(University of Toronto romance series) Pessoa, Fernando_ Pessoa, Fernando_ Sabine, Mark_ Klobucka, Anna - Embodying Pessoa _ corporeality, gender, sexuality-University of Toronto Press, Scholarly Publ.pdf

E MB O D YI NG P E SS O A :
C OR PO R E A L I T Y, G E N D E R , S E X U A L I T Y
This page intentionally left blank
EDITED BY ANNA M. KLOBUCKA
AND MARK SABINE
Embodying Pessoa:
Corporeality, Gender, Sexuality
UN IV ERS ITY OF TO RO NT O P RES S

Toronto Buffalo London
© University of Toronto Press Incorporated 2007
Toronto Buffalo London
Printed in Canada
ISBN 978-0-8020-9198-7
Printed on acid-free paper
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Embodying Pessoa : corporeality, gender, sexuality / edited by Anna M.
Klobucka and Mark Sabine.
(University of Toronto romance series)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8020-9198-7 (bound)
1. Pessoa, Fernando, 1888–1935 – Criticism and interpretation.

I. Klobucka, Anna, 1961– II. Sabine, Mark III. Series.
PQ9261.P417Z733 2007 869.1c41 C2006-906602-7
University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its

publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario
Arts Council.
Ao Victor e à Maria José, pela inspiração
To Tina, with thanks from all Mark’s heteronyms
Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction: Pessoa’s Bodies 3

anna m. klobucka and mark sabine
Part One: Corporeal Investigations
To Pretend Is to Know Oneself 39

dana stevens
Strength, Contemplation, and Disquiet: Towards a Corporeal Aesthetic

of the Heteronyms 52
alessandra m. pires
Unburied Bodies: Abdication and Art Production in The Book of

Disquiet 71
blake strawbridge
Part Two: Reading Pessoa Queerly
Fernando Pessoa: The Homoerotic Drama 103

fernando arenas
Fernando Pessoa, He Had His Nerve 124

george monteiro
viii Contents
‘Ever-repositioned mysteries’: Homosexuality and Heteronymity in

‘Antinous’ 149
mark sabine
Part Three: (Dis)Placing Women
The Truant Muse and the Poet’s Body 181

m. irene ramalho santos
Kissing All Whores: Displaced Women and the Poetics of Modernity in

Álvaro de Campos 201
kathryn bishop-sanchez
Together at Last: Reading the Love Letters of Ophelia Queiroz and

Fernando Pessoa 224
anna m. klobucka
Part Four: Pessoa in Performance
Appearances of the Author 245

fernando cabral martins
Automatic Romance: Pessoa’s Mediumistic Writings as Sexual

Theatre 258
richard zenith
Antonio Tabucchi in Search of Pessoa’s Heteronymous Body 273
francesca billiani
Contributors 293
Index 297
Acknowledgments
We would like to express our sincere gratitude to the following bodies

for their generous financial support for the publication of Embodying
Pessoa: the Office of the Provost of the University of Massachusetts Dart-
mouth, the Office of the Dean of Arts of the University of Nottingham,
the School of Modern Languages and Cultures of the University of
Nottingham, and the Humanities Research Centre of the University of
Nottingham. We are also most grateful to Rita Sá for allowing us to use
her artwork for the volume cover and we acknowledge Transformadores
and 101 Noites, the publishers of the Wordsong Pessoa project.
Equally we would like to thank the many colleagues, friends, and fam-
ily members who offered encouragement and advice on this volume’s
development. In particular we gratefully acknowledge their assistance in
responding to bibliographical enquiries, and their observations on the
book’s conception and on drafts of the introduction. Above all, our
warmest thanks go to Richard Zenith for his unstintingly generous sup-
port, wise counsel, and invaluable practical assistance.
E MB O D YI NG P E SS O A :
C OR PO R E A L I T Y, G E N D E R , S E X U A L I T Y
Introduction: Pessoa’s Bodies
anna m. klobucka and mark sabi ne
The multifaceted and labyrinthine body of work by Fernando Pessoa

(1888–1935), Portugal’s greatest modern poet, has received much criti-
cal attention from Portuguese and Brazilian scholars and is internation-
ally one of the most acclaimed monuments of modern literature, even as
it remains relatively underrecognized in English-speaking countries,
where the limited scope of Pessoa’s work available in English translation
could, until recently, be partially blamed for this lack of acknowledg-
ment.1 Thus, one reason for the publication of the present volume is
simply to respond to the scarcity of published Pessoa criticism in English,
and to flesh out with varied textual references and multilayered interpre-
tation his ghost-like presence on the contemporary canonical scene of
modern Western literature: a figure superficially recognizable to many as
an eccentric and exotic poet of many selves, whose work remains, how-
ever, rarely if ever explored in any meaningful depth outside of the small
and specialized field of Portuguese literary studies.2
A more significant and specific rationale for our volume’s thematic
and theoretical focus has to do with the dominant way or ways in which
Pessoa’s literary enterprise has been interpreted over the last few
decades, in Portugal and elsewhere. A distinguishing feature of Pessoa’s
work is that he wrote much of it under a great number of assumed
names, which were not mere pseudonyms, but what he himself called
‘heteronyms’: fully developed dramatis personae who wrote poetry (and,
to a lesser extent, prose) in their own highly distinct styles, and whose
creative personalities ranged all the way from a Futurist iconoclast
smitten with a homoerotic longing for Walt Whitman to a neoclassicist
sceptic who composed intricately wrought, melancholic odes after the
manner of Horace. The principal figures in what Pessoa called his drama
4 Anna M. Klobucka and Mark Sabine
em gente (drama in people) – Alberto Caeiro, Álvaro de Campos, and

Ricardo Reis – were conceived as autonomous authors not just by virtue
of the intrinsic distinctiveness of their writings: they were realized textu-
ally as existentially independent individuals, with biographic trajectories
and interpersonal relationships of their own. Furthermore they engaged
in both celebratory and parodic acts of interpretation of one another’s
works and lives (including those of Fernando Pessoa ‘himself’).3 Not-
withstanding the inherently materialist and explicitly performative
design and execution of this heteronymous system, mainstream criticism
(with significant exceptions) has generally emphasized disembodied,
abstractly intellectual qualities of Pessoa’s work, viewing it as a philosoph-
ically inclined (and confined) theatre of the mind. Even while ascribing
major epistemological status to the textual grid produced by the inven-
tion of the heteronymous personae, most critics have relegated the vari-
ous roles played by the heteronymous bodies to an ancillary or purely
ornamental function.4 Simply (and no doubt reductively) put, this prev-
alent approach has stressed depersonalization as an entropic emptying
out of authorial subjectivity, while dedicating comparatively little atten-
tion to the concomitant movement towards impersonation: the diversi-
fied multiplication and exploration of embodied subjective experience
that the heteronyms make possible.5
In a parallel development, the saturation of Portuguese and Luso-
phone cultural space with Pessoa-related discourse, which reached its
apogee in the second half of the 1980s (provoking one journalist’s noto-
rious quip, ‘Tanto Pessoa já enjoa’ [so much Pessoa makes you sick]),
has led, in the last fifteen years, to a steep decline in the number of pub-
lications, as well as conferences and conference sessions, dedicated to
the poet. This apparent waning of critical interest has coincided, some-
what contradictorily, with the continuing publication of a great deal of
previously unknown material from the Pessoa archive that has come to
light since the early 1990s.6 The outpouring of the poet’s inéditos, along
with some highly contentious aspects of their publication, seems to have
outpaced the inevitably slower progress of in-depth critical commentary
on this newly available mass of writing.7
By directing analytical scrutiny towards those aspects of the Pessoa
phenomenon that have tended to be either marginalized or neglected
by his critics – corporeality, gender, and sexuality – we also seek to
emphasize the importance of this latest stage in the gradual revelation of
the poet’s life’s work. Many of the recently published writings by Pessoa
(and some that remain unpublished) point to the centrally important
place occupied by corporeal physicality in the heteronymous experi-

ment, as well as to the role, far more instrumental than had previously
been thought, of (gendered) sexuality, especially but not exclusively
male homosexuality, in Pessoa’s work as a whole. In some instances, this
fresh evidence invites a rereading of his canonical texts – and, no less
important, of their canonical interpretations – from a newly and unex-
pectedly illuminated angle. Such is the case, for instance, with the only
female first-person voice in the heteronymous chorus (heard for the first
time upon its publication in Teresa Rita Lopes’s 1990 compilation Pessoa
por Conhecer), the voice belonging to the nineteen-year-old, miserably ill,
and wretchedly infatuated hunchback named Maria José.
Maria José’s letter (on which more below) is perhaps the most spec-
tacular among Pessoa’s texts that bring the mind/body conundrum
enacted in his work into a newly sharpened focus, as the performative
relationship between depersonalization and embodiment – in which
depersonalization necessarily makes embodiment happen – emerges as
a pervasive pattern throughout his writings. One of the most striking for-
mulations of this process may be found in some of Pessoa’s reflections on
the subject of ‘the superior man’ who incarnates his author’s doctrine of
meta-affective dis/engagement: he ‘[a]prende a sentir tudo sem o sentir
directamente; porque sentir directamente é submeter-se – submeter-se à
acção da cousa sentida’ (learns to feel everything without feeling any-
thing directly; because to feel directly is to surrender – to surrender to
the action of the thing that is felt).8 In the actual depiction of this super-
human ideal, ‘feeling’ encompasses both mind and body, as it carries
combined meanings of emotional empathy and sensory perception.
Thus, the superior man imagines himself among the crowd assembled in
front of the palace of Pontius Pilate in Galilee, demanding to save the
life of the thief Barabbas over the life of Jesus:
E no momento em que pensou como o tinha sido, o nome de Barabbas

lembrava-lhe já que Barabbas era ele, e Cristo também, que o povo não
pedira. Quando voltou a querer lembrar-se que homem do povo havia sido,
viu que tinha sido todos eles. Se olhava ligeiramente para cima sentia em
sonho na sua fronte de mulher os cabelos negros de Maria. Sentia seios.
Como eles desviaram a ideia para o instinto sexual, ele chorou de repente e
sabia que era a Madalena. Estendia as mãos, mas lembrou-se de quando
Pilatos as lavara de responsabilidade, e o seu vulto aprumava-se, governa-
dor romano, na sonhada toga que lhe roçava de leve a sensação ideal da
própria pele.9
[And the moment he thought about it, the name of Barabbas reminded him
that he himself was Barabbas, as well as Christ, for whom the crowd had not
asked. When he tried to remember which man of the crowd he had been, he
saw that he had been all of them. If he looked slightly up while dreaming, he
could feel on his woman’s forehead the dark hair of Mary. He felt breasts.
Since they deflected his thoughts toward sexual instinct, he suddenly wept
and he knew he was Mary Magdalene. He reached out with his hands, but
then he remembered how Pilate had washed them of all responsibility, and
his body straightened up; he was the Roman governor in his imagined toga
that gently brushed against the ideal sensation of his own skin.]
These shape-shifting, transgendering materializations of the superior

man’s imaginary body illustrate in a particularly vivid and synthetic way
the foundational interrelatedness of thought and sensation, as well as of
self-consciousness and becoming-other, that are at the core of Pessoa’s lit-
erary experience. Hence, the desire to ‘feel everything in every way’ (sen-
tir tudo de todas as maneiras) – incarnated in Pessoa’s ‘Sensationist’
heteronym Álvaro de Campos – emerges as a method for deflecting away
from the (authorial) subject’s body the suffering that is said to come, inev-
itably, with both pleasure and pain.10 Whether this or any other method
Pessoa elaborates can ever actually be declared successful is, of course,
another matter. The superior man’s fear of domination by the ‘thing that
is felt’ seems also to motivate the ideal of living through abstract thought
professed by Bernardo Soares, the semi-heteronymous author of Pessoa’s
prose masterpiece Livro do desassossego.11 Since this strategy of intellectu-
ally regulated sensory and emotional dis/engagement can only ever be an
individual enterprise, Soares aims to ‘[a]umentar a personalidade sem
incluir nela nada alheio – nem pedindo aos outros, nem mandando nos
outros, mas sendo outros quando outros são precisos’ (enlarge your per-
sonality without including anything from the outside – asking nothing
from others and imposing nothing on others, but being others when you
need them).12 However, the price of this ostensibly liberating detachment
is a redoubled sense of alienation: separation from the social Other that
Soares claims to disdain but also a painful sense of infinite inauthenticity:
‘Sou o intervalo entre o que sou e o que não sou, entre o que sonho e o
que a vida fez de mim’ (I’m the gap between what I am and am not,
between what I dream and what life has made of me).13
At the same time, in Campos’s Sensationist odes the loss of self-con-
sciousness in an ecstasy of sensation has as its correlative a loss of self
that threatens to result in domination and abjection. Campos’s ecstasy is
never more than the fantasy, rather than the actuality, of experiencing
simultaneously being and not-being. This is nowhere more true than in
his (sexual) encounters with others: the existence in his works of those
he claims to have loved – that is, the distantly recalled Daisies and Fred-
dies, rather than the child prostitutes, pirates, athletes, and Walt Whit-
mans of whose embracings he fantasizes from a position of voyeuristic
marginality – is predicated on the remoteness of their voices and their
bodies and on their unconditional objectification. In Campos’s later
works, the growing sense of inauthenticity and even of abjection – wit-
ness the opening declaration of ‘Tabacaria’ (Tobacco Shop), ‘Não sou
nada’ (I’m nothing) – that indicates his loss of faith in his meta-affective
capacities is concomitant with the withering of this sexual bravura.14
Meanwhile, Pessoa’s probably best-known poem, the orthonymous
‘Autopsicografia’ (Autopsychography), generally read as an epigram-
matic exposé of the artifice of heteronymous fingimento (feigning, faking),
is also very much about the writing (and reading) bodies in pain; pain that
is disclaimed, deferred, and, in the process, generously proliferated:
O poeta é um fingidor.
Finge tão completamente
Que chega a fingir que é dor
A dor que deveras sente.
E os que lêem o que escreve,

Na dor lida sentem bem,
Não as duas que ele teve,
Mas só a que eles não têm.
[The poet is a faker

Who’s so good at his act
He even fakes the pain
Of pain he feels in fact.
And those who read his words

Will feel in what he wrote
Neither of the pains he has
But just the one they don’t.]15
Somatic flows and crystallizations of subjective identity – as exempli-

fied by the adventures of the superior man in ancient Galilee, as well as
by Soares’s ars vivendi and by Campos’s Sensationist ecstasies – and the

preoccupation with the discipline and performative impetus of textual-
ized emotions and sensations – as encapsulated in ‘Autopsicografia’ –
are played out in a myriad of ways in Pessoa’s heteronymous drama em
gente. At its centre stands that corporate entity’s own superior man, the
poet whom both Pessoa and other principal heteronyms called their
master. Alberto Caeiro’s notably physical presence and the electrifying
effect he had on his disciples are attested to most forcefully in Campos’s
testimonial ‘Notas para a recordação do meu mestre Caeiro’ (Notes for
the Memory of My Master Caeiro).16 Campos’s own encounter with Cae-
iro is said to have occurred in between the two poems that jointly consti-
tuted Campos’s poetic debut (both published in 1915 in the first issue of
Orpheu, the short-lived literary magazine co-directed by Pessoa that ush-
ered in Portuguese modernism): ‘Opiário’ (written pre-Caeiro) and
‘Ode triunfal’ (post-Caeiro). Campos emerges thus in Orpheu as divided
at the very origin of his existence, already in keeping with the split per-
sonality that becomes manifest in his later poetry, but also as two quite
distinct bodies. In ‘Opiário,’ we meet a drugged, somnolent (albeit well-
dressed) carcass paralyzed by the decadent atmosphere of forced leisure,
‘uma máquina nervosa de não fazer coisa nenhuma’ (a nervous machine
that busily did nothing), as Campos himself expresses it in his ‘Notas.’17
The subject of ‘Ode triunfal’ is, by contrast, a hyperactive, proliferating,
sensorily and sexually promiscuous quasi-cyborg, corporeal excrescence
and binding tissue of the industrialized modernity that his poem exalts.
Campos’s ‘Notas’ make clear as well that not only the effects but also the
causes of his transformation are closely related to the body: it is a state-
ment made by Caeiro (‘Tudo é diferente de nós, e por isso é que tudo
existe’ [Everything is different from us, and that’s why everything
exists]) that precipitates the reaction whose poetic product becomes
‘Ode triunfal.’ ‘Esta frase,’ comments Campos,
... seduziu-me com um abalo, como o de todas as primeiras posses, que me

entrou nos alicerces da alma. Mas, ao contrário da sedução material, o
efeito em mim foi de receber de repente, em todas as minhas sensações,
uma virgindade que não tinha tido.
[This sentence ... seduced me with a seismic shock – as always occurs when
someone is deflowered – that penetrated to my soul’s foundation. But con-
trary to what occurs in physical seduction, the effect on me was to receive
all at once, in all my sensations, a virginity I’d never had.]18
Campos expresses the earth-shaking and paradoxically redemptive

impact of Caeiro’s ontological and phenomenological insights not only
through corporeal metamorphosis but also through oscillations of sex-
ual identity that illustrate how the heteronymic coterie functions very
much like the artifice of drag, and not only on those occasions – such as
Campos’s ‘Notes’ or his poem ‘Ode marítima’ – when performative sub-
jectivities of the drama em gente engage in explicitly drag-like behaviour.
Like the act of gender impersonation (as theorized by Judith Butler), the
formation of the authorial egos of Pessoa’s textual universe does not
amount to an imitation of subjective identities; it is, rather, a dramatiza-
tion of signifying gestures through which identity itself is established.19
Campos’s ‘penetration’ by Caeiro’s vision not only recalls his fre-
quently reaffirmed bisexuality, but also pinpoints his bigendered iden-
tity, assuming a feminine or effeminate role as well as, elsewhere, a
phallically masculine one. The restitution of Campos’s virginity serves as
metaphor for the recuperation of an Edenic consciousness wherein
Campos is effeminately unsullied by ideology or theology, and yet can
assert his necessary separation, as ‘superior man,’ from the infinite oth-
erness that threatens to swallow or absorb him. Meanwhile, his ‘Notes’
present in still more explicitly corporeal and sexual terms the encounter
with his Master Caeiro of the second of Pessoa’s heteronyms to become a
published poet.20 Unlike Campos, Ricardo Reis had not written a single
poem prior to that turning point in his life; it was meeting Caeiro and
hearing him recite his ‘O guardador de rebanhos’ (The Keeper of
Sheep) that made Reis realize he was ‘organicamente poeta’ (organically
a poet). Just as newly acquired awareness ‘reflowered’ Campos, so too it
manifested itself through Reis’s sexuality: according to his fellow hetero-
nym, ‘Ricardo Reis deixou de ser mulher para ser homem, ou deixou de
ser homem para ser mulher – como se preferir – quando teve esse con-
tacto com Caeiro’ (Ricardo Reis stopped being a woman and became a
man, or stopped being a man and became a woman – as you wish – when
he met Caeiro).21 Here, as in his critical readings of Reis’s writing
wherein he attempts to ‘out’ his fellow heteronym as a closet bisexual,
Campos emphasizes that his and Reis’s existential and aesthetic reac-
tions to Caeiro share a fundamental corporeal and sexual aspect.22 How-
ever, Reis’s subjective stance develops in a direction that is diametrically
opposite to Campos’s pursuit of the joyous dissolution of consciousness
into the vortex of sensation, as exemplified by one of Reis’s best-known
odes, ‘Vem sentar-te comigo, Lídia, à beira do rio’ (Come sit with me,
Lídia, on the river’s bank), wherein the poet urges his companion, an
ethereal nymph of Horatian extraction, to desist from physical love-mak-

ing with him because ‘não vale a pena cansarmo-nos / Quer gozemos,
quer não gozemos, passamos como o rio’ (it is not worth the trouble of
tiring ourselves / Whether or not we take our pleasure, we pass like the
river):
Amemo-nos tranquilamente, pensando que podíamos,

Se quiséssemos, trocar beijos e abraços e carícias,
Mas que mais vale estarmos sentados ao pé um do outro
Ouvindo correr o rio e vendo-o.23
[Let us love calmly, thinking that we could,

If we wanted, exchange kisses, embraces, and caresses,
But that it is better to be seated one close to the other
Listening to the river run, and watching it.]
Reis’s appeal to chastity responds neither to a Neoplatonic notion of

disembodied spiritual adoration, nor to the idealization of corporeal
chastity by the Christian religion that he, as a ‘neo-pagan’ heteronym,
despised. Rather, Reis the ‘sad Epicurean’ seeks to minimize his suffering
in an imperfect world, by positing the endless deferral or interruption of
the life of the sentient, yet tragically transient and perishable body.24
Campos’s account of the emergence and definition of heteronymous
bodies and minds as a process of sexualized and gendered rebirth is very
much in keeping with his designated role as the daring agent provoca-
teur of Pessoa’s fellowship of poets. Pessoa himself was considerably
more circumspect on the subject in a series of letters commenting on his
own work that he wrote in the 1930s to Adolfo Casais Monteiro and João
Gaspar Simões, young writers, critics and editors of the literary magazine
presença. In November 1930, Gaspar Simões wrote to Pessoa declaring his
intention to elaborate a comprehensive interpretation of the poet’s cre-
ative process through an application of what he referred to as a theory of
‘aesthetic transposition’ (transposição estética).25 He proposed to famil-
iarize himself (notwithstanding his poor command of English) with cer-
tain works among Pessoa’s considerable output in English, a language
the poet spoke from childhood.26 The critic’s emphasis on Pessoa’s
homoerotic elegy ‘Antinous’ hinted at his parti pris; thus forewarned,
Pessoa accompanied the requested booklets with a pre-emptive explana-
tion of the reasons that led him to write the ‘obscene’ (that is, sexually
explicit) ‘Antinous’ and ‘Epithalamium’:
Há em cada um de nós, por pouco que se especialize instintivamente na

obscenidade, um certo elemento desta ordem, cuja quantidade, evidente-
mente, varia de homem para homem. Como esses elementos, por pequeno
que seja o grau em que existem, são um certo estorvo para alguns processos
mentais superiores, decidi, por duas vezes, eliminá-los pelo processo sim-
ples de os exprimir intensamente.27
[There is in each one of us, however instinctively uninterested in obscenity,

an element of that order whose magnitude varies obviously from man to
man. Since these elements, however small the degree of their presence,
hinder to some extent certain superior mental processes, I decided on two
occasions to eliminate them through a simple process of expressing them
intensely.]
Nevertheless, rather than accept at face value the theory of intentional

and definitive cathartic expurgation by which Pessoa sought to explain
away ‘Antinous’ and ‘Epithalamium’, Gaspar Simões folded it into his
sketchy and skittish Freudian-cum-Jungian analysis that proceeded from
the notion of sublimation and hinted at an unspoken (and unspeakable)
dimension of the repressed infantile desire he placed at the vital centre
of Pessoa’s creativity: ‘Sabe-se, aliás, quanto Fernando Pessoa admira a
civilização helénica ... e não se deve esquecer o “fundo maternal,” “fem-
inino,” em que fala Jung, ao lembrarmo-nos dos seus heterónimos’ (It is
known, by the way, how greatly Fernando Pessoa admires Hellenic civili-
zation ... and we must not forget what Jung refers to as the ‘maternal,’
‘feminine depth’ when we recall his heteronyms).28 The apparent non-
sequitur of this observation, linking a high regard for ‘Hellenic civiliza-
tion’ to the essential femininity attributed by Jung to creative personali-
ties and introduced by the coyly suggestive ‘sabe-se, aliás,’ appeared
sufficiently clear in its import to provoke a lengthy and carefully com-
posed response, in which Pessoa simultaneously praised, refuted, and
upstaged Freud, while warning Gaspar Simões against the possibly unan-
ticipated consequences of his insinuations.29 Analyses such as this, Pessoa
claimed, inevitably lead to
um rebaixamento automático, sobretudo perante o público, do autor criti-

cado, de sorte que a explicação, sinceramente buscada e inocentemente
exposta, redunda numa agressão. Porque o público é estúpido? Sem
dúvida, mas o que faz o público público, que é o ser colectivo, por isso
mesmo o priva de inteligência, que é só individual. A Robert Browning, não
só grande poeta, mas poeta intelectual e subtil, referiram uma vez o que
havia de indiscutível quanto à pederastia de Shakespeare, tão clara e con-
stantemente afirmada nos Sonetos. Sabe o que Browning respondeu?
‘Então ele é menos Shakespeare!’ (‘If so the less Shakespeare he!’). Assim é
o público, meu querido Gaspar Simões, ainda quando o público se chame
Browning, que nem sequer era colectivo.
[an instant debasement of the author being studied, particularly in the eyes
of the public, so that the critic’s explanation, elaborated in good faith and
innocently set forth, comes off as an act of aggression. Because the public is
stupid? Undoubtedly, but the collective nature that makes the public the
public also deprives it of intelligence, which is strictly individual. When
Shakespeare’s homosexuality, so clearly and constantly affirmed in his son-
nets, was mentioned to Robert Browning, who was not only a great poet but
a subtle and intellectual one, do you know what he answered? ‘If so, the less
Shakespeare he.’ That’s the public for you, my dear Gaspar Simões, even
when the public is named Browning, who wasn’t even collective.]30
While neither Gaspar Simões nor Pessoa cited any specific works by
Freud, it is relatively safe to assume that they both had in mind, among
other likely references, the 1910 essay ‘Leonardo da Vinci and the Mem-
ory of His Childhood’ in which the concept of sublimation is developed
in the context of an investigation into the origins of homosexuality in a
figure of an exceptional artist. This essay, incidentally, is the only book by
Freud to be found (in French translation) in what remains of Pessoa’s
library.31 Numerous underlinings by Pessoa in his copy of the essay testify
to a reading guided by a perception of personal and creative kinship.32
One underlined sentence comments on Leonardo’s ‘cool repudiation of
sexuality’ (a more emphatic ‘froid éloignement de toute sexualité’ in the
French translation) and may be read as a correlative of the exegetic seed
planted by Pessoa in his epistolary self-interpretations, evidently written
for ultimate public consumption, that was to take root in such influential
critical constructs as Jorge de Sena’s claim that Pessoa had exorcized sex-
uality once and for all from his heteronymous universe, ‘para justificar a
castidade e a disponibilidade heteronímica do ortónimo e dos heteróni-
mos, dando a estes uma “universalidade” acima das circunstancialidades
eróticas’ (to justify the chastity and heteronymous availability of the
orthonym and the heteronyms by endowing them with a ‘universality’
that placed them above and beyond erotic circumstance).33 Another
offshoot from the same explanatory stem may be located in Eduardo
Lourenço’s attribution to Pessoa of a ‘sexualidade branca’ (white/blank

sexuality) in his landmark study Fernando Pessoa revisitado, notwithstand-
ing the critic’s insightful and probingly deconstructive reading of the
poet’s letter to Gaspar Simões.34 However, Gaspar Simões himself turned
out to be less inclined, in the long run, to heed his correspondent’s
warning: immediately after the poet’s death he published Pessoa’s epis-
tolary self-exegesis in presença, following up with an extended commen-
tary on sincerity, Pessoa’s critical image of himself, and the role of the
critic. The latter section recalled the poet’s advice to ‘estudar o artista
exclusivamente como artista ... [e] cercar estes estudos e estas buscas de
uma leve aura poética de desentendimento’ (study the artist exclusively
as an artist ... [and] wrap these studies and these discoveries in a hazy
poetic aura of unintelligibility); Gaspar Simões’s cutting if belated
riposte could not have been more unequivocal: ‘If so the less critic he.’35
He eventually asserted his critical right ‘de tomar uma obra de arte como
obra de um homem’ (to take a work of art as the work of a man) in his
1951 biography Vida e obra de Fernando Pessoa, a sizeable section of which
was dedicated to explicating the poet’s ‘frustrated sexuality’ in terms
more elaborate but essentially homologous with those sketched out in
the 1931 essay.
Pessoa’s correspondence with Gaspar Simões, along with its posthu-
mous aftermath, may be read alongside other contemporary episodes of
attempted literary outings, and is perhaps most helpfully illuminated by
the biographic and critical fortune of a writer – Walt Whitman – whose
crucial influence on the Portuguese poet’s work has been amply docu-
mented.36 For the famously reserved and personally proper Pessoa to
imagine what it might be like to be publicly discussed, in a Freudian key
and (as he expressed it in the same letter to Gaspar Simões) ‘num estilo
degradante e Brasileira do Chiado’ (in a degrading fashion worthy of the
Café Brasileira of Chiado) as a sublimated homosexual, the case of
Leonardo da Vinci, dead for many centuries, was not likely to offer a con-
vincing illustration.37 Another book in Pessoa’s library would have
brought the scenario much closer to home: his extensively annotated
and underlined copy of Walt Whitman’s Anomaly, a small book by one
W.C. Rivers published in London in 1913 that was entirely dedicated to a
hostile denunciation of the American poet’s homosexuality.38 In his
peripheral Portuguese location, Pessoa was as much a ‘Whitmaniac’ as
those English contemporaries of the last years of Whitman’s life, ‘the
first generation of homosexuals’ who ‘read him ... for his exuberant
homo-eroticism’ and ‘shuddered, and not with horror, at the thought of
how manhood might blossom, unrestrained.’39 However, he was also no

more likely than Whitman himself (not to mention any other Portu-
guese writer of Pessoa’s time, with the singular and complex exception
of his friend António Botto) to welcome an association of his real-life
name and persona with the charge of sexual inversion, although his
response to Gaspar Simões was considerably less peremptory than Whit-
man’s famously outraged reply to John Addington Symonds’s repeated
pleas for a declaration of homosexual principles.40
Pessoa returned frequently to the consideration of homosexuality as a
sexological phenomenon, moral question, and, most significantly, an
inspiration for literary creation. One notes, however, not only the diver-
sity of rationales in his apologia for male homosexuality, but also the var-
ious methods by which he distanced his orthonymous persona from any
emerging homosexual identity. Particularly when approaching the sub-
ject in print or in public, Pessoa either attributed his more candid and
uncensorious discussions of homosexuality to Álvaro de Campos or
made recourse to the English language, a tactic which afforded him par-
ticular freedom of expression in two ways. First, it permitted him the
inconspicuous circulation of material that censorship laws made unpub-
lishable in Great Britain in a medium that was safely unintelligible in
Portugal. Second, it facilitated textual engagement with the genealogy
of covertly homoerotic anglophone writing that had emerged in the pre-
vious half-century. It is significant that the orthonymous Pessoa’s few
graphic and affirmative representations of homoerotic desire, such as
‘Antinous’ and the more recently revealed ‘Le mignon,’ are English com-
positions, as is a fragmentary essay defending the former poem, this last
text being a rare exception to Pessoa’s habit of addressing the relation-
ship of homosexuality to artistic creation by reference to other writers,
notably Shakespeare, Wilde, and particularly his younger contemporary
Botto, whose candidly homoerotic Canções was published by Pessoa’s
short-lived publishing venture Olisipo in 1922.41 Pessoa’s initial defence
of Botto against charges of sodomitic pornography takes the startling
form of an epistolary debate between Fernando Pessoa ele-mesmo and
Álvaro de Campos in the literary review Contemporânea. Campos asserts
the primacy of ‘sensibility’ – of which erotic desire is a part – in the cre-
ation of true art. While the Sensationist engineer-poet commends his
characteristically provocative vindication of literary homoerotism to the
reader from the safe distance of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Pessoa exploits
the cultural, rather than geographic, remoteness of England, citing
Walter Pater in a defence that dissimulates the erotic content of Botto’s
work by arguing for the morally unimpeachable nature of the male aes-
thete’s pleasure in male beauty, his ‘aperfeiçoamento subjectivo da vida’
(subjective perfecting of life) through the substitution of the idea of
beauty, passionately apprehended, for the idea of truth or goodness.42
Anything beyond the most superficial inspection of Pessoa’s supposed
critical appreciation of Botto’s work reveals it as an arch and supercilious
riposte to the self-appointed moral guardians who first condemned the
young poet. It bamboozles the uninitiated with rarified erudition and
convoluted logic, while sending a very different encoded message to
those familiar either with Botto and his flamboyantly advertised sexual
identity or with the euphemistic currency of the epithets ‘aesthetic’ and
‘Hellenic’ in the works of Pater and the circle of British critics, scholars,
and social activists that first coalesced around him.43
Read in isolation, Pessoa’s and Campos’s arguments are at best ten-
dentious. In conjunction, however, they work dialectically to suggest the
centrality of the body and its contemplation to a perpetual and dynamic
conflict in artistic creation between the diametrically opposed Apollo-
nian and Dionysian principles to which orthonym and heteronym,
respectively, subscribe. The conflict is evoked in the very passage –
Pater’s famous conclusion to The Renaissance – to which Pessoa ele-mesmo
refers. While Pater’s allusion to the various ‘great passions [that] may
give us this quickened sense of life ... by getting as many pulsations as
possible into the given time’ admits of Campos’s ‘Sensationist’ lust for
transcendental apprehension of reality through subordination of the
intellect to the sway of sensation and emotion, his conclusion that the
greatest and purest such passion arises from the contemplation of beauty
evokes the passive Epicureanism of Campos’s opposite number in the
heteronymic system, Ricardo Reis.44
Thus Pessoa advances a characteristically polyvalent justification of
homoerotism as literary topos without venturing a committed defence of
homosexual agency itself. The nearest that his writings on Botto would
come to providing this was in a later essay, which argues that Botto rep-
resents not exclusively passive contemplation, but also a reactive stance
relative to ‘o ambiente hóstil que lhe não permite ser só esteta’ (the hos-
tile environment that will not allow him to be solely an aesthete),
wherein Botto imposes upon his oppressive milieu the very image of
masculine beauty that it prohibits.45 What is particularly striking in this
argument, aside from the manner in which Pessoa’s earlier emphasis on
Botto’s passive and asexual art is collapsed into Campos’s argument for
the same poet’s active and erotic qualities, is Pessoa’s reference to Botto
as ‘um esteta grego nascido num exílio longínquo [que] [a]ma a Pátria
perdida com a devoção violenta de quem não pode voltar a ela’ (a Greek
aesthete born into a distant exile [who] loves his country with the fierce
devotion of one who cannot return to her).46 Thus Pessoa claims for the
lover of male beauty the true inheritance of classical Greek culture and
enlightenment, and the embodiment of the ‘pagan’ ideals whose restitu-
tion he so frequently cites as essential for the cultural rehabilitation of
contemporary society.
At the same time as insinuating the homosexual inclinations of his
(male) colleagues and heteronyms into a telos of spiritual and intellec-
tual advancement, however, Pessoa frequently theorizes his specifically
dramatic path of depersonalization as inherently linked to the psycho-
sexual ‘disorders’ that stalked both the pseudoscientific and popular
imaginations of his day: masturbation, transsexualism or sexual ‘inver-
sion,’ and hysteria. One recently published note baldly asserts that ‘[o]
desdobramento do eu é um fenómeno em grande número de casos de
masturbação’ (the multiplication of the I is a frequent phenomenon in
cases of masturbation).47 Notably in what remains the best known of
such self-explanatory statements, Pessoa’s 1935 letter to Casais Monteiro,
the poet recognized that a causal relationship between depersonaliza-
tion and embodiment was characteristic of hysteria, and explicitly diag-
nosed the heteronymous experiment as a hysterical phenomenon: ‘A
origem dos meus heterónimos é o fundo traço de histeria que existe em
mim’ (My heteronyms have their origin in a deep-seated form of hyste-
ria).48 At the same time, however, he denied the physicality of the pro-
cess, claiming that, as is natural in a male, his hysterical symptoms were
intellectualized and internally contained: ‘Se eu fosse mulher ... cada
poema do Álvaro de Campos ... seria um alarme para a vizinhança’ (If I
were a woman ... each poem of Álvaro de Campos ... would be a general
alarm to the neighbourhood).49 According to this theory, what Pessoa
neglected or refused to act out through his own bodily persona, he chan-
nelled into the dramatic creatures he called heteronyms. Another way of
conceptualizing this form of displacement is through the closely related
notion of abjection, a process of repudiation and exclusion, which is at
the same time constitutive of the subject, in that the abjected outside
remains, as it were, ‘inside’ the subject as its own founding repudiation.50
Both hysteria and abjection have been historically linked to the femi-
nine, and Pessoa wrote from within a well-established tradition in relat-
ing hysteria to what he referred to as his ‘temperamento feminino’
(feminine temperament) – as demarcated from his ‘inteligência mascu-
lina’ (masculine intelligence) – and in incarnating his most unredeem-

ably abject heteronymous voice in a woman’s body.51 At the same time,
Pessoa’s ability to claim the hysterical model for his own male (albeit psy-
chologically bigendered) authorial persona was predicated historically
on the ‘gradual loosening of hysteria from its moorings in the female
body’ in the evolving and proliferating discourse of modern medical psy-
chiatry: reclassified as a nervous disorder rather than a malfunctioning
of the womb, the diagnosis of hysteria could be extended to male bodies
even as its established gendered connotations remained in full force.52
Bringing into consideration later twentieth-century conceptualizations
of hysteria, it is possible to trace a parallel between Pessoa ele-mesmo’s and
Campos’s linkage of hysteria and creativity and certain post-Lacanian
feminist theorizations wherein hysteria provides the conceptual space
for the transcendence of the restricted life of the subject within the pre-
vailing social order. However, one cannot disregard, in Pessoa’s self-diag-
nosis, the antifeminist emphasis on the role of ‘masculine intelligence’
in directing the counter-normative hysterical irruption: only thus can
Pessoa imagine the hysteric’s escape from the shackles of subjectivity as a
triumph of the will over the alterity of the external universe, rather than
as a defeat by illness.
Among Pessoa’s heteronymous creations, the one who emerges as the
most insistently and explicitly physical is the disabled young woman
named Maria José. Her hyperbolic physicality is all the more notable
given that her discursive persona, articulated in a love letter to a metal-
worker named António, constitutes a thickly overdetermined coinci-
dence of several contentious planes of identity formation structuring the
drama em gente. Maria José’s abject, disfigured, and dying body becomes
almost comical in its cumulative pathologization: not only is she a
hunchback in the last stages of terminal tuberculosis, she is also ‘como se
fosse paralítica’ (practically a cripple), since she suffers from ‘uma
espécie de reumatismo nas pernas’ (a kind of arthritis in my legs) that
prevents her from moving.53 The monophonic formula of Maria José’s
epistolary discourse – hers is a love letter she has no intention of sending
– underscores the self-enclosed nature of her utterly miserable exist-
ence, and, unlike Pessoa’s other abjectly physical heteronym, Barão de
Teive, she has no way of escaping through suicide, since to attempt to kill
herself would imply draping her body in another layer of visual repug-
nance.54 As she spends her days propped up in a window watching the
street, she imagines throwing herself out onto the pavement, but ‘a
janela é tão baixa que eu nem morreria ... e estou a ver-me na rua como
uma macaca, com as pernas à vela e a corcunda a sair pela blusa e toda a
gente a querer ter pena mas a ter nojo ao mesmo tempo ... (the window’s
so low that I wouldn’t even die ... and I can just see myself flailing on the
street like a monkey, with my legs in the air and my hunchback poking
out of my blouse, and everyone wanting to pity me but also feeling
repulsed ...).55
Notwithstanding the radical otherness of Maria José’s physical and dis-
cursive persona within Pessoa’s heteronymous galaxy of authors and
texts, her letter parallels closely, on several occasions, fragments of
autopsychographic expression by such bona fide members of the collec-
tive as Bernardo Soares and Pessoa ele-mesmo. For instance, it shares a
metaphor – albeit elaborated in distinct stylistic registers indicative of
the two writers’ respective class status, gender, and corresponding levels
of literacy – with Soares’s Livro do desassossego. Soares imagines himself as
‘um daqueles trapos húmidos de limpar coisas sujas, que se levam para a
janela para secar, mas se esquecem, enrodilhados, no parapeito que
mancham lentamente’ (one of those damp rags used for house-cleaning
that are taken to the window to dry but are forgotten, balled up, on the
sill where they slowly leave a stain).56 For her part, Maria José claims that
her beloved António cannot imagine ‘o que é para quem é um trapo
como eu que ficou no parapeito da janela de limpar o signal redondo
dos vasos quando a pintura é fresca por causa da água’ (what this is like
for someone who’s like a rag that got left on the recently painted win-
dowsill where it was used to wipe the round marks left by flowerpots from
when they got watered).57 Other evidence of Maria José’s intertextual
complicity in the heteronymous network may be found in Pessoa ele-
mesmo’s autobiographic notes on the subject of his imaginary love affairs,
one of which involves ‘uma tuberculosa de génio, que havia escrito o seu
livro imortal na esperança de não sei que, sempre, assentada, à janela da
casa caiada’ (a tuberculous woman of genius who had written her
immortal book hoping for who knows what, always, seated, at the window
of her whitewashed house).58 Further on in the passage, the writer awak-
ens from his reverie, which he describes as ‘romantismo sexual’ (sexual
romanticism), and chastises himself mildly for being a ‘costureira mascu-
lina’ (male seamstress) whose princes are princesses, ‘e muitas vezes são
outra coisa, na imaginação inevitável’ (and often are something else yet
in my inescapable imagination).59 This gendered vacillation of the imag-
inary exercise represented as proper of fantasizing working-class women
also recalls vividly the androgynously named Maria José who, in a crueler
twist, sees herself as not both but neither male nor female: ‘meter-se
alguém conosco é a gente ser mulher, e eu não sou mulher nem homem,
porque ninguém acha que eu sou nada ...’ (when someone makes a pass
at us it means we’re women, and I’m neither a woman nor a man,
because nobody thinks I’m anything ...).60 Last but not least, it has been
suggested that Maria José’s monophonic epistolary discourse may be
likened to the poetic amorous confessions of Pessoa’s ‘anonymous gay
heteronym,’ similarly destined never to be shown to their addressee.61
At the same time, however, Maria José is the ultimate outcast with rela-
tion to the coterie of Pessoa’s heteronyms by virtue of her gender, class
(as Pessoa’s only low-class creation), and her drastically pathologized
body; she is the abjected outside, whose repudiated being remains,
however, spectacularly visible ‘inside’ the heteronymous homosocial
community. As such, she bears a marked resemblance to Violante de
Cysneiros, the non-existent woman poet invented, at Pessoa’s prompting,
as the only female member of the literary collective assembled in Orpheu.
Published in the second issue of the magazine, Violante’s poems
(authored by Armando Côrtes-Rodrigues) are simultaneously a parody
of female poetic voice – the parodic intention manifests itself in particu-
lar in the poet’s impossibly pretentious name, but can also be detected in
the poems themselves – and a dialogic forum on which relationships
between the male members of the team are teasingly glossed and played
out.62 The latter process is signalled through the poems’ dedications, all
of which are directed at other contributors to either Orpheu 1 or Orpheu
2: Côrtes-Rodrigues himself, Mário de Sá-Carneiro, Fernando Pessoa,
Alfredo Pedro Guisado, and Álvaro de Campos, whom Violante calls her
‘master’ (a gesture both intriguing in its parody of the organization of
Pessoa’s heteronymic coterie around the ‘Master’ Caeiro and disconcert-
ing in the light of Campos’s poetic evocations of aggressive physical and
sexual subordination of women). The poems as such may also be shown
to refer, in some cases more obviously than in others, to the texts of those
poets published in Orpheu, the cumulative effect of this projection of Pes-
soa’s experiment in heteronymity onto the collective ground of Orpheu is
not unlike the scene that emerges from Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s rewrit-
ing of the narrative schema described by René Girard in Deceit, Desire, and
the Novel. In her Between Men, Kosofsky Sedgwick famously developed
Girard’s claim that in a narrative love triangle, in which two men appear
to be competing for a woman’s love, ‘the bond that links the two rivals is
as intense and potent as the bond that links either of the rivals to the
beloved’ and that such a triangle may disguise as rivalry what is actually
an attraction between men.63 As she argued through her concept of
homosocial desire, which places male bonding and male homosexuality

on the same continuum, this pattern has two major effects: it denies or
disguises the sexual dimension that male homosocial relations may have
and it reduces women to a middle term whose function is limited to
mediating between men. Violante’s textual body, brought to life through
an apparent equal opportunity gesture – according to a testimony from
her author, Pessoa had thought it excellent to include a female contrib-
utor in the all-male Orpheu company – allowed the conspirators to engage
safely in a subversive play with gendered authorial agency while substitut-
ing an invented female voice for a potentially real female contributor
and then largely restricting that voice to a subservient, mediating func-
tion in the textual playground for the boys.64
It can be confidently stated that for the most part Pessoa had little use
for women even as mediators or facilitators of male bonding: to give but
one illustrative example, his comments on the world of the novels of
Charles Dickens, as represented particularly by his favourite, The Pickwick
Papers, contain a wistful evocation of a homosocial utopia, modelled
loosely on the original Orphic brotherhood of ancient Greece (accord-
ing to legend the first society to introduce the custom of man-boy love
into Greece), ‘a recasting of the old pagan noise, the old Bacchic joy at
the world being ours, though transiently, at the coexistence and fullness
of men, at the meeting and sad parting of perennial mankind’:
It is a human world, and so women are of no importance in it, as the old

pagan criterion has it, and has it truly. The women of Dickens are card-
board and sawdust to pack his men to us on the voyage from the spaces of
dream. The joy and zest of life does not include women, and the old
Greeks, who created pederasty as an institution of social joy, knew this to
the final end.65
Pessoa’s rhetorically striking, if also substantively clichéd – in the con-

text of the discursive history of Western misogyny – image of women serv-
ing as packaging that facilitates male intellectual and emotional
commerce (in this case, between Dickens, his male characters, and read-
ers) reemerges in a singular guise in his (to date unpublished) notes
typed up in English under the heading ‘Things thought out during the
night 2 to 3 February 1917.’66 The text begins as a critique of the ‘apo-
theosis of instincts,’ specifically of ‘the sexual instinct’ as acted out (hys-
terically, according to Pessoa) in the ‘lower romanticism’ of H.G. Wells’s
novel Ann Veronica (1909). It follows up with several paragraphs of a com-
mentary on the ‘revolt of woman’ as ‘one of the saddest of modern symp-

toms of decadence’ and on the question of suffrage, which Pessoa sums
up as follows: ‘Woman, by nature and social function, should not deal
with political matters; by the circumstances created by our civilization
she is fatally led to do so, being placed on equality with man in many
social functions.’ Pessoa’s reasoning throws up a conclusive aporia: to
give women the vote is tantamount to violating a natural law; by denying
them the vote ‘you shut your eyes to the fact that they have been given by
the circumstances of our civilization as much a right to vote as any man.’
It is then that his argument takes an apparent detour:
The problem is analogous to that which once took place with a friend of
mine. This boy was very clever but had received a strict education, religious
and moral. It happened that he was constitutionally a sexual invert. That
being his natural sexual tendency, all happiness and satisfaction could not
be obtained by him except by indulgence in his ‘vice.’ His moral standards
rebelled against this natural impulse. But he had to yield to it finally, for his
nerves were going under with the strain of resisting his tendency, and his
very intellectual activity was being impaired.
Resisting his homosexual nature would amount for the clever boy to
‘destroy[ing] his life, weaken[ing] his intellect and debas[ing] his very
morals,’ while yielding to it ‘damaged his moral standards.’ There was,
Pessoa sums up for the second time, ‘no solution to the problem.’ In face
of these two solutionless problems, the writer’s conclusion addresses
ostensibly only one of them: ‘It seems therefore that it is better to give
women the vote, not because they have a normal right to it, but because
they have an abnormal right to it ... not because it is for the good of man-
kind or the furtherance of civilization, but because the contrary is still
less in that direction.’ It is ultimately immaterial to speculate whether
the main protagonist of Pessoa’s note, the smart and tortured young gay
man, might be a reflection of Pessoa’s close friend, the poet Mário de Sá-
Carneiro (who killed himself in Paris less than a year earlier), Pessoa
himself, or a purely fictional creation. It is more interesting to observe
that the note, a convoluted argument for gay rights disguised as a grudg-
ing concession to female suffrage, illuminates the historical context in
which the homosexual and the New Woman shared much of the same
ground in social and political debates of the time, being ‘often linked in
the press and in popular culture as “twin apostles of social apocalypse”’
who challenged established gender roles and patterns of relationship
between the sexes and endangered the institution of marriage.67 Pes-

soa’s note testifies both to the potential for an effective political alliance
between the two groups and to the manner in which this potential was,
more often than not, left unrealized, as happened in England where ‘the
feminization of the English homosexual ... went with a loss of interest in
the political fate of real women’ (while New Women ‘were, at best,
ambivalent about alliances with homosexual men’).68 Pessoa’s argument
by analogy, with its embedded protestations of female inferiority and
praise for the German concept of the three Ks – Kinder, Küche, Kirche
(children, kitchen, church) – can hardly be read as sympathetic to
women’s political aspirations.69 In the note’s tangled rhetorical struc-
ture, the ostensible argument for female emancipation emerges as little
more than disposable packaging easing the delivery of its central pro-
posal: the social vindication of male homosexuality.
Similarly, in an unpublished and unattributed dialogue fragment
asserting an equation between ‘emancipated’ women and male ‘inverts,’
Pessoa’s disdainful consideration of female aspirations serves as the foil
for a vindication of male homosexuality based on artistic and intellectual
concerns.70 According to the text’s first interlocutor, the professional
woman is as much an ‘invert’ as the male homosexual, since ‘a mulher
que ganha a vida perde a sua qualidade fundamental de mulher. Todo o
tempo que gasta a trabalhar para ganhar a vida, perde-o para o seu único
fim vital e psíquico, que é captar o homem’ (the woman who earns a liv-
ing loses her fundamental quality as a woman. The time spent working to
earn a living is lost to her sole vital and psychic objective, which is that of
securing a man). However, whereas in the case of the professional
woman, psychosexual perversion is the result of a misguided pursuit of
intellectual and creative excellence, Pessoa’s speaker sees male homosex-
ual proclivities as an evil necessary for the realization of the highest intel-
lectual and creative ambitions. The example that he gives of this is
Shakespeare, ‘representante supremo do tipo máximo masculino, o do
homem cheio de interesses e atenções para tantas cousas da vida, que não
pode gastar tempo na caça ao prazer sexual normal, e por isso o substitui
pelo prazer sexual dado pela amizade com outros homens levada ao
requinte, visto que esses interesses da sua vida o levarão por certo a lidar
mais com homens do que com mulheres’ (the supreme example of the
highest masculine type, that of the man full of interest in and attention
towards so many aspects of life that he cannot waste time in the pursuit of
normal sexual pleasure, and thus substitutes for this the sexual pleasure
given by friendships with other men taken to the limit, given that his
interests in life will undoubtedly lead him to concern himself more with
men than with women). By way of contrast he alludes to Sappho, who rep-
resents the ‘error terrível e imoralíssimo, de, sendo mulher, escrever ver-
sos’ (the terrible and immoral error of being a woman and writing verse),
and he claims that this error was the cause of the Lesbian poet’s inversion:
she ‘ficou ipso facto invertida: uma vez invertida, tornou-se psiquica-
mente homem’ (ended up ipso facto an invert: once an invert, she
became psychically a man). The speaker does not explore whether Sap-
pho’s purportedly misconceived poetic vocation would have been better
served by anticipating Shakespeare’s example and selecting the less intel-
lectually distracting sexual option of ‘amizade com outros homens,’
whether these be biological males or other female-bodied men such as
herself. Whichever conclusion one presumes, however, only serves to
reinforce the speaker’s principal objective of identifying the male homo-
sexual at the apex, rather than in the dubious middle-ground, of a misog-
ynist diad equating masculinity with culture and femininity with nature
and with sexuality that imperils cultural advancement.71
Although in Pessoa’s own heteronymous and hypertextual universe
the issues of corporeality, gender, sexuality, and performative embodi-
ment remain intricately intertwined (as we hope to have preliminarily
shown in the above discussion), for the sake of clarity and readability we
have organized the present volume’s contents into four distinctly
themed clusters. The first section, ‘Corporeal Investigations,’ elaborates
further a reading of Pessoa’s drama em gente as a literary-philosophical sys-
tem that foregrounds the neglected question of corporeality in terms of
the lives of the heteronyms’ bodies and of their diverse strategies for the
negotiation of the mind/body conundrum. Dana Stevens’s ‘To Pretend
is to Know Oneself’ focuses on the symbolic return of a physicality
repressed within Pessoa’s system, as articulated by the recurrent motif of
dolls, toys, and childhood games in the heteronymic oeuvre. Childhood
is constructed as a proto-theatrical space of re-creation, wherein identity
is continually reinvented and restaged. Alessandra M. Pires, meanwhile,
develops a reading of the heteronyms’ theoretical writings that serves to
counter presumptions of the disembodiedness of Pessoa’s poetics. She
investigates the very different configurations of a specifically corporeal
and anti-metaphysical aesthetics in the works of Campos, Caeiro, and
Soares and in their respective cardinal principles of ‘strength, contem-
plation, and disquiet.’ Blake Strawbridge’s ‘Unburied Bodies: Abdica-
tion and Art Production in The Book of Disquiet’ considers Soares’s
concept of ‘abdication’ – the self-as-fiction – which, far from being a pri-
vation, actually creates a different space from which to view the world:
the space of art. Thus Soares aspires to an interpenetration or even sym-
biosis of art and the physical world, through which art enables a radical
transcendence of identity and its limitations by affirming the essential
and errant non-referentiality of the subject’s body.
The second section, ‘Reading Pessoa Queerly,’ links these issues of
corporeality and corporeal aesthetics and the (de)construction of sub-
jectivities to inscriptions of erotic – and especially homoerotic – desire in
Pessoa’s work. Fernando Arenas’s historical survey of the presence of
homoerotic desire in Pessoa’s work assesses the recurrent challenge that
its manifestations have posed to canonical readings, and how this is
related to the capacity of the heteronymic text to privilege a free expres-
sion of homoeroticism. Examining texts both familiar and newly avail-
able to Pessoa’s readers, Arenas views the affective and erotic dimension
of Pessoa’s heteronymic enterprise as not subordinate to, but rather
interactive with and informative of, that enterprise’s existential debate.
George Monteiro and Mark Sabine take contrasting approaches to Pes-
soa’s most famously homoerotic text, ‘Antinous.’ Monteiro’s ‘Fernando
Pessoa, He Had His Nerve’ traces the English language precedents for,
and editorial and critical reception of, this poem, with a view to probing
Pessoa’s perseverance in securing its publication, and to relating this atti-
tude and the poem itself to Pessoa’s biography and oeuvre as a whole.
This investigation reveals the significance of ‘Antinous’ as the textual
meeting point of distinct anglophone and Portuguese sexual and
aesthetic conventions and conceptions. Sabine’s ‘Homosexuality and
Heteronymity in “Antinous,”’ meanwhile, considers how the poem’s rep-
resentation of male homoerotic agency disavows ‘phallic’ masculinity as
a normative generic paradigm. Through polymorphous, transgendered
role play, Pessoa’s male lovers escape the restraints of unitary subjectivity
to assume an idealized and painlessly interactive plural mode of being.
Thus, the implicit exaltation in ‘Antinous’ of ‘perversity’ over exemplary
masculine identity signals desire and its (de)regulation to be crucial to
Pessoa’s vision of heteronymic being.
The presence – or equally significant absence – in Pessoa’s work of
women both mythical and historical, as well as the poet’s engagement
with conceptions of femininity, are explored in Part Three, ‘(Dis)Placing
Women.’ M. Irene Ramalho Santos and Kathryn Bishop-Sánchez
explore Pessoa’s response to the lyric poet’s conventional invocation of a
female figure, as muse and as object of desire respectively. Ramalho San-
tos’s ‘The Truant Muse and the Poet’s Body’ examines the corporeal
ramifications of the use of the muse figure as metonym for poetry. What
Ramalho Santos terms the ‘interruptive,’ or even ‘auto-interruptive,’
strategy of modernist lyric poetry renders impossible any invocation of
the ancient muses. Rather, the modern (male) poet must invoke his own
body and its corroboration of his incapacity adequately to denote or give
voice to the phenomena to which the poem alludes. Bishop-Sánchez’s
‘Kissing All Whores’ investigates Campos’s relationship with aesthetics of
modernity, and especially with Marinetti’s Futurism and its ‘scorn for
women.’ She considers how Campos’s ‘Sensationalist’ odes present both
modernity and women as things to be captured and dominated. While
woman as object of desire is replaced by inanimate objects that provoke
an orgasmic fascination in the poet, the desire to capture the modern is
often expressed through the feminization, in various ways, of the poet
himself. Anna Klobucka’s contribution, ‘Together at Last: Reading the
Love Letters of Ophelia Queiroz and Fernando Pessoa,’ discusses the
correspondence between the poet and the only documented love inter-
est of his life. While Pessoa’s love letters have been the object of intense
critical scrutiny since their original publication in 1978, Queiroz’s contri-
bution to the exchange (which remained unpublished until 1996) has
attracted no comparable attention. As Klobucka argues, reinserting the
missing woman and her letters into the hermeneutic landscape sur-
rounding Pessoa’s Cartas de amor is tantamount to reconfiguring it radi-
cally, while at the same time casting potential new light on the politics
and poetics of heterosexual romance that in fragmentary and contradic-
tory ways traverses Pessoa’s work.
The final section, ‘Pessoa in Performance,’ considers the textual
embodiment of Pessoa himself both in the writings of the literary others
that he created and in the work of some of the numerous creative artists
who have engaged with the poet and his concept of heteronymity.
Fernando Cabral Martins’s essay ‘Appearances of the Author’ traces
these signs throughout the theatrical space of Pessoa’s work and – in an
appended space of personal reflection – recalls the critic’s own experi-
ence of performing the role of Pessoa in João Botelho’s 1980 film Con-
versa acabada (Finished Conversation). Cabral Martins’s analysis enters into
a dialogue with the ways in which existing Pessoan criticism has dealt
with the polymorphous textual existence of Pessoa as, simultaneously,
the author of the heteronymous macrotext and a character in his own
drama em gente and proposes an alternative perspective for the contem-
plation of Pessoa’s engagement with the theatre of his plural literary
existence. Richard Zenith’s ‘Automatic Romance: Pessoa’s Mediumistic
Writings as Sexual Theatre’ examines the discussion of Pessoa’s sexuality

as the primary subject of the poet’s several hundred pages of automatic
writing, produced during spiritist seances from 1916 onwards but mostly
unpublished until 2003. Zenith interprets the predictions and exhorta-
tions Pessoa received about his sex life from the spirit world as a theatral-
ization of his (literary and existential) self, which serves both to conceal
and to mediate his sexual identity. As Zenith shows, this mode of textual
production is a crucial, yet hitherto unexplored, facet of Pessoa’s heter-
onymous deconstruction of the mind/body problem. Francesca Bil-
liani’s ‘Antonio Tabucchi in Search of Pessoa’s Heteronyms’ considers
Tabucchi’s representation of Pessoa and his heteronyms as both embod-
ied author-characters and fragmented textual corpus. The various forms
of Pessoa’s embodiment illustrate particular functions of postmodernist
character representation, thus permitting Tabucchi’s glossing of the het-
eronymic corpus’s implicitly postmodern conception of authorship and
of textual and cultural boundaries. As Billiani shows, Tabucchi’s images
of sickness and mortality set up the metaphor of self-consciousness as
infection, which suggests the contamination of all writing and identity by
other texts, other discourses, and other bodies.
NOTES
1 Pessoa’s canonic status in continental Europe, in Latin America, and else-

where is indicated by the lavish editions of his complete works in translation
by such prestigious publishing houses as Pléiade in France, and at another
level by his ever-growing presence on the web: a recent Google search for his
name called up 109,000 hits worldwide, a total greater than those for Feder-
ico García Lorca, Luigi Pirandello, Jean Cocteau, Hart Crane, Marcel Proust,
or Herman Hesse and only marginally fewer than those for Ezra Pound and
Rainer Maria Rilke. In a marked contrast, Pessoa’s works are available in
English translations only in the form of several one-volume anthologies. See
especially Fernando Pessoa, A Little Larger than the Entire Universe: Selected
Poems, ed. and trans. Richard Zenith (London and New York: Penguin, 2006);
Fernando Pessoa & Co.: Selected Poems, ed. and trans. Richard Zenith (New York:
Grove Press, 1998); Poems of Fernando Pessoa, ed. and trans. Edwin Honig and
Susan M. Brown (New York: Ecco Press, 1986); Selected Prose, ed. and trans.
Richard Zenith (New York: Grove Press, 2001); A Centenary Pessoa, ed.
Eugénio Lisboa with L.C. Taylor (Manchester: Carcanet, 1995). There are
several English translations of Pessoa’s major prose work, Livro do desassossego
(Book of Disquiet); the latest is by Richard Zenith, based on his revised and
expanded Portuguese edition of Livro (London and New York: Penguin,
2001; Port. edition: Lisbon: Assírio & Alvim, 1998). For book-length critical
studies of Pessoa in English, see Darlene Sadlier, An Introduction to Fernando
Pessoa: Modernism and the Paradoxes of Authorship (Gainesville: University Press
of Florida, 1998); George Monteiro, The Presence of Pessoa: English, American,
and South African Literary Responses (Lexington, KY: University Press of Ken-
tucky, 1998) and Fernando Pessoa and Nineteenth-Century Anglo-American Litera-
ture (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2000); and Irene Ramalho
Santos, Atlantic Poets: Fernando Pessoa’s Turn in Anglo-American Modernism
(Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2003).
2 Two emblematic high points of Pessoa’s occasional centre-stage prominence
on the contemporary Anglo-American scene were a New Yorker magazine arti-
cle by George Steiner (8 January 1996) and, especially, Harold Bloom’s inclu-
sion of the poet among the twenty-six literary giants monumentalized in The
Western Canon (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1994). With regard to the latter
volume, one reviewer’s reaction, with its symptomatic singling out of Pessoa
(and a presumably unintended contribution of biographic fiction worthy of
the poet’s own imagination), merits quoting: ‘The only name likely to be
unfamiliar is that of Fernando Pessoa, a Portuguese writer born in 1888, and
who died in an automobile accident [sic] in 1935. Pessoa turns out to be an
intriguing Whitmanesque poet who wrote under three different names, rest-
lessly experimenting with different identities’ (John J. Burke, Jr, in South
Atlantic Review 61.1 [winter 1996]: 131). Pessoa is also featured in Bloom’s
more recent Genius (New York: Warner Books, 2002). An important forerun-
ner of these high-profile mainstreaming pronouncements on Pessoa was
Michael Hamburger’s discussion of the Portuguese poet’s heteronymity in
The Truth of Poetry: Tensions in Modernist Poetry since Baudelaire (London:
Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1969).
3 The much-quoted expression drama em gente appeared originally in a ‘tábua
bibliográfica’ (bibliographic note) on Pessoa, written by the poet himself and
published in presença 17 (December 1928): 10. Referring to his three princi-
pal heteronyms, Pessoa wrote: ‘As obras destes três poetas formam ... um con-
junto dramático; e está devidamente estudada a entreacção intelectual das
personalidades, assim como as suas próprias relações pessoais. Tudo isto con-
stará de biografias a fazer, acompanhadas, quando se publiquem, de horósco-
pos e, talvez, de fotografias. É um drama em gente, em vez de em actos’ (The
works of these three poets form ... a dramatic whole; intellectual interaction
of their characters as well as their personal relations have been studied com-
prehensively. All this will be explained in future biographies, accompanied
upon their publication by horoscopes and possibly photographs. It is a drama

in people rather than in acts).
4 The role of the founding work of Pessoan criticism can arguably be attributed
to Jacinto do Prado Coelho’s Diversidade e unidade em Fernando Pessoa, origi-
nally published in 1949 and to this day remaining in print. (It was only the
second book entirely dedicated to Pessoa, preceded in 1943 by Adolfo Casais
Monteiro’s A poesia de Fernando Pessoa, which has aged less well.) Prado
Coelho placed Pessoa’s heteronymous system firmly at the centre of his inter-
pretation, dedicating separate chapters to the author’s three principal poetic
alter egos, to Pessoa ‘himself’ (further subdivided into the lyric poet and the
author of Mensagem), and finally to the ‘semi-heteronymous’ author of Livro
do desassossego, Bernardo Soares. At the same time, the critic stressed their
essential interconnectedness, discernible in a series of shared ‘motivos cen-
trais’ and stylistic affinities, which allowed him to develop an ultimately inte-
grated, systematic view of the poet’s universe, if not quite relegating the
heteronyms to the status of mere stylistic and thematic organizational
devices, then at least deemphasizing the radically material, fragmentary, and
open-ended nature of Pessoa’s oeuvre. Subtle and sophisticated, but at the
same time eminently accessible in its explanatory lucidity, Prado Coelho’s
model of ‘unity in diversity’ has proven greatly influential in shaping the ways
in which Pessoa’s work has been taught in schools, presented in anthologies,
translated, and discussed by critics.
5 Important exceptions to be noted here are José Gil’s Deleuzian investigations
of Pessoa’s work (which are at the same time Pessoan commentaries on
Deleuze): Fernando Pessoa ou a metafísica das sensações (Lisbon: Relógio
d’Água, n.d.; originally published in French as Fernando Pessoa ou la métaphy-
sique des sensations [Paris: Éditions de la Différence, 1988]), and Diferença e
negação na poesia de Fernando Pessoa (Lisbon: Relógio d’Água, 1999).
6 In his lifetime Pessoa published a relatively large number of poems and prose
selections in Portuguese literary magazines, but almost no books beyond sev-
eral self-published booklets of English poems and, in the year of his death,
the lyric-epic nationalist poem cycle Mensagem. Gradual publication of mate-
rial from his sprawling archive of manuscripts extended for decades follow-
ing Pessoa’s death and continues to this day. The first volume of poetry in the
Ática edition of Obras completas appeared in 1942; the last, numbered elev-
enth and containing Pessoa’s English poems, was published in 1974. They
were accompanied by several volumes of selected prose, including a first edi-
tion of Livro do desassossego in 1982, as well as important collections of miscel-
laneous writings, such as the Páginas íntimas e de auto-interpretação and Páginas
de estética e de teoria e crítica literárias, which offered varied and fairly compre-
hensive insights into the intellectual framework informing the poetic land-
scape of Pessoa’s orthonymous and heteronymous verse. For over three
decades, the Ática editions remained the principal source of the readers’ and
critics’ awareness of Pessoa’s work, in Portugal and elsewhere. In 1990, Teresa
Rita Lopes’s two-volume collection of unpublished material entitled Pessoa
por conhecer revealed a vast galaxy of heteronymous production that for the
first time clearly demonstrated the limited scope of earlier editions, and
emphasized the truly radical degree of fragmentation and displacement at
work in the mass of writing produced by Pessoa over his lifetime. Many other
volumes have appeared since then, including successive instalments of the
critical edition of Pessoa’s works (published, also since 1990, by Imprensa
Nacional – Casa da Moeda).
7 An exemplary case of contention over the publication of Pessoa’s works
involved two competing editions of the poetry of Álvaro de Campos: the first
volume in the critical edition series and the revisionist version published
shortly afterwards by Teresa Rita Lopes, who vehemently disagreed with the
critical edition team’s editorial criteria in general and with the choices made
by the volume’s guest editor, Cleonice Berardinelli, in particular. The other
cause célèbre of the 1990s was the competition between the version of Livro
do desassossego published by Teresa Sobral Cunha at the beginning of the
decade and the one produced more recently by Richard Zenith for Assírio &
Alvim, which since 1997 has retained exclusive publication rights to Pessoa’s
work (the end of calendar year 2005 marked, however, the return of Pessoa’s
writings to public domain). For a more comprehensive account of these and
other controversies see Sadlier, An Introduction to Fernando Pessoa, 130–3.
8 Teresa Rita Lopes, Pessoa por conhecer (Lisbon: Estampa, 1990), 2:27. We have
modernized spelling in all quotes from the Portuguese. All translations not
otherwise attributed are our own.
9 Lopes, Pessoa por conhecer, 2:27.
10 Fernando Pessoa (Campos), Obra poética, ed. Maria Aliete Galhoz (Rio de
Janeiro: Nova Aguilar, 1987), 278.
11 ‘Para o homem vulgar, sentir é viver e pensar é saber viver. Para mim, pensar
é viver e sentir não é mais que o alimento de pensar’ (For the ordinary man,
to feel is to live, and to think is to know how to live. For me, to think is to live,
and to feel is merely food for thought). Pessoa, Livro do desassossego, ed. Rich-
ard Zenith (Lisbon: Assírio e Alvim, 2001), 103; The Book of Disquiet, ed. and
trans. Richard Zenith (London: Allen Lane/Penguin, 2001), 70.
12 Livro do desassossego, 235; The Book of Disquiet, 205. Original emphasis.
13 Livro do desassossego, 210; The Book of Disquiet, 180.
14 Pessoa (Campos), Obra poética, 296–300; Fernando Pessoa & Co., 173–9.
15 Obra poética, 98–9; Fernando Pessoa & Co., 247.

16 For a reading of Campos’s physical description of Caeiro as a (Hegelian)
Greek sculpture, see António M. Feijó, ‘Fernando Pessoa’s Mothering of the
Avant-Garde,’ Stanford Humanities Review 7.1 (1999): 118–26. Available at
http: //www.stanford.edu/group/SHR/7–1/html/body_feijo.html.
17 Fernando Pessoa (Caeiro), Poemas completos de Alberto Caeiro, ed. Teresa Sobral
Cunha (Lisbon: Presença, 1994), 162; Trans. by Richard Zenith, Selected Prose,
49.
18 Pessoa (Caeiro), Poemas completos de Alberto Caeiro, 157; Selected Prose, 39–40.
19 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (New York and London: Routledge, 1990), viii.
20 Pessoa’s famous, and carefully drafted account of the ‘birth’ of his major het-
eronyms, in his letter of 13 January 1935 to Adolfo Casais Monteiro, alludes
to the ‘derivação oposta’ (opposed derivation) of Álvaro de Campos and
Ricardo Reis from the prior appearance within him of Alberto Caeiro.
Fernando Pessoa, Correspondência 1923–1935 (Lisbon: Assírio & Alvim, 1999),
220. Zenith’s English translation renders the appearance of Álvaro de Cam-
pos as follows: ‘And then a new individual, quite the opposite of Ricardo Reis,
suddenly and impetuously came to me.’ Selected Prose, 256. Reis’s works’ earli-
est appearance in print was the publication of Odes – Livro primeiro in the first
issue of Athena (1924), another literary magazine co-directed by Pessoa.
21 Poemas completos de Alberto Caeiro, 161; Selected Prose, 49.
22 The most elaborate instance of Campos’s outing of Reis also occurs in his
‘Notas’ where he illuminates the ‘escuridão sintática’ (syntactic darkness) of
Reis’s ode ‘A flor que és, não a que dás, eu quero (I Want the Flower You Are,
Not the Flower You Give) to point out that the gender of its addressee is mas-
culine. Poemas completos de Alberto Caeiro, 163. See António Feijó’s commentary
on Reis’s ode and on Campos’s analysis of the poem in Século de ouro: Antologia
crítica da poesia portuguesa do século XX, ed. Osvaldo Manuel Silvestre and
Pedro Serra (Braga, Coimbra, and Lisbon: Angelus Novus & Cotovia, 2002),
467–73.
23 Pessoa (Reis), Obra poética, 190.
24 Reis’s philosophy of ‘sad Epicureanism’ and his belief that this is the only
worthy attitude that a pagan poet can adopt in the Christian era are
explained in a preface to his works written by his cousin, the ‘sub-heteronym’
Frederico Reis. Fernando Pessoa, Obra em prosa, ed. Cleonice Berardinelli
(Rio de Janeiro: Nova Aguilar, 1998), 140; Selected Prose, 56–7.
25 Cartas entre Fernando Pessoa e os directores da presença, ed. Enrico Martines (Lis-
bon: Imprensa Nacional – Casa da Moeda, 1998), 136.
26 Pessoa’s facility in English derived from his ten years, from the age of seven,
living in Durban, where his step-father was posted as Portuguese consul to the
then British colony of Natal. Pessoa’s British grammar school education

allowed him to develop an impressive knowledge and appreciation of the
English canon (for more on which see Monteiro, Fernando Pessoa, and
Ramalho Santos, Atlantic Poets). Pessoa’s earliest literary compositions are in
English and his earliest extant heteronyms English-speaking. Later in life, his
only works published in book form, apart from Mensagem (1935) are the two
booklets, 35 Sonnets and Antinous: A Poem, published in Lisbon by Monteiro &
Co. in 1918, and English Poems – including ‘Epithalamium’ and a revised ver-
sion of ‘Antinous’ – published in a further two slim volumes in 1921. Although
these published works were included, with Portuguese translations, in the
eleventh and final volume of the Ática edition of Pessoa’s poetry in 1974, only
in 1993 did an attempt at a comprehensive edition of his English poems
appear (Poemas Ingleses I: Antinous, Inscriptions, Epithalamium, 35 Sonnets, ed.
João Dionísio (Lisbon: Imprensa Nacional – Casa da Moeda). Much of
Pessoa’s vast output of prose in English has waited longer still for publication.
27 Pessoa, Correspondência 1923–1935, 220.
28 João Gaspar Simões, O Mistério da poesia, 2nd edition (Porto: Inova, 1971),
159.
29 It is worth noting that Pessoa and Gaspar Simões were among the very few
Portuguese literary intellectuals of their time who developed an active inter-
est in Freud’s theories. It is even possible to claim, according to José Mar-
tinho, that ‘os únicos documentos importantes que existem na cultura
portuguesa dos anos 30 sobre as relações entre a literatura e a psicanálise se
encontram na obra de João Gaspar Simões e na sua correspondência com
Fernando Pessoa’ (the work of João Gaspar Simões and his correspondence
with Fernando Pessoa are the only important texts documenting the relation-
ship between literature and psychoanalysis in the Portuguese culture of the
1930s). José Martinho, ‘Sobre a recepção de Freud em Portugal,’ Metacrítica 2
(March 2003): 4.
30 Pessoa, Correspondência 1923–1935, 253; Selected Prose, 243–4.
31 Un souvenir d’enfance de Léonard de Vinci, trans. and annotated by Marie
Bonaparte (Paris: Gallimard, 1927). Pessoa’s book collection has been
housed since 1993 in Lisbon’s Casa Fernando Pessoa where it may be con-
sulted by researchers. Its inventory was published as the inaugural issue
(numbered 0) of the journal Tabacaria (February 1996) and is also available
online at http://www.instituto-camoes.pt/escritores/pessoa/biblioteca.htm.
32 Witness, for instance, the following passage (underlined by Pessoa) in which
Freud refers to Leonardo’s ‘notorious inability to finish his works’ and
defends him against accusations of ‘hastiness and unsteadiness’ in the
painter’s relation to his art: ‘On the contrary, it is possible to observe a quite
extraordinary profundity, a wealth of possibilities between which a decision

can only be reached with hesitation, demands which can hardly be satisfied
...’ (Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood, trans. Alan Tyson, ed.
James Strachey [New York and London: W.W. Norton, n.d.], 13–14). In
Pessoa’s copy of the French edition, the quote is on page 22. In his unfin-
ished English-language essay Erostratus Pessoa compares Leonardo da Vinci
to Shakespeare, his much-analysed literary model, and both artists to Hamlet,
‘a man too great for himself’ (‘It is not the tragedy of inexpression but the
larger tragedy of too much capacity for expression and too much to express
even for that capacity’). See Fernando Pessoa, Heróstrato ou a busca da imortal-
idade (bilingual edition), ed. Richard Zenith (Lisbon: Assírio & Alvim, 2000),
191.
33 Freud, Leonardo da Vinci, 16; Un souvenir d’enfance, 28. Jorge de Sena, Fernando
Pessoa e Ca Heterónima (Lisbon: Edições 70, 1984), 331. Sena’s essay ‘O het-
erónimo Fernando Pessoa e os poemas ingleses que publicou’ was originally
published as an introduction to Poemas ingleses de Fernando Pessoa (Lisbon:
Ática, 1974). On Pessoa’s carefully crafted and placed statements of self-inter-
pretation in his letters to the editors of presença, see Enrico Martines’s intro-
duction to Cartas entre Fernando Pessoa e os directores da presença.
34 Eduardo Lourenço, Fernando Pessoa revisitado: Leitura estruturante do drama em
gente (Lisbon: Moraes, 1981), 102.
35 Gaspar Simões, ‘Notas à margem de uma carta de Fernando Pessoa,’ presença
47 (December 1935): 22; Pessoa, Selected Prose, 245.
36 On the Pessoa-Whitman connection, see especially Susan Margaret Brown,
‘Pessoa and Whitman: Brothers in the Universe,’ in The Continuing Presence of
Walt Whitman: The Life after the Life, ed. Robert K. Martin (Iowa City: University
of Iowa Press, 1992), 167–81; Ramalho Santos, Atlantic Poets, chapters 2–4;
and Monteiro, Fernando Pessoa and Nineteenth-Century Anglo-American Litera-
ture, chapter 7.
37 Pessoa, Correspondência 1923–1935, 250; Selected Prose, 242. Pessoa was a fre-
quent customer of the Brasileira do Chiado, which was popular with Lisbon
intellectuals. The café, still in business, now boasts a life-size statue of Pessoa,
seated at a coffeehouse table, on its sidewalk. A sample illustration of what
Pessoa meant by ‘fashion worthy of Brasileira do Chiado’ and his habitual
reaction to it may be found in an excerpt from his 1913 diary: ‘Frases casuais,
nem sequer comigo (excepto o que, felizmente, aguentei risonho e calmo, a
citação pelo Almada [Negreiros] das frases – pedido que o Castañé lhe fez,
de que não dissessem indecências diante de mim), feriram a nota “Marcos
Alves”’ (Casual remarks, not even directed at me (except for what I fortu-
nately managed to bear calmly and smilingly, Almada’s quoting of the
remarks – Castañé asked him not to utter profanities in my presence) struck

the ‘Marcos Alves’ chord). Fernando Pessoa, Escritos autobiográficos, automáti-
cos e de reflexão pessoal, ed. Richard Zenith (Lisbon: Assírio e Alvim, 2003), 121.
‘Marcos Alves’ is a fragmentary, quasi-autobiographic narrative Pessoa was
working on at the time; it remains unpublished. Its protagonist is obsessed
with thoughts of sexuality, in reference to himself and to others, but lives a
life of ‘virgindade suja’ (dirty virginity). See Lopes, Pessoa por conhecer, 1:40–3
and 2:38–44.
38 For more on Walt Whitman’s Anomaly see Monteiro, Fernando Pessoa, 88–99.
39 Gregory Woods, A History of Gay Literature (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1998), 177. The term ‘Whitmania’ was coined by A.C. Swinburne in his Stud-
ies in Prose and Poetry. See Nineteenth-century Writings on Homosexuality: A Source-
book, ed. Chris White (London and New York: Routledge: 1999), 211–28; and
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial
Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 201–17.
40 Woods, A History, 178. Ramalho Santos has suggested that the apparent
‘homosexual panic’ detectable on a number of occasions in Pessoa’s autobio-
graphic writings should more properly be interpreted as a ‘sexual panic,’ a
resistance to ‘sexuality as a social and moral differentiating imperative’: ‘In
other words, what we observe Pessoa experiencing here is, purely and simply,
fear of the consequences of being compelled to abide by fixed (sexual) defi-
nitions and identifications.’ Atlantic Poets, 165.
41 Pessoa’s draft essay defending Antinous is published in Poemas Ingleses I: Anti-
nous, Inscriptions, Epithalamium, 35 Sonnets, 131–5. Here, as in his defence of
Botto, Pessoa does not present a singular and unequivocal defence of homo-
erotic literature, but rather argues from two standpoints, to ‘refute these
objections severally and in their total – to prove first that even if my poem
were immoral and pernicious to read, that would not matter to its beauty,
whatever that may be; to prove, secondly, that, even if it were ugly and
immoral, it would not have any pernicious influence at all; to prove, lastly,
that it is not immoral at all’ (131).
42 Pessoa, ‘António Botto e o ideal estético em Portugal,’ republished most
recently in Crítica: Ensaios, artigos e entrevistas, ed. Fernando Cabral Martins
(Lisbon: Assírio & Alvim, 2000), 173–85.
43 See Linda Dowling, Hellenism and Homosexuality in Victorian England (Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press, 1994), esp. 28–30, 67–103.
44 Pater, conclusion to The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry (1868). In Walter
Pater: Three Major Texts, ed. William E. Buckler (New York: New York Univer-
sity Press, 1986), 200.
45 Pessoa ‘António Botto e o ideal estético criador,’ originally published as the
preface to Botto’s Cartas que me foram devolvidas (Lisbon: Paulo Guedes,

1932), and republished in Pessoa, Crítica, 442–58. The quoted passage is on
page 457.
46 Pessoa, Crítica, 457.
47 Pessoa por conhecer, 477; Selected Prose, 237.
48 Pessoa, Correspondência 1923–1935, 340; Selected Prose, 254.
49 Pessoa, Correspondência 1923–1935, 341; Selected Prose, 254.
50 Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter (New York and London: Routledge, 1993), 3.
51 Pessoa’s attribution to himself of a ‘feminine temperament’ and a ‘masculine
intelligence’ is articulated in a well-known autobiographic note published for
the first time in the compilation Páginas íntimas e de auto-interpretação, ed.
Georg Rudolf Lind and Jacinto do Prado Coelho (Lisbon: Ática, 1966), in
which the writer also diagnoses his ‘inversão sexual fruste’ (latent sexual
inversion) and compares himself to Shakespeare and Rousseau: ‘E o meu
receio da descida ao corpo dessa inversão do espírito – radica-mo a contem-
plação de como nesses dois desceu – completamente no primeiro, e em ped-
erastia; incertamente no segundo, num vago masoquismo’ (My fear that this
spiritual inversion could descend to my body comes, in fact, from thinking
about how it descended in them – completely in Shakespeare, as homosexu-
ality; indefinitely in Rousseau, as a vague form of masochism). Escritos auto-
biográficos, 186–7; Selected Prose, 201. In her discussion of Pessoa’s note,
Ramalho Santos suggests ‘fruste’ should be translated as ‘mild’ (Atlantic Poets,
318–19n29).
52 Rita Felski, The Gender of Modernity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1995), 183. The perceived colonization of the male body by hysteria is
reflected in Portuguese literature as early as the 1870s in Eça de Queirós’s
novel O Crime do Padre Amaro (The Crime of Father Amaro). Subsequently the
‘feminizing’ condition of hysteria emerged as a key topos of Portuguese Dec-
adentismo. The specifically transgendered image of the poetic subject as hys-
teric in the work of decadentists such as António Nobre can be considered a
significant precedent for Campos and Pessoa ele-mesmo.
53 Lopes, Pessoa por conhecer, 2:257. Pessoa, Selected Prose, 316.
54 Barão de Teive (Baron of Teive) is the metonymically castrated author of an
autobiographic manuscript A Educação do estóico, ed. Richard Zenith (Lisbon:
Assírio & Alvim, 1999); available in English translation as The Education of the
Stoic: The Only Manuscript of the Baron of Teive, trans. Richard Zenith (Boston:
Exact Change, 2005).
55 Lopes, Pessoa por conhecer, 2:257. Pessoa, Selected Prose, 317.
56 Livro do desassossego, 65; The Book of Disquiet, 31–2.
57 Lopes, Pessoa por Conhecer, 2:258. Pessoa, Selected Prose, 317.
58 Escritos autobiográficos, 176. Original punctuation. The passage was included

by Teresa Sobral Cunha in her edition of Livro do desassossego (Lisbon: Pre-
sença, 1990–1, 1:210); Richard Zenith has chosen to publish it in his compi-
lation of Pessoa’s autobiographic writings, rather than in his edition of Livro,
on the grounds that the original is signed ‘Fernando Pessoa.’ It is worth
recalling at this juncture that Pessoa’s Master Caeiro was also sick with tuber-
culosis, ultimately dying of the disease in 1915 at the age of twenty-six
(although he continued to write poems until as late as 1930). The Romantic
and Decadent association of tuberculosis with literary or artistic genius and
its parallel characterization as the disease of poor or working women (as in
the poem ‘Contrariedades’ by Cesário Verde, one of Pessoa’s acknowledged
lyric masters) are brought together in this description of the orthonymous
writer’s imaginary love object.
59 Pessoa, Escritos autobiográficos, 177.
60 Lopes, Pessoa por conhecer, 2:258. Pessoa, Selected Prose, 317–18.
61 Richard Zenith. ‘Fernando Pessoa’s Gay Heteronym?’ in Lusosex: Gender and
Sexuality in the Portuguese-speaking World, ed. Susan Canty Quinlan and
Fernando Arenas (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 44.
62 See Anna Klobucka, ‘A mulher que nunca foi: para um retrato bio-gráfico de
Violante de Cysneiros,’ Colóquio/Letras 117/118 (1990): 103–14; reprinted in
As Primeiras vanguardas em Portugal, ed. K. David Jackson (Madrid: Iberoamer-
icana; Frankfurt am Main: Vervuert, 2003), 407–19.
63 Kosofsky Sedwick, Between Men, 21.
64 As Côrtes-Rodrigues recalled nearly forty years later, ‘Fernando Pessoa, que
muito frequentemente me recomendava a “duplicação de personalidade” (a
frase era dele) sugeriu que arranjasse um pseudónimo de mulher, achando
até excelente que aparecesse uma colaboradora entre tantos poetas,
guardado o costumado sigilo, para provocar maior curiosidade. E foi ele que
escolheu o nome’ (Fernando Pessoa, who often used to recommend that I
should engage in ‘duplication of personality’ [the expression was his], sug-
gested taking on a female pseudonym; he thought it would be excellent to
include a woman contributor among so many male poets, while maintaining
the usual secrecy in order to provoke greater curiosity. And he chose the
name himself). ‘Diálogo com o Poeta Armando Côrtes-Rodrigues.’ O Primeiro
de Janeiro 28 (October 1953): 3.
65 In English in the original. Pessoa, Selected Prose, 217–18.
66 Pessoa archive, Biblioteca Nacional de Lisboa. Catalogue number 15B1/90.
67 Elaine Showalter, Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin-de-Siècle (New
York: Penguin, 1990), 170. Showalter quotes from Linda Dowling, ‘The Dec-
adent and the New Woman,’ Nineteenth-Century Fiction 33 (1979): 440–1.
68 Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men, 217. Showalter, Sexual Anarchy, 174.

