Resumen: |
Manual de pintura e caligrafia (Manual of painting and calligraphy, 1977) was the first novel Saramago wrote after 30 years of «silence». My study concentrates on the dialectic in the titles of the five exercises of autobiography that the protagonist H. (Saramago) is doing in this novel, which, followed by the imaginary voyage to Italy treasures, give us keys to decipher Saramago's perception of the world. Everything is dialectic; nothing has one dimension, like the Renaissance painting, which presents multidimensions. It is a permanent dialectic, a kind of polyphony which will be further developed in his later novels. Manual is a kind of autobiography due to the real contact with Saramago's life upon which he declared in many interviews. It is a journey to the other and the self without the confrontation with the distant Renaissance era, which allows the aesthetic and ethic distance; but rather with the next door's neighbours, the nearby streets, in Lisbon, that for a long time H. tried to ignore until he met M. and due to her virtues H. came to confront with the aesthetic and ethic closeness. |