Year: 2014
Type: book
Abstract: ly, through empty signifi ers), Ripstein and Berman integrate a subaltern narrative into the plot, albeit peripherally. What remains absent from all three examples is the present—an untimely, unanticipated present that is called into question by the confl icts dramatized by the performative works. Because the “present”—an empty signifi er in itself— is in constant motion and as such impossible to fi x, each production or screening encounters a new and therefore wholly unpredictable social, political, and aesthetic moment. Bernardo Santareno’s 1966 play O Judeu serves as the sole example within this corpus of Inquisition allegories of a work that explicitly addresses the present but, in doing so, risks the foreclosure of possible meanings. Through the fi gure of the time-traveling narrator and the prophetic dreams of Antonio Jose’s mother, Lourenca, O Judeu addresses the totalitarianism and genocide of twentieth-century Europe through the use of apostrophe and the visual. A dramatic narrative penned during the repressive Salazar dictatorship in mid-twentieth-century Portugal but not performed until after Santareno’s death in 1980, O Judeu belongs to a broader tradition of Inquisition dramas written or performed under totalitarian regimes and, as such, serves as a bold voice of resistance to fascism. By establishing a link between past and present “unenlightened” political cultures through allegory, Santareno—whose 1959 O crime da Aldeia Velha also dramatizes a frenzied witch hunt—appropriates the singularity of the Inquisition in a universalizing gesture that equates distinct historical moments. This move, while not entirely dissimilar from Miller’s denunciation of McCarthyism through the lens of the Salem Witch Trials or Ripstein’s and Berman’s critique of PRI-dominated Mexico, goes a step further in speaking directly to a “contemporary” viewer and in explicitly naming then contemporary Portugal and the Holocaust as part of its condemnation of twentieth-century fascism. Through an analysis of the narrative function of the Cavaleiro de Oliveira and the disturbing prophesies of Lourenca, I want to explore the relationship between apostrophe, visuality, and haunting, asking if the work remains limited to the realm of the “sayable” or whether it is possible for narrative address and visual projections to perturb the public by pointing to another side of the spoken story. I have already discussed in the previous chapter the way in which Santareno displaces the marranismo of Antonio Jose onto the (also converted) narrator Cavaleiro de Oliveira. Oliveira’s Protestantism is doubly signifi cant in its metonymic signaling of the “enlightened” quality of northern Europe, which stands in contrast to the “backwards” religious Allegory and Hauntology ❘ 81
Author: Erin Graff Zivin
Language: English
Subfield: History
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W151189236