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Rewriting and the fiction of history: Camess The

Lusiadsand Lobo Antuness The Return of the CaravelsMaria Alzira Seixo

Abstract

This article underlines the role of a major hypotext (The Lusiadsby Lus de Cames) inthe writing of a contemporary Portuguese novel (The Return of the Caravelsby AntnioLobo Antunes), in which literary heritage may be seen as a determinant frame for textualinnovation. In particular the article examines the way in which contemporary eventsmay be better understood if viewed as if their adopted ideological meaning is in adynamic relation with their fictional representation. Post-colonialism and parody arethus considered here in a way that allows us to conclude that rewriting may be seen asthe fiction of history, or at least as a way of presenting history as personal experience andactive commitment.Keywords: Lobo Antunes; Cames; parody; post-colonialism; history

As a device of intertextuality, rewriting can be conceived as a fundamental literaryprocedure that allows a new text to be situated within the field of literature. Rewritingembraces the process of rereading; indeed it is the other side of rereading that is, itis the necessary operation for the critical appreciation of a text. All critical writing isbased on rereading: on the one hand, it activates what we remember of the text fromour first act of reading, which principally entails affect and surprise, producing themore generalized effects of literature; on the other hand, it is only in rereading that wegrasp the structure and organizing principles of a literary text.

As a specific mode of composing texts, rewriting is rereading manifesting itself as anew 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 thecomposition of postmodern literary texts, but the practice of writing as a consequenceof reading and, moreover, as a result of compulsive or parodic intentions in relation toones literary heritage is perhaps only postmodern in terms of its frequency and interms of the way in which postmodern writers emphasize their relations with earliertexts. In fact, rewriting has a long history in western cultures, in forms such asalternative versions, adaptations and intertextual relations of all kinds, including eventhe conventional and the newly theorized translation (Calinescu 1997).

Both the freedom and constraints of rewriting can be fruitfully observed in AsNaus[The Return of the Caravels(henceforth The Return)], Antnio Lobo Antunessseventh 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 dealmainly with the Portuguese colonial war in Africa, developing new insights into theevolution of the democratic Portuguese revolution as well as into the process ofdecolonization which was one of the consequences of that political transformation.The intertextual palimpsest (Genette 1982) ofThe Return is the classical epic poemby Lus de Cames, Os Lusiadas[The Lusiads], published in 1572, which is consideredto be a key text of Portuguese cultural identity because of its portrayal of the oldempire and major sea voyages. Lobo Antuness text follows Camess poem, whiledifferentiating itself from its father-text in many ways.

It is generally accepted that The Lusiads is the greatest Portuguese poeticcelebration of the discoveries in epic form, simultaneously embracing the Virgiliantradition and introducing into the sixteenth-century poem the new devices of

modernity as well as a different aesthetic discourse. Christianity and paganism areboth praised in the poem, acting not only as historically opposed doctrines but alsoas narrative components, although Christian interests determine the plot and theworld view it manifests. Pagan deities, such as Jupiter, Venus, Bacchus and Thetys, arepresented as active characters in the plot, at a similar level to the Portuguese sailors,but both ideological supremacy and definitive power belong to EuropeanChristianity, which proposes a specific ethics of behaviour and idealism. Camesdescribes Vasco da Gamas maritime voyage to India in 14978 and the discovery ofterritories 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 worldSo far from your native Portugal?

Exploring, he replied, the vast oceanWhere 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 Lusiadsis itself actually a meeting point for a variety of earlier texts: chronicles(historiographical writings dealing with events included in the plot, such as FernoLopess works on King John I, Barross and Castanhedas works on Portugueseterritories in India, Damio de Giss work on King Manuel, etc.), log-books (dealingmainly 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

Maria Alzira Seixo76

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a greater or lesser extent, of all these texts and others (including brief allusions toclassical texts), and, in a particular way, to Virgils The Aeneid, which provides thestructure for the entire poem. Constituting a kind of encyclopedic and heterogeneouscollection of texts in a whole of ten cantos, each of them grouping approximately ahundred stanzas, The Lusiads is a privileged junction of literary convention andinnovation. 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, inthe guise of original storytelling and new symbolic expression.

