Josiah Blackmore. Manifest Perdition: Shipwreck Narrative and the Disruption of Empire.

Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002. Pbk. xxviii + 186 pp. + b/w pls. index. illus, bibl. $18.95. ISBN: 0-8166-3850-0.

Blackmore's study represents the coming of age, in English, of critical work on the genre which Giorgio Raimondo Cardona ("I viaggi e le scoperte," A. A. Rosa, ed., Letteratura Italiana 5:1982-90), in one of the surely very few texts remotely related to the subject that this book's bibliography does not mention, has called "tipicamente portoghese": the shipwreck narrative or shipwreck literature (relatos de naufragio).

Manifest Perdition "proposes that shipwreck narrative is a practice of prose writing, defined not solely by the thematic presence of shipwreck in a text but by a relationship between calamity and writing" (xxi). The disruptive effect of this relationship affects the "official" historiographic discourse of expansionism, interferes with the formation of a national literary canon, questions "gendered power relations" (89) and authority, places teleological certainty in doubt, impedes the redemptive possibilities of sacrifice at sea, and counters the justifications for empire. Therefore, a need to redefine the genre does arise. Blackmore criticizes the current tendency "to posit shipwreck literature as a category of travel narrative" as "far too broad a characterization to be of extensive critical use," and proposes instead "that shipwreck narrative is a form (or 'minor genre') of historiographic or chronistic writing" (40). Although the author opposes the view that these narratives, collected in the eighteenth-century Historia Tragico-Maritima (HTM), affirm and confirm political and discursive imperialism--an example is the image of the shipwrecked vessel as "the wrecked vessel (...) of textual authority" (104), he does not fall into the simplistic trap of using them as part of a critical discourse that aims to place resistance monologically in the locus of empire. Although Blackmore could have cited classical culture (from Homer and Aristotle onwards) to advocate that these Renaissance texts use shipwreck as a uniform mode of vituperation, he restricts himself to Iberian literature and begins his analysis with Galician-Portuguese shipwreck poetry (3-19), where the Christian paradigm of miraculous salvation (as opposed to perdition) predominates, and argues that the HTM collects texts which posit subversion in problematic ways.

One instance of the difficulty in assigning a mode of resistance to these narratives is their anthologizing by Bernardo Gomes de Brito in the HTM, the form in which the texts have almost always been published and read. As this book puts it, Gomes de Brito "recuperates shipwreck as a uniquely Portuguese contribution, as it were, to history" (110). By dissolving the recalcitrant nature of individual relatos de naufragio, the eighteenth-century anthology, several times reprinted, has contributed to the successful process of canonization the shipwreck narratives originally seemed to avoid (chap. 5). The quotation from Cardona above is a reminder of this success, and one would wish that among the many high-quality insights of Manifest Perdition, more attention were paid to the ways in which HTM effectively contributes to the idea that this kind of literature is "typically" or "uniquely" Portuguese, therefore analyzing the nationalist agenda that here seems to be fundamental to the understanding of canonicity.

The book also interprets texts which are collateral to the Portuguese relatos, such as excerpts from Camoes' Os Lusiadas, Alfonso o Sabio's Cantigas de Santa Maria, Spanish travel chronicles, Zurara's Cronica da Guine, Diogo do Couto, and Francisco Manuel de Melo, as well as critical work on these texts. Indeed, Blackmore claims that all these writers "may be considered shipwreck authors" (58). One wonders whether this is not as loose a bond for the conception of a literary kind as that which "travel literature" encompasses. The density of argument that such a wide bibliographical array of complex literature entails for a book of only some two hundred pages, together with the wealth of new insights that almost every paragraph makes evident, causes an effect of concentration and occasional underdevelopment that this reviewer finds excessive. Not a few of the endnotes are included so as to add even more points to an already very rich work. Doubtless, an up-to-date study in English of Portuguese shipwreck literature was a sufficiently urgent task to justify most of the arguments, frequently stimulating or informative, that this book contains.

Nevertheless, one could mention a few instances of thought-provoking issues that cry out for further justification or exploration. The attempted inclusion of HTM in the "Baroque aesthetic" (33-36), the discussion of the prose narratives as products of a wider cultural entity called "Iberia" (passim), and some generalizing statements on Camoes and the Lusiads (xxvi, 3, 23) are cases in point. Moreover, it is a shame that "the allegorical epic by Corte-Real" (123), Blackmore's perceptive label for modern Europe's first major epic of loss, is not studied in this book. The poem is far more central to shipwreck than most of the texts discussed and could have helped develop issues like the "'loss of being'" as constituent of Portuguese voyages" (95), or the themes which arise in Manuel de Mesquita Perestrelo's narrative of the S. Bento shipwreck, like the descriptions of the "subjective imagination" (83) or the "brutal visitation of nature or divinity" (79).

It is likely that Portuguese students of expansionism will find this book as important as their anglophone colleagues surely will.

HELIO J. S. ALVES

Universidade de Evora

Portugal