Queer Lusitania

Queer Lusitania António Nobre’s Minor Nationalism

Anna M. Klobucka

Uma das principais ênfases estéticas e ideológicas na cultura intelectual portuguesa das últimas décadas do século XIX deveu-se à campanha multifacetada de redescoberta e reinvenção nacional, que foi catalizada pela crise do Ultimatum britânico e teve em António Nobre o seu protagonista literário mais original e, a longo prazo, mais influente. Este artigo foca a resignificação performativa da identidade lusitana, realizada por Nobre, no contexto da sua inédita e altamente heterodoxa negociação dos tropos de família, género e orientação sexual. A reescrita queer a que o poeta sujeita as fórmulas genealógicas do nacionalismo português emerge como um projecto subversivamente “menor” e desterritorializado (no sentido elaborado teoricamente por Deleuze e Guattari), constituindo uma contribuição singularmente perversa e profundamente desconstrutiva para o repertório cultural nacionalista.

O ne of the leading aesthetic and ideological themes in Portuguese intellectual culture of the 1880s, 1890s and beyond was the multifaceted campaign of national rediscovery and reinvention, whose symbolic starting point may be located in the 1880 tercentenary of the death of Luís de Camões, with Cesário Verde’s poem “O Sentimento dum Ocidental”—written expressly for the Camões celebrations—as its most enduring literary emblem. Catalyzed by the crisis of the British Ultimatum (1890) and anchored in a more general end-of-the-century reaction against positivist and universalist postulates of the Geração de 70, the movement of reaportuguesamento (making Portugal Portuguese again) claimed the poet António Nobre and his Luso-Brazilian Review 48:2 ISSN 0024-7413, © 2011 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System

5

6

Luso-Brazilian Review 48:2

1892 volume Só as foundational references for a project whose goals oscillated, often contradictorily, between the recovery of a cultural past that has been forsaken and nearly forgotten, yet was claimed to be truer to the national soul than the emerging Portuguese modernity, and an explicit search for a contemporary and inventive artistic synthesis. While Nobre’s poetry clearly set out to realize a performative reinscription of Portugueseness— epitomized, in the flagship poem of Só, “Lusitânia no Bairro Latino,” by the replacement of the heroic collective ethos of Os Lusíadas with the intimately narcissistic self-portrait of “o Lusíada, coitado”—this discussion will claim that the poet’s highly unorthodox engagement with gendered and familial metaphorics results, in effect, not in a foundational solidification of reliably transmittable essential values of the Portuguese pátria, but rather in a surreptitiously destabilizing queering of genealogical tropes of Portuguese nationalism. What I mean, in this context, by queering is a recurrently and variously realized disturbance of signifying practices historically deployed to produce master fictions of Portuguese nationality, in which non-normative treatments of gender and sexuality play a role that is prominently instrumental, albeit not exclusive. In fin-de-siècle Portugal, what Rita Felski has diagnosed as the “saturation of cultural texts with metaphors of masculinity and femininity” (1) in the context of Western modernity’s quest for self-definition was as pervasive as elsewhere in Europe, going hand in hand with the expanding practice and popularization of the newly flourishing sciences of psychology and sexology. Against this background, the Portuguese crisis of national identity and purpose, exacerbated by the Ultimatum and its consequences, offered a fertile ground for creative intermingling of narratives dramatizing forms and relations of gender with those that focused on national belonging and definition. Thus, for example, in Abel Botelho’s novel O Barão de Lavos (1891)—the first work of Portuguese literature that deployed as a central theme the newly representable condition of homosexuality and that, upon its translation into Spanish in 1907, became also “one of the first modern works with a clearly homosexual subject to appear in Spain” (Robb 204)—the rhetorics of individual, familial, and national pathology go hand in hand. The novel’s eponymous protagonist, who “garfava por enxertia duplamente bastarda em duas das mais antigas e ilustres famílias de Portugal” (22) and whose given name happens to be Sebastião (which, given his aristocratic status, makes it possible for the narrator to refer to him throughout the novel as “D. Sebastião,” in a transparent allusion to the hapless and sexually suspect sixteenth-century monarch), is presented as an inevitably perverse offspring of the centuries-long evolutionary decline of the Portuguese society and the only slightly shorter durée of his own family’s history. Portugal’s sexu-

Klobucka

7

ally problematic origins as a Greek and Roman colony—“A inversão sexual do amor, o culto dos efebos, a preferência dada sobre a mulher aos belos adolescentes, veio-nos com a colonização grega e romana” (25)—stamp the country’s future with an indelible mark of sexual deviation, a “gérmen mórbido” that in later centuries bears fruit in the favorable conditions created by “o abuso do monaquismo e das expedições náuticas longínquas” (26), becoming a legacy fatally and prominently enmeshed in the present: “Com a diuturnidade da causa, o mal prosperou e enraizou-se, alargando sobre a geração de hoje um império feroz e dissolvente” (27). As for the baron’s familial descendancy, by his own account it too makes him subject to “um fatalismo sórdido” (272): Eu havia de ser isto, por força! Trago a tatuagem da infâmia. Estava escrito . . . A genealogia moral dos meus é edificante . . . Meu trisavô, inquisidor, era um verdugo e um místico; meu bisavô, um sodomita incorrigível, morreu aos dezanove anos, esgotado, tísico; um irmão dele, que foi cardeal, organizou com tiples castrados da sé e meninos de coro um harém para seu uso exclusivo; minha avô paterna, espécie de Egéria debochada e histérica, essa pagava os madrigais e os sonetos com dormidas, por escala, às noites, no seu leito, à choldra almiscarada dos seus preciosos turiferários; e meu pai . . . meu pai foi mignon de D. João VI . . .