69 ‘About woman’s position in social life the sane man is of the same opinion as
the Kaiser when he quoted the three KKK as woman’s function. Outside deal-
ing with children, with religion, with the household and all its implications,
from cooking to dressmaking, there is nothing a woman has done which we
can truly say cannot be spared.’ Pessoa archive, Biblioteca Nacional de Lis-
boa. Catalogue number 15B1/90.
70 Pessoa archive, Biblioteca Nacional de Lisboa. Catalogue number 55/36–8.
Published in abridged form in Lopes, Pessoa por conhecer, 2:479–80.
71 Pessoa por conhecer, 2:479–80. Pessoa’s commentary on Sappho correlates
interestingly with the predicament of his contemporary real-life ‘Sapphic’
Portuguese woman poet, Judith Teixeira. Copies of Teixeira’s volume Dec-
adência were apprehended and burned, in March 1923, by the civil govern-
ment of Lisbon along with those of António Botto’s Canções and Raul Leal’s
Sodoma divinizada, the central event in what came to be known as the ‘Liter-
atura de Sodoma’ controversy. In a series of articles, Pessoa defended both
Botto and Leal against the charges of public immorality, but his interventions
contained no mention whatsoever of Teixeira’s poems. For more on Teixeira,
see Judith Teixeira, Poemas (Lisbon: &etc, 1996); and René P. Garay, ‘Sexus
sequor: Judite Teixeira e o discurso modernista português,’ Faces de Eva 5
(2001): 53–68. For a recent reexamination of the ‘Literatura de Sodoma’ epi-
sode, see Mário César Lugarinho, ‘“Literatura de Sodoma”: o cânone
literário e a identidade homossexual,’ Gragoatá 14 (2003): 133–45, which,
however, curiously replicates Pessoa’s exclusionary manoeuvre by failing to
mention Teixeira’s participation in the controversy.
PART ONE
Corporeal Investigations
To Pretend Is to Know Oneself
da n a s te v e n s
In this essay, I would like to explore the presence in Pessoa’s oeuvre of

the recurrent motif of childhood play as a model for the heteronymic
system itself. By looking at some of the heteronyms’ key writings on toys,
dolls, and imaginary friends, along with a sampling of their debates on
the question of genre, I hope to show how Pessoa posits fingimento –
literally ‘pretending’ – as a new kind of super-genre to encompass all
others.
If the heteronymic work is not a ‘play’ in the sense of a stageable
dramatic production – a genre with which Pessoa maintained an ambiv-
alent relationship throughout his writing life – it can certainly be imag-
ined as play in the larger sense: both as the flexibility, the ‘give,’ that the
movement towards heteronymy implies, and simply as recreation or pre-
tending, ‘the spontaneous activity of children’ (Webster’s Ninth Collegiate
Dictionary).1 Clearly, for Pessoa, the only true work of the poet is to
engage in this game, to remain at the place of the emergence of some-
thing from nothing. But significantly for Pessoa’s politics as well as his
poetics, this emergence from nothing is never complete, never fully
present to itself. This is why, though I use it from time to time in this dis-
cussion, the word ‘work’ is also not quite right as a name for the hetero-
nymic production, or for the heteronyms as production. Like a child at
play, the heteronyms do not so much create an oeuvre as they stage and
restage the scene of creation itself. Their work is, literally, re-creation,
the continual invention and reinvention of themselves.
Not infrequently, Pessoa actually does compare literary works to toys,
and the heteronyms to imaginary friends. Bernardo Soares confides, in
an unusually confessional passage of The Book of Disquiet, that his status as
a ‘living stage’ goes far back, to the ‘cadaver of [his] childhood past’:
40 Dana Stevens
(a child’s hand playing with cotton-reels, etc.)

I’ve never done anything but dream. This, and this alone, has been the
meaning of my life. My only real concern has been my inner life ... The only
thing I’ve loved is nothing at all ...
My obsession with creating a false world still accompanies me, and will
until my death. Today I don’t line up spools of thread and chess pawns in
my dresser drawers (with an occasional bishop or knight sticking out) but I
regret that I don’t ... I line up figures in my imagination, that dwell in my
inner being and are alive and dependable, and I feel cozy, like someone sit-
ting by a warm fire in winter. I have a world of friends inside me, with their
own real, individual, imperfect lives.2
A close reading of this remarkable passage is impossible without some

attention to the actual page on which it was written. The opening sen-
tence fragment, ‘a child’s hand playing with cotton-reels, etc.,’ is in
English in the original, while the rest of the fragment reverts to Portu-
guese. Given Pessoa’s childhood spent in English-speaking schools in
South Africa (and despite his adult resistance to being read psychoana-
lytically), it might not be too much to say that this sudden shift into
English represents a kind of return of the repressed, a linguistic regres-
sion that interrupts the flow of thought with an unassimilable remnant.
For Soares, the ‘child’s hand playing with cotton-reels’ appears to be an
actual memory of childhood play, or an observed scene that recalls that
memory. The English sentence fragment about the cotton-reels lies out-
side the text proper, linguistically and temporally inaccessible, evocative
but useless, like an abandoned toy. Finally, it is worth noting that this sen-
tence fragment is a double for the corporeal fragment it evokes; the
image that precedes, and perhaps instigates, the memory is not of a child
playing with cotton-reels, but only a child’s hand.3
Despite its nostalgic tone, then, this passage is no simple paean to a lost
childhood wholeness. For the scene of child’s play is already one of dou-
bling and pretending, of fragmentation and re-creation. Like Soares’s
and Pessoa’s beloved childhood novel The Pickwick Papers, the spools and
chessmen lined up in a drawer recall, not a time prior to division and rep-
resentation, but a time when representation worked, when one thing
could stand in for another without remainder.4 The bishops and spools of
Soares’s childhood games are able (as Soares writes elsewhere of the
Hegelian absolute) to ‘be two things at the same time.’5 Unlike the ‘fig-
ures’ that inhabit the adult Soares’s imagination, their being can coin-
cide with their non-being – a coincidence that Soares and the other
heteronyms have long ceased to expect from art.6
Many of Pessoa’s fragmentary writings, unpublished at his death (a

category that includes virtually all of The Book of Disquiet) contain textual
variants, words or phrases that Pessoa wrote above or alongside the orig-
inal without crossing it out. For my purposes, I have tended to ignore
these variants and go with whichever version the editor in question has
chosen as the primary reading. But one of the variants that survives of
the above fragment seems worthy of note, because of its relevance to the
notion of the heteronyms as constituting their own genre; where Soares
writes, ‘My only real concern has been my inner life,’ the variant given by
editors for ‘my inner life’ (a minha vida interior) is ‘my stage-setting’: o
meu cenário.7 Of the two, the second seems more suggestive, recalling
the description Soares gives of himself elsewhere as a ‘empty stage.’8 But
the existence of the two variants side by side offers a still richer reading,
making this one of the places where it becomes clear that, as Richard
Zenith writes, ‘The Book of Disquietude is Pessoa’s magnum opus’ because
it is an unfinished book, one that, ‘had he forced it into a finished state,
would be vastly less grand than the scattered, impossibly ambitious work
he left us.’9 If Soares’s ‘only real concern’ is seen as eternally oscillating
between his ‘inner life’ and his ‘stage-setting,’ then the two readings are
able to exist side by side, recreating one another in an unresolved, para-
doxical relation, a grownup’s game of hide and seek. But this play is
made possible only by the work’s failure to complete itself, to emerge
definitively into being.
While the heteronyms often return to the larger theme of childhood,
specific references to toys in Pessoa almost always have a direct relation-
ship to the drama em gente. In a preliminary draft of the letter on the het-
eronyms to Adolfo Casais Monteiro, Pessoa, in the last year of his life,
reflects on the origin of the heteronyms in his childhood games:
Ever since I was a child, I’ve felt the need to enlarge the world with fictitious
personalities... . When I was but five years old, an isolated child and quite
content to be so, I already enjoyed the company of certain characters from
my dreams, including a Captain Thibeaut, the Chevalier de Pas, and various
others, whom I’ve forgotten, and whose forgetting is one of my life’s great
regrets [saudades]. 10
This may seem merely like a child’s imagination that gives life to dolls.
But it was more than that. I intensely conceived those characters with no
need of dolls. Distinctly visible in my ongoing dream, they were utterly
human realities for me, which any doll – because unreal – would have
spoiled. They were people [gente].11
42 Dana Stevens
The final version of the letter retains the reference to the Chevalier de
Pas, while Captain Thibeaut oddly disappears, replaced by ‘another fig-
ure who also had a foreign name, which I can no longer recall, and who
was a kind of rival to the Chevalier de Pas ...’12 But the passage on dolls is
excised entirely. I include it here (at the risk of veering dangerously close
to a psychoanalytic reading that I have neither the space nor the back-
ground to embark on) because of its resonance with so many of the ques-
tions at stake here, including Pessoa’s contempt for the live theatre.
In a 1914 meditation on the nature of theatrical performance, Pessoa
compares a play to the bar on which the gymnast shows his abilities. Like
an athlete, the actor may be able to display infinite variations in his ‘gym-
nastic abilities,’ but he is still ‘limited by the necessary conditions of a
bar.’ Dramatic representation, for Pessoa, ‘has all the attraction of forg-
ery,’ since ‘the basis of acting is misrepresentation’:
We all love a forger. It is a very human and a quite instinctive sentiment. We

all love trickery and counterfeit. Acting unites and intensifies, through the
material and vital character of its manifestations, all the low instincts of the
artistic instinct – the riddle-instinct, the trapeze-instinct, the prostitute-
instinct. It is popular and appreciated for these reasons, or, rather, for this
reason ... All appearance before people is low.13
This vision of live theatre as low trickery, mere prostitution, echoes

Pessoa’s curious characterization of Shakespeare as ‘the greatest failure
in literature’ because, despite his genius, he ‘stoop[ed] to the common
drudgery,’ the ‘hackwork’ of writing actual plays.14 And yet ‘we all’ love
this glorious sham; and Pessoa’s inclusion of himself in that ‘we’ is far
from being entirely ironic. For, as noted above, Pessoa’s relation to the
theatre is nothing if not ambivalent. One might say that what he finds
‘low’ in live theatre is not so much ‘appearance before people’ as the
phenomenon of appearance itself, the actor’s gross attempt to embody
what should be a movement of pure imagination. His childhood disdain
for dolls seems to partake of this same squeamishness, what Soares calls
‘a squeamishness about existing.’15 For what do dolls do if not ‘unite and
intensify’ the child’s impulse to pretend, through their ‘material and
vital character’ as objects? Though Pessoa claims that the use of a doll
would have destroyed his figuras ‘because it was unreal’ (por irreal),
there is another sense in which dolls are too real; they spoil the possibil-
ity of the appearance of ‘figures’ [gente], in the same way the presence
of real actors would spoil the drama em gente. The doll is both unreal – in
that it mimics a living being – and too real, in that its physical materiality
claims to stand in for a far greater dreamed unreality. Similarly, the dra-
matic genre expresses its constitutive falsehood through the all-too-real
embodiment of the actor. In both the critique of theatre and the critique
of the doll, the sheer appearance or presentation of figures – and Pessoa
insists throughout the letter on the word figuras for his childhood friends
– trumps re-presentation, which would be the simple substitution of a
crass material ‘reality’ for the greater reality of the dreamed Chevalier de
Pas. In the doll, for Pessoa – as in the ‘trickery’ of theatre – the worst of
the fake meets the worst of the real. The ‘low instincts’ of art, ‘the riddle-
instinct, the trapeze-instinct, the prostitute-instinct,’ would seem to
include the instinct of the doll as well.16
In the final draft of the letter to Casais Monteiro on the genesis of the
heteronyms, Pessoa begins the description of his childhood friends thus:
‘Ever since I was a child, it has been my tendency to create around me a
fictitious world, to surround myself with friends and acquaintances that
never existed. (I can’t be sure, of course, if they really never existed, or if
it’s me who doesn’t exist. In this matter, as in any other, we shouldn’t be
dogmatic.)’17 Certainly there is an irony in Pessoa’s distance, his refusal
to choose between the heteronyms’ ‘reality’ and his own. But the very
existence of the heteronyms, not as pseudonymous pen names or literary
‘characters,’ but as autonomous writing selves, presupposes an under-
standing of fiction (fingimento) that is radically uncertain about the sta-
tus of fiction’s opposite. With this notion, the role of fingimento expands
outward in concentric circles; to pretend, to create a space for the emer-
gence of figures (as the child does in play) is not merely the task of the
artist; it is the purpose of life.
‘The central point of my personality as an artist,’ says Pessoa in a 1931
letter to João Gaspar Simões, ‘is that I am a dramatic poet; continually,
and in everything I write, I exhibit the intimate exaltation of the poet
and the depersonalization of the playwright. I fly as another – and that is
all.’ (Vôo outro – eis tudo.)18 The description of writing as ‘flight as
another’ brings together the sublime elevation traditionally associated
with the lyric form – what Pessoa calls ‘exaltation’ – and the act of other-
ing that occurs in drama. In fact, even the word ‘as’ (which carries, in
this translation, its prepositional sense of ‘like; in the capacity, character
or role of’)19 is absent in the original Portuguese: a more literal transla-
tion of ‘vôo outro,’ one which captures the strangeness of the neologism,
might be ‘I fly other.’ This nuance is important, since without the ‘as,’
the image loses its force as simile; in his flight, the author of the drama em
44 Dana Stevens
gente is not simply like another, assuming the character or role of another;
he is other, and not any one particular ‘other,’ but the sheer advent of
otherness itself.
The definition of writing as flight also recalls the freedom that Soares
and Campos associated elsewhere with the prose form, unrestricted by
the ‘rigid laws’ of rhythmic verse (although their difficulty in escaping
those laws reminds us that this flight, like that of Icarus, may be doomed
to failure). Finally, the description of the heteronymic work as ‘flying
other’ also returns us to the world of childhood play, where a good fingi-
dor might become a bird, a plane, or even (remembering Campos’s fig-
ure of the ‘super-Homem’ as well as Pessoa’s aspiration to become the
Portuguese ‘super-Camões’) Superman.20
In the same rough draft of the letter on the heteronyms in which he
mentions his childhood aversion to dolls, Pessoa again defines himself
as, primarily, a dramatist, at least in ‘temperament.’ But this capacity for
othering is one that is contingent on impropriety and non-being, the
nada side of the tudo/nada paradox. After tracing the development of his
‘spontaneous tendency to depersonalization’ through his adolescence
and early adulthood, Pessoa writes:
Today, I have no personality: I’ve divided all my humanness among the

various authors whom I’ve served as literary executor. Today I’m the meet-
ing-place of a small humanity that belongs only to me.
This is simply the result of a dramatic temperament taken to the
extreme. My dramas, instead of being divided into acts full of action, are
divided into souls. That’s what this apparently baffling phenomenon comes
down to.
I don’t reject – in fact, I’m all for – psychiatric explanations, but it should
be understood that all higher mental activity, because it’s abnormal, is
equally subject to psychiatric interpretation. I don’t mind admitting that
I’m crazy, but I want it to be understood that my craziness is no different
from Shakespeare’s, whatever may be the comparative value of the products
that issue from the saner side of our crazed minds.21
Just as Soares compared himself to a ‘living stage,’ so Pessoa, defining

his lifelong writing project in the last year of his life, ultimately falls back
on a dramatic metaphor, and invokes his favourite negative model, ‘the
greatest failure in literature,’ Shakespeare. Rather than a ‘living stage,’
though, Pessoa imagines his place in this drama as a kind of null point,
the ‘meeting place’ (ponto de reunião) for his own ‘small humanity.’ Is
this encounter, which by definition takes place nowhere, really to be visu-

alized as a theatrical performance? Is the drama em gente really a drama?
Given Pessoa’s scorn for anything that smacks of the theatrical, the space
in which this heteronymic ‘meeting’ might take place is, to say the least,
difficult to picture. To try to imagine it, we have recourse to a very curi-
ous image that occurs in a fragmentary text by Fernando Pessoa ‘him-
self,’ where, in the midst of a discussion of genre, he suddenly digresses
into a brief meditation on the possibility of a character without a play:
Imagine that a supreme depersonalizer like Shakespeare, instead of creat-

ing the character Hamlet as part of a drama, had created him simply as a
personage, without drama. He would have written, so to speak, the drama
of a single personage, a prolonged analytical monologue. It would not be a
legitimate endeavour to search in this person for a definition of the feelings
and thoughts of Shakespeare, unless this character was a failure, for the bad
dramatist is the one who reveals himself.22
If we think back for a moment to Pessoa’s characterization of Shakes-

peare as ‘the greatest failure in literature,’ this image of Hamlet as a ‘per-
sonage without drama’ is particularly striking. Is Pessoa saying that
Shakespeare’s real success would have been to fail to provide a dramatic
framework for Hamlet as character, to allow him simply to wander in
some extra-literary, non-representational space, a theatre of the imagina-
tion, like that of the heteronyms? If Shakespeare, by engineering a dra-
matic oeuvre that privileges theatrical re-presentation over and above
the pure presentation of gente, fails to fail, does the Pessoan drama em
gente propose to redeem that failure as a success by, to paraphrase Sam-
uel Beckett, ‘failing better’?
In this connection, we might cite one of Bernardo Soares’s odder aspi-
rations in The Book of Disquiet : ‘It would be interesting to be two kings at
the same time: not the one soul of them both, but two distinct, kingly
souls.’23 This formulation reduces to comic absurdity the grandiose fan-
tasy of the Pessoan desire to ‘fly as another’ or – as voiced by the hetero-
nym Álvaro de Campos – to ‘be everything in every way’ (ser tudo de
todas as maneiras.) Throughout the drama em gente, the reader encoun-
ters this tension between the aspiration to be – to be the ‘super-Camões’
(Pessoa); to be ‘everything in every way’ (Campos); to be the founder of
‘neopaganism’ (Mora); to be ‘the discoverer of Nature’ (Caeiro); to be
‘two kings at the same time’ (Soares) – and the desire not to be, or not to
be anything in particular; the abdication from being, the radical unde-
46 Dana Stevens
cidability of the pretender (fingidor) who knows (like the late Campos of
the poem ‘Tobacco Shop’) that the ‘cart of everything’ goes down ‘the
road of nothing.’24 In the undecidable space of the heteronyms, a space
before or beyond literature that is also the condition of literature’s pos-
sibility, these seemingly opposed pairs – tudo and nada, outside and
inside, being and non-being, literature and life – are continually at play,
recreating each other over and over again as they stage the unstageable:
the emergence of something from nothing.
A stunning passage attributed to Álvaro de Campos states this very Pes-
soan paradox in the starkest possible manner:
To live is to belong to someone else. To die is to belong to someone else.

To live and to die are the same thing. But to live is to belong to someone else
on the outside, and to die is to belong to someone else on the inside. The two
things are similar, but life is the outside of death, which is why life is life and
death is death. The outside is always truer than the inside, for it is, after all,
the side we see.
Every true emotion is a lie in our intelligence, where emotion doesn’t
exist. The expression of every true emotion is therefore false. To express
ourselves is to tell what we don’t feel.
The cavalry’s horses are what make it a cavalry. Without horses, the cav-
alry would be infantry. A place is what it is because of its location. (O lugar
é que faz a localidade). Where we are is who we are. (Estar é ser.)
To pretend is to know ourselves. (Fingir é conhecer-se).25
All of the paradoxes central to the heteronymic oeuvre are here: the
inside which is also an outside (with, ultimately, an affirmation of the
façade over the interior); the truth that can only be known through false-
hood (mentira); the place that becomes what it is by having no propriety
of its own. The penultimate formulation, ‘estar é ser,’ equates the two
Portuguese verbs for ‘to be’ in order to point up, not only the impossibil-
ity of distinguishing between ‘being’ (in the sense of identity) and ‘being
there’ (in the sense of temporal existence in a certain time and place, or
in a certain state), but the absurdity of trying to define being in the first
place – which is, of course, the traditional job of philosophy.26
The final paradox, ‘to pretend is to know ourselves’ (fingir é con-
hecer-se) (whose decisive character seems pointed up by the fact that it
constitutes its own paragraph which is, also, the closing sentence of the
fragment) constitutes a kind of summation, a superparadox which seems
to contain all the preceding ones within it. With it, we arrive at a kind of
node in Pessoa’s thought, a knot which is also a limit. In answer to the
Delphic injunction ‘Man, know thyself’ comes the imperative to ‘pre-

tend’ (fingir). Judith Balso has written convincingly for a translation of
this term, vital to Pessoa’s lexicon, as fictionner in French, with its reso-
nances of the Latin fingere, to form, mould or sculpt; those meanings are
certainly there in the Portuguese as well, but to imagine fingimento pri-
marily as sculpture conveys a sense of completion, of mastery over the
‘matter’ of representation, that, as I have tried to show, is absent from (if
not the opposite of) Pessoa’s own conception of his poetic project.27 If
the fingidor is a sculptor, it is only in Soares’s sense of a ‘chiseller of inac-
curacies,’ who sculpts without having a chisel and without being a sculp-
tor.28 Oscillating between the thinking of play in the theatrical sense of
‘faking’ and the childhood sense of ‘pretending,’ I would prefer to think
of fingir as, if not ‘the untranslatable word,’ at least one whose meaning
is always, by definition, en jeu.
NOTES
1 Of course, Pessoa produced a number of dramatic works, from the early

‘static drama’ O Marinheiro to the sprawling, unfinished Fausto. But, as we
shall see later in this essay, he often distanced himself from the genre in his
critical writing, scorning theatrical representation as mere ‘trickery and
counterfeit.’
2 ‘(a child’s hand playing with cotton-reels, etc.) Eu nunca fiz senão sonhar. Tem
sido esse, e esse apenas, o sentido da minha vida. Nunca tive outra preocu-
pação verdadeira senão a minha vida [var: o meu cenário] interior ... Nunca
amei senão coisa nenhuma ... A minha mania de criar um mundo falso acom-
panha-me ainda, e só na minha morte me abandonará. Não alinho hoje nas
minhas gavetas carros de linha e peões de xadrez – com um bispo ou um cav-
alo acaso sobressaindo – mas tenho pena de não o fazer... e alinho na minha
imaginação, confortavelmente, como quem no inverno se aquece a uma
lareira, figuras que habitam, e são constantes e vivas, na minha vida interior.
Tenho um mundo de amigos dentro de mim, com vidas próprias, reais,
definidas e imperfeitas.’ Fernando Pessoa, Livro do desassossego, ed. Richard
Zenith (Lisbon: Assírio & Alvim, 1998), 120–1; The Book of Disquiet (London:
Penguin, 2001), 88. Translation slightly modified.
3 [Editors’ note] In the more recent reprints of his 1998 edition of Livro do
desassossego, as well as in the subsequent paperback edition of The Book of Dis-
quiet by Penguin Classics, Richard Zenith corrected the original transcription
of the opening sentence fragment to read ‘(our childhood’s playing with cotton-
reels, etc.).’ We were alerted to this change by Zenith while editing the volume
48 Dana Stevens
for final submission, which we gratefully acknowledge. We have chosen, how-

ever, not to ask Dana Stevens to modify the wording of the fragment along
with her corresponding analysis, since the case illustrates in a neatly synthetic
way the ongoing editorial and critical complications associated with the
extremely drawn-out and conflicted process of the publication of Pessoa’s
manuscripts.
4 Despite Pessoa’s well-documented disdain for the novel as a genre, the Dick-
ens serial was his great childhood love, about which he wrote, in the voice of
Bernardo Soares, ‘Having already read The Pickwick Papers is one of the great
tragedies of my life. (I can’t go back and read it for the first time.)’ (Ter já
lido os Pickwick Papers é uma das grandes tragédias da minha vida. [Não posso
tornar a relê-los.]) Livro do desassossego, 264; Book of Disquiet, 234.
5 ‘Only the absolute of Hegel managed to be two things at once, but in writing.
Being and non-being do not mix and meld in the sensations and laws of life;
they exclude one another, by a kind of reverse synthesis’ (Só o absoluto de
Hegel conseguiu, em páginas, ser duas coisas ao mesmo tempo. O não-ser e o
ser não se fundem e confundem nas sensações e razões da vida: excluem-se,
por uma síntese às avessas). Livro do desasossego, 364; Book of Disquiet, 336.
6 Despite this non-coincidence with themselves, Soares’s internal ‘figures’ are
able to warm him from within, and his description of their world is one of the
very rare places in The Book of Disquiet where we see a Soares who is actually
happy: ‘Some of them are full of problems, while others live the humble and
picturesque life of bohemians. Others are traveling salesmen. (To be able to
imagine myself as a traveling salesman has always been one of my great ambi-
tions – unattainable, alas!). Others live in the rural towns and villages of a
Portugal inside me; they come to the city, where I sometimes run into them,
and I open wide my arms with emotion. And when I dream this, pacing in my
room, talking out loud, gesticulating – when I dream this and picture myself
running into them, then I rejoice, I’m fulfilled, I jump up and down, my eyes
water, I throw open my arms and feel a genuine, enormous happiness’
(Alguns passam dificuldades, outros têm uma vida boémia, pitoresca e
humilde. Há outros que são caixeiros-viajantes. [Poder sonhar-me caixeiro-
viajante foi sempre uma das minhas grandes ambições – irrealizável, infeliz-
mente!]. Outros moram em aldeias e vilas lá para as fronteiras de um Portu-
gal dentro de mim; vêm à cidade, onde por acaso os encontro e reconheço,
abrindo-lhes os braços, numa atracção ... E quando sonho isto, passeando no
meu quarto, falando alto, gesticulando ... quando sonho isto, e me visiono
encontrando-os, todo eu me alegro, me realizo, me pulo, brilham-me os
olhos, abro os braços e tenho uma felicidade enorme, real). Livro do desassos-
sego, 121; The Book of Disquiet, 88.
7 Both editors of Livro do desassossego, Teresa Sobral Cunha and Richard Zenith,
choose ‘my inner life’ as the primary reading, while footnoting the other.
8 Fernando Pessoa, Livro do dessassossego, 284; Book of Disquiet, 254.
9 Richard Zenith, in his introduction to The Book of Disquietude, ed. and trans.
Richard Zenith (Manchester: Carcanet, 1991), ix.
10 The syntax of the verb esquecer (forget), as used in this passage (‘outros que já
me esqueceram’), allows for a dual meaning: the ‘others’ in question – the
early heteronym/playmates – could be read either as the subject or the object
of the act of forgetting. Another possible, if less idiomatic, translation of this
passage, then, would be ‘the others who have now forgotten me.’ I’m grateful
to Anna Klobucka for this observation.
11 ‘Tive sempre, desde criança, a necessidade de aumentar o mundo com per-
sonalidades fictícias ... Não tinha eu mais que cinco anos, e, criança isolada e
não desejando senão assim estar, já me acompanhavam algumas figuras de
meu sonho – um capitão Thibeaut, um Chevalier de Pas – e outros que já me
esqueceram, e cujo esquecimento, como a imperfeita lembrança daqueles, é
uma das grandes saudades da minha vida.
Isto parece simplesmente aquela imaginação infantil que se entretém com
a atribuição de vida a bonecos ou bonecas. Era porém mais: eu não precisava
de bonecas para conceber intensamente essas figuras. Claras e visíveis no
meu sonho constante, realidades exatamente humanas para mim, qualquer
boneco, por irreal, as estragaria. Eram gente.’ Fernando Pessoa, Obras em
prosa (Rio de Janeiro: Nova Aguilar, 1986), 92; The Selected Prose of Fernando
Pessoa, ed. and trans. Richard Zenith (New York: Grove Press, 2001), 261–2.
The word ‘gente’ has, among its many usages in Portuguese, an infantile con-
notation of ‘real’ (as opposed to ‘pretend’); in the tale of Pinocchio, for
example, the desire of the puppet to ‘become a real boy’ would be expressed
as a longing to virar gente [to turn into gente].
12 ‘uma outra figura, cujo nome já me não ocorre mas que o tinha estrangeiro
também, que era, não sei em quê, um rival de Chevalier de Pas ...’ Pessoa,
Obras em prosa, 95; Selected Prose, 255.
13 Fernando Pessoa, Páginas de estética e de teoria e crítica literárias, ed. Georg
Rudolf Lind and Jacinto do Prado Coelho, 2nd ed. (Lisbon: Ática, 1994),
114. Original in English.
14 ‘Shakespeare is the greatest failure in literature, and it is perhaps not too
much to suppose that he must have been, to a great extent, aware of it. That
vigilant mind could not have deceived itself as to this. The tragedy of his
unsuccess was but the greater by the mixture with the comedy of his success.’
Fernando Pessoa, A Centenary Pessoa, ed. Eugénio Lisboa with L.C. Taylor
(Manchester: Carcanet, 1997), 277. Original in English.
15 ‘It’s a kind of squeamishness about existing – there’s no other way to put it!’
(É uma espécie de pudor de existir – não tem outro nome!). Livro do desasos-
50 Dana Stevens
sego, 154; The Book of Disquiet, 121.

16 In this connection, it is interesting to compare the child Pessoa’s disdain for
dolls to the child Soares’s affection for his cotton-reels and chess pieces. Per-
haps the verisimilitude of the doll, its attempt to faithfully reproduce human
features, places it at a greater remove from the realm of imagination than
less figurative toys.
17 ‘Desde criança tive a tendência para criar em meu torno um mundo fictício,
de me cercar de amigos e conhecidos que nunca existiram. (Não sei, bem
entendido, se realmente não existiram, ou se sou eu que não existo. Nestas
coisas, como em todas, não devemos ser dogmáticos.)’ Pessoa, Obras em prosa,
95; Selected Prose, 254.
18 ‘O ponto central da minha personalidade como artista é que sou um poeta
dramático; tenho, continuamente, em tudo que escrevo, a exaltação íntima
do poeta e a despersonalização do dramaturgo. Vôo outro – eis tudo.’ Pessoa,
Obras em prosa, 66; A Centenary Pessoa, 249. In the same paragraph of his letter,
Pessoa discourages Simões from reading his work too psychoanalytically:
‘Desde que o crítico fixe, porém, que sou essencialmente poeta dramático,
tem a chave da minha personalidade, no que pode interessá-lo a ele, ou a
qualquer pessoa que não seja um psiquiatra que, por hipótese, o crítico não
tem que ser’ (As long as the critic bears in mind that I am essentially a dra-
matic poet, he has the key to my personality, insofar as that can interest him,
or anyone else who is not a psychiatrist, which, conceivably, the critic need
not necessarily be).
19 Webster’s Ninth Collegiate Dictionary.
20 The phrase ‘super-Camões’ [supra-Camões] comes from the 1913 article ‘Rein-
cidindo ...,’ in which the young Pessoa predicted the emergence of a ‘man of
force’ who would revolutionize the moribund literature and politics of Portu-
gal: ‘Super-Camões? The phrase is humble, restrained ... Let us say “a Shake-
speare,” and reason will serve as testimony, since the future cannot be quoted’
(Supra-Camões? A frase é humilde e acanhada ... Diga-se ‘de um Shakespeare’
e dê-se por testemunha o raciocínio, já que não é citável o futuro). Pessoa,
Obras em prosa, 377. Translation mine.
21 Pessoa, Obras em prosa, 101. Selected Prose, 263. ‘Trata-se, contudo, simples-
mente do temperamento dramático elevado ao máximo; escrevendo, em vez
de dramas em actos e acção, dramas em almas. Tão simples é, na sua substân-
cia, este fenómeno aparentemente tão confuso. Não nego – favoreço, até – a
explicação psiquiátrica, mas deve compreender-se que toda a actividade
superior do espírito, porque é anormal, é igualmente susceptível de interpre-
tação psiquiátrica. Não me custa admitir que eu seja louco, mas exijo que se
compreenda que não sou louco diferentemente de Shakespeare, qualquer
que seja o valor relativo dos produtos do lado são da nossa loucura.’ Pessoa,
Obras em prosa, 92; Selected Prose, 262.
22 ‘Suponhamos que um supremo despersonalizado como Shakespeare, em vez
de criar o personagem de Hamlet como parte de um drama, o criava como
simples personagem, sem drama. Teria escrito, por assim dizer, um drama de
uma só personagem, um monólogo prolongado e analítico. Não seria legí-
timo ir buscar a esse personagem uma definição dos sentimentos e dos pen-
samentos de Shakespeare, a não ser que o personagem fosse falhado, porque
o mau dramaturgo é o que se revela.’ Pessoa, Obras em prosa, 87. Translation
mine.
23 ‘Seria interessante poder ser dois reis ao mesmo tempo: ser não a uma alma
de eles dois, mas as duas almas.’ Livro do desassossego, 362; The Book of Disquiet,
334.
24 ‘Com o destino a conduzir a carroça de tudo pela estrada de nada.’ ‘Tabac-
aria.’ Fernando Pessoa (Campos), Obra poética (Rio de Janeiro: Nova Aguilar,
1987), 296; trans. (very slightly modified) by Richard Zenith in Pessoa & Co.:
Selected Poems (New York: Grove Press, 1998), 173.
25 Viver é pertencer a outrem. Morrer é pertencer a outrem. Viver e morrer são
a mesma coisa. Mas viver é pertencer a outrem de fora e morrer é pertencer
a outrem de dentro. As duas coisas assemelham-se, mas a vida é o lado de fora
da morte. Por isso a vida é a vida e a morte é a morte, pois o lado de fora é
sempre mais verdadeiro que o lado de dentro, tanto que é o lado de fora que
se vê. Toda a emoção verdadeira é mentira na inteligência, pois se não dá
nela. Toda a emoção verdadeira tem portanto uma expressão falsa. Exprimir-
se é dizer o que se não sente. Os cavalos da cavalaria é que formam a cava-
laria. Sem as montadas, os cavaleiros seriam peões. O lugar é que faz a local-
idade. Estar é ser. Fingir é conhecer-se.’ Pessoa, Obras em prosa, 163; Selected
Prose, 200.
26 Pessoa’s usage of the verbs for ‘to be’ (estar and ser) is consistently unusual,
often challenging the distinction between them by substituting one where
the other is expected. Thus Bernardo Soares will say ‘Estou homem’ (loosely
translatable as ‘I am being a man’) rather than ‘Sou homem’ (I am a man).
27 Judith Balso. ‘Voir ce qui se passe ici, où il n’y a personne, où il ne se passe
rien,’ (thesis for a D.E.A. at the Université de Paris VIII, 1991), made avail-
able by the author.
28 ‘burilador de inexactidões.’ Livro do desasossego, 436; Book of Disquiet, 456.
Strength, Contemplation, and Disquiet:
Towards a Corporeal Aesthetic of the
Heteronyms
al e s s a n d ra m . p i r e s
Ce que j’appelle profondeur n’est rien ou c’est ma participation à un Etre sans

restriction
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
O essencial é saber ver
Alberto Caeiro
My starting point for this discussion of the aesthetic systems elaborated

by Fernando Pessoa’s heteronyms is Álvaro de Campos’s essay ‘Aponta-
mentos para uma estética não-aristotélica’ (Notes for a Non-Aristotelian
Aesthetic).1 In his text, Campos specifies the elements that define the
ultimate goal of art and lays out the foundations of his philosophy of
artistic creation. I propose to follow some of the heteronymous author’s
steps, namely his search for an aesthetic that might embody a non-Aris-
totelian model, one relying on the idea of strength and thus contrary to
Aristotle’s notion of beauty as the ultimate objective of art: ‘Chamo
estética aristotélica à que pretende que o fim da arte é a beleza ... Creio
poder formular uma estética baseada, não na ideia de beleza, mas na de
força’ (I call Aristotelian any aesthetic with claims that the objective point
of art is beauty ... I believe it is possible to formulate an aesthetic based
not on the idea of beauty, but on that of strength).2
Since Campos’s idea of strength cannot be understood in isolation
from other aesthetic systems coexisting in Pessoa’s work, my analysis will
focus on three key concepts – strength, contemplation, and disquiet –
contextualized in a selection of writings by three of Pessoa’s alter egos: in
addition to Campos, the heteronym Alberto Caeiro and the semi-hetero-
nym Bernardo Soares. The mode of contemplation, characteristic of Cae-
iro, promotes a tendency towards stillness. The poet of nature proposes
Towards a Corporeal Aesthetic of the Heteronyms 53
an explanation of the world that appears to be tautological: ‘Cada cousa

é o que é’ (Every thing is what it is).3 While seemingly signalling a quasi-
nihilistic view of the world, in effect Caeiro embarks on a venture that
deconstructs the world without judging surrounding reality or bringing
it down to level zero, consequences that nihilism typically implies. Such is
the state of contemplation as Caeiro proposes it: man and nature are two
parts of the same. Dana Stevens (in this volume) decodes Caeiro’s notion
by affirming that it functions as one of the ‘paradoxes central to the het-
eronymic oeuvre ... the inside which is also an outside (46).’ Finally, the
notion of disquiet constitutes a key element in Bernardo Soares’s Livro do
desassossego, a work in which the author’s sensations are linked to the phe-
nomenon of a depressive restlessness, ‘a trace of a “sleep” that Soares
makes into a veritable ontological principle.’4 It is already possible to
notice, in light of the preliminary examples given above, that these three
heteronyms present jointly what I wish to call a corporeal aesthetic. Their
three leading notions of strength, contemplation, and disquiet are linked
to a bodily attitude towards the world inside and outside of the poet’s own
corporeal representations.
In his ‘Apontamentos,’ Campos explains how art exists through the
body: ‘como a arte é produzida por entes vivos, sendo pois um produto da
vida, as formas da força que se manisfestam na arte são as formas da força
que se manifestam na vida’ (because art is produced by living beings, and
therefore a product of life, the forms of force which manifest themselves
in art are the forms of force which manifest themselves in life).5 For its
analysis situating the body as a byproduct of the heteronymous poetic sys-
tems, this essay will rely on a phenomenological approach, as elaborated
by Maurice Merleau-Ponty. According to the philosopher’s view in his
Phénoménologie de la perception, one can only fully understand humankind
through his notion of ‘facticité,’ i.e., a description of one’s experience as
a body immersed in the world, in which the body functions as a means
that allows perception to evolve into knowledge of oneself and of others.
I develop my analysis of the concepts central to the work of the three het-
eronyms following Merleau-Ponty’s notion according to which man is
plunged into the world, not detached from it: ‘il n’y a pas d’homme
intérieur, l’homme est au monde, c’est dans le monde qu’il se connaît.
Quand je reviens à moi à partir du dogmatisme de sens commun ou du
dogmatisme de la science, je trouve non pas un foyer de vérité intrin-
sèque, mais un sujet voué au monde.’6
A powerful aesthetic display of his philosophy of art, Campos’s ‘Apon-
tamentos para uma estética não-aristotélica’ renders an account of life
intricately entangled with art and subjugated by it: ‘A arte ... é antes de
54 Alessandra M. Pires
tudo, um esforço para dominar os outros’ (art ... is above all, an attempt to
dominate others).7 An Aristotelian aesthetic would hold beauty to be one of
the key concepts that the writer must take into account; Aristotle states,
for instance, that beauty is a matter of size and order and that beauty is
proper to art that imitates nature.8 Campos, on the contrary, asserts that
life, not art, embodies beauty, and therefore should represent the final
achievement for an artist. Moreover, his writings often experiment with
the conceptual binary of integration and disintegration, considered as
the pure manifestation of life itself and reflected as the focus of his ‘new
aesthetic,’ for, according to him, there is no place for art outside of life
and everything that one intends to express in an artistic or creative act
may be contained within life’s scope: ‘A arte, para mim, é, como toda a
actividade, um indício de força, ou energia ... Ora, a força vital é dupla, de
integração e de desintegração ... Sem a coexistência e equilíbrio destas
duas forças não há vida, pois a pura integração é a ausência da vida e a
pura desintegração é a morte.’ (Art, as far as I’m concerned, is, like all
activity, a sign of force, or energy ... But the vital force is dual, integrative
and disintegrative ... Without the coexistence and equilibrium of those
two forces life is impossible, since pure integration is the absence of life,
and pure disintegration is death.)9
Further on, Campos explains that while Aristotle’s rationale is to move
from the particular to the general, in his aesthetic one moves from the
general to the particular. From the vast domain of life one embarks on a
search for details. The focus on the particular is opposed to a collective
conformity that seeks a common denominator in a grouping of individ-
uals: ‘ao contrário da estética aristotélica, que exige que o indivíduo gen-
eralize ou humanize a sua sensibilidade, necessariamente particular e
pessoal, nesta teoria o percurso indicado é inverso: é o geral que deve ser
particularizado, o humano que se deve pessoalizar ...’ (contrary to Aris-
totelian aesthetic, which requires that the individual generalize or
humanize his necessarily specific and personal sensibility, in this theory
the charted route is the opposite: it is the general which must be made
specific, the human which must be individualized).10
In the Aristotelian axiom one encounters a generalization of sensibil-
ity, a proposition that departs from the artistic project per se, whereas in
Campos’s aesthetic priority is given to the particular rather than to the
general. From where he stands, what is at stake in art is a unique sensibil-
ity: ‘Ora a arte, como é feita por se sentir e para se sentir – sem o que seria
ciência ou propaganda – baseia-se na sensibilidade. A sensibilidade é pois
a vida da arte’ (And since art comes about because of feeling, and for the
purpose of feeling – without which it would be either science or propa-

ganda – it is based on sensibility. Sensibility, therefore, is the life of art).11
Thus, Campos’s proposal situates life at the epicentre of the artist’s mind,
subsuming all other artistic concerns: ‘Dentro da sensibilidade, portanto,
é que tem que haver a acção e a reacção que fazem a arte viver, a desin-
tegração e a integração que, equilibrando-se, lhe dão vida’ (It is within
sensibility, therefore, that the action and the reaction which make art
alive must take place, the disintegration and integration, which, in a state
of equilibrium, give it life).12 Aesthetic tension is therefore represented
by the idea of life according to Álvaro de Campos and strength, its central
principle, is defined by the poet as ‘força no seu sentido abstrato e cientí-
fico; porque se fosse no vulgar, tratar-se-ia, de certa maneira, apenas de
uma forma disfarçada de beleza’ (strength ... in its abstract and scientific
sense; because if it were to be taken in the ordinary sense, it would be, in
a way, merely a disguised form of beauty).13 In Campos’s aesthetic,
perfection does not dictate artistic experience; art becomes tension and
continuous debate. Strength is comprehended, in this context, by the
simultaneous intervention of the twin notions of integration and disinte-
gration: bodies exist on this permanent edge that results from the tension
between them referred to by Campos. His explanation anticipates Mer-
leau-Ponty’s formulation in which the body is fully and literally compara-
ble to the work of art: ‘Ce n’est pas à l’objet physique que le corps peut
être comparé, mais plutôt à l’oeuvre d’art ... Il [le corps] est un noeud de
significations vivantes.’14 In order to sustain such a complex conjunction
of living meanings, the binary integration/disintegration must coexist in
a constant and automatized state of tension; if any of its terms prevailed
conclusively, the result would be destruction: ‘Como estas forças essen-
cialmente se opõem e se equilibram para haver, e enquanto há, vida, a
vida é uma acção acompanhada automática e intrinsecamente da reacção
correspondente. E é no automatismo da reacção que reside o fenómeno
específico da vida’ (And because these forces are essentially opposed and
balance each other out in order for life to exist, while it does so, life is an
action accompanied, automatically and intrinsically, by the correspond-
ing reaction. And it is in the automatic nature of the reaction that resides
the specific phenomenon of life).15 The unceasing reactive process estab-
lishes tension between opposing forces as a condition sine qua non for
life to continue to generate itself.
Moreover, as stated above, the definition of art in Campos’s aesthetic
relies also on a corresponding tension between the individual and the
human: we, as human beings, are simultaneously equal and different
from one another. It is, therefore, this very disjunction, a blurring of the
boundaries, that, at the very least, captures and establishes some of the
real meaning of art’s undertaking. According to the Aristotelian model,
the work of art captures the viewer’s gaze effectively in order to be dis-
posed of in what is merely a pleasing moment for the senses; Aristotelian
aesthetic experience relies thus on a transformation of the work of art
into an object of contemplation. In Campos’s aesthetic, the work of art
endeavours to enrapture rather than to capture. Although his essay does
not address directly the Aristotelian transformation of art into a serene,
pleasant, and therefore amorphous object, his aesthetic is an explicit
quest first to dominate and secondly to master sensibility. He states that
‘o artista não-aristotélico subordina tudo à sua sensibilidade, converte
tudo em substância de sensibilidade, para assim, tornando a sua sensibil-
idade abstracta como a inteligência ... se tornar um foco emissor abstracto
sensível que force os outros, queiram eles ou não, a sentir o que ele sen-
tiu, que os domine pela força inexplicada ...’ (the non-Aristotelian artist
subordinates everything to his sensibility, converts everything into a mat-
ter of sensibility, in order that, in rendering his sensibility abstract like
intelligence ... he may become an abstract, sensitive, emitting source, forcing
others, whether they wish it or not, to feel what he has felt, dominating
them through inexplicable force ...).16 These latter definitions contrib-
ute to an idea of radical strength that corroborates another aspect of
Campos’s aesthetic, namely, the notion that art is in fact a metaphysics in
progress. Campos’s life- and art-sustaining tension of abstract forces is
mirrored in certain aspects of Alberto Caeiro’s antimetaphysics, but iron-
ically so, since, in Caeiro’s work, metaphysics appears to function as a
movement against life. Caeiro rejects any metaphysical system by insist-
ing on the prevalence of the senses (‘Eu não tenho filosofia: tenho sen-
tidos’ [I have no philosophy, I have senses])17 and claiming that ‘há
metafísica bastante em não pensar em nada’ (to not think of anything is
metaphysics enough).18 By contrast, in Campos’s ‘Passagem das horas’
or ‘Ode triunfal,’ it is remarkable how an aesthetic of tension that sus-
tains the poems affirms Campos’s authorship of them and illuminates
the core of his theory of simultaneous integration and disintegration:
‘Sentir tudo de todas as maneiras, / Ter todas as opiniões, / Ser sincero
contradizendo-se a cada minuto, / Desagradar a si próprio pela plena
liberalidade de espírito, / E amar as coisas como Deus’ (To feel every-
thing in every way, / To hold all opinions / To be sincere contradicting
oneself every minute, / To annoy oneself with absolute open-minded-
ness, / And to love things just like God).19 The internal contradictions
expose the flesh of Campos’s disintegration, his corporeal engagement

in life: ‘Je m’engage avec mon corps parmi les choses, elles coexistent
avec moi comme sujet incarné.’20
While Campos’s furious tone and avowed lack of coherence may dis-
concert the reader, nevertheless it is this very lack of internal coherence
that defines Campos’s work. My earlier allusion to Caeiro raises the ques-
tion of whether a common trait exists between ‘Master’ Caeiro and his
pseudodisciple Campos. Both heteronyms share a modus vivendi based
on the concept of strength: a dialectic of balance/imbalance translates
their idea of life, which is grounded in strength itself. Arguably, Caeiro’s
works attest to a state of tension equal to that of Campos’s. Caeiro’s
strength is articulated in his timeless, constantly renewed gaze whose
movement towards the world discloses the truth of an incessantly differ-
entiated object. Paradoxically, given Caeiro’s disregard for all philosoph-
ical movements, what is renewed in his work is the act of ‘philosophical
astonishment’ per se, a pre-Socratic stance through which new worlds,
new realities, and new concepts reveal themselves to the philosopher.
Pre-Socratic inspiration imposes itself on Caeiro’s train of thought, as in
his recognition of the elements of nature as fully sufficient components
of reality.21 Caeiro formulates a vision of the organic fullness of the
world:
A espantosa realidade das cousas

É a minha descoberta de todos os dias.
Cada cousa é o que é,
E é difícil explicar a alguém quanto isso me alegra,
E quanto isso me basta.
Basta existir para se ser completo
(The amazing reality of things

Is my everyday discovery.
Everything is what it is,
And it is hard to explain to anyone how glad that makes me,
And how it is enough for me.
To exist is enough to be fulfilled).22
The ability to experience ‘amazement’ in the face of mundane activities

is ceaselessly expressed in Caeiro’s body of work. Therefore, although in
one sense Caeiro’s aesthetic project relies on a perspective that is the
extreme opposite of Campos’s, it is also possible to recognize in Campos’s
antimetaphysics of tension a revisiting of Caeiro’s poetics and epistemol-

ogy of astonishment.
The poetics of tension in Caeiro’s poems finds its answers in a system
that incorporates nature in conjunction with poetry. Caeiro’s theory of
nature as tension presents one goal: to exhale and spread life as an
intrinsic movement within itself. Using a Barthesian tautology to support
the assertion that ‘beauty is what it is,’ one recognizes Caeiro’s claim that
beauty becomes whatever one wishes to transform it into. Beauty does
not embody the simple thought of it. Beauty can only be.23 For Caeiro,
beauty is equal to one truth: the truth that is corporeally visible. Beauty
becomes, therefore, what one can touch, hear, and see: ‘Por isso quando
num dia de calor / Me sinto triste de gozá-lo tanto, / E me deito ao com-
prido na erva, / E fecho os olhos quentes, / Sinto todo o meu corpo dei-
tado na realidade, / Sei a verdade e sou feliz.’ (That is why on a hot day /
When I enjoy it so much I feel sad, / And I lie down in the grass / And
close my warm eyes, / Then I feel my whole body lying down in reality, /
I know the truth and I’m happy).24 Caeiro’s notion of peaceful medita-
tion unveils itself in the line ‘Sinto todo o meu corpo deitado na real-
idade,’ since this is the breakthrough moment at which the reader
realizes the fusion between the intrinsic reality of things and its creator
(the poet). As Merleau-Ponty has pointed out, ‘le monde est cela que
nous percevons.’25 The idea that one need not pursue a metaphysical
unfolding proves to be real in Caeiro’s aesthetic, since the poet’s objec-
tives do not involve a quest for a meaning. Again in Merleau-Ponty’s
words, ‘qu’il s’agisse du corps d’autrui ou de mon propre corps, je n’ai
pas d’autre moyen de connaître le corps humain que de le vivre.’26 In
the body alone repose all the answers. Within the limits of the bodily
senses, the senses of poetry coexist. One sense unfolds into another, pro-
moting the internal definition of a poetics that does not wish to be
defined by other means than itself. Aporetic to the critic’s eye, perhaps,
it is nonetheless full of meanings in the realm of its own body, not distant
from the body of the poet who declares himself pregnant with nature:
O meu olhar é nítido como um girassol.

...
Creio no mundo como num malmequer,
Porque o vejo. Mas não penso nele
(My gaze is clear like a sunflower.

...
I believe in the world as in a daisy,

Because I see it. But I don’t think about it).27
While mundane elements permeate Caeiro’s poems, in Campos’s

seemingly very different world an analogous quest occupies the poet.
Both heteronymous poetics envision a reassigning that operates contrary
to a unifying Cartesian framework, which defines beauty according to a
number of categorical patterns and architectonic symmetries. For Cae-
iro and Campos, beauty resides in the world in such a way that those who
are exposed to it will apprehend it; more specifically, it is visible to any-
one who acknowledges its natural tension. Campos has coined the fol-
lowing formulation that confirms the aesthetic kinship between the two
heteronyms: ‘a sensibilidade é a vida da arte’ (sensibility is the life of
art).28 Caeiro expresses his antimetaphysical project in a similar pro-
posal; his quest brings forth a conception of art that is adverse to
thought, an art opposed to the equations that may exist behind the
words: ‘O espelho reflecte certo; não erra porque não pensa. / Pensar é
essencialmente errar. Errar é essencialmente estar cego e surdo’ (The
mirror reflects rightly; it does not err because it does not think. / To
think is essentially to err. / To err is essentially to be blind and deaf).29
Moreover, Caeiro considers everything that is to be sensation, a stance
opposed to the philosophical axioms dominant in the Western world,
especially since the advent of Descartes’ scientific dualism.30 Whereas for
Caeiro art remains complementary to the poet’s modus vivendi, it can-
not be dissociated from his being; art is, consequently, a product of his
own Weltanschauung. In Campos’s poetry, on the other hand, every-
thing assumes a virtual imbalance, as illustrated by the opposition
between the poet’s disillusionment and the monotony of the world con-
veyed in ‘Tabacaria’: ‘Janelas do meu quarto, / Do meu quarto de um
dos milhões do mundo que ninguém sabe quem é / (E se soubessem
quem é, o que saberiam?) / Dais para o mistério de uma rua cruzada
constantemente por gente, / Para uma rua inacessível a todos os pensa-
mentos, / Real, impossivelmente real, certa, desconhecidamente certa’
(Windows of my room, / The room of one of the world’s millions
nobody knows / (And if they knew me, what would they know?) / You
open onto the mystery of a street continually crossed by people, / A
street inaccessible to any and every thought, / Real, impossibly real, cer-
tain, unknowingly certain).31
The imbalance, which has appeared in a hyperbolic form in Campos’s
‘Ode triunfal,’ proves to be a permanent accessory in ‘Tabacaria.’ A
sense of monotony affects Campos’s own self and body, a feature not
altogether common in his earlier poetry. As a consequence, Campos
even exalts the banality of daily events (‘E continuo fumando, /
Enquanto o Destino mo conceder, continuarei fumando’ [And (I) keep
smoking. / As long as Destiny permits, I’ll keep smoking]), or, in a par-
enthetical aside, he exalts a potentially more cheerful life that could
result from his marrying into a working-class family: ‘(Se eu casasse com
a filha da minha lavadeira / Talvez fosse feliz.)’ (If I married my wash-
woman’s daughter / Perhaps I would be happy.)32
As these verses make the reader realize, ‘Tabacaria’ presents a less
troubled version of the aesthetic of strength proposed by Campos in his
‘Apontamentos.’ Daily events surround the poet, only to unfold them-
selves into his distinctly unpassionate desire for worldly things. A ciga-
rette becomes the emblem of a philosophical project that is similar to
Caeiro’s. Instead of thinking about the world, Campos smokes and feels
the world. He ceases to desire the world for a brief moment only while a
fusion occurs between his smoking (his body) and his being in the
world. The metaphysical unfolding happens as if Campos were aware of
his capacity for duplication: he is double, like his author Fernando Pes-
soa, and double in the same manner in which the character inherent in
his poetry is also double. He looks from within and criticizes himself:
‘Pudesse eu comer chocolates com a mesma verdade com que comes!’
(If only I could eat chocolates with the same truth as you!).33 Campos’s
self-criticism points to his resentment at his inability to act in an unself-
conscious manner. Although he longs for Caeiro’s simplicity, he never-
theless appears unable to reproduce it in the radical fashion that
Caeiro’s poems embody. In Campos, there is a constant temptation
towards the chaos and confusion of the mundane aspects of life. Pro-
ceeding, along with Campos, from the assumption that ambiguity exists,
one realizes that metaphysics is unavoidable for human beings, who are
inevitably given to questioning; yet, the will to abandon all questioning
also appears, almost as an aporetic formulation, in the heteronym’s
poetics. In the end, a harsh bitterness prevails, a feeling that emanates
from the poet’s realization of the omnipresence of doubt. In spite of his
desire to live according to Caeiro’s premises, he experiences a constant
dichotomy between the opaque and the clear and thus proves his inabil-
ity to absorb the teachings of his master. The constant oscillation
between clarity and confusion becomes Campos’s reality: ‘Conquistamos
todo o mundo antes de nos levantar da cama; / Mas acordamos e ele é
opaco, / Levantamo-nos e ele é alheio’ (We conquer the whole world
before getting out of bed, / But we wake up and it’s hazy, / We get up
and it’s alien).34
Caeiro presents another version of this interpretation of reality: a
poetics of visibility. Everything is visible and transparent in Caeiro’s
poems. His world suffers a brutal transformation: it becomes whole,
abundant. This observation is best illuminated by Merleau-Ponty, who in
his essay on vision in painting defines the meaning of ‘seeing’ through
the eyes of the painter. He describes how the painter is fully immersed in
a world where everything that is is vision. Vision appears so clear and
bright that one realizes that what really matters in the world is, in fact,
visibility. As a result, the painter experiences a state of near-madness as
regards the perception of things, whereby only someone who has
achieved a state of full vision is able to perceive the world: ‘le monde du
peintre est un monde visible, rien que visible, un monde presque fou,
puisqu’il est complet n’étant cependant que partiel.’35 This description
of the painter who envisages the world as at the same time complete and
fragmentary approximates Caeiro’s declaration of an equivalent predic-
ament of nature: ‘A Natureza é partes sem um todo’ (Nature is parts
without a whole). Caeiro prefaces this line with an explanation: ‘Vi que
não há Natureza, / ... / Que há rios e pedras, / Mas que não há um todo
a que isso pertença’ (I saw that there is no Nature, / ... / That there are
hills, valleys and plains, / But that there is no whole to which all this
belongs).36
Caeiro defines nature as a reality, an idea that exists but is nowhere to
be grasped, and that, in a somewhat commonplace oxymoron, involves
death and life as parts of a whole. Caeiro therefore constructs a world
that is part of his existence as a creator. Like the painter Cézanne, scruti-
nized in Merleau-Ponty’s essay, Caeiro suggests that the world and his
work are natural extensions of his own being.37 If the whole does not
exist as a reality, it exists through the fragmented parts that complement
one another. Poetry belongs among the fragments that constitute the
whole being of a poet. Just as, according to Merleau-Ponty, for Cézanne
the brush is an extension of the painter’s body, for Caeiro poetry is a part
of his self: ‘On ne voit pas comment un Esprit pourrait peindre. C’est en
prêtant son corps au monde que le peintre change le monde en pein-
ture ... il faut retrouver le corps opérant et actuel.’38 Caeiro’s ‘operating
and virtual’ body is in harmony with his poetry, since (as noted above)
his is a poetry that plunges the poet into the mundane. The basic princi-
ples of Caeiro’s work would not exist without his living, as much as the
poet would not exist without the things that surround him. Caeiro’s aver-
sion to thinking suggests a poetry coherent with everything that exists in

nature. In this sense, one can infer that Caeiro’s God also equals nature,
which equals poetry, which equals human beings themselves: ‘Sejamos
simples e calmos, / como os regatos e as árvores’ (Let’s be calm and sim-
ple, / Like brooks and trees).39 Within the context of this discussion, it
seems legitimate to question Caeiro’s philosophical principles. What
would be the purpose of removing one’s world from the search for
meaning? The wholeness of poetry’s existence does not suffice to sup-
port a system of countermetaphysics. The challenge resides in the total
suppression of a metaphysical conception of the world that appears to
take place in his work. Could Caeiro’s poetry really be antimetaphysical
altogether?
Merleau-Ponty’s observation concerning an operant and virtual body
may also apply, on another level, to the poet of fragmentation and urban
life, Álvaro de Campos. In Campos’s poems, there is another dualistic
threat: the poet perceives himself as susceptible to fracture and realizes
that a dichotomy exists between his thinking and his acting, although his
proposal for a poetic system demonstrates an openness to the notion of
pure sensation: ‘Vi todas as coisas, e maravilhei-me de tudo, / Mas tudo
ou sobrou ou foi pouco – não sei qual – e eu sofri. / Vivi todas as
emoções, todos os pensamentos, todos os gestos’ (I’ve seen all things,
and marveled at them all, / But it was too much or too little – I’m not
sure which – and I suffered. / I’ve lived every emotion, every thought,
every gesture).40 An impending temptation to fall into metaphysics pre-
vails, above all, in what concerns the aspects of mundane living that sur-
round Campos. In ‘Tabacaria,’ there is no place for the banality of
things. The constant swinging between the mundane and the metaphys-
ical reveals the poet’s permanent confusion: ‘Estou hoje dividido entre a
lealdade que devo / À Tabacaria do outro lado da rua, como coisa real
por fora, / E à sensação de que tudo é sonho, como coisa real por den-
tro’ (Today I’m torn between the loyalty I owe / To the outward reality of
the Tobacco Shop across the street / And to the inward reality of my feel-
ing that everything is a dream).41
Campos’s poetry reveals that the body definitely belongs to the world,
and in particular to the body of modernity, as theorized by Walter Ben-
jamin, which involves an auraless poet and suggests a poetry written in
the same auraless vein.42 There is, in Álvaro de Campos, no mediation
between the poet and his knowledge through any kind of a Platonic idea.
What exists is an urban ethics, in which there is no speculation at all
regarding ideas; the main concern of the poet is to live those ideas. Thus,
metaphysics in Campos evolves as a mere consequence of being ‘mal dis-

posto’ (indisposed).
Alain Badiou claims in his analysis of Campos and Caeiro that both
heteronyms belong to the anti-Platonic movement. According to the
critic, Pessoa does not accept the assertion that poetry belongs to remi-
niscence, that it speaks from an ideal place which is not the hic et nunc.
On the contrary, Badiou states that Pessoa’s poetry is ‘la pensée elle-même,
telle quelle.’43 Nonetheless, while in Caeiro the refusal of thinking
embodies coherence and univocity, Campos finds strength in the eternal
oscillation between the integrity of life and the integrity of poetry. He
finds strength in his own effort to overcome univocity: ‘Multipliquei-me,
para me sentir, / Para me sentir, precisei sentir tudo, / Transbordei, não
fiz senão extravasar-me, / Despi-me, entreguei-me, / E há em cada canto
da minha alma um altar a um deus diferente’ (I multiplied myself to feel
myself, / To feel myself I had to feel everything, / I overflowed, I did
nothing but spill out, / I undressed, I yielded, / And in each corner of
my soul there’s an altar to a different god).44
Such a proliferation of beings and lives generates a fragmentation in
the poet’s own self, which is reflected in his thoughts. Affirmations of the
superiority of sensations become concomitant with expressions of dis-
persion and doubt: ‘Viro todos os dias todas as esquinas de todas as
ruas, / E sempre que estou pensando numa coisa, estou pensando
noutra’ (I turn every corner of every street every day, / And whenever
I’m thinking of one thing, I’m thinking of another).45 The question is
how to embrace this being everywhere. The two heteronyms and the
semi-heteronym Soares present the puzzle and the response differently:
what tension represents in Campos and univocity in Caeiro translates
into disquiet in the faded semi-heteronym Bernardo Soares. Disquiet
becomes therefore a fundamental aspect of the third of Pessoa’s alter
egos to be considered here, he who wants to be read as an open book
(and his is a book that has remained open despite its author’s will
towards nothingness). Bernardo Soares embodies the character of the
bookkeeper, which contrasts with the character of the patrão Vasques,
who is a personification of the man of action; however, it is through
Vasques that one reads, in fact, the train of thought of the prose poet
Soares. As Soares declares: ‘Todos temos o patrão Vasques, para uns
visível, para outros invisível ... Prefiro o Vasques homem meu patrão, que
é mais tratável, nas horas difíceis, que todos os patrões abstractos do
mundo’ (We all have a Vasques who’s the boss – visible for some of us,
invisible for others ... For my boss I prefer the man named Vasques, who
in difficult moments is easier to deal with than all the abstract bosses in
the world).46 The patrão Vasques conducts and embodies the work and
therefore is homologous with the very definition of poetics. He can be
compared to the text itself, in that he possesses a more tangible reality, as
both a reflex of the world and of the mentality of Pessoa’s semi-hetero-
nym. Moreover, Vasques represents life through his embodiment of the
‘man of action.’ Thus, Soares moves beyond the dichotomy of life vs.
poetry, established by Caeiro, when he affirms clearly: ‘O patrão Vasques
é a Vida. A Vida, monótona e necessária, mandante e desconhecida. Este
homem banal representa a banalidade da Vida’ (Vasques my boss is Life
– monotonous and necessary, imperious and inscrutable Life. This banal
man represents the banality of Life).47
Judith Balso has suggested that Soares’s Book of Disquiet reflects an anti-
metaphysics.48 This observation might be taken to comment on a ten-
dency towards mediocrity that is in evidence in the book, a will towards
spending only the average kind of effort in life. The lines quoted above
indicate that Pessoa has withheld from Soares the possibility of becom-
ing extraordinary. However, the distinction between Soares and the
other heteronyms lies in their relationship to the act of writing itself. In
fact, writing is the only activity that distinguishes Soares from other
human beings; it defines his way of being in the world: ‘La seule chose ...
qui le distingue du garçon de courses et de la couturière, est de savoir
écrire.’49 This apparently minor distinction becomes the main defining
trait of Soares’s text: the writer’s self is on display as a disquieted subject
that does not cease to question himself and to confront himself: ‘Pessoa
ne cesse de confronter le sujet (Soares) avec la question de sa propre
stature.’50 At the point of such a confrontation lies the question of the
self as a creator who does not wish to split apart from the real world. The
writer of Livro desires to be in harmony with what is outside and with
what is inside, in his inner self: ‘de faire de l’écriture, de la réalité, un
complément naturel de l’âme.’51 Jean Bessière remarks that the Livro do
desassossego constantly deals with dualities, among which particular atten-
tion is given by Soares to life and death, as well as to reality and fiction, as
active and complementary participants in the creative process.
Existence, however, remains a game of fleeing and what constitutes
life becomes, in fact, this ceaseless escaping, the passage of minutes and
the nostalgia for an unresolved future perfect. One can assume, there-
fore, that the writer exists as a mode, a mode that may be observed in
Soares’s construction of the borderline man as what Bessière terms the
‘homme des interstices, homme intermédiaire.’52 It is in the placing of
himself as an intermediate man that Bernardo Soares resembles Álvaro

de Campos; the two heteronyms share their eternally floating existential
doubt that does not allow for any resolution of the poet’s angst. As Rob-
ert Bréchon has noted in his biography of Pessoa, especially after 1932
Soares ‘parece-se cada vez mais com Campos. Resumindo, no que resta
da “coterie” de outrora ... é agora Campos que dá o tom, e esse tom é
cada vez mais fúnebre’ (increasingly resembles Campos. To sum up, in
what remains of the heteronymous ‘coterie’ ... it is now Campos who sets
the tone and the tone is becoming more and more mournful).53 At the
same time, there is a major difference between the two heteronyms:
Soares’s tendency towards a constant state of mediocrity, which is by no
means shared by Campos. Where Campos’s writings, even in his later
years, testify to an affirmation of an explosive and vital personality, in
Soares we witness a deeply entrenched, ongoing process of emptying the
self, a perpetual movement towards nothingness.
According to Bréchon, Soares personifies the ‘man without qualities’
himself. His writings are based on the principle of subtraction, whereas
in Campos it is the process of ‘multiplication’ that prevails. Soares does
not seem to be too distant from Pessoa ‘himself,’ although he is not Pes-
soa either; he is the nothingness that Pessoa discovers in his self when-
ever he stops pretending.54 As such, he has no defined identity; he is an
emptied alter ego of his orthonym Fernando Pessoa. Soares himself com-
ments on his disembodied state of quasi-existence: ‘Em mim sempre
menor foi a intensidade das sensações que a intensidade da consciência
delas’ (The intensity of my sensations has always been less than the inten-
sity of my awareness of them).55 He also recognizes his ineptitude with
regard to the ordinary business of living: ‘Sou tão inerte, tão pobrezinho,
tão falho de gestos e actos’ (I’m so listless, so pathetic, so short on ges-
tures and acts).56 The discourse of Livro recurrently conveys Soares’s
weary attitude towards life and his acceptance of the limitations of his
own existence; his proposed modus vivendi arises from his willingly
embraced state of self-isolation: ‘O isolamento talhou-me à sua imagem e
semelhança’ (Isolation has carved in me its image and likeness).57
The contrast that Soares presents in regard to Álvaro de Campos is so
striking because the latter heteronym expresses a radical movement
towards life, a constant tension that does not cease, regardless of his
emotional state of the moment. Soares, on the other hand, places his self
between life and mediocrity and does not attempt to bridge the two
realms. Campos demonstrates a connection to his own madness, which is
expressed by his ability to accept his self and to enjoy his demanding
character. Campos’s proposition recalls that of Soares by contrasting so

strongly with it, while at the same time signalling a degree of commonal-
ity: ‘O mundo é para quem nasce para o conquistar / E não para quem
sonha que pode conquistá-lo, ainda que tenha razão. / Tenho sonhado
mais que o que Napoleão fez. / ... / Mas sou, e talvez serei sempre, o da
mansarda’ (The world is for those born to conquer it, / Not for those
who dream they can conquer it, even if they’re right. / I’ve done more in
dreams than Napoleon. / ... / But I am, and perhaps will always be, the
man in the garret).58 While both heteronyms acknowledge their shared
identity as ‘the man in the garret,’ Campos, unlike Soares, leans towards
a ludic and ironic solution in confronting his fate.
Bernardo Soares, the ‘man without qualities,’ embodies a more static
and a less verbose attitude than Campos. Thus it is pertinent to ask how
his defining trait of disquiet becomes reconciled with stagnation, given
that the state of disquiet would seem to figure as the exact opposite of
Soares’s predicament of existential paralysis. José Gil explains that it is
Soares’s need for ‘absurd’ feelings that leads to the fracture inside the
system construed by the semi-heteronym.59 Whenever there is stagna-
tion, the poet’s disquiet seems, absurdly, to thrive. Every joy conveys a
consequence of the utopian possession of everything Soares would like
to possess. Soares cultivates a nostalgia for what he has never achieved or
completed, a desire for impossible things, a bitterness at not being the
Other.
Regarding Soares’s characteristics, Gil reminds the reader that the
semi-heteronym does not have a face: he is constantly hidden behind the
fog of his thoughts. The only face Soares will ever display is that of some-
one who is anonymous and remains lost in the shadow of his subjectivity.
His identity as a man without qualities is reflected in his quality-less vis-
age: ‘A minha cara magra e inexpressiva nem tem inteligência, nem
intensidade, nem qualquer coisa, seja o que for ...’ (My gaunt and inex-
pressive face has no intelligence or intensity or anything else ...).60 The
amorphous appearance that defines the writer belongs to what Gil has
called ‘la grisaille,’ a Weltanschauung omnipresent in Soares’s rapport
with life.61 Everything that pertains to Soares’s life is grey, neutral, amor-
phous, tedious, and anguished: the grey days, the rain, his work as a
bookkeeper, and above all his insomnia. Insomnia has been pointed out
by some critics as the fundamental trait of the Livro do desassossego. Anto-
nio Tabucchi has called Soares’s text the ‘book of insomnia’ since the
writer’s declared lack of rest and sleep contribute to the permanent sen-
sation of opacity, a foggy condition that mirrors Soares’s conception of
his literary work.62 Contrasting Caeiro’s effortless viewing with Soares’s

impaired, ‘foggy’ ability to envisage things, Gil remarks: ‘En fait, c’est la
brume qui empêche la vision de Soares de devenir la pure vision de Cae-
iro.’63 A web of such elements of narrative characterization brings into
existence the world according to Bernardo Soares: a vertiginous creation
of an insomniac.
In analysing the three dominant aspects that underlie the heterony-
mous aesthetic of Fernando Pessoa, it is necessary to acknowledge differ-
ences arising within this threefold project. The two heteronyms and the
semi-heteronym discussed here articulate their aesthetic proposals by
being aware of the presence of the Other and by simultaneously disre-
garding otherness. Strength, contemplation, and disquiet may be
regarded as parts of a whole that is permanently in motion; parts that
overlap by means of distinctions or distance; parts that become an exten-
sion of Pessoa’s poetics in the manner of the painter’s brush becoming
part of his own body in Merleau-Ponty’s reading of Cézanne. In Álvaro
de Campos, the concept of strength attests to an aesthetic coherent with
contemporary urban modernity and illustrative of the vitality and
tension that coexist in his adopted scenario of life. In Alberto Caeiro, we
witness a return to a pagan ideal of existence, which envelops the heter-
onym’s contemplative modus vivendi. Caeiro reminds the reader of the
corporeality of poetry, anticipating and embodying Merleau-Ponty’s phe-
nomenological declaration of principles: ‘je ne suis pas devant mon
corps, je suis dans mon corps, ou plutôt je suis mon corps.’64 The poet’s
body retains all the intensity of Caeiro’s aesthetic by just being in conjunc-
tion with his work. Finally, Bernardo Soares and his notion of disquiet
seem to be associated with the symbolist, decadent, and elitist implica-
tions of the fin-de-siècle aesthetic model. The turn-of-the-century pathos
never abandons Soares’s aesthetic; the common ground he shares with
Caeiro’s and Campos’s projects remains the tangibility of the writing
body, which in Soares is represented by the ennui and mal de vivre typical
of the historical time frame to which he implicitly regresses. If we recall,
however, the fragmented presentation of the Book of Disquiet and its mul-
tiple reading ouvertures, we may classify Bernardo Soares as the one
among Pessoa’s heteronyms who has the most precise pre-vision of what
would become the dominant literary adventure of the twentieth century,
an experience of fragmentation coupled with a persistent movement
towards deconstruction. Despite obvious differences among the models
of excessive vitality (Campos), peaceful corporeal awareness (Caeiro),
and painful translation of the body into prose (Soares), their points of
contact remain visible to the reader, if often between the lines of the web
of ideas arising at various crossroads of the heteronymous macrotext.
There, Fernando Pessoa’s ‘authors’ continue at play in a field that does
not cease to open new vistas to readers willing to undertake a journey
through the poet’s massive and labyrinthine body of work.
NOTES
1 Pessoa (Campos), ‘Apontamentos para uma estética não-aristotélica,’ in

Fernando Pessoa, Crítica: Ensaios, artigos e entrevistas, ed. Fernando Cabral
Martins (Lisbon: Assírio & Alvim, 1999), 236–45. The essay was originally
published in issues 3 and 4 of Athena (December 1924 and January 1925).
2 Pessoa (Campos), ‘Apontamentos,’ 236–7; ‘Notes for a Non-Aristotelian Aes-
thetic,’ trans. Bernard McGuirk and Maria Manuel Lisboa in A Centenary Pes-
soa, ed. Eugénio Lisboa with L.C. Taylor (Manchester: Carcanet, 1997), 254.
3 Pessoa (Caeiro), ‘A espantosa realidade das cousas,’ in Fernando Pessoa,
Obra poética, ed. Maria Aliete Galhoz (Rio de Janeiro: Nova Aguilar, 1987),
168. ‘The startling reality of things,’ in Poems of Fernando Pessoa, trans. and ed.
Edwin Honig and Susan Brown (New York: Ecco Press, 1986), 26.
4 Blake Strawbridge. ‘Unburied Bodies: Abdication and Art Production in The
Book of Disquiet’, in this volume.
5 Pessoa (Campos), ‘Apontamentos,’ 237; ‘Notes,’ 254.
6 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phénoménologie de la perception (Paris: Gallimard,
1945), v.
7 Pessoa (Campos), ‘Apontamentos,’ 241; ‘Notes,’ 256. Original emphasis.
8 Frederick Copleston, A History of Philosophy (New York: Doubleday, 1994),
1:361.
Translation slightly modified.
12 Pessoa (Campos), ‘Apontamentos,’ 238; ‘Notes,’ 255. Translation modified.
14 Merleau-Ponty, Phénoménologie de la perception, 176–7.
16 Pessoa (Campos), ‘Apontamentos,’ 242–3; ‘Notes,’ 258. Original emphasis.
17 Pessoa (Caeiro), Obra poética, 139; Fernando Pessoa & Co.: Selected Poems, ed.
and trans. Richard Zenith (New York: Grove Press, 1998), 48.
18 Pessoa (Caeiro), Obra poética, 140; Fernando Pessoa & Co., 49.
19 Pessoa (Campos), ‘Passagem das horas,’ in Obra poética, 278; Fernando Pessoa
& Co., 164.
20 Merleau-Ponty, Phénoménologie de la perception, 216.
21 According to Aristotle, pre-Socratic philosophers ‘had stressed natural phi-
losophy and cosmology rather than ethics.’ Robert Audi, ed., The Cambridge
Dictionary of Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 733.
22 Pessoa (Caeiro), Obra poética, 168; trans. by Keith Bosley, A Centenary Pessoa, 61.
23 In his essay S/Z, Roland Barthes proposes the definition of beauty according
to which it can only be perceived as a tautology: ‘Ainsi de la beauté: elle ne
peut être que tautologique (affirmée sous de nom même de beauté) ou ana-
lytique (si l’on parcourt ses prédicats), jamais synthétique.’ Roland Barthes,
S/Z (Paris: Seuil, 1970), 110.
25 Merleau-Ponty, Phénoménologie de la perception, xi.
27 Obra poética, 138; Fernando Pessoa & Co., 48.
29 Obra poética, 173. All translations not otherwise attributed are the editors’.
30 I am referring here to the Cartesian proposal for a scientific system suppos-
edly capable of categorizing all phenomena by a quantitative method, as
expressed by Descartes in his Principles of Philosophy: ‘my consideration of mat-
ter in corporeal things involves absolutely nothing apart from divisions,
shapes and motions.’ Quoted in The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy, 226.
34 Obra poética, 298; Fernando Pessoa & Co., 175. Translation slightly modified.
35 Merleau-Ponty, L’Oeil et l’esprit. (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), 26.
37 Merleau-Ponty affirms that the world surrounding the painter – and, I would
claim, the poet as well – is part of his body as well as his creation and an
assembly of elements that participate in the creative process: ‘Visible et
mobile, mon corps est au nombre des choses, il est l’une d’elles, il est pris
dans le tissu du monde et sa cohésion est celle d’une chose. Mais, puisqu’il
voit et se meut, il tient les choses en cercle autour de soi, elles sont un annexe
ou un prolongement de lui-même, elles sont incrustrées dans sa chair, elles
font partie de sa définition pleine et le monde est fait de l’éttofe même du
corps.’ L’oeil et l’esprit, 19.
38 Merleau-Ponty, L’Oeil et l’esprit, 16.
39 Obra poética, 142; Poems of Fernando Pessoa, 12.
40 ‘Passagem das horas,’ in Obra poética, 277; Fernando Pessoa & Co., 156.
41 ‘Tabacaria,’ in Obra poética, 297; Fernando Pessoa & Co., 173.
42 Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,’
in Selected Writings, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge,
MA: Belknap Press, 1996), 2:101–33.
43 Alain Badiou et al., ‘Une tâche philosophique: être contemporain de Pessoa,’
in Colloque de Cerisy. Pessoa: Unité, diversité, obliquité, ed. Pascal Dethurens and
Maria Alzira Seixo (Paris: Christian Bourgeois, 2000), 144–9.
46 Pessoa, Livro do desassossego, ed. Richard Zenith (Lisbon: Assírio & Alvim,
1998), 51. Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet, ed. and trans. Richard
Zenith (London: Penguin, 2001), 17.
48 Judith Balso, ‘L'Hétéronymie: une ontologie poétique sans métaphysique,’ in
Colloque de Cerisy, 169.
49 Balso, ‘L’Hétéronymie,’ 169.
50 Jean Bessière, ‘Le Livre de l’intranquillité et la fiction de la modernité,’ in Col-
loque de Cerisy, 36.
51 Bessière, ‘Le Livre de l’intranquillité,’ 37.
52 Bessière, ‘Le Livre de l'intranquillité,’ 47.
53 Robert Bréchon, Estranho estrangeiro: Uma biografia de Fernando Pessoa (Lisbon:
Quetzal, 1996), 513.
54 Bréchon, Estranho estrageiro, 514–15.
58 ‘Tabacaria,’ in Obra poética, 297; Fernando Pessoa & Co., 174–5.
59 José Gil, ‘Qu’est-ce que voir?’ in Colloque de Cerisy, 198.
61 José Gil, Fernando Pessoa ou la métaphysique des sensations (Paris: Editions de la
Différence, 1988), 19.
62 ‘Il Libro dell’Inquietudine è un’enorme insonnia, la “poetica” dell’Insonnia ...
La vita come impossibilità di riposare.’ Antonio Tabucchi, Un baule pieno di
gente (Milan: Feltrinelli, 2000), 73.
63 ‘Mais la suite du texte montre que cette vision de Bernardo Soares n’est pas
pure; elle comporte des éléments subjectifs: “Je suis comme quelqu’un qui
pense. Et une brume légère d’émotion se dresse en moi de manière
absurde.”’ Gil, ‘Qu’est-ce que voir?,’ 198.
Unburied Bodies: Abdication and Art
Production in The Book of Disquiet
bla ke s tr awb ri d g e
Know this, there is something boundless within these boundaries

...
there’s a fertile black silence in the work.
Osip Mandelstam, ‘Black Earth’
The Book of Disquiet presents itself as the intimate diaries of Bernardo

