Queer Lusitania

António Nobre’s Minor Nationalism

Anna M. Klobucka

Uma das principais ênfases estéticas e ideológicas na cultura intelectual

portuguesa das últimas décadas do século XIX deveu-se à campanha multi-
facetada de redescoberta e reinvenção nacional, que foi catalizada pela
crise do Ultimatum britânico e teve em António Nobre o seu protagonista
literário mais original e, a longo prazo, mais inluente. Este artigo foca a
resigniicação performativa da identidade lusitana, realizada por Nobre,
no contexto da sua inédita e altamente heterodoxa negociação dos tropos de
família, género e orientação sexual. A reescrita queer a que o poeta sujeita
as fórmulas genealógicas do nacionalismo português emerge como um
projecto subversivamente “menor” e desterritorializado (no sentido elabo-
rado teoricamente por Deleuze e Guattari), constituindo uma contribuição
singularmente perversa e profundamente desconstrutiva para o repertório
cultural nacionalista.

O ne of the leading aesthetic and ideological themes in Portuguese intel-

lectual culture of the 1880s, 1890s and beyond was the multifaceted campaign
of national rediscovery and reinvention, whose symbolic starting point may
be located in the 1880 tercentenary of the death of Luís de Camões, with
Cesário Verde’s poem “O Sentimento dum Ocidental”—written expressly
for the Camões celebrations—as its most enduring literary emblem. Cata-
lyzed by the crisis of the British Ultimatum (1890) and anchored in a more
general end-of-the-century reaction against positivist and universalist pos-
tulates of the Geração de 70, the movement of reaportuguesamento (mak-
ing Portugal Portuguese again) claimed the poet António Nobre and his

Luso-Brazilian Review 48:2 5

ISSN 0024-7413, © 2011 by the Board of Regents
of the University of Wisconsin System
6 Luso-Brazilian Review 48:2

1892 volume Só as foundational references for a project whose goals oscil-

lated, oten contradictorily, between the recovery of a cultural past that has
been forsaken and nearly forgotten, yet was claimed to be truer to the na-
tional soul than the emerging Portuguese modernity, and an explicit search
for a contemporary and inventive artistic synthesis. While Nobre’s poetry
clearly set out to realize a performative reinscription of Portugueseness—
epitomized, in the lagship poem of Só, “Lusitânia no Bairro Latino,” by the
replacement of the heroic collective ethos of Os Lusíadas with the intimately
narcissistic self-portrait of “o Lusíada, coitado”—this discussion will claim
that the poet’s highly unorthodox engagement with gendered and familial
metaphorics results, in efect, not in a foundational solidiication of reli-
ably transmittable essential values of the Portuguese pátria, but rather in a
surreptitiously destabilizing queering of genealogical tropes of Portuguese
nationalism.
What I mean, in this context, by queering is a recurrently and variously
realized disturbance of signifying practices historically deployed to produce
master ictions of Portuguese nationality, in which non-normative treat-
ments of gender and sexuality play a role that is prominently instrumental,
albeit not exclusive. In in-de-siècle Portugal, what Rita Felski has diagnosed
as the “saturation of cultural texts with metaphors of masculinity and femi-
ninity” (1) in the context of Western modernity’s quest for self-deinition was
as pervasive as elsewhere in Europe, going hand in hand with the expanding
practice and popularization of the newly lourishing sciences of psychology
and sexology. Against this background, the Portuguese crisis of national
identity and purpose, exacerbated by the Ultimatum and its consequences,
ofered a fertile ground for creative intermingling of narratives dramatizing
forms and relations of gender with those that focused on national belonging
and deinition. hus, for example, in Abel Botelho’s novel O Barão de La-
vos (1891)—the irst work of Portuguese literature that deployed as a central
theme the newly representable condition of homosexuality and that, upon
its translation into Spanish in 1907, became also “one of the irst modern
works with a clearly homosexual subject to appear in Spain” (Robb 204)—the
rhetorics of individual, familial, and national pathology go hand in hand.
he novel’s eponymous protagonist, who “garfava por enxertia duplamente
bastarda em duas das mais antigas e ilustres famílias de Portugal” (22) and
whose given name happens to be Sebastião (which, given his aristocratic sta-
tus, makes it possible for the narrator to refer to him throughout the novel as
“D. Sebastião,” in a transparent allusion to the hapless and sexually suspect
sixteenth-century monarch), is presented as an inevitably perverse ofspring
of the centuries-long evolutionary decline of the Portuguese society and
the only slightly shorter durée of his own family’s history. Portugal’s sexu-
Klobucka 7

ally problematic origins as a Greek and Roman colony—“A inversão sexual

do amor, o culto dos efebos, a preferência dada sobre a mulher aos belos
adolescentes, veio-nos com a colonização grega e romana” (25)—stamp the
country’s future with an indelible mark of sexual deviation, a “gérmen mór-
bido” that in later centuries bears fruit in the favorable conditions created
by “o abuso do monaquismo e das expedições náuticas longínquas” (26),
becoming a legacy fatally and prominently enmeshed in the present: “Com
a diuturnidade da causa, o mal prosperou e enraizou-se, alargando sobre
a geração de hoje um império feroz e dissolvente” (27). As for the baron’s
familial descendancy, by his own account it too makes him subject to “um
fatalismo sórdido” (272):

Eu havia de ser isto, por força! Trago a tatuagem da infâmia. Estava escrito . . .
A genealogia moral dos meus é ediicante . . . Meu trisavô, inquisidor, era
um verdugo e um místico; meu bisavô, um sodomita incorrigível, morreu
aos dezanove anos, esgotado, tísico; um irmão dele, que foi cardeal, orga-
nizou com tiples castrados da sé e meninos de coro um harém para seu uso
exclusivo; minha avô paterna, espécie de Egéria debochada e histérica, essa
pagava os madrigais e os sonetos com dormidas, por escala, às noites, no seu
leito, à choldra almiscarada dos seus preciosos turiferários; e meu pai . . .
meu pai foi mignon de D. João VI . . .

