DOI: 10.24308/iass-2014-021

Universidade Estadual de Londrina, Brazil

cecilia.contani@gmail.com

Universidade Estadual de Londrina, Brazil

ego@uel.br

Abstract

This paper examines the argumentative features and semantic discourse potential found in Eça de Queirós’ The city and the mountains. The notion of speech is focused as a source of meaning and persuasion. A mix of speeches is produced as a result of an enriched storytelling, a remarkable skill of the author who employ a multiplicity of voices as found in the Dostoevsky’s model. The concept of polyphony discussed by Bakhtin (2011) in “Problems of Dostoevsky's poetics” is used to explain this operation and grasp the meanings found in the characters’ wide-ranging discussion. The presence of two voices at first distinct, but afterwards integrated into dialogues and narration is not simply opposition, but a divergence that shape the argument and provide contrasting and complementary meanings. Voices that overlap in the same context and merge into a third voice with argumentative power and ability to clarify the theme in the novel. The argument is further built, to a larger extent, by the use of adjectives, thus releasing statements that this study will point out as countermeanings, a notion inspired in the psychoanalytical concept of countertransference, to cover differences that are not purely oppositions, but disagreements and agreements that can be worked out.

Introduction

The city and the mountains by Eça de Queirós takes into account two postures: Jacinto de Tormes’s (the novel’s protagonist) and José Fernandes’s (his best friend and narrator). Jacinto de Tormes, born in Paris, is of Portuguese descent and is the heir to a vast estate located in a village in Portugal. He never visited the place, but rental incomes from that family property allow him to afford his living in the metropolis. At a certain point in time, he started to become bored and disappointed with life among all sorts of appliances and devices available in modern urban life, plus the rush that was becoming typical. It was then that he received a letter from the estate manager, José Fernandes, notifying him that for a decision to be made, his presence was required in the farmland. Fernandes travels to Paris to see Jacinto about the issue and to persuade him to come to Portugal – and so it happens. Upon this return to roots, with the contact with the country environment, Jacinto started reflecting about the sense of life with technology and of life without it. Fernandes takes part in the plot with more than his dialogues with Jacinto: he lends his voice as a narrator.

In spite of being distinct, they exert forces of equal magnitude: none of these characters’ voices overlap. Jacinto, heir to a profitable estate in the country, is delighted with Paris cultural and technological effervescence in the context of the beginning of the 20^th century. He lives in a two-story house, in the city centre of the French capital and, at a certain point, hosts his best friend, who has just arrived from Portugal, José Fernandes that, as opposed to Jacinto, is eternally in love with Portugal and the quality of living associated with country life.

From that moment on, in their daily interaction, Jacinto and José display different attitudes towards the same contexts. The perspectives, however, add up to each other and alternate in the meantime, eventually generating a third perspective, which is an evolution of the previous two. Hence, the relationship between the hereby named meaning and countermeaning, further explained. José Fernandes is granted the freedom to assess and interpret his friend’s attitudes as well as to establish not solely a dialog with him or between characters, but also an interaction with the reader who is involved and clearly realizes Jacinto’s psychological transformation as he absorbs the contents of the arguments presented by his friend.

In order to more easily perceive the characters’ consciousness modifications, the analysis will be divided into three times: Time 1, in which Jacinto falls for Paris; Switching Time, where the character is already bored and uncomfortable in the metropolis and Time 2, when they are already in Portugal, displaying love and working for their homeland. The discourse that depicts Jacinto's feelings regarding both cities where he lived is built with the use of the adjectives – this process here known as a resource of argumentative construction.

It is assumed that the book’s argumentative construction has its main expression in the judicious use of adjectives, capable of allowing a deep thematic discussion with a surprisingly degree of utility for the present-day. That is attained through an undisputable capacity to assign many voices (not to be thought as lines or dialogues) to few characters allowing access to meaning and manner as they become reality.

1. The meaning and countermeaning relation

The characters represent human conscience with great support in reality to the extent that their interactions simulate or portrait daily facts. Therefore, the interaction between Jacinto and José Fernandes also occurs in an unconscious way: the two characters that at first show very different postures under the same circumstances will dissolve their contrasts and merge, embracing their unconsciousness and establishing a more advanced posture emerged from their emotional response.

José Fernandes' dense narrative is able to comprise Jacinto's evaluation and along with it compose a new meaning to the concept of happiness that lies in human conviviality in their homeland. This is accomplished by the double role or double voice assigned to José Fernandes in sharing the instance of narrator. This new posture, comprised by the overlapping of both character's views, starts to belong also to the reader that through argumentative resources dialogues with the text and realizes their concepts change.

