Portuguese Modernisms: Multiple Perspectives in Literature and the Visual Arts 9781906540791, 1906540799, 9781315089607, 1315089602, 9781351553605, 1351553607

Table of contents :
Cover......Page 1
Half Title......Page 2
Title Page......Page 6
Copyright Page......Page 7
Table of Contents......Page 8
Dedication......Page 10
List of Illustrations......Page 11
Notes on the Contributors......Page 14
Introduction......Page 20
PART I: MAIN FIGURES AND MAGAZINES......Page 30
1. Portuguese Precursors of the First Modernist Generation......Page 31
2. Fernando Pessoa: Not One but Multiple isms......Page 43
3. Mário de Sá-Carneiro: Modernism Achieved by Means of Wrong Beauty......Page 61
4. Lisbon Stories: The Dialogue Between Word and Image in the Work of José de Almada Negreiros......Page 74
5. José de Almada Negreiros: Modernism in the Visual Arts......Page 88
6. Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso: A Modernist Painter......Page 109
7. António Botto’s Impossible Queerness of Being......Page 129
8. Modernist Differences: Judith Teixeira and Florbela Espanca......Page 141
9. António Ferro: Modernism and Politics......Page 154
10. How the First Portuguese Modernism Became Public: From Orpheu to Athena......Page 174
11. The Presença Generation......Page 190
12. Vieira da Silva: The Visible and the Gap......Page 203
13. The Formation of a Modernist Tradition in Contemporary Portuguese Poetry......Page 218
PART II: HISTORICAL AND COMPARATIVE PERSPECTIVES......Page 232
14. The Continuum of Modernism in the Iberian Peninsula, 1890–1936......Page 233
15. Portuguese Modernism, Brazilian Modernism......Page 245
16. The Reception of Futurism in Portugal......Page 255
17. Modernist Confluences: Comparative Perspectives on Portuguese Modernism......Page 269
18. The Tail of the Lizard: Pessoan Disquietude and the Subject of Modernity......Page 283
19. Ezra Pound and Fernando Pessoa with T. S. Eliot in-between......Page 296
20. A Scattering of Shards: The Fragmentation of the Subject in the Orpheu Generation......Page 313
21. Modernist Theatre in the First Two Decades of the Twentieth Century......Page 329
22. The Aesthetics of Nationalism: Modernism and Authoritarianism in Early Twentieth-Century Portugal......Page 350
23. Spiritualism and Poetry in Modernist Portugal......Page 369
24. Important Literary Works of Portuguese Modernism......Page 383
Index......Page 397

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Portuguese Modernisms Multiple Perspectives on Literature and the Visual Arts

LEGENDA founded in 1995 by the European Humanities Research Centre of the University of Oxford, is now a joint imprint of the Modern Humanities Research Association and Routledge. Titles range from medieval texts to contemporary cinema and form a widely comparative view of the modern humanities, including works on Arabic, Catalan, English, French, German, Greek, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Yiddish literature. An Editorial Board of distinguished academic specialists works in collaboration with leading scholarly bodies such as the Society for French Studies and the British Comparative Literature Association. LEGENDA,

MHRA The Modern Humanities Research Association (MHRA) encourages and promotes advanced study and research in the field of the modern humanities, especially modern European languages and literature, including English, and also cinema. It also aims to break down the barriers between scholars working in different disciplines and to maintain the unity of humanistic scholarship in the face of increasing specialization. The Association fulfils this purpose primarily through the publication of journals, bibliographies, monographs and other aids to research.

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edITORIAL BOARd Chairman Professor Colin davis, Royal Holloway, University of London Professor Malcolm Cook, University of exeter (French) Professor Robin Fiddian, Wadham College, Oxford (Spanish) Professor Paul garner, University of Leeds (Spanish) Professor Andrew Hadfield, University of Sussex (english) Professor Marian Hobson Jeanneret, Queen Mary University of London (French) Professor Catriona Kelly, new College, Oxford (Russian) Professor Martin McLaughlin, Magdalen College, Oxford (Italian) Professor Martin Maiden, Trinity College, Oxford (Linguistics) Professor Peter Matthews, St John’s College, Cambridge (Linguistics) dr Stephen Parkinson, Linacre College, Oxford (Portuguese) Professor Suzanne Raitt, William and Mary College, Virginia (english) Professor Ritchie Robertson, The Queen’s College, Oxford (german) Professor Lesley Sharpe, University of exeter (german) Professor david Shepherd, Keele University (Russian) Professor Michael Sheringham, All Souls College, Oxford (French) Professor Alison Sinclair, Clare College, Cambridge (Spanish) Professor david Treece, King’s College London (Portuguese) Managing Editor dr graham nelson 41 Wellington Square, Oxford ox1 2jf, UK [email protected] www.legenda.mhra.org.uk

Portuguese Modernisms Multiple Perspectives on Literature and the Visual Arts ❖ edited by Steffen dix and Jerónimo Pizarro

Modern Humanities Research Association and Routledge 2011

First published

2011

Published by the Modern Humanities Research Association and Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA LEGENDA is an imprint of the Modern Humanities Research Association and Routledge Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

© Modern Humanities Research Association and Taylor & Francis

2011

ISBN 13: 978-1-906540-79-1 (hbk) All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, including photocopying, recordings, fax or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the copyright owner and the publisher. Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Copy-Editor: Richard Correll

The editors gratefully acknowledge the support

ef

Institute de Ciencias Sociais da Universidade de Lisboa Laborat6rio Associado

Centro de linguistica da Universidade de Lisboa

CALOUSTE GULBENKIAN FOUNDATION

Contents ❖ List of Illustrations Notes on the Contributors Introduction steffen dix and jerónimo pizarro

x xiii 1

PART I: MAIn FIgUR eS And MAgAZIneS

1. Portuguese Precursors of the First Modernist Generation paula morão 2. Fernando Pessoa: Not One but Multiple isms jerónimo pizarro 3. Mário de Sá-Carneiro: Modernism Achieved by Means of Wrong Beauty giorgio de marchis 4. Lisbon Stories: The Dialogue Between Word and Image in the Work of José de Almada Negreiros ellen w. sapega 5. José de Almada Negreiros: Modernism in the Visual Arts raquel henriques da silva 6. Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso: A Modernist Painter rui-mário gonçalves 7. António Botto’s Impossible Queerness of Being anna m. klobucka 8. Modernist Differences: Judith Teixeira and Florbela Espanca cláudia pazos-alonso 9. António Ferro: Modernism and Politics josé barreto 10. How the First Portuguese Modernism Became Public: From Orpheu to Athena steffen dix 11. The Presença Generation mariana gray de castro 12. Vieira da Silva: The Visible and the Gap pedro lapa 13. The Formation of a Modernist Tradition in Contemporary Portuguese Poetry fernando j. b. martinho

12 24 42

55 69 90 110 122 135

155 171 184

199

viii

Contents

PART II: HISTORICAL And COMPAR ATIVe PeRSPeCTIVeS

14. The Continuum of Modernism in the Iberian Peninsula, 1890–1936 antonio sáez delgado 15. Portuguese Modernism, Brazilian Modernism arnaldo saraiva 16. The Reception of Futurism in Portugal gianluca miraglia 17. Modernist Conf luences: Comparative Perspectives on Portuguese Modernism antónio sousa ribeiro 18. The Tail of the Lizard: Pessoan Disquietude and the Subject of Modernity maria irene ramalho de sousa santos 19. Ezra Pound and Fernando Pessoa with T. S. Eliot in-between maria de lurdes sampaio 20. A Scattering of Shards: The Fragmentation of the Subject in the Orpheu Generation pedro eiras 21. Modernist Theatre in the First Two Decades of the Twentieth Century inês alves mendes 22. The Aesthetics of Nationalism: Modernism and Authoritarianism in Early Twentieth-Century Portugal manuel villaverde cabral 23. Spiritualism and Poetry in Modernist Portugal kenneth krabbenhoft 24. Important Literary Works of Portuguese Modernism k. david jackson Index

214 226 236

250

264 277

294 310

331 350 364 378

for liza

list of illUstRAtioNs ❖

Fig. 2.1. Orpheu 1 ( January–March 1915). 25 cm. Front cover designed by José Pacheco. Fig. 2.2. Orpheu 2 (April–June 1915). 25 cm. New kind of front cover: ‘fixed’ design with a ‘normal tipographical aspect.’ Fig. 2.3. Santa-Rita Pintor, Geometrical synthesis of a head × plastic infinite of atmosphere × physico-trascendentalism (radiographic sensibility), Paris, 1913. Published in Orpheu 2 (1915). Fig. 2.4. BNP/E3, 71A-53. [Biblioteca Nacional de Portugal / Fernando Pessoa Arquive, E3, document 71A-53]. Page with the signature of Álvaro de Campos, containing the dedication of ‘A Passagem das Horas. Ode Sensacionista.’ Fig. 4.1. José de Almada Negreiros, a engomadeira — Novela Vulgar Lisboeta (Lisbon: O autor, 1917 [Typografia Monteiro & Cardoso, Lisbon]), 30 p. 24 cm. Fig. 4.2. José de Almada Negreiros, K4 O Quadrado Azul. Poesia Terminus; diz-se aqui o segredo do génio intransmissível, ed. by José Almada Negreiros and Amadeo de SouzaCardoso (Lisbon: n.pub., 1917), 20 p. 23 cm. Fig. 4.3. José de Almada Negreiros, ‘Sintra,’ illustration included in ‘Histoire du Portugal par cœur, illustrée aux couleurs nationales par Almada,’ in Contemporanea, vol. I, nos 1, 2, 3, May–June–July 1922, p. 29. 29 cm. Fig. 5.1. José de Almada Negreiros in ‘an urban form of harlequin’s costume’. Portugal Futurista, no. 1, Lisbon, Nov. 1917. Fig. 5.2. José de Almada Negreiros, ‘Auto-retrato num grupo,’ 1925, oil on canvas, 130 × 197 cm. CAM / Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian Collection. Fig. 5.3. José de Almada Negreiros, ‘Jazz,’ 1929, Plaster, low-relief, (diptych) 130 × 120 cm (each panel). Maria Arlete Alves da Silva / Manuel de Brito Collection. Carlos Monteiro (photographer). Fig. 5.4. José de Almada Negreiros, ‘A Sesta,’ 1939, pencil on paper, 68 × 100 cm. Museu do Chiado-Museu Nacional de Arte Contemporânea Collection. Arnaldo Soares (photographer). Fig. 5.5. José de Almada Negreiros, ‘Domingo lisboeta’ and ‘Partida de Emigrantes,’ 1945–49, two large triptychs painted al fresco (410 × 205 cm / 405 × 200 cm). Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian. Fig. 5.6. José de Almada Negreiros, ‘Retrato de Fernando Pessoa,’ 1 December 1935, china ink on paper (44 × 34 cm). Palácio do Correio Velho. Reproduced in Carlos Queiroz, Homenagem a Fernando Pessoa (Coimbra: Presença, 1936), p. 7. Fig. 5.7. José de Almada Negreiros, ‘Retrato de Fernando Pessoa,’ 1954, oil on canvas (201 × 201 cm). Casa Fernando Pessoa Collection. Fig. 5.8. José de Almada Negreiros, ‘Auto-Retrato,’ c. 1940, wire and China ink on cardboard, 36 × 20 cm. António Homem Cardoso (photographer). Fig. 6.1. Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso, ‘Quadro G,’ c. 1912, oil on canvas, 51 × 29.5 cm. CAM / Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian Collection. Fig. 6.2. Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso, unknown title, 1913, oil on canvas, 27 × 46 cm. CAM / Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian Collection.

List of Illustrations

xi

Fig. 6.3. Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso, ‘Arabesco Dinâmico,’ 1916, oil on canvas, 100 × 60 cm. Private Collection (Ernesto Cardoso, Porto). Fig. 6.4. Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso, unknown title, 1917, oil and collage on canvas, 93.5 × 93.5 cm. CAM / Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian Collection. Fig. 6.5. Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso, unknown title [‘Coty’], 1917, oil and collage on canvas, 94 × 76 cm. CAM / Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian Collection. Fig. 6.6. Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso, unknown title [‘Zinc’], 1917, oil and collage on canvas, 59 × 49 cm. Private Collection (Idílio Pinho, Porto). Fig. 6.7. Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso, unknown title [‘Entrada’], 1917, oil and collage on canvas, 93.5 × 76 cm. CAM / Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian Collection. Fig. 9.1. António Ferro, A Idade do Jazz-Band, front cover by Bernardo Marques (Lisbon: Portugália, 2nd ed., 1924). 17 cm. Conference delivered at Teatro Lírico do Rio de Janeiro, 30 July 1922. Fig. 9.2. António Ferro, Leviana. Novela em fragmentos, introd. by Ramón Gómez de la Serna; front cover by Antonio Soares (Lisbon: Emprêsa Literária Fluminense, 1929). Edition: ‘Ed. definitiva’. [ 1 ] leaf of plate. 19 cm. Fig. 9.3. António Ferro, Salazar: le Portugal et son chef, preceed by a note on the idea of dictatorship by Paul Valéry; trans. by Fernanda de Castro (Paris: Éd. Bernard Grasset, 4th ed., 1934). 19 cm. Casa Fernando Pessoa Collection. Fig. 9.4. António Ferro, Intervenção Modernista, introd. by António Rodrigues; with a sanguine red chalk drawing of the author by Mário Eloy (Lisbon: Verbo, 1987–). Works by António Ferro, vol. I. 22 cm. Fig. 10.1. Almada Negreiros’s caricature on the reaction of the establishment that Orpheu faced (O Jornal, 3 April 1915). Fig. 10.2. Portugal Futurista’s cover. 24 cm. Fig. 10.3. Detail from Contemporanea, vol. I, nos 1, 2, 3, May–July 1922. Fig. 10.4. Advertisement, with a drawing by José de Almada Negreiros, in Contemporanea, vol. II, nos 4, 5, 6, Oct.–Dec. 1922. 30 cm. Fig. 10.5. Contemporanea’ front cover, 3rd series, no. 2, 1926. 30 cm. Fig. 11.1. Title page of Presença, no. 11, 31 March 1928. 36 cm. Fig. 11.2. Presença, no. 53–54, November 1938, p. 12. 36 cm. Júlio Reis Pereira’s Romantic illustration of artistic inspiration. Fig. 11.3. Title page of Presença, no. 1, 2nd series, November 1939. Fig. 12.1. Maria Helena Vieira da Silva, ‘La Chambre à Carreaux,’ 1935, oil on canvas, 60 × 92 cm.Tate Modern, London. Fig. 12.2. Maria Helena Vieira da Silva, ‘Le Promeneur Invisible,’ 1949–51, oil on canvas, 132 × 168 cm, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Donated by Mr. and Ms. Wellington S. Henderson Fig. 13.1. Sophia by Arpad Szenes. Private Collection. Maria Andresen. Fig. 13.2. Cesariny in his atelier. Eduardo Tomé (Photographer). Fig. 13.3. Ana Hatherly, Untitled, s. d., ink on paper, 19 × 14 cm. Fundação LusoAmericana para o Desenvolvimento Collection. Fig. 13.4. Ana Hatherly, Untitled, s. d., ink on paper, 19 × 14 cm. Fundação LusoAmericana para o Desenvolvimento Collection. Fig. 13.5. Mário Cesariny, ‘Mário de Sá-Carneiro raptando Maria HelenaVieira da Silva,’ oil on canvas, 65.5 × 50.5 cm. CAM / Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian Collection. Fig. 14.1. BNP/E3, 97–45. Text written by Pessoa circa 1931; published in Sobre Portugal, org. by. Joel Serrão (Lisbon: Ática, 1979), pp. 366–70. Fig. 21.1. A photograph exhibiting the protagonists of O Sonho da Princesa na Rosa as it was published by Ilustração Portuguesa on the 3 April 1916.

xii

List of Illustrations

Fig. 21.2. José Barbosa, ‘Bonecos Russos,’ Água-pé, 1927. Stage photograph by Silva Nogueira displaying Luísa Santanela and Francis (taken on 23 January 1927); 26.5 × 37 cm. Santanella-Amarante Company. Avenida Theatre. Museu Nacional do Teatro Collection (101886). Fig. 21.3. José Barbosa. ‘Madame Progresso,’ Rambóia, 1928. Costume sketch for Maria Cristina. Watercolour and gouache on paper; 25.5 × 27.6 cm. Hortense Luz Company. Maria Vitória Theatre. Museu Nacional do Teatro Collection (66931). Fig. 21.4. José Barbosa. ‘Varina Espanhola,’ Rambóia, 1928. Costume sketch for Corine Freire. Watercolour and gouache on paper; 25.8 × 25.2 cm. Hortense Luz Company. Maria Vitória Theatre. Museu Nacional do Teatro Collection (66932). Fig. 21.5. José Barbosa. ‘Vila Franca,’ Rambóia, 1928. Costume sketch for Cesária Henriques. Watercolour and gouache on paper; 21.6 × 25 cm. Hortense Luz Company. Maria Vitória Theatre. Museu Nacional do Teatro Collection (66926). Fig. 21.6. José Barbosa. ‘Voga,’ Rambóia, 1928, Costume sketch for Corina Freire. Watercolour on paper; 24 × 26.6 cm. Hortense Luz Company. Maria Vitória Theatre. Museu Nacional do Teatro Collection (66929). Fig. 21.7. Stage photograph by J. Marques displaying Fernanda Lapa and Norberto Barroca in Deseja-se Mulher. 1963. Casa da Comédia. Museu Nacional do Teatro Collection (79550). Fig. 21.8. José de Almada Negreiros, ‘1º Diablo,’ Auto da Alma, 1965, Taffeta and felt costume (used by Varela Silva), dress: 73 cm, cape: 168 cm, wings: 530 cm. Rey Colaço-Robles Monteiro Company. São Carlos Theatre. Museu Nacional do Teatro Collection (132224). Fig. 21.9. José de Almada Negreiros, ‘Alma,’ Auto da Alma, 1965, Taffeta, felt and lamé costume (used by Maria Lalande), dress: 143 cm, cape: 257 cm, hat 26cm (diameter). Rey Colaço-Robles Monteiro Company. São Carlos Theatre. Museu Nacional do Teatro Collection (132226). Fig. 21.10. Photographs of the architectural project of José Pacheco for Teatro Novo, as published by Ilustração Portuguesa on the 21 January 1922. Fig. 22.1. Santa-Rita Pintor by Pedro Lima (photographer). In Carlos Parreira, Santa-Rita Pintor: in-memoriam (Lisbon: Imprensa de Manuel Lucas Torres, 1919). 13 p. 24 cm. Casa Fernando Pessoa Collection. Fig. 22.2. BNP/E3, 135C-30 e 30a. acção (Órgão do «nvcleo de acção nacional»), dir. by Geraldo Coelho de Jesus, Year II, no. 4, Lisbon, 27 February 1920. Fig. 22.3. Lord Hugh Cecil, Conservatism (London: Williams & Norgate; New York: Henry Holt & Co.; Toronto: W. M. Briggs; India: R. & T. Washbourne, Ltd. [1912]). 17 cm. ‘Home university library of modern knowledge, no. 11’. Casa Fernando Pessoa Collection. Fig. 23.1. BNP/E3, 13A-57. Page from a diary that Fernando Pessoa kept in 1906.

Notes oN the CoNtRiBUtoRs ❖

José Barreto is a Senior Researcher at the Institute of Social Sciences (ICS) of the University of Lisbon. Since the 1990s, he has specialized in the social and political of history twentieth-century Portugal. His current research project focuses on the political writings of Fernando Pessoa. Recent publications: books: Religião e Sociedade. Dois Ensaios (2003); articles: ‘Salazar and the New State in the Writings of Fernando Pessoa,’ Portuguese Studies, 24, 2, (2008); chapter in books, ‘Fernando Pessoa racionalista, livre-pensador e individualista: a inf luência liberal inglesa,’ in A Arca de Pessoa: novos ensaios (2007); ‘Pessoa e Fátima: A propósito dos escritos pessoanos sobre catolicismo e política,’ in Fernando Pessoa: o guardador de papéis (2009). Manuel Villaverde Cabral is a Senior Researcher at the Institute of Social Sciences (ICS) of the University of Lisbon. He was the Director of Portugal’s National Library from 1985 to 1990 and Vice-Rector of the University of Lisbon from 1998 to May 2002. He was the chairman of the ICS Academic Board for several years and is once again Vice-Rector of the University of Lisbon. He has published extensively on contemporary Portuguese history and society, and he is a regular contributor to the mainstream media. He is currently running several big projects in the sociology of health, as well as urban quality of life and civic participation. His latest publications in English include ‘Class Effects and Societal Effects: Elite and Working Class Attitudes towards Political Citizenship from a European Comparative Perspective,’ Portuguese Journal of Social Science, 5, 3 (2006), 159–78; and ‘The Political Economy of the Portuguese Labour Market,’ in Unemployment in Southern Europe: Coping with the Consequences, ed. by N. Bermeo (London: Frank Cass & Co., 2000). Mariana Gray de Castro submitted in April 2010 a PhD thesis titled ‘Fernando Pessoa’s Shakespeare’ (King’s College London). She previously read English and Portuguese literature at the University of Oxford (B.A., M.Phil.), where she was also Titular Lecturer in three different years. Her main research interest lies in comparative modernist literature, and she has published articles in Portugal, Brazil and the UK. She is currently editing the first book of essays, in English, on Fernando Pessoa (forthcoming 2011). Antonio Sáez Delgado is Professor of Spanish and Iberian Literatures at the University of Évora (Portugal). He has published three books of poetry (Miradores, 1997; Ruinas, 2001; and Días, Humo, 2003), four books of essays dedicated to the relations between the Portuguese and Spanish literature in the beginnings of the twentieth century (Órficos y ultraístas, 2000; Adriano del Valle y Fernando Pessoa, 2002; Corredores

xiv

notes on the Contributors

de fondo, 2003; and Espíritus contemporáneos, 2008), two anthologies (Um Minuto, Um Século, 1998; and 20 Poetas Espanhóis do Século XX, 2003) and two volumes of his diary (En otra patria, 2005; and Vida errante, 2005). He is a regular contributor to Babelia, a cultural supplement of the daily newspaper El País. He is also translator of many modern and contemporary Portuguese authors, and was awarded the Giovanni Pontiero Translation Prize (2008). He is currently the President of the Association Writers of Extremadura. Steffen Dix is Associate Researcher at the Institute of Social Sciences of the University of Lisbon. He works in the areas of History and Sociology of Religion. His research interests include religion, religious plurality and Catholicism in Portugal, modernism and the Fernando Pessoa’s philosophical and religious writings. He has published articles on these topics in several national and international journals. He is the editor and translator of Fernando Pessoa Die Rückkehr der Götter (2006) and Genie und Wahnsinn (2010). He co-organized the book of essays A Arca de Pessoa (2007) and co-edited the special issue of Portuguese Studies, 24, 2 (2008), of the Department of Portuguese and Brazilian Studies, King’s College London, devoted to Fernando Pessoa. Pedro Eiras is Professor at the Faculty of Letters of the University of Porto, where he teaches Portuguese Literature. He is a researcher at the Margarida Losa Institute of Comparative Literature. He has published several books of essays such as Esquecer Fausto (2005; on Raul Brandão, Fernando Pessoa, Herberto Helder and Maria Gabriela Llansol), A Moral do Vento (2006; on Gonçalo M. Tavares), and A Lenta Volúpia de Cair (2007; on Portuguese poetry), and Tentações (2009; on Marquis de Sade and Raul Brandão), as well as novels and theatre plays. His current research interests are poetry, ethics and interartistic studies. Rui-Mário Gonçalves is Professor at the Faculty of Letters of the University of Lisbon and the author of many studies in History and Art Criticism, among which we can recall the following: Pintura e Escultura em Portugal 1940–1980 (1980); Pioneiros da Modernidade (1986); De 1945 à Actualidade (1986); A Arte Portuguesa do Século XX (1998); Almada Negreiros (O Menino de Olhos de Gigante) (2005); Amadeu de SouzaCardoso (A Ânsia de Originalidade) (2006). He was curator of several exhibitions. Kenneth David Jackson is Professor of Luso-Brazilian literature at Yale University. He is editor of Portugal: as primeiras vanguardas (2003), and A Vanguarda Literária no Brasil (1998), and author of the CD-ROM Luís de Camões and the first edition of ‘The Lusiads’ (2003) and other titles on Portuguese and Brazilian literatures, ethnography, ethnomusicology, photography and Creolistics. His book Adverse Genres in Fernando Pessoa will be published in Oxford in 2010. Anna Klobucka is Professor of Portuguese at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. She is the author of The Portuguese Nun: Formation of a National Myth (2000; Portuguese translation 2006) and O Formato Mulher: a emergência da autoria feminina na poesia portuguesa (2009), and she has co-edited After the Revolution: Twenty Years of Portuguese Literature 1974–1994 (1997) and Embodying Pessoa: Corporeality, Gender, Sexuality (2007; Portuguese edition forthcoming). She is also the lead

notes on the Contributors

xv

author of the first edition of the textbook Ponto de Encontro: Portuguese as a World Language (2007). Her articles have appeared in Colóquio/Letras, Luso-Brazilian Review, Portuguese Literary and Cultural Studies, Portuguese Studies, Slavic and Eastern European Journal, SubStance, and symplokē, among other journals. Kenneth Krabbenhoft is Professor of Spanish and Portuguese Literature at New York University. His published work includes books on seventeenth-century Spanish literature; essays on Fernando Pessoa, José Saramago, and Clarice Lispector; and translations of Eduardo Lourenço, Fernando Gil and Helder Macedo, Pablo Neruda, and St John of the Cross. His book Fernando Pessoa e As Doenças do Fim de Século is scheduled for publication by the Imprensa Nacional–Casa da Moeda (IN–CM) in 2010. Pedro Lapa is Professor at the Catholic University of Lisbon and Senior Curator of the National Museum of Contemporary Art (Chiado Museum). His writings on Art History and Art Criticism cover the period from the late nineteenth century to the present. From the books and catalogues he has published, one may highlight the following: Picabia: máquina caleidoscópica de linguagens (1997); Jimmie Durham interruptions (1998); The Uncanny Screen, Stan Douglas (1999); Joaquim Rodrigo — Catalogue Raisonné (1999); More Works About Buildings and Food: Art and Social Space (2000); Cinco Pintores da Modernidade Portuguesa 1911–1965 (2003); Mediaspectrologies, James Coleman (2004); Columbano Bordalo Pinheiro: uma arqueologia da modernidade em Portugal (2007); Linguagem e Experiência (2010). Giorgio de Marchis is Associate Professor of Portuguese and Brazilian Literature at the University of Rome III. Within the scope of his research concerning Portuguese modernism, he has participated in several international conferences and in a research project, Estudo e Edição dos Manuscritos Autógrafos de José Régio, supervised by Professor Luiz Fagundes Duarte. In this project he edited the critical edition of the Fados collection. Recently, he published the critical edition of the volume Dispersão, by Mário de Sá-Carneiro; see O Silêncio do Dândi e a Morte da Esfinge (2007). Fernando J. B. Martinho is a retired Professor of Portuguese Literature of the University of Lisbon. Main research areas: Fernando Pessoa and Portuguese modernism, and contemporary Portuguese poetry. Main publications: Fernando Pessoa e a Moderna Poesia Portuguesa (1983; 2nd edn, 1991); Pessoa e os Surrealistas (1988); Tendências Dominantes da Poesia Portuguesa da Década de 50 (1996); Literatura Portuguesa do Século XX, editor and author of the essay on Poetry (2004). Ines Alves Mendes is a PhD candidate in Modern Languages (Portuguese), at the University of Oxford, where she has lectured on Eça de Queirós and Fernando Pessoa for the past three years. Her doctoral thesis explores the rewritings of Antigone in Portuguese theatre throughout the twentieth century. Mendes is the co-editor of the on-line proceedings of ‘From Renaissance to Post-Modernism: Rewritings of Myths in Britain and Portugal,’ the result of a conference she co-organized with another doctoral student, in Wadham College, Oxford, in 2008. She has published in the United Kingdom and France.

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Gianluca Miraglia is Associate Researcher at the Centro de Tradições Populares Portuguesas at the University of Lisbon. He has written articles on nineteenth-century Portuguese authors, edited Pessoa’s texts and studied the relationships between Portuguese and Italian literature. Paula Morão is Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures at the Faculty of Letters of the University of Lisbon. Her research work is mainly linked with nineteenth- and twentieth-century Portuguese literature, autobiographical literature, textual criticism of modern texts and the relation between literature and the fine arts. She is the author of several publications such as Irene Lisboa: vida e escrita (1989); António Nobre: uma leitura do nome (1991); Viagens na Terra das Palavras (1993); Obras de Irene Lisboa, 10 vols (1991–99); Salomé e Outros Mitos: o feminino perverso na literatura portuguesa entre o fim-de-século e ‘Orpheu’ (2001); Retratos com sombra — António Nobre e outros contemporâneos (2004); Cesário Verde — Visões de artista, with Helena Carvalhão Buescu (2007); and Escrever a vida — verdade e ficção, with Carina Infante do Carmo (2008). Cláudia Pazos-Alonso is University Lecturer in Portuguese and Brazilian Studies at the University of Oxford, and Senior Research Fellow (Wadham College). Her main research interests centre on Lusophone women writers and questions of identity. She is the author of Imagens do Eu na Poesia de Florbela Espanca (1997) and co-author (with Hilary Owen) of a book entitled Antigone’s Daughters? Gender, Genealogy and the Politics of Authorship in 20th-Century Portuguese Women’s Writings (forthcoming with Bucknell Press). Her co-edited volumes include Closer to the Wild Heart: Essays on Clarice Lispector (2002), and most recently, with her Oxford colleagues T. F. Earle and Stephen Parkinson, the volume A Companion to Portuguese Literature (2009). Jerónimo Pizarro is Associate Researcher at the Linguistics Centre of the University of Lisbon and member of the Equipa Pessoa [Pessoa Team]. He is editor of seven volumes of Fernando Pessoa’s Critical Edition: of the major series, vol. VII, Escritos sobre Génio e Loucura [Writings on Genius and Madness], vol. VIII, Obras de Jean Seul de Méluret [Works by Jean Seul de Méluret], vol. IX, A Educação do Stoico [The Education of the Stoic]; vol. X, Sensacionismo e outros Ismos [Sensationism and other Isms], vol. XI, Cadernos [Notebooks], and vol. XII, Livro do Desasocego [Book of Disquietude]; and of the «Studies» Collection, vol. III, Fernando Pessoa: entre génio e loucura [Fernando Pessoa: between genius and madness]. He co-organized the book of essays A Arca de Pessoa [Pessoa’s Trunk] (2007) and co-edited the special issue of Portuguese Studies, 24, 2 (2008), of the Department of Portuguese and Brazilian Studies, King’s College London, dedicated to Fernando Pessoa. António Sousa Ribeiro is Professor of German Studies at the Faculty of Arts of the University of Coimbra, where he heads the Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures, and a senior researcher at the Centre for Social Studies of the same University. He is the co-coordinator of the doctoral programmes on postcolonialisms and global citizenship, on Materialities of Literature, and on Languages and Heterodoxies: History, Poetics and Social Practices. His current

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research interests include Austrian and German studies, comparative literature, postcolonial studies, translation studies, studies on modernism, and studies on violence, culture and identities. He has published extensively in all these fields. Maria de Lurdes Sampaio is Professor at the Faculty of Letters of the University of Porto and researcher at the Margarida Losa Institute of Comparative Literature. She is the author of Aventuras Literárias de Eça de Queirós e Ramalho Ortigão (2005), co-editor, with Gonçalo Vilas Boas, of Crime, Detecção e Castigo: Estudos sobre Literatura Policial (2001), and, with Isménia de Sousa, of the issue of Cadernos de Literatura Comparada: Contextos de Modernidade, no. 5 ( Jul. 2002). Collaborator of the Anglo-American digital databasis Ulissei@s (www.ilcml.com) with texts on Ana Luísa Amaral, Richard Aldington, and other Portuguese and English writers. Main research areas: postcolonial studies, Portuguese and comparative literature (law and literature studies, detective/criminal fiction, migrations), and studies on modernism. Maria Irene Ramalho de Sousa Santos is Professor of English, American Studies and Feminist Studies at the Faculty of Letters, and Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Social Studies, University of Coimbra. She is an International Affiliate of the Department of Comparative Literature of the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where she teaches regularly as a Visiting Professor. She is the author, more recently, of Atlantic Poets: Fernando Pessoa’s Turn in Anglo-American Modernism (2003; Brazilian ed., 2007; Portuguese ed., 2008), and ‘Poetry in the Machine Age,’ in vol. V of The Cambridge History of American Literature (2003). She is co-editor of Translocal Modernisms: International Perspectives (2008), and Transnational, Post-Imperialist American Studies? (2010). Also in collaboration, she prepared Uma paciência selvagem, a bilingual anthology of Adrienne Rich’s poetry (2008). Her work on poetry and poetics, focusing mainly on English, American, and Portuguese authors, has been published as articles or chapter of books, in Portugal and abroad, both in English and in Portuguese. Ellen Sapega is Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Her publications include articles and book chapters on Portuguese modernism, memory, visual culture and commemoration since the late nineteenth century, and the contemporary Portuguese novel. Author of Ficções Modernistas and Consensus and Debate in Salazar’s Portugal, she is also co-editor of the Luso-Brazilian Review. Arnaldo Saraiva is Professor at the Department of Portuguese and Romantic Studies at Porto University. He founded the CEP — Centro de Estudos Pessoanos — in 1975 and founded and co-directed the journal Persona (1977–85). From his vast academic contributions, one way highlight the following: Literatura Marginalizada (2 vols, 1975 and 1980); O Modernismo Brasileiro e o Modernismo Português (1986) and Fernando Pessoa, Poeta — Tradutor de Poetas (1996). He also edited: Cartas de Mário de Sá-Carneiro a Luís de Montalvor, Cândida Ramos, Alfredo Guisado, José Pacheco (1977); Correspondência Inédita de Mário de Sá-Carneiro a Fernando Pessoa (1980); Orpheu 3 (1984); and O Livro de Poemas, by Luís de Montalvor (1998).

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Raquel Henriques da Silva is Professor of Art History and Museology at the Faculty of Social and Human Sciences of the New University of Lisbon. She is the co-ordinator of the Revista de História da Arte published by the Art History Institute. She has published works on nineteenth- and twentieth-century Portuguese Art History that cover several areas: architecture, urbanism and the visual arts. She has been the Senior Curator of many exhibitions and was the Director of the Chiado Museum and the Portuguese Museums Institute.

IntroduCtIon ❖ Steffen Dix and Jerónimo Pizarro All definitions are limiting. Rather than suggest a new and broad definition of modernism, we would like to highlight one of the more distinctive features of the set of cultural trends and artistic movements that are usually identified as modernist: its plurality. This does not mean that we don’t agree, at least in part, with some recent descriptions of modernism as ‘the lure of heresy’ and ‘a commitment to a principled self-scrutiny’,1 for instance, or with prior studies that reveal other common characteristics and fundaments.2 either approach has its own advantages, but in our view, modernisms — in the plural — should be the term used, in order not to subsume the more theoretically peripheral manifestations in a global, or rather, an Anglo-American and Central european perspective. This perspective has already been strongly challenged by some of those involved in modernist movements who were neither born in great urban centres, the focal point of european modernisms, nor then spent long periods in many of them as they came and went from these points of convergence. What in retrospect has been called modernism — one of those great nouns in the singular where plurals tend to be avoided — is part of a historical period that includes industrialization, urbanization, rationalization and democratization, that is to say, Western modernity, and as such, describes a series of manifestations that reveal the transformations of the forms of perception of human sensibility in relation to new socio-historical contexts. These manifestations were plural, which could hardly have been otherwise seeing that modernity brought with it a growing pluralization of our world and that modernization was not (and still is not to this day) homogenous in time and space. In fact, unlike what some inf luential classical sociology authors predicted, modernization has not shown itself to be a process that leads to a single modernity, but as a differential process that multiplies differences within each social group.3 Consequently, modernism as a phenomenon cannot be considered a less plural set of expressions than modernity, and its concept must be understood as a notion in which the (collective) singular is formally a plural. At the same time, this understanding of modernism and modernity requires a distancing in relation to certain critical ‘post-modernist’ assumptions. The pluralization of the modern world is not recent and history demonstrates that the hegemony of some ‘grand narratives’ has been at stake since the mid-nineteenth century. One of the most lucid testimonies to this hegemonic crisis is in Livro do Desasocego [Book of Disquietude], the greatest Portuguese modernist book, in which Fernando Pessoa describes his generation in the following manner: Pertenço a uma geração que herdou a descrença no facto christão e que creou em si uma descrença em todas as outras fés. Os nossos paes tinham ainda o

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Steffen dix and Jerónimo Pizarro impulso credor, que transferiam do christianismo para outras formas de illusão. Uns eram enthusiastas da egualdade social, outros eram enamorados só da belleza, outros tinham a fé na sciencia e nos seus proveitos, e havia outros que, mais christãos ainda, iam buscar a Orientes e occidentes outras fórmas religiosas, com que entretivessem a consciencia, sem ellas ôca, de meramente viver.4 [I belong to a generation that inherited the disbelief in the Christian fact and created in itself a disbelief in all other faiths. Our parents still had the creative impulse, which they transmitted from Christianity to other forms of illusion. Some were enthusiasts of social equality, others were in love only of beauty, others had faith in science and its benefits, and there were others that, even more Christian, set out to look in Orients and occidents for other religious forms, with which to entertain the consciousness, without them empty, of merely living.]

Instead of being an outdated historical period that foreshadows an epoch that was postmodern in theory, modernity is a qualitative transformation that continues — in a differential manner — to be deeply felt in contemporary life.5 Modernism, understood as a critical category associated with the initial impulse of avant-gardist experimentation, a profound concern to renew all artistic forms in every aspect, and a permanent search for alternative systems of beliefs and values. *

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In the early twentieth century, a number of revolutionary artists and art movements emerged in Portugal, as well as in many other Western countries. The works of these artists and art movements — which nowadays constitute the modernist canon — encouraged a re-examination of many aspects of human existence and can be said to have produced some of the most significant and radical changes in the tradition of Portuguese literature and the visual arts, as well as in social and cultural life. In Portuguese history, for instance, since the renowned ‘generation of 1870’, nothing had had such an important and critical bearing on the arts and society as Portuguese modernisms — in the plural, for there would be a first and then a second modernism, and some critics would even argue a third.6 during the period encompassed by the first and the second modernist generation (1915–40), a series of artists and intellectuals began an ongoing renovation of the relations between production and reception of literature and the visual arts. They rebelled against nineteenth-century artistic, academic and historicist traditions, which were seen as outdated. They attacked the traditional forms of art, literature and daily life in order to establish new forms of human experience. As an alternative to outmoded ways of thinking and conceiving of life, Portuguese modernists suggested the fragmentation of the subject and (sometimes) a dialogue between antiquity and modern times. The effects of modernist transformations in Portugal were so profound and irreversible that they still reverberate in contemporary cultural life. In spite of these facts, very few books in english have examined in retrospect Portuguese modernisms as an artistic-cultural phenomenon within a specific social and historical context. A few very good articles about different topics on Portuguese modernisms can be found in some english-language journals, but not a

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wide-ranging volume on it. In any case, it is important to mention here two books that are mainly focused on Fernando Pessoa. The first is An Introduction to Fernando Pessoa: Modernism and the Paradoxes of Authorship, by darlene Sadlier, who studied the formation of Pessoa’s modernist aesthetic and the poetry of his main heteronyms, i.e. Alberto Caeiro, Ricardo Reis and Álvaro de Campos, as well as the poems signed by Pessoa under his ‘own’ name. The book addresses the problem of authorship and the question of how a national poet is constructed or deconstructed.7 The second is a comparative study, entitled Atlantic Poets: Fernando Pessoa’s Turn in Anglo-American Modernism, by Maria Irene Ramalho de Sousa Santos. This book begins with a comparison between Hart Crane and Fernando Pessoa, and constitutes a remarkable attempt to place Pessoa rightfully in the canon of Anglo-American literature.8 However, these two books, and even a third one, concerned with corporeality, gender, and sexuality,9 should be seen as exceptions. There is no single volume in english-speaking countries that presents an overview of Portuguese modernisms. This is exactly what we will try to convey in this volume. *

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This book presents a number of essays written by specialists in various fields that include literary criticism, linguistics, sociology, history and art criticism. It therefore offers an excellent overview of Portuguese modernism in a current, challenging and encompassing manner. Although contributions focus on literature and the visual arts, that is to say the two artistic forms that had the greatest impact in the first decades of the twentieth century in Portugal, several texts refer critically to the socio-cultural and political changes of the time. The first and second modernisms are usually bracketed between 1915 (the appearance of the Orpheu magazine) and 1940 (when the Presença magazine folded), but in making temporal delimitations we decided to set a distinction between the beginning and theoretical end of Portuguese modernisms in less absolute terms, to focus more on the roots and advent of twentieth-century modern movements, and to highlight the early work by Maria Helena Viera da Silva (1908–1992). It is also worth mentioning that although we focus mainly on those figures who were involved in what is known in Portugal as the ‘first modernism,’ which is considered the most inf luential part of the Portuguese modernist movement, we also include the precursors of Portuguese modernists and the so-called second modernist generation, which consisted mainly of contributors to the Presença magazine. Finally, it is important to mention that if the appearance of the Orpheu generation was roughly concurrent with the proclamation of the First Republic in Portugal (there was also a First Republic!), Presença’s appearance on the literary scene coincided with the military coup that would put an end to that short-lived experiment with democracy. This is relevant, especially if we recall that the first modernist generation was the primary initiator of a new kind of Weltanschauung that began to inf luence literature, art and even daily life, and that the second modernist generation, in contrast, was more committed to the institutionalization of this aesthetic. The book is in two parts: the first is devoted to the leading practitioners of modernist literature and art in Portugal, and it begins with an article on precursors

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of the first burst of modernism and ends with an essay on successors of Portuguese modernisms; the second part is more historical and comparativist and begins with a text that suggests the possibility of considering the literature of the Iberian Peninsula ‘as a dream without physical or time frontiers’, and ends with a critical index of ten key Portuguese modernist works, according to its author. We will now take a look at aspects in each article. As Paula Morão argues in the first chapter, ‘Today it seems absurd to consider that poets of a certain generation appear spontaneously without the support of a tradition.’ All generations, even those that claim to have made a break with the past, are indebted to the past to a greater or lesser extent. So, however much of a paradox it may seem, we may even talk about the tradition of the break itself, as Octavio Paz did in Los hijos del limo (1974), a book where he explores the history of modern poetry from german Romanticism to the late avant-gardes.10 Morão examines the important inf luence that writers, such as Almeida garrett, Antero de Quental, Cesário Verde, António nobre and Camilo Pessanha had over the first generation of Portuguese modernists, the generations connected with the Orpheu magazine. Jerónimo Pizarro writes about the main isms (paulism, intersectionism and sensationism) that Fernando Pessoa created ‘between 1914 — when he gives “life” to Alberto Caeiro, Ricardo Reis and Álvaro de Campos — and 1915, when he writes numerous newspaper articles, sociological ref lections, parts of the Book of Disquietude and some inf lammatory letters, many of which he never gets round to sending.’ This panoramic presentation of Pessoan isms was helped by a previous work: volume x of the Fernando Pessoa Critical edition, entitled Sensacionismo e Outros Ismos.11 Its appendix presents an unknown and unfinished text by Pessoa, called Technique of Feeling. The next contribution is by Giorgio de Marchis, who focuses on Mário de Sá-Carneiro, a close friend of Fernando Pessoa and joint director of Orpheu. de Marchis studies Sá-Carneiro’s own, rather peculiar interpretation of modernism, as well as his obstinacy in defending all his works, though seeming to accept Pessoa’s criticism of some of them by revising, reformulating and republishing them in a new guise. From this perspective, Mário de Sá-Carneiro always appears determined to rescue the ‘beauty’ of his works from oblivion, though admitting to a certain ‘wrong beauty’. The third key figure of the first generation of modernists — and perhaps the most versatile — was José de Almada negreiros. This poet, novelist, dramatist, painter, draughtsman, caricaturist, conference speaker and choreographer is examined by ellen sapega and raquel Henriques da silva. For Sapega, Almada negreiros’s body of work presents the most successfully developed and complex effort at capturing the nuances of urban life in Lisbon during the first half of the twentieth century. In her essay, Sapega argues that after 1917, i.e., after incorporating the lessons of abstraction into his visual production, Almada began to develop the distinct visual style for which he is known today. Raquel Henriques da Silva complements this essay when she looks into Almada negreiros’s artistic work during the modernist period, which in Portugal went from the early or mid 1910s to 1940. In her introduction, Silva explains that she will not comment on every phase

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in Almada negreiros’s artistic career, but only ‘highlight those that I believe to be more relevant in the context of Portuguese culture of the time’. Following these essays on the precursors as well as the better known figures in the ‘first modernism’ are four critical texts that examine the works of other artists and writers (Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso, António Botto, Florbela espanca, Judith Teixeira) as well as that of a journalist and politician (António Ferro) who was also a modernist writer, dramatist and poet. rui-Mário Gonçalves writes about Souza-Cardoso, who very early in his career developed abstract-geometric paintings of a cubist type. gonçalves argues that Souza-Cardoso attained a remarkable and original synthesis of the extreme energy of colours with the extreme energy of forms, thus overtaking both the orthodoxies of expressionism and cubism. gonçalves’s chapter is an outstanding presentation of the highlights of an extraordinary painter who died very young, victim of the 1918 pneumonic epidemic, and whose work remained unknown for about forty years, even bearing in mind that Modigliani, Brancusi, delaunay and Henri gaudierBrzeska were among Souza-Cardoso’s greatest admirers. Anna Klobucka’s essay is on António Botto, one of the most controversial figures in Portuguese modernisms and a frequenter of the cafés and tertulias that Pessoa, Sá-Carneiro and Almada used to frequent. Pessoa defended him as an artist very early on, in a manifesto signed by Álvaro de Campos and in an article signed by Pessoa-ipse, ‘António Botto e o Ideal estético em Portugal’ [António Botto and the Aesthetic Ideal in Portugal], published in Contemporanea, 3, (1923). Klobucka is interested in the important inf luence that Botto’s work and presence had on several leading figures of Portuguese and international modernism, such as Fernando Pessoa, Federico garcía Lorca and Vaslav nijinsky — Pessoa got to know Lorca through Botto12 — as well as the cultural and social environment in which they and others moved. Klobucka argues that Botto’s was the first openly gay Portuguese author and that he cultivated a highly visible queer persona in the historical setting of the 1920s and 1930s. Cláudia Pazos-Alonso’s article explores the workings and consequences of the marginality of women in Portuguese modernisms, studying the contrasting strategies of Judith Teixeira and Florbela espanca, and discussing their thematic points of contact with Sá-Carneiro and Pessoa. Pazos-Alonso argues that a close reading of Teixeira’s and espanca’s respective works reveals their modernist propensity to thematize embodied subjective experiences and to challenge assumptions of sexual orthodoxy, through the conscious enactment of an elaborate performative stance. Finally, in his article, José Barreto analyses António Ferro’s ideas as a young modernist and his policies when collaborating with the Salazarist regime, i.e. with the authoritarian, right-wing government that António de Oliveira Salazar headed. Ferro was described as someone who — in political terms — was somewhere ‘between goebbels and Malraux’. He was a young member of the modernist group involved with Orpheu (1915) and a close friend of several futurist artists. Bearing in mind that Ferro’s ‘politics of the spirit’ is based on a ‘modernist’ conception serving political purposes, Barreto’s chapter can be seen as an excellent case study on the relationship between modernism and totalitarianism (or Salazarism) in Portugal.

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The first part of the book includes steffen dix’s text on modernist literary magazines prior to Presença, Mariana Gray de Castro’s text on the Presença generation, as well as two essays that expand the timeframe of Portuguese modernisms: Pedro Lapa on the early work of Maria Helena Vieira da Silva, and Fernando J. B. Martinho on ‘The Formation of a Modernist Tradition in Contemporary Portuguese Poetry’. dix emphasizes the importance of several modernist magazines, seen as the public face of the first Portuguese modernism and the most important and significant vehicles for the entry of a modernist Weltanschauung into the public and cultural sphere of the time. In this chapter, the reader will find a presentation of the key magazines of the first Portuguese modernism (Orpheu, Centauro, Exílio, Portugal Futurista, Contemporanea, Athena, and the like), a brief summary of their history and a discussion of their inf luence. Castro’s article is devoted to the Coimbra-based magazine Presença and its creation, which was affirm on its pages and was made up, in part, of the founders of the magazine themselves ( José Régio, 1901–1969; João gaspar Simões, 1903–1987; and Branquinho da Fonseca, 1905–1974) and, in part too, by many of its contributors. As Castro recalls, Presença was ‘an important vehicle for the visual arts as well as literature’, since it was illustrated throughout by artists like Almada negreiros, Sarah Afonso, Bernardo Marques and Mário eloy; and, as a magazine, it ‘did much to establish the previous Orpheu generation firmly at the heart of Portuguese modernism’ by publishing unknown writings by Fernando Pessoa, Mário de Sá-Carneiro, José de Almada negreiros, Ângelo de Lima and Luís de Montalvor. In the penultimate chapter of the first part of the book, Pedro Lapa presents Maria Helena Vieira da Silva (1908–1992) as one of the main figures of the Jeune École de Paris, a school that included diverse artists who in the 1930s and especially in the 1940s challenged the foundations of abstraction, without rejecting its principles. ‘The essential aim’ of these artists, explains Lapa, ‘was to investigate questions raised by Paul Klee concerning the ability of art to represent a reality that had been transformed by modern technology and warfare, and, above all, its ability to represent the unrepresentable, that which lies beyond human understanding, as a means of returning to the Romantic sublime.’ In the last text, Fernando J. B. Martinho reveals the extraordinary artistic inf luence of leading modernist figures on the following generations, and how their contribution allowed other successors — besides Vieira da Silva — to discover the first and second Portuguese modernisms. Martinho shows that ‘there was a process of interaction and exchanges between successive generations’ and concludes that the ‘modernist tradition played a decisive role in making the twentieth century in Portugal a “golden century” as far as poetry is concerned’. The second part of the book includes essays that take on a more comparativist and historical viewpoint. In the first text, Antonio sáez delgado tries to establish what he understands as ‘the three principal stages’ of the ‘plural continuum’ of modernity in the Iberian Peninsula: (1) the moment of the Portuguese symbolism / Spanish modernism, and, of the Portuguese saudosism / Spanish generation of 98; (2) the moment of the first Portuguese modernism / First Spanish vanguardias; and

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(3) the moment of the second Portuguese modernism / Spanish Veintisiete. In the second part of his article, Sáez delgado shows that ‘the connections among the Portuguese and the Spanish literatures in the period between 1890 and 1936 owe much to the personal contacts established between the writers from both countries’. In the second article, Arnaldo saraiva mentions many of the differences and similarities between the modernisms of Portugal and Brazil. According to Saraiva, the modernist movements of Portugal and Brazil were not unaware of each other, and the Brazilian movement did not cut itself off from Portuguese literature. In fact, Brazilian and Portuguese modernisms, despite their differences, shared many aesthetic similarities, and the most representative modernist writers of both countries are nowadays read with pleasure and profit on both sides of the Atlantic. Gianluca Miraglia’s article, ‘The Reception of Futurism in Portugal,’ can also be read, to a certain extent, as an attempt to form a bridge between two countries, namely Portugal and Italy. Miraglia describes the way futurist theories became known in Portugal and how they were received and transmitted, by means of a collection of a wide variety of testimonies, such as quotations, translations, newspaper or magazine articles, letters and personal notes. This article is important for an understanding of the role that futurism played in the first Portuguese modernism. next, António sousa ribeiro draws upon a number of texts from Portuguese and other modernisms (particularly Viennese modernism) in order to identify modes of conf luence that have their roots in a common nietzschean tension that no longer allows for any unified structure of feeling and testifies to the loss of any accepted evidence about the subject, the world or the literary object itself. For Sousa Ribeiro, ‘Pessoa’s “drama em gente” [drama in people] is just the more radical materialization’ of the crisis of the relationship between the subject and the world, and between these instances and language and artistic expression. In ‘The Tail of the Lizard: Pessoan disquietude and the Subject of Modernity,’ Maria Irene ramalho de sousa santos evokes a collection of essays entitled Who Comes after the Subject? (1991), and explains, by way of introduction: ‘One of the authors concludes that after the subject comes the citizen (etienne Balibar). [ Jean-Luc] nancy himself argues that what comes after the subject is the community. Another philosopher offers “situation” or “place” as a reply ([Alain] Badiou). Yet another submits that the question should address what, not who, the proper answer being death — or nothing ([Philippe] Lacoue-Labarthe). All these concepts (“citizen”, “community”, “situation”, “nothing”) will be useful in dealing with the Pessoan desassossego below.’ Pessoa’s Book of Disquietude was published posthumously and exists in many versions; in this sense, it is posterous, as theory and interpretation. Maria de Lurdes sampaio is the author of a comparative essay on ezra Pound and Fernando Pessoa ‘with T. S. eliot in between’. As Sampaio explains, ezra Pound, T. S. eliot and Fernando Pessoa left behind not only remarkable literary works but also very important essayistic ones. Pessoa was the Portuguese modernist with the best understanding of the Anglo-American world and this essay endeavours to encapsulate the different critical approaches to these three writers. Pedro eiras in the next essay deals with the question of the act of fragmenting the

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subject, common to all modernisms in general. To a certain extent, his essay seeks to explain the paradox at the start. eiras defends that ‘the proposal that the subject is inexistent [...] can be seen to begin in the experimental discourse of Camilo Pessanha,’ the main Portuguese symbolist poet. Inês Alves Mendes contribution is summarized in her introduction: ‘This article examines a genre that has received little critical attention: the theatrical works of Almada negreiros, Fernando Pessoa, Mário de Sá-Carneiro, António Ferro, together with José Pacheco and António Ponce Leão.’ Mendes’s very well documented article fills a lacuna in modernist studies — that of the theatre. Mendes prefers not to talk about a modernist theatre as it is debatable that such a theatre ever existed, i.e., if all the plays performed during a certain period of time were modernist or not. Subsequently, her text examines the theatrical works of some modernists, irrespective of whether these works can or not be classified as modernist, such as Pessoa’s O Marinheiro [The Mariner], for example, which david Jackson mentions in his article (see below). In ‘The Aesthetics of nationalism: Literary Modernism and Political Authoritarianism in early Twentieth-Century Portugal,’ Manuel Villaverde Cabral argues that in Portugal some of the writers and artists associated with the modernist magazines, Orpheu and Portugal Futurista, contributed significantly to the ‘attitude of mind’ (g. L. Mosse) that provided the later totalitarian regime in Portugal with its initial cultural aura. In ‘Spiritualism and Poetry in Modernist Portugal’, Kenneth Krabbenhoft ‘examines a central issue of nineteenth-century science and philosophy in light of its inf luence on Portuguese poetry in the modernist period’; this ‘central issue’ is the debate over the nature of the human soul, the quarrel between materialism and spiritualism. Finally, in an article that classifies as modernist many works produced during the modernist period, K. david Jackson selects ten ‘Important Literary Works of Portuguese Modernism,’ and writes an analytic commentary for each of the entries of this final index. This canonical endeavour, as any other, is personal and might need to be refined, but it is a very useful guide to what to read (initially) and a justification of the works selected. *

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This volume hopes to provide a critical guide to Portuguese modernisms for students and teachers of modernism. We also expect to fill a gap in the bibliographical field of english critical literature on modernism and to suggest the necessity of including Portuguese modernist manifestations in literature and the visual arts in the broader spectrum of multi-continental modernism or ‘geo-modernisms’. As we have explained, in the case of Portuguese modernisms, and contrary to what happens in relation to other modernisms, very few books in english have examined it within its social and historical context. There are, for example, many books on Spanish American modernism, Brazilian modernism and Spanish modernism, but there is no single companion or a really comprehensive book on Portuguese modernisms. We hope that different scholars in different countries can benefit from an ongoing dialogue between a sometimes vague and more abstract definition of modernism,

Introduction

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and a specific and more concrete reality, which is, in all of its manifestations, plural. If this book helps to broaden an understanding of Portuguese modernisms and of its plurality in english-speaking countries, it will have achieved one of its main goals. As with all highly ambitious books that result from a large amount of col lective participation, this book would not have been possible without the help of many people. We would like to thank sincerely — in our name and in that of many writers — Carole garton, Patricia Odber de Baubeta, Vicky Hartnack, Stefan Tobler, Peter Wise, Ana Luísa Amaral, Adelaide galhano, Pauly ellen Bothe, Carlos Alvarez, Sofia Patrão, Isabel Carlos, Joana Pizarro, Catarina Almada, Rita Almada, Manuel gaspar, Manuel Rosa, Luis Filipe gomes, José Reis Pereira, Maria Andresen de Sousa Tavares, Maria Arlete Alves da Silva, Rui Brito, Hugo dinis, Ana Hatherly, João Silverio, Inês Pedrosa, Carmo Mota, Jorge Uribe and nuno Ribeiro. notes to the Introduction 1. Peter gay, Modernism (London: Vintage Books, 2009), pp. 3–4. 2. As Michael Bell reminds at the beginning of his article ‘The Metaphysics of Modernism’, if we approach modernism on an intellectual plane, we are forced to recognize that ‘its intellectual formation encompassed a coming to terms with the lines of thought associated with Marx, Freud, and nietzsche’; see Bell’s chapter in The Cambridge Companion to Modernism, ed. by Michael Levenson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 9–32 (p. 9). 3. In relation to the persistence of some traditional values, for instance, modernization represents a cultural change that interacts closely with the structures of the system in which it occurs. In recent years, various celebrated sociologists, such as Shmuel eisenstadt, Immanuel Wallerstein and Ronald Inglehardt have suggested a revision of the classic modernization thesis in the light of the different forms of modernity. 4. Fernando Pessoa, Livro do Desasocego, edited by Jerónimo Pizarro (Lisbon: Imprensa nacional– Casa da Moeda, 2010), 142–43 (p. 143). This is the first and only critical edition of Pessoa’s Book of Disquietude; it corresponds to vol. xii of the ‘Fernando Pessoa Critical edition,’ a national project co-ordinated by Ivo Castro. 5. We keep mentioning these differences because it is important to abandon readings that directly or indirectly approach the various modernisms from the sole perspective of the two or three great ‘centres’, while neglecting the geographic ‘margins’ and some local, national and transnational manifestations. In fact, modernity’s different paths will not allow a discourse that does not adopt more encompassing and complex perspectives. See Translocal Modernisms: International Perspectives, ed. by Irene Ramalho Santos and António Sousa Ribeiro (Bern: Peter Lang, 2008), and Sousa Ribeiro’s article (‘Modernist Conf luences’) in this volume (Chapter 17). 6. See Fernando J. B. Martinho, ‘Terceiro Modernismo,’ in Dicionário de Fernando Pessoa e do Modernismo Português, ed. by Fernando Cabral Martins (Lisbon: Caminho, 2008), pp. 849–50. Martinho considers ‘discutível a introdução de uma nova categoria periodológica [Terceiro Modernismo]’ [the introduction to a new periodological category [third modernism] debatable],’ and that it is preferable to underline ‘the persistence of modernism’ seen as a megaperiod in poetry of the 1940s, 50s and 60s. 7. darlene Joy Sadlier, An Introduction to Fernando Pessoa: Modernism and the Paradoxes of Authorship (gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1998). 8. Irene Ramalho Santos, Atlantic Poets: Fernando Pessoa’s Turn in Anglo-American Modernism (Hanover, nH, and London: University Press of new england, 2003). 9. Embodying Pessoa: Corporeality, Gender, Sexuality, ed. by Anna M. Klobucka and Mark Sabine (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007). 10. Octavio Paz, Los hijos del limo (Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1974). Lectures originally given and published in english; cf. Children of the Mire: Modern Poetry from Romanticism to the Avant-garde, trans. by Rachel Phillips (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974).

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11. Fernando Pessoa, Sensacionismo e Outros Ismos, ed. by Jerónimo Pizarro (Lisbon: Imprensa nacional–Casa da Moeda, 2009). 12. Botto recalls his encounter with Federico garcía Lorca (c. 1929) and writes: ‘dias, depois, apresentava-o [a garcía Lorca] no velho Café da Arcada, ao grande [↑ imenso] Fernando Pessoa. Pessoa disse alguns versos seus, mas Lorca não os sentiu. Que eram duros e forçados. Supondo que Federico não tinha gostado porque Fernando Pessoa não sabia recitar, acudi, recitando eu outros que são estes que vou dizer aqui: [one page is missing] não haverá um cansaço, | das coisas. | de todas as coisas, | Como das pernas ou de um braço? || Um cansaço de existir, | de ser, | Só de ser, | O ser triste brilhar ou sorrir... || não haverá, um cansaço [↑ enfim,] | das coisas Para as coisas que são, | não a morte, mas sim | Uma outra espécie de fim, | Ou uma grande razão — | Qualquer coisa assim | Como um perdão?’ [days after, I introduced him (garcía Lorca), at the old Café da Arcada, to the great (↑ immense) Fernando Pessoa. Pessoa said some of his verses, but Lorca did not feel them. He meant they were hard and forced. Supposing Federico had not liked them because Fernando Pessoa could not declaim, I aided declaiming some others that are these I will say, here: [one page is missing] Is there no tiredness | Of things, | Of all things, | Like that of the legs and the arms? || A tiredness of existing, | Of being, | Only of being, | The sad being shine or smile... || Will there not be, after all, | For the things that are, |not death, but fair enough | Another sort of end, | Or a big reason — | Anything maybe | Like a forgiveness?]. See A. Klobucka’s article in this volume (Chapter 7).

PA R T I ❖

Main Figures and Magazines

CHAPter 1

❖

Portuguese Precursors of the First Modernist generation Paula Morão Today it seems absurd to consider that poets of a certain generation appear spontaneously without the support of a tradition which gives meaning to what they wish to put into practice, even when they intend to present themselves as bringers of the new, demolishing their older contemporaries and their predecessors. Since classical antiquity one has been able to note quarrels between the ancients and moderns (to use the term of the French seventeenth-century polemic), who have differentiated themselves with positions of either imitating the ancient models or staking a claim to innovation and to the use of artistic and poetic forms created ab initio. This concept only makes sense in the context of the introduction of ideas and practices by someone arriving on the literary or artistic scene, yet, as we will have the opportunity to see, even defenders of the new end up taking root in strata of the tradition which they wished to delete. This is the case of the Portuguese poets gathered in the 1915 magazine Orpheu and is suggested in the very title of that publication, with its desire to be new and different from the literary production of the era. In greek myth Orpheus symbolizes poetry itself, with its origins in song and in the harmonious mixture of the poetic word and music. So the innovations (and even the ruptures) that the magazine proposes echo a concept of literature which is firmly anchored in an intuitive recognition of the ancestral nature of poetry, whose historicity is recognized and linked to the condition of the poet as faber, as a craftsperson who must know his or her trade and its historicity in order to practise it in a full and competent way. This is why, when we read the first two numbers of Orpheu, and the third which remained at the proof stage,1 it is not surprising to find much-used classic forms such as the sonnet, the ode and the elegy alongside modern themes (machines and industry, for example), nor is it scandalous to find, beside traditional metres and versification, prose elements, blank and longlined verse, etc. This article seeks, therefore, to discern the elements of a lineage that sustains ‘os de Orpheu’ [those of Orpheu] in Portuguese literature,2 searching for the meeting of voices at the foundations of the poetics of modernity,3 which, in what is called the first modernism, takes on a stability that becomes apparent to those involved. The most poetically self-aware of the magazine’s contributors was Fernando Pessoa, as a number of his writings prove; we will point out a few. A fragment, probably

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from 1914, lists ‘Inf luências’ [Inf luences], including poetry in english during his formative years, 1904–05, when he was studying in South Africa. He also adds: 1905–1908 (fim) — edgar Poe (já na poesia), Baudelaire, Rollinat, Antero, Junqueiro (na parte anticlerical), Cesário Verde, José duro, Henrique Rosa. 1908–1909 (fim) — garrett, António Correia de Oliveira, António nobre. 1909–1911 — Os simbolistas franceses, Camilo Pessanha. 1912–1913 — 1) O saudosismo; 2) Os futuristas.4 [1905–1908] (end) — edgar Poe (already his poetry), Baudelaire, Rollinat, Antero, Junqueiro (for his anticlericalism), Cesário Verde, José duro, Henrique Rosa. 1908–1909 (end) — garrett, António Correia de Oliveira, António nobre. 1909–1911 — The French symbolists, Camilo Pessanha. 1912–1913 — 1) The saudosismo movement; 2) The futurists.] Other stages of Pessoa’s work confirm the Portuguese sources (those which interest us here), but it is worth remembering the ‘notas que Armando Côrtes-Rodrigues coligiu em 1914 [...] baseadas em dados fornecidos pelo próprio Poeta’[notes which Armando Côrtes-Rodrigues compiled in 1914 [...] based on information provided by the Poet himself ].5 These notes were published ‘tal como se encontram’ [as they were found] by Joel Serrão.6 For the period from 1908 to 1911, Côrtes-Rodrigues records the following: ‘Inf luências sobre as poesias portuguesas’ [Inf luences on the Portuguese poems] which Pessoa wrote in that period: ‘garrett — num impulso súbito, vindo da leitura das Folhas Caídas e das Flores Sem Fruto [Pessoa] começa a escrever versos portugueses’7 [garrett — In a sudden impulse, coming from reading Fallen Leaves and Flowers without Fruit, he [Pessoa] starts to write verse in Portuguese]. This note corroborates the list entitled ‘Inf luências’ [Inf luences] already quoted. Knowing now, as we do, of Pessoa’s role as mentor to ‘those of Orpheu’, it is not hard to believe that his declared inf luences constituted, in addition, a corpus of Portuguese readings common to all the poets in the group, and the pages of the magazine in fact bear this out. On the other hand, after 1915 each poet followed his own path, in some cases abandoning the intense desire to be new and original that the magazine embodied, in other cases pursuing this desire in various periodicals, with or without Pessoa’s collaboration. This article focuses on mapping the Portuguese readings that inform and sustain the poetry of the first modernism, discerning which among those poets were the ones who, for their patent or latent importance, we can designate as the precursors of Orpheu and of what follows it.8 In a second stage the article will examine those authors whom it has become apparent are the most relevant co-ordinates of such a map. The obligatory first point of reference has to be Almeida garrett, in whose work can be found many seminal elements of a modern conception of literature in general and poetry in particular.9 Lírica de João Mínimo [The Poetry of Minimum John], the 1829 book in which he collects his juvenilia, includes exercises in translating and glossing ancient and modern authors,10 as well as poems more or less of circumstance, such

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as the two odes ‘Ao Corpo Académico’ [To the Academic Body]. These poems prepare the ground for the mature poetry of this towering figure of Portuguese Romanticism. However, perhaps the most relevant text of garrett’s volume is the preface, ‘notícia do autor desta obra’ [Author’s note on this Work] (1828), in which garrett weaves a fiction around the search for that enigmatic ‘Senhor João Mínimo’, the author of the work from which garrett distances himself ironically with regard to its paternity. He documents the poetic types of the early nineteenth century, before distancing himself from all of them, emerging as an auctoritas who collects and publishes the poems that have come to him in a crammed chest from that man in whom, under the mask of humility, is hidden a cultured person and the preface writer’s alter ego. The preface writer, never mentioned by name, allows his authorial condition to be glimpsed, as he distances himself from his juvenile verses. This is a biographical fiction which, on the one hand anticipates by almost twenty years the narrator of Viagens na Minha Terra [Travels in my Homeland], and on the other hand works with authorial fiction in ways which strongly anticipate those later practised in Orpheu. The inventive and self-ironic qualities are also found in the mature writer’s two poetry collections — Flores sem Fruto (1845) and Folhas Caídas (1853) — and in their respective prefaces, metapoetic texts in which the image of a poet (a Romantic poet) is constructed and in which a protocol of reading is established which plays with a vegetal isotopy (the leaves are natural elements, but they are also the paper on which the verses are recorded). This trajectory continues in the unclassifiable Viagens na Minha Terra (1845–46), a book which is a cornerstone of modern fiction in Portuguese, initiating an impurity in the genre which questions how the borders of fiction (not just the borders of the novel) are defined. These borders are problematized as he recounts ‘journeys’ taken not only in Portugal but also in the mind of the person who is writing, employing irony, giving his opinion, describing, observing. The books mentioned above are the height of garrett’s work, displaying his mastery of verse techniques and his use of a carefully chosen language, particularly in the interior monologues and the use of orality. But the books above do not exhaust garrett’s importance to modern writing in Portuguese. At the least, one would have to recall the play Frei Luís de Sousa [Brother Luís de Sousa] (1843) and its themes of individual and national identity in crisis, of masks and guilt. Poetic motifs and issues, such as those mentioned above, as well as garrett’s decisive contribution to a f luid style that owes much to orality and the rhythms of folk poetry, may well be the reason for Pessoa’s manifest interest in his work. Antero de Quental was in the list of Pessoa’s ‘Inf luences’, and it is worth examining, via a reading of the three articles by Pessoa in A Águia [The Eagle] in 1912,11 the reasons why the author of the Sonetos was included as a primary inf luence. In them Pessoa responds to the question of ‘quando a nossa corrente principia. O seu tom especial e distintivo, quando começa a aparecer?’ [when our current started. Its particular and distinctive tone, when did it start to emerge?].12 He establishes a lineage, which we will return to, which passes through António nobre, some of eugénio de Castro and the Junqueiro of Os Simples [The Simple Ones], in other words, ‘o começo da última década do século dezanove’ [the beginning of the last decade of the nineteenth century].13 For now, what interests

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us is Pessoa’s next comment: he considers that for all of them ‘o precursor é Antero de Quental’14 [their precursor is Antero de Quental]. Further on he becomes more explicit and says that Antero represents ‘transcendentalismo, sob forma de emoção’ [transcendentalism in the form of emotion].15 It is a case of emphasizing the metaphysical aspect of Antero’s poetry, present above all in the Sonetos,16 in which one can still detect a Romantic vein, although they also open onto the foundational questions of a modernity informed by philosophical readings. So it is that in the Sonetos we find a subject who asks questions about the meaning of life and of truth, configuring the search in the figure of a homo viator, referring to classical myths, to the motif of a knight errant and to an entity called god (‘Ignoto deo’ [Unknown god] or ‘Ignotus’). This is a god without religion situated in a plane of metaphysical questioning, of the transcendentalism Pessoa referred to. In Antero, and particularly in the Sonetos, the figure of a visionary poet is formed, someone alone against the world and even against himself, who moves in the darkened setting of an individual’s consciousness divided between ref lection and intervention, between the struggle for the ideas of a nascent socialism and the passivity of an anguished and sorrowful subject. If in garrett (and in Alexandre Herculano) night becomes the chosen domain of the poet lost in himself and his thoughts, in Antero we see poetry more clearly defined as a soliloquy in search of the Ideal and the Ineffable (‘das Unnennbare’ [the Unnameable], this ‘quimera’ [chimera] or ‘misteriosa fada’ [mysterious spirit] whose name is unknown). The subject does battle with an alter ego named ‘o meu coração’ [my heart], and so symbolizing the inner division of the hyperconscious ego, which carries in itself ‘todos os sonhos do mundo’ [all the dreams of the world], as Álvaro de Campos says in the poem ‘Tabacaria’ [The Tobacconist’s]. The symbolic combat in which the subject faces himself, seen in the two aspects of ‘Mors-Amor’, is also found in ‘no Circo’ [In the Circus], when the ‘monstro’ [monster] emerges from inside the I ‘feito fera’ [made wild]. This mortal and eschatological combat could only give way to the sense of being vanquished that can be read in many of the sonnets and in the short poem ‘Os Vencidos’ [The Vanquished].17 It does not seem difficult to see here themes that interested Pessoa, Sá-Carneiro and the other Orpheu poets, all of whom were attracted to the idea of poetry providing a comment on the meaning of life, even if that response were the technical perfection of its verses, as is characteristic of Antero. However, from a critical point of view it is worth adding another parallel between Antero and Pessoa: both contributed decisively to the construction of themselves as mythic figures, both left in written form fictionalized autobiographies which met with a resounding, long-lasting response in critical readings which are limited by the deceit of a narrative programme of a biographic nature. In the case of Antero, the texts in question are two letters: to Carolina Michaëlis de Vasconcelos and to Wilhelm Storck.18 In the first, the poet of the Odes Românticas talks about the ‘colecção completa dos meus sonetos [...] desde 1860 até agora’ [the complete collection of my sonnets [...] from 1860 to the present] — twenty-five years in other words — works which ‘têm revestido a forma poética o meu pensar e o meu sentir’ [have clothed the poetic form of my thoughts and feelings], and adds a possible title

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— ‘Memórias duma Consciência’ [Memoirs of a Consciousness].19 In turn, the letter to Storck, which Antero knew would be published, does not only provide in summary the author’s biography and the history of his works, but also readings of poets and philosophers who have informed it.20 He writes of the sonnets that they are ‘como a notação dum diário íntimo’ [like the notes of an intimate diary], accounting for ‘minha vida intelectual e sentimental’ [my intellectual and sentimental life], and forming an ‘espécie de autobiografia de um pensamento e como que as memórias de uma consciência’ [a kind of autobiography of a thought, like the memoirs of a consciousness].21 These excerpts from the two letters (which should be read in their entirety and in the context of other letters) show the acute poetic self-awareness, as well as the establishment of a clearly defined protocol for reading. A history of thoughts and of feelings, the diary of a consciousness (much more so than the life of the empirical subject), these make us think of what Pessoa often did in his work, particularly in O Livro do Desassossego [The Book of Disquietude], and invoke the abundant self-ref lective correspondence between ‘those of Orpheu’, in which one can find essential contributions to the poetic consciousness the modernists display in what they write and publish. Another of the great poets of the nineteenth century, and indeed of all Portuguese literature, acknowledged by modernists as a precursor, is Cesário Verde. Alberto Caeiro, who claims to read so little, expressly mentions him in poem III of O Guardador de Rebanhos [The Keeper of Sheep];22 Álvaro de Campos invokes him in two emblematic poems;23 these references are in addition to Pessoa’s inclusion of Verde in his earlier cited list of formative reading. In Verde’s short life (1855–1886) he published poems in a number of journals, but did not manage to collect them in a single volume, which only occurred in 1887, thanks to his friend Silva Pinto. O Livro de Cesário Verde,24 to which in future editions further poems and an important collection of letters were added, occupies an unequalled place in Portuguese literature for various reasons, among which one should note the perfect pairing of technically impeccable verses and the combination of a problematization of the modern subject, the time in which he lived and the tradition that sustains it. His earlier poems show the apprenticeship of varied reading (of which the most prominent is of Baudelaire’s Fleurs du Mal, 1857), not only in motifs such as neurosis, the dandy or the distant and cold femme fatale, but also in the metre (above all alexandrines and decasyllables), in the stanza form and in the rhythms.25 The poems of his maturity (if we can talk of maturity for such a brief life) like ‘num Bairro Moderno’ [In a Modern neighbourhood] (1877), ‘Cristalizações’ [Crystallizations] (1878), ‘O Sentimento de um Ocidental’ [A Westerner’s Feeling] (1880), allow the emerging voice of modernity in Portuguese poetry to be heard, for example in the thematization of writing itself as an incessant search for the perfection of the lines of verse and of the ‘things’,26 the only way of guaranteeing the symbolic permanence of the subject, abolishing circumstantiality and a predatory temporality.27 In addition to the technical mastery that Álvaro de Campos acknowledges, Cesário Verde is the source of Pessoa’s interseccionismo [intersectionism], with its genial leaps between the trivial and the epic, the banal and the sublime. The abovementioned poems give ample examples of this. One only has to remember how in

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‘num Bairro Moderno’ a heroic body is imagined and composed from the stimulus of a basket of fruit and vegetables, using the ‘visão de artista!’ [artist’s vision!] and aided by the Apollonian ‘luz do Sol, o intenso colorista’ [light of the Sun, the vivid colourist] (stanza 7). Within this plasticity and intense visuality what particularly stands out is the construction of a subject who anticipates the division in the I that we see in the modernists; the subject is a voyeur, in the wake of Baudelaire, but also a visionary and voyant, following Rimbaud. For his visionary conception of the poet, it is also important to consider gomes Leal, especially his Claridades do Sul [Clarities of the South].28 Under the aegis of Baudelaire, but having learnt also from Antero, he marries Satanism to realism to thematize a dandified subject who has a nocturnal and melancholic side, which is sometimes expressed in irony or even in sarcasm. Poems such as ‘A Bela Flor Azul’ [The Beautiful Blue Flower], ‘O Visionário ou Som e Cor’ [The Visionary or Sound and Colour] (composed of four sonnets) and ‘nevrose nocturna’ [nocturnal neurosis] (with the cascading anaphoric comment of ‘Bela!’) exemplify the art of his verse and his problematization of the divided subject, whose days — sub specie dandy — are marked by tedium and melancholy and whose nocturnal being corresponds to the visionary poet battling a capitalized Sorrow, as is fitting for a symbol in which two aspects cohabit: that of poetry and that of the consciousness of the subject who expresses that poetry. Poems such as ‘A Senhora de Brabante’ [The Lady of Brabante] deal, in perfect quatrains, with the symbolist tradition of ethereal and falsely happy aristocratic ladies, who — it turns out — hide monstrous children, mirrors of the black f lower of evil. On the other hand, this poem and others from Claridades do Sul already suggest the dramatic monologue, a source of the fin-de-siècle theatre of which the play O Marinheiro [The Mariner] is the most important example.29 Pessoa paid homage to the poet in the sonnet ‘gomes Leal’, which opens with these lines: ‘Sagra, sinistro, a alguns o astro baço. | Seus três anéis irreversíveis são | A desgraça, a amargura, a solidão’ [Holy, sinister, to some a tarnished star. | His three irreversible rings are | disgrace, bitterness, solitude];30 in this decasyllabic portrait, full of symbols and assonance, Pessoa expresses his debt to the poet of crepuscular clarity and of bitter laughter, who glimpsed the literal, symbolic and poetic ‘fim de um mundo’ [end of a world],31 and questioned it in a way that would be taken up by the modernists. The first of the three lines by Pessoa quoted just above recall another precursor of modernism — eugénio de Castro. Since his time as a student in Coimbra, as a mentor to one of the magazines of 1889 in which the birth of Portuguese symbolism can be seen,32 and above all in his books of the 1890s, Oaristos, Horas and others,33 Castro theorizes and practises a poetry that presents itself as new and even avantgarde, taking pride in the use of rare vocabulary, sophisticated rhymes and complex verses with innovative themes. eugénio de Castro’s poetic work in the 1890s is an art firmly based on classical poets (above all, Latin poets) and on the Franco-Belgian poets (Théophile gautier, Baudelaire, Verlaine, Jean Moréas, René ghil and others) who are putting into practice advances in poetic technique. These new techniques arrive in Portugal in magazines and in books familiar to those Coimbra students who dedicate themselves to poetic experiences shaped by the said magazines. A

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high pose is struck by the author of ‘Silva esotérica para os raros apenas’ [The esoteric forest only for the few],34 the poet who speaks to the ‘Bárbaros’ from the ‘Torre do Conceito Puro’ [Tower of the Pure Idea],35 and removes himself from them in Horatian manner (as he does in the Horas cycle with the title ‘Longe dos Bárbaros’ [Far From the Barbarians]). He constructs his new poetry on wellestablished models of various traditions. Thematically, the poetry often treats Old Testament motifs or greco-Latin mythology, while in his versification he adapts tried and tested models and from them creates his own voice, original and haughtily superior in its craft.36 The exotic locations populated by hieratic princesses (Salomé, Belkiss and others), which are described in artfully composed and complex lines, in the end serve to create interior scenes marked by the oneiric and a rhetorical obscuritas. Arenas are drawn in which the subject questions himself in the midst of the exquisite cascading words. As an example, this author’s perhaps most famous text can be cited — poem XI of Oaristos, which opens: ‘na messe que enlourece, estremece a quermesse...’ [In the crop ripening blond, the fair trembles], a carefully crafted composition that uses three kinds of stanza, two of which repeat to create a mournful melody, woven from lines with a variety of metres and dulling the senses, as befits ‘Um sonho’ [A dream], the epigraph and key to the poem. The poem is a morceau de bravoure, a complete demonstration of technical versatility which inscribes itself in the line of modern aesthesia. nor can two contemporaries of eugénio de Castro be ignored in this respect: António nobre and Camilo Pessanha. Both were expressly acknowledged by the Orpheu generation as strong inf luences on them: their names can be seen on Pessoa’s reading list as cited at the start of this essay, and there are many other proofs of their inf luence. António nobre is the author of Só [Alone], the only book he published in his lifetime.37 In this book the biography of an exiled subject is constructed. The subject sees himself at a distance and in his poems his memory materializes in a cohesive and melancholy narrative thread. All of this is done with an apparently uncomplicated use of versification that does not resist close analysis. In the poetry one finds the technically f lawless use of alexandrines, of decasyllables, and of other metres, and the use both of shorter poetic forms such as the sonnet or elegy and of longer forms such as the paradramatic poem with its elaborate layering of voices,38 and of perfectly regular, elaborate compositions (such as ‘Purinha’, ‘Lusitânia no Bairro Latino’ and ‘Males de Anto — I’). nobre uses language’s various registers (from the educated to the popular), and transforms them into poetic materials to express a complex inner universe that takes as its themes childhood as a golden age of innocence; the town/country opposition as suggesting the aesthesia of a subject ironically distanced from himself, on the edge of the inner division that the modernists were to take further. Pessoa wrote about him in a text which has become an essential part of the mythology of that poet, and of Pessoa himself: ‘Para a memória de António nobre’.39 ‘Quando ele nasceu, nascemos todos nós’ [When he was born, we were all born], writes Pessoa, in what is both a homage and a fair acknowledgement. For his part, Mário de Sá-Carneiro, in Indícios de Oiro [Traces of Gold], dedicates to him the poem ‘Anto’ (whose title cites the ironic pet name given in Só to the protagonist’s childish and simultaneously dandified side), while

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various other passages in Sá-Carneiro’s work invoke the figure who in his sonnet 13 wrote a line that anticipates Sá-Carneiro: ‘Falhei na Vida. Zut! Ideais caídos!’ [I failed in life. Zut! Fallen Ideals!]. On the other hand, the sense of dialogue already referred to, and the meeting of various, non-simultaneous planes, clearly looks ahead to ‘intersectionism’, which is formed from precisely this difficulty of expressing in a single text the multiplicity of layers in which a restless subject can become dispersed, struggling with himself. As for Camilo Pessanha, who like Cesário and nobre is the author of a single book, Clepsydra,40 the importance of his book is expressly acknowledged by ‘those of Orpheu’. Pessoa wrote on behalf of the magazine to Pessanha in Macau,41 asking him to collaborate on the third issue, and proposing a number of pages (‘entre dez e vinte’ [between ten and twenty]) much above the usual number (of around eight pages). The admiration for Pessanha is clear,42 so much so that the director of Orpheu proposes a list of poems that he already knows and which he would like to include, so that it is possible to glimpse his own criteria and taste.43 The characteristics of Pessanha’s sui generis poetics make the modernists’ interest, to which Pessoa gave voice, perfectly understandable. Symbolist themes and motifs (Ophelia, Venus and other myths; liquid and mineral metaphors; the gloss on vanitas and on all-consuming time; life seen as a battle which one leaves in defeat, etc.) are joined by a pre-modernist dissolution of the discursive unit. It has become unstable, fragmentary, by its nature incomplete. The subject retires from the scene, looks at himself as an other, a distanced screen that is glimpsed in the mirror of the still waters,44 separated from himself and from a rational awareness of things. This dissolution arises, however, in poems which are erudite and perfect from a technical point of view, as if there were in the end a poetic framework to create a solid defence against a world ready to lose its meaning. The meeting of these two tendencies can also be found in Sá-Carneiro and in Pessoa. For example, Ricardo Reis’s stoicism, divided between restlessness and serenity, leads to the wisdom of the person who is content with the symbolic journey in search of a deeper I; the apparent simplicity of Caeiro’s world leads in the same direction. Pessanha’s legacy passes, therefore, to the modernists in a complex series of ways, including highly developed stylistic, rhetorical and metrical resources, as well as a universe of themes and motifs continually present in the works the modernists were to write. Reference must also be made to an author who cannot be left out of this survey of modernism’s precursors — António Patrício, above all for his dramatic texts, O Fim [The End] (1909); Pedro o Cru [Peter the Cruel] (1918); Dinis e Isabel [Dinis and Isabel] (1919); and D. João e a Máscara [Dom João and the Mask] (1924).45 As allegories of Portuguese history in a time of transition between the monarchy and the Republic, a stage for disbelief and surrender, denunciations and the hope for something new, Patrício’s plays take as their themes the decay of values, the agony of an era populated by shades, spectres and phantoms. They embody a nietzschean pessimism as they conjure up royal personages (dom Pedro, dom dinis and dona Isabel) alongside emblems of decadence such as a dom João laden with the decadent symbolism and the traditional density of the figure from El Burlador de Sevilla, the trickster of Seville. Allegorical portraits of Patrício’s own day, his figures appear in

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texts very close to the theatre of the era (Ibsen and Strindberg are major presences), and close to the static theatre that the symbolists practised. Their aim was no longer to represent realistic characters, but to bear witness to the fragmentation of a world full of voices echoing and searching for a meaning. Whether in the stories of Serão Inquieto [Restless Night] (first edition 1910) or in his poetic oeuvre,46 there is a continuation of this universe of hurt laughter, of decadent eagles (‘diálogo com uma Águia’ [dialogue with an eagle]), and of prostitutes visited by bored dandies (‘Suze’), where characters fall into an indifference verging on aboulia. The author, a diplomat, was — literally — far from the early Portuguese twentieth-century magazines and movements, but his work serves as a counterpoint to that of his contemporaries in the Orpheu group. They are more united by themes and practices than they are divided by them, in a harmony that places them all as cornerstones of Portuguese writing. This article has not attempted to be exhaustive, nor to consider all the authors Pessoa names; rather it has drawn out those which seem to be of most critical relevance in tracing a Portuguese lineage which Pessoa and his fellow poets recog nized. All the authors discussed here are canonical figures, and when seen together in a panoramic view and in chronological sequence they can be read as the foundations of modern writing in Portuguese. notes to Chapter 1 1. Orpheu: números 1 & 2, provas de página do terceiro número (facsimile edition), preface by Fernando Cabral Martins (Lisbon: Contexto, 1989). 2. I refer to the expression that Pessoa coined in the title ‘Nós os de Orpheu’ (Sudoeste, 3, november de 1935), p. 3; cf. Fernando Pessoa, Crítica: ensaios, artigos e entrevistas, ed. by Fernando Cabral Martins (Lisbon: Assírio & Alvim, 1999), pp. 522–23. 3. For an understanding of this concept, refer to Helena Carvalhão Buescu’s entry ‘Modernidade’, in Dicionário de Fernando Pessoa e do Modernismo Português, ed. by Fernando Cabral Martins (Lisbon: Caminho, 2008), pp. 467–72. 4. Fernando Pessoa, Cartas a Armando Côrtes-Rodrigues, ed. by Joel Serrão (Lisbon: Conf luência, 1945), pp. 91–92. 5. Ibid., p. 84. 6. Ibid., p. 84. The notes mentioned are in the appendix, pp. 85–92. 7. Ibid., p. 89. 8. In this regard we must mention one of the critics who contributed so much to the study of modernism’s antecedents. Adolfo Casais Monteiro’s A Poesia Portuguesa Contemporânea (Lisbon: Sá da Costa, 1977) begins with the chapter ‘Os Primeiros dos Modernos’ [The First Moderns], consisting of three essays, ‘Os Precursores’, ‘Cesário Verde’, ‘Apontamento sobre António nobre’ [The Precursors, Cesário Verde, note on António nobre], which are as indispensable as others in the chapter entitled ‘A Transição’ [The Transition]. 9. Almeida garrett, Obras de Almeida Garrett, 2 vols (Porto: Lello & Irmão, n.d.). 10. They are poems from his formative years, showing the inf luence of his uncle, Frei Alexandre da Sagrada Família, and his teaching of classics, but also showing evidence of readings from other sources. Taking into account the epigraphs alone, we have verses (quoted in the original languages) by Virgil, Catullus, Horace, Terence and Anacreon; as well as by Racine and Chénier, and by Shakespeare, Thompson, Young, Milton and Byron. These in addition to the Portuguese, Camões and Filinto elísio. 11. These three essays are ‘A nova Poesia Portuguesa Sociologicamente Considerada’ [The new Portuguese Poetry in its Sociological Aspect], ‘Reincidindo’ [Relapsing] and ‘A nova Poesia

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Portuguesa no seu Aspecto Psicológico’ [The new Portuguese Poetry in its Psychological Aspect], published in A Águia, 2nd series, in (respectively) no. 4 (April 1912), no. 5 (May 1912), and nos. 9, 11 and 12 (September, november and december 1912). We follow the article’s text in the following edition: Pessoa, Crítica, pp. 7–17, 18–35 and 36–67. 12. Pessoa, ‘Reincidindo’, in Crítica, p. 22. 13. Ibid. 14. Ibid. 15. Pessoa, ‘A nova Poesia Portuguesa no seu Aspecto Psicológico’, in Crítica, p. 64. 16. Among the many editions of Antero de Quental’s Sonetos the following can be used: Sonetos, ed. by António Sérgio (Lisbon: Sá da Costa, 1984); Sonetos, ed. by nuno Júdice (Lisbon: Imprensa nacional–Casa da Moeda, 1994). Both editions reproduce Oliveira Martins’s important preface (1886). 17. Along with others of a similar theme, this poem is part of a book that Antero wished to see destroyed; fortunately he had given a copy to Oliveira Martins, who did not respect his good friend’s wishes. In this regard see p. lxxviii of Martins’ preface to the Sonetos in the Sá da Costa edition (1984), and the note by António Sérgio in the Appendix to the Sonetos (p. 255). See also: Antero de Quental, Hino da Manhã e Outras Poesias do Mesmo Ciclo, ed. by Joel Serrão (Lisbon: Livros Horizonte, 1989). 18. Antero de Quental, Cartas II: 1881–1891, ed. by Ana Maria Almeida Martins (Lisbon: Universidade dos Açores/ed. Comunicação, 1989); ‘Carta n.º 465. A Carolina Michaëlis de Vasconcelos (Vila do Conde, 7 de Agosto [1885])’ and ‘Carta n.º 524. A Wilhelm Storck (Ponta delgada, 14 de Maio 1887)’, pp. 747–49 and 833–40. 19. Antero de Quental, ‘Carta n.º 465. A Carolina Michaëlis de Vasconcelos (Vila do Conde, 7 de Agosto [1885])’, in Cartas II: 1881–1891, p. 747. 20. names such as Hegel, Michelet, Proudhon, Hartmann, Leibniz, Kant, Heine, etc. 21. Quental, ‘Carta n.º 524. A Wilhelm Storck (Ponta delgada, 14 de Maio 1887)’, in Cartas II: 1881–1891, p. 839. 22. ‘Leio até me arderem os olhos | O livro de Cesário Verde. | Que pena que tenho dele! ele era um camponês | Que andava preso em liberdade pela cidade’ [I read until my eyes burn | The book by Cesário Verde. | How I pity him! | He was a peasant | Who walked, captive in liberty, through the city]. In Fernando Pessoa, Alberto Caeiro, Poesia, ed. by Fernando Cabral Martins and Richard Zenith (Lisbon: Assírio & Alvim, 2001), p. 26. 23. ‘e que misterioso fundo unânime das ruas, | das ruas ao cair da noite, ó Cesário Verde, ó Mestre, | Ó do “Sentimento dum Ocidental!” ’ [And how mysterious the unanimous end of the streets | When the night falls, O my master Cesário Verde, | Who wrote ‘A Westerner’s Feeling’!], in ‘dois excertos de Odes (Fins de duas Odes, naturalmente) — II’ [excerpts from Two Odes (ends of Two Odes, naturally) — II]; ‘Há quem olhe para uma factura e não sinta isto. | Com certeza que tu, Cesário Verde, o sentias’ [Some people look at an invoice and don’t feel this. | Surely you felt it, Cesário Verde], in ‘Ode Marítima’ [Maritime Ode]. Cf. Fernando Pessoa, Álvaro de Campos, Poesia, ed. by Teresa Rita Lopes (Lisbon: Assírio & Alvim, 1998), pp. 95 and 139. Translations from Fernando Pessoa, A Little Larger Than the Entire Universe: Selected Poems, trans. by Richard Zenith (London: Penguin, 2006). 24. Quotations here are from the most recent critical edition: Cesário Verde: cânticos do realismo e outros poemas [followed by] 32 cartas, ed. by Teresa Sobral Cunha (Lisbon: Relógio d’Água, 2006). See the critical review by Paula Morão in Românica, 16 (2007), 225–29. It is also necessary to consult the Obra Completa de Cesário Verde, ed. by Joel Serrão (Lisbon: Livros Horizonte, 1992), or the more recent Poesia Completa: 1855–1886, establishment of texts and introductory note by Joel Serrão, revision and notes by Jorge Serrão (Lisbon: dom Quixote, 2001). 25. For example ‘Meridional — Cabelos’ [Southerner — Hair] (1874; first title: ‘Flores Venenosas I — Cabelos’ [Venomous Flowers — Hair], a clear allusion to Baudelaire), ‘deslumbramentos’ [dazzlements] and ‘Frígida’ [Frigid] (1875), or ‘Humilhações’ [Humiliations] (1887). 26. As early as ‘Contrariedades’ [Setbacks] one can read: ‘e apuro-me em lançar, originais e exactos, | Os meus alexandrinos’ [And I perfect myself in launching, original and exact, | My alexandrines]; and in ‘O Sentimento dum Ocidental’ (section III): ‘e eu, que medito um livro que exacerbe, | Quisera que o real e a análise mo dessem; | [...] não poder pintar | Com versos

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magistrais, salubres e sinceros, | A esguia difusão dos vossos reverberos, | e a vossa palidez romântica e lunar!’ [And I, who plans a book that provokes, | Would like it to give the real and an analysis; | [...] To not be able to paint | With masterful, salubrious and sincere verses, | The delicate shimmering of your brilliance, | And your moonlit and romantic pallor!]. 27. ‘Se eu não morresse, nunca! e eternamente | Buscasse e conseguisse a perfeição das cousas!’ [If I would never die! And eternally | Could seek and find the perfection of things!] IV, stanza 37. 28. gomes Leal, Claridades do Sul, ed. by José Carlos Seabra Pereira (Lisbon: Assírio & Alvim, 1998). (1st edition 1875; 2nd rev. edn 1901). Of the ‘Obras de gomes Leal’ [Works of gomes Leal] collection, ed. by Seabra Pereira, eight volumes have appeared so far. Their introductions are well worth reading. 29. O Marinheiro: drama estático em um quadro, by Fernando Pessoa, had its first publication in Orpheu no.1 (pp. 27–39 of the facsimile edition referenced in the first note). 30. ‘gomes Leal’, in Ficções do Interlúdio: 1914–1935, ed. by Fernando Cabral Martins (Lisbon: Assírio & Alvim, 1998), p. 84. 31. Refers to another work by gomes Leal: Fim de um Mundo: Sátiras Modernas, ed. by José Carlos Seabra Pereira (Lisbon: Assírio & Alvim, 2000). 32. Bohemia Nova e Os Insubmissos, facsimile reproduction, ed. by Vera Vouga (Porto: Campo das Letras, 1999). eugénio de Castro was the mentor to Os Insubmissos; Alberto de Oliveira and António nobre published in Bohemia Nova. 33. eugénio de Castro, Obras Poéticas, I — Oaristos — Horas — Silva — Interlúnio — Belkiss — Tirésias, facsimile reproduction ed. by Vera Vouga (Porto: Campo das Letras, 2001); Obras poéticas, II — Sagramor — Salomé e Outros Poemas — A Nereide de Harlém — O Rei Galaor — Saudades do Céu, facsimile reproduction ed. by Vera Vouga (Porto: Campo das Letras, 2002). 34. Opening text in Horas, 2001, p. 129. 35. Ibid., p. 139. 36. The importance of eugénio de Castro to the modernists is developed at greater length in the entry by Paula Morão, ‘eugénio de Castro’, in Dicionário de Fernando Pessoa e do Modernismo Português, coord. by Fernando Cabral Martins (Lisbon: Caminho, 2008), pp. 151–53. 37. First edn (Paris: Léon Vanier editeur, 1892); 2nd rev. edn (Lisbon: guillard, Aillaud e Cª, 1898). This article cites the typographic reproduction of the second edition (1898), ed. by Paula Morão (Porto: Caixotim, 2000). It is worth consulting both editions, as they are radically different. This in itself is a fundamental element of nobre’s poetics and authorial consciousness, as can be read in: Paula Morão, ‘A edição crítica do Só: alguns fundamentos e pressupostos’, in Retratos com Sombra: António Nobre e os seus contemporâneos (Porto: Caixotim, 2004); pp. 91–124. 38. See ‘António’, ‘Os Figos Pretos’, ‘Poentes de França’, ‘À Toa’ or section II of ‘Males de Anto’. 39. First published in A Galera, 5–6, 25 February 1915; cf. Crítica, pp. 100–01. 40. Camilo Pessanha. Clepsydra, 1st edn 1920. This article quotes from the critical edition: Clepsydra: poemas de Camilo Pessanha, ed. by Paulo Franchetti (Lisbon: Relógio d’Água, 1995). 41. Today it has been proven that Pessanha made extended stays in Lisbon during the years he lived in Macau, putting to rest erroneous readings which do not take this into account; in Lisbon he frequented a number of cafés where the Orpheu group met up with him. Cf. daniel Pires and Júlia Ordorica, Espólio de Camilo Pessanha: inventário (Lisbon: Biblioteca nacional de Portugal, 2008); pp. 114–16. See also Paulo Franchetti, O Essencial sobre Camilo Pessanha (Lisbon: Imprensa nacional–Casa da Moeda, 2007). 42. ‘Logo da primeira vez que [nos] vimos, fez-me V.exª a honra, e deu-me o prazer, de me recitar alguns poemas seus. guardo dessa hora espiritualizada uma religiosa recordação. Obtive, depois, pelo Carlos Amaro, cópias de alguns desses poemas. Hoje, sei-os de cor, [...] e são para mim fonte contínua de exaltação estética.’ [The first time that (we) met, you did me the honour, and gave me the pleasure, Sir, of reciting several of your poems to me. I treasure that spiritual hour as a religious memory. Through Carlos Amaro I later obtained copies of some of those poems. Today I know them by heart, [...] and for me they are a continual font of aesthetic exaltation]; Fernando Pessoa, Correspondência 1905–1922, ed. by Manuela Parreira da Silva (Lisbon: Assírio & Alvim, 1998), pp. 183–84. 43. Pessanha did not reply to the letter, and his poems are not among the proofs for the planned issue no. 3 of Orpheu; but they do appear in another of the modernist magazines, Centauro, in

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1916. The relations between Pessanha and Pessoa were first studied in two issues of Persona, dir. by Arnaldo Saraiva: no. 10, July 1984, and nos. 11/12; december 1985. 44. ‘Singra o navio. Sob a água clara | Vê-se o fundo do mar, d’areia fina...| [...] | e a vista sonda, reconstrue, compara’ [The ship sails. Under the clear water | The bottom of the sea is seen, its fine sand... | [...] | And sight sounds out, reconstructs, compares]. (‘Vénus — II’, ed. by Franchetti, p. 111). 45. António Patrício, Teatro Completo (Lisbon: Assírio & Alvim, 1982). 46. António Patrício, Serão Inquieto (Lisbon: Assírio & Alvim, 1979); Poesia Completa (Lisbon: Assírio & Alvim, 1989).

CHAPter 2

❖

Fernando Pessoa: not One but Multiple isms Jerónimo Pizarro Acronyms and isms proliferated in the twentieth century. The latter had their golden age during the first decades of the last century and began to be commemorated with the recent centenary of Italian futurism. In coming years we may see celebrations to commemorate a hundred years of certain manifestations of german expressionism, english imagism and the many other artistic isms that emerged before, during and after the First World War in different countries of the world. In Portugal, two short-lived magazines that attracted criticism and censorship, Orpheu and Portugal Futurista respectively, were the main vehicles for disseminating national and foreign isms. Orpheu started out with texts of a more decadent and post-symbolist tendency and a propensity for ‘exile’, but quickly took on a more challenging, vanguardist orientation. All this between the first and second numbers, and within the space of three months, because the magazine — which was quarterly — changed its directors between January and April of 1915, and the third number was only published (partially) in 1983, once a set of page proofs had been located.1 The covers of the only two numbers of the magazine illustrate very well the change of direction, and the cover of the second may bring to mind the first number of Blast, the publication dedicated to english vorticism (see Figs 2.1 and 2.2). Orpheu was the platform for various isms, but above all the platform for the isms created by Fernando Pessoa, between 1914 — when he gives ‘life’ to Alberto Caeiro, Ricardo Reis and Álvaro de Campos — and 1915, when he writes numerous newspaper articles, sociological ref lections, parts of the Book of Disquietude and some inf lammatory letters, many of which he never gets round to sending (for example, a letter to ‘Mr’ Marinetti,2 and another entitled ‘Letter to a stupid hero’,3 addressed to a twenty-four-year-old lieutenant who had been imprisoned and had declared in favour of the Republic at the time of his heroic return to Portugal). In his evocation of the modernist moment of Orpheu, José de Almada negreiros, who was one of its main contributors and who delivered the first futurist lecture in 1917, in Lisbon, recalls precisely, that: Uma característica do ‘Orpheu’ (a qual chegou a ser hilariante) era a de perpassar por uma série infindável de ismos. e tanto mais infindável quanto no ‘Orpheu’ era o encontro de letras e pintura, cada uma com a sua série infindável de ismos [...]

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Fig. 2.1. Orpheu 1 ( January–March 1915). 25 cm. Front cover designed by José Pacheco. Fig. 2.2. Orpheu 2 (April–June 1915). 25 cm. new kind of front cover: ‘fixed’ design with a ‘normal typographical aspect.’ enquanto que a ‘Águia’ não tinha senão um ismo, o saudosismo, o ‘Orpheu’ tinha três ismos criações suas por Fernando Pessoa: o paùlismo, interseccionismo, sensacionismo, além dos ismos que estavam já generalizados mundialmente e os criados de novo.4 [One characteristic of ‘Orpheu’ (often quite hilarious) was to go through an interminable series of isms. All the more so because ‘Orpheu’ was where literature met painting, each bringing their own interminable series of isms [...] While the ‘Águia’ only had one ism, saudosism,5 ‘Orpheu’ had three isms, created by Fernando Pessoa: paulism, intersectionism, sensationism, as well as the isms that were already commonly accepted and those that had been newly coined.]

These are many isms, and more, as Almada underlines, than those embraced by A Águia, the main Porto literary magazine and the mouthpiece for the Portuguese Renaissance movement. In 1915, in Portugal, the real focus of artistic modernity was the magazine Orpheu, which did not arise out of a feeling of ‘saudade’ or nostalgia (hence the term ‘saudosismo’) nor a kind of traditionalist nationalism (like that of the Portuguese Renaissance movement), but out of a yearning for Europa (the title suggested in 1914) — in other words, a burning desire to be in harmony with the most modern artistic manifestations of europe and, through europe, with the rest of the world.

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In this study, I shall focus on the three isms cited by Almada negreiros: paulism, intersectionism and sensationism. Pessoa also created atlantism and neo-paganism (see volume x of the critical edition of Fernando Pessoa, Sensacionismo e Outros Ismos, 2009), two less ‘artistic’ isms that I shall not consider here because they are less germane to a discussion of the ‘meeting of literature and painting’. On the one hand, atlantism is Pessoa’s most ‘prophetic’ ism: between 1915 and 1918 he outlined an ‘atlantic conception of life’, inspired by Walt Whitman, which looked forward to Iberian cultural hegemony and a new maritime expansion, spiritual yet rooted in Iberia. In a page that contains a fragment entitled ‘Iberia’ and dates from around 1918, Pessoa wrote, significantly: ‘Todo o portuguez que não é sebastianista é um traidor’ [Any Portuguese who does not believe in King Sebastian’s return is a traitor].6 On the other hand, neo-paganism is Pessoa’s most philosophical ism; aware of the desacralization of the modern world, he invented a new conception of the ancient world in the sphere of literature and entrusted a semi-heteronym, António Mora, with the dissemination of this Portuguese neo-pagan current, or rather, theoretical ref lection on pagan elements in the works of Alberto Caeiro and Ricardo Reis. As Steffen dix observes, at the beginning of the twentieth century there was a new return to the ancient gods, encouraged by ‘the death of god’ and by the work of Friedrich nietzsche, a return which would explain, in part, the presence of antiquity in the works of various modern painters, writers and composers.7 Therefore, of the isms created by Pessoa — himself multiple and the ‘medium’ of other authorial figures8 — I am interested by three in particular: paulism, intersectionism and sensationism. The last-mentioned, which is the main ism, will receive most attention. First of all, however, I must point out the following: in the years in which he was creating and developing his multiple isms (1913–17), perhaps the most productive years of his life, Pessoa also wrote socio-political texts, took an even stronger interest in astrology and discovered theosophy. For this reason, anyone reading Pessoa’s production from those years — parts of which are included in many volumes of his works — will probably retain the same impression as the editors of a recent anthology on modernism: that the very notion of literature is permeable, it intersects with another kind of practices and ref lections. Quoting from the preface: ‘Our selection and presentation of texts reveals a (previously unavailable) broad literary perspective. At the same time, however, the very concept of literature seems to fade in and out of other disciplines such as the visual arts, philosophy, and social and political theory’.9 Paulism, intersectionism and sensationism are more or less ‘literary’ approaches, but they are approaches in which literature and the visual arts enter into a dialogue, have a philosophical dimension and cannot avoid issues pertaining to the arts and the place of the artist in society, because they coexist, in time and sometimes in space, with all kinds of writing about the most varied topics and matters. Another question which greatly interested Pessoa during these years, and which goes some way towards explaining the origins of his heteronyms, is the Shakespeare–Bacon question, that is, the question of who wrote Shakespeare’s works.10 I begin with the most f leeting of Pessoa’s isms, paulism, sketched out in the first critical articles that Pessoa published on ‘new Portuguese poetry’ in the magazine

Pessoa: not One, but Multiple

isms

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A Águia in 1912, two years before his break with Portuguese Renaissance, but only named as such in 1913, for the poem entitled ‘Paues de roçarem ancias pela minha alma em Ouro’ (dated 29 March, 1913; published in February 1914).11 In Pessoa’s written production — among the writings he left in his chests — there are few references to paulism; so few that it is possible that paulism was better defined posthumously by the critics than by the author himself, who cannot have taken it so seriously. Thus, by 1957 Jacinto do Prado Coelho had formulated a good definition: O estilo paúlico define-se pela voluntária confusão do subjectivo e do objectivo, pela ‘associação de ideias desconexas,’ pelas frases nominais, exclamativas, pelas aberrações de sintaxe [...] pelo vocabulário expressivo do tédio, do vazio da alma, do anseio de ‘outra coisa,’ um vago ‘além’ (‘ouro,’ ‘azul,’ ‘Mistério’), pelo uso de maiúsculas que traduzem a profundidade espiritual de certas palavras [...]12 [The paulist style is defined by the voluntary confusion of the subjective and the objective, by the ‘association of disconnected ideas’, by noun phrases, exclamations, by aberrations of syntax [...] by vocabulary that expresses tedium and emptiness of the soul, the yearning for ‘something else’, an ill-defined ‘beyond’ (‘gold’, ‘azure’, ‘Mystery’), through the use of capital letters that convey the spiritual depth of certain words [...]]

Pessoa did not leave a direct definition of paulism — perhaps there was one in a lost letter to Mário de Sá-Carneiro — but drafted an article to attack the paulist ‘school’ (‘the new sickness of Portuguese literature’), with the probable intention of writing another to defend it; years later, he classified the poem ‘Paues’ as hackwork.13 Yet, Pessoa’s creation Álvaro de Campos, the naval engineer who graduated from glasgow University, in an article on ‘Modern Currents in Portuguese Literature’ that he too did not publish during his lifetime, considers that paulism represents ‘um enorme progresso sobre todo o symbolismo e neo-symbolismo de lá fora’ [enormous progress over all the symbolism and neo-symbolism from outside].14 Pessoa must have quickly lost his initial enthusiasm for his first ism, but he did not stop envisaging himself as a ‘Portuguese Mallarmé’, explicitly because he had no book published, implicitly perhaps because of the value he came to attribute to many of his poetic compositions. Be that as it may, paulism was the original nucleus of intersectionism, a rather more established trend that might more easily be described as an example of literary cubism. Paulism was in some ways a first intuition which intersectionism would take further. The aim was to obtain a poetry that was simultaneously objective and subjective, that could — through the ‘materialization of the spirit’ and the ‘spirituality of nature’ — translate into a ‘vague’, ‘subtle’ and ‘complex’ poetry.15 But intersectionism is the current in which the inf luence (on Pessoa) of Pablo Picasso, georges Braque and Juan gris is most clearly observed, through the literary and theoretical mediation of Apollinaire, for example, or even the ascendancy of futurism and vorticism, through their manifestos and programmatic texts. Intersectionism is Pessoa’s first genuinely trans-vanguardist ism, as sensationism will be, while paulism — sometimes described simply as a decadent and crepuscular state of the soul — is

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no more than a timid approach. For this reason, it is possible to see these three isms as phases that correspond to a pre-analytical, an analytical and a synthetical period. Paulism, the pre-analytical, is characterized both by refinement and strangeness. It denotes musical and metaphysical preoccupations, but does not yet achieve balance, and is shown to be artificial — so much so that Pessoa reacts against that ‘sincere cult of artificiality’, which reminds him of the case of Oscar Wilde, and leaves these jottings in a notebook: — necessidade de dominar o elemento páulico. — O culto das cousas secundarias. — Como tudo quanto é grande causa pasmo, o artificial desata a querer causar pasmo para dar a si-proprio a impressão de ser grande.16 [— need to master the paulic element. — The cult of secondary things. — As everything great causes astonishment, the artificial sets out to cause astonishment in order to give itself the impression of being great.]

Paulism was a trend that never succeeded in becoming a school or a movement, whose most clearly defined reality is, to some extent, a posthumous construction of literary historiography. Perhaps because of this, what one critic has asserted about imagism and vorticism may be said, with more justification, of paulism and intersectionism: ‘London’s principal contributions to the history of the avant-guarde — Imagism and Vorticism — proved to be moments rather than movements, short-lived phases in a more complex history.’17 no anthology was ever made of paulism to compare with the volume Des Imagistes (1914), edited by ezra Pound, or a magazine like The Egoist, in which Pound and Richard Aldington collaborated. Aldington’s book, Images: 1910–1915, is found in Pessoa’s Library).18 Intersectionism is also associated with an inaugural poem: in this case, with the six poems that make up ‘Chuva Oblíqua’ (c. 1914), described as ‘intersectionist poems’ in the magazine Orpheu, no. 2 (April 1915). In order to make this ism more widely known, Pessoa planned a magazine, Europa, an anthology, various manifestos, an exhibition and even a literary survey, but in the end he gave up or did not carry out these projects. Interested in ‘intersectionist possibilities’, he concentrated on theorizing about them. It was a matter of ‘intersecting’ different planes, or rather, sensations: The incredible stupidity of the public, that did not immediately see here new art.19

Thus, in pages that he did not publish but perhaps shared with friends in his letters and at the tables of Lisbon cafés, Pessoa drew attention to the intersection of Reality and dream in some passages intended for the Book of Disquietude, and in a novella by Mário de Sá-Carneiro (Lúcio’s Confession). He also drew attention to the intersection of musical images with visual images in the work of Mallarmé, and of musical images with auditory images, in the works of two colleagues and collaborators in Orpheu, Alfredo Pedro guisado and Armando Côrtes-Rodrigues. The latter published poems under his own name in Orpheu, no. 1, and poems under the name of Violante de Cysneiros in Orpheu, no. 2.20 Like many other ‘contem-

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porary spirits’,21 Pessoa was seeking an inter-artistic aesthetic, but without going outside literature. ‘Wagner queria musica + pintura + poesia. nós queremos musica × pint ura × poesia’ [Wagner wanted music + painting + poetry. We want music × paint ing × poetry], he writes.22 He was aiming to ‘dar o simultaneo’ [give the simultaneous],23 but without going outside literature and using, for example, the technique of collage or typographical layout. Anticipating sensationism, Pessoa placed emphasis on sensation in order to distinguish the intersectionism of the Orpheu poets from other ‘intersectionist intuitions’: Intersecção do Objecto comsigo proprio: cubismo. (Isto é, intersecção dos varios aspectos do mesmo Objecto uns com os outros). Intersecção do Objecto com as idéas objectivas que suggere: Futurismo. Intersecção do Objecto com a nossa sensação d’elle: Interseccionismo, propriamente dito; o nosso.24 [Intersection of the Object with itself: cubism. (That is, intersection of various aspects of the same Object with each other). Intersection of the Object with the objective ideas it suggests: Futurism. Intersection of the Object with our feeling of it; Intersectionism, strictly speaking, our own.]

now, Pessoa was certainly not the first person to emphasize sensation, and the distinction is certainly not absolute. For Manuel g. Simões, for example, the manifesto Pittura e Scultra futuriste (Dinamismo plastico), by Umberto Boccioni, ‘poderia ser subscrito perfeitamente pelo heterónimo autor das grandes odes’ [could perfectly well have been written by the heteronymous author of the great odes],25 in other words, Álvaro de Campos, Pessoa’s most sensationist voice. In reality, affirmations made in many texts by Boccioni, on dynamism, the interpenetration of planes, dynamic complementarity and simultaneity, could have been written by Pessoa or Campos, the heteronym who would sign the letter to Marinetti in 1915.26 See, for example, this passage in the chapter ‘Che cosa ci divide dal cubismo’: Si può dunque dire che noi ci troviamo agli antipodi del cubismo. I cubisti assurgono alla generalizzazione riducendo l’oggetto ad una idea geométrica, cubo, cono, sfera, cilindro (Cézanne), e ciò ha fondamento nella ragione. noi giungiamo alla generalizzazione dando lo stile della impressione, cioè creando uma forma dinamica unica, che sia la sintesi del dinamismo universale percepito attraverso il moto dell’oggetto. Questa concezione che crea la forma della continuità nello spazio ha fondamento nella sensazione.27 [It may then be said that here we find the opposite of cubism. The cubists rise to generalization reducing the object to a geometrical idea, cube, cone, sphere, cylinder (Cézanne), and based themselves on reason. We arrive at generalization by giving the style of the impression, that is, creating a unique dynamic form that is the synthesis of the universal dynamism perceived through the movement of the object. This conception that creates the form of continuity in space is based on sensation.]

Pessoa was not a painter — although, like Charles Baudelaire and Césario Verde, he was a ‘painter of modern life’ — and he did not seek, effectively, ‘to create a form of continuity in space’, but like Boccioni, he was seeking a synthesis based on sensation.

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Marinetti’s figure has eclipsed a movement, futurism, which is not restricted to the most widely known programmatic manifestos, and whose ‘dynamic’ theatre, for example, made a serious impression on Pessoa, who was trying to radicalize the ‘static’ theatre proposed by Maurice Maeterlinck. Before moving on to examine Pessoa’s most complex ism, sensationism, I would like to recall two passages from Pessoa’s correspondence. The first is in a draft letter to an english addressee: ‘The Futurist elements in “Orpheu 2” are the pictures (or whatever they are) of Santa-Rita Pintor, and the scandalous typographic processes adopted by Mario de Sá-Carneiro in his famous “Manucure” ’; the second, in a letter to Frank Palmer, english editor: ‘Orpheu [...] is a review of all kinds of advanced literature, from a quasi-futurism to what we here call intersectionism.’ Pessoa accepted, with some reluctance, the presence of futurist elements in Orpheu, for he did not want the magazine to be associated with one single ism, but ‘[to] all kinds of advanced literature’; besides, he only acknowledged the inf luence of futurism in the most obvious cases, like the poem ‘Manucure’ by Sá-Carneiro and the paintings or ‘whatever they are’ of Santa-Rita Pintor (1889–1918). The second number of Orpheu contained, in fact, a ‘special collaboration by the futurist Santa-Rita Pintor’, four double hors-textes that bore witness respectively to ‘mechanical sensibility’, ‘lithographical sensibility’, ‘radiographic sensibility’ and ‘visual intersectionism’ (see Fig. 2.3). More important than sticking to an ism was to be all of the possible isms and be anointed by the ‘new’; we should remember ‘Manucure’: Meus olhos ungidos de novo, Sim! — meus olhos futuristas, meus olhos cubistas, meus olhos interseccionistas, não param de fremir, de sorver e faiscar Toda a beleza espectral, transferida, sucedânea, Toda essa Beleza-sem-Suporte28 [My eyes anointed with the new, Yes! — my futurist eyes, my cubist eyes, my intersectionist eyes, do not cease to tremble, absorb and glitter All the spectral beauty, transferred, a surrogate All the Beauty-without-Support]

There was no specific name for the new and it was the genuine dynamo of the younger writers, even if some, like Pessoa, maintained a closer relationship with tradition and relativized that anxiety. It should not be forgotten that Marinetti was a contemporary of Umberto Saba, whose Canzoniere recalls those of Pessoa, of giuseppe Ungaretti, who moved from futurism to dadaism, and eugenio Montale, who belongs to a second modernist generation, like many poets of the ‘generation of ’27’ in Spain. Besides this, as a writer Pessoa was always more concerned with the relationship between morality and art, and even more so with the question of artistic sincerity, rather than with the rupture with the institution of art. A contemporary of ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, T. S. eliot and James Joyce, Pessoa, like the so-called Men of 1914, ‘felt little direct hostility towards art as an institution and, accordingly, no desire to dissolve the boundaries between art and life’.29 In one of his notebooks, he made this note:

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Fig. 2.3. Santa-Rita Pintor, Geometrical synthesis of a head × plastic infinite of atmosphere × physico-trascendentalism (radiographic sensibility), Paris, 1913. Published in Orpheu 2 (1915). Separar inteiramente a Literatura da Vida. O literato interseccionista tanto pode ser serio como não, honesto como um escravo na sua vida... A falta de sinceridade do artista de modo algum se deve ref lectir na sua vida, que deve obedecer á moral, e ás leis, honesta e burguezamente. Só na literatura é que a immoralidade é permittida, a contradicção sem importancia, e a insinceridade obrigatoria.30 [Separate Literature from Life completely. The intersectionist man of letters may be serious or not, honest like a slave in his life... The artist’s lack of sincerity must in no way be ref lected in his life, which must obey morality and the law, in an honestly and bourgeois manner. Only in literature is immorality permitted, contradiction does not matter and insincerity is obligatory.]

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Pessoa almost certainly identified with a famous passage from The Picture of Dorian Gray: ‘Is insincerity such a terrible thing? I think not. It is merely a method by which we can multiply our personalities.’31 I discuss sensation at greater length because this represents a kind of final synthesis of Pessoa’s trans-vanguardist and interdisciplinary (or inter-artistic) project, and meant much more than a compositional technique: sensationism came to constitute an entire aesthetic, social, religious and political philosophy. First, returning to the magazine Orpheu, I quote a passage from a declaration by its directors, Pessoa and Sá-Carneiro, in which they refer to the terms ‘sensationist’ and ‘intersectionist’: (2) Os termos ‘sensacionista’ e ‘interseccionista,’ que, com maior razão, se applicaram aos artistas de orpheu, tambem não teem cabimento. Sensacionista é só Alvaro de Campos; interseccionista foi só Fernando Pessoa, e em uma só collaboração — a ‘Chuva Obliqua’ em orpheu 2.32 [(2) The terms ‘sensationist’ and ‘intersectionist’, which, with greater reason, were applied to the orpheu artists, are not suitable either. Only Álvaro de Campos is sensationist; only Fernando Pessoa was intersectionist, and in a single collaboration — ‘A Chuva Oblíqua’ in orpheu 2.]

In some respects, the directors of Orpheu limited the intersectionism, officially, to the six poems of ‘Chuva Oblíqua’ and associate sensationism with one of Fernando Pessoa’s three heteronyms, Álvaro de Campos, who emerges as the author of the ‘Ode Triunfal’ (Orpheu, no. 1) and the ‘Ode Marítima’ (Orpheu, no. 2); the first ode ends with the indication ‘London, 1914 — June’ and the signature ‘Alvaro de Campos’; the second just has ‘Alvaro de Campos, engineer’. These two odes are the key to the poetic revolution of the magazine Orpheu, which did not include any more daring or unbridled collaborations that these. eugénio Lisboa found a fortunate way to express the surprise of those readers who knew that Campos was a heteronym of Pessoa: ‘ninguém mais convencional na sua vida discreta e monótona do que o Fernando Pessoa que trazia dentro de si a Ode Marítima’ [no one more conventional in his discreet and monotonous life than the Fernando Pessoa who bore within himself the Ode Marítima].33 I quote some lines from the ‘Ode Marítima’, that Whitmanesque ode of Atlantic deliverance, in which the delirium for the sea and for ‘maritime things’ swells in a crescendo: Penetram-me fisicamente o cais e a sua atmosfera, O marulho do Tejo galga-me por cima dos sentidos, e começo a sonhar, começo a envolver-me do sonho das ágoas, Começam a pegar bem as correias-de-transmissão na minh’alma e a aceleração do volante sacode-me nítidamente. Chamam por mim as ágoas, Chamam por mim os mares. Chamam por mim, levantando uma voz corpórea, os longes, As épocas marítimas todas sentidas no passado, a chamar. [...] Pensando nisto — ó raiva! pensando nisto — ó fúria! Pensando nesta estreiteza da minha vida cheia de ânsias, Subitamente, trémulamente, extraorbitadamente,

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Com uma oscilação viciosa, vasta, violenta, do volante vivo da minha imaginação, Rompe, por mim, assobiando, silvando, vertiginando, O cio sombrio e sádico da estrídula vida marítima.34 [The dock and its ambience penetrate me physically, The tide of the Tagus f loods all my senses, And I start dreaming, I start wrapping myself up in a dream of waters, driving-belts start winding themselves firmly around my soul, And the fast-whirring f lywheel clearly shakes me. Waters are calling me. Seas are calling me. All distances raise a bodily voice and call me, And all maritime ages known in the past are calling me. [...] As I think of this — o madness! — as I think of this, o fury! Thinking of my straight-and-narrow life, full of feverish desires, Suddenly, tremulously, extraorbitally, With one viciously vast and violent twist Of the living f lywheel of my imagination, There breaks through me, whistling, trilling and whirling, This somber, sadistic envy of all strident seafaring life.]35

The f lywheel is the ‘living f lywheel of my imagination’, which oscillates in the moment in which the ‘somber, sadistic envy of all strident seafaring life’ erupts with the greatest force. Campos, to whom Pessoa also attributed a poem that begins ‘Afinal, a melhor maneira de viajar é sentir. | Sentir tudo de todas as maneiras’ [After all, the best way to travel is to feel. | Feel everything in every way],36 it is the sensationist engineer through whom Pessoa assumed, during his most vanguardist period, the most violent and excessive journeys, ‘outrando-se pela imaginação sensivel de si mesmo’ [othering himself through the self-sensitive imagination].37 Of the heteronyms, this is most ‘hystericamente hysterico’ [hysterically hysterical];38 the mask behind which Pessoa initially sublimated a more profound disquietude. In this respect, Peter nicholls’s comments may be illuminating: Modern man is ‘nerve-ridden’, in Baudelaire’s phrase (BSW [Baudelaire Selected Writings], 186), dominated by a ‘psychology of nerves’ and increasingly unpredictable, caught between a cult of ‘multiplied sensation’, on the one hand, and an impasse of inaction and impotence, on the other’ [...] This new form of subjectivity is accompanied by a rejection of art’s traditional role as an arbiter of moral truths.39

Pessoa represents, in part, this modern man, trapped between the multiplicity of his sensations and his feeling of tedium, that kind of melancholy that Pessoa attempts to define in The Book of Disquietude. But let us return to sensationism. In one of the initial texts, written in english and aiming to disseminate sensationism, Pessoa set out from the assumption that ‘There is nothing, no reality, but sensation’, and emphasized the following idea: ‘Sensationism pretends, taking stock of this real reality, to realise in art a decomposition of reality into its psychic geometrical elements’.40 Initially, sensationism was a sophisticated version — more ‘complete’, ‘complex’ and ‘harmonious’41 — of intersectionist attempts to analyse and divide reality into its

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psychic constituents. This in theoretical terms, because in practice, sensationism, which reached a culminating point (‘was brought to a head’)42 with the publication of the magazine Orpheu and claimed to be a movement, was a much more varied reality. Pessoa represented the more intellectual side of the movement — as an example of the intellectual analysis of the emotions and sentiments he himself cites (through the persona of an anonymous critic)43 his static drama O Marinheiro.44 But Pessoa qua Campos was already far more explosive and apparently irrational; after all, modernist poetics always maintained a fractious relationship with Romanticism and Romantic elements can be discerned in Campos’s Odes. However, according to the anonymous critic created by Pessoa, Mário de Sá-Carneiro, Luís de Montalvor (the first director of Orpheu) and José de Almada negreiros — presented as an ‘artist’ in Orpheu, no. 2, but who signs the poem ‘A Scena do Odio’ (1915), as ‘José d’Almada-negreiros, sensationist poet and narcissus of egypt’ — also belonged to sensationism.45 (Almeida negreiros dedicated ‘A Scena do Odio’ to Álvaro de Campos; just as Campos dedicated to Almada negreiros ‘A Passagem das Horas. Ode Sensacionista’; see Fig. 2.4). Concerning Sá-Carneiro, Pessoa’s alter ego states: no sensationist has gone higher than Sá-Carneiro in the expression of what may be called, in sensationist, coloured feelings. His imagination — one of the very finest in modern literature, for he outdid Poe in the reasoning-tale, in ‘The Strange death of Professor Antena’ — rioted among the elements given it by the senses and his colour-sense is one of the intensest ones in literary men.46

now, the sensationism that was born of the friendship between Pessoa and Sá-Carneiro was more than an artistic philosophy, open to all the vanguard movements and all poets of all times, irrespective of their stature (cf. ‘The sensationist admits joyfully both Homer and [Robert] Herrick to the great brotherhood of Art’).47 It was more than this, at least for Pessoa, who was the true instigator of the movement, and he published an article entitled ‘Movimento Sensacionista’ (1916), plan ning its dissemination in Portugal and abroad, beginning, probably, with england. According to Pessoa, sensationism argued first for the spiritual division of society into three classes; second, for aestheticism ‘in all its pagan splendour’; and third, for the possibility of going through all beliefs, all opinions and all systems of the world in one day, that is to say, the possibility of an artist being multiple and living artistically all states of mind, whether or not they are lived with sincerity. With some humour, Pessoa wrote: I grew to be a mere apt machine for the expression of moods which became so intense that they grew into personalities and made my very soul the mere shell of their casual appearance, even as theosophists say that the malice of naturespirits sometimes makes them occupy the discarded astral corpses of men and frolic under cover of their shadowy substances.48

not all of the values that Pessoa defended were actually modern. nor were some of those defended by Pound and eliot. But it should be noted that what is presented in the passage quoted above as an experience, is transformed elsewhere into a principle. Sensationism would operate as a means of eliminating the ‘Personality’:

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Fig. 2.4. BnP/e3, 71A-53. [Biblioteca Nacional de Portugal / Fernando Pessoa Arquive, e3, document 71A-53]. Page with the signature of Álvaro de Campos, containing the dedication of ‘A Passagem das Horas. Ode Sensacionista.’: ‘Almada negreiros: você não imagina como eu lhe agradeço o facto de você existir’ [Almada negreiros: you cannot imagine how grateful I am to you for existing]

[...] pela admissão num mesmo individuo de todos os modos de sentir e de pensar possiveis, embora incompativeis uns com os outros, isto quer simultaneamente sentidos (interseccionismo psychico), quer sentidos sucessivamente (dynamismo sensacionista), quer sentidos separadamente, como que com almas diversas (polypersonalidade).49 [[...] by the acceptance in one and the same individual of all possible modes of feeling and thinking, even though incompatible with one another, whether they are felt simultaneously [psychic intersectionism], successively [sensationist dynamism], or separately, as if with different souls [polypersonality].]

In some respects, ‘heteronymity’ or ‘polypersonality’ is the supreme sensationism; the best way to ‘Feel everything in all ways’ is, perhaps, to be, as Pessoa wanted, multiple and master of one’s own multiplicity.50 Sensationism then, was a movement destined to be the meeting point of many currents and, more important still, of many writers — namely, ‘Pessoa & Co. Heteronymy’51 — and the ultimate overcoming of the other great Portuguese ism of the twentieth century: ‘saudodismo’, associated by Teixeira de Pascoaes, his

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mentor, with ‘the Lusitanian spirit’, and the expression of ‘Portuguese genius’. In one of his notebooks, Pessoa makes a clear distinction between the two isms. It is worth quoting at length: As differenças entre o saudosismo e o sensacionismo indicam-se em poucas palavras: (1) O saudosismo subordina a arte a uma preoccupação patriotica e religiosa; o sensacionismo põe a arte acima de tudo. (2) O saudosismo proclama como verdadeira uma determinada doutrina, ou visão esthetica; o sensacionismo proclama verdadeiras todas as doutrinas e visões estheticas — classicas, romanticas, symbolistas, futuristas — ; exige-lhes apenas que sejam doutrinas estheticas, visões artisticas. (3) O saudosismo apoia-se não só numa religião, mas tambem numa metaphysica. O sensacionismo apoia-se em todas as metaphysicas. (4) O saudosismo tem perante as cousas uma attitude moral; o sensacionismo apenas uma attitude esthetica. Por ex[emplo] uma arvore, para o saud[osis]ta é uma irmã sua; para o sen[sacionis]ta é, ou não é, conforme lhe convenha ao que quer dizer. (5) O saudosismo e o sensacionismo teem de commum o julgarem-se interpretadores da alma nacional, Mas o saudosismo suppõe que a alma é essencialmente mystica; o sensacionismo que ella é essencialmente cosmopolita, synthetica e pagã. (6) O saud[osismo] procura fundir o paganismo e o Ch[ristianis]mo. O sens[acionismo] põe de parte o Ch[ristianis]mo; procura apenas trascendentalizar o paganismo.52 [The differences between ‘saudosismo’ and sensationism can be indicated in a few words: (1) Saudosismo subordinates art to a concern with patriotism and religion; sensationism sets art above all things. (2) Saudosismo proclaims a specific doctrine or aesthetic vision to be true; sensationism proclaims all doctrines and aesthetic visions — classical, romantic, symbolist, futurist — to be true; it only demands that they should be aesthetic doctrines, artistic visions. (3) Saudosismo is based not only on a religion but also on a metaphysics. Sensationism is based on all metaphysics. (4) Saudosismo adopts a moral attitude to things; sensationism only takes an aesthetic attitude. For example a tree, for the saudosista is his sister, for the sensationist it is or is not, depending on how it matches what he wants to say. (5) Saudosismo and sensationism have in common their belief that they are interpreters of the national soul. But saudosismo presupposes that the soul is essentially mystical; sensationism presupposes that it is essentially cosmopolitan, synthetic and pagan. (6) Saudosismo seeks to blend paganism and Christianity. Sensationism sets Christianity aside, it seeks only to transcendentalize paganism.]