Other, far more obviously inluential Portuguese literary statements of

the late nineteenth century—such as Eça de Queirós’s novels Os Maias and
A Ilustre Casa de Ramires—while hardly “foundational ictions” in the sense
ascribed by Doris Sommer’s eponymous study to nineteenth-century narra-
tives that expressed and shaped emergent Latin American cultural nation-
alisms, also insistently stage an “overlapping” of “love plots and political
plotting” (Sommer 41), although here the imbrication is as likely as not to
result in a deconstructive iasco. his iasco manifests itself as the undoing
of both the family line and the territorial pull of the nation by the scandal of
incest—in Os Maias—or as the protagonist’s quest, corroded by irony and
ultimately inconclusive, for a nationally and genealogically beitting mascu-
line identity (in A Ilustre Casa). In ways that are both similar and profoundly
diferent, Nobre’s poetry also participates in the turn-of-the century enter-
prise of relating discourses of sexuality and gendered relations to forms and
forces that inlect the Portuguese nation’s passage into modernity. But rather
than attempt to rephrase earnestly and convincingly for the modern times
any of the historically major discourses of Portuguese cultural nationalism,
whether rooted in territorial and genealogical continuity of the homeland or
in globalizing aspirations of the empire, it deterritorializes the homogeniz-
ing and power-driven claims of such discourses from within. It functions
8 Luso-Brazilian Review 48:2

thereby in a manner akin to cultural formations and processes inluentially

theorized by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari under the rubric of “minor
literature,” an analogy to be developed in the latter part of this essay.
A somewhat extended but (I hope) not irrelevant digression is now in
order. My discussion of Nobre’s poetry and other writings as a queering dis-
course seeks also to point toward—but does not, at this stage, comprehen-
sively pursue—an interpretation of Nobre as a queer author. Such an inquiry
would consider, in a far more detailed way than is possible within the con-
ines of this article, the pivotal personal and literary relationship between
Nobre and Alberto de Oliveira, and the complex interfaces of their friendship
with Nobre’s numerous heterosexual engagements (also both personal and
literary), as well as the ways in which Nobre’s ambiguous sexuality has been
framed by Portuguese literary history, including the nonexistent history of
gay Portuguese literature. Even in Eduardo Pitta’s seminal essay Fractura.
A condição homossexual na literatura portuguesa contemporânea, published
in 2003, the signiicance of Nobre as a retroactively identiiable antecedent
is acknowledged but leetingly, with a single mention of “o seráico António
Nobre, de quem quase nunca ninguém se lembra a este respeito” (8). To-
ward the end of Fractura, Nobre is alluded to for the second and last time in
the space of the essay, as the (unnamed) author of the expression “pilinha-
morango,” evoked as an example of the homotextual impulse to “celebrar o
objecto desejado” (largely absent, in Pitta’s estimation, from contemporary
Portuguese literatura gay). Identiied in an endnote as used by Nobre in one
of his letters to Oliveira, the expression occurs in a commentary on No-
bre’s departure for Paris, in October 1890, on board the steamship Britan-
nia. he respective fragment is worth quoting in its entirety, not least for
the delightful spin it implicitly puts on the post-Ultimatum expression of
Anglophobic sentiment that dominated Portugal in the months preceding
Nobre’s voyage:

Também te quero dizer que o Britannia nasceu em 1873, tendo pois a tua
idade: sois, talvez, gémeos, mas não sois com certeza patrícios, porque o
teu corpo de Purinho, desengonçado e cor de leite, foi baptizado na concha
de pedra da Igreja de Santo Ildefonso, [e] o desse monstro do Britannia,
sólido e negro, tem o seu nascimento arquivado nalguma babilónica oi-
cina de Liverpool. Contudo, há esta coincidência, mas eu não consinto que
a tua pilinha-morango toque nem de leve o vergalho deste paquete. (Nobre
1982, 116)

Nobre’s historical import as a potentially central igure of Portuguese

homotextuality has been more clearly foregrounded in some other recent
publications, such as Mário Cláudio’s illustrated album entitled Triunfo do
Amor Português (2004), in which the sequence of chapters devoted to the
Klobucka 9

usual suspects in the amorous history of Portugal—Pedro and Inês, Mari-

ana Alcoforado, etc.—culminates with the inal (apotheotic?) installment
dedicated to Nobre and Oliveira’s amitié amoureuse. If in Cláudio’s perspec-
tive, which is conveyed also, consistently albeit less directly, in his essays on
Nobre and editions of the poet’s writings, Nobre and Oliveira appear as the
irst canonical gay couple of Portuguese literature, a more enigmatic—if no
less enticing—sign of Nobre’s legacy emerges from the pages of António Bot-
to’s Canções, a foundational text in its own right, as the irst book of openly
homoerotic poetry published in Portugal (in 1921). In a poem that paints
a landscape of post-coital awakening and melancholia, a prominently dis-
played element of the debris scattered about the speaker’s room is a torn-up
copy of Só: “Além, o livro de António Nobre, / Todo rasgado . . . !” (60).
hat Nobre, while potentially assimilable as an author to the emergent
genealogical narrative of Portuguese male literatura gay, may be regarded
also—and, in my view, even more productively—as a igure of multifaceted
textual queerness, is demonstrated with particular eloquence by one of the
most frequently evoked concentrated assessments of his literary-historical
signiicance: Teixeira de Pascoaes’s notorious reference to Nobre as “a nossa
maior poetisa” (Andrade 18). While oten cited, the reference is almost never
described and analyzed in its original context, which—as it happens—
makes all the diference. he context is the irst meeting, sometime in the
1940s, between Pascoaes and the young Eugénio de Andrade, who visits the
older poet in Marão, and their conversation (as related by Andrade in an
essay irst published shortly ater Pascoaes’s death in 1952), which touches
upon a number of writers, segueing from Nobre to Mário de Sá-Carneiro
and from there to Fernando Pessoa. Andrade “devours with [his] eyes” the
volumes in Pascoaes’s library—among which “o Libro de Poemas, de Lorca,
donde saltou um postal de Federico (“Querido Poeta . . . No me olvide”)—
and, having come upon an old edition of Só, asks his host: “Gosta muito de
António Nobre, Pascoaes?” Pascoaes’s reply—“Claro que gosto! É a nossa
maior poetisa!”—is followed by Andrade’s reported laughter (embarrassed?
complicit? mocking? all of the above?), whereupon, with no additional com-
ment, the conversation swerves to another book and another author (“Era
a Dispersão, oferecida por Sá-Carneiro”), to inally settle for a time on Fer-
nando Pessoa. If we accept, as seems inevitable, that Pascoaes’s remark on
Nobre colors in some way further development of this exchange, then the
choice of the poem by the latter author Andrade recites in order to prove
to Pascoaes that Pessoa was “um grande poeta” (and not just “um grande
crítico,” as Pascoaes believes) is loaded with suggestive signiicance: it is “Dá
a surpresa de ser,” a rare example of heteroerotic lyric in Pessoa’s oeuvre, to
this day periodically evoked by interested parties as the most consequential
poetic proof of the author’s ultimately heterosexual leanings. Without wish-
10 Luso-Brazilian Review 48:2

