Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies

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Lídia Jorge’s allegories of democracy

Ana Paula Ferreira

To cite this article: Ana Paula Ferreira (2023) Lídia Jorge’s allegories of democracy, Journal of
Spanish Cultural Studies, 24:2, 239-252, DOI: 10.1080/14636204.2023.2211792
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/14636204.2023.2211792

Published online: 18 May 2023.

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JOURNAL OF SPANISH CULTURAL STUDIES
2023, VOL. 24, NO. 2, 239–252
https://doi.org/10.1080/14636204.2023.2211792

Lídia Jorge’s allegories of democracy

Ana Paula Ferreira
Department of Spanish and Portuguese Studies, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN, USA

ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY

This article focuses on Lídia Jorge’s first two novels, O dia dos Received 18 July 2022
prodígios (The Day of Prodigies) and O cais das merendas (Picnic Accepted 13 February 2023
Quay), as anti-realist allegories that challenge the consensus
KEYWORDS
vision of a free and equal “people”, encouraged by propaganda, Revolutionary period; Lídia
celebrating the Portuguese Revolution of 25 April 1974. Following Jorge; literariness;
Jacques Rancière’s philosophical insights on literariness and disagreement; democracy
democracy, each of the novels is analyzed in relation to an
equivocal, misunderstood process of democratization that
continues to exclude and ignore “the part of those who do not
count” in the theoretical equality of all citizens in a given regime.
Specifically, the analysis sheds light on what Prime Minister Maria
de Lourdes Pintasilgo once called “the small revolutions” of
anonymous common people who, rather than submit to an
equality that shuts them out, perform theatrical, political acts of
disagreement calling attention to themselves as human subjects
of social injustices or wrongs. Specific attention is given to the
geo-cultural location and the economic configuration of the
communities fictionalized in each novel, dramatizing different
stages of the so-called transition to democracy. Jorge’s complex
texts provoke us to “see” history otherwise, according to the
experience of a “people” confined to a coastal fringe of land who
are undergoing a violent but unavoidable transformation from a
rural subsistence economy to a capitalist market economy
dependent on foreign investments and a liberal multi-party
democracy.

O poema não explica, implica.

(The poem does not explain, it implicates.)

—Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen ([1975] 1977, 77)

Between July and August of 1975, in the volatile political climate that would lead to
the end of the revolutionary period (25 November 1975) initiated by the coup d’état
of 25 April 1974, the poet and songwriter Ary dos Santos composed a long poem
titled “As portas que abril abriu” (The doors that April opened) (Santos [1975]
2020).1 It is an epic of sorts celebrating the long history of emancipation of landless
peasants and disenfranchised workers who embraced the alliance of “the people”
with the Armed Forces Movement. This was one of many cases of art engaged with

CONTACT Ana Paula Ferreira apferrei@umn.edu

© 2023 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
240 A. P. FERREIRA

the dominant Left narrative of liberation associated with the Carnation Revolution
(Varela 2019, 109–118). Political propaganda in the form of music, wall art, posters,
paintings, literature and theater abounded throughout the nineteen months of the
revolutionary period, which witnessed increasing divisions within the Armed Forces
(Cruzeiro 1989). As early as May 1975, in the First Congress of Portuguese Writers,
the well-respected poet Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen had warned against the
“demagoguery” of meaning and the repetition of slogans and called for an environ-
ment where writers could exercise their critical consciousness without fear of being
denounced as reactionaries or fascists (Andresen 1975, 79).

Literariness as democracy or literature as disagreement

Portuguese writers would in time cultivate aesthetic practices that, while foregrounding
the autonomy of art in relation to life, promoted a critical dialog with the social, cultural
and political context of the revolution. Their texts would aim to “implicate” readers –
reflecting Sophia’s statement quoted in the epigraph.2 It should be noted that the Portu-
guese verb implicar (to involve), also means “to disturb”, “to provoke”, “to imply” or “to
suggest”. If a transition to democracy can be said to have taken place in Portugal, that
transition might be better understood in the creative sphere as the quality of literariness
as a way to involve the reader in keeping the promise of democracy alive. In his often-
quoted essay “Politics and Literature”, included in Dissensus (2010), Jacques Rancière
argues that the aesthetic regime (concerned with literariness), as opposed to the
regime of representation (concerned with reference to an external reality), models “demo-
cratic literariness”. By this he means the disruption of boundaries that mandate what can
be represented, by whom and in what type of language. According to this view, literature
is democratic when it makes visible and audible specific data that would otherwise be
occluded and silenced; when it allows for some specific subjects to appear or be
spoken about (2010, 152). Refusing the problematic consensus invited by such revolution-
ary slogans as “O povo unido jamais será vencido” (United, the people will never be van-
quished), Portuguese literature would make heard what was being silenced by the
prescriptive Povo-MFA (People-Movement of the Armed Forces) alliance and make
visible what some would prefer to hide or ignore. This is particularly the case in the
period of “revolutionary crisis” (Santos 1984, 48) that witnessed, between March and
November 1975, the expression of political divisions not only within the left among the
military but also within Portuguese culture at large.3 For, surely, “the doors that April
opened” were not as univocal, ample or equitable as Ary dos Santos’s popular poem
had made them out to be.
Among the writers associated with what the renowned critic and intellectual Eduardo
Lourenço called “the generation of the revolution”, Lídia Jorge became one of the most
critically acclaimed, translated and internationally recognized, alongside other towering
figures such as António Lobo Antunes and the Nobel laureate José Saramago. Lourenço
hailed Jorge’s first novel, O dia dos prodígios (The day of prodigies), published in 1980, as
the “key book of the revolution”, and considered her second, O cais das merendas (Picnic
quay), published in 1982, to have finally achieved “the revolution of writing” begun earlier
by Maria Velho da Costa (Lourenço 1984, 14; emphasis in original). In the “new space”
opened up by the revolution (Lourenço 1984, 13, 16), other women writers emerged to
 JOURNAL OF SPANISH CULTURAL STUDIES 241

