Entre a realidade e a aparência – Incursões pela História em Fama e Segredo na História de Portugal, de Agustina Bessa-Luís

Abstract

This study aims to reflect on the writing process in Fama e Segredo na História de Portugal by Agustina Bessa-Luís, a work organized around twelve operas that draw on historical material as memory or cultural foundation, inviting the reader to delve into the History of Portugal. In this exploration, the author presents some outlines and mysteries surrounding certain personalities who shaped Portugal, such as D. Afonso Henriques, Viriato, among others.

Thus, the aim is to demonstrate the sense of History that shapes Agustina Bessa-Luís’s work, in a clear approximation between the real and the fictional, realized through successive journeys, historical events and figures that the author proposes, retrieving echoes of the past in the narrative’s present, joined by possible rewritings of History and thus also of fiction.

The approach to reality will take into account the inherent limitations in the reconstitution of past events, considering that History is also a discourse of recompositing, and therefore, even though it relies on documents and thorough investigations, it will inevitably reflect the historian’s perspective by making unavoidable interpretations and selections, as well as their particular way of narrating, in this vision of the present that reshapes the past to reinvent it.