the dreamer and
his critic
José
Maria de Eça de Queirós Correspondencia
de Fradique Mendes, translated by Gregory Rabassa as The Correspondence of Fradique Mendes (Dartmouth, Massachusetts:
Tagus Press/UMass Dartmouth, 2011)
Fradique Mendes, originally conceived as
a Pessoa-like heteronym, was created by the great Portuguese writer Eça de Queirós
and two friends in 1869 in a newspaper, poking fun at their fellow countrymen.
The poet, Carlos Fradique Mendes, wrote poems in a kind of satanic Baudelaire
manner, which for the great author was a affectation of many younger Portuguese
poets whom Eça felt needed to be satirized.
The figure and his writing so engaged him,
however, that he continued to write through the pseudonym from 1888 onward,
revising the work into a comical biography and collection of letters published
in 1900, the year of Eça's death. In many respects this work cannot be
separated from his great fiction, published in 1901, The City and the Mountains. Both works swing between two extremes,
between a kind of dandyish figure living in the center of Portuguese culture
and a more retiring version of the same figure, returning to the quiet
isolation and nostalgic innocence of a previous time. In the later book,
Jacinto begins as a believer in change, embracing the most progressive
developments of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a man who, when that
world falls apart, retreats to his home in the mountains, where he rediscovers
the quietude and order of an agricultural tradition.
So too does Fradique Mendes begin by being a man of the world, living in
France and traveling to exciting exotic locales such as Arab countries and
Brazil. Yet, like Jacinto, Fradique Mendes, whose great love fails him,
gradually reverts to more conservative-based realities, often scolding his co
responders for their desire to become involved in urban life and their lack of
religious values. Fradique Mendes finally "disappears," traveling, as
it describes it "on a very long and distant journey," which, he
declares, is no longer out of curiosity, "for there are no longer curiosities
left, but to put an end in a most worthy and beautiful way to a relationship
like ours."
The letters of this fiction, are fascinating for their swings between
worldly knowledge and peasant pleasures, for their alteration between a
cultivated artistic sensibility and a craving for the simplicities of the past.
In the end, because of this oscillation of values, Fradique Mendes is a grand
failure, a made-up man who fails in life primarily because of his vicissitudes.
The difference is that in The
Correspondence of Fradique Mendes, Eça forces us to compare this failed
dreamer with an academic critic, so slavishly attracted to the
"ecstasy" of Fradique Mendes' earlier poetic dabblings that he cannot
see the failures of the man. Presenting his subject in metaphors even more
Romantically inspired than the poet's later life, the critic of the fiction,
ridiculously drops names—from Ponce de León to Mozart and Beethoven, from
Voltaire to Klopstock and Immanuel Kant that reveal even-more confused notions
of reality. Here's a sample:
Here I fell back,
wide-eyes. Victor Hugo (everyone still remembers),
exiled at the time on
Guernsey, held for us idealists and democrats
of 1867 the sublime and
legendary proportions of a Saint John on
Patmos. And I drew back
in protest, eyes inflamed, so much it seemed
to me beyond the realm
of possibilities that a Portuguese, a Mendes,
could have held in his
the august hand that had written The
Legend
of the Centuries! Corresponding
with Mazzini, camaraderie with
Garibaldi, that was all
very well! But a sojourn on the sacred isle, to
the sound of the waves
from the Channel, strolling, chatting, pondering
with the same of Les Misérables, looked to me like the
impudent
exaggerations of the
Azorean island who was trying to put one over on
me...
If there was ever an example of literary
hero-worship, this critic has said it all. Fradique Mendes is great because he
associates with the great!
At times, this comic lavishing of metaphors and comparisons wears on
one—as it is meant to. And The
Correspondence of Fradique Mendes is, overall, not quite the masterwork
that is The City and the Mountains.
But the fiction remains a wonderful send-up of Portuguese cultural pretensions,
and perhaps, to a certain degree, a revelation of the cultural tensions in
Eça's own life. Given the depths of his literary contributions, however, it is
well worth reading through this satiric work.
Los
Angeles, March 13, 2012
Reprinted from Rain Taxi (on-line edition, Summer 2012).
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