The term countermeaning is adopted with a special connotation. The prefix counter, largely applied in already renowned expressions such as counterculture, counteract, counterclockwise, among others. A concept that best represents the desired definition is the psychoanalytical notion of countertransference. According to Freud (1912, p. 113) transferences “are new editions or reproductions of the tendencies and fantasies which are aroused and made conscious during the process of the analysis, but they have this peculiarity that they replace some earlier person by the person of the physician.” The psychoanalyst believed that this emotional transference is expected, but the professional is not to allow the phenomenon to interfere in their analytical posture.

Countertransference is the name given by Freud to the situation in which the analyst is emotionally involved and integrates the transference phenomenon, which, according to Leitão (2003, p. 176) “is the analyst’s emotional response to the patient’s stimuli.” The transference and countertransference processes hold ambivalent natures, once the feelings that may be aroused develops from a human relationship and as such have double composition, that is, postures that present themselves in different ways under the same therapeutic context but that with the sessions’ evolution along with human interaction between these individuals become a shared posture between the analyzed and the analyst.

The term created by Freud in German: Die Gegenübertragung can be divided for a Portuguese version as indicates Orozoco (2000, p.137, apud Antonelli 2006, p. 25, our translation): 1) Gegen, from opposition, ‘against’ ‘that opposes to’, but also holding the idea of reciprocity. 2) über, that means on, in the top of. 3) tragung that comes from the verb tragen, to carry, take. Therefore, according to the same author the term “against” in Portuguese does not contemplate every aspect of the word in German, once the latter carries the idea of reciprocity, integration. Consequently, countertransference is not characterized by the opposition but by the reciprocity of postures that at first are individual and only existent in the personal unconsciousness but that evolve to an emotional completion that coexists in the relation established between the person analyzed and the analyst.

Freud (1912, p.402) claims to have “(...) good reasons to assert that everybody possesses in their own unconsciousness a tool enabling them to interpret other people’s unconsciousness elocutions”. This is the point of interface between the idea of counter transference and the concept of countermeaning which have no further resemblance. There is, therefore, the entanglement of two different consciousnesses that individually possess forces of equivalent magnitudes that merge and unite from a relationship that may have an argumentative nature. It emerges from the possible interpretation of such consciousness that then become one as a result. Jacinto e José Fernandes are examples of this relation as people who are daily together and have different attitudes at first. During the story they unite and compose a third attitude. Being able to conduct such a process demands the handling of multiple voices at risk of harming access to subtleness, small details or nuances. As a result, the argumentation is built through a sophisticated process of use of adjectives that is associated with the characters’ positioning (meaning and countermeaning), turned to the construction of thought.

2. Polyphony

The narrator’s and the main character’s voices merge and compose the before mentioned relation. “The consciousness of a character is given as someone else’s consciousness, another consciousness, yet at the same time it is not turned into an object, is not closed, does not become a simple object of the author’s consciousness.” (Bakhtin, 2011, p.7) The characters are not still voices in the plot, but representations of consciousnesses that, as in human relations, intertwine and recover themselves. This is the process described by the relation between meaning/countermeaning.

According to Bakhtin (2011, p.6, author’s italics): “(…) rather a plurality of counsciousness, with equal rights and each unit with its own world, combine but not merged in the unit of the event. Dostoevsky’s major heroes are, by the very nature of his creative design not only objects of authorial discourse but also subjects of their own directly signifying discourse.” Polyphony, particularly in this Eça de Queirós’s work, not only designates the mixture of voices present in the text, but also presents the independence that each character is given by the author, making them different subjects, masters of their speech and autonomous enough to interact with other voices. They are, therefore, free to be built from that relation controlled by the author, but does not only evolve from him hands: the subjects of this newly created speech may generate new interactions and change.

The novel is to Bakhtin (2011) a typically polyphonic genre once that, in presenting various social voices that confront, collide, represents distinct postures and worldviews that converge to an interaction. In The city and the mountains, the two main voices correspond to such definition as their postures and consciousnesses converge to a union – they persuade each other and unite. Postures and consciousnesses that are opposed at times and similar or completing each other at others – consequently, they are not individual but composed by the voices and their union.

