Saramago's Cain: irony, satire, heresy

José Saramago, the Portuguese Nobel Prize-winner of Literature, uses Cain to attack God, in his latest book. Or better: it is with a certain idea of God - an idea created and cultivated by men - that he wants to settle accounts. Avowedly atheist, why would he bother to attack something - someone - that does not exist?

Saramago had already rewritten in his own way the New Testament, in The Gospel of Jesus Christ. In Cain (Companhia das Letras, 2009) he revisits the Old Testament, convinced that "the God of Christians is not that Jehovah".

He's not the first great Portuguese writer to do so. Fernando Pessoa, to oppose to the idea of a distant God, the father who judges and condemns, uses baby Jesus, a child god, our naughty little brother, neighbor and accomplice of human antics:

"He is the Eternal Child, the God that was missing.
He is the human, which is natural,
He is the divine who smiles and jokes.
And so, I know for sure,
He is the true Christ Child.

Pessoa's child Jesus fled from the Heavens because there, He explains, "everything is stupid as the Catholic Church" and "God is an old guy, stupid and sick."

In Cain there is no nice god to replace or to make up for the terrible God, creator and tormentor of mankind, who He seems to delight in making suffer.

Arbitrary and unfair, God rejects the offerings of Cain, while accepting those of his brother, Abel, for no apparent reason. Cain kills his brother, and becomes the counterpoint that Saramago chooses to denounce the "absurdities" that seem to populate the divine attitudes in the Old Testament.

With irony, humor and even some spicy moments, Cain - a kind of Don Quixote, mounted on a donkey - moves through the places and times of the old Holy Land witnessing, and sometimes intervening in known biblical episodes.

God commands Abraham to sacrifice his son, God takes vengeance on men who wanted to get to him building a tower, God turns fire on the sinful cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, exterminating sinners as well as innocents, God gets bored with his creation and sends the flood to destroy (almost) everything...

The stories are known, the ideas of Saramago about them too. What makes this book so interesting? The provocation, on the one hand: it forces us to think, even to be able to refute it, if we not agree with it. But especially the gripping literary qualities of the narrative, which holds us from beginning to end. Cain has something of the Iberian picaresque novel, a bit of Latin American magical realism, something of Brazilian Cordel literature (1), a seasoning of the on the road spirit, an aroma of classic heroic narrative and even a paradoxically Biblical accent. The mixture has been successful, I believe. And recommend.


An Eglish translation was published in 2011:Cain, By José Saramago, trans. Margaret Jull Costa
Harvill Secker, £12.99, 150pp. (£11.69 from the Independent Bookshop: 08430 600 030)

(1) https://publish.illinois.edu/litlanglibrary/2011/07/25/brazilian-cordel-literature/

Where is the vanguard?

If there is something that stands out in the present theatrical season in London it is the huge proportion of classical plays and successes that have been running for decades which are being staged or re-staged.

To mention but a few: Pygmalion, Journey’s End (based on a classic book first published in 1928), The Wizard of Oz, The Phantom of the Opera, Les Misérables, Chicago, Legally Blonde - the Musical, Mamma Mia, Billy Eliot - the Musical and Priscilla - Queen of the Desert as well as shows based on the memory of Freddie Mercury’s Queen (We will Rock You) or Michael Jackson’s shows. Chekhov’s Cherry Orchard; Emperor and Galilean – an Ibsen play from 1873, and several Shakespeare plays add to the menu of sure-fire hits on offer.

Where are the experimental works, the risks, the provocation, the novelty?

We seem to be left with War Horse, a play first performed on Broadway and which was the theme of a Stephen Spielberg movie. Pardon my scepticism.

It seems that photography and art galleries (the new hobbies of the British jeunesse dorée) are more promising this season. I’m waiting to finish my course to have time to check for  myself.

London, July/August, 2011

ON THE DEATH OF A GOOD MAN

Paulo Renato was my brother-in-law (the husband of my sister). I've allways admired and loved him for his good character, his intelligence and the important work he did for the improvement of education in Brazil. I quote below the words of Graham Howells, my husband, on the occasion of Paulo's death.

From  http://graham-graysworld.blogspot.com/2011/06/v-behaviorurldefaultvmlo.html

I’m going back to John Donne to reflect on the sudden death recently of a man for whom I had greatest respect.  When I heard the shocking news Donne’s Holy Sonnet No. 10 came to mind (I’ve included a modern ‘translation’ after it).

Death, be not proud, though some have called thee

Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so;

For those whom thou think’st thou dost overthrow,

Die not, poor Death, nor yet canst thou kill me.

From rest and sleep, which but thy pictures be,

Much pleasure; then from thee much more must flow,

And soonest our best men with thee do go,

Rest of their bones, and soul’s delivery.

Thou art slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate men,

And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell;

And poppy or charms can make us sleep as well

And better than thy stroke; why swell’st thou then?

One short sleep past, we wake eternally,

And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die

Do not be proud, Death, even though some people have called you powerful and fearsome, because you are neither of those things. Because, poor Death, the people you think you kill do not die, nor can you kill me.  Since we take great pleasure in rest and sleep, which are imitations of you, then we shall have even more pleasure from you yourself, and our best men go to you before anyone else, to enjoy peace for their bodies and the delivery of their souls [to God].  You are a slave to destiny, to fortune, to kings and to desperate men and live with poison, war and sickness.  And if opium or magic can make us sleep as well or better than your actions, why do you swell with pride?  After a brief period of sleep we shall wake up to enjoy eternal life where there will be no more death and Death, you will die.

