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Rewriting and the fiction of history: Camess The Lusiads and Lobo Antuness The Return of the Caravels
Maria Alzira Seixo

Abstract
This article underlines the role of a major hypotext (The Lusiads by Lus de Cames) in the writing of a contemporary Portuguese novel (The Return of the Caravels by Antnio Lobo Antunes), in which literary heritage may be seen as a determinant frame for textual innovation. In particular the article examines the way in which contemporary events may be better understood if viewed as if their adopted ideological meaning is in a dynamic relation with their fictional representation. Post-colonialism and parody are thus considered here in a way that allows us to conclude that rewriting may be seen as the fiction of history, or at least as a way of presenting history as personal experience and active commitment. Keywords: Lobo Antunes; Cames; parody; post-colonialism; history

As a device of intertextuality, rewriting can be conceived as a fundamental literary procedure that allows a new text to be situated within the field of literature. Rewriting embraces the process of rereading; indeed it is the other side of rereading that is, it is the necessary operation for the critical appreciation of a text. All critical writing is based on rereading: on the one hand, it activates what we remember of the text from our first act of reading, which principally entails affect and surprise, producing the more generalized effects of literature; on the other hand, it is only in rereading that we grasp the structure and organizing principles of a literary text. As a specific mode of composing texts, rewriting is rereading manifesting itself as a new composition, where notions such as repetition, quotation, imitation, similarity and difference become central for understanding the innovatory aspects of the particular literary work. As we know, rewriting has often been associated with the composition of postmodern literary texts, but the practice of writing as a consequence of reading and, moreover, as a result of compulsive or parodic intentions in relation to ones literary heritage is perhaps only postmodern in terms of its frequency and in terms of the way in which postmodern writers emphasize their relations with earlier texts. In fact, rewriting has a long history in western cultures, in forms such as alternative versions, adaptations and intertextual relations of all kinds, including even the conventional and the newly theorized translation (Calinescu 1997). Both the freedom and constraints of rewriting can be fruitfully observed in As Naus [The Return of the Caravels (henceforth The Return)], Antnio Lobo Antuness seventh novel, which was published in 1988 (one of the years in which great
Journal of Romance Studies Volume 3 Number 3 2003 ISSN 14733536

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Portuguese sea voyages were officially commemorated). His previous novels deal mainly with the Portuguese colonial war in Africa, developing new insights into the evolution of the democratic Portuguese revolution as well as into the process of decolonization which was one of the consequences of that political transformation. The intertextual palimpsest (Genette 1982) of The Return is the classical epic poem by Lus de Cames, Os Lusiadas [The Lusiads], published in 1572, which is considered to be a key text of Portuguese cultural identity because of its portrayal of the old empire and major sea voyages. Lobo Antuness text follows Camess poem, while differentiating itself from its father-text in many ways. It is generally accepted that The Lusiads is the greatest Portuguese poetic celebration of the discoveries in epic form, simultaneously embracing the Virgilian tradition and introducing into the sixteenth-century poem the new devices of modernity as well as a different aesthetic discourse. Christianity and paganism are both praised in the poem, acting not only as historically opposed doctrines but also as narrative components, although Christian interests determine the plot and the world view it manifests. Pagan deities, such as Jupiter, Venus, Bacchus and Thetys, are presented as active characters in the plot, at a similar level to the Portuguese sailors, but both ideological supremacy and definitive power belong to European Christianity, which proposes a specific ethics of behaviour and idealism. Cames describes Vasco da Gamas maritime voyage to India in 14978 and the discovery of territories as yet unknown to Western nations. These new countries, landscapes, cultures, men and customs inform the concept of difference and otherness at work in the poem, according to a historical, commercial and ideological intent:
Quem te trouxe a estoutro mundo, To longe da tua ptria Lusitana? Abrindo (lhe responde) o mar profundo, Por onde nunca veio gente humana; Vimos buscar do Indo a gro corrente, Por onde a Lei divina se acrecente. (Cames n.d.: VII, 25) [Who brought you to this other world So far from your native Portugal? Exploring, he replied, the vast ocean Where no human being ever sailed; We come in search of the River Indus; To spread the faith of Christ is our purpose. (1997: 144)]

The Lusiads is itself actually a meeting point for a variety of earlier texts: chronicles (historiographical writings dealing with events included in the plot, such as Ferno Lopess works on King John I, Barross and Castanhedas works on Portuguese territories in India, Damio de Giss work on King Manuel, etc.), log-books (dealing mainly with Gamas travel, such as Alvaro Velhos diary), narratives of shipwrecks (such as that of the great galleon Saint John). Camess masterpiece is a rewriting, to

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a greater or lesser extent, of all these texts and others (including brief allusions to classical texts), and, in a particular way, to Virgils The Aeneid, which provides the structure for the entire poem. Constituting a kind of encyclopedic and heterogeneous collection of texts in a whole of ten cantos, each of them grouping approximately a hundred stanzas, The Lusiads is a privileged junction of literary convention and innovation. It is a poem shaped both by the Ancient Greek and Roman models and, simultaneously, by the founding text of the colonial encounter and of modernity, in the guise of original storytelling and new symbolic expression. After the 1974 democratic revolution, concerns emerge in Portuguese writing about the complexity and uncertainty of decolonization and the bitterness surrounding the return from Africa of the descendants of colonizers. Later, the official commemorations of Portuguese discoveries, and in particular of Gamas voyage, allowed contemporary writers to approach with greater freedom of thought the historical and aesthetic values of the Renaissance epic. At the same time these commemorations also allowed the Portuguese to evaluate almost fifty years of imperialist propaganda from the Salazar regime and to discover at last the context of pain and struggle involved in the colonial endeavour on the part of both Portuguese citizens and African individuals. It is precisely in this context that the first novels written by Lobo Antunes must be read: Memria de elefante (1979), Os cus de Judas (1979a) [South of Nowhere (1983)], Conhecimento do inferno (1980), Explicao dos pssaros (1981) [An Explanation of the Birds (1991)] and Fado alexandrino (1984). They all give an account of the tragedy of war, of oppression and of the duty which was imposed on Portuguese soldiers to fight in Africa, very often against their own beliefs and political opinions. What is more, Lobo Antunes speaks in his novels (the narrator addressing the reader directly) from a point of view which expresses sympathy with the colonized, or, more precisely, he writes in a way that shows that the colonizer himself senses the absurdity of colonization, and therefore gradually adopts the perspective of the colonized, thus adding a specific touch of post-colonial sensibility to the initial colonial position. The literary form of The Return, however, puts this topic in a different light. The single narrators voice is replaced by many voices who speak in turn, a technique already employed in Fado Alexandrino, where a soldier and other members of a battalion give an account of their tour of duty in Mozambique. But this time the community of voices is somewhat different: the narrators are people who have returned from Africa, where they went either on official service or out of greed for commercial profit, so that they are part of that immense mass of retornados who flocked back to Portugal soon after the independence of the former colonies. They have no understanding of the political and social transformations that have taken place in the home country, no real place in which to be integrated as citizens, no jobs, no houses and very often no family to receive and support them. The narrators in The Return are thus men and women who are neither in their own place nor in their own time, and this is literalized in the novel: in fact, these narrators are, by means of the ironic reversal of history, the very personalities who in the past built the world of the Portuguese discoveries and the empire itself, such as the navigators (Gama, Cabral,