After the 1974 democratic revolution, concerns emerge in Portuguese writingabout the complexity and uncertainty of decolonization and the bitternesssurrounding the return from Africa of the descendants of colonizers. Later, the officialcommemorations of Portuguese discoveries, and in particular of Gamas voyage,

allowed contemporary writers to approach with greater freedom of thought thehistorical and aesthetic values of the Renaissance epic. At the same time thesecommemorations also allowed the Portuguese to evaluate almost fifty years ofimperialist propaganda from the Salazar regime and to discover at last the context ofpain and struggle involved in the colonial endeavour on the part of both Portuguesecitizens and African individuals. It is precisely in this context that the first novelswritten by Lobo Antunes must be read:Memria de elefante(1979), Os cus de Judas(1979a) [South of Nowhere(1983)], Conhecimento do inferno (1980), Explicao dospssaros(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 ownbeliefs and political opinions. What is more, Lobo Antunes speaks in his novels (thenarrator addressing the reader directly) from a point of view which expressessympathy with the colonized, or, more precisely, he writes in a way that shows that thecolonizer himself senses the absurdity of colonization, and therefore gradually adoptsthe perspective of the colonized, thus adding a specific touch of post-colonialsensibility to the initial colonial position.

The literary form ofThe Return, however, puts this topic in a different light. Thesingle narrators voice is replaced by many voices who speak in turn, a techniquealready employed in Fado Alexandrino, where a soldier and other members of abattalion 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 havereturned from Africa, where they went either on official service or out of greed forcommercial profit, so that they are part of that immense mass of retornados whoflocked back to Portugal soon after the independence of the former colonies. Theyhave no understanding of the political and social transformations that have takenplace 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 TheReturn are thus men and women who are neither in their own place nor in their owntime, and this is literalized in the novel: in fact, these narrators are, by means of theironic 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 thetrader and writer (Pinto) or even anonymous colonizers (a couple in Guinea). Theyall flee from Independence in Angola, Mozambique and Guinea, they all disembarkin 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 ofcivilization, points in two opposing directions: the past, when they acted as the victorsin history, and the present, where they are subjected to contingency as the losers in thesame history (Wesseling 1991). Of course, for Lobo Antunes, history is not thesame, and the similarities brought out by the characters who have lived in one eraand are trying to survive in another are extremely meaningful. This parodic similarityeffectively makes explicit the deep sense of difference the different reactions to thecontemplation 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 doembarque [], 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 pedrapara uma construo enorme dirigidos por escudeiros de saia escarlata indiferentes aoscarros de praa []. Passando por uma placa que designava o edifcio incompleto e quedizia 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, abrinquedos quebrados, formavam uma serpente de lamentos e misria aeroportoadiante, empurrando a bagagem com os ps [] na direco de uma secretria a que sesentava, em um escabelo, um escrivo da puridade que lhe perguntou o nome (Pedrolvares qu?), o conferiu numa lista dactilografada cheia de emendas [] e inquiriu derepente Tendes famlia em Portugal?, e eu disse Senhor no [] Ningum, disse eu, sa moblia do quarto que h-de chegar no prximo galeo se a no desviaram no portocom esta histria de roubalheira, democracia e socialismo [] Arranjmos-lhe lugar naResidencial Apstolo das ndias, Largo de Santa Brbara, meta-se num autocarro epergunte pelo senhor Francisco Xavier [] e estvamos sozinhos e postos de bandanuma cidade que conhecia sem conhecer [], espera das mesinhas vindas de Angolacomo 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 sandcalled Belm () and he caught sight of hundreds of people and teams of oxen thatwere 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 buildingand said JERONYMITES, we came upon the Tower in the background in the middleof 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 atyped 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 onthe 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 theIndies 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 anddidnt know () waiting for the little tables from Angola as if the caravels would crossthrough the avenues. (Lobo Antunes 2002: 18)]

This first chapter ofThe Return establishes one of the major procedures that LoboAntunes adopts in rewriting the Portuguese epic The Lusiads: the conversion of thedeparture 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 reversalare also developed, in this fictional situation, not only as the opposite of what hasbeen established as historical circumstances (which are partially identical to history)but mainly as a coexistence of different time periods, as an overlapping of events anderas, which is a common literary technique in both postmodern parody and in post-colonial satire. In this respect, Lobo Antunes goes further: the writing of differentevents, imagined as if they were taking place at the same time, and the fantasy ofdealing with historical figures as if they were characters of a contemporary realisticnovel, are accomplished in his novel by following the key text of the discoveries, thatis, by rewriting Camess The Lusiads.

