The Poetics of Empire in the Indies: Prophecy and Imitation in "La Araucana "and "Os Lusiadas". (Reviews).

James Nicolopulos, The Poetics of Empire in the Indies: Prophecy and Imitation in "La Araucana "and "Os Lusiadas."

It is always a pleasure to get the opportunity to revisit a Renaissance literary classic that has been ignored or marginalized in our time. In calling critical attention to two little-read (today) Iberian epic poems of the sixteenth century, La Araucana (1569, 1578, 1589, 1597) of Alonso de Ercilla y Zuniga (1533-94) and Os Lusiadas (ca. 1572) of Luis de Camoes (ca. 1524-80), James Nicolopulos has done just that.

University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2000. xvi + 332 pp. $55. ISBN: 0-271-01990-5.

These works, the first written by a Spaniard, the second by a Portuguese, were acclaimed in their day for their stylistic and thematic excellence both as poems and models for other poems. And yet they have suffered neglect over the last two centuries or so, possibly because of their association with the colonizing and Christianizing dynasties for which they were written. After all, both works appear, on the more literal levels of their allegories, to endorse the militant imperialism of two Roman Catholic nations. Another reason may be their deceptive blend of historical and marvelous material. Even in their own day, despite their considerable popularity and impressive publication histories, neither of the poems (both of them dedicated to their respective sovereigns, Felipe II of Spain and [his nephew] young Sebastiao of Portugal) received a stipend commensurate with its value, a particular irony since Ercilla and Camoes represent in some ways diametrically opposite sides of the patronage spectrum. The former, an aristocrat and soldier, was an insider at the Spanish court since childhood, while the latter was an outsider not only to the Lisbon court but also to his homeland, from which he was exiled for much of his adult life, apparently owing to his reputation as acerbic wit and street brawler.

It is Nicolopulos's assumption that one can apprehend the meanings of "Iberian Imperial Age" poets and "the labyrinth of subtexts and their uses" only by recourse to a systematic analysis based on the theories of imitation as formulated by writers steeped in the tradition of imitatio" (4). And this systematic approach derives chiefly from his careful reading and incorporation of the work of specialists in Renaissance poetics, as well as critical commentators on, particularly, La Araucana, a feature of the book that I found particularly informative and stimulating. Such an approach, he emphasizes, is a corrective to what he calls the Romantic and post-Romantic tendency to dismiss much of the Spanish poem (especially Part 2) as "digressive or irrelevant" (269).

The purpose of this book, therefore, is to apply such an analysis to the two poems under question in order to deliver "insights that will illuminate not only the aesthetic appreciation of these texts, but also their more profound cultural and ideological resonances in the problematic foundation of the colonial societies of the New World" (20). But the attentive reader soon notes that these resonances do take precedence over aesthetic appreciation for Nicolopulous. He himself offers the disclaimer that this is "not intended to be an exhaustive study [of either of the works] but rather a demonstration of the utility of a coherent theoretical approach to imitation in the study of colonial epic" (19).

For this reviewer, Nicolopulos's study provides an invaluable service in illuminating the differences between the first and second parts of Ercilla's poem. The former furnishes an essentially verisimilar picture of the origins of the war in Chile prior to the poet's arrival, while largely dissimulating its epic imitations. The latter, by contrast, even more popular than its predecessor, is far less historical and more self-consciously "literary," with amorous, prophetic, and marvelous imitations and topoi foregrounding its debt (and contribution) to epic tradition. What, Nicolopulos rightly asks, accounts for the drastic change in surfaces and the greater popularity of the second over the first part? May the publication of Os Lusiadas in between be a factor? Nicolopulos answers enthusiastically in the affirmative, postulating Ercilla's "poetic, ideological, and dynastic rivalry" (x) with his Iberian counterpart. This is best evidenced in Ercilla's imitative transformation (in the two prophecies seen in Fiton' s globe) of the two culminating prophecies that occur in the tenth canto of Camoes's poem.

Despite its title, Nicolopulos's study is far more interested in illuminating Ercilla's than Camoes's poem, and his discussion of the latter is at times tendentious. For example, he speculates that Camoes's mapamundi represents "a challenge to Portugal's ancient rival, Castile" (245), Portugal's "ancestral common enemy (266). Although Portugal had wrested her liberty from Spain in the late fourteenth century, many of her medieval and Renaissance poets (including Camoes) chose to write in Castilian as well as their native language (something that one cannot say, for example, about contemporary poets who dwell in the Galician district of Spain). There is no question that in his comments in propria persona, the inspired narrator of Os Lusiadas misses few opportunities to advertise himself and promote his poem, but his rivals are not necessarily Spaniards; in fact, they are either Italian (Boiardo and Ariosto) or classical (Homer and Virgil) (I, 11-12). Indeed if Camoes emulates or rivals Spanish poets anywhere i n his epic poem, it must be by dissimulation.

In devising his "coherent theoretical approach to imitation," Nicolopulos occasionally gets lost in a web of ostensibly interminable imitations; for example, while a subtext for La Araucana, Os Lusiadas is said to have as its own subtexts Juan de Mena's Laberinto de Fortuna (245), Sannazaro's De partu Virginus (189 ff.), Garcilaso's Second Eclogue (193), and Ficino's Latin translation of Plotinus's Enneads (193). In keeping with this strategy, Nicolopulos sometimes resorts to such syntactical constructions as "In order to appreciate the dimensions and motives of this. . it is first necessary to examine. . ." (184) and "Before elucidating that point, it is necessary to briefly examine . . ." (236). One wonders if all of these retrogressive forays into a potentially infinite web of imitation, although informative, really enhance our "aesthetic appreciation" of the poems under consideration. I also found the inclusion of critical and historical commentary and the textual decisions in this study to be uneven, cle arly favoring Ercilla over Camoes.

Nevertheless, this intertextual world of imitation has been too long ignored, and Nicolopulos should be credited for bringing it to our attention in a systematic way and opening up debate. His book is learned and provocative, and it convinces its reader that such devices as the prophetic globe (or "aleph") and minute geographical descriptions (mapaemundi), both of them set-piece literary exercises, are not merely digressions to be dismissed or even excised, but essential elements in an over-arching thematic and structural design. In all, this study provides a welcome corrective to the biographical, geographical, and historical knee-jerk reflexes that mark many, if not most, of the commentaries on these two great poems that have come down through the centuries.