Pessoa in an International Web

Influence and Innovation

David G. Frier

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781907747939
• eBook ISBN: 9781351192934
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

"Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935) is Portugal's most celebrated poet of the twentieth century, who wrote under the guise of dozens of literary personalities, or heteronyms. As well as his poetry, however, his work is marked by a constantly inventive and innovative engagement with authors and literary traditions from an astonishing variety of sources, placing him firmly in the worldwide literary canon. The present volume brings together a number of experts at the forefront of Pessoa studies internationally, with chapters examining his literary relations with Italy, Spain, France, England and Portugal, as well as his contextualisation in relation to major philosophers such as Kant and Nietzsche. It features essays examining his work from a range of perspectives to complement the multi-faceted nature of Pessoa himself (psychoanalytical, philosophical, political and artistic) and it includes consideration of his prose masterpiece The Book of Disquiet, as well as of various aspects of his poetic oeuvre."

INTRODUCTION
Pessoa/Pessoas?

David G. Frier

This book seeks to locate the importance of Portugal’s outstanding modernist poet and writer Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935) in both a European and an international tradition. Its purpose is twofold: to evaluate the influence exerted on Pessoa’s own work by his inheritance from earlier writers and thinkers in Portugal and elsewhere in Europe, and to consider how the Pessoan oeuvre and image interrelate with other literary and cultural works (produced in Portugal and abroad), both during his own lifetime and over the decades since his death. While discussions continue over the value and precise definition of deceptively familiar-sounding concepts such as that of Goethe’s notion of Weltliteratur (which formed the basis, for example, of the annual conference of the American Comparative Literature Association in Vancouver in the spring of 2011), there can surely be little doubt that, quite remarkably for a writer working in a relatively ‘undiscovered’ language such as Portuguese, Pessoa now has to be considered as having a place in any serious survey of influential literatures of the twentieth century. Whether Pessoa is viewed as a figure who transcends the specificities of his Portuguese origins to enter into the hallowed portals of Goethe’s idea of a world literature, or as someone who should be viewed primarily within his national context (and it may be suggested that he can and should be viewed in both of those contexts), his seminal role is surely beyond dispute in his shaping of twentieth-century Portuguese culture and in his contribution to reviewing and representing in creative form the identity(-ies) of the self in the bewildering urban world of the modern (and, indeed, the postmodern).

The present work derives largely from four successful one-day symposia organized by the editor (in conjunction with other Departmental colleagues, and with the generous support of the Instituto Camões) at the University of Leeds on an annual basis, from January 2007 to February 2010, on the topics of ‘Fictional Representations of Fernando Pessoa’, ‘Pessoa’s Masters’, ‘Representing Pessoa(s)’, and ‘A Symposium of Disquiet’. Most of the chapters within the present work are therefore developed from papers given at this annual Pessoa symposium in Leeds. The common feature running through all of these contributions, however, is that they address in some way the comparative aspect of Pessoa’s vast literary output: while it is relatively easy to identify (at least in purely superficial terms) Pessoa’s legacy on subsequent Portuguese culture, and he is rightly regarded as the outstanding representative of Portuguese modernism, it would be entirely wrong to regard him as a figure divorced from his own times and the cultural milieu (both Portuguese and European) from which he emerged. His debt to the English tradition (acquired partly from his schooling in South Africa) is clear, but the present volume not only expands further on this aspect of the writer’s work (through the chapter contributed by Mariana Gray de Castro), but it seeks also to place Pessoa in relation to a number of other European cultures, as well as to the growing discussions of the unstable human psyche which developed through the influence of Freud and others during his lifetime.

The cultural works on which Pessoa may be said to have exerted an influence are too numerous to list (and many of the more familiar texts in this connection need no further enumeration), but this does not mean that the nature of Pessoa’s interrelationship with later cultural production does not require closer examination. The proliferation of studies which have examined the presence of Pessoa’s work in Saramago’s O Ano da Morte de Ricardo Reis [The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis], for example, may all too easily suggest that the Pessoan vein in Saramago studies leaves little room for further exploration; yet many of those studies simply repeat a valuable but not very deep-rooted examination of the verbal echoes of the writings of Pessoa’s Ricardo Reis in the novel. While this is a work of remarkable exuberance and intricacy, its vitality lies not in those verbal echoes themselves, but in their applicability both to Pessoa’s time and to the decade which separated the April Revolution of 1974 from the date of the novel’s publication in 1984. There is therefore scope for some much-needed and subtler excavation of both the Pessoan legacy and the broader movements in European culture with which he was (wittingly or unwittingly) connected, as is explored, in the present volume, in the insightful chapter by Mark Sabine.

The field of Pessoa studies in general continues to constitute an enormous challenge for those scholars who work on him, even three quarters of a century after his death. The fact that this is so is due in part, of course, to the writer’s vast output, which was left in some considerable disarray within the notorious trunk of countless manuscripts, hand-written notes, and poems, often written without attribution to a particular heteronym or with attributions which contradict other written statements. This is not to mention the complexities of the Livro do Desassossego [Book of Disquiet], that massive, rambling work of no fixed form, which was not even published until 1982 and which perhaps was never (in spite of the author’s suggestions to the contrary) intended to be published in any stable form. Amidst all of the wranglings over alternative versions of this work, the only statement of certainty which can reasonably be made about it with regard to its form is that each version of the Livro is a different work from all of the others. The challenge posed to our very conception of the idea of the literary work by this fact is what allows each reader, each critic, each culture, each period to create its own Livro do Desassossego. As the commercial success of this work and critical interest in it continue to grow, so the range and variety of publications around the author proliferate. It is therefore appropriate that a number of the chapters in this book focus to greater or lesser degrees on the centrality of the Livro in understanding Pessoa as a whole.