Soares, assistant bookkeeper in the city of Lisbon. “These are my Confes-
sions,”1 Soares writes in one of the many pieces in which he thematizes
what he thinks he is doing by writing his book. The reference to Rous-
seau, however, could hardly be more ironic: far from the latter’s ideal of
sincerity and naturalness, demonstrated by the revelation of a ‘shocking’
biographical event, Soares’s book is almost completely free of narrative
or events – nor is there any great secret of which he is trying to absolve
himself. He writes his book ‘in an indifferent sort of way, without facts ...
and if I don’t say anything in them, it’s because I really have nothing to
say.’2 Whence, then, the book’s disquiet, or, for that matter, its interest
for us today? Although my essay is not about Pessoa’s (or Soares’s) rela-
tion to Rousseau, another passage in which Soares refers to Rousseau is
helpful in this context. This time the irony works the other way; instead
of claiming to be writing another Confessions – and immediately under-
mining the conditions on which such an identification depends – here
Soares attacks Rousseau’s own self-conception of his work, but in doing
so reveals the virtue of his own: ‘From the weakness that made him fail,
he derived the strength (tirou ... as forças) that made him triumph ... but
on the banners of his victory, as he entered the city, was written the word
“Defeat.”’3 Rousseau proclaims his weakness by writing ‘Defeat,’ surrep-
72 Blake Strawbridge
titiously praising himself for his candour, but disavowing the triumphant
forces that allow the declaration of defeat to become legible: he believes
in transparent, sincere communication. Soares writes ‘Defeat’ too – but
he never allows himself to be assuaged that he has thereby adequately
expressed an inner truth or biographical event. The Book of Disquiet con-
tinually reenacts the event of expression itself, and it is the naive belief
that language can ever be a transparent vehicle for sincere confession
that Soares’s writing relentlessly works to ‘disassuage.’
The relation between the forces themselves and their signifying ban-
ners thus parallels – to extrapolate from an image of Maurice Blanchot’s
to which I will return in the final section of this essay – the way the anon-
ymous cadaver in the grave (and every body is anonymous insofar as it is
actually distinct from its name) appears to be that ‘of’ the gravestone that
marks it. The named and dated marker reassuringly tells us that the body
below it ‘really is’ the one we remember from life, instead of the disturb-
ingly placeless, identityless, and implacable corpse in face of which
knowledge (or any connection based on a subject-object relation) comes
up empty.4 But how soothing it is to be able to make that assertion! Desas-
sossego – dis-assuagement – never stops insisting: what does each significa-
tion disclaim? what is it the gravestone of? what does it conceal in the very
act of showing? Bernardo Soares’s faith in a sign’s meaning is ‘perenni-
ally’ shaken by the ‘unburied body (cadáver perenemente insepulto) of
my sensations.’5 This ‘disruption,’ this perennial inability to ‘put cre-
dence in what I believe’ becomes, however, the drive from which the
forces of The Book’s writing are drawn. Yet the process of unburying must
be continually renewed insofar as every revelation immediately re-veils
(vela e revela) the body in a reassuring legibility that rewrites the unwrit-
able insistence by which the hand is driven to put pen to paper, and the
affects writing can produce beyond any determination of meaning.6
The Book of Disquiet ’s virtue consists in its relentless attention to what
attention constitutively excludes in the act of thematization. Language’s
force cannot be thematized. Soares’s blatantly oxymoronic, tautological,
and self-contradictory sentences are a way of neutralizing signification’s
self-evidence in order to liberate an affective power – a power of the body
that is nevertheless transmitted through reading. Only in this way can we
get a ‘sense’ of what signification disavows in the very act of signifying: as
Emily Dickinson put it, the ‘internal difference / Where the Meanings,
are,’ which is neither the difference between signifier and signified, nor
the Saussurian ‘system of differences’ between signifiers, but the ontolog-
ical difference between signification as representation and the force sub-
Abdication and Art Production in The Book of Disquiet 73
tending all signification (its coming into being, its jouissance).7 If we

understand the former as necessarily ideological and ‘obvious,’ then it is
a short step to Louis Althusser’s astonishingly Dickinsonian use of a simi-
lar phrase, because of how he situates it as the relationship between art
and ideology: ‘[Artworks] make us “perceive” (but not know) in some
sense from the inside, by an internal distance, the very ideology in which they
are held.’8 We will see that, for Soares, Art is precisely the attempt to bring
the sensation of internal distance/difference from the ‘everything’
Soares will call Life, into the visible, external world: ‘the afternoon.’
But at first Soares thinks he can assign the covering and the covered
separate locations on the same Lisbon street:
Ah, now I understand! The boss Vasques is Life. Life, monotonous and
necessary, commanding and unknown. This banal man represents the
banality of Life. He is everything for me, outwardly (por fora), because Life
is everything for me outwardly.
And if the office on the Rua dos Douradores represents life for me, this
third floor where I live, on that same Rua dos Douradores, represents Art
for me. Yes, Art, residing on the very same street as Life, although in a dif-
ferent place, Art that alleviates life without alleviating living ...9
For the purposes of this discussion, I take the above distinction as my

starting point, because the relation between Art and Life is one of the
constant preoccupations of The Book. But in producing a reading of this
aspect of The Book – which traverses nearly all of its passages – I have to
arrange in a narrative that which is without any actual ‘original’ arrange-
ment. Therefore I take the clear delimitation of the spheres of ‘Life’ and
‘Art’ quoted above as a starting point. Life is the sphere of command, of
bureaucratic banalities, of surveillance and self-surveillance as attention;
of Art all we know, at first, is that it is nothing like that, that it is some-
where else, ‘down the road.’ My first section uses a passage in which
Soares, in the office, discovers that Art is not ‘somewhere else,’ but rather
everywhere, although it is an everywhere that is ‘nothing’ to the purposes
that Vasques embodies and enforces. In the second text I read, the blind
spot Soares discovered within the office becomes a window through
which we get a glimpse of what ‘liberated sensation’ is able to do. Finally
I return to Soares’s ‘initial passage’ to read a text that proposes a much
different (and more productive) reading of the relation between Art and
Life, in which ‘abdication’ can be conceived of as a means of experienc-
ing the Art in Life, at its back.
Julia Kristeva refers to this kind of experiencing as ‘the ethical func-

tion of the text.’ It is
the negativizing of narcissism within a practice ... [such that] it dissolves those
narcissistic fixations (ones that are narrowly confined to the subject) to
which the signifying process succumbs in its socio-symbolic realization. The
text ... is a practice assuming all positivity in order to negativize it and there-
fore make visible the process underlying it ... Given this insight, one cannot
ask that ‘art’ – the text – emit a message which would be considered ‘posi-
tive’: the univocal enunciation of such a message would itself represent a
suppression of the ethical function as we understand it ... [Rather,] it fulfills
its ethical function only when it pluralizes, pulverizes, ‘musicates’ these
truths ...10
My essay artificially constructs stages that show Soares passing through

these phases: first, by pulverizing the experience ‘on Life’s terms,’ mak-
ing it ‘go to seed’ (Text 125); then by pluralizing it, allowing its larval
power to hatch (Text 37); and, finally, by showing how this ‘musicates’
Life too (Text 153), in so far as sensation itself is already aesthetic.
Abdicating Life: angústia às avessas
In Text 125,11 the reader finds Soares in Life’s paradigmatic site: the
office. He is ‘in one of those moments’ in which ‘everything bores us
(tudo nos cansa), even what would give us rest (nos repousaria) ...
because the idea of getting (obter) it bores us.’ In the first edition of Livro
(and in Mac Adam’s translation of it) Text 125 immediately follows the
passage about Art and Life quoted in my introduction; as I read it, we
should see the weariness that begins the former as quite literally a conse-
quence of that conception. Soares is so overwhelmed by Life’s value
regime that even though he realizes that ‘rest’ is just another determin-
able thing – an awareness that already sets him at a distance from Life’s
self-evidence – the claustrophobic restlessness he describes indicates that
he still labours under the notion that there is nothing he can access that
eludes Life’s determinations. Art is somewhere else, down the street: oth-
erwise ‘everything’ in the office would not depress him in the way it does.
What is so wearying about rest, as he still understands it, is the very idea
of it as something to be obtained. Text 125 enacts the slow, painful exhu-
mation of the visceral anguish that the sudden reassurance of Text 124’s
‘Now I understand!’ convinced itself it had conquered by dividing Art
and Life extensively.
In the beginning of the second paragraph, Soares turns back to the

now of the act of writing with a direct, present-indicative assertion about
what the very text we are reading hopes to do: ‘I am in one of those
moments and I write these lines as one who at least wants to know he is
living.’12 Clearly, whatever understanding he thought he had gained
about Life is by the wayside: he does not even know he is living, and he
wants so desperately to break out of this sense of ubiquitous weariness
that he almost begs: ‘At least let me ...’ And yet he evades directly con-
fronting this painful sensation by narrating its history: ‘All day, until now,
I worked like a man half-asleep, adding sums by dream processes, writing
all along my torpor. For the entire day I have felt life weighing on my
eyes, a pressure pushing outward within my temples, awareness of all this
in my stomach ...’ The attentiveness that the accounts demand has been
saturated with sleep. But we know from other passages that Soares often
finds the banality of the office (and the street) quite refreshing.13 What
really ‘weighs on him’ is that the rest that Life acknowledges will bring
no relief, while the torpor that he does experience appears as a threat to
what, according to Life’s demand, should be his undivided attention.
The oppressive ‘weight’ of the double bind he feels boxed in by drives
his awareness all the way back into his stomach, a space from which his
experience is reduced to the passivity of asignifying pressures affecting
the body, both from within and from without. Evidently for Soares, noth-
ing in this awareness allows him to conclude that ‘therefore I am.’
Caught, on the one hand, between an unachievable total disaffection
that he seems to have hoped his retreat into the stomach would provide,
and, on the other, the insistent desire to ‘know I am living,’ this attempt
to flee his weariness produces only ‘nausea and dispirit.’14
As if in revenge, Soares’s awareness suddenly bursts out of this affec-
tive cul-de-sac, not back to the world of the office, but to an author-posi-
tion whose scope is so wide it seems to come from beyond the world.
‘Living, it seems to me, is a metaphysical error of matter, a mistake (des-
cuido) of inaction.’ His frustration with his inability to ‘know he is living’
has turned outward, apparently producing a ressentiment of universal pro-
portions. But he immediately tries to apply it to his local situation by
ostentatiously refusing to pay attention to his surroundings:
I don’t even look at the day to see what it might have to distract me from
myself, and, by writing it here in a description, I might cover with words the
empty cup of my not loving myself (não me querer). I don’t even look at the
day and I ignore with my back bent if it’s sunny or if there is no sun out
there on the subjectively sad street, on the deserted street where the sound
of people is passing by. I ignore it all, and my chest hurts. I stopped working
and I don’t want to move from this spot.
Having failed as a vehicle of his desire to ‘know he is living,’ Soares now

views writing as a means to seal off his lack of desire for himself. He
thereby establishes a connection between his refusal to look at the out-
side world and the drive to cover his ‘empty cup’: the seal that covers his
interior emptiness appears to depend on ignoring everything. Hence his
insistent repetitions of negation (‘I don’t even look at ...’). At the level of
the text, of course – as is self-evident in reading the passage above – the
entire project is flawed from the start. Writing can only negate by first
representing what it then pretends to cancel out with a ‘not,’ which in
itself only adds another attribute to what it represents: that of non-exist-
ence. Not-doing, qua written, is still doing.
Even at the level of his perceptual experience in the office (i.e., prior
to its representation as text), however, something still seeps through this
veritable negative phenomenology: Soares can bend his back to ignore
the weather outside, refuse to move his body, but its sounds – as the pres-
sures in his stomach had done previously – still reach into his body.
Because he still conceives of himself as a subject who should – even if
unable to know himself – at least be able to ‘contain himself,’ the sounds
appear as a ‘subjective sadness’ that threatens to blow the cover of
‘describing it here.’ The ‘deserted street’ seems to mark, at this point in
the double aporetical tension that the text negotiates (must evade/can-
not evade, must contain/cannot contain), a compromise position: while
unable to seal off sensation, his desire to ignore ‘it all’ does not extend as
far as the total foreclosure of perception that would constitute its para-
noiac limit. Instead, he acknowledges the sounds from the street, but
only insofar as it is ‘deserted.’ Such hearing senses sound as a force push-
ing through air out of bodies: it does not erase intentional sounds (since
they too are produced through material sounds), but it does not take into
account the meaning that consciousness considers as their motivation.
Soares takes these sounds at the level of anonymous bodily production
rather than as intentional linguistic signification. By not focusing on the
words’ meanings, their material and productive forces remain, just as
earth and weather persist in the city and even inhere in the materials that
seem to negate them (asphalt, concrete, etc.). But Soares cannot yet
affirm this form of hearing; the attention the text itself gives to it is imme-
diately foreclosed by his renewed determination to ‘ignore it all.’ It there-
fore still appears as the failure to seal himself off from his surroundings.
The interest his text has taken in the phenomenon of the ‘deserted
street’ shows that Soares’s intention to close himself off results only in
displacement: as soon as he clamps down on his hearing, a similar expe-
rience pops up in his visual field. Only then does his litany of determined
negations finally shed its ‘not’s:
I’m looking at the dirty-white blotter that stretches out ... on top of the great
age of the tilted desk. I look ... at the traces of absorption and distraction
that are erased in it (borrados nele: that is, ‘blotted into it’). Several times
my signature, backward, reversed (às avessas e ao invés). Here and there
some numbers, just like that. Some insignificant scribbles (desenhos de
nada), made by my lack of attention (desatenção). I look at all this like a
blotter peasant (aldeão de mata-borrões), with the attention of someone
looking at new things (novidades), with his entire brain inert behind the
cerebral centers that promote vision.
In marked contrast to the phases of passive frustration and active nega-

tion that precede it, it is difficult to read the effect that the encounter
with the blotter traces produces in Soares. Like the attention in his stom-
ach, like the ‘deserted’ sounds from the street, attention on the blotter
traces selects a wholly different ‘take’ on what actually exists. But what
had appeared previously as failure (first to evade, then to seal off) now
opens up a vista so absolutely novel that he can only gape at it in astonish-
ment. The apparently ‘subjective’ move that had stripped sounds of their
intention (‘the subjectively sad street’) now finds an ‘objective correlate’
that has been, as it were, staring at him all along. The simple, fragmentary
assertions that describe the moment of apprehension, however, have
none of the triumphant recognition of the ‘now I understand!’ that had
inspired Text 124. Here he ‘perceives’ the marks on the blotter, but does
not ‘know’ what they mean, not even that they signify ‘a waste of time,’
which would be obvious to Vasques or any attentive worker.15 This lack of
understanding, however, turns out to be the virtue of this moment of
astonishment. Before looking at what has happened for Soares, though, I
am first going to step back from the text itself to examine the blotter’s
place in terms of what the office values and what it implies for the labour-
ing body that is supposed to function according to commands so banal
that they are normally not even expressed.
Soares has stumbled across a layer inside the office’s walls that bears
the traces of something without value to the office – something obviously
not worth being passed on to Vasques in order to become the ‘raw mate-
rial’ for his command decisions – but which is nevertheless not what Life
calls ‘rest’ either, since it exists only in and through the labour and mate-
rials the office sets out for him as employee. Marx calls what Vasques
requires from Soares in his role as assistant bookkeeper ‘the control and
ideal synthesis of the process [of production]’: the numbers that trans-
late actual materials and labour into expenditures and income.16 Even if
we disregard the labour involved in generating them (which we cannot),
these ‘idealities’ themselves require a material body – ink on paper – in
order to send them up the chain of command.
The blotter retains something ‘wasteful’ to the office that is still neces-
sary for its functioning at the most immanent level: that of the ink’s con-
tact with a surface through the movements of Soares’s hand, regardless
of what is written or even any criteria of legibility. The office cares
(cuida) only about work useful to it: in this case, the production of the
‘ideal synthesis’ it will use as the basis for decisions about how to control
its costs. That is, what it pays for it rewards according to the form of value
it functions by and makes socially necessary. Yet there is no work that
does not come from a body, a fact that Soares’s text had already ‘per-
ceived’ (enacted without ‘knowing’ it, i.e., without being able to affirm
it) when his attention’s retreat into his stomach still registered the pres-
sures of his own body’s functioning in relation to its environment. The
blotter ‘recognizes’ this simply in its being a surface without importance.
Its very insignificance enables it to be a passive surface on which any
action, both those that his job requires and those made through careless-
ness (descuido), can be absorbed. Each blotter mark is in this sense
‘caused’ by the idealities that govern the office and the sub-categories it
organizes according to its need for control, i.e., its protection against
inefficiencies (wasted time, wasted money, right down to the blotter
itself, which, for the office, exists only to protect the desk from ink). But
the very functioning of the blotter does more than what the office needs
it to do: it absorbs materials the office does not care about, does not
value. The presence of the blotter shows that the office implicitly
acknowledges the ‘descuido’ as a necessary precondition of production,
even when what is produced are the abstractions that will form the data
Vasques will use to command.17
The ‘idea of obtaining’ requires a labour of idealization which depends
in turn on bodies whose capacities necessarily exceed the attention the
job demands. Not only the accounts he keeps, but even Soares’s labour
itself is ‘obtained’ qua commodity. Even something as ‘personal’ as his sig-
nature is the trace of something Soares had to sign as an official agent of
the office, such that the individualizing marks of his signature are made
to function within the structure of responsibility through which the office
ensures discipline. The blotter, on the other hand, preserves the imma-
nent singularity of all Soares’s writing marks (his signature, the numbers,
his ‘desenhos de nada’) as something other than ‘his’ or ‘the office’s’: the
marks are preserved, but their purpose subtracted, even when they only
came about only through doing work ‘for’ the office’s purpose. What the
blotter retains both is and is not the writing he does for the office: it marks
the ‘internal difference’ where the (office’s) meanings are. Meaning is
the production of meaning. The blotter marks show nothing other than
what Soares has actually done (whether ‘working’ or doodling ‘disatten-
tively’), but also something other than what he is paid to do, i.e., is valued
as. And this is the key to its strange power, a power that the text cannot
describe any more than the office – but implicitly indicates through its
form, its pace, the attention the text itself gives it, even in describing it as
‘desatenção’ – the recognition that there is something before recognition
(before attention/possession), before any what.
Soares’s affective ‘inertia’ is the mirror image of the blotter’s ‘indif-
ference’ (receptivity without criteria). For Vasques, the blotter marks
represent only ‘spillage’: a lack of control occurring in the very act of
converting the concrete labour process into abstract time and money,
and a lack of value within the production of the very ‘ideal synthesis’ that
allows the bottom line to be determined. In the same way, for Soares
(according to the expectations laid out in Text 124), looking at the blot-
ter constitutes the failure both of his intention to ‘not look’ at the day
and of his capacity to cover over his ‘não me querer’ behind purportedly
objective description. Certainly the reader gets some idea of what Soares
sees on the blotter, but faced with these marks ‘made by my lack of atten-
tion’ his writing breaks down into verbless fragments: he discovers the
difficulty of describing what has no predetermined meaning. He is
clearly fascinated by what he sees, but cannot provide any reason for it.
Although his job function is synonymous with urbanity and capitalism,
he feels himself to be a peasant to whom the blotter, covered with noth-
ing but never-valuable traces of out-of-date calculations, appears as
‘novidades.’ The consciousness that had aspired to attentive description
can attest only to its own stupefaction and yet the vision that he had
rejected persists in an ‘inert’ staring that goes on even without the brain
actively directing it or obtaining any definite knowledge from it.
The traces on the blotter, which seem to come after the ‘real work’ of
accounting as an ink mark that has continued when attention has bro-
ken off, are reflected in Soares-as-‘blotter peasant’ by the inertia that

uncovers a pre-intentional ‘promotion of vision,’ prior to any will to see
any given object, subtending and subsisting in every actual visual percep-
tion. His vision has turned – às avessas e ao invés – producing a counter-
light to that of Life, allowing the reconceptualization, from its pre- (and
post-) purposive point of view, of everything that had appeared as failure,
dead end, and negation. It
is that experience through which the consciousness discovers its being in its
inability to lose consciousness, in the movement whereby, as it disappears,
as it tears itself away from the meticulousness of an I, it is re-created beyond
unconsciousness as an impersonal spontaneity, the desperate eagerness of a
haggard knowledge that knows nothing, which no one knows, and which
ignorance always discovers behind itself as its own shadow changed into
gaze.18
The author of these words is not referring to someone spacing out while
exhausted at work: the subject of the above sentence is ‘Literature.’ As
far from each other as these two things may seem, Soares completely
agrees – when he is not making the kind of overhasty distinctions that
conceive of Art and Life as if they occupied separate locations: ‘By art I
mean everything that delights us without being ours – the trail left by what
has passed, a smile given to someone else (a outrem), a sunset, a poem,
the objective universe.’19
Soares’s conclusion is actually an inversion that does not so much
resolve the aporias of the text, as it does point back towards all the oscil-
lations of intention in the text that have preceded it. Text 125 culminates
with the following declaration: ‘I am more sleepy than I can be (Tenho
mais sono íntimo do que cabe [caber = to contain] em mim). And I want
(quero) nothing, I prefer nothing, there is nothing to flee (não há nada
a que fugir).’20 The world turned backward and reversed is therefore not
the opposition of one preference to another. It is the inversion of wanting
and preference itself, the inversion of selfhood itself qua sum of prefer-
ences. Art, the force that precedes and exceeds Life’s contained obtain-
abilities (its partial negations) only appears as a descuido from Life’s point
of view. But Art affirms the terms ‘error’ and descuido only to throw them
back at Life, such that matter’s error – which had seemed to be the height
of ressentiment – can now be affirmed the ‘essential error’: Art.21 The ‘con-
verse’ logic of Life, defined by extensive opposition, produces the oppo-
sition: if what is not Life is Art, then Art is not Life. Art’s inverse logic, on
the other hand, says: non-Life is Art and Life is Art. It is not a question of
going to another place. Art is not extensively outside Life; it is a ‘distance
from everything’ – an internal distance that is intensive – ‘even in my own
soul.’22 Art is the ‘gaze,’ in Blanchot’s words, of the productive forces
prior to all distinctions between culture and nature, work and rest, mean-
ingful and unmeaningful, the gaze that looks back at the clear world and
finds that even clarity is force before it is representation.
But consciousness, apparently, first has to be ‘pulverized’ before it can
approach a non-representational gaze. (This need not be as literally vio-
lent or frustrating as it sounds: sleep and staring are also such ‘pulveriza-
tions.’) Text 125’s last paragraph is not experienced as a solution to any
of the frustrations through which the text has passed; if anything, it
appears to exacerbate them, such that Soares seems even less powerful at
the end of the text than at the beginning. His expectations (as set up by
the mindset Text 124 exemplifies) are systematically ‘pulverized’: he
wanted his writing to provide him with the knowledge that he was living,
but instead he finds his mind operating by ‘dream processes,’ even while
doing the accounts, and his body the locus of ‘pressures’ not clearly dis-
tinct from those of inorganic matter. He ends up frustrated, not wanting
anything. He wanted to describe rather than look at his surroundings in
order to cover the empty cup of his not loving himself: instead he finds
that he cannot not look (he stares at the blotter), and that what he sees
he cannot describe except as novidades with no positively describable
qualities. His capacity for seeing, moreover, is rendered into an ‘inert’
bodily power. In reading Text 37, we will see how such inertia is ‘plural-
ized’ – indeed, ‘infinitized’ – into ‘liberated sensation.’
Abdication as Art Production: ‘os ombros do inconsciente a quem sigo’
In Text 3723 we see what ‘the objective universe’ looks like under the
uncontainable and usually disavowed gaze of Art. Its condition of possi-
bility is abdication of subjectivity’s ‘obvious’ extensive distinctions and
the conception of possession that underlies it. While Text 125’s conclu-
sion still didn’t feel particularly ‘liberating,’ it nevertheless indicated the
impossibility of either containment or (extensive) flight, which will
become the basis for the productive actualization of Soares’s prime ‘vir-
tue’: liberated sensation, that is, boundless intensive flight. What was a
slow and painful process in Text 125 takes place here almost immediately.
Significantly, however, the process still has to begin in the obvious, in
medias res: quotidian Life. Soares thinks quite ordinarily about ‘the back
of a man walking in front of me. It was the vulgar back of a commonplace

man (um homem qualquer) ...’ On the basis of the clothes the man wears
and the things he carries, Soares makes a few idle assumptions about the
kind of life he must lead; in the process we can see how, very quickly,
Soares moves from the obvious to the incomprehensible, i.e., to ‘libera-
tion’ from comprehension’s containment. To see how this happens, let us
imagine the ‘commonplace man’’s responses as we go through Soares’s
assertions. The man would presumably be willing to affirm, even with
some pride, that he is a ‘paterfamilias on his way to work.’ Soares then
speaks of the pleasures and pains ‘that perforce make up his life.’ The
man would probably allow the statement: life is hard, but he struggles
heroically for his family, and is perhaps proud of a recent promotion or
raise. But when Soares speaks of his ‘innocence in not analysing things,’
the man would likely become defensive: he might allow that ‘analysing
too much’ is frivolous and thus detrimental, but to call him ‘innocent’
could only be insulting to the self-image of a ‘real man.’ Providing for his
family – and protecting the ‘innocence’ of his wife and children – is the
very basis of maturity (and reputation) as the paterfamilias conceives it.
But instead of being in any way concerned about the ‘ob-vious’ contra-
diction between ‘paterfamilias’ and ‘innocence,’ Soares pushes the jux-
taposition farther and suddenly extracts a stunning oxymoron from his
otherwise ‘idle’ speculations: ‘the animal naturalness of that clothed
back.’
For Soares this defamiliarizing insight into the normal serves as a
jumping-off point for an extremely effective and affective exhuming of
associative force. As if spurred on by the delight of having produced such
an audacious formulation, Soares continues:
I turned my eyes toward the man’s back, a window through which I saw
these thoughts.
The sensation was exactly identical to that which strikes us [nos assalta] in
the presence of someone asleep. A person asleep becomes a child again.
Perhaps it’s because while we’re asleep we can’t do bad things, and so long
as he does not realize he is alive (se não dá conta da vida), so long as he
sleeps, the greatest criminal, the most ironbound egoist, is sacred, because
of a natural magic. Between killing someone asleep and killing a child, I
cannot detect the slightest difference.
As the wall of the man’s back becomes a window, the banality Soares
had ascribed to him suddenly becomes ‘sacred.’ While the mark of civili-
zation par excellence (i.e., clothing) appears ‘animally natural,’ the

most undistinguished part of the man now gives rise to ‘natural magic’
insofar as it is that which his respectable, self-assured, and goal-oriented
behaviour would dismiss as unimportant, were he to think about it at all.
But, in this encounter, it does not matter what the man thinks. His back
catches Soares’s attention precisely because it is that which remains
asleep even while the man is ‘fully’ conscious. It is Soares’s insight into
the dormancy of wakingness that enables his sensation to ‘liberate’ itself
from reference to what the man is supposed to be and how he (presum-
ably) presents himself. Not accidentally, this rejection of the man’s Life
(i.e., his conscious self-representation, his respectability, his dar-se conta
da vida: the ‘control and ideal synthesis’ of himself) produces another
kind of ‘humanitarianism,’ one that discovers an entirely different ethi-
cal ground for the prohibition against murder, based not on patriarchal
dignity (the father’s duty to provide and protect) but on the unconscious
power that becomes manifest in sleep.
But ‘liberated sensation’ does not preach; it explores. In dismissing
the consciousness of this ‘homem qualquer,’ Soares breaks open individ-
ualism per se, at least insofar as it is ‘obvious.’24 The unanalysed is not
something outside of individual consciousness; it subtends the status of
the ‘obviously’ known world itself. So that if his back is asleep, then ‘All
of him walking in front of me at a speed equal to mine is asleep.’ From
there, in the leaps and bounds through which this window of unbridled
associations charges, it is but a short distance to the generalization of the
back/sleep principle: ‘He sleeps, because we all sleep. Life is all a dream.
No one knows what he does, no one knows what he wants, no one knows
what he knows. We sleep our lives, eternal children of destiny.’ The
back’s transformation into a thought-window is the paradigm for all the
words that appear negative: even as they denigrate human knowledge,
they reopen the most ‘obvious’ questions – What do we do? What do we
want, what do we know? – asked not in order to close them off beneath
new certainties, but in order to explore the most obvious aspects of our
thought as strange.25
It is no accident that precisely at the moment when Soares connects
the man’s back to sleep he brings his own body back into the scene as the
double of the man walking in front of him. This bodily equivalence is
based on a relation of physical movement: ‘all of him walking ... at a speed
equal to mine is asleep’ (my emphasis). It is as if Soares had involuntarily
synchronized the pace of his walking to that of the man ahead of him, as
if Soares’s own body (like the man’s own back) had become an inert,
unconscious mass dragged along in the wake of the man’s intentional

movement.26 Thus spellbound, Soares plays Eurydice to the man’s
Orpheus: were the latter to turn around, Soares would have to answer for
himself in Life’s terms, to ‘realize he is alive,’ driving ‘liberated sensa-
tion’ back to the underworld.27 Soares’s Eurydice ‘wants’ to remain
‘dead’ to Life – that is, prior to or beyond interpellation – but not bur-
ied, since s/he is magnetically attracted to the actuality that calculation
and purposive action dismisses (if it recognizes it at all) as irrelevant,
idle, or unworthy of serious attention.28 Of course, Eurydice does not
really want anything (não quer nada). Rather, her perennial return is
the ‘liberation’ of what the obvious covers or limits. The ‘empty cup’ of
Text 125 is not healed by filling it with ‘me querer’ (in the sense of the
‘self-esteem’ that Life encourages when it is the very acceptance of its cri-
teria of respectability that convinces the individual that he or she is
‘worth’ more or less than someone else), because the primary obvious-
ness that sensation liberates is that of self-possession, self-containment: in
short, identifiable subjectivity. Liberated sensation neither has nor lacks
a self because it happens through a relation of mutual becoming with
whatever it senses, and makes (or lets) that encounter become whatever it
can. It unlimits Life’s self-possession by discovering a back in what any-
one (qualquer) ‘knows’ he or she ‘really’ is. Actually, ‘he or she’ (as
mutually exclusive) would be one of the primary divisions that inaugu-
rates the illusion of individual essence. Text 37 ends by saying the sex we
‘are all of’ does not exist.29
Statements such as the above, and others leading up to it (e.g., ‘Life is
all a dream’), show that Soares’s conception of the body is far from self-
evident. One could even read this text as radically antimaterialist,
expressing a belief that in some sense our physical bodies do not ‘really’
exist. Because I believe such a reading would fail to grasp much of what
The Book does, let us return to the Life/Art distinction. The body, as Life
knows it, is more or less the one Descartes defined at the beginning of
the modern era: a finite, divisible body that is – or properly should be –
subjected to purposive manipulation by the conscious mind. According
to such a view, any other movement is aberrant and can only be
explained as evidence of madness or at least weakness of will. Such a
body is properly an instrument to be manipulated by the mind – always
already ‘for’ appropriating what reason sees fit to obtain.
Although in his own time Spinoza was often categorized as a Cartesian
due to his rejection of the superstitions institutional religion relies on to
maintain authority, we can now see that his main target was this kind of
dualism (which always ends up making the mind master of the body). To
this end, he categorically rejected any conception of the body as limited
and led by the mind for the simple reason that ‘no one has so far deter-
mined what a body can do’; in other words, bodily production is not cir-
cumscribed by the consciousness that names it and that thus believes it
owns it.30 The examples Spinoza uses to demonstrate this argument are
astonishingly close to those that appear again and again in The Book: that
‘lower animals’ have the capacity to organize themselves and produce
works ‘that far exceed human sagacity,’ and that sleepwalkers can do
things at which the mind is amazed.31 Determination is a transcendent
principle of consciousness; but our immanent relations occur outside
consciousness. It is thus never a question of what a body ought to be
according to the standards of the family, boss, priest, or government that
one ‘belongs to’ by spirit, blood, contract, or title – or according to the
consciousness that acts on the basis of the ‘natural order’ such institu-
tions present themselves as. Instead, a body’s (or mind’s) virtue is its own
capacity, whose (immanent, affective) reward is intrinsic to its interac-
tions. As opposed to Descartes’ claim that the mind is essentially active
because it alone, as res cogitans, can know, Spinoza replies: ‘It is never we
who affirm or deny something of a thing; it is the thing itself that affirms
or denies something of itself to us.’32
But Spinoza’s most radically anti-Cartesian move is his repudiation of
the body (res extensa) as finite and divisible; in doing so he articulates
the most radically antiindividualist concept the West has ever seen. By
making extension an attribute of the one substance he is able to say that
it is – as attribute – just as infinite as thought. From the point of view of
the individual (mode), the infinity of extension has two valences: a
macro level, which says that where one body ends, another begins (a
molecule of air, say, right against a molecule of skin); but also a micro
level, whereby each body is ‘composed of very many individuals of a
diverse nature’ (e.g., organs, cells, molecules, each of which is also ‘com-
posed of very many’ diverse individuals, ‘and so on to infinity’).33 Rela-
tions between individuals are established through ‘fixed ratios’ of speed
and slowness. It follows that what we call two or more individual bodies,
when they enter into such a relation, ‘simultaneously compose one body,
i.e., an individual.’34
In a Cartesian universe, Soares’s ‘liberated sensation’ can only be
thought of as a kind of insanity; no doubt it is possible to view the passage
in such a way. Reading the encounter through Spinoza, however, much
less needs to be dismissed. In fact we can say that walking along ‘at a
speed equal to’ the man he follows, Soares enters into a relation of
mutual becoming with this ‘homem qualquer’ at the level of the body,
his ‘unconscious body or ... unconsciousness as a body.’35 Soares’s state
of ‘hypnosis’ therefore has nothing to do with control, as if the man were
dangling a shiny object in front of him in order to make him do his will
(or vice versa). Rather, Soares is trying to describe the experience as an
immanent relation that takes place at the level of the body and its affec-
tive capacities, which consciousness usually disrupts or, to use Spinozan
language, partially negates. This fascination with the back produces ‘lib-
erating’ effects/affects precisely because its ‘object’ – what ‘affirms
something of itself’ in Soares – is that in the man which, even while he
consciously moves himself, is the trace of a ‘sleep’ that, as we saw in Text
125, exceeds consciousness’s power to contain it. In Text 37, ‘liberated
sensation’ allows Soares to generalize this principle:
All movements and intentions in life, from the simple life of the lungs to the
building of cities and the defense of imperial frontiers (fronteiração de
impérios) – I consider them like a somnolence, things like dreams or rest-
ing, involuntarily spent in the interval between one reality and another,
between one day and another day of the Absolute.
In comparing ‘all movements and intentions in life’ (that which is nor-

mally thought of as directed by consciousness – in other words, Life
itself) to ‘the simple life of the lungs’ and the preservation of empire
(which is beyond the control of any single individual and hence ‘not
ours,’ thus Art) Soares has no need to resort to metaphor.36 It is simply a
matter of widening the perspective beyond consciousness’s criteria of
possessing or obtaining. Life demands that one’s body be under control,
that one not sleep in the office, that one pay attention in order to prop-
erly carry out commands. But both temporally and spatially, the inten-
tions operate within a very narrow spectrum whose margins are the
infinitesimal and the infinite: each leading to literally inconceivable
absolutes. And it is this – ‘our common ignorance,’ not our conscious
contracts – that makes us ‘brothers.’37 One can decide to hold one’s
breath, and for a few seconds, or maybe even a minute or two, the inten-
tion holds. But the ‘simple life of the lungs’ soon overwhelms intention
in one way or another, even if it has to force a loss of consciousness, at
which point the body starts breathing again on its own. What is true of
what eludes consciousness on a small scale is also the case on the large
scale: all empires, even if they last for centuries, eventually fall. Intention
doesn’t like to think about such ‘absolutes.’ It achieves ignorance of
them not so much by denouncing them or overcoming them, but by sim-

ply ignoring them as impractical. The ‘back,’ however, does not resist
this unlimiting of consciousness’s borders. Indeed, it has an affinity with
it qua actually existing unthought.
Through this micro- and macro-situating of intention, Soares has, as it
were, built up enough resistance to Life to look around at faces, although
still at a distance that excludes intentional communication. Text 37 ends
with these words:
all this is the same unconsciousness diversified on faces and bodies that are
different (se distinguem), like puppets moved by strings that end (vão dar)
in the same fingers of the hand of one who is invisible. They stroll along
with all the attitudes that define consciousness, but they are not conscious
of anything, because they are not conscious of being conscious. Some are
intelligent, others stupid, they are all equally stupid. Some old, others
young, they are all the same age. Some are men, others women, they are all
of the same nonexistent sex (sexo que não existe).
The Spinozan conception of the body shows that we cannot equate the
invisible with the ideal. Following Soares’s own ‘proofs’ against extensive
movement as willed, we should remember that there is a whole milieu of
very real actions and interactions going on at the molecular and sub-
atomic level everywhere, even in the air we do not see and can therefore
see through; and at the other pole, we can never even see the totality of
a country or the planet, since even from outer space we only see, at most,
one side of the earth at any given time. This is of course the case with
every limited (i.e., determinate) object that comes into our vision, or
rather, our mind. Even at noon the planet as a whole is in as much
shadow as ever. To think that emphasizing the invisible is necessarily an
idealism is to have already, wittingly or not, bought into the Cartesian
conception whereby extension is always divisible into finite entities that
are the property of subjects that rule and are responsible for everything
they contain. Even by its own logic, though, the Cartesian principle of
divisibility should undo the possibility of ever actually totalizing the
object it recognizes, because there is nothing (except a transcendent
God) that could ever provide an adequate reason to stop division’s move-
ment into the infinitesimal.38
Text 37 ends with two Absolutes: the Absolutely deterritorialized
(‘invisible’) body and the Absolutely deterritorialized mind (ageless,
without intelligence or sex) – not opposed, but linked such that they are
equal in their ‘grace’ insofar as they are freed from the partial negations
of consciousness.39 This God is the one and only substance, but this does
not mean God is sedentary: actually, ‘He’ cannot contain ‘Himself’ (and
wants nothing, prefers nothing, and cannot flee its puppets, which move
it by distinguishing themselves [se distinguem]). Connecting with sub-
stantial immanence ‘liberates’ sensation such that it thinks not in terms
of simple opposition (which belongs to the same value regime it thinks it
opposes), but through a series of non-disjunctive ‘or’s, whereby each
new term unfolds a ‘given’ determination: God, or nature, or essence, or
virtue, or desire, ‘and so on to infinity ...’40 Likewise, in Text 37: back, or
window of my thoughts, or sleep, or innocence, or becoming sacred
‘and so on to infinity ...’ Ultimately even faces are backs, even conscious-
ness is unconscious; not in such a way that one could ‘wake up’ from it
once and for all, but rather insofar as it is a constitutive ‘not conscious of
being conscious.’
Thus while it remains true that ‘there is nothing to flee’ or flee to, the
affirmation of identity’s inability to contain its referent – or the imma-
nent materials of its means of production – can nevertheless be a means
of exploration, provided they take refuge from signification as the
demand for correspondence.
The Ficting of Life: ‘o livro das sensações ... que podemos gozar como se
viessem na tarde’
We can now show how, in Soares’s ‘initial passage,’ the blotter traces and
‘liberated sensation’ come together in sensation that does not ‘take seri-
ously’ the ‘other reality’ of which it appears to be the conduit, and thus
show how sensation itself can be conceived of as a ‘book,’ i.e., as Art.
As in the passage quoted at the beginning of this paper, in Text 153
Soares begins with ‘weakness,’ only to reveal it as the condition of possi-
bility of artistic exploration of sensation:
we desist (abdicamos) from ... effort in the way the weak give up the sport of
athletes, and we bend over the book of sensation with a great scruple about
felt erudition.
By not taking anything seriously, not considering that we were certainly
given another reality beyond our sensations, we take refuge (nos abriga-
mos) in them, and explore them like unknown lands.41
In Text 125 the blotter is able to become a refuge because what Soares
sees in its traces is not ‘obtainable’ like the ‘idea of rest’ that Life calls the
opposite of work. In Text 37, the back is able to become a window open-
ing up possibilities of exploration for the same reason: but in this case its
valuelessness to subjective consciousness exposes a deeper ‘innocence’
(non-awareness, ‘sleep’) subtending and surpassing ‘all movements and
intentions in life.’ It is sleep that is uncontainable and unfleeable. Only
when sensation does not point to ‘another reality’ based on possession
can it become a terrain of exploration without end rather than some-
thing to be ‘obtained’ and contained as property over which one would
have exclusive rights. This applies not only to the object, but to the sub-
ject as well.42
We must therefore return to the notion of distance: not a relative dis-
tance, but that ‘distance from everything,’ the absolute distance that
Soares calls Decadence. Here the Dickinson poem quoted in the intro-
duction becomes productive too, because it establishes the link between
the internal difference (in the act of identification on which meaning
depends) and ‘the Distance / On the look of Death –,’43 which is also the
main figure in Maurice Blanchot’s ‘The Two Versions of the Imaginary.’
Blanchot’s essay shows how the unburied body is linked to abdication’s
power to invert Life’s order of possession and command. The cadaver’s
Unheimlichkeit consists in its continuing to resemble the subject it had
appeared to be the image of even after that person no longer exists. Even
though the cadaver is undeniably present, it is a presence that cannot be
approached: it is ‘the neutral double of the object [or subject] in which
all belonging to the world is dissipated.’44 As such, it takes on an absolute
distance, the ‘distance from everything,’ since it is indifferent to any
attempt to establish a relation with it. Nothing useful can be done with
the cadaver since it cannot be communicated with and does not respond
to any hailing. Its very stubbornness in persisting, however, testifies to a
power that ‘makes of our intimacy an exterior power which we suffer pas-
sively.’45 Blanchot compares this phenomenon to the way ‘a tool, when
damaged ... no longer disappearing into use, appears.’46 The condition of
possibility of this mode of appearing – an appearance that transforms
the banal ‘meaning’ (purpose) of a hammer into something visible as
itself a formed object exceeding utility’s partial negation – is the break-
down (or ‘destitution’) of its ‘obvious’ raison d’être. Although the situa-
tion Blanchot describes takes place after death, there is no reason we
need to take this literally (particularly when we know that elsewhere
Blanchot equates signification itself with the murder of the body it
names).47 In abdication, the situation Blanchot illustrates via the cadaver
is shown to be not only something that appears after life – it is, rather, the
‘perennially unburied’ outside of Life in Life, the trace of a force Life

cannot recognize because it is what Life appropriates by disavowing and
devaluing it in the very act of ‘giving it meaning.’48 If Art inverts Life, it
is not in order to establish itself as another proper entity; rather, it does
so because Art is the act of depropriating, ‘disassuaging’ recognition that
‘liberates’ sensation from what it ‘means.’
We can see how this functions via the example of property. A brief note
in ‘Lake of Possession (II)’ shows how Soares conceives of the ‘internal
difference’ between property and the place it claims to own: ‘Property
isn’t a robbery. It’s nothing.’ Proudhon’s famous dictum (‘Property is
theft’) implicitly accepts the concept of private property as legitimate –
otherwise it could not be stolen.49 Soares’s ‘property is nothing’ takes the
Proudhonian relativization of the concept of property to the absolute.50
One might even say property is the prison of place in the same way that,
as Foucault says, ‘The soul is the prison of the body.’51 ‘The Two Versions’
shows this absolutely depropriated relation of body to place: while the
place of death is indifferent, the cadaver still ‘join[s] it profoundly ...
[and thus] becomes the basis of indifference, the gaping intimacy of an
undifferentiable nowhere which must nevertheless be located here.’52 If
not properly marked, the body’s materiality is, for Life, ‘nowhere’ – or, at
least, nowhere reasonable. Nevertheless, it ‘stays with us because it has no
place’: an immanence [immanere = to remain in] characterized primarily
by the endless wandering familiar to us via ghost stories, which Blanchot
calls ‘the premonition of the error which [the cadaver] now represents.’
This ‘premonition’ motivates our concern for proper localization; but
‘the here of the here lies, filled in by names, well-formed phrases and affir-
mations of identity’ is merely a vain cover for what is actually ‘the anony-
mous and impersonal place par excellence.’53 To say this is to expose a
difference between place and property that property disavows in princi-
ple – and property is nothing but a ‘principle’ that attempts to put bound-
aries on the boundless.
It is signification’s regime of universal possession – of self (your will
defines your existence), of bodies (your body is subject to your will), or
of any identity (you are x, where x may be any category of race, gender,
nation, targeted market, etc.) – that buries sensation insofar as it makes
it into a means to or for the purposes of ‘another reality,’ the one that is
‘obvious:’ that’s Life. Soares’s ‘distance from everything,’ however, turns
‘use’ into something quite different:
If we assiduously use ourselves not only in aesthetic contemplation but also

in the expression of its modes and results, it’s that the prose or verse we
write, destitute of the will to convince (de vontade de querer convencer)

the understanding of others or move other wills, is only like the speaking
aloud of a person reading (de quem lê), made to give total objectivity to the
subjective pleasure of reading (leitura).54
This quotation immediately follows the one that opened this section.
Only through ‘weakness’ (destitution of the will to convince others) does
sensation become conceivable as book: it cannot but seem to point to
‘another reality,’ but only by being recognized as text can sensation’s
transparency – the obvious ‘content’ of its signification – become ques-
tionable. Not taking the text ‘seriously,’ however, is completely different
from the negation serious belief performs on the book. ‘When reading
Hamlet, you do not first begin by settling once and for all in your mind
that such a thing never took place. You would thereby poison your own
pleasure, which you go in search of in the text.’55 It is the primacy of
outer-directed ‘success’ that devalues both the materiality on which its
own capacity to signify depends (sensation as book) and any signification
in which ‘illusion is accepted from the start (admitida desde o princí-
pio).’56 Far from self-caused action, will is actually founded on the cap-
ture of that part of sensation it can use to justify and mobilize its ‘own’
ends.
The quotation that refers to reading Hamlet continues: ‘Who reads
ceases to live. So now do as you would have done: cease living, and read.
What is life?’ Life is a partial negation of Art’s productive force. As things
in the world, artworks cannot represent their source (Art production);
this ‘imperfection,’ though, also constitutes Art’s virtue, showing its com-
mon cause with Life:
We know full well that the entire work has to be imperfect and that the least
secure of our aesthetic contemplations will be the one we write about. But
everything is imperfect: there is no sunset so beautiful that it couldn’t be
more so, or light breeze that brings us sleep that couldn’t give us an even
calmer sleep. And so, contemplators equally of mountains and statues,
enjoying days as we enjoy books, dreaming everything, just to turn it into
our intimate substance, we shall also make descriptions and analyses, which,
once made, will become alien things, which we can enjoy, as if we had seen
them in the afternoon.57
In abdication, the status of the external world itself changes because the
(ostensibly interior) sensation that is supposed to faithfully indicate an
exteriority is itself already exterior: but realizing this, it can view itself
as participating in a generalized expressiveness that both art and nature

share in. ‘Imperfection’ is only measurable in terms of criteria external to
production in itself (that a breeze give us rest, a sunset be beautiful to us)
– in short, by our expectations of utility and purpose (even if these appear
to be ‘aesthetic’). But if, as Soares writes a few sentences after the above,
‘we do not have ... a standard of value to apply to the work we produce,’
there nevertheless remains a pleasure subtending all ‘reading aloud’: a
pleasure of becoming-other, of entering into new relations with the world
and one’s own sensations beyond or before any criteria or end.58 The
phrase ‘intimate substance’ seems to smack of a subjective idealism in
which the poet magnanimously preserves nature’s transience in lan-
guage’s pantheon. In the quotation above, however, if Art ‘imitates’
nature, it is only to the extent that it tries to learn from nature, qua imma-
nence (the ever-‘imperfect’ because always becoming) how to read the
book of sensation aloud – i.e., how to write – by freeing itself from the con-
cerns Life presents to us as our own. But the latter only function by the
presumptuous belief (which only demonstrates Life’s need for compen-
satory images: ‘Happiness, a Better Future, Social Science’) that there is
a transcendent standard of value outside the sphere of production itself.59
As with the other inversions I have discussed, giving primacy to what –
for Life – is merely contingent does not negate the ‘real world.’ Rather,
it resituates Life by throwing the whole value-system ordering its contexts
out of any of determinate context. Sensation itself can then be conceived
of as a site of Art production: ‘This thing that without any measure mea-
sures us.’60 The book of sensation is not mine. It is already Art: Art pro-
duces Life, including sensation, not vice-versa. Unlike Life, Art knows it
does not represent the world; rather, it reads itself as having been written.
As the act of reading (and, as act, it is already writing), Art is ‘the singu-
larity that decides its common opening to the immeasurable ...[in such a
way that it] does not deny but exalts the body (and with it the constella-
tion of bodies and ontological machines) as constituent power.’61
NOTES
1 Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet, trans. Alfred Mac Adam (Boston: Exact
Change, 1998), Text 4 (hereafter designated with an ‘M’ before the number
of the text in question). In the Portuguese edition by Richard Zenith (Lis-
bon: Assírio & Alvim, 1998) and in the corresponding Penguin Modern Clas-
sics edition (2002) translated by Zenith, Text 12 (hereafter designated with a
‘Z’ before the number of the text). In general I use Mac Adam’s translation
(with the Portuguese when it seems appropriate), and thus when I use the
term ‘Text xx’ in the main text the reader should assume I am referring to
the numbers in the Exact Change edition of his translation. Quotations that
are cited only with a Z are texts that are not included in the Exact Change edi-
tion of The Book.
2 M 4/Z 12.
3 M 265/Z 249.
4 Placeless insofar as, to use Heideggerian terminology well suited to this case,
there is place only where there is ‘world’; the cadaver, however, has returned
to ‘earth.’ See Martin Heidegger ‘The Essence of the Work of Art,’ in Off the
Beaten Track (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
5 M 117/Z 465.
6 Soares uses the veil/reveal pun in M 38/Z 312. In Portuguese the words are
even more similar: ‘velam e revelam.’
7 Emily Dickinson, The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed. Thomas Johnson
(Boston: Little, Brown, 1960), Poem 258.
8 Louis Althusser, ‘A Letter on Art,’ in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays
(New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971), 223. Althusser’s emphases.
9 M 124/Z 9.
10 Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language (New York: Columbia Uniersity
Press, 1984), 233. Kristeva’s italics. Soares recommends ‘the pulverization of
the personality’ in the text ‘The Art of Effective Dreaming for Metaphysical
Minds’ in The Book of Disquiet, ed. Zenith, 402. In this sense, The Book of Dis-
quiet takes ethics to a level few texts reach.
11 All quotations from The Book in this section are from M 125/Z 99 unless
otherwise noted.
12 I have had to pass over the complex image that takes up most of the first para-
graph of M 125/Z 99. In it, Soares describes the movement by which those
who know ‘depressions of the soul lower than all anguish and all pain’ come
to this awareness. As I read it, the image articulates the phenomenal process
the rest of the text describes: stages of attempted flight, negotiation, nega-
tion, and finally – once diplomacy is recognized as a mere ‘shield,’ at which
time ‘the whole structure of their self-awareness begins to weigh on them’ –
producing an ‘anguish in reverse (angustia às avessas), a lost pain.’
13 E.g., M 91/Z 200: ‘Banality is a home. The quotidian is maternal.’
14 By the end of Text 125, Soares will, like Álvaro de Campos, be able to affirm
this experience – although I would say it is precisely the mode of ‘making
present’ that is at stake here. See Irene Ramalho Santos, ‘The Truant Muse
and the Poet’s Body,’ in this collection.
15 Cf. the formula in Althusser’s ‘Letter on Art,’ quoted in my introduction.

16 Karl Marx, ‘Book-keeping,’ in Capital, vol. 2, The Process of the Circulation of
Capital (New York: International Publishers, 1967), 135.
17 In this sense, the ‘descuido’ is the trace of living labour that capital buries
under its ideal syntheses, that which it constantly needs to control in order to
exploit. Michel Foucault, in one of his last pieces, ontologizes error in a way
that I believe is entirely consistent with this hypothesis: ‘At the most basic
level of life, the processes of coding and decoding give way to a chance occur-
rence that, before becoming a disease, a deficiency, or a monstrosity, is some-
thing like a disturbance in the informative system, something like a
“mistake.” In this sense life – and this is its radical feature – is that which is
capable of error ... And if one grants that the concept is the reply that life
itself has given to that chance process, one must agree that error is the root of
what produces human thought and history.’ ‘Life: Experience and Science,’
in Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–1984, vol. 2, Aesthetics, Method and Epistemol-
ogy, ed. James Faubion (New York: New Press, 1999), 476.
18 Maurice Blanchot, ‘Literature and the Right to Death,’ in The Work of Fire
(Stanford: Stanford Uniersity Press, 1995), 331–2. In Appendix 13 to ‘The
Age of the World Picture,’ Heidegger takes what is at stake in the shadow fur-
ther: ‘Everyday opinion sees in the shadow merely the absence of light, if not
its complete denial. But, in truth, the shadow is the manifest, though impen-
etrable, testimony of hidden illumination. Conceiving of the shadow this way,
we experience the incalculable as that which escapes representation, yet is
manifest in beings and points to the hidden being [Sein].’ Off the Beaten Track,
85. In the terms I am presenting in this essay, the ‘hidden illumination’ is the
living labour that is buried (or appears only as ‘descuido’) under Life’s ‘ideal
syntheses.’
19 Z 270. Both emphases mine.
20 I have emphasized ‘caber’ simply because the link to the notion of contain-
ment is lost in Mac Adam’s translation. I have used Zenith’s translation for
the last phrase, which Mac Adam renders as ‘there is nothing to flee to.’ As
different as these meanings would be in most situations, as far as my argu-
ment is concerned it does not matter: fleeing to or fleeing from both belong
to the plane of Life.
21 ‘that essential error which is writing.’ Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature
(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982), 74.
22 M 153/Z 1, M 186/Z 208.
23 All quotations from The Book in this section are from M 37/ Z 70, unless oth-
erwise noted.
24 Although here I can do no more than point to it, this man’s ‘qualquer-itude’
(whose locus is, at first, limited to his back) should be read along the lines of
what Giorgio Agamben has called ‘whatever being,’ which he defines as ‘a
singularity plus an empty space ... the event of the outside.’ The man’s back is
that ‘in’ him that falls outside what is ‘obviously’ valuable in the world and his
own conception of the meaning of his activity. In the same sense as I have
tried to read Art’s relation to Life, the point at which whatever singularity
comes into existence ‘is not another space that resides beyond determinate
space [nor certainly, as this essay has emphasized, any other determinate
space either], but rather, it is the passage, the exteriority that gives it access ...’
The Coming Community (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993),
67–8. Agamben’s italics. Later, as if he were commenting on Althusser’s
description of the artwork, but from the other side, Agamben speaks of the
threshold that constitutes the quodlibet (whatever/qualquer) as ‘the experi-
ence of being-within an outside’ (68). My hypothesis (although working this
out at the theoretical level is outside the scope of this paper) would be that
what Althusser is articulating from the perspective of an always-already lin-
guistic subject attempting to get out of ideology, Agamben is articulating
from the perspective of Being coming-into-language. To speak very broadly,
we might say that this marginal space (‘internal distance’/‘within an outside’)
is one in which the work of Marx and Heidegger can productively encounter
each other: in the work of Althusser and Agamben, not in the still all-too-
prevalent caricatures of them exemplified by, to use a pointed example,
Molotov and Ribbentrop.
25 See Jean-Luc Nancy’s conception of ‘measureless responsibility’ in ‘Respond-
ing to Existence,’ in A Finite Thinking, ed. Simon Sparks (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 2003), 289–99. Interestingly for my argument, Nancy also
speaks – in a usage of the term ‘abdication’ that is utterly Soaresian – of the
need for a rigorous concept of responsibility ‘to abdicate the serious pose
and the pedantic precautions of those who would give lessons about respon-
sibility’ (298). For Nancy’s articulation of this problematic in a Heideggerian
context, see ‘Originary Ethics’ in the same volume (172–95).
26 The man is implicitly linked to Vasques and Life through hypnotism. In Z 8/
M 68, Soares writes, ‘At times I’m inexplicably hypnotized by Senhor Vasques’
(Zenith’s translation). This does not mean ‘under his control,’ although
Soares does not deny that Vasques is ‘an occasional obstacle, as the owner of
my time, in the daylight hours of my life.’ Rather, it marks the extension of
the blotter experience (also characterized by a fascination and oblivion char-
acteristic of hypnosis) into command itself, just as liberated sensation has
taken Soares’s thought from ‘this man’s back is asleep’ to ‘all of him is asleep’
to ‘Life is all a dream.’
27 Soares does not refer to this myth in Text 37; I find it a productive allusion to
the figuration in which my overall argument is presented: that of the unbur-
ied body.
28 I am thinking here of the famous scenes in ‘Ideology and Ideological State
Apparatuses (Notes towards an Investigation)’ which Althusser uses to show
that ‘the existence of ideology and the hailing or interpellation of individuals
as subjects is one and the same thing.’ Althusser, in Lenin and Philosophy and
Other Essays, 121–86; quotation on page 175.
29 The phrase ‘non-existent sex’ need not be read as a denial of Eros; what it
rejects is not sex per se but ‘the anthropomorphic representation [of sex]
that society imposes on th[e] subject and with which it represents its own sex-
uality.’ In doing so it opens up the possibility of discovering the ‘n sexes’ (n as
in ‘any number of’) in any body, exceeding every fixed representation. Gilles
Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus (Minneapolis: University of Minne-
sota Press, 1983), 296. While questions of gender and sexuality are not my
primary concern in this essay, Soares’s statement is powerful because it shows
how far into the ‘natural’ Soares is able to find Life’s categories concealing
what is ‘really’ Art, i.e., a fiction, in the positive sense Soares gives this term.
Althusser is also salutary on this point insofar as he makes it clear that sex-
uation is one of the primary events in ‘the long forced march’ of ‘the only war
without memoirs or memorials,’ i.e., that which ‘makes mammiferous larvae
into human children, masculine or feminine subjects’ (Althusser, ‘Freud and
Lacan,’ in Lenin and Philosophy, 205–6; Althusser’s italics). The hypothesis
here – which I think Soares agrees with – is that the male/female distinction
exists only for Life, but which Art, at an ontologically prior level, recognizes
as fiction. Thus reading, for example, Lyotard’s statement, ‘I don’t know if
sexual difference is ontological difference. How would a person know?’ (‘Can
Thought Go on without a Body?’ in The Inhuman [Stanford: Stanford Univer-
sity Press, 1991], 21), through Althusser, one would have to remember that,
since knowledge in Althusser’s sense of ‘to know’ is necessarily ideological
(i.e., the operation of a subject defined by interpellation), the ontological is
necessarily unknowable: prior to Life’s determinations, and therefore, in the
sense I have used the term here, ‘fiction.’
30 Spinoza, Ethics, ed. and trans. G.H.R. Parkinson (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2000), 167 (Part III, Prop. 2, Scholium). Despite a terminology that is
often confusing for the (post)modern reader, in its constant use of the terms
like ‘essence’ and ‘adequate’ (not to mention ‘God’), this is an absolutely
anti-essentialist understanding of the body, in the sense that the term is used
in critical discourse today.
31 Spinoza, Ethics, 167.
32 Cited by Gilles Deleuze in Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, (San Francisco: City

Lights, 1981), 81. The quotation is from Spinoza’s Short Treatise on God, Man,
and His Well-Being.
33 Spinoza, Ethics, 130 (Part II, Postulate 1).
34 Spinoza, Ethics, 128 (Part II, Prop. 13, Lemma 3, Axiom 2, Definition).
35 Lyotard, ‘Can Thought Go On?’ 21.
36 Cf. the passage from Z 270 quoted near the end of the previous section.
37 Z 150. It is therefore involuntary: ‘Like it or not, we cannot escape the univer-
sal brotherhood. We all love each other, and the lie is the kiss we exchange’
(Z 260). This ‘universal brotherhood’ is the inescapability of our ignorance;
the lie (‘fiction’) is that which remains outside consciousness’s certainties,
insofar as the latter is the sole locus of ‘truth’ (in exactly the sense that Fou-
cault uses the term when he speaks of truth-regimes, or Nietzsche when he
calls man’s truths merely his ‘irrefutable errors’ [The Gay Science: With a Prelude
in German Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs, ed. Bernard Williams, trans. Jose-
fine Nauckhoff and Adrian del Caro (Cambridge University Press, 2001),
151]). Art’s virtue, on the other hand, is that it is unjustifiable and without
purpose, a condition which, affirmed as far as it can go, leads to ‘I never did
anything useful and I will never do anything justifiable’ (M 123/Z 204). From
this point of view (that of Art), the problem is not with error, it is with the
claim to irrefutability, which, like the defence of imperial frontiers, is
doomed to barbarian invasion and ultimate dispossession.
38 Cf. ‘Millimeters (experiencing tiny things),’ M 239. In the Penguin edition
this text appears in the unnumbered section Zenith calls ‘A Disquiet Anthol-
ogy’ (435–6). In the Livro, it is included among ‘Os Grandes Trechos’ (451–
2).
39 I am alluding here to Kleist’s ‘On the Marionette Theater’ (as Soares himself
quite likely is). There, grace is seen as the identity of the absolute body and
the absolute mind after ‘passing through infinity,’ i.e., insofar as the body is
not partially negated by a mediating consciousness that claims to ‘know what
it’s doing.’ Lyotard gives a fascinating reading of this phenomenon using
music as his topos in ‘God and the Puppet,’ in The Inhuman, 153–64.
40 Spinoza, passim.
41 M 153/Z 1.
42 It is significant that The Book of Disquiet is not written by a ‘full’ heteronym.
What has been said about containment and possession as principles of Life
(and not Art) applies to the self or ego, as well as to the world. Heteronymy
was an attempt to undo this, but I suspect that what Pessoa discovered was
that creating separate personalities is not enough, insofar as each of the het-
eronyms is still, itself, a ‘full’ personality. But if the problem is consciousness’s
belief that it is ‘all there’ (that it can or should fully possess itself), then cre-
ating several putative self-contained identities does not change the situation.
Only an awareness conscious of itself as saturated with unconsciousness, a
persona perennially ‘mutilated’ (never ‘all there’) by ‘sleepiness’ (or insom-
nia) can hope to affirm the real source of power (‘the body as unconscious of
the unconscious as body’) that is beyond and before conscious control, and
in which consciousness can only participate, not contain it or escape it.
43 Dickinson, Complete Poems, poem 258. It ends with these words.
44 Blanchot, The Space of Literature, 262.
45 Blanchot, The Space of Literature, 262.
46 Blanchot, The Space of Literature, 258. Blanchot’s emphasis.
47 Blanchot, ‘Literature and the Right to Death,’ 322–3: ‘For me to be able to
say, “This woman,” I must somehow take her flesh-and-blood reality away
from her, cause her to be absent, annihilate her. The word gives me the
being, but it gives it to me deprived of being. The word is the absence of that
being, its nothingness, what is left of it when it has lost being – the very fact
that it does not exist.’
48 Cf. Heidegger’s ‘Letter on “Humanism’: ‘To think against “values” is not to
maintain that everything interpreted as “a value” – “culture,” “art,” “science,”
“human dignity,” “world,” and “God” – is valueless. Rather, it is important
finally to realize that precisely through the characterization of something as
“a value” what is so valued is robbed of its worth.’ Pathmarks (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1998), 265.
49 This is the heart of Marx’s critique of Proudhon; Marx is particularly con-
temptuous of Proudhon’s naive belief that property can be distributed fairly.
He sees that the very notion of ‘equal measure’ inherent in the concept of
property conceals (or ‘assuages’) the immeasurable productive forces that
give it its value in the first place. See Karl Marx, Grundrisse (London: Penguin,
1973), 137 and passim for Marx’s contempt for Proudhon’s work.
50 ‘The Lake of Possession (II),’ page 424 in the Penguin edition; Livro, 438.
Deleuze and Guattari speak of the difference between relative and absolute
as the difference between pedagogy and ontology (What Is Philosophy? 22).
The Proudhon maxim is indeed instructive, as Pessoa himself said; but
Soares’s phrase (pace Zenith) neither refutes nor relativizes it. On the con-
trary, it affirms it as far as it goes, but absolutizes it by ontologizing its ‘lesson.’
See Zenith’s note on page 500 of the Penguin edition; Livro, 524.
51 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vin-
tage, 1979), 29–30.
52 Blanchot, The Space of Literature, 256–7.
53 Blanchot, The Space of Literature, 259; italics in original.
54 M 153/Z 1. The ‘we’ here refers not to some group that Soares identifies him-
self as belonging to, but rather to those ‘left ... on the fringes of society’ (M
153/Z 1). It is an ‘unavowable community’ or ‘heterotopia’ constituted by a
mutual exclusion from or abdication of any belonging-to. The description of
‘their’ practice clearly shows that any ‘program’ other than the affirmation of
non-belonging and non-possession would immanently – as opposed to con-
tractually – revoke the condition of possibility of being ‘in’ such a group.
55 Fernando Pessoa, Textos de intervenção social e cultural, ed. António Quadros
(N.p.: Publicações Europa-América, 1986), 183. Translation by Richard
Appignanesi as cited in his ‘Fernando Pessoa: Missing Person,’ in Other Than
Identity: The Subject, Politics, and Art, ed. Julia Steyn (Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 1997), 44.
56 Z 270.
57 M 153/Z 1.
58 M 153/Z 1.
59 M 261/Z 273.
60 Z 350.
61 Antonio Negri, ‘Kairòs, Alma Venus, Multitudo,’ in Time for Revolution, trans.
Matteo Mandarini (New York: Continuum, 2003), 248 (‘Multitudo: Decision’
1.3, 1.4).
PART TWO
Reading Pessoa Queerly

Fernando Pessoa: The Homoerotic Drama
fer nando ar enas
The homoerotic desire that runs through Fernando Pessoa’s oeuvre has
been noted by succeeding generations of critics, from the now classic
studies by João Gaspar Simões, Jorge de Sena, and Eduardo Lourenço to
the more recent ones by Irene Ramalho Santos, Richard Zenith, José Car-
los Barcellos, Mário César Lugarinho, Fernando Arenas, and others.1
However, despite the eloquent and courageous attempts to call attention
to the role of homoerotic desire in the Pessoan text, and in light of the
manuscripts that are still emerging or yet to be discovered, much work
unquestionably remains to be done. The latest discoveries made by
researcher and translator Richard Zenith in the archive of Pessoa’s
manuscripts have further reinforced the idea of the importance of homo-
erotic desire for a broader and deeper understanding of the poet’s liter-
ary-ontological labyrinth. These recently revealed homoerotic poetic
texts, as well as new theoretical approaches to Pessoa (such as, for
instance, José Gil’s Deleuzian studies), make it both possible and desir-
able to update the debate around the ‘homosexual question’ and to
reevaluate its importance within the heteronymic universe. This essay,
therefore, seeks to achieve four things: first, to map the terrain of existing
criticism in terms of established approaches to the homoerotic dimen-
sion in Pessoa’s work; second, to insert the homoerotic question into the
paradigm of ‘local readings’ of Pessoa’s works; third, to undertake fresh
analysis of relevant texts; and, finally, to suggest – on the basis of texts
both familiar and little known – in what manner the consideration of
homoerotic desire might permit a new global reading of Pessoa’ s work.2
This essay does not intend, however, to exhaust the theme or to rule out
alternative critical approaches. Rather, taking as a starting point some
previous critical endeavours, my intention is to move the discussion fur-
ther forward.
104 Fernando Arenas
Pessoa left thousands of manuscripts, of which many are still being

unearthed, classified, read, and published today. Teresa Rita Lopes has
attested to the existence of at least seventy-two heteronymous voices
within this still-emerging body of work; those figures include a hunch-
backed woman named Maria José and an anonymous subject who is
explicitly ‘gay.’3 Since the 1990s, new poems of openly homoerotic con-
tent, written in English and in French, have also emerged. As Lopes
reminds us, expanding awareness of Pessoa’s unpublished manuscripts
not only alters quantitatively our knowledge of his work but also qualita-
tively alters the landscape of Pessoan criticism.4 The latest ‘archaeologi-
cal’ discoveries have undeniably contributed more data to what is already
known of the (homo)erotic question in Fernando Pessoa’s work and life
on the basis of references – although always scarce – spread across all of
his orthonymic, heteronymic, and epistolary production. In effect, this
relative scarcity of references, or even (at times) their symptomatic
absence, constitutes a paradoxical argument in support of the assertion
that the ontological crisis flickering at the heart of Pessoa’s literary pro-
duction is related, to a certain point, to a sense of unrealized
(homo)erotic desire. The philosophical complexity of Pessoa’s work that
results from this ontological crisis (and here we should consider also the
work of his partner in literature, Mário de Sá-Carneiro) cannot be disso-
ciated, in the end, from desire and sexuality.
João Gaspar Simões was the first critic to initiate discussion of the
‘enigma of Eros’ in Pessoa’s life and work. The basis of his analysis rests
on an Oedipal reading of the poet’s sexuality. Pessoa’s love affair with
Ophelia Queiroz, which Gaspar Simões describes as fleeting and essen-
tially platonic, as well as the poet’s ‘frustrated,’ ‘abnormal,’ and ‘aber-
rant’ sexuality are read from a markedly Freudian perspective. According
to the Freudian model applied by Gaspar Simões, the poet’s infantile
fixation on his mother would develop into an obstacle to being able to
love any other woman and, indeed, the mother’s strong presence in
Pessoa’s psyche was said to be conducive to homosexuality. According to
the critic, however, this homosexuality, just like the romance with
‘Ophelinha,’ would have been of a ‘platonic’ nature. In both cases, Gas-
par Simões declared the forms of sexuality present in Pessoa’s life and
work (which are interrelated in his analysis) to be of an ‘abnormal’
nature. But such abnormality became aesthetically sublimated through
literary production:
O ideal de Beleza, valor imperativo no momento em que debate consigo

mesmo os vários problemas do amor, era, então, por assim dizer, o único
ideal da sua obra, visto que o ideal de Beleza correspondia à ‘translação’ de

elementos psíquícos e sexuais, especialmente sexuais, que, amputados na
sua originária manifestação, se haviam refugiado na abstracção ideal do
princípio para que tendiam todas as aspirações da sua sensibilidade.5
[The ideal of Beauty, of imperative value at the moment in which he

debates with himself various problems of love, was, thus, to put it one way,
the only ideal of his work, since the ideal of Beauty corresponded to the dis-
placement of psychic and, especially, sexual elements that, having been
amputated in their originary manifestations, sought refuge in the ideal
abstraction of the principle to which all the aspirations of his sensibility
tended.]
According to this reading, everything is legitimate as long as it is put to

the service of Beauty. This is precisely the reasoning that Pessoa ele-mesmo
employs in his defence of António Botto’s explicitly homoerotic poetry.
In fact, in his 1922 essay ‘António Botto e o ideal estético em Portugal,’
Pessoa argues that since Botto has pursued the aesthetic ideal in his work
– by singing praises of male bodies, which the Greeks held as the
supreme example of beauty – he has placed himself above morality. In
Pessoa’s view, Botto’s poetic penchant for celebrating physical beauty
and pleasure for their own sake makes him an archetypal aesthete in the
Greek sense; therefore, Pessoa suggests, any moral condemnation of
Botto’s celebration of male beauty is absolutely misplaced. This clever
historical-aesthetic argument circumvented societal homophobia that
was directed at Botto, but could potentially extend even towards Pessoa
himself. It is possible that this line of reasoning, albeit with an injection
of significant Freudian overtones, may have been appropriated by Gas-
par Simões as Pessoa’s critic and biographer, but also friend, in order to
explicate the poet’s ‘problematic’ sexuality.
While the erotic question in Pessoa’s life and work occupies an entire
chapter in Gaspar Simões’s exhaustive biography of the poet, Pessoa’s
French critic and biographer Robert Bréchon dedicates only a few lines
to it in his more recent and likewise exhaustive Étrange étranger (1996)
(published in Portuguese as Estranho Estrangeiro [1996]). With regard
to the deep platonic and intellectual friendship between Pessoa and
Sá-Carneiro, Bréchon peremptorily asserts that ‘mesmo que haja incon-
testavelmente em Pessoa, e ainda mais em Sá-Carneiro, tendências
homossexuais, a relação deles foi unicamente a de duas ‘almas,’ para
utilizar o seu próprio vocabulário’ (even if homosexual tendencies are
incontestably present in Pessoa, and even more so in Sá-Carneiro, their
106 Fernando Arenas
relationship was only that of two ‘souls,’ to use their own terminology).6
For Bréchon, the ‘homosexual tendencies’ – whether implicit, latent,
explicit, or repressed – are a factor to be taken into account in the biog-
raphy and bibliography of the two poets (although the critic makes a qual-
itative distinction between them in this regard), but the assertion of such
tendencies stops there, and does not compromise Bréchon’s emphasis on
what he views as the strictly platonic nature of the relationship between
Pessoa and Sá-Carneiro.
Eduardo Lourenço, for his part, introduces a nihilistic reading with
Nietzschean underpinnings in order to interpret Pessoa’s ontological-
erotic enigma. According to this reading, the poet’s entire being consti-
tutes a ‘painful absence.’ The suffering that derives from this predica-
ment is as metaphysical as it is carnal and affective, in the sense that there
is a constitutive gap between the self and the other. This gap, according
to Lourenço, leads to an excruciating inability to love and, particularly, to
love women (the beings whom Lourenço defines as Other in relation to
men, leaving somewhat unclear where to situate a biological male in rela-
tion to another man). The absence of women as objects of carnal desire
throughout Pessoa’s work has, in fact, been generally recognized. Not
even Ricardo Reis is immune from this dynamic, given that he avoids at
all costs any physical contact or emotional involvement that might lead to
the experience of pleasure or disaffection. Although Lourenço recog-
nizes that in Pessoa there is a more ‘incarnate and convincing’ treatment
of the homoerotic impulse, he distances himself from the explanation
given by Pessoa himself, who stated that homoerotic inclination was the
basis of his unfulfilled need for love (Lourenço, in fact, alludes to Pes-
soa’s declaration).7 In the end, Lourenço chooses to refute, probably for
reasons of prudishness and homophobia, the manifest relationship
between homosexuality, absence of love, and metaphysical pain. The
critic’s stance is ambiguous, in that he subordinates the erotic to the onto-
logical, refuting any link between the phenomenon of não-amor and what
he calls (citing Freud) the ‘desvio da norma amorosa’ (deviation from
the amorous norm), despite having recognized this ‘deviation’ as palpa-
ble and problematic in Pessoa’s text. Nevertheless, at the same time,
Lourenço admits that Pessoa ‘liberates’ his homosexual and sado-mas-
ochistic tendencies in his English Poems and in the well-known odes by
Álvaro de Campos, and acknowledges that there may be a ‘sincere’ tone
to the homo-affectivity described in, for example, the poem ‘Antinous.’
In any case, despite being ‘messengers’ of his homoerotic impulse, these
‘written figures’ of Pessoa’s affectivity are said to ‘traverse only with diffi-
culty the cold, solitary circle of the não-amor.’8 In Lourenço’s reading, the
question of affections, homoerotic or other, in Pessoa’s life and work
inexorably passes through the labyrinth of infinite solitude, through the
anguish on the contemplation of death, and through the weakening of
the modern subject. However, the question of an affective, sentimental,
and erotic truth in Pessoa is, in the end, inseparable from the question of
the ontological qualities of Pessoa’s literary ‘universe,’ that is, from the
play of masks and the rule of dissimulation that mediate the poet’s exis-
tential drama. Hence, the following questions remain: what is, in the end,
the place of homoerotic desire in Pessoa’s literary-ontological universe?
In what way is desire the cause, effect, symptom, or correlative of an exis-
tential anguish? Even though Lourenço makes some important advance-
ments towards answering these questions, they deserve still more
reflection, and I will return to them later.
Jorge de Sena and António Quadros, both focusing on the poem
‘Antinous,’ dedicate a number of pages to determining the significance
of the (homo)sexual question in relation to Pessoa’s life and work.9 In
their respective interpretive approaches, considerable recourse is made
to the letters sent by Pessoa to Gaspar Simões. In these, Pessoa reveals his
obsession with what he defines as ‘obscenity,’ and, equally, with what,
according to him, is his need to eliminate it once and for all:
Há em cada um de nós, por pouco que se especialize instintivamente na

obscenidade, um certo elemento desta ordem, cuja quantidade, evidente-
mente, varia de homem para homem. Como esses elementos, por pequeno
que seja o grau em que existem, são um certo estorvo para alguns processos
mentais superiores, decidi, por duas vezes, eliminá-los pelo processo sim-
ples de os exprimir intensamente.
[There is in all of us, however little we may be inclined toward obscenity, a

certain element of this order, which obviously varies from person to person.
Since these elements, no matter how small, will in some way be a hindrance
to superior mental processes, I decided to eliminate them twice, by the sim-
ple expedient of expressing them intensely.]10
In this passage, Pessoa alludes to the genesis of two poems in English,

which are considered the most explicitly and paradigmatically erotic of
all his presently known work: ‘Antinous’ (1918) and ‘Epithalamium’
(1921). Sena is quite interested in the ambiguity of this section of the let-
ter and discusses it at length in his introduction to the Poemas Ingleses
108 Fernando Arenas
(1974). Sena writes that in this letter Pessoa tries to ‘rationalize’ a psycho-
logical reality (in this case, what Pessoa calls ‘obscenity,’ or what for us
would simply be ‘sexuality,’ whether hetero-, bi-, or homo-), in addition to
trying to ‘neutralize’ the erotic charge of his poems. Such a process of
intellectual sublimation of sexuality, as this symptomatic passage reveals,
points towards a conscious strategy of sexual repression as well as a man-
ifest sense of guilt, or homo- and ero-phobia, imbued with a certain Pla-
tonism. Nevertheless, this complex attempt at sublimation is situated in a
much broader dialectical context of chastity and pan-eroticism, as Sena
suggests, involving all of Pessoa’s work, from the radical bisexuality of
Álvaro de Campos, the explicit homosexuality of the tender and tragic
‘gay heteronym’ recently discovered by Richard Zenith, and the unabash-
edly expressed and mutually shared homoerotic love between two men –
Hadrian and Antinous – in the English-language poem ‘Le Mignon‘
(published for the first time, in an incomplete version, in 1995 by Luísa
Freire and more recently made known in a more complete, though still
fragmentary, form by Zenith), to the parodic heterosexuality of ‘Epith-
alamium,’ to recall some of the major examples in Pessoa’s oeuvre.11
Of the critics of his generation, Jorge de Sena undoubtedly evinces the
greatest sensitivity to the (homo)erotic drama in Pessoa’s work. Free of
moralizing remarks, prudishness, or a pathologizing approach, he offers
a reading that attests to a limited circulation of erotic desire in the
diverse registers of Pessoa’s literary work, corresponding to the suppres-
sion of such desire in the poet’s life. His reading admits the expression of
a certain liberty achieved by Pessoa, though at a high price: not through
the affirmation of the personality but, paradoxically, through its annul-
ment. We have here, then, in summary, various canonical readings of the
(homo)erotic dimension of the Pessoan ontological drama: the subject
exploding into dozens of textual beings as a conscious strategy of subli-
mation that, according to Gaspar Simões, is a response to an aesthetic
imperative; or an attempt to resolve an excruciatingly painful existential
impasse, according to Lourenço; or a multiplication in the text of erotic
desire in its diverse manifestations that serves to erase its manifestations
in life, according to Sena. These three readings highlighting the subli-
mation, subordination, and negation of Eros in Pessoa agree in affirm-
ing as their conclusion the clear impossibility of (homo)erotic
expression and its realization in life, or rather, outside of the text. In any
case, an overview of various critical approaches to Pessoa, whether by the
more canonical scholars outlined here or the newer ones mentioned at
the outset, reveals that the expressive boundaries of (homo)erotic desire
in Pessoa’s work are quite limited (with the possible exception of the
poem ‘Le Mignon’) and its degree of plausibility minimal, especially if
we consider the ‘Maritime Ode’ by Álvaro de Campos or the orthony-
mous ‘Antinous.’ Despite this, the textual markers of homoerotism are,
on the one hand, a symptom of its importance in the dialectic between
life and text in Pessoa and, on the other hand, a fundamental feature of
the textual dialectic between dissimulation and sincerity that opens up
the possibility of free expression of a multiplicity of desires.
Following Eduardo Prado Coelho’s overview of the development of
Pessoan studies up to the 1980s, we can see that the interpretative para-
digms he identifies are situated between two poles. In readings belong-
ing to the first group, such as Gaspar Simões’s, the biographical fact
explains the textual fact. In this case, the human fact, conceived of as a
‘weakness’ located in the ‘psychosexual dimension,’ would condition the
‘aesthetic credibility’ – or lack thereof – of the text. In readings of the
second group, the textual fact explains the biographical fact, as the exis-
tential drama is absorbed and rearticulated by the literary discourse.
Eduardo Lourenço’s reading is one of the most representative of this
approach, in that it highlights Pessoa’s text as a response to an individual
saga that, for its part, is symptomatic of the crisis of modernity, in which
the destiny of the Western (male) subject is called into question. Mean-
while, in the midst of this polarization of paradigms one finds various
local readings, among which I would like to situate a homoerotic reading
of Pessoa’s work. In Prado Coelho’s analysis, however, a third globalizing
paradigm seeks to break with the general view of the Pessoan text as a
negation of lived experience; it is my belief that this third paradigm
might enhance a homoerotic reading of Pessoa and vice versa. Proposed
by José Gil, this new way of reading Pessoa is the result of a productive
dialogue with Deleuzian theoretical thought that takes as its premise the
view of Pessoa’s desire to ‘feel everything in every way’ as no less than an
extraordinary affirmation of life. This approach is essentially based on a
conception of the text as a springboard of ideas and sensations that pro-
duce intense and dynamic fluctuations of expression.
Through his analysis of the metaphysics of sensations in Pessoa’s work,
Gil reads the poet first as the theoretical fact that sustains the existence
of Pessoa as textual fact (literature emerges here as the production of an
act of becoming-other that is at the same time a becoming-oneself ).12 The tex-
tual fact, for its part, remains imbricated in a vast and complex network
of texts that constitute the heteronymic phenomenon. In this reading,
heteronymity would be ‘a device for producing literary sensations and
110 Fernando Arenas
the multiplication of those sensations’; at the same time, this device acts
as a technique of liberation from repressive forms of identity.13 Here, Gil
follows the path of Deleuze and Guattari’s poststructuralist approach to
subjectivity, desire, epistemology, and politics, in order to rescue Pessoa
from negative and nihilistic readings. ‘Pessoa and Company’ become
therefore the object of a conceptual and historical transcodification,
insofar as they appear archetypical, avant la lettre, of the postmodern sub-
jectivity celebrated by the French theoreticians. As is known, Deleuze
and Guattari refute any notion of a unified and centred subject and, to
the contrary, postulate the emergence, in a postmodern age, of subjectiv-
ities freed from fixed forms of identity. In this context they theorize the
‘body-without-organs,’ the ‘de-territorialized’ body, without organiza-
tion; a liberated entity in a semiotized state, socially articulated and dis-
ciplined in order to admit the possibility of reconstituting itself in
multiple forms. At the root of the schizo-analysis developed by Deleuze
and Guattari in Anti-Oedipus we find the primacy of desire and the
unconscious over material production. Here, the ‘body-without-organs’
is the entity that liberates the flow of the unconscious and desire.14
According to Gil, the poetic space of Campos’s ‘Maritime Ode’ is, in its
orgasmic delirium for all things maritime, one of the most accomplished
examples of the construction of the ‘body-without-organs’ in all of Pes-
soa’s work. Gil reads the ‘Maritime Ode’ as a minutely detailed account
of an attempt ‘at a possible form of construction of a plane of imma-
nence.’15 This plane presupposes the non-separation of the spirit and
the body, as a unity wherein all sorts of affections, emotions, sensations,
and intensities coexist. According to the critic, here the ‘body-without-
organs’ is composed of three planes in one: skin, sea, and poetic writing.
The enactment of the ‘delírio das coisas marítimas’ (delirium of mari-
time things) thus implies the ‘circulação nómada de intensidades
literário-dérmico-marítimas’ (nomadic circulation of literary-dermal-
maritime intensities).16 In this way, the movement of sensation becomes
the movement of writing. The place of (homo)erotic desire in this move-
ment, however, remains to be clarified. It is clear that (homo)erotic
desire permeates the entire surface of the ‘body-without-organs’ across
the various planes enumerated by Gil (skin, sea, poetic writing), but at
the same time there is no apparent attempt, in Gil’s otherwise brilliant
hermeneutic exercise, to explain the role of this desire in the economy
of the poem, apart from suggesting that the sexual intensities that run
through the ‘Maritime Ode’ pertain to the ‘infantile’ world that is con-
stantly evoked in various sections of the poem (for example, in the
scenes of piracy).17 Thus Gil’s reading, in its conclusions with respect to

homoerotic desire, represents a return to the Freudian interpretations
of (homo)sexuality so crucial to Gaspar Simões, in which homoerotic
desire emerges as a symptom of unresolved childhood conflicts of Oedi-
pal origin.
It therefore remains for us to deepen the reading of homoerotic desire
in Pessoa’s work, focusing specifically on a number of paradigmatic texts:
‘Triumphal Ode,’ ‘Maritime Ode,’ ‘Antinous,’ ‘Le Mignon,’ and the
recently published, unattributed and fragmentary ‘gay poem.’ In the ‘Tri-
umphal Ode’ – and, in a more emphatic manner, in the ‘Maritime Ode’
– the poetic space becomes the forum for the expression of the most rad-
ical of desires, attempting to escape from disciplinarian social hierarchies
and liberating repressed erotic fantasies, while at the same time privileg-
ing a libidinal flow as intense as it is ‘perverse.’ Campos’s famous odes are
probably among Western modernism’s most daring examples of libera-
tion of polymorphous desire expressed in literary texts. Here, the inter-
section of Pessoa/Campos with Walt Whitman is evident, as has been
pointed out by George Monteiro, Susan M. Brown, and Irene Ramalho
Santos.18 Ramalho Santos stresses the pivotal importance of Pessoa’s
encounter with Whitman in the emergence of the heteronymic device.
The heteronyms are in fact the vehicle that conveys ‘Pessoa’s own poetic
and political (if not “bacchic”) “orgy of freed sensations.”’19 Campos’s
odes are a celebration of the possibilities of modernity for both ‘the West-
ern subject’ as a generalized entity and the Portuguese nation in partic-
ular. However, they are also a torturous lament of the limitations of
subjectivity and nationhood. With regard to Campos’s ‘Maritime Ode,’
Ramalho Santos states that
the modern Portuguese poet’s sentient body, as if turned into the sexual
object of modernity, becomes the most vulnerable site of the poem’s
obscene performance. All the abnormalities and perversions of turn-of-the-
century regulated and medicalized sexuality, not excluding the heterosex-
ual familialism of ‘decent’ patriarchy, are conjured up in a sentient body
that is both male and female, yet a body not merely androgynous, rather
multisexual and intersexual, to construct Pessoa/Campos’s orgiastic ver-
sion of the epic of modern consciousness.20
In the wake of the Freudian revolution, Pessoa’s odes present a ‘poetics

and politics of the perverse’ – to use Joseph Boone’s term – in the sense
that they coincide with a number of modernist writings, including both
112 Fernando Arenas
prose and poetry, which delineate the instability and variability of psycho-
sexual desires as well as the ‘deviations’ of the libido in the unconscious.
Thus, we find in the ‘Triumphal Ode’ and in the ‘Maritime Ode’ not only
an open expression of male homoerotic desire, but also its enclosure
within a framework of explicitly sado-masochistic nature. In his analysis
of the representation of sexuality in Anglo-American modernism, Boone
correctly reminds us that the formation of the modernist movement in
art and culture is indissociable from the new psychoanalytical and sexo-
logical discourses that emerge at the beginning of the twentieth century.
However, from an ideological, aesthetic, and narrative-poetic point of
view, modernism occupies an antitotalizing and counterhegemonic posi-
tion relative to those discourses.21 In the specific case of Pessoa/Campos,
the subject’s posture is ambiguous: it oscillates between totalizing and
antitotalizing forces, reinforcing a hierarchical gender-sex system but
also – as Ramalho Santos suggests – problematizing and exploding it.22
The ‘Triumphal Ode’ and the ‘Maritime Ode’ erupt spectacularly into
the cultural stagnation at the centre of an empire that, at the beginning
of the twentieth century, is located on the margins of history.23 The ‘Mar-
itime Ode’ engages in appropriation and transformation of the ‘raw
materials’ that make possible the construction of empire (in its forma-
tive fifteenth- and sixteenth-century sense) – the sea and its referents – in
order to project them onto a new plane (‘the Absolute Quay’), the logos
that comes to govern the poem. This logos consists essentially of the pro-
duction of a new (poetic) form of being, and of being in language, with
the goal of uttering and representing the contemporary moment. At the
same time, it consists of an attempt at living a total experience. An aspect
of this longing for totality is the poetic subject’s desire to render himself
radically other, and a fundamental aspect of this process of othering that
takes place throughout the ‘Maritime Ode’ (as well as the ‘Triumphal
Ode’) relates to matters and phenomena sensual, erotic, and sexual.
Thus, the male modern subject yearns to liberate himself through the
promise of technology and the machine, becoming the passive sexual
object of both, Whitmanesquely ‘feeling everything in every way’ in a hal-
lucinatory multiplication of sensations. Sexual differences are annulled
and the binary oppositions and boundaries between subject and object
implode. The fury of the desire for total sensation is expressed through
a sado-masochistic relationship with the world, in which the poetic sub-
ject longs to be sexually dominated and penetrated, as well as tortured,
beaten, and even raped and slain by the machine – the archetypal sign of
modernity – or by its humanized version in the form of sailors, arche-
typal heroic figures of the Portuguese nation. Witness first the ‘Trium-
phal Ode’ and then the ‘Maritime Ode’:
Eu podia morrer triturado por um motor

Com o sentimento de deliciosa entrega duma mulher possuída.
Atirem-me para dentro das fornalhas!
Metam-me debaixo dos comboios!
Espanquem-me a bordo de navios!
Masoquismo através de maquinismos!
Sadismo de não sei quê moderno e eu e barulho!
[I could die cut to pieces by a motor

With the feeling of delicious surrender of a woman possessed.
Let them throw me into furnaces!
Let them put me under trains!
Let them flog me above ships!
Masochism by mechanisms!
Sadism of anything modern and me and hubbub!]24
Façam enxárcias das minhas veias!

Amarras dos meus músculos!
Arranquem-me a pele, preguem-na às quilhas.
E possa eu sentir a dor dos pregos e nunca deixar de sentir!
Façam do meu coração uma flâmula de almirante
Na hora da guerra dos velhos navios!
Calquem aos pés nos conveses meus olhos arrancados!
Quebrem-me os ossos de encontro às amuradas!
Fustiguem-me atado aos mastros, fustiguem-me!
A todos os ventos de todas as latitudes e longitudes
Derramem meu sangue sobre as águas arremessadas
Que atravessam o navio, o tombadilho, de lado a lado,
Nas vascas bravas das tormentas!
[Make shroud ropes out of my veins!

Hawsers of my muscles!
Tear off my skin, nail it down to the keels.
Let me feel the pain of the nails and never stop feeling it!
Out of my heart make an admiral’s flag
Unfurled in a battle between old sailing ships!
Let my ripped-out eyes be squashed underfoot on the decks!
114 Fernando Arenas
Break my bones against hulls!

