The margins of fiction in António Lobo Antunes

Abstract

In Até que as pedras se tornem mais leves que a água (2017, 1st ed.), António Lobo Antunes returns to the surviving and traumatic image of the colonial war. The contemporary and fragmentary fiction presents the montage, or collage, of two delirious voices, which float between simultaneous and superimposed times and spaces: that of the "white father" (an ensign mobilized to Angola) and that of the "black son" (the African "kid" taken by him to Portugal). From the beginning, it is known that both will die, on the occasion of the ritual slaughter of the pig in the village, and it will be up to the reader to follow the identity crises of the excentric and deterritorialized subjects in order to decipher the causes of the conflict. Once again, Antune's fiction inscribes narrator-personages, who subtract themselves to the "time of the victors", in a clear Benjamian bias, coating them with a singular human dimension. Through the poetics of detachment and flight, inherent in the title of a chronicle and the novel, we observe the ascending gesture of liberation of the subjects holding the voices that float between the past and the present. There is an "image-phrase" to be deciphered, based on Jacques Rancière's critical and philosophical reflections. By rethinking, through the image, the relations of the Once with the Now, the fiction of the contemporary Portuguese author not only proposes the interweaving of the fantasy-image, the image-pathos, and the image-symptom - theorized by Aby Warburg - but also teaches us to see the invisible: what was on the fringes of official history during the period of the attempt to maintain the Portuguese Empire.