Portuguese Modernisms

Multiple Perspectives in Literature and the Visual Arts

Steffen Dix

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351553599
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Languages
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

For a more encompassing and stimulating picture of Modernism seen as a movement of the 20th century, a broad spectrum of work across many countries we must explore its diversity. Portuguese Modernism manifested itself both in visual art and in literature, and made a vigorous contribution to this time of profound cultural change. Indeed, the sociocultural transformations that marked the early 20th century in Portugal are still current. This volume provides a critical guide for students and teachers, contributed by an array of scholars with unparalleled knowledge of the period, its artists and its writers. Steffen Dix is Research Fellow at the Institute of Social Science, University of Lisbon; Jeronimo Pizarro is Research Fellow at the Linguistics Centre, University of Lisbon.

PART I

❖

Main Figures and Magazines

CHAPTER 1

Portuguese Precursors of the First Modernist Generation

Paula Morão

Today it seems absurd to consider that poets of a certain generation appear spontaneously without the support of a tradition which gives meaning to what they wish to put into practice, even when they intend to present themselves as bringers of the new, demolishing their older contemporaries and their predecessors. Since classical antiquity one has been able to note quarrels between the ancients and moderns (to use the term of the French seventeenth-century polemic), who have differentiated themselves with positions of either imitating the ancient models or staking a claim to innovation and to the use of artistic and poetic forms created ab initio. This concept only makes sense in the context of the introduction of ideas and practices by someone arriving on the literary or artistic scene, yet, as we will have the opportunity to see, even defenders of the new end up taking root in strata of the tradition which they wished to delete. This is the case of the Portuguese poets gathered in the 1915 magazine Orpheu and is suggested in the very title of that publication, with its desire to be new and different from the literary production of the era. In Greek myth Orpheus symbolizes poetry itself, with its origins in song and in the harmonious mixture of the poetic word and music. So the innovations (and even the ruptures) that the magazine proposes echo a concept of literature which is firmly anchored in an intuitive recognition of the ancestral nature of poetry, whose historicity is recognized and linked to the condition of the poet as faber, as a craftsperson who must know his or her trade and its historicity in order to practise it in a full and competent way. This is why, when we read the first two numbers of Orpheu, and the third which remained at the proof stage,¹ it is not surprising to find much-used classic forms such as the sonnet, the ode and the elegy alongside modern themes (machines and industry, for example), nor is it scandalous to find, beside traditional metres and versification, prose elements, blank and longlined verse, etc.

This article seeks, therefore, to discern the elements of a lineage that sustains ‘os de Orpheu’ [those of Orpheu] in Portuguese literature,² searching for the meeting of voices at the foundations of the poetics of modernity,³ which, in what is called the first modernism, takes on a stability that becomes apparent to those involved. The most poetically self-aware of the magazine’s contributors was Fernando Pessoa, as a number of his writings prove; we will point out a few. A fragment, probably from 1914, lists ‘Influências’ [Influences], including poetry in English during his formative years, 1904–05, when he was studying in South Africa. He also adds:

1905–1908 (fim) — Edgar Poe (já na poesia), Baudelaire, Rollinat, Antero, Junqueiro (na parte anticlerical), Cesário Verde, José Duro, Henrique Rosa.

1908–1909 (fim) — Garrett, António Correia de Oliveira, António Nobre.

1909–1911 — Os simbolistas franceses, Camilo Pessanha. 1912–1913 — 1) O saudosismo; 2) Os futuristas.⁴

[1905–1908] (end) — Edgar Poe (already his poetry), Baudelaire, Rollinat, Antero, Junqueiro (for his anticlericalism), Cesário Verde, José Duro, Henrique Rosa.

1908–1909 (end) — Garrett, António Correia de Oliveira, António Nobre.

1909–1911 — The French symbolists, Camilo Pessanha.

1912–1913 — 1) The saudosismo movement; 2) The futurists.]

