Lídia Jorge’s allegories of democracy

ABSTRACT This article focuses on Lídia Jorge’s first two novels, O dia dos prodígios (The Day of Prodigies) and O cais das merendas (Picnic Quay), as anti-realist allegories that challenge the consensus vision of a free and equal “people”, encouraged by propaganda, celebrating the Portuguese Revolution of 25 April 1974. Following Jacques Rancière’s philosophical insights on literariness and 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.