James Peter Rasmussen and Dr. Steven P. Sondrup, Humanities, Classics, and Comparative Literature
The poetry of Fernando Pessoa contributes in a highly original way to a significant twentieth-century aesthetic development: the attempt to overthrow Romantic conceptions of authorship. Through the creation of his “heteronyms”—invented poets with a large degree of independence in style, form, imagery, and thought to whom he attributes his poetry—Pessoa’s poetry fragments into many distinct voices and thus challenges the notion of coherent authorial identity. Fernando Pessoa’s heteronymic structure itself is thus a quintessentially modern voice. The heteronyms challenge, as critic Darlene J. Sadlier writes, “the notion of coherent identity” (118).1 With the fragmentation of the poetic voice, the romantic notion of “author”—a coherent, unified, a priori “master planner” behind a body of writings—begins to lose its explanatory power. The creation of the heteronyms thus helps overcome, along with the works of such figures as Mallarmé and Joyce, what theorist Roland Barthes has called “the sway of the Author” (143).2 The “Author” that Pessoa helps to overcome is in effect the Cartesian Subject: the heteronymic structure powerfully embodies the fragmentation not only of the Author but of the Self.
Nevertheless, the heteronymic voices are not entirely distinct identities, despite the many obvious aesthetic differences. The fragmentation is not complete: the heteronyms are not entirely distinct Subjects. Indeed, the interrelationships among the heteronymic voices are highly complex and have yet to be fully explored. The juxtaposition of sameness and difference among the heteronymic voices suggests a highly complex Self-Other relationship operating within (and characterizing) the modern Self, in a sense perhaps not far removed from Paul Ricoeur’s conception developed in his Oneself as Another, in which he speaks of “otherness of a kind that can be constitutive of self-hood as such” (3).3 My investigation contributes to the larger exploration of the heteronymic interrelations by closely reading four poems, one from each of the four major heteronyms, in terms of their treatments of four common themes: listening, poetic creation, death, and sorrow. Through my readings I attempt to provide a balanced representation of the heteronyms, fully acknowledging their differences while also observing how the worldviews underlying the heteronyms’ attitude toward these thematic ideas exhibit certain conceptual similarities.
I first began thinking about this project because of my interest in the intersections of literature and philosophy, an interest which burgeoned as I became exposed to the later works of the German philosopher Martin Heidegger. I had originally thought to interpret Pessoa’s artistic project in explicitly Heideggerian terms, taking as a starting point Heidegger’s assertion that poetry is an originary naming that calls what it names into existence. However, as I began to read Pessoa’s poetry and Heidegger’s essays more deeply, I began to discover that I would have to do more than merely paste Heidegger’s words onto Pessoa’s poetry: Pessoa is too original and too daring a thinker and poet to fit exactly into someone else’s ideas. Thus, I decided to place Heidegger in the background. His thought is present in terms of the reading strategies by which I interpreted Pessoa’s poems (and by which I presented my interpretations) and in terms of the specific themes I chose to highlight. More explicit treatment of the intersection of philosophy and literature, however, comes through my dealing with the issue of fragmented authorship, which has affinities to broader philosophical investigations of the modern self.
This project culminated in my Honors Thesis, which is eighty-four pages long despite the fact that Ionly look at four poems (the original plan included fourteen!). I found that the more I thought about the issues of authorship and fragmentation in connection with Pessoa’s poetry, the more there was to say. My project thus turned into something much larger than I had originally anticipated, and as I progressed I constantly found myself having to find ways to limit its scope more and more. I have learned firsthand the necessity of learning how to judge better the size of my proposed projects, and of learning how to propose smaller ones.
Perhaps the most satisfactory aspect of working on this project has been the opportunity to read everything by Pessoa that I could get my hands on. Reading Pessoa is not merely an academic exercise for me: I feel moved and changed by the experience, though of course some of his writings speak to me more than others. The four poems I selected were chosen on the basis of other criteria, but personal affinity for Pessoa’s work as a whole was the original motivation for choosing him for this project, and the most profound consequence of having done so is the fact that such affinity has grown tremendously. In the end, I think, the final result of my project was not so much an eighty-four page thesis but a deeper understanding of myself and of those aspects of humanity that I share with the lyric voices of Fernando Pessoa’s poetry.
References
- Sadlier, Darlene J. An Introduction to Fernando Pessoa: Modernism and the Paradoxes of Authorship. Gainesville, FL: UP Florida, 1998.
- Barthes, Roland. “The Death of the Author” in Image, Music, Text. Essays selected and translated by Stephen Heath. New York: Hill and Wang, 1977.
- Ricoeur, Paul. Oneself as Another. Trans. Kathleen Blamey. Chicago: U Chicago P, 1992.