Is the flower still beautiful after hours and hours closed in a pocket? About representations, idealizations and disappointments in Augusto Abelaira

The present work proposes a reading of the artistic-intellectual project of the Portuguese writer Augusto Abelaira, from de novels The City of Flowers and Bolor, in order to place him in the scenery of the Portuguese neo-realism and the intellectual resistance against fascism. The expression of the idealizations and disappointments in the work of Abelaira points to an opposite direction to that identified with the socialist realism and with what was conventionally called doctrinaire neo-realism in Portugal before the public emergency of the controversy between those who defended the primacy of the content and another aesthetic response that problematizes the pre-eminence of a specular model. Thus, there never was an internal homogeneity neither aesthetic nor theoretical in the movement. The public emergency of this debate translates a controversy that is not confined to the aesthetic, but is, in its most profound dimension, theoretical and political. The objective of the work is to demonstrate the writing procedures of Augusto Abelaira as susceptible techniques to represent conceptions of life and of the world able to translate a social demand, that are, ultimately, writing programs appropriate to the envisioned transformations. Therefore, there is not one unique neo-realistic writing program, but there is a neo-realistic aesthetics which is the literary neo-realism itself that the works of Augusto Abelaira helps to compose.      Keywords: Augusto Abelaira; Intellectual writer; Neo-realism.