Camões antiliteratura? Um tópico e algumas questões teórico-historiográficas

Abstract

To read Camões’ poetry as if it were a discursive act similar to the contemporary “literature” is somewhat anachronistic. This epistemic limitation feeds on the lack of a strong counter-concept. The attempt to compensate for the pragmatic defectiveness of written communication through the hermeneutical filling of historical gaps is also an ungrateful task, for it submits all of its findings to the rule of current literary studies, their theoretical as well as institutional inertia. Not only that, but also Camões’ very work seem to “require” not to be confused among others: it accuses the lyrical poets of being “sophists”, in the well-known “Sôbolos rios que vão”; it mocks, through Duriano’s speech, a platonic “love fine like a melon” to which the passionate Filodemo gave himself; in the ridiculous figure of the unhappy Satyre, it represents the despair of love as a “depiction” of what “roughness and savage science had taught him.” These figures become all the more important when we intend to conceive the ethic-rhetorical coordinates of poetic writing in the 16th Century. Our article poses some questions around this “Anti-literary Camões” as a small contribution to the reconstruction of the pragmatic space of his poetry, perhaps also applicable to pre-bourgeois poetry in general.