Garrett's Camoes.

I should start by mentioning that I am not a 'garrettiana' (a Garrett specialist) in the sense that one might be said to be a 'pessoana' (a Pessoa specialist). I am not sufficiently acquainted with Almeida Garrett's extensive euvre, which spreads across the most diverse genres and touches upon the most diverse of topics, to be able to say that I feel completely and utterly comfortable when speaking about it. Garrett was a prolific and inimitable writer, unique, like Pessoa, who lived in a complicated century, which influenced and pervaded everything he wrote. Thus, in Garrett we have a good example of how it is impossible to speak of an author's work without immediately feeling the presence of the time in which it fits, the age of writing also demanding the composition of reflections about it and commentaries on it.

I wrote this paper with the idea that one can only learn to like a work, an author or an age more through contributing, even if only modestly, in some small way towards knowledge about it. (1) It is in this way that my words should be understood and I hope one day to be able to proceed further with this project in the wake of a dialogue with those who are better informed and better read than me about this material.

I should start, then, by explaining my reason for choosing the poem Camoes as the object of examination. It would be equally as stimulating for me to tackle Catao, Frei Luis de Sousa, Viagens na Minha Terra, the poems collected in Flores sem Fruto and Folhas Caidas, or even a text like Portugal na balanca da Europa, which is not, strictly speaking, literature. But it just so happens that because we are celebrating the bicentenary of Garrett's birth, the choice of one poem from amongst all these works became immediately obvious to me: the poem whose title constitutes the name of another great poet (Camoes) for whom public commemorations are organized on a regular basis. It is enough to remember that in Portugal 10 June is an obligatory national holiday, because it is the day on which Camoes is celebrated, thus associating his name with Portugal and the Portuguese communities around the world. Garrett does not possess the mythical status of Camoes, but whoever thinks of Camoes from a patriotic and nationalistic perspective cannot help thinking of Garrett as being partly responsible for the mythical status which Camoes has acquired in the modern Portuguese imagination. His poem Camoes helps us to see why. As Eduardo Lourenco explains in his now classic essay, 'Da literatura como interpretacao de Portugal', (2) by writing Camoes and treating his subject as his double, Garrett questions the idea of Portugal as no longer an abstract and humanistically universal entity, but as an historical and moral reality: 'uma patria a ser feita e nao apenas ja feita', therefore, a reality susceptible of being transformed by any citizen endowed with a civic consciousness. For the first time the relationship between individual and country is problematized in a modern sense in literary terms. But before I proceed with this idea, which is very interesting in terms of perceiving the novelty of the poem at the time it was written, it is worth remembering that it was not only Garrett who contributed to the public glorification of the figure of Camoes. The Romantic period in Portugal, which simmered with patriotic ardour, abounds with homages to the poet. They took place one after another at unprecedented speed and in the most diverse forms, from the publication of a special edition of Os Lusiadas by the Morgado de Mateus in 1817, to the composition of a 'Missa de Requiem' by Domingos Bontempo, and the exhibition of a painting by Domingos Sequeira representing A Morte de Camoes, on show in the Salon in Paris in 1824. It is also noteworthy that of all the nineteenth-century public commemorations of the poet, the most famous ones were held in 1880 to mark the tricentenary of his death, and the most interesting thing is that it is still Garrett who is sought out when one tries to identify the paternity (or legitimacy, if we can use this term) of those vehement proofs of public acclaim. Yet, the ideological reasons behind these commemorations (the opportunity to attack the monarchy) are not quite the same as those which, at the dawn of the nineteenth century, marked Garrett's generation. This happens partly because he was the one who led the way, in the Portuguese arts, in the consecration of the figure of Camoes as a symbol of national unity.

