:The Inner Sea: Maritime Literary Culture in Early Modern Portugal

Previous articleNext article FreeBook ReviewThe Inner Sea: Maritime Literary Culture in Early Modern Portugal. Josiah Blackmore. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022. Pp. ix+225.Noel Blanco MourelleNoel Blanco MourelleUniversity of Chicago Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookXLinkedInRedditEmailPrint SectionsMore It is a strange fate that the only Portuguese book published in life by Fernando Pessoa, a year before his death in 1935, was Messagem (Message), a book of patriotic content contrasting Portugal's imperial and glorious past with its present political decadence. If the reader is able to untangle the strong ideological framework from Pessoa's poetic expression, it is possible to find in Messagem a profound reflection on the sea as an essential motif of Portuguese cultural production. In the poem "O Infante," perhaps the book's most famous, Pessoa gives poetic expression to the longing to find in the sea a geography of commerce and imperial expansion: "que o mar unisse, ja não separasse" (that the sea should unite, no longer separate). From this act of maritime and literary cosmogony expressed by the poem in its famous verses "E viu-se a terra inteira, de repente, / Surgir, redonda, do azul profundo" (The entire land was seen, suddenly, to emerge roundly from the deep blue), a modernist vision is born, looking back at Portuguese literature as an expression of a fundamentally maritime culture, seeking synthesis between cosmopolitanism and national essence.1 Certainly, Pessoa shows himself untroubled by the imperial past, with its extractive and racist legacy. However, the need to find the recurrence of the sea as a central motif in Portuguese literary and cultural imagery goes beyond this ideological vision of national regeneration. In reality, the sea is a constitutive element of poetic subjectivity to the extent that it emerges in cognitive dialogue with elements of nature. Josiah Blackmore's The Inner Sea is precisely situated at the intersection of subject and nation to discuss maritime culture, including aspects of labor and materials, as a poetic engine of premodern Portuguese literature. Despite Blackmore's book anchoring its structure in the literary imagination of the poet par excellence of Portuguese maritime expansion, Luís Vaz de Camões (1524–1580), and his epic Os Lusíadas (1572), it is impossible not to consider the formation of the sea as a metaphor for different values in premodernity understood as a longue durée. Thus, the book begins with the importance of the sea as a poetic element in the Galician-Portuguese poetic songbooks. In these songbooks, poets like Meendinho and Martin Codax stand out because they poeticized the sea as an element that reflects the interiority of the poetic voice in the context of the love relationship, as does Paio Gomes Charinho, a Galician navigator (named "Almirante do mar" by King Alfonso X) who explored the lyrical dimension of the warship. The language of the sea is particularly present in poems where the female poetic voice laments the absence of the beloved. The sea in its continuous becoming represents both the tireless quality of desire and the melancholy of a lost or unattained object. The ship acquires a more complex dimension in Camões's epic since one of its fundamental motives is to generate a mythical and national narrative around Vasco da Gama's journey and to signify that, ultimately, "to navigate is to encounter, create, and know worlds, to narrate history, to write myth, and to prophesy the future" (54). One of Blackmore's great achievements is recognizing that there is a textual interaction in which the poetic text expands its registers in light of Camões's curiosity about genres such as the map, the roteiro, and the navigation diary. The book not only acknowledges the importance of these genres but also understands the audacity to transform them into poetic material. The Inner Sea is a book that ultimately questions not only the importance of the sea and navigation in Portuguese literature but also one of the fundamental mythopoetic components of universal literature, what Josiah Blackmore calls "the intellectual and literary histories of the human-ocean encounter" (15). The study of this encounter is generative in opening up a possible dialogue between premodern literature and ecocriticism. The first chapter of this history, "Saltwater Poetics," begins with the foundational genres of maritime consciousness in the Middle Ages: hagiography (explored through the Navigatio Sancti Brendani) and the lyrics of the Galician-Portuguese songbooks, central in the sense that they became one of the most successful models of peninsular lyricism. "Epic Seas," the second chapter, focuses on Camões's poem as a fundamental reference for maritime epic in premodern Iberian literature. The third chapter, "Lyric Seas," particularly analyzes the conceptual importance of the idea of sea governance and the carreira da India as colonial administration, making explicit the political contours of Os Lusíadas through the dialogue between the two major opposing genres, poetry and history. The third chapter continues to focus on Camões as a literary figure but centers on maritime experience as formative of individual consciousness through the exploration of Camões's lyrical poetry, particularly in terms of the experience of travel as separation, loss, and exile. Finally, the fourth chapter, "The Sunken Voice," expands on the terms of maritime experience as loss and disaster by exploring the tale of the shipwreck of the carrack São Bento on the coast of South Africa written by Manuel de Mesquita Perestrelo and canto 6 of Os Lusíadas. Through this comprehensive archive of different genres and textual forms, The Inner Sea seeks to capture the multifaceted and protean quality of the sea. The critical view of the Portuguese imperial enterprise and the slave trade as part of that enterprise is a component of the writing of two authors who are part of Blackmore's archive in The Inner Sea: Gomes Eanes de Zurara and Fernão Mendes Pinto. These figures already appeared in the author's previous book, Moorings (2008), focused on Portuguese expansion in Africa, with which the present book could be said to form a diptych. The author of The Inner Sea is not so much concerned with centering imperial violence, as there is a vast historiography that deals with that important task, but rather with understanding how literature establishes a dialectical relationship with it—an ideological relationship. This does not mean that the importance of this archive is not self-sustaining. What must be taken into account is that the multiplicity of genres dealing with the sea and travel literature reflects the importance of the sea as a literary motif, but also the multiplicity of motivations behind its cultivation. Blackmore himself formulates the argument as follows: "Imperial or expansionist writers document several reasons for expansion, such as the fight against the infidel, the search for slaves or gold, chivalric honor, a providential plan, and obedience to the Christian faith—and oftentimes all in the same text" (xx). What emerges as racial thought, colorist and gradualist but also profoundly anti-Black, is one of the numerous points where the author indicates a fruitful direction in which his research could be further developed by future authors. For those authors, The Inner Sea will be a fundamental map for charting the still underexplored Lusophone premodern archive.Notes1. Fernando Pessoa, "O Infante," lines 3, 7–8, in Messagem, ed. Fernando Cabral Martins (Lisbon: Assírio & Alvim, 1998), my translation. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 122, Number 2November 2024 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/731774 PermissionsRequest permissions Views: 47Total views on this site HistoryPublished online July 18, 2024 For permission to reuse, please contact email protected.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.