engage likewise with the seemingly miraculous political rupture in non-realist, exper-
imental ways (Ferreira 1997).4
However, Jorge chronicled in a unique manner the period from 25 April 1974 to 1979,
by the end of which the socialist promises and possibilities of the revolution had begun to
fall into oblivion. This is registered in her third novel, Notícia da cidade silvestre (News from
the Wild City, 1984), which, nonetheless, is not so much a novel of desencanto with the
promise of democracy as it is a dramatic demonstration of how only through social
conflict can that promise be kept alive.5 First, through allegory in O dia dos prodígios
and O cais das merendas and, subsequently, through an aesthetics of resemblance
(rather than realism) in Notícia da cidade silvestre, the author consistently draws on the
figurative density of language to subvert the authoritarianism and violence in which rep-
resentation is involved (Ferreira 1999, 99). These first three novels constitute a novelistic
cycle tracing the narrative arc of the 25 April Revolution while calling attention to the pit-
falls of interpellating a “people” into consensus in the name of freedom, social justice and
democracy. In the analysis that follows, I consider the author’s first two novels, connected
by allegory, as disruptive, dissenting figurations of a national community metonymically
figured by the intimate, affective lives of characters experiencing irreversible, violent
changes in their lives. These changes are set against the background of the southernmost
province of Portugal, the Algarve, a fringe of partially urbanized and developed land by
the sea – a sea that evokes a painful history of empire and immigration.6
Rancière’s notion of “the part of those who have no part” (1999, 27) is particularly apt to
describe “the people” in Jorge’s first novels – e.g., “the people” as understood in the revo-
lution’s slogan “United the people will never be vanquished” – who take action against
the farce of equality that claimed to bring them together. I will here consider these
groups not as the poor, oppressed, female or feminine, peasant minority – as the disen-
franchised populace has been variously interpreted in O dia dos prodígios and O cais das
merendas – but in accordance with the ancient Greek notion of demos, which Rancière
mobilizes and from which I argue Lídia Jorge drew inspiration.7 The notion of the
demos is clearly defined in Thesis 5 of Rancière’s “Ten Theses on Politics”, where he
states, “The people that comprises the subject of democracy, and thus the atomic
subject of politics”, is “the supplementary part” of the community “in relation to every
count of the parts of the population, making it possible to identify ‘the count of the
uncounted’ with the whole of the community” (2010, 33). In addition to suggesting
that Jorge’s construction of that “supplement” makes it possible for some to be
counted or heard politically, and not just in abstract or general terms, I depart from pre-
vious readings of the novels in question by bringing into focus Rancière’s distinction
between what he calls the “police” and the “political” or democratic spheres (1999, 21–
42). Rancière understands the police as “an order of the visible and the sayable that
sees that a particular activity is visible and another is not, that this speech is understood
as discourse and another as noise” (1999, 29). In both novels, when the characters begin
to see themselves as “speaking bodies doomed to the anonymity of work and reproduc-
tion”, as even less than slaves, since slaves at least had the status of their masters (Rancière
1999, 7), they become the antagonistic subjects of the “wrong” that constitutes them as
“the part of those who have no part” (1999, 8–9). Becoming the counted among the
uncounted, Jorge’s characters voice and act out their revolt in theatrical, spectacular
“one-off performances” of “equality” – to follow Rancière’s reasoning – not meant to
242 A. P. FERREIRA

