Allegories of nation? A reading of Jose Cardoso Pires's novel O Delfim.

The definition of nation as an 'imagined community' (1) and the recognition that national cultures constitute 'a discursive device which represents difference as unity or identity' have become in recent years a widely shared presupposition of critical discourse, indeed a vital component of the present common sense in cultural studies. (2) Formulations such as these help to draw our attention to the simple fact that national identity is not just a matter of content, but also, decisively, a matter of form--not so much a question of tradition, but of translation and of invention. Not surprisingly, the concept of the border or the boundary is becoming increasingly prominent in cultural studies, as it permits one to grasp the strategies of distinction and of articulation that specifically constitute a given culture--the production of its own borders being an essential component of the self-definition of any culture.

The dramatically increasing pressures of globalization have lent a new centrality to the notion of national culture and of cultural identity, while at the same time rendering them problematic. In fact, in a globalized world system, cultural identity becomes instrumental for the negotiation of a national state's position within that system. The consequences of such an instrumentalization are obvious: witness, for instance, how the positive connotations of multiculturalism are being increasingly eroded by a reinterpretation of this notion as a sign of insurmountable difference or of essential incompatibility, or, worse still, by a foundation of the 'originality' and 'authenticity' of a given culture on ethnic terms. As another case in point, Samuel Huntington's model of the 'clash of civilizations' (3) is in the end but one version of an 'insanity of identity' intent on investing cultural difference with some essentialist meaning. (4)

At the same time, however, the context of a globalized world, involving 'interactions of a new order and intensity', destabilizes the very notion of local identity. (5) It becomes apparent that a definition of the local can only be achieved through a reflection on its relation to the global, without which the concept itself is unthinkable. Indeed, both concepts are strictly interdependent: the definition of certain cultural formations as local is the way a dominant cultural discourse can claim a global status for itself--thus concealing the fact that the global is in turn nothing else than a local formation that has succeeded in achieving hegemony and in the process has gained possession of the power to define, that is to provide its own code with the mark of universality.

Under this light, the illusion of homogeneity conveyed by the panorama of contemporary culture can be uncovered as what it really is: a fiction through which hegemonic globalization conceals those differences and unequal power relations which it is the task of a counter-hegemonic logic to expose. As a matter of fact, globalization is the code word for a process which is not uniform but highly heterogeneous. As Arjun Appadurai reminds us, 'the new global cultural economy has to be seen as a complex, overlapping, disjunctive order'. (6) In this context, it has in turn become easier to discard any essentialist assumptions from the notion of cultural identity and to recognize it as a contested terrain, prey to internal contradictions and the object of a permanent negotiation between different and often conflicting positions. Identity turns out to be some kind of floating signifier, requiring careful contextualization and a specific integration in a dynamic, relational framework.

Within such a framework, it is clear that a notion of agency cannot be dispensed with. It is crucial to ask about the instances of mediation and it cannot, therefore, come as a surprise that the whole discussion about the changing contemporary conditions of cultural production, accommodated under the rather awkward label of postmodernism, has brought about a renewed interest in the question of intellectuals--ranging from the straightforward proclamation of their final demise, as in Lyotard's obituary, to the various positions favouring the hypothesis that the proclaimed dead are after all alive and well. (7)

I hope these few remarks will have helped to set the stage for the brief discussion of some central problems connected with the question of the literary representation of the nation I propose to engage with here. Indeed, one cannot address this question without acknowledging that the 'imagining' of the nation has long been taking place in a context over-determined by the tensions between the local and the global I roughly outlined above. It is against this background that the adequacy of competing models of interpretation has to be tested. That is why I shall start with some comments on the argument presented by Fredric Jameson in his article 'Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism', published in 1986 in the journal Social Text, before proceeding to a reflection on the Portuguese case, centred on a rereading of a key text of modern Portuguese literature, the novel O Delfim by Jose Cardoso Pires.

Jameson's text rests on assumptions that are of vital importance for a discussion of cultural identity, starting with his insistence on the need for comparative cultural studies based on a relational way of thinking world culture and on the significance of peripheral cultures and non-canonical texts for such studies. The course of his argument leads him, however, to highly problematic conclusions that seem to me extremely instructive in regard to the central questions I am addressing.