The main symbol of the whole modernist adventure culminating in sensationism, whose foundations are summed up in these six points, was precisely the magazine Orpheu. It aimed to place art above all else, to accept all aesthetic doctrines (hence its eclectic character), not to privilege a single vision of the world or transmit moral doctrines, to be national and cosmopolitan, ancient and modern, at the same time, and, in a ‘epocha singular’ [singular age],53 in which the decadence of the Church

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of Rome was apparent, to ‘transcendentalize paganism’, in other words, ancient polytheism, feeling ‘everything in all ways’ and ‘with different souls’.54 ‘Orpheu acabou. Orpheu continua’ [Orpheu has ended. Orpheu continues].55 Thus ends the evocation of Orpheu, written by Pessoa, in 1935, the year of his death. Historians usually associate an artistic ism with one or more outstanding figures: cubism, with Braque and Picasso; futurism with Marinetti; saudosismo with Teixeira de Pascoaes; vorticism with Lewis; suprematism with Malevich; simultaneism with the delaunays; dadaism with Tristan Tzara; surrealism with André Breton — and so on. Pessoa, who was various poets and prose writers, would have to be linked with at least five isms, which after 1917, following the suicide of Sá-Carneiro, and the deaths of Santa-Rita Pintor and Amadeu de Souza-Cardoso, practically died out. Pessoa created not one, but multiple isms. Appendix (technique of Feeling) Of the texts that Pessoa wrote directly in english, it is this one that gives us the best idea of what a segment of The Book of Disquietude would have been like had it been written in that language. It is a kind of dreamer’s handbook, inf luenced by the theorization of two isms: intersectionism and sensationism. It can be dated to c. 1915. I located and read it anew (BnP/e3, 15B3-14 and 15) after receiving an opportune indication of nuno Ribeiro, whom I very much thank. [15B3-14] Technique of Feeling The art of feeling just for the sake of feeling is the one which is essential to the ideler. To know how to receive impressions so that they cause you the greatest pleasure possible, or, when they occasion pain, cause the least possible pain, or, when giving pain or discomfort, can be forced to yield some compensating pleasure — this is the object of this course. do not specialize in certain elements of individuality.56 Specialize, if you like, in an attitude of individuality; but that attitude must include all possible moods or impressions. The cultivation of selfishness is absurd, for it limits pleasure; a complete individuality, even if sel[f ]-centred, should know how to feel in also a self-uncentred way. Pity, indignation, fello[w]-feeling can give pleasure; we curtail our pleasures when we limit our individuality, and to exclude the social feelings is to curtail our individuality. Literature on the subject: O[scar] W[ilde] “Intentions”, but Wilde is too preoccupied with contradicting, to be quite at his intellectual ease. Live completely, though you live only for yourself; feel completely, though you feel only to feel, and neither to think, nor to act. There is an art of compassion, by which pleasure can be extracted from pitying others, just as there is an art of gourmandise, by which — First Law: never abstain. It is not the use of c[oc]aine which is immoral, but the abuse of cocaine. (???) If you smoke ten cigarettes a day, being a smoker each cigarette will taste better than each does when you smoke a hundred. Cultivate the taste first; then cultivate its limitation. The limit defines; a country is a country not only by having its territory, but also by not having the territory of other nations. A nation is defined by its frontier, and its frontier not only marks what the country is, but also what it is not. Cultivate non-abstention in the natural things; but neither abuse the natural things, nor indulge in unnatural ones, the [e]ssence of which is abuse.

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The difficulty is to define “natural” things. Why is wine natural and cocaine unnatural? The point of reference is the acceptation of mankind; wine is human, cocaine is special. Mankind everywhere where it is natural and uncorrupted is wine-drinking; not section of mankind except degen[e]rates is cocaine-taking. Cocaine is a substitute; wine is not.57 The minority differs from the majority not in essence, but in attributes; not in the things it does, but in the manner of doing them. This manner is obtained by choice in the natural things, which is an intellectual act; and by peculiarity in the manner of taking natural things, which is a sentimental act. The act itself is common to all men; all men drink wine in the same way. It is not aristocratic to drink wine through the nose. In drinking wine, the member of the minority differs from the member of the majority, in two ways: in the wine which he drinks, and in the intellect behind the drinking. He chooses a better, a choicer wine; and he has a different manner of putting his intelligence into his palate. Complexity of emotion belongs to simple things. It is fools who choose complex things. A complex thing is sought be the aristocracy of the people. Taking cocaine is like overdressing.58 The popular vices are excess — The way to spoil pleasure is to seek for it where it is not. To strive to get from drinking petrol the pleasure that should be got from drinking brandy is a foolish thing, because petrol does not resemble brandy. The art of intersecting sensations. — This is a peculiarly difficult thing to do we[l]l, and not every succeeds in it. Of course it is impossible to concentrate attention on two things at a time, and it is a highly injurious thing to attempt if our training59 is directed to the active intellect, or to the will. But if we are cultivating feeling, it does no harm. We all know that most agreeable of mental states, when sleep is not yet cast off, and yet we have not yet awaked. The mind is still plunged in the dream it had in sleep, but it feels already around it the slow murmur and vague shadow of real things. This is the most natural state of intersected sensations; neither the subjective, nor the objective, consciousness being fully active, they seem to divide our mind between them, each penetrating 60 the other. This is the type of intellectual and emotional state which is to be cultivated. In full waking, however, this can only be done by heightening the power of subjective consciousness: this is the real day-dreaming. How can the power s[ubjective] c[onsciousness] be heightened without shutting off o[bjective] consc[ious]ness? And how can this state of mind be cultivated without eventually drying the roots of either or of each and thus inducing a morbid mental state by which pleasure itself will diminish and the capacity for pleasure be made weaker? A parallel cultivation of the objective and of the subjective consciousness can do this. In the first place, learn how to be acutely conscious of external things, even —

notes to Chapter 2 1. Orpheu 3 (Porto: nova Renascença, 1983); cf. Orpheu: revista trimestral de literatura, facsimile of the Lisbon edition: Typografia do Commercio, 1915; includes issue number 3 in page proofs (Lisbon: Contexto, 1989). 2. Jerónimo Pizarro, ‘Pessoa e “Monsieur” Marinetti’, Estudos Italianos em Portugal, 4 (2009), 77–88. 3. Fernando Pessoa, Carta a um Herói Estúpido, ed. by Jerónimo Pizarro (Lisbon: Ática, 2010). 4. José de Almada negreiros, orpheu, 1915–1965 (Lisbon: Ática, 1965), p. 24. 5. Broadly translated as ‘nostalgia’. 6. In the Pessoa arquive: BnP/e3, 97–38r. In full, ‘Biblioteca nacional de Portugal, espólio [Arquive], no. 3, cota [classification] 97–38 rosto [recto]’. 7. Steffen dix, ‘neopaganismo’, in Dicionário de Fernando Pessoa e do Modernismo Português, coord. by Fernando Cabral Martins (Lisbon: Caminho, 2008), pp. 523–26 (p. 524). 8. For eugénio Lisboa, ‘O modernismo caracteriza-se precisamente por uma necessidade de multi-

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plicação de rostos, pela utilização deliberada e frenética de um jogo de espelhos desorientador, visando, frequentemente, a um nível de ironia superior, um estado de permanente fuga englobante e cepticamente pacificadora’ [Modernism is characterized precisely by the need for a multiplicity of faces, by the deliberate and frenetic use of a disorientating game of mirrors, aiming, more often than not, at a higher level of irony, a permanent state of all-embracing and sceptically peacemaking f light]. See eugénio Lisboa, Poesia Portuguesa: do ‘Orpheu’ ao neorealismo, 2nd edn (Lisbon: Instituto de Cultura e Língua Portuguesa, 1986), pp. 33–34. 9. Modernism: An Anthology of Sources and Documents, ed. by Vassiliki Kolocotroni, Jane goldman and Olga Taxidou (edinburgh: edinburgh University Press, 1998), p. xviii. 10. Fernando Pessoa, ‘A Questão Shakespeare–Bacon’, Escritos sobre Génio e Loucura, ed. by Jerónimo Pizarro, 2 vols (Lisbon: Imprensa nacional–Casa da Moeda, 2006), i, 341–78. Volume vii of the Critical edition of Fernando Pessoa. 11. In the draft of a letter or article in French, Pessoa explains: ‘C’est lá [La Renaissance] qu’a paru le célèbre poème Paues (Étamp) de F[ernando] P[essoa], qui a donné à l’école son nom populaire de paúlismo (ce qui est un pseudo-substantif formé du substantif Paul, étamp)’ [It was there [The Renaissance] that the famous poem Paues (Swamps) by Fernando Pessoa was born, which gave the school its popular name of paulism (which is a pseudo-noun formed from the noun Paul, swamp)]. Fernando Pessoa, Sensacionismo e Outros Ismos, ed. by Jerónimo Pizarro (Lisbon: Imprensa nacional–Casa da Moeda, 2009), p. 378. Volume x of the Critical edition of Fernando Pessoa. 12. Jacinto do Prado Coelho, ‘Modernismo’, in Dicionário das Literaturas Portuguesa, Galega e Brasileira (Porto: Livraria Figueirinhas, 1957), p. 491. 13. Pessoa, Sensacionismo e Outros Ismos, p. 101. 14. Ibid., p. 161. 15. Pessoa, ‘A nova poesia portuguesa no seu aspecto psicológico’ [1912], in Crítica: ensaios, artigos e entrevistas, ed. by Fernando Cabral Martins (Lisbon: Assírio & Alvim, 1999), pp. 36–67 (p. 42 and p. 48). 16. Pessoa, Sensacionismo e Outros Ismos, p. 340. 17. Peter nicholls, Modernisms: A Literary Guide (new York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009) [1st edn Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995], p. 163. 18. Richard Aldington, Images: 1910–1915 (London: The Poetry Bookshop, 1915). 19. Pessoa, Sensacionismo e Outros Ismos, p. 106. In Portuguese, in the original: ‘Sensações do eu | Sensações do espirito | Sensações Abstractas | Sensações da natureza | A estupidez incrivel do publico, que não viu logo aqui uma nova arte’. 20. This was the only representation (fictitious) of a woman in the magazine Orpheu. On this subject, see an observation by eugénio Lisboa: ‘nos homens do Orpheu lusíada a mulher quase não está presente. numa carta de dezembro de 1912 escrita de Paris, a Fernando Pessoa, Sá-Carneiro proclamava com uma espécie de altiva amargura: “A nossa geração é mais complicada, creio, e mais infeliz. A iluminar as suas complicações não existe mesmo uma boca de mulher. Porque somos uma geração superior.” A mulher pode ser presença discreta na vida (quando é), mas, ou se ausenta dos textos ou tem neles uma função excessivamente peculiar’ [In the men of the Portuguese Orpheu, woman is almost never present. In a letter of december 1912 written from Paris, to Fernando Pessoa, Sá-Carneiro proclaimed, with lofty bitterness: ‘Our generation is more complicated, I believe, and more unhappy. Illuminating their complications there is not even a woman’s voice. Because we are a superior generation’. Woman may be a discreet presence in life (when she is), but either she is absent from the texts, or she has in them an excessively peculiar function]. eugénio Lisboa, Poesia Portuguesa: do ‘Orpheu’ ao neo-realismo, p. 16. 21. This concept was borrowed from Jorge guillén; see Antonio Sáez delgado, Espíritus contemporáneos. Relaciones literarias luso-españols entre el modernismo y la vanguardia (Seville: Renacimiento, 2008). 22. Pessoa, Sensacionismo e Outros Ismos, p. 109. 23. Ibid., p. 109. 24. Ibid., p. 122. 25. Manuel g. Simões, ‘Os mitos futuristas e a “Ode Triunfal” de Álvaro de Campos’, Estudos Italianos em Portugal, 4 (2009), 89–98 (p. 92).

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26. Pizarro, ‘Pessoa e “Monsieur” Marinetti’; cf. note 2. 27. Umberto Boccioni, ‘Pittura e Scultura futuriste (dinamismo plastico)’ [1914], ed. by Zeno Birolli (Milan: Abscondita, 2006), p. 76. 28. Mário de Sá-Carneiro, ‘Manucure’ [in ‘Poemas sem suporte], Orpheu 2 [1915], ed. by Maria Aliete galhoz (Lisbon: Ática, 1976), pp. 21–37 (p. 29). 29. nicholls, Modernisms, p. 163; cf. p. 342. ‘The phrase ‘Men of 1914’ is from Wyndham Lewis, Blasting and Bombadiering (1937), p. 252. 30. Pessoa, Sensacionismo e Outros Ismos, p. 286. 31. Oscar Wilde, Plays, Prose, Writings and Poems, with an introduction by Terry eagleton (new York: Alfred A. Knopf; London: everyman’s Library, 1991), p. 251. Wilde was one of the authors who Pessoa read, criticized and translated between 1913 and 1914, and whose work is important for reconstructing the intellectual genesis of the heteronyms. See Mariana de Castro, ‘Oscar Wilde, Fernando Pessoa, and the Art of Lying’, Portuguese Studies, 22 (2006), 219–49. 32. Pessoa, Sensacionismo e Outros Ismos, p. 69. 33. eugénio Lisboa, Poesia Portuguesa: do ‘Orpheu’ ao neo-realismo, p. 23. 34. Fernando Pessoa, ‘Ode Marítima, por Álvaro de Campos’, Orpheu 2 [1915], ed. by Maria Aliete galhoz (Lisbon: Ática, 1976), pp. 67–106 (pp. 77–80). 35. Trans. by edwin Honig, see Fernando Pessoa, Selected Poems, with an introduction by Octavio Paz, bilingual edition (Chicago: Swallow Press, 1971), pp. 88–143 (pp. 101–05). 36. Álvaro de Campos, ‘Afinal, a melhor maneira de viajar é sentir’ (BnP/e3, 69–44 and 45), in Fernando Pessoa, Poemas de Álvaro de Campos, ed. by Cleonice Berardinelli (Lisbon: Imprensa nacional–Casa da Moeda, 1992), pp. 196–99 (p. 196). 37. Cf. ‘Condillac começa o seu livro celebre, “Por mais alto que subamos e mais baixo que desçamos, nunca sahimos das nossas sensações”. nunca desembarcamos de nós. nunca chegamos a outrem, senão outrando-nos pela imaginação sensivel de nós mesmos. As verdadeiras paisagens são as que nós mesmos creamos, porque assim, sendo deuses d’ellas, as vemos como ellas verdadeiramente são, que é como foram creadas’ [‘Condillac begins his celebrated book [Treatise on the Sensations]: “no matter how high we rise or how low we descend, we never get outside our sensations.” We never disembark from ourselves. We never arrive elsewhere, unless by othering ourselves through the self-sensitive imagination. The true landscapes are those that we ourselves create, because in this way, being their gods, we see them as they truly are, which is how they were created’]. My translation. Fernando Pessoa, Livro do Desasocego, ed. by Jerónimo Pizarro (Lisbon: Imprensa nacional–Casa da Moeda, 2010), 296–98 (p. 287). Volume xii of the Critical edition of Fernando Pessoa. 38. Letter to Adolfo Casais Monteiro, 13 January 1935, in Fernando Pessoa, Escritos sobre Génio e Loucura, pp. 457–65 (p. 459). 39. nicholls, Modernisms, p. 8. 40. Pessoa, Sensacionismo e Outros Ismos, p. 153. 41. I am quoting from Ultimatum (1917), manifesto attributed to Álvaro de Campos; see Pessoa, Sensacionismo e Outros Ismos, p. 273. 42. Ibid., p. 160. 43. This is a fictitious critic, coming to Portugal from england simultaneously with the arrival of Orpheu from Olympus, who prepared an anthology of Portuguese sensationist poets. See Pessoa, Sensacionismo e Outros Ismos, pp. 215–20. 44. ‘Fernando Pessoa is more purely intellectual; his power lies more in the intellectual analysis of feeling and emotion, which he has carried to a perfection which renders us almost breathless. Of his static drama “The Sailor” a reader once said: “It makes the exterior world quite unreal,” and it does. no more remote thing exists in literature. Maeterlinck’s best nebulosity and subtlety is coarse and carnal by comparison’. Ibid., p. 216. 45. ‘A Scena do Odio, por José d’Almada-negreiros, poeta sensacionista e narciso do egypto, 1915’, in Contemporanea, 7 (1923) [separata — no. 7]. 46. Pessoa, Sensacionismo e Outros Ismos, p. 216. 47. Ibid., p. 155. 48. Ibid., p. 157. 49. Ibid., p. 240.

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50. ‘Sejamos multiplos, mas senhores da nossa multiplicidade’ [Let us be multiple, but masters of our own multiplicity]. Ibid., p. 241. 51. Jorge de Sena, ‘Fernando Pessoa & Ca. Heterónima’, 2 vols (Lisbon: edições 70, 1982). 52. Pessoa, Sensacionismo e Outros Ismos, p. 316. 53. Ibid., p. 187. 54. Regarding the relationship between neo-paganism and sensationism, see also Steffen dix ‘The Plurality of gods and Man, or “The Aesthetic Attitude in All Its Pagan Splendor” in Fernando Pessoa’, The Pluralist, 5, 1 (Spring 2010), 73–93. 55. Pessoa, Sensacionismo e Outros Ismos, p. 95. 56. The author crossed out one word: ‘do not specialize in individuality certain elements of individuality’. 57. ‘Cocaine is not unnatural: it is a substitute for the unnatural.’ [Handwritten variant; cf. last sentence.] 58. The author crossed out some letters: ‘Taking cocaine is like [↓ the] overdressing. [of the palate]’. I kept what he wrote first. 59. ‘it is a highly injurious thing if we are traii to attempt if our training’. 60. ‘inter penetrating’.

CHAPter 3

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Mário de Sá-Carneiro: Modernism Achieved by Means of Wrong Beauty Giorgio de Marchis not many writers have seen his work so tampered with and restructured after his death as Mário de Sá-Carneiro, an author whose literary career, we should not forget, spanned a mere four years (1912–16) and whose work consisted of only a co-authored theatrical screenplay, two collections of stories, two books of verses, a futurist poem and a short novel.1 Without taking into account what are unanimously considered juvenile and hardly significant works, we can say that after an initial pre-modernist phase, Sá-Carneiro began to write his most important works after his arrival in Paris in October 1912. As Fernando Cabral Martins rightfully acknowledges, ‘O que escreve Sá-Carneiro depois de 1913, e que começa por publicar em 1914 nos dois livros simultâneos Dispersão e A Confissão de Lúcio, é de uma arte nova’ [everything that Sá-Carneiro writes after 1913 and begins to publish the following year in his books Dispersão and A Confissão de Lúcio, both dated 1914, belongs to a new art].2 After all, the poet himself did not have any trouble admitting in letters he sent from Paris to Fernando Pessoa that the poetic products of that phase, which he already thought on 7 January 1913 could be considered an ‘época de energia’ [energetic period], were completely different from what he had ever written until then. On 3 February, commenting upon the composition of the first fragments of ‘Além’, Sá-Carneiro wrote: ‘Junto, vão umas linhas que tenho escrito ultimamente. elas não se aparentam em coisa alguma com o que até hoje tenho composto. São coisas que me têm surgido bizarramente, não sei bem como’ [I’m sending you a few lines that I wrote recently. They don’t resemble in any way anything that I’ve written so far. They are things that just came to me in an uncanny way, I’m not sure how].3 Later, on 10 March, he sent ‘O Homem dos Sonhos’ in a letter to his friend: in the light of the results he had almost effortlessly achieved in his writing, the author did not hesitate to define those last few weeks as ‘a melhor quadra da minha vida literária’ [the best phase of my literary life].4 Two weeks later, on 25 March, he said that he was convinced that the two works of poetic prose that he was composing those days — ‘Além’ and ‘Bailado’ — were highly innovative: ‘Mau ou bom não acha que estas composições no seu corte, na sua expressão, na sua ideia — em suma no seu todo — têm qualquer coisa de novo? eu, parece-me que sim; pelo menos nada conheço que se lhe aparente’ [Whether good or bad, don’t compositions

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like these have something new in their style, expression, idea — in short, as a whole? It seems so to me. Or at least, I don’t know of anything that resembles them].5 Hence, on 5 May 1913, when he had a sudden burst of lyrical inspiration (a rather uncommon occurrence for a writer who, although now considered one of the most renowned Portuguese poets of the twentieth century, had hitherto considered himself a prose writer who occasionally versified like an amateur),6 the author of Princípio wondered: ‘Como é que de súbito me virgulo para outra arte tão diferente? e sem esforço, antes naturalmente’ [How is it that I suddenly pause and turn to so different an art? And effortlessly, even naturally].7 nevertheless, if we lend too much importance to the turning-point that supposedly marked Mário de Sá-Carneiro’s work in the first half of 1913, we risk over-emphasizing Pessoa’s role in a definition of Sá-Carneiro’s modernism. Moreover, this does not take into due consideration the fundamental homogeneity of his compositions and the fact that his work developed mainly through the accumu lation and superimposition of different poetics rather than by an abrupt break in his creative attitude. Undoubtedly, the author of ‘Tabacaria’ [‘The tobacco shop’], whom Mário met before his departure for France in 1912, laid the foundations of the new language his friend began to adopt during his first months in Paris. Sá-Carneiro frequently declared his admiration for his amigo de alma [soul mate], explicitly positing himself as one of his disciples. In this sense, some of his comments about the genesis of the collection Dispersão that were found in his correspondence, appear particularly significant: Cá estou de novo a maçá-lo. Mas você tem que ter pena de mim. escrevo uma coisa e logo tenho uma ânsia de saber o que o meu amigo pensa dela. É um entusiasmo, uma ansiedade... tenha paciência.8 [Here I am bothering you again. But you must take pity of me. As soon as I write something, a wave of anxiety comes over me and I long to know what my friend thinks of it. It’s a sort of enthusiasm, a craving... be patient.] É preciso notar que só farei essa publicação se o meu amigo me disser que efectivamente estes versos valem alguma coisa, não muita coisa — entanto alguma coisa.9 [Let it be clear that I will publish this only if my friend tells me that these verses are worth something, not a great deal but at least something.] Traduz esta quintilha, no meio das outras, uma coisa muito muito verdadeira da minha alma. Mas receio no entanto que ela venha destruir o equilíbrio do desequilíbrio artístico da composição. Meti-a entre parêntesis, por isso mesmo. gostaria muito de a conservar. entanto hesito, e, em última instância, recorro a você. Mas seja imparcial. e diga se ela pode ficar. Se apenas for preferível eliminá-la, deixá-la-ei. Mas se for preciso condená-la, condená-la-ei. Você mo dirá.10 [This stanza expresses something, in the midst of others, that holds very, very true to my soul. But I fear that it may destroy the balance of the artistic imbalance in the composition. That’s exactly why I placed it within parentheses. I would really like to preserve it. nonetheless, I hesitate and I turn to you as a last resort. But please be impartial and tell me whether it should stay. If you

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giorgio de Marchis think it might be better to delete it, then I’ll leave it. However, if you think it’s necessary to condemn it, I will condemn it. But it’s up to you to tell me.] Peço-lhe que me estabeleça a ordem em que todas as 12 poesias devem ser publicadas e, se tiver pachorra, a sua ordem de preferência conforme a opinião do meu querido amigo. A ‘Bebedeira’ intitulei-a definitivamente ‘Álcool’. não lhe parece bem este título? Outra pergunta: na capa do livro que pôr abaixo de Dispersão versos, poemas, poesias, 12 poemas de Mário de Sá-Carneiro, 12 poesias de Mário de Sá-Carneiro? e se fizesse isto: 344 versos de Mário de Sá-Carneiro (344 ou o número deles, quero dizer). Isto porém, que seria novidade, é talvez (quase com certeza) de mau gosto. Indicar por fora que o livro é em verso, é forçoso pois eu sou conhecido como prosador. Ainda outro subtítulo: Série em verso. diga o que pensa sobre isto e que pouca importância tem (diga-me: Seria melhor em vez de: ‘de embate ao meu amor todo me ruo’; ‘de embate ao meu ansear todo me ruo’?) Sobre estas pequeninas coisas de viva voz me aconselharei consigo.11 [Please put all 12 poems in the order they should be published for me. Then, if you still can be bothered, I’d like you, my dear friend, to put them in the order of your preference. I gave ‘drunkenness’ the permanent title ‘Alcohol’. do you like this title? One other question: on the cover of the book, what should I put beneath the title, Dispersion? Verses, poetry, poems, 12 poems by Mário de Sá-Carneiro, 12 poetic compositions by Mário de Sá-Carneiro? And what if I did it this way: 344 verses by Mário de Sá-Carneiro (344 or whatever the number is, I mean)? Though this may be a novelty, it is perhaps (almost certainly) in bad taste. The book cover should indicate that it’s a book of verse, seeing that I am known as a prose writer. Here is yet another subtitle: A series in verses. Please tell me what you think and how important it is (Tell me which is better: ‘I fall to pieces completely when I am confronted with my love’; ‘I fall to pieces completely when I am confronted with my anxiety’?) Regarding these little things, I will ask for your advice in person.]

nevertheless, although Mário de Sá-Carneiro’s admiration for Fernando Pessoa remains unchanged right up until his death (after all, he actually entrusted his friend with the editorial future of his works just a few days before he committed suicide), I believe that following his second visit to Paris ( June–August 1914)¸ the author of Céu em Fogo became even more secure of his formal artistic decisions. If Dispersão was profoundly inf luenced by the stylistic indications that Fernando Pessoa was sending him from Lisbon (to the extent that it might even be seen as a co-authored work), the poems transcribed in the notebook he sent to Pessoa on 2 April 1916 were written with greater freedom and independence. From this perspective, I believe that david Mourão-Ferreira — who is still credited with having written one of the most brilliant and rightly celebrated essays about the relationship between the two poets — might have exaggerated when he highlighted the importance of Pessoa’s role in Sá-Carneiro’s creative process: Se não fosse Fernando Pessoa, com o seu encorajamento, com a resposta amiga, rápida, imediata, àquelas cartas febris do começo de Maio de 1913, em que Sá-Carneiro lhe comunicava o inesperado surgimento de criação poética em verso (até então julgara-se apenas prosador) e lhe enviava poesias, e pedia conselhos, e submetia planos — sem esse constante encorajamento, repito, talvez não tivesse chegado a haver Dispersão nem os Indícios de Oiro de Mário de Sá-Carneiro.12

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[If it hadn’t been for Fernando Pessoa’s encouragement and his rapid, prompt and friendly responses to the feverish letters in which Sá-Carneiro early in May 1913 revealed to him the sudden emergence of his poetic creation (until that moment he had considered himself only a prose writer) and sent him his poems and asked for his advice and submitted his projects to him — without this constant encouragement, I repeat, there might never have been Dispersão or Indícios de Oiro by Mário de Sá-Carneiro.]

Reading through the letters the author of A Confissão de Lúcio wrote to his friend in Lisbon, one can perceive a dialectical exchange between two forces that inf luenced the creative decisions taken by the younger of the two poets: on the one hand, Pessoa’s advice, that of the authoritative literary critic of the magazine A Águia (and we should not forget the ambiguous and strategic manner in which Sá-Carneiro approached this magazine, where he had three short stories published before his adamant refusal to publish more, as a result of his leap into modernism),13 who pushed Mário towards new formal solutions that were far different from his juvenile compositions such as ‘O poste telegráfico’ as well as the ‘correcção quase academicista da prosa’ [the almost pedantic correction of his prose],14 that seemed a characteristic of his first collection of short stories dating from1912; on the other hand, the disciple was not always as submissive as he seemed and was at times stubbornly resistant. He asked his friend for advice and accepted all his opinions, but, on more than one occasion, he failed to discard his compositions as he had been advised in letters from Lisbon. As to the first of these two drives, the genetic evolution of the poem ‘Partida’ and the prose ‘Bailado’ stands out as an example. When he sent the first version of his poem, which was still called ‘Simplesmente...’ [Simply...], Sá-Carneiro asks Pessoa ‘que não se assuste nem com o título nem com as primeiras quadras naturais’ [not to be afraid of the title or the first few natural verses],15 showing at the start that he agreed with Pessoa’s inevitable objections to the first part of the poem, which, at the time, he considered just a joke in bad taste possibly destined, at most, to be published in the pages of Ilustração Portuguesa in order to satisfy António Maria de Freitas’s frequent and insistent requests. A few weeks later, Sá-Carneiro accepted Pessoa’s negative feedback, as well as that of Ponce de Leão and Correia de Oliveira, regarding his prose work ‘Bailado’, and came to terms with its complete failure and the impossibility of saving his work by making a few sporadic corrections. This correspondence is profoundly marked by the interference of literary fictionality, an aspect so prominent that more than one critic was led to suggest that these letters should be read as if they were an epistolary novel. Sá-Carneiro likes to play the part of a scrupulous pupil, who accepts his mentor’s critique, even when it is harsh. Yet, this time, he is confronted with two profoundly different critiques: in ‘Simplesmente...’ Pessoa comes down hard on the blatant imitation of Cesário Verde and the excessiveness of ‘realidade da forma’ [reality of form], which probably, in his view, had already heavily conditioned the outcome of Princípio. On the contrary, as Mário de Sá-Carneiro suggests, the fault in ‘Bailado’ was determined by the excessive departure from that format, and by a sort of overf low of ideas that made the conception of the piece both confusing and obscure. This was exactly what prevented the piece from conveying any impression of a dance:

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giorgio de Marchis Ainda me apoiei algumas linhas, mas em breve atacado da bebedeira de palavras — o que não é o mais grave: o pior é que essa bebedeira é também de ideias, sobretudo no final — me transviei. não mais me lembrei da dançarina, só me lembrei de sons falsos, de ideias que saíam do quadro. e daí a ruína. Por isso muita razão tem você quando diz que as minhas frases nenhuma impressão lhe dão de bailado.16 [I still held on for a few lines, but I soon was drunk with words — which is not the hardest part: the worst was that I was also drunk with ideas, especially towards the end — and I lost myself. I could no longer remember the ballerina. All I could remember were false sounds and ideas that leaped out of the picture frame. And that where everything fell apart. For this reason, you are very right when you say that my sentences don’t convey any impression of a dance.]

From this perspective, I believe that a sense of ‘vagueness’ was the most fundamental aesthetic category that inf luences the evolution of Mário de Sá-Carneiro as a poet — along with his general approach to new expressive methods, which was later defined as ‘modernism’ as a whole. And it was the same ‘vagueness’ that Fernando Pessoa discussed in his analysis of the new Portuguese poetry published in the magazine A Águia between September and december 1912, of which Mário de Sá-Carneiro was certainly aware,17 and which allowed him to cast off his naturalist trammels. during the first semester of 1913, the writer recognized his need to change his works several times in order to make them vaguer: A narrativa resume-se no seguinte: dar por frases a ideia do ‘Além’ — o Além, o vago, os desequilíbrios do espírito, os voos da imaginação. Isso dar-se-á por meio de mistura de coisas raciocinadas, coerentes, com súbitos mergulhos no azul, tempestades de palavras que se emaranhem e arranhem, se entredevorem e precipitem.18 [The essence of the story can be summarized in the following way: to render in a few sentences the idea of ‘Beyond’ — the Beyond, its vagueness, imbalance of the spirit, f lights of the imagination. This might be achieved by combining rational and coherent things with sudden plunges into the deep blue, a storm of words that scrape against and cling to one another, that devour each other and lose control completely.] Rogo-lhe que me diga a sua impressão total apontando os defeitos que é claro existem. Mas julgo-o entanto suficientemente amadurecido. Como vê modifiquei inteiramente o final tornando-o o mais vago que pude.19 [I beg you to give me your frank opinion, and also indicate the f laws, of which, of course, there are. But I consider it to be sufficiently mature. As you can see, I’ve completely modified the ending in order to make it as vague as possible.] ‘O Fixador de Instantes’ está completamente amadurecido e orientado para o vago como convém.20 [‘O Fixador de Instantes’ is completely mature and aspires, as it should, to vagueness.]

The ‘new language’ that the poet of Dispersão recognizes in the verses that Pessoa transcribes, in a letter he sent from Lisbon at the end of January, is actually a complex,

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vague and subtle language. Through an alteration of traditional syntax, a selection of unusual adjectives, the incorrect use of the ethical dative, a bizarre use of modal adverbs, elisions, series of nouns and a transitive construction of intransitive verbs, this ‘new language’ enabled the poet (in Mário de Sá-Carneiro’s words) to suggest — rather than enunciate — this dreamed poetry, in which the poet is able to deal with the mystery and question the Beyond in a hazy, misty orchestration of words. The crucial aspect of the issue (one that should advise against a complete severance of the 1912 writings from the production that follows) is that Mário de Sá-Carneiro feels that this language is not to be used to begin expressing a new beauty, but should be exploited to continue expressing the same old beauty, his idea of beauty, in new forms. From this point of view, it is significant that, while Fernando Pessoa finds it impossible for the literary critics of the Diário de Notícias to understand and grasp Céu em Fogo — ‘porque ninguém pode esperar ser compreendido antes que os outros aprendam a língua que fala’ [because no one can hope to be understood before others can learn the language he speaks],21 Mário de Sá-Carneiro appears to be sincerely surprised that Mário Beirão and other critics of Pessoa’s work cannot comprehend his language ‘só porque ignoram que ela existe quando, se reparassem um pouco mais, breve veriam que essa língua era bem sua conhecida; apenas ampliada e mais brônzea, mais sonora e mais de fogo...’ [only because they are not aware of its existence; if they were a bit more attentive, they would immediately see that they know this language quite well. It’s only more amplified, more bronzecoloured, more resonant and full of fire...].22 In fact, the difference between the two poets is based on a different interpretation of a new poetic expression of beauty, which implies, according to Sá-Carneiro, a language with just a little more fire, and this corresponds to the dialectics between two different concepts of modernist beauty. For Mário de Sá-Carneiro, beauty, however intense and theatrical, undoubtedly holds a central role. It is precisely the impossibility of giving up what the poet feels is beautiful — beautiful in spite of everything — that drives his winding ‘resistance’ to Pessoa’s instructions. Actually, in a letter he wrote to João gaspar Simões in 1933, Pessoa himself recalled his friend’s persistent defence of some of his formal decisions, which appeared bizarre and unorthodox but which he considered aesthetically valuable and therefore absolutely inescapable: O mesmo se aplica à pontuação, extraordinariamente irregular e fantasista, mas a que o Sá-Carneiro ligava uma grande importancia. Varias vezes eu repontei com elle por causa de traços onde conviria pôr virgulas, ou ponto-e-virgulas, etc. Mas elle, apesar de prompto a annuir em outras coisas, nesta nunca annuia. Concordava muitas vezes commigo, mas tinha amor a essa pontuação especial.23 [The same thing can be said for the extremely irregular and bizarre punctuation that Sá-Carneiro considered fundamental. I argued several times with him about hyphens, which he used where there should have been commas or semicolons, etc. But even though he was willing to yield about certain things, this was something he would never accept. Though he agreed with me several times, he was particularly fond of this special punctuation.]

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It is obvious that the poet of Dispersão often agrees with his friend Pessoa and does not hesitate to recognize his superiority. He declares he feels honoured to be the poet that can be considered the closest and most in tune with his work, as closely and directly related to it as the earth is to the sun.24 Yet it is also true that Sá-Carneiro very rarely resigns himself to renouncing the publication of what he writes, even regardless of the approval he receives from Pessoa. It is in this stubborn defence of what the poet considers to be beautiful, even though this beauty might be excessive and unsuitable, that we can find the main features of Sá-Carneiro’s peculiar interpretation of modernism. It is his uncompromising refusal to ‘give up the gold’, which is a typical expression he uses to describe every aesthetical or existential experience that is superior and unparalleled. In his search for this gold, he decides to keep his outlandish punctuation. This also leads him to defend ‘Bailado’ from the start from attacks by Santa-Rita Pintor (who wanted to illustrate the text while adding provocative phrases in other languages — including a Spanish quotation by goya — in order to make it utterly incomprehensible), and later on, from the harsh critiques expressed by a group of friends who condemned it for its excessive strangeness. From this point of view, the editorial itinerary of ‘Bailado’ stands out as an example. It has already been pointed out that, on 21 April 1913, Mário de Sá-Carneiro recognized that his text had failed, and he also repeated this to his friend António Ferro just a few days later.25 nevertheless, while admitting to his failure, in the same letter to Pessoa he could not resign himself to renouncing the beauty he saw within those pages, even if it was wrong: e no entanto, veja, ainda hoje creio na sua beleza — simplesmente essa beleza é uma beleza errada. não é uma falsa beleza, é uma beleza errada. daí eu aceitar a conclusão da sua crítica, condenar o meu trabalho, condená-lo mesmo à morte, e no entanto estimá-lo.26 [And yet, look, even today I still believe in its beauty. This beauty is simply a wrong beauty. It’s not a false beauty. Rather, it’s a wrong beauty. For this reason, I accept your critique’s conclusion, I condemn my work and I even condemn it to death. However, I will always like it.]

Once he had accepted the damning verdict on ‘Bailado’, Sá-Carneiro’s main problem was to find a way to save from the midst of the rubble of its failure at least some of the phrases he just could not relinquish. As he writes to Pessoa, ‘é esta a tortura: como salvar essa beleza?’ [this is torture: how to save this beauty?].27 It was this need, a vital one for Mário de Sá-Carneiro, that turned ‘Bailado’ into a sort of mine of poetry from which he could extract phrases that he would then transform into the verses later embedded in ‘Rodopio’, ‘Álcool’ and ‘Inter-Sonho’. It was still the need to save this beauty that led him, in the autumn of 1914, to recover a text he considered irreparably jeopardized: in fact, he decided to insert ‘Bailado’ and ‘Além’ in the story ‘Asas’, which he published in his 1915 collection Céu em Fogo, but which he nonetheless wrote deliberately so as not to give up the two unedited works of poetic prose that had been collecting dust for months.28 He saw a value in all of his works, which appeared to share important thematic links rather than becoming separated because of a formal renovation. This renovation was rather clear, but it

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was also an increasingly audacious use of the same elements (madness, eroticism, precious stones, polychrome voluptuousness, pathological sensual euphoria, etc.) that on 26 February 1913 led Sá-Carneiro to attempt, in a final and desperate effort, to redeem Princípio from a curse passed down from Pessoa, a curse which must have been unforgiving: O meu livro (Princípio) cabe na arte que eu aconselho. Apesar do erro das digressões e da realidade da forma, explora, não infinito, mas loucura — que é um outro infinito. É ‘asa longínqua a sacudir loucura, nuvem precoce de subtil vapor’ se não viaja outros sentidos. Aliás, ampliação completa há numa das coisas menos valorosas do livro: ‘Página dum Suicida’. É justamente alguém que à força quer partir para o desconhecido — a morte.29 [My book (Princípio) fits into the kind of art that I recommend. In spite of the fault of digressions and the reality of form, it probes madness rather than infinity. And madness is yet another infinity. It is ‘a distant wing that stirs up madness, an early premature cloud made of subtle vapour’ when it doesn’t travel through other senses. As a matter of fact, in one of the less interesting things about this book, there is a complete overhaul: ‘Página dum Suicida’. It is precisely someone who wants to disappear into the great unknown — death.]

Thus, the distance between the two poets — a distance which appears inevitably softened if we follow a linear and progressive reconstruction of Sá-Carneiro artistic path — is based on a different interpretation of the nature of beauty and on the function that, according to Mário de Sá-Carneiro, it holds. For the poet of Indícios de Oiro, the artistic experience is an end in itself, an absolute and supreme value to hold onto and transcends the conditionings and rigorous restraints imposed by any poetics. A perfect example in this sense is the outline of Sá-Carneiro’s artistic personality, which he himself describes in a letter written to his friend in Lisbon, on 21 April 1913. Here he claims that despite an admirable imagination and the supreme quality of resources at his disposal to realize his plans, there is corresponding poor and distracted labour, which leads to the inability to achieve a balanced work of art. Such an enduring imbalance does not determine, however, the aesthetic failure of the work of art because, as Sá-Carneiro declares: Para mim basta-me a beleza — e mesmo errada, fundamentalmente errada. Mas beleza: beleza retumbante de destaque e brilho, infinita de espelhos, convulsa de mil cores — muito verniz e muito ouro: teatro de mágicas e apoteoses com rodas de fogo e corpos nus. Medo e sonambulismo, destrambelhos sardónicos cascalhando através de tudo. Foi esta a mira da minha obra.30 [For me, beauty is enough even if it’s wrong, fundamentally wrong. Yet beauty: a beauty resounding with importance and splendour, infinite with mirrors, convulsive with a thousand colours — a great deal of varnish and gold: a theatre of illusions and apotheoses with wheels of fire and naked bodies. Fear, somnambulism and sardonic blunders that laugh in the midst of everything. This was the aim of my work.]

The beauty that he likes, his beauty, must be wrong because it is the result of poetic excess.31 It is a beauty that blends in swirls the materials from symbolist tradition, which were already present from the time of Princípio. Yet from the first half of 1913, he submitted this material to a process of acceleration and decomposition, suggested

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by the emergence of Pessoan isms and by the contact with other avant-gardes, which he approaches, albeit indirectly, through Santa-Rita Pintor when he was in Paris. The ‘new language’, the language that has more fire and which Sá-Carneiro refers to, does not cause abrupt breaks with tradition; rather, it takes it to an extreme through a wild, unbalanced and ‘wrong’ accumulation of decadent relics: coloured lights, sequins, aromas and gold that, with the passing of time, begins to appear unavoidably false.32 An adequate analysis of Mário de Sá-Carneiro, a poet who is rarely read outside of a Pessoan sphere of inf luence, should therefore emphasize the originality of his peculiar interpretation of modernism and his creative autonomy. It should thus take into consideration the thematic continuity (the brilliant monotony, as José Régio would say) that characterizes an imagery which, between 1912 and 1916, remains substantially unchanged, despite the change of diction. The reconstruction of this interpretation of modernism, which we can define as ‘Sacarneirian’ on account of its inevitable irregularity, cannot therefore disregard the analysis of works until now considered of minor importance (such as Princípio). neither should it ignore the recovery of a few residual texts — above all ‘Além’ and ‘Bailado’ — that were essential in creating a new reading elaborated in the ‘in-betweenness’ of the dominant and normalizing interpretation. This, which we could define as a counter-offer, however, contrasts with the reading of Sá-Carneiro’s works as encouraged by Fernando Pessoa through some editorial and critical operations. Indeed, it was the author of Mensagem himself, who felt entitled by his friend’s authorization to edit Os últimos poemas de Mário de Sá-Carneiro, published in the second edition of the magazine ‘Athena’ in november 1924. It was a collection of six poems, preceded by a brief introduction, and organized on the basis of editorial options that were very arbitrary. This is, for example, the case with the insertion of ‘Caranguejola’ — which, like ‘Último Soneto’, initially belonged to the Indícios de Oiro but, according to Pessoa, clearly clashed with the rest of the volume — or with the elimination of ‘Crise Lamentável’ and the attribution of a title ‘Fim’, with its powerful extra-literary significance, to the two conclusive quatrains, which the editor evidently wanted to present as sort of a pre-epitaph. Those six poems were meant to be read as if they were ‘a rampa final, ou os sintomas do impulso de autodestruição que o autor entretanto vive, como se das suas últimas palavras, testamento e canto de cisne, se tratasse’ [the final stretch, or the symptoms of the impulse of self-destruction felt by the author, as if they were his last words, his testament and swan song].33 Pessoa’s aim, which appears evident from 1924 onwards, was to create a final phase of the poet in which the poems worked dramatically like the stations of a Via Crucis, concluding with the death of Sá-Carneiro. At the same time, Fernando Pessoa drafted the ‘Tábua bibliográfica’ [Bibliographic table] for the author of Dispersão, published in november 1928 in ‘Presença’, which also excluded Amizade and Princípio from Sá-Carneiro’s works. It also downsized the significance of ‘Manucure’, reducing it to something similar to a ‘poema semifuturista (feito com intenção de blague)’ [a semi-futurist poem (meant as a joke)],34 a rather inexplicable reading, especially if we consider that there wasn’t a single reference in Sá-Carneiro’s letters that confirmed this interpretation.

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With these editorial decisions, Fernando Pessoa identifies three periods in Sá-Carneiro’s poetic development, which also becomes an existential path — seeing that ‘em todo o sentido de todos os sentidos, o Sá-Carneiro não teve biographia: teve só genio. O que disse foi o que viveu’ [in every possible sense, Sá-Carneiro never had a biography: he just had genius. What he said was what he lived];35 Pessoa transforms the author of Os últimos poemas de Mário de Sá-Carneiro (who was his companion in paulism, as well as his intersectionist lieutenant) into a poet that was absolutely sincere and coherent, an interpretation mainly elaborated upon for the consumption and use of presencistas.36 An author who, from Princípio to ‘Fim’, staged a tragedy that would shine through his portrait, the most genuine one, according to Pessoa.37 Like the photograph that Pessoa talks about with gaspar Simões, this reconstruction is more believable than authentic because everything that could contradict it (starting with the avant-garde euphoria of ‘Manucure’, for example) becomes depreciated, and the last poems that accentuate its persuasive force are clearly a clever editorial trick. The post-reconstruction that Pessoa pieces together is nothing but a narration developed in a linear manner that was organized in three different time frames. It recalls the poetic and existential passage of other Pessoan creatures. After a younger and minor Sá-Carneiro who simply ‘não presta’ [isn’t good enough],38 there follows the poet during his first visits to Paris, the amigo de alma [the soul mate], enthusiastic about the new language revealed to him by his Master, and author of Céu em Fogo and Indícios de Oiro. He is the modernist poet who finds the famed Sagrada Familia in Barcelona to be ‘paúlica’ and Paris to be ‘interseccionista’ during the First World War. Finally, past the euphoric phase, we find the overweight sphinx, beaten and disillusioned, who confesses in his last verses ‘Morreram-me meninos nos sentidos...’ [Children died in my senses...] like others, after numbing their sense of ennui with opium and after living through a fever of sensations, they too will end up confessing that they were nothing.39 notes to Chapter 3 1. Amizade (1912); Princípio (1912); Dispersão (1914); A Confissão de Lúcio (1914); Manucure (1915); Céu em Fogo (1915); Indícios de Oiro (1916; 1st edn 1937). 2. Fernando Cabral Martins, ‘Uma questão de vida’, in Mário de Sá-Carneiro, Primeiros Contos, ed. by Fernando Cabral Martins (Lisbon: Assírio & Alvim, 1998), p. 223. 3. Mário de Sá-Carneiro, Cartas de Mário de Sá-Carneiro a Fernando Pessoa, ed. by Manuela Parreira da Silva, (Lisbon: Assírio & Alvim, 2001), p. 41. 4. Ibid., p. 55. 5. Ibid., pp. 61–62. 6. ‘não dou importância alguma aos meus versos. Como há escritores que nas suas horas vagas são pintores eu, nas minhas horas vagas, sou poeta — na expressão de escrever rimadamente, apenas. eis tudo. Se não desgosto destas quadras é pelo que elas dizem, não pelo que elas cantam. Logo a sua opinião inteira e rude — despida de perífrases, de todas as perífrases visto tratar-se dum mero diletantismo’ [I don’t think my verses are of any importance. Just as there are writers who in their free time become painters; I myself, in my free time, am a poet; just in the sense that I write in rhymes. There, that’s all. If I don’t dislike these quatrains, it’s because of what they say, not because of what they sing. Therefore [I ask for] your complete and blunt opinion, purged of paraphrases, of all paraphrases seeing this has to do with mere amateurism]. ‘do Repas du Lion

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du Curel diz o e. Faguet que é um tecido maravilhoso trazendo preso um farrapo imundo. A minha poesia será um farrapo que traz preso um pedaço de seda alguma coisa brilhante. e já é muito para um prosador ter conseguido isto. enfim, para mim, entre a poesia e a «literatura», há a mesma diferença que entre estas duas artes e a pintura, por exemplo. As minhas horas de ócio são ocupadas, não a pintar, como o Bataille, mas a fazer versos. Puro diletantismo’ [e. Faguet said that Repas du Lion by Curel is a marvellous texture with a filthy rag attached to it. My poetry must be a rag with a piece of silk attached to it, something that sparkles. And that’s already a lot for a prose writer to have managed. In short, for me there are the same differences between poetry and ‘literature’ as there are, for example, between those two and painting. My hours of idleness are already occupied and not with painting, like Bataille, but with making up verses. Pure amateurism]. Sá-Carneiro, Cartas de Mário de Sá-Carneiro a Fernando Pessoa, p. 47 and p. 56. 7. Ibid., p. 74. 8. Ibid., p. 71. 9. Ibid., pp. 74–75. 10. Ibid., p. 81. 11. Ibid., pp. 95–96. 12. david Mourão-Ferreira, ‘Ícaro e dédalo: Mário de Sá-Carneiro e Fernando Pessoa’, in Hospital das Letras (Lisbon: Imprensa nacional–Casa da Moeda, 1983), p. 132. 13. In 1913, ‘O Homem dos Sonhos’ and ‘O Fixador de Instantes’ and the year after, ‘Mistério’. The three stories would subsequently be included in the collection Céu em Fogo. 14. José Régio, ‘O fantástico na obra de Mário de Sá-Carneiro’, in Ensaios de Interpretação e Crítica, ed. by Maria João Reynaud (Lisbon: Imprensa nacional–Casa da Moeda, 2009), p. 144. 15. Sá-Carneiro, Cartas de Mário de Sá-Carneiro a Fernando Pessoa, p. 45. 16. Ibid., p. 67. 17. ‘Ideação vaga é coisa que é escusado definir, de exaustivamente explicante que é de per si o mero adjectivo; urge, ainda assim, que se observe que a ideação vaga não implica necessariamente ideação confusa, ou confusamente expressa (o que aliás redunda, feita uma funda análise psicológica, precisamente no mesmo). Implica simplesmente uma ideação que tem o que é vago ou indefinido por constante objecto e assunto, ainda que nitidamente o exprima ou definidamente o trate; sendo contudo evidente que quanto menos nitidamente o trate ou exprima mais classificável de vaga se tornará. Uma ideação obscura é, pelo contrário, apenas uma ideação ou fraca ou doentia. Vaga sem ser obscura é a ideação da nossa actual poesia’ [A vague conception is something that’s pointless to define, especially since the adjective itself clarifies it completely. It is, however, necessary to take into consideration that vague conception doesn’t necessarily imply a conception that’s confused or confusingly expressed (which comes down exactly to the same thing, if we carry out a scrupulous psychological analysis). It simply implies a conception that has a vague or indefinite element as its constant object or theme, even if it is clearly expressed or if it is treated in a definite way. nevertheless, it’s evident that the less clearly it is treated or expressed, the more appropriate it will be to classify it as vague. An obscure conception is, on the contrary, just a weak or sickly conception. Vagueness without obscurity is the conception of our present poetry]. Fernando Pessoa, ‘A nova poesia portuguesa no seu aspecto psicológico’, in Crítica: ensaios, artigos e entrevistas, ed. by Fernando Cabral Martins (Lisbon: Assírio & Alvim, 1999), p. 42. 18. Sá-Carneiro, Cartas de Mário de Sá-Carneiro a Fernando Pessoa, p. 38. 19. Ibid., p. 53. 20. Ibid., p. 55. 21. Fernando Pessoa, Sensacionismo e Outros Ismos, ed. by Jerónimo Pizarro (Lisbon: Imprensa nacional–Casa da Moeda, 2009), p. 375. 22. Sá-Carneiro, Cartas de Mário de Sá-Carneiro a Fernando Pessoa, p. 87. 23. Fernando Pessoa, Cartas entre Fernando Pessoa e os Directores da presença, ed. by enrico Martines (Lisbon: Imprensa nacional–Casa da Moeda, 1998), p. 216. 24. ‘Meu querido Amigo, juro-lhe que não exagero, que não literatizo, que não deixo a minha pena seguir inadvertidamente: eu a cada linha mais sua que leio sinto crescer o meu orgulho: o meu orgulho por ser, em todo o caso, aquele cuja obra mais perto está da sua — perto como a terra

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do sol — por o contar no número dos bem íntimos e em suma: porque o Fernando Pessoa gosta do que eu escrevo’ [My dear Friend, I swear I’m not exaggerating, I’m not writing literature, I’m not letting my pen to run off inadvertently. With every one of your lines that I read, I feel a growing pride. It’s the pride of being, in any case, the one whose work is the closest to your work; close like the earth is to the sun. It’s the pride of having you among my most intimate friends. In short, it’s because Fernando Pessoa likes what I write]. Sá-Carneiro, Cartas de Mário de Sá-Carneiro a Fernando Pessoa, p. 124. 25. Mário de Sá-Carneiro, Corrispondenza per António Ferro, José Paulino de Sá Carneiro, Ricardo Teixeira Duarte, in La ricerca infinita. Omaggio a Mário de Sá-Carneiro, ed. by Fernanda Toriello (Bari: Lusitania/Libri, 1987), p. 154. 26. Sá-Carneiro, Cartas de Mário de Sá-Carneiro a Fernando Pessoa, p. 67. 27. Ibid., p. 68. 28. ‘Quero mesmo escrever as ‘Asas’ neste volume por causa do ‘Além’ e ‘Bailado’, ultrapederasta assim o volume’ [I really want to write ‘Asas’ in this volume because of ‘Além’ and ‘Bailado’. This way, the volume will be very pederast]. Ibid., p. 154. In reality, ‘Além’ had already appeared as an unedited fragment by the Russian poet Petrus Ivanovitch Zagoriansky in the only edition of the magazine A Renascença which was published in February 1914. 29. Ibid., p. 50. 30. Ibid., pp. 200–01. 31. eduardo Lourenço, ‘Suicidária Modernidade’, Colóquio/Letras, 117/18 (1990), 7–12. 32. ‘O céu da minha obra não quero dizer que seja grande — não sei se na verdade o será. entretanto estou bem certo que é pesadamente dourado (talvez de ouro falso, mas em todo o caso dourado) com muitas luzes de cor, e lantejoulas, todas a girar, fumos policromos, aromas, maquilhagens, lagos de água, dançarinas nuas, actrizes de Paris, salas de restaurantes, densos tapetes... e isso me basta’ [I don’t wish to say that the sky of my works is wide. I don’t really know if it’s so. But in any case, I’m sure that it’s heavily golden (maybe it’s false gold, but still golden anyway) with many coloured lights and sequins that swirl around. It’s full of fumes of many colours, scents, make up, lakes, naked ballerinas, Parisian actresses, restaurant rooms, thick carpets... And this is enough for me]. Sá-Carneiro, Cartas de Mário de Sá-Carneiro a Fernando Pessoa, p. 126. 33. Fernando Cabral Martins, O Modernismo em Mário de Sá-Carneiro (Lisbon: editorial estampa, 1997), p. 25. 34. Pessoa, Cartas entre Fernando Pessoa e os Directores da presença, p. 71. 35. Ibid., p. 113. 36. To understand how Pessoa’s interpretation inf luenced and favoured the reception of Mário de Sá-Carneiro by the exponents of the second modernism, it is sufficient enough to read the pages that José Régio dedicated to the poet of Dispersão. Besides the essay already cited, regarding the fantastic in Sá-Carneiro’s work (in which the evolution of three time frames of this author’s work is explicit), it is particularly interesting, especially because of its interpretation of Manucure, to compare the pages dedicated to the poet in Pequena História da Moderna Poesia Portuguesa, dated 1941, with the chapter about Sá-Carneiro written in the university thesis, As Correntes e as Individualidades na Moderna Poesia Portuguesa, discussed by Régio in 1925. Régio was undoubtedly the closest to Sá-Carneiro’s work among the members of Presença. 37. ‘Tenho, felizmente, o ultimo retrato, que é o espiritualmente verdadeiro do Auctor. É um retrato pequeno, typo bilhete-de-identidade, mas susceptivel de ser ampliado e reproduzido depois de accordo com essa ampliação. O retrato, de que fallo, e de que digo que é espiritualmente verdadeiro, não dá o Sá Carneiro como usualmente era, mas um Sá Carneiro torturado (o proprio olhar o diz), um Sá Carneiro emmagrecido e final, que tem mais verdade que os retratos mais vulgares que elle tinha tirado nas photographias do grande costume. e é isso mesmo que dá a essa photographia casual o valor que o casual muitas vezes usurpa ao authentico — a fixação, por uma imposição subita do destino, do aspecto em que qualquer alma se revela’ [Fortunately, I have the last portrait, which is spiritually true to the author. It’s a small portrait, like a tiny Id photograph; yet it’s still possible to enlarge it and to make a larger photograph. The portrait that I’m talking about, which in my mind is spiritually true, doesn’t show us Sá-Carneiro as he usually was. Instead, it shows a tortured Sá-Carneiro (his glance says it all), a thinner and final Sá Carneiro that seems more real than the one showed in the ordinary and larger portraits he

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usually had taken of himself. This is exactly what gives this informal photograph its worth, one that often the informal usurps from the authentic — the fixing, thanks to destiny suddenly imposing itself, of the real aspect that any soul reveals]. Pessoa, Cartas entre Fernando Pessoa e os Directores da presença, p. 98. 38. Ibid., p. 97. 39. Cf. what Álvaro de Campos wrote about Alberto Caeiro: ‘A obra de Caeiro divide-se, não só no livro, mas na verdade, em trez partes — “O guardador de Rebanhos”, “O Pastor Amoroso” e aquella terceira parte a que Ricardo Reis poz o nome authentico de “Poemas Inconjuntos”. “O Pastor Amoroso” é um interludio inutil [...] “O guardador de Rebanhos” é a vida mental de Caeiro até a diligencia levantar no alto da estrada. Os “Poemas Inconjuntos” são já a descida. [...] nos “Poemas Inconjuntos” ha cansaço, e portanto differença. Caeiro é Caeiro, mas Caeiro doente. nem sempre doente, mas ás vezes doente. Identico mas um pouco alheado’ [The work of Caeiro is divided, not only in the book itself, but also really into three parts — ‘The Keeper of Sheep’, ‘The Shepherd in Love’ and that third part to which Ricardo Reis gave the genuine name of ‘detached Poems’. ‘The Shepherd in Love’ is a useless interlude [...] ‘The Keeper of Sheep’ is the mental life of Caeiro up to when the carriage reaches the top of the road. The “detached Poems” are already the downhill path. [...] In ‘detached Poems’ there’s struggle and therefore, there’s a difference. Caeiro is Caeiro. But he is a sick Caeiro. He’s not always sick, just sometimes. Identical but a bit absent]. Fernando Pessoa, ‘notas para a recordação do meu mestre Caeiro’, in Pessoa por Conhecer, ed. by Teresa Rita Lopes, 2 vols (Lisbon: estampa, 1990), ii, 411–12.

CHAPter 4

❖

Lisbon Stories: The dialogue between Word and Image in the Work of José de Almada negreiros Ellen W. Sapega negreiros travaille, mais il écrit beaucoup plus qu’il ne peint. [negreiros is working, but he writes much more than he paints.] (from a letter by eduardo Viana to Robert and Sonia delaunay, October 1915)1 Há quem persista em que ‘Orpheu’ foi início de um epocal das letras quando afinal era já a consequência do encontro das letras e da pintura. [There are some who insist that ‘Orpheu’ marked the beginning of an important literary epoch when in fact it was really a product of the meeting of literature and painting.] José de Almada negreiros (1965)2

In the spring of 1915, the Parisian avant-garde painters Robert and Sonia delaunay arrived in Vila do Conde, a fishing village located on the coast of northern Portugal, where they set up a studio in a home, which they immediately christened La Simultanée. As they passed through Lisbon on their way to the place where they expected to wait out the events of the great War, the delaunays were eagerly welcomed by a small group of young painters and poets who knew their work, or knew of it, and were excited by the prospect of developing projects in common with them. Just a few months earlier, these same Portuguese artists had publicly registered their opposition to the reigning post-symbolist aesthetics of the day with the publication of the inaugural issue of the journal Orpheu. In late June of that same year, just weeks after the delaunay’s arrival, the second number of Orpheu appeared, and the Portuguese modernists’ desire to effect a literary and artistic rupture with traditionally accepted forms and topics, a desire that was merely hinted at on the pages of the first number, was unquestionably confirmed. Although histories of Portuguese literature and art often mention this event only in passing, the delaunays’ sojourn in Portugal merits closer attention for several reasons. Their arrival, which occurred at an important foundational moment in the history of Portuguese modernism, was responsible for putting local modernist circles into direct contact with members of the international, cosmopolitan avantgarde. Several key members of the Orpheu generation had lived on and off in Paris during the previous years and, as the letters that Mário de Sá-Carneiro sent to

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Fernando Pessoa attest, they regularly reported back to their friends at home about the exhibitions and performances they attended. In 1915, however, the locus of experimentation rather abruptly shifted from France to Portugal, thus allowing fresh opportunities for viewing new works and participating in futurist- and cubistinspired events to those who had not travelled abroad. These opportunities were undoubtedly important for both Fernando Pessoa and José de Almada negreiros, for whom new contact with visual media would serve as an important supplement to their literary experiments. The delaunays’ decision to take up residence in Portugal provided an impetus for the Portuguese modernists to organize a series of activities that would entail the participation of both poets and painters. In the months that followed, Robert and Sonia met frequently with Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso, a painter who had collaborated with the delaunays while working in Paris; Amadeo himself had just recently returned to his family’s estate after having spent some nine years in the French capital. Through Souza-Cardoso’s contacts the delaunays quickly became acquainted with eduardo Viana and José de Almada negreiros; together this group launched a shared project, called the Corporation Nouvelle, that was dedicated to promoting and sponsoring art exhibits and producing original albums. In discussing the impact of Robert and Sonia delaunay’s stay in Portugal, the art historian José-Augusto França has speculated that their experience, while certainly fruitful for the two, had very little impact on the development of Portuguese painting. Thus he notes that while this was a ‘momento importante para os dois artistas, [...] estes meses portugueses dos delaunay situaram-se, porém, à margem do desenvolvimento da arte nacional, dentro da qual abriram um breve parêntese que a pintura portuguesa não pôde absorver’ [important moment for the two artists, [...] however, the months that the delaunays spent in Portugal were marginal to the development of national art, in which they opened a brief parenthesis which Portuguese painting was unable to absorb].3 With the qualified exception of Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso and eduardo Viana, França explains that the delaunay’s abstract practices, based on theories of Orphism and simultaneous contrasts, went unnoticed or were misunderstood by contemporary Portuguese artists. More specifically, in regard to Almada negreiros, França observed that his enthusiasm for their experimental projects was great, but that Almada was not yet ‘enough of a painter’ to understand the delaunays’ lessons in abstraction.4 Just twenty-two years old in 1915, Almada already had begun to make a name for himself as a caricaturist, illustrator, and decorator. However, he had not yet had an opportunity to travel outside Portugal and to view the radical visual experiments that had transformed the Parisian art world. Like his friend and colleague, Fernando Pessoa, Almada’s knowledge of vanguard pictorial practices was second-hand, at best, until the arrival in Portugal of Souza-Cardoso, the delaunays, and guillerme de Santa-Rita (better known as Santa-Rita Pintor), who had also just returned from Paris in 1914. This would change quickly, however, from the spring of 1915: besides his participation in the planning and organization of the Corporation Nouvelle, we must assume that Almada had the opportunity to view the four futurist-inspired paintings by Santa-Rita Pintor that were reproduced that year in the second issue of

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Orpheu (1915).5 A year later, Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso organized two exhibitions of his works, one in Porto and the other in Lisbon, that constituted the first public viewing in Portugal of paintings inspired by cubist and simultaneist experiments. On the occasion of the Lisbon exhibit, Almada, whose enthusiasm for Souza-Cardoso’s work was palpable, was stirred to pen his ‘Manifesto da exposição de Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso: Primeira descoberta de Portugal na europa do Século XX’. In this brief text, he famously proclaimed that ‘a descoberta do Caminho Marítimo prà Índia é menos importante que a exposição de Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso na Liga naval de Lisboa’ [the discovery of the Sea Route to India is less important than the exposition by Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso at the Liga naval in Lisbon]. describing Amadeo as, ‘Um Português, genialmente do século XX, [que] desce da europa’ [A Portuguese, whose genius is truly of the twentieth century, [who] comes from europe], he exhorts his readers to pay no attention to the negative responses to this exhibit espoused by José de Figueiredo, the conservative director of the Museu nacional de Arte Antiga. Instead, Almada advises his readers: ‘Vai à exposição na Liga naval de Lisboa, tapa os ouvidos, deixa correr os olhos e diz lá que a Vida não é assim? [...] vale a pena seres persistente porque depois saberás também onde está a Felicidade’ [go to the exhibition at the Liga naval in Lisbon, cover your ears, let your eyes run free and admit it — isn’t this life? [...] your persistence will be worthwhile for you will then discover where to find Happiness].6 Almada’s public display of support for Souza-Cardoso’s work and his active participation in the Corporation Nouvelle, would seem to contradict França’s comments that the delaunays’ ‘lessons’ had gone unnoticed or unappreciated by him. It may well be true that his visual production from this time reveals little or no inf luence of contemporary abstract or cubist experiments. nevertheless, by the spring and summer of 1915, Almada suddenly was no longer just reading about cubism and abstract art, he was actually viewing it and quite vociferously disseminating public responses to the images that he saw. Rather than immediately incorporating the lessons of abstraction into his visual production, Almada first would inscribe his enthusiasm for the new visual material he encountered at this time in the radical and innovative fiction that he wrote between 1915 and 1917. In these works, Almada began to develop his unique and extraordinary ‘pensamento visual’ [visual thinking], to borrow a phrase from Rui Mário gonçalves.7 drawing on a variety of visual and literary sources that range from the vocabularies of popular culture and advertising to the delaunays’ and Souza-Cardoso’s erudite ‘lessons in abstraction’, these literary experiments adumbrate a portrait and a critique of urban experience in early twentieth-century Portugal that would subsequently materialize in some of Almada’s best known paintings and public murals. When eduardo Viana wrote to Robert and Sonia delaunay in October of 1915, observing that ‘negreiros is working, but he writes much more than he paints’,8 he called attention to a fact that is often overlooked in assessments of Almada’s long and prolific career as a painter, muralist, and graphic designer: that his entrance into Lisbon’s modernist circles came by way of the written word. Best known today as the creator of some the most iconic visual images of his era, it is easy to overlook the fact that, as a young man, Almada negreiros dedicated significantly more time to

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writing than to painting. In 1915 alone, Almada produced several key texts that are generally regarded as the cornerstones of his own artistic and literary production and that also are emblematic of the early avant-garde phase of Portuguese modernism: the long, insult-driven poem written in free verse ‘A Cena do Ódio’; ‘Manifesto Anti-dantas’, an equally aggressive diatribe against one of Orpheu’s sternest critics; and the ‘intersectionist’ novella A Engomadeira, which bore the subtitle ‘novela vulgar lisboeta’. Together with Álvaro de Campos’ famous ‘Ode Triunfal’ and ‘Ode Marítima’, which appeared that same year in the pages of Orpheu, these texts mark a heady moment of revolutionary challenges to the post-symbolist aesthetic that had dominated Portuguese art and letters in the first decades of the twentieth century. This moment of avant-garde experimentation would come quickly to a close with the publication and seizure by the police of Portugal Futurista, in november 1917. In the autumn of 1915, Almada negreiros was not only writing much more than he was painting, he was writing a lot. Following the example of his ‘european’ avant-garde counterparts, Almada quickly found himself immersed in a culture of experiment that entailed a radical rethinking of representation. Responding to realism’s failure to capture the complexities of modern life, Almada, like other writers and painters of this time embraced a radical aesthetic of formal decomposition in hopes of ‘making it new’.9 Almada’s attempts to challenge existing assumptions occur primarily through a recon figuration of space, although this reconfiguration first surfaces in his writ ing, where he is led to f lirt with abstraction. As I will contend in the conclusion to this essay, these literary experiments will then come to alter his visual material as well. In Almada’s writing of this time, the modernist crisis of representation was twofold, deeply affecting both the form and the content of his works.10 As the anarchic energies of the ‘Manifesto da exposição de Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso’ attest, one of the author’s goals is a violent rupture with authority and tradition. It is worth remembering as well that this is but one of several equally strident manifestos from this time, which also include the ‘Manifesto Anti-dantas’, the ‘Ultimatum futurista às gerações portuguesas do Século XX’, and the collectively authored manifesto ‘Os Bailados Russos em Lisboa’.11 In the experimental fiction that Almada published alongside these texts, there are indications, however, that his desire to break with tradition did not necessarily entail the complete abandonment of a mimetic impulse. In fact, several works that Almada wrote or published during this time include many easily recognizable images of places and characters that come together to form a scathing depiction of Lisbon’s middle and working classes during the first years of the Republic. In the poem ‘A Cena do Ódio’ (written in 1915 but only published, in a partial version, in 1921), for example, and the novellas A Engomadeira (1915/17) and K4 O Quadrado Azul (1917), the author renders experience as both irremediably subjective and fragmented, yet ultimately tied to a specific time and place, thereby offering up a critique of what can only be viewed as a disgracefully impoverished present. For a variety of reasons, Almada’s most successful novella of this period — A Engomadeira — best exemplifies the author’s embrace of the crisis of representation that was at the core of modernist practice and theory in Portugal during the

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first two decades of the twentieth century. Recalling many of Almada’s more programmatic texts of this time, this novella’s scathingly acerbic tone denounces the various banalities of life in Portugal’s capital city. As I shall demonstrate, the satirical element present in this novella is equally derived from and ref lective of Almada’s engagement with various forms of contemporary visual culture — most particularly with the languages of advertising and caricature. The text opens with easily recognizable depictions of characters and spaces, but as the narrative progresses over the course of twelve short chapters, the story that is told begins to disintegrate, to be substituted by a proto-surrealist discourse that seems to take on a life of its own. As the narrator seemingly loses control of the representational or objective capacity of his text, he is led to develop a series of considerations on the powers and responsibilities of modern art. In this fashion, the reader is invited to accompany him as he works his way through satire to arrive at a very personal and somewhat maddeningly abstruse theory of representation that is non-objective at its core. This arrival at abstraction will in turn enable the author, Almada negreiros, to move beyond the almost incomprehensible moment of semantic instability to develop the highly personal visual and narrative views of Portuguese urban experience for which he is best known today. It is not surprising that the text of this novella documents a progression, even an arc, of literary experimentation, for it most likely was written over the course of one or two years, during the period 1915–17, during which time Almada was exposed to many new visual and literary stimuli. While the author explains in a letter/ dedication directed to the architect José Pacheco that he had completed the novella by early January 1915,12 several minor plot elements point to events occurring during the spring of 1916, just after Portugal’s entrance into the First World War on the side of Britain and France.13 As the ‘story’ that is told in A Engomadeira takes place in Lisbon, during the early, often chaotic, years of the Republic, passing references are made to the social unrest (strikes, assassinations) and the political debates of the time. While certain characters define themselves as monarchists or Republicans (Chapter I), or as supporters of the Allies or as ‘germanófilos’ (Chapter VIII), the differences between these opposing positions are rendered as superficial. Comments such as the narrator’s observation that the engomadeira [laundry-maid] ‘Agora não tinha política, tinha era medo de morrer’ [no longer was political, what she was afraid of was dying]14 seemingly point to other, deeper concerns, but in fact most of the characters clearly are more interested in keeping up the appearance of social propriety while pursuing adulterous affairs than probing the meaning of life (see Fig. 4.1). In many respects, the oral registers, the slang, and the characters’ off handed comments and insults present a narrative equivalent of the vapid poses and ironic situations depicted in Almada’s visual material of the time. These characters, hailing from the city’s working classes and its small and fickle middle class, recall sectors of contemporary Lisbon society that Almada had already depicted in the caricatures he had exhibited in 1913.15 Moreover, many of the descriptions of couples engaging in seductive banter are evocative of the decorative panels Almada had been commissioned to execute for a tailor’s shop (the Alfaiataria Cunha)

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in downtown Lisbon.16 Interestingly, his visual images generally are devoid of background details — their positioning within the social discourses of the city, as pictures that circulated in the weekly or daily press or were placed on display in public spaces, would have provided them with an implied context, perhaps. In contrast, the characters in the novella are referenced explicitly in accordance with the spaces they inhabit: the engomadeira rents a second-f loor room on the Rua do Alecrim; the barber’s shop is located in the Praça da Alegria; the engomadeira’s mother, identified as the ‘Senhora loira e chique’, meets the narrator in Sintra; Sr. Barbosa’s cousin (who, ironically, also is a cousin of the ‘Senhora loira e chique’) is a government minister who works in the Terreiro do Paço. Other places referenced include the two Lisbon cafés associated with the Orpheu modernists: O Martinho (Chapter XIII) and A Brasileira (Chapter X). Throughout the novella, the narrator’s ironic selection and combination of details links the characters’ physical appearance to their mental condition, resulting in the creation of ‘verbal portraits’ that expose their contradictions and hypocrisy: e.g. ‘[A senhora loira e chique] trajava rigorosamente de luto mas o apetite do seu sorriso e o cinzento das olheiras pintadas trajavam rigorosamente de adúltera’ [[The chic blonde woman] was rigorously dressed in mourning but the desire in her smile and the dark circles painted under her eyes were rigorously dressed in adultery].17 This is but one example of the narrator’s technique of denoting two qualities that he considered characteristic of his milieu: the ‘desorganização e descarácter lisboetas’ [Lisbon’s disorganization and lack of character]. Almada draws attention to these qualities twice in the dedicatory letter that precedes the novella, even as he simultaneously lays claim to a certain distance from the material at hand. In this letter the author explains that, having reread his work, he must alert the reader to his ‘literary insufficiency’ at the time of writing. In particular, he observes that he may have lost control of the descriptive elements of the text and given in to an ‘aceleração das imagens por vezes atropelada’ [often hasty acceleration of the images]. even with the critical distance afforded by time, however, Almada steadfastly affirms the continued existence of the negative aspects — the ‘descarácter’ of the capital’s residents — that he had set out to represent.18 The rushed, almost uncontrolled, production of verbal images alluded to in this preface is comprised for the most part of metaphors and descriptions19 that subsume the plot of A Engomadeira in modernism’s politics and aesthetics of rupture. While various critical images of Lisbon and its inhabitants are plentiful in the opening chapters, thereby fulfilling the promise of the novella’s sub-title that what will follow is a ‘novela Vulgar Lisboeta’, these mimetic elements soon disappear in favour of a discourse of fantasy and fragmentation. In keeping with the actions suggested in the prefix ‘des-’, which was applied to the nouns ‘character’ and ‘organization’ and alludes to a removal, disruption, or reversal of temperament, method, and order, the reader attends to a progressive dismantlement of the characters. As the various layers that constitute their public personae — the social, political and the moral or ethical — are gradually removed, the dialogue increasingly begins to intersect with interior monologues, and characters are described from a variety of perspectives.20 Using a device that may have been inspired by experiments in cinematic montage,

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Fig. 4.1. José de Almada negreiros, A Engomadeira — Novela Vulgar Lisboeta (Lisbon: O autor, 1917 [Typografia Monteiro & Cardoso, Lisboa]), 30 p. 24 cm.

the same action is often repeated in various episodes. In addition, objects appear and reappear in multiple guises and situations, thus recalling cubist practices of creating works with multiple focal points.21 These techniques are all put to the service of demonstrating the lack of coherence that is a basic element of all of the characters; eventually, this same technique will be used on the narrator himself, as the narrative moves from the perspective of an omniscient narrator to the first person. By the novella’s close, moreover, this first person narrator will have included several biographical elements that relate him with the author himself, José de Almada negreiros.22 In effect, any pretension of objectivity has been withdrawn and the author’s own subjective perspective comes to dominate the narrative. In Chapter X, which opens with the observation: ‘Talvez que o leitor não saiba mas eu também sou conhecido como caricaturista’ [Perhaps the reader does not know it but I am also known as a caricaturist],23 it becomes evident that the story about the engomadeira and the various other characters whom she interacts with was nothing more than a pretext for the narrator to talk about himself and his experiences.

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Fig. 4.2. José de Almada negreiros, K4 O Quadrado Azul. Poesia Terminus; diz-se aqui o segredo do génio intransmissível, ed. by José Almada negreiros and Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso (Lisbon: n.pub., 1917), 20 p. 23 cm.

While it is impossible to ascertain exactly when the final chapters of A Engomadeira were written, it is fairly safe to presume that Almada designed the novella’s cover very close to the time of publication in november 1917. This cover is, moreover, one of only a handful of graphic images that Almada created during the period 1915–17. When placed in dialogue with the text, the image presented on the cover is suggestive of several of the avant-garde processes that had so intrigued and seduced José de Almada negreiros during the previous two and a half years. More specifically, the novella’s cover is devoid of human figures, just as the plot and characters will have disappeared by the end of the narrative, to be replaced by a proto-surrealist imagery that I have described elsewhere as constituting an allegorical discourse on the redemptive possibilities of art.24 Additionally, this cover reproduces and complements the mirroring process that will take place in the text: in a slightly off-kilter image of an empty room, a candle placed in a bottle sits before a mirror in which it is ref lected. Also ref lected in the mirror is a rectangular shape that may represent a door to the room that is depicted. On the table, just below the mirror, rests a smaller square outlined in a lighter colour that resembles a piece of

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paper, and perhaps even represents the text itself. Much like the opening chapters of the novella, the outlines of the room are familiar, but the perspective from which it is viewed is uncertain, and there are hints of a focal instability. Interestingly, the room itself is devoid of colour, but for the frame of the mirror, which is outlined in blue. In this outline, the viewer encounters a trace or a vestige of an image that dominated the novella that Almada published in 1917 just prior to A Engomadeira. This blue-edged mirror recalls, in effect, the geometrical object that gave rise to the experimental text titled K4 O Quadrado Azul. Presenting an example of the principles of abstraction applied to a literary text, the novella K4 O Quadrado Azul picks up on the allegorical and theoretical discourses that appeared at the end of A Engomadeira.25 Although it represents a continuation of the earlier text in many respects, K4 O Quadrado Azul is far less memorable than its precursor. This is due, in part, to the fact that it contains fewer recognizable images of social types and urban spaces. While the final chapters of A Engomadeira are characterized by the narrator’s idiosyncratic prose style, the more objective material that preceded these highly subjective chapters provides a context, or a background, for this highly personalized, abstruse conclusion. The narrator seems to draw inspiration from the characters and places that he refers to throughout his novella, thus attesting to the importance of the city itself in his literary project. As home for the many Senhor Barbosas of the time,26 that is, for the burguês who was much loathed by Almada and others of his generation, the city constituted a place where modernity’s many contradictions were most evident. At the same time, however, it also was a space that allowed for variety and provided a source of seemingly boundless energy that would facilitate the emergence of the ‘new’. The front matter that accompanies the 1917 first edition of A Engomadeira documents the wide range of vanguard activities that Almada participated in at that time and likewise communicates his almost palpable energy and enthusiasm. Curiously, on a list of the author’s works, Almada identifies himself as a painter — ‘José de ALMAdA-negReIROS, Pintor’ — although no reference is made to any specific visual work that he had produced or exhibited.27 The two-page inventory of the author’s published and unpublished works contains three headings, the first of which, ‘Theatro’, includes seven titles of dramas and ballets. Under the rubric of ‘Litteratura’, there is a list of poems, novellas, and one novel. Of the fifteen texts referred to in these two categories, only five were ever published and, to my knowledge, no drafts or manuscript copies of the unpublished texts have ever been found. It is quite likely, in fact, that most of these texts only existed as future projects that never got off the ground. even so, the wide range of genres that are cited in this list of titles does attest to Almada’s enthusiastic participation in the literary and artistic ferment of the time. The works listed on these two pages, both those that were completed, and those that only were projected, are dedicated to a wide range of public figures that include painters, actors, and composers. The diverse mix of the participants in Lisbon’s avant-garde circles during the brief period of 1914–18 whom Almada identified as his inspiration and collaborators includes many names that are still well known today: besides the painters eduardo Viana, Santa-Rita Pintor, and Amadeo

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de Souza-Cardoso, the composer Alexandre Rey Colaço is listed, as is his daughter, the actress Amélia Rey Colaço. Fernando Pessoa’s heteronym Álvaro de Campos is included, and the caricaturist Cristiano Cruz also receives a dedication. Almada clearly was eager to learn from this diverse and cosmopolitan group that had come together in Portugal during the years of the First World War. Although many different figures representing a wide range of approaches to renovating Portuguese art, music and letters are invoked in this list of dedications, and Almada’s partners in the staging of his ballets are recognized, only one literary collaboration was included in this list. This is a series of ‘10 Poemas Portuguezes’ that is described as a joint enterprise between José de Almada negreiros and M.me Sonia delaunayTerk. delaunay-Terk’s name appears two other times as well in the front matter of the novella: first, as the dedicatee of a ballet suite entitled ‘Ballet veronèse et bleu’ (which is the only title listed under the heading ‘Originiaes Francezes’), and again several pages later, immediately after the letter in which Almada dedicates his novella to José Pacheko. There, on the verso facing the novella’s opening page, Almada unabashedly celebrated delaunay-Terk as his teacher or guide, announcing: ‘em todos os meus trabalhos eu guardo esta página para dizer o orgulho de ter como Mestre M.me Sonia delaunay-Terk’ [in all of my works I save this page to proclaim the honour of having M.me Sonia delaunay-Terk as my Master]. By the time of publication of A Engomadeira, the delaunays’ stay in Portugal had come to an end, but it is clear that the ‘lessons’ that Almada learned from them (and from Sonia, in particular), continued to impact his engagement with a wide range of artistic experimentation. It is equally evident, moreover, that the ‘crisis of representation’ announced in the visual works of the delaunays, of Amadeo, and of Santa-Rita Pintor first surfaces in Almada’s writing, where an implied dialogue takes place between word and image. This dialogue makes Almada’s work from this time quite unique and supports Rui Mário gonçalves’s assertion that, ‘na sua geração, Almada foi o único pintor que verdadeiramente acompanhou os poetas Sá-Carneiro e Pessoa; e foi ele o único escritor que entendeu a pintura moderna dos seus contemporâneos’ [Of his generation, Almada was the only painter who truly accompanied the poets Sá-Carneiro and Pessoa; and he was the only writer who understood the modern painting of his contemporaries].28 Curiously, while Almada was translating techniques from modern painting to a verbal format, he did not produce many drawings. However, in both K4 O Quadrado Azul and A Engomadeira, the narrator identifies himself explicitly as a visual artist.29 In the years following the publication of these experimental texts Almada’s preferred medium of communication became increasingly visual, but he would continue to draw upon and develop the knowledge that he had absorbed regarding the importance of the viewing subject in capturing and communicating a new and unconventional perspective on a given time and space. Many of Almada’s later images seem to take up several of the themes and characters referenced earlier in his fiction, as he returned time and time again to the characters and places that he had described in his experimental writing. In early 1919, several months after the deaths of Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso and Santa-Rita Pintor, Almada negreiros finally had the opportunity to travel to

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Fig. 4.3. José de Almada negreiros, ‘Sintra,’ illustration included in ‘Histoire du Portugal par cœur, illustrée aux couleurs nationales par Almada,’ in Contemporanea, vol. I, nos 1, 2, 3, May–June–July 1922, p. 29. 29 cm.

Paris, a place that he had long aspired to visit, believing that it was there that he truly belonged.30 Ironically, once he arrived in France, Almada would discover that ‘A arte não vive sem a Pátria do artista’ [Art does not live without the artist’s homeland].31 After remaining in France for just over a year, first in the capital and later in Biarritz, Almada returned to Lisbon in 1920. At that time, his visual style had matured noticeably. The formal aspects of the works that he completed during the 1920s have little in common with the caricatures and ‘fashion pics’ that date from around 1913. Almada’s visual production from this time reveals a simpler, cleaner style that is often marked by a distortion of perspectives clearly inspired by the cubist example.

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Almada’s best-known and most memorable work from the 1920s–40s is informed by two attributes that had characterized his avant-garde writing of the decade before: the specificity of place and the subjective importance of the images’ creator. Representations of the city and its inhabitants appear in countless contexts and media, while a significant number of other drawings and paintings are self-portraits. In 1921, Almada’s own self-portrait preceded the text of the prose poem, ‘Invenção do dia Claro’, while both varinas and burgueses fill the depictions of Lisbon and Sintra that appear as illustrations for the prose poem ‘Histoire du Portugal Par Cœur’ that he published in the review Contemporanea in 1922 (see Fig. 4.3). Later, in the 1940s, naturalist- and cubist-inspired versions of many of these same images reappear in several of the panels in the Gares Marítimas of Alcântara and the Rocha do Conde de Óbidos. In the latter set of murals, completed in 1947, the capital city serves as a backdrop against which dockworkers and varinas mix with bourgeois lovers and families. In this urban space, as in A Engomadeira, the lines are blurred between work and leisure, and the viewer is invited to contemplate a familiar landscape from a new, unexpected and subtly critical perspective.32 Almada negreiros’ tendency to insert himself into his representations of the city is perhaps best illustrated in a 1925 self-portrait, which he included in one of two oil paintings that was commissioned to hang in the café A Brasileira do Chiado. Already in 1925, this café was one of the best-known modernist spaces in the Portuguese capital and the painting that Almada created for its walls fittingly captures the ironies and ambiguities behind its iconic status. This deceptively simple canvas depicts the author of A Engomadeira seated at a table with a group that includes two louche women who recall both the novella’s female protagonist and her mother, the ‘senhora loira e chique’.33 The gaze of the male figures is not directed toward the women, however, but rather to the rectangular sheets of paper of a similar size that each holds in his hands. A large white rectangle located on the lower right-hand corner of the canvas mirrors the papers held in their hands, as does the very surface of the table at which the two couples are seated. While the content of the page held by Almada’s companion is obscured from the viewer, the figure that resembles the artist looks at a drawing of a man in a hat and tie, presumably his own work. Thus, as the painter looks at his painting, he invites the viewer to join him in contemplating his creation. He is both situated in and surrounded by his inspiration: the typical spaces and the personalities that he portrays, in the city whose dynamics he strives to represent and transform. notes to Chapter 4 1. In Paulo Ferreira, Correspondance de quarto artistes portugais avec Robert et Sonia Delaunay (Paris: Presses Universitares de France/Centre Culturel Portugais Fondation Calouste gulbenkian, 1981), p. 93. 2. José de Almada negreiros, Orpheu 1915/1965 (Lisbon: Ática, 1965), p. 8. 3. José-Augusto França, A Arte em Portugal no Século XX, 3rd edn (Lisbon: Bertrand, 1991), p. 62. 4. França, A Arte em Portugal, p. 62 5. An opening note inserted in the second issue of Orpheu had called attention to the editors’ decision to include a selection of a given artist’s drawings or paintings in each issue of the review, beginning with the reproduction of four futurist paintings by Santa-Rita Pintor. Of course, no

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subsequent issue of Orpheu was ever published, although plans for the third number of the series register the proposed inclusion of works by Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso. 6. José de Almada negreiros, Obras Completas, 6 vols (Lisbon: Imprensa nacional–Casa da Moeda, 1986–93), vi: Textos de Intervenção, p. 30. 7. Rui Mário gonçalves, ‘negreiros, Almada—Obra’, in Dicionário de Fernando Pessoa e do Modernismo Português, ed. by Fernando Cabral Martins (Lisbon: Caminho, 2008), p. 515. 8. Ferreira, Correspondance de quarto artistes portugais, p. 93. 9. The slogan ‘Make it new’, coined by the poet ezra Pound, summarizes the desires of many modernist writers and artists who were committed to rethinking literary and artistic tradition. For more on the wide range of practices they employed see Pericles Lewis, The Cambridge Introduction to Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 26–33. 10. See Lewis, The Cambridge Introduction to Modernism, pp. 3–10. 11. With Ruy Coelho and José Pacheco, in Portugal Futurista, facsimile edition (Lisbon: Contexto editora, 1981), pp. 1–2. 12. ‘Terminei-a em 7 de Janeiro de mil novecentos e quinze e desde esta data foi agora a primeira vez que a reli’ [I finished it on January 7, 1915 and since that date this is the first time I have reread it]. José de Almada negreiros, Obras Completas, 6 vols (Lisbon: Imprensa nacional–Casa da Moeda, 1989), iv: Contos e Novelas [A Engomadeira], p. 51. 13. For a detailed analysis of the episodes describing events related to the First World War that took place in the spring of 1916, see Carlos Paulo Martínez Pereiro, A Pintura das Palavras — A Engomadeira de Almada Negreiros: Uma Novela em Chave Plástica (Santiago de Compostela: edicións Laiovento, 1996), pp. 25–33. 14. Almada negreiros, A Engomadeira, p. 54. 15. In addition to the engomadeira, who is referred to in the title and introduced in the novella’s opening pages, the text includes episodes describing the engomadeira’s mother, her husband, the barber who is assassinated, a certain Sr. Barbosa and his wife, as well as the engomadeira’s many lovers who included a series of varinas (typical Lisbon fishmongers), lottery sellers, etc. 16. While reproductions of these images can be found in the catalogues from many exhibitions of Almada’s work (held at the Centro de Arte Moderna — Fundação Calouste gubenkian and the Centro Cultural de Belém, for example), one of the most accessible sources is Joaquim Vieira, Fotobiografias Século XX — Almada Negreiros (Lisbon: Bertrand, 2006), pp. 42–45. 17. Almada negreiros, A Engomadeira, p. 71. 18. Almada negreiros, A Engomadeira, p. 51. 19. For a ‘family tree’ of the imagery that is central to various intellectual disciplines, see W. T. J. Mitchell, Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), p. 10. 20. To add to the confusion, the engomadeira counts Sr. Barbosa, the varina, and the narrator himself as her lovers, while Sr. Barbosa’s wife and the engomadeira’s mother also both make attempts to seduce the narrator. 21. This technique is common to many experiments in producing ‘simultaneous’ art and poetry. For more on the subject, see Chapter Three of Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space: 1880–1918 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983). 22. For a detailed analysis of the various stages of narrative decomposition that occur in this novella, see Chapter Two of ellen W. Sapega, Ficções Modernistas (Lisbon: Instituto de Cultura e Língua Portuguesas, 1992). 23. Almada negreiros, A Engomadeira, p. 81. 24. Sapega, Ficções Modernistas, pp. 51–52. 25. The ‘plot’ of K4 O Quadrado Azul moves very quickly from a realist opening to achieve abstraction based on cubist-inspired principles of optical decomposition. As I have noted elsewhere, the object invoked in the novella’s title leads the narrator to ‘encontrar uma libertação da realidade (das relações tradicionais entre o tempo e o espaço) através da celebração da cor e da forma como forças omnipotentes’ [free himself from reality (from the traditional relationship between time and space) through a celebration of colour and form as omnipotent forces]. Sapega, Ficções Modernistas, p. 63. 26. In a lengthy diatribe that appears toward the end of Chapter XI, the narrator equates his character with mediocrity in art and politics: ‘O senhor Barbosa que por ser senhor Barbosa é

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toda a gente, quer seja senhor Barbosa na Arte, quer o seja na Política...’ [Senhor Barbosa who by being senhor Barbosa is everyone, be he senhor Barbosa in Art, be he in Politics...]. 27. This is one of several lists of Almada’s works that date from this time. Other similar listings may be found in the ‘Manifesto Anti-dantas’ and K4 O Quadrado Azul. 28. Rui Mário gonçalves, ‘negreiros, Almada—Obra’, p. 518. 29. In Chapter XI of A Engomadeira, the narrator specifically references the illustration Almada produced for the cover of the magazine A Ideia Nacional that appeared during Holy Week, in 1916. This cover portrays an image of the Crucifixion in which Christ is pained green and his face is devoid of features. In contrast to the covers that he produced for the two novellas, this image of Christ is still reminiscent of his earlier post-symbolist aesthetic. 30. Toward the end of the dedication of A Engomadeira, Almada recalled that Mário de Sá-Carneiro often exclaimed of Almada, Pacheco and himself ‘nós trez somos de Paris!’ [We three are from Paris!]. Almada then concludes: ‘e sômos. Temos esta elegancia, esta devoção, este farol da Fé’ [And we are. We have this elegance, this devotion, this beacon of Faith]. 31. This observation, dating from november 1926, was included in a presentation that Almada gave at the closing gala of the second Salão de Outono. entitled ‘Modernismo’, it was reprinted at the time in the newspaper Folha do Sado. See José de Almada negreiros, Textos de Intervenção, p. 61. 32. For a detailed analysis of these murals, see Chapter Two of ellen W. Sapega, Consensus and Debate in Salazar’s Portugal: Literary and Visual Negotiations of the National Text (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2008). 33. The woman to the painter’s left resembles an earlier drawing, dated 1913, that José-Augusto França identifies by the title ‘Judite’, after the female protagonist of the novel Nome de Guerra (written in 1925 and published in 1938). França, A Arte em Portugal, pp. 125–34. given the date of this figure’s first appearance, I see no reason, however, for not identifying her with the engomadeira as well, thereby establishing a relationship between the characters in the two literary texts.

CHAPter 5

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José de Almada negreiros: Modernism in the Visual Arts Raquel Henriques da Silva então, onde fica o modernismo para aquele que procura, todavia, a sua personalidade? Uma época não é apenas uma questão de tempo mas essencialmente um sentido novo no eterno. Tão-pouco a novidade é uma impressão recebida do exterior — mas é o próprio fundo da alma que faz a sua aparição ao sol.1 [So, where is modernism for someone who has, however, been looking for its character? An epoch is not just a question of time, it’s basically a new meaning within the eternal. nor is newness an impression that comes from the outside — it’s the bottom of the soul itself that makes its appearance in the sun.] Almada negreiros, ‘O desenho’, 1927

José de Almada negreiros is one of the key figures in twentieth-century Portuguese culture. His vast oeuvre was always divided between literature (poetry, novels, theatre, philosophical and critical essays) and the arts (drawing, painting, engravings, tapestry, glasswork, ceramics), despite their sharing the same driving force and creativity.2 In this article I will approach Almada’s artistic work from the point of view of the modernist period, which went from 1910 to 1940 in Portugal,3 with the exception of the Portrait of Fernando Pessoa painted in 1954. In this summarized chronology, I will not describe all the phases of his career,4 but will highlight those that I believe to be most relevant in the context of Portuguese culture of the time. I would also like to explain in this introduction what the concept of modernism means in so far as the arts are concerned in Portugal. In the first place, it is defined in opposition to several things: modernists are those who from 1910 onwards questioned the prevailing naturalism that had remained true to techniques that originated in the French school of Barbizon, sometimes kept up to date through the inf luence of impressionism or symbolism at the turn of the century. In the face of a more or less modernized naturalism, the first generation of modernists also opposed the principal artists that represented it, that is to say the teachers at the Fine Arts Schools of Lisbon and Porto. This led to the second defining point of the modernists: practically none of them had received any formal training and they were often self-taught, as in the case of Almada. To refuse to attend art school in order to become an artist was a way, albeit very romantic, to defend a right to expressive subjectivity and proclaim freedom of choice in aesthetics and styles while

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safeguarding a kind of initial purity which, in Almada’s opinion, artists shared with children, the mad and the primitive. Rebelliousness was thus a cultivated, staged characteristic and modernists are more cosmopolitan than their predecessors for this reason as well. However, within the context of Portuguese art, this rebelliousness only showed itself in a truly innovative artistic style in Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso,5 who throughout his brief life was attentive to avant-garde movements, such as cubism, futurism, abstract art, Orphism and expressionism. In comparison to the friend of his youth, Almada was much less daring, or rather, he was more resistant to the appeal of avant-garde fashions. Like Fernando Pessoa, he wanted to make his own mark, simultaneously individualist and engaged with the representation of a national culture. Futurist Almada Almada’s entrance into the Portuguese artistic world was relatively low-key: his first works were humorous and satirical drawings in newspapers and magazines between 1911 and 1912. His modern leanings emerged in the anti-mimetic geometrization of his sketches, in the expressive use of shading that brought out the figure–background relationship and in applying formal rhymes that connected in an innovative manner with the reality of his formal moulds. Fernando Pessoa wrote about his first individual exhibition in 1913 an impenetrable text filled with paradoxes that, with time, now seems to have captured the budding artist’s future characteristics.6 He wrote, for instance, ‘(d)o sorriso do seu lápis a que se liga o polimorfismo da sua arte’ [about ‘the smile of his pencil that is linked to the polymorphism of his art], highlighting the artist’s existential, versatile optimism. Yet, when the young Almada looked for the poet at the café, A Brasileira, in the Chiado to thank him for the review, Pessoa replied: ‘Olhe meu amigo, vou falar-lhe francamente. eu não fui ver a sua exposição e não percebo nada de arte...’ [Look, friend, I’ll be frank with you. I didn’t see your exhibition and I don’t understand a thing about art...].7 Almada contributed with issue number one of the Orpheu magazine in April 1915 as a poet and fiction writer with symbolist inclinations, but signed his work ‘desenhador [draughtsman] José de Almada negreiros’. In the summer of that year, he met Robert and Sonia delaunay, who had come to live in Portugal for a short period of time,8 and wrote A Cena do Ódio, which he dedicated to Álvaro de Campos, who in turn referred to him with high praise: Almada is ‘actualmente, homem de génio em absoluto, uma das grandes sensibilidades da literatura moderna’ [nowadays, a man of genius, absolutely, one of the great sensibilities in modern literature].9 Other equally innovative literary works such as A Engomadeira [The Laundry-Maid] also came out in that splendid year of 1915. Adopting rebelliousness as a style, he wrote in October his ‘Manifesto anti-dantas e por extenso’ signed ‘José de Almada negreiros, Poeta de Orpheu, Futurista e Tudo’. He was twentytwo years old and ‘por ele o escândolo viera à cidade’ [with him scandal had come to town].10 The following year, 1916, he published what is considered in literary critique his best text for its radical innovation in style of writing and brilliance of imagination: Mima Fataxa, ‘Litoral’ and K4 Quadrado Azul, dedicated to Amadeo,

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Fig. 5.1. José de Almada negreiros in ‘an urban form of harlequin’s costume’. Portugal Futurista, no. 1, Lisbon, nov. 1917.

and ‘Saltimbancos’ dedicated to Santa-Rita Pintor. Because of its special importance in the history of Portuguese art, I would also like to mention his critique of the only exhibition of Amadeo’s in Portugal (Porto and Lisbon, 1916). He believes him to be ‘a primeira descoberta de Portugal na europa do século XX’ [the first discovery of Portugal in twentieth-century europe], and demonstrates a capacity that no one else had to understand the impact of that painter’s avant-gardism. In April 1917, he presented the ‘Ultimatum futurista às gerações portuguesas do Século XX’ [Futurist ultimatum to the Portuguese generations of the twentieth century] in what is today the São Luiz Theatre in Lisbon. Provocatively, he wore a blue

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boiler-suit,11 reminiscent of a working man’s clothes but very different because of its exuberant blue and elegant cut. In fact it was an urban form of harlequin’s costume, which was the greatest theme of the iconography of his drawings (see Fig. 5.1). Proclaiming that he was inf luenced by Marinetti, he stated that ‘É preciso criar a pátria portuguesa do século XX’ [it’s necessary to create a twentieth-century Portuguese nation] and set it free from the ‘sentimento síntese do povo português’ [its people’s quintessential feeling], which was ‘a saudade’, as the ‘nostalgia mórbida dos temperamentos esgotados e doentes’ [morbid nostalgia of worn-out and sick temperaments].12 Fernando Pessoa may have been inf luenced by this text to write, through Álvaro de Campos, the Ultimatum that came out in Portugal Futurista, a magazine with which Almada was closely involved. Ref lecting on these two works, eduardo Lourenço says that ‘tudo se passa como se o Ultimatum de Campos fosse uma resposta e uma tradução para europeu do Ultimatum para portugueses de Almada negreiros. Tradução, mas também superação e refutação, como foi sempre hábito de Pessoa no confronto com o texto alheio’ [everything occurs as if Campos’s Ultimatum were a reply and a translation into European of the Ultimatum for the Portuguese by Almada negreiros. A translation that also surpasses it and dismisses it, as was Pessoa’s wont when confronted with another person’s text].13 In my personal opinion, if there were a ‘translation’ at all, it too was one of lively and youthful rebelliousness on the part of Almada (who was then enamoured with diaghilev’s ballets and was himself a dancer) for the phantasmatic rationality of Campos, an extraordinary bodiless mind. Paris, 1919–1920 Almada had a rather strange time in Paris. He decided not to attend any kind of school, not even free academy classes, and managed to live by working as a professional dancer, a dancer in a nightclub in Biarritz and an employee in a candle factory. According to José-Augusto França, from whom I derived this information, ‘assim lhe parecia entrar na vida febril da cidade, mergulhar numa experiência marcada sobretudo por outro ritmo’ [in this way he thought he entered into the feverish city lifestyle and plunged into an experience marked most of all by another rhythm].14 With regard to his artistic work, it shows enormous progress in the effectiveness and creativity of the line of his drawings, which acquire a post-cubist matrix that reveals a passing inf luence of the classic period that Picasso was then going through. As in the case of Picasso, whom Almada deeply admired, the modernity of the drawing, geometrized and with expressive distortions, highlights the imaginativeness of the figures. When we look at them, our gaze too is renewed. We discover with delight unforgettably facets, sometimes comical, that reconcile the viewer with innovative aspects of a modernity which, in comparison to that of the previous decade, shows itself soothed by the beauty and memory of art from the past. The sureness of the drawn expression now has a very different fictional support from the one of the years in which Almada was ‘Futurist and everything’. early in 1919, he wrote a long poem called ‘Histoire du Portugal par cœur’. He plays here

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on the polysemic French term ‘par cœur’ [by heart] and returns to the affective memory he felt within himself: it was not the head but the nostalgic ‘heart’ that remembered. He recognizes his love for his country and he expresses it in adroit lyricism that is definitely a far cry from the belligerent fury of ‘Cena de Ódio’ and Ultimatum Futurista, although it is likewise about enhancing his ideas about Portugal. The great difference is that the intractable defects of the country — ‘Portugal [está] a dormir desde Camões’ [Portugal [has been] asleep since Camões], as he says in his Ultimatum Futurista — become a gentle fatality submerged in mythified memories of kings who conquer Moors and of the king lost in a desert as result of a war against the Moors. However, what is more soothing is a lyrically Portuguese geography: the Tagus River rises in Spain but moves from there to f low into Portugal, just as the sun is Portuguese ‘para fazer crescer os portugueses’ [to make the Portuguese grow]. However, the lyrical soothing effect is not definitive. While telling the story of dom Sebastião (the king whose body was never found when he died in AlcácerQuibir in Morocco), a story that shaped a popular legend about the king’s return one misty morning, Almada concluded that ‘os portugueses continuam á espera dos Portugueses de hoje’ [the Portuguese are still waiting for the Portuguese of today], going back to the provocative attitude of the Ultimatum Futurista. As José-Augusto França so well noted, the mythification of Portugal as a symbolic reality greater than its history and its events comes about ten years before the prophetism of Fernando Pessoa’s poem ‘Mensagem’.15 nevertheless, Almada cultivates a lyricism, nurtured through a recreation of popular cultures and their ingenuousness, which is unrelated to Pessoa’s transcendence, except in the Alberto Caeiro heteronym. I think that this would be a path worth exploring in comparative studies. But we do not find in Caeiro the nationalist drive that is behind Almada’s creativity. In ‘Histoire de Portugal par cœur’, Almada does, in fact, state his preference for Portugal over Paris. This option has consequences: he deliberately abandons cosmopolitanism and the challenges of artistic avant-gardes (in any case, very diluted and eclectic during the 1920s Paris years) to turn to another subjective and indecisive modernity nurtured by a profound desire ‘to be Portuguese’. He declared this in a clearly determined manner: em Paris procurei os artistas avançados. Fiquei amigo de vários. Mas, e aqui é que bate o ponto, essa convivência com os artistas avançados de Paris foi apenas amizades pessoais. não apareceu nunca o motivo que juntasse no mesmo ideal a minha arte e a de cada um deles. [...] O nosso ideal não era o mesmo. A arte não vive sem a pátria do artista, aprendi eu isto para sempre no estrangeiro.16 [In Paris I sought out advanced artists. I became friendly with several of them. However, and here’s the point, conviviality with advanced artists in Paris was only because they were personal friends. There never emerged a motive to bring together within the same ideal my art and that of any of theirs. [...] Our ideals were not the same. Art does not live without the artist’s country, I learnt this lesson for all time when I was abroad].

One might have liked to ask Almada if this question was of any importance to the

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Spaniard Picasso, bearing in mind the great admiration Almada had for him. JoséAugusto França, in his fundamental work which I have been using, goes further into his examination to identify when it was that Almada recognized that his stay in Paris was a kind of artistic (re)birth: in the illustration for ‘Histoire du Portugal par Cœur’, he draws ‘um grande coração, com outros dois incluídos, numa unidade global que vai ser o “leitmotiv” de toda sua obra’ [a large heart, including another two, in a global unit that is to be the ‘leitmotiv’ of his entire work].17 At the same time, he writes a play called Antes de Começar [Before Starting] that dates from 1919, which is suggestive of this ‘limiar de uma nova fase da sua vida’ [threshold of a new phase of his life].18 The characters in this short piece (performed only in 1949) are dolls and acrobats, poetical recreations of the physical and affective abandonment that Almada had constructed. Likewise in the drawings he produced, circus performers, especially harlequins, become established figures in his work, self-portraits of his artistic multifacetedness and his own historical condition: to be modern in a country where modernity had to be a contract with the weight of the past and the energy of the popular cultures of the people, both inscribed in what was to be a prophetic exploration into the numerological fundaments of the world. In order to frame stylistically Almada’s drawings of these years, França refers to ‘a inf luência mundana do figurinista erté (1892–1990)’ [the worldly inf luence of the costume designer erté], who was then greatly admired in the Parisian world of fashion. Without questioning this possibility, it is not determinant with regard to art deco, which became a dominant feature at the exhibition of decorative Arts in 1915: in his best drawings, Almada is more knowledgeable and employs an internationalized language of cubist deformations in the figures, objects and scenes, and enriches them with his own mark, one he had in common with Picasso, that shows in his wonderful use of shadows. Throughout the 1920s, he would develop this stylization in dozens of drawings that were published in Diário de Lisboa after his return to Lisbon. At a Café table, between Lisbon and Madrid Following his short stay in Paris, which was enormously significant at a personal level, Almada lived within a Portuguese modernist framework in the 1920s. The more interesting aspects of his life were connected with the dissemination of a modern aesthetic that prevailed, albeit only f leetingly, in newspaper and magazine pages. It had worldly elegance, very focused on the shape of women’s bodies, that were drawn or painted with elongated and concise lines in the style of Arts Déco. Having overcome their futurist rebelliousness of the First World War years and now zealous about their distinctiveness, modernists were willing to take part in social dynamics that aimed to increase the reception and consumption of images of modernity. Channels for this alliance were set up outside the sphere of public institutions, whether museums or exhibition galleries, although in 1915, the painter eduardo Viana (who had lived in Vila do Conde with Sonia and Robert delaunay in 1915–16) managed to organize a Salão de Outono at the Sociedade Nacional de Belas-

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Fig. 5.2. José de Almada negreiros, ‘Auto-retrato num grupo,’ 1925, oil on canvas, 130 × 197 cm. CAM / Fundação Calouste gulbenkian Collection.

Artes, and thereby opened it for the first time to a modernist initiative. But there were also ‘alternative museums’ of a kind: the Bristol Club, a fashionable cabaret that the owner had decorated with paintings and sculptures of modern artists, and above all, the famous café, A Brasileira, which was one of the futurists’ meeting places. In 1923, this historic place was remodelled by one of the fashionable architects of the time ( Joaquim norte Júnior) in line with the taste for Art nouveau and decorated with paintings by leading modern artists, including Almada. Although he had already painted in oils, this commission allowed him for the first time to demonstrate on considerably large canvases the experience and maturity he had gained in over ten years of constant drawing. One of the two paintings he did was Auto-retrato num grupo [Self-portrait in a group], 1925, which was to become one of the iconic paintings of modern aesthetics, though rooted in a remembrance of a Lisbon bohemian lifestyle that was more myth than reality (see Fig. 5.2). The theme is a table in a café, one of Almada’s more habitual iconographic images. Around a rectangular marble tabletop, the centre from which an artificial white light radiates, are seated four figures, two women and two men, one of whom is the artist himself, skilfully shown in a profile that he had often practised in various drawings. The two men hold sheets of paper in their hands, in a pleasing play of hiding and revealing. The artist allows us to see his sheet, which has the bust of a man with an unmarked face drawn on it. The other man hides his sheet, which could be another drawing, or equally some text. The women are passive: one, wearing a brimmed hat, holds out a hand with a cigarette between her fingers,

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Fig. 5.3 (above and opposite). José de Almada negreiros, ‘Jazz’, 1929, Plaster, low-relief, (diptych) 130 × 120 cm (each panel). Maria Arlete Alves da Silva / Manuel de Brito Collection. Carlos Monteiro (photographer).

while the other crosses her long arms over the table and perhaps is looking, with no great interest, at the sheet which we cannot see. Almada creates, with great effect, a suspension of feelings by means of a suspension of attitudes, suggesting figures not as expressions of the quotidian but of its pathetic staging, a theme that Beckett was to explore in his work. The aesthetics of the drawing supports the exercise of the painting. Its suppler component is the undulating shapes but the colour enriches the formal rhymes and rhythms through a restricted palette in which white and almost black predominate. It is worth paying attention to the play of correspondences between the faces, legs and feet that reinforces the isolation of each of the elements of this informal grouping. It is even possible to link the presence of these emancipated young women with a theme in Almada’s writing. The same year that he produced this painting, he wrote a novel (only published in 1938) called Nome de Guerra about the (dis)encounter between a provincial young man and a prostitute. She is an ambiguous character and has traits that are peculiar to the culture of the time: the changing social status of women, which was frequently related to bohemian

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lifestyles and artistic creativity. I believe that it is within this context that one should also appreciate his continuous work as a dramatist,19 author and director of dance performances,20 especially focused on women’s dance performance. Almada definitively chose his place in Portuguese culture on reading, in a conference in 1920, A Invenção do Dia Claro, which was written in an aphoristic style and proclaimed a natural wisdom that could not be obtained in libraries: ‘Todas as coisas do universo, onde por tanto tempo me procurei, são as mesmas que encontrei dentro do peito no fim da viagem que fiz pelo universo’ [everything in the universe, where I have been searching for so long, are the same as those I have found within myself at the end of the journey I made throughout the universe].21 The last part of Almada’s formative years was spent in Madrid, where he lived and worked between 1927 and 1932, and where he enjoyed a good relationship with modernist tertulias or literary gatherings in Café Pombo, which the writer Ramon gomez de la Serna presided over.22 They were extremely active years in all the fields of his wide range of interests in an atmosphere filled with requests and emotions. His exhibition of drawings in 1927 presented in the Unión IberoAmerican with the support of La Gaceta Literaria was an enormous success. Spanish

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critics noticed in the works a special stamp of Portugueseness, very much in line with the current concepts of the understanding between art and national identity and representation.23 Besides regularly contributing drawings and texts to magazines (mostly ABC and Blanco y Negro), Almada did decorative work for several buildings, such as the Cinema San Carlos in Calle Atocha. In this case, the work consists of a set of plaster panels of drawings in relief, which were rediscovered by ernesto de Sousa (1921– 1988), a leading Portuguese artist of the 1960s who made a film called Almada, um Nome de Guerra, which he had begun in 1968 and publicly screened in 1984.24 It was ernesto de Sousa who managed to find a buyer for this work in Manuel de Brito, a collector and the owner of an art gallery. When all the panels came to Lisbon, the complicated process of restoring the panels, which had remained intact, began, but has not yet, unfortunately, been completed. Of the twelve panels that Almada produced in 1919, the diptych ‘Jazz’ allows us to see the ease with which he adapted the synthetic line of his drawing to the aesthetics of publicity, cinema and theatre posters. Particularly effective is the split between the two main figures that move from one panel to the other, wittily highlighting the dynamic interplay between the chorus singer’s leg and the musician’s saxophone. The lettering of the title, ‘Jazz’, which is cut but still readable in one of the corners of the work, together with the still-life motif in which the artist’s name is written, also contribute towards the effectiveness of the work. The contrast between the predominant shades of grey and ochre brings out the black of the man’s clothing, which the woman appropriates with the top hat (see Fig. 5.3). At a time when the ‘Roaring Twenties’ were drawing to a close, especially in Spain and Portugal, this work by Almada summarizes his existential, aesthetic and symbolic values. They evoke the transgressive, anti-bourgeois and bohemian lifestyle that supported the avant-gardes so productively; the revival of a mimetic art constantly nurtured by the use of new mediums linked to the press, theatre and increasingly the cinema; the aim to build a new european culture which, without forgetting celebrated past legacies, opted for the upbeat youthfulness of the new American nation, where culture was being industrialized for the first time. As always, at every phase of his life, Almada managed to capture with intuitive intelligence the signs of this new world. For this reason, I believe there is a provocative link between his harlequinesque photograph of the Ultimatum futurista... and the jazz club scene in Madrid. But this was the last time this was possible: when he returned to Lisbon in 1932, at a time when the political situation in Spain was growing tense, Almada was thirty-nine years old and had reached maturity. Modernism as a Classic Age The 1930s and 40s saw the consecration of Almada as a leading Portuguese artist, and well integrated in the Estado Novo (new State), a peculiar authoritarian regime shaped on the fascist model by Oliveira Salazar, who had come to power in 1928, after a military coup, and remained there until 1968. Almada’s good relationship with the regime can be seen in the large amount of decorative work that he did for architectural spaces, in partnership with his great friend and protector, the

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architect Porfírio Pardal Monteiro.25 Furthermore, Almada’s own philosophical and poetical thinking in the early 1930s could be considered close to the political basis of a corporativist state that had abolished political parties in the name of the country’s higher interests. The text of the Direcção Única conference, 1932, as well as the ones published in the SW-Sudoeste magazine that he set up and directed in 1935, announce in his aphoristic style that a kind of coincidence existed between the individual and the collective that the nation presented: ‘Que cada português, dentro ou fora da nossa terra, seja o perfeito indivíduo da nossa própria colectividade’ [May every Portuguese, whether in or outside our country, be the perfect individual of our own collectivity].26 At the establishment of the new State, Almada put this belief at its service through two items of ideological propaganda that he produced. The first was a poster of a young mother holding her child, a boy, in her arms and two powerful underlined statements: ‘nós queremos um estado forte!’ [We want a strong state!] and, further down, a political declaration: ‘Votai a nova Constituição’ [Vote for the new Constitution], referring to the plebiscite that in 1933 brought a formal end to the dictatorship and instituted the Estado Novo. Then in 1935 he drew with great economy of means a postage stamp that became the most popular one in Portugal for several decades and had the words ‘Tudo pela nação’ [everything for the nation] written along it. none of these things made Almada ‘a fascist’ as some people (in fact only a few) said after the 25 April Revolution. The work he was commissioned to do was attuned to the inherent nationalism of his education, which, as in the case of Fernando Pessoa, was mythical and symbolic in meaning, and not political. none of his proclamations — the futurist ones of his youth and the philosophical ones of his more mature years and old age — were ever aimed at doing a political service, something he refused to do. This is made evident by the strong criticism he voiced at Marinetti’s conference in Lisbon in 1935, when he wished Marinetti ‘uma feliz viagem de regresso à sua grande Pátria onde o espera o seu lugar bem merecido de académico do fascio italiano’27 [a happy journey home to your great nation where your well-deserved place as an Italian fascio academic awaits you]. Almada’s indisputable independence stems from his understanding that art is disconnected from politics and is the most profound prime-mover of history, as he says in one of his most enigmatic texts called Tekné, a Cabeça da Colectividade (1935): ‘As realidades políticas pretendem que a Arte proceda dos factos e não que os preceda. Ora, precisamente, é a Política que há-de estabelecer-se sobre o resultado determinante dos factos’ [Political realities want Art to proceed from facts and not that they precede them. now, it is precisely Politics that must establish itself on the determining result of the facts].28 In my opinion, Almada played an active role in the new State’s cultural and artistic life while using, very independently, the margin of delimited freedom that the Portuguese intelligentsia had grown used to within the framework of the prolonged absence of political freedom. His continual, at times even tumultuous, practice of drawing remained fundamental to his artistic work. In 1941, the Secretariat for national Propaganda, the official organ of the State’s ‘Política do espírito’ [Policy of the Spirit] headed by António Ferro, promoted a large exhibition to celebrate the ‘thirty years’ of continuous work of the most brilliant and resilient Portuguese modernist who first

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Fig. 5.4. José de Almada negreiros, ‘A Sesta,’ 1939, pencil on paper, 68 × 100 cm. Museu do Chiado-Museu nacional de Arte Contemporânea Collection. Arnaldo Soares (photographer).

showed his work in 1919. The eighty-four issue numbers of the catalogue record his trajectory but also what could be described as a classic age rooted in the inner maturity of an individual style.29 A Sesta (1939) is a good illustration of his stylistic and poetic qualities. The young couple that sleep for a moment — her head resting on his shoulder — are drawn with an undulating line that create expressive anatomical distortions that work as a form of signature of anti-academic modernism as well as a covert homage to Picasso. Although their faces bear marks of individuality, they do not seem portraits but rather figures of idealized beauty, as brief as youth and satiated love. Their bodies are magnificent fragments that focus feelings instead of dispersing them, which is also an eminently modern attitude. Almada’s skill and emotion emerge prominently in the work of shading and his use of pencil as the magic generator of a low light in which the black itself is internally luminous (see Fig. 5.4).30 Yet it was in painting that Almada created his absolute work of art. I am referring to the two large triptychs painted al fresco, dating 1945–49, that decorate the main reception area in the Rocha do Conde de Óbidos Maritime Station, which was designed by the architect Pardal Monteiro.31 The two triptychs face each other and while one evokes the idea of emigration through gestures and looks between those who leave and those who remain behind with a large piece of machinery, a ship, in the background, the other painting is about ‘Sundays in Lisbon’ along the river

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front with family boat trips, fishwives and age-old forms of fishing, and street shows with acrobats. These extremely rich themes — recurring in numerous, suggestive scenes within the scene — are configured in a compositional network within a cubist matrix (but also recall mediaeval glass techniques),32 fragmenting bodies and colours and compressing people and things as if our eyes were using a wide angle. For those who are familiar with Almada’s work, all his motifs can be found here and handled with the very same efficiency and speed. But he had hitherto never succeeded in representing it entirely in a work of such complexity and ambition, which by depicting it, depicts the constant invention of the nation: a blue city bathed by the River Tagus, always on the verge of leaving for some useless destiny only to return and once again spread itself among those solid fishwives, circus performers and childish joys of Sunday outings. Almada himself acknowledged the vital importance of these works as a whole in his vast production: ‘Creio não ter havido cumprido melhor nem feito obra que fosse mais minha’ [I believe I have never achieved anything better nor executed a work that is more mine],33 he said in an interview in 1953 (see Fig. 5.5). As in other circumstances, Almada, who was then over fifty years of age, was recognized as one of the most modern of non-abstract Portuguese painters. In the years following the war, he could have been a model for young artists involved in the neo-realist movement, ideologically akin to Soviet socialist realism and artistically to the Mexican muralists, Orozco and Rivera.34 However, he refused to be the master of anyone at all, because he would not comply with prescriptions or programmes, but preferred to exercise his own marked individuality, which corresponded with a mythical figure of the nation according to the formula he had soon arrived at: 1+1=1. despite this profound commitment, the paintings in the Alcântara Station failed to please the ideologues of the new State regime, which entered a protracted decline after the Allied victory in 1945. Some people suggested the paintings should be demolished as they were excessively modern and dealt with themes that were either too plebeian (Sunday performances of acrobats) or about matters it was better not to mention at all (emigration). They were saved thanks to João Couto, director of the national Museum of Ancient Art, one of the many Portuguese intellectuals who carried out functions within the regime while, in a discreet and cautious manner, not identifying with it.35 Fernando Pessoa, according to Almada The last long phase of Almada’s work lay outside the modernism in which he had grown as an artist. Although he continued to produce drawings that constantly repeated the same themes and motifs, he was now focused on researching the numerological fundamentals of the universe and art, for which he used various philosophical schools of thought, mostly Pythagorean. Central to these ref lections are the Panels of Saint Vincent, the most famous and masterly Portuguese painting, a work by nuno gonçalves, dom Afonso V’s court painter, in the mid-fifteenth century. The iconological and historical deciphering of this magnificent group portrait, which in its way celebrates Portuguese society of the time, is one of the

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Fig. 5.5. José de Almada negreiros, ‘domingo lisboeta’ and ‘Partida de emigrantes,’ 1945–49, two large triptychs painted al fresco (410 × 205 cm / 405 × 200 cm). Fundação Calouste gulbenkian / Porto de Lisboa.

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Fig. 5.6. José de Almada negreiros, ‘Retrato de Fernando Pessoa,’ 1 december 1935, china ink on paper (44 × 34 cm). Palácio do Correio Velho. Reproduced in Carlos Queiroz, Homenagem a Fernando Pessoa (Coimbra: Presença, 1936), p. 7.

most researched themes in Portuguese art history. Almada took a different path and on examining the perspective of the set of panels, he suggested rearranging them as well as their original localization, which was, in his opinion, the Batalha Monastery. With ceaseless intuitive exploration, albeit based on mathematical fundamentals, Almada delved into a complex abstraction that led to the extraordinary engraved panel Começar, 1969, his final great work commissioned for the main atrium of the Calouste gulbenkian Foundation head office in Lisbon. Almost by magic, the elderly artist keeps up with the avant-gardes by means of a geometric abstraction with metaphysical contents.36 Yet once again, the way to get there had been extremely personal and Almada had remained detached from the rhythms and proposals of successive international avant-gardes. Beforehand, in 1954, Almada had been commissioned by the restaurant ‘Os Irmãos Unidos’ in Rossio, Lisbon, to paint a portrait of Fernando Pessoa.37 Its starting point was the drawing of 1 december 1935, the date of the poet’s funeral, which depicted him with extraordinary economy of means and mimetic competence. The image is so powerful that, in a very Pessoan manner, it remains to this day the first portrait that comes to mind when we think of the poet, and accept that the truth of his face is an unembodied heteronymic mask (see Fig. 5.6). After Fernando Pessoa died, Almada very often referred to him. José-Augusto França cites a strophe of ‘Ode to Fernando Pessoa’ dated 1935. It is worth quoting:

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Raquel Henriques da Silva Foi substituído Portugal pelo nacionalismo que é a maneira de acabar com partidos e de ficar talvez o partido de Portugal mas não ainda talvez Portugal! Portugal fica para depois e os portugueses também como tu. [Portugal has been replaced by nationalism which is the way to end with parties and perhaps remain the party of Portugal but perhaps still not Portugal! Portugal will come later And the Portuguese as well like you.]38

This encrypted dialogue at a time when the new State was establishing itself shows that Almada was ideologically independent but inclined to a scepticism that is sometimes similar to Pessoa’s, although it did not have the same depth. The Portrait incorporates this and other issues. If we look again at the 1925 ‘Self-portrait in a group’, which we have already discussed here, we see that the drawing of Fernando Pessoa’s legs and shoes is reminiscent of that of the men’s in this painting. This authorial stamp evokes his great love for dance and the circus, which runs through all Almada’s work but is totally absent in the poet. In fact, any thought of dance is cancelled, muted by the sobriety of the black suit, conventional and office-like. We have the impression that if that painted body were to get up, it could not be held up by so fragile a skeleton and would remain suspended in mid air like an articulated marionette. The poet is sitting at a table, perhaps Café Martinho da Arcada,39 and a copy of the magazine Orpheu 2 dates the scene back to his youth in 1915 (see Fig. 5.7). However, if this is the case, it depicts an older poet already transformed into an image of himself, his hands suspended over a sheet of paper. Awkwardly balanced within the perspective of the f loor and hovering slightly, Pessoa is enveloped in an intense red light that accentuates the geometry of the table, the frames of the panelled walls and the f loor tiles. In this case again, it is the light that artificially casts the colours of the patterns, thereby creating the form of the harlequin costume that Almada so often painted. We could imagine a fallen harlequin lying there and the poet, dressed in black, emerging from him, or that this planned harlequin is the painter himself, suggesting a symbiosis of all things in everything, a fusion of affective memory between him and the dead poet, the famous 1+1=1. Throughout his career, Almada produced dozens of self-portraits and self-representations.40 It is not possible to produce them all here and so there is little point in examining them, but I have selected one, dated 1940, when the artist was forty-five years old. He was then going through his most productive phase and carrying out a great many public commissions, which made him even more famous. Apart from the painter eduardo Viana, he was now the only surviving member of the turbulent generation of 1910. Back in 1917, in order to give his talk at the futurist conference, he had donned a boiler-suit, which called to mind a worker’s clothes as much as those of a circus acrobat. Thirty years later, Almada depicts himself in a singular piece of

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Fig. 5.7. José de Almada negreiros, ‘Retrato de Fernando Pessoa,’ 1954, oil on canvas (201 × 201 cm). Casa Fernando Pessoa Collection.

sculpture made of wire (see Fig. 5.8). It is an extraordinarily mimetic caricature that could draw a smile with no further thought. But laughter, as Almada said, is one of the most serious things in the world. It could be still seen as a modernist work, although a great deal more consistent than those of his youth. We should consider its formal innovation, one that blends drawing, painting and sculpture; the choice of materials that questions the nobility and distinction of an artistic work’s materiality; its rebellious meaning, emptying the depiction of his face to invent the shape of a cat in its stead, suggesting that there is no interior in that excess of exteriority. And even so, those motionless, childish eyes continue to look at us, a signified without a signifier or rather, there’s a sense of full coincidence between them. In the Portugal of that time, there were very few artistic works with the same inventive drive.

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Fig. 5.8. José de Almada negreiros, ‘Auto-Retrato,’ c. 1940, wire and China ink on cardboard, 36 × 20 cm. António Homem Cardoso (photographer).

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notes to Chapter 5 1. José Almada negreiros, ‘O desenho’, in Obras Completas, 6 vols (Lisbon: editorial estampa, 1971), v: Ensaio, p. 15. 2. See Almada negreiros’s chronology of events in Almada (Lisbon: Fundação Calouste gulbenkian, 1984) (exhibition cur. by José Sommer Ribeiro; catalogue org. by Margarida Acciaiuoli). 3. The best history of twentieth-century Portuguese art remains José-Augusto França’s A Arte em Portugal no Século XX (Lisbon: Bertrand, 1984). In it França discusses and explains its modernist context, with an analysis which I generally share. 4. The best work about Almada negreiros was also written by José-Augusto França, Amadeo & Almada (Lisbon: Bertrand, 1983), from which I will amply quote in this article. This book includes two different essays, one called Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso, o Português à Força [Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso, the Portuguese by Force] and the other, Almada Negreiros, o Português sem Mestre [Almada Negreiros, the Portuguese without Master]. In this latter case, the first independent edition came out in 1974. 5. See Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso, Catalago Raisonné: Fotobiografia, coord. by Helena de Freitas (Lisbon: Fundação Calouste gulbenkian), 2007 and Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso, Catalogo Raisonné: Pintura, coord. by Helena de Freitas (Lisbon: Fundação Calouste gulbenkian, 2008). 6. Fernando Pessoa, ‘As Caricaturas de Almada negreiros’ A Águia, II-16 (1913), p. 134. It should be noted that this is Fernando Pessoa’s only piece of art criticism. 7. note by Jorge de Sena in Fernando Pessoa, Páginas de Doutrina Estética (Lisbon: Ática, 1946), p. 312, cited by França, Amadeo & Almada, p. 181. 8. The story of the stay of these Parisian artists in Portugal was narrated through a correspondence publ. by Paulo Ferreira, Correspondance de quatre artistes portugais Almada-Negreiros, José Pacheko, Souza-Cardoso, Eduardo Vianna avec Robert e Sonia Delaunay (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1972). For an evaluation of the impact of Portuguese culture on these two artists and its link with the works of Amadeo, Almada and Viana, see Eduardo Viana, Ami des Delaunay 1881– 1967. Portugal europália 91, 1991 (catalogue of exhibition cur. by Raquel Henriques da Silva). 9. See França, Amadeo & Almada, p. 201. This comment was originally made in a letter to Armando Côrtes-Rodrigues, 4 September 1916. 10. Ibid., p. 196. 11. Cottinelli Telmo, a close friend of Almada, wrote in his review of Almada’s 1914 drawing exhibition that the blue of the costume was not ‘o da tabela para homens’ [on the men’s colour chart] and thus ‘provocou escândalo no Chiado’ [caused a scandal in the Chiado]. Cottinelli Telmo, ‘Trinta Anos de desenhos de Agitação de Ideias e Problemas Artísticos de Mocidade de espírito’, Acção (3 April 1941), reproduced in Almada (Lisbon: Fundação Calouste gulbenkian, 1984), unnumbered. 12. José de Almada negreiros, Ultimatum Futurista às Gerações Portuguesas do Século XX, in Obras Completas, 2nd edn, 6 vols (Lisbon: Imprensa nacional–Casa da Moeda, 1991), vi, 42 and 39. 13. eduardo Lourenço, ‘Almada ou do modernismo como provocação’ in Almada (Lisbon: Fundação Calouste gulbenkian, 1984), unnumbered. 14. França, Amadeo & Almada, p. 224. 15. Ibid., p. 230. 16. Ibid., p. 232. 17. Ibid., p. 232. 18. Ibid., p. 232. 19. One could mention during these years the play Pierrot e Arlequim published in the magazine Athena, 1924, directed by Fernando Pessoa. For more on the chronology of Almada’s theatrical productions (at times announced without actually being performed) see França, Amadeo & Almada, pp. 260–65. 20. Almada’s work in dance began in 1913 with a project called ‘O Sonho da Rosa’, which was before diaghilev’s Russian ballet company came to Lisbon in 1917 to stir enormous enthusiasm in him. In 1918, he was the fundamental figure of a Lisbon ballet group and for them he wrote, staged, choreographed and performed in the plays: A Princesa dos Sapatos de Ferro, Bailado do Encantamento and O Jardim de Pierrette.

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21. José de Almada negreiros, A Invenção do Dia Claro, in Obras Completas, i, 171. 22. For how this question developed, see De Picasso a Dali: As Raízes da Vanguarda Espanhola (1907–1936), Spanish Pavilion, expo ’98, Lisbon (exhibition catalogue presented in the Chiado Museum and coord. by Juan Manuel Bonnet). See in particular Maria Jesus Ávila’s article ‘Proxi midade geográfica: O dialogo Inexistente’, pp. 69–86, which ref lects on Almada’s life in Madrid. 23. António espina thought that Almada had not had ‘qualquer inf luência de Paris, sendo o pintor português de inteira originalidade’ [was not ‘inf luenced in any way by Paris, and was an entirely original Portuguese painter]; gomez de la Serna said that the artist ‘resume a delicadeza, a inquietação e o diletantismo de Lisboa’ [epitomized Lisbon’s delicacy, disquietude and dilettantism]. In França, Amadeo & Almada, pp. 301–02. 24. For more on ernesto de Sousa, see Ernesto de Sousa: Revolution my Body (Lisbon: Fundação Calouste gulbenkian, 1998) (catalogue of the exhibition cur. by Maria Helena de Freitas and Miguel Wandscheider). ernesto de Sousa tells the story of his search, discovery and acquisition of the panels from Cine San Carlos in his book Recomeçar, Almada em Madrid (Lisbon: Imprensa nacional–Casa da Moeda, 1983), pp. 41–45. 25. For more on this fruitful collaboration, see Raquel Henriques da Silva, ‘Almada e Pardal Monteiro’, in O Mundo de Almada (Lisbon: Fundação Calouste gulbenkian, 1984), republished in Almada: A Cena do Corpo (Lisbon: Centro Cultural de Belém, 1993) (Catalogue of exhibition coord. by José de Monterroso Teixeira), p. 194–99. 26. In França, Amadeo & Almada, p. 317. 27. Ibid., p. 320. 28. Ibid., p. 323. 29. Almada himself had already shown in 1927 that he was perfectly aware of how his drawing had evolved: ‘duas épocas tem o desenho: a primeira, época da atenção respeitando o instinto, a outra, a da correcção do instinto procurando a harmonia. Passa da sinceridade primária ou romântica à impassibilidade construtiva ou clássica naquele mesmo sentido em que Ingres definiu a obra clássica: a que não faz rir nem chorar’ [There are two epochs to drawing: the first is a time to respect instinct, the other, to correct instinct while seeking harmony. It goes from primary or romantic sincerity to constructive or classic impassability in the sense that Ingres defined classic art, as that which neither makes us laugh nor cry]. Almada negreiros, ‘O desenho’, A Ideia Nacional (9 July 1927), republished in Almada negreiros, Obras Completas, 6 vols (Lisbon: editorial estampa, 1971), vi: Ensaio, p. 14. 30. When Pedro Lapa wrote about this drawing, he rightly referred to the use of sfumato that ‘espalha-se por vastas áreas da superfície criando uma envolvência e temperatura da cor’ [spreads over vast areas of the surface creating a sense of involvement and colour temperature] in Cinco Pintores da Modernidade Portuguesa (1911–1965) (Barcelona: Fundación Caixa Catalunya, 2004), (catalogue of the exhibition cur. by Pedro Lapa), p. 28. 31. Between 1943 and 1945, Almada had produced two triptychs painted al fresco for the Alcântara Maritime Station, also designed by Porfírio Pardal Monteiro. The themes in the paintings celebrate Lisbon as a port and the legend of ‘nau Catrineta’, but was less innovative as a composition than his later work at the Rocha do Conde de Óbidos Maritime Station. 32. Almada produced a remarkable set of stained-glass windows in 1938 for the nossa Senhora de Fátima Church in Lisbon, designed by the architect Pardal Monteiro. See França, Amadeo & Almada, p. 346. 33. Ibid., p. 381. 34. For further development of this question, see Raquel Henriques da Silva, ‘Arte Pública NeoRealista: Reflexões Exógenas’ [neo-Realism in Public Art: exogenous Ref lections] in Batalha pelo Conteúdo: Exposição Documental. Movimento Neo-Realista Português (Vila Franca de Xira: Câmara Municipal de Vila Franca de Xira, 2007), (catalogue cur. by david Santos), pp. 198–207. 35. França, Amadeo & Almada, p. 382. 36. For further development of this question in an international context, see Pedro Lapa, ‘Almada e a Emergência do Cânone’, in Cinco Pintores da Modernidade Portuguesa (1911–1965), pp. 231–32. 37. In 1965 Almada produced a copy of this painting for the Calouste gulbenkian Foundation. It is the reversal of the original — ‘como se fosse o primeiro quadro visto ao espelho’ [as if it were

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the first painting, seen in a mirror] as José-Augusto França so aptly put it in Amadeo & Almada, p. 411. 38. Ibid., p. 318. 39. França’s reading of the portrait is so efficient that it is worth citing: ‘É o retrato do poeta e da sua geração que a simples presença da revista anuncia. e também, de certo modo, um retrato de Lisboa que entra, num sol matutino, pela sala adentro, envolto em cheiro de maresia — porque se está no Terreiro do Paço e o café só pode ser o “Martinho da Arcada” ’ [It’s a portrait of the poet and his generation that the simple presence of the magazine reveals. It is also, in a certain way, a portrait of Lisbon that enters together with the morning sun into the room filled with the salty scent of the sea — because we are in the Terreiro do Paço and the café can only be ‘Martinho da Arcada’]. Ibid., p. 410. 40. Bernardo Pinto de Almeida said that ‘Almada foi sempre um auto-retrato’ [Almada was always a self-portrait] in the text Almada Negreiros included in O Rosto da Máscara: Auto-Representacão na Arte Portuguesa. (Lisbon: Centro Cultural de Belém, 1994), (catalogue of exhibition cur. by António Rodrigues), p. 338. It is worth reading the analysis made of the 1940 self-portrait in the same text and the chosen object for this article.