Other stages of Pessoa’s work confirm the Portuguese sources (those which interest us here), but it is worth remembering the ‘notas que Armando Côrtes-Rodrigues coligiu em 1914 […] baseadas em dados fornecidos pelo próprio Poeta’[notes which Armando Côrtes-Rodrigues compiled in 1914 […] based on information provided by the Poet himself].⁵ These notes were published ‘tal como se encontram’ [as they were found] by Joel Serrão.⁶ For the period from 1908 to 1911, Côrtes-Rodrigues records the following: ‘Influências sobre as poesias portuguesas’ [Influences on the Portuguese poems] which Pessoa wrote in that period: ‘Garrett — Num impulso súbito, vindo da leitura das Folhas Caídas e das Flores Sem Fruto [Pessoa] começa a escrever versos portugueses’⁷ [Garrett — In a sudden impulse, coming from reading Fallen Leaves and Flowers without Fruit, he [Pessoa] starts to write verse in Portuguese]. This note corroborates the list entitled ‘Influências’ [Influences] already quoted.

Knowing now, as we do, of Pessoa’s role as mentor to ‘those of Orpheu,’ it is not hard to believe that his declared influences constituted, in addition, a corpus of Portuguese readings common to all the poets in the group, and the pages of the magazine in fact bear this out. On the other hand, after 1915 each poet followed his own path, in some cases abandoning the intense desire to be new and original that the magazine embodied, in other cases pursuing this desire in various periodicals, with or without Pessoa’s collaboration. This article focuses on mapping the Portuguese readings that inform and sustain the poetry of the first modernism, discerning which among those poets were the ones who, for their patent or latent importance, we can designate as the precursors of Orpheu and of what follows it.⁸ In a second stage the article will examine those authors whom it has become apparent are the most relevant co-ordinates of such a map.

The obligatory first point of reference has to be Almeida Garrett, in whose work can be found many seminal elements of a modern conception of literature in general and poetry in particular.⁹ Lírica de João Mínimo [The Poetry of Minimum John], the 1829 book in which he collects his juvenilia, includes exercises in translating and glossing ancient and modern authors,¹⁰ as well as poems more or less of circumstance, such as the two odes ‘Ao Corpo Académico’ [To the Academic Body]. These poems prepare the ground for the mature poetry of this towering figure of Portuguese Romanticism. However, perhaps the most relevant text of Garrett’s volume is the preface, ‘Notícia do autor desta obra’ [Author’s Note on this Work] (1828), in which Garrett weaves a fiction around the search for that enigmatic ‘Senhor João Mínimo’, the author of the work from which Garrett distances himself ironically with regard to its paternity. He documents the poetic types of the early nineteenth century, before distancing himself from all of them, emerging as an auctoritas who collects and publishes the poems that have come to him in a crammed chest from that man in whom, under the mask of humility, is hidden a cultured person and the preface writer’s alter ego. The preface writer, never mentioned by name, allows his authorial condition to be glimpsed, as he distances himself from his juvenile verses. This is a biographical fiction which, on the one hand anticipates by almost twenty years the narrator of Viagens na Minha Terra [Travels in my Homeland], and on the other hand works with authorial fiction in ways which strongly anticipate those later practised in Orpheu. The inventive and self-ironic qualities are also found in the mature writer’s two poetry collections — Flores sem Fruto (1845) and Folhas Caídas (1853) — and in their respective prefaces, metapoetic texts in which the image of a poet (a Romantic poet) is constructed and in which a protocol of reading is established which plays with a vegetal isotopy (the leaves are natural elements, but they are also the paper on which the verses are recorded). This trajectory continues in the unclassifiable Viagens na Minha Terra (1845–46), a book which is a cornerstone of modern fiction in Portuguese, initiating an impurity in the genre which questions how the borders of fiction (not just the borders of the novel) are defined. These borders are problematized as he recounts ‘journeys’ taken not only in Portugal but also in the mind of the person who is writing, employing irony, giving his opinion, describing, observing. The books mentioned above are the height of Garrett’s work, displaying his mastery of verse techniques and his use of a carefully chosen language, particularly in the interior monologues and the use of orality. But the books above do not exhaust Garrett’s importance to modern writing in Portuguese. At the least, one would have to recall the play Frei Luís de Sousa [Brother Luís de Sousa] (1843) and its themes of individual and national identity in crisis, of masks and guilt. Poetic motifs and issues, such as those mentioned above, as well as Garrett’s decisive contribution to a fluid style that owes much to orality and the rhythms of folk poetry, may well be the reason for Pessoa’s manifest interest in his work.