The main axis of Jameson's argument rests on the notion of national allegory as the distinctive feature of 'third world literature':

Third-world texts [...] necessarily project a political dimension in the
form of national allegory: the story of the private individual destiny
is always an allegory of the embattled situation of the public third-
world culture and society. (8)

And again, towards the end of the essay, in a central passage that has to be quoted at some length:

The view from the top is epistemologically crippling, and reduces its
subjects to the illusions of a host of fragmented subjectivities, to the
poverty of the individual experience of isolated monads, to dying
individual bodies without collective pasts or futures bereft of any
possibility of grasping the social totality. This placeless
individuality, this structural idealism which affords us the luxury of
the Sartrean blink, offers a welcome escape from the 'nightmare of
history', but at the same time it condemns our culture to psychologism
and to 'projections' of private subjectivity. All of this is denied to
third-world culture, which must be situational and materialist despite
itself. And it is this, finally, which must account for the allegorical
nature of third-world culture, where the telling of the individual story
and the individual experience cannot but ultimately involve the whole
laborious telling of the experience of the collectivity itself. (9)

There are several problems with this argument, that have been incisively tackled by Pakistan-born critic Aijaz Ahmad in his powerful rejoinder in one of the next issues of the same journal. (10) I shall restrict myself to what seems to me a crucial point: although the question remains implicit, the course of the argument makes it perfectly clear that the postulated binary opposition between the ideal types of 'first world' and 'third world' literatures is but another piece in Jameson's continued polemics against postmodernism as 'the cultural logic of late capitalism'. (11) As a matter of fact, as the argument goes, the specificity of the 'third world' situation lies in the prevalence of the figure of the (rational) mediator that to Jameson's eyes has disappeared from the fragmented and utterly individualistic cultural space he construes as characteristic of the 'first world'. The question of the role of intellectuals is indeed central to the whole argument: in the 'third world', the writer and the intellectual essentially coincide and the national allegory represents the specific form of their social and political commitment, mediated through the figure of the nation.

It seems unquestionable to me (although in some passages this appears to be explicitly rejected) that Jameson's convoluted text implies the return of the concept of the nation as a collective subject, which, in a thoroughly Hegelian fashion, is coming to a conscience of itself through a process where the writers, the producers of 'national allegories', have a decisive and literally organic role to perform. In the process, the concept of allegory is dealt with in a way that seems to me rather problematic. Jameson does stress that the concept entails a sense of discontinuity and ambivalence; he explicitly alludes to the opposition between allegory and symbol and points to the heterogeneous, polysemic nature of the former. (12) However, his insistence on the congruence between individual experience and 'the experience of the collectivity itself' under 'third world' conditions cannot but remind us of the Lukacsian category of the typical as the aesthetic warrant for the ultimate identity between the world of narration and the narrated world. (13) In any case, the solution for the crisis of representation is postulated as lying in the very nature of 'simple' social formations where individual and collective subject (the 'nation') fundamentally coincide.

In his already mentioned rejoinder to Jameson, Aijaz Ahmad, although the word 'globalization' does not occur in his text (back in 1987 the catchword was only just starting its irresistible career), argues in substance for a global view that will not get stuck in rigid oppositions, but, instead, will be able to account for the essential heterogeneity of its subject matter. 'There is no such thing', he states, 'as a "third-world literature" which can be constructed as an internally coherent object of theoretical knowledge' and, on the other hand, 'allegorization is by no means specific to the so-called third world'. (14)

This means that a more complex model is needed, one necessarily founded on that 'situational difference in cultural production and meanings' that, in his rather inconclusive answer to Ahmad, Jameson states to have pursued, (15) but, as we saw, has also fundamentally misconstrued. (16) This situational difference has to be thought within the dynamics of globalization--a globalization understood in the terms I sketched before, that is as a process that combines a unifying tendency with the production of heterogeneity and inequality.

