The sicks in the I

Abstract

This article proposes a reading of “Os doentes”, poem included in the book Eu, by the poet Augusto dos Anjos, starting from the philosopher Walter Benjamin’s conception about allegory as a ruinous procedure of language. In this poem, an “I” narrates historical events as someone who walks through an anachronistic metropolis, being himself pierced by individual decrepitude – the hetica, at the same time that he suffers a guilt for having “violated the laws of Nature” – the ethics. I consider death and physical decrepitude - portrayed throughout the poem in the body, in illness, in the corpse and in putrefaction - as allegorical of the moral and ethical degeneration of a “blond race”. Such reading makes it possible to place the narrative voice of the poem in two threshold dimensions, because the “I” is at the same time another (the sicks) and the others (a sick civilization).