create a new order of things but, rather, to call attention to themselves as fully-fledged
human beings (1999, 34). In Peter Hallward’s discussion of what he calls Rancière’s “thea-
trocratic conception of equality”, the British philosopher is critical of the “unabashedly
sporadic and intermittent” effects of “ephemeral” and (necessarily) “improvisational”
acts of transgression equated with democracy by the French philosopher (2009, 152).
However, this is precisely what Jorge’s novels dramatically bring into view, arguably to
shed light on the “one-off performance [or act]” – as Rancière would say – that the 25
April Revolution represented to “the part of those who ha[d] no part”, at least in the
short term.
In addition, this article not only builds on but also diverges from the amply recognized
notion that Jorge’s novels exploit the performative mode (e.g., Ferreira 1992, 1997;
Martins 2012 , 177–212). Without denying the author’s deliberate and thematized use
of theater to show (as opposed to tell) the historical event, my objective is not to demon-
strate Jorge’s revisionist strategies but to peruse how her texts stage an idea of democ-
racy that has only in mind the “supplementary” part of the uncounted that emerge (as if
on a stage) to voice how they have been “wronged” by exclusion from the equality that
supposedly unites all human beings. By momentarily calling attention to the voices and
figures that recall “the people” hailed by the revolution, the theatrical mode provokes the
reader to see and hear those who had been silent and hidden from view not only before
but also during and after the “era” of hope for democracy in Portugal.8

On the small revolutions of the everyday

O dia dos prodígios stages the disconnected, divergent voices of a cast of characters living
in an isolated rural village of the Algarve, as the references to the city of Faro unambigu-
ously suggest.9 The novel opens with a scene that sets the stage for the story that is to
follow, where the problem of representation is brought to light in both its political and
aesthetic dimensions. The characters appear to be dependent upon an author to create
discursive intelligibility out of the chaos of their individual voices speaking all at once:
Um personagem levantou-se e disse. Isto é uma história. E eu disse. Sim. É uma história. Por
isso podem ficar tranquilos nos seus postos. A todos atribuirei os eventos previstos, sem que
nada sobrevenha de definitivamente grave. Outro ainda disse. E falamos todos ao mesmo
tempo. E eu disse. Seria bom para que ficasse bem claro o desentendimento. Mas será mais
eloquente. Para os que crêem nas palavras. Que se entenda o que cada um diz. Entrem
devagar. Enquanto um pensa, fala e se move, aguardem os outros a sua vez. O breve
tempo de uma demonstração. (13; emphasis added)

(A character got up and said. This is a story. And I said. Yes. It is a story. That is why you can
remain peacefully in your places. I will attribute to everyone the events that were predicted,
without anything definitively serious happening. Someone else still said. And we all speak at
the same time. And I said. It would be good to make the disagreement very clear. But it will be
more eloquent. For those who believe in words. That what each person says is intelligible.
Come in slowly. While one thinks, speaks and moves about, let the others wait for their
turn. The brief period of a demonstration.)

Following Rancière’s suggestion in Figures of History ([2014] 2015, 6–13), it may be stated
that Jorge inscribes the revolutionary moment as a collective figure celebrating the end of
censorship and the newly found freedom to speak about any topic, including politics. The
 JOURNAL OF SPANISH CULTURAL STUDIES 243

image dramatizes the desentendimento that divides the characters. It should be noted
that, in Portuguese, desentendimento not only means disagreement but also ignorance
or misunderstanding. The different experiences, beliefs, fears and dreams of these char-
acters – many connected to a fantastic or “alternative way of knowing” (Martins 2012,
199) – condition their perceptions of themselves and the world around them. The right
to tell one’s own story rather than being represented by a common narrative imposed
from outside is at the core of democracy. Hence, the process of disagreement that democ-
racy calls for is in contradistinction to the masses chanting in unison a single story of
liberation.
The action of O dia dos prodígios is in large measure centered around what the char-
acters disagree on. It begins by referring to the reported sight of a snake flying away
after having been killed by a townswoman, a reaper humorously named Jesuína Palha
(She-Jesus of Straw).
Even if some doubt her story, it is taken to be an omen that an extraordinary occur-
rence is due to take place in the village. Its name, Vilamaninhos, a compound of vila
(village) and maninhos (the diminutive of manos, a colloquialism for brothers), suggests
the tenuous brotherhood that holds the neighbors together. They are bound by contin-
gent, specific losses, the most ostensible being that of the eleven children of the village’s
oldest couple, who emigrate to escape the mandatory draft for the war in Portugal’s
African colonies of Angola, Guinea-Bissau and Mozambique (1961–1974). Another impor-
tant loss is embodied by Carminha Rosa and Carminha Parda, who are cast out of the
community since Carminha Parda is the child of the former village priest (whose name,
“Pardo”, she bears in the potentially racializing family name, Parda). The possibility of Car-
minha Parda marrying stands as the condition for the reintegration of abjected subjects,
namely herself and her mother, back into the community of “those who have no part”.
In order to find a husband, Carminha avails herself as a madrinha de guerra, or war
sponsor, thereby unwittingly supporting the regime waging war in the colonies to
defend the empire, or what the regime called “the integrity of the fatherland”.10
However, she rejects a sergeant who visits her instead of Manuel Amado, the soldier
whom she sponsored and who had already visited her before leaving for the war in
Africa, where he dies, either killed or by killing himself. Carminha’s decision to reject
the arrogant sergeant is a consequence of his public bragging about the violent, racist
crimes that he and others had committed in Africa, followed by his public killing of
two dogs copulating in the village’s square. Her refusal to be an accomplice to these colo-
nial crimes for the sake of getting married represents an ostensible act of disagreement in
Rancière’s sense (1999) of taking a political stand: not only against the exclusion of the
demos from the broader national community, but also against the wrong committed
by the fascist colonialist regime. Carminha’s dissent continues in her everyday behavior,
when she stops cleaning her house, which she had been doing to show off how desirable
a would-be housewife and mother she was or was prepared to be according to the model
of womanhood imposed by the regime. It is thus ironic that precisely following what
amounts to a young woman’s micro-revolution, a group of soldiers arrive atop an
armored car announcing that they had made a revolution in Lisbon to bring freedom
and justice to everyone (Jorge [1982] 1995b, 152–154).
An outsider to the community, a road worker, notes that freedom is up to individuals
to pursue: “ninguém se liberta se não quiser libertar-se” (no one breaks free if they don’t
244 A. P. FERREIRA

