K. David Jackson Adverse Genres in Fernando Pessoa 2010
Adverse Genres in
Fernando PessoaThis page intentionally left blank
Adverse Genres in
Fernando Pessoa K. David Jackson
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Jackson, K. David (Kenneth David)
Adverse genres in Fernando Pessoa / Kenneth David Jackson.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-19-539121-3
1. Pessoa, Fernando, 1888–1935–Criticism and interpretation.
I. Title.
PQ9261.P417Z719 2010
869.1′41–dc22 2009049012
1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
To Jorge and Mécia
Argonautas das sensações verdadeiras Poema de Cinza À memória de Fernando Pessoa
1 Se pudesse fazer com que viesses Todos os dias, como antigamente, Falar-me nessa lúcida visão— Estranha, sensualíssima, mordente;
5 Se eu pudesse contar-te e tu me ouvisses Meu pobre e grande e genial artista, O que tem sido a vida—esta boemia Coberta de farrapos e de estrelas, Tristíssima, pedante, e contrafeita,
10 Desde que estes meus olhos numa névoa De lágrimas te viram num caixão; Se eu pudesse, Fernando, e tu me ouvisses Voltávamos à mesma: Tu lá onde Os astros e as divinas madrugadas
15 Noivam na luz eterna de um sorriso; E eu, por aqui, vadio da descrença, Tirando o meu chapéu aos homens de juizo. . . Isto por cá vai indo como dantes; O mesmo arremelgado idiotismo
20 Nuns Senhores que tu já conhecias —Autênticos patifes bem falantes. . .
E a mesma intriga; as horas, os minutos,
As noites sempre iguais, os mesmos dias,
Tudo igual! Acordando e adormecendo
25 Na mesma cor, do mesmo lado, sempre
O mesmo ar em tudo a mesma posição
De condenados, hirtos, a viverSem estímulo, sem fé, sem convicção. . . .
Poetas, escutai-me! Transformemos30 A nossa natural angústia de pensar—
Num cântico de sonho! E junto dele,
Do camarada raro que lembramos, Fiquemos, uns momentos, a cantar!António Botto Poem in Ashes To the memory of Fernando Pessoa
1 If I could only have you come by Every day, as was your habit, To speak to me from your lucid vision— Strange, most sensual, biting;
5 If I could tell you, and you could hear me, My poor and great and genial artist, What life has been like—this bohemia Covered by tattered rags and stars, Supremely sad, pedantic, at cross purposes,
10 Ever since these eyes of mine in a mist Of tears saw you in a coffi n; If I could, Fernando, and you could hear me We’d return as before: You there where Stars and divine daybreaks
15 Romance in the eternal light of a smile; And I, around here, wandering disbeliever,
Taking off my hat before people of judgment. . .
At least around here it’s just as it always was;
The same astonishing idiocy20 In some Gentlemen whom you already know — Authentic well-spoken scoundrels. . .
And the same intrigue; the hours, the minutes,
The nights always the same, the same days,Everything unchanged! Waking and sleeping
25 In the same color, on the same side, always The same air, in everything the stance Of those stiffl y erect, condemned to live Without stimulus, without faith, without conviction. . . Poets, listen to me! Let’s transform
30 Our natural anguish of thought— Into a canticle of dreams! And next to him, That rare comrade whom we remember, Let us for some moments keep on singing!
António Botto
This page intentionally left blank ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The essays in this book are the culmination of more than forty years of study and teaching the works of Fernando Pessoa, which all began in the seminar led by Portu- guese author and scholar Jorge de Sena (1919–1978) at the University of Wisconsin- Madison between 1966 and 1967. Sena’s profound knowledge of Pessoa, whether conveyed in his lectures or in his infl uential essays—from the 1977 “The Man Who Never Was” to the collection Fernando Pessoa & C.a Heterónima (1982)—, remains the foundation for my understanding of Pessoa and the inspiration for the further work sustaining these essays. Sena’s dedication and brilliance left an indelible mark on all who had the good fortune to study with him. During my fi rst visits to Lisbon in 1975 and 1976, thanks to the generosity of the Senas, I lived a few of the frag- mented episodes and sensations of the Book of Disquiet in solitary wanderings through the districts of the city, at that time still in the midst of revolutionary fever and change, before publication and scholarship on Pessoa had reached the intensity they were later to assume. After another twenty years, I could sit beside the statue of Pessoa on his bench in front of the coffee shop “A Brasileira” for a photo alongside the celebrated author.
