Oscar Wilde and José Saramago – Death on the scene

The Great Art was always made by simple and passionate themes as love and death. The greatness of all these texts, though, is laid in the way the artist elaborates a new universe. This kind of artist is able to manage the simple in favor of simplicity and to use a brute material to create a polished one, like Pessoa wrote in his lines.

There are authors, however, who are more than elaborators, there are authors who are managers of the reality around them, taking part in the process, even if they  come into conflict with that.

Two writers who may be examples of conflict with their time - both in a different way and time - are Oscar Wilde and José Saramago. They might be refferences of thinkers, sometimes classified as Philosophers of Life.

Wilde and Saramago do not expose a reality as it is by the world eyes, but like Aristotle indicated, they present us what could have been – ironically well presented, by the way! Differently of using the art by art perspective – even though Wilde pointed the opposite –, this kind of artist seems to understand their work as cause and effect.

A very recurring subject in Art is death. Death is an odd question of the human beings and a topic of great discussions, including philosphical, scientifical and religious ones. Again, we can establish a parallel between Oscar Wilde and José Saramago, with their different points of view of the 'same thing'.

Oscar Wilde is the prior one. He was a man in the Victorian Period, living amog monarchic pricipals, hypocratic appearences and old values. José Saramago is a contemporary writer, living in a post-modern period, among liberal principals, hypocratic values and old appearences.

A play, as we know, is a text created to be perfomed, thus, it is ‘complete’ just on stage. A novel is a text to be read, normally in silence. So, we are talking about two different genres which have to be read differently. 


The Importance of Being Earnest, a play written by Wilde, involves an amount of themes, especially death, marriage and morality. As Intermitências da Morte, a novel written by José Saramago, handles subjects as death, politics and religion. In common, they have more than a theme (among other ones), since they have a similar style, an attitude in front of what they write. And it is not a matter of language, it concerns with discourse (it is a great deal for another discussion!).

Wild and Saramago construct an ironic, sometimes satirical speech:

The amount of women in London who flirt with their own husbands is purfectly scandalous. It looks so bad. (Wilde)

 ... utilizando para tal as suas armas preferidas, corrupção, suborno, intimidação, aproveitar os serviços da gigantesca rede de informadores já montada pelo governo. (Saramago)

 Both of them explore the reality around them:

It isn’t easy to be anything nowadays.

(Wilde)

...dons, cujo prazo de validade, como sabemos por experiência própria e pelo panorama que o mundo oferece. (Saramago)

Both of them construct a dialogue between arts:

You see, if one plays good music, people don’t listen, and if one plays bad music people don’t talk. (Wilde)

...onde a literatura tem todo o ar de conviver com a música na mais perfeita harmonia. (Saramago)

Wilde and Saramago mention their period by value judgements. In their writings, we can find metaphysical thoughts. Guendolen, Wilde’s character, says that “metaphysical speculations have very little reference at all to the actual facts of real life”, a very ironic speech. Their characters have a posture of real people. In Saramago’s novel, death is presented in an anthropomorphic way, by the fugure of a woman – one of the figures, since there are a plurality of them.

Wilde presents death as a natural process, a bad fortune that can be thought ironically.

I have lost both my parents.

... who haven’t got the remotest knowledge of how to live, nor the samllest instinct about when to die.

Lots of people die of apoplexy, quite suddenly, don’t they?

Wilde uses the characters’ speech in a very satirical way, obtaining humor from our own condition. An example is when the characters were talking about the death of Earnest: What a lesson for him! I trust he will profit by it. Were you with him at the end?. They did not care about the fact that one was dead, that was quite normal. 

While Saramago shows differents aspects of death in favor of an argumentation, Wilde choose to emphasise one: the benefit we can give to somebody! One of the interesting things to be analysed in both works is the the authors’ metamorphose in so many characters and arguments, since in all of them we can clearly see their own voice and shadow.                                                                                         

obs: texto adaptado de texto entregue para disciplina na Faculdade de Letras.