want to do so) (Jorge [1982] 1995b, 148, 295). This may be true of the freedom to go
against the moral consensus, represented in his case by the refusal of the woman he
loves, Branca, to leave her violent and abusive husband. But this is not true of the
freedom from basic needs that only work can buy (in the case of those not indepen-
dently wealthy). Thus, the military having quickly departed after dismissing the story
of the flying snake as a sign of the villagers still “miraculous” worldview (270), the com-
munity’s leader Jesuína Palha looks at the abandoned fields and reflects on the long
and difficult process of turning wheat into bread when the only thing that matters
to people is eating bread (“só o pão interessa comer” [257]). With or without the revo-
lution in Lisbon, the poor peasants’ desire for social emancipation from slave-like con-
ditions of rural labor, together with the desire to enjoy ready-made consumer goods,
beginning with bread, which presumably they would not have to make any longer,
signal the irreversible social, economic and cultural changes that will transform the
fictional world portrayed in the novel.
Those changes can hardly be untangled from others happening arguably less visibly,
certainly less extraordinarily, but with as much power to transform society. In her informal
review of O dia dos prodígios, included in the posthumous volume Palavras dadas, former
Prime Minister Maria de Lurdes Pintasilgo highlights the “múltiplos lugares das pequenas
revoluções” (multiple places of small revolutions) of anonymous, common people (2005,
180).11 The micro-revolutions of women and other feminized beasts of burden are not
only made visible by Carminha’s rejection of the sergeant but also, and most notably,
by the character Branca. The latter will confront her husband, who had imprisoned her
at home for ten years. In the end, the bedspread she had been embroidering during
this time empowers her to speak and to act, though not necessarily because of the
Lisbon revolution, as the following statement to her husband evinces: “nunca consegui
dizer tantas palavras junto de ti. Ou seja da noite, ou da revolução, ou de mim mesma”
(I was never able to say so many words next to you. Whether about the night, the revolu-
tion, or about myself) (Jorge [1982] 1995b, 306). In addition, Branca refuses to follow her
would-be lover, the road worker, who speaks of freedom in vulgar Marxist terms. Branca’s
“small revolution” may represent an act of self-affirmation as a subject by declaring the
wrong that has been done to her by her husband, thus linking the home and the commu-
nity in the “particularized universal” of a division of parts and roles against the supposed
equality of all citizens (Rancière 1999, 41–42). Yet, Branca’s actions do not coincide with a
decontextualized notion of feminism because, first and foremost, they aim to attain socio-
economic independence from an already substantially emasculated husband-master at a
particular point in time and in a particular place.12 Her reference to the buses that are to
arrive with people from elsewhere wanting to see and hear her (Jorge [1982] 1995b, 349–
350) is particularly important, for it foretells the emergence of the tourist economy that
will radically alter, if not contribute to, the extinction of the traditional rural world in
the region. Even before the village was visited by the revolution’s enlightened messen-
gers, one of the peasants had, indeed, announced that “[c]hegue quem chegar,
ninguém estará para regar os campos com o suor do seu rosto” ([no] matter who
arrives, no one will want to continue watering the fields with the sweat of their brow)
(166). Lídia Jorge’s second novel will dramatize the consequences of this important cul-
tural, social and economic rupture, dictating the end of traditional rural society, taking
place during the revolutionary period.
 JOURNAL OF SPANISH CULTURAL STUDIES 245

