Pessoa, the Isolated Author
FERNANDO PESSOA, SOME REVIEWING
Bernardo Soares, The Book of Disquiet,
Richard Zenith, translator and editor, Penguin Random House UK, 2015
First of all, this is a translation of an original book that never existed in any finalized form when Fernando Pessoa passed away. He left a whole bunch, a heap actually of small texts in any order that was not an order at all and the version used for this translation was set up by an editor of any sort who is the real orderer, order-imposing person. The translation is moreover a frustration that cannot be compensated by any distance and I regret it. But that’s my fault you will say. And you will be right. Why don’t I learn Portuguese or just stay away from this book, this author? Because he has become some kind of reference in the literary world, and I say the world, not only Europe, not only Portuguese-speaking countries but the global world. Last time I learned a language to read some books, it was Pali to read the Dhammapada and other Buddhist “sacred” texts that are not sacred anyway since Buddha did not believe in God. These texts are fundamental texts for a philosophy, a vision of the universe, a cosmic vision of the whole universe. I don’t feel like doing that again, so I am compelled to read a translation, and I prefer an English translation because a French translation would not be that good. I know why but I do not have to say. Now let me get into the book, into what I have been able to get out of it, as much as possible.
Let’s get rid of the authoring problem. Bernardo Soares is not the author of the book at all. He is only a heteronym of the real author who created this heteronym to be a character in the book as the author of it. The character can say anything he wants, and everyone knows that the author of any work of literature is not his character or characters, even if Flaubert said “Madame Bovary c’est moi!” imitating Louis XIV who used to says “L’état c’est moi!” Never mind what Yvan Leclerc [« ‘Madame Bovary, c’est moi’, formule apocryphe », Yvan Leclerc, February 2014, available at https://flaubert.univ-rouen.fr/ressources/mb_cestmoi.php] may have said about it, a character is, first of all, a way for the author to protect himself because a character is not the author, what’s more when this character is supposed to be the author of the whole work speaking in his first person of the singular. I am not, interested in why Fernando Pessoa needs to have an authorial screen between himself and his audience, but be it fear, shyness, modesty, plain refusal to reveal himself, hence some psychiatric derangement, I am not interested because I am not a voyeur. If I were to follow such a wrongful way, I would have to assert Fernando Pessoa is a gay-basher when he writes page 416:
“Those of us who are not homosexuals wish we had the courage to be. Our distaste for action cannot help but feminize us. We missed our true callings as housewives and idle chatelaines because of a sexual mix-up in our current incarnation. Although we don’t believe this in the least, to act as though we do smacks of irony’s very blood.”
If I were to psychoanalyze Fernando Pessoa, this sentence would reveal a lot about the two or three closet-deep gay-bashing and sexist cell he is locked up in. But you can’t honestly do that since it is Bernardo Soares who is writing this. And I know I can’t because I am not interested.
So looking at the book as a work of imagination carried by a character and not a human being, I can let myself go into it and eventually enjoy some passages, and particularly the aimless drift into which the author is trying to engulf me, a maelstrom of pieces and titbits that is not a jigsaw puzzle because, even if two or three pieces might go together, 98% of the pieces are in no way cut for them to assemble into a wider picture. We have to get the wider picture all by ourselves, like big boys or big girls, gay or straight, or whatever our orientation in any social field might be.
The very first remark I want to make is that the character-author, Bernardo Soares, is a great artist that is trying to convince us he is psychotic. He starts here from “sensations” that are declared to be all reality, and since he declares somewhere else he is a great romantic and that romanticism is a sickness, we can only agree when we read the following quotation that proves he lives in a fantasized world and cannot in any way find an integration in the real world he knows exists but his sensations cannot capture.
“In recent times, souls contracted a sickness known as Romanticism, which is Christianity without illusions or myths, stripped down to its sickly essence… The romantic malady is to want the moon as if it could actually be obtained.”
This is in direct contradiction with what some other heteronyms of Fernando Pessoa might have written about “sensationism” which is supposed to be the only way the world, even reality can exist, at least for us. But it is in perfect agreement with what some other heteronyms, including by the way a character named Fernando Pessoa, declare against Christianity which is supposedly guilty of having killed pagan polytheism, which is an elegant way not to accuse Judaism to have done it before and Islam to have done afterward. This anti-Christian position explains why heteronyms can say it without making Fernando Pessoa guilty of attacking the sole religion that can be considered as basic in Portugal. Here you could think Fernando Pessoa is a coward, and you might be right, but you would miss the subtlety of the pretense.
But that leads the author-character to his conclusion, then just on the same page: “You can’t have your cake and eat it too.” That’s just the point. This sentence is absurd. If you have your cake it is not to petrify it under a glass dome, but the function of this cake is to be eaten. So yes, you can have your cake and eat it too. You will still have it, but it will be in your chemical body-plant, being transformed into something else that will last quite long in your various bones and fibers. I must say the sentence is nice, but it is absurd, though of course, it is an allusion to Marx’s common proverbial quotation that the proof of the pudding is in its eating. Absurd because it negates the cubist vision of the world that was being born and developed at the time by people like Picasso and Braque and Juan Gris, and quite a few more, this cubism that pretends you can capture a face in frontal view as well as sideways, and cubism could make it possible to see it sideways both from the left and from the right.
