Vasco da Gama as narrator in Os Lusiadas.

Frank Kermode observes that 'Permanent modernity is conferred on chosen works by arguments and persuasions that cannot themselves remain modern'. (1) Old books continue to be read because they are read in new ways. The changing interpretations of the Aeneid are perhaps the best example. A similar revision of received opinion is taking place concerning Os Lusiadas and for similar reasons.

Richard Heinze, in 1903, considered Aeneas 'the ideal Roman hero' and the Aeneid 'a sublime assertion of the might of Rome and Augustus'. (2) Most classical scholars in the first half of the twentieth century accepted Heinze's assessment, as does T. S. Eliot in What is a Classic? (1945) and 'Virgil and the Christian World' (1951). After World War II, and surely in part because of it, many readers began to see the poem differently. Among them were the American classicists Adam Parry, Wendell Clausen, and Michael C. J. Putnam:

In a reaction against the traditional view [...] that the Aeneid asserted the values of order and civilization by depicting their eventual victory, they tended to hold that the poem presented a pessimistic view alongside the surface glory of Aeneas and Rome [...]. The cost of imperialism, a cost felt by victor as well as victim, was the essential message--the plot of the Aeneid is 'a long history of defeat and loss', [...] and Aeneas was an uncertain, sensitive, and quasi-existentialist hero, 'profoundly melancholy, half-paralysed by fate'. (3)

Thomas M. Greene observes that 'of the two great forces which animate it, imperialism and nationalism, the first is largely discredited in our day, and the second is beginning to be suspect. [...] One can scarcely open Camoens' volume without questioning those principles he takes most instinctively for granted'. (4) It is hardly surprising that many readers now find Os Lusiadas less attractive than Camoes's lyrics, where these political issues hardly appear, and that they look for the same qualities in both. Helder Macedo, for example, asserts that 'Camoes gave a new dimension to epic by making it an extension of his lyric poetry, using himself as an epic character'. (5) I would add that Camoes does so not just by making himself a character in his poem, but by assigning Vasco da Gama a dual role as protagonist and as narrator of a considerable portion of the poem (Canto III, stanza 3, to Canto V, stanza 89). In allowing Gama to share his duties as narrator, Camoes, of course, follows the example of Virgil in the Aeneid but with the important difference that much of Gama's narrative presents events of which he himself has no first-hand knowledge, the history of Portugal from its earliest beginnings until his voyage.

Frank Pierce expresses the dissatisfaction felt by many modern readers with what they see as Gama's inadequacy as an epic hero: 'he meets no Dido, he has no Ascanius or Anchises, that is, he is not seen as a son, a father or a lover. [...] The result is that Vasco da Gama is [...] rather shadowy.' (6) Camoes's contemporaries did not share this view. They associated epic with epideictic, the rhetoric of praise and blame, and expected an epic hero to be perfect in every way, a model for readers to imitate. Craig Kallendorf observes that 'one of the things we do not find' in sixteenth-century commentaries on the Aeneid 'is any significant willingness to see moral failing in Aeneas'. (7) As protagonist of Os Lusiadas, Vasco da Gama is impassive and unchanging, quite unlike the protagonist of a novel whose character is gradually transformed by experience. As narrator, however, he is free to express his most deeply held beliefs:

   Quao facil e ao corpo a sepultura!
   Quaisquer ondas do mar, quaisquer outeiros
   Estranhos, assi mesmo como aos nossos,
   Receberao de todo o illustre os ossos. (V.83.5)

Camoes blurs the distinction between himself and his surrogate narrator by making both of them share the same feelings. It is Gama, not Camoes, who declares that

   Com esta condicao pesada e dura
   Nascemos: o pesar tera firmeza,
   Mas o bem logo muda a natureza, (V.80.6)

repeating a favourite theme in Camoes's lyrics, 'the Ovidian conviction that nothing is what it seems--or if it is, it will shortly turn into something else'. (8) Both share the same mastery of rhetoric. Whatever may be said of the historical Vasco da Gama, the Gama who serves as narrator in Os Lusiadas has as much right as his creator to say that he, too, has a 'mente a's Musas dada'. Camoes is fully justified in calling him '[o] facundo capitao' (V.90.1).