In the previous example, Pedro lvares Cabral is presented simultaneously at themoment of his own departure from Lisbon in the fifteenth century and in the arrivalof a twentieth-century Portuguese settler returning after Angolas independence, thelatter contaminating the earlier historical time. At the moment of return, the ongoingconstruction of Jernimos, the monastery built by King Manuel to commemorate thefirst sea voyage to India, which had taken place two years before, can be seen in thefictional present from the taxi that takes Cabral to the caravel. At the moment ofreturn, not only is the caravel replaced with an aeroplane and Cabral is waiting in linewith his wife and son before boarding, but also upon arrival in Lisbon he is receivedas a retornado, given provisional accommodation in a guesthouse run by FranciscoXavier (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 profaneones), and Cabrals family is surprised and even shocked by the differences theyobserve in Lisbon (as if the caravels would cross through the avenues).

Rewriting, in this case, is a textual operation that must somehow be placedbetween two literary levels: the level of textuality and the level of enunciation. Inother words, Lobo Antuness novel does not follow the discursive progression ofTheLusiads; rather, it builds an intermediary stage where historical facts, literary referencesand both the excess of fantasy and the distortion of parody all work together, althoughin some passages verbal resonances from Camess poem are included, either assimilarities 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 instaladanum 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 thesailing ships, the court arranged on a platform with a fringed awning, watching himtake off (2002: 88)]; and Cabrals departure at the very beginning of the novel; onthe other hand, the departure from Luanda, Angola, in the twentieth century, afterthe Portuguese revolution and decolonization (citing Francisco Xavier: O aparelhocorreu 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 nasjanelas mas eu sabia que era o mar, e recordei-me de quantas vezes, em pequeno, olheiaquelas 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. Imean: you couldnt see anything no matter what except for our own reflections in thewindows, 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 withthe two stanza (I, 19 and V, 3) which describe the departure:

J no largo oceano navegavamAs inquietas ondas apartando;Os ventos brandamente respiravam,Das naus as velas cncavas inchando;Da branca escuma os mares se mostravamCobertos, onde as proas vo cortandoAs martimas guas consagradas,Que do gado de Prteu so cortadas.(Cames n.d.: I, 19)

[They were midway on the wide oceanCleaving the ever-restless wavesThe billowing wind blew gently,The sails of the ships were concave;White spume was whipped backwardsAs the mighty prows sped onCutting 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 inLobo Antuness novel by mixing nature, the city and the people in post-colonialhybridity, and, moreover, by mixing different aspects of nature, cities and people atdifferent periods of time. The title of the English translation, The Return of theCaravels (and of all translations ofAs Naus, as far as I know), takes the impliedcriticism of the maritime discoveries one step further: the caravels were, of course, aparticular kind of ship used in the discoveries during a specific period in history, butthe 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 triumphantaspects of the enterprise and the accompanying feelings of disappointment andrejection. Lobo Antunes already articulates this duality in the first chapter,juxtaposing Cabrals fifteenth-century departure from Lisbon to Africa (epic andpositive) with his departure-return (tragic and negative) from Luanda to Portugal inthe twentieth century, the action being conversely the same but the attitudesdiverging completely. The difference may also be seen in the fact that Cabral onlytravelled to Africa in the novel. The change is instrumental in maintaining both theauthors interest in Angola, an obsessive territory in his fiction, and his veryfictionalization of history, which is a particular aspect of his practice of rewriting. Theauthor expresses the anxiety and discomfort of this unexpected change in a veryimpressive description of the sadness experienced by a colonial couple in Guinea:

