Life and work, figure and myth of Camões – “dangerous matter”

Abstract

The 500th anniversary of Luís Vaz de Camões’s birth has focused attention on the writer himself and the projection of his personal myth, sometimes tempted to return to a fallacious biographical approach to extrapolating data and fanciful in its attempt to fill in information gaps. Narratives about Camões’s life have gradually become part of the code of biography as a literary genre, with its categories and topics, and a long humanist tradition. In any case, Camões’s life brought to his literary creation a fertile store of motivations and biographemes, although certain contingencies and experiences may have been relived by the poet in the same way others are attributed to great historical figures or heroes of epic narratives and mythical fables. But Camões was above all a magnificent creator of figures; and his figurative creation extends to himself as a persona that his audiences have variously presented. Luís de Camões knows that figure is fiction and diction; and the authorial movements toward the figural construction of personal myth were joined by many other movements of critical and creative reception. In his work, Camões reveals himself to be “dangerous matter”, as he creates a poetry of endogenous knowledge, with a brilliant beauty of problematic complexity between experiential knowledge and the Augustinian “higher understanding”. The effect of meaning often begins with the semantic displacement of core terms – as with “pena” and “experience” – and leaves open the problematic scope of many other concepts and existential data – as with “mal” and “caso.” At crucial moments in Camões’s work, this idiolectal challenge implicates important thematic topics – such as “change” and “disconcertation”– and subjects them to a subversive treatment, until the crisis is overcome.