When I became coeditor of the series of books on vanguard literatures of the Iberian peninsula and Latin America, with Merlin Forster and Harald Wentzlaff- Eggebert, I was responsible for the volume Portugal: As Primeiras Vanguardas (“Portugal: The First Vanguards,” 2003), which is a bibliography of Portuguese mod- ernism with a collection of scholarly essays by an array of distinguished authors on the principal fi gures, journals, and works. I soon found it necessary to limit the bib- liography on Pessoa to the 1990s, so that the citations would fi ll no more than one hundred pages in small print. This vast explosion in scholarship did not include many titles in English, thus one of the main purposes of these essays, which treat many of the
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
diverse forms and heteronyms used by Pessoa, is to provide an interpretative frame- work for the continuing reception of his work in English. José Blanco has provided thorough documentation of translations of Pessoa to English up to the present (“Pes- soa’s Editorial and Critical Fortune in English: A Selective Chronological Overview,”
Portuguese Studies 24.2, 13–32), although most of his sources are no longer generally
available, nor did they attract the notice of anthologies of world literature, comparative literature studies, or even have much impact on the fi eld of modernist literary studies. As a result, Pessoa has not taken up his deserved position alongside Ezra Pound (1885–1972), T. S. Eliot (1888–1965), Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968), Constantin Cavafy (1863–1933), Osip Mandelstam (1891–1938), Franz Kafka (1883–1924), Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926), Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) and other foundational fi gures of the European avant-garde to whom he is compared, notwith- standing his inclusion by Harold Bloom in the list of twenty-six fundamental authors of the Western tradition in The Western Canon: The Books and Schools of the Ages (1994). Irene Ramalho Santos’s book, Atlantic Poets: Fernando Pessoa’s Turn in
Anglo-American Modernism (2003), made strides in placing Pessoa in the wider
English-language literary world of his time, however her notion of his constant presence among English readers after translations began in 1955 is too optimistic, confi rmed by her observation that most of the international criticism on Pessoa is not written in English. Of all Pessoa’s works ever translated to English, very few remain in print, a discrete list that fortunately includes the diary-novel, The Book of Disquiet, translated by Richard Zenith, and the useful bilingual editions of The Keeper of
Sheep, translated by Edwin Honig and Susan M. Brown, and Message, translated by
Jonathan Griffi n.I wish to thank Darlene Sadlier of Indiana University for her support of my pro- jects over the years and especially for her keen critical perceptions, her attentive reading, and her deep knowledge of Pessoa and his work. Her introduction to Pessoa,
An Introduction to Fernando Pessoa: Modernism and the Paradoxes of Authorship
(1998), is the indispensable predecessor that makes it possible for my essays to be read in the context of Pessoa’s total production and existence, as an entity or phenom- enon. Her suggestions are always pertinent and precise, and her critical reading of the manuscript led to signifi cant improvements in this book. Many conversations and long correspondence with Seth Wolitz of the University of Texas at Austin have given me the benefi t of his knowledge and mastery of international literary modernism and the arts, which has come full circle by returning to his studies of Portuguese language and Pessoa during his undergraduate days at Yale. His thought-provoking knowledge of modernism in its international dimensions and his insights into Pessoa encouraged me to undertake this study and made a decisive contribution to the shape of the essays in this book. I wish to acknowledge the students in my seminars on Pessoa over the years for their ideas and creative interpretations, particularly Christopher Ballantyne and Jacobo Sefamí at the University of Texas at Austin and Estela Vieira, Lisandro Kahan, Norman Valencia, and Daniel Scarfó at Yale University. I also wish to thank the anonymous reviewers from Oxford University Press who made valuable sugges- tions toward the organization and content of the book. I am grateful to Philip Krum- mrich for permission to quote from his clever translations of Pessoa’s popular verse,
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
to Anthony Rudolf for permission to quote translations by Jonathan Griffi n, to The Sheep Meadow Press for permission to quote translations by Edwin Honig and Susan M. Brown, and to Landeg White for permission to quote from his translation of Camões. This book has benefi ted from the many translators and scholars of Pessoa, but most of all from Jorge de Sena for his example sub specie aeternitatis.
