The narrator rejected by Saramago

Abstract

Two statements made by Portuguese writer José Saramago motivate this article. In these
statements, he rejects the existence of a narrator who does not identify with the author. Saramago apparently
questions the theories of enunciation, which emphatically separate the author as a person from the narrator,
who only gains meaning inside the limits of the text. Therefore, a confusion arises between what is of
ontological nature and what is of linguistic nature. However, an analysis of these declarations in light of
Greimasian semiotics and discourse categories allows one to infer that he considers the activity of the author
as an artistic work. As a Marxist, Saramago defends the singularity of the artistic work and does not admit its
separation or alienation. This denial of the narrator is not an isolated fact throughout Saramago’s critical
positioning; it is in fact part of the discourse strategy adopted by him. Based on the idea that this denial is
essentially revolutionary, he challenges the automatism of the bourgeois discourse. In order to do so, he
recreates, in the fictional text, situations that are homologous to those of history, marked by unpredictability,
since the facts, fictional or not, are not self-explanatory, but are the result of a complex correlation of forces that
are in play inside the social scenario.