What is it about?
The national poet of Portugal Luís de Camões depicts himself, at the end of his epic Os Lusíadas (The Lusiads, 1572)—which recounts the voyage of the explorer Vasco da Gama—not as a heroic conqueror, but as a woman about to commit suicide and writing her last words. To understand this unexpected and often omitted image, it is necessary to reassess the epic genre according to a hydrocritical approach: the fluidity of the aquatic element makes it possible to envisage a “ language swollen with water ” (Bachelard) which inverts the “male profile” into a female one (Eliade). The epic genre thus appears to have less to do with conquest than with spiritual value.
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Why is it important?
The article takes place into a redefinition of the epic genre, seen not only as a specific form or a set of themes, but as a spiritual endeavor that claims to reveal the hierarchy of Being: the epic doesn't idealize reality, it rather unveils the existence, inside reality itself—as dark, violent, and deceptive it may be—of things that have a greater value than others. This explains why the concept of epic transcends poetics and narratology, and must be seen as a political, ethical, and spiritual category.
Perspectives
This article is part of my current effort towards a new unifying theory of the epic, seen as a (spiritual) value, that I base especially on the study of modern (with authors such as Camões or Victor Hugo) and non-European (with poems such as the Mahabharata or the Shahnameh or ) works, as well as visual arts.
Armand Erchadi
Universite du Luxembourg
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Pour une approche hydrocritique du genre épique, June 2023, Brill,
DOI: 10.1163/9789004549258_006.
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