Manual of Painting and Calligraphy
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Authors: Jose Saramago
Manual of Painting and Calligraphy
First Mariner Books edition 2012
Manual de Pintura e Caligrifia
was first published in 1983 © Editorial Caminho, SARL, Lisbon. Published in Great Britain by arrangement with Dr. Ray-Gude Martin, Literarische Agentur, Bad Homberg, Germany.
This translation from the Portuguese copyright © 1994 by Giovanni Pontiero,
first published in association with
Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation Instituto da Biblioteca Nacional e do Livro Instituto Camões. This edition first published in 1994 by Carcanet Press Limited.
All rights reserved
For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:
Saramago, José.
[Manual de pintura e caligrifia. English]
Manual of painting and calligraphy: a novel / José Saramago; translated from the Portuguese by Giovanni Pontiero.—1st Mariner Books ed.
p. cm.
ISBN
978-0-547-64022-8
I. Pontiero, Giovanni. II. Title.
PQ
9281.
A
66
M
313 2012
869.3'42—dc23 2012005375
e
ISBN
978-0-547-64024-2
V
3.1112
This book is part of a series: From the Portuguese
1. Miguel Torga:
Tales and More Tales from the Mountain
2. José Rodrigues Miguéis:
Happy Easter
3. José Saramago:
Manual of Painting and Calligraphy: A Novel
In association with Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation
Each book I write is a conversation with my reader.
—J. S.
J
OSÉ
S
ARAMAGO FIRST
began to attract attention outside his native Portugal in the early 1980s with a steady output of substantial novels. The author was already sixty when he published
Memorial do Convento
(
Baltasar and Blimunda,
1982), a passionate and compelling narrative set in the eighteenth century, which won critical acclaim and several prestigious literary prizes. His books were soon being translated into more than twenty languages. Further explorations of Portugal’s cultural heritage followed:
o
Ano da Morte de Ricardo Reis
(
The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis,
1984);
A Jangada de Pedra
(
The Stone Raft,
1986);
A Historia do Cerco de Lisboa
(
The History of the Siege of Lisbon,
1989); and his most controversial work to date,
o
Evangelho segundo Jesus Cristo
(
The Gospel According to Jesus Christ,
1991).
Self-taught, Saramago did various manual jobs before turning to journalism, editing, and translation. In the late 1960s he published a book of verse, and this was followed by collections of essays and short stories and a play. Then, in 1980, he published a political novel,
Levantado do Chão
(
Raised from the Ground
), which was much praised in Portuguese literary circles. This was encouraging, insofar as his first novel,
Manual de Pintura y Caligrafia
(
Manual of Painting and Calligraphy
), had aroused little interest when it first appeared some three years earlier. Critics might have been misled by the title into thinking this was some kind of handbook for art students. When the novel was reprinted in 1983, critics came to realize, however, that this was the matrix of the more capacious books that were to bring Saramago fame.
The
Manual
is narrated in the first person by H., a portrait painter of no great merit who, like all the main characters in the novel, goes unidentified for, as the author warns the reader, “names are not persons.”
There are striking similarities between H.’s quest for self-awareness and Saramago’s own reflections on the function of art. By the end of the novel, both author and protagonist have defined their objectives, and the sense of inner freedom they achieve coincides symbolically with the Portuguese revolution of April 1974 and the overthrow of Salazar’s dictatorial regime. The tense atmosphere in which this novel was written cannot be underestimated. Dogged by poverty and ignorance, Portugal was controlled by a backward-looking oligarchy. The rich and powerful thrived while the rest of the nation stagnated.
The influential industrialist referred to as S. who commissions a portrait is a typical nouveau riche of the Salazar era. Formidable and arrogant, he demands a portrait in keeping with the canons of bourgeois taste, namely, an acceptable and flattering resemblance. H., on the other hand, is in search of an “inner reality” capable of exposing the real person behind the mask. From the outset, relations between painter and client are awkward and strained, and a clash of wills becomes inevitable.
Convinced that anyone who paints portraits portrays himself, H. would argue that the finished picture is worth only as much as the painter himself. Painfully aware that he is no Rembrandt or Van Gogh, H. nevertheless feels that his portraits could be more expressive and truthful. Accurate observation, alas, is not enough. The real test is to transform
seeing
into
knowing.
Here the protagonist speaks for Saramago, who in several interviews insisted that “each of us sees with the eyes we possess and our eyes see what they can . . . Besides, the human beings we see around us are not one but multiple.”
H. eventually turns to writing in the hope of transcending the limitations of pictorial representation. Lines and colors on the canvas can convey only so much. Certain ambiguities are beyond the painter’s powers but might prove to be less elusive if written. H. sees painting and writing as two skills “so closely related that they are interdependent,” but writing offers the greater freedom because, unlike the painting of a picture, a narrative can be prolonged indefinitely and the written word teaches us to listen to the human voice. He believes the important books of antiquity reveal a close resemblance to paintings and altarpieces and the most lucid and concise of those texts have been written with an eye for visual detail. A quotation from Quintilian’s treatise on rhetoric reminds us that “the orator (or writer) should not simply master the distribution of words but in his own hand he should be able to trace out the pattern . . . that is why great artists are referred to as men of letters.” These words refer us back to one of the novel’s central themes, namely, that “biography is to be found in everything we do and say, in our every gesture, in the way we sit, the way we talk and stare, the way we turn our head or pick up an object from the floor. And that is what the painter (or narrator) must try to capture. Everything in life that is lived, painted and written adds some new link to our prehistory.” Confronting the empty canvas or blank sheet of paper, H. must reflect and fill the void waiting to be inhabited, and this is the crucial test for any artist.