Staging the political in the “hot summer” of 1975

The community presented in O cais das merendas can be said to begin where the com-
munity presented in O dia dos prodígios left off. A highly experimental allegory, the
novel presents what happens to the poor of another imaginary village in the rural
south, whose name, Redonda, evokes the closed-in, endogamous world of the past.
With no reference to toponyms, as was the case with the first novel, the location seems
purposedly vague with geographical markers limited to the sea, beach, hotel and the
rural interior. However, highly fragmented, non-sequential and multi-voiced temporal
references distributed throughout the text allow the reader to date the main plot
between August 1975 and the beginning of summer 1976. This timeframe corresponds
to the height of the political crisis threatening the revolutionary process, in the
summer of 1975, due to burst of violence throughout the whole country against organ-
izations representing the Left. The military coup, led by moderates on 25 November 1975
secured the stabilization of democracy, in the sense of a liberal, multi-party democracy.
Still, the Constitution that went into effect on 25 April 1976 retained many of the socially
oriented laws that emerged from the revolution (Pinto 2018; Varela 2019, 249–265). It is
important to keep in mind this broad historical background when reading Jorge’s highly
challenging, aesthetically complex text, given how it engages with the economic process
that would be responsible for prompting an equivocal form of democracy in Portugal.
Some of the members of the traditional inland community of Redonda exchange the
ancestral, back-breaking hardships of rural life for various service jobs at a seashore
hotel owned by a Dutch person, referred to as Mr. Hals. The community members
are recruited by one of their neighbors, Sebastião Guerreiro, who eventually also con-
vinces his teenage daughter Rosário to work at the hotel.13 They are attracted by the
prospect of regular salaries, lighter work, reduced hours, a clean, socially appropriate
appearance and periods of leisure. Sebastião’s desire for new, modern horizons is
first fulfilled by listening to a proto radio that he built himself and, years later, by
the language and behaviors he learns in foreign films, popular magazines and daily
contact with foreign hotel guests. In this way, Sebastião, as is the case with most of
the workers, fulfills the desire to possess the attributes of civilizational advancement
typical of (liberal capitalist) democracies. This is shown in a series of meals organized,
planned and choreographed by the hotel’s gift shop attendant Zulmira, referred to in
English as “parties”, “barbecues” and “evenings”. These repasts point to a would-be
refinement of cultural taste (Bourdieu 1984) compared to family members and friends
left behind in the village and, particularly, in relation to past times of meager merendas
in the fields. However, the characters do not consensually embrace a foreign model of
cultural expression that would make them “lose” their national culture entirely.14 The
predominance of English in the hotel is explained by the development of the tourist
industry in the area since the 1960s (Barreto 2015, 114–115).
There is, in fact, very little that the hotel workers agree on: their relationships are mostly
conflictual and resentful – as suggested by their conversations, thoughts and remem-
brances during the “parties” that structure the text as an allegory. They have been
reduced to bodies fulfilling specific functions and occupying specific places related to
their jobs in hotel services. The only thing that unites the characters is the “common
virtue” of those who do not really count – as Rancière would argue (1999, 8–9) – and
246 A. P. FERREIRA

yet identify with the new post-25 April 1974 “democratic” national community. Following
this line of thought, it is plausible to assume that the “parties” evoke the explosion of
different political parties in Portugal, which had been banned under the dictatorship.
Somehow, similarly to the sophisticated bites served and eaten in “parties” worthy of
that name, the plurality of political parties and capitalist modernization emblematize
the erosion by liberal democracy of the dominance of the Left – meaning the Portuguese
Communist Party – in the period immediately following the military coup (Varela 2019,
254). The tragedy of these characters is that they see themselves being pushed aside
and devalued as human beings as the crisis of the revolution opens the path to a
liberal consensus encouraged by the globalized market economy represented by Mr.
Hals and his hotel business. The opening chapter of the novel, which describes a first
“party” taking place in November 1975, begins to shed light on the workers’ vulnerable
situation.
As the first words of the text suggest, the “party” is the continuation of the group’s
Sunday merendas to celebrate their day of rest (Jorge [1982] 1995b, 4). Curiously,
however, the group is dressed in regional fisherman and fishwife garb, emulating
the image of an old postcard (understood implicitly to depict the Algarve). There is
no explanation for this kind of masquerade, though the apparent lack of sleep of
the party organizer and her assurance to the group that “fortunately” everything is
fine (“tudo bem, tudo tão certo, tão o.k” [4]) suggests that something is wrong. The
reference to the fifteenth of August of the previous summer, when the workers
planned to occupy the hotel and demand a share of the profits from Mr. Hals (26),
explains what is wrong and at least partially explains the strange “party” as if they
are performing for the (absent) tourists. While the planned occupation was, in
theory, a legal challenge, the workers’ confused abstract notion of freedom allowed
the boss to cut short their demands and they were euphemistically dispensados, that
is, fired from their jobs. But they were still allowed to have parties in a space adjacent
to the hotel “como se nada tivesse acontecido nesse campo laboral” (as if nothing had
happened in that field of labor) (19). This incident of “desentendimento” or disagree-
ment, registered in the novel with the date of 15 August, evokes the infamous
workers’ takeovers and attempted takeovers of their places of employment during
the so-called “hot summer” of 1975 (Varela 2019, 252). Instead of spurring them to
action, the frustrated labor dispute leaves the hotel workers feeling vulnerable and
fearful of being fired, with no legal recourse against their Dutch employer, and of
ending up forced to work the land like they did before. This fear is heightened by a
“pensamento íntimo” (intimate thought) that recurs throughout the first party and
which no one dares to voice. While one worker surmises that, in Sebastião’s case,
the unease is related to his daughter Rosária, Sebastião is ironically fixated on his
(real or imagined) summer fling with a Miss Laura (43–45). It is not necessary to
dwell on the parodic intertextual reference to Petrarch’s muse. What is important is
how the political challenge started by the workers on the fifteenth of August takes
an unexpected and symptomatic individual turn, on the stage where what Rancière
has often referred to as “the scandal of democracy” is played out.
In the second to last chapter of the novel, which takes place in June of the following
year, 1976, the workers’ fears of being dismissed for good are substantiated with an indir-
ect reference to their labor dispute: “por altura da crise da noção de propriedade” (around
 JOURNAL OF SPANISH CULTURAL STUDIES 247