The author’s perception of the work is essential for the polyphony’s maintenance through the narrative. The characters are portraits of the human psyche thus, text and reality should overlay. The voices settle in the reader’s mind, taking into account that he becomes familiar with polyphony and makes the characters’ interaction something real and feasible. According to Bakhtin (2011, p.37):

Dostoevsky had the seeming capacity to visualize directly someone else’s psyche. He looked into someone else’s soul as if equipped with a magnifying glass that permitted him to detect the subtlest nuances to follow the most inconspicuous modulations and transitions in the inner life of a man. Dostoevsky, as if passing the external barriers, observes directly the psychological processes taking place in a man, and fixes them on paper…

Eça de Queirós in Portugal, similarly to Dostoevsky (just in procedure, no further comparison meant), also portrayed his reality, his culture’s reality, his compatriots’ and a period of time. He became eternal by portraying human mind’s reality through voices that overlay and are pronounced, becoming every so often either Portugal or the he himself.

4. Analysis

The novel is narrated by José Fernandes, the protagonist’s, Jacinto Tormes, best friend. The text is formed by the two characters’ distinct views on happiness. While narrating Jacinto’s crossing of two countries, Portugal and France, José constantly intervenes with descriptions and evaluations. His friend’s and his own attitudes gradually become clearer while he, as a narrator, composes Jacinto’s imaginary place and as an interlocutor in directly dialogues with the protagonist.

While living in Paris, Jacinto shows himself as someone in love with technology and incapable of living without urban life’s facilities. However, his inseparable friend and story narrator’s company gradually brings about another feature of his character: in returning to Portugal and country life he realizes that happiness is not in luxury, but in the country’s bucolic life. The Lusitanian fighting spirit and the author’s love for such land become clear when one observes Jacinto’s radical opinion changing upon realizing country life’s potential.

Nature’s defense does not assume a laudatory characteristic on the stillness and exiguity of Portugal’s country life in that moment. In fact, it occurs in order to enlarge the Lusitania spirit in its active and laborious feature. Both lusophony’s view – José Fernandes’s, that praises and regards it as synonym of accomplishment, and Jacinto Tormes’s, that regards it as old-fashioned and decadent – merge showing Portugal’s strength and the world diffusion of its culture. The narrative is an example of how the discourse resources may contribute to the construction of new meanings.

The use of adjectives employed bears criticism of costumes and the description of social values at the time. In raising the relation meaning/countermeaning through usage of adjectives, one has access to rich possibilities of expression and through them to a better integrated and advanced comprehension of an idea. In order words, the protagonist returns to his homeland with a new vision, more valuing and also enriched that also comprises a more exempt and absorbing evaluation of the environment customs that had temporality embraced him.

The adjectives are used to assign a new meaning to another term already endowed of meanings. On the other hand, the adjective inserts the reader into the production context as it stimulates the dialogue between him himself and the text through the stimuli of the interlocutor’s capacity of articulation and imagination. This term allows truth and meaningfulness “to the context but, above all, to the noun that follows the adjective and that pours in it a bit of its soul” (Lapa, 1998, p. 125, our translation). “Through the adjective, the speaker emotionally characterizes the being talked about; through the abstract noun highlights feeling, quality and state, presenting it with more enhancement, less tied to the being (…)” (Martins, 2012, p. 107, our translation).

Therefore, the process of adjective use is the semantic union between the proprieties the noun already has and the persuasive arsenal sustained by the characteristics carried by the adjectives. Such process induces the reader to a reflection where the narrated context is imagined, making it concrete in their imagination and inserting them in the work. The argumentative process makes the character’s voices and consciousnesses real in the interlocutor’s mind. The polyphonic construction is the ideal space for the adjective as an argumentative resource to carry all its argumentative potential in a clear and noticeable way.

Predication is the process of assigning a statement to something positioned as the subject. Whether the subject is a verbal or nominal action to whatever extent, even phrasal, it promotes a description or makes a comment. Hence, predication has the adjectivation nature, develops the narrative and makes the textual voices move as the characters’ consciousness components. It also has the benefit of engaging the reader in exciting and surprising interactions.

The analyses are composed of the narrative division in three distinct moments: the first displays Jacinto’s love for the metropolis – Paris, the second concentrates on the switching of this posture already under José Fernandes voice’s influence to a more contemporary view on happiness and the third blends both characters’ voices and show true happiness once they return to Portugal. These consciousnesses as the awareness if the times presented in the narrative [Time 1 (T1), Switching Time and Time 2 (T2)] are polyphonically linked and become clear through the use of adjectives and predication.

T1

This part of the narrative presents Jacinto inebriated by Paris’s charm and falling in love for all that is new. He is dependent on technology’s innovations and comfort. The metropolis is pictured as the sole possible source of happiness to the character. When the narrator describes this attitude, he presents an appraising tone perceived by the usage of adjectives in the protagonist’s voice when reported in his friend’s words on value judgment. Consequently, the reader feels that both have totally different opinions about such topic.

