Review

Reviewed Work(s):
Eça de Queirós and European Realism
by Alexander Coleman
Review by: Linda Rodrigues
Source: Luso-Brazilian Review , Summer, 1982, Vol. 19, No. 1 (Summer, 1982), pp. 111-
113
Published by: University of Wisconsin Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/3513476

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Books Reviewed

Eqa de Queirds and European ReaZism. Alexander Coleman. New York

University Press, 1980.

English-speaking students, scholars, and admirers of Ega de

Queiroz's fiction have long awaited an intelligent, book-length
study of the nineteenth-century Lusitanian novelist. The wait is
over. Alexander Coleman's Eqa de Queirds ond Europeon ReaZism is
a serious, scholarly work of great warmth, lucidly written, and
remarkably successful in its effort to convey gn understanding of
and appreciation for the fiction and personal character of the
enigmatic Ega.
Prof. Coleman's first chapter, "Theories for Fictions," solidly
grounds the work by providing both a critical perspective and a
historio-cultural context for evaluating Ega de Queiroz's work.
While Prof. Coleman wisely argues that Ega's works must be viewed
within the context of nineteenth-century European literary cur-
rents, and in full knowledge of the cultural hegemony of France,
England, and Germany during this period, he is careful (as too few
of Ega's critics are) to show that Ega was a complex individual,
an artist whose novels belie an author of a synthetic nature,
rather than a staunch, never-changing proponent of any one parti-
cular literary perspective:

Ega's maJor works function within the tenets of Reilism, but

all such designations end by being deceptive, for his peculiar
response to the central impulses of Realism qualifies him, not
as a docile follower, but as a synthesist of the various kinds
of imaginative bifurcation that Romantic, Realist, and Natural-
ist theory and practice have come to mean for us. Though it
seems foolish to say so, Ega de Queiros ' s literary allegiances
partook of all three tendencies.

It is no small task to examine the fabric of Ega' s extensive

literary output, tracing the strands of various literary strains,
while never losing sight of the overall pattern of character de-
velopment and thematic preoccupation exhibited in his works. But,
then again, Eqa de Queirds and European ReaZism is no small accom-
plishment. Few critics have escaped the temptation of evaluating
EcJa's works solely in terms of one another: this is especially
true with respect to the author's later works such as A Cidade e
as Serras, or of works which break the "Realistic mold" of 0 Crime

lll

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 luso-BraziZian ResieS 19:1
112

db Padre Amaro and O Primo Bas6Zio, such as O Mandarim, and even A

ReZfquia. Prof. Coleman shines each of Ecaa's major works through
a critical prism, allowing each work its own particular spectrum
of qualities, illuminating, through a careful study of Ecaa's cor-
respondence, Journalistic writings and articles, the individual
qualities of each work. And the spectrum which shines forth is
proJected against the background of Eca's perceptions of contem-
porary Portuguese political history, as well as his intellectual
preoccupations. The background may seem hopelessly vast and com-
plex: as wide as the pendulum swing from Monarchy to Republic,
frome Conte to Hegel, from Darwin to the Bible, from Zola to
Baudelaire. Yet, this is the very panorama encompassed by EcJa's
works, the very ground, wide as it is, of his intellectual con-
cerns.
While the sheer scope of Prof. Coleman's study alone is impres-
sive, this reviewer was equally impressed with his sensitive and
often bold interpretation of particular works. A case in point is
Mr. Coleman's perceptive analysis of the character Luiza (O Primo
Bas6Zio) in relation to Emma, of Flaubert's Mad*me Bosary:

What seem to be glaring coincidences have led oritics to the

belief that Emma and Luiza are national doubles of each other,
the typically Queirosian appropriation of a Flaubertian model.
Such inferences are misguided, not only in the specific in-
stance of Luiza, but in the more general area of the organizing
principles of Ega's fiction. We are confronted with the enigma
and the mystery behind Ecaa's borrowings from other literatures.
The borrowed elements are there, for sure, and cannot be denied.
But, they db undergo a sort of sea change and become quickly
acclimated and assimilated into the peculiar structure of
Portuguese society and EcJa's theory about that society.