the time that the notion of property was in crisis) (219). At a special meeting with the
service workers, Mr. Hals reports that three hundred reservations had been canceled
and are “all documented” (Jorge [1980] 1995a, 218). The workers suspect that he is amas-
sing proof to justify letting them go (244) due to an unsightly tragedy that had taken
place the previous summer on the hotel grounds, in view of the guests.15 The tragedy
in question is the suicide of the youngest and newest recruit for the hotel services,
Rosária, an apparently private matter that cannot be separated or distinguished from
the public space in which it occurs and from those who occupy it. Although the text
does not clearly identify the speaker, it could be Rosária’s father who states, “Claro que
as pessoas não gostavam de tragédias, my friends” (Of course people don’t like tragedies,
my friends) (429). Occurring sometime after the aborted labor dispute of August fifteenth,
the economic threat that Rosária’s suicide represents to the hotel’s reigning order can be
considered a political act, given the stark theatricality that commands attention from
those who had never really seen or noticed the human being who serviced them.
The possible motive for Rosária’s suicide has a collective implication to it, which can be
gleaned from the disturbing contradictory meanings of the toponyms that anchor the
novel’s allegory. Jorge invents toponyms to suggest how the community formed by
“the part of those who have no part” is founded on loss, lack, expropriation and death.
This is a community formed in specific class terms beyond the purely philosophical
ones outlined by Roberto Esposito, who argues that community is founded upon and
held together by “the breach, the trauma, the lacuna out of which we originate”
(2009, 8). The name of the hotel, Alguergue, aside from vaguely evoking the name of
the province, Algarve, is almost a homophone for a lowly countryside hostel, an albergue,
the common origin of the two words being the Arabic alquirq. Alguergue/albergue
bespeaks what the hotel jobs mean for those who found in them not only paid labor
but also living arrangements that represent a refuge from the hardships connected
with subsistence agriculture. Less obvious is the interpretation of the actual referent of
Alguergue, an ancient stone used for the extraction of olive oil. Silently addressing his
dead daughter in the novel’s second chapter, Sebastião explains that the alguergue
stone found on the site where the hotel was to be built was from the time of the
Moors and was kept for marketing purposes (Jorge [1980] 1995a, 48–49). “This is a histori-
cal stone, ladies and gentlemen”, one of the hotel servants announces in English (49).16
The tourists do not seem to care, but the hotel’s founding stone is a reminder of the
hard work connected not only with the extraction of olive oil in the past, but with
serving the tourists’ needs and expectations in the present. Here we are reminded of
the perennial meaning of the racialized Portuguese expression, “trabalhar como um
mouro” (to work like a Moor), implying to work like a slave.
The name of the beach, Devícias (Vices), reinforces the equivocal meaning of Alguergue,
adding to the contradictions of democracy and modernization that are at the crux of the
allegory. On one hand, Devícias is a neologism that recalls the figurative and literal delícias
(delights) that the beach environment offers the tourists and, even if superficially, those
who serve them and see them as models of modern civilization. On the other hand, deví-
cias is phonetically akin to the noun sevícias (afflictions), suggesting the forms of abuse
endured by the workers.
The mixed bag of pleasure and suffering that results from the illusion of democracy at
the hotel (and of course beyond, since the hotel is part of an extended metaphor) is
248 A. P. FERREIRA