This romanticism can become purely psychotic when Bernardo Soares writes: “Like me, they all [most of the people I chance to pass in the street] have an exalted and sad heart… They all have, like me, their future in the past.” (page 60) His curse is thus projected onto everyone and the world, and of course, he is going to feel alone because no one is going to accept to like life in that closet, in those customized drawers of that customer, of that custom-chest of drawers, standing all alone in the corner of life. But he misses the customized potential diversity of this customer when he says: “Seen from up close, people are monotonously diverse [oxymoronic contradiction of terms]… These people are singular with commonality. [second oxymoronic contradiction of terms over three lines]” (page81) And this romanticism based on some impossible contradictions leads us to the following oxymoronic declaration about grammar.
“Analyzing myself this afternoon, I’ve discovered that my stylistic system is based on two principles, and in the best tradition of the best classical writers I immediately uphold these two principles as general foundations of all good style:
1) to express what one feels exactly as it is felt — clearly, if it is clear; obscurely, if obscure; confusedly, if confused; — and
2) to understand that grammar is an instrument and not a law.” (page 81–82)
And then he gets into a long digressive and confused dissertation on how grammar has to be rejected by all authors because style is grammar-free, like with “She’s a boy.” Or the just as much confused progression from “I am” to “I am myself” and to “[t]riumphantly and anti-grammatically supreme, I’ll speak of ‘amming myself’.” (page 82) You can understand that I am rather frustrated by this translation because the progressive form with the copulative verb “to be” is not anti-grammatical since everyone knows that “So and so is, of course, and as usual, being a clown.” And you will not believe someone who is being honest, because that means he might be too honest to be true. But of course, if he had said that he is being himself, that would have been better. I guess the Portuguese language does not have a progressive form and must have said things differently, but the demonstration in English does not work, except of course that “amming” is absurd but it proves nothing since the progressive form is conjugated “be” + present participle of the concerned verb (and that includes “be” and “have”). This means the translation is not good enough and there should have been a note. But nevertheless, the anti-grammar discourse has been well-known since 1968 when in Paris some libertarian anarchistic leftist Trotskyites or Maoists declared and wrote on the walls “Grammar is fascist” [La Grammaire est fasciste.] But he is tremendously right when he says or implies that style is necessarily using the grammar of a language to say different things differently.
This romanticism leads Bernardo Soares to become a constantly, permanently frustrated person with declarations that are marvelous in style but very ambiguous in meaning like: “The eternally missing barber from the adjacent chair” though we do not know why he was missing, maybe he got too old and he retired, or maybe he got in some rough situation and he was terminated in a way or another since that was a time when a very brutal dictatorship took over the country. Is Bernardo Soares criticizing Salazar, though Fernando Pessoa, the man, apparently supported him? But the most final declaration remains:
“Apocalyptic Feeling.
Since every step I took in life brought me into horrifying contact with the New, and since every new person I met was a new living fragment of the unknown that I placed on my desk for my frightful daily meditation, I decided to abstain from everything, to go forward in nothing, to reduce action to a minimum, to make it hard for people and events to find me, to take abstinence to new heights, and to be a Byzantine artist of abdication. That’s how badly life terrifies and tortures me.” (page 403–404)
This final mental apocalypse leads me to the starting point I wanted to use but did not use, but it is now time to bring it up because it explains the “Byzantine” word that is otherwise very confused.
“Not even I know if this I that I’m disclosing to you, in these meandering pages, actually exists or is but a fictitious, aesthetic concept I’ve made of myself. Yes, that’s right. I live aesthetically as someone else.” (page 106)
“I am still obsessed with creating a false world, and will be until I die… In my imagination I line up the characters — so alive and dependable — who occupy my inner life, and this makes me feel cozy, like sitting by a warm fire in winter. I have a world of friends inside me, with their own real, individual, imperfect lives.” (page 89)
This multitude in his mind and his imagination is brought to life in these titbits of jigsaw puzzle pieces that do not fit together to build a wider picture that will never come out from the pile of notes, evocations, and phantasms that are nothing but the debris of a living imagination lost in a world where it does not find a place where it could fit and excel. Bernardo Soares cannot be an author in his lifetime. He can only become one after his death, and he can only be killed by Fernando Pessoa who cannot kill him because Bernard Soares is the better folding-screen he can use to have a private life with no one but himself. Mental private onanism.
This book is haunted by the unstable equilibrium of oxymorons and other chiasmus and figures of style that are binary in nature, and at the same time looking for a ternary element, a third possibility that would mean going out of the unbearable oxymorons. But let me be more precise.