Therefore, because it was written at a moment when liberty had been lost (the time of the emergence of anti-liberal movements which put an end to the constitutionalism of 1820), and because it was written by a politically committed poet who, when he saw himself deprived of liberty, was forced into exile, Garrett's Camoes can be read as a romantic manifesto of a crisis in nationality. In relation to all the other poetic texts about Portugal written between the end of the first quarter of the nineteenth century and 1934 (the year Pessoa's Mensagem was published), it became the seminal text of the country's modern nationalistic imagination. In other words, none of these other texts can be totally understood without reference to Garrett's Camoes. So, we can describe the poem as a romantic manifesto of a crisis in nationality. Romantic. The adjective is important because Camoes has been seen as the text which introduced Romanticism to Portugal, a cliche which I am not going to spend any time discussing here, but because when reading the poem it is impossible not to be sensitive to the novelty of its hybridity, its stylistic eclecticism, its imperfections and irregularities, especially if we think of the aesthetic demands of the neoclassical canon still applicable at the time it was composed and without forgetting Garrett's own arcadian training. Garrett himself was aware of his innovation when he said, talking about the subject of the poem: 'Porventura me criticarao a novidade de fazer um poema assunto de outro: sei que sou o primeiro que me atrevo a isso; mas se me sair bem, nao que desmereca das letras porque inovei um genero'. (3) And, actually, it did turn out well, because the poem was published four times in its author's lifetime: after the first edition in 1825, there was a second in 1839, a third in 1844 and a fourth in 1854 (the year of Garrett's death). Nor was it belittled by the arts, because the text is indeed innovative, not only from the point of view of genre, as Garrett judged, but in many other ways. It is innovative in its diction, which tries to be modern (in its use of dialogue and direct discourse) without relinquishing an assumed and very conscious arcadianism; in its structure, which is of the romantic type but which makes use of the classical mould of the epic poem (Camoes' return to his homeland recalls that of other classical heroes, that of Ulysses to his native Ithaca and that of Aeneas to Italy, more specifically to the region of Lazio, to found a new nation there); and in its nationalistic message the poem is also strongly innovative, since contrary to what one would expect from an epic text, where the figure of the hero is exalted, Camoes comes out of Garrett's poem diminished and totally identified with a weakened, destroyed, emaciated and enfeebled Portugal. In fact, Camoes dies in the poem (unlike the other classical heroes), his death coinciding with the moment when Portugal loses its liberty after the disastrous battle of Alcacer-Quibir; in other words, at the moment when his country dies too:

   Os olhos turvos para o ceu levanta;
   E ja no arranco extremo:--'Patria, ao menos
   Juntos morremos ...'. E expirou coa patria. (4)

Therefore Garrett, by making both deaths converge, identifies Camoes with a Portugal that no longer exists and which one can only long for nostalgically. Both Camoes and Portugal, identified with each other through the figure of death, symbolize absence and this idea throws light on the meaning of the initial lines of the poem:

   Saudade! Gosto amargo de infelizes,
   Delicioso pungir de acerbo espinho,
   Que me estas repassando o intimo peito
   (...)
   (...) Vem (...)
   A alma buscar-me que por ti suspira. (5)

These lines summon up 'saudade' (the feeling of suffering and pleasure for that which has been lost) fulfilling, in the place where they appear, the role reserved for what, in the epic poem, would be the 'invocation'. At the same time, they anticipate the final feeling every Portuguese reader will be forced to face upon closing the book: the longing and nostalgia for an ideal Portugal of which Camoes, as both poet and soldier was, in the past, the real builder.

It has always seemed to me that what is best about the nationalistic nature of Portuguese Romanticism becomes indelibly marked by this feeling of absence (the absence of a greater good), by the feeling of loss and waiting. The absence of a greater good, first, then absence pure and simple. Therefore I would like to point out here a possible affinity between this Garrettian saudade (aiming at the absence of the ideal country symbolized by Camoes) and Pessoa's epic exhortation 'E a Hora!' from the last poem of Mensagem (apparently demanding the fulfillment of this absence, that is, the repositioning of Portugal at the highest point of its historical existence). These seem to me to be two ways of recording a container without content, two ways of saying that at the present moment Portugal lacks an ideal and, at the same time, two ways of confirming the need for its repositioning (the repositioning of that ideal).

If this is the meaning of the two poems, then there is a curious coincidence in purpose between them to be explored. It could be said that Camoes and Mensagem both conform to the same project of romantic utopianism, in as far as this concept signifies belief in a place and a time where perfection is possible. But the utopianism of the former poem is situated at the dawn of Romanticism and because of this it brings with it emotional weight, feelings of impotence, disillusion and disenchantment, whereas the utopian nature of the second poem was asserted during the decline of Romanticism and because of this it stands as abstract and crystalline like a truth which no longer needs proving.

However, the most interesting thing of all is to see how the ethos of this utopianism is, in both cases, deeply classical. Utopianism is the desire for perfection in the most classical sense of the word perfection: that which evades the contingent, that which is untouched by the contingent. Or by the historical, or by the social, or by the human. It might be said that this idea of perfection cannot be found in Camoes. Indeed, Garrett endeavoured to present his hero as a particular individual touched by the empirical existence, formless and historical. And it is precisely because Garrett highlighted Camoes' human drama in the specific context of history and time that the poem can be seen as romantic (the hero who loses everything and who, isolated and abandoned by society on his way home, ends up dying in poverty). However, the truth is that at the beginning of the Romantic period the desire for that which is unmarked by time or by discourse (the craving for the sublime, still in conformity with the Enlightenment frame of mind) coexists with the rude, pragmatic world. The ideal (perfection) coexists with the real (imperfection), and this coexistence becomes visible, in my opinion, when, in the poem, Camoes reads Os Lusiadas to Dom Sebastiao. In this moment Camoes displays the highest emotional expression of his literary and individual character. He is reason and emotion at the same time; that is, he is the origin of moral precepts with which he becomes confused and he is the individual 'I' who endures the external passions which govern him.