Camoes and Vasco da Gama are not, of course, interchangeable as narrators. Venus and Bacchus, who play key roles in Camoes's narrative, have no place in Gama's for the obvious reason that he himself is unaware of them. Their repeated interventions in Camoes's account of Gama's voyage in the first two cantos are not mentioned when Gama tells his own story of the voyage to the Sheik of Malindi. The historical events themselves--the hostility Bacchus makes the Portuguese encounter in Mozambique (I.76-81) and their escape with the help of Venus and her Nereids from the trap he sets for them in the harbour of Mombasa (II.18-24)--are referred to only briefly in Gama's narrative on the plausible ground that the sheik already knows about them:

   Na dura Mocambique, enfim, surgimos,
   De cuja falsidade e ma vileza
   Ja seras sabedor, e dos enganos
   Dos povos de Mombaca, pouco humanos. (V.84.5)

Vasco da Gama's intervention as narrator is a response to the Sheik of Malindi's invitation to tell him something about Portugal and its people. The invitation occupies five stanzas and, as T. F. Earle has noted, is 'replete with learned classical allusion'. (9) The sheik urges Gama to begin his story at once since they have the whole day before them, invoking the classical image of the horses that draw the chariot of the sun:

   Conta, que agora vem cos aureos freios
   Os cavalos que o carro marchetado
   Do novo Sol da fria Aurora trazem. (II.110.5)

He ends his invitation with two stanzas praising the daring of the Portuguese, whom he compares to figures from Greek and Roman mythology (II.112-13). It is significant that Camoes does not mention an interpreter in connection with the sheik, as he does later when Vasco da Gama speaks with the hostile Catual (VII.46).

Given such a listener, Gama is free to call on all the rhetorical resources at his command in telling the story of Ines de Castro. His first reference to Ines does not mention her by name--indeed, her full name never appears in the poem--but by the rhetorical device of antonomasia, 'substitution [...] of a descriptive phrase for a proper name': '[a] mysera e mesquinha | Que despois de ser morta foi rainha' (III.118.7). (10) He follows it with a three-fold apostrophe, addressing first 'puro amor' (III.119.1), then Cupid, 'fero Amor, que a sede tua | Nem com lagrimas tristes se mitiga' (III.119.5), and finally Ines herself, whom he addresses as she enjoys her moment of greatest happiness, unaware of her fate:

   Estavas, linda Ines, posta em sossego,
   De teus anos colhendo doce fruito,
   Naquele engano da alma, ledo e cego,
   Que a Fortuna nao deixa durar muito. (III.120.1)

Gama underscores Ines's ironic unawareness that she is in danger by the rhyme sossego: cego and by the oxymoron 'ledo e cego', 'ledo' because 'cego'. He will emphasize it again in the following stanza: 'E quanto enfim cuidava e quanto via | Eram tudo memo rias de alegria' (III.121.7).

As narrator, Gama is free to express sympathy for the characters in his story and to share their emotions. His apostrophe to Ines, who had died more than a century before he was born, helps to establish his character, suggesting that he is not so coldly impassive as many modern readers believe. His repeated use of apostrophe in telling the story of Ines underscores his ability to share her feelings.

Gama returns to the figure of apostrophe in III.122.3: 'Que tudo enfim, tu, puro amor, desprezas, | Quando um gesto suave te sujeita'. He employs it again in a later stanza when he addresses the 'horryficos algozes' responsible for Ines's death: 'Contra u dama, o peitos carniceiros, | Feros vos amostrais e cavaleiros?!' (III.130.7). Later he will refer to them as 'os brutos matadores' (V.132.1), equating them with their cruelty, as his first reference to Ines equated her with her tragic destiny through the same device of antonomasia. In the next stanza Gama again employs apostrophe, addressing the sun and the valleys that echo Ines's dying words:

   Bem puderas, o Sol, da vista destes,
   Teus raios apartar aquele dia,
   Como da seva mesa de Tiestes,
   Quando os filhos por mao de Atreu comia!
   Vos, o concavos vales, que pudestes
   A voz extrema ouvir da boca fria,
   O nome do seu Pedro, que lhe ouvistes,
   Por muito grande espaco repetistes! (III.133)

First, however, Gama inserts Ines's appeal to King Afonso to spare her life and allow her to choose exile for the sake of her children, who are present during her appeal (III.127.5: 'estas criancinhas'; my emphasis). She stresses that she is innocent of any wrong doing:

   O tu, que tens de humano o gesto e o peito
   (Se de humano e matar ua donzela
   Fraca e sem forca, so por ter sujeito
   O coracao a quem soube vence-la),
   A estas criancinhas tem respeito,
   Pois o nao tens a' morte escura dela;
   Mova-te a piedade sua e minha,
   Pois te nao move a culpa que nao tinha. (III.127)

In stressing her inability to withstand the demands of love, Ines anticipates the position Gama will take at the end of the canto when he refuses to judge the conduct of Ferdinand: 'Desculpado por certo esta Fernando | Para quem tem de amor experiencia' (III.142.5).