Tie me to the mast and lash me, lash me!
To all the winds of all latitudes, longitudes,
Spread my blood over rushing waters
That dash side to side across the quarter-deck
In the wild gale’s death rattle!]25
Here, the violent impulse reaches a self-flagellatory and lethal

extreme in the sense that the poetic subject, in a heretical gesture,
desires to be sacrificed like an (anti)Christ, or even a slave, by the devas-
tating force of maritime life. In this delirium, the hierarchizing catego-
ries of morality, religion, sexuality, and gender undergo a violent
transcodification, parallel to a multiplication of the subject’s identities. It
is on this immanent plane, as José Gil defines it, that all the contradictory
sensations would coexist, making possible the multiplicity of feeling, in
one and in infinite sensations, unfolding itself instantaneously in ‘pregas
infinitas’ (infinite creases).26 However, in Campos’s odes, the sensual
explosion of strong (homo)erotic charge is ephemeral, leaving the sub-
ject exhausted, disillusioned, and solitary, without the possibility of com-
munication with the Other. The poetic subject’s relationship with
modernity and its signifiers is essentially negative and alienating. The
modernity of the machine, of technology, of the steering wheel, though
erotically emancipatory, does not fill the ontological void left by the
gods, while at the same time it is marked by an extraordinarily self-
destructive violence that is as misogynist as it is homophobic:
Ser o meu corpo passivo a mulher-todas-as-mulheres

Que foram violadas, mortas, feridas, rasgadas pelos piratas!
Ser no meu ser subjugado a fêmea que tem de ser deles
E sentir tudo isso – todas estas coisas duma só vez – pela espinha!’
[To let my passive body be the grand sum-total-woman of all women

Who were raped, killed, wounded, torn apart by pirates!
To be, in my bondage, the woman having to serve them all!
And feel it all – feel all these things at once – through to the backbone!]27
Despite the impulse to demolish all sexual differences and binary

oppositions in the maritime ecstasy, as with the hallucinatory and liberat-
ing return of the repressed, the masculine subject remains inevitably
leashed to the patriarchal sex/gender system in that all the sexual rela-
tionships that take place in this poetic space are highly hierarchized,
following the rigid scheme of masculine/feminine, active/passive polar-
ization, in which the poetic subject occupies the place of the passive and
feminized object of a hypermasculinized machine.
The ‘body-without-organs,’ the theoretical concept that postulates an
emancipatory function of the flows of the unconscious and of desire, and
that eloquently describes the vital impulse of the Pessoan heteronymic
device, belongs in the end to the domain of art, or in the specific case of
Pessoa, to the poetic space. It is within this space that the ‘body-without-
organs’ is potentialized, thus mobilizing the creative energy that multi-
plies the possibilities of the process of becoming-being. Therefore, the
(homo)erotic desire, the materiality of the body, and sexual acts, are sub-
jected to a regime of the aestheticization of existence.28 That is to say,
there is, on the one hand, the rejection of reason, of ‘normativity,’ and of
social conventions and, on the other hand, the search for refuge in art, in
the body, and in individualized ways of being. However, even in this
poetic/aesthetic space, the body and desire do not entirely escape the
principles of the Real (understood here in the Lacanian sense, as the
sphere of impossibility, of the non-satisfaction of desire and need), nor
the ideological structures that delimit the circulation of desire and the
production of certain identities. As much in the spectacular odes of
Álvaro de Campos as in the sensitive and amorous ‘Antinous’ or the
sadly tender unattributed ‘gay poem,’ we witness the expression of
(homo)erotic desire in a diversity of registers, just as we also witness the
relative textual liberation of what would be in life the repression of
(homo)erotic desire. Nevertheless, and despite the liberatory impulse in
these poems, we note the impossibility of actualizing this desire even
within the text. ‘Le Mignon’ emerges, then, as the only poem of homo-
erotic content known among Pessoa’s work in which homoerotic desire is
visible and not only explicitly evoked but also consummated, albeit in a
historically distant time (ancient Rome) and within a cultural context
where same-sex love affairs between adult and adolescent males were an
integral and expected part of life. Yet, in Pessoa’s work (despite this last
important example), the almost complete (homo)erotic impossibility in
the poetic space tends to predominate, accentuating the distance
between textual expression of (homo)erotic desire and its lack of realiza-
tion (inside most texts, with the singular exception of ‘Le Mignon’).
‘Antinous,’ for example, despite being one of the most carnal and sen-
sual poems of all of Pessoa’s work, is marked by its funereal and necro-
philiac aspect. ‘Antinous’ calls attention to the impossibility of physically
116 Fernando Arenas
loving a being that no longer exists, in this case, the young Antinous, who
died in the year 130 A.D. In Pessoa’s poem, the dead ephebe is being
mourned and hymned by his lover, the Roman emperor Hadrian. We
note a constant tension between the said and the unsaid, the sensual and
the chaste, the macabre and the erotic; in the end, between life and
death. These tensions inhabit the entire text, serving as commentary on
the historical episode in question and, also, as the poet’s metacommen-
tary on (homo)sexuality. Erotic expression in this poem centres on the
corporeal, where Eros intermingles with Thanatos, thus creating the rite
of necrophiliac love, the moment in which physical love, lust, and death
meet. Meanwhile, falling rain establishes from the beginning an atmo-
sphere of pain and mourning, as well as the nostalgic tone that runs
through the entire poem, revealing the influence of the aesthetics of Por-
tuguese decadentismo: ‘The rain outside was cold in Hadrian’s soul.’29
Soon after, the poem becomes a sort of erotic journey across Antinous’s
body. The poetic voice evokes the parts of the body that no longer have
life but that were and will be (in the poem) the emperor’s delight: warm
(now cold) hands, hair, eyes, lips, erogenous sites, fingers, tongue, hands,
white body, nipple, head, mouth, and so on. The properties that emanate
from the body are also evoked: heat, arousal, lust, pleasure, etc. Still, the
poetic voice avoids detailing the actions, limiting itself to (albeit sensual)
suggestion: ‘O lips whose opening redness erst could touch,’ or simply
not saying at all (‘O fingers skilled in things not to be told’).30 Hadrian,
in the end, wishes to eternalize love, beauty, and youth (qualities that
Antinous embodies) beyond time and death. Carnal love is symbolically
transfigured as stone. The unrealized Eros, therefore, undergoes a pro-
cess of sublimation that is channelled through the statue, projecting itself
into eternity: ‘Thy death has given me a higher lust – / A flesh-lust raging
for eternity.’31 The shaping of desire remains in memory, through the
iconographic multiplication of Antinous and through Pessoa’s own
poetic evocation: ‘And here memory and statue, we shall stand / Still the
same one as we were hand in hand.’32
Pessoa’s other evocation of Hadrian and Antinous, ‘Le Mignon,’ is a
fragmented poem with a French title (meaning ‘the pretty one’ or ‘the
pretty boy’), written in an archaic English syntax, containing at times
unintelligible sentences. Despite some gaps in the original manuscript,
what stands out in ‘Le Mignon’ is its clear celebration of homoerotic
desire between men, that is, not only its possibility but also its concrete
reality (at least in the poetic space). In contrast to all of Pessoa’s other
poems with homoerotic content, including ‘Antinous,’ ‘Le Mignon’ fea-
tures a love affair between two men in which desire is undoubtedly recip-
rocal. Sensuality, tenderness, and romantic love emerge in a context of

open complicity between the poetic subject and the loved object. Analo-
gous to the poem by the presumably ‘gay’ heteronym discovered by Rich-
ard Zenith, which will be discussed shortly, the poetic subject in ‘Le
Mignon’ shows full consciousness of society’s hostility towards homosex-
uality. In that sense, Pessoa strategically appropriates the archetypal
homoerotic love affair from antiquity and projects it towards the future,
i.e., towards the poet’s own time, and challenges prevailing attitudes
towards homosexuality in early twentieth-century English and Portu-
guese societies. This consciousness of societal homophobia is revealed
through the refrain that is repeated a number of times: ‘Let them speak.’
In this way, the subject defiantly faces society’s contempt as he explicitly
describes the two lovers’ love: ‘Let them speak. Life is sweet if thy lips
mean / Life,’ or, ‘Let them speak. Put thy hand within my hand / And let
us love as maid and boy are said / To love. But we are none.’ The defiant
tone of this poem is reflected to a certain point in the lyric discourse of
the ‘gay’ heteronym, but in contrast to his poem, ‘Le Mignon’ does not
express an air of melancholic uncertainty (which represents also a signif-
icant departure from the prevailing mournful tone of ‘Antinous’).
Instead, it presents a serene and sure sense of the legitimacy of its desire:
‘Let’s to thy bed and kiss naked while touches / Selected from our hotter
dreams transcend / Lust with thought.’33 Just as in Pessoa’s other English
poems of explicitly erotic nature (including ‘Antinous’), the choice of
English is not gratuitous; it is a conscious strategy, on the part of the poet,
to distance himself from sexual (in this case, homosexual) thematic,
while at the same time maintaining intact the dense Pessoan web of
masks, personalities, languages, and heteronyms, where all ontological
and sexual truths remains fleeting. As George Monteiro points out (in
this volume), ‘Le Mignon’ ‘says nothing more definite about Pessoa’s sex-
ual proclivities than it does about the poet’s dramatic ability to write
poetry in the voice of a historical figure (128).’ Still, as the poem’s finale
erupts with the sudden cry ‘Antinous!’ ‘Le Mignon’ remains inscribed
within a literary-historical tradition in which the timeless figure of
Hadrian’s young lover represents an archetypal homoerotic object and
poetic reference. Moreover, the various homoerotically themed poems
discussed here represent artistic interventions, on the part of Pessoa, on
a polemical subject for his time that most definitely was of direct concern
to him as a human being.
One of the most explicitly homoerotic poems in Pessoa’s known out-
put was discovered and transcribed a few years ago by Richard Zenith.34
In spite of the evident gaps in the original manuscript, this (untitled)
118 Fernando Arenas
poem is without doubt one of the most moving in all of Pessoa’s work.
Among his few texts that overtly speak of love, it is also, along with ‘Le
Mignon,’ one of the most poignant. Situating itself within the Pessoan
game of fictions, in which the borders between dissimilitude and sincer-
ity regarding what is felt and what is said remain inevitably fluid, the
poem expresses thusly sad, tender, and timidly passionate feelings of one
man for another:
Sei que desprezarias, não somente

A mim, mas ainda mais o meu amor,
Se eu ousasse, numa hora
Dizer-te quem tu és pra a minha dor
[I know you would scorn me

And scorn my love even more,
If I dared tell you
What you mean to my sorrow].35
The poetic voice is directed to a presumably heterosexual man who is

completely ignorant of the fact that he is another – homo- or bisexual –
man’s object of desire:
Nada de mim salvo o amor vão, te toca

No corpo, e nem sequer não me desejas;
Pois tudo ignoras que há entre mim e a louca
Ideia que me faço de ti
[No real part of me – only my vain love – touches

Your body, and you don’t even not desire me,
For you know nothing of what goes on
Between me and my crazy idea of you].36
The expression of the subject’s desire, despite its explicit nature, is

hesitant in the sense that the subject is revealed as unsure of himself and
unable to believe in the possibility of reciprocation of his desire:
Ah, se soubesses com que mágoa eu uso

Este terror de amar-te, sem poder
Nem dizer-te que te amo de confuso
De tão senti-lo, nem o amor perder
[Ah, if you knew with what pain I endure

This horror of loving you without being able
To tell you my love, so dazed am I by this
Emotion, and without being able to shed it].37
Nevertheless, the poem becomes a locus for the celebration of homo-

erotic desire, as well as a vehicle for the open defence of the subject’s
right to express his love for another man:
Quê? Há-de ser só justo e natural

Cantar o amor que pra a mulher impele?
Que mal há, se é [que] na alma há bem e mal,
Em cantar outro amor que não aquele?
[What? Must it be right and natural to sing

Only of the love that goes out to women?
What’s wrong (if right or wrong exists
In the soul) with singing of a different love?].38
In the end, the poetic subject is reluctant to open up emotionally to

his beloved object even though the poetic text serves as a safe and pro-
tective space. As suggested by Zenith, the poem exudes a certain air of
anxiety deriving from the fact that the speaker is struggling both with
desire itself and with the homoerotic nature of his desire.39
Is it right to say, as Zenith affirms, that Pessoa ‘cross-dresses’ as a
repressed homosexual in this poem? Probably. Can it be attributed to a
presumed ‘gay heteronym’? If the main criteria utilized to define a het-
eronym involves a distinctive language and tone, as well as personality,
thus leading critics such as Teresa Rita Lopes and Zenith to identify more
than seventy heteronymous ‘authors’ in Pessoa’s work, then the plausibil-
ity of a ‘gay heteronym’ is likely. Moreover, given the poet’s consistent
recourse to various strategies of simulation and distance in his thematic
treatment of same-sex desire, as exemplified throughout this essay, a ‘gay
heteronym’ would not be out of the question.
The poetic economy that entails a dialectical game between life and
text, between the word and silence, between sincerity and dissimulation,
fosters ambiguity, mystery, and the multiplication of meanings. The dec-
laration made by Bernardo Soares in the Book of Disquiet (and cited by
Zenith in the preface to his edition of Soares’s text), illuminates this
dynamic in a Derridean manner: ‘Tudo quanto o homem expõe ou
120 Fernando Arenas
exprime é uma nota à margem de um texto apagado de todo. Mais ou

menos, pelo sentido da nota, tiramos o sentido que havia de ser o do
texto; mas fica sempre uma dúvida, e os sentidos possíveis são muitos’
(Everything stated or expressed by man is a note in the margin of a com-
pletely erased text. From what’s in the note we can extract the gist of what
must have been in the text, but there’s always a doubt, and the possible
meanings are many).40 In this way, the construction of the network of sig-
nification originates from the erasure or occultation of the sign, which
paradoxically allows for a semiotic profusion. As is known, instability,
both ontological and semiotic, is a central characteristic of Pessoa’s work.
We conclude, then, with Pessoa as the textual fact that affirms what is
negated in life. Instead of committing suicide in life, Pessoa decides to
multiply himself existentially through text. The feeling-sincerely-
pretending in the literary space allows him to be everything and feel
everything in every way. The ontological void found at the base of the
heteronymic system, however, cannot be dissociated from an affective,
erotic, and sexual dimension unrealized by the poet that, at the same
time, has a decidedly bi- or homosexual component. This textual dimen-
sion, for its part, cannot nor should not be subordinated to the existen-
tial realm, as the two interact and mutually inform each other. Despite
the almost liberatory and even protective nature of the textual space for
the expression of (homo)erotic desire, this desire remains bound to a
series of historical, existential, psychic, and societal constraints that
indelibly mark the poet’s human and literary drama.
NOTES
An earlier and shorter version of this essay was published in Portuguese

(‘Fernando Pessoa: o drama homoerótico,’ Gragoatá 12 [2002]: 197–210). The
present version was mostly translated by Malcolm McNee, to whom I express my
deepest gratitude and admiration.
1 Irene Ramalho Santos, Atlantic Poets: Fernando Pessoa’s Turn in Anglo-American

Modernism (Hanover: University Press of New England, 2002); Richard
Zenith, ‘Fernando Pessoa’s Gay Heteronym?’ in Lusosex: Gender and Sexuality
in the Portuguese-Speaking World, ed. Susan C. Quinlan and Fernando Arenas
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 35–56; José Carlos Bar-
cellos, ‘Identidades problemáticas: configurações do homoerotismo mascu-
lino em narrativas portuguesas e brasileiras (1881–1959),’ Boletim do Centro de
Estudos Portugueses 18 (1998): 7–42; Mário César Lugarinho, ‘Al Berto, In

Memoriam: The Luso Queer Principle,’ in Lusosex, 276–99. See also the edi-
tors’ introduction to Lusosex.
2 ‘Local readings’ is a term suggested by Eduardo Prado Coelho that would
entail a third paradigm in the history of Pessoa studies, thus bracketing ‘the
exhausted question of heteronymity’ in an effort to read certain textual
aspects of Pessoa’s work as the basis for proposing a new global reading. Edu-
ardo Prado Coelho, ‘José Gil: um terceiro paradigma nos estudos pessoanos,’
in A noite do mundo (Lisbon: Imprensa Nacional – Casa da Moeda, 1988), 68.
3 Since 1988, more than twenty Pessoan scholars (among them Teresa Rita
Lopes and Richard Zenith) have systematically explored the poet’s archive.
According to Lopes, the archive, located in the National Library of Lisbon,
consists of ‘27,543 documents, including 18,816 manuscripts, 3,948 type-
scripts and 2,662 mixed, distributed among 343 “envelopes.”’ Pessoa por con-
hecer (Lisbon: Estampa, 1990), 1:15.
4 Lopes, Pessoa por conhecer, 1:18.
5 João Gaspar Simões, Vida e obra de Fernando Pessoa (Lisbon: Bertrand, 1954),
526. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are mine.
6 Robert Bréchon, Estranho estrangeiro (Lisbon: Quetzal, 1996), 172.
7 Eduardo Lourenço, Fernando, rei da nossa Baviera (Lisbon: Imprensa Nacional
– Casa da Moeda, 1986), 66.
8 ‘Mesmo como mensageiras da sua pulsão homossexual as figuras escritas da
sua afectividade atravessam com dificuldade o círculo frio, solitário, do não-
amor.’ Lourenço, Fernando, 75. Original emphasis.
9 Jorge de Sena, ‘O heterónimo Fernando Pessoa e os poemas ingleses que
publicou,’ in Poemas ingleses de Fernando Pessoa (Lisbon: Ática, 1974), 27–33;
António Quadros, Fernando Pessoa: vida, personalidade e génio (Lisbon: Dom
Quixote, 1984), 146–51.
10 Fernando Pessoa, Cartas de Fernando Pessoa a João Gaspar Simões (Lisbon: Imp-
rensa Nacional – Casa da Moeda, 1982), 67. Translated by Richard Zenith in
‘Fernando Pessoa’s Gay Heteronym?’ 36.
11 See Pessoa, Poesia inglesa, ed. Luísa Freire (Lisbon: Livros Horizonte, 1995),
498; also in Pessoa, Poesia inglesa II, ed. Luísa Freire (Lisbon: Assírio & Alvim,
2000), 80–90. In the latter edition, Freire provides an explanatory note that
identifies the manuscript of the poem as document numbered 49A4–42
within the Pessoa archive in the National Library of Lisbon. More recently,
Zenith has researched the same manuscript, attempting to fill in gaps and
reconstituting the text in a more complete form, though it remains fragmen-
tary. My reading of this poem is based upon the more complete and to date
unpublished version produced by Zenith.
122 Fernando Arenas
12 See Prado Coelho’s analysis of Gil’s critical approach to Pessoa’s work in ‘José
Gil: um terceiro paradigma nos estudos pessoanos.’
13 José Gil, Fernando Pessoa ou a metafísica das sensações (Lisbon: Relógio D’Água,
1987), 227.
14 For a detailed discussion of the concept of the ‘body-without-organs,’ see
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, L’Anti-Oedipe (Paris: Minuit, 1973), 17–22.
For a critical reading of Deleuzian thought, see Steven Best and Douglas Kell-
ner, Postmodern Theory (New York: Guilford Press, 1991), 77–110. For more
details on the conceptual dialogue between Deleuze and Pessoa enacted by
José Gil with respect to the ‘body-without-organs,’ see Gil, Diferença e negação
na poesia de Fernando Pessoa (Lisbon: Relógio D’Água, 1999), 115–32.
15 ‘O início da Ode marítima representa sem dúvida, em toda a obra de Pessoa, o
exemplo mais perfeito, mais minuciosamente descrito, de uma forma pos-
sível de construir o plano de imanência.’ Gil, Diferença e negação, 116. Empha-
sis mine.
16 Gil, Diferença e negação, 128.
17 Gil, Diferença e negação, 130.
18 See George Monteiro, Fernando Pessoa and Nineteenth-Century Anglo-American
Literature (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2000); Susan M. Brown,
‘Pessoa and Whitman: Brothers in the Universe,’ in The Continuing Presence of
Walt Whitman: The Life after the Life, ed. Robert K. Martin (Iowa City: University
of Iowa Press, 1992); and Ramalho Santos, Atlantic Poets.
19 Ramalho Santos, Atlantic Poets, 76.
21 In Libidinal Currents (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), Joseph
Allen Boone offers, through a series of close readings, a detailed analysis of
the representation of sexuality in fictional texts of paradigmatic English-
language modernist writers, such as, among others, James Joyce, Virginia
Woolf, William Faulkner, and Djuna Barnes.
23 This reading of Pessoa/Campos’s ‘Maritime Ode’ is inspired by many fruitful
conversations I have entertained with Jorge Fernandes da Silveira, to whom I
am most grateful.
24 Fernando Pessoa (Campos), Poesias de Álvaro de Campos (Lisbon: Ática, 1980),
150. Translation by Keith Bosley in A Centenary Pessoa, ed. Eugénio Lisbon
and L.C. Taylor (Manchester: Carcanet, 1995), 87.
25 Pessoa (Campos), Poesias de Álvaro de Campos, 178–9; Poems of Fernando Pessoa,
trans. and ed. Edwin Honig and Susan M. Brown (San Francisco: City Lights
Books, 1998), 59–60.
26 Gil, Diferença e negação, 116–17.
27 Pessoa (Campos), Poesias de Álvaro de Campos, 183; Poems of Fernando Pessoa, 63.
28 I would like to thank José Carlos Barcellos for reminding us of the ideal of the
‘aestheticization of existence’ in the work of Proust, a fundamental aspect of
modernist literary and artistic production that has, at the same time, much
relevance for the understanding of Pessoa’s work and the issues pertaining to
homoerotic desire that specifically interest me in this essay.
29 Fernando Pessoa, Obra poética, ed. Maria Aliete Galhoz (Rio de Janeiro: Nova
Aguilar, 1987), 529.
30 Obra poética, 529.
33 Pessoa, Poesia inglesa II (2000), 89–90.
34 Published for the first time in the original Portuguese and in English transla-
tion in Zenith, ‘Fernando Pessoa’s Gay Heteronym?’ in Quinlan and Arenas,
Lusosex, 47–53.
35 Zenith, ‘Fernando Pessoa’s Gay Heteronym,’ 47, 50.
39 Zenith, ‘Fernando Pessoa’s Gay Heteronym,’ 45.
40 Pessoa, Livro do desassossego, ed. Richard Zenith (Lisbon: Assírio & Alvim,
1998), 13. The Book of Disquiet, ed. and trans. Richard Zenith (New York: Pen-
guin, 2003), 131–2.
Fernando Pessoa, He Had His Nerve
georg e m ontei ro
Principally because of their subject matter, particularized in uncom-

monly sensual detail – still a risky proposition in the first decades of the
twentieth century – Fernando Pessoa’s two major English-language
poems have been commonly ignored in mainstream scholarship on Por-
tugal’s great modernist poet. There are major exceptions to this general-
ization: Jorge de Sena’s introductory essay to Pessoa’s Poemas ingleses
(1974), Catarina T.F. Edinger’s monograph A metáfora e o fenómeno amo-
roso nos poemas ingleses de Fernando Pessoa (1982), and Yara Frateschi
Vieira’s study Sob o ramo da bétula: Fernando Pessoa e o erotismo vitoriano
(1989).1
Sena’s richly historical introduction to the English poems Pessoa pub-
lished during his lifetime remains the starting point for investigations
into the varied contexts of this portion of Pessoa’s work and what that sig-
nifies for our understanding of Pessoa and his times. His analysis of the
ways in which John Addington Symonds’s pioneering, if cautious and eva-
sive, essay on Antinous can be used to shed light on Pessoa’s poem can be
enhanced by taking into account additional literary references to
Hadrian’s young lover, including Symonds’s own little-known poem
‘The Lotos-Garland of Antinous.’2 Pessoa’s characteristic language of
love and lust – its metaphors and images – is the thrust of Edinger’s more
narrowly aesthetic study. Vieira searches into the sado-masochistic
aspects – especially flagellation – inherent in the kind of education Pes-
soa received in South Africa (along with his reading of Swinburne’s sado-
masochistic poem ‘Dolores’ and Oscar Wilde’s story ‘The Portrait of Mr.
W.H.’) as informative glosses on Pessoa’s erotic or obscene poems.
Vieira’s study does not carry into the 1890s, not to the scarcely veiled
homosexuality dramatized in Wilde’s novel The Picture of Dorian Gray
(1891) – with its off-handed reference to the Antinous of sculpture – or
the public spectacle of Wilde’s two trials in 1895 and their aftermath.
Brian Reade has written that ‘1894 could be described as a golden year
for homosexuals in England, for the very reason that it was the last year
for a long time in which they could take shelter in public ignorance or tol-
erance to propagate a non-hostile climate of taste and opinion.’3 Given
the strongly conservative moral dictates of England’s ‘established
orders’4 that prevailed in the two decades following the exposure of
Wilde in the courts, Pessoa’s attempt to disseminate a poem that speaks
openly of ‘the love that dare not speak its name,’ not to mention necro-
philia, can only be seen as an act of daring and defiance.5
There is no gainsaying either that the writing and publication of ‘Anti-
nous’ and ‘Epithalamium’ pose singular questions for anyone trying to
understand Pessoa’s early sense of himself as a poet, for in choosing to
bring out those poems, along with 35 Sonnets, when he did, Pessoa was
staking an early claim for recognition as a poet working within (and
expanding) English literary traditions.6 His motive, both in the writing
of these poems and in his decision to publish and disseminate them
when and where he did, was calculated, pragmatic. For this reason, if for
no other, the subject deserves another look.
Like Shakespeare, who started out his poetic career with two narrative
poems, ‘Venus and Adonis’ and ‘The Rape of Lucrece’, Pessoa began his
career (as an English poet) with two narrative poems, ‘Antinous’ and
‘Epithalamium.’ And if, like Shakespeare’s poems, his, too, could have
been described as ‘obscene’ and ‘immoral,’7 they nevertheless might
have merited consideration, again like Shakespeare’s, as ‘high works of
art which are, not only immoral, but frankly apologetic for some species
of immorality.’8 In a draft for an essay on Shakespeare that he seems
never to have brought to completion, Pessoa claimed: ‘I have a feminine
temperament and a masculine intelligence.’ Two paragraphs later, build-
ing on a reference to the subject of ‘mild sexual inversion,’ he wrote of
Shakespeare and Rousseau: ‘And fear of the descent into the body of this
inversion of the spirit – I’m bothered by the contemplation of how in
these two it descended – completely in the former into pederasty; uncer-
tainly in the latter into a vague masochism.’9
In 1990 Teresa Rita Lopes published for the first time four paragraphs
of Pessoa’s prose, in English, under the title, in Portuguese, of ‘O amor
como “conceito do mundo”’ (Love as the Concept of the World). The
text, incomplete, appears to have been intended as part of a preface to a
book of poems that was never realized. Pessoa writes that the volume will
be made up of five poems, but describes only three of them, ‘Antinous,’
‘Epithalamium,’ and ‘Prayer to a Woman’s Body,’ the last of which he
126 George Monteiro
seems not to have written. ‘The first poem, “Antinous,” represents the
Greek concept of the sexual world. Like all primitive concepts, it is elab-
orate; like all innocent concepts, it is substantially perverse. That it may
show up as primitive, the emotion depicted is purposely a non-primitive
one; that it may blossom as innocent, it is developed into a metaphysics,
but, as is right in innocence, the metaphysics is added to, not put into,
the substance of the main theme.’10 None of this is obvious, however – it
can be ventured – when one looks at the poem itself. Like Pessoa’s static
drama, O Marinheiro, ‘Antinous’ dramatizes a wake. In this case, however,
it is established that the wake is, Poe-like, for the sensual body of a beau-
tiful lover: ‘bare female male-body.’11 Antinoüs: A Tragedy, an obscure
play from the early 1890s, ends with a stage direction for the grieving
Hadrian – throws himself down by bier – which is exactly where the drama
enacted in Pessoa’s poem begins.12
Antinous’s corpse has been ‘denuded whole’ by the mourning
Hadrian. Its living attributes, its lively gestures, and its sensual move-
ments are all accounted for by their absence from this final scene:
O hands that once had clasped Hadrian’s warm hands,

Whose cold now found them cold!
O hair bound erstwhile with the pressing bands!
O eyes half-diffidently bold!
O bare female male-body such
As a god’s likeness to humanity!
O lips whose opening redness erst could touch
Lust’s seats with a live art’s variety!
O fingers skilled in things not to be told!
O tongue which, counter-tongued, made the blood bold!
Hadrian remembers pleasurable movements, moments of love and lust,

on the ‘memoried bed’ on which Antinous now lies – a figure of ‘human
ice no way of heat can move.’ In that place,
There was he wont thy dangling sense to cloy,

And uncloy with more cloying, and annoy
With newer uncloying till thy senses bled.
His hand and mouth knew games to reinstal
Desire that thy worn spine was hurt to follow.
Sometimes it seemed to thee that all was hollow
In sense in each new straining of sucked lust.
Then still new turns of toying would he call

To thy nerves’ flesh, and thou wouldst tremble and fall
Back on thy cushions with thy mind’s sense hushed.
Hadrian manages to imagine his lover alive in ‘a memory of lust.’ As

Jorge de Sena has noticed, ‘these are not scenes of tenderness or love
that he evokes, but the sexual abilities of his favorite.’13 But this selfish,
self-serving memory of ‘that love they lived as a religion’ will not, and
does not, last.
So he half rises, looking on his lover,

That now can love nothing but what none know.
Vaguely, half-seeing what he doth behold,
He runs his cold lips all the body over.
And so ice-senseless are his lips that, lo!,
He scarce tastes death from the dead body’s cold,
But it seems both are dead or living both
And love is still the presence and the mover.
Then his lips cease on the other lips’ cold sloth.
This moment in the poem is followed by Hadrian’s resolve to ‘immortal-

ize’ Antinous.
I shall build thee a statue that will be

To the continued future evidence
Of my love and thy beauty and the sense
That beauty giveth of divinity.
Hadrian continues in this vein, until he has an epiphany:
Thy death has given me a higher lust –

A flesh-lust raging for eternity.
On mine imperial fate I set my trust
That the high gods, that made me emperor be,
Will not annul from a more real life
My wish that thou should’st live for e’er and stand
A fleshly presence on their better land,
More lovely yet not lovelier, for there
No things impossible our wishes mar
Nor pain our hearts with change and time and strife.
128 George Monteiro
In short, Emperor Hadrian will ‘eternalize’ Antinous into what he is

already (personally) to him – a god. And we know, historically, that for a
time Hadrian’s plan succeeded. But not for long, for, as everyone knows,
the half-god Antinous disappeared with the triumph of Jesus of Nazareth.
Rich as this story of Pessoa’s Antinous is, there is an even greater yield
when one takes up the matter of what the poem might reveal about
the biographical Pessoa. Not surprisingly, in Pessoa’s description of
Hadrian’s necrophilia, some readers have seen evidence that Pessoa’s
own sexual experience went beyond his imaginings or hallucinations.14
Admittedly, the biographer’s use of works of the imagination is a tricky
matter, dangerous to the unwary or the reckless. A poem in English like
the only recently published ‘Le Mignon,’ cast in the voice of Hadrian
addressing the living Antinous, says nothing more definite about Pessoa’s
sexual proclivities than it does about the poet’s dramatic ability to write
poetry in the voice of an historical figure.15 Yet Pessoa’s decision in the
famous poem ‘O menino da sua mãe’ – a protest against the war (1914–
18) – to focus on the young soldier’s body rotting in the hot sun enables
him to echo the necrophilic and, less explicitly, homoerotic strains of
‘Antinous.’ That the poet ‘notices’ that the corpse gives off the smell of
rot reveals something of the nature of the poem’s sublimated necro-
philia.16
In the act of writing ‘Antinous,’ no less than in the event depicted
therein – Hadrian’s grieving over the death of his minion – it is plausible
to think that Pessoa was expressing, in a relatively safe form, his own usu-
ally sublimated eroticism. If his homosexuality, he worried, were to
descend from his brain to his body – transforming what was safely mental
to something dangerously physical – it would be disastrous.17 The alterna-
tive to giving in to his body’s sensual needs is clear. ‘Let’s make the recep-
tivity of our senses purely literary,’ as he has his semi-heteronym
Bernardo Soares write in Livro do desassossego, ‘and let’s convert our emo-
tions, when they stoop to becoming apparent, into visible matter that can
be sculpted into statues with fluid, glowing words.’18 And if it can be com-
plained that words do not sculpt statues, it cannot be denied that words
create images in the minds of those who read or hear them. Then it is pos-
sible to think that the statue of Antinous that Hadrian, channelling his
grief, will install over and again throughout his empire has its counter-
part, in a small way and in a different medium, in Pessoa’s own effort to
channel into his poem emotions unacceptable to his society no less than
to himself. Just as he did later with the flesh-and-blood poet António
Botto and his explicitly homosexual poetry, Pessoa in this poem about
antiquity’s (the classical world’s) last god, ‘embodied’ his own, reined-in
physical sexuality in ‘others’ (historical personages, this time) in a dra-
matic narrative – a poem similar to those poems Robert Browning called
his dramatic monologues or, more precisely, perhaps, his dramatic
poems. Incidentally, as much as Pessoa admired Browning, he deplored
the fact that the Victorian poet had denigrated Shakespeare for his ped-
erasty (‘If so the less Shakespeare he,’ were Browning’s words quoted by
Pessoa).19 Elsewhere Pessoa calls attention to Shakespeare’s ‘sexual inver-
sion’ and the fact that, along with Walt Whitman, he was a ‘paederast.’20
In publishing ‘Antinous’ when he did, Pessoa might have been hoping
to contribute to the literary culture of his time. For his poem could be
seen as a substantial example on a subject that was largely taboo in
traditional English-language literature. After all, readers consulting a
standard reference work such as Oskar Seyffert’s Dictionary of Classical
Antiquities, based on the best German scholarship and first translated into
English in 1891, for information on Antinous would have had to be sat-
isfied with the following discreet entry:
A beautiful youth of ClaudiopGolis in Bithynia, a favourite and travelling

companion of the emperor Hadrian. He drowned himself in the Nile, prob-
ably from melancholy. The emperor honoured his memory by placing him
among the heroes, erecting statues and temples, and founding yearly games
in his honour, while the artists of every province vied in pourtraying [sic]
him under various forms, human, heroic, and divine; e.g. as DionyFsus, Her-
meFs, Apollo. Among the features common to the many surviving portrai-
tures of Antinous are the full locks falling low down the forehead, the large,
melancholy eyes, the full mouth, and the broad, swelling breast. Some of
these portraits are among the finest works of ancient art, for instance, the
colossal statue in the Vatican, and the half-length relief at the Villa Albani.
There is also a fine bust in the Louvre.21
The same readers might have learned something different, but no less
evasive, from Arthur Symons, apologist for the symbolist poets and,
closer to home, the decadents of Victorian England and Ireland. In 1897
in the London periodical Cosmopolis, he concluded:
We find the one really satisfying work in sculpture left by the Romans to be
the Antinous, repeated over and over again, in an almost mechanical carry-
ing out of the will of Hadrian, but coming, at its best, to a kind of perfec-
tion. Antinous is the smile of the eternity of youth, and the smile is a little
130 George Monteiro
sad, for all its gracious acceptance of the sunlight. It is sad with youth’s sen-
sitive consciousness of the first cold breath of wind which comes to trouble
that sunlight; a wistfulness which is the wistfulness of animals, and in which
the soul and its regrets have no part. Perfect bodily sensitiveness; the joy
and sadness which are implicit in mere human breathing: a simplicity of
sensation which comes at once into the delightful kingdom of things which
we are so painful in our search for, and thus attains a sort of complexity, or
its equivalent, without knowing it; life taken on its own terms, and without
preference of moment to moment: it is all this that I find in the grave, and
smiling, and unthinking, and pensive head of Antinous, in that day-dream
of youth, just conscious enough of its own felicity for so much the more
heightened an enjoyment of that passing moment.22
Symons just will not name what it is that lies behind that ‘perfect bodily
sensitiveness’ of Hadrian’s Antinous – flesh or stone.
Equally evasive were the poets or the writers of fiction. One obscure
versifier of the 1890s writes as directly of Hadrian’s love as he will dare:
The great lord loved Antinoüs the most.

There was no warrior chief in all his host,
No maid of all the fragrant singing bands
That tended him, the choice of many lands,
He loved so much. Antinoüs returned
His love so greatly that he scarcely yearned
For love of women.23
In 1907 Montague Summers published Antinous and Other Poems. In the

lead poem, this future student of demonology and witchcraft addresses
the boy-god over the centuries:
Antinous! Mysterious prototype

Of psychical desires which aye have burned
Within our bosom hold.
And he touches upon the nature of Hadrian’s feelings for his boy-lover:
‘Effeminately was mourned by Adrian.’24
However, most references to Hadrian’s boy-lover, common enough in
stories or poems, occurred in passing. A notable exception is Oscar
Wilde’s allusion in ‘The Sphinx,’ a poem begun during the poet’s days at
Oxford but not finished for years:
Sing to me of that odorous green even when couching by

the marge
You heard from Adrian’s gilded barge the laughter of
Antinous
And lapped the stream and fed your drouth and watched
with hot and hungry stare
The ivory body of the rare young slave with his
pomegranate mouth!25
As Jorge de Sena affirms, ‘in its aesthetic ardor’ this passage ‘anticipates
much of the atmosphere of Pessoa’s poem.’26 What it lacks, of course, is
the detailed description of necrophilia that is the feature of Pessoa’s
poem.
English poems published in Pessoa’s time are receptive now to a read-
ing of their sublimated erotic meanings. A case in point is A.E. Hous-
man’s best-known poem, ‘To an Athlete Dying Young,’ published in A
Shropshire Lad in 1896. Pessoa’s graphic description of the male body con-
trasts with Housman’s calculated depiction, ventured only in the final
stanza, and only in the most subdued of conventional terms:
And round that early-laurelled head

Will flock to gaze the strengthless dead,
And find unwithered on its curls
The garland briefer than a girl’s.27
Through synecdoche – the clichés of laurels and garland – Housman

manages to transfer the (public) task of viewing the corpse in naturalistic
terms to the private realm of the reader’s imagination. This ‘English’
evasion stands out when contrasted with the descriptions of the corpse in
those Portuguese poets known to Pessoa. Here, for example, is Camilo
Pessanha’s description of the corpse of Venus, ‘Putrid the belly, blue and
glutinous.’28
Wilde notwithstanding, the Victorians more commonly referred to
Antinous in his embodiment as a statue or as the figure on a medallion,
religious or artistic, than as, biographically or historically, Hadrian’s boy-
lover. One of Edith Wharton’s Jamesian gentlemen, for example, in a
story titled ‘The Eyes,’ describes a young man: ‘slender and smooth and
hyacinthine, he might have stepped from a ruined altar – one to Anti-
nous, say.’29 Henry James himself, in ‘The Last of the Valerii,’ an early
story, refers to the possibilities of excavating statuary. ‘It may be,’ says the
132 George Monteiro
narrator, ‘that some marble masterpiece is stirring there beneath its

lightening weight of earth! There are as good fish in the sea – I may be
summoned to welcome another Antinous back to fame, – a Venus, a
faun, an Augustus!’30 How such ‘another Antinous’ might appeal to him,
one is permitted to infer from what James had written in his own, appre-
ciative voice just two months earlier, in ‘From a Roman Note-Book’:
The collection of marbles in the Casino (Winckelmann’s) admirable,

and to be seen again. The famous Antinous crowned with lotus, a strangely
beautiful and impressive thing. One sees something every now and then
which makes one declare that the Greek manner, even for purely romantic
and imaginative effects, surpasses any that has since been invented. If there
be not imagination in the baleful beauty of that perfect young profile,
there’s none in ‘Hamlet’ or in ‘Lycidas.’31
It was John Addington Symonds, however, an author known best for his
studies of the Italian Renaissance, who first wrote unmistakably, if guard-
edly, about Antinous, Hadrian, and the love that dared not speak its
name, bringing the matter to the fore in the Victorian world. Symonds
published a long poem on Antinous as well as a two-part essay.
As Jorge de Sena recognized, Symonds is the important precursor in
English literature for Pessoa, particularly in the way he treats the ‘forbid-
den’ subject of Hadrian’s sexual love for Antinous.32 Even with the pro-
tection afforded by self-publication, presenting the poem ‘The Lotos-
Garland’ in 1871 took courage. He expressed his fears to friends before
and after publication, though, as it turned out, his poem received little
attention and caused no scandal.33 Silence from his few readers probably
encouraged him to go further, for he did make the poem available to a
larger public by including it in Many Moods: A Volume of Verse, which was
issued in London by the reputable trade publisher Smith, Elder, in 1878.
But he took the precaution of appending to the poem a substantial his-
torical endnote identifying Antinous, neutrally, as only a ‘court-favou-
rite.’34 It is not without interest that at the same time, Symonds confessed
to Edmund Gosse: ‘I have collected a vast mass now of Antinous informa-
tion; wh[ich] I hope some time to put into shape,’ adding ruefully, ‘I
regret the publication (now rendered inevitable by the printing press) of
the poem I wrote years ago upon Antinous, before I knew as much as I do
now. I think I might have ventured on a far more heroic treatment than
I then thought possible.’35
It is of course understandable that Symonds was fearful that the public
would reject or dismiss his poem about Hadrian and Antinous.

Symonds’s risk begins with the narrator’s description of the young lover:
[W]hat tongue shall tell the orient glow

Of those orbed breasts, smooth as dawn-smitten snow;
The regal gait, processional and grand,
As of a god; the sunny-marble hand,
Grasping a silk-enwoven cedar-wand? –
Symonds elevates the risk when Antinous characterizes himself, as he

prepares to take his life:
A slave – the toy and bauble of a king,

Picked from the dust to play with – a cheap thing,
Irksome as soon as used – a cup to sip,
Then fling with loathing from the sated lip! –
When the body is discovered, the narrator has one final opportunity to
describe directly the body of his boy-lover but chooses instead to detail
the trappings of an imminent deification. Thus ‘the perfect body of the
boy’ is
Raised on their petals, pillowed tenderly,

And curtained with fresh leaves innumerous,
Smiled like a god, whom errands amorous
Lure from Olympus, and coy Naiads find
Sleeping, and in their rose love-wreaths bind.36
Nearly forty years after Symonds’s justified edginess about what his
readers would make of his poem and think of him for taking such a great
risk in making it public, Pessoa had similar concerns about his own
poem. He, too, worried about how English readers would greet his more
explicit treatment of the sexual and sensuous nature of Hadrian’s rela-
tionship to Antinous. To the publisher John Lane he offered, in October
1915, a collection of his shorter poems. ‘I have indeed longer poems
written in English,’ he revealed, in what was, perhaps, a testing of the
waters, ‘but these could not be printed in a country where there is an
active public morality; so I do not think of mentioning them in this
respect – that is to say, in respect of a possibility of their being published
in England.’37 Pessoa refers to the phenomenon in Edwardian England
134 George Monteiro
of what has been called The Organization of Morality: the actions of

groups such as the Social Purity Alliance and the Friends’ Purity Com-
mittee.38 Most probably he was also aware that in Great Britain libel law
made the printer, in addition to the author and publisher, liable to legal
action. What this meant, of course, was that in practice printers exer-
cised ‘a private censorship’ of the things they were asked to set, rather
than risk the chance of fine or imprisonment.39 It is no coincidence, I
think, that three years later one of the factors in Pessoa’s decision to have
his poems printed in Lisbon was that he would thus avoid the risk of
being ‘censored’ by any printer under British jurisdiction.40
In the same year that he wrote to John Lane, Pessoa also wrote to Frank
Palmer, hoping to interest him in an ‘English number’ of the literary
journal Orpheu. Beginning with a warning – ‘our review contains certain
poems and prose works which are “objectionable” from a strictly moral
standpoint. In the present number the central part of Álvaro de Campos
“Marine Ode” (Ode marítima) is in this case’ – he explains: ‘The worst
which the English number of the review would have is the poem of mine,
written in English, called “Antinous” of which I send you a copy herewith
(to avoid lengthy and unsatisfactory explanations). Could a review be sold
in England with a poem like this inserted?’ Then he adds to his case: ‘Fun-
damentally, it is really not quite as “bad” as Shakespeare’s sonnets, but no
one ever sees anything fundamentally.’ However, there are legal matters
here that Pessoa would like to have answered before the editors of Orpheu
could decide whether or not to publish an ‘English supplement.’
Suppose a review or book were really published or introduced into

England bearing such a composition, what could happen? I ask this because
I am not familiar with proceedings (legal) possible on this line. Here in Por-
tugal, though a fairly stringent law exists on this and kindred subjects, yet
only political writers, and that only at periods of great excitement, run any
risk. From the moral standpoint, almost any kind of literature can be pub-
lished, even going into the clearly obscene.41
There is no record of Pessoa’s having received an answer – one way or

the other – to his questions; there was to be no English supplement to
Orpheu.
In ‘Antinous’ Pessoa tackled the subject of Hadrian’s love for his min-
ion openly and straightforwardly, doing so in English in a poem that he
ascribed, not to any of his heteronyms, but to himself. And although not
fearing any official intervention in Portugal (as we have seen), he distrib-
uted his Lisbon-printed poem (along with his emulative Shakespearean

sonnet sequence) to newspapers, journals, and selected libraries
throughout the British Isles. To put his temerity in so braving the British
Lion into perspective, one need only recall that the conviction and incar-
ceration of Oscar Wilde in the mid-1890s for ‘committing acts of gross
indecency in private’ turned them unspeakable.42 Even the Bloomsbury
Group’s E.M. Forster, who wrote his explicitly homosexual novel Maurice
in 1913–14 (roughly the same date as Pessoa’s ‘Antinous’), did not dare
publish it during his lifetime. Forster’s suppression of Maurice is only one
instance of the ways in which ‘modern English literature was significantly
affected by the conviction of Wilde in 1895,’ as has been observed, ‘for it
established the pattern of persecution that forced homosexuals to go
underground for more than seventy years.’43 Indeed, as it has been put
recently, ‘many of the English poems [of Pessoa] have a homoerotic
explicitness that Pessoa’s post-Wilde English counterparts scarcely
dared.’44
Pessoa was undoubtedly disappointed in the reception his work
received in England and Scotland. His English poems – 35 Sonnets and
Antinous – received not ‘eulogistic reviews,’ the claim made in one refer-
ence work, but a somewhat mixed press with even the praise muted.45
The Times Literary Supplement found ‘Antinous’ ‘not a poem that will
appeal to the general reader in England; although the reflections of
Hadrian over the dead body of his minion are interesting for what we
should now call this Renaissance style and atmosphere, and the poetry is
often striking.’ The Athenaeum characterized the theme of ‘Antinous’ as
‘repellent.’ The Glasgow Herald employed the same term in commenting
on the poem. Undoubtedly responding to the homosexual necrophilia
of the poem, it saw in ‘Antinous’ ‘what we might term a repellent theme,
repellent at times in its treatment; yet it is never weak, and out of mere
fleshly lust grows a true vision of eternal beauty’; while the Scotsman
found Pessoa’s sonnets, as well as his ‘Antinous,’ ‘often too Southern
both in expression and in feeling to be likely to please a strictly English
taste.’46 The code word here is ‘Southern,’ which stands for illicitly ‘sen-
suous’ or, more specifically, ‘homosexual.’47 A measure of just how
extraordinary it was at the time for Pessoa to depict homosexual necro-
philia in his poem can be gleaned from the fact that as late as the 1970s
the famous psychoanalyst Erich Fromm was defining ‘sexual necro-
philia’ as ‘a man’s desire to have sexual intercourse or any other kind of
sexual contact with a female corpse.’48 It is also noteworthy that in Pes-
soa’s own day, in the thousands of pages in the renowned Havelock
136 George Monteiro
Ellis’s four-volume Studies in the Psychology of Sex, there are no more than
a half-dozen or so references to necrophilia and not one of those runs
longer than a sentence or two.49
When Pessoa sent copies of his English poems to the erstwhile editor
of the short-lived Portuguese Monthly, a British citizen with whom the poet
had corresponded as early as 1915, he received what must have been an
unexpected and disappointing response. ‘And “Antinous”?’ asked Wil-
liam A. Bentley,
I am not so absolute prude [sic]; but, couldn’t you find a worthier subject
than such a pitiful playing around the most ignoble vices. Health is so infi-
nitely grander and should be more beautiful and attractive than disease,
and health of the soul more even than that of the body. Frankly I’m sorry
that you should prostitute the capability for really fine and noble poetry
with such ignoble sources for inspiration. Your people want helping to
finer, nobler ideals than those of these last centuries. You can help them but
not by stooping to sow the germs of real poetry in such loathsome soil.50
Bentley’s reaction to the subject of Hadrian’s love for Antinous does not
differ materially from the position taken on the same theme, eighty years
earlier, by the vigilant, morally conservative Spectator: ‘Antinous, and
other celebrities of ancient times, were supported by the imperial power,
to whose vices they administered.’51 But taking no cognizance of the irony
that Antinous’s lover was also the Roman emperor who built the so-called
Hadrian’s Wall to separate the Romans from the Brittunculi (‘wretched
Britons’),52 Bentley offers an admonishment, issuing from a self-righ-
teous assumption of moral superiority – England’s over Portugal, the liv-
ing Empire’s over the defunct Empire – in his conviction that ‘Antinous’
is socially unhealthy and, as such, detrimental to the potential ‘regenera-
tion’ of a politically and socially decadent Portugal. It is possible that, sub-
consciously, Pessoa’s determination to present his English poems to an
English audience constituted a paradoxical gesture of defying British
imperialist attitudes towards Portugal by celebrating ‘decadence’ and
foisting that celebration on such a readership. If so, then ‘Antinous’ was
intended to do the same basic work, as I have suggested elsewhere, that
was done by ‘O menino da sua mãe,’ a poem condemnatory of the boot-
less sacrifices made by Portugal on England’s behalf during the Great
War.53 It is an ironic touch, I suspect, that Pessoa sees Antinous, as he does
the mother’s young son, as blond, a reflection of ‘an Anglo-Saxon concep-
tion of masculine beauty,’ as Jorge de Sena has suggested.54
If Bentley’s negative reaction to his poems fazed Pessoa, it did not do so

for long. In 1921 he tried again to reach an English audience. In English
Poems I-II he reprinted ‘Antinous,’ revised, along with a series of bits mod-
elled on the Greek anthology collected as ‘Inscriptions.’ (At the same
time he issued English Poems III, which consisted of ‘Epithalamium,’
which, like ‘Inscriptions,’ was being published for the first time.) For the
record, presumably, but also for the benefit of those few who knew the
first version of ‘Antinous,’ Pessoa added an explanatory note: ‘An early
and very imperfect draft of ‘Antinous’ was published in 1918. The
present one is meant to annul and supersede that, from which it is essen-
tially different.’55 Many of those revisions are stylistic, but some seem to
be differently motivated. For instance, in changing the characterization
of the boy-lover’s amorous skills (line 18) from ‘soiled art’s variety’ in the
first edition to ‘live art’s variety’ in the second, Pessoa removes the adjec-
tive opening the way to adverse moral judgment and replaces it with one
that is temporally descriptive and morally neutral. His motivation is simi-
lar when he replaces the judgmental phrase ‘of love’s arts most unholy’
(line 80) by the more neutral ‘that art, that makes love captive wholly.’
Again, in 1921, as he had three years earlier, he sent review copies of his
English poems abroad but this time they attracted even fewer notices.
Now this second attempt to attract attention in the British Isles had, just
like the first one, a crucial fault. No one could buy the book; Pessoa had
made little effort, if he tried at all, to entice booksellers to stock any of his
publications. Even if the few and spare notices had piqued the interest of
the English reader (and there is no evidence that they did), the curious
reader had no simple or easy way to purchase copies. Of course, since the
poems had been printed in Lisbon, there was also no way for the authori-
ties to clamp down on Pessoa by intimidating printers or booksellers –
had they wanted to (or even known about the poems), that is.
Jorge de Sena has pointed out that John Addington Symonds applies
the classical adage that ‘they die young whom the Gods love’ to Antinous
and that Pessoa employs the same phrase in writing about Mário Sá-Car-
neiro after his suicide.56 Pessoa had already written his poem about
Hadrian’s lament for Antinous in 1915, within a year of Sá-Carneiro’s sui-
cide – a poem Pessoa hoped to publish, it will be recalled, in an ‘English
supplement’ to the third issue of Orpheu. But the journal did not make it
beyond its second issue, the projected third issue surviving only in proof.
That proof offers a clue, in this echo of Menander and Symonds, as to how
Pessoa was taking, over the long haul, the suicide of the poet-friend who
had died young – at twenty-six – in Paris. If Hadrian had attempted to
138 George Monteiro
install his favourite Antinous as a god, in competition with Jesus, Pessoa

would make of the deceased Sá-Carneiro a great poet of modern Portugal.
In this sense, Pessoa played Hadrian, if you will, to Sá-Carneiro’s Antinous,
just as, in a much more playful way, he played a sort of Platonic Hadrian
to the flamboyant Antonio Botto’s whimsical Antinous.
Functioning as Sá-Carneiro’s literary executor, Pessoa carefully man-
aged the posthumous publication of his most intimate friend’s poems.
He began by publishing three of Sá-Carneiro’s last poems from Paris in
Portugal Futurista in 1917. He continued next with Athena, the journal
Pessoa co-edited with the artist Ruy Vaz. In its second issue Pessoa chose
to lead off with his own belated eulogy of Sá-Carneiro, followed by six
poems identified as his friend’s ‘last’ poems. Next came Contemporânea,
with two poems by Sá-Carneiro in 1922, and another in 1924. More
poems followed in presença in 1927, 1928, 1931, and 1933 – enough, cer-
tainly, to keep Sá-Carneiro’s name alive until the publication of a collec-
tive works. And along the way, in November 1928, presença published, as
the first in a series, a ‘Tábua Bibliográfica’ of Sá-Carneiro’s work, for
which Pessoa supplied the bibliographical details.57 Hadrian worked to
turn the memory of his favorite Antinous into a myth. Pessoa, who
wished ‘to be a creator of myths, the highest mystery at which any human
being can work,’ did his best to create for Sá-Carneiro a major, if posthu-
mous, literary reputation.58
Usually taken to be a companion piece to ‘Antinous’ (though a lesser
poem), ‘Epithalamium’ was written in 1913. Pessoa’s major precursor in
this venture was the English poet Edmund Spenser. ‘No one (perhaps
not even Spenser) ever read the “Faerie Queene” with a thorough thor-
oughness,’ guessed Pessoa, but he knew Spenser’s Epithalamion (1595)
well enough to re-work it in brutally naturalistic terms.59 In fact, in tenor
Pessoa’s poem of the marriage bed, unpublished until 1921, evokes not
Spenser but the Swinburne who says the Gods
Have strewed one marriage-bed with tears and fire,

For extreme loathing and supreme desire.60
The epithalamium has its origins in the wedding song sung on the
threshold of the bridal chamber. As a genre it flourished among the
Latin poets, including Catullus, and took one of two main forms or
styles: that of the elevated ceremonial or that of the private and lyrical.
Common elements were an invocation to the muses, the bringing home
of the bride, singing and dancing at the wedding party, and preparation
for the wedding night. Just as Pessoa did with ‘Antinous,’ which begins
where most accounts or poems dealing with the subject stop – with Anti-
nous’s death and with Hadrian’s presence at the wake that follows – his
marriage poem begins with the preparations being made for the wed-
ding night but focuses on the realities of sexual consummation. And
unlike in ‘Antinous,’ where Pessoa focuses solely on Hadrian and his
grieving thoughts, in ‘Epithalamium’ he attends, in turn, to the thoughts
and reactions of the bride, her maids, the groom, and even the wedding
guests on this ‘great muscled day.’ Its vision of love, lust, and violence is
harsh, brutal, and crude, outdoing even the Elizabethans – possibly John
Donne and most assuredly Shakespeare – whose poetic language and
syntax are broadly and generically parodied. Its vision is that of ‘the man
who feels and who is, in that feeling, two beings’ – the ‘odi et amo of Cat-
ullus,’ as Pessoa noted in reviewing António Botto’s poems.61
Between her and the ceiling this day’s ending

A man’s weight will be bending.
Lo! with the thought her legs she twines, well knowing
A hand will part them then;
Fearing that entering in her, that allowing
That will make softness begin rude at pain.
If ye, glad sunbeams, are inhabitèd
By sprites or gnomes that dally with the day,
Whisper her, if she shrink that she’ll be bled,
That love’s large bower is doored in this small way.
....
Now is she risen. Look how she looks down,
After her slow down-slid night-gown,
On her unspotted whille of nakedness
Save where the beast’s difference from her white frame
Hairily triangling black below doth shame
Her to-day’s sight of it, till the caress
Of the chemise cover her body. Dress!62
Even the children, ignorant of their own sexuality, will rise to great
excitement on this day:
Shout, even ye children, little maid and boy

Whose belly yet unfurred yet whitely decks
A sexless thing of sex!
140 George Monteiro
This day will bring forth guests and friends, an eager, voyeuristic, pruri-
ent, molesting horde:
The sun pours on the ordered rout,

And all their following eyes clasp round the bride:
They feel like hands her bosom and her side;
Like the inside of the vestment next her skin,
They round her round and fold each crevice in;
They lift her skirts up, as to tease or woo
The cleft hid thing below;
And this they think at her peeps in their ways
And in their glances plays.
Here is the anxious, restless, lusty, anticipating bridegroom:
The bridegroom aches for the end of this and lusts

To know those paps in sucking gusts,
To put his first hand on that belly’s hair
And feel for the lipped lair,
The fortress made but to be taken, for which
He feels the battering ram grow large and itch.
The trembling glad bride feels all the day hot
On that still cloistered spot
Where only her nightly maiden hand did feign
A pleasure’s empty gain.
In this public scene – one of ‘Flesh pinched, flesh bit, flesh sucked, flesh
girt around, / Flesh crushed and ground’ – there is the common behav-
iour of the groundling:
Now seem all hands pressing the paps as if

They meant them juice to give!
Now seem all things pairing on one another,
Hard flesh soft flesh to smother,
And hairy legs and buttocks balled to split
White legs mid which they shift.
....
Now are skirts lifted in the servants’ hall,
And the whored belly’s stall
Ope to the horse that enters in a rush,
Half late, too near the gush.
And even now doth an elder guest enmesh

A flushed young girl in a dark nook apart,
And leads her slow to move his produced flesh.
Look how she likes with something in her heart
To feel her hand work the protruded dart!
Pessoa was twenty-five when he wrote this naturalistic yet hallucinated

poem. His vision of a hellacious day he can only call the ‘day of pomp of
heat’ is, oddly, not that of a Blakean heroine such as the virginal Thel
shrinking away from an entrance into sexual experience, but of the still-
uninitiated young who both fear and welcome the ceremonies of licensed
rutting. Pessoa’s account of this wedding day, the Walpurgisnacht of wed-
ding nights, reaches its nadir in what are nearly the final lines of the
poem:
Teach them these things, O day of pomp of heat!

Leave them in thoughts such as must make the feat
Of flesh inevitable and natural as
Pissing when wish doth press!
Its title and putative subject matter notwithstanding, Pessoa’s ‘Epithala-

mium’ recalls Spenser less than it does, say, Jonathan Swift. whose ‘excre-
mental vision’ extended to those he loved. (‘Oh! Celia, Celia, Celia shits!’
as he so famously put it.) In the second of the two known notices of ‘Epi-
thalamium,’ the Aberdeen Journal called Pessoa’s poem a ‘bridal paean
more disgustingly lascivious than was even Donne in his most voluptuous
moments.’63
It will be recalled that ‘Epithalamium’ was composed in 1913 and was
available, therefore, for publication in 1918 when Pessoa published Anti-
nous and 35 Sonnets. But it was passed over. When Pessoa finally decided
to make his poem public, his action came the year after he decided to
break off his love affair with the young Ofélia Queiroz. Given the possi-
ble biographical implications of the radically imagined violence of ‘Epi-
thalamium,’ it is small wonder that Pessoa’s real-life affair could not go
much beyond the stage of the discrete meeting or the cloying, not always
entirely sincere, love letter – no matter how many times these gestures
were replicated. In this vein, Armand Guibert, Pessoa’s best French
translator, even goes so far as to ask whether we are not to take Pessoa’s
act – the publication of ‘Epithalamium’ – as one of revenge. In any case,
as he notes, ‘It is difficult to conceive of a contrast more radical than that
between the real-life sentimental affair and the sexual situation imag-
142 George Monteiro
ined’ in the poem.64 One can only imagine Ofélia’s reaction to a poem
she probably never encountered, ‘Ode Marítima,’ particularly to those
lines in which Álvaro de Campos – ‘flesh torn, ripped open, disembow-
eled, the blood pouring out’ – cries out his desire:
To let my passive body be the grand sum-total-woman of all women

To be, in my bondage, the woman having to serve them all!
And feel it all – feel all these things at once – through to the backbone!65
NOTES
In my title I have adopted the sentiment and words that the poet-critic Randall
Jarrell applies to Walt Whitman. He suggests that the legend ‘Walt Whitman: he
had his nerve’ be inscribed on the American poet’s tombstone. Randall Jarrell,
‘Some Lines from Whitman,’ in Poetry and the Age (New York: Vintage, 1955), 118.
1 Jorge de Sena, ‘O Heterónimo Fernando Pessoa e os poemas ingleses que

publicou,’ in Fernando Pessoa, Poemas ingleses, ed. Jorge de Sena (Lisbon:
Ática, 1974), 11–87; Catarina T.F. Edinger, A metáfora e o fenómeno amoroso nos
poemas ingleses de Fernando Pessoa (Porto: Brasília, 1982); and Yara Frateschi
Vieira, Sob o ramo da bétula: Fernando Pessoa e o erotismo vitoriano (Campinas:
Editora da Unicamp, 1989).
2 John Addington Symonds, ‘Antinous,’ Cornhill Magazine 39 (February 1879):
200–12; (March 1879), 343–58. Also published in his Sketches and Studies in
Italy (London: Smith, Elder, 1879). John Addington Symonds, ‘The Lotos-
Garland of Antinous,’ in Many Moods: A Volume of Verse (London: Smith,
Elder, 1878), 121–34.
3 Brian Reade, introduction to Sexual Heretics: Male Homosexuality in English Lit-
erature from 1850 to 1900: An Anthology (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul,
1970), 53; quoted in Jeffrey Meyers, Homosexuality and Literature, 1890–1930
(Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1977), 12–13.
4 In Samuel Hynes’s discussion, the plural phrase ‘established orders’ refers to
‘those members of the Church, the peerage, the Tory party, and Society, who
styled themselves the ruling class of England.’ The Edwardian Turn of Mind
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968), 11.
5 Quoted by Oscar Wilde in his testimony in court, the phrase comes from ‘Two
Loves,’ a sonnet by Lord Alfred Douglas. Meyers, Homosexuality, 6 and 165n.
6 Taking up the question of what language one might choose to write in were
the Iberian Peninsula broken up into independent nations – Castilian, Cata-

lan, etc. – Pessoa writes tellingly: ‘Unamuno put the case: why not write in
Castilian? If it comes to that, I prefer to write in English, which will give me a
wider public than Castilian; and I am as much Castilian as I am English in
blood and much more English than Castilian since my education is English.’
Ultimatum e páginas de sociologia política, ed. Maria Isabel Rocheta and Maria
Paula Morão (Lisbon: Ática, 1980), 193. Unless otherwise attributed, all
translations from the Portuguese are my own.
Why Pessoa self-published his English poems when he did is not entirely
clear. Perhaps his automatic writing, recently published, offers a clue to his
decision. ‘Henry More,’ the spirit who is Pessoa’s most assiduous ‘astral cor-
respondent’ (Zenith’s characterization, in this volume) tells him: ‘In 1917
you enter fame.’ Fernando Pessoa, Escritos autobiográficos, automáticos e de
reflexão pessoal, ed. Richard Zenith with Manuela Parreira da Silva (Lisbon:
Assírio & Alvim, 2003), 210, 280. But Pessoa did not achieve fame in 1917,
even though he did try to place his collection of poems The Mad Fiddler with
the London publisher Constable. (The letter of rejection is dated 6 June
1917; see Anne Terlinden, Fernando Pessoa: The Bilingual Portuguese Poet; A Crit-
ical Study of ‘The Mad Fiddler’ [Brussels: Publications des Facultés universi-
taires Saint-Louis, 1990], 189.) Then, setting aside The Mad Fiddler, Pessoa
had Antinous and 35 Sonnets printed in Lisbon for distribution to reviewers
and libraries in the British Isles. If it was fame that he sought at the time, this
venture, as everyone knows, brought him none.
7 Pessoa also called Shakespeare’s two poems works of ‘immature beauty.’ Pági-
nas de estética e de teoria e crítica literárias, ed. Georg Rudolf Lind and Jacinto do
Prado Coelho (Lisbon: Ática, 1966), 58, 287.
8 Pessoa, Páginas de estética, 58.
9 ‘sou um temperamento feminino com uma inteligência masculina’; ‘e o meu
receio da descida ao corpo dessa inversão do espírito – radica-mo a contem-
plação de como nesses dois desceu – completamente no primeiro, e em ped-
erastia; incertamente no segundo, num vago masoquismo.’ Fernando Pessoa,
Páginas íntimas e de auto-interpretação, ed. Georg Rudolf Lind and Jacinto do
Prado Coelho (Lisbon: Ática, 1966), 27–28.
10 Pessoa por conhecer, vol. 2, Textos para um novo mapa, ed. Teresa Rita Lopes (Lis-
bon: Estampa, 1990), 62.
11 Fernando Pessoa, Poemas ingleses I: Antinous, Inscriptions, Epithalamium, 35 Son-
nets, ed. João Dionísio (Lisbon: Imprensa Nacional – Casa da Moeda, 1993),
41. All quotations from ‘Antinous’ come from this volume.
12 Abbie Carter Goodloe, Antinoüs: A Tragedy (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott,
1891), 134.
144 George Monteiro
13 ‘[N]ão são cenas de ternura e paixão as que ele evoca, mas as habilidades sex-
uais do favorito.’ Sena, ‘O Heterónimo,’ 46.
14 See, for instance, José Férez Kuri, ‘Introducción,’ Antinoo, trans. Cayetano
Cantú and José Férez Kuri (Colonia Santa Úrsula Xitla, México: Ácrono,
1999), 14; Wayne Dynes, ‘The Masks of Consciousness of Fernando Pessoa
(1888–1935): An Essay-Review,’ Gay Books Bulletin (summer 1979): 20–2; and
Robert Howes’s entry on Pessoa in the Encyclopedia of Homosexuality, ed.
Wayne R. Dynes et al. (New York and London: Garland, 1990), 2:977–8. Of
singular importance in the debate over Pessoa’s sexuality are two of Richard
Zenith’s essays, ‘Fernando Pessoa’s Gay Heteronym?’ in Lusosex: Gender and
Sexuality in the Portuguese-Speaking World, ed. Susan Canty Quinlan and
Fernando Arenas (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 35–56;
and ‘Automatic Romance: Pessoa’s Mediumistic Writings as Sexual Theatre,’
in this volume. In the first of these pieces, Zenith prints (for the first time) an
untitled ‘fragmentary gay poem,’ which he takes to be a somewhat direct self-
revelation on Pessoa’s part. So taking the poem is problematic, I think, espe-
cially since Zenith elsewhere (‘Automatic Romance’) concludes (puzzlingly,
in view of what he has decided about the biographically factual status of the
‘fragmentary gay poem’ he has discovered): ‘Ophelia Queiroz, I contend,
was a species of counterheteronym, a real-life character with whom Pessoa
lived a fiction.’
15 Fernando Pessoa, ‘Le Mignon,’ in Poesia inglesa II, ed. Luísa Freire (Lisbon:
Assírio & Alvim, 2000), 88.
16 See Erich Fromm, The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness (New York: Holt,
Rinehart and Winston, 1973), 326, 332–3, 334.
17 Pessoa, Páginas íntimas, 27–8.
18 ‘Tornar puramente literária a receptividade dos sentidos, e as emoções,
quando acaso inferiorizem aparecer, convertê-las em matéria aparecida para
com ela estátuas se esculpirem de palavras fluidas e lambentes.’ Fernando
Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet, ed. and trans. Richard Zenith (New York: Pen-
guin, 2003), 322; Livro do desassossego, ed. Richard Zenith (Lisbon: Assírio &
Alvim, 1998), 350.
19 Cartas de Fernando Pessoa a João Gaspar Simões, ed. João Gaspar Simões (Lisbon:
Europa-América, 1957), 97–8.
20 Pessoa, Páginas de estética, 134, 212.
21 Oskar Seyffert, A Dictionary of Classical Antiquities, rev. and ed. Henry Nettle-
ship and J.E. Sandys (New York: Meridian Books, 1956), 36. Seyffert’s work
first appeared in 1882.
22 Arthur Symons, ‘Rome,’ Cosmopolis 7 (August 1897): 323–39; reprinted in Lit-
tell’s Living Age 215 (2 October 1897): 29–30.
23 Hugh McCulloch Junior, ‘Antinoüs,’ The Quest of Heracles and Other Poems
(Cambridge and Chicago: Stone and Kimball, 1894), 49–50.
24 Montague Summers, ‘Antinous,’ in Antinous and Other Poems (London: Cecil
Woolf, 1995), 36, 37.
25 Oscar Wilde, ‘The Sphinx,’ in Oscar Wilde (The Oxford Authors), ed. Isobel
Murray (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 542.
26 ‘trecho que, na sua ardência esteticista, antecipa muito da atmosfera do
poema de Pessoa.’ Sena, ‘O Heterónimo,’ 65.
27 A.E. Housman, A Shropshire Lad (New York: Heritage Press, 1951), 46.
28 ‘Pútrido o ventre, azul e aglutinoso.’ Clepsidra e outros poemas de Camilo Pes-
sanha (Lisbon: Ática, 1969), 195. For other examples, see Alfredo Margarido,
‘Necrophilia in Portuguese Poetry: From the Eighteenth Century to the
Present,’ trans. T.F. Earle, Portuguese Studies 4 (1988): 99–116.
29 Edith Wharton, ‘The Eyes,’ in Collected Short Stories, ed. R.W.B. Lewis (New
York: Scribner’s, 1968), 2:123.
30 Henry James, ‘The Last of the Valerii,’ Atlantic Monthly 33 (January 1874):
74.
31 James, ‘From a Roman Note-Book,’ Galaxy 16 (November 1873): 684.
32 A copy of John Addington Symonds’s Shelley (1884), bearing Pessoa’s signa-
ture, underlining, checkmarks, and annotations, survives among Pessoa’s
books at the Casa Fernando Pessoa in Lisbon. Jaime Silva, ‘Appendix A:
Fernando Pessoa’s Library,’ unpublished. See also ‘Biblioteca de Fernando
Pessoa: Lista Bibliográfica,’ Tabacaria 0 (February 1996): 90 (no. 8–532).
33 The Letters of John Addington Symonds, ed. Herbert M. Schueller and Robert L.
Peters (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1967), 2:118, 166, 522–3.
34 Symonds, ‘The Lotus-Garland of Antinous,’ 252–3.
35 The Letters of John Addington Symonds, 2:541.
36 Symonds, ‘The Lotos-Garland of Antinous,’ 123–4, 132, and 134.
37 Fernando Pessoa, Correspondência 1905–1922, ed. Manuela Parreira da Silva
(Lisbon: Assírio & Alvim, 1999), 175.
38 Hynes, Edwardian Turn, 254–306.
39 Hynes, Edwardian Turn, 271.
40 As Hynes observes, ‘The tendency to organize in the cause of morality is a
characteristic of the whole of the nineteenth century in England, from the
Society for the Suppression of Vice, through whose efforts publishers of
obscenities were sentenced to the pillory in the early years of the century,
to the National Vigilance Association at the end; but this sort of activity
seems to have reached unusual heights during Edward’s reign. Through
the years before the war, organizations dedicated to the improvement of
other people’s morals had so proliferated that by 1910 there were enough
146 George Monteiro
in London alone to be collectively organized as the Conference of Repre-

sentatives of London Societies Interested in Public Morality.’ Edwardian
Turn, 279–80.
41 Pessoa, Correspondência 1905–1922, 190.
42 Meyers, Homosexuality, 5.
43 Meyers, Homosexuality, 9.
44 Donald N. Mager, ‘Pessoa, Fernando (1888–1935),’ in Gay Histories and Cul-
tures: An Encyclopedia, ed. George E. Haggerty (New York and London: Gar-
land, 2000), 681.
45 Anonymous, ‘Fernando Pessoa,’ Grande Enciclopédia Portuguesa e Brasileira
(Lisbon and Rio de Janeiro: Editorial Enciclopédia, 1950), 21:488.
46 Times Literary Supplement, no. 870 (19 September 1918): 443; Athenaeum, no.
4637 (January 1919): 36; Glasgow Herald (19 September 1918): 3; and The
Scotsman (15 August 1918): 2.
47 For ‘the myth of the homoerotic South’ and ‘the call of the South,’ see Rob-
ert Aldrich, The Seduction of the Mediterranean: Writing, Art and Homosexual Fan-
tasy (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), x, 88.
48 Fromm, Anatomy, 325. Emphasis added.
49 Havelock Ellis, Studies in the Psychology of Sex, 4 vols (New York: Random
House, 1936). Ellis has much less to say about necrophilia, in fact, than did
W.A.F. Browne, sixty years earlier, in his anecdotal account ‘Necrophilism,’
Journal of Mental Science 92, n.s. 56 (January 1875): 551–60.
50 William A. Bentley to Fernando Pessoa, 3 August 1918. Pessoa, Correspondência
Inédita, ed. Manuela Parreira da Silva (Lisbon: Livros Horizonte, 1996),
208.
51 ‘Captain Jesse’s Life of Brummell,’ Littell’s Living Age 1 (22 June 1844): 333.
52 Nicholas A. Basbanes, A Splendor of Letters: The Permanence of Books in an Imper-
manent World (New York: HarperCollins, 2003), 56.
53 George Monteiro, ‘Webs of Empire: Caroline Norton, Rimbaud, and Others,’
chapter 10 in Fernando Pessoa and Nineteenth-Century Anglo-American Literature
(Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2000), 129–44.
54 ‘uma concepção anglo-saxónica da beleza masculina ...’ Sena, ‘O Heterón-
imo,’ 70n.
55 Quoted in Fernando Pessoa, English Poems I-II-III, Poemas ingleses, 35 Sonnets,
Sonetos (Lisbon: n. p., 1975), 166.
56 Sena, ‘O Heterónimo,’ 45n. In 1878 Symonds wrote to Edmund Gosse: ‘Has
anyone, German or other, written a monograph on the story of Antinous &
the relics of Sculpture that bear his name?’ (The Letters of John Addington
Symonds, 2:518). Symonds’s essay, ‘Antinous,’ appeared shortly thereafter. His
linking of Antinous with the early death of those whom the Gods love also
appears in a story by a now little-known American writer. Here is some dia-

logue from Ellen Olney Kirk’s ‘A Florentine Episode’ (Atlantic Monthly 70
[August 1892], 174):
‘No; at this moment you are like Raphael’s St. John in the Tribuna. I was
thinking about beauty – beauty. What is beauty in a face? What does it
mean? What does it interpret? I know a man whose soul is so lovely he
ought to be more beautiful than the Antinous, yet he is homely, common-
looking, without a fine feature. I was thinking whether I wished he might
look like the Antinous. But I do not. Antinous always seems half sulky.’
‘It is not often,’ said Keith, ‘that I have an idea, but I have an idea about
the Antinous. When I look at him, I say to myself that I understand him.’
‘Is it a secret between you two?’
‘I don’t mind telling you. The presentiment of his early death is
imposed from on high. He feels the stirring in him of great powers, but
Fate lays her finger on his hope and withers it, like blasted fruit on a
green bough. All his victory is to be victorious over death. People quar-
rel, too, with Achilles for sulking in his tent when he ought to be fight-
ing; but I always pitied Achilles when he said to his mother that, since
Jove had made his life so brief, he ought to have crowned it with happi-
ness and honor.’
‘Did he say that?’ said Phillis, her pencil busy. ‘Whom the gods love die
young.’
Keith flung up his arms. ‘Love me not too well, O ye gods!’ he cried. ‘I
would not die young.’
‘Do not move, for the world. I want that pose!’ she cried eagerly.
57 See Pessoa’s letters to José Régio of 3 May 1928 and 15 November 1928. Car-
tas entre Fernando Pessoa e os directores da presença, ed. Enrico Martines (Lisbon:
Imprensa Nacional – Casa da Moeda, 1998), 67, 70.
58 ‘Desejo ser um criador de mitos, que é o mistério mais alto que pode obrar
alguém da humanidade.’ Pessoa, Páginas íntimas, 100.
59 Pessoa, Páginas de estética, 191.
60 Quoted in John Addington Symonds, A Problem in Modern Ethics (London,
1896; reprinted by Benjamin Blom, New York, in 1971), 109. Symonds quotes
Swinburne to illustrate the question posed by Karl Heinrich Ulrichs: ‘With
regard to the dignity of man, is there, asks Ulrichs, anything more degrading
to humanity in sexual acts performed between male and male than in similar
acts performed between male and female. In a certain sense all sex has an ele-
ment of grossness which inspires repugnance.’
61 ‘o homem sente que, ao sentir, é dois. É o odi et amo de Catulo.’ Fernando Pes-
148 George Monteiro
soa, ‘Ciúme, de António Botto,’ in Crítica: Ensaios, artigos e entrevistas, ed.