This reading, which comprises Cantos VII and VIII of the poem, is a way of exorcising the confused, mutable and disorganized world which was the Portugal the poet encountered upon his return from India, and which hurt and tainted him. It is a way of resisting it. For me, it is at this crucial point in the narrative that Garrett outlines his image of Camoes in a classical way, imbuing it with the Kantian sublime. For a moment Garrett makes Camoes erase himself and let just his work be heard. As Kant intended, Garrett turns reason into moral will by which one can resist the particular and chaotic nature of history. And it is as Kant's heir (because he is already a romantic) that Garrett shows, by rewriting the text of Os Lusiadas, that this moral will is a creative, individual process, uniquely dependent on the will of the subject. Indeed, it seems to me that when, in these cantos, Garrett appropriates Camoes' text and interacts with it to create what is known today in critical terms as intertextuality, he is first and foremost appropriating an incorruptible discourse--a kind of textual archetype which functions as a dogma (because Os Lusiadas is the discourse of authority, reason and liberty for Garrett, a poet trained according to the rational principles of the eighteenth century). But he is also appropriating this dogma in an individual sense, showing that if it works towards the consciousness of the self as an individual subject, it also functions as moral reason for any other individual subject endowed with a civic consciousness. In other words, Garrett shows his contemporaries that it is possible to resist the disorder and chaos of early nineteenth-century Portuguese society, fallen into disgrace and decay after the loss of liberty (the short-termed liberty established in the 1822 Constitution). He does that by paraphrasing the incorruptible discourse of Camoes and by putting it into the mouth of the very hero who wrote it. His intention is that this discourse should reintroduce order in the heart of chaos and perfection in the heart of formlessness.

Garrett is aware that the dogma is a moral value, a kind of 'categorical imperative' which belongs to the autonomous, independent and free world of each subject. The use of Camoes' reading of Os Lusiadas to Dom Sebastiao would thus have a moral force which, at the moment when it is resumed by Garrett, blends with the experience of the sublime, with the moral experience of liberty of every subject. And, at the same time, it blends with that which has the stamp of spiritual-creative power, with art (with the aesthetic sublime) which is a demiurgic self-contained power, completely free from causality and risk, from uncertainty, failure and the deformations of the empirical world.

But Camoes belongs to both worlds, the spiritual world of moral reason because he is Os Lusiadas, and the material world of imperfections, ruled by passions and laws, because he is human. Therefore, although it could be said that the book in confrontation with society prefigures the necessary in confrontation with the contingent, it would be wrong to abrm that at the time when the poem was written one would overshadow, or be more important than the other. In the poem, Camoes as a human being dies (and with this death the contingent seems to conquer) but Camonian 'saudade', both patriotic and literary, remains in the nationalistic writing of Garrett as the desire for the ideal and for perfection.

Now, in the course of the nineteenth century art seems to travel from the transformation of the contingent to the necessary--from man to work, from 'I' to text. There is a moment in the century when the contingent actually overtakes the necessary, when more importance is acorded to imperfections (the real) than to perfection (the ideal). This moment is represented in A Fome de Camoes, a poem written by Gomes Leal in 1880, and for this very reason also contributing to the euphoria of the Camoes commemorations taking place that year. In this poem too, Camoes dies, but his death is evoked, as Vitorino Nemesio says, at the level of a 'fenomenologia da desgraca' (phenomenology of misfortune). Sinister and lugubrious details emerge from the text: a sheet, begged for, which becomes the poet's shroud (this representing all the action in Canto III); a genius, Camoes, who dies of hunger, literally, in a squalid hospital bed (Canto II). Certainly Camoes' 'hunger' could and should be read as an allegory (which is exactly what happens in Canto IV, the last canto of the poem). But what is the allegory in aesthetic terms if not precisely the terrible force of the contingent (the detailed and concrete) superimposing itself, discursively hyperbolized, on the necessary (the archetypal substantial)? What is the allegory if not the antithesis of the aesthetic sublime, the opposite of the symbol? A discursive affirmation of truth is the exact opposite of a truth economically and intuitively caught in the same poetic act which invents it, or which reinvents it (as Garrett does in Cantos VII and VIII of his Camoes). This new truth is an intellectual and mythical truth, totally purified of all circumstance.

