The Book of Disquiet: Phase 2 - Bernardo Soares (Fernando Pessoa)

I’ve spent the last two months reading The Book of Disquiet. I’ve read books about this book, I’ve read books about Pessoa…and instead of clarity and illumination I feel like I’m in a haze. There’s isn’t one flickering Alexandrian lighthouse to steer me safely through the literary shoals of Pessoan prose…but rather many flickering lights in opposing directions. The question is how to proceed… The more I read this book, the less I know how to describe it. 

There’s only one way forward. I turn on The Milk-Eyed Mender by Joanna Newsom, and plunge in. This isn’t a book to be read like other books…It’s subversive. It’s personality claws itself into your heart and you’re left with emotional scar tissue rather than a synopsis.

In some ways it’s kind of like a magical 8-ball for those suffering from chronic depression. Question: “Will I enjoy this ten day excursion across four different countries with my extended family?”

Shake. Shake. Shake. 

“I find the idea of traveling only vicariously seductive, as if it were an idea more likely to seduce someone other than myself. The whole vast spectacle of the world fills my awakened imagination with a wave of brilliant tedium; like someone grown weary of all gestures, I sketch out a desire and the anticipated monotony of possible landscapes disturbs the surface of my stagnant heart like a rough wind.” [213] 

8-Ball version: “Don’t count on it.” 

Question: “Should I take a shower and get dressed…it’s been four days.” 

Shake. Shake. Shake. 

“Action is a disease of thought, a cancer of the imagination. To act is to exile oneself. Every action is incomplete and imperfect.” [71]

“Anything that involves action, be it war or reasoning, [or showering?] is false; and anything that involves abdication is false too. If only I knew how not to act and how not to abdicate from action either! That would be the dream crown of my glory, the silent scepter of my greatness.” [14]

8-Ball version: “My reply is no.” 

Question: “Should I try to teach my kids the basic geography of the regions we’re visiting?” 

Shake. shake. Shake. 

“The supreme, most honorable state for a superior man is not even to know the name of his country’s head of state, or whether he lives in a monarchy or a republic.” [52]

8-Ball version: ‘My sources say no.” 

Question: “Will I regret following this advice?” 

“..I myself, who dares but does not act, will end up, with no regrets, among those soggy reeds made muddy by the nearby river and by my own flaccid inertia, beneath the vast autumn skies of evening, in impossibly far-flung places. And through it all, like the shrill whistle of naked anxiety, I will feel my soul in my dreams- a deep, pure howl, useless in the darkness of the world.” [320]

8-Ball version: “Reply hazy, try again.” 

Having experienced my own bout of major depression, Pessoa’s prose feels like discovering the journal of a kindred spirit, long forgotten, hidden beneath the bed. There’s an immediate recognition of this shifting topography of the mind…I’ve been to this terrain; I’ve traveled this vast expanse; alone and exhausted, with the impossibility of one more step, the impossibility of one more breath, looming almost menacingly before me. 

“I found myself in this world one day, I don’t know when, and until then, from birth I presume, I had lived without feeling. If I asked where I was, everyone deceived me, everyone contradicted everyone else. If I asked them to tell me what to do, everyone lied and told me something different. If I became lost and stopped along the road, everyone was shocked that I did not just continue on to wherever the road led (though no one knew where that was), or did not simply retrace my steps- I, who did not even know whence I came, having only woken up at the crossroads. I realized that I was on a stage and did not know the words that everyone else picked up instantly even though they did not know them either. I saw that though I was dressed as a pageboy they had given me no queen to wait on and blamed me for that. I saw that I had in my hands a message to deliver and when I told them the paper was blank, they laughed at me. I still don’t know if they laughed because all such pieces of paper are blank or because all messages are only hypothetical.” [306]

This is Kafka. This is Prufrock. This is depression. Waking up like Rip Van Winkle, in a world you used to inhabit that no longer makes sense, where all the landmarks are unrecognizable and all words have become indecipherable. 

In The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression, Andrew Solomon describes depression as: “an emotional pain that forces itself on us against our will, and then breaks free of its externals. Depression is not just a lot of pain; but too much pain can compost itself into depression. Grief is depression in proportion to circumstances; depression is grief out of proportion to circumstances. It is tumbleweed distress that thrives on thin air, growing despite its detachment from nourishing earth. It can be described only in metaphor and allegory.”  

“I have lived so much without ever having lived. I have thought so much without ever having thought. I feel weighed down by worlds of unenacted violence, of stillborn adventures. I am sick of what I never had nor will have, weary of gods always just about to exist. I bear on my body the wounds of all the battles I did not fight. My muscles are weary from efforts I never even considered making.” [389]

Pessoa’s metaphors and similes are unhinged, they push association beyond the comfortable into the realm of the unreasonable where anything can happen. His narrative style is filled with non-sequiturs and ellipses, thoughts are aborted almost mid-sentence. This is not comfortable reading, it’s a labyrinth with a center that cannot hold. In An Unwritten Novel: Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet, Thomas Cousineau describes Pessoa’s poetic style in an intriguing way: “When we look more closely at the emergence of poetic figures within the prosaic texture of The Book, we notice that it occurs in three quite distinct forms of amplification, contradiction and comparison. Like ellipses, all of these figures create reciprocities where we would expect to find mutual exclusions, although they do this in quite different ways. At first glance, ellipses imply incompletion; as we have already noticed, however, Soares’s ellipses often create co-presences between fragmentation and wholeness.”  Intriguing. There’s a tension between the fragmentation and wholeness that’s amplified and then left unresolved and ambiguous. 