CHAPter 6

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Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso: A Modernist Painter Rui-Mário Gonçalves the Year things turned If we wish to understand the history of Portuguese culture in the light of presentday knowledge, we should regard 1912 as the beginning of modernism. This was the year in which changes occurred in the individual behaviours and the work of a few young artists who were little or hardly known up to then. We may, without further ado, point out the most important ones: the composer Luís de Freitas Branco (1890–1955), the poets Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935) and Mário de Sá-Carneiro (1890–1916) and the painters eduardo Viana (1881–1967), Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso (1887–1918), guilherme Santa-Rita (1889–1918) and José de Almada negreiros (1893–1970). Before 1912, what each of them had to say about the others could be summed up in a very few words, for a variety of reasons. Firstly, they were all very young. The eldest, eduardo Viana, was not given to writing either critiques or chronicles. He was thoroughly acquainted with academic techniques as he was one of the two artists who had completed his studies in Painting at the Fine Arts Academy, but he left for Paris in 1905 where he was connected with naturalism. Indeed, and as I shall be explaining further on, modernism had replaced lengthy procedures with other, more expedient techniques that were in keeping with the fervent enthusiastic nature of young artists wanting to abandon naturalism and, even more, to kick over any traces of an ailing fin-de siècle spirit so as to give themselves over wholly to the adventures of the nouveau esprit. Hence, it was the novecentismo of the early twentieth century pitted against the oitocentismo of the nineteenth century: the struggle took its time in Portugal due to the dominant class’s hold on naturalism which prevented new aesthetic concepts from being assimilated, even in the Art Schools. Santa-Rita, who was one of the youngest and who had also finished his degree in Painting, obtaining excellent marks, drastically cut the ties with what he had learned after he had seen an exhibition of the Italian futurists in Paris in 1912. His provocative behaviour from that time on intrigued Sá-Carneiro so much so that he created a character based on the painter in his novella A Confissão de Lúcio (1913): the sculptor gervasio Vila-nova. Secondly, the ways in which these young people reacted to official Portuguese conservatism included travelling outside the country and choosing different cultural

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references. Thus, Freitas Branco profited from his lessons in germany; Fernando Pessoa assimilated British culture; Sá-Carneiro and the painters chose Paris. Thirdly, they were divided into the arts each one pursued: music, poetry, painting. This circumstance, which made exchanging creative ideas among themselves complicated, nevertheless offers anyone studying their work a chance to detect a few common aesthetic characteristics that define an age in which all that was structurally inventive happened through the offices of various vanguard trends. The battle fought by musicians and painters alike against tonalism in favour of timbrism found its equivalent in the struggle waged by the poets against syntax. They too esteemed the signifier: sound, graphism, visuality, the support itself; instead of a linear organization of words, they sometimes preferred writing them in multiple directions and, with the futurists, they even proposed resorting to wordsin-freedom. Literary asyntacticism appeared just as pictorial afocalism and musical atonalism did. These and other concepts current in critical thought that seeks to establish comparisons between the different arts did not circulate among the art studios, exhibition halls or magazines. each era is also characterized by the concepts it uses when faced with events happening in the here-and-now. In about 1912, the manifestos tried to situate themselves in close proximity to the works of art and some of the latter were indeed presented as manifestos. Paradoxically, critical studies about their works of art were of no interest to the creator-artists; their unadulterated support, yes. Thus Apollinaire’s writing about The Cubist Painters, published in 1913, in Paris, was a hit among the artists despite the fact that, later on, some of them stated that the poet understood nothing about painting and that his arguments were unsound — what was important at that time was winning the great poet over to the modern painters’ movement. Some months before, the artists gleizes and Metzinger had published a theoretical book where they substantiated cubism. In some way, these painters had set up an orthodoxy in cubism to such an extent that Marcel duchamp’s ‘nude descending a Staircase’ was rejected by the 1912 Salon des Indépendants. Almada negreiros once said, in conversation with me, that cubism had been harmed by hurriedly cobbled together theories that had given rise to this orthodoxy, whereby even in the 1960s, opinions still ref lected the vanguard spirit of the 1910s. Be that as it may, among the Portuguese artists mentioned above, only Luís de Freitas Branco and Fernando Pessoa were involved in theoretical activity. Freitas Branco composed ‘Vathek’ in 1912–13, but it only won acclaim in the 1960s thanks to Jorge Peixinho, another vanguard musician. This goes to show that ‘Vathek’ was the world’s most modern composition at the time it was composed. Its third variation which lasts only one minute starts off at an almost inaudible pianissimo, progressing to sound structures according to counterpoint rules and finally building up to all the auditory possibilities of polyphonic individualization. This means attaining the two inaudible extremes owing to different causes: pianissimo and fortissimo. during that minute, the listener feels the surging and ebbing of a sound structure that knows no clear boundaries. Luís de Freitas Branco’s extremely up-todate knowledge made him an inf luential composer although he was strictly limited to the musical world.

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To a certain degree, the same thing happened with Fernando Pessoa. In 1912, he wrote theoretical texts that are read with great interest even today. At this time, Pessoa was known more as literary critic than as a poet. However, according to what Almada negreiros told david Mourão-Ferreira, Fernando Pessoa did not know how to look at a drawing.1 nevertheless, he was able to draw up a theory applicable to any kind of aesthetic category. Thus it was that in 1913, on the occasion of an exhibition showing Almada negreiros’s caricatures, Pessoa wrote a small essay on the art of satire for the magazine Águia, in which he showed that it could be used in three genres and that an artist’s merit lay at three levels. The three satirical genres were: the hateful, the ridiculous and the futile. The three levels of merit were: genius, talent and mere skill. In his essay, Pessoa classed Almada’s caricatures as futile and his level of merit a little higher than mere skill: he had some talent. It may be inferred that the words ‘futility’ and ‘skill’ were applied to Almada negreiros on the basis of the Portuguese panorama showing the young caricaturists who were exhibiting their work at the First exhibition of Humorists in 1912, where Almada had distinguished himself. The theory is Pessoa’s; the lowly classification he awarded to Almada is, perhaps, inspired by the reviews written by the best magazine critics as well as on the opinion voiced by Castañé who, despite being Spanish, also exhibited his work at the exhibition and painted a portrait in oils of the poet that very year. Pessoas’s essay sought to situate Almada’s drawings but did not make a detailed study of the techniques he used or his subject matter in any of the designs. Two years later, Almada negreiros was to proceed in a similar fashion in his astounding Manifesto Anti-Dantas where, curiously, he used Pessoa’s brief evaluation table to ridicule the intellectual as merely skilful, thus denying him both genius and talent. O dantas é um habilidoso! [...] O dantas em génio nem chega a pólvora seca e em talento é pim-pam-pum. O dantas nu é horroroso! O dantas cheira mal da boca! Morra o dantas, morra! Pim!2 [dantas is skilful! [...] dantas as a genius isn’t even dry gunpowder and in talent he is pim-pam-pum. dantas naked is dreadful! dantas has bad breath! die dantas, die! Pim!]

not long afterwards, Pessoa recognized Almada’s merit in the field of literature itself. In 1916, in a letter addressed to Côrtes-Rodrigues announcing the third number of the magazine Orpheu, Pessoa referred to Almada’s genius which emerged very clearly in his poem ‘A Cena do Ódio’ [The Scene of Hatred] (1915). Indeed, according to Pessoa’s classification table, genius and hate are located at the exact opposite poles of skill and futile interest in things. In the same letter, Pessoa further stated that Orpheu 3 would also carry ‘quatro hors-textes do mais celebre pintor avançado portuguez — Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso’ [four hors-textes by the most famous, advanced Portuguese painter — Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso].3 At the time, Pessoa thought that Orpheu 3 would be ready for sale in September because some of the magazine was already in the press. However, in reality it failed to come out either in September or at any other time, because the money had run out.

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nonetheless, in 1917 the only edition of Portugal Futurista came out. It favoured Santa-Rita rather than Amadeo who only had the right to print two of his least significant paintings while Santa-Rita had four, and an accompanying article by Marinetti about futurism and the manifesto of Italian futurist painters; Santa-Rita appeared in a full-page photograph dressed as a clown. A literary text written by Almada negreiras called ‘Saltimbancos’ [‘Acrobats’] was also dedicated to him. Portugal Futurista, which was published in november, was immediately seized by the police. The main pretext was that the novella ‘Saltimbancos’ was deemed obscene because it spoke about stallions covering mares, in heavily rhythmical prose without resorting to punctuation, and where the text was interspersed with mental pictures. Leaving behind the traditional syntax and the use of rhythm and intersections are the literary equivalents of cubist painting. Almada himself introduced his text as ‘simultaneous contrasts’, a term he borrowed from Robert delaunay when referring to his cubist colouring. The great French painter and his wife Sonia Terk stayed in Portugal in 1915 and 1916; Almada was very friendly with them and together they formed the short-lived group Corporation Nouvelle to which eduardo Viana, José Pacheko and Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso also belonged.4 The painters as well as the poets writing for the magazine Orpheu (1915) used to meet; they respected each other owing to their individualist personalities. They did not have a collective programme. The painters understood that visual thought was current however. In a youthful vein of humour, one of them ( José Pacheko) even proclaimed: ‘Há pensamentos que só vistos, contados ninguém acredita!’ [There are thoughts that are only skin-deep because no one believes in them!].5 For his part, Almada negreiros wrote: ‘O que os olhos vêem só o desenho o sabe’ [What the eyes see only the drawing knows].6 From Paris, the history of the recent vanguard with its scandals, showed that the artists were producing paintings which, more than merely exhibiting the skills they had learned during their standard education, were expressive of their rebelliousness against everything that they believed had stagnated, whether socially or culturally. Before anything else, their paintings meant the affirmation of their independence, even when it came to respecting the rules of sound painting. Their pictures could be made into sites of experimentation with new techniques where new issues were raised before finally appearing before the public as manifestos that had no need of words. Aware of the merits entailed, this autonomy had grown considerably in strength over the previous few decades. Hence, a painting acting as a manifesto and called ‘The painter’s studio’ made its appearance in 1855. It was painted by gustave Courbet, a painter who, more for ideological reasons than affinity, interested the Portuguese writers of the Geração de 70 [1870s Generation], and was respected by the portrait artist of bygone trends, Columbano Bordalo Pinheiro (1857–1929). edouard Manet’s ‘Olympia’ also caused a long-lasting scandal. In 1912, according to Marcel duchamp (‘Conversations’ with Pierre Cabanne),7 Manet was still a reference point whenever the artistic circles talked about the stir modernity was making. Indeed, in 1911 as an academic exercise, Santa-Rita had scrupulously copied Manet’s painting which he immediately sent to a state exhibition taking place in Lisbon that year.

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Polemical pieces of work kept on showing up in Paris. ‘Les demoiselles d’Avignon’ (1907) was a painting that had been conceived as a breaking point and a problem-teaser: in it, Picasso was faced with several stylistic and functional conceptions of painting. The painting itself was the basis of cubism, which had adopted new ways of representing shapes. And in 1913 duchamp conceived his first ready made which acted partly as a manifesto against the academism which he feared was making inroads in painting itself given the fact that his ‘nude descending a Staircase’ (1912) had been refused by the cubist artist-theoreticians at the Salon des Indépendants (1912). Many other examples may be quoted in this vein.8 More quickly than the other arts, painting revealed important structural changes in aesthetic activity and in its diversity. More than twenty vanguard trends had appeared since impressionism. At first, the hostile public was responsible for giving them their nicknames: the impressionists in 1874; the cubists in 1908, and so on... In 1909, however, the futurists named themselves, taking to heart their role to provoke, come what may. not all the trends had the same value and it was not enough for one of them to be the newest in order to be the most important. Some trends closely resembled others and bore only regional variations that were significant locally. This was the case with vorticism, the British movement that appeared in 1912 in the work of Wyndham Lewis and was baptized as such by ezra Pound. The movement published an extremely polemical magazine, BLAST, which Fernando Pessoa read, subscribing to its ideas. In reacting against futurism, vorticisim nevertheless had certain affinities with it. In Portugal, futurism led Almada and Santa-Rita to adopt provocative stances in their discourse or even in their simple utterances as well as in their anti-dandy clothes in which they were photographed for the magazine Portugal Futurista (1917). Owing to these and other kinds of behaviour about which many an undocumented tale could be told, it may be ventured that a dadaist spirit of avant la lettre festered in these artists. One of the most remarkable cases that was based on undocumented production, concerned Santa-Rita Pintor’s almost total absence of work. It seems that on his deathbed, the artist had asked his family to destroy all his work because nothing had lived up to his genius. Out of the paintings that were reproduced in the magazines Orpheu 2 and Portugal Futurista, the only painting to survive was ‘Orfeu nos Infernos’ [Orpheus in Hell], apparently painted when he was fourteen years old at the Lisbon School of Fine Arts, according to the caption next to the picture. The only role played by plastic artists in Portugal’s first modernism would have been merely based on legends if it had not been for the work of Amadeo de SouzaCardoso. Amadeo’s Work Born in 1887 in a village near Amarante, in northern Portugal, Amadeo grew up in a large household, with eight brothers and sisters and many cousins. Having discovered his talent for drawing, his father and an uncle backed him up, clearing his path to studying architecture. Thus it was that Amadeo went to Lisbon for the 1905–06 school year. But he disliked both the School and the city.

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In the meantime he drew caricatures that entertained his classmates. during his summer holidays, which the family always spent by the seaside at espinho near Porto, he met the writer Manuel Laranjeira, who immediately recognized his talent. despite being seven years older, Laranjeira established a close friendship with Amadeo. When studying the correspondence between the two,9 the intense exchange of ideas and their references to good writers emerges clearly. The young Amadeo’s culture progressed and as it did so, the aesthetic quality of his caricatures improved. In 1906, he produced the first caricatures worthy of being included in any album of standing, mainly his portraits of Laranjeira. His friend encouraged him to go to Paris and in fact he set off for the city in november 1906. Once there, he started meeting the Portuguese painters already living in Paris and also working in caricature. His friendship with fellow artists pursuing the same line as he did, and who had taken him in and admired him, made his vocation all the more keenly felt. He spent 1907 visiting museums, travelling, studying architectural drawing and getting in a lot of practice in with his caricatures. Painting exerted an attraction on him although he did not hold the academies in any esteem until he met the Spanish painter Anglada Camarasa and accepted him as his tutor in 1909. Amadeo’s circle of friends widened and went beyond Portuguese confines. He met the Italian painter Modigliani and the Romanian artist Brancusi. His drawing gained in a stylistic rigour that extended beyond the art of the caricaturist. And his painting, which until 1910 had been done on small canvases in dark, hurried sketches of landscapes or café interiors, grew lighter in tone and became livelier, owing to his use of pure colour contrasts. In other words: Amadeo took a decisive step when he moved from tonal to timbric chromaticism, something that was not to be sneered at coming, as he did, from a country where the officially sanctioned painters were Columbano and Malhoa (1885–1933). The symbolist portrait painter from Amarante, António Carneiro (1872–1930), had also chosen tonalism, subjecting his shapes and colours to light–dark shades. As from 1910, Amadeo studied the effects of having colours and shapes interact with each other. In numerous small-format landscapes he carried out extremely innovatory chromatic experiments, starting from a simple shape, whether it was the rounded crowns of trees or the reddish rectangles of the roofs of houses, or yet again, other rectangles depicting white walls. The variation in the sizes of the circles and rectangles followed the same tendency. In contrasting these shapes, Amadeo added the complementary colours of green and red. The optical strength of these small compositions was seductive. Without losing any of nature’s freshness, which was more evoked than imitated, these small pictures condensed the pure act of looking. In using only greens and whites, Amadeo brought to life a composition consisting of circular shapes in his ‘Quadro g’ [‘Picture g’], painted in 1912 (see Fig. 6.1). It is already an abstract picture, as it does not wish to imitate any particular trait of nature. It is not about coloured circles either. The coloured shapes were not drawn before he had chosen the colour. On the contrary. His aesthetic search for a better use of colour led Amadeo and other painters of the same era (delaunay, Kupka, Severini) to choose the circle for various reasons. Let us enumerate them.

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Fig. 6.1. Amadeo de SouzaCardoso, ‘Quadro g,’ c. 1912, oil on canvas, 51 × 29.5 cm. CAM / Fundação Calouste gulbenkian Collection.

The circle is a closed line, containing within itself the greatest area. It therefore affects less what is within. It also attracts the eye more easily, freeing it from the borders of the inner coloured area. The position of a circle on the f lat surface of the picture is absolute. It is neither vertical nor horizontal nor does it lean to one side. In this way, it helps to give the feeling of the very canvas’s f latness and does not require the observer to seek out representations of volumes and spatial depths. Indeed, in order to intensify the interaction of colours, it is necessary to see them juxtaposed on the same plane. ‘Quadro g’ has an animated composition and a sensitive colour scheme. A lot of Amadeo’s visual experience is concentrated in it. Without denying what I

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Fig. 6.2. Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso, unknown title, 1913, oil on canvas, 27 × 46 cm. CAM / Fundação Calouste gulbenkian Collection.

have already said about ‘Quadro g’ being an abstract picture due to the laws of perception, perhaps what I am about to say will suggest an unconscious reason for his choosing to fill the composition with green circles of such emphatic verticality. The region of Amarante has luxurious vegetation in its valleys and mountains. Covering the valley bed it is possible to see circles drawn by the crowns of trees with the mountains rising above them. A real landscape is not tangible except for some peaks on first plane (see Fig. 6.2). But the tendency for someone facing a landscape is to look into the distance. It may be said that in his abstract compositions, Amadeo uses verticality and circles to harness the pleasure of looking into the distance. nonetheless he prefers horizontality, clear outlines, straight lines and closed spaces when mapping out the details of tactile experience. In the first case, the landscape tradition and impressionism would have interested him, while in the second it would have been still life and cubism. Recalling Amadeo in 1959, Almada negreiros admitted that while his friend’s painting was not a portrait of Amarante’s landscape, Amarante nevertheless primed his eye so as to detect the colours of the landscape. He said: Quando fui a primeira vez à terra natal de Amadeo, dezoito anos depois da sua morte, a luz na paisagem e as cores nas proporções eram as mesmíssimas nos seus quadros de pintura. Tanto na sua primeira fase, inf luência burguesa do Porto, como na segunda, inf luência internacional de Paris. Toda a sua arte ref lecte o seu rincão natal. e nunca é o rincão natal o que o pintor retrata. O seu rincão natal são as suas próprias cores, as do seu rincão natal. Foram estas cores que teve para começar a sua mensagem de poeta [...].10 [When I went to Amadeo’s birth place for the first time eighteen years after his death, the light of the landscape and the proportions of colour were exactly the

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Rui-Mário gonçalves same as in his paintings. As much in his first stage with the bourgeois inf luence of Porto as in his second stage with the international inf luence of Paris. His whole art ref lects that corner of home. And it is never the corner of home that the artist portrays. His corner of home lies in the colours he uses, the colours of his corner of home. These were the colours he had when he began his message as a poet [...].]

Abstractionism sought to create an international language. In some of its creators however, their countries’ accents may be found. Places where one has spent one’s childhood stamp an individual’s subjectivity. The more inventive artists frequently take refuge in their subjective choices connected to the tastes acquired during this stage of their lives. I have already mentioned that Amadeo had a happy childhood in the bosom of a wealthy, closely knit family, which had ‘enchanted’ him, as he himself had said.11 But it is not necessary to know Amarante or his family or even his psychological traits in order to recognize the aesthetic value of Amadeo’s paintings. In fact, critics and artists who are not Portuguese have acknowledged his merit: Modigliani, Brancusi, delaunay, Freundlich, Juan gris, Henri gaudier-Brzeska, Boccioni, Severini, Archipenko, Apollinaire, Walter Pach, Louis de Vauxcelles and others.12 In February 1912, the exhibition of the Italian futurist painters in Paris was decisive in Amadeo and Santa-Rita’s choice of vanguard. Amadeo had already read Marinetti’s Manifesto which was published in the Le Figaro newspaper in 1909, and not only did it not interest him all that much but it failed to interest his Italian friend Modigliani. But the painting convinced him. He himself started painting futurist pictures using the pointillistic technique similar to what Severini was doing at the same time. From there he went on to geometrical abstractionism where he was one of the pioneers together with delaunay. Through delaunay, Amadeo met other expressionists who were working in germany. He sent them some of his abstract paintings in 1912 and among them was ‘Quadro g’. His contact with germany was to invigorate his expressionist streak, close to what the Russian artist Jawlensky was doing in Munich when he was working with Kandinsky. He then started exhibiting his work in the Salon des Indépendants and was discovered by the American critic Walter Pach who invited him to exhibit at the Armoury Show (1913, USA). In 1914 he was invited by the BLAST magazine group to send his paintings to a collective exhibition in London. The exhibition failed to take place, because the First World War had broken out in September that year, but one of the organizers, the sculptor-painter Henri gaudier-Brzeska, sent an article to The Egoist in which he praised the Portuguese painter: A. de Souza-Cardoso comes nearer to my feelings. He has as much colour as Kandinsky and of a richer kind in his ‘Musicien de nuit’. Whereas Kandinsky always uses the same palette — at least in his works here — Cardoso tones it down to a perfection in his ‘Jardinier’, a jewel in warm blues agitated in a fresh motion [...].13

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Comparisons Amadeo therefore, was the first Portuguese painter to have taken part in the international vanguard of his time. A comparison of his work with that of other artists he was friendly with reveals certain similarities, and also differences that are worthy of ref lection. Like Modigliani, he acknowledged that two of his most important modernist trends were cubism and expressionism, the first in relation to a new concept of space-form, the other in terms of colour. Amadeo attained a notable union of the maximum energy of colours with the maximum energy of shapes, surpassing the orthodoxies issuing as much from expressionism as from cubism. In this respect, he differed from his Italian friend whose synthesis of such tendencies was rooted in Cézanne’s pre-cubism and Toulouse-Lautrec’s pre-expressionism. This comparison also allows an explanation to be given of the stylistic unity which Modigliani achieved early on and which was still lacking in Souza-Cardoso’s work in 1912. Both had arrived in Paris in 1906. The Italian was secure as regards the merits of his birthplace’s pictorial tradition and the Botticelli-like outlines helped him when he was taking on board the cubist-expressionists. The Portuguese painter did not enjoy the same intellectual and sensitive background, owing to the ignorance that official Portuguese culture displayed about the value of its artists; he therefore had to try everything out and he even dabbled in the vanguard extremes that confronted each other in Paris and Berlin, although he never betrayed his own temperament. Owing to his faithfulness, his use of colour differed from that of his other close friend, Robert delaunay. The colour the French artist used was more luminous; his ‘disks’ worked in the same way as newton’s disks where the interaction of pure colours produced a sensation of whitish luminosity on the retina; his ‘windows’ are painted as if they were looked at by someone inside the house and hence they seem to be the source of light. In those of Souza-Cardoso’s paintings which are similar to delaunay’s, the ‘windows’ are looked at by someone outside the house, in the open air, and they seem to be the source of darkness; and the ‘disks’ are targets or decorative elements made of some kind of cloth — they are tangible and not purely optical. In this demonstration of tactile experimentation, Amadeo came closer to the most significant achievements of cubism and expressionism than Robert delaunay, whose work always showed hints of impressionism. delaunay and his wife Sonia Terk lived brief ly in Portugal; Sonia had studied ethnology in Russia and appreciated the coloured pottery and the traditional costumes worn in northern Portugal. For his part, delaunay was enchanted by the colours of the landscape and wrote in his diary that his theories about colour coincided with what he saw around him. For these reasons he painted some figurative pictures inspired by what was happening around him. We should remember that delaunay’s theories were among the most highly respected by the european vanguard. For example Paul Klee went to Paris, in 1912, to visit the cubists and asked permission to translate a theoretical article of delaunay’s about the simultaneous contrasts of colours, and to disseminate it in germany. In the light of these facts, we are far more likely to understand Almada’s

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words quoted above about Amadeo’s use of colour in his painting. They may help towards a better perception of the last part of the quotation which seems to be a play on words about what is inherent to Amadeo as a painter: it is the aesthetic development that discovers natural beauty, it is the natural folk environment that helps along this aesthetic development. In the end, in 1959, Almada saw northern Portugal through Amadeo and delaunay’s eyes. The fact that Sonia had helped both Amadeo and Viana to discover coincidences between vanguard tastes and some of the folk traditions also deserves ref lection, because already during the twentieth century, some european political powers, going under the pretext of defending the common folk, were hostile to modern art, stating that it was far removed from rural sensitivity. An exuberant joy is expressed in most of Amadeo’s drawings and paintings that comes across immediately, even when his painting becomes a complex assimilation of the avant-garde tendencies he was experimenting with in 1912 and 1913, in a sequence at variance with other painter’s efforts. It was the futurists’ paintings that led Amadeo to discover geometrical abstractionism, followed by cubism. Indeed, futurism, and in particular his friend Severini, had adopted techniques that were open to control and optical effects that were intensified at will (such as the counterpoint that Freitas Branco had resorted to in his ‘Vathek’). Severini’s pictorial techniques were based on neo-impressionist pointillism for their colour and on the rhythmicity of rectilinear traces found in the analytical cubism of 1910. They are two optical processes which in themselves are able to suggest dynamism. A certain abstractionism such as Severini’s was achieved by articulating effects and Amadeo came close to him in 1913 when he painted ‘Os Cavaleiros’ [Knights] merely by using a pointillist technique and segments of straight lines and circles. ‘Cavaleiros’ is a notable picture that was bought for the national Museum of Modern Art (Paris) by Jean Cassou in 1958. For many years this hung beside another futurist painting by Severini. The figuration suggested in ‘Cavaleiros’ is make-belief that steps into the sensations aroused by a magical world of fantasy he had created in his drawings for an album in 1912, earning him praise from the critic Louis de Vauxcelles (Gil Blas, 15 december 1912).14 This was Amadeo’s first futurist stage, in 1913. His other stage came later on, in 1916. Indeed it is the futurist vector of modernism that escapes rural tastes by rejoicing in speed, strength, the incessant striving to go beyond nature’s boundaries, the machine... In exploring the optical energy of simultaneous contrasts, delaunay was integrated into the futurist spirit. And he acknowledged this fact when he painted machines and games that opened new possibilities for man’s mobility, whether it was for functional or recreational purposes: aircraft, the carrousel, football... For delaunay, the months he spent in Portugal acted as an interval between abstractionism and futurism. The first abstract painters rejected imitating the surrounding space, favouring the specific value of the painting instead. ever since impressionism, this rule had made an increasingly impact on the Moderns. Maurice denis’ warning had become famous and was often quoted among the Moderns: ‘Se rappeler qu’un tableau,

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avant d’être un cheval de bataille, une femme nue ou une quelconque anecdote, est essentiellement une surface plane recouverte de couleurs en un certain ordre assemblées’ [Remember that a picture, before being a battle horse, a female nude, or some anecdote or other, is essentially a f lat surface covered with colours assembled in a certain order] (1890).15 After 1912, the abstractionism, which delaunay had started, continued to develop by gradually and systematically reducing the picture to the real two-dimensional quality of the canvas. While in Portugal, and perhaps because his state of spirit had been inf luenced by the landscape and the rural life, delaunay painted pictures which were indeed admirable, but which resorted to schemes of traditional figurative representations that pleased Viana more than they did Amadeo. eduardo Viana represented pottery folk dolls with their vivid colours, and made a collage ‘La Petite’ (1916) that represented a cloth folk doll whereby the picture itself was composed of a collage of velvet cloth and other expensive fabrics, contrasting with Picasso’s newspaper collages. In the background, there were typed letters alluding to Orpheu 2 and Almada negreiros’s novella K4 Quadrado Azul. Viana’s use of cloth may perhaps be explained by Sonia delaunay’s habit of sewing. It was also in 1916 that Amadeo painted pictures inspired by folk dolls and objects used daily by the country folk: windows, targets, fruit and musical instruments filling the entire canvas. There are no empty spaces. everything is tangible. The objects are absorbed by a chromatic energy. In order to avoid being subjugated by contrasting shapes or by clearly represented objects and letters, colour contrasts are aided by contrasting pigment matter which is sometimes smooth and at other times in paste, geometrically defined or exploding in unruly stains. In some of his pictures, these stains are the result of a simple paint spill dripping onto the canvas. Viana was closer to delaunay than Amadeo in the sense that the latter was less concerned with imitating the visible so that he could re-align himself with futurism. In 1916, Amadeo published a small book in French, entitled ‘12 reproductions’, certainly with the idea of sending it to Paris. Among the paintings he considered to be his best work, is one he exhibited in 1916 whose title is similar to SantaRita’s collages published in Orpheu 2. For example, the title of one of these collages was: ‘estojo científico de uma cabeça + aparelho ocular + sobreposição dinâmica visual + ref lexos do ambiente x luz (sensibilidade mecânica)’ [Scientific case of a head + ocular apparatus + dynamic visual overlap + environmental ref lections x light (mechanical sensitivity)] (1912). And now for Amadeo’s long title: ‘Arabesco dinâmico / Real / Ocre Rouge Café / ZIg ZAg / Vibrações Metálicas / esplendor Mecano-geométrico / Cantante / Couraceiro / Bandolim’ [dynamic Arabesque / Real / Ochre Red Coffee / ZIg ZAg / Metallic Vibrations / Mechanicalgeometrical Splendour / Singing/ Cuirassier / Mandolin] (1916) (see Fig. 6.3). The full-length figure of a mandolin player is shot through with pistons and levers. Isn’t this an attempt to raise a smile? Shouldn’t we relate this interpenetration with the theory about laughter formulated a few years earlier by the French philosopher Henri Bergson, where he says laughter arises when, in the case of the person being observed, the mechanical is superimposed on the living being? Bergson’s theory was

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Fig. 6.3 (above). Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso, ‘Arabesco dinâmico,’ 1916, oil on canvas, 100 × 60 cm. Private Collection (ernesto Cardoso, Porto). Fig. 6.4 (opposite). Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso, unknown title, 1917, oil and collage on canvas, 93.5 × 93.5 cm. CAM / Fundação Calouste gulbenkian Collection.

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well known and Amadeo had read his books. Bergson was also favourite reading for Amadeo’s friend Modigliani. And we should not forget that Amadeo had spent many years of his youth drawing caricatures. On the other hand, taking into account the fact that the vanguardists of the time agreed about actions and had the same concerns, we should think about Francis Picabia’s paintings and drawings. He was also a cubist-futurist who, during this period, abandoned the optimism of the futurists and became cynical. Picabia (like Santa-Rita) thought up and painted useless machines in an ironical proto-dada stance that sought to denounce the bankruptcy of the machine civilization which was filled with many contradictions and incapable of preventing war. Picabia’s drawings were published in the magazine 291 in 1915. Amadeo’s second futurist stage was probably the outcome of his contact with those participating in the Orpheu magazine. One of his masterpieces, produced in 1917, represents typewriters, letters, pistons, levers and a metal pole running through a violin that bleeds! This painting was made as a replica of José Malhoa’s ‘O Fado’ when the latter achieved outstanding success at the national Society of Fine Arts in Lisbon the same year. As a futurist, Amadeo was against the tragic dimension of Fado singing (see Fig. 6.4).

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Amadeo’s Last Paintings Amadeo’s paintings-collages made in 1917 are highly provocative. One of them shows a fragmented nude woman and includes bits of real mirrors, hooks, a necklace and the letters of a brand of perfume, Coty. The words (in French) parfum Coty appear in the advertisements included in Sá-Carneiro’s futurist poem ‘Apoteose’ [‘Apotheosis’] published in Orpheu 2. It is a kind of combine-painting (see Fig. 6.5). When comparing this picture with a collage made in 1912 by Juan gris, also containing real mirrors (because, according to this cubist, a mirror cannot be represented pictorically), the rage and the desire to shatter may be noted in the Portuguese picture. In gris’s collage, right angles predominate; in Amadeo’s work, diagonals and curves. The mirror that the nude woman should look into so as to see herself brushing her hair is shattered, but she does not look into the mirror, she looks at us. We are the voyeurs who are seen and ref lected in the mirror. In another collage made in 1917, Amadeo uses as his background an aggressive geometrical face with circular lines around a target-eye and in place of the other eye, there is a mirror. What seems to be illustrated here is the primitive magical spell where mirrors are used as protection: throwing back the evil eye. On first plane is the distorted figure of a Christ, along the lines of the folk-pottery figurines found in northern Portugal; it is painted the same red that folklore reserves for painting the devil. Higher up, instead of the four letters InRI, there are the four letters ZInC, in the colour of zinc, which in French not only means the metal, but also tavern bar-counters. The replacement of the letters touches on blasphemy and already bears a dadaist stamp worthy of the pen of a georges grosz. The collage must have something to do with the surge of anarchist sentiment that was not altogether unknown in the Amarante region. And in writing ZInC in zinccoloured letters, Amadeo preceded the American neo-dadaist Jasper Johns by forty years (see Fig. 6.6). In work like this, the capacity to provoke goes much further, in terms of violence and localized force, than the banal swear word — MeRdA — written large by Álvaro de Campos in his ‘Mandado de despejo aos mandarins da europa’16 [eviction order to the mandarins of europe] printed in the magazine Portugal Futurista. The pictorial construction is expressive in itself. In writing ZInC in zinc (just as Jasper Johns would do much later when he wrote Red in red paint, or YeLLOW in yellow paint; or as the minimalist Frank Stella would declare about his shaped canvas, ‘What you see is what you see’), the painter was intensifying the moment of visual perception by relying on concepts or by calling into action the attributes of other sensory organs apart from the eyes. Amadeo threw himself into pictorial research work that extended over time. Above all, his last pictures were to withstand a more penetrating and discerning look, opening themselves up to lyricism. Let us look at yet another painting done in 1917, for example. At the beginning it was untitled but later it was called ‘entrada’ [‘entrance’] because the word was written into the picture, and was probably taken from one of the bullring signs (see Fig. 6.7).

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Fig. 6.5. Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso, unknown title [‘Coty’], 1917, oil and collage on canvas, 94 × 76 cm. CAM / Fundação Calouste gulbenkian Collection.

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Fig. 6.6. Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso, unknown title [‘Zinc’], 1917, oil and collage on canvas, 59 × 49 cm. Private Collection (Idílio Pinho, Porto).

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Fig. 6.7. Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso, unknown title [‘entrada’], 1917, oil and collage on canvas, 93.5 × 76 cm. CAM / Fundação Calouste gulbenkian Collection.

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generally speaking, the composition praises joy, calling upon all the senses and their synaesthesias: smell (f lowers, fruit, brand of perfume BRUT 300), taste (fruit, BRUT which is also a class of champagne), hearing (guitar and violin), touch (the difference in colouring matter, smooth or harsh, thin or thick, collages), sight (colour contrasts and different shapes, collages made of glass and mirrors). The objects used in the pictures are chosen from among the most banal things, because cubism is mainly interested in organizing a new syntax and not a new vocabulary. This new syntax would bring painting a new value: rhythmicity which is suggested by strictly pictorial means, repeating circles, rectangles and other basic geometrical shapes abstractly over the entire surface of the canvas, no matter what these shapes may represent. For example the roundness of the hole in the guitar is repeated in the target bull’s eyes as if they were plastic rhymes. Frontal planes predominate and tend to merge with the physical f latness of the canvas. Hence, a focused look at the real surface of the canvas is never disturbed by any suggestion of spatial depth. The physical truth of painting is that painting challenges the most stubborn, resistant eye because in reality, one’s eyes can only see the simultaneous nature of figures, shapes and colours clearly if they are all located on the same plane. Taking into consideration the value of the signifiers, their sensory nature and resulting capacity to trigger extremely rich synaethesias, Amadeo’s painting may only find its equal in the poetry of Mário de Sá-Carneiro. It is of no consequence that in Paris, in 1912, the poet was still uneasy about the painter’s merit. The work of each one is a lyrical expression of the same desire to live life as intensely as possible. The poet was fearful of ‘morrer à míngua, de excesso’ [dying for want of excess].17 More than in Paris, the most important creators of modernist work were to be found in Portugal where they took refuge from the 1914–18 great War. The most positive outcome of this friendship was founding the magazine Orpheu whose prime mover was Mário de Sá-Carneiro. The scandal surrounding the second number of the magazine and the ‘Manifesto Anti-dantas’ enabled Amadeo to emerge from the solitude into which he had been cast in Amarante. The painter took the initiative of sending Almada a postcard backing him up and he decided to put on two large exhibitions in 1916, the first in Porto and the other in Lisbon. When the public jeered at him, he counter-attacked, seeking to throw a disoriented public even further off-balance. He refused to be introduced to a well-intentioned critic. But he gave an ignorant journalist working for the newspaper O Dia an interview, impinging upon some of Marinetti’s ideas and proclaiming his eclecticism. He was asked: ‘Pode dizer-nos a que escola de pintura pertence?’ [Can you tell us what school you belong to?]. And he began to answer thus: ‘eu não sigo escola alguma. As escolas morreram. nós, os novos, só procuramos agora a originalidade. Sou impressionista, cubista, futurista, abstraccionista? de tudo um pouco’ [I don’t follow any school. The schools are dead. We, the newcomers, are only looking for originality now. Am I an impressionist, a cubist, futurist, abstractionist? A little of everything].18 This is what would be afterwards known as taking a trans-vanguard stand. By the time the War ended, Sá-Carneiro, Santa-Rita and Souza-Cardoso had already died. The first modernist adventure had lost its prime movers. Afterwards, Viana went to live in Belgium, until 1940. As a poet, Pessoa only published his

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first book of poetry, ‘Mensagem’ [‘Message’] shortly before his death in 1935. Only as from 1942 did the poet Pessoa truly begin to be regularly published. That left Almada negreiros, who became a guardian figure of the new modernisms. He produced remarkable mural work during the 1940s. People who sought him out because they admired his paintings and his writings, however, found him to be a man absorbed in studying ‘geometria sem cálculo’ [geometry without calculus] that only a very few were able to understand. notes to Chapter 6 1. david Mourão-Ferreira, Sobre Viventes (Lisbon: Publicações dom Quixote, 1976), pp. 169–74. 2. José de Almada negreiros, ‘Manifesto Anti-dantas’, in Obras Completas, 6 vols (Lisbon: Imprensa nacional–Casa da Moeda, 1993), vi: Textos de Intervenção, p. 20. 3. Fernando Pessoa, Sensacionismo e Outros Ismos, ed. by Jerónimo Pizarro (Lisbon: Imprensa nacional–Casa da Moeda, 2009), p. 400. 4. See Correspondance de quatre artistes portugais: Almada Negreiros, José Pacheco, Souza-Cardoso, Eduardo Vianna avec Robert et Sonia Delaunay (années 1915–1917), ed. by. Paulo Ferreira (Paris: Fondation Calouste gulbenkian, 1981). 5. Quoted in Rui-Mário gonçalves, Pioneiros da Modernidade, História da Arte em Portugal, 14 vols (Lisbon: Publicações Alfa, 1986), xii, 135. 6. See the words Almada wrote in an auto-portrait, in José-Augusto França, Amadeo de SousaCardoso: o Português à Força, Almada Negreiros: o Português sem Mestre (Venda nova: Bertrand, 1986), p. 298. 7. Pierre Cabanne, Marcel Duchamp: Ingénieur du Temps Perdu (Paris: ed. Befond, 1967). 8. Ibid. 9. Manuel Laranjeira, Cartas (Lisbon: Relógio d’Água, 1990). 10. José de Almada negreiros, Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso, Catálogo da exposição (Lisbon, 1959) [cf. Diário de Lisboa, 21 May 1959). 11. Fernando de Pamplona, Chave da Pintura de Amadeo: as ideias estéticas de Souza-Cardoso através das suas cartas inéditas (Lisbon: guimarães, 1983). 12. See Maria Helena de Freitas, Diálogo de Vanguardas (Lisbon: Fundação Calouste gulbenkian, 2006). 13. Henri gaudier-Brzeska , ‘Allied Artists’ Association Ltd.’, The Egoist, 1, 12 (15 June 1914), 227–29. 14. See José-Augusto França, Amadeo de Sousa-Cardoso: o Português à Força, p. 38. 15. Initially published in Art et Critique (Paris), 23 and 30 August 1890; included by the author in Maurice denis, Théories, 1890–1910, 4th edn (Paris: Rouart et Watelin, 1920), pp. 1–13. 16. Pessoa, Sensacionismo e Outros Ismos, p. 247. 17. ‘A Queda’, the last poem of Dispersão, written in Paris, in May 1913, published in Lisbon, 1914; see Obra Poética de Mário de Sá-Carneiro (Lisbon: europa-América, 1985), p. 94. 18. O Dia, 4 december 1916; cf. Fotobiografia de Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso (Lisbon: Fundação Calouste gulbenkian, 2007), p. 254.

CHAPter 7

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António Botto’s Impossible Queerness of Being Anna M. Klobucka The life, writings and critical fortune of António Botto (1897–1959) present a singularly complex case study in the epistemology of the Portuguese closet.1 Far from disguising or obscuring his homosexuality, as many of his male and female contemporaries did as a matter of fact and survival, he just as matter-of-factly wrote candid and often joyful homoerotic verse, prose and drama that were acknowledged and discussed as such in the literary and journalistic milieu of the day. While Botto’s contribution to the enterprise of formal experimentation carried out by Fernando Pessoa and some of his leading fellow modernists (such as Mário de Sá-Carneiro and Almada negreiros) was at best tangential — although the free form of his lyric had certainly been enabled by their example and that of their precursors, most notably António nobre — at the same time he remained a much-debated central figure of the literary environments of the so-called ‘first’ and ‘second’ Portuguese modernisms, due precisely to his overt textual and existential enactment of an unorthodox identity that responded in a unique way to the fin-de-siècle and modernist fascination with gender and, particularly, with male homosexuality.2 This enactment opened up, in turn, pathways of literary and subjective expression without precedent in the Portuguese language, as Botto forged singlehandedly and seemingly out of thin air an entirely original discourse of poetic homotextuality. In a brief but incisive critical assessment published over twenty years ago, Joaquim Manuel Magalhães pointed to this aspect of Botto’s oeuvre as the main reason for its enduring value; Magalhães’s call for a critical reappraisal of the poet’s legacy has so far remained largely unheeded, however, in the mainstream of Portuguese literary history, criticism and pedagogy.3 The radically groundbreaking sweep of Botto’s homoerotic poetics can best be appreciated by surveying brief ly the history of the representations of male homosexuality in Portuguese literature. For centuries, beginning with the bawdy galician-Portuguese cantigas d’escarnho e mal dizer in the Middle Ages and all the way up to Sá-Carneiro’s foundational 1913 novella A Confissão de Lúcio [Lúcio’s Confession], the literary conditions of discursive possibility for representing same-sex love and desire oscillated between satire and tragedy, with few if any alternatives in between.4 The satirical vein prevailed all the way up to the astonishingly Foucauldian emergence of the first developed homosexual character in Portuguese

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fiction, eça de Queirós’s Libaninho in O Crime do Padre Amaro [The Crime of Father Amaro], originally published in 1875, or a mere five years following what Michel Foucault famously designated as the approximate ‘date of birth’ into the episteme of Western culture of the homosexual as a species.5 The figure of Libaninho sprang out from eça’s imagination as a fully formed parodic stereotype of an effeminate gay man: it is the social spectacle of his speaking and moving body, rather than any insinuation of an actual practice of sexual relations (which is only referred to at the very end of the novel), that makes Libaninho’s identity manifest to those who apprehend him, including, most importantly, eça’s readers — so much so that twenty-first-century undergraduates at a north American university, who are reading the novel in english translation, will recognize Libaninho’s ‘sexual orientation’ (to deploy the lexicon of their own episteme) unhesitatingly as soon as he appears on the narrative scene.6 From the unspoken obviousness of Libaninho’s identification and the comic-relief function of his presence in the plot of O Crime do Padre Amaro, the pendulum has to swing quite far to reach the discursively overdetermined construct of ‘sexual inversion’ embodied by the eponymous protagonist of Abel Botelho’s 1891 novel Barão de Lavos [The Baron of Lavos]. The Baron’s homosexuality is as loquaciously over-analysed by the narrator as Libaninho’s is tacitly inferred, and throughout the novel he is clearly headed toward a disastrous end as the only possible outcome for the appalling horror of his being. What Libaninho and the Baron do share, however, is their narrative existence as objects of a public spectacle: whether their destiny is to generate amusement or disdain and revulsion, they figure in their respective fictional worlds as self-enclosed targets of homophobic curiosity and entertainment. Although A Confissão de Lúcio takes a dramatic departure from this barely solidified representational paradigm, it still emphatically places same-sex love within the realm of tragic incompatibility of moral and affective imperatives that can only result in death and disgrace. Viewed against this summarily sketched background, Botto’s lyric persona, as embodied in various guises throughout Canções (Songs), the volume of collected poems he published eight times between 1921 and 1956 in progressively expanded editions, stands out as an emphatic rejoinder to Confissão’s tortured insistence that it is ‘impossible’ to ‘possess a creature of our own sex’.7 Indeed, the possibility of male same-sex desire and its urgently pursued (or, on occasion, sensuously deferred) fulfilment is not ontologically or epistemologically queried but simply taken as a pre-existing given in the textual world of Canções, where dramatic suspense and versatile mobility of subject positions and intersubjective relations derive instead from the infinite variety of love that is all the more eloquent for knowing it has been historically considered unspeakable.8 Botto’s friend and champion Fernando Pessoa expressed the subjectively overpowering condition of unspeakability clashing with desire in the unattributed words of a poetic persona that has been labelled, with understandable but perhaps excessive caution, as his ‘anonymous gay heteronym’: Ah, se soubesses com que mágoa eu uso este terror de amar-te, sem poder nem dizer-te que te amo, de confuso de tão senti-lo, nem o amor perder.9

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It is impossible to ascertain whether Pessoa ever showed his unpublished poem to Botto after they became friends sometime in the early 1920s, but Botto’s following brief lyric, included in his 1925 collection Piquenas Esculturas (Small Sculptures, later folded into Canções), reads practically like a direct response to Pessoa’s ‘gay heteronym’’s repeated protestations of the tragic disparity between what is felt and what can be put into words, between affective self-awareness and the inability to share it with the desired other: Conversando a sós contigo, desfruto o prazer imenso de não pensar no que digo e de dizer o que penso. e mais uma vez Afirmo Sem receio de que seja desmentido: — A maior felicidade É ser-se compreendido.10 [When I talk with you, in straying Words, my pleasure finds its brink: I don’t think of what I am saying And I say all that I think. And once again I affirm — deny it who ever would? — There is no happiness Like being just understood.]

The miraculous outspokenness of Canções can be further illuminated by observing that what can appear as an improbably homophilic environment of the literary Lisbon of the 1920s, into which Botto emerged from his humble working-class family background to quickly become a celebrated poet, was also intensely — and more predictably — homophobic. Perhaps the most concise illustration of this claim may be found in the cameo portrayal of Botto — as the poet João Salvador — in José Régio’s novel A Velha Casa (namely in the volume Vidas São Vidas, originally published in 1966) and in the complicated and contradictory reaction to Salvador shared by the novel’s autobiographic protagonist Lelito and his circle of friends: ‘Que se passará, em verdade, no íntimo deste homem?’ pensou algumas vezes. ‘Quem será ele?’ decididamente, começara a admirá-lo, no seu género; mas sem deixar de também o desprezar, ou até, em certos momentos, o achar enjoativo ou repugnante. de resto ... a outros componentes e aderentes do grupo se estendia esse misto de admiração e desprezo.... 11 [What is really going on inside that man?’ he thought once in a while. ‘Who is he?’ He had decidedly begun to admire him, after a fashion; but without ceasing to despise him or even, on some occasions, to find him nauseating or

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repugnant. Moreover ... other members and followers of the group also partook in this combination of admiration and disdain....]

As Régio’s narrator also notes, one particular strand of the milieu’s negative reaction to João Salvador originated among those who were his ‘colegas em todos sentidos, embora alguns secretos’ [equals in every way, albeit some of them secret] but who, contrary to him, were incapable of verbalizing their collective singularity in their art: ‘Os versos destes eram vulgares, por isso eram estes que mais o odiavam e invejavam’ [Their own poems were ordinary, which is why they were the ones who hated and envied him the most].12 Like João Salvador, Botto embodied a secret that was as open as it could conceivably be (and then some), but that to those surrounding him — who included Pessoa, identified in Régio’s novel (under his real-life name) as Salvador’s protector — remained as unspeakable as ever. One contemporary witness offers an account of Pessoa’s apparent delight in telling anecdotes of Botto’s rhetorical exploits — off-colour jokes, seductive incursions, verbal sparrings — and voicing them ‘em tom gozão ... af lauta[ndo] a voz’ [in a mocking tone ... pitching his voice high].13 As a representational device, Pessoa’s vocal mannerism — imitating voice patterns meant to be apprehended as signifying Botto’s gayness — carries a peculiarly loaded performative charge. It could be contemplated in terms of the enunciatory (and denunciatory) dynamic eve Kosofsky Sedgwick describes in the context of her analysis of Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past: ‘the theatricization of a closet-figured-as-spectacle to preserve the privacy of someone else’s closetoccluded-as-viewpoint’.14 While a reconsideration of the Botto–Pessoa relationship is not my main purpose here, I will say that the f luid and equivocal complicity between the evidence of Botto’s spectacularly uncloseted persona and the dizzying contredanse of revelation and occlusion of dissident desires engaged in by Pessoa’s heteronymous coterie of alter egos is likely to be a promising point of departure for such a discussion.15 It is also worth recalling here that Botto’s life in Portugal took a decisive turn for the worse, ultimately leading to his self-exile in Brazil (where he lived out the rest of his life in abject poverty, shared with his common-law wife Carminda Silva Rodrigues, who accompanied him abroad), when he was fired from his public service job in 1942 for three specific infractions, two of which were of elocutionary nature. As the official record of his dismissal states, he was accused of ‘dirigi[r] galanteios e frases de sentido equívoco a um seu colega, denunciando tendências condenadas pela moral social’ [addressing f lirtatious and equivocal statements to a male co-worker, thereby demonstrating tendencies condemned by the social morals] and ‘fazer versos e recitá-los durante as horas regulamentares do funcionamento da repartição’ [making up and reciting poems during regular working hours of his office].16 It appears that the unguarded freedom of Botto’s speech, more so than any other aspect of his presence and social behaviour, was what determined with particular force the sheer outrage of his existence, notwithstanding João gaspar Simões’s characteristically bizarre assertion that ‘era, na verdade, nos olhos que a sodomia de António Botto avultava, coisa que, aliás, acontece quase sempre com os sodomitas’ [it was, in fact, through his eyes that Botto’s sodomy showed most clearly, as indeed almost always happens with the sodomites].17 Botto stood out (pun

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intended) because of what he said and because of how he spoke — because of what Maria da Conceição Fernandes calls uncritically his ‘preciosismo narcísico ... forma de chamar a atenção geral para a sua pessoa’ [narcissistic preciousness ... a way of calling general attention to his person], buttressing her claim with the testimony of the writer Luís Forjaz Trigueiros who told her, in a personal interview, that ‘o poeta quase sempre se conduzia como se estivesse num palco, proferindo as suas frases com um certo empolamento dramático’ [the poet almost always behaved as if he were on stage, expressing himself with a kind of dramatic pompousness] and that ‘esse seu modo afectado “aborrecia as pessoas” e que as levava, muitas vezes, a afastarem-se do poeta’ [this affected behaviour ‘annoyed people’ and often caused them to distance themselves from the poet].18 Rereading the spectacle of Botto’s public presence as, to put it anachronistically, an out-and-proud gay man — spectacle attested to, albeit in a largely homophobic or at best ambivalent key, in many contemporary and retrospective testimonials — remains an unaccomplished and urgent critical task to undertake. In the remaining space of this essay, however, my goal is far more modest: to begin to consider an often acknowledged but barely, if ever, discussed aspect of Botto’s life and work — his exceedingly robust and polyvalent penchant for selfinvention — and to relate it tentatively to the improbable, and in his day and time ultimately unsustainable, queerness of his public existence. I argue that Botto not only fashioned himself as a gay icon in the relatively confined context of the literary and artistic circles of Lisbon, but also constructed a comprehensively developed alternative reality, international if not global in scope, in which he could truly thrive as such; in which his homoerotic poetry and nonconformist social behaviour provoked neither scorn nor titillation but only unqualified admiration and respect. It has been a common, and not entirely unjustified, critical practice to file away this aspect of Botto’s creativity under the rubric of unbridled megalomania.19 Without disputing the property of this label, I wish to suggest that specific products of Botto’s undeniably prodigious vanity not only deserve to be contemplated as integrally meaningful components of his life’s work, but furthermore may be related to his predicament as an unapologetically gay artist of extremely humble origins who managed to rise into the ranks of Portuguese cultural elites in spite of his poverty and seemingly complete lack of formal education.20 If homosocial desire can be said to be the glue that binds together the participants in Pessoa’s comedy of heteronymous multiplication, I would venture that Botto’s virtual reality had a similar function of creating self-fulfilling conditions of possibility where none had existed; in other words, of producing a hospitably homophile and class-blind environ ment to cushion him from the harsh realities of a social and cultural setting that for the most part was neither of those things. It would be difficult to find a better epigraph to herald this discussion than the Brazilian poet Carlos drummond de Andrade’s remark in his notably gentle and moving obituary of Botto (who died in 1959 after being hit by a truck or van on Avenida Copacabana in Rio de Janeiro): não me interessa discutir se o Bôto dos poemas finais valia ou não o Bôto triunfal de outros tempos. Interessa-me essa fidelidade do poeta a si mesmo, esse orgulho de não renunciar à poesia e de se considerar um príncipe do mundo,

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esse poder de manipular mitos e dar-lhes uma existência, uma densidade social. nesse sentido, coube-lhe uma forma de felicidade que nenhum infortúnio externo podia atingir. Bôto criava o seu reino.21 [I am not interested in debating whether the Bôto who wrote his final poems was worthy or not of the triumphant Bôto of times past. What I care about is the poet’s faithfulness to himself, the pride he took in not relinquishing poetry and in considering himself a prince of the world, his power to manipulate myths and to give them an existence, a social density. In this sense, his was a happiness that no misfortune could reach. Bôto created his own kingdom.]

For the vast majority of readers, the only available insight into Botto’s mythmaking prowess is likely to have come from numerous self-promotional blurbs, featuring com ments from press reviews and assorted literary, cultural and even political celebrities, which from the 1930s on occupied an increasingly ample space in successive editions of his writings. Botto claimed that collections of his poems, as well as his children’s stories and plays, had been translated into many languages and sold millions of copies worldwide, an assertion supported by enthusiastic praise from the likes of Luigi Pirandello, Miguel Unamuno, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, André gide, Lawrence Olivier, gabriela Mistral, and many others, which he interspersed among his poems and cited in prefaces or press interviews. In effect, only two translations of Botto’s texts appeared in his lifetime: The Children’s Book, translated by Alice Lawrence Oram and published in Lisbon by Bertrand, and the volume of Songs in Fernando Pessoa’s english, which was printed in 1948.22 It is therefore reasonably safe to assume the purely fictional nature of comments such as the following from Woolf (who had died in 1941, seven years before the actual publication of Songs): ‘Assombroso predestinado e Artista de toda a imensidade não atingida este António Botto do livro Canções, traduzido, para o inglês, por Fernando Pessoa. Com mais tempo e vagar volto a falar desta obra no ‘Suplemento literário’ do Times’ [Prodigiously predestined, an Artist of unsurpassable immensity, this António Botto of Songs, translated into english by Fernando Pessoa. With more time and leisure, I will return to this book in The Times Literary Supplement].23 A much broader, nuanced, and at times utterly fascinating picture of Botto’s lifelong enterprise of self-invention emerges from his archive, housed in the Portuguese Biblioteca nacional. Although the archive contains almost no materials from before 1947 (the year of Botto’s emigration to Brazil), it is a vast resource that in a curious fashion replicates some of the mechanisms of the closet that both did and did not circumscribe the living poet’s existence. The invitingly titled file ‘Caderno proibido’ [Forbidden notebook], composed for the most part of both softcore and hardcore erotic verse (the latter considerably more graphic than even the boldest of Canções), is freely handed out to researchers, but other, seemingly less objectionable files remain off limits (namely those that contain photographs, of Botto himself and of others, as well as results of medical tests). Many of the texts found in the archive, such as manuscript notes and poem drafts, but also newspaper clippings with Botto’s crónicas and interviews published in the Brazilian press, contribute to the writer’s autobiographic project, two of whose major themes I will now brief ly describe. The first leitmotiv to register is the constitution of an affective community of gay artists who could be evoked, and who would occasionally even speak out in

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their own voices, as Botto’s peers and admirers. One such imaginary friend was the dancer Vaslav nijinsky. Botto had a collection of nijinsky’s photos in various roles, clipped from newspapers and magazines, and in an interview given to Rio de Janeiro’s Diário da Noite, shortly after his arrival in Brazil, he claimed to be staying in the same room (‘in a modest boarding house in Santa Teresa’) in which nijinsky had spent his honeymoon back in 1913 (nijinsky had in fact lodged in Santa Teresa during his stay in Rio, but he and his bride stayed in the rather more upscale Hotel Internacional).24 The dancer is also quoted in the 1956 edition of Canções as stating: ‘O meu grande amigo António Boto é incomparável como Poeta, mas, quando me diz os seus versos ainda é maior’ [My good friend António Boto is incomparable as a poet, but when he recites his verses for me he is greater still]. What is worth noting about this quote is its claim of close friendship — absent from most other fake encomiums recorded in Canções — as well as the motif of shared artistry of stagecraft: nijinsky the charismatic dancer praises Botto as an equally charismatic performer of his poetry. Upon nijinsky’s death in 1950, Botto assembled a collection of press reports and obituaries, in Portuguese and in French; one of the articles mentioned that nijinsky had died unaccompanied in a London hospital, and Botto ref lected upon this fact in a poem written on the back of the sheet to which the clipping is glued: ninguém acompanhou nijinski morto em Londres num hospital. Sim: ninguém no funeral. e ainda bem. ninguém. no mundo de hoje Quem é que o compreenderia na sua divina máscara fria? Sou [sic] eu o acompanhei, Sou eu, o seu grande amigo, em alma e de joelhos o beijei.25 [no one was with nijinsky when he died in a London hospital. That’s right: no one at the funeral. no one. And that’s just as well. In the world of today Who ever could understand him Under his divine cold mask? Only I accompanied him, Only I, his greatest friend, Kneeled down and kissed him in my soul.]

The most intense imaginary relationship Botto created for himself was, however, not with nijinsky but with Federico garcía Lorca, and the most extensive commentary on that relationship is recorded in a lecture on the Spanish poet that Botto was scheduled to present at the Teatro Municipal in São Paulo in the fall of 1947. Although the event did not take place, much of the handwritten text of the lecture survives in the archive, narrating the story of the intimate friendship between the two poets. At one point Botto quotes from a letter in which Lorca advises him to disregard his critics: ‘Meu querido António Botto: deixa-os falar! ... Tu não respondas. Faz como eu. Também tenho sido alvo de verdadeiros insultos. Tu bem

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sabes que os teus ritmos de beleza original ... são línguas de água divina jorrando de uma fonte à beira de um caminho onde se passa de noite para irmos sem vergonha a essa grécia imortal que é tua no pensamento e na emoção’ [My dearest António Botto: Let them speak! ... don’t answer. do as I’ve done. I too have been a target of real insults. You know best that your rhythms of original beauty ... are splashes of divine water that issue from a spring at the side of the road where we walk by night to reach, without shame, that immortal greece that is yours in thought and in feeling].26 An extensive section of the lecture describes Lorca’s visit with Botto in Lisbon, in the course of which the two spend much time wandering about the working-class neighbourhoods of Alfama, Mouraria and Bairro Alto, listening to fado performances, but also run into Fernando Pessoa in Café da Arcada (‘Pessoa disse alguns versos seus, mas Lorca não os sentiu. Que eram duros e forçados’ [Pessoa recited some of his poems, but Lorca did not feel them. They were hard and contrived]). In real life, back in 1923, Botto did send to Lorca a copy of the edition of Canções issued by Pessoa’s short-lived publishing house Olisipo, but it seems there was no follow-up: the only Portuguese correspondent featured in the index to Lorca’s voluminous Epistolario Completo is Teixeira de Pascoaes, the recipient of one postcard and one brief letter (both from 1923), and the only mention of Botto is in a footnote, which quotes from a letter to Lorca by Pessoa’s friend Adriano del Valle (also from 1923): ‘Recibió usted un libro de Antonio Botto, poeta portugués?’ [Have you received a book by Antonio Botto, a Portuguese poet?].27 The apparent one-sidedness of this contact was, however, no impediment to Botto, who years later went on to represent Lorca as both a chosen soul mate and his most eloquent and faithful correspondent: following his move to Brazil, he corresponded with Lorca’s friend and editor guillermo de Torre, who was then literary director of editorial Losada in Buenos Aires, offering for publication over two hundred letters from Lorca he claimed to have in his possession. At first cautiously enthusiastic, de Torre turned increasingly frosty and laconic in his replies to Botto, likely having realized that his correspondent was using the nonexistent letters as bait in order to interest de Torre in the publication of his own poems by the same house that had just released the first multi-volume edition of Lorca’s Obras completas.28 Another major theme in Botto’s creation of his alternative-reality persona was the narrativization of his childhood and adolescence, which at the same time sought to preserve his credentials as the poet of the people, deeply familiar with Lisbon’s bairros populares and their artistic culture, and strove to elevate him above the very real limitations of his working-class origins. While no firm evidence to this effect seems to exist, most sources claim that Botto’s gradual rise to artistic prominence was facilitated by his becoming employed at a well-known bookstore where he met a number of writers who encouraged his talents. One of them was likely to be guerra Junqueiro, whose probably apocryphal laudatory comments Botto went on to reprint in his books long after Junqueiro’s death in 1923.29 In a newspaper article published in 1953 in Brazil, Botto reframed what may have been his true recollection of meeting the older writer in a striking way.30 As the account goes, the eleven-year-old Botto was studying in england (British education being a recurrent element of his autobiographic fictions) and visiting Lisbon during a brief

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vacation. Having wandered into the Bertrand bookstore in Chiado, the young Botto speaks in english to request a copy of Junqueiro’s Pátria and is approached by the writer himself who happens to be in the bookstore and is curious to know why a British boy should desire to buy a book ‘que diz tanto mal da sua grã-Bretanha’ [that speaks so badly of your great Britain]. Botto answers him ‘num péssimo português, bastante esquecido em quatro anos de Inglaterra, lidando, apenas, com ingleses’ [in very bad Portuguese, having forgotten to speak it in my four years in england, where I only dealt with english people]. As a result of their conversation, Junqueiro signs the book for Botto, ends up paying for it, and insists that the boy should visit him at home. The conclusion of the story injects a distinct, and rather disconcerting, note into this account of the beginning of a friendship: ‘Ao mesmo tempo, as nossas mãos, envolvidas num aperto nervoso e profundo, disseram de parte a parte, sem palavras, o que uma criança e um homem talvez tivessem que dizer, mas sem que ninguém ouvisse’ [At the same time, our hands, joined in a nervous and forceful grasp, told each other wordlessly what a child and a man might have to say, but without anyone overhearing]. I hope that my retelling of this story in the present context is not interpreted as aimed at casting guerra Junqueiro in the role of a potential child molester. What it does illustrate rather aptly is, on the one hand, the transformative creativity of Botto’s imagination, moulding his own life and self with materially concrete ingeniousness comparable to that his friend Pessoa channelled into the invention of his heteronyms. On the other hand, it illuminates the kind of environment that may have enabled Botto’s ascent as the artist he went on to become, in which male homosociality of intellectual dialogue taking place in bookstores and cafés went hand in hand with veiled but hardly invisible expression of male homoerotic desire. A number of texts in Botto’s ‘Caderno proibido’ and elsewhere sketch out, in fact, what could be called an ethnography of same-sex relations in pre-World War II Lisbon, featuring, among others, the figure of a lower-class adolescent who is taken under the wing of an older and wealthier man, sometimes a respectable paterfamilias. It is impossible to ascertain whether this was Botto’s own predicament, but he clearly shows himself to be familiar with — and highly sympathetic to — the practice of same-sex prostitution by young Portuguese males, as he launches on occasion into a heated defence of adolescents who trade sexual favours for a degree of economic security. This is what happens, for instance, in a long, rambling poem draft in which condemnation is diverted from the youngsters whom Botto describes as innocent victims of prejudice and toward those benefiting from the economic exploration of female prostitution, while also suggesting the social pervasiveness of homoerotic trade.31 In another poem, the same structure of contrastive judgement has the speaker himself occupy the place of the pure lovers who are situated in opposition to the beneficiaries of female prostitution: Se me acusam de ser exagerado Quando entro no corpo que me vem Ao meu encontro para ser beijado, e se gostei, amei porque fiz bem, Por que razão eu sou caluniado

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Por esses que não gostam de ninguém e que vivem de andarem no mercado das mulheres compradas e alugadas — Comércio que repugna a quem não o tem?32 [If I’m accused of being excessive When I enter a body that comes my way To meet me and to be kissed, And if I liked and loved because what I did was right, Why am I being vilified By those who do not like anyone And who live off the market Of women bought and rented — Trade that disgusts whoever takes no part?]

Patent in both his published and unpublished works, Botto’s genius — and I use the word without irony — consisted in his ability precisely not to transcend but to transform himself, while forging unprecedented conditions of speakability for samesex erotic and social expression in modern Portuguese literature and culture. notes to Chapter 7 1. Following his emigration to Brazil in 1947, Botto began to spell his last name as ‘Boto’ in all publications and manuscripts. I am following currently prevailing Portuguese usage in retaining the spelling associated with the two and a half decades of his most prolific and acclaimed literary activity as a public figure in Portugal. 2. For a commentary on Pessoa’s writings on Botto, see Embodying Pessoa: Corporeality, Gender, Sexuality, ed. by Anna M. Klobucka and Mark Sabine (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007), pp. 14–16. Other leading modernist figures who wrote about Botto include António Ferro, José Régio and João gaspar Simões. See the anthology of critical comments by these and other writers in António Botto 1897–1959 (Lisbon: Biblioteca nacional, 1999), pp. 41–78. 3. Joaquim Manuel Magalhães ‘António Botto’, in Um Pouco da Morte (Lisbon: Presença, 1989), pp. 17–20. The most comprehensive critical assessment of Botto’s homotextual poetics is an essay by Carlos Manuel Callón Torres, ‘notas para a re-leitura dum maldito: a cultura homossexual n’As Canções de António Botto’, Lusorama, 47–48 (October 2001), pp. 59–78. 4. On male and female homosexuality in Medieval galician-Portuguese lyric, see Josiah Blackmore, ‘The Poets of Sodom’, in Queer Iberia: Sexuality, Cultures, and Crossings from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance, ed. by Josiah Blackmore and gregory S. Hutcheson (durham, nC: duke University Press, 1999), pp. 195–221. The foundational status of A Confissão de Lúcio with regard to the ‘contemporary Portuguese homosexual canon’ is stressed by eduardo Pitta in his (likewise seminal) essay Fractura: A condição homossexual na literatura portuguesa contemporânea (Coimbra: Angelus novus, 2003), p. 12. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations from the Portuguese are mine. 5. ‘We must not forget that the psychological, psychiatric, medical category of homosexuality was constituted from the moment it was characterized — Westphal’s famous article of 1870 can stand as its date of birth — less by a type of sexual relations than by a certain quality of sexual sensibility ... a kind of interior androgyny, a hermaphroditism of the soul. The sodomite had been a temporary aberration; the homosexual was now a species.’ Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, I: An Introduction, trans. by Robert Hurley (new York: Vintage Books, 1980), p. 43. 6. My experience (in a class on ‘gender and Sexuality in Lusophone Literatures’ taught at the University of Massachusetts dartmouth in the spring of 2009). 7. Mário de Sá-Carneiro, A Confissão de Lúcio (Lisbon: Ática, 1973), p. 154. 8. Regarding the unspeakability of same-sex love (known for centuries as amor nefando) in Portuguese, the first comprehensive dictionary of the language, Raphael Bluteau’s Vocabulario

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Portuguez e Latino (1712–1728), offers an unsurpassably expressive illustration: it defines ‘nefando’ as ‘cousa indigna de se exprimir com palavras: cousa da qual não se pode falar sem vergonha’ [a thing unworthy of being expressed in words: a thing that cannot be spoken about without shame] and ‘peccado nefando’ [nefarious sin] as ‘o de sodomia’ [the one of sodomy]; the entry on ‘sodomia’, in turn, conclusively forecloses any discursive articulation by defining sodomy as ‘peccado, por antonomasia, nefando, & por consequência indigno de definição da sua torpeza’ [nefarious sin, by antonomasia, and consequently unworthy of a definition of its turpitude]. The dictionary may be consulted in digital form on the site of the Instituto de estudos Brasileiros of the Universidade de São Paulo (http://www.ieb.usp.br/online/index.asp). 9. These verses belong in a long, unfinished poem, written in 1919 and published for the first time, in its original Portuguese and in english translation, by Richard Zenith in ‘Fernando Pessoa’s gay Heteronym?’, in Lusosex: Gender and Sexuality in the Portuguese-Speaking World, ed. by Susan Canty Quinlan and Fernando Arenas (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), pp. 47–53. 10. António Botto, Canções e Outros Poemas, ed. by eduardo Pitta (Vila nova de Famalicão: Quasi, 2008), p. 100. english translation by Fernando Pessoa in António Botto, Songs (1948), p. 85. While any extended consideration of Pessoa’s role as the translator of Botto’s poetry is beyond the scope of this essay, his insertion, in the poem’s first stanza, of the curious qualifier ‘in straying words’ (absent in the original Portuguese) is worth highlighting in the present context. 11. José Régio, A Velha Casa, IV: Vidas São Vidas (Lisbon: Imprensa nacional–Casa da Moeda, 2003), p. 125. 12. Régio, Vidas São Vidas, p. 120. 13. Luiz Pedro Moitinho de Almeida, ‘António Botto’, Jornal dos Poetas e Trovadores 2, 14 (March 1982), 10–15 (p. 12). 14. eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), p. 242. 15. At the same time, it is crucial to take under advisement, in this context, Sedgwick’s caveat regarding ‘our own empowering effort to reconfront the two closets with each other as symmetrical objects of our own analysis’: ‘How far, in developing such an account, are we drawing our own surplus value of interpretive energies from the homophobic commonplace that attributes the enforcement of heterosexist norms to, precisely and double-damningly, the closeted homosexual himself?’ Ibid., p. 242. 16. The third infraction was disobeying an order issued by Botto’s superior. Interestingly, the dispatch orders also the dismissal of three female employees of the same government office (Círia Rosa, Maria da nazaré Freire, and deolinda Augusta galvão), all of whom are said to have demonstrated the lack of ‘moral reliability necessary for the exercise of their functions’. Diário do Governo, 2nd series, 262 (9 de novembro de 1942), p. 5795. 17. João gaspar Simões, Retratos de Poetas que Conheci (Porto: Brasília, 1974), p. 168. 18. Maria da Conceição Fernandes, António Botto: um poeta de Lisboa (Lisbon: Minerva, 1998), p. 49. 19. See, for example, Luís Amaro, ‘nota de Abertura’, in António Botto 1897–1959, pp. 33–37. 20. Botto’s working-class family moved to Lisbon from the rural province of Ribatejo when he was a child. While it is not known whether he received any formal education at all, the fact that he remained more or less poor throughout his life is well attested to in contemporary and posthumous testimonials (notwithstanding occasional episodes of showy magnificence, such as his voyage to naples in a first-class cabin of the steamer Martha Washington, as a companion of the prince don Luis Fernando de Orleans y Borbón, documentation of which survives in Botto’s archive at the Biblioteca nacional in Lisbon). 21. Carlos drummond de Andrade, ‘Bôto: Um Príncipe’ (a newspaper article clipped from an unknown source; see Botto’s archive, BnP/e12, 3536). 22. It is unclear whether Botto had Songs printed in Portugal or in Brazil. eduardo Pitta states that all of Botto’s books were published in Portugal (Botto, Canções, p. 21), but a marketing f lyer preserved in the writer’s archive suggests Songs may have been printed in São Paulo. BnP/e12, 228 (‘Fragmentos de Poesia’). 23. António Botto, As Canções de António Boto [sic] (Lisbon: Bertrand, 1956), p. 450. 24. Diário da Noite, 4 September 1947. BnP/e12, 898–950 (‘Recortes de Imprensa’).

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25. BnP/e12, 2092–2413 (‘Temas Vários’). 26. BnP/e12, 172 (‘garcía Lorca’). 27. Federico garcía Lorca, Epistolario Completo. Libro I (1910–1926), ed. by Christopher Maurer (Madrid: Cátedra, 1997), p. 194 note 563. Pessoa and del Valle comment on the books sent to twenty-one Spanish recipients (using addresses supplied by del Valle) in the letters they exchange between August and October 1923. Fernando Pessoa, Correspondência 1923–1935, ed. by Manuela Parreira da Silva (Lisbon: Assírio & Alvim, 1999), pp. 20, 368–69. Pessoa’s archive at the Portuguese Biblioteca nacional contains a handwritten list of twenty-one names of Spanish intellectuals, including Lorca, under the heading ‘notas para mandar libros a españa’ (notes for sending books to Spain). Catalogue number BnP/e3, 133C-3 and 3a. 28. Botto’s archive, BnP/e12, 809–11 (‘Cartas de guillermo de Torre’). 29. Amaro, ‘nota de Abertura’, p. 34. 30. ‘Intimidade com guerra Junqueiro’, published in an unidentified Brazilian newspaper in late 1953, under the rubric ‘António Boto aos domingos’. BnP/e12, 898–950. 31. BnP/e12, 13 (‘Caderno Proibido’). 32. BnP/e12, 109 (‘Poesias dispersas VII’).

CHAPter 8

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Modernist differences: Judith Teixeira and Florbela espanca Cláudia Pazos-Alonso Quando vejo juntos homens de letras tenho a impressão de que eles, forçados por um meio pobre a escrever uns para os outros, formam uma demasiado apertada e amável sociedade de críticos.1 [When I see men of letters gathered together, I have the impression that, being forced by a barren milieu to write for one another, they form an excessively close-knit and amiable coterie of critics.] Irene Lisboa

Although the exclusion of women writers from literary history has been a central concern for feminist criticism in the West for several decades, re-evaluation of paternally authorized canonicity was relatively slow to gain momentum in Portuguese academia until the early 1990s. Amongst pioneer re-visions, one must cite the special issue of Discursos edited by Ana Paula Ferreira, which questions the invisibility of women within Portuguese modernism in a series of seminal articles by Paulo de Medeiros, Anna Klobucka, dionísio Vila Maior (an analysis of a case of female impersonation within modernism, that of Maria José, the hunchback created by Pessoa), and ellen Sapega.2 The last-mentioned, in particular, in an article entitled ‘Para uma aproximação feminista do modernismo português’, points to the need to rethink the complex poetics and politics of gender at play in Portuguese modernism and begins to map out the issues at stake in an uneven playing field for writers such as Florbela espanca and Irene Lisboa. Florbela espanca’s relationship with modernism has repeatedly been posited as tangential. She has been defined as lacking the right formal and stylistic credentials to be as a bona fide member of the modernist generation. Yet her perceived mismatch with Primeiro Modernismo deserves further analysis, since in practice individual studies have often thrown into relief a range of thematic affinities between her poetry and that of her modernist counterparts, most notably Sá-Carneiro. And, with regard to prose, Renata Soares Junqueira’s doctoral thesis convincingly juxtaposes her with the three giants of Portuguese modernism.3 Furthermore, on the other side of the equation, as a growing number of feminist critics have cogently argued in the context of english modernism, narrow and rigid definitions of modernism tend to exclude women, a fact also discussed by Sapega

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in her article. For instance, elliott and Wallace note that, in general terms, ‘radical experimentation with form is “modernist” while radical experimentation with content is not’.4 On this count, espanca’s use of the traditional sonnet-form would leave her out of step with existing descriptions of ‘modernism’.5 Yet, thematically, her radical experimentation from within the canon, as it were, is neither derivative nor passé: it is in fact closely aligned not only with the avowed modernist aims of shaking up old certainties, but also with a quintessentially modern interrogation of identities. Moreover, she was the only female poet featured in the Antologia de Poemas Portugueses Modernos edited by Pessoa and Botto.6 If, in the case of Florbela espanca, the jury still remains out, the insertion and/ or subsequent recuperation of Judith Teixeira as a modernist female icon could have, objectively speaking, proved to be a fairly straightforward task. In practice, however, it has been even slower to gain ground. Teixeira’s irrefutable modernist links stem from at least three main strands of evidence. Firstly, she was contributor to the literary magazine Contemporanea, alongside the likes of Pessoa and Sá-Carneiro (posthumously, courtesy of Pessoa): her first contribution was the poem ‘Fim’, published in volume 2 in 1922. Secondly, she was targeted, alongside António Botto and Raul Leal, during the controversy surrounding the morality of art in March 1923, as a result of which her first published collection Decadência was seized by the governo Civil de Lisboa and destroyed. Thirdly, and unusually enough for a woman at the time, she directed a literary magazine, Europa, in 1925. The magazine was admittedly short lived, since only three numbers saw the light of day before it folded, but nevertheless deserves to be placed alongside a number of other equally ephemeral modernist magazines. After all, Pessoa’s personal library contained a copy of the first issue.7 The marginalization of Teixeira from the literary canon can be explained, to a large extent, by the fact her poetry contained a barely disguised lesbian subtext. elsewhere in europe, official or unofficial censoring on similar grounds also occurred (as evidenced for instance by the trial of Radclyffe Hall’s novel The Well of Loneliness in 1928). Yet, the expurgation of Teixeira’s memory in Portugal remained comparatively more severe, and for longer. The decisive turning point in terms of her literary recuperation only occurs as late as 1996, with the long-overdue reprinting of her poetic works in a modern edition.8 Straightforward access to the literary texts themselves, including additional material such as her outspoken 1926 lecture entitled ‘de Mim’, paved the way for a swift re-evaluation of her place in literary tradition: in 2002, René garay reclaims this artist as an important figure for our understanding of Portuguese modernism, in the very title he chose for his critical study.9 Twenty-first-century interest in Teixeira is further confirmed by the creation in 2005 of a website (http://www.europa.blogspot.com), named Europa after the literary magazine she directed in 1925, which is exclusively devoted to discussions of her works. In addition, her two 1927 novellas, published under the title of the first, Satânia, were finally reprinted in 2008.10 Last but not least, in an unprecedented canonizing move, Fernando Cabral Martins’s Dicionário de Fernando Pessoa e do Modernismo Português contains two separate entries on Judith Teixeira, one on her works, the other on the magazine Europa.

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despite significant progress in terms of the belated recognition of Teixeira, much remains to be done to retrieve women writers from the periphery of Portuguese modernism, not least in terms of close textual analysis. Accordingly, this paper begins by brief ly mapping out a literary context where women were still predominantly the imagined Other, so as to illustrate more concretely the assumptions surrounding the discursive space available to women as creators. It then engages more extensively with Teixeira’s work and additionally brings in espanca, in order to show their points of convergence and divergence with a more f luid ‘modernist’ landscape than had been acknowledged until recently. Since Portuguese modernism itself unquestionably undergoes significant mutations and permutations over a period of just over two decades, a useful starting point for our purposes is Sá-Carneiro’s early masterpiece A Confissão de Lúcio (1914).11 This novella symptomatically showcases two contrasting representations of women. On the one hand, the first chapter foregrounds a f lamboyant female artist, a nameless American woman whose bold avant-garde theories and artistic practice leave the first person narrator, Lúcio, and his friend, the poet Ricardo, mesmer ized. Her artistic manifesto is simply articulated as ‘A voluptuosidade é uma arte’ [Voluptuousness is an art form].12 Her embodiment in a theatrically sexual ized dance/performance is breathtaking, and is subsequently referred to as ‘Orgia de Fogo’ [Orgy of Fire], a name that conceivably points to the spiritual transmutation of the materiality of the body into art. Her lesbianism is made explicit both in real life and on stage, heightening her exotic and foreign aura. Her presence, even by the standards of bohemian artistic Paris,13 is completely out of the ordinary and, after her groundbreaking experimental show, her trail is lost, perhaps suggesting that true art moves in a different plane. It may well be that Sá-Carneiro’s real-life model for this character was Isadora duncan, who, as we shall see, is praised as an inspirational figure by Teixeira one decade later, in her 1926 lecture. Certainly, duncan’s assertion that the body of the dancer ‘is simply the luminous manifestation of his soul’,14 could — if one disregards her use of the universalizing masculine pronoun — provide an apposite explanation of the aims of the performance staged by the American woman. It also calls to mind Ricardo’s own search for the Beyond and the materialization of his soul into a female body. The other woman featured in A Confissão de Lúcio is Ricardo’s sphinx-like wife, Marta. At the close of the novella, we find out that the demiurgic Ricardo created her as a work of art, in a successful embodiment of his soul. She is his crown ing artistic achievement, but as such completely devoid of an independent existence and thought. effectively, she is a means to an end, a bridge between two men.15 As a result, only the model of the nameless American artist, not that of the excessively silent Marta, may afford a subject position to early twentieth-century Portuguese women artists, albeit a problematic one, since it equates a priori female creativity with monstrous and excessive libidinal energies. However controversial this model of agency may appear to be, in her poetry Teixeira does not shy away from appropriating (whether consciously or not) some of the defining characteristics the foreign nameless ‘Americana fulva’, including the insistence on the theme of voluptuousness as embodied art, the carefree f launting of an alternative sexuality

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and an extravagant appearance (for instance her luxuriant hair described as ‘fulvo’ in colour). The erotic ambience created by Teixeira thus bears many parallels with that conjured up by Sá-Carneiro in the fin-de-siècle Parisian setting of his A Confissão de Lúcio.16 In order to understand Teixeira’s artistic project, it is necessary to consider further her own thoughts about the fraught relationship between artistic geniuses and society, outlined in her lecture ‘de Mim’. Her opening lines allude openly to the scandal caused by her three volumes of poetry, but only in order to turn the tables on her detractors by suggesting that, as far as she is concerned, appalled reactions are merely a measure of her superior worth. She remains therefore adamant in her refusal of any limitations which society may seek to impose on artistic practice: ‘não sei cantar os amores débeis. Adoro o Sol, amo a Cor, quero a Chama, bendigo a Força, exalta-me o Sangue, embriaga-me a Violência, deliro com a Luta, sonho com os gritos rebeldes do Mar!’ [I know not how to sing feeble loves. I adore the Sun, I love Colour, I want Flames, I praise energy, I am exalted by Blood, I am intoxicated by Violence, I am inf lamed by Strife, I dream of the rebellious cries of the Sea!].17 These assertions align her closely with some of Álvaro de Campos’s famous ref lections in ‘Apontamentos para uma estética não-Aristotélica’, first published in the literary magazine Athena only a couple of years previously (1924– 25), where he had argued for the importance of ‘força’ over traditional beauty in modernist aesthetics. Teixeira does not cite Campos at any point in the course of the lecture, but she is certainly familiar with futurist premises. For instance, she cites Valentine de Saint-Point ‘A luxúria é uma força’,18 expanding on Saint-Point’s statement in her Manifeste de la femme futuriste as follows: ‘na verdade, a luxúria é uma força. Vive em todos nós, comanda os todos os nossos gestos! Inconsciente e por isso torpe nos inconscientes, sagrada, ordenadora e directiva nos responsáveis, nos iluminados!’ [in truth, lust is a strength. It lives inside all of us, it directs all our movements! It is unconscious and therefore contemptible in those devoid of consciousness, but a sacred, organizing and guiding principle in those who are responsible, the illuminated!].19 In other words, lust can be experienced on an instinctive, primitive level but, whenever channelled by artistic inspiration, it reaches a heightened level of sacred understanding. It is clear that Teixeira includes herself amongst the select few, enlightened artists who, as Oscar Wilde famously put it, have nothing to declare except their genius. This is why, for her as for other exceptional artists, ‘a natureza não basta, é certo’ [nature is not sufficient, to be sure].20 Although she is here drawing on some of Oscar Wilde’s declarations to support her argument (he is mentioned three times in the course of the lecture), this statement also brings to mind Sá-Carneiro’s wellknown rhetorical question in his poem ‘Partida’: ‘A vida, a natureza, que são para o artista? Coisa alguma’ [What are life and nature to the artist? Absolutely nothing].21 Her impetus to go beyond accepted aesthetic practices and existing reality affiliates her with a time-honoured conception of the (male) artist as inspired visionary, but may also align her with an almost surrealist willingness to tap into the unconscious, given her strife towards the artistic articulation of initially unconscious motifs:

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‘nesses momentos encontro-me num estado de beleza particular em que certos motivos psíquicos do meu mundo interior se agitam inconscientes dentro de minha razão lúcida e consciente’ [In those moments, I find myself in a peculiar state of beauty in which certain psychological motives of my inner world stir unconsciously within my conscious, lucid reason].22 early on in her lecture, Teixeira had asserted that ‘desta minha alta concepção dos processos morais da existência, desta minha singular lealdade de “afirmar”, nasceu, pois, o desacordo entre mim e a Maioria’ [From this sublime notion of the moral processes of existence, from this singular commitment of mine to ‘standing firm’, was thus born the disagreement between myself and the Majority].23 A few pages later, she returns to this point, developing at length the notion of dissonance between the artist and the masses, and concluding that ‘a concepção do artista tem de ficar sempre em desacordo com o sentir da Maioria’ [the artistic ideal has to remain forever in disagreement with the opinions of the Majority] (italics in the original).24 In support of her ideas, she cites twice Francisco Lagreca, one of the contributors to the Brazilian ‘Semana de Arte Moderna’ in 1922,25 as well as two of her own unorthodox poems, ‘Flores de Cactus’ (from Decadência) and ‘Ilusão’ (from Nua). Her artistic lineage, therefore, may stem from nineteenth-century decadence, but she unmistakably belongs to the twentieth-century avant-garde, whose modernity she extols ‘neste século de audácia’ [in this century of daringness].26 For Teixeira, the twentieth-century can be defined as follows: ‘herdou o espírito de Oscar Wilde e dos Medicis, escutou os ritmos da poesia plástica de Renée Vivien e viu despir-se Isadora duncan sob o céu estrelado de Paris’ [it inherited the spirit of Oscar Wilde and of the Medicis, it listened to the rhythms of the f luid poetry of Renée Vivien and it saw Isadora duncan undressing under the starry sky of Paris].27 The range of (foreign) artists she cites in the same sentence clearly shows her to be eclectic and ‘modern’ in her sensibilities and tastes, as well as unconventional in her artistic preferences (and indeed sexual identifications, since Wilde and Vivien were both homosexuals, while duncan was bisexual). For Teixeira, pushing back boundaries is the only worthwhile way forward, ‘é a outra vida da nossa vida que [...] nos salva da vida de toda a gente’ [it is the other life of our life, which saves us from living the life of everyone],28 reinforcing once more her supercilious dismissal of accusations of immorality as a mere ‘rumor’ [background noise]. Accordingly, as she gears herself towards a lengthy conclusion, she proudly sides with ‘os exóticos, os futuristas, os doidos’ [the exotics, the futurists, the lunatics] (in italics in the text) against the complacent certainties and dogmatism of the mediocre bourgeoisie ‘impermeável às projecções luminosas dos cérebros cultos e inteligentes’ [impervious to the luminous projections of intelligent and cultured minds],29 whom she goes on to wittily ridicule over another two pages. Sadly, ‘os exóticos, os futuristas, os doidos’ did not see it fit to welcome her within their ranks, leaving her in a no man’s land, despite her obvious points of contact with modernism. As such, we must bear in mind, especially in a Portuguese context, ‘the need to avoid falling into too ready a belief that women have historically enjoyed access on equal terms with men to [...] aesthetic transgression of the sexual symbolic. [...] neither does the connection between gender transgression or “deviance” and

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genius work equally for men and women’.30 Abundant proof of this is the canonical recognition granted to Pessoa’s versatile embodiments and, more recently, the celebration of Álvaro de Campos’s bisexual identity,31 while conversely, until recently, Teixeira’s name was completely exorcized from the Portuguese literary canon on account of her ‘abject’ sexuality. It is enlightening in this respect to compare and contrast Teixeira’s critical reception with that of Florbela espanca on the one hand, and the gay António Botto on the other. In the wake of the 1923 scandal, Botto had staunch defenders (Pessoa, for instance, whose article in the May 1922 issue of Contemporanea had sparked off the controversy, promptly came to his friend’s rescue, albeit under the guise of Álvaro de Campos). Interestingly, the few voices in the press that attempted to stand up for Teixeira mostly played the gender card: ‘de mais a mais, trata-se de uma senhora...’ [moreover, we are talking about a lady...].32 While Botto continued to have prominent public admirers, such as Régio, Teixeira’s work continued to be met with insults. It is true that Castelo de Sombras, published a mere six months after the scandal, was mostly spared condemnation, but the backlash came with a vengeance with the appearance of her third collection Nua. Poemas de Bizâncio escritos que foram por Judith Teixeira, in June 1926: she found herself being virtually demonized in some quarters.33 Florbela, by contrast, who also published her second collection, Livro de Soror Saudade in January 1923, precisely at the same time as Decadência, and who was also accused of immorality by some critics,34 managed to escape unscathed from the heavy-handed censoring of March 1923. Furthermore, over a period of time, espanca’s place in literature history became firmly secured as the exception that confirms the norm, despite her seeming lack of affiliation to the cult Geração de Orpheu. Why is it then that Teixeira’s Decadência and Castelo de Sombras, which were both published in the same year, 1923 — and in fact overlapped in terms of composition, as is clear from the date ascribed to individual poems within each collection — could be so differently judged? And why was espanca’s Livro de Soror Saudade not singled out for censoring too? The reluctant approval granted to both Castelo de Sombras and Livro de Soror Saudade must be understood as the tacit acceptance of a slightly less transgressive content than that of Decadência, comparatively speaking: brief ly put, these two collections contain overtly sensual imagery, to be sure, but they explore female desire of the heterosexual variety. In particular, the sonnets of Livro de Soror Saudade, despite constituting in effect a trajectory of empowerment, could still at first sight be taken as continuing to act as, to quote espanca’s contemporary Virginia Woolf, f lattering ‘looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of ref lecting the figure of man at twice its natural size’.35 The collection’s presiding organizing image, that of the mystical Soror Saudade, was after all acknowledged as the brainwave of a male poet, Américo durão.36 As for Castelo de Sombras, in an interview in Revista Portuguesa, Teixeira showed herself to be confident that this collection would prove less inf lammatory than the first.37 Yet, in the light of her subsequent trajectory, it is unlikely that she would have simply decided to stick to a more socially acceptable articulation of sexuality for strategic reasons: indeed a mere six months after the publication of Castelo de Sombras, she went ahead with the second edition of Decadência, printed at the

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end of december 1923.38 One could argue instead that Decadência and Castelo de Sombras function as diptychs, consciously organized as separate entities in order to explore different ways of being. If so, one might speculate that Teixeira found the sonnet-form restrictive, unlike espanca who clearly thrived on pushing its boundaries to their utmost limit, through anaphoras, daring enjambements, paratax and some memorable series of asyndeton. Indeed, Teixeira’s trademark pieces tend to be in irregular blank verse, which goes hand in hand with the use of rows of dashes to indicate oneiric moments, fragmentations, and discontinuities in time à la Sá-Carneiro. By contrast, in Castelo de Sombras, the predominant confinement within the castle-like sonnet arguably mirrored the taming of polymorphous libidinal excess and/or fantasies. If Decadência and Castelo de Sombras explore different faces of the same coin, where the latter engages with a slightly more socially acceptable treatment of sexuality, doesn’t this, one might ponder, fit in with the fact that plurality and fragmentation within the self are modernist themes par excellence, as evidenced by the extreme case of Pessoa? In that connection, it is telling that one of the poems in Decadência is entitled ‘A Outra’. It begins: ‘A Outra, a tarada, | aquela que vive em mim’, [The Other, the madwoman, | the one who lives inside me],39 thereby proposing an image of the poet’s alternative other as a deranged and dangerous woman who, crucially, is nevertheless living within her. espanca’s well-known posthumous sonnet ‘Loucura’ engages with a similar theme, in this case not just of internal duality, but downright multiplicity: the poet is plagued by ‘pesadelos de insónia, ébrios de anseio’ [sleepless nightmares, drunken with desire] and thus condemned to the ‘mal’ [disorder] of having many different facets of personality erupting within her; ‘Tantas almas a rir dentro da minha!’ [so many souls laughing inside mine!].40 The connection with hysteria could be productively explored at this stage, underscoring a further link with Pessoa of course, but suffice to note that the theme of decadence, a breeding ground for hysteria in its various configurations, is much in evidence throughout Decadência, as foregrounded by its very title. Furthermore, although Teixeira does not cite António nobre, possibly the most inf luential Portuguese nineteenth-century decadent poet, and also a notable precursor of hysteric tendencies, she displays many affinities with him. By contrast, espanca’s early work develops in explicit dialogue with nobre. In a modernist context, decadence was famously epitomized in ‘Opiário’ by Campos. There are echoes of a similar ambience at times in Decadência. In her opening piece, the sonetilho ‘Predestinada’, Teixeira portrayed herself as being an ‘alma penada’ [a doomed soul] and ‘o Castigo fatal | dum negro crime ancestral’ [the fatal Punishment | of a dark ancestral crime], as if condemned to atone for the sins of others, including those of previous generations. This was a feeling shared by Campos, albeit communicated with a heavy dose of irony in ‘Opiário’: ‘ando expiando um crime numa mala, | Que um avô meu cometeu por requinte’ [I am expiating a crime in a case | that one of my forefathers committed exquisitely]. Teixeira depicts a feeling of dissolution in two further sonetilhos, ‘Fim’ and ‘Ruínas’, perhaps not coincidentally placed either side of ‘A Outra’. Campos’s sense of

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displacement was linked to a (masculine) loss of empire and purpose. ‘Fim’ (the poem first published in the magazine Contemporanea in 1922), evokes an atmosphere of doom, in which her corrosive feeling of ‘fim de raça’, like that of her more celebrated contemporary, can only be assuaged by ‘orgias de morfina’ [orgies of morphine].41 But like Campos who goes on to ‘sentir tudo de todas as maneiras’ [to feel everything in every possible way], if Teixeira feels weighed down in the dismal present, in her poetic imaginings she can create a space of freedom. Part way through this collection, in the poem symptomatically entitled ‘Liberta’,42 her escape is mediated by an unidentified male painter, although ambiguously so perhaps, as the last stanza evokes ‘orgias de estranha cor | de que tu fosses somente | o extraordinário inventor’ [strangely coloured orgies | of which you might merely be | the extraordinary inventor] (my italics).43 elsewhere decadence, as envisaged by Teixeira, becomes primarily a foil whereby the most unconventional sexual scenarios can be explored in dream-like visions, something the futurist Campos would also engage in extensively. A case in point is her ‘Perfis decadentes’, a homoerotic reworking of a ‘noivado do sepulcro’ union,44 between ‘dois corpos esculpidos em marfim’ [two bodies sculpted in ivory], who come to life and are revealed halfway through the poem as ‘femininos’ [feminine]. Female freedom to ‘sentir tudo de todas as maneiras’ is most controversially enacted in the poem ‘A Minha Amante’ [My female lover]. given the female place of enunciation, the sexual impropriety of this latter title alone draws attention to the fact that Teixeira was appropriating what would normally have been a male desiring perspective, thereby publicly displaying a case of ‘sexual inversion’ (to draw on contemporary terminology, used by Pessoa amongst others). As Judith Butler highlights, ‘The heterosexual imperative enables certain sexed identifications and forecloses and/or disavows other identifications.’45 It should be recognized that, historically, in the case of a woman, homosexuality was even more disreputable than male homosexuality. Whereas the latter has often been aestheticized throughout times as further proof of genius, relationships between women were seen as a threat to one of the central tenets of heterosexuality, the imperative of biological reproduction, in a way that those involving two men were not. Thus, it can be postulated that the reason Decadência met with such repudiation was the articulation of lesbian desire, whether actual or imagined. By the end of the collection, in ‘Última Frase’, Teixeira unequivocally asserts her poetic emancipation in a short three-line poem, ‘Minha alma ergueu-se para além de ti... | Tive ânsia de mais alto | abri as asas, parti!’ [My soul rose beyond you... | I yearned to go higher | unfolding my wings, I departed!],46 in a way that may be consciously offering a succinct reworking of Sá-Carneiro’s famous artistic manifesto in ‘Partida’ to push back boundaries. Furthermore, it foreshadows Florbela espanca’s vision of her own quasi-celestial assumption in ‘Soneto VII’, as well as her stated ambition in ‘Mais Alto’ of climbing ‘mais alto, sim! [...] | Até sair de mim’ [higher, oh yes [...] | until I break out of my self ].47 In espanca’s case, the rejection of the norm led to sacrilege of a religious order: appropriation of imagery associated with the Virgin Mary.

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By 1926, in Nua, perhaps her most self-aware composition, Teixeira becomes evermore sophisticated in the way she plays with gender ambiguity from the outset. Indeed Nua starts off with a dedication which enacts an extraordinary intertextual dialogue with eça de Queirós: ‘Aos braços delgados, e brancos, e nus da minha Quimera em cujas curvas de Perturbação e de Sonho musical, eu descobri o ritmo selvagem e sonoro de viver!’ [To the slender, white, naked arms of my Chimera, in whose confusing curves of musical dream, I discovered the wild and resonant rhythm of living!].48 eça de Queirós had famously stated in his epigraph to A Relíquia ‘Sobre a nudez forte da verdade, o manto diáfano da fantasia’ [over the stark nakedness of truth, the diaphanous cloak of fantasy]. More to the point, in the landmark Lisbon statue produced by Teixeira Lopes and placed in 1903 in the Largo Barão de Quintela, Queirós is represented holding in his arms a life-size woman, whose diaphanous cloak has come undone, revealing her naked body in its entirety. She is widely deemed to embody the allegory of Truth. Teixeira’s dedication to her own Fantasy, which is ambiguously anthropormophized, allows for the discovery/ uncovering, through poetic imagination, of a materialized female body, unreal yet simultaneously true to life. This sense of the uncanny is compounded by the recurrent descriptions of naked female statues in Teixeira’s poems (for instance in ‘A estátua’ or in ‘Ilusão’), which often become endowed with life in dreamlike sequences. Were this unorthodox dedication not sufficient, the next page features a oneline epigraph in French by the writer Renée Vivien: ‘Je rêve d’amour et je dors solitaire’ [I dream of love yet sleep in solitude].49 Taken out of context, the line may be simply interpreted as the love lament of a forlorn or dissatisfied female. In point of fact, however, Vivien’s poem, entitled ‘Sur le rythme saphique’ [In Sapphic Rhythm], takes its cue from a famous short poem by Sappho, which she quotes by way of epigraph.50 Moreover, Vivien’s modern amplification then proceeds to depict same-sex love far more explicitly than the greek original. The ambiguities inherent to Teixeira’s dedication and epigraph thus function as a conscious prelude to the destabilization of gender assumptions enacted throughout the thirty-five poems that make up this collection. Through the playful alternation between (homo)erotic imagery and a number of poems where a male addressee is explicitly invoked, as well as several pieces in which the lover is only equivocally addressed as ‘meu amor’, the poet destabilizes heterosexual normativity. Clearly, in the wake of the 1923 scandal, further female poetic exploration of ‘sexual inversion’ was likely to re-ignite controversy. It is hardly surprising that, when the magazine Contemporanea announced the forthcoming publication of Nua,51 it chose to exemplify its literary merits with ‘A Cor dos Sons’,52 a daring sensual poem which interpellates a male lover, and explores the interrelated themes of mutual desire, seduction and consummation. By contrast, shortly after, in her own lecture ‘de Mim’, when Teixeira chose two of her poems as illustrations, she foregrounded her sexed identifications as both heterosexual (‘Flores de Cactus’ from Decadência) and homosexual (‘Ilusão’ from Nua), in effect proclaiming her refusal to foreclose and/or completely disavow other possible identifications, however unacceptable these may have been considered to be.

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Both Teixeira and espanca’s poetic treatments of female desire were, albeit for differing reasons, unprecedented in scope at the time. But their daring sexual imagery, whether celebrated or vilified, diverted attention away from pieces where the historical supremacy of patriarchal discourses comes undone in more subtle ways. A seldom-discussed sonnet by Florbela espanca, for instance, is the posthumous ‘navios-fantasmas’ (p. 263). Yet it is remarkable for the way it reworks and disrupts masculine images of the nation, in keeping with modernist Pessoan themes, one might add. Its starting point is the poet enjoying a cigarette as she recalls her companion’s words (both spoken, ‘o que disseste’ and written, ‘o que me escreveste’). The image of a smoker who is female is transgressive and stresses espanca’s disregard for convention. It unequivocally foregrounds her as a freespirited woman both in real life and in literary terms. The smoke lingering in the air conjures up memories of the past, at first presumed to be simply autobiographical in scope. Yet, by the end of the second stanza, the unexpected reference to a lost ship, insofar as it is linked with maritime imagery, instinctively calls to mind the shadow of a more collective national past: ‘a lembrança de tudo o que me deste | Passa como o navio que perdeste | no arabesco fantástico do fumo...’ [the memory of all that you gave me | passes by just like the ship you lost | in the fanciful arabesque of smoke...].53 Ironically, the travelling back in time becomes a way of evoking not only the demise of her past, but also a loss squarely attributed to the male lover, embodied in the male ‘navio que perdeste’. In the course of her transgressive act of smoking, the latter literally seems to dissolve into thin air, as indicated by the ellipsis at the end of the stanza. The first tercet offers a close-up of yet more ships, now a f leet, but an increasingly surreal one, described as ‘navios-fantasmas’ [ghostly ships], ‘sem velas e sem mastros’ [devoid of sails and masts]. Bearing in mind that the Portuguese sea voyages and discoveries, by and large, would have been exclusively the preserve of male crews, espanca is here (re)presenting the empire-building enterprise as bound for imminent shipwreck. In the final tercet, the ships are engaged in the task of fetching her in what seems like a previous incarnation, as a ‘noiva-menina’ [childbride]. This anachronistic image embodies the many young princesses sacrificed through mar riage in order to further the national interests of the Portuguese Crown. The misguided ships become described as (grammatically feminine) ‘doidas caravelas’ [foolish caravels], their lack of purpose being further underscored by the chiasmus in ‘sem mastros e sem velas’, which suggests not only irreparable physical damage, but also arguably emasculation figuratively speaking. As they seek to locate her in what is qualified as an illusory or perhaps non-existent point of origin, ‘ao ignoto País da minha infância...’ [the unknown country of my child hood], the increasingly disjointed sentences, which culminate in the ellipsis at the end of the final stanza, suggest the utter impossibility of completing this task successfully. ‘navios-fantasmas’ begins with an image of Florbela as a modern emancipated woman, as various layers of male discourse become ever more tenuous, only to conclude with images that undo previous historical certainties and scenarios: the inexistent fathom-ships are unequal to the task of finding the pure ‘child-bride’. In

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other words, the empowerment of the female poet, in the here and now, stems from her ability to realize that the historical foundations of male discourse lack substance; they are not solid realities. The sonnet shares thematic affinities with Pessoa, evoking amongst other things the imaginary ship which crosses the landscape in his celebrated ‘Chuva oblíqua’, but also the poem which begins ‘Ó naus felizes’. Just as tantalizingly, Teixeira’s collection Nua has already featured a poem foregrounding the image of a woman smoking, entitled ‘O fumo do meu cigarro’ [The smoke of my cigarette].54 Teixeira also offers a dissident take on national discourse, as she unexpectedly concludes her poem by dwelling on the image of ‘A duquesa de Brabante’. This is an intertextual reference to ‘A Senhora de Brabante’, a famous piece by the nineteenth-century poet gomes Leal, considered by some to be a precursor of modernism, and to whom Pessoa, for one, dedicated a sonnet. gomes Leal had depicted a duchess guilty of the heinous ‘crime’ of producing ‘um filho horroroso e jamais visto! | — Raquítico, enfezado, excepcional’ [a hideous son as never seen before | — Puny, stunted, exceptional].55 Moreover, even after his death, she continued to mourn the ‘monstro’, in a way that was presumably entirely contrary to the healthy survival of the nation. Significantly, Teixeira’s poem does not mention the monster-like child at all: instead it powerfully conjures up the ghost of the duchess: ‘ergueu-se, rácica e impiedosa’ [she stood up, thoroughbred and merciless], a symbol of ‘rebeldia | fidalga e sem remédio’ [aristocratic, incurable | rebellion].56 The duquesa de Brabante, not unlike Teixeira, is the embodi ment of a woman deemed to be perverse for failing to observe social norms, one who could not or would not (re)produce what expected of her. Her ghostly figure was described by gomes Leal with perverse fascination as doomed to haunt the collective national imaginary. For Teixeira however, she does not stand merely as a symbol of the return of the repressed, but rather as a tangible embodiment of uncompromising dissidence and irreducible difference. Both Teixeira and espanca, then, display their awareness of how modernity necessarily entails appropriating man-made images of the past for their own purposes. Yet, it is perhaps not a coincidence that in both these poems they reveal how their self-styled images as modern women ultimately left them inhabiting a no-man’s-land, an imaginary nomadic/ex-centric space. To sum up, in their multifaceted poetic journeys, from the precarious cultural position overwhelmingly assigned to Portuguese female artists in the first quarter of the twentieth century, both Florbela espanca and Judith Teixeira challenged assumptions of sexual orthodoxy, testing previously uncharted waters through the conscious foregrounding of their variously embodied subjectivities. The heterosexual desire explored so compellingly in espanca’s sonnets may have been disruptive, but as the twentieth century unfolded it became gradually more socially acceptable. even at the time of original publication, this brand of desire was considered less threatening to instituted social norms than the depiction of the desiring (and desired) female naked body, so vividly visualized by Judith Teixeira in her first and third collections. The homosexual body of works, when engendered by a female creator, became scapegoated by the monstrously visible site of social disorder and, as such, warranted complete erasure.

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These two writers, especially when considered together, thus raise significant questions for a gendered politics of the reception of women writers in early twentieth-century Portugal. Indeed, there is a case for wondering whether the grudging incorporation into the canon of espanca as the sole ‘exceptional woman’ of that generation may have even been, perversely, a kind of pre-emptive strike: a lesser evil, so to speak, than Teixeira. As a representative ‘exceptional woman’, the role ascribed to espanca for many decades was to ‘guarantee the unity of collective national consciousness and hegemonic cultural memory, precisely by marking its limits, as the solitary exception[s], the necessary reminder[s] of the “others” that the system normally excludes’.57 One decade into the twentieth-first century, as the landscape of modernism is shifting to show new gendered configurations and intersections, the ‘outra[s]’ who dared to engender in their writings the other(s) within, deserve today the simple poetic justice of being remembered for their ingenious takes on the manifold différances of modernity. notes to Chapter 8 1. Irene Lisboa, Solidão, 2 vols (Lisbon: Presença, 1991), ii, 156–57. 2. ellen Sapega, ‘Para uma Aproximação Feminista do Modernismo Português’, Discursos: Estudos de Língua e Cultura Portuguesa, 5 (1993), 67–79. 3. Renata Soares Junqueira, Florbela Espanca: Uma Estética da Teatralidade (São Paulo: UneSP, 2003). 4. Bridget elliott and Jo-Ann Wallace, Women Writers and Artists: Modernist (Im)positionings (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 15. 5. Paradoxically Pessoa’s own virtuoso adoption of the sonnet-genre in a series like ‘Passos da Cruz’ is not perceived as diminishing his modernist credentials in any way. 6. Antologia de Poemas Portugueses Modernos, ed. by Fernando Pessoa and António Botto (Coimbra: editorial nobel, 1944). 7. See Patrício Ferrari’, Fernando Pessoa as a Writing-Reader: Some Justifications for a Complete digital edition of his Marginalia’, Portuguese Studies, 24 (2008), 69–114. 8. Judith Teixeira, Poemas (Lisbon: &etc, 1996). All citations will be from this edition. 9. René garay, Judith Teixeira e o Modernismo Sáfico Português (Lisbon: Universitária editora, 2002). 10. Judith Teixeira, Satânia: Novelas (Lisbon: edições Varicelas, 2008). The title of the second short story is ‘Insaciada’. 11. Mário de Sá-Carneiro, A Confissão de Lúcio (Lisbon: Ática, 1973). 12. Ibid., p. 28. 13. Homosexuality was more visible in Paris than in england, as French laws did not prohibit it. 14. Isadora duncan, My Life (London: Victor gollancz, 1928). 15. Cláudia Pazos Alonso, ‘displacement and Condensation: A Freudian Analysis of A Confissão de Lúcio’, Journal of Romance Studies (forthcoming 2011). 16. This should not cause undue surprise, since in an interview in Revista Portuguesa Teixeira lists Sá-Carneiro amongst her favourite writers. Teixeira, Poemas, p. 237. 17. Teixeira, ‘de Mim’, in Poemas, p. 206. 18. For an english translation of this manifesto, see Gender in Modernism, New Geographies, Complex Intersections, ed. by Bonnie Kime Scott (Urbana: University of Illinois, 2007), p. 307. For a Portuguese translation, see Manifesto da Mulher Futurista, trans. by Célia Henriques with an introduction by Fernando Cabral Martins (Lisbon: &etc, 2009). 19. Teixeira, ‘de Mim’, in Poemas, p. 206. 20. Ibid., p. 217. 21. Mário de Sá-Carneiro, Obra Poética de Mário de Sá-Carneiro (Lisbon: Presença, 1985). 22. Teixeira, ‘de Mim’, in Poemas, p. 217.

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23. Ibid., p. 206. 24. Ibid., p. 212. 25. Lagreca published Apologia da Arte Moderna in 1923. 26. Teixeira, ‘de Mim’ in Poemas, p. 218. 27. Ibid. 28. Ibid. 29. Ibid., p. 222. 30. Hilary Owen and Cláudia Pazos Alonso, Antigone’s Daughters? Gender, Genealogy and the Politics of Authorship in 20th-Century Portuguese Women’s Writing (Bucknell Press, forthcoming 2010). 31. For further details, see Anna Klobucka and Mark Sabine, ‘Introduction: Pessoa’s Bodies’, in their edited collection Embodying Pessoa: Corporaeality, Gender, Sexuality (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008). 32. Teixeira, Poemas, p. 235. 33. The 1996 edition of Poemas usefully reproduces press articles, alongside a particularly vicious caricature and parody of her in Sempre Fixe. These give us an idea of the scale of the debate as well as the grounds for her de-authorization (pp. 245–51). 34. For further details see Cláudia Pazos Alonso, Imagens do Eu (Lisbon: Imprensa nacional–Casa da Moeda, 1997), pp. 30–32. 35. Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (London: Penguin, 2000), p. 37. 36. For an extensive discussion of espanca’s engagement with and subversion of male canonicity, including her reworkings of the image of the virginal nun, see Owen and Pazos Alonso, Antigone’s Daughters? (Chapter 2). 37. Teixeira, Poemas, pp. 236–38. 38. By all accounts, only this edition survives. Therefore, were it not for Teixeira’s defiant streak, the contents of Decadência might have been lost forever, save a few isolated pieces published in newspapers. 39. Ibid., p. 45. 40. Florbela espanca, Obras Completas, 6 vols (Lisbon: dom Quixote, 1985–86), iii, 258. Further references will be to this edition. 41. Teixeira, Poemas, p. 44. 42. The thematic proximity between Teixeira and espanca is underscored by the use of identical titles over the years, ‘Liberta’ but also for instance ‘A Vida’, ‘Ruínas’, and ‘Volúpia’. At the very least, the two writers knew of each other, since Teixeira published the eponymous ‘Charneca em Flor’ in Europa 3. 43. Teixeira, Poemas, p.57. 44. Soares de Passos, see Poesia Romântica Portuguesa, ed. by Álvaro Manuel Machado (Lisbon: Imprensa nacional–Casa da Moeda, 1982), pp. 222–24. 45. Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 3. 46. Teixeira, Poemas, p. 72. 47. espanca, Obras Completas, p. 197 48. Teixeira, Poemas, p. 117. 49. Ibid., p. 119. 50. The epigraph reads : La lune s’est couchée, ainsi que les Pléiades; il est minuit, l’heure passe, et je dors solitaire’. For further details on Vivien, see diana Holmes, French Women Writers (London: Athlone Press, 1994). 51. See in Contemporanea, 3rd series, 1, p. 41 52. Teixeira, Poemas, pp. 137–39. 53. espanca, Obras Completas, p. 263. 54. Teixeira, Poemas, pp. 131–33. 55. gomes Leal, Claridades do Sul, ed. by José Carlos Seabra Pereira (Lisbon: Assírio & Alvim, 2000), pp. 243–45. 56. Teixeira, Poemas, p. 133. 57. Owen and Pazos Alonso, Antigone’s Daughters? (Chapter 1).

CHAPter 9

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António Ferro: Modernism and Politics José Barreto Journalist, writer and man of culture, António Ferro (1895–1956) is referred to as a figure of modernism in twentieth-century Portuguese literary history, but he is better known and more studied for his political activities in the second half of his life: the famous interviews with Salazar, which promoted the image of the dictator in 1932–33, and most of all his work regarding the new State’s propaganda and cultural policy from 1933 to 1950, when he headed the Secretariat for National Propaganda (SPN — Secretariado da Propaganda Nacional). Ferro’s literary output includes poetry, commentary, short stories, novels and plays and was relatively short-lived: it started at the end of the First World War and came to an end around 1925. When compared with works of other contemporary modernists, his 1917–25 literary work has not particularly drawn the attention of researchers either. Portugal’s leading literary review, Colóquio/Letras, has never published a single essay or article about him since it was launched in 1971, apart from a short book review. Books about Ferro published in the last thirty years basically focus on his work for the SPn, and his political background.1 There has been a photobiography published by his family, but only the first volume of the planned complete works by Ferro ever came out. It has been repeatedly suggested that this lack of interest, which some people consider unfair, could result from a dislike for the writer derived from the position he held in the dictator’s government in the 1930s and 40s.2 In fact, to consider Ferro a major literary figure in the Portuguese modernist movement (and even futurist) is a controversial matter and has never been convincingly established — and the terms in which some of Ferro’s contemporaries, himself included, upheld the view now sound absurdly exaggerated.3 The ambiguity was certainly increased by the vague, equivocal notion of what was meant by Portuguese ‘modernism’, a term used in the 1910s and 20s in a very broad sense and which remains imprecise to this day. JoséAugusto França, though he was talking mainly about the plastic arts, summed up problems with the concept of ‘modernism’ in the following way: [...] conceito polémico em 1915, integrado em 1930, ultrapassado dez anos depois, e jamais claramente definido. Para uns teve sabor mundano e elitista, para outros animava-o o fogo da criação, para outros, finalmente, tinha indesejável sabor revolucionário. necessariamente oposto ao gosto oficial

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José Barreto da 1ª República, naturalista quanto positivista, sofre recuperação no regime seguinte por via ilusória e precária, por ele sendo abandonado em nome dum nacionalismo cujos princípios ideológicos deviam estar para além de posições estéticas subordináveis [...].4 [[...] a polemical concept in 1915, politically integrated in 1930, outdated ten years later and never clearly defined. For some people it had a worldly and elitist f lavour, for others it was blessed by the fire of creativity, for others, finally, it had an unwanted revolutionary f lavour. necessarily opposed to the official taste of the First Republic, which was naturalist as much as positivist, the concept underwent an illusory and precarious appropriation by the following regime, which eventually abandoned it for the sake of a nationalism whose ideological principles should supplant any aesthetical position [...].]

In the case of young Ferro’s modernism, a predominant ‘worldly and elitist f lavour’ seems more applicable, together with what França calls, after Almada negreiros, Portuguese modernism’s trait of hesitating between a ‘way of being’ and a ‘way of dressing’, or better still, between a ‘modo’ [way] and a ‘moda’ [fashion].5 In a review of Ferro’s modernist writings reprinted in 1987, França argues that Ferro’s work gave Portuguese modernism ‘uma dimensão em certa medida mundana, algo superficial e banalizadora’ [a facet that is to a certain extent worldly, somewhat super ficial and trivializing], a quality that, in his opinion, was also necessary to consider in modern literature.6 Acknowledging Ferro’s gift as a phraseur, cultivator of paradoxes and portrayer of Lisbon’s petty bourgeois society, França thinks that Ferro identified, to a certain extent, with the Orpheu friends in their common aim ‘to reform urban mentality’. In another of his works, França mentions the 1926 ‘Inquérito aos escritores portugueses’ [Survey of Portuguese writers] that was organized by the Catholic nationalist writer, João Ameal, in the columns of the Diário de Notícias. giving voice, almost exclusively, to a gallery of acclaimed writers who were representatives of literary traditions and political conservatism, Ameal chose António Ferro as the only ‘authorized and legitimate representative of the new generation’ — thus excluding Fernando Pessoa and José Régio as presumably ‘illegitimate’ modernists. The ‘legitimate modernism’ that Ferro thus personified was fashioned by the aesthetic and political criteria of a traditionalist, João Ameal.7 Ferro and the Orpheu group It is not the purpose of this work to make a profound assessment of the place of Ferro’s literary work in the movement known as ‘Portuguese modernism’. The key figures of the movement were Mário de Sá-Carneiro, Fernando Pessoa, Santa-Rita and Almada negreiros, who were all connected to the beginnings of the Orpheu magazine, together with Souza-Cardoso, eduardo Viana, António Soares and others, and continued throughout the 1920s and 30s by the presencista group, the nucleus of the so-called ‘second modernism’. However, that Ferro has persistently been associated, and rather hastily, with the Orpheu ‘group’ and ‘movement’ deserves a few remarks, especially since the emergence of a theory that describes Ferro’s work in the new State’s cultural policies as meaning ‘Orpheu in power’.8

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Ferro being described as a ‘modernist’ invariably relies on the allegation that, besides his friendship with Mário de Sá-Carneiro, five years his elder and the pioneer of literary modernism in Portugal, Ferro was the ‘editor’ [publisher] of the Orpheu magazine in 1915, when he was only nineteen. This is literally true though misleading. In any case, it is not enough to prove that Ferro was part of the Orpheu group and much less that he identified with the magazine’s hypothetical ‘ideas’, ‘aesthetic ideals’ and even ‘cultural policy’ proposals — of which Ferro was allegedly the faithful depository and in time the great practical architect, according to his eulogist, António Quadros.9 This view is endorsed by another writer, who accepted that the ‘Política do espírito’ [Politics of the Spirit] of Salazar’s government, described as the personal work of Ferro, could really have had Orpheu ‘at its origin’.10 The most clamorous denial of such a theory, if there were none other, was the vehement and indignant reaction (although silenced by the censors) of Orpheu’s leading figure, Fernando Pessoa, to Ferro’s and Salazar’s public disclosure on 21 February 1935 of the principles and directives of the ‘Politics of the Spirit’.11 But let us examine the facts regarding the times of Orpheu. It has long been known, through testimonies left by Alfredo guisado and Fernando Pessoa, that as a young man Ferro had been chosen by the organizers of Orpheu to fill the position of the magazine’s mandatory ‘publisher’ — the person who was legally responsible for the publication — on the grounds that, as a minor, he would be ‘irresponsável’ [not answerable] in the eyes of the law. Pessoa thought that Ferro was then still ‘muito criança, social e paulicamente’ [very much a child, both socially and stylistically].12 Sá-Carneiro did not even ask Ferro beforehand if he would agree to be its publisher and simply added his name at the head of the magazine.13 Ferro did not contribute any work of his to the magazine as a writer, or as anything else. There is just a handwritten note of Pessoa’s saying that Ferro had found some subscribers.14 Quadros, who claimed without any evidence that Ferro was ‘one of the most active and talented members’ of the Orpheu group or movement,15 tried to solve the problem of his not having collaborated with the magazine by saying that ‘it would have come out in the following issues’.16 However, there is no evidence of this at all. On the contrary, the third issue of the magazine, which was actually composed but never went into print, failed to include any work of Ferro’s. It should also be said that Orpheu, as a group of artists, had no ‘ideals’ of its own, failed to display them in any collective document or manifesto, followed no specific aesthetic line, much less a philosophical or political one — which must be taken into account when people talk, as did Quadros, of the alleged ‘cultural policy that the Orpheu movement recommended’, and which Ferro, when he was older, was to have carried out.17 Pessoa described Orpheu’s literary trend as an endeavour to combine different Portuguese ‘modern tendencies’, ranging from saudosismo and post-symbolism to futurism, interseccionismo and sensacionismo.18 A declaration dated 1915 that Pessoa had written and which remained unpublished although it was meant to be signed publicly by Orpheu’s two directors (the ultra-individualistic Pessoa and Sá-Carneiro), rejected the idea that the artists of the group had some collective school, identity or ideology:

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José Barreto Os artistas do Orpheu pertencem cada um à escola da sua individualidade própria, não lhes cabendo portanto [...] designação alguma colectiva. As designações colectivas só pertencem aos sindicatos, aos agrupamentos com uma ideia só (que é sempre nenhuma).19 [each of the Orpheu artists belongs to the school of his own individuality, they do not therefore fall [...] under any collective designation. Collective designations are only for trade unions, groups with one sole idea (which always means none).]

If there were common characteristics that Pessoa claimed for the Orpheu group but which the magazine collaborators only partially ref lected, they were only ‘absolute originality’ and ‘cosmopolitanism’ or ‘internationalism’.20 Besides this, the clearest evidence that there was no aesthetic, philosophical or political unity in Orpheu is their divergences and disagreements, which resulted in a change of directors between the first and second issue and contributed, along with financial difficulties, to the sudden end of the project.21 Finally, we should remember the key episode of the satirical letter that Fernando Pessoa/Álvaro de Campos sent to the Lisbon daily newspaper, A Capital, on 6 July 1915, in which he objected to the newspaper’s repeated attacks on Orpheu’s ‘madhouse literature’. In this letter, the poet also rejoiced in a serious incident suffered a few days before by the Republican leader, Afonso Costa.22 The scandal caused by that blague among the Republicans had repercussions on Orpheu and led to several of its collaborators publicly drawing their support away from Pessoa/Campos and even keeping their distance from the magazine itself. Antonio Ferro’s own position, which he revealed in a letter to O Mundo, deserves a mention here. In his capacity as ‘publisher’, although merely perfunctory, he not only distanced himself from ‘those gentlemen’ at Orpheu while expressing the ‘greatest of admirations’ for Afonso Costa, but he also announced he was going to relinquish his position as publisher immediately.23 In short, the only definite and documented thing that Ferro did with regard to Orpheu, besides allowing his name to be used as the publisher of the first two issues was to contribute towards its end by distancing himself publicly from Pessoa, from the magazine and from the group. In comparison, Sá-Carneiro and Almada negreiros also disassociated themselves publicly from Pessoa’s letter but not from him or the Orpheu project. Subsequent to this affair, the modernist group around Pessoa and Almada no longer kept close to Ferro. The poetry that the young Ferro published between 1913 and 1916 clearly mirrors the gulf that separates him in terms of aesthetics, ‘originality’ and ‘cosmopolitanism’ from the Orpheu poets.24 Besides, Ferro had nothing to do with the publications that followed in the wake of Orpheu and which, to a certain degree, carried on its innovative style, such as Exílio and Centauro (1916) and Portugal Futurista (1917), which Pessoa and Almada were connected to. Much to the contrary, when he began as a journalist with O Século in 1918, Ferro made fun of the poets who frequented Café Martinho, the modernists’ usual haunt, and made allusions that were seemingly aimed at the poet of the heteronyms and Ode Triunfal as well as the Portugal Futurista magazine, which had come out some months before:

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Os poetas do Martinho! A sua Arte é um constante Carnaval... Andam todos mascarados, com receio que não lhes dêem pela falta de talento... [...] e os que posam de futuristas, que cantam a força, as máquinas, o Progresso, e andam para aí a apodrecer pelas esquinas?!...25 [Martinho Poets! Their Art is one constant Carnival...They all go about in masks in fear that their lack of talent will be noticed... [...] And those who pose as futurists, that sing in praise of strength, machinery, Progress, and are rotting away at street corners?!...]

In the 1920s, Pessoa and Almada negreiros occasionally collaborated with Ferro, who had, in the meantime, abandoned his republican sympathies and f lung himself successfully into political and cultural journalism. He wrote regularly for O Século (1918–20), O Jornal (1919), A Situação and O Imparcial (1920), Diário de Lisboa (1921) and, most of all, for the Ilustração Portuguesa magazine, which he ran for a semester in 1921–22. He modernized its graphics and greatly improved its literary and artistic contents, which included collaborations with Pessoa and Almada. In 1929, in an article called ‘Alguns precursores’, Ferro made an appraisal of the history of ‘modernism’ in Portugal, which was by then being renewed by the Presença group (1927–40). He examined and reviewed the group of ‘precursors’, including himself among them, and started off by quoting Sá-Carneiro (‘our Apollinaire’), Pessoa (‘the great philosopher of the new spirit in Portugal’), SantaRita, Souza-Cardoso and Almada negreiros.26 dividing the fifteen-year history of the ‘modern movement’ in three parts, he considered an initial period, which revolved around Orpheu, Sá-Carneiro and Pessoa, without forgetting to mention the ‘unanswerable publisher’, that is to say, himself. The second period, was marked by the Contemporanea magazine (1922–26), founded and run by José Pacheko. The third and last period Ferro kept for himself and his ‘Teatro novo’, a supposedly ‘art theatre’ or ‘vanguard theatre’ that he tried to launch in 1925 but which failed, apart from a play by Jules Romains and another by Pirandello. The very ambitious and much publicized project ended up acquiring the characteristics of a worldly event, an elitist attempt to import the ‘good taste’ of Parisian boulevards, the very opposite of a vanguard theatre experience.27 Ferro finished his pretentious appraisal in the 1929 article with his belief that the ‘modern movement’ had triumphed in Portugal, suggesting again his personal merit in the achievement, side by side with Sá-Carneiro, as if they were both founding fathers of the modernist movement: Triunfou o modernismo em Portugal? Suponho que sim, porque o sinto, cada vez mais, na própria alma de quem o combate. Toda essa mocidade que anda aí pelos jornais, pelas capas de livros, pela fisionomia gráfica das revistas, pela pintura, pelos cartazes, pelas montagens de certas peças ligeiras — é obra nossa, é o nosso inf luxo, a nossa respiração, é o braço de Sá-Carneiro ‘a dançar nos salões do vice-rei...’28 [did modernism triumph in Portugal? I believe so, because I feel it more and more in the very soul of those who fight it. All those young people out there in newspapers, doing book covers, graphics for magazines, painting, posters, staging certain light plays — that’s our work, it’s our inf lux, our breathe, it’s the arm of Sá-Carneiro ‘dancing in the salons of the viceroy...’]

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In the years between Orpheu and this self-praising assessment of modernism in 1929, Ferro began and virtually concluded his literary career. After publishing in the first half of the 1920s some books, conferences and a play, which he tried to make with as much ado as possible, he interrupted his writing career in order to concentrate on journalism and, much later on, politics. the seduction of Charismatic Leaders and Authoritarian rule during the Sidónio dictatorship, Ferro’s political position suffered a sudden downturn and he forever abandoned his sympathies for historical republican leaders, defeated in december 1917 by the military coup led by Sidónio Pais. In April 1918, this artillery officer and former Portuguese ambassador in Berlin was enthroned as President of the Republic by popular vote and without a challenger. Historians agree that he was a precursor of the authoritarian ideas and regime in Portugal if not of european fascism itself. The charismatic Sidónio was to fascinate the young Ferro in 1918, at a meeting Ferro much later described as a sort of epiphany. In fact, similarly to what happened with Fernando Pessoa, it was only after the assassination of Sidónio Pais (december 1918) and when the Messianic and Sebastianista myth growing about him as a martyr and saviour had grown into an ideological weapon against the República nova, that Ferro came forward with his inf lammatory writings in praise of the Sidónio dictatorship and accused the republican government, again in power, of his death. In 1918 Ferro was called up to do his military service, another experience he described as being decisive in his education. naval Commander Filomeno da Câmara, whom Sidónio appointed governor of Angola, took Ferro with him to Africa and a few months later made him general secretary of the colony’s government. Câmara, a future admirer of Mussolini and tireless plotter of military coups in 1925, 1926 and 1927, greatly inf luenced Ferro in Angola in 1918 and in Lisbon after the Sidónio dictatorship. According to what Ferro was to say later, he had been, until they met, nothing but a bohemian poet, an idle frequenter of cafés, a cultivator of paradoxes and what he called ‘hollow Baudelairianisms’ and ‘disdainful Wildisms’.29 The energetic and restless naval commander offered Ferro ‘contact with life’ and ‘the edifying spectacle of a great leader in action’. He was his ‘great teacher of practical nationalism’, instilling in him ideas about authority, a willingness to serve the motherland and a hatred of ‘professional politics [...], the so-called liberals’. In these 1954 memoirs, Ferro added this observation which sheds light on the image he then had of his former fellow modernists: Foi ele quem me sacudiu, me rasgou os olhos, me arrancou a mim próprio. Se o não tivesse conhecido, eu continuaria, talvez — ai de mim! — sem encontrar saída no labirinto das mesas do Café Martinho, ‘a beber, com um café detestável, uma inspiração ainda mais detestável’. e quantos, quantos não se perdem, quantos não ficaram lá, por não terem encontrado o seu Filomeno da Câmara, o seu comandante...30 [He was the one who shook me, ripped my eyes open and tore me away from myself. If I hadn’t met him, I would have perhaps continued — alas! — not to find a way out of the labyrinth of tables at Café Martinho, ‘drinking in, along with an abominable coffee, some even more abominable inspiration’. And how

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Fig. 9.1. António Ferro, A Idade do Jazz-Band, front cover by Bernardo Marques (Lisbon: Portugália, 2nd ed., 1924). 17 cm. Conference delivered at Teatro Lírico do Rio de Janeiro, 30 July 1922. many, how many were lost, stayed there because they didn’t find their Filomeno da Câmara, their commander...]

