SOURCE: “History as Prophecy in Camões's Os Lusíadas,” in Luso-Brazilian Review, Vol. 22, No. 2, Winter 1985, pp. 145-50.

[In this essay, Dixon argues that Camões' shaping of events in The Lusiads places da Gama's expedition at the pinnacle of Portugese history, and in so doing makes the poem itself the high point of the country's literary history.]

Few would disagree with the assertion that Camões's Os Lusíadas,¹ as history, is an extremely imaginative history, formed at least as much by the poet's mentality as it is by the events it records.² Yet the difference between Os Lusíadas and other, more properly “historical” records is one of degree, and not of kind. If we define history as discourse about past events rather than as the events themselves, then any history must bear the imaginative imprint of its narrator. The happenings of a particular time span are like a crude mass of stone, with no significant shape, and the historian is like a sculptor. The moment he decides that some facts are relevant to his account and others are not, he in effect begins chipping away at the stone of past events, imposing his own peculiar shape upon them.

Recent investigation into the nature of historical discourse suggests that history is essentially the telling of a story, and as such it is subject to some of the same imaginative constructs we find in fiction.³ The historian is apt to structure his narrative along the lines of the traditional poetic genres. For example, the same general set of facts may be related historically as a comedy, a tragedy, or an epic. Contrasting versions of the Portuguese discoveries provide us with a good case in point. Camões, obviously, constructed his history according to the plan of epic. Fernão Mendes Pinto, on the other hand, chose a satiric form of discourse with picaresque elements.⁴ The raw material of the events themselves, it seems, does not necessarily contain its own generic meaning. That meaning or shape is imposed upon it by the imagination of the narrator.⁵

Having explained this theoretical premise—that histories have a structure emerging from the imagination or from literary convention, rather than from the facts themselves—I wish to discuss the role of prophecy in creating such a structure in Camões's epic version of Portuguese history. I will attempt to show that the telling of certain portions of Portuguese history as prophecy plays a decisive role in subjecting the facts to a significant pattern.

The poetic voice in Camões's epic shows a curious mixture of omniscience and limitation. With respect to space, the poet sees all and knows all. He views not only the activities of the Portuguese sailors, but also those of the natives in Africa and India, and of the gods in their mythic domains. With respect to time, however, the poet is restricted to the point of view of Gama and his men. He narrates directly only the activities of Gama's expedition (from its starting point in medias res), or events in other locations contemporaneous with that expedition.⁶

Because of this limitation in temporal scope, the poet must resort to various recourses to broaden his narrative scope, to make the poem an epic of the Portuguese nation and not simply a song to a single hero. In order to present Portuguese history from its beginnings up to the voyage of Gama, Camões resorts to the technique of telling a history within a history. In Cantos III, IV, V and VIII, speeches by Vasco and Paulo da Gama, which present the great moments and persons constituting a Portuguese history before Gama, are embedded into the account of the expedition.

From the viewpoint of Camões and his contemporaries, there remains a significant period of the nation's history untold by the historians Vasco and Paulo. In order to include that portion of history which follows the first voyage to India, the poet creates several prophetic discourses. Jupiter comforts Venus with a view of Portuguese glory in the Orient (II; 44-55); Gama tells of a prophetic dream given to D. Manuel, predicting great discoveries and conquests (IV; 67-75); the “Velho do Restelo” warns of death and waste (IV; 94-104); Adamastor predicts maritime disasters (V; 41-48); and Tethys gives a detailed account of future feats of the Portuguese (X; 10-44, 50-73, 93-143). Because of these two distinct modes of narration—historic discourse proper and prophecy—Portuguese history in the poem is divided into two balanced but contrasting parts.

One of the artistic effects of telling history as prophecy, I believe, is the creation of a special sort of irony. I use this term in the specific sense it often has when we speak of drama, that is, referring to knowledge held by the audience, but denied the actors. In Os Lusíadas the actors hear the poem's great prophecies as predictions, and nothing else. The reader, however, has the privilege of being more modern, and therefore hears them as both prediction and accomplished fact. This blending of prophecy and history instills the prophetic utterances with authority and power. Our suspension of disbelief, which accepts the idea that privileged characters within the work may speak prophetically, blends with our historical consciousness, and we are convinced of the great accuracy and power of those who prophesy. All of this contributes to the sense of the marvelous and supernatural that pervades the poem.