It is important to bear in mind that, in this global framework, the distinction of centre-periphery has retained its full import: although globalization has no doubt brought some turbulence into the terms of the relation, it remains unquestionable that the conflicting positions and the unequal power relations hinted at by that distinction fully persist. Now Portugal is certainly not a central country, but, on the other hand, neither is it a 'third world' country; Boaventura de Sousa Santos and his research group have argued extensively for the characterization of Portugal as a semi-peripheral country, that is as a country that occupies on several accounts an intermediate position in the world system--an ambiguous position that will not easily accommodate clear-cut distinctions such as Jameson's. (17) Is this the reason why, to put my argument in a nutshell, I have not been able to find, in the novel I have chosen for consideration, neither the solipsistic, psychological stance Jameson assigns to 'first world' writers, nor the organic identification with a collective subject that, according to this critic, would characterize 'third world' literature? I suspect rather that the problem lies in the inadequacy of Jameson's model: once put under scrutiny, its assumption of the centrality of the 'nation' for authors writing in non-central contexts proves, albeit not totally misleading, to be in need of very careful contextual qualification.

I shall open here a brief parenthesis to argue that the overt allegorical construction of the novel I am going to dwell briefly upon is in my view best read in the framework of Walter Benjamin's theory of the allegory, developed in the context of his study of German Baroque tragic drama. (18) Within this framework we find a definition that is clearly non-coincident with Jameson's use of the word. As Bainard Cowan puts it, 'in Benjamin's analysis, allegory is pre-eminently a kind of experience [...] in it the world ceases to be purely physical and becomes an aggregation of signs [...]. Transforming things into signs is both what allegory does--its technique--and what it is about--its content'. (19) In these terms, it is clear that in allegory there can be no unity of subject and object; on the contrary, they are violently estranged and torn apart--the subjective nature of allegory, linked to its essential arbitrariness, is crucial to Benjamin's account. Thus, allegory can never really be a site of identity, on the contrary, it bears the distinct mark of non-identity. For my purpose here, the indication that the melancholic gaze of the allegorist conflates history with nature and presents time as the cyclical condition of indifferent repetition is also of special relevance.

I think one can recognize in this synthesis very much of the desolate world constructed by Pires's novel. Let us then turn to the Portuguese case: although fascist dictatorship was to last until 1974, the sixties have witnessed in Portugal a quite palpable dynamics of change. The liberation wars in the African colonies, having erupted in 1961, were putting the regime under increasing pressure; legal and illegal emigration (including many young men who refused to serve in the colonial army) was drastically changing the social landscape and putting strains on the labour market; marked cultural changes, notably among the youth, were taking place and were reflected above all in the universities, where an increasingly strong student's movement was to play an important part in the creation of the political culture that was ultimately to lead to the overthrow of the regime, brought about on 25 April 1974 by the so-called Revolution of Carnations, organized by a group of mostly young officers.

For some decades, literary writers had been one of the most publicly visible faces of anti-fascist opposition and were accordingly in possession of a particular kind of legitimacy. They were also under very severe pressure, deriving above all from an omnipotent censorship and from related forms of political repression. Notwithstanding, if one looks closely at the dynamics of the Portuguese literary field at the period, (20) one will find that anti-fascist commitment did not necessarily lead to the pursuing of a literary strategy that would project an image of the nation in the sense of Jameson's allegory. This is especially visible in the sixties in the evident erosion of the literary paradigm of so-called neo-Realism, the Portuguese version of socialist Realism, whose populist assumptions had been questioned almost from the start and that was now getting increasingly under fire. That is, the radical critique of the official mythology of the regime was not willing to replace it by a counter-mythology. The personal biography of the author of O Delfim, it should be noted, fits neatly within this framework; although his literary beginnings owe much to the neo-realist group, he never belonged to it and, while remaining in solidarity with its political agenda, always kept a clear distance, which, for a while, even brought him close to the small group of surrealists. (21)

My own research, centred on the period of drastic social and political change in 1974-75 and having had to deal with the problem of what has been called 'the silence of the intellectuals' in that period, has led me to the conclusion that one of the main causes for that silence can be found, not in the rejection of political commitment, but rather in the internal complexities of a literary field where the dynamics of autonomy were already particularly powerful--in some sense prefiguring central aspects of that peculiar constellation that would later be called postmodernism. In this context, forms of mediation between the assertion of the primacy of writing and the desire for action and for public intervention proved particularly hard to find.