In the following text one can observe Jose Fernandes’s appraising narrative regarding his friend’s consciousness while describing his concept of happiness: “(…) a man can only be superlatively happy[1] when he is superlatively civilized.” (Queirós, 2008, p.7). The highlighted adjectives display the symbiosis between being happy and civilized, two adjectives that are only valuable once together, that is, they have their complete meaning at the moment they appear together in Jacinto’s consciousness and in the strength of his voice.

In another excerpt the narrator, through adjectives, describes how his friend’s consciousness works and lists what is considered to be civilized to him. However, every lexical choice grants the speech an appraising tone and proposes the merging of voices once that Jacinto’s consciousness only takes shape in José Fernandes’s appraising process, as he needs to analyze his friend’s chosen postures prior to narrating in order to attribute strength to the voice. “(…) Jacinto’s idea of Civilization was inseparable from the image of the City, an enormous City with all its vast organs in powerful working order.” (Queirós, 2008, p. 10) The use of the highlighted adjective indicates the metropolis’ dimension in Jacinto’s mind, but does not provide the description with reality, once José Fernandes neither agrees with it nor visualizes verisimilitude between it and Paris’ reality.

In the excerpt, José Fernandes refers to his friend as “my Prince”, predication that works as an epithet. Prince of Boa Ventura is the total expression of his esteem towards Jacinto and the acclamation of what he symbolizes to Portugal. Another character arises to emphasize all of the technological occurrences acquired at the two-store house and to show the strength such opulence holds in the narrative. “(the Countess de Trèves) was marveling at my super-civilized Prince’s sumptuous collection of machines and instruments.” (Queirós, 2008, p.50). There is a sequence of three positive adjectives that have their semantic fields joined by the part Jacinto’s consciousness that considered the mechanics of his residence his only source of happiness.

During Time 1, in which the metropolis is valued, there is also the depreciation of the mountain by Jacinto’s consciousness in the voice of José Fernandes, noticed through the adjectives implying how tedious the protagonist considers the country life to be. “And it seemed to him (Jacinto), too, that there was a kind of fickle melancholy about the forms and shyapes of certain inanimate things: the futile sprightly haste of streams, the bald rocks, the contorted trunks of trees, and the silly solemn muttering of leaves.” (Queirós, 2008, p.13). Although Fernandes’s narrative is faithful to Jacinto’s approaches, it is also distant, given that those thoughts do not belong to the narrator at any given moment.

Time of Switching

In this part of the story, Jacinto appears to be bored with the empty life of civilization. In José Fernandes’s narrative his voice and consciousness as a character acquire space and the strength of both voices becomes the same as their speeches begin to merge and the positions facing daily events start to match.

In the following excerpt, the narrator’s voice arises on its own. He does not describe as his friend thinks or acts, but evaluates the context where he lives and shares with his friend. His voice emerges unaccompanied and gathers persuasive strength through the chosen adjectives and adjectival phrases. “(…) in this (the City) highly unnatural creation (…) man seems a non-human creature, without beauty, strength, freedom, laughter or feeling(…)” (Queirós, 2008, p. 93) The adjectives possess a negative semantic charge and come in multiples, that is, there are six expressions used in the sequence that able to qualify, punctuating the reading and promoting persuasion. Besides, Jacinto and the reader when faced with such structure visualize a semantic unity composed by the sum of these adjectival phrases turning what was already bad into something worse.

The next excerpt points to Jacinto’s transition of attitude. The narrator describes his friend’s worldview no longer in a radical way, as he sees himself in doubt and the city as something negative and harmful. Such change is owing to the strength assigned to José Fernandes’s voice that becomes as much or more important that Jacinto’s at this point and he starts to speak for himself and for his friend. “Perhaps the City is just a perverse illusion!”(Queirós, 2008, p.94)

In this other excerpt, José Fernades’s voice is again free and with appraising strength. His consciousness now works for both postures, building in his friend’s voice, a new place, invading his imaginary and modifying his worldview.

(…)in the inconstant and skeptical City of Paris he was surrounded by ever active and ever faithful friends; Nº 202 was filled to bursting with comforts (…) and yet still he was sad. (…)his sadness – that gray hairshirt in which his soul was shrouded – came not from him, from Jacinto, but from Life, from the regrettable, disastrous fact of being alive! And thus the healthy, intelligent, wealthy, well-loved Jacinto slid into Pessimism. (Queirós, 2008, pp. 111, 112)

The last excerpt of this time of switching again indicates love for Portugal with its gentleness and kindness as homeland in José Fernandes’s voice. Now the focus is no longer on being in the metropolis as there are neither criticisms nor praises to Paris now and the story focus switches from the French city to Portugal and its appeals that start to be noticed by Jacinto and the reader, who is convinced, along with the main character, using the adjectives as an important argumentative resource to the text voices adaptation. “Ah, little mother Portugal, still so kind to her children!” (Queirós, 2008, p.119)

T2

In this last narrative moment, happiness becomes synonym of country life for both characters. Both voices and consciousness that would follow distinct paths now unite and converge to the same reasoning. Meaning and countermeaning converge and complement each other. The characters now use all knowledge and technological evolution acquired in Paris in favor of their homeland and find a third posture that mixes all the other voices to make Portugal their source of happiness.

