Pessoa: The Book of Disquiet (In Person)

Fernando Pessoa is rightly regarded as one of the greatest poets of the twentieth century. His originality stems in part from his novel use of heteronyms: fictitious people for whom he developed extensive biographies, as well as distinctive personalities, and aesthetic styles. Heteronymy performs the destabilizing of the self, presenting a wholly modern vision of meaning in a world where belief systems have been ruptured by unhealable gashes. While Pessoa’s heteronyms number around one hundred and thirty-six in total, three stand out for their sheer volume and significance within the poet’s oeuvre: Alberto Caeiro, Ricardo Reis, and Álvaro de Campos. One year before Pessoa composed poems by these three, however, he began writing a book of lyrical prose that was to become perhaps his most astonishing work of all: The Book of Disquiet. While Pessoa initially attributed authorship to the heteronym Vicente Guedes, it was later reassigned to the semi-heteronymous bookkeeper Bernardo Soares, who lived and worked in Lisbon at Rua dos Douradores.

“An autobiography without facts,” Pessoa left The Book of Disquiet unfinished upon his death in 1935, having worked on it from 1913. This unfinished book boldly defies genre in committing to dismantle the fundamental tenets of prose narrative. It renders meaningless the notion of beginnings and endings. The book is a perpetual middle, a text that continues by unending itself, denying the architecture of narrative qua narrative. It paradoxically builds its own startling form through fragments, ruins, discontinuity, digression, break, flight, suspension, mirage, alongside the recording of a recognizable everyday order. Its attention is capacious; it seems to contain everything and to be about everything. The book functions as an assemblage of reflections encompassing an array of subjects and genres: philosophy, art, religion, aphorism, analysis, observation, and much more.

In this seminar we will read Margaret Jull Costa’s translation of The Book of Disquiet in its entirety and, through close analysis, glean how it enacts the complexities in the “disquiet” of its title. This translation reflects Jerónimo Pizarro’s recent editorial approach to The Book of Disquiet, emphasizing the book’s process of construction. We will trace the affective attitudes of Guedes/Soares in relation to the existential problems that characterized the first half of the twentieth century: the question of how to live in a dehumanizing world; the role and nature of art; the relation between affect and action; and the political attitudes that may be gleaned from the text, among other questions. We will consider how its unfinished and perhaps unfinishable nature puts forth a new conception of the book—one that disrupts the idea of book itself as it dreams the world of media yet to emerge. It is a work proposing itself as infinite, existing because ever-in-flux, the unfinished artwork as ideal agent of unsettled times that deeply resonate with our own. At times, we will compare Jull Costa with selections from Zenith’s translation and engage with critical responses to Pessoa’s writing from Alain Badiou, Gabriel Josipovici, George Steiner, W.S. Merwin and others.