Fernando Cabral Martins (Lisbon: Assírio & Alvim, 2000), 517.
62 All quotations from ‘Epithalamium’ come from Poemas Ingleses I: Antinous,
Inscriptions, ‘Epithalamium,’ 35 Sonnets, ed. João Dionísio (Lisbon: Imprensa
Nacional – Casa da Moeda, 1993), 54–65.
63 Quoted in Pessoa, Poemas ingleses, 27.
64 ‘Il est difficile de concevoir contraste plus radical entre une affaire sentimen-
tale vécue et une situation sexuelle imaginée.’ Armand Guibert, ‘Fernando
Pessoa: Poète de langue anglais,’ in Antinoüs, trans. Armand Guibert (Paris:
Fata Morgana, 1979), 22.
65 ‘a carne rasgada, a carne aberta e estripada, o sangue correndo’; ‘Ser o meu
corpo passivo a mulher-todas-as-mulheres / Que foram violadas, mortas, fer-
idas, rasgadas pelos piratas! / Ser no meu ser subjugado a fêmea que tem de
ser deles! / E sentir tudo isso – todas estas coisas duma só vez – pela espinha!’
Pessoa (Campos), ‘Ode marítima,’ in Obra poética, ed. Maria Aliete Galhoz
(Rio de Janeiro: José Aguilar, 1969), 326, 325. ‘Maritime Ode,’ in Poems of
Fernando Pessoa, trans. and ed. Edwin Honig and Susan M. Brown (New York:
Ecco Press, 1986), 57.
‘Ever-repositioned mysteries’: Homosexuality
and Heteronymity in ‘Antinous’
ma rk sa bin e
It is evidence of a wind of change currently refreshing Lusophone aca-

deme that studies of Pessoa’s work have begun to challenge the classifi-
cation of ‘Antinous’ as a minor and – for some readers – mildly disturbing
curiosity on the fringes of the Pessoan canon.1 Such critical engagement
has by now effectively contextualized Pessoa’s most candid and complex
inscription of homosexual identity and homoerotic desire within both
English- and, to a lesser extent, Portuguese-language traditions of male
homoerotic expression. Relatively little, meanwhile, has been written
about ‘Antinous’ in the several recent studies, such as those of José Gil
and Irene Ramalho Santos, that cite sexuality as a crucial consideration in
the heteronymic project, which they interpret as literary articulation of a
libidinous and plural mode of being.2 Consequently, no fully developed
post-structuralist response has yet emerged to João Gaspar Simões’s
Freudian reading of the poem as a kind of psychic overflow pipe for the
heteronymic enterprise, draining Pessoa’s irrepressible homoerotic
urges, which might otherwise derange the decorous balance of autobio-
graphical sincerity and (dis)simulation that the heteronymic oeuvre –
according to Simões – expressed.3
This essay builds on recent scholarship with the aim of supplying this
alternative reading. Gil and Ramalho Santos focus on the extravagantly
orgasmic effusions of Álvaro de Campos’s Sensationist odes, and there-
upon surmise that this mode of being attains its most authentic and
explosive liberation through real, or imagined, sexual(ized) experience.4
My essay responds to these readings first by moving ‘Antinous’ from an
interpretative framework that sees sexuality – and more specifically, Pes-
soa’s presumed homosexual proclivities – as the ‘problem’ spurring het-
eronymic fingimento as cathartic projections of unruly erotic emanations,
150 Mark Sabine
to one in which sexuality features as a psychic field within which the indi-
vidual can attain liberation from the restraints of subjectivity. My study
interprets the depiction in ‘Antinous’ of such liberation in the light both
of post-Lacanian psychoanalysis and of Deleuze and Guattari’s critique of
this discipline’s definition of desire as lack and of its pathologization of
attempts to escape the ‘territorialization’ of desire within an ideologically
constituted symbolic order. Whilst concurring with Gil that desire in Pes-
soa is presented as an inherent and productive psychic force, I question
the compatibility of the sexually libertarian aspect of Deleuzo-Guattarian
schizoanalysis with Pessoa ele-mesmo’s disdain for bodily erotic inter-
course.5 ‘Antinous’ and the apparent contradictions that it presents are
thus revealed as crucial to the identification of a sexual politics of neopa-
ganism. The English poem evokes the ecstatic dissolution of subjectivity
achieved through sensuously promiscuous interaction with external phe-
nomena, which Gil identifies in ‘Ode Marítima.’6 However, one must
emphasize three fundamental differences between these poems. First,
their treatment of the construction of epistemologies around concep-
tions of gender and sexual difference; second, the issue of the composi-
tion of ‘Antinous’ as part of a cycle of poems; and third, Pessoa ele-mesmo’s
discomfort with the promiscuous sexual interaction sought by Campos.
As vision of the transformation of the subject’s body into a plane of
immanence, wherein plural sensations, attitudes, and identities are simul-
taneously experienced, ‘Antinous’ entails a disavowal of the hierarchical
and patriarchal nature of a phallocentric symbolic order. Immanence is
conceived as an ecstasy reached through the exploration and transcen-
dence of multiple and contradictory male subjectivities in the course of
homosexual love-making. ‘Ode marítima,’ by contrast, rhapsodizes the
rape fantasies of a subject who is alternately phallic masculine dominator,
and feminized and passive victim, within a homosocial context of stable
phallic masculine authority.7 In ‘Antinous,’ Hadrian mourns experiences
of tender sexual recreation in which different identities and relationship
models, deriving from diverse modern cultural inscriptions of male
homosexual subjectivity, are adopted and adapted by the lovers in turn.
This role play destabilizes not just subjective categories but also the hier-
archies of age and social status that these engender. Thus is initiated a per-
petual circulation of agency and power within which both emperor and
slave abdicate, yet are never violently subordinated to, the phallic mascu-
linity that articulates authority within a patriarchal society. This demon-
strated implication of gendered corporeal models in the construction
of an alternative, non-unitary phenomenology of the self assumes
Homosexuality and Heteronymity in ‘Antinous’ 151
significance when viewed within the framework of Pessoa’s vision of

the ‘androgynous’ or ‘intersexual’ dominion of a Fifth Empire.8 This
becomes clear when one compares the depiction of male lovers in ‘Anti-
nous’ with that of the archetypically phallic bridegroom in ‘Epithala-
mium,’ the successor of ‘Antinous’ in a projected, but never completed,
cycle of erotic English poems representing ‘stages in historical psychol-
ogy.’9 My essay offers a conjectural reconstruction of the erotic and
epistemic logic of this cycle, so as to provide a theory of the respective sig-
nificance of (male) homosexuality and homoerotic art within Pessoa’s
heteronymic, neopagan and ‘imperial’ enterprise. It does so by reconcil-
ing to its Deleuzo-Guattarian framework the post-Lacanian critic Kaja Sil-
verman’s argument that patriarchal order is sustained by a ‘dominant
fiction’ that conflates the (symbolic) phallus and the (anatomical)
penis.10 Hereupon, the essay shows how the two poems’ contrasting
inscriptions of male subjectivity are anchored by dissimilar depictions of
the penis. Whereas in ‘Epithalamium’ it appears as unequivocally phallic,
in ‘Antinous’ the penis, when not actually absent, appears always as sec-
ondary, passive, or impotent. Meanwhile, ‘phallic’ properties of primacy
and agency are disseminated to other, plural, and non sex-specific, cor-
poreal sites: hands, lips, eyes and tongues.
In ‘Antinous’ the disavowal of the penis-phallus conflation, and the
concommitant subversion of any potential phallic/non-phallic opposi-
tion, indicate the ideological nature of a monolithic and patriarchal sym-
bolic order and of the concept of the singular and coherent subject.
However, its presentation of the instrumentality of a harmoniously eroti-
cized self-Other relationship to the development and sustenance of a
phenomenology of the liberated plural self is inconsistent both with Pes-
soa ele-mesmo’s (and Reis’s, and Soares’s) withdrawal from the life of the
sexual body, and with ele-mesmo’s, Reis’s, and António Mora’s apparently
celibate and individualist utopian vision. The blissful homoerotic vision
in ‘Antinous,’ I believe, is reconciled to this by its historical location in an
irrecoupable past. An idealized love and phenomenology are both
negated by the slave boy’s death, but are immortalized for future gener-
ations in the statue that Hadrian erects. As António Feijó has shown, Pes-
soa’s aesthetics responds to Walter Pater’s treatise on art as both the
expression of, and developmental spur to, succeeding moments in
human consciousness.11 Using ‘Antinous’ to corroborate Pater’s view of
classical sculpture as embodiment of the lost unselfconsciousness and
self-sufficiency guaranteed by the Hellenic world’s blissfully naive episte-
mology, Pessoa also conceives of a utopian strategy for the latter-day recu-
152 Mark Sabine
peration of the joy of plural and polymorphous self-perception. This

strategy vindicates homoerotic art as locus of metasubjective liberation
and transcendence, and asserts heteronymity as a project reaching
beyond artistic endeavour to assume the broader dimensions of ars viv-
endi. Meanwhile, whether by accident or by well-disguised design, Pes-
soa’s erotic cycle fails to refute the potential of homosexual agency itself
to inculcate a ‘neopagan’ self-consciousness.
The point of departure for my study of Pessoa’s representations of dis-
sident male agency is Kaja Silverman’s theory that a conflation of the
phallus and the penis constitutes society’s ‘dominant fiction’ or primary
agency of social consensus.12 Grounding her argument in relation to a
Lacanian model of subjectivity, Silverman claims that this conflation sus-
tains patriarchal authority by aligning male corporeality with the ‘tran-
scendental signifier’ of the symbolic order (42–3). Thus it constitutes a
simultaneously ‘miraculous’ (since inexplicable) and ‘natural, or biolog-
ically motivated’ refutation of the male subject’s castration.13 She argues
that what Lacan terms the symbolic Law is known to the subject not in its
essential form, but in its local articulation through historically (and ideo-
logically) variable signifiers: currently the Name-of-the-Father and the
phallus.14 Whereas ‘within the Lacanian text’ there is a tendency for the
phallus to emerge ‘as the obligatory unconscious representative of what
is lost to the subject with the entry into language,’ for Silverman it is
more accurate to conceive of the phallus as ‘the variable metaphor of an
irreducible lack ... one of a range of possible representatives [of what is
lacked].’15 Hence, Silverman concludes, the penis’s supposed ineffable/
natural affinity with the transcendental signified is an ideological illusion
created by the phallus’s status as local articulation of the law of language.
Thus one can admit of the possibility of a non-phallic symbolic order and
of a non-patriarchal society.
It remains to be considered whether Pessoa presents the regulation of
desire as a necessary correlative of semiotic, and thus social, coherence
(as Silverman’s Lacanian framework suggests), or as, in Deleuzo-Guattar-
ian terms, a malign ‘territorialization’ of a dynamic psychic force, which
is consequently misrecognized as lacking. However, Silverman’s analysis
of this ‘dominant fiction’ accounts for the relationship between male
sexual behaviour and social law in Pessoa’s two English poems, insofar as
in ‘Antinous’ the non-phallic presentation of men’s subjectivities and
sexualities is rendered most obvious when compared with the emphati-
cally phallic depiction of the same in ‘Epithalamium.’ The loose narra-
tive structure of this bacchanalian celebration of marriage and of the
deflowering of a bride spans from dawn on the wedding day, through the
ceremony itself, to, finally, the marriage’s consummation. A mounting
sexual frenzy affects both bride and groom, and, indeed, the attendant
congregation, who are egged on in their vicarious sense of desire by a
crowd of satyrs, gnomes, and other ‘pagan’ creatures.16 As the poem’s
principal representations of male and female subjectivity, the bride and
groom are both depicted exclusively through references to sexual desire,
physical sex attributes, and sexual behaviour. Without exception, these
references attribute to the bridegroom the phallic properties of activity,
primacy, completeness, and power, by way of opposition to the passive
bride, who is both dependent on her husband’s agency for sexual grati-
fication, and a helpless victim of his violent pursuit of his own satisfac-
tion. The bridegroom is represented as a bull that ‘climbs on the heifer
mightily.’17 Other zoomorphic metaphors, meanwhile, present the bride
as a hunter’s prey: as she anticipates her first experience of intercourse,
her heart pants ‘like a pursued hart’ destined to be pierced by the bride-
groom’s ‘protruded dart.’18 This idea of male conquest of the female is
reinforced by several references to the sexual act as a battle with one
inevitable outcome:
The war that fills the womb and puts milk in

The teats a man did win
The battle fought with rage to join and fit
And not to hurt or hit!
and by the metaphor of the penis as ‘a battering ram’ against ‘the for-
tress made but to be taken.’19 Where naming of bodies and body parts is
more literal, this also serves to assert a vicariously aggressive male role in
the carnal meeting of complementary, opposite sexes:
Hard flesh soft flesh to smother

And hairy legs and buttocks balled to split
White legs mid which they shift20
Most prominent amongst all features of this belligerent male bodyscape,

the penis – predator, aggressor, and executioner that digs the bride’s
‘grave of untorn maidenhood / ... in her small blood’ – is nevertheless
cast as hero rather than villain in the context of this ‘glad funeral.’21 Its
heroic status is emphasized by its less paradoxically positive conceptual-
ization as active inseminator of a passive womb comparable to arable
154 Mark Sabine
land, and as beneficent donor of ‘the male milk which makes living.’22
Yet the penis is not depicted merely as giving purpose and validity in and
of itself to sexual intercourse as procreative act, but also as an indispens-
able satisfier of the bride’s desire, even though her passion is tempered
by fear of the impending sexual violence of her wedding night.23 When
she masturbates tentatively in pent-up anticipation of that night, her
non-phallic ‘maiden hand’ can but ‘feign / A pleasure’s empty gain’:
meaningless, phoney sexual pleasure.24
Throughout ‘Epithalamium,’ the social order is associated with exem-
plary, phallic masculinity. The poem’s enunciating voice exhorts the
bridegroom to take a violently dominant role, and the congregation to
rejoice in the taking of the bride’s virginity. And, indeed, the wedding
congregation responds, sharing the bridegroom’s desire to possess and
dominate the bride. As the bride appears at church, the waiting revellers
undress her and manipulate her with their gaze:
all their following eyes clasp round the bride:

They feel like hands her bosom and her side;
...
They lift her skirts up, as to tease or woo
The cleft hid thing below.25
Marriage itself, meanwhile, is seen as having the purposes only of sex-

ual domination and of reproduction: the guests hold the rituals of
church and wedding feast ‘as nought but corridors to bed.’ Phallic prop-
erties of strength, agency, and aggression are even bestowed upon the
wedding day itself. Not only does the enunciating voice thus celebrate
the day’s importance in perpetuating the institution of patriarchy, but it
also aligns the bridegroom’s performance of animalistic sexual preda-
tion and domination of woman with a natural and universal order that is
itself attuned to phallic male domination:
this great muscled day

That like a courser tears
The bit of time, to make night come and say
The maiden mount now her first rider bears!26
It is perhaps futile to ask whether Pessoa’s description of ‘Epithala-

mium’ as ‘directo e bestial’ (frank and obscene) signals that he con-
ceived this vigorous exposé of the brutal activation of phallic domination
underlying the institution of marriage as either ‘satiric,’ or contrastingly

satyric.27 In relation to our focus on dissident and non-reproductive sex-
ualities, what is of greatest concern is desire’s subordination, in ‘Epith-
alamium,’ to a socially dominant ideology, and the contrast to this in
‘Antinous,’ where a desire that is not co-opted to a patriarchal procre-
ative imperative inspires sexual agency that frees the desiring beings
from hierarchical power relationships.
Whereas the metaphoric presentation of the bridegroom in ‘Epith-
alamium’ is restricted to the phallic and aggressive mainstays of preda-
tory animals and offensive weapons, in ‘Antinous’ an immense variety of
properties accrues to the lovers and their bodies through metaphor. The
sixty-two-year-old Emperor Hadrian and his twenty-three-year-old slave
lover adopt and then adapt shifting and contradictory subject positions,
thus subverting differentials of status. Moreover, the resulting kaleido-
scopic play of intersubjective relationships samples numerous recogniz-
able paradigms of homosexual subjectivity and erotic dyads, yet without
establishing any as more than a provisional identity for either man or
for their love. Simultaneously, however, the cross-fertilization of these
paradigms in ‘Antinous’ problematizes the martial (and hierarchical)
Athenian model of paederastia to which nineteenth-century Oxonian
Hellenism pointed by way of an apology for homosexuality, as I will dis-
cuss later.28 Thence, for example, comes the paradigm of the twin-like
male lovers: a myth familiar to the neoclassical eighteenth century as pru-
dently ambiguous allegory of Socratic love in acclaimed retellings of the
myth of Castor and Pollux, such as that by the composer Rameau, and in
copies by leading sculptors such as Coysevox and Nollekens of the
famous ‘San Ildefonso’ group that was soon after to be extolled by
Winckelmann as an archetype of the Greek aesthetic ideal.29 Pessoa
evokes both the sublime equality of Castor and Pollux and their separa-
tion by death, through an emphasis on the reciprocity of Hadrian and
Antinous’s actions and through presentation of body parts as mirror
images: ‘O hands that once had clasped Hadrian’s warms hands / Whose
cold now found them cold’; ‘No warmth of his another’s warmth
demands.’30 At the same time, however, Hadrian’s echoing of Castor’s
offer to sacrifice himself in exchange for his beloved’s restoration to life
deviates from the original sufficiently to reference his own love with Anti-
nous to a wholly different model. Hadrian’s willingness to ‘give up his
reign’ and be turned into ‘beggar or slave’ if the gods will revive Antinous
is, meanwhile, but one of several instances of Hadrian’s exchange with
his lover of roles of (sexual) master and slave.31 The submissive and dom-
156 Mark Sabine
inant role playing wherein Antinous’s arms were ‘now ... dead leaves, now
iron bands’ and his arts ‘now ... a feather and now a whip’ suggest the
mild sadomasochistic practices that, in Pessoa’s day as now, were accu-
rately or erroneously perceived as a mainstay of Victorian (homo- and
hetero-) erotism.32 While arguably conjuring within the classical bed-
chamber a spectre of the nineteenth-century bordello, however, such
allusions to bondage and flagellation serve to exemplify the lovers’
eschewal of a consistent phallic/non-phallic dynamic of domination and
submission, and the contrastingly mercurial and libidinous character of
Antinous’s agency: an inconsistent dominator, ‘[now] softly gripping,
then with fury holding / Now playfully playing, now seriously.’33
The gamut of subjectivities performed in the course of sexual play is
only fully revealed, however, when Hadrian ‘adorns’ his lover like an idol
or compels him to dress up in turn as a sequence of deities:
Sometimes he was adorned or made to don

Half-vestures, then in statued nudity
Did imitate some god that seems to be
By marble’s accurate virtue men’s again.34
Thus Antinous becomes first the goddess of (heterosexual) love, then

the solar deity of enlightenment, patron of the arts and paragon of male
beauty, and finally thundering Jove, Olympus’s sexually predatory over-
lord:
Now he was Venus, white out of the seas

And now he was Apollo, young and golden;
Now as Jove sate he in mock judgement over
The presence at his feet of his slaved lover.35
Considered in isolation, this Olympian drag routine might appear as no

more than costumed titillation enacted by the emperor’s minion. Within
the context of the poem as a whole, however, Antinous’s dressing up is
revealed as part of a two-way traffic in identities of divine derivation. The
slave boy’s embodiment of Venus – specifically referenced to the god-
dess’s birth from the severed and ocean-tossed genitals of Uranus – is
particularly intriguing when one considers that, earlier, ‘Venus herself,
that was Adonis’s lover’ is seen to empathize with Hadrian’s mourning
for his younger and more lowly consort, while Antinous is referenced as
Adonis ‘that newly lived, now dead again.’36 Similarly, the information
that ‘[now] is Apollo sad because the stealer / Of his white body is for-
ever cold’ evokes a comparison between the emperor and the sun god
mourning the death of Hyacinthus, while line 129 suggests that Antinous
has died because Jove has snatched him from Hadrian to be his ‘better
Ganymede.’37 As the description of Antinous as ‘an acted rite ... / In
ever-repositioned mysteries’ indicates, the love between the emperor
and his slave is neither that of master and servant, nor of elder and aco-
lyte, nor of chaste twin souls.38 Rather it is a polymorphous sequence that
encompasses all of these configurations, and many more, by the consent-
ing agency of both parties, each of whom contains in potentia the identity
that his companion currently performs. As such, it is tempting to inter-
pret Pessoa’s vision of love between males not as a reiteration of the cult
of ‘manly’ paederastia trumpeted by nineteenth-century Hellenists, but
rather as predicated on the notion that homosexual love was first com-
mended to the Greeks by the shamanic poet-priest Orpheus. Aside from
the coincidence of the composition of ‘Antinous’ with, and intended
integration into, Pessoa’s Orpheu project, this theory is supported by the
echoing, in the list of gods and their mortal consorts that the lovers imi-
tate, of Orpheus’s defence of homosexuality in Ovid’s Metamorphoses.39
The dissolution of unitary subjectivity, and of the self-consciousness of
the actor, in this consistently overdetermined play of identities, genders,
and relationship dynamics is conveyed in the comparison of Antinous’s
love making to the playing of a kitten:
He was a kitten playing with lust, playing

With his own and with Hadrian’s, sometimes one
And sometimes two, now linking, now undone;
Now leaving lust, now lust’s high lusts delaying;
Now eyeing lust not wide, but from askance
Jumping round on lust’s half-unexpectance;
Now softly gripping, now seriously, now lying
By th’side of lust looking at it, now spying
Which way to take lust in his lust’s withholding.40
Part and parcel of this subjective dissolution is, of course, the disrup-
tion, by the innocently and unselfconsciously amoral kitten-like libidi-
nosity, of ‘exemplary’ male behaviour.41 ‘Antinous’ signals the male
lovers’ abdication of the phallic properties arrogated by ‘Epithala-
mium’’s bridegroom through a correspondingly non-phallic depiction
of the penis. The penis is never referenced in unambiguous terms:
158 Mark Sabine
rather, a series of quasi-baroque conceits are constructed in which nouns

such as ‘sense’ and ‘senses’ apparently denote the mercurial nature of
the libido, yet are also clearly referenced to the flesh. In this manner,
these passages apparently describe the agency of a male member whose
inconstant and emphatically non-phallic characteristics correspond to
the mercurial and deviant nature both of desire and of the two men’s
relationships to exemplary masculinity:
Naked he lies upon the memoried bed

...
There he was wont thy dangling sense to cloy
And uncloy with more cloying, and annoy
With new cloying till thy senses bled.42
The act of ‘cloying’ – wearying with an excess of pleasure – might be

affecting the sexual urge, yet equally it could be the flesh which dangles
and bleeds by turns. Other images, such as the arousal of Hadrian’s
‘nerve’s flesh’ elide corporeal and mental referents:

To thy nerve’s flesh, and thou wouldst tremble and fall
Back on thy cushions with thy mind’s sense hushed.43
In this instance, it is impossible to be certain whether the ‘mind’s

sense’ is so termed to signal the earlier dangling and bleeding ‘sense’ as
being specifically corporeal. What appears superficially as Pessoa’s coy or
cautious evasion of explicit corporeal reference also, however, suggests
the diffusion of self-consciousness, and the elision of body and mind into
a plane of immanence as the limitations of a singular and coherent sub-
jectivity are broached. Another possible reference to the penis is the
ambiguous reference to the emperor’s ‘worn spine’:
His hand and mouth knew games to reinstall

Desire that thy worn spine was hurt to follow.44
Read as a blunted spike – metaphor for a spent penis – the image pre-
sents the organ not only as impotent but also as taking a secondary and
passive role in sexual acts prosecuted by the hand and mouth (à propos
of this theme, one wonders exactly how Antinous effects the ‘cloying’ in
lines 67–71). In this way, phallic properties of primacy, activity, and
potency are disseminated to other, and non-sex-specific, body parts: lips,

hands, eyes, and tongue. This transference and the consequent second-
ary status of the penis in the homoerotic context of ‘Antinous,’ create a
striking contrast to ‘Epithalamium,’ in which hands and lips enter the
arena of hetero-erotic agency only as auxiliaries that ‘prepare’ the bride
– and her body ‘that will by hands other than hers be touched / And will
find lips sucking their budded crown’ – for the attentions of the penis.45
The bride’s hand can do no more than to ‘feign / A pleasure’s empty
gain.’46 For Hadrian – by contrast, and in a manner that anticipates allu-
sions to the significant link between masturbation and metasubjective
fantasy elsewhere in Pessoa’s work – manual stimulation appears to acti-
vate all of many erogenous zones such that, for an ungraspable instant at
least, ‘all becomes again what ‘twas before.’47 When Hadrian mastur-
bates over the body of his lover,
... lust revives and takes

His sense by the hand, his felt flesh wakes,
...
A creeping love-wise and invisible hand
At every body-entrance to his lust
Whispers caresses which flit off yet just
Remain enough to bleed his last nerve’s strand.48
While subjection to manipulation by a non-sex-specific body part robs

the penis of phallic primacy, the unitary value of the supposedly phallic
organ is displaced by the very plurality of the hands, lips, and eyes that
lead sexual activity, as, for example, when the two lover’s tongues inter-
act to articulate and satisfy desire:
O tongue which, counter-tongued, made the blood bold!49
It should be noted, meanwhile, that these body parts switch unproblem-

atically between primary/active roles and secondary/passive ones:
Now were his lips cups, now the things that sip.50
By the combination of these various impulses, homoerotic interaction,

rather than shutting Hadrian and Antinous into one or another phallic/
non-phallic diad imitative of the activation of the patriarchal Law in
socially endorsed heterosexual unions, propels the lovers both beyond
160 Mark Sabine
that patriarchal Law and beyond the phallic masculine identity that the
Law stipulates is their entitlement or responsibility. The consequence of
this is not merely the eschewal of ‘masculine’ values of aggression and
domination, and of male socio-sexual privilege, but also, and crucially, of
the rule of a unitary transcendental signified. Transported to a psychic
state wherein the body is perceived as a deregulated zone of multiple
(inter)agency and unmitigated sensation, and where body and mind
elide (as Pessoa’s use of the terms ‘sense’ and ‘nerve’s flesh’ serves to sug-
gest), the lovers are free to imagine themselves – and each other – as
mutable, multiple, even contradictory entities.51
It is this aspect of Pessoa’s depiction of homoerotism that suggests a
departure from Lacan’s much-questioned opposition between the Sym-
bolic and the Imaginary, and his abject vision of retreat from the former
as extra-linguistic psychosis.52 ‘Antinous’ suggests not this schema but
rather Deleuze and Guattari’s conception of the human as a ‘desiring
machine’ that, prior to interpellation by the ideologies that constitute
the symbolic order and ‘territorialize’ desire by configuring a unitary
sense of self as insufficiency, operates in a ‘primal realm of undifferenti-
ated bodies.’53 While the ever-fluid qualities and relations of Hadrian
and Antinous’s body parts correspond to those of the Deleuzo-Guattar-
ian ‘body-without-organs,’ the similarly mercurial qualities and relations
of the lovers’ personae recall the ‘schizophrenicizing’ project that, as
Steve Best and Douglas Kellner summarize, ‘seeks to dissolve the ego and
superego and to liberate the prepersonal realm of desire that molar and
representational structures repress, the libidinal flows that exist “well
below the conditions of identity.”’54 Deleuze and Guattari’s schizoanaly-
sis, a phenomenology of the human predicated on the ‘primacy of desire
and the unconscious over needs, interests, and material production’
offers a non-pathologizing psychic rationale for Pessoa’s identification of
unitary subjectivity as insincerity, and of the incessant fingimento of the
multiple, mutable metasubject as the nearest possible approximation to
sincerity.55
Meanwhile, the poem offers intimations of a Deleuzo-Guattarian con-
ception of desire as dynamic force, as plenitude rather than lack. Signif-
icantly, Hadrian’s awareness of this dynamism apparently arises from his
disavowal of phallic agency, when his ‘worn spine’ acquiesces to ‘follow’
Antinous’s ‘hand and mouth’ in ‘reinstal[ling] desire’:
Sometimes it seemed to thee that all was hollow

In sense in each new straining of sucked lust.

To thy nerve’s flesh, and thou wouldst tremble and fall
Back on thy cushions with thy mind’s sense hushed.56
The final destination of erotic agency in the repose of the ‘mind’s

sense’ contradicts Lacan’s dystopian diagnosis of the male subject’s redis-
covery of lack, and of the correspondingly insatiable hunger of desire, in
the unphallic spectacle of his post-coital shrinking violet. The experi-
ence of a sense of lack, indeed, appears to derive not from the petite mort
that curtails male identification with the phallus, but rather from the
curtailment of Hadrian’s desire through the death of Antinous. Images
of darkness and cold in descriptions of Hadrian’s mourning corral con-
ventional metaphors for death and love into an evocation of Hadrian’s
desire as an abruptly extinguished energy source:
But all his [Antinous’s] arts and toys are now with Death.
This human ice no way of heat can move;
These ashes of a fire no flame can burn.
O Hadrian, what will now thy cold life be?

What boots it to be lord of men and might?
His absence o’er thy visible empery
Comes like a night,
Nor is there morn in hopes of new delight.57
The recognition of Deleuzo-Guattarian concepts of desire and identity

in ‘Antinous,’ and of their suppression under a phallocentric symbolic
order in ‘Epithalamium,’ raises two key questions. First, why does Pessoa’s
incomplete erotic cycle appear to privilege a specifically homosexual love
as more creative and more liberating? And, second, is physical union with
the Other – such as is consistently shunned, deferred, effaced, or substi-
tuted by the heteronyms, and even in ‘Antinous’ can only be counte-
nanced as evoked through the vagaries of Hadrian’s remembrance of
times past – shown to be indispensable to such liberation? The answer to
both questions, I believe, lies in the overarching logic of Pessoa’s cycle of
five poems ‘que percorre o círculo do fenómeno amoroso’ (that traces
the circle of the phenomenon of love), and its status as a key (if uncom-
pleted) facet of Pessoa’s ‘imperial’ and neo-pagan literary project.58 The
leitmotif of rain and lack of movement and colour in ‘Antinous’ (in con-
trast to the animation and coercive festivity of ‘Epithalamium’) signal
162 Mark Sabine
mourning for more than an individual death. Hadrian is placed at the

point of transition from a culture that harmoniously integrates the eroti-
cized body (or at least its contemplation) into spiritual pursuits, to one of
bestially corporeal and utilitarian eroticism. If one considers the purpose
of Pessoa’s poetic cycle as being that of demonstrating a relationship
between the regulation of desire and the phenomenology of the self, and
of articulating the hopefully self-fulfilling prophecy of a Fifth Empire
wherein metasubjective plurality is reinstalled as modus vivendi, it
becomes clear that ‘Antinous’ exploits the potential of specifically homo-
sexual attraction to incite the deterritorialization of the desiring body in
modern society. If under this era’s prevailing ideological conditions,
homosexual urges spur the subject to disregard the social duty of repro-
duction (as fulfilled in ‘Epithalamium’) and transgress sexual taboos, the
threat of punishment entailed by such transgression in turn catalyzes the
fracturing of a unitary subjectivity, as the social dissimulation, or private
sanctioning, of prohibited desires demands the definition and projection
of credibly ‘authentic’ other selves. Meanwhile, at a corporeal level, the
duplication or resemblance of sexually distinguishing body parts impels
(or at least suggests) the reconceptualization of erotic relations in terms
of a phallic/non-phallic generic dyad, and replaces the notion of the
sexed body as defined by phallic affinity or lack with that of multiple cor-
poreal erogenous zones. Genuine though both Pessoa’s sympathy for
homosexual emancipation and his homoerotic stirrings in life may have
been, ‘Antinous’ suggests primarily an interest in homosexuality as con-
duit to a more enlightened phenomenology of the self as metasubjective
multiplicity, and an interest in homoerotic art as vehicle for the hetero-
nymic coterie’s neopagan epistemology. This becomes clearer when one
considers Hadrian’s decision to erect a statue of Antinous in the second
half of the poem, and the place of ‘Antinous,’ along with ‘Epithalamium,’
in Pessoa’s planned cycle. As will be seen, the theme of the statue recalls
Pessoa’s engagement with the ideas of Walter Pater, and specifically
Pater’s post-Hegelian identification, in the art of succeeding civilizations,
of humanity’s changing self-perception. Drawing on António Feijó’s bril-
liant analysis of Pessoa’s reception of Pater, and specifically of his use of
images of classical sculpture to express heteronymity’s function as the
deliberate undoing of self-consciousness, I will attempt to relate Pater’s
art history to twentieth-century discussions of desire and subjectivity.
Thereupon I hope to show that Antinous’s statue constitutes a signifier of
a lost ideal of unselfconscious, plural, and libidinous being. While con-
ceiving of modern man as unable ever to return to this Edenic state,
except during the fleeting epiphanies provoked on artistic contempla-

tion or during sexual ecstasy, Pessoa’s heteronymic project serves to pre-
figure the neopagan and metasubjective utopia of the Fifth Empire.
The significance of Pessoa’s engagement with the discourse on the
aesthetics of classical sculpture that Pater encapsulates is evident in
Hadrian’s profession that he will erect
... a statue that will be

To the continued future evidence
Of my love and thy beauty and the sense
That beauty giveth of divinity.59
Hadrian’s establishment of a more permanent reembodiment of his

lost love than that of his fleeting masturbatory projections is clearly sig-
nalled as more than the imposition on society, by a self-indulgent ruler
with pretensions to Olympian might, of the cult of his dead lover. Since,
as Hadrian asserts, ‘[my] love that found thee, when it found thee did /
But find its own true body and exact look,’ the erection of a statue
attempts the bodily reinsertion into the present not only of Antinous but
equally of desire: of ‘our love’s incarnate and discarnate essence.’60 It is
not just Antinous’s beauty, or his and Hadrian’s union, but also the two
lovers’ experience of themselves as polymorphous desiring bodies that
Hadrian hopes ‘[all] future times, whether they will’t or not / Shall, like
a gift a forcing god hath brought, / Inevitably inherit.’61
There is a close resemblance between the statue and its signifying pur-
pose and the ‘monumental’ qualities that António Feijó, by reference to
Pater, attributes to the heteronyms. As Feijó outlines, Pessoa’s ‘company
of poets’ is a creation that ‘[springs] fully armed from Hegel’s descrip-
tion of sculpture in the Lectures on Aesthetics, as glossed in Walter Pater’s
essay on Winckelmann.’62 In a gesture that is echoed by Pessoa’s descrip-
tions of António Botto as an anachronistic exile from classical Greece,
Pater attributes to Winckelmann a personality like ‘a fragment of Greek
art itself, stranded on that littered, indeterminate shore of Germany in
the eighteenth century.’63 The quality that unites Winckelmann and
Greek art, according to Pater, is the freedom from the modern condition
of ‘perplexity’ – the ‘bewildering toils’ of the ‘thoughts of the modern
mind concerning itself’ – and this ‘first naïve, unperplexed recognition
of man by himself’ is best recorded in sculpture.64 In other words, Pater
(following Hegel’s deduction of the aesthetic ideal in its progression
through the ages) presents classical sculpture as the now-vestigial
164 Mark Sabine
embodiment of a lost, ideal phenomenology of the self as at once com-

plete and unified, yet also at ease both with its own infinity and with that
of its relations with its surroundings. On the one hand, sculpture’s limi-
tation to pure form, its ‘equanimity of surface, semantic evenness high-
lighted by the unbroken white of the marble’ expresses the integrity of
the human.65 Simultaneously, this unhierarchized and harmonious
internal plurality is apparent where ‘no member of the human form is
more significant than the rest, the eye is wide, and without pupil (not fix-
ing anything with [its] gaze, not riveting the brain to any special external
object); the lips and brow are hardly less significant than hands, and
breasts, and feet.’66 Simultaneously also, the classical statue holds ‘the
power of conceiving humanity in a new and striking way,’ and thus
projects the multiplicity of the self by ‘generating around itself an atmo-
sphere with a novel power of refraction, selecting, transforming, recom-
bining the images it transmits, according to the choice of the imaginative
intellect.’67 Such a conception of classical statuary, Feijó concludes,
inspires Álvaro de Campos’s presentation of the ‘emphatic whiteness ...
open, absorbed gaze, and ... unmodulated expressiveness’ of his mestre
Caeiro.68 Caeiro, the fantastical and matchless embodiment of pagan-
ism, possesses that freedom from subjectivity that Hegel calls the divine
and that is the neopagan’s ideal.
As Feijó argues, however, while Pessoa draws on Hegel and his notion
of ‘objectivity of spirit,’ in contrast to Pater, he invokes Hegel’s concep-
tual-historical moments only in order to refute them. Whereas for Hegel
Greek art is the median term in a teleological triad, for Pessoa it has the
status, within a ‘quincunx’ or five-term sequence, of an ideal and reiter-
ative articulation of a pagan epistemology that the modern artist can
only by other means aspire to communicate.69 Thus, within Pessoa's pro-
jected cycle of five erotic poems, ‘Antinous’ is the elegy, sung at the twi-
light of paganism, for a ‘Greek’ love engendered not in accordance with
the martial utilitarianism of the classical polis, but with a pagan admission
of the individual’s infinite and ‘intersexual’ plurality and mutability.
While memorializing (in the past tense) the untrammelled flow of desire
to which such a mode of being corresponds, ‘Antinous’ narrates (in the
present tense) the curtailment of both, and finally foretells the capacity
of classical art to embody them in such a form that the human individual
might later recover awareness of his (or her) own plurality, and pagan
phenomenology be reinstalled, in the eventual ‘return of the gods’ that
António Mora and Ricardo Reis, the principal theoreticians of neopa-
ganism, envisaged.70 As Hadrian asserts,
The end of days when Jove were born again

And Ganymede again pour at his feast [which]
Would see our dual soul from death released
And recreated unto joy, fear, pain –
All that love doth contain.71
‘Epithalamium,’ in turn, presents the restriction both of sexual desire

and of identity in accordance with a monolithic and patriarchal episte-
mology. Its location of ‘a bestialidade romana’ (Roman bestiality) within
the precincts of the Christian church attests to what for Mora’s corre-
spondent and fellow theorist Ricardo Reis was the ‘propriamente cristã,
e não pagã’ (basically Christian, not pagan) nature of the ‘entorpecida e
decadente mentalidade dos povos romanos’ (torpid and decadent men-
tality of the Roman people), and to Christian society’s misconceived
faith in a single god and unitary human agency.72 Phallic masculinity is
thus no less the ‘barbarian’ age’s defence against the unravelling of sub-
jective unity than it is a strategy for oppressing women (a form of oppres-
sion regarding which Pessoa evinces little concern).
Pessoa’s location of ‘Greek love’ at the court of the famously philhel-
lene Hadrian, and of ‘Roman love’ in the premodern Christian era, are
consistent with contemporary glosses of Hadrian and Antinous’s story,
and with the neopagans’ review of social history, respectively.73 Neverthe-
less, they threaten to compromise the quinquapartite logic of Pessoa’s
planned cycle, making it debatable whether it was this assymmetry, or a
distaste for the ‘woman’s body’ intended for veneration in the third
poem, or something else altogether, that led him to leave the cycle unfin-
ished.
This issue of the uncompleted components of the cycle and of their
respective visions of love underpins the question that remains to be
answered regarding the need – or otherwise – for physical union. This is
particularly the case since we can assume that Pessoa’s vision of the
‘[Weltanschauung] of the instinctive’ under the Fifth Empire – to be
expressed in the poem ‘Anteros’ – was essentially asexual.74 As Richard
Zenith observes, ‘Pessoa understood Anteros not as the avenger of unre-
quited love ... but as an anti-Cupid. Eros, for Pessoa, represented instinc-
tive, sensually motivated love, and Anteros dispassionate, intellectual love
– the transcendence of carnal love.’75 One can read Pessoa’s depiction of
‘five concepts of the world, considered through the sexual emotion’ as
linking a Paterian vision of the redemptive capacity of art, and a quasi-
Hegelian teleology of ‘historical psychology,’ to Deleuzo-Guattarian con-
166 Mark Sabine
cepts of the human as desiring machine and of subjectivity as an ideolog-

ically founded territorialization of desire. But although the completed
sections of the erotic quincunx reiterate the metanarrative of disrupted
Edenic autosufficiency that underpins Pater’s nostalgia for ‘unper-
plexed’ Greece, and the view of presocial and prelinguistic infancy pre-
sented by Lacanian psychoanalysis and its critics, it does not follow that
Pessoa had in mind a cyclical return to a primeval unselfconsciousness,
nor to correspondingly ‘innocent’ forms either of artistic expression, or
of sexual ‘perversity’ such as might constitute the total ‘deterritorializa-
tion’ of desire.76 Indeed, Pessoa takes his cue from Pater’s assertion that
‘that naïve, rough sense of freedom, which supposes man’s will to be lim-
ited, if at all, only by a will stronger than his, he can never have again.’77
With regard to artistic expression, Pater claims, ‘the development of the
various forms of art has corresponded to the development of the
thoughts of man concerning humanity, to the growing revelation of the
mind to itself.’78 Thus, while ‘[s]culpture corresponds to the unper-
plexed, emphatic outlines of Hellenic humanism [and] painting to the
mystic depth and intricacy of the middle age[,] music and poetry have
their fortune in the modern world ... Only in this varied literary form can
art command that width, variety, delicacy of resources, which will enable
it to deal with the conditions of modern life.’79
Although, as we have seen, homosexual agency in itself is potentially
challenging to the phallocentric logic of the modern era, Pessoa’s revi-
sion of Pater elaborates a kind of literary by-pass that renders unneces-
sary such messy experimental couplings. To put it another way, the
aestheticization in ‘Antinous’ of a primeval erotic scenario sublimates
phenomenological insight from what – to the modern mind – would be
the distracting stew of passion and sensation. Pessoa’s heteronymic cor-
pus trumps the ‘width, variety [and] delicacy’ of Pater’s music and
poetry with the lyric polyglossia of what Pessoa (elsewhere) terms the
‘fifth degree of lyric poetry’ (o quinto grau da poesia lírica).80 As
António Feijó explains, the heteronymic enterprise articulates plural
being from within what the heteronyms frequently term the ‘império
dos bárbaros’ (barbarian empire) through self-conscious allusion to,
rather than through reiteration of, classical aesthetics. The neopagan
ontology of the universe – and of the self – as ‘parts without a whole’ can-
not be expresssed by feigning the unselfconscious world view immortal-
ized in classical sculpture, but rather – as in Campos’s description of
Caeiro – by using the statue as symbol, thus citing the ideal of objectivity
at the heart of a literary elaboration of infinitely plural being.81 A mod-
ern society cannot unlearn selfconsciousness, thus neither can it recover

the ‘innocence’ that qualifies Greek homoerotic ‘perversity’ as beautiful.
It can, however, both note the institution of epistemologies through sex-
ual convention and ponder their disturbance or contradiction as precip-
itated by the irruption of (currently) dissident desire.
Thus, if and when the ‘androgynous imperialism’ of neopaganism
were ubiquitously established, homoerotic visions in art might be unnec-
essary, or even inconceivable, as metasubjective plural consciousness per-
mitted the dissemination of desire beyond the focus of the human
body.82 Prior to this classically Hegelian negation of the vision of poly-
morphous ‘perversity’ that in ‘Antinous’ or ‘Ode marítima’ unfastens
the epistemological corset of the modern era, and while the disciples of
the master Caeiro sought by their various means merely to establish
neo-paganism as a personal modus vivendi, sexual intercourse clearly
remained a troubling proposition for Pessoa. Unpublished writings pro-
fess his anxiety regarding his psychological ‘sexual inversion’ assuming a
physical dimension.83 Indeed, the only corporeal articulation of desire
deemed in any way appropriate by Pessoa ele-mesmo would appear to have
been masturbatory. Pessoa’s occasional yet consistent intimation of a
relationship between masturbation and ‘o desdobramento do eu’ (the
multiplication of the ego), echoed as it is by Hadrian’s momentary recov-
ery of polymorphous experience through manual stimulation, suggests a
belief (though perhaps a discomforting or guilty one) in animating
one’s own multiplicity either through a narcissistic eroticization of the
self or through conjuring a make-believe substitute for the Other who
might corroborate the agency of other selves: if, that is, such an Other
could only be trusted to indulge the fluid being and freely desiring
agency of the self without imposing the constraint of a singular iden-
tity.84 The desire for such an indulgence is what appears both to have
motivated Pessoa’s dalliance with Ophelia de Queiroz and to have fore-
shortened their courtship, punctuated as it was by the imposture of
Álvaro de Campos and his mocking admonishments of Ophelia for not
dumping Pessoa, and by Pessoa’s own protests that Ophelia was forcing
the role of clown upon him.85
With this conjecture regarding the ultimate purpose of Pessoa’s unfin-
ished erotic cycle, his most ambitious, explicit, and publicly aired homo-
erotic composition, and his representation – so eminently compatible
with the assertions of contemporary queer theory – of the superficial and
ideological nature of phallic masculine identity, we come full circle, back
to the same indulgence in biographical inferences that characterizes
168 Mark Sabine
João Gaspar Simões’s apology for Pessoa’s homoerotic works. It is a good

question whether Pessoa was spurred to the elaboration of a homoerotic
expression of plurisubjective becoming by his awareness of discomforting
homosexual proclivities or whether, on the other hand, his concern that
the heteronymic enterprise operate beyond the restraints of contempo-
rary social and sexual laws prompted an analysis of homosexuality. How-
ever, as I hope to have proven, the answer to this chicken-and-egg
question is incidental. What is more significant is that while the homo-
sexual intercourse that ‘Antinous ’evokes may be classifiable as what João
Gaspar Simões termed a ‘serena e bela abstração’ (serene and beautiful
abstraction), the poem and its homoerotic theme assume a significance to
the heteronymic oeuvre, and to our comprehension of it, far greater that
that of an aesthetically-, or morally-, motivated act of catharsis.86
NOTES
1 Recent studies of ‘Antinous’ include George Monteiro, this volume; Richard

Zenith’s ‘Fernando Pessoa’s Gay Heteronym?’ in Lusosex, ed. Susan Canty
Quinlan and Fernando Arenas (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
2002), 35–56; and Fernando Arenas, this volume. See Arenas for a summary
of the principal earlier readings. Irene Ramalho Santos, in Atlantic Poets:
Fernando Pessoa’s Turn in Anglo-American Modernism (Hanover, NH: University
Press of New England, 2003), does not read ‘Antinous’, but does stress its
integrity to Pessoa’s ‘poetic creativity as a whole,’ and its consistency with the
‘imperial’ nature of Pessoa’s literary project (2).
2 See Ramalho Santos, Atlantic Poets, and José Gil, Fernando Pessoa ou a metafísica
das sensações, (Lisbon: Relógio d’Água, 1988).
3 João Gaspar Simões, Vida e obra de Fernando Pessoa: História de uma geração, 2nd
ed., revised with a new preface (Amadora: Bertrand, 1970), 493–502. It must
be stressed that Simões’s reading of the English Poems I–III (‘Antinous,’
‘Inscriptions,’ and ‘Epithalamium’), published in 1921, as representing Pes-
soa’s ‘fase, por excelência, de depuração ou sublimação’ (phase par excel-
lence of purification or sublimation) (495) is based firmly on Pessoa’s own
explanation to Simões of these works, ‘que são nitidamente o que se pode
chamar obscenos’ (which are precisely what can be termed obscene), in his
letter of 18 November 1930 (see Pessoa’s Cartas a João Gaspar Simões, ed. J.G.
Simões [Lisbon: Publicações Europa – América, 1957], 67). Herein Pessoa
claims that ‘[há] em cada um de nós, por pouco que especialize instintiva-
mente na obscenidade, um certo elemento desta ordem ... Como estes ele-
mentos, por pequeno que seja o grau em que existem, são um certo estorvo
para alguns processos mentais superiores, decidi, por duas vezes, eliminá-los
pelo processo simples de os exprimir intensamente’ (There is in each one of
us, however instinctively uninterested in obscurity, an element of that order
whose magnitude varies obviously from man to man. Since these elements,
however small the degree of their presence, hinder to some extent certain
superior mental processes, I decided on two occasions to eliminate them
through a simple process of expressing them intensely). Simões’s glossing of
this explanation relates it to his own ‘explicação psicanalítica da frustrada
sexualidade de uma inibição com raízes numa fixação sexual infantil, a qual
afastou do adulto qualquer possibilidade de vir a encontrar-se com criaturas
do sexo daquela que foi causa prematura dessa fixação sexual’ (psychoana-
lytic explanation of frustrated sexuality consisting of an inhibition with its ori-
gins in an infantile sexual fixation. This robbed the adult [Pessoa] of any
possibility of consorting with creatures of the same sex as the one that was the
premature cause of this sexual fixation) (Vida e obra, 500), but stresses what
for Simões is the solid evidence that Pessoa only ever ‘cedeu ao desejo de
satisfazer a sua obscura líbido ... de forma puramente platónica’ (yielded to
the desire to satisfy his shadowy libido ... in a purely platonic form) (501).
Meanwhile, Simões cites Pessoa’s critique of Freudian criticism (for which see
Pessoa’s letter of 11 December 1931, in Cartas, 95) in claiming that ‘a “trans-
lação,” ou melhor, a “conversão de certos elementos psíquicos em outros” é
um dos factores essenciais da sua obra’ (‘translation,’ or rather ‘conversion of
certain psychic elements into others’ is one of the essential factors governing
his work) and that ‘os elementos psíquicos (e sexuais, portanto)’ (psychic
[and thus also sexual] elements) discernible in the heteronymic project ‘são,
precisamente, aqueles que se expandirem “por estorvo ou desvio” originais’
(are precisely the ones that are developed ‘by an initial hindrance or devia-
tion’) (Vida e obra, 505).
4 As Ramalho Santos conjectures, ‘the greatest, although most ambiguous and
troubling, of liberations [envisioned through Pessoa’s heteronymic enter-
prise] may well have been sexual’ (Atlantic Poets, 75). For Gil’s treatment of
sexuality in ‘Ode marítima,’ see A metafísica das sensações, esp. chapter 4, ‘A
Construção do plano de imanência,’ 115–32.
5 See Jacques Lacan, ‘La signification du phallus,’ in Écrits (Paris: Editions du
Seuil, 1966), 685–95; and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus:
Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R.
Lane (London: Athlone Press), 1984. See also Arenas, this volume, for a
review of Gil’s Deleuzo-Guattarian reading of Pessoa. For a succinct and
accessible critical summary of Deleuze and Guattari’s Capitalism and Schizo-
170 Mark Sabine
phrenia project, its theory of desire and political program, see Steve Best and
Douglas Kellner, Postmodern Theory: Critical Interrogations (London: Mac-
millan, 1991), chapter 3, 76–110.
6 Gil, A metafísica das sensações, 129–30.
7 See Bishop-Sanchez, this volume.
8 See Pessoa’s ‘Atlantist Manifesto,’ in Obra poética e em prosa, ed. António
Quadros and Dálila Pereira Costa (Porto: Lello e Irmão, 1986), 3:679–84; and
Ramalho Santos’s reading of Pessoa’s imperialism as ‘intersexual’ in Atlantic
Poets, 105, 170–5.
9 Pessoa left several characteristically inconsistent accounts of this cycle or
‘quincunx.’ Here I quote the undated and incomplete text 142-33 in enve-
lope 139 of the Pessoa archive (published in Pessoa por conhecer: Textos para um
novo mapa, ed. Teresa Rita Lopes [Lisbon: Estampa, 1990], 2:62). The first to
come to light is that in his same letter of 18th November 1930 to Simões,
describing ‘um pequeno livro que percorre o círculo do fenómeno amoroso
... num ciclo, a que poderei chamar imperial. Assim, temos: (1) Grécia, Anti-
nous; (2) Roma, Epithalamium; (3) Cristianidade, Prayer to a Woman’s Body; (4)
Império Moderno, Pan-Eros; (5) Quinto Império, Anteros’ (a slim volume that
traces the circle of the phenomenon of love ... in a cycle, which I would call
imperial. Thus we have (1) Greece, ‘Antinous’; (2) Rome, ‘Epithalamium’;
(3) Christianity, ‘Prayer to a Woman’s Body’; (4) the Modern Empire, ‘Pan-
Eros’; (5) the Fifth Empire, ‘Anteros’) (Cartas, 67–8). Pessoa claims here that
the latter three are unpublished, though to date all that has been found is a
six-line fragment entitled ‘Ode to a Woman’s Body’ (published in Pessoa
inédito, ed. Teresa Rita Lopes [Braga: Horizonte, 1993], 116) and the five
lines of the same poem, and three of ‘Anteros,’ that accompany a schema of
the same ‘Quincunx’ on the undated manuscript 48D/34. I am deeply
indebted to Richard Zenith for his invaluable help in bringing this and other
key manuscript sources to my attention. As Jorge da Sena notes in the essay
‘O heterónimo Fernando Pessoa e os poemas ingleses que publicou’ prefac-
ing his edition of Pessoa’s Poemas ingleses (Lisbon: Ática, 1974), the letter’s
account is contradicted by a typewritten schema, undated but clearly earlier,
that lists ‘Five Poems (1) Antinous (2) Divineness (3) Epithalamium (4) Prayer to
a Fair Body (5) Spring 1917’ (32n1). The conjectural analysis of this cycle
offered by Pessoa, Simões, and Sena, will be discussed further below.
10 Kaja Silverman, Male Subjectivity at the Margins (London and New York: Rout-
ledge, 1992).
11 António Feijó’s ‘Fernando Pessoa’s Mothering of the Avant-garde,’ Stanford
Humanities Review 7.1 (1999). http://www.stanford.edu/group/SHR/7–1/
html/body_feijo.html.
12 Silverman, Male Subjectivity, 15–51. Silverman borrows the term ‘dominant fic-
tion’ from Jacques Rancière’s use of the term, as she explains (29–31).
13 Silverman, Male Subjectivity, 43. Silverman further explains that this ‘domi-
nant fiction effects an imaginary resolution of this contradiction by radically
reconceiving what it means to be castrated ... It urges both the male and the
female subject ... to deny all knowledge of male castration by believing in the
commensurability of penis and phallus, actual and symbolic father’ (42). On
how the dominant fiction constitutes ‘the representational system through
which the subject is accommodated to the Name-of-the-Father,’ see 34–5; on
the penis-phallus conflation in Lacanian and post-Lacanian theory, see 42–8.
14 Silverman’s argument develops Althusser’s Marxist revision of Lacan’s
account of the subject’s relationship to the symbolic Law. Lacan and Althus-
ser, she notes, concur in that ‘the law is not single, but double’ – composed of
the ‘law of language’ and the ‘law of kinship structure’ (Male Subjectivity, 38).
Silverman identifies the Name-of-the-Father as the signifier of a (universal?)
Law of Kinship Structure that ‘is not necessarily phallic,’ since while this law’s
incest taboo obliges the circulation of individuals, ‘much like words, between
“classes, lineages or families,”’ Lacan’s paradigm does not adduce ‘any struc-
tural imperative, analogous to the incest prohibition itself, which dictates
that it be women rather than men – or both women and men – that circulate
in this way, nor can such an imperative be found’ (Male Subjectivity, 37). If the
Law of Kinship Structure is not fundamentally patriarchal, Silverman argues,
it follows that one can maintain an analogous distinction ‘between the Law of
Language’ and its local articulation: the phallus.
15 Male Subjectivity, 38. Silverman’s critique of Lacan’s toleration of the penis-
phallus conflation is made clear through her distinction between the two
aspects of the double Law. As she explains, in Lacan’s paradigm ‘the Law of
Language dictates universal castration, whereas our Law of Kinship Structure
equates the Father with the Law, and hence exempts him from it’ (ibid., 42).
16 Pessoa, ‘Epithalamium,’ in Poesia inglesa, bilingual edition, ed. and trans.
Luísa Freire (Braga: Horizonte, 1995), 284.
17 Poesia inglesa, 274.
18 Poesia inglesa, 276, 286. There is, curiously, just one zoomorphic image in
‘Epithalamium’ that elides sexual difference, when the whole community is
exhorted to ‘Bellow! Roar! Stallions be or bulls that fret / On their seed’s
hole to get!’ (288).
19 Poesia inglesa, 284, 280.
22 Poesia inglesa, 288, 284.
172 Mark Sabine
23 There is a clear difference between male and female experience of desire in

the poem. While the bridegroom can scarcely contain his lust (280), the
bride’s sexual desire is always tempered by fear of the impending sexual vio-
lence: ‘her legs she twines, well knowing / A hand will part them then; /
Fearing that entering in her, that allowing / That will make softness begin
rude at pain’ (278). The distinction between the bride’s mixed feelings and
her consort’s unqualified avidity is encapsulated in the reference to ‘the
bride’s sad joy and / The bridegroom’s haste inreined’ (282).
27 Pessoa, Cartas, 67.
28 On nineteenth-century Hellenism’s interpretation of the origins of the social
sanctioning and practice of paederastia, see Linda Dowling, Hellenism and
Homosexuality in Victorian England (Ithaca: Cornell Univesity Press, 1994).
Existing studies that have considered Pessoa’s reception of the writings of
Pater, Symonds, and others on classical Greek aesthetics, on paederastia, and
on the Antinous legend include Sena’s ‘O heterónimo Fernando Pessoa,’
Monteiro’s Fernando Pessoa and his essay in this volume, and António Feijó’s
‘Fernando Pessoa’s Mothering of the Avant-garde.’ For a survey of rewritings
of the Antinous legend that respond to nineteenth-century Hellenism’s redis-
covery of paederastia, see Sarah Waters, ‘“The Most Famous Fairy in History”:
Antinous and Homosexual Fantasy,’ Journal of the History of Sexuality 6.2
(1995): 194–230.
29 Rameau’s ‘tragédie lyrique’ celebrating the love and loyalty of Castor and
Pollux was produced in 1737, proving sufficiently popular for a revised ver-
sion to be successfully premiered in 1754. Antoine Coysevox, Castor et Pollux,
ca. 1687–1706, signed 1712, marble, Palais de Versailles, Paris; Nollekens,
Castor and Pollux, 1767, marble, Victoria and Albert Museum, London. An
illustrated catalogue of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century copies of the San
Ildefonso group is available at http://www.antinoos.info/copies1.htm.
Winckelmann offers a more unequivocally homoerotic interpretation of the
sculpture by identifying the figures as Orestes and Pilades, as Whitney Davis
notes in ‘Homoerotic Art Collection from 1750–1920,’ Art History 24:2 (April
2001): 258. For a discussion of homoerotism and treatment of paederastia in
Winckelmann’s art criticism, see Alex Potts, Flesh and the Ideal: Winckelmann
and the Origins of Art History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 182–4.
30 Pessoa, ‘Antinous,’ in Poesia inglesa, 290.
32 Poesia inglesa, 296. For a study of the putative influence on Pessoa of nine-
teenth-century British sexual attitudes and erotic texts, see Yara Frateschi Vie-
ira, Sob o ramo da bétula: Fernando Pessoa e o erotismo vitoriano (Campinas:
Editora da Unicamp, 1989).
33 Poesia inglesa, 296. As Frateschi Vieira notes, ‘a descrição da ars erotica de Antí-
noo ... se organiza em torno de pares em oposição: folhas mortas/barras de
ferro; olhos muito fechados/muito fitadores; interrupções/frenético tra-
balho; pena/chicote. Antínoo passa de um pólo a outro, englobando
oposições, tais como maciez/dureza, penetrado/penetrante, aberto/
fechado, passivo/ativo, carícia/flagelo. Deve se observar que essas oposições
operam tradicionalmente no campo da sexualidade como atributos femini-
nos e masculinos, respectivamente’ (the description of Antinous’s ars erotica
... is organized around binary oppositions: dead leaves/iron bars, eyes firmly
shut/staring wide, interruptions/feverish activity, feather/whip. Antinous
moves from one pole to the other, encompassing oppositions such as soft-
ness/hardness, penetrated/penetrating, open/closed, passive/active,
caress/lash. It should be noted that in discussions of sexuality these opposi-
tions traditionally function as respectively female and male attributes) (Sob o
ramo, 89–90).
37 Poesia inglesa, 292, 296. As Waters observes, comparisons of Antinous with
Adonis, Hyacinthus, and Ganymede all have well-established precedents in
the homoerotic literature of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries
(‘The Most Famous Fairy,’ 202, 208, 210, 212–13, 221). Pessoa’s use of these
analogies is, however, distinct and thus remarkable in that while implying
Hadrian’s adoption of the corresponding divine roles, it also depicts Hadrian
as the mortal, ‘slaved’ consort of Antinous’s deities.
39 See Ovid, Metamorphoses, ed. R.J. Tarrant (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2004), book 10, esp. lines 148–219 on Ganymede and Hyacinthus (pp. 288–
91) and lines 708–39 on the death of Adonis (pp. 310–12). For a history of
sources for the legend of paederastia’s Orphic origins, see Dorothy M. Kosin-
ski, Orpheus in Nineteenth-Century Symbolism (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research
Press, 1989), 16–18. Although Ovid’s treatment of Orpheus’s story has been
read as a satire on paederastia (see for example W.S. Anderson’s ‘The
Orpheus of Virgil and Ovid: flebile nescio quid’ in Orpheus: The Metamorphosis of
a Myth, ed. John Warden [Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1982], 36–
48), Frateschi Vieira observes that ‘Antinous,’ with its several ‘imprecaç[ões]
misógina[s] ... procura aludir de forma marcadamente erudita à polêmica
174 Mark Sabine
grega entre os filósofos defensores do amor pelas mulheres e os outros que

consideravam o amor heterossexual uma forma inferior’ (misogynist denun-
ciations ... seeks to allude in a distinctly erudite manner to the [ancient]
Greek polemic between those philosophers who defended love for women
and those others who considered heterosexual love to be inferior) (Sob o
ramo, 87). On Pessoa’s plan to include ‘Antinous’ in an English supplement
to a future number of Orpheu, see Monteiro’s essay in this volume.
41 Frateschi Vieira interprets the description of Antinous’s sexual agency in this
passage as a ‘recusa de assumir a sexualidade na sua forma adulta’ (refusal to
take on an adult form of sexuality) and ‘nostalgia de um paraíso perdido da
pseudo-assexualidade, que se situaria na infância’ (nostalgia for a lost para-
dise of pseudo-asexuality, situated in infancy) (Sob o ramo, 88); I would ques-
tion her use of the term ‘pseudo-assexualidade.’
51 It should be noted that at no point in ‘Epithalamium’ does the bride, the
groom, or anyone else caught up in the frenzy of rutting, experience this
transformation of the body into a plane of immanence. The newlywed’s
‘repeated / Coupling in darkness’ at no point leads to any dissolution of sub-
jectivity. As ‘sleep come[s] on hurt frames,’ they ‘dream still of love’ while
‘mouthing each other’s names’ (288), indicating that their identities have in
no way been disrupted by their love making.
52 For a discussion of this, see Bice Benvenuto and Roger Kennedy, The Works of
Jacques Lacan: An Introduction (London: Free Association Books, 1986), 142–
61, esp. 145–5.
53 Best and Kellner, Postmodern Theory, 84.
58 Pessoa, Cartas, 67. My translation.
60 Poesia inglesa, 304; 306.

62 Feijó, ‘Fernando Pessoa’s Mothering of the Avant-Garde,’ 3. Pater, ‘Winckel-
mann,’ in The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry, in Three Major Texts: The
Renaissance, Appreciations and Imaginary Portraits, ed. William E. Buckler (New
York: New York University Press, 1986), 183–216.
63 Pater, The Renaissance, 213. For Pessoa’s comment on Botto, see his 1932 pref-
ace to Botto’s Cartas que me foram devolvidas, republished in Obra poética e em
prosa, 2:1264. It should be noted that António Mora and Ricardo Reis also
refer to the neopagan coterie as ‘exiles’ from the classical world, e.g., in
Reis’s fragmentary Prefácio (Preface) to the works of Alberto Caeiro, Páginas
íntimas e de auto-interpretação, ed. Georg Rudolf Lind and Jacinto Prado
Coelho (Lisbon: Ática, 1966), 323.
64 Pater, The Renaissance, 215, 204.
65 Feijó, ‘Fernando Pessoa’s Mothering of the Avant-Garde,’ 4.
66 Pater, The Renaissance, 204.
68 See Feijó, ‘Fernando Pessoa’s Mothering of the Avant-garde,’ 6. Here Feijó is
commenting on Campos’s ‘Notas para a recordação do meu Mestre Caeiro.’
69 As Feijó summarizes, ‘Greek art, the median term of Hegel’s triad, is, for Pes-
soa, the strong moment which exceeds both the late, anti-sensuous nature of
Christian art and the early vapid, nihilistic impulse of Indian art. The undo-
ing of classic sculpture by the romantic arts of painting, poetry and music is
itself undone by Pessoa’s apology of the former’s brief balance’ (‘Fernando
Pessoa’s Mothering of the Avant-garde,’ 5). On Pessoa’s term ‘quincunx,’ see
note 9.
70 Pessoa’s principal theoretical text on neopaganism is the unfinished Regresso
dos deuses, the fragments of which were first collated for publication in Pági-
nas íntimas, 223–303. As Richard Zenith points out, while Pessoa’s notes and
letters attribute this work to António Mora, some manuscripts labelled
Regresso dos deuses are signed by Ricardo Reis, who also wrote extensive theo-
retical treatises on neo-paganism. The Selected Prose of Fernando Pessoa, ed. and
trans. Richard Zenith (New York: Grove Press, 2001), 147–8.
71 Poemas inglesas, 306.
72 Pessoa, Cartas, 68, my translation; Páginas íntimas, 318, trans. by Richard
Zenith, in The Selected Prose, 155.
73 As Waters notes, ‘Hadrian’s passion for all things Greek was famous, even
notorious, among his Roman contemporaries ... [It] seems likely that he fos-
tered an identification of Antinous as a Greek eromenos, and of himself as a
complementary erastes, in emulation of a cherished classical model. Whatever
176 Mark Sabine
Hadrian’s personal motivations, this was certainly the interpretation put on

his affair with Antinous in the nineteenth century: for homosexuals and non-
homosexuals alike, Greek Love was the point at which Antinous’s story and
modern sexual narratives intersected’ (‘The Most Famous Fairy,’ 203).
74 Pessoa por conhecer, 2:62.
75 Zenith, The Selected Prose, 160. Sena refutes Simões’s assumption that Pessoa’s
‘Anteros’ would represent ‘o amor de cuja negação sistemática nasce a gran-
deza de um mundo em que os seres se repelem mais do que se aproximam’
(the love from whose systematic negation is born the glory of a world in
which beings repel each other more than they attract each other) (Vida e
obra, 498) with the assertion that ‘Anteros’ represents the ‘divindade grega ...
irmã de Eros, e seu complemento não-antagónico’ (Greek deity ... sister of
Eros, and his non-antagonistic complement) (Poemas ingleses, 27–34). Thus
the cycle would progress ‘da pansexualidade [em ‘Pan-Eros’] ... ao amor sub-
lime de tudo e todos por tudo e todos’ (from pansexuality [in ‘Pan-Eros’] ...
to the sublime love of everything and everyone for everything and everyone)
(Poemas ingleses, 33). Fragments of prose entitled ‘Anteros’ in envelope 139 of
the Pessoa archive (15B3/77; 15B3/77v; 15B3/79, and 15B3/80, all unpub-
lished) discuss inconclusively ‘the future of attraction between human
beings’ (15B3/77) by assessing the relations between the three forms of such
attraction: ‘love, friendship and affection’ (ibid.).
76 Pessoa por conhecer, 2:62.
77 Pater, The Renaissance, 215. The degree of alignment between Pessoa’s think-
ing and that of Pater can be better appreciated if one considers Pater’s asser-
tion that ‘[the] chief factor in the thoughts of the modern mind concerning
itself is the intricacy, the universality of natural law, even in the moral order.
For us, necessity is not, as of old, a sort of mythological personage without us,
with whom we can do warfare. It is rather a magic web woven through and
through us, like that magnetic system of which modern science speaks, pene-
trating us with a network, subtler than our finest nerves, yet bearing in it the
central forces of the world’ (215). While Pessoa frequently voiced his impa-
tience with the concern of the ‘rebel Christian’ Pater for ‘moral order’ (Pági-
nas íntimas, 286) and avoids Pater’s association of innate desires with ‘natural
law,’ his similar distinction between a ‘primitive’ unselfconsciousness and the
modern intellectual’s burden of plural self-consciousness is clearly outlined
in such well-known texts as the poem ‘Ela canta, pobre ceifeira’ (She sings,
poor reaper). See Obra poética e em prosa, 1:187–8.
80 Pessoa’s ‘Os graus da poesia lírica’ is published in Obra poética e em prosa, 3:87–
8. For an extended critical reading of this text, see Ramalho Santos, Atlantic
Poets, 13–22 and 77–82.
82 Obra poética e em prosa, 3:682; translation by Richard Zenith in The Selected
Prose, 161.
83 See the text entitled ‘Prefácio’ in Pessoa’s Escritos autobiográficos, automáticos e
de reflexão pessoal, ed. Richard Zenith (Lisbon: Assírio e Alvim, 2003), 186–7;
trans. by Zenith in The Selected Prose, 201.
84 Pessoa por conhecer, 2:477; translation by Zenith in The Selected Prose, 237. See
the Introduction to this volume and also the transcription of Pessoa’s séance
correspondent Sir Henry More, commenting on Pessoa’s habitual masturba-
tion, in The Selected Prose, 105 and 117.
85 For evidence of the interference of Campos in Pessoa and Ophelia’s
romance, see Pessoa’s letters of 5 April, 27 April, 28 May, and 15 October
1920, and also those of 25 and 26 September 1929 and 11 January 1930, in
Cartas de amor a Ophelia de Queiroz, ed. David Mourão Ferreira and Maria da
Graça Queiroz, 3rd ed. (Lisbon: Ática, n.d.), 77–8; 83; 97–9; 127; 145; 147;
159–61. Pessoa’s accusations that Ophelia is forcing a clownish role upon him
are exemplified in his letter of 31 July 1920. Cartas de amor, 108.
86 Vida e obra, 499.
PART THREE
(Dis)Placing Women
The Truant Muse and the Poet’s Body
m. irene ra malho s antos
Encontrei uma verdade, senti-a com os intestinos!

[I found a truth, I felt it with my bowels!]
Álvaro de Campos
Something unknowable is traversing my vagus nerve.

próspero saíz
The origin of the muses is lost in antiquity. They have always been more
than one and are said to be the daughters of a female Titan, Mnemosyne
(Memory), and Zeus. Traditionally, the muses signify the power of cre-
ativity but they do not have the power themselves. They are merely the
vessels to convey the power. The names by which we came to know the
nine muses and the competences of each one of them seem to have been
established in ancient Rome. Their nine specialties are somehow all
related to music or language: Calliope (epic poetry), Clio (history),
Erato (lyric poetry), Euterpe (music), Melpomene (tragedy), Polymnia
(sacred poetry), Terpsichore (dance), Thalia (comedy), Urania (astron-
omy). In the tradition, the muses ended up being mainly associated with
poetry. When there is mention of invocation of the muses, it is usually
poetry that is in question. Poets invoke ‘the muses’ or, more frequently,
‘the muse’ for ‘inspiration.’ It comes as no surprise that the muse, or the
muses, should often become a metonym for poetry itself. When the
young William Blake surmises in his Poetical Sketches (1783) that ‘the
muses’ ‘wander fair’ or ‘rove’ in far-off distances ‘forsaking Poetry,’ what
he is really saying is that poetry writing at the end of the eighteenth cen-
tury had become repetitively sterile and had lost its power to surprise:
‘The sound is forc’d, the notes are few.’1 The question of the muses and
182 M. Irene Ramalho Santos
their invocation is therefore really a question about the meaning and

very foundation of poetry.
Jean-Luc Nancy has written a book explaining why the muses are more
than one.2 Nancy’s question concerns the plurality of the arts, and I shall
not deal with this problem here. But from Nancy’s dialogue with and
elaboration on Hegelian aesthetics, I would like to take three ideas. First,
that art has no beginning or end, and hence there is no question of ‘ori-
gin.’ Second, that the arts have to do with the senses in that they separate
‘the sense’ (both feeling and meaning) from common sense, or signifi-
cation. This concept of separation (séparation, dégagement) should be
articulated with the concept of interruption that I have been using in my
work and to which Nancy resorts as well here.3 Third, that of all the arts,
poetry, because language is its medium, is the one in which this ‘separa-
tion’ can best be observed. The ‘proper’ of poetry, writes Nancy, invok-
ing Paul Celan and Fernando Pessoa, is the ‘outside’ (dehors). Poetry,
insists Nancy, ‘names the outside.’4 The passage from Celan’s Meridian
quoted by Nancy indeed stresses the ‘outside’ of art, its open-endedness,
its being without resolution, without beginning or end.5 The Pessoa
poem, on the other hand, is number XXXIX of Alberto Caeiro’s ‘O
guardador de rebanhos’ (The Keeper of Flocks), the one that asks about
‘the mystery of things’ and ends up proclaiming that their mystery (their
‘hidden sense’) is that there is no mystery, no ‘hidden sense at all.’ What
there is is ‘existence’ and ‘sense,’ and nothing else.6 Nancy, who seems to
have written passages of his book on the muses with Armand Guibert’s
Pessoa/Caeiro very much in mind, might have wished to invoke poem
number V as well, with its debunking of ‘metaphysics’ and propounding
‘loving’ without ‘thinking’; or poem number XXVIII, the one about the
‘mystic poets’ that are ‘sick philosophers’ because they speak about the
‘feelings’ of ‘things,’ whereas ‘things’ like flowers, stones, or rivers have
no feelings, they merely exist. ‘Feelings,’ in Portuguese, is sentimentos,
from sentir (to feel) and related to sentidos, the senses. Sentidos without
sentimentos is like sense without signification. Thus the poem summons
up ‘sense’ without ‘signification.’ It reveals what we might call, after Cae-
iro, ‘the outsidedness’ of nature. Or rather of ‘things,’ since ‘Nature
doesn’t exist,’ only trees, flowers, rivers, and stones ‘exist.’ Unlike the
‘mystic poets,’ or the ‘false poets’ mentioned in another poem, Caeiro’s
poet simply writes the prose of his verses and is happy, for he is ‘the out-
side.’7 It is not ‘the centre’ but the ‘space outside’ that is the only ‘real-
ity,’ as the poet says in one of his ‘Poemas inconjuntos’ (Unconjunct
Poems), and the outside (o exterior) is what we are ‘essentially.’8
What I would like to suggest by way of Nancy and of poets themselves
is that poetry distances itself by interrupting thought and by speaking the

sense in the senses (or the body).9 Here is Pessoa/Caeiro on ‘the won-
drous reality of things’: ‘Eu nem sequer sou poeta; vejo’ (I’m not even a
poet; I see).10 Meanwhile Bernardo Soares, the practising theoretician of
Pessoa’s heteronymic poeming, states: ‘Ver é estar distante ... Analisar é
ser estrangeiro’ (To see is to be distant ... To analyse is to be foreign).11
Poetry makes the radically Other appear. Poetry is by distancing itself and
consenting to the utter otherness of death, of existence.12 To exist is to
die, an apparent paradox that poets formulate in many different ways.
‘Eternity’ is the ‘Term,’ says Emily Dickinson, and Mallarmé once heard
‘death triumph[ing]’ in the poet’s ‘strange voice,’ while Pessoa-as-Ber-
nardo Soares proclaims: ‘Viver é ser outro’ (To live is to be other) and
‘Somos morte’ (We are death).13 The Caeiro poem that best illustrates
Nancy’s thinking on the uncanny disengagedness of poetry, especially in
‘Le vestige de l’art’ (The Vestige of Art), is number XLIII of ‘O guardador
de rebanhos’:14
Antes o vôo da ave, que passa e não deixa rasto,

Que a passagem do animal, que fica lembrado no chão.
A ave passa e esquece, e assim deve ser.
O animal, onde já não está e por isso de nada serve,
Mostra que já esteve, o que não serve para nada.
A recordação é uma traição à Natureza,
Porque a Natureza de ontem não é Natureza.
O que foi não é nada, e lembrar é não ver.
Passa, ave, passa, e ensina-me a passar!
[Rather the flight of the bird that passes and leaves no trace,
Than the passing of the animal, that remains remembered on the ground.
The bird passes and forgets, and this is as it should be.
The animal, where it no longer is and is therefore of no use,
Shows it was there, which is totally without use.
Remembrance is a betrayal of Nature,
Because yesterday’s Nature is not Nature.
What was is nothing, and remembering is not-seeing.
Pass by, bird, pass by, and teach me to pass by!]
The poetic is always on the verge of not-being, like existence/death,

best expressed by the bird’s traceless flight in Caeiro, or by the passing of
the stage coach in another Caeiro poem. In the latter, number XLII of
‘O guardador de rebanhos,’ poetry, that is to say, human making (or, as
the poem puts it, ‘human action’) is absolutely traceless: ‘Nada tiramos e
nada pomos; passamos e esquecemos’ (We take nothing, we add noth-
ing; we pass by and forget).15 Ultimately, the poem, says Celan in the pas-
sage already quoted, ‘does not exist.’ In the following nonexisting poem
by próspero saíz (a fine reader of Celan), the mutually ‘missing’ senses
(‘the eye missing the hand’) are the only way of capturing the ‘rhythm’
of being – ‘soft vanishing flow’ or ‘flowing stillness’:16
red sand
trickling down
one grain at a time
the eye missing the hand
the eye missing the earth
a soft vanishing flow

the brain
a rhythm
a flowing stillness
Poets have access to (or ‘sense’) the radical, inhuman otherness that
grounds the poetic by speaking the foreignness of language. Rimbaud,
the poet who aimed to become a seer by a ‘long, immense and reasoned
(raisonné) derangement of all the senses,’ was probably the first to speak his
Other in literal terms: ‘Je est un autre.’17 Pessoa spoke himself into many
other selves, but the closest to an absolute Other among his heteronyms
is Caeiro.18 ‘Closest,’ I say, because the ‘othering’ process makes Caeiro
‘sick,’ the poet has trouble taking a bite of the earth and tasting it, or see-
ing only the visible, and, like Stevens, he embraces imperfection.19 To
‘sense,’ that is to say, to ‘see’ the ‘things’ in ‘things,’ or ‘the outside,’ is a
course in unlearning. If poem XXIV states it very clearly – poetry requires
a learning of how to unlearn (uma aprendizagem de desaprender) –
poem XLVI provides the course syllabus for writing poetry as if it were
something that just happened to the poet, like the sun shining on him
‘from the outside’ (de fora).20 The difficulty of the process is patent in
the wording of the poem: poetry writing as the random and non-deliber-
ate nature of what ‘chances to occur’ (calha), and the near impossibility
of making word and idea coincide, or of sensing sense. The learning pro-
cess consists in undressing oneself, unpacking one’s true emotions,
unwrapping one’s self, and finally finding oneself, not one’s self, but ‘a
human animal that Nature produced’ (um animal humano que a
Natureza produziu). In this poem we find out that poetry demands much
more than Pessoa’s own othering process. We discover that what Pessoa
called outrar-se and outridade has no end.21 We learn that the poet who at
last finds himself ‘the Discoverer of Nature,’ ‘the Argonaut of true sensa-
tion,’ he that brings ‘the Universe to the Universe,’ is not even Caeiro. A
‘human animal,’ Caeiro as non-Caeiro is no poet that can be known at all.
As he senses, he is the universe coinciding with his own body: ‘Sentir a
vida correr por mim como um rio por seu leito’ (To sense life flowing
through me like a river along its bed). Having thus located himself on the
very ground of the poetic, Pessoa’s Caeiro embodies poetry itself. He (his
‘body’) happens, or chances, as poetry. What use would Caeiro have for
a muse? His body (he is a ‘mystic in the body’) and his senses (‘Vi como
um danado’ [I saw like one of the damned]) transport him to the strange
distance of poetic language.22
No wonder Álvaro de Campos is jealous of his much admired ‘master.’
Like Hölderlin’s ‘Der Einzige’ (The Only One), Campos’s poem ‘Mestre,
meu mestre querido’ hankers desperately after the distant and foreign,
yet inescapable being of poetry.23 ‘My Master and my Lord!,’ cries out
Hölderlin, ‘O you, my teacher! / Why did you stay / Away?’ (Mein Meis-
ter und Herr! / O du, mein Lehrer! / Was bist du ferne / Geblieben?).
Left without an answer, the poet is compelled to return to his sole self
and his own frailty: ‘And yet I know, it is my / Own fault’ (Ich weiß es
aber, eigene Schuld / Ists!). The song has come too much from his heart,
and there is a wide gap between his desire and his accomplishment
(‘Much though I wish to, never / Do I strike the right measure’ [Nie treff
ich, wie ich wünsche, / Die Maas]). The poet’s ‘fault’ is strange, however,
for it is the consequence of the absence of the gods. After the gods dis-
appeared from the earth, the poet, earlier struck by divine love, remains
hopelessly ‘worldly.’ The last two lines of the poem sum up the poetic
paradox with a force that the English version lacks: ‘Die Dichter müssen
auch / Die geistigen weltlich seyn’ (The poets, the spiritual ones, must
also be worldly). No matter that Pessoa probably never read Hölderlin:
Campos’s ‘Mestre, meu mestre querido’ reads like a belated commentary
on ‘Der Einzige.’ ‘Ergo as mãos para ti, que estás tão longe, tão longe de
mim!’ (I lift up my hands to you, so far away, so far from me!) is how Cam-
pos conjures up Hölderlin’s cry about the aspired-to uniqueness of
poetry’s experience. It is as if Hölderlin’s poet had to be more than one
poet to speak the poetic in a more destitute time. Caeiro harbours in
himself the longing for the ancient gods even as he offers protection
from such dangerous longing; Campos cannot understand but longs for
and dreads the longing itself. The word ‘refúgio’ in the line ‘Refúgio das
saudades de todos os deuses antigos’ (translated by Honig and Brown as
‘Refuge from the nostalgia for all the old gods’) is ambiguous, for it
points to Caeiro both as refuge from inordinate desire (the desire, that
is, to come as close as possible to the divine) and as the very site of desire.
In Campos, the absence of the gods is not perceived as the absence of a
presence, but rather as absolute absence: Caeiro ‘died’ in 1915. And yet,
rather than an elegy for the death of Caeiro, ‘Mestre, meu mestre
querido’ is actually a hymn addressed to the ‘master,’ authorizing the dis-
ciple-poet’s ‘life,’ ‘origin,’ and ‘inspiration.’24 If an elegy at all, it is an
elegy for Campos himself, the poet who has a glimpse of the total disen-
gagedness of the poetic (in the objectivity, or ‘thingness,’ of Caeiro’s
non-poems) only to end up trapped in the ‘subjectivized world.’ Cam-
pos’s observations in his ‘Notas para a recordação do meu mestre Caeiro’
(Notes for the Memory of My Master Caeiro) testify to his inability to
grasp Caeiro’s tranquil sense of objective reality – what Campos calls here
Caeiro’s ‘direct concept of things’ (conceito directo das coisas). Because
he cannot really grasp them, Campos is tormented by the presentness of
reality, the immediacy of space, and the inexorability of time. That is why
he is so frustrated by his conversation with Caeiro about ‘the infinite’ that
is not ‘there,’ or the yellow flower that is just a ‘yellow flower’ and yet
never the same.25
Campos’s ode to Caeiro asks all the important questions about lyric
poetry: questions about the subject and the object, the human and the
inhuman, nature and language, life and death. It is a poem about the
foundation of poetry, the ever-elusive origin that some of us still call
‘inspiration.’26 ‘Mestre, meu mestre querido’ is really a muse poem,
albeit without a traditional muse. The truth is that the muse is no longer
available. Not surprisingly, it is up to the contemporary American poet,
próspero saíz, to formulate the implicitly paradoxical predicament: ‘the
mating of Mnemosyne with Zeus, resulting in the birth of the nine
muses, is out of memory. The muses no longer call upon the poets with
the gift of the poetic word.’27 As Campos intuits it with a certain degree
of resentment, Caeiro needs no intermediary messenger to access poetic
power because he embodies poetic power itself. We might say, to borrow
Hölderlin’s beautiful formulation in ‘Brot und Wein’ (Bread and Wine),
that Caeiro is the very site where the poetic appears – like flowers: ‘Seg-
uro como um sol fazendo o seu dia involuntariamente, / Natural como
um dia mostrando tudo’ (Sure as a sun making its day involuntarily, /

natural as a day showing everything).28 Campos, on the contrary, is torn
between Caeiro’s dreadful knowledge of the senses (a pavorosa ciência
de ver) and the senselessness of the quotidian normality that makes up
common human destiny. He, more indeed than any other heteronym,
could use the intermediation of the muse, that old prerogative of the
male poet in the tradition. But once Baudelaire found the muse sick and
even derisively stated that she had to sell herself to survive, the modernist
poet could hardly bring her back.29 Abandoned by the truant muse, the
male modernist poet was forced to rethink the old notion of inspiration
as well. Like women poets since Sappho, men poets had no choice but to
turn to their own mortal bodies to ground their poetry writing.30
To deal with the body is never easy for Pessoa; the effort often makes
him sick, even though sickness is where he most finds himself.31 Sickness,
in Pessoa, is ever linked with what Eduardo Lourenço has called the
poet’s ‘sexual panic,’ or, I would say rather, his homosexual panic, the
concern that his ‘feminine’ (i.e., ‘passive’) side might eventually take
over his ‘masculine’ (i.e. ‘active’) ‘whole’ being.32 If the ostensibly het-
erosexual Ricardo Reis seems to avoid the problem by merely letting him-
self listlessly feel his own passing through life and poetry, Campos, in his
‘Notes for the Memory of My Master Caeiro,’ points to the discomfort of
the organic (physiological) genesis of Pessoa’s poetry by invoking the first
encounter between Reis and Caeiro. When he met Caeiro, Reis ‘found
out he was organically a poet.’ As he thus became a poet in his body, Cam-
pos argues, Reis ‘stopped being a woman and became a man, or stopped
being a man and became a woman.’33 ‘Naked man’ or ‘sensation of [him-
self],’ in ‘the complexity of his simplicity’ Caeiro embodies the Ur-poem,
the primordiality of the poetic itself. It should come as no surprise, there-
fore, that Caeiro’s bout of illness ends up justifying his ‘separate’ being by
showing the ‘opposite’ (o contrário) of what he is.34 Álvaro de Campos
and Bernardo Soares are the most afflicted, the latter, once again, the
practising theorizer of the self-interruptive, creative body: ‘Dói-me a
cabeça hoje, e é talvez do estômago que me dói. Mas a dor, uma vez suger-
ida do estômago, vai interromper as meditações que tenho por detrás de
ter cérebro’ (I have a headache today, and it comes perhaps from my
stomach. But the pain, once suggested by the stomach, is going to inter-
rupt the meditations I have behind my having a brain).35 Álvaro de Cam-
pos is, however, the most interesting case. He is sick even before he
becomes Álvaro de Campos.36 In ‘Opiário,’ an ‘old’ poem of Campos’s
written before he met Caeiro and actually became Campos, the poet,
beleaguered by fever and weakness, individual and national despon-

dency, general indisposition, and opium dependency, is at best convales-
cent. If ‘Opiário’ already has ‘Álvaro in the bud,’ as Pessoa explained to
Casais Monteiro, no wonder ‘Álvaro’ has so much trouble with his body.37
The only way for him to ‘sense,’ and thus make the poem appear, may
well be to fall sick. Of course, the poet’s ailing body is no match for the
traditional muse, but at least it doesn’t play truant. Here is Álvaro de Cam-
pos’s lament for the inadequate replacement of the absent muse by the
poet’s diminished body:38
Os Antigos invocavam as Musas.

Nós invocamo-nos a nós mesmos.
Não sei se as Musas apareciam –
Seria sem dúvida conforme o invocado e a invocação. –
Mas sei que nós não aparecemos.
Quantas vezes me tenho debruçado
Sobre o poço que me suponho
E balido ‘Ah!’ para ouvir um eco,
E não tenho ouvido mais que o visto –
O vago alvor escuro com que a água resplandece
Lá na inutilidade do fundo ...
Nenhum eco para mim ...
Só vagamente uma cara,
Que deve ser a minha, por não poder ser de outro.
É uma coisa quase invisível,
Excepto como luminosamente vejo
Lá no fundo ...
No silêncio e na luz falsa do fundo ...
Que Musa!...
[The Ancients invoked the Muses.

We invoke ourselves.
I don’t know if the Muses appeared –
It would no doubt depend on the invoked and the invocation. –
But I know we do not appear.
How often have I leaned over
Into the well that I suppose myself to be
And bleated ‘Ah!’ to hear an echo,
And have heard nothing more than the seen –
The vague dark dawn that is the water’s sheen

Down there in the uselessness of the depth ...
No echo for me ...
Only a face vaguely,
Which must be mine since it can’t be anybody else’s.
It’s an almost invisible thing,
Except as I luminously see
Down there in the depth ...
In the silence and false light of the depth ...
What a Muse! ...]
It is not just that the vagabond muse has been gone a long time. What
happens is that poetry has no grounding any longer. Forced to invoke
himself, the modern poet is unable to respond to the call. The narcissis-
tic gesture of self-invocation mixes up the myths to signify the poet’s
lonely silence. Left but with the barely visible reflection of his own face at
the bottom of the deep well that is his own being, the poet is like a bodi-
less Narcissus that dares not embrace his own image, and is therefore
denied even the echo of a voice. The reflected face that he believes to be
his own ‘because it can’t be anybody else’s’ is really not his proper face,
but rather a heteronymic face, and the reflection of a heteronymic face,
at that. What a (non)muse indeed! Her non-existence is even more pow-
erfully dramatized in ‘Tabacaria’ (The Tobacconist’s), an earlier poem
(1928) that reads like a metaleptic commentary on ‘Os antigos invoca-
vam as Musas’ (1935). Half-way through, ‘Tabacaria’ is interrupted by a
strange parenthetical invocation that nonetheless leaves the poet liter-
ally empty-hearted: ‘Meu coração é um balde despejado’ (My heart is a
bucket that’s been emptied). The invocation is addressed to an indeter-
minate, evanescent giver of comfort that ‘doesn’t exist’ and ‘therefore’
does give comfort, a feminine principle as the ancient muse would have
to be, but not the muse herself as conveyer of poetic power. It is rather
the eroticized idea of woman-as-inspiration in the predominantly male
literary history, from antiquity (‘deusa grega’ [Greek goddess], ‘patrícia
romana’ [patrician Roman matron]) through the Middle Ages and
modernity (‘princesa de trovadores’ [princess of the troubadours], ‘mar-
quesa do século XVIII’ [eighteenth-century marchioness], ‘cocote céle-
bre’ [famous cocotte]) to the contemporaneity of the poet’s own
creative destitution: ‘não sei quê moderno – não concebo bem o quê ...
invoco / A mim mesmo e não encontro nada’ (some modern something
– I can’t quite imagine what ... I invoke / Myself and find nothing).39 The
unexpected parenthesis, which seems at first meant to bring some relief
from the entire poem’s oppressive nothingness, concludes with the utter
foreignness of things. The poet ‘sees,’ apparently like Caeiro (‘Vejo ... /
Vejo ... / Vejo ...’), that everything is ‘foreign,’ as if consciousness of him-
self in his obsession with signification earlier in the poem (‘Que sei eu
do que serei, eu que não sei o que sou?’ [What do I know of what I’ll be,
I who don’t know what I am?]) could not but prevent him from ‘sens-
ing.’ The poet ends up merely feeling like the cut-off tail of the lizard he
imagines himself to be. A previous parenthesis, the one with the little girl
eating chocolates, points to the metaphysical nature of Campos’s predic-
ament: even though he knows that ‘there is no more metaphysics than
eating chocolates,’ he himself cannot eat chocolates at all. We could
say, however, that the poem concludes almost totally under the aegis of
Caeiro, after its despondent speculative mode is interrupted by the
‘plausible reality’ of the tobacconist’s ‘without ideal or hope’ across the
street. The poet lights a cigarette, ‘savours’ it (saboreio) and remains
determined to smoke it for as long as Fate permits. The speculative that
threatens to return in the brief parenthesis about happiness is not
allowed to prevail. The comfort of the non-existent muse lies in the
poet’s ‘sense’ (or Caeiro).
More often, however, Campos’s mode does not allow for Caeiro’s
unselfconscious sensuousness. A sick body is Campos’s usual way of sens-
ing and making present. In ‘Ora até que enfim ... perfeitamente ...’ (At
long last ... perfectly ...), a poem that reads like an ironic account of his
poetic career at the end of his life (which is neither ‘end nor life’), Cam-
pos claims finally to have understood himself.40 The explanation (or
‘solution’) is the ‘exactitude’ of madness in his head or, more graphically
still, the ‘nausea,’ as of a hangover, that ‘tickles’ his throat and makes
him vomit. To find the ‘solution’ he uses his stomach, the ‘truth’ he feels
with his bowels: ‘Arre, encontrei uma solução, e foi preciso o estômago!
/ Encontrei uma verdade, senti-a com os intestinos!’ (Strewth, I’ve
found a solution, and it took my stomach to find it! / I found a truth, I
felt it with my bowels!) The very existence of ‘Álvaro de Campos’ is, of
course, already a problematization of the poetic, but Campos’s poem
pushes it further. As the poet dismissively recalls the different kinds of
poetry he has written, nausea overwhelms him and he is on the verge of
vomiting. Poetry presents itself as beyond signification:
Poesia transcendental, já a fiz também!

Grandes raptos líricos, também já por cá passaram!
A organização de poemas relativos à vastidão de cada assunto resolvido

em vários –
Também não é novidade.
Tenho vontade de vomitar, e de me vomitar a mim ...
[Transcendental poetry, I’ve done that too!

Grand lyrical raptures, those have been here before as well!
Organizing poems on the vastness of each matter resolved in several –
Not new either.
I want to vomit, I want to vomit my selfhood too ...]
Nowhere is Campos’s body made more obstreperously present than in

‘Ode marítima’ (Maritime Ode).41 This long ode to the sea (Pessoa’s
longest poem, with more than 900 lines) is a subversive, indeed accusa-
tory celebration of the sea and the Portuguese discoveries, and hence a
denunciation as well of all seafaring as expansion, conquest, possession,
domination, and destruction. But this theme is no more than the mod-
ern poem’s excuse to let itself be written as one of the greatest lyrics
of modernity. Quite early on, the poem includes an invocation in the tra-
ditional mode, explicitly asking for poetic inspiration (‘Fornecei-me
metáforas, imagens, literatura’ [Supply me with metaphors, images,
literature]). The passionate apostrophe is, however, addressed to no
muse figure, but rather to the sea itself and all things related to the sea
and sea voyaging. What the poet asks for is to be completely possessed by
the sea. He wants his body and all his contradictory sensations turned
into the ships, keels, masts, sails, and nets he already feels physically as
part of himself. The civilized engineer, modern and educated abroad,
yearns for the sea – the triumphs and obscenities of the sea’s history,
geography, and peoples – to take over his body. His body is here highly
sexualized in a very complex, homoerotic manner. It is the body of the
brave mariner and that of the plundering pirate at one and the same
time, the body of the penetrating conqueror and the body of the ravaged
land, the body of the rapist and the woman’s raped body. It is a body trans-
ported by the wild shatteredness of being a sensation-inflicting and, most
of all, a sensation-suffering body. Long before Judith Butler problema-
tized ‘the subject’ by questioning the ‘heterosexual imperative’ and
rethinking sex, gender, and sexuality, the heteronymic modernist poet
was already doing it. In ‘Ode marítima,’ Pessoa’s Campos’s body elo-
quently interpellates the culture about bodies that matter: theory is
always posterous.42 As if in answer to the poet’s apostrophic plea early in
the poem, he becomes disturbingly indistinguishable from the heroic,
delirious, bestial body of water that made possible imperial voyages,

adventures, discoveries, and violences of all kinds across the centuries,
and is still raging and roaring, encompassed in the poet’s body:
Todo o meu sangue raiva por asas!