Antero de Quental was in the list of Pessoa’s ‘Influences’, and it is worth examining, via a reading of the three articles by Pessoa in A Águia [The Eagle] in 1912,¹¹ the reasons why the author of the Sonetos was included as a primary influence. In them Pessoa responds to the question of ‘quando a nossa corrente principia. O seu tom especial e distintivo, quando começa a aparecer?’ [when our current started. Its particular and distinctive tone, when did it start to emerge?].¹² He establishes a lineage, which we will return to, which passes through António Nobre, some of Eugénio de Castro and the Junqueiro of Os Simples [The Simple Ones], in other words, ‘o começo da última década do século dezanove’ [the beginning of the last decade of the nineteenth century].¹³ For now, what interests us is Pessoa’s next comment: he considers that for all of them ‘o precursor é Antero de Quental’¹⁴ [their precursor is Antero de Quental]. Further on he becomes more explicit and says that Antero represents ‘transcendentalismo, sob forma de emoção’ [transcendentalism in the form of emotion].¹⁵ It is a case of emphasizing the metaphysical aspect of Antero’s poetry, present above all in the Sonetos,¹⁶ in which one can still detect a Romantic vein, although they also open onto the foundational questions of a modernity informed by philosophical readings. So it is that in the Sonetos we find a subject who asks questions about the meaning of life and of truth, configuring the search in the figure of a homo viator, referring to classical myths, to the motif of a knight errant and to an entity called God (‘Ignoto Deo’ [Unknown God] or ‘Ignotus’). This is a god without religion situated in a plane of metaphysical questioning, of the transcendentalism Pessoa referred to. In Antero, and particularly in the Sonetos, the figure of a visionary poet is formed, someone alone against the world and even against himself, who moves in the darkened setting of an individual’s consciousness divided between reflection and intervention, between the struggle for the ideas of a nascent socialism and the passivity of an anguished and sorrowful subject. If in Garrett (and in Alexandre Herculano) night becomes the chosen domain of the poet lost in himself and his thoughts, in Antero we see poetry more clearly defined as a soliloquy in search of the Ideal and the Ineffable (‘Das Unnennbare’ [the Unnameable], this ‘quimera’ [chimera] or ‘misteriosa fada’ [mysterious spirit] whose name is unknown). The subject does battle with an alter ego named ‘o meu coração’ [my heart], and so symbolizing the inner division of the hyperconscious ego, which carries in itself ‘todos os sonhos do mundo’ [all the dreams of the world], as Álvaro de Campos says in the poem ‘Tabacaria’ [The Tobacconist’s]. The symbolic combat in which the subject faces himself, seen in the two aspects of ‘Mors-Amor’, is also found in ‘No Circo’ [In the Circus], when the ‘monstro’ [monster] emerges from inside the I ‘feito fera’ [made wild]. This mortal and eschatological combat could only give way to the sense of being vanquished that can be read in many of the sonnets and in the short poem ‘Os Vencidos’ [The Vanquished].¹⁷ It does not seem difficult to see here themes that interested Pessoa, Sá-Carneiro and the other Orpheu poets, all of whom were attracted to the idea of poetry providing a comment on the meaning of life, even if that response were the technical perfection of its verses, as is characteristic of Antero.

However, from a critical point of view it is worth adding another parallel between Antero and Pessoa: both contributed decisively to the construction of themselves as mythic figures, both left in written form fictionalized autobiographies which met with a resounding, long-lasti...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Notes on the Contributors
• Introduction
• PART I:  MAIN FIGURES AND MAGAZINES
• PART II: HISTORICAL AND COMPARATIVE PERSPECTIVES
• Index