Obsession, Aesthetics, and the Iberian City by Benjamin Fraser

Author:Benjamin Fraser
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Vanderbilt University Press
Published: 2021-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 4

Shattering Lisbon: Destabilization and Drudgery

In 1755, Lisbon suffered an earthquake that devastated the Baixa, its central lower-city area, and left an imprint on the city’s collective imaginary. From an urban planning perspective, this event is crucial. The earthquake is estimated to have been equivalent to a magnitude of 9.0 on the Richter scale. Along with the tsunami and fires that followed it, the quake caused massive destruction. This event prompted a complete redesign and reconstruction of the central Baixa area, which was led by Sebastião José de Carvalho e Melo (1699–1782). Commonly known as the Marquês de Pombal, Carvalho e Melo served under José I of Portugal and was a statesman with a reputation for being strict, but not a trained architect or planner. The architects he recruited to rebuild the Baixa Pombalina de Lisboa used a novel wooden-cage design intended to make the area’s foundational structures more flexible and thus resilient to future recurrence of earthquakes. The rebuilt Baixa area also stood out for being a rectilinear grid. This strict form was imposed on what had previously been a more organic street pattern, thus anticipating the hallmark aesthetic geometricality of modern planning’s contemporary legacy.

The Marquês de Pombal’s response to the earthquake reshaped Lisbon through its monumental design, open urban spaces, and a regularized street pattern. By the nineteenth century, the so-called Pombaline street had emerged as a key element of the area’s modernizing, bourgeois urban lifestyle. While Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935) captured the city’s enduring tributes to the earthquake in an English-language travel guide titled Lisbon: What the Tourist Should See (2008), he is most remembered for his complex collection of prose fragments published posthumously as Livro do Desassossego (1982; The Book of Disquiet [2017]). Therein, the thoughts of the author’s narrators turn obsessively toward the hallmark urban and architectural aesthetics of Lisbon’s Baixa. With this port-adjacent area now increasingly dedicated to commerce and luxury, it becomes almost a self-contained segment of the city for Pessoa’s fictional bookkeeper-narrator. Public and private spheres of urban life overlap for the bourgeois resident of the new Baixa. The regularization and drudgery of modern urban living is insistently referenced in the book in a variety of ways: repetitive accounting work that relies on obsessive attention to numerical tabulation as well as excessively repetitive walks, to work and back home again, along a single Pombaline block. The urban environment itself becomes intertwined with details from what might seem to be the author’s autobiography and ultimately comes to reflect, resonate with, and substitute for his interior mood and conflicts.

Pessoa himself was a compulsive writer, and the narrators he employs in this work share this trait. Their observations on everyday urban life prove to be obsessively repetitive; they are aware of their compulsion to write endlessly and yet unable to stop. Their cognition is a flight of imagination that never aims for a conclusion, but instead remains fixated on the sights, sounds, and movements of life in the Baixa. While the repetitive urban movements of Pessoa’s

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