Acts of Literature: Notes on "The Return of the Caravels"

Abstract: The last two decades or so have witnessed a profound theoretical reaction against cultural and aesthetic claims of “literariness.” Despite its political appeal, however, such a critical attitude too often forgets the capacity of all canonical cultures to challenge and critique themselves internally. This paper reads the work of António Lobo Antunes, in particular his The Return of the Caravels, as an exemplary instance of such internal critique, reworking The Lusiads to yoke imperial fantasies of the Age of Discovery to harsher memories of the Portuguese occupation of Angola. Yet, no simple work of counter-imperial demystification, Lobo Antunes’s novel does not simply dismiss or destroy the rich epic texture of The Lusiads. Instead, it strives to “recycle” the tropes and allusions of the earlier work into a new ethical fabric for our times. In so doing, it also provides an occasion to re-think the value of “literariness” itself: its elasticity, capacity for metamorphoses, and status as a record of all that is not only worst but also best in culture, imperial or anti-imperial, European or otherwise.