Earlier versions of some essays in Adverse Genres were presented as lectures: “Clearly Non-Campos! Álvaro de Campos’s Song of Non-Self” at Indiana Univer- sity and “Alberto Caeiro’s Other Version of Pastoral” at NYU. I am grateful to the academic journals that published two of the essays in earlier versions: “Adverse Genres in Pessoa: Alberto Caeiro’s Other Version of Pastoral” in Portuguese Literary
& Cultural Studies 3 (Fall 1999), 149–60 and “The Adventure of the Anarchist
Banker” in Portuguese Studies 22 (2006), 209–18.The very real “pessoas” in my family—Elizabeth, Sophia, Katharina, and Kenneth Gregory—with their continual support, vitality, tolerance, and love, have made this and every other written word possible.
The fi nal and greatest debt of this book is to Fernando Pessoa, whoever he may have been, for the genius, wit, and polish of a profound life of thought and letters, and for the mystery of it all.
This page intentionally left blank CONTENTS
CONTENTS
Adverse Genres in
Fernando PessoaThis page intentionally left blank
A paradox, a paradox, a most ingenious paradox ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! a par-a-dox!
—Gilbert and Sullivan, Pirates of Penzance Si tu veux tromper quelqu’un par l’intermédiaire d’un messager, commence par tromper le messager.
—Robert Bréchon, L’innombrable Escrevo e paro. Pergunto a mim-próprio se poderá julgar tudo isto, porque não é transbordante de elogios, uma crítica adversa.
—Fernando Pessoa, “Realidade e
Imaginação na Poesia”
In Gilbert and Sullivan’s comic opera, The Pirates of Penzance, which ran 373 per- veal the Victorian taste for paradox to young Frederic, who is entitled to leave the pirates’ ship on reaching his twenty-fi rst birthday: since he was born on the twenty-ninth of February, “by a simple arithmetical process” he is but a little boy of fi ve and therefore not yet entitled to be free. Through the paradox, they can all be reunited; Frederic will no longer be obligated to exterminate the pirates with whom he was raised, and they all sing “We’ve quips and quibbles heard in fl ocks; But none to beat that paradox!” The witty aphorism was a prominent genre among Victorian esthetes, practiced by Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) in Epigrams and Aphorisms (1905). The Portuguese modernist poet Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935) likewise showed a taste for the contradictory philosophical aphorism: “To affi rm anything is to deceive oneself from the start” (Afi rmar é enganar-se na porta); “To think is to limit. To reason is to exclude” (Pensar
é limitar. Raciocinar é excluir ), “Keep substituting yourself. One you is not enough
for you” (Substitui-te sempre a ti-próprio. Tu não és bastante para ti
ADVERSE GENRES
in a self-analysis that he is excessively cerebral; his passion for analysis and logical
Ingenious paradox and self-contradiction form the shifting foundation of the inte- rior literary world of Fernando Pessoa, an anglophile in literary culture, who was raised August, 1905, Pessoa initiated a lifelong literary project centered in the city he rarely ever left again, marked by difference and genius. The biography of Pessoa by Robert Bréchon,
Étrange Étranger patetic nonexis-
tence in Lisbon, after his return from formative years in South Africa. His education in English was alienating to the Portugal to which he returned, and he soon abandoned university studies for a phantom literary life of modernist circles in the cafés and part- time employment as a translator. Three of his four books were published in Lisbon in English in 1918 and 1921, amounting to yet another mask confi rming the enduring in- in the city in 1914, he wrote to Armando Côrtes-Rodrigues, “I am no longer myself. I am a fragment of myself kept in an abandoned museum” (Eu já não sou eu. Sou um
fragmento de mim conservado num museu abandonado He began to consider himself
to be multiple: “I am like a room fi lled with fantastic mirrors that falsely refl ect a single previous reality that isn’t in any of them and is in all of them” (Sou como um quarto com
inúmeros espelhos fantásticos que torcem para refl exões falsas uma única anterior
When asked what literary workshad most infl uenced him, Pessoa fi rst translated the question: “What were the books that most made me change into that different person we all want to be?” (Quais foram os
