Fernando Pessoa and the Drama of Being

“I’ve created in myself various personalities. I constantly create personalities. Each of my dreams, as soon as I start dreaming it, is immediately incarnated in another person, who is then the one dreaming it, and not I.” —The Book of Disquiet

Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa is famous for producing a literary oeuvre through the creation of heteronyms: fictional persons the poet fashioned with distinct biographies and particular writing styles. Most of what Pessoa wrote was by inhabiting these personas. In this seminar we will focus on the better known heteronyms of Pessoa: the existential shepherd poet, Alberto Caeiro, whom Pessoa called the master of the other heteronyms; the pagan doctor exiled to Brazil Ricardo Reis, who wrote in a Neoclassic style inspired by Horace; the urban dweller and traveler Álvaro de Campos, whose poetic style was modelled after Walt Whitman and the Futurists; the semi-heteronym, Bernardo Soares, author of The Book of Disquiet and Pessoa as himself, especially the poem Mensagem. Finally, we will read writing from the poet’s only female heteronym, Maria José.

In this seminar we will examine Fernando Pessoa’s writing as a sustained meditation on modernity and the nature of the self, one that ushers in novel ideas about personhood, reality, and the conditions of “authentic” artistic creation. We will ask how his writing implies a new existential philosophy: how does the self exist in process, in states of becoming, and what kind of agency emerges from that existence in flux? How does Pessoa transform our understanding of emotion, belief, and literary creation itself? What is his vision of Lisbon and rural Portugal, and what role does Portuguese history play in shaping his poetic imagination? Pessoa’s poetics hinged upon an idea of depersonalization, an emptying of the self that paradoxically allows for the emergence of an unbounded multiplicity. The self is evacuated in a movement that simultaneously transforms it into a dramatized singularity: a personality as real as it is invented. The secret is this: multiplicity is born of the echoing out of nothingness. Thus, Álvaro de Campos writes in “Tobacco Shop,” “I am nothing,” and a few lines later, “But I have in me all the dreams of the world.” Pessoa’s work is so strikingly modern precisely because it presents the self not as a fixed entity but as a theatrical experience. He places on stage imaginary people who produce poems responding to real aesthetic legacies and historical conundrums, who have visions for futures as much as they inhabit philosophical positions.

We will also reflect on the political contradictions that Pessoa’s work reveals, and the at times contradictory positions he took — or failed to take — in his writing, especially within the colonial imaginary of his poem Mensagem. How does his celebrated embrace of multiplicity sit alongside the ideological tensions latent in his most explicitly nationalist work? Finally, we will consider Pessoa’s reception across the twentieth century and beyond through the writings of Octavio Paz, W. S. Merwin, Gabriel Josipovici, Harold Bloom, and Giorgio Agamben.