“Strictly speaking, Fernando Pessoa does not exist.” These are the words of Alvaro de Campos, a naval engineer, a consumer of opium partial to absinth, whose deportment was always that of a futuristic dandy and, last but not least, one of the seventy-two heteronyms whereby Fernando Pessoa wrote some of the most amazing pages of poetry in the entire literature of the twentieth century. Alongside him, C. R. Anon, an English philosopher passionate about free will and the aspects of determinism, Ricardo Reis, a Portuguese monarchist, a poet influenced by Horace and a teacher of Latin now and again, Alberto Caeiro, the author of „The Keeper of the Sheep”, one of the subtlest works of criticism of language and of metaphysics alike, with parts of his work at least as insightful and compelling as some of Wittgenstein’s best pages, are but some of the masks adopted by Pessoa during his literary activity which is, in broad lines, an ingenuous foreshadowing of the Postmodern condition devoid of a stable, unique identity, that has so frequently been addressed in recent decades. But among them all, perhaps the closest to Pessoa’s ethos is, if we were to give credence to the author’s own confession, Bernardo Soares, the fictional author of „The Book of Disquiet”, subtitled „A Factless Autobiography”.
If choosing a pseudonym – or several ones, for that matter – is not uncommon in literature and philosophy, choosing ‘heteronyms’, as Pessoa himself called them, is the expression of a fundamentally different artistic attitude, as each and every one of these literary ‘voices’ has its own technique, its individual language, its easily recognizable style, while relating to a well-defined (each and every time distinct!) cultural tradition and – surprising as it may seem – having complex biographies and being fully aware of the subtle system of influences that has been woven, almost imperceptibly, between them. And if Octavio Paz described Caeiro as “everything that Pessoa is not – and a bit more”, we should admit that, upon having read „The Book of Disquiet”, we will be tempted to define Bernardo Soares along the same lines. Partially, of course. Because fragmentation and the technique of intentional omission actually turn out to be the very essence of Pessoa’s spirit, embodied, to a higher degree than anywhere else, in this prose work, which was published only after his death and which sparked heated debate among literary critics. And these controversies were engendered, naturally so, by the actual detail, acknowledged by the very editor, Richard Zenith, that this book could never have what would strictly speaking be called an ultimate edition. Having been written over the span of more than twenty years, with the author’s apparent intention of ascribing it to a different heteronym, Vicente Guedes, and having become, right in the making, a kind of unexpected literary legacy of Bernardo Soares, „The Book of Disquiet” is, rather than a mere ‘autobiography’ in the proper sense of the word, a collection of thoughts, of philosophical musings, of imagined recollections and of thoroughly examined feelings, all likely to engage the readers and to make them organize by themselves the vast material of Pessoa’s unfinished project. An image clearly redolent of a genuine ‘Book of Sand’, to mention Borges’s famous syntagm, but equally so of Fernando Pessoa’s keenness to devise an amazing fictional identity – proof to which stands the essential detail that, as we shall see, Pessoa himself defined Soares as one of his semi-heteronyms. On the other hand, the multitude of heteronyms imagined by Fernando Pessoa is also meant to underscore, in a mediated manner, the Portuguese writer’s belief that individual subjectivity, the bedrock of Western thought, is a mere illusion. The ‘I’ is plural (“I am plural like the Universe”, as the Portuguese writer not incidentally asserted) and proof to this stands the entire literary work of Fernando Pessoa who, in so doing, did not simply jot down his own experiences but foreshadowed one of the trends that would later be influential in the entire European culture: an acute sense of the self, conjoined with the lack of an exclusive or stable vision of the outer world. Precisely for that reason, devoid of the support of religion or of the earlier Enlightenment belief in progress, the author withdraws into himself, only to encounter doubt and mistrust – the elements that Bernardo Soares, the designated author of „The Book of Disquiet”, reiterates, with different degrees of emphasis, throughout his text.