livros que mais me transmudaram em mim mesmo para aquela pessoa diferente que
todos nós desejamos ser? ). His answer to José Osório de Oliveira, naming “Dicken’s
Pickwick Papers , Shakespeare, Milton, Shelley and the romantic poets, Greek and Ger-
man philosophers,” carried the witty proviso that “all of them have a supreme impor- tance that disappears the next day” (Todos ele têm uma suprema importância que passa
no dia seguinte ). If you fi nd some apparent paradox in that, he concludes, that’s just the
way I am (Se há nela, aparentemente, qualquer coisa de paradoxo [. . .] sou eu). “ten thousand thoughts” that constantly besiege his mind are no more permanent: “they are not my thoughts, just thoughts that pass through me” (não são pensamentos meus,
mas pensamentos que passam através de mim ), he observes. From his earliest writings
he differentiated between a conscious self and its ideas and experiences.No greater apparent contradiction to the ephemeral witticism could be found than in Pessoa’s 1915 letter to Côrtes-Rodrigues about a psychic crisis, in which he confesses a deep awareness of his duty as a man of genius to make a difference through art for humanity and civilization. Rejecting the futility of “mere art” (mera
arte ) or any desire to “shine for the sake of shining” (brilhar por brilhar), Pessoa
describes his mission as “absolute perfection in realization” and “total seriousness in writing” (uma perfeição absoluta no realizado, uma seriedade integral no escri-
to ). His imperative to take art and life seriously, he continued, is “to look reli-
giously at the sad and mysterious spectacle of the World” (o espetáculo triste e
misterioso do Mundo His entire literary project was dedicated to discovering
the true nature of cognitive perceptions and deeper realities. The negative dimen-
INTRODUCTION DECEIVING THE MESSENGER
worst defect is that I can never forget my metaphysical presence in life” / O meu
pior mal é que não consigo nunca esquecer a minha presença metafísica na vida )
and his confl ictive conjugation of mystery and meaning (“Everything is mystery and everything is full of meaning [. . .] Hence the horror [. . .]” / Tudo é mistério e
tudo está cheio de signifi cado [. . .] Em conseqüência, o horror [. . .]).
ardo Lourenço coined the phrase “negative ontological adventure” to refer to Pessoa’s participation in the journal ORPHEU (1915). Pessoa’s letter affi rms the metaphysical seriousness of his ideal for the heteronyms he invented to replace his own self: “In any one of them I put a profound concept of life, different in all three, but in all gravely attentive to the mysterious importance of existing” (Em
qualquer destes pus um profundo conceito da vida, diverso em todos três, mas em
todos gravemente atento à importância misteriosa de existir ). Darlene Sadlier
sees in the heteronyms different stylistic responses to elementary existential constants: the meaning of life, the inevitability of death, confl icts between rational and emotional sides of human nature and cultural history.
At this moment of ferment, circa 1914, Pessoa invented a decentered, fragmented literary universe characterized by reciprocal relationships among multiple authors, works, and ideas. His invention is the culmination and resolution both of a literary ideal and a psychic crisis. The pain of a divided, disperse, and alienated self is described in a fragment written as a refl ection in the 1930s by the literary personality close to Pessoa, Bernardo Soares, author of his Livro de Desassossego (Book of Disquietude):
We all live far away as distant strangers, disguised, our suffering is unknown. For
some, however, the distance between being and the self is never revealed; for others
it occasionally shines forth, in horror or in grief, in a limitless lightning fl ash; but for
others it remains that painful constant of daily life.Vivemos todos longínquos e anónimos; disfarçados, sofremos desconhecidos.
A uns, porém, esta distância enter um ser e ele mesmo nunca se revela; para oturos
é de vez em quando iluminada, de horror ou de mágoa, por um relâmpago sem lim-
ites; mas para outros ainda é essa a dolorosa constância e quotidianidade da vida .
