so horsemouth has finished reading antonio de figueiredo’s portugal: fifty years of dictatorship most of which was spent under the strange half cleric/ half accountant salazar.
‘i am one more writer who will die in intellectual solitary confinement. they never allowed me to write down what i wanted to say.’ remarks the novelist alves redol from his deathbed.
but the whole country (and its overseas empire/ colonies/ provinces) is one giant zombie exporting its surplus population not just to the colonies mozambique, angola, guinnea-bessau, goa but also to the car plants of france.
he’s also started (back) on auerbach’s mimesis - the paratactic approach of the bible (I show you two things without stating their connection - each become a figure, a heralding, a visual echo of the other) bumps up against the syntactic approach in greek and roman thought (I show you two things but their relation is carefully set out in the connecting words as if viewed from above). the church fathers, classically educated, writing in latin, feel this.
meanwhile the descendents of the romans driven mad by events produce texts of baroque horror. ammianus writes of procopius ‘the somber melancholic conspirator... always looking down, who, scion of an illustrious family hides among the scum of the people’ in the end agrees to become emperor just to save his neck (and that if only for a little while);
‘so there he stood like a rotting corpse, like a man risen from the grave, without a mantle (because imperial purple could nowhere be found), is tunic embroidered with gold like an attendant at court, but from the waist down dressed like a schoolboy... in his left hand he bore a lance , in his right hand a piece of purple cloth...’
- ammianus (26.6).
No comments:
Post a Comment