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Reviewed by:
  • Adverse Genres in Fernando Pessoa
  • Leland Guyer
Jackson, K. David . Adverse Genres in Fernando Pessoa. Oxford, New York. Oxford UP. 2010. 268 pp.

It must have captured the interest of many scholars of Fernando Pessoa when Harold Bloom declared Pessoa the "most representative poet of the twentieth century" and included him among the 26 writers he identified as central to Western literature in his book The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages (1994). Subsequent to this judgment, we are fortunate to have an important new book, Adverse Genres in Fernando Pessoa, which adds credibility to Bloom's assertion while developing a convincing new thesis.

Much has been made of the quirky man and the four primary voices that comprise what until relatively recently had made up most of Pessoa's work. Previously, readers had to be content largely with the works of his "heteronyms" Alberto Caeiro, Ricardo Reis and Álvaro de Campos, as well as works of poetry and prose to which he signed his own name, Fernando Pessoa. Many readers distinguish them in convenient ways, calling Caeiro a pastoral poet, Reis a pagan classicist, Campos a futurist/sensationist, and Pessoa a complex lyricist who wrote on a range of philosophical themes, exploring epistemological, ontological, esthetic, and national problems. Since the 1980s previously inaccessible [End Page 274] manuscripts and notes have appeared both to amplify and cloud the waters of Pessoa studies.

Professor Jackson dedicated his Adverse Genres in Fernando Pessoa to Jorge and Mécia de Sena, "argonautas das sensações verdadeiras" (vi) hinting at some of the origins of the argument that the book presents. Jorge de Sena contributed important insights into Pessoa studies that informed and influenced Pessoa scholars around the world. Sena was one of the first and most analytical critics to probe deep within the metaphysics and broader philosophies of Pessoa, and his former student, Professor Jackson, has brilliantly added to the discussion of what Sena called the "man who never was" in a close study of genres whose content is at odds with its form.

Pessoa offered the term "drama of persons" to help illuminate his confusing world of contradiction, but Jackson offers a corollary "drama of genres" to explore a modernist subversion of forms, or adverse genres, "defined by tensions between form and thought, writer and text, language and meaning...based on the paradox that since we cannot know what we are in reality, the 'only way be to be in agreement with life is to disagree with ourselves' [Book of Disquietude 23]" (16). Paradox and contradiction, irony and ambiguity, negation and incongruity are some of the mind-bending terms that suff use this study. Jackson applies them not only to Pessoa's best-known poetic works but also to letters, a story, a play, and a "non-book" and points to the unifying role that adverse genres play.

Pessoa's interest in the macabre and in mystery and detective fiction is well established. His fascination with the genre includes Edgar Allen Poe, whose "Cask of Amontillado" shares some tonal features with "A Very Original Dinner" (1907), written in English by one of Pessoa's first heteronyms, Alexander Search. Montresor in the story by Poe engages his audience in a cruelly wry and morbid deception reminiscent of the one that Herr Prosit inflicts upon his own audience in the story by Search. The latter story is, however, notably more gruesome and complex than the story by Poe.

In this story a "simple mysterious puzzle [becomes] one of psychological perversity and primitive mentality, by placing it in the midst of the most elaborate and civilized of societal functions, the formal banquet" (30). The formal, even stiff, mores of the Victorian Age tale are met by clashing displays of egotism, murder, cannibalism, and savage retribution, presented for review in light of the day's contemporary ethnographic research on primitivism and taboo, as well as today's understanding of racism and colonialism.

The drama "O Marinheiro" (1913) is emblematic of Jackson's thesis. Spare in design and almost devoid of action, Pessoa himself declared "O Marinheiro" a "static drama." The work is "constructed on allusive referents, paradoxes, and absences; there is...

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