 A few days ago we lost a very good man.  Paulo Renato Souza, Brazil’s Minister of Education for eight years during the government of President Fernando Henrique Cardoso, died of a heart attack at the appallingly early age of 65. I was not a close friend of Paulo but we were friendly enough to have sailed together in his boat, which I later sold for him as he had rather more important things to do, trying to reform and modernise the educational system of a country the size of half a continent where social conditions range from the wealthiest of suburbs to riverside communities reachable only by boat, via some of the largest and most violent slums in the world. The technical details of his innovations, the most important of which involved objective assessment of educational attainment both within Brazil and measured against other countries through the PISA system, together with schemes for extending access to schooling, providing books to the furthest outposts of the country and encouraging distance learning, are matters of official record. What the record does not show is the manner in which the man approached the immense problems put before him, a manner I can only describe as ‘graceful toughness’.

Looking objectively at Mediterranean cultures such as that of Brazil, the outsider is struck by the savage selfishness of their citizens when personal privileges are questioned.  Shaking up the complacent lives of teachers and educational bureaucracies is a short route to attracting vituperative criticism (we are seeing a version of it in Britain today, and this is a society where people are used to making personal sacrifice for the general good), yet Paulo Renato rode over these petty attacks with the self-confidence of strong man doing what was right – in contrast to the hysteria of weak men clinging to dogma which characterised his critics.

Paulo Renato was a Renaissance man in a shabby world of specialists – he enjoyed his sailing, though when I knew him work prevented him from doing it as often as he would have liked; when he visited a relative who had just had a baby I watched him give an informal lecture on how the bones of the infant skull knit together; he enjoyed his wine and his cigars and his house had good paintings.  We read his career path and it seems to have been an uninterrupted rise from one post of immense responsibility to another and yet this was not achieved by crawling to authority: he was working for a United Nations agency Chile when Pinochet seized power and he and his wife Giovanna took into their own house refugees from Brazil whose position in this new dictatorship had become perilous – at one time hosting 17 of them.  He and Giovanna also housed for a year a family member branded a ‘dissident’ by the Brazilian dictators, but they never boasted of these acts nor sought to gain personal or political capital from them.

In life Paulo was an inspiration to those of us working in education at a far lower level and even his death reminds of another of John Donne’s reflections: “Do not ask who the funeral bell is ringing for – it’s ringing for you”.  The best thing those of us can do who are lucky enough to still be in the world and have the chance to do something useful in life is to take a lesson from Paulo and keep trying to make the world a better place.

On Induction and the Empirical Sciences

The epistemological core of the discussion on induction and its role in the methodology of the empirical sciences may be summarised in a very simple question: is the principle of induction the basis of modern empirical sciences, and should it be or, having been questioned since the time of Hume in the 18th century, is it practically discredited today, having been defeated by the criticisms of Popper and by Hempel’s paradox?

The concept of induction (the kind of reasoning that leads us to draw general conclusions or make predictions concerning unobserved cases based on cases we have observed) has a long tradition in philosophy, which is worth revisiting.

Aristotle was the first to concern himself systematically with induction and he gave it a foundation based on the whole of his metaphysics, that is, what he thought concerning the nature of reality and knowledge. For Aristotle, scientific knowledge was essentially a system of classification. In a world of beings which organise themselves and rank themselves according to unchangeable forms or essences, a scientific statement confirms that an individual belongs to a certain species or that a certain species belongs to a genus. The individual is the specific case, the particular; stating that he belongs to a species defines his essence and shows what is universal in him.

According to Aristotle, the universal elements, the essences, exist in things, in particulars. Induction (in-ducere, to lead inward) consists precisely in this recognition of the concept (the universal) within the sensible (the particular). As we observe the behaviour of a phenomenon in various particular cases and recognize a regular pattern, we are naturally led to infer that this regular behaviour is a sign of the essence of the phenomenon and to forecast that the same behaviour will be shown in cases which will be observed in the future. This is basically the way in which Aristotle understands and justifies induction. 

After 2000 years of almost complete dominance, Aristotle’s metaphysical ideas were challenged by modern philosophy. Hume, in particular, rejected Aristotelian essentialism, thus undermining the basis of induction. The link between particular cases and general law no longer depends on the presence of the universal within the thing and comes to be seen as simply the result of subjective expectation based on habit. This does not imply that Hume rejects or undervalues induction as a resource to be used in daily life or in empirical science: he simply removes the claim that knowledge obtained through it has an absolute, unquestionable metaphysical truth.

Hume’s criticism of Aristotle’s theory of induction did not prevent logical empiricism, the dominant concept in the philosophy of science until the 1950s, from defending an inductivist view of scientific method. It was felt that the general laws of empirical sciences were obtained through induction from the observation of specific cases, thus consisting in a simple summary or ‘condensation’ of concrete experience. As well as being acquired by induction, for the logical empiricists general laws could also be proved inductively. The greater the number of positive examples (specific cases conforming to the law) that could be observed, the greater would be the level of confirmation of the law or hypothesis. Actually, laws were only hypotheses with a sufficiently high degree of confirmation. The idea of the degree of confirmation led to attempts to apply calculations of probability to this discussion, but without any great success.

The discrediting of the inductive conception of scientific method was to a great extent the work of Popper. Proper claimed to have solved the problem of induction in a new and radical way: simply showing that the problem of induction does not exist in empirical science for the good reason that empirical science is not inductive. Scientific hypotheses are not obtained by inductive generalisation nor are they proved by the repetition of positive cases. Science moves forward by conjecture (bold generalisations with no logical support from experience) and refutations. What strengthens our hypotheses is their resistance to the clever and honest attempts to refute them to which they are subjected and that they manage to survive. Popper calls this process corroboration.