Abstract
Lídia Jorge’s A costa dos murmúrios (1988) has been primarily theorized as a subversion of historical discourse. Similar to a number of Jorge’s examinations of social changes emerging as the Estado Novo declined, the novel juxtaposes two competing versions of the past, in this case a fictional representation of the colonial wars and a woman’s testimonial account twenty years later. This article reconsiders the novel’s status as historical deconstruction, arguing that its oral and visual strategies instead correspond to the methodology of cultural historiography that emerged during the 1970s and 1980s. Expanding Helena Kaufman’s reading of the testimonial as “deliterarization,” I analyze how a slippage of critical terminology over time has equated historical fiction with narrative history. After examining the competing agendas of cultural history and literary postmodernism, I demonstrate how reconceiving Jorge’s historical “annulment” as a productive revision of fiction provides a model of complementary history facilitating interdisciplinary engagement.
Highlights
Lídia Jorge’s A costa dos murmúrios (1988) has been primarily theorized as a subversion of historical discourse
At various points during her literary career, Lídia Jorge has returned to the period surrounding Portugal’s 1974 Carnation Revolution, employing the device of personal confession to highlight the role of female experience in the wake of the Estado Novo (1933-1974)
Via a military bride who revises a literary account of her estrangement from her husband during the Portuguese Colonial War (1961-74), Jorge symbolically evokes the impending liberation of the country’s African colonies
Summary
The cultural and historical shifts that preceded Jorge’s text are part of a general reconsideration of Portuguese national identity after the fall of António de Oliveira Salazar’s Estado Novo. Practitioners of cultural history called into question three traditional distinctions central to sociological methods: 1) the division between high culture and popular culture; 2) production and consumption; and 3) reality versus fiction (Poster 7-8) These theoretical and methodological deconstructions notably share much with Kaufman and Ornelas’s subsequent model for new historical literature. Eva’s oral testimony acts as a form of microhistory, while her dialogue with a literary text in A costa dos murmúrios may be more productively reframed as a fictionalized form of cultural history Understood in these terms, the two competing accounts of Eva’s past reveal a complementary means of staging public debate on international questions. See chapters three and four of Burke (What Is Cultural History?) for an account of cultural history’s response to social history and the role of feminism in expanding the field
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