First oxymorons and the meaning of this word that sounds like “oxygen for morons.” Etymonline.com tells us: oxymoron (noun) In rhetoric, “a figure conjoining words or terms apparently contradictory so as to give point to the statement or expression.” It appeared in the 1650s, from Greek oxymōron, noun use of neuter of oxymōros (adj.) “pointedly foolish,” from oxys “sharp, pointed” (from Proto-Indo-European root *ak-” be sharp, rise (out) to a point, pierce”) + mōros “stupid” (see moron that is precisely connected to this figure of speech)… Now often used loosely to mean “contradiction in terms.” Related: Oxymoronic.
Fernando Pessoa, via Bernardo Soares, is making it a rule to use as many oxymorons as possible and in all kinds of ways. Very often the author via his heteronym is going against common sense with unreasonable statements that are supposed to leave us senseless due to their meaninglessness. And the volume starts with such a declaration.
“I reasoned that God, while improbable, might exist, in which case he would be worshipped; whereas Humanity, being a mere biological idea and signifying nothing more than the animal species we belong to, was no more deserving of worship than any other animal species.” (page 11)
The author thus builds an oxymoronic opposition between God and Humanity which is just absurd since there would be no concept of God if there were no Humanity to devise it. At the same time, he builds anti-oxymoronic assimilation of Humanity and any other animal species, and we need to be clear there is no Descent of Man, just the plain animality, animalness and animaldom of humanity. And this oxymoronic position leads to another diktat: “Whether or not they exist, we’re slaves to the gods.” (page 26) If we are slaves then we are in some way of the same nature as the gods we are speaking of since slaves are humans enslaved to humans, then being slaves to the gods we are gods enslaved to the gods themselves. And if they don’t exist, then we are existence-less beings enslaved to non-existing beings. Absurd of course and Blaise Pascal’s challenge or bet on the existence of God and the utility of worshipping Him in case He may or might exist is reduced to some kind of at least ironical speculation.
And page 11 the author or heteronym of the author had said: “Decadence is the total loss of unconsciousness, which is the very basis of life.” What is “the very basis of life”? “the total loss of unconsciousness” or “decadence” which “is the total loss of unconsciousness”? But then consciousness would result from this total loss of unconsciousness and decadence would be this consciousness and decadence would be life. You can only live if you are conscious you are degrading, rotting away, being decadent, vaporizing yourself into some kind of inexistent mist, like some breathing fog on a winter morning, breathing fog that may carry and convey some COVID-19 germs, a sure guarantee you will dissolve, dissipate and degenerate into decadence.
The result is a couple of formulas that are so oxymoronic that they do not mean much, except the fact they trap your own attention and reflection into some snares. “the algebra of the world’s mystery.” (page 14) Then the mystery is no mystery. Just calculate that algebraic formula, which we have known how to do since René Descartes and his “algebra,” but it means “the zero” in Arabic. The mystery is zeroing down. “The monotony of twilight.” (idem) Every poet considers twilight, dawn or dusk, is anything but monotonous since it is the passage from one state to another, day to night or night to day. It is a revolution. When the sun is leaving it could be seen as a menace to life, and when the sun is coming back it could be seen as a fruitful period of creativity. How can it be monotonous? Because it happens every day, every night? So, the author or his heteronym can go one step further. “In my heart, there’s a peaceful anguish, and my calm is made of resignation.” (idem) Two oxymorons to make that author-character pathetic. Anguish can be anything but peaceful, and resignation cannot bring calm since it is the rejection of any energetic resistance to something evil. And he even adds another oxymoron with the parallel construction: peaceful — anguish versus calm — resignation, which brings the synonymous peaceful and calm together and thus makes anguish and resignation synonymous, which they cannot be. To finish with this series of oxymorons, on the next page we get to: “the ring of renunciation on my evangelical finger, the stagnant jewel of my ecstatic disdain.” (page 15) This evangelical finger is referring, I guess, to the sign of the cross that is supposed to be performed according to the Byzantine Orthodox church, or to the Old Believers in a very clear way. The Byzantine way requires three fingers together, the thumb, the pointer, and the middle finger joined, the other two curled up. The Old Believers’ sign requires two fingers only, the pointer and the middle finger, the thumb curled onto of the two other curled fingers. Note that’s also the way Jesus blesses his followers. That kind of debate was very crucial for Lutherans in some older days, and of course for traditional Catholic churches too. But how can you put a ring on several fingers? So, the evangelical finger evades comprehension. It would be the ring finger for a nun since she would be married to Jesus Christ, but the author and his heteronym, despite his heteronym’s protest that he is more complex than just male, is not a female, though on the virginity side of the nun he could be, at least the heteronym could pretend he is. But this evangelical ring could not be a ring of renunciation. It has to be a ring of faith, belief, conviction, though this last word may smell like a court conviction for some crime, and thus we have an oxymoron between renunciation and evangelical. In the same way, we have a whole bunch of oxymorons in the second part of the phrase: stagnant — jewel versus ecstatic — disdain. Stagnant versus ecstatic, stagnant versus jewel, ecstatic versus disdain, jewel versus disdain. To bring them into some meaningful meaning, we have to refer to the jewel a nun keeps between her legs, according to Jacques Brel or some other music-hall artist that Fernando Pessoa or Bernardo Soares could not know. Disdain this jewel and this will bring you ecstasy that could be stagnant, meaning, with a semantic and semiological twist, permanent.