A mulher disse No perteno aqui num sussurro que provinha do interior da suadesiluso e da sua misria, e repetiu baixinho No perteno aqui [] Um grandepaquete claro aproximava-se do cais a ameaar destruir Bissau com o gume da proa ondeuma 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 herdisillusionment and misery, and she repeated softly I dont belong here (). A largewhite packet was approaching the docks, threatening to destroy Bissau with the point ofits bow where a carved mermaid with a huge pelvis split the foam with the golden fleeceof 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 thesecond text surpasses, and even forgets, the literary work from which it draws itsmain inspiration. It could be argued, in a closer analysis ofThe Return, that, ratherthan finding inspiration in The Lusiads(the authors usual claim in both private andpublic statements), Lobo Antunes intended to compose a novel about the effects ofthe 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 historicalprocess, found in The Lusiadsan effective tool. Moreover, Lobo Antunes focuses noton the strong figures of his time, but on the weaklings of contemporary history (incommon with much postmodern fiction), that is, on the retornados formercolonizers associated with the Salazar regime whose lives have been completelyshattered and disrupted after the democratic revolution. The novel leaves out thosewho enacted the revolution, the soldiers and captains, replacing them with thesailors (the historical heroes who correspond to the present-day heroes of therevolution). In so doing, and also by presenting each of them as living in differenttimes and with different social and cultural concerns and, especially, leaving asideall 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. Unexpectedchange is the dominant figure in the novel, based on total upheaval in twentieth-century Portugal, a country which, once accustomed to its self-image as the head ofa great empire (albeit hardly sustained) arrives, after the oppression of a fascistdictatorship, at a frail revolution. But unexpected transformation is also thecompositional 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 theIndies boarding house, or turning King Manuel, the master of the maritimediscoveries, into a ridiculous puppet.

Transformation and reversal of fortune were already the principal dangersproclaimed 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 theaction summarized in some passages of The Lusiads. And the tangential mode ofcomposition, which is used in some parts of the novel relating it to The Lusiads, makesthe rewriting also explicitly a kind of dis-writing. This implies that The Return, basedas it is on Camess epic, is not only a parody of the sea voyage to India, but also adistortion 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 veryclose to agony and to the grotesque. The postmodern multiplicity apparent in thisnovel constitutes precisely the opposite of Camess classical unity. Camess poemdoes deal with multiple effects, but these are delimited by the constructed readingwhich works to separate out the contradictions in the text. The following example isthe second stanza on the departure:

J a vista, pouco e pouco, se desterraDaqueles ptrios montes, que ficavam;Ficava o caro Tejo e a fresca serraDe Sintra, e nela os olhos se alongavam.Ficava-nos tambm na amada terraO 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 exiledFrom the native hills we left behind;

There remained the dear Tagus and the greenSintra, 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)]

In The Return, the parody, normally present in many kinds of rewriting, is the resultof discontinuity and disruption in the intertextual process of similarity achievedthrough 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 theplane, 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 mastreaode uma nau fundeada no Tejo, de estandaartes recolhidos, espera de vento paradescer a barra a caminho de arquiplagos povoados por vulces estranhos e vegetaesinconcebveis (1988: 186) [even without the help of the eyeglasses stuck away in thepocket of his vest, took note of the arrangement of masts on a ship anchored in theTagus, with flags furled, waiting for a wind in order to go down to the river mouthon its way to archipelagoes inhabited by strange volcanoes and inconceivablevegetation (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, andhaving been lodged after their return in a guesthouse in the countryside, look at thetrees in front of it, which reflect their state of mind and situation: As rvoresdefinhavam na praa, jogando ao acaso os membros esquartejados de quatro ou cincoramos em pnico (1988: 137) [The trees stood out on the square, casually tossingabout 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 theanticolonialist voice can already be heard in The Lusiadstoo, and that Camess poemalso 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 ofRestelo: 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 utteredthese words from a much-tried heart (1997: 95 ]:

glria de mandar, v cobiaDesta vaidade a que chamamos Fama![]Que perigos, que mortes, que tormentas,Que crueldades neles exprimentas!


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A que novos desastres determinasDe levar estes reinos e esta gente?

Que perigos, que mortes lhe destinas,Debaixo dalgum nome preminente?Que promessas de reinos e de minasDe 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 lustFor 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 planTo drag this kingdom and these people?What perils, what deaths have you in storeUnder what magniloquent titles?What visions of kingdoms and gold-minesWill you guide them to infallibility?What fame do you promise them? What stories?What conquests and processions? What glories?