Todo o meu corpo atira-se para a frente!
....
E a minha carne é uma onda dando de encontro a rochedos!
[All my blood rages for wings!

My whole body throws itself forwards!
....
And my flesh is a wave breaking against the rocks!]
The sexual and power relation implied in the idea of possession is mas-
terfully crafted into the pathological, sado-masochist, and intersexual
mode of the poem-as-poem. As he is possessed by the sea and his body is
ravished by the actions of the sea, the victimized poet’s body becomes
female, and so it becomes, like a muse, the ancient vessel of inspiration.
The poem erupts from the poet’s passive, woman-like, and self-abused
body. What I am suggesting is that ‘Ode marítima,’ as one of the most
highly self-conscious poems of modernity, gives powerful voice to the
problem of the modern lyric.43 The poet’s desire for the sea in himself is
ultimately his desire for ‘the Absolute Distance’ (a Distância Absoluta)
and ‘[the] Pure Far-away’ (O Puro Longe) that ground the poetic. ‘Nada
perdeu a poesia’ (Poetry has lost nothing), exclaims the poet wishfully as
he nears the end of his chant: modern poetry is still possible, not in spite
of, but because of the ‘flywheel’ (o volante) and the ‘crane’ (o guin-
daste), the two modern images that structure the ode throughout. Once
his orgasmatic delirium of frenetic piracy gives way to the silence of cae-
sura (‘Parte-se em mim qualquer coisa’[Something breaks inside me]);
the poet once again hears the lyric’s ‘vast, most ancient of cries’ (o vasto
grito antiquíssimo). And at the end, the Far-away (o Longe) is the mov-
ingly anguished silence of the seemingly bodiless poet. Caeiro’s ‘de fora’
and Celan’s ‘draussen’ come back to mind.
In ‘Ode triunfal’ (Triumphal Ode), Pessoa’s body-as-muse is even
more powerfully expressed by an extraordinary, untranslatable meta-
phor: passento.44 As the ambiguities of the triumphal chant get under way
– the feverish poet torn between the elating force and the crippling pain
of the machines – a timely cry for inspiration is put in place. What muse
could bring the poet the words capable of expressing all the contradic-
tions of modernity, which of course include all the contradictions of
antiquity and of all times? How can the poet express the promiscuity of
time and space and their intersections and passages? There may be no
answer to these questions. All we have is the poet’s sensuously hyperbolic
desire, suggesting that the answer must lie in the promiscuous organicity
of his own body. Pessoa/Campos anticipates here a much later poet, who
joco-seriously rethinks the poetic in our time by concerning himself with
his ‘circulatory system,’ his ‘sympathetic nervous system,’ the capacity of
his heart to produce the ‘atrial natriuretic factor,’ and the ‘electromag-
netic signals’ of the ‘breath-turning’ of his heart. In the passage from
which I am quoting, próspero saíz takes Celan’s ‘Atemwende’ (Breath-
turn) as the quintessentially poetic and traces its literal anatomy in the
organic functionings of his own body.45
Almost a century earlier, Pessoa/Campos’s concern was similar.
Aroused by his own astonishment at the complex accomplishments of
modernity, which he obsessively compares with the timelessness and
amplitude of Nature, Literature, and Philosophy, the poet is inspired by
his physical, corporeal incapacity to voice them:
Ah, poder exprimir-me todo como um motor se exprime!

Ser completo como uma máquina!
Poder ir na vida triunfante como um automóvel último-modelo!
Poder ao menos penetrar-me fisicamente de tudo isto,
Rasgar-me todo, abrir-me completamente, tornar-me passento
A todos os perfumes de óleos e carvões
Desta flora estupenda, negra, artificial e insaciável!
[Oh to be able to express my whole being as an engine expresses itself!

To be complete like a machine!
To go triumphantly through life like the latest model car!
To be able at least to penetrate myself physically by all this,
Rip myself wide open, and become passento
Of all the perfumes of the oils and hot coals
Of this stupendous, artificial and insatiable black flora!]
I left the original ‘passento’ in my translation above because ‘pervious’

(Zenith’s brilliant choice) doesn’t entirely work, but I cannot come up
with a better suggestion. Elsewhere, I comment at some length on the
possible origin and uses of this relatively uncommon Portuguese word.46
Suffice it to say here that the use Pessoa makes of passento in Campos’s
ode requires all the meanings associated with passar (to pass), both as a
transitive and intransitive verb (passing, letting pass, suffering, endur-
ing, disappearing, dying). The problem with ‘pervious’ (both ‘that can
be penetrated’ and ‘having the quality of penetrating’) is that it loses the
sound meaning of passar, a verb that is conjugated five times twenty-four
lines below (‘Tudo o que passa, tudo o que passa e nunca passa! ... ped-
erastas que passam ...’ [All that passes, all that passes and never passes! ...
pederasts that pass by ...]).47 More important still, the word had already
made its appearance in the previous strophe as ‘o passado’ (the past),
where time is problematized, and the idea conveyed is that modernity is
all reality, and all reality – incessant, timeless passage: ‘Canto, e canto o
presente, e também o passado e o futuro, / Porque o presente é todo o
passado e todo o futuro’ (I sing, I sing the present, and the past and the
future too, / Because the present is all the past and all the future). The
apparently paradoxical concept is again repeated in one of the last sec-
tions of the poem, in which time is the promiscuity of all dynamic pas-
sages imaged in the Bacchic ‘Moment.’ Everything passes, the strophe
insists, seemingly incongruously, everything but the passing ‘Moment.’
The obvious conclusion is that this ‘Moment’ is the strident poem, one
with the Orpheus-like poet’s naked and sensing body (passento):
Tudo isso apaga tudo, salvo o Momento,

O Momento de tronco nu e quente como um fogueiro,
O Momento estridentemente ruidoso e mecânico,
O Momento dinâmico passagem de todas as bacantes
Do ferro e do bronze e da bebedeira dos metais.
[All that erases everything save for the Moment,

The Moment with a bare, hot chest like a stoker,
The strident, noisy, mechanical Moment,
The dynamic Moment passage of all the bacchantes
Of the iron and the bronze and the drunkenness of the metals.]
‘Passable,’ as one of the OED definitions of ‘pervious,’ is of course out

of the question to translate passento, for the poem does not allow at all for
the pejorative connotations of something that is passable (as in the Por-
tuguese passável) because it is not good enough. But the poetic subject is
indeed ‘pass-able’ in the literal sense that he passes, even as he is the
thoroughfare of all that passes. The context of passento suggests the
poet’s bodily desire to pass and be passed through by time-as-concrete-
reality, and thus become the perfect multiple passageway of modernity

and hence adequate voice of timeless lyric. The poet’s body and excited
senses are, like the intermediary muse in antiquity, the appropriate ves-
sel of poetry. In Campos’s ‘Saudação a Walt Whitman’ (Salutation to
Walt Whitman), Pessoa expresses this concept better than anywhere else.
As the ‘rutting of the passages’ (cio das passagens), Walt, with whom
Campos identifies (‘Tu sabes que eu sou Tu’ [You know I am You]) and
who thus emerges as the paradigmatic modern poet for Pessoa, is cele-
brated as the ‘forever modern and eternal singer of concrete absolutes’
(Ó sempre moderno e eterno, cantor dos concretos absolutos).48 In
‘Passagem das horas’ (The Passing of the Hours), the Sensationist poet
indulges in a long, complex, and highly sexualized gloss on a line that is
repeated twice in the poem: ‘Sentir tudo de todas as maneiras’ [To feel,
i.e., to sense (like Rimbaud) everything in every way].49 The length and
complexity of the gloss denounce the poem’s difficulty in expressing
itself. The wealth of experience imagined in the physicality of the poet’s
body requires sexual metaphors. The poet-that-is-everything has sex (all
kinds of sex) with everything. As so often in Campos, ‘intersexuality,’
rather than intertextuality, best describes the rich cross-dialogue
between all the contradictions of life and poetry that characterizes Pes-
soa’s strongest writing.50 His poeming is completely physical and corpo-
real, his soul hurts like a burnt hand. As the poem reaches its conclusion,
time [horas] is still passing through the poet’s body, and vice versa. The
poet’s frenetic sensing is not a bit abated; he is still craving to endure the
pain of being more, becoming more, devouring more of the world. In a
word, the poet is passento, and so is his poem. In the end, the poet’s pas-
sento body manages to recapture the truant muse for itself.
After such a major feat, how could Pessoa’s imagination not bodily
ache in the person of Álvaro de Campos? 51
NOTES
I would like to thank Monica Andrade and António Sousa Ribeiro for their care-
ful readings of my paper.
1 William Blake, ‘To the Muses,’ in The Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed.
David Erdman (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1968), 408–9.
2 Jean-Luc Nancy, Les muses (Paris: Editions Galilée, 1994); The Muses, trans.
Peggy Kamuf (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996). The seven essays
that make up Nancy’s book have Hegel’s aesthetic ideas as a starting point.
3 See Irene Ramalho Santos. Atlantic Poets: Fernando Pessoa’s Turn in Anglo-Amer-
ican Modernism (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2003), 222–
56 and throughout.
4 Nancy, Les muses, 57; The Muses, 30–1.
5 Nancy invokes Celan’s Der Meridian as quoted by Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe in
La poésie comme expérience (Paris: Christian Bourgeois, 1986), 98; Poetry as Expe-
rience, trans. Andrea Tarnowski (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999),
42. See Paul Celan. Der Meridian: Gesammelte Werke, ed. Beda Alleman and Ste-
fan Reichert, 5 vols (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1983), 3:187–202
[199]. ‘The Meridian,’ Paul Celan, in Collected Prose, trans. Rosmarie Waldrop
(Manchester: Carcanet, 1999), 50. Waldrop’s translation, however, fails to
keep the concept of the ‘outside’ (draussen) that poetry is, according to
Celan, and which brings Celan and Pessoa/Caeiro together in Nancy’s think-
ing. In the 1950s, we recall, Celan translated some Pessoa poems, including
two by Alberto Caeiro, with the help of Edouard Roditi. See Gesammelte Werke
5:562–93.
6 Fernando Pessoa, Obra poética, ed. Maria Aliete Galhoz (Rio de Janeiro: Nova
Aguilar, 1981), 157. I quote the entire poem below, providing my own trans-
lation (when not otherwise indicated, all translations are my own). But see
The Keeper of Sheep, bilingual edition, trans. Edwin Honig and Susan M. Brown
(Riverdale-on-Hudson, NY: Sheep Meadow Press), 1985. Nancy, quoting from
‘Le gardeur de troupeaux,’ trans. Armand Guibert (Paris: Gallimard, 1987),
omits the first stanza:
O mistério das coisas, onde está ele?
Onde está ele que não aparece
Pelo menos a mostrar-nos que é mistério?
Que sabe o rio disso e que sabe a árvore?
E eu, que não sou mais do que eles, que sei disso?
Sempre que olho para as coisas e penso no que os homens pensam delas,
Rio como um regato que soa fresco numa pedra.
Porque o único sentido oculto das coisas
É elas não terem sentido oculto nenhum,
É mais estranho que todas as estranhezas
E do que os sonhos de todos os poetas
E os pensamentos de todos os filósofos,
Que as coisas sejam realmente o que parecem ser
E não haja nada que compreender.
Sim, eis o que os meus sentidos aprenderam sozinhos: –
As coisas não têm significação; têm existência.
As coisas são o único sentido oculto das coisas.
[The mystery of things, where is it?

Where is it that it doesn’t appear
At least to show that it is a mystery?
What does the river know of this and what the tree?
And I, being no more than they, what do I know?
Whenever I look at things and think of what men think of them,
I laugh like a brook resounding freshly on a rock
Because the only hidden sense of things

Is that they have no hidden sense at all,
It is stranger than all strangenesses
And than the dreams of all the poets
And the thinking of all the philosophers,
That things are really what they seem to be
And that there’s nothing to understand.
Yes, this is what my senses learned all by themselves: –
Things have no meaning; they have existence.
Things are the only hidden sense of things.]
7 Obra poética, 153. See also poem V (140–2) and poem XLVII (160–1).
8 Obra poética, 174–6.
9 My thinking here is indebted to Lacoue-Labarthe’s reflections on Hölderlin’s
reinvention of the caesura in his ‘Anmerkungen an Oedipus.’ See Phillipe
Lacoue-Labarthe, ‘The Caesura of the Speculative,’ Glyph: Textual Studies 4
(1978): 57–85.
11 Fernando Pessoa (Bernardo Soares), Livro do desassossego, ed. Richard Zenith
(Lisbon: Assírio & Alvim, 1998), 113; The Book of Disquiet, ed. and trans. Rich-
ard Zenith (London: Allen Lane/Penguin, 2001), 80. For the definition of
Bernardo Soares as ‘the practising theoretician of Pessoa’s heteronymic
poeming,’ see my ‘The Art of Rumination: Pessoa’s Heteronyms Revisited,’
Journal of Romance Studies 3.3 (2003): 9–21.
12 Nancy, Les muses, 97; The Muses, 55.
13 Emily Dickinson, The Complete Poems, ed. Thomas H. Johnson (Boston: Little,
Brown and Company, 1960), 303 [# 615]. Stéphane Mallarmé, ‘Le tombeau
d’Edgar Poe,’ in Oeuvres complètes (Paris: Gallimard, 1945), 70. Livro do desas-
sossego, 124, 189.
14 Obra poética, 158–9, my translation. But see The Keeper of Sheep, 104–5. Nancy,
Les muses, 135–9; The Muses, 81–100.
15 Obra poética, 158. The Keeper of Sheep, 102–3.

16 próspero saiz, ‘red sand,’ Osiris 55 (2002): 17.
17 ‘Le poète se fait voyant par un long, immense et raisonné dérèglement de tous
les sens.’ Rimbaud’s letter to Paul Demeny, 15 May 1871, in Arthur Rimbaud,
Oeuvres complètes, ed. Antoine Adam (Paris: Gallimard, 1972), 249–54 [251].
Original emphasis.
18 That Caeiro often sounds like a sanitized version of Rimbaud’s brutal
debunkings of Christianity is a matter for another paper.
19 See poems XV, XXI, XXVI, and XLI of ‘O guardador de rebanhos,’ in Obra
poética, 148–52; The Keeper of Sheep, 47, 59, 69, 101. Wallace Stevens, ‘The
Poems of Our Climate,’ in The Collected Poems (New York: Alfred A. Knopf,
1967), 193–4. In several fragments of Livro do desassossego, Pessoa theorizes
imperfection as the essence of art. Indeed, Soares writes his book only
because he knows it is ‘imperfect.’ Livro do desassossego, 308.
20 Obra poética, 159–60; The Keeper of Sheep, 110–12.
21 Pessoa coined these words for ‘becoming other’ in Livro do desassossego, 156,
262.
22 See also poems XXX, XLVIII, and XLIX of ‘O guardador de rebanhos’ and
‘Se, depois de eu morrer, quiserem escrever a minha biografia’ in ‘Poemas
inconjuntos,’ in Obra poética, 154, 161–2, 171; The Keeper of Sheep, 76, 116–18.
23 Pessoa, Obra poética, 303–4. Friedrich Hölderlin, ‘Der Einzige, Erste Fassung’
(The Only One, First Version), in Selected Poems and Fragments, trans. Michael
Hamburger (London: Penguin, 1998), 218–23. See also ‘Second Version’ on
the following pages.
24 Curiously enough, Bernardo Soares, the author of Livro do desassossego, can-
not even remember the authority of inspiring priority (‘Nunca tive alguém a
quem pudesse chamar “Mestre”’ [I never had anyone I could call ‘Master’]).
Livro do desassossego, 406.
25 Obra poética, 180–3. A longer version was published in Pessoa por conhecer II:
Textos para um novo mapa, ed. Teresa Rita Lopes (Lisbon: Editorial Estampa,
1990), 411–29. For an English translation, see The Selected Prose of Fernando Pes-
soa, ed. and trans. Richard Zenith (New York: Grove, 2001), 38–50.
26 This old-fashioned concept – inspiration – is on its way to being reinvented.
See Timothy Clark, The Theory of Inspiration: Composition and Crisis of Subjectiv-
ity in Romantic and Post-Romantic Writing (Manchester: Manchester University
Press, 1997).
27 próspero saíz, ‘In Time, Keep the Muse Thin.’ A Portuguese version of this
essay, first presented at the IV International Meeting of Poets in Coimbra
(1998), will appear as ‘No tempo, a Musa quer-se magra,’ trans. Maria Irene
Ramalho, in The New Poetics, ed. Graça Capinha and Maria Irene Ramalho
(Coimbra, forthcoming).
28 Pessoa, Obra poética, 303. Hölderlin, Selected Poems and Fragments, 154–5.
29 See Charles Baudelaire, ‘La muse malade’ and ‘La muse venale,’ in Oeuvres
complètes (Paris: Gallimard, 1963), 14–15.
30 In a separate paper-in-progress, I deal with the question of the woman poet’s
muse (‘Remembering Forgetfulness: Women Poets and the Lyrical Tradi-
tion’). Forthcoming in Cadernos de Literatura Comparada 16/17 (University of
Oporto).
31 For a different approach to the relationship between illness and poetry, see
Maria Irene Ramalho de Sousa Santos, ‘A doença do poeta,’ Revista Crítica de
Ciências Sociais 23 (September 1987): 259–70. In Atlantic Poets, chapter 7, esp.
237ff., I suggest the articulation of sickness and interruption as poetic con-
cepts.
32 Eduardo Lourenço, Pessoa revisitado: Leitura estruturante do drama em gente
(Porto: Inova, 1973), 143, 243. I touch upon Pessoa’s (homo)sexual panic at
a later stage in this essay.
33 Pessoa por conhecer II, 413. See also António Feijó’s reading of Reis’s homoerot-
icism in ‘A flor que és, não a que dás, eu quero,’ in Século de ouro: Antologia
crítica da poesia portuguesa do século XX, ed. Osvaldo Manuel Silvestre and
Pedro Serra (Braga, Coimbra, and Lisbon: Angelus Novus/Cotovia, 2002),
467–73.
34 See poem number XV of ‘O guardador de rebanhos.’ The first four lines of
the poem read like this: ‘As quatro canções que seguem / Separam-se de
tudo o que eu penso, / Mentem a tudo o que eu sinto, / São do contrário do
que eu sou’ (The four songs that follow / Are separate from everything I
think. / They lie to everything I feel, / They are the opposite of what I
am ...’). Obra poética, 148; The Keeper of Sheep, 46. See also Pessoa por conhecer II,
413, 425, 426.
35 Livro do desassossego, 309.
36 By cogently articulating modernity and the machine, as well as sex and mis-
ogyny, Kathryn Bishop-Sanchez suggests that Campos’s ‘disturbance,’ as she
calls it after Bataille, is a feature of futurism. See, in this volume, ‘Kissing all
Whores: Displaced Women and the Poetics of Modernity in Álvaro de
Campos.’
37 ‘Opiário,’ Obra poética, 335–9. See Obras em prosa, ed. Cleonice Berardinelli
(Rio de Janeiro: Nova Aguilar, 1982), 93–9, for Pessoa’s letter to Casais
Monteiro (13 January 1935), where he explains (no doubt tongue-in-cheek)
the genesis of the poem.
39 Although I take into account Isabel Allegro de Magalhães’s excellent essay on
the figuration of the feminine in Fernando Pessoa, my reflection on the Pes-
soan muse has completely different theoretical concerns. See Isabel Allegro
de Magalhães. ‘O gesto, e não as mãos: Fernando Pessoa e a figuração do

feminino; Uma gramática da mulher evanescente,’ in Capelas imperfeitas (Lis-
bon: Livros Horizonte, 2002), 113–46.
41 Obra poética, 248–69. For specific quotes, see especially 252, 253, 254, 263,
267, and 269. For an English translation, see Poems of Fernando Pessoa, ed. and
trans. Edwin Honig and Susan M. Brown (New York: Ecco Press, 1986), 44–
71.
42 Judith Butler. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’ (New York:
Routledge, 1993).
43 I read ‘Ode marítima’ somewhat differently in chapter 5 of Atlantic Poets.
44 Obra poética, 240–5. See also Richard Zenith’s translation in Literary Imagina-
tion 2.2 (2000), 239–48.
45 From the conclusion of ‘In Time, Keep the Muse Thin.’ See also Paul Celan,
Der Meridian and Atemwende (1967), in Gesammelte Werke, 2:11–107. English
translation: Breathturn, trans. Pierre Joris (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press,
1995).
46 See Atlantic Poets, 181–2. In her ‘Kissing All Whores,’ Bishop-Sanchez further
elaborates on the (homo)erotic meanings of Campos’s passento.
47 Zenith kept only four of the five Portuguese repetitions of the verb. The last
one (‘pederasts that pass by’) he translates as ‘sauntering homosexuals.’ A
few other instances of ‘passings’ that couldn’t be honored in English: ‘Notí-
cias passez-à-la caisse, grandes crimes – / Duas colunas deles passando para a
segunda página!’ (translated as ‘Sensationalist news, crime stories – / Two
columns and continued on the next page!’); and a crucial one, almost at the
end: ‘O Momento dinâmico passagem de todas as bacantes,’ translated as
‘The dynamic Moment of all the bacchantes.’
48 Obra poética, 270–5 [270, 271].
49 Obra poética, 275–88.
50 See chapter 5 of Atlantic Poets.
Kissing all Whores: Displaced Women and
the Poetics of Modernity in Álvaro de
Campos
kat hry n bi sh o p - sa n c he z
It is widely acknowledged among scholars of Portuguese modernism that

Álvaro de Campos is the player in Fernando Pessoa’s ‘drama-in-people’
who most vividly expressed the essence of early twentieth-century moder-
nity. Imbued with the symptomatic explosion of modern industrialized
production concurrent to the nostalgia for a premodern era,1 Campos’s
work problematizes the pervasive normalization of subjectivity character-
istic of modern societies.2 As this study will explore, this disruption of
fixed ontological identities is prominently articulated through the
expression of the poet’s multiple sexualities that rejects a binary male/
female construct and entails the displacement of women in Campos’s
poetry.
Campos’s vast and eclectic corpus of writing has traditionally been
divided into three chronological phases: sombre, Pessoa-like sonnets;
these give way to an explosion of effusive odes of the Sensationist period;
these are then followed by the writing of less frenetic, predominately free-
verse compositions.3 The second phase of Campos’s work encompasses
poems that were written for the most part between 1914 and 1916 and
have been of greatest interest to literary critics. Many studies of Campos’s
poetry of his middle period attest to an ongoing preoccupation with char-
acterizing it in relation to the work of Walt Whitman and to Marinetti’s
Futurist aesthetics, and with defining Campos’s Sensationism in relation
to other authors of the modernist vanguard both in Portugal and
abroad.4 Given the intensely sexual nature of many of the sensations
expressed in the poems, the interpretation of Campos’s sexuality/ies has
also, predictably, been a recurrent topic of critical writing. Set against the
eclectic display of exhilarated industrialization and the juxtaposition of
speed, light, and noise at both syntactic and thematic levels, Campos’s
202 Kathryn Bishop-Sanchez
multiple, shifting, and even self-contradictory sexual identities are pre-

dominately vented during the heteronym’s second artistic phase. Edu-
ardo Lourenço’s now classic text Fernando Pessoa revisitado and, more
recently, the studies of Darlene Sadlier, Richard Zenith, and Irene
Ramalho Santos have each offered interpretations on the theme of Cam-
pos’s sexuality.5 In particular, Ramalho Santos’s discussion of Pessoa’s
‘intersexualities’ offers a framework for exploring how the production of
these complex articulations of desire is conditioned by the poet’s rela-
tionship to the concept of modernity. Making an ironic gesture towards
the cultural codes to which the poet’s sexual images constitute a peculiar
reaction, Ramalho Santos focuses on the sexualization of the Campos
odes contending that ‘[a]ll the abnormalities and perversions of turn-of-
the-century regulated and medicalized sexuality, not excluding the
heterosexual familialism of “decent” patriarchy, are conjured up in a
sentient body that is both male and female, yet a body not merely androg-
ynous, rather multisexual and intersexual.’6
To explore further this concept of the ‘multi/intersexual’ Campos, for
my discussion of the heteronym’s odes I draw predominantly on Georges
Bataille’s perspective on sexuality and eroticism. Of particular interest is
Bataille’s canonical study Erotism: Death and Sensuality, in which he con-
siders eroticism as the passage from discontinuity (or isolation) to conti-
nuity (or fusion with the Other). According to Bataille, eroticism can be
perceived as ‘an effort to reach continuity by breaking with individual
discontinuity,’ and this emotional, carnal, and metaphysical fusion can
only be reached when certain rational boundaries are crossed to find the
lost sense of being.7 Lourenço’s Fernando Pessoa revisitado (as Fernando
Arenas points out in this volume) emphasized the ontological-erotic
enigma in Pessoa’s work as linked to the ‘constituitive gap between the
self and the other.’8 This ‘painful absence’ of plenitude is at the root of
the ‘excruciating inability to love, most particularly, women,’ a promi-
nent Pessoan theme.9 In Campos, this suffering becomes a quest to sur-
pass all temporal limitations in order to obtain oneness, or ‘continuity,’
with the universe and translates into an eagerness to interact with an
accelerated industrialized city through the satisfaction of the poet’s libid-
inal drive. As my analysis will demonstrate, Bataille’s schematic opposi-
tion between ‘continuity’ and ‘discontinuity’ may be deployed as a
paradigm through which to examine how the heteronymous poet seeks
to overcome all ‘human’ limits in order to fuse with modernity and how
he explores alternatives to the heterosexual matrix. I will analyse how, on
the one hand, Campos’s poetry conjures up an eroticized urban forum
Displaced Women in Álvaro de Campos 203
representative of men’s phallic power and libidinal drives that concomi-

tantly precludes women from the public sphere of modernity and, on
the other, how the poet’s desire to capture ‘the modern’ is expressed in
terms of his own feminization that takes differing forms throughout his
poems. Indeed, Campos’s yearning for continuity reveals a negation of
women through his eroticized relation to machines in particular and to
modernity in general, which by the same token enables the poet to
replace this conspicuous feminine absence.
Of Sex and Machines
The Sensationist Campos’s urge to ‘sentir tudo de todas as maneiras’ (to

feel everything in every way), simultaneously involving all of his senses,
homes in on the sexualization of the desire to experience fulfilment and
complete oneness with the universe, attaining a peak of sensation that is
orgasmic in its intensity.10 As Ludwig Scheidl indicates, in Campos there
is an emphasis on ‘a linguagem dos instintos, em especial de origem sex-
ual, de carregado valor metafórico e simbólico: a sua origem está na val-
orização do corpo humano, em especial das percepções sensoriais’ (the
metaphorically and symbolically charged language of the instincts, par-
ticularly those of sexual nature: it originates in the privileging of the
body and, especially, of sensory perception).11 This sexualization corre-
sponds to the endpoint of a chain-reaction of feelings, a euphoric laissez-
aller culminating in a state of erotic emotion that derives from the poet’s
contact with modernity and, in particular, with the emerging technolog-
ical age.12 Perhaps in order to render his heteronymic work more accept-
able, Pessoa indicates that Campos ‘is non-moral, if not positively
immoral, for, of course, according to his theory it is natural that he
should love the stronger better than the weak sensations, and the strong
sensations are, at least, all selfish and occasionally the sensations of cru-
elty and lust.’13 As I will bear in mind throughout this study, the ‘cruelty
and lust’ dynamic is pervasive in Campos’s poetry and forms an intricate
leit motif through which the poet expresses his urge to embrace the
essence of modern life.
In Campos’s odes the machine is perceived, through a process of intel-
lectualization of sensations, as the emissive focus of strong emotions.14 It
is certainly not by chance that Pessoa chose the machine as the key met-
aphor of modernity to anchor his heteronym’s eroticized drive. As
Lourenço suggests, ‘[a] “Máquina” esconde, ou está ao serviço de uma
outra metaforização mais essencial, a da sua pulsão erótica, que através
das múltiplas “figuras” do imaginário mecânico encontra maneira de

exprimir na linguagem da “pura exterioridade” e “fantasmal irrespons-
abilidade” que lhe é própria, o seu delírio frio mas real’ (the ‘Machine’
hides, or is subservient to, another, more essential, set of metaphors,
those related to its erotic drive, which employs multiple ‘figures’ of the
mechanical imaginary in order to express, in its characteristic language
of ‘pure exteriority’ and ‘phantasmatic irresponsibility,’ its cold yet real
delirium).15 From the beginning of the modern period, the machine has
been intimately related to the long-standing history of two kinds of
desires: the desires from which the machines are born and those they in
turn provoke.16 Throughout the Campos odes, the pattern of associa-
tions between the machine as a locus of desire and a pretext for erotic
metaphors pervasively draws on the configuration of the machine’s com-
ponents, its movement, distribution, and turgidity, projecting explicit
sexual imagery replete with phallic symbols. In ‘Ode triunfal,’ for exam-
ple, the modern machine is blatantly present as a sign of promiscuity
where heat, excitement, circular movements, lubrication, and vibration
evoke sexual intercourse:
Fraternidade com todas as dinâmicas!

Promíscua fúria de ser parte-agente
Do rodar férreo e cosmopolita
Dos comboios estrénuos.
Da faina transportadora-de-cargas dos navios.
Do giro lúbrico e lento dos guindastes,
Do tumulto disciplinado das fábricas,
E do quase-silêncio ciciante e monótono das correias de transmissão!
[Brotherhood with all the dynamics!

Indiscriminate fury of being an active part
Of iron and cosmopolitan rumbling
Of strenuous trains,
Of the cargo-carrier toil of ships,
Of the lustful, slow rotation of cranes,
Of the disciplined tumult of factories,
And the whispering, monotonous near-silence of transmission belts!]17
As in ‘Ode triunfal,’ so too in ‘Passagem das horas’ (Time’s Passage)

the combination of rhythmic movements, speed, explosions, strength,
and fatigue are heavily laden with erotic connotations that lead towards
an orgasmic overflowing of feelings, ‘todos os ... sentidos em ebulição’

(all my senses fizzing).18 It is not surprising to note that several techno-
logical symbols are portrayed with insistence in the poem, such as the
recurringly evoked thrusting piston whose constant up and down move-
ment projects a highly sexualized image, ‘steel Romeos inside cast-iron
Juliets’:19
Por dentro da acção dos êmbolos, por fora do giro dos volantes.
Dentro dos êmbolos, tornado velocidade abstracta e louca,
Ajo a ferro e velocidade, vaivém, loucura, raiva contida,
Atado ao rasto de todos os volantes giro assombrosas horas,
E todo o universo range, estraleja e estropia-se em mim.
[Inside the driving pistons, outside the turning flywheels.

Inside the pistons I take the form of raging abstract speed,
Acting by iron and motion, come-and-go, madness, pent-up rage,
And on the rim of every flywheel I turn staggering hours,
And the entire universe creaks, sizzles, and booms in me.]20
In this passage, the piston is marked with sexual connotations that can
be interpreted as representative of phallic power. Moreover, through this
imagery the poet’s anxiety to fuse with modernity collapses the distance
between libidinal and mechanical forces. In ‘Ode triunfal,’ the reference
to mechanical friction and the speaker’s supplication for ‘trams, cable-
cars [and] undergrounds’ to rub/brush against him until he experi-
ences a spasm further equates technological and sexual movements:
Ó tramways, funiculares, metropolitanos,

Roçai-vos por mim até ao espasmo!
[O trams, cable cars, undergrounds,

Brush past me till I have a spasm!]21
Similar imagery is woven throughout ‘Ode marítima’ (Maritime Ode),

where the repeatedly evoked image of the ship’s spinning flywheel, as
commented on by several critics, represents a key sexualized metaphor
that accompanies the poet’s libidinal build-up as the poem progresses.22
The wheel reaches its highest speed towards the centre of the poem,
coinciding with an explosion of violence, speed, and eroticism depicted
by the episode of the pirates, to which we will return. In Bataillian terms,
one could envision this symbolic erotic climax as ‘the feeling of some-
thing bursting, of the violence accompanying an explosion.’23 In Cam-
pos’s ode, this eroticized convulsion later gives way to the slowing down
of the wheel, corresponding to the physical post-orgasmic recuperation,
as though the desire to capture the ‘modern’ could only be short-lived.24
It is interesting to emphasize that the machinery described by Campos
is not ‘useful’ from a productive point of view; it only projects sensa-
tions.25 Indeed, it is not incidental that in Campos’s odes the insistent
use of the word cio (rut, heat) literally expresses the poet’s sensory attrac-
tion to modernity in terms of the instinctive drive of an animal in heat,
yet there is no copulation, no ‘productivity.’ This fits with Bataille’s claim
that ‘the being yielding to that [sexual] urge is human no longer but,
like the beasts, a prey of blind forces in action, wallowing in blindness
and oblivion.’26 In Campos this sexual ‘disturbance,’ to borrow once
again from Bataille’s terminology, foregrounds a state of excitement that
remains unsatisfied during the rut provoked by the desired object, as
explicitly denoted by the expression ‘cio impotente’ (impotent libido).27
This is further encapsulated in the phrase ‘metálico cio’ (metallic libido)
that points towards inanimate objects of modern urbanity as the source
of the poet’s sexual impulse whose desires are not satisfied.28 Symboli-
cally, the speaker realizes that his projected desire is unrealistic, as
evoked in the following simile: ‘Roço-me por tudo isto como uma gata
com cio por um muro!’ (I rub up against all this like a cat in heat against
the wall!).29 Here the speaker is gendered female by the comparison that
likens the poet to a she-cat in heat who does not obtain what she desires
and must therefore make do with the substitute of a wall. This image pos-
tulates a period of sexual excitement that represents the poet’s frantic
metaphysical ‘rubbing up’ against all the elements of the modern city. In
line with a Lacanian argument, in these odes the evocation of the rutting
state suggests the phallic function of modernity as the signifier of the
lack. As Luce Irigaray develops this idea, the rut impulse underlines the
‘ceaselessly recurring hiatus between demand and satisfaction of desire,’
in which the desire is ‘specifically sexual satisfaction.’ 30
In Campos’s poetry, one of the most telling references to his anxiety to
embrace the universal and satiate his ‘sede nos centros sexuais’ (thirst in
sex organs)31 is made in ‘Passagem das horas,’ with the poet metaphori-
cally kissing each and every prostitute on the mouth: ‘Beijo na boca todas
as prostitutas’ (I kiss every whore on the lips).32 The presence of the pros-
titute on the street of the metropolis, as a quintessential part of the boom-
ing commodity culture, is emblematic of modernity and charged with
intense sexualized desires. She represents not a real, individualized

woman, but the illusion of femininity and a relationship destitute of
authentic emotions.33 It is my contention that the desire to ‘kiss all prosti-
tutes’ epitomizes Campos’s idealized relationship with a modern ‘Other’:
anonymous, interchangeable, transient, and fruitless. This reference to
the emblematic ‘collectivity of prostitution,’ along with the poet’s acqui-
escence to the prostitutes’ souteneurs, aptly encapsulates a dominant male
attraction to an impersonal, sexualized modernity that would encompass
Campos’s multi/inter-sexuality, a notion to which I shall return.
Along similar lines, it is pertinent to note that the machine, as a
replacement for human interaction, has traditionally been portrayed as
having a role similar to that of a woman, often as a mother, a child, or a
wife.34 Interestingly, moving beyond the view of the machine as a form of
substitution for female roles, theorists such as Maryvonne Perrot have indi-
cated that it represents a means of deliverance from the woman seen as a
repulsive pole.35 Perrot notes that this displacement is more than a sim-
ple eroticization of modernity; it is, in effect, a form of liberation. The
deliverance from women and their replacement by the machine was
emblematized by Marinetti’s notorious ‘scorn for woman’ expressed in
his 1909 ‘Founding and Manifesto of Futurism’ along with the desire for
a remasculinized society that would restore to humanity its natural heroic
instincts and virtues.36 This liberating process entailed the freeing of Italy
from past ‘captivity’ through the destruction of museums, libraries, acad-
emies, moralism, and feminism and the glorification of war, militarism,
and patriotism. Within the Futurist paradigm, Marinetti’s manifestoes
are supported insistently by machine metaphors that, as Larsen and
Sousa point out, replace the passé cult of the human body so prominent
in nineteenth-century lyric, particularly in Whitman. As such, in the Mari-
nettian metaphors the machine is a ‘female body,’ ‘an ideal female body,’
‘an aggressive male body,’ ‘male offspring,’ and ‘the loved possession of
the worker,’ to name a few of the metaphors most pertinent to our
study.37 In relation to Futurist ideology, which posits art as nothing but
‘violence, cruelty, and injustice’ and praises speed, aggressiveness, the
‘love of danger,’ and the ‘habit of energy,’ these examples reinforce the
masculinist chauvinist ideals that, regardless of whether the machine is
gendered masculine or feminine, articulate the displacement of
women.38 As Clara Orban states, in several of Marinetti’s tracts the notion
of an ideal universe is one devoid of women: ‘Women have become not
only ambiguous ... but superfluous. It is as though the futurists view
woman as neither a positive nor a negative entity. She has become trans-
parent.’39 In view of Campos’s multisexual nature and his own cult of the
machine, this aspect of Futurism – that is, the transgendered cultified
machine as a replacement for the cult of the body in general and the era-
sure of women in particular – needs to be kept in mind.40
Within these parameters, and although it is beyond the scope of my
study to offer a thorough analysis or assessment of the Marinettian con-
fluences in Campos’s poetry, it is nonetheless appropriate to briefly
define the essence of the Campos-Marinetti relationship in regards to
sexual investments. As Ramalho Santos contends, ‘futurist celebration of
masculine aggression, energy, and technological velocity, as well as futur-
ist indictment of sentimental (i.e., feminine) passivity ... irrupt in the
odes of Pessoa’s Campos as the sadomasochist chant of a multisexual sub-
ject that originates a true aesthetic simultaneity of historical agency and
victimization.’41 Indeed, in light of the Futurist hypermasculinization
and its corollary the machine (feminized or virile), we must register Cam-
pos’s emphatic appropriation of the cult of the machine and several of its
sexualized metaphors that translate the poet’s rejection of conventional
sexual differences. As such, in Campos’s odes the machine is portrayed as
either a female body or an aggressive male one, yet in both cases this
mechanization of sexuality portends an explicit ‘scorn for woman,’ as the
following examples will illustrate.
In ‘Ode triunfal,’ Campos’s mirage of modernity, with the explosion
of industries, constructions, and mass culture, supplants the sensualized,
heterosexual desire and possession of a ‘beautiful woman’ who is clearly
displaced within the poem. In her stead, the poet’s orgasmic fascination
with Futurist technology that typifies the age of modernity leaves his
mind perturbed and impassioned:
Ó fábricas, ó laboratórios, ó music-halls, ó Luna-Parks,

Ó couraçados, ó pontes, ó docas flutuantes –
Na minha mente turbulenta e encandescida
Possuo-vos como a uma mulher bela,
Completamente vos possuo como a uma mulher bela que não se ama,
Que se encontra casualmente e se acha interessantíssima.
[O factories, O laboratories, O music-halls, O Luna Parks,

O battleships, O bridges, O floating docks –
In my turbulent and glowing mind
I possess you like a beautiful woman,
Utterly I possess you like a beautiful unloved woman
Met by chance and found fascinating.]42
Yet, as I will point out shortly, the poet defies all consistency of sexual
norms in that, within a moral and aesthetic economy of phallic domina-
tion, he constantly exchanges the status of dominant, phallic, heterosex-
ual male for that of submissive female or ‘deviant’ male receiver of the
sexual attentions of a phallic agent.
In the above verses, the explicit comparison of the modernized city to
‘uma mulher bela’ underlines the beauty of ‘the modern’ and the poet’s
complete, phallic domination of it, as he develops an increasingly
mechanical function of desire. Ironically, in Campos’s urge to maximize
all sensations, it is immunity to true emotions that he seeks through
impersonal, anonymous contacts with inanimate objects of modernity,
an idea that is likewise pervasive throughout Campos’s theoretical writ-
ings.43 Furthermore, a particularly intriguing aspect of Campos’s poetry
is the alternating position that the poet takes vis-à-vis the machine at the
forefront of his vision of modernity. The dominating stance illustrated
above is uncannily reversed when the speaker wishes to surrender to
modernity, seeking to capture the new age and become an integrated
part of it. In the following metaphor, the poet, feminized, gives himself
to the machine passively, like a woman who is sexually dominated and
possessed:
Eu podia morrer triturado por um motor

Com o sentimento de deliciosa entrega duma mulher possuída.
[I could die cut to pieces by a motor

With the feeling of delicious surrender of a woman possessed.]44
In these verses the sexual sentiment is clearly and hauntingly com-

pared to the desire for death. Campos’s convulsive drive to reach a pleth-
ora of sensations is amplified by, in Bataille’s terms, a ‘dizzy confusion
which the subjective experience of death brings to mind’ making ‘physi-
cal pleasure more exquisite.’45 This fetishization of Campos’s own imag-
inary femininity points to the masculine attributes ascribed to the age of
the industrial revolution and cultural modernization in ‘a society in
which masculinity is identified with action, enterprise, and progress –
with the realms of business, industry, science, and law.’46 The expendi-
ture of the female principle serves the purpose of masculinizing the dis-
cursive economy but by the same token requires the poet’s feminization.
Thus Campos’s erotic imagery, coupled with sadomasochistic refer-
ences, conveys a complex projection of interaction and identity as the
poet expresses a desire for self-inflicted mechanical pain and death that
he likens to heterosexual copulation in which he is objectified as a

‘woman possessed.’47 The convergence of sadomasochism and the sex-
ual act portrays Campos’s propensity for liberation and recovery of the
self. Campos’s peculiar sadomasochism, which structures his imaginary
self, places desire at the centre of what Susan Suleiman calls a ‘project of
cultural subversion,’ that is, a redefinition of the normal self in terms of
‘perverse’ sexual impulses.48 Yet by the same token Campos’s ‘subver-
sion’ is all the more complex in that it rejects all constancy; this is
expressed by the manner in which his poetry seeks to provocatively
explode the received notions of sexual continuums. From this perspec-
tive, the libido, driven by modernity, becomes the most influential factor
in the heteronym’s quest for selfhood, a self that in Bataillian terms one
can envision as subverting conventional boundaries between normality
and perversion through Campos’s sadomasochistic and transsexual plea-
sures and desires.49
As illustrated by the above examples, in Campos’s ambivalently
desired interaction with ‘the modern’ he alternates between the posi-
tion of the subjugator and the subjugated. As such, ‘to possess’ (domi-
nant/masculine) and to ‘be possessed’ (passive/feminine) translate
Campos’s imaginative frenzy in which the sexual homologies project
clear manifestations of multisexualism: on the one hand, he aims to
phallically dominate modernity that he likens to a ‘beautiful woman’
and, on the other, he yearns to be passively possessed, in scenes where
pain and violence figure side by side with orgasmic pleasure in a rhap-
sody of speed and movement. An explicit example of Campos’s femi-
nized interaction with the modern is vividly portrayed as metaphorical
penetration, which expresses the climax of his frenetic quest to be ‘one’
with the universal:
Poder ao menos penetrar-me fisicamente de tudo isto,

Rasgar-me todo, abrir-me completamente, tornar-me passento
[To be able at least to penetrate myself physically with all that,

To rip myself fully open, to become absorbent]50
Of note in this excerpt is the use of the reflexive ‘penetrar-me,’ indi-

cating that although Campos is being penetrated, and despite his explicit
(feminine?) passivity, he remains a pseudoagent in this voluntary act that
he sees as the minimal desired threshold of interaction with the universe.
In a Freudian reading, this bizarre enactment of penis envy is sweepingly
referred to by the sequence of the verbs ‘penetrar-me,’ ‘rasgar-me,’ ‘abrir-

me,’ thus allowing for the ‘operation of equivalence among mouth, anus,
and vagina.’51
Furthermore, in Campos’s ‘interior erotic-poetic confession,’52 this
image of phallic penetration is expanded to the complete (porous?) sur-
face of his body since he desires to become ‘passento’ (absorbent) in
order to be as receptive as possible to the new experience of the moder-
nity.53 Ramalho Santos interprets ‘passento’ as ‘first as letting pass ... but
soon enough passing as well’ and then transfers the interpretation of
‘passento’ to the subject of the poem, as the poet’s proper name.54 What
is interesting in Ramalho Santos’s further development of this concept –
that the critic also extends to other poems by Campos, such as ‘Ode
marítima’ and ‘Passagem das horas’ – is the fact that the subject, by
becoming ‘passento,’ is left with a body of pure sensations: ‘Nothing stays
there, nothing is really absorbed, the body remains mere sensation ...’55
In our reading of this multisexual matrix, ‘tornar-me passento’ can thus
be perceived as a diversification and multiplication of the erogenous
zones, or in Irigarayan terms, ‘the hystericization of [the] entire body.’56
What is interesting in this maximization of sensual/sexual pleasures is
that it is clearly of a feminized nature, de-centred from the pleasure of the
phallic organ. Though Adorno might suggest that Campos’s metaphysi-
cal transformation is a negation of the ‘ego principle,’ not to be oneself
‘a piece of sexual utopia,’ in Pessoa’s/Campos’s world view this self-con-
scious revision interprets the poet’s impulse to experience greater grati-
fication by being fully penetrated by the age of modern technology.57 In
‘Ode marítima’ a similar imagery is expressed through the ecstatic sea-
bound delirium: ‘Penetram-me fisicamente o cais e a sua atmosfera’ (The
dock and its ambience penetrate me physically).58 Approaching this met-
aphor in terms of its sexual connotation, Sadlier suggests that for Campos
the sea voyage is ‘a kind of infinite wet dream, as he finds himself at the
edge of modernity, looking towards the sea, symbolic of Portugal’s situa-
tion in the modern age in relation to the rest of Europe.’59 Given the con-
text, this appropriate analogy can be taken a step further, since the
mental ‘sea voyage’ is a clear replacement for the real thing: for Campos,
it is only through his imaginary that he could ever achieve such a climax
that mimics reality. His search for Being takes on the form of mental mas-
turbation of sorts that can merely exist in the realm of his imagination,
given that there is no physical contact with anything external to his self.
Among Campos’s odes, one of the episodes that most aggressively depicts
this maximization of sensual/sexual desires is ‘a canção do Grande
Pirata’ (the Great Pirate song), a key passage of ‘Ode marítima’ to which
we will now turn.
Pirates, Masochism, and Transsexuality
The piratical episode in ‘Ode marítima’ merits particular attention as a

privileged poetic locus of intensified feelings that culminate in an explo-
sion of lasciviousness and cruelty. As Campos’s anxious drive to embrace
all sensations in the ‘there and then’ of his contemporary existence leaves
him with a feeling of dissatisfaction, he nostalgically turns to explore
areas of a distant national past that contrast with the personal recollec-
tions of his childhood home. As one critic has suggested, by projecting his
imaginative self Campos ‘recaptures the past of a specific maritime period
to which, via creative imagination, he now belongs ... [fusing] into a
simultaneous co-present.’60 This anachronistic fusion brings Campos to
investigate the very beginning of modern times, the primitive modernity
‘de uma era de tecnologia incipiente, de veleiros, barcos de madeira’ (of
the time of incipient technology, of sailing ships made of wood).61 In rela-
tion to Campos’s desire to capture the ‘modern,’ as referred to at the
beginning of this study, an essential aspect of our interpretation is the fact
that this leap in time establishes a distinct parallel between the erotic
emotions generated by contemporary technology and the Portuguese
maritime golden age. Just as Campos’s urge to be an intricate part of
modernity triggered multiple and intensified libidinal impulses, similar
sensations are expressed towards the wayward piratical empire. In this
regard, Lourenço offers the following summary of Campos’s ‘eternal
prison’ emphasizing the poet’s erotic passivity: ‘é a Tristeza mesma, a ime-
morial passividade atravessada por sobressaltos de alma e gestos que
tocaram para fugir a ela impérios e fins do mundo. Passividade agravada
depois que a onda passou e com ela o inatingível propósito de alcançar de
novo a Realidade, gémea da que sufoca e não lhe deixa entrever mais
saída que a da maceração, da auto-flagelação erótica mais desorbitada ...’
(it is Sadness itself, a timeless passivity traversed by agitations of the soul
and gestures reaching out, in order to escape it, towards empires and
ends of the world. Passivity made worse by the passing of the wave and,
with it, of the impossible proposition to return to Reality, a twin entity of
that which stifles him and allows no way out other than mortification, the
most outlandish erotic self-flagellation ...)62 Comparable to the images
depicted in Campos’s urban Sensationist poetry, this lyrical explosion (‘a
onda’) stemming from references, albeit ambiguous, to Portugal’s mari-
time glory combines intense notions of sex, death, and violence, as Cam-
pos’s desire for identity and belonging takes a euphoric turn to the sea
and the world of piracy. This mythical journey backwards is an alternative
means for Campos to break through temporal and rational barriers and
yield to the violence of excessive desire.63
The emblematic appearance of the pirates in ‘Ode marítima’ occurs,
significantly, towards the middle section of the poem, concurrent to the
above-mentioned twirling ‘volante’ reaching its fastest speed. Insomuch
as the pirates, often referred to as ‘hostis humani generis’ (the common
enemy of all mankind),64 represent an unrestrained culture in a wide-
open seascape, this (anti)society of libertine, economic relationships sat-
isfies Campos’s need to transcend the constraints of his ‘physical’ exist-
ence to a dimension no longer restrained by socially sanctioned values
and rules. Taking his urge straight to its climax, he desires to be part of
this transgressive homosocial world during the golden years of its
dominance, ‘pirata-resumo de toda a pirataria no seu auge’ (the grand-
sum-total-pirate of piracy at its height).65 In relation to piratical societies,
Hans Turley refers to the pirates’ ‘unnatural’ desires to live in an all-
male society: ‘The pirate was an individual defined by his desire; he had
an unnatural desire to live and carouse in a violent, transgressive
homosocial world and to perform piratical acts ... The pirate threatened
society because he embodied all kinds of economic criminal desires and
cultural transgressions and deviance.’66 Campos’s desire to become one
with these consumate outlaws of the sea, as expressed by his cry ‘Misturai-
me convosco, piratas!’ (Pirates, let me melt into you!), translates a means
to escape the confinement of his in-existence by fusing with a male
homosocial camaraderie that excludes women.67 In ‘Ode marítima’ this
homosociety gives rise to a power structure that points to ‘interdepen-
dence and solidarity among men that enables them to dominate
women.’68 In the overall context of Campos’s odes, the scene of piratical
bonding casts an interesting sidelight on the poet’s preclusion of women
from the immediate frame of his eroticized sensations. Though refer-
ences to heterosexual libidinal drive run throughout the poem and serve
as a point of comparison, the presence of women is restricted to the dis-
tant shore or suppressed in the poet’s memories, two aspects to which we
shall return. What further complicates the interpretation of Campos’s
‘piratical impulses’ is the silence that has traditionally existed in relation
to the sexuality of pirates. Given pirates’ often overtly hypermasculine
depiction, this ‘silence’ is a source of persistent ambiguity.69 Turley makes
the link from cultural to sexual deviance, claiming that the ‘dead silence
in the space of the pirate’s homosocial private life suggests that the trans-
gressive homosocial world of the pirate requires the presence of homo-
eroticism.’70 In an alternative, unconventional world, it is fitting that

markers of sexual identity should enter into a complex economy of gen-
dered ambiguity. In Campos’s case, rather than an explicit homoerotic
instance, the evocation of the pirates’ anger and cruelty forefronts the
revivified lust of the poet’s feminine past ‘cujo cio sobrevive’ (where
nothing is left but the sexual itch).71 As he reaches out to the homosoci-
ety of the pirates, Campos’s own gender ambiguity brings forth the femi-
nized nature of his present desire as the female body’s blood continues to
course through his veins. In comparison to Turley’s ‘sexual deviance’ par-
adigm that is perceived as homoerotic, Campos’s ode underlines several
forms of deviance, such as heterosexual sadism and the pirates’ blood-
thirstiness, that conflate sexual desires and bloodshed. This is projected,
for example, in the verse ‘Sobre os cadáveres nus das vítimas que fazeis no
mar’ (On top of the naked corpses of your victims at sea), which, harking
back to the fury of the woman awaiting the pirates in the port, portends
the image of women walking the plank.72 Similarly, the line ‘o corpo das
mulheres que violais!’ (the body of all women you violate!) articulates an
explicit reference to the rape of women.73
The desire to join forces with the pirates in carnage, pillage, and plun-
dering also leads to the expression of extremely polarized feelings such
as love and hate, as Campos cries out to the pirates: ‘Piratas, amai-me e
odiai-me’ (Love me and hate me, pirates!).74 As an extension of these
powerful feelings, references to pain inflicted sadomasochistically are
present throughout the pirate episode. But of particular interest is the
fact that Campos desires to be victimized by taking on a female persona,
and what is more, yearns to represent hyperbolically ‘a vítima-síntese,
mas de carne e osso, de todos os piratas do mundo’ (the grand-sum-total-
victim, but in flesh and bone, of all the pirates in the world).75 The
female gendering of this process of auto-victimization portends the
speaker’s passiveness; specifically, Campos expresses the desire to be the
sum total of all the victimized women who were raped, wounded, killed,
and dismembered by the pirates:
Ser o meu corpo passivo a mulher-todas-as mulheres

Que foram violadas, mortas, feridas, rasgadas pelos piratas!
Ser no meu ser subjugado a fêmea que tem de ser deles
E sentir tudo isso – todas estas coisas duma só vez – pela espinha!
[To let my passive body be the grand-sum-total-woman of all women

To be, in my bondage, the female having to serve them all!

And feel it all – feel all these things at once – through to the backbone!]76
The emphasis is once again on the plethoric maximizing of all the sen-
sations, but these particular sensations are clearly masochistically
embraced. The reference to being the ‘fêmea’ destined for the pirates’
domination underlines the vulnerability and subjugation that the poet
incarnates in order to become part of their society by yielding to animal-
istic instincts. In these verses the objectified subject is clearly gendered as
female and the related rhetoric of violence conflates the realms of ‘the
sexual’ and ‘the criminal.’ This is further underlined by the depiction of
the pirates’ hypermasculinized traits, projected, as was commonly the
case in accounts of their exploits, as maritime heroes, ‘peludos e rudes
heróis da aventura e do crime’ (my heroes, hairy, coarse, adventurous
and criminal).77 Evidently, in order to become the victim of sexual and
violent offences that coalesce in the references to rape, Campos
becomes objectified ‘as a woman.’78
The pirates’ bestiality is also portrayed in conjunction with their being
named as the poet’s metaphysical spouses, ‘marítimas feras, maridos da
minha imaginação’ (seafaring beasts, you husbands of my imagina-
tion).79 This claim brings to mind Baudelaire’s now classic plea to
‘become one flesh with the crowd’ that in Campos is transposed to the
haunting image of metaphysically espousing a horde of pirates.80 This
transgendering of the poet expands to his desire to be the distant woman
who awaits the arrival of the pirates in the ports, ‘Aquela que vos esper-
asse nos portos’ (One-and-Only lover awaiting you in every port).81 Once
again, the poet’s quest to be and feel the universe gives way to an explicit
transsexual desire as he yearns to be the receiver of the pirates both men-
tally and physically. In the merging of his imaginary self with the image of
the woman who awaits the pirates on the shore, it is his femininity that
the poet hopes will accompany the pirates from afar, on their ‘orgia
oceânica.’ The image of the ocean orgy evokes, in Bataillian terms, ‘sex-
ual excitement ... through an uncontrolled urge,’ individuals losing
themselves ‘at the climax, but in mingled confusion.’82 The orgy is viewed
by this critic as the most sacred form of eroticism that most plainly repre-
sents ‘the continuity of beings beyond solitude.’83 This overcoming of all
barriers, the extreme and most radical desire for fusion (or continuity)
with an Other, is expressed as the final aim in Campos’s description; yet,
the illusion, just as the ecstasy of the flywheel, is short-lived and, ulti-
mately, the orgy will be, as Bataille posits, ‘necessarily disappointing.’84
In Campos’s yearning to embrace this paradoxical combination of

orgiastic anguish and pleasure – this jouissance, to borrow Lacan’s term –
the image of the witch-spirited woman is particularly intriguing in that it
points to the sacrilegious nature of the pirates’ erotic venture. Bataille
develops the link between eroticism and the profane exemplified by
witches’ sabbaths as a model of taboo and transgression. According to
Bataille, such an unleashing of passions marks a ritual based on existing
freely within Evil, a freedom that was ‘not only the condemnation but
also the reward of the guilty.’85 In Campos it is not fortuitous that the
emblem of sacrilege is waiting on the shore, at the limits of society. She
represents the converging of eroticism, crime, and the profane as she
whistles a red-yellow Sabbath of a Black Mass during their orgasms:
Porque ela teria acompanhado vosso crime, e na orgia oceânica

Seu espírito de bruxa dançaria invisível em volta dos gestos
Dos vossos corpos, dos vossos cutelos, das vossas mãos entranguladoras!
[Because she would be your accomplice in crime, and in your oceanic orgies
Her witch’s spirit dancing invisibly amid the movements
Of your bodies, amid your cutlasses and your stranglers’ hands!]86
The physical contact fuses sensuality and masochistic pain, to be dom-

inated in Campos’s striving to belong to the unconventional empire of
the pirates: ‘ó prazer, ó beijada dor!’ (oh my delight, oh kiss of pain!).87
As succinctly stated in the following excerpt, through the imaginary
interaction with the piratical society Campos gives himself to the pirates,
to be dominated as the object of their violent frenzy, to combine, once
more, ‘cruelty and lust’:
Beijai com cutelos de bordo e açoites e raiva

O meu alegre terror carnal de vos pertencer.
A minha ânsia masoquista em me dar à vossa fúria,
Em ser objecto inerte e sentiente da vossa omnívora crueldade,
Dominadores, senhores, imperadores, corcéis!
[Kiss with cutlass, whips and frenzy

My joyous fleshly terror of belonging to you,
My masochistic itch to give in to your fury,
To be the sentient, inert object of your omnivorous cruelty –
Dominators, masters, emperors, corsairs!]88
The ecstatic overflow of orgasmic sensations purportedly commanded

by the cult of the machine, eroticized urban forums, fetishized moder-
nity, and the piratical maritime voyage are not enough for Campos to
escape his non-existence. Similar to Faust’s celebration of Walpurgis-
nacht, the orgiastic witches’ sabbath, Campos will return from his ‘night
flights’ unsatisfied, the spontaneous rush of multisexual desires insuffi-
cient to complete his fusion with ‘universal life.’ For Pessoa’s entrapped
heteronym, all forms of sexualized yearning for union with the outside
world of modernity fail. Indeed, as Campos, certainly more than any
other of Pessoa’s heteronyms, struggles to come to grips with his lack of
existence by embracing modernity, the symbolic slowing-down of the
wheel replaces the sexual euphoric ecstasy. Both the urban and sea-
borne contexts leave Campos to merely contemplate, with objectivity,
maritime modernity and the emblematic presence of the machine:
‘Maravilhosa vida marítima moderna, / toda limpeza, máquinas e
saúde!’ (Wonderful modern maritime life, / Everything so sanitary,
mechanized, healthy!).89 However, though it is clear that Campos’s
poetic view and imaginary grasp of the modern through alternating
eroticized sensations corroborate women’s pervasive invisibility in the lit-
erature of modernity, his work ultimately needs to be re-placed within
the context of heteronymy and the inherent strategics of Pessoa’s poetic
masquerade. Indeed, the erasure of women that is blatantly expressed
through Campos’s odes is diametrically opposed, for example, to
Ricardo Reis’s romanticized idealization of women as love objects. As a
heteronymic stance, therefore, multifaceted intercourse with modernity,
eroticized violence, and ambivalent sexual categories that displace
women in Campos’s poetry can be perceived as one aspect of Pessoa’s
anxiety of self-definition that explores and incorporates a series of onto-
logical and experimental alternatives to promote the realization of new
forms of subjectivity within his poetics of modernity.
NOTES
1 Marshall Berman refers to this modern paradox as the ‘inner dichotomy’ of

modernity. See Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air (New York:
Penguin, 1982), 17. This paradoxical stance is pervasive throughout Cam-
pos’s poetry, emblematized, as I will show, by his simultaneous yearning for
oneness with modernity and nostalgia for the golden age of Portuguese dis-
coveries.
2 Here we are being guided by Michel Foucault’s theorization of the systematic

subjection and reduction of individual subjects to a series of reiterable
norms, models, and subject positions in modern societies. Foucault refers to
this concept as the ‘government of individualisation,’ against which he theo-
rizes the practice of several means of resistance. See Michel Foucault, ‘After-
word: The Subject of Power’ in Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and
Hermeneutics, 2nd ed, ed. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow (Chicago: Uni-
versity of Chicago Press, 1983), 208–23. Fernando Arenas also draws atten-
tion to this theoretical issue as he engages Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of
freed subjectivities with Campos’s work. See Arenas, ‘Fernando Pessoa: The
Homoerotic Drama’ in this volume.
3 For a brief discussion of Campos’s poetic evolution, see Darlene Sadlier, An
Introduction to Fernando Pessoa (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1998),
106–14.
4 See, for example, Ludwig Scheidl, ‘A componente whitmaniana nas odes de
Álvaro de Campos,’ Biblos 55 (1979): 1–35; and Neil Larsen and Ronald W.
Sousa, ‘From Whitman (to Marinetti) to Álvaro de Campos: A Case Study in
Materialist Approaches to Literary Influence,’ Ideologies and Literature: Journal
of Hispanic and Lusophone Discourse Analysis 4.17 (1983): 94–115.
5 Eduardo Lourenço, Fernando Pessoa Revisitado (Porto: Editorial Inova, 1973),
93–132; Sadlier, An Introduction, 106–114; Richard Zenith, ‘Fernando Pessoa’s
Gay Heteronym?’ in Lusosex, ed. Susan C. Quinlan and Fernando Arenas
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 39–46; Irene Ramalho
Santos, ‘Intersexualities and the Modernist Ode: The Sea Poems of Pessoa
and Crane,’ Atlantic Poets (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England,
2003), 154–99.
7 Georges Bataille, Erotism: Death and Sensuality, trans. Mary Dalwood (San Fran-
cisco: City Lights Books, 1986), 44, 118–19. Although Bataille ties this pursuit
for continuity to Christianity, what is pertinent to my study is the concept of
transgression of boundaries as a way of access to overcoming the existential
discontinuity of beings.
8 Arenas, ‘Fernando Pessoa: The Homoerotic Drama,’ 106.
9 Ibid.
10 Fernando Pessoa, Poesias de Álvaro de Campos (Lisbon: Ática, n.d.), 222;
Fernando Pessoa & Co. Selected Poems, ed. and trans. Richard Zenith (New York:
Grove Press, 1998), 146.
11 Scheidl, ‘A componente whitmaniana,’ 33. All translations not otherwise
attributed are the editors’.
12 The exact nature of ‘Portugal’s technological age’ during the first decades of
the twentieth century is beyond the scope of this study and has been dis-
cussed in Larsen and Sousa, ‘From Whitman,’ 105–8.
13 Fernando Pessoa, Páginas íntimas e de auto-interpretação (Lisbon: Ática, 1966),
342. In English in the original. Emphasis added.
14 As D’Onofrio and Árabe state, it is through the intellectualization of these
sensations that the machine, taken metaphorically, becomes the emissive
focus of strong emotions, ‘o foco emissor de fortes emoções.’ Salvatore
D’Onofrio and Maria Amélia A. Árabe, ‘O sensacionalismo na visão poética
de Álvaro de Campos,’ Revista Letras (São Paulo) 20 (1980): 59–73.
15 Lourenço, Fernando Pessoa revisitado, 97.
16 I are drawing here from Jean Brun who states: ‘Derrière leur naissance se
cachent les désirs dont elles sont nées et ceux qu’elles feront naître à leur
tour ... elles sont les réalisations concrètes d’une stratégie de l’existence qui
tente de donner corps à ses désirs afin d’ouvrir le champ même de son
essence.’ Jean Brun. ‘Biographie de la machine,’ Les Études philosophiques 1
(1985): 4.
17 Poesias de Álvaro de Campos, 145–6; trans. Keith Bosley, A Centenary Pessoa, ed.
Eugénio Lisboa with L.C. Taylor (Manchester: Carcanet, 1995), 84–5. Trans-
lation slightly modified.
18 Poesias de Álvaro de Campos, 234; Fernando Pessoa & Co., 151.
19 I am borrowing this appropriate metaphor from Linda Klieger Stillman, who
refers to popular icons of modernity that serve as loci for male fantasies. Still-
man, ‘Machinations of Celibacy and Desire,’ L’Esprit créateur 24 (winter 1984):
21. Interestingly, in Marinetti’s novel, 8 Souls within a Bomb: An Explosive Novel
(1919), the piston is one of the phallic formulas marked with a string of pow-
erful associations: going – coming – boiler – industry – vapour, etc.
21 Poesias de Álvaro de Campos, 151; Centenary Pessoa, 87.
22 See Sadlier, An Introduction, 107, and Ramalho Santos, Atlantic Poets, 187–9.
23 Bataille, Erotism, 115.
24 In relation to Campos’s overall evolution, Sadlier takes this analogy a step fur-
ther: ‘After 1916, Campos’s poetry shifts away from the frenetic modernist
experimentation of his odes and assumes a more subdued tone, as if the fly-
wheel of his dreams were no longer spinning ... The sexual euphoria also
recedes, replaced by a kind of somber detumescence, although the poet is far
from serene’ (An Introduction, 112). This poetic/libidinal exhaustion is the
result of the Sensationist Campos’s failure to sustain his climactic unity with
modernity.
25 Larsen and Sousa refer to the Futurist machine as not having any value in and
of itself: it is ‘equipped to produce a thrill (fast cars, airplanes, trains); at
worst, to engage in the opposite of production: destruction’ (‘From Whit-

man,’ 101).
28 Poesias de Álvaro de Campos, 239. Translation author’s own.
29 Poesias de Álvaro de Campos, 181; Poems of Fernando Pessoa, ed. and trans. Edwin
Honig and Susan M. Brown (New York: Ecco Press, 1986), 56.
30 Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter (Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press, 1985), 61. Here Irigaray is explicitly discussing
Lacan’s ‘The Signification of the Phallus,’ in his Écrits: A Selection, trans. Alan
Sheridan (New York: W.W. Norton, 1977), 281–91.
31 Poesias de Álvaro de Campos, 224; Fernando Pessoa & Co., 147. Translation mod-
ified.
33 Among an abundance of critical literature on the prostitute as emblematic of
modernity, I refer the reader especially to Charles Bernheimer’s Figures of Ill
Repute: Representing Prostitution in Nineteenth-Century France (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1989).
34 Jean Brun, ‘Biographie de la machine,’ 5–6. There is an abundance of such
literary examples where the machine replaces the woman. See Kathryn
Hume, ‘Making Love with the System: Sexualizing Technology-with-a-Capital-
T,’ New York Review of Science Fiction 22 (1990): 1–5.
35 See Maryvonne Perrot, ‘Le Futurisme et la machine,’ Les études philosophiques
1 (1985): 27.
36 See Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, ‘Founding and Manifesto of Futurism,’ in
Marinetti: Selected Writings (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1972), 42.
37 For a more in-depth analysis of Marinettian metaphors of the machine, see
Larsen and Sousa, ‘From Whitman,’ 100.
38 Marinetti, ‘Founding and Manifesto of Futurism,’ 42–3.
39 Clara Orban, ‘Women, Futurism, and Fascism,’ in Mothers of Invention: Women,
Italian Fascism, and Culture, ed. Robin Pickering-Iazzi (Minneapolis: Univer-
sity of Minnesota Press, 1995), 56.
40 This idea is pervasive throughout Marinetti’s texts but particularily developed
in his 1915 piece ‘Uomo moltiplicato e il regno della macchina’ (Multiplied
Man and the Reign of the Machine).
41 Ramalho Santos, Atlantic Poets, 177. Emphasis in the original.
43 From this point of view, it is appropriate to recall Campos’s assessment of
Alberto Caeiro in theoretical texts such as ‘Notas para a recordação do meu
Mestre Caeiro’ where he denounces his ‘master’ for having toyed with
romantic ideals that exerted a detrimental effect on his poetry and his under-
standing of the universe. Furthermore, Campos’s expression of aversion to
‘true emotions’ and romantic involvement with women is comparable to
Marinetti’s plight for ‘the young modern male’ to infinitely distract ‘his sex
with swift, casual contacts with women.’ Marinetti, ‘Founding and Manifesto
of Futurism,’ 92.
45 Bataille, Erotism, 104–5.
46 Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 45. In Portuguese literature,
discourses that correlate ‘male’ with the ‘modern’ and ‘female’ with ‘tradi-
tion’ are present in the works of authors of the late nineteenth century such
as Eça de Queirós’s novel A cidade e as serras (1900) or, in poetry, ‘Nós’ by
Cesário Verde (1884).
47 For a discussion of the death drive and its auto-destructive forces in relation to
Freud in ‘Ode marítima,’ see Ana Araújo. ‘A reabilitação do meio exluído em
Ode Marítima de Álvaro de Campos,’ Romance Languages Annual 3 (1991): 344.
48 Susan Rubin Suleiman, Subversive Intent: Gender, Politics and the Avant Garde
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 74–7.
49 Bataille, Erotism, 94–100.
51 Irigaray, ‘Signification of the Phallus,’ 56.
52 D’Onófrio and Árabe, ‘O sensacionalismo,’ 69. My translation.
53 Campos’s feminization appears in other passages as well. In ‘Passagem das
horas,’ the poet’s self appears in comparison to male athletes, representative
of manly bodies, and in relation to them he becomes feminized: ‘Os braços
de todos os atletas apertaram-me subitamente feminino, / E eu só de pensar
nisso desmaiei entre músculos supostos’ (Poesias de Álvaro de Campos, 224).
56 Irigaray, ‘Signification of the Phallus,’ 28.
57 Theodor Adorno, ‘Sexualtabus und Rechte heute,’ in Eingriffe (Frankfurt am
Main: Suhrkamp, 1963), 104; quoted in Huyssen, After the Great Divide, 27.
58 Poesias de Álvaro de Campos, 171; Poems of Fernando Pessoa, 50.
59 Sadlier, An Introduction, 107.
60 Francisco Cota Fagundes, ‘The Search for the Self: Álvaro de Campos’s “Ode
Marítima,”’ in The Man who Never Was: Essays on Fernando Pessoa (Providence,
RI: Gávea-Brown, 1982), 112–13.
61 Stella Costa de Mattos, ‘A “Ode Marítima” de Álvaro de Campos – uma Leit-
ura,’ Nova Renascença 4.14 (1984): 149.
62 Lourenço, Fernando Pessoa revisitado, 130.

63 Here we are once again drawing from Bataille when he refers to man’s quest
to break through barriers in order to attain continuity, either through terror
or through death. Erotism, 140–2.
64 It appears that this expression was first used in reference to pirates by Sir
Edward Coke, the British jurist and politician (1552–1634), in Part Three of
his Institutes of the Laws of England, article 113.
66 Hans Turley, Rum, Sodomy, and the Lash: Piracy, Sexuality, and Masculine Identity
(New York: New York University Press, 1999), 2.
67 Poesias de Álvaro de Campos, 182; Poems of Fernando Pessoa, 56. Though in the
history of piracy there are a few cases of women pirates roaming the seas, doc-
umented in studies such as Ulrike Klausman et al., Women Pirates and the Poli-
tics of the Jolly Roger (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1997), here it seems obvious
that for Campos the piratical society is one of men.
68 Heidi Hartmann, ‘The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism:
Towards a More Progressive Union,’ in Women and Revolution: A Discussion of
the Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism, ed. Lydia Sargent (Boston:
South End Press, 1981), 14; quoted in Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men:
English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1985), 25.
69 Turley, Rum, Sodomy, and the Lash, 2.
70 Turley, Rum, Sodomy, and the Lash, 85.
78 Monique Plaza develops this idea as follows: ‘rape is sexual essentially
because it rests on the very social difference between the sexes ... It is social
sexing which is latent in rape. If men rape women, it is precisely because they
are women in a social sense.’ And as de Lauretis continues, ‘when a male is
raped, he too is raped “as a woman.”’ Monique Plaza, ‘Our Costs and Their
Benefits,’ trans. Wendy Harrison, m/f 4 (1980): 31; quoted in Teresa de Lau-
retis, Technologies of Gender (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 37.
80 Baudelaire’s phrase refers specifically to the flâneur, but the analogy certainly
exists, and can even be expanded further, between this ‘lover of universal life’
and Campos’s poetic subject. Both are ‘“I”(s) with an insatiable appetite for
the “non-I.”’ See Charles Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life and other
Essays, trans. Jonathan Mayne (Greenwich, CT: Phaidon, 1964), 9.
84 Bataille, Erotism, 129
Together at Last: Reading the Love Letters of
Ophelia Queiroz and Fernando Pessoa
anna m. klobucka
In the tradition of pessoano criticism, the self-sustaining autobiographic

fiction of Fernando Pessoa’s heteronymous drama em gente has been
explored and interpreted, for the most part, as separate and distinct
from the historical daily matter of its author’s personal identities as a
member of a large extended family, a free-lance professional and occa-
sional aspiring entrepreneur, and a politically aware citizen. While Pes-
soa himself sporadically transgressed the implicit boundary demarcating
his extratextual existence from his manifold lives in literature (with
Álvaro de Campos as the usual designated trespasser), he also empha-
sized it on numerous occasions in his writings, most prominently in his
quasi-testamentary letters to his original critics and future editors, João
Gaspar Simões and Adolfo Casais Monteiro. Those injunctions were
reinforced later by the general opprobrium placed on biographic criti-
cism by the Portuguese academic and intellectual establishment at the
time when Pessoa’s writings attracted the greatest numbers of critical
readers (in the 1970s and 1980s). Nevertheless, one undeniably factual
episode of the poet’s life – his romance with Ophelia Queiroz – and one
set of ostensibly non-literary texts associated with it – the correspon-
dence that accompanied the affair – have consistently retained the status
of a legitimate, indeed privileged, object of interpretation for literary
critics. This exceptional status can, to some extent, be related to the role
the episode has played in the largely subterranean debates on the issue
of Pessoa’s sexuality. If, as Darlene Sadlier has predicted, an imminent
construction of a ‘convincing “queer” Pessoa’ is looming on the herme-
neutic horizon, its contrasting critical fiction – ‘the “straight” Pessoa of
the love letters to Ophélia’ – has long been in place, deployable against
any assertions of active erotic deviation that might reach beyond the
Love Letters of Ophelia Queiroz and Fernando Pessoa 225
safely circumscribed territory of the heteronym Campos’s pansexual

exuberance.1 Regardless, however, of the historical context of Pessoa’s
Cartas de amor and their biographically charged implications, critical
readings of the correspondence have tended to rely on the same disem-
bodied and self-referential paradigms of textuality that have generally
informed discussions of the heteronymous maze of Pessoa’s literary
texts. One ongoing effect of this orientation has been the gradual efface-
ment from the scene of textual interpretation of the poet’s partner in his
conflicted amorous adventure, an erasure so subtle and yet so effective
that even the recent reinscription of Ophelia’s voice and body into the
story of the romance – through the long-delayed publication of her let-
ters to the poet – has not produced any discernible critical reaction. Yet,
bringing ‘together at last’ the two sets of epistolary texts does not
amount merely to a primary (if necessary) gesture of feminist vindica-
tion; it modifies decisively the conditions of reading Pessoa’s Cartas de
amor and also, by a problematic but inescapable extension, of interpret-
ing other discourses of desire and relationship that flow throughout his
textual legacy.
The love letters of Fernando Pessoa to Ophelia Queiroz were pub-
lished in 1978 in a volume edited by Maria da Graça Queiroz – Ophelia’s
great-niece, who contributed an account of the relationship based on an
interview with her aunt – and by the critic and writer David Mourão-Fer-
reira who supplied an introductory essay.2 The edition documented
what appears to have been Pessoa’s only, extremely hesitant, experimen-
tation with the routine of Portuguese middle-class mating rituals circa
1920 and beyond, offering a rare intimate glimpse into the deceptive
mirror chamber of the poet’s jealously guarded privacy. Not until almost
twenty years later did it become possible to read Ophelia’s letters as well
(to call them ‘responses’ would be, as I hope to show, a fallacy).3 Their
author outlived her famous correspondent by many decades, dying in
1991 at the age of ninety; a year later, the death of Pessoa’s sister Henri-
queta Madalena – who had remained adamantly opposed to the publica-
tion of the entire correspondence – removed the last obstacle to the
revelation of Ophelia’s contribution to the epistolary exchange.4 A fair
selection was made available by Manuela Nogueira, Henriqueta’s daugh-
ter, approved (contingent on a number of requested suppressions and
deletions) by the Queiroz family and published in 1996 by Assírio &
Alvim. In a marked contrast – the first of many – to the relatively slim col-
lection of Pessoa’s fifty letters, Cartas de amor de Ofélia a Fernando Pessoa is
a hefty volume, even though it contains fewer than half of the available
226 Anna M. Klobucka
total of 230 letters, forty-six postcards, two telegrams, and various short
notes written by Ophelia over the period of roughly two and a half years
that her intermittent relationship with the poet lasted.5
Another obvious contrast emerging from even the most superficial of
comparative perusals of the two volumes is that while many of Pessoa’s
letters are brief and crisply practical, Ophelia wrote invariably in a tor-
rential, stream-of-consciousness style, with no apparent editing or even
forethought. The result, chatty and repetitive, cannot help but make for
somewhat tedious reading, and is surely one reason why the publication
of her letters produced no interpretive fervour comparable to the out-
pouring of commentary on Pessoa’s Cartas de amor. Nevertheless, it is sur-
prising to note the all but complete lack of critical engagement with the
Pessoa-Ophelia correspondence made whole: after the initial flurry of
comments in the Portuguese press following publication of the 1996 vol-
ume, I am aware of no single study exploring their epistolary interaction.
The newly expanded store of evidence, inevitably and quite dramatically
rearranged by the introduction of Ophelia’s letters, has remained in a
virtual vacuum of interpretation.
It is possible to conjecture another explanation for the apparent lack
of interest in revisiting this unique episode of Pessoa’s life and work. The
unilateral testimony of Pessoa’s letters, which until 1996 was the only
material available to the poet’s critics and biographers, has been subject
to a very different kind of hermeneutics than the availability of a full,
bilateral correspondence might have encouraged.6 Thus, existing inter-
pretations of the poet’s letters to Ophelia, although to some extent diver-
gent in their respective emphases, have converged in their main
underlying premise, articulated originally by the letters’ editor: as noted
by Mourão-Ferreira, had Pessoa’s letters been found in his archive of
manuscripts, ‘seria bem verosímil que se vissem atribuídas, se não propri-
amente a qualquer uma das suas criações heteronímicas ou semi-heter-
onímicas ... pelo menos a um ortónimo propósito de mistificação’ (they
would have probably been attributed, if not exactly to any one of his het-
eronyms or semi-heteronyms ... at least to an orthonymous project of fab-
rication).7 Such reterritorialization of the poet’s real-life letters to
Ophelia as a fitting piece of the heteronymous textual puzzle did not
remain, however, in the realm of unrealized possibility; Mourão-Ferreira
himself initiated the interpretive strain of contextualizing the letters with
reference to Pessoa’s work, linking his amorous epistolary discourse to a
number of heteronymous and orthonymous texts and noting its ‘inex-
haustible’ hermeneutic potential.8 Soon afterwards, José Augusto Seabra
insisted forcefully on reading the letters as ‘poetic texts’ engaged in

an ‘intertextual give-and-take with the heteronymous discourse’ and
mapped the course that their future interpretation was to follow:
No que concerne Campos, ou qualquer outro heterónimo, e a relação

entre a experiência amorosa de Pessoa, as suas cartas e os seus poemas, há
quanto a nós que explorar, sobretudo, em termos de migração intertextual,
os elementos paragramaticamente dispersos de uma textualidade múltipla,
nos seus discursos e sujeitos.9
[In what regards Campos, or any other heteronym, and the relationship
between Pessoa’s amorous experience, his letters and his poems, I believe
that we must explore, above all, in the context of intertextual migration, the
paragrammatically dispersed elements of a multiple textuality realized
through its discourses and subjects.]
Other critics have followed this exhortation in their own ways; to

quote one representative comment (by Isabel Allegro de Magalhães),
‘estas missivas a uma mulher “real” manifest[am] o carácter predomi-
nantemente fictício, ou a invenção textual do amor’ (these missives to a
‘real’ woman demonstrate their predominantly fictitious nature, their
textual invention of love).10 The tradition of approaching the poet’s rela-
tionship with Ophelia Queiroz and its epistolary record as an integral
episode in Pessoa’s lifelong enterprise of autopsychographic fingimento
appears to be going strong, to judge by two mentions of their romance
by contributors to the present volume: while Richard Zenith contends
that Ophelia ‘was a species of counterheteronym, a real-life character
with whom Pessoa lived a fiction,’ George Monteiro follows Armand
Guibert in linking the end of the relationship’s first act to the subse-
quent publication of Pessoa’s sexually violent English poem ‘Epithala-
mium.’11 These and other readings may to some extent be viewed as
oppositional rewritings of the first ambitious narrative of the romance,
contained in João Gaspar Simões’s 1951 Vida e obra de Fernando Pessoa, in
which the boldly plotted story is told in exclusively biographical terms: in
lieu of Gaspar Simões’s Oedipal triangle (between the poet, the poet’s
mother – his true ‘único amor’ [only love] – and the unforgivably trivial
girlfriend, an exemplar of ‘banalidade burguesa’ [bourgeois banality]),
critics since Mourão-Ferreira have woven narratives of heteronymous
feigning that substitute sophisticated meta- and intertextual modes of
relating and explaining for the embarrassingly literal and overwrought
Freudianism of Pessoa’s original biographer.12 One crucial if presumably

unintended effect of this reorientation of critical framing and plotting –
away from biography and ever deeper into literature – has been a pro-
gressive redefinition of the role played by Ophelia Queiroz in her love
affair with the poet. From a relatively strong and autonomous protago-
nist of Gaspar Simões’s biographic narrative – stronger yet for being pre-
sented with undisguised and at times frankly misogynous hostility – she
has evolved into a relatively minor and largely passive character in the
ongoing enterprise of Pessoa’s self-fashioning storymaking (it needs to
be noted that Gaspar Simões himself pointed future critics in that direc-
tion by dubbing the young woman an ‘Ofélia Shakespeareana,’ an iden-
tification to which I will return).13
In a concomitant development, encouraged by the vicissitudes of sep-
arate and asynchronous publication, the figure of Pessoa’s correspon-
dent has remained essentially immobilized in the cameo appearance of
her 1978 account, which – notwithstanding the prevailing critical trend
to view Pessoa’s agency in the affair as a case of fiction-making emplot-
ment of the (amorous) self and other – has generally been taken at face
value, as a straightforwardly factual contribution to documenting the
relationship, with little if any attention paid to its eminently literary qual-
ities. As it turns out, however, on the evidence of Ophelia’s own letters,
that account is as much a work of narrative recomposition of the histori-
cal record as any of the subsequent, self-consciously interpretative, ver-
sions of the story, as told by Pessoa’s critics and biographers. It is
immaterial whether the responsibility for this should rest with Ophelia’s
imperfect recollection of events several decades old, with her conscious
or unconscious effort to refashion her experience in ways more pleasing
and favourable to herself, with her great-niece’s editorial initiative, or,
most likely, with all of the above. It is worth noting, nevertheless, that
Ophelia’s story was framed and presented in a highly oblique and ambig-
uous fashion already at the time of its original appearance in print: while
it is generally assumed that it had been told shortly before the volume’s
publication, in effect Mourão-Ferreira refers to it as if it had been regis-
tered quite a while before (‘em tempos’).14 At the same time, editorial
processing of the account by Maria da Graça Queiroz is defined variously
as a ‘compilação’ (compilation), ‘recolha’ (collection) and ‘estrutur-
ação’ (structuring), while the fact that the story is told in the first person
suggests to the reader an unmediated access to Ophelia’s own voice.15
On the joint testimony of Fernando’s letters and Ophelia’s account, it
emerged that their love affair had begun in late February 1920, shortly
after the young woman, who was nineteen at the time, started to work as
a typist at the same Lisbon firm where the poet contributed his services
as a commercial correspondent. This is how Ophelia’s narrative voice
recounted the crucial episode of the first physical contact between them:
Um dia faltou a luz no escritório. O Freitas não estava e o Osório, o ‘gru-

mete,’ tinha saído a fazer um recado. O Fernando foi buscar um candeeiro
de petróleo, acendeu-o, e pô-lo em cima da minha secretária.
Um pouco antes da hora de saída, atirou-me um bilhetinho para cima da
secretária, que dizia: ‘Peço-lhe que fique.’ Eu fiquei, na expectativa. Nessa
altura, já eu me tinha apercebido do interesse do Fernando por mim e eu,
confesso, também lhe achava uma certa graça...
Lembro-me que estava em pé, a vestir o casaco, quando ele entrou no
meu gabinete. Sentou-se na minha cadeira, pousou o candeeiro que trazia
na mão e, virando para mim, começou de repente a declarar-se, como Ham-
let se declarou a Ofélia: ‘Oh, querida Ofélia! meço mal os meus versos;
careço de arte para medir os meus suspiros; mas amo-te em extremo. Oh!
até do último extremo, acredita!’
Fiquei perturbadíssima, como é natural, e, sem saber o que havia de
dizer, acabei de vestir o casaco e despedi-me precipitadamente. O Fernando
levantou-se, com o candeeiro na mão, para me acompanhar até a porta.
Mas, de repente, pousou-o sobre a divisória da parede: sem eu esperar, agar-
rou-me pela cintura, abraçou-me e, sem dizer uma palavra, beijou-me,
beijou-me, apaixonadamente, como louco ...
Fui para casa, comprometida e confusa. Passaram-se dias e como o
Fernando parecia ignorar o que se havia passado entre nós, resolvi eu
escrever-lhe uma carta, pedindo-lhe uma explicação. É o que dá origem à
sua primeira carta-resposta, datada de 1 de Março de 1920.
Assim começámos o ‘namoro.’16
[One day lights went off at the firm. Freitas wasn’t in and Osório, the
office boy, had left to deliver a message. Fernando found an oil lamp, lit it,
and placed it on my desk.
A little before closing time he dropped a note on top of my desk; it said:
‘Please stay.’ I stayed, full of anticipation. At that time I had already noticed
that Fernando was interested in me and I confess that I also found him
intriguing...
I remember that I was standing up, putting on my coat, when he entered
my office. He sat on my chair, set down the lamp he was carrying, turned to
me, and began suddenly to declare his feelings, just as Hamlet had
addressed Ophelia: ‘O dear Ophelia, I am ill at these numbers, I have not