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Diogo Co) or the king (Manuel) or the shipwrecked nobleman (Seplveda) or the trader and writer (Pinto) or even anonymous colonizers (a couple in Guinea). They all flee from Independence in Angola, Mozambique and Guinea, they all disembark in Lisbon with their few belongings and throughout the novel drift through the city, the textual meaning of which, with the overlapping of the different periods of civilization, points in two opposing directions: the past, when they acted as the victors in history, and the present, where they are subjected to contingency as the losers in the same history (Wesseling 1991). Of course, for Lobo Antunes, history is not the same, and the similarities brought out by the characters who have lived in one era and are trying to survive in another are extremely meaningful. This parodic similarity effectively makes explicit the deep sense of difference the different reactions to the contemplation of otherness and thus these sixteenth-century characters playing their roles in the twentieth century represent hybridity in a post-colonial perspective. Let us examine the first historical hero who returns to Lisbon from Luanda, in The Return. He is Pedro lvares Cabral, who had arrived in Brazil in 1500:
Passara por Lixboa h dezoito ou vinte anos a caminho de Angola []. No dia do embarque [], o txi deixou-nos junto ao Tejo numa orla de areia chamada Belm [], e ele avistou centenas de pessoas e de parelhas de bois que transportavam blocos de pedra para uma construo enorme dirigidos por escudeiros de saia escarlata indiferentes aos carros de praa []. Passando por uma placa que designava o edifcio incompleto e que dizia Jernimos esbarrmos com a Torre ao fundo, a meio do rio, [] e mais prximo, [] achmos espera [] a nau das descobertas. Os que regressavam consigo, clrigos, astrlogos genoveses, comerciantes judeus, aias, contrabandistas de escravos, brancos pobres do Bairro Prenda, do Bairro da Cuca, abraados a volumes de serapilheira, a malas atadas com cordis, a cestos de verga, a brinquedos quebrados, formavam uma serpente de lamentos e misria aeroporto adiante, empurrando a bagagem com os ps [] na direco de uma secretria a que se sentava, em um escabelo, um escrivo da puridade que lhe perguntou o nome (Pedro lvares qu?), o conferiu numa lista dactilografada cheia de emendas [] e inquiriu de repente Tendes famlia em Portugal?, e eu disse Senhor no [] Ningum, disse eu, s a moblia do quarto que h-de chegar no prximo galeo se a no desviaram no porto com esta histria de roubalheira, democracia e socialismo [] Arranjmos-lhe lugar na Residencial Apstolo das ndias, Largo de Santa Brbara, meta-se num autocarro e pergunte pelo senhor Francisco Xavier [] e estvamos sozinhos e postos de banda numa cidade que conhecia sem conhecer [], espera das mesinhas vindas de Angola como se as caravelas atravessassem as avenidas. (Lobo Antunes 1988: 917) [Hed passed through Lixbon eighteen or twenty years earlier on the way to Angola (). On the day we sailed (), the taxi dropped us off beside the Tagus on a strip of sand called Belm () and he caught sight of hundreds of people and teams of oxen that were bringing stone blocks for a huge building, led by squires in scarlet habits, indifferent to the taxis (). Passing by a plaque that identified the unfinished building and said JERONYMITES, we came upon the Tower in the background in the middle of the river () and, closer by, () we found the ship of the discoveries waiting. those who returned with him, clergyman, Genoese astrologers, Jewish merchants, governesses, slave smugglers, poor whites from the Prenda district, the Cuca district, clinging to burlap bundles, suitcases tied with cords, wicker baskets, broken toys, formed a serpentine line of lamentations and misery up to the airport, pushing their baggage along with their feet () toward a desk where sitting on a stool was the kings

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official chronicler who asked him his name (Pedro lvares what?), checked him on a typed list full of corrections () and suddenly asked Do you have family in Portugal? and I said No, sir () Nobody, I said, just the bedroom furniture that should arrive on the next galleon if it didnt disappear on the docks with all this business of thievery, democracy, and socialism (). weve arranged a place for you at the Apostle of the Indies Boarding House on the Largo of Santa Brbara, take a bus and ask for Mr. Francisco Xavier () and we were all alone and abandoned in a city that I knew and didnt know () waiting for the little tables from Angola as if the caravels would cross through the avenues. (Lobo Antunes 2002: 18)]

