“Gravitas me rapuit”: la saudade tra rimorso e rimosso in Antonio Tabucchi

Abstract

Antonio Tabucchi gives many definitions of saudade, that from time to time show the peculiar and exclusive side of this entirely Portuguese feeling, that torments many writers since the kingdom of Duarte in the 15th century. The saudade has two fundamental psychological consequences: both the pleasure of delight and the pain. The manifestations of this complicated feeling, according to Tabucchi’s statements through his short stories and his critical essays, result to be basically two: the first is a psychological reaction in which you rock in melancholy, but with dignity; the second, instead, is the development, within the psyche, of a disturbing universe made of a unreal and parallel reality, full of vivid nightmares, populated by irrational and monstrous characters. The best representation of the first inner way of saudade’s manifestation is, surely, the Dantesque image of the infinite seafarer, as Tabucchi himself reminds us, that stands out with clarity in Amália Rodrigues’ Portuguese fados. The representation of the second unconscious way of saudade’s manifestation, instead, are frightening and disturbing presences, distressing objects that occupy dreams and memories, transfiguring them, throwing the absurd’s shadows on them: among the numerous specters halfway between reality and oneirism, scattered in different absurd tales by Tabucchi, the most mysterious ones, which deserve to be analyzed are for sure the fish.