art to reckon my groans, but that I love thee best, O most best, believe it.’
I felt extremely agitated, as is only natural, and, not knowing what to say,
I finished putting on my coat and rapidly said good bye. Fernando got up,
oil lamp in hand, to accompany me to the door. But then, suddenly, he set
the lamp down on top of a low wall and unexpectedly seized me by the
waist, embraced me and, without a word, kissed me, kissed me passionately,
like a madman ...
I went home ashamed and confused. Days went by and since Fernando
made no reference to what had happened between us I decided to write
him a letter asking for an explanation. That is what gave origin to his first
letter, the response dated March 1, 1920. And so our ‘courtship’ began.]
This exceedingly dramatic scene, occurring literally on a darkened

stage, with meticulous marking of the actors’ movements (I was stand-
ing, he sat down, he stood up), no less meticulously described use of
props (the note, the oil lamp, the coat), and the Hamlet-Ophelia love
scene metatheatrically embedded at its climax, has been cited by critics
such as Seabra as one proof among many that Pessoa staged his affair
with Ophelia as an episode in the ongoing production of his heterony-
mous drama em gente. However, the scene reproduced above was, after all,
narrated by Ophelia and written down – ‘collected,’ ‘compiled,’ and
‘structured’ – by her great-niece: at the very least, it can be observed that
they took the element of Shakespearean inspiration supplied by the poet
and ran with it, constructing a fully developed work of dramatic fiction
that has, in turn, shaped the scene of critical interpretation of the affair
for decades to come.17 That the two Queiroz women may have engaged
in something more complex than passively reflective acts of recollection
and transcription did not, however, become fully apparent until the pub-
lication of Ophelia’s letters (to which she had no access since writing and
sending them in the first place, and therefore could not refer to her own
documentation of the relationship, much more detailed and compre-
hensive than that contained in Pessoa’s contribution to the correspon-
dence). For the letters tell a rather different story of the early stages of
the courtship: while confirming that the famous quasi-Shakespearean
love scene with its crucial first kiss did in fact occur – since in one of her
later missives Ophelia refers to an anniversary of the ‘performance of
Hamlet’ as the ‘first time my mouth touched your mouth’ – they also
revealed that it took place on 22 January 1920, and therefore not days
but well over a month before Ophelia wrote to Fernando demanding a
statement of his intentions, and that in those intervening weeks their

love affair had gained considerable momentum.18 In other words, the
nineteen-year-old Ophelia was not such a stern paragon of respectability
as her much later account implies; it was only after several months of
flirting and a few weeks of physical intimacy (limited, to be sure, to kisses
and embraces at the office) that the young woman became exasperated
with the secret and undefined nature of her workplace romance and
chose to take initiative towards determining its long-term prospects.
It is indeed fitting that the correspondence between Pessoa and
Ophelia began the way it did, since the two inaugural letters – hers and
his – anticipate and epitomize its further development. Ophelia’s open-
ing gambit is a mention of her conversation with an ex-boyfriend who is
still devoted to her and desires to win her back:
Estou desprezando um rapaz que me adora, que me faria feliz e que eu sei
muito bem as ideias d’ele para mim ... E diga-me agora francamente, sei eu
alguma coisa do Fernandinho? Já alguma vez me disse as suas ideias, o que
pensa fazer de mim? ... Não me tenho eu entregado completamente ao meu
Fernandinho? Que recompensa me dará? ... Se o Fernandinho nunca pen-
sou em construir família, e se nem pensa, peço-lhe por tudo ... que mo diga
por escrito, que me diga as suas ideias sobre a minha pessoa (e não se
esqueça que tem dito muitas vezes que me não ama, que me adora!)19
[I am rejecting a man who adores me, who would make me happy and
whose plans for me I know very well ... And tell me frankly now, what do I
know of you, Fernandinho? Have you ever told me your ideas, what you
plan to do with me? ... Haven’t I given myself completely to my Fernand-
inho? And how will he recompense me for it? ... Fernandinho, if you never
contemplated starting a family, and if you don’t have such plans now, I
implore you ... to tell me in writing what your ideas for me are (and don’t
forget that you have told me many times that you don’t just love me, that
you adore me!)]
Now for Fernandinho’s reply:
Para me mostrar o seu desprezo, ou, pelo menos, a sua indiferença real, não
era preciso o disfarce transparente de um discurso tão comprido ... Quem
ama verdadeiramente não escreve cartas que parecem requerimentos de
advogado. O amor não estuda tanto as cousas, nem trata os outros como
réus que é preciso ‘entalar’ ... Reconheço que tudo isso é cómico, e que a
parte mais cómica disto tudo sou eu. Eu próprio acharia graça, se não a
amasse tanto, e se tivesse tempo para pensar em outra cousa que não fosse
no sofrimento que tem prazer em causar-me ...
Aí fica o ‘documento escrito’ que me pede. Reconhece a minha assinatura
o tabelião Eugénio Silva.20
[You could have shown me your contempt, or at least your supreme indif-
ference, without the see-through masquerade of such a lengthy treatise ...
Those who really love don’t write letters that read like lawyers’ petitions.
Love doesn’t examine things so closely, and it doesn’t treat others like
defendants on trial ... I realize that all this is comical, and that the most
comical part of it is me. I myself would think it was funny if I didn’t love you
so much, and if I had the time to think of anything besides the suffering you
enjoy inflicting on me ...
Here’s the ‘written document’ you requested. The notary Eugénio Silva can
validate my signature.]21
What stands out above all else in this initial exchange is the ‘he said,
she said’ miscommunication and crossing of purposes between the two
lovers: Ophelia’s unexceptional desire to domesticate and normalize
their romance by channelling it into engagement and marriage – the
only possible development for a young woman from a respectable, mid-
dle-class Portuguese family of her time, as both Ophelia and Fernando
knew very well – clashes with the confused and confusing non-sequitur of
Pessoa’s reply, in which we can detect jealousy and injured pride at being
examined side by side with Ophelia’s ex-boyfriend, but also a perplexing
lack of understanding of what was, in the historical time and social
milieu they shared, an entirely predictable expectation. In effect, it is
possible to read this exchange as a textbook case of Deborah Tannen’s
linguistic investigations into the ‘cross-cultural communication’ between
men and women and an apt sample of the distinct ‘genderlects’ of the
two sexes clashing dialogically in a historically specific time and place.22
The question of marriage would remain at the forefront of further
correspondence, although Pessoa himself made only rare, mostly indi-
rect references to their possible future life together, while Ophelia seized
every opportunity to attempt to extract a more binding declaration,
going as far as to sign some of her letters ‘Ophelia Queiroz Pessoa’ (fol-
lowed by ‘I wish’ in parentheses) and sending Fernando postcards of
babies she would describe as ‘o nosso Fernandinho pequenino de algum
dia’ (our future little Fernandinho). She also attempted to transform
her metaphysics of wishful thinking into a politics of faits accomplis by

suggesting that she might tell her sister Fernando had already asked for
her hand in marriage in order to dispose her family more favourably
towards their continuing courtship. Pessoa, with very rare exceptions,
tended to ignore those and other hints: to give but one example, when
Ophelia wrote him repeatedly and at considerable length about a conve-
niently priced and located apartment that had become available for rent,
he chose to ignore her at first implied and eventually explicit message –
that it would be perfect for the two of them – and answered only her
originally stated query about its precise distance from the street in which
he was then living with his mother and sister.23
The recurrently foregrounded question of marriage that forms the
sustaining backbone of the correspondence (expressing itself through
insistent redundancy in Ophelia’s letters and through elliptical circum-
navigation in Fernando’s) allows us to posit, in addition to the overt
Shakespearean parallel, another fictional model that may be taken as a
correlative of their epistolary relationship. The Pickwick Papers – Pessoa’s
all-time favourite work of narrative fiction – and other early novels by
Dickens launched the archetypal pattern of Victorian fiction by making
the ‘happily-ever-after’ of their often multiple conjugal denouements the
cornerstone on which ‘a protective alliance of domestic harmony and a
refuge from the world’s evils’ is founded.24 Yet, at the same time, the con-
trasting gynephobic and utopian homosocial dimension of The Pickwick
Papers – an aspect of the novel to which Pessoa was highly sensitive, as
noted in the introduction to the present volume – generates resistance
against the coercive social and moral authority of the marriage plot. In an
analogous fashion, resistance against Ophelia’s conjugal designs is
embodied, within hers and Fernando’s epistolary dialogue, by recurrent
evocations of the queerest of Pessoa’s heteronyms. Ophelia’s unwavering
dislike of Álvaro de Campos and his presumable aversion towards her
(affirmed, albeit occasionally also denied, by Pessoa) form one of the leit
motifs of the correspondence and, without explicitly intersecting with
references to marriage, produce nevertheless a pattern of triangular
negotiation of purposes and desires. Ophelia generally rebuts Álvaro’s
encroachments, declaring, for instance, that she will not voluntarily
receive him in her and Fernando’s home.25 On one occasion, however,
she appears sufficiently resigned to the inevitability of Campos’s inter-
ventions in her relationship with Fernando as to assent to the vision of
their future cohabitation as a ménage à trois: ‘eu hei-de gostar muito de
viver com o meu Fernandinho, com o Sr. Eng. A. C. e tudo, e alienado e
tudo, o que vem a ser o mesmo, porque o meu amor quando está alien-
ado é por causa do Sr. Eng. que lhe faz subir a febre a 50o’ (I’m going to
like very much to live with my Fernandinho, with Mr. Engineer A.C. and
all, with you crazy and all, which is really the same thing, because when
my love goes mad it’s Mr. Campos who is bringing your fever up to 50
degrees).26 Álvaro’s and Fernandinho’s shared feverish madness figures
more prominently in the second phase of the relationship, with Campos
often dictating his creator’s letters to Ophelia (when not writing to her in
his own name), calling her on the phone in Fernando’s stead, or coming
along on their streetcar rides. Campos’s prominent role in the affair and
the ambiguous whimsicality of the three protagonists’ relations echo in
the last poem signed by the heteronym, the much-quoted ‘Todas as cartas
de amor são ridículas’ (All Love Letters Are Ridiculous).27 It has been
generally taken for granted by the critics that the poem comments indi-
rectly on Pessoa’s epistolary relationship with Ophelia; if so, Campos’s
testamentary reflection on the inherent ridiculousness of love and amo-
rous discourse gives him the last word in the discursive chain initiated by
the above-quoted Dickensian confrontation of Ophelia’s and Fernando’s
inaugural letters, with the desired, endlessly deferred marriage proposal
at its inflamed centre.
The juxtaposition of Ophelia’s first missive and Fernando’s reply also
helps illuminate in more general terms the rearrangement of the scene
of interpretation of Pessoa’s Cartas de amor as a result of the publication
of Ophelia’s side of the exchange. As I have already noted, given the
absence of the matching other half of the epistolary dialogue, Pessoa’s
letters were detached by their commentators from their pragmatic con-
text of referentially rooted dialogic communication and viewed as mono-
logic literary expression, becoming an object of formalist hermeneutics
and freewheeling critical improvisation, which their fragmentary form,
elliptic elusiveness, and referential ambiguity undeniably encouraged.
By contrast, to read them against Ophelia’s letters is to replace this liber-
ally open-ended discursive scene with one defined by dialogic jostling of
meanings allied with competing pragmatic purposes; it is to balance
their aesthetic qualities against semiotic demands of material discourse
analysis and historicized patterns of gendered (mis)communication.
I will resist the temptation to revisit mockingly earlier readings of Car-
tas de amor from a perspective privileged by a hindsight that, if not per-
fect, is at least vastly improved by the access to Ophelia’s contribution to
the exchange. Nonetheless, I find it worthwhile to cite one example of a
conspicuous misreading in order to illustrate the kind of effects that the
interpretive framing of Pessoa’s letters in the unilateral context of his life

and writing has tended to produce. In his critical commentary on Cartas
de amor, Mourão-Ferreira elaborated at length on what, in his analysis, is
‘o tema ... fundamental’ of the poet’s correspondence with Ophelia: ‘the
theme of childhood sought after or recovered through love.’28 Among
his close readings of individual letters we find an interpretation of num-
ber thirteen, written after the return of Pessoa’s mother to Lisbon from
South Africa, where she had lived since 1896, and therefore, according
to the critic, reflecting a clash of two distinct, and possibly antagonistic,
infantilized identities: on the one hand, the familiar ‘menino da sua
mãe’ (his mother’s boy), on the other, Ophelia’s beloved ‘Nininho.’ The
relevant passage is worth quoting in its entirety:
Na primeira carta escrita depois dessa instalação [da família na casa da rua
Coelho da Rocha] ... ei-lo que significativamente toma certa ‘distância’ em
relação a Ophélia, detendo-se e comprazendo-se numa recordação muito
sua, e que é, presumivelmente, uma recordação de infância: ‘Sabes? Estou-
te escrevendo mas não estou pensando em ti. Estou pensando nas saudades
que tenho do meu tempo da caça aos pombos; e isto é uma coisa, como tu
sabes, com que tu não tens nada ...’ (original emphases).
[In the first letter written after the settling (of his family into the apartment
on Rua Coelho da Rocha) ... he significantly distances himself from
Ophelia, taking time to delight in a recollection very much his own, which
is presumably a memory preserved from childhood: ‘By the way – although
I am writing you, I’m not thinking about you. I’m thinking about how I miss
the days when I used to hunt pigeons, which is something you obviously have
nothing to do with ...’]29
If this mention of a ‘hunt for pigeons’ had, in fact, constituted a refer-

ence to Pessoa’s childhood memories, it would be difficult to disagree
that it was ‘a recollection very much his own.’ However, Ophelia’s relent-
lessly detailed epistolary flow reveals on several occasions that in the lov-
ers’ private vocabulary, ‘pombos’ designated, quite unambiguously and
precisely, the young woman’s breasts. Pessoa’s comment translates there-
fore into a coy, teasing antiphrasis – ‘what I’m thinking about doesn’t
concern you’ meaning its exact opposite, ‘what I’m thinking about has
everything to do with you’ – a figure of discourse so alien to his literary
expression that the possibility of reading it as such eludes Mourão-Fer-
reira entirely, as it does another critic (Seabra), who chooses the same
passage to support his contention that the relationship between

Fernando and Ophelia was imbued with negativity.30 Ophelia, by con-
trast, understood Fernando’s implied meaning perfectly and followed up
in her reply with an antiphrastic comment of her own, referring to Pes-
soa’s coterie of heteronyms and, among them, to ‘aquele sujeito ... muito
mau, muito feio, e muito rabino que se chama Fernando’ (that very bad,
ugly, and naughty one named Fernando): ‘desse é que eu não gosto nada,
mas mesmo nada ...’ (him I don’t like at all, really not at all ...).31
Another discursive feature of Pessoa’s Cartas de amor that critics have
found perplexing, given its conspicuous contrast to the generally mature
and rhetorically controlled expression of his other writings, is the wealth
of diminutives that grace his letters to Ophelia, their many bébézinhos,
amorzinhos, anjinhos, queridinhos, and, last but not least, beijinhos (not to
mention beijões, beijocos, beijocas, and beijerinzinhos). Here, too, alleged sty-
listic incongruence disappears if instead of reading Pessoa’s love letters
against his poetry, literary prose, or even epistolary discourse of non-amo-
rous nature, we reinsert them into the dialogic context that produced
them, given that a prodigious use of diminutives stands out as one of the
most salient features of Ophelia’s epistolary expression. To illustrate:
Sim, filhinho, o teu bebezinho tem estado tiste e coitadinho do Nininho

também tem tado! Tem Fernandinho? E é por não ver o seu bebezinho?! Eu
achei tanta graça ao meu querido pieguinhas! Mas que maridinho tão
pieguinhas que eu vou ter! É o meu menino pequenino!! Se o bebé não
fosse bebé andava com o Nininho ao colo, mas assim só se assenta no colo
para ouvir histórias mas que histórias, histórias de beijinhos não é meu feio?
[Yes, my child, your little baby has been sad and poor little Nininho has been
too! Haven’t you Fernandinho? And that’s because he hasn’t seen his little
baby?! I thought my goofy darling was so cute! What a goofy little husband
I’m going to have! He’s my tiny little boy! If baby weren’t a baby she would
carry Nininho in her arms, but because she is she just sits on his lap to listen
to his stories, but what great stories, kissing stories, right my honeypie?]32
This modest illustration of Ophelia’s exuberant deployment of dimin-

utives serves also to bring into play another leit motif of existing critical
commentary on Pessoa’s Cartas de amor: the presumable infantilizing
thrust of Fernando’s attitude towards Ophelia. Be it in Mourão-Fer-
reira’s essay, in Robert Bréchon’s biography of the poet, or in Yvette Cen-
teno’s tellingly titled article, ‘Ophélia-Bébézinho ou o horror do sexo’
(Baby Ophelia, or the Horror of Sex), the emphasis is on the poet’s ini-
tiative in metamorphosing the young woman into an innocent, asexual
infant, along with his own concomitant regression into the imaginary
paradise of childhood.33 However, as Ophelia’s letters demonstrate on
countless occasions, the discourse of infantile masquerade they both
adopted for their exchange was, at the very least, a two-way street. In
effect, it is Ophelia who far more energetically than Fernando spins out
elaborate constructions of their mutual infantilization; at the same time,
her flights of fancy make it clear that her copious use of diminutives, a
predilection for baby talk, and imagining her beloved Fernandinho
and/or herself as children are not in the least incompatible with adult –
that is, sexualized – patterns of amorous engagement, as her wordplay
between ‘ao colo’ (in my arms) and ‘no colo’ (on your lap) in the above
passage neatly demonstrates. It is Ophelia who sends Fernando numer-
ous postcards featuring, alternatively, amorous adult couples and
chubby babies and toddlers, with such hybrid configurations as two small
children kissing (identified as representing little Fernando and
Ophelia) and a mother with a small boy (labeled as ‘Fernandinho’). It is
Ophelia’s imagination that engenders a seamless continuum between
infantile masks she makes herself and her lover wear throughout their
romance and the child as a reproductive signifier of their future sexual
union. To assume, as has invariably been the case, that Ophelia was
merely a willing follower in what Bréchon has called ‘o jogo de infantil-
idade perversa que lhe impõe o seu excêntrico namorado’ (the game of
perverse infantilization imposed on her by her eccentric lover) is of
course consistent with extrapolating all interpretive constructs of the
relationship from the unilateral, monologic evidence of Pessoa’s let-
ters.34 Such an assumption rests additionally on the evidence of obvious
intellectual inequality between the correspondents; as Bréchon also
stresses, Fernando and Ophelia should not be viewed as a Portuguese
counterpart to Flaubert and Louise Colet. Yet it ignores the commonsen-
sical recognition that, in the matter of lovers’ talk and in spite of her
young age, Ophelia was likely more experienced and uninhibited than
Fernando: unlike him, at least she had already had a boyfriend. The ease
and exuberance with which she deploys her considerable repertoire of
baby talk, diminutive endearments, and imaginary scenarios of sexual-
ized children’s play are only on rare occasions matched by her corre-
spondent’s epistolary discourse, occasions puzzling nevertheless for the
interpreters of Pessoa’s Cartas de amor and for which they have attempted
to account by articulating explanations ranging from infantile regres-
sion as a refuge from sex to suggestions of paedophilia (to which even

the thirty-year-old Ophelia of the affair’s second stage remains subject in
Bréchon’s imagination). Here as elsewhere, reading Pessoa’s letters in a
dialogic counterpoint with Ophelia’s yields effects that are quite distinct
from – if not necessarily incompatible with – those produced by reading
them as part and parcel of his mass of heteronymous writing. It is to be
hoped that such a split framing of this much-dissected hermeneutic
object can make it a more meaningfully relevant component of the
increasingly variegated scenario in which Pessoa’s drama em gente is recur-
rently being restaged in contemporary critical discourse.35
NOTES
1 Darlene Sadlier, An Introduction to Fernando Pessoa: Modernism and the Paradoxes

of Authorship (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1998), 133.
2 The existence of the relationship and of its epistolary record had, of course,
been public knowledge since Carlos Queiroz, Ophelia’s nephew and Pessoa’s
friend, commented on them in a radio broadcast (later published in a book-
let) a few days after the poet’s untimely death. See Carlos Queiroz, Homena-
gem a Fernando Pessoa: Com os excerptos das suas cartas de amor e um retrato de
Almada (Coimbra: Presença, 1936).
3 I will generally follow the usage prevalent in Portuguese cultural discourse,
which is to refer to Fernando Pessoa as ‘Pessoa’ and to Ophelia Queiroz as
‘Ophelia’ (or, in a modernized fashion, as ‘Ofélia’), since the discursive con-
vention on which it rests is not predominantly sexist but takes into account
the relative originality of a person’s given and last name (thus ‘Pessoa’ is used
since it less common than ‘Fernando,’ whereas ‘Ophelia,’ an unusual first
name, is preferred as more original than ‘Queiroz’). I will, however, attempt
to correct the gendered bias that is also operative in this usage (since women
are never referred to by their last name alone) by employing the poet’s given
name on suitable occasions.
4 Although it is not entirely clear whether such a bias was among the reasons
for the delayed publication of Ophelia’s letters, it is worth noting that the his-
tory of women’s epistolary writing registers a strong tradition of resistance
against making a female writer’s private discourse public: ‘To publish a
woman’s letters ... was in some way to violate her personal integrity.’ Elizabeth
C. Goldsmith, Introduction to Writing the Female Voice: Essays on Epistolary Lit-
erature, ed. Elizabeth C. Goldsmith (Boston: Northeastern University Press,
1989), vii.
5 On the combined evidence of Fernando’s letters and Ophelia’s retrospective

account (as presented in the 1978 volume), the first stage of their relation-
ship was assumed to have lasted eight months, from late February 1920 to late
November of the same year, and its second instalment just four months, from
September 1929 to January 1930. As Ophelia’s letters show, however, their all-
important first kiss (vividly if imprecisely recollected in her account)
occurred in effect on 22 January 1920, while their exchange of flirty notes at
the office where they both worked had been taking place as early as Novem-
ber 1919. More dramatically, it can be ascertained that the second phase of
the romance lasted at least a year and a half, till the spring of 1931; the last
published letter in which Ophelia still showers her ‘Nininho’ with terms of
endearment and expresses expectations for a common future dates from 29
March 1931.
6 In fact, the commentary most attentive to the two-way dynamic of the
exchange is probably a note by Jorge de Sena, written in 1977 and therefore
before any of the correspondence, save for brief excerpts from Pessoa’s let-
ters, was published at all; Sena based his remarks on a paper by Alexandrino
Severino, which remains unpublished. See Jorge de Sena, Fernando Pessoa e Ca
Heterónima (Lisbon: Edições 70, 1984), 427.
7 David Mourão-Ferreira, ‘Sobre as “Cartas de amor” de Fernando Pessoa,’ in
Cartas de Amor de Fernando Pessoa, ed. Mourão-Ferreira and Maria da Graça
Queiroz, 3rd ed. (Lisbon: Ática, 1994), 183–4. Unless otherwise attributed,
all translations are my own.
8 Mourão-Ferreira ‘Sobre as “Cartas de amor,”’ 214.
9 José Augusto Seabra, ‘Amor e Fingimento (Sobre as “Cartas de amor” de
Fernando Pessoa),’ Persona 3 (July 1979): 78, 84. Reprinted in his O Heterotexto
pessoano (Lisbon: Dinalivro, 1985), 61–76.
10 Isabel Allegro de Mahalhães, ‘O gesto, e não as mãos: Fernando Pessoa e a
figuração do feminino; uma gramática da mulher evanescente,’ in Capelas
imperfeitas (Lisbon: Horizonte, 2002), 115. In an essay posted on the internet,
Janise de Sousa Paiva takes this critical direction to an extreme bordering on
self-parody by stating that ‘[o] espaço ocupado por Ophélia é um não
espaço’ (the space occupied by Ophelia is a non-space) and that the poet’s
missives are in effect ‘cartas de amor entre Fernando Pessoa e Fernando
Pessoa’ (love letters between Fernando Pessoa and Fernando Pessoa). ‘A
Heteronímia nas cartas de amor de Fernando Pessoa,’ http://victorian
.fortunecity.com/statue/44/Aheteronimianascartasdefernando.htm.
20 July 2004.
11 In an earlier publication, Monteiro had suggested a connection between the
development of Pessoa’s romance and the discourse of his letters to Ophelia
and Edgar Allan Poe’s short story ‘Ligeia’ (which Pessoa glossed in a poem).
See his ‘Ophélia’s Lovers’ in Selected Proceedings of the 35th Annual Mountain
Interstate Foreign Language Conference, ed. Ramón Fernández Rubio (Green-
ville, SC: Furman University, 1987), 245–54. For another contribution to
reading the relationship as a case of fictional emplotment intentionally engi-
neered by Pessoa, see Antonio Tabucchi, ‘Um Fausto Mangas-de-alpaca: as
“Cartas de amor” de Pessoa’ in Pessoana mínima (Lisbon: Imprensa Nacional-
Casa da Moeda, 1984), 51–9.
12 João Gaspar Simões, Vida e obra de Fernando Pessoa, 4th ed. (Amadora: Ber-
trand, 1981), 493.
13 Gaspar Simões, Vida e obra de Fernando Pessoa, 492.
14 Mourão-Ferreira, ‘Nota prévia,’ in Cartas de amor de Fernando Pessoa, 10.
15 An even more patent case of testimonial ambiguity may be found in a text
published in 1985, in which Maria da Graça Queiroz freely alternates
between her own third-person recollections of her great-aunt and Ophelia’s
first-person responses to Maria da Graça’s interview questions. See Maria da
Graça Queiroz, ‘Ophelia Queiroz: O mistério de uma pessoa,’ Jornal de Letras,
Artes e Ideias, 12–18 November 1985.
16 Cartas de amor de Fernando Pessoa, 23–6.
17 The responsibility for endowing the youngest offspring of the Queiroz family
with a Shakespearean name – undoubtedly a source of attraction for Pessoa,
whose intense and lifelong interest in Shakespeare and the character of
Hamlet is well documented – also lies with one of the family’s women: as
Ophelia recounts in the 1985 interview, her oldest sister Joaquina was reading
Hamlet at the time of the girl’s birth. Ophelia’s own predilection and talent
for theatrical self-dramatization is attested to vividly in the same testimony.
18 Cartas de Amor de Ofélia a Fernando Pessoa, ed. Manuela Nogueira and Maria da
Conceição Azevedo (Lisbon: Assírio & Alvim, 1996), 53.
19 Cartas de amor de Ofélia, 33–4.
20 Cartas de amor de Fernando Pessoa, 49–50.
21 The Selected Prose of Fernando Pessoa, ed. and trans. Richard Zenith (New York:
Grove, 2001), 129–30.
22 Deborah Tannen, You Just Don’t Understand: Women and Men in Conversation
(New York: William Morrow, 1990), 18, 42. Interestingly, one of Fernando’s
own devices for deflecting Ophelia’s continuing insistence on introducing
him to her family was an invocation of properly cultural difference: he
refused the invitation to her home on the grounds of his ‘educação
estrangeira’ (foreign education). Cartas de amor de Ofélia, 77.
23 Cartas de amor de Ofélia, 81, 88; Cartas de amor de Fernando Pessoa, 86.
24 Barbara Weiss, ‘The Dilemma of Happily Ever After: Marriage and the Victo-
rian Novel,’ in Portraits of Marriage in Literature, ed. Anne C. Hargrove and

Maurine Magliocco (Macomb: Western Illinois University, 1984), 68.
25 Cartas de amor de Ofélia, 210.
27 Dated 21 October 1935 and therefore a little over a month before Pessoa’s
death. See Fernando Pessoa (Álvaro de Campos), Poesia, ed. Teresa Rita
Lopes (Lisbon: Assírio & Alvim, 2002), 550–1.
28 Mourão-Ferreira, in Cartas de amor de Fernando Pessoa, 192.
29 Cartas de amor de Fernando Pessoa, 198–9. English translation of the quote from
Pessoa’s letter is by Richard Zenith (Selected Prose, 133).
30 Seabra, ‘Amor e Fingimento,’ 81.
32 Cartas de amor de Ofélia, 92. My English translation of this passage is at best
approximate. I have not accounted for Ophelia’s spelling distortions that
mimic baby talk (‘tiste’ for ‘triste’ and ‘tado’ for ‘estado’); her wordplay jux-
taposing ‘ao colo’ and ‘no colo’ is likewise untranslatable. It is worth noting
that she consistently displays a predilection for antiphrastic terms of endear-
ment, such as ‘feio’ (literally, ‘ugly’) and, elsewhere, ‘preto’ (literally,
‘black’).
33 Robert Bréchon, Estranho estrangeiro: Uma biografia de Fernando Pessoa, trans.
Maria Abreu and Pedro Tamen (Lisbon: Quetzal, 1996); Yvette Centeno,
‘Ophélia-Bébézinho ou o horror do sexo,’ Colóquio/Letras 49 (May 1979): 11–
19.
34 Bréchon, Estranho estrangeiro, 375.
35 Another long-overdue critical undertaking, which is however beyond the
scope of the present essay, would be a comparative reading of Pessoa’s most
significant epistolary texts (such as, in addition to Cartas de amor, his much-
discussed epistles to Gaspar Simões and Casais Monteiro, his few surviving let-
ters to Mário de Sá-Carneiro, etc.) as a diversified but fundamentally coexten-
sive exercise in heteronymous discursive performance, in which heteronymy
clearly and recurrently emerges as a living experiment in enacting and con-
fronting alterity, both within the writing self and between the self and the
interpellated, (non-)corresponding other. (I am grateful to Mark Sabine for
this suggestion.)
PART FOUR
Pessoa in Performance
Appearances of the Author
fer nando c a br al m arti ns
The Director
The poetics of fingimento (feigning, faking) created by Fernando Pessoa

finds its primary artistic reference in the theatre. ‘O poeta é um fingidor’
(The poet is a faker) and therefore he becomes an actor, along with all
the paradoxes that this identification entails.1 His art does not consist of
expressing his pain, in the manner of the Romantic artist, but in fabricat-
ing that pain before the eyes of the spectators. His art, and his pain, have
a semiotic nature rather than a psychological one.
At the same time, Pessoa’s concept of heteronymy, his great fictional
masterpiece of a drama in poets, is incomprehensible outside the con-
text of the modernist avant-garde. By this term I refer to the precipitate,
euphoric, and apocalyptic cultural transformations which took place in
the wake of the Futurist Manifesto of 1909, and particularly during the
following violent decade. This concatenation of aesthetic revolutions
involved formal experiments that sought to surprise and that breached
all the rules of the Western aesthetic tradition, for example by denying
the autonomy of art in relation to the life of society (an aspect of the
avant-garde emphasized by Peter Bürger).2 Thus the first observation to
be made is that the origin of Pessoa’s heteronymy in 1914 – his explosive
atomization of the figure of the author – coincides with the publication
of Orpheu and the theoretical whirlwind of Sensationism, which, in its
own turn, was a direct consequence of the European avant-gardist trans-
Translated by W. Alexánder Díaz and Anna M. Klobucka

246 Fernando Cabral Martins
formations. Looking ahead slightly, the Ultimatum of 1917, a magnum

opus of Portuguese Futurism ascribed by Pessoa to Álvaro de Campos, is
simultaneously a manifesto of heteronymy (the elaboration therein of a
Malthusian Law of Sensibility is but a thin disguise). Proof of this is the
fact that many fragments belonging to Pessoa’s project of a Sensationist
Manifesto can be found integrated into the text of Campos’s Ultimatum.
On the other hand, it has to be highlighted that the publication of the
literary journal Athena in 1924 was orientated towards a new poetic
agenda. According to David Mourão-Ferreira, this was the third of Pes-
soa’s ‘tácticas maiores’ (major tactics) of literary publication, which the
critic describes as follows: the first one, realized in Orpheu in 1915, con-
stitutes ‘a afirmação da modernidade de Campos e Pessoa ele-mesmo’
(the affirmation of the modernity of Campos and of Pessoa ele-mesmo); the
second one, in the slim volumes of English-language verse published in
1918 and 1921, is ‘a afirmação do poeta ortónimo de expressão inglesa’
(the affirmation of the orthonymous poet writing in English); and the
third one, in Athena from 1924 to 1925, is ‘a afirmação do binómio Reis-
Caeiro’ (the affirmation of the Reis-Caeiro binary).3 In reality, the latter
publication belongs to a new era, upon which the journal presença would
stamp its mark from 1927 onwards. This era is characterized by the return
to the romantic and realist favouring of psychology and to author-centred
literary expression, as well as to all the other aesthetic norms threatened
by the cataclysm of the modernist avant-garde. However Athena is also the
space of a particular enactment of heteronymy that elevates it to a higher
level of complexity. It is in Athena that Pessoa and Álvaro de Campos
engage in a theoretical polemic, in which the latter contradicts the
former relying on a strategy customary in the work of the engineer-poet:
a vindication of a scientific model for literary production. Through this
debate, therefore, Álvaro de Campos appears not as Pessoa’s alter ego,
but as someone radically other. In such a way, the publication of the het-
eronyms in Athena develops and exploits the indistinguishability of the
realms of history and fiction. Heteronymy becomes a supreme form of
game, in which fiction is constituted not as a lie or provocation but as the-
atre: as art whose substance is that of life itself.
The cases of Ricardo Reis and Alberto Caeiro become examples of the
‘drama in people’ in the terms in which Pessoa himself will come to
describe it: they are characters that have the same reality as Hamlet, a
reality of ghosts and dreams, that is, of ‘ficções de interlúdio’ (interludial
fictions). Meanwhile, Álvaro de Campos establishes a direct relationship
with Pessoa, enters into dialogue with him, and even scorns to publish
poems in Athena. Campos’s figure stands out; it assumes an autonomous

existence that is reiterated on several occasions, as may be appreciated –
amongst other less significant cases – in the set of texts compiled in the
volume Crítica.4 And this existence takes his status beyond that of a mere
character within the ‘lyrical drama.’
At this point it is important to mention another distinctive character-
istic of the enactment of heteronymy in Athena. In the index of the suc-
ceeding issues of the journal, Pessoa’s name appears written in two
different ways and also with two correspondingly different functions.
First, the name on the magazine’s heading, wherein both Fernando Pes-
soa and Ruy Vaz are named as directors, relates to the level of organiza-
tion and of editorial production. Second, the name in the index of
contributors to each issue (where Pessoa’s name appears next to those of
Álvaro de Campos, Ricardo Reis, and Alberto Caeiro) acknowledges an
author of a heteronymic nature. In effect, the polemic between Fernando
Pessoa and Álvaro de Campos can only make sense if it is understood as
a debate between equals.
One cannot, however, ignore the fact that this separation between the
director and the actor is not as clear as it should have been for the benefit
of theory. The first Pessoa (the author and director) does not restrict
himself to appearing on the magazine’s graphic and typographic design,
in this way leaving to the second Pessoa (the orthonym) any and all par-
ticipation in the game of heteronymic characters. As it turns out, the first
Pessoa is also the editor who presents and organizes ‘Os Últimos Poemas
de Mário de Sá-Carneiro’ (The Last Poems of Mário de Sá-Carneiro) in
the journal’s second issue. He is, likewise, the one who agrees to give an
interview to the newspaper Diário de Lisboa for Athena’s launching in
November 1924. It is also he (or so at least it may be presumed) who signs
his own editorial. Yet the intervention of Álvaro de Campos, taking Pes-
soa’s editorial as a target, immediately transforms Pessoa into his oppo-
site number in a heteronymic game. Campos makes Pessoa go through a
transmutation that does not permit the survival of the function that dis-
tinguished Pessoa the author from Álvaro de Campos the character and
thus introduces a dangerous oscillation into the entire system.
The orthonymous Pessoa is thereby revealed, so to speak, as being
himself a fiction, the character of a symbolist, Intersectionist, and her-
metic poet, whose construction involves an uncommon functional multi-
plicity. Therefore, Eduardo Lourenço’s generalizing affirmation about
Pessoa the writer can only be taken to refer to this particular orthony-
mous Pessoa: ‘He was a symbolist his entire life. In the whole of Western
literature there is no other such complete expression of symbolism.

Modernism was his and our fiction.’5 If this statement is only associated
with the orthonymous poet, then the truth of its assertion is rendered
evident; since symbolism is the distinctive matrix that constitutes the
orthonymous work and through which it reaches its apogee in the static
drama O Marinheiro and, later, in the minimalist epic of Mensagem. In
addition, Intersectionism itself derives directly from symbolism, and one
has only to read poems such as ‘Violoncelo’ (Violoncello) or ‘Branco e
Vermelho’ (White and Red) by Camilo Pessanha in order to find vivid
examples of this inspiration. Reaching still further back, we find in
Baudelaire’s sonnet ‘Correspondances’ (Correspondences), itself the
poetic matrix of symbolism, a prefiguration of formal principles of Inter-
sectionism.
Here, however, we need to reactivate the distinction that renders intel-
ligible what would otherwise impose itself as contradictory: the fact that,
in addition to this latter Pessoa, there is another. The other Pessoa is the
silent organizer of everything else, the one who plots and traces his
‘major tactics’: the director of the ‘drama in people.’
The Character
In what ways are the notions of a heteronymic author and a character

related? This relation is clearly indicated in the theory of heteronymy
that Pessoa explicates in texts he disseminated in the public realm.
Prominent among these is the not-so-private letter to Adolfo Casais Mon-
teiro, dated 13 January 1935, which became famous for telling the story
of Pessoa’s ‘Triumphant Day’ of 8 March 1914. Although the factual
details included in that letter do not correspond to the historical truth,
as has been clearly proved by scholarly investigation (even though the
origin of heteronyms is dated, without a doubt, from the beginnings of
1914), it has to be acknowledged that this letter, in relation to the Pes-
soan textual universe, constitutes a document with the same importance
as the ‘Philosophy of Composition’ in relation to the work of Edgar Allan
Poe. Both pieces are unquestionably fictional texts; however, their perti-
nence is not commemorative, but rather genuinely theoretical. Both Pes-
soa’s letter and Poe’s essay set out a mode of interpretation that, on the
one hand, is born of architectural and formal concerns, and, on the
other, proposes a particular reading of their literary corpus. Both texts
are very far from being intentionally mystifying.
Accepting this premise, we may attempt to analyse the dramatic praxis
of the heteronymic game. First of all, in no form is any subjectivity con-

figured as the structuring gesture of this multiple act of representation,
and neither is the author distinguished from all of his various characters
in an existential space distinct from that occupied by them. In other
words, we are dealing with a figure of the author who is known only in
the form of his numerous author-characters who bear certain vague and
vestigial resemblances to one another as members of a group, but never-
theless each display a marked singularity. As T.S. Eliot writes of Shake-
speare, we face a creator who is always present and yet always hidden.
It should be pointed out straight away that this is not a universally
accepted reading. Taking Pessoan criticism as a whole, we can identify
two principal interpretative tendencies: one that tends to emphasize the
notion of consistency between Pessoa the character and Pessoa the direc-
tor, and another that tends towards their distinction. The position of
Maria Helena Nery Garcez is an exemplary case of the first, synthesizing
tendency; she asks, ‘Should we still continue to consider Pessoa the
orthonym as a mask, on equal footing with the other characters of the
“drama in people”? Or is it not finally the time to see in him a privileged
expression of Fernando Pessoa himself?’6 As regards the second, analytic
tendency, it has perhaps been encapsulated most succinctly in the words
of José Augusto Seabra: ‘There are, then, in our view, two Fernando Pes-
soas, who overlap without becoming conflated: Fernando António
Nogueira Pessoa, born on 13th July 1888, son of Joaquim de Seabra Pes-
soa and Maria Madalena Nogueira Pessoa, international correspon-
dence clerk by profession, and Fernando Pessoa, the ortho-heteronymic
poet, to whom the first Pessoa lent (as one might lend a mask) his own
biography. This explains why, by distinction to what occurred with Cae-
iro, Reis and Campos, it was not necessary for Pessoa to re-write that
biography: it had already been written in life, as a textual expression of
his “biographemes.”’7 This latter tendency proceeds from an unqualified
acceptance of the reading of heteronymy as drama.
The analytical direction manifests itself further in the myth of the
‘man who never was,’ elaborated as it is in different ways in the writings
of Almada Negreiros, Jorge da Sena, George Monteiro, or John Wain.
This strange non-existent man has to be understood, as for example in
the schema devised by Jorge da Sena (who was the first to express the
myth in those exact words) as the absent author, whose presence is essen-
tial for Sena, given his understanding of poetry as ‘testimony.’8 As for the
synthesizing tendency, it has led to a theoretical insistence on the deep
unity of the ego, which, in Pessoa’s case, explodes into contradictory
identities. The best example of this theory remains Jacinto do Prado

Coelho’s seminal work, which exposes the need to conceive a substantial
and credible authorial figure – albeit only in effigy – in order to compen-
sate for the intolerable vacuum created by the mechanism of fragmenta-
tion and depersonalization that is the foundation of Pessoa’s work.9
An author can, in fact, be recognized through the medium of the dif-
ferent characters he or she has created, just as, in the case of an actor, a
large part of the pleasure of watching a dramatic performance is observ-
ing the actor’s capacity for metamorphosis, for becoming another. Let us
cite the outstanding example of Marlene Dietrich in Billy Wilder’s Witness
for the Prosecution (1958), in which the plot is founded on Dietrich’s meta-
morphic ability to play two different characters, and its resolution
depends on the audience’s recognition of the identity of the actor who
plays these roles. However, in Pessoa’s work, and in contrast to this mode
of performance, the specific heteronymic effect consists not in the dis-
covery of the identical under the mantle of difference, but in the uncon-
tainable proliferation of differences subsumed under the one name.
In contradiction to the message implied by the nearly identical titles of
two anthologies (both published in 1978) – Visage avec masques (Face
with Masks), one of a number of volumes of Pessoa’s writings edited by
Armand Guibert, and David Mourão-Ferreira’s O Rosto e as máscaras (The
Face and the Masks) – the direction of interpretation arising from the
reading of these and other collections is, first and foremost, that of the
discovery, behind the figure of Pessoa, of others who cannot be con-
flated or confused with him.10 Perhaps a more appropriate title would be
The Mask and the Faces, if, that is, the word ‘mask’ did not too strongly
imply an epistemology of identity. Alternatively, therefore, we might con-
sider the mask as denoting the presence of an absence, or as being the
metaphor for that ‘vácuo-pessoa’ (person-vacuum) that is the centre of
Pessoa’s world.11
The Actor
Portuguese poetry after Pessoa (and after presença, whose authors read
primarily Mário de Sá-Carneiro) was to a great extent affected by the
influence of his texts. The appearance of the inaugural series of volumes
of Pessoa’s poetry, published by Ática from 1942 to 1944, was a decisive
event of those years for poets as diverse as Jorge de Sena, Alexandre
O’Neill, Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen, or Mário Cesariny, in ways
that were, in all these cases, anything but simple.
As an example, Cesariny’s long poem ‘Autoractor,’ published in 1961

in the volume Planisfério e outros poemas (Planisphere and Other Poems),
situates the poet in a theatre.12 There, the entire offstage area is defined
as the space where the actors and the author, who ‘procedem à reverên-
cia’ (take deferential bows), are clearly distinct from one another and
where death proliferates.13 On the contrary, what ‘a cena representa’
(the stage play represents) is a space of limitless imagination, of the ‘fes-
tim’ (feast) and ‘viagem do mar’ (sea voyage).14 In this staged world, the
author and the actor are a single being, the authoractor. Their metamor-
phosis is accompanied, in the final verse of the poem, by a violent out-
burst of metaphorical jubilation: ‘tu pareces a igreja de S. Domingos a
arder’ (you resemble the St. Domingos church burning).15 A perfect syn-
thesis is thus produced, in which the poet is no longer a mere carrier of
images, but himself becomes an image. In this poem about the poet as
actor, the highest possible value is attributed to his acting work: ‘o que se
passa em cena nunca a morte o saberá’ (what happens on stage death
will never know).16 The actor becomes the symbolic embodiment of the
artist in this pure affirmation of their wholeness.
The importance of the theme of author/actor in Cesariny is exempli-
fied in a different manner in the 1985 anthology of Portuguese poetry
edited by Herberto Helder, Edoi Lelia Doura.17 Each of the authors
included in the collection is represented by several poems, which are
sequenced not chronologically but according to a quest for ‘uma possível
organicidade particular’ (a potential particular organicity), thus produc-
ing a new textual unity whose logic derives from the sequencing.18 In this
way, the anthology gains a hermeneutic dimension, since it implies and
produces an interpretation of the anthologized author, as well as a poetic
ambition of its own, given that the arrangement of the poems multiplies
the meanings of each particular text. In this context, the section of Edoi
Lelia Doura dedicated to Cesariny reveals, through the choice and
arrangement of his texts, the importance given by Helder to the issue of
performative authorship. The poem ‘Autoractor’ appears in this selec-
tion and the first text in the sequence, ‘Algumas ligações’ (Some Connec-
tions), from 1963, is none other than the text in which Cesariny set out
the foundations of his surrealist interpretation of Pessoa: ‘os quatro
Fernandos Pessoas são um escândalo ... são o cadáver esquisito da pessoa
humana’ (the four Fernando Pessoas are a scandal ... they’re the exquis-
ite corpse of the human being). According to this reading, heteronymy is
a form of knowledge that encompasses wholeness, the ‘total delirante’
(delirious totality).19 Therefore, Pessoa becomes the inaugural illustra-
tion of Cesariny’s ‘authoractor,’ a poet who treats authors as dramatis per-

sonae and poetry as the stage.
At the same time, Cesariny’s interpretation of Pessoa has to do, above
all, with his own writing. At first, in the 1940s, he illuminated Pessoa’s
texts in the same manner as he read them, in an attitude of ‘louvor e sim-
plificação’ (praise and simplification). Later on, the radical change in
the affective modulation of Cesariny’s reading that took place in 1989,
when Pessoa became for him the object of one of the most virulent sat-
ires ever written in Portuguese – O Virgem Negra (The Black Virgin) – dem-
onstrates, on the one hand, the extent to which Pessoa had evolved into
a foundational reference, but also, on the other, the high degree of
poetic incommunicability that had developed between the surrealist
poetics of profound unity and absolute spontaneity and Pessoa’s poetics
of feigning and multiplication.20 It is significant to note, in this context,
that from a certain point on Cesariny chose to value Teixeira de Pascoaes
over Pessoa, describing the former, with paradoxical accuracy, as a ‘sur-
realista sem o Surrealismo’ (surrealist without surrealism) and explicitly
relating his privileging of Pascoaes to his rejection of Pessoa: ‘Teixeira de
Pascoaes, poeta bem mais importante, quanto a nós, do que Fernando
Pessoa’ (Teixeira de Pascoaes, a poet far more important in our view
than Fernando Pessoa).21
In the final analysis, Pessoa is the inventor of figures that represent dif-
ferent concepts of authorship. This is why the major effect of the reading
of Pessoa’s heteronyms is the propagation of difference, a denial of ‘le
primat d’un original sur la copie, d’un modèle sur l’image’ (the primacy
of an original over the copy, of a model over the image) and an affirma-
tion of ‘le règne des simulacres et des reflets’ (the reign of simulacres
and reflections).22 The variation between Caeiro and Campos, for exam-
ple, is neither stylistic nor thematic, since many of their poetic features
coincide (the free verse, the use of internal rhymes, the influence of
Cesário Verde, the theme of sensation); the change that takes place in
the transition from the one to the other consists less in intrinsic qualities
of their characters than in the figuration of a distinct effect of author-
ship. As Deleuze might have commented, ‘Cela, c’est une idée d’homme
de théâtre’ (This is an idea proper to a man of the theatre).23
At the same time, Pessoa attributed to the word ‘actor’ meanings that
tend to be pejorative. In a 1914 passage – analysed, in this volume, by
Dana Stevens – he noted that ‘[the] basis of acting is misrepresentation’
and that it ‘unites and intensifies, through the material and vital charac-
ter of its manifestations, all the low instincts of the artistic instinct – the
riddle-instinct, the trapeze-instinct, the prostitute-instinct.’24 This com-

mentary could have ended up in Livro do desassossego, which glosses in a
variety of ways the need for discretion and the repudiation of fame, as in
the following fragment: ‘actor – criatura que o bom artista despreza,
moço de esquina da Arte’ (an actor – an errand boy of Art, a figure
despised by any good artist).25 And in a 1919 poem vulgarity is a quality
attributed to actors: ‘vil como um vil actor’ (vile like a vile actor).26
However, the communicative dimension of acting, while contributing
towards its vulgarity – according to the metaphoric terms employed by
Pessoa – also brings out its essentially social nature. This is what prompts
Pessoa’s impeccably lucid affirmation, registered in a fragmentary draft
of a letter to the president of Portugal, which he composed in 1935, that
‘uma nação é um teatro’ (a nation is a theatre) and that no political
leader can avoid being an actor.27 The actor’s function becomes suddenly
invested with even greater prestige in two passages from Livro do desassos-
sego. The first one is an allegory of Pessoa’s own poetic method: ‘um
grande actor, o Verbo, transmuda ritmicamente em substância corpórea
o mistério impalpável do universo’ (a great actor, the Word, rhythmically
transforms into its bodily substance the impalpable mystery of the uni-
verse).28 The second is quasi-confessional: ‘Em mim todas as afeições se
passam à superfície, mas sinceramente. Tenho sido actor sempre, a valer.
Sempre que amei, fingi que amei, e para mim mesmo o finjo’ (All my
affections take place on the surface, but sincerely. I’ve always been an
actor, and in earnest. Whenever I’ve loved I’ve pretended to love, pre-
tending it even to myself.)29 At this point, the meaning of ‘actor’ becomes
‘he who pretends’ and, by metonymic extension, Pessoan fingimento itself.
In closing, I recall Leyla Perrone Moisés’s insight, according to which
Pessoa ‘experimenta a vertigem de assistir, impotente, ao desdobra-
mento da máscara: ele finge que finge que finge’ (undergoes the dizzy-
ing experience of being an impotent observer of the multiplication of
his masks: he feigns that he feigns that he feigns).30 It is important to
stress, with regard to the last quote from Bernardo Soares, that this actor
of written emotions does not merely pretend for the benefit of others,
but also for himself. The possibility of a return to the authorial figure of
the romantic tradition is here completely and definitively negated and
no single identity emerges from under the masks worn by the author.
The persistent desire for unity that haunts critical readings of Pessoa,
from João Gaspar Simões to Eduardo Lourenço to Darlene J. Sadlier, is
impossible to satisfy. Yes, the pretender plays a role for his own benefit.
In Pessoa’s work, the mimetic principle saturates the entire literary space
and the actor becomes the figure of the author, his work defined as a sin-
cere exercise of feigning.
NOTES
In 1980 I played the character of Fernando Pessoa in João Botelho’s film Conversa
acabada (Finished Conversation). It is not easy for me to reflect on this experi-
ence. The film, devised in the years following Portugal’s 25 April Revolution of
1974, took its lead from an atmosphere of freedom and passion that can never be
recreated. Popular revolutions are not an everyday occurrence; besides, over and
above the immediate political and cultural circumstances created by the end of
dictatorship, this was the era of Portugal’s discovery of Pessoa. The time of the
film’s release was just prior to the publication of the first edition of the Livro do
desassossego, which would in short order be elevated, by Bloomian decree, to the
most select canon of international modernism. The year 1980 was, moreover, just
the very beginning of a decade marked by the commemoration of the anniversa-
ries of the birth and death of Pessoa, acts of homage that entailed a tremendous
political and commercial exploitation of information about the poet, along with
the granting of a long-term government subsidy for a critical edition of his works,
the transferral of Pessoa’s mortal remains to the Jerónimos Monastery in Belém,
and the indiscriminate quotation of his words in ceremonies and speeches of
every kind. This last phenomenon began with the forgettable case of the misun-
derstood aphorism ‘a minha pátria é a língua portuguesa’ (my homeland is the
Portuguese language), which, in the democratic context of Portuguese decoloni-
zation and the incipient post-imperial project of Lusofonia, came to acquire the
same symbolic function that had been assigned to Pessoa’s Mensagem (Message)
in the context of the recently deposed dictatorship.
It should also be pointed out that the period of discovery that was then getting
underway was characterized, as well, by the almost immediate repercussion of
Pessoa’s iconization through such media as medallions and commemorative
coins, banknotes, and even household gadgets and haute couture mannequins.
It was a time of seemingly unstoppable crescendo, of the ubiquitous dissemina-
tion of the writer and his renown, the dawn of Pessoa’s assumption of a central
location on the global stage. I must, however, restate my discomfort in reminisc-
ing about this experience. This is not so much due to an actor’s phobia on being
confronted with the consummate greatness of the figure that he, through a priv-
ilege bestowed by mimetic convention, was able to impersonate – a phobia that
brings to mind the exemplary discomfort that led the great actor Sean Connery
to decline to assume, for the umpteenth time, his career-making role as James
Bond. The reason is a more modest one, the recognition that what one sees on a
screen, what constitutes the art of cinema, is not, strictly speaking, the work of an
actor but rather the work of film montage – a text written in image and sound –
authored by a film director. In brief, that representation of Pessoa is not my work.
This seeming truism serves me here as a means of recalling that, as I personally
experienced long ago, the scope of interpretations to which the spectator is led
when watching a film is of a disproportionate nature, conditioned as these inter-
pretations are by all manner of ideological projections and recourse to fantasy. It
might, perhaps, make sense to bring Master Caeiro’s teachings to bear on the
common experience of the cinema-goer who, once ensconced in his or her seat
in that inverse Platonic cave that is a cinema, is to see and hear what the film pre-
sents and see and hear no more than what the film contains. As far as I am
directly concerned, my memories of the shooting of that film do not correspond
to any artistic product. Notwithstanding the friendship going back many years
that connected me with the director of Conversa acabada, the creative work was
his, and it was he, João Botelho, who was able to oversee at liberty the entire pro-
cess of the film’s creation, from the sketching of the storyboards through to the
final cut. This is the key characteristic of the politique d’auteur, the presentation of
the intellectual substance of cinema at the site of the production of forms – not
through the author’s financing position as executive producer, nor through the
film’s cast of actors, nor even through the behind-the-scenes aspects of filming
that can be the focus of the ‘making of’ documentaries, but in that laboratory of
signifying operations that is the editing room. In sum, it is therein that resides
the creation of film as textual form. As regards the actors, they operate within a
framework of physical performance that is devoid of the flow of continuity that
characterizes theatre, and quite removed from the rhetorical exercise of an ora-
tor’s actio. Part supporting role and part homage, my share of the film is the
memory of a cinematographic outcome in which my own work has no particular
relevance.
In any case, speaking briefly and strictly as a viewer of the film, I feel that Con-
versa acabada seeks to achieve a biographical effect through the superimposition
upon facts of readings and cinematic adaptations of texts by Mário de Sá-Car-
neiro and Pessoa, as in the case of the scenes incorporating O Marinheiro (The
Mariner) or A Confissão de Lúcio (Lúcio’s Confession) in their distinct symbolist
or fantastic modes. This is the story of the two authors’ lives and friendship
related to elements taken from their work, or vice versa, without that relationship
articulating any attempted causal explanation. A plot devised on such dialectical
– or Intersectionist – terms ends up signalling a particular, multileveled historical
reality that focuses, especially in the more complex case of Pessoa, on the funda-
mental relation, which this essay attempts to map out, between the figure of the
author and the figures of the authors as they are made up on different planes:
that of the historical and biographical author and that of the authors as fictional
or dramatic characters.
1 Fernando Pessoa, ‘Autopsicografia’ (Autopsychography), published in pre-

sença 36 (November 1932): 9.
2 Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1982).
3 David Mourão-Ferreira, ‘Fernando Pessoa: algumas tácticas de publicação,’
in Fernando Pessoa o Supra-Camões (Lisbon: Academia das Ciências de Lisboa,
1987), 42.
4 Fernando Pessoa, Crítica: Ensaios, artigos e entrevistas, ed. Fernando Cabral
Martins (Lisbon: Assírio & Alvim, 2000).
5 Eduardo Lourenço, Fernando rei da nossa Baviera (Lisbon: Imprensa Nacional
– Casa da Moeda, 1986), 19.
6 Maria Helena Nery Garcez, ‘Quinto Império e Parusia,’ in Sobre as naus da ini-
ciação (São Paulo: UNESP, 1998), 104.
7 José Augusto Seabra, Fernando Pessoa ou o poetodrama (São Paulo: Perspectiva,
1974), 141.
8 Jorge de Sena, ‘Fernando Pessoa, o homem que nunca foi,’ Persona 2 (1978):
27–41.
9 Jacinto do Prado Coelho, Diversidade e unidade em Fernando Pessoa, 6th ed. (Lis-
bon: Verbo, 1980).
10 Fernando Pessoa, Visage avec masques, ed. Armand Guibert (Lausanne: Alfred
Eibel, 1978); Fernando Pessoa, O Rosto e as máscaras, ed. David Mourão-Fer-
reira (Lisbon: Ática, 1978).
11 Fernando Pessoa, Páginas íntimas e de auto-interpretação, ed. Georg Rudolf
Lind and Jacinto do Prado Coelho (Lisbon: Ática, 1966), 60.
12 The poem was later republished in the expanded edition of Cesariny’s Pena
Capital (Lisbon: Assírio & Alvim, 1982), from which I am quoting here.
13 Cesariny, Pena Capital, 107.
14 Cesariny, Pena Capital, 108-10.
17 Herberto Helder, Edoi Lelia Doura, ed. Herberto Helder (Lisbon: Assírio &
Alvim, 1985).
18 Helder, Edoi Lelia Doura, 8.
19 Helder, Edoi Lelia Doura, 201.
20 Mário Cesariny, O Virgem negra (Lisbon: Assírio & Alvim, 1989).
21 Mário Cesariny, ‘Para uma cronologia do surrealismo português’ (1973), in
As mãos na água a cabeça no mar (Lisbon: Assírio & Alvim, 1985), 261.
22 Gilles Deleuze, Différence et répétition (Paris: PUF, 1968), 92.

23 Deleuze, Différence et répétition, 16.
24 Fernando Pessoa, Páginas de estética e de teoria e crítica literárias, ed. Georg
Rudolf Lind and Jacinto do Prado Coelho (Lisbon: Ática, 1973), 114.
25 Livro do desassossego, ed. Richard Zenith (Lisbon: Assírio & Alvim, 1998), 285.
The Book of Disquiet, ed. and trans. Richard Zenith (New York: Penguin, 2003),
256.
26 ‘Alfonso Costa, o traidor,’ in Pessoa inédito, ed. Teresa Rita Lopes (Lisbon:
Horizonte, 1993), 351.
27 Pessoa inédito, 374.
30 Leyla Perrone-Moisés, Fernando Pessoa: Aquém do Eu, além do Outro, 3rd ed.
(São Paulo: Martins Fontes, 2001), 26.
Automatic Romance: Pessoa’s Mediumistic
Writings as Sexual Theatre
ri ch ar d zenit h
Fernando Pessoa, interested from a young age in hermetic religious tra-

ditions and the occult sciences, seems to have been initiated into spirit-
ism when living with his Aunt Anica, between 1912 and 1914.1 This aunt,
in whose home there were family seances, was an adept of automatic writ-
ing, whose original form might better be termed mediumistic writing, to
distinguish it from the French surrealist practice of writing directly out
of the subconscious. It may be that all automatic writing is ultimately a
subconscious expression, but the practitioners of the spiritist school pur-
portedly receive, through their writing hand, communications from the
dead. In Pessoa’s case these communications, which he began to receive
shortly before turning twenty-eight, were concerned largely with his non-
existent love life and, more specifically, with his virginity and how to cure
it.
The several hundred sheets of mediumistic writings left by Pessoa,
which have only recently begun to be published, are a gold mine for sex-
ual psychoanalyses, and this essay will indicate some of the lodes that
could be explored, but the main focus will be on their ‘psychodramatic’
use – not on what Pessoa ‘really’ was deep down, but on his strategies for
hiding and/or mediating what he was, and for gaining a comfortable dis-
tance from it.2 When he described his life’s work as ‘a drama divided into
people instead of into acts,’ Pessoa was referring to his creation of the
heteronyms, whose function seems to have been partly to live what their
author only dreamed of.3 Alberto Caeiro, residing in the Ribatejo coun-
tryside, may have compensated for emphatically urban Pessoa’s lack of
such an experience, and it is a known fact that Pessoa planned, at various
times, to visit and even to take up residence in Britain, where Álvaro de
Campos supposedly lived after finishing his studies in Scotland. The het-
Pessoa’s Mediumistic Writings as Sexual Theatre 259
eronyms, all of them bachelors, had girlfriends and, in several cases, boy
lovers, but these amorous figures were always ethereal, the love relation-
ships mere abstractions. Pessoa’s mediumistic writings, I maintain, are
more self-theatralization, dealing with a problem – the sexual problem –
that the heteronyms were unable to resolve.
Pessoa, who considered himself to be ‘essencialmente ... dramaturgo’
(essentially ... a dramatist)4 and his life to be a ‘cena nua onde passam
vários actores representando várias peças’ (empty stage where various
actors act out various plays),5 was the first to admit, or rather, to vaunt,
that he was a fingidor – a pretender, forger, feigner, faker – a condition
that he considered indispensable for all worthwhile artistic creation. But
when or where, if ever, did Pessoa separate his art from his life? His most
succinct and most famous ars poetica, which is itself a poem, seems also, in
light of its title and third stanza, to be an ars vitae:
Autopsychography
The poet is a faker

Who’s so good at his act
He even fakes the pain
Of pain he feels in fact.
And those who read his words

Will feel in his writing
Neither of the pains he has
But just the one they’re missing.
And so around its track

This thing called the heart winds,
A little clockwork train
To entertain our minds.6
The poem’s at-first-glance recherché title turns out to be astonishingly

apt, for when we consider the three definitions for ‘psychography’
offered by Webster’s Third International Dictionary, it would seem that the
lexicographer who drew them up had Pessoa’s case in mind:
1 Automatic writing for spiritualistic purposes. Though not directly relevant

to the poem, this definition reminds us of the importance of automatic
writing for Pessoa and of how virtually all his writing was in a sense for
260 Richard Zenith
spiritualistic purposes. Whether automatically generated or not, Pessoa’s

prose and poetry were tools as well as offspring of an ongoing inquiry
into his own self and into the mystery of existence, whose spiritual
aspects interested him increasingly as he grew older. His sprawling,
unfinished Fausto,7 which he worked on throughout his adult life, is the
frankest embodiment of that enquiry, but we also clearly see it in The
Book of Disquiet, in the orthonymic poetry, in the poetry attributed to
Álvaro de Campos, in his ‘static’ dramas such as O marinheiro (The Mari-
ner)8, and in his metaphysically inclined short stories.9
2 The production of images of spirits upon sensitive plates without the use of a
camera, held to be accomplished by means of spiritualistic forces. Changing the
terms a bit – if we take Pessoa’s manuscripts to be ‘sensitive plates’ – this
definition could apply to the poet’s invention of the heteronyms, for he
claimed that their existence depended in part on mysterious forces out-
side his control, he acting as a passive vehicle not only for their literary
output but also for their spontaneous emergence. Heteronymy, Pessoa
would have us believe, was itself a form of automatic writing.10
3 Description of an individual’s mental characteristics and their development:

psychological biography. This definition is the most obviously pertinent one
to Pessoa’s signature poem. Adding to it the ‘auto’ of the poem title, we
get ‘psychological autobiography.’
There are about thirty published translations of the poem ‘Autop-

sicografia’ into English, including several that are titled ‘Self-analysis,’
which has the advantage (if it is an advantage) of ready intelligibility. But
Pessoa had a good reason for rejecting the commonplace ‘auto-análise’
in favour of the word he chose, which is as rare in Portuguese as ‘autop-
sychography’ is in English. In his expository writings Pessoa, like Thomas
Aquinas, was fond of offering three arguments, three examples, three
reasons why, and the word ‘autopsychography’ breaks down into three
vital parts: auto + psycho + graphy. Or, shifting from Greek to Anglo-
Saxon roots: self + soul/inner life + writing. The problem with ‘Self-anal-
ysis’ is that it leaves out ‘writing,’ the third member in Pessoa’s personal
trinity, and it is the member on which, like a desperate gambler, he ulti-
mately bet everything. ‘Ultimately’ here means towards the end of his
life, when – after a half-hearted replay, in late 1929, of the less-than-
steamy romance he carried on in 1920 with Ophelia Queiroz – Pessoa
seems to have completely given up on love and on whatever vague fanta-
sies of forming a family he may have harboured. He even gave up hoping

for fame in his lifetime, holding out instead for literary immortality.11
By April 1931, when Pessoa wrote ‘Autopsychography,’ the ‘thing
called the heart’ was treated as a mere mental entertainment. And in a
letter to his future biographer, written four months earlier, he stated that
sexual desires are ‘a hindrance to superior mental processes,’ for which
reason he had long ago ‘eliminated’ them from his system ‘by the simple
expedient of expressing them intensely.’12
I took this affirmation as my starting point for an essay titled ‘Fernando
Pessoa’s Gay Heteronym?’, which was concerned not simply to trace
homosexual elements in Pessoa’s writing but to show that his claim to
have eliminated sexual desire from his life once and for all was false; it
continually asserted itself and was continually repressed, being sublimated
in his writing.13 In the present essay I will argue that it was not always Pes-
soa’s clear intention to relegate sex to the literary domain. I will assemble
evidence to show that Pessoa also tried to ‘get a life,’ as the expression
goes – a real, physical, sexual love life.
The intense expression of sexual desires that allegedly resulted in their
elimination by catharsis was, according to the cited letter, a two-step pro-
cess that began with ‘Epithalamium,’ a long and mildly pornographic,
heterosexual poem written in 1913, and ended with ‘Antinous,’ a long
and less explicit, homosexual poem written in 1915.14 Both poems were
written in English. With verses such as ‘And hairy legs and buttocks balled
to split / White legs mid which they shift’ and ‘Look how she likes with
something in her heart / To feel her hand work the protruded dart!’, we
might wonder if ‘Epithalamium’ was not an attempt to stimulate rather
than eliminate whatever heterosexual desires Pessoa may have had. The
very different ‘Antinous,’ in which Emperor Hadrian pines over the
corpse of his boy lover drowned in the Nile, is a poem not about sex but
about an indomitable love – it is the most poignant love poem Pessoa
wrote – and seems clearly to be a sublimation of desire, perhaps (as Pessoa
contended) with a view towards its elimination. But the ploy did not work.
In the fall of 1915, Pessoa kept a diary in which he recounted, among
other things, his visits to the Hotel Avenida Palace, where his ‘Aunt’ Lis-
bela (in fact a second cousin from Tavira, in the Algarve) was staying for
several weeks. On 29 November Pessoa recorded, in English, that he had
‘made eyes with a rather interesting girl, who seemed to like me. Felt
myself agreeable to them (her and perhaps a sister), though I said little
... The Emperor, alas! ...’ The next day we find him back at the hotel
‘making still more eyes (and exchanging) with the girl (17 years old,
262 Richard Zenith
excellent)’ and talking more easily with her. The entry closes with
another ‘Alas!’ Two days later, after another encounter with the same
girl, Pessoa wrote that ‘the thing was agreeable but the Emperor inner-
ness caused a great unrest. I think the girl wondered at my slowness ...
Came away at 12½ and went home in part along Avenida, in very strong
depression.’15 From other diary entries, in which Pessoa reads like a ner-
vous teenager, it seems clear that he felt relieved when his meetings with
the ‘excellent’ girl came to an end. But if the girl was a teenager, Pessoa
was not; he was twenty-seven years old. So what was the problem? It was
the Emperor – alas! – whose name was Hadrian, and the Emperor’s
‘innerness,’ which seems to be more code language, for sexual inversion.
Pessoa obviously wanted to be a ‘normal,’ practising heterosexual but
could not, as it were, rise to the occasions that presented themselves,
either because he was too timid and uncertain of himself, or because he
was not a heterosexual. (The question of Pessoa’s sexual orientation is
not an immediate focus of this paper, but as we explore our topic or
indeed almost any topic concerning Pessoa’s heteronymy, his recourse to
masks, his obsessive literariness, and his preference for a kind of meta-
existence, we are bound to feel that question rumbling, like a seismic
tremor, under our feet.) A few months after his failure with the girl in
the hotel, Pessoa took his problem to the astral realm. According to the
aforementioned letter to his Aunt Anica, Pessoa’s first contact with a
dead spirit occurred in March 1916, when his uncle Manuel Gualdino da
Cunha, who died in 1898, signed his name through Pessoa’s hand.16 This
was followed by sporadic communications containing ‘numbers ...
Masonic and Kabbalistic signs, occult symbols and the like.’
By his twenty-eighth birthday, on 13 June 1916, Pessoa was carrying on
an intense exchange with spirits from the astral world. The communica-
tions he received were usually in English, occasionally in Portuguese, and
much more rarely in French or even Latin. Pessoa’s most assiduous astral
correspondent had existed in real life as Henry More (1614–87), a poet,
Rosicrucian, and one of the so-called Cambridge Platonists. The second
most frequent communicator, called simply Wardour, also wrote poetry,
including a collaborative effort with Pessoa,17 and cast a few horo-
scopes.18 There was one malefic spirit, the Voodooist, who also signed
himself as Joseph Balsamo, the original name (Giuseppe Balsamo, to be
exact) of Count Alessandro di Cagliostro (1743–95), a celebrated spiritist
in the French court who was eventually exposed as a charlatan.
Pessoa posed questions, which the spirits would answer through his
writing hand, usually in a childish script. Some questions dealt with prac-
tical matters – whether Pessoa should change residence, whether he

should embark on a given business venture – and others had to do with
his literary life, but the vast majority of astral dialogues were concerned
with Pessoa’s sex life, or lack thereof. The spirits warned their subject
that he was not cut out for a monastic existence and that chastity would
be ultimately prejudicial to his literary ambitions. Besides exhorting Pes-
soa to lose his virginity as quickly as possible, the spirits acted as match-
makers, predicting that he would meet various paramours, who are
described in some detail and occasionally named.
Some time before 1920 Pessoa wrote notes for an essay, ‘A Case of
Mediumship,’ in which he denied the validity of his ‘pretended commu-
nications with diverse spirits’ via automatic writing.19 Yet he continued to
write automatically until at least 1930. Having debunked the spiritual
dimension of this practice, Pessoa apparently still valued it for therapeu-
tic reasons, either as a means of psychological exploration or simply as a
way to relax and have some fun. Or had he always been aware that it was,
at some level, a game of pretend, and that the ‘diverse spirits’ were all
him, in dialogue with himself?
Whatever the case, the vast majority of Pessoa’s mediumistic writings
date from 1916–17. The spiritual battling over Pessoa’s soul (with the
Voodooist pitted against More and his colleagues) might well reflect psy-
chological and emotional conflict, but this was really just a sideshow. The
main drama was not about good vs evil but about sex vs chastity, manli-
ness vs effeminacy, marriage and copulation vs. bachelorhood and mas-
turbation. The ‘good spirits’ – Henry More, Wardour, Henry Lovell, a
Portuguese spirit named Sousa, and a few others – are rather unanimous
in their verdict on Pessoa, in their warnings and recommendations, and
in the encouragement they offer him.
The verdict on Pessoa is that he is guilty of being a virgin. In a commu-
nication received on 2 July 1916, virginity, or the ‘monastic life,’ is equated
with ‘wavering,’ ‘moral instability,’ and ‘weakness of will and of moral pur-
pose’ (#15).20 In an astral missive received two weeks earlier, on 28 June,
Henry More accuses his spiritual charge of being a masturbator and there-
fore not a real man, since a ‘man who masturbates himself is not a strong
man, and no man is man who is not a lover’ (#9). The case against Pessoa
is stated most unabashedly when one of the spirits writes in a rage: ‘You
masturbator! You masochist! You man without manhood! ... You man
without a man’s prick! You man with a clitoris instead of a prick!’ (#24).
The problem seems to be that ‘[n]ot many women appeal’ to Pessoa
(#8). Henry More, mincing no words, refers to Pessoa’s ‘aversion to
264 Richard Zenith
women’ (#60). Another communication cautions: ‘Lusts never sow sane

aspirations. You must sample sex associating with some amorous girl.
Never sample sex in man’ (#57). Here ‘lust’ seems to be tantamount to
masturbation, and there is a suggestion that women are not the object of
Pessoa’s masturbatory lust.
Álvaro de Campos, who was an occasional thorn in Pessoa’s relation-
ship with Ophelia, having at one point written her a letter recommend-
ing that she ‘deite [a] imagem mental [de Fernando Pessoa] na pia’
(throw [her] mental image [of Pessoa] down the toilet),21 is named in
several astral communications, being curiously defined by a spirit who
signs himself George Henry Morse as ‘an artificial elemental in a mortal
condition’ (#26). Henry More, on the other hand, accuses Pessoa of
‘pandering to “Álvaro de Campos’s” whims,’ with the result that he works
with ‘less ardor’ (#41). This reference to Pessoa’s work life is preceded
and followed, in the same communication, by references to his love life,
for which the rambunctious naval engineer is perhaps also seen as a sap-
per of energy. We should not underestimate Pessoa’s ability to experi-
ence love vicariously (and hence dispense with living it in his own flesh)
through the most vivacious and sexually expressive of the heteronyms.
Make-believe is a children’s specialty, and Pessoa retained, as an adult, a
childlike playfulness that sometimes embarrassed his relatives.22
The spirits’ advice to their troubled disciple is simple: he must get rid
of his virginity as soon as possible. They employ various rationales to con-
vince him that virginity is undesirable, the most obvious one being that it
is antisocial or, rather, anti-society, since ‘[m]onastic life is for monaster-
ies’ (#27). Chastity may be a virtue for certain men, but not for Pessoa,
whose psychological constitution is not cut out for that sort of privation.
Sexual abstinence, in his case, is a threat to his mental stability: ‘No tem-
perament like yours can manage to keep chastity [sic] and sane emotion-
ally. Keeping chastity is for stronger men’ (#9). What this seems to mean
is that physiological chastity is too great a violence for his decidedly
unchaste ‘temperament’ to bear. He has a dirty mind, in other words, as
the frequent references to Pessoa’s masturbatory habits confirm. Mastur-
bation, in fact, is a leit motif in the writings of Pessoa, who at one point
makes this telling observation: ‘[o] desdobramento do eu é um fenó-
meno em grande número de casos de masturbação’ (the multiplication
of the I is a frequent phenomenon in cases of masturbation).23 One of
the books in Pessoa’s library, titled Amativeness: The Master Passion of Life:
How to Control It, How to Direct it for your Good, by one E.G. Stanley, is
largely taken up by stern warnings about the ill effects of masturbation.24
Pessoa probably was not worried about going blind, but it was a com-
monly accepted notion that ‘self-abuse’ could affect one’s mental equi-
librium and even cause insanity.
If chastity is bad for Pessoa’s mental health, it is also injurious to his
spiritual well-being. In one of his longest communications, Henry More
writes that ‘[m]arriage is to be understood as a sacrament of regression
to God ... [M]arriage is a welding still, but the things welded are the man
and the woman of the same man – the man being the 3 and the woman
the 4 in the complete 7 of the Nature where numbers are living and enti-
fied’ (#56). Henry More further explains that sexual union on earth is
necessary for a man to be ‘married monadically to that part of him that
was lost before this world began.’ The one sort of marriage is a counter-
part to the other. Only by sexually joining himself to a woman can Pessoa
hope to be a complete man, at all levels.
But the warning most liable to cut to the quick of Pessoa’s heart is that
his writing will suffer if he remains a virgin. Henry More, Pessoa’s self-
proclaimed spiritual master, issues the following ultimatum on 28 June
1916: ‘You must not maintain chastity [any] more. You are so misogy-
nous that you will find yourself morally impotent, and in that way you will
not produce any complete work in literature. You must abandon your
monastic life and now’ (#9). One of Pessoa’s oft-stated frustrations was
precisely that he failed to produce many complete works of literature. This
frustration was embodied in the Baron of Teive, probably the last heter-
onym to emerge, in 1928. The baron, exasperated at his inability to write
more than fragmentary, disconnected prose pieces, burns them all in the
fireplace and resolves to commit suicide. First, however, he puts pen to
paper to explain why he was unable to achieve finished literary works,
but even this explanation, titled A Educação do estóico (The Education of the
Stoic) and subtitled ‘A impossibilidade de fazer arte superior’ (The
Impossibility of Producing Superior Art), is left as a bunch of fragments
without a conclusion.25 Significantly, the baron also suffers from impo-
tence. He never feels sufficiently aroused to have sexual relations with
women, not even with the maids at his country estate, who would jump at
the chance to go to bed with their aristocratic boss. To judge by the
baron’s twin tragedy, as well as by Henry More’s ominous warning, Pes-
soa feared that his failure to be a complete person socially, amorously,
and sexually could be detrimental to his creative work.
And wasn’t his fear justified? Isn’t it true that his writing suffered
severe limitations due to his social and amative inexperience? It is doubt-
ful, for instance, that he could ever have written an even halfway credible
266 Richard Zenith
novel. He attempted dozens of short stories and plays, but they thrive on
ideas rather than on real-life feelings and action, and they do not thrive
very well: virtually all of them were left unfinished, and the scenes and
episodes that he wrote tend to be limp, the characters flat.
The astral spirits’ insistence on Pessoa’s need to meet a lady and make
love to her is complemented by their heartening predictions that he will
do just that. Pessoa can continue to be his passive self, since fate will take
care of everything. ‘Wait. Nothing but fate can bring her near. Keep pas-
sive. Events are active.’ So writes a spirit on 1 July 1916 (#14), confirming
what had been communicated to Pessoa two days earlier.
‘She is pushed on to you by events. She is herself an event in your life’
(#10). Pessoa will meet his woman through another man, at a ‘massing’
or ‘soirée’ in someone’s house; the woman, whom he has never seen
before, will ‘appear in due time’; she is a virgin, ‘just as you are,’ but no
need to worry, for ‘[i]t will all be simpler than you suppose,’ and it is at
any rate useless to resist (#2, #8, #1, #6, #9).
The spirits are not very consistent about the timing and the place of
this life-changing meeting – now promising that it will occur the next
day, now in two weeks’ time, two months’ time, or on some specified
date, at the house of his cousin, or at a literary meeting, or at a doctor’s
office – but the meeting, and the subsequent ‘mating’ (as it is called in
various communications), are bound to take place, since Pessoa is ‘a
man who is monadically married already’ (#28). The fact of monadical
marriage takes precedence, according to Pessoa’s spiritual correspon-
dents, over earthly marriage. In fact they stress that he need not, or per-
haps should not, marry. As one communication (#27) puts it: ‘Marry her
is not marry her in a church or before a registry officer, but marry her
means copulate.’ There are various predictions of Pessoa having mis-
tresses, affairs, women who live with him, and even children (three boys,
born by three different mothers [#32]), but not of his actually taking
anyone to the altar. ‘You are to be a married man,’ explains a communi-
cation from 1917 (#58), ‘[b]ut not wedded.’
If these predictions suggest that it is fine for Pessoa to be passive, since
there is no fighting fate, they are also a form of encouragement, in the
most literal sense of that word: investing with courage. They say, in effect,
that ‘fate is on your side, a woman is waiting for you around the corner,
open up your eyes, there she is, grab her.’ But Pessoa does not seem to
have taken any action until late 1919, when he met Ophelia Queiroz, sev-
eral years after the astral avalanche of pep-talking and reassuring predic-
tions (at least 90 per cent of the communications date from 1916 to 1917).
The astral spirits not only assured Pessoa that a woman was in his near
future, they painted the portrait of a woman who would presumably have
been to his liking. The darling who would deflower Pessoa or, as one com-
munication has it, ‘assist you to manhood’ (#70), was ‘a masculine type of
girl’ (#9), ‘a man in her mighty power of command’ (#8), an ‘immensely
masculine’ woman who ‘will make you submit’ (#9). Endowed with ‘mas-
sive will power,’ she ‘seeks men for her masturbation’ and ‘must make
[Pessoa] her slave’ (#16). If we combine this portrait of the woman who
would succeed in seducing Pessoa with his automatically stated ‘aversion
to women’ (referred to above), it is hard not to wonder if Pessoa’s sexual
problem was more than mere shyness and ineptitude.
We may also wonder if the sexual theatre, rather than actually encour-
aging Pessoa, merely acted as a surrogate for the real thing. In fact the
predictions were impossibly specific. The femme fatale was described, in
the early communications, not only as an amateur poet (#1) but as one
who ‘was educated in France and England’ and who ‘masks her poetry
with a pseudonym’(#2). Another early communication describes her as
an actress (#18). Some months later Pessoa – or the astral spirits writing
through him – lowered his, or their, sights. The woman who would ini-
tiate Pessoa sexually was described as a governess and, a bit later, as a
farmer’s daughter. Had the predictions stopped there, Pessoa could con-
ceivably have felt motivated to cruise the housemaids who were a regular
feature of middle-to upper-middle-class households in Lisbon and who
sometimes were indeed daughters of farmers or farm workers. But the
farmer’s daughter was said to live in Carnaxide (#71), an outlying sub-
urb, and the governess worked for a woman named Dona Maria Mon-
teiro (#37). The governess, furthermore, was named Nora Harding
Davis (#36, #37), presumably English and not corresponding to a real
person. It seems unlikely that Pessoa thought he would meet women to
match these specifics (and communication #39 informs him that the
governess’s name is after all not Nora Harding Davis), though it is under-
standable that they excited his imagination. If, as mentioned above, he
considered sexual desire ‘a hindrance to superior mental processes,’ he
seems (judging by several of his alter egos) to have been affectively
moved and sexually aroused by unintellectual, working-class people. Ber-
nardo Soares, in The Book of Disquiet, feels a ‘simpatia espontânea’ (spon-
taneous rapport) and ‘fraternidade’ (camaraderie) with restaurant
waiters, barbers and delivery boys, and he has to hold back tears when
the office boy quits the fabric warehouse to return to his home town.26
Álvaro de Campos, on the other hand, speculates that he might be happy
268 Richard Zenith
if he married his washwoman’s daughter (in the penultimate stanza of

‘Tabacaria’ [The Tobacco Shop]). Nora Harding Davis, besides being
working class, had the added attraction of being English, a language and
culture that Pessoa missed and cherished.
Pessoa spent a lot of his automatic ink on two women in particular who
were supposed to change his monastic ways: Margaret Mansel and Olga
de Medeiros. The latter woman was identified as the niece of a business-
man who worked on the Rua Augusta and who was at least marginally
known by Pessoa (#49). Born, according to one of Henry More’s longer
communications (#55), on the island of São Miguel, in the Azores, on 10
October 1898, Olga Maria Tavares de Medeiros was destined to ‘make
copulation with’ Pessoa, in 1917. As it happens, a woman by the same
name and born in São Miguel actually existed, but she was born four
years earlier, and on 25 September.27 Though his facts were a bit inaccu-
rate, Henry More, in his communications, was ‘revealing’ personal infor-
mation on Olga de Medeiros (her full name, place of birth, her
relationship to the businessman from the Rua Augusta) that Pessoa
apparently already knew. More also indicated several ways in which his
disciple would make her acquaintance (e.g., in a doctor’s office, on 12
June [#60]), but Pessoa in all likelihood had already seen her, and per-
haps even vaguely knew her. Was his automatic writing a way of stalling,
of putting the burden of love’s meeting on fate, so as not to have to take
action?
Margaret Mansel was identified as Pessoa’s ‘monadic’ wife (#24, #28),
whose somatic incarnation was to become his mistress on earth, but this
was all, according to Pessoa’s own later admission, the fruit of his mind’s
invention.28 Did ‘monadic marriage’ represent a real hope of a corre-
sponding physical union, or did it in a certain way obviate, or at least
minimize, the need for earthly love? Whatever the case, Pessoa surely
had no expectation of meeting this woman he invented (or her somatic
incarnation), and we may doubt that he really wanted to have a relation-
ship with Olga Medeiros. What would be the point? He had lived it all
out in his automatic theatre, in accord with the modus vivendi of Ber-
nardo Soares, his semi-heteronym (so called because his personality was
not different from Pessoa’s, just a ‘mutilated’ version of it):29
O meu ideal seria viver tudo em romance, repousando na vida – ler as min-
has emoções, viver o meu desprezo delas. Para quem tenha a imaginação à
flor da pele, as aventuras de um protagonista de romance são emoção
própria bastante, e mais, pois que são dele e nossas. Não há grande aven-
tura como ter amado Lady Macbeth, com amor verdadeiro e directo; que
tem que fazer que[m] assim amou senão, por descanso, não amar nesta vida
ninguém?
[My ideal would be to live everything through novels and to use real life for
resting up – to read my emotions and to live my disdain of them. For some-
one with a keen and sensitive imagination, the adventures of a fictional pro-
tagonist are genuine emotion enough, and more, since they are experienced
by us as well as the protagonist. No greater romantic adventure exists than
to have loved Lady Macbeth with true and directly felt love. After a love like
that, what can one do but take a rest, not loving anyone in the real world?]30
For Fernando Pessoa, permeated with a horrified disdain, or disdain-

ful horror, of love in the real world, automatic writing was, like the heter-
onyms, an avoidance strategy, a way to live without living. When, in 1920,
he first declared his affections for Ophelia Queiroz, it was with a candle
in hand and the words used by Hamlet to declare himself to his
Ophelia.31 Pessoa’s only sweetheart was, I contend, a species of counter-
heteronym, a real-life character with whom he lived a fiction.
NOTES
1 João Gaspar Simões, in Vida e obra de Fernando Pessoa, 6th ed. (Lisbon: Dom
Quixote, 1991), 338–42, wrote that it was Pessoa’s Aunt Anica who introduced
him to spiritistic practices. In his riposte to that biography, Eduardo Freitas da
Costa, a second cousin of Pessoa, claimed it was the other way around
(Fernando Pessoa: Notas a uma biografia romanceada [Lisboa: Guimarães, 1951],
160–2). Whichever the case, the aunt (and her daughter Maria) evidently
caught on more quickly, for in the letter Pessoa wrote her on 24 June 1916, he
recalls how he was ‘um elemento atrasador nas sessões semiespíritas que
fazíamos’ (basically a hindrance in the quasi-seances we used to hold) and
tells her that his automatic writing, only recently begun, ‘não é nada que se
pareça com a escrita automática da Tia Anica ou da Maria – uma narrativa,
uma série de respostas em linguagem coerente’ (is nothing like yours or
Maria’s automatic writing, which comes out as a smooth narrative, a series of
answers in coherent language). Fernando Pessoa, Correspondência 1905–1922,
ed. Manuela Parreira da Silva (Lisbon: Assírio & Alvim, 1998), 217–18; The
Selected Prose of Fernando Pessoa, ed. and trans. Richard Zenith (New York:
Grove, 2001), 99–100.
270 Richard Zenith
2 In Fernando Pessoa, Escritos autobiográficos, automáticos e de reflexão pessoal, ed.

