The Necessity of Error: History, Truth and Utopia in the novels of Jose Saramago

这本计划出版的书通过对1998年诺贝尔文学奖得主约瑟夫·萨拉马戈（生于1922年）的五部历史小说的原始阅读，在当代文学和文化理论的指导下，评估了他的政治哲学。在过去的二十年里，萨拉马戈已成为当代最受欢迎的葡萄牙语小说家，他的作品被翻译成四十多种语言，他的观点被世界各地的新闻媒体报道。作为一名终身的政治活动家、富有创造力的作家和散文家，萨拉马戈越来越被认为是文学表现、历史编纂、文化认同、民众抗议以及激进的社会和经济改革等辩论的关键贡献者。尽管全球对萨拉马戈作品的接受程度迅速提高，但在萨拉马戈作品的重要参考书目中存在着显著的差距，尤其是在英文版本中。这主要集中在讽喻小说系列，从《失明》（1995）开始，萨拉马戈在伊比利亚和拉丁美洲以外的地区最为人所知。因此，为了满足日益增长的对萨拉马戈长篇研究的需求，我的书突出了一系列重新审视葡萄牙历史的小说，这些小说使他在葡萄牙声名鹊起。通过探索萨拉马戈对世界范围内文学技术和文化理论创新的回应，我的书将超越许多现有的史学理论批评所采用的重点，特别是国家文学和政治背景。因此，它将为萨拉马戈提出的看似矛盾的观点提供一个新的视角，作为一个公开支持马克思主义纲领的作家，他的书对马克思主义的认识论和社会学前提提出了后现代主义的质疑。这本书将包括一系列完整的小说细读，从《起死回生》（1980）开始，到《里斯本围城史》（1989）结束。它将首先确定萨拉马戈对历史小说的重塑如何回应马克思主义文学理论家对“社会主义现实主义”的替代方案的表述，以及当代欧洲和拉丁美洲激进左翼作家的实验。然后，它将使用当代英语国家和法语国家的文化和政治理论来确定这五部小说作为激进社会主义新哲学和实践的持续国际相关性。特别是，本研究将确定萨拉马戈对后结构主义辩论的回应，这些辩论涉及欲望、性别和种族在决定身份和社会关系中的作用，以及这对他寻求加强激进政治文化的核心作用。这本书将引导读者了解萨拉马戈的历史、文化和文学典故，将每本小说的葡萄牙语参考框架与国际背景联系起来，从而阐明它们与他后来的“寓言”小说之间的连续性。萨拉马戈本人认为，他的每一部小说都可以被看作是一部多卷文本的组成部分。我的研究将通过探索萨拉马戈在他的每一部小说中对他早期作品的更复杂的互文典故来全面解读他的文学作品，以展示每一部小说如何放大和折射其他小说的政治信息。虽然这本书主要面向葡萄牙和世界文学学者，但它也会引起政治和文化理论专家的兴趣，因为它揭示了萨拉马戈对过去的强烈关注，以及一个国家在几十年的独裁统治后重新发现其历史和身份的愿望，对当代激进左翼的分析和对新自由主义经济学和全球化对文化认同、公民和就业权利、民主参与、自我与他人关系和生态的影响的回应，提供了细致入微和具有挑战性的贡献。

The projected book assesses the political philosophy of the 1998 Nobel Literature laureate José Saramago (b.1922) through original readings of his five historiographical novels, informed by contemporary literary and cultural theory. Over the last twenty years, Saramago has become the most acclaimed contemporary Portuguese-language novelist, his books translated into over forty languages and his opinions reported by news media worldwide. As a lifelong political activist as well as a creative writer and essayist, Saramago is increasingly recognised as a key contributor to debates regarding literary representation, historiography, cultural identity, popular protest, and radical social and economic reform. Despite this burgeoning global reception, significant gaps exist in the critical bibliography on Saramago's work, and particularly in that part of it available in English. This focuses predominantly on the series of allegorical novels, commencing with _Blindness_ (1995), for which Saramago is best known outside Iberia and Latin America. Therefore, in addressing the growing demand for book-length studies of Saramago, my book foregrounds the sequence of novels that re-examine Portuguese history and that secured his fame in Portugal. By exploring Saramago's responses to innovations worldwide in literary technique and cultural theory, my book will advance beyond the focus adopted in much existing criticism on historiographical theory and on specifially national literary and political contexts. It will thereby offer a fresh perspective on the seeming paradox that Saramago presents, as a writer who publically espouses a Marxist programme while his books advance a post-modernist interrogation of Marxism's epistemological and sociological premises.The book will comprise an integrated sequence of close readings of the novels, starting with _Risen from the Ground_ (1980) and concluding with _The History of the Siege of Lisbon_ (1989). It will first identify how Saramago's recasting of the historical novel responds both to Marxist literary theorist's formulation of alternatives to 'socialist realism', and to the experiments of contemporary radical left writers in Europe and Latin America. It will then use contemporary anglophone and francophone cultural and political theory to identify the five novels' continuing international relevance as vehicles for a new philosophy and praxis for radical socialism. In particular, this study will identify Saramago's response to post-structuralist debates regarding the roles of desire and of gender and ethnicity in determining identity and social relations, and how this is central to his quest for an enhanced culture of radical politics.The book will guide the reader through Saramago's historical, cultural and literary allusions, relating each novel's specifically Portuguese frame of reference to international contexts, and thereby illuminating continuities between them and his later, 'allegorical' fiction. Saramago himself has suggested that each of his novels can be considered a component of a single multi-volume text. My study will work towards a comprehensive reading of his literary project by exploring Saramago's ever more intricate intertextual allusion to his earlier works in each of his novels to demonstrate how each individual novel amplifies and refracts the political messages of the others. While primarily aimed at scholars of Portuguese and world literature, the book will thus also be of interest to specialists in political and cultural theory, by revealing how Saramago's ostensive focus on the past, and on the aspirations of a nation rediscovering its history and identity after decades of authoritarian rule, offers a nuanced and challenging contribution to contemporary radical left analyses and responses to the impact of neo-liberal economics and globalisation on cultural identity, civic and employment rights, democratic participation, self-Other relations, and ecology.