ing to reduce the rich and intricate scafolding of what remains unspoken
in this conversation and its retrospective account to a simple linear con-
clusion, I will note that the pilgrimage of the young poet—who in the late
1930s, at the age of sixteen, had elected none other than António Botto as his
original literary mentor—appears to have resulted in a complex formative
experience that centered on the relationship between qualitative assessment
of poetic value and expression of heteronormative masculinity in poetic dis-
course, with António Nobre as the leading example of the failure to succeed
in the latter undermining the likelihood to be granted unequivocal accla-
mation in the former. But it also opens up other venues of interpretation,
such as an inquiry into what it could have meant, in 1940s Portugal, to be
classiied, respectively, as a poeta (like Pessoa) and as a poetisa (like Nobre),
in the context in which real-life women poets had yet to crack the ceiling
of canonical validation. No wonder, therefore, that Maria Irene Ramalho
de Sousa Santos chose to take Pascoaes’s witticism (as deployed in another
pragmatically complex exchange, between Santos herself and Luís Amaro,
then editor of the journal Colóquio/Letras) as a point of departure for her
commentary on “o sexo dos poetas” in an article introducing the forthcom-
ing inaugural volume of poetry by Ana Luísa Amaral, “uma nova voz na
poesia portuguesa, a quem neste momento Pascoaes e Luís Amaro me im-
pedem de chamar ‘poetisa’” (122).
Pascoaes was not alone, of course, in his appraisal of Nobre’s lyric iden-
tity. he poetry of the author of Só has always been read, notwithstanding
other hermeneutic framings that may have been employed in particular in-
stances of its interpretation, as intensely personal, whimsical and idiosyn-
cratic, and its intimate eccentricity has more oten than not been coded,
taking lead from Anto’s own signature textual gestures, as infantile and/or
efeminate. Given this a priori minorization of the poet’s discursive persona,
a sustained attribution of collective prescriptive value to any constructs of
identity discernible in his verses was not commonly undertaken even by
the reaportuguesadores, remaining conined to such generic glosses as Jú-
lio Dantas’s description of Só as the “Lusíadas da nossa decadência” and to
emphasizing the poet’s ethnographic prowess as the “neo-Garrettian” tran-
scriber of the “grande livro nacional que é o povo e as suas tradições,” to
quote from Almeida Garrett’s own formulation of the task in his preface to
the Romanceiros (682). Fernando Pessoa’s brief but extraordinarily fertile
note “Para a memória de António Nobre,” even while stressing that from
Nobre’s poetry “partem todas as palavras com sentido lusitano que de então
para cá têm sido pronunciadas” and, more notoriously, that “[q]uando ele
nasceu, nascemos todos nós,” disclaims any doctrinal import of his legacy:
“[dos] seus versos não se tira, felizmente, ensinamento nenhum” (100–101).
And yet, the inimitable lyric voice of Nobre’s poems, notwithstanding the
Klobucka 11

peculiarity of its self-absorbed inlections, does speak a political language of

national identity; it claims to speak from, to and for its nation, and it plays
the game of allegorizing Portugueseness no less interestingly, if perhaps less
obviously, than such more clearly legible turn-of-the-century ictional stag-
ings of the country’s fate as, to return to this already cited example, A Ilustre
Casa de Ramires.
In Eça’s late novel, the historical trajectory of the Ramires family ac-
companies closely the ups and downs of national destiny from the Middle
Ages to the present—as narrated in Oliveira Martins’s História de Portugal
(1879), a recognized dialogic reference for A Ilustre Casa—while its present-
day ofspring Gonçalo is explicitly characterized as an allegorical stand-in
for his nation in search of a way out of its crisis of identity and purpose. In
“Memória,” the narrative opening poem of Só, the personal mythology of
Anto, the volume’s lyric protagonist, is likewise blended with the memory
of the nation through the evocation of Anto’s father, “Português antigo, do
tempo da guerra” (Poesia Completa 163), who in a historically exemplary
gesture leaves his ancestral homeland of Trás-os-Montes for faraway lands,
but later returns to it in order to marry Anto’s mother. It is ater Anto is born
(and anointed by the Fates as the future poète maudit) that things go seriously
and rather weirdly astray: Anto’s mother puts on some sandals and leaves on
a brief errand, only to be never heard from again, and the father soon fol-
lows in his wife’s footsteps, both disappearing forever from their son’s life.
he defamiliarizing strangeness of the lyric scenario of “Memória” does not,
however, spring merely from its ictional emplotments of the poet’s family
romance, with its tropes of maternal agency and abandonment and pater-
nal compliance and feminization (Anto’s father is said to possess an “alma
de bronze e coração de menina”). It is chiely due to the poem’s exquisitely
bathetic transitions, such as the mother’s dressing up as Nossa Senhora das
Dores in order to go for a ride in a horse buggy or Anto’s self-consolatory
statement that “Sempre é agradável ter um ilho Virgílio.” he latter verse
marks a passage between two distinct apostrophes: Anto concludes his di-
rect address of his absent parents (“Em vão corri mundos, não vos encon-
trei”) and turns to the collective audience of his compatriots (164):
Sempre é agradável ter um i lho Virgílio,
Ouvi estes carmes que eu compus no exílio,
Ouvi-os vós todos, meus bons Portugueses!

