An Unwritten Novel

Fernando Pessoa's The Book of Disquiet

Thomas Cousineau

• Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781564788856
• eBook ISBN: 9781564789839
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

"Anything and everything, depending on how one sees it, is a marvel or a hindrance, an all or a nothing, a path or a problem, " says Bernardo Soares, the putative author of Fernando Pessoa's classic The Book of Disquiet. Thomas Cousineau's An Unwritten Novel offers the general reader, as well as students and teachers, an "Ariadne's thread" that will help them to find their way through this labyrinthine masterpiece: a self-proclaimed "factless autobiography" in which all the expected elements of the contemporary novel remain "unwritten."

Chapter One: Paradise Remade

“If there could at least be a paradise made of all this, even if only for me.”

THE BRITISH NOVELIST Gabriel Josipovici begins his essay on Pessoa by remarking that “When I think of what is most radical in the literature of the past hundred years, of what embodies most clearly the essential spirit of modernism, I think of five grey-suited gentlemen: Constantin Cavafy, Franz Kafka, T.S. Eliot, Fernando Pessoa, and Jorge Luis Borges. Each belongs to a city and has made that city his own: Alexandria, Prague, London, Lisbon, Buenos Aires” (27). Yet, as Alfred MacAdam reminds us in the preface to his translation of The Book of Disquiet, Lisbon itself actually plays only a marginal role in Soares’s “factless autobiography,” unlike Dublin, of which James Joyce gives us such precisely detailed descriptions in Ulysses. MacAdam then astutely relates The Book, not to the actual city in which it is set, but to the imaginary realm that Jorge Luis Borges created in his short story “The Library of Babel.”

Both The Book and “The Library of Babel” provoke uncanny effects by treating open and enclosed spaces as though they were interchangeable. Borges blurs the distinction between them in the opening sentence of his story, which reads: “The universe (which others call the Library) is composed of an indefinite and perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries” (Labyrinths 51). The reciprocity thus created recurs in the narrator’s later claim that “my grave will be the fathomless air; my body will sink endlessly and decay and dissolve in the wind generated by the fall, which is infinite” (52). He then combines the enclosed geometrical figure of the hexagon with indefiniteness in a rewriting of the mystical definition of God: “The Library is a sphere whose exact center is any one of its hexagons and whose circumference is inaccessible” (52). A limited set of letters and punctuation marks, in its turn, combines to produce an indefinite multiplicity of books: “he deduced that the Library is total and that its shelves register all the possible combinations of the twenty-odd orthographical symbols” (54). Throughout the entire story, the labyrinth itself is implicitly present as a space that, while enclosed, nonetheless invites a potentially infinite number of possible meanderings.

This subversion of the logical distinction between the greater and the lesser as well as between the open and the enclosed—which permits the boundless universe to be contained within the restricted space of the library and, conversely, the library to become boundless—receives yet another uncanny inflection when we learn of the theory according to which somewhere within the library there exists a “total book,” which the narrator describes as “the formula and perfect compendium of all the rest” (56). A concluding footnote offers what may be a plausible rationale for this idea: “Letizia Alvarez de Toledo has observed that this vast library is useless: rigorously speaking, a single volume would be sufficient, a volume of ordinary format, printed in nine or ten point type, containing an infinite number of infinitely thin leaves” (58).

The Book of Disquiet contains, if not an infinite number of pages, then certainly hundreds of separate pages that, if published as a boxed rather than as a bound edition, could be arranged in virtually infinite combinations. Like the narrator of “The Library of Babel,” Soares himself combines a bounded geometric figure with the indefinite when he describes himself as “the center that exists only in the geometry of the abyss” (228). Like the library itself, his fourth-floor rented room expands until it “becomes” the universe and, like the “total book,” the smallest of his fragments becomes “the formula and perfect compendium” of the hundreds of disparate texts that Pessoa left behind at the time of his death.