Let us now turn to Jose Cardoso Pires's O Delfim, a novel first published in 1968. Although it has been translated into several languages, regrettably there is as yet no English translation. For the sake of my argument, I deliberately chose a text that has often been subject to interpretation, a central, canonical, literally representative text, arguably one of the most outstanding novels in twentieth-century Portuguese literature. It is a text that provides, I believe, very tangible evidence for a 'reading of the nation' whose internal complexity precludes any easy and straightforward systematization.

For those writing under fascist dictatorship, the idea of national identity could not but be the object of very ambivalent constructions. On the one hand, it was a concept laden with guilt, since it served as a vital ideological weapon in the hands of the regime; under this perspective, national identity became equated with collective remorse, as is expressed in the much quoted end passage of the poem 'Portugal' by Alexandre O'Neil: 'Portugal, questao que eu tenho comigo mesmo [...] | meu remorso | meu remorso de todos nos'. (22) On the other hand, the search for identity was felt as an essential component of the process of writing; the task of rewriting the concept of national identity in a democratic code was felt to fall almost naturally to an essentially progressive literary field. Retrospectively, Cardoso Pires would write that:

Durante o periodo do fascismo a literatura portuguesa viva era, apesar
da censura e contra a censura, um lugar geometrico, digamos, da
consciencia nacional. (23)

On several other occasions, Cardoso Pires has explicitly named the question of identity and of the search for identity as the vital core of his aesthetic project. Let me quote from an interview given in 1997:

Para mim escrever ficcao e uma busca de identidade comigo pr prio, com a
lingua, com o pais. Sao estes tres valores que fazem com que se escreva.
Preciso de discutir a relacao que tenho comigo pr prio. Nao e possivel
escrever bem sem conflitos com a lingua.

And, in an even more revealing formulation:

Agora, no dia em que se estabeleca uma definicao concreta do portugues,
a literatura portuguesa acabou. (24)

The conflict with language--that is, the problem of writing--comes first. The pursuit of identification is here described in the form of a dynamic confrontation, an ambivalent process that is never finished and that will not stabilize in a conclusive image.

O Delfim has everything to do with the ambivalence inherent in such a process of identity production through a struggle with language. It is difficult to give a synopsis of the novel in just a few lines, since this is a text that works its way through conflicting points of view and is built up as a series of enigmas: in the end, the reader--and the narrator--are left with no certainties. It is in important respects an essay-novel, a genre best illustrated in modernist literary tradition by Robert Musil's The Man without Qualities. The novel is set in 1967, that is in present time (the date of publication was 1968). As we shall see, it is precisely the conflation of present time with the time of short-term and long-term memory that provides one of the central narrative strategies. The place is a village that once had some importance but has since decayed, called Gafeira--a designation in Portuguese for a leprous disease and a name that has in itself an evident allegorical meaning.

As the text evolves, the reader quickly recognizes that the place is designed as a microcosm for Portugal. Nearby, there is a lagoon that is described as ideal for hunters--that is why the narrator is there in the first place, he has come for the hunting season, and the hunt provides in fact one of the central metaphors of the text. The lagoon is a place bursting with life, but at the same time visited by death and by disease. The right to hunt there belongs exclusively to the central character in the novel, the engineer Palma Bravo, nicknamed the Dauphin by the narrator, a character that clearly has a typical significance. He is the last in a line of generations of big landowners that have reigned over the place for centuries. He is a violent, tyrannical character, proud of the absolute power he exerts over others: over the people in the village, but above all over his direct subordinates, including his wife (he is the paradigmatic representative of the 'marialva' type, theorized by Cardoso Pires in an important essay, the typical male obsessed with the display of his virility). (25) His wife leads a life of seclusion in the house she almost never leaves. There is also a servant of African origin, who is physically handicapped (he suffered an accident when working at a factory and has been literally 'rebuilt' by the Dauphin, whom he serves with the fidelity of a dog).

