From the animal to the "intuition" “of the supernatural”

Faces of the human in the reception of bucolicism in Fialho de Almeida and Francisco Bugalho

Abstract

This study seeks to understand the relevance of the different representations of the reaper in different moments of Portuguese literary modernity, namely those that occur, respectively, in works by Fialho de Almeida and Francisco Bugalho. This poet, by explicitly summoning Fialho's perspective of that figure, seeks to distance his poetics from Fialho's proposal. In this way, the reference to Fialho must, on the one hand, be understood in terms of the reception of his work in the context of literary creation in the 20th century; on the other hand, it should be understood within the scope of pastoral poetics, namely the configurations that it takes on in modern and contemporary times. In this context, Fialho de Almeida's proposal of a zoomorphic representation of man awakens in Francisco Bugalho what can be seen as an attempt to stop the consequences of the vision of essential nudity. Without being able to forget the natural, as a process of loss, an attempt is made to fill in the void with an “intuition” of “the supernatural”.