“Like the useless corpse of the average man being lowered into the common ground, the equally useless corpse of my prose, written while I wait, is lowered into a general oblivion. What right have I to make fun of another man’s pork chop, red wine and girlfriend?” [176]

“My dream failed even in its metaphors and figurations. My empire didn’t even go as far as a pack of old playing cards. My victory didn’t even include a teapot or an ancient cat. I will die as I lived, among the bric-a-brac of my room, sold off by weight among the postscripts of things lost.” [193]

“All of this leaves me with the impression of a vile, monstrous animal created out of the unwitting dreams of the soggy crusts of desire, the chewed-over remains of sensations.”  [234]

There’s something beyond the modernist breakdown of language here…something deeply personal and without grounding. Like Prufrock, this non-book is not comprised of action or plot, there is no “going.” In a previous post I described Prufrock as being caught in a net of indecision, hemmed in by his own self-loathing. But behind the inaction, T.S. Eliot has created an almost obsessively refined structure. There are bones that the futility and ‘flaccid inertia’ cling to. Pessoa is different; here we have raw, desperate, unfiltered, unorganized emotion.

“I’m two people who mutually keep their distance - Siamese twins living separate lives.” [275]

Using Jeronimo Pizarro’s edition which is organized chronologically we see Pessoa age and shape shift before our eyes. Vicente Guedes makes his last entry in the spring of 1920 and then after a decade long pause he is reborn as Bernardo Soares. Siamese twins living separate lives.  This multiplicity is always just below the surface, and towards the end of the book becomes a burden, a fractured displaced soul, searching for a place to land. His identity is fluid rather than fixed and as such the disparity of text reflects the disparity of his personhood. 

On the back of my copy of this book, the Irish novelist, Mike McCormack describes this book as ‘Beautiful and life affirming.’…I wonder what he means by that. I found the narrative to slowly devolve into one long extended death wish. 

“I feel physically sickened by ordinary humanity, which is, besides, the only kind there is. And I sometimes play at provoking that nausea, the way one can sometimes make oneself vomit in order to relive the urge to vomit.” [234]

“I, too - this feeling and thinking soul, the universe I am to myself - yes, tomorrow I, too, will be someone who no longer walks these streets, someone others will evoke with a vague ‘I wonder what’s become of him?’ And everything I do, everything I feel, everything I experience, will be just one less passer-by on the daily streets of some city or other.” [437]

“Death is liberation because to die is to need no one else.” [438]

The first seven of eleven times suicide is mentioned (from 1913-1916) it is from the perspective of others committing this act or posed as a theoretical conundrum: “Why did he commit suicide?” [46: 1913]  Or “I never considered suicide a solution, because I only hate life out of love for it.” [88: 1915] 

By 1930, Soares is exhausted. Suicide is no longer objectively theoretical but dangerously close to becoming a dream of relief and respite. 

“Then I wonder at my ability to survive, at my cowardly presence here among these people, on terms of perfect equality, in genuine accord with all their trite illusions. All the solutions spawned by my imagination flash upon my mind like beams from a distant lighthouse: suicide, flight, renunciation, in short, the grand aristocratic gestures of our individuality, the cloak-and-dagger of existence like mine with no balconies to climb.” [220]

Using electronic books you can track constellations of words, and in a book like this watch how these constellations change over time. The word “dream” is used 953 times throughout the book, 658 times within the first phase. The word “dream” is exchanged for dreamless sleep, “sleep” being used 486 times, only 39 of which are in the first phase. 

In the first phase we have: “Creator of absurdities, disciples of sexless sentences. Let your silence rock me to sleep, let your merely-being caress and soothe and comfort me, O Herald from Beyond, O Empress of Absence, Virgin Mother of all Silences, Hearth and Home of shivering souls, Guardian Angel of the abandoned, Human landscape- unbelievably sad - eternal Perfection.” [5:1913]

By 1929 the mood has shifted from lyrical to the somber: “We sleep our lives away, the eternal children of Fate.” [192]

“Apart from those vulgar dreams, which flow shamefully down the soul’s sewers, and to which no one would dare confess, and which haunt our sleepless nights like grubby ghosts, the slimy, greasy, seething detritus of our repressed sensibility, what absurd, horrifying, unspeakable things the soul can, with a little effort, find in its hidden corners.” [197:129]

As the dreams, coupled with the hope of the young and immortal, slowly ebb and fade, words like “tedium” (395 times, 37 in the first phase) and “death” (395 times, 60 in the first phase) form a constellation with words like dying, leaving, shipwrecked, flaccid, boredom, malaise, etc. all words that belong to the genre of hopeless exhaustion. 

“So great is my tedium, so overwhelming the horror of being alive, that I cannot imagine what could possibly serve as a palliative, an antidote, a balm, a source of oblivion. The idea of sleeping, horrifies me too. As does the idea of dying. Leaving or staying are the same impossible thing. Hoping and doubting are equally cold and grey. I am a shelf full of empty bottles.” [314]

The word “you” is used 957 times, 797 times throughout the first phase. The first phase is more of a dialogue, albeit one in which the “you” is imagined. There is life outside of the narrative voice. By the second phase the narrative voice is steeped in an introspective world couched in self-loathing and hopelessness, the petri dish of depression. 

I think it would ultimately be simplistic to say this book is about depression. It is about so many things… I’ve read books about Hamlet and Prufrock and language, trying to find the right toe hold for this insurmountable climb... But whatever themes ebb and flow, the current of depression is unavoidable. 

On December 2,1935, both Vincente Guedes and Bernardo Soares died, along with Pessoa and his seventy-three other heteronyms, and were buried together in the Cemetery of Pleasure in the city of Lisbon. In the end he did not take his own life. So maybe, when Mike McCormack said this book was “life affirming” he meant that we can witness a shipwreck of a life, buoyed on the flotsam of anguish and depression, struggling to make sense of life and communication in a world where both concepts are fraught with complexity…and yet, through the despair and hopelessness, our hero survives, battling the temptation each day to end it quietly and slip away. 

Question: “Am I even marginally close to understanding what this book was about?”

Shake. Shake. Shake.

