Seeing too much: the 1755 earthquake in literature

Helena Carvalhão Buesco

European Review, 2006, vol. 14, issue 3, 329-338

Abstract: The 1755 Lisbon earthquake produced huge and diversified reactions in Portuguese literature. This paper aims at analysing some of the issues raised by these reactions, namely: the recognition of the disturbance, beginning as geographical and architectural, but soon becoming symbolic and anthropological; the effects on the understanding of a phenomenon which, because it goes beyond the frontiers of what is known, soon becomes a paradigm of the incomprehensible, with the consequent debates on how to make God compatible with the destruction that occurred, and the confirmation of fear and terror as the major effects of the event. The paradoxical relation between seeing (too much) and saying (too little) is stressed, as well as the visual, theatrical, and melodramatic components of several descriptions of the event.

Date: 2006
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