Death as Subject in Portuguese Literature

Eros and Thanatos are the two most widely used literary (and artistic) archetypes making it almost impossible to find a single author who would be insulated against the phenomenon of death as “the most borderline of all border cases”. It is even more difficult to imagine such a thing about the Portuguese, who were at one point termed the “people of suicides” by the Spanish existentialist philosopher Miguel de Unamuno. Indeed, as much as de Unamuno’s “definition” of the Lusitanian historically (principally maritime oriented) adventurous nation might seem overly romantic and too general, statistics could prove the Spanish philosopher right when it came to the fin-de-siècle period of the Portuguese (cultural) history. Beginning with 1891, when a leader of the so-called Coimbra movement, also known as the Generation of 1871, Antero de Quental took his own life (thus emulating the suicidal act by Camil Castel Branco), it ushered in an “inglorious sequence of suicides” of dozens of Portuguese intellectuals, among them predominantly writers. That “inglorious” tradition, of course, could not but leave its deep trace in the literary and artistic creation of the westernmost of the European nations so that the number of the Lusitanian word artists concerned with the theme of death was much higher than in the literatures of other (European) nations. Therefore, it could be argued, to paraphrase the Greek philosopher Hegesias, that Portuguese literary history truly abounds in “preachers of death”