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Part I Saudade and Portugueseness Introduction to Part I Part I Saudade and Portugueseness Introduction to Part I It is our divine word – I never tire of repeating it – containing the dream of our Race, its intimate and transcendent, messianic and redemptive design, and that is why it is untranslatable, Portuguese, it explains our great historical events and the soul of our great men, and creates our dream for the future, a national Aspiration which will unite the Portuguese here and across the seas. 1 – Teixeira de Pascoaes The divine word was saudade . Ubiquitous in Portuguese popular culture, saudade is found in music, poetry and literature, generally as a versa- tile cultural concept that designates a melancholy longing. To the poet Teixeira de Pascoaes, however, it was even more than that. Saudade , he believed, would be Portugal’s salvation. In Pascoaes’ view, it was salvation from the present that the country needed more than anything. The early 1910s were proving difficult for Portugal. With its reviled monarchy recently deposed, longstanding economic and political problems still to solve, and the recent loss of colonial territories, the new Republic had got off to a shaky start. Within a few years, a sense of disillusionment had begun to sink in, and debates on the country’s future direction had become commonplace. A writer with a habit of dabbling in mystical and nostalgic themes, Pascoaes was convinced he had the answer – a return to ‘original Portugueseness’ as incarnated in the divine word, saudade . Around it he constructed a whole literary-philosophical movement, Saudosismo , and began promoting an approach to Portuguese regeneration that was out of step with those of many of his contemporaries. The debate over saudade in this moment of national reckoning is at the heart of this first section. More specifically, I focus on a polemical 29 30 Emotions, Language and Identity on the Margins of Europe debate of 1913 and 1914, in the early years of Portugal’s tumultuous and short-lived First Republic (1910–26). The polemic took the form of a series of open letters between Pascoaes and the intellectual and educa- tionalist António Sérgio, who argued against the regressive and nostalgic template he believed Saudosismo and its champions provided. Both Pascoaes and Sérgio were active contributors to the Renascença Portuguesa (Portuguese Renaissance), a project which sought to reform Portugal through broadly Republican ideals. Yet their ideologies and strategies of national regeneration were very different, and their arguments over saudade not only encapsulated the main points of disagreement within the Portuguese intelligentsia of the day, but also echoed wider European conversations about the tension between modernity and tradition. How, they asked, was this tension to be resolved? Certainly, Pascoaes’ adoption and sanctification of the word saudade was representative of a wider cultural backlash against progress, technology and other Enlightenment values that was gaining ground in Europe at the time. Yet his argument was not for the universality of the emotion but rather its particularity to the Portuguese people. In this basic sense, the cultural specificity of Pascoalian saudade was very much an offshoot of European Romanticism, with its privileging of the senses, its high emotional register and incorporation of ethnic nationalism. Saudade , according to its usual dictionary gloss, is a form of longing, yearning, homesickness and nostalgia. Ter saudades (literally, ‘to have saudades ’) is to long for or miss someone or something; Tenho saudades de ti means simply ‘I miss you’ and deixar saudades (‘to leave, or bequeath, saudades ’) is to be greatly missed.2 In everyday Portuguese, the use of the word is common and unremarkable, yet the semantic history of the concept behind it is complex and disputed. A significant element in Portuguese language and culture for several hundred years, saudade has been associated from an early stage with the imperial Age of Discoveries and territorial expansion, and so with notions of nationhood and iden- tity. As a result, the concept has frequently been invoked whenever this identity has encountered challenges or complications. It is a comfort- able trope to fall back on. Concentrating on Pascoaes’ saudade and his polemic with Sérgio allows a discussion of broader European trends, particularly those also relevant to the cases of lítost and hüzün . It is especially striking, for instance, that Pascoaes and Sérgio each took clear sides in the ongoing emotion vs. reason, tradition vs. progress, Romanticism vs. Enlightenment debate, and also defined themselves in these terms. Any nuances in the argu- ment, or possible complications of setting out a civilisational dichotomy, Saudade and Portugueseness 31 were largely unrecognised by both parties, for whom the sides seemed clearly drawn. Furthermore, while the study of saudade moves in and out of favour, at no time was it debated as much as it was in the 1910s, nor taken so seriously as an agent of national cohesion. In a practical sense, the polemic compelled Pascoaes to summarise his philosophy of saudade in more succinct and persuasive terms than he had previously. Though his rhetorical style did not exactly lend itself to brevity, his debate with Sérgio does stand out from his many other writings on the topic over a much longer period and allows us to examine the instance of his defence of Saudosismo in a precise historical and intellectual context. The problems of the early Republican era are not the only ones to have influenced Pascoalian saudade ; rather, they came at the end of a century of ongoing crises for Portugal. I begin by investigating the argu- ments made for and against the use of saudade at this time, examining the two very different approaches to the role of nostalgia in responding to national crises. An overview of the polemic is followed by a wider historical assessment, in which I discuss the importance of Portugal’s imperial history and the nature of its peripherality. Indeed, the country’s outsider identity was central to Pascoaes’ conception of Portugueseness, into which he wove traditions of Christian messianism as well as modern theories of cultural essentialism and race. This study investigates how these many influences were synthesised into what was ultimately a flawed but coherent conception of national spirit. In a movement that placed great emphasis on the role of poets and the intelligentsia in the formation and propagation of this spirit, Pascoaes’ very personal stake in Saudosismo and the relationship between the personal and the collec- tive are important issues to be addressed. How did one man’s saudade become the focus for the resolution of national crisis? What does this say about the construction of Portuguese identity and the place of sadness and fatalism within it? And, more generally, why the enduring appeal of saudade as a marker of Portugueseness? .
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