Pessoa's Geometry of the Abyss

Modernity and the Book of Disquiet

Paulo De Medeiros

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351554312
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Languages
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

"Fernando Pessoa wrote prolifically in many genres until his untimely death in 1935, and he has long been widely recognized as Portugal's most influential twentieth century writer. The publication of the Book of Disquiet in 1982, however, caused a seismic change in the appreciation of his work and its place in Modernism. In that great and vast collection of fragments, Pessoa firmly established his place among the canon of European modernists and radically questioned many of Modernity's assumptions. Alain Badiou, for example, has argued that philosophers are not yet able to assimilate Pessoa's thinking. Paulo de Medeiros's new study, one of the first to be dedicated to the Book of Disquiet, takes up that challenge, exploring the text's connections with photography, film, politics and textuality itself, and developing comparisons with D. H. Lawrence, Walter Benjamin, and Franz Kafka. Paulo de Medeiros is Professor of Modern and Contemporary World Literatures in the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick."

Chapter 1
Protocols of Reading

A quoi bon la critique? A quoi bon? — Vaste et terrible point d'interrogation, qui saisit la critique au collet dés le premier pas qu'elle Veut faire dans son premier chapitre.

BAUDELAIRE, Le Salon de 1846

The Book of Disquiet is unlike any other book. As such, if one is to read it at all, that is, try to understand it on its own grounds, specific protocols for reading become necessary. Pessoa spent much of his life writing an enormous variety of works: poems, essays, a play, film scripts, commercial slogans, and what he imagined would be the Book of Disquiet. He published much and left even more unpublished. One can speculate on what the Book of Disquiet would be like had he lived longer and had he managed to make a book of the numerous fragments he left, some clearly intended to be joined together as a book, others to be guessed at by future editors. However, such speculation is not only futile but misguided because it assumes that, had Pessoa been able to, he would have made the Book of Disquiet into a conventional book. He did not and my argument will be that as readers we should stop wishing for such a book, because what Pessoa left instead is far more challenging. Since the Book of Disquiet saw publication in its earliest version, in 1982, subsequent versions with different texts and a different order have been published, both in Portuguese and in translation, so that there is not one book but several books. That, however, is not the challenge I have in mind, even if I recognize the difficulties inherent in assembling a book out of the myriad pieces left by Pessoa. After the publication of the first edition prepared by Richard Zenith (1998), with a clear explanation for the choices made in assembling the various pieces, one can even say that there is a base text one can read with some assurance, and with the publication of the critical edition prepared by Jerónimo Pizarro (2010) readers can easily check on variants and other textual issues. For my purposes, however, as reassuring as such editorial work might be, it is not fundamental. The rigour of a critical edition, for instance, is necessary as long as one conceives of a book in traditional terms, but the Book if Disquiet is anything but traditional. Richard Zenith first ventured the notion of it as a sort of non-book, but in my view it is much more than that: it is an anti-book. That is, the Book of Disquiet should not be seen as an unfinished book but rather as a text without limits and thus also without a possible end. The reader who approaches the Book of Disquiet conventionally will be fascinated by some of its passages, perhaps annoyed by others, but will begrudge the lack of a conclusion. Instead of such a conventional approach, however, a first protocol of reading would demand an acceptance of the impossibility of any conclusion for the Book of Disquiet. That is, instead of regarding the text as lacking, one should see it as a form of excess. Boundless, the text of the Book of Disquiet refuses to be tamed into a whole as if writing were indeed an infinite task. One could think of Melville in Moby Dick as having Ishmael express that same notion: 'This whole book is but a draught — nay, but the draught of a draught' (Melville 2008, Chapter 32), with the difference that whereas Melville still contemplated a system of cetology, Pessoa's Book of Disquiet abandons any notions of a system. Sceptical readers might see in such a claim a rather romantic notion of either Pessoa as author, or of his texts. Yet, like Baudelaire, in the 1846 Salon, one should ask oneself what the purpose of criticism is, and with him agree that criticism must be rooted in passion. Besides, no matter how conventional Pessoa might have been in his daily life, all of his writing can be deemed excessive: from the radical break with the provincialism of Portuguese letters and the scandal of Orpheu (1915), the literary magazine he founded and that can be seen as inaugurating Portuguese modernism, to the complexity of Mensagem (1934), the only book published while he was alive. To see the Book of Disquiet as a form of such excess, even its epitome, is neither anachronistic wishful thinking nor a mere fancy of criticism, but an attempt at meeting the writing's own premises.