Ferro really had found ‘his commander’, his master of authoritarian nationalism in 1918, but the era’s cosmopolitan culture, bohemian lifestyles, disdainful poses and hollow frivolity were to hold a strong attraction on him for years to come. Ferro and his modernist period Starting in 1919, when he joined the political circle in Lisbon of the man he always called ‘my commander’ and as he began his career in political journalism in newspapers linked with conservative and nationalist republicanism (O Jornal, A Situação, O Imparcial), Ferro also began to write social columns, theatre criticism, literary collaborations for magazines, interviews and journalistic reports. Ferro was a nationalist, a lover of cultural traditions and folklore — while still a teenager he had published a book of quatrains in Portuguese folk verse31 — and he was interested in folk dances, which he was keen to renovate and promote. He was at the same time an enthusiastic admirer of grand european illustrated magazines, cinema (in 1917 he gave a conference about cinema),32 diaghilev’s Ballets Russes (that came to Lisbon in 1917–18), modern music (in 1922 he gave an innovative conference in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, interspersed with band music, A Idade de Jazz-Band (see Fig. 9.1), which he later published),33 and modern theatre that he got to know during his visits to Paris. An old dream of Ferro’s was to play a role in bringing this new cosmopolitan culture to Lisbon and thereby to contribute patriotically to making it a modish and

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Fig. 9.2. António Ferro, Leviana. Novela em fragmentos, introd. by Ramón gómez de la Serna; front cover by Antonio Soares (Lisbon: emprêsa Literária Fluminense, 1929). edition: ‘ed. definitiva’. [1] leaf of plate. 19 cm.

up-to-the-minute city. His personal strategy to this end consisted of making himself cosmopolitan first of all. He set off on constant trips to and from european capitals, Brazil and the United States, with his job as an international reporter acting as the ideal pretext. An extrovert, charmeur, bold and highly skilled in making excellent contacts inside and outside Portugal, Ferro set up a network of acquaintances in key cultural positions, as well as forming a group of young and talented artistic and literary Portuguese and foreigners, who in their turn inf luenced him. In 1920 Ferro launched in grand style his career as an international journalist by writing a report for O Século: he travelled across europe to the Adriatic coast to meet and interview his beloved writer and hero, gabriele d’Annunzio, then the ‘duce’ of Fiume, which he had occupied with his nationalist troops. The meeting took place a few weeks before the end of d’Annunzio’s military and political adventure, one that was to serve in several respects as an inspiration to Mussolini. Ferro later published his report in a book called Gabriele D’Annunzio and Me,34 which is typical of his snobbery and selfpromotion. That same year, he visited Colette in Paris and then gave a conference about her in Lisbon, followed by a book.35 In 1920 Ferro began by publishing a work that launched him as a writer, Teoria da Indiferença,36 which was a collection of short,

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paradoxical aphorisms and definitions, at times witty and at other times just out to shock the bourgeois. It was clearly inf luenced by the creator of this greguerías genre, a Spanish writer and his future friend, Ramón gómez de la Serna,37 who published the book Greguerías in 1917, followed by a collection of erotic short stories, Senos. In 1921 Ferro published Leviana, a ‘novel in fragments’ (see Fig. 9.2), which is a series of portraits, sentences and dialogues depicting a futile, ridiculous and f lighty (leviana) woman, which served as an excuse for some daring erotic writing. It also owes a great deal to the style of gómez de la Serna, but perhaps written in a more blagueur, vain and misogynist style, which makes it more difficult to decide who is more frivolous: the woman whom he simply called ‘Leviana’, or the disdainful author. That same year Ferro published a leaf let-manifesto called Nós [Us]. despite its name, it was a personal proclamation, Marinettian in style, but following in the footsteps of Almada’s and Pessoa’s futurist manifestos and conferences of some years before (1916–17) by partially imitating their bombastic style and phraseology. A cry of fierce elitism, in the form of a conventional dialogue between an inf lated and arrogant ‘Me’ and an obtuse, deaf and hostile ‘Crowd’, Nós expresses the author’s obsession with being modern, up-to-date, revolutionary, higher and faster, like a plane or a ‘Sud-Express train to the future’. The author calls his passionate cult of the new ‘the religion of the Hour’.38 The manifesto failed to find an echo in Portugal, but was published in Brazil’s modernist Klaxon magazine in 1922. Common to Ferro’s works in the first half of the 1920s is his elitist shunning of the crowd, disdain for critics (whom he called ‘pygmies’ or ‘the etceteras of life’), his narcissistic showing off, the cult of punning and paradox, provocation and overriding superficiality; characteristics that are offset by his witty style and positive aspects related to his struggle against artistic traditions and prejudice.39 Without ever neglecting the promotional aspects, his books were always published in modernist wrappings, with cover designs by some of the most talented illustrators of the time (António Soares, Jorge Barradas, Almada negreiros and Bernardo Marques) and frequently preceded by f lattering prefaces. The lightness of tone and the superficiality of his themes were only to disappear in Ferro’s more controversial and scandalous work, a faintly Ibsenian play called Mar Alto, which was staged in São Paulo in 1922 with Ferro playing one of the parts. The South American tour also gave Ferro the opportunity to give his self-promoting conferences and appear as ‘the representative of Portuguese modernism’.40 The play depicted scenes of amoral realism and some Brazilian critics found it shocking. It was performed only once in Lisbon, in July 1923, and had to be stopped because an incensed audience booed and protested while arguing with the actors. The storyline, a very outrageous one (for those times), dealt with a husband, his wife and her lover triangle, a subject clearly chosen to ‘light a fire’, and which was considered ‘immoral’, ‘repugnant’ and ‘pornographic’ by most critics.41 given the threat of further disturbances, the police closed down the play. These events, more than any merit the play might have had, made frontpage news, and writers and intellectuals of all political inclinations signed a protest against the prohibition. This helped to console Ferro for the fiasco and gave him an opportunity to emerge in the role of victim of censorship. The ban was lifted a few days later but the play was not performed again, either then or under the

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1926–33 military dictatorship and the new State, when the censorship would never have allowed it. Ferro would later concur with the moralizing criticisms when his political functions required him to project an image of moral respectability. In 1935, and recently arrived in a position of power, Ferro tried to label these too novel and too awkward works as ‘dead weight from other eras’ and shadows in a personal ‘development’ that had meanwhile made him another person.42 Towards the end of his life, now in possession of greater ‘Catholic sensitivity’ and critical shrewdness, he would freely admit to the frivolous, decadent and brash traits of the writings of his iconoclastic youth.43 However, he never stopped believing that they were avant-gardist in their own way, just as he never stopped thinking that his political career afterwards was also imbued with ‘vanguardismo’, a concept with elitist and anti-democratic echoes that made it much more attractive for the conservative-authoritarian ideology of the new State than the ambiguous and rebarbative ‘modernism’ that reeked of rebelliousness, cosmopolitanism, liberalism and the First Republic. In a famous speech that he gave in February 1935, in which he defined the ‘Politics of the Spirit’ in the presence of Salazar, Ferro brushed aside accusations that he had betrayed his avant-gardism of the 1920s and asserted he felt he was ‘in the vanguard as never before’, but a vanguard — quoting Jacques Maritain — that was ‘anti-modern against the errors of the present time and ultramodern in all the truths yet wrapped in the future’.44 In a 1943 speech in which he looked back on the ten years of cultural policy at the head of the Secretariat of national Propaganda, Ferro definitively settled scores with the term ‘modernism’, which he said he ‘loathed’, preferring the word ‘vanguardism’ to describe the orientation of his politics.45 On one condition, however: vanguardism had to divorce itself from internationalism, with which it was almost always linked, by means of ‘nationalization work’. Ferro thus openly broke with his modernism, exchanging it for a nationalist vanguardism that was committed to a return to tradition and a ‘renaissance of folk art’, though served by a generation of young values, ‘seeking new skills and materials to construct new works’.46 reporter of dictatorships and the Propagandist of Mussolini entering a career in journalism on his return from Africa in 1919, Ferro began work in 1923 with Diário de Notícias, where he made a name for himself mainly as an international reporter, and only left to become Salazar’s head of propaganda in 1933. His literary work in the form of A Amadora dos Fenómenos (1925) stories came to an end on the eve of the 1926 military coup, and he would only start to publish books again with selections of his reports and interviews with foreign celebrities for that newspaper — Viagem à Volta das Ditaduras (1927), Praça da Concórdia (1929), Novo Mundo, Mundo Novo (1930), Hollywood, Capital das Imagens (1931) and Prefácio da República Espanhola (1933) — during his travels through Fascist Italy, Primo de Rivera’s Spain, Mustafa Kemal’s Turkey, democratic France, the United States (where he was more interested in Portuguese immigrants, Broadway and Hollywood than in politics) and again Spain, this time no longer a dictatorship.

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Very soon attracted to Italian fascism, he was to witness its theatrical prologue in Fiume with d’Annunzio. In 1923 Ferro interviewed Mussolini after having introduced himself as an ‘admirer of fascism and its leader’. Ferro met Mussolini again in 1926, and then in 1934 (by now as head of Salazar’s propaganda machine), and transmitted to the Portuguese an uncritical and peaceful image of the man who had ‘saved Italy’ and ‘turned Italy into an eternal Spring’. Ferro depicted Mussolini as a historical figure transforming into a bronze one and as ‘the grand master of modern politics’, the ‘astounding sculptor of modern Italy’, the author of a ‘miracle’ that could not happen in Portugal ‘because everyone’s eyes were shut as everyone is asleep’.47 In his constant search for notable people, ‘the majuscules’ as he called them, he also interviewed Primo de Rivera (1924), Hitler (1930) and the leading liberals in France and Spain; he spoke also with Cardinal gasparri, Marshals Pétain and Foch (1930), writers and intellectuals (Cocteau, Valle-Inclán, Ortega y gasset, Unamuno), the industrialist Citroën, the director of Figaro, but also the Parisian singer and actress, Mistinguett. Around 1930, Ferro was already considered the ‘prince of the interview’ in Portugal. In his interviews with politicians and intellectuals, Ferro would always ask them for their opinion about dictatorships, a political solution he had defended for Portugal before it became a fashionable idea in europe and for which he had plotted with his Commander Filomeno da Câmara in 1925. The journalist was a militant for a political cause and this fact comes out in his asking Câmara in 1927 to write the preface to his Viagem à Volta das Ditaduras [Voyage around the dictatorships]. The commander used the occasion to praise the ‘saviour’ Mussolini and call Ferro ‘one of the precursors in defence of the principle of Authority’ in Portugal.48 That same year, when Câmara led another coup to force the military dictatorship to take a more fascist line, Ferro was his agent, connecting him with various military units.49 The coup was a ridiculous failure; Câmara went back to Africa, this time without Ferro, who found some years later his new political leader in Salazar. From 1926 onwards, Ferro’s foreign interviews were already the work of a journalist coming from a dictatorship. Along with the 1926–33 military dictatorship came the censorship of the press, books and the performing arts. The effect of this is noticeable in what Ferro was publishing even though, as a supporter of the dictatorship, he obviously did not complain. In the early 1930s, when Catholic vigilance over morality started to grow more powerful, hand in hand with state censorship, it was no longer possible to publish books such as Teoria da Indiferença (where he had written that ‘to kneel down and kiss a woman’s body was to be Christian’), his novel Leviana or, above all, his play Mar Alto. In view of the new political situation, it is highly probable that Ferro no longer wanted to do any more writing of this particular kind, but the alleged ‘personal development’ that the ex-modernist writer Ferro said he had undergone must have been in some way connected with the hold that censorship had over Portugal. The effect is visible in the interviews after 1926 as they could not contain anything that might prove politically inconvenient. Consequently, in interviews carried out in 1930 in Spain with some leading politicians and intellectuals,50 in which the subject of dictatorship constantly crops up, there is not a word about the recently installed

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dictatorship in neighbouring Portugal. The interviewer could no longer publish in his own country any free opinions about taboo matters. Antonio Ferro grew up in an age in which freedom of expression, apart from a few threats, remained a consensual matter, and he became a supporter of dictatorships that destroyed this freedom. The impudent modernist writer who had pushed back the frontiers of what was publishable, and who had been defended by his peers as a victim of censorship, this journalist who fought hard against republican governments and denounced the way freedoms were being trampled on, was now in a paradoxical situation, as his opponents pointed out. However, when he had to choose between defending a liberty of creativity that no longer interested him and adapting to the rules of a game in an authoritarian regime whose ideology he basically identified with, Ferro did not hesitate. The prospect of a political career in the dictatorship, which he skilfully prepared, quelled any hesitation he might have had. the Myth-Creator and embellisher of the dictatorship When Salazar was appointed minister of finances in 1928, very few people in Portugal knew of him. The Catholic professor of Public Finance was a shy and retiring politician who avoided journalists and crowds and was believed to be ascetic. However, he soon revealed immense ambition and a talent in conducting state affairs and, above all, in strengthening his own position within the military dictatorship. In 1930, he was already the key civilian in government and launched his ‘national Revolution’ plan, a one-party system to bring liberalism and democracy to a definitive end. In July 1932, he became the head of the government and prepared the Constitution, which, the following year, established an authoritarian and corporatist regime called ‘estado novo’ or new State, which was both similar and dissimilar to Italian fascism. In 1932, when Salazar became dictator, António Ferro tried to approach the triumphant leader. As a journalist and admirer of Mussolini, he had in the past helped construct the Sidónio myth and he had supported Filomeno da Câmara in his unsuccessful efforts to become dictator. Ferro did not now hide his ambition to play a part in the propaganda, staging and promotion of the new dictator. In May 1932, he wrote two articles for the Diário de Notícias in which he pointed out what he considered to be the lacunas in the dictatorship as far as propaganda and cultural policy were concerned. He argued that there was an urgent need to find the right man, a ‘director’ who would know how to tackle the missing sense of celebration or ‘joy’ as well as the difficulty of not letting good initiative, wit and talent become dispersed.51 With Salazar now at the head of the government, Ferro wrote two new editorials in which he insisted on the new regime’s crucial need for a celebration of ‘the life of the spirit’,52 and defended more active propaganda, a festive ‘staging’ to link the dictator with the masses and he had Mussolini clearly in mind as a model: Que deve fazer o ditador para evitar a morte da sua obra e do seu nome, para não ser esquecido, para não ser vítima da ingratidão daqueles que serviu,

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daqueles que salvou? Apenas isto: martelar constantemente as suas ideias, despilas da sua rigidez, dar-lhes vida e calor, comunicá-las à multidão. Que o ditador fale ao povo e que o povo lhe fale. Que ditador e povo se confundam de tal forma, que o povo se sinta ditador e que o ditador se sinta povo...53 [What should the dictator do to prevent his work and his name from dying and being forgotten, victim of the ingratitude of those he served, those he saved? Just this: hammer in his ideas continuously, take away their stiffness, give them life and warmth, transmit them to the people. Let the dictator speak to the people and the people speak to him. Let the dictator and the people become one so that the people feel they are the dictator and the dictator feels he is the people...]

These proposals for a cultural policy and a propaganda strategy failed to persuade the dictator immediately as he did not see the need for the state to subsidize the arts and culture, or spend money on political marketing. In his contact with the public, Salazar had acquired a kind of chilly charisma, professorial and conservative, the very opposite to Mussolini. Ferro knew this and suggested that in order to solve the ‘chilliness’ problem, Salazar should entrust ‘someone’, suitable and competent, to organize the ‘necessary staging of the festival of the ideal, those indispensable interviews in dictatorships between the people and their rulers’.54 Ferro, who was obviously proposing himself for this job, managed to persuade Salazar in december 1932 to give him a series of interviews, which the newspaper published on the front page and had an enormous public impact. Brought together in a book with a long preface by the dictator, the work came out in several european countries too (see Fig. 9.3 for the French edition).55 The inspiration behind Ferro’s publicity stunt was the interviews that the german writer and journalist, emil Ludwig, had conducted with Mussolini in April 1932, which were published in book form.56 But the distance that separated the german writer (an avowed pacifist and individualist) from Mussolini was in no way present in the conversations between Ferro and Salazar, and by showing the journalist’s fascination and total adherence to the dictator’s political ends, the interviews became a simple propaganda tool, although ref lecting the interviewer’s talent and ‘publicity skills’, as Fernando Pessoa conceded in a letter thanking him for his book.57 The work was very effective in dissipating the aura of remoteness in which the dictator had enclosed himself, making him human in the eyes of the public and also showing his political ideas in an informal and more attractive manner. José-Augusto França describes Ferro’s work as ‘the first stone in the mythification’ process of Salazar, and Ferro himself, within the Portuguese setting, as the ‘only intellectual (aside from minor ones) who took the fascist attraction to its practical consequences’.58 For Ferro, the success of this work meant that in October 1933 he was invited by Salazar to run SPn, the new governmental department that was to handle Portugal’s domestic and foreign propaganda along with its cultural policies. Six months previously, Hitler’s germany had set up a Ministry for People’s enlightenment and Propaganda, headed by goebbels, and in Italy, culture and propaganda were also to be brought together in a new department which in 1937 was called the Ministry of People’s Culture. The French journalist, Émile Schreiber, on a visit to Portugal in 1938, saw a new goebbels in Ferro: ‘The Portuguese dictatorship also

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Fig. 9.3. António Ferro, Salazar: le Portugal et son chef, prefaced by a note on the idea of dictatorship by Paul Valéry; trans. by Fernanda de Castro (Paris: Éd. Bernard grasset, 4th ed., 1934). 19 cm. Casa Fernando Pessoa Collection.

has its secretariat for propaganda. Its head, its dr goebbels, as energetic but less aggressive, is Mr António Ferro.’59 The concern that dictators took with propaganda, ‘the continuous hammering of ideas’ on the people (as Ferro put it, with no pejorative meaning intended) was then seen with a great deal of scepticism by a few europeans. Austen Chamberlain, a leading British Conservative politician, had agreed to write the preface to the english edition of Ferro’s book of interviews in 1935 and said in his mostly sympathetic but incidentally critical words about the Portuguese dictatorship: The Fascist dictatorship in Italy, the nazi dictatorship in germany, and the dictatorship of the Coimbra Professor of Finance in Portugal have one thing in common. Signor Mussolini, Herr Hitler and dr. Salazar have each set out to remake the soul of a people. An englishman may feel that the price paid is too high. He may thank heaven that he is still free citizen of a free country, and resolve that he will guard that freedom the more jealously because of its destruction elsewhere.60

As director of SPn, Ferro developed an energetic and efficient approach to political propaganda inside and outside Portugal, a task that he summed up as the need to construct ‘the great façade of the nation, what one can see from the outside’.61 On

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Fig. 9.4. António Ferro, Intervenção Modernista, introd. by António Rodrigues; with a sanguine red chalk drawing of the author by Mário eloy (Lisbon: Verbo, 1987). Works by António Ferro, vol. I. 22 cm.

the other hand, he created and developed, within the framework of the officialized ‘Politics of the Spirit’, a pioneer system of stimulus for the arts and literature that was firmly aimed at the political ends of the ‘national Revolution’ and defined by the nationalist and traditionalist ideology (contrary to fascism in this) of Salazar’s regime. ‘Politics of the Spirit’ in action served the twofold aim of the ‘aesthetization of politics’ and the politicization of art, features common to all totalitarian regimes between the two world wars. To this end and with this innovative opening and concern, Ferro also looked to recruit artists of the modernist generation with whom he had maintained a long relationship. Several authors on a path paved by António Quadros have found in this blend of traditionalist nationalism values with modern sensitivity, not always welcomed by the regime, proof of the ‘synthesis’ of the traditional with the vanguard that would characterize all his work. For his part, José-Augusto França accepts that Ferro in the 1930s and 40s at the head of the SPn struggled against ‘nineteenth-century provincialism’ that lingered in the aesthetic tastes of the new State government members.62 A recent study puts forwards a somewhat different view, emphasizing the merely rhetorical nature of Ferro’s avant-gardism and pointing to his political activity in the 1930s and 40s as being clearly anti-modern in meaning, the product also of a ‘contrition’ of the modernist and futurist that had occurred in the early 1930s.63 According to this author, Ferro ‘wanted to put the arts at the service of the

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dictatorship and not the dictatorship at the service of the arts’ with the ‘logical result’ of the ‘domestication of modernism’. To illustrate Ferro’s anti-modernist change of direction, the author quotes an 1932 article in which Ferro attacks ‘false vanguardism, cheap “futurism”, shabby “futurism” consisting of red blobs, hanging triangles and verbal delirium’. In the 1930s and 40s, Ferro even developed ‘some of the most refined anti-modern arguments’. His ‘conciliatory rhetoric’ didn’t conceal ‘Manichaeism and a yearning for purity which, in every circumstance, nourishes intolerance, even artistic intolerance’.64 The great moment that defined the undeniably anti-modern significance of ‘Politics of the Spirit’ was the previously mentioned speech that Ferro gave on 21 February 1935 in the presence of Salazar at the award-giving ceremony of the first SPn literary prizes. The speech was a long indictment against ‘everything that soils the spirit’, ‘everything that is ugly, coarse, brutish, everything that is wicked, sick, for the sake of voluptuousness or Satanism’, against the ‘amorality and morbidity’ of ‘certain depraved paintings of depravity’, against ‘the renaissance of a sadistic literature’ and ‘Freudian digging’. The man who had written Mar Alto ten years before, now pointed to Céline’s Voyage au bout de la nuit (1932) as an example of despicable and reprehensible ‘shamelessness’ (it is noteworthy that Ferro knew the novel). disquietude — a key word within the modernist sphere of inf luence — was now, thanks to Ferro, associated with something diabolical and nihilist that produced ‘deliberately morbid literature and art’. ‘non-conformist literary works’, some of which could even be admired according to Ferro, although they were ‘cor rosive and dangerous’, were not favoured or given prizes by the new State, although it could ‘perhaps’ not prevent them. In any case, what really mattered was to ‘set up a spiritual environment’ in which dangerous and sick works ‘will not be possible or that any appetite to create them will fade as a matter of course’. ‘Politics of the Spirit’ would thus promote ‘healthy art’ of ‘abundantly constructive intentions’, criteria which, according to Ferro, would be enlightened by reading Salazar’s speeches and the ‘moral principles contained therein’.65 Ferro’s long speech, which was filled with erudite citations and references in which Jean Cocteau and Katherine Mansfield stand shoulder to shoulder with Charles Maurras and giovanni Papini in substantiating his anti-modern theses, was complimented by Salazar at the end, who spoke of the social responsibility of writers and artists in the new regime and thereby justified the ‘imposition’ not only of ‘limits’ (censorship) but also ‘directives’ in literary and artistic creativity.66 Fernando Pessoa, who had not gone to the ceremony to receive his award for the book Mensagem, reacted with indignation to the dictator’s ideas. However, every ref lection in Ferro’s speech about the allegedly ‘immoral’ and ‘dangerous’ art could not but be totally rejected by Pessoa, who had always courageously come out in defence of so-called ‘immoral’ and ‘dangerous’ writers — doubtlessly one himself. This celebratory occasion at which the new State’s cultural policy was presented could also have led to the consecration and recruitment of Pessoa as the poet of the regime; instead, it marked the writer’s definitive break with Salazar’s dictatorship.67 Ferro was mistaken if he thought that a prize and the prospect of collaborating with the regime could buy or ‘tame’ Pessoa (‘the great philosopher of the new spirit in Portugal’ as he

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had called him in 1929) and turn him into the prophetic poet of the new regime. As the undeniably emblematic figure of Portuguese modernists, Pessoa offers an ideal counterpoint to the evaluation of Ferro’s modernist consistency and of the authenticity of his ‘new spirit’, all the more so because politically they both were nationalists and sceptical about Portuguese democracy. Ferro’s afore-mentioned vision as a modernist who abandoned the vanguardist, cosmopolitan ideals of his youth when he met Salazar in order to become the great ‘tamer of modernism’, is a half-true and simplistic thesis, the result of a mistaken understanding of Ferro’s place in the Portuguese modernist movement. His own nationalism, although certainly more cosmopolitan than Salazar’s, dated back not to the 1930s but to his youth. It is, however, a defensible thesis insofar as Ferro’s position on censorship is concerned. In this matter, as a writer and a journalist, he did betray his old values. In 1935, the propaganda chief of the regime became also the first president of the Sindicato nacional dos Jornalistas, the governmentsponsored union of Portuguese journalists. In that quality he publicly supported the maintenance of the censorship introduced in 1926 by the military (which was to last until 1974), in response to a petition against censorship signed by two hundred journalists, writers and artists. In a violent speech he then declared ‘war on the tyranny of freedom of thought, on free intellectuals [...], who poison the world!’68 As we’ve seen, although Ferro had been well acquainted with Sá-Carneiro and Pessoa in his youth, he neither collaborated with nor belonged to the Orpheu literary group. On the contrary, he publicly broke with Pessoa in 1915 and refused to allow his name to appear as publisher of that magazine. Young Ferro’s poems and plays were at an abysmal distance, in every sense, from the artistic work of the group. Ferro never published poetry or prose in any of the modernist magazines that appeared during the war or even later (he did not contribute to Contemporanea nor to the Athena magazine, which Pessoa directed in 1924–25). In 1918, the twentythree-year old Ferro was still making fun publicly of modernist and futurist writers, and he would do so again later in the 1930s. Only some of his writing between 1920 and 1925 might be considered modernist, although with a mundane and frivolous f lavour, as well as being excessively indebted to contemporary inf luences. Ferro’s integration, as a writer, in the modernist sphere was belated and superficial, and his work lacked depth or originality, in spite of the quality of his writing. His only work ever translated into another language is the book of the Salazar interviews. It was in journalism, especially in the ‘art’ of the interview-report, that Ferro revealed his greatest talent, in close relation with his concept (and a very ‘modern’ one at that) of political marketing — together with the promotion of his own activities and his own person. Ferro kept up with or adhered to the spirit of modernism more truly as a result of his modernist sociability, through creating a network of connections with the national and foreign artistic world, as well as the comparative up-to-dateness of his aesthetic taste as an appreciator of modern art and literature. It was his modernist sociability and cosmopolitan taste, together with his intelligent political marketing, that led the head of the new State’s propaganda, despite the prevailing reactionary political and cultural environment, to organize pioneering exhibitions of modern

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art, the first in 1935, and to give out prizes to many modern artists — but not to any modernist writer other than Pessoa. In this manner, the supporter of censorship, the creator of rituals, spectacles, commemorations and monuments glorifying the past (the main example being the Portuguese World exhibition held in 1940),69 and the champion of folk art, rurality and the cult of the traditional, also left an image as the defender of modernity. Summing up the direction of António Ferro’s cultural policy, one historian situated him somewhere ‘between goebbels and Malraux’.70 Perhaps one might specify: between a non-aggressive goebbels and an anti-democratic Malraux, whatever that may mean. notes to Chapter 9 1. Jorge Ramos do Ó, Os Anos de Ferro (Lisbon: estampa, 1999) and ernesto Castro Leal, António Ferro: Espaço Político e Imaginário Social (Lisbon: Cosmos, 1994). 2. See the preface by António Rodrigues in António Ferro, Obras I: Intervenção Modernista (Lisbon: Verbo, 1987), pp. ix–xxvi, and the chapter about Ferro in António Quadros, O Primeiro Modernismo Português: Vanguarda e Tradição (Lisbon: europa-América, 1989), pp. 317–34. 3. The French writer Valéry Larbaud, who visited Portugal in 1926, called Ferro ‘the leader of the Portuguese modernist movement’, according to António Quadros’s preface in António Ferro’s Saudades de Mim (Lisbon: Betrand, 1957), p. 34. The Brazilian poet Ronald de Carvalho made a similar comment about Ferro in a preface to António Ferro, A Idade do Jazz-Band (Lisbon: Portugalia, 1924), p. 34: ‘I know no other in his country’s modernist literature who is more current, more perturbing, more artistically agile than the writer of Teoria da Indiferença.’ 4. José-Augusto França, O Modernismo na Arte Portuguesa (Lisbon: ICALP, 1991), p. 99. All translations were made for the first time from the original language. 5. Ibid., p. 101. 6. José-Augusto França, ‘António Ferro: Obras I: Intervenção Modernista. Teoria do Gosto’, Colóquio/ Letras 100 (1987), 163–64. 7. José-Augusto França, Os Anos Vinte em Portugal (Lisbon: Presença, 1992), pp. 127–28. 8. António Quadros, ‘Anos 40: Política do espírito é cultura portuguesa’, Tempo, 17 June 1982, reproduced in Quadros, O Primeiro Modernismo Português, pp. 330–32. 9. Quadros, preface to António Ferro, Saudades de Mim, pp. 16, 17, 20 and 28. In O Primeiro Modernismo Português, p. 331, Quadros maintains his previous position and considers Ferro the person who materialized ‘Orpheu’s profound thinking’. 10. Artur Portela Filho, Salazarismo e Artes Plásticas (Lisbon: ICALP, 1982), p. 58. 11. José Barreto, ‘Salazar and the new State in the Writings of Fernando Pessoa’, Portuguese Studies, 24 (2008) pp. 188–220. 12. Letter dated 4 October 1914 to A. Côrtes-Rodrigues, in Fernando Pessoa, Correspondência 1905–1922, ed. by Manuela Parreira da Silva (Lisbon: Assírio & Alvim, 1999), p. 127. 13. François Castex, ‘Um inédito de Pessoa’, Colóquio, 48 (1968), 59–69. See also ‘A história do Orpheu: Confidências de Alfredo guisado’, Autores, 10 (1961), 10–11. 14. Fernando Pessoa, Sensacionismo e Outros Ismos, ed. by Jerónimo Pizarro (Lisbon: Imprensa nacional–Casa da Moeda, 2009), p. 38. 15. Quadros, preface to António Ferro, Saudades de Mim, p. 15. 16. Ibid., p. 14. 17. Ibid., p. 28. 18. Pessoa, Sensacionismo e Outros Ismos, pp. 37–95, especially p. 49. 19. Ibid., p. 69. 20. Ibid., p. 49. 21. João gaspar Simões, Vida e Obra de Fernando Pessoa, 4th edn (Lisbon: Bertrand, 1981), pp. 233–55 and 611–16. 22. Ibid., pp. 611–16. Pessoa’s letter was transcribed, along with similar documents, by Jerónimo Pizarro in Pessoa, Sensacionismo e Outros Ismos, pp. 379–81.

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23. The letter dated 7 July 1915, signed by Alfredo guisado and António Ferro was reproduced in Simões, Vida e Obra, pp. 614–15, note 2. 24. ernesto Castro Leal, António Ferro: espaço político e imaginário social (Lisbon: Cosmos, 1994), pp. 189–96. 25. ‘Carta do Martinho’ (O Século, 3 March 1918), reproduced in Ferro, Obras I: Intervenção Modernista, pp. 10–11. 26. António Ferro, ‘Alguns precursores’, in Ferro, Obras I: Intervenção Modernista, pp. 368–72. 27. graça dos Santos, Le Spectacle dénaturé: Le Théâtre portugais sous le règne de Salazar 1933–1968 (Paris: CnRS Éditions, 2002), pp. 107–09. 28. Ferro, Obras I: Intervenção Modernista, pp. 371–72. The final quotation refers to a poem by Sá-Carneiro appeared in Orpheu. 29. Ferro, preface to D. Manuel II, o Desventurado (Lisbon: Bertrand, 1954), pp. 23–24. 30. Ibid., pp. 28–33. 31. Augusto Cunha and António Ferro, Missal de Trovas [Missal of Ballads] (Lisbon: Livraria Ferreira, 1912). 32. António Ferro, As Grandes Trágicas do Silêncio (Lisbon: Monteiro & Companhia, 1917). 33. António Ferro, A Idade do Jazz-Band (Lisbon: Portugália, 1924). 34. António Ferro, Gabriele D’Annunzio e Eu (Lisbon: Portugália, 1922). 35. António Ferro, Colette, Colette Willy, Colette (Lisbon: H. Antunes, 1921). 36. António Ferro, Teoria da Indiferença (Lisbon: Portugália, 1920). 37. His inf luence over Ferro has been studied by Antonio Sáez delgado, ‘Ramón gómez de La Serna, António Ferro y la greguería’, Península: Revista de Estudos Ibéricos, 4 (2007), 195–202. 38. António Ferro, ‘nós’, in Fernando Pessoa et al., Nas Encruzilhadas do Mundo e do Tempo: Escritos Públicos (Porto: CeP, n.d.), pp. 91–98. 39. For Ferro’s ‘five years of modernism’, see nuno Rosmaninho, ‘António Ferro e a propaganda nacional anti-moderna’, in Luís Reis Torgal and Heloísa Paulo, Estados Autoritários e Totalitários e suas Representações (Coimbra: IUC, 2008), pp. 290–92. 40. Ferro, Obras I: Intervenção Modernista, p. 399. 41. An extensive dossier of reviews was published together with the play in António Ferro, Mar Alto (Lisbon: Portugália, 1924), pp. 67–95, with a long preface by the author. The book includes ‘Protesto dos Intelectuais Portugueses’, with fifty or so signatures, which was sent to the head of the government. 42. António Ferro, Prémios Literários (Lisbon: SnI, 1950), pp. 26–29. 43. Ferro, preface to D. Manuel II, o Desventurado, pp. 9–35. 44. Ferro, Prémios Literários, p. 29. 45. António Ferro, Dez Anos de Política do Espírito (Lisbon: SPn, 1943), pp. 17–18. 46. Ibid., p. 18. 47. António Ferro, Viagem à Volta das Ditaduras (Lisbon: empresa diário de notícias, 1927), pp. 74–75, 113, 121. 48. Ibid., p. 12. 49. Leal, António Ferro: Espaço Político e Imaginário Social, p. 43. 50. António Ferro, Prefácio da República Espanhola (Lisbon: enP, 1933). 51. ‘Vida’ [Life], Diário de Notícias, 7 May 1932, p. 1, and ‘Falta um realizador’ [A director Is needed], Diário de Notícias, 14 May 1932, p. 1. 52. ‘Política do espírito’ [Politics of the Spirit], Diário de Notícias, 21 november 1932, p. 1. 53. ‘O ditador e a multidão’ [The dictator and the Crowd], Diário de Notícias, 31 October 1932, p. 1. 54. Ibid. 55. António Ferro, Salazar: O Homem e a sua Obra (Lisbon: enP, 1933), published in great Britain as Salazar: Portugal and her Leader (London: Faber and Faber, 1939), prefaced by Austen Chamberlain, and in France as Salazar: Le Portugal et son chef (Paris: grasset, 1934), prefaced by Paul Valéry. There were also Italian (1934) and Spanish (1935) editions. 56. emil Ludwig, Talks with Mussolini (London: Allen & Unwin, 1932). 57. Letter from Pessoa to Ferro, dated 11 March 1933, in Fernando Pessoa, Correspondência 1923–1935, ed. by Manuela Parreira da Silva (Lisbon: Assírio & Alvim, 1999), p. 289.

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58. José-Augusto França, ‘Sondagem nos anos 20: cultura, sociedade, cidade’, Análise Social, 77–79 (1983), 823–44 (p. 838). 59. Émile Schreiber, Le Portugal de Salazar (Paris: denoël, 1938), p. 136. 60. Austen Chamberlain, preface to Ferro, Salazar: Portugal and her Leader, p. 9. 61. Ferro, Salazar: o homem e a sua obra, p. 86. 62. França, O Modernismo na Arte Portuguesa, p. 105. 63. Rosmaninho, ‘António Ferro e a propaganda nacional antimoderna’, p. 294. 64. Ibid., pp. 295–96. 65. ‘Política do espírito e sua definição’, in António Ferro, Prémios Literários, pp. 17–30. 66. A. Oliveira Salazar, ‘Para servir de prefácio’, in Discursos, I, (Lisbon: Coimbra editora, 1935). 67. Barreto, ‘Salazar and the new State in the Writings of Fernando Pessoa’, pp. 188–201. 68. Ibid., pp. 183–84 and 189–91. 69. See david Corkill and José Carlos Pina Almeida, ‘Commemoration and Propaganda in Salazar’s Portugal: The Mundo Português exposition of 1940’, Journal of Contemporary History, 44 (2009), 381–99. 70. graça dos Santos, Le Spectacle dénaturé, pp. 57–111.

C H A P t e r 10

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How the First Portuguese Modernism Became Public: From Orpheu to Athena Steffen Dix Because of their highly critical attitude and acute sense of self-awareness, modernist artists needed a public forum, almost as if it were a necessity, in order to express and parade — directly whenever possible — their ideas and convictions. Magazines were their most suitable, effective and persistent mouthpieces, along with theatres, public readings and activities, art galleries and, above all, cafés. Taking advantage of the fact that paper had grown less expensive, and especially of the new graphic technology in the early twentieth century, modernism raised its profile in various magazines and thereby inf luenced public life a great deal more rapidly and with more immediate effect than any other artistic movement before. Modern life was ref lected in a massification of supplements and both modernist literature and art appeared in magazines that came out in very few issues and with small print runs. That is to say, the history of modernist literature was to emerge publicly in small magazines, as ezra Pound wrote in 1930: ‘The history of contemporary letters has, to a very manifest extent, been written in such magazines.’1 When we look at cultural life in europe at the beginning of the twentieth century, Portugal seems a somewhat surprising case insofar as the sociocultural environment in which Portuguese modernism emerged. In accounts dating to the end of the nineteenth century, Portugal is described as a traditional, rural country without a genuine urban lifestyle and remarkably behind the times with regard to industrialization and culture in general. One of the better-known poetic laments about this state of affairs was written by Cesário Verde, who sensed a certain sullen melancholy in the streets of Lisbon, which he describes in his famous poem ‘Sentimento dum Occidental’ [‘Feelings of a Westerner’] as a depressing and sad mediaeval city. gross-bellied men coming out of taverns, a few miserable drinkers, barefoot women unloading coal, neighbourhood cats and rotting fish come as a painful contrast to Baudelaire’s descriptions of modern life, and more specifically with that in the great metropolises of ‘Madrid, Paris, Berlin, St. Petersburg, the world!’2 Although the first timid steps in modernization were being taken some years after Cesário Verde’s death, Portugal continued for the first decades into the twentieth century to have a high level of illiteracy and a weak economy, while an enormous gulf existed between a small educated minority and a vast uneducated and illiterate mass. However, Portugal also had a surprising output of printed matter. Without

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proper sociocultural conditions, a remarkable number of magazines appeared in the 1910s and 1920s that could well be described — in a broader sense — as modernist.3 Certain of them must be included in the so-called first modernism in view of their contents, or their contributors, especially in the case of Orpheu (1915), Centauro (1916), Exílio (1916), Portugal Futurista (1917), Contemporanea (1922–26) and Athena (1924–25).4 Contributors to these magazines sometimes appeared to be a small coterie and Portuguese modernist magazines were usually published in small print runs and very few issues. It is ironical that they should have emerged in a society that not only had just taken its first steps in modernization, but where its abundant literary activity appeared so disproportionate in a population that was mostly rural and with a high rate of illiteracy. This means that the public face of Portuguese modernism arose paradoxically in a sociocultural environment that could not offer the necessary conditions for such a thing to occur. The first modernist magazines in Portugal were not exactly children of their time. That is to say, bringing together art with modern life was still very difficult in a provincial city like Lisbon in the early twentieth century. Seeing that Portuguese modernism became truly visible for the first time with the publication of the two issues of Orpheu in 1915, we should call to mind a brief moment of its pre-history that perfectly illustrates this inconsistency. In April 1912, Fernando Pessoa said in an article he wrote for a magazine called A Águia that poetry should be understood as a: indicador sociologico [...] ponteiro para indicar a que horas da civilização estamos, ou, para fallar clareza, para nos informar do estado de vitalidade e exuberância de vida em que se encontra uma nação ou epoca, para que, pela litteratura simplesmente, possamos prever ou concluir o que espera o paiz em que essa litteratura é actual.5 [sociological indicator [...] a hand to show at what time of civilization we were in, or, to speak plainly, to give us information about the state of vitality or liveliness a country or an epoch finds itself so that simply by its literature we may predict or conclude what is in store for the country where that is their current literature.]

Recognizing that his own epoch is ‘um periodo de pobre e deprimida vida social, de mesquinha politica, de difficuldades e obstáculos de toda a especie á mais quotidiana paz individual e social, e á mais rudimentar confiança ou segurança n’um, ou d’um, futuro’ [a period of a poor and depressed social life, of petty-minded politics, from difficulties and obstacles of all kinds to the most ordinary individual and social peace and the most rudimentary confidence and assurance in, or of, a future],6 the official start of Portuguese modernism with the first issue of Orpheu seems historically almost an impossibility, or at least a paradox. So it is not by chance that the first public consubstantiation of Portuguese modernism seems as if it had been imported. greatly inf luenced by the Parisian experiences of Mário Sa-Carneiro,7 the first two issues of Orpheu move to and fro between various different isms, starting, for instance, with symbolism in Pessoa’s static drama O Marinheiro [The Mariner] (in Orpheu 1, pp. 27–39), via paulism in Ângelo de Lima’s ‘Poemas Inéditos’ [‘Unpublished Poems’] (in Orpheu 2, pp. 85–93), intersectionism in Pessoa’s poem

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‘Chuva Oblíqua’ [‘Oblique Rain’] (in Orpheu 2, pp. 159–64), a kind of futurism in Mário de Sá-Carneiro’s poem ‘Manucure’ (in Orpheu 2, pp. 98–107), vertigism in Raul Leal’s novel Atelier (Orpheu 2, pp. 113–20) and finally ending with sensationism in Álvaro de Campos’ ‘Ode Triunfal’ [‘Triumphal Ode’] (in Orpheu 1, 77–83) and ‘Ode Marítima’ [‘Maritime Ode’] (in Orpheu 2, 128–52). The proofs of the third Orpheu issue still exist although it was never published because Sá-Carneiro’s father, who had paid for the first two issues, would no longer provide financial backing.8 Although Fernando Pessoa had emphasized that the first issue of Orpheu is ‘quase um manifesto’ [almost a manifesto],9 there is nothing in it that can be described as a programmatic idea that would have united all the contributors and establish an independent alternative to all the other european modernisms. Unlike many other famous manifestos that had established artistic trends such as futurism (Marinetti, 1909), cubism (Apollinaire, 1913), vorticism (Lewis, 1914), dadaism (Tzara, 1918), de Stijl’s (Van doesburg, 1918), Bauhaus (gropius, 1919) or surrealism (Breton, 1924), the two Orpheu issues do not contain any text of a programme that communicates the genuine aesthetic idea of Portuguese modernists, or at least one that instantly cures — as Tristan Tzara understood a manifesto was meant to do — ‘the literary syphilis’ of the past. Although a manifesto had been announced to appear in Orpheu’s third issue, there’s nothing to indicate in this issue’s proofs that a manifesto was to be published. In this sense, the two Orpheu issues may be understood only in part as avant-gardist, and the first issue, at least, is still very attached to the finde-siècle or symbolist spirit of art for art’s sake, and is more of a search for modernity than a genuine product of modernity. Moreover, although the cover and some pages of Orpheu 2 already clearly signalled a modernist graphic design (especially Sá-Carneiro’s ‘Manucure’ and Santa-Rita Pintor’s graphic contributions),10 we must acknowledge that it also seems more a fusion of various isms than the launch of a genuinely Portuguese modernism. Curiously enough, it is some of Fernando Pessoa’s writings that were published just a few years after Orpheu and his death11 that allow us to see that the two issues of Orpheu actually represent a genuine Portuguese modernism precisely because of its diffusion of isms. Seeing that Pessoa considered the only true modernist attitude to be that of fully accepting all possible literary (and artistic) trends, regardless of whether they were of the past, present or future, we can say that genuine Portuguese modernism emerges precisely in Pessoa’s sensationist approach: ‘Ao passo que qualquer corrente literária tem, em geral, por típico excluir as outras, o Sensacionismo tem por típico admitir as outras todas’ [While it is usually typical of any literary trend to exclude others, it is typical of Sensationism to admit all others].12 If Orpheu accepts and diffuses various literary trends, the magazine could be described as a sensationist magazine as a whole and thereby represents genuine Portuguese modernism, whose key characteristic is a plurality of various isms.13 In view of the fact that Pessoa had not officially explained his position, and in the absence of a manifesto or programmatic text, Orpheu is, however, somewhat failed as a project insofar as being some methodical launching of this Portuguese modernism and subsequently confirms Pessoa’s pessimism in his article in Águia in 1912. Although sensationism is there in practice, it is not ‘manifestly’ launched. When we look at their general contents, Orpheu’s two issues

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Fig. 10.1. Almada negreiros’s caricature on the reaction of the establishment that Orpheu faced (O Jornal, 3 April 1915).

should be seen as an attempt to bring metropolitan and cosmopolitan literature to its readers (various poems are presented as if they had been written in Paris, London, the Suez Canal and Barcelona) and to make the life of a modern person appear through a subjectivization or accelerated psychologization of experience of reality and an excessive aesthetic self-ref lexivity. Time and space are, in most texts, shattered at various levels and into non-systematic perspectives, and the person is no longer seen as separated from the impersonal plurality of things, but rather integrated in the f lux of events. By the manner in which the modern individual’s psychological state is presented, Orpheu does seem, in fact, a magazine that transmits a typically modernist state of mind, and it thus stirred some rather aggressive reactions (see Fig. 10.1), such as an article in the newspaper A Capital on 30 March 1915, just a few days after the first issue came out. In this article, the contributors to Orpheu are placed into a ‘categoria de indivíduos que a ciência definiu e classificou dentro dos manicómios, mas que podem sem maior perigo andar fora deles’ [category of people that science has defined and classified inside lunatic asylums but that may be outside them without it being a great danger].14 In short, we may reiterate that Orpheu is without any doubt the point of departure and one of the most important magazines of literary modernism in Portugal, but it failed as the recognizable launching of an authentic Portuguese modernism as it lacked a manifesto or at least some programmatic text. However, Orpheu managed to make a complete break with Portugal’s literary past and thereby provide Portuguese modernism with its first social identity by offering Portuguese modernists a certain degree of cohesion although still very fragile, decentralized and without a definitive structure. Within the range of modernist magazines, Centauro and Exílio come between Orpheu and Portugal Futurista. Although these magazines enjoy a somewhat f leeting status within Portuguese modernism, they are not entirely insignificant in literary

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terms. The only issue of Centauro, a magazine that came out in 1916 under the direction of Luís de Montalvor, also rebels in a way against the old traditionalism of nineteenth-century Portuguese literature, but in the end it does little more than assert the decadence: ‘Somos os decadentes do seculo da decadência. [...] Toda a arte é decadente [...]. A decadência é para nós o símbolo com que vestimos o estado de alma colectivo de exilados da Beleza!’ [We are the decadents of the century of decadence. [...] All art is decadent [...]. decadence is for us the symbol in which we clothe the collective state of the soul of the exiled from Beauty!].15 Besides its decadentism, the magazine meant a step backwards on the whole for symbolism and presents the first important selection of sixteen poems by Camilo Pessanha, whose poem ‘Clepsidra’ was only published in 1920, that is to say, four years after Centauro. Consequently, this magazine is an accurate demonstration of the enormous inf luence that symbolism had on Portuguese modernists who found Camilo Pessanha an indisputable point of reference.16 Likewise in 1916, the one issue of Exílio (Revista Mensal de Arte, Lettras e Sciencias) came out under the direction of Augusto de SantaRita. Although some of the most representative modernists had taken part in this editorial project, Exílio did not conceal its strong nationalist tendencies, which are very obvious in a short text written by the Integralist, António Sardinha, in his praise for the Portuguese as a race. In his glorification of battles and blood, Sardinha extols Portugal’s illustrious past and tries to arouse it from its current lethargic state.17 genuinely modernist ideals are only voiced in two contributions by Fernando Pessoa that bring together paulist and sensationist tendencies: the poem ‘Hora Absurda’ [Absurd Hour] (Exílio, pp. 13–16) and an attempt to revive Orpheu’s spirit of sensationism in a text called Movimento Sensasionista. This text appears on the last pages of Exílio and stands out like a foreign body with no connection to the general contents of the magazine. However, it is an interesting text that brings to mind the programmatic text or manifesto that had been announced for the third issue of Orpheu. Which means that it is, anachronistically, in Exílio that sensationism is explained as the true Portuguese modernism that first appeared in Orpheu. A year after ‘the Orpheu scandal’, Pessoa here declared sensationism to be a synthesized art that is simultaneously cosmopolitan and national, that is to say ‘como a primeira manifestação de um Portugal-europa, como a unica “grande arte” literária que em Portugal se tem revelado’ [as the first manifestation of a Portugal-europe, as the only literary ‘grand art’ to emerge in Portugal].18 To sum up, if we look at the magazine as a whole, Exílio was nothing more than an unsuccessful attempt to dress up conservative nationalism in a modernist suit. The real culminating peak of Portuguese modernism was reached with the launching of Portugal Futurista, a magazine that came out in 1917 in one issue and truly brought together literature with visual arts. At first sight there cannot be the least doubt that the contributors to the magazine were clearly focused on the speed, dynamism and aggressiveness of Marinetti’s futurism. He had surprised the art world with his Founding and Manifesto of Futurism, which had come out on 20 February 1909, in the French newspaper Le Figaro. However, when we look at his celebration of ‘great crowds agitated by work’, ‘the vibrant nightly fervour of arsenals and shipyards blazing with violent electric moons’ and ‘great-chested

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Fig. 10.2. Portugal Futurista’s cover. 24 cm.

locomotives whose wheels paw the tracks’, the Portuguese futurist movement once again appears more of a desperate, anachronic effort to wake up a people slumbering (‘since Camões’) in a country with no industrialization or urbanization of any note: ‘O portuguez, como todos os decadentes, só conhece os sentimentos passivos: a resignação, o fatalismo, a indolencia, o mêdo do perigo, o servilismo, a timidez, e até a inversão. Quando é viril manifesta-se instintivamente animal a par do seu analfabetismo primitivamente anti-hygienico’ [The Portuguese, like all decadents, only knows passive feelings: resignation, fatalism, indolence, a fear of danger, servility, timidity and even inversion. When he’s being manly he shows himself to be instinctively animal-like, on a par with his primitively unhealthy illiteracy].19 Portugal Futurista stood out because of its extremely modernist graphics (this time, in fact, very inf luenced by Blast; see Fig. 10.2), being openly provocative at times (for instance, the word SHIT in capital letters in Álvaro de Campos’ Ultimatum and sexual references in José de Almada negreiros’s Saltimbancos) and publishing, unlike Orpheu, a number of ‘manifestos’.20 However, the futurist movement had little impact on Portuguese social life, which shown a certain immaturity and resistance to all attempts to bring about an artistic revolution (the magazine was seized by the police immediately after it was published, in november 1917). In view of the indifference and rather poor reaction of the public, Portuguese futurism seems rather like a stillborn child.

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neither the first Futurist Conference organized by Almada negreiros at the Teatro República on 14 April, 1917, nor the ‘futurist’ features of Sergei diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, which performed in december 1917 in the Coliseu dos Recreios and the São Carlos Theatre, were able to turn the short-lived Portuguese futurism into an inf luential artistic movement. The enthusiastic text with which Almada negreiros starts Portugal Futurista illustrates very well the frustrated attempts to draw the Portuguese to european modernism. Within this context, Ballets Russes is presented as a means by which the Portuguese can become familiar with an art that was already known throughout modern europe: ‘Tendo reunido em si extraordinárias realizações da Arte moderna e maravilhosas aplicações da sciencia os BAILAdOS RUSSOS dispõem de todas as vantagens para facilitaram a comprehensão das atitudes syntheses de toda a duração da juventude até esta grande Victoria da Civilizacao Moderna europeia [...] É justamente o que tu, Portuguez, vaes aprender nos BAILAdOS RUSSOS: educar-te a ti próprio’ [Having brought together extraordinary examples of modern art with its marvellous applications to science, BALLeTS RUSSeS have at their disposal every facility to make it easy for you to understand the synthesized attitudes from the whole duration of youth up until this great Victory of Modern european Civilization [...] This is exactly what you, Portuguese, will learn with BALLeTS RUSSeS: educate yourself ].21 Apart from this, Portuguese futurism did not rejoice — unlike Italian futurism and english vorticism — in a genuine glorification and anthropomorphization of the machine. Portuguese futurism was unable, by simply reproducing some key ideas that came from Marinetti, Boccioni and Carrà, to put forward convincingly an analogy between the machine and a work of art, or to transmit effectively typical futurist ‘macchinolatria’ and ‘tecnofilia’. Propelled mainly by Santa-Rita Pintor22 and Almada negreiros, Portugal Futurista should be viewed as an important publication during the first Portuguese modernism in which, for the first time, there was a real fusion between literature, visual arts and modern graphics. However, Portuguese futurism did not have, as already noted, any genuine cultural impact. It was, in fact, unable to arouse any enthusiasm among other literary and artistic figures of the time,23 and ended with the death of Santa-Rita Pintor in 1918 and Almada negreiros’s move to Paris. When compared with the agitated years since the publication of Orpheu, a creative pause followed the futurist experience until 1922 when the first issue of the Contemporanea magazine came out. However, the story of Contemporanea had begun seven years before, in the same year as the ‘Orpheu scandal’. A ‘Programme’ issue and a ‘Specimen’ issue had come out in 1915, sketching out what it proposed to publish. Unlike Orpheu, which intended to shock and be critical of old literary traditions, Contemporanea’s main objective was to create a ‘cultivated circle’ in which one could debate ‘the arts of word and line, theatre, feminine elegance, the elegant detail of events’.24 The ‘Specimen’ issue is a small, eclectic magazine that combines literary texts with articles about the war, the increase in religious faith at Semana Santa [Holy Week] and the latest ladies fashion. Following these two transitory publications, Contemporanea was properly launched in May 1922 after seven years of great political instability in the Iberian Peninsula. In fact, the

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Fig. 10.3. detail from Contemporanea, vol. I, nos 1, 2, 3, May–July 1922.

instability had an enormous impact on the future course the magazine was to take and two important characteristics became immediately apparent in the first official issue. On the one hand, it continued in the spirit of Orpheu,25 and provided a happy blend of modernist literature and art. On the other hand, it also revealed strong politico-nationalist tendencies while striving to disseminate the idea that Portugal and Spain should move towards a closer relationship under the motto ‘Peninsular Alliance’ and seek funding for friendship-organizations between the two Iberian countries (see Fig. 10.3). With regard to its continuing in the spirit of Orpheu, Contemporanea stands out for its literary and graphic modernism, for bringing together several key texts in Portuguese modernism with sophisticated printing techniques as well as for its illustrations, mainly by Almada negreiros. Straightaway the first three issues (May to July 1922) published texts by Fernando Pessoa (‘O Banqueiro Anarquista’ pp. 5–21; ‘António Botto e o Ideal estético em Portugal’ pp. 121–26), Almada negreiros (‘Histoire du Portugal par cœur’ pp. 25–35; ‘Rondel do Alem-Tejo’ pp. 68–70; ‘O dinheiro’ p. 92; ‘O diamante’ pp. 113–14;), António Botto (‘Versos’ p. 37; ‘Uma Canção’ pp. 127–28), Judith Teixeira (‘Fim’ p. 59) and, posthumously, Mário de Sá-Carneiro (‘Poemas de Paris’ pp. 23–24; ‘O Lord’ p. 54;). Together with contributions by Marinetti (‘Le Contrat’ p. 131) and Corpus Barga (‘Conferencia Cubista sobre la esquizofrenia’ pp. 86–87),26 the first three issues of Contemporanea are, in fact, a continuation of Orpheu and Portugal Futurista. Curiously enough, there are some sports articles that call the futurist sensibility to mind and seem to refer to ‘The passion, art and idealism of Sport’.27 As for the magazine’s politico-nationalist tendencies, an article by António Sardinha appeared in the second issue called ‘O Pan-Hispanism’ (pp. 49–51), and in it this monarchist, a disciple of Charles Maurras and the driving force behind Integralismo Lusitano, demands a reorganized relationship between Portugal (including Brazil) and Spain in order to re-establish in the future the former grandeur the two Iberian peoples once enjoyed. A demonstration of an agreement to this closer relationship on the part of the Spanish soon appears in the third issue in the form of a mediocre poem that says: ¿Vamos, hermana? El porvenir es nuestro, | el porvenir más fuerte que la muerte; | seremos outra vez los argonautas, | lancemos los navios a Occidente, | ¡Que todo el horizonte, a nuestros ojos, se ilumina com sol de eterno Oriente! 28

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[Shall we go, sister? Fortune is ours, | a fortune stronger than death; | we will be Argonauts, | once more and launch our ships to the West. | So that the whole horizon, in our eyes, may receive the light of the eternal east!]

Although Sardinha’s nationalistic text on Pan-Hispanism is not overtly a manifesto, it should be read as one. If we look at the next few issues, António Sardinha appears almost as some spiritus rectus of the Iberian question, which dominated almost entirely the next issues of Contemporanea with its increasing numbers of Spanish contributors. In an effort to find ways to overcome the lack of geopolitical importance in comparison to their former colonial expansionism and increasing isolation on an international level, Contemporanea seems more and more like a platform for a cultural exchange with highly theoretical contents between Portugal and Spain. The aim was to create a ‘vast system of Luso-Hispano-American entente’ that would respect the individuality and independence of the two countries.29 Almost immediately after this ideological contribution, twelve of Fernando Pessoa’s poems came out for the first time. These poems were to be included more than ten years later in the book Messagem, which is nowadays considered his most nationalistic work. Pessoa celebrates his country’s imperial past and publicly expresses his Sebastianism and conviction that a special destiny is reserved for Portugal because of its discovery of the sea routes to the west and the east.30 It could well not be by chance that various fragments called ‘Iberia’ were found in Pessoa’s estate, which makes one think that Pessoa had planned, at least for a certain length of time, to enter the debate on the future of the two countries. Reading one of these unpublished fragments, we understand quite clearly Pessoa’s opinion on the predominating topic in most Contemporanea issues: Que sentido real tem o exposto, de que devemos, portuguezes e hespanoes, agir seperados e conjuntos? em que ponto deve haver entre nós separação, e em que ponto combinação de esforços? A questão é exaggeradamente simples. devemos ser seperados em tudo o que seja problemas nacionais, juntos em tudo o que seja problemas civilizacionaes. Instituições, costumes, convém que tudo isso seja differente em um, e outro, povo. Orientação perante a europa, convém que seja em ambos a mesma.31 [What is the real meaning of the article, that we, the Portuguese and Spanish, should act separately or together? At what point should there be a separation between us and at what point a combination of forces? The question is exaggeratedly simple. We should be separated in everything that relates to national problems, and together in everything that relates to civilizational problems. Institutions, customs, this should all be different in one and each people. As far as a course to take with regard to europe, we should both take the same one.]

A distinguishing feature of the next Contemporanea issues until March 1923 was that it brought together modernism with extreme nationalism (see Fig. 10.4) or patriotism (although the modernist contributions grew increasingly less frequent). After the first three issues, in which modernist contributors still predominated, the magazine became more of a fusion of modernist, nationalist and Iberist ideas, as can be seen in two speeches that Ramón gómez de la Serna and Rogério garcía

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Fig. 10.4. Advertisement, with a drawing by José de Almada negreiros, in Contemporanea, vol. II, nos 4, 5, 6, Oct.–dec. 1922. 30 cm.

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Fig. 10.5. Contemporanea’ front cover, 3rd series, no. 2, 1926. 30 cm.

Pérez made at a banquet given in honour of Contemporanea and its director José Pacheco. The two speeches praise Contemporanea as an extremely modern magazine that promotes patriotism and the wish to bring the two Iberian nations closer together.32 Although planned as a monthly magazine, there was only one complete issue of the series that appeared between March 1923 and May 1926, and that was the March 1924 issue and a supplement in March 1925 that lamented the premature deaths of some Portuguese modernists who had contributed to Orpheu and Portugal Futurista: Mário de Sá-Carneiro, Amadeu de Souza-Cardoso, Santa-Rita Pintor and Ângelo de Lima. The third and last series of Contemporanea came out in May 1926 with its main topics displayed on the cover: ‘Portugal — Brasil / Ibero-Americanismo / Arte’ (see Fig. 10.5). Alongside modernist writers such as Fernando Pessoa, Álvaro de Campos, Mário de Sá-Carneiro, António Botto, Judith Teixeira, Luís de Montalvor and Almada negreiros, as well as the modernist precursor, Camilo Pessanha, what also appeared in this third series were António Sardinha’s Integralismo Lusitano ideas, especially his Ibero-American policies. It was mainly these topics that daily newspapers from the Diário de Noticias to O Século highly praised.33 demands to bring Portugal and Spain closer together politically became practically the foremost topic of Contemporanea’s third series, which began straightaway with an article called ‘Brief commentary on the Ibero-American policies’. With regard to the anxiety that had been caused by the

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by then already old Monroe doctrine of 1823 as well as the recent ‘Weltpolitik’ and german’s colonial efforts, that is to say by the ‘Reich’s superior political direction’, the author of this article calls to your attention the extraordinary civilizational work of the two Iberian countries in Latin America.34 Various other articles in the following issues consisted of practically the same subject matter, one that kept emphasizing the Iberian alliance in view of Portugal and Spain’s supposedly unfavourable geopolitical position. Although the last Contemporanea issue shows a slight inclination for a certain Orientalism,35 it should be remembered that the magazine never stopped being an important political tool for Ibero-Americanism. Contemporanea comes to an end for good in the late summer of 1926. To summarize, we can say that this magazine had the longest life span of all the magazines of the first modernism in Portugal and used an extremely modern graphic art for the first time (which Almada negreiros especially had mastered). While the first three issues were still clearly inf luenced by an opening to european modernisms, Contemporanea was also inclined towards anti-liberal, nationalist and Iberist values mainly represented by some Portuguese and Spanish contributors who never hid their Catholic and monarchist convictions, men such as António Sardinha and the Marques de Quintanar. In this sense, it is interesting that José Pacheco planned to revive Contemporanea in 1929. Although the project failed, there is evidence that shows the magazine’s Ibero-Americanist spirit once again. We find among the printer’s proofs, for instance, a speech given by the Marques de Quintanar where Pacheco is praised as ‘merecedor de la gratitud de todos los peninsulares’ [deserving the gratitude of all the peoples of the Iberian peninsula] and António Sardinha is posthumously celebrated as ‘el maestro, el labrador [...] dos nuestros ideales hispanoamericanistas y lusoamericanistas’ [the master, the man who labours for [...] our Hispano-American and Luso-American ideals].36 In general, a habit of or desire for the new and the future predominated in modernism prior to the First World War. This changed completely with the first industrial-scale killings in the trenches in Champagne, which deeply disillusioned many of the first modernists, at least in relation to the futurist belief that war was the ‘only hygiene of the world’, and some of them, August Macke and Franz Marc, for instance, even died there. So, as gladys Fabre noted, the perspective changed and was reformulated during the years between the First and the Second World War, and both the future and the past were now looked at simultaneously: ‘Modern art and avant-garde in the period between the two wars can be associated metaphorically with a Janus sculpture representing the two opposing faces of the zeitgeist.’37 There was, in fact, a return to antiquity in the work of many writers of the time, such as Jean Cocteau, André gide, Rainer Maria Rilke and Marguerite Yourcenar, and especially in the case of numerous artists, such as giorgio de Chirico, Pablo Picasso, Man Ray, Francis Picabia, Marcel duchamp and René Magritte. One of the most iconic modernist magazines in europe was Minotaure, which was published between 1933 and 1939. Its purpose was to rediscover archaic cultures under the motto ‘an archaeology of modernity’. nevertheless, this rediscovery had already taken place some years beforehand within the context of Portuguese modernism with the launching of Athena magazine, under the direction

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of Fernando Pessoa (together with Ruy Vaz, mainly responsible for the graphic illustration), which came out in five issues between October 1924 and February 1925. Although Pessoa left in his famous trunk various fragments of writing about religion, cultural life and ancient greek philosophy before and during the First World War, it was in Athena that Pessoa managed for the first time to make known his real understanding of modernity. In a way, Pessoa had anticipated the zeitgeist that dominated european modernism between the two wars, and he demanded for modern art a temporary perfectionism and most of all a permanent perfectionism that was, in his view, embodied in the greek goddess of civilization and wisdom. Athena represented for Pessoa the coming together of art with science and she became the patron deity of a literary magazine that saw two of Pessoa’s heteronyms appear for the first time, that is to say Alberto Caeiro and his bucolic world,38 and Ricardo Reis and his neoclassicism.39 Bearing in mind that Athena was also the stage on which various contributions by Álvaro de Campos and Pessoa ipse appeared (together with translated works by Walter Pater, edgar Allan Poe and O. Henry) and that the other contributions came mainly from some of Pessoa’s friends (such as Almada negreiros, António Botto, Luís de Montalvor, Mário Saa and posthumously from Mário de Sá-Carneiro), we must acknowledge that Pessoa’s aesthetic ideas predominate almost completely in the contents of the magazine. With his openness to the classicism of antiquity and that of the Renaissance while he also looked towards the future, Pessoa succeeded in creating a magazine where modernism was celebrated as a balanced incorporation of various understandings of art. That is to say, art can be at the same time a rediscovery of the traditional idea of beauty: ‘o resultado da harmonia entre a particularidade da emoção e do entendimento, que são do homem e do tempo, e a universalidade da razão, que, para ser de todos os homens e tempos, é de homem, e de tempo nenhum’ [the result of the harmony between the particularity of emotion and understanding that are of man and time, and the universality of reason, which, because it is of all men and times, is of no man or time];40 and a denial of the concept of beauty: ‘um indício de força, ou energia’ [a sign of strength, or energy], that is to say an art where the human being ‘se deve pessoalizar,41 o “exterior” se deve tornar “interior” ’ [must personalize, the ‘exterior’ must become ‘interior’].42 Subsequently, the modernism in Athena is far from representing simple nostalgia in relation to antiquity, but rather a denial of the old querelle des Anciens et des Modernes, and an impressive attempt to find an ancient form of dramatic art in modern times. Seen this way, the magazine can be understood to be a radical correction of the futurist perspective that inf luenced modernist claims in Portugal for a long time. By bringing to the fore the parallels between the modern and antiquity, the Athena was perhaps the most innovative magazine in the first Portuguese modernism. Looking at all the magazines from Orpheu to Athena on the whole, some particularities of the first modernism in Portugal are apparent. We can underline that as a rule these magazines were in fact the most important means by which Portuguese modernism becomes visible. Paraphrasing ezra Pound’s comment, the first Portuguese modernism was written and was born in these magazines. Apart from this, there is no doubt that at its core the first Portuguese modernism was a small

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coterie made up of various highly cultured people who had generally enjoyed artistic experiences abroad. All these magazines, with the exception of Portugal Futurista, were for the most part a conglomeration of various isms, some of which were imported (mainly symbolism, futurism and cubism), while others were created in Portugal (mainly intersectionism and paulism). Curiously enough, although never openly and publicly declared so, this set of several isms was a genuinely Portuguese modernism, which Fernando Pessoa called ‘sensationism’. As already explained at the start of this article, sensationism signifies an acceptance of all isms, whether they are modern or already older ones. Pessoa therefore recognized in sensationism a certain superiority to other european modernisms and that it remained invisible simply because Lisbon was geographically on the periphery: Cubism, futurism and other lesser isms have become well-known and fartalked, because they have originated in the admitted centres of european culture. Sensationism, which is far more interesting, a far more original and a far more attractive movement than those, remains unknown because it was born far from those centres.43

nonetheless, this sensationism was never set up as a genuinely Portuguese modernism due to its lack of a truly internal coherence (of a group) and an external reference (one or various manifestos) that could explain the theoretical content, or drive forward this artistic movement with its own staging of events. On the other hand and perhaps as a result of a certain industrial and urban backwardness in the country, Portuguese modernism never demonstrated the aggressiveness and cult of the machine and technological advances that were so typical to other european modernisms, such as futurism, vorticism and Russian constructivism. As far as Portugal’s geographical and geopolitical periphery is concerned, Portuguese modernism revealed strong traditionalist and nationalist inclinations in Exílio and Contemporanea in particular, as well as a desire for a return to the ancient glory of the discoveries. When we view all modernist magazines as a whole in Portugal, we may reiterate that the First Portuguese modernism was ultimately never anything but a ‘sensationist’ assimilation or even a pluralization of various isms. In my opinion, this makes the First Portuguese modernism extremely genuine and modern. notes to Chapter 10 1. ezra Pound, ‘Small Magazines’, The English Journal, 19, 9 (1930), 689–704 (p. 702). 2. Cesário Verde, O Livro de Cesário Verde (Lisbon: Ática, 1992), pp. 101–11. 3. For more general information about the vast output of literary or art magazines at the start of and throughout the twentieth century, see Fernando guimarães, Simbolismo, Modernismo e Vanguardas (Lisbon: Imprensa nacional–Casa da Moeda, 1982), pp. 141–78, and generally Clara Rocha, Revistas Literárias do Século XX em Portugal (Lisbon: Imprensa nacional–Casa da Moeda, 1985). 4. Another of the most inf luential modernist magazines in Portugal is Presença (1927–40). However, this magazine belongs to the second wave of modernism, and is examined in greater details in Mariana de Castro’s article (Chapter 11 in this volume). Apart from these magazines, we can also include among modernist magazines the three issues of Sudoeste that were published in 1935. The first two issues are an attempt to place Portugal within a modern europe. The third issue strives to bring together former contributors to Orpheu and subsequently represents a certain

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continuation of the first modernism. However, the magazine does not represent anything basically new and therefore does not require a detailed description in this article. 5. Fernando Pessoa, ‘A nova Poesia Portugueza: Sociologicamente Considerada’, A Águia, 4 (1912), 101–07 (p. 102). 6. Ibid., p. 106. 7. Sá-Carneiro had already mentioned Marinetti’s futurism, Picasso’s and Picabia’s cubism as well as Max Jacob’s ‘literary cubism’ in his letters to Fernando Pessoa before 1914. Besides this, there are indications that ideas had been f loated about calling the periodical Europa: ‘europa! europa (magazine) what is needed above all!’ Mário Sá-Carneiro, Cartas a Fernando Pessoa, 2 vols (Lisbon: Ática, 1958), i, 40, 81–82 and 153. 8. See letter from Sá-Carneiro to Fernando Pessoa dated 13 September 1915. Mário Sá-Carneiro, Cartas a Fernando Pessoa, 2 vols (Lisbon: Ática, 1958), ii, 80–85. 9. Fernando Pessoa, Escritos sobre Génio e Loucura, ed. by Jerónimo Pizarro, 2 vols (Lisbon: Imprensa nacional–Casa da Moeda, 2006), i, 392. 10. If we bear in mind that Mário Sá-Carneiro thought the letter fonts and paper type of Orpheu 2 to be ‘tão inglês’ [so very english] (Cartas a Fernando Pessoa, ii, 53), and also that they were planning to publish a manifesto in the third issue, we can only conclude that Orpheu 2 was somewhat inf luenced by Blast, an english magazine whose only two issues Fernando Pessoa owned. However, Orpheu is not at all aggressive in comparison to Blast; this aggressiveness was only to appear two years later in the magazine Portugal Futurista. 11. See especially Fernando Pessoa, Sensacionismo e Outros Ismos, ed. by Jerónimo Pizarro (Lisbon: Imprensa nacional–Casa da Moeda, 2009). 12. In the same fragment, Pessoa calls it ‘typically Sensationist, this strange trend that most of ORPHeU’s compositions belong to.’ Pessoa, Sensacionismo e Outros Ismos, pp. 183–85. 13. Without getting into a detailed debate about the correct meaning of the word ‘avant-garde’, it should be highlighted that Adorno actually understood artistic plurality to be characteristic to the avant-garde. Theodor W. Adorno, Ästhetische Theorie, gesammelte Schriften Bd.7, (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1973), p. 311. From this viewpoint, Orpheu can be considered an avant-garde magazine. 14. This citation appears in nuno Júdice, A Era do Orpheu (Lisbon: Teorema, 1986), p. 61. In general, Orpheu provoked a great deal of reaction, mostly aggressive. See in Pessoa, Sensacionismo e Outros Ismos, pp. 663–68. 15. Luiz de Montalvôr, ‘Tentativa de um ensaio sobre a decadência’, Centauro, 1 (1916), 7–8. 16. It is worth pointing out that Fernando Pessoa tried but failed to persuade Pessanha to contribute to the third issue of Orpheu. For more on Pessanha’s general inf luence on the Orpheu generation, see mainly Fernando guimarães, Simbolismo, Modernismo e Vanguardas, pp. 25–43. 17. António Sardinha, ‘A Colina Inspirada’, Exílio (1916), 17–20. 18. Fernando Pessoa, ‘Movimento Sensacionista’, Exílio (1916), 46–48. We should emphasize once again that this is not the only text that Pessoa wrote about sensationism. Various other texts have been found in his estate that would have served any intention of his to launch a manifesto of sensationism a great deal better. See also Pessoa, Sensacionismo e Outros Ismos, pp. 142–220. 19. José de Almada negreiros, ‘Ultimatum Futurista às gerações Portuguezas do Seculo XX’, Portugal Futurista, facsimile edn (Lisbon: Contexto editora, 1981), 36–38 (p. 37). 20. Some of the manifestos were just imported (Manifeste des Peintres Futuristes by the Italian futurists Umberto Boccioni, Carlo d. Carrà, Luigi Russolo, giacomo Balla and gino Severini; Marinetti’s Music-Hall; the French futurist, Valentine de Saint-Pont’s Manifeste Futuriste de la Luxure) and others that were, in fact, Portuguese ( José de Almada negreiros’s Ultimatum futurista ás gerações portuguezas do Seculo XX and Álvaro de Campos’s Ultimatum). 21. José Almada negreiros, ‘Os Bailados Russos em Lisboa’, Portugal Futurista, p. 2. For more on the Ballets Russes in Portugal, see also Filomena Serra, ‘Almada negreiros, a dança e os Ballets Russes’, (unpublished manuscript, 2009). 22. Santa-Rita Pintor, whose real name was guilherme de Santa-Rita, was in personal contact with Marinetti in Paris and planned to publish the Futurist Manifesto in Portugal, an undertaking that failed, at least in mainland Portugal. There exists only a partial translation of that manifesto, which was published in August 1909 in the Diário dos Açores, a newspaper that came out on the island of São Miguel in the Azores.

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23. Although Fernando Pessoa and his heteronym Álvaro de Campos (who sometimes described himself as a futurist) contributed to the planned magazine, Pessoa never showed a great deal of enthusiasm for this artistic movement and said with lapidary brevity: ‘Todos nós temos momentos futuristas, como quando, por exemplo, tropeçamos numa pedra’ [We all have within ourselves futurist moments, such as, for instance, when we trip on a stone]. Pessoa, Sensacionismo, p. 178. In general, futurism had no visible impact on Portuguese society, at least if we compare it with the public successes of Marinetti in europe, and especially in London, between late 1913 and early 1914. For more on the relationship between ‘mass culture’ and modernism, see Lawrence Rainey, ‘The Cultural economy of Modernism’, in The Cambridge Companion to Modernism, ed. by Michael Levenson (Cambridge: University Press, 1999), pp. 33–69. 24. These topics are announced in the Contemporanea ‘Programme’ that came out a short time before the ‘Specimen’ issue. Although there is no indication about who the author of the ‘Programme’ was, it is likely that it was Fernando Pessoa. In fact, José Barreto found in Pessoa’s estate a list of the publications (BnP/e3, 48g-29) that identifies him as the author of the ‘Programme;’ cf. Sensacionismo e Outros Ismos, p. 276. 25. We can cite a letter that José Pacheco, the director of the magazine, received in October 1922. Álvaro de Campos, a former contributor to Orpheu who was apparently living in newcastle-onTyne at the time, congratulated Pacheco on the publication of the magazine and said he missed ‘nosso Orpheu. V. continua subrepticiamente [...] Parece que variamos só com a oscillação de quem se equilibra’ [our Orpheu. You continue surreptitiously [...]. It seems we only vary with the oscillation of someone keeping his balance]. Álvaro de Campos, Contemporanea, 4 (October 1922), 4. 26. Corpus Barga is a pseudonym of Andrés garcía de Barga y gómez da la Serna, who was to write again in some of the next Contemporanea issues under his real name. 27. Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, ‘destruction of Syntax — Imagination without Strings — Wordsin-Freedom’, in Modernism: An Anthology ed. by Lawrence Rainey (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), p. 29. 28. Rogelio Buendía, ‘Canción de espanha a Portugal’, Contemporanea, 3 ( July 1922), 115–16. 29. Martinho nobre de Mello, ‘As Relações Luso-Hespanholas — O Pan-Iberismo’, Contemporanea, 4 (October 1922), 1–6. 30. Fernando Pessoa, ‘Mar Portuguez’, Contemporanea, 4 (October 1922), 9–14. 31. See Fernando Pessoa’s estate BnP/e3, 97–22. 32. ‘discurso de Ramon gomez de la Serna’ e ‘discurso de Rogério gracía Pérez’, Contemporanea, 7 ( January 1923), 1–5. 33. See Contemporanea, 3rd series, 2 ( June 1926), unnumbered. 34. Celestino Soares, ‘Breve Comentário à Política Ibero-Americana’, Contemporanea, 3rd series, 1 (May 1926), 1–10. 35. especially Fernando Pessoa, ‘Rubaiyat’, Contemporanea, 3rd series, 3 ( July–October 1926), 98; Camilo Pessanha, ‘Macau e a gruta de Camões’, Contemporanea, 3rd series, 3 ( July–October 1926), 116–18; Luís de Castro norton de Mattos, ‘O Misticismo na Filosofia Oriental de Rabindranath Tagore’, Contemporanea, 3rd series, 3 ( July–October 1926), 128–29. 36. See José-Augusto França, ‘Contemporanea’ e os Anos 20 Portugueses’ in Contemporanea, facsimile edn (Lisbon: Contexto, 1992) Vol. iv, unnumbered. 37. gladys Fabre, ‘Antiquity/Modernity in art between 1914–1939’ in Antiguitat/modernitat en l’art del segle XX ed. by gladys Fabre (Barcelona: Fundació Joan Miro, 1990), p. 303. 38. Alberto Caeiro, ‘escolha de Poemas de Alberto Caeiro’, Athena, 5 (February 1925), 197–204. Facsimile edition: Athena. Edição fac-similada, introd. by Teresa Sousa de Almeida (Lisbon: Contexto, 1983). 39. Ricardo Reis, ‘Odes’, Athena, 1 (October 1924), 19–24. 40. Fernando Pessoa, ‘Athena’, Athena, 1 (October 1924), 8. 41. A play on words: ‘pessoalizar’ instead of ‘personalizar’. 42. Álvaro de Campos, ‘Apontamentos para uma esthetica não-Aristotelica’, Athena, 3 (december 1924), 113–15. 43. Pessoa, Sensacionismo e Outros Ismos, p. 214.

C H A P t e r 11

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The Presença generation Mariana Gray de Castro The Coimbra-based magazine Presença first appeared in March 1927, and ended its run of fifty-four issues in February 1940, following a brief suspension in the preceding two years; in 1977, a commemorative issue was published to mark its fiftieth anniversary.1 Founded by José Régio (1901–1969), João gaspar Simões (1903–1987) and Branquinho da Fonseca (1905–1974), who were also its initial directors, it was intended as the outlet for their own work and that of the artists they admired. More than thirty artists contributed to the magazine over the years, ranging chronologically from Ângelo de Lima, born in 1872, whose work appeared in it posthumously, to J. J. Cochofel, born in 1919, but its inner circle of collaborators was born between 1899 (edmundo de Bettencourt) and 1908 (Adolfo Casais Monteiro), which corresponds more closely with the notion of a generation. An important vehicle for the visual arts as well as literature, Presença was illustrated throughout by artists like Almada negreiros, Sarah Afonso, Bernardo Marques and Mário eloy, publishing a drawing by Arpad Szénes in 1935 and one by Maria Helena Vieira da Silva in 1940. The magazine displayed a range of typographical innovations and experimental layouts; titles sometimes appeared vertically, or in several columns. The rather cheap paper on which it was printed, sometimes pinkish in hue, might have been dictated by financial considerations, but it had the added advantage of being unusual. From its fourth issue onwards, the heading presença appeared, without the expected capitalized initial letter.2 Presença was international in outlook, and it actively promoted key foreign writers such as Proust, dostoevsky, Ibsen, gide, Joyce, Pirandello and contemporary Brazilian writers, making their work available to a Portuguese audience, in many instances, for the very first time (see Fig. 11.1). Those involved with the magazine published pioneering freestanding anthologies of individual authors. They did much to establish the previous Orpheu generation firmly at the heart of Portuguese modernism, by publishing in Presença a steady stream of previously unknown poetry and prose by Fernando Pessoa, Mário de Sá-Carneiro, José de Almada negreiros, Ângelo de Lima, and Luís de Montalvor. A series of biographical sketches devoted to Sá-Carneiro, Pessoa, Raul Leal, Mário Saa, António Botto and Almada were instrumental in making these authors better known, and in providing valuable information on them.3 When Pessoa died in 1935, Presença dedicated an issue to him, which included one of Almada’s most celebrated portraits, excerpts from Pessoa’s letters, and various tributes.4 Pessoa’s famous, and famously problematic,

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Fig. 11.1. Title page of Presença, no. 11, 31 March 1928. 36 cm. Contains a study of Ibsen, one of many foreign writers the group promoted and admired.

letter to Adolfo Casais Monteiro (1908–1972) on the genesis of the heteronyms was first made public in Presença 49, and its recipient provided an accompanying study in which he put forward his own interpretative theory of the heteronyms.5 Presença’s subtitle was ‘Folha de arte e crítica’ [Art and Criticism Review], and it presented criticism alongside poetry, creative prose, and illustrations, systematically publishing studies of different art forms, in keeping with Régio’s dictum, printed in the article entitled ‘Literatura livresca e literatura viva’ [Bookish Literature and Living Literature] that became known as the magazine’s ‘ensaio-manifesto’ [manifesto-essay], that ‘Literatura é pura e simplesmente um meio de expressão

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artística — como a pintura, a escultura, o cinema, a dança, a architectura, a música’ [Literature is merely one mode of artistic expression — like painting, sculpture, cinema, dance, architecture, music].6 The magazine’s contributors explored in its pages their diverse interests, ranging from philosophy to popular culture, from music (Fernando Lopes-garcia writes of Schoenberg’s musical revolution in Presença 47) to painting, from modern dance ( Josephine Baker inspired poems published in the magazine, and is mentioned by Régio in ‘Literatura livresca e literatura viva’) to theatre and cinema. during its lifespan, unprecedented for a publication of its kind in the country, Presença was extremely inf luential, even though it suffered from clashes of personality and competing visions that prompted divisions and subtle changes of direction. 1930 marked the major scission, with the exit of Adolfo Rocha (1907–1995), better known under the pseudonym Miguel Torga, and edmundo de Bettencourt (1889–1973), both of whom had been active contributors up to that point — Bettencourt had even named the magazine — as well as the director, Branquinho da Fonseca, who was not much interested in the criticism that was a prominent feature from the start. Upon their departure, Torga, Bettencourt and Branquinho sent the directors Régio and gaspar Simões an open letter accusing them of a lack of continuing innovation, and of excluding viewpoints that did not conform to their own presiding vision. The dissension may have been based on personal rivalries, as Régio suggested in a letter to gaspar Simões shortly afterwards, and it has been posited retrospectively as a generational struggle, or even a psychological affirmation in the Freudian model. Whatever the case, in 1931 Casais joined the Presença team as director, in place of Branquinho. Régio, gaspar Simões and Casais comprised the central trio that shaped the magazine throughout the 1930s. Régio (as José dos Reis Pereira called himself ) had published his opening collection of poetry, Poemas de Deus e do Diabo [Poems of God and of the Devil] (1925), two years before founding Presença, to critical and public acclaim. In the same year, he had presented an undergraduate thesis titled As Correntes e as Individualidades da Moderna Poesia Portuguesa [The Currents and Personalities of Modern Portuguese Poetry] (1925) at Coimbra University, which contained pioneering studies of the Orpheu modernists which he would expand in the pages of the magazine. A prolific writer, Régio would go on to produce six further collections of poetry, five novels, a novella, a book of short stories and seven plays, in addition to a vast critical and essayistic output. gaspar Simões had also graduated from Coimbra University, where he read law, and during his time at Presença he established himself as one of the most inf luential critics of the twentieth century, although he also produced a few novels, the most significant of which are Elói (1932), O Pântano (1940) and Amigos Sinceros (1941). gaspar Simões’s critical reputation was cemented after his time at Presença by his regular contributions to Portuguese newspapers (he was a weekly critic for the Diário de Notícias from the 1950s onwards, for instance) and magazines. Casais had read philosophy at Porto University, later moving to Coimbra with an eye to qualifying as a schoolteacher; he was a poet and novelist as well as a critic. Following his involvement in Presença he would go on to edit the first-ever anthology of Pessoa’s poetry, which appeared in 1942.7 That this anthology was

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reprinted as recently as 2006 points to the continued appeal of Casais as editor and critic.8 Casais would later align himself with the surrealist circle in Lisbon, and in 1954 his opposition to the Salazar regime would force him to move permanently to Brazil, where he also became highly regarded. Régio and Torga emerged as the Presença generation’s two most inf luential creative writers, although their work displays few affinities, which partly accounts for Torga’s departure from the magazine. Régio’s poetry and prose centres on the conf licts of the human condition, especially the problem of religious faith, or lack thereof. It represents, with great psychological acuity, complex states of mind and contradictory emotions prompted by existential questions. In Régio’s play Benilde, ou a Virgem Mãe [Benilde, or the Virgin Mother] (1947), there is no resolution as to whether the young woman whose pregnancy might, or might not, mirror the story of the Virgin Mary is telling the truth, is herself deluded, or is intentionally attempting to deceive those around her; the other characters represent their differing conclusions on stage. Torga’s writings can also display a religious dimension, containing undertones of agnostic anguish, but they are very different in style, being firmly rooted in rural Portugal rather than its urban centres. Torga’s chosen pseudonym is itself a pastoral pose, for ‘torga’ is a heather that thrives in the region of his birth in north-eastern Portugal, Trás-os-Montes. The marked differences between these two literary giants are a good illustration of Presença’s creative scope. Casais refused to find any artistic unity whatsoever in the writers of his generation: ‘O que importa notar neste momento é que, admitindo a existência de qualquer coisa-tipo, se admite uma unidade da Presença. Contra ela sempre preguei’ [The important thing to note at this time is that, even allowing for the existence of anything typical, a unity is ascribed to Presença. I have always argued against this].9 To illustrate the point, Casais included poets who had never published in the magazine, but whom he considered to share in its spirit, in the first ever anthology ostensibly dedicated to A Poesia da ‘Presença’ [The Poetry of ‘Presença’] (1959), which he edited. The magazine’s aesthetic programme, however, was much more coherent, and it is possible to trace its broad contours. Régio wrote a disclaimer in ‘Presença Reaparece’ [Presença Reappears], the editorial of the first issue of the magazine’s second series: ‘Importa não confundir a atitude da revista presença com a de qualquer dos seus directores, colaboradores, leitores’ [It is important not to mistake the magazine presença’s outlook with that of any of its directors, contributors, or readers].10 But the contributors who did not conform to the aesthetic ideals set out in Presença, like Torga but also Vitorino nemésio, Irene Lisboa and Florbela espanca, were predictably undervalued by the magazine’s directors. That Presença’s aesthetic stance was shaped, almost exclusively, by Régio and gaspar Simões, is evident from the attack of Torga, Bettencourt and Branquinho in 1930. In the opening article of the first issue of Presença, ‘Literatura Viva’ [Living Literature], Régio lays the three cornerstones of his critical vision: art should be original, sincere, and independent of any moral, political or social considerations.11 Arguing that the two vices of contemporary Portuguese letters were a lack of originality and a lack of sincerity, he posited that the artists of his generation should

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Fig. 11.2. Presença, no. 53–54, november 1938, p. 12. 36 cm. Júlio Reis Pereira’s romantic illustration of artistic inspiration.

combat these by infusing their work with their own personalities: ‘Literatura viva é aquela em que o artista insuf lou a sua própria vida, e que por isso mesmo passa a viver de vida própria’ [Living art is that into which the artist has breathed his own life, and for that very reason it gains a life of its own].12 If the personality of the artist is original and brilliant, his living work will be the same. Freud had shown that the true self resides in the unconscious mind; it follows that the best works of art will be those which best register and express unconscious psychic realities. gaspar Simões, the first Portuguese critic to be openly enthusiastic about Freudian psychoanalysis as an interpretative approach to literature, wrote in an essay in Presença of dostoevsky’s wonderful ‘revelação dinâmica do mecanismo psicológio’ [dynamic revelation of the psychological machinery].13 Régio’s poetry is grounded in the belief that it is in theory possible, however fraught with difficulty,

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to communicate the most virgin, most sincere and most intimate part of the artistic personality to others. gaspar Simões, too, attempted to convey in his fiction the inner worlds of his characters: Elói bears the subtitle ‘Romance numa cabeça’ [novel inside a Head], and places the action in the recesses of a jealous mind, in a manner reminiscent of the technique of Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), another writer he and Régio both admired. Their ideal of the artist as an inspired individual, attempting to express his true personality, is an inherently Romantic view of authorship, and it is furthered by the numerous illustrations of creativity that feature in the magazine, such as the drawings by Júlio, Régio’s brother, that feature a young poet alone with his thoughts or his imagined muse (see Fig. 11.2). In his criticism, gaspar Simões attempted to reach the essential core of the artistic personality and explain how it shaped the work. His pioneering psychoanalytical essay on Pessoa appeared in Temas [Themes] (1929), and he allowed the method full rein in the first ever biography of Pessoa, Vida e Obra de Fernando Pessoa [Fernando Pessoa’s Life and Work] (1950).14 gaspar Simões’s brand of criticism has not dated well, and is today largely dismissed as ineffective, reductive, and theoretically unsound, but few alternative biographies of Pessoa have appeared since. Régio’s insistence upon artistic sincerity, and gaspar Simões’s attempts to discover in the unconscious mind the seed of artistic creativity, take for granted something which the previous generation of modernists everywhere called into question: the existence of a core personality one must be faithful to. Régio makes this much explicit in the opening sentences of ‘Literatura viva’: em Arte, é vivo tudo o que é original. É original tudo o que provém da parte mais virgem, mais verdadeira e mais íntima duma personalidade artística. A primeira condição duma obra viva é pois ter uma personalidade e obedecerlhe.15 [In Art, everything that is original is alive. What is original is what stems from the most virgin, most sincere and most intimate part of the artistic personality. The first condition for a living work is therefore to have a personality and to be true to it.]

In the same essay, Régio further declares: ‘O escritor português tem e mantém uma personalidade’ [The Portuguese writer has, and maintains, a single personality.] This belief is in start stark contrast to that of the Orpheu poets, for one of the key revelations of the ‘high’ modernism represented by Pessoa and Mário de Sá-Carneiro in Portugal, and by T. S. eliot and James Joyce further afield, is that we have no selves to speak of. Whereas Régio and gaspar Simões strove to discover the artist in his handiwork rather than out of it, they had instead championed authorial impersonality.16 The great ontological difference between the two modernist generations is expertly analysed by eduardo Lourenço in his seminal essay on the Presença generation, ‘ “Presença”, ou A Contra-Revolução do Modernismo Português?’ [‘Presença’, or the Counter-Revolution to Portuguese Modernism?] (1969).17 Arguing that the Presença poets’ psychological grounding is diametrically opposed to the Orpheu writers’ negation of any essential self, Lourenço concluded that the Presença generation represented not a continuation of Orpheu modernism, but rather a ‘reflexão

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sobre o Modernismo e, simultaneamente, refracção do Modernismo’ [a ref lection upon Modernism and, at the same time, a refraction of Modernism].18 Interestingly, Régio anticipated the charge, albeit for different reasons, when he wrote in 1935: ‘só falta que Fradique nos acuse de contra-revolucionários’ [the only thing missing is for Fradique [a newspaper] to accuse us of being counter-revolutionary].19 Lourenço’s thesis turned the reigning critical consensus on its head, and it has generated much ink since. Before his essay’s appearance, the Presença generation’s admiration for the Orpheu circle had misled many readers into perceiving more points of contact between the two modernist groups than in reality existed. The perceived lack of differentiation between the two had been fuelled by the fact that many of Presença’s contributors published their work in both Orpheu and Presença. Almada, often regarded as the perfect representation, in his multifaceted experimentation, of the Orpheu generation, also contributed articles and illustrations to Presença, and in 1935 a third magazine, S. W. Sudoeste celebrated both groups in the same breath. Furthermore, the criticism published in Presença, in keeping with the magazine’s promotion of contemporary modern art, tended to explore individual and group contributions to modernism; almost invariably, any discussions of what it meant to be ‘modern’ hinged upon studies of Pessoa, Sá-Carneiro and Almada. Régio described modernity in various pieces as the attempt to create the eternal from the transient, in line with Baudelaire’s famous definition of modernity, but he usually sought to extract the movement’s key ingredients from the work of the Orpheu poets.20 In ‘da geração modernista’ [On the modernist generation], for example, he embarked on a study of Pessoa, Sá-Carneiro and Almada negreiros, to conclude that the main features of modernism was an interest in the unconscious, even as the artwork is intellectually constructed, and the simultaneous expression of conf licting emotions.21 These writers’ technical virtuosity and stylistic f lights of fancy Régio considered the natural by-products of the last tendency in particular, when in reality they were integral components. gaspar Simões, in ‘Modernismo’, concluded that modernism was inherently individualistic, taking the proliferation of Orpheu -isms as evidence of the fact.22 Casais, in one of numerous articles retrospectively examining the movement to which he belonged, claimed that until Torga, Branquinho and Bettencourt’s defection in 1930, Presença was a mouthpiece for a typical group comprised of students or alumni of Coimbra University; after Casais himself joined it became, more grandly, ‘o único órgão estável da vanguarda das artes e das letras portuguesas’ [the only stable vehicle for avant-garde Portuguese art and literature].23 This statement suggests that Casais viewed the magazine as being highly modernist in its attempt to display, as Orpheu had done before it, the most avant-garde currents of the day. In a direct line from the Presença generation’s critical and poetic approximations between their own brand of modernism and that of the Orpheu poets, 1930s readers continued to approximate the two movements; Pierre Hourcade, for example, in ‘Panorama du Modernisme Littéraire au Portugal’ (1931) explored the modernist mindset he discovered in both the Orpheu and Presença generations.24 Inevitably, the Presença generation came to be referred to as a ‘second modernism’. The problem with this classification is not merely that, like any artistic label, it is too restrictive

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for such a multifaceted group.25 The problem is that the notion of a second modernism implies that the Presença generation represents a second wave of Orpheu modernism: a continuation of the earlier artists’ trends along similar lines, following a brief hiatus. The obvious hiatus, for those who ascribe to this chronological view of inf luence, was the period between the Wars, which brought with it a yearning for order and serious ref lection that Presença ably supplied in its criticism. Certainly, in some respects Presença aligned itself with the previous modernist generation’s ideals, and Lourenço’s thesis has been challenged by those who feel that he divides the two movements too neatly. His analysis focuses on Pessoa and Sá-Carneiro versus Régio and Torga, but it is arguably less applicable following a wider appreciation of both groups: not everything in Orpheu is revolutionary — some of its contributors, like Alfredo guisado and Armando Côrtes-Rodrigues, are steeped in late nineteenth-century aesthetics like symbolism — and there are highly modernist impulses in António de navarro, in the prose poems of Branquinho, and in the surrealism of Bettencourt, all of whom published in Presença but not in Orpheu. Lourenço himself concedes, in his essay, that the poetry of Casais is extremely modernist. In his blank verse, Casais attempts to widen the possibility of sound and rhythm combinations, to amplify its limits like modern atonal music, such as Schoenberg’s. In his third collection of poetry, one section bears the heading ‘Melodias atonais’ [Atonal Melodies]. His opening collection, Confusão [Confusion] (1929) had outlined an aesthetic vision grounded on disorder, uncertainly, and the ‘caótico tumulto | das vozes interiores’26 [chaotic tumult | of internal voices]. Casais acknowledged his debt to the previous modernist generation outright: one the poems in his collection Noite Aberta aos Quatro Ventos [Night Open to the Four Winds] (1943) is titled ‘Ode ao Tejo e à memória de Álvaro de Campos’ [Ode to the Tagus and to the Memory of Álvaro de Campos]. gaspar Simões called attention to Presença’s magazine’s ‘revolutionary’ aspects in an essay in the commemorative 1977 issue. On occasion, the magazine could be as daring as Orpheu: for instance, many subscribers indignantly returned the double issue 31–32, which contained Raul Leal’s scandalous text ‘A Virgem-Besta’.27 Arguably, Presença realized one of Orpheu’s central tenets better than the earlier magazine in the critical attention it paid to so many different modes of artistic expression. Régio assimilated elements of the Orpheu modernism, such as the fracture of the self, which he reinterpreted in a creative rather than copycat appropriation, infusing it with a psychological or religious dimension. This means that there are striking poetic approximations between his work and that of the Orpheu poets, even if his ontological starting-point was contrary to theirs. Régio’s most emblematic poem, ‘Cântico negro’, (Poemas de Deus e do Diabo, 1925) is evocative of an earlier poem by Pessoa, ‘Lisbon Revisited (1923)’, first published in the magazine Contemporanea in 1923 under the name of Álvaro de Campos.28 In Régio’s poem, a religious meditation oscillating between god and the devil which establishes a dialogue with the former via the latter, the speaker declares his independence — ‘Só vou por onde | Me levam meus próprios passos...’ [I only go where | my own steps take me...]29 — in terms reminiscent of Pessoa’s phrasing in ‘Lisbon Revisited (1923)’:

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não me peguem no braço! não gosto que me peguem no braço. Quero ser sozinho. Já disse que sou sozinho!30 [do not grab me by the arm! I do not like being grabbed by the arm. I want to be alone. I have already said I am alone!]

Pessoa’s poem, in its defence of the insanity he believes to be intrinsic to artistic genius (‘sou doido, com todo o direito a sê-lo. | Com todo o direito a sê-lo, ouviram?’ [I am insane, with every right to be so. | With every right to be so, do you hear?])31 also anticipates Régio’s ‘eu tenho a minha Loucura!’ [I have my Insanity!].32 In ‘Cântigo negro’, lines like ‘eu amo o Longe e a Miragem, | Amo os abismos, as torrentes, os desertos...’ [I love the Far Away and the Mirage, | I love the abyss, the torrents, the deserts...] could have been lifted straight from Sá-Carneiro’s poetry. Both men’s poetic doublings display a self tenuously suspended between itself and the other, and they are similarly interested in masks and ref lections, doubles, spectres, and other shadowy manifestations of a binary self. This explains Régio’s selective affinity with Sá-Carneiro rather than Pessoa, whose work he found too insincere and too cerebral. It also cannot have helped that in their only documented meeting, in 1930, with gaspar Simões and Carlos Queiroz also present, Pessoa insisted on impersonating Álvaro de Campos for the duration. The myriad critical and poetic affinities between the two modernist generations does not, however, imply the existence of the profound direct inf luence that the chronology of the period would suggest. Régio’s poetry never abandoned formal rhythm and rhyme, and it was devoid of experimental modernist techniques, owning more to the subjectivity of António nobre, the structural juxtapositions of Cesário Verde, the rhetoric of gomes Leal, and the symbolism of António Patrício than to the impulses of Pessoa’s generation. Régio’s line of artistic descent prompted Jorge de Sena to argue that, since to his work was exclusively indebted to earlier trends, ‘se Fernando Pessoa e Mário de Sá-Carneiro não tivessem existido, a obra de Régio teria sido exactamente a mesma’ [had Pessoa and Sá-Carneiro never existed, Régio’s work would have been exactly the same].33 This is at least an exaggeration: had Sá-Carneiro never existed, Régio could not have written the play that borrows the title of one of his short stories, Mário ou Eu Próprio — O Outro [Mário or Myself — The Other] (1957), and reading the poems in Régio’s Biografia [Biography] (1929) made Pessoa miss his dead friend, for he sensed in them ‘uma íntima analogia entre o seu modo de sentir e o modo de sentir que distinguia o Sá-Carneiro’ [an intimate correspondence between your sensibility and the sensibility that characterized Sá-Carneiro].34 But Sena’s point is that Régio’s brand of modernism is in no way a straightforward continuation of the Orpheu poets’, even if it is shaped by the inf luences the two groups shared, like nobre and Cesário. The Presença generation, he and Lourenço both argue, represents another, parallel strand of modernism, even if at times it intersects with the critical and aesthetic ideals of the previous one. ‘Cântigo negro’ may display sentiments shared by Pessoa and Sá-Carneiro, but it is by no means a poetic response, for in it Régio arrives at a similar, terrifying loss of identity via a different critical and poetic process.

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Fig. 11.3. Title page of Presença, no. 1, 2nd series, november 1939.

The introspective, psychological core of Régio’s work, and that of other contributors to Presença, led the succeeding generation to attack the Presença poets for being too self-absorbed, and too little concerned with the social and political landscape during what was unquestionably a troubled time. Presença barely referred to the world-changing events of the period, such as the formation of the military dictatorship in Portugal just a year before its conception, and the rise of Fascism in Italy, the rise of nazism in germany, the consolidation of Stalinism in the Soviet Union, or the Spanish Civil War during its lifetime. Instead, the magazine called for artistic independence: in ‘Literatura livresca e literatura viva’, Régio condemned any criticism that approached art ‘sob o ponto de vista moral, social, patriótico ou religioso’ [from a moral, social, patriotic or religious perspective].35 Régio reiterated the magazine’s independence in the first issue of Presença’s second series: À revista presença interessam as criações da arte, as pesquisas ou conclusões da crítica, — e, dum modo geral, as manifestações do espírito humano dominando tanto quanto possível as limitações do espaço e do tempo. As questões políticas e sociais não lhe interessam.36 [Presença is interested in artistic creations, critical studies or conclusions — and the manifestations of the human spirit in general conquering as far as possible the limitations of time and space. It is not interested in political or social issues.]

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That the Presença generation should have promoted artistic freedom, meaning also detachment and disengagement, at a time when there were increasing limitations on that freedom, in the form of state censorship, has been hailed by some as a heroic stance. david Mourão-Ferreira argued that the Presença generation’s only option was to ‘continuarem defendendo, no plano estético, os valores supremos da liberdade por que sempre lutaram’ [keep defending, on the aesthetic plane, the supreme values of freedom for which they always fought.]37 This is a generous appraisal, for there is little evidence that censorship was a real threat to the little-known magazine, or that it was instrumental in shaping the Presença generation’s championing of artistic freedom, which had been an ideal from the start (see Fig. 11.3). This stance ultimately led to the magazine’s demise, for to be outside politics at such a time was felt by many to be an untenable position. In the late 1930s, the Presença generation was attacked by the newspapers O Diabo and Sol Nascente, as well as by neo-realist writers, whose emergence coincided with the magazine’s final years, who argued that art should be socially responsible and politically engaged, rather than limited to the confines of an ivory tower. The leader of the Portuguese Communist Party, Álvaro Cunhal, famously accused Régio of worshipping his own navel. Although there is a certain ambivalence in Régio’s political attitude, the charge is unfair, for his work contains a critique of the estado novo’s mechanisms of power, in particular its patriarchal social structures. The short stories in Régio’s Histórias de mulheres [Women’s Stories] (1946) are sensitive and sympathetic portrayals of various forms of female subjugation in an oppressive patriarchal society. Further to being attacked for its apolitical stance, the Presença generation was also charged with provincialism. Mourão-Ferreira, who defended it against the charge of political irresponsibility, pointed out that many of its artists, like Torga, were more concerned with bucolic, pastoral settings and themes than with the more pressing concerns of the capital.38 However, the creative ‘exiles’ of Torga and other Presença writers were arguably an intentional response to the political situation, for if one form of refuge is a retreat into the inner self, as in Régio’s psychological poems, another is the movement away from the urban centres associated with government to the periphery. Viewed in this light, they foreshadowed the real exile of Casais to Brazil in 1954, and Régio’s retreat from public life in later years. notes to Chapter 11 1. Whether Presença is best described as a review, journal or magazine is open to discussion; in this chapter, ‘magazine’ is favoured because similar english-language publications are generally referred to as ‘little magazines’. The British Library holds an important collection of these, which its curator describes thus: ‘The term “little magazine” can be applied to a range of different publications, but here it is used to suggest a literary magazine, usually produced without concern for immediate commercial gain, and with a guiding enthusiasm for contemporary literature, especially poetry. A little magazine may champion work by a very small number of authors, or a particular style, or attempt to provide a cross-section of what its editor sees as the contemporary scene.’ (http://www.bl.uk/reshelp/findhelprestype/journals/littlemagazines/littlemagazines. html) 2. Presença can thus appear as presença in Portuguese texts; in this chapter Presença is preferred, but all quotations follow the original renditions. 3. See Presença 6 (18 July 1927), 17 (december 1928), 18 ( January 1929), 19 (February–March 1929), 20 (April–May 1929), 21 ( June–August 1929).

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4. Presença 48 ( June 1937). 5. Fernando Pessoa, letter to Casais Monteiro, 13 January 1935, Presença 49 ( June 1937), 1–4.; repr. in Pessoa, Correspondência 1923–1935, ed. by Manuela Parreira da Silva (Lisbon: Assírio & Alvim, 1999) pp. 337–48. 6. José Régio, ‘Literatura Livresca e Literatura Viva’ [Bookish Literature and Living Literature], Presença 9 (9 February 1928), p. 1. All issues of Presença are reproduced in Presença: Edição Facsimilada Compacta, 3 vols, ed. by david Mourão-Ferreira (Lisbon: Contexto, 1993); since this edition does not have running page numbers, page numbers refer to those in the magazines. It was Casais Monteiro who baptized this essay Presença’s essay-manifesto, in a newspaper article of 1955 (O Estado de São Paulo, 27 February 1955; cited in Osvaldo Manual Silvestre’s Preface to a 2003 edition of Casais’s anthology A Poesia da ‘Presença’ (Lisbon: Cotovia, 2003), p. 7. 7. The first volume was on Pessoa’s orthonymic poetry, or the poems he signed as ‘himself ’, and included an Introduction by Casais and the ‘Tábua Bibliográfica’ first published in Presença 17 (december 1928); the second was dedicated to the poetry of the heteronyms, and reproduced Pessoa’s letter to Casais on their genesis. 8. Adolfo Casais Monteiro, A Poesia da ‘Presença’ (Lisbon: Cotovia, 2003) reproduces Casais’s single-volume edition of 1945, the second edition of his pioneering anthology. 9. Adolfo Casais Monteiro, O Que Foi e o Que Não Foi o Movimento da Presença, ed. by Fernando J. B. Martinho (Lisbon: Imprensa nacional–Casa da Moeda, 1995), p. 111. 10. Presença 1, series II (november 1939), 1. 11. Régio, ‘Literatura viva’, Presença 1, (10 March 1927), 1. 12. Ibid. 13. gaspar Simões, ‘depois de dostoievski’, Presença 6 (18 July 1927), 1–2. 14. gaspar Simões, Temas (Lisbon: edições Presença, 1929). 15. Régio, ‘Literatura Viva’. 16. Joyce puts the goal most clearly when he writes, in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), that ‘the artist, like the god of creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails’ (A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man [1916], ed. by Seamus deane (London: Penguin, 1992), p. 219). 17. eduardo Lourenço, ‘Presença ou A Contra-Revolução do Modernismo Português?’ [Presença, or the Counter-Revolution to Portuguese Modernism?] (1960), Tempo e Poesia (Porto: Inova, 1974), pp. 187–93. 18. Ibid., p. 189. Original emphasis. 19. José Régio, Páginas de Doutrina e Crítica da ‘Presença’ (Porto: Brasília editora, 1977), p. 307, cited in Luís Adriano Carlos, ‘O Classicismo Modernista’, Cântico Negro: antologia poética, ed. by Luís Adriano Carlos and Valter Hugo Mãe (Vila nova de Famalicão: Quasi edições, 2005), p. xiii. 20. In ‘The Painter of Modern Life’ (1859) Baudelaire declares: ‘[The artist] makes it his business to extract from fashion whatever element it may contain of poetry within history, to distil the eternal from the transitory. [...] By “modernity” I mean the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent, the half of art whose other half is the eternal and the immutable.’ (‘Le Peinture de la vie moderne’, Le Figaro, Paris, 26 and 28 november and 3 december 1863; repr. and trans. in The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, ed. by Jonathan Mayne (London: Phaidon, 1964) pp. 9–10. 21. José Régio, ‘da geração Modernista’, Presença 3 (8 April 1927), 1. 22. Presença 14–15 (23 July 1928), 3. 23. Adolfo Casais Monteiro, O Que Foi e o Que Não Foi o Movimento da Presença, pp. 52–53. 24. Pierre Hourcade, ‘Panorama du Modernisme Littéraire en Portugal’, Bulletin des Études Portugaises, 1931. 25. Fernando J. B. Martinho voices the usual complaint: ‘não obstante o profundo enraizamento na nossa tradição crítica moderna de uma designação periodológica como a que vem indicada em epígrafe [Segundo Modernismo], a leitura da poesia novecentista portuguesa só terá, porventura, a ganhar com uma visão do Modernismo que o aproxime mais de um megaperíodo, das durações intermédias do que das durações curtas, como o Primeiro e Segundo Modernismo, a que, com frequência, se tem procurado restringi-lo’ [notwithstanding the deep grounding of our traditional modernist criticism on period classifications like the one above [i.e. Second Modernism] the reception of twentieth-century Portuguese poetry would benefit from a

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vision of Modernism as a megaperiod, with intermediate rather than brief time-spans, such as the restrictive First and Second Modernisms to which it has frequently been conscribed]. ‘Segundo Modernismo’, in Dicionário de Fernando Pessoa e do Modernismo Português, coord. by Fernando Cabral Martins (Lisbon: Caminho, 2008), p. 783. 26. Adolfo Casais Monteiro, Poesias Completas, (Lisbon: Imprensa nacional–Casa da Moeda, 1993) p. 38. 27. Presença, 31–32 (March–June 1931). 28. Contemporanea 8 (February 1923). 29. José Régio, Cântico Negro, p. 22. 30. Fernando Pessoa, Álvaro de Campos: Poesia, ed. by Teresa Rita Lopes (Lisbon: Assírio e Alvim, 2002), p. 272. 31. Ibid., p. 271. 32. José Régio, Cântico Negro, p. 23. 33. Jorge de Sena, ‘na Morte de José Régio’ (1970), O Que Foi e o Que Não Foi o Movimento da ‘Presença’, p. 146. 34. Pessoa, Correspondência 1923–1935, p. 195. 35. Régio, ‘Literatura Livresca e Literatura Viva’, Presença 9, 2. 36. Presença 1, series II (november 1939), 1. 37. david Mourão-Ferreira, ‘Intróito’, Presença da ‘presença’ (Porto: Brasília editores, 1977), p. 13. 38. See ‘Caracterização da “Presença” ou as definições involuntárias’, Presença da “presença”, pp. 27–29. Mourão-Ferreira focuses also on the ‘provincialism’ of Alberto de Serpa, Saúl dias, Francisco Bugalho and Fausto José.

CH A P t e r 12

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Vieira da Silva: The Visible and the gap Pedro Lapa What you see in my painting is uncertainty, that terrible labyrinth. Vieira da Silva

The work of Maria Helena Vieira da Silva (1908–1992) emerged during the outof-phase period of the second movement of Portuguese modernism. It thus developed in the context of european abstract art of the mid-twentieth century as a protagonist of a way of thought that differed from the first historical avant-gardes. While abstract art established itself as a search for an intelligible visuality of pictorial space, some artists in the 1930s and, above all, in the 1940s sought other ways forward. Without rejecting the principles of abstraction, they challenged its foundations in another way. The essential aim was to investigate questions raised by Paul Klee concerning the ability of art to represent a reality that had been transformed by modern technology and warfare, and, above all, its ability to represent the unrepresentable, that which lies beyond human understanding, as a means of returning to the Romantic sublime. These artists of the Jeune École de Paris, of which she was a leading member, thus significantly reconfigured and developed the fundamental maxim of Klee’s artistic practice: ‘Art does not represent the visible; it makes visible’. For these artists the visuality of a painting was not structured on the basis of a discourse on determining essential models, but on the primacy of lived experienced in which perception and consciousness work together to construct the constituent visuality of the painting. Pure consciousness, separated from sense experience and developed through abstract geometrization, played a dominant role in the practice and thought of abstract art in this period. Perhaps for this reason, artists like Vieira da Silva, who shared a different, less idealist attitude towards questions of visuality, began to gain recognition only in the post-war period, as the global conf lict produced profound changes in modern thought. It was also at this time that Paris gave way to new York as a centre of attraction and production of modern art. Abstract expressionism led to a deep radicalization of these issues as it abandoned the lyricism adopted by Vieira da Silva and the Jeune École de Paris. Regardless of the great importance of the artistic practise of Hans Hofmann, Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Robert Motherwell, Mark Rothko and Barnett newman, among many others, their emergence, associated with a political project of cultural hegemony, led to a dominance that excluded other, mainly

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european artistic movements to which Vieira da Silva, Pierre Soulages, nicolas de Staël, Jean Bazaine, Alfred Manessier, Bram van Velde and Hans Hartung belonged. The work of Mark Tobey emerged as a channel of communication between these two worlds. Vieira da Silva was the only Portuguese artist of the twentieth century who participated directly in the growth of international modern art movements. She thus stands out as a singular example in Portuguese modernist painting. While Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso was forced to leave France for Portugal when the First World War broke out in 1914, never returning to Paris and dying prematurely in 1918, Vieira da Silva created her work outside Portugal, almost always in Paris, in a context in which her art was understood and which provided her with a stimu lating dialogue that Portugal, closed off by a dictatorship averse to any form of modernity, could never have provided. Working aboard also favoured the international development and recognition of her art at a level that no other Portuguese artist would achieve in the twentieth century. She left Portugal in 1928 to live and study sculpture in Paris, first with Bourdelle and later with despiau. But she quickly abandoned these studies and dedicated herself to painting, attending courses given by Léger and Bissière. In 1930, she married the Hungarian painter Arpad Szenes. As a result of her marriage, she was stripped of her Portuguese nationality and became stateless, bearing a League of nations passport until 1956, when she became a naturalized French citizen. Vieira da Silva continued to exhibit in Portugal in the 1930s and to maintain relations with the Portuguese artistic and intellectual community, spending several seasons in the country. She exhibited her work in the I Salão dos Independentes of 1930, a collective exhibition that brought together first generation modernists with the young artists, poets, architects and musicians representing a second generation keen to disseminate the modernist movement within a conservative, indifferent Portuguese society. Their proposals, however, failed to make an impact on Portuguese society and after a second year the exhibition retreated into conventionalism without the participation of Vieira da Silva and was criticized at the time by the writer José Régio in the magazine Presença.1 Vieira da Silva’s earliest works demonstrate a great harmony among elements defined by linear drawing and an un-nuanced, homogeneous chromaticism. They are portraits composed only of structural elements, having no expressive components and no shadow. They are reduced to silhouettes with anatomic extensions and distortions suggested by compositions that are sensitive to the surface of the canvas. Her palette is reduced to austere colours, but she also shows a strong spatial tendency that is sometimes open and at other times contained within clearly marked lines. The rough forms with which she depicts figures, interiors and landscapes, which are often composed of architectural elements, reveal her clear awareness of the two dimensional plane of the painting. The paintings Marseille blanc, Le Quai de Marseille, Le Pont transbordeur and Les Balançoires, all painted in 1931, were created during a spring visit to Marseilles. They build on her interest in architectural motifs and allow her to occupy spaces fully by using the structural lines of spatial rhythms. Her use of frontal or aerial points of view strengthens the f latness of her abstract

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treatment of these motifs. In the last of these paintings, there is a clear tautology between the narrow and markedly vertical shape of the canvas and the motif represented. According to diane daval Béran, the figuration loses itself within the construction as if we are already dealing with ‘the simultaneous representation of two successive instants of a swinging movement’.2 In the case of Le Pont transbordeur (a work that has disappeared) the linear treatment of the motif annuls the figure– background dichotomy within pictorial planes that define their own spaces, being compartmentalized and articulated on the basis of their autonomy. This treatment already asserts the ambiguous pictorial space of Vieira da Silva, as José-Augusto França noted of this painting.3 Vieira da Silva said of this work that ‘foi o primeiro verdadeiro quadro que eu fiz, e só resta dele uma fotografia má. [...] nesse quadro, havia já uma direcção, no seu princípio’ [it was the first real painting that I made, and all that remains of it is a bad photograph. [...] There was already the beginning of a direction in that painting].4 While these paintings reveal a great facility in appropriating and reconfiguring central aspects of modernity, they remain distant from the specific questions that her subsequent work would raise in the art world. It is also important to emphasize that they brought her to the threshold of engaging with the central questions of the art discourses and practices of the decade. The move from Lisbon to Paris also placed Vieira da Silva in the right city to participate. The art movements that dominated the period arose from the debate between realist and figurative art, which was politically committed to the fight against the fascist threat that ravaged europe in the 1930s, and abstraction as a space for the expression of the freedom inherent in human beings. Surrealism was yet another movement, having different strands and seeing itself as a continuation of the avantgarde of previous decades. The emigration of André Breton and Max ernst to new York during the Second World War led to other developments that culminated in abstract expressionism. But surrealism had no direct impact on the work of Vieira da Silva, who represented a new approach to non-figurative art and who, to a certain degree, saw her work as a means of rising above the conf lict between figurative and abstract art that dominated much of the debate during this period. Artists such as Mark Tobey and Julius Bissier, who emerged in the 1930s and were contemporaries of Vieira da Silva, developed work that was critical of logical and rational consciousness — the canon of western knowledge — and which moved towards oriental traditions, placing particular emphasis on the integrity of the sign. As dora Vallier said: ‘from the oriental point of view, form exists only as a function of content, each sign being a profound expression of the relationship between man and the universe. This is what Bissier and Tobey understood.’5 This current of modern art, many concerns of which can be found in the work of Vieira da Silva, focused on the relation between the phenomenal and the ontological, exploring the representation in painting of both the visible and the invisible. Vieira da Silva understood painting as an experience of the visible, seeing it as a source of complexity to be offered to the senses of perception and being. Sensorial and cognitive data are developed in relation to the world, but not limited by it. What

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Vieira da Silva would subsequently explore in her work were the conditions that pertain to the visible. It would perhaps be useful here to describe the more specific antecedents of these concerns in the first historical avant-gardes. The art of Paul Klee, with which Vieira da Silva became familiar from 1933, was based on theories relating to the visible and to questions of form suggested by the relationship between the different elements of painting. His work explored the notion of construction as opposed to representation. By articulating basic categories such as line, tonality and colour, his painting entered new areas that escaped conscious control. On one hand, painting and its three fundamental elements can be viewed as a standard, rational project. On the other hand, creative demands carry the theoretical issue much further. In the appeal to the notion of what lies beyond understanding, of the non-formulaic that remains an indomitable part of the creative force, rationality vanishes. In this sense, the aesthetic experience for Klee was no longer the product of a consciousness which produces a feeling that can be deciphered by a system or perceived through the evidence of its presence. Rather, the aesthetic experience seeks in the visible a degree of invisibility, an ontological sign. Vieira da Silva’s work began to develop in a specific direction from the second half of the 1930s. Paintings such as Atelier, Lisbonne (1934–35) and the Composition series (1936) are structured around a closed space that is clearly defined in terms of classical perspective and which encloses the surface of the canvas within the illusory space of a chamber, where large linear and abstract sculpture-like structures create dynamic tension between intricate interior and exterior spaces. Chromatism plays a dominant role in the dynamic tension that animates these structures. In Atelier, Lisbonne, the studio space has a dull, earthy tone, but the small, emblematic segments of colour — which are placed at certain points in the abstract structure, but which do not constitute structural points in its representation — create a distraction in the force field defined by the linear structure. A tension is apparent between the colour and the spatial structure defined by line. It is in this difference that the resistance to the overlapping of one of these categories by the other resides. The conf lict between drawing and colour is confronted in a productive fashion. The compositions she painted in the next year followed more than one exploratory path. The paintings of the Composition series of 1936 continued to explore the construction of linear structures that produce conf licting spatial relations with the perspectival space in which they are placed. In other words, Vieira da Silva explored the overlaying of different spatial orders belonging to different historical traditions. While the linear constructions define sculptural spaces, they are located in the virtual space of the studio, organized according to Quattrocento rules of perspective that suggest the effect of a sculpture in space. However, the spatial structure undergoes several overlays on the frontal plane of the canvas surface and establishes irrational overlapping relationships that deconstruct the depth of the illusionary space of classical perspective. An oscillation between the illusion of depth and f latness affects the composition, contradicting the virtual integration of one spatial order within another, a facet of her painting which was still in existence in Atelier, Lisbonne.

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Fig. 12.1. Maria Helena Vieira da Silva, ‘La Chambre à Carreaux,’ 1935, oil on canvas, 60 × 92 cm. Tate Modern, London.

Another direction, initiated in her painting in 1935, took as its reference point La Chambre à carreaux and a sequence of other works that followed (see Fig. 12.1). All of them dispense with the central theme that we saw occupying the linear structures of the Composition paintings. The chamber which configures the workshop space, structured by the main lines of the perspective and inherited from Atelier, Lisbonne, defines a spatial organization within a model affected by the suggestion of a third illusory dimension. However, the chromatic fragmentation created by the small squares and lozenges produces, through an irregularity of dimension and chromatic rhythm, a spatial oscillation that differs from the orientation determined by the use of perspective. The chromatic repetitions create their own rhythms and tend, at times, to isolate different areas of the space as defined by the sequences pertaining to these elements. These are developed in spirals in a rhythmical sequence in the same colour, separating them from the perspectival structure of space in the form of a chamber, thus creating a tension between different understandings of visuality itself. This painting, more than any other previous work by Vieria da Silva, expresses the difference between linearly defined space and space suggested by colour. This is a subtle question, which she never ceased to explore in her work, rejecting any unifying synthesis. It is of note that the space produced by these two categories tends to become dynamic through the use of either chromatic rhythm or the large structural composition lines of a possible third dimension. This turbulence, as yet only suggested in the form of oscillations, reveals the implicit sensory nature of perception as it generates images and was explored in her later paintings.

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This helps explain her deployment of classical, historically defined traditions together with a modernist awareness of different categories of painting, an area of experimentation inf luenced by the divide between colour and line. Vieira da Silva’s references range from the painters of Siena, such as Simone Martini, to the questions concerning colour and drawing raised by Matisse. These paintings rejected the stabilization of perception through the imposition of a rational order. La Scala, painted in 1937, maintains the linear spatial organization of La Chambre à carreaux, but replaces its grid with eyes in multiple colours that harmonize in chromatic units that are developed in spirals, a clearly defined movement that is in contradiction with the depth created by the linearity of the perspective. Her use of this element — the eye — ref lects an awareness of the perspectival dimension of the painting as a representation of the eye mechanism. By segmenting and diversifying the eye in a multiplicity of different elements, she fragments the unity of perception itself. The space becomes a field for myriad tiny perceptions that enter into conf lict with the absolute point of view defined by linear perspective. The association between the figurative element of the eye and the colour of the space it occupies, made autonomous by gradation and rhythm within its own spatial movement, creates a tension that results in an overlapping. As Merleau-Ponty put it: ‘vision divides itself: there is a vision on which I ref lect; I cannot think it except as thought, the mind’s inspection, judgement, a reading of signs. And then there is vision that really takes place, an honorary or instituted thought, squeezed into a body, its own body, of which we can have no idea except in the exercise of it, which introduces between space and thought, the freestanding order of the amalgamated soul and body. The enigma of vision has not been eliminated: it has been corrected from the “thought of seeing” to vision in action’.6 The rejection of any synthesis between conf licting categories of painting and different approaches to spatial issues leads to an overlapping of vision. This is why the paintings of Vieira da Silva can be defined, from her earliest works, as art that complicate these categories and traditions. This in turn results in a continuous generation of spatial possibilities. As early as 1937, the painting La Machine optique deepened her exploration of the questions raised by her earlier paintings through an approach that involved a high degree of systematization. In this work, the role played by chromatic rhythms in the construction of forms and spaces is absolute. From a web of lozenge shapes that are not rigorously geometrical and thus extremely dynamic, two motifs are highlighted by a simple, but luminous tonal variation: a circle and a square. Sequences in the same colour and spatial orientation are enough to define these forms. The colour repetitions are concentric for the circle and linear for the square. The compulsive repetition of a shape as dynamic as a lozenge creates a visual network that allows each element to be read either individually or as part of a group of units similar in shape and colour, although not rigorously identical, which, by stimulation of the nervous system, enables the shape printed on the retina to be projected onto the next similar, but never identical, element, resulting in a relatively slow visual reading of the whole. This projects a unity of shape, colour and surface, producing a spatial awareness that depends not on pictorial illusion but on active perception based on the visual mobility that the reading of the painting creates, a

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process produced by the perceptual psychomotor apparatus of the observer. Vieira da Silva’s clear awareness of this process is evident in the title of the painting and anticipates some of the problematic issues that Op Art would come to explore decades later. However, Vieira da Silva was interested not in constructing a rational model that would integrate these aspects in a standard geometrical system, but in exactly the opposite — the ambiguity and asymmetry that the eye discovers, hesitating among a proliferation of singularities. Vieira da Silva’s first individual exhibition was held in Lisbon in 1935 and organized by António Pedro, a leading figure of Portuguese surrealism, at his Galeria UP, Lisbon’s first modern art gallery. In January 1936, Vieira da Silva and Arpad Szenes held another exhibition of their recent work in their Lisbon studio, which was praised by local artists and intellectuals, but had little other impact. It was away from Lisbon, following an individual exhibition at the Jeanne Bucher gallery in Paris, in 1937, that a growing appreciation of her work started to become evident. The english painter Jules Travelyan acquired La Chambre à carreaux, which is now in the Tate gallery, and Hilla Rebay bought one of the Composition series for the collection of what was to become the guggenheim Museum. during these years, Vieira da Silva would spend some seasons in Lisbon and others in Paris. After the outbreak of Second World War, she returned with her husband to Lisbon, where many refugees from the conf lict had travelled, many of them en route to the United States. In Portugal, Vieira da Silva was commissioned at the end 1939 to paint a large panel of Lisbon to be shown at the Portuguese World exhibition, which the dictator António Salazar had decided to organize. Shortly before the inauguration, however, the work was censured and destroyed. despite numerous attempts to recover her Portuguese nationality, which she had forfeited by marrying Arpad, who had also lost his own nationality, Salazar’s Interior Ministry refused to grant her request. In 1940, she hesitated between leaving for the US or Brazil. She decided on the latter, which proved not to have been the best option for her artistic career, although she was made welcome there and her work became a cornerstone of Brazilian modernism, particularly in Rio de Janeiro. From this time, her relationship with Portugal began to fade. She would visit Lisbon frequently after her return to europe, but her ties were limited to her family. In 1938, Vieira da Silva painted Les Losanges or Danse, continuing the investigation of optical questions that she began with La Chambre à carreaux and which she developed to the extreme in La Machine optique. This decidedly horizontal painting marks a return to perspective and a linear chamber, which here takes the form of a stage, over which a web of elongated and individually distorted lozenge shapes f lutters like a semi-transparent curtain. Tonal variations in the painting’s component elements create vague suggestions of dancing harlequins. In this painting Vieira da Silva introduced figurative elements that harmonize with the general structure of the composition. This would become a recurrent feature of her work in the coming decade. L’Atelier (1940) and La Partie d’échecs (1943) explored these questions to the limit. In the former painting, the vanishing point of classical perspective structures the spatial construction by means of a chamber that defines the studio. In the second painting this is achieved by means of the chequered f loor that expands over the

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whole surface and undergoes a concentration in the upper area. In both works the vanishing point is located outside the painting, which becomes a place through which the supposed movement passes. In her work, depth manifests itself as a search. By simultaneously citing the Renaissance solution based on a grid structure and the modernist configuration of two-dimensional space, she rejects a rational simplification of our understanding of perception. For Vieira da Silva, it was not a question of reducing the illusion of the third dimension to the historic solution of the Renaissance window, nor of opposing this illusion with a f latness reconstructed on the basis of a rationalist (Cartesian) model that would suppress the sensory primacy and ubiquity of perception, transforming vision into a world organized on the basis of thought, which would exclude all the ambiguities generated between the senses and thinking. Vieira da Silva never ceased to explore the possibilities for creating depth and or giving it meaning in terms of a relationship with the body and the perceptive sensory dynamism that this implies. She said: Se utilizei estes quadradinhos, esta perspectiva cambaleante (sou eu que a qualifico assim), foi porque não vi nenhum interesse em seguir Mondrian ou outro qualquer. Queria algo diferente. Queria que as pessoas não ficassem passivas. Queria que viessem, que participassem nos jogos, que passeassem, subissem, descessem... eu não queria evidências, queria era que houvesse muitas coisas no meu quadro e, no entanto, queria que fosse tudo muito simples.7 [I used these little squares, this staggering perspective (that’s how I describe it), because I saw no interest in following Mondrian or anybody else. I wanted something different. I didn’t want people to remain passive. I wanted them to come and join in the games, to stroll, go up, go down... I didn’t want the obvious, I wanted my painting to be full of many things, and yet I wanted it all to be very simple.]

The introduction of figures or figurative elements in these and other abstract compositions brought to her painting the icons of an awareness of vision as the movement and physical tension of the body engaging in spatial construction. Whether it is the rebellious, turbulent movement of the dancing figures in L’Atelier, whose bodies blend with the chequered chromatic grid defining the space, or the players in La Partie d’échecs, whose faces loom over the chessboard, creating another depth and definition above the twisted chequered pattern, and which are pulled towards the upper part of the painting to produce depth of field, these two works mark a clear return to figuration as an iconographic model for a discourse on the visible and the invisible. An awareness of the body as what Merleau-Ponty called ‘a woven pattern of vision and movement,’ discloses a sphere that goes beyond the body as ‘what looks at all things can also look at itself and recognize, in what it sees, the “other side” of the power of looking. It sees itself seeing, touches itself touching, is visible and sensitive to itself ’.8 It is to this discursive return in which the visual unfolds in a ref lection on its own modalities that the figurative elements point. If we analyse these elements in detail, we see that they lack any independence apart from the subject’s observation in relation to the pictorial space. The dance in L’Atelier ref lects an awareness of bodily movement in the construction of space; the game of chess in La Partie d’échecs produces what is almost an image of the act

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of thinking — in this case visual thinking — as part of an infinite game. This suggests the two categories that are implicit in the pictorial work: the visible and the invisible. In the first case, the use of figurative elements approaches the question of movement and its bodily expression in the construction of space through a simple analogy, dance. In this metaphor the representation of an awareness of the sensory experience is achieved without any great leaps. In La Partie d’échecs, the use of the metaphor of the players, who ref lect on the movements of the pieces on the chessboard, establishes a direct relationship with the organization of the pictorial space to represent an awareness of the connection between thought and sense data, but remains a long way from attempting the contiguity expressed in the former painting. The attempt to include invisibility in the sphere of the visible, that is, locate an awareness of the perceptual experience in the realm of sense perception, finds in this residual figuration the possibility of symbolization and, therefore, of an intelligible discourse. However, by suggesting pictorial categories belonging to modes of understanding that were almost the direct opposite of each other, the relationship between these two distinctly different orders exposed the difficulty of establishing a relationship between visibility and invisibility in the realm of perception. This was an essential and inbuilt difficulty that Vieira da Silva was able to express in her later work, maintaining both the perceptual nature of vision and the ontological dimension of the invisible as a place apart from the visual sphere, but which is nonetheless implied within it. Vieira da Silva was aware of the course of history and these works, L’Atelier, painted in Lisbon shortly before she left europe because of the Second World War, and La Partie d’échecs, created in Rio de Janeiro, are no more than examples in which figurative elements very often represented values directly related with the events of history or with everyday life. Le Désastre (1942) was emblematic of the former. However, a permanent questioning of pictorial categories and their expression remained the foundation of her painting. In this sense, her work played a significant role in introducing abstract art practices to Brazil, beginning in Rio de Janeiro, which was then dominated by figurative painting inspired by the Neue Sachlichkeit school through the classes given by her husband Arpad Szenes.9 Lygia Clark and Almir Mavignier were among his students. While friendship with the poets Murilo Mendes and Cecília Meireles was important for Vieira da Silva, her association with them marked a distancing from the art world centred on the painting of Portinari.10 However, the painter Carlos Scliar produced a short documentary film called Escadas [Ladders] about her work, ref lecting the curiosity that her painting had stimulated in artistic circles.11 In 1942, Murilo Mendes was inf luential in the organization of her first exhibition at Rio de Janeiro’s national Museum of Fine Arts. Through the artist Carmelo Arden Quin, Vieira da Silva met Joaquin Torres-garcía, an artist for whom she acknowledged a deep admiration and perhaps considered to be her artistic master. In January 1943, Torres-garcía published an article on her work in Alfar magazine in Montevideo, focusing on the painting Le Désastre. When the Second World War ended and she returned to europe in 1947, this reoccurrence of figurative elements faded from her work, which became dominated by the abstract.