The question of heteronymy (while still a fascinating aspect of Pessoa’s work and one which is addressed by a number of contributors to this volume) is no longer at the very heart of Pessoan studies, as it might fairly (and understandably) have been said to be some decades ago, when such major exploratory works were published as Jacinto do Prado Coelho’s Unidade e Diversidade em Fernando Pessoa of 1949. Nor does what now seems the slightly dated tendency towards simple biographical-based analysis espoused by critics such as João Gaspar Simões actually lead to greater insights in the case of a poet who never was simply one poet. As Eduardo Lourenço has noted through an allusion to two poems by Campos,¹ the most interesting aspect of heteronymy is not Pessoa’s pretence to have been an inf inity of individuals, but what this fact says about the nature of the modern individual, cast adrift in a universe with no guarantee of truth and no stable, reliable context for the self:

O ‘Dono da Tabacaria’ imaginário da Heteronímia mítica talvez tenha morrido. Mas o Esteves imortal de outro drama maior, de uma heteronímia absoluta, a do Sujeito e da sua Escrita — salvadora e impotente ao mesmo tempo — basta para sabermos que desde ontem a cidade fabulosa e quotidiana de Pessoa mudou.

[The imaginary ‘owner of the tobacco shop’ of mythic heteronymy may have died. But the immortal ‘owner’ of another, greater drama, one of an absolute heteronymy, of the subject and his writing — simultaneously salvatory and impotent —, is all we need in order to know that, in comparison with yesterday the fabulous and quotidian city of Fernando Pessoa has been transformed.]²

In this sense Pessoa is perhaps less unique than many commentators on Portuguese culture have traditionally thought, but perhaps also more interesting, for the specific aspects of his heteronymous experiment highlighted by Lourenço brings him directly into the mainstream of international cultural production in the early decades of the twentieth century, alongside recognized giants such as Kafka and Proust, Yeats, Eliot and Joyce. In reflection of this stature, the other principal literary authors and thinkers focused upon in the present volume cover a wide range of major figures in the international literary and philosophical canons: Kant and Nietzsche in Germany; Antero de Quental, Cesário Verde, Almada Negreiros, José Saramago, Valter Hugo Mãe and José-Augusto França in Portugal; Xavier de Maistre in France; Miguel de Unamuno in Spain; William Shakespeare and T. S. Eliot in the Anglophone world; Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Antonio Tabucchi and Luigi Pirandello in Italy, while the work also offers some reflections on the presence (and, equally significantly, the absence) of Pessoa in the work of two visual artists in Portugal, Alfredo Margarido and Júlio Pomar. This is thus intended to be a comparative study which explores the cultural milieu from which Pessoa emerged and his posthumous projection, while also seeking to dispel the image of him merely as a memorable and remarkable, but essentially an eccentric, high-point in Portuguese cultural history, integrating him instead into both a national and an international tradition. These original papers by experts in their field should contribute to an ongoing debate around the richness and complexity of the Pessoan oeuvre and further contribute to placing this writer firmly at the heart of discussions of European modernism(s).

The range of angles adopted on Pessoa’s work in recent years has also grown, and one might mention here such significant studies as the edited volume by Anna Klobucka and Mark Sabine, Embodying Pessoa: Corporeality, Gender, Sexuality (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007), or Steffen Dix and Jerónimo Pizarro (eds), A Arca de Pessoa (Lisbon: Imprensa de Ciências Sociais, 2007), which contains numerous chapters relating to the reception of Pessoa and possible influences over his own work, with contributions from a total of twenty-four authors based in seven different countries. The excellent volume by Irene Ramalho de Sousa Santos, Atlantic Poets: Fernando Pessoa’s Turn in Anglo-American Modernism (Hanover and London: University Press of New England, 2003), develops in greater depth the contextualization of Pessoa within Anglophone modernisms: Pessoa, after all, was not simply a Portuguese poet, but a writer who (in common with his semi-heteronym Bernardo Soares) may have been based firmly in Lisbon but who kept a very lively eye on literary and intellectual currents in Portugal and abroad.

New work continues to appear on Pessoa incessantly: two very recent contributions are Kenneth Krabbenhoft’s Fernando Pessoa e as Doenças de Fim de Século (Lisbon: IN–CM, 2011), and José Barreto’s Misoginia e Anti-Feminismo em Fernando Pessoa (Lisbon: Babel, 2011), which includes five previously unpublished texts by the writer. Meanwhile, the publishers of the present volume have also recently issued the comparative study by Patrícia Oliveira de Silva McNeill, Yeats and Pessoa: Parallel Poetic Styles (Oxford: Legenda, 2010), and the forthcoming volume of essays edited by one of the contributors to this work, Fernando Pessoa World Wide: Influences, Dialogues, Responses, ed. by Mariana Gray de Castro (Woodbridge: Tamesis, 2011), consisting largely of papers given at a two-day conference on Pessoa held at King’s College London in December 2008, is further illustration of the continuing richness and originality of the field of Pessoan studies.

This volume is divided into three sections: one dealing with Pessoa’s treatment of his own inheritance from writers and thinkers who preceded him; one placing Pessoa in the context of other cultural production during his own lifetime; and finally a se...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• List of Contributors
• Introduction: Pessoa/Pessoas?
• Index