Abstract: By examining some of the mechanisms which govern Portuguese writer José Saramago’s later novels –and more specifically his political fable Seeing–, “Du détour comme nécessité” explores a work which is both baroque and subversive, based on the idea that it is impossible to consider “Reality” and “Fiction” as leakproof, external to each other or even structurally separate. Meanwhile, its author declares war on strict rationalization, the cult of Capital Letters and Abstract Values in order to abolish the old opposition between essence and appearance and to defend a literature which is in tune with a complex reality without simultaneously accepting the hazards of our carnal, too carnal condition.
