A clay that shapes the potter

It’s often been suggested how alike God and the novelist are, especially by people who believe in the novel and don’t believe in God. The Portuguese novelist Jose Saramago particularly invites the comparison. It’s not only that Saramago exhibits as a creator such a miraculous combination of power and ease, that his air of enormous wisdom coexists with a marked tetchiness or that he follows the activities of his people with such pained concern. In “The Gospel According to Jesus Christ” (1991), he made the rivalry explicit. His Jesus of Nazareth emerges from this heretical novel as a more complete and persuasive literary character than we get from the evangelists. Saramago writes of Jesus in a tone of loving superiority; he describes the kid as a father might. And even as he treats the earnest and decent, somewhat humorless carpenter’s son as a moral exemplar, he announces that “if another man’s son had been chosen, we are confident that whoever he was, he would have given us just as much food for thought as Jesus.”

Saramago is always like this: generously sententious, warm and wicked, royal in his tone, democratic in his affections. Theologians used to refer to the condescension of God’s becoming man -- and that term does better than most to characterize Saramago’s special way with his characters. If such condescension sounds off-putting, then it should be pointed out that Jane Austen has a similar manner. She knows her heroines’ frailties but also knows their desires before they do and wants to see them gratified. By contrast, the God of “The Gospel According to Jesus Christ” seeks his own glory over the welfare of his followers. When Jesus asks God whether his sacrifice will be the last that God requires, he is met with one of Saramago’s most astonishing passages: a nine-page catalog of divinely sanctioned martyrdom and massacre.

Saramago joined the Portuguese Communist Party in 1968 and remains a Marxist to this day. What is remarkable is to read him and find yourself rooting against religious fundamentalism and market fundamentalism in something like the way that, reading “Pride and Prejudice,” you pray for Elizabeth Bennett and Mr. Darcy to get married. Of course Saramago understands that politics and marriage are not so simple. As his serious and unpopular politics confirm, the grand old man (Saramago is 80 this year) is more than a mere vague humanist. The atheist god of his created worlds, Saramago urges a distinct creed.

Cipriano Algor is a 64-year-old widower and potter threatened not so much by mortality as by obsolescence. The jugs and vases he has been making all his life no longer sell as before, and “The Cave” begins as his contract with the Center -- a giant burgeoning residential mall that dominates the landscape of his unnamed country -- is abruptly terminated. As one character says in another Saramago novel, “The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis,” “This is the first loneliness, to feel that we are useless.” Cipriano sees no option but to follow his daughter and son-in-law to the Center, where the son-in-law works as a security guard (a growth industry, one gathers, in this stratified society) and has hopes of being granted residential status.

Like “Blindness” and “All the Names,” “The Cave” is an allegorical novel alive through its details -- its mulberry tree and dog, its van and potter’s kiln -- but judiciously unspecific as to physiognomy and place, so that the characters’ faces and their city may be filled in with the thought of our own. It is also more a love story and more programmatically leftist than its predecessors. If the Center seems too pat a symbol for the increasing identification of the marketplace with human life, Saramago’s feel for work and love are another thing. His long fluid sentences, richly stocked with folk wisdom, swerve through psychology and the physical world with equal assurance and lend his novels a rare quality of permanence; it’s as if only a story confirmed in its shape many times before could be so confidently told.

Cipriano’s daughter Marta proposes a final bid for economic viability. Why not collaborate on a line of clay dolls? Maybe these will find favor with the Center’s resident-consumers. (Marta’s other, unannounced design is to make a match between her father and a young widow named Estudiosa.) The molding and firing of a small raceof figurines becomes not only a matter of private renewal but also a metaphor for human self-creation, or the usurpation of God. Saramago’s symbolism is never of the Freudian kind, force-fed by the unconscious. He is wry and openhanded about his meanings, and he supplies them to his characters with typical warm generosity. The initial work on the dolls he calls “the first day of creation,” and as Cipriano digs through the kiln for the first fired pieces, “the ashes became hotter, but not enough to burn him, they were merely warm, like human skin, and just as smooth and soft.”

The Algor household knows better than to imagine the Center will vigorously retail the clay dolls; so does the reader. Meanwhile Saramago spreads a cat’s cradle of familial love between the points of Cipriano, his daughter, her husband, their dog and the young widow. We see what these characters ought to want; we see that, except for the dog, with his canine clairvoyance, they mostly lack this awareness themselves; and we don’t know whether anyone will be satisfied in the end. Saramago’s work, like his potter’s, arrives at “the right shape, the precise line, the harmonious whole,” and it would be spoiling a good story to reveal the genuine horror the Center ultimately throws open, or to say just how widow and widower execute their tango. But when you’ve come to feel for Saramago’s people something of the affection they show one another, it’s a shame to have to admit that he provides them with too happy an ending.

The Center is of course the cave of the title. It serves up simulacra and virtual reality in place of experience. As with the reigning economic model, it seems poised to attain such dominance that nothing remains outside it. Marxism has a long-standing affinity with Plato’s parable of the cave (Saramago’s epigraph comes from “The Republic”). Plato held that behind the busy flux of phenomena there existed a realm of changeless ideas. Yet most people mistook shadows on the wall for all there was and supposed their cave was the world. To Marx, the occluded reality was not one of pure ideas, but of labor -- something that has never seemed truer than today, when producers and consumers live so remote from one another and commodities appear in the store or on the screen scoured clean of the history of their production.

Yet in art as in economics, a Marxist analysis is often cruelest to Marxists themselves. In “The Cave,” Saramago has leveraged Cipriano’s insight and ultimate rebellion on his work as a potter. That is, Cipriano is an artisan, self-employed in a mode of production steadily on the decline since the inception of capitalism. The anthropologist David Graeber has argued that the movement against corporate globalization, to which Saramago belongs, has drawn its constituency from, on the one hand, students, intellectuals and artists, and, on the other, indigenous peoples, because these are groups not yet assimilated into the system of wage-labor.

Yet the cave of corporate rule, if that’s what it is, would have to be abandoned by those who live there; the artisans and the indigenous are too few to change things by themselves. One needn’t be a Marxist to sense about “The Cave” that Saramago, in his fondness for his characters, has spared them the problem he means to illustrate. This is especially so when the Algor family all leave the Center -- for what? It’s hard to frame an answer in the terms Saramago sets out. Most readers will feel this as a certain wishfulness or sentimentality: How nice to work with such satisfaction and to escape with such ease.

It could be that such a feeling will help bring us around to Saramago’s view that human society ought to become self-consciously what it has always been -- not a product of the hand of God or “the invisible hand,” but human handiwork. This, in any case, is the humble counterpart to Saramago’s magnificent condescension: his desire, movingly like that of his potter and his Christ, to be of use.