A more significant effect of the use of prophecy in the work has to do with what prophecy does to shape or structure the main subject matter of the poem—Portuguese history. The fact that part of the history is told as history, and part as prophecy, divides the succession of events into two distinct stages, the dividing line being the voyage of Vasco da Gama. This splitting has a powerful effect upon the shaping of Portuguese history within the poem. We find an obvious analogy when we consider the shaping effect Christians have had upon world history by manipulating the way we count our years. The fact that we count our early years in descending order until we get to zero, and then count them in ascending order, cannot but place a great amount of emphasis on the year zero. The year of the advent of Christ emerges as the apex of recorded time. We call it the meridian of time, which implies culmination, zenith, or pivot. The Christian method of counting is essentially the same as Camões's method of recounting. In Os Lusíadas Camões changes history from a line into a vertex. At the meridian or apex of this historical vertex is Gama's voyage of discovery.

It is of course customary in epic poems to begin the account of the hero's action in the middle, in medias res. This practice holds true for Os Lusíadas but on more than one level. Considering the hero to be Vasco da Gama, we perceive that the action begins well after the turning point in Gama's V-shaped journey around the Cape of Good Hope. Considering the hero of the poem to be a more collective one, the Portuguese nation, we find that the record of the action likewise has its point of departure in medias res. Although Gama's voyage may not be the chronological middle of Portuguese history, it is the middle point in the sense of being the meridian between two modes of recounting all the rest of that history, and in the sense of being a point of departure for the same. All historical discourse in the poem, whether told as history or as prophecy, is stimulated by Gama's voyage. Gama makes the historical narration happen, in both of its complementary wings. The principle of in media res is therefore much more than a mere adornment or concession to convention in Os Lusíadas. Rather, it appears to be the structuring framework for the entire poem.⁷

I have referred to a splitting of Portuguese history in the work, that is, a division of historical discourse into two different modes, with Gama constituting the dividing line. It is fascinating to note that splitting figures prominently into the poem's imagery. Let us look at the first image of Vasco da Gama's ship at sea:

Já no largo Oceano navegavam,
As inquietas ondas apartando;
Os ventos brandamente respiravam,
Das naus as velas concavas inchando;
Da branca escuma os mares se mostravam
Cobertos, onde as proas vão cortando
As marítimas águas consagradas,
Que do gado de Próteo são cortadas;

(I; 19)

In this stanza Gama's ships “apartam as ondas” and “cortam as águas.” Such images of separating or cutting the seas are repeated over and over again in the poem. Vasco da Gama's ship has a “cortadora proa” (V; 37), and seems to split the ocean like a driving axe wherever it goes. This frequent splitting imagery in the description of the actual sea voyage harmonizes with the splitting that occurs in the poem's historical discourse. Just as Gama's ship cuts through and separates the seas, so also does his voyage slice through and divide historical discourse. The metaphor which presents itself here is that of a nation's course through history being similar to a ship's course through the sea. The equation between history and a sea voyage is made explicit in the fourth Canto, where Gama comments in his speech at Melinde on the calm following the tumultuous reign of D. Fernando:

Despois de procelosa tempestade,
Nocturna sombra e sibilante vento,
Traz a manhã serena claridade,
Esperança de porto e salvamento;
Aparta o Sol a negra escuridade,
Removendo o temor ao pensamento:
Assi no Reino forte aconteceu,
Despois que o rei Fernando faleceu.

(IV; 1)

The poem gives us justification, then, for comparing Portuguese history with a maritime voyage. But it is hard to think of just any sea voyage when we read Os Lusíadas; the preeminence of Vasco da Gama's journey practically demands that we give the metaphor a more specific dimension. If we understand Gama's voyage as a figure for the particular conception of Portuguese history presented in Camões's epic, then we have an entirely adequate image to concretize the relationship of Gama, history, and prophecy in the work: Vasco da Gama's pointed prow, cutting through the poem's historical discourse, history as history flowing off in its wake on the one side, and history as prophecy flowing off symmetrically on the other.

One of the most fascinating aspects of the poem's prophetic treatment of history is that the work includes itself in that treatment. By referring to itself, it actualizes Portuguese history to the maximum point, the point of its own writing, and goes just a little beyond that into the realm of legitimate prophecy. In Canto X, the poet refers to his own epic poem, being salvaged from a shipwreck in the Mekong delta:

Este [rio] receberá, plácido e brando,
No seu regaço o canto que molhado
Vem do naufrágio triste e miserando,
Dos procelosos baxos escapado,
Das fomes, dos perigos grandes, quando
Será o injusto mando executado
Naquele cuja lira sonorosa
Será mais afamada que ditosa.

