Allegories of nation? A reading of Jose Cardoso Pires's novel O Delfim.

Publication: Portuguese Studies

Publication Date: 01-JAN-03

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The definition of nation as an 'imagined community' (1) and the recognition that national cultures constitute 'a discursive device which represents difference as unity or identity' have become in recent years a widely shared presupposition of critical discourse, indeed a vital component of the present common sense in cultural studies. (2) Formulations such as these help to draw our attention to the simple fact that national identity is not just a matter of content, but also, decisively, a matter of form--not so much a question of tradition, but of translation and of invention. Not surprisingly, the concept of the border or the boundary is becoming increasingly prominent in cultural studies, as it permits one to grasp the strategies of distinction and of articulation that specifically constitute a given culture--the production of its own borders being an essential component of the self-definition of any culture.

The dramatically increasing pressures of globalization have lent a new centrality to the notion of national culture and of cultural identity, while at the same time rendering them problematic. In fact, in a globalized world system, cultural identity becomes instrumental for the negotiation of a national state's position within that system. The consequences of such an instrumentalization are obvious: witness, for instance, how the positive connotations of multiculturalism are being increasingly eroded by a reinterpretation of this notion as a sign of insurmountable difference or of essential incompatibility, or, worse still, by a foundation of the 'originality' and 'authenticity' of a given culture on ethnic terms. As another case in point, Samuel Huntington's model of the 'clash of civilizations' (3) is in the end but one version of an 'insanity of identity' intent on investing cultural difference with some essentialist meaning. (4)

At the same time, however, the context of a globalized world, involving 'interactions of a new order and intensity', destabilizes the very notion of local identity. (5) It becomes apparent that a definition of the local can only be achieved through a reflection on its relation to the global, without which the concept itself is unthinkable. Indeed, both concepts are strictly interdependent: the definition of certain cultural formations as local is the way a dominant cultural discourse can claim a global status for itself--thus concealing the fact that the global is in turn nothing else than a local formation that has succeeded in achieving hegemony and in the process has gained possession of the power to define, that is to provide its own code with the mark of universality.

Under this light, the illusion of homogeneity conveyed by the panorama of contemporary culture can be uncovered as what it really is: a fiction through which hegemonic globalization conceals those differences and unequal power relations which it is the task of a counter-hegemonic logic to expose. As a matter of fact, globalization is the code word for a process which is not uniform but highly heterogeneous. As Arjun Appadurai reminds us, 'the new global cultural economy has to be seen as a complex, overlapping, disjunctive order'. (6) In this context, it has in turn become easier to discard any essentialist assumptions from the notion of cultural identity and to recognize it as a contested terrain, prey to internal contradictions and the object of a permanent negotiation between different and often conflicting positions. Identity turns out to be some kind of floating signifier, requiring careful contextualization and a specific integration in a dynamic, relational framework.

Within such a framework, it is clear that a notion of agency cannot be dispensed with. It is crucial to ask about the instances of mediation and it cannot, therefore, come as a surprise that the whole discussion about the changing contemporary conditions of cultural production, accommodated under the rather awkward label of postmodernism, has brought about a renewed interest in the question of intellectuals--ranging from the straightforward proclamation of their final demise, as in Lyotard's obituary, to the various positions favouring the hypothesis that the proclaimed dead are after all alive and well. (7)

I hope these few remarks will have helped to set the stage for the brief discussion of some central problems connected with the question of the literary representation of the nation I propose to engage with here. Indeed, one cannot address this question without acknowledging that the 'imagining' of the nation has long been taking place in a context over-determined by the tensions between the local and the global I roughly outlined above. It is against this background that the adequacy of competing models of interpretation has to be tested. That is why I shall start with some comments on the argument presented by Fredric Jameson in his article 'Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism', published in 1986 in the journal Social Text, before proceeding to a reflection on the Portuguese case, centred on a rereading of a key text of modern Portuguese literature, the novel O Delfim by Jose Cardoso Pires.

Jameson's text rests on assumptions that are of vital importance for a discussion of cultural identity, starting with his insistence on the need for comparative cultural studies based on a relational way of thinking world culture and on the significance of peripheral cultures and non-canonical texts for such studies. The course of his argument leads him,...

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