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This first chapter of The Return establishes one of the major procedures that Lobo Antunes adopts in rewriting the Portuguese epic The Lusiads: the conversion of the departure into the arrival. Here, the arrival is not seen as attaining a point or a goal, but rather as both a return and a reversal of situations and states. Return and reversal are also developed, in this fictional situation, not only as the opposite of what has been established as historical circumstances (which are partially identical to history) but mainly as a coexistence of different time periods, as an overlapping of events and eras, which is a common literary technique in both postmodern parody and in postcolonial satire. In this respect, Lobo Antunes goes further: the writing of different events, imagined as if they were taking place at the same time, and the fantasy of dealing with historical figures as if they were characters of a contemporary realistic novel, are accomplished in his novel by following the key text of the discoveries, that is, by rewriting Camess The Lusiads. In the previous example, Pedro lvares Cabral is presented simultaneously at the moment of his own departure from Lisbon in the fifteenth century and in the arrival of a twentieth-century Portuguese settler returning after Angolas independence, the latter contaminating the earlier historical time. At the moment of return, the ongoing construction of Jernimos, the monastery built by King Manuel to commemorate the first sea voyage to India, which had taken place two years before, can be seen in the fictional present from the taxi that takes Cabral to the caravel. At the moment of return, not only is the caravel replaced with an aeroplane and Cabral is waiting in line with his wife and son before boarding, but also upon arrival in Lisbon he is received as a retornado, given provisional accommodation in a guesthouse run by Francisco Xavier (the Jesuit saint, who here is given a totally different role from that which he had historically, thus transforming his previously sacred activities to extremely profane ones), and Cabrals family is surprised and even shocked by the differences they observe in Lisbon (as if the caravels would cross through the avenues). Rewriting, in this case, is a textual operation that must somehow be placed between two literary levels: the level of textuality and the level of enunciation. In other words, Lobo Antuness novel does not follow the discursive progression of The Lusiads; rather, it builds an intermediary stage where historical facts, literary references and both the excess of fantasy and the distortion of parody all work together, although in some passages verbal resonances from Camess poem are included, either as similarities or as oppositions, and thus the original text is always close at hand. This is most evident in the passages dealing with the simultaneous departures; on the one

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hand, the departure from Lisbon to India in the fifteenth century (citing Gama: Lembrou-se do Restelo de manh, hora da partida dos veleiros, da corte instalada num palanque com um toldo de franjas para o ver largar (Lobo Antunes 1988: 113) [He remembered Restelo in the morning at the moment of the departure of the sailing ships, the court arranged on a platform with a fringed awning, watching him take off (2002: 88)]; and Cabrals departure at the very beginning of the novel; on the other hand, the departure from Luanda, Angola, in the twentieth century, after the Portuguese revolution and decolonization (citing Francisco Xavier: O aparelho correu ao longo da pista quase sem luzes e ergueu-se acima da ndoa opaca do mar. Quer dizer: no se topava o que quer que fosse salvo o reflexo de ns prprios nas janelas mas eu sabia que era o mar, e recordei-me de quantas vezes, em pequeno, olhei aquelas ondas a lembrar-me de Goa (1988: 47) [The aircraft ran the length of the strip that was almost without lights and lifted up over the opaque blur of the sea. I mean: you couldnt see anything no matter what except for our own reflections in the windows, but I knew it was the sea, and I remembered how many times, as a child, Id looked at those waves remembering Goa (2002: 32)]. This vision of the sea marks the connection with Camess poem, particularly with the two stanza (I, 19 and V, 3) which describe the departure:
J no largo oceano navegavam As inquietas ondas apartando; Os ventos brandamente respiravam, Das naus as velas cncavas inchando; Da branca escuma os mares se mostravam Cobertos, onde as proas vo cortando As martimas guas consagradas, Que do gado de Prteu so cortadas. (Cames n.d.: I, 19) [They were midway on the wide ocean Cleaving the ever-restless waves The billowing wind blew gently, The sails of the ships were concave; White spume was whipped backwards As the mighty prows sped on Cutting the sacred waters of the deep, Where the cattle of Proteus never sleep. (1997: 6)]

The mere manifestation of the ships crossing the waves is rendered more complex in Lobo Antuness novel by mixing nature, the city and the people in post-colonial hybridity, and, moreover, by mixing different aspects of nature, cities and people at different periods of time. The title of the English translation, The Return of the Caravels (and of all translations of As Naus, as far as I know), takes the implied criticism of the maritime discoveries one step further: the caravels were, of course, a particular kind of ship used in the discoveries during a specific period in history, but the title emphasizes the return,1 thus underlining both the epic voyage of discovery

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and the tragic return. As such, the English title already indicates both the triumphant aspects of the enterprise and the accompanying feelings of disappointment and rejection. Lobo Antunes already articulates this duality in the first chapter, juxtaposing Cabrals fifteenth-century departure from Lisbon to Africa (epic and positive) with his departure-return (tragic and negative) from Luanda to Portugal in the twentieth century, the action being conversely the same but the attitudes diverging completely. The difference may also be seen in the fact that Cabral only travelled to Africa in the novel. The change is instrumental in maintaining both the authors interest in Angola, an obsessive territory in his fiction, and his very fictionalization of history, which is a particular aspect of his practice of rewriting. The author expresses the anxiety and discomfort of this unexpected change in a very impressive description of the sadness experienced by a colonial couple in Guinea:
A mulher disse No perteno aqui num sussurro que provinha do interior da sua desiluso e da sua misria, e repetiu baixinho No perteno aqui [] Um grande paquete claro aproximava-se do cais a ameaar destruir Bissau com o gume da proa onde uma sereia esculpida, de bacia gigantesca, separava a espuma com a l doirada do sexo: No somos de parte alguma agora, respondeu o marido. (Lobo Antunes 1988: 56) [The woman said I dont belong here in a whisper that came from inside her disillusionment and misery, and she repeated softly I dont belong here (). A large white packet was approaching the docks, threatening to destroy Bissau with the point of its bow where a carved mermaid with a huge pelvis split the foam with the golden fleece of her sex: we dont belong anywhere now, the husband answered. (2002: 39)]

The relation between both texts thus goes beyond merely generic intertextuality, given the fact that the first text is, on the one hand, the pre-text for the second one (as is usual in intertextual practice and rewriting), and, on the other hand, that the second text surpasses, and even forgets, the literary work from which it draws its main inspiration. It could be argued, in a closer analysis of The Return, that, rather than finding inspiration in The Lusiads (the authors usual claim in both private and public statements), Lobo Antunes intended to compose a novel about the effects of the decolonization process in Portugal following the democratic revolution, and, perhaps wishing to mix the historical grandeur of events and figures with representations of everyday life that had been disrupted by that very historical process, found in The Lusiads an effective tool. Moreover, Lobo Antunes focuses not on the strong figures of his time, but on the weaklings of contemporary history (in common with much postmodern fiction), that is, on the retornados former colonizers associated with the Salazar regime whose lives have been completely shattered and disrupted after the democratic revolution. The novel leaves out those who enacted the revolution, the soldiers and captains, replacing them with the sailors (the historical heroes who correspond to the present-day heroes of the revolution). In so doing, and also by presenting each of them as living in different times and with different social and cultural concerns and, especially, leaving aside all political questions The Return constructs its heroic figure as a mix of action

