The center
The center (original title: A Caverna ) is a novel by the Portuguese author José Saramago from 2000.
content
A 64-year-old potter, Cipriano Algor, who lives in a small village with his daughter Marta, regularly supplies the center , a monumental residential and commercial complex where his son-in-law Marçal works as a security guard, with his pottery . The business relationship is suddenly terminated because pottery is no longer modern on the market and therefore unsaleable, and Algor even has to take back all pottery that has not been sold.
He is now trying to get into business again by making folk clay figures. In doing so, he repeatedly has to deal with different hierarchical levels of the center, which in the novel is a symbol of totalitarianism and the alienation of people from their roots. The production of the large number of characters occupies a large space in the novel, and the description of the plot is often accompanied by allegorical comparisons.
The apparent idyll is threatened by a move from father and daughter to the son-in-law in the center, which then takes place. The turning point is a find in a cave below the center. Nothing more and nothing less is found than the arrangement of Plato's allegory of the cave . The protagonists recognize each other in the long-dead people who, as is well known, never saw the real world, but only mirages. This prompts them to leave the center and then also the village and the pottery - with an unknown but hopefully expected destination. As with Plato, they leave captivity behind and step outside.
Like hardly any other novel by the Nobel Prize winner Saramago, the novel is peppered with allusions to human myths and world literature. The production of the clay figures (from “clay”) is a biblical act of creation. Like Odysseus, the returning potter is first recognized by his dog. A woman waits for him as for them. The lives of the four protagonists (five with the dog, six with the child who will soon be born) is secretly linked in many ways with the central metaphors and events that are only gradually becoming apparent (as in Plato's allegory of the cave). The six clay figures correspond to the six main characters and also the six tied up dead, who sit in the archaeological site under the center. The potter already had a key experience in his oven, when he was sitting on a bench in front of the wall, just like the Platonic people.
Perhaps the book also addresses the struggle of the individual against the dictatorship of Salazar .
The central characteristic of the novel is a flow of language consisting of description and reflection that is not interrupted by sections and, above all, with a lot of direct speech that is seamlessly integrated into the incessant course of the sentences. This flow of language and reflection of a functioning family is the element that carries it through the inhumanity of the system of the “center”. The sixth person, the new wife of the center, joins the family at the end because she was there “in conversation” long beforehand. Communication, understanding, love, faith and human creativity ultimately turn out to be the ferment of an alienated future beyond life in the “center”. This is also discussed towards the end, when it means that the flow of events carries us on incessantly, although it can also happen that it suddenly flows with us in our direction, that it has turned without our noticing. This happens when substance and truth suddenly find themselves in the Platonic cave under the "center" and materialize.