“…I am offering you this book because I know it to be both beautiful and useless. It teaches nothing, preaches nothing, arouses no emotion. It is a stream that runs into an abyss of ashes that the wind scatters and which neither fertilize nor harm - I put my whole soul into its making, but I wasn't thinking of that at the time, only of my own sad self and of you, who are no one. And because this book is absurd, I love it; because it is useless I want to give it to you, and because there is no point in wanting to give it to you, I give it anyway…Pray for me when you read it, bless me by loving it and forget it as I forget those women, mere dreams I never knew how to dream.” [17]

8-Ball version: “Very doubtful.”

Notes:

All Quotes from: Pesso, Fernando. The Book of Disquiet. Ed. Jeronimo Pizarro and trans. Margaret Jull Costa. London: Serpent’s Tail’s, 2018. 

Solomon, Andrew. The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression. Scribner of New York, 2001. pg.15

Cousineau, Thomas. An Unwritten Novel: Fernando Pessoa’s The Book Of Disquiet. Dalkey Archive Press, 2013. pg. 226

Bibliography: 

Bloom, Harold. The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages. Harcourt Brace & Co, 1994.

Cousineau, Thomas. An Unwritten Novel: Fernando Pessoa’s The Book Of Disquiet. Dalkey Archive Press, 2013.

Ghose, Zulfikar. Hamlet, Prufrock and Language. Palgrave Macmillan, 1978.

Gray de Castro, Mariana, editor. Fernando Pessoa's Modernity Without Frontiers: Influences, Dialogues and Responses. Tamesis, 2013.

Griffin, Jonathan. Fernando Pessoa: Selected Poems. 2nd ed, Penguin Books, 2000.

Jackson, David. Adverse Genres in Fernando Pessoa. Oxford University Press, 2010.

Pessoa, Fernando. The Book of Disquiet. Ed. Jeronimo Pizarro and trans. Margaret Jull Costa. London: Serpent’s Tail’s, 2018.

Pessoa, Fernando. The Transformation Book. Edited by Nuno Ribeiro & Claudi Souza. First Contra Mundum Press, 2014.

The Book of Disquiet: Phase 1 - Vicente Guedes (Fernando Pessoa)

In order to write this, I plucked the souls from all the flowers, and out of the ephemeral moments of all the songs of all the birds I wove eternity and stagnation. Sitting at the window of my life and forgetting that I was alive, that I existed, I began to weave shrouds in which to shroud my tedium, chaste linen cloths for the altars of my silence. 

[…]

Silent Tower of my desires, may this book be the transforming moonlight in the night of the Ancient Mystery!

River of Painful Imperfection, may this book be the boat set adrift on your waters and wasted down an undreamed-of sea. 

Landscape of Alienation and Abandonment, may this book be as much as your Hour, and transcend you as it does the fateful purple hour.

[The Book of Disquiet, fragment 17]

In 1982 Maria Aliete Galhoz, Teresa Sobral Cunha and Jacinto do Prado Coelho finally had deciphered the mountains of barely legible notes that had been found in two forgotten trunks belonging to Pessoa, and were ready to publish The Book of Disquiet, now forty-seven years after Pessoa’s death. Some notes were dated, others not. Some notes were written semi-formally on actual writing paper, others were scrawled across the top of envelopes and napkins. Creating coherence from the more than 30,000 pieces of paper was a feat similar to the archeologists unearthing the fragments of Sappho’s poetry, fragmented sporadically across the vast landscape of Lesbos. Like Sapphic poetry there is no definitive edition of The Book of Disquiet and instead there is the infinite possibility of permutations based on editorial preference. 

As one would expect, it’s challenging to describe, it defies genre and is more a kaleidoscopic eruption of text than anything else. At times it’s somber and serious, edging into the genre of philosophical diary, at other times it has a more didactic tone similar to Hesiod’s Works and Days. It’s self-referential, irreverent, playful and brilliant.

The edition I’m using, translated from the Portuguese by Margaret Jull Costa and edited by Jeronimo Pizarro (2013), has organized the content chronologically and into two phases: Phase I, which was written from 1913-1920 is authored by the heteronym Vicente Guedes. This phase is more formative and experimental and feels like it’s written from many perspectives in many voices. Phase II is written from 1929-1934 by Bernardo Soares, the introverted bookkeeper of Lisbon. Most, if not all, previous editions have organized material thematically, and have attempted to provide a modicum of coherence to the text.

I like the chronological modality. It’s almost like watching Pessoa age in literary form before our eyes. The tone of voice is entirely different in the second phase and the outlines of a more coherent narrative structure are lightly sketched, just enough to give life to a more definitive narrative persona. Perhaps the biggest change between the two phases is a sense of place, in Phase II the geography of Lisbon emerges and situates the book in space and time.

Guedes is a symbolist and his oeuvre tends towards the fleeting, sensation driven vignettes of his individual inner life and experience. The symbolists preferred: “to communicate the underlying mystery of existence through a free and highly personal use of metaphors and images that, though lacking in precise meaning, would nevertheless convey the state of the poet’s mind and hint at the “dark and confused unity” of an inexpressible reality.” (1)

Marcelo Valdes of the Publisher Weekly (Starred Review) mentions that: “ Guedes is all preening self-absorption and jejune metaphysics; he’s like an introverted version of Dadaist Tristan Tzara. “I want your reading of this book to leave you with the sense of having lived through some voluptuous nightmare,” he declares. Pessoa himself planned a “rigorous” pruning and revision of Guedes’s droning that never occurred, and newcomers to The Book of Disquiet should consider skipping straight to Soares’s half.” (2)

I emphatically disagree. The “self-absorption" is saturated in the angst of a new era, without faith, devoid of hope and trying to make sense of a world without a center. To quote Yeats: 

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

I should mention that the structure of this book is pretty much what you would expect if you were compiling a “book” based on written artifacts found in a trunk. It’s Pascal’s Pensées written by heteronyms that struggle with chronic depression. In a sense, if Pascal’s book is a fragmentary apology for the Christian faith (also compiled posthumously), then The Book of Disquiet could be though of as an apology for life in the chaos of modernity without God.