Richard Zenith (Lisbon: Assírio & Alvim, 2003), 207–331. A shorter selection
had previously been published in Selected Prose, 103–20.
3 This and all unidentified translations are my own. The phrase, which in Por-
tuguese reads ‘um drama em gente, em vez de em actos,’ is from Pessoa’s
‘Tábua Bibliográfica’, presença 17 (December 1928), republished in Pessoa,
Crítica: Ensaios, artigos e entrevistas, ed. Fernando Cabral Martins (Lisbon:
Assírio & Alvim, 1999), 404–7, and elsewhere.
4 Pessoa, Correspondência 1923–1935, ed. Manuela Parreira da Silva (Lisbon:
Assírio & Alvim, 1999), 350; Selected Prose, 263.
5 Pessoa, Livro do desassossego, ed. Richard Zenith, 4th ed. (Lisbon: Assírio &
Alvim, 2003) 284; The Book of Disquiet, ed. and trans. Richard Zenith (New
York: Penguin, 2003), 254. See also ‘Aspects,’ in Selected Prose, 1–5.
6 Fernando Pessoa, A Little Larger Than the Entire Universe: Selected Poems, ed. and
trans. Richard Zenith (New York: Penguin, 2006), 314.
7 Most of the passages written for the work were collected in Fausto: Tragédia
subjectiva, ed. Teresa Sobral Cunha (Lisbon: Presença, 1988).
8 Pessoa, Obra poética, ed. Maria Aliete Galhoz (Rio de Janeiro: Nova Aguilar,
1987), 609–19; Selected Prose, 18–34.
9 Largely unfinished and as yet largely unpublished, Pessoa’s many short sto-
ries were less concerned with plot and character than with directly philosoph-
ical and existential questions. A few of these stories have been published, in
Pessoa, Obras em prosa, ed. Cleonice Berardinelli (Rio de Janeiro: Nova Agui-
lar, 1974), and elsewhere.
10 In an unfinished preface to his heteronymic works titled ‘Aspectos’ (Aspects)
Pessoa refers to himself as a ‘medium’ of the heteronyms and affirms that
‘[n]em esta obra, nem as que se lhe seguirão têm nada que ver com quem as
escreve ... Como se lhe fosse ditado, escreve’ (neither this work nor those to
follow have anything to do with the man who writes them ... He writes as if he
were being dictated to). Obras em prosa, 82; Selected Prose, 2. In his celebrated
letter of 13 January 1935 to Adolfo Casais Monteiro, Pessoa, writing about the
so-called triumphal day of his life, 8 March 1914, reports in the first place that
he wrote, as if in a trance (‘numa espécie de êxtase’), more than thirty poems
from O guardador de rebanhos (The Keeper of Sheep), an experience that was fol-
lowed by ‘o aparecimento de alguém em mim, a quem dei desde logo o nome
de Alberto Caeiro’ (the appearance in me of someone whom I instantly
named Alberto Caeiro). Correspondência 1923–35, 343; Selected Prose, 256. See
also the preface to Ficções do interlúdio (Fictions of the Interlude), in Pessoa,
Obras em prosa, 85–6, and in Selected Prose, 311–13.
11 Between 1929 and 1931 Pessoa wrote a number of fragments for an ambitious
essay in English titled Erostratus, in which he argued that literary genius can
never be recognized in its own generation. This meant, of course, that his
own lack of such recognition made him a good candidate for posthumous
immortality. This and a shorter, related essay by Pessoa were published, in a
bilingual edition, as Heróstrato e a busca da imortalidade, ed. Richard Zenith
(Lisbon: Assírio & Alvim, 2000). Excerpts from the essay can be found in
Selected Prose, 202–12.
12 ‘Como estes elementos ... são um certo estorvo para alguns processos mentais
superiores, decidi, por duas vezes, eliminá-los pelo processo simples de os
exprimir intensamente.’ The letter, dated 18 November 1930, can be found
in Correspondência 1923–1935, 219–21.
13 Richard Zenith, ‘Fernando Pessoa’s Gay Heteronym?’ in Lusosex: Gender and
Sexuality in the Portuguese-Speaking World, ed. Susan Canty Quinlan and
Fernando Arenas (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 35–56.
14 Both poems were published in Pessoa, Poesia inglesa, ed. Luísa Freire (Lisbon:
Assírio & Alvim, 2000), 80–135, and elsewhere.
15 Escritos autobiográficos, 168–70.
16 This uncle, married to Pessoa’s favourite great-aunt, Maria, accompanied Pes-
soa and his mother on the voyage that took them, in January of 1896, to Dur-
ban, South Africa, where her second husband, João Miguel Rosa, had
recently been appointed Portugal’s consul.
17 Teresa Rita Lopes, Pessoa por conhecer (Lisbon: Estampa, 1990), 2:289–90.
18 In the envelope of the Pessoa archives marked ‘Sinais 5.’ Unpublished.
19 Escritos autobiográficos, 333–9.
20 All citations from Pessoa’s automatic writings were written by him in (occa-
sionally flawed) English and are taken from Escritos autobiográficos. The num-
bers in parentheses are those assigned to the eighty separate
‘communications’ that comprise the book’s middle section, ‘Comunicações
Mediúnicas’ (207–331).
21 In the letter dated 25 September 1929. Pessoa, Correspondência 1923–1935,
164; Selected Prose, 142.
22 His half-brother João Maria Nogueira Rosa, for instance, recalled some
rather disconcerting antics that occurred in 1920, when the siblings and their
newly widowed mother lived together for several months in Lisbon. Pessoa
would act drunk in the neighbourhood where they lived, staggering on the
sidewalk and swinging around lampposts. Or he would stop in the middle of
a busy street, announce that he was an ibis, and start balancing on one foot
while extending the other behind him in the air and sticking a hand forward
in imitation of the bird’s beak. ‘Fernando Pessoa – Como eu o conheci’
(translation of a lecture, ‘Fernando Pessoa – As I Knew Him,’ delivered at the
272 Richard Zenith
University of Wales College of Cardiff in 1968). Ocidente 87: 379 (November

1969): 227–36.
23 Pessoa por conhecer, 2:477; Selected Prose, 237.
24 London: Health & Vim Publishing, undated.
25 The fragments were collected in Pessoa (Barão de Teive), A Educação do
estóico, ed. Richard Zenith (Lisboa: Assírio & Alvim, 1999). Translated into
English as The Education of the Stoic, ed. and trans. Richard Zenith (Cam-
bridge, MA: Exact Change, 2005).
26 Livro do desassossego, 61, 270–1; The Book of Disquiet, 27, 240–1.
27 I owe this information to José Blanco and to his friend Augusto de Athayde,
who ran a search (at Blanco’s request) on the name Olga Maria Tavares de
Medeiros at the public library of Ponta Delgada, in São Miguel.
28 Escritos autobiográficos, 335 (in the aforementioned ‘A Case of Mediumship’).
29 As stated in Pessoa’s letter of 13 January 1935 to Adolfo Casais Monteiro. Cor-
respondência 1923–1935, 346; Selected Prose, 258–9.
30 Livro do desassossego, 320; The Book of Disquiet, 290–1.
31 Reported by Ophelia Queiroz in an interview published in Cartas de amor de
Fernando Pessoa, ed. David Mourão-Ferreira and Maria da Graça Queiroz (Lis-
bon: Ática, 1978), 23.
Antonio Tabucchi in Search of Pessoa’s
Heteronymous Body
fr anc e sc a b i l l i a n i
Introduction
The Italian novelist, critic, and translator Antonio Tabucchi often popu-
lates his works with representations of Fernando Pessoa, thereby creating
a metanarrative space in which the concept of authorial identity is chal-
lenged.1 More precisely, the Portuguese poet, portrayed as both a high
modernist and a precursor of postmodern thought and narrative strate-
gies, functions in this metaliterary textual corpus both as a sort of Piran-
dellian character in search of an author and as a literary model to be
deconstructed.2 As my point of departure I take contrastive definitions of
modernism as an ontological search into the notions of authorship and
subjectivity and of postmodernist thought as an epistemological inquiry
into the concept of tradition. Drawing on what Brian McHale terms a
postmodern framework of dominants – that is to say, the focusing com-
ponent of a work of art that rules, determines, and transforms the
remaining components – I will argue that, in the particular instance of
Tabucchi’s appropriation of Pessoa, the main dominant can be located in
the changes involved in the transition from modernism to postmodern-
ism, as articulated in the representation of Pessoa’s authorial voice.3
Thus, in order to establish whether Tabucchi’s extensive allusions to Pes-
soa’s heteronymous practice can be read either as merely exemplary of
the postmodern practice of narrative metafiction, or as a more substan-
tial challenge to the unitary notion of authorship, this article discusses
both the embodied relations between Tabucchi’s different Pessoas and
the articulations of the metanarrative discourse between Tabucchi and
the Portuguese writer’s coterie of heteronyms.
This essay first examines the construction of character in Tabucchi’s
postmodern writing around which his representations of Pessoa’s autho-
274 Francesca Billiani
rial voice can be analysed, and thereupon discusses how Tabucchi rede-
fines the heteronyms in order to substantiate his own postmodern
writing. Indeed, Pessoa, through the creation of his heteronymic coterie,
had demonstrated how to generate a proliferation of styles and writings
in a way that had led precisely to a rewriting of his nation’s literary tradi-
tion, as well as to a challenge to the notion of both the consistency of the
author and that of the character.4 Secondly, since in Tabucchi’s play of
intertextual allusions, the representation of characters and authors often
focuses on their bodily functions, this essay explores both how Tabucchi
portrays Pessoa’s corporeality and how the relationship between body
and mind substantiates the authorial figure’s disempowerment and sub-
jectivity’s loss of sovereignty over the self. In light of these considerations,
this essay demonstrates how representations of Pessoa’s corporeality play
a fundamental role in Tabucchi’s discourse on an author’s loss of author-
itative power over textuality. Specifically, in Tabucchi’s representation of
Pessoa the relationship between body and mind is mostly articulated
through the associated images of the unconscious, understood as the site
of contradictory impulses, and through the sick body. Hence, both classes
of bodies in question, those of an author and his/her characters but also
those of the narrative texts, lose their unity in such a way that they open
up to a multitude of influences and question the very notions of tradition,
subjectivity, and authorship.
(Post)Modernisms: Deconstructing Characters and Authors
Postmodernist literary critics have often called into question the onto-
logical consistency of authors and characters. In her foundational study
of postmodernism, Linda Hutcheon outlines how characters in post-
modern metafiction pose a discursive challenge to nineteenth-century
realist conventions of characters’ portrayal since they replace the repre-
sentation of historical developments with a self-referential and meta-lit-
erary form of textuality.5 Tabucchi’s works illustrate Hutcheon’s point
well, since Pessoa and his coterie of heteronyms appear not only as
authors and characters simultaneously (most notably in his short novel
Gli ultimi tre giorni di Fernando Pessoa [The Last Three Days of Fernando Pes-
soa]), but also as elements which trigger and substiantiate the metanar-
rative and intertextual discourses the text is about to engage with. For
example, in the one-act play in blank verse, Il Signor Pirandello è desiderato
al telefono (Mr Pirandello Is Wanted on the Phone), published in I dialoghi
mancati (The Non-Existent Dialogues) and set in an asylum for the mentally
Tabucchi in Search of Pessoa’s Heteronymous Body 275
disturbed, Pessoa appears as an actor whose identity is at stake since he

can play Pessoa or anybody else, provided we readers are willing to sus-
pend our disbelief in the finitude of textuality.
attore: Eccomi, sono Pessoa, o così

mi hanno detto di essere,
diciamo che sono un attore
e sono venuto per divertirvi,
oppure, se più vi piace,
sono Pessoa che finge di essere un attore
che stasera interpreta Fernando Pessoa.6
[actor: Here I am, I am Pessoa, or so

they told me to be,
let’s say that I am an actor
and I am here in order to entertain you,
or else, if you prefer it,
I am Pessoa who pretends to be an actor
who tonight plays Fernando Pessoa.]
By the Actor’s alluding to the title of Pirandello’s play Così è se vi pare

(Right You Are If You Think You Are), Pessoa is identified both as a charac-
ter within the text and as as a leading figure of European culture. Thus
the scene uses the embodiment of Pessoa’s voice to ask not the standard
questions of modernist enquiry, such as ‘What is there to be known?’ but
rather those advanced by postmodernist discourse, such as ‘What hap-
pens when different kinds of worlds are placed in confrontation, or
when boundaries between worlds are violated?’7 If in a modernist text
the boundaries of the ego are to be traversed and fragmented, the Piran-
dellian quest embodied in Tabucchi’s Pessoa occupies an ambiguous
position between modernism and postmodernism, precisely because it
does not engage with the definition of the ontological consistency of the
character, but rather with his/her epistemological status. For instance, in
Requiem, Pessoa’s first appearance is on a banknote during a dialogue
between the protagonist, already depersonalized and named only as the
‘I,’ and a drug addict.8 This conversation dwells upon the acknowledg-
ment of Pessoa as a prominent literary and cultural figure. The poet is
portrayed as an image drawn on a banknote, whose identity is disclosed
by a set of intertextual, as well as extratextual, references which entail
broader cultural and literary discourses.9 Precisely, owing to the distinct
metanarrative nature of Pessoa’s heteronymy, he can occur both as a

real-life character, entering somebody else’s text in which there is an
implicit autobiographical identification, and as a literary body, or as cul-
tural reference to an extratextual discourse, which is then defined by the
infinitude of its associations. Hence, Pessoa, as a modernist literary
model, loses his authoritative power over textuality when he engages in a
play of intertextual allusions that challenge the very notion of tradition.
Although Tabucchi’s definition of Pessoa’s heteronymy has been
widely examined, I believe it needs to be reinvestigated in relation to my
interpretation of Pessoa functioning both as a deconstructed modernist
authorial figure and as a postmodern character.10 Tabucchi defines het-
eronymy as follows:
non tanto come metaforico camerino di teatro in cui l’attore Pessoa si

nasconde per assumere i suoi travestimenti letterario-stilistici; ma proprio
come zona franca, come terrein vague, come linea magica varcando la quale
Pessoa diventò un ‘altro da sé’ senza cessare di essere se stesso.11
[not so much as a metaphorical theatre dressing room, in which Pessoa the

actor hides himself away in order to assume his literary and stylistic dis-
guises, but precisely as a free zone, a terrein vague, a magical line that, once
crossed, made Pessoa a ‘stranger to himself,’ without, however, preventing
him from being himself.]
Intertextual memory has proven the possibility of establishing new dia-

logic practices between texts, traditions, and authorial figures, thereby
creating a new textual space. Thus, although relations between Pessoa
and his heteronymic coterie are based on the principle of alterity (he is
an altro da sé, a ‘stranger to himself’), only by positing new relationships
between subjectivity and objectivity can the heteronym, the alter ego, be
conceived. As a result, in the context of the heteronymic collective, the
ego becomes
uno sguardo in dentro, e solo in questa direzione: il microcosmo diventa

macrocosmo, il soggetto esclude l’oggetto, anzi il soggetto diventa oggetto
di se stesso, si pone a se stesso come altro da sé. Non c’è più l’altro ma l’alter
ego: l’eteronimo.’12
[a glance within, and only in this direction: the microcosm becomes macro-
cosm, the subject excludes the object, or rather the subject becomes its own
object, is positioned as other in relation to itself. There is no longer the

other but the other I, the heteronym.]
The phenomenology of the perception of the ego resides in this inter-

stitial space, a meeting place in which the ultimate mode of representa-
tion is for the subject to become the object of itself, thereby cancelling
out their dichotomy. In a draft of an unsent letter to Adolfo Casais Mon-
teiro, the poet presents himself as ‘o ponto de reunião de uma pequena
humanidade só minha’ (the meeting place of a small humanity that
belongs only to me).13 As Richard Zenith argues, Pessoa has:
left us not just inspired lines and not just inspired characters that recite
inspired lines but a vast system of logically interconnected ideas material-
ized in a literature of interconnected ‘Pessoas’ (pessoa means ‘person’ in
Portuguese) – a cosmography not just of his multiplied self but of Western
thought and philosophy as embodied by those various selves.14
Furthermore, as later observed by Deleuze and Guattari, there is no

unity other than when ‘there is a power takeover in the multiplicity by
the signifier or a corresponding subjectification proceeding ... .’15 Pes-
soa’s definition of heteronymy, delineating and interconnecting the bor-
ders between subject and object, creates a tantalizing subjectivity which
denies a superior ordering entity. As illustrated in Tabucchi’s Gli ultimi tre
giorni di Fernando Pessoa, which narrates the events that might have
occured during the last three days of Pessoa’s life, characters can only
define themselves in relation to each other. This is exemplified when
Pessoa is visited in the hospital by his heteronyms who are paying their
last tribute to a fictionalized authorial subjectivity; in those scenes, he is
presented as a multiplied subject rather than as demiurgic creator of
fictional personae.16 The heteronym is defined as a positional relation-
ship between the subject and the object, the latter now ontologically
inscribed in the phenomenology of the subject. Thus, the relation
between Pessoa and his coterie cannot be simply a binary one, but prolif-
erates in an infinite number of associations.
Moreover, Tabucchi’s works show that this definition of heteronymy
can also be explained from a narratological point of view. Asked to
define the role played by narrative in contemporary society, he answers
that ‘per ordinare e capire chi noi siamo, dobbiamo raccontarci’ (in
order to regulate and understand who we are, we have to narrate our-
selves).17 And he goes on to say that ‘Pessoa ha imbastito una grande
opera romanzesca, ha inventato quattro, cinque o sei personaggi che

parlano al suo posto non come personaggi operanti, ma come person-
aggi poetanti’ (Pessoa has woven a great narrative work, he has created
four, five, or six characters who speak in his stead not like operative char-
acters, but like lyrical characters).18 According to Tabucchi, Pessoa is a
twofold body, a fictional character and a fictional author, but also a tex-
tual corpus, the heteronymic collective, which is substantiated by its rhi-
zome-like structure intertwining its parts.19 This notion of Pessoan
textuality denies the existence of a main authorial voice which organizes
the plot, replacing it with that of a multitude of voices articulated in a
given narrative structure.20 Once we eliminate from the narrative text an
ordering principle represented by the author who organizes the plot,
what remains is only a bare structure.21 Pessoa reiterates this idea of elim-
inating the authorial voice when writing about himself and his hetero-
nyms: ‘Médium, assim, de mim mesmo todavia subsisto. Sou porém
menos real que os outros, menos coeso, menos pessoal, eminentemente
influenciável por eles todos’ (I subsist as a kind of medium of myself, but
I’m less real than the others, less substantial, less personal, and easily
influenced by them all).’22
Having defined Tabucchi’s understanding of Pessoa’s heteronymy, we
remain with the question of how, according to the Italian author, the
postmodernist enquiry into the notion of tradition and influence
relates to his representations of Pessoa. Postmodernism in Requiem is
defined as
un ristorante con molti specchi e una cucina che non si sa bene cos’è,
insomma, è un posto che ha rotto con la tradizione recuperando la tradiz-
ione, diciamo che sembra il riassunto di varie forme diverse, secondo me è
in questo che consiste il post-moderno.23
[a restaurant with lots of mirrors and goodness-only-knows what kind of

cooking. In a word it is a place that has broken with tradition by recovering
tradition. Let’s say that it resembles the summing up of a variety of different
forms; if you ask me that is what makes up postmodernity.]
Endorsing the notions of plurality and instability, postmodernism

refutes claims of the epistemological consistency of the self. The post-
modern conception of the text is instead that of an epistemologically
inconsistent field of hybridization in which dominants can be subverted
and new narrative roles can be played.24 In the already cited definition by
Brian McHale of the postmodern ontological dominant as opposed to
the modernist epistemological dominant, the former engages with the

exploration of the ‘being’ raising questions such as ‘What is the mode of
existence of a text?’ while the latter focuses on the investigation of the
world, raising instead questions such as ‘What is there to be known?’ In
the interview mentioned above on the role played by the novel in the con-
temporary literary environment, Tabucchi explicitly states that Pessoa
‘ha capito che quello che restava del romanzesco non era più l’intreccio
ma la struttura, e ha quindi eliminato l’intreccio’25 (understood that
what survived of the novelistic tradition was no longer the plot but the
structure, and therefore he dispensed with the plot).
If we cannot claim ontological consistency for the author’s voice, we
can no longer trace a strong literary tradition to which we feel we belong,
but only interstitial spaces where lines of influence meet. Hereupon we
witness the fall of the ‘Poetic Father’ and the coming into being of those
other, deconstructed selves that permit us to dispute paternity in and of
the text.26 In light of these observations, one can then explain the famous
postmodern banquet towards the end of Requiem during which Pessoa
appears as a special guest under the guise of ‘il mio convitato’ (my guest),
thereby articulating this revised view of texual authority and genealogy.
Continuously asking why Pessoa speaks in English if he is Portuguese,
Mariazinha emphasises how the notions of tradition and literary influ-
ence need to be reassessed according to postmodern views on frag-
mented forms of textuality in which characters and authors are not
defined as self-referential unities but rather as interstitial spaces resulting
from a fragmented idea of subjectivity.27 Requiem’s final literary menu lists
the dishes ‘che si mangiano in questo libro’ (which one has eaten in this
book), thereby putting forward, precisely, the idea of a literary tradition
that results from associations of already-given inscriptions of our cultural
memory. Pessoa, the liminal modernist, represents, as Tabucchi’s ‘mio
convidato,’ not only a literary tradition within the boundaries of another
literary tradition, but also the eruption of an individually authored tex-
tual corpus in the textual corpus of another culture.28 In Tabucchi’s rep-
resentation of Pessoa, this conceptualization is best represented by
corporeal images, since in this overt play of intratextual references tex-
tual allusions are often associated with bodily functions, thereby marking
the strong link between corporeality and textuality.
Text, Body, and Soul
Tabucchi’s strategy of representing the relationship between body and

mind in a manner which undermines the notion of unified subjectivity is
most evident in Requiem, a novel about an oneiric search through some-

one’s past during a Sunday afternoon in a deserted Lisbon.29 The first-
person narrator and protagonist of ‘this hallucination,’ as Tabucchi
describes his narrative, engages in an investigation of his own past that
represents a mise en abyme of the whole story.30 Indeed, Requiem opens with
the phrase ‘quel tizio non arriva più’ (that fellow is not going to arrive any
more), a sentence which, as well as referring directly to Pessoa, echoes
both the Beckettian topos of waiting in vain and Blanchot’s definition of
literature as absence, thereby calling into question the paternity of the
text as well as the notions of literary tradition.31 In fact, in contrast to the
‘modernist’ Godot, Pessoa will arrive not only as a spectre of his historical
self but also both as many of his heteronyms and as characters populating
his fictional creations, thereby becoming a deconstructed and multiple
body within a postmodern textual corpus which is validated purely by its
own intertexts.32 Furthermore, Requiem begins with a direct mention of
the problem of the unconscious which ‘avrà un gran daffare in un giorno
come questo’ (will be very busy on a day like today).33 Indeed, through-
out this whole story, populated by absences and presences, the relation-
ship between the body and the mind is articulated along two main
interpretative strands: first, an authorial presence which denies his or her
material phenomenology and, second, an ontological presence which
emphasises the relationship between corporeality and textuality.
Even before he is conclusively embodied as a character in the final
chapter of Requiem, the ‘real’ or ‘historical’ Pessoa maintains a ghostly
presence in the text through indirect references to his life.34 The physi-
cally and mentally upsetting journey described in chapter 2, in the
course of which the protagonist is driven around Lisbon in search of his
dead friend Tadeus (one of the other main characters in the story), takes
him through various material simulacra that mark Pessoa’s ‘absent’ pres-
ence in the story. The statue outside the Café Brasileira, the pictures of
the poet in the windows of the Casa Museu Fernando Pessoa, and the
family tomb at Prazeres where Pessoa’s engraved name and dates mark
an empty coffin ledge, would be familiar to a Portuguese reader in that
they represent the places which bear witness to Pessoa’s life in Lisbon, as
well as to his cultural heritage.35 Tabucchi can thus create a culturally
hybridized narrative and a metanarrative space in which characters and
authors engage in a narrative play in which Pessoa can emerge as a vivid
ghostly presence through a fragmented form of textuality.
Conversely, the relationship between body and mind becomes very vis-
ible when Tadeus, in an oneiric dialogue with the I-protagonist, declares
that, having lost his soul, he has been left just with his empty body.36 As
Monica Jansen has pointed out, ‘Tadeus stesso dice, che mentre il pro-
tagonista è solo anima, lui è solo corpo e perciò è materialista. L’immag-
inario, secondo lui, va animato dalla materia: l’anima si cura con lo
stomaco’37 (Tadeus himself says that whilst the protagonist is only soul,
he is only body and therefore is a materialist. The imaginary, according
to him, has to be animated by the raw material: the soul can be treated
through the stomach). Indeed, as the protagonist says, ‘È vero, dissi io, io
l’anima ce l’ho, di sicuro, ma ho anche l’Inconscio, voglio dire, ormai
l’Inconscio io ce l’ho, l’Inconscio uno lo prende, è come una malattia,
mi sono preso il virus dell’Inconscio, càpita’38 (It is true, I said, I surely
have a soul, but also I have the Unconscious; I mean, by now I have the
Unconscious. You catch the Unconscious; it is like a disease. I have con-
tracted the virus of the Unconscious; it can happen).
This ‘virus of the unconscious’ first manifests itself as another main
character of Requiem, when the I-protagonist suffers an attack of excess
perspiration, an event which, as well as being symptomatic of an unset-
tling psychological state, marks the relationship between the psyche and
the body.39 In this story the unconscious – defined not as an epidemic
virus, but as the herpes zoster which needs a host cell in which to live and
reproduce – is prompted to reemerge only on those occasions when the
body is weak, thereby becoming intrinsic to our corporeality. Tadeus’s
discovery of the inner bodily materiality of the unconscious complicates
the Platonic battle between body and soul by challenging the consistency
of both. In fact, Tadeus, defined as bodily materiality, forces the I-protag-
onist to face his remorses for not having been able to support and under-
stand the reasons behind the abortion and subsequent suicide of Isabel,
the woman they both love. The I-protagonist’s encounter with Tadeus
prompts the unconscious to manifest itself. The protagonist, however,
will not find the answers he is looking for since body and mind can not
be reconciled, not even in the realm of the afterlife.
This idea of the loss of epistemological as well as ontological authority
of literary tradition, determined by a state of sickness, is reiterated in
Requiem when the protagonist meets his father, who is dying from throat
cancer. As Susan Sontag has argued, cancer is the disease which has
marked our century, evoking a sense of mystery and destabilizing the
power relations between the sick person and those who surround him or
her. Cancer invades the body and germinates as an external and disrup-
tive force which, inducing in its victims a permanent state of pain, makes
them aware of their corporeality.40 The physical pain becomes a manifes-
tation of an ontological condition characterized by the loss of totality.

Thus, by marking the presence of the body in pain, sickness acts as a dis-
empowering force over the protagonist’s father, but also affects the figure
of the poetic father. Furthermore, in this case, the conflict between the
father disempowered by cancer and his son occurs in an oneiric dimen-
sion in which a prophecy about the future is accommodated. The Padre
Giovane, as a young father back in 1932, asks his son to predict his own
future, in which he will die of cancer, thereby reversing their power rela-
tions. It is interesting to observe how Tabucchi rewrites this episode with
reference to his real father’s illness in one of his most recent works, Auto-
biografie altrui (Autobiographies of Others), an essay about his work as a nov-
elist in which a whole chapter focuses on Requiem.41 Tabucchi explains
how his relationship with his father was affected precisely by the father’s
physical condition, forcing them to find new forms of communication
which excluded the oral and privileged the written. In this way, they were
able to reestablish their respective roles. Once the authoritative figure
has lost the power of his voice, the author himself is reduced to silence,
delegating his words to an alternative communicative means. Represent-
ing a father figure who has lost his enunciative power due to a throat can-
cer puts forward the idea that the relationship between authority and
authorship has to be reassessed.
Therefore, echoing Aldo Palazzeschi’s idea of the poet as a puppet,42
the chorus of Il Signor Pirandello – which portrays the typical Pirandellian
crisis of modernity, resulting in a psychic disempowerment of the subject
– explains what is the only remaining task for the poet, who is another
embodiment of Pessoa, to fulfill
coro: Viva, viva, un pupazzetto!

Poeta pupazzetto,
sei qui per farci ridere,
per rivelarci l’anima,
l’anima tua malata.’43
[chorus: Hurrah, hurrah, a little puppet!

A little puppet poet,
you are here in order to make us laugh,
to reveal to us your soul,
your sick soul.]
The poet has lost his authority over his task of voicing an ultimate
truth, since he can only expose his sick and thus disempowered artistic
soul. Insofar as we cannot relate to an authoritative figure that can voice

a final truth, we cannot recognize a mainstream tradition to identify with,
but only interstitial places of influence where the relationship between
authors and characters can be redesigned as exemplified by the coterie of
Pessoa’s heteronyms.
The same notion of disempowerment caused by the sick body seeking
its final peace is central to Gli ultimi tre giorni di Fernando Pessoa.44 Pessoa’s
heteronymic collective composed of Álvaro de Campos, Alberto Caeiro,
Bernardo Soares, Coelho Pacheco, Ricardo Reis, and António Mora,
gathers at the São Luís dos Franceses Hospital in Lisbon in order to pay
their last respects to the poet who is dying of a socially embarrassing liver
condition (cirrhosis). Structurally, the diegetic unity of Gli ultimi tre
giorni can be identified as a collection of micronarratives framed into an
overarching metanarrative discourse. Ontologically, meanwhile, it can
be situated in the reunion of the heteronyms, as long as the polyphonic
interaction of the heteronymous voices procedes without the direction
of any superior authority invested in the ‘real-life’ author. A similar idea
is expressed in Pessoa’s poem ‘Autopsicografia,’ in which the poet asso-
ciates his artistic creation with the physical condition of pain. However,
in the theatrical and surreal atmosphere of Tabucchi’s text, the deca-
dent body, the body as a site of suffering, can only find a transitional
form of authorial and narrative unity before its eternal silence. Only
death can recompose the body of the heteronymic writings fragmented
by the condition of pain.
In his essay ‘Arte e scienza,’ Pirandello describes the condition of the
human being in contemporary society as characterized precisely by a
constant disease caused by the lack of faith in a superior totalizing
entity.45 As far as the mind is concerned, there is a psychological cate-
gory, that of the disajutato (helpless), which could be applied to Pessoa’s
state of mind in Gli ultimi tre giorni. As Enrico Ghidetti wrote in Malattia,
coscienza e destino (Disease, Consciousness and Destiny), analysing the main
traits of Pirandello’s characters,
Quella del ‘disajutato’ appare però, a prima vista, un ben pirandellinana

categoria psicologico-morale che implica, in sequenza, abbandono, isola-
mento sociale, solitudine esistenziale e quindi un sentimento di perenne
inutilità dell’agire, appunto un ‘venir meno a se stesso nel cercare la pro-
pria utilità’ ... Come tale non ha di fronte a sé vie di fuga, ed è condannato
alla solitaria, ossessiva ricerca di una identità, di una maschera per sé e per
gli altri che lo aiuta a trascorre, alla meno peggio, il suo ‘involontario sog-
giorno’ su questa terra.’46
[That of the disajutato appears tough, at first glance, a clearly defined Piran-
dellian psychological and moral category that implies, in sequence, aban-
donment, social isolation, existential solitude and therefore a feeling of
endless worthlessness to act, ‘exactly a way of denying himself when search-
ing for his own purpose’ ... As such he does not have a way of escaping. He
is doomed to a lonely, obsessive search for an identity, for a mask both for
himself and for others, a mask that will help him to pass, in the least painful
way, his ‘unwanted stay’ on this planet.]
The disajutato type feels compelled to create and to assume masks that
would give him an identity, however unstable and provisional this could
possibly be. This description fits with Pessoa’s personal and artistic life
and, especially, with their point of fusion. In his last dialogue with
António Mora, Tabucchi’s Pessoa synthetizes his life as follows: ‘Ma ora
basta ... vivere la mia vita è stato come vivere mille vite, sono stanco, la
mia candela si è consumata, la prego, mi dia i miei occhiali.’47 (But now
I’ve had enough ... living my life has been like living a thousand lives. I’m
tired; my candle has burned out. Please hand me my eyeglasses.)
Pessoa’s modus poetandi, precisely because it refutes a single authorial
form of enunciation, fuels an art that has lost any ambition to give total-
izing answers. Nonetheless, how can this ontological and physical
impasse be unblocked? In their final encounter, in the proximity of
death, Soares tells Pessoa: ‘E quando gli dèi torneranno, noi perderemo
questa unicità dell’anima, e la nostra anima potrà di nuovo essere plu-
rale, come vuole la Natura’48 (And when the gods return, we’ll lose this
singleness of the soul, and our soul can be plural again, as Nature
desires). Thus, both the narrative structure and the soul, the principle
that founds that narrative structure, have renounced their unity in order
to be plural. The relationship between body and soul can be finally
resolved by a pantheistic vision of reality in which, having killed the
ordering principle represented by the authorities, the principle of non-
hierarchical plurality of bodies and souls can be reaffirmed.49
In Il Signor Pirandello è desiderato al telefono most of the characters are
described as ‘manichini, ma ci sono anche cinque o sei persone che tut-
tavia mantengono una posizione di perfetta immobilità’50 (mannequins,
but there are also five or six people who, however, maintain an immobile
position). The body, in this case through the phenomenology of the
individual’s mental perceptions, is, in a proper Pirandellian fashion, rep-
resented by manichini (mannequins) or by maschere nude (naked masks),
and thus reduced to its minimal unities.51 This ontological block, a state
of apathy both physical and mental, again results in a portrait of disem-

powered authorial figures and characters who are not even able to iden-
tify the genre their work belongs to. The Actor says:
Non saprei dire esattamente

se si tratti di dramma o di commedia,
il mio autore su questo è reticente
e questa è la mia personale
tragedia:
che vivo entrambe le cose come se fossero la stessa cosa,
che non è né una cosa né l’altra.’52
[I would not be able to tell exactly

whether this is a tragedy or a comedy,
my author is reticent on this issue
and this is my personal tragedy:
the fact that I live both things as if they were the same thing,
which is neither one nor the other.
If the author cannot say the final words about his works, the characters
themselves cannot but be neutral towards the text to which they alleg-
edly belong. Consequently, the breaking of the boundaries between texts
and traditions can be fully achieved, since the phenomenology of the
creative act results in a state of absence. In fact, in his introductory note
Tabucchi describes Sogni di sogni (Dreams of Dreams), a collection of short
medallions, as his own warm tribute to ‘gli artisti che ho amato’ (artists I
have loved). Also in this instance, literature compensates for a loss: that
of not knowing about the life of dreams of the artists who have shaped
our thinking. However, this is an oneiric tribute, a sort of journey in the
realm of dreams, among the artists’ nocturnal wanderings (‘i percorsi
notturni dei loro spiriti’). As usual, the introductory note emphasizes
the metanarrative nature of Tabucchi’s discourse on dreams, thereby
creating a textual space in which the oneiric and, quite significantly,
never ‘lived’ but only written dreams of the artists, are uncovered. The
narration finds its unity in the same pattern that all the recollected sto-
ries, or micronarratives, follow.
‘Sogno di Fernando Pessoa, poeta e fingitore’ (Dreams of Fernando
Pessoa, Poet and Pretender) begins by describing Pessoa’s oneiric jour-
ney thorough Ribatejo, though his final destination is instead South
Africa, where he visits Alberto Caeiro on 7 March 1914.53 Caeiro would
appear for the first time in Pessoa’s writing on 8 March 1914 and Tabuc-
chi, marking this event, ends the short story as follows: ‘Era l’otto di
marzo, e dalla finestra di Pessoa filtrava un timido sole’ (It was March the
eighth, and into Pessoa’s window filtered a pale sun).54
As Pessoa’s life becomes ‘letteraturizzata’ (literaturalized) – to use
Italo Svevo’s term – by achieving a fully realized fictional status and thus
becoming more real than real life, so the heteronymic coterie engages in
a metanarrative discourse, further violating the textual boundaries of
Pessoa’s already fragmented textual corpus. In this dream-story, Pessoa
travels both back in time, to his youth in South Africa,55 and forward into
the labyrinth of his heteronymic world, finally arriving not as a cigarette-
smoking adult but as a boy dressed in a sailor suit, and meeting Caeiro in
the body of his former grammar school master, who defines himself as ‘la
parte più profonda di lei ... la sua parte oscura’ (the deepest part of you
... your dark side) and states: ‘Per questo sono il suo maestro’ (In this I
am your master).56
The unconscious appears here associated again with the act of literary
creation, which points towards the fragmentation of a unitary notion of
authorship. Caeiro the ‘master’ manifests himself in a dream and there-
fore abdicates his rational authoritative power. Hence, by establishing
dialogic practices analogous to those already analysed with reference to
his other works that feature Pessoa, Tabucchi reinforces his statement
about the author’s loss of authority.57 The truth Caeiro reveals to Pessoa
is that he can be his master only within the realm of the obscure. Cul-
tural authority, therefore, does not act as a form of conscious power over
a given entity, but as an uncontrolled impulse outside monodimensional
reason. Similarly, the strength of the father’s influence is undermined by
its nocturnal phenomenology.
Furthermore, on the one hand, the association of Caeiro with the
obscure contradicts Álvaro de Campos’s description of the heteronym as
an embodiment of ‘emphatic whiteness’ in which any sort of subjectivity
is erased.58 One the other hand, however, Caeiro loses the rational side
of his emphatic white/rational power to assume that of the unconscious.
In Tabucchi’s interpretation, the master embodies the hidden principle
which rules our bodily phenomenology. Indeed, after talking to Caeiro,
Pessoa is physically described as an adult again: ‘gli erano cresciuti di
nuovo i baffi’ (his mustache had grown back).59 Thus is marked the rela-
tionship between the occurences of bodily and onotological transforma-
tions which ultimately challenge the very notions of authority and
tradition.60 In Gli ultimi tre giorni di Fernando Pessoa, Tabucchi writes:
Pessoa sorrise. Lo sapevo, disse, l’ho sempre considerata mio padre, anche
nei miei sogni lei è sempre stato mio padre, non ha niente da rimprover-
arsi, Maestro, mi creda, per me lei è stato un padre, colui che mi ha dato la
vita interiore.’61
[Pessoa smiled. I knew that, he said, I always considered you my father, even
in my dreams you were always my father. You have nothing to blame your-
self for, Master, believe me. You were a father, the one who gave me inner
life.]
Pessoa is a father figure who cannot exist in the open space of the con-
scious unitary subjectivity, but only in that of the unconscious that is asso-
ciated with the phenomenology of the mutability of the body. The body
in pain is a metaphor for the representation of the shift in dominants
from modernism to postmodernism: the disempowerment of the autho-
rial figure, the fall of the poetic father, is articulated through the dis-
course on the notion of multiple subjectivity which undermines the very
notion of aesthetic influence. In this way, the body in pain, in that it
enhances the dichotomy between body and mind, emphasises the need
for the author to renounce his modernist self-centred relationship with
reality and put forward the postmodern challenge for a new phenome-
nology of the self which welcomes plurality over totality.
Conclusion
As I have argued in the first part of this essay, the discursive and narrative
models put forward by Tabucchi aim at presenting Pessoa as a decon-
structed modernist author. In a metanarrative postmodern context,
Tabucchi uses allusions to Pessoa’s oeuvre in order to represent decon-
structed authors and characters, whereby the ontological consistency of
both author and character can be seen as dissolved into a rhizome-like
postmodern labyrinth of anxious modernist influences. As discussed
with reference to heteronymy, this new phenomenological order results
in a subversion of the relationship between subject and object. Both the
ordering principle embodied by the author and that incarnated in the
subject are redefined by a narrative that is marked by a plurality of voices
which have lost their totalizing power. Tabucchi uses the relationship
between body and mind in order to convey these ideas. The phenome-
nology of the body is that of a sick body, a body which undergoes a pro-
cess of desegregation and loss of unity. In particular, the representation
of the sick father figure underlines the discourse of the body as that of
the Other, the unconscious. The unconscious, being a virus, materializes
and manifests itself as a part of the deconstructed body, thereby estab-
lishing a closer relationship between corporeality and the realm of the
obscure. The reality of the obscure is precisely where the authority of the
author is questioned, as Alberto Caeiro’s case demonstrates. Finally, we
can see how Tabucchi’s representations of Pessoa and the heteronyms
aim at challenging the ontological consistency of characters and authors,
which results in a representation of textuality as a sick body without an
ordering principle, textuality organized as a labyrinth.
NOTES
1 See Alessandro Iovinelli, ‘Antonio Tabucchi e il paratesto di Requiem,’ Narra-

tiva 16 (1999): 205–15.
2 See Anna Botta, ‘Antonio Tabucchi’s Requiem: Mourning Modernism,’ in
Antonio Tabucchi: A Collection of Essays, ed. Bruno Ferraro and Nicole Prunster,
special issue of Spunti e Ricerche 12 (1996–7): 143–57.
3 Brian McHale, ‘Change of Dominant,’ in Approaching Postmodernism, ed.
Douwe Fokkema and Hans Bertens (Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Ben-
jamins, 1986). On Tabucchi, see Monica Jansen, ‘Tabucchi: Molteplicità e
rovescio,’ in Piccole finzioni con importanza: Valori della narrativa italiana contem-
poranea, ed. Nathalie Roelens and Inge Lanslots (Ravenna: Longo, 1993),
137–46; Jonathan Smith, ‘Tabucchi Echoes Lacan: Making an End of “Post-
modernism” from the Beginning,’ Annali d’Italianistica 18 (2000): 77–108;
and Anna Botta, ‘Antonio Tabucchi’s Requiem : Morning Modernism,’ 143–
57. In her psychoanalytical reading of Requiem (see note 2 above), Botta asks:
‘Did Tabucchi’s first Portuguese book successfully complete his (and perhaps
Pessoa’s) unfinished work on mourning?’ (145).
4 McHale, ‘Change of Dominant,’ 55.
5 Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism (Toronto: University of Toronto
Press, 1988), 120.
6 Antonio Tabucchi, I dialoghi mancati (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1988), 16. Unless oth-
erwise indicated, all translations are my own.
7 McHale, ‘Change of Dominant,’ 58, 60.
8 Antonio Tabucchi, Requiem: un’allucinazione (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1992), 15. See
Iovinelli, ‘Antonio Tabucchi,’ 211, on the problem of the autobiographical
identification of the ‘I’ in Tabucchi’s text.
9 Tabucchi, Requiem, 15.
10 See also António M. Feijó, ‘Fernando Pessoa’s Mothering of the Avant-

Garde,’ Stanford Humanities Review 7.1 (1999): 118–26, available at http://
www.Stanford.edu/group/SHR/7–1/html/body_ feijo.html.
11 Antonio Tabucchi, Un baule pieno di gente: Scritti su Fernando Pessoa (Milan: Fel-
trinelli, 1990), 7. In another formulation of the same definition, Tabucchi
stresses the importance of the biographical grounding of the heteronyms:
‘Gli eteronimi (e non pseudonimi, si badi) sono ‘l’altro da sé’ di Pessoa. Sono
cinque poeti-personaggi inventati fino nel minimo dettaglio (la biografia, i
caratteri somatici, il gusto e la formazione culturale e perfino le piccole
manie) che vivono, pensano e poetano in maniera autonoma’ (The hetero-
nyms (and not the pseudonyms, let’s be careful) are Pessoa’s ‘strangers to
himself.’ They are five poets-characters totally made up (their biography,
somatic traits, tastes, and cultural backgrounds, and even their little manias)
who live, think, and write poetry autonomously).’ Antonio Tabucchi, La
parola interdetta: Poeti surrealisti portoghesi (Turin: Einaudi, 1971), 35–6.
12 Paola Gaglianone and Marco Cassini, Conversazione con Antonio Tabucchi: Dove
va il romanzo? (Milan: Omicron Nuova, 1995), 26.
13 Fernando Pessoa, Obras em prosa, ed. Cleonice Berardinelli (Rio de Janeiro:
Nova Aguilar), 1998; The Selected Prose of Fernando Pessoa, ed. and trans. Rich-
ard Zenith (New York: Grove, 2001), 262. Although Pessoa’s other, famous
letter to Casais Monteiro was for many years widely accepted as a truthful and
accurate guide to the genesis of the heteronymic enterprise, scholars are now
more aware of the fact that it represents yet another intricate literary contriv-
ance on Pessoa’s part. The letter remains, however, a key point of reference
in Pessoan studies.
14 The Selected Prose, 37.
15 See Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and
Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 8.
16 Antonio Tabucchi, Gli ultimi tre giorni di Fernando Pessoa (Palermo: Sellerio,
1994), 54–5.
17 Gaglianone and Cassini, Conversazione con Antonio Tabucchi, 7.
19 See especially Tabucchi, Gli ultimi tre giorni di Fernando Pessoa, when Pessoa
meets with and reunites his coterie.
20 Tabucchi, Requiem, 111–12.
21 See Monica Jansen, ‘Requiem: una meditazione fra “vera finzione” e “verità
pratica,”’ in I tempi del rinnovamento, ed. Serge Vanvolsem, Franco Musarra,
and Bart Van den Bossche Bart (Rome: Bulzoni, 1995), 1:421–9.
22 Pessoa, Obra em prosa, 92. The Selected Prose, 262.
24 ‘Vorrei telefonare a Pirandello, / forse lui saprebbe aiutarmi / a uscire da

questa situazione / lui ci sa fare con i personaggi / che si trovano intrappolati,
schiavi / di un ruolo e di una maschera’ (I would like to ring Pirandello, /
maybe he could help me to get out of this situation / he knows how to deal
with those characters / who are trapped, like slaves, either in a role or in a
mask). Antonio Tabucchi, Il Signor Pirandello è desiderato al telefono, in I dialoghi
mancati (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1988), 28.
26 See Harold Bloom’s discussion of the six ‘revisionary ratios’ (Clinamen,
Tessera, Kenosis, Daemonization, Askesis, Apophrades) in his The Anxiety of
Influence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973), 10, 14–16.
27 Tabucchi, Requiem, 16–18.
28 After having claimed to be able to be Pessoa, as well as many others, the actor
says: ‘Una volta, a Glasgow, / interpretai un giovane artista che si innamora /
dell’arte.’ (Once in Glasgow, / I played a young artist who felt in love / with
art itself). Tabucchi, Il Signor Pirandello è desiderato al telefono, 24.
30 According to JoAnn Cannon, ‘Antonio Tabucchi’s Requiem is a metanarrative
novel par excellence.’ JoAnn Cannon, ‘Requiem and the Poetics of Antonio
Tabucchi,’ Forum Italicum 35:1 (2001): 100.
31 On this narrative topos see Inge Lanslots, ‘Tabucchi’s Waiting Rooms,’ in
Antonio Tabucchi: A Collection of Essays, 51–60. On Blanchot’s influence on
Tabucchi, see Jonathan Smith, ‘Tabucchi Echoes Lacan: Making an End of
“Postmodernism” from the Beginning,’ Annali d’Italianistica 18 (2000): 77–
108.
32 For example, the appearance of the Lottery Ticket Seller in Requiem’s first
chapter triggers a further intertextual reference to Pessoa’s ‘semi-heteronym’
Bernardo Soares: ‘Bernardo Soares, ecco dove l’ho incontrata, in quel libro
che stavo leggendo sotto un gelo in una casa di campagna di Azeitão’ (Ber-
nardo Soares, now I remember where I met you, in that book I was reading in
the icy cold of a country house in Azeitão). Tabucchi, Requiem, 17.
34 See, for example, the episode in which the protagonist goes to the Brasileira
coffee house and the taxi waits for him in Largo Camões. Tabucchi, Requiem,
25.
35 See Tabucchi, Requiem, 23–34.
36 A similar notion of the body as a mere cover for our consciousness is
expressed in another text where Pessoa is a significant presence. As Tabucchi
writes: ‘Il corpo, questo stupido involucro / che avvolge il nostro quasi-
niente: / sogni, estasi, nuvole, / paure principalmente’ (The body, this silly
cover / that wraps up our almost-nothing: / dreams, ecstasies, clouds / pri-

marly fears). Tabucchi, Il Signor Pirandello è desiderato al telefono, 22.
37 Jansen, ‘Requiem: una meditazione,’ 425.
40 See Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), 5–6;
and Susan Wendell, ‘Feminism, Disability, and the Transcendence of the
Body,’ in Feminist Theory and the Body: A Reader, ed. Janet Price and Margit
Shildrick (New York: Routledge, 1999), 224–33.
41 Antonio Tabucchi, Autobiografie altrui: Poetiche a posteriori (Milan: Feltrinelli,
2003), 15–39.
42 See especially the poem by Aldo Palazeschi, ‘Lasciatemi divertire,’ in Poeti
italiani del Novecento, ed. Pier Vincenzo Mengaldo (Milan: Mondadori, 2004),
61–4.
43 Tabucchi, Il signor Pirandello è desiderato al telefono, 19.
44 If Requiem’s subtitle is ‘an hallucination,’ that of Gli ultimi tre giorni di Fernando
Pessoa is ‘a delirium.’
45 Luigi Pirandello, ‘Arte e scienza’ (1908), in Opere di Luigi Pirandello: Saggi,
poesie, scritti varii, ed. Manlio Lo Vecchio-Muri (Milan: Mondadori, 1960),
161–80.
46 Enrico Ghidetti, Malattia, coscienza e destino (Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1993),
96.
47 Tabucchi, Gli ultimi tre giorni di Fernando Pessoa, 55. Dreams of Dreams and The
Last Three Days of Fernando Pessoa, trans. Nancy J. Peters (San Francisco: City
Lights, 1999), 123.
Last Three Days, 112.
49 In Tabucchi’s novel Sostiene Pereira (Pereira Declares) a similar theory of the soul
is illustrated.
50 Tabucchi, Il signor Pirandello è desiderato al telefono, 15.
51 See Joseph Francese, ‘The Postmodern Discourses of Doctorow’s Billy Bath-
gate and Tabucchi’s I dialoghi mancati,’ Annali d’Italianistica 9 (1991): 182–97.
52 Tabucchi, Il signor Pirandello è desiderato al telefono, 17–18.
53 ‘Alberto Caeiro da Silva, maestro di Fernando Pessoa e di Álvaro de Campos,
nacque nel 1889 e morì nel 1915, tubercoloso come il padre di Pessoa. Era
nato cittadino, a Lisbona, ma fu uomo campagnolo perché passò tutta la vita
in un villaggio del Ribatejo, in una casa di una vecchia prozia presso la quale si
era ritirato per la sua salute cagionevole’ (Alberto Caeiro da Silva, Fernando
Pessoa and Álvaro do Campos’s master, was born in 1889 and died in 1915; like
his father he suffered from tuberculosis. He was born as a city man, in Lisbon,
but lived as a country man, because he spent all his life in a village in Ribatejo,
in the house of an old great-aunt of his where he had moved because of his
fragile health). Antonio Tabucchi, Un baule pieno di gente, Scritti su Fernando
Pessoa (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1990), 44.
54 Antonio Tabucchi, Sogni di sogni (Palermo: Sellerio, 1992), 67; Dreams of
Dreams and The Last Three Days, 66.
55 ‘Pessoa si sentì rassicurato e si appoggiò allo schienale del sedile. Ah, dunque
era in Sud Africa ma era proprio quello che voleva. Incrociò le gambe con
soddisfazione e vide le sue caviglie nude, dentro due pantaloni alla marinara’
(Pessoa felt reassured and leaned back in the seat. Ah, so he was in South
Africa, that was what he really wanted. He crossed his legs in a satisfied man-
ner and saw his naked calves, in two navy-blue trouser legs). Tabucchi, Sogni
di sogni, 65; Dreams of Dreams and The Last Three Days, 64.
56 In his famous letter to Adolfo Casais Monteiro, Pessoa writes: ‘Desculpe-me o
absurdo da frase: aparecera em mim o meu mestre’ (Excuse the absurdity of
this statement: my master had appeared in me). Obras em prosa, 96; The Selected
Prose, 256; Sogni di sogni, 66. Dreams of Dreams and The Last Three Days, 65.
57 In Tabucchi’s selections of quotes from Pessoa’s oeuvre we find the following
passage: ‘Ho creato in me varie personalità. Creo personalità costantemente.
Ogni sogno mio, appena che appare sognato, si incarna in un’altra persona
che possa sognarlo, ma non io’ (I have created in me various personalities. I
create personalities all the time. Every dream of mine, as soon as it manifests
itself as a dream, is embodied in another person who can dream it, but not
me). Tabucchi, Il poeta è un fingitore, 124.
59 Tabucchi, Sogni di sogni, 67; Dreams of Dreams and The Last Three Days, 66.
60 ‘La letteratura forse è il desiderio di resistere alla morte; è la difficoltà di non
essere più bambini e nello stesso tempo la voglia di continuare ad esserlo, di
essere accolti in un grembo materno, ma è anche il desiderio adulto di con-
frontarci con noi stessi’ (Literature is perhaps the desire to resist death; it is
the difficulty of not being children any more and at the same time the desire
to continue to be children, to be taken into a maternal bosom, but it is also
the adult desire to confront ourselves). Gaglianone and Cassini, Conversazione
con Antonio Tabucchi, 5.
Last Three Days, 101.
Contributors
Fernando Arenas is Associate Professor of Portuguese, Brazilian, and

Lusophone African literary and cultural studies in the Department of
Spanish and Portuguese Studies at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cit-
ies. He is the author of Utopias of Otherness: Nationhood and Subjectivity in
Portugal and Brazil (University of Minnesota Press, 2003) and co-editor,
together with Susan C. Quinlan, of Lusosex: Sexuality and Gender in the Por-
tuguese-Speaking World (University of Minnesota Press, 2002). In 2005 he
was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in order to write his new book,
titled After Independence: Globalization, Postcolonialism, and the Cultures of
Lusophone Africa. He also continues to work on an ongoing project on
homoerotic desire in Brazilian and Portuguese cultures and literatures.
Francesca Billiani is Lecturer in Italian Studies at the University of

Manchester, where she is also a member of the Centre for Translation
Studies. After completing her PhD at the University of Reading, on the
diffusion of foreign literature in Fascist Italy, she worked at the Institute
of Romance Studies, University of London, from 2001 to 2002, research-
ing the influence of the Gothic genre on representations of female
bodies and sexuality in post-unification Italy. She is the author of La
riscrittura dei modelli, ovvero leggere, pubblicare e tradurre in Italia tra le due
guerre (Florence: Le Lettere, forthcoming), and co-editor, with Gigliola
Sulis, of a forthcoming volume tracing the influence of the Gothic and
Fantastic genres in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Europe. She has
also published a number of articles on Cesare Pavese and his relation-
ship with anglophone literatures, and on the role played by translations
in the literary scene of the 1920s and 1930s in Italy.
294 Contributors
Kathryn Bishop-Sanchez is Associate Professor of Portuguese at the Uni-

versity of Wisconsin-Madison where she teaches Portuguese literature
and language. Her main areas of interest are the Portuguese nineteenth
and twentieth centuries and women’s studies, with an emphasis on the
nineteenth-century novel by authors such as Eça de Queirós and Almeida
Garrett, and other lesser known nineteenth-century writers. She has pub-
lished articles in Portuguese Studies, Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, Quadrant,
Santa Barbara Portuguese Studies, World Literature and Its Time and Portuguese
Literary and Cultural Studies. Her study of the work of Almeida Garrett
entitled Utópias desmascaradas: O mito do bom selvagem e a procura do homem
natural na obra de Almeida Garrett is forthcoming with the Imprensa Nacio-
nal-Casa da Moeda, Lisbon.
Anna M. Klobucka holds an MA in Iberian Studies from the University of

Warsaw (Poland) and a PhD in Romance Languages and Literatures
from Harvard University (1993). She has taught at the Ohio State Uni-
versity and the University of Georgia, and is currently Associate Professor
and Chair of the Department of Portuguese at the University of Massa-
chusetts, Dartmouth. She is the co-editor of After the Revolution: Twenty
Years of Portuguese Literature, 1974–1994 (Bucknell University Press, 1997)
and the author of The Portuguese Nun: Formation of a National Myth (Buck-
nell, 2000; Portuguese translation 2006). Her articles have appeared in
Luso-Brazilian Review, Colóquio/Letras, SubStance, Portuguese Studies, and
symplokeF, among other journals.
Fernando Cabral Martins is Professor of Modern and Contemporary Por-

tuguese Literature at Universidade Nova de Lisboa. In 1982 he played the
role of young Fernando Pessoa in João Botelho’s film Conversa Acabada,
which won two major prizes at European film festivals. He is the author of
several books on nineteenth- and twentieth-century Portuguese poetry,
including Cesário Verde ou a transformação do mundo (Comunicação 1988)
and O modernismo em Mário de Sá-Carneiro (Estampa 1994). In recent years
he has published several new editions of Pessoa’s poetry and prose, as well
as Sá-Carneiro’s Poemas completos (Assírio & Alvim, 1996) and Primeiros con-
tos (Assírio & Alvim, 1999), in addition to other edited volumes and
anthologies.
George Monteiro is Professor Emeritus of English and Portuguese and

Brazilian Studies at Brown University. He is the author of many articles
and books on Fernando Pessoa, including, most recently, The Presence of
Contributors 295
Pessoa (University Press of Kentucky, 1998) and Fernando Pessoa and Nine-
teenth-Century Anglo-American Literature (University Press of Kentucky,
2000). He has also published extensively on other Portuguese- and
English-language authors, including Camões (The Presence of Camões, Uni-
versity Press of Kentucky, 1996), Stephen Crane (Stephen Crane’s Blue
Badge of Courage, Louisiana State University Press, 2000), and Robert Frost
(Robert Frost and the New England Renaissance, University Press of Kentucky,
1988).
Alessandra M. Pires, a native of Brazil, received her PhD in Romance

Languages at the University of Georgia. She completed her MA at the
Université de Nice in European Literatures and Civilizations. In addition
to her doctoral research on ekphrasis, her areas of interest are film stud-
ies and literatures of the Portuguese-speaking world. She taught French
and Portuguese from 1999 to 2004 at the University of Georgia and has
been an instructor in the Summer Program of the Portuguese Language
School at Middlebury College since the founding of the school in 2003;
since 2005 she has also served as the program’s associate director. She
taught Portuguese at the University of Pennsylvania in 2004–5 and, since
fall 2005, has been Assistant Professor of French at Missouri State Univer-
sity.
Mark Sabine is Lecturer in Lusophone Studies at the University of Not-

tingham. He received his PhD from the University of Manchester in 2001
and, between then and 2003, conducted research at the Institute of
Romance Studies, University of London, and taught at the Universities of
Southampton and Oxford. He is the co-editor, with Adriana Martins, of
In Dialogue with Saramago, a volume of comparative readings of the Por-
tuguese novelist’s work (Manchester: MSPS, 2006), and has published a
number of articles on Pessoa and other Portuguese, Brazilian, and
Mozambican writers, with a particular focus on the themes of gender, cor-
poreality, and the cultural politics of national and sexual identities. He is
currently working on a full-length study of Saramago’s historical fiction
and on the writings of the avant-garde Portuguese poet, Al Berto.
M. Irene Ramalho Santos is Professor of English and American Studies at

the University of Coimbra and an International Affiliate of the Depart-
ment of Comparative Literature of the University of Wisconsin-Madison,
where she teaches regularly as a Visiting Professor. She is the author of
Atlantic Poets: Fernando Pessoa’s Turn in Anglo-American Modernism (Univer-
296 Contributors
sity Press of New England, 2003) and ‘Poetry in the Machine Age’ in vol-
ume 5 of The Cambridge History of American Literature (2003). Her work on
poetry and poetics, focusing mainly on English, American, and Portu-
guese authors, has been published as articles or chapters of books, in
Portugal and abroad, both in English and in Portuguese.
Dana Stevens received her PhD in comparative literature from the Uni-
versity of California, Berkeley, in the fall of 2001 with a dissertation on
Fernando Pessoa (‘A Local Habitation and a Name: Heteronymy and
Nationalism in the work of Fernando Pessoa’). She currently lives in New
York City, where she writes on film and television for Slate.com and the
New York Times. Until November 2005, she also published the online film
journal the High Sign.
Blake Strawbridge is currently completing research towards his PhD dis-

sertation, which applies the work of Heidegger and Blanchot, Deleuze
and Guattari, and Spinozan Marxism to elucidate interrelations between
Dickinson, Pessoa, and William Gaddis, and the relationship between
theory and literature in general. Formerly based in the Department of
Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of Minne-
sota, Twin Cities, he currently lives in Philadelphia, where he combines
part-time study with work as a housing support provider. In addition to his
work on the Book of Disquiet, he is currently preparing an essay entitled
‘Dickinson’s Loaded Gun: Affect, Language, Time,’ for publication in the
Emily Dickinson Journal.
Richard Zenith is a freelance writer, scholar, and translator based in

Lisbon. His Fernando Pessoa & Co.: Selected Poems (Grove Press, 1998) won
the 1999 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation. More recently he has
published A Little Larger Than the Entire Universe: Selected Poems (Penguin
USA, 2006), The Selected Prose of Fernando Pessoa (Grove, 2001) and a new
edition and translation of Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet (Penguin, 2001),
based on his earlier, ground-breaking edition of this work in its original
Portuguese (Lisbon: Assírio & Alvim, 1998). He has also edited several
other volumes of Pessoa’s writings in Portuguese and in English, for the
most part never before published. Among his recent articles on Pessoa
are ‘Alberto Caeiro as Zen Heteronym’ (Portuguese Literary and Cultural
Studies, spring 1999) and ‘Fernando Pessoa’s Gay Heteronym?’ (Lusosex:
Nations, Sexualities and Genders in Portuguese-Speaking Cultures, University
of Minnesota Press, 2002).
Index
abdication, 73, 89 Baudelaire, Charles, 187, 215, 222–

abjection, 16, 19 3n80, 248; ‘Correspondances,’ 248
acting, 42–3, 252–3 Beckett, Samuel, 280
Adorno, Theodor, 211 Benjamin, Walter, 62
aestheticism, 15–16 Bentley, William A., 136–7
Agamben, Giorgio, 94–5n24 Berardinelli, Cleonice, 29n7
Althusser, Louis, 73, 94–5n24, 96n29, Berman, Marshall, 217n1
171n14 Best, Steve, 160
Andresen, Sophia de Mello Breyner, Blake, William, 141, 181; Poetical
250 Sketches, 181
Anteros, 165, 176n75 Blanchot, Maurice, 72, 81, 89–90, 280
Antinous, 108, 116–17, 124, 126–33, Bloom, Harold, 27n2, 254, 290n26
136, 155–61, 172n28, 173n37, 175– body-without-organs, 110, 115,
6n73 122n14, 160
Antinoüs: A Tragedy, 126 Boone, Joseph, 111, 122n21
Aquinas, Thomas, 260 Botelho, João, 254–5; Conversa aca-
Árabe, Maria Amélia A., 219n14 bada, 254–5
Arenas, Fernando, 103, 202 Botto, António, 14–16, 105, 128, 138,
Aristotle, 52–3, 56 139, 163, 175n63; Canções, 14, 36n71
Athena, 30n20, 138, 246–7 Bréchon, Robert, 65, 105–6, 236–8;
Étrange étranger, 105
Badiou, Alain, 63 Brown, Susan M., 111, 186
Balsamo, Giuseppe, 262 Browning, Robert, 11–12, 129
Balso, Judith, 47, 64 Brun, Jean, 219n16
Barcellos, José Carlos, 103, 123n28 Bürger, Peter, 245
Barthes, Roland, 58, 69n23 Butler, Judith, 9, 191
Bataille, Georges, 202, 205–6, 209–10,
215–16, 218n7, 222n63 cadaver, 72, 89, 93n4
298 Index
Caeiro, Alberto (Fernando Pessoa), Deleuze, Gilles, 98n50, 109–10, 150,

4, 8–9, 19, 30n16, 35n58, 45, 52–3, 160–1, 165, 252, 277; Anti-Oedipus,
56–64, 67, 164, 166–7, 182–7, 190, 110
198n18, 220–1n43, 246–7, 252, 255, depersonalization, 4–5, 16, 44
258, 270n10, 283, 285–6, 291–2n53 Derrida, Jacques, 119
Campos, Álvaro de (Fernando Pes- Descartes, René, 59, 69n30, 84–5, 87;
soa), 4, 6–9, 14–15, 16, 19, 29n7, Principles of Philosophy, 69n30
30n20, 44, 45, 52–7, 59, 62–3, 65–7, Dickens, Charles, 20, 233; The Pick-
93n14, 106, 108–9, 111–15, 134, wick Papers, 20, 40, 48n4, 233
142, 149–50, 164, 166–7, 185–95, Dickinson, Emily, 72–3, 89, 183
201–23, 224–5, 233–4, 246–7, 252, Dietrich, Marlene, 250
258, 260, 264, 267–8, 283, 286 Donne, John, 139, 141
Castor and Pollux, 155, 172n29 D’Onofrio, Salvatore, 219n14
Catullus, 138, 139 drag, 9
Celan, Paul, 182, 184, 192, 193,
196n5; ‘Atemwende,’ 193; Merid- Edinger, Catarina T.F., 124
ian, 182, 196n5 Eliot, T.S., 249
censorship, 36n7, 133–4, 145–6n40 Ellis, Havelock, 135; Studies in the Psy-
Centeno, Yvette, 236 chology of Sex, 135–6
Cesariny, Mário, 250–2; ‘Autoractor,’ embodiment, 4–5, 42, 163
251; O Virgem Negra, 252 empire, 112, 136, 151, 162
childhood, 39–40, 110–11, 174n41, England, 22, 125, 133–4, 136
236–8, 264 Epicureanism, 15, 30n24
Coelho, Eduardo Prado, 109,
121n2 Feijó, António, 151, 162–4, 166,
Coelho, Jacinto do Prado, 28n4, 250; 175n69, 199n33
Diversidade e unidade em Fernando femininity, 16–17, 23, 153, 199–
Pessoa, 28n4 200n39, 206–11, 221n53
Coke, Sir Edward, 222n64 Flaubert, Gustave, 237
Colet, Louise, 237 Forster, E.M., 135; Maurice, 135
Côrtes-Rodrigues, Armando, 19, Foucault, Michel, 90, 94n17, 97n37,
35n64 218n2
Costa, Eduardo Freitas da, 269n1 Freire, Luísa, 108, 121n11
Coysevox, Antoine, 155 Freud, Sigmund, 11, 31n29, 104, 106,
Cunha, Teresa Sobral, 29n7, 35n58 111, 149, 210–11, 221n47, 228;
Cysneiros, Violante de (Armando Leonardo da Vinci and the Memory of
Côrtes-Rodrigues), 19–20 His Childhood, 12
Fromm, Erich, 135
da Vinci, Leonardo, 12, 31–2n32 Futurism, 201, 207–8, 219–20n25,
decadentismo, 44n52, 116 245–6
Index 299
Garcez, Maria Helena Nery, 249 Intersectionism, 248, 255

Ghidetti, Enrico, 283 intersexuality, 195, 202, 207
Gil, José, 28n5, 66–7, 103, 109–11, Irigaray, Luce, 206, 211
114, 149–50
Girard, René, 19 James, Henry, 131–2; ‘The Last of the
Gosse, Edmund, 132, 146–7n56 Valerii,’ 131
Greece, ancient, 11, 15–16, 20, 126, Jansen, Monica, 281
132, 151, 157, 163–4, 166, 175–6n73 Jarrell, Randall, 142
Guattari, Félix, 98n50, 110, 150, 160– Jung, Carl, 11
1, 165, 277; Anti-Oedipus, 110
Guibert, Armand, 141, 182, 227, 250 Kellner, Douglas, 160
Guisado, Alfredo Pedro, 19 Kleist, Heinrich von, 97n39
Kristeva, Julia, 74
Hadrian (emperor), 108, 116–17,
126–39, 150–1, 155–61, 165, 167, Lacan, Jacques, 17, 115, 150, 152,
173n37, 175–6n73, 261–2 160–1, 166, 171nn13–15, 206, 216
Hamlet (character), 31–2n32, 45, Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe, 197n9
230, 240n17, 246, 269 Lane, John, 133–4
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, Larsen, Neil, 207, 219–20n25
162–4, 165, 167, 175n69, 182, 195– Leal, Raul, 37n71
6n2; Lectures on Aesthetics, 163 Lopes, Teresa Rita, 5, 29n7, 104, 119,
Heidegger, Martin, 93n4, 94n17, 94– 121n3, 125; Pessoa por conhecer, 5,
5n24 29n6
Helder, Herberto, 251; Edoi lelia Lourenço, Eduardo, 12–13, 103, 106–
doura, 251 7, 109, 187, 202, 203, 212, 247, 253;
Hellenic civilization. See Greece, Fernando Pessoa revisitado, 13, 202
ancient Lugarinho, Mário César, 103
Hellenism, 155, 157, 172n28 Lyotard, Jean-François, 97n39
Hölderlin, Friedrich, 185, 186,
197n9; ‘Brot und Wein,’ 186; ‘Die machine, 112, 115, 203–9, 219n19,
Einzige,’ 185 219–20n25
homosexuality, 12, 13–16, 21–3, 150, Magalhães, Isabel Allegro de, 199–
155, 157, 162 200n39, 227
homosocial desire, 20, 213, 233 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 183
Honig, Edwin, 186 Maria José (Fernando Pessoa), 5,
Horace, 3, 10 17–19, 104
Houssman, A.E., 131; ‘To an Athlete Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso, 201,
Dying Young,’ 131 207–8, 220nn37, 40, 220–1n43
Hutcheon, Linda, 274 marriage, 154–5, 232–4, 265, 266
hysteria, 16–17, 34n52, 211 Marx, Karl, 78, 94–5n24, 98n49
300 Index
masculinity, 16–17, 23, 150, 152, 153– Orban, Clara, 207

4, 158, 207–10 Orpheu, 8, 19–20, 134, 157, 245–6
masturbation, 16, 154, 159, 167, Orpheus, 157, 173–4n39
177n84, 263–5 Ovid, 157, 173n39; Metamorphoses, 157
McHale, Brian, 273–6, 278
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 53, 55, 58, Pacheco, Coelho (Fernando Pessoa),
61–2, 67, 69n37; Phénoménologie de 283
la perception, 53 paederastia, 155, 157, 172nn28–9,
misogyny, 20, 115, 228, 265 173n39
modernism, 8, 111–12, 245–6, 273, painting, 61, 69n37, 166
275–6, 279–80, 287 Paiva, Janise de Sousa, 239n10
modernity, 112, 114, 201–2, 206–11, Palmer, Frank, 134
217, 219n19 Pascoaes, Teixeira de, 252
Moisés, Leyla Perrone, 253 Pater, Walter, 14–15, 151, 162–3, 165–
Monteiro, Adolfo Casais, 10, 16, 41, 6, 176n77; The Renaissance, 15
188, 224, 241n35, 248, 277, 289n13 penis, 151–4, 158–9, 171n13
Monteiro, George, 111, 117, 227, Perrot, Maryvonne, 207
239–40n11, 249 Pessanha, Camilo, 131, 248
Mora, António (Fernando Pessoa), Pessoa, Fernando: ‘anonymous gay
45, 151, 164–5, 175nn63, 70, 283, heteronym,’ 19, 104, 108, 117, 119;
284 archive, 4, 28–9n6, 121n3; drama em
More, Henry, 262, 263–5, 268 gente, 3–4, 8, 17, 27–8n3, 41, 45,
Mourão-Ferreira, David, 225–8, 235– 230, 246–9, 258–9; education, 30–
6, 246, 250 1n26, 124, 240n22; and English
muse, 181–2, 186–90, 199n30 language, 14, 26–7n26, 40, 117,
142–3n6; fingimento, 7, 39, 43, 46–7,
Nancy, Jean-Luc, 95n25, 182–3, 195– 149–50, 160, 227, 245, 253, 259;
6n2, 196n5; ‘Le vestige de l’art,’ heteronyms (see individual names);
183 heteronymy, 3–4, 16, 19, 28n4, 39,
nature, 58, 61–2, 182, 185 43, 97–8n42, 109–10, 121n2, 162,
Negreiros, José Almada, 32n37, 249 226–7, 245–9, 251, 260, 270n10,
neopaganism, 10, 16, 20, 30n24, 150, 276–8, 289n11; international rec-
152, 164–7, 175nn63, 70 ognition, 3, 26–7n1, 135, 137;
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 97n37, 106 orthonymous, 65, 247–8, 249; as
Nobre, António, 34n52 Super-Camões, 44, 45, 50n20
Nogueira, Manuela, 225 – works: 35 Sonnets (Pessoa), 125,
Nollekens, Joseph, 155 135, 141, 142–3n6; ‘Antinous’ (Pes-
soa), 10–11, 14, 33n41, 106–7, 109,
O’Neill, Alexandre, 250 111, 115–16, 125–9, 134–9, 142–
Ophelia (character), 228, 229–30, 269 3n6, 149–77, 261 (see also English
Index 301
Poems); ‘Apontamentos para uma somente’ (Pessoa), 117–19,

estética não-aristotélica’ (Cam- 144n14; ‘Tabacaria’ (Campos), 7,
pos), 52–6; ‘Autopsicografia’ (Pes- 46, 59–61, 2, 189–90, 268; ‘Todas
soa), 7, 259–61, 283; ‘Carta de as cartas de amor são ridículas’
corcunda para o serralheiro’ (Campos), 234; Ultimatum (Cam-
(Maria José), 5, 17–19; Cartas de pos), 246; ‘Vem sentar-te comigo,
amor (Pessoa), 224–41; English Lídia, à beira do rio’ (Reis), 9–10
Poems (Pessoa), 106, 124, 137 (see phallus, 151–2, 158–9, 161, 171n13,
also ‘Antinous,’ ‘Epithalamium’); 204–5, 209, 211
Educação do estóico (Teive), 265; ‘Ela Pirandello, Luigi, 275, 283, 284
canta, pobre ceifeira’ (Pessoa), pirates, 213–16, 222nn64, 67
176n77; ‘Epithalamium’ (Pessoa), Plaza, Monique, 222n78
10–11, 107–8, 125, 137, 138–42, Poe, Edgar Allan, 126, 248; ‘Philoso-
151, 152–5, 157, 159, 161–2, 165, phy of Composition,’ 248
174n51, 227, 261 (see also English poetry, 58, 61–2, 181–5, 186, 189, 190;
Poems); Erostratus (Pessoa), 31– as interruption, 183, 199n31
2n32, 270–1n11; Fausto (Pessoa), postmodernism, 273–6, 278–80,
260; ‘A flor que és, não a que dás, 287
eu quero’ (Reis), 30n22; O guarda- presença, 10, 13, 138, 246, 250
dor de rebanhos (Caeiro), 9, 182–5, pre-Socratic philosophy, 57, 69n21
270n10; O livro do desassossego prostitute, 206–7, 220n33
(Soares), 6, 18, 29n7, 39–40, 41, 45, Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph, 90, 98n49
53, 64–7, 71–99, 119, 128, 198nn19, Proust, Marcel, 123n28
24, 253, 254, 260, 267; The Mad Fid-
dler (Pessoa), 142–3n6; ‘Marcos Quadros, António, 107
Alves’ (Pessoa), 32–3n37; O marin- Queirós, Eça de, 34n52, 221n46; A
heiro (Pessoa), 126, 255, 260; ‘O cidade e as serras, 221n46; O crime do
menino da sua mãe’ (Pessoa), 128, Padre Amaro, 34n52
136; Mensagem (Pessoa), 28n6, 254; Queiroz, Carlos, 238n2
‘Le mignon’ (Pessoa), 108–9, 111, Queiroz, Maria da Graça, 225, 228,
115–17, 128; ‘Ode marítima’ (Cam- 240n15
pos), 9, 109, 110–14, 134, 142, 150, Queiroz, Ophelia, 104, 141–2,
167, 191–2, 205–6, 211–16; ‘Ode 144n14, 167, 177n85, 224–41, 260,
triunfal’ (Campos), 8, 56, 59, 111– 264, 266, 269; Cartas de amor de
13, 192–4, 204–5, 208–10; ‘Passa- Ofélia a Fernando Pessoa, 225–6
gem das horas’ (Campos), 56, 195,
204, 206, 211, 221n53; Poemas Rameau, Jean-Philippe, 155, 172n29
inconjuntos (Caeiro), 182; ‘Sau- Reade, Brian, 124
dação a Walt Whitman’ (Campos), Reis, Ricardo (Fernando Pessoa), 4,
195; ‘Sei que desprezarias, não 9–10, 15, 30nn20, 22, 106, 151,
302 Index
164–5, 175nn63, 70, 187, 199n33, Seyffert, Oskar, 129; Dictionary of Clas-
217, 246–7, 283 sical Antiquities, 129
Rimbaud, Arthur, 184, 195, 198n18 Shakespeare, William 14, 22–3, 31–
Rivers, W.C., 13; Walt Whitman’s Anom- 2n32, 34n51, 42, 44–5, 125, 129,
aly, 13, 33n38 134, 142–3n7, 228–9, 233, 240n17,
Rome, ancient, 136, 165 249; Hamlet, 91, 230, 240n17; ‘The
Rosa, João Maria Nogueira, 271– Rape of Lucrece,’ 125; ‘Venus and
2n22 Adonis,’ 125. See also Hamlet (char-
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 34n51, 71–2, acter); Ophelia (character)
125; Confessions, 71 sickness, 187–8, 190, 199n31, 281–3,
287–8
Sá-Carneiro, Mário, 19, 21, 104, 105– Silverman, Kaja, 152, 171nn13–15
6, 137–8, 241n35, 247, 250, 255; Simões, João Gaspar, 10, 13, 31n29,
Confissão de Lúcio, 255 103, 104–5, 107–9, 149, 168, 168–
Sadlier, Darlene, 202, 211, 219n24, 9n3, 176n75, 224, 227–8, 241n35,
224, 253 253, 269n1; Vida e obra de Fernando
sadomasochism, 112, 124, 156, 209– Pessoa, 13, 227–8
10, 214–15 Soares, Bernardo (Fernando Pes-
saíz, próspero, 184, 186, 193 soa), 6, 18, 39–40, 41, 45, 46, 48n6,
Santos, M. Irene Ramalho, 33n40, 51n26, 52–3, 63–7, 71–99, 119, 128,
103, 111–12, 149, 169n4, 202, 208, 151, 183, 187, 197n11, 198nn19,
211 24, 253, 267, 268, 283, 284, 290n32
Sappho, 23, 187 Sontag, Susan, 281
Scheidl, Ludwig, 203 Sousa, Ronald W., 207, 219–20n25
schizoanalysis, 110, 160 Spenser, Edmund, 138, 141; Epithala-
sculpture, 30n16, 47, 128, 151, 162–4, mion, 138
166, 175n69 Spinoza, Baruch, 84–5, 87
Seabra, José Augusto, 226–7, 230, Stevens, Dana, 252
235–6, 249 Stevens, Wallace, 184
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 19; Between Stillman, Linda Klieger, 219n19
Men, 19 sublimation, 12, 108, 261
Sena, Jorge de, 12, 103, 107–8, 124, Suleiman, Susan, 210
127, 131, 136, 170n9, 176n75, Summers, Montague, 130; Antinous
239n6, 249, 250 and Other Poems, 130
sensation, 6, 58, 63, 65, 72, 81, 83–4, surrealism, 251–2, 258
88–92, 109–10, 112, 114, 191, 203, Svevo, Italo, 286
211–12, 252 Swift, Jonathan, 141
Sensationism, 6, 15, 149, 201, 212, Swinburne, Algernon, 124, 138;
245–6 ‘Dolores,’ 124
Severino, Alexandrino, 239n6 symbolism, 247–8
Index 303
Symonds, John Addington, 14, 124, Vieira, Yara Frateschi, 124, 173n33,
132–3, 137, 145n32, 146–7n56, 173–4n39, 174n41
147n60; ‘Antinous,’ 146–7n56; virginity, 32–3n37, 154, 263–5
‘The Lotos-Garland of Antinous,’
124, 132–3 Wain, John, 249
Symons, Arthur, 129–30 Waters, Sarah, 173n37
Wells, H.G., 20; Ann Veronica, 20
Tabucchi, Antonio, 66, 273–92; Auto- Wharton, Edith, 131; ‘The Eyes,’ 131
biografie altrui, 282; Gli ultimi tre Whitman, Walt, 3, 13–14, 111–12,
giorni di Fernando Pessoa, 274, 277, 129, 142, 195, 201, 207
283, 286; Requiem, 275, 279–82, Wilde, Oscar, 14, 124–5, 130, 135,
290n32; Il Signor Pirandello è desider- 142n5; The Picture of Dorian Gray,
ato al telefono, 274, 282, 284; Sogni di 124; ‘The Portrait of Mr. W.H.,’
sogni, 285–6 124; ‘The Sphinx,’ 130
Tannen, Deborah, 232 Wilder, Billy, 250; Witness for the Prose-
Teive, Barão de (Fernando Pessoa), cution, 250
17, 34n54, 265 Winckelmann, Johann Joachim, 155,
Teixeira, Judith, 36n71 163, 172n29
theatre, 39, 42–3, 47n1, 230, 240n17, women, 20–3, 106, 165, 189, 202–3,
245, 251–3, 259 207–8, 213–14, 217, 220–1n43,
toys, 39–43, 50n16 238n4
Turley, Hans, 213–14
Zenith, Richard, 29n7, 35n58, 47–
Ulrichs, Karl Heinrich, 147n60 8n3, 98n50, 103, 108, 117, 119,
121nn3, 11, 144n14, 165, 175n70,
Vaz, Ruy, 247 193, 200n47, 202, 227, 277
Verde, Cesário, 35n58, 221n46, 252

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E MB O D YI NG P E SS O A :

UN IV ERS ITY OF TO RO NT O P RES S

Printed on acid-free paper

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

1. Pessoa, Fernando, 1888–1935 – Criticism and interpretation.

PQ9261.P417Z733 2007 869.1c41 C2006-906602-7

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its

Introduction: Pessoa’s Bodies 3

Part One: Corporeal Investigations

To Pretend Is to Know Oneself 39

Strength, Contemplation, and Disquiet: Towards a Corporeal Aesthetic

Unburied Bodies: Abdication and Art Production in The Book of

Part Two: Reading Pessoa Queerly

Fernando Pessoa: The Homoerotic Drama 103

Fernando Pessoa, He Had His Nerve 124

‘Ever-repositioned mysteries’: Homosexuality and Heteronymity in

Part Three: (Dis)Placing Women

The Truant Muse and the Poet’s Body 181

Kissing All Whores: Displaced Women and the Poetics of Modernity in

Together at Last: Reading the Love Letters of Ophelia Queiroz and

Part Four: Pessoa in Performance

Appearances of the Author 245

Automatic Romance: Pessoa’s Mediumistic Writings as Sexual

We would like to express our sincere gratitude to the following bodies

The multifaceted and labyrinthine body of work by Fernando Pessoa

em gente (drama in people) – Alberto Caeiro, Álvaro de Campos, and

place occupied by corporeal physicality in the heteronymous experi-

E no momento em que pensou como o tinha sido, o nome de Barabbas

These shape-shifting, transgendering materializations of the superior

E os que lêem o que escreve,

[The poet is a faker

And those who read his words

Somatic flows and crystallizations of subjective identity – as exempli-

by Soares’s ars vivendi and by Campos’s Sensationist ecstasies – and the

... seduziu-me com um abalo, como o de todas as primeiras posses, que me

Campos expresses the earth-shaking and paradoxically redemptive

ethereal nymph of Horatian extraction, to desist from physical love-mak-

Amemo-nos tranquilamente, pensando que podíamos,

[Let us love calmly, thinking that we could,

Reis’s appeal to chastity responds neither to a Neoplatonic notion of

Há em cada um de nós, por pouco que se especialize instintivamente na

[There is in each one of us, however instinctively uninterested in obscenity,

Nevertheless, rather than accept at face value the theory of intentional

um rebaixamento automático, sobretudo perante o público, do autor criti-

Lourenço’s attribution to Pessoa of a ‘sexualidade branca’ (white/blank

how manhood might blossom, unrestrained.’39 However, he was also no

lina’ (masculine intelligence) – and in incarnating his most unredeem-

homosocial desire, which places male bonding and male homosexuality

It is a human world, and so women are of no importance in it, as the old

Pessoa’s rhetorically striking, if also substantively clichéd – in the con-

mentary on the ‘revolt of woman’ as ‘one of the saddest of modern symp-

between the sexes and endangered the institution of marriage.67 Pes-

Writings as Sexual Theatre’ examines the discussion of Pessoa’s sexuality

1 Pessoa’s canonic status in continental Europe, in Latin America, and else-

upon their publication by horoscopes and possibly photographs. It is a drama

15 Obra poética, 98–9; Fernando Pessoa & Co., 247.

then British colony of Natal. Pessoa’s British grammar school education

extraordinary profundity, a wealth of possibilities between which a decision

remarks – Castañé asked him not to utter profanities in my presence) struck