SOURCE: “Alabaster and Gold: A Study of Dialectics in Os Lusíadas,” in Luso-Brazilian Review, Vol. 17, No. 2, Winter 1980, pp. 199-206.

[In this essay, Jackson maintains that in The Lusiads, Camões establishes “dialetics” between such oppositions as Occident/Orient, sacred/profane and history/prophecy. Rather than creating ambiguity, he argues, these dualities express the power of myth and metaphor to create unity.]

Dialectics, in the sense of the nature of logical argumentation, although conveyed through poetic metonym or metaphor, has been perceived as having a central role in the poetic art of Camões. In an approach to Camões' lyric poetry published in Lisbon in 1951, Jorge de Sena used the term “dialectic” in reference to a philosophical or aesthetic world view as elaborated in certain sonnets and songs.¹ By “dialectic” Sena understood a fragmented vision of the world in which conflicting impulses undermined any harmony that might have resulted from either a philosophical balance or fusion. Such a scheme of opposites has been noted in Os Lusíadas even by readers whose acquaintance with Camões as a literary figure had been achieved solely through a comparative context. C. W. Bowra singles out conflicting elements in Os Lusíadas in the realms of mythology, religion, history, adventure, and aesthetics:

He is a Humanist even with his contradictions, in his association of a Pagan mythology with a Christian outlook, in his conflicting feelings about war and empire, in his love of home and his desire for adventure, in his appreciation of pleasure and the demands of his heroic outlook.²

A. Bartlett Giamatti encountered oppositions or extremes in his comparative analysis of the “ilha namorada” as a Renaissance garden: “Like the gardens of the Italian epics, this garden indicates what is real as opposed to illusory, true as opposed to false; and it also tells us something about the relationship of love to duty, pleasure to honor.”³ The extremes employed in Os Lusíadas, however, are not meant to stand only as concepts to be balanced, judged, or analyzed; rather they are metaphorical and aesthetic, involved in the special paradox typical of Camões' dialectics through which each extreme by its own existence affirms its opposite and thus calls its own nature into question. One of the traditional complaints against Os Lusíadas by readers of the epic has been concerned with the contradictions or conflicts perceived in his dialectics. Such a view is found in Thomas Greene's comment in relation to Camões' use of Pagan mythology and Christian theme: “The poem's cosmic confusion, the result of introducing pagan gods into a professedly Christian work, is the most naive of its faults and has attracted a great deal of critical attack. …”⁴ That Greene has based his comment on a literal and surface reading of Camões is perhaps evidenced by his characterization of the epic's animating themes as “imperialism and nationalism” (p. 220), and by his unwillingness to consider Camões as a writer of a particular time and as continuer of a certain tradition, in terms of Sena's description of Mannerist dialectics. Yet Greene does comment that “the poem is stronger for its ambivalences,” and like Giamatti sees in the garden episode the author's intent “to resolve whatever dialectical ambivalences had earlier emerged” (p. 229). The role of such ambivalences leads Greene to an appreciation of the paradox in Camões' style, here considered important because of the interplay between the adventure which enriched Camões' country and its actors while at the same time impoverishing them both. Greene writes:

It is immensely to his credit that he found room in his poem for this denial of Promethean heroism. … For the very denial enlarges the heroism and the shadows it casts endow the action with a plastic relief. Thus Os Lusíadas is a poem which turns back upon itself.

(pp. 230-231)

Giamatti furthers consideration of dialectical ambivalences in his treatment of the garden episode by interpreting its incongruencies as an intentional stylistic method:

The extremes of the poem find their most forthright expression in the island garden, and it is typical of Camoens' whole method that the most delightful and pagan episode should be made the source and pointer for the dominant Christian, historical theme.

(p. 215)

In a larger step, considering Camões' dialectic as consonant with Renaissance literary forms, Giamatti classifies the age stylistically as one of inherent opposing impulses: “… The ambiguous nature of the gardens represents the conflicting forces at the center of these Renaissance poems, the conflicts between classical heritage and Christian culture, between love and duty, woman and God, illusion and reality” (p. 6). In a similar and simpler statement, Bowra considers Camões' “classical references and reminiscences [to be] his tribute to Latin civilization” (p. 102). In terms of Camões' dialectics, one may conclude that he is not dealing with antitheses at all. Rather he is attempting to fuse experience into a unity, despite the conflicting tendencies of experience observed, through, on the one hand, a form of intense paradox (in which the conflicting impulses reinforce and annul each other) and on the other a personal dialectic of philosophical or aesthetic dimensions which forms through such a complex world view an aesthetic structure, both formal and logical, to serve as a basis for his art.