Phase I begins with a preface written in 1917 that will provide the narrative structure for the project. Our narrator, (presumably Pessoa himself) first comes across Vicente Guedes while people-watching on a lazy afternoon and observing “the eccentric and nondescript […] people who are but a series of  marginal notes in the book of life.” [Preface]

This particular marginal note he finds fascinating. Tall, thin, with the stooped shoulders of a lifetime of poor posture, approximately thirty-year-old male: Vicente Guedes. 

“Vicente Guedes endured his empty life with masterly indifference, the foundations of his mental attitude being built on the stoicism of the weak. He was constitutionally condemned to suffer all kinds of anxieties, but fated to abandon them all. I never met a more extraordinary man. He abdicated everything to which he was by nature destined, but not out of any kind of asceticism. Though naturally ambitious, he savored the pleasure of having no ambitions at all.”  [Preface]

Inert. Detached. “Dreamily Debauched”. Pessoa persuades us, his imagined ‘dream’ readers, that what we hold in our hands is not a book, but rather a life: 

“The biography of someone who never existed […] This book is not by him, it is him. However, we should always remember that behind everything written here lies a shadow, a mystery…For Vicente Guedes, being self-aware was an art and a morality; dreaming was a religion. He created an inner aristocracy, an attitude of soul that most closely resembles the attitude of the body of the consulate aristocrat.”[Preface]

Dreaming was a religion. For me, this is the crux of the thesis. There’s an authorial freedom and independence in being a dreamer, but there’s also the existential fear of being a minor character in someone else's dream. Maybe even just a walk-on, with no lines and completely lacking in dimension or character development. There’s also the fear that lucidity and madness are indistinguishable: 

“Having seen with what lucidity and logical coherence certain madmen […] justify their crazed ideas to themselves and to others, I have lost forever any real confidence in the lucidity of my own lucidity.”  [133]

I think the tension is part of the solution. Pessoa is about to redefine terms, ‘aristocracy’ will not be something hereditary, no longer the rule of the nobility that one could simply exist submerged within. Instead it will be the rule of those monastically devoted to inaction. Heroes will no longer be the type of consummate brawn, but the dreamers. 

“Seeing and hearing are the only noble thing that life contains. The other senses are plebeian and carnal. The only aristocracy lies in not touching. Do not get too close - that is true nobility.”  [11]

“Anything that involves action, be it war or reasoning, is false; and anything that involves abdication is false too. If only I knew how not to act and how not to abdicate from action either! That would be the dream crown of my glory, the silent scepter of my greatness.” [14]

The inaction is so complex. It’s not the lethargy of the superfluous man, who became a staple of Russian literature in the middle of the 19th century, like Gochorov’s Oblomov, who doesn’t get out of bed because he’s luxuriating in silk sheets. There are no silk sheets for Guedes. Between the lines for the superfluous men of Russian literature was a longing, or nostalgia, for a sense of stability, a sense of place and belonging. But for Pessoa and his coterie of modernists the world has changed. There is no stability to fall back on. 

“I belong to a generation that inherited a disbelief in the Christian faith and that created within itself a disbelief in all their faiths. Our forefathers still felt an impulse to believe, which they transferred from Christianity to other forms of illusion […] We lost all this and were orphaned at birth of all these consolations. Every civilization cleaves to the intimate contours of the religion that represents it: to go after other religions is to lose that first religion and ultimately to lose them all […] Each of us was left abandoned to ourselves, amidst the desolation of merely knowing we were alive. […] Bereft of illusions, we live on dreams, which are the illusions of those who cannot have illusions. [134]

“I lie recumbent in my life. And I do not even know how to dream the gesture of getting up, so empty of soul am I that I do not even know how to make the effort. [21]

Chronologically, one of the first entries, written in 1913, presents a metaphor of a man and a woman trapped in opposing stained glass windows. The preceding lines talk of a love based on possession to be the extremity of banality and so:

“Since we choose to be sterile, let us also be chaste, because there can be nothing baser and more ignoble than to renounce in Nature all things fertile, and yet vilely keep back anything that takes our fancy among those things renounced. There are no partial nobilities.” [2]

They renounce the corporeal and exchange religious dogma for a new faith of love based on each other: 

“Let our love be a prayer…Anoint me with seeing you, and out of the moments when I dream you I will make a rosary on which all my tediums will be Our Fathers and all my anxieties Hail Marys…”[2]

So far so good. The two lovers hold their gaze, suspended in time, as the maelstrom of humanity swirls around them, and the occasional passerby sprinkles their inanimate forms with a prayer. But then everything begins to devolve: 

“The centuries will not touch our glass silence. Outside, civilization will come and go, revolutions will break out, parties will whirl past, meek, everyday people will rush by…And we, my unreal love, will be frozen in the same pointless pose, the same false existence, and the same […], until one day, after centuries of empires, the Church will, at last, crumble and everything will end…But we, knowing nothing of this, will still be here, quite how or where or when I don’t know, like eternal stained glass windows, hours of innocent art painted by some artist who has long been sleeping in a Gothic tomb where two angels, hands clasped in prayer, have set the idea of death in cold marble. ”[2]

The lovers separation from humanity has gone from idyllic contemplation of each other to a type of estrangement and alienation. 

“A tenuous pane of glass stands between me and life. However clearly I see and understand life, I cannot touch it.  Should we reason our way out of sadness? But why, when reasoning requires effort? And the sad man lacks the necessary energy to make any effort at all. […] My dreams are a foolish refuge, about as reliable as an umbrella in a thunderstorm. I am so inert, such a poor wretch, so entirely lacking in gesture and action. However deeply I plunge into myself, all the paths of my dreams lead into clearings of anxiety…” [16]

Throughout the first phase there is a motif of being caged or trapped. “Your hands are like caged doves…” [1] The futility and impotency of existence is overwhelming, language is fragmented and reality is ambiguous and untenable: 

“You do not exist, I know that, but can I be sure that I exist? Does the I who allows you to exist in me necessarily have more real life than you, than the dead life that lives in you? Halo-thin flame, absent presence, rhythmic, female silence, twilight of vague flesh, glass left over at the banquet, stained glass window painted by a painter-cum-dreamer in the middle of ages of another Earth.” [10]

“..my feelings a confused yet lucid mistake - like an imaginary condor, I spread my wings but do not fly.” [19]

The splintering and fragmentation are not just historically contextualized, but specific to the heteronymonic psyche. Like the stained glass window, Guedes is constructed from a multiplicity of fragmented glass shards, each one jockeying and vying for authorial power and control. Like the crowds eddying around the icons, occasionally offering a prayer, he finds himself frozen in time, without language, without hope, trapped within the ebb and flow of his anxiety. 