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The triumph of abstractionism in post-war Paris took various forms. One was the Jeune École de Paris, which was of a gestural nature and represented a rejuvenation of the old cubist school. Vieira da Silva was one of its main protagonists, together with Jean Bazaine, Pierre Soulages, Alfred Manessier, Hans Hartung, Bram van Velde, Serge Poliakoff and nicolas de Staël. The work of this generation, partly because it represented a counterweight to the emergence of American abstract expressionism, gave rise to a general fashion that, as in the US, produced successive generations of imitators who trivialized the concepts of these artists into simple effects of style. While the treatment of space by the Jeune École de Paris was inherited from cubism, it would be an oversimplification to judge all of the art it produced as ‘so far they have added nothing but refinements’ and therefore being an expression of the decline of cubism, as Clement greenberg suggested in a 1948 article called The Decline of Cubism.12 A new approach to issues relating to the modalities of the visible and the invisible, only glancingly explored by the first avant-gardes, was explored in the work of some of these painters. The Cartesianism that Yves-Alain Bois attributed to these artists,13 whom he saw as being safe in their pictorial universe, also collapses in relation to the work of Vieira da Silva, who is herself a sign of this collapse. While it is well known that after her return to europe, in 1947, her painting became more abstract and architectural, abandoning the figurative representation that emerged in the previous period, the issue of uncertainty was absolutely central to her work, to the point of her saying that: ‘A incerteza sou eu. Sou a própria incerteza. É a incerteza que é a minha certeza. É na incerteza que me baseio. [...] eu digo uma coisa. ela pode ser outra coisa. Pode ser ainda outra coisa. É assim’ [Uncertainty is what I am. I am uncertainty itself. Uncertainty is my certainty. I base myself on the uncertain. [...] I say one thing. It could be another. It could be yet another. That is how it is].14 Uncertainty became for Vieira da Silva a means of putting off and suspending the application of a system. diane daval Béran notes that it was from this time that her paintings could no longer be ordered chronologically ‘according to a classification based on their sequence in time; they now came to be classified as part of a whole in which their effects could not be solely determined on the basis of the order in which they were created.’15 We do not find in this series of paintings a central theme from which variations are generated, but a permanent multiplicity produced by the differences between paintings in the same series. It is also important to note that each series was not produced over a continuous period, but in parallel with other series, sometimes involving gaps of several years followed by a sudden resumption. While initially in 1935 two series of paintings stand out as separate and complete, as we have seen — chambers constructed from a grid of squares and spatial structures — everything now begins to meld in a f lowing back and forth of spaces that continually question the representation of the visible. Her paintings begin to investigate space and depth beyond specific references to the history of painting, moving towards creating the experience of intensity. From her earliest works, we observe different conceptions of the space of the painting that do not coincide and which, by coexisting in the same painting, create a field of tensions. Between colour and line, between line and the classical space of perspective, there are no hierarchical relationships, not even those determined by

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different conceptions of the construction of the space of the painting, but rather a conf lictual coexistence. The paintings of Vieira da Silva during this period could, as Clement greenberg then put it: [...] render every element, every part of the canvas equivalent; and they likewise weave the work of art into a tight mesh whose principle of formal unity is contained and recapitulated in each thread, so that we find the essence of the whole work in every one of its parts. [...] This very uniformity, this dissolution of the picture into sheer texture, sheer sensation, into the accumulation of similar units of sensation, seems to answer something deepseated in contemporary sensibility. It corresponds perhaps to the feeling that all hierarchical distinctions have been exhausted, that no area or order of experience is either intrinsically or relatively superior to any other.16

However, while Clement greenberg reduced the f latness of modern painting to a strict uniformity and on this basis sought to deconstruct the scene of forms still present in the painting of Mondrian in order to declare an indivisible unity, Vieira da Silva proceeded less assertively, systematically interrogating the possible relationships between all these elements without submitting to established hierarchical relationships, but rather inverting many of them and refuting the idea of unity. This could only result in the exclusion of the dynamics of the invisible and a restriction to the evident modes of presence that greenberg would later confront. From her earliest works, the dichotomies already noted in the paintings of Vieira da Silva resulted in a gap that can be interpreted as the expression of an implied invisibility, but which cannot be confused with those dichotomies. Her subsequent use of figurative elements suggested a metaphoric discourse on invisibility. The use of metaphor as a discourse on the invisible reveals an awareness of its independence from the modalities of the visible. From this period onwards, her concern was to allow invisibility to infiltrate and manifest itself among the visible. depth and her experience outside the artistic canons would occupy the rest of Vieira da Silva’s painting as if it were an infinite re-beginning where multiple possibilities were unceasingly explored. Vieira da Silva told how ‘one day, soon after the war, Wols said: “Tell me now, I really like what you do, but why perspective?” I replied that I knew it was not used in modern art, but that I nevertheless had to use it.’17 In fact, as Merleau-Ponty put it: ‘Four centuries after the “solutions” of the Renaissance and three centuries after descartes, depth is still new, and it insists on being sought, not “once in a lifetime”, but all through life.’18 Paintings like Enigme (1947) and Le Promeneur invisible (1949–51) involve a profusion of perspectival spaces that significantly alter the Renaissance mode of reference (see Fig. 12.2). When Quatrocento perspective is cited in the paintings of Vieira da Silva, it undergoes continuous diversions, the product of a radically different set of considerations. The question of illusory space, capable of representing the world as seen by an empirical understanding of vision and characteristic of Renaissance thought, was a convention created to establish a relationship between looking at objects and knowing their physical location in the world in order to achieve a passive representation of them. Objects that appear in the painter’s field of vision are measured according to a

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Fig. 12.2. Maria Helena Vieira da Silva, ‘Le Promeneur Invisible,’ 1949–51, oil on canvas, 132 × 168 cm, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. donated by Mr. and Ms. Wellington S. Henderson

certain physical relationship, which replaces and organizes the actual experience of the visible. However, between this convention and abstraction, which in the twodimensionality of the surface of the painting organizes the relationships between essential forms or dilutes them in a repetitive pattern, as greenberg would put it, there lie all the differences that separate these two modes of understanding. What is common to both is an emphasis on the sensory data of perception that define the body, not passively as in looking at a intelligible display of forms, but as active elements in the construction of the visible. This is what gave rise to Paul Valéry’s famous expression: the painter offers his body. Colours and spaces are also defined in relation to the contingency of the position of the body that perceives them or to the ghost of this body that memory brings to the act of painting. This is why the depth of pictorial space is created in the gap between the knowledge of where things are, which overcomes the eclipse of spatial overlapping generated by depth, and the sensory realm of vision, which makes each independent from the other. It is in this web of the visible and the invisible that the painting segregates depths and constructs its labyrinthine space.

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From this time onwards, Vieira da Silva’s work involves a profound dissociation of the categories, concepts and constituent elements of painting, all of which she independently explores. Many of her works of this period are characterized by chromatic fragmentation in dynamic rhythmic grids composed of small squares, which create wavy surfaces and which expand into different depths. In this sense, they both approach and differ from Clement greenberg’s all-over picture. From line to colour, grid to perspective, plane to atmosphere, from centre to the absence of a centre, no category predominates over another. Classical perspective can be expressed by means of a modernist grid, as seen in the examples previously referred to and in Bibliothèque (1949), which would give rise to an extensive series taken up again over the course of several years. Many other aspects are expressed in her painting.19 In La Gare Saint-Lazare (1949), a rarefaction of line and colour emerges. The lines constructed by coloured and interrupted segments suggest an isomorphic orthogonality of the proportions of the canvas to which diagonals structuring the depth are added. dotted colour splashed over the surface of the canvas emphasizes the informal nature of the painting, but it is above all in the marked dilution of the paint, which shares the chromatic value of the raw canvas in the general colour scheme, that the work’s atmospheric values are explored. In this way, grid, perspective and atmosphere coexist. In paintings such as Composition 55 (1955), Vieira da Silva places the perspectival value of clarity in conf lict with its use in classical perspective, that is, the little black squares in the background of the painting are small in comparison with the expanding dimensions of the white squares, apparently creating depth of scale. However, the white squares are less defined and more entangled in a way that contrasts with the extreme definition of the small black squares. This seems to make the black squares f low back into the spatial depth in the opposite direction and to remain there suspended in ambiguity. In Composition (1951) and in La Bataille des couteaux (1948), the orthogonal grid is placed in opposition to dynamic diagonal lines, while the planes are ordered in such a way as to place dark behind light, associating the f lat diagonal lines in perspective with the brighter colours, creating a tension between the space created by the colour, the plane defined by the grid and the imbalance caused by the diagonals, so that the f latness of the painting is disturbed by the chromatic relationship provided by the grid. The framing provided by the orthogonality of the composition is also broken by the tension between the diagonals and the planes of colour, which thus produces an asymmetry. In other paintings such as La Ville brûlée (1955), the weft of the lines and the f lat planes is interrupted by a large black space that threatens the stability of the plane of the canvas. On the other hand, paintings such as Le Cataclysme (1954) develop rhythms from the basis of a grid — an element of stability — which has been destructured, creating circular movements and different orientations that are not related with each other and which occupy the whole pictorial surface, making the grid itself the motive of the painting. These paintings by Vieira da Silva, created through the continuous accumulation of experiences without any major interruptions, preserve the gap or space through

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which she expresses categories, concepts and pictorial elements as pieces of information relating to the visible. Her paintings never cease to explore this gap, which does not appear as perceptual data, as the evidence of a presence, but as an inversion of the perceptual experience, where the echo of bodily movements occurs in the overlapping of experiences of the visible. The image that emerges is thus created on the basis of invisibility, as a gap or a link with what is visible. This invisibility, which refuses to be expressed in the form of a presence and rejects any existence outside the viewer’s consciousness, behaves as if it were an interior language exploring the possibilities of the visible. In analysing this question of the relationship of the visible to the invisible in Merleau-Ponty, and in a way that applies perfectly to the painting of Vieira da Silva, José gil defined this as a language of tiny perceptions that generates entre o corpo e as coisas percebidas, estas percepções ínfimas separam-nos para os reunir de outro modo, articulando-os de maneira diferente. [...] Os movimentos das pequenas percepções em direcção à forma não originam uma macropercepção [...], fazem nascer, sim, formas invisíveis, que dizem das formas visíveis mais do que elas próprias manifestam.20 [between the body and what it perceives infinitesimal perceptions that separate and then reform in another way, expressing themselves in a different manner. [...] The movements of these small perceptions towards the form do not give rise to a macro-perception [...], rather they give birth to invisible forms, that tell us more about the visible forms than those forms themselves show.]

This emergence of the invisible within the visible defines Vieira da Silva’s paradoxical way of seeing, which blends the intelligible with what can be perceived by the senses and with all the other categories described above, giving form to the forces from which the image is constructed. This is the intense quality of her painting that makes the invisible visible. notes to Chapter 12 1. See Presença, 31–32 (March–June 1931), unnumbered. Also quoted by José-Augusto França, Arte em Portugal no Século XX. (Lisbon: Bertrand editora, 1984), p. 197. 2. diane daval Béran, ‘Análise da Obra,’ in Vieira da Silva: Monografia, (geneva: Skira, 1993), p. 137. 3. José-Augusto França, ‘Vieira da Silva,’ in Dicionário da Pintura Universal, ed. by Mário Tavares Chicó, Artur nobre de gusmão, and José-Augusto França (Lisbon: estúdios Cor, 1962–64), p. 348. 4. Jean-Jacques Lafaye, ‘Vieira da Silva, la contemporaine capital,’ Connaissance des Arts (September, 1988), unnumbered pages. Also quoted by diane daval Béran, p. 137. 5. dora Vallier, A Arte Abstracta (Lisbon: edições 70, 1986), p. 223. 6. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, O Olho e o Espírito (Lisbon: Vega, 1997), p. 45. [Original: L’Œil et l’esprit (Paris: gallimard, 1961)]. 7. Quoted in Vieira da Silva: Monografia, p. 32. 8. Merleau-Ponty, O Olho e o Espírito, pp. 19–21. 9. nelson Aguilar, ‘Vieira da Silva no Brasil,’ in Vieira da Silva no Brasil, ed. by nelson Aguilar (São Paulo: Museu de Arte Moderna, 2007), pp. 248–50 and p. 266 10. See Valéria Lamego, ‘dois mil dias no deserto: Maria Helena Vieira da Silva no Rio de Janeiro, 1940–1947’ in Vieira da Silva no Brasil, p. 65.

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11. See nelson Aguilar, ‘Vieira da Silva no Brasil,’ pp. 261–62. 12. Clement greenberg, ‘The decline of Cubism’, in The Collected Essays and Criticism, 2 vols (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1986), ii, 214. 13. Yves-Alain Bois, ‘1967’, in Art Since 1900 (London: Thames & Hudson, 2004), p. 518. 14. Quoted by diane daval Béran, ‘Análise da Obra’, in Vieira da Silva: Monografia, p. 192. 15. Ibid., p. 189. 16. Clement greenberg, ‘The Crisis of the easel Picture in Cubism,’ in The Collected Essays and Criticism, ii, 224. 17. Vieira da Silva quoted by Jean-Luc daval, ‘Renovar a experiência do Ver’ in Vieira da Silva: Monografia, p. 109. 18. Merleau-Ponty, O Olho e o Espírito, p. 53. 19. For a complete inventory of these situations see diane daval Béran, ‘Análise da Obra’. 20. José gil, A Imagem-Nua e as Pequenas Percepções (Lisbon: Relógio de Água, 1996), pp. 51–54.

CH A P t e r 13

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The Formation of a Modernist Tradition in Contemporary Portuguese Poetry Fernando J. B. Martinho By the second half of the twentieth century, Portuguese writers and poets were fully aware of a modernist tradition in contemporary Portuguese poetry. A well-known critic of the time even spoke about the persistence of modernism, on reviewing the publication of some recent literary magazines.1 However, it would still take time for post-modernism to emerge, which it did only around the early 1970s in Portugal. The modernist tradition had started in Portugal, as is known, in the 1910s with the Orpheu generation and continued into the 1960s, when the idea of an avantgarde re-emerged with some vigour. A modernist tradition, within a period of a little over half a century, effectively meant there was a process of interaction and exchanges between successive generations. The desire for change and innovation was common to these generations as they tended to focus on a specific literary programme, presented in manifestos or similar texts in the magazines or journals they promoted. Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935) is undoubtedly the author who contributed most towards the definition of the Portuguese modernist tradition, so much so that he is the only modern poet in Portugal of whom we may speak in the same way as we do when we refer to a Pound tradition in American poetry. To begin with, many poets and critics amongst us have argued that it would be impossible to continue to write poetry following the revolution brought about by Pessoa as if that revolution had not taken place.2 What they basically mean by this is that Pessoa made it impossible for us to go on viewing the relationship between poet and poetical persona as one of complete identification. Moreover, Pessoa is also to be credited, mainly through Álvaro de Campos, with disseminating and imposing free verse in contemporary Portuguese poetry as well as with attaching importance to the intellect in his poetical work, thereby creating a dialectic between thought and feeling in a literary tradition more often inclined to extreme sentimentality. Portuguese poets have expressed their debt to Pessoa in more or less overt ways, but none went so far as Ruy Belo (1934–1978) when he wrote in a poem published thirty-five years after Pessoa’s death that he was ‘the living poet’ that most interested him.3 We will, of course, return to Pessoa but we must keep in mind that it would be a great mistake to study the modernist poetical tradition in Portugal by only taking into account the role, however commanding it may be, that the creator of

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the heteronyms played. Among his companions in Orpheu, Mário de Sá-Carneiro (1890–1916) was also a strong inf luence on the poets of the next generations. We may even find signs, among some of these poets, of a disagreement over the merits of the two poets, Pessoa and Sá-Carneiro. José Régio (1901–1969), who was the first critic to write about them in an academic work, as early as 1925, never made an effort to conceal his preference for Mário de Sá-Carneiro for his dramatic authenticity, which he tended to contrast with Pessoa’s excessive intellectualism. Later on, the surrealist poet, Mário Cesariny (1923–2006), did not omit to pay homage to Sá-Carneiro in the middle of a long poem that professes to be praise and a simplification of Álvaro de Campos.4 Mário de Sá-Carneiro is commended for committing suicide and for having preferred death to dreary everyday life.5 In another poem, Cesariny sees Sá-Carneiro as a ‘hero’ in his own way, his heroism consisting of his refusal of a part in the mediocrity of his country, of his lack of ‘business’ sense and his inability to deal with practical life.6 For other poets of the 1950s, such as Sebastião da gama (1924–1952) and Cristovam Pavia (1933–1968), Sá-Carneiro was the modernist poet who most powerfully expressed the theme of the double, the division and dispersion of the self, as the title of his first collection of poems, Dispersão [Dispersion] so aptly suggests. What, on the other hand, attracted other poets in the 1950s was his bizarre syntax and imagery, more in line with ‘paulismo’, a modernist current in which he excelled. Another important aspect of Sá-Carneiro’s poetry, his taste for the unrestrained fantasy associated with harlequinades, had found some echo in a poem published by António de navarro in the first issue of Presença, in March of 1927, ‘O braço do arlequim’ [The harlequin’s arm].7 Although Almada negreiros (1893–1970) was a constant presence in Portuguese culture from the mid-1910s to the time of his death, the imprint he left on Portuguese poetry, both as a writer and as a painter, was relatively insignificant. The impression he made on young poets celebrating futurism in the newspaper O Heraldo in the Algarve in 1917 seemed to announce some extraordinary future reception for his poems, but somehow this did not happen. If O Heraldo acclaimed him as ‘the great Jo’ and ‘the only genius in the world’,8 his later impact was quite unexceptional, except for the space that natália Correia (1923–1993) and Herberto Helder (b. 1930), two poets connected to surrealism, reserved for his poems in the anthologies they organized in 1973 and 1985 respectively.9 even his magnificent ‘A Cena do Ódio’ [The Scene of Hatred], a fierce tirade against the bourgeois spirit that Jorge de Sena made known in 1958,10 failed to act as the inspiration it was supposedly going to be for young poets at the time. The only exception is perhaps a prose poem by Orlando neves, ‘Sopapo para a destruição da Felicidade’ [A slap for the destruction of Happiness],11 as it echoes the virulent language of avant-garde manifestos. Almada negreiros’s limited direct inf luence on Portuguese poetry does not mean, however, that his example as an artist constantly struggling to defend the most challenging Modernity was not taken into account by those who, as poets, were deeply involved in the same struggle. Raul Leal (1886–1964), who also contributed to the journals of the first modernism with his long, delirious and heterodox poems in French, did not especially inf luence the course of Portuguese modern poetry, in spite of the excellent treatment

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he received from the most inf luential journal of the second modernism, Presença. nevertheless, when he was old, his visionary writings and his iconoclastic attitude were warmly applauded by two different groups in the late 1950s: the surrealists for the hallucinatory quality of his imagination, and the writers responsible for the magazine Tempo Presente for the right-wing tendencies of some of his political views. One of the inspirations for the composition of the ‘Quatro sonetos a Afrodite Anadiómena’ [Four sonnets to Aphrodite Anadyomene], which was included in Metamorfoses (1963),12 came from Ângelo de Lima’s poems, especially the ones that were published in the second issue of Orpheu, in June of 1915,13 as Jorge de Sena acknowledged in the afterword to his book (1963).14 Lima was then in a mental home, and the fact that Fernando Pessoa and his colleagues at the journal had published his strange, exquisite poems was not entirely free from a certain spirit of provocation. The strangeness of Lima’s texts came from the peculiar words and syntax he used, and their exquisiteness resulted in a large measure from the musical effects he achieved as a true symbolist poet. As Sena explained in his afterword to Metamorfoses, his four sonnets could be seen as ‘an attempt to recover in Ângelo de Lima [...] one of the betrayed courses of Portuguese modernism’,15 meaning that Lima’s example had not been followed by later poets as it should have been. But Sena went much further than Lima with his experiments, as he was not only interested in ‘expanding’ the language of poetry but also in ‘destroying’ it as signification,16 thereby getting closer to the ‘transrational language’ of the Russian futurists. Sena wrote his poems with invented or distorted words, and in several cases he recovered greek terms, which occurred especially in the fourth sonnet built around epithets of Aphrodite. On the other hand, in this celebration of the goddess of love, the poet appeals to subliminal consciousness and creates a strong erotic suggestion in his untranslatable poems. One of the most active experimental poets at the time, e. M. de Melo e Castro (b. 1932) did not fail to notice the potential of Sena’s experiments and followed his path in one of the poems he included in Poligonia do Soneto [Polygony of the Sonnet].17 It was the torrential form of free verse which Álvaro de Campos used in his sensationist odes on which poets, such as Cesariny and Raul de Carvalho (1920– 1984), modelled their long poems in the 1950s. The free verse that António Botto (1897–1959) adopted for his relatively short poems in the early 1920s, from the heroic first modernism period to the beginning of the second one in the late 1920s, is quite different. It is based on a well-balanced combination of different metres and strophic arrangements. It proved to be the most adequate form for the prevailing narrative structure of his poems, which frequently and openly describe homosexual encounters and the complex emotions they involve.18 Botto contributed decisively to having this kind of free verse accepted by poets of the next generation who were receptive to the rhythmical variations it allowed, without falling into what might be seen as avant-garde excesses. These included not only poets associated with the more moderate practice of modernism in the Presença group or their immediate followers, but also younger poets, such as eugénio de Andrade (1923–2005) during his first phase.

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Mário Saa (1894–1971), a poet and Botto’s contemporary, is noted for the brilliant craftsmanship of his verse-making.19 Some of his poems, in which his verbal skills and profound taste for concept and wordplay are most evident, recall seventeenthcentury Baroque poetry which pays a great deal of attention to the construction of the poem as an object. The verve of his poems demonstrates the pleasure he gets from using his imagination freely and from the possibilities opened up to him by the powerful mechanisms of versification. On the other hand, an extraordinary sense of humour pervades everything. The importance of craftsmanship in Saa’s poetry found an echo in a 1960s poet, José Carlos Ary dos Santos (1937–1984), who not only cared deeply about the formal aspects of verse writing, but who was also sensitive to the modernist poet’s humour and added a penetrating touch of satire and parody to it. Curiously enough, one of his best-known poems, ‘Brevíssima antologia da poesia portugesa com certeza’20 [A very short anthology of Portuguese poetry for sure], is a devastating satirical revision of the recent history of Portuguese poetry, selecting for our attention some of the names of the literary canon of the time. The time has now come to return to Pessoa after these pages devoted to the contribution of other poets of the Orpheu group, as well as their immediate successors, towards the formation of a modernist tradition in Portuguese poetry. And to this end, we should begin with a poet in the Presença group, Adolfo Casais Monteiro (1908–1972), who, in a book published in 1934, quoted Pessoa for the first time in his exact words in a poem.21 The paradox of the quoted aphorism (‘To pretend is to know ourselves’) works to illustrate his rejection of conventional poetical arts and to propose a new attitude towards poetry writing that the poet voices. He openly argues for a ‘rhythm without rhythm, the rough word’ in line with his avant-garde writing, and the dissonant or ‘atonal’ music of his verse, together with his social concerns, which will inf luence later poets, like the neo-realist Mário dionísio (1916–1993) in the late 1930s and early 1940s, and António Ramos Rosa (b. 1924) and João Rui de Sousa (b. 1928) in the 1950s. If Casais Monteiro was mainly inspired by Álvaro de Campos, then Carlos Queiroz (1907–1949), his colleague in Presença, was inspired by Fernando Pessoa seeing that his poetry belongs to the Portuguese lyrical tradition. It is therefore not surprising that his moderate form of modernism (he was in his own words a ‘transmodern’)22 served as an example for the poets of Távola Redonda in the 1950s, when they put forward a compromise between tradition and modernity. One of those poets, david Mourão-Ferreira (1927–1996), wrote an introduction to the two volumes of his Poetical Works, while two others, António Manuel Couto Viana (b. 1923) and Cristovam Pavia, paid enthusiastic tribute to him in their poetry.23 In the case of Miguel Torga, a poet initially associated with Presença, the only poem Pessoa published in his lifetime in 1934, Mensagem, was the inspiration behind the poems he mainly wrote a short time later and would afterwards bring together in Alguns Poemas Ibéricos in 1951 and then in Poemas Ibéricos in 1965. Torga’s vision of Portuguese history, however, is clearly removed from Pessoa’s esoteric and messianic quests, and his Portuguese heroes are put into an Iberian cultural context side by side with their Spanish peers.24 On the other hand, Torga himself would have an important role to play for later poets, such as Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen

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and eugénio de Andrade in the 1940s, and Manuel Alegre in the 1960s, especially through the modernist practice that goes against rhetoric and uncontrolled emotion, but is based instead upon ‘concise’ and ‘ascetic’ forms of expression, as can be seen especially in the early volumes of the Diário.25 Torga also served as an inf luential example in Coimbra in the second half of the 1930s for poets of the emerging neo-realist generation, who were attracted to his dry style and his realistic and socially concerned outlook. For some of those young poets in Coimbra, particularly one who became one of the most respected names in Portuguese contemporary literature, Carlos de Oliveira (1921–1981), the poetry of Afonso duarte (1884–1958), an older poet who converted to modernism through the inf luence of Presença in the late 1920s, turned out to be a lesson in conciseness by adopting the ‘new’ and subsequently refusing the ‘past’, which he viewed as some kind of ‘rest’ and also ‘unhealthy’.26 António de Sousa (1898–1981) is another poet who was in touch with several generations in Coimbra and who also came to modernism in the 1930s because of Presença. A few years after he died, an interesting exercise in poetical dialogue came about between a much younger poet, Fernando Assis Pacheco, and himself. One of the 1960s generation, Assis Pacheco was born in Coimbra and had studied there. He published a book called Variações em Sousa [Variations in Sousa] in 1987,27 which is an ironical memoir of his youth in Coimbra through the mediation of that legendary figure in the university student-life there, who by the ‘lyricalhumoristic procedures’ of his poetry, proved to be an excellent guide for his playful and uninhibited verse and his total rejection of ‘grandiloquence’.28 In their different ways, the poets of the second modernism kept alive the legacy they had received from their predecessors and they, in turn, handed it down to newly arrived poets. It was only in the 1950s that Vitorino nemésio (1901–1978), who had published three major poetry collections between 1935 and 1940, managed to rise above the idea of the eccentric poet that critics of the times had construed and be assessed properly. One of the first signs of the new attitude towards his poetry came from Alberto de Lacerda (1928–2008) in the third issue of Távola Redonda in 1950. There Lacerda welcomes the recent publication of Festa Redonda [Round Feast] and calls it an excellent demonstration of the possibility for a poet to combine the popular sources of his inspiration, in the circumstance, with the highest refinement.29 By the end of the 1950s, the inf luence of nemésio’s elliptical and intricate syntax could be felt in the two collections brought out by Pedro Tamen (b. 1934),30 and which also benefited from the fact that the two poets were close religiously. Some years later, another poet of Tamen’s generation, Fernando echevarría (b. 1929), who greatly admired nemésio, would show in two of his collections, Introdução à Filosofia (1981) and Fenomenologia (1984),31 that there was no need to fear or avoid nemésio’s previous efforts to give a philosophical direction to his poetical meditation, as seen in his fascination for Heidegger in O Verbo e a Morte (1959).32 The descent into the abyss of the human soul in its contradictions that emerges in José Régio’s poetry as an individual drama with religious or metaphysical implications, resonated strongly in some of the poets associated with Távola Redonda, such as Sebastião da gama, especially during his early period.33 But the Távola poets were not the only ones who found Régio’s complex poetical universe appealing. during an interview,34

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José Saramago (1922–2010), who became better known for his novels from the late 1970s onwards, recognized that Régio’s book, O Filho do Homem [The Son of Man] (1961), played a significant role when he wrote the poems that he included in his first collection, Os Poemas Possíveis [Possible Poems] (1966).35 If it is true that Régio’s book acted as a catalyst for Saramago’s poems, we should not forget that the period in which he was writing his poems was also one of the synthesis of the whole modernist legacy. Other voices in the modernist tradition, from Pessoa to the surrealists, emerge in his poetry.36 His case is no different from that of António gedeão (1908–1997), who made a brilliant debut onto the Portuguese literary scene in the mid-1950s. neither of them started on their poetic itineraries as young men and they both represent a process of continuity rather than one of rupture in the evolution of Portuguese poetry, although, in Saramago’s case, in clear contrast to the ongoing avant-garde experiments of the first half of 1960s. Régio’s brother, Saúl dias (1902–1983), was a poet and a painter (under his Christian name, Júlio) and one of the best-known cases of Doppelbegabung [double vocation] in modern Portuguese literature, together with Almada negreiros in the Orpheu group and the surrealist, Mário Cesariny. With his short, delicate poems filled with an airy lightness,37 he paved the way to the concise, epigrammatic verse in Portuguese modernist lyric tradition. We can follow the path opened up by Saúl dias in the short, allusive poems of António Reis (1925–1991), with their intimate moments of a couple’s daily life, tender instances of mutual understanding, concerns and routines,38 as well as in the sensorial intensity of the epigrams of Albano Martins (b. 1930), reminiscent of both classical epigrams and Japanese haikus.39 Raul de Carvalho, a colleague of Albano Martins’ at the literary journal Árvore, showed another side to his creative process in Versos: Poesia II [Verses: Poetry II] (1958),40 that was much in the enumerative style of the long poems by Whitman, and Campos in Poesia, 1955. His aim in his 1958 collection was to achieve the same results, the same intensity with very simple means, nothing less than some ‘kind of infinite’ in a single verse, as he described it in the first poem in the collection.41 In the early 1970s, he had the opportunity to express his identification with what he saw as the ‘aesthetic of banality’,42 in the same way as Irene Lisboa (1892–1958), a much respected writer in the second modernism who abhorred the fake literature of the literati and tended to put life above art. Other poets apart from those in the second modernism movement contributed meaningfully to the formation of a modernist tradition in Portugal. Jorge de Sena and Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen are two good examples and both were connected with the group of Cadernos de Poesia in the 1940s and 50s (see Fig. 13.1). The case of these two poets shows that adopting the principles of modernism did not imply an uncritical acceptance of everything the initiators of the movement stood for. If we take, for instance, their relationship with Pessoa, we will see how far their differences go. Sena collected the prose texts that Pessoa had published in newspapers and magazines during his lifetime into a volume in the mid-1940s. He had studied Pessoa’s work at length and was one of the most inf luential of his critics after the generation of João gaspar Simões and Casais Monteiro. He made a point of emphasizing in the preface to his Collected Poems in 1961 that he did not subscribe

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Fig. 13.1. Sophia by Arpad Szenes. Private Collection. Maria Andresen.

entirely to the views of the creator of the heteronyms, especially the ones related to his poetics involving pretending or feigning.43 Instead, he viewed his poetry as a way of bearing witness to his deep involvement in the multiple affairs of the world, trying not only to understand them but also to contribute to their transformation.44 In her poetic dialogue with Pessoa throughout the years, Sophia, in her turn, never concealed her critical view of Pessoa’s self-denial and renunciation of life, ‘the widower of himself ’ closed within his own labyrinth.45 Sena was a powerful inf luence on some of the poets connected with Árvore, particularly those who were attracted to his discursive style and his speculative lyricism, such as Ramos Rosa, Vasco Miranda (1922–1976) and José Terra (b. 1928). Sophia proved to be a stimulating example for some 1950s poets, such as Vítor Matos e Sá (1927–1975)46 and Fernando guimarães (b. 1928),47 who perceived the ideal of a poetry of the essence of poetry, through Paulo Quintela’s translations of Hölderlin and Rilke in the 1940s.48 eduardo Lourenço once said that these translations had a profound inf luence on the course of Portuguese poetry at the time, not very unlike the one at the start of the systematic publication of Pessoa’s poetry at the same period.49

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Fig. 13.2. Cesariny in his atelier. eduardo Tomé (Photographer).

This should remind us that international contacts must also be considered when we examine the formation of a modernist tradition in Portugal. Some of the poets connected with Cadernos de Poesia, for example, Sena, José Blanc de Portugal (1914–1999), Ruy Cinatti (1915–1986) and Tomaz Kim (1915–1967), opened up new avenues for Portuguese modern poetry, hitherto usually more focused on French poetry, because of their growing familiarity with Anglo-American modernism. determinant for eugénio de Andrade, another poet of the same period, were the Spanish poets known as the generation of ’27 and the importance they gave metaphor and imagery, as well as their notion of the poem as a perfect artefact, a ‘verbal icon’.50 The inf luence of these poets, particularly Jorge guillén, can also be felt in the elliptical poetry of two poets of the 1950s who had studied in Spain in their youth, Fernando echevarría and Jorge de Amorim (b. 1928). The main inf luences for António Osório (b. 1933), whose mother was Italian and had instilled in him a love for her cultural roots, came from Montale and Saba. After his first contributions to literary magazines in the 1950s, he began in the early 1970s to

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publish poetry collections,51 which made him a very inf luential writer among the new poets although he also questioned some of the principles that sustained the modernist paradigm. For surrealists such as António Maria Lisboa (1928–1953) and Cesariny (see Figs 13.2 and 13.5) in the late 1940s, the great models came from France and the group that Breton had recently reorganized in Paris. However, Alexandre O’neill (1924–1986), who had been connected with surrealists earlier in his career, found inspiration in a re-evaluation of a well-established satirical tradition in Portuguese poetry since the Middle Ages, which was closer to his poetic aim of portraying Portugal’s failings and myths ruthlessly.52 Ramos Rosa, who defined the main lines of the aesthetic programme of Árvore in the early 1950s, should never be considered as someone afraid of inf luences. On the contrary, as Zadie Smith says of Keats, ‘he devoured inf luences’,53 different foreign inf luences. An article he wrote in 1990 allows us to look into his ‘literary echo chamber’, where he speaks with poets who, in one way or another, spurred on his own creativity.54 They include at different periods an amazing variety of names, from Juan Ramón Jiménez to Paul eluard and drummond de Andrade, from Vicente Aleixandre, Jorge guillén and Pedro Salinas to Octavio Paz and Roberto Juarroz, Wallace Stevens and Theodore Roethke. Ruy Belo, who, like Ramos Rosa, greatly inf luenced later poetry, went as far as to say (provocatively) that the only thing he could never forgive in a poet he had read and studied was if the poet failed to leave on his work a sign of the attention he had generously given him.55 eliot is definitely among those Belo could not complain had not inf luenced him, especially if we consider his early work and that the Four Quartets is so clearly present in it.56 As for Herberto Helder, another major poet in the second half of the twentieth century, he drops a few hints as to how he formed his personal canon and that it is shaped by those for whom poetry is made of ‘energy and a sense of its rhythms’,57 particularly the ones who could be seen as the models for future poets with ‘movie-cameras in their hands’, poets such as Apollinaire, Cendrars, Pound and eliot.58 As eduardo Lourenço pointed out in an essay he wrote in 1971, both Belo and Helder belong to the ‘crucial moment’ when Modernity ‘says good-bye to itself ’.59 This can also be said about the most important poets of the 1960s, or in terms of a modernist tradition, what we might consider late modernism when the idea of an avant-garde regains its vigour. This holds true particularly for the two groups active in the beginning of the period or throughout the whole decade: the poets included in Poesia 61 and the proponents of ‘experimental poetry’. Both groups can be situated within a common trend of neo-avant-garde movements to be found in different Western literatures at the time. Poets who contributed to the collective volume Poesia 61, Fiama Hasse Pais Brandão (1938–2007), gastão Cruz (b. 1941), Luiza neto Jorge (1939–1989), Maria Teresa Horta (b. 1937), Casimiro de Brito (b. 1938) and a poet close to them, Armando Silva Carvalho (b. 1939), practised in their early poetry different kinds of disintegration of poetic discourse based on a ‘revolt of the words’, as one of them put it.60 Two poets of the previous generation, Carlos de Oliveira and António Ramos Rosa, served as inspirations for these poets because of their highly innovative stand at the time. experimental poets, such as Melo e

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Figs. 13.3 (above) and 13.4 (opposite). Ana Hatherly, each Untitled, s. d., ink on paper, 19 × 14 cm. Fundação Luso-Americana para o desenvolvimento Collection.

Castro, Ana Hatherly (b.1929) and Alberto Pimenta (b. 1937) among others, carried out, in their turn, an atomization of language along the lines of concrete poetry, or highlighted the visual dimension of poetry, taking as an example the avantgarde tradition, which included the futurist’s words-in-freedom, Apollinaire’s calligrammes and the inspiration Pound found in Chinese ideograms (see Figs 13.3 and 13.4). The title of a poetry collection published by M. S. Lourenço (1936–2009) in 1960, O Desequilibrista [The Unbalanced Rope-Dancer],61 epitomizes perfectly the radical stance of Portuguese late modernism. In conclusion, we can say that the modernist tradition played a decisive role in making the twentieth century in Portugal a ‘golden century’ as far as poetry

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is concerned.62 Another period was to begin in the early 1970s, namely postmodernism, which distrusted the modernists’ obsession with the ‘new’ and the idea of rupture and continuous change. However, this did not stop emerging poets from viewing as their precursors some major modernist poets, such as Vitorino nemésio, Jorge de Sena and Ruy Belo. notes to Chapter 13 1. Manuel Antunes, ‘Persistência do Modernismo’, Legómena: textos de teoria e crítica literária, ed. by Maria Ivone de Ornellas (Lisbon: Imprensa nacional–Casa da Moeda, 1987), pp. 179–83. 2. See, for example, Ruy Belo, ‘Manuel Bandeira em Verso e Prosa’, Na Senda da Poesia, ed. by Maria Jorge Vilar de Figueiredo (Lisbon: Assírio & Alvim, 2002), p. 226. 3. Ruy Belo, ‘da poesia que posso’, Homem de Palavra(s), in Todos os Poemas, 3 vols (Lisbon: Assírio & Alvim, 2004), i, 337.

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Fig. 13.5. Mário Cesariny, ‘Mário de Sá-Carneiro raptando Maria Helena Vieira da Silva,’ oil on canvas, 65.5 × 50.5 cm. CAM / Fundação Calouste gulbenkian Collection.

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4. Mário Cesariny, ‘Louvor e Simplificação de Álvaro de Campos (Fragmento)’, in Nobilíssima Visão (1945–1946) (Lisbon: Assírio & Alvim, 1991), pp. 59–73. 5. Cesariny, ‘Louvor e Simplificação de Álvaro de Campos’, pp. 68–69. 6. Mário Cesariny, XIVth poem of Discurso sobre a Reabilitação do Real Quotidiano, in Manual de Prestidigitação (Lisbon: Assírio & Alvim, 1981), p. 102. 7. António de navarro, ‘O braço do arlequim’, in presença, 1 (10 March 1927), 2. 8. See Kernoc, ‘Saudação’, and nesso, ‘Orientes’, in Poesia Futurista Portuguesa (Faro 1916–1917), ed. by nuno Júdice (Lisbon: A Regra do Jogo, 1981), pp. 61–62 and 104–05. 9. O Surrealismo na Poesia Portuguesa, org. by natália Correia (Mem Martins: europa-América, 1973); Edoi Lelia Doura: antologia das vozes comunicantes da poesia moderna portuguesa, org. by Herberto Helder (Lisbon: Assírio & Alvim, 1985). 10. José de Almada negreiros, ‘A Cena do Ódio’, in Líricas Portuguesa, org. by Jorge de Sena (Lisbon: Portugália, 1958), pp. 96–117 11. Orlando neves, ‘Sopapo para a destruição da felicidade’, in Poesia Portuguesa do Pós-Guerra (1945–1965), org. by Afonso Cautela e Serafim Ferreira (Lisbon: Ulisseia, 1965), pp. 347–51. 12. Jorge de Sena, ‘Quatro sonetos a Afrodite Anadiómena’, Metamorfoses, in Poesia, II (Lisbon: Moraes editores, 1978), pp. 149–53. 13. Ângelo de Lima, ‘Poemas inéditos’, in Orpheu, 2 (1915); cf. Orpheu: Edição Fac-similada, intro. by Fernando Cabral Martins, 2nd edn (Lisbon: Contexto, 1994), pp. 85–92. 14. Sena, Poesia, ii, 165. 15. Ibid. 16. Ibid. 17. e. M. de Melo e Castro, ‘Sones Soneticum’, Poligonia do Soneto, in Autologia: poemas escolhidos 1951–1982, intro. by Fernando Segolin (Lisbon: Moraes editores, 1983), p. 104. 18. António Botto, Canções e Outros Poemas, ed. by eduardo Pitta (Vila nova de Famalicão: Quasi edições, 2007). 19. Mário Saa, Poesia e Alguma Prosa, ed. by João Rui de Sousa (Lisbon: Imprensa nacional–Casa da Moeda, 2006). 20. José Carlos Ary dos Santos, ‘Brevíssima antologia da poesia portuguesa com certeza’, in Poemas Portugueses: antologia da poesia portuguesa do séc. XIII ao séc. XXI, org. by Jorge Reis-Sá and Rui Lage, intro. by Vasco graça Moura (Porto: Porto editora, 2009), pp. 1699–1702. 21. Adolfo Casais Monteiro, ‘Artes poéticas’, Poemas do Tempo Incerto, in Poesias Completas, intro. by João Rui de Sousa (Lisbon: Imprensa nacional–Casa da Moeda, 1993), p. 51. 22. Carlos Queiroz, ‘Ode a Arthur Rimbaud’, Epístola aos Vindouros e Outros Poemas, intro. by david Mourão-Ferreira (Lisbon: Ática, 1989), pp. 32–37. 23. António Manuel Couto Viana, ‘Hino a Paris, à maneira do poeta’, A Face Nua, in Uma Vez uma Voz: poesia completa (1948–1983), intro. by José Carlos Seabra Pereira (Lisbon: Verbo, 1985), p. 99. Cristovam Pavia, ‘Ruas polidas’, Poesia, org. by António Luís Moita, António Osório, João Filipe Bugalho, José Bento and Pedro Tamen (Lisbon: Moraes editores, 1982), pp. 207–08. 24. Miguel Torga, Poemas Ibéricos, in Poesia Completa (Lisbon: dom Quixote, 2000), pp. 689–733. 25. See Fernando J. B. Martinho, ‘Miguel Torga vu par trois poètes portugais: Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresem, eugénio de Andrade et Manuel Alegre’, in Miguel Torga, Écrivain Universel, intro. by eduardo Lourenço (Paris: La différence, 2009), pp. 267–77. 26. Afonso duarte, ‘duas quadras’, Ossadas, in Obra Poética (Lisbon: Plátano, 1974), p. 136. 27. Fernando Assis Pacheco, Variações em Sousa, in A Musa Irregular (Lisbon: Hiena, 1991), pp. 135–66. 28. See Vitorino nemésio, ‘Poesia e humor — Jangada’, in Conhecimento de Poesia, intro. by José Martins garcia, 3rd edn (Lisbon: Imprensa nacional–Casa da Moeda, 1997), p. 179. 29. Alberto de Lacerda, ‘Festa Redonda de Vitorino nemésio’, in Távola Redonda, 3 (15 February 1950); cf. Távola Redonda: Edição Fac-similada, intro. by João Bigotte Chorão (Lisbon: Contexto, 1989). 30. Pedro Tamen, Poema para Todos os Dias, and O Sangue, a Água e o Vinho, in Retábulo das Matérias (1956–2001) (Lisbon: gótica, 2001), pp. 7–127. 31. Fernando echevarría, Introdução à Filosofia, in Obra Inacabada, intro. by Maria João Reynaud (Porto: Afrontamento, 2006), pp. 107–219; Fenomenologia, in Obra Inacabada, pp. 221–307.

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32. Vitorino nemésio, O Verbo e a Morte, in Poesia, II, ed. by Fátima Freitas Morna (Lisbon: Imprensa nacional–Casa da Moeda, 1989), pp. 253–327. 33. Sebastião da gama, Serra-Mãe, 3rd edn (Lisbon: Ática, 1963). 34. See Carlos Reis, Diálogos com José Saramago (Lisbon: Caminho, 1998), p. 110. 35. José Saramago, Os Poemas Possíveis, 4th edn (Lisbon: Caminho, 1998). 36. See Fernando J. B. Martinho, ‘Para um enquadramento periodológico da poesia de José Saramago’, in Colóquio/Letras, 151/52 ( January–June 1999), 21–33. 37. Saúl dias, Obra Poética, ed. by Luís Adriano Carlos, 3rd edn (Porto: Campo das Letras, 2001). 38. See António Reis, Poemas Quotidianos, intro. by eduardo Prado Coelho (Lisbon: Portugália, 1967). 39. Albano Martins, Assim São as Algas: Poesia 1950–2000 (Porto: Campo das Letras, 2000). 40. Raul de Carvalho, Versos: Poesia II, in Obras de Raul de Carvalho, ed. by Luiz Fagundes duarte (Lisbon: Caminho, 1993), I: Obra Publicada em Livro, pp. 313–66. 41. Ibid., p. 319. 42. Raul de Carvalho, Uma Estética da Banalidade, in Obras, I: Obra Publicada em Livro, pp. 619–22. 43. Jorge de Sena, preface to the first edition of Poesia, I, 2nd edn (Lisbon: Moraes editores, 1977), pp. 25–26. 44. Ibid. 45. Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen, ‘Cíclades (evocando Fernando Pessoa)’, in O Nome das Coisas, ed. by Maria Andresen de Sousa Tavares and Luís Manuel gaspar (Lisbon: Caminho, 2004), pp. 9–12. 46. Vítor Matos e Sá, Poesia, ed. by Ana Paula Coutinho Mendes (Porto: Campo das Letras, 2000). 47. Fernando guimarães, Algumas das Palavras: Poesia Reunida 1956–2008 (Vila nova de Famalicão: Quasi edições, 2008). 48. Hölderlin, Poemas, intro., sel. and trans. by Paulo Quintela (Coimbra: Atlântida, 1945; repr. 1959); Rainer Maria Rilke, Poemas: As Elegias de Duíno e Sonetos a Orfeu, intro., sel. and trans. by Paulo Quintela (Porto: O Oiro do dia, 1942; repr. 1983). 49. See eduardo Lourenço, ‘duas mansardas poéticas’, in Tempo e Poesia (Lisbon: Relógio d’Água, 1987), pp. 109–14 (pp. 111–12). 50. See Fernando J. B. Martinho, ‘eugénio de Andrade e a geração de ’27’, in Aula Ibérica: actas de los Congressos de Évora y Salamanca (2006–2007) (Salamanca: ediciones Universidad de Salamanca, 2007), pp. 373–83. 51. António Osório, A Luz Fraterna: poesia reunida, intro. by eugénio Lisboa (Lisbon: Assírio & Alvim, 2009). 52. Alexandre O’neill, Poesias Completas: 1951–1983, intro. by Clara Rocha (Lisbon: Imprensa nacional–Casa da Moeda, 1984). 53. Zadie Smith, ‘That crafty feeling’, in Prospect ( January 2010), 54–58 (p. 56). 54. António Ramos Rosa, ‘Apontamento sobre a minha poesia’, in Diário de Lisboa (11 January 1990). 55. Ruy Belo, ‘As inf luências em poesia’, Na Senda da Poesia, pp. 284–86. 56. See preface to the second edition of Aquele Grande Rio Eufrates, in Ruy Belo, Todos os Poemas, i, 18. 57. Herberto Helder, ‘(imagem)’, Photomaton & Vox, 2nd edn (Lisbon: Assírio & Alvim, 1987), p. 144. 58. Herberto Helder, ‘(memória, montagem)’, Photomaton & Vox, pp. 145–51. 59. See eduardo Lourenço, ‘dialéctica mítica da nossa modernidade’, in Tempo e Poesia, p. 199. 60. Luiza neto Jorge, apud gastão Cruz, ‘Luiza neto Jorge — Dezanove Recantos’, in A Vida da Poesia (Lisbon: Assírio & Alvim, 2008), pp. 269–70 (p. 270). 61. M. S. Lourenço, O Desequilibrista, in O Caminho dos Pisões, ed. by João dionísio (Lisbon: Assírio & Alvim, 2009), pp. 9–104. 62. See Século de Ouro: antologia crítica da poesia portuguesa do século XX, org. by Osvaldo Manuel Silvestre and Pedro Serra (Braga, Coimbra and Lisbon: Angelus novus and Cotovia, 2002).

PA R T I I ❖

Historical and Comparative Perspectives

C H A P t e r 14

❖

The Continuum of Modernism in the Iberian Peninsula, 1890–1936 Antonio Sáez Delgado the Heterogeneous Continuum of the Iberian Modernity There is no difficulty in agreeing that the period of time between 1890 and 1936 represents one of the most passionate moments of Iberian literary history. Overlooking the exact details of timing (modernism, in its international dimension, offers small variations of dating that do not substantially affect the whole, nor the dimension of its aesthetical and ideological proposals), the period from the start of symbolism and the burst of the modernist project (a singular which hides a plural) in the 1930s constitutes one of the fundamental epochs in the tradition of Iberian modernity. The markers, though f lexible, are unmistakable: in 1890 Oaristos by eugénio de Castro is published, the starting f lag of Portuguese symbolism and, because of its primacy, also of modern Iberian literature. Fernando Pessoa and Ramón gómez de la Serna had both been born two years earlier, and they would start a vital path that would lead, a quarter of a century later, to the coming of a new literary generation. They were linked to the idea of modernism, a somewhat diffuse concept — because it had been applied, among others, to the poets of the Portuguese symbolism and to some of their Spanish counterparts — from ‘os novos’ to ‘los nuevos’. A generation, then, of the first modernists/vanguardists, which helped the one that followed, which in turn was tied to the concept of Veintisiete in Spain and to the second modernism in Portugal. That second generation had everything necessary to accomplish the path to a modernity that it could lucidly analyse, without being blinded by the fireworks of the first vanguardist outbreaks and including elements both from the classic tradition and the immediate one. everything pointed towards a moment of true settlement of the modernism and the avant-garde in the different Peninsular literatures, until the establishment of the ‘estado novo’ [new State] and, most of all, the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War of 1936, a year after the death of Pessoa. The War brought to an end the dreams of several generations of authors who aimed at throwing open the doors of the Iberian Peninsula to new international movements. In the light of the work of Rubén darío, the footsteps of the Hispano-American context in Spanish modernism are more than evident, and it is impossible to refer to modernism in the Peninsular space without bearing this in mind. Octavio

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Paz, in Los hijos del limo, put this with outstanding clarity: modernism is the true Romanticism of Hispano-American Literature. It will take us closer to that near half-century which separates 1890 from 1936 if we establish two different categories for the term modernism in Spanish culture: a chronological one (defended by Juan Ramón Jiménez in El modernismo. Apuntes de curso, 1953), based on the historical moments when literary modernity bedded down: and another, more aesthetic, one, closer to the concept of symbolism linked to a more Parnassian dimension. Thus time, in terms of modernism, should be understood as at once the synthesis and the amalgam of an important group of tendencies and projects, a group made up of all the different authors who dreamt about a new art and a new world, with something like a renewed spirit of the Renaissance. Modernism is plural and multiple: one must keep in mind not only those who searched for the internationalization of the essence of the age, but also those who wanted to perform their own revolution through an extreme concentration on the essential principles of their own culture, not by looking outside. Modernism performs a remarkable role in the traditional antagonism, on both sides of the aesthetic and ideological trenches, which divided artists into either defenders or detractors of cosmopolitanism. What was considered by some to be a great modernist banner of internationalism was interpreted by others, hostile to the ‘new’, as a gesture of petulance or disdain towards the cultural identity of individual nations. From this perspective, it is possible to trace a single line — perhaps a concealed one — which runs through those years, and unites the pieces that make up the mosaic of modernism on the Peninsula. In parallel, the two greater Iberian literatures begin a fundamental and passionate exploration of the tension that existed between those who advocated foreignization of the national literatures (with France as the model to imitate) and those who found true novelty in the incessant search for the essence of their own nation’s culture.1 It is a process in which the authors who favoured internationalization (eugénio de Castro and the Spanish modernists, on the trail of Rubén darío) were as important as those who manifested themselves, actively or passively, as detractors of what they considered an escape to the outside without having arrived at the centre of their own aesthetic and philosophical concerns (Pascoaes and Unamuno, for example). The first important fruits of the avant-garde are born almost in parallel in both countries, with the publication of the Lisbon magazine Orpheu (1915) and the public appearance of the Spanish ultraism (1918). The major chronological ties between the two literatures seem, up to that point, firmly drawn, and their essential natures coincide. However, one must bear in mind an important fact: when these first vanguardist fruits appear and when (in the early 1920s) contacts between the first Portuguese modernism and Spanish ultraism intensify themselves, the best-known authors of each country to its neighbour are still, respectively, eça de Queirós and Vicente Blasco Ibáñez. (díez-Canedo will say in 1918 that de Queirós is ‘almost a Spanish writer’,2 so strong is his presence.) For many Spanish authors connected to the appearance of the avant-garde, the Portuguese poets they most admire are eugénio de Castro and Teixeira de Pascoaes. These facts stress that the line of modernity which we have referred to is multiple, with different strings that are

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joined to the main thread. If we perform, as nil Santiáñez proposes, a ‘transversal section’3 of the onset of modernity, we will observe that the rupture with realist and symbolist postulates was not in the least uniform. Their works actively coexist with the first vanguardist proposals, so it is possible to interpret the first Portuguese modernism, linked to the magazine Orpheu, as only another element of the same plural continuum. Alongside the vanguardist elements in Orpheu are other aesthetic traces, from post-symbolist territory. Something similar also occurs in Spain where — in parallel with the work of Ramón gómez de la Serna, which was always distant from movements and schools — the poets of the ultraism, who meant to break with aesthetic modernism, had as their leader an author — Rafael Cansinos Assens — who never, in truth, abandoned that aesthetic, and instead spread it to a major part of his re-converted followers. If the first Portuguese modernism, by Fernando Pessoa, Mário de Sá-Carneiro and José de Almada negreiros, forged a link of extraordinary value in the chain of the Portuguese modernity, in Spain, however, both the ultraist movement and the creationism brought by Vicente Huidobro from Chile were more prone to gestures than to individual works. (Creationism was perhaps the great opportunity missed by the Spanish avant-garde, with the exceptions of gerardo diego and Juan Larrea.) nevertheless, these early Spanish movements played a fundamental role in preparing the ground for the outburst of the great generation of the ’27 or, in a larger sense, the Veintisiete, contemporaries of the authors of the second Portuguese modernism. It is not difficult, once these parallelisms are seen, to establish the three principal stages which form the continuum of modernism in the Peninsula. One must always bear in mind the great variability of the chronological and aesthetic traces of a plural process, but taken as a whole we can make a logical reading of this history as continuity: (1) The moment of Portuguese symbolism / Spanish modernism (with all its nuances) and of Portuguese saudosism / Spanish generation of ’98, marked by the internal debate between the defenders and detractors of the imitation and importation of foreign literatures considered more advanced. The first step towards the assumption of an aesthetic model that faced outwards without complexes. (2) The first Portuguese modernism / first Spanish vanguardias or Spanish historical avant-garde, the moment in which the first projects of a fully vanguardist character, with the active and conscious importation of the most relevant precepts of the european isms — futurism, dadaism, above all, but also (in the case of creationism) cubism. (3) The Second Portuguese modernism / Spanish Veintisiete, the last stage of the process before the outburst of the Civil War and the social reality that its new political map brings to both countries, regarded both as an active revision of the classical cultural tradition (especially the Baroque) and as immediate; a time of clear critical vocation, which knows how to appreciate the richness of the conceptual chiasmus ‘tradition as avant-garde; avant-garde as tradition’. It is true that the process of modernism runs mostly parallel in Portugal and

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in Spain, with similar chronological boundaries and a timeline enabling us to draw lines that cross the entire Peninsular map. However, each national system functioned at the same time as its own universe, most of the time closed within itself, its internal logic distant from that of its neighbours. The mature fruits of the modernity processes in Spain and Portugal were not always directly comparable, because whereas in Portugal the generation of the first modernism has some of the most important authors of the first half of the twentieth century, in Spain that same situation only occurs with the arrival of the Veintisiete. each culture favoured, during this process, an intense contact with the theoretical approaches of the plastic artists (without neglecting other expressions, like cinema or music) with an intensity probably unseen since the Baroque, and this convergence forms an identity card of the modernist period. Because of this, it is essential to find the context of the literary connections within and outside literature, a constant and complex exercise that does not limit the threads of contact to the strict universe of the literatures of both countries. So, once general characteristics are observed, we must offer means of interpretation which stand further back, in order to see the whole modernist domain. Only thus can the terrain of modernism become a territory, the physical and spiritual space which the true protagonists inhabited in that radiant time, full of contradictions. the Communicating Vessels of Friendship: Primary and secondary Actors with Leading roles Connections between the Portuguese and the Spanish literatures in the period between 1890 and 1936 owe much to the personal contacts established between the writers of both countries and are rather similar, once the general timelines are drawn, to what we would now call a social network. Friendship and literature adapted themselves, coming and going in a circuit of authors who had initially known each other only through the history of letters in their neighbouring countries. It is impossible to speak about presences or echoes without referring, directly or indirectly, to these connections of friendship established between the writers of both countries. Among the protagonists we find only a small group of canonical authors but alongside them a broader ensemble of minority authors, children of their time who had won the battle of the day but failed to win the war of literary history. But those background authors, with their intimate (if modest) history of small successes and larger failures, are an unending source of information. As actors on the Iberian literary stage, they enable us to establish more precisely a narrative of what happened. The first polarizing focus of connections is eugénio de Castro. enthroned by Rubén darío to a privileged place among the international figures of symbolism,4 his presence in Spain can only be compared to that of Fernando Pessoa in the second half of the twentieth century. Castro was read, admired, translated and published in Spain, and was made use of in the critical centre of a first phase of contacts which demonstrates, once again, the hybridism of the territory in which we walk. Through his friendship with Unamuno, the latter began as an open critic

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of Belkiss but ended up strongly defended the pages of Constança, for which he wrote the prologue of the Spanish version.5 The friendship of both poets, which occurred in the interval of those two opinions, justifies not only the radical change in the poet from Bilbao, but also the fact that he better understood the aesthetic project started by the symbolist poet. Castro, whose Spanish letters reveal the magnitude of the admiration that the modernists professed him,6 makes himself the most quoted and praised Portuguese poet in Spain; and therefore something like a symbol of the aesthetic plurality so often mentioned as an inherent characteristic of modernism, since his work and his personality were approached with equal passion by the detractors and defenders of the internationalization of poetry, with Unamuno, and Rubén darío, respectively, leading the way. The devotion for Castro7 (who dedicated the book of poems A mantilha de Medronhos, 1923, to Spain) was evident in authors like Unamuno (who dedicated the text that opens Por tierras de Portugal y de España, 1911, to him) and eugenio d’Ors (whose friendship was especially noticeable in the 1940s, encouraged by their ideological affinities). But it could also be seen in others like Juan gonzález Olmedilla (who translated El Rey Galaor, 1913; El hijo pródigo, 1914; La sombra del cuadrante, 1916(?), and, in 1922, the first volume of his Complete Works, composed by Oaristos and Horas); or Andrés gonzález-Blanco (who translated, with Maristany and Olmedilla, Eugénio de Castro: Las mejores poesías (líricas) de los mejores poetas, from 1922, and dedicated to the poet a remarkable essay in Revue de l´Amérique Latine, which also appears in the third volume of the Obras Poéticas published in Portugal); or the youth who took part in Rogelio Buendía’s ultraist avant-garde (in whose book Lusitania. Viaje por un país romántico, from 1920, a visit to Castro in Coimbra is reported); or César gonzález Ruano (who in Un español en Portugal, from 1928, also refers a long conversation that took place in Coimbra); or Mauricio Bacarisse (who in 1931 published Los terribles amores de Agliberto y Celedonia, an avant-garde novel in which the protagonist couple visits, without naming names, the ‘great Parnassian poet’). The name of Castro, as a consequence, crossed over at the moment of Hispanic modernism and remained as an unalterable reference until the arrival of the avant-garde. Castro became the most evident bastion of Portuguese poetry in Spain, and a definitive example of the survival and superposition of aesthetics which form part of the chain of modernity. Some Spanish authors mentioned as friends of Castro were also, fervently, friends of Teixeira de Pascoaes,8 whose saudosist project obtained a certain repercussion in Spain, and specially in Catalonia where it was interpreted as the Iberian equivalent to ‘Añorantismo’ [Yearning],9 defended by many of its poets as a possible way of escaping from both the excessive Parnassian and French mannerism and the excesses of the new vanguardist trends. Thanks to names like those of Unamuno (the true el verdadero link between Castro, Pascoaes and Spain), eugenio d’Ors10 (his host in Barcelona, who would dedicate exciting pages in Nuevo Glosario to Pascoaes), Fernando Maristany (translator of Regreso al paraíso, 1922, with a prologue by Leonardo Coimbra), Valentín de Pedro (who translated Tierra prohibida in 1920) or Andrés gonzález-Blanco (who in 1917dedicated an interesting article to Saudosim),11 Pascoaes’s work was translated and recognized in Spain. It had a special

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Fig. 14.1. BnP/e3, 97–45. Text written by Pessoa circa 1931; published in Sobre Portugal, org. by. Joel Serrão (Lisbon: Ática, 1979), pp. 366–70.

impact not only in Catalonia and galicia,12 but also in Madrid, as his presence in the Residencia de estudiantes in 1923 seems to prove, a year after eugénio de Castro had visited it and five years after his crucial visit to Barcelona, from which the book Os Poetas Lusiadas came about. Miguel de Unamuno13 was in those years, in fact, the most important Spanish writer in the Iberian line. Admired by and dear to Castro and Pascoaes, his privileged intellectual position in both countries reached as far as Mário de Sá-Carneiro and Fernando Pessoa, who sent him some books, and the first issue of the Orpheu magazine, respectively. However, Unamuno was not the right interlocutor to give the magazine the reception in Spain that it wanted since his interests were, as is well known, far from avant-garde. This fact was never entirely forgotten by Pessoa, who came to argue with Unamuno from Bilbao in some theoretical texts (see Fig. 14.1).

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even before that, possibly around 1914, Pessoa had written a key passage in which he scathingly established the difference between the ‘men with a lot of talent’ existing in Spain (among whom he counts Unamuno) and the Portuguese ‘men of genius’: diferença entre o género de cultura que há hoje em espanha e Portugal. em espanha há um intenso desenvolvimento da cultura secundária, da cultura cujo máximo representante é um homem de muito talento; em Portugal, essa cultura não existe. Há porém a superior cultura individual que produz os homens de génio. e, assim, não há em espanha hoje uma figura de real destaque genial: o mais que há é figuras de grande talento — um diego Ruiz, um eugenio d’Ors, um Miguel de Unamuno, um Azorín. em Portugal há figuras que começam na centelha genial e acabam no génio absoluto. Há individualidades vincadas. Há mais: há um fundo carácter europeu no fundo.14 [There is a difference of culture today in Spain and Portugal. In Spain there is an intense development of the secondary culture, of the culture whose maximum representative is a man with a lot of talent; in Portugal that culture does not exist. However, there is an individual higher culture which produces men of genius: what we have rather are figures with a lot of talent — such as diego Ruiz, eugenio d’Ors, Miguel de Unamuno, Azorín. In Portugal there are figures who start with a spark of genius and end in absolute genius. There are marked individualities. There is more: there is a deep european character deep down.]

either way, and despite the fact that Unamuno’s texts on Portugal are frequently critical and harsh, he becomes an unquestionable reference point in the framework of the relations of both countries, both for the writers of his generation and among the younger set, closer to the proposals of the avant-garde. From 1915, Portugal was also a constant presence in the life of Ramón gómez de la Serna and Carmen de Burgos (Colombine) who even built a house — el Ventanal — in estoril, beginning what is, undoubtedly, the most fruitful relationship of the time of the first avant-gardes. In a strict sense, rather than a vanguardist, Ramón is a modernist who actively participates in the spirit of ‘the new’, as his contacts with José Pacheco and his magazine Contemporanea demonstrate (the most ambitious project of the 1920s, since it succeeded in creating a literary meeting point between the two countries),15 along with António Ferro, with Rogério garcía Pérez (the ‘Terrible Pérez’) and, especially, with José de Almada negreiros. In fact, in a greater part of his work (Pombo, La sagrada cripta de Pombo, Automoribundia, El novelista, Cinelandia, Falsas novelas or, particularly, La Quinta de Palmyra) there are ambiances, characters, notes or ref lections about Portugal, where he was for a time a writer known and respected by the literary media, thanks also to the friendship of Colombine with Ana de Castro Osório (who published some of their works in Portugal) and her entourage. In the first years of the 1920s, while Ramón was living in Portugal, Fernando Pessoa established contacts with some Spanish writers close to the ultraist orbit. Pessoa dedicated an interesting group of texts to the problem of the Iberian identity,16 and in 1923 he met Adriano del Valle,17 who become, apart from sparse encounters, the only Spanish writer to study the creator of the heteronyms. Thanks

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to the work of this young poet and of his friend Rogelio Buendía, some texts were published in Spain not only by Pessoa (in 1923 and in the Huelva newspaper La Provincia), but also by Mário de Sá-Carneiro, António Botto and Judith Teixeira. José de Almada negreiros, another vertex of the Orphic triangle, lived in Madrid between 1927 and 1932, where he wrote fundamental texts and was a graphic contributor for the ABC, El Sol, La farsa, Blanco y Negro, La esfera, Nuevo Mundo, Mundo gráfico or Revista de Occidente, apart from carrying out decoration works in public spaces, such as the San Carlos and Barceló cinemas and the theatre Muñoz Seca.18 His adventure in Madrid is an unending source of news and novelties and is transformed, in every respect, into the pinnacle of the pyramid of relations between both countries. His presence in Madrid leads us to the context of the Veintisiete. Just as the prior stages had been served by magazines which tried to convey new developments between the neighbouring literatures — the Renacimiento Latino, the publication directed by Francisco Villaespesa and Abel Botelho, and Contemporanea — so the Veintisiete was served by La Gaceta Literaria. That magazine was directed by giménez Caballero — one of the staunchest defenders, along with Ramón gómez de la Serna, of Almada’s work — and it tried, though with little success, to join with Presença to convert itself into an active focus of literary communion between the two countries,19 through the publication of a regular dossier dedicated to Portugal (the Gaceta Portuguesa), coordinated by António Ferro and Ferreira de Castro. All the conditions were favourable for the magazine to take on this great agglutinative element, but it failed in its aims because of the ideological drift of its director and the ‘imperialist’ role that it tried to adopt over the whole Latin American world, centred on Madrid. Thus two generations of writers who could have formed collaborations, which might have borne significant fruit, did not meet. This situation was responsible, in large part, for the rather slight knowledge that the poets of the Veintisiete had of their Portuguese contemporaries.20 On the Portuguese side, Adolfo Casais Monteiro was perhaps the author demonstrating the greatest interest in the Spanish literature of the moment, to the extent of dedicating a text to Benjamín Jarnés in Presença 21 (that he was to recollect later in Considerações pessoais, from 1933); and to borrow an expression of Antonio Machado’s as the title, many years later, of one of his works (A Palavra Esencial [The Essential Word], 1965). However, the most important contacts were accomplished by less recognized authors — or by those who, though recognized, only occasionally participated in cross-cultural relationships. These authors merged almost into a collective character in a stage play, in one voice representing the true essence of the process. Their names frequently give an extraordinary emphasis to the difficult process of reconstruction of such relationships, and of common points between both countries; they are part of a truly broad list. Consider, among others, the Portuguese writers Abel Botelho (who actively contributed in the editorial projects of Francisco Villaespesa), António Botto (who knew Adriano del Valle, with whom he exchanged letters, and saw one of his poems translated in La Provincia in 1923), Raul Brandão (translated by Valentín de Pedro — La farsa — and by Ribera i Rovira — Humus), Ana de Castro Osório and Teófilo Braga (who introduced Carmen de Burgos and Ramón gómez de la Serna to the Lisbon environs), António Ferro (the most faithful defender of

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Ramón gómez de la Serna in Portugal who, in works like Teoria da Indiferença, in 1920, or Leviana, whose definitive version is from 1929 and has a prologue by Ramón, is placed in the orbit of the aphorism), Fidelino de Figueiredo (who in 1951 published the volume Viagem a través da Espanha Literária, with impressions from 1928), Joaquim Manso (who narrates in the O Fulgor das Cidades, from 1924, a meeting in Madrid with Ramón), Vitorino nemésio (correspondent of Unamuno in the first years of the 1930s), Rogério garcía Pérez (the journalist who signed as the ‘el Terrible Pérez’, and is one of the most quoted names in this universe of contacts and references), António Sardinha (related to eugenio d’Ors, Ramiro de Maeztu — who wrote the prologue of the Spanish version of La alianza peninsular — and the circle of Acción española), Judith Teixeira (one of whose poems was translated in La Provincia), the illustrator Leal da Câmara (author of Miren ustedes. Portugal visto de Espanha, from 1917, and of a vast work of illustrations with Spanish motives) or the painters Mário eloy (who portrayed the ‘el terrible Pérez’), guilherme Filipe (who appears on the pages of La sagrada cripta de Pombo), Ventura Porfírio (who portrayed eva Aggerholm, Vázquez díaz’s wife) or Amadeu de Souza-Cardoso (author of several works with Spanish references). In Spain the provisional list of names connected to Portugal is considerably enlarged with the presence of a notable group of authors, translators22 and critics dedicated to Portuguese literature. In this aspect there are irreplaceable names like that of Mauricio Bacarisse (author of Los terribles amores de Agliberto y Celedonia, from 1931, where the characters, during the first part of the novel, travel around Lisbon, Coimbra and Porto, though without referring to the names of the cities), Tomás Borrás (who published Noche de Alfama in 1926, set in the well-known Lisbon neighbourhood), Rogelio Buendía (first translator of Pessoa in Spain and author of Lusitania. Viaje por un país romántico, from 1920), Carmen de Burgos, Colombine (who, as well as an important series of articles on Portuguese literature published in Cosmópolis between 1920 and 1921, was the author of Las Tricanas, from 1916, set in Coimbra; Los míseros, from the same year, in Figueira da Foz; Don Manolito, also from 1916, in Lisbon; La flor de la playa, from 1920, and the seventh chapter of the travel book Peregrinaciones, from 1916), enrique díez-Canedo (translator of the Pequeña antología de poetas portugueses, c. 1909–11, and poems by João de deus, Pascoaes, António nobre or Afonso Lopes Vieira), Wenceslao Fernández Flórez (translator of eça de Queirós, among others), ernesto giménez Caballero (who would publish, later in 1949, Amor a Portugal), Andrés gonzález-Blanco (who translated Fialho de Almeida, Antero de Quental and eça de Queirós and wrote El fado del Paço d’Arcos, from 1921, and Españolitas de Lisboa, from 1923, both set in Lisbon and its surroundings), Juan gonzález Olmedilla (that did the same with eugénio de Castro), César gonzález Ruano (who dedicates to Portugal and to some of its writers a book Un español en Portugal, from 1928 — some of which Portuguese fragments he later reproduced in Caras, caretas y carotas, from 1931 — , and set in Lusitanian ground several fragments of La alegría de andar, from 1943), Francisco Maldonado (translator of eugénio de Castro), Fernando Maristany (who translated and was devoted to Pascoaes, to whom he grants a privileged place in Las cien mejores poesías líricas de la lengua portuguesa, 1918, and whom he asked for

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a prologue for his book En el azul, from 1919), Marqués de Quintanar, Count of Santibáñez del Río (translator of António Sardinha and the author of Portugal y el hispanismo, from 1920, and Por tierras de Portugal, from 1930), eduardo Marquina (devoted translator of guerra Junqueiro and eça de Queirós), Valentín de Pedro (translator of Raul Brandão and Pascoaes), Ignasi Ribera i Rovira (who translated to Castilian and/or Catalan Raul Brandão, Júlio diniz or Júlio dantas, and wrote the prologue to the Portuguese anthology of Maristany, and dedicated to Portugal and its literature books such as Portugal Literari, of 1912, Atlántiques, of 1913 or Solitaris, of 1918), Adriano del Valle (who was personally acquainted with Pessoa, facilitated the translation of his first texts in Spain and wrote poems like ‘Canto a Portugal’ and ‘Lisboa a babor’), the very same Ramón María del Valle Inclán (who signed several translations, polemical in terms of authorship, of eça de Queirós), Isaac del Vando-Villar (who actually exchanged a letter with Fernando Pessoa, and in 1924 sent him his book La sombrilla japonesa) or Francisco Villaespesa (controversial translator of El Rey Galaor by Castro and author of Viaje sentimental, from 1909, with a chapter dedicated to Portugal, and Saudades, from 1910). If to all these translators and authors we join the attention given to Portugal by critics like díez-Canedo, gonzález-Blanco, Alfonso Maseras, Pérez de Ayala or Ribera i Rovira, as well as sporadic contacts (in visits, epistolary contacts or public activities) from others like Andrenio, Francisco Ayala, Ramiro de Maeztu, guillermo de Torre or Felipe Trigo, or the painters Castañé (author of a well-known portrait of Fernando Pessoa) or, most specially, daniel Vázquez díaz (whose Portuguese experience, helped by the magazine Contemporanea, is rather visible in his plastic production), we will end up with a truer picture of the cross-cultural landscape: one that was not fed only on the contacts established by the most important authors on each side. In the 1930s, however, the complex political environment made it difficult for the atmosphere to be entirely suitable for encounters in a liberal spirit. To a certain extent, and particularly in Spain, the vanguardist conscience was removed from the field of literature, with the exception of the bridges already created around surrealism by the middle of the century. Inevitably, these relations between the literatures and the writers were carried on into the dictatorial period, and they even managed to bring to fruition, during those times, processes which had started before the Civil War. (The reception of Pessoa in Spain begins to manifest itself, in a timid way, around the 1940s.) But modernism had only a short time left to live, amid the social turmoils that stirred both countries, and the priorities and concerns of writers moved to other aesthetics distant from the modernist splendour. If we study the modernist period and the Peninsular geographical space, broadening the focus of attention towards other artistic disciplines — without ever losing sight of literature, the agglutinating element of the principal contacts — and in the spirit of a continuous work in progress, we can advance investigations that will allow us to understand the course of literary and artistic modernity between 1890 and 1936. We must undertake this research within the perspective of an Iberian dialogue, as a continuum process, without radical breaks as far as its aesthetic and ideological evolution is concerned, and even less so concerning the relations established by the authors from the different stages mentioned. One may see the

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literature of that Iberian Peninsula as a dream without physical or time frontiers, as many authors have tried to see and feel it, digging from beneath the debris of time several generations of authors who fought with all their strengths, until the moment the cry of bullets silenced their voices; and finding in the other Iberian the most faithful fellow-traveller.23 notes to Chapter 14 1. Jesús Torrecilla dedicated himself to an in-depth study of this debate in the case of Spain, from the eighteenth until the twentieth Century, in La imitación colectiva. Modernidad vs. autenticidad en la literatura española (Madrid: gredos, 1996); El tiempo y los márgenes: Europa como utopía y como amenaza en la literatura española (Chapel Hill: University of north Carolina, department of Romance Languages, 1996); España exótica: la formación de la imagen española moderna (Boulder, CO: Society of Spanish and Spanish-American Studies, 2004); La actualidad de la generación del 98: algunas reflexiones sobre el concepto de lo moderno (Mérida: editora Regional del extremadura, 2006); Guerras literarias del XVIII español. La modernidad como invasión (Salamanca: ediciones Universidad de Salamanca, 2008). 2. enrique díez-Canedo, Conversaciones literarias (1915–1920) (Madrid: editorial América, 1921), p. 160. 3. nil Santiáñez, Modernidad, historia de la literatura y modernismos (Barcelona: Crítica, 2002), p. 65. 4. In 1896, Rubén darío dedicated to eugénio de Castro a lecture given in Buenos Aires, later to be reproduced, with a far greater impact, in Los raros. 5. eugénio de Castro, Constanza, trans. by Francisco Maldonado, prologue by Miguel de Unamuno (Madrid: Tipografia de la Revista de Archivos, 1913). 6. Eugénio de Castro y la cultura hispánica. Epistolario 1877–1943, ed. by eloísa Álvarez and Antonio Sáez delgado (Mérida: Junta de extremadura, 2007). 7. On the eugénio de Castro’s relationship with Spain, see the introductory studies by eloísa Álvarez and Antonio Sáez delgado, in Eugénio de Castro y la cultura hispánica, and José Adriano Carvalho, ‘A Mantilha de Medronhos. Impressões e recordações de Espanha de eugénio de Castro: caminhos e processos de uma imagem de espanha à volta de 1920’, in Península (Porto), 4, (2007), 177–94. 8. On the Spanish relations of Pascoaes, see Lurdes Cameirão, ‘Teixeira de Pascoaes e espanha’, 2 vols (unpublished doctoral thesis, Universidad de Salamanca, 2001). Also the texts by Antonio Sáez delgado dedicated to Pascoaes in Espíritus contemporáneos. Relaciones literarias luso-españolas entre el Modernismo y la Vanguardia (Seville: Renacimiento, 2008). 9. Cf. Ignasi de Ribera i Rovira, ‘Prólogo’, in Las cien mejores poesias líricas de la lengua portuguesa, trad. by Fernando Maristany (Valencia: Cervantes, 1918), p. 11. 10. On eugenio d’Ors and Portugal, see Jordi Cerdà, ‘eugenio d´Ors y Portugal’, in Actas del Congreso internacional de historia y cultura en la frontera, vol. i (Cáceres: Universidad de extremadura, 1996), pp. 525–42. 11. Andrés gonzález-Blanco, ‘Teixeira de Pascoaes y el saudosismo’, in Estudio (Barcelona), 5th year, 57 (1917), 391–414. 12. Os Intelectuais Galegos e Teixeira de Pascoaes, ed. by eloísa Álvarez and Isaac Alonso estraviz (A Coruña: edición do Castro, 1999). This epistolario demonstrates the privileged relations that Pascoaes had in galicia, with interlocutors such as Álvaro Cebreiro, Vicente Risco and Xavier Bóveda. 13. Unamuno’s relations with Portugal have been the object of detailed studies, like the one by Julio garcía Morejón, Unamuno y Portugal (Madrid: gredos, 1971), and Ángel Marcos de dios, Epistolario portugués de Unamuno (Paris: Fundação Calouste gulbenkian, 1978); and Escritos de Unamuno sobre Portugal (Paris: Fundação Calouste gulbenkian, 1985). 14. Fernando Pessoa, Páginas de Estética e de Teoria e Crítica Literárias, ed. by georg Rudolf Lind and Jacinto do Prado Coelho (Lisbon: Ática 1967), pp. 355–56. 15. On the magazine Contemporanea and its Spanish contributors, see Antonio Sáez delgado, Órficos y ultraístas. Portugal y España en el diálogo de las primeras vanguardias literarias (1915–1925) (Mérida: Junta de extremadura, 2000).

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16. Cf. Fernando Pessoa, Ultimatum e Páginas de Sociologia Política, org. by Joel Serrão (Lisbon: Ática, 1980), pp. 59–95. 17. On this relation, see Antonio Sáez delgado, Adriano del Valle y Fernando Pessoa (apuntes de una amistad) (gijón: Llibros del Pexe, 2002). 18. On the presence of Almada in Spain, see Carlos Areán, ‘Almada negreiros y su exposición en Madrid’, in Arbor (Madrid), 458, (1984), 45–52; Pablo del Barco, ‘Almada negreiros montado en Rocinante’, in Revista de Occidente, 94, Madrid (1989), 159–72; and the contribution by Luís Manuel gaspar and João Paulo Cotrim in El alma de Almada el impar. Obra gráfica 1926–1931 (Lisbon: Bedeteca de Lisboa, 2004) and Marginálias. Ramón Gómez de la Serna, desenhos de Almada (Lisbon: Bedeteca of Lisboa/Assírio & Alvim, 2004). 19. Cf. Perfecto e. Cuadrado, ‘Portugal en La Gaceta Literaria: encrucijada de conf luencias y dispersiones’, in Anthropos (Barcelona), 84 (1988), 57–61, and António Apolinário Lourenço, ‘A Presença e o “Modernismo” espanhol: breve história de um grande equívoco’, in Estudos de Literatura Comparada Luso-Espanhola (Coimbra: Centro de Literatura Portuguesa, 2005), pp. 123–38. 20. Illustrative of this is the fact that among all the poetry translations made by the poets of the Veintisiete, only Jorge guilén and gerardo diego have translated a few stray poems by Portuguese authors (Antero and Pessoa, by guillén; eugénio de Castro, Pessoa and Carlos Queiroz, on diego’s part). Las traducciones del 27. Estudio y antología, ed. by Francisco Javier díez de Revenga (Seville: Fundación José Manuel Lara/Vandalia, 2007). 21. The magazine Presença offered on its pages references and texts by Pío Baroja, Unamuno, Ortega y gasset or the quoted Jarnés, coldly closing a process that, without a doubt, could have yielded much more interesting and fruitful results from the point of view of the projects in common. In any case, it is fair to stress the role that the writers of the Portuguese second modernism had in the reception that Pessoa had in Spain, in the 1940s and 1950s, through the critical texts of Joaquín de entrambasaguas and Ildefonso-Manuel gil, supported by the theoretical postulates of Adolfo Casais Monteiro and other presencistas. 22. It is important, on this point, to bear in mind that the availability of translations in the first decades of the twentieth century was quite different in Spain to that in Portugal; whereas in cities like Madrid, Valencia or Barcelona, in particular, there were numerous collections by foreign authors available in translation, the same was never consistently true in Portugal. This meant that the diffusion of Portuguese authors was always greater in Spain than that of Spaniards in Portugal, since the Spanish works were available abroad only in the original Castilian, and so were not always within the reach of the common reader. On the translations available in the Spanish market of the day, see the important book by Miguel gallego Roca, Poesía importada. Traducción poética y renovación literaria en España (1909–1936) (Almería: Universidad de Almería, 1996). Another good source of information is M. Correia Fernandes, Literatura Portuguesa em Espanha: ensaio de uma bibliografia (1890–1985) (Porto: Livraria Telos editora, 1986). 23. This text belongs to an ambitious research project, called Suroeste, on Iberian literary and artistic modernity between 1890 and 1936. Cf. Suroeste. Relaciones literarias y artísticas entre Portugal y España, ed. by Antonio Sáez delgado and Luis Manuel gaspar, 2 vols (Badajoz: Sociedad estatal de Conmemoraciones Culturales; MeIAC; Assírio & Alvim, 2010).

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Portuguese Modernism, Brazilian Modernism Arnaldo Saraiva A comparative study of the rich modernist movements in Portugal and Brazil during the twentieth century, which were marked by the same inf luences, demands the special attention that must be given to an ideological field characterized by the dialectics of the colonizer and the colonized, as well as to language and literature in general. Let it immediately be understood which modernisms we are speaking about, as several can be understood, each of which with its conceptual and temporal f luctuations as suggested by prefixes such as pre-modernism, early modernism, neo-modernism, post-modernism, anti-modernism and contra-modernism. each one is a ‘movement’ defined as a dramatic break with the Parnassian and symbolist aesthetics as well as new initiatives inspired by or stimulated by Italian futurism. In addition to books, the second and third decades of the twentieth saw the rise of manifestos, magazines, public demonstrations and propaganda. In Lisbon, the climactic moment was in March 1915, with the publication of the magazine Orpheu, while the same occurred in São Paulo at the Week of Modern Art of 13–17 February 1922. The period of modernist militancy is thought to have ended in 1927 with the appearance of the magazine Presença and, in the Brazilian case, with the publication of drummond’s volume Alguma Poesia. The principal motivating forces behind these movements are well known: in Portugal, Fernando Pessoa, Mário de Sá-Carneiro, Almada negreiros, Luís de Montalvor, Alfredo guisado, Armando Côrtes-Rodrigues, António Ferro, and, in Brazil, Mário de Andrade, Oswald de Andrade, Menotti del Picchia, Manuel Bandeira, Ronald de Carvalho, Cecília Meireles, Carlos drummond de Andrade, Jorge de Lima, gilberto Freyre, Augusto Meyer, and Raul Bopp. Anthony giddens has pointed out aspects of the international context which contributed to modernity: capitalism, industrialism, militarism and the emergence of nation states.1 In addition, however, the unique characteristics of the Portuguese and Brazilian national contexts as regards their distinct social, historical and cultural situations must not be underrated, since they aid our understanding of the motives behind them. during the periods of incubation and militancy, i.e. the manifestation of modernism, Portugal was undergoing some of the most turbulent years of its

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existence. Incidents included: the english Ultimatum of 1890, revolts, strikes, the regicide (1908), the Proclamation of the Republic (1910) and related unrest, assassination attempts, persecutions, the First World War and the Russian Revolution and, finally, the murder of Sidónio Pais (1918), the proclamation of the northern Monarchy (1919), and the revolution of 28 May 1926, culminating in the beginning of the Salazar dictatorship. Brazil, on the other hand, was experiencing a true Belle Epoque favourable to ‘ufanism’, instigated in 1900 by Afonso Celso. nevertheless, local and occasional counterpoints to this tendency include the Revolta da Armada (navy Revolt) (1893), the Canudos Rebellion (1896–97) and the Sailors’ Revolt against the Lash (1910). It was, in fact, only in 1922 that serious political and social unrest began, with moves such as ‘tenentism’, the founding of the Communist Party, the Prestes Column revolutionary movement, the revolt against President Bernardes and the Revolution of 1930. Whereas in Portugal pessimism contributed to the verses of ‘nevoeiro’, the last poem of Pessoa’s Mensagem (‘ninguém sabe que coisa quer’ [no one knows what they want]),2 in Brazil, especially in São Paulo, urban and industrial growth as well as novelties such as the cinema, the radio, the automobile and jazz contributed to the frisson of the ‘Roaring 1920s’.3 This scenario immediately helps to explain some of the differences between Portuguese and Brazilian modernism, but it is important to remember the concrete reasons which contributed to a certain degree of separation between the cultures from which the two movements emerged. These reasons were proclaimed, with or without irony (see Oswald de Andrade’s ‘Manifesto Antropófago’ [Cannibal Manifesto] in 1928 or graça Aranha’s Conference on the Academy in 1924), in many pieces of Brazilian modernist writing. (1). The gradually growing awareness of Brazilian Independence. If, from the beginning of the twentieth century, the ‘ufanist’ ideology encouraged Brazilian nationalism, this tendency was further strengthened with the approach of the Brazilian Centennial Celebration in 1922. One main theme of the Brazilian modernist manifestos was the need to ‘Brazilianize Brazil’ which drummond later parodied (in ‘Hino nacional’ of Brejo das Almas, 1934: ‘nenhum Brasil existe. e acaso existirão os brasileiros?’ [There is no Brazil. Incidentally, do Brazilians exist?]).4 It is not by chance that, within a few years’ time, analytical and interpretive studies of Brazilian culture and society began to appear, such as those by Paulo Prado, gilberto Freyre and Sérgio Buarque de Holanda. Thus began the Brazilian Integralist movement led by Jackson de Figueiredo and Plínio Salgado, the latter linked to the modernist submovements Verdamarelo (1926) and Anta (1927), which included the participation of Menotti del Picchia and Cassiano Ricardo. Curiously enough, this group based itself partly on the ideas of the so-called Lusitanian Integralist group, which included Luís de Almeida Braga and António Sardinha. The Portuguese were seen as the enemies of Brazilian Independence, even those, such as dom Pedro I, who had formerly been considered national heroes. The Portuguese were subjected not merely to generalized hostility but even contempt by the Brazilian intelligentsia. Let us not forget the extreme example of insults, acrimony and resentments included in António Torres’s As Razões da Inconfidência (1925), which went so far as to consider the Portuguese language an ‘dialecto obscuro e atamancado’ [obscure and awkward

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dialect] and the Portuguese ‘marrecos’, ‘picaretas’ [lit. hunchbacks, pickaxes] and obstacles to Brazilian progress, which could only be obtained when the country truly ‘desaportuguesasse’, i.e., rid itself of the Portuguese identity.5 (2). An increase in the number of Luso-Brazilian conflicts. numerous conf licts of varying degrees of size and importance — national, regional and local — interfered with Portuguese–Brazilian relations during the pre-modernist and modernist periods, including some serious enough to threaten a breakdown Luso-Portuguese diplomatic relations, such as the case of President Floriano Peixoto, who alleged that Portuguese ships had supported soldiers attempting to depose him in 1884. Another example was the offer by the Brazilian authorities in 1911 and 1912 of diplomatic exile to supporters of the monarchical regime who were conspiring against the Portuguese Republic. In 1913, there were demonstrations against the Portuguese inf luence in the press in Rio and São Paulo. In 1922, the epitácio Pessoa law required Portuguese fishermen, known as ‘poveiros’, to acquire Brazilian nationality under penalty of deportation. Another instance, namely the debate relative to the linguistic norms or spelling reform, will be discussed below. In 1931, there were still cariocas (people from Rio de Janeiro), who celebrated the 100th anniversary of the ‘noite das garrafadas’, during which various brawls and riots had occurred between Brazilians (whose motto was ‘mata galego’, i.e., kill the galicians) and Portuguese, respectively supporters and detractors of dom Pedro I. (3). The War of 1914–18. With the beginning of the war, communication between Portugal and Brazil, which had never been easy, became even more difficult, largely due to Portugal’s support of the Allied Forces. Moreover, the Atlantic Ocean was patrolled by german ships which went so far as to sink several Brazilian vessels in 1917. At this point, support began to grow for Brazilian involvement in the war, which indeed came to pass. It is worth remembering that the friendship between Oswald de Andrade and Mário de Andrade dates from the moment when Oswald heard Mário give a speech at a rally in support of Brazil’s joining the war. (4). New Brazilian immigrants. Up until 1809, the Portuguese were the only people who migrated to Brazil on a large scale. However, with the opening of the Brazilian ports, ordered by King João VI, and especially in the late 1890s, new masses of immigrants began to inf luence Brazilian social and cultural life. Amongst these were Italians, Spanish, and germans, but also groups of non-europeans including Arabs, Russians, South Koreans and Japanese. In 1920, on the brink of the modernist revolution, there were 433,557 Portuguese officially residing in São Paulo, but the number of Italian immigrants was higher (558,405). (5). The ‘Brazilian Literature’ question. during the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, no one, whether in Brazil or Portugal, spoke of ‘Brazilian Literature’. Authors who had been born or who had settled in Brazil, had been naturally considered part of ‘Portuguese Literature’ or of the indivisible ‘Portuguese and Brazilian Literature’ (at that time, the concept ‘Luso-Brazilian Literature’ was not used yet). gonçalves de Magalhães, in his Discurso sobre a História da Literatura do Brasil (1836), clearly inspired by Ferdinand denis, whom he cited, and

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Almeida garrett, whose name was erased, wished for and conceived of the future existence of a ‘Brazilian Literature’. The concept and expression, however, did not immediately gain general acceptance. Most people preferred to speak merely of ‘national literature’ while others, such as Machado de Assis, pointed out that a national literature may be present as an ‘instinct’, but does not take form from one minute to the next. However, the linguistic and literary debates provoked by Pinheiro Chagas’s essays on José de Alencar and by Camilo’s essays on the poets in Cancioneiro Alegre gave impetus to the idea and the expression, which became generally consecrated after Sílvio Romero and José Veríssimo. even during the modernist period, though, there was a still a need to appeal for a further distancing from european literary models as well as for the adoption of a truly Brazilian literary voice, the so-called ‘abrasileiramento’ [Brazilianization]. (6). The Language Question. The debate about the existence of a ‘Brazilian Literature’ became frequently associated with the debate about a ‘Brazilian Language’ which divided not only Brazilians from Portuguese but also Brazilians from Brazilians. After José de Alencar, the distinctive manner and the originality of Brazilian Portuguese began to receive attention. The ‘Portuguese Language’ began to be referred to with distinctions such as: Brazilian language, Brazilian dialect, Brazilian co-dialect, Luso-Brazilian co-dialect, Brazilian speech, Brazilian forms of speech, American Portuguese, the national language, the national idiom, the new Brazilian idiom, the Brazilian Portuguese language and Brazilian Portuguese. In the modernist period, there were even writers arguing that in order to achieve full independence, Brazil had to have an independent language. Others, such as Medeiros and Albuquerque went so far as to state that the Brazilians were the true ‘owners’ of the language due to their overwhelming numerical superiority. (7). The Orthography Question. Tired of waiting for the Lisbon Academy of Sciences to carry through on the reform of the orthographic system promised since the end of the nineteenth century and which was intended to do away the reigning anarchy (between the phonological, etymological, aesthetic and mixed models of spelling) the new Brazilian Academy of Letters unilaterally launched its reform in 1907, which the Portuguese attempted to respond to with the reform of 1911. The latter never achieved national consensus nor was it accepted in Brazil. during the following decades, many attempts were made to reach an agreement. This was finally achieved in 1990 and is intended to come into effect between 2009 and 2012. This agreement, however, continues to divide Portuguese from Brazilians as well as Portuguese from Portuguese and Brazilians from Brazilians. (8). Competition with French culture. In the second half of the nineteenth century and at the beginning of the twentieth century, Paris was the great cultural capital of the world, as suggested by a monumental study by Walter Benjamin, ‘Paris, Capital of the nineteenth Century’. It was France that, in the words of Camilo, a character in Machado’s short story ‘A parasita azul’, had become a cultural homeland to Brazilians as, in fact, it had for the Portuguese as well. In his famous 1866 piece entitled ‘O francesismo’, eça de Queiroz argued that Portugal, and through Portugal, Brazil, imported from France not only ideas, books, magazines, plastic arts, and the theatre,

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but also fashion and culture. In 1911, Veiga Simões restated this dependence in his book A Nova Geração, as did Brito Broca (A Vida Literária no Brasil, 1900), elísio de Carvalho (As Modernas Correntes Estéticas na Literatura Brasileira, 1907) and João do Rio (O Momento Literário, 1908) in Brazil. Both countries had avid readers of French books and magazines, some of which were written by Portuguese or by Portuguese and Brazilians (such as Os Dois Mundos, Ilustração Brasileira, Le Courrier du Brésil, etc.). Brazilian writers, including future modernists, visited France, where they might spend several months, as did Oswald de Andrade and Ronald de Carvalho, or even live there as did modernist artists like Anita Malfatti and Tarsila do Amaral. (9). The mutually negative preconceptions of the Portuguese and the Brazilians. As early as colonial times, biases and stereotypes about Brazilians already existed, not only those related to race but also those that identified differences between the whites born in Brazil and the ‘reinóis’ or royal subjects, as testified a ‘romance’ by gregório de Matos himself (‘Que os brasileiros são bestas, | e estarão a trabalhar | toda a vida por manter | maganos de Portugal’ [the Brazilians are the brutes who will work all their lives to support the Portuguese scoundrels]).6 After Independence, the differences between Brazilians and Portuguese grew even more marked. The Portuguese were regarded as rude, dim-witted, without manners, greedy, rigid, lecherous and were called insulting or disparaging names such as: ‘galegos’, ‘labregos’, ‘mondrongos’, ‘marotos’, ‘novatos’, ‘marinheiros’, ‘burros sem rabo’, ‘pésde-chumbo’, ‘marrecos’, ‘picaretas’, ‘talaveiras’, ‘cutrucas’, ‘tamanqeiros’, ‘portugas’. But the ‘execrável caricatura’ [execrable caricature]7 with which the Brazilians characterized the Portuguese and which, during the modernist period, turned into the so-called ‘jokes about the Portuguese’ corresponded, to some extent, to the caricature or the stereotype which the Portuguese used to describe the Brazilians, who were considered uncivilized, superficial, childish, clownish and were dubbed monkeys, mulattos, and brasucas. It was certainly the mutual resentment of the colonizers and the colonized which contributed to this reciprocal negative stereotyping denouncing the sentiments of proximity or familiarity inherent in ethnic jokes. Thus, it is not surprising that the forces behind the cultural distancing between Portugal and Brazil in the pre-modernist and modernist periods competed with the forces of approximation, of which we shall review nine: (1). Reading of Portuguese authors in Brazil and of Brazilian authors in Portugal. At the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, Portuguese authors were very popular in Brazil, where Portuguese books, newspapers, magazines, and almanacs were enthusiastically, and perhaps indiscriminately, received. Some of the most popular writers included Camilo, eça, Ramalho, António nobre, Junqueiro, Fialho, António Feijó, Alberto de Oliveira, eugénio de Castro, and Malheiro dias. This last author, together with others, such as Xavier de Carvalho, Justino de Montalvão, José Maria Alpoim and Santo Tirso regularly published in the Brazilian press. Simultaneously Brazilian writers such as Machado de Assis, Olavo Bilac, Raimundo Correia, Luiz guimarães Júnior, Coelho neto, euclides da Cunha,

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Sílvio Romero, Lima Barreto, and Ronald de Carvalho were achieving significant success in Portugal. (2). The circulation of Portuguese publications within Brazil and within the Portuguese immigrant population. There were several regular issues of magazines, newspapers and almanacs which were published in Portugal, Brazil or Paris with a high level of circulation within Brazil. Some of these publications specifically targeted either Brazilians or Portuguese citizens in Brazil, such as the particularly relevant example of the 24 volumes of the Biblioteca Internacional de Obras Célebres or newspapers such as Diário Português, Gazeta de Notícias and O País. Brazilian collections did not circulate in Portugal, but the Portuguese could count on Brazilian participation or even seek Luso-Brazilian collaborations in publications such as the magazine Orpheu, in which Ronald de Carvalho collaborated with eduardo guimaraens, or other contemporary publications such as A Águia and Atlântida. (3). Portuguese immigration to Brazil. Brazil had always been a destination for Portuguese emigrants but between 1850 and 1930 it was, as noted by Maria Beatriz nizza da Silva in Documentos para a História da Imigração Portuguesa no Brasil (1850–1938), it became their ‘almost exclusive’ destination.8 especially in the years following the proclamation of the Republic there, immigrants from Portugal outnumbered legal immigrants from Italy, Spain, germany and Japan, totalling 21,235 in 1900, 39,516 in 1910, 48,000 in 1911, and 75,000 in 1912. While Italian immigrants worked mostly in coffee production, and the Japanese preferred farming, the Portuguese generally enjoyed settling in local, urban commerce or working in small-scale industrial establishments, where they could easily communicate with the Brazilians who would hear Portuguese popular expressions. An inf luence not to be underestimated is that of some forms of Portuguese popular literature, such as ‘literatura de cordel’ or string literature, which would serve as a model for the greatly successful popular literature that emerged in the Brazilian northeast at the end of the nineteenth century. (4). The presence of Portuguese literary figures and artists in Brazil and vice versa. In the decades of 1910 and 1920, several Portuguese writers either lived in Brazil or spent long periods of time there, including Paulino de Oliveira, Ana de Castro Osório, Alberto de Oliveira, António Patrício, Luís de Montalvor, Álvaro Pinto, António Sérgio, Jaime Cortesão, António Ferro, and José Osório de Oliveira. We must not forget, however, that during the same period Portuguese booksellers such as Francisco Alves, Heitor Antunes, Joaquim Antunes and Joaquim Saraiva played an important cultural role as did actors like António Silva and Adelina Abranches, as well as artists like Correia dias, who married Cecília Meireles. Brazilian writers also visited or lived in Portugal, among whom Olavo Bilac, João do Rio, Álvaro Moreira, Felipe de Oliveira, and Oswald de Andrade. (5). Signing of cultural agreements between the Portuguese and Brazilian governments or between Portuguese and Brazilian institutions. The 1908 regicide prevented dom Carlos from visiting Brazil, a trip which had even been the subject of an elegant commemorative book. In addition, the proclamation of the Republic resulted

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in the Brazilian president Hermes da Fonseca failing to achieve his objective of visiting Portugal. nevertheless, such historical accidents did not prevent the two countries from entering into several cultural agreements such as the literary property agreement (1889), the book export agreement (1898), the establishment of a Portuguese embassy in Rio de Janeiro (1913), the immigration agreement, the double nationality agreement, and the protection of literary and artistic creation agreement (1922), the latter being signed in Brazil by Presidents epitácio Pessoa and António José de Almeida, who had travelled to Brazil without concerns for safety to participate in the Brazilian Centennial Independence Celebration. (6). The debate about the idea of a Luso-Brazilian Confederation. The idea was an old one, dating from 1882, but it gained new impetus in 1908–09, largely due to the efforts of Consiglieri Pedroso, Member of Parliament, teacher, and researcher into popular literature. The plan of a confederation, which mobilized intellectuals in both countries for several years, aimed to establish close political, economic and cultural links between the two countries. Although the Confederation never came to be, it did promote the Luso-Brazilian cause and formed the basis for the Community of Portuguese-Speaking Countries. (7). The creation of a Brazilian Studies Course in Lisbon. In 1915, shortly after the establishment of a Portuguese embassy in Rio de Janeiro, the Portuguese poet and diplomat Alberto de Oliveira started to work on the creation of a course in Brazilian Studies at the University of Lisbon, which would teach Brazilian history, literature, and art, as well as various other forms of Brazilian culture. The idea was enthusiastically received by both the cultural and political communities, but the course, which was intended to be taught by a Brazilian, was inaugurated only in 1923 and was taught by Oliveira Lima. (8). The publication and sale of Brazilian books in Portugal and Portuguese books in Brazil. Books by Brazilian authors were traditionally published in Portugal, but at the beginning of the twentieth century some publishers, such as Lello in Porto, began to focus on this type of publication. In Rio, Anuário do Brasil began to focus in a similar fashion on books by Portuguese authors. Manuel Bandeira was an admirer of França Amado’s publishing house in Coimbra and sought him as his publisher. However, the differences in orthography interfered with sales and books by new authors rarely appeared in bookstores. Although Brazil was an excellent market for Portuguese books, the same could not be said about Portuguese receptiveness to Brazilian authors, a fact which provoked the publisher Monteiro Lobato’s ire. Marisa Lajolo’s information in Brasil e Portugal: 500 Anos de Enlaces e Desenlaces, is worth noting: ‘By 1924, Brazil had imported 179,796 kilos of books from Portugal, but had exported only 648.’9 (9). The first transatlantic flight (Lisbon / Rio) by Gago Coutinho and Sacadura Cabral between 30th March and 17th June 1922. Much more symbolically relevant than President António José de Almeida’s visit to Brazil on the occasion of Brazil’s Centennial Celebration of its Independence, was the visit of the two airmen who were triumphantly received in several Brazilian cities. Although the trip had been

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made in several steps with some long stopovers (Las Palmas, gando, São Vicente, Santiago, Penedos, Fernando noronha, Recife, Salvador, Porto Seguro, Vitória, and Rio), it inaugurated a new era in communication between the two countries, which was vastly quicker and more comfortable than the maritime voyages. The reasons enumerated did not always show the inf luence of modernism, but they prove either the ignorance or the exaggeration on the part of Afrânio Coutinho who wrote in A Literatura no Brasil: ‘In the twentieth century the distance between Brazil and Portugal is vaster than that between Brazil and France [...] to the extent that the two modernisms — the Lusitanian and the Brazilian — have virtually no contact, with the Portuguese movement being virtually ignored in Brazil.’10 In fact, there are interesting parallels and analogies between some Brazilian and Portuguese modernist texts, which shared common popular and erudite cultural roots as well as the inf luence of modern, post-symbolist and futuristic aesthetics. In some cases the inf luence was obvious (such as in Leviana, by António Ferro and Serafim Ponte Grande, by Oswald de Andrade), while in others it was less so. Less doubtful is the inf luence of pre-modernists on modernists, such as Olavo Bilac on Pessoa (who had been read in Brazil as a translator since 1913, following the publication of the important Biblioteca Internacional de Obras Célebres) and the inf luence of gomes Leal, António Feijó, António nobre and eugénio de Castro on Bandeira and others. Further relationships can be mentioned between the two forms of modernism: personal relationships (Luís de Montalvor and António Ferro had contact with several Brazilian pre-modernists and modernists, while Oswald de Andrade and Ronald de Carvalho knew Portuguese pre-modernists and modernists); correspondence (between Ferro and Oswald, between Ronald and Montalvor and between Pessoa and Ronald); collaborative relations (Sá-Carneiro contributed to a newspaper and various magazines in Rio as early as 1913 and 1914, while Ronald wrote for Orpheu, Ferro published in Klaxon, Oswald contributed to Contemporanea, gilberto Freyre to Portugália...); relations of co-readers of the same publications (Luso-Brazilian or otherwise) — books, reviews, almanacs; relations of criticism (Montalvor wrote about Ronald, Ronald critiqued Sá-Carneiro and Montalvor and expounded on the Luso-Brazilian exchange. Ferro wrote about ‘the new Brazilians’ and about Oswald, who, in turn, together with guilherme de Almeida, Menotti del Picchia, Carlos drummond de Andrade, Ronald and José Lins do Rego wrote about Ferro). difference between the two modernisms can also be pointed out. As was mentioned above, each movement emerged from a distinct national context. One ‘exploded’ in 1915, the other in 1922. One had a strong militant presence until 1927, the other until 1930. One was based in Lisbon with a tiny offshoot in Faro; the other took place not only in São Paulo and Rio but in several regional capitals as well (Recife, Maceió, Bahia, Belo Horizonte, Cataguases, Porto Alegre...). One was composed of a small group roughly the size of a football team, while the other comprised several distinct teams. One left a limited body of work, with the exception of Almada and, of course, Pessoa, who produced an entire body of literature in and of himself. The production of Sá-Carneiro, however,

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was surprising, given that he only lived to be twenty-five years old. The other modernism left a vast amount of work. One movement was more cosmopolitan and mostly explored deep psychological issues and themes of the human condition while the other was more nationalistic, and more extroverted, dealing mostly with the Brazilian condition. One was more dramatic, more pessimistic, while the other was inclined more to humour and optimism. One respected the linguistic canon to a certain extent but at the same allowed for some internal innovation or revolution, while the other ostentatiously broke with all the norms of the time, opening itself shamelessly to the oral vernacular and illiteracy (Mário de Andrade went so far as to invent an inconsequential Gramatiquinha da Fala Brasileira). However, the similarities between the two modernisms are not few in number. Their leading figures are men (women would begin their active participation in other twentieth century movements), all of whom were born within a short period starting in 1886, the year of birth of Manuel Bandeira and Raul Leal. Pessoa was born in 1888, while Sá-Carneiro, two years younger, was born in 1890, as was Oswald de Andrade. Almada negreiros was born in 1893, the same year as Mário de Andrade, Ronald de Carvalho and Jorge de Lima. The youngest of the Portuguese modernists, António Ferro, was born in 1895, while drummond, one of the youngest Brazilian modernists, was born in 1902. despite the differences in the national contexts from which they emerged, the two modernisms shared similar if not identical inf luences from the international social and political scene: the war, the clash of the oligarchies, urban grown, the rapid technological development and industrial growth, and the rise of authoritarian or dictatorial regimes. Both modernisms used the same strategies of affirmation: manifestos, debates, performances, magazines (Orpheu, Portugal Futurista, Athena, Contemporanea; Klaxon, A Revista, Revista de Antropofagia, Verde). Both broke away from those whom Mário de Andrade called the ‘masters of the past’ (the Parnassians and the symbolists), and both demonstrated an identical disdain for academics and conservatives, like dantas and the ‘european mandarins’ that Almada negreiros and Pessoa ridiculed, and like the bourgeois of Mário de Andrade; both expressed themselves via isms including ‘paulismo’, ‘interseccionismo’, ‘sensacionismo’, ‘futurismo’, ‘desvairacionismo’, ‘verde-amarelismo’, and ‘antropofagismo’. Both modernisms concentrated especially on poetry, which they regarded as the greatest form of art, while leaving behind them a very limited production in fiction and even less for the theatre. However, they explored the limits of genre and rules: free verse, prose poetry and poetic prose, ‘poema piada’ [literally, poem joke], new epic poetry, carnivalesque discourse, fragmentation, discontinuity, and verbal-visual explorations. despite the restrictions and the limits that post-modernists accused modernists of (and of which Ledo Ivo accused the Brazilian modernists in ‘Os modernismos do Sec-XX’, text first published in the review Presença, 32, and today included in Ajudante de Mentiroso, 2009),11 the two modernisms dedicated themselves religiously to a high-level cultural mission that was simultaneously aesthetic and ethical. Their objective was to use their creations to forge a new man, whole, free and committed to the struggle against inequality, taboos, and prejudice.

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Ultimately, both modernisms found themselves bound by some level of mutual ignorance, motivated or not by the afore-mentioned reasons. Very early on, in 1915, Pessoa lamented the Brazilian ignorance of Portuguese modernism in a letter to William Bentley, writing: ‘Brazilians today are scarcely [a]ware that things are moving in Portugal.’12 As they are undoubtedly among the most important cultural movements ever in Portugal and Brazil, we might be tempted to ask how much further they might have advanced if their great creative minds had forged a more solid alliance, a closer exchange of ideas. This, however, is a moot and sterile question. What must be stressed, however, is that along with them, or because of them, each of the two countries became richer and worthier and went on to encounter further motives for approximation — those that demand new masterpieces written in a common language, even if that language has a novel standard. These works give pleasure to and widen the horizons of those who choose to be included in the Portuguese-speaking community. They also contribute, to a great extent, to attracting the international recognition that the language and culture of Portuguesespeaking countries have lacked. But, even more importantly, they contribute to the elevation and the ennoblement of humanity as a whole. notes to Chapter 15 1. Anthony giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990). 2. Fernando Pessoa, ‘nevoeiro’, in Mensagem, facsimile of the first edition of 1934 (Lisbon: Portugália editora, 2008), p. 96. 3. nicolau Sevcenko, Orfeu Extático na Metrópole (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1992). 4. Carlos drummond de Andrade, Brejo das almas: poemas (Belo Horizonte: Os Amigos do Livro, 1934); cf. Obra Completa (Rio de Janeiro: Companhia Aguilar editora, 1964). 5. António Torres, As Razões da Inconfidência (Rio de Janeiro: A. J. Castilho, 1925). 6. Obras Completas de Gregório de Matos, ed. by. James Amado, 7 vols (Salvador: Janaína, 1969), vii, 1595. 7. Miguel Torga, Traço de União, 2nd edn (Coimbra: n.pub., 1969). 8. Maria Beatriz nizza da Silva, Documentos para a História da Imigração Portuguesa no Brasil (1850– 1938) (Rio de Janeiro: ed. nórdica, 1992), p. 138. 9. Marisa Lajolo, ‘Correspondência entre Ana de Castro Osório e Monteiro Lobato’, in Brasil e Portugal: 500 anos de enlaces e desenlaces, Revista Convergência Lusíada (Rio de Janeiro), 17 (2000), 305–11 (p. 307). 10. A Literatura no Brasil, dir. by Afrânio Coutinho, 5th edn (São Paulo: global, 1999), iv, 349–50. 11. Ledo Ivo, ‘Os modernismos do sec. XX’, in Revista Presença, 32, 2nd term, Teresina (2004); cf. Ajudante de Mentiroso (Rio de Janeiro: Academia Brasileira de Letras/edUCAM, 2009), pp. 25–37. 12. Fernando Pessoa, letter to William Bentley, in Correspondência, ed. by Manuela Parreira da Silva, 2 vols (Lisbon: Assírio & Alvim, 1998), i, 196.

C H A P t e r 16

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The Reception of Futurism in Portugal Gianluca Miraglia Futurism, which was at its most vigorous between 1909 and 1920, holds an important place among avant-garde movements in the early twentieth century. By means of commercial promotional techniques and attention-seeking stunts, such as ‘futurist evenings’ hitherto unfamiliar in literary and artistic circles, futurism managed to reach out to a wide public and sparked off, directly or indirectly, all other avant-gardes. Aside from this, it presented a programme to revitalize general aesthetic awareness that was aimed at all arts, from literature to theatre, painting, sculpture, architecture, photography, cinema, dance but also embraced habits and customs, from fashion to cuisine and political life. The movement was launched on 20 February 1909 with the publication of The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti in the Paris newspaper Le Figaro. It begins in a prophetic manner and then sums up into eleven points an ambitious programme to modernize literature, which, according to Marinetti, should be geared to the new civilization of machinery created by the industrial revolution: the profound changes in social and human life calls for a literature that is able to grasp, elevate and celebrate the things that separate the modern epoch from the past. This resulted in the movement’s exaltation and dynamism to contrast with stagnant immobility, as well as the celebration of a new kind of beauty: that of speed, which the industrial revolution had brought the world. The past — or ‘passéism’ as it was newly defined in a pamphlet (Contro Venezia passatista, 1910) — which imprisons and mummifies culture, is seen as the enemy to bring down, and a call was made for museums, libraries and academies to be destroyed. The last point in the programme provides a number of topics for poetical creation: noi canteremo le grandi folle agitate dal lavoro, dal piacere e dalla sommossa: canteremo le maree multicolori e polifoniche delle rivoluzioni nelle capitali moderne; canteremo il vibrante fervore notturno degli arsenali e dei cantieri incendiati dalla violenti luci elettriche; le stazioni ingorde, divoratrici di serpi che fumano, le officine appese alle nuvole pei contorti fili dei loro fumi; i ponti simili a ginnasti giganti che scavalcano i fiumi, balenanti al sole con un luccichio di coltelli; i piroscafi avventurosi che fiutano l’orizzonte, le locomotive dall’ampio petto, che scalpitano sulle rotaie, come enormi cavalli d’acciaio imbrigliati di tubi, e il volo scivolante degli aeroplani, la cui elica garrisce al vento come una bandiera e sembra applaudire come una folla entusiasta.1

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[We will sing of great crowds excited by work, by pleasure, and by riot; we will sing of the multicoloured, polyphonic tides of revolution in the modern capitals; we will sing of the vibrant nightly fervour of arsenals and shipyards blazing with violent electric moons; greedy railway stations that devour smoke-plumed serpents; factories hung on clouds by the crooked lines of their smoke; bridges that stride the rivers like giant gymnasts, f lashing in the sun with a glitter of knives; adventurous steamers that sniff the horizon; deep-chested locomotives whose wheels paw the tracks like the hooves of enormous steel horses bridled by tubing; and the sleek f light of aeroplanes whose propellers chatter in the wind like banners and seem to cheer like an enthusiastic crowd.]

The following years saw manifestos of various arts, among them Manifesto of Futurist Painters (1910) and Manifesto of Futurist Musicians (1910), published in quick succession. In 1912, a year in which futurism reached a wide public in Paris and other european cities as a result of a collective exhibition of painting, Marinetti launched the Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature, which was aimed at providing the movement with new expressive means and suitable techniques that would allow in the literary field the principle of simultaneity that futurist painters had already determined to be distinctive in their aesthetic theory. The first points of the manifesto develop the pars destruens and seek ‘to liberate language from the prison of the Latin sentence’, to banish syntax, adjectives, adverbs and punctuation, and to uphold the use of verbs in the infinitive. In the second part, the pars construens, Marinetti points to the basic instrument of poetical creation, that is to say, analogy: ‘Only by means of the most extensive analogies can an orchestral style, at once polychromatic, polyphonic and polymorphous, embrace the life of matter.’ The manifesto’s last point calls for the death of the literary ‘I’, which signifies a definitive break with the entire heritage of romantic sentimentalism, psychologism and humanistic culture. According to Marinetti, man’s psychology must be replaced with ‘obsession with matter’ by means of introducing into literature three hitherto neglected factors: noise, weight and smell. In three successive pamphlets, all devoted to literary theory, Supplement to the Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature (1912), Destruction of Syntax. Wireless Imagination. Words in Freedom (1913), Geometric and Mechanical Splendour and the Numerical Sensibility (1914), Marinetti endeavours to explain, further develop and in certain cases enlarge on his revolutionary ideas. Among his various proposals is a typographical revolution, which was to have significant repercussions on other avant-garde movements both at the start of the twentieth century, such as dadaism, as well as the second half of the century: Io inizio una rivoluzione tipográfica [...]. Il libro deve essere l’espressione futurista del nostro pensiero futurista. non solo. La mia rivoluzione è diretta contro la così detta armonia tipografica della pagina, che è contraria al f lusso e rif lusso, ai sobbalzi e agli scoppi dello stile che scorre nella pagina stessa. noi useremo perciò in una medesima pagina, tre o quattro colori di versi d’inchiostro, e anche 20 caratteri tipografici diversi, se occorra.2 [I am launching a typographical revolution [...]. The book should be futurist expression of our futurist thought. not only that. My revolution is also aimed at the so-called typographical harmony of the page, which opposes the ebb and f low of style across the page. Therefore, we will use three or four colours of ink on the same page, or even twenty different typefaces if necessary.]

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Futurism reaches its highest point of theorization with these texts, at least on a literary level, and from then on a crystallization of the movement takes, over though it continues its activities under Marinetti’s leadership until his death in 1944. The reception of futurism in Portugal is discussed here from the very first time news about it came out in the press until Marinetti’s visit to Lisbon in 1932, emphasizing its greater visibility and impact on the literary and social circles.3 It should be straightaway said that in view of the way Portuguese modernism itself emerged, more as a momentary coming together of individuals than the expression of a real group, the manner in which each of the leading modernist authors, that is to say Pessoa, Sá-Carneiro and Almada negreiros, are linked with Futuristic theories will be brief ly touched upon and the reader should refer to articles in this volume where the matter is dealt with more profoundly and systematically. On 26 February 1909, six days after The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism appeared in Paris, an article called ‘A new school of poetry — Futurism’ came out in Jornal de Notícias in Porto. Its author, Xavier de Carvalho, had been the Paris correspondent for several Portuguese and Brazilian newspapers since 1886 and was to play an important role in publicizing symbolism and decadentism in Portugal in the early 1890s. He wrote for the Bohemia Nova and Arte magazines and his reaction to the Manifesto clearly reveals that he despised Marinetti’s ideas. After brief ly describing the futurist programme and its more iconoclastic aspects, such as a break with the past that asked for the destruction of museums and libraries, or the more strident ones, such as the exaltation of war, the journalist ends the article by raising the suspicion that it was nothing but some kind of carnivalesque blague or prank, bearing in mind its publication coincided with the Carnival period. A little later, in Jornal de Notícias dated 6 April 1909, Xavier de Carvalho informs his Portuguese readers of the presentation of a play by the founder of futurism and reviews it negatively in an article entitled ‘Roi Bombance — Marinetti play a fiasco’. A diametrically opposite view of futurist ideals can be found in the second article about the manifesto in the Portuguese press, which appeared on 5 August 1909 in Diário dos Açores, a newspaper published in São Miguel.4 The author, Luís Francisco Bicudo, who was then in genova on a journey throughout europe, shows a great deal of interest in the avant-garde movement. His conviction that this is a literary and cultural phenomenon of remarkable significance leads him to write a long, well-documented article and provide his readers with exhaustive information about futurism and its charismatic leader. Besides a partial translation of The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism, that is to say, the eleven programmatic points without the opening part, the article includes a transcription of an interview Marinetti gave the journal Comoedia explaining the movement’s basic proposals. At the end of the article, Bicudo ref lects on the relations between writers and the press, and invites writers in the Azores to contact the futurists. despite Bicudo’s best efforts, the article has no impact on Portuguese cultural and artistic circles in 1909, which can be explained not only by the Diário dos Açores’s low readership, but also because at that time there was no reason to assume that avant-garde proposals should get a favourable reaction. However, the fact that a translation, however incomplete, was immediately made of Marinetti’s manifesto into Portuguese is, in itself, significant.

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Three years later, another reference to futurism appeared in the press because of an exhibition of futurist painters in the Bernheim-Jeune gallery in Paris between 5 and 24 February. Aquilino Ribeiro, who had exiled himself to Paris, saw the exhibition and wrote about it in an article that came out in the Ilustração Portuguesa magazine. On reading the text, it becomes clear that Aquilino did not share the principles of the futurist movement; in fact, the movement in no way inf luenced his vast oeuvre. He is somewhat perplexed by the exhibited works, but in his evaluation of the aesthetic theory at the origin of these works, he recognizes that futurism has made an important contribution: Há todavia nesta escola, que acaba de estalar em Paris como uma bomba, alguma coisa de útil e bem-intencionado. A característica do nosso século é efectivamente o movimento. A mobilidade, a rapidez, a acção são tão nossas como dos gregos eram a placidez, o repouso, a serenidade. nós somos sôfregos, enquanto que os antigos eram moderados. nós somos vítimas da insatisfação e eles eram-no da saciedade [...] Onde eles tinham a elegante quadriga, a galera, nós temos o expresso de 100 à hora, o aeroplano de 150; para eles as termas, o acúbito, os columbários, os ginásios onde se cultivava a forma; para nós o automóvel, o ascensor eléctrico, a cozinha saignante, a casa de dez andares. As épocas são essencialmente diferentes. Por isso a arte antiga se inspirava em linhas de abandono e em imobilidades elegantes, por isso a arte de hoje deve procurar o jogo das forças, a instabilidade das coisas [...] depois do impressionismo e outras escolas ansiosas de novidade os futuristas, loucos e irritantes, têm o préstimo de esquissar corajosamente a teoria nova da arte. São precursores pedantes e ilógicos, mas trouxeram quand même uma revelação. A revelação foi impor como princípio supremo de escola o carácter da época.5 [Yet there is something useful and well-intentioned in this school that has just exploded like a bomb in Paris. Movement is in fact what characterizes our century. Mobility, speed, action are as much ours as tranquillity, relaxation and serenity were to the greeks. We are greedy whereas they were moderate. We fall prey to dissatisfaction and they to satiety [...] Where they had the elegant chariot and the galley, we have the 100 kph express train, the 150kph aeroplane; theirs the spa, lectus, dove-house, gymnasium where they kept fit and in shape; ours the car, electric lift, saignante cuisine, ten-story houses. The epochs are fundamentally different. This is why ancient art was inspired on pleasurable abandonment and elegant immobility and why today’s art should seek the play of strengths, the instability of things [...] In the aftermath of impressionism and other schools eager for novelty, futurists, mad and irritating, have the merit of bravely drafting a new theory of art. They are pedantic and illogical precursors, but they have brought, quand même, a revelation to light. The revelation is to make the character of the epoch the ultimate principle of their school.]

Apart from this, Aquilino Ribeiro, wanting to give the reader a complete and objective description of the most important characteristics of futurist painting, makes an effort to explain in detail, with various examples, the new aesthetic concept that constitutes the basis for the creations by these Italian artists, and he very concisely summarizes the fundamental principle of this form of painting: ‘A futurist painting provides the simultaneity of states of conscientiousness.’6 If the articles that had appeared in 1909 went unnoticed, there are reasons to believe this was not the case with Aquilino Ribeiro’s article. not only because it

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came out in a widely distributed magazine, but also because in 1912, a year usually seen as the terminus a quo of Portuguese modernism, a more favourable and receptive climate emerges for the dissemination of futurist theories.7 For some of the writers who were soon to stand out as exponents of modernism, this article was probably their first contact with futurism. According to the german critic, dieter Woll, this is the case for Mário de Sá-Carneiro, and Aquilino Ribeiro’s article could also have been the inspiration behind the first extract in Portuguese literature that is inf luenced by futurist ideas: the first part of the short story Mistério, written in 1913, which appeared in the volume Céu em Fogo.8 Whatever the case may be, the fact that Sá-Carneiro, guilherme de Santa-Rita Pintor, as well as Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso,9 were living in Paris means that futurist theories were disseminated in Portuguese artistic and literary circles by channels other than the press from 1912 onwards. The documents that we have allow us to arrive at a partial reconstruction of these events and we should not forget the essential role that conversations and discussions, or any oral transmission of ideas, had on the diffusion of futurism. Santa-Rita Pintor was undoubtedly the most dedicated of Marinetti’s followers and the most enthusiastic proponent of his ideas among Portuguese artists. Mário de Sá-Carneiro writes in his letters to Fernando Pessoa that the avantgarde movements were then f lourishing in the Parisian art scene. In contrast to Santa-Rita Pintor, who so assuredly embraced the avant-garde in his artistic as well as personal convictions, Sá-Carneiro shows muted enthusiasm for these new artistic and literary theories. His letters give the impression that he is open to some ideas and to some suggestions, but that he has no great admiration for the works the avant-garde were producing, and that he is somewhat sceptical about them, as in the case of cubist paintings, for instance. His comments on ‘Triumphal Ode’, which he sent Fernando Pessoa at the end of June 1914, cast a light as to his opinion about futurism: não tenho dúvida em assegurá-lo, meu Amigo, você acaba de escrever a obraprima do futurismo. Porque apesar talvez de não pura escolarmente futurista — o conjunto da ode é absolutamente futurista. Meu amigo, pelo menos a partir de hoje Marinetti é um grande homem... porque todos o reconhecem como fundador do futurismo, e essa escola produziu a sua maravilha. depois de escrita a sua ode, meu querido Fernando Pessoa, eu creio que nada mais de novo se pode escrever para cantar a nossa época [...] do que até hoje eu conheço futurista — a sua ode não só é a maior — é a única coisa admirável. O lê-la, creia, meu querido Amigo, foi um dos maiores prazeres da minha vida — pois fica sendo uma das peças literárias que mais sinto, amo e admiro.10 [I have no doubt when I assure you, dear friend, that you have just written futurism’s masterpiece. Because though it may not be pure, scholastic futurism, the whole of the ode is absolutely futurist. My friend, at least from now on Marinetti is a great man... seeing that everyone acknowledges him as the founder of futurism and that school has produced a marvel. After your ode, my dear Fernando Pessoa, I believe that nothing else that is new can be written to sing our epoch. [...] Of what until today I know as futurist — your ode is not just the greatest — it is the only admirable thing. Reading it, believe me, my dear friend, was one of the greatest pleasures in my life — and remains one of the literary pieces I feel, love and admire the most.]

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On reading this, it could be said that futurism for Sá-Carneiro was basically a celebration of contemporary life as it emerges after the Industrial Revolution, that is to say, in the literary execution of the points in Marinetti’s first manifesto in 1909. Later concepts such as ‘words in liberty’ or ‘imagination without strings’ etc. never appear in his letters although it can only be assumed that Sá-Carneiro knew of the technical writings. Likewise, when he writes in a letter dated 13 August 1915 about the I Poeti futuristi anthology, which, as is well known, included the Technical Manifesto, there are no comments on Marinetti’s proposals. This leads us to think that the composition of ‘Manucure’, which was included in issue no. 2 of Orpheu, could well have been a prank as Fernando Pessoa later suggested, or a kind of exercise in style, which does not mean he shared the same principles as futurist poetry. Futurism is spoken of once again, and at great length, in the Lisbon press when the magazine Orpheu was launched in March 1915.11 It was then that the word futurist entered definitively into the Portuguese vocabulary, with the additional meaning of ‘extravagant’ and ‘eccentric’ that it still has today, because of the controversial articles and pranks that the magazine was involved in for several months. In fact, when we look at the first issue of this magazine, the texts marked in any way in their topic or linguistic experimentation by a futurist inf luence are few in number, whereas the great majority are poems and prose that seem to belong to the symbolist school or paulism, the movement Pessoa launched in 1914. newspaper critics’ oversimplified and exaggerated identification of Orpheu with futurism was criticized by Pessoa himself in a letter signed Álvaro de Campos and addressed to Diário de Notícias though never actually sent: O que quero accentuar, accentuar bem, accentuar muito bem, é que é preciso que cesse a trapalhada, que a ignorancia dos nossos criticos está fazendo, com a palavra futurismo. Fallar em futurismo, quer a proposito do 1º nº de “Orpheu”, quer a proposito do livro do sr. Sá-Carneiro, é a cousa mais disparatada que se pode imaginar. nenhum futurista tragaria o “Orpheu”. O “Orpheu” seria, para um futurista, uma lamentavel demonstração de espirito obscurantista e reaccionario. A attitude principal do futurismo é a Objectividade Absoluta, a eliminação, da arte, de tudo quanto é alma, quanto é sentimento, emoção, lyrismo, subjectividade em summa. O futurismo é dynamico e analytico por excellencia. Ora se ha cousa que seja typica do Interseccionismo (tal é o nome do movimento portuguez) é a subjectividade excessiva, a synthese levada ao máximo [...] e o tedio, o sonho, a abstracção são as attitudes usuaes dos poetas meus collegas n’aquella brilhante revista. no 2º numero do “Orpheu” virá collaboração realmente futurista, é certo. então se poderá ver a differença, se bem que seja, não litteraria, mas pictural essa collaboração. São quatro quadros que emanam da alta sensibilidade moderna do meu amigo Santa-Rita Pintor. [...] A minha Ode Triunfal, no 1º numero do “Orpheu”, é a unica cousa que se approxima do futurismo. Mas approxima-se pelo assumpto que me inspirou, não pela realisação — e em arte a forma de realisar é que caracterisa e distingue as correntes e as escolas.12

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gianluca Miraglia [I want to emphasize, strongly emphasize, very strongly emphasize that the confusion that the ignorance of our critics makes with the word futurism must cease. To speak of futurism, either on account of Orpheu no. 1 or else on account of Sr. Sá-Carneiro’s book is the most foolish thing imaginable. no futurist would swallow Orpheu. For a futurist, Orpheu would be a sorry demonstration of an obscurantist and reactionary spirit. Futurism’s main attitude is Absolute Objectivity, eliminating from art everything that is soul, sentiment, emotion, lyricism, in short, objectivity. Futurism is dynamic and analytical par excellence. now if there is anything that is typical of Intersectionism (which is the name of the Portuguese movement), it is its excessive subjectivity, synthesis taken to its limit [...] And tedium, dream, abstraction are the usual attitudes of my colleagues, the poets in that brilliant magazine. Orpheu no. 2 will become a really futurist collaboration, that’s certain. One will then be able to see the difference, although it will be not literary but pictorial in that collaboration. They are four paintings that proceed from the heightened modern sensibility of my friend Santa-Rita Pintor. [...] My ‘Triumphal Ode’, in issue no. 1 of Orpheu, is the one thing that comes close to futurism. But it does so because of the subject matter, which inspired me, not by the way in which it was accomplished — and in art, the form in which works are accomplished is what characterizes and distinguishes currents and schools.]

It is impossible today to tell whether the publication of the letter would have sparked a more profound critical debate about Orpheu and subsequently about futurism as well, although if we consider the contents of various newspaper items, it seems more likely that it would not have had this effect. It should be said that Pessoa, by acknowledging, on the one hand, his debt to futurism with regard to the subject matter of ‘Triumphal Ode’ and by describing, on the other hand, what distinguishes his composition insofar as the form in which he accomplished it, that is to say, the expressive means and compositional techniques, shows that he is perfectly aware of the futurist programme in its experimental vein as well. Although there is no record of books by Marinetti in his library, this letter shows he had a sound understanding of the futurist leader’s theories in the Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature. This is further established by another letter, or rather a rough draft of one, which has recently come to light and which Pessoa meant to send to Marinetti himself.13 In it he stresses, once again, the difference between his poetry, that of sensationism, and that of the futurists, describing words-in-freedom as meaningless.14 To return to Orpheu, it should be noted, however, that it was the more innovative texts, that is to say, Mário de Sá-Carneiro’s writings and, most of all, ‘Triumphal Ode’, that caused the greatest scandal in the press and public opinion, thereby achieving one of the objectives any avant-garde seeks. In regard to ‘Triumphal Ode’, the editor of A Capital wrote: ‘it sings of the less delicate and less poetical things of our times with astonishing verbal expressions that are sometimes pornographic.’15 He is obviously referring to the lines ‘And whose eight-year-old daughters — and I find this beautiful and love it! | Masturbate respectable-looking men in stairwells’. The transgressive nature of these lines of poetry continued to perturb for a long time, so much so that they were omitted in the Ática publishing house edition of

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Pessoa’s Obra Poética. We find here a direct correspondence with one of Marinetti’s proclamations in his Technical Manifesto, ‘Facciamo coraggiosamente il “brutto” in letteratura e uccidiamo dovunque la solennità’ [Let us boldly create ‘the ugly’ in literature and kill solemnity wherever it may be].16 Manifesto Anti-Dantas e por extenso por José de Almada Negreiros Poeta d’Orpheu futurista e Tudo was most probably published at the end of 1915. It is the first Portuguese manifesto inspired on the textual model created by Marinetti. By an interesting course of events, Júlio dantas, the target of this manifesto, managed to have the distribution of this pamphlet stopped and so the effect of the scandal was vastly reduced. As critics have noted, the manifesto written by Almada negreiros, as well as those that followed, especially Álvaro de Campos’s Ultimatum, reveal relevant differences in relation to the Italian models as a result of a characteristic inherent to the Portuguese avant-garde experience: nella prassi delle avanguardie, i manifesti, anche se procedenti a volte da un solo individuo, debbono essere considerati opere collettive perché presentati come volontà di gruppo, scritti in nome di un noi drammatico e sociale che si colloca sopra e in opposizione all’io lirico dell’effusione poetica individuale. Ma nel Modernismo portoghese che non ebbe mai gruppi o volontà collettiva di espressione, i manifesti, pur sorti secondo il modello immediato dei manifesti del Futurismo italiano (versione francese) dicono sempre io e non noi. Scritti ogni volta da un io che ne assume la responsabilità singola, appartengono retoricamente alla specie dei monologhi, un genere letterario legato alla scrittura, di fronte ai manifesti italiani che registrano le interruzioni del pubblico e avendo come modello l’espressione orale, si sviluppano come dialoghi.17 [In the practice of avant-gardes, manifestos, even if they sometimes came from just one person, should be considered collective works because they are presented as the will of a group, written in the name of a dramatic and social ‘we’ that places itself above and in opposition to the lyrical ‘I’ of the individual poetic effusion. But in Portuguese modernism, which never had groups or a collective will of expression, their manifestos always say ‘I’ and not ‘us’, although they emerged directly in line with the model of manifestos of Italian futurism (French version). They are written by an ‘I’ that takes single responsibility for belonging rhetorically to the monologue form, a literary genre associated with writing, while Italian manifestos, which register interruptions coming from the public and are modelled on oral expression, develop like dialogues.]

