Uma gaveta de facas sempre aberta

: cómico e desfiguração da História de Portugal na escrita de Lobo Antunes

Abstract

This research intends to study the decline the idea of Portugal-empire, by revisiting the thematic of the tragic effects of Decolonization, having as background four books of Lobo Antunes: Os Cus de Judas, As Naus, O Esplendor de Portugal and Comissão das Lágrimas, whose writing is based on the context of postmodern literature and proposes us an unclouded and demystifying view of the History of Portugal. From his writing, a tenseterritory between history and literature transpires, bearing in mind the pernicious character of the fact-shunning carried out by the official historians, to this period. The author bases hiscriticism in different comic processes, exposing, in an exacerbated tone, unfeeling,inconvenient, grotesque and ferocious, iconoclastic criticism of the politics of Salazar and his allies (of the Catholic Church e.g.,) desacralizing political and ecclesiastical and be ironically with the fallacious perspective narrated by the History. This pernicious alliance between Throne and Altar, raised in the triad of values God, Motherland and Family, is, undoubtedly, criticized in the four books, revealing the decadence of the colonial elite and the devastating effects of Decolonization. Thus, the writing-reaction of Lobo Antunes criticizes acerbically, the salazarist regime that forced thousands of soldiers to fight for a fictitious patriotic ideal, and becomes the voice of the silenced. As a confessional and a witness writing, because the writer himself was coerced into obligatory military service to go to war, the novels analysed expose the identity conflict of contemporary man, overshadowed by the mythical glorious past and emphasize the process of individual and collective dilacerations of all those involved in the Colonial War. Therefore, in addition to revive their traumatic memories, fiction gives them the possibility of exorcising and expelling the violent psychological experience to which they were exposed.

Date of Award	22 Jun 2018
Original language	Portuguese
Awarding Institution	Universidade Católica Portuguesa
Supervisor	José Cândido de Oliveira Martins (Supervisor)