Equally noteworthy is Prof. Coleman's discussion of O Mandarsm and

A ReZf quia , contained in the provocatively titled chapter, "The
East of the Imagination." Following the views expressed in the
second edition of Joao Gaspar Simdes's Vida e Obra de Eqa de
Queirds , Prof. Coleman sees these two works 16. . . not as an
' asphyxiation ' by reality, but rather a luminous, alternative
world untranmeled by the impositions of moralized art," different,
surely, but not unconnected, he notes, to the later work , Os
Maias. Coleman boldly points to what he perceives as the "Wag-
nerian shadow" which hangs over the characters of Carlos Eduardo
and Maria Eduardo in OS MAZaS. In "Fauns and Apostles, Wars and
Georgics," the chapter focusing on 08 Maia8, A IZUStre Ca8a de
RomireS, and the short story, JQSE Matias," he offers an intelli-
gent suggestion with respect to the reading of Ega's monumental
history of the Maia family: the text can be read as a carefully
constructed symbolic network of obJects, actions, and relation-
ships emblematic of the state of the Portuguese nation.
There is one last quality of E¢a de Queirds and Europeon
ReaZism which deserves special mention: it is an extraordinarily
accessible text, a text which can easily inspire those unfamiliar

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Books Reviezged
113

with Ega's works to read them. Prof. Coleman closes his study by
expressing the hope that his work will add to the lamentably
limited number who read and appreciate Equ. While too few of
Ega's works are today easily available in English translation,
Prof. Coleman's study of Ega is the kind of intelligent and appre-
ciative work which can, and hopefully will, create a new demand
for in-print English translations of the nineteenth-century Portu-
guese master of fiction.

Linda Rodrigues
Uniarersity of Wisconsin-Madison

DIE ANFAENGE DER MODERNEN LYRIK IN PORTUGAL (1865-1890). Rainer

Hess. Freiburger Schriften zur Romanischen Philolo;ie, 23.
Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1978. 367 pp. DM 90.00.

Being a revised version of his dissertation for the University

oP Erlangen (1969), Hess's treatment of the beginnings of modern
lyric poetry in Portugal intelligently uncovers ideological and
stylistic principles with tools furnished by comparative litera-
ture, the sociology of literature, and stylisties. The German
scholar brings to his task an admirable knowledge of Portuguese
and of several European literatures, particularly of French
Romanticism and Parnassianism, which were unquestionably the guid-
ing inspiration of Portuguese poets during the second half of the
past century. Their dependence and corresponding lack of origi-
nality explain the scant interest paid abroad to them or to their
likewise inspired contemporaries in Brazil, in spite of formal
craftsmanship and, in Portugal, a picturesquely dramatic struggle
for recognition in the face of entrenched neo-Classicism.
Hess defines modernity in two aspects which the Portuguese
found ready-made in Proudhon on the one hand, as anti-authoritarian,
anti-traditional writing with a social mission, and on the other,
in Baudelaire, as the artistry, nay, the magic with which to react
against the stupidly materialistic society of modern times.
He draws a clear picture of the rise of modern lyric poetry in
Portugal, important because it ushered in the third flowering of
lyric poetry through the centuries. The rise is chronicled from
the publi cation of Antero de Quental ' 5 Odes modertnas in 1865, with
its programmatic epilogue about the rnission of poetry to express
most purely the beliefs and aspirations of "the collective soul of
an epoch" , to the return to a formal and anti-revolutionary
aesthetics in 1890, signaled by EugEnio de Castro in the preface
to his Oar*stos , under the influence of the French DEcadents and
Symbo Zistes .
The differences between urbanized French, more precisely,
Parisian society in the mid-nineteenth century and a still pre-
dotinantly rural and patriarchal Portugal, undiminished by a
thirty-year delay in literary transmission, are pointed up to ex-
plain why the first writings of the "modern" Portuguese poets ap-
pear artificlal and rather playful or mild when compared to French

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