José Saramago leitor de Montaigne: a presença dos Ensaios nos Cadernos de Lanzarote

Abstract

The present work aims to show some aspects assimilated by José Saramago as a reader of Montaigne's Essays (1580), which are in the composition of his Cadernos de Lanzarote. I do not want to try to equate the writers, or to see in one of them the mere application of the concepts found in the other’s thoughts. I want to understand how the 20th century writer assimilates important points brought by a 16th century writer, in order to deal with issues that move him, among political, existential issues and those issues related to the theory of literature itself. In this sense, our main bibliography is composed of diaries produced by the portuguese writer in the late 1990s, as well as the Montaigne's Essays (1580). In order to carry out in the best possible way what has been proposed, the text will be divided into four parts. In the first one, I present general aspects of the project that Saramago develops on the Cadernos, as well as I try to show how Montaigne appears in this context. My starting point to work it, is the analysis of the presentation written in April 1994 to introduce the “Diary I”, which I call letter to the reader. As we will see, what Saramago proposes is the writing of a specular text, whose paradigm seems to be the Essays. After verifying the familiarity, the second chapter outlines the idea of essay with which we are working, exposing the concept from its genological elements. Following the path, the third chapter will be dedicated to the understanding of Montaigne's essay. It will be done in the sense of observing the gender, the concept as a specular text from some central notions such as: friendship, self, prolongation and consubstantiality. After this point, we will return to Saramago. In the fourth and final chapter, we return the Cadernos. Now we will try to understand how these elements that we observed are worked in the project of the portuguese writer. As I hope to have shown at the end of this long way, the analyzed writing of Saramago is intrinsically linked to the idea of essay and its figure, inside and outside his books, to the figure of the essayist, even though his work cannot be taken as an essay and that the writer never fully identifies, in fact, with that writing.