One of the ways in which many commentators on fado have characterised it is as a cultural practice of remembering or, better, as a kind of collectivising memory work. But what is it that fado has forgotten or what kind of remembering does it enable? To ask this question, we need also to ask something about the places in which fado has moved and the actors that have enabled and used it. To ask these two question – where? and who? – is also to ask about the nature of the exchanges, encounters and representations that fado has enabled. With this in mind, then, I want to propose four observations.
• My first proposition, then, is that fado, from its very conception, was always implicated in a kind of ‘inter-class emotionality’. In other words, it is a constitutive property of vernacular or ‘collectivising’ musics such as fado that their very ontological coherence is born of an encounter with another community: only when the epistemological frame of the ‘boundary’ is experienced both by insider and outsider, can that ontological boundary be drawn. Put another way, within the confines of Western European modernity, one must encounter difference in order to be able to draw up a sense of what is internally coherent in one’s own cultural practices. In this sense, those early inter-class encounters between working class exponents of early fado and the bourgeoisie are constitutive of fado’s musical ontology. In this context, then, fado’s memory work is a work of covering over the split class origins of the music.
• Second, fado presents a coherent and persuasive set of narratives (a narrative cluster) around certain mythologised places. ‘Mouraria’, and ‘Alfama’, alongside other districts of Potugal’s capital and, of course, ‘Lisboa’ itself appear with stubborn regularity in fado lyrics. But to say hat fado is about the city is only true to the extent that one understands the preposition here in a number of ways: the city is certainly thematised in fado, but not ubiquitously; fado also performs or stages a certain acoustic field (doors and windows must be shut or open, the city must be allowed to, or prevented from, entering the privileged acoustic space of the casa, the boundary must be marked by both the discipline of guarding that boundary and by its contestant transgression. This two-way dialectic of passing and being prevented from passing is precisely how the city is represented (which is to say, disciplined, represented). Similarly, the manner in which fado will sometimes tumble into the open air (the regular concerts at the Castilo de São Jorge, for example) are also markers of changing reterritorialisations of the city by fado.
• My third proposition is that fado’s imagined city is not cartographic in the strictest sense, but much more profoundly metonymic. The distinction I want to raw here is between a tendency in some urban song forms to engage in what might be termed an imaginary mapping of the city (where a protagonist can easily stumble form one landmark to another, even though such landmarks might be some distance form each other) and a tendency, most notable in fado (but also in the French chanson) to both valorise and fragment the cityscape: fado, for example, often presents Lisbon as a feminine (‘Maria Lisboa’, ‘Lisboa, menina e moça’, and so on) but in which small details, landmarks and markers of the city are thrown together in an order that in non-linear, making new structures of proximity that overlay the city. In ‘Lisboa, menina e moça’, for example, we encounter the following: ‘No Castelo, ponho um cotovelo / Em Alfama, descanso o olhar / E assim desfaço o novelo de azul e mar / À Ribeira encosto a cabeça / A almofada, da cama do Tejo’ in which the boy of a woman provides a new logic of proximity, a new order of places and spaces, but always with the notion of a kind of navigability at h heart of its logic. What this metonymic reordering of the city does is to turn the city, like Calvino’s Maurilia in Invisible Cities. Just as the imaginary Maurilia represents an ideal, perfectly captured imagination of the city, so the metonymically transformed city of Lisbon is laid out as a kind of discursive space into which to pour regret, loss and the delicious jouissance of nostalgia.
• My fourth proposition is that the manner in which fado reimagines the city is symptomatic of a broader trend in vernacular urban song to deal with modernity as a kind of forgetting. Friedrich Kittler has noted that late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century discourses on the past take on new metaphors and imageries of ‘loss’ in a kind of negative emblamatisation of new storage media such as phonography, photography and film. Where the new technologies produce the possibility of saving lost voices, lost performances, so also they produced an intensification of discourses on loss at those voices, performance, moments not captured. Indeed, as Bennett Hogg has noted, phonography takes on the function of a kind of ‘prosthetic’ memory. And so, for fado, modernity comes to stand for the arrival of her lost object, the precious thing that can never be wholly put back together, the memento mori, the partial object of desire. In this sense, fado’s modernity is the call to remember.
Fado can thus be thought ethnographically and psychoanalytically as a kind of memory work and as such, it offers a striking case study in the public cultural work of remembering and forgetting. Its reparative force, to use a term from Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, is complex, by no means efficient and far from universally productive in therapeutic terms, but cultural practices inevitably take up complex relations with the jouissance of suffering and easing that suffering.
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