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and suffering, success and misfortune, adventure and unhappy routine. Unexpected change is the dominant figure in the novel, based on total upheaval in twentiethcentury Portugal, a country which, once accustomed to its self-image as the head of a great empire (albeit hardly sustained) arrives, after the oppression of a fascist dictatorship, at a frail revolution. But unexpected transformation is also the compositional device for the characters, turning miserable survivors of shipwrecks (Manuel de Sousa Seplveda) into successful businessmen, turning a saint (Francisco Xavier) into the lubricious and greedy manager of the Apostle of the Indies boarding house, or turning King Manuel, the master of the maritime discoveries, into a ridiculous puppet. Transformation and reversal of fortune were already the principal dangers proclaimed by Cames:
Oh! Grandes e gravssimos perigos, Oh! Caminho da vida nunca certo, Que, aonde a gente pe sua esperana, Tenha a vida to pouca segurana! (Cames n.d.: I, 105) [O great and grave dangers! O the vicissitudes of lifes journey! That wherever a people place their trust, The little they rely on turns on dust! (1997: 24)]

Thus, The Return is a literary work in which change and discontent play out the action summarized in some passages of The Lusiads. And the tangential mode of composition, which is used in some parts of the novel relating it to The Lusiads, makes the rewriting also explicitly a kind of dis-writing. This implies that The Return, based as it is on Camess epic, is not only a parody of the sea voyage to India, but also a distortion of this voyage (the result of which is the burlesque and unhappy return), related in a literary register situated somewhere between tragedy and satire, and very close to agony and to the grotesque. The postmodern multiplicity apparent in this novel constitutes precisely the opposite of Camess classical unity. Camess poem does deal with multiple effects, but these are delimited by the constructed reading which works to separate out the contradictions in the text. The following example is the second stanza on the departure:
J a vista, pouco e pouco, se desterra Daqueles ptrios montes, que ficavam; Ficava o caro Tejo e a fresca serra De Sintra, e nela os olhos se alongavam. Ficava-nos tambm na amada terra O corao, que as mgoas l deixavam. E j despois que toda se escondeu, No vimos mais, enfim, que mar e cu. (Cames n.d.: V, 3)

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[Little by little our gaze was exiled From the native hills we left behind; There remained the dear Tagus and the green Sintra, and on those our sight long dwelt; Our hearts, too, stayed behind us, Lodged with their griefs in the loved land; And when at last all faded from the eye, Nothing was visible but sea and sky. (1997: 98)]

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In The Return, the parody, normally present in many kinds of rewriting, is the result of discontinuity and disruption in the intertextual process of similarity achieved through adjustment. It is also the result of a parody of the very mode of the original writing: leaving Africa, Francisco Xavier says, as he looks out the window in the plane, Eu sabia que era o mar (1988: 47) [I knew it was the sea (2002: 32)]; Gama, going for a Sunday morning drive with King Manuel in contemporary Lisbon, Mesmo sem a ajuda dos culos entalados na algibeira do colete, notou a mastreao de uma nau fundeada no Tejo, de estandaartes recolhidos, espera de vento para descer a barra a caminho de arquiplagos povoados por vulces estranhos e vegetaes inconcebveis (1988: 186) [even without the help of the eyeglasses stuck away in the pocket of his vest, took note of the arrangement of masts on a ship anchored in the Tagus, with flags furled, waiting for a wind in order to go down to the river mouth on its way to archipelagoes inhabited by strange volcanoes and inconceivable vegetation (2002: 1556)]; and, in an amazing conversion of literary motifs, the colonial couple in Bissau, after looking at the ships that take them to Lisbon, and having been lodged after their return in a guesthouse in the countryside, look at the trees in front of it, which reflect their state of mind and situation: As rvores definhavam na praa, jogando ao acaso os membros esquartejados de quatro ou cinco ramos em pnico (1988: 137) [The trees stood out on the square, casually tossing about their quartered members of four or five panic-stricken branches (2002: 108)]. This communion of feelings and thoughts, through the animism of the landscape, is, in a way, emblematic of a post-colonial condition. But we must remember that the anticolonialist voice can already be heard in The Lusiads too, and that Camess poem also contains its own self-criticism, giving expression to ideological views that contradict the ideals the poem proposes and follows. Let us consider some verses of the famous episode known as The old man of Restelo: Cum saber s de experincias feito, / Tais palavras tirou do experto peito (Cames n.d.: IV, 94) [with a wisdom only experience could impart, / He uttered these words from a much-tried heart (1997: 95 ]:
glria de mandar, v cobia Desta vaidade a que chamamos Fama! [] Que perigos, que mortes, que tormentas, Que crueldades neles exprimentas!

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A que novos desastres determinas De levar estes reinos e esta gente? Que perigos, que mortes lhe destinas, Debaixo dalgum nome preminente? Que promessas de reinos e de minas De ouro, que lhe fars to facilmente? Que famas lhe prometers? Que histrias? Que triunfos? Que palmas? Que vitrias? (Cames n.d.: IV, 95, 97) [O pride of power! O futile lust For that vanity known as fame! () To what deaths, what miseries you condemn Your heroes! What pains you inflict on them! To what new catastrophes do you plan To drag this kingdom and these people? What perils, what deaths have you in store Under what magniloquent titles? What visions of kingdoms and gold-mines Will you guide them to infallibility? What fame do you promise them? What stories? What conquests and processions? What glories? (1997: 96)]

