Para uma história da Civilização: a polarização da mesa entre a cidade e o campo

After publishing the short story “Civilização” in 1892, Eça de Queirós will spend the last years of his life engaged in the drastic refoundation of the brief narrative in a novelistic work of greater estrus, conceived as part of a vast fictional collection of other short fantasistic narratives. In the tormented process of recreation, improvement, and systematic amendments, which will result in posthumous publication, the narrative will appear articulated not only on identical diegetic referents, but also on the same essential thesis (that of the supremacy of civilization over nature), antithesis (accidental entry into the space of nature), and synthesis (nature reconciles man with life). From the simplified binomial of the plot, between the materialistic dehumanization of the City-Civilization, and the redemptive spirituality of the MountainNature, both narratives are enriched by exceptional stylistic-symbolic potentialities, to which thematic references to the food and gastronomic context (already noted by literary criticism as an obsidian motif in the Queirosian imagination) strongly contribute. In the light of this peculiar polarized expressive framework
− the pleasures of the table and infarction − we intend to comparatively revisit the Queirosian narratives “Civilização” and A Cidade e as Serras, in order to recover the cultural memories of Classical Antiquity and its survival in the symbolic imaginary of the West.