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  • Suicidal Spaniards in Moody Portugal and Other Helpful Stereotypes: Imagology and Luso-Hispanic Cultural Studies
  • Julie M. Dahl (bio)

As nações todas são mistérios.

Fernando Pessoa

In the first short story in Enrique Vila-Matas’s collection Suicidios ejemplares (1991), a Spaniard travels to Lisbon because it is the best place to jump to one’s death. Of course, it is only fitting that a book about “exemplary suicides” would begin with a character contemplating just such an act. However, when Vila-Matas takes his troubled character to Lisbon, he is undoubtedly paying homage to Miguel de Unamuno’s famous epithet of Portugal as “un pueblo de suicidas,” which first appeared in a Spanish newspaper in 1908 and was later reprinted in the much-cited collection Por tierras de Portugal y de España (47). By 1991 when Vila-Matas’s story was first published, the image of Portugal as a place conducive to suicide had been circulating in the Spanish imaginary for almost ninety years. Inversely, Madrid has long been famous for being a poor place to commit suicide. Despite a high number of Spaniards throwing themselves off the viaduct in the Calle de Segovia,1 a commonplace in Spanish literature has been to criticize Madrid for its lack of a river or high places—in other words, its pronounced shortage of good spots to “regenerarte con un vuelo,” as Valle-Inclán’s miserable character Max Estrella so eloquently put it (103). Thus, on one hand, there is nothing surprising about [End Page 23] Vila-Matas’s character seeing in Lisbon, not just a city built on many hills, but rather a city “llena de hermosos lugares para arrojarse al vacío” (13). What is surprising, however, is that the Spaniard does not jump, but rather resolves to live out his life in Lisbon, waiting patiently for death by adopting the posture of saudade, a stereotypical Portuguese emotion that describes both a longing for the past and for a future that will never be. Saudade is said to have originated with the first Portuguese explorers who coined a word to describe the yearning they felt for the land and the life they had left behind and is often linked with the idea of sadness and melancholy, but more importantly, saudade has become one of the most predominate traits that Portuguese identify in their own national character, and as the Portuguese scholar João Leal has shown, in many cases, saudade has become a metaphor for “Portugueseness” (282).2

The stereotypes about Portugal in this short story, as in every story, derive their potency from the fact that they are so widely recognized. Once a particular image gains a strong “ring of familiarity,” it is rarely questioned and becomes amazingly mobile, cutting across what are seemingly disparate areas of daily life and appearing in all manner of cultural discourses. Spanish literary critic Claudio Guillén sees the examination of stereotypes as a crucial aspect of textual analysis and has proposed that literature—given all of the national and cultural stereotypes that it perpetuates—keeps us from being able to see the world (336). Likewise, tourism theory has long established that the word is more powerful than the eye, and that when we travel to a new place, our expectations based on previously consumed texts color our experiences.3 Furthermore, postcolonial theory has given us insights into the discursive strategies behind one nation’s need to, in the words of Homi Bhabha, “anxiously repeat” what is different about another nation (Location 95) and in so doing invent a self-serving other. There is, however, another methodology that is particularly helpful in identifying and decoding stereotypes that one nation has of another. This growing field of study, known as Imagology or Image Studies, generally defines itself as the study of national and ethnic characteristics or stereotypes in cultural and textual production. Put more simply, it is the study of how one nation or group imagines another in discourse.4 Although positivist studies of the character of a given nation as it has appeared in the literature of other nations have been a part of literary studies...

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