Mário de Sá-Carneiro: suicide or shape-shifting?

Abstract

http://dx.doi.org/10.5007/2175-7917.2016v21n2p89

We live in an era of inflation. Inflated money, inflated positions, inflated letters of recommendation, inflated reputations and inflated ideas. Without proper designation, postmodernism does not pass, for some, of an infatuated version of modernism. The excessive rationalism of Western society has failed to build defenses against the irrational. The naive cult of progress made humanity vulnerable to the horrors of the twentieth century. But modernism, on the other hand, could only arise conveyed by a social and ideological logic so flexible that it allows to produce contrasts, divergences and antinomies. For the first time in history, the individual self is perceived and perceives himself or herself as the ultimate, with the right to free disposal of his or her own life. At the dawn of this time, at the center of the ring of these issues, appeared in Portugal a movement led by a young pair of antithetical and complementary poets, Fernando Pessoa and Mário de Sá-Carneiro: the serious and the frivolous, the thin and the fat, the heavy and the light, the survivor and the suicidal. Increasingly contemporaneous in the twentieth-first century, their works exemplarily reflect the spetacularization of the real and the unsuitability of the subject to a world in continuous metamorphosis.