Jorge de Sena, in his essay “Maneirismo e Barroquismo na Poesia Portuguesa dos Séculos XVI e XVII,” provides a thorough explanation of Camões' confrontation with the dialectics of his life and art as the concomitant development of an individual consciousness and significant literary structure committed to a resolution, although paradoxical, of the conflicts of his age.⁵ For Sena, these conflicts are those of Mannerism, understood to result when stylistic desequilibrium yields to formation of individualized consciousnesses. In terms of dialectics, the Mannerist mentality would be one of vital reality and painful irony: “To be or not to be.”

… é Camões ‘junto de um seco, fero, estéril monte’ como a paisagem de Toledo do Greco; é Hamlet meditando uma ontologia psicologística; é John Donne, tão eròticamente como João da Cruz, chorando à margem dos rios ‘que vão de Babilónia a Sião;’ é Montaigne discreteando sobre a morte; é a loucura heróica de Don Quixote [e] de Camões. …

(p. 36)

These Mannerist artists or works were deprived the Baroque sense of harmony between concept and form, the condition of “aesthetic object” that would neutralize literarily the existential pain of their origin. In terms of outlook, Sena defines the Mannerist position as that of “subjectivity pressed to the limits of its own object,” or again as “the terrible liberty of a spirit facing itself,” without resorting to literary devices as solutions. To the contrary, it was precisely from the dialectic of contradictions that Camões would form both a style and an aesthetic vision. Sena comments on this particular generative relationship between philosophy and poetry:

Há, sim, uma dialética entre a realidade vital e a lição intelectual extratável dela … cuja dialética se desenvolve, nas mais sutis e dolorosas contradições, na esplêndida harmonia estilística.

(p. 46)

It is, then, within the spirit of Mannerism that Camões is determined to form meaningful literary structures, often within his own arithmetic and occult vision of history, that are in Sena's terms called on to mean something more than the meaning of the text itself: “É [a estrutura] ela mesma o mais decisivo elemento constitutivo desse sentido último. …” In a similar sense, a study of Os Lusíadas reveals a dialectical fabric whose meaning in terms of Camões' literary and aesthetic world view is more than the specific content or meaning of the epic at any one level; rather, the poet's intentions are sought in the structural solutions of the work itself, such as the structure of the island garden which Giamatti chose as especially significant.

Camões' personal dialectic is perhaps best extracted from his lyric poetry, particularly the “philosophical” sonnets, many composed during his seventeen-year Asian exile. Within his life vision, the pure “amor” and “esperança” through which he conceives a meaning to experience are perpetually countered by “destino,” “fortuna,” or “desamor,” the inner world denied by the outer. In the vacuum left by these conflicting impulses, Camões conceived of a mental state in which he no longer would feel what he feels, but air his complaints through ironic lyrics which themselves express the contrary of what they seem or desire: “Sobre os rios que vão por Babilonia me achei.” Through a fusion of opposing tendencies, Camões arrives at an “estranha condição,” or estrangement, in which “amor” and other existential terms generate their contraries through paradox: “Amor é um fogo que arde sem se ver … tão contrário a si é o mesmo amor.” Yet, unwilling to accept paradox as the inescapable arm of destiny and logically doubting the inevitability of his own lamentable condition of the basis of the contradictory nature of reality itself, Camões conceived of an undefinable essence in experience, “um não sei quê, que nasce não sei onde, vem não sei como, e dói não sei por quê,” which makes possible the transcendence of his own dialectic through this mystical and logical, although ultimately aesthetic, step. Camões transmutes his dialectic by comprehending in the tension of opposites a fertile ground for the enactment of a heroic and epic drama, in which the artist adapts an existential, analytical position in the face of the occult, contradictory nature of reality. In a further step, Camões objectifies his own dialectic, transforming the memory of experience into the experience of memory, and calls all his conclusions into doubt because they too are elements of further dialectics. What remains as a nucleus is the experience of writing itself, “Vinde cá meu tão certo secretário …,” in terms of an aesthetic structuring of his world vision, the certainty of the text as a meaningful structure. Thus Camões could carry his epic Os Lusíadas outside the realms of history, religion, or ethics while developing his themes in exactly those areas; if the frame is dialectical, it would be within Camões' artful manipulation of it that his aesthetic be sought, in terms of a complete poetic and existential vision of language and reality.

