Reflections and Insights: The Year in Portugal

In Portugal, the tradition of life writing is still embryonic. Catherine Dumas, Portuguese teacher at Sorbonne Nouvelle University, Paris, argues that there is a tendency to include the writing of diaries in fictional literature and she stresses that in general, these two genres are frequently confused with one another. In fact, only recently, scholars in academia have started to include memoirs, diaries, biographies, autobiographies, and other forms of life writing in their curricula. It is also important to note that the first study on letter writing in Portugal dates only from 1965, thus demonstrating how late the theme has caught the attention of specialists. In fact, the work of Andrée Crabbé Rocha, A epistolografia em Portugal, is still essential, hence revealing how little else has been added in terms of critics. This proves that the theme continues to be not only out of academia but also out of the canon.

However, Clara Rocha, author of Máscaras de Narciso, argues that genres like diaries, memoirs, letters, and biographies can be seen in Portuguese literature since ancient times, while the same is not applicable to autobiographies. If during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries auto/biographical texts were produced by nuns, priests, and by an elite, in the twentieth century, Portuguese authors have put out auto/biographical texts in the form of diaries and memoirs. Maria Alzira Seixo, professor at Lisbon University, has no doubt that the diary of the Portuguese writer Vergilio Ferreira, Contracorrente, issued in 1980, marks a turning point, being hence acknowledge as a courageous and challenging approach of the author rather than a literary tendency. Since then, the diary became fashionable in Portugal. As far as diaries by women are concerned, Clara Rocha’s Máscaras de Narciso, dated from 1992 is considered a pioneering work. Other Portuguese writers, realizing the pleasures of the genre and, in particular, the opportunity to avoid or challenge regulations, as well as its power to resist and forget, have also shown an inclination to these types of texts. Portuguese author Irene Lisboa points to the wonders of writing about nothing important, and how free she feels to be able to get away from other people’s eyes. Portuguese author, Maria Gabriela Llanson, explains that keeping a diary is like being at her own house, but with the feeling of coming to pay a visit to someone else.

In reality, the Portuguese market is still saturated with translated biographies and autobiographies of notable people, mainly politicians, musicians, or film stars from outside Portugal. First-person texts of common citizens are still rare. We have to take into consideration that diaries and letters are still considered paraliterary texts and hence scholarly interest is little. Paulo de Medeiros in “The Diary and Portuguese Women Writers,” suggests that diaries are in fact a non-genre, which explains why there are so few studies on them. Abel Barros Baptista, in his article “O Espelho perguntador,” argues that the discussion behind the reason to write diaries and first-person texts should not be the main goal of literary criticism, even less to prove whether these texts are literary or not. Assuming that there is no longer any such thing as fiction or nonfiction, and although the genre has been considered delicate if not doomed, we believe the discussion should go further to find out why the writing of life, of ordinary and plain days, tends to makes us feel uncomfortable and, in particular, why in Portugal the status of life writing is still marginal.

The writing of the self, in its varied forms and as suggested by Catherine Dumas, responds to the urgent and contemporary quest for self-determination, either as a notable and extraordinary struggle or as a plain and ordinary account. This is where its relevance lies. This is the challenge. Even if there is an almost natural fragility to “inscribing the daily,” as the title of Bunker and Huff’s book indicates, or a certain unraveling in the self-quest, and even as critics continue to relegate life narratives to silence, the truth is that writing random notes on a...