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COPYRIGHT 2003 Modern Humanities Research Association
History would be an excellent thing if only it were true.
Tolstoy
Reference to Julio Dinis in an academic context almost invariably gives rise to a paradox: dismissal of his standing as a forgettable pedlar of adolescent literatura cor-de rosa and romances piegas, is compelled to coexist with the knowledge that some of the most august names in the Portuguese critical establishment--Antonio Jose Saraiva (1949), (1) Oscar Lopes (1972), (2) Maria Lucia Lepecki (1979), (3) Joao Gaspar Simoes (1987), (4) and in particular Liberto Cruz (1972) (5)--have chosen to devote time to rescuing his work from the neglect to which it has been habitually consigned. Nonetheless, it is undeniably within the less than hallowed regions of pulp fiction that on the whole his writing inhabits, and when first toying with certain ideas evoked by his work, my first instinct was to abandon them, much like a bad Sophoclean mother tempted to expose her troublesome child on the mountainside to die. But like every mother who has read her classics, I knew that such children have a habit of coming back not only to haunt the mother, but to marry her, with well-known and disastrous consequences. Rather than risk this, I decided hubristically on a pre-emptive strike against fate, by marrying Julio Dinis at once, or at least clutching him to my maternal bosom--a manoeuvre all the more apposite, as I shall argue, given the theme to be developed here, but given also the personal history of the man: orphaned, unmarried, dead of tuberculosis aged thirty-two, and whose only rumoured, certainly unconsummated, affair of the heart was his toothsome, quasi-incestuous attachment to a married cousin in loco parentis, fourteen years older than himself.
Julio Dinis's critical paladins have maintained that far from being escapist Mills & Boon type literary fare, his writing reflects a curious and complex moment in the nation's agitated political life in the nineteenth century, a phenomenon which Marina de Almeida Ribeiro has described as 'uma imagem de esperanca e a memoria magoada de um pais que se dividira em dois e que demorava a reconciliar-se'. (6) This reference to the civil war which swept through Portugal, technically between 1828 and 1834, but effectively continuing until 1847, identifies that moment in Portuguese history which, as I will argue, anchors some of the important preoccupations which underwrite Julio Dinis's four novels and occasional short stories, written over a period of just over ten years, from 1858 to 1871, within living memory of a war which was still being fought when he was born.
By the time Dinis began writing his novels the war had ended and the country had embarked upon a period of relative political and social stability known as Regeneracao. Albeit internally wounded by the memory of the civil war and economically handicapped by the loss of Brazil in 1822, Portugal had entered an epoch of two-party parliamentarian rotativism and infrastructural reconstruction which on the political front promoted low-grade cooperation in social policy implementation between the two by now barely distinguishable parties, and in more generalized aspects witnessed a profound alteration in the socio-economic landscape, both urban and rural: changes in legislation controlling land ownership, the abolition of the quasi-feudal law of morgadios, the extension of roads and railways into the countryside, and intellectually--within an urban context--the rise of the cult of science in line with the changing mood abroad.
Julio Dinis, therefore, observed, thought and wrote on the cusp of two eras: the old order of an imperial, sea-faring and more recently war-torn Portugal, and the new order of a nation recently and possibly precariously at peace, seeking to modernize and industrialize along the lines of the new progressive scientific and technological advances apparent elsewhere in Europe. From the point of view of historians and thinkers such as Alexandre Herculano (1846-53), (7) and to some extent Antero de Quental (1871), (8) as expounded in his famous lecture on the causes of the decadence of the Peninsular peoples, what both the old and the new order had in common was a neglect of the geophysical, agricultural concreteness of the torrao natal, the native soil which they saw as the body and backbone of the motherland, and one literally and fatally diluted by the nation's headlong rush to put all its eggs into the basket of the Descobrimentos.
An atavistic attachment to the land which, according to Jaime Cortesao (1979) is the identifying characteristic of the Portuguese, wherever imperial, colonial or emigrational drives may have scattered them, is the paradoxical trait of a people who have become memorable in European history precisely for the itchy feet that led them to leave that beloved motherland in the pursuit of pastures new. (9) This contradictory instinct simultaneously to cling to and abandon--delightful to a psychoanalytical turn of mind bent upon observing in Oedipal sons an imperative to discard the mother at all times countered by the repressed desire to return to her and possess her--becomes particularly apt when considering first, the Freudianly turbulent historical moment to which Julio Dinis dedicated his writing; and second, a bird's-eye view of Portuguese history in general. As regards the latter, we can contemplate what in effect amounts to the history of a country whose Oedipal beginnings, curiously self-destructive, have hauntingly recycled themselves with puzzling regularity from its origins to the present day.
In 1143 D. Afonso Henriques, independent Portugal's first king, stabbed the Spanish political father against whom he declared independence, and drove into exile his own biological mother from whose...
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