Within this context, Os Lusíadas may be viewed as a work constructed with the ambivalences noted by Greene employed as its content, exploiting the conflicting forces, as listed by Bowra and Giamatti, as surface content and dramatic theme: the classical and the Christian, the individual and the historical, the Humanistic and the adventurous. The epic is framed between pairs of worlds in creative tension: Occident and Orient, Heaven and Earth, sea and air—and between abstractions that also frame the epic content—staying and going, being and doing, home and exile, pleasure and suffering, knowing and finding, truth and illusion, and even writing and declaiming. Camões' experience placed him as well between two worlds, the Latin civilization of Portugal and Europe and the older cultures of India and East Asia, whose contact the poem celebrates. In terms of the poet's own dialectic, such conflicting surface forces in Os Lusíadas could be interpreted as ambivalences which invoke and affirm their opposites, leading toward an aesthetic structure in which the experience of writing itself provides an answer, or pleasure, to the contradictory nature of reality as witnessed through adventure. As Bowra writes: “… Camões' concern is not intellectual but aesthetic; his gods and goddesses come from poetry” (p. 110). Examples drawn from the frame of the epic and its interior worlds of history, religion, ethics, and poetics can serve to illustrate the poet's exploitation of dialectical tension and its consequent fusion into a unified treatment via Mannerist aesthetics.

From the religious standpoint, this “professedly Christian epic” is traditionally said to celebrate the propagation of Christianity as one of the themes of European expansion; indeed, conflict with Moslems colors Vasco da Gama's voyage. Yet the ambiguous figure Monçaide complicates the dialectic: He speaks in Spanish, has knowledge of Portugal, and could symbolize the contacts with India that had characterized European civilization since the ancient world but whose roots had been obscured. Francis Rogers reminds us in The Quest for Eastern Christians⁶ that Nestorian and Syro-Malabar Christians had been active in India since the first century, a situation with which Camões undoubtedly was acquainted in detail, given the importance of St. Thomas's apostolate in Canto X. The religious dimensions of the arrival of Christianity to India with Gama are thus restored to historical perspective as a re-contact, even if the spiritual importance lent to the new infusion of faith is undiminished.

From a literary perspective, although Portuguese history is extolled throughout the epic, there is some evidence that the re-contact with India, as the recovery of lost roots, is upheld as a Utopian fusion of the Occident-Orient split. In Canto III Camões refers to an “idade de ferro,” characteristic of Europe and of the principle of its historical reality, and to an “idade de ouro,” as representing Asia in the sense of an ideal and the human theme of love as transformed conquest. Camões more than once characterizes the Portuguese as bellicose, “… o esforço e ousadia / Dos belicosos peitos que em si cria,” and militant, “Vês Europa Cristâ, mais alta e clara / Que as outras em polícia e fortaleza.” In the “Velho do Restelo” episode, the poet voices a humanistic argument against the expansionist mentality, although one suspects not against the fruits resulting from the successful fusion of opposites in the island garden, the latter standing as an apotheosis of the former and possible aesthetic resolution to the old man's complaints:

Que promessas de reinos e de minas
De ouro, que lhe farás tão facilmente? …
Idade de Ouro, tanto te privou
Que na de ferro e de armas te deitou …

(Canto IV, 97, 98)

The dialectic is resolved in the pleasures of Venus' island, the transmutation of the sailors' “extranha condição.”

In the “Inês de Castro” episode, Camões perhaps most clearly presents the paradox of his dialectic. Through love, which arms man's desires and thereby insures his captivity, a condition ensues of which the captive is helplessly and painfully aware:

Mas quem pode livrar-se, porventura,
Dos laços que Amor arma brandamente
Entre as rosas e a neve humana pura,
O ouro e o alabastro transparente?
Quem … o coração converte … em desejo aceso?

(Canto III, 142)

If love is ambivalent, so then the distinction between freedom and slavery is obscured; what remains certain is the vital contradiction, the poet's pain of awareness, his “desejo aceso.” In poetic images, Camões contrasts symbols of love and value, “rosas, ouro,” with the desired human form, “a neve humana pura, o alabastro transparente,” of Inês de Castro:

No colo de alabastro, que sustinha
As obras com que Amor matou de amores
Aquele que despois a fez Rainha.

(Canto III, 132)

Rogers's book provides another vivid example of such imagery in reproducing Andrea da Barberino's 1473 description of the throne of Prester John, “two columns of solid gold … four walls of alabaster …,” a possible poetic link between the human desire for love and adventure and the quest for religious roots in Ethiopia or India.⁷ Such a union of imagery between a major religious quest of Renaissance Europe and a dialectic of Os Lusíadas would suggest the transformation of the historical into the personal, of suffering and adventure into pleasure and delight, and of experience into art.