And, therefore, when we reach Mensagem, outside the nineteenth century now in chronological terms but not absolutely in terms of sensibilities, we reach that which is beyond the contingent, beyond the circumstantial, beyond the signs of a particular age, whichever that may be. We reach that which is outside the 'I', that which has nothing to do with the phenomena of the reality of the subject, nor even with the subject itself (because it is no longer part of the literary text), but has everything to do with the moral or symbolic reality which came in its place, a rarefied and autonomous reality, dazzling and self-contained, which blends with the reality of poetic writing, with the cry 'E a Hora!', not with the reality nor the opportunity of the time ('Hora') itself since this time does not exist except in the actual cry which denotes it. Therefore I do not find it strange that Camoes does not appear as a character in Mensagem and is more conspicuous for his absence. This absence, interpreted along the lines of what Harold Bloom calls the 'anxiety of influence' has been much commented on, as if Pessoa had wanted to erase the memory of the great poet and, by eliminating him from his poem, come to replace him. A kind of intentional parricide perpetrated by someone who suffers the poetic relationships as if they were family relationships. I do not agree with this interpretation, for exactly the same reasons that lead me to feel unsatisfied when the romantic image of Camoes becomes identified with his ontological solitude. This is Carlos Reis' reading of Garrett's Camoes, for example, in the article 'Intertextualidade e ideologia: uma imagem romantica de Camoes'. (6) He comments on the lines which mark the beginning of the 'narration' of the poem:

   Um so no meio de alegrias tantas
   Quase insensivel jaz: calado e quedo,
   Encostado a amurada, os olhos fitos
   Tem nesse ponto que negreja ao longe
   La pela proa e cresce a pouco e pouco. (7)

Carlos Reis says:

A esta notacao inicial junta-se, entretanto, um conjunto de sentidos que, constituindo um feixe isotopico praticamente constante ao longo da accao, completam o perfil romantico ja insinuado: a melancolia e o nacionalismo; os sinais fisicos da nobreza e da superioridade; a coragem e a super-energia vital nao extinta pelas agruras da existeencia [...]. (8)

I find this interpretation of the 'romantic' unsatisfactory. It is too general and, in my view, does not focus in enough detail on the key poem on which the definition should have been based. Indeed, in Carlos Reis' definition the singularity of Camoes refers to the subject as an individual person, and not to the idea of human nature which is to me inextricably linked to the way Camoes is presented in Garrett's poem. In other words for Carlos Reis what matters is the individual and his complex responses to society and therefore his attention is drawn to Camoes' personal drama, whereas Garrett's 'romantic' originality consists, in my view, of showing that this drama of Camoes is a unique experience only possible because Camoes embodies every Portuguese who experiences the poet within himself by his own free and rational choice. In this respect Camoes' solitude in Garrett's poem (shown in Cantos VII and VIII through the fusion of the personal 'I' with Os Lusiadas) is not so much ontological or psychological as it first appears, but rather more rational and creative, universal and objective. It is a solitude which does not refer to the individual, to the contingent, but to the contingent under the necessary: to the inner voice or the moral law which is created by us as free and responsible human beings. This is where the two poems, Camoes and Mensagem, come together. As I mentioned before, Romanticism is in decline with Pessoa; with him Romanticism is already something else. Yet the absence of Camoes in the nationalistic poem by Pessoa reminds us of Camoes' solitude in the nationalistic poem by Garrett. It is an absence equally creative and fictional. It should be understood not only as a mark of the depersonalization in modern writing of which the poems in Mensagem are already a part, but first and foremost as the abrmation of a desire for a country which does not exist anywhere outside the creative writing which invents it. That country (whether of Camoes or anybody else) is a fiction, and nationalism is a romantic invention which Pessoa hated.

UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD

(1) This paper was given at the Jornada de Estudos Garrettianos conference at St Peter's College, Oxford on 29 November 1999.

(2) Eduardo Lourenco, 'Da literatura como interpretacao de Portugal', in O Labirinto da Saudade. Psicanalise mitica do destino portuguees (Lisbon: Quixote, 1978).

(3) Extract from a letter to Duarte Lessa, 27 July 1824, in Obras Completas de Almeida Garrett, 2 vols (Porto: Lello & Irmao, 1963), I.

(4) Teresa Sousa de Almeida, Camoes de Almeida Garrett (Lisbon: Comunicacao, 1986), p. 194.

(5) Almeida, pp. 55-56.

(6) Carlos Reis, 'Intertextualidade e ideologia: uma imagem romantica de Camoes', in Construcao da leitura, ensaios de metodologia e de critica literaria (Coimbra: INIC, 1982), pp. 59-73.

(7) Almeida, p. 59.

(8) Reis, pp. 61-62.