Maria Alzira Seixo

Catastrophes and perils are to be found in all episodes of Portuguese history centred on the age of the discoveries, but here the counter-epic voice is strongly expressed, although it is the only example in the poem. Before the democratic revolution, literary critics often interpreted this episode as the expression of a figure of the past presented as a symbol of resistance against the future and against innovation. But this voice apparently inspires Lobo Antunes to write his book, thus distancing himself from that ideologically motivated interpretation. What The Return does is to develop the stories and the glories mentioned in the questions asked by the old man at the moment of the departure of the ships to the Eastern seas; but it also develops the interrogative mood that marks them, thus underlining the uncertainty that they have carried in history and that they still contain. Parody is also, as Linda Hutcheon (1988) argues, both a negative critique of events and a kind of homage to them. We may now consider that The Return is not only a parody of The Lusiads, with some instances of rewriting, but also a parody, with many points of rewriting (which also includes reinterpretation and deviation) of the very events that both works deal with. Those events converge in the topics of travel, knowledge and power, particularly in Camess epic, and in the related topics of anxiety, incompetence and misery that stand out in Lobo Antuness novel. But, we should always remember, it was also Cames who already opened this door for our contemporary writer: in canto VII of The Lusiads, after having related almost all the Portuguese exploits, the poet interrupts his own narration of such exploits to say, once more looking at an old man with a branch in his hands:

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Um ramo na mo tinha Mas, cego, Eu que cometo, insano e temerrio, Sem vs, ninfas do Tejo e do Mondego, Por caminho to rduo, longo e vrio! Vosso favor invoco, que navego Por alto mar, com vento to contrrio, [] [] Numa mo sempre a espada e noutra a pena; Agora, com pobreza avorrecida, Por hospcios alheios degradado; [] Agora, s costas escapando a vida, [] Que no menos milagre foi salvar-se [] E ainda, Ninfas minhas, no bastava Que tamanhas misrias me cercassem, Seno que aqueles que eu cantando andava Tal prmio de meus versos me tornassem: A troco dos descansos que esperava, Das capelas de louro que me honrassem, Trabalhos nunca usados me inventaram, Com que em to duro estado me deitaram. (Cames n.d.: VII, 7881) [In his right hand was a branch But what Blind folly is this that I embark, On a voyage so hard, so long and varied Without you, nymphs of Tagus and Mondego? I implore your help, for I am sailing The open sea with a wind so contrary () () Pen in one hand, a sword in the other Now banished, in hateful poverty, To long exile under alien roofs; () Now, my life on a thread, surviving Shipwreck by () a miracle ()

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And yet, my nymphs, it was not enough To plague me with such suffering, But that the very men whose deeds I praised Should reward my poetry as they did: Where I had hoped to exchange toil For honours and wreaths of laurel, Labours undreamed of they devised for me Encompassing my present misery! (1997: 1545)

Maria Alzira Seixo

This somehow extra-diegetical passage of The Lusiads is one of the sources for the disillusion felt by most of the characters of The Return, and in a very special way for three of the main characters in the book: the man named Lus (as Lus de Cames is always called in Lobo Antuness novel), Gama (Vasco da Gama, the captain who reached India in 1498) and Dom Manuel (the ruling king at the time of Gamas voyage). The presence of Cames in Lobo Antuness book not only corresponds to the manifest presence of the poet in his epic, as we have just seen, but means also that, in the development effected by the novel, the writer is the only character who is spared satire and parody: he is simply miserable and displaced. In one of his first appearances, he is viewed in a metafictional position, beginning to write The Lusiads in a caf situated in Lisbons crowded central train station, Santa Apolnia, surrounded by the diversity of his fellow travellers. Clear allusion is made to post-colonial topics (displacement, hybridity, passage and mutation, reversal of social positions for example, the esplanade attendant is in reality, that is, within this historical novel, Garcia da Orta, a great Portuguese botanist and contemporary of Cames):
O homem de nome Lus percebeu o cego no roldo dos passageiros [] O empregado da esplanada, esquecido da esferogrfica e do bloco das somas, levantou-se como um harmnio se desdobra e enfiou-se de vis numa espcie de arrecadao ou de cozinha [] Ento afastei a garrafa de gua das pedras para um canto da mesa, agarrei na caneta e no caderno do criado sem ossos, sacudi-me melhor na cedeira, apoiei o cotovelo esquerdo no tampo, e de ponta da lngua de fora e sobrancelhas unidas de esforo, comecei a primeira oitava herica do poema. (Lobo Antunes 1988: 97) [The man named Lus caught sight of the blind man in the confusion of passengers () The esplanade attendant, forgetting his ballpoint and order pad, got up like an accordion opening up and slipped sidewise into a kind of booth or kitchen. () Then I took the bottle of soda water over to a corner of the table, grabbed the boneless attendants pen and notebook, settled better into my seat, leaned my left elbow on the tabletop, and with the tip of my tongue sticking out and my brow knitted with effort, I began the first heroic octave of the poem. (2002: 734)]

Writing is an activity much praised in The Return, but particularly in relation to Cames. It is true that another writer of the classical period, Ferno Mendes Pinto, the author of Peregrinao,2 in my view, the most important Portuguese travelogue, is treated in the same way as other contemporary personalities, that is, as exceptional figures in history but subjected nonetheless to parody and satire, for they either partake of power or are involved in business. The only character who emerges in the

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novel as an entirely honourable figure of tragedy is the author of the chosen precursor text, The Lusiads, who is spared from corruption and from the deterioration brought about by both the ravages of time and human derision. Let us consider a passage where Ferno Mendes Pinto is described:
O musseque, quase rente ao mar, era habitado por pssaros da gua poisados na chapa dos telhados e macaenses de cabaia fumigando na rua essncias destinadas aos deuses de trancinha na nuca que moram no fundo dos pratos entre pagodes e salgueiros. O nico branco do bairro vendia bblias, postais erticos e gira-discos no porta a porta da cidade, chamava-se Ferno Mendes Pinto, possua uma cabana na areia atulhada de refugos de equincio e recordaes da Malsia []. Ferno Mendes Pinto mostrou-lhe o mao, j batido mquina, das suas viagens caudalosas (Qualquer dia entrego esta bodega toda a um editor). (Lobo Antunes 1988: 1004) [The slum, almost at the waters edge, was inhabited by water birds that roosted on the sheeting of the roofs and people from Macau in wide-sleeved tunics fumigating essences destined for the gods on the streets, with pigtails hanging down the backs of their necks and who live on the bottom of dishes amidst willow trees and pagodas. The only white man in the neighbourhood sold bibles, erotic postcards, and record players from door to door in the city; his name was Ferno Mendes Pinto, he owned a hut on the sand that was crammed full of equinoctial junk and memories of Malaysia (). Ferno Mendes Pinto showed him the pile of paper already typed up dealing with his extensive voyages (Someday Im going to turn all this junk over to a publisher). (2002: 769)]