Like Camoes in the rest of the poem, Vasco da Gama tells his story by evoking classical analogues. He compares the 'brutos matadores' who murdered Ines to those who killed Polyxena:

   Qual contra a linda moca Policena,
   Consolacao extrema da mae velha,
   Porque a sombra de Aquiles a condena,
   Co ferro o duro Pirro se aparelha;
   Mas ela, os olhos com que o ar serena
   (Bem como paciente e mansa ovelha)
   Na mysera mae postos, que endoudece,
   Ao duro sacrifycio se oferece. (III.131)

Here, of course, the situation is inverted, since Ines is not looking at her mother but at her children. The phrases 'paciente e mansa ovelha' and 'duro sacrificio' recall Christ's death on the cross, while 'os olhos com que o ar serena' is perhaps a reminiscence of two lines from Garcilaso's sonnet 'En tanto que de rosa y d'acucena': 'y que vuestro mirar ardiente, honesto, | con clara luz la tempestad serena'. (11) The phrase also recalls a line in the last stanza of Camo es's graceful lyric in praise of the slave-girl Barbara: 'Presenca serena, | que a tormenta amansa'. (12)

Like Camoes, too, Vasco da Gama makes skilful use of the rhetorical figure enargeia or evidentia, 'a vivid description intended to give the reader or listener the illusion that he or she is actually witnessing the thing described', in his graphic depictions of the things he has seen on his way to Malindi. One of them is his horrifying description of the symptoms of scurvy:

   Quem havera que sem o ver o creia?
   Que tao disformemente ali lhe incharam
   As gengivas na boca, que crecia
   A carne e juntamente apodrecia. (V.81.5)

Another is his description of the waterspout, which he renders with a vivid simile:

   Qual roxa sanguessuga se veria
   Nos beicos da alimaria (que, imprudente,
   Bebendo a recolheu na fonte fria)
   Fartar co sangue alheio a sede ardente;
   Chupando, mais e mais se engrossa e cria,
   Ali se enche e se alarga grandemente;
   Tal a grande coluna, enchendo, aumenta
   A si e a nuvem negra que sustenta. (V.21)

Like Camoes in his description of Neptune's son Triton (VI.17-18), Gama is good at describing things that neither he nor anyone else has ever seen, as in his marvellous portrait of Adamastor, one of the most admired passages in the poem:

   Nao acabava, quando ua figura
   Se nos mostra no ar, robusta e valida,
   De disforme e grandyssima estatura,
   O rosto carregado, a barba esqualida,
   Os olhos encovados, e a postura
   Medonha e ma, e a cor terrena e palida,
   Cheios de terra e crespos os cabelos,
   A boca negra, os dentes amarelos. (V.39)

As narrator, Gama shares both the sensitivity of his creator and his ability to express it in words.

Not without cost, for, as T. F. Earle observes, everyone in Os Lusiadas 'speak[s] in a highly wrought literary language which makes no claim at all to verisimilitude'. (13) Readers brought up on the 'formal realism' that Ian Watt considers a defining feature of the novel will be uneasy with Camoes's refusal to adapt his style to his characters. (14) Camoes, of course, knew no such tradition. He does not try to give Vasco da Gama an individual temperament either as actor or as substitute narrator, but wants only to tell his story in the most effective way at his disposal by raising everything in it to the level he thought appropriate to an epic poem. Camoes was, however, familiar with another tradition that might have led him in a different direction.

In dedicating his poem to the young king Sebastian Camoes boasts that it surpasses not only the epic poems of Homer and Virgil but also Ariosto's chivalric romance in verse, Orlando furioso:

   Ouvi, que nao vereis com vas facanhas,
   Fantasticas, fingidas, mentirosas,
   Louvar os vossos, como nas estranhas
   Musas, de engrandecer-se desejosas;
   As verdadeiras vossas sao tamanhas
   Que excedem as sonhadas, fabulosas,
   Que excedem Rodamonte e o vao Rugeiro,
   E Orlando, inda que fora verdadeiro. (I.11)

Richard Helgerson observes that 'Camoes sees himself and his experience through eyes trained by much reading of chivalric romance [...]. The romantic tale of the Twelve of England, the perilous encounter with the giant Adamastor, the enchanted visit to the Isle of Love [...] belong rather to the world of Rodomonte, Ruggiero, and Orlando than to that of pius Aeneas'. (15) Camo es's rejection of 'vas facanhas' does not imply a rejection of romance; the prolonged controversy over the genre of Orlando furioso is evidence that the line that divides epic from romance was less clearly drawn in the sixteenth century than it is today. (16)

Camoes follows Ariosto in his use of ottava rima but he handles the form differently. Italo Calvino notes that the octave is una strofa che si presta a discorsi anche lunghi e ad alternare toni sublimi e lirici con toni prosastici e giocosi [...]. Il segreto dell'ottava ariostesca sta nel seguire il vario ritmo del linguaggio parlato [...] ma il registro colloquiale e' solo uno dei tanti suoi, che vanno dal lirico al tragico allo gnomico e che possono esistere nella stessa strofa. (17)

