The Cave

Have you heard of Plato's Allegory of the Cave? I'll paraphrase from Wikipedia. Basically it's a famous allegory from The Republic wherein people are forced to live their entire lives stuck in a dark cave, strapped down and immobile, staring straight ahead at a wall (logistics like food and activity don't matter here). Now suppose that behind them there are other people and a large fire. The people would grow accustomed to the shadows and echoes on the wall, until a point where they're not reflections of reality but the only reality in existence (again, don't ask questions, just run with it). The people would make guesses to eachother as to what shadows and echoes they would hear next, and whoever could figure out patterns in the shadows would surely be deemed very wise. Now assume that one of these people was released from the shackles and turned around to look at the fire and other actual, real things. Wouldn't the person be blinded and unable to handle looking at these real objects, immediately attempting to look back at the more familiar shadows? Would he be angry at his captors as they drag him out of the cave, away from everything he understands as reality? However after who knows how much time on the outside, he finally starts to get acclimated- seeing things that aren't just reflections, getting used to the light, maybe after a while being able to observe the sun. Finally after part one- the Cave and part two- the Release comes part three- the Return. Surely the guy, now much wiser as to how the world works, pity the poor fools still strapped down, watching the wall? Suppose he's brought back to his home in the cave. Now that he's no longer accustomed to the game and the dark, he'd probably have a tough time observing and predicting the shadows on the wall, and be considered stupid by his old friends. 'Why bother leaving the cave," they'd ask, "if you'll only return corrupted and stupefied?" It's a pretty interesting idea that to me seems to say that people really just like things that are comfortable and easy to digest even when they may be very clearly wrong. Apparently in The Republic this is analyzed to another level about meeting god or having a spiritual epiphany or something, but the idea seems mostly the same.

The problem I had with Saramago's The Cave unfortunately is that I had never heard of any of this. The Cave is Saramago's allegory based on an allegory but actually follows the lessons of the Allegory of the Cave in sort of a reverse fashion. To back up a bit, I had read a blurb on the book which claimed that a struggling potter's family is changed forever after a major discovery in a cave. So naturally when the book started I expected them to go to a cave at some point early on. This didn't happen, however. Instead what I got was a slow-burning family drama in which an old potter finds out that his industry has basically died overnight with the invention of new plastics. Working together with his fellow potter daughter and her husband, a security guard at a huge building in the city, they try to figure out a way to stay financially stable and manage to strain their relationships with eachother to the breaking point. Throughout the book hints are dropped about a sort of rising Orwellian society in the form of 'the Center'- it's really just a huge building, but it's aggressively expanding and starting to take over the city and it's inhabitants- you do business through the center, you work at the center, you live at the center, and inevitably when our characters are forced to move due to lack of money, you are stuck at the center. Towards the end of the book the family is angry with eachother over money, jobs, lack of jobs, and their living situation, and the father has turned down a second shot at love because of how little money he has. Finally, the titular cave shows up, as the father and son-in-law make a startling discovery in a recently excavated cave beneath the building. I wasn't quite sure what Saramago was hinting at, but whatever it was it drives the family to immediately stop everything and just get the hell out of the city, at which point it's revealed that the cave is going to be set up as some sort of tourist trap, 'Plato's Cave.' And then it ends. And it made no sense to me. But now that I actually know what Plato's cave represents, it makes a lot more sense. I liked the contrast in the book, because it took a trip into the cave to force a life-altering change in world-view. While in the Allegory of the Cave the prisoners don't know reality from traces of reality, in The Cave the discovery of the tourist trap opens up the family's eyes to how pointless it is to spend life in pursuit of the almighty dollar, and to instead actually take time to appreciate their loved ones. It's a bit of a sappy message, sure, but I think Saramago went about it in a very intelligent way- but only if you're familiar with the original story in the first place.