The Symbolic, the Imaginary, and the Real in Jesuit narratives: A comparative study on the written output of Manuel da Nóbrega and Luís Fróis (1549-1585)

Abstract

The present work aims to provide a comparative analysis of the workings of the Companhia de Jesus in Brazil and Japan in the second half of the sixteenth century, before considering the activities of Portuguese Jesuit priest Luís Fróis (1532-1597) on the Japanese mission and his central importance to the written output and publication of the mission among European and Ignatian circles. In writing on the Japanese mission, Fróis introduces into his discourse the foreign voice of the native Japanese, giving them a voice in the texts and describing their rituals, customs, and way of life. A comparative analysis with the written output of Manuel de Nóbrega, who wrote on the Brazilian mission, indicates that the symbolic aspect of the written representation of difference, which may be located in Luis Fróis, is less pronounced or even absent from Nóbrega’s work, giving rise to the appearance of the other not as difference, but as similarity, diluted in the fifteenth-century European imaginative and rhetoric frameworks. To conclude, a general reading is carried out between the work of Luis Fróis and Antoine Galland, the first European translator of One Thousand and One Nights.