Other, far more obviously influential Portuguese literary statements of the late nineteenth century—such as Eça de Queirós’s novels Os Maias and A Ilustre Casa de Ramires—while hardly “foundational fictions” in the sense ascribed by Doris Sommer’s eponymous study to nineteenth-century narratives that expressed and shaped emergent Latin American cultural nationalisms, also insistently stage an “overlapping” of “love plots and political plotting” (Sommer 41), although here the imbrication is as likely as not to result in a deconstructive fiasco. This fiasco manifests itself as the undoing of both the family line and the territorial pull of the nation by the scandal of incest—in Os Maias—or as the protagonist’s quest, corroded by irony and ultimately inconclusive, for a nationally and genealogically befitting masculine identity (in A Ilustre Casa). In ways that are both similar and profoundly different, Nobre’s poetry also participates in the turn-of-the century enterprise of relating discourses of sexuality and gendered relations to forms and forces that inflect the Portuguese nation’s passage into modernity. But rather than attempt to rephrase earnestly and convincingly for the modern times any of the historically major discourses of Portuguese cultural nationalism, whether rooted in territorial and genealogical continuity of the homeland or in globalizing aspirations of the empire, it deterritorializes the homogenizing and power-driven claims of such discourses from within. It functions

8


thereby in a manner akin to cultural formations and processes influentially theorized by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari under the rubric of “minor literature,” an analogy to be developed in the latter part of this essay. A somewhat extended but (I hope) not irrelevant digression is now in order. My discussion of Nobre’s poetry and other writings as a queering discourse seeks also to point toward—but does not, at this stage, comprehensively pursue—an interpretation of Nobre as a queer author. Such an inquiry would consider, in a far more detailed way than is possible within the confines of this article, the pivotal personal and literary relationship between Nobre and Alberto de Oliveira, and the complex interfaces of their friendship with Nobre’s numerous heterosexual engagements (also both personal and literary), as well as the ways in which Nobre’s ambiguous sexuality has been framed by Portuguese literary history, including the nonexistent history of gay Portuguese literature. Even in Eduardo Pitta’s seminal essay Fractura. A condição homossexual na literatura portuguesa contemporânea, published in 2003, the significance of Nobre as a retroactively identifiable antecedent is acknowledged but fleetingly, with a single mention of “o seráfico António Nobre, de quem quase nunca ninguém se lembra a este respeito” (8). Toward the end of Fractura, Nobre is alluded to for the second and last time in the space of the essay, as the (unnamed) author of the expression “pilinhamorango,” evoked as an example of the homotextual impulse to “celebrar o objecto desejado” (largely absent, in Pitta’s estimation, from contemporary Portuguese literatura gay). Identified in an endnote as used by Nobre in one of his letters to Oliveira, the expression occurs in a commentary on Nobre’s departure for Paris, in October 1890, on board the steamship Britannia. The respective fragment is worth quoting in its entirety, not least for the delightful spin it implicitly puts on the post-Ultimatum expression of Anglophobic sentiment that dominated Portugal in the months preceding Nobre’s voyage: Também te quero dizer que o Britannia nasceu em 1873, tendo pois a tua idade: sois, talvez, gémeos, mas não sois com certeza patrícios, porque o teu corpo de Purinho, desengonçado e cor de leite, foi baptizado na concha de pedra da Igreja de Santo Ildefonso, [e] o desse monstro do Britannia, sólido e negro, tem o seu nascimento arquivado nalguma babilónica oficina de Liverpool. Contudo, há esta coincidência, mas eu não consinto que a tua pilinha-morango toque nem de leve o vergalho deste paquete. (Nobre 1982, 116)

Nobre’s historical import as a potentially central figure of Portuguese homotextuality has been more clearly foregrounded in some other recent publications, such as Mário Cláudio’s illustrated album entitled Triunfo do Amor Português (2004), in which the sequence of chapters devoted to the

Klobucka

9

usual suspects in the amorous history of Portugal—Pedro and Inês, Mariana Alcoforado, etc.—culminates with the final (apotheotic?) installment dedicated to Nobre and Oliveira’s amitié amoureuse. If in Cláudio’s perspective, which is conveyed also, consistently albeit less directly, in his essays on Nobre and editions of the poet’s writings, Nobre and Oliveira appear as the first canonical gay couple of Portuguese literature, a more enigmatic—if no less enticing—sign of Nobre’s legacy emerges from the pages of António Botto’s Canções, a foundational text in its own right, as the first book of openly homoerotic poetry published in Portugal (in 1921). In a poem that paints a landscape of post-coital awakening and melancholia, a prominently displayed element of the debris scattered about the speaker’s room is a torn-up copy of Só: “Além, o livro de António Nobre, / Todo rasgado . . . !” (60). That Nobre, while potentially assimilable as an author to the emergent genealogical narrative of Portuguese male literatura gay, may be regarded also—and, in my view, even more productively—as a figure of multifaceted textual queerness, is demonstrated with particular eloquence by one of the most frequently evoked concentrated assessments of his literary-historical significance: Teixeira de Pascoaes’s notorious reference to Nobre as “a nossa maior poetisa” (Andrade 18). While often cited, the reference is almost never described and analyzed in its original context, which—as it happens— makes all the difference. The context is the first meeting, sometime in the 1940s, between Pascoaes and the young Eugénio de Andrade, who visits the older poet in Marão, and their conversation (as related by Andrade in an essay first published shortly after Pascoaes’s death in 1952), which touches upon a number of writers, segueing from Nobre to Mário de Sá-Carneiro and from there to Fernando Pessoa. Andrade “devours with [his] eyes” the volumes in Pascoaes’s library—among which “o Libro de Poemas, de Lorca, donde saltou um postal de Federico (“Querido Poeta . . . No me olvide”)— and, having come upon an old edition of Só, asks his host: “Gosta muito de António Nobre, Pascoaes?” Pascoaes’s reply—“Claro que gosto! É a nossa maior poetisa!”—is followed by Andrade’s reported laughter (embarrassed? complicit? mocking? all of the above?), whereupon, with no additional comment, the conversation swerves to another book and another author (“Era a Dispersão, oferecida por Sá-Carneiro”), to finally settle for a time on Fernando Pessoa. If we accept, as seems inevitable, that Pascoaes’s remark on Nobre colors in some way further development of this exchange, then the choice of the poem by the latter author Andrade recites in order to prove to Pascoaes that Pessoa was “um grande poeta” (and not just “um grande crítico,” as Pascoaes believes) is loaded with suggestive significance: it is “Dá a surpresa de ser,” a rare example of heteroerotic lyric in Pessoa’s oeuvre, to this day periodically evoked by interested parties as the most consequential poetic proof of the author’s ultimately heterosexual leanings. Without wish-

