In the yore days of 2004, no book gathered the ire of Portuguese high-schoolers quite like Vergílio Ferreira’s Aparição [Apparition]. It was so phenomenally hated, it managed to surpass even the students’ legendary annoyance with the excellent, though in fairness rather lengthy description of the Ramalhete mansion with which Eça opens The Maias. Eça’s sentences, and in fact his plots as well, have a nicely fluent rhythm, in many ways helped by the finesse of his irony. But Vergílio moves at the cadence of a solitary, ruminant philosopher – and not one given to the bouts of sentimentality that generally appeal to teens. It’s all a crime too difficult to stand, least of all forgive.
A few years later, Vergílio got kicked out of most required readings so Saramago could get in. Students in the humanities still had close encounters with Vergílio, but everyone else moved on, their complaints nicely transferred to Belimunda and all those Saramago sentences lacking the proper ways of traditional punctuation.
Intellectuals and newspapers did debated the curriculum change, normally with one side arguing that “Saramago is the only Nobel laureate in literature Portugal has, so it must be studied at school”, while the opposing end claimed that “exactly because of the Nobel, students are much more likely to read Saramago outside of school than anything by Vergílio.” But really the matter got solved without much ado or drama. After all, Saramago had already won the Nobel back in 1998 and not having him as required reading was starting to paint the wrong picture.
Nineteen-year-old me – fresh out of high-school, with two books published and another, more mature one, on its way – was a bit sad to see Vergílio pushed out of the required readings. Unlike all my friends and school mates, I had loved Aparição to the point I’d easily claim it as my favourite of the required readings. In fact, that third book of mine had learned a thing or a hundred with Aparição (not that it necessarily applied them well). Can’t remember if anyone asked me for a byline at the time, but if they did I probably said something about the higher chance of people reading Saramago than opening a Vergílio book of their own accord. I didn’t quite disagree with having Saramago in the curriculum; I just preferred sacrificing some other novel to make it happen. Did that mean I’d willing perpetuate the generational trauma caused by Aparição and its melancholic main character with his teaching position in Évora? Well, why not? It had been part of the Portuguese school experience for ages and, besides, it didn’t even rank in the top ten of the worst rites of passage.
These days, required readings are no longer such prime material for the collective traumas of Portuguese students. The curriculum became way more flexible. In most cases, teachers can choose from several options per author or per learning objective, and so the great book loathing that united students across the nation came to an end. Now they can even finish school without any close encounter with the Maias’ Ramalhete. And fortunately they get to read some more diverse authors as well.
This year’s polemic about the potential – and indeed likely – removal of Saramago from Portugal’s required readings derives precisely from one such curricular update.
Contrary to popular belief, the Nobel Prize in Literature is not the ultimate recognition of an author’s literary prowess.
Up until now, the Portuguese curriculum made it mandatory to teach one of Saramago’s works. Teachers chose between Baltasar and Blimunda and The year of the death of Ricardo Reis; students would then read and, hopefully, learn to interpret the book.
The current change will allow teachers to opt for one of those two Saramago novels or instead go with A God Walking in the Late Afternoon Breeze by Mário de Carvalho. Basically, it will be possible to finish school without ever reading a word Saramago wrote.
The entire thing doesn’t really come with a crystal clear logic. It’s also rare the curriculum creates such an unbalanced choice list; it’s normally either all by the same author or all different authors, not this case of two books by one author and a third by a different one. Not to mention the update puts a right wing administration effectively doing away with the requirement to read an entrenched leftist Nobel winner. So of course outrage grew and grew fast. Our era of social media rage just fuelled things further.
Opinion pieces popped up from all quarters and in every publication. Pundits went on the record, editors spoke up, posts multiplied across socials in little more than a week after the news broke in late March. Most everyone rushed to declare the end of high standards in education, because apparently without Saramago the program no longer has complex readings or lexical richness. It’s such an absurd diagnosis, either people read too little and don’t know better, or they’re uninformed about previous changes to the curriculum. Or maybe they just don’t know how to argue.
