The Traveling Eye: Retrospection, Vision, and Prophecy in the Portuguese Renaissance (review)

The present volume, a well-executed translation of the authors’ Portuguese original (published by Campo das Letras in 1998), presents an incredible wealth of historical, cultural, and artistic insights surrounding the key texts of Portugal’s Renaissance. In fact, the number and variety of the interpretations off ered may come to seem overwhelming to those who attempt to read the volume from cover to cover.

The title in English gives the impression that travel, as well as the observation and recording of travel form the nucleus of the book, but the original title, Viagens do olhar (very difficult to translate), comes closer to capturing the breadth of the issues raised by the authors: Hélder Macedo, one of the most renowned scholars of the Portuguese “classical period,” and the late cultural philosopher Fernando Gil. (There is also an essay on Portuguese chronicles by Luís de Sousa Rebelo.) Th e viagens suggested by the title are both external, stemming from Portugal maritime voyages and the construction of its empire, and internal, involving personal and national introspection, as well as prophetic vision. Although it is clear the Macedo and Gil composed and gathered the essays in a consciously collaborative way, readers should not expect to fi nd a new “global interpretation” of the Portuguese 15th–17th centuries, since the approaches used by both authors range from cartographic analysis to in depth psychological commentary on lyric poetry. Yet such eclecticism is both refreshing and singularly appropriate for the material under study. In fact, this volume represents, however unconsciously, a trail-blazing approach to analysis and speculation about early modern texts and cultural artifacts after the “collapse of theory”: a series of essays that theorize, from various points of view, on important texts without being tied to a predetermined school or trend. The volume also signals a happy marriage between the uses of literature, on one hand, to bolster or refute socio-political notions of nationhood, sovereignty, empire, race, or subject formation and, on the other hand, aesthetic analysis that centers on “the poem itself,” an art that has fallen on hard times in recent decades. In fact, one of Fernando Gil’s analyses even examines phonemic patterns in Sá de Miranda’s poetry, a technique seldom thought worthy of attention in US literary criticism today. The following are a few examples of how the overarching themes of the book bring together widely divergent texts and genres:

1. 1. The volume’s subtitle includes the triad “retrospection, vision, and prophecy,” to which I would add the act of imagination without necessary reference to the future. These basic human operations are discussed with respect to Camões’s Os Lusíadas in such key episodes as the doom-saying harangue of the old man of Restelo, the re-telling of Portugal’s history (both through the visual medium of the banners displayed by the Portuguese in India and through oral discourse), and the goddess Th etys’s prophetia ex eventu of post-Vasco da Gama discoveries and conquests (whose outcome was, of course, already known to the poet). Yet the same categories of “seeing” are explored in, for example, the cancioneiro-style lyrics and the Écloga Basto of Sá de Miranda, where he inveighs, stoically and satirically, against compatriots who, under the influence of self-interest and prejudice, “see” what is not there to be seen. Finally, the sermons and other prose works of António Vieira provide a fertile field for exemplifying the intersection between foundational (Catholic) doctrine and the almost hallucinatory prophecies of the quinto império.

2. 2. Another recurring dichotomy throughout the volume is that between foundation, grounding and groundlessness (including peregrination and nomadism). In the analyses of Os Lusíadas, a distinction is made between the system of “founding” (either of the Portuguese nation or of its colonies in Asia) and that of “voyage,” both of which are reflected not only in...