Embodying Pessoa: Corporeality, Gender, Sexuality (review)

Containing top-notch essays by twelve prominent scholars of Luso-Brazilian and comparative literature and divided into four sections which collectively offer a cultural studies approach to Pessoan scholarship, the contributors of this volume focus primarily on issues surrounding the body, queer studies, women's and gender studies, and performance theory.

While the reader is easily able to access connections that assure a unified, cohesive logic, threads are also drawn by the scholars themselves. Rather than constituting a disparate collection of articles, there is consistent evidence of critical interaction as the authors dialogue with other essays included in the volume. As such, the body of the collection is organic, housing a wide variety of heteronymic voices critically speaking to one another to enrich the overall complexity and yet unified wholeness of the orthonym that becomes the final product.

One of the most interesting, though hardly new, topics treated in the volume is the question of sincerity, often staged in Pessoa's poetic universe as fingimento (“pretending”). Another polemic emerges with regard to the enterprise of heteronymy as a deliberate philosophical project. Some, as Richard Zenith contends, see such desdobramento as an avoidance strategy, as, quite simply, “a way to live without living” (269) rather than as a Utopian idealization that would allow the poetic voice to become precisely the opposite, as alive as possible, engaged in the existential commitment to “sentir tudo de todas as maneiras,” indeed the most oft-cited phrase in the book (references to this fundamental Pessoan principle occur at least six times). The performative conceptualization of heteronymy seems to straddle the middle ground between the two interpretations mentioned above, as Francesca Billiani's innovative work points out. Much like an actor, Billiani contends that Pessoa hides himself not with the intention of running away but rather to create “a new textual space” (276), estranging the author from himself to locate multiple selves that may, in their multitude, be more authentic than his monolithic (or orthonymic) self-construction.

Perhaps equally central to the debates surrounding sincerity and the construction of multiple selves is the question of language. Fernando Arenas, for example, raises a central issue to the intersecting fields of Pessoan and queer studies: why are Pessoa's most explicitly homoerotic poems composed in English? (see pp. 107 and 117 but also Dana Stevens' interesting argument on Pessoa's use of English on p. 40). With a poet who self-consciously multiplies his own identity it also becomes quite relevant to ponder why he has chosen to express aspects of those identities in a language that is not his own. While it is true that Pessoa clearly dominated English from his childhood years spent in English-speaking schools in South Africa, why did he resort to it to express his own queerness?

A related yet different problematic of language translates itself into perhaps my only significant criticism of this English-language volume. In a work that seeks to subvert hegemonic structures and examine the marginalized actors in Pessoa's poetic universe (including Pessoa himself as an actor), I find it rather ironic that when French scholars are quoted, there is no translation into English (or Portuguese, for that matter). This linguistic phenomenon appears, for example, in Alessandra M. Pires' essay, which makes painstaking attempts to translate Portuguese citations into English but ignores the same obligation with quotes originally presented in French, where translation is not provided even within the extensive footnotes to the article (64–7). The assumption that French need not be translated where Portuguese cannot claim the same exemption belies an attitude of cultural hegemony of French critical theory, as if to say that French scholarship has dominated academe to such an extent that it is now offered immunity from translation into the languages about which it is speaking.

In addition to the topics raised above, the essays in this collection treat many more, with top-notch scholarship and unusual clarity, from the role of women and possible degree of misogyny in...