José Maria de Eça de Queirós

Portuguese novelist and short-story writer

• Born: November 25, 1845
• Died: August 16, 1900

Biography

José Maria de Eça de Queirós (AY-suh duh kay-ee-ROHSH), also spelled Queirós, is generally regarded as Portugal’s most important author of prose fiction. Eça, as he is known in Portuguese circles, was born an illegitimate child. His parents were later married, but he spent most of his childhood and adolescence separated from them. He completed secondary studies in Oporto and in 1865 received a law degree at the University of Coimbra, where he witnessed extensive polemics about the status of Portuguese literature and the ideas of positivism. After practicing law for a short period and directing a political journal, Eça traveled to Egypt to attend the opening ceremonies of the Suez Canal in 1869 and then to the Holy Land, experiences which are reflected in his writings. Upon returning to Portugal, he became an intellectual activist. He was one of the principal organizers of a historic colloquium on modern thought in Lisbon, delivering an address titled “Realism as a New Expression of Art” in 1871. In this address the author argued for the moral and social roles of the artist, who should seek to better society by portraying it without traditional biases. {$S[A]Queirós, José Maria de Eça de;Eça de Queirós, José Maria de}

While publishing continually, Eça made a career of diplomacy; he served in Havana, Newcastle, and Bristol before settling in Paris in 1888. There he was married and found the tranquillity necessary to devote himself to his career in literature. He met Émile Zola, to whom he was compared by several contemporaries. Others have compared him to Stendhal and Benito Pérez Galdós. Eça spent the last days of his life in France. Many of his stories, travel diaries, and letters were published posthumously. Contemporary interest in his fiction was stimulated with the publication of The Tragedy of the Street of Flowers, a work of long fiction that Eça had left in manuscript form. In 1988, a major Portuguese critic challenged the assumptions that Eça had completed work on this novel and that he intended the work to be published.

The work of Eça de Queirós is customarily divided into three phases. In what may be termed the author’s preparatory phase (1866-1875), he published journalistic articles and late Romantic stories. These initial years reveal an impetuous young writer in the process of developing a forceful style and a critical posture. In his realist phase (1875-1888), Eça superseded the sentimentalism of romance and instituted the realist novel in Portuguese letters. The author aimed at a social anatomy of contemporary problems, combating literarily the structures and values of society’s fundamental institutions, the monarchy and the church, as well as those of the bourgeoisie. He sought to create characters whose actions would be symbolic. Rather than exceptional individuals, Eça’s literary figures tend to be social types, representing institutions or particular aspects of the historical environment. While The Sin of Father Amaro centers on a case of clerical impropriety, the narrow-mindedness of provincial life and the undue influence of local oligarchies are also exposed. The classic realist theme of adultery is treated in Cousin Bazilio, which is reminiscent of Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1857). The extramarital intrigue of a woman fond of popular Romantic literature is a springboard to investigate bourgeois marriages of convenience and the consequences of ignoring the education of women. While The Relic takes place mostly outside Portugal, the questions of religious hypocrisy the work raises were quite relevant to local nineteenth century reality. The Maias is Eça’s most ambitious work. In this vast treatment of Lisbon’s high society, the author applies his characteristic irony to politicians and their ignorance, financiers and their influence on government, the ostentatious behavior of the new rich, the shallowness of social climbers, and the futility of romantic imagination. In all these works, Eça focuses on customs, moral values, and exterior appearances, favoring a social psychology and adopting a consistently critical posture.

Eça’s mature phase (1888-1900) reveals fictional worlds beyond orthodox realism and the iconoclasm associated with it. The fundamentally scientific approach of observation, documentation, and diagnostic commentary moves toward a more general humanitarianism with frequent spiritual overtones. The corrosive irony of earlier works becomes tempered, as the seemingly pessimistic outlook of the grand social portraits gives way to more constructive and hopeful attitudes. The Illustrious House of Ramires, built around the common novelistic structure of genealogy, frames a historical romance of picturesque medieval content, which is being written by the protagonist. While there are ambivalent and humorous elements, aristocratic personages, with their attempts to regenerate senses of heroism and achievement, are treated with evident sympathy. The work is by no means a simplistic appeal to patriotism, but it can be read as an effort to uphold integrity and to stimulate national pride and respect. The City and the Mountains, in turn, offers a kind of neopastoral optimism. Eça contrasts urban (especially Parisian) and rustic settings in an apology for the latter. Without the excesses of Romantic style or exaggerations of Romantic thought, the novel communicates an idealistic message: Happiness and fulfillment can best be achieved in bucolic surroundings, far from the distractions and corruption of urban civilization.

Eça was a prolific writer of stories, novels, letters, criticism, travel literature, and social commentary. As a consummate stylist, he is considered to have initiated modernity in Portugal and, along with Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis of Brazil, in the Portuguese language. While Eça’s nonfictional writing is consistently insightful, it concerns a Portuguese public above all. The stories and novels he left achieved a more universal plane and have been translated into twelve languages; they clearly merit recognition in the canon of nineteenth century European fiction.

Bibliography

Coleman, Alexander. Eça de Queirós and European Realism. New York: New York University Press, 1980. A biography placing Eça de Queirós in the context of his literary contemporaries, focusing on his promotion of realism as a literary genre.

Demetz, Peter. “Eça de Queirós as a Literary Critic.” Comparative Literature 19 (Fall, 1967): 289-307. One of the few studies in English of Eça de Queirós’s nonfiction.

Pritchett, V. S. The Myth Makers: European and Latin American Writers. London: Chatto & Windus, 1979. Eça de Queirós is discussed.

Stevens, James R. “Eça and Flaubert.” Luso Brazilian Review 3, no. 1 (1966). Discusses two masters of realism.