The voices in this excerpt resonate together as José Fernandes narrates it with his and his friend’s consciousnesses. “And soon, in the face of the incomparable beauty of that blessed land, all our ills were forgotten!” (Queirós, 2008, p.149) The positive adjectives now characterize the Portuguese mountain and the narrator no longer drifts apart from the information. On the contrary, it makes it his unconscious portrait.

The union of voices is established in the following excerpt: “And may we stay here with you always, you welcoming, fertile, peaceful mountains, most blessed of all mountains!” (Queirós, 2008, p.159), in which the narrator’s voice emerges in the plural. The narrative’s external plurality of voices and the sequence of adjectives show that the love for the mountain is shared by both characters’ consciousnesses.

In this excerpt, the narrator describes his friend’s happiness in feeling as if he belongs to the country, is a product of the land so beloved by the two of them. “(…) a long, loud, healthy, genuine guffaw made me start awake and force open my heavy lids. It was Jacinto, sprawled in a chair (...)” (Queirós, 2008, p.183). The sequence of adjectives allows the semantic sum of their meanings. Jacinto’s laugh, that is, his happiness is characterized by the sum of all these positive characteristics and is now intrinsic to his voice and consciousness.

At last, the narrator inserts a metaphor, a figure of speech that consists on the internal comparison between one element, here Jacinto, and another, a tree. This comparison search for common elements that allow an interface between the chosen words. In the story, the choice of a tree was not in vain as Jacinto, once in love with technology, now surrenders to country life appeals and can therefore, be associated to it by the narrator who had active participation in his friend’s switching of consciousness. Such metaphor becomes more evident by the uses of the adjectives at times linked to the vegetables at others linked to human beings. “(…) that withered branch from the City (Jacinto) replanted in the mountains, had taken root, sucked up the humus from that inherited earth, created sap, set down more roots (…) and burst into flower – strong, serene, happy, beneficent, and noble, producing fruit and providing shade.” (Queirós, 2008, p.259)

The argumentative process at this point presents both characters’ voices that in turn are very close, so united that they represent the same consciousness and the same reason why they seek happiness and find it. The plot comes to an end and each character views are the result of everything that was confronted by them during the narrative.

Final remarks

Argumentation within a literary text follows many paths and this work attempted to produce a study regarding the argumentative construction of the relation between meaning and countermeaning that emerges in the work founded on polyphonic construction. The central element is the use of adjectives as it is the process by which the narrative can contribute with the meaning formation with depth and sophistication. The employed adjectives bear the characters’ voices in each assessment and we realize, in every description, the positioning of Jacinto and José Fernandes due to the direction the adjectives assign to the narrative. This argumentative resource deals with the costume criticism and the social values description at the time.

All of these promoters compound the Queirosian work and combined integrate a unique and characteristic language. The idea of countermeaning is seen as an outcome of such match: Jacinto, the protagonist, has before him a group of arguments that may lead to two distinct interpretations. In other words, the same situation during the whole context of the story generates double positive – negative reading; excitement – indifference, affection – rejection and other counterparts that persuade the reader to interact with the voice that conducts the text. In the end, the main character realizes that his country and village are his best reference of home and happiness. This posture was conducted through the text mainly by the use of adjectives contained in their present countermeaning. And this is the aspect one wished to achieve in this research.

The study of the argumentative elements and the formation of the countermeaning in Eça de Queirós’s narrative is, therefore, the uniqueness we attempted to grant the work. The novel is intended to be focused on association with the evaluation of such resources to facilitate the understanding the characterization of the habits met by the character in two different social contexts and compare them. As a result, it is also meant to get to know better how the writer uses argumentation as means of scrutinizing the urgencies of the early 20^th century society, marked by the never-ending search for new technologies.

Two views that, at first, are divergent but as the story unfolds merge and form a third, composed by the previous ones. This new conception of happiness also starts to belong to the reader, whereas the argumentative resources form the text so that this dialogue emerges from the work and settles in the imaginary place of the interlocutor.

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