“Pois dize tu a El-Rei, …”: Estética de conversação e linguagem arcaizante em A Ilustre Casa de Ramires

Abstract

This paper will analyze the provincial conversational culture in A Ilustre Casa de Ramires, in which the nobleman Gonçalo Ramires and André Cavaleiro, the dandy politician from Oliveira, stand out. In the face of dilettantism and conversation, the attempt to recover the word as a call to action ends up immersing oneself in an idealized medieval past, in an archaic language. In Gonçalo’s advances and retreats when writing the novel A Torre de D. Ramires, we can see – in a way that is not devoid of self-irony – the dilemma of an Eça who wants to distance himself from the profile of a dandy-writer, seeking a way out of national decadence. This constitutes not only an ethical-moral problem, but also a discursive one. However, A Ilustre Casa de Ramires does not manage to overcome conversation as happens in A Cidade e as Serras through Socratic dialogue and a project of (re)carnivalization.