Upon coming again to the village for the new hunting season, the narrator no longer finds these three characters. He is told that the servant has been found dead in his master's bed, the woman has drowned in the lagoon and the Dauphin has disappeared. According to one version, he has killed both servant and adulterous wife and has then fled; this is, however, by no means positive truth--there are other, intricate hypotheses, different rumours circulate, and the actual truth is to remain uncertain, in accordance with the enigmatic structure of the whole plot.

This course of events seems to signal a new era for the inhabitants of Gafeira. The right to hunt has been purchased by a local co-operative and the possibility of a future that will be more than the eternal repetition of a frozen time is perhaps in sight.

My purpose is not to provide anything even resembling an analysis of the intricate textual fabric of Pires's novel. I will just elaborate briefly on a few aspects that are central for my argument. Let me start with the narrator. The narrator--a first-person narrator that remains anonymous till the end--repeatedly names himself, and is named by others, a writer, one that the author would explicitly characterize in an important essay as an escritor-furao ('weasel-writer'). (26) Indeed, he performs an inquisitive function, tirelessly bringing together the pieces of a puzzle that will never completely fit together, assembling everything, from fragments of conversation to written documents, like the fictitious nineteenth-century monograph about the village that is again and again alluded to. Indeed, the narrator takes on first and foremost the role of the reader. But what does he read? Certainly not the 'nation' in the sense of any unified image; what he reads is a fragmented universe of an essentially allusive nature, where history and nature conflate and where for the subject everything is turned into a sign waiting to be decoded. The attitude thus required from the narrator coincides with the one that is asked from the allegorist--the attitude of the semiotician.

The narrator-function in O Delfim is dealt with in a quite complex fashion: sometimes it is doubled, in that the narrator reflects on his own role, on his attitude of 'interested distancing' and on the different perspectives, from the critical to the naive, he alternatively assumes. (27) Also, as I have mentioned already, he often points to himself as the writer, thus bringing still another level into play and incorporating a reflection on the problems involved with the writing of the novel itself. As a matter of fact, the narrator most often does not really narrate in a strict sense; instead, he comments, he resorts to an essayistic mode, or he stages a course of events, experimenting at the same time with different combinations and different possibilities. (28) It is indeed striking how often he resorts to a hypothetical mode: one of the frequent devices in the text is the putting in doubt and correcting of an assertion that has previously been made in the affirmative mode. Also frequently, a solution is suggested or announced that in the end does not materialize in the text. (29) We end up with some sort of a baroque code: things are what they are, but at the same time they are also or stand for something else.

Given such a narrator, it is easy to guess that the story in itself is by no means central to the economy of the novel. (30) The text is centred, not on the events themselves, but in the different ways they are reflected in discourse, and the narrator explicitly refuses to provide a final interpretation. Indeed, only superficially can the text appear as structured in the mode of the detective story; as a matter of fact, there is no final truth to be uncovered here, but, instead, a permanent interrogation, an immense play, where reality is never just there, but instead appears reduced to that which the author, in an important meta-commentary, designates as 'delirious illuminations'. (31) Not surprisingly, then, the narrator at one time defines himself with the thoroughly ambivalent formula of 'an inventor of truths', and the figure of the writer as it is constructed by the text is one that is immune to any pretension of authority. (32)

All of this has everything to do with the treatment of space and time in the novel. Space and time are closely interconnected in a way that qualifies the novel's chronotope as strictly constricted, and indeed suffocating. One has the house, the central square of the village, the lagoon, circular places where things appear to be frozen in time. The central figure is the lagoon, which is sometimes anthropomorphized, and the fog that always hovers above it and that permeates everything is a leitmotiv carried throughout the whole novel. In the lagoon, the topoi of life and death conflate in an ambivalent metaphor that is structurally equivalent to the ambivalent construction of the text itself. Just as the process of writing is in the end not capable of getting hold of the enigma, so also the eternal fog qualifies the space of Gafeira as a kind of maze, where a truth-content is not discernible under the different masks that prevail. The social topography of the village is thus translated into a determinant image of nature that is unfolded in various ways throughout the text.

