Jose Saramago: The Double

It seems the higher one goes on the scale of Literature, the more irrelevant the customary means of analysis become.  We are trained to look for things like meaning, intention, message and the like, both in book and in other forms of media.  At a certain level, however, writers move beyond these things, just as painters and composers do.  One expects the answer to the question "What is it about?" to be answered in terms of meaning rather than plot.  I am hard pressed to answer for this book in other other way than, "It is about two men who look exactly alike, and take that scenario to its logical conclusion."

Given that setup, one would assume that it would be "about" concepts of identity and self, fate, determinism, and the like.Perhaps there is a possible existentialist reading of this book, but it seems at times that Saramago is going out of his way to event it.  He, in the voice of the narrator, often interjects and waxes philosophical, but pointedly avoids those ideas.  Instead, his digressions are about things that seem more universal: the nature of language, communication, and thought itself.  Where one would expect a book on this topic to be Cartesian, it is Chomskian.

The book is not "about" these things, however.  It simply reflects on them , almost wistfully, and then continues as a mere description of a singular occurrence, which is all it purports to be.  The singular occurrence in question, however, is not the eponymous doubling.  It is rather the observation of this doubling, and of the interior lives of those doubles, by a slyly witty narrator.  The narrator is no mere pronoun distributor, either.  They have a personality, and a certain reflective way of looking at things, pointedly disregarding conventions of punctuation and dialogue, as if to say, "Isn't this all interesting?"

Saramago's greatest trick, however, is that the narrator is not merely observing and describing.  They are actively discussing with the reader, apostrophising and rhetoricising with us, even going so far as to refer to themself as "we", which in context includes the reader her or himself.  The effect is one of a salon, a gathering of witty, reflective individuals, into which the reader is conscripted, at which one has proposed a little thought experiment.  "What if," one of us has mused, "It was possible that . . ." and the rest of us have chimed in with our own thoughts on the subject, ending in the wry comment over aperitifs, "Human minds certainly are capable of some interesting things."