ABSTRACT
Saramago’s explorations in the short story collection The Lives of Things/Objecto Quase (1978/2012) are discussed as indicating a range of agentic positions and relations that challenge, undo and even reverse prevailing orders of use and exploitation. References to child and childhood are strikingly absent from The Lives of Things, but the minor references that do occur are shown to signify powerfully within Saramago’s evocations of what might be at stake in transforming dominant axes of power. The Child as method analyses undertaken over this and the previous chapter combine to suggest two contrasting motifs. Perec’s Things appears to mobilise child tropes as indicators of the alienation structured by racial capitalism, whereby child-related references reflect either colonial disengagement or else signify the protagonists’ settling for ‘settling down’ to assume their position within the racialised developmentalist generational order. By contrast, Saramago’s The Lives of Things accords child and children liminal status between human and non-human, whose presence occurs at moments of subjective and geopolitical transition and transformation. The analysis focuses on scant but suggestive child-related references in both texts, which are seen as related to, even articulating, the equally few direct references to colonialism. This is even as, together, these child references seem potent indicators of how ideology works. Saramago acknowledges how anticolonial uprisings in those territories were instrumental in ending the Portuguese dictatorship, so reversing dominant centre–periphery relations even as he celebrates the agentic powers of, even the absence of, a limb.
