Cain: A wonderful reading experience

'for oft,when on my couch I lie

in vacant or in pensive mood,

They flash upon the inward eye

which is the bliss of solitude...'(The Daffodils by William Wordsworth)

Memory is restorative.It restores intimacy. In fact it is only through memory that we can have access to our past.

Lately the statement has become more pronounced for me as I try to recall to my memory what actually I read in Cain, one of the masterpieces of Jose Saramago.The task is uphill and produces an uncanny feeling of disorientation.

Cain is the story of Cain , the son of Adam and Eve(Saramogo never uses upper case letters for proper names)who killed his brother Abel. It deals with many of the moral and logical sequitures

born out of whims and caprices of an arbitrary, authoritarian and patriarchal God.For Saramago, God is always an illogical entity. So in way the book forms part of his long argument with God and origin of Christianity that he set out in 'Gospel according to Jesus Christ'.

At first glance the book seems to be like satire of the old testament. Let me give you an example of the subtlety of the satire:'Seth,their(Adam and Eve's)third child, will only come into the world one hundred and thirty years later,not because his mother's womb required that amount of time to complete the fabrication of a new descendant , but because the gonads of father and mother,the testets and ovaries respectively,had taken more than a century to mature and to develop sufficient generative power'.

But Saramago's satire transcends the conventional limits and gimmickry(our own poor Sashi Tharoor and The Great Indian Novel )and lends a new dimension to the entire book.

For me Cain is a single voice open to interpretation on three levels:

A)Wandering of a condemned man. For Cain is condemned because he killed his brother.And God willed that he had to live a live of fugitive.The root cause is God because God favored Abel at the cost of Cain and produced jealousy.Mark Cain's defiance when he said to God:'Am I my brother's keeper ?'He further said to god that God is the one who pronounced the sentence and 'I merely carried out the execution'. Mark again what Cain said to God:'It's simple enough,I killed Abel(bold is mine) because I could n't kill you,so,in intent you are dead too.' Like a road fiction(On the road, Savage Detectives) all the incidents in the book take place when Cain is on the move from one place to another.In one sense Cain is Saramago -a writer with roving eyes who see the conflation of time past, present and future.

B) Conflict between Cain and God.Through out the book Cain questions God. It is through Cain's eye we can construct an old, fool,illogical God who is ruthless and indifferent to our pain and anxiety.When God tells Cain that he is the sovereign lord of all things, Cain replies:'but not of me and my freedom'.That way the book deals with free will and predestination. One important aspect of the book is a sorry portrayal of God that emerges out of Cain's action and arguements particulary during the great flood.

C) The book throws considerable light on the history of Christianity and its illogical foundation.The story is taken from the old testament and in the process brings to light many lacunae the testament carries within it.

Cain raises many questions,answers none.Maybe it is not Saramago's aim too.The story is couched in modern idioms. For instance the angel fails to come on time for a fault on his 'right wing'.God is busy checking the 'hydraulic system of the earth'.

What struck me most is the concept time that Saramago has employed in unfolding the whole story. It is in perfect conformity with modern concept of time that new physics enunciates and which defies the concept-'the arrow of time'.In the book, past , present and future intermingle that becomes 'subjective present'. For Saramago, at least in Cain , the future is as irrevocable as past.

At the start of my essay I have hinted at the memory as an instrument of knowledge. But memory ,at times , can be treacherous. I might have omitted some important aspects of the book. But I am certain of one thing: It is a wonderful reading experience that I have in recent times.