(1997: 96)]

Catastrophes and perils are to be found in all episodes of Portuguese history centredon 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 pastpresented as a symbol of resistance against the future and against innovation. But thisvoice apparently inspires Lobo Antunes to write his book, thus distancing himselffrom that ideologically motivated interpretation. What The Return does is to developthe stories and the glories mentioned in the questions asked by the old man at themoment of the departure of the ships to the Eastern seas; but it also develops theinterrogative mood that marks them, thus underlining the uncertainty that they havecarried 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 ofThe Lusiads, withsome instances of rewriting, but also a parody, with many points of rewriting (whichalso includes reinterpretation and deviation) of the very events that both works dealwith. Those events converge in the topics of travel, knowledge and power, particularlyin Camess epic, and in the related topics of anxiety, incompetence and misery thatstand out in Lobo Antuness novel. But, we should always remember, it was alsoCames who already opened this door for our contemporary writer: in canto VII ofThe Lusiads, after having related almost all the Portuguese exploits, the poet interruptshis 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 navegoPor 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 bastavaQue tamanhas misrias me cercassem,Seno que aqueles que eu cantando andavaTal 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 whatBlind folly is this that I embark,On a voyage so hard, so long and variedWithout you, nymphs of Tagus and Mondego?I implore your help, for I am sailingThe 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, survivingShipwreck by () a miracle()


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And yet, my nymphs, it was not enoughTo plague me with such suffering,

But that the very men whose deeds I praisedShould reward my poetry as they did:Where I had hoped to exchange toilFor honours and wreaths of laurel,Labours undreamed of they devised for meEncompassing my present misery!(1997: 1545)

This somehow extra-diegetical passage ofThe Lusiads is one of the sources for thedisillusion felt by most of the characters ofThe Return, and in a very special way forthree 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 whoreached India in 1498) and Dom Manuel (the ruling king at the time of Gamasvoyage). The presence of Cames in Lobo Antuness book not only corresponds to themanifest presence of the poet in his epic, as we have just seen, but means also that, inthe development effected by the novel, the writer is the only character who is sparedsatire 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 cafsituated in Lisbons crowded central train station, Santa Apolnia, surrounded by thediversity of his fellow travellers. Clear allusion is made to post-colonial topics(displacement, hybridity, passage and mutation, reversal of social positions forexample, 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 empregadoda esplanada, esquecido da esferogrfica e do bloco das somas, levantou-se como umharmnio 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 canetae no caderno do criado sem ossos, sacudi-me melhor na cedeira, apoiei o cotoveloesquerdo 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. () ThenI took the bottle of soda water over to a corner of the table, grabbed the bonelessattendants pen and notebook, settled better into my seat, leaned my left elbow on thetabletop, 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 toCames. It is true that another writer of the classical period, Ferno Mendes Pinto,the author ofPeregrinao,2 in my view, the most important Portuguese travelogue, istreated in the same way as other contemporary personalities, that is, as exceptionalfigures 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 precursortext, The Lusiads, who is spared from corruption and from the deterioration broughtabout by both the ravages of time and human derision. Let us consider a passagewhere Ferno Mendes Pinto is described:

O musseque, quase rente ao mar, era habitado por pssaros da gua poisados na chapados telhados e macaenses de cabaia fumigando na rua essncias destinadas aos deuses detrancinha na nuca que moram no fundo dos pratos entre pagodes e salgueiros. O nicobranco 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 deequincio e recordaes da Malsia []. Ferno Mendes Pinto mostrou-lhe o mao, jbatido mquina, das suas viagens caudalosas (Qualquer dia entrego esta bodega todaa um editor). (Lobo Antunes 1988: 1004)

[The slum, almost at the waters edge, was inhabited by water birds that roosted on thesheeting of the roofs and people from Macau in wide-sleeved tunics fumigating essencesdestined for the gods on the streets, with pigtails hanging down the backs of their necksand who live on the bottom of dishes amidst willow trees and pagodas. The only whiteman in the neighbourhood sold bibles, erotic postcards, and record players from doorto door in the city; his name was Ferno Mendes Pinto, he owned a hut on the sand thatwas crammed full of equinoctial junk and memories of Malaysia (). Ferno MendesPinto 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 oftheir greed during the colonization of Portuguese territories in Africa, and also thearrogance of power and domination with their dangerous outcomes, or rather thedangerous outcomes that they have according to the authors views on colonization.However, the spirit of this derision never involves punishment or contempt, since themajority of these personalities are presented in a humorous way, and the intertextualdialogue simultaneously plays on serious consideration, on the one hand, andmockery, on the other. Take Seplveda, for instance, who epitomizes the sufferingresulting from shipwrecks, caused by the excessive weight of the ships returning fromIndia 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 nopas dos antropfagos) (1988: 123) [Dona Leonor Bar (in homage to the wife underher stone angel in the land of cannibals) (2002: 97)]. Consequently he is at once thesymbol of all shipwreck survivors and a successful businessman, and when Nunolvares Pereira, the Constable of the Realm (himself also a victor in the Aljubarrotabattle against the Castilians in the fourteenth-century) asks him: Ouve? [] So astrombetas do acampamento castelhano (1988: 131) [Do you hear? () Its thetrumpets from the Castilian camp (2002: 104)], Seplveda answers: Trombonesuma 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 interdiscursiveobjectives, Lobo Antunes refers not to The Lusiadsbut to contemporary culture whenhe deals with the artistic activities of secondary characters in The Return. The navigatorwe met at the beginning of the novel, Pedro lvares Cabral, is now miserable and hasdecidiu emigrar para Paris (167) [decided to emigrate to Paris (139)], as a greatnumber of Portuguese people did during the Salazar period. He tells us that fortunatelyhe has come across two gypsies, Federico Garca Lorca and Luis Buuel, who sold hima fake passport. They all celebrate in the streets of Lisbon, the former reciting lines fromhis 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 Lorcasabia 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 makea film that will leave them all with their mouth open (2002: 148)].