10


ing to reduce the rich and intricate scaffolding of what remains unspoken in this conversation and its retrospective account to a simple linear conclusion, I will note that the pilgrimage of the young poet—who in the late 1930s, at the age of sixteen, had elected none other than António Botto as his original literary mentor—appears to have resulted in a complex formative experience that centered on the relationship between qualitative assessment of poetic value and expression of heteronormative masculinity in poetic discourse, with António Nobre as the leading example of the failure to succeed in the latter undermining the likelihood to be granted unequivocal acclamation in the former. But it also opens up other venues of interpretation, such as an inquiry into what it could have meant, in 1940s Portugal, to be classified, respectively, as a poeta (like Pessoa) and as a poetisa (like Nobre), in the context in which real-life women poets had yet to crack the ceiling of canonical validation. No wonder, therefore, that Maria Irene Ramalho de Sousa Santos chose to take Pascoaes’s witticism (as deployed in another pragmatically complex exchange, between Santos herself and Luís Amaro, then editor of the journal Colóquio/Letras) as a point of departure for her commentary on “o sexo dos poetas” in an article introducing the forthcoming inaugural volume of poetry by Ana Luísa Amaral, “uma nova voz na poesia portuguesa, a quem neste momento Pascoaes e Luís Amaro me impedem de chamar ‘poetisa’” (122). Pascoaes was not alone, of course, in his appraisal of Nobre’s lyric identity. The poetry of the author of Só has always been read, notwithstanding other hermeneutic framings that may have been employed in particular instances of its interpretation, as intensely personal, whimsical and idiosyncratic, and its intimate eccentricity has more often than not been coded, taking lead from Anto’s own signature textual gestures, as infantile and/or effeminate. Given this a priori minorization of the poet’s discursive persona, a sustained attribution of collective prescriptive value to any constructs of identity discernible in his verses was not commonly undertaken even by the reaportuguesadores, remaining confined to such generic glosses as Júlio Dantas’s description of Só as the “Lusíadas da nossa decadência” and to emphasizing the poet’s ethnographic prowess as the “neo-Garrettian” transcriber of the “grande livro nacional que é o povo e as suas tradições,” to quote from Almeida Garrett’s own formulation of the task in his preface to the Romanceiros (682). Fernando Pessoa’s brief but extraordinarily fertile note “Para a memória de António Nobre,” even while stressing that from Nobre’s poetry “partem todas as palavras com sentido lusitano que de então para cá têm sido pronunciadas” and, more notoriously, that “[q]uando ele nasceu, nascemos todos nós,” disclaims any doctrinal import of his legacy: “[dos] seus versos não se tira, felizmente, ensinamento nenhum” (100–101). And yet, the inimitable lyric voice of Nobre’s poems, notwithstanding the

Klobucka

11

peculiarity of its self-absorbed inflections, does speak a political language of national identity; it claims to speak from, to and for its nation, and it plays the game of allegorizing Portugueseness no less interestingly, if perhaps less obviously, than such more clearly legible turn-of-the-century fictional stagings of the country’s fate as, to return to this already cited example, A Ilustre Casa de Ramires. In Eça’s late novel, the historical trajectory of the Ramires family accompanies closely the ups and downs of national destiny from the Middle Ages to the present—as narrated in Oliveira Martins’s História de Portugal (1879), a recognized dialogic reference for A Ilustre Casa—while its presentday offspring Gonçalo is explicitly characterized as an allegorical stand-in for his nation in search of a way out of its crisis of identity and purpose. In “Memória,” the narrative opening poem of Só, the personal mythology of Anto, the volume’s lyric protagonist, is likewise blended with the memory of the nation through the evocation of Anto’s father, “Português antigo, do tempo da guerra” (Poesia Completa 163), who in a historically exemplary gesture leaves his ancestral homeland of Trás-os-Montes for faraway lands, but later returns to it in order to marry Anto’s mother. It is after Anto is born (and anointed by the Fates as the future poète maudit) that things go seriously and rather weirdly astray: Anto’s mother puts on some sandals and leaves on a brief errand, only to be never heard from again, and the father soon follows in his wife’s footsteps, both disappearing forever from their son’s life. The defamiliarizing strangeness of the lyric scenario of “Memória” does not, however, spring merely from its fictional emplotments of the poet’s family romance, with its tropes of maternal agency and abandonment and paternal compliance and feminization (Anto’s father is said to possess an “alma de bronze e coração de menina”). It is chiefly due to the poem’s exquisitely bathetic transitions, such as the mother’s dressing up as Nossa Senhora das Dores in order to go for a ride in a horse buggy or Anto’s self-consolatory statement that “Sempre é agradável ter um filho Virgílio.” The latter verse marks a passage between two distinct apostrophes: Anto concludes his direct address of his absent parents (“Em vão corri mundos, não vos encontrei”) and turns to the collective audience of his compatriots (164): Sempre é agradável ter um fi lho Virgílio, Ouvi estes carmes que eu compus no exílio, Ouvi-os vós todos, meus bons Portugueses!

