"I never appreciated 'positive heroes' in literature. They are almost always cliches, copies of copies, until the model is exhausted. I prefer perplexity, doubt, uncertainty, not just because it provides a more 'productive' literary raw material, but because that is the way we humans really are"
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Saramago skewers the literary “good guy” not as a moral ideal but as a manufacturing process: a template run through the copier until the toner dies. The jab is aimed at a long tradition of edifying fiction (and, in Saramago’s Portugal, decades of authoritarian propaganda) where virtue is meant to reassure readers that the world is legible, hierarchy is natural, and history has a clean spine. A “positive hero” is comforting precisely because he removes the mess: he acts correctly, thinks correctly, and proves the system correct.
Saramago’s preference for “perplexity” and “doubt” isn’t postmodern decoration; it’s an ethical stance. Uncertainty forces responsibility. A character who can’t hide behind the right answer has to choose, and choice exposes motive. That’s where Saramago’s work lives: in the gap between what people say they believe and what they do when the rules stop protecting them. His novels often stage that gap with allegorical pressure-cookers (blindness, bureaucratic absurdity, divine silence) where the old heroic script fails and the supposedly decent unravel.
The subtext is also a rejection of aesthetic obedience. “Positive” heroes are not just cliched; they’re politically convenient. They teach readers to admire the finished product rather than examine the conditions that produced it. Saramago insists that humans are not exemplary statues but unstable, contradictory creatures, and literature that pretends otherwise isn’t uplifting - it’s anesthetic. Doubt, in his hands, becomes realism with teeth.
Saramago’s preference for “perplexity” and “doubt” isn’t postmodern decoration; it’s an ethical stance. Uncertainty forces responsibility. A character who can’t hide behind the right answer has to choose, and choice exposes motive. That’s where Saramago’s work lives: in the gap between what people say they believe and what they do when the rules stop protecting them. His novels often stage that gap with allegorical pressure-cookers (blindness, bureaucratic absurdity, divine silence) where the old heroic script fails and the supposedly decent unravel.
The subtext is also a rejection of aesthetic obedience. “Positive” heroes are not just cliched; they’re politically convenient. They teach readers to admire the finished product rather than examine the conditions that produced it. Saramago insists that humans are not exemplary statues but unstable, contradictory creatures, and literature that pretends otherwise isn’t uplifting - it’s anesthetic. Doubt, in his hands, becomes realism with teeth.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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