A farm of one's own: about the city and the mountains

Abstract

The City and the Mountains, a novel published posthumously by Eça de Queirós, is one of Eça’s books that has generated more controversy among specialized scholars, who do not manage to agree on what its ideas and arguments mean, nor on the reasons why we should reread the history of Jacinto. Defended by some critics, who in the history of the millionaire who finds the meaning of life in Portuguese countryside recognize the highest point of the ironic imagination of Eça and the hopes of a humanist writer engaged in fighting economic and social injustice; and disqualified by others, who see this novel as a corroboration of a writer who betrays the critical stance of his realist novels in defence of a reactionary and traditionalist Portugal. Despite the profound differences between the various critical judgments, we have been told that The City and the Mountains is in tune with the relationship that Eça maintained with Portugal and the Modern World. Changing the terms of the discussion, in this essay I try to show what happens if we resist the temptation to explain an abstraction such as ‘Tormes’ in terms of an image of Portugal and the Portuguese. I will conclude by arguing that if we are to find in Jacinto's lesson a set of useful suggestions on how to live a life that is worth living, we should see his experience in Tormes as contingent, private and temporary, and not as a permanent and universal solution to the boredom of the Modern Age.