From sacred to profane: Luís de Camões as a character in Lobo Antunes’ and Mário Cláudio’s works

Abstract

The present text intends to demonstrate how Portuguese writers António Lobo Antunes and Mário Cláudio have changed Luís de Camões into a character in their novels – As Naus (1988) e Os Naufrágios de Camões (2017), respectively – stressing, though in very distinct ways, the character’s human and fragile condition. Using the trails and gaps left by Camões’ biography as a starting point – but not escaping to change it or even hybridize it to other contexts, as As Naus does –, both authors explore different possibilities of the image of Luís de Camões, destroying the aura that the Salazarist ideological reading imposed to the poet and restoring him to the common use. According to this perspective, in both works we can see a profane character that, even being inside a fictional context – and maybe because of that condition –, contributes to the critical rethinking of the place of this poet in the Portugal of now and then, since “it is not only about not forgetting about the past, but also about acting on the present” (GAGNEBIN, 2006).