With this switch of addressee, Anto effectively gives himself up for adoption by the Portuguese nation, offering his services as a poet in exchange for a return to familial stability: simply put, he becomes the “filho Virgílio” of the Portuguese. At the same time, Anto’s choice of Virgil—the epic poet and acknowledged chief precursor of Os Lusíadas—openly sets the stage

12


for the dramatic monologue of “Lusitânia no Bairro Latino,” in which the imaginary voyage of “o Lusíada, coitado” through the lost landscapes of his childhood and his homeland is sprinkled with references to Camões’s poem (a sampling unhindered, incidentally, by the fact that Nobre had not read Os Lusíadas prior to composing Só). At the same time, another, more covert connotation may be said to attach itself to the “filho Virgílio” identity that Nobre adopts for the duration of Só. As the Oxford Classical Dictionary rather primly puts it, Virgil “never married and homosexual tendencies were inferred from this and from the appearance in the Eclogues of that traditional Greek theme” (1124). Nobre was clearly aware of this aspect of the Roman poet’s legacy, given that one of his early sonnets, an amorous evocation of a “rapazito de quem sou amigo, / Virgem pastor d’uma bonita aldeia,” is entitled “Virgiliana” (Cláudio, Páginas Nobrianas 214). It is also worth mentioning that the author’s note in the manuscript of the poem, although disclaiming the factual veracity of the attachment, does so merely on the grounds of the actual shepherd’s extreme unattractiveness: “Rapaz das jericas. Não sinceridade: horroroso o pastor” (259). The familial agency of Anto-the-Son-of-Portugal continues to unfold in the pages of Só, with the poem “Purinha” standing out as the volume’s most extensive dramatization of the question of descendancy. Purinha is Anto’s imagined future bride and a nickname recurrent also in Nobre’s correspondence, where it is applied indiscriminately both to the steadiest, relatively speaking, of his numerous female love interests, Margarida de Lucena (who is Purinha) and to Alberto de Oliveira (who is Purinho). The Purinha of the poem is likewise ambiguously gendered, styled at the same time as a compound of Virgin Mary with the bride of The Song of Songs and as a phallic dominatrix (Poesia Completa 197): E será uma espada a sua mão, E branca como a neve do Marão, E seus dedos serão como punhais, Fusos de prata onde fiarei meus ais!

She is also, however, unambiguously Portuguese and to be chosen, in an established fairy-tale fashion, from among all of the country’s young women, who are addressed in the poem’s refrain (198): Meninas, lindas meninas! Qual de vós é o meu Ideal? Meninas! lindas meninas Do Reino de Portugal!

The imagined scene of Anto and Purinha’s wedding also has implications that go beyond the personal: the groom awaiting his bride in front

Klobucka

13

of the church is surrounded by subdued and respectful country folk with whom he chats “das colheitas, da chuva” and who react appropriately (199): E animados então (o Povo é uma criança!) porque o Sr. Doutor lhes deu confiança, “Que Deus o ajude” dirá um, e o Regedor: “Vá coa Graça de Nosso Senhor!” E eu hei-de agradecer, sorrir, gostar. . . .

In this brief moment, away from his bride, Anto-the-Son becomes transformed into Anto-the-Father, fi lled with paternalistic condescension towards his flock of peasants and sanctioned in his authority by an arm of the law (“o Regedor”). The spell of power ends, however, as soon as the bride makes her appearance on the scene (200): Mas o Anjo assomará, à porta da capela, e eu branco e trémulo hei-de ir com ela.

In the following sequences of Nobre’s quasi-epithalamium—and here, to evoke another example of the genre, the contrast with Pessoa’s pornographic English-language poem, written twenty years later, could hardly be greater—the bride falls asleep alone on the marital bed and Anto reverts to his paradigmatic role of unemancipated son, with Purinha in yet another martial disguise (as Joan of Arc) decisively assuming the role of her husband’s mother (203): E será a Mamã que me há-de vir criar, Admirável Joaninha d’Arc, Meu novo berço duma Vida nova!

It is also Purinha who effectively takes possession of Anto’s ancestral domain, feeding its poor and tending to its sick, while Anto becomes a brooding recluse who never leaves the self-imposed confinement of their home. Appropriately enough, while in the opening sections of the poem the imagined Purinha is referred to in generic Symbolist terms as “Esta Torre, esta Lua, esta Quimera” (198), in its last verses this asyndetic sequence is reiterated for the second time in a highly distinct manner: “Esta Bandeira, esta Índia, este Castelo” (204). In brief, Purinha, as a consequence of having taken charge of Anto’s life and lands, acquires a privileged relationship with markers of national and imperial identity that tweaks the traditional “trope of the nation-as-woman,” an iconography in which Britannia or Germania can be safely gendered feminine precisely because the actual experiences of their female populations maintain them at a categorical remove from the seats of political power (Parker et al. 6). The trope of Anto’s-bride-asPortugal is, by contrast, a logical outcome of the poem’s narrative of male

14


filial dispossession, which in turn feeds upon the dynamics of the family saga sketched out in the opening poem of Só. Nobre’s own conjugal fantasies (articulated mainly in his correspondence) occasionally intersect with those of Anto through shared signifiers (such as Purinha/Purinho) and cognate workings of narrative imagination. For example, in one of his letters to Alberto de Oliveira, the poet elaborates on what he calls “a ilusão do meu Lar-com-Margareth” (i.e., Margarida, the real-life Purinha), enfolding both of his beloveds into a triangular scenario of conjugal bliss: Já concluí que serias tu . . . o Padrinho de António e minha Irmã Madrinha. E resolvi, também, que o dia 16 de Fevereiro (que é o dia de Santo Alberto) será por Margareth e por mim considerado de guarda (e com jejuns) dizendo-se missa na capela de Vil’Alva, a que irão todos os pobrezinhos. Num dos altares será posta a tua Imagem, em tamanho natural que, em hora oportuna, encomendarei, ali, nas maravilhosas oficinas de Saint Sulpice. (Correspondência 157–58)

