Dramatic Forms of Solitude

The Heteronomous Responsibility of Cardoso Pires's Realism

Abstract

This article draws on elements from José Cardoso Pires’s De Profundis, Valsa Lenta (1997), particularly the tension established between the act of writing the author’s personal account and the experience of the drift of a self that becomes other, as well as the social and cultural consequences Pires reflects upon regarding this experience. From this singular moment, it derives formulations of Cardoso Pires’s prose found in other works by the author, such as Jogos de Azar (1963), O Delfim (1968), and Balada da Praia dos Cães (1982). The hypothesis presented is that by staging the singular and collective experience of drift, Cardoso Pires’s fiction develops ways of responding not only to his generation of writers but also to the problematizing discourse of realism, which underpins both adherence to Neo-Realism and Portuguese Surrealism. More broadly, Cardoso Pires’s prose operates within the realist tradition, unsettling it from within by reintroducing some of its central dilemmas: the complicating inclusion of figures of alterity, the loss of authorial sovereignty, its heteronomous nature, and the problem of literary responsibility.