In 1917, public affirmation of modernism has a second high point, which this time proceeds entirely under the sign of futurism. In fact, the futurist element of Portuguese modernism had until now showed itself in an unusual, diffuse manner and all the activities announced in Orpheu issue no. 1, that is to say, various conferences (A Torre Eiffel e o Génio do Futurismo, by Santa-Rita; Teatro Futurista no Espaço, by Raul Leal; As Esfinges e os Guindastes: estudo do bi-metalismo psicológico, by Sá-Carneiro), never get beyond the planning stage. The first futurist conference took place on 14 April at the Teatro República thanks to the collective efforts of Marinetti’s more dedicated followers, Santa-Rita Pintor and José de Almada negreiros, who founded the Lisbon Futurist Committee. This is how Almada negreiros describes the event that was to go down in history as the most significant episode of Portuguese avant-garde social intervention:

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gianluca Miraglia À minha entrada no palco rebentou uma espontânea e tremenda pateada seguida de uma calorosíssima salva de palmas que eu cortei dum gesto. Reduzida a plateia à sua inexpressão natural tive a glória de apresentar o futurista SantaRita Pintor que o público recebeu com uma ovação unânime. Comecei então o meu ultimatum à juventude portuguesa do século XX e a plateia costumada a conferências exclusivamente literárias e pedantes chocou-se nitidamente com a virilidade das minhas afirmações pelo que executava premeditas e cobardes reprovações isoladas mas sem efeito de conjunto [...] Consegui, inspirado na revelação de Marinetti e apoiado no genial optimismo da minha juventude, transpor essa bitola de insipidez em que se gasta Lisboa inteira, e atingir ante a curiosidade da plateia a expressão da intensidade da vida moderna, sem dúvida de todas as revelações a que é mais distante de Portugal.18 [As I stepped onto the stage, there was a tremendous, spontaneous roar followed by warm applause, which I cut short with a gesture. When the stalls had been brought back to their normal impassive state, I had the glorious task of presenting the futurist, Santa-Rita Pintor, whom the public welcomed with a general ovation. I then started on my ultimatum to twentieth-century Portuguese youth. The audience, used as they were to exclusively literary and pedantic conferences, were clearly shocked with the vivacity of my declarations and rebuked me in deliberate, cowardly ways but in isolated instances that had no effect collectively [...] Taking my inspiration from Marinetti’s revelations and helped by my sublime youthful optimism, I managed to triumph over the insipidness that the whole of Lisbon uses as a measure, and attain the expression of intensity of modern life, of all revelations the one that is unquestionably the furthest from Portugal.]

The conference’s programme was divided into three parts to include Almada negreiros’s Ultimatum Futurista às Gerações Portuguesas do Século XX, Madame de Saint-Points’s Futurist Manifesto of Lust and finally Marinetti’s Music-Hall et Tuons le Clair de Lune! Almada negreiros’s text, like Marinetti’s pamphlets, was in three parts: the announcement of some topics of futurist thoughts, such as the war apologia and exaltation of strength, followed by a ten-point examination into Portuguese social and political reality, and a proclamation of the need for a radical and definitive break with the past, as the basic condition for ‘o nascimento de uma nova pátria inteiramente portuguesa e inteiramente actual’ [the birth of a new entirely Portuguese and entirely current fatherland].19 In november 1917, a magazine akin to Italia Futurista came out called Portugal Futurista, whose founder and director was Carlos Porfírio, an artist. The first issue, which was promptly seized by the police, was experimental and brought together the literary collaboration of Almada negreiros (‘Saltimbancos — contrastes simultâneos’, prose; ‘Mima-Fatáxa Sinfonia Cosmopolita and Apologia do triângulo Feminino’, poem), with Blaise Cendras and guillaume Apollinaire. Much in evidence is Santa-Rita Pintor, about whom Bettencourt-Rebelo and Raul Leal wrote; there are also reproductions of four paintings, as well as a photographic portrait with a caption saying: ‘the great initiator of futurism in Portugal’. As for the theoretical part, we find Álvaro de Campos’s Ultimatum, Portuguese translations of excerpts taken from various Italian futurist manifestos, the original French version of Le Manifeste des peintres futurists and, in the latter part of the magazine, texts that had already been read in the conference at the Teatro República.

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The Portuguese avant-garde experience in Lisbon comes to an end with the deaths of Santa-Rita Pintor and Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso and Almada negreiros’s departure for Paris in 1918. It was an experience, although brief, that had the merit of allowing Marinetti’s ideas to penetrate more widely in literary circles and even become legitimate, as Olímpio César, under his pseudonym eduardo Metzner, shows in his book Técnica da Poesia, undated but probably from 1918. In the first pages, the principles announced in the Technical Manifesto of 1912 are summarized, or rather, paraphrased: ‘A Poesia — afirma com razão o admirável revolucionário e literato italiano Marinetti — deve ser uma sequência ininterrupta e vertiginosa de imagens novas [...] O estilo orquestral, policromo, polifónico e polimorfo, parsemé de analogias impressionantes e audaciosas como voos de aeroplanos, são a energia fundamental, o eixo e o fulcro em volta do qual deve girar a Poesia moderna, nesta era mecânica de nevrose, bárbaro esplendor e ânsia ascensional para a realização frenética da síntese. Para dar a impressão do movimento sucessivo é necessário estabelecer uma cadeia de analogias cujos elos sejam as imagens derivadas duma única palavra essencial que constitui o leit-motiv irradiante ou a source duma acção ou de um motivo que se descreve.’20 [Poetry — the admirable Italian revolutionary and literato Marinetti has rightly said — should be an uninterrupted and vertiginous sequence of new images [...] The orchestral style, at once polychromatic, polyphonic and polymorphous, sprinkled with impressive and audacious analogies like the f light of aeroplanes, is the basic energy, the axis and hub around which modern poetry should revolve in this mechanical era of neurosis, barbaric splendour and the spiralling anxiety for the frenetic achievement of the synthesis. To give the impression of successive movement, a chain of analogies must be set up and each link should be the image derived from one essential word that constructs the radiant leitmotiv or the source of an action or a motif that is described.]

After this general description of how futurism was received in Lisbon, we will now look at other parts of Portugal where there were literary and artistic activities inspired by Marinetti’s movement. In the Algarve, O Heraldo, a newspaper in Faro, launched on 5 november 1916 a new section called Gente Nova and another called Futurism on 4 February 1917, which continued until August 1917 when the newspaper closed. Among the many collaborators who wrote under a pseudonym, there are João Rosado (writing as Horácio or O’Racio), Leyster Franco (Kernok), and especially Carlos Porfírio (nesso), a painter born in Faro and the founder and director of Portugal Futurista. The connection between these experiences in the Algarve and the modernist movement in Lisbon is made clear with the collaboration in O Heraldo of José de Almada negreiros with his poem ‘Litoral’, Fernando Pessoa with ‘A casa branca nau preta’ and Mario de Sá-Carneiro with ‘Além’. There is also a letter of greetings and encouragement to the collaborators, dated 15 July 1917 and signed by representatives of the Futurist committee, Almada negreiros and Santa-Rita Pintor. In May 1917 in Faro, a exhibition of paintings was organized, and Carlos Porfírio helped with the catalogue, called Futurism. The greater part of the works published in the two sections of O Heraldo were inspired by the typographical revolution that Marinetti had called for, and by some of the principles in his Technical Manifesto, but they rarely dealt with the most

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distinctive futurist subject, which is to say a celebration of the industrial civilization and the symbol of progress, the machine. Coimbra is another place where futurism made an impression. In a first phase around 1916, avant-garde manifestations were evident in the life and work of Francisco Levita.21 A law student who had comfortably settled down to life in Coimbra, Levita soon became popular among the student population, so much so that his experimental poems were parodied in the press. Some of his eccentricities to épater le bourgeois became famous when he was an undergraduate, such as going the Bussaco Palace together with other students for a futurist-like meal: chicken with chocolate, peach omelette, and French champagne to wash everything down. His manifesto Negreiros–Dantas. Uma Página para a História da Literatura Portuguesa, dated 1916, came out as a controversial response to that of Almada negreiros, whom he may have known, and concludes that anyone who bothers with Júlio dantas is just a dantas no. 2. The second phase in Coimbra dates to the mid-1920s. The first news about an avant-garde movement of university students is an article entitled ‘The futurist movement in Coimbra’ that came out in Diário de Lisboa on 13 March 1925. The reporter interviews the most prominent promoter of the movement, Mário Coutinho, whom he visits in his room, which is filled with paintings and reproductions of avant-garde works and manifestos in various languages. Besides organizing a conference given by António de navarro in Teatro Sousa Bastos, the group published Coimbra Manifesto 1925. The pamphlet is divided into four parts, each one by a different author writing under a pseudonym. The introduction is written by Óscar, who is Mário Coutinho; the second part ‘da Arte — Toda’ is by Pereira São-Pedro (Pintor), that is to say, João Carlos Celestino gomes; the third, ‘do Sentido geométrico’ is by Tristão de Tieve, Abel Almada’s pseudonym, and the fourth and last, ‘grito do genesis’, is by Príncipe de Judá, António de navarro’s pseudonym. The epigraph has some significance as it consists of two sentences in French by Marinetti: the first sentence of the Technical Manifesto, and the last one of the Manifesto and Founding.22 According to Rita Marnoto, the Coimbra futurist group’s short burst of activity revitalized literary life there and opened the way for the magazine Presença. The last event which should be included in a description of the reception of futurism in Portugal takes us back to Lisbon, where in november 1932 the founder of the movement, Marinetti, came to give a conference at the Sociedade de Belas Artes. Futurism was newsworthy again for a few days. The conference, like those that Marinetti gave throughout his life in various cities in and outside europe, was a general presentation of futurist aesthetics in all artistic fields, followed by his reading excerpts from ‘Zang Tumb Tumb’, one of his better known ‘parolibere’ [freeword or words-in-freedom] compositions. Almada negreiros wrote in a polemical article that ‘para os futuristas portugueses [...] o que Marinetti lhes trouxe é velho de 23 anos e um dia, nem mais nem menos. e para os que não são futuristas a tarefa do chefe deve ter sido esplendidamente inútil ou um bom número de variedades...’ [for Portuguese futurists [...] what Marinetti brought them was 23-years-and-a-day old, no more, no less. And for those who are not futurists, the leader’s task must

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have seemed splendidly useless or else just a good variety show act...].23 However, despite all these limitations and in view of what the futurism experience actually represented in Portugal, we cannot but remark that for many of those who were at the Sociedade das Belas Artes, that conference was probably their one and only contact with futurism. notes to Chapter 16 1. Filippo T. Marinetti, Teoria e invenzione futurista (Milan: Mondadori, 1968), pp. 10–11. 2. Ibid., p. 67. 3. On how futurism is received in Portugal, see in particular João Alves das neves, O Movimento futurista em Portugal (Porto: divulgação, 1966); Pierre Rivas, ‘Frontières et limites des futurisme au Portugal et au Brésil’, Europe, LIII, 551 (1975), pp. 126–44; Teolinda gersão, ‘Para o estudo do futurismo literário em Portugal’, Portugal Futurista (facsimile edition) (Lisbon: Contexto editora, 1981), xix–xl; nuno Júdice, ‘O Futurismo em Portugal’, Portugal Futurista, v–xiii; José Augusto Seabra, ‘Marinetti e o Futurismo em Portugal’, Estudos Italianos em Portugal, 45–46–47 (1982–84), 165–83; Luciana Stegagno Picchio, ‘Pessoa, Marinetti e il futurismo mentale della generazione dell’ Orpheu’, in Il poeta e la finzione: scritti su Fernando Pessoa, ed. by Antonio Tabucchi (genova: Tilgher, 1983), pp. 79–109; Carlos d’Alge, A Experiência Futurista e a Geração de Orfeu (Lisbon: ICLP, 1989); Osvaldo Silvestre, ‘As Vanguardas Históricas em Portugal e em espanha: Futurismo, Ultraismo e Criacionismo’ in Santa Barbara Portuguese Studies, 5 (2001), 158–70; ‘dossiê-Futurismo, 1909–2009’, in Estudos Italianos em Portugal, nova Série, 4, (2009), 7–152. 4. See Pedro da Silveira, ‘O que soubemos logo em 1909 do Futurismo’, Revista da Biblioteca Nacional, 1, 1, (1981), 90–103. 5. Aquilino Ribeiro, ‘A Pintura Futurista’, Ilustração Portuguesa, 316 (11 March 1912), 345–47. There are black and white reproductions of eight paintings by Boccioni, Russolo and Severini in the article. 6. In writing his article, Ribeiro makes abundant use of the exhibition catalogue, ‘Les exposant au public’, written by U. Boccioni, C. d. Carrà, L. Russolo, g. Balla and g. Severini. The preface to the catalogue explains: ‘Pour faire vivre le spectateur au centre du tableau, [...] il faut que le tableau soit la synthèse de ce dont on se souvient et de ce que l’on voit. Il faut donner l’invisible qui s’agite et qui vit au delà des épaisseurs, ce que nous avons à droite, à gauche et derrière nous [...]’ [To transport the spectator into the middle of the scene, [...] it is necessary this scene may be the synthesis of that which is evoked and seen. It is necessary it may transmit the sensed and discernible invisible [quality] to be found beyond thickness, that which we have at our right, at our left, and behind us [...].] Archivi del Futurismo, org. by Maria drudi gambillo e Teresa Fiori, 2 vols (Roma: de Luca editore, 1958), i, 106. 7. In 1912, we also find a reference to futurism in Almachio diniz, Moral e Critica (Porto: Magalhães & Moniz, 1912), p. 205: ‘na literatura italiana passam-se, agora, curiosíssimos fenómenos de reorganização estética. não se deve levar a outra conta o grande movimento futurista, chefiado pelo sr. F. T. Marinetti. entretanto, as verdadeiras forças daquela literatura não são literalmente novas nem modernas’ [Very interesting phenomena regarding aesthetic organization are now taking place in Italian literature. This is how we should consider the great futurist movement, headed by Sr. F. T. Marinetti. nevertheless, the real strengths of that literature are neither literally new or modern]. The author is referring to the writers Fogazzaro and d’Annunzio. As for futurism in goa, a fringe phenomenon but worth examining especially for its political implications, see Sandra Bago, ‘Il Futurismo a goa e la Revista da Índia’, in Rosa dos Ventos. Atti del Convegno. Trenta anni di cultura di língua portoghese a Padova e a Venezia, ed. by Sílvio Castro and Manuel Simões (Padova: Università di Padova, Sezione Portoghese dell’Istituto di Lingue e Letterature Romanze, 1994), pp. 89–101. 8. dieter Woll, ‘Sá-Carneiro, Aquilino Ribeiro e o Futurismo’, in Mário de Sá-Carneiro 1890–1916 (Lisbon: Biblioteca nacional de Portugal, 1990), pp. 31–46.

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9. In an interview for the newspaper O Dia (5 december 1916), the painter, while claiming his independence and originality in relation to his artistic creation, quotes copiously from the 1909 Manifesto as well as the Technical Manifesto of Futurist Painting, which shows his profound knowledge of futurist theories. 10. Mário de Sá-Carneiro, Correspondência com Fernando Pessoa, ed. by Teresa Sobral Cunha, 2 vols (Lisbon: Relógio d’Água, 2003), i, 155–56. 11. See nuno Júdice, A Era do ‘Orpheu’ (Lisbon: Teorema, 1986). 12. Fernando Pessoa, Sensacionismo e Outros Ismos, ed. by Jerónimo Pizarro (Lisbon: Imprensa nacional–Casa da Moeda, 2009), pp. 375–76. 13. Jerónimo Pizarro, ‘Pessoa e “Monsieur” Marinetti’, Estudos Italianos em Portugal, 4 (2009), 77–88. 14. It should be noted that the fact that Pessoa insisted on the differences between sensationism and futurism is in no way surprising or unique. exponents of various isms, such as Tristan Tzara, André Breton and ezra Pound, among others, were always trying to proclaim their independence with regard to futurism and deny any kind of affiliation; ‘anxiety of inf luence’ is a common trait of all avant-gardes. 15. See nuno Júdice, A Era do ‘Orfeu’, p. 62. 16. Marinetti, Teoria e invenzione, p. 47. 17. Luciana Stegagno Picchio, ‘Pessoa, Marinetti e il futurismo mentale della generazione dell’ Orpheu’, p. 99. 18. José de Almada negreiros, ‘1ª Conferencia Futurista’, Portugal Futurista (facsimile edition) (Lisbon: Contexto editora, 1981), p. 35. 19. José de Almada negreiros, ‘Ultimatum Futurista às gerações Portuguezas do Século XX’, Portugal Futurista, p. 36. 20. Olímpio César, Técnica da Poesia (Arte Poética). Iniciação Poética. Teoria Geral da Versificação. Antologia. (Lisbon: n.pub., n.d). pp. 22–24. See also José guerreiro’s book, Como Se Aprende a Redigir (Lisbon: Livraria Sá da Costa, 1926), which includes an article by João de Castro Osório, ‘O Modernismo e o Futurismo’ and in the anthological part, a reproduction entitled ‘a futurist excerpt’ of a page taken from Mário de Sá-Carneiro’s Céu em Fogo. 21. On futurism in Coimbra see Rita Marnoto, Francisco Levita, Negreiros–Dantas. Uma Página para a História da Literatura Nacional. Óscar, Pereira São-Pedro (Pintor), Tristão de Teive, Príncipe de Judá, Coimbra Manifesto 1925 (Lisbon: Fenda, 2009), in which there are facsimiles of the 1916 manifesto, as well as the 1925 manifesto, which will be discussed now. 22. That same year a booklet called Guarda-sol. Exortação à Mocidade Futurista Precedida dum Prefácio às Frontarias. Abaixo a Cor! Bendita a Lua! came out in an octagonal shape and opens from left to right. Its author is Humsilfer, clearly a pseudonym, and the book is dedicated to Almada negreiros. It is obviously a send-up of Levita’s manifesto and the Coimbra Manifesto 1925. 23. In Diário de Lisboa on 25 november 1932. In this article Almada negreiros expresses his indignation and profound disappointment with Marinetti’s visit: ‘O mais grave é que Marinetti não desconhece que Portugal é o único país latino, além da própria Itália onde houve um movimento futurista. Pois da parte de Marinetti não houve uma única e simples saudação aos seus companheiros de Portugal e pelo contrário, bem custodiado pelos austeros ‘pompiers’ nacionais, veio de casaca estabelecer mais confusão que as que já cá havia entre os que gostam de fazer equívocos e os eternos equivocados. Quanto ao admirável e sempre novo criador do futurismo, F. T. Marinetti lastimamos, nós os futuristas portugueses, a sua amnésia quanto a Portugal, a sua falta de memória acerca do que nomes heróicos do futurismo fizeram aqui na nesta terra, em guerra sem trégua, contra os putrefactos e botas de elástico. Lastimámos, nós, os futuristas portugueses, que o grande cosmopolita Marinetti tenha por desgraça o grande e irreparável defeito de não saber viajar, pelo menos em Portugal’ [The worst is that Marinetti is not unaware that Portugal is the only Latin country, apart from Italy itself, where there’s been a futurist movement. Marinetti never once extended even a simple greeting to his companions in Portugal. On the contrary, in the custody of our stern ‘pompiers’, he appeared in a dress-coat, which sparked off even greater confusion than what there already was between those who like to mislead and the eternally mistaken. As for the admirable and forever new creator of futurism, F. T. Marinetti, we, the Portuguese futurists, regret his amnesia with regard to Portugal, his loss

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of memory as to what the heroic figures of futurism have undergone here in this country in a war without a truce against a putrefied old guard. We, the Portuguese futurists, regret that the great cosmopolitan Marinetti has, unhappily, the great and irreparable defect of not travelling well, at least in Portugal]. See in Almada negreiros, ‘Um ponto no i do Futurismo’, in Obras Completas, 6 vols (Lisbon: Imprensa nacional–Casa da Moeda, 1993), vi: Textos de Intervenção, 91–92.

C H A P t e r 17

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Modernist Conf luences: Comparative Perspectives on Portuguese Modernism* António Sousa Ribeiro It has long been evident that the euphoric version of post-modernism which reached its high point in the 1980s rested upon a blatant misunderstanding and simplification of the concept of modernism as a normative, unidimensional concept. The polemical context at the time provided ample ground for an immoderate use of the argument of death that, in retrospect, cannot but look like a futile exercise.1 Indeed, the organizers of a recent volume on ‘translocal modernisms’ felt compelled to ask, not only what modernism was, but also what modernism will be.2 Such a question definitely implies a pluralization and translocalization of the concept; quite ironically, one of the outcomes of the relatively ephemeral post-modernist wave is the renewed strength of Modernist Studies which seem to be thriving on the need for a reconceptualization that lays stress on the complexity and multidimensionality of modernism. The canonical, eurocentric centre/periphery model of modernist internationalism is being thereby questioned from the perspective of a transnational model that emphasizes the heterogeneity of ‘a constantly hybridized phenomenon’ which ‘travels, translates, transplants, and indigenizes — globally, and not from a single point of origin’.3 From this point of view, to ask what modernism will be is not simply to postulate that it has not exhausted its potential or to plead for an enlargement of the canon through the incorporation of texts and contexts that have been disregarded until now. It is also, decisively, the question of the development of an ex-centric critical discourse capable of taking a different look at the core of the modernist canon itself. The growing attention to the essential multipolarity of what we may call modern ism evidences at least two consequences: on the one hand, it takes increasingly into consideration not just the ‘centres’, but also the ‘peripheries’ — and I do not just mean the geographic, geopolitical or geocultural peripheries. I refer also e.g. to the renewed attention paid to the role of women in the different contexts of modernism.4 On the other hand, the new transnational perspective calls for comparative approaches based not so much on studies of inf luence and reception, but on the analysis of paradigmatic relationships.5 In other words, what is at stake is the need to move beyond the emphasis on the international nature of modernism — which has always been evident, but has not prevented the overwhelming weight of

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national perspectives — on to the recognition of paradigmatic correlations that are grounded on the common problematics of modernity and the crisis of modernity.6 Such a move from the inter-national to the trans-national does not imply the denial of the relevance of the national framework for the self-definition of the various ‘modernisms’, but it allows to put that relevance in perspective and to expose the purported singularity as the effect of an aesthetic construction that is in many ways paralleled in other national contexts.7 The typological approach I propose in the present essay will focus on chosen examples taken for the most part from contexts that remain peripheral to the canonical mainstream, drawing in particular from Viennese modernism as a term of comparison. It is, no doubt, true that the crucial relevance of the main figure in my account, Fernando Pessoa, is meanwhile well established. However, in the context of the current reconfiguration of Modernist Studies, a closer comparative consideration of Pessoa’s place within modernism, as a figure that is paradoxically at the same time central and marginal, may prove highly instructive. Pessoa’s centrality, as witnessed by the profound, multifaceted, in several ways groundbreaking originality of his response to the crisis of modernity, is unquestionable; however, his acceptance in the ‘Western Canon’ and the importance attached to him in the last decades by leading writers and critics stands in sharp contrast with his conspicuous absence in several standard works on modernism up to this day. Thus, although it pleads for an understanding of the concept that in several ways goes beyond the dominant Anglo-Saxon reference, a standard volume like Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane’s Modernism, 1890–1930, first published in 1976 and successively reissued,8 does not contain a single mention of his name. The same may be said of several other widely used similar companions.9 And the recent volume on modernism in the series A Comparative History of Literatures in European Languages, edited under the patronage of the International Comparative Literature Association,10 follows essentially along the same track: although several contributors repeatedly refer to eliot, Pound, Proust, Joyce, Kaf ka or Yeats, none (with, for obvious reasons, the exception of my own contribution)11 seems to feel the need to include Pessoa in his/ her horizon of critical reference. Apparently, then, despite the growing global resonance of his work, Pessoa’s continues to occupy an ex-centric position which stands in the way of his inclusion in the ‘normality’ of the modernist canon. This should not come as a total surprise. After all, it might be argued that the central significance of Pessoa’s specific responses to vital concerns of aesthetic modernity is in good part a function of the geoculturally marginal position he occupies. As is particularly evident in his postulating of a central role for Portugal based on the pre-eminence of an ‘imperialism of poets’, Pessoa keeps formulating in a consistent, albeit heterogeneous and fragmentary way, what could be called an imagination of the centre that is grounded on a consciously detached and negative stance. As Irene Ramalho Santos’s groundbreaking research on the crucial meaning of the topos of ‘empire’ for Pessoa’s poetic project has clearly shown,12 the imaginary projection onto a subject position characterized by a fiction of centrality that is part of a conscious poetic design plays a defining role in Pessoa’s endeavour. Such a projection, however, is grounded on the acute

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perception of the paradoxical negativity of the subject’s position. A crucial passage in Livro do Desassossego brings the dialectics of this perception to a state of ultimate tension: e eu, verdadeiramente eu, sou o centro que não há nisto senão por uma geometria do abismo; sou o nada em torno do qual este movimento gira, só para que gire, sem que esse centro exista senão porque todo o círculo o tem. eu, verdadeiramente eu, sou o poço sem muros, mas com a viscosidade dos muros, o centro de tudo com o nada à roda.13 [And I, what’s truly I, am the center that doesn’t exist in any of this except by an abyss-based geometry; I’m the nothing around which this movement spins, existing only so that it can spin, being a center only because every circle has one. I, what’s truly I, am a well without walls but with the walls’ viscosity, the center of everything with nothing around it.]14

I have argued elsewhere that in this passage it becomes all too clear that the radical modernist experience of non-identity goes along with a reconstruction of identity: the I is nothing, but this nothing is conceived of as an absolute centre. It reveals itself as the geometric location from where, in the end, a reorganization of experience may, however precariously, be carried out. Thus, disquietude turns out to be, not an existential, but, rather, an aesthetic condition, the metaphor for that simultaneously disruptive and productive situation that ends up giving meaning to the loss of meaning.15 Such a paradoxical stance is fully representative of the modernist aesthetic condition. It is characteristic of a sense of time as a time of suspension and precariousness, and for a mode of perception that no longer allows for any unified structure of feeling and that testifies to the loss of any accepted evidence about the subject, the world or the literary object itself. This loss of any firm ground is directly addressed in an early statement by the Austrian writer and critic Hermann Bahr in his essay ‘die Moderne’ [Modernity] (1890), where the same sense of indefinition and precariousness is taken as the defining mark of the situation, not only of the isolated subject, but of mankind as a whole: es kann sein, dass wir am ende sind, am Tode der erschöpften Menschheit, und das sind nur die letzten Krämpfe. es kann sein, dass wir am Anfange sind, an der geburt einer neuen Menschheit, und das sind nur die Lawinen des Frühlings. Wir steigen ins göttliche oder wir stürzen, stürzen in nacht und Vernichtung — aber Bleiben ist keines.16 [It may be that we stand at the end, the end of exhausted mankind, and these are just the final spasms. It may be that we stand at the beginning, at the birth of a new mankind, and these are the avalanches of spring. We ascend to the divine or we fall, we fall into night and annihilation — but staying is nowhere.]17

In turn-of-the-century Vienna the common sense among the intellectual elite is, of course, that only the poet and the artist possess the seismographic capability to perceive the condition of crisis and to articulate this perception at the one and the same time as the sense of an ending and the opening up of unheard of possibilities. These possibilities, however, are purely aesthetic: faced with the logics of a modernity where ‘all that is solid melts into air’, what is left for the subject who is

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no longer able to experience a stable sense of identity is to play with a variety of possible, even if contradictory, options, to stage his own crisis of identity as an end in itself.18 In a thoroughly nietzschean way, ‘truth’ has become a purely contingent category: the choice is no longer between ‘representation’ or ‘expression’, the mirror or the lamp, since the material world or the subject no longer possess any substantial meaning — in a sense, there is, therefore, nothing that can be represented or expressed. In a way very much akin to Pessoa’s ‘fingimento’, art, then, becomes the site of a purely fictional play, whose sole meaning, in the sense later codified by Clive Bell, lies in the search for significant form as the source of emotions that are nothing but aesthetic.19 The common nietzschean reference goes a long way towards explaining the convergence in the notion of the essentially chameleonic nature of the modern artist.20 One could mention Oscar Wilde as well, another major reference for Viennese modernity,21 whose essays, especially ‘The decay of Lying’, are also important for Pessoa, as is convincingly highlighted by Mariana de Castro.22 In the Viennese context one has to acknowledge in particular, besides these crucial references, the importance of the reception of ernst Mach. Mach’s Beiträge zur Analyse der Empfindungen [Contributions to the Analysis of Sensations], first published in 1886, provided turn-of-the-century Vienna with the theoretical-epistemological foundation for the notion of the irretrievable loss of the ‘self ’ that opened up entirely new prospects to the aesthetic thought of the Viennese avant-garde. In 1904, Hermann Bahr, himself a second-rate writer, but an inf luential figure in the Viennese literary field as the herald and theorizer of the new aesthetic tendencies, provided a sustained gloss of Mach’s views in the section ‘das unrettbare Ich’ [The Irrecoverable I] of his book Dialog vom Tragischen [A Dialogue on the Tragic]: ‘das Ich ist unrettbar.’ es ist nur ein name. es ist nur eine Illusion. es ist ein Behelf, den wir praktisch brauchen, um unsere Vorstellungen zu ordnen. es gibt nichts als Verbindungen von Farben, Tönen, Wärmen, drücken, Räumen, Zeiten, und an diese Verknüpfungen sind Stimmungen, gefühle und Willen gebunden. Alles ist in ewiger Veränderung. [...] die Welt wird unablässig und indem sie wird, vernichtet sie sich unablässig. es gibt aber nichts als dieses Werden. [...] das ding ist nichts außer dem Zusammenhange der Farben, Töne, Wärmen. [...] das Ich ist nur ein name für die elemente, die sich in ihm verknüpfen. [...]23 [‘The I is irrecoverable.’ It is just a name. It is just an illusion. It is a practical aid we need to order our ideas. There is nothing except combinations of colours, sounds, degrees of heat, pressures, spaces, times, and there are impressions, feelings and will attached to these combinations. everything is constantly changing. [...] The world is relentlessly becoming and, as it becomes, it destroys itself relentlessly. But there is nothing except this becoming. [...] The thing is nothing except the combination of colours, sounds, degrees of heat. [...] The I is just a name for the elements that are combined in it.]

Bahr’s perception of the self as just the site for the organization of ever f loating sensations that come provisionally together in relentlessly changing unsubstantial constellations is remarkably akin to the central tenets of Pessoa’s ‘sensationism’. In the critical-poetic idiom of Hugo von Hofmannsthal, this essential principle of

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uncertainty had been translated since the beginning of the 1890s into the notion of ‘das gleitende’, ‘the f loating’, as the key feature of the modern condition. Hofmannsthal, as a leading poet, dramatist, writer of short stories and essayist, may be considered the most radical experimenter with different possibilities of confrontation with the indefinition of the subject’s position inherent to the principle of loss enunciated by Bahr. ‘das gleitende’ is in many ways structurally equivalent to Pessoa’s notion of ‘disquietude’. Consider e.g. the second and third stanzas of the terza rima poem ‘Über Vergänglichkeit’ [On Transitoriness], written in 1894: dies ist ein ding, das keiner voll aussinnt, Und viel zu grauenvoll, als dass man klage: dass alles gleitet und vorüberrinnt. Und dass mein eignes Ich, durch nichts gehemmt, Herüberglitt aus einem kleinen Kind Mir wie ein Hund unheimlich stumm und fremd.24 [This is a thing that mocks the deepest mind And far too terrifying for lament: That all f lows by us, leaving us behind. And that unhindered my own self could f low Out of a little child whom now I find Remote as a dumb dog, and scarcely know.]25

Michael Hamburger’s translation does not do justice to the full resonances of the adverb ‘unheimlich’, which does not simply imply remoteness, but, more precisely, an uncanny strangeness that is perceived by the subject as threatening, much in the sense that would later be analysed by Freud in his essay Das Unheimliche [The Uncanny].26 In this essay, among other aspects, Freud dwells upon the motif of the splitting of personality, in the form of the Doppelgänger or in other analogous forms, a motif clearly present in Hofmannsthal’s passage, as well as elsewhere in his work.27 The uncanny in the sense implied by Hofmannsthal is all the more threatening because it emerges abruptly out of what was most familiar, drastically putting in question the subject’s identity and destroying all semblance of stability. In this, it is a central figure of modernist writing, as the simple mention of Kaf ka may help understand. The image of the dog points explicitly to the sphere of the unconscious, to the mute universe of the drives that lead the subject to a state of fragmentation.28 Thus, in Hofmannsthal’s verse we find a clear, ruthless inscription of Bernardo Soares’s diagnosis of ‘this gap between me and myself ’29 — a gap which, in the end, becomes the condition for aesthetic existence. The assimilation of the logics of décadence in post-symbolist, modernist poetics reveals itself in a particularly clear way in the emphasis on a sense of distance that translates the experience of the world in the form of a structure of defamiliarization which is, paradoxically, dependent on the proximity of that experience. It may well be that sensationism, no doubt one of the major expressions of what could be called a post-symbolist condition, is, as a poetic programme fully developed in the terms of Pessoa’s theory and practice, ‘an exclusively Portuguese literary current’.30 However, one should not overstretch such an assumption, since at least some of the basic tenets brought by Pessoa to their most sophisticated expression can also

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be observed in other national contexts. In an important essay on some affinities between Portuguese and german ‘sensationism’, João Barrento sums up three main characteristics: (1). Sensationism confirms that modernisms are attitudes characterized by the overwhelming presence of a ‘thorn of Socrates’ (i.e. a thorn of the intellect) nailed into vitalist nostalgia. (2). Sensationism is more a modified form of — organicistic and syncretistic — decadentism than of futurism. (3). Sensationism is a theory of total involvement and, thus, of total indifferentism — indifferentism not as indifference, but as complete openness in its refusal of distinction and hierarchy between phenomena.31 All three aspects are directly relevant to the analysis of some conf luences between Austrian and Portuguese modernism I am pursuing here. In a fragment first published in 1966, Pessoa writes: Os Sensacionistas são, antes de mais, decadentes, descendentes directos dos movimentos decadente e simbolista. Reivindicam e pregam absoluta indiferença para com a humanidade, a religião e a pátria.32 [The Sensationists are in the first place decadents, direct descendants of the decadent and symbolist movements. They claim and preach an absolute indifference towards humanity, religion and the fatherland.]

It is quite significant that, in a letter of July 1909 addressed to erich Unger, erwin Loewenson, one of the main representatives of what could be called german sensationism, should express a fervent admiration for Hofmannsthal in the context of an enthusiastic reference to the latter’s central poetological essay ‘der dichter und diese Zeit’ [The Poet and These Times] of 1906.33 In this essay, an emphatic concept of the identity of the poet, who apparently has reconciled himself with his own self, goes hand in hand with the acute perception of a status of non-identity — in the end, the poet is ‘a slave of all living things and the sport of every puff of air’ [ein Sklave aller lebendigen dinge und ein Spiel von jedem druck der Luft].34 In a central passage, Hofmannsthal writes: er darf nichts von sich ablehnen. er ist der Ort, an dem die Kräfte der Zeit einander auszugleichen verlangen. er gleicht dem Seismographen, den jedes Beben, und wäre es auf Tausende von Meilen, in Vibrationen versetzt. es ist nicht, dass er unauf hörlich an alle dinge der Welt dächte. Aber sie denken an ihn. Sie sind in ihm, so beherrschen sie ihn. Seine dumpfen Stunden selbst, seine depressionen, seine Verworrenheiten sind unpersönliche Zustände.35 [He should not dismiss anything that comes to him. He is the site where the energies of the times demand to be balanced against each other. He is like the seismograph, that any earthquake, even if thousands of miles away, sets in vibration. It is not so that he keeps thinking ceaselessly about all things in the world. But they think about him. They are in him, so they govern him. even his dark hours, his depressions, his abstruse states of mind are impersonal conditions.]

The passage from the Book of Disquietude on the subject as the ‘centre of everything

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with nothing around it’ that I quoted earlier comes irresistibly to mind. The self, as one can read in both passages, is a place and, at the same time, a non-place, and thus, the relentless movement of everything in the world coincides with the suspension of time. ‘das Leben ist rastlose Vereinigung des Unvereinbaren’ [Life is a restless conciliation of the irreconcilable]: the paradox formulated by Hofmannsthal in a late annotation of 192836 points to the foundation of a poetics that is very close to the ‘abyss-based geometry’ of Bernardo Soares. In the end — that is why the process is ‘restless’ — the horizon of conciliation is always put in question and this is also why, in the terms of Pessoa/Soares, the centre of everything is, at the same time the centre of nothing. That is, identity is always just the illusion — the fiction — of identity. The aesthetic subject that imagines himself as a centre acknowledges, at the same time, his radically decentred position. As is evident in this series of conclusions, we remain quite close to the logic of decadentism: the fictions of identity carry with them the exacerbated consciousness of being no more than that, fictions, intellectual constructions. This exacerbation — the thorn of the intellect — is common both to Pessoa and Hofmannsthal. Its terms are very clearly defined in a much quoted passage in The Book of Disquietude: Assim, não sabendo crer em deus, e não podendo crer numa soma de animais, fiquei, como outros da orla das gentes, naquela distância de tudo a que comummente se chama a decadência. A decadência é a perda total da inconsciência; porque a inconsciência é o fundamento da vida. O coração, se pudesse pensar, pararia.37 [And so, not knowing how to believe in god and unable to believe in an aggregate of animals, I, along with other people in the fringe, kept a distance from things, a distance commonly called decadence. decadence is the total loss of unconsciousness, which is the very basis of life. Could it think, the heart would stop beating.]38

The same ‘distance from everything’, the excess of lucidity that is at the same time a form of blindness is expressed in a sense which is quite analogous in an early text by Hofmannsthal on d’Annunzio dated 1893: Wir haben nichts als ein sentimentales gedächtnis, einen gelähmten Willen und die unheimliche gabe der Selbstverdoppelung. Wir schauen unserem Leben zu; wir leeren den Pokal vorzeitig und bleiben doch unendlich durstig [...]; so empfinden wir im Besitz den Verlust, im erleben das stete Versäumen. Wir haben gleichsam keine Wurzeln im Leben und streichen, hellsichtige und doch tagblinde Schatten, zwischen den Kindern des Lebens umher.39 [We have nothing but a sentimental memory, a paralysed will and the uncanny gift of self-duplication. We are spectators of our own life: we empty the cup ahead of time and remain notwithstanding infinitely thirsty [...]; in this way, we experience loss in possession, a continual loss in what is lived. It is as if we had no roots in life and would wander among the children of life like clear sighted but day-blind spectres.]

‘Pudesse eu comer chocolates com a mesma verdade com que comes! | Mas eu penso e, ao tirar o papel de prata, que é de folha de estanho, | deito tudo para o chão, como tenho deitado a vida’ [If I could eat chocolates with the same truth

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as you do! | But I think and, peeling the silver paper with its fronds of tin, | I leave it all lying on the f loor, just as I have left life]. Thus Álvaro de Campos in ‘Tabacaria’ [Tobacconist’s].40 But also some lines by Mário de Sá-Carneiro can be read as almost a gloss of the Hofmannsthal passage I just quoted. Compare e.g. the following quatrain from ‘Quase’ [Almost], a poem dated 1913: num ímpeto difuso de quebranto, Tudo encetei e nada possuí... Hoje, de mim, só resta o desencanto das coisas que beijei mas não vivi...41 [In a diffuse impetus of languor I have started all and possessed nothing... Today what is left of me is the disenchantment Of the things I kissed but did not live...]

The subject of Hofmannsthal’s early essay sees himself as well ‘in the fringe’ (na orla das gentes), he belongs to those ‘godforsaken in the midst of the forest’ (seres perdidos de deus, no meio da f loresta) evoked in a fragment by Pessoa.42 But this condition of loss is not ref lected as a fatality, but as the outcome of a conscious decision. The same process is observed by Fernando Cabral Martins in Mário de Sá-Carneiro, in a sense that makes it clear that we are not dealing here with just the topos of romantic solitude and search for meaning. With regard to the first stanza of the poem ‘dispersão’ [dispersion], by Mário de Sá-Carneiro — ‘Perdi-me dentro de mim | Porque eu era labirinto, | e hoje, quando me sinto, | É com saudades de mim’ [I got lost inside myself | For I was a labyrinth, | And today, when I feel myself, | It is for myself I long]. — Cabral Martins makes the insightful observation that ‘o “eu” não está perdido num labirinto, “é” um labirinto sem eu’ 43 [the ‘I’ is not lost in a labyrinth, it ‘is’ a labyrinth without an I]. This observation points to the spatialization of the self to which I alluded above and underlines the decisive circumstance that, in the context of decadentism, loss is experienced as a condition of aesthetic existence and, thus, is ref lected not in a nostalgic key, but positively and sometimes, as in Hermann Bahr, even euphorically. Thus, for example, in ‘der Brief des letzten Contarin’ [The letter of the last of the Contarin] a fragment written in 1902, the year of the ‘Letter of Lord Chandos’, but only published posthumously, Hofmannsthal describes a state of renunciation and self-marginalization vis-àvis society, the choice of a condition of poverty and self-despoilment which is equivalent to non-existence. At the same time, however, it represents a deliberate choice on the part of a subject who is uncompromising in the conscious rejection of a common sense that would suggest to him ways of integration. The image of the labyrinth in Sá-Carneiro is analogous to one of the central images in ‘The Letter of Lord Chandos’, a key text of european modernism. I refer to the image of the vortex that occurs in the central part of the essay: es zerfiel mir alles in Teile, die Teile wieder in Teile, und nichts mehr ließ sich mit einem Begriff umspannen. die einzelnen Worte schwammen um mich; sie gerannen zu Augen, die mich anstarrten und in die ich wieder hineinstarren muß: Wirbel sind sie, in die hinabzusehen mich schwindelt, die sich unauf haltsam drehen und durch die hindurch man ins Leere kommt.44

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The vertigo alluded to in this passage can again only be understood in the framework of an ‘abyss-based geometry’: the strangeness of the subject towards his own identity is here radicalized by the strangeness of a fragmented language. The loss of every evidence of the world carries with it the loss of every evidence of language; like the self, language has become irrecoverable. In its formulation of the irretrievable loss of the unity between the subject, language and the world, the Chandos letter is a markedly modernist text. It seems no longer necessary to polemicize against the biographist interpretations that were common for a long time and that transformed this crucial document of the turn of the century into the testimony of a personal crisis, neglecting the evident fictional nature of the essay. But it may perhaps be in order to highlight another aspect which, strangely enough, all too often goes unnoticed. I mean the way in which the text stages its own paradox, the supreme irony lying in the contrast between Chandos’s confession that he is no longer able to think and speak with coherence and the highly elaborate character of his discourse, the rhetorical power well expressed in the clear and f luent organization of the argument and in the use of sophisticated imagery. The apology for silence is, thus, totally relativized by the text’s own performative contradiction — the historical disguise itself (which includes the use of the epistolary form as a vehicle of philosophical ref lection) is part of the rhetorical distance which exposes the apparently confessional gesture and evidences the fictional and, literally, experimental character of the letter. It is true that after Chandos the problematics of silence remains indelibly inscribed in aesthetic consciousness. The notion of the precariousness of the word, the permanent tension inherent to the constitution of language, definitively exposes the equivocations of the romantic search for the essential word and places itself at the core of the modernist literary project. After all, if there is no such word, the artist is forced to accept the notion of his own poverty by placing himself at the mercy of the multiple and contradictory stimuli coming from a reality that language will never be able to capture entirely. In a letter to Richard Beer-Hofmann written in 1895, Hofmannsthal elaborates on the difficulty he experiences in dealing with the variety of stimuli he is subjected to. But he thinks he has found a solution: he will organize his intellectual horizon by establishing Potemkin villages,45 i.e. a number of fictions to provide himself with a point of support as fictions, as the materialization of a poetic perception that knows itself to be illusory but pretends to be authentic.46 The task is to conquer for language that ‘absolute exteriority’ (exterioridade absoluta) mentioned by Bernardo Soares at a certain moment.47 In another passage of Livro do desassossego, the voice of Pessoa’s semi-heteronym manifests its impatience with what he in another fragment names the ‘insuportável interiorice’ [intolerable mania of interiority],48 of clearly romantic ascendancy, of a passage in Amiel’s

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Journal intime — a key text of the fin de siècle to which Hofmannsthal himself also refers a number of times.49 Pessoa writes: disse Amiel que uma paisagem é um estado de alma, mas a frase é uma felicidade frouxa de sonhador débil. [...] Objectivar é criar e ninguém diz que um poema feito é um estado de estar pensando em fazê-lo. [...] de resto, de que servem estas especulações de psicologia verbal? [...] Mais certa [sic] era dizer que um estado de alma é uma paisagem; haveria na frase a vantagem de não conter a mentira de uma teoria, mas tão-somente a verdade de uma metáfora.50 [Amiel said that a landscape is a state of the soul, but the phrase is a f lawed gem of a feeble dreamer. [...] To objectify is to create, and no one would say that a finished poem is a state of thinking about writing one. [...] Besides, what’s the use of these speculations of semantic psychology? [...] It would be better to say that a state of the soul is a landscape, for the phrase would contain not the lie of a theory but the truth of a metaphor.]51

To build Potemkin villages is a method which, like taking a state of the soul to be a landscape, aims at transforming a sensation into an object, one of the three basic principles of ‘sensationism’ as formulated by Pessoa.52 It should be borne in mind that in its final section the Chandos letter narrates several experiences of epiphany in which the fragmentation of the world appears as a paradoxical source of meaning, and no longer as a threat. These epiphanies stem from the naked materiality of things offering themselves to the subject in all immediacy, in a sense reminiscent of Caeiro’s ‘O rio da minha aldeia não faz pensar em nada | quem está ao pé dele está só ao pé dele’ [The river of my village makes you think of nothing | who stands beside it is just standing beside it.]. From the perspective of Portuguese modernism, such epiphanies can only be named sensationist. In my own analysis, the text of the Chandos letter itself is nothing more than one of those Potemkin villages to which Hofmannsthal alludes programmatically — i.e. the fictional, in a literal sense playful materialization of one of the several possibilities that offer themselves to poetic experimentation, in this case, the possibility of radical scepticism in regard to the potentialities of language. Which would mean that, from this perspective, Chandos is far from being the alter ego construed by biographist interpretation and should instead be understood as somehow a protoheteronym of Hofmannsthal. ‘Ballade des äußeren Lebens’ [Ballad of the Outer Life], one of the most widely known poems by Hofmannsthal, written presumably in 1894 and published in the following year, is structured around a f lux of images which convey the sense of a perpetual cycle but also of absolute fragmentation. The world of ‘outer life’ is captured by the poetic subject in its elementary immediacy, without any apparent effort of organization — the poetic voice restricts itself to following and registering the inevitable f lux of things. However, the fifth stanza phrases a question about meaning which interrupts the f lux of images: ‘Wozu sind diese aufgebaut?’ [To what end were they built?].53 This question has an almost literal correspondence in ‘Impressões do crepusculo’ (Impressions of Sunset) (1913) by the orthonymous Pessoa: ‘Para que é tudo isto’ [Wherefore is all this].54 As in the emblematic poem

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of Pessoa’s ‘paulismo’, where the disorder of sensations does not comply with any mode of organization, the topography of chaos delineated in Hofmannsthal’s poem does not allow for any synthesis whatsoever. While, however, in ‘Impressões do crepúsculo’ the question remains unanswered and is no more foregrounded in the poem’s structure than any other of the sentences and fragments of sentences that build up the text, Hofmannsthal’s ‘ballad’ attempts some kind of an answer. This is contained in a famous line towards the end of the composition: ‘Und dennoch sagt der viel, der “Abend” sagt’ [Yet he says much who utters ‘evening’]. The precarious character of such an answer is evident. ‘Abend’, ‘evening’, connotes a borderline moment, an instant of transient balance between two sets of time. It has nothing of the romantic dwelling in a state of dream or transcendence, it is, rather, about inhabiting a moment of suspension which does not allow for the illusion of a mythical sublation of the distance in regard to the world. The possibility of uttering ‘Abend’ is phrased as an objection to the overwhelming weight of a world with no apparent meaning and appears, thus, as a possibility of overcoming indifferentism, of reinstating difference and distinction. But the statement of the possibility of a dense poetic word at the end of the poem is carried out without any absolutization of the subject or of an emphatic concept of art. It is, thus, carried out in a distinctly modernist way. In the poetics of Viennese modernism, as Alice Bolterauer argues, there is no statement that does not contain immediately, if not its own negation, at least the element of doubt.55 It is by definition a self-ref lexive poetics, and, as such, also a poetics of self-presentation. Among the implications of this concept, it should be stressed that such a self-presentation is, above all, self-representation in the theatrical sense of the word representation as theatrical play. I repeat: in the context of the turn of the century, the solution to the crisis of the relationship between the subject, the world and language lies in the aesthetic mise en scène of that crisis, of which Pessoa’s ‘drama em gente’ [drama in people] is just the more radical materialization. This is, to my view, one of the main threads that may substantiate a comparative analysis of different modernist poetics which, although not directly connected and even fully unaware of each other, nonetheless show clear typological affinities, still awaiting for systematic analysis. notes to Chapter 17 * I wish to thank Maria Irene Ramalho for her careful reading, for her assistance with procuring Hamburger’s translations of Hofmannsthal’s poems, and for everything else. 1. As I suggested then. See António Sousa Ribeiro, ‘Modernismo e pós-modernismo: o ponto da situação’, Revista Crítica de Ciências Sociais, 24 (1988), 23–46. 2. See Translocal Modernisms: International Perspectives, ed. by Irene Ramalho Santos and António Sousa Ribeiro (Bern: Peter Lang, 2008). 3. Susan Stanford Friedman, ‘Cultural Parataxis and Transnational Landscapes of Reading: Towards a Locational Modernist Studies’, in Modernism, ed. by Astradur eysteinsson and Vivian Liska, 2 vols (Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2007), i, 51. 4. See e.g. Vivian Liska’s book on ‘Modernism as a woman’, a study of Ricarda Huch and Annette Kolb (‘Die Moderne — ein Weib’. Am Beispiel von Romanen Ricarda Huchs und Annette Kolbs

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(Tübingen and Basel: A. Francke Verlag, 2000)) or Anne Martina emonts’s thorough new approach to the almost forgotten Mechtilde Lichnowsky (Mechtilde Lichnowsky, Sprachlust und Sprachkritik. Annäherung an ein Kulturphänomen (Würzburg: Könighausen & neumann, 2009)), but also comparative studies such as Cristanne Miller’s Cultures of Modernism: Marianne Moore, Mina Loy, and Else Lasker-Schüler (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005). 5. Following dionyz durisin, Peter Zima names such an approach ‘typological comparative studies’, by contrast with ‘genetic comparative studies’, which centre on the analysis of contact situations. See Peter V. Zima, Komparatistik. Einführung in die Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft (Tübingen: Francke, 1992), pp. 94–129. The two approaches, as is emphasized by Zima, are not mutually exclusive and very often cannot even be separated; however, the typological perspective clearly opens up theoretical and methodological possibilities that are not accessible to the genetic approach. 6. A brilliant example of this approach is Irene Ramalho Santos’s Atlantic Poets: Fernando Pessoa’s Turn in Anglo-American Modernism (Hanover, nH, and London: University Press of new england, 2003). On another key, it is perhaps these paradigmatic correlations that Jorge de Sena had in mind when he wrote: ‘eu tenho para mim que os grandes poetas do pós-simbolismo pertencem bem menos às literaturas respectivas de que são figuras mestras, que a uma europa ideal em que, conquanto diversissimamente, se integram [...]’ [I am convinced that the great poets of post-symbolism belong much less to their respective literatures, of which they are key figures, than to an ideal europe of which, albeit in the most diverse ways, they are a part]. See Jorge de Sena, ‘Fernando Pessoa e a literatura inglesa’, in Fernando Pessoa e Cª heterónima: Estudos Coligidos 1940–1978 (Lisbon: edições 70, 1982), 89–96 (pp. 93–94). 7. See António Sousa Ribeiro, ‘A Center That Can Hold: The Figure of empire in Portuguese and Austrian Modernism’, in Modernism, ed. by Astradur eysteinsson and Vivian Liska (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2007), pp. 561–72, for a contribution in this direction. The model of ‘cosmopolitan nationalism’ I scrutinize in this study is also clearly present in, for example, Italian futurism or in english vorticism. A case in point of an aesthetic movement purported to be utterly singular and firmly placed by a long critical tradition within a strictly national literary canon is german expressionism, which, in recent studies, is being increasingly incorporated into the framework of a transnational modernist paradigm. On this topic, see Catarina Caldeira Martins, ‘Modernismo, ensaísmo, Imperialismo: Robert Müller e “a corrente amazónica da alma humana” ’ (unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Coimbra, Faculdade de Letras, 2007). 8. Modernism, 1890–1930, ed. by Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976). 9. See e.g. Peter nicholls, Modernisms: A Literary Guide (London: Macmillan, 1995); Michael Leven son, The Cambridge Companion to Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Jane goldman, Modernism, 1910–1945: Image to Apocalypse (new York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004). 10. See Modernism, ed. by Astradur eysteinsson and Vivian Liska. 11. Ribeiro, ‘A Center That Can Hold’. 12. Santos, Atlantic Poets. See also António Sousa Ribeiro, ‘ “A Tradition of empire”: Fernando Pessoa and germany’, Portuguese Studies, 21 (2005), 201–09, and Ribeiro, ‘A Center That Can Hold’. 13. Fernando Pessoa, Livro do Desassossego por Bernardo Soares, ed. by Richard Zenith (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1999), p. 258. 14. Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquietude, trans. by Richard Zenith (Manchester: Carcanet Press, 1991), p. 155. 15. Ribeiro, ‘A Center That Can Hold’, p. 563. 16. Hermann Bahr, ‘die Moderne’, in Die Wiener Moderne. Literatur, Kunst und Musik zwischen 1890 und 1910, ed. by gotthart Wunberg (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1981), p. 189. Compare Bernardo Soares: ‘nascemos já em plena angústia metafísica, em plena angústia moral, em pleno desassossego político’ (Livro do Desassossego, p. 187) [We were born right into the midst of metaphysical anguish, moral anxiety, and political disquietude] (The Book of Disquietude, p. 105). 17. Whenever not otherwise stated, translations are mine. 18. Jacques Le Rider’s Modernité viennoise et crises de l’identité (Paris: PUF, 1990) remains the most

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important reference on the topic of the crisis of identity as a defining feature of Viennese modernity. See also, among others, Michael Pollak, Vienne 1900: une identité blessée (Paris: gallimard, 1992). 19. I am referring to Clive Bell’s well-known essay ‘The Aesthetic Hypothesis’, first published in 1914, a highly inf luential reference among British modernist circles. 20. On nietzsche and Pessoa see Jorge de Sena, ‘ “O poeta é um fingidor”, nietzsche, Pessoa e outras coisas mais’, in Fernando Pessoa & Cª Heterónima, pp. 117–43. See also, among others, eduardo Lourenço, ‘nietzsche e Pessoa’, in Nietzsche: Cem anos após o projecto ‘Vontade de Poder — Transmutação de Todos os Valores’, ed. by António Marques (Lisbon: Vega, n.d.), pp. 247–63; Steffen dix, ‘Pessoa e nietzsche: deuses gregos, pluralidade moderna e pensamento europeu no princípio do século XX’, Clio, 11 (2004), 139–74. On the reception of nietzsche in turn-ofthe-century Vienna see Nietzsche and the Austrian Culture, ed. by Jacob golomb (Vienna: WUV, 2004). 21. See Sylvie Arlaud, Les Références anglaises de la modernité viennoise (Paris: Les Éditions Suger, 2000). 22. Mariana de Castro, ‘Oscar Wilde, Fernando Pessoa, and the Art of Lying’, Portuguese Studies, 22, 2 (2006), 219–49. 23. Wunberg, Die Wiener Moderne, pp. 147–48. 24. Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Gesammelte Werke in zehn Einzelbänden, ed. by Bernd Schoeller, 10 vol (Frankfurt am Main: dtv, 1979), i, 21. 25. Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Poems and Verse Plays, trans. by Michael Hamburger (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1961), p. 29. 26. Sigmund Freud, ‘das Unheimliche’, in Freud, Studienausgabe, ed. by Alexander Mitscherlich and others, 10 vols (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 2000), iv, 241–74. 27. The motif of the Doppelgänger is used by Hofmannsthal e.g. in the short story ‘Reitergeschichte’ [A Tale of the Cavalry] or in the novel fragment Andreas. 28. On the relevance of animal imagery in Hofmannsthal, see Renate Böschenstein, ‘Tiere als elemente von Hofmannsthals Zeichensprache’, Hofmannsthal-Jahrbuch, 1 (1993), 137–64. 29. Cf. ‘este intervalo que há entre mim e mim’, Pessoa, Livro do Desassossego, p. 218. 30. Paula Cristina Costa, ‘Sensacionismo’, in Dicionário de Fernando Pessoa e do Modernismo Português, ed. by Fernando Cabral Martins (Lisbon: Caminho, 2008), 786–91 (p. 787). 31. João Barrento, ‘Ismos em convergência ou: o sensacionismo português fala alemão?’ in Barrento, O Espinho de Sócrates: Expressionismo e Modernismo (Lisbon: Presença, 1987), 51–83 (pp. 55–56). 32. Fernando Pessoa, Páginas Íntimas e de Auto-Interpretação, ed. by georg Rudolf Lind and Jacinto do Prado Coelho (Lisbon: Ática, 1966), p. 204. 33. Die Schriften des Neuen Clubs 1908–1914, ed. by Richard Sheppard, 2 vols (Hildesheim: gerstenberg Verlag, 1980), i, 41. 34. Hofmannsthal, ‘der dichter und diese Zeit’, in Gesammelte Werke, viii, 54–81 (p. 81). 35. Hofmannsthal, ‘der dichter und diese Zeit’, p. 72. 36. Hofmannsthal, Gesammelte Werke, x, 592. 37. Pessoa, Livro do Desassossego, p. 45. 38. Pessoa, The Book of Disquietude, p. 7. 39. Hofmannsthal, ‘gabrielle d’Annunzio (I)’, Gesammelte Werke, viii, 174–75. 40. Fernando Pessoa, Obra Poética, ed. by Maria Aliete galhoz (Rio de Janeiro: Aguilar, 1969), p. 364. english translation in Fernando Pessoa, Selected Poems, trans. by Jonathan griffin (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982), p. 114. 41. Mário de Sá-Carneiro, Poesias Completas (Lisbon: Anagrama, 1980), p. 26. 42. Fernando Pessoa, Sobre Portugal: introdução ao problema nacional, ed. by Joel Serrão (Lisbon: Ática, 1979), p. 60. 43. Fernando Cabral Martins, O Modernismo em Mário de Sá-Carneiro (Lisbon: estampa, 1997), p. 210. 44. Hofmannsthal, ‘ein Brief ’, in Gesammelte Werke, vii, 461–72 (p. 466). 45. Prince Potemkin, the minister and favourite of Catherine II of Russia, is said to have ordered the building of fake villages that were no more than façades in order to deceive the sovereign on the occasion of her trips across the land, making her think that Russia was in a process of swift development.

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46. Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Richard Beer-Hofmann, Briefwechsel, ed. by eugene Weber (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 1972), p. 47. 47. Pessoa, Livro do Desassossego, p. 172; The Book of Disquietude, p. 93. 48. Ibid., p. 315; Ibid., p. 213 (translation modified). 49. See Hofmannsthal, Gesammelte Werke, viii, 113; x, 344 and 348 (here the Austrian author interprets the sentence ‘tout le paysage est un état d’âme’ in a way that is very similar to Bernardo Soares’s). 50. Pessoa, Livro do Desassossego, p. 103. 51. Pessoa, Book of Disquietude, p. 46. 52. More exactly, it is the intermediate term of a syllogistic progression phrased by Pessoa in the following way: ‘1. Todo o objecto é uma sensação nossa; 2. Toda a arte é a conversão de uma sensação em objecto; 3. Portanto, toda arte é a conversão de uma sensação numa outra sensação’ [1. every object is a sensation of ours; 2. All art is the conversion of a sensation into an object; 3. Therefore, all art is the conversion of a sensation into another sensation]. Pessoa, Páginas Íntimas e de Auto-Interpretação, p. 168. 53. Hofmannsthal, Gesammelte Werke, i, 23. english translation by Michael Hamburger, Poems and Verse Plays, p. 33. 54. Pessoa, Obra Poética, p. 108. 55. See Alice Bolterauer, Selbstvorstellung: die literarische Selbstreflexion der Wiener Moderne (Freiburg im Breisgau: Rombach, 2003).

C H A P t e r 18

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The Tail of the Lizard: Pessoan disquietude and the Subject of Modernity Maria Irene Ramalho de Sousa Santos Talvez tenhas existido apenas, como um lagarto a quem cortam o rabo e que é rabo para aquém do lagarto remexidamente.1 (Pessoa/Campos ‘Tabacaria’)

In 1991, a collection of essays was published in the United States by Routledge with the intriguing title, Who Comes after the Subject?2 edited by eduardo Cadava, Peter Connor and Jean-Luc nancy, the book gathers together essays by French philosophers (known in the United States as ‘continental’) on what we might call the crisis of the post-Cartesian subject. Some of the essays first appeared in the international review of philosophy Topoi (September 1988). A French edition of this issue of Topoi, with new contributions, appeared in 1989. Who Comes after the Subject? includes all the previously published essays and adds some that had never been translated or even published before. The authors’ challenge, as conceived of by Jean-Luc nancy, who agreed to coordinate the project, was to respond to the question formulated in the title: ‘who comes after the subject?’ In his introduction, nancy, invoking Hegel, explains that the integral ‘subject’ as identified by descartes’s famous Je pense donc je suis / Cogito ergo sum was already putting itself in question by the early nineteenth century (Hegel: the subject is that which is capable of maintaining within itself its own contradiction). From the late nineteenth century onwards, the thinking of such philosophers as Marx, nietzsche, Freud, Husserl, Heidegger, Bataille, and Wittgenstein contributed much to help the authors included in this book further to put the subject in question. Factors inf luencing these authors’ meditations on the crisis of the subject, nancy suggests, are also findings in linguistics and the social sciences, the european experience of war, fascism, Stalinism, the camps, decolonization, new nations emerging. The question (‘Who comes after the subject?’), nancy insists, is actually multiple: it is a question about the individual, but also about peoples, the state, history, geography; it also addresses work, men and women, myself, ourselves. The subject as manifested in the philosopher’s formulation of the question is the existent-asoccupying-a-place, or put another way, ‘the one present there’. One of the authors

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concludes that after the subject comes the citizen (etienne Balibar). nancy himself argues that what comes after the subject is the community. Another philosopher offers ‘situation’ or ‘place’ as a reply (Badiou). Yet another submits that the question should address what, not who, the proper answer being death — or nothing (LacoueLabarthe). All these concepts (‘citizen’, ‘community’, ‘situation’, ‘nothing’) will be useful in dealing with the Pessoan desassossego below. Fernando Pessoa is actually mentioned in two of the French philosophers’ responses to nancy’s question and cannot but come vividly to mind in a third one. In ‘On a Finally Objectless Subject’, Alain Badiou observes that the subject ‘wore thin and fell into ruin between nietzsche and Heidegger, as well as throughout the whole of what should be called “the age of the poets” (Hölderlin, Hopkins, Mallarmé, Rimbaud, Trakl, Pessoa, Mandelstam, Celan)’.3 This is not the only time that Badiou invokes the Portuguese modernist poet to elucidate his own thinking. A few years later, in Petit manuel d’inesthétique (1998), arguing that more than Mallarmé’s Pessoa’s book is as multiple, contingent, and untotalizable as the universe, Badiou challenges fellow philosophers ‘to be contemporaries of Pessoa’, that is to say, ‘to think of him as a possible condition for philosophy’.4 In the wake of nietzsche and deleuze, and acknowledging José gil’s deleuzian approach to Pessoa’s work (Álvaro de Campos in particular), Badiou’s meditations on Pessoa here aim to contribute to a clarification of the poet’s relationship with Plato. If the task of modern philosophy, as famously defined by nietzschean deleuze, is to ‘overturn Plato’, Badiou’s conclusion that Pessoa’s modernity puts in question ‘the pertinence of the Platonism/anti-Platonism opposition’ already points to the complexities and contradictions involved in such an overturning.5 From Badiou’s earlier essay, included in Who Comes after the Subject? (‘On a Finally Objectless Subject’), I draw his negative delimitation of the subject as situation, place or chance (hasard). Before I go brief ly to the two other essays in which Pessoa is mentioned or has echoes, let me offer Pessoa’s desassossego [disquietude]6 as, in Badiou’s rather Pessoan terms, the ‘interval that the poet has opened up for us, a veritable philosophy of the multiple, of the void, of the infinite. A philosophy that will affirmatively do justice to this world that the gods have for ever abandoned.’7 Intervalo, repeated more than forty times in the book, is a crucial concept in Livro do desassossego. Suffice it here to suggest, following Badiou’s thinking, that the intervalo that the poet opens up for us is precisely the inbetweenness-of-being-nonbeing-in-multiplicity (‘Quantos sou? Quem é eu? O que é este intervalo que há entre mim e mim?’ [How many am I? Who is I?, What is this interval that exists between me and me] #213). Pessoa’s Intervalo is the void of nothingness (‘um intervalo entre nada e nada’ [an interval between nothing and nothing] #225) and the lure of infinitude (wind whistling ‘no intervalo do vento’ [in the interval of the wind] #32).8 In a word, intervalo, signifying presence and absence at one and the same time, is the sign of the Pessoan rift-enigma of disquietude in Livro do desassossego.9 The term carries different meanings in different sketches, and they are all relevant. Whether it be a proper interval, like the intermission of a show, or a space between beings, feelings, or things, an unfathomable twilight zone, as it were, intervalo is implicitly and explicitly disquieting: ‘entresou’ [I-am-in-between], the poet confesses in sketch

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#281, and the image of human existence in modernity suddenly appears as the I’s total vulnerability-in-incomprehensibility. even when the interval explicitly refers to a show’s intermission, the futility and artificiality of what happens (or does not happen) in the interval is what provokes the poet’s disquietude about human existence in general and his own existence in particular: ‘Somos qualquer coisa que se passa no intervalo de um espectáculo; por vezes, por certas portas, entrevemos o que talvez não seja senão cenário. Todo o mundo é confuso, como vozes na noite’ [We are something that happens in the interval of a show; at times, through certain doors, we have glimpses of what is perhaps no more than setting. The whole world is confused, like voices in the night] (#63). Intervalo is what is supposed to be temporary, possibly a welcome interruption, some respite or relief, quieting down the subject (as, almost, in ‘Sossego, quase, do cansaço do desassossego’ [I almost quiet down from the fatigue of disquietude] #243). But it ends up crystallized in the terrifying emptiness of an eternity. In another sketch, projected as triviality and meaninglessness, human existence is mere ‘crochet of things’, an ‘interval’ (#12). There are several sketches bearing the titles, ‘Intervalo’ and ‘Intervalo doloroso’ [Painful Interval], the latter title expressing in fact a redundancy: the interval cannot but be painful. That is why, in ‘Saudação a Walt Whitman’, a euphoric Pessoa/Campos cries out, ‘não quero intervalos no mundo’ [I want no intervals in the world].10 Ultimately, being the interval is what disquiets, the interval is that which provokes disquietude. To acknowledge, as the poet does in sketch #204, ‘Sou o intervalo entre o que sou e o que não sou’ [I am the interval between what I am and what I am not], means fully to assume desassossego, a word which the reader half expects to find next. And, indeed, it makes its appearance a line below. The very book in Livro do desassossego, be it the assistant bookkeeper’s book of accounts or the poet’s casual book of disconnected scribblings (#12; #13), is like an interval in its being a groan between half light and half darkness (‘este livro é um gemido’ (#412, ‘Intervalo doloroso)). disquietude and interval, or betweenness, are explicitly linked as well in sketch #480: ‘desassossego entre margens’ [disquietude between margins]. It comes as no surprise that mystery haunts disquietude. given that the sensation is one of the subject’s ways of manifesting itself (or being its own being), the most complex of sensations, because it both pains and comforts, is the ‘disquietude of mystery’ (desassossego do mistério, ‘Milímetros’, p. 452). As I have argued elsewhere, Pessoa’s book of fragments — or of disquietude — is the modernist crowning of the poetic and theoretical adventure initiated by the first Romantics, particularly as regards the Athenäum Romantics’ ‘incomprehensibility’ and conception of the lyric as an endless becoming (werden) pure subjectlessness.11 Pessoa’s desassossego best characterizes modernity’s loss of grounds for meaning in its rigorous problematization of the subject and acute consciousness of the opacity of language. Taken together with Pessoa’s total oeuvre, Livro do desassossego anticipates both nancy’s question and the various philosophers’ replies it garnered, and to which I now return. Pessoa also features in Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe’s ‘The Response of Ulysses’.12 By invoking Ulysses’s response to Polyphemus’s question, ‘Who are you?’, and by translating the meaning of ‘no one’ into Pessoa’s name, which in his native

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French, ‘personne’, means both ‘person’ and ‘no one’, Lacoue-Labarthe addresses the problem of the subject as a problem of existence and identity, that which Heidegger calls ‘Jemeinigkeit’ (always-being-my-own-being).13 Setting aside Kant’s transcendental subject, Lacoue-Labarthe suggests that what, not who, comes after the subject is nothing, or death, death and nothingness being the limit of existence and identity. In the fragility of existence, he argues, lies the essence of lyricism. even if Pessoa’s name is not mentioned again, it is clear that the Portuguese modernist poet’s heteronymic fragmentation and negativity (that is to say, his disquietude) are behind Lacoue-Labarthe’s ref lections. As existence (Dasein) grounds essence (Wesen), the heteronyms-as-existents (what Pessoa called his pessoas-livros [personbooks]) are the precarious grounding of Pessoan being.14 ‘Fernando Pessoa’ is no transcendental subject, but rather one more heteronym — merely one more existent. ‘Fernando Pessoa [...] não existe, propriamente falando’ [Fernando Pessoa [...] does not exist, properly speaking]. This erasure of the poet is stated by Álvaro de Campos, who, properly speaking, does not exist either. Only the places/books claimed by the heteronyms do exist.15 Before I turn to the poet’s performance and subtler theorization of the question of the subject in his own work, I would like to take up a short essay by Maurice Blanchot in the same collection, entitled simply ‘Who?’.16 Trying to answer nancy’s question (‘Who Comes after the Subject?’), Blanchot imagines a dialogue between a student and an examiner. The dialogue does not go much further than a ref lection on the grammatical/syntactical meaning of the phrase. For example: why ‘who’ and not ‘what’; why ‘comes’ and not ‘came’ or ‘will come’; ‘after’, but how? — as in time? or as in causality?; ‘the’ as indicating specificity? But unlike any of the other authors in this collection, Blanchot seems to leave the ‘subject’ unquestioned. even if, as the author puts it, ‘ “who comes” never comes’, Blanchot’s ‘subject’ is here the Cartesian ‘thinking thing’, apparently before it started to wane, and merely on the verge of putting itself in question. This self-questioning is precisely what Blanchot stages at the closure of his brief meditation — and he does so in a Pessoan way, as we shall see. Admitting that he has actually been trying to avoid the very question posed by nancy, Blanchot invokes a title by the French philosopher, Claude Morali, which cannot but make Pessoan scholars prick up their years: Qui est moi aujourd’hui? Morali’s title refers to children playing in the garden and exclaiming, in jest and naïve wonder at identity, alterity and impersonation: ‘who is me today?’ The miseen-abîme of Pessoa’s infinitely fragmented subject in the poem about a little boy playing with an oxcart cannot but come to mind: Brincava a criança Com um carro de bois. Sentiu-se brincando e disse, eu sou dois! Há um a brincar e há outro a saber, Um vê-me a brincar e outro vê-me a ver. estou por trás de mim Mas se volto a cabeça

The child was playing With an oxcart. He felt himself playing And said, I am two! There is one playing And there is another knowing, One sees me playing The other sees me seeing. I’m behind myself But if I turn my head

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Maria Irene Ramalho de Sousa Santos não era o que eu qu’ria A volta só é essa ... O outro menino não tem pés nem mãos nem é pequenino não tem mãe ou irmãos. e havia comigo Por trás de onde eu estou, Mas se volto a cabeça Já não sei o que sou. e o tal que eu cá tenho e sente comigo, nem pai nem padrinho, nem corpo ou amigo, Tem alma cá dentro ‘Stá a ver-me sem ver, e o carro de bois Começa a parecer.

It’s not what I wanted The turn stops there ... The other little boy Has neither feet nor hands nor is he tiny He has no mother or brothers and sisters. And he was with me Behind where I am, But if I turn my head I no longer know what I am. And the one I have here And feels with me, neither father nor godfather, neither body nor friend, Has a soul inside Sees me without seeing, And the oxcart Begins to appear.

This is a poem signed by Pessoa-himself, as is the much anthologized and far better known, ‘Autopsicografia’, both poems speaking eloquently to the complex interplay of the different heteronyms (the so-called semi-heteronym Bernardo Soares included; see, in this context, #155: ‘e há muito sentimento sincero, muita emoção legítima que tiro de não estar sentindo’ [And there is much sincere feeling, much legitimate emotion that I get from not feeling]). In the rest of my paper I will try to show how Pessoa anticipates (and renders problematical) the philosophers’ understanding of the subject of modernity in their various responses to nancy’s question. As Rimbaud once put it, poetry is always en avant (letter to Paul demeny, 15 May 1871). Citizen, Community, situation, nothing/death Citizen The citizen is Balibar’s reply: ‘After the subject comes the citizen. The citizen (defined by his rights and duties) is that nonsubject who comes after the subject, and whose constitution and recognition put an end (in principle) to the subjection of the subject.’17 Pessoa’s radical modernist poetics is a comment on, and at the same time puts in question, the clear trajectory from subject-ed (subjectus, subditus) to republican citizen in etienne Balibar’s ‘Citizen Subject’. Is the citizen, asks Balibar, the citizen as defined by liberty, equality, fraternity, the constitutive element of the State? His answer is yes and no. The citizen can be simultaneously considered as the constitutive element of the State and as the actor of a revolution. The actor, Balibar specifies, ‘of a permanent revolution: precisely the revolution in which the principle of equality, once it has been made the basis or the pretext of the institution of an inequality or a political “excess of power”, contradicts every difference.’18 The pitfalls and conf licts traced by Balibar in his analysis of the course of european thinking from the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (1789) to the end of the twentieth century can be observed in Pessoa’s work as a whole.

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The poet’s desire to create a State inside himself both underlines and undermines the notion of the active ‘citizen subject’ as formulated by Balibar. In sketch #157 of Livro do desassossego, Pessoa/Soares begins by expressing the impossible desire to create a State inside himself, a State with a political system, parties and revolutions, in order to embody in his own ‘the-people-I’ [povo-eu] the sovereign citizenry of such an imaginary State. The impossibility is further complicated, of course, by the fact that the ‘I’, here, is ‘no one’, that is to say, no person [Pessoa], precedence having been given to the imagined person of Bernardo Soares. The ‘I’’s sacrilegious desire to be ‘all’, to be ‘them’ and ‘not them’ puts in question such ideas of authority and totalization as the State, the people, or even god. More interestingly still, in sketch #120, echoing Balibar metaleptically, as it were, Pessoa/Soares proclaims citizenship as passive resistance to the State: ‘não me submeto ao estado nem aos homens; resisto inertemente [...] nunca me apoquentou o estado [...]’ [I submit myself neither to the State or to men; I resist inertly [...] The State never caused undue concern in me]. In another sketch, the unexpected, sympathetic gesture of a waiter in the modest restaurant where the equally modest assistant bookkeeper usually eats his meals inspires Pessoa/Soares to muse on community, class and status, and the ‘subtleties’ of ‘fraternity’. ‘A fraternidade tem subtilezas’, he states; and then goes on to submit that between an American millionaire and the socialist leader of a village there is no difference of quality but simply of quantity (#24). If fraternity has its subtleties, so does freedom: ‘A liberdade é a possibilidade do isolamento [...] Se te é impossível viver só, nasceste escravo’ [Freedom is the possibility of isolation [...] If you find it impossible to live alone, you were born a slave] (#283). In yet another sketch, Pessoa/Soares suspends the distinction between human beings and trees, and claims to abhor social reformers (#161). Pessoa/Campos’s ‘Cruzou por mim, veio ter comigo, numa rua da Baixa’ cannot but come to mind.19 In this poem, the poet’s lucidity about the difficult articulation of humanity, society and sociability grasps the complexities of social existing and structuring far better than the philosopher’s rigor. Ironically feeling sorry for himself for (willingly) failing to abide by social rules, ‘poor Álvaro de Campos’ (who in another poem adamantly refuses to be ‘taxable’) closes the poem with an expletive that reinforces the lucidity of his social marginality: ‘Merda! Sou lúcido.’ In poem XXXII of O guardador de rebanhos, Pessoa/Caeiro’s disgust at the ‘man from the cities’ (citizen?) who preaches social solidarity is another of Pessoa’s footnotes on the problematization of the republican, egalitarian society emerging from the French Revolution and critically surveyed by Balibar himself as well: ‘Todo o mal do mundo vem de nos importarmos uns com os outros, | quer para fazer bem, quer para fazer mal’ [All the evil in the world comes from concerning ourselves with other people, | Whether to do good or to do evil].20 A poem from Poemas inconjuntos, in explicit dialogue with the one just quoted, reads like another scathing gloss on the hazards of class struggle and social justice: ‘Ontem o pregador de verdades dele | Falou outra vez comigo [...] | Falou de tudo quanto pudesse fazê-lo zangar-se’ [Yesterday the preacher of the truths he holds | spoke with me again [...] He spoke of everything that might make him angry].21

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Situation In ‘On a Finally Objectless Subject’, Alain Badiou insists that ‘the subject’, as that which, in classical philosophy, grounds being, knowledge, and truth, is not obsolete. What comes after the subject, therefore, cannot but be the subject, albeit now redefined as the concrete, finite event, or situation, including what we usually call the subject matter; in a word, the concrete place of existence itself. Badiou rejects the abstract nature of previous metaphysical conceptions of the subject. In Badiou’s thought, truth is not an abstract concept; a truth never pre-exists the event, it is always post-eventual, its process is fidelity to the event. In this frame of thought, individual human consciousness does have a relatively diminished role; what counts now is the ‘event’, the ‘situation’, the ‘[pluri-subjectivized] procedure’, ‘names’ and ‘naming’, and noncoincidental truth; hence the logic of Badiou’s use of the future anterior: a truth, always already, will have been, that is to say, it will never be in the abstract or the infinite. The subject, or rather, subjectivization, is the advent of a twofold event: for example, St Paul/Church; Lenin/the Party; Cantor/serial theory; Schoenberg/atonality; lovers/singular love. But if rather than twofold we think multi-fold, the obvious addition to the series is: Pessoa/heteronyms. Badiou’s statement that a ‘subject is that which uses names to make hypotheses about truth’ seems to have been written with Pessoa in mind. What I am suggesting is that Badiou takes pains to explain here something that is marvellously presented by the poet Fernando Pessoa in many different ways: there is no subject, rather a situation, an event, a subjectivized procedure, names and naming, and noncoincidental truth. A change in space, time or situation — and ‘I’ am no longer ‘I’. Or, on the contrary, my ‘I’ may be suddenly restored to its proper ‘I’. The latter case is masterfully re-enacted in Pessoa/Campos’s ‘Tabacaria’, a poem of total desubjectivization (‘não sou nada [...] tenho em mim todos os sonhos [...] Falhei em tudo’ [I am nothing [...] I have in me all the dreams [...] I have failed in everything]) which ends up resubjectivizing the ‘I’. The poem resorts to several devices (let me call them ‘places’) to situate and ground the subject: the little girl eating chocolates; the invocation of the muse; the tail of the lizard that lends me my title; the signboard of the tobacco shop; the writing (calligraphy) of the poem itself. But the poet’s utter feeling of non-being is only and barely overcome at the very end, when the tobacco shop, the owner of the tobacco shop, and the patron that goes into the tobacco shop, esteves-without-metaphysics, are put in place. no longer ‘nothing’ and now without ‘dreams, grasping the situation, the subject is finally the poet himself, no doubt risking failure, as a true poet: ‘e vou tencionar escrever estes versos em que digo o contrário’ [And I will intend to write these lines in which I say the opposite]. I am tempted to suggest that Alain Badiou would conceive of Pessoa’s oeuvre as a whole as ‘making a hole in knowledge’.22 In sketch #279 of Livro do desassossego, a change in the situation sparks a crisis in the subject. When the office boy leaves the office to return to his home town, the assistant bookkeeper, Bernardo Soares, is in a state of shock. The line, ‘O moço do escritório foi-se embora’ [the office boy has gone away], its content already expressed in a different form twice before, is repeated four times, emphatically

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closing the four last paragraphs of this five-paragraph sketch. The office boy is gone and the office is no longer the same for Soares. The assistant bookkeeper himself is no longer the same. A vital, substantial part of his very being went with the office boy: ‘Fui hoje diminuído’ [I was diminished today]. Only with great effort can Soares resume his work as bookkeeper in the office. Interestingly enough, his work, bookkeeping, is literally ‘writing’ (escrita), the office being, also literally, the ‘place of writing’ (escritório). I have shown elsewhere that Soares’s bookkeeping ledger and his ‘disconnected’ ‘literature’ are inextricably tied together (see sketches #12 and #13).23 A change in the office situation is also a change in the escritório, that is to say, a change in the escrita itself. In the end, the sketch (#279) leaves its readers uncannily in the presence of a self-conscious, Portuguese Bartleby, picturing himself in what can be seen as corresponding to the dead letters office: ‘amanhã [...] eu também serei quem aqui já não está, copiador antigo que vai ser arrumado no armário por baixo do vão da escada’ [tomorrow [...] I will also be the person who is no longer here, old copier about to be stowed away in the closet under the stairs]. Community Commenting on the fact that he did not write a response to his question himself, Jean-Luc nancy concludes his introduction to Who Comes after the Subject? by high lighting the commonality of presence. ‘The coming into presence is plural,’ he says, ‘in each case “ours” as much as “mine”. This community without the essence of community, without a common being, is the ontological condition of existence as presence-to [...] the plural liberates (or shares) the singular, the singular liberates (or shares) the plural, in a community without subject [...] Who thinks, if not the community?’24 When he helped to produce this book, nancy had already published La Communauté désœuvrée.25 This earlier book is an attack on the totalizing implications of one of the most important concepts of the Western tradition, namely the idea of community. Focusing mainly on Bataille to ref lect on mid-twentieth-century european intellectuals’ nostalgia for a lost community, as well as on their fascination with either the mystical totalization of Christian communion (best expressed in national Socialism) or communism/Stalinism, nancy critiques both the suspension of difference and erasure of an outside, as in Christianity, and an undifferentiated, egalitarian, producing society, threatening totalitarianism, as in communism. The community he proposes is ‘unworking’, (désœuvrée) precisely because it ‘cannot arise from the domain of work (œuvre). One does not produce it, one experiences or one is constituted by it as the experience of finitude.’26 nancy does conceive of being as community, but community as defined by ‘ecstasy’, that is to say, by the capacity to be beside itself, not ab-solute, hence stating the impossibility of complete immanence: being is ever being-with, fragmentary, and sharing (partage). Because it has the capacity to interrupt itself, experience ecstasy and exist outside itself, literature best inscribes community-assharing.27 Community is what takes place through others. It is the space of the I’s that are not egos, but rather others.28 Could nancy be thinking of Pessoa here? Perhaps not.29 But when he writes that ‘there is no singular being without another singular being’, that only ‘a being-in-

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common makes possible a being-separated’, that community is not communion, rather communication-as-sharing in the compearance (com-parution) of finite others, this reader cannot but think of the complex community dynamics of the selfinterruptive heteronyms of Fernando Pessoa.30 The major heteronyms — Caeiro, Campos, Reis, Soares, Pessoa-Himself — compear (com-paraît) as poetry by sharing and inscribing community. Community as sharing but also as unworking, that is to say, as having nothing to do with production or completion, and everything to do with ‘interruption, fragmentation, suspension’.31 Or imperfection and ruin. given its praise of incompletion, imperfection, ruin, uselessness and the absurd, and given its utter contempt for productivity and utility, sketch #330 of Livro do desassossego again sounds like a metaleptic commentary, this time on nancy’s communauté désœuvrée: ‘[P]or que escrevo eu este livro? Porque o reconheço imperfeito. Calado seria a perfeição; escrito, imperfeiçoa-se. e, sobretudo, porque defendo a inutilidade, o absurdo’ (Why do I write this book? Because I recognize it as imperfect. Silent, it would be perfection; written, it imperfects itself. And, above all, because I defend uselessness, the absurd). The same could be said of sketches #311, 312, 313, which, by parodically demystifying the Christian concept of ‘the so-called thy neighbour’ (o chamado semelhante), seem to make fun of the semi-religious overtones of nancy’s discussion of ‘le semblable’, alterity, and community.32 The heteronyms are livros (books) that are pessoas (persons). They interrupt themselves and one another, as nancy says literature must do if it is to inscribe community. Above all, the heteronyms (Pessoa’s drama em gente [drama in people]), are the perfect dramatization of poetry as interruption.33 A brilliant example is ‘Saudação a Walt Whitman’, signed by Álvaro de Campos. The extended apostrophic address to the American poet, himself grounded in the interruptiveness of his many ‘I’s’, ‘Me’s’, ‘Me myselves’, as well as all their opposites, is interrupted two thirds of the way by a somewhat surprising call, written in english in the original: ‘He calls Walt.’ If the salutation poem is written by Álvaro de Campos, who is this person (pessoa) interloping here to explain what is happening? It cannot but be Fernando Pessoa (the other one of the heteronyms who knows english). Moreover, the interruptive meta-explanation cannot but convene the community of the heteronyms which cannot fail to compear. The interruption is followed by one final ecstatic outburst of poetic naming which translates Walt Whitman into the very Pessoan idea of poetry: multiple, many-voiced, paradoxical, interloping, inter-relational, self-interrupting. Ultimately, ungraspable communication. ‘Saudação a Walt Whitman’ is a hymn to the interpenetration of the singular and the plural, a hymn to the mystery of identity and difference. It is the chant of an ‘I’ that is really ‘others’. Within the community of heteronyms, Álvaro is and is not Walt. Failing in this problematical identification, the poetic self is condemned to the anxiety and pain of not recognizing himself, as in ‘Mestre, meu mestre querido’, also signed by Álvaro de Campos. More than a tribute to the sublime poetic being embodied in Alberto Caeiro (the poet who is not even ‘a poet’ because he knows how to see), ‘Mestre, meu mestre querido’ is an elegy for Álvaro de Campos, the tortured ‘decadent poet’ who has grasped the ‘terrifying science of seeing’ from Caeiro, but not the master’s ‘serenity’.34 To complete the community of heteronyms here, suffice it to

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mention Pessoa/Reis’s ‘Vem sentar-te comigo, Lídia, à beira do rio’ [Come sit by my side, Lydia, by the river] and Pessoa-Himself ’s Fausto. In the former, amidst the placidity of quietude (sossegadamente), disquietude having been previously relativized (sem desassossegos grandes), ignorance of death is the sad privilege of paganism (pagãos inocentes da decadência [pagans innocent of decadence]; pagã triste e com flores no regaço [a pagan, sad and with f lowers in her lap]). In Fausto, which rather than a ‘subjective tragedy’, as Pessoa called it, is best described as a tragedy of subjectivity, knowledge is terrifying because it is no less than dread of nothingness and death.35 Nothing/Death Who comes after the subject? no one, Lacoue-Labarthe is tempted to reply, thinking of Fernando Pessoa. Who comes after the subject? Personne? Pessoa-ninguém? Or ninguém-as-Pessoa? Looking at a corpse, in sketch #40, Pessoa/Soares understands death as a ‘departure’, the disappearance of a subject from the dead interval that is life, leaving behind his garment finally discarded as useless.36 In sketch #42, the poet’s contract with death grants him the nothingness of his own disappearance. And in sketch #262, in a gesture that evokes several heteronymic poems, including Fernando Pessoa’s ‘O que eu fui o que é?’, Ricardo Reis’s ‘nada fica de nada. nada somos’, and Álvaro de Campos’s ‘Começo a conhecer-me. não existo’, the I’s nonexistence after itself, so to speak, is powerfully narrated.37 The subject is here a perfect nothing, a nothingness that yields itself up to its own narrative of itself. In a gesture reminiscent of the disquieting interval that is presence and absence at the same time, the subject is nothing, but a nothing that is a centre, and a centre that is in turn surrounded by nothing. The incomprehensibility of it all is registered in the poet’s absurd and proper sensation: ‘Cheguei hoje, de repente, a uma sensação absurda e justa. Reparei [...] que não sou ninguém. ninguém, absolutamente ninguém [...] Roubaram-me o poder ser antes que o mundo fosse [...] reencarnei sem mim [...] Sou uma figura de romance por escrever [...] sou o nada [...] o centro de tudo com o nada à roda’ [Today, I suddenly reached an absurd and proper sensation. I noticed [...] that I am no one. no one, absolutely no one [...] They robbed me of the power to be before the world ever was [...] I reincarnated without me [...] I am a character in a novel yet to be written [...] I am nothingness [...[ The center of everything with nothingness on every side]. no heteronym better speaks the language of the ‘nothing’ that the subject of modernity is than Álvaro de Campos. Any of the poems already quoted would do, but let me linger a little on the two ‘Lisbon Revisited’ poems before I return to ‘Tabacaria’ for my conclusion. I suggested above that ‘Lisbon Revisited (1923)’ puts in question Balibar’s notion of the citizen subject. It also renders problematical nancy’s notion of community: ‘Ah, que maçada quererem que eu seja da companhia!’ [Oh, what a bore that they want me to be of the company!]. To the extent that ‘Lisbon’, the place, being the same and other than itself, fails to hold the lyric I in both poems, both ‘Lisbon Revisited (1923)’ and ‘Lisbon Revisited (1926)’ can be read as metaleptic commentaries on Badiou’s conception of the modern subject as a place or situation. Who comes after the subject? Pessoa/Campos’s response is, the placeless foreigner: ‘estrangeiro aqui como em toda a parte’ [Foreigner here as everywhere

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else] (1926). Ask the question again and you will wonder about Lacoue-Labarthe’s reply. The ever-foreign subject is less than nothing and less than death. It is a splintered fragment, a brittle shard, a resilient remnant — just like the wriggling tail of the lizard in ‘Tabacaria’. The tail of the lizard is, thus, an apt metaphor for the Pessoan tale of the fragmented/fragmentary subject of modernity, which european (‘continental’) philosophers would discuss at the end of the twentieth century. Part of the tale that my lizard’s tail tells is that poetry happens first and theory lags behind. Theory is always posterous. notes to Chapter 18 1. ‘Perhaps you merely existed, like a lizard whose tail they cut off | And is a tail on this side of the lizard, wriggling’. My translation. When not otherwise indicated, translations are my own. I thank Monica Varese Andrade for her careful reading of my paper and brilliant suggestions. For three complete (and very different) translations of ‘Tabacaria’ see The Tabacconist’s/Tabacaria. A Poem by Fernando Pessoa (Álvaro de Campos), trans. by Suzette Macedo (Lisbon: Calouste gulbenkian Foundation, 1987), a bilingual edition; Poems of Fernando Pessoa, trans. by edwin Honig and Susan Margaret Brown (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1998 [1986]), pp. 98–104; and Fernando Pessoa & Co.: Selected Poems, trans. by Richard Zenith (new York: grove Press, 1998), pp. 173–79. 2. Who Comes after the Subject? ed. by eduardo Cadava and others (new York: Routledge, 1991). 3. Who Comes after the Subject?, pp. 24–32. French: ‘d’un sujet enfin sans objet’, Cahiers Confrontation, 20 (1989), 13–22. Alain Badiou elaborates on what he means by ‘the age of the poets’ in ‘L’Âge des poètes’, in La Politique des poètes: Pourquois des poètes en temps de détresse, ed. by Jacques Rancière (Paris: Albin Michel, 1992), pp. 21–38. In the very first sentence of this particular essay, Badiou explains that he first introduced the idea of an ‘age of the poets’ in his Manifeste pour la philosophie (Paris: Seuil, 1989). However, the same title (‘L’Âge des poètes’) presides over two different, though complementary, texts. In the one included in Manifeste, Badiou mentions Pessoa’s ‘pluralized subject’ and quotes Pessoa/Campos’s ‘O binómio de newton é tão belo como a Vénus de Milo’ (translation in Fernando Poems, Selected Poems, trans. by Jonathan griffin (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974; repr. 1982). In the one included in La Politique des poètes, Badiou quotes poems from O guardador de rebanhos (‘Há metafísica bastante em não pensar em nada’; ‘Acho tão natural que não se pense’; ‘deste modo ou daquele modo’). Pessoa’s poems, identified by title or first line, can easily be found in any edition. 4. Alain Badiou, ‘Une tâche philosophique: être contemporain de Pessoa’, in Petit manuel d’inesthéthique (Paris: Seuil, 1998), pp. 61–89. english: Handbook of Inaesthetics, trans. by Alberto Toscano (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), pp. 36–45 (‘A Philosophical Task: To Be Contemporaries of Pessoa’). More recently, in Le Siècle (Paris: Seuil, 2005), Badiou resorts to Pessoa once again to explain, or perhaps understand, through Álvaro de Campos, the ‘cruelties’ of our time. english: The Century, trans. by Alberto Toscano (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007). 5. On the philosophical need to overturn, or not, Platonism, see Max Statkiewicz’s Rhapsody of Philosophy: Dialogues with Plato in Contemporary Thought (Philadelphia: Penn State University Press, 2009). 6. I prefer ‘disquietude’ (the term used by Richard Zenith in his first english translation of Livro do desassossego, as well as by edwin Honig in Always Astonished) because it better translates the sound and rhythm of ‘desassossego’, perfectly conveying its ‘sound reasoning’ (Christopher Smart). But also because it was a word used by the english romantic poets that Pessoa knew so well. Just a few examples: Wordsworth (in The Prelude, Books IV and V); Coleridge (twice, in a letter to the Morgans, 10–12 February 1808); Byron (in ‘darkness’); Shelley (in The Revolt of Islam, I. xxxiii). If Pessoa were to say desassossego in english, I suspect he would choose disquietude. Zenith’s first version of Livro do desassossego was published as The Book of Disquietude (Manchester: Carcanet/

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gulbenkian Foundation, 1991). See also Fernando Pessoa, Always Astonished: Selected Prose, ed., trans. and intro. by edwin Honig (San Francisco: City Lights, 1988), p. 68. 7. Who Comes after the Subject? p. 45. emphasis added. 8. All quotations from Livro do desassossego, ed. by Richard Zenith (Lisbon: Assírio & Alvim, 1998). Translations mine, but see The Book of Disquiet, trans. by Richard Zenith (new York: Penguin, 2001; repr. 2003). Sketches identified by the number ascribed to them by this editor; or, failing that, title and page number. Teresa Sobral Cunha’s new edition reached me too late for use in this essay (Fernando Pessoa [Vicente guedes/Bernardo Soares], Livro do desassossego, ed. by Teresa Sobral Cunha (Lisbon: Relógio d’Água, 2008)). 9. That, to my mind, Pessoa’s ‘intervalo’ illuminates Heidegger’s concepts of ‘between’ (das Zwischen), ‘dif-ference’ (der Unter-schied) and ‘rift’ (der Riß) is a matter for another paper. See Martin Heidegger, ‘die Sprache’, in Unterwegs zur Sprache (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, [1959] 1985), pp. 9–30. The translations are Albert Hofstadter’s in Poetry, Language Thought (new York: Perennial Classics, 1971; repr. 2001), pp. 185–208. 10. For a complete translation of ‘Saudação a Walt Whitman’, see Poems of Fernando Pessoa, pp. 81–89. 11. Cf. Irene Ramalho Santos, Atlantic Poets: Fernando Pessoa’s Turn in Anglo-American Modernism (Hanover, nH: University Press of new england, 2003), p. 259. 12. Who Comes after the Subject? pp. 198–205. 13. It is tempting to surmise that Pessoa/personne may be somehow behind Roger Laporte’s Lettre à personne, avant-propos de Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe; postface de Maurice Blanchot ([Paris]: Plon, 1989). It is also fair and relevant to remember that Leyla Perrone-Moisés’s inf luential ‘Pessoa personne?’ was published in Tel Quel, 60 (1974) 86–104. See also Perrone-Moisés, Fernando Pessoa: aquém do eu, além do outro (São Paulo: Martins Fontes, 1982; repr. 1990). 14. For ‘pessoas-livros’, see Fernando Pessoa, Páginas íntimas e de auto-interpretação, ed. by georg Rudolf Lind and Jacinto do Prado Coelho (Lisbon: Ática, 1966) p. 101. 15. Fernando Pessoa, Notas para a recordação do meu Mestre Caeiro, ed. by Teresa Rita Lopes (Lisbon: estampa, 1997), p. 75. For the complete translation of these Notas, see The Selected Prose of Fernando Pessoa, trans. by Richard Zenith (new York: grove Press, 2001), pp. 38–50. 16. Who Comes after the Subject? pp. 58–60. 17. Who Comes after the Subject? pp. 33–57. For this particular quotation, see pp. 38–39 (emphasis in original). 18. Who Comes after the Subject? p. 54 (emphasis in original). 19. For a translation of the entire poem, see Poems of Fernando Pessoa, pp. 117–19. In ‘Lisbon Revisited (1923)’, Álvaro de Campos indignantly resists conventional, societal mores: ‘Queriam-me casado, fútil, quotidiano e tributável?’ [You wanted me married, futile, quotidian and taxable?]. Poem also translated in full in Poems of Fernando Pessoa, pp. 90–91. 20. For a complete translation of O guardador de rebanhos, see The Keeper of Sheep, trans. by edwin Honig and Susan M. Brown (Riverdale-on Hudson, nY: The Sheep Meadow Press, 1985). The poem quoted is no. XXXII. 21. For a complete translation of ‘Ontem o pregador de verdades dele’, by Richard Zenith, see Fernando Pessoa & Co, p. 83. 22. Who Comes after the Subject? p. 25. 23. Cf. Maria Irene Ramalho Santos, ‘The Art of Rumination: Pessoa’s Heteronyms Re-visited’, Journal of Romance Studies 3, 3 (2003), 9–22 (special issue on re-reading and re-writing ed. by Ziva Ben-Porat). A revised, slightly longer version, in Portuguese, entitled ‘A arte da ruminação: Os heterónimos pessoanos revisitados’, appeared in Largo mundo alumiado, Festschrift for Vítor Aguiar e Silva (Braga: Universidade do Minho, 2004 [published in 2005]). 24. Who Comes after the Subject? p. 8. emphasis in the original. 25. Jean Luc-nancy, La Communauté désœuvrée (Paris: Christian Bourgois editeur, 1986). I quote from The Inoperative Community, ed. by Peter Connor; foreword by Christopher Fynsk (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1991). 26. The Inoperative Community, p. 31. 27. Ibid., p. 72. Cf. Le Partage des voix (Paris: galilée, 1982). 28. The Inoperative Community, p. 6 and p. 15.

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29. But see Jean Luc-nancy, Les Muses (Paris: galilée, [1994] 2001), pp. 57–58, where poem no. XXXIX from O guardador de rebanhos and ‘Ontem o pregador de verdades dele’, from ‘Poemas inconjuntos’, are quoted (cf. The Muses, trans. by Peggy Kamuf (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), pp. 30–31). 30. nancy’s terms, com-paraître and com-parution, have a juridical implication (to appear before a tribunal) well captured by Peter Connor’s compear and compearance. The Inoperative Community, p. 29. For the previous quotations, see pp. xxxvii, 28 and 29. 31. The Inoperative Community, p. 31. 32. Communauté désœuvrée, pp. 81–85; The Inoperative Community, pp. 32–34. 33. Speaking of his heteronyms in a biobibliographical note he wrote for presença (november 1928), Pessoa says: ‘É um drama em gente, em vez de em actos’ [It is a drama in people, rather than in acts], in Páginas íntimas e de auto-interpretação, p. 102, the idea is expressed slightly differently: ‘em vez de dramas em actos e acção, dramas em almas’ [dramas in souls, rather than in acts and action]. 34. english versions of both ‘Saudação a Walt Whitman’ and ‘Mestre, meu mestre querido’ in Poems of Fernando Pessoa, pp. 81–89 and 106–08. 35. I discuss this aspect of Fausto in Atlantic Poets, pp. 256–59. 36. Cf. ‘Marcha Fúnebre’, p. 445: ‘A vida é [...] um intervalo, [...] intervalo morto entre a Morte e a Morte’ [Life is [...] an interval, [...] a dead interval between death and death]. 37. For translations of Reis’s ‘nada fica de nada. nada somos’ and Campos’s ‘Começo a conhecerme. não existo’, see Poems of Fernando Pessoa, p. 142 and p. 116 respectively.

C H A P t e r 19

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ezra Pound and Fernando Pessoa with T. S. eliot in-between Maria de Lurdes Sampaio Sentir tudo de todas as maneiras, Viver tudo de todos os lados, Ser a mesma coisa de todos os modos possíveis ao mesmo tempo, Realizar em si toda a humanidade de todos os momentos num só momento difuso, profuso, completo e longínquo. Fernando Pessoa/Álvaro de Campos What thou lovest well remains, the rest is dross What thou lov’st well shall not be reft from thee What thou lov’st well is thy true heritage Whose world, or mine, or theirs or is it of none? First came the seen, then thus the palpable elysium, though it were in the halls of hell, What thou lovest well is thy true heritage What thou lov’st well shall not be reft from thee ezra Pound

(1). The first steps towards Fernando Pessoa’s universal recognition were taken in the 1980’s, according to José Blanco.1 Blanco’s account of Pessoa’s reception in the United Kingdom and in the United States notes that the translation into english of O Livro do Desassossego [The Book of Disquietude] played a major role in the worldwide diffusion of Pessoa and of his works. Similarly, it was also in the late eighties and more so in the nineties, that both in Portugal and abroad relevant comparative studies appeared, and that some forgotten texts were given closer attention (e.g. detective fiction and the english poems). One of the first critics to rescue Pessoa from the fringes of the history of modernism, while associating him with Anglo-American modernism, was José Palla e Carmo (1987).2 In his essay ‘Uma Trindade: ezra Pound, T. S. eliot, Fernando Pessoa’, Carmo outlines some parallels between the works of Pound, eliot and Pessoa (all of whom shared the condition of exiled men), and it is interesting to note that Carmo stresses more similarities between the works of Pound and

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Pessoa than between those of Pessoa and eliot (both born in 1888). It is the aim of this essay to elaborate on some of the affinities sketched by Carmo such as these three poet’s cosmopolitanism, their lifetime experimentation, their anti-Romantic and fragmentary poetics and mainly the famous process of depersonalization, to which eliot’s name is closely connected. nevertheless, according to the poet and modernist critic Casais Monteiro, Pessoa went ‘mais longe de que eliot, quando em 1931 nos dá a admirável síntese na qual, referindo-se a si próprio, nos diz ter a “exaltação íntima do poeta e a despersonalização do dramaturgo” ’ [went further than eliot when, in 1931, he gives us an amazing synthesis in which he, referring to himself, admits to have ‘the intimate exaltation of the poet and the depersonalization of the dramatist’]3. For several reasons, it was T. S. eliot who became the most famous expounder of the theory of impersonality which is linked to modernist poetics as a whole and to its anti-Romantic trends. The essay ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ (1919) seems to be its main manifesto, although the importance of this essay to some extent lies in eliot’s discussion of tradition and in his definition of poetic emotion by means of the analogy drawn to a chemical catalyst. This theory was corroborated by the striking concept of ‘objective correlative’ presented in ‘Hamlet and his Problems’ (1919). Later, in 1922, the publication of The Waste Land highlighted the idea that the poet did not have a personality to express, or that ‘[t]he progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality’.4 As the history of its reception shows, the poem would soon come to symbolize the disillusionment of the post-World War I generation, and its techniques of elliptical juxtaposition, montage and collage, its play with different voices and languages, its complex intertextual network would rapidly become a model for younger poets who wanted to move away from Victorian or Romantic poetry. In this scenario, we should not disregard Pound’s crucial contribution to the theory of impersonality, which had a great impact on eliot’s poetic and critical works. In fact, it is in The Spirit of Romance (1910) that Pound launches one of his typical definitions of poetry and arts in general: ‘Poetry is a sort of inspired mathematics, which gives us equations, not for abstract figures, triangles, spheres, and the like, but equations for the human emotions.’5 The recurrence of the word ‘equation’ in his definition of poetry in early essays extends itself to the definition of image itself — the image able to convey emotions in a non confessional language: ‘not an equation of mathematics, not something about a, b, and c, having something to do with form, but about sea, cliffs, night, having something to do with mood.’ 6 As is well known, over the years Pound maintained that poetry had a social function in the modern world and was as important as sciences in general. This explains some idiosyncrasies of his critical discourse, plenty of analogies and metaphors taken from hard sciences, from electricity and electromagnetism — given that light is one of his poetic and political central metaphors.7 Having outlined the fact that these three authors each devoted themselves to the definition of a theory of impersonality (although in slightly different ways), what is important is not to track down any priority but rather to stress that all these modernists were in some sense moving away from Romantic poetics, from the confessional, over-sentimental and rhetorical language of the age and were in

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fact exploring innovative ways of writing. They all tried to do so without rejecting tradition (i.e., the greeks, Shakespeare or other canonical authors), but at the same time were willing to take on modern challenges. (2). As commonly accepted, ezra Pound began his career as a poet by engaging in a conscious experimentation with masks (mainly the Provençal troubadours) and other poets’ language, using Browning’s and Yeats’s poetics as models, as he himself admits: ‘I began this search for the real in a book called Personae, casting off, as it were, complete masks of the self in each poem. I continued in a long series of translations, which were but more elaborate masks.’8 In fact, Personae (1909), as a fitting title, unravels that process of borrowing languages — or rewriting from foreign languages as in translation — which would allow the American poet, devoid of a poetic language and voice of his own, to cope with the many epistemological, poetic and cultural issues of modern times. The poem ‘Masks’, which is displaced from his first book A Lume Spento (1908) into Personae, pointed to another process of talking indirectly about private emotions or stories: the use of the myth in general, and of greek myth in particular. In the essay ‘Psychology and Troubadours’ (1910), Pound offers his own theory of the genesis of myth: ‘I believe that greek myth arose when someone having passed through delightful psychic experience tried to communicate it to others and found it necessary to screen himself from persecution.’9 In a later essay ‘Vers Libre and Arnold dolmetsch’ (1918), Pound repeats this theory and equates myth with work of art, which he explains as ‘an impersonal or objective story woven out of his own emotion’.10 In the early years of the twentieth century, settled in europe, Pound had already defined or sketched three important modes of occultation of the self — personae, translation and myth. What is most relevant, though, is that he put these strategies into practice and explored them in many different ways within a very short period of time. In 1913, Pound moved away from imagisme to vorticism, disappointed with what he considered the static and excessive descriptiveness of imagisme and he reformulated his previous definition of image as ‘that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time’,11 replacing it by another one closer to vorticist aesthetics: ‘The image is not an idea; is a radiant node or cluster; it is what I can, and must perforce, call a VORTeX, from which, and through which, and into which, ideas are constantly rushing.’12 Moreover, vorticism seemed to offer him some solutions for his interest in the alliance of arts, and, above all, reinforced his theory of words containing energy which might be enhanced by ‘exact juxtaposition’, as he wrote in The Spirit of Romance.13 This period was also that of the discovery of the ideogram through Fenollosa, whose view of Chinese characters fascinated Pound: ‘A true noun, an isolated thing, does not exist in nature. Things are only the terminal points, or rather the meeting points, of actions, cross-sections cut through actions, snapshots. [...] The eye sees noun and verb as one: things in motion, motion in things.’14 Pound’s enthusiasm for the ideogram encouraged him to go on exploring rather unorthodox modes of translation, which are often referred as paraphrases or versions, as in Cathay (1915), and later in Homage to Sextus Propertius (1917). At the same time (and linked to the practice of translation), Pound

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became more and more interested in prosodics, in the musical properties of words, in rhythm, that is to say, in melopeia.15 (3). Fernando Pessoa was, like Pound, a translator of other poets, who left several plans and drafts of translations (both from english into Portuguese and from Portuguese into english) and who also elected rhythm as a key principle in the art of translating, as attested by some notes on an intended theory of translation and by his translation of Poe’s ‘The Raven’. The poem ‘O Corvo’ (1924) was preceded by the sentence: ‘Tradução de Fernando Pessoa, ritmicamente conforme o original’ [Fernando Pessoa’s rhythmic translation according to the original poem]. 16 Pessoa’s practice and projects of translation prove how important this kind of cultural transfer was for him; he regarded translation as a way of fighting provincialism, as a step towards cosmopolitanism.17 Although there is no confession by Pessoa that translation might be a mask or a process of depersonalization, one may infer this from some of his plans to translate the elected poets (such as Shakespeare’s works). One may even say, borrowing Steiner’s view of the musical interpreter, that translation always implies the intrusion of the self into otherness, which allows the translator to declare (after Rimbaud) Je est un autre. Thus, this practice overf lows the linguistic level, as Steiner puts it: ‘To experience difference, to feel the characteristic resistance and ‘materiality’ of that which differs, is to re-experience identity. One’s own space is mapped by what lies outside,’18 If one considers Pessoa’s biography (and the ‘return of the author’ is, sometimes, necessary), the whole issue of ‘otherness’ has to take into account Pessoa’s displacement from Portugal into South Africa and learning of english when he was seven years old. Throughout his main and radical process of depersonalization, Pessoa used devices such as the process of feigning, the use of masks and dramatis personae, notably, the semi-heteronyms and the heteronyms Alberto Caeiro, Álvaro de Campos and Ricardo Reis (just to mention the sacred trilogy). Literature on the heteronymic phenomenon is vast, both in Portugal and abroad, and there is no need to discuss, in this place, its significance and the way that it realized, to a certain extent, and avant la lettre, Foucault’s theories on the extinction of the modern idea (and pathology) of the Author.19 This essay will leave aside the heteronyms and take a brief look at the least famous devices of impersonality, such as masks or the use of the objective correlative, in order to show both the affinities and differences between Pessoa and Pound and eliot. The ‘VIII Sonnet’ of 35 English Sonnets is without doubt a key poem within Pessoa’s work as a whole, and the complexity of Pessoa’s masks as used in this poem is best seen when we compare them to those ‘tales of old disguise’ in Pound’s Masks (1908; 1912). Pessoa’s lines read like this: ‘How many masks wear we, and undermasks, [...] | The true mask feels no inside to the mask | but looks out of the mask by co-masked eyes. [...] And when a thought would unmask our soul’s masking, | Itself goes not unmasked to the unmasking.’20 In Pound, the masks were just a device of occultation of what might be the subject’s face or private story, thus more implying sociological rather than

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ontological issues. As Hugh Witemeyer claims, Poundian masks (at least during his London years) were a kind of linguistic device for hiding personal utterance, for the subject’s protection from ‘others’.21 In Pessoa, masks have from early times a deep ontological and psychological nature and are associated with a sense of the unreality of the world and with his personal anxieties, his fear of madness and fragmentation (hence Pessoa’s deep interest in nineteenth-century psychiatric and criminologist theories). Pessoa’s masks, as the above poem shows us, are like onions with layers upon layers without a centre. The process of impersonality is, in fact, tried in different ways outside the territory of heteronyms. ‘desolation’ is an almost forgotten poem, written in 1916 and published posthumously by george Lind.22 In spite of its length, it is possibly the poem that most resembles (and anticipates) some passages of eliot’s The Waste Land, suggesting his use of the objective correlative. A subjective state of mind or inner feelings of anguish and sterility (‘broken heart’, ‘empty heart’) are conveyed through objective images of a dry landscape. Let us look at the opening stanza: ‘Here where the rugged hills | Their gnarled loose basis grip into the earth, | And nothing save the sorrow of our birth | From seeing the seeing spirit fills, | Here where, among the grim, deserted stones | Or water’s sound’.23 It is very likely that at the time he wrote this poem Pessoa had read Frazer’s Golden Bough, Marvell’s poetry, or Spenser’s Prothalamion (since he knew Spenser’s writings well). Like Pound and eliot, Pessoa was an omnivorous reader; all of them may be considered ‘Writing-Readers’ and they wrote strong dialogic works.24 But unlike Pound and eliot, in Pessoa’s works ‘dialogues’ with other authors have not a strong visibility. There are many passages in The Book of Disquietude about readings (or the act of reading), but few names are identified (Padre António Vieira or Cesário Verde are the most visible). Yet it is hard to believe that we face a clear process of concealing or denying inf luences. In 1914, Pessoa even made a short list of his inf luences between 1904 and 1913 (with reference to many english and Portuguese Romantic poets, as well as ‘os simbolistas franceses’). Certainly one never finds in Pessoa’s work anything similar to Pound’s exhortation to young poets: ‘Be inf luenced by as many great poets as you can, but have the decency either to acknowledge or try to conceal it’.25 As I have argued in another essay, there is no place in Pound’s writings for the Bloomian anxiety of inf luence.26 Although Pound believed that great art is not just the result of many hours’ work but ‘must be an exceptional thing [...] the result of some exceptional faculty, strength or perceptions’,27 he always defended the importance of a serious study of other poets’ works. For him ‘the experimental demonstrations of one man may save the time of many’.28 There is in Pound’s typology of poets no Romantic panegyric of originality. Part of the genius of ‘[t]he so-called major poets’ (dante), he writes in The Serious Artist, is due to their ‘faculty of amalgamation’ or recreation through/by translation.29 More than other modernist authors, he took the task of translation very seriously and his practice of free translation was the origin of fruitful discussions on the meaning of ‘translating’. Pound’s ABC of Reading, for instance, may (also) be read as a treatise on the importance of literary and cultural transfers and transfusions. In ‘After Babel’, george Steiner considers Pound as one

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of a few authors who said ‘anything fundamental or new about translation’.30 In one essay, included in Ezra Pound and the Making of Modernism published in 2007, William Pratt argues that Pound never created ex nihilo, that he was a master of the act of recreating and that he should be regarded mainly as a translator, without diminishing his value.31 george Steiner suggested a similar approach when he stated, in After Babel, that ‘Pound’s genius [was] largely one of mimicry and selfmetamorphosis’.32 When one turns to some of Pessoa’s typology of poets and to some statements made in 1913, it seems that he did not at all share Pound’s theories regarding inf luence and technical apprenticeship. In that year, at the age of twenty-five, Pessoa wrote: ‘I am now in full possession of the fundamental laws of literary art. Shakespeare can no longer teach me to be subtle, nor Milton to be complete.’33 But a closer look at Pessoa’s laboratory throws light on this issue. All the published or unpublished fragments in his Espólio point to a continuous process of experimentation (as the multitude of sketches on the same theme testifies alongside with the variants in a single fragment). Pessoa’s readings play, in most part of his work, the role ascribed by eliot to the poet’s personal emotions in the famous analogy of the catalyst: readings function like filiated platinum — they enable the process, but in the end there are either no signs of it or only some traces of it. Pessoa’s work does not offer a visible intertextual nature and almost the whole of his poetry can be read without footnotes or extra-textual information. even his epic poem Mensagem (in so far it is ‘a poem including history’), with its factual characters, does not call for an erudite reader as The Cantos and even The Waste Land do — although it may require a reader familiar with the esoteric sciences. (4). The issue of tradition naturally raises the question of these poets’ relationship to one another and their role within the literary and art movements (isms) that appeared at the beginning of the twentieth century, both in england and Portugal. Pound’s immersion in vorticism might have helped him to come to terms with the imperative to be modern (and to modernize his language), without renouncing his fascination for past literature and cultures or the long epic poem The Cantos. As dasenbrock argues, if the vorticists’ view of history was by no means reverential, it was not ignorant of it.34 With vorticist artists (mainly with epstein) Pound may have learnt to make a more dynamic use of juxtaposition (of styles, of primitive and modern traditions, of different cultures and centuries). Or, in dasenbrock’s synthesis: ‘Juxtapose the old and the new, and they will comment on and illuminate each other.’35 It is no surprise that two years after the heyday of vorticism, Pound started writing The Cantos. Pessoa’s engagement in art movements does not have the frenetic touch of Pound’s activities, but in the period 1914–15 Pessoa seems firmly decided to put his ideas into actions. Those years are a key moment in Pessoa’s career as the ‘maker of civilization’ which he intended to be; a period of fertile production and public intervention. It is interesting to notice that several times Pessoa attempted a classification and definition of arts from different angles (or entries), and that he used graphics and

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geometry to present his typology of arts, possibly by drawing some inspiration from vorticism. Those graphics36 clearly reveal an ambitious plan to fit intersectionism into a universal History of Art: ‘classicism’, ‘romanticism’, ‘symbolism’, ‘intersectionism’. Both intersectionism and sensationism are, as vorticism was, somewhat detached from futurism or cubism. Osvaldo Silvestre, Vítor Aguiar e Silva and Jerónimo Pizarro, among a particular group of critics, agree that Pessoa’s isms don’t fall easily into the category of the avant-garde, in spite of some inf luences, or ‘suggestions’, according to Pessoa’s own words.37 It is important to note that, except for some circumstantial texts (such as Campos’s Triumphal Ode), Pessoa also disparaged futurism, as did the vorticists, and his view of cubism is also evident: cubism provided the intersectionist writings with a method of decomposition of ‘not things, but our sensations of things’.38 It is also worthwhile studying the effects and refractions of imagism and of vorticism in Pessoa’s definitions of intersectionism. Here the main thought relates to two passages, one where Pessoa talks about good art as being a simultaneous representation of an inner and an outer landscape, that is, a perfect intersection of both landscapes,39 and another where intersectionism is strictly defined in spatial terms: ‘não podemos pensar em 2 ou mais cousas ao mesmo tempo. O que podemos é reduzil-as a uma — isto é fazer, ou esperar a ocasião, em que todos esses planos se cortem n’um ponto’ [We cannot think of 2 or more things at the same time. What we can do is to reduce them to one — that is to create, or wait for the occasion when all plans intersect at one point].40 There is also clear evidence that in Pessoa’s mind, imagism and intersectionism could coexist: ‘Francamente intersectionista é este trecho do imagista F. S. Flint’41 [Truly intersectionist is this text by the imagist F. S. Flint]. The application of some intersectionist principles can be seen in Campos’s poetry and famous poems such as ‘The Slanting Rain’ (1914), which has a remarkable dynamic quality. According to Pessoa’s own explanation, the poem accomplishes the intersection between ‘Visual Arts’, ‘Music’ and ‘Literature’.42 each of these arts is defined on the grounds of a principle of ‘simultaneity’ (space, time, etc.), in which the operator also assures distinctions between them. Pessoa seems to follow the vorticist programme of art’s alliance but he clearly defines that kind of alliance, not by a process of joining or fusing but by ‘intersections’: ‘nós queremos musica × pintura × poesia’ [We want music × painting × poetry].43 He even talks about ‘interartes’, but he categorically condemns any idea of fusion or synthesis; rather he insists on the need for differentiation, considering that the contemporary ideal of joining them together is a deep mistake. On reading all of Pessoa’s texts on isms, there is no doubt that intersectionism was but a stage in the poet’s search for that which would lead him to sensationism. As José gil rightly argues in Fernando Pessoa ou a Metafísica das Sensações, ‘sensations’ are at the very core of Pessoa’s writings and are a recurrent subject (often implicit) both in his doctrinal and literary texts. In one important text on sensationism, Pessoa presents its mains principles: ‘(1) that of Sensation, (2) that of Suggestion, (3) that of Construction. The latter, the great principle of the greeks — whose great philosopher did indeed hold the poem to be “an animal” — has had very careless handling at modern hands.’44 Here again, Pessoa

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agrees with the vorticist Pound, but he goes further by emphasizing the principle of construction and by citing Aristotle as an example — thus showing (restating) his respect for the greeks. Unlike Pound, Pessoa’s attitude towards progress and the machine age is one of distrust with regards to the evolution of Art, in general. One of the various fragments he wrote on the arts reads like this: ‘Painting will sink. Photography has deprived it of many of its attractions. [...] Architecture becomes a minor aspect of civil engineering. Only music and literature will remain.’ 45 And he continues: ‘Literature is the intellectual way of dispensing all arts. A poem, which is a musical picture of (in) ideas, makes us free, through the understanding of it, to see what we want and to hear what we want. All statues and paintings, all songs and symphonies, are tyrannous in comparison with this.’46 There are some other scattered but coherent comments on the insignificance of sculpture, painting and architecture. In this context there is a quite striking remark: ‘except the germans and the Russians, no one has yet been able to put anything like art into the cinema. The circle cannot be squared there.’47 It is, no doubt, a paragraph worthy of a whole treatise. Some scattered cinematic images in Pessoa’s writings and traces of expressionist aesthetics in some texts — such as ‘Carta da Corcunda ao Serralheiro’ — make us think that Pessoa was well acquainted with the german cinema. Most important is that, with slight variations on the theme, Pessoa states over and over again that the only true arts are music, literature and metaphysics.48 Although he sometimes suggests that music could be replaced by literature, many other statements as well as his own translation practice allow us to conclude that he would always leave a space for music in his private Pantheon of arts. When Pessoa writes that ‘o ouvido é um sentido mais íntimo do que a vista’ [the ear is a more intimate sense than the eye],49 there remains no doubt that Pessoa and Pound have come closer than one could expect, but Pessoa’s notion of rhythm is charged with cosmic overtones. We will revert to this topic later, at the end of the essay. For the moment, let us consider another common subject in Pessoan and Poundian scholarship: the fragment and fragmentary, the issue of unfinished works. (5). In 1924, Pound published ‘A draft of XVI Cantos for the Beginning of a Poem of Some Length’. In 1928 ‘A draft of Cantos XVII to XXII’ came to light followed by ‘A draft of XXX Cantos’ in 1933. In 1934, ‘eleven new Cantos, XXX–XLI’ appeared along with didactic books, ABC of Reading, Make it New, Guide for Kulchur and from that year onwards he devoted the rest of his life to The Cantos, to the project of a new Paideuma and to building the City of god (i.e., a paradiso terrestre). From the very beginning, the intended epic poem displayed its affinities with The Waste Land: montage, collage, palimpsest, amalgamation, juxtaposition of fragments and highly elliptical sequences. As the poem went on, many other formal features became visible: the catalogues of items, its visual patterns (ideograms and hieroglyphics), telegraphic symbols, phonetic transcriptions of several languages, heteroglossia or even glossolalia. Over the years, until he died in 1972, Pound continued writing new Cantos and rewriting the previous published drafts, publishing them as autonomous sections in different journals (in Paris, new York and other cities). And he went on talking

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about his masterpiece, his dilemmas (mainly that of the poem’s closure), but also about the form which would emerge in the end. Warwick gould rightly affirms that ‘Pound had trapped himself into claiming too much, over the years, on behalf of a structure he had to say was hidden (because of the poem’s surface incoherence and unfinished state)’.50 To a certain extent this explains why Pound’s work in progress had so much devastating criticism, causing either distress and depression or anger and aggressive attitudes which lead to conf licts and to breaks between him and some old friends like Yeats.51 But in spite of some critics’ condemnation of the whole project and of the accusations of insanity, he never ceased publishing the Cantos and controlling the editing process — and he engaged himself in the publication, both of the selected parts of his modern epics (which he came to see as a continuation of Walt Whitman’s work) and of the whole section of Cantos I — CXVII, in 1970.52 As we will see, Pessoa’s unfinished works are also synonymous with non-publication (except for a few texts) and the whole issue of the fragment and fragmentary is much more complex than in Pound’s case. For Bernstein there is no doubt that Pound’s project of a finished poem including history is deeply rooted in the idea of a renovatio mundi in his own time, which explains his sympathy for Mussolini and, in the end, the failure of the poem itself — because history also failed.53 Bernstein’s historical line of argument (and that of other scholars) to deal with The Cantos’ absence of closure cannot be easily dismissed, but one should remember that early in 1927, in a letter to his father, Pound was already apprehensive about the poem’s fragmentary nature: Afraid the whole damn poem is rather obscure, especially in fragments. Have I ever given you outline of main scheme [...]? Rather like, or unlike subject and response and counter subject in fugue. A. A. Live man goes down into world of dead. C. B. The ‘repeat in history’. B. C. The ‘magic moment’ or moment of metamorphosis, bust thru [sic] from quotidien into ‘divine or permanent world.? gods, etc.54

Thus, some years prior to his commitment to fascism, Pound was raising the problem of the poem’s clarity and relating it to its fragmentary nature. Later on, the fragment itself would become the poetical subject of some stanzas and Canto CXVI is one of the most cited, since there seems to be a confession of the failure of Pound himself in the verses: ‘And I am not a demigod, | I cannot make it cohere. | If love be not the house there is nothing.’55 There is some ambivalence in this Canto, because the counterpoint possibility of hope and redemption also appears: ‘to “see again,” | the verb is to “see,” not “walk on” | i.e., it coheres all right | even if my notes do not cohere’.56 Although The Cantos have a strong autobiographical dimension, which is not confined to The Pisan Cantos, this intrusive voice sounds like a controlling voice of the reader’s attitude towards the poem. Questioning whether there is an underlying structure or unity of The Cantos seems both a way of evaluating the poem in the author’s terms and his declared intentions, as well as a way of dismissing its innovative mode of composition, which is similar to some serial works of our time, which is — undoubtedly — an ‘Age of the Fragment’.57

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(6). The problem of the fragment and the fragmentary in the work of Pessoa is in some sense akin to Pound’s: it also relates to the unfinished nature of his writings, to discontinuity and to the problem of structure. But as previously underlined it turns into a more complex issue, since Pessoa’s work is more ontologically fragmented and most of it is literally posthumous. Pessoa did not publish much while alive, and in fact he wrote for future readers, for posterity. The fragment in his writings was always intimately connected to the problem of the fragmentation of the self, to an acute awareness of the subject’s split (of the absence of a unified ‘I’) or even to the dissolution of the subject into the act of writing, which seems to be a problem that Pound later faced in his life. In any case, there is a substantial difference between Pound’s surrender to extra-textual materials and Pessoa’s complex scene of dissolution.58 Although, as Pedro eiras puts it ‘não há fragmentação da subjectividade anterior à fragmentação da linguagem’ [There is no fragmentation of subjectivity previous to the fragmentation of language],59 for the sake of clarity, the ref lection that follows will emphasize the question of the ‘fragment’ in physical or material terms, before moving on to some other problems of our postmodern age. There is in most of Pessoa’s writings a sense of failure and defeat regarding his fragmentary writing. He himself provided some explanation for this: the overf low of ideas and plans, his lack of will, his aversion to closure, the conf lict in him between the eagerness for totality and the reluctance for putting aside trivial details. Many scholars have, meanwhile, offered other reasons. Carla gago, for instance, argues that if the poet’s fragmentary work is a sign of Pessoa’s tension between ‘central thought’ and ‘casual thought’ the poet’s restlessness derives not from the unfinished state of his works, but from the ‘sentimento de perda do momento’ [the sense of loss of the transient moment], from his desire to record the ‘f luxo da escrita’ [the f lux of writing].60 When one examines Pessoa’s less familiar fragments, such as the prose sketches entitled ‘Preface to Quaresma’, one cannot avoid thinking about Valéry’s literary praxis and theories. More than any other poet at the beginning of the twentieth century, Valéry meditated on what he called ‘le possible-à-chaque-instant’, that is, the variations, the plurality of paths that every writer faces whenever he works with and within verbal language.61 Hence his idea that a literary work is never finished but simply abandoned and thus his practice of changing previously published poems. gérard genette rightly explains in his text ‘La Littérature comme Telle’ that ‘Valéry [révait] d’un livre qui, exemplairement, dénoncerait la convention en exposant à chaque articulation la liste des virtualités sacrifiées’.62 As José gil claims in Fernando Pessoa ou a Metafísica das Sensações, Pessoa does not write about the impossibility of writing, but about ‘a possibilidade infinita de escrever, sobre a incessante proliferação das palavras e das sensações’ [the infinite possibility of writing, on the unceasing proliferation of words and sensations].63 Over the years Pessoa also discovered that the overf low of ideas, sensations, visions, associations or memories were not compatible with the logical, linear and sequential process of writing.64 At the opening of his study, gil stresses what I would call the almost isochronic process of writing and self-contemplation, the double role of actor and spectator (or reader). This is something different to eliot’s defence of the necessary fusion of the writer and the critic in modern times. gil states that in his laboratory Pessoa even caused

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the conditions to observe the logic of the poem’s ‘construction’, i.e., the very process of the poem’s coming into being (its ‘apparition’). In his ‘laboratory’ Pessoa also pushed the process of depersonalization to its utmost limits; he came close to impersonating the very role of the reader and came to write as if reading an already written text (or in the process of taking form). Writing as if reading and reading as if dreaming — this is the equation one may draw either from the reading of texts such as O Livro do Desassossego [The Book of Disquietude], O Marinheiro [The Sailor] as well as other texts or from Pessoa’s/Soares’s own comments: ‘I have found out that reading is a slavish sort of dreaming. If I must dream, why not my own dreams?’65 It will not be necessary to bring into discussion The Act of Reading (Wolfgang Iser) or other theories on this issue; it will suffice to remember the radial and rhizomatic nature of all our readings, i.e., the discontinuities, the leaps, the associations and detours, the digressions, in short, the centrifugal movements which at every moment drive us outwards from texts whenever one reads (even books with a strong Aristotelian plot). Therefore, I suggest that the fragmentary nature of Pessoa’s writing is also isomorphic to the process of reading, which also requires the faculty of memory — in itself a source of discontinuities. Pessoa’s sentence ‘Hoje, quando leio, extravio-me’ [nowadays whenever I read I lose my self ]66 may describe the reading experience of any informed reader, since there is, strictly speaking, no immanent reading. If the fragments of The Book of Disquietude indicate Pessoa’s impotence to ‘make it cohere’, they also seem to represent (by the interruption of its publication) the poet’s awareness (refusal, maybe) of the impossibility of the book in traditional terms. It is significant that one of his heteronyms, barão de Teive, utterly refuses to publish a book and that Pessoa preferred the title Book of Disquietude to that of The Forest of Estrangement,67 which would have been more suitable to the labyrinthine nature of the intended book or its effect on future readers. That decision seems to be justified within the text, in a fragment which sounds like an Envoi written to posterity: It was in the silence of my disquietude, O my love, in those moments when the landscape is a halo of life and dreaming is mere dreaming that I raised up this strange book like open gates in an abandoned house at the end of a broad drive. To write it I plucked the soul of all the f lowers, and I wove eternity and stagnation from the ephemeral moments of all the songs of all birds. [...] And I offer you this book because I know it is beautiful and useless. [...] And because this book is absurd, I love it; because it is useless, I want to give it away; and because it serves no purpose, I want to give it to you, I give it to you... [...]. Landscape of estrangement and of Abandon, may this book be yours like your Time, loosing itself from you as from the Time of false purple robe.68

In consonance with the decadent overtones of this excerpt, the book is qualified as ‘strange’, ‘absurd’, ‘beautiful’ and ‘useless’. In other words, it is a book which causes estrangement and which goes further in challenging taxonomies than the poem ‘Clearly non Campos’ — which might also be ‘Clearly non Ricardo Reis’, i.e., something in-between or in the course of turning into something else. It is also ‘an open gate’ inviting readers to enter the labyrinthine forest. Recent times have brought a better vision of the fragmentary nature of Pessoa’s work, along with a

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growing awareness that The Book of Disquietude is a non-book from which, not a book, but many books may derive, as claimed by their editors or readers. In 1991, in the Preface to his english translation, Richard Zenith already suggested its publication in ‘a loose-leaf edition permitting the reader to order and re-order the fragments according to the dictates of his or her own intuition’.69 That the reader plays a major role in the connectivity of sequences seems for some critics indisputable, thus preserving the idea of a material and autonomous book to be made, a position that can be grounded on Pessoa’s plans for publication. nevertheless, Fernando Cabral Martins rightly sustains that some fragments from The Book of Disquietude are a set of beautiful and finished prose poems.70 And if we consider the book, as Maria Irene Ramalho does in Poetas do Atlântico, an instance of the lyrical modern mode, one can even do away with the anguish of putting the fragments together. When Pessoa chooses the label ‘book’ for the array of fragments he leaves unpublished, it is the very gutenberg idea of the book that is challenged (as Pirandello did with the episodes of his non-book Uno, Nessuno e Centomila) — while dismissing the dependence of western culture on the ‘eye’ (the visual senses). The fact that what might have been a book remained in silence is linked to its ontological nature: not a well-defined textual territory with clear frontiers, but an open space where the fragments ascribed to the book may be related not only to one another in different ways (similarity, opposition, etc.) but to other texts by Pessoa (the orthonym or the heteronyms). At present, it is obvious to many scholars that Pessoa’s textuality is rhizomatic and José gil has already shown how the deleuzian concepts of interval and plateau can enlighten our understanding of Pessoa’s work. It is not by chance that interval is a recurrent theme in many poems (as it is the title of some fragments in The Book of Disquietude): Começo a conhecer-me. não existo. Sou o intervalo entre o que desejo ser e os outros me fizeram, Ou metade desse intervalo, porque também há vida... Sou isso, enfim... Apague a luz, feche a porta e deixe de ter barulho de chinelas no corredor Fique eu no quarto só com o grande sossego de mim mesmo. É um universo barato 71 [I am beginning to know myself. I don’t exist. I am the interval between what I wish to be and what the others made of me, Or half that interval, because there is also life... I am that, in short... Turn off the light, close the door and stop having the noise of slippers in the corridor And may I stay alone in the room with the wide quietness of myself. This is a cheap universe] 72

I will conclude this approach to Pessoa by borrowing deleuze-guattari’s concept of ritournelle, as it is connected either to the rhytmic figure underlying Pessoa’s work or to the poet’s never-ending process of drawing new territories and reshaping our representations of the world and the way we inhabit it. Let us take a brief look at a sample of a magnificent text entitled ‘Intersectionist Sketch’, which came to light in 2009:

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I never knew where I met her. It is possible I never did meet her. [...] night had fallen long ago, some great city breathed near and this was by the sea [...]. There was a vague perfume of f lowers, as of a f lower that was all f lowers, and existed nowhere, in my sense of space. The air was absolutely real, not vague, as that of nights in high summer, under an excessive moon, when there is more moonlight than space proper. now and then voices sounded in the night — not very human voices. Their effect was strange because quite usual. The supreme reality was the sound of the sea. [...] Her lips quailed, not really but in my idea of them, and of how they should act at the moment, behind the darkness. [...] Were we speaking to one another? We could not know. Our communication was silent, as when hand holds hand and that is all speech there is. [...] There was never any more any reality than this. The sound of the sea shifted suddenly from light to night — not in my space but in my sensations. My soul was not down somewhere facing god.73

This text deserves a whole essay, which would have to begin with a discussion of the modernist epiphany; therefore, I will simply highlight some points: i) ‘the communicative energies’ of silence, in Steiner’s words, after Wittgenstein’s lessons;74 ii) the play with reality and dream; iii) the multitude of sensations; iv) its maritime or wavy structure; v) the extraordinary rhythmic quality of the whole and/or at a micro-level (e.g., ‘The sound of the sea shifted suddenly from light to night — not in my space but in my sensations’). There are similar fragments like this in The Book of Disquietude, but it is my belief that this is a perfect illustration of Pessoa’s analogy between the ‘wave’ and the movement of any literary composition, which opens his inchoative theory on rhythm in ‘O Ritmo e a Onda’.75 One of the above quoted fragment’s striking qualities is the way it presents communication as a holistic process: it is as if we enter the aforesaid garden where we face the fullness of our sensorium, where communication is again communion: communion amongst human beings and the cosmic forces of Universe (the earth fused with the air). Another of its qualities is the way Pessoa conveys the image (and effect) of silence by the artful use of such numerous and repetitive words — which bring to mind radical artistic experimentations such as John Cage’s piece 4,33, Rauschenberg’s blank paintings, and obviously Beckett’s dramatic monologues. It is irrelevant whether the sketch describes a vision, a dream, an hallucination; it presents one of the best examples of sensationism, reinforcing the importance of José gil’s thesis that Pessoa’s aesthetics contains a poetics where sensations are primary unities, the roots of the artist’s expressive language. (7). While Pound played with eliot’s idea of the pastness of present (and vice versa) mainly in historical and in cultural terms, Pessoa raised the issue of the simultaneous (or the simultaneity of the heteregoneous and non-simultaneous) in strong ontological and epistemological terms, which is closer to our postmodern condition, our virtual era and our awareness of tri-dimensional worlds. Yet, if we live in an Age where some great men are more concerned with the mysteries of the mind than in resurrecting ancient civilizations (proving their contemporariness) or in reaching the Moon, that does not allow us to say that we have moved from The Pound era (in Hugh Kenner’s homage) to Pessoa’s era. Our Age is one where there

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is no place for Masters and Apostles or for the renewing of the author’s Romantic aura (we have, meanwhile, rediscovered Kaf ka, Walter Benjamin, Robert Musil and other writers). In following my case to its conclusion, what I want to stress is that Pound, Pessoa and eliot came to the same criticism of Cartesian and positivist principles and a refusal of a europeist absolute reign, and that they all attempted to reconcile faiths, traditions and cultures, fostering transcultural dialogues and the knowledge of the unfamiliar or the unknown. When, in The Book of Disquietude, Soares equals men to gods and equals gods of all religions (‘African idols’, ‘egyptian’ and ‘greek divinities’, ‘Mithras lord of the Sun and of emotion’, ‘Jesus’, and ‘various versions of the same Christ’),76 he is not at all, like eliot, claiming the spiritual value of both eastern (e.g., Hinduism) and Western religions (e.g., Catholicism), but he writes in his own way Pound’s famous sentence: ‘We are nevertheless one humanity, compounded of one mud and of one aether.’77 In some sense, all these authors (and not only eliot) in their theory and practice of depersonalization or devotion to the corpus poetarum (just as Pound overtly did) have come to a kind of renunciation or abdication which is both existential and literary. The greater part of their writings already belongs to a universal culture. Some sentences, lines, aphorisms and passages of their work, as well as single poems, circulate without references, reaching many other arts and artists, suffering different metamorphoses. They have got rid not only of their authors but also of the written page, standing alone like the murmur of old texts and old forests. notes to Chapter 19 1. See José Blanco, ‘Fernando Pessoa’s Critical and editorial Fortune in english: A Selective Chronological Overview’, in Portuguese Studies, 24, 1 (2008), 13–32. 2. In Colóquio/Letras, 95 ( June–February 1987), 26–37. For further reading on eliot and Pessoa, see Pauly ellen Bothe, ‘Poesía y musicalidad en las poéticas modernistas de Fernando Pessoa y T. S. eliot’ (unpublished master’s thesis, University of Lisbon, 2003); T. S. Eliot e Fernando Pessoa, essays by Ricardo daunt (São Paulo: Landy editora, 2004); António Cardiello, ‘Tradição e obra de arte no pensamento modernista de Fernando Pessoa e T. S. eliot’ in Kath’autón (digital magazine). See also Irene Ramalho Santos, Atlantic Poets: Fernando Pessoa’s Turn in AngloAmerican Modernism (Hanover, nH: University Press of new england, 2003). 3. In O Tempo e o Modo, 68 (February 1969), 204–09 (p. 206). Pessoa’s quotation is drawn from Páginas de Doutrina Estética, selection, preface and notes by Jorge de Sena (Lisbon: editorial Inquérito, 1946), p. 176. 4. T. S. eliot, ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, in 20th Century Literary Criticism: A Reader, ed. by david Lodge (London: Longman, 1972), 71–77 (p. 73). 5. ezra Pound, The Spirit of Romance [1910] (new York: new directions, 1968), p. 14 6. ezra Pound, Gaudier-Brzeska: A Memoir [1916] (new York: new directions, 1970), p. 92. 7. On this subject, see Martin Kayman, The Modernism of Ezra Pound: The Science of Poetry (London: Macmillan, 1986). 8. Pound, Gaudier-Brzeska: A Memoir, p. 85. 9. Pound, ‘Psychology and Troubadours’, in The Spirit of Romance [1910] (new York: new directions, 1968), p. 92. 10. Literary Essays of Ezra Pound [1954], ed. with an intro. by T. S. eliot (London: Faber and Faber, 1974), p. 431. 11. Cf. ‘A Few don’ts’, in Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, p. 4. 12. In Gaudier Brzeska: A Memoir, p. 92.