Such intertextual approaches may be based, not on similarity, as in the Aljubarrotacase, but on opposition, which occurs when Lobo Antunes deals with love and withthe sailors erotic adventures. The Lusiadsis famous for the way in which the epic isinterrupted, 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 islandwith refreshing landscapes and beautiful nymphs. This topic is developed within an

idyllic vision of sexual relations and according to the concept of sensuality found inerudite 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 noonAs 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 mostunexpected ones (Francisco Xavier, Seplveda). The episode corresponding to cantoIX, known as The isle of love, is in The Return progressively built around thenavigator Diogo Co, who used Comandar caravelas pelos penedos de frica fora,cravando padres no areal (Lobo Antunes 1988: 213) [to command caravels off thecliffs of Africa, planting markers on the beaches (2002: 179)] and is now procuradas slfides que boiam entre os cascos dos barcos (1988: 154) [looking for the sylphsthat float along among the hulls of ships (2002: 125)], and trying to put the nymphsof the Tagus back into the river. This concern with the nymphs is ambiguous in thenovel, for it obviously signifies the erotic obsessions of sailors who have been kept farfrom land and home for a long time, but it also refers, in my view, to the care LoboAntunes 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 stanzaalready quoted (in the passage In his right hand was a branch, where the nymphs ofthe river Mondego are also evoked).

In this way, Cames and Lobo Antunes work together where the practice of loveand 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 inwhich the whore who comes from Africa in search of her beloved Diogo Co findshim, giving rise to a scene of love that is related in the form of an analogy of greatnautical adventures:

Mal a noite principiou a diluir-se no quarto em fragmentos de tecido sem peso que osgases 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 asvelas desfraldadas e o ressoar de cabaa das conchas. Ao percorrer, fascinada, amonumentalidade nutica desse pnis florido de insgnias e de ecos temeu sentir-seperfurada por uma energia muito maior do que o seu tero, que a desarticularia semremdio, como nos suplcios rabes, nas maarocas de milho do colcho. Tentou afastar-se, rastejando no lenol, siderada por aquela potncia sem limites, mas os pulsos domarinheiro imobilizaram-lhe de golpe as ndegas com a fora com que trinta anos antesdomavam rodas de leme desvairadas pelos temporais, sofreu, a centmetros da cara, umsopro 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 reaisde caravela. (Lobo Antunes 1988: 2223)

[No sooner had night begun to dissolve in the room into fragments of weightless cloththat the visceral gases of the seven oclock ferries frightened off, that the woman, whenshe no longer hoped for anything in spite of the detailed weave of her art, suddenlytouched ground against the navigators immense and unexpected proud mast, whichrose up vertically over his belly with all sails unfurled and the calabash resonance ofconch shells. On ranging over the nautical monumentality of that penis embellishedwith insignias and echoes, fascinated, she grew fearful of feeling herself run through byan energy much greater than that of her uterus, which would inevitably break apart asin 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 spinningout 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 insideher with the flutter of dozens of royal caravel standards. (2002: 1878)]

It appears that The Return finds in love the possibility of recreating history, throughthis way of giving Diogo Co the gift of youth of a young lover and, moreover, thepossibility of making love as if he was sailing or is himself a caravel crossing theoceans. In other words, love is a reward, in The Lusiads, or a sad episode which endswith 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 itis too weighty to be included in this novel whereas, in the novel, love is the sadactivity of whores or of corrupted businessmen. Furthermore, we may accept that, in

conceiving The Return, Lobo Antunes gives shape to his love of history andreconstructs 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 fightsdeath, and in so doing he returns faithfully to Cames, evoking Camess writing justas the epic poet evokes Portuguese history. In this sense, rewriting may be seen as thefiction of history, or at least as a way of presenting history as personal experience andactive commitment.