Lobo Antunes regularly derides some very revered figures of Portuguese history, combining in a subtle way the tragedy of the retornados and the violent criticism of their greed during the colonization of Portuguese territories in Africa, and also the arrogance of power and domination with their dangerous outcomes, or rather the dangerous outcomes that they have according to the authors views on colonization. However, the spirit of this derision never involves punishment or contempt, since the majority of these personalities are presented in a humorous way, and the intertextual dialogue simultaneously plays on serious consideration, on the one hand, and mockery, on the other. Take Seplveda, for instance, who epitomizes the suffering resulting from shipwrecks, caused by the excessive weight of the ships returning from India to Lisbon, a man who has seen his wife, Dona Leonor, kill herself so as not to be captured by Africans on the coast. Lobo Antunes portrays him as now the owner, in Lisbon, of the Bar Dona Leonor (homenagem esposa sob o seu anjo de pedra no pas dos antropfagos) (1988: 123) [Dona Leonor Bar (in homage to the wife under her stone angel in the land of cannibals) (2002: 97)]. Consequently he is at once the symbol of all shipwreck survivors and a successful businessman, and when Nuno lvares Pereira, the Constable of the Realm (himself also a victor in the Aljubarrota battle against the Castilians in the fourteenth-century) asks him: Ouve? [] So as trombetas do acampamento castelhano (1988: 131) [Do you hear? () Its the trumpets from the Castilian camp (2002: 104)], Seplveda answers: Trombones uma ova []. Em que sculo que voc julga que vive? (1988: 132) [Trumpets, shit (). What century do you think were living in? (2002: 105)].3

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From a different perspective but with similar intertextual and interdiscursive objectives, Lobo Antunes refers not to The Lusiads but to contemporary culture when he deals with the artistic activities of secondary characters in The Return. The navigator we met at the beginning of the novel, Pedro lvares Cabral, is now miserable and has decidiu emigrar para Paris (167) [decided to emigrate to Paris (139)], as a great number of Portuguese people did during the Salazar period. He tells us that fortunately he has come across two gypsies, Federico Garca Lorca and Luis Buuel, who sold him a fake passport. They all celebrate in the streets of Lisbon, the former reciting lines from his poems, Verde que te quiero verde, Voces de muerte sonaron cerca del Guadalquivir, Antonio Torres Heredia hijo y nieto de Camborios and a voz de Federico Garcia Lorca sabia a laranjas, a gumes de faca, a azeitonas lunares e s tranas do vento (1988: 176) [Federico Garca Lorcas voice had the taste of oranges, knife blades, lunar olives, and braids of wind (2002: 147)], and the latter was constantly whispering Um dia destes, vais ver, largo esta porcaria toda e fao um filme que fica tudo a de boca aberta (1988: 177) [One of these days, youll see, Im going to get away from all this crap and make a film that will leave them all with their mouth open (2002: 148)]. Such intertextual approaches may be based, not on similarity, as in the Aljubarrota case, but on opposition, which occurs when Lobo Antunes deals with love and with the sailors erotic adventures. The Lusiads is famous for the way in which the epic is interrupted, in canto IX, in order to allow an episode of intense love to take place, when the sailors, during the return of Gamas fleet from India, come across an island with refreshing landscapes and beautiful nymphs. This topic is developed within an idyllic vision of sexual relations and according to the concept of sensuality found in erudite Renaissance poetry:
Oh! Que famintos beijos na floresta, E que mimoso choro que soava! Que afagos to suaves, que ira honesta, Que em risinhos alegres se tornava! O que mais passam na manh e na sesta, Que Vnus com prazeres inflamava, Milhor expriment-lo que julg-lo; Mas julgue-o quem no pode expriment-lo. (Cames n.d.: IX, 83) [What ravenous kisses filled the woods! What little moans and tender weeping! What sweet caresses! What virtuous anger, Yielding to happy, compliant laughter! What further happened that morn and noon As Venus fanned the flames of love, Better to relish than disparage it; Let those begrudge who cannot manage it. (1997: 193)]

Instead of turning this episode into a collective experience, as is the case in the epic, as a kind of reward for the sailors efforts, Lobo Antunes concentrates the erotic

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episode on some of the individual characters, preferring to deride the most unexpected ones (Francisco Xavier, Seplveda). The episode corresponding to canto IX, known as The isle of love, is in The Return progressively built around the navigator Diogo Co, who used Comandar caravelas pelos penedos de frica fora, cravando padres no areal (Lobo Antunes 1988: 213) [to command caravels off the cliffs of Africa, planting markers on the beaches (2002: 179)] and is now procura das slfides que boiam entre os cascos dos barcos (1988: 154) [looking for the sylphs that float along among the hulls of ships (2002: 125)], and trying to put the nymphs of the Tagus back into the river. This concern with the nymphs is ambiguous in the novel, for it obviously signifies the erotic obsessions of sailors who have been kept far from land and home for a long time, but it also refers, in my view, to the care Lobo Antunes takes with his literary craft, thus assimilating into his novel the poetic inspiration from The Lusiads, which is concentrated in the second part of the poem (in the invocation to the Tgides, the nymphs of river Tagus), and even in the stanza already quoted (in the passage In his right hand was a branch, where the nymphs of the river Mondego are also evoked). In this way, Cames and Lobo Antunes work together where the practice of love and the practice of literature meet, although with different processes of composition. The individual erotic experience in The Return is at its most intense in the episode in which the whore who comes from Africa in search of her beloved Diogo Co finds him, giving rise to a scene of love that is related in the form of an analogy of great nautical adventures:
Mal a noite principiou a diluir-se no quarto em fragmentos de tecido sem peso que os gases de vscera dos cacilheiros das sete espavoriam, a mulher encalhou de repente, quando j nada esperava mau grado a mincia tecedeira da sua arte, no imenso, inesperado mastro orgulhoso do navegante, erguido, na vertical da barriga, com todas as velas desfraldadas e o ressoar de cabaa das conchas. Ao percorrer, fascinada, a monumentalidade nutica desse pnis florido de insgnias e de ecos temeu sentir-se perfurada por uma energia muito maior do que o seu tero, que a desarticularia sem remdio, como nos suplcios rabes, nas maarocas de milho do colcho. Tentou afastarse, rastejando no lenol, siderada por aquela potncia sem limites, mas os pulsos do marinheiro imobilizaram-lhe de golpe as ndegas com a fora com que trinta anos antes domavam rodas de leme desvairadas pelos temporais, sofreu, a centmetros da cara, um sopro de beribri e de bagao digerido, e achou-se, por fim, apunhalada por uma enxrcia descomunal que vibrava no interior do seu corpo dezenas de estandartes reais de caravela. (Lobo Antunes 1988: 2223) [No sooner had night begun to dissolve in the room into fragments of weightless cloth that the visceral gases of the seven oclock ferries frightened off, that the woman, when she no longer hoped for anything in spite of the detailed weave of her art, suddenly touched ground against the navigators immense and unexpected proud mast, which rose up vertically over his belly with all sails unfurled and the calabash resonance of conch shells. On ranging over the nautical monumentality of that penis embellished with insignias and echoes, fascinated, she grew fearful of feeling herself run through by an energy much greater than that of her uterus, which would inevitably break apart as in an Arab torture on the corncob mattress. She tried to move away, crawling along the sheet, astonished by that limitless potency, but the sailors grip suddenly immobilized

