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THE TEAM
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Later, once disconnected from the social and economic paradigm of a dialectical matrix, Saraiva rejected this work. However, José Mattoso, the historian who offered the best appraisal of Saraiva’s contribution to historiography, encourages the reader to dismiss this radical attitude by emphasising the renewal effect of the sociological contextualisation that Saraiva’s works brought to historical-literary analysis (“António José Saraiva”, Penélope... no. 12, pp. 129-132).
Yet it should also be noted that those concepts and methods were filtered by his awareness that the text could not be reduced to an aesthetic manifestation. A text where fiction and reality, imagination and history are mingled in a magma of intuitions and reasonings, and where the collective whole is characterised by the plight or formal irreverence inherent to the creative act – the indelible impression of subjectivity – comprehending ipso facto a “diversity of possible coherences”, allows for a broad, renewed variety of interpretations. Overall, this led to the creator of such an impressive Portuguese historical and cultural production being ranked alongside the literary critics and social historians who approached the work of art devoid of any strict monochromatic and mechanistic perspective. He was therefore convinced that the reception of a text, in other words, its reader and interpreter, was per se, a constituent entity of the work's actual recreation and survival. This was not only viewed as writing capable of inducing sensory delight but also as a source of intellectual pleasure in the form of an instrument used to understand the world in its permanent and unpredictable reconfiguration (Ser ou não ser arte... [To be or not to be art…] (1993), pp. 74 and passim). These viewpoints were compiled in an anthology between 1959 and 1973. This understanding was thus imbued with all the diffuse conceptual influx of Husserlian phenomenology and of its proliferating space of emotional experiences, as well as the theories that followed, particularly post-Heidegger’s transcendentalism, another of the implicit critical frameworks of Saraiva’s rigorous aesthetic-literary pattern. On the other hand, his academic and principal hermeneutics and linguistics background was also evidenced and thus, his sensitivity to the multi-vectorial tessitura of the imaginary expressed in literature and of the polysemic density of the word, an obscure and disturbing domain of the being, the raw material of the writer and poet.
However, as far as production of a doctrinal nature and the sphere of social political realities are concerned, themselves the domain of denotative discourse, a rigorous methodological standard was called for, as well as the strictest univocity when formulating a concept or constructing an interpretation proposal. Thus, “… terms must be rigorously defined, and their connections painstakingly inspected” (ibid. p. 38).
