I am facing a serious decision with regard to my Duolingo Portuguese course, which I first reported on some months ago and have been following with a fair degree of attentiveness since. The circumstances are unusual. My original aim was to move beyond my semi-mastery of the highly Latinate Renaissance language of Luis de Camões in order to be able to attempt some modern authors. For years, teaching Chaucer I was focused on helping students look backward through their contemporary English to understand an earlier form of the language. Linguistic time travel is usually retrograde in this sense. Here the task has been very different—that of an Elizabethan schoolboy wanting to read Henry James or William Faulkner, perhaps. This is a somewhat perverse approach, but it has pretty well worked—pretty well. I deduce that most of the people using Duolingo are young folks, who are principally interested in achieving a fluency sufficient for the corporate offices and discos of contemporary São Paulo. Such students understandably might have a greater interest than do I in video games, running shoes, speed dating, electronic gismos and other such topics as loom large in the “literary” materials provided by the on-line course, a series of increasingly demanding mini-stories, very good, engaging, and amusing of their kind.
Needless to say these are not Henry James, but I think, perhaps arrogantly, they have been enough to send me timorously off on my own. It is probably rare for an octogenarian literature professor to be making his first discovery of a really great novelist who has been dead for more than a century, but that is what I am doing. By more or less general agreement the great Portuguese novelist of the nineteenth century was José Maria Eça de Queiroz (or Queirós after orthographic reform), who died at the age of fifty-five in the year 1900. So with considerably less equipment than that possessed by a Brazilian elementary school student I have undertaken to read a novel by perhaps the greatest writer of a modern language currently spoken by about two hundred and fifty million people. And what a novel!--The Relic (1887).
The plot of The Relic is brilliant but pretty simple. The financial future of a worldly young man named Teodorico Rasposo, an orphan descended from a once grand family, is riskily dependent upon a hoped-for inheritance from the elderly maiden aunt who has raised him and whose cloying, ostentatious, and formulaic Catholic piety he hypocritically imitates in hopes of staying in her good graces. In 1875, when he learns she may be contemplating leaving her fortune to a religious order, he takes a desperate action to impress her with his religiosity. He undertakes a pilgrimage to Jerusalem on her behalf with the aim of securing a precious religious relic: in the event a DIY Crown of Thorns! Eça de Queirós was himself a kind of Teodorico, not an orphan but a bastard child without notable worldly prospects
There is a major tradition in early Spanish prose fiction of the picaresque novel. The pícaro is a bad-boy, anti-hero type, a scamp, an attractive scoundrel whose outrageous escapades engage the reader in a kind of narrative schadenfreude. The greater Teodorico’s ethical outrages, the greater the reader’s enjoyment. Eça toys with this tradition and exploits its comic potential, but his intellectual concerns are serious and contemporary. Both as an artist and an “ideas man” he seems to me the peer of predecessors and contemporaries to whom he was sometimes considered even superior: Dickens, Zola, Flaubert, Tolstoy.
The Relic is in a certain sense an anthology of narrative genres. I have already mentioned its allegiance to Hispanic picaresque tradition. Eça’s comic range, however, includes the subtle as well as the thigh-slapping. The satire, though mainly directed toward the stultifying conventions of Iberian society, reaches out in many directions. Teodorico’s unforgettable travel companion, an erudite German archaeologist named Topsius, is one of those who would peep and botanize upon his mother’s grave and the pedantic quintessence of modern Teutonic science. As the story of a pilgrimage to then exotic parts, it is also travel literature of a high order. The Jerusalem it describes, as that depicted more famously by Pierre Loti some years later, is a sad and grubby Ottoman outpost in the unfriendly desert, little more than a watering hole and a souvenir factory. The novel would be highly satisfying if it did no more than present the reader with several vivid character placed in convincing dynamic relationship, but it has and achieves higher ambitions.
The extraordinary modernity of the thought of Eça de Queirós is revealed in an utterly unexpected passage of narrative experimentation at the center of the book. He has to be described as a realist—as real as Flaubert, as real as Zola, and a good deal realer than Dickens. But in the midst of the novel, at what one could expect to be the culmination of the “travel plot,” he suddenly abandons Thomas Hardy for Jules Verne. One does not know whether to describe what happens at the center of The Relic as science fiction, time-travel, or authorial mental breakdown. Suddenly the picaresque travelers find themselves, jokeless, in the Jerusalem of Jesus of Nazareth—in fact at the time that the capital trial of Jesus of Nazareth is to be conducted. And just as the Jerusalem they visit is not that city lauded in the psalms and centuries of Christian hymnody, neither is the Jesus on trial the man-god of two thousand years of Christian theology. It is at this point that The Relic became for many conventionally minded conservatives a deeply controversial work of blasphemy rather than simply a racy comedy.
By the middle of the nineteenth century the countries of the Iberian peninsula were long since imperial has-beens, politically moribund, intellectually feeble, culturally stultified. In both the Roman Church in its most reactionary forms continued to wield oppressive cultural power amid great wealth. For many, little seemed changed since the time of Voltaire, who had memorably treated Portugal as a bastion of obscurantism, bigotry, and the Inquisition. As they sadly surveyed their native wasteland, men like Eça de Queirós sought their inspiration abroad: Germany for science, France for art, England (where he lived for several years) for political liberalism. They often adopted explicit anti-clerical positions. I want to work on this more, but I already am pretty certain that he intended his extravagant, fictional life of Jesus to contribute to a scholarly tradition that was shaking traditional European fideistic Christianity to its foundations. This work had been done not so much by Darwin or natural scientists as by theologians. In 1835 a German pastor, David Strauss, published his blockbuster The Life of Jesus Critically Examined. This demythologizing biography, in its English translation by Mary Ann Evans (George Eliot), had enormous influence in England. In the Portuguese novelist’s youth the French historian and patristic scholar Ernst Renan published a yet more popular Life of Jesus in 1863. And at least one like-minded radical Italian journalist, Petruccelli de la Gattina, had produced a model in fiction, a sizzling fantasy biography called The Memoirs of Judas (1867).
My method of approach borrows from the Latin-teaching techniques of Renaissance Jesuits. There is more than one English translation of The Relic, but the best is by a fine Hispanist, Aubrey Bell, who first published it in 1925. I read this through carefully and keep it close at hand. After that is the slow business of collated paragraph after paragraph, with frequent consultations of the Novo Michaelis Dicionário. Duolingo has given me a surprising and probably false confidence about basic linguistic structure, but the lexicon is overwhelming. Eça de Queirós has an enormous vocabulary, and his realism does not eschew ambitious lyrical moments. His world is one of the horse-and-buggy (and the camel back) across a large ocean from the coffee shops and rock concerts of Rio. But even with all the barriers of time and water it comes across fresher than The Pickwick Papers, fresher and a good deal funnier. And it does take one’s mind off coronavirus.
José Maria Eça de Queirós, The Relic: a Novel, translated from the Portuguese by Aubrey F. G. Bell, preface by Harold Bloom
Tagus Press at UMass Dartmouth, 2012
ISBN 978-1-933227-35-1
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