Forgetting the Heteronyms

One of Pessoa's excesses is the construction of the heteronyms. Hardly any discussion of his work neglects to mention them and most present it as the distinguishing feature separating Pessoa from all other modernist writers. George Steiner, reviewing Richard Zenith's English translation of the Book of Disquiet starts precisely by reflecting on this: '"Heteronyms", as Pessoa called and defined them, are something different and exceedingly strange. For each of his "voices", Pessoa conceived a highly distinctive poetic idiom and technique, a complex biography, a context of literary influence and polemics and, most arrestingly of all, subtle interrelations and reciprocities of awareness' (Steiner 2001). Undoubtedly, Pessoa's heteronymic production is of great relevance to understanding modernism's problematization of identity and its move away from conceiving the Self as unified. However, for a reading of the Book of Disquiet, emphasizing the heteronyms would be a serious misreading, hence my proposal to forget the heteronyms. In doing so I realize that I am, if not setting myself against scholarly consensus, at least risking appearing to do so. And yet I find such a move absolutely necessary in order to read the Book of Disquiet in a way that takes into account its demands on the reader. Pessoa had always invented others who wrote alongside him, since his childhood, and were one to tally the number of heteronyms one could easily approach, if not exceed, a hundred. Not all of these were important or fully developed of course, and for a consideration of Pessoa's adult poetics four are especially relevant: Alberto Caeiro, Ricardo Reis, Álvaro de Campos, and Bernardo Soares — whom Pessoa considered not so much a heteronym as a semi-heteronym, as of all the others he was the closest to Pessoa himself. To this more restricted group one should perhaps also add Fernando Pessoa himself, as, by creating the main heteronyms and having them write a large part of his work, Pessoa in a sense also made himself into one as well.

Pessoa's own account of how the major heteronyms were created, in a blaze of creativity, is nearly always mentioned. This is how Pessoa recounts his 'triumphant day', in a letter to his friend and editor Adolfo Casais Monteiro dated 13 January 1935:

Num dia [...] — foi em 8 de Março de 1914 — acerquei-me de uma cómoda alta, e, tomando um papel, comecei a escrever, de pé, como escrevo sempre que posso. Ε escrevi trinta e tantos poemas a fio, numa espécie de êxtase cuja natureza não conseguirei definir. Foi ο dia triumphal da minha vida, e nunca poderei ter outro assim. Abri com um título, 'O Guardador de Rebanhos'. Ε ο que se seguiu foi ο aparecimento de alguém em mim, a quem dei desde logo ο nome de Alberto Caeiro. Desculpe-me ο absurdo da frase: aparecera em mim ο meu mestre. (Pessoa, Teoria da Heteronímia 2012: 277—78)

[One day [...] — it was March 8th, 1914 — I walked over to a high chest of drawers, took a sheet of paper, and began to write standing up, as I do whenever I can. And I wrote thirty-some poems at once, in a kind of ecstasy I'm unable to describe. It was the triumphal day of my life, and I can never have another one like it. I began with a title, The Keeper of Sheep. This was followed by the appearance in me of someone I instantly named Alberto Caeiro. Excuse the absurdity of this statement: my master had appeared in me.] (Pessoa, The Selected Prose, 2001: 256)

Pessoa then goes on to explain how he also immediately wrote a series of poems in his own name, as the disciple of Caeiro, and in the names of Ricardo Reis and Alvaro de Campos. The whole letter is a fascinating document in terms of how Pessoa thus sought to create an original moment for his heteronymical constellation in clear romantic terms, complete with the unexplainable ecstasy that preceded the fantastical writing. What I would like to focus on, though, is the complex movement by way of which Pessoa both asserts his authorship of the heteronyms and deflects that authority into the figure of Caeiro. This bucolic poet, who would be the master of them all, including Pessoa himself, would also, conveniently, be dead by then, since in the biography Pessoa made for him he was born in 1887, about a year before Pessoa, but died in 1915. This is what Pessoa says about his relation to the master in that triumphant day: 'Foi ο regresso de Fernando Pessoa Alberto Caeiro a Fernando Pessoa ele só. Ou, melhor, foi a reacção de Fernando Pessoa contra a sua inexistência como Alberto Caeiro' (Pessoa, Teoria da Heteronímia 2012: 278) ['It was the return of Fernando Pessoa as Alberto Caeiro to Fernando Pessoa himself. Or rather, it was the reaction of Fernando Pessoa against his nonexistence as Alberto Caeiro'] (Pessoa, The Selected Prose 2001: 256). Both the construction of his own Self as mediated through the creation of another, as well as his explanation that the Self regained its identity based on the lack of being other already show in very concentrated form a key aspect of Pessoa's heteronymic construction that is not only a recognition of the importance of relating to the Other in order to be himself, but also a deflection of the Self's own authority and authorship. By doing so Pessoa both affirms and rejects, so to speak, the originating moment of his own creation. What might have started as an elaborate game, as Pessoa alludes to in his wish to play a trick on his friend the poet Sá-Carneiro, was in fact much more than that, even if one were to leave out the other, minor, heteronyms that had always accompanied the poet since childhood. For an understanding of Pessoa's poetry, much of it written in the names of the heteronyms, there is no avoiding such a strategy of writing.