With this switch of addressee, Anto efectively gives himself up for adop-
tion by the Portuguese nation, ofering his services as a poet in exchange
for a return to familial stability: simply put, he becomes the “ilho Virgílio”
of the Portuguese. At the same time, Anto’s choice of Virgil—the epic poet
and acknowledged chief precursor of Os Lusíadas—openly sets the stage
12 Luso-Brazilian Review 48:2

for the dramatic monologue of “Lusitânia no Bairro Latino,” in which the

imaginary voyage of “o Lusíada, coitado” through the lost landscapes of his
childhood and his homeland is sprinkled with references to Camões’s poem
(a sampling unhindered, incidentally, by the fact that Nobre had not read
Os Lusíadas prior to composing Só). At the same time, another, more co-
vert connotation may be said to attach itself to the “ilho Virgílio” identity
that Nobre adopts for the duration of Só. As the Oxford Classical Diction-
ary rather primly puts it, Virgil “never married and homosexual tendencies
were inferred from this and from the appearance in the Eclogues of that
traditional Greek theme” (1124). Nobre was clearly aware of this aspect of
the Roman poet’s legacy, given that one of his early sonnets, an amorous
evocation of a “rapazito de quem sou amigo, / Virgem pastor d’uma bonita
aldeia,” is entitled “Virgiliana” (Cláudio, Páginas Nobrianas 214). It is also
worth mentioning that the author’s note in the manuscript of the poem,
although disclaiming the factual veracity of the attachment, does so merely
on the grounds of the actual shepherd’s extreme unattractiveness: “Rapaz
das jericas. Não sinceridade: horroroso o pastor” (259).
he familial agency of Anto-the-Son-of-Portugal continues to unfold in
the pages of Só, with the poem “Purinha” standing out as the volume’s most
extensive dramatization of the question of descendancy. Purinha is Anto’s
imagined future bride and a nickname recurrent also in Nobre’s correspon-
dence, where it is applied indiscriminately both to the steadiest, relatively
speaking, of his numerous female love interests, Margarida de Lucena (who
is Purinha) and to Alberto de Oliveira (who is Purinho). he Purinha of the
poem is likewise ambiguously gendered, styled at the same time as a com-
pound of Virgin Mary with the bride of he Song of Songs and as a phallic
dominatrix (Poesia Completa 197):
E será uma espada a sua mão,
E branca como a neve do Marão,
E seus dedos serão como punhais,
Fusos de prata onde iarei meus ais!

She is also, however, unambiguously Portuguese and to be chosen, in

an established fairy-tale fashion, from among all of the country’s young
women, who are addressed in the poem’s refrain (198):
Meninas, lindas meninas!
Qual de vós é o meu Ideal?
Meninas! lindas meninas
Do Reino de Portugal!

he imagined scene of Anto and Purinha’s wedding also has implica-

tions that go beyond the personal: the groom awaiting his bride in front
Klobucka 13

of the church is surrounded by subdued and respectful country folk with

whom he chats “das colheitas, da chuva” and who react appropriately (199):
E animados então (o Povo é uma criança!)
porque o Sr. Doutor lhes deu coniança,
“Que Deus o ajude” dirá um, e o Regedor:
“Vá coa Graça de Nosso Senhor!”
E eu hei-de agradecer, sorrir, gostar. . . .

In this brief moment, away from his bride, Anto-the-Son becomes trans-
formed into Anto-the-Father, i lled with paternalistic condescension to-
wards his lock of peasants and sanctioned in his authority by an arm of
the law (“o Regedor”). he spell of power ends, however, as soon as the bride
makes her appearance on the scene (200):
Mas o Anjo assomará, à porta da capela,
e eu branco e trémulo hei-de ir com ela.

In the following sequences of Nobre’s quasi-epithalamium—and here,

to evoke another example of the genre, the contrast with Pessoa’s porno-
graphic English-language poem, written twenty years later, could hardly be
greater—the bride falls asleep alone on the marital bed and Anto reverts to
his paradigmatic role of unemancipated son, with Purinha in yet another
martial disguise (as Joan of Arc) decisively assuming the role of her hus-
band’s mother (203):
E será a Mamã que me há-de vir criar,
Admirável Joaninha d’Arc,
Meu novo berço duma Vida nova!

It is also Purinha who efectively takes possession of Anto’s ancestral

domain, feeding its poor and tending to its sick, while Anto becomes a
brooding recluse who never leaves the self-imposed coninement of their
home. Appropriately enough, while in the opening sections of the poem the
imagined Purinha is referred to in generic Symbolist terms as “Esta Torre,
esta Lua, esta Quimera” (198), in its last verses this asyndetic sequence is
reiterated for the second time in a highly distinct manner: “Esta Bandeira,
esta Índia, este Castelo” (204). In brief, Purinha, as a consequence of having
taken charge of Anto’s life and lands, acquires a privileged relationship with
markers of national and imperial identity that tweaks the traditional “trope
of the nation-as-woman,” an iconography in which Britannia or Germania
can be safely gendered feminine precisely because the actual experiences
of their female populations maintain them at a categorical remove from
the seats of political power (Parker et al. 6). he trope of Anto’s-bride-as-
Portugal is, by contrast, a logical outcome of the poem’s narrative of male
14 Luso-Brazilian Review 48:2

ilial dispossession, which in turn feeds upon the dynamics of the family
saga sketched out in the opening poem of Só.
Nobre’s own conjugal fantasies (articulated mainly in his correspon-
dence) occasionally intersect with those of Anto through shared signiiers
(such as Purinha/Purinho) and cognate workings of narrative imagination.
For example, in one of his letters to Alberto de Oliveira, the poet elaborates
on what he calls “a ilusão do meu Lar-com-Margareth” (i.e., Margarida, the
real-life Purinha), enfolding both of his beloveds into a triangular scenario
of conjugal bliss:

Já concluí que serias tu . . . o Padrinho de António e minha Irmã Madrinha. E

resolvi, também, que o dia 16 de Fevereiro (que é o dia de Santo Alberto) será
por Margareth e por mim considerado de guarda (e com jejuns) dizendo-se
missa na capela de Vil’Alva, a que irão todos os pobrezinhos. Num dos al-
tares será posta a tua Imagem, em tamanho natural que, em hora oportuna,
encomendarei, ali, nas maravilhosas oicinas de Saint Sulpice. (Correspon-
dência 157–58)