From his earliest writings, Pessoa had the habit of creating many heteronyms in poetry and prose, including Alexander Search, who wrote in English, three Crosse The creation of major imaginary poets held to be separate from his own writing is further foreshadowed by the separation of person, speech, and meaning in his 1913 play, O Marinheiro (The Mariner): “And it seemed to me that you, your voice, and the meaning of what you said were three different beings, like three creatures that walk and talk” (E parecia-me que vós, e a vossa voz, e o sentido do que dizieis eram três entes
diferentes, como três criaturas que falam e andam ). Pessoa sets into motion the
perception of fragmented and multiple other selves, which opened European liter- ature and psychology to freedom and escape from the determinism of an original or authentic self of childhood formation. While emptying out his own inner self, Pessoa fi lls the vacuum with the names, biographies, and works of a large number
ADVERSE GENRES
Contrasting with the use in the literary tradition of pseudonyms, alter egos, or character-narrators, Pessoa claimed a form of real existence for the major hetero- nyms, for whom he created horoscopes and biographies, and in addition he made their collective work greater than that in his own name. The pretension is that it is the heteronyms, rather than Pessoa’s person, who pen some of the greatest poems, let- ters, manifestos, and essays of the century. By populating his interior world with other writers of his invention, the heteronyms, he makes the point that the works themselves, be they truthful or beautiful, are completely independent of the intention or personality of any “real” authors, who are at odds with their “own” expression. Pessoa anticipates T. S. Eliot, who would not propound his theory of objective cor- relative until 1920. Pessoa further argues, more radically, that the heteronyms make of him “not just one author alone” but rather an entire literature, which confi rms the mysterious and occult ways of reality: “With such a total lack of literature as there is today, what can a man of genius do except to convert himself, alone, into a whole literature?” (Com uma tal falta de literatura, como há hoje, que pode um homem de
génio fazer senão converter-se, ele só, em uma literatura? ). The heteronyms con-
fi rm that no one author can cover all the avenues of literary expression; at the same time, their wish to constitute an entire literature would compress all of literary his- tory into a modernist synthesis, a “tremendous abbreviation,” with the possible aim the writers of the nineteenth and early twentieth century who use imagined, multiple authorship to structure a comprehensive literary project because his selection of authors challenges and replaces the centrality of a single creative and responsible self, while focusing the entire literary tradition on the present moment of writing. Pessoa could be visualized as the conductor of a literary orchestra in which he also played all the instruments, while critiquing the performance from the audience as a music critic, before archiving the scores for future performances as a librarian. The second number of the revolutionary journal ORPHEU (July 1915) that launches Álvaro de Campos’s epic “Ode Marítima” (Maritime Ode) and “Chuva Oblíqua, poemas interseccionistas de Fernando Pessoa” (Oblique Rain, intersectionist poems by Fernando Pessoa), opens with unpublished poems by Ângelo de Lima (1872–1921), who had been interned since 1898 in the Rilhafoles hospital and asylum because of complications of aural hallucinations. In his fi nal lines, Lima wonders if his old verses will be remembered in some Book of Forgotten Things, because they come from non-being and go to sleep in nothingness (Vindo do Não-Ser, Vae, Finalmente, / were director of a literary asylum, it would be peopled by other non-beings, the per- sonalities or selves whom he created and whose existence replaced, multiplied, or challenged the certainty of a singular self. His coterie of heteronyms, resembling a bizarre extension of the eighteenth-century literary academies with the atmosphere of a Victorian gentleman’s club, has been described by critic Teresa Rita Lopes as a “the- atre of being,” an apt and encompassing metaphor suggested by Pessoa himself: “To create, I’ve destroyed myself [. . .] I’m the empty stage where various actors act out various plays” (Para criar, destruí-me [. . .] Sou a cena viva onde passam vários actors
INTRODUCTION DECEIVING THE MESSENGER
dramatis personae, however; life is their stage, and they are selves who must live out the literary forms in which they write and exist. Their gentlemen’s club is fi lled with authors and thinkers who not only perform but also live Pessoa’s theatrical and literary drama of the self. The heteronyms read and critique each other’s works, and at least one is fully aware of the existence of his author, whom he considers less than an equal: “Tell Fernando Pessoa that he’s not right” (Diga ao Fernando Pessoa que não tenha
razão In this art of illusion, drawn from symbolist theatre, Victorian aestheticism,
and the commedia dell’arte, Pessoa projects identities that deny any possible inner coherence to his individual self and further question such dichotomies as self versus other, signifi er versus signifi ed, imagination versus reality, or being versus identity. By putting into action the “negative subjectivity” that characterizes the modern lyric, “[. . .] the writing on the page into which the ‘I’ disappears,” in the phrase of Irene grounded in the het- eronyms whose work is “clearly non-Pessoa.”