Yet, for a reading of the Book of Disquiet, only part of it is directly relevant. Pessoa was busy with the Book if Disquiet for most of his adult life, even if the bulk of it, as Richard Zenith points out, was written towards the end. A few passages had been published under his own name as early as 1913; Pessoa later thought of ascribing the book to a heteronym by the name of Vicente Guedes, before settling on Bernardo Soares as putative author. The issue of the heteronyms, then, even if not completely absent from Pessoa's plans for the book, already appears much less urgent. On Bernardo Soares, this is what Pessoa writes to Casais Monteiro in the same letter, in parentheses:

(Ο meu semi-heterónimo Bernardo Soares, que aliás em muitas coisas se parece com Álvaro de Campos, aparece sempre que estou cansado ou sonolento, de sorte que tenha um pouco suspensas as qualidades de raciocínio e de inibição; aquela prosa é um constante devaneio. Ε um semi-heterónimo porque, não sendo a personalidade a minha, é, não diferente da minha, mas uma simples mutilação dela. Sou eu menos ο raciocínio e a afectividade. A prosa, salvo ο que ο raciocínio dá de tenue à minha, é igual a esta, e ο português perfeitamente igual [...].) (Pessoa, Teoria da Heteronímia 2012: 280)

[(My semiheteronym Bernardo Soares, who in many ways resembles Álvaro de Campos, always appears when I'm sleepy or drowsy, such that my qualities of inhibition and logical reasoning are suspended; his prose is an endless reverie. He's a semiheteronym because his personality, although not my own, doesn't differ from my own but is a mere mutilation of it. He's me without my logical reasoning and emotion. His prose is the same as mine, except for a certain formal restraint that reason imposes on my own writing, and his Portuguese is exactly the same [...].)] (Pessoa, The Selected Prose, 2001: 258—59)

Obviously, this is as much a part of Pessoa's mythical account of the birth of the heteronyms as the passages previously quoted and as such must be taken for what it is and no more. Nonetheless, it is significant that Pessoa would think of both making a distinction between Bernardo Soares and the other heteronyms, claiming that the differences between Soares and himself are much less than between the other heteronyms and himself, and at the same time equate Soares with Campos, the most outrageously modernist of them all. Furthermore, the differences that Pessoa claims exist between Soares and himself all fall into the category of a lack. Soares would lack logical reasoning, emotion and formal restraint — Soares then is but a mutilated version of Pessoa himself. However, that lack is also a form of excess, being without restraint and constituting an infinite reverie. One can only speculate as to why Pessoa abandoned the project of signing the Book of Disquiet with his own name, or why he moved from the far less significant figure of Guedes to the one that is finally presented as his closest double, Soares. Like most speculation it is idle, as what matters is that in his assignation of the Book of Disquiet to Soares Pessoa decided on a turn that only apparently emulates that of the splitting of the self into a multiplicity of others. The Book of Disquiet, as I will come to argue, for all its unwieldy structure — or better said, lack of structure — could be said to have within itself intense moments of specularity when it comes to the construction of the Self. These obey a logic of cryptology, which, as I intend to show, always serves to display a false Self so as to better hide the true Self. For the moment, however, what I want to stress is that in writing the scattered pieces that comprise the Book of Disquiet Pessoa settled for one signature only, even if one must still see those of Guedes and Pessoa himself as if under erasure, palimpsest-like. So the Book of Disquiet, in contrast to so much of Pessoa's writing, does not depend on, nor does it contribute to, a multiplication of the Self. Without at all falling back into a pre-modern concept of the Self as unified — indeed, if one wanted to one could argue that in the extreme fragmentation of the Book of Disquiet there is a consummate representation of a shattering of the Self into myriad splinters — the Book of Disquiet enacts a mirroring of the Self that is both true and false, inasmuch as Soares both is and is not a double of Pessoa. And it is a doubling that both lacks and exceeds that which it represents, indeed, exceeds it by virtue of its own lack.