But all that style is built with pairs of terms and this duality seems to be cruel to Bernardo Soares’ mind if this author-character has a mind. That brings him to some kind of conversational and communicational dilemma:
“And so, I often repeat to someone what I’ve already repeated, or ask him again what he’s already answered. But I am able to describe, in four photographic words, the facial muscles he used to say what I don’t recall, or the way he listened with his eyes to the words I don’t remember telling him. I’m two, and both keep their distance — Siamese twins that aren’t attached.” ( page 20)
The number of antagonistic pairs is so numerous here that we should feel vertigo as if we were stepping over the banister of the third floor of the Eiffel Tower to monkeylike climb down back to the Champ de Mars. And first of all, I versus he, note two males if we assume this I is Bernardo Soares and he is a male despite his protest. On this dual basis then style is all it takes to build it into a marching forest of antagonistic oxymoronic oppositions, including purely conjugational pairs like “often repeat — have already repeated” doubled up with “ask him again — he’s already answered.” The four photographic words are the four nails of the cross, even though they might have only been three. The two negatives “I don’t recall — I don’t remember” are oxymoronic because respectively attached to “he used to say — [I] telling him” both further attached to “the [his] facial muscles — his eyes” and this last element is amplified by “listened — with his eyes.”
That leads us to some existential oxymorons like :
“They [all-embracing plural covering all the people around him in some street] go on their way with all the manners and gestures that define consciousness, and they’re conscious of nothing, for they’re not conscious of being conscious. Whether clever or stupid, they’re all equally stupid. Whether old or young, they’re all the same age. Whether man or woman, all are of the same sex that does not exist.” (page 70)
The Siamese twins are playing with our understanding of plain language and beyond the pairs of opposites, the author-character is trying to find a third term that could reunite the antagonists. That is exactly the type of existentialistic fear and vertigo Jean-Paul Sartre’s character experienced in some of his early novels, vomiting in front of a tree root that was stepping out of the ground in some Parisian public garden, Luxembourg or Tuileries. This sounds incongruous like a pair of wild ducks walking on a bridge going to Notre-Dame’s Cathedral in Paris locked-down by COVID-19. Not so wild after all and probably living comfortably in the very same two gardens and taking a stroll on a day of deserted streets.
And now and there, you find a chiasmus that expresses this dual dilemma: “To give each emotion a personality and a soul to every mood!” (page 29) This one is simple: “each emotion — a personality versus a soul — to every mood.” And note the reinforcing of the chiasmus with “each — every.” And what about this one: “People are monotonously diverse… These people are singular with commonality.” (page 81) The first oxymoron is inverted into the second oxymoron, and with a chiasmus, “monotonously — diverse versus singular — commonality.”
That leads to something that is no longer existential but that has become philosophically confusing: “To recognize reality as a form of illusion and illusion as a form of reality is equally necessary and equally useless.” (page 86) The first oxymoron is followed by the chiasmic second oxymoron and this is stated as being equally two oxymoronic qualifying adjectives, “necessary — useless.” And that leads to another desire expressed by the author-character from time to time, the desire to reach a ternary item that could go beyond this dual opposition.
“[1] To know nothing about yourself is to live. [2] To know yourself badly is to think. [3] To know yourself in a flash… is to have a fleeting notion of the intimate monad, the soul’s magic word. But that sudden light [A] scorches everything, [B] consumes everything. It [C] strips us naked of even ourselves.” (page 41)
Two ternary sequences connected together into what could be a David’s star but certainly not Solomon’s wisdom since it leads to pure destruction, self-destruction, suicide in other words. This is the psychotic stance the author-character wants to describe. It is upside-down inside-out schizophrenia when what is revealed to you by your own deranged mind burns the bridges, the boats, the oars and leaves you stranded on an isolated desert-island in the middle of a tempestuous ocean on the dark side of the moon. You cannot integrate into the world because you are refused the way you are by the world, but because you have burned up all possible connections or means of connection with the world. And that is pathetic. And we are back to the multi-closet-layers of a cell in which the author-character is consciously locking himself up against some kind of social virus that may contaminate his purity.
“Where can one think of fleeing if the cell is everything? And then I feel an overwhelming, absurd desire for a kind of Satanism before Satan, a desire that one day — a day without time or substance — an escape leading outside of God will be discovered, and our deepest selves will somehow cease participating in being and non-being.” (page 45)
The triad is WE — SATAN — GOD, and there is no escape from it because he wants Satan before Satan (paganism), he wants God before God (polytheistic paganism), he wants to get out of this cell of {BEING + NON-BEING}. And in the next page, the author-character multiplies the ternary triple triads.