To realize the far-reaching extent of this and other formulas of alternative family structures springing out from Nobre’s imagination, it helps to contrast them with the more conventionally tormented homoerotic triangle of Mário de Sá-Carneiro’s A Confissão de Lúcio. In Sá-Carneiro’s novella, Ricardo’s tortured insistence that it is “impossible” to “possess a creature of our own sex” (154) has as its overdetermined corollary the creation of Lúcio’s bride Marta, the phantasmatic female intermediary through whom Lúcio and Ricardo can love each other, but whose fantastic interchangeability with Ricardo is an “either/or” proposition that implodes tragically at the text’s conclusion. By contrast with Confissão, the fictional mode in which Nobre couches the interface of his and Oliveira’s same-sex attachment with heterosexual marriage is not one of tragedy but of ecstatic comedy, founded on the principle of “both/and” inclusiveness. Rather than regard heteronormative conjugal form as a socially inevitable compromise, at once enabling and disguising covert maintenance of homosexual relations, Nobre is exuberantly and eloquently affirmative on the subject of marriage to his polyvalently gendered Purinha/Purinho, expressing his fantasy, moreover, in terms of a public and institutionally sanctioned celebratory spectacle. Ecstatic comedy and panoptic inclusiveness can also be said to supply the key in which Nobre chose to chronicle his real-life sexual exploits: a page from a Parisian notebook categorizes by nationality (but not by gender) various “Carnes que já provei,” beginning with “Portugal (ilhas e colónias),” continuing through several European countries (that include a crossed-out Romania replaced by Poland), United States and Brazil, and ending, some-

Klobucka

15

what pedantically, with Alsace-Lorraine (Cláudio, Páginas Nobrianas 295). This glimpse into Nobre’s freewheeling cosmopolitan promiscuity belies several aspects of the established critical image of Anto blended into one with his creator. Chief among them is of course the perception of the poet as, in Jorge de Sena’s words, “a personificação simbólica . . . da castração tradicional” and “o mais completo e mais sinistro retrato do solipsismo lusitano . . . que se compraz masoquisticamente na ideia da morte, para . . . escapar à naturalidade de aceitar o sexo em si mesmo” (qtd in Cláudio 1993, 200). While the discursive history of this reputation is too extensive to be considered more amply here, Teixeira de Pascoaes’s early portrayal (originally published in 1911 in A Águia) of Nobre as a perennial virgin whose only meaningful relationship was with death itself is worth quoting as an especially synthetic illustration: “A sua graça espiritual é infantil e feminina; o túmulo em que ele repousa deve ter a forma dum berço, e a terra que o cobre a brancura e a pureza dum véu nupcial. Foi o poeta da virgindade. . . .” (Pascoaes 29). Moreover, the evidence of Nobre’s sexual sociability aligns with the realization that the existential and essential loneliness of Anto’s poetic persona is a determinedly performative and inconsistently maintained pretense in the textual universe of Só. Beginning with “Memória” and continuing through the rhetorical cadences of “Lusitânia no Bairro Latino” and many other poems of his “saddest book in Portugal,” the poet repeatedly deploys direct address in an insistent quest for attention and companionship. As Isabel Cardigos has perceptively noted, “o poeta do Só parece estar sempre acompanhado” (26): A solidão do Só nunca é o desenraizamento, o corte que sentimos no alheamento gelado de Pessanha ou no desespero visceral de Sá-Carneiro. A sua é uma solidão que estabelece amarras com tudo e sobretudo com o leitor.

Last but not least, the allegedly self-contained and inward-looking Portugueseness of Nobre’s literary and personal identity can be said to yield here—as it does elsewhere in his textual legacy—to a wholehearted immersion in (queer) cosmopolitanism, worthy of such illustrious future representatives of this Weltanschauung in the Portuguese lyric tradition as Álvaro de Campos or Al Berto. Nobre’s unorthodox and spectacularly inventive exercises in queering the traditional tropes of Portuguese familial and nationalist poetics may be productively considered against Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s concept of minor literature, although I will not pursue this venue of interpretation here to its full extent. If “minor literature” is “what a minority constructs within a major language” (Deleuze and Guattari 16), I would propose to read

16


Nobre’s poetry and other writings as a sustained attempt at an articulation, on the ruins of the “major” imperial identity claimed for Portugal and the Portuguese language and literature by Os Lusíadas and its legitimate descendants, of a language and poetics that is no less national for being minor. Such a reading might proceed from, and consider in a far greater depth than is possible within the scope of this article, Nobre’s widely recognized crucial contribution to the reinvention of the language of modern Portuguese poetry, which Gastão Cruz summarizes as “a experiência herdada do Garrett das Viagens, uma linguagem em que as hesitações, as indecisões, são incorporadas, em que o português coloquial, quotidiano e popular constitui uma verdadeira transfusão operada na língua poética ‘oficial’” (19). Nobre, however, takes considerably further than Garrett the operation of “stuttering” in poetic language (to cite one of the aspects of becoming-minor developed by Deleuze in Critique et clinique), since his departures from the major discourse of literary tradition rely so prominently on signifying practices incompatible with an authoritative model of heteronormative male authorship. Cruz himself unwittingly illustrates the inadequacy of the critical tools at his disposal to the task of interpreting both the specific parameters of Nobre’s singularity and his role as a lyric precursor when he refers to the “histerismo exclamativo, interrogativo, enumerativo” (20) as a discursive path opened up by Nobre and followed, most spectacularly, by Pessoa’s Campos, and when he supports his argument by citing Pessoa’s own description of Campos as the most hysterical of his heteronyms and evoking the first verse of Anto’s following self-representation in “Carta a Manuel”: Histeriza-me o Vento, absorve-me a alma toda Tal a menina pelas vésperas da boda, Atarefada maila ama, a arrumar . . . (Poesia Completa 213)

