José Cardoso Pires's Balada da Praia dos Cães, Historiographic Metafiction, and the Detective Novel

Abstract

This article examines the ways in which José Cardoso Pires's novel A Balada da Praia dos Cães uses the postmodern techniques of what Linda Hutcheon calls 'historiographic metafiction' in order to revisit and review the social conditions prevalent at the height of the Salazar dictatorship. For Hutcheon, the principal characteristic of historiographic metafiction is the way in which it both installs and subverts official history. In Balada it is the real-life murder of an opponent of the regime that is fictionalized or, in the words of Brian McHale, turned into 'apocryphal history' in order better to investigate what Cardoso Pires calls the 'social crime' of the Estado Novo. It is argued here that one of the main ways in which Cardoso Pires challenges the historical is through a parodic reworking of the generic conventions of the detective novel. As well as permitting a multiple view of the socio-political situation of the country and a flâneur's-eye view of the city of Lisbon in the early 1960s, Cardoso Pires's parodying of familiar genre figures such as the detective, the suspects, the perpetrators, and the victim allows the author to depict a country and a time in which there was nothing just about justice.