“Yes, I live aesthetically in another being. I have sculpted my life like a statue made of material alien to myself. Sometimes, I don’t even recognize me, so external to myself have I become, and so entirely artistically have I deployed my consciousness of myself. Who am I behind the unreality? I don’t know. I must be someone […] If I were to live I would destroy myself. I wanted to be a work of art, at least as regards my soul, since physically that’s impossible. That is why I sculpted myself calmly and indifferently and placed myself in a hothouse, far from draughts and direct sunlight - where the exotic flower of my artificiality can bloom in secluded beauty.”  [29]

Notes:

1. Symbolism 

2. Marcelo Valdes 

Bibliography: 

Bloom, Harold. The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages. Harcourt Brace & Co, 1994.

Cousineau, Thomas. An Unwritten Novel: Fernando Pessoa’s The Book Of Disquiet. Dalkey Archive Press, 2013.

Griffin, Jonathan. Fernando Pessoa: Selected Poems. 2nd ed, Penguin Books, 2000.

Jackson, David. Adverse Genres in Fernando Pessoa. Oxford University Press, 2010.

Pesso, Fernando. The Book of Disquiet. Ed. Jeronimo Pizarro and trans. Margaret Jull Costa. London: Serpent’s Tail’s, 2018. 

Selected Poems - Fernando Pessoa

“One of my mental complications - horrible beyond words - is a fear of insanity, which itself is insanity.” 

Pessoa - October 30, 1908

I’m about to embark on what I hope will be a long and profitable love affair with Portuguese poetry. The thing that I love about this canon project is that it always broadens my horizons beyond the known and expected. There are moments (this past month) when I began to wonder if eight years of this was enough…how will I know when to stop? Is there ever a good stopping point? I very obviously will never finish this project unless somehow A. I learn to read faster or the Matrix becomes real and I can just download books into my brain or B. The great minds of science figure out a way one could read while being cryogenically frozen…but since neither option seems imminent or very likely…

I almost stopped this month. I called my sister and told her maybe it was time to be done. I’ve learned a lot…maybe it’s time to throw in the towel. She wasn’t an explicit “yes”…and so almost reluctantly I picked up a book of poetry by Pessoa, and then as usually happens, was transported down the rabbit hole into a world beyond my ken or imagination. And so, Pessoa has become the perfect gateway drug into Portuguese literature and poetry and for the time being the project will continue with reignited passion with no foreseeable end in sight. I have too many questions and rabbit trails to follow at this point.          

This post will be more an introduction into Pessoa and the questions I will begin to follow than a traditional essay.

Perhaps there is no greater modernist than the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935). With the modernist obsession with fracturing and dislocation, Pessoa embodies this fractured sensibility with a whole new fervor, taking on the identities of three other poets and a coterie of seventy-two different personalities. For Pessoa, identity is fluid and complex, and his heteronyms allow him to submerge himself into this complexity rather than continuously wrestle with it. 

According to Jonathon Griffin (1) “Pessoa was a poet who wrote poets as well as poems.” Each of his different poets have markedly different styles and voices. Pessoa created histories for his personalities beyond the page and frequently found himself an observer to their dramatic arguments rather than a possessor of them.

According to George Steiner: 

“Pseudonymous writing is not rare in literature or philosophy (Kierkegaard provides a celebrated instance.) ‘Heteronyms’ as Pessoa called and defined them, are something different and exceedingly strange. For each of his ‘voices’, Pessoa conceived a highly distinct 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. Octavio Paz defines Caeiro as ‘everything that Pessoa is not and more.’ He is a man magnificently at home in nature, a virtuouso of pre-Christian innocence, almost a Portuguese teacher of Zen. Reis is a stoic Horatian, a pagan believer in fate, a player with classical myths less original than Caeiro, but more representative of modern symbolism. De Campos emerges as a Whitmanesque futurist, a dreamer in drunkenness, the Dionysian singer of what is oceanic and windswept in Lisbon. None of this triad resembles the metaphysical solitude, the sense of being an occultist medium which characterizes Pessoa’s ‘own’ intimate verse.” (2)

First, as an example of Pessoa’s poetic style we’ll take a look at “Suddenly a Hand” (14.3.1917) translated by Jonathon Griffin (3):

Suddenly a hand, part of some occult haunting,

Between the folds of the night and of my sleep

Shakes me, and I awake, and in the deep

Neglect of night discern no face or movement. 

Yet an old terror I have, immanent

And unburied, as though from a king’s siege

Descends, and affirms itself my liege

Without command, without threat, without taunting. 

And I can feel my life - how on a string 

Of Unconscious abruptly tightening

I am, by some nocturnal hand, controlled. 

I feel that I am no one, only shade, 

Of a face I don’t see, being in its shade,

And in nothing exist as the dark’s cold. 

The enjambment leaves the reader with a sense of unpredictability and tension. The repetition of ‘without’ creates an echoing effect of isolation, alone with oneself in a chasm of impenetrability. The mood is haunting and somber, precariously held together by a ‘string’… The poem opens with a disembodied hand, and ends with the narrator realizing he is but a disembodied face, or rather a “shade of a face I don’t see, being in its shade.” His life is controlled by a disembodied puppeteer, and the narrator stands at its mercy; identity and “selfhood” being ambiguous, mercurial and always beyond grasp.   As mentioned above, Pessoa takes the modern movement’s preference for flux over stasis and internalizes it, he’s flotsam along his own stream of consciousness. 