The major poetic works published in the two numbers of the 1915 avant-garde journal ORPHEU were signed by Álvaro de Campos, the “Scottish naval engineer” with whom Pessoa has come to be identifi ed in American criticism through studies by Susan Brown, Harold Bloom, and Irene Ramalho Santos. His fi rst poem expressing alienation both from self and society, a soul sickness, and a consciousness estranged from life is the “Opiário” (Opium Voyage). The narrator writes from onboard ship at Port Said, passing through the Suez Canal, after having visited China and returning from India in the com- pany of British Colonial civil servants. His travels were useless, he muses, because the world is all the same, and the only possible India for the sensitive modern traveler is to be found within his soul and imagination, which fi nds itself traveling “between somno- lence and anxiety” (entre sonolência e a ansiedade), in Jacinto do Prado Coelho’s suc- cinct phrase. The opportunities for an epic or even meaningful life disappeared with the end of the voyages of discoveries and the mystery of the Orient, which is now reduced to opium, “an Orient to the orient of the Orient” (Um Oriente ao oriente do
Oriente ) and to a generation without horizons, denied the quest for being or paradise that
energized the voyages of discovery: “I belong to a generation of Portuguese who, once India was discovered, were thrown out of work” (Pertenço a uma geração de portu-
gueses / Que depois de estar a Índia descoberta / Ficaram sem trabalho ). The narrator
is existentially unemployed, sailing in a futile voyage belittled in its inevitable compar- ison to the adventurous voyages to India and the Orient of a Luís de Camões or Fernão response, he falls into opium to disguise a banal, useless, and absurd life to which he reacts with fever and tumultuous inner sensations. His escape into opium references the romantic tradition described in Thomas De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium- Eater (1822), implied in the poem’s satire of English travelers on board. De Quincey sketches the opium-eater as a philosopher “in the phantasmagoria of his dreams,” who claims to possess a superb analytical intellect and an eye for the mysteries of human nature (1927: 12–13). Campos’s poem plays on De Quincey’s aphoristic and witty themes, whereby he affi rms that consciousness is a greater burden than a wife or a car- riage (p. 34), the sense that his own self has been counterfeited (p. 44), and that Oriental dreams have left him with sensations of astonishment and abomination, “a sense of
ADVERSE GENRES
recasts De Quincey’s “confessions” into a modernist voyage of alienation, played out between the hearty “English constitution” that De Quincey satirizes (p. 12) and the Por- tuguese sense of loss and absence expressed in the movement of Saudosismo, a search for the Portuguese soul, to which Pessoa contributed in 1912.
Campos expresses Pessoa’s wish to become everyone, everywhere in the second poem in ORPHEU, the “Triumphal Ode” (Ode Triunfal), in which the poet celebrates and merges with the very noise and epic movement of mechanical modernity. The poet shouts ecstatically while the wheels and gears grind productively throughout the city:
Hey-ho façades of the great department stores! Hey-ho elevators of the great buildings! O great train wrecks! [. . .] O delicious shipwrecks of great transatlantic liners! Hey electricity, sick nerves of Matter! Eh-lá-hô fachadas das grandes lojas! Eh-lá-hô elevadores dos grandes edifícios! [. . .] Eh-lá grandes desastres de comboios! [. . .]
Eh-lá naufrágios deliciosos dos grandes transatlânticos!
Eia electricidade, nervos doentes da Matéria!The poet’s carnivorous love for the universal energy of machines replaces his indi- vidual consciousness:
I love you all carnivorously, Pervertedly [. . .] Ah not to be me to be everyone everywhere! Amo-vos carnivoramente, Pervertidamente [. . .] Ah não ser eu toda a gente e toda a parte!