(X; 128)

The reference here to a “lira afamada” seems to contain a real prophecy, a prediction that the poet's works, of which his epic is certainly not a negligible part, will achieve a certain fame. On this point, Camões crosses the threshold between telling the past in the guise of prophecy, and authentically foretelling the future. It would seem that in the case of Os Lusíadas, we have here a self-fulfilling prophecy. As has been suggested, the poem imposes a particular shape upon Portuguese history, so that the voyage of Vasco da Gama achieves the status of the history's pinnacle. This having been established, an important factor to take into account is this: through metaphor, the poet creates an association or equivalence between Gama's journey and the creation of his own epic. The stanza just read presents the image of the manuscript itself, traveling over the sea, experiencing the pitfalls of maritime voyage, and arriving ashore a “canto molhado.” Here is a metonymic figure, associating the poem with a sea journey. This association is strengthened by metaphor as well, as in this invocation by the poet to his muses:

                                                                                … Mas oh, cego
Eu, que cometo insano e temerário,
Sem vós, Ninfas do Tejo e do Mondego,
Por cimanho tão árduo, longo e vário!
Vosso favor invoco, que navego
Por alto mar, com vento tão contrário,
Que, se não me ajudais, hei grando medo
Que o meu fraco batel se alague cedo.

(VII; 78)

Clearly this passage establishes a semantic equivalence between a sea voyage and the writing of the poem at hand.⁸ Any sea voyage described in this poem must inevitably be associated with that of Gama. Camões's poem thus is linked with Gama's travels not just by the obvious factor of a story's intimate relation with its main subject matter. It is connected metaphorically as well, through the motif of the sea journey.

In elevating Gama's explorations to the pinnacle of Portuguese history, the poem elevates itself as well. The nation's history is shaped by the poem, so that the discoveries, in particular those of Gama, form the meridian or apex. If the Portuguese people still perceive their history in this shape, we need look no further than Camões to explain it. At the same time, it is no accident that Portuguese literary history may seem isomorphic with this pattern of the vertex. If we tend to establish a meridian in Portuguese literary history, to speak of literature in two main periods, before and after Camões, an important justification may be found in Os Lusíadas itself. The Camonian epic inextricably binds history with literature, and more specifically, binds itself to Vasco da Gama. By making Gama's expedition preeminent in Portuguese history, it prefigures its own preeminence as well.

Notes

1. Luís de Camões, Os Lusíadas, ed. Frank Pierce (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973). All further references to this work appear parenthetically in the text, by number of canto and stanza.

2. See Thomas R. Hart, “The Idea of History in Camões's Lusiads,” Ocidente, XXXVI (1972), pp. 83-97. Hart's thesis is that Camões shapes his history to exemplify his principal poetic themes.

3. See Hayden White, The Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), 101-20.

4. Some disagreement exists as to the extent to which Peregrinação is a picaresque work. See, for example, António José Saraiva and Oscar Lopes, História da literatura portuguesa, 7th ed. (Porto: Porto Editora, n.d.), pp. 317-18; Rebecca Catz, A sátira social de Fernão Mendes Pinto (Lisboa: Prelo, 1979), pp. 93-96; and Ulla M. Trullemans, Huellas de la picaresca en Portugal (Madrid: Insula, 1968), pp. 77-125.

5. It should be admitted that there are those who maintain that the facts of the Portuguese discoveries themselves have an epic dimension, and that a Portuguese epic poem was an almost inevitable outcome thereof. See, for example, A. Pedrosa Veríssimo, “Realidade e mito em ‘Os Lusíadas,’” Ocidente, LXXXIII (1972), p. 329; and Norwood H. Andrews, Jr., “An Essay on Camões's Concept of the Epic,” Revista de Letras, 3 (1962), pp. 64-65.

6. See Thomas R. Hart, “The Author's Voice in The Lusiads,” Hispanic Review, XLIV (1976), pp. 48-49.

7. See Pierce's introduction, p. xxiv, in the edition cited.

8. Ronald W. Sousa calls attention to the importance of this metaphor in “Os Lusíadas: voz poética/leitura,” Estudos Ibero-Americanos, VI (1980), pp. 68-69. For a general discussion of the convention of maritime metaphores, see Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard R. Trask (New York: Harper & Row, 1953), pp. 128-30.