The figure of the circle is absolutely recurrent in the novel. One of its more powerful images is the one of the device for raising water, that is described at one point as 'a blind watch' (33) always running in circles, as a circle that translates into another, bigger circle. (34) Here space and time get conflated in one single image. Indeed, the spatialization of time is a central device in O Delfim--a device, by the way, that would provide one of the topics for postmodernist theory. Time seems to have been absorbed by the immobility of space. Consequently, the present and the past of--short-term and long-term--memory are compressed into something like the intemporal present of cyclic repetition. (35)

The text makes it perfectly clear that this frozen, circular time is also a national time. This is particularly conveyed by one image that is conjured up in some central passages, the image of the motionless lizard stuck against an ancient wall:

Ser humilde, portugues, que habita ruinas da Hist ria [...] um fragmento
de pedra gerado na pedra [...] Lagartixa, meu brasao do tempo. (36)

The image of the small wall-lizard contrasts with grandiloquent, pathetic myths of identity, like that of dominant nationalist discourse, or like that represented by Palma Bravo, the Dauphin, that, like Portugal, is in the course of the novel always in the process of constructing his own mask, of asserting a mythical identity. The lizard is really a very humble emblem; its immobility against the ancient, ruined wall, however, is a very clear figure for an immobility of time that is only apparent. The conflation of history with nature, that is essential to the deconstructive strategy of the novel, is not its last word. In the end, the lizard will have awakened, historical time and historical change will have regained its rights against the circular repetition of the same--time has jumped forward, 'tudo mudou na Gafeira'. (37)

This has led some critics to euphoric interpretations, taking the disappearance of the Dauphin as a metaphor for liberation. (38) This indeed it is, but a very ambivalent one. The unreal, hallucinatory world the novel has constructed is still there. It is the structure of the text itself, the interrogative and enigmatic mode of construction, that resists such an euphoric reading. In fact, there is in the novel no nostalgia or idealization of the 'roots', quite the contrary, they are shown as weighing like a nightmare upon the living, but, at the same time the options remain totally unclear. (39) The novel is suspended between two temporalities, both of which resist the assertion of any essentialist identity, the unproblematic postulating of a collective subject with whom the writer would in the end peacefully merge.

So, in a sense, although the nation certainly remains as something towards which the whole text tends--one could say its object of desire--the novel is in the end about the impossibility of narrating the nation. Yes, it tells us, the nation cannot be narrated, it can only be the object of allusion--and that is what Pires's strategy of interrogation and self-interrogation is all about, the fragmentary, dialogic structure of the novel becomes in itself a sign for that impossibility. But perhaps the best summary for all of this has been provided by the author himself with a sentence he has used on several occasions and that indeed fits, one could say, not just O Delfim, but equally most of his work:

                Este pais nao existe; eu estive l[sz]. (40)

(1) Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities. Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, revised edn (London/New York: Verso, 1991).

(2) Stuart Hall, 'The Question of Cultural identity', in Modernity and Its Futures, ed. by St Hall et al. (London: Polity, 1992), p. 297.

(3) Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996).

(4) Thomas Meyer, Identitats-Wahn. Die Politisierung des kulturellen Unterschieds (Berlin: Aufbau, 1997).

(5) Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large. Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis/London: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), p. 27.

(6) Appadurai, p. 32.

(7) Jean-Francois Lyotard, 'Tombeau de l'intellectuel', in J.-F. Lyotard, Tombeau de l'intellectuel et autres papiers (Paris: Galilee, 1984), pp. 9-22.

(8) Fredric Jameson, 'Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism', Social Text, 15 (1986), 69 (italics in the original).

(9) Jameson, 'Third-World Literature ...,' pp. 85-86.

(10) Aijaz Ahmad, 'Jameson's Rhetoric of Otherness and the "National Allegory"', Social Text, 17 (1987), 3-25.

(11) Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London: Verso, 1990).

(12) Jameson, 'Third-World Literature ...', p. 73.

(13) Jameson, 'Third-World Literature ...', p. 85.

(14) Ahmad, pp. 4 and 15.

(15) Fredric Jameson, 'A Brief Response', Social Text, 17 (1987), 26.

