Philosophical essays: a critical edition—Fernando Pessoa edited by Nuno Ribeiro (review)

Nominally considered the most significant poet of 20th-century Portugal, Fernando Pessoa also holds the distinction of writing himself out of much of his works systematically—something unique in European literature as a whole. This is all the more curious for his having published just four books during his life and many other poems and texts in literary journals and magazines. While a known figure in his locale and time, the broader international acclaim he has more recently gained during the last several decades plays well into the game he established as his overall method. He wrote the majority of his work under several heteronyms, each composing an oeuvre relatable to the name, not the author. But then, who was the author and whom do we read—Pessoa or the heteronym? And what difference does it make if we confound the two? Where does the one appear and the other fade? Or are they twins or something else that entices and eludes us?

There is certainly playfulness here, and it can grow infectious. Play has a tendency to do that. And what a breath of fresh air it is to find a poet who found, in fully embodied masks, a kind of multiplicity of character, if you wish to take it that way, and relative anonymity for the author behind, within or in front of the mask. At least in my reading of “his” poems and essays before the publication of the present book, it kept me attuned not only to their brilliance but also to the way that Pessoa set the stage for our encounter with them.

Not being a scholar in things Pessoa, I am not the one to comment in any authoritative fashion on the histories, complexities or parallelisms that his masks—that is, his heteronyms—and writings involve. Perhaps his upbringing was a factor. It seems to have been. Born in Lisbon in 1888, thereafter relocated to Durban, South Africa, in 1896, he learns English, and the effect of this linguistic and spatial disjunction on the young sensibility of the future poet must have been significant. In 1906 he returned to Lisbon for good but did not give up writing in English. He only gave up writing in his name in English, adopting two droll “pre-heteronyms,” as Pessoa calls them—Charles Robert Anon and Alexander Search—in which to compose most of the brief philosophical essays that comprise the book at hand.

Make no mistake: These essays, discovered recently and published as written for the first time, are not in any sense methodical or complete. They can be read as commentary on a host of issues—rationality, atheism, belief, freedom, the will, the soul, sensation, consciousness, etc.—and seem at once serious in their intent and ludic in their results.

This is not an unknown for poets who grapple with philosophical concepts. Nor are flashes of insight unknown, particularly in regard to a fundamental origin for the poetic: the encounter with the Other, whether real or imagined, or partaking of something of both. The recounting of Baudelaire’s exclamation to a friend, who was just about to throw an African mask into the corner in disgust, to stop because the mask might be “the true god” is striking in this respect, especially for us, ever drained of the kind of heterogeneity between peoples and cultures that gives meaning to who and what we are. Striking, too, is this perhaps involuntary couplet at the end of a paragraph on “introspective psychology,” which of course can also be taken as two unconnected jottings:

Psychological arguments. Walking in the street, too quickly.

Nor can I really say what the author meant with the following depiction though I have an inkling that it responds more to a poetic than to a philosophical desire:

Objective classifications made according [to] a process are Subjective, Objective or Subjective-Objective.

Subjective classifications as processes are of...