Saramago controversy: ideology and the exception called Camões

Nobel Prize works may leave the 12th year program. Foundation questions the criteria of the Government’s proposal.

Os students of the 12th year will be able to stop studying works of José Saramago.

In the proposal to review the Essential Learning of Portuguese, from the Ministry of Education, Science and Innovation, schools have the possibility of choosing one of these three works: ‘Memorial do Convento’ and ‘O Ano da Morte de Ricardo Reis’ – both by Saramago – and also ‘Um Deus Passeiando pela Brisa da Tarde’, by Mário Carvalho.

In other words, if schools choose this last work, José Saramago will be in the program.

A Foundation Jose Saramago questioned the criteria for this proposal (still preliminary). Ask if this posture will “include other authors that are part of the canon of Portuguese Literature, placing them as suggested and not mandatory reading”.

Camões is the exception

If Saramago leaves classes, it won’t be a surprise to Helena Buescu, professor at the Faculty of Arts of the University of Lisbon.

Not all great authors are studied by students in secondary education. Only there is one exception: “Camões. Luís de Camões is an author who cannot leave the canon. Everyone else, even Fernando Person, you can come and go“.

“The rest is relatively flexible and has to be, since we have, as Eduardo Lourenço said, a literature that is practically the age of the country as it was constituted. There are many centuries of great literature and, evidently, not all authors can be part of school programs and it is natural that this is the case”, he analyzed, in .

“There may be authors who, at a given moment, are absolutely essential and can later be replaced by others, for example, the Camilo Castelo Branco“.

“Absurd tone”

Also at , general director Inês Cardoso admits that it will be strange if students stop studying the only Portuguese writer who received the Nobel Prize for Literature.

“Any literary criteria is subjective” but the delivery of Nobel Prize is something objective.

There are those who question whether the decision “will not be based on the fact that the writer has always been very critical in relation to some entities”.

“Judging by absurd tone of the debate which is growing on social media, the Nobel Prize transformed for a few years the look that was given to Saramago, but it was enough for us to enter times of greater polarization for us to hear litanies against his communism or the ideological bias of the works”.

“It is enough to emphasize that the idea of ​​neutrality and the attempt to free literature from ideology are an absurd fantasy”, analyzes Inês, who recalls that there is also politics in literature.