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13. In The Spirit of Romance, p. 34, Pound writes: ‘... three or four words in exact juxtaposition are capable of radiating this energy to a very high potentiality; mind you the juxtaposition of their vertices must be exact.’ 14. ernest Fenollosa, The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry, ed. by ezra Pound [1918] (San Francisco: City Lights, 1969), p. 10. 15. For a definition of phanopeia, logopeia and melopeia, see ‘How to Read’ (1928), in Literary Essays, mainly on pp. 24 and 25. For a summarized version of the three concepts, see ABC of Reading (London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1971), p. 37. 16. See Athena, 1 (October 1924), 27–29. For an instructive view of Pessoa’s activity as translator, see Arnaldo Saraiva, Fernando Pessoa Poeta: Tradutor de Poetas (Porto: Lello editores, 1996). See also the fragment ‘Para uma Teoria da Tradução’, in Pessoa Inédito, coord. by Teresa Rita Lopes (Lisbon: Livros Horizonte, 1993). 17. Both Pound and Pessoa wrote an article on this theme. Cf. Pound’s ‘Provincialism the enemy’ in Ezra Pound: Selected Prose 1909–1965, ed. with an intro. by William Cookson (London: Faber and Faber, 1973), pp. 159–74 and Pessoa’s ‘O Provincianismo Português’, in Fernando Pessoa, Obras em Prosa, org. by João gaspar Simões, 2 vols (Lisbon: Círculo de Leitores, 1987), ii, 91–92. 18. george Steiner, After Babel (Oxford and new York: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 381. 19. Michael Foucault, ‘Qu’est-ce qu’un author?’ in Dits et Écrits 1954–1988, 4 vols (Paris: gallimard, 1994), ii, 789–821. 20. Fernando Pessoa, ‘Sonnet VIII’, in Poemas Ingleses (Lisbon: Ática, 1974), p. 164. 21. See The Poetry of Ezra Pound: 1908–1920 (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1969). 22. georg Rudolf Lind, ‘Oito Poemas Ingleses Inéditos de Fernando Pessoa’, Ocidente, 362, LXXIV ( June 1968), 265–90. This volume includes a translation of ‘desolation’ by Paulo Quintela. See also Fernando Pessoa, Poesia Inglesa, ed. by Luísa Freire (Lisbon: Livros Horizonte, 1995), pp. 478–81. 23. Pessoa, Poesia Inglesa, p. 478. It is worth mentioning that after the first social and political readings of The Waste Land, some of eliot’s later interpreters related the poem to his own personal problems. 24. For a discussion of Pessoa as a ‘Writing-Reader’, see Patricio Ferrari’s article ‘Fernando Pessoa as a Writing-Reader: Some Justification for a Complete digital edition of His Marginalia’, in Portuguese Studies, 24, 1 (2008), 69–114. 25. ezra Pound, ABC of Reading, pp. 15–40. First published in 1913, in ‘A Few don’ts by an Imagist’. 26. Maria de Lurdes Sampaio, ‘ezra Pound: dos Sentidos da Inf luência’, Revista da Faculdade de Letras, Línguas e Literaturas, II Série, 10 (1993), 145–61. Cf. . 27. ‘A Retrospect’ (1918), in Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, p. 56. 28. Ibid., p. 10. 29. ‘The Serious Artist’ (1913), in Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, pp. 48–49. 30. Steiner, After Babel, p. 283. 31. See collection of essays by William Pratt, published in new York by A. M. S. Press Inc. 32. Steiner, After Babel, p. 378. 33. Fernando Pessoa, ‘Personal notes’, Páginas Íntimas e de Auto-Interpretação, ed. by georg Rudolf Lind and Jacinto do Prado Coelho (Lisbon: Ática, 1966), p. 20. 34. Reed Way dasenbrock, The Literary Vorticism of Ezra Pound & Wyndham Lewis: Towards the Condition of Painting (Baltimore, Md, and London: Johns Hopkins University, 1985), p. 100. 35. dasenbrock, The Literary Vorticism, p. 100. 36. See Fernando Pessoa, Sensacionismo e Outros Ismos, ed. by Jerónimo Pizarro (Lisbon: Imprensa nacional–Casa da Moeda, 2009), p. 107. 37. See Jerónimo Pizarro’s Introduction to Fernando Pessoa, Sensacionismo e Outros Ismos, pp. 9–20; Vítor Aguiar e Silva, ‘Modernismo e Vanguarda em Fernando Pessoa’, Diacrítica. Revista do Centro de Estudos Humanísticos da Universidade do Minho, 11 (1996), 705–36 and Osvaldo Silvestre, ‘As Vanguardas Históricas em Portugal e espanha (Futurismo, Ultraísmo e Criacionismo)’, Santa Barbara Portuguese Studies, 5 (2001), 158–71.

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38. Pessoa, Sensacionismo e Outros Ismos, p. 401. This statement is made in a long and insightful letter addressed to an english editor. 39. Ibid., p. 123. 40. Ibid., p. 113. 41. Ibid., p. 124. 42. Ibid., p. 109. 43. Ibid., p. 109. 44. Ibid., p. 404. 45. Pessoa, ‘erostratus’, Obras em Prosa, p. 244. 46. Ibid., p. 245. 47. Ibid., p. 244. 48. Pessoa, Sensacionismo e Outros Ismos, p. 116. 49. Ibid., p. 413. 50. Warwick gould, ‘The Unknown Masterpiece: Yeats and the design of the Cantos’, in Pound in Multiple Perspective ed. by Andrew gibson (London: Macmillan Press, 1993), p. 63. 51. For a better understanding of modernism in general, see Modernism Revisited: Transgressing Boundaries and Strategies of Renewal in American Poetry, ed. by Viorica Patea and Paul Scott derrick (Amsterdam and new York: Rodopi, 2007). Pound’s devotion to poetry and to his principles (which led to a break between him and his old friend William Carlos Williams) is well discussed by Hélène Aji in ‘Pound and Williams: The Letters as Modernist Manifesto’, in Modernism Revisited, as before, pp. 53–73. 52. See the poem ‘A Pact’, in Collected Shorter Poems [1952] (London: Faber and Faber, 1984), p. 89 and ‘What I feel about Walt Whitman’, in Ezra Pound: Selected Prose 1909–1965, pp. 115–16. 53. See also Michael André Bernstein, The Tale of the Tribe: Ezra Pound and the Modern Verse Epic (Princeton, nJ: Princeton University Press, 1975). 54. The Selected Letters of Ezra Pound 1907–1941, ed. by d. d. Paige (London: new directions, 1971), p. 210. (letter of 11 April 1927). 55. ezra Pound, The Cantos (London: Faber and Faber, 1975), p. 796. 56. The Selected Letters of Ezra Pound 1907–1941, p. 210. 57. expression taken from Warwick gould’s essay, ‘The Unknown Masterpiece: Yeats and the design of the Cantos’, p. 69. 58. This process assumes several forms. See how the process of the subject’s fusion with writing is described in two sentences ‘I am, in large measure, the selfsame prose I write. I unroll myself in periods and paragraphs, I make myself punctuation marks’, in The Book of Disquietude, trans. by Richard Zenith (London: Carcanet and Calouste gulbenkian Foundation, 1991), p. 113. 59. Pedro eiras, Esquecer Fausto: a fragmentação do sujeito em Raul Brandão, Fernando Pessoa, Herberto Helder e Maria Gabriela Llansol (Porto: Campo das Letras, 2005), pp. 203–365, (p. 280). 60. Carla gago, ‘Interstícios: o fragmento em Fernando Pessoa’, in A Arca de Pessoa, ed. by Steffen dix and Jerónimo Pizarro (Lisbon: Imprensa de Ciências Sociais, 2007), pp. 229–42. On the fragment issue (and fragmentation), see also Manuel gusmão, ‘O Fausto: um teatro em ruínas’, in Românica: Revista de Literatura, 12 (2003), 67–86 and Fernando Cabral Martins, ‘Breves notas sobre a alta definição’, in Românica: Revista de Literatura, 12 (2003), 157–72. 61. Paul Valéry, Œuvres II (Paris: gallimard, 1957), p. 551. 62. gérard genette, in Figures I (Paris: Seuil, 1966), p. 255. 63. gil, Fernando Pessoa ou a Metafísica das Sensações, p. 10. 64. It is worth mentioning some discoveries in the field of cognitive sciences about the complexity of man’s brain and consciousness — completely incompatible with the linearity of writing. Particularly fascinating are daniel dennett’s analogies between our brain and computer processors in Consciousness Explained (new York: Little Brown, 1991). 65. Fernando Pessoa, ‘Personal notes’, in Páginas Íntimas e de Auto-Interpretação, p. 21. 66. Fernando Pessoa, Escritos Autobiográficos, Automáticos e de Reflexão Pessoal, ed. by Richard Zenith, in collab. with Manuela Parreira da Silva (Lisbon: Assírio & Alvim, 2003), p. 140. There are many statements similar to this in The Book of Disquietude. And there is another remark worth citing, since, in my view, it also explains how Pessoa escaped ‘inf luences’ or even the anxiety of inf luence: ‘Though I have been a reader voracious and ardent, yet I remember no book that I

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have read, so far were my reading states of my own mind, dreams of my own, nay, provocations of dreams.’ Páginas Íntimas e de Auto-Interpretação, p. 17. 67. Some pages of The Book of Disquietude came to light in 1913, in the magazine A Águia, under the title ‘na Floresta do Alheamento. do Livro do desassossego, em preparação.’ 68. The Book of Disquietude, pp. 201–02. 69. R. Zenith, ‘Introduction’ to The Book of Disquietude, p. 5. 70. Fernando Cabral Martins, ‘Breves notas sobre a alta definição’, in Românica: Revista de Literatura, 12 (2003), 157–72. This view also explains why many fragments are being studied as autonomous texts, as Paulo de Medeiros did in ‘Visions of Pessoa’, in Cadernos de Literatura Comparada (Poesia e Outras Artes: do Modernismo à Contemporaneidade), 17 (2007), 166–75, as well as Rita Patrício in ‘da imperfeição: leitura de um fragmento do Livro do Desassossego’, in Largo mundo alumiado: estudos em homenagem a Vítor Aguiar e Silva, ed. by Carlos Mendes de Sousa and Rita Patrício, 2 vols (Braga: Centro de estudos Humanísticos da Universidade do Minho, 2004). 71. Fernando Pessoa, Poesias de Álvaro de Campos (Lisbon: Ática, 1980), p. 124. 72. Trans. by Ana Luísa Amaral. 73. Pessoa, Sensacionismo e Outros Ismos, pp. 124–28. 74. ‘For the silence, which at every point surrounds the naked discourse, seems, by virtue of Wittgenstein’s force of insight, less a wall than a window. With Wittgenstein, as with certain poets, we look out of language not into darkness but light’, in george Steiner, Language and Silence: Essays on Language, Literature, and the Inhuman (new Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 1998), p. 21. 75. Fragment included in Pessoa Inédito, p. 387. 76. In The Book of Disquietude, see the sketch that begins: ‘History negates sure things’ (p. 160). In section VIII, of ‘O guardador de Rebanhos’, Pessoa presents his own version of Jesus Christ. 77. In Pound, The Spirit of Romance, p. 33.

CHAPter 20

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A Scattering of Shards: The Fragmentation of the Subject in the Orpheu generation Pedro Eiras Cogito, ergo sum descartes Je est un autre Rimbaud eu não sou o eu nem sou o outro [I am neither myself nor the other] Mário de Sá-Carneiro1

There is considerable irony in the fact that the Orpheu generation inherited such strong models of subjecthood from the eighteenth century, yet went on to create fragmented subjects. The nineteenth century invented and interpreted to exhaustion models of a subject who was strong and capable of titanic political, economic, philosophical and artistic actions. In the century of Faust, Werther, Rastignac, superheroes of knowledge and experience, the subject is he who takes upon himself the narrative of his own action, claiming its axiology in order to take on the description of the world. In the Romantic, as well as the positivist/naturalist incarnations of the Weltanschauung, it is the subject who organizes the economy of the discourse, attributing a personal significance to the world, one that is absolutely new and impossible to repeat. even the apparent objectivity of naturalist narration, which implies the radical erasure of the subject, continues to be a mechanism for describing the world through the language of an ideal subject: the scientist (to whose neutral place of observation the reader must yield). during the nineteenth century, extreme subjectivity and extreme objectivity of discourse were thus able also to preserve the place of the subject as the agent of the revelation of truth. Antero de Quental, in his last sonnets (or the sonnets he made out to be his last) proposes an annihilation of the subject, fading away in the ‘suspiro das cousas tenebrosas’ [sigh of tenebrous things] or ‘na mão de deus’ [in the hand of god].2 What remained was the pure objectivity of the cosmos, postulated by discourse, and the end of the rebellions of the subject, by means of a final expiation,

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inspired by Schopenhauer; but this renunciation of subjectivity was still spoken by an ‘I’, and therefore necessarily Romantic. We find the extreme solution — or dissolution — in Camilo Pessanha, in a sonnet published first in 1895, and included in the collection Clepsidra [Clepsydra], twenty-five years later. I quote only the first stanza: Foi um dia de inúteis agonias, dia de sol inundado de sol. Fulgiam nuas as espadas frias, dia de sol inundado de sol.3 [It was a day of useless agonies, day of sun overf lowing with sun. The cold swords shone naked, day of sun overf lowing with sun.]

As an exercise in the most extreme scarcity, the poem constructs rhymes through the literal repetition of words, reduces the narrative to enigmatic fragments (the swords are naked, already unsheathed for combat; but cold, not stained with the hot blood of the enemy, therefore combat has been abandoned), and annuls the subject: there is not one deictic pronoun in the whole poem. There are ‘inúteis agonias’ [useless agonies] but no subject who claims them. Here is the paradox: the poem implies subjectivity without a subject. This is consistent with the last lines of Clepsidra, with their last renunciation: ‘Adormecei. não suspireis. não respireis’ [Sleep. Sigh not. Breathe not].4 Fernando Pessoa and Mário de Sá-Carneiro greatly admired Camilo Pessanha. In a letter that is undated, but must have been written in 1915, Pessoa asks Pessanha to send poems for inclusion in the third issue of the literary journal Orpheu,5 which was due to come out in October that year (but never actually did). The second issue had already published poems by the symbolist Ângelo de Lima (an inmate of the Bombarda Asylum; a detail which the spiteful Portuguese press used as proof that Orpheu was produced by madmen). Just as in Pessanha’s work, the poems by Ângelo de Lima included in Orpheu dissolve the narrative into fragments from which there emerges only a very vague definition of the subject of the experience: — Além Foi — a ninive da Piedade, A Cidade do Luto Singular e a Sepultura da Semi-Rami... — e Hoje... está por Ali, Vaga, a Saudade... — e anda no Céu Supremo a eterna Istar... — e... Passa, às Vezes, a Serpente... — Ali!...6 [— Beyond Stood — the ninevah of Piety, The City of Singular grief And the Tomb of Semi-Rami... — And Today... Yearning is Abroad, Vague... — And in Supreme Heaven, eternal Ishtar goes... — And... Sometimes, the Serpent, Passes... — There!...]

There is a revelation here, but no human subject who can base his actions upon it (only much later does Pessoa, in Mensagem, reconcile the human subject and divine

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myth in a heroic act, maybe thus overcoming the impasse faced by the symbolists): in Ângelo de Lima, the truth is suggested by enigmatic capital letters that elevate people and things to transcendental realities, and between ellipses that render knowledge inaccessible. If there is a subject of experience, he gathers fragments of truth, on the threshold of the unformulatable. Therefore, the proposal that the subject is non-existent, which is commonly ascribed to the Orpheu generation, can be seen to begin in the experimental discourse of Camilo Pessanha. At almost the same time, the saudosista poet Teixeira de Pascoaes was also exploring ways of erasing the subject. Without renouncing deictic pronouns, he withdraws from them the capacity for referential designation: ‘I’ does not refer, from this point onwards, to any definable narrative. I cite the end of ‘Canção monótona’ [Monotonous Song], from the book Terra Proibida [Forbidden Land]: A mesma vida, em nós, vivida por ninguém... Constante calmaria, eterno mar parado... este íntimo Alentejo em que se perde a gente... em nosso próprio ser, o Tempo desmaiado... O mesmo, o mesmo, o mesmo, em nós, perpetuamente!7 [The same life, in us, lived by nobody... Constant lull, eternal becalmed sea... This intimate Alentejo where people lose themselves... In our own being, swooning Time... The same, the same, the same, in us, perpetually!]

A litany that is in every way contrary to the dialectic and heuristic poetry of Antero de Quental, who read Hegel, ‘Canção monótona’ allows for no resolution or synthesis. There exists a ‘nós’ [us], but it is ‘vivido por ninguém’ [lived by nobody], and an anonymity that gathers the world into an empire of ‘o mesmo’ [the same]: if difference becomes impossible, the subject dissolves on the horizon. In other words, the subject is not acting in opposition to the world-object, but is rather the place where the world reveals itself. This is an anti-revelation, however, because it only confirms the sameness of time and space, never the overcoming of a superior truth. Any knowledge, scientific or spiritual, is compromised in this indistinct relationship between subject and object. We can recognize lines from Pascoaes’s poem in Fernando Pessoa. It is a wellknown fact that Pessoa’s first published work (essays on ‘the new Portuguese poetry’) appeared in the saudosista literary journal A Águia in 1912. Here he praised the saudosismo of Teixeira de Pascoaes and Jaime Cortesão (but, at the same time, predicting the imminent arrival of a poet greater than Camões, giving to understand that that poet is neither of the ones in the journal; so his praise becomes ambiguous...). The following year, he wrote an untitled poem, which begins ‘Paúis de roçarem ânsias pela minh’alma em ouro...’ [Swamps of yearnings brushing against my gilded soul],8 that was published in the journal A Renascença in 1914; the aesthetic proposed by this poem, quickly adopted by Sá-Carneiro and other modernists, would be called paulismo in homage to its first word. ‘Canção monótona’ [Monotone song] can be identified as a hypotext: Pascoaes’s

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‘estagnação da dor’ [The stagnation of pain] became ‘Azul esquecido em estagnado...’ [Stagnant, forgotten blue...], in Pessoa; the ‘ermos longes de alma’ [far wilderness of the soul] turned into ‘dobre longínquo de Outros Sinos’ [distant tolling of Other Bells]; ‘o mesmo, em nós, perpetuamente’ [the same, in us, perpetually] was transformed into ‘Tão sempre a mesma, a Hora!...’ [How forever equal the Hour!...]. Pessoa’s capacity for abstraction certainly amplified the metaphysical value of the experiment, but the dialogue with saudosismo demonstrates how much paulismo owed to the fading away of the eighteenth century lyrical subject. Perhaps it is also because of this that Pessoa himself quickly turned his back on paulismo: ‘não são sérios os Paúis’ [the Paúis are not serious], he wrote in January 1915 to his friend and confidant, the poet Armando Côrtes-Rodrigues.9 Strangely enough, in the same letter he also turns his back on intersectionism, which was intended simply to shock the conservative public; but he admits the possibility of publishing the foundational texts of these new isms for strategic purposes, to pose an intellectual challenge to a slumbering Lisbon (in fact, the intersectionist poems of ‘Chuva oblíqua’ [Slanting Rain], an aesthetic which Pessoa seemed no longer to believe in, were to come out in the second issue of Orpheu). I quote an excerpt from ‘Paúis de roçarem ânsias...’: Tão sempre a mesma, a Hora!... Baloiçar de cimos de palma... Silêncio que as folhas fitam em nós... Outono delgado dum canto de vaga ave... Azul esquecido em estagnado... Oh que mudo grito de ânsia põe garras na Hora! Que pasmo de mim anseia por outra coisa que o que chora! estendo as mãos para além, mas ao estendê-las já vejo Que não é aquilo que quero aquilo que desejo...10 [How forever equal the Hour!... The tops of the palms swaying... The leaves staring at the silence inside us... Wispy Autumn Of a hazy bird’s singing... Stagnant forgotten blue... How quiet the shout of yearning that gives this Hour claws! How my self-dread longs for something that doesn’t weep! My hands reach out to the beyond, but even as they’re reaching I see that what I desire is not what I want...]

Overcome by the eternal return of the same, the subject cannot even coincide with its desire in successful alienation. If in Pessanha the object of the desire was viable, in Pessoa the desire is split between ‘aquilo que quero’ [what I want] and ‘aquilo que desejo’ [what I desire]: the ‘I’ is made up of diverse and irreconcilable urges, a dysphoric multiplicity. The rare movement of an active subject (‘estendo as mãos’ [My hands reach out]) only satisfies the immediate urge, in the lucid consciousness (‘já vejo’ [I see]) of the deferral of the last, immaterial and impossible desire, from the Lacanian order of the real. It still has to constitute itself — and lose itself — in the frustrating symbolic order. If Pessoa is in debt to Pascoaes in this poem, Mário de Sá-Carneiro interprets and pays tribute to paulismo in his poem ‘16’, dating from May 1914 and published the following year, in the first issue of Orpheu. The two parts of ‘16’, separated by an asterisk, start out by reclaiming the symbolism, decadentism and paulismo that came before; but only in order to lift the discourse to an obscene delirium. The following passage from the surreal crescendo of ‘16’ marks the shift from a paulist experiment

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to an expressionism avant la lettre that is also recognizably Sá-Carneirian: Meus sonhos, leões de fogo e pasmo domados a tirar A torre d’ouro que era o carro da minh’Alma, Transviarão pelo deserto, moribundos de Luar — e eu só me lembrarei num baloiçar de palma... nos oásis, depois, hão-de se abismar gumes, A atmosfera há-de ser outra, noutros planos; As rãs hão-de coaxar-me em roucos tons humanos Vomitando a minha carne que comeram entre estrumes...11 [My dreams, lions of fire and shock tamed pulling The golden tower that was the carriage of my Soul Will roam through the desert, dying by Moonlight — And I will only remember in the swaying of a palm... In the oases, later, blades shall sink deep, The atmosphere shall be otherwise, in other planes; The frogs shall croak me in hoarse human tones Vomiting my f lesh which they ate among the dung...]

The line ‘e eu só me lembrarei num baloiçar de palma...’ [And I will only remember in the swaying of a palm...] is an obvious homage to Pessoa’s ‘Baloiçar de cimos de palma...’ [The tops of the palms swaying...]. But the elegy, in language already stereotypical of a paulismo that still attempts solemnity, gives in to the carnivalesque delirium of the frogs that croak the subject or the arm that, in the second part, falls off the body and goes ‘valsar | Vestido de casaca, nos salões do Vice-Rei’12 [to waltz | dressed in a tailcoat, in the saloons of the Viceroy]. This fragmentation of the subject, although brutal and scatological, is no less painful. The unbearable image (parodied by numerous newspapers, incapable of integrating modernist nonsense into their conservative horizons of expectation) is one of extreme pain: that of the subject reduced to an organ, a fragment that carries out absurd social formalities. It is in the scatological fragmentation of the I, eaten amid dung, vomited by frogs, that modernism is achieved. This proposal for a genealogy, searching for a narrative of inexistence / dissolution / deferral / fragmentation of the subject, should not make us forget that Portuguese modernism also continued to experiment — at least as a utopia to be pursued — with models of a subject capable of action, recovering and testing the legacies of the enlightenment, Romanticism and positivism. We cannot always recognize the Portuguese modernists in douwe Fokkema’s description: ‘The modernist does not try to be complete and lacks the certainty that would make him attempt to discover the laws governing human existence. Like Monsieur Teste, however the modernist is an intellectual who never stops thinking, even when he knows that the results of his ref lections are always provisional.’13 In fact, the Orpheu generation began by searching for models of completeness: in Fernando Pessoa, Mário de Sá-Carneiro and Almada negreiros there is still a Romantic ambition to live an absolute experience of the world. It is precisely because that desire remained that their experiences proved insufficient. Pessoa relativized, through his heteronym Bernardo Soares, the possibilities of any legacy, and therefore of previous narratives able to confer a global meaning

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to human experience. Several fragments of Livro do Desassossego [The Book of Disquietude] open with the definition of generations past, to explain Soares’s spiritual orphanhood: nasci em um tempo em que a maioria dos jovens haviam perdido a crença em deus, pela mesma razão que os seus maiores a haviam tido — sem saber porquê. [...] a maioria desses jovens escolheu a Humanidade para sucedâneo de deus. Pertenço, porém, àquela espécie de homens que estão sempre na margem daquilo a que pertencem [...]. Por isso nem abandonei deus tão amplamente como eles, nem aceitei nunca a Humanidade.14 [I was born in a time when the majority of young people had lost faith, for the same reason their elders had had it — without knowing why. [...] most of these young people chose Humanity to replace god. I, however, am the sort of person who is always on the fringe of what he belongs to [...]. That’s why I never gave up god as completely as they did, and I never accepted Humanity.]

We might compare this reiterated confession of incapability, in Soares, with Pessoa’s heroic projects, strong subject models, the possibility of an exhaustive experience of the world. The essays in A Águia on ‘the new Portuguese poetry’, for example, predicting the emergence of a ‘supra-Camões’ in the ‘supra-Portugal de amanhã’ [tomorrow’s supra-Portugal],15 come together in this project: ‘A grandeza de um período literário mede-se pela grandeza individual do seu máximo representante’ [The greatness of a literary period can be measured by the individual greatness of its greatest representative], so measuring the value of an era consists in ‘ver o valor do que [o seu representante máximo] é capaz de criar de espiritual dentro de si próprio; isto é, a altura a que ele é capaz de elevar os seus próprios elementos espirituais, isto é, as individualidades que em si contém’ [seeing the value of what spiritual creation its greatest representative is capable of creating inside himself; that is, the heights to which he is capable of raising his own spiritual elements, that is, the individualities contained within him].16 In this way, all literature is subsumed in the work of an author; or, conversely, the work of an author, multiplied into diverse individualities, condenses all literature. It is about being ‘toda a gente e toda a parte’ [all people and all places], as Álvaro de Campos desires in his ‘Ode triunfal’ [Triumphal Ode]:17 to integrate the plurality of ‘I’s in a plural ‘I’. The modernism of Orpheu is therefore not synonymous with the simple incapacitating fragmentation of the subject; just as one cannot simply confuse the capacitating subject who wants to ‘sentir tudo de todas as maneiras’ [to feel everything in every way] (Álvaro de Campos again, in ‘A passagem das horas’ [The Passing of Time])18 with a new Romantic version of the Faust myth. The modernist experience of the subject rather implies the superimposition of two ways of living: the fragmentation of the unified subject and the desire for unity in all experiences, incapability and capability. It is only in the fusion of these gestures, in the very decline of the totalizing projects into splinters of discourse, that we can define the modernism of Orpheu. That is why, in Pessoa, there are classical, Romantic, positivist, symbolist and futurist texts, an infinite number of aesthetic and philosophical proposals. Any partial observation, however, leads towards error: we need to rethink the system

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that, defining each of those texts as ‘fingimento’ [feigning], constructs modernism as a dialogic experience, at the cost of finding a definitive truth. Coherence at the local level falls apart under global plurality. Thus eduardo Lourenço states: ‘O espírito da Modernidade é o de uma epopeia do negativo, o que não quer dizer, ao menos para nós, uma negativa epopeia.’ [The spirit of Modernity is that of an epic of the negative, which does not mean, at least for us, a negative epic].19 An epic of the negative, because inebriated with its own capacity for doubt, but, nonetheless, an epic that is not negative, because it sustains itself through its own gestures of contradiction. The work of the negative is an arduous conquest: ‘não se nasce moderno. A consciência da modernidade é sempre negativa’ [One is not born modern. Awareness of Modernity is always negative].20 If the word ‘fragmentation’ implies negativity, it might be better to use ‘multiplication’: Pessoa seeks the totality of experience through multiplication. This is, once again, a Romantic project, if we recall this prophetic suggestion, attributed to Friedrich Schlegel in Jena: ‘to transport oneself arbitrarily now into this, now that sphere, as if into another world, not merely with one’s understanding and imagination, but with one’s whole soul [...]: of this only a spirit is capable that contains within itself simultaneously a plurality of spirits and a whole system of persons, and in whose inner being the universe which, as they say, should germinate in every monad, has grown to fullness and maturity.’21 The project of totality of the experience implies that the subject is a monad, but the monad is the embryo of a universe (as an author could be the embryo of all the literature of an era). Between Schlegel and Pessoa, the unity of the subject becomes defined as a plurality that is possible and condensed in one individual. nonetheless, it is not a case of basing experience on the beautiful or the true, but on a contradictory plurality, which also includes Kant’s sublime, Baudelaire’s ugliness, Pessoa’s fingimento. Modernism makes it possible for pure subjectivity to replace literature and the physical world. It is the ambition of a demiurge, to be paid for with the risk of solipsism. In fact, in its most dysphoric version, it is the story told by the mourning maidens in Fernando Pessoa’s ‘static drama’ ‘O Marinheiro’ [The Mariner].22 In order to avoid going mad on a desert island, the shipwrecked sailor entertains himself by inventing his own reality. When a boat finally goes to rescue him, he is no longer on the island. Obviously — one of the watching women tentatively suggests — the sailor has gone to live in the reality he invented. Isn’t that what poetry itself does, according to Pessoa: create true reality? But the women seem to fear the ability to ‘make worlds’, in nelson goodman’s expression;23 the solipsism is a condemnation, not an aptitude. The euphoric version of the transfiguration of the world into a work of art, on the contrary, confers upon the artist the possibility of creating not necessarily a world, but an aesthetic experience of that world. That is what Sá-Carneiro’s dandies desire. But it was also a code of conduct, a performance, for Santa-Rita Pintor. Ironically, Pintor [painter] was famous for creating practically no works of art (although the second edition of Orpheu reproduces four of his cubist-inspired ‘Horstexte’). However, Santa-Rita caused a scandal through his behaviour, his outfits, his apparent narcissism. We can only conclude that this performance, this incarnation of

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a character constitutes Santa-Rita’s own work: he was a painter without paintings, a painter who acts as if he were his own work, alive not mimetic. I will now return to the idea of the unified subject, which can contain and replace an entire era, displacing all other authors. Within it there are many kinds of writing, ortho- and heteronymic, which define their own particular truths. In an extreme situation, these truths become irreconcilable, and they claim exclusivity; for example, Caeiro teaches that there is no Occult, while the Occultist poetry of his orthonym searches for a revelation beyond the world of phenomena. We cannot reconcile Caeiro with occultism, but both posit the existence of a coherent subject capable of absolute knowledge. Mensagem [Message] defines a subject capable of epic, sometimes unconscious, action; crime fiction invents rational detectives with extraordinary abilities of deduction; Álvaro de Campos gains access to truth by exploring extreme sensations; even the neo-Classical Ricardo Reis transfigures the saying in medio est virtus into this ethical dilemma demanding an absolute: Para ser grande, sê inteiro: nada Teu exagera ou exclui. Sê todo em cada coisa. Põe quanto és no mínimo que fazes.24 [To be great, be whole: don’t exaggerate Or leave out any part of you. Be complete in each thing. Put all you are Into the least of your acts.]

Obviously, these projects are all very different; but they do share the desire to construct a subject through the exhaustive exploration of one’s capacities: a subject is someone who gains access to a revelation of truth through reason, intuition, action. At one extreme, it is someone upon whom truth is conferred by an autonomous force, divine or unconscious: someone who receives a communication from the beyond, or someone through whom Portugal forms itself epically, continues to be a subject. In these cases, the subject acts as the object of a greater force: it is alienated. Countering the Cartesian cogito, which reassures us of the existence of the self (and its identity, its unity), Rimbaud had already stated: ‘Je est un autre.’ [I is another],25 and nietzsche: ‘It is, therefore a falsification of the facts to say that the subject “I” is the condition of the predicate “think.” It thinks: but to say the “it” is just that famous old “I” — well that is just an assumption or opinion, to put it mildly.’26 It is not surprising that grammar itself suffers in the defence of this thesis: indeed, it is rationalism as a whole that founders. In Pessoa too the truth of the unified subject is in the other, transcendent or interior. The medium does not know the truth s/he transmits, the warrior acts without reaching awareness of his acts. Álvaro de Campos, Ricardo Reis and António Mora receive the truth of the master, Alberto Caeiro, possessor of an objective knowledge of the world. Here, truth does not originate from a transcendent entity; moreover the master teaches that nothing is transcendent. It is possible that the disciples reach gratification (in the sense of Lacanian jouissance) through their master, in the sense in which Slavoj Žižek describes the ref lectivity of the subject’s belief through the other:27 the Pessoan narrative says that Campos

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and Reis receive the wisdom of Caeiro, but it might be more correct to think that they believe that Caeiro believes, therefore they feel excused from believing in their own names. Maybe we can only really find a subject capable of affirming the coordination of all his forces, physical and mental, in Almada negreiros. And this will not be through the resolution of the deferrals that dominate Pessoa, but through the simple abandoning of this theoretical impasse. In Almada, the revelation of truth immediately becomes action. Remember the energy of this self-presentation in ‘Ultimatum futurista às gerações portuguesas do século XX’ [Futurist ultimatum for the Portuguese generations of the twentieth century], in the only (and, because it was allegedly indecorous, confiscated by the police) issue of Portugal Futurista: eu pertenço a uma geração construtiva. [...] eu resolvo com a minha existência o significado actual da palavra poeta com toda a intensidade do privilégio. eu tenho 22 anos fortes de saúde e de inteligência. eu sou o resultado consciente da minha própria experiência: a experiência do que nasceu completo.28 [I belong to a constructivist generation. [...] I resolve with my existence the current meaning of the word poet with all the intensity of that privilege. I am 22 years old, strong years of health and intelligence. I am the conscious result of my own experience: the experience of one who was born complete.]

In ‘eu pertenço a uma geração construtiva’ we can read the resolution of the spiritual orphanhood of Bernardo Soares: ‘Pertenço [...] àquela espécie de homens que estão sempre na margem daquilo a que pertencem’ [I am the sort of person who is always on the fringe of what he belongs to]. Almada does not live in internal exile, because he subordinates the universe to his own creative capabilities; it is the universe that can be seen denouncing its lack of ontology here, not the subject. Happy to be a demiurge, Almada does not understand art as the invention of simulacra in order to overcome the lack of truth, but as the affirmation of an undeniable personal truth. Subjectivity does not distort the objectivity of the world: subjectivity invents the world. This energetic premise obliges us to rethink history, collectively and radically: ‘nós não somos do século de inventar as palavras. As palavras já foram inventadas. nós somos do século de inventar outra vez as palavras que já foram inventadas’ [We are not from the century that invents words. Words have already been invented. We are from the century that reinvents the words that have already been invented], we read in the speech/book A Invenção do Dia Claro [The Invention of the Clear Day], by Almada negreiros.29 Furthermore, this re-description of the world and of language, the unity of the subject makes possible a multiplication of experiences: ‘Quando digo eu não me refiro apenas a mim mas a todo aquele que couber dentro do jeito em que está empregado o verbo na primeira pessoa’ [When I say I, I am not referring simply to myself, but to all that fits within the way in which the verb in the first person is employed].30 But maybe Almada negreiro’s most complete demonstration of how one becomes a full subject and gains super-humanity comes in Nome de Guerra [Nom de Guerre], the Bildungsroman of a young provincial man arriving in Lisbon. First he is designated by the surname Antunes, then by the Christian name Luís, until he loses all his names and becomes who he really is. By assimilating the violence

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of the bas-fonds of Lisbon, he elevates himself to a second nature, among the stars: As ocasiões não se procuram, encontram-se. e quem é, além de nós mesmos, que lhes há-de dar o a propósito? Só quem não há-de encontrar-se antes de chegar ao fim é que foge da realidade com medo de ser mordido por ela! Mas eu não tenho medo de viver. O meu medo é incomparavelmente maior do que esse: tenho medo de não viver!31 [One does not seek occasions, one finds them. And who, apart from ourselves, is there, who shall provide them with a purpose? Only the one who f lees from reality in fear of being bitten by it shall not find himself before reaching the end! But I am not afraid of living. My fear is incomparably greater than that one: I am afraid of not living!].

Where Almada proclaims the unity of the subject, which is discovered and laid claim to as truth, Pessoa recognizes his inevitable fragmentation. The heteronyms themselves, in turn, include a plurality of subjects: ‘Vivem em nós inúmeros’ [Legion live in us], ‘Tenho mais almas que uma. | Há mais eus que eu mesmo’ [I have more souls than one. | There are more ‘I’s than myself ], affirms Ricardo Reis;32 and the Livro do Desassossego [The Book of Disquietude] adds: Cada um de nós é dois, e quando duas pessoas se encontram, se aproximam, se ligam, é raro que as quatro possam estar de acordo. [...] Somos forças porque somos vidas. Cada um de nós tende para si próprio com escala pelos outros.33 [each of us is two, and when two people meet, come into contact, join together, it’s rare that the four of them can agree. [...] each life, because it’s a life is a distinct force, and each of us naturally tends towards himself, stopping at other people along the way.]

even the creation of heteronymy can be described, as it is in a final testimonial by Pessoa, as an enabling operation. I am referring to the famous letter to Adolfo Casais Monteiro, dated 13 January 1935 (Pessoa was to die on 30 november that same year). This long letter, addressed to an essayist from the Presença generation, written in the explicit awareness that Casais Monteiro might use it in a future study (which makes it a letter that is simultaneously private and public), reveals the process by which the main heteronyms were created — or which Pessoa, long after the emergence of Caeiro, Reis and Campos in 1914, wanted to identify as the authorized version of that creation. The letter describes the fragmentation or multiplication of the self in euphoric terms, but oscillates between active and passive formulations. On one hand, the author presents himself as the conscious, voluntary, creative subject: ‘pus no Caeiro todo o meu poder de despersonalização, pus em Ricardo Reis toda a minha disciplina mental [...], pus em Álvaro de Campos toda a emoção que não dou nem a mim nem à vida.’ [I placed all my power of dramatic depersonalization in Caeiro; I placed all my mental discipline [...] in Ricardo Reis; and in Álvaro de Campos I placed all the emotion that I deny myself and don’t put into life].34 On the other hand, contradicting the above, this act of creation is said to be unconscious, involuntary and passive: ‘a origem mental dos meus heterónimos está na minha tendência orgânica e constante para a despersonalização e para a simulação. estes fenómenos [...] mentalizaram-se em mim’ [the mental origin of my heteronyms lies

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in my relentless, organic tendency to depersonalization and simulation. [...] these phenomena have been mentally internalized].35 The active subject reveals itself simply as the place where the simulation is enacted; the subject is a space, a witness, a force under pressure. It gradually fades away: desde que me conheço como sendo aquilo a que chamo eu, me lembro de precisar mentalmente, em figura, movimentos, carácter e história, várias figuras irreais que eram para mim tão visíveis e minhas como as coisas daquilo a que chamamos, porventura abusivamente, a vida real.36 [ever since I’ve known myself as ‘me’, I can remember envisioning the shape, motions, character and life story of various unreal figures who were as visible and as close to me as the manifestations of what we call, perhaps too hastily, real life.]

Here I wish to highlight certain words: ‘desde que [eu] me conheço como sendo aquilo a que chamo eu, [eu] me lembro de precisar...’ [ever since I’ve known myself as “me”, I can remember...]. The sentence begins with the ungovernable distinction between active and passive instances of the same (?) subject, and ends with the solipsistic proviso about ‘aquilo a que chamamos, porventura abusivamente, a vida real’ [what we call, perhaps too hastily, real life], in a sceptical ontology. This contradiction has extraordinary consequences: ...lembrei-me um dia de fazer uma partida ao Sá-Carneiro — de inventar um poeta bucólico [...] num dia em que finalmente desistira — foi em 8 de Março de 1914 — , acerquei-me de uma cómoda alta, e, tomando um papel, comecei a escrever, de pé, como escrevo sempre que posso. e escrevi trinta e tal poemas a fio, numa espécie de êxtase cuja natureza não conseguirei definir. Foi o dia triunfal da minha vida, e nunca poderei ter outro assim. Abri com um título, ‘O guardador de Rebanhos’. e o que se seguiu foi o aparecimento de alguém em mim, a quem dei logo o nome de Alberto Caeiro. desculpe-me o absurdo da frase: aparecera em mim o meu mestre.37 [...it one day occurred to me to play a joke on Sá-Carneiro — to invent a [...] bucolic poet [...]. One day when I’d finally given up — it was March 8th, 1941 — I walked over to a high chest of drawers, took a sheet of paper, and began to write standing up, as I do whenever I can. And I wrote thirty-some poems at once, in a kind of ecstasy I’m unable to describe. It was the triumphal day of my life, and I can never have another one like it. I began with a title ‘The Keeper of Sheep’. This was followed by the appearance in me of someone whom I instantly named Alberto Caeiro. excuse the absurdity of this statement: my master had appeared in me.]

The fact that Caeiro appeared involuntarily, according to Pessoa, reignites the Romantic idea of inspiration. But heteronymy is much more than fragmentation into writings attributed to different authors, recognizable from their style. What is decided here is the appearance of a ‘master’, of the figure of truth. The heteronymic system implies that the creative subject (Pessoa) is merely the disciple of an external truth (Caeiro). But this is the final, euphoric version of a system in the process of becoming. Until writing the 1935 letter, Pessoa defined heteronymy on the basis of various centres and perspectives. We should understand the letter to Casais Monteiro as an ultimate

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definition of a system that cannot be crystallized in a single reading. Heteronymy is different depending upon how it is presented by (and seen through) Pessoa, Caeiro, or by Reis, Campos, Mora, Soares. Curiously, this plurality of readings respects Caeiro’s thesis, according to which ‘A natureza é partes sem um todo’ [nature is parts without a whole].38 The various disciples quote and comment upon this verse as the culmination of neo-pagan revelation: if there is no whole, there is only this tree, but neither f lora nor botany (see poem XLV of ‘O guardador de Rebanhos’ [The Keeper of Sheep]: ‘Mas o que é um renque de árvores? Há árvores apenas. | Renque e o plural árvores não são cousas, são nomes’ [But what is a row of trees? There are just trees. | Row and the plural trees are names, not things].)39 Science, history, theology and language are overturned. What remains is a sensory access to the world, a kind of mystical faith which posits that the world exists (Wittgenstein defends the idea that ‘It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists’)40 and it is objectively perceptible to the senses. In contrast to Kant, Caeiro is able to combine phenomenon and numen; and nevertheless, this is not about simply dissolving the dichotomy into a holistic vision, because the concept of ‘everything’ is contested as being a rational illusion. By trusting absolutely in the data gathered by the senses, opposing the abusive generalization operated by reason, Caeiro achieves a ‘formidável infância’ [boundless childhood],41 the expression used by Álvaro de Campos in his Notas para a recordação do meu mestre Caeiro [Notes for the Memory of My Master, Caeiro]; and note that, etymologically, ‘formidável’ means ‘frightening’, which makes Campos’s praise ambiguous. In any case, the master validates the myth of an integral objectivity, but loses the awareness that the world is a creation of the human mind. Infancy, mysticism and neo-paganism therefore constitute a voluntary ingenuousness, which ignores relativism (Kant, nietzsche, and later Wittgenstein and Rorty). But this is an ingenuousness without innocence: it is a knowing ignorance. It remains to be seen whether it is possible to write through the very illusion that one denounces, remaining untouched and ‘infantile’. If infans, etymologically, is one who does not speak, the doctrinary ‘speech’ of Caeiro contradicts the notion of an ideal infancy. What can I say about the disciples? If Álvaro de Campos gains access to the truth through his master, why does he feel devastated in ‘Apontamento’? A minha alma partiu-se como um vaso vazio. Caiu pela escada excessivamente abaixo. Caiu das mãos da criada descuidada. Caiu, fez-se em mais pedaços do que havia loiça no vaso. Asneira? Impossível? Sei lá! Tenho mais sensações do que tinha quando me sentia eu. Sou um espalhamento de cacos sobre um capacho por sacudir. [My soul shattered like an empty vase. It fell irretrievably down the stairs. It fell from the hands of the careless maid. It fell, breaking into more pieces than there was china in the vase. nonsense? Impossible? I’m not so sure? I have more sensations than when I felt like myself. I’m a scattering of shards on a doormat that needs shaking.]42

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In the first issue of Orpheu, Campos published ‘Ode Triunfal’ [Triumphal Ode], a poem with its very own futurism. It is a furious epic about the machine that the subject wants to know through self-dissolution: ‘Atirem-me para dentro das fornalhas! | Metam-me debaixo dos comboios! | espanquem-me a bordo de navios! | Masoquismo através de maquinismos!’ [Toss me into the furnaces! | Throw me under passing trains! | Thrash me aboard ships! | Masochism through machines!].43 Sic: masochism, pleasure in pain, the constitution of the subject on the sublime threshold of annihilation. If the bucolic master constitutes himself as a subject through the observation of nature, his urban disciple experiences himself through euphoric torture: both lead to ecstasy, even if this is at the cost of the subject. Why is ‘Apontamento’ [note] the negation of this euphoria? Of course, in ‘Ode triunfal’ [Triumphal Ode] the subject provokes and dominates his own dissolution, just as the child consciously evokes a painful sensation in order to overcome it, in Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle;44 whereas in ‘Apontamento’ the subject is the victim of a ‘criada involuntária’ [careless maid],45 a tool of the gods. But cannot a conclusion such as ‘Tenho mais sensações do que tinha quando me sentia eu’ [I have more sensations than when I felt like myself ], with its rejection of the unified subject, be seen as a parody of Caeiro’s teaching? The subject is henceforth ‘partes sem um todo’ [parts without a whole], more parts than there were when the vase was intact; but this fragmentation, far from being liberating, makes action impossible. There is not even any masochism, which could be ecstasy: now, there is only the painful absurdity of the ‘espalhamento de cacos’ [scattering of shards]. Maybe all the disciples fail to perpetuate the wisdom of the master. While Caeiro proposes sensation as the objective access to the world, Campos’s sensationism goes through a heroic phase and decays in a long ‘desistism’. It is perhaps due less to a lack of truth than to excess; Campos accuses Caeiro of having entrusted him with an intolerable truth: ‘porque é que ensinaste a clareza da vista, | Se não me podias ensinar a ter a alma com que a ver clara?’46 [why did you teach me the clarity of vision, | If you could not teach me to have the soul with which to see it clearly?], we read in a poem paying homage (apparently) to the already deceased master, as if Campos had not resolved an Oedipal conf lict. Summoned towards the truth of the father, he knows he is castrated; and since there is no mother to conquer back, he desists from fighting for the force of paternal truth. Campos’s truth is Caeiro, and he fails to reach that truth. But Caeiro’s truth is a paganism at the same time ancient and yet to come; in other words, absent. The truth of the orthonym is revealed to him by ‘Mestres que não permitem nem perdoam’ [Masters who do not relent and do not forgive], as Pessoa wrote in the letter breaking off his first relationship with Ofélia Queirós.47 A subject is an emissary, a delegate, a fragment of the truth — but never the unpresentable truth itself; and when, like Campos, it gets closer to the truth than it can bear, it seeks absolute alienation: the truth is always outside the subject. In Mário de Sá-Carneiro, alienation takes place through the invention or discovery of an ideal being. This is a strategy reiterated in his novellas: the subject meets an Other, an artist, who is beautiful, exotic and enigmatic. It is hard to say whether this other exists materially outside the subject, whether it consists in the projection of a desire, or whether it has the consistency of the ghosts of eighteenth-

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century fantastic literature (probably all three hypotheses are true). In any case, the truth of the Object quickly overcomes the subject, who in turn embraces their own lack of authenticity, by going mad or committing suicide. In fact, this is not just the defeat of the subject; in order to gain access to the other, to become worthy of the revelation, the subject must already have sublimated in part the bourgeois condition from where he came. neither ‘lepidóptero’ [lepidopterous], as Sá-Carneiro described the Lisbon bourgeoisie, including those critical of magazines like Orpheu, nor inaccessible, aesthete Other: the subject discovers he is an intermediary. This condition purges the subject of bourgeois mediocrity, which is a sign of choice, but also condemns him to insufficiency and anguish. From whence derives the famous lament in the poem ‘Quase’ [Almost]: Um pouco mais de sol — eu era brasa, Um pouco mais de azul — eu era além. Para atingir, faltou-me um golpe d’asa... Se ao menos eu permanecesse aquém...48 [A little more sun — I would be embers, A little more blue — I would be beyond. To reach it, I lacked a wing beat... If at least I could remain inadequate.]

‘Permanecer aquém’ [to remain inadequate] would be to preserve ignorance and bourgeois conformism which would, at least, avoid the anguish of knowing that a model was unattainable. Campos was also to confess, later on: ‘Tudo menos saber o que é o Mistério! | Superfície do Universo, ó Pálpebras descidas, | não vos ergais nunca! | O olhar da Verdade Final não deve poder suportar-se!’ [Anything but knowledge of the Mystery! | Oh Lowered eyelids, Surface of the Universe, | Remain forever closed! | The gaze of Ultimate Truth can surely not be borne!].49 In both authors, not-knowing could be the solution to existential insecurities or, at the very least, a lesser evil. The subject in Sá-Carneiro’s novellas is never the simple bourgeois who does not write literature, nor the Other who is living literature but disdains to write. In fact, words are in reach of the lepidopterous, they betray the failings of an artistic way of life. Using this idea, José guilherme Merquior demonstrates the elitist closing off of modernism, which is translated into apolitical or anti-democratic forms: the ‘agonismo niilista trai [...] um impulso psicótico, sob a máscara virtuosa da contracultura modernista’ [the nihilist agonizing betrays a psychotic impulse, under the virtuous mask of modernist counterculture].50 In fact, the subject of Sá-Carneiro’s novellas is always ‘intermediary’: he writes against the bourgeoisie, about the impossibility of living like the Other. Writing the novella is a demonstration of the impossibility of writing, full-blown aporia. In the story ‘Asas’ [Wings], from the volume Céu em Fogo [The Great Shadow],51 the perfect book of poems by the Other dissolves: once perfection is achieved, the pages of the notebook miraculously turn blank. In contrast, in the novella A Confissão de Lúcio [Lúcio’s Confession],52 the long testimonial account written by the protagonist, a bourgeois incapable of understanding the mysteries he has glimpsed, remains: the proof of his insufficiency.

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Observing this strange notebook, whose pages end up blank, as if the poems have evaporated, I will make my conclusion. That book is the unsurpassable threshold of perfection. Modernism thus claims that writing is possible, of course, but only because the act of writing fails the writing itself. As the Orpheu generation understood it, what is written, what remains, is a game of compromises, experiments, fingimento, but always delaying the truth, glimpsed and unattainable; that is why Caeiro is contradictory, the Other is evanescent, and Nome de Guerra is a utopia. In the best case scenario, writing is fingimento: it is a game which does not attain the objectivity of an unlikely pagan master, but which defines the master himself as just another fingidor. That is the hard lesson of modernism: only failure is possible. As Beckett was to say, years later, one can only admit attempting this kind of experimentation without a net: ‘ever tried. ever failed. no matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.’53 notes to Chapter 20 1. existing published translations from other languages into english have been used whenever it has been possible to locate them. All other translations are by the translator of this article. 2. Antero de Quental, Sonetos Completos, ed. by nuno Júdice (Lisbon: Imprensa nacional–Casa de Moeda, 2002), pp. 148 and 159. 3. Camilo Pessanha, Clepsidra e Outros Poemas, ed. by Barbara Spaggiari (Porto: Lello editores, 1997), p. 93. 4. Pessanha, Clepsidra e Outros Poemas, p. 141. 5. Fernando Pessoa, Correspondência 1905–1922, ed. by Manuela Parreira da Silva (Lisbon: Assírio & Alvim, 1999), pp. 183–86. 6. Ângelo de Lima, ‘Poemas Inéditos’, Orpheu 2 (facsimile edition) (Lisbon: Contexto, 2000), p. 91. 7. Teixeira de Pascoaes, Belo, À Minha Alma. Sempre. Terra Proibida (Lisbon: Assírio & Alvim, 1997), p. 286. 8. Fernando Pessoa, A Little Larger Than the Entire Universe: Selected Poems, trans. by Richard Zenith (London: Penguin, 2006), p. 279. 9. Pessoa, Correspondência. 1905–1922, p. 142. 10. Fernando Pessoa, Ficções do Interlúdio. 1914–1935, ed. by Fernando Cabral Martins (Lisbon: Assírio & Alvim, 1998), p. 12. Pessoa, A Little Larger Than the Entire Universe, p. 279. 11. Mário de Sá-Carneiro, ‘Para os “Indícios de Oiro” ’, Orpheu 1 (facsimile edition) (Lisbon: Contexto, 2000), p. 74. 12. Sá-Carneiro, ‘Para os “Indícios de Oiro” ’, p. 74. 13. douwe Fokkema, Literary History, Modernism and Post-Modernism (Utrecht: John Benjamins, 1984), p. 13. 14. Fernando Pessoa, Livro do Desassossego, ed. by Richard Zenith (Lisbon: Assírio & Alvim, 1998), p. 45. The Book of Disquiet, trans. by Richard Zenith (London: Penguin, 2003), p. 11. 15. Fernando Pessoa, Crítica: ensaios, artigos e entrevistas, ed. by Fernando Cabral Martins (Lisbon: Assírio & Alvim, 2000), p. 17. 16. Pessoa, Crítica, p. 53. 17. Álvaro de Campos, ‘Ode triunfal’, Orpheu, 1, p. 83. Pessoa, A Little Larger Than the Entire Universe, p. 160. 18. Fernando Pessoa, Álvaro de Campos: Livro de Versos, ed. by Teresa Rita Lopes (Lisbon: estampa, 1993), p. 161. ‘The Passing of Time’, trans. by Richard Zenith, Translation, 25 (1991), Special Issue: Portugal, ed. by Richard Zenith, p. 31. 19. eduardo Lourenço, Tempo e Poesia (Lisbon: Relógio d’Água, 1987), p. 186. 20. eduardo Lourenço, Ocasionais I (Lisbon: A Regra do Jogo, 1984), p. 66. 21. Friedrich Schlegel, ‘Athenaeum fragment 121’, in The Literary Absolute: The Theory of literature

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in German Romanticism, ed. by Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc nancy; trans. by Philip Barnard and Cheryl Lester (Albany: State University of new York Press, 1988), p. 140. 22. Fernando Pessoa, ‘O Marinheiro, Orpheu 1, pp. 27–39. ‘The Mariner’, trans. by george Ritchie, Translation, 25 (1991), Special Issue: Portugal, ed. by Richard Zenith, pp. 38–56. 23. nelson goodman, Ways of Worldmaking (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1978). 24. Fernando Pessoa, Ricardo Reis: Poesia, ed. by Manuela Parreira da Silva (Lisbon: Assírio & Alvim, 2000), p. 130. Pessoa, A Little Larger Than the Entire Universe, p. 134. 25. Arthur Rimbaud, Œuvres Poétiques Complètes (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1980), p. 186. Arthur Rimbaud, Collected Poems, trans. by Martin Sorrell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. xvii. 26. Friedrich nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, ed. by Rolf-Peter Horstmann, Judith norman; trans. by Judith norman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 17. 27. Slavoj Žižek, ‘The Interpassive Subject’, (1998) available at [consulted 25 February 2010]. 28. José de Almada negreiros, ‘Ultimatum futurista às gerações portuguesas do século XX’, Portugal Futurista (facsimile edition) (Lisbon: Contexto, 1990), p. 36. 29. Almada negreiros, A Invenção do Dia Claro (Lisbon: Assírio & Alvim, 2005), p. 21. 30. Almada negreiros, A Invenção do Dia Claro, p. 31. 31. Almada negreiros, Nome de Guerra (Lisbon: Assírio & Alvim, 2001), p. 155. 32. Fernando Pessoa, Ricardo Reis: Poesia, p. 137. Pessoa, Selected Poems, trans. by Jonathan griffin. rev. edn (London: Penguin, 1982), p. 105. 33. Fernando Pessoa, Livro do Desassossego. p. 467. The Book of Disquiet, pp. 448–49. 34. Fernando Pessoa, Correspondência 1923–1935, ed. by Manuela Parreira da Silva (Lisbon: Assírio & Alvim, 1999), p. 340. Fernando Pessoa, The Selected Prose of Fernando Pessoa, ed. and trans. by Richard Zenith (new York: grove, 2001), pp. 253–54. 35. Pessoa, Correspondência 1923–1935, p. 340. Pessoa, The Selected Prose, p. 254. 36. Pessoa, Correspondência 1923–1935, p. 341. Pessoa, The Selected Prose, pp. 254–55. 37. Pessoa, Correspondência 1923–1935, pp. 342–43. Pessoa, The Selected Prose, p. 256. 38. Fernando Pessoa, Alberto Caeiro: Poesia, ed. by Fernando Cabral Martins and Richard Zenith (Lisbon: Assírio & Alvim, 2001), p. 84. A Centenary Pessoa, ed. by eugénio Lisboa with L. C. Taylor, poetry trans. by Keith Bosley (Manchester: Carcanet, 1995), p. 61. 39. Pessoa, Alberto Caeiro: Poesia, p. 81. Pessoa, A Little Larger Than the Entire Universe, p. 41. 40. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (London: Routledge, [1961] 2004), p. 88. 41. Álvaro de Campos, ‘notas para a recordação do meu mestre Caeiro’, Presença 30 (facsimile edition), 3 vols (Lisbon: Contexto, 1993), ii, 15. Pessoa, The Selected Prose, p. 41. 42. Pessoa, Álvaro de Campos: Livro de Versos, p. 256. Pessoa, A Little Larger Than the Entire Universe, p. 234. 43. Álvaro de Campos, ‘Ode triunfal’, Orpheu 1, p. 80. Pessoa, A Little Larger Than the Entire Universe, p. 157. 44. Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings, trans. by John Reddick (London: Penguin, 2003). 45. Pessoa, Álvaro de Campos: Livro de Versos, p. 256. 46. Ibid., pp. 246–47. 47. Pessoa, Correspondência 1905–1922, p. 361. Pessoa, The Selected Prose, p. 138. 48. Mário de Sá-Carneiro, Poemas Completos (Lisbon: Assírio & Alvim, 2001), p. 38. 49. Pessoa, Álvaro de Campos: Livro de Versos, p. 244. Pessoa, Selected Poems, ed. and trans. by Peter Rickard (edinburgh: edinburgh University Press, 1971), p. 109. 50. José guilherme Merquior, ‘Sobre a doxa Literária’, Colóquio/Letras, 100 (1987), 7–19 (p. 13). 51. Mário de Sá-Carneiro, Céu em Fogo (Lisbon: Assírio & Alvim, 1998). The Great Shadow, trans. by Margaret Jull Costa (Sawtry, Cambs.: dedalus, 1996). 52. Mário de Sá-Carneiro, A Confissão de Lúcio (Lisbon: Assírio & Alvim, 1998). Lucio’s Confession, trans. by Margaret Jull Costa, 2nd edn (Sawtry, Cambs.: dedalus, 2009). 53. Samuel Beckett, Últimos Trabalhos de Samuel Beckett (Lisbon: O Independente/Assírio & Alvim, 1996), p. 6.

CH A P t e r 21

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Modernist Theatre in the First Two decades of the Twentieth Century Inês Alves Mendes This article examines a body of work that has received little critical attention: the theatrical works of Almada negreiros, Fernando Pessoa, Mário de Sá-Carneiro, and António Ferro, together with José Pacheco and António Ponce de Leão. The plays I will look at date to the troubled years of the First Portuguese Republic, and the authors themselves either took part in the Orpheu venture or were intimately connected with those who were, as is the case with António Ponce de Leão. Pessoa, Sá-Carneiro, Almada, Ferro, Pacheco and Ponce de Leão were keen appreciators of the dramatic arts, and António Ferro and Mário de Sá-Carneiro even chose the theatre for their public debut as writers. Although I will examine the dramatic work of Portuguese modernists in this chapter, the first two decades of the twentieth century cannot be considered modernist given the conventional nature of theatre, as can be easily realized by the analysis of the theatre repertoires of the time.1 The most representative genres throughout the First Portuguese Republic were historical and psychological dramas embedded in a naturalist aesthetic. As for comedy, it was by far the most favoured genre. An honourable exception was the genre ‘revista’ (musical comedy revues) which, because of its ‘marginal’ character, succeeded in exploiting visually the artistic potential of modernism from the end of the 1920s onwards. Panorama of the theatre in the early twentieth Century The Portuguese theatre of the First Republic has already been located between an aesthetic of naturalist inclinations and a Romantic sensibility.2 The great renovation in the panorama of the theatre early in the twentieth century was the adoption of a French theatrical model, the so-called Théâtre Libre, which was rooted in naturalism. In effect, the inf luence of French culture touched upon all aspects regarding Portuguese cultural life, and this was particularly the case of theatre. The magazine Ilustração Portuguesa, which even had its head office in Rue des Capucines in Paris at one time, was a constant source of detailed information about theatre life in that great city: repertoires, actors, set designs and daring dramatic experiences

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were communicated to a Portuguese public craving news from the great city of light. As a result of André Antoine’s Théâtre Libre, a ‘Teatro Livre’ was set up in Lisbon in 1904, in keeping with the growth of this movement throughout the rest of europe.3 Antoine’s visits to Portugal in 1896, and again in 1903, greatly contributed to the dissemination of his aesthetic principles. Although Antoine was not a theorist, his text Causerie sur la mise en scène, which was published on 1 April 1903 in Revue de Paris, nicely summarizes the ethos behind his theatre: the need to renovate set design and find new ways to train actors. Antoine rightly remonstrates against the teaching of drama whereby actors learnt to behave unnaturally and affectedly on stage, accentuating and moving in stereotypical, conventional ways, and even speaking in an artificial and ridiculous style. His school of theatre embodies Zola’s theories about acting, and Zola himself was a supporter of Théâtre Libre at its inception. Antoine symbolically marked the start of modernism in theatre and the opening of doors to an independent theatre, although modernist theatre is generally associated with an anti-realist trend. In effect, with regard to the Portuguese modernists, their starting point was naturalist lessons and theories and gradually grew closer to symbolism as an aesthetic more suitable to modernity. Almada negreiros As previously explained, the Ilustração Portuguesa magazine provided abundant news items about what was happening in the theatre world, discussed what was on stage and commented on what was happening out there in fabulous Paris. However, theatre in the First Portuguese Republic was far from an healthy position. Almada negreiros expressed with consummate skill his displeasure with the state of the dramatic arts in Portugal when he published his Manifesto Anti-Dantas e Por Extenso in 1915, as a reaction against a comment made by Júlio dantas in the press, describing Orpheu 2 as the product of lunatics. The famous manifesto is a sharply worded pamphlet protesting against institutionalized dramatic arts as embodied in dantas, then director of escola de Arte de Representar (the acting school nowadays known as the conservatory) and a much respected dramatist and playwright who had enjoyed huge success from 1902 onwards, after the representation of his play A Ceia dos Cardeais. Almada’s invective was addressed to a man who was officially the highest authority on theatre in Portugal.4 Almada, as a futurist and closely in synchrony with modernism, promoted an aesthetic that was the exact opposite of that of dantas. The plays he wrote and the dance pieces he devised and choreographed were a far cry from naturalist concerns. As it is known, the Ballets Russes had an enormous inf luence over the genesis of modernism in europe and also in Portugal. The balletomane Almada was not only an enthusiastic ballet-goer but he also promoted amateur ballet. diaghilev’s Russian Ballets were first performed in Paris on 18 May 1909, and it is likely that Almada found out about them through the French illustrated magazines that were widely distributed in Portugal or through his friends, Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso and Santa-Rita who lived in Paris (or even Ruy Coelho and Rui Lino, enthusiastic spectators of these ballets in Paris).5 Serge diaghilev’s Russian Ballets strove to

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Fig. 21.1. A photograph exhibiting the protagonists of O Sonho da Princesa na Rosa as it was published by Ilustração Portuguesa on 3 April 1916. Almada is on the left hand side and Ruy Coelho on the right hand side, among a group of aristocratic young ladies

bring about a total spectacle where all the arts would come together in a synthesis of supreme art: music, dance and the visual arts. This search for a total art is a particularly relevant concept for symbolists. ‘Total theatre’ is, in fact, a term that comes from Wagner’s concept of ‘gesamtkunstwerk’. which means a unified or total theatre where music, voice, movement and performance fuse in a harmonious whole.6 even before the Russian Ballets came to Portugal, an opportunity soon arose for Almada to explore his interest in ballet and turn it into something real, thanks to Helena da Silveira de Vasconcelos, the daughter of the Count of Castelo Melhor. Helena made her Palácio Rosa a centre of attraction for the worldly milieu of Lisbon and ballet became an integral part of social events and parties. With the help of the architect, José Pacheco, and the musician, Ruy Coelho, Almada choreographed a ballet that was presented on 6 April 1915 in the home of Helena Vasconcelos. The dancers were chosen, according to Almada, from among the ‘charming aristocratic ladies of Portugal’.7 The following year on 7 March, a new ballet, O Sonho da Princesa na Rosa, in which the hostess, Helena Vasconcelos, made an appearance, was performed in the palace of the Count and Countess of Castelo Melhor. The Ilustração Portuguesa gave an account of the event on 3 April 1916 and in the photograph taken of the performers, Almada stands on the right and Ruy Coelho on the left (see Fig. 21.1). In 1917 the Ballets Russes came to Lisbon. They arrived on 2 december, and because of the unrest caused by the coup d’état led by Sidónio Pais, it was only on 13 december that they performed in the Coliseu dos Recreios, where they remained until 27 december. The company also appeared at the São Carlos Theatre on 2 and 3 January 1918, at the invitation of the Count of Mafra. The benefits from the

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Fig. 21.2. José Barbosa, ‘Bonecos Russos,’ Água-pé, 1927. Stage photograph by Silva nogueira displaying Luísa Santanela and Francis (taken on 23 January 1927); 26.5 × 37 cm. Santanella-Amarante Company. Avenida Theatre. Museu nacional do Teatro Collection (101886).

performance reverted to the charity of war godmothers. newspaper reviews of the ballets were far from enthusiastic and, apart from Almada and A. Ferro and a few others, diaghilev’s ballets were scoffed at as a ‘fantasy straight out of a lunatic asylum’, as Rodrigues Alves put it.8 Unfortunately, the Ballets Russes, which had been a revolution for Almada, did not alter the panorama of the Portuguese performative arts. Seven years later, in 1925, António Ferro still harshly criticized the tedious and unchallenging artistic panorama in the Diário de Notícias. That same year, the musical comedy revue called Chic-chic presented the first modernist set design.9 There were to be many modernist set designers who worked for the Portuguese music-hall productions and they definitely deserve more critical attention. Among them, the best known modernist set designer is perhaps José Barbosa, who, starting in 1927 with ÁguaPé, introduced modernism in a decisive manner into the panorama of Portuguese set and wardrobe design with the first of many productions in this genre. In the following photographs, we can see the visual impact of the Ballets Russes on José Barbosa’s production, especially in the costumes of Água-Pé (1927), which recreated the Russian folklore and costumes, as in some of diaghilev’s ballets (see Fig. 21.2). In Rambóia (1928), too, Barbosa’s modernist trait is easily recognizable in his wardrobe sketches (see Figs 21.3 to 21.6).

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Fig. 21.3 (upper left). José Barbosa. ‘Madame Progresso,’ Rambóia, 1928. Costume sketch for Maria Cristina. Watercolour and gouache on paper; 25.5 × 27.6 cm. Hortense Luz Company. Maria Vitória Theatre. Museu nacional do Teatro Collection (66931). Fig. 21.4 (upper right). José Barbosa. ‘Varina espanhola,’ Rambóia, 1928. Costume sketch for Corine Freire. Watercolour and gouache on paper; 25.8 × 25.2 cm. Hortense Luz Company. Maria Vitória Theatre. Museu nacional do Teatro Collection (66932). Fig. 21.5 (lower left). José Barbosa. ‘Vila Franca,’ Rambóia, 1928. Costume sketch for Cesária Henriques. Watercolour and gouache on paper; 21.6 × 25 cm. Hortense Luz Company. Maria Vitória Theatre. Museu nacional do Teatro Collection (66926). Fig. 21.6 (lower right). José Barbosa. ‘Voga,’ Rambóia, 1928, Costume sketch for Corina Freire. Watercolour on paper; 24 × 26.6 cm. Hortense Luz Company. Maria Vitória Theatre. Museu nacional do Teatro Collection (66929).

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When the Russian Ballets left Portugal, the São Carlos Theatre showed Portuguese ballet with the support of Helena Castelo Melhor. Almada did the choreography, Raul Lino the sets and costumes, and Ruy Coelho the music and libretto. The performance consisted of two ballets: Bailado do Encantamento (choreography by Almada, sets by Raul Lino) and A Princesa dos Sapatos de Ferro (staging by Almada and costumes by Pacheco). José Pacheco, whose visiting cards read ‘arquitecto pela graça de deus’ [architect by the grace of god],10 designed the scenery for A Princesa dos Sapatos de Ferro ballet. Once again, on 13 May 1918, Ilustração Portuguesa devoted three pages to the ballets in São Carlos and remarked on the inf luence of the Ballets Russes over the event’s organizers, among whom Almada is mentioned as a remarkable dancer. The works of Almada as a dramatist have been brought together in Volume vii of his complete works, published by the Imprensa nacional–Casa da Moeda, and I would like to highlight some of the texts.11 In 1919, Almada went to live in Paris and wrote a lever de rideau [curtain-raiser] entitled Antes de Começar, a play about a dialogue between two dolls, a boy and a girl, as they talk about artistic creation. Their dialogue embodies gordon Craig’s ideas about marionettes. This piece was announced in the repertoire of the Teatro novo [new Theatre] of António Ferro and Pacheco but, unfortunately, the play was never actually staged there. It was eventually performed on 17 June 1949, in the Teatro estúdio de Salitre, and Sarah Affonso and Almada negreiros designed the dolls’ costumes themselves. After Antes de Começar, Almada announced in 1923 a play in three acts called Os Outros, whose whereabouts remains unknown, and he wrote Portugal the following year. This play was announced in the Teatro novo repertoire but never actually performed, seeing how short-lived that experiment was. The play Deseja-se Mulher, dated 1928, was only staged thirty years later on, on 26 november 1963, when Fernando Amado directed it for Casa da Comédia. Almada considered Deseja-se Mulher as his best dramatic work. It is set in seven scenes and two acts, during which a man and a woman have encounters and disencounters without a sequential plot. In his written dedication to Fernando Amado, who directed Antes de Começar in 1949 and Deseja-se Mulher in 1963, Almada presented his ideas about the play in the following terms: A não-acção em teatro parece contradição. não-acção é o que distingue teatro dos espectáculos cinema e televisão. não-acção, à Ésquilo: o teatro. deixar a acção incólume para cada um.12 [non-action in theatre seems a contradiction. non-action is what distinguishes theatre from cinema and television performances. non-action in the manner of Aeschylus: theatre. Leave the action unscathed for each one.]

As well as clearly admitting a preference for the greek dramatist, the reference to Aeschylus is an argument for a non-naturalist theatre, one that does not reproduce the real, unlike that of the ‘cinema and television’. That Almada disparages naturalism is very well summarized in his sharp statement: ‘a decadência do teatro está na razão directa das toneladas de realismo importado para cima das tábuas’ [the

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Fig. 21.7. Stage photograph by J. Marques displaying Fernanda Lapa and norberto Barroca in Deseja-se Mulher. 1963. Casa da Comédia. Museu nacional do Teatro Collection (79550).

decadence in theatre is in direct correlation with the tons of imported realism on the boards].13 Deseja-se Mulher was published in 1959 with set design suggestions and scenery drawings by Almada,14 which Casa da Comédia recycled for the play’s opening in 1963. Although the play suffered several cuts from the censors and was performed only for a small audience,15 it caused a great impact on its spectators and was represented again in 1972 and 1984, thanks to Fernanda Lapa, who had played the part of Vampa in the first staging, in 1963. In both Antes de Começar and Deseja-se Mulher, neither the action nor the individualization of the characters acquires great relevance, which brings these two plays close to the aesthetics of symbolism (see Fig. 21.7). The prolific amount of work Almada did in designing the sets, graphics and costumes for theatre companies has been documented by Vítor Pavão dos Santos,16 and is too long to list here. Almada produced posters, sets and costumes for companies such as the Rey Colaço–Robles Monteiro, Lucília Simões and Casa da Comédia. His last incursion into theatre work was in 1966, when he created the sets and costumes and even directed Auto da Alma for the Companhia nacional, Rey Colaço–Robles Monteiro, at the São Carlos Theatre.17 The costumes he designed are of great beauty and are preserved as part of the permanent collection of the Museu nacional do Teatro, in Lisbon.

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Fig. 21.8 (upper left). José de Almada negreiros, ‘1º diablo,’ Auto da Alma, 1965, Taffeta and felt costume (used by Varela Silva), dress: 73 cm, cape: 168 cm, wings: 530 cm. Rey Colaço-Robles Monteiro Company. São Carlos Theatre. Museu nacional do Teatro Collection (132224). Fig. 21.9 (upper right and lower). José de Almada negreiros, ‘Alma,’ Auto da Alma, 1965, Taffeta, felt and lamé costume (used by Maria Lalande), dress: 143 cm, cape: 257 cm, hat 26cm (diameter). Rey Colaço-Robles Monteiro Company. São Carlos Theatre. Museu nacional do Teatro Collection (132226).

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sá-Carneiro and his Collaborators Mário de Sá-Carneiro wrote four plays, two of which are lost: O Vencido and Irmãos. Of the two surviving, Alma and Amizade, the first was published for the first time in François Castex’s doctoral thesis in 1971,18 and the second in 1912 by the publisher Arnold Bordalo. Sá-Carneiro first became involved in theatre at school, in the Passos Manuel lyceum, popularly known as the Carmo lyceum. Mário duarte, Rogério Perez and Sá-Carneiro organized several theatrical recitals that involved Carmo students as well as those at the São domingos lyceum. Included in these schools’ repertoires was Sá-Carneiro’s O Vencido, performed in 1905 at the Clube Simões Carneiro at the end of the school year. This group led to the setting up of the União dramática de Caridade, which later became grupo dramático Mário duarte and then Sociedade dos Amadores dramáticos. It was with his group of school friends that Sá-Carneiro acted in the play Don César de Bazan, which was performed on 15 May 1907, at the Teatro do Ginásio. Alma was written together with António Ponce de Leão, who had also been a schoolfellow at the Carmo, and the play was performed in 1905 at Clube Simões Carneiro’s small auditorium, at its headquarters in Rua da Fé. The club was very much in vogue at the time and it was encouraged by the king, d. Carlos, and the queen, d. Amélia. Some years later, this club lost its inf luence to Clube estefânia,19 where Amizade was performed for the first time in 1913. Sá-Carneiro wrote this play in collaboration with Tomás Cabreira Júnior, a school friend who would commit suicide in 1911. In Fernando Pessoa’s compiled a list for the publication of the Obras Completas de Sá-Carneiro, which came out in issue number 16 of the Presença magazine, in november 1928, no information is given about Amizade or Alma. As Pessoa said: ‘Mário de Sá-Carneiro deixou a Fernando Pessoa a indicação de publicar a obra, que dele houvesse, onde, quando e como lhe parecesse melhor’ [Mário de Sá-Carneiro left Fernando Pessoa the indication that he should publish any work of his where, when and as he saw fit].20 even though Pessoa overlooked Sá-Carneiro’s dramatic texts, the dramatic genre was of great importance for the formation of Mário as a writer and a poet. Amizade is a play in three acts, written in 1912. It argues that as a rule, a friendship between a man and woman is eroticized. A quote from Zola in the play’s epigraph helps us decipher and understand Amizade: ‘...une amitié ayant abouti fatalement au don de la personne, comme il arrive entre homme et femme’ [a friendship that inevitably led to bestowing one’s body, as it happens between a man and a woman].21 The plot revolves around two couples whose relations are disturbed (and eroticized) when a family friend arrives from Paris. Afonso, a forty-year-old widower, has been living for sixteen years with his sister-in-law Raquel, a thirtyseven-year-old widow, and together they have brought up their children, the two cousins, eighteen-year-old Maria and twenty-year old Ricardo. When Cesário, a famous artist in Paris, comes to Portugal after an absence of twelve years, he confesses he is perplexed by the relationship between Afonso and Raquel, who live

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together in perfect friendship without an erotic attraction drawing them together. Afonso and Raquel deny that they have erotic feelings for each other. Although they have hitherto lived in undisturbed harmony, young Ricardo’s strange behaviour is about to upset all of them. His aloofness and lack of interest in his fiancée, Maria, ends in a violent argument with his father, Afonso, who finds out that his son has been receiving anonymous letters saying that Maria is his sister, Afonso’s love child with Raquel. Afonso and Raquel are devastated when they find out about this terrible and false accusation, and their despair makes young Ricardo sick with remorse for having ever doubted his family, and he falls into a feverish state after a frustrated attempt to commit suicide. While his son is recovering from this nervous breakdown, Afonso admits he loves Raquel. Weighing up the social consequences of publicly acknowledging this love, he decides to go abroad, as this will permit his son to live in society without having to suffer ill-meant remarks. Cesário steps in and persuades Afonso to acknowledge his love for Raquel and they all leave to go abroad where they may live free of petty social conventions and judgements. The play belongs to the naturalist school of aesthetics, evident in the style of its dialogues, sets and spaces. This is confirmed by Zola’s epigraph, as Óscar Lopes has already pointed out.22 Alma, a one-act play written in August 1913, comes a month before A Confissão de Lúcio, and shares with this novel an interest in eroticism that draws friends together in their relationships. Alma probes the triangular relationship between Clara, her husband Jorge, a poet, and his cousin, Ricardo, who is in the army. The play begins immediately after Ricardo and Clara have confessed their love after years of repressing it, and the time is just before Ricardo’s departure for Timor, where he has volunteered to go in order to put a great distance between them. Jorge senses the romantic attachment and confronts Clara with it. She does not deny her love for his cousin, but assures her husband she has never betrayed him and so his honour remains unsullied. However, Jorge believes that the spiritual union of two souls is even more serious than a physical betrayal resulting from an act of sensuality. The play ends with Jorge telling Clara that she deserves to die while the two fight in a struggle with erotic overtones ‘que ambos gozam, e com que ambos se deliciam’ [that they both enjoy and in which they both delight’].23 Both plays structure their storylines around a love triangle (Clara, Jorge and Ricardo in Alma and the two couples and Cesário in Amizade). Although Amizade and Alma start from different viewpoints, they have two things in common: they both examine how people’s affinities and affectionate bonds tend to materialize in physical union. They both view the dissociation of love and sex as a middle-class preconception that they revolt against. This is noticeable in the following excerpts from these two plays: Cesário [a Raquel e Afonso] [...] A frase é rude, mas julgo-a verdadeira; por isso não hesito em proferi-la: a intimidade das almas exige a dos corpos — em circunstancias como as vossas é claro — porque os homens... são animais... (Amizade, III acto, cena 5) Jorge [a Clara] [...] (num grito) Tens deixado a alma sujar-se com esse ignóbil segredo, tens vivido em concubinagem com os teus pensamentos adúlteros ao

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Sá-Carneiro’s two known plays show a chronological transition from a naturalist aesthetic to one that is closer to symbolism, which is hardly surprising since, as Jorge de Sena succinctly said ‘o simbolismo e o naturalismo eram ambos como irmãos inimigos, e as faces complementares de um mesmo momento histórico-literário’ [symbolism and naturalism were like enemy brothers, and the complementary faces of the same historico-literary moment].24 Together with António Ponce de Leão, Sá-Carneiro translated Os Fósseis by François de Curel, a dramatist whose plays Antoine had staged in his Théâtre Libre and whom Sá-Carneiro admired enormously, as we can see in his article ‘O TeatreArte’, published in the republican periodical O Rebate, on 28 november 1913. This article shows that Sá-Carneiro’s aesthetic preferences were close to symbolism. In effect, Maeterlinck and Claudel are praised as examples to follow. Moreover, Sá-Carneiro believes that drama does not reside in action or words but is something invisible, ‘uma grande sombra que se vê e não se sente’ [a great shadow that is seen and not felt], which brings him close to Maeterlinck’s beliefs, as Teresa Rita Lopes has suggested.25 The distinction that Sá-Carneiro draws between literature and performative arts should be highlighted. O teatro é uma arte plástica, porque uma obra verdadeiramente dramática só se pensa depois de se ver. São os nossos olhos que a conduzem ao nosso cérebro. [...] Uma obra dramática é uma obra plástica porque para lá das suas palavras existe qualquer coisa que nela é o principal: suscita um arcaboiço, uma arquitectura.26 [Theatre is a visual art because a truly dramatic work can only be thought after it has been seen. It is our eyes that carry it to our brain. [...] A dramatic work is a visual art because something else exists beyond the words and it is its most important element: it brings about a structure, an architecture.]

Further ahead in this article, Sá-Carneiro writes about Madame Bovary and O Primo Basílio as dramatic pieces of work, which corresponds with symbolist interests that also equate the dramatic with the novelesque. However, Sá-Carneiro goes further and lists notre dame Cathedral and the Winged Victory of Samothrace as dramatic works of art, thereby illustrating how the visual character (‘a structure, an architecture’) are crucial elements of the dramatic art. Sá-Carneiro thus goes beyond

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a strict reading of dramaturgy tied to the literary text and proposes advancing with the aim to reach a global concept of theatre, which is already drawing away from symbolist claims. António Ponce de Leão António Ponce de Leão is the author of two dramas which explore Freudian themes par excellence: the triangulation of desire and the libidinal drives. The first play, A Onda, was performed and published in 1915, and the second, A Venda, is still unpublished. Livraria Ventura Abrantes brought out A Onda in 1915, the year in which the play opened on 27 March at the ginásio dramático (the name given to the Teatro do ginásio whenever it presented dramas). Teatro do ginásio, commonly known as Cinema Condes, was opened in 1846, the same year as Teatro nacional. The public went to ginásio for the sake of its comedies, especially French comedy, the most performed genre there throughout the First Portuguese Republic.27 A Onda, a play in one act, is a drama that explores the illicit relationship of eva, a widow, with Manuel, a young lawyer who is already engaged to be married to his cousin, Carlota. The connection between the two is explained as an irresistible attraction. Manuel [a eva]: [...] Uma onda de desvairamento toma-nos a ambos, envolvenos, o turbilhão é enorme, contorcemo-nos, lutamos, unimos os lábios, os olhos, as mãos crispam-se! A onda impele-nos e atira-nos cansados para a grande praia do esquecimento! (A Onda) [Manuel [to eve]: [...] A wave of delirium sweeps the two of us up and envelops us, the turmoil is enormous, we twist and turn and struggle, we close our lips, our eyes and clench our fists! The wave drags us along and dashes us exhausted against the great beach of oblivion!] (A Onda)

A sexual theme, and an illicit one, was possibly seen as a very daring one to explore at the time, as we understand through a review in the Capital newspaper, which describes the main dialogue between Manuel and eva in the following terms: ‘conduzido magistralmente num crescendo de emotividade passional que chega a sacudir rudemente os nervos’ [driven in a crescendo of passionate emotion in a magisterial fashion that jolts our nerves].28 Although not divorced from a naturalist aesthetic, the drama has a modern subject. As in the case of Amizade, this drama explores the meanderings of the human psyche and its secret desires, very often independent of social norms. Venda also explores matters of a sexual nature and the divided inner feelings of a man who struggles with his desires. Augusto Ávila is married but has not managed to have sex with his wife except after epileptic fits that leave him in an amnesiac state. As the title of the play suggests, Augusto Ávila is convinced that his wife only married him out of financial interest and subsequently, although he has decided to despise her (and to despise his feelings for her), his suppressed unconscious desires emerge at times and overwhelm him. As we see, Ponce de Leão looks into the legitimacy of human relationships within a framework that goes beyond social conventions. So, if Jorge in Alma thinks that his wife’s secret passion is a more serious matter than the physical act of adultery, Augusto Ávila in Venda considers

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that having sex with his wife is an illegitimate act, although it is socially sanctioned by marriage. Moreover, both plays suggest that the libidinal force cannot be stif led by social conventions or even by individual choice. António Ponce de Leão shared in the writing of another two dramas, neither of which has been staged or published; he wrote A Mãe dos Nossos Filhos together with Oliveira Mouta and O Passado with Mário duarte. Besides the dramatic poem O relógio do Sr. Cura, Ponce de Leão also collaborated with Sá-Carneiro on a four-act play called Mentiras, which was announced in the Folha da Tarde on 3 March 1913, but whose whereabouts remains unknown.29 Ponce de Leão is also the author of a compilation of chronicles of theatrical reviews, published in 1917 by Ventura Abrantes: Se Gil Vicente voltasse... António Ferro, José Pacheco and Teatro Novo António Ferro’s choice of adultery as a subject in his play Mar Alto stirred up a furore. Written in 1922, Mar Alto was performed that same year in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro by the Lucília Simões-eurico Braga Company,30 and although it was not very innovative, it caused a (quite predictable) scandal. Ferro then had it staged at the São Carlos theatre, on 10 July 1923. In the event, the São Carlos public interrupted the performance with protests and foot stamping, and the following day the civil governor of Lisbon promptly prohibited the play, as being immoral.31 despite this, the dramatic text was published in 1924 by the editorial house Portugália. As a matter of a fact, in the First Republic censorship was already governed by different criteria as to what could be staged and published.32 Intellectuals and members of the theatre community strongly protested against the prohibition. Among these protesters were Raul Brandão, António Sérgio, Robles Monteiro, Aquilino Ribeiro, Jaime Cortesão and Alfredo Cortês. Together with his friend José Pacheco, A. Ferro set up the short-lived Teatro novo. Almost all of the graphic work produced by José Pacheco, who diligently signed his name ‘Pacheko’, has been sadly lost. However, his participation in the Orpheu adventure, in the magazine O Ocidente and his enthusiasm in launching Contemporanea make his name inseparable from the first Portuguese modernism. Pacheco also designed the cover of the first issue of Orpheu and Sá-Carneiro’s Dispersão and Confissão de Lúcio. Furthermore, he was the architect behind the Teatro novo project, which was announced in Ilustração Portuguesa on 21 January 1922, as ‘a theatre of art’. Ferro wrote the article that went with the architectural project. Unfortunately, the project never progressed beyond the planning stage (see Fig. 21.10). Four years after the Ballets Russes toured Portugal, their impact still had a powerful affect on Ferro, who mentions them in the same 1922 article, in which the Teatro novo was publicly presented for the first time. Os nossos olhos estão impossibilitados de tornar a ter a felicidade dos bailados Russos, porque da sua primeira vinda a Portugal eles não encontraram aquela atmosfera de carinho que teriam tido se houvesse um Teatro-Arte, um TeatroBallet Russe.33 [Our eyes will not be given the opportunity to enjoy the Russian ballets again because the first time they came to Portugal they failed to find the caring

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Fig. 21.10. Photographs of the architectural project of José Pacheco for Teatro novo, as published by Ilustração Portuguesa on the 21 January 1922.

atmosphere they would have had if there had been a Teatro-Arte, a TeatroBallet Russe.]

The trail of fire that the ballets left behind them made Ferro aspire to renovate the Portuguese performing arts and form an educated public that knew how to welcome and appreciate these arts. The article ‘Teatro-Arte’, with its news about the wish to set up a Teatro novo, mentions as dramatists who were regrettably unknown in Portugal, the names of Maeterlinck and d’Annunzio, both connected (directly and indirectly) with symbolism. However, Antoine’s initiative and his Vieux-Colombier naturalist theatre are also praised as a source of inspiration.

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The press wrote about Teatro novo when it came into being in 1925 in violent terms, especially as it came at the same moment as Ferro’s harsh attacks on the Portuguese theatrical scene. In his column in Diário de Notícias, Ferro criticized Pic-Nic, a musical comedy revue that was on at the Éden Theatre, and the play Tangerinas Mágicas at the Trindade Theatre. His last review, in which he states that the stage setting of Tangerinas was expressionless, mobilized every set designer in town to insult the young modernist artists, whom they confusedly called ‘futurists’.34 Avelino de Almeida, nobre Martins, Leitão de Barros, gustavo de Matos Sequeira and Júlio dantas came out against the Teatro novo plan in the press. Júlio dantas even commented ironically: Teatro novo? Mas entendamo-nos. novo em quê? na data? na idade dos autores? nas ideias? nos processos? (...) É o teatro simplesmente novo no processo de realização cénica, — cubista, futurista, expressionista? não sei. Para representar as últimas novidades a salinha do Tivoli não chega: não se mete o mundo numa bombonnière.35 [Teatro novo? now, let’s understand each other. new in what? The date? The age of its authors? The ideas? The processes? [...] Is theatre simply new as a result of a process of scenic creation, — cubist, futurist, expressionist? I don’t know. To present the latest thing, the little auditorium in the Tivoli isn’t enough: the world can’t be put into a bombonnière.]

Teatro novo aspired to imitate Copeau’s Vieux-Colombier, as A Tarde wrote on 17 February 1925, and wanted to renovate the public’s taste by promoting afternoons of poetry and conferences with personalities such as Cocteau, Colette and Claude Farrère. exactly as with Copeau’s theatre, they sought a small, educated public, closely connected to the theatre company, seeing that the theatre only had capacity for 300 people, as Ferro confessed in Diário de Lisboa on 18 March 1925. In effect, it was an ambitious project: Pacheco designed a teatro-boîte [theatre-nightclub] in the Chiado with a set of boxes and 250 seats in the stalls.36 In the basement there was to be a library, a bar, the dressing rooms and a ‘cercle’, a private club for members only. The financing of the project was in the hands of the impresarios Lino Ferreira (who managed the dona Maria II) and Ricardo Jorge (son), who was the artistic director of São Luiz. The Teatro-boîte, called Teatro novo, announced that they were going to select international and Portuguese dramatists for their repertoire, and among the latter, they named the plays Portugal by Almada, Mar Alto by Ferro and Luz dos meus olhos by José Osório de Oliveira. The cast would have at its head the famous actor Chaby Pinheiro. There was, however, no possible comparison between the Vieux-Colombier and Ferro’s Teatro novo. Provisionally set up in the Tivoli cinema, the theatre did not have the simple, unadorned space of the Vieux-Colombier Theatre. On the contrary, as gustavo de Matos scathingly said in the Século after the opening night on 2 June, the theatre was very ornately decorated. O teatrinho está decorado com uma policromia exuberante, policromia que atinge os porteiros, todos de vermelho e ouro, marciais e solenes. [...] A gente chega a sentir-se mal vestido de preto... [...] da ante-sala passa-se para a sala por entre cortinados para a sala, toda guarnecida de panos caídos, cor de

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laranja, decorados com ornatos indeterminados, pintados a preto e dourado. dir-se-ia um cofre de jóias, colgado de acolchoado...O tecto, todo em pano branco pregueado, como cúpula de um dossel de leito, guarnecido a cordões que aos cantos se rematam em borlas, deixando passar a luz jorrada do alto. em derrodor sem solução de continuidade, uma série de cortinas, escondendo até o proscénio, encerram os espectadores na “noite”. Se não fosse o cadeirado da plateia, ignorar-se-ia de que lado era o palco.37 [The little theatre is decorated in a lot of exuberant colours, even the doormen are in red and gold, martial and solemn. [...] We begin to feel uncomfortable dressed in black... [...] From the ante-chamber we reach the auditorium though curtains, an auditorium adorned in drooping orange-coloured drapery festooned with indeterminate decorations, painted in black and gold. One could call it a jewellery box with padded sides... The entire ceiling is a pleated white sheet like the top of a canopy bed decorated with cords tied at the corners in tassels, allowing the light to pour down from above. All around there’s an endless series of curtains that even hides the proscenium and encloses the spectators in a ‘night’. If it weren’t for the rows of seats in the stalls, we wouldn’t know which side the stage was.]

We should bear in mind that this account was given by gustavo Sequeira, who had been openly against the project right from the start, when the press announced its conception. despite this, there is no doubt that the atmosphere there bore little comparison to Copeau’s spartan theatre. At the opening of Knock, the first play performed by Teatro novo, Ferro made a thirty-five-minute speech before the performance began and complained that he had been the butt of the press’s derisive comments when his project was announced. Knock ou O Triunfo da Medicina by Jules Romains (translated by Luís Figueira) was directed by Joaquim de Oliveira and ran from 2 to 15 June 1925. José Pacheco and Almada negreiros collaborated as the set designers of the play. The second play that was staged was Uma verdade para cada um by Pirandello (translated by Teresa Leitão de Barros) and directed by gil Ferreira, which ran from 25 to 29 June 1925. The set designer was eduardo Malta. These were the only two plays staged by the Teatro novo and both were directed by Joaquim de Oliveira and gil Ferreira, who were professional directors at the Teatro nacional dona Maria II. In effect, Ferro endeavoured to lend some credibility to his company by associating it with these well-known names, besides the aforementioned ‘star’ Chaby Pinheiro. As Rogério Paulo succintly said ‘embora pretendendo ser revolucionário, o Teatro novo, ainda que útil, limitou-se a insistir numa obediência a um naturalismo que já nessa altura estava ultrapassado para além-fronteiras’ [Although it seeks to be revolutionary, the Teatro novo, however useful, merely insisted on deferring to a naturalism that was already by then outdated abroad].38 António Quadros believed that the Teatro novo came to an end as a result of a lack of financial backing,39 but what also must be taken into account as a factor that helped towards the company’s collapse was the great animosity that Ferro had attracted towards himself and his project.

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Fernando Pessoa Like Almada, Pessoa believed that action was a secondary function in drama. He wrote in his notes on literary criticism that ‘o enredo do teatro é, não a acção nem a progressão e consequência da acção — mas, sim, mais abrangentemente, a revelação das almas através das palavras trocadas e a criação de situações’ [dramatic plot is not action or the results of action — but rather, it is more broadly the revelation of souls through the words that are exchanged and the creation of situations].40 However, unlike Almada, who created costumes and sets, Pessoa was not concerned with the visual aspects of theatre. The first international modernist movement in theatre was symbolism and Pessoa followed it closely when he wrote O Marinheiro: drama estático em um quadro [The Mariner: a static drama in one act]. This was his only completed play and it was published during his lifetime, but only performed in 1957. O Marinheiro was not, though, his only incursion into theatre and he left numerous fragments of drama projects. As a result, we are restricted to examining his work at a literary level unless we wish to study the adaptations of O Marinheiro to theatre, which is not within the scope of this article. Fernando Pessoa was interested in Irish theatre, and particularly in John M. Synge and William B. Yeats. He even planned to translate Synge and typed two pages and wrote another three by hand of what was to have been a translation of Riders to the Sea.41 Pessoa wrote O Marinheiro in 1913 and that same year he tried to have it published in A Águia. Álvaro Pinto’s rejection it was the official reason for Pessoa to break free from Renascença Portuguesa and its organ, A Águia. Finally, in 1915, Pessoa selected O Marinheiro from among his various unpublished works and had it published in the first issue of Orpheu. Pessoa pitted his strength against the symbolist master, Maeterlinck, as we understand from a comment made by Álvaro de Campos. In a plan to publish sensationist poetry in england, Álvaro de Campos presents Fernando Pessoa as the author of O Marinheiro and describes it in these terms: ‘no more remote thing exists in literature. Maeterlinck’s best nebulosity and subtlety is coarse and carnal by comparison’.42 O Marinheiro touches upon one of the most recurrent of Pessoan themes: the difficulty in differentiating between life and dream, between the real and the unreal. There are four female characters in this static drama: three of them are keeping watch over the corpse of a fourth while they tell each other stories to pass away the night. The border between the real and the unreal, which is questioned immediately at the start of the drama, attains a new dimension when the second watcher tells her story about a mariner lost on an island, and suggests that that they could all be in this mariner’s dreams and not the other way around. Could the watchers be people that the watcher has dreamed up or, on the contrary, are they dreaming about him? The presence of the absent mariner guides the watchers through an inner journey that ends with the break of day and a watcher saying ‘sim, acordou alguém’ [yes, someone has woken up].43 With that, there is a return

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to the suggestion that the four women are or could be the products of someone’s imagination, perhaps the mariner’s. A terror that they may not exist takes over the vigil-keepers and grows in intensity until the end of the drama. The play was first performed in 1957 at the Teatro de ensaio in Lisbon. In 1961, Fernando Amado became interested in it and directed it at the Centro nacional de Cultura as well as Casa da Comédia. Another great name in theatre, António Pedro, directed it in 1966 with students from the Teatro Universitário of Porto, and it was performed at the Cine-Teatro de São João. The play has been performed very frequently since 25 April 1974. Besides O Marinheiro, Pessoa left numerous fragments that show his interest in the theatre. These have been documented by Teresa Rita Lopes in her doctoral thesis, which remains to this day the most extensive work on this matter. Pessoa was only sixteen years old when he wrote Marino, a play about adultery that was, according to his plan, to have been in five acts. The inf luence of english culture and the great elizabethan dramatist, Shakespeare, is evident in this play.44 Also in english and written at the same time as Marino are several fragment of The Multiple Gentleman, a title that cannot but remind us of the ‘drama em gente’ of which Pessoa himself was a protagonist. At the age of twenty, in 1908, the admiration that Pessoa felt for goethe translated into Fausto: Tragédia subjectiva, a dramatic poem that Pessoa planned to publish in separate volumes: Primeiro Fausto, Segundo Fausto and Terceiro Fausto.45 This project continued for twenty-five years (1908–33). Pessoa summarized this project in the following manner: ‘o conjunto do drama representa a luta entre a Inteligência e a Vida, em que a Inteligência é sempre vencida. A Inteligência é representada por Fausto e a Vida diversamente, segundo as circunstâncias acidentais do drama’ [the drama as a whole represents the struggle between Intelligence and Life, in which Intelligence is always vanquished. Intelligence is represented by Faust and Life is represented in diverse manners according to the accidental circumstances in the drama].46 The Pessoan problem of the division between intellectual life and the empirical and daily attractions of life is present here. The first act is focused on the conf lict within Intelligence itself, the second act deals with the conf lict between Intelligence and other Intelligences, the third act the conf lict between Intelligence and emotion and the fourth the conf lict between Intelligence and Action. It is curious that in this fourth act, Intelligence is confronted with Life, in the form of a woman; another woman to add to the various female characters in his work. In the fifth act, Intelligence is overwhelmed and crushed. At the age of thirty, Pessoa began to write fragments of The Duke of Parma, a play that was to have five acts and is last dated back to 1922.47 There are seventeen undated manuscripts entitled Circo Internacional Schildroth, which are satires on the politics, institutions and people of the Portuguese First Republic. In another fragment, Monólogo Dialogado, the Holy Trinity, Father, Son and Holy ghost, discuss which of the three has a real existence. Mereia is a dialogue between a brother and sister about possibly running away from home. T. R. Lopes includes the fragments of the dramas Salomé, A Morte do Príncipe and Diálogo no Jardim do Palácio in a cycle she describes as ‘Teatro de Êxtase’ [Theatre of

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ecstasy], an expression that Pessoa himself uses to catalogue his work in progress, on 12 January 1914. Sakyamuni and Calvário belong to a triptych whose third name is unknown. The first play is about Buddha and the second about Christ. Apart from Pessoa’s dramatic texts, one might also take into account the large amount of dramatic poetry produced throughout his life under different names, characters and personalities. As Pessoa said himself in a text published in Presença 17, entitled ‘Tábua Bibliográfica’ (december 1928), his work deals with ‘um drama em gente, em vez de actos’ [a drama in people instead of in acts]. Conclusion In my search for Portuguese manifestations of modernism in theatre I found myself confronted with the great urge to consider not only the familiar and renowned authors and genres but also to explore less-known authors side by side with the perfor mative aspects of staging, such as wardrobe and set. In effect, in order to examine modernist theatre in Portugal, one should go beyond the dramatic works of the Orpheu generation and revisit the legacies of numerous works left by set and wardrobe designers of the Portuguese genre ‘revista’. These include: Maria Adelaide de Lima Cruz (1908–1985), Raul Lino (1879–1974), Leitão de Barros (1896–1967), Tomás de Melo (1906–1990), Alice Rey-Colaço (1893–?), Júlio de Sousa (1906–1966), Armando Bruno (1907–1989), António Amorim (1898?–1964?), Jorge Herold (1907–1990), Laierte neves (1914–1981), José Barbosa (1900–1977), Pinto Campos (1908–1975), José Pacheco (1885–1934), António Soares (1894–1978), Jorge Barradas (1894–1971), Freder ico Jorge (1915–1993), Stuart Carvalhais (1887–1961). Work on this has already been carried out by Vítor Pavão dos Santos and Francisco Luiz Rebello, pioneers in the research and study of revista as a genre. nevertheless, there is still much to be done, and many ‘stories’ to unearth. I must acknowledge that the efforts of the Orpheu generation, apart from that of Almada and Pacheco, are of a greater literary impact rather than a visual or a plastic one, although many of them dreamed of a theatre that would involve all the arts or, as Almada expressed it, a theatre that would be ‘a showcase for all the arts’.48 notes to Chapter 21 1. glória Bastos and Ana I. Vasconcelos, O Teatro em Lisboa no Tempo da Primeira República (Lisbon: Museu nacional do Teatro, 2004), pp. 87–139. 2. Luiz Francisco Rebello, História do Teatro (Lisbon: Comissariado para a europália ’91/Imprensa nacional–Casa da Moeda, 1991), p. 89; Bastos and Vasconcelos, O Teatro em Lisboa, p. 11. 3. The same kind of initiative began in Berlin in 1889, Copenhagen in 1891, Moscow in 1898 and Munich and London in 1900. Marvin Carlson, ‘Modernism’, in The Continuum Companion to Twentieth Century Theatre, ed. by Colin Chambers (London and new York: Continuum, 2002).

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4. In March 1908, dantas was invited to become professor of history of literature and director of the drama department of the Escola de Arte de Representar, a position he held until April 1936 when the legislation in force required that he chose between being either director of the Conservatory or Inspector of Bibliotecas Eruditas e Arquivos; he chose the latter. In 1914, a year before the famous Manifesto, Júlio dantas was not only at the head of the institution that trained actors but he also suggested to the government the setting up at Escola de Arte de Representar of a course in scene-painting and another in theatre costumes, proposals that were enthusiastically welcomed. Luiz de Oliveira guimarães, Júlio Dantas: uma vida, uma obra, uma época (Lisbon: Romano Torres, 1963). 5. Vítor Pavão dos Santos, O Escaparate de Todas as Artes; ou, Gil Vicente visto por Almada Negreiros (Lisbon: Museu nacional do Teatro, 1993), p. 10. 6. See Marvin Carlson, ‘Modernism’. The Continuum Companion. 7. Almada quoted by Santos, O Escaparate de Todas as Artes, p. 11. 8. Quoted by Santos, Ibid., p. 19. 9. Vítor Pavão dos Santos, A Revista Modernista (Lisbon: Instituto Português de Museus, 2000), p. 5. 10. Álvaro Andrade, ‘Recorda-se uma iniciativa em prol do teatro moderno’, Diário Popular (26 August 1969), p. 39. 11. José de Almada negreiros, Obras Completas, 7 vols (Lisbon: Imprensa nacional–Casa da Moeda, 1986–93), vii: Teatro. 12. Ibid., p. 16. 13. Almada quoted by Luiz Francisco Rebello, O Teatro Simbolista e Modernista, 1890–1939 (Lisbon: Instituto de Cultura Portuguesa, 1979), p. 58. 14. See José de Almada negreiros, Teatro. 15. Santos, O Escaparate de Todas as Artes, p. 56. 16. Vítor Pavão dos Santos, O Escaparate de Todas as Artes; ‘O homem de teatro’ in Almada Negreiros e o Espectáculo (Lisbon: Fundação Calouste gulbenkian/Centro de Arte Moderna, 1984); ‘Almada e o teatro’, in Almada Negreiros, 1893–1970, ed. by Margarida Acciaiuoli (Lisbon: Fundação Calouste gulbenkian/Centro de Arte Moderna, 1985). 17. The Teatro nacional d. Maria II had recently burnt down and, as a result, the prestigious São Carlos Theatre had been chosen for this invitation-only event aimed at the elite. 18. See François Castex, Mário de Sá-Carneiro e a Génese de Amizade (Coimbra: Almedina, 1971). 19. Ibid., p. 65. 20. Ibid., p. 9. 21. Ibid., p. 149. 22. Óscar Lopes, De Fialho a Nemésio, 2 vols (Lisbon: Imprensa nacional–Casa da Moeda, 1987), ii, 532. 23. António Ponce de Leão and Mário de Sá-Carneiro, A Alma, ed. by Luiz Francisco Rebello (Lisbon: Rolim, 1987), p. 68. 24. Rebello, O Teatro Simbolista e Modernista, 1890–1939, p. 11 25. Teresa Rita Lopes, Fernando Pessoa et le drame symboliste: Heritage et création (Paris: Fundação Calouste gulbenkian/Centro Cultural Português, 1977), p. 90. 26. Castex, Mário de Sá-Carneiro, p. 377. 27. Bastos and Vasconcelos, O Teatro em Lisboa, p. 46. 28. Press cutting reproduced in António Ponce de Leão, A Onda, Peça em 1 Acto (Lisbon: Livraria Ventura Abrantes, 1915), p. 15. 29. Renata Soares Junqueira, ‘António Ponce de Leão’, in Dicionário de Fernando Pessoa e do Modernismo Português, coord. by Fernando Cabral Martins (Lisbon: Caminho, 2008), pp. 397–99 (p. 398). 30. António Quadros, O Primeiro Modernismo Português: vanguarda e tradição (Mem Martins: europaAmérica, 1989), p. 319. According to Quadros, Ferro had actually acted a part in his play on several nights of the Brazilian tour. 31. graça dos Santos, O Espectáculo Desvirtuado: o teatro português sob o reinado de Salazar (1933–1968), trans. by Lígia Calapez (Lisbon: Caminho, 2004), p. 140 32. The play was only officially censored on 4 August 1958.

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33. António Ferro, ‘Um teatro de arte’. Ilustração Portuguesa, 21 January 1922, p. 54. 34. Santos, A Revista Modernista, p. 5. 35. dantas quoted by Joaquim de Oliveira, O Teatro Novo: o ‘Knock’ e o seu encenador; memória e ensaios; subsídios para a técnica e história do teatro português (Lisbon: Livraria Trindade, 1950), p. 75. 36. On 21 January 1922, Ilustração Portuguesa announced that the Teatro novo was to be built in the Parque eduardo VII. 37. gustavo Sequeira Matos quoted by Álvaro Andrade, ‘Ideia bem intencionada que morreu quase antes de nascer...’. Diário Popular, 2 September 1969, p. 40. 38. Rogério Paulo, ‘Resenha do teatro em Portugal das origens aos nossos dias’, in História do Teatro Europeu, ed. by g. n. Boiadzhiev and others, 2 vols (Lisbon: Prelo, 1960–62), ii (1962), p. 939. 39. António Quadros, O Primeiro Modernismo Português, p. 320. 40. Fernando Pessoa, Páginas de Estética e de Teoria e Crítica Literárias, ed. by georg Rudolf Lind and Jacinto do Prado Coelho (Lisbon: Ática, 1967), p. 113. 41. Teresa Rita Lopes, Fernando Pessoa et le drame symboliste, p. 126. 42. Fernando Pessoa, Páginas Íntimas e de Auto-Interpretação, ed. by georg Rudolf Lind and Jacinto do Prado Coelho (Lisbon: Ática, 1966), p. 141. 43. Fernando Pessoa, ‘O Marinheiro’, Orpheu 1 (1915); reedited with an introduction by Maria Aliete galhoz (Lisbon: Ática, 1959), p. 53. 44. Teresa Rita Lopes, Fernando Pessoa et le drame symboliste, p. 123. 45. Ibid., p. 118. 46. Pessoa quoted in ibid., p. 118. 47. Ibid., p. 124. 48. Almada quoted by Santos, O Escaparate de Todas as Artes, p. 66.

CHAPter 22

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The Aesthetics of nationalism: Modernism and Authoritarianism in early Twentieth-Century Portugal1 Manuel Villaverde Cabral To the memory of george L. Mosse The relationship between artistic and literary modernism, on the one hand, and right-wing authoritarianism on the other, has often been noted. According to g. L. Mosse’s classic essay on Fascism and the Intellectuals, the extreme authoritarian movements of the inter-war period in Western europe cannot be fully understood outside their cultural context, namely in connection with the rise of modern nationalism and elitism, as well as the pre-war literary tradition.2 It is my contention that in Portugal some of the best writers and artists of the 1910s and 1920s, in particular those associated with modernism (Orpheu, 1915) and futurism (Portugal Futurista, 1917), contributed significantly to the ‘attitude of mind’ and ‘aesthetic politics’, to use Mosse’s terminology, that provided fascism with its initial cultural aura and its attraction for creative intellectuals. In this paper I will be mainly concerned with the writings of Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935), Mário de Sá-Carneiro (1890–1916), José de Almada negreiros (1893– 1970) and their companions of the modernist generation, but I will only elaborate on the political aspects — sometimes explicit and more frequently implicit — of their creative activities. First, I will show the strong relationship existing since the 1880s between the modernization of Portuguese literary patterns and the rise of nationalism, particularly in connection with the Republican movement. I will then try to analyse the political overtones of the modernist movement that followed the proclamation of the Republic in 1910. To conclude, I will deal with the increasingly traditional outlook of the Portuguese authoritarian regime and the estrangement of most creative intellectuals from its appeal in the 1930s. the origins of Literary nationalism Portugal’s literary trends underwent a significant shift in the late 1860s with the advent of the so-called Geração de 1870. Insofar as culture is related to the broader issues of societal change, modern literary trends followed closely the institutionalization of political liberalism and the beginnings of socioeconomic

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modernization. But it was only in the 1880s that the Republican movement took off, as a reaction against the shortcomings of the liberal system, establishing from the beginning a strong association between the struggle against the monarchist regime and the rise of modern nationalism. From an aesthetic viewpoint, Portuguese literary modernism started with Cesário Verde, who first brought to Portuguese poetry the Baudelairean concern with the modern world and the new attitudes of the artist towards modernity. As Pessoa put it once, ‘Cesário has taught us how to see.’ In turn, Sá-Carneiro, when he was asked in 1914 to quote the major works of Portuguese modern literature, answered provocatively: ‘Frisantemente, o livro do futurista Cesário Verde, ondulante de certo, imenso de europa, ziguezagueante de esforço’ [Strikingly, the book of the futurist Cesário Verde, waving for sure, immensely european, zigzagging with effort].3 Moreover, Cesário also associated himself with political protest, contributing eventually to the founding event of modern political nationalism in Portugal, i.e., the Republican celebrations of Camões in 1880, with his most famous poem, ‘O sentimento de um ocidental’ [Feelings of a Westerner]. However, it was only in the following decade that literary nationalism matured. Cesário had already died when the first big crisis of Portuguese liberalism broke out and paved the way for a new stage both in politics and culture. In January 1890, the British Ultimatum gave political nationalism more momentum in one day than the Republican propaganda had done in the previous decade. Striking at the heart of Portuguese identity as a small and backward nation, at pains to live up to the standards of its huge historic empire, the Ultimatum provoked a patriotic outcry that found its best literary expression in various books of the most popular Republican poet, guerra Junqueiro. But the Ultimatum was followed by more trouble. By 1892, Portuguese society had shifted from the relatively peaceful political and economic liberalism of the previous decades, into a protracted state of crisis which brought about the Republic first, the military takeover of 1926 afterwards, and eventually the institutionalization of authoritarianism under Salazar in the 1930s. In Portugal the ‘twilight of the liberal state’, to use Mosca’s expression, was on its way since then.4 The monarchy was seriously challenged for the first time on 31 January 1891 and among the leaders of the abortive Republican coup in Porto we find two of the most inf luential nationalist ideologues to whom Junqueiro’s verse drama ‘Pátria’ [Fatherland] (1896) is dedicated: Basílio Teles (1856–1923), the most articulate proponent of authoritarian rule in Portugal during the early 1900s; and Sampaio Bruno (1856–1915), whose cultural stance had an overtone of esoteric prophecy similar to Pessoa’s own ‘Sebastianism’.5 It is in this context that Pessoa’s repeated praises of Junqueiro’s nationalist poetry have to be appreciated, irrespective of the low aesthetic value currently attributed to it. However, literary nationalism as a self-conscious movement did not follow the epic dimension of Junqueiro’s ‘Pátria’. Instead, it represented a retreat from the political scene and became a refuge for fin-de-siècle subjectivism and traditionalism. In spite of his later efforts to write a patriotic poem, significantly entitled ‘O desejado’ [The desired One],6 a clear allusion to King Sebastian who disappeared in Morocco in

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the late 16th century, Antonio nobre (1867–1900), the best representative of literary nationalism, remained also the most obvious example of the inherent contradiction between tradition and modernity which pervades nationalism. Thus, the ‘Janus-faced quality’ of literary modernism was already apparent in Portugal from the 1890s onwards.7 In fact, such ambiguous quality stems directly from the nature of the nationalist sentiment itself, as ernest gellner pointed out,8 and no one was more aware of it than Pessoa: Quando a hora do Ultimatum abriu em Portugal, para não mais se fecharem, as portas do templo de Jano, o deus bifronte revelou-se na literatura nas duas maneiras correspondentes à dupla direcção do seu olhar. Junqueiro — o de ‘Finis Patriae’ e o de ‘Pátria’ — foi a face que olha o Futuro, e se exalta. António nobre foi a face que olha o Passado, e se entristece.9 [When the time of the Ultimatum in Portugal opened never to close again the doorway of the temple of Janus, the dual-faced god revealed himself in literature in the two manners, in line with his double-sided gaze. Junqueiro — of ‘Finis Patriae’ and ‘Pátria’ — was the side that looked into the future and was overjoyed. António nobre was the side that looked back on the Past and grew sorrowful.]

Like nobre, Pessoa too became increasingly backward-looking, despite his efforts to depict the esoteric future of the so-called Fifth empire. However, at the very beginning of his dramatic intervention into the Portuguese cultural scene in the early l910s, Pessoa was ideologically — if not aesthetically — much closer to the epic, forward-looking rhetoric of Junqueiro, than to the sad lyricism of the author of ‘Só’ [Alone] (1892). Indeed, in his Notes on ‘Pátria’, Junqueiro provides more than one clue to Pessoa’s strong emphasis on the connection between his concept of a ‘new Portuguese poetry’ and Republican nationalism. The undisguised messianic and somewhat authoritarian elements of Junqueiro’s notion of political reform cul minates in a conception of the Republic which clearly anticipates Pessoa’s own vision: O republicanismo não é [...] uma fórmula de direito Publico; é a fórmula extrema da salvação pública [...]. nesta agudíssima crise nacional, a República é mais do que uma simples forma de governo. É o último esforço, a última energia que uma nação moribunda opõe à Morte.10 [Republicanism is not [...] a formula of Public Law; it is the ultimate formula of public salvation [...]. In this extremely serious national crisis, the Republic is more than a simple form of government. It is the last effort, the final burst of energy that a dying nation puts up against death.]

Thus, like Junqueiro and, to a large extent, also like the Renascença Portuguesa group, created soon after the proclamation of the Republic by the poet Teixeira de Pascoaes (1877–1952), Pessoa explicitly associated himself with the Republican movement, while establishing a strong, however obscure, relationship between it and the new trends in Portuguese literature: [...] tendo o movimento literário português nascido com e acompanhado o movimento republicano, é dentro do republicanismo, e pelo republicanismo, que está, e será, o glorioso futuro, deduzido. São duas faces do mesmo fenómeno criador.11

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For Pessoa too, ‘to be a monarchist today, in Portugal, is to be a traitor to the national soul and the future of the Portuguese motherland’, but similarly to Junqueiro and especially to Basílio Teles’s total rejection of liberalism as a political system allegedly unsuitable to sustain Portugal’s historic status, Pessoa immediately separates himself from any attempt, on the part of the Republic, to prolong the politics of constitutionalism. Thus he established, from his first call for a ‘nova poesia portuguesa’, a profound connection between literature and politics under a rather messianic concept of Republicanism. Simultaneously, he also spelled out his contempt for liberal-democratic politics. The call for modernism as a ‘civilizing value’ goes together with a deep rejection of both liberalism and socialism as soon the Republic was installed: O espírito de tudo isso é absolutamente o contrário da nova corrente literária [...]. Tudo isso, que afinal é estrangeiro, morrerá de per si, ou à boca dos canhões do nosso Cromwell futuro. e a nossa grande Raça partirá em busca de uma Índia nova.12 [The spirit of all this goes completely against the new literary trend [...]. All this, which is foreign after all, will die of itself or at the mouth of the cannons of our future Cromwell. And our great race of people will set off in search of a new India.]

In the early 1910s, such a political and aesthetic stance could hardly fail to be associated with the thrust, spreading throughout most of europe, towards an authoritarian way out of the traditional cleavages of liberal democracy. It is thus undeniable that Pessoa’s intellectual stand contained many ingredients relating his political views to modern authoritarian nationalism. Indeed, his specific blend of modernism and nationalism separates him from both the mild authoritarianism of many Republican writers of the time as well as from the increasing traditionalism of their monarchist counterparts. the Modernist revolution Pessoa’s main drive towards literary modernism is of course rooted in his aesthetic concerns, rather than in any consistent political ideology. His split from Renascença Portuguesa came only as a confirmation of his profound aesthetic disagreement with Pascoaes’s ‘saudosismo’ and its neo-romantic vagueness and sentimentality. It was essentially under the inf luence of his english education and of his readings of French symbolists, as well as his recent acquaintance with the almost unknown symbolist poetry of Camilo Pessanha (1869–1926), that Pessoa eventually launched in 1913 his poem-manifesto ‘Paúis’ as a reaction against ‘saudosismo’. The poem represented a major break with the prevailing trends of Portuguese poetry and echoed the most advanced expressions of european literature of the time. Moreover, it immediately contributed to crystallize around Pessoa the group of young artists who were to

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publish Orpheu two years later. But if the aesthetic revolutionary character of ‘Paúis’ is quite evident, the connection between aesthetics and politics will only surface with the advent of Portuguese futurism in 1917. By the end of 1914, António Ferro (1895–1956), the future editorial manager of Orpheu, was spreading the word that ‘paúlismo’ had been superseded by another ism of Pessoa’s fertile invention.13 In March of that year, Pessoa had written ‘Chuva Oblíqua’ [Oblique Rain], a long poetical manifesto for ‘intersectionism’, a sort of literary equivalent of cubism which represented a further stage in his search for the ‘intellectualization of emotions’. Although ‘intersectionism’ can hardly be described as political, Sá-Carneiro and Almada negreiros did add explicit political overtones to it, as aesthetics and politics became part of the stuff from which modernist literature was made. On the 8 March 1914, Pessoa had created his first heteronym, Alberto Caeiro, and although, again, there is apparently nothing political about Caeiro’s poetry, he too did at times allude explicitly to the political life of the day, making clear his anti-humanitarian and anti-socialist stand, as in poem XLVI. More importantly, a second heteronym made its appearance, also in March, with the ‘discovery of true sensations’, starting with ‘Opiário’ and soon followed by ‘Ode Triunfal’ and the dramatic 1,000-odd-line ‘Ode Marítima’. These poems stand as a kind of manifesto for ‘sensationism’, which came into full being during the next years, under the signature of Álvaro de Campos, the imaginary naval engineer trained in glasgow who declared from the beginning ‘to belong to that kind of Portuguese who became jobless after India was discovered’. Belonging and cosmopolitanism came simultaneously into Portuguese modernism as a legacy of the universalistic content of the Portuguese overseas adventure, Pessoa claimed. Finally, in June 1914 there appeared the third great heteronym, Ricardo Reis, also a member of the ‘sensationist’ family. Thus, before the First World War broke out, Pessoa, then aged twenty-six, had already set the pattern for his unique contribution to modern literature. To quote one of his english translators, ‘Fernando Pessoa is the extreme example of what may be the essentially modern kind of poet: the objective introvert.’14 Indeed, as Bradbury and McFarlane put it: [...] one of the most remarkable features of this period between 1890 and 1930 is that extraordinary galaxy of talent and [...] few historical phases contain such an extraordinary wealth of major writers [...] whose complexity of aesthetic enquiry, whose generative sense of style, whose sustaining and self-risking intelligence offers so much work worthy of detailed consideration.15

Then it is fair to argue that Pessoa was himself a whole galaxy of complex aesthetic enquiry, generative sense of style and self-risking, virtually self-destroying, intelligence. One year after the birth of the heteronymous galaxy, Portugal was undergoing its second authoritarian experiment of the twentieth century, after an attempt in 1907 to devise a dictatorial solution for the long-term problems of oligarchic liberalism. In 1915, the short-lived dictatorship of general Pimenta de Castro was the first unconstitutional attempt, under the Republic, to address the new pressures brought

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upon the liberal regime by increasing urban unrest and the outbreak of the War. He was eventually defeated in a bloody revolution on 14 May 1915, an episode which found many echoes in modernist literature. It was under Castro’s favourable rule that several extreme right-wing groupings first manifested themselves, with great impact among the Portuguese elites. The most inf luential of those groups was Integralismo Lusitano, directly inspired by Action Française but also traceable to the Portuguese nationalist political tradition. While the modernists were put off associating with the ‘Integralistas’ on account of their strong cultural traditionalism, Pessoa, like many others, repeatedly borrowed from their political themes. Another outlet of modern authoritarian nationalism, also created in early 1915, was the magazine Ideia Nacional, edited by Francisco Homem Cristo Filho (1892–1928) and directly inspired by Italian nationalism. Almada negreiros was a frequent contributor to the magazine, having designed several of its cover pages. A f lamboyant cosmopolitan ‘littérateur’, the young Homem Cristo enjoyed some credibility among the Parisian ultra-right, and consistently praised Youth as a political category. Sá-Carneiro, as well as several other members of the modernist movement like the painter guilherme de Santa-Rita (1889–1918) and dr Raul Leal (1886–1964), used to meet him before the War in Paris, where Homem Cristo later published his enthusiastic Mussolini Bâtisseur d’Empire (1923). It was under dictatorial rule that Pessoa and his friends eventually launched Orpheu, in March 1915, provoking an immediate and lasting effect. With the two issues of Orpheu, Portuguese modernism acquired the features of an ‘aesthetic guerrilla warfare’ which only added to the fragmentation of the Republic’s cultural legitimacy. Like Italian futurism and several other european avant-garde movements, Orpheu too represents a new type of politicization of art and literature. Artists and writers organize themselves in factions and issue manifesto after manifesto; the aesthetic revolution presents itself as a metaphor, if not as a model, for the need to revolutionize the entire social order, and indeed life itself: ‘a Arte moderna revolucionou a Vida’ [modern art has revolutionized life], António Ferro liked to say in the early 1920s.16 However, the modern artist did not see himself as an intellectuel engagé, supporting some established political ideology; rather, he saw himself as engaged in imposing an aesthetic worldview upon politics. As Pessoa put it graphically: politics is a subordinate form of aesthetics. the Politics of Modernism and Futurism This politicization of aesthetics and the parallel aesthetization of politics reached their peak in 1917 with the single issue of Portugal Futurista, which was quickly seized by the police. The driving force behind Portuguese futurism was Almada negreiros. Five years younger than Pessoa, personally acquainted with Paris and its fashions, a multifaceted artist and writer, Almada was crucially instrumental in bringing together the initial group of Orpheu, somewhat ‘decadentista’, and the forceful younger generation of Portuguese artists. Under the spur of the self-styled futurist agitator Santa-Rita Pintor (see Fig. 22.1), Almada was the most inf luential

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Fig. 22.1. Santa-Rita Pintor by Pedro Lima (photographer). In Carlos Parreira, Santa-Rita Pintor: in-memoriam (Lisbon: Imprensa de Manuel Lucas Torres, 1919). 13 p. 24 cm. Casa Fernando Pessoa Collection.

member of the group’s guerrilla warfare to the literary establishment of the time and indeed Portuguese society at large. Against all odds, the publication of Orpheu in early 1915 had been an unexpected success because of the utterly scandalized reactions of the establishment. Almada’s counter-attack was fulminating. While working on his unique contribution to the modernist prose, Almada became the impresario of the futurist show and specialized in the writing of its most outrageous manifestos. First, he issued the Manifesto anti-Dantas, in which he picked vigorously on the academician Júlio dantas (1876–1962) and on all ‘those gentlemen who earned Portugal the reputation of europe’s and the world’s most backward country’.17 And just after that, on the very day of the first bloody showdown between authoritarians and liberals in Republican Portugal, Almada wrote the most ferocious poem of those ferocious days, ‘A cena do ódio’.18 It was Almada too who provoked an enormous outcry with a public lecture at which he read the Ultimatum futurista às gerações portuguesas do século XX, whose brilliant irony did not exclude strong political overtones: nós vivemos numa pátria onde a tentativa democrática se compromete quotidianamente [...]. É preciso explicar à nossa gente o que é a democracia para

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Manuel Villaverde Cabral que não torne a cair em tentação [...]. É preciso ter consciência exacta da Actualidade [...].19 [We live in a nation where the current attempt at democracy is at daily risk [...]. We must explain to our people what democracy is so that they do not fall into temptation again [...]. It is necessary to be exactly aware of what is happening [...]]