Pessoa, whose name, by way of parenthesis, means precisely ‘person’, and, by extension, ‘mask’, was not the only twentieth-century writer who attempted to make the image of the individual permanently devoid of a stable identity the core of his literary concerns. Practically, this experience is also to be found in the work of Robert Musil, if we were to mention his oftentimes overlooked masterpiece, „The Man Without Qualities”. On the other hand, to the readers with an eye for detail, „The Book of Disquiet” will reveal an intensity somewhat commensurate with the one encountered in Rainer Maria Rilke’s „The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge”, or a tone similar to Nietzsche’s ominous one. However, by this text Pessoa outclassed any kindred work, especially by his ability to highlight the crucial relationship between dream, illusion and reality and to create a fictional space, a Lisbon truly resplendent on each and every page, one which eclipses, by its conspicuousness, even the real space, being in actual fact more than the mere capital of Portugal and turning imperceptibly into a genuinely mythical realm. Thereby, Pessoa proved fully capable of doing, on the level of fiction, precisely what some of his contemporaries or later critics accused him of not having managed to accomplish, namely to surpass his own limits, his own timidity – a remarkable triumph of fictional illusion over reality. And if Adorno asserted that, in the contemporary age, a finite work was nothing but a lie, by his compelling „Book of Disquiet” Fernando Pessoa literally substantiated that idea. Because, having been written, from beginning to end, with a touch of melancholy perhaps happened upon only in Pessoa’s best pages of poetry, this work, truly unique in world literature, is neither a mere autobiography nor solely a collection of philosophical musings.
As if compiling elements seemingly redolent of Coleridge’s „Notebooks”, of Valery’s intellectual diary or of Robert Musil’s „Diaries”, Pessoa’s absolutely singular chronicle is a complex mosaic of psychological and philosophical notations, of pseudo-biographical vignettes, of pages of literary theory and aphorisms put together as if to concoct a kind of ingenious text-book of assumed, embraced and even anticipated failures. And if we were to pinpoint their common denominator, the red thread of all these fragments, we shall undoubtedly home in on introspection and on the meaning that Pessoa ascribed to dream, in all its possible versions. It is as if, time and again, the author of these pages were looking in a large mirror, obsessively asking himself out loud: “Who am I and what is it that makes me write?” The author’s bent for introspection and self-irony are perhaps tantamount to the best excerpts from the works of Baudelaire, Melville or, on a philosophical level, Wittgenstein; moreover, as a rather unexpected element – many of the notes point to a sui-generis form of sur-realism. The themes that feature prominently in „The Book of Disquiet” are loneliness, estrangement, weariness in the middle of a city perceived as quintessentially alien but which nevertheless becomes an unadulterated geography, imperiously necessary for genuine self-knowledge and for setting up an aesthetics centred on the contemplation of life. At times called by critics “a modernist epicurean”, at others “a Postmodern cynic”, Pessoa was fundamentally capable of observing and, moreover, of thoroughly rendering not only the loneliness of the individual living in the modern age but also the failure of many trends in philosophy, in an unparalleled tone and with amazing insight into the deep humaneness of the human being – the ultimate proof of his standing belief that “if it could think, the heart would stop.”
Long before Postmodernism turned into a genuine academic undertaking – and more -, Fernando Pessoa had managed to fully define the very concept of ‘deconstruction’; and yet, not few of those who wrote exhaustive studies on Postmodern irony unhesitatingly ignored his work, either for various pseudo-ideological reasons or simply out of cluelessness… However, Harold Bloom did include him in „The Western Canon” as one of the representative writers of the twentieth century and of world literature on the whole – an honorary distinction which the Portuguese writer would undoubtedly have been tempted to receive (and look at) with a condescending smile: the attitude seething from almost every page of „The Book of Disquiet”. Because, having been conceived as a “factless autobiography” of Bernardo Soares, this book substantiates once and for all the image of the writer who has acquiescently withdrawn from the world, wishing to impose himself as an “inexistent figure”, forever behind and under screen of the masks of his heteronyms and, for certain, behind his work – the ultimate proof of his belief that “literature is the avowal that life is not enough.”