To realize the far-reaching extent of this and other formulas of alterna-

tive family structures springing out from Nobre’s imagination, it helps to
contrast them with the more conventionally tormented homoerotic triangle
of Mário de Sá-Carneiro’s A Conissão de Lúcio. In Sá-Carneiro’s novella,
Ricardo’s tortured insistence that it is “impossible” to “possess a creature of
our own sex” (154) has as its overdetermined corollary the creation of Lúcio’s
bride Marta, the phantasmatic female intermediary through whom Lúcio
and Ricardo can love each other, but whose fantastic interchangeability with
Ricardo is an “either/or” proposition that implodes tragically at the text’s
conclusion. By contrast with Conissão, the ictional mode in which Nobre
couches the interface of his and Oliveira’s same-sex attachment with hetero-
sexual marriage is not one of tragedy but of ecstatic comedy, founded on the
principle of “both/and” inclusiveness. Rather than regard heteronormative
conjugal form as a socially inevitable compromise, at once enabling and dis-
guising covert maintenance of homosexual relations, Nobre is exuberantly
and eloquently airmative on the subject of marriage to his polyvalently
gendered Purinha/Purinho, expressing his fantasy, moreover, in terms of a
public and institutionally sanctioned celebratory spectacle.
Ecstatic comedy and panoptic inclusiveness can also be said to supply
the key in which Nobre chose to chronicle his real-life sexual exploits: a page
from a Parisian notebook categorizes by nationality (but not by gender) var-
ious “Carnes que já provei,” beginning with “Portugal (ilhas e colónias),”
continuing through several European countries (that include a crossed-out
Romania replaced by Poland), United States and Brazil, and ending, some-
Klobucka 15

what pedantically, with Alsace-Lorraine (Cláudio, Páginas Nobrianas 295).

his glimpse into Nobre’s freewheeling cosmopolitan promiscuity belies
several aspects of the established critical image of Anto blended into one
with his creator. Chief among them is of course the perception of the poet
as, in Jorge de Sena’s words, “a personiicação simbólica . . . da castração
tradicional” and “o mais completo e mais sinistro retrato do solipsismo lu-
sitano . . . que se compraz masoquisticamente na ideia da morte, para . . .
escapar à naturalidade de aceitar o sexo em si mesmo” (qtd in Cláudio 1993,
200). While the discursive history of this reputation is too extensive to be
considered more amply here, Teixeira de Pascoaes’s early portrayal (origi-
nally published in 1911 in A Águia) of Nobre as a perennial virgin whose only
meaningful relationship was with death itself is worth quoting as an espe-
cially synthetic illustration: “A sua graça espiritual é infantil e feminina;
o túmulo em que ele repousa deve ter a forma dum berço, e a terra que o
cobre a brancura e a pureza dum véu nupcial. Foi o poeta da virgindade. . . .”
(Pascoaes 29).
Moreover, the evidence of Nobre’s sexual sociability aligns with the re-
alization that the existential and essential loneliness of Anto’s poetic per-
sona is a determinedly performative and inconsistently maintained pretense
in the textual universe of Só. Beginning with “Memória” and continuing
through the rhetorical cadences of “Lusitânia no Bairro Latino” and many
other poems of his “saddest book in Portugal,” the poet repeatedly deploys
direct address in an insistent quest for attention and companionship. As
Isabel Cardigos has perceptively noted, “o poeta do Só parece estar sempre
acompanhado” (26):
A solidão do Só nunca é o desenraizamento, o corte que sentimos no alhea-
mento gelado de Pessanha ou no desespero visceral de Sá-Carneiro. A sua é
uma solidão que estabelece amarras com tudo e sobretudo com o leitor.

Last but not least, the allegedly self-contained and inward-looking Por-
tugueseness of Nobre’s literary and personal identity can be said to yield
here—as it does elsewhere in his textual legacy—to a wholehearted immer-
sion in (queer) cosmopolitanism, worthy of such illustrious future represen-
tatives of this Weltanschauung in the Portuguese lyric tradition as Álvaro de
Campos or Al Berto.
Nobre’s unorthodox and spectacularly inventive exercises in queering
the traditional tropes of Portuguese familial and nationalist poetics may be
productively considered against Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s concept
of minor literature, although I will not pursue this venue of interpretation
here to its full extent. If “minor literature” is “what a minority constructs
within a major language” (Deleuze and Guattari 16), I would propose to read
16 Luso-Brazilian Review 48:2

Nobre’s poetry and other writings as a sustained attempt at an articulation,

on the ruins of the “major” imperial identity claimed for Portugal and the
Portuguese language and literature by Os Lusíadas and its legitimate de-
scendants, of a language and poetics that is no less national for being minor.
Such a reading might proceed from, and consider in a far greater depth than
is possible within the scope of this article, Nobre’s widely recognized cru-
cial contribution to the reinvention of the language of modern Portuguese
poetry, which Gastão Cruz summarizes as “a experiência herdada do Gar-
rett das Viagens, uma linguagem em que as hesitações, as indecisões, são
incorporadas, em que o português coloquial, quotidiano e popular constitui
uma verdadeira transfusão operada na língua poética ‘oicial’” (19). Nobre,
however, takes considerably further than Garrett the operation of “stutter-
ing” in poetic language (to cite one of the aspects of becoming-minor devel-
oped by Deleuze in Critique et clinique), since his departures from the major
discourse of literary tradition rely so prominently on signifying practices
incompatible with an authoritative model of heteronormative male author-
ship. Cruz himself unwittingly illustrates the inadequacy of the critical
tools at his disposal to the task of interpreting both the speciic parameters
of Nobre’s singularity and his role as a lyric precursor when he refers to
the “histerismo exclamativo, interrogativo, enumerativo” (20) as a discur-
sive path opened up by Nobre and followed, most spectacularly, by Pessoa’s
Campos, and when he supports his argument by citing Pessoa’s own de-
scription of Campos as the most hysterical of his heteronyms and evoking
the irst verse of Anto’s following self-representation in “Carta a Manuel”:
Histeriza-me o Vento, absorve-me a alma toda
Tal a menina pelas vésperas da boda,
Atarefada maila ama, a arrumar . . .
(Poesia Completa 213)

