Neobaroque Figurations in José Saramago

Abstract

This work proposes to bring the perspective of José Saramago's narrator closer to the baroque perspective, from the dialectical tension characteristic of allegory as elaborated by Walter Benjamin (1984). We associate the modernity of Benjamin's allegory in literature as a dialectical game that expresses the conflict and the laceration of the subject in the face of the precarious condition of his existence, in order to present the narrator's position as a fundamental authorial strategy for the presentation of the Portuguese author's worldview. As we perceive, the allegory will correspond to a “responsibility of the form” of José Saramago, an author known to be engaged with a political writing that reconciles the social denunciation with the dialogical and dialectical expressive force, crossed by irony and play with the reader.