“I would be incapable [1] of thinking, [2] of feeling, [3] of wanting. And [A] I walk, [B] I roam, [C] I keep going… [I] It’s like being [a-1] intoxicated [b-1] with inertia, [a-2] drunk but [b-2] with no enjoyment [c-1] in the drinking or [c-2] in the drunkenness. [II] It’s [II-a] a sickness with [II-b] no hope or [II-c] recovery. [III] It’s a lively death… To live [1] a dispassionate and [2] cultured life [3-a] in the open air of [3-b] ideas, [i] reading, [ii] dreaming and [iii-a] thinking of [iii-b] writing…[A-i-ii] to be no more, [B-i-ii] have no more, [C-i-ii] want no more… [1-a-b-c] The music of the hungry beggar, [2-a-b-c-] the song of the blind man, [3-a-b-c] the relic of the unknown wayfarer, the tracks in the desert of the camel without burden or destination…” (page 46)
He has finally found the third element of an existential triad: BE — HAVE — WANT. And that leads him to the negative vision of this triad: BE NO MORE — HAVE NO MORE — WANT NO MORE. And it comes to a conclusive image or metaphor that is so oxymoronic that we can wonder if it really is a reality in the author-character’s or character-author’s mind, maybe minds. The camel does not exist since we only see its tracks and the tracks reveal the camel has no burden and no destination. The tracks in this desert reveal three negative elements.
And that is where I will depart. His desire to refuse the dual choice between being and non-being leads him to the desire to refuse the triadic choice between be, have and want. And he finds his escape in a desert, the Sahara, as an evanescent camel that is only present in the form of tracks that reveal this camel is carrying no burden and does not go anywhere. That’s the antagonistic, oxymoronic escape this author-character and this character-author are dreaming of. That’s what comes out of this Fernando Pessoa’s Book of Disquiet. Just be patient and read one page at a time and skip forward and backward as if it were a TV series or a science-fiction film, Supernatural or Mr. Mercedes, True Detective, Above Suspicion or Poldark. In a world that does not exist and does not want to exist, a world in which you are not welcome and cannot be because you believe too much in anything rational, even if it is religious rationality.
Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU
FERNANDO PESSOA, The Selected Prose of Fernando PESSOA, Richard Zenith, translator and editor, Grove Press, New York, 2001
Of course, reading an English translation of Fernando Pessoa’s prose writing is frustrating because you cannot have the music of the original language, hence the music of the author’s personal and mental experience. In the same way, you cannot have the architecture of the original syntax and even worse, you cannot have the paradigmatic semantic and oral/auditory networks of the original language. Translating is betraying the originality of the original work. The main loss holds in two words, apart from the one I have repeated several times: alienation and deprivation. I will not then in any way try to deem, let alone redeem, the style, beauty, and complexity of this author’s works.
Yet, there are plenty of things that can be said because the translation reveals some elements without necessarily distorting them. These elements have to do with general semantic ideas and structures that do not depend on language. I will try to pick some and analyze what they represent. I am not interested in the psychoanalysis or psychiatric evaluation of the author himself (1888–1935) who died before his normal life expectancy due to his extreme alcoholism that wiped him out of life at a precocious date. He was at least spared the Popular Fronts in France and Spain and the cruel civil war that followed in Spain. I will only consider the characters in his here-collected works, knowing that Fernando Pessoa is cheating with the process of creative writing because he is making this Fernando Pessoa a character of his own written prose. But I will not speak of the real Fernando Pessoa I will refer to as the author, always of the character Fernando Pessoa present and used, often abused, in this prose selection.
The author has a theory about these characters who are all of them declared to be the authors of some of these prose writings. Let’s first enumerate them knowing that the author published these prose-works under their different names and the author often theorized about them as being his heteronyms or semi-heteronyms. Who are they, and we can say who because the author treats them as real persons with a biography and a position in society besides being the authors of the texts published under their names? In common authors’ rights or copyright regulations, they are pennames, but Fernando Pessoa is one of these pennames. The list is long: I take the list from the January 13, 1935 letter to Adolfo Casais Monteiro.
1. First, Chevalier de Pas, when the author was six years old.
2. Second, Ricardo Reis on March 8, 1914.
3. Third, Alberto Caeiro defined as “the return of Fernando Pessoa as Alberto Caeiro to Fernando Pessoa himself,” when speaking of the poem “Slanting Rain” by Fernando Pessoa. In such a more than circular, totally entangled and messed-up affiliation of the one to the other through the one by the other and both being nothing but one in two with each other, we can accept here the author’s assumption in his constant self-distantiation and self-analysis, like page 125: “From the psychiatric point of view, I’m a hysterical neurasthenic but fortunately my neuropsychosis is rather weak.” And then the author gargles with such words: “neurasthenic… hysterical element… hysterical traits… my hysteria…instability of feelings and sensations… emotional fickleness and fluctuation… protean neurosis… a mental introvert… like most born neurasthenics… my extreme emotionalism… my extreme rationalism… an overly analytical and logical intelligence… my abulia and parabulia…” over less than ONE page. Of course, all that concerns the character Fernando Pessoa, not the author who anyway is not qualified nor able to do such a self-analysis which was absolutely rejected by people like Sigmund Freud and a few others.