The details we glean of H.’s past also suggest a close affinity between author and protagonist. Both experienced a childhood of poverty when sacrifices had to be made to acquire any kind of formal training. Both confess to being timid and somewhat insecure, introspective and skeptical by nature. Like Saramago himself, H. is a compulsive reader and thinker, a creature of habit, disciplined in his working habits and with few interests outside his studio apart from dinner with friends or visits to the cinema. He shares the author’s fascination with women. Both feel irresistibly drawn to “the sphinx and her mysteries,” and H.’s amorous adventures persuade him that there are uncanny similarities between making love and the artist’s tense struggle with paints and words.
Both as a man and as an artist, H. feels diminished and jaded. His relentless musings about the meaning and validity of art develop into a subtle debate about cognition. Images are fleeting and the creative process whereby they are captured is so very fragile. H. wryly concludes, “It is a mistake to confuse art with life.” The distinction between reality and artifice is often imperceptible, and as he goes on laboriously copying from the works of Old Masters and the writings of famous authors, he begins to suspect that ultimately “all truth is fiction.”
A tour of Italy’s museums and galleries, starting in Bergamo and progressing south to Naples and Pompeii, confirms H.’s intuitions about the cultural influences which have shaped Western civilization, but the artistic legacy of successive generations is somehow incomplete. This gives no cause for pessimism but is simply an invitation to find the links in the chain and divine new paths for artistic creativity.
Overwhelmed by the art treasures of Italy and exhilarated by the welcoming “voice and smile of Siena,” by “gentle Ferrara,” by “seductive Bologna” and Naples, “a gymkhana of placid madmen,” H. is no less sensitive to the political and social tensions which continue to plague a nation still contaminated by fascism. Filing past the canvases and statues keeping vigil in those museums, H. becomes increasingly aware that works of art somehow withhold as much as they reveal, however patient or experienced the observer.
Once back in Portugal, H. abandons portrait painting and turns to scenes from everyday life for fresh inspiration. The sudden news of a friend’s arrest by Salazar’s secret police brings him into confrontation with the fear and mistrust which has gripped the entire country. Ironically enough, it is in this grim climate of repression that H. finally falls in love. M. helps him to discover that “perfection exists,” and she provides the reassurance so propitious for an artist’s work.
Under the guise of a painter’s odyssey, Saramago is already mapping out the itinerary of subsequent novels. His fictional works emphasize the importance of harmonizing aesthetics with ethics, ideals with social and political realities. As in all his novels, the most commonplace detail in the
Manual
throws new light on the complexities of life and death, love and conflict, fact and circumstance. Serious and mocking in turn, Saramago invites the reader to reexamine values and objectives. Self-questioning must precede any process of renewal. Like Marguerite Yourcenar’s Hadrian, H. reacts against an existence which seems “less vast than our projects and duller than our dreams.” Like the Roman emperor, H. studies self, his fellow men, and books in order to investigate “those intermediate regions where the soul and flesh intermingle, where dreams echo reality, where life and death exchange attributes and masks.” Opposed to the concept of an absent, impartial narrator who limits himself to registering impressions without reacting to them, Saramago defines art as a magical operation capable of evoking a lost countenance for the author, his characters, and his readers. Reflection is the hallmark of all Saramago’s writings, and his
Manual
of Painting and Calligraphy
convincingly demonstrates how paintings and literature can teach us the art of living and dispel fear of death.
Giovanni Pontiero
Manchester, January 1994
On revient de loin. La formation bourgeoise, l’orgueil intellectuel.
La nécessité de se réviser à tout moment. Les liens qui subsistent.
La sentimentalité.
L’empoisonnement de la culture orientée.
—
PAUL VAILLANT-COUTURIER
I
SHALL GO ON
painting the second picture but I know it will never be finished. I have tried without success and there is no clearer proof of my failure and frustration than this sheet of paper on which I am starting to write. Sooner or later I shall move from the first picture to the second and then turn to my writing, or I shall skip the intermediate stage or stop in the middle of a word to apply another brushstroke to the portrait commissioned by S. or to that other portrait alongside it which S. will never see. When that day comes I shall know no more than I know today (namely, that both pictures are worthless). But I shall be able to decide whether I was right to allow myself to be tempted by a form of expression which is not mine, although this same temptation may mean in the end that the form of expression I have been using as carefully as if I were following the fixed rules of some manual was not mine either. For the moment I prefer not to think about what I shall do if this writing comes to nothing; if, from now on, my white canvases and blank sheets of paper become a world orbiting thousands of light-years away where I shall not be able to leave the slightest trace. If, in a word, it was dishonest to pick up a brush or pen or if, once more in a word (the first time I did not succeed), I must deny myself the right to communicate or express myself, because I shall have tried and failed and there will be no further opportunities.