Philosophy and Literature Network

The mere existence of the so-called heteronyms is the vexata questio of Pessoa studies. Pessoa sought to ensure the legibility of his work both to his contemporaries and to posterity. He did so in published and unpublished texts on the genesis and identity of such quasi-actual figures, in the dramatic setting of their several colloquia, mutual admiration society and prefaces to each other’s work, as well as in the tireless writing of as yet unpublished and stillborn publishing plans of the work of his heteronyms. And yet, the first occurrence of the word, heteronym, is late (1928, presença), being denoted till then by functionally inert terms such as “pseudonym” or by periphrastic descriptions intended to denote the putative dramatic nature of such figures.

The critical interpretation of Pessoa’s heteronymy oscillates between an emphasis on the multiplicity of the work, in which Pessoa is described as a mere rendez-vous of dramatic or mediumistic impulses endowed, by baptism, with a proper name (Alberto Caeiro et alii), or an emphasis, comparatively minor, on the unity of a set of texts which a proper name, Fernando Pessoa, subscribes. The former emphasis is attractive to those contemporary interpretations ruled by models which contest any robust philosophical notion of the “subject.” The latter, to interpreters who accept Pessoa’s own stance when, in 1932, he defends the publication of his work under his own name since it is too late, he claims, to maintain any “thorough disguise” anymore. The dilemma of the unity or multiplicity is, as it is only to be expected, an object of scrutiny for Pessoa’s best critics.

João Gaspar Simões, for instance, considers Pessoa’s heteronymy an insubstantial and futile exercise only repaired by the orthonym Pessoa’s later encounter with the national lyrical tradition. Eduardo Lourenço, in turn, describes Alexander Search as a “proto-Pessoa” wherein the topics later addressed by the major heteronyms are incipiently unified. José Gil describes this “proto-Pessoa” as the immanent plane onto which Pessoa’s sustained sensationalism is mapped. The topic of the heteronymy seems to be unavoidable in any serious critical analysis of Pessoa’s work.

This research project presupposes the unity of all of Pessoa’s written production, taken as co-incident in a single plane, irrespective of generic divisions. This strong postulate necessarily requires an additional argument which will reveal the coherence, near or remote, of all extant texts in that single plane.

Taking as mode of access the notion of “heteronym,” we intend 1) to survey and analyse all the occurrences of the latter term, or of its pre-1928 periphrastic equivalents denoting it, 2) to review all the critical literature on Pessoa, which, for the most part, is heavily dependent on Pessoa’s self-interpretation, serially released in his lifetime to chosen recipients (the editors of presença, for example) or left unpublished by the author.

The role and nature of Pessoa’s self-interpretative efforts, undertaken in a sustained, if erratic, manner, must be reviewed, without assuming that therein lies an unquestionable material truth (the 1935 letter to Casais Monteiro, for instance, may be read as a prime example of authorial obfuscation), 3) an exhaustive analysis of all the editorial projects left unpublished by Pessoa. The extant manuscripts include various unpublished editorial projects, jottings, notes or lists, in which we find how changing were the titles attributed to given texts, as well as the inclusion of any given text in a larger work or its subsumption under the name of any of the heteronyms. The collection and analysis of this material are decisive, when we realise that the attribution of a given text to a name cannot be dissociated from editorial decisions, 4) assuming this dual role of the heteronyms, their construal either as a principle of poetic production, or as names labelling editorial and publishing plans, to analyse the major text in which this dual function flagrantly intersects, Bernardo Soares’s The Book of Disquiet.

It does not, in fact, seem possible to read Soares’ work in the absence of confronting the materiality of the edition we choose to read. The Book of Disquiet is the textual space in which, the hybrid nature of its author notwithstanding, the heteronymic process as principle of textual production swerves drastically from heteronymy as organizing and editorial principle: to establish the extent to which both principles may coexist harmonically, if at all, will be one of the aims of the research project.

The end results of the project, undertaken by a team of, for the most part, junior researchers, under the supervision of a team of well-known senior researchers in the field, will be published in five volumes, and debated in a permanent seminar and in public conferences open to anybody who wishes to join the ongoing debate.