Alberto Caeiro, the bucolic, “uneducated” poet, writes almost exclusively in free verse and is described by Octavio Paz as: “..the sun in whose orbit, Reis, Campos, and Pessoa himself rotate. In each are particles of negation or unreality. Reis believes in form, Campos in sensation, Pessoa in symbols. Caeiro doesn’t believe in anything. He exists.” (4) Perhaps I will circle back and do an entire essay on “The Keeper of Sheep” but for now here are a few excerpts I found intriguing: 

To think is uncomfortable like walking in the rain

When the wind is rising and it looks like raining more. 

I have no ambitions or wants. 

To be a poet is no ambition of mine. 

It is my way of staying alone. 

[…]

When I sit down to write verses, 

Or, as I walk along the roads or short cuts, 

Write verses on the paper that is in my thought,

I feel a shepherd’s crook in my hands

And see and outline of myself

There on the hill-crest,

Listening for my flock and seeing my ideas, 

Or listening for my ideas and seeing my flock,

And smiling vaguely like a man who does not 

understand what is being said

And tries to pretend he understands. 

Very Zen. I’d like to spend a lot of time on Caeiro, it’s easy to see why he’s described as the ‘master.’ His writing is stripped down and bare and yet so incredibly evocative. I love the chiastic: listening for my flock and seeing my ideas, or listening for my ideas and seeing my flock,” there’s almost a similar disembodied hand leading both the ideas and flocks on a imperceptible string. Again beneath the surface is the problem of communication, but here Caeiro is comfortable with the fact that knowledge is illusory and unattainable. 

Ricardo Reis, a physician, writes in mostly metrical but unrhymed poetry influenced in part by Horace and Catullus. The poem I picked for Reis, “Legion Live in Us” (13.11.1935) is less Horatian and more to the point of dissociation: 

Legion live in us; 

I think or feel and don’t know 

Who it is thinking, feeling. 

I am merely the place

Where the thinking or feeling is.

I have more souls than one. 

There are more ‘I’s than myself. 

And still I exist

Indifferent to all. 

I silence them: I speak. 

The crisscross thrusts

Of what I feel or don’t feel

Dispute in the I I am.

Unknown. They dictate nothing

To the I I know. I write. 

By 1914 Pessoa was aware that he was no longer “himself.” In a letter to Armando Cortes-Rodrigues he writes: “I am no longer myself. I am a fragment of myself kept in an abandoned museum”  and  “I am like a room filled with fantastic mirrors that falsely reflect a single previous reality that isn’t in any of them and is in all of them.” (5) In answer to how he knows which heteronym is doing the writing, Pessoa says that Reis is the better writer but with a “purism I find excessive.” (6) 

And lastly Alvaro de Campos, the naval engineer/ adventurist, influenced by the Italian futurists and in constant dialogue with Walt Whitman. De Campos is the blackguard of the group, writing scathing manifestos and publicly critiquing the works and opinions of Pessoa, and occasionally writing/publishing poetry while drunk and broken hearted, such as “Ah Margarida” in which this postscript says: “Dictated by the naval engineer, Sr. Alvaro de Campos, in a state of alcoholic unconsciousness.”

Here’s an excerpt from “Triumphal Ode”: 

Ah, to be able to express myself whole as a motor expresses itself! 

To be complete like a machine! 

To be able to go through life triumphal like an automobile, the very latest model!

Be able at least to permeate myself physically with all that, 

Rip myself right open, lay myself bare completely, 

render myself passive

To all the oil and heat and carbon perfumes

Of that stupendous, black, artificial and insatiable 

flora!

I’m looking forward to the day when I can chuckle and say things like “That’s so typical of De Campos and his mechanical modernism…” (I should probably be holding a glass of bourbon while I say this.) It’s easy to see why De Campos and Pessoa were frequently at odds, occasionally rebutting Pessoa’s views in literary publications. De Campos seems to have a thing for a good simile…my quick take away from this excerpt is thus: 

Beneath the exclamations and presented awe at the mechanical age, lurks in the background the horrors of mechanical warfare and mass slaughter of the first World War. And like Pessoa, but from a different angle is the problem of identity and communication. The narrative voice is envious of being truly known in a way impossible for mere mortals of the modernist age. And while the ‘latest model’ is proud and triumphant, for a lonely ineffectual poet, there’s the hovering anxiety of being remembered and triumphant only in death. 

Notes: 

1.  Griffin, Jonathan. Fernando Pessoa: Selected Poems. 2nd ed, Penguin Books, 2000. pg. 9

2.  Steiner, George. “A Man of Many Parts,” The Observer, Sunday 3 June 2001. 

3.  All Pessoa poems from: Griffin, Jonathan. Fernando Pessoa: Selected Poems. 2nd ed, Penguin Books, 2000

4.  Bloom, Harold. The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages. Harcourt Brace & Co, 1994

5.  Jackson, David. Adverse Genres in Fernando Pessoa. Oxford University Press, 2010.

Invisible Man - Ralph Ellison

Invisible Man is a complicated book to describe. The structure of the novel is frequently compared to a jazz composition, with themes and their riffs weaving through complicated patterns and distortions. I think that is a helpful comparison. If the title of the piece is “Invisibility” the riffs would be about the problems of vision in all its many permutations. 

The opening line: “I am an invisible man,” contrasts with the opening of Moby Dick "Call me Ishmael." In Moby Dick the quest is seemingly straightforward, i.e. Captain Ahab’s vendetta against the white whale and the hopeless quest to find him. For the invisible man the quest is amorphous, his white whale is his own namelessness. His identity is constantly in flux as he tries to make sense of belonging to a nonsensical world.  