What has been termed the experience of memory, after Camões' reconstruction of the epic's themes, provides a key to a structural solution for the global meaning of Os Lusíadas. This formulation of structural meaning is based on the use of twos and threes, that is, the dialectic of extremes and their resolution, by which the dialectical tension finds a resolution in a tertiary unity in the text. It seems possible in accordance with the arquitectural ingredients of the epic (that is, narrated history, classical mythology, the description of the voyage, prophecies, and incursions of the poet himself) to posit a structure linking each two cantos: I-II, III-IV, V-VI, VII-VIII, IX-X. These are naturally linked because of similar content, revealing five large structural units supported by the poem's theme. For example, Cantos I and II are characterized by the intervention of the gods in the voyage around Africa. In the second pair, III and IV, Gama narrates the history of Portugal to the king of Melinde, from its origins to the departure of the fleet for India. The third pair, V and VI, reintroduce the gods and their prophecies, with the narration of the continuation of the voyage and its dangers as background. In Cantos VII and VIII, there are descriptions of India and its cultures presented by Paulo da Gama in a historical-ethnographical context. The poem closes with the final pair, Cantos IX and X, with the return of the gods, led by Venus and Tethys, in a philosophical and metaphoric synthesis of the main threads of the epic, elaborated in the “island of love,” “miniature of the universe,” and “St. Thomas” episodes. Thus, the architectural elements form meaningful thematic units in each group of two cantos.

One can observe in these structures of two internal oppositions, the dualities that inject an impulse and dynamism to the work. Subordinate to the encompassing thematic dialectic, whether it be viewed as Occident-Orient, expansionist adventurism-traditional humanism, there are dualities corresponding to each level and element of the poem, such as the sacred and the profane, good and evil, faith and blasphemy, history and prophecy. This dynamics is what creates drama out of the epic and historical theme. At the same time, Cantos III-IV and VII-VIII contain structurally almost all the historical and cultural material, strictly speaking, balanced between Vasco's narration and his brother Paulo's. In the first case, the history of Portugal is narrated in retrospect and, in the second, a firsthand description of the customs and peoples of India is given. With these two pairs of cantos thus united, a larger structural link is formed in terms of twos, which is internal in Os Lusíadas. This duality in the poem also symbolizes the confrontation of classical, religious, and cultural forces, tied to the West, with Asia. These forces support an allegorical and philosophical interpretation of history and lead to a further structural solution. Through the passage from the historical to the philosophical via dualities, one may perceive in the architectural arrangement of the cantos a transition from these structures of two to one structure of three, which in itself symbolizes the surpassing of thematic conflicts in the ludic celebration among gods, men, and history.

In such a large Camonian synthesis, three pairs of cantos are distinguished, I-II, V-VI, IX-X, which are similar because of their structural content, controlled by the gods and their prophecies. These three pairs could be considered external, and control the epic's structure. Thus, the “arquitetura significante”—the meaning given to structure—in terms of threes amounts to the resolution of Camonian dialectics in the supremacy of philosophy, metaphor, and the experience of memory, structurally illustrated by the dominant position of the three pairs of cantos. In summary, such a scheme comprehends three pairs of cantos linked by mythical, philosophical content and two internal pairs linked through narration of the historical theme.

This structural scheme has the advantage of underlining the importance of the last pair of cantos in the resolution of the dualistic tensions of the work, interpreting thematic oppositions as developed in the surface content as being almost always ironic or false in the poet's view of art. Thus Camões objectifies the content of the poem further, as he had done through short interventions at the end of several cantos, now in an embracing superstructure emphasizing the superior powers of myth, metaphor, and the difficult unity of his world view. The departure and return of Vasco da Gama close a cycle in which the actors themselves in the epic can discover the true nature of their culture and history by contrast and perspective, led by the gods beyond their civilization to the epic's culminating point, which symbolizes understanding of the universe as seen in miniature and of the idea of happiness and delight as an end of human pursuits. Through such a structural unity in Os Lusíadas, Camões creates an interpretative level in his epic, within and beyond dialectics, expressing an aesthetic architecture of themes and ideas.

Notes

1. Jorge de Sena, A poesia de Camões: ensaio de reveļͣcao da dialética camoniana (Lisboa, 1951).

2. C. W. Bowra, From Vergil to Milton (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1967), p. 138.

3. A. Bartlett Giamatti, The Earthly Paradise and the Renaissance Epic (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966), p. 225.

4. Thomas Greene, The Descent from Heaven: A Study in Epic Continuity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975), p. 225.

5. Jorge de Sena, “Maneirismo e Barroquismo na Poesia Portuguesa dos Séculos XVI e XVII,” in Luso-Brazilian Review (1965), pp. 29-53.

6. Francis M. Rogers, The Quest for Eastern Christians: Travels and Rumor in the Age of Discovery (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1962).

7. Rogers, p. 96.