Stumbling on the corpse — Mário de Sá-Carneiro as perceived by Eduardo Lourenço

Abstract

This article revisits the central elements of Eduardo Lourenço’s thought on the poet of Indícios de Oiro. To do so, I consider particularly two essays by Lourenço, namely “Suicidária Modernidade” (1990) and “A Poesia de Orpheu” (2015). If in “Suicidária Modernidade” Lourenço reflects on how Sá-Carneiro’s suicide came to be inscribed in the ​​Portuguese literary Modernity, in “A Poesia de Orpheu” Lourenço revisits the idea of ​​Sá-Carneiro as modern essentially due to a clownish self-representation. In the latter essay, Lourenço describes the poet as having a late romantic personality and departing from a symbolist language, and as someone who dramatizes a gap between a desire to achieve a somewhat diffuse Beyond and a real life in which this desire never materializes. In his analysis, Lourenço highlights the relevance of Sá-Carneiro’s last poems in the subversion of some of his imagined roles, from that of the King to that of the Jester. Still, as I demonstrate, Lourenço gives little value to some aspects of the most innovative language of Sá-Carneiro, namely his use of the immediate elements of the modern society as metaphors for the self, which leads him not to recognize the way Sá-Carneiro’s language, very directly, helped Fernando Pessoa become more modern himself.