Des angles et des contours dans História do Cerco de Lisboa (une lecture parmi tant d'autres)

This paper analyzes the narrative structure and the literary elements that give Saramago’s novel its postmodern features, focusing in the plot and its uchronic perspective in order to appreciate the sci-fi dimension that the historical events take through the narrative. Our discussion examines the action of the principal character, Raymundo Silva, who proofreads a historical work titled The History of the Siege of Lisbon and decides to deny an important fact: "the crusaders did (not) help the Portuguese forces against the Moorish army". Added to the historical work, this não ("not", in portuguese) produces a disruption over the ‘real’ temporary line. In consequence, the city of Lisbon, at the centre of a meteorological phenomenon, slides in between the medieval siege and contemporary life. Thus, the historical subject resorts to a science fiction procedure: uchrony. Two intradiegetic symbols -the circle and the deleatur- represent the two overlapped universes; the circle refers to the historical world and the deleatur symbolizes the uchronic universe. Therefore, História do cerco de Lisboa is not a sci-fi work, but a postmodern historiographical metafiction.