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He is always so self sufficient, arrogant, cocky, thinking he deserves every existing honour on the face of earth. I had the same problem with Nabokov. Took me a while to learn to look past the man and appreciate his art. I'm yet to read his previous one, I bought it recently, imported from Portugal, for they don't publish Lobo Antunes regularly enough here. So sad, we speak the same language! Please let us know what you think about it. I love his stuff. I hope this one gets translated soon. Didn't he say he was done with writing like 5 novels ago? I will ; It will take sometime until the bookstore in Brazil I usually import books has this one, and then the time for me to actually decide to read it, but yeah, anytime I'm reading him I'll come here sharing my thoughts: I still haven't got to read him this year last time was December , which makes me sad, but I soon will Btw, I haven't bought Caminho como uma casa em chamas yet.
It's one of those not edited here in Brasil. I love the titles this dude gives to his books, they always pick my interest. The Last Door Before Night is a great one. Does Lobo Antunes make up his own titles? It's very often the publisher who puts a title to a book. A good title has a big impact on sales numbers. It's always him, he talks about that a lot in interviews, how sometimes some titles leave a mark on him.
But usually he takes them from poems or popular songs or sayings and stuff. In French it is: N'est pas minuit qui veut. The author says this new title is a homage to Bela Bartok, I haven't traced from which work it comes tho. It may be from bluebeard's Castle. Two things I'm not sure got english coverage and anyhow I'd like to get recorded here: Very few living writers have received the honour of appearing in the collection, the most recent additions were Vargas Llosa in and Philip Roth in Apparently, Lobo Antunes is very happy with it, stating it was a dream of his since he was a teenager to be in the Pleiade, claiming it is to him more important the receiving the nobel The interview itself was comprised of only one starting question, after which the Author went on to speak for about ninety minutes non-stop.
The highlight, and the point which got much talking, was some of his remarks regarding the Nobel. Firstly, when asked about the crisis in the swedish academy, he replied: I'm sick of hearing about the Nobel, i'ts a literary prize whose last winners don't appeal to me. If we take a look at it, the last years's winners are not interesting. I'm being totally honest, for I think people give way too much importance to it.
Who remembers the winners of the Jerusalem prize, whose winners are very good, as opposed to the Nobel and others? It's a conversation that does not make sense anymore because I've had luck and people are generous with me. What else can I ask for? I can't see a prize as being the glorification of a country's literature - and I've won so many of them! I'm busy with my writing None of this matters, I'm better than Plato There was a time when I was quite thirsty about it, I was enraged, but for some time now I am at peace.
It was a stupid and narcissistic reaction" He went on talking about other writers he loves, some thoughts about what makes a goog book good, his views on his writing, some more personal stories He told the name of his next novel, which he has finished writing and is waiting for his editors to return a typed copy so that he can make additional corrections.
In some part of the talk he said he thinks the writings of Saramago to be shit: And Google Translate does a decent job here. It's quite easy to follow. Good to know it is being translated well and you have liked it: I would love to translate it all but it's quite long, it'd take a lot of time: A review of his latest novel is out https: This goes to Bartleby, who I think is the greatest fan of Lobo Antunes on this site.
I've hard his latest novels aren't as difficult as his earlier ones and I have to admit, the other day I read many of the back covers of some his recent novels and some of them sound quite appealing. So, based on those premises, which one would you recommend me to give it a try? Hey, look at that! Nice to hear you're willing to give him another try. They're way less plot-driven, more focused on the characters' interiors, the prose mirroring the shattered process of the mind thinking lots of things at the same time.
The one I'm reading now too, Da Natureza dos deuses one I'm yet to resume, having stopped reading it at a period when I really wasn't able to read anything is quite different from the other stuff I've read in that it doesn't so much circle around itself but moves itself forward, having even some sort of thread you're always curious to know what comes next - I kept thinking it's dickens the social concern, mainly had he absorbed the techniques of modernism I just don't remember if this one's been translated. So maybe you'd like to focus on those titles These ones I haven't read yet.
Early life Barnes was born in Leicester, although his family moved to the outer suburbs of London six weeks afterwards. At the age of 10, Barnes was told Beyond ridiculing the most banal situations, Ionesco's plays depict the solitude and insignificance of human existence in a tangible way. Biography Ionesco was born in Slatina, Romania, to a Romanian father belonging to the Orthodox Christian church and a mother of French and Romanian heritage, whose faith was Protestant the faith into which her father was born and to which her originally Greek Orthodox Christian mother had converted.
Many sources cite his birthdate as , this error being due to vanity on the part of Ionesco himself, who wanted the year of his birth to coincide with that when his idol, Romanian playwright Caragiale, died. In it, host Anthony Bourdain visits various countries and cities, and places within the U. The Travel Channel announced that season 9 would be the show's final season. The show premiered in and concluded its run with the series finale episode Brooklyn on November 5, Richard Zenith born February 23, , Washington, D.
Life Zenith graduated from the University of Virginia in Jean Patrick Modiano French: His works have been translated into more than 30 languages and have been celebrated in and around France,[1] but most of his novels had not been translated into English before he was awarded the Nobel Prize. His father, Albert Modiano —77, born in Paris , was of Italian origin;[3] on his paternal side he was descended from a Sephardic family of Thessaloniki, Greece.
Legion, the demon of Gadarenes, is the name given in two of three New Testament accounts of the exorcism connected with the Gadarene swine. As the only named demon in the New Testament the name "Legion" has received frequent use in popular culture. Uses of the story with the name "Legion" in classical literature and arts is not common. Some notable exceptions include: In Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, Toby says he will speak to Malvolio, who has been acting strangely, even "if all the devils of Hell be drawn i In the Western tradition of surnames, there are several types of double surname also double-barrelled surname[1].
If the two names are joined with a hyphen, it may also be called a hyphenated surname. In British tradition, a double surname is heritable, and mostly taken in order to preserve a family name which would have become extinct due to the absence of male descendants bearing the name, connected to the inheritance of a family estate. Examples include Harding-Rolls and Stopford Sackville. In Hispanic tradition, double surnames are the norm, and not an indication of social status.
A person will take the first surname of their father, followed by the first surname of their mother i. The double surname itself is not heritable. These names are combined without hyphen but optionally combined using y "and". In addition to this, there are heritable double surnames apellidos compuestos which are combined with a hyphen.
In German tradition, double surnames a History This award is considered the premier literary prize for an author in the Portuguese language for the entirety of their work. The award consists of a cash amount resulting from the contributions from Brazil and Portugal, and is set annually by mutual agreement. Dalkey Archive Press is a publisher of fiction, poetry, and literary criticism in Illinois in the United States, Dublin, and London, specializing in the publication or republication of lesser known, often avant-garde works.
Founded in Chicago in , Dalkey Archive began as an adjunct press to the literary magazine Review of Contemporary Fiction, itself founded by John O'Brien, John Byrne, and Lowell Dunlap and dedicated to highlighting writers who were overlooked by the mainstream critical establishment. Initially, the Press reprinted works by authors that were featured in the Review but eventually branched out to other works, including original works that had not before been published. In December , Dalkey Archive relocated to the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana to be part of the university's commitment to global projects that will complement the Press's commitment to translations.
It was published in Portuguese in and in English translation by Gregory Rabassa in Structure Much of the novel consists of four characters telling their stories to a fifth, known as the Captain, who remains silent for most of the novel. In each part, chapters 1, 5, and 9 are centered on the Soldier; 2, 6, and 10 on the Lieutenant Colonel; 3, 7, and 11 on the Communications Officer; and 4, 8, and 12 on the Second Lieutenant. Chapter 11 of Part Three breaks with the format established by the other chapters and will be covered in the plot synopsis.
He taught for many years at Columbia University and Queens College. He earned his doctorate at Columbia University and taught there for over two decades before accepting a position at Queens College, City University of New York. He later declared Rabassa's translation to be superior to the Spanish original. In he moved back to France. He began writing plays in the late s. His theatrical works belong to the genre of absurdist fiction, intended to shock the audience with non-realistic elements, political and historic references, distortion, and parody. In he moved into the government-run Writer's House ZLP headquarters with the restricted canteen.
Alison Louise Kennedy born 22 October is a Scottish writer, academic and stand-up comedian. She writes novels, short stories and non-fiction and is known for her dark tone, blending of realism and fantasy, and for her serious approach to her work. She contributes columns and reviews to European newspapers. Her parents divorced when she was From to she worked on Project Ability, a Glasgow-based visual arts organisation. In she was a part-time lecturer at the University of Copenhagen. William John Banville born 8 December , who sometimes writes as Benjamin Black, is an Irish novelist, adapter of dramas, and screenwriter.
His fourteenth novel, The Sea, won the Booker Prize in In he won the Prince of Asturias Award in Letters. Solveig Nordlund born June 9, is a Swedish-Portuguese filmmaker. In , she met Alberto Seixas Santos, whom she married, and her interest in cinema grew. In , this interest transformed into a profession when she became an assistant on several films: With Brandos Costumes, by Alberto Seixas Santos — , her name began to enter the credits as editor.
In she received a scholarship from the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation and completed internships in Paris under the guidance This is a list of Portuguese language authors, by country and then alphabetically. Gardel's baritone voice and the dramatic phrasing of his lyrics made miniature masterpieces of his hundreds of three-minute tango recordings. Together with lyricist and long-time collaborator Alfredo Le Pera, Gardel wrote several classic tangos. Gardel died in an airplane crash at the height of his career, becoming an archetypal tragic hero mourned throughout Latin America.
For many, Gardel embodies the soul of the tango style.
Jerusalem Prize recipients Revolvy Brain revolvybrain. Lobo Antunes topic Lobo Antunes is the name of: People from Lisbon Revolvy Brain revolvybrain. Member feedback about Manuel Lobo Antunes: Member feedback about Antunes: Portuguese-language surnames Revolvy Brain revolvybrain.
Member feedback about The Land at the End of the World: Portuguese novels Revolvy Brain revolvybrain. Member feedback about My Name Is Legion: New Testament words and phrases Revolvy Brain revolvybrain. Katia Guerreiro topic Katia Guerreiro born February 23, [1] is a fado singer, who has released eight albums and has received several awards, including Order of Arts and Letters, Chevalier rank from the French government and the Comenda da Ordem do Infante D.
Member feedback about Katia Guerreiro: Portuguese female singers Revolvy Brain revolvybrain. Letters from War film topic Letters from War Portuguese: Member feedback about Letters from War film: Portuguese-language films Revolvy Brain revolvybrain. Member feedback about in Portugal: L topic List of authors by name: Member feedback about Eduardo Gageiro: Photojournalists Revolvy Brain revolvybrain. Educational institutions started in Revolvy Brain revolvybrain. List of Portuguese writers topic This is a list of Portuguese writers, ordered alphabetically by surname. Member feedback about List of Portuguese writers: Lists of writers by nationality Revolvy Brain revolvybrain.
Member feedback about Sara Moura: People from Lisbon District Revolvy Brain revolvybrain. Member feedback about Salman Rushdie: Member feedback about Rui Cardoso Martins: Pathetically, however, the women for whom they are intended never hear such apostrophes. The sight of the Lisbon beggar close to whom the protagonist stands in order to spy on his daughters and with whom he thus establishes some quite unwanted complicity reminds him of Africa and the war.
The three salient memories he then recalls are those of the wait here waiting for the mail, elsewhere both in Os cus de Judas and Conhecimento do inferno the wait for an attack or for death itself , illness here the fever which struck his wife who joined him in Cassanje, as well as their baby daughter , and the suicide of a soldier at Mangando.
The Mangando episode returns in full detail in Conhecimento do inferno chapter 10 , where it gives rise to a somber meditation on death and the war. In Memoria , though, the description of the suicide is particularly concise and gory, and symmetrically framed by indirect references to the silence that surrounds the incident: Whether the doctor needs to feel cocooned in protective silence or simply suspects that his words would have no effect, the fact is that he does not make his opinion heard.
Que sabe este palerma de Africa? This self-doubt needs to be read in the light of the fundamental change the protagonist underwent in Africa: His war experience, and his involvement with the restricted African civilian populations he also cared for, revealed that the place in which he thought he belonged was not only a place but also a set of values and a time already condemned by history. His service in Angola has opened his eyes to a different reality, which the Africans have managed to preserve as their own despite centuries of European domination. But after his tirade against a colleague who knows noth- ing about that different world, he checks himself too: Velhos livres tornados reles escravos do arame [ These are the signs of powerful anti-colonial feelings which herald the awakening of a post-colonial conscience.
Having returned to Lisbon after his participation in the war as a conscripted surgeon at the northeastern Angolan front for 27 months, the narrator of Os cus de Judas often refers to what appears to him, several years later, to be a conspiracy of silence about the colonial war. In this case, it is no longer only a silence politically imposed and militarily justifiable, but indeed a silence of indifference, accepted and effected by Portuguese society at large, already in post-imperial and supposedly democratic times: The narrator has returned to a society which he sees as split between those who made the war and those who did not — in other words, those who under- stand and those who do not, whether the dichotomy applies to the despised generals who sent the soldiers to war but never risked their own skin, or to the draft-dodgers who lived safely in Paris or London while the conscripts fought.
Cus 73; emphasis added In the case of Os cus de Judas , the hushing that the narrator perceives in the society around him contrasts strongly with his enormous personal need to break the general silence and place the colonial war under scrutiny. Nonetheless, it is important to emphasise here that, while such a torrent of words in the end remains pain- fully a monologue — never a dialogue — addressed to a sympathetic listener — never literally an interlocutor, the fact is that the written word, the published novel itself, immediately reached and continues to do so in the subsequent editions one of the largest audiences ever in the history of Portuguese pub- lishing.
Narrated by a returned army doctor who gives the impression of not quite having the emotional energy to take upon himself the role of official conscience of the country, this novel truly did more than any other to rescue the colonial war from oblivion in post-Salazar Portugal.
In them, the narrator makes it clear that the memory of the young men who died in Angola despite his desperate efforts to save them will never let him rest easy, so that in effect he speaks also for them though not, patronis- ingly, for the Africans. He himself, on the other hand, always claims not to feel sufficiently alive to take up such a demanding cause, in a country which prefers to forget its ex-combatants and even to pretend that the whole war episode never happened: Initially, the narrator believes that she, like most Portuguese who did not go to the war, cannot understand.
And at the end of the novel she seems curiously to have acquired, in his eyes, the status of one of those who did go there, for having attentively listened to his narrative. Perhaps, then, the narrator is vaguely aware of the perlocution- ary value Searle of his solitary ramblings. The novel further develops themes that are already central in the previ- ous ones, though in different proportions: In Conhecimento do inferno , the narrator-protagonist is travelling back home to Lisbon on his own in his car, so that the question of the difficulty of oral com- munication does not arise.
Furthermore, presumably he has largely though, by his own admission, not totally overcome his fear of being unable to write, judging from the unstated feeling of confidence that the finishing of a first book Conhecimento 61 must have given him. The hell of the title [knowledge of hell] refers primarily to mental illness and psychiatric hospitals, but also to the misery undergone at the war front.
There seem to be two principal links between the two experiences: Each group suffers at the hands of an all-powerful elite: It is in this context that some of the strangest incidents narrated in this novel the gallery of penises, the cannibalistic episodes can best be under- stood, for they reveal the ambivalent, bipolar position in which the psychi- atrist-narrator finds himself. In Os cus de Judas , the conscripted surgeon is in all aspects a victim of the war. In Conhecimento do inferno , however, a new element is introduced.
The psychiatrist cannot, on the one hand, completely extricate himself from the responsibility for the wrongs of institutional psychiatry, which he criticises but in which he too is implicated. Nor can he, on the other, feel free from blame for his involvement in the colonial war. Thus, in the third novel, the narrator is no longer always the victim of the colonial war but also now shares in the national guilt.
He recalls the time when he was already awaiting his departure to war in Angola, but he must first medically examine the general recruits: Estive alguns momentos [ Conhecimento 43; emphasis added The doctor is thus placed in a position where he must betray medical eth- ics: The inclusion of such language, not previously used in Portuguese literary discourse, which Maria Alzira Seixo considers a kind of post-colonial abrogation of standard Portuguese, can also be seen as a highly effective way of disrupting the silence — in the sense of absence of any real meaning — that the repetition of worn-out slogans constitutes.
He is no longer just another victim. Still, this is the same country which another psy- chiatrist, in Memoria de elefante , describes as an emasculated kingdom: A domesticated seminary, a kingdom where all have been emasculated, or a gagged country? A country that devours its own children, in any case, just as the narrator imagines, in the nightmarish chapter 7, that he eats the corpse of private Pereira, killed at war, whom he was unable to save. But the same chapter concludes with his realisation that he himself is the patient whose flesh his fellow psychia- trists are eating in Sintra, thus confirming that in this novel the narrator feels both a victim and a perpetrator of wrong both in psychiatry and as to the colonial war.
Whether castrated or silenced, nobody in this country has had the courage to vociferate against the colonial war, which in the end explains why the nation now prefers to hide behind an indifferent silence about the subject. The first is a scene of torture of three African men accused of stealing from Portuguese army officers Conhecimento To begin with, the episode is narrated in the third person plural, it is the army officers who are taking revenge, but soon two verbs appear in the first person plural, thus implicating the narrator himself.
Neverthe- less, the first suggestion as to how to conceal the ugly evidence of the torture comes from the doctor himself: And the scene finishes with the officers and the doctor asking the very PIDE officer, whom the narrator has so often described as inspiring nothing but scorn and disgust in all of them, for professional advice on how to cover up the torture.
While this is one of the most appalling memories recorded in the novel, it is in fact told with considerable professional? Um coma de insulina [ The feeling of complicity with the gaolers and the executioners is thus related not only to the practice of institutional psychiatry but also to the war experience itself.
And in the end the finger is pointed very personally at the narrator himself, for he too has connived in the cover-up of the ugly truth of the atrocities of the colonial war. Neither does he hide the fact that he too has perpetuated the unpunished, even condoned, rape of colonised women, which has for centuries been the prerogative of the coloniser and above all of invading armies Conhecimento The pages in which the narrator recalls the matter-of-factness with which the troops himself included have sex with African women, with the tacit though more likely: The conscripts feel dead, many would prefer to die, for their living conditions are appalling: They would be better off if they were dogs.
The war has, in any case, turned them into animals: While Lobo Antunes frequently mentions African, exotic fauna in his work, one of the very last references to the war in this novel revolves around the most familiar of animals, mans proverbial best friend: In Memoria de elefante , the protagonist tends to see himself as a victim of lack of attention in all personal circumstances. Moreover, in Os cus de Judas , the narrator is profoundly concerned with a perceived need to break the official silence surrounding the colonial war, in a society that ostracises its returned soldiers and would rather allow the silence of history to spread over the whole uncomfortable episode.
The narrator of Os cus de Judas breaks that silence in his name and in theirs. All three novels speak out against the war — never comfortably, but never apologetically either. It is a critically piercing voice that can be heard in this early trilogy discussing and dissecting the colonial war that post-Salazar Portugal largely swept under the carpet. And this is a voice not only vehemently clamouring against the colonial war but also refusing to let any of us feel free from blame in our col- lective responsibility for the estrepitoso silencio terrivel da guerra.
When trans- lated, translations are mine. Quo- tations in English are taken from the published English translation, South of Nowhere. Works Cited Antunes, Antonio Lobo. Theorizing Post-Colonialism and Post-Modernism.
Ian Adam and Helen Tiffin. U of Calgary P, Minnesota UP , An Essay on the Philosophy of Language. Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race. Her main research area is contemporary Portuguese literature, particularly the novels dealing with the colonial wars in Africa. Other research interests are comparative literature contemporary European and literatures from Portuguese-speaking African countries.
Some of her recent publications on topics related to the one in this article include: This article traces the loss of paternal meaning manifest in Antonio Lobo Antuness Explicagao dos passaros. His removal from the role of national father was concomitant in Portugal with a search by some for an alternative figure of symbolic paternal authority, before the ideology of Marx was replaced by the inexorable rise of liberal democracy and the trend to consumerism that this has come to imply.
Lobo Antuness novel captures precisely that moment of rupture in which symbolic fatherhood shifts and changes before sliding away into an orgy designed to trigger consumer desire. A powerful message to arise from Lobo Antuness text is that the symbolic relevance of fatherhood, as the granter of meaning and the figure whom we confusedly aspire to emulate, has outlived its relevance and is being written out of the picture in a new economy of desire structured around brutal and meaningless consumption.
The tale is told over a period of four days that, due to the way that the narrative is structured, condense a lifetime of experiences of a certain Rui S. Two failed marriages later, and leaving behind an unfinished dissertation on Sidonio Pais, Rui S. There is, of course, a palpable sense of abandonment on the part of Rui, given the breach in his relationships with all the other characters in the narrative. Furthermore, in the novel, birds always represent a meaning that is sought from a father but never ceded. It is a search that destroys him. Literally, the failure to satisfy his need for meaning consumes his flesh.
He fails as a son because society no longer needs or wants a father. It no longer operates on the basis of a yielded heritage that implies both progress and tradition; it is now dependent on an infinitely inflected but never definitive commercial transaction. Rui is the incarnation of the moment of transition, when teleol- ogy still hovered in the territory brutal commercialism was about to consume. His hankering after a father cannot be realized, and he cannot himself pass through that oedipal phase to assume the mantle of paternity: The question that the text raises is what exactly does it mean to be a father and, more pressingly, does it mean anything any more?
Both psychologically and theologically, one of the primary functions of fatherhood is the bestowal of meaning. Whether it be the Lacanian prohibi- tions associated with the acquisition of the grammar of a language or the Word that is the beginning until it becomes the flesh of the son in the Judeo- and more concretely the Christian tradition, paternity means to mean.
Fatherhood is the traditional repose of the Word, which makes Rui S. Rui has adopted a profession that makes him a producer of words. His definition, his identity, rotates around writing about history. His writing reclaims a past and attempts to substitute a silence that divides him from his father. In some ways, he was the precursor to Salazar and projected an intrinsic quality in the rhetoric of paternity: Yet this father who is able to horrify his son with the image of a crucified meaning will become an impotent figure, unable to satisfy his new trophy wife sexually, an impotence that captures his own demise as a reproductive father able to per- petuate his worldview through his son.
So, what dies on the cross of crucified birds is, in a subversion of the Christian paradigm, paternal authority. Throughout the text, dysfunctional paternal metaphors accompany wan- ing ideology. The survival of the business is of greater significance than the survival of the bloodline.
The capitalism of appearances and of false flows — of the external — consumes the principle of the father passing an inheritance, some- thing meaningful, onto his son. Pseudo-sons, who are themselves of question- able repute, are more valid for a system that ranks appearance over meaning, because they give the impression of a succession while representing a rupture.
They preserve the image of family progression and unity while encapsulat- ing the defeat of the image they project. The most poignant aspect of these related collapses is that the latter is not able to offer succor to Rui for the loss of the former. His exclusion from the Communist party cell, in part for the suspected bour- geois tendencies that he supposedly inherited from his father, combines with his subsequent preemptive rejection at the hands of Marflia to deny him the paternity of Marx.
His abject failure — his admission that amid the Carnation Revolutionaries he was no hero — compounds his unfulfilled and unfulfillable need to grasp meaning. Neither of these trends is able to offer meaning to Rui. They just tease him, holding out the specter of paternity for him but never ceding him any meaning — never allowing him to occupy the role of father he sought as he lay at his mothers side to console her on the nights her husband failed to come home.
His desire to mimic his father, to learn how to shout and tell everyone to shut up, to be able to explain things to his own sons, is blocked by the overriding burden of his fathers disowning of him. Most significantly, it is an act of disowning that excludes Rui from a cross-generational transfer of capital. The loss of inheritance and the disavowal of fatherhood do not, how- ever, prevent the flow of capital, which merely seeks an alternative root. The net effect is a total loss of paternity and the prohibition of any future paternity, for neither of them is capable of sir- ing future sons, or providing any meaning for their sons to inherit.
Amid this loss of meaning, the role of the writing process becomes cru- cial. The text of the novel is itself a fragmentary fusion of constantly shifting parallel plot lines that challenges the reader to try and locate meaning. Mid- sentence, time zones are shifted and characters switched in a manner that initially confuses but then enhances the sense that Rui S. The writing process, in both the Platonic and Hegelian arguments, is to a certain extent an assurance of immortality, while paradoxi- cally being associated, in Plato at least, with death itself.
The author dies, and his dead words live on, even if they are tainted by falsehood or lack of pres- ence. Ate certo ponto, um livro e um suicfdio. That is, it gives a guy the chance to reach the sensation of immortality. And there is no such thing as a suicide which lacks the sense of immortality, that is, suicide is the murder of another person. The novelty in his argument explains one of the reasons why Rui must die and, more impor- tantly, why he must commit suicide. Associating suicide with a positive sen- sation of immortality counters its association with ultimate desperation and attenuates its proscription in religious traditions that mandate eternal dam- nation for those who carry it out.
Lobo Antunes describes it as a creative rather than destructive act of self-expression, and one that lives on eternally. Additionally, he casts it as a way of expunging the undesired other from the self. It is an act that cleanses the compromises of the past, both the symbolic and real father who propagated the symbolic father.
The new system, harshly portrayed by Lobo Antunes as his protagonist stakes a claim to perpetuity through suicide, functions through a sociological mandate to constant, repetitive and meaningless desire, a con- sumption that gives birth to nothing. Figures of authority — symbolic and bio- logical fatherhood — no longer have a place in a society that bore the weight of authoritarian leaders whose primary justification was a misconceived and abu- sive metaphorization of what it means to be a family.
The immortal- izing moment of suicide becomes a spectacular obliteration marking the end of one era — the paternal that policed through an over-inflated, omnipresent single image of authority — and the inception of another — that of consump- tion that will police through the dissipation of fragmented and distractive images that conceal where authority truly resides.
Martin Seeker and Warburg, Pelo futuro de Portugal. Os romances de Antonio Lobo Antunes. He has published widely in refereed journals. He is the author of A Postmodern Nationalist: Paternity in Portuguese Narrative Lewisburg: In relation to the cultural opening of the mids, we analyze this renegotiation of gender and sexuality as a site for the display of a newly found freedom of expression that nonetheless privileges a masculinist narrative voice.
Her work argues that the notion of belonging to a sex or gender can be problematized, not only due to distinct historical or cultural interpretations but also because gender is an effect performatively produced through a citational process of non-identical re-enactments. As a public action and performative act, gender is not a radical choice or project that reflects a merely individual choice, but neither is it imposed or inscribed upon the individual [ The body is not passively scripted with cultural codes, as if it were a lifeless recipient of wholly pregiven cultural relations [ Women on Top The narrative of Fado alexandrino is divided into three chronological sections before, during and after the Revolution that are recounted through the remi- niscing and pseudo-confessional discourse of four army comrades to their cap- tain during a battalion reunion dinner and the continuation of the continu- ation of an increasingly drunken evening.
Among those present are a soldier, a communications officer, a second lieutenant, a lieutenant colonel and their captain.
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The male protagonists put into relief the different angles of interwoven discourses with an emphasis on their ostensibly inconclusive sexual and affec- tive relationships. This pervasive feeling of ineptness and failure is perceived as concurrent to a shift from male to female dominance in the individual relationships that can be interpreted as representative of a more widespread transition in gender roles.
Chronologically speaking, one of the first emblem- atic scenes portrays Ines losing her virginity to Jorge in a pine grove, a scene that becomes all the more important in the narrative through its numerable references. The episode foregrounds female pain and dishonor as initial teas- ing gives way to forceful penetration. Several telling examples will serve as illustrative of this trait shared by the main female protagonists of the novel. In these last two examples in particular one can question the caricatural depiction of these masculinized women.
Set against the socio-political cir- cumstances of the fall of Fascism, we are reminded that the aftermath of the revolution gave greater power to women only in theory. It is as though lesbianism, gay homoerotica, transsexu- alism and transvestism, by becoming symbolically more visible and liter- ally replacing former heterosexual relationships as a search for unrequited desires, are emblematic of a greater freedom of expression that can be per- ceived on both a social and literary plane. Fado alexandrino , published during that time period, most certainly attests to the cultural liberation ostensibly present in the overt sexual con- tent of the text.
The destabilization of the continuum sex, gender and desire adds to this already overwhelming sense of estrangement. Perhaps one of the most striking contrasts of this demise of the law of the Father is the above-mentioned rejection of Jorge by his wife Ines and her relationship with Ilka. This sexual blurring reaches its pinnacle at the conclusion of the novel, where the merging of the couples is even more disturbing as the scenes move from one couple to the next with graphic sexual content leaving Jorge with an intensified sense of fear and nausea.
In yet a different twist, this analogy is extendable to the urban context of the novel where, in the post-colonial setting, Abflio, who once was in a position to pay the sodomized twenty contos, finds himself now at the bottom end of the urban class system, and is transformed from sodomizer into sodomized in his relationship with the Senegalese busker and the blond painter Appar- ent in this complex hetero-homo matrix is the fact that the homo-prostitu- tion fuels the money into the hetero-relationship.
The descriptions of the painter and Desire translate a challenge to exist- ing ontological assumptions about gender arrangements in distinct manners. Seen through the eyes of Abflio, the named sexed bodily parts in this ana- tomic description pubes, penis, breasts At the anticlimactic climax of this bizarre love triangle that merges prostitutional and domestic spheres, the painter turns up dead in Cruz Quebrada on the outskirts of Lisbon and Desire is arrested for the crime.
In contrast to Desire and the transvestites of the Cais j de Sodre, To Ze marks the opposite pole of male subjectivity. Whereas the male cross-dresser or transvestite can be perceived as representing, as Robert I J. Stoller ; Garber These different forms of engendered performativities transgress the idea of fixed norms of sex, gender and sexuality by flaunting disobedience to a het- j erosexual, binary framework.
Whether it is a partial sex change, a temporary mimicry of the opposite female sex, or a blatant effacement of a heterosexual paradigm, Lobo Antunes emblematizes the liberatory desire to reconceive gender identities. In this post-Revolutionary era, these newly constructed identities constitute the epitome of post-modern sexuality by exploding the anxieties of binarity and revealing the essential constructedness or perfor- mance of gender. Alongside the denaturalization of heterosexuality that the novel sets center-stage through an explosion of sexual discourses and alterna- tive engenderings of desire, the text also denigrates female sex and sexuality, an!
Abject female sex As our analysis has outlined so far, the novel works from the viewpoint of the I hegemonic heterosexual male discourse and as a consequence other forms of sexuality are presented as marginalized or outright abnormal. This notion is all the more tell- s! Likewise, Ines is compared to a toad and a turtle, specifically as she lies on the conjugal bed.
If the novel caricatures female sex and sexuality, there is also throughout a phallocentric censoring of female sexual pleasure. Emblematic of this is Jorges fear of Ilda reaching orgasm and how that affects his sexual enjoyment, as though he were repulsed by her female pleasure, so blatantly fitting with the masculinist view of sex that is constant throughout the narrative In almost complete denial, he comments: This dissonant juxtaposition, transposed within the lesbian economy, por- trays Ilka as identified with masculinity in a play of masculine and feminine that destabilizes both terms as they come into erotic play.
Butler addresses this complex identification of lesbian desires in relation to the heterosexual paradigm when she states: Lesbian femmes may recall the heterosexual scene, as it were, but also displace it at the same time.
Nonetheless, Abflio voices his attempt to keep his dignity by justifying his self-sufficiency through sexual difference: In particular, in the now classic text This Sex Which is Not One , Irigaray attempts to articulate feminine sexuality and sexual pleasure beyond the realm of dis- course produced by men. The positioning of the section and its inherent significance project the importance for women to finally express their point of view on the topic of female sexuality, as the last part of this section suggests: As such, Esmeralda considers masturbation the only alternative to an abusive, sexual dead-end for women within the patriarchal impositions of forceful heterosexuality.
Her depiction of male anatomy and their genitalia in particular, along with her view of their grotesque sexual tactics, emphasizes images of nausea, death, sterility and dry- ness Even after his death, she still pic- tures: On the one hand, because of her silence, Esmer- alda can no longer be even symbolically a discursive challenge to patriarchy as she recedes into an enclosed society in order to elude submission to male- supremacist oppression.
This intermittent impotence coalesces with his political inaptness, por- traying him as a political eunuch, fearful of taking a stand alongside the com- munist activist Captain Mendes and other revolutionaries who want to bring down the dictatorship, and who also refuse to support the Caetano govern- ment.
In the first scene with Edite, his paranoia is couched in the distortedly exaggerated vision of the bed as she lures him into her room, like a spider to her web: The cruel description of the midget is extremely grotesque: In the battalion gathering, Jorge comments on her genitalia and sexuality with equal ruthlessness, portraying her to be somewhat of a sexual curiosity, representative of all midgets: He only regains his manliness when he begins the process of his morning shave, a culturally marked ritual that allows him to take on the shape and size of a man Following the night with the officers, it is also this tragico- comical scene that will greet Jorge under the effect of the whiskey and gin: As both of these examples illustrate, the conclusion of the novel, playing along the line of obscure sexualities and engendered masquerade, takes to its peak the explosion of normal heterosexual boundaries.
The kaleidoscope of overlap- ping, unfulfilled desires that fuel the narrative represent the constructed status of gendered performances and un-idealized relationships that are purposely and emblematically set against what was seemingly a meaningless war and a subsequent, manque Revolution. The Construct of Femininity in the Estado Novo. Individuals accused of this crime were kept, sometimes for years, in the Mitras , institu- tions for prostitutes, homeless, and other excluded persons. However, it would seem that Jorge, still obsessively think- ing about his wife, continues to desire her through the memory of the shared past Seixo The original Portuguese is as follows: Seixo comments on the different styles of narration as follows: These two texts mark a stark contrast to the silenced woman in the bar in Os cus de Judas.
Arenas, Fernando and Susan Canty Quinlin, eds. Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York and London: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory. Feminist Critical Theory and Theatre. Johns Hopkins UP, Twenty Years of Portuguese Literature, Helena Kaufman and Anna Klobucka. The History of Sexuality. Cross-dressing and Cultural Anxiety.
Irigaray, Luce, This Sex which is not One. Jacques Lacan and the Ecole Freudienne. Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose. Female Impersonators in America. U of Chicago P, Portuguese Womens Writing Reincarnations of a Revolution. Edwin Mellen Press, On the Development of Masculinity and Femininity. Her research interests include the works of Ega de Queiros, Almeida Garrett and other less-known 19 th century writers. Her study of the work of Admeida Garrett entitled Utopias desmascaradas: Da cena polftica e publica, nosso olhar e dirigido para o cotidiano da vida em famflia, quando o protagonista deste relato inicial observa a sua propria mulher na cama a fumar a amargura, despeitada de se saber trafda.
Diante do fim de Diogo, patriarca de Auto dos danados , os sucessores abandonam o casarao as margens do Guadiana, e tratam de salvar a pele, como fizeram tantos portugueses apos Entre estes esta a famflia moderna. Daf se explica o enorme exito dos romances epistolares, do romance burgues e da autobiogra- fia, que fizeram do fntimo e do familiar o seu assunto predileto. As relates entre autor, obra e publico se tornaram proximas e todos choravam juntos. O realismo psicologico romantico ou nao reproduziu no romance relates substitutivas do real, criando-se a fiction.
A ruptura deste padrao familiar burgues aconteceu ao longo do seculo XX, mas de modo diferenciado nos pafses que compoem a sociedade ocidental. De modo geral observou-se um exacerbamento do individualismo, que, aos poucos, entrou em choque com a famflia, demolindo-a ou, em alguns casos, erigindo um modelo alternativo para ela por exemplo, as comunidades hip- pies da decada de Em Portugal este processo foi retardado pela manuten- 9 ao do regime salazarista ate o ultimo quartel do seculo e ate onde interessou as elites agrarias, colonialistas e mundiais envolvidas. Na epoca rememorada, Nuno e um dentista que reside com a famflia no Restelo, bairro de classe alta de Lisboa, proximo as Embaixadas.
Deste se exige empenho, mas a ele e oferecido o prazer da descoberta paulatina das relates de parentesco que envolvem os sujeitos das varias narrates. Ainda que evitando o papel de narrador omnisciente intruso, o autor manipula por detras da cena os cordelinhos de subjetividades que falam por si mesmas, criando uma impressao de distanciamento que lembra a dos cirurgi- oes a operarem seus pacientes.
Mas a aparente frieza causada pela ausencia de um narrador que acompanha, protege ou execra personagens gera um efeito mais humanizante do que a figura de um narrador demiurgico. Sucedem-se entao progres- sivamente, como numa terapia de famflia, os relatos dos seus membros, aos quais nao cabe a rubrica de herois, muito menos a de anti-herois. Assim desdobram-se diante de nos personalidades dostoievskianas, que nos horrorizam mas tambem nos comovem.