Interestingly, Isabel Cardigos elects the same fragment (in her case, lim-
ited to the irst two of the three verses quoted above) to comment on Nobre’s
representation of “o ser feminino” as “o ser frágil e histérico” (26). However,
the attribute of fragility hardly seems to igure in Nobre’s simile, particu-
larly if we take into account its full extent: manic intensity, channeled into
the materially precise activity of “arrumar” (in Anto’s case, his mental and
existential condition as a mostly unhappy resident of Coimbra), would be a
more satisfying characterization. Notwithstanding the considerable overall
merits of the two critical texts (Cruz’s and Cardigos’s) within the broader
enterprise of reevaluating the poet’s legacy, their hermeneutic fragments I
have opportunistically selected here point toward the inevitable conclusion
that taking such luid and complex notions as “hysteria” or “femininity” as
preexisting instrumental givens in any approach to Nobre’s poetry can only
Klobucka 17

result in falling short of the target in attempting to trace the inventive and
vibrant movements of his queerly stuttering lyric imagination.
Secondly, if it is possible to extend the condition of a “high coeicient
of deterritorialization” (16) that according to Deleuze and Guattari afects
the language of minor literature to such literature’s functioning within se-
mantic and structural networks that constitute the intertextual canon of
national literary tradition, this is also a condition put into practice in No-
bre’s poetry through multiple and layered tropes and devices of subjective
and referential displacement. he very title of “Lusitânia no Bairro Latino”
dislocates radically the geocultural construct of Portugal-in-the-world that
was paradigmatically monumentalized in Os Lusíadas and reappropriated,
among others, by the neo-imperial vision of Pessoa’s Mensagem. Lusitania,
the Portugal that once spanned the globe and that, for Pessoa, makes it pos-
sible for Europe to once again look toward the future is here literally cir-
cumscribed by the conines of a single Bohemian neighborhood of Paris.
Furthermore, the gaze that deines the poem’s focus in its irst section be-
longs to a nostalgically self-centered peripatetic individual—half-pilgrim,
half-lâneur—whose repertory of communal references from the past could
hardly be more distant from that of Camões’s inaugural “barões assinal-
ados” and his and Pessoa’s galleries of prominent Portuguese historical
igures. As an eloquent example, the irst irrevocably lost fellowship Anto
sets out to mourn is his childhood intimacy with locks of goats and sheep,
whose decidedly unconventional description exceeds by a wide margin
any automatized hermeneutic ascription of canonical pastoral frameworks
(181–82):

Formosas cabras, ainda pequeninas,

E loiras vacas de maternas ancas
Que me davam o leite de manhã,
(. . .)
Eram minhas Irmãs e todas puras
E só lhes minguava a fala
para serem perfeitas criaturas . . .

In the second and third sections of the poem, the lonely “Lusíada, coi-
tado” summons the companionship and the shared gaze of a fellow observer,
who happens to be a foreigner (“Georges”) and whose constitutive agency
in framing Portugal as the object of poetic analysis is further indication
of Nobre’s defamiliarizing impetus. he speciically queering aspect of this
agency may be postulated by way of evoking Georges’s earliest appearance
in Nobre’s lyric, in a poem drat included in the manuscript notebook Ali-
cerces (dated 1882–1886), whose deinitive version, published posthumously
in Primeiros versos (1921), begins with the following apostrophe:
18 Luso-Brazilian Review 48:2

Ellen! meu céu! meu norte! meu abrigo!

Alma gentil, consoladora e grata!
Ah, quem me dera navegar contigo
Pelos céus, n’uma gôndola de prata . . .
(Poesia Completa 81)

In the manuscript version, however, this poem is entitled “Georges” and

the variant of its irst verse reads “Georges, meu anjo protector e amigo”;
while the drat does not settle conclusively on either the male Georges or
the female Ellen as its ultimate addressee, most of the epithets attached to
him/her are of masculine grammatical gender (“Amado meu de sangue
aristocrata,” “meu anjo loiro,” “Meu delicioso príncipe de fadas”) (Cláudio,
Páginas Nobrianas 248–49, 256). Although in “Lusitânia no Bairro Latino”
Georges is vigorously invited to “become Manel” (“Vá! Georges, faze-te
Manel!”) in order to put on a convincing performance of pinching and kiss-
ing the rustic “Marias” he and Anto encounter on their imaginary visit to
the Portuguese countryside (Poesia Completa 190), his character’s prehistory
in Nobre’s oeuvre contributes further to the poem’s preemptive destabiliz-
ing of reliably reproducible (and reproductive) identitarian postulates of the
reaportuguesamento campaign in Portuguese culture.
Finally, as Deleuze and Guattari express it, in minor literature “everything
takes on collective value”: “Indeed, precisely because talent isn’t abundant in
a minor literature, there are no possibilities for an individuated enunciation
that would belong to this or that ‘master’ and that could be separated from
a collective enunciation” (17). he introductory self-presentation of Só—“o
livro mais triste que há em Portugal” (Poesia Completa 164)—foregrounds
both the scarcity of accomplishment against which to measure one’s own
and the excess of collective identiication, which remains one of the distinc-
tive aspects of Nobre’s volume, as well as of its reception and inscription in
the narrative of Portuguese literary history. At the same time, it is much
more diicult to pin down, in the literary and critical descendancy of inter-
pretations Nobre’s writings have generated, the particular lineage of “active
solidarity in spite of skepticism” that could be said to respond to the poet’s
attempt “to express another possible community and to forge the means for
another consciousness and another sensibility” (Deleuze and Guattari 17).
Set against Pascoaes’s sarcasm, Eugénio’s unreadable laughter, and Botto’s
ripped-up copy of Só, it is perhaps Pessoa’s appreciation of Nobre that of-
fers, notwithstanding its elusiveness, the most constructive and optimistic
interpretive potential in this regard (100):

Mas ele foi o primeiro a pôr em europeu este sentimento português das al-
mas e das coisas, que tem pena de que umas não sejam corpos, para lhe poder
fazer festas, e de que as outras não sejam gente, para poder falar com elas.
Klobucka 19

While Pessoa, in his guise as Supra-Camões and despite the many strains
of minor political and afective allegiance that are also readable in his multi-
directional work, claimed for himself the major line of descendancy from the
Ur-poet of the Portuguese language, he nevertheless appeared to recognize
in Nobre’s eccentric national imaginary a compelling alternative, embodied
in the poetic persona of Anto as the invitingly and polymorphously perverse
Other who had managed to masquerade—successfully and enduringly—as
a foundational touchstone: a queerly and exuberantly inventive performer
and founding son of the minor strand of Portuguese cultural nationalism
and literary modernity.