Again like Borges’s narrator, Soares explicitly invokes the image of the labyrinth at several points in The Book. In one allusion, he expresses his desire “To cease, to be the ebb and flow of a vast sea [ . . . ] the ocean spray of far-off fountains, and all the uncertainty of parks at night, lost in endless tangles, natural labyrinths of darkness!” (33). In another, he yearns to “shake off this state of suspension” that seems to keep him from contact with his true self and to discover “a more intimate thinking, a feeling that’s more mine, a will lost somewhere in the labyrinth of who I really am” (115). The city of Lisbon itself acquires a labyrinthine aspect in the midst of Soares’s nocturnal wandering: “I don’t know why, but I’m troubled by this objective network of wide and narrow streets, this succession of street lamps, trees, lighted and dark windows, opened and closed gates—heterogeneously nocturnal shapes which my near-sightedness makes even hazier, until they become subjectively monstrous, unintelligible and unreal” (191).

This resemblance between the Lisbon of The Book and Borges’s library is alluded to at least indirectly by many critical comments on Soares’s “unwritten novel.” Françoise Laye, for example, points to the ease with which Soares moves back and forth between a realistic and an imaginary portrayal of Lisbon, which she traces to its source in “a boundless narcissism that creates a constant back and forth movement between Pessoa as the creator and Soares as his creature” (12). Washington Dener dos Santos suggests an even closer identification when he describes The Book (in a way that will remind us of Borges) as an expression of its author’s “interior labyrinth” as well as of the “regular geometry of the city” (77). Soares himself substantiates this idea of his inhabiting a recognizably Borgesian realm when he remarks that he can “dream simultaneously of a real sunset over the real Tagus River and a dreamed morning on an inner Pacific Ocean” (435) and that “it’s the fifth corner [of the world] that I travel in, and it belongs to me” (123). The narcissistic motivation underlying his imaginative refashioning of the real world especially comes to the fore when he exclaims “If there could at least be a paradise made of all this, even if only for me! If I could at least meet the friends I’ve dreamed of, walk along the streets I’ve created, wake up amid the racket of roosters and hens in the early morning rustling in the country house where I pictured myself” (90; my emphasis).

Before looking more closely at the blurring of the boundary between the real and the imaginary that permeates The Book, let us recall that Pessoa remade Lisbon as a “paradise regained” in not one but two prose works, the other being a little guidebook entitled Lisbon: What Every Tourist Should Know. Pessoa’s native city, as portrayed both in The Book and in Lisbon, fulfills—albeit, in two completely contrasting ways—the aspiration to which Soares gives voice when he evokes the experience of being alone in a normally crowded place: “We suddenly have a feeling of absolute ownership, of vast and effortless dominion, and—as I said—of relief and serenity” (338; my emphasis). Both Soares and Pessoa’s model tourist “own” Lisbon in highly gratifying ways. To begin with, the existence of other living people is significantly marginalized in both works. In The Book, they are, with few exceptions, reduced to an anonymous and insignificant mass. As Rhian Atkin has observed, “while Lisbon is purportedly what inspires Soares’s writings, his introspective, self-indulgent attitude and his rejection of action actually mean that the physiognomy of the city is largely overlooked, and its inhabitants are grouped together with little attention to any particularly lisboeta traits that they may have” (159).

We may remember, in this respect, Soares’s tribute to “the stillness of early summer evenings downtown, and especially the stillness made more still by contrast, on the streets that seethe with activity by day” (13) and his description of his ability, in the midst of his routine bookkeeping activities in the office of Vasques’s company, to have a vision that conflates open and enclosed spaces and in which he shares “the sublime feeling of a monk in the wilderness or a hermit in his retreat, acquainted with the substance of Christ in the sands and in the caves of withdrawal from the world” (15; my emphasis). The guide who conducts the tour in Lisbon is, like Soares, a nearly solitary figure, his only companion being the tourist himself. Every other inhabitant of the city—including the various artists and political figures whose achievements he celebrates—has been dead for years if not centuries. The virtual effacement of daily events in both works also contributes to this effect. Nothing except sightseeing actually happens in Pessoa’s guidebook. In The Book, events, such as they are, tend to alternate between long stretches of tedium and sudden, visionary moments, neither of which have any direct connection with the daily life of the other inhabitants of Lisbon.

Rogelio Orónez Blanco explains in his introduction to Béatrice Verne’s French translation of Pessoa’s guidebook that its author’s idealizing portrayal of the city of his birth was inspired by his recognition of the greatly diminished role played by Portugal on the world stage, a circumstance of which he became particularly aware during his childhood years in Durban, where “he was able to observe the abysmal ignorance that prevailed with respect to the historical importance of the Portuguese people, which led him to think seriously of writing a guide which would restore his country to its rightful place” (11).

Given this implied ambition, it is not surprising that Pessoa makes constant use of strategies—particularly, his constant resort to superlatives—that effectively imbue public monuments, historical figures, and creative artists with a resplendent aura that places them at the summit of a pervasively invoked hierarchical order. Not only is Lisbon encircled by seven literal hills; it is, as well, teeming with innumerable figurative pinnacles of human greatness and artistic achievement. The gallery of great creators begins with Brother João Turriano, who devised the plans of the Bugio Lighthouse. The strategy of praising past glories is sounded here by the remark that the Tower of Belém is “a magnificent specimen of sixteenth century military architecture, in the romanic-gothic-moorish style” (11), high praise to which Pessoa will return in his later remark that it is the “one of the finest monuments in Lisbon and one of the most expressive memories of Portuguese military and naval power” (60). The superlative mode at work here continues in the observation that the Tagus River is “one of the largest natural ports in the world, with ample anchorage for the greatest fleets” (11; my emphasis).

Pessoa then proposes to serve as the tourist’s “cicerone,” one who will show him “the monuments, the gardens, the more remarkable buildings, the museums—all that is in any way worth seeing in this marvelous Lisbon” (12–13; my emphasis). He rarely misses an occasion to boast of the larger-than-life dimensions of each of these points of interest, taking note, for example, of the Royal Pantheon of the House of Braganza, whose corridor alone measures “17 metres long and 4 1/2 wide” (28). Evidence of Pessoa’s patriotic ambition may also be noted in the passages relating to the National Museum of Contemporary Art, whose “fine paintings and sculptures dating from 1850 onwards” are the work of dozens of artists whose names he only too willingly shares with the tourist. These, along with the sculptures, drawings, and water-colours that also contribute their individual excellences to the glory of the collection as a whole lead him to conclude that “There is, in fine, much to see and to admire in the museum, which is fitly installed” (37), a comment that underlines the importance of respect for both hierarchy and proportion.

The cicerone’s description in Lisbon of the National Library, unlike Borges’s of the Library of Babel, is firmly grounded in empirically observable details that are designed to elicit—not the dizzying experience of the uncanny that we remember from the Borges story—but the comparatively mundane experience of heightened admiration. We learn—among other eminently plausible as well as doubtlessly impressive features—that it “has 11 rooms and 14 passages, on two floors, and contains 360,000 volumes.” The quantitative measure of the library’s excellence is matched by the qualitative when the cicerone tells us that the upper floor houses “the very important Reserved Book room, which contains the rarer works, real bibliographic relics, some unique copies, specimens of rare binding and illustration, manuscripts, coins, and many written documents of all kinds, all of which form a bibliographic collection worthy of the greatest possible care” (38). This strategy of convincing the tourist as to the special excellence of the sites to which his attention is drawn reappears in his praise of the Archeological Museum, which, along with containing innumerable historically important objects, is also graced with a principal entrance which, “formed by a doorway with six ogive arches, is one of the finest of its time” (42).

We notice, furthermore, that the cicerone takes pride, not only in the remarkable dimensions and special excellence of each of the sites to which he calls the tourist’s attention, but in the aesthetically pleasing whole to which each part contributes. This is noticeably true, for example, of his description of the Praça do Commercio:

It is a vast space, perfectly square, lined on three sides by buildings of uniform type, with high stone arches [ . . . ] The fourth, or South side of the square is formed by the Tagus itself [ . . . ] In the center of the square stands the bronze equestrian statue of King José I, a splendid sculpture by Joachim Machado de Castro, cast in Portugal, in a single piece, in 1774 [ . . . ] On the North side of the square, facing the river, there are three parallel streets; the middle one issues from a magnificent triumphal arch of great dimensions, indubitably one of the largest ones in Europe. (15–16)