(16) A more complex model would of course have to start by acknowledging the problematic nature of the concept of the 'third world' itself. See Hannah Arendt, Macht und Gewalt (Munich: Piper, 1996). The new left, Arendt wrote in the 1960s,

     Took the keyword of the third world from the arsenal of the old
     left. So the imperialistic distinction between colonial and
     colonised countries was simply carried on. For the imperialists
     there was almost no difference between Egypt and India: it all fell
     under the concept of the 'subject races'. This imperialist
     levelling of all particularities is now simply being adopted under
     an opposite sign. (p. 117; my translation)

(17) See in particular Portugal--Um retrato singular, ed. by Boaventura de Sousa Santos (Porto: Afrontamento, 1993).

(18) Walter Benjamin, 'Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels', in W. B., Gesammelte Schriften, I (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1980), 203-430.

(19) Bainard Cowen, 'Walter Benjamin's Theory of Allegory', New German Critique, 22 (1981), 110.

(20) Antonio Sousa Ribeiro, Intelectuais, cultura e literatura em Portugal, 1958-1995 (research report), (1997); see also Antonio Sousa Ribeiro, 'Configuracoes do campo intelectual portugues no pos-25 de Abril: o campo literario', in Portugal--Um retrato singular, pp. 481-512.

(21) Artur Portela, Cardoso Pires por Cardoso Pires (Lisbon: Dom Quixote, 1991), p. 29.

(22) Alexandre O'Neill, 'Portugal', in Poesias Completas 1951/1983 (Lisbon: INMC, 1984), p. 228.

(23) Jose Cardoso Pires, 'O espaco do escritor portugues "agora"', in II Congresso dos Escritores Portugueses, ed. by Associacao Portuguesa de Escritores (Lisbon: 1982), p. 224.

(24) Publico, 13 December 1997, p. 3; see also Cardoso Pires por Cardoso Pires, p. 50.

(25) See Jose Cardoso Pires, Cartilha do Marialva: ou das negacoes libertinas (Lisbon: Ulisseia, 1967).

(26) See Jose Cardoso Pires, 'Memoria descritiva', in J. C. Pires, E agora, Jose? (Lisbon: Moraes, 1977), pp. 137-95; compare 'Os furoes da literatura', in Jose Cardoso Pires, O Delfim (Lisbon: Dom Quixote, 1997), p. 221.

(27) 'Distanciamento desinteressado', in 'Memoria descritiva', p. 170.

(28) In this 'staging', Pires's prose reveals that cinematic quality that has been stressed by the author himself on several occasions and is often mentioned and praised. Fernando Lopes released his film version of O Delfim in 2002. It is based on a script by Vasco Pulido Valente that follows Pires's text quite closely.

(29) Claudia Hoffmann, Jose Cardoso Pires: O Delfim. Ein Anti-Detektiv-Roman zwischen Mythos und Wirklichkeit (Frankfurt am Main: TFM Verlag, 1992), p. 29.

(30) This is a point made by most commentators, See Eduardo Prado Coelho, 'O circulo dos circulos', in Jose Cardoso Pires, O Delfim (Lisbon: Dom Quixote, 1997), p. 10.

(31) 'Iluminuras delirantes', in 'Memoria descritiva', p. 158.

(32) 'Um inventor de verdades', O Delfim, p. 113.

(33) 'Relogio cego', O Delfim, p. 54.

(34) 'E a mula-relogio arrasta-se num circulo de terra e de alcatruzes que se traduz num outro circulo, mas de sons e maior--uma area onde cabe a tarde e o largo que, de quando em quando, e atravessado por um acontecimento', O Delfim, p. 54.

(35) See for example O Delfim, p. 119.

(36) O Delfim, p. 68.

(37) O Delfim, p. 226.

(38) See especially Maria Lucia Lepecki, Ideologia e Imaginario. Ensaio sobre Jose Cardoso Pires (Lisbon: Moraes, 1977).

(39) On the dialectics of roots and options as a central equation for modernity, see Boaventura de Sousa Santos, 'The Fall of the Angelus Novus: Beyond the Modern Game of Roots and Options', Current Sociology, 46 (1998), 81-118.

(40) See for example the interview with Claudia Hoffmann on 3 April 1985: Hoffmann, p. 237.

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