Notes

1. For a recent synthetic survey of the longstanding critical consensus regarding

Nobre’s poetry as “a mais acabada realização poética nacionalista do im-de-século,”
see Alves 173–88 (175). While Alves’s interpretation of Nobre does not consider gen-
dered inlections of his poetic discourse (or of his literary-historical reputation),
the critic does emphasize the “estrangeidade” [foreignness/estrangement] inherent
in the subjective perspective of Nobre’s verses: “A poesia do Só . . . é a poesia dum
migrante entre territórios e tempos auto-ironicamente incapaz de . . . representar o
Portugal saudoso que gerações posteriores ali quiseram ver” (183).
2. he irst edition of the magnum opus of Portuguese sexology, Egas Moniz’s A
Vida Sexual, dates from 1901. It was continuously reedited, in revised versions, over
the following three decades, with the last (nineteenth) edition published in 1933.
3. he representability of the (male) homosexual as a distinct species was, ac-
cording to Michel Foucault’s famous and much-debated claim, datable to around
1870: “We must not forget that the psychological, psychiatric, medical category of
homosexuality was constituted from the moment it was characterized—Westphal’s
famous article of 1870 can stand as its date of birth—less by a type of sexual rela-
tions than by a certain quality of sexual sensibility . . . a kind of interior androgyny,
a hermaphroditism of the soul. he sodomite had been a temporary aberration; the
homosexual was now a species” (43).
4. For an extended discussion of the social and ideological context informing
the publication and reception of O Barão de Lavos, see Howes. An overview of Por-
tuguese historiography’s interpretations of the psychology and sexuality of King
Sebastian—the original “D. Sebastião” of Portugal—is ofered in Johnson 199–203.
Considering the Baron’s confession, quoted below, that his father had been a young
favorite (“mignon”) of King João VI, the choice of the name Sebastian for the Baron
senior’s only male ofspring igures as a possible in-joke of considerable twisted-
ness, at the same time as it emphasizes the family’s drive to self-extinction.
5. he surviving letters Nobre wrote to Oliveira over the period of approxi-
mately ive years their relationship lasted (1888–93) are gathered in the volume of
20 Luso-Brazilian Review 48:2

his Correspondência. A parallel track of their correspondence, initiated when No-

bre let Portugal for Paris, was composed of a “diary” in the form of postcards that
was ordered to be destroyed by Oliveira upon his death in 1940, as “impublicável
pela natureza pessoal e íntima do seu conteúdo” (Nobre 1982, 25). Writes Nobre on
22 October 1890: “Deixa-me ser simples, todo eu, e amanhã prometo-te começar
o meu diário tal como foi por nós combinado, sempre e sempre, sem interrupção,
até ao dia grande em que de novo te tiver em meus braços, numa efervescência de
alegria e lágrimas” (1982, 110). In his last letter to Oliveira, Nobre demanded the
return of the “diary” (an injunction Oliveira refused to obey), alluding to “certas
fórmulas de cortesia que em algumas circunstâncias se aplicam, tal a correspondên-
cia que se troca entre homem e menina” and pointing out that “o Sr. Alberto de
Oliveira foi a menina da nossa correspondência” (186).
6. In her study Apocalipse e Regeneração. O Ultimatum e a Mitologia da Pátria
na Literatura Finissecular (Lisboa: Cosmos, 1996), Maria Teresa Pinto Coelho ofers
a detailed and comprehensively documented account of the reactions to the Ulti-
matum in Portuguese journalism and literature throughout 1890 and beyond.
7. here are, of course, notable exceptions to this rule. I owe my awareness of the
full story of Pascoaes’s quip to António Ladeira’s unpublished conference paper,
“António Nobre, ‘a nossa maior poetisa’?” (I am grateful to the author for sharing
the text of his paper with me and indebted to his discussion of this episode.) See
also Osvaldo M. Silvestre, “A nossa maior poetisa.” http://blogcasmurro.blogspot
.com/2005/06/nossa-maior-poetisa.html. 1 July 2010.
8. he postcard containing these exact expressions, one of two Lorca wrote to
Teixeira de Pascoaes in 1923, following their likely meeting at the Residencia de
Estudiantes in Madrid, is reproduced in volume I of Lorca’s Epistolario Completo,
edited by Christopher Maurer (Madrid: Cátedra, 1997), 181.
9. See, for example, Teresa Rita Lopes, “O Falso Virgem.” Egoísta. Número espe-
cial: Fernando Pessoa (Junho 2008), 60–64.
10. For Andrade’s account of his relationship with Botto, see “Encontro e desen-
contro,” Jornal de Letras, no. 699 (30 de Julho de 1997), 18–19.
11. It is signiicant that the the irst two studies ushering the critical recognition
of Florbela Espanca as a poet to be regarded seriously and on equal terms with
male authors were produced (by Jorge de Sena and José Régio) in 1946, roughly at
the same time the conversation between Pascoaes and Andrade took place, and no
less signiicant that the discussion of whether one ought to refer to Florbela as a
“poet” or a “poetess” igured prominently in both texts. See Sena, “Florbela Espanca
ou a Expressão do Feminino na Poesia Portuguesa,” Porto: Biblioteca Fenianos,
1947 (public lecture given in 1946 and later reproduced in the volume Da Poesia
Portuguesa); and Régio, “Sobre o Caso e a Arte de Florbela Espanca,” in Florbela
Espanca, Sonetos Completos, Coimbra: Livraria Gonçalves, 1946 (a revised version
entitled simply “Florbela” was published in 1950 and reprinted in Régio’s Ensaios de
Interpretação Crítica).
12. See letter to Justino de Montalvão, dated 3 de Julho 1896, in Nobre’s Corres-
pondência: “Não sabe decerto (porque eu ainda não lho disse) que sou agora doido
pelo velho Luís. Nunca lera os Lusíadas. Mas na minha passagem por Paris, em
Klobucka 21