4. Fourth, Alvaro de Campos who rejoins Ricardo Reis as the second, or first, the order is not important, disciple of Alberto Caeiro.
5. Fifth, “my semi-heteronym Bernardo Soares, the official declared author of The Book of Disquiet.
6. Sixth, Alvaro Coelho de Athayde, the fourteenth Baron de Teive, as the author of The Education of the Stoic.
7. Seventh, to conclude the Christian Holy Week, which the author would reject as probably iconoclastic, the only female in this colony, a hunchback girl of eighteen who writes the Letter from a Hunchback Girl to a Metalworker, Maria José.
8. Eighth, the Second Coming, the character Fernando Pessoa who intervenes in many texts as one character opposed to one of the author’s heteronyms. That makes the colony, company or gang a real redemptive team since it is the Second Coming of Jesus Christ, just before the Apocalypse and Doomsday. This remark is the final nail needed to crucify the author who cannot spend one page without rejected Christianity, all the more because he is in his works and his characters a direct impersonation of Jesus Christ himself if at least we believe what the characters say about him. But that concerns more the real author than the character, the latter being so vain at times that we cannot even push aside the idea that this Fernando Pessoa in this dramatic prose-writing believes he is the Savior of this world, though the author reminds him regularly of the fact that he is nothing but a dramatic and pathetic playwright’s puppet.
But my reflection is not on these eight characters and the Christian allusion we can feel behind and then the contradiction with the numerous anti-Christian assertions in the name of paganism, of a multiplicity of gods that correspond to the multiplicity of human personalities, experiences, and experiments. Paganism and multi-polytheism are not really at stake here. It is quite obvious Pessoa does not really know the “logic” of the multiple gods in ancient polytheist societies. In fact, I am not sure he knows much beyond Greek mythology and its copycat Roman mythologies. And I am not going to discuss the point because his choice of a polytheistic vision is purely ideological. It is in no way “natural” as he is prone to say. It is only the way societies started conceptualizing and spiritualizing their experience of real life. They saw, not because what they saw existed but because that was their own conjecturizing and mental construction, a vast array of spirits and they established a lot of rituals. These spirits could be existential, having to do with life, death, birth, initiation (at 12–13, that has become circumcision in some societies for boys, and excision for girls), coming of age, procreation, fertility. They could also be real and attached to the moon, the sun, stars and planets, Venus and Mars for example, and the cycles attached to each one of them. They could also be attached to moments in these cycles, like day and night, the seasons, the seasonal weather, and many other things. They finally could be attached to other living beings, animals of course, but also plants, trees, and particularly the wild plants that were domesticated by man and transformed man’s life, like Maize becoming the Maize God, Jun Nal Ye, for the Mayas, and under other names for many Meso-American old agricultural civilizations. All that is missing in Pessoa, at least in this selection of prose texts.
But it is a lot more interesting to discuss this systematic attitude that erases the identity of the real author and splits a hypothetical identity into eight different entities, and in fact some more with a lot of minor heteronyms or semi-heteronyms, without speaking of the women in the play The Mariner — A Static Drama in One Act. There the dead woman and the three waking women are nothing but plain theatrical characters. That can lead you to the idea that the author is looking at himself as a bunch of actors on the stage of life, or at least the stage of life he is imagining, because I am not sure he is realistic about what life really is. I will come back to The Anarchist Banker later, but let’s say here this Anarchist Banker text, with an extra character who could be considered as another heteronym, but yet with the proper status of a character being interviewed by the author, or an interviewer who is supposed to be the author — but is he really? — is at least of a fictional journalistic nature that makes it something absolutely different from what it pretends to be.
For the time being, we can bring up, several ideas in this imbroglio.
First, the author does not want to project his real personality into his writing, and he does not accept the idea he has only one personality, or that his one personality is absolutely unified. He says several times that his nature is double, one side feminine and the other masculine, but that is not the author, but the character Fernando Pessoa who also expresses several times his revulsion and refusal of anything gay or homosexual (the two are not the same thing), both practice or attraction. He invests this homosexuality in some of his heteronyms and semi-heteronyms. But, in the very same way, we may think the character Fernando Pessoa has no sexual life at all, his heteronyms and semi-heteronyms have no sexual life either. They are haunted by sexuality, by masturbation, by passion and love but they have no real sexual intercourse with anyone or, as for that, anything else. The final letter by Maria José is typical of this absolute frustration the author imposes onto his characters: “I’m neither a woman nor a man, because nobody thinks I’m anything but a creature that fills up the space in this window and is an eyesore to everyone around. God help me… I hope you never find out about me so as not to laugh, for I know I can’t hope for more. I love you with all my heart and life. There I said it, and I’m crying.” We should discuss this female semi-heteronym who is neither a woman nor a man, — whereas Fernando Pessoa, as a man, says he is both — who has a hump and whose body is distorted with arthritis in the legs. She can’t even stand up on her legs and straight with her hunch or hump. When he deals with female characters, the author seems to be at least sexist.
