In an essay written in 1949, Jorge Luis Borges declared that the allegory was “an aesthetic error”. He confessed that his first impulse had been to write “nothing but an error of Aesthetics”, before realizing that the sentence itself contained an allegory. Literature, Borges believed, tends to correct itself, transforming the general into the individual, and eventually, he argued, most allegories become novels. While Spenser’s The Faerie Queene is an example of pure allegory, Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress allows for a less stringent, more ambiguous reading. Seventy years before Borges, Robert Louis Stevenson had noted that “all allegories have a tendency to escape from the purpose of their creators; and as the characters and incidents become more and more interesting in themselves, the moral, which these were to show forth, falls more and more into neglect”. He pointed out how Bunyan turns Christian into a living character when he describes the pilgrim running away “with his fingers in his ears”.
Portuguese literature is fond of allegories. From at least the sixteenth century onwards, lusophone writers have concocted memorable fables that, as Stevenson suggested in the case of Bunyan, tend to favour character and incident over the proclaimed moral. Beginning with Gil Vicente’s plays of the early sixteenth century, allegories of civic and religious virtues and vices, and Camões’s epic The Lusiads (Os Lusíadas, 1572), an allegory of exploration and imperial power, and moving all the way on to José Saramago’s Blindness (Ensaio sobre a Cegueira, 1995), an allegory of failed civic values, Portuguese readers have become accustomed to reading cautionary fiction less for the moral than for the particulars of the plot, eschewing the allegorical forest for the individual trees. The grumpy Old Man of Restelo in The Lusiads who pooh-poohs Vasco da Gama’s resolution to explore new worlds is far more memorable than the groves of Venus in which the goddess and her nymphs hail da Gama’s “New Kingdom much exalted”.
The subtitle of Gonçalo M. Tavares’s latest book, O Fim dos Estados Unidos da América (The End of the United States of America) is Epopeia (An epic), but, like The Lusiads, it can be read as a dystopian allegory; it is written in free verse or, as Tavares himself says, it is a novel “composed in language suspended between narrative prose and humming poetry, not belonging to any literary genre, neither one thing nor the other” (translations my own throughout). This is not the stuff bestsellers are made of, yet the first run of this 900-page novel sold out overnight in Portugal.
O Fim dos Estados Unidos da América begins with the unexplained spread of a cancerous plague across the US that only affects the lower classes. The three main characters bear blatantly allegorical names: Ted Trash is a right-wing extremist who thinks in commercial jingles and dreams of splitting the US into two realms, one for the rich, one for the poor; Left Wing is a leftist extremist who wants to set a social revolution in motion; and Bloom is the Everyman hero who will try to save his country by means of philosophical cogitation as an antidote to its addiction to violent action. Bloom’s Molly in this case is the Mexican La Rosa, a beautiful woman whom he once met in a stadium and now cannot forget. As in traditional allegories, other characters carry different symbolic values. There are Jonathan and Mary, hippie activists; there is the anarchist Johnston Bonne, a computer engineer, who attempts to end chaos through alchemy; Tiresias, a blind prophet; Jocasta, a visionary friend of Bloom’s youth; Dr Robert, a scientist and buddy of Bloom’s; James, the plain-spoken gravedigger; and Mack Morris, a Polonius-like worshipper of clouds.
Readers of Tavares will already have encountered Bloom in Voyage to India (Uma Viagem à Índia, 2010). Here he follows the path of Camões’s Vasco da Gama, but Bloom’s journey has nothing of the god-ridden, swashbuckling, fortune- seeking adventures of his predecessor. Instead, he winds his way slowly and painfully through present-day London, Paris and other European cities, seeking a promised oriental wisdom. He will not find it. An early poem by Tavares sums up Bloom’s dilemma: “In the café they bring me a glass of water / as if it could solve all my problems. / How ridiculous, I think: there is no solution”.
In all his writings, Tavares is keen on literary references. Readers interested in etymological conundrums will find shades of Milton in the first two characters, of Joyce in Bloom and La Rosa, of the Beat poets in Jonathan and Mary, of the Greek tragedians in Tiresias and Jocasta, of Frankenstein in Dr Robert, of Hamlet in James and Morris. In spite of such a motley cast, O Fim dos Estados Unidos da América has a carefully crafted coherence. Guiding his readers from chapter to chapter, warning them of pitfalls and telegraphing events to come, harping back on details that might have been missed and commenting on his characters’ behaviour, Tavares shows astonishing chutzpah and a powerful narrative skill as he unfurls his ambitious pageant.
The author began writing the book during Covid, but in light of the present universal chaos, what might have been merely another take on Camus’s The Plague acquires a vaster apocalyptical significance. The fate of Tavares’s US becomes the fate of the planet, a global civil war between left and right, between haves and have-nots, mirrored in an ecological crisis that brings clouds of disease-spreading tsetse flies and herds of problematic buffalo. In the short final chapter, following a series of explosions that destroys city after city, the US president resigns, recognizing in his farewell speech that the civil upheaval that has divided his nation has given birth to two biologically distinct species: the rich and the poor. His final words are: “This country will never again have one single president and one single human species: the war has begun”. And (in English in the original): “It’s the end of the United States of America”.
Tavares is a prolific author. Born in 1970 in Angola, he wrote his first book at thirty, and has since published many more: this is his fifty-second. As is to be expected, some are more successful than others, but the best – A Voyage to India, Jerusalem (2004) and his Neighborhood series (O Bairro, 2002–10) – justify the critical acclaim he has enjoyed. In 2005, Saramago predicted that, “in thirty years, if not before, Tavares will win the Nobel prize”, adding, “[he] has no right to be writing so well at thirty-five; one feels like punching him”. Fortunately for Tavares, the Portuguese have long considered politeness and respect to be essential civic virtues: in most other countries, that prediction would have made Tavares the critics’ favourite whipping boy.
Any book concerning the fall of an empire must acknowledge, explicitly or implicitly, Edward Gibbon. But Gibbon, as a historian, wrote with hindsight. To foretell the end of an empire that has not quite yet taken place, Tavares takes as his implicit reference, as will be recognized by the majority of his Portuguese readers, a seventeenth-century baroque classic, Father António Vieira’s História do Futuro (1718), an eloquent allegory of Portugal’s divine destiny. Father Vieira imagined a Portugal giving birth to a future Fifth Empire, following the classic empires of antiquity; Tavares picks up where Vieira left off, and imagines the US aping the demise of all those other empires.
Readers of O Fim dos Estados Unidos da América might recall Gibbon’s melancholic question at the end of Volume III of his Decline and Fall: “Instead of inquiring why the Roman empire was destroyed, we should rather be surprised that it had subsisted so long”.
Alberto Manguel is the director of Espaço Atlântida in Lisbon.
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