“A VIAGEM DO ELEFANTE (THE ELEPHANT’S JOURNEY)”: José Saramago’s “THE
TEMPEST”?
“A Viagem do Elefante” (“The Elephant’s Journey” – not yet available
in English), published in 2008, is José Saramago’s latest novel, and
he has said it may be his last. In its warmth, geniality and good
humour, as well as its joyful exploration of the resources of the
Portuguese language, it does indeed have a feeling of farewell to
literature that might recall Shakespeare’s in “The Tempest” (“Our
revels now are over”), and, like the play in which Shakespeare bids
adieu to the stage, this mellow work is, ultimately, a comedy in which
threats never quite come to fruition and no-one dies untowardly.

Saramago recounts what is in itself a true story, the journey of an
Indian elephant and his retinue across land and sea, plain and
mountain, all the way from Lisbon to Vienna. It was in 1551 that King
João III of Portugal gifted an Indian elephant to his cousin the
Archduke Maximilian of Austria, son-in-law of the Emperor Charles V.
Saramago thus returns to the genre of the historical novel in which he
wrote so memorably in “Memorial do Convento” / “Baltasar and
Blimunda”. That novel, set in the eighteenth century, focused on the
Portugal of the Inquisition, though not excluding the wider European
world, in, for instance, the figure of Domenico Scarlatti. The new
novel starts in Portugal but fans out through Spain and Italy to its
Austrian finishing-point: more pan-European, it also takes in, as no
previous Saramago novel had done in significant fashion, another wider
world, that of empire. The book’s twin heroes are, beyond all doubt,
the elephant Solomon (Salomão or Solimão) and his mahout or keeper (in
Portuguese, “cornaca”), Subhro (later absurdly renamed Fritz), a
Bengali Indian and nominal Christian convert, arrived in Portugal via
Goa. The dignified and resourceful figure of Subhro is  a fictional
vindication of the ordinary person recalling other such characters in
Saramago’s work – Blimunda, Lídia in “O Ano da Morte de Ricardo
Reis” / “The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis”, or the optician’s
wife in “Ensaio sobre a Cegueira” / “Blindness”. Through Subhro, too,
Saramago engages as he had never done before with the culture of
India, as when, in inquisitorial Portugal, Subhro recounts the story
of the elephant-headed Hindu deity Ganesh.

As in “Memorial do Convento”, Catholicism is a lurking presence in the
pages of a narrative this time set in an earlier period, that of the
Council of Trent (happening while the tale unfolds), the Counter-
Reformation and the ideological counter-offensive against
Protestantism. The Inquisition threatens, but while the church throws
up both an absurd attempt at exorcism and a fake miracle involving the
elephant, here, in marked contrast to the tragic finale of the earlier
novel, no-one actually falls into its institutional clutches, and the
“alien” Subhro reaches destination safe and sound. There is,
meanwhile, some implicit intertextuality with Saramago’s interrogation
of biblical orthodoxy in “O Evangelho Segundo Jesús Cristo” / “The
Gospel According to Jesus Christ”, as in passages rewriting the
stories of Lazarus and the Gadarene swine.

If “A Viagem do Elefante” marks Saramago’s return to the historical
novel – far more successfully than Salman Rushdie’s recent damp-squib
stab at that genre in “The Enchantress of Florence”, and on a par with
Amitav Ghosh’s remarkable tour de force in “Sea of Poppies”, it also
finds him engaging in the art of (purposive) comedy to a greater
extent than in any other of his novels, the black humour of “O Homem
Duplicado” / “The Double” included. Here we may identify a continuity
with its predecessor, “As Intermitências da Morte” /  “Death at
Intervals”, whose second half marked a new departure combining Gothic
fantasy in the mode of E.T.A. Hoffmann with an exuberant high comedy.
If the author’s intuition is that this elephant’s odyssey may be the
last in a long and distinguished line of novels, then we may join with
him in crowning this empathetic feat of narration as, indeed, the
Portuguese Nobel laureate’s very own “The Tempest”.