condensed in the figure of Rosária, who literally tests out the sense of freedom acquired
through her various experiences there. Not the least decisive factor is how a guest, a Por-
tuguese experimental visual artist known by the nickname Folhas (Leaves), completely
disrupts the way she sees herself and her world, including her physical world. Under
his gaze the apron straps crossed on her back become “duas asas de voo” (two wings
of flight) (Jorge [1980] 1995a, 203). This comparison may explain why Rosário later flies
out of a hotel window to meet her death. Folhas’ effect on Rosária is insidious but argu-
ably liberating, precisely the opposite of seeing her mother bathing on the tourist beach
wearing only a printed black slip on the next-to-last Sunday in August (206). The presence
of rural folk on the hotel’s beach one week or so after the workers’ confrontation with Mr.
Hals on 15 August represents a more aggressive, political interruption in the established
order of what is visible in this privileged space. It is significant that Rosária’s suicide takes
place in September, while there are still tourists at the hotel to witness it. By October the
tourists are gone, as suggested by the management’s instructions that Sebastião put
away the boats and the boards (36–37).
Although temporal references are deliberately vague and non-sequential, the timing of
these three events – a labor dispute, the invasion of the privileged space of the beach by
bodies that are not supposed to be there, a young hotel worker’s suicide – suggests their
relevance to democracy as a political act, a refusal to accept the invisibility and exclusion
of the people as demos. Not unlike the bodies of Africans and of lowly Portuguese soldiers
in the so-called colonial war, the bodies of hotel workers, including that of Rosária, are still
not seen as fully or equally human “no princípio da nova era” (at the beginning of the new
era) of democracy ushered in by 25 April 1974 (363). Not seen until the tourists and hotel
management see it smashed to pieces on the Hotel Alguergue’s founding stone, Rosária’s
body disturbs the guests’ peace, their pleasure, and maybe even everyone’s sense of
democracy. It is no wonder that one of the characters associates Rosária’s body parts
to a spread of foreign dishes (Jorge [1980] 1995a, 353). Because her tragic fall is so
highly visible, it disturbs what is visible and sayable about the community of workers
who are not seen or heard as equals, as fully human. For that reason, the hotel’s manage-
ment prefers to ignore Rosária’s death, while the workers dare not mention it for fear of
losing their jobs. This fate that becomes imminent when Mr. Hals announces at the begin-
ning of the following summer, that is, the summer of 1976, that there had been three-
hundred canceled reservations (218). Since the first “party” in November 1975, the
workers have become a community of mourners, grieving their own annulment as
human beings after the (albeit momentary) political scandal (of visibility) represented
by Rosária’s death. Nonetheless, they continue to submit to the order that seems to
feed and shelter them because Portugal’s new democracy and community of equals is
revealed to fundamentally depend upon the workers’ internal exclusion, that is, they
are there but no one seems to notice: they do not count.17

Conclusion
In the early days of the “rarest” of revolutions (Arroyo 2018, 6), the goals of the Armed
Forces Movement included “democratization”, “decolonization” and “development” – in
that order (Cruzeiro 1989, “1. Um programa”). The turns that such aspirations for
“national salvation” (ibid.) took as political and economic crisis mounted in the
 JOURNAL OF SPANISH CULTURAL STUDIES 249

second half of 1975 are figured by Lídia Jorge in allegories that purposedly flaunt their
literariness to question the simplistic, problematic mimeticism mandated by slogans
and political propaganda featured in song and public art. Working against yet
another authoritarian interpellation of the “people”, Jorge’s early novels put on a thea-
trical display of political acts by characters who function as figures in order to ascertain
the limits of the new theoretical equality that mutatis mutandis still excludes such char-
acters as those who “don’t count”.
The concept of “disagreement” proposed by Rancière illuminates the courageous acts
of dissent presented in O dia dos prodígios and O cais das merendas. A small number of
characters make visible and audible their existence as fully equal human beings, set
against a farce of democracy that excludes them. They are therefore part and parcel of
the “demonstration” proposed from the beginning of O dia dos prodígios. Like Carminha
in this novel, numerous citizens refused to be accomplices of the dictatorship’s police
order (and police state) and its attendant colonial warfare. After the 25 April Revolution,
citizens went on to disturb the imposed consensus of democracy and economic develop-
ment, since that consensus obviously contradicted their supposed “equality”. By imagin-
ing the service staff of a luxury seaside hotel having “parties” that, in fact, mourn their
irreversible dependence on the globalized liberal economy that exploits them, Jorge pro-
poses in O cais das merendas that discreet acts of disagreement can emerge to correct
(even if momentarily) configurations of consent in a liberal democracy that continues
to shut the door in the face of the demos.
If we wish to look for signs of democracy in Portugal and Spain today, almost half a
century after the 25 April 1974 Revolution and the death of Francisco Franco on 20
November 1975, we would do well to look for recognition in the literary cultures of
each country of Rancière’s concept of disagreement as an essential ingredient of democ-
racy. That is, to look for the presence (or not) of an awareness that “society is always
divided and discursively constructed” (Mouffe 2019, 6). From the perspective of those
who continue not to count, identifying the commitment to dissent is likely to be more
productive than insisting on the “desencanto” resulting from the failure to realize demo-
cratic potential.18