A leitmotif running throughout the novel is the problems of mistaken identity. The protagonist “sees” himself as the next potential Booker T. Washington, an illusion that slowly dissolves. Mr. Norton, the white college trustee, has had his illusions of the peaceful cultivation of the black race shattered when he’s confronted with the brokenness and complexity of the black lives that live beyond the campus boundaries. Out of sight out of mind, he has no frame of reference for life existing outside of his imperialistic vision. 

Perhaps the most significant riff on identity is when the protagonist, after suffering a traumatic accident in the paint factory is cocooned/coffined in a small medical apparatus. The staff hover around him talking about the theoretical success the prefrontal lobotomy machine will have. As the disembodied voices talk above him he hears the voices agree that his psychology is not at risk, because it’s doubtful how much psychology he possesses in the first place…it’s a win win situation: they get to try out their new machine and “society will suffer no traumata on his account.” (366) 

“There was a pause. A pen scratched upon paper. Then, ‘Why not castration, doctor?’”

The scientific cultivation of the black person has been transformed from an idyllic college campus to barbaric medical experimentation. In each instance the black person is matter to be changed and transformed, but without personhood to tether it to humanity. As the protagonist undergoes horrific shock treatments, biting his lips to smother his screams, his body convulses with the pulsating electric. 

“Look, he’s dancing, “ someone called. 

‘No, really?’

An oily face looked in. ‘They really do have rhythm, don’t they? Get hot boy! Get hot!” it said with a laugh.”  (368)

Despite the electric shock therapy and the unequivocal claim that the result will be a “complete change of personality,” the protagonist emerges largely intact. The only thing missing is his name. And now for the first time he must wrestle with his own invisibility. His name has become meaningless, he has been transformed from a man with a dream and the possibility of hope into “blackness and bewilderment and pain.”  (372) As he’s pressed over and over to answer questions, his lack of identity begins to haunt him: 

“I wanted freedom, not destruction. It was exhausting, for no matter what scheme I conceived, there was one constant flaw—myself. There was no getting around it. I could no more escape than I could think of my identity. Perhaps, I thought, the two are involved with each other. When I discover who I am, I’ll be free.” (376)

Another significant theme is confusion that leads to violence. The first instance of this thematic cycle is within the first chapter when the protagonist is asked to read his high school graduation speech at a boxing match for the white spectators. His speech argues that “humility was the secret, indeed, the very essence of progress,” and as he makes his way to the ballroom he’s swept up along with the young black boxers getting ready for the fight. I say “swept up” because the majority of the action in this book happens without the volition or consent of the protagonist. He’s merely flotsam in the endlessly meaningless chaos. 

As he’s pushed along with the nine others into the servant elevator, the atmosphere is tense and without solidarity. Our protagonist assesses his compatriots and finds them wanting: 

“…I suspected that fighting a battle royal might detract from the dignity of my speech. In those pre-invisible days I visualized myself as a potential Booker T. Washington…I felt superior to them in my way, and I didn’t like the manner in which we were all crowded together into a servant’s elevator.” (29)

As the doors open they are led through the haze of cigar smoke toward the center of the room and pushed into place. And there standing in front of them is a naked blonde woman, gyrating slowly to the music “the smoke of a hundred cigars clinging to her like the thinnest of veils.” (32)

Only, part of the entertainment is the boxing match, the other part is the humiliation of the black male in all aspects of his personhood. Will the black boys look at the woman? Can they control themselves in the presence of a naked gyrating woman, their control or lack thereof being evident in their thin boxing shorts? The protagonist feels a wave of “irrational guilt and fear.” In Black Like Me, the author John Howard Griffin, who had dyed his skin black to experience racism in the south, was cautioned to never look directly at a white woman under any circumstances. In Mississippi he was told to avoid looking at movie posters if they happen to have a white woman on them, any direct gaze was enough to run the risk of lynching. 

“I wanted at one and the same time to run from the room, to sink through the floor, or go to her and cover her from my eyes and the eyes of the others with my body; to feel the soft thighs, to caress her and destroy her, to love her and murder her, to hide from her, and yet to stroke where below the small American flag tattooed on her belly her thighs formed a capital V. I had a notion that of all in the room she saw only me with her impersonal eyes.” (32)

Their looking creates a layering of objectification. The subjugation of a black man in the south circa 1950 is almost taken for granted…but with the arrival of the blonde, the objects are equally engaged in objectifying the woman standing before them as the white men surrounding them. The protagonist sees the woman before him as a sexual object and as such he dehumanizes her. The description of the woman exposes the irony of the American “dream”. Although the woman has the American flag tattooed across her belly, her “V” is not for victory, but an ironic reminder of subjugation.

In Shelly Eversley’s essay “On Female Invisibility in the Novel” she argues that one of the most under explored aspects of Invisible Man is the concept of vision. 

“More than a literal question of seeing, the protagonist’s life depends on his ability to ‘learn to look beneath the surface’ and discern reality despite ‘mirrors of hard, distorting glass’ (153, 3). Such discernment requires he learn to distinguish salient meaning from stereotype.” 1

The protagonist imagines this blonde woman as a type of mythic siren, “calling to me from the angry surface of some gray and threatening sea.” (32) This image presupposes a level of agency, but as a clarinet begins to softly “moan”, something about the song snaps him out of his reverie and allows him to see the world around him more objectively. Both the black men and the woman are pawns in this horrific game of chess. He notices now specific men in the throng of lascivious white faces. One man, in a particularly disturbing simile is described as “clumsy like that of an intoxicated panda, wound his belly in a slow obscene grind.”(33) 

Gradually, the focus of interest shifts from the physiological predicament of the boys to the dancing blonde and as the circle tightens their “beefy” fingers begin to reach out for her flesh. Mistaken at first for a siren, the protagonist now sees her lack of agency. Her inability to escape and her equal subjugation. She tries to gracefully dance away from their groping fingers but is eventually caught and carried out of the room, hoisted above their heads like a prize. And as she is carried away he sees her for the first time: 

