New Portuguese navigations

Literary Review, Summer, 1995 by Richard Zenith

A number of writers, such as George Steiner in Real Presences (1989), have cited historical and psychological evidence to show that the creative urge is linked to the religious urge. Can we not also link it to the human urge to adventure? All three urges have to do with our relationship to the unknown: with our fear of it, our hesitation before it, and our irresistible attraction to it. But the third urge, towards adventure, seems to be particularly characteristic of the Western psyche. It was "across seas never before sailed" that the Portuguese navigators trekked, according to the third verse of Luis Camoes's The Lusiads. It is a verse that can serve as a metaphor for the driving impulse of Western civilization, and there is a certain redundancy here that reinforces the point, since "driving impulse" is itself a distinctly Western concept, whose mere mention already indicates a mentality that is determined to move forward, explore new territory, Go West! go anywhere, for better or worse, until death catches up with us.

The ocean - besides serving Western culture as one of its major metaphors - has provided an especially prestigious mise en scene for its literature. From Homer to Melville and Conrad, it is possible to trace an intimate, mysterious link between the ocean and the invented, inventive, inventing word, the Western lust to venture into the unknown having often played itself out simultaneously in the abstract of words and in the heavy materiality of real water. The Lusiads, first published in 1572, is a stellar realization of this conjugation, Camoes having sailed far and wide with the Portuguese navigators and having drawn from his experiences to produce his masterpiece about Vasco da Gama and the glory of seafaring Portugal. It is arguably the last historical epic poem worth its salt; Tasso's Jerusalem Delivered (1575) never rose to its stature, while Milton's Paradise Lost (1667) is a spiritual rather than historical voyage.

Yet if Camoes stands out as Portugal's greatest poet and one of the greatest in Europe, he stands almost alone among his contemporaries. Some time before Camoes there was a great playwright in Gil Vicente (approx. 1465-1536), but Portuguese literature was not otherwise very stunning during the Age of Discoveries. The Discoveries themselves are perhaps the reason for this. If some men, such as Camoes and Melville, or, to take a more recent example, Hemingway, were adventurers both physically and imaginatively, in the way they lived and in what they wrote, it is perhaps more common that one mode of adventure obviates the need for other modes. In the era of the navigators, when the Portuguese ventured around the globe like no other nation in Europe, the first Westerners to make contact with dozens of previously unknown places and peoples, what possible need would they feel to live, imaginatively, what they actually experienced directly or vicariously, since most of the home country in some way contributed to the maritime enterprise? The more or less true accounts, or chronicles, of the navigators' voyages and foreign encounters were more fascinating than any pure fictions could have been (though it is true that some accounts were embroidered to the point where they bordered on fiction).

In its wake the Age of Discoveries left a wistful and somewhat paralyzing nostalgia for a glorious and overglorified past, together with a slowly decaying, already unglorious empire, whose final remnants - the colonies in Africa - became independent in 1975, a year after Portugal itself threw off the yoke of the fascist-style government that had ruled the country for over forty years. If the Portuguese voyages of old provided an adequate outlet for the human urge to venture into the unknown, thus minimizing the need for literary and imaginative adventure, the end of those voyages and the empire they built should theoretically have caused this urge to be rechanneled into literature and other realms of adventure. Portugal's other great poet after Camoes, Fernando Pessoa, was living proof of this theory. After returning at age 17 from South Africa, where he spent ten years of his childhood, Pessoa never again left Portugal and in fact rarely set foot outside of Lisbon. Yet he traveled immensely, multiplying himself into dozens of differentiated literary personalities which in their ensemble constituted an ever-expanding universe, with an infinite potential for interrelationship among them. In The Book of Disquietude (Carcanet Press, 1991), hyperconscious Pessoa lucidly recognized what his sublimated adventure was all about:

None of the four corners of the world is the one that interests me and that I can truly see; it's the fifth that's mine and that I travel in.

Whoever has crossed all the seas has only crossed the monotony of himself. I've crossed more seas than anyone. I've seen more mountains than there are on earth. I've passed through more-than-real cities, and the great rivers of non-worlds have flown sovereignly under my contemplating eyes. If I were to travel, I'd find a poor copy of what I've already seen without taking one step. (82)