Notes
1. All translations from the Portuguese are my own unless otherwise indicated.
2. Very few writers in Portugal are known by their first name: Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen
is one such author, hence my use of “Sophia”.
3. Robert Fishman, a social sciences expert on comparative perspectives of the Spanish and Por-
tuguese transitions, considers the “multiple meanings” and “multifaceted character” of the
revolution to be decisive factors in creating lasting “cultural legacies” of democracy in Portu-
gal (2018, 24; emphasis in original).
4. Alongside Maria Velho da Costa and Maria Teresa Horta, two of the famous authors of New
Portuguese Letters (trans. 1975), the new women writers who emerged after the revolution
and wrote about it in experimental, complex and critical ways include Olga Gonçalves, Teo-
linda Gersão, Eduarda Dionísio and Lídia Jorge.
5. I have in mind here readings that highlight the “desencanto” of the characters in relation to
the post-revolution environment (see, for example, Tutikian’s 1999 reading of Notícia da
cidade silvestre); and Rivera’s 2017 reading of the “desencanto” with democratization regis-
tered by a number Spanish novelists.
250 A. P. FERREIRA

6. This is especially the case in O cais das merendas. See Ferreira 1992 and 1999 for (among other
things) Jorge’s use of the Algarve as a metonym of Portugal. For the same topic, see Martins
(2012), especially pages 196–208 where the author shows how Jorge tries to resist the exoti-
cism that such a metonym can convey if the “minority histories” of Portugal are read as “sub-
altern” histories of the global South.
7. A graduate in Romance Philology, Jorge has admitted to having been inspired by the Classics.
Nowhere is this more visible than in the most famous of her novels, published in 1988 and
translated as The Murmuring Coast (Jorge [1988] 1995c).
8. The various meanings attributed to the 25 April 1974 Revolution have been a cause of debate,
especially since the 1990s. For the notion of “era”, see Ferreira, José Medeiros (1994, 9–11).
More recently, Varela (2019) and Fishman (2018), for example, offer two very different
views on this topic in their engagements with the debate on whether “transition to democ-
racy” is an appropriate term for discussion of the Portuguese revolution, in comparison with
the pacted reform that occurred in Spain. See also Medina (1995, especially pages 582–585).
9. Lídia Jorge’s place of birth, the rural town of Boliqueime, is in this area of the Algarve, the
southernmost province of Portugal.
10. Madrinhas de guerra, or war sponsors, were young nubile women who agreed to maintain
correspondence with soldiers serving in the African colonies at war against Portuguese colo-
nialism. This was an initiative of the government group Movimento Feminino Nacional to
offer emotional support to the soldiers while keeping young women controlled with the
hope of marriage once the soldiers returned. See, for example, Silva 2020.
11. Maria de Lurdes Pintasilgo, a socialist and well-respected Catholic feminist, held the position
of Prime Minister for three months (August to November 1979) during the caretaker govern-
ment of General Ramalho Eanes.
12. Critics have, for the most part, treated the character of Branca from the perspective of a
decontextualized notion of “feminism” or of “the feminine”; see, for example, Silva (1993);
Serra (2008); and Trilho (2016).
13. The central figure in the novel, Sebastião Guerreiro, parodically recalls the young and naïve
King Sebastian of Portugal, whose religious fanaticism against the Moors led him and his sol-
diers to a tragic death in Alácer el-Quibir, in Morocco, in 1578, resulting in Portugal losing its
independence to Spain because Sebastian left no heir to the throne. For a reading of the
novel as a parody, see Orione (2009).
14. See, for example, Sapega (1995); Lima (2005); and Debus (2010).
15. Ramalho dos Santos draws an analogy between Rosária’s suicide and the 25 April Revolution,
describing them both as “violent” and “excessive” events that must be kept silent (Santos
1989, 65).
16. The history of olive processing in the region dates back to the Romans. Indeed, heritage
tourism in the Algarve has been developed thanks to Roman ruins found in the area.
17. Contrary to Orione (2009), I argue that Rosária’s death is not the “expiation” of some sin com-
mitted by the hotel workers, as if the need for salaried work were morally wrong.
18. A different, earlier version of this article was published in Portuguese as “Democracia e comu-
nidade na ficção alegórica de Lídia Jorge” (Ferreira 2020).

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributor
Ana Paula Ferreira is Professor of Portuguese Studies at the University of Minnesota. She has
written on Portuguese women writers, feminisms and colonialism/postcolonialism, particularly
in relation to gender. Since the 1990s she has published articles, given invited talks and edited
a collection of essays on the fiction of Lídia Jorge and the problem of representation. Her
 JOURNAL OF SPANISH CULTURAL STUDIES 251

latest book, Women Writing Portuguese Colonialism in Africa (Liverpool UP, 2020), traces the
agency of women as cultural producers regarding Portuguese colonialism in Africa from the
end of the nineteenth century to the first decade of the twentieth-first century. Email:
apferrei@umn.edu

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