This colloquial register is occasionally found in Os Lusiadas, for example when Veloso makes a hurried return to the ship after being attacked by natives, but it is so rare that the stanza seems almost out of place in Camo es's poem as it certainly would not in Ariosto's:

   Disse entao a Veloso um companheiro
   (Comecando-se todos a sorrir):
   --'Oula, Veloso amigo, aquele oteiro
   E melhor de decer que de subir ...'
   --'Si e,--responde o ousado aventureiro --,
   Mas, quando eu pera ca vi tantos vir
   Daqueles caes, depressa um pouco vim,
   Por me lembrar que estaveis ca sem mim.' (V.35)

Luciana Stegagno Picchio rightly remarks that in Os Lusyadas 'nous ne trouvons pas le leger sourire de l'Arioste'. (18)

Camo es's treatment of ottava rima differs from Ariosto's because his treatment of the epic narrator is different. He keeps Ariosto's romance elements but rejects his irony as incompatible with his own serious purpose. If Camoes is a master of popular speech in some of the lyrics in medida velha, in his letters, and in some passages in the Auto do Filodemo, but not in Os Lusiadas, this must be a matter of deliberate choice. (19) Similarly, Vasco da Gama's elaborate use of rhetorical figures in a portion of the poem supposedly improvised before a listener who does not understand Portuguese is not an indication of Camoes's inability to differentiate his narrators but of his refusal to do so. Camoes's language in Os Lusiadas does not aim at mimesis of ordinary speech, just as Vasco da Gama's narrative does not aim at imitation of everyday life in introducing Adamastor. Gama's reference to 'a verdade que eu conto, nua e pura' (V.89.7) must not be taken too literally. In his narrative, as in the rest of the poem, 'the fiction enhances and interprets the history'. (20)

University of Oregon 

(1) Forms of Attention (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), p. 72.

(2) S. J. Harrison, 'Some Views of the Aeneid in the Twentieth Century', in Oxford Readings in Virgil's 'Aeneid', ed. by S. J. Harrison (Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), pp. 1-20 (p. 1).

(3) Harrison, p. 5; the phrases quoted are Wendell Clausen's.

(4) Thomas M. Greene, The Descent from Heaven: A Study in Epic Continuity (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1963), p. 220.

(5) Helder Macedo, 'Os Lusiadas: The Ambiguous Epic of Luys de Camoes', Journal of the Institute of Romance Studies, 2 (1993), 243-49 (p. 249).

(6) Luys de Camoes, Os Lusiadas, ed. by Frank Pierce (Oxford: Clarendon, 1973), pp. xxiv-xxv. All references in the text are to this edition.

(7) Craig Kallendorf, Virgil and the Myth of Venice: Books and Readers in the Italian Renaissance (Oxford: Clarendon, 1999), p. 77.

(8) Stephen Reckert, Beyond Chrysanthemums: Perspectives on Poetry East and West (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993), p. 8.

(9) T. F. Earle, 'Narrative Voice, Irony, and the Defence of Poetry in Os Lusiadas', Journal of the Institute of Romance Studies, 2 (1993), 251-59 (p. 252).

(10) I use the terms and definitions in Brian Vickers, In Defence of Rhetoric (Oxford: Clarendon, 1990).

(11) Garcilaso de la Vega, Obras completas con comentario, ed. by Elias L. Rivers (Madrid: Castalia, 1974), pp. 125-28.

(12) Luys de Camo es, Lyrica completa, ed. by Maria de Lurdes Saraiva, 3 vols (Lisbon: Imprensa Nacional/Casa da Moeda, 1980-81), i, 246-47.

(13) Earle, p. 252.

(14) Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1957), p. 32.

(15) Richard Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), p. 160.

(16) See Bernard Weinberg, A History of Literary Criticism in the Italian Renaissance, 2 vols (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961); Daniel Javitch, Proclaiming a Classic: The Canonization of 'Orlando furioso' (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991); Jane Everson, 'Ariosto and the Orlando Furioso: An Epic?', Journal of the Institute of Romance Studies, 2 (1993), 223-42 (pp. 224-28).

(17) Ludovico Ariosto, Orlando furioso, raccontato da Italo Calvino (Turin: Einaudi, 1970), p. xxv.

(18) Luciana Stegagno Picchio, 'L'occident, syste'me de valeurs', in La Methode philologique: E crits sur la litterature portugaise, 2 vols (Paris: Fundacao Calouste Gulbenkian, 1982), i, 225-27 (p. 226).

(19) Andree Rocha, 'Uma contradicao fundamental d'Os Lusyadas', Arquivos do Centro Cultural Portugues, 16 (1981), 119-26 (pp. 122-23).

(20) William Nelson, Fact or Fiction: The Dilemma of the Renaissance Storyteller (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973), p. 100.