The Sea and the Shield: Lacan and Epic Mirrors in Luís de Camões’s Os Lusíadas and Torquato Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata

Abstract

THE essence of the literary epic, regardless of its period or form, is a narrative that endeavors consolidate identity. Like Lacan's mirror stage--an that takes place when one assumes an image that is seemingly predestined have effect (76)--the epic, from Virgil through the Renaissance in particular, most often depicts the identification or conceptualization of a of nation, forging wholeness from fragments. In many epic narratives, the vortex of this mirror imagery converges around the hero's encounter with idealized Gestalt, reflected by fate, which casts him in his role as a national imago. For example, in Luis de Camoes's 1572 Portuguese epic, Os Lusiadas, Vasco da Gama and the Portuguese fleet face their epic mirror of fortune in the sea itself as they seek out the maritime route India. Torquato Tasso's rendition of the First Crusade, Gerusalemme liberata (published just eight years later), utilizes the sign of the shield reflect the destiny of Rinaldo and the Christian host. This article will examine how these symbols each cast back their protagonists, granting them situational apperception. Through reflection, the sea and the shield generate a desire for oneness, aiming build empire in their own image. CAMOES, OS LUSIADAS, AND THE PORTUGUESE SEA Camoes cuts unlikely figure for a great epic poet. Though technically a nobleman, he was not particularly well born, and his works suggest that his life was more bookish than it really was--an alternative he might have preferred, given the choice. What details we know about him outline adventurous existence for someone of his lyric vocation: odyssey of war, shipwreck, and financial ruin through Ceuta, Goa, Mozambique, and Macau. Yet Camoes's own experiences at sea imbue Os Lusiadas with a verisimilitude that Virgil, inventing Aeneas's journey from the comfort of Rome, could never have hoped grasp. The sea influences the tale in a tangible sense, reflecting authenticity that extends its characters as well. Even in the context of his Roman-Christian mythos, Camoes tells his story very much as it happened. He does not even exaggerate Gama's role. The result is different from anything done before in epic. [...] He believed that his truth was as interesting as fiction and his poem was written on that principle. (Bowra 99). Indeed, in canto 1.10, Camoes explicitly rebukes Ariosto and Boiardo for writing fables; and, in V.86, he boasts that da Gama's fleet sails farther than either of the fictional heroes of the Aeneid and the Odyssey. Nevertheless, as Christopher Lund reminds us, there had be some larger than life poetic apparatus elevate his expedition to the mythical proportions that aptly conveyed its place in Portuguese history (282). To accomplish this, Camoes places the Portuguese at the apex of Oedipal triangle involving Venus, who has taken a motherly interest in them because they resemble her favored Romans, and Bacchus, divine sire of the Portuguese, whose lust for fame has trounced the parental tendencies that he once harbored for his son Lusus and his Iberian descendants. Of all the traditional epic considerations in Os Lusiadas, however, its nationalistic bent distinguishes itself. Da Gama's quest is as much about reaching India as it is living up the ideal-I of the Portuguese unconscious. As Camoes saw it, Achilles, Ulysses, and Aeneas were not important for who they were, but for how what they did shaped cultural unity or promoted collectivity in the national sense (Andrews 62). Consequently, faced with a Portuguese golden age in decline, Camoes sought recreate the spirit which had engendered [its] ascendancy (63). A century of hindsight inspired him with imago for the waning empire, a unified national unconscious guide its progress. Throughout their travels in Os Lusiadas, it is this vision that da Gama and his crew find reflected in the sea that they explore. …