Let’s start with this: Contrary to popular belief, the Nobel Prize in Literature is not the ultimate recognition of an author’s literary prowess, same as the Oscar rarely goes to the actual best picture of the year. Any award has its idiosyncrasies, politics, and blind spots. After all, Dylan’s a Nobel laureate for literature and I don’t imagine we’ll get a ton of fools lining up to claim the American sing-songwriter as a must of 20th and 21st century literature. Even if we’d stick to just songwriting we’d have plenty of others as deserving or indeed better than Dylan.
And that’s the second thing to remember when discussing awards: Many won’t ever get one not because they lack quality but simply because circumstances didn’t align at the right time.
Portugal having just one Nobel Prize in Literature doesn’t mean Saramago was the only Portuguese writer worthy of the award. The Swedish Academy likes to diversify the nationality of their laureates, if nothing else to ensure the award retains a certain international dimension. That doesn’t favour the chances of a small country like Portugal winning a second time. Even less so when Portugal never made a concerted effort to become a paragon of world literature; the national marketing is more pastries, beaches, and sun than cultural colossus. Not just that, for decades the Nobel in literature had a strong political component. It certainly benefited Saramago but not so much Lobo Antunes, who always cared more about his own intellect than he did about the aches of society. And to top it all Portugal consistently failed to raise the profile of authors with a real shot at winning the Nobel. Maria Teresa Horta, for instance, had a revolutionary oeuvre that encompassed poetry, fiction, and essay, combining inventiveness in both structure and phraseology with a gaze that far transcended her own experiences. But Portugal, including most of the intellectual scene, kept treating her feminism as a niche, somewhat annoying quirk. It took far too long to recognise her literary merits as well as the importance of her actions in helping Portugal’s society evolve. She had international acclaim, including from Simone de Beauvoir, that held all the way up to her death. In fact, in 2024 the BBC’s 100 Women list named her as as one of the most inspiring and influential women in the world. Meanwhile, Portugal was still busy championing the same old bunch.
Portugal’s marketing is more pastries, beaches, and sun than cultural colossus.
Even putting aside all these considerations about the Nobel, we run into the little fact that Mário de Carvalho’s book is a literary giant. The novel introduced by the new curricular update has that rare ability of nailing narrative while also mastering applied linguistics.
A God Walking in the Late Afternoon Breeze has an exuberant lexical richness that serves a double purpose: On one hand, it helps asserting the intellect of the protagonist-narrator, and on the other it applies a variety of terms that place the action during the period of the Roman Empire. Similarly, the structure, the phraseology, the tone and the figures of speech used plus everything the text hints at without spelling it out – in short, all the writing techniques Mário de Carvalho employs – not only reinforce the book’s themes but indeed become foreshadowing for the plot events. They also immerse the reader in the socio, political, and religious themes the novel debates.
Not quite the novel to sustain outcries about the death of teaching serious, complex literature. It sure would have been a neat way to annihilate a right wing government that just deprioritised studying a Nobel with ties to the communist party – hence all the rush to embrace those arguments –, but, alas, the facts didn’t help.
Worse still, Mário de Carvalho is himself a certified leftist. And the revision even goes so far as to turn some of Natália Correia’s texts into required readings. She, who not only ensured many of Portugal’s feminist texts got published but who also applied her rather sharp wits towards decimating rightist people while she served as a member of parliament.
Kinda hard to claim left sympathisers are getting cancelled. Actually, I can’t help but appreciate an update that champions authors like Natália Correia and Mário de Carvalho.
Perhaps Montenegro’s administration had a rare stroke of genius. Widely unexpected but, then again, even broken clocks are right twice a day.
Truth be told, Montenegro’s social democratic party (PSD) could never stand Saramago. Just two paradigmatic examples:
No wonder so many sensed a certain fishy stink in this idea of no longer having Saramago as a required school reading.
In 1992, six years before the Nobel, Sousa Lara blocked Saramago from competing for the European Literary Prize. Almost twenty years later, Cavaco Silva failed to attend Saramago’s funeral, even though he was Portugal’s President at the time and one would expect the presence of all major state figures at the funeral of our only Nobel Prize in Literature.
