Saramago’s Cave, a metaphor for modern consumerism

The Portuguese author José Saramago was an atheist, and his novel “The Cave” is, on one level, a parable about how old gods are made irrelevant by newer worldviews and ways of life. The story is set in a world where all aspects of life are dominated by the Centre, a vast and pervasive urban conglomerate that provides employment, housing and entertainment to faceless, bureaucratised masses. Separated from the countryside by a menacing industrial corridor, it has become the overarching power that encroaches on every aspect of life in this world, a new god whose worship dominates everything. “Qualquer caminho que se tome vai dar ao centro,” or every path you take will lead to the Centre. 

Against this backdrop, Saramago narrates the story of Cipriano Algor, an elderly potter from the rural area surrounding the Centre, who moulds clay into figurines in a scene reminiscent of many creation myths. He becomes a victim of the Centre’s ruthless exploitation and a witness to the horror at the heart of its existence. Like many people around the world today who exist at the periphery of cultural and political discourse, he finds himself a victim of standardisation in a world where cultural capital that cannot be packaged and sold eventually becomes obsolete.

The story, translated into English by Margaret Jull Costa, begins with Cipriano being told that the Centre will no longer purchase his earthenware dishes and plates because of a shift in demand. This essentially leaves him without a livelihood in the monopsony economy that the Centre benefits from after having wiped out smaller stores. 

Given a second chance to make an astonishing number of small clay figurines for the Centre, he and his daughter Marta begin shaping hundreds of tiny humans out of clay, a sequence that takes up a large part of the novel and is punctuated by the entry of two new characters - Isaura Madruga, a young widow with whom Cipriano begins a tentative romance, and the stray dog Found, whose commentary on the absurdity of human actions weaves through the novel.

The order for the figurines is cancelled just before it is finished, shattering Cipriano’s hopes of ever rebuilding his business with the Centre. He is ripped away from his livelihood and made irrelevant in the world where he once played a part, however small; in fact, even at the end of his participation in the Centre’s business, he does not dare negotiate the Centre’s exploitative terms because you “[don’t] quibble with the king over pears, let him eat the ripe ones and give you the green ones.” Instead, he moves to the Centre with Marta and her husband Marçal, who lives there as a guard.

However, Saramago’s novel is not necessarily about employment crises or old worldviews giving way to the new; instead, the story explores the ruptures of the society in which it is set. The Centre’s idea of capitalism, in which even experiences and ideas that are geographically distant or simply surreal, can be brought to the consumer for a price, turns it into a dizzying wonderland. The postmodernist philosopher Jean Baudrillard spoke of simulacra, or representations of reality, having overtaken the real world to the extent that “It is no longer a question of imitation, nor duplication, nor even parody. It is a question of substituting the signs of the real for the real,” and consumers have in turn lost the ability to distinguish the reality from artifice.

Some of the changes that Baudrillard suggests as factors that contributed to the rise of simulacra include the separation of the production process of a commodity from its consumption, so that those who use the product have lost touch with the worker who created it. This exists along with the separation of urban existence from the natural world, and the postmodern world’s reliance on symbols that mediate between the observer and reality - all aspects that Saramago touches upon in the novel.

The Centre is the epitome of this artificiality in postmodern society, containing simulacra of wonders as varied as ghost trains, electric chairs, a living tyrannosaurus, the Christ the Redeemer statue, and astronomical phenomena like comets and stars. There is even a natural sensations zone where, poignantly, people who have lived inside the Centre for a long time come to witness natural weather events like rain, snow and sunshine that, as Marta says, are “nothing you can’t see every day outside.” 

It is a utopia, but to quote the philosopher Michel Foucault, it is “a fundamentally unreal space,” that aims to present the best of society but leaves out so much of what exists on its own periphery. However, even this plethora of sensory stimulation comes at the expense of individual freedom, as all inhabitants of the Centre are carefully monitored by the bureaucracy that manages it.

Eventually, however, the revelation that Cipriano stumbles upon is reminiscent not of Baudrillard, but of the works of a much older philosopher, Plato. His allegory of the cave, which he records as having been told by Socrates, describes a group of people who have been chained to the wall of a cave on which they have seen projected images or shadows of objects all their lives. Eventually, when a prisoner finally escapes and comes out into the sunlight, they are at first stunned by reality, but later come to realise the inadequacy of the world of images and simulacra they lived in previously. 

In Cipriano’s case, the discovery of a macabre secret in a cave deep in the bowels of the Centre, and the realisation that “they are us, me, you, Marçal, the whole Centre, probably the world,” is like being allowed into the sunlight again.

Ultimately, the novel ends on a note of quiet triumph, and while this is uncertain given the insignificance of the characters in comparison to the Centre’s insidious reach, it is still very moving. The family leaves the Centre and their pottery, heading off to a countryside where, even if the future is uncertain, it is free, with only "the current sweeping us along."

The book’s theme of the individual’s struggle against the excesses of capitalism and the extinction of small businesses, was important to Saramago, an avowed Communist. "When I set a shopping centre against a pottery doomed by progress to disappear," he was quoted as saying, "it is not my intention to say 'Let's go back to the vieux bons temps'. But we know what globalisation is like. Nobody can delude themselves any longer about what its final project is."

However, “The Cave” is most memorable not for its quasi-dystopian depictions of flawed economic systems, but for the characters and their human frailties and foibles. A theme that runs through his work is that of utopias being nonexistent; rather, as the protagonist of Saramago's other short story “The Unknown Island” discovered, they exist in individual human beings. 

The nebulous, artificial Centre is juxtaposed to the humor and affection that shines through the characters and their interactions. Ultimately, unlike many dystopian books that portray a society devoid of hope or redemption, "The Cave" left me with the sense that while the modern artificial world may seek to undermine human identity and freedom of choice in its pursuit of rationality, it is through unpredictable and non-rational emotions like love and hope that we can move beyond the reach of the Centre. 

Image attribution: By Silar - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=109798389