Second, every single heteronym or semi-heteronym is conceived as a stage-enacted reproduction of the author but systematically distorted in a way or another, and/or amputated, castrated, deprived of some elements of the author, and this is true even of the character Fernando Pessoa. This systematic psychological excision or circumcision makes all these characters stripped or bereft of something essential that could make the character livable, humanly plausible. They are in a way all of them cartoons, caricatures of the author so that the author is never really present in his writing. This creates a feeling of alienation, frustration, dissatisfaction, even discontentment in the absolute meaning Sigmund Freud gave to the term in Civilization and Its Discontents (1929). Sigmund Freud was targeting the two main discontented political parties of Germany in 1929 after the Big Depression, viz. Ernst Thaelmann’s Communist Party and Hitler’s National-Socialist party. The latter seized power in 1933 and the former’s leader died in Buchenwald. This systematic discontentment leads to a negative feeling and it is not the concept of “fifth empire” for Portugal that he will invest in the nationalism of António de Oliveira Salazar after the May 28, 1926 military coup and his appointment as Prime Minister on July 5, 1932. He finally found the extreme he needed to invest his characters’ discontentment and frustration into: then he just had to lock himself up in his alcoholism and let his characters play on his mental slightly distorted stage. And I must say there is then a depth that can be rebuilt in this exploded multiplicity that goes millennia beyond his present time. We can probably compare him to Gabriele d’Annunzio who found in Mussolini the force he needed outside his own self to be able to balance this very self into some kind of peaceful coexistence with the world.
Third, what is the anarchism of his character, the Anarchist Banker, in this political or ideological approach? Is it a prank, a satire, a real conviction? Probably these three things at once, and many others in the exploded way of thinking of this author projected into his exploded characters. The Banker is a character like many others and he is telling his life, totally fictitious of course, to a Fernando Pessoa who is there only to say he approves what the Banker says and to ask some slightly disruptive questions, but nothing very deep or provocative. And we know, from the very start, what it is all about: the inflated ego of this anarchist banker. “I’m an anarchist in theory and practice… I’m an intelligent anarchist. I, in other words, am the true anarchist” Note how the article “the” makes this character vain enough to assert there is only one true anarchist and he is that unique true anarchist. The humility of “I am a true anarchist” is beyond the self-centered umbilical personality of this character. He tried to integrate anarchist groups of trade-unionists or political activists and he was side-tracked, rejected, laughed at when he defended his vision of his true anarchism, that, by the way, is so close to my brother’s anarchism in the 1950–60–70s turned ecological in the 1980–90s. He too came to that true individualistic anarchism from a Christian education turned anti-militaristic into conscientious objection, which led him into prison, with a military court-martial afterward that hit a compromise, condemning his refusal to abide by the law on conscientious objection, but freeing him de facto at the end of the trial. But let’s look at this author’s Anarchist Banker’s principles. Objective: “An anarchist is someone who rebels against the injustice of people being born socially unequal.” He rejects any reformist approach: “Any system besides pure anarchism, which aims to do away with all systems, is likewise a fiction.” That makes him reject any “progressive” approach he calls social fictions. He needs a concept of justice to justify his objective and he states it in very simple terms: “Where does the notion of justice come from? It comes from what is true and natural, in opposition to social fictions and the lies of convention.” This reference to natural truth is the most surprising element you can imagine. Even Jean-Jacques Rousseau knew that there was no truth in this concept because all human history is nothing but the ideological vision of the situation of humanity trying to go against nature and control it with social contracts or compacts, to avoid the Christian or Jewish term covenant.
The Anarchist Banker then favors “the only adaptation, evolution, or transition that can occur in passing from the bourgeois society to the free society [that] is psychological; it’s the gradual adapting of people’s minds to the idea of the free society.” He rejects the “revolutionary dictatorship… A revolutionary regime … is materially only one thing, a revolutionary regime… a despotic military regime, because a state of war is imposed on society by just one part of it… Military despotism…” That leads him to his conclusion: “Goal: an anarchist or free society. Means: an abrupt passage, with no transition, from bourgeois society to the free society. This passage will be made possible by an intense, sweeping propaganda campaign, designed to prepare people’s minds and break down all resistance.” Then we seem to be in Trotsky or at times Mao Zedong. The revolution is done by propaganda in words and actions but with no violence or duress of any sort. That’s purely dreamlike. And he does not seem to understand that it is all a question of power, who is in power, no matter how they manage to capture it, but of course, that goes against his pure anarchism that dissolves the state at all levels. And that is the main contradiction. He is in fact in line, ninety years before, with what Marcel Gauchet defended last week in Le Figaro, Paris, France, about the COVID-19 pandemic: “Let’s hope this crisis will be the opportunity to come to a real re-evaluation of our social reality and it will be a wake-up call.” (Si cette crise pouvait être l’occasion d’un vrai bilan et d’un réveil collectif!) and for him, this call is the call for a mythologized social revolution.