To operate from a universal perspective would be a way of escaping the confi nes of a biographical self. By becoming another, or everyone, Pessoa could empty out and reconstitute his inner self, fi lling the external image of Fernando Pessoa with very dif- ferent contents. He would not assume the identities of the poetic personalities whose presence would dominate his literary work after 1914, rather he would allow them to occupy and to become Pessoa, thereby achieving a form of high modernist universality, on the one hand, while emptying the inner self and erasing biographical authorship, on the other. To empty the self is to create a vacuum of absence that is compensated only by an excess of existence, a surfeit of Pessoas overfl owing the limits of genre, language, and being. Absence and excess form the borders of his dialectical oscillations. To pro- mote individual relationships with each heteronym, like donning a mask, would have constituted a reversible passage to otherness; however, Pessoa constructed a critical discourse purely among the heteronyms, who reviewed and commented on each other’s With the autonomous world of the heteronyms, Pessoa created and entered a labyrinth, a path to the mystery
INTRODUCTION
DECEIVING THE MESSENGER
As author, the black ink of his pen fl owed in obfuscation, so as to admit only the initiate into the hidden selves working to comprehend reality. Pessoa con- trolled the instruments of poetic creativity, searching for meaning with an unsettled vision aimed at attaining elusive truth through the technical bonds of rhythm, form, and sound. The idea of negative universality, the questioning of existence and the percep- tion of it, established an oscillating rhythm, or alternating current, fl owing between the occult author of a whole dramatic literature and the insuffi ciency of any one of its het- eronymic authors or works to explain or represent that whole; between the inheritance of literary tradition and its insuffi ciency to express the revolutionary, depersonalized modern aesthetic. In the acumen of his critical essays, Pessoa demonstrated the reason- ing of a logician, or pure intellectual, which he carried to a perfection that he himself described as “almost breathless” (quase sem fôlego Applying the same logic, Pessoa accepted no limits on the imagination; he was acutely aware that the window of consciousness comprehended an increasingly narrow and incomplete explanation of reality, and he actively explored the occult and esoteric sciences: “Everything is some- thing else in this world where everything is sensation” (Tudo é outra coisa deste mundo onde tudo se sente ), writes Álvaro de Campos. Only imagination can compensate for the defi ciencies of sensations used to apprehend or describe reality.
Pessoa’s professional career, which unfolds within his imagination, can be con- trasted to that of the Cambridge mathematician G. H. Hardy, who described in his memoirs the limitations under which the applied mathematician operates:
But is the position of an ordinary applied mathematician in some ways a little pathetic?
If he wants to be useful, he must work in a humdrum way, and he cannot give full play
to his fancy even when he wished to rise to the heights. “Imaginary” universes are so
much more beautiful than this stupidly constructed “real” one; and most of the fi nest
products of an applied mathematician’s fancy must be rejected, as soon as they have
been created, for the brutal but suffi cient reason that they do not fi t the facts. (135)I have never done anything “useful.” No discovery of mine has made, or is likely
to make, directly or indirectly, for good or ill, the least difference to the amenity of the
world. I have helped to train other mathematicians, mathematicians of the same kind as
myself, and their work has been, so far at any rate as I have helped them to it, as useless
as my own. Judged by all practical standards, the value of my mathematical life is nil;
and outside mathematics it is trivial anyhow. I have just one chance of escaping a verdict
of complete triviality, that I may be judged to have created something worth creating.
And that I have created something is undeniable: the question is about its value.The case for my life, then, or for that of any one else who has been a mathema-
tician in this same sense in which I have been one, is this: that I have added some-
thing to knowledge, and helped others to add more; and that these somethings have
a value which differs in degree only, and not in kind, from that of the creations of the
great mathematicians, or of any of the other artists, great or small, who have left
Pessoa’s hidden life in Lisbon, useless “by all practical standards,” would in his estima-tion surpass that of the Cambridge mathematician, since Pessoa conceives and sets into
ADVERSE GENRES
to him and apparently nil for almost fi fty years, has at present grown to be propor-
The earliest essays on Pessoa emphasize the paradoxical nature of his works and personae: writing in Paris in 1961, poet Octavio Paz addressed the problem of his personae in “The Man Who Didn’t Know Himself” (El desconocido de si mismo), which begins like a literary manifesto, affi rming that poets have no biography since their works are their biography. In 1954, poet Adolfo Casais Monteiro focused on truth and pretense in “Fernando Pessoa: The Insincere Truth-teller” (Fernando Pes-
soa: O Insincero Verídico ), fi nding in authorial insincerity a path to greater truths,
whereas in 1977 Portuguese poet and scholar Jorge de Sena characterized Pessoa What Sena meant was that Pessoa sacrifi ced a personal life, a biography in the usual sense, for a totally literary life, in which he invented and coexisted with numerous other writers and personalities with their own biographies, whom he called heteronyms; even poetry written under his name should be read as another heteronym because of its primary, literary iden- tity. Because he was occupied living the lives of such a numerous coterie, he chose to live a daily life completely absorbed by literary essays, letters, and the poetry of the personae:
Caught in these ways of understanding that I don’t understand, Caught in the midst of these wills unwillingly So contrary to mine, so contrary to me?! De meio d’estas maneiras de comprehender que não comprehendo, Do meio d’estas vontades involuntariamente
Tão contrarias á minha, tão contrarias a mim?! (Livro de Versos, p. 219)
He actively sought to exchange an individual identity for the contradictory and ephemeral existence of the heteronyms, a point illustrated in the essays and prefaces in which his group of poets introduce and criticize each other’s poetics, to the point soa scholars Leyla Perrone Moisés and Ettore Finazzi-Agrò continued to describe his labyrinth of absence with titles foregrounding inner tensions and contradictions,
Aquém do Eu, Além do Outro (Before the Self, Beyond the Other) and O Álibi Infi ni-
to (The Infi nite Alibi), respectively. Pessoa can be compared to a playwright who
lives so intensely through his characters that he denies himself a personal life, prefer- ring to lives the lives of his characters. His fascination with the occult even leads him to speculate that he may be living the life of imaginary persons from another time: “I don’t know what I was thinking about [. . .] Perhaps about the past of others [. . .], the past of wondrous people who never existed [. . .]” (Eu já não sabia em quem pensava [. . .] No passado dos outros talvez [. . .], no passado de gente maravilhosa que nunca existiu [. . .]) [O Marinheiro / The Mariner].
The empty inner self of Fernando Pessoa opened up the multiple selves of modernity, confi rmed the freedom to escape from the confi nes of a self, and wrote in different styles to express contradictory ideas. In the move from late symbolist and decadentist infl u-
INTRODUCTION DECEIVING THE MESSENGER
structure, and expression, Pessoa joins the company of other twentieth-century fi gures in literature and the arts who followed a similar transformative path, from Picasso’s Cubism (Les Demoiselles d’Avignon,1907) following the Blue Period, to Schoenberg’s atonality in the Op. 11 piano pieces after the chromatic postromanticism of Verklarte
Nacht (“Transfi gured Night,” 1899), to Ezra Pound’s precise rhythms and synthetic
language in the Cantos (begun in 1915) after the Imagism of Personae soa’s invention of the aesthetic schools of “intersectionism” and “sensationism” marked his entrance into the European vanguards, confi rmed by the appearance of two of the major poetic works of international modernism, Álvaro de Campos’s “Ode Triunfal” (Triumphal Ode) and “Ode Marítima” (Maritime Ode) printed in ORPHEU (1915), as well as by Pessoa’s refusal to ally himself with any other movement than his own. The quintessential modernist, Pessoa created a form of universalism, as did James Joyce (1882–1941) in Ulysses, although he did not stop at the boundary of the work itself, rather he embraced the totality of a literary life and art. His work was circular in form, comparable to the principles of equidistance and indeterminacy in Finnegans Wake per- ceived by poet and critic Haroldo de Campos (1929–2003):
Finnegans retained ownership of the circle, equidistance of all points in relation to
the center: the work is porous to reading in whichever of its parts the reader tries to
attack it. Thus, reading Finnegans must be a topological reading in progress, that
never ends, that is always on-going and always still to be done, such are the meander-
ings of the text, the diffi culties that fi ll it, the multiple planes of that marvelous son
of the kaleidoscope.Finnegans retinha a propriedade do círculo, da eqüidistância de todos os pon-
tos em relação ao centro: a obra é porosa à leitura por qualquer das partes através
das quais se procure assediá-la. Assim, a leitura do Finnegans há de ser uma leitura
topológica, em progresso, que não termina nunca, que se está fazendo sempre e que
está sempre por fazer, tais os meandros do texto, as difi culdades que o inçam, as
multifacêtas desse maravilhoso caleidoscópio.