No wonder so many Portuguese writers, intellectuals, and opinion makers sensed a certain fishy stink in this idea of no longer having Saramago as a required school reading. Pity we focused on the wrong arguments.
To recap: Is this curriculum update politically motivated? Maybe. Probably. Does it stab to death the standards of Portugal’s literary studies? Hell, no.
Compulsory education exists to guarantee students share the same knowledge basis. It gives people a foundation from which to build on. It’s also a crucial tool for any nation wishing to nourish its citizens and improve their odds. An imperfect system for sure, but still the best social escalator we have.
Should pre-university education establish a national cannon taught to all students?
And so the key question here is one most hot takes barely mentioned: Should pre-university education establish a national cannon taught to all students?
If we answer yes, then we basically agree certain works or authors are so fundamentally important they have to be known by each student of every generation. This leads us to required readings. It also implies having someone establishing the criteria and then deciding on the final list. So far, said criteria remains hard to parse, and even more so for works from the second half of the twentieth century onwards, which means we have no solid basis for making Saramago’s case. And we didn’t even touch the fact canons inevitably come bursting with subjectivity. Or how canon discussions take us straight into attempts at educating taste, another area packed full of subjectivities and opinions, not to mention a high propensity for intellectual preachiness.
If, on the other hand, we do away with a cannon, then all compulsory education needs is a list of book recommendations. We probably wouldn’t get that many classics, though, which would leave us wanting for those shared foundations.
Virtue, I suspect, sits somewhere in the middle.
Let’s go back to the beginning: The Portuguese syllabus has become more flexible with time. Some books were added, others removed, and a whole lot just floats around as suggested readings. In other words, we’ve long done away with strict requirements. It’s an approach that showcases more of literature’s variety. It also lets teachers pick works that might fit better with the needs of their classes. Not only that, it improves the chances of students running into texts they enjoy, which in turn might lead them to read more for pleasure and therefore improve their reading habits.
So, what should absolutely stay as required? The UK’s model strips it to the very bones and eliminates everything but Shakespeare. Transferred to Portugal it would get us to something like Camões for sure and everything else as it may please the user. A bit reductive.
Perhaps the best option is to select for required readings works that, for one reason or another, became part of Portugal’s collective imagination and shared language. That means Camões, Eça, Pessoa. Also the medieval poetry with its cantigas de amigo. Then a few of Sophia’s poems (the first whole and clear day, plus a dash of sea). Maybe some theatre as well – Gil Vicente, Garrett, Luís de Sttau Monteiro. The Reverend António Vieira for rhetoric? Most likely. And there! Pretty much done.
Perhaps the best option is to select for required readings works that, for one reason or another, became part of Portugal’s collective imagination and shared language.
Saramago would definitely be on the list, hopefully with far more options than today. At the very least, the current program lacks both Blindness and The Gospel According to Jesus Christ, not just because of their themes but because they have an edge and a sharpness that often work well with young audiences (yes, I know, teaching the Gospel would create an entire polemic of its own but that actually scores points with students; books the adults can’t stand immediately become that much more appealing to adolescents).
Now, about Saramago being a required reading: Twenty years passed since we added him to the list; I’ve read a lot more in the meantime. I’m gonna say no on this one.
Schools have a limited amount of time. It neither stretches nor is it enough for everything, and the Nobel really remains the biggest reason to keep Saramago as a required reading. A Nobel, however, doesn’t inscribe an author’s oeuvre into a nation’s collective imagination or identity, even if it often guarantees a place for the writers themselves. It likewise doesn’t mean the laureate is a more inventive or excellent render of the times than many of his or her peers. So we really have no pedagogic reasons to highlight Saramago instead of Vergílio Ferreira, Maria Teresa Horta, Mário de Carvalho, Natália Correia, or many, many others.
Besides, who knows, maybe Portugal will soon have its second Nobel Prize in Literature. Lídia Jorge started ranking well on some bookmakers lists. Right up there with, and sometimes even ahead of Margaret Atwood, Salman Rushdie, and Karl Ove Knausgård. Fingers crossed Portugal has the wisdom to champion her and put together the right marketing campaign.