At the beginning of her monumental comparative study of Pessoa in relation to Anglo-American poetry, Maria Irene Ramalho, basing herself on the work of Eduardo Lourenço, one of the most eminent Pessoa critics, remarks on how one needs to separate two strands in Pessoa's poetics that coincide in the heteronyms: one which would depend on that supreme fiction, the construction of the heteronyms as an ultimate form of 'self-objectification', and another that would 'keep [...] intact the fiction of the integral subject [...] as precisely what it is also: a fiction' (Ramalho 2003a: 2—3). In an essay that was also published in 2003, but which explores this question from a different perspective, Ramalho recalls Schlegel's dictum on criticism as rumination and considers the heteronymic multiplication of Pessoa as the epitome of such a perspective, and the Book of Disquiet as perhaps its highest expression. According to Ramalho, then, not only would Bernardo Soares be even more heteronymic than the other major heteronyms, but the Book of Disquiet would be suffused through and through with heteronymy:

Livro do desassossego contains the theory and practice of modern (or Pessoan) lyricality (Ramalho 2003: 257). 'Casual and meditated' that it is (Pessoa 1998: 55), Livro do desassossego is an integral part of Pessoa's conception of the poetic as heteronymy — that is to say, a self-interruptive and ruminative construct. [...] The heteronyms are a constant presence in Livro do desassossego, whether the allusion be implicit, [...] or explicit. (Ramalho 2003b: 18)

Ramalho's positions in the book and in the article, even though they may appear conflicting, are in fact complementary. For the moment I will bracket off the question of rumination and the importance of reading Friedrich Schlegel to understanding the poetics of the Book of Disquiet that she aptly uses in the article, whereas in the book, the focus is more on the question of the fragmentary. Obviously, one can see in the Book of Disquiet elements that remind one of other Pessoan heteronyms; and the suggestion to see the Book of Disquiet as a form of rumination in Schlegel's sense is very apt. Nonetheless, in my view, focusing on the question of the heteronyms is not the most productive way to read the Book of Disquiet. Sliding such a unique and radical text as the Book of Disquiet neatly into line with Pessoa's other writing is tempting and even, to some point, justified. And yet, it also threatens to remove its specificity. And that is certainly not Ramalho's intention, since she also is careful to highlight the book's unique status: 'The fragmentary, ever-in-progress Livro do desassossego is, of course, the book that is not a book; it is rather, in Blanchot's terms, the work (or writing) that is the absence of the book' (Ramalho 2003b: 17). Should one insist on reading it through the prism of heteronymy, then, I would recommend — echoing Ramalho's echo of Blanchot — reading it only as an absence of heteronymy. Furthermore, in the conclusion to Atlantic Poets, which is where she discusses at length some of the Book if Disquiet's poetics, Ramalho states: 'If there is an "I" in The Book (and, of course there is, The Book is overwhelmingly written in the "first person"), that "I" is, as Sena was the first one to note, an "anti-I"' (Ramalho 2003a: 265). It is especially this last notion, drawn by Ramalho from a seminal essay by Jorge de Sena on 'Fernando Pessoa: The Man Who Never Was' that can better help us read the Book of Disquiet freed from the trap of the heteronyms. Forgetting the heteronyms may be difficult, as we have become so accustomed to see in them not only one of the most distinguishing facets of Pessoa's extraordinary creativity but also an answer to the radical shattering of identity brought forth by modernity. Yet, if we are to be consistent to the demands the Book if Disquiet makes of its readers, we should be prepared to discard conventional readings. By bracketing off the heteronyms — that is, by accepting that as much as they are a part of all Pessoa ever did, and as such also, inevitably, of the Book of Disquiet, they should be strategically forgotten — a reading closer to the theoretical importance of the text might be achieved. Just as the Book of Disquiet must be read as an anti-book, so Bernardo Soares, as author of the Book of Disquiet, must be understood foremost as an anti-Self.

Remembering the Hedgehog

In his dense and wide-ranging, though short, review of the Book of Disquiet George Steiner highlighted its fragmentary nature:

The fragmentary, the incomplete is of the essence of Pessoa's spirit. The very kaleidoscope of voices within him, the breadth of his culture, the catholicity of his ironic sympathies [...] inhibited the monumentalities, the self-satisfection of completion. Hence the vast torso of Pessoa's Faust on which he laboured ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Protocols of Reading
• 2 (Un)Seeing Pessoa
• 3 Phantoms and Crypts
• 4 Dreams, Women, Politics
• 5 Infinite Writing
• Envoi
• Bibliography
• Index