A similar attention to wholeness and harmony leads him to regret (in a remark that may be taken as an amusing, although doubtlessly unintended, allusion to The Book itself) that the Lisbon Cathedral, which had been damaged by several earthquakes, has been “very badly restored, since its present state shows the lack of a definite plan on the part of the several ‘restorers.’” He hopes that the restoration undertaken by António Couto “will put some artistic unity into the cathedral” (32–33). A bit later in the tour, the Monastery of the Jerónimos elicits, by contrast, the cicerone’s unconditional praise as “the most remarkable monument which the capital contains” (54). He reminds us of the contribution made by quantity to the unforgettable impression that the monastery creates via his mention of the stone-work, which is “full of niches, of statues, of reliefs, arms and emblems.” Shifting his attention to quality, he then praises the “exquisite harmony” of the aggregate, which itself testifies to the presence in Portugal at the time of its construction of “the greatest masters of stone-work, both national and foreign” (54–55).

In keeping with its focus on specifically urban forms of human achievement, Lisbon rigorously restricts mention of the natural world to descriptions of the city’s formal gardens. For the cicerone, “nature shows us many of her choicest specimens” (48) only on those limited occasions when the “finest gardens” become the object of his attention. Especially relevant examples include the Campo Grande, which, we learn is “one of the finest parks in the city [ . . . ] over a kilometer in length and about 200 metres broad throughout” and containing “valuable specimens of exotic trees, ornamental plants, flowers, etc.” (25) and an unnamed garden, also praised as “one of the finest gardens in Lisbon,” which “contains some fine specimens of trees, the most remarkable one being a spreading cedar, the branches of which, resting on iron-work, cover ground enough to hold some hundreds of persons” (44).

The Lisbon to which the cicerone pays such superlative homage in his guidebook is, to be sure, the same city in which Bernardo Soares lives, works, and writes—but seen from an entirely different perspective. Soares alludes repeatedly to the tedium of his daily life, which is never relieved by the inspiring sight of a magnificent historical monument or an impressive public square. In place of such touristic attractions, we find frequent mention of such utterly unworthy places as the office in which he works, the restaurant in which he meets the stranger, the tavern across the street, the fourth-floor rented room from whose window he gazes, and the barbershop in which he learns of the barber’s death. The great historical figures—whose devotion to the active life led to the rebuilding of Lisbon out of the rubble left by the 1755 earthquake—are replaced by Bernardo Soares, an assistant bookkeeper who regularly expresses his disdain for “men of action.” The note of patriotic pride that echoes throughout Lisbon is likewise replaced by Soares’s “disquiet.”

Although he suffers from attacks of anxiety unknown to the cicerone, Soares possesses remarkable literary gifts that give him access to blissful experiences that are not, on the evidence of the guidebook, available to even the most elated of tourists. The pleasure afforded to the tourist depends upon conventional judgments of comparative worth that allow the cicerone to establish hierarchies of merit. Soares’s bliss, by contrast, is generated by uncanny reciprocities between the worthy and the worthless. In Lisbon, the most admirable monuments and public spaces are placed on a pinnacle, whereas in The Book, the most negligible object constantly becomes a gateway to the infinite.

In Lisbon, Pessoa had directed our attention inward: beginning with a panoramic view of the city, he then introduced the tourist to individual buildings, monuments, public gardens, and squares that contribute to its wholeness and harmony. In The Book, however, he moves in the opposite direction by treating the panorama as merely part of an immeasurably larger space. Pessoa’s tourist arrives in Lisbon aboard a boat that is sailing up the Tagus. From there, he disembarks and begins a journey whose temporal and spatial coordinates are clearly specified: “We shall now ask the tourist to come with us. [ . . . ] Right in front of the wharf he has just left is the Rocha do Conde de Óbidos [ . . . ] A little further on [ . . . ] let us notice this square [ . . . ] Our car moves on, goes through the Rua do Arsenal, and passes the town hall [ ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Introduction: The Sheltering Ruins
• Chapter One: Paradise Remade
• Chapter Two: A Show without a Plot
• Chapter Three: Shadows of Gestures
• Chapter Four: The Written Voice
• Chapter Five: The Daedalus Complex
• Bibliography
• Acknowledgments
• Copyright