The reader of Lobo Antuness novel cannot fail to notice the elegiac tone thatsurrounds Vasco da Gama and King Dom Manuel, now meeting frequently, aftertheir 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 osamericanos alugavam ao ms, saam sozinhos na direco de Marvila conversando dedescobertas 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 darmosconta 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 Antunes1988: 119, 184)

[Vasco da Gama and the monarch, hoodwinking the bodyguards bulging with pistolsthat the Americans rented out by the month, sneaked out all by themselves towardMarvila, chatting about discoveries and goddesses. ()

Dom Manuel, his crown on his knees, scratching the hollow of his skull with afingernail, was bemoaning the misery of this life, hell, look how were getting oldwithout realizing it, look how were no good for anything, Im not exaggerating, damnit, for anything, you try to climb up a mast and you cant, you try to read a telephonebook and fat chance, look how age makes the sound of the waves breaking on the shaledown there turn sad. (2002: 94, 1534)]

The deceptive description of these two heroes ends, in the novel, with the expectationand 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 completestate 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 TheLusiads, the major law of the epic, namely the need to fight against death andoblivion, transformed in the novel by the supremacy of love and by the possibility ofsurvival. 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 thefierce, 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 fantasizedapocalyptic scene of King Sebastians return for the sake of the retornados, observedin 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 oldnavigator, 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 ovento dos bzios tinha por fim desaparecido (Lobo Antunes 1988: 233) [staring atthe earth that had been transformed into a desert dry of waves and Tagus nymphswhere 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 senseof 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 discursiveinterpretation of the past, can act as a factor of reinterpretation or progression towardsa more correct understanding of what happened. Fiction is undoubtedly a privilegedpath for that understanding.

Notes1 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. Seealso Seixo (2001: 167, n.1).

2 Mendes Pinto (1983a, 1983b and 1991). See also Seixo and Zurbach (1999).3 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, andominous (1997: 82)].

Works citedAlves, 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 UniversityPress).

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 Abreuand 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 umabibliografia 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 Antunessnovels, including those that are most relevant for the study ofAs Naus, from a literaryperspective. None is listed here as an individual reference because none is concerned with thespecific subject of this article.


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Saramagos Gospeland the poetics of prototypical

rewritingZiva Ben-Porat

Abstract

Saramagos novel O Evangelho segundo Jesus Cristo is a paradigmatic example of successfulprototypical 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 pragmaticapproaches to reading and interpretation, the article presents a detailed analysis of therelationship between the novel and the Gospels, focusing on Saramagos treatment ofMary Magdalene and of the temptation in the desert. Newspaper reviews andpublishers blurbs supply the empirical data for evaluating the success of Saramagosnovel 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; readerresponse; intertextuality; allusion

Inasmuch as many have undertaken to compile a narrative of the things whichhave been accomplished among us [] it seemed good to me also [] to write

an orderly account for you [] that you may know the truth concerning thethings of which you have been informed. (Luke 1: 14)

The full quotation from Luke is the epigraph, as well as the only information on theback cover of the Portuguese edition (an important pragmatic indicator to be discussedlater) of Jos Saramagos O Evangelho segundo Jesus Cristo (henceforth O Evangelho)[The Gospel According to Jesus Christ(henceforth Gospel)]. With minor changes theabbreviated 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 withwhich his reader is already familiar. Prototypical novelistic rewriting is, then, a retellingof a known story in such a way that the resulting text, the rewrite, is simultaneously anoriginal 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 theintroduction of new semantic functions to at least some of the transposed elements,various additions, and a concomitant reorganization of the narrative.2 Saramagosnovel, as I shall show throughout the article, is a paradigmatic and particularlyinteresting example of successful prototypical rewriting.3

Journal of Romance Studies Volume 3 Number 3 2003 ISSN 14733536

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