But „The Book of Disquiet” begets an additional complication every step of the way, because Pessoa repeatedly underlines, sub-textually – and via the letters addressed to some of his friends and collaborators – that Bernardo Soares’s personality is neither identical with nor diametrically opposed to his own. Which substantiates the fact that, as he tried to suggest, the author himself was reliant on and bound by his work of fiction. On the other hand, as he is portrayed in the present text, Soares evinces, at least temporarily, attitudes akin to those of Alberto Caeiro, while not being devoid of touches straightforwardly resonant of Ricardo Reis’s classicism. Thus, not in the least incidentally, Soares ponders on his voyages at sea, mentions data related to engineering techniques and complains about his own inconsequentiality, which, much like Alvaro de Campos, he experiences acutely. Hence the unadulterated obsession, prevalent in „The Book of Disquiet”, with plurality, multiple identities and with the complicated relationship between the individual and the ones around him. And hence too, the insistence of Richard Zenith, the editor of the first edition of this remarkable work, that the readers should not take Fernando Pessoa for Soares, since Pessoa clearly intended to write a work of fiction, given the envelopes in which, before his death, he had enclosed several fragments of this text, while Soares, on the other hand, had simply pieced those fragments together. What results is, first and foremost, an excellent instance of ironic play in which the readers are enticed to fully partake: because the juxtaposition of Pessoa’s ideas with the imagined reality of Soares, his semi-heteronym, marks out precisely the inherent difference between a series of apparent similitudes and confusions that Pessoa intentionally inserted in his text; hence the belief, shared by some of his readers and by a significant part of his critics alike, that the desk which Soares obstinately described was in actual fact Pessoa’s own…
On the other hand, the very manner of devising the text of „The Book of Disquiet” may be ascribed to the same strategy of the double intent, or rather to the strategy of a plural intent: just like Pessoa chose to present himself under the guise of a host of heteronyms who, in certain moments, unswervingly refuted the others’ ideas, the present text also seems to infinitely multiply itself and, by way of consequence, its reception will much depend on the order in which one reads the (only) apparently disparate fragments. It is as if „The Book of Disquiet” were a genuine recitative involving a profusion of voices and essential notes, all underlying the falsely narrative – and falsely autobiographical – structure of the text. Precisely for that reason, the more elaborate a certain fragment is, the more indeterminate the assemblage will seem, becoming the adequate expression of ‘disquiet’ itself – not of mere uneasiness, but of a kind of disquietude that is, by and large, the hallmark of great literature on the whole. In this sense alone can Bernardo Soares, the author of the text, be regarded as a ‘fragment’ of Pessoa himself, with the distinction between the two to be found in the difference, much debated upon in the book, between reality and imagination. And if, according to Pessoa, “an individual is always the transformation undergone by another individual”, likewise, imagination proves to be an alteration of reality.
After all, for the disquieted author of this disquieting text, imagination offers even more than a mere escape from the realm of everyday reality and in this sense one fathoms that his dreams become the expression of an alternate reality, some space of ideality that can be controlled so as to perfectly overlap with the former field of imagination, in the somewhat traditional sense of the term. It is only thus that Soares can claim to be content with his undertaking and its conclusiveness. Because, unlike, for instance, the Romantic poets whom he criticized, implicitly, for their rejection of contemporaneity in favour of an oftentimes fantastic super-reality, Bernardo Soares does not reject the present ab initio, but only manages to overcome any conditioning of everyday life in order to reach a realm of utter contentment. In other words, to quote Pessoa himself, “he chooses to inter-exist.”
The Preface to „The Book of Disquiet”, itself subject to debate from a variety of critical perspectives, is the centrepiece of Pessoa’s text, inasmuch as it imposes the adequate tone necessary for indirect ironic communication. Appropriated by Pessoa and availing itself, among others, of the convention of the found manuscript, this introduction offers even a physical description of Bernardo Soares, while also providing details about the encounter between the two. The atmosphere is captured in an outstanding manner, in the clear line of poetic dramatization already imposed by the Portuguese poet in some of his previous masterpieces. Because now it is precisely the author’s subtle irony that gives substance to Bernardo Soares: for now, this introduction provides the readers with the details of Bernardo Soares’s outer existence, while the upcoming text will be expression of his inner reality, Pessoa being, however, fully adroit at underlining the fact that the imagined reality is even more real than the one traditionally called real and also somehow sheltered by the former. Fernando Pessoa thus proves to have deftly surpassed the stage of Socratic irony, which is regarded as the first stage whereby one can attain complete self-awareness. Adopting some of the philosophical stances advanced by the Portuguese classical scholar Francisco Sanchez, whose theories preceded Cartesianism, „The Book of Disquiet” demonstrates, by means of great literature, that the negation implied by some of Pessoa/Soares’s assertions is, in actual fact, nothing but the sign of the uttermost affirmation, conveying, in like manner, some essential truths about the tragedy of the human condition, marked by the image of a perpetually torn-up Orpheus forever yearning to emerge as Proteus.
Fernando Pessoa, „The Book of Disquiet”/ „Cartea neliniştirii”, translation into Romanian by Dinu Flămând, Humanitas Fiction Publishing House, Bucharest, 2024
Translated into English by Mirela Petraşcu
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