Re-Writing the Estado Novo: Antonio Tabucchi's Sostiene [Afirma] Pereira

Abstract

Portugal, 25 July 1938; self-isolated from but ideologically the neighbour of Fascist Spain. An ageing, literary editor, for long a crime reporter now charged with a supposedly harmless culture page for the weekly Lisboa, Pereira is a Catholic “a modo mio” and a widower preoccupied with resurrection; shy and bookish, given to eating and drinking alone. Into his sheltered life comes the half-Italian, half-Portuguese, Monteiro Rossi, an idealist activist prone to leftist thinking and to penning articles on living writers rather than anodyne obituaries commissioned on safely departed authors. ‘Onore a Francesco Franco Onore ai militari portoghesi in Spagna’ (‘Viva Francisco Franco Vivam os militares portugueses em Espanha’) proclaims the banner slung from tree to tree in the Praça da Alegria in Lisbon, where Pereira is snatched back to reality amidst the singing and dancing of ‘uma festa salazarista’ … , now alerted to the danger of fellow-travelling with Franco's Spain. Can there ever be a terra firma? Has there ever been a terra firma Nation? A sovereign State controlled, tight, constructed within borders … alone? In António Salazar's Estado Novo, which was to perdure/perjure from 1933 to 1974, were the Portuguese ever to be sustained, affirmed, (re)claimed, maintained—or detained, ‘even violently’—merely by being deemed (and as late as 1965, defiantly declared, by Salazar himself) as … ‘orgulhosamente sós’? How can/may any such position/posture have been anything but pretence, the later dictum ‘proudly alone’ anything but a lingering (paranoiac? still colonizing?) pretention? That is the aporetic question confronting the eponymous Pereira in Antonio Tabucchi’s novel Sostiene Pereira.

Key words:

• Antonio Tabucchi
• Sostiene Pereira
• António Salazar
• Francisco Franco
• Fascism in Spain & Portugal (1930s–1970s)
• Estado Novo in Salazar's Portugal
• ‘orgulhosamente sós’
• William C. Atkinson
• Hispanic Studies in the UK (1930s–1970s)
• leftist activism in Franco's Spain & Salazar's Portugal
• dictatorship in Spain & Portugal (1930s–1970s)
• aporia
• Jacques Derrida
• Roland Barthes

Notes

1 See Mackenzie, in Ann L. Mackenzie & Nicholas G. Round, ‘William Christopher Atkinson (1902–1992)’, BHS, LXX:4 (1993), 435–40; Part I, 435–38 (p. 436).

2 Round, in Mackenzie & Round, ‘William Christopher Atkinson (1902–1992)’, Part II, 438–40 (p. 439).

3 Extracted from the opening of a lecture given at the Collège de France on 4 January 2011: Antoine Compagnon, ‘Barthes versus Picard’, p. 1, <http://www.college-de-france.fr/site/antoine-compagnon/course-2011-02-08-16h30.htm> (last accessed 18 April 2016). All further references to Compagnon are to this extract and lecture.

4 Roland Barthes, Image, Music, Text, essays sel. & trans. by Stephen Heath (London: Fontana Press, 1984). All subsequent quotations refer back to these extracts from Barthes and/or to his works here cited, unless otherwise indicated.

5 Giovanni Pontiero, ‘Obituary, William Christopher Atkinson’, The Independent, 1 October 1992.

6 Mackenzie, in Mackenzie & Round, ‘William Christopher Atkinson (1902–1992)’, Part I, 436.

7 Round, in Mackenzie & Round, ‘William Christopher Atkinson (1902–1992)’, Part II, 439.

8 Geoffrey Bennington & Robert Young, ‘Introduction: Posing the Question’, Post-Structuralism and the Question of History, ed. Derek Attridge, Geoffrey Bennington & Robert Young (Cambridge: Cambridge U. P., 1987), 1–11 (pp. 8–9).

9 See also Geoffrey Bennington, Legislations: The Politics of Deconstruction, Phronesis (London: Verso, 1994), 9.

10 Antonio Tabucchi, Sostiene Pereira (Milano: Feltrinelli, 1994). All subsequent page numbers in parentheses refer to this edition.

11 Barthes, Image, Music, Text, essays sel. & trans. Heath.

12 Tabucchi, Sostiene Pereira; quoted from the back-cover blurb of the previously cited edition in the original Italian.

13 Antonio Tabucchi, Afirma Pereira, trad. José Lima (Alfragide: Leya, 2012); cited from the back-cover blurb of this edition in Portuguese.

14 Antonio Tabucchi, Sostiene Pereira, trad. Carlos Gumpert & Xavier González Rovira (Barcelona: Anagrama, 1999); cited from the back-cover blurb of this edition in Spanish.

15 Antonio Tabucchi, Pereira prétend: un témoignage, trad. Bernard Comment (Paris: Gallimard Folio, 2010); cited from the back-cover blurb of this edition in French.

16 Antonio Tabucchi, Pereira Maintains, trans. Patrick Creagh (Edinburgh: Canongate, 2011); cited from the back-cover blurb of this edition in English.

17 Jacques Derrida, Aporias: Dying—Awaiting (One Another At) the ‘Limits of Truth’ (Mourir—s’attendre aux ‘Limites de la Vérité’), trans. Thomas Dutoit (Stanford: Stanford U. P., 1993), 12.

18 Umberto Eco, in Patrizia Violi, ‘ “Il soggetto è negli avverbi”. Lo spazio della soggettività nella teoria semiotica di Umberto Eco’, E/C Rivista On-Line dell‘Associazione Italiana Studi Semiotici (2006), 1–16, <www.ec-aiss.it/archivio/tipologico/autore.php> (accessed 20 December 2014).

19 Barthes, Image, Music, Text, essays sel. & trans. Heath, 104.

20 Christie V. McDonald & Jacques Derrida, ‘Interview: Choreographies: Jacques Derrida and Christie V. McDonald’, Diacritics, 12 (1982), 66–76 (pp. 68–69). Further in-text quotations from Derrida are usually taken from this same extract and interview.

21 Luce Irigaray, Elemental Passions, trans. Judith Still & Joanne Collie (London: Athlone Press, 1992), 73.

22 Derrida, in McDonald & Derrida, 'Interview: Choreographies’, 68–69.

23 Round, in Mackenzie & Round, 'William Christopher Atkinson (1902–1992)', Part II, 440^*.

* Disclosure Statement: No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.