Interestingly, Isabel Cardigos elects the same fragment (in her case, limited to the first two of the three verses quoted above) to comment on Nobre’s representation of “o ser feminino” as “o ser frágil e histérico” (26). However, the attribute of fragility hardly seems to figure in Nobre’s simile, particularly if we take into account its full extent: manic intensity, channeled into the materially precise activity of “arrumar” (in Anto’s case, his mental and existential condition as a mostly unhappy resident of Coimbra), would be a more satisfying characterization. Notwithstanding the considerable overall merits of the two critical texts (Cruz’s and Cardigos’s) within the broader enterprise of reevaluating the poet’s legacy, their hermeneutic fragments I have opportunistically selected here point toward the inevitable conclusion that taking such fluid and complex notions as “hysteria” or “femininity” as preexisting instrumental givens in any approach to Nobre’s poetry can only

Klobucka

17

result in falling short of the target in attempting to trace the inventive and vibrant movements of his queerly stuttering lyric imagination. Secondly, if it is possible to extend the condition of a “high coefficient of deterritorialization” (16) that according to Deleuze and Guattari affects the language of minor literature to such literature’s functioning within semantic and structural networks that constitute the intertextual canon of national literary tradition, this is also a condition put into practice in Nobre’s poetry through multiple and layered tropes and devices of subjective and referential displacement. The very title of “Lusitânia no Bairro Latino” dislocates radically the geocultural construct of Portugal-in-the-world that was paradigmatically monumentalized in Os Lusíadas and reappropriated, among others, by the neo-imperial vision of Pessoa’s Mensagem. Lusitania, the Portugal that once spanned the globe and that, for Pessoa, makes it possible for Europe to once again look toward the future is here literally circumscribed by the confines of a single Bohemian neighborhood of Paris. Furthermore, the gaze that defines the poem’s focus in its first section belongs to a nostalgically self-centered peripatetic individual—half-pilgrim, half-flâneur—whose repertory of communal references from the past could hardly be more distant from that of Camões’s inaugural “barões assinalados” and his and Pessoa’s galleries of prominent Portuguese historical figures. As an eloquent example, the first irrevocably lost fellowship Anto sets out to mourn is his childhood intimacy with flocks of goats and sheep, whose decidedly unconventional description exceeds by a wide margin any automatized hermeneutic ascription of canonical pastoral frameworks (181–82): Formosas cabras, ainda pequeninas, E loiras vacas de maternas ancas Que me davam o leite de manhã, (. . .) Eram minhas Irmãs e todas puras E só lhes minguava a fala para serem perfeitas criaturas . . .

In the second and third sections of the poem, the lonely “Lusíada, coitado” summons the companionship and the shared gaze of a fellow observer, who happens to be a foreigner (“Georges”) and whose constitutive agency in framing Portugal as the object of poetic analysis is further indication of Nobre’s defamiliarizing impetus. The specifically queering aspect of this agency may be postulated by way of evoking Georges’s earliest appearance in Nobre’s lyric, in a poem draft included in the manuscript notebook Alicerces (dated 1882–1886), whose definitive version, published posthumously in Primeiros versos (1921), begins with the following apostrophe:

18


Ellen! meu céu! meu norte! meu abrigo! Alma gentil, consoladora e grata! Ah, quem me dera navegar contigo Pelos céus, n’uma gôndola de prata . . . (Poesia Completa 81)

In the manuscript version, however, this poem is entitled “Georges” and the variant of its first verse reads “Georges, meu anjo protector e amigo”; while the draft does not settle conclusively on either the male Georges or the female Ellen as its ultimate addressee, most of the epithets attached to him/her are of masculine grammatical gender (“Amado meu de sangue aristocrata,” “meu anjo loiro,” “Meu delicioso príncipe de fadas”) (Cláudio, Páginas Nobrianas 248–49, 256). Although in “Lusitânia no Bairro Latino” Georges is vigorously invited to “become Manel” (“Vá! Georges, faze-te Manel!”) in order to put on a convincing performance of pinching and kissing the rustic “Marias” he and Anto encounter on their imaginary visit to the Portuguese countryside (Poesia Completa 190), his character’s prehistory in Nobre’s oeuvre contributes further to the poem’s preemptive destabilizing of reliably reproducible (and reproductive) identitarian postulates of the reaportuguesamento campaign in Portuguese culture. Finally, as Deleuze and Guattari express it, in minor literature “everything takes on collective value”: “Indeed, precisely because talent isn’t abundant in a minor literature, there are no possibilities for an individuated enunciation that would belong to this or that ‘master’ and that could be separated from a collective enunciation” (17). The introductory self-presentation of Só—“o livro mais triste que há em Portugal” (Poesia Completa 164)—foregrounds both the scarcity of accomplishment against which to measure one’s own and the excess of collective identification, which remains one of the distinctive aspects of Nobre’s volume, as well as of its reception and inscription in the narrative of Portuguese literary history. At the same time, it is much more difficult to pin down, in the literary and critical descendancy of interpretations Nobre’s writings have generated, the particular lineage of “active solidarity in spite of skepticism” that could be said to respond to the poet’s attempt “to express another possible community and to forge the means for another consciousness and another sensibility” (Deleuze and Guattari 17). Set against Pascoaes’s sarcasm, Eugénio’s unreadable laughter, and Botto’s ripped-up copy of Só, it is perhaps Pessoa’s appreciation of Nobre that offers, notwithstanding its elusiveness, the most constructive and optimistic interpretive potential in this regard (100): Mas ele foi o primeiro a pôr em europeu este sentimento português das almas e das coisas, que tem pena de que umas não sejam corpos, para lhe poder fazer festas, e de que as outras não sejam gente, para poder falar com elas.

Klobucka

19

While Pessoa, in his guise as Supra-Camões and despite the many strains of minor political and affective allegiance that are also readable in his multidirectional work, claimed for himself the major line of descendancy from the Ur-poet of the Portuguese language, he nevertheless appeared to recognize in Nobre’s eccentric national imaginary a compelling alternative, embodied in the poetic persona of Anto as the invitingly and polymorphously perverse Other who had managed to masquerade—successfully and enduringly—as a foundational touchstone: a queerly and exuberantly inventive performer and founding son of the minor strand of Portuguese cultural nationalism and literary modernity.

Notes 1. For a recent synthetic survey of the longstanding critical consensus regarding Nobre’s poetry as “a mais acabada realização poética nacionalista do fim-de-século,” see Alves 173–88 (175). While Alves’s interpretation of Nobre does not consider gendered inflections of his poetic discourse (or of his literary-historical reputation), the critic does emphasize the “estrangeidade” [foreignness/estrangement] inherent in the subjective perspective of Nobre’s verses: “A poesia do Só . . . é a poesia dum migrante entre territórios e tempos auto-ironicamente incapaz de . . . representar o Portugal saudoso que gerações posteriores ali quiseram ver” (183). 2. The first edition of the magnum opus of Portuguese sexology, Egas Moniz’s A Vida Sexual, dates from 1901. It was continuously reedited, in revised versions, over the following three decades, with the last (nineteenth) edition published in 1933. 3. The representability of the (male) homosexual as a distinct species was, according to Michel Foucault’s famous and much-debated claim, datable to around 1870: “We must not forget that the psychological, psychiatric, medical category of homosexuality was constituted from the moment it was characterized—Westphal’s famous article of 1870 can stand as its date of birth—less by a type of sexual relations than by a certain quality of sexual sensibility . . . a kind of interior androgyny, a hermaphroditism of the soul. The sodomite had been a temporary aberration; the homosexual was now a species” (43). 4. For an extended discussion of the social and ideological context informing the publication and reception of O Barão de Lavos, see Howes. An overview of Portuguese historiography’s interpretations of the psychology and sexuality of King Sebastian—the original “D. Sebastião” of Portugal—is offered in Johnson 199–203. Considering the Baron’s confession, quoted below, that his father had been a young favorite (“mignon”) of King João VI, the choice of the name Sebastian for the Baron senior’s only male offspring figures as a possible in-joke of considerable twistedness, at the same time as it emphasizes the family’s drive to self-extinction. 5. The surviving letters Nobre wrote to Oliveira over the period of approximately five years their relationship lasted (1888–93) are gathered in the volume of

20


his Correspondência. A parallel track of their correspondence, initiated when Nobre left Portugal for Paris, was composed of a “diary” in the form of postcards that was ordered to be destroyed by Oliveira upon his death in 1940, as “impublicável pela natureza pessoal e íntima do seu conteúdo” (Nobre 1982, 25). Writes Nobre on 22 October 1890: “Deixa-me ser simples, todo eu, e amanhã prometo-te começar o meu diário tal como foi por nós combinado, sempre e sempre, sem interrupção, até ao dia grande em que de novo te tiver em meus braços, numa efervescência de alegria e lágrimas” (1982, 110). In his last letter to Oliveira, Nobre demanded the return of the “diary” (an injunction Oliveira refused to obey), alluding to “certas fórmulas de cortesia que em algumas circunstâncias se aplicam, tal a correspondência que se troca entre homem e menina” and pointing out that “o Sr. Alberto de Oliveira foi a menina da nossa correspondência” (186). 6. In her study Apocalipse e Regeneração. O Ultimatum e a Mitologia da Pátria na Literatura Finissecular (Lisboa: Cosmos, 1996), Maria Teresa Pinto Coelho offers a detailed and comprehensively documented account of the reactions to the Ultimatum in Portuguese journalism and literature throughout 1890 and beyond. 7. There are, of course, notable exceptions to this rule. I owe my awareness of the full story of Pascoaes’s quip to António Ladeira’s unpublished conference paper, “António Nobre, ‘a nossa maior poetisa’?” (I am grateful to the author for sharing the text of his paper with me and indebted to his discussion of this episode.) See also Osvaldo M. Silvestre, “A nossa maior poetisa.” http://blogcasmurro.blogspot .com/2005/06/nossa-maior-poetisa.html. 1 July 2010. 8. The postcard containing these exact expressions, one of two Lorca wrote to Teixeira de Pascoaes in 1923, following their likely meeting at the Residencia de Estudiantes in Madrid, is reproduced in volume I of Lorca’s Epistolario Completo, edited by Christopher Maurer (Madrid: Cátedra, 1997), 181. 9. See, for example, Teresa Rita Lopes, “O Falso Virgem.” Egoísta. Número especial: Fernando Pessoa (Junho 2008), 60–64. 10. For Andrade’s account of his relationship with Botto, see “Encontro e desencontro,” Jornal de Letras, no. 699 (30 de Julho de 1997), 18–19. 11. It is significant that the the first two studies ushering the critical recognition of Florbela Espanca as a poet to be regarded seriously and on equal terms with male authors were produced (by Jorge de Sena and José Régio) in 1946, roughly at the same time the conversation between Pascoaes and Andrade took place, and no less significant that the discussion of whether one ought to refer to Florbela as a “poet” or a “poetess” figured prominently in both texts. See Sena, “Florbela Espanca ou a Expressão do Feminino na Poesia Portuguesa,” Porto: Biblioteca Fenianos, 1947 (public lecture given in 1946 and later reproduced in the volume Da Poesia Portuguesa); and Régio, “Sobre o Caso e a Arte de Florbela Espanca,” in Florbela Espanca, Sonetos Completos, Coimbra: Livraria Gonçalves, 1946 (a revised version entitled simply “Florbela” was published in 1950 and reprinted in Régio’s Ensaios de Interpretação Crítica). 12. See letter to Justino de Montalvão, dated 3 de Julho 1896, in Nobre’s Correspondência: “Não sabe decerto (porque eu ainda não lho disse) que sou agora doido pelo velho Luís. Nunca lera os Lusíadas. Mas na minha passagem por Paris, em

Klobucka

21

Setembro, os meus editores deram-me um exemplar e foi o meu companheiro inseparável durante o meu inverno nos Alpes” (318). 13. For an insightful analysis of “Purinha,” see Emma Brech, “‘Amo-te mais quando estou só’: Fantasy and Femininity in the Poetry of António Nobre and Florbela Espanca.” Portuguese Studies 15 (1999), 130–39. 14. By foregrounding and exacerbating the intensity of homosocial desire between Lúcio and Ricardo, A Confissão simultaneously anticipates and exceeds the theoretical description of erotic triangles in European fiction proposed by René Girard in Deceit, Desire, and the Novel and influentially extended by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick in her Between Men. For an in-depth analysis of the novella along these lines, see Fernando Arenas, “Onde Existir?: A (im)possibilidade excessiva do desejo homoerótico na ficção de Mário de Sá-Carneiro.” Metamorfoses 6 (2005), 159–68. 15. Most crucially, in what follows I am leaving out a consideration of how Nobre’s queer nationalism relates to the second characteristic named in the Deleuzo-Guattarian description of minor literature, in which “everything . . . is political” (17), since a properly attentive discussion of the “minor” (queer) politics of Nobre’s writings, as interpreted here, would require much ampler space than this prefatory approach allows. 16. Ronald Bogue elucidates Deleuze’s comments on “stammering in one’s own tongue” (as articulated in the essay “He Stuttered”) by referring to its textually material manifestation as “an answerable style that forms part of the atmosphere, an adequation between the peculiar strangeness of each writer’s use of his language and the objects described. (. . .) Kafka’s spare, ascetic use of German [in ‘The Metamorphosis’] is not simply a fitting vehicle for the narration of Gregor’s dreamlike transformation, it is an inseparable atmospheric medium that pervades the story . . . The echoes between the twitterings of Gregor and the elements of Kafka’s prose, then, may be seen not simply as the residual effects of a compositional process of becoming-animal, but also as evidence of the atmosphere within which represented affects communicate with one another over, above and through the words” (108).

Works Cited Alves, Hélio J. S. Tempo para Entender: História Comparada da Literatura Portuguesa. Casal de Cambra: Caleidoscópio, 2006. Andrade, Eugénio de. “Imagem de Pascoaes.” Os Afluentes do Silêncio. Porto: Inova, 1974. 13–23. Bogue, Ronald. Deleuze on Literature. New York and London: Routledge, 2003. Botelho, Abel. O Barão de Lavos. Lisboa: Livros do Brasil, n.d. Botto, António. Canções e Outros Poemas. Ed. Eduardo Pitta. Vila Nova de Famalicão: Quasi, 2008. Cardigos, Isabel. “‘Os Figos Pretos’ de António Nobre.” Colóquio/Letras 120 (Abril 1991), 25–41.

22


Cláudio, Mário. Páginas Nobrianas. Porto: Caixotim, 2004. ———. “Rua dos dois amigos, outras pedras.” Colóquio/Letras 127/128 (JaneiroJunho 1993), 169–202. ———. Triunfo do Amor Português. Lisboa: Dom Quixote, 2004. Cruz, Gastão. “António Nobre e o moderno discurso poético português.” A Poesia Portuguesa Hoje. 2.a edição corrigida e aumentada. Lisboa: Relógio D’Água, 1999. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1986. Felski, Rita. The Gender of Modernity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1995. Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality. Volume I: An Introduction. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage Books, 1980. Garrett, João Baptista da Silva Leitão de Almeida. Obras. Porto: Lello & Irmão, 1966. Howes, Robert. “Concerning the Eccentricities of the Marquis of Valada: Politics, Culture and Homosexuality in Fin-de-Siècle Portugal.” Sexualities 5:1 (2002), 25–49. Johnson, Harold. “A Pedophile in the Palace or The Sexual Abuse of King Sebastian of Portugal (1554–1578) and Its Consequences.” Harold Johnson and Francis A. Dutra, eds., Pelo Vaso Traseiro: Sodomy and Sodomites in Luso-Brazilian History. Tucson: Fenestra Books, 2007. 195–229. Nobre, António. Correspondência. Ed. Guilherme de Castilho. 2nd edition. Lisboa: IN-CM, 1982. ———. Poesia Completa. Lisboa: Dom Quixote, 2000. Oxford Classical Dictionary. Ed. N. G. L. Hammond and H. H. Scullard. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1970. Parker, Andrew, Mary Russo, Doris Sommer, and Patricia Yaeger, eds. Nationalisms and Sexualities. New York and London: Routledge, 1992. Pascoaes, Teixeira de. A Saudade e o Saudosismo. Lisboa: Assírio & Alvim, 1988. Pessoa, Fernando. Crítica. Ensaios, artigos e entrevistas. Ed. Fernando Cabral Martins. Lisboa: Assírio & Alvim, 2000. Pitta, Eduardo. Fractura. A condição homossexual na literatura portuguesa contemporânea. Coimbra: Angelus Novus, 2003. Robb, Graham. Strangers: Homosexual Love in the Nineteenth Century. New York: W.W. Norton, 2004. Sá-Carneiro, Mário de. A Confissão de Lúcio. Lisboa: Ática, 1973. Santos, Maria Irene Ramalho de Sousa. “O Sexo dos Poetas: A propósito de uma nova voz na poesia portuguesa.” Via Latina (Inverno de 1989/90), 122–24. Sommer, Doris. Foundational Fictions: The National Romances of Latin America. Berkeley and Los Angeles: U of California P, 1991.