O Esplendor de Portugal or the impossibility of learning freedom

Abstract

This is not the first time that the Shakespearean allegories of Prospero and Caliban are used to refer to the colonialist model, because this was certainly a fundamental reading line for the author of The Tempest. My proposal attempts to focus on the novel by Lobo Antunes – The Splendor of Portugal – whose title, like so many others by the same author, is a kind of “ready-made” or, in other words, a cut operated in the culture system. In order to make signifiers and meanings, structures and significations in the construction of this novel, it seemed productive to allude to these allegories, which denounce, on the one hand, the mask of the soft Portuguese customs and, on the other, the unequivocal African incapacity to escape the fatality of the place of the slave, thus falsifying the very meaning of freedom. The Splendor of Portugal, which leads to a tragic political, economic, sociological and cultural impasse, allows us to see a great social farce with no possibility of remission to any of the conventional oppressed and oppressive sides, excluding any possibility to learn healthily in the face of the consequences – nefarious and concrete – of the choices made and of the acts committed. If Shakespeare also does not redeem his characters, if Prospero and Caliban also do not elude their ambiguities, we would dare to say that Lobo Antunes goes further in nihilism and tragedy, plunging his anti-heroes into a great theater of masks that inserts them definitely in the most extreme solitude, what the romance organization gives to see through its discursive structure. This is just the point I am interested in discussing.