Setembro, os meus editores deram-me um exemplar e foi o meu companheiro in-

separável durante o meu inverno nos Alpes” (318).
13. For an insightful analysis of “Purinha,” see Emma Brech, “‘Amo-te mais
quando estou só’: Fantasy and Femininity in the Poetry of António Nobre and
Florbela Espanca.” Portuguese Studies 15 (1999), 130–39.
14. By foregrounding and exacerbating the intensity of homosocial desire be-
tween Lúcio and Ricardo, A Conissão simultaneously anticipates and exceeds the
theoretical description of erotic triangles in European iction proposed by René
Girard in Deceit, Desire, and the Novel and inluentially extended by Eve Kosofsky
Sedgwick in her Between Men. For an in-depth analysis of the novella along these
lines, see Fernando Arenas, “Onde Existir?: A (im)possibilidade excessiva do desejo
homoerótico na icção de Mário de Sá-Carneiro.” Metamorfoses 6 (2005), 159–68.
15. Most crucially, in what follows I am leaving out a consideration of how
Nobre’s queer nationalism relates to the second characteristic named in the
Deleuzo-Guattarian description of minor literature, in which “everything . . . is
political” (17), since a properly attentive discussion of the “minor” (queer) politics
of Nobre’s writings, as interpreted here, would require much ampler space than this
prefatory approach allows.
16. Ronald Bogue elucidates Deleuze’s comments on “stammering in one’s own
tongue” (as articulated in the essay “He Stuttered”) by referring to its textually ma-
terial manifestation as “an answerable style that forms part of the atmosphere, an
adequation between the peculiar strangeness of each writer’s use of his language and
the objects described. (. . .) Kaka’s spare, ascetic use of German [in ‘he Metamor-
phosis’] is not simply a itting vehicle for the narration of Gregor’s dreamlike trans-
formation, it is an inseparable atmospheric medium that pervades the story . . . he
echoes between the twitterings of Gregor and the elements of Kaka’s prose, then,
may be seen not simply as the residual efects of a compositional process of becom-
ing-animal, but also as evidence of the atmosphere within which represented afects
communicate with one another over, above and through the words” (108).

Works Cited

Alves, Hélio J. S. Tempo para Entender: História Comparada da Literatura Portu-

guesa. Casal de Cambra: Caleidoscópio, 2006.
Andrade, Eugénio de. “Imagem de Pascoaes.” Os Aluentes do Silêncio. Porto: Inova,
1974. 13–23.
Bogue, Ronald. Deleuze on Literature. New York and London: Routledge, 2003.
Botelho, Abel. O Barão de Lavos. Lisboa: Livros do Brasil, n.d.
Botto, António. Canções e Outros Poemas. Ed. Eduardo Pitta. Vila Nova de Fama-
licão: Quasi, 2008.
Cardigos, Isabel. “‘Os Figos Pretos’ de António Nobre.” Colóquio/Letras 120 (Abril
1991), 25–41.
22 Luso-Brazilian Review 48:2

Cláudio, Mário. Páginas Nobrianas. Porto: Caixotim, 2004.

———. “Rua dos dois amigos, outras pedras.” Colóquio/Letras 127/128 (Janeiro-
Junho 1993), 169–202.
———. Triunfo do Amor Português. Lisboa: Dom Quixote, 2004.
Cruz, Gastão. “António Nobre e o moderno discurso poético português.” A Poe-
sia Portuguesa Hoje. 2.a edição corrigida e aumentada. Lisboa: Relógio D’Água,
1999.
Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. Kaka: Toward a Minor Literature. Minneapo-
lis: U of Minnesota P, 1986.
Felski, Rita. he Gender of Modernity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1995.
Foucault, Michel. he History of Sexuality. Volume I: An Introduction. Trans. Robert
Hurley. New York: Vintage Books, 1980.
Garrett, João Baptista da Silva Leitão de Almeida. Obras. Porto: Lello & Irmão,
1966.
Howes, Robert. “Concerning the Eccentricities of the Marquis of Valada: Politics,
Culture and Homosexuality in Fin-de-Siècle Portugal.” Sexualities 5:1 (2002),
25–49.
Johnson, Harold. “A Pedophile in the Palace or he Sexual Abuse of King Sebastian
of Portugal (1554–1578) and Its Consequences.” Harold Johnson and Francis A.
Dutra, eds., Pelo Vaso Traseiro: Sodomy and Sodomites in Luso-Brazilian History.
Tucson: Fenestra Books, 2007. 195–229.
Nobre, António. Correspondência. Ed. Guilherme de Castilho. 2nd edition. Lisboa:
IN-CM, 1982.
———. Poesia Completa. Lisboa: Dom Quixote, 2000.
Oxford Classical Dictionary. Ed. N. G. L. Hammond and H. H. Scullard. Oxford:
Oxford UP, 1970.
Parker, Andrew, Mary Russo, Doris Sommer, and Patricia Yaeger, eds. Nationalisms
and Sexualities. New York and London: Routledge, 1992.
Pascoaes, Teixeira de. A Saudade e o Saudosismo. Lisboa: Assírio & Alvim, 1988.
Pessoa, Fernando. Crítica. Ensaios, artigos e entrevistas. Ed. Fernando Cabral Mar-
tins. Lisboa: Assírio & Alvim, 2000.
Pitta, Eduardo. Fractura. A condição homossexual na literatura portuguesa contem-
porânea. Coimbra: Angelus Novus, 2003.
Robb, Graham. Strangers: Homosexual Love in the Nineteenth Century. New York:
W.W. Norton, 2004.
Sá-Carneiro, Mário de. A Conissão de Lúcio. Lisboa: Ática, 1973.
Santos, Maria Irene Ramalho de Sousa. “O Sexo dos Poetas: A propósito de uma
nova voz na poesia portuguesa.” Via Latina (Inverno de 1989/90), 122–24.
Sommer, Doris. Foundational Fictions: he National Romances of Latin America.
Berkeley and Los Angeles: U of California P, 1991.