But let’s go back ninety years and listen to our Anarchist Banker. “Social fictions are the only hindrance. They, I realized, were what had to be destroyed… in order to promote freedom.” And then the dream becomes a dystopic utopia (note the oxymoronic expression of the contradiction): “A swift, sudden, and overwhelming social revolution that will cause society to pass, in a single leap, from the bourgeois regime to the free society… A social revolution that will be preceded by an intense work of preparation — relying on direct and indirect action — to make people’s minds receptive to the coming of a free society and to reduce bourgeois resistance to a state of coma… This revolution would ideally be worldwide…” Then he has to migrate from this revolutionary vision that is very Bolshevik to the central idea that no one must be revolutionary for others but only for his own sake. He also had to do with the small little tyrannical leaders in all these autonomous anarchist groups who all had one member who was over the others. He refused that “creation of tyranny in [our] midst” even “the tyranny of helping.” So he comes to the idea that true anarchists are supposed to work separately: “We all work for the same goal, but separately… By working separately, we would learn to be more self-reliant, not to lean so much on each other, to become already freer, thus preparing ourselves — as well as others, by our example — for the future.” His mind then goes back to the real society he has to live in, and he comes across the idea that “It’s war, I thought, between me and social fictions…” And it is in this line of struggle against social fictions (all ideologies and political parties) that he realizes “the foremost social fiction, at least in our own time, is money.”
Then he implements a simple strategy: do not flee, just fight. “The only possible method was to acquire it, to acquire enough of it so as not to feel its influence: and the more I acquired, the freer from the influence I would be.” His conclusion is obvious in his way of thinking: “Since the method results in my getting rich, there is a selfish reward. And since I free myself from money, becoming superior to its power, I achieve the method’s goal, which is freedom… I resorted to all means available: profiteering, financial finagling, and even unfair competition.” He then ends up in some casuistic that is absolutely typical of the Jesuits in the 17th and 18th centuries. (You know: “If I kill my neighbor who is having a relationship with my wife, I do not sin since the man is practicing adultery. In fact, I liberate him from his sin.”) And here we are: “I set out to fight social forces; I fought them and, what’s more, defeated them… I’ve created no tyranny. Whatever tyranny may have resulted from my struggle against social fictions didn’t originate in me, and so it isn’t my creation. The tyranny resides in social fictions; I didn’t add it to them.” And the ranting and raving of this Anarchist Banker seems to reveal that the author might be satirical or at least humorous when the Anarchist Banker goes on to say: “What’s at issue isn’t the creation of tyranny but the creation of new tyranny — tyranny where there was none‑ before…I, by the very condition of my method, did not and could not create such a tyranny… I created only freedom. I freed one man. I freed myself.” This self-centered egotism is so intense that we are wondering if the author could even think half of it.
Let’s conclude this lesson in anarchism with two small remarks. “If you destroy capital instead of capitalists, how many capitalists will be left?… — Yes, you’re right.”
Capital is buildings, machines, raw materials, energy, and human work. Is he speaking of this capital, of destroying all this capital? Of course, he cannot be. The Anarchist Banker is beating about the bush with words he plays with.
And the punchline comes straight away: “For a man born to be a slave, freedom would be a tyranny, since it would go against his very nature.”
All slaves, past and present, and even future, would appreciate that some people are born to be slaves, that slavery is in their genes and they could not survive one minute if they were deprived of their dear slavery. How on earth do the Anarchist Banker and the author imagine a propaganda campaign to convince genetic slaves they have to turn to freedom, though they are born to be slaves?
And that will lead me to the real conclusion that comes from Fernando Pessoa himself: “An inability to adapt to real life.” Yes, his characters, including Fernando Pessoa, are unable to adapt to real life. Each one of them is plagued by this inability, each one in his own way, and the end is death, be it natural or man-made, death like TB for Maria José, or suicide for Alvaro Coelho de Athayde, the fourteenth Baron of Teive. And the castrated frustrated and alienated Baron will not complain in his feudal vision because. “Gaiety is for dogs; whining is for women. Man has only his honor and silence.” And please do not mix up gaiety and gayness. This declaration of the Baron’s is sexist on the side of women who are just above dogs. So, do not make him homophobic or gay-unfriendly. Soon enough in Germany, they were going to end up in concentration camps.
After this introduction. I am going to dive into and soak myself in the mental and intellectual juices of The Book of Disquiet. So, stay tuned.
Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU