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her buttocks with the strength that thirty years before had tamed ships wheels spinning out of control in storms, and inches from her face she suffered a whiff of beriberi and digested rotgut and found herself finally pierced by a huge yardarm that vibrated inside her with the flutter of dozens of royal caravel standards. (2002: 1878)]

It appears that The Return finds in love the possibility of recreating history, through this way of giving Diogo Co the gift of youth of a young lover and, moreover, the possibility of making love as if he was sailing or is himself a caravel crossing the oceans. In other words, love is a reward, in The Lusiads, or a sad episode which ends with death as is the case in the Ins de Castro episode (Cames n. d.: III, 11938) [Cames 1997: 715] which is curiously absent from The Return, perhaps because it is too weighty to be included in this novel whereas, in the novel, love is the sad activity of whores or of corrupted businessmen. Furthermore, we may accept that, in conceiving The Return, Lobo Antunes gives shape to his love of history and reconstructs history by means of a novel that reinvents it, mixing past and future, great adventures and anonymous misfortunes. By means of the same process, he fights death, and in so doing he returns faithfully to Cames, evoking Camess writing just as the epic poet evokes Portuguese history. In this sense, rewriting may be seen as the fiction of history, or at least as a way of presenting history as personal experience and active commitment. The reader of Lobo Antuness novel cannot fail to notice the elegiac tone that surrounds Vasco da Gama and King Dom Manuel, now meeting frequently, after their return to Portugal, and chatting both about the past and about the disappointment they suffer in the present:
Vasco da Gama e o monarca, enganando os guarda-costas tumefactos de pistolas que os americanos alugavam ao ms, saam sozinhos na direco de Marvila conversando de descobertas e de deusas. [] D. Manoel, de coroa nos joelhos, a coar a cova da moleirinha com a unha, lamentava-se da misria desta vida, p, repara como envelhecemos tanto sem darmos conta disso, repara que j no servimos para nada, qual exagero, catrino, para nada, queres trepar a um mastro e no consegues, queres ler a lista dos telefones e chapu, repara como com a idade o som das vagas se torna triste l em baixo. (Lobo Antunes 1988: 119, 184) [Vasco da Gama and the monarch, hoodwinking the bodyguards bulging with pistols that the Americans rented out by the month, sneaked out all by themselves toward Marvila, chatting about discoveries and goddesses. () Dom Manuel, his crown on his knees, scratching the hollow of his skull with a fingernail, was bemoaning the misery of this life, hell, look how were getting old without realizing it, look how were no good for anything, Im not exaggerating, damn it, for anything, you try to climb up a mast and you cant, you try to read a telephone book and fat chance, look how age makes the sound of the waves breaking on the shale down there turn sad. (2002: 94, 1534)]

The deceptive description of these two heroes ends, in the novel, with the expectation and utopian fantasy of the return of King Sebastian (who died prematurely and to whom Cames dedicated his poem), but this time the restoration of the past,

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according to the wishes of the retornados, is impossible. Deranged and in a complete state of physical and mental alienation, they look out over the sea at the horizon, forever waiting. This memory perpetuated in fiction is, in The Return as well as in The Lusiads, the major law of the epic, namely the need to fight against death and oblivion, transformed in the novel by the supremacy of love and by the possibility of survival. Cames constantly emphasizes this power of the epic, which is, in his view, the power of Portuguese exploits and conquests: Albuquerque terribil, Castro forte, / E outros em quem poder no teve a morte (Cames n.d.: I, 14) [Albuquerque the fierce, Castro the brave,/ And others whose exploits have survived the grave (1997: 5). In Lobo Antuness novel, the narrative ends with Diogo Co, before the fantasized apocalyptic scene of King Sebastians return for the sake of the retornados, observed in silence by the man named Lus (a metaphor for the writer, who conceives the scene and literally writes the hope as well as its subsequent emptiness). The old navigator, who was capable of a formidable love scene, remains silent also, and lonely, waiting for sleep, Fitando, at de madrugada, roendo a pedra-pomes das mandbulas, a Terra que se transformara num deserto seco de ondas e de tgides, onde mesmo o vento dos bzios tinha por fim desaparecido (Lobo Antunes 1988: 233) [staring at the earth that had been transformed into a desert dry of waves and Tagus nymphs where even the wind of the conch shells had finally disappeared (2002: 197)]. The disappearance may here hint at the emptiness of the quiet rest and the sense of history as immobile that is apparent too in Lobo Antuness later literary works, and, in particular, in his forthcoming novel Boa tarde s coisas aqui em Baixo. Ironically, only the reversal of the historical situation, provided by rewriting, the discursive interpretation of the past, can act as a factor of reinterpretation or progression towards a more correct understanding of what happened. Fiction is undoubtedly a privileged path for that understanding. Notes
1 2 3 The title of the novel was originally the same in Portuguese, but the author had to change it for editorial reasons, as he frequently emphasizes in private and in public statements. See also Seixo (2001: 167, n.1). Mendes Pinto (1983a, 1983b and 1991). See also Seixo and Zurbach (1999). Let us not forget that Cames wrote, at the beginning of Aljubarrota episode, in The Lusiads: Deu sinal a trombeta castelhana, / Horrendo, fero, ingente e temeroso (Cames n.d. IV, 28) [The war trumpet of Castille sounded / Horrifying, savage, mighty, and ominous (1997: 82)].

Works cited
Alves, Hlio (1999) O sistema da poesia pica quinhentista, Universidade de vora, PhD dissertation. Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin (1989) The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-colonial Literatures (London and New York: Routledge). Calinescu, Matei (1997) Rewriting, in International Postmodernism: Theory and Literary Practice, ed. Hans Bertens and Douwe Fokkema (Amsterdam and Philadelphia: Benjamins), 2438.

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Cames, Lus Vaz de (n.d.) [1572] Os Lusadas, ed. Emanuel Paulo Ramos, 6th edition (Oporto: Porto Editora). (1997) The Lusiads, trans. Landeg White (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press). Genette, Grard (1982) Palimpsestes: la littrature au second degr (Paris: Seuil). Hutcheon, Linda (1988) A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction (London and New York: Routledge). Kaplan, Caren (1996) Questions of Travel: Postmodern Discourses of Displacement (Durham: Duke University Press). Lobo Antunes, Antnio (1979) Memria de elefante (Lisbon: Vega). (1979a) Os cus de Judas (Lisbon: Vega). (1980) Conhecimento de inferno (Lisbon: Vega). (1981) Explicao dos pssaros (Lisbon: Vega). (1983) South of Nowhere, trans Elizabeth Lowe (London: Chatto & Windus). (1984) Fado alexandrino (Lisbon: Dom Quixote). (1988) As Naus (Lisbon: Dom Quixote). (1991) An Explanation of the Birds, trans. Richard Zenith (New York: Grove Weidenfeld). (2002) The Return of the Caravels, trans. Gregory Rabassa (New York: Grove Press). Mendes Pinto, Ferno (1983a) Peregrinao, ed. Adolfo Casais Monteiro (Lisbon: Imprensa Nacional/Casa da Moeda). (1983b) The Travels of Ferno Mendes Pinto, trans. Rebecca Katz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). (1991) La Prgrination, trans. Robert Viale (Paris: ditions de la Diffrence). Mooij, J. J. A. (1993) Fictional Realities: The Uses of Literary Imagination (Amsterdam and Philadelphia: Benjamins). Prier, Raymond A. and Gerald Gillespie (eds) (1997) Narrative Ironies (Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi). Scarpetta, Guy (1985) LImpuret (Paris: Grasset). Seixo, Maria Alzira and Christine Zurbach (1999) O discurso literrio da Peregrinao (Lisbon: Cosmos). Seixo, Maria Alzira (2000) Reading Camess The Lusiads. Postcolonial views in the constitution of literary colonial discourse, in Maria Alzira Seixo, John Noyes, Graa Abreu and Isabel Moutinho, The Paths of Multiculturalism: Travel Writings and Postcolonialism (Lisbon: Cosmos/International Comparative Literature Association), 30312. (forthcoming) Bibliografia e bibliologia: subsdios para a constituio de uma bibliografia passiva de Antnio Lobo Antunes, Diana, 56.* (2001) Os Romances de Antnio Lobo Antunes (Lisbon: Dom Quixote). Spivak, Gayatri (1999) A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (Cambridge MA and London: Harvard University Press). Wesseling, Elisabeth (1991) Writing History as a Prophet: Postmodernist Innovations of the Historical Novel (Amsterdam and Philadelphia: Benjamins). * This article draws on around two hundred works written about Antnio Lobo Antuness novels, including those that are most relevant for the study of As Naus, from a literary perspective. None is listed here as an individual reference because none is concerned with the specific subject of this article.

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Saramagos Gospel and the poetics of prototypical rewriting

Ziva Ben-Porat

Abstract
Saramagos novel O Evangelho segundo Jesus Cristo is a paradigmatic example of successful prototypical rewriting: a retelling of a known story in such a way that the resulting text, the rewrite, is simultaneously an original composition and a recognizable rendition, involving a critical rereading of the source. Grounded in cognitive and pragmatic approaches to reading and interpretation, the article presents a detailed analysis of the relationship between the novel and the Gospels, focusing on Saramagos treatment of Mary Magdalene and of the temptation in the desert. Newspaper reviews and publishers blurbs supply the empirical data for evaluating the success of Saramagos novel as a rewrite. The article ends with a brief comparison with Jim Craces Quarantine, in order to illustrate the difference between a prototypical rewrite and a global allusion. Keywords: Saramago; Jim Crace; cognitive poetics; comparative literature; reader response; intertextuality; allusion Inasmuch as many have undertaken to compile a narrative of the things which have been accomplished among us [] it seemed good to me also [] to write an orderly account for you [] that you may know the truth concerning the things of which you have been informed. (Luke 1: 14)

The full quotation from Luke is the epigraph, as well as the only information on the back cover of the Portuguese edition (an important pragmatic indicator to be discussed later) of Jos Saramagos O Evangelho segundo Jesus Cristo (henceforth O Evangelho) [The Gospel According to Jesus Christ (henceforth Gospel )]. With minor changes the abbreviated quotation can stand as a defining description of prototypical rewriting.1 An author is undertaking the writing down of a story that has been told and, for us, written! before, claiming that his version clarifies the true meaning of the story with which his reader is already familiar. Prototypical novelistic rewriting is, then, a retelling of a known story in such a way that the resulting text, the rewrite, is simultaneously an original composition and a recognizable rendition, involving a rereading of the source. Recognizable rendition requires the consistent use of significant original elements. Originality prohibits straightforward reproduction of the source text, and requires the introduction of new semantic functions to at least some of the transposed elements, various additions, and a concomitant reorganization of the narrative.2 Saramagos novel, as I shall show throughout the article, is a paradigmatic and particularly interesting example of successful prototypical rewriting.3
Journal of Romance Studies Volume 3 Number 3 2003 ISSN 14733536