Fradiquices em terras paroaras: a circulação de prosas embrionárias de cartas de Fradique Mendes n’ A Província do Pará

Abstract

Carlos Fradique Mendes is the result of Eça de Queirós, Antero de Quental and Jaime Batgalha Reis’ collective creation. The innovative portuguese author emerged in A Revolução de Setembro’s pages in 1869; years later Eça de Queirós appropriates the character and creates for him a biography, compiles his remaining private letters and publishes the book entitled A Correspondência de Fradique Mendes. However, the first writings that compose Fradique’s biography, as well as the first letters, are disclosed in Rio’s newspaper Gazeta de Notícias. After the Gazeta´s publication, the portuguese author begins, in a fragmented fashion, to publish them in the portuguese magazine Revista de Portugal. In 1892, when the magazine ended its activities, Eça wrote some articles and proses for the Rio newspaper and four more letters, two of these under the signature of Fradique Mendes. Both the epistolary and narrative prose and the article published in Rio de Janeiro were reproduced in the pages of the Pará’s sheet A Província do Pará. With the project of publication of the book the prose were reformulated and transformed into letters. The purpose of this research is to present how the process of rewriting undergone by the prose and embryonic articles published in A Província do Pará was carried out and how the interventions are conveyed to fit the writings to Fradique Mendes’ thoughts. We analyze the transformations of the narrative and epistolary prose, as well as of the articles’, starting from the change of support, the reorganizations of the paragraphs, the adaptation of the writings to the style of Fradique and the transposition to another genre. Thus, we focus on understanding how the Portuguese author builds the Fradiquian personality, based on the first Fradique Mendes and the form that he transforms a character into an ideal of a civilized man. These proses and articles reused to compose the letters of Fradique Mendes and that circulated in the Pará’s newspaper ratify the strong Portuguese presence in Nineteenth Century’s Belém. This study contributes to the researches on the circulation and reception of Eça de Queirós in the capital of Pará and Brazil, as well as the circulation of fiction in periodicals in the 19th century.