“…above her red, fixed-smiling lips I saw the terror and disgust in her eyes, almost like my own terror and that which I saw in some of the other boys. As I watched, they tossed her twice and her soft breasts seemed to flatten against the air and her legs flung wildly as she spun. Some of the more sober ones helped her to escape. And I started off the floor, heading for the anteroom with the rest of the boys. Some were still crying and in hysterics.” (34)

This has just been the prologue to the fight. The theme of distorted vision and confusion has been set up and now we circle back for a riff. In the first rendition the boys think they are about to fight each other, but instead are forced to contend with themselves and their own sexuality. In the second rendition the boys again think they are about to fight each other, but being blindfolded individualizes the experience where they are battling blindly against a bloody melee of flesh. And once again they are goaded by the white onlookers: 

“See that boy over there? one of the men said. [before being blindfolded] “I want you to run across at the bell and give it to him right in the belly. If you don’t get him, I’m going to get you. I don’t like how he looks.”(34)

The irony here is the emphasis of vision. The boys won’t be able to see anything blindfolded. This is the black man’s predicament: There is no solidarity in a ‘dog eat dog’ world. He has been fear-mongered into an automaton, mechanically obeying another’s commands based not on rationale but biased opinion; the white man controls everything by his preferences: he doesn’t like how the other boy “looks.”

Within this paradigm there is no sight. The protagonist feels “blind terror” he “wanted to see, to see more desperately than ever before, but the blindfold was as tight as a thick skin-puckering scab and when I raised my gloved hands to push the layers of white aside a voice yelled, “Oh no you don’t you black bastard! Leave that alone!” (36)

Throughout the novel this will be repeated over and over again, the idea of pushing aside the “white” in order to be able to see. And always in response the disembodied voice of a white man unwilling to relinquish control. There is a dichotomy between those who have the power to see and be seen and those who do not.  With vision comes dignity. 

“Blindfolded, I could no longer control my emotions. I had no dignity. I stumbled about like a baby or drunken man…A blow landed hard against the nape of my neck. I felt myself going over, my head hitting the floor. Streaks of blue light filled the black world behind the blindfold.” (37)

Ellison said once that he didn’t set out to write a protest novel, and I think the “black world behind the blindfold” is what is the differentiating factor. This isn’t simplistic racism, it’s not as easy as black vs. white. It’s a broken system that throws all interactions within the body politic into confusion. Throughout the fight everyone fights everyone hysterically in “complete anarchy.” “No group fought together for long.” Embedded within the text is an allusion to the failures of both Marxism and Black Nationalism that the protagonist will contend with throughout the novel. 

For Ellison, the problem of the Invisible Man is complex. He argues that invisibility comes from two basic facts of American life: The first is racial conditioning which leads white people to make judgments about black people as inferior and ultimately subhuman. The second is the “formlessness of Negro life wherein all values are in flux.” 2  

“The boys groped about like blind, cautious crabs crouching to protect their midsections, their heads pulled in short against their shoulders, their arms stretched nervously before them, with their fists testing the smoke-filled air like the knobbed feelers of hypersensitive snails.”  (38) 

The values are in flux, not because they lack solidarity as the Black Nationalist would argue, but because they have lost their dignity as humans. The protagonist realizes slowly the fighters have been pulled off the mat one by one until it’s just him and the largest brute in the group. As they dodge and parry he leans in and whispers “Fake like I knocked you out, you can have the prize.” But in this moment his opponent has come to believe that this fight is worth fighting for, that despite the puppetry, he chooses to fight: one black boy against another. 

Ultimately, the protagonist will find himself again in the same predicament, blindly fighting against another black man for the right to live, only to find himself buried alive in a coal cellar, left alone with his nightmares. 

Written in 1952, this book has a timeless quality about it, which perhaps isn’t a good thing. Ellison challenges the reader to go beyond discussions of racism and begin to ponder what disembodied voices are guiding our societal prejudices for better or for worse. 

It’s a fallacy that racism is on the wane. Racism is a protean entity, always in flux. “A changing ideology with the constant and rational purpose of perpetuating and justifying a social system that is racialized.” 3 Our standards must evolve with the times rather than being permanently entrenched in a Slavery/Jim Crow era paradigm. Three years after Invisible Man was published 14 year old Emmett Till was murdered for having a conversation with a white woman in a grocery store. In 2014 a 12 year old black boy, Tamir Rice was shot repeatedly by a police officer while playing with a toy gun in a park. When black bodies are objectified as predatory it creates a vision problem. Christian Smith And Michael Emerson argue in Divided by Faith: Evangelical Religion and the Problem of Race in America that our framework for describing racism needs to change. Instead of racism, they argue for a more complex understanding of racialization: 

“It understands the racial practices that reproduce racial division in the contemporary United States are ‘(1) increasingly covert, (2) are embedded in normal operations of institutions, (3) avoid direct racial terminology, and (4) are invisible to most Whites.’ It understands that racism is not mere individual, overt prejudice or the free-floating irrational driver of race problems, but the collective misuse of power that results in diminished life opportunities for some racial groups.” 4

In the prologue, the Invisible Man says that what ultimately leads to his invisibility isn’t something inherent in his biochemical makeup, but rather something intrinsic in the eyes of those he comes in contact with. It’s an “inner eye” problem. A choosing to not see by choosing to not look. In the end, the relevance of this book is a reminder to choose to see. To wrestle with our own identity and the visibility of those around us. No matter what echelon of society you belong to, whether visible or invisible, we humans in our “absurd diversity”  all have a role to play.

Footnotes: 

1. Eversley, Shelly.  "Female Invisibility in the Novel." Bloom's Guides: Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, ed. Harold Bloom, Infobase Publishing, New York, 2008, pp 57-58.

2. Ellison, Ralph. "Working Notes for Invisible Man." Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man: A Casebook, ed. John F. Callahan, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2004, pp24

3. Emerson, Michael, and Christian Smith. Divided by Faith: Evangelical Religion and the Problem of Race in America. Oxford University Press, 2000.

4. Ibid.