Admittedly, this revolutionary aesthetic movement was very brief, as most avantgarde experiments tended to be. Pessoa and Almada became more engaged in their personal work, leaving most of the guerrilla warfare to minor figures, such as the art editor of Ideia Nacional, José Pacheco (1885–1934),20 or António Ferro, who went on to make the link with Brazilian modernism, issuing his belated futuristic manifesto ‘nós’ in Klaxon (1922). Almada virtually dropped out of the movement after the publication of his surrealistic prose poem ‘A invenção do dia claro’ [The invention of the bright day],21 and went to Spain in 1927 to devote himself to the arts. Meanwhile, the ideological consequences of the authoritarian movement became apparent after the assassination of Sidónio Pais, in december 1918, and throughout the period of intense political strife between liberalism and authoritarianism that followed. We know of Pessoa’s commitment to ‘sidonismo’ and we need not forget that he was the author of a Defesa e justificação da ditadura militar em Portugal [Defence and Justification of the Military Dictatorship in Portugal] of 1928. In 1927, António Ferro published his inf luential Viagem a Volta das Ditaduras [Voyage around the Dictatorships],22 an international survey of the new authoritarian regimes that had been spreading throughout europe; later, he became Salazar’s official inter viewer, and eventually his Secretary for national Propaganda from 1932 to 1949. In other words, one cannot measure the impact of the anni incendiari — to borrow the phrase of the Italian futurist Viviani23 — of Portuguese modernism by its short span of life. From the intellectual viewpoint, the modernists and futurists contributed significantly, in the eyes of the intellectual youth, to undermine the cultural legitimacy of the Republican regime and to make vain the claim of Portuguese liberals to lead the nation towards recovery and modernization. From 1917 onwards, the fire was set to burn lastingly. gaspar Simões was right when he dismissed Pessoa’s attempts to separate himself from the ‘fascist character’ of the new nationalist mentality.24 Among the creative writers of those hectic years, Pessoa probably contributed more than anyone else to the increasing hegemony of authoritarian ideologies and patterns of political behaviour. Admittedly, Pessoa’s political views were far from simple and linear, but he did not refrain entirely from putting them in practice. We were familiar with the two essays he contributed to Acção from May to August, 1919 — How to organize Portugal and Public Opinion — but we were unaware of the personal effort that Pessoa devoted to the publication and distribution of the ‘órgão do núcleo de Acção nacional’ [organ of the national Action group]. Acção was edited by geraldo Coelho de Jesus, a close friend of Pessoa’s about whom we know little. A mining engineer and the author of a surprisingly farsighted plan for Portugal’s industrialization (1918), he was for a short while one of the most articulate supporters of socioeconomic modernization under the guidance of strong government, and he too supported Sidónio’s dictatorship. Soon after the

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Fig. 22.2. BnP/ e3, 135C-30 e 30a. Acção (Órgão do «nvcleo de acção nacional»), dir. by geraldo Coelho de Jesus, Year II, no. 4, Lisbon, 27 February 1920.

charismatic leader was killed, Coelho de Jesus brought out the small journal, with very little help but Pessoa’s, to get across an elitist ideology of technical competence similar to António Sérgio’s Pela Grei, published the year before. Like Sérgio and Seara Nova,25 he also claimed to have nothing against political parties; ‘only against the consequences of party politics’. However, the independent stand of Acção’s first two issues was little more than a disguise. eventually, the third one carried a full front page photograph of Sidónio; and under the photo, a quotation in english from Shakespeare’s Hamlet that could only have been chosen by Pessoa: ‘He was a man, take him for all in all; | I shall not look upon his like again’. The real political aims of the núcleo were made clear when Coelho de Jesus declared in August 1919:

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Manuel Villaverde Cabral Se procurarmos na vida nacional, qual a força capaz de concentrar patriotismo, qual a força capaz de, ao mesmo tempo, atingir as competências e o povo [...] encontramos só uma: o sidonismo, [...]. O resto é só bolchevismo... Ou sidonismo ou bolchevismo: o problema está nisto para quem queira ter acção política em Portugal. nós [...] vamos pelo sidonismo.26 [If in our lives as a nation we seek a force capable of rallying patriotism, a force capable of reaching out to both those in authority and the people at the same time [...] we find only one: Sidonism, [...]. The rest is only Bolshevism [...]. either Sidonism or Bolshevism: here lies the problem for those who would like to engage in political activities in Portugal. We [...] go for Sidonism.]

Although this seems to have been Pessoa’s and Coelho de Jesus’s last significant participation in Portuguese politics, the poet was for a few days actively involved in the distribution of Acção’s last issue, which provoked a predictable outcry from the Republicans, who were at the peak of their radicalism and particularly sensitive to ‘sidonista’ come-back. We know all about Pessoa’s excitement with his political task from four long letters and one telegram he sent to his friend, then away from Lisbon.27 Most of the letters are technical but we know the contents of Pessoa’s writings in the previous issues of Acção, especially Public Opinion. Short of his apology for the military dictatorship, this is Pessoa’s most interesting political piece. Basically, he shares the usual criticisms of liberalism put forward by elite theory and quotes Lord Cecil’s Conservatism (1907) in order to dismiss political suffrage (see Fig. 22.3). Allegedly, ‘socialism is the terminal dementia of liberalism’ and, despite the attempted sophistication of the argument, the conclusion is only too predictable: ‘Ser revolucionário é servir o inimigo. Ser liberal é odiar a pátria. A democracia moderna é uma orgia de traidores!’ [To be a revolutionary is to serve the enemy. To be a liberal is to hate the Fatherland. Modern democracy is an orgy of traitors!].28 From revolutionary Patriotism to Messianic sebastianism While it is clear that the aesthetic drive towards modernity put the new literary movement at odds with the prevailing traditionalist outlook of Portuguese nationalism, it is also evident that Portuguese futurism only managed to reconcile the cosmopolitan appeal of modernity with the call for national aggrandizement in a precarious and short-lived manner. Moreover, while the stylistic reconciliation of modernism and nationalism shows a high degree of innovation, the political symbolism of the modernists was much less innovative and does not show any decisive difference from the main thrust of Portuguese elitism and authoritarianism, from Oliveira Martins to António Sérgio.29 Overall, Pessoa’s political thought is hardly different from most writers of the time until the rise of Salazar, whose ‘thesis’ Pessoa correctly equated with ‘integralismo’: A tese do Professor Salazar um apanhado, aliás muito lúcido e lógico de princípios já conhecidos — os da chamada ‘contra-revolução’, ou seja, os que distinguem e definem as doutrinas dos chamados integralistas.30 [Professor Salazar’s theory — a very lucid and logical set of already known

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Fig. 22.3. Lord Hugh Cecil, Conservatism (London: Williams & norgate; new York: Henry Holt & Co.; Toronto: W. M. Briggs; India: R. & T. Washbourne, Ltd. [1912]). 17 cm. ‘Home university library of modern knowledge, no. 11’. Casa Fernando Pessoa Collection. Underlined: ‘Political Conservatism is not the effect of purely conservative tendencies. It is an amalgam.’

principles — of the so-called ‘counter-revolution’, that is to say, those that distinguish and define the doctrines of the so-called Integralists.]

As to Pessoa’s own ‘thesis’, ‘it will bring instead, when it is developed, entirely new results’. But as usual he did not develop his own thesis... In fact, since Orpheu was launched, Pessoa was consistently concerned with separating himself from all previous forms of literary nationalism, particularly the ‘integralistas’. However, his main motive was aesthetic rather than political. In a manuscript note of 1915 Pessoa asks ‘— O que quer Orpheu?’ [— What does Orpheu want?]: Crear uma arte cosmopolita no tempo e no espaço. A nossa epocha é aquella em que todos os paizes [...] existem todos dentro de cada um [...]. Por isso a verdadeira arte moderna tem de ser maximamente desnacionalizada [...] Só assim será typicamente moderna.31 [To create a cosmopolitan art in time and space. Ours is the epoch in which all countries [...] exist within each of us [...].

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Manuel Villaverde Cabral So, true modern art has to be denationalized to its utmost [...] Only in this way will it be typically modern.]

Clearly, this was the very opposite of everything the traditionalists stood for. The nationalism of the modernists claimed, thus, to be very different from ‘passadismo’ [the cult of the past], and to a certain extent it was, but only to a certain extent and for a while. By the mid-1930s that possibility had been entirely cancelled. The same thing happened to Almada’s call for ‘a spirit of adventure against the literary sentimentality of passadistas’. But in spite of the sense of irony that his patriotism displayed, as distinct from Pessoa’s, he was painfully aware of the increasing distance separating the heroic days of futuristic patriotism from the so-called ‘Política do espírito’ [The Politics of the Spirit], now engineered by António Ferro at the head of the Secretariat for national Propaganda. While collaborating assiduously with Salazar’s regime, Almada made that distance clear with typical sarcasm, when Ferro invited Marinetti to come to Lisbon in november 1932: Os inimigos figadais do futurismo em Portugal ganharam a sua primeira vitória anteontem na presença do chefe do futurismo, F. T. Marinetti [...]. Lastimamos, nós os futuristas portugueses, a sua amnésia quanto a Portugal, a sua falta de memória acerca de que nomes heróicos do futurismo fizeram aqui nesta terra uma guerra sem tréguas contra putrefactos e botas de elástico.32 [The bitter enemies of futurism in Portugal enjoyed their first victory the day before yesterday in the presence of the leader of futurism, F. T. Marinetti [...]. We, Portuguese futurists, regret his amnesia with regard to Portugal, his loss of memory about the heroic names of futurism who, here in this country, have waged a war without respite against the putrefying and the bigoted.]

Pessoa too was aware of the increasing surrender of many artists to the appeal of traditional nationalism and reactionary authoritarianism. However, he did not resign all involvement in this protracted and, by now, hopeless battle for modernity. Only this time, the adversaries were not, as João gaspar Simões pointed out, the usual lot of academic writers and liberal politicians, but a fascistic grouping of university students led by Pedro Teotónio Pereira, the future Under-Secretary of State for Corporations during the estado novo. Thus, in 1923 we find Pessoa himself distributing a short ‘Warning on account of Morals’, in which he responds acidly to the campaign waged by those students against the poet António Botto (1897–1959), whose Canções [Songs] of homosexual love Pessoa had not only just published, but praised as a new aesthetic contribution to Portuguese literary modernism. He begged the students ‘to shut up as silently as possible’, but the episode was not finished. A few weeks later, Raul Leal, a former contributor of Orpheu, issued another pamphlet in praise of Botto, significantly entitled ‘Sodom divinized’. The unfortunate dr Leal was savagely attacked as an ‘insane pederast’ and Pessoa returned to the fore with a unique and moving defence of individual freedom: ‘There are three things a noble mind [...] never laughs about [...]. The gods, death and insanity.’ From there he proceeds to coin the famous phrase, later incorporated into one of his poems: ‘Loucos são os heróis, loucos os santos, loucos os génios, sem os quais a

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humanidade é uma mera espécie animal, cadáveres adiados que procriam’ [Mad are the heroes, mad are the saints, mad are the geniuses, without whom humanity is a mere species of animal, deferred corpses that procreate].33 nothing is more remote from the futurist and fascist myths of virility and violence. These latter episodes of the modernist guerrilla warfare in Portugal appear, thus, as a painful confession of overwhelming frustration. In a letter of 1923 Pessoa complains to a friend: Tanta saudade — cada vez mais tanta! daqueles tempos antigos do Orpheu, do paúlismo, das intersecções, e de tudo mais que passou! Você tem visto a Contemporanea? É de certo modo a sucessora do Orpheu. Mas que diferença! Que diferença!34 [So very missed — more and more so! The old days of Orpheu, paulism, the intersections and everything else that happened! Have you seen Contemporanea? In a way, it’s the successor to Orpheu. But what a difference! What a difference!]

This also shows in his poetry. From the early 1920s onwards, there is not a single epic or merely joyful line to be found; as he wrote at the end of ‘Tabacaria’ [The tobacco shop] (1928) ‘o universo | Reconstruiu-se-me sem ideal nem esperança’ [The universe reconstructed itself for me with neither ideal nor hope]. Indeed, Pessoa’s futuristic reconciliation of nationalism and modernism, as well as his political writings, never displayed the ref lexivity shown by Almada negreiros. Campos’s Ultimatum (1917) provides more than one clue to his frustrated political passion. In typical futurist vein, he claims that ‘europe is thirsty for creation, hungry for the future’, but he goes far beyond the usual ironic praise of the ‘hygienic virtues of war’. To catch up with the enormous potential of the modern epoch, Campos suggests an ‘act of sociological surgery’. As a political result of such surgery, one would get, predictably enough, ‘the total abolition of the concept of democracy’ as well as ‘the abolition of any conviction that takes public opinion to last for more than half an hour’. But there is more than mere provocation to the notion that democracy and public opinion should be replaced by the ‘dictatorship of the Complete, the Man who contains in himself the greater number of Men.’ In fact, nietzsche’s inf luence on Campos’s Ultimatum is nothing but consistent with the modernists’ exacerbated elitism and with their inclination to favour the rise of a charismatic leader, ‘the Politician who will consciously build the unconscious destiny of his People.’35 Such a call for charismatic leadership was soon fulfilled beyond expectations by the dictatorship of Sidónio Pais, following the ‘coup’ of december 1917. The modernists did not fail to support him enthusiastically. One among many others, António Ferro wrote later of Sidónio: Foi então que senti, pela primeira vez, a beleza, o sentido poético da palavra chefe [...]. A ele devo esta certeza que nunca mais me abandonou: a poesia das nações, a sua poesia heróica, não está nas alfurjas, nas associações secretas, ou até nos parlamentos, mas nos seus chefes.36 [It was then that I felt for the first time the beauty, the poetic meaning of the word leader... I am indebted to him for this certainty that will never leave me:

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Manuel Villaverde Cabral the poetry of nations, their heroic poetry, does not lie in filthy alleyways, secret associations or even parliaments, but in their leaders.]

As to how passionately Pessoa felt about Sidónio, we only have to remember his ode of 1920, ‘À memória do Presidente-Rei Sidónio Pais’. However, the appeal of strong messianic leadership was by no means a new feature of Portuguese nationalism since the late 1880s. On the monarchist side, it suffices to mention Oliveira Martins’s césarisme which was quick to spread.37 If anything, such a trend was even stronger among Republican nationalists, who often joined the Republican movement out of their disappointment with King Carlos’s alleged inability to lead Portugal towards ‘national salvation’ after the 1890 Ultimatum. Junqueiro again is a case in point. In his Notes on ‘Pátria’, he makes clear the nationalist roots of his Republicanism: A crise não era simplesmente económica, política ou financeira. Muito mais: nacional [...]. Perigava a existência, a autonomia da Pátria. Hora grande, momento único. A revolução impunha-se Republicana? Conforme. Se o monarca nos saísse um alto e nobre carácter, um grande espírito, juvenil e viva encarnação do ideal heróico, tanto melhor. A revolução estava feita.38 [The crisis was not merely economic, political or financial. It was a great deal more: national [...]. The existence, the independence of our country was at stake. A great time, a unique moment. did the revolution have to be Republican? That depends. If the monarch turned out to have a high and noble character, a great spirit, and was the youthful, living embodiment of the heroic ideal, so much the better. The revolution would have been achieved.]

But the king did not live up to such expectations; hence Junqueiro’s search for strong leadership. Most of the themes of authoritarian nationalism are already apparent here, especially the theme of the ‘heroic youth’. Junqueiro elaborated several of the symbols that the authoritarian groupings of the 1910s and 1920s would use abundantly, like the ‘resurrection of Lazarus’,39 or the memory of nun’ Álvares, the fourteenth-century constable who became the equivalent of Joan of Arc in the mythology of the Portuguese followers of Action Française.40 From this symbolic elaboration, the call for charismatic leadership springs almost automatically: A ductilidade, quase amorfa, do carácter português, se torna duvidosas as energias colectivas, os espontâneos movimentos nacionais, facilita, no entanto, de maneira única, a acção de quem rege e quem governa. Cera branda, os dedos modelam-na à vontade. Um grande escultor, eis o que precisamos.41 [The almost apathetic docility of the Portuguese character renders collective energies and spontaneous national movements uncertain, but facilitates in a unique manner the work of those who rule and govern. Pliant wax, fingers can shape it effortlessly. A great sculptor, that’s what we need.]

In essence, Junqueiro is not interested in the ‘form of government’, but in the ‘form of the ruler’. And he moves as close to a modern authoritarian view of political leadership as could be expected from an inf luential Republican author in the mid1890s: A metempsicose, em moderno, do grande Condestável, eis o meu sonho [...]. A mesma chama noutro invólucro. não combateria castelhanos, combateria portugueses. O inimigo mora-nos em casa.42

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[The metempsychosis, in modern form, of the great Constable, that’s my dream [...]. The same f lame in another cover. We would not fight Castilians, we would fight Portuguese. The enemy dwells among us in our home.]

And who was l’ennemi de l’intérieur? The monarchists? The Catholics? not really. Rather the ‘burguês estúpido’, the ‘burguês rotundo’, the ‘burguês odioso’ [stupid bourgeois, fat bourgeois, hateful bourgeois], who seems to have inspired Almada twenty years later in his exhilarating ‘Cena do Ódio’. Junqueiro’s social and political philosophy was brought to completion by another inf luential republican ideologue, Basílio Teles, in his retrospective analysis of the rise of Republicanism after the British ultimatum: Sim!, mil vezes um tirano [...], duro e frio, contanto que inteligente e patriota, prendendo, deportando, perseguindo, mas impondo à estima do mundo um povo que apenas lhe vem servindo de joguete, do que um bando de politicantes histriões, atascados em torpeza e estupidez [...]. Resta ainda, algures, neste país de escravos, um homem de espada, com energia e capacidade para mandar? Que se mostre, que apareça à luz do dia, sem hesitação nem receio, que nos livre, quanto antes, de um rei antipático e de um parlamento ridículo, e governe em lugar deles, a sério, a valer, restituindo ao exercício do poder a força e a autoridade que lhe faltam.43 [Yes! a thousand times a tyrant [...], hard and cold, as long as intelligent and patriotic, arresting, deporting, persecuting but also making the world esteem a people that it uses merely as a toy, rather than a band of political clowns, mired down in their turpitude and stupidity [...]. Is there still somewhere in this country of slaves a swordsman with the energy and capacity to rule? May he show himself, may he emerge into the light of day, without hesitation or fear, and rid us, the sooner the better, of an unlikeable king and a ridiculous parliament, and govern in their stead, properly and fittingly, and return to the exercise of power the strength and authority it lacks.]

From the viewpoint of political symbolism, thus, there is little innovation in modernist writings, including Pessoa’s. The main themes and images of his nationalist poetry and most of his political writings come straight from a wellestablished tradition that cuts across monarchists and republicans, providing the cultural legitimation for authoritarian rule, including that form of charismatic leadership which Sidónio Pais brief ly incarnated while paving the way for the decisive military coup of 28 May 1926. The close association of nationalism and authoritarianism with the traditional symbols of the Portuguese patriotic legend can be illustrated with as many examples as one cares to choose from Pessoa’s writings. Such examples show how difficult it was, even for him, to resist literary convention, and indeed the odd slip into ‘passadismo’. Should Pessoa’s creative reputation stand on Mensagem (1934) alone, he would not have been acknowledged internationally as one of twentieth century’s major poets. As time went by, his poetry became less and less concerned with the values of modernity and took increasing refuge either in conventional subjectivism or in esoteric self-denial and messianic hope.

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Conclusion Why then did Pessoa not give in to Salazar’s appeal, as most of his companions did? no one has answered this question satisfactorily. Instead of engaging in fruitless guesses, let me pick up the chronological thread of my argument. Just as Sá-Carneiro and the heteronym Ricardo Reis declared themselves conservative monarchists, Campos too posed as a self-styled monarchist in seeming contradiction with Pessoa’s alleged Republicanism. But it is also true that Pessoa had tried more than once to put forward a theory of a sort of ‘aristocratic Republic’, where Sidónio Pais fitted perfectly, as a way out from what he described as the ‘political torture of contemporary Portugal’.44 Pessoa addressed this ‘political torture’ just after the attempted nationalist coup of 18 April 1925, often described as the final rehearsal before the military takeover a year later. In a brilliant but unfinished dialogue called Na Farmácia do Evaristo [In the pharmacy of Evaristo],45 he discusses in detail the political history of the Republic and, for the first time, uses the modern category of ‘legitimation’ in order to account for the institutional and ideological stalemate which, according to him, was the essential characteristic of the country’s critical political situation and which provided the room for constant and increasingly forceful attacks on the liberal regime. The debate was then inconclusive but he found the answer soon, as clearly as his increasing esoteric pretensions allowed, in O interregno, published by the revived núcleo de Acção nacional, already under the military dictatorship. His ‘defence and justification of military dictatorship’ was also not the first of such calls from the Portuguese intelligentsia. However, Pessoa’s argument was more interesting than most. given the political stalemate and the unreliability of public opinion, as well as the subsequent collapse of law and order, only the military possessed the legitimate means to guarantee the ‘social minimum [...] without which even the simplest activities [...] cannot be pursued’. Pessoa too sees the military dictatorship as a ‘state of transition’, an ‘interregnum’. But whereas the liberal critics of the Republican parties saw it as a transition to a new constitutional arrangement, and others, like Salazar and the ‘integralistas’, saw it as an irreversible step to full scale authoritarianism, Pessoa was hopelessly alone in conceiving the ‘interregnum’ as a transition to his esoteric ‘Fifth empire’ of Lusitanian aggrandizement. A few years later, sometime in 1933, he seems to be again unhappy about the political situation. In an undated manuscript note which had no follow-up, he claims to be working on a new version of O interregno but he never wrote such new version, nor indeed did he ever say why exactly he did not agree with the estado novo: ‘Porque não concordo’ [Because I don’t agree], that was all. Undoubtedly, had he lived longer, he would have made his reasons clearer, in however esoteric a manner. And it is true that he left a few unpublished poems, mainly written in 1935 and not particularly satisfying, where he attacks Salazar and the estado novo with sarcasm. But as late as december 1934 he was busily engaged in getting his first book published — initially called Portugal, eventually Mensagem — while also submitting it for the literary prize that his former colleague of Orpheu, António Ferro, had created for ‘nationalist poetry’ at the Secretariat for national Propaganda.

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According to João gaspar Simões, it was the double failure of Mensagem that eventually drew the poet away from the regime. He did not win the first prize; moreover, his new friends from the Coimbra literary journal created in 1927, Presença, who had given Pessoa more recognition and support than anyone before, made clear that the book was far from living up to the standards he had set himself during the heroic days of Orpheu.46 But again we cannot be sure. Last but not least, in February 1935 Pessoa went out of his way to oppose publicly the banning of ‘secret societies’ by the newly appointed ‘national Assembly’.47 Much has been written inconclusively about Pessoa’s esoteric beliefs but it is easy to recognize how strongly he felt about the issue. Indeed, the authoritarian attack on the Free Masonry may have been a decisive factor alienating whatever inclinations Pessoa might have had to sympathize with the estado novo. Unrelenting, he immediately proceeds to explore yet another political theory, ‘liberal nationalism’. He discovers the values of individualism and firmly opposes censorship. He believes that society needs ‘order’ and ‘prestige’, and acknowledges that Salazar had given both to the Portuguese nation, but somehow he finds Salazar’s prestige ‘absurd’ and resents the new regime as a ‘tyranny’. However, he did not have the time or the will to pursue the theory of ‘liberal nationalism’.48 At any rate, it was definitely too late in Portugal for a reconciliation of nationalism with liberalism as well as with modernism. The cultural outlook of the estado novo was increasingly reactionary, as was to be expected from a dictatorship which gathered most of its support among the conservative middle classes, Catholics and monarchists. In tune with the international mood, by the early- to mid-1930s the younger intellectual generation tended to join the ranks of the opposition to the dictatorship and Pessoa was aware of it.49 Some of the best new authors became Communists or fellow travellers and, with the advent of ‘neo-realism’ in the late 1930s, the left-wing intelligentsia eventually managed to impose a kind of cultural counter-hegemony in Portugal over the next three decades. So much so, that it was only in the early 1970s that the modernist literary revolution was known to the general public. In spite of his strong inf luence upon successive generations of poets and of the publication of a few major studies devoted to his work, it took the general public three decades after Pessoa’s death to discover his oeuvre. In the last decades since 1974, admiration for Pessoa has become something of a pop-cult, which makes it difficult for the historian to put the achievements of the modernist generation in perspective. This is all I have tried to do. Irrespective of aesthetic and ethical judgements, I hope to have given evidence to the effect that the political symbolism of Portuguese modernism was closely associated with the evergrowing tradition of authoritarian nationalism, which in turn provided the cultural legitimacy for the military takeover of 1926 and the subsequent institutionalization of the Salazar dictatorship. It seems thus safe to argue that the aesthetics of nationalism did indeed receive a significant boost from Fernando Pessoa and his modernist friends.

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notes to Chapter 22 1. An earlier and longer version was published for the first time in Luso-Brazilian Review, 26, 1 (Summer 1989), 15–43. 2. george L. Mosse, ‘Fascism and the Intellectuals’, in The Nature of Fascism, ed. by. Stuart J. Woolf (London: Weidenfeld and nicolson, 1968), pp. 205–25. 3. Quoted in Mário de Sá-Carneiro, ed. by João Alves das neves (São Paulo: Iris, n.d.), p. 205. 4. See Manuel Villaverde Cabral, Portugal na Alvorada do Século XX: forças sociais, poder político e crescimento económico (Lisbon: Regra do Jogo, 1979). 5. See José Pereira Sampaio [Bruno], O Encoberto (Porto: Lello, 1904). As early as 1914, Pessoa was writing to Bruno about ‘Sebastianism’. See in Joel Serrão, Sampaio Bruno: sua vida e obra (Lisbon: Inquérito, 1957), pp. 136–38. 6. ‘The desired One’ refers to the late-sixteenth-century king, d. Sebastião. Published posthumously in António nobre, Despedidas (Porto: n.pub., 1902), with a predictable preface by none other than Sampaio Bruno. 7. See Modernism: 1890–1930, ed. by Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1976), p. 49. 8. ‘Janus-faced nationalism [...] one face was adapted to religiously and socially pluralistic country folk and groupings, the other set for the more fastidious, scholarly, individualist and literate urban schoolmen.’ ernest gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca, nY: Cornell University Press, 1983), pp. 79–80. 9. Fernando Pessoa, ‘Para a memória de António nobre’, in Obra em Prosa, ed. by Cleonice Berardinelli (Rio de Janeiro: Aguilar, 1982), pp. 344–45. 10. guerra Junqueiro, Obras, ed. by Amorim de Carvalho (Porto: Lello, 1972), pp. 627–47. 11. Fernando Pessoa, A Nova Poesia Portuguesa, published for the first time in 1912 (between April and december) in successive issues of Águia. I am quoting from Pessoa, Obra em Prosa, pp. 361–97 (p. 377). 12. Ibid., p. 397. 13. Letter of Sá-Carneiro to Pessoa of 12 december 1914. See in Mário de Sá-Carneiro, p. 250. 14. Jonathan griffith, ‘Introduction to Fernando Pessoa’, in Fernando Pessoa, Selected Poems, ed. and trans. by Jonathan griffith (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1974), pp. 9–23. 15. Bradbury and McFarlane, Modernism: 1890–1930, p. 52. 16. António Ferro, A Idade do Jazz-Band (Lisbon: Portugália, 1924), p. 44. 17. José Almada negreiros, Obras Completas, 6 vols (Lisbon: estampa, 1972), vi: Textos de Intervenção, pp. 9–17. 18. Almada negreiros, Obras Completas, iv: Poesia, pp. 19–40. 19. Almada negreiros, Obras Completas, vi, 29–39. 20. José Pacheco (or Pacheko, as he enjoyed spelling his name) was another impresario of the movement. He was the art editor of Contemporanea (1922–26). 21. Issued by Pessoa’s small publishing house Olisipo, in 1921. See José de Almada negreiros, A Invenção do Dia Claro, partial trans. into english by Fernando Pessoa; introd. by Jerónimo Pizarro (Lisbon: guimarães, 2010). 22. António Ferro, Viagem a Volta das Ditaduras (Lisbon: edição da empresa ‘diário de notícias’, 1927). 23. Alberto Viviani, Giubbe Rosse: il caffè fiorentino dei futuristi negli anni incendiari, 1913–1915 (Firenze: Vallecchi, 1983). 24. João gaspar Simões, Vida e Obra de Fernando Pessoa, 2 vols (Lisbon: Bertrand, 1951), ii, 202–03. 25. Manuel Villaverde Cabral, ‘The ‘Seara nova’ group and the Ambiguities of Portuguese Liberal elitism, 1921–1927’, Portuguese Studies, 4 (1984), pp. 181–95. 26. See Acção, 2 (1919). 27. See Pessoa’s estate: BnP/e3, 114 2-33 to 114 2-45. 28. See Acção, 2 (1919). 29. Most of Pessoa’s political writings are available in three volumes edited by Joel Serrão and colleagues: Sobre Portugal: Introdução ao Problema Nacional (Lisbon: Ática, 1979); Da República

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(Lisbon: Ática, 1979); Ultimatum e Páginas de Sociologia Política (Lisbon: Ática, 1980). For a critical review of Serrão’s interpretation, see Manuel Villaverde Cabral, ‘O universo político de Fernando Pessoa’, in Diário de Notícias, Revista de Livros, 2 March 1983). 30. Pessoa, Da República, p. 376. 31. Fernando Pessoa, Sensacionismo e Outros Ismos, ed. by Jerónimo Pizarro (Lisbon: Imprensa nacional–Casa da Moeda, 2009), p. 76. 32. Almada negreiros, ‘Um ponto no i de futurismo’, in Obras Completas, vi, 135–37. 33. Fernando Pessoa, Sobre um Manifesto de Estudantes (Lisbon: n.pub., n.d.), quoted by Maria Aliete galhoz in her ‘general Introduction’ to Fernando Pessoa, Obra Poética, ed. by Maria Aliete galhoz (São Paulo: Aguilar, 1969), pp. 33–34. 34. Pessoa, Obra em Prosa, p. 415. 35. Álvaro de Campos, ‘Ultimatum’, in Portugal Futurista (facsimile edition) (Lisbon: Contexto editora, 1981), 30–34 (p. 30). 36. António Ferro, D. Manuel II: o desventurado (1954), quoted by António Quadros, pp. 128–30. 37. See Manuel Villaverde Cabral, The Demise of Liberalism and the Rise of Authoritarianism in Portugal, 1880–1930, Inaugural Lecture, King’s College London, 1993. 38. guerra Junqueiro, ‘Anotações a Pátria’, in Obras, pp. 627–47. 39. The theme of Lazarus’s resurrection as a symbol for national recovery was used in particular by ezequiel de Campos (1874–1965), a Seara Nova ideologue of technical competence who later joined the authoritarian establishment. 40. The Cruzada nun’ Álvares, created in 1918, was one of the most important authoritarian organizations prior to the military takeover of 1926. 41. guerra Junqueiro, ‘Anotações a Pátria’, pp. 627–47. 42. Ibid. 43. Basílio Teles, Do Ultimatum ao 31 de Janeiro (Porto: Lello, 1905), p. 197. 44. Pessoa, Ultimatum e Páginas de Sociologia Política, p. 355. 45. Fernando Pessoa, Da República, pp. 271–94. 46. gaspar Simões, Vida e Obra de Fernando Pessoa, p. 315. See also Pessoa, Obra em Prosa, pp. 403– 06. 47. Fernando Pessoa, ‘Associações Secretas’, in Da República, pp. 391–404. 48. Fernando Pessoa, ‘nacionalismo Liberal’, in Ultimatum e Páginas de Sociologia Política, pp. 343–51. See also Da República, pp. 370–71. 49. Pessoa’s manuscript note of 1935 on the ‘Portuguese new poetry’ and the Presença group. See Obra em Prosa, pp. 403–06.

CHAPter 23

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Spiritualism and Poetry in Modernist Portugal Kenneth Krabbenhoft This essay examines a central issue of nineteenth-century science and philosophy in light of its inf luence on Portuguese poetry in the modernist period. For our purposes, modernism can be said to begin in the 1890s and to end in the 1930s, when the disastrous consequences of the First World War manifested themselves in economic crisis and the rise of totalitarian nationalisms that led to the Second World War and the Cold War. If we call this poetry ‘modernist’, it is as an aid to determining the place of fin-de-siècle and early twentieth-century Portuguese poetry in the european literary culture of the period, but with an important caveat: although most of the significant voices in Portuguese poetry at that time owe a debt of inf luence and inspiration to modernism, it would be a mistake to equate their work with avant-gardism, which left such an indelible mark on modernism. Jerónimo Pizarro has pinpointed this difference, noting that all isms do not necessarily imply avant-gardism. This does not mean that poets like Teixeira de Pascoaes, Mário de Sá-Carneiro, and Fernando Pessoa do not deserve to be called the most forwardlooking writers in Portugal: they sought to bring Portuguese literature up to date with the ground-breaking innovations of modernist poetry and prose in english, French, german, and Italian, contributing their own share of isms in the process, including saudosismo, associated with Pascoaes and the Renascença Portuguesa movement (1911–32); sensacionismo, paulismo and interseccionismo, promoted by Pessoa and Sá-Carneiro in the pages of the review Orpheu (1915–17); and on-going debates over the nature of modernism itself in the pages of the long-lived journal Presença (1927–38 and 1939–40). At the same time, the unshakeable fidelity to literary and cultural tradition that characterizes the work of the most important poets of the period, including Pascoaes and Pessoa, obliges us to acknowledge that Pizarro’s characterization of Pessoa as a poet who ‘was not the product of an avant-garde movement’ can readily be applied to others in the Portuguese modernist camp.1 In other words, in the case of Portugal, the programmatic isms of both foreign and national origin are best understood as part of a dialogue between an artistic view of the modern world rooted in admiration and emulation of literary tradition, rather than a militant, antagonistic iconoclasm.2 Because this is such an enormous topic, the following pages will do little more than point to the opposing sides of a polemic that was of crucial importance to

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european writers of the period: namely, the debate over the nature of the human soul. The factions went by many names, but for our purposes they can be divided into two groups. On the one hand are the materialists who held that all human experience is ultimately reducible to natural causes, and that the human race must be understood to be nothing more than a stage — albeit the highest stage — of evolutionary processes that began with unicellular life. On the other hand are the spiritualists, who maintained that there was an essential difference between human beings and all other sentient life, which can only be explained as the result of non-material inf luences on the evolutionary process. This topical focus inevitably leaves out contemporary debates about such related topics as the historically Catholic doctrine of free will and its deontologized analogies in thinkers of special interest to the Portuguese modernists, like Arthur Schopenhauer and Albert Fouillée. It leaves aside widespread interest in the occult and esotericism, including astrology, mesmerism, mediumism, and Freemasonry. Connections between the materialism–spiritualism debate and poetics of pseudonymity, heteronymity, and personae can only be hinted at here, as well as the complex links between theories of degeneracy and quasi-Messianic calls for the cultural reform of Portugal, which various Portuguese poets seemed to believe, in a not entirely metaphorical way, would enable their country to lead europe out of the spiritual and artistic decay of the fin de siècle. In the following pages the focus is on Fernando Pessoa, not so much because he is arguably the Portuguese poet who gave the most complete expression to the full range of philosophical and psychological issues connected with the materialism– spiritualism debate, as because few if any european poets took those debates more seriously than he did — at the very least, it would seem that none left a comparable written record of their reaction to them. By comparing the original works that he consulted, many of which he purchased and annotated, and the nearly 30,000 pages of quotations and comments that were discovered in a family trunk after his death in 1935, we have a window on the intellectual context of the time, as witnessed by one of the most important modern poets.3 Materialism in darwin and Haeckel (A) Charles Darwin darwin’s theory of evolution is so well known it requires no introduction. It is sometimes forgotten, however, that the concept of evolution itself is as old as Western thought, with roots in the pre-Socratics and Aristotle, and had gained wide currency thanks to the work of Buffon, Cuvier, Saint-Hilaire, Lamarck, and Wallace, in the century preceding the publication of On the Origin of Species. The controversy that dominated the latter half of the nineteenth century had to do not with the what of evolution but the how, and its rallying point then as now was darwin’s version of the theory of natural selection: an aleatory, entirely material process that favoured certain individuals of a species over others. even darwin’s mentors and disciples often disagreed with him on this score: Alfred Russel Wallace, who came up with the idea before darwin, refused to apply it to the human race, and T. H. Huxley, darwin’s most important apologist, rejected it outright.4

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Stephen Jay gould defines natural selection as a process which ‘relies upon small, isotropic, nondirectional variation as raw material, and views extensive transformation as the accumulation of small changes wrought by the struggle between organisms and their (largely biotic) environment. Trial and error, one step at a time, becomes the central metaphor of darwinism.’5 natural selection, being ‘above all, a theory about the struggle of individual organisms for success in reproduction’ is of necessity reductionist:6 at its most basic level, it has no interest in the endless complexities of interpersonal relationships except as they impact the chances of the survival of the human race. gould puts this clearly when he writes: ‘Selection operates on organisms, not on any higher collectivity. Selection works directly for the benefit of organisms only, and not for any larger harmony that might embody god’s benevolent intent.’7 The crux of the problem faced by modernist writers who wanted to embrace contemporary advances in evolutionary science were the metaphysical implications of this essentially blind and directionless mechanism whose benefit to the human race was only a chance side effect of its effects on individual members of the species. For the nineteenthand early twentieth-century european mind, the metaphysical and the spiritual were virtually synonymous: random selection therefore seemed to strip the most poignant elements of human experience, both the sublime and the ignominious, of their full meaning. One thinks of ernst Haeckel’s treatment of love in his popular 1904 book The Wonders of Life. It consists of a single paragraph about the physiology of sexual desire under the heading: ‘Sexual sensations (love)’.8 And as with love, so with happiness and despair, tedium and rapture, faith and doubt, good and evil, and so forth: Haeckel has nothing to say about everything that poetry is about. Pessoa’s interest in the psychological, aesthetic, and moral implications of evolutionism was typical of darwin’s reception in Portugal generally. As Ana Leonor Pereira has pointed out, the theories of the survival of the fittest and natural selection were too powerful to be ignored, although they were received in Portugal primarily in their anthropological and social applications.9 Pessoa accepted the idea put forth by darwin in The Descent of Man (1871) that altruism is a product of natural selection, as it proves advantageous in the struggle for economic, military, and cultural supremacy, the historical proof being the triumph of highly evolved human societies (e.g. the european), in which moral idealism could be expected to prevail over selfish impulses. The nonconformist in Pessoa was nevertheless sceptical of such claims, preferring to put his trust in the individual rather than in society as a whole, as one might expect of the creator of the over seventy independent literary voices. Pessoa’s marginal notions to a passage in his copy of the French translation of The Descent of Man are indicative of his doubts. darwin writes: Looking to future generations, there is no cause to fear that the social instincts will grow weaker, and we may expect that virtuous habits will grow stronger, becoming perhaps fixed by inheritance. In this case the struggle between our higher and lower impulses will be less severe, and virtue will be triumphant.10

Pessoa wrote an ‘→’ next to these words and two question marks: one next to the first line of the quotation (‘There is no cause to fear that the social instincts will grow weaker’) and the other next to the final sentence (‘In this case...’) the word

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‘romantismo’ [Romanticism]. What might appear to be a contradiction is really Pessoa’s way of amending a view with which he is only partially in agreement. Another page from the Pessoa archive begins with a rather cynical avowal of the darwinian view: What is mankind? A multitude of slaves that love their slavery and indeed, desire nothing but that. So long as a man can eat, drink, lie with a woman, and feel nothing in him to look upon these things with strange eyes, so long as man hears out in him [sic] the voice of the dreadful judge who for every act has a value — so long man can be happy. Believe me, outside this there is no happiness at all.

The notation ends, however, with a question about the ‘small, isotropic, nondirectional’ activity of natural selection: Put this conscience behind thee, disdain all spirit of good: thy happiness is gained. dost thou doing this fear a hell, dost thou expect remorse? Mark me, there is no such thing as Hell; your conscience also may be silent. But be sure, doubt not at all, that by so doing you are doing to mankind a lasting ill, that by yielding not unto good [the rest of the line is blank].11

In this instance as in many others, a deep fidelity to an anti-materialist, nondarwinian understanding of the human person asserts itself in Pessoa’s mind. (B) Ernst Haeckel By the end of the nineteenth century, the name most widely associated with the most radical variety of monism was that of the german zoologist ernst Haeckel, whose works Pessoa studied with great intensity. Pessoa purchased translations of at least four of Haeckel’s books for his personal library. Two of them, Histoire de la création (Natürliche Schöpfungsgeschichte 1868; The History of Creation) and Origine de l’homme (Anthropogenie 1874), have none of Pessoa’s underlining or marginal notes; to judge from its binding, the latter of the two may never have been opened. With the exception of their most technical sections, the other two — The Riddle of the Universe (Die Welträthsel 1899) and Les merveilles de la vie (Die Lebenswunder 1904; The Wonders of Life), are on the contrary virtual palimpsests, criss-crossed with the poet’s markings and ref lections. Pessoa’s semi-heteronym Bernardo Soares mentions that he read Haeckel ‘in the childhood of the mind, when one reads about scientific findings and arguments against religion’.12 In fact we can date Pessoa’s experience to May 1906: he was eighteen years old and by his own testimony read the first and second chapters of The Riddle of the Universe on the 26th and 28th of the month, respectively (see Fig. 23.1).13 In the French translation of The Wonders of Life that belonged to Pessoa, Haeckel defines his work as ‘nothing less than a conscientious attempt to account for all manifestations of organic life under the guise of a whole and to explain all of the “wonders of life” from the monist perspective, that is, as phenomenal forms of a unique, vast, and perfectly homogenous universe which may be called, if one so wishes, “nature”, “Cosmos”, “World”, or “god”.’14 elsewhere in the same book he refers to his Die Systematische Phylogenie (1894) in which, he says, ‘I showed

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Fig. 23.1. BnP/e3, 13A-57. Page from a diary that Fernando Pessoa kept in 1906.

that all the activities of organisms, which result from the transformation of new species in the struggle for life, can be reduced to such physiological functions as growth, nutrition, adaptation, and heredity, which in turn depend on the mechanics and chemistry of plasma.’15 Tempering this monism, which rejects all forms of non-quantifiable intervention in the material world, was Haeckel’s sympathy with Lamarck’s theory of acquired characteristics, which allowed that some sort of adaptive energy or impulse inherent to living organisms could explain how physical changes were transmitted from one generation to the next. Haeckel accordingly maintained that developments in physiology between the publication of On the Origin of Species and The Wonders of Life demanded a rejection of the exclusively unidirectional activity of darwin’s natural selection. The concept of an invisible, immeasurable vital force, he wrote, could be understood to designate ‘the sum of all the organism’s characteristic forms of energy’, including adaptations and heredity: in this way it was not necessary to maintain that these energies are essentially different from those present in inorganic nature.16 In human beings, this force would have evolved into what Haeckel calls the ‘phroneme, or organ of the soul, a specific area of the cerebral cortex’ — the highest manifestation of cerebral evolution, in the same way that the eye is the most highly evolved organ of sight and the heart the central organ of the circulatory system.17 The proof that this vital life-giving force can nevertheless be understood as somehow separate from inert matter, says Haeckel, resides in the universality of sensation, which extends even to the atoms.18

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It was this desire to speculate about a non-material dimension of evolutionary change which led Haeckel, as Peter J. Bowler remarks apropos The History of Creation, simultaneously to promote a Lamarckian view of acquired characteristics and a conf licting darwinian view of evolution ‘as a succession of upward steps toward man, each step having been preserved in the form of a lower animal’.19 He would later carry this fundamental contradiction into the philosophy of monism, in which, as Bowler writes, ‘matter and spirit were treated as parallel manifestations of one universal substance. Indeed, Haeckel virtually equated force with mind, adopting the pantheistic view that god represents the driving energy of the world.20 This explains why we find blatant inconsistencies in Haeckel’s most popular work, The Riddle of the Universe. On the one hand, he can write that ‘darwin has not only proved by his theory of selection that the orderly processes in the life and structure of animals and plants have arisen by mechanical laws without any preconceived design, but he has shown us in the “struggle for life” the powerful natural force which has exerted supreme control over the entire course of organic evolution for millions of years.’21 On the other hand, he uses language peppered with vitalist terminology, as in the chapter heading ‘The Phylogeny of the Soul’ and his discussion of the ‘law of substance’, where he claims that ‘all the vital activities of the organism — without exception — are based on a constant “reciprocity of force” and a correlative change of material, or metabolism, just as much as the simplest processes in “lifeless” bodies’22 — an idea reminiscent of Bergson’s ‘élan vital’. Adding to this confusion is yet another, less objective Haeckel who sallies forth in The Riddle of the Universe to defend monism against its critics (specifically in Chapters XI and XIV–XIX). Here science recedes into the background and opinion overshadows reason, creating confusion and contradiction. On one page, for example, Haeckel praises ‘the high value of Christian doctrine, which will still survive when the long series of these retrogrades dogmas [of nietzsche and Stirner] has disappeared forever’23; note that Pessoa underlined the names of the ‘prophets’ and writes in the margin: ‘this one was nuts [doido]’). On another page, Haeckel describes Christianity as an unmitigated disaster that europe would do best simply to abolish.24 Which side of this divide Pessoa stands on will become clearer below. If we have spent some time surveying Haeckel’s ideas, it is in order better to understand the complexity of Pessoa’s reaction to them, which can be outlined in three broad, mutually exclusive categories. The first encompasses Pessoa’s sympathy with the materialists’ call for a modern ethic based on scientific rationalism rather than revealed truth. The second stems from a deep hostility to this same materialism, proposing instead a synthesis of nineteenth-century anticlericalism and neo-paganism. The third consists of Pessoa’s philosophical defence of the reality and importance of the human soul, for which he draws on Christian sources. As with Haeckel, the question naturally arises how anyone in his right mind could hold opposing views about the same thing. Pessoa’s answer is to find a place for all three of these positions within the larger framework of the poetry he wrote under his own name (i.e. his ‘orthonymic’ work) and the poetry written by his heteronyms. As it turns out, both his sympathy for and his hostility to materialism

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tend to be expressed in prose signed with his own name, while apologies for neo-paganism are largely assigned to the philosopher-heteronym António Mora and the poet-heteronym Ricardo Reis, a kind of press agent for the heteronympoet Alberto Caeiro. This neat breakdown into orthonymic Pessoa and various heteronyms is of course an over-simplification: the orthonymic Pessoa often takes up the cause of alternate spiritualities, as do heteronyms like Alexander Search and Thomas Crosse, while still others, like Charles Robert Anon (whose name honours the discoverer of natural selection), praise the cultural benefits of materialism. This orthonym-heteronym scheme is imperfect, in other words, but it is at least a step toward describing Pessoa’s position in the materialism–spiritualism debate. The first category mentioned above is suggested by remarks like the following: ‘Rend the works of the mystics and receive instruction therefrom. You will see the danger of making a system of morals depend on a metaphysical system.’25 Similar comments frequently appear in Pessoa’s ruminations about ethics: they do little more than echo sentiments that had become common in the wake of Kant and Hegel. The second requires more attention, as the philosopher-heteronym António Mora engaged in a wide-ranging critique of the state of contemporary european society from the perspective of a distinctively meliorist historical evolutionism. For Mora, europe, riding the crest of scientific advance, was leading mankind into a new period of freedom. He makes the hyperbolic claim that this is due to ‘the prevalence of scientific activity over all other kinds of activity’, a natural outcome of ‘the natural accumulation of knowledge, of the liberating inf luence of the renaissance of ancient civilizations, of the growing exercise of reason and speculation for the increase of individual and political freedom’. So deeply has this transformation penetrated, he claims, that religion has lost its importance altogether: ‘Science has quickly taken over the true innermost temple — the highest throne — of the contemporary mind.’ Mora understands this to be an effect of the increasingly objective understanding of human experience that inevitably follows upon the triumph of reason over the besetting evil of what he calls ‘Christism’, which is its subjectivism. ‘Christism’ and ‘Christist’ are words coined by the British writer John M. Robertson as part of the attempt to dehistoricize the teachings of Jesus Christ, to which Pessoa, like many other anti-clerical spiritualists, likes to attribute ethical validity, by artificially separating them from both the magisterial teachings of the Catholic Church and mainline Protestant doctrine.26 But like Pessoa himself, Mora feels the need to search for a spirituality that can be reconciled with reason, ‘a pure, objective religion [...] originating in science’, and he finds it in a form of ‘true paganism’ whose re-birth coincides with the birth of scientific materialism.27 This is the religion practised most completely by the heteronym-poet Alberto Caeiro. In a larger sense, however, religion in the sense of a spirituality that looks beyond the material world is at the heart of all aesthetic experience. Mora puts this succinctly: ‘Religion is basically a rudimentary form of the sense of beauty. All art is nothing more than religious ritual.’28 Whether this is a kind of proto-Wittgensteinian claim for the ineffability of the aesthetic, which is inseparable from the moral, or a nietzschean sublimation of violence and creativity, is not something we can answer here. It is important to mention in this context

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that Ricardo Reis, the most nietzschean of all the heteronyms, sinks to Haeckelian depths in his strident vilification of Christianity — yet this does not prevent him from proclaiming the glories of a pagan aesthetic.29 As if to complete the set of contradictions that Pessoa weaves around this topic, the orthonymic poet pays singular homage to a certain strain of traditionalist Christian evolutionism — the third category mentioned above and subject of the following section. rationalism, Lamarckism, and spiritualism (A) The limits of reason O homem physico não é um aggregado de cellulas, como um monte de pedras é um aggregado de pedras. É um corpo cuja acção resulta directamente de orgãos, que são compostos de cellulas. O homem psychico não é um aggregado de emoções.30 [The physical man is not an aggregate of cells, in the way a pile of stones is an aggregate of stones. He is a body whose actions proceed directly from organs, which are made up of cells. The psychic man is not an aggregate of emotions.] Rationalism is knowledge bounded by ignorance. It is no more than this.31

Whatever Pessoa’s sympathy for Haeckel’s views of ‘Christism’, and however venomously heteronyms like Ricardo Reis express themselves on the subject, he himself was violently opposed to the consequences of materialist incursions into the realm of the spirit. In this he reveals the deep affinity that united the principal theorists of Portuguese modernism. António Cândido Franco writes of Teixeira de Pascoaes and Leonardo Coimbra, both associated with the Renascença Portuguesa movement, that despite their differences they were proponents of ‘a libertarian, metaphysical evolutionism of the anti-positivist and anti-dogmatic kind, opposed to the imitation of foreign models [anti-estrangeirado]’.32 In Pessoa’s case, this stance finds expression in scepticism about the claims of science to have a superior understanding of phenomena that by definition cannot be accounted for empirically. Take for instance the notion of infinity, a concept that by its very definition frustrates any and all human attempts at description and quantification. In one fragment Pessoa takes Haeckel to task for failing to allow that reason has no right ‘to pursue the infinite’ and for substituting self-righteous and self-serving a priori judgements for proper logic. Addressing the scientist directly, he remarks: ‘The lack of criticism, by which your system is dogmatic, is the cause of this. What affirms the right of reason to pursue the infinite?’ Pessoa was especially outraged by the german zoologist’s equation of the material universe with the divine, which he calls a ‘blind, stupid, unscrupulous philosophy (for so it is called)’. The difference between a Haeckel and an artist, he implies, is that the scientist rejects the wisdom that comes from everyday experience — as Pessoa puts it, in words that seem to foreshadow Ludwig Wittgenstein’s philosophy of language: ‘Common sense is the worst enemy of philosophy.’33 For Pessoa, as for many others then and now, Haeckel

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is the supreme example of this corrosive hubris which in the place of spiritual verities blindly consecrates ‘scientific prejudice, convention — ultimately in some cases intellectual dishonesty’.34 In the same way that materialism cannot in Pessoa’s opinion speak meaningfully about infinity, the sciences of the human body have no business speculating about the soul, for the simple reason that analogies between the corporeal and the incorporeal have no empirical basis. The reasoning behind the following page from the Archive may be a bit twisted, but the basic point is intelligible: The soul is then materially constituted? Cut the optic nerve & there is no longer any vision. Hurt the part of the brain where the centre of language exists & a trouble in speech is brought about. But none of these arguments & no argument of their kind can say anything against the soul. As a matter of fact, if the soul act [sic] upon the body, or, rather by the body, it is obvious that hurting that body in whatever way is lessening its power of acting by the soul.

This is a way of fighting fire with fire, so to speak: using a materialist argument to make a spiritualist point. More closely related to the anti-materialism of the poet Pessoa are those pages in which he evokes the yearning for spiritual certainties and peace as a defining element of human experience. In a passage that we can imagine exciting the ire of António Mora, he writes: What do I care about the motions of atoms? What is my concern with their compositions? What are ions, electrons? Are these anything at all? The discoveries of astronomy are immense; so are those of physics, of chemistry, of geology to-day. But what is there in these things that will be balm to a wounded soul? I find science in these things; not science, alas! as Plato meant it, but a science relative altogether. But what is this science to me? I have in me something superior to physics and to chemistry. In my spirit (let me speak so) there is a desire for something greater than attraction and repulsion. I know not whether this be myself or merely in me. What I know is that it is in me and that I suffer thereby.35

The heteronyms are capable of adding their voices to this chorus, as we can appreciate from an attack on Haeckel by one of Pessoa’s earliest creations, Alexander Search. He writes: The ‘theological’ soul is of course dead. no argument, however abstract, can bring it back from the grave. But the notion of spirit is not dead; far from it. But for a man of science to declare, categorically, that he has resolved the riddles of the universe is illogical and absurd. The metaphysician Haeckel is worth little, and is more positive and dogmatic than any philosopher of the old school, be the name of him Thomas Aquinas.36

It is not just the reductivism that blinds materialists and monists to the spiritual realities of human existence that Pessoa and Search object to: it is their hypocrisy is making metaphysical extrapolations to attack rival metaphysics while claiming to speak the language of empirical science.

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(B) The Lamarckian alternative Pessoa seems to suggest that if materialists could only allow a little latitude in their thinking they would be able to embrace a scientific alternative which explained the empirical evidence without resorting to random selection or monist reductivisms, namely the theory of adaptive change, usually associated with the French zoologist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, creator of, in Stephen J. gould’s words, ‘the first evolutionary system in modern Western thought’.37 In the seventh chapter of his Philosophie zoologique (1809), ‘On the Actions of Animals’, Lamarck proposes two laws that account for the evolution of animal species. According to the first, ‘the frequent and sustained use of any organ gradually strengthens, develops, and enlarges that organ [...] just as the lack of sustained use weakens it’ until it disappears altogether. According to the second law, everything that nature has caused individual animals or species to acquire by the inf luence of external factors on organs, ‘she preserves through the generation of new individuals’.38 For gould, the originality of Lamarck’s system lies in the second law, with its implication that behind the evolution of living things from simplicity to complexity is the action of a ‘force that tends incessantly to complicate organization’, a force that operates ‘through the creative response of organisms to “felt needs” ’.39 This and similar theories which held that a non-material force was necessary to explain evolutionary processes were known collectively as vitalism. By the end of the nineteenth century, many of those who were anxious to safeguard ideas about the human soul and spirit from materialist reductivism embraced Lamarckism as a way to reconcile science and metaphysics in both its secular and religious forms — a way that proved more palatable than the complicated philosophical proposals of thinkers like Alfred Fouillée, who explored the subject exhaustively in several books that appear to have belonged to Pessoa at one time or another. The last of these religious forms from which Pessoa drew is what might be called traditionalist reform Christianity, in particular the kind of evolutionism it proposed. (C) Spiritualist alternatives To give anything like a comprehensive sense of the Christian response to materialist evolutionism would require a book or two. To give an idea of the inf luence of Christian evolutionism on Pessoa’s thinking is much easier, because his readings in this area were focused on a handful of key texts. As we have seen, Pessoa, like Haeckel, had no sympathy for the older Christian communions — that is, the Catholic Church and mainline Protestantism. There is no evidence, for instance, that he paid serious attention to either Catholic evolutionists like St george Mivart or liberal, secularized Protestants who looked favourably on darwin, like edward Caird (the one book of Caird’s in Pessoa’s library was an introduction to Hegel). He was drawn nevertheless to non-mainline Protestant reform movements from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He approved of the teleological evolutionism of Henry drummond, a member of the Free Church of Scotland and author of popular works like Natural Law in the Spiritual World (1883) and The Ascent of Man

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(1894), and he was especially interested in the Swedenborgian apologist Thomas Child’s anti-materialism. The numerous markings and marginal notes that Pessoa made in his copy of Child’s anti-Haeckelian essay, Root Principles in Rational and Spiritual Things (1905), give a clear idea of how Pessoa was able to draw on Christian theology without compromising his neo-pagan anti-clericalism. Between drummond and Child, the latter is the more useful for understanding Pessoa’s spiritualism. For one thing, as a Swedenborgian, Child had no more patience with Catholic and mainline Protestant theology than Pessoa himself: he called them manifestations of ‘that double-headed evil, the Church of Faith-alone and of Meritorious Works’.40 For another, Root Principles was praised by none other than Alfred Russel Wallace — pioneer of the theory of natural selection and a firm spiritualist — as ‘the most complete and satisfactory theory of the nature of matter and of mind, of force and life, of spirit, immortality, and free-will, that has yet been given to the world’.41 The great enemy of spiritualism for Child is what he calls ‘Rationalism’, meaning radical materialism in its specifically monist avatar, which Child convicts of confusing appearance and essence. Here is a passage next to which Pessoa wrote ‘Bravo Bravo’: In this monistic scheme it is the appearance that dominates; for is not appearance the only reality? Is not all phenomenal? Because the appearance is that things come of themselves, and naturally select each other, and themselves bring forth life and are thence made alive, therefore life is creatable, produced originally in and by the matter-force, and there is no uncreated power behind and apart from the appearances of matter — no reality of which the appearance is but the expression! The reality is but the phenomenal, and nothing is is but the phenomenal, Herbert Spencer notwithstanding!42

Child consequently has trouble crediting ‘the so-named “primal stuff ” ’ that Haeckel claims is the eternal, ubiquitous substance of which the universe is made. For him this is a contradiction in terms, a conclusion underscored in a number of passages marked ‘true’ by Pessoa, among them Child’s relentlessly dialectical statement: ‘The necessary self-containment of the material on its own plane can never prove the assumed negative of the non-existence of the immaterial on another plane.’43 An even greater enemy, in Child’s opinion, is the echt darwinian doctrine of natural selection, which he claims contaminates even its opponents by forcing them to substitute an imponderable divine will for this mechanistic, material source of causation. He writes: The Theologian [...] on being met by the doctrine of necessity, either accepts it, or , without perception of its rightful place, aims at its disproof, maintaining the will of god and the freedom of Man [...]. The Rationalist, on the other hand, seizing the material truth of necessity, proclaims it the primary and universal fact. He is as blind as the theologian to the possibility of conjoint necessity and freedom...44

To these errors Child opposes a Swedenborgian theology of Sufficient Cause. Pessoa marked the following statement of Child’s with a vertical line and the word ‘important’: ‘They [theologians and rationalists] have confounded nature’s evolution by her Self-Selection with, what should have been for them, a profounder, more

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perfect evolution, from and through and momently [sic] in, an abiding Sufficient Cause.’45 If Pessoa rejects the notion that this Cause is identical with ‘the divine Personality as a Being infinite in Love, Wisdom, and energy, who, having produced all finite substances and matters from Himself, is yet absolutely Mental, Immaterial, or divine’ — and consequently also ‘un-evolved’ — he is nonetheless impressed by Child’s argument that Haeckel’s monism inevitably leads to a kind of pantheism which, while allowing for merely mechanical processes, ‘goes much beyond them’ 46 to arrive at a supra- or infra-material explanation of natural phenomena. Pessoa writes: ‘Any phenomenon has a cause, that cause another, and so on.... There are 2 hypotheses here possible — either there is a first cause, or there is an infinity of causes. If there be an infinity of causes and as the effect is in time, so are the causes, which are each the effect of the other and being infinite it takes infinite time to get to this cause. The theory is manifestly false.’47 Child blames natural selection for ‘killing’ man’s instinctive longing for and striving toward transcendence and immortality. This includes (rational) religion and ‘the instincts of music, or art in general’ which like religion have the effect of ‘lifting the mind above the devices of Selection with its mere utilities and strivings, above the sphere of its commands and of temporary pain, and even moral injury’. Pessoa would have been particularly interested in Child’s abhorrence of natural selection for promoting ‘the extinction of the dramatic and Poetic instinct’.48 It is interesting to note that Pessoa’s statements not infrequently sound as if they had been written by Child himself, such as the following, addressed to Haeckel: Any really profound thinker, rationalist or not, will gasp at the joining of the ideas of matter and of eternity, not to speak to those of eternity and infinity and of evolution. Scientific inquiry and observation limit the reasoning powers; there is no sure way of training the mind in dialectics [other] than reasoning independent of observation. Rationalism is dogmatic, and it is not a system of philosophy. Telescopes search the sky and, as they find no limit, they declare matter infinite. But such is no scientific method, such is pure assumption, which is the outcome of your idea of Rationalism. How do you know that reason has the power to affirm infinite multiplication[?]49

In another fragment, Pessoa extends Child’s critique of science’s non-scientific assumptions to the non-empirical essence of religious belief, pointing out that ‘what cannot be proved also cannot be disproved’: ‘The affirmation that Christ is god, for example, cannot be rejected by a Rationalist because it cannot be affirmed by him. It may be an error; it may be the vision of a higher sight — the Rationalist cannot determine which it is, because he does not know a thing to be wrong unless he can subject it to reason, and he cannot affirm a sense to be non-existent simply because he himself has not got it’.50 This narrowness of vision reduces materialists to the status of ‘strange aesthetes of the lesser mind’ capable of understanding ‘the paradoxical beauty of a genius clothed with obscurity, but not the paradoxical splendour of the god crucified among thieves’.51 A final quotation from the orthonymic Pessoa by way of closing. Addressing ‘the substance and meaning of art’, Pessoa proclaims that art — including literary art — has evolved as far as it needs to, indeed as far as it can. ‘There is no room for evolution’ in this respect, he says, which means that the science of evolution has

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no more to offer the artist: whatever inf luence it might have had has presumably been incorporated into artistic practice.52 In this Pessoa echoes the claim made by teleological evolutionists like Henry drummond that life on earth was designed by its Creator to culminate materially in the human race, so that this being, uniquely created in god’s image, would be free to continue evolving spiritually. We need only substitute aesthetically for spiritually to appreciate how, in the end, Pessoa the spiritualist triumphs over Pessoa the materialist.53 He and António Mora agree that ‘All art is nothing more than religious ritual’ — with the understanding that the artist-god’s pseudo-divinity is always nourished by his belief in the reality of nonmaterial experience. This essay lays the foundation of the argument that it is precisely this intersection of spiritualism and aesthetics that links Pessoa and Portuguese modernism to the broader european and American phenomenon. Studies of Pessoa and AngloAmerican poets like Pound, eliot, Crane, Wilde, and Yeats by Suzette Macedo, Patrícia Oliveira da Silva Mcneill, Maria Irene Ramalho, José Palla e Carmo, and others point the way to a study of this kind. It would link the spiritualist convictions of Pessoa, Teixeira de Pascoaes, Sá-Carneiro, and their Portuguese contemporaries to those which motivated searchers like Rilke, Unamuno, and Machado and believers like gerard Manley Hopkins and eliot; it would also embrace symbolists like Mallarmé and Valéry, not to mention the decadents, dadaists, futurists, and surrealists whose inf luence on the Portuguese literature of the period has received more critical attention. To bring the names of these great poets together under the same heading reminds us of Pessoa’s remark that ‘human experience includes very little that is rational’.54 And this is why, as Pessoa also said, ‘não há grande poetas materialistas’: ‘there are no great materialist poets’.55 notes to Chapter 23 1. Jerónimo Pizarro, ‘Introdução’, in Fernando Pessoa, Sensacionismo e Outros Ismos, ed. by Jerónimo Pizarro (Lisbon: Imprensa nacional–Casa da Moeda, 2009), p. 13. My italics. 2. Ibid., p. 15. 3. João dionísio, ‘Arca’, in Dicionário de Fernando Pessoa e do Modernismo Português, ed. by Fernando Cabral Martins (Lisbon: Caminho, 2008), p. 56. A note on translation: Pessoa wrote with equal facility in Portuguese, english, and French, the latter two languages predominating in his discussions of science, metaphysics, and psychology. Citations from these writings are in his original english unless otherwise noted. In the interest of simplicity, translators of published works known to Pessoa, mostly from german to French or english, are not credited by name. english translations of secondary sources in French and Portuguese, whether these are the original languages or themselves translations, are mine. 4. See Stephen Jay gould, The Panda’s Thumb (new York: W. W. norton & Co., 1980), p. 66, and Ana Leonor Pereira, Darwin em Portugal (1865–1914) (Coimbra: Almedina, 2001), p. 43. 5. Stephen Jay gould, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard–Belknap, 2002), p. 94. 6. gould, The Panda’s Thumb, p. 50. 7. gould, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory, p. 127. 8. ernest [sic] Haeckel, Les Merveilles de la vie (Paris: Schleicher frères, n.d.), p. 260. This is the edition that Pessoa had in his library. 9. Pereira, Darwin em Portugal, p. 75. 10. Charles darwin, The Descent of Man (new York: d. Appleton and Company, 1971), p. 127.

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11. See Pessoa’s estate BnP/e3, 154-17r. 12. Fernando Pessoa, Escritos sobre Génio e Loucura, ed. by Jerónimo Pizarro, 2 vols (Lisbon: Imprensa nacional–Casa da Moeda, 2006), i, 85–86. 13. Fernando Pessoa, Cadernos, ed. by Jerónimo Pizarro, 2 vols (Lisbon: Imprensa nacional–Casa da Moeda, 2009), i, 262–63. 14. Haeckel, Les Merveilles de la vie, p. xi. 15. Ibid., p. 300. 16. Ibid., pp. 43–44. 17. Ibid., p. 16. 18. Ibid., p. 253. 19. Peter J. Bowler, The Eclipse of Darwinism (Baltimore, Md: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983), p. 68. 20. Ibid., p. 69. 21. ernst Haeckel, The Riddle of the Universe (new York: Harper & Brothers, 1900), p. 70. 22. Haeckel, Les Merveilles de la vie, p. 232. 23. Ibid., p. 103. 24. Ibid., p. 356. 25. Fernando Pessoa, Textos Filosóficos, ed. by António de Pina Coelho, 2 vols (Lisbon: Ática, 1968), i, 202. 26. Fernando Pessoa, Obras de António Mora, ed. by Luís Filipe B. Teixeira (Lisbon: Imprensa nacional–Casa da Moeda, 2002) pp. 218–19. 27. Ibid., pp. 217 and 220. 28. Ibid., p. 288. 29. See Fernando Pessoa, Fernando Pessoa e o Ideal Neo-Pagão, ed. by Luís Filipe B. Teixeira (Lisbon: Fundação Calouste gulbenkian, n.d.). 30. Pessoa’s estate BnP/e3, 15B1-42. 31. BnP/e3, 152-62. 32. António Cândido Franco, ‘Renascença Portuguesa’, in Dicionário de Fernando Pessoa e do Modernismo Português, p. 723. 33. See Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophische Forschungen/Philosophical Investigations (new York: The Macmillan Company, 1958), nos. 89, 116, 120, 129, 133, and passim. 34. BnP/e3, 151-45 and 46. 35. Ibid., BnP/e3, 154-43. 36. Pessoa, Escritos sobre Génio e Loucura, ii, 622. 37. gould, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory, p. 186. 38. Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, Philosophie zoologique ([Paris]: Bibliothèque 10/18, 1968), p. 204. 39. gould, Panda’s Thumb, p. 77. 40. Thomas Child, Root Principles in Rational and Spiritual Things (London: H. R. Allenson, 1905), p. 11. 41. Quoted by george Trobridge, Swedenborg: His Life, Teachings and Influence (new York: The new-Church Press Inc., 1918), p. 63. 42. Child, Root Principles, p. 16. 43. Ibid., p. 25. 44. Ibid., p. 8. 45. Ibid., p. 11. 46. Ibid., p. 97, passage marked by Pessoa in the margin. See also pp. 53, 72, and 97. 47. BnP/e3, 151- 42. 48. Child, Root Principles, p. 76. 49. BnP/e3, 151-46. 50. BnP/e3, 152-62. 51. BnP/e3, 152-64. 52. Fernando Pessoa, Pessoa Inédito, ed. by Teresa Rita Lopes (Lisbon: Livros Horizonte, 1993), p. 278. 53. See ‘Involution’, the final chapter of drummond’s The Ascent of Man. 54. BnP/e3, 152-64. 55. Pessoa, Textos Filosóficos, ii, 80.

CHAPter 24

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Important Literary Works of Portuguese Modernism K. David Jackson during the years of literary modernism in Portugal, circa 1915–35, three major authors published important works that deserve to be counted among the most profound and significant contributions to european modernist literatures.1 Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935), Mário de Sá-Carneiro (1890–1916), and José de Almada negreiros (1893–1970) led a circle of vanguard writers and artists, centred in Lisbon, whose notoriety first arrived in the two numbers of the journal Orpheu (1915).2 Their most important works, those that count among modernism’s literary works of highest quality, should be considered essential reading in european modernism. Fernando Pessoa has achieved worldwide fame, if not notoriety, yet his works have not received comparable critical attention and availability in english translation as they have in many other languages. Mário de Sá-Carneiro has attracted several important monographs in english, and his stories are now available in translation, although his important post-symbolist poetry remains to be included in the masterworks of early modernism, alongside Apollinaire. José de Almada negreiros is one of the rare modernist figures equally important as an artist (tapestry, murals, printmaking, ballet scenography) and writer (novels, poems, plays, essays, manifestos) at the same time. Although his works are the least known internationally among the major figures, they connect with the inventive, provocative, and engaged spirit of the age across the arts and letters. The compositions selected here as a core of important Portuguese modernist works, largely neglected in comparative literature studies, demonstrate thematic currents and stylistic innovations perfected by their authors. Recent republications of these works in Portugal render them accessible to contemporary readers, although english translations remain more difficult to obtain. The list of important works includes Fernando Pessoa’s main ‘heteronyms’ through whom he wrote, Alberto Caeiro, Ricardo Reis, and Álvaro de Campos. The selections from the three authors begin with Fernando Pessoa’s only play, ‘O Marinheiro’,3 and include three odes by Álvaro de Campos,4 his manifesto ‘Ultimatum’,5 the sequence of poems ‘guardador de Rebanhos’, by Alberto Caeiro,6 the ‘Odes’ of Ricardo Reis,7 Pessoa’s only published book of poetry in Portuguese, Mensagem,8 and the phantom novel or book of memoirs O Livro do Desassossego attributed to Pessoa’s semi-heteronyms Vicente guedes and Bernardo Soares.9 Sá Carneiro is represented by the prose

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stories of Céu em Fogo,10 and Almada negreiros by his manifesto, ‘Ultimatum futurista às gerações portuguesas do século XX’,11 and his assemblage of poetic prose, A Invenção do Dia Claro.12 Pessoa’s play, The Mariner, written in 1913, is one of the most purposefully provocative and experimental plays of european avant-garde theatre, joining late symbolist currents of Maurice Maeterlinck and Villiers de L’Isle-Adam with the strangeness of Alfred Jarry. The play illustrates the enormous inf luence of symbolism on Portuguese modernism, as Pessoa expands on language, themes, and atmosphere found in Maeterlink’s essays in Le Trésor des Humbles (1896) and L’IsleAdam’s play Axël (1890). His play follows Pessoa’s intention to produce ‘static drama’ without movement, so as to surpass Maeterlinck, in which rhetorical, contained, or potential emotion is expressed only philosophically in a mise-en-abîme of stories within stories within stories. Paradox and unreality dominate. The title character never appears, although the mariner is considered to be the only potential contact with any reality external to the play itself. The three ‘sisters’ who wait for him have no names, only numbers, and their anonymity opens a latent state ref lected in the fourth maiden, deceased, dressed in white lying in a coffin at centre stage. The mariner’s expected return from a long voyage, should he ever arrive, would bring closure to their epic and existential wait. The scene is set in a medieval castle, as in a fairy tale or dream, ref lecting Portugal’s medieval Catholicism: Um quarto que é sem dúvida num castelo antigo. do quarto vê-se que é circular. Ao centro ergue-se, sobre uma eça, um caixão com uma donela, de branco. Quatro tochas aos cantos. À direita, quase em frente a quem imagina o quarto, há uma única janela, alta e estreita, dando par aonde só se vê, entre dois montes longínquos, um pequeno espaço de mar. do lado da janela velam três donzelas. A primeira está sentada em frente à janela, de cotas contra a tocha de cima da direita. As outras duas estão sentadas uma de cada lado da janela. É noite e há como que um resto vago de luar.13 [A room that is obviously in an old castle. From the room, we can tell that the castle is circular. In the middle of the room on a bier there rises a coffin with a young woman in white. Four torches in the corners. To the right, almost in front of whoever is imagining the room, there is a sole window, long and narrow, from which one can see only a small stretch of sea between two distant hillsides. Three young women keep watch beside the windows. The first is sitting in front of the window, with her back to the torch on the upper right. The other two are seated one on each side of the window. It is night, with just a vague glow of moonlight.]

In their conversations, the women consider consciousness and memory to be illusions and the universe to be endlessly recurring. They are living a profound mystery of being in which the life they live, on the level of consciousness, is separated from a more essential, deeper truth, to be found in a strange and distant geography ruled by unseen and unknown forces. One’s destiny and fate are unknown, and the only possible action in present time is to contemplate death and absence, as the women converse aimlessly waiting for an unknown end. The dead maiden in the coffin

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symbolizes the mute question of the meaning of life and the terror of eternity. The play is considered to foreshadow and predate Beckett’s Waiting for Godot by forty years. The centre of the ontological crisis raised by the play is found in the realization that consciousness is based on reminiscences that may have no basis in reality at all, being past. Thus the play reasons that dreaming and potentiality will always be superior to reality and experience. Through ‘The Mariner’ Pessoa separates the interior voice of the self from its own consciousness and referents, while at the same time undermining any certainty about either existence or external realities. existential doubt is converted into drama with an intensity that is almost exclusively imaginary. Pessoa as author posits unanswerable thesis-questions that carry the play forward: ‘Mas sabemos nós, minhas irmãs, por que se dá qualquer cousa? | O que é qualquer cousa? | Se tudo fosse, de qualquer modo, absolutamente coisa nenhuma? | Há alguma razão para qualquer cousa ser o que é?’ [But do we know, my sisters, why anything happens? | What is anything? | What if everything were, in a way, absolutely nothing? | Is there any reason for anything to be what it is?].14 The criticism of rational materialism is deepened by an inescapable fatalism, which is the observation that things are condemned to be exactly what they are, nothing more or less. The idea of the existence of the mariner — and perhaps it is only an idea — is, finally, the only hope for an exit or solution to humanity’s complete ontological isolation. Pessoa commented that his play was the most remote and ephemeral thing in all literature. It remains as much an avant-garde challenge to the dramaturge and to the stage today as it was when published in 1915. The three major odes composed by the ‘engineer of sensations’ Álvaro de Campos — ‘Opiary’, ‘Triumphal Ode’, ‘Maritime Ode’ — capture the absurd predicament of the modernist hero more concisely and expressively than T. S. eliot’s poem ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’, published the same year. Their dramatic interior narratives are based on the voyage, evocative of the Portuguese seaborne empire and its routes to the Orient, and on the mechanical celebration of a perverse and glorious modernity that has trivialized the epic journeys. ‘Opiary’, the confession of a voyager aboard ship in the Suez Canal, written in forty-three quatrains and dated March 1914, is the song of an excessively self-aware traveller under the ethereal inf luence of opium, writing from the torpor and exhaustion of the loss of certainty previously supplied by the colonial past. It is one of the first major post-colonial poems, as the narrator confesses that he is atoning for crimes committed by his ancestors. In comparison, he lives modern days of incompetence, malaise, and disaster, an anonymity consoled by opium. ‘Opiary’ may be read as a modernization of gérard de nerval’s Voyage en Orient (1851), itself a reminiscence of a visit to Cairo and Beirut enhanced by hashish. Campos’s voyage to the Orient has not confirmed the difference he imagined, as the east has become West. Returning from India, the Portuguese traveller laments the absence and indeed impossibility of any useful enterprise, while he feels the alienation and mechanical emptiness of time, under the anaesthetizing effect of opium as a mere passenger on board. The narrator casts the concluding judgement on the epic age of colonial voyages, which is that the earth is one and the same, and the exotic lands are all inside of us. With

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the loss of India, all illusions of useful profession have likewise disappeared. What is left is banality and life out of kilter, frustration, restlessness, and a long and perhaps endless wait for a change or for the end. Under the formal jacket of conformity, he feels the horror of existence and the absurdity of his condemnation. Such is the comedy that he describes in his soul, the seasickness he feels when observing the absurdity of the passengers and the emptiness of his own self. Within a satire of Orientalism, the poem contains some of the most famous lines of Campos, notably: ‘Pertenço a um género de Portugueses | que depois de estar a Índia descoberta | ficaram sem trabalho.’ [...] ‘nasci pra Mandarim de condição, | mas falta-me o sossego, o chá e a esteira’ [I belong to that class of Portuguese | who, once India was discovered, | were thrown out of work’ [...] ‘I was born to be a mandarin | but lack the serenity, tea, and mat].15 The ‘Triumphal Ode’ dated London, 1914, may be considered a poetic counterpoint to Igor Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du printemps (1912–13, Rite of Spring) or precursor to Chaplin’s Modern Times (1936). Its mechanics of modernity whirl, spin, gnash, and explode in delirious tropical rapture of 237 lines, ‘roaring, grinding, thumping, humming, rattling’ as if caressing the soul in a productive, promiscuous dynamics. The ode translates the mechanical energy of the futurist manifesto into the universality of a Whitman song, while carrying futurist aesthetics into the dark consequences of the pure, incessant movement of production and new beauty. The dark side begins with the excessive enthusiasm running throughout the ode, in fact a raging fever applied not to the normal objects of desire but rather to a convulsive, de-personalized mechanics. Violence in personal and commercial relationships becomes the siren call of civilization: graft, corruption, scandals, fraud, crime, and yellow-press journalism. The ideal muse is a shop mannequin, while an unrepressed love of modernity consumes its desired objects carnivorously, perverted and banal. The narrator transforms himself masochistically into the fodder crushed and consumed by the great mechanization of life. The ode praises, shouts, and celebrates the cruelty of modernity and the sacrifice of any inward life. everything is superseded except the current moment of material ecstasy, and the triumphant song turns against itself through its own hyperbole, the unyielding excess of ‘a beauty the ancients never knew’. Campos’s dazzling futurism, encomium and glorification of the new machine age, is cast as an all-consuming love song that sings its own frenzied banality as the apotheosis of the novelty of modern times. The poet whoops and yells as his very being is consumed by the fatal call of metallic machines at work, as he is absorbed into the new universal everything. The machine is the terrible muse of a futuristic love lyric. The ‘Maritime Ode’ has the distinction of being one of the longest poems in the Portuguese language (thirty dense pages in the english translation). It is a poem of the sea, in the tradition of Valéry’s ‘Le Cimitière Marin’, yet the voyage is entirely imaginary. A narrator on a pier in Lisbon fantasizes and lives in his vivid imagination an epic voyage of ocean depths, calling to mind the Orient of the Portuguese voyages and empire of the sixteenth century. Like the narrator of ‘Opiary’, this one also feels a seasickness in his soul, such that the pier and the steamers lose their present reality to evoke the mysterious nostalgia of experience

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lost in the totality of all wharfs and voyages. Overcome by metaphysical meanings, the narrator feels sharply the anxiety of separation, which is the difference between the wharf in front of him and the archetypal ‘great Wharf ’ of eternal and divine ecstasy, lost in distance and the forgetfulness of human experience repeated. After embarking on the voyage of voyages in his daydreaming, his ship’s virtual wheel begins to spin more rapidly and the poet becomes sailor, pirate, cannibal, and pure adventurer of abstract distance, experiencing pure freedom. The ship is his sensations, and he longs for a mystical transformation that will change the seas into f lesh. He enters the delirium of his own fantasy, following the call of primordial oceans. His voyage becomes timeless and universal, envisioned as a symphony or an omnivorous sea serpent, a devouring embodiment and torrid gale of madness, crimes, and terror, at the ultimate depths of instinct and the psyche. Inventive formal and linguistic features of the poem include seafarer shouts and songs, fragments of medieval ballads such as the ‘nau Catarineta’ [good Ship Catarineta], and rhetorical anaphora, sequential lines beginning with the same repeated words. After indulging in crazy, loud singing and barbarous, savage deeds, the ecstasy begins its slow descent in a return to home port and stasis on the poet’s pier, finally to disappear in the troubled modern silence of his soul. The poem confronts the contemporary lack of being, replaced by a vicarious reality encountered only in historical fantasy. The ‘Maritime Ode’ is a tour de force, an epic meditation on the isolation of the poet, his encounter with a voice lost in the genetics of experience, vaguely remembered, and his psychic reunion with a misplaced, infinite, and abstract past, which he conjures in a search for an instinctual and primitive ancestry, as if in a trance or dream. Ancestral fantasies include becoming an animal, a woman’s body, a bloodthirsty pirate, a crucified victim — cut, mauled, raped, and killed — and a monstrous and satanic god. The poet exhausts himself and ultimately returns to peace, tenderness, quiescence, and an acceptance of the spectacle of humanity, united as mutual voyagers in the Infinite. The ‘Maritime Ode’ is the ultimate voyage to the unknown of human feelings through unfathomable dimensions beyond time, of the most ancient and forgotten traces of memory outside of any ethical, religious, or societal constraints. Mário de Sá Carneiro’s poetical prose stories in Céu em Fogo (1915) create a constant atmosphere of expectation for the unknown, strange, and unexpected. Sá-Carneiro combines the mystery, colour, and musicality of symbolism with the modernist questioning of the foundations of reality and the self, whether existential, scientific, or purely imaginative. His stories are prose poems that are also mysteries, science fiction, adventure, and philosophical questioning. In ‘Mystery’, the narrator turns a streetcar ride into a delirious vision of simultaneity and relativity, as great buildings bend with the zigzag of the route, and the air is composed of spinning planes of colour that create bizarre harmonies. With the jarring movement, passengers’ faces are overlaid with those of their neighbours, just as movement multiplies reality. Obsessions, charms, dark imaginings, fantastic and terrifying mysteries, secrets and enigmas of the shadows, strange excitements and wanderings, a whirlpool in pursuit of an incomprehensible reality all constitute the phantasmagoric questioning in Sá-Carneiro’s quest to reveal the inexplicable nature of reality and experience.

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death and suicide are the dark forces underlying the great and mysterious maelstrom of the diaphanous and often strange experiences of an artist. In these stories, science is an art form, close to what most consider supernatural. ‘A estranha Morte do Professor Antena’ [The Strange death of Professor Antena],16 for example, relates the story of the disappearance of a scientific researcher, apparently run over by a car but in reality entering a weird trance that left his body shattered by a conical hole in the middle. The narrator, one of the Professor’s students, reveals the results of his research into the matter, detailing the Professor’s experiments with overlapping superimposed lives, such that our present-day senses must adapt to the awareness of previous lives and times. Putting his theories to the test, the Professor had come to an absolute moment in which he emerged into another life and time, leaving behind merely inert physical remains. Sá-Carneiro’s eerie quests for encounter with identity and meaning prepare for existential alienation within the carnivalesque mystery of life as an impenetrable and occult aesthetic. The manifesto ‘Ultimatum’, published by Álvaro de Campos in the ephemeral journal Portugal Futurista in October 1917, is one of the most brilliant of the futurist manifestos, by turns profound, bombastic, profane, insulting, and prophetic. The very title is an obvious reference to the humiliating ultimatum delivered to the Portuguese government by the British in 1890, demanding removal of Portuguese forces from the territory lying between Angola and Mozambique. now the tables will be turned, in a general denunciation of the bankruptcy and decadence of european intellectual and political classes in an ‘order of expulsion’ to all the mandarins in europe: ‘get Out’. After naming all those to be rejected, building into the absurdity of the first war, the manifesto arrives at a crescendo in the large bold graphic ‘MeRdA!’ What makes of the ‘Ultimatum’ the greatest of the modernist manifestos are three prophetic crystallizations of the meaning and implications of modernity original to Campos. First comes the ‘Malthus law of Sensibility’, which states that stimuli to sensibility increase in geometric proportion, while sensibility itself, our ability to absorb the stimuli, increases only in arithmetic proportion. Modernism is responsible for a sensory overload, such that either civilization itself will fail, or some kind of artificial adaptation will become necessary. Second is the theory of the necessity of artificial adaptation, which means the elimination of psychic additions to our spirit since the establishment of our current civilization, leaving only a basic psychic deposit. The third step is the ‘anti-Christian surgical intervention’ in order to extirpate the prejudices, dogmas, and attitudes that ‘Christianism’ has brought to the contemporary psyche. The result is the new Superman, amending nietzsche’s, who will be the most complete, complex and harmonic of men, representing the new ‘Humanity of engineers’. Inverting the narrative voice of the ‘Maritime Ode’, the narrator of the ‘Ultimatum’ shouts his proclamations from the banks of the Tagus, perhaps on the same pier, with his back to europe, his arms raised to the Atlantic, while staring abstractly into infinity. Thus the voyage of the ‘Ultimatum’, while likewise mental, is projected into future, infinite space as an ultimate voyage into a modernity of no return. Almada negreiros’s manifesto, ‘Ultimatum futurista às gerações portuguezas do Século XX’ [Futurist ultimatum to Portuguese generations of the twentieth

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century], is notable for carrying the futurist metaphor and destructive catalyst of war into a constructivist and positive phase. Upon observing that the war had an advantage in sweeping away all the formulas of old civilizations, all conventions, rights, and limits, Almada negreiros surveys ten major defects of Portuguese literature, culture, society, and politics. Portugal amounts to an amateur country of decadents who are not prepared to recognize even the new meanings of words. The author then provides a rhetorical recipe for the revival and renewal of civilization in the twentieth century, beginning each line with the phrase ‘É preciso criar’ [We must create]. The desirable qualities include optimism, adventure, women’s rights, cosmopolitanism, democracy, equality, danger and patriotism. As did Álvaro de Campos, Almada ends his manifesto with an evocation of a superman or super race made of strength, intelligence, genius, and conquest. The aura of modernity will counterbalance the residue of historical defects in producing a completely modern generation. Almada negreiros’s experimental writing in A Invenção do Dia Claro (1921; The Invention of the Bright Day) has no published translation to english, although Portuguese artist Hugo Canoilas read part of the text in translation as a performance in england in 2006. That event supports Almada’s stated goal as artist and author, which is to revolutionize Portuguese painting, for which the Invenção was meant as a conceptual guide. Fernando Pessoa published the original work in his shortlived press, Olisipo, and translated segments to english, only recently located in his archive.17 The importance of Almada’s work is found first in its generic f lexibility, or ambiguity: it was announced as a conference, and after several postponements finally read at the naval League in Lisbon on 3 March 1921. Almada had read the work two months earlier, however, in a private residence, as entertainment for the ‘Club of Five Colours’, made up of the artist and four young girls for whom he had created poem, designs, and dances. The surprising novelty of this book of poetry is its style of creative innocence as a primer on painting, on the one hand, as if it were conveying truths immediately obvious to a child, and on the other its use of play and playfulness as a form of organization and discourse. The Invention is dedicated with superlatives to the Club’s muses. This work of poetic inspiration is entirely composed of prose fragments, divided into three books titled ‘Scaffolds and nights Before’, ‘The Voyage, or What Can’t be Foreseen’, and ‘The Return, or The Seated Man’. disrupting this organization are an introduction, several ‘confessions’, extra parts left over, and a final story titled ‘The Truth’. each segment consists of numerous titled vignettes, each telling a concise story independent of the others. Yet together the fragments amount to a set of revelations of the unexpected, to creative answers to situations. In its presentation, the book is reminiscent of Saint-exupéry’s Le Petit Prince (1943); a comparable style of constructive innocence is found in Oswald de Andrade’s Primeiro Caderno do Aluno de Poesia Oswald de Andrade (1927). All belong to a current of basic constructivism in which the child’s voice represents intuitive learning, which is earlier than and often contrary to mature ways of the world. It is a countercurrent and antidote to pretence. Jerónimo Pizarro’s study proposes the inf luence of the Ballets Russes’ performance in Lisbon in december 1917, with scenes of a certain primitivism full of intuitive,

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simple, and spontaneous gestures. Almada’s Invention constantly plays with its own themes and discourse in a way that undercuts any philosophical gravity, while it often makes fun of or questions routine. When about to walk into a bookstore, for example, the poet quickly calculates how many books are on the shelves and how many years he has to live. The result: he does an about face and abandons a hopeless proposition. The comedy brings out the difference between specificity and totality, individual and group, aimed at the encyclopedic organization of our cultures. His poetic vignettes are simple but deeply instructive, perhaps inf luenced by Oriental thought. In the fragment ‘The Flower’, a child is given pen and paper and asked to draw a f lower. The child drew both very forceful and delicate lines, then showed the drawing to grown-ups with the explanation ‘A Flower’, yet none of them thought it looked like a f lower. nevertheless, Almada pronounces them to be the most original lines out of which f lowers are made. A Invenção do Dia Claro, written as a primer, or search for elemental truths, is structured as a first voyage, leaving home to travel around the world. Its conclusion is that the traveller must find the universe inside, that we ourselves are both the world and the voyage. Almada’s Invention is a compilation of epiphanies told by a wise guide to poetry and art to those ready to undertake the journey toward a maturity that never loses its wonder. The Invention closes with ‘A Leftover Phrase’ that synthesizes wonder: ‘Quando copiei pela última vez a Invenção do dia Claro, sobejou uma frase que não me recordo a que alturas pertence. A frase é esta: Há sistemas para todas as coisas que nos ajudam a saber amar, só não há sistemas para saber amar!’ [When I copied the Invention of the Bright Day for the last time, a sentence was left over and I don’t remember where it belongs. This is the sentence: There are systems for everything that helps us to know how to love, there is only no system for knowing how to love!].18 Alberto Caeiro’s poetic sequence ‘O guardador de Rebanhos’ is one of the masterworks of literary modernism. Composed of forty-nine poems balanced between earth and water, natural and constructed space, inherent and composed verses, the rock and the sea, nature and language, this sequence amounts to a reformulation of Western metaphysics and a rejection of accepted literary language and genre. This work explores the countercurrents that challenge and seek to reformulate key concepts of epistemology. Led by a rural poet visionary, ‘The Keeper’ lies at the revolutionary edge of Pessoa’s junction of philosophy and poetics. The paradoxical and revisionary thesis of the work is placed in the opening line, not unlike a manifesto: ‘eu nunca guardei rebanhos | Mas é como se os guardasse’ [I never kept sheep, | But it is as if I had kept them]. Caeiro challenges metaphor, language as a symbolic system, and even representation itself, as he reveals that the sheep are thoughts, and thoughts are sensations. The poet purports to see directly with the senses and without any philosophy at all (‘Há metafísica bastante em não pensar em nada’ [There is enough metaphysics in not thinking about anything]), with the innocence of scent and colour, the simplicity of existence without qualifiers (‘Pensar numa f lor é vê-la e cheirá-la’ [To think about a f lower is to see it and smell it]).19 Wanting to become one with nature, Caeiro seeks to write and to exist in the same way as a tree, a stone, or a river. Moreover, his poems are an appeal to direct sensory experience without the intervention of consciousness; the narrative

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glories in the paradox of writing in words a ref lection about the falsity of any barrier placed between experience itself and its sensory reception and expression. In this he proclaims himself to be direct and lucid ‘like a sunf lower’. The poet and his meaning are one, comparable to Wallace Stevens’s blackbirds (1917), yet poetry is a metaphoric language that must be overcome with effort by exposing its obvious artfulness and evasion. Caeiro struggles to eliminate poetic language in favour of verse that brings the poet closer to direct, material oneness with the source of all sensation in the natural world. In order to be faithful to Caeiro’s exposition, the literary world should imitate the rhymes of trees, the movement of wind, the slope of the ground, and the taste of fruits, that is, things as they are beyond language or comparative description. The true mysticism in Western culture, so these poems posit, is to be without thinking about it and to live directly. Caeiro struggles to find an art of words beyond rejection, and he refuses literary language. Traces of Oriental philosophy are often seen in Caeiro, and critic Leyla Perrone-Moisés discovered imbedded haiku in his free verse. His thought is not Oriental, however, because it makes a constant point of its rebellion against a false literature, which is the traditional use of poetic language that makes participation in primary, real experience impossible. Caeiro waves his handkerchief to verses that sail away into the infinite, again possibly from the poet’s pier on the Tagus River, and he accepts passing into the Universe as the natural fate of poems and of humans. It is this primal instinct, in the poet’s final moments, that unites individual being with existence, rather than philosophy, language, or religion: with the window shut, without reading, thinking of nothing, the poet feels the current of life like a river, and senses the great silence outside like a sleeping god. Caeiro is both a profound dissenter (‘Pensar em deus é desobedecer a deus’; ‘não me importo com as rimas’; ‘Acho tão natural que não se pense’; ‘da minha aldeia vejo quanto da terra se pode ver no Universo’ [To think about god is to disobey god’; ‘I don’t worry about rhymes’; ‘I find it so natural not to think’; ‘From my village I see as much of the universe as can be seen from the earth]) and a self-proclaimed discoverer, a poetic ‘Argonauta das verdadeiras sensações’ [Argonaut of true sensations].20 He attempts to say those things that cannot or should not be expressed in common literary language. There is hardly anything remotely like Caeiro in european modernism, and Pessoa promotes him as the master of his heteronyms. The twenty odes of Ricardo Reis in the magazine Athena in 1924, followed by eight more in Presença (1926–33), mark the appearance of the Horatian odes so extensively practiced by Reis. With ninety-six more odes added in 1946, and with the finding of a comparable number in the 1990s, the corpus has passed 200 odes. The resurgence of classical odes belongs to a return to antiquity, recast as ruins or lost origins, which can be seen in surrealist poetry and in paintings by de Chirico or Magritte, and in Picasso’s full-bodied formal muses. In Pessoa, the odes are a conscious return to classical civilization, meant to correct and replace the f laws of contemporary europe. In imitating Horace, Reis maintains the rhetorical address of the poems to three muses — Lydia, Chloe or neera — as well as the metaphors of nature and the aphoristic style. What Reis adds to the formula is a self-consciously archaic syntax and morphology, in terms of stylistics, and a nihilistic fatalism

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that goes far beyond the passive stoicism of the originals. The great innovation of Reis’s odes for modernism is the revival of a neoclassicism, comparable to poetry and painting, meant to replace a decadent Western literature with greek aesthetic ideals. Their ideal is a return to Latin and classical sources, and in certain odes the Portuguese syntax is almost identical to Latin. Yet the modernity of Reis’s recreations is found in their paradoxical content: pretending to be stoic, fatalistic poems in which the poet and his muses await inevitable death with poise and calm, they are at the same time dramatic, self-conscious evocations of uselessness, emptiness, and the impossibility of emotion in the face of an awesome void. While written in the mode of aphoristic teachings or truths, the poems un-teach and destabilize any possible confidence in external reality, its beauty, or even its f leeting deceits. In contrast to classical pastoral, Reis gives his readers modern anxiety and a state of unknowing. His ideal is the rose that opens after sunrise and shuts before dark, thus thinking that light is eternal. While Reis coins unforgettable aphorisms in the classical manner, such as the line ‘Sábio é o que se contenta com o espectáculo do mundo’ [Wise is the man who’s content with the spectacle of the world],21 — a phrase adapted by Saramago in his novel O Ano da Morte de Ricardo Reis (1984) — the intent is dark indeed, as this man is denied a memory and sees all events as new. Human freedom, Reis writes, is the freedom to submit of our own free will to the commands of the gods; nothing exists except in the illusion of it: ‘Só esta liberdade nos concedem os deuses; submetermo-nos ao seu domínio por vontade nossa’ [The gods concede only this freedom; we submit to them voluntarily]. The ode inscribed on Pessoa’s tomb raises illusion to the level of poetic epiphany: the poet urges his readers to be themselves completely with everything they do, yet by doing so they become indistinguishable, just as the moon high in the sky is ref lected in each lake: ‘Sê todo em cada coisa [...] Assim em cada lago a lua toda | Brilha, porque alta vive’ [Be all in each thing [...] Thus in each lake the whole moon glows | Because it lives aloft]. Knowing is the ultimate value sought desperately throughout the odes, and the only thing Reis asks of inexorable fate is the ability to be aware of it. The odes of Ricardo Reis are an ultimate and consummate expression of our inability to know or to act. Reis gives formal perfection to an aesthetic state of suspended animation, while we await the unknown and the inevitable end: ‘Coroai-me de rosas [...] que se apagam | em fronte a apagar-se, Tão cedo! | e de folhas breves | e basta’ [Crown me with roses [...] that die before your eyes [...] so suddenly [...] and short-lived leaves. That’s enough].22 Pessoa’s Mensagem is considered to be the most important book of poetry in Portuguese language in the twentieth century. Appearing in 1934, it is the ultimate book of poetry by a master of the craft and one of the greatest works of literary modernism. It is a carefully constructed series of poems that are like pictures in an exhibition, whose theme is the past, present, and clouded future of Portugal. The work conf lates Portugal’s history with occult themes drawn from loss of empire and contemporary national aimlessness. The three major parts are titled ‘Brasão’ [Blazon], ‘Mar Português’ [Portuguese Sea], and ‘O encoberto’ [The Hidden One]. The poems describe the heroes of Portuguese history, particularly of the maritime expansion to India led by Vasco da gama in the 1497–99 voyage. The pantheon of

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heroes is fashioned in verse to recall the heraldry, the secular and religious symbols, and the regalia of authority that had been displayed in Calicut on twenty-four f lags on board Paulo da gama’s ship, an iconography described in historical panorama in Canto VIII of The Lusiads (1572) by Luís de Camões. The book is important not only to the national historical consciousness but moreover to modernist poetics. Although it is often read for its nationalistic themes, the poems are filled with experimental and avant-garde verses that count among the most daring aesthetic creations of modernism. The very first poem contains one of the most perplexing lines in modernist poetry, captivating as a palindrome in its apparent tautological simplicity: ‘Baste a quem baste o que lhe basta | O bastante de lhe bastar!’ — Stein’s ‘A rose is a rose is a rose’ (written 1913, published 1922) wilts in comparison. Linguistic archaisms run throughout, principally in orthography but also in highly worked lines reminiscent of Pound or Stein (‘e o mar ’scuro ’struge’ [and the shadowy sea shouts]), de-familiarized by phonetic and morphological alterations that distance the line from the Portuguese language, as if it were Italian or Latin. Pessoa mixes genres, filling his book with narrative genres in poetic form, such as the oral tale, autobiography, dialogue, and prayer. He creates pared, modern verse with archaic spellings, and he uses almost every available kind of poetic metre, verse type, and rhythm. The overall effect is of a theatrical dramatization in three acts, whose intensity comes from contrasting forms of narration and scenes. It is a visual, aural tale that can be compared to the great murals composed of Portuguese painted tiles. The dark side of the voyage theme is evoked in the second section through the ‘Captains of the end’ who died at sea, Bartolomeu dias (1450–1500), Fernão de Magalhães (Magellan, 1480–1521), and Vasco da gama (1469–1524), who died at Cochin during his third voyage to India. As in The Lusiads, mythological gods are invoked to explain Portugal’s fortunes, which end definitively with the loss of d. Sebastião in 1578 at el-Ksar el-kebir in Morocco. The modern national uncertainty is evoked in the poem’s final section under the themes of silence, overcast seascapes evoking the impressionistic musicality of debussy’s La Mer (1903–05), and longing. Through poetry, Pessoa seeks to reveal the great archetypes both of historical experience and of human fate and fortune, where meaning is translated into semiotics and iconography, and language strangely separated from our ability to read its meanings. Message contains some of the most daring and famous lines of modern poetry in Portuguese, such as the much-quoted paradox ‘O mytho é o nada que é tudo’ [Myth is the nothing that is everything]. The forty-four poems in Message form a contemporary questioning of the epic panorama of Portuguese national history and identity, rather than a confirmation of it. The Livro do Desassossego is consummate modernist prose because of its indeterminacy and its fragmentary non-existence as a literary creation. The ‘Book’ never actually existed as such, and Pessoa reformulated it often with different proposed titles and sections, some never written, without giving it any definitive shape or purpose. Although Pessoa published fragments from the ‘Book’ during his lifetime, this major work is unusual for having been assembled by editors and scholars working in Pessoa’s large literary archive. The ‘Book’ is thus a ‘lost’

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modernist masterpiece, composed over Pessoa’s lifetime in the style of an artist’s or philosopher’s diary, attributed in the first phase circa 1913–14 to a Vicente guedes and largely finished in the 1930s by a Bernardo Soares, bookkeeper in the commercial district of Lisbon. The Book of Disquietude has much of the same importance to modernism as Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), for its critical introspective narration and a simultaneity resulting from the oscillation between a confined urban space, the Rua dos douradores in Lisbon, and an open historical and intellectual space of social, philosophical, and existential imagination. The ‘Book’ is a compendium of imagination, ideas, potentialities, and mental annotations like a running chronicle, always of aesthetic and existential ref lections. Like the narrator in the ‘Maritime Ode’, Soares contemplates the ‘spectacle of the world’ from his vantage point in Lisbon while unconvinced of the meaning or reality of anything. Soares reduces the stoicism of a Ricardo Reis to contemporary banality and tedium. While of indeterminate genre, the ‘Book’ may be considered a novel in the fragmentary style practised by the modernist vanguard, although it has much in common with nineteenth-century diaries and confessions and their incorporation into complex narratives, seen in Portuguese language in works by eça de Queirós and Machado de Assis. The narrator recapitulates the intimate journal of Henri-Frédéric Amiel, whose personal tragedy Pessoa describes as having had the characteristic emotions of genius without the greatness that distinguishes it. The narrator of the ‘Book’, in contrast, describes himself as a genius, although hidden and inconsequential like thousands of possible others. The central issues both of the journal and the ‘Book’ are philosophical and even theological, including consciousness, epistemology, and fate explored in a climate of self-doubt, emptiness, and decadence, in view of the unknowable nature of life. Yet as opposed to novels of self-realization attempted through voyages of change, as in the prose of Hermann Hesse, the ‘Book’ follows a negative journey of non-realization toward the loss of the individual self, trapped in a closed city space between interior and exterior worlds or between perception and self-consciousness. As a project, the ‘Book’ captures the paradox present in Pessoa, whether in individual works or in its totality: there is nothing to tell yet it is being told; an unrecognized genius tells a common story of emptiness and fatality; he writes the interior story of a self that can never be known; he composes an intimate journal as the epic story of modern times; the ‘Book’ is both prison and liberation of the written word; it encompasses the grandeur and nausea of life. Because the ‘Book’ was never definitively planned or published, different editors working in the Pessoa archive have put together different possible versions of the ‘Book’ since 1982, and all of them are authentic. Consummate modernist, Pessoa succeeded in writing a non-book whose readership continues to expand, along with the many possible versions of the ‘Book’ now in print. It is the ultimate occult artefact of modernist invention. These selected important works by Fernando Pessoa, Mário de Sá-Carneiro, and José de Almada negreiros contain major themes of european modernism that came to light during its formative moments circa 1915, when futurism, cubism, and the Ballets Russes were dynamic forces and novelties. They reveal the transition from symbolism and fin-de-siècle aestheticism to the thematic and formal inventions

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of modernism and, taken together, they cover almost every major theme and style practised by the avant-garde movements. These titles belong to the masterworks of european modernism and should be counted among its most important literary compositions. notes to Chapter 24 1. For a panorama and critical introduction to Portuguese modernism, see the bibliography and critical anthology by K. david Jackson, Portugal: as primeiras vanguardas (Madrid: Interamericana, 2003). 2. While each of these figures has received critical acclaim and consecration in the field of Portuguese arts and letters; only Fernando Pessoa is currently recognized as a major world author; even so, translations of his works may not be available readily, and all three authors often fall outside the general scope of history and criticism of european modernist literature. Aside from neglect of Portuguese literature generally, there are some reasons for the little attention paid to their important works. The Portuguese modernists published in experimental or academic journals, chief ly Orpheu (1915), Portugal Futurista (1917), Athena (1924–25), and Presença (1927–33); Pessoa’s only book of poetry in Portuguese is Mensagem (1934). Sá-Carneiro put an end to a brilliant career by committing suicide in Paris in 1916, and Almada negreiros worked mainly as an artist in Paris and Madrid before returning definitively to Portugal in 1934. 3. Fernando Pessoa, O Marinheiro [The Mariner], in Orpheu, 1 ( January-February-March 1915). english translation, in The Selected Prose of Fernando Pessoa, trans. by Richard Zenith (new York: grove, 2001), pp. 18–35. 4. Álvaro de Campos, ‘Opiário’ [Opiary], in Orpheu, 1; ‘Ode Triunfal’ [Triumphal Ode], in Orpheu, 1; ‘Ode Marítima’ [Maritime Ode], in Orpheu, 2 (April-May-June 1915). english translation, in A Little Larger Than the Entire Universe: Selected Poems, trans. by Richard Zenith (London: Penguin, 2006), pp. 147–96. 5. In Portugal Futurista (1917). The first and only number was prohibited from sale. english trans. in The Selected Prose of Fernando Pessoa, pp. 69–87. 6. Alberto Caeiro, ‘O guardador de Rebanhos’, in Athena, 4 ( January 1925), 145–56. english trans. The Keeper of Sheep, trans. by edwin Honig and Susan M. Brown (Riverdale-on-Hudson, nY: Sheep Meadow Press, 1986). 7. Ricardo Reis, ‘Odes’, Athena, 1 (October 1924); Presença, 6 (1926); 10 (1928), 31/32 (1931); 37 (1933). 8. Fernando Pessoa, Mensagem (Lisbon: Parceria Antonio Maria Pereira, 1934). english trans. Message, trans. by Jonathan griffin; with an intro. by Helder Macedo (London: Menard Press, 1992); The Boundless Sea: Poems from Mensagem, trans. by edwin Honig and Susan M. Brown (Lisbon: Instituto Português do Património Arquitectónico, 2000); Message, trans. by Richard Zenith (Lisbon: Oficina do Livro, 2008). 9. Published in incomplete excerpts, beginning with ‘na Floresta do Alheamento’, in A Águia, 2nd series, no. 20, Porto (August 1913), and continuing with ‘Trecho do “Livro do desassossego,” ’ in Solução Editora, 2 and 4, Lisboa (1929), 25 and 42; ‘Trecho de um Livro do desasocego composto por Bernardo Soares, ajudante de guarda-livros na cidade de Lisboa’, Presença, 27, Coimbra ( June–July 1930), 9; ‘Livro do Desassosssego (Cinco fragmentos)’, Descobrimento, 1, Lisbon (1931), 403–15; ‘do Livro do desassossego composto por Bernardo Soares, ajudante de guarda-livros na cidade de Lisboa’, Presença, 34, Coimbra (november–February 1932), 8. First Portuguese edition, Livro do Desassossego, ed. by Maria Aliete galhoz, Teresa Sobral Cunha and Jacinto do Prado Coelho (Lisbon: Atica, 1982). Four english translations in the 1990s: Book of Disquiet: A Selection, trans. by Iain Watson (London: Quartet Books, 1991); Book of Disquiet, trans. by Alfred MacAdam (new York: Pantheon Books, 1991); Book of Disquiet, trans. by Margaret Jull Costa (London, Baltimore and new York: Serpent’s Tail, 1991); Book of Disquietude, trans. by Richard Zenith (Riverdale-on-Hudson, nY: Sheep Meadow Press, 1996). 10. Mário de Sá-Carneiro, Céu em Fogo (Lisbon: Livraria Brazileira, 1915). english translation, The Great Shadow and Other Stories, trans. by Margaret Jull Costa (Sawtry, Cambs.: dedalus, 1996).

Important Literary Works of Portuguese Modernism

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11. In Portugal Futurista (1917). 12. José Almada negreiros, A Invenção do Dia Claro (Lisbon: Olisipo, 1921). See José de Almada negreiros, A Invenção do Dia Claro, partial trans. to english by Fernando Pessoa; intro. by Jerónimo Pizarro (Lisbon: guimarães, 2010). 13. Fernando Pessoa, ‘O Marinheiro’, Orpheu 1 (facsimile edition) (Lisbon: Ática, 1971), p. 37. 14. Ibid., pp. 37, 39 and 40. 15. Fernando Pessoa, Poesias de Álvaro de Campos (Lisbon: Ática, 1956), pp. 140–43. 16. Mário de Sá Carneiro, Céu em Fogo: Novelas (Lisbon: Ática, 1956), pp. 225–56. 17. Jerónimo Pizarro and Sara Afonso Ferreira, ‘A génese d’A Invenção do Dia Claro e o estabelecimento de Invention of the Bright Day’, in Fernando Pessoa: o guardador de papéis, ed. by Jerónimo Pizarro (Lisbon: Texto editores, 2009), pp. 283–338. 18. José de Almada negreiros, Poesia (Lisbon: estampa, 1971), p. 178. 19. Pessoa, Poemas de Alberto Caeiro (Lisbon: Ática, 1956), pp. 19, 26 and 38. 20. Ibid., pp. 29, 40, 37, 30, and 67. 21. Pessoa, Odes de Ricardo Reis (Lisbon: Ática, 1956), p. 32. 22. Ibid., pp. 42, 148 and 18. Unpublished english trans. of the odes by Benjamin norwood.

Index ❖

Abranches, Adelina 231 Aeschylus 315 Afonso V., dom 81 Afonso, Sarah 6, 171, 315 Aggerholm, eva 222 Águia, A [eagle, The] (magazine) 14, 25, 27, 45–46, 92, 156–57, 231, 296, 299, 326 Aldington, Richard xvii, 28 Alegre, Manuel 203 Aleixandre, Vicente 207 Alencar, José de 229 Alighieri, dante 281 Almada negreiros, see negreiros, José de Almada Almada, Abel 246 Almeida, António José de 232 Almeida, Avelino de 324 Almeida, Fialho de 222, 230 Alpoim, José Maria 230 Álvares, nun’ 344, 349 Alves, Francisco 231 Alves, Rodrigues 313 Amado, Fernando 315, 327 Amado, França 232 Amaral, Ana Luísa xvii, 9 Amaral, Tarsila do 230 Ameal, João 136 Amélia, d. 318 Amiel, Henri Frédéric 258–59, 375 Amorim, António 328 Amorim, Jorge de 206 Andrade, Carlos drummond de 114, 207, 226–27, 233–34 Andrade, eugénio de 201, 203, 206 Andrade, Mário de 226, 228, 234 Andrade, Oswald de 226–28, 230–31, 233–34, 370 Andrenio 223 Andresen, Sophia de Mello Breyner 202, 204 Annunzio, gabriele d’ 142, 145, 247, 256, 323 Anon, Charles Robert, see Pessoa, Fernando Antoine, André 311, 320, 323 Antunes, Heitor 231 Antunes, Joaquim 231 Apollinaire, guillaume 27, 91, 98, 139, 157, 207–08, 244, 364 Aranha, graça 227 Archipenko, Alexander 98 Aristotle 284, 351 Assens, Rafael Cansinos 216 Assis, Machado de 229–30, 375

Athena (magazine) 6, 50, 125, 151, 155–56, 166–67, 234, 372 Ayala, Francisco 223 Ayala, Pérez de 223 Azorín 220 Bacarisse, Mauricio 218, 222 Bacon, Francis 26 Badiou, Alain 7, 265, 270, 273, 274 Bahr, Hermann 252–54, 257 Baker, Josephine 173 Balibar, etienne 7, 265, 268–69, 273 Ballets Russes 72, 141, 161, 311–13, 315, 322, 370, 375 Bandeira, Manuel 226, 232–34 Barbosa, José xii, 313–14, 328 Barradas, Jorge 143, 328 Barrento, João 255, 262 Barreto, José xiii, 5 Barreto, Lima 231 Barros, Leitão de 324, 328 Barros, Teresa Leitão de 325 Bataille, georges 264, 271 Baudelaire, Charles 13, 16–17, 21, 29, 33, 155, 177, 182, 300 Bazaine, Jean 185, 193 Beckett, Samuel 76, 289, 308, 366 Beer-Hofmann, Richard 258 Beirão, Mário 47 Bell, Clive 253 Belo, Ruy 199, 207, 209, 212 Benjamin, Walter 229, 290 Bentley, William 235 Béran, diane daval 186, 193 Bergson, Henri 101, 103, 355 Bernardes, Artur da Silva 227 Bernstein, Michael André 285 Bettencourt, edmundo de 171, 173–74, 177–78 Bettencourt-Rebelo, João 244 Bicudo, Luís Francisco 238 Bilac, Olavo 230–31, 233 Bissier, Julius 186 Bissière, Roger 185 Blanchot, Maurice 267 Blanco, José 277 Blast (magazine) 24, 94, 98, 160, 169 Boccioni, Umberto 29, 98, 161, 169, 247 Bois, Yves-Alain 193 Bolterauer, Alice 260

Index Bopp, Raul 226 Bordalo, Arnold 318 Borrás, Tomás 222 Botelho, Abel 111, 221 Boto, António, see Botto, António Botticelli, Sandro 99 Botto, António 5, 10, 110–21, 123, 127, 133, 162, 165, 167, 171, 201–02, 211, 221, 342 poetry: Canções [Songs] 111, 115–16 Piquenas Esculturas [Small Sculptures] 112 ‘Uma canção’ [A song] 162 ‘Versos’ [Verses] 162 prose: O Livro das Crianças [The Childrens’s Book] 115 Bourdelle, Antoine 185 Bowler, Peter J. 355 Bradbury, Malcolm 251, 335 Braga, Luís de Almeida 227 Braga, Teófilo 221 Branco, Camilo Castelo 229–30 Branco, Luís de Freitas 90–91, 100 Brancusi, Constantin 5, 95, 98 Brandão, Fiama Hasse Pais 207 Brandão, Raul xiv, 221, 223, 322 Braque, georges 27, 37 Breton, André 37, 157, 186, 207, 248 British Ultimatum (or english Ultimatum) 227, 332, 345 Brito, Casimiro de 207 Brito, Manuel de 76, 78 Broca, Brito 230 Browning, Robert 279 Bruno, Armando 328 Bruno, Sampaio 332, 348 Buendía, Rogelio 170, 218, 221–22 Buescu, Helena Carvalhão xvi, 20 Buffon, Comte de 351 Burgos, Carmen de (Colombine) 220–22 Butler, Judith 129 Caballero, giménez ernesto 221–22 Cabanne, Pierre 93 Cabral, Manuel Villaverde xiii, 8 Cabral, Sacadura 232 Cadava, eduardo 264 Caeiro, Alberto, see Pessoa, Fernando Cage, John 289 Caird, edward 359 Câmara, Filomeno da 140–41, 145–46 Câmara, Leal da 222 Camarasa, Anglada 95 Camões, Luís de xiv, 20, 73, 160, 170, 296, 299, 332, 374 Campos, Álvaro de, see Pessoa, Fernando Campos, Pinto 328

379

Canoilas, Hugo 370 Cantor, georg 270 Cardoso, Amadeo de Souza x-xi, xiv, 5, 37, 56–58, 62, 64, 67, 70, 87, 90–109, 136, 139, 165, 185, 222, 240, 245, 311 ‘Arabesco dinâmico’ [dynamic arabesque] xi, 101–02 ‘Os cavaleiros’ [Knights] 100 ‘Quadro g’ [‘Picture g’] x, 95–98 Sem título [Unknown title] [1913] x, 97 Sem título [Unknown title] [1917] xi, 102–03 Sem título [Unknown title] [‘Coty’, 1917] xi, 104–05 Sem título [Unknown title] [‘entrada’, 1917] xi, 104, 107 Sem título [Unknown title] [‘Zinc’, 1917] xi, 104, 106 Carlos, d. 231, 318, 344 Carmo, José Palla e 277, 362 Carneiro, António 95 Carrà, Carlo 161, 169, 247 Carvalhais, Stuart 328 Carvalho, Armando Silva 207 Carvalho, elísio de 230 Carvalho, Raul de 201, 204 Carvalho, Ronald de 152, 226, 230–31, 233–34 Carvalho, Xavier de 230, 238 Cassou, Jean 100 Castañé, Adolfo Rodríguez 92, 223 Castelo Branco, Camilo, see Branco, Camilo Castelo Castex, François 318 Castro, e. M. de Melo e 201, 207–08 Castro, eugénio de 14, 17–18, 22, 214–15, 217–19, 222–23, 224, 225, 230, 233 Castro, Ferreira de 221 Castro, Mariana gray de xiii, 6, 168, 253 Castro, Pimenta de 335–36 Cecil, Lord 340–41 Celan, Paul 265 Céline, Louis-Ferdinand 150 Celso, Afonso 227 Cendrars, Blaise 207 Centauro (magazine) 6, 22, 138, 156, 158–59, 169 César, Olímpio 245 Cesariny, Mário 200–01, 204, 206–07, 210 Cézanne, Paul 29, 99 Chagas, Pinheiro 229 Chamberlain, Austen 148 Chaplin, Charlie 367 Child, Thomas 360–61 Chirico, giorgio de 166, 372 Cinatti, Ruy 206 Citroën, André-gustave 145 Clark, Lygia 192 Claudel, Paul 320 Cochofel, J. J. 171

380

Index

Cocteau, Jean 145, 150, 166, 324 Coelho, Jacinto do Prado 27 Coelho, Ruy 67, 311–12, 315 Coimbra, Leonardo 218, 357 Colette, Sidonie-gabrielle 142, 324 Connor, Peter 264 Constructivism 168, 370 Contemporanea (magazine) x, xi, 5–6, 20, 40, 65–66, 80, 123, 127, 129–30, 134, 139, 151, 156, 161–66, 168, 170, 178, 183, 220–21, 223–24, 233–34, 322, 343, 348 Copeau, Jacques 324–25 Corpus Barga, see Serna, Andrés gómes da la Correia, natália 200 Correia, Raimundo 230 Cortês, Alfredo 322 Cortesão, Jaime 231, 296, 322 Côrtes-Rodrigues, Armando 13, 28 (Cysneiros, Violante de), 87, 92, 152, 178, 226, 297 Cosmopolitanism 73, 138, 144, 215, 278, 280, 335, 370 Costa, Afonso 138 Courbet, gustave 93 Coutinho, Afrânio 233 Coutinho, gago 232 Coutinho, Mário 246 Couto, João 81 Craig, gordon 315 Crane, Hart 3, 362 Creationism 216 Cromwell, Oliver 334 Crosse, Thomas, see Pessoa, Fernando Cruz, Cristiano 64 Cruz, gastão 207 Cruz, Maria Adelaide de Lima 328 Cubism 5, 27, 29, 37, 57, 70, 91, 94, 97, 99–100, 108, 157, 168–69, 193, 198, 216, 283, 335, 375 Cunha, euclides da 230 Cunhal, Álvaro 181 Curel, François de 52, 320 Cuvier, georges 351 Cysneiros, Violante de, see Côrtes-Rodrigues, Armando dadaism 30, 37, 94, 104, 157, 216, 237, 362 dantas, Júlio 92, 223, 234, 243, 246, 311, 324, 329, 337 dante, see Alighieri, dante darío, Rubén 214–15, 217–18, 224 darwin, Charles 351–55, 359–60 dasenbrock, Reed Way 282 delaunay (or delaunay-Terk, or Terk), Sonia 37, 55–57, 64, 66, 70, 74, 87, 93, 99, 101, 109 delaunay, Robert 5, 37, 55–57, 64, 66, 70, 74, 87, 93, 95, 98–101, 109 deleuze, gilles 265, 288 delgado, Antonio Sáez xvi, 6–7 demeny, Paul 268 denis, Ferdinand 228

denis, Maurice 100 descartes, René 194, 264, 294 despiau, Charles 185 deus, João de 222 diaghilev, Sergei 72, 87, 141, 161, 311, 313 dias, Bartolomeu 374 dias, Correia 231 dias, Malheiro 230 dias, Saúl 204 diego, gerardo 216, 225 díez-Canedo, enrique 215, 222–23 dinis, dom 19 diniz, Júlio 223 dionísio, Mário 202 dix, Steffen 6, 26, 41 doesburg, Theo van 157 dostoevsky, Fyodor 171, 175 drama em gente, see Pessoa, Fernando drummond, Henry 359–60, 362 duarte, Afonso 203 duarte, Mário 318, 322 duchamp, Marcel 91, 93–94, 109, 166 duncan, Isadora 124, 126 durão Américo 127 duro, José 13 echevarría, Fernando 203, 206 eiras, Pedro xiv, 7, 286 eisenstadt, Shmuel 9 eliot, T. S. 7, 30, 34, 176, 207, 230, 251, 277–82, 286, 289, 291, 362, 366 elliott, Bridget 123 eloy, Mário 6, 149, 171, 222 eluard, Paul 207 ernst, Max 186 erté 74 espanca, Florbela xvi, 5, 122–25, 127–29, 131–34, 174 poetry: Livro de Soror Saudade [Sister Saudades’s Book] 127 ‘Loucura’ [Madness] 128 ‘Soneto VII’ [Sonnet VII] 129 ‘navios fantasmas’ [gosthly ships] 131 ‘O fumo do meu cigarro’ [The smoke of my cigarette] 132 estado novo, see new State europa (magazine) 28, 123, 169 exílio (magazine) 6,138, 156, 158–59, 168–69 Fabre, gladys 166 Faguet, Émile 52 Farrère, Claude 324 Feijó, António 230, 233 Fernandes, Maria da Conceição 114 Ferreira, Ana Paula 122

Index Ferreira, gil 325 Ferreira, Lino 324 Ferro, António xi, 5, 8, 48, 53, 79, 87, 119, 135–54, 220–21, 226, 231, 233–34, 310, 313, 315, 322–25, 329–30, 335–36, 338, 342–43, 346, 348–49 plays: Mar Alto [High Sea] 143 145, 150, 153, 322, 324 prose: A Idade do Jazz-Band [The Jazz-Band Age] xi, 141, 152–53, 348 ‘Alguns precursores’ [Some precursors] 139, 153 Viagem à Volta das Ditaduras [Voyage Around the dictatorships] 144–45, 153, 338, 348 Intervenção Modernista [Modernist Intervention] xi, 149, 152–53 Gabriele D’Annunzio e Eu [gabriele d’Annunzio and Me] 142, 153 Leviana [Flighty] xi, 142–43, 145, 222–23 Nós [Us] 143 Salazar [Salazar] xi, 147–48, 153 Teoria da Indiferença [Indifference Theory] 142, 145, 152–53, 222 Fialho, see Almeida, Fialho de Figueira, Luís 325 Figueiredo, Fidelino de 222 Figueiredo, Jackson de 227 Figueiredo, José de 57 Filho, Homem Cristo 336 Filipe, guilherme 222 Fin-de-siècle 17, 110, 125, 157, 332, 350, 375 First Republic 3, 136, 144, 310, 322, 327 First World War 24, 51, 59, 64, 67, 74, 98, 135, 166–67, 185, 227, 335, 350 Flint, F. S. 283 Flórez, Wenceslao Fernández 222 Foch, Ferdinand 145 Fokkema, douwe 298 Fonseca, Branquinho da 6, 171, 173 Fonseca, Hermes da 232 Foucault, Michel 111, 280 França, José-Augusto 56–57, 68, 72–74, 83, 89, 135–36, 147, 149, 186 Franco, António Cândido 357 Franco, Leyster 245 Frazer, James george 281 Freitas, António Maria de 45 Freud, Sigmund 175, 254, 264, 306 Freundlich, Otto 98 Freyre, gilberto 226–27, 233 Futurism 5, 7, 13, 24, 27, 29–30, 36–37, 39–40, 42, 50, 56, 70, 90, 93–94, 98, 100–01, 103–04, 108, 125–26, 135, 137, 139, 143, 149–51, 157, 159–62, 165–70, 200–01, 208, 216, 226, 233, 236–49, 255, 261, 283, 291, 299, 302, 306, 311, 324, 331, 335–38, 340, 342–43, 362, 367, 375

381

gago, Carla 286 gama, Paulo da 374 gama, Sebastião da 200, 203 gama, Vasco da 373–74 garay, René 123 garrett, Almeida 4, 13–15, 229 gasparri, Pietro 145 gaudier-Brzeska, Henri 5, 98 gautier, Théophile 17 gedeão, António 204 gellner, ernest 333 genette, gérard 286 ghil, René 17 giddens, Anthony 226 gide, André 115, 166, 171 gil, José 197, 265, 283, 286, 288–89 gleizes, Albert 91 goebbels, Joseph 5, 147–48, 152 goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 327 gomes, João Carlos Celestino 246 gómez de la Serna, Ramón, see Serna, Ramón gómez de la gonçalves, nuno 81 gonçalves, Rui-Mário xiv, 5, 57, 64 gonzález Ruano, César 218, 222 gonzález-Blanco, Andrés 218, 222–23 goodman, nelson 300 gould, Stephen Jay 352, 359 gould, Warwick 285 goya, Francisco 48 greenberg, Clement 193–96 gris, Juan 27, 98, 104 gropius, Walter 157 grosz, georges 104 guattari, Félix 288 guedes, Vicente, see Pessoa, Fernando guillén, Jorge 39, 206–07 guimaraens, eduardo 231 guimarães, Fernando 205 guisado, Alfredo Pedro 28, 137, 153, 178, 226 Haeckel, ernst 351–55, 357–61 Hall, Radclyffe 123 Hamburger, Michael 254 Hartmann, Karl Robert eduard von 21 Hartung, Hans 185, 193 Hatherly, Ana 208 Hegel, georg Wilhelm Friedrich 264, 296, 356, 359 Heidegger, Martin 203, 264–65, 267, 275 Heine, Heinrich 21 Helder, Herberto 200, 207 Henry, O. (William Sydney Porter) 167 Herculano, Alexandre 15 Herold, Jorge 328 Herrick, Robert 34 Hesse, Hermann 375

382

Index

Hitler, Adolf 145, 147–48 Hofmann, Hans 184 Hofmannsthal, Hugo von 253–60, 262, 263 Holanda, Sérgio Buarque de 227 Hölderlin, Friedrich 205, 265 Homer 34 Hopkins, gerard Manley 265, 362 Horace 20, 372 Horta, Maria Teresa 207 Hourcade, Pierre 177 Huidobro, Vicente 216 Husserl, edmund 264 Huxley, T. H. 351 Ibáñez, Vicente Blasco 215 Ibsen, Henrik 20, 171–72 Inglehardt, Ronald 9 Integralismo Lusitano 162, 165, 336, 340 Intersectionism (or interseccionismo) 4, 16, 19, 25–38, 51, 58, 137, 156, 168, 234, 241, 242, 283, 288, 297, 335, 343, 350 Isabel, dona 19 Ivo, Ledo 234 Jackson, david K. xiv, 8 Jacob, Max 169 Jarnés, Benjamín 221, 225 Jarry, Alfred 365 Jawlensky, Alexej von 98 Jesus, geraldo Coelho de 338–40 Jiménez, Juan Ramón 207, 215 João VI, dom 19, 228 Johns, Jasper 104 Jorge, Frederico 328 Jorge, Luiza neto 207 Jorge, Ricardo 324 Joyce, James 30, 115, 171, 176, 182, 251, 375 Juarroz, Roberto 207 Júnior, Joaquim norte 75 Júnior, Luiz guimarães 230 Júnior, Tomás Cabreira 318 Junqueira, Renata Soares 122 Junqueiro, guerra 13–14, 117–18, 223, 230, 332–34, 344–45 Kafka, Franz 251, 254, 290 Kandinsky, Wassily Kant, Immanuel 98 Keats, John 207 Kemal, Mustafa (Atatürk) 144 Kenner, Hugh 289 Kim, Tomaz 206 Klee, Paul 6, 99, 184, 187 Klobucka, Anna xiv, 5, 122 Kooning, Willem de 184 Krabbenhoft, Kenneth xiv, 8 Kupka, František 95

L’Isle-Adam, Villiers de 365 Lacerda, Alberto de 203 Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe 7, 265–67, 273–74, 275 Lajolo, Marisa 232 Lamarck, Jean-Baptiste 351, 354, 359 Lapa, Fernanda 316 Lapa, Pedro xv, 6, 88 Laranjeira, Manuel 95 Larbaud, Valéry 152 Larrea, Juan 216 Leal, gomes 17, 132, 179, 233 Leal, Raul 123, 157, 171, 178, 200, 234, 243–44, 336, 342 Leão, António Ponce de 8, 45, 310, 318, 320–22 Léger, Fernand 185 Leibniz, gottfried Wilhelm 21 Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich 270 Levita, Francisco 246 Lewis, Wyndham 30, 37, 94, 157 Lima, Ângelo de 6, 156, 165, 171, 201, 295–96 Lima, Jorge de 226, 234 Lima, Oliveira 232 Lino, Raul 315, 328 Lino, Rui 311 Lisboa, António Maria 207 Lisboa, eugénio 32, 39 Lisboa, Irene 122, 174, 204 Lobato, Monteiro 232 Loewenson, erwin 255 Lopes, Óscar 319 Lopes, Teresa Rita 320, 327 Lopes-garcia, Fernando 173 Lorca, Federico garcía 5, 10, 116–17, 121 Lourenço, eduardo 72, 176–79, 205, 207, 300 Lourenço, M. S. 208 Ludwig, emil 147 Macedo, Suzette 362 Mach, ernst 253 Machado, Antonio 221, 362 Macke, August 166 Maeterlinck, Maurice 30, 40, 320, 323, 326, 365 Maeztu, Ramiro de 222–23 Magalhães, Fernão de 374 Magalhães, gonçalves de 228 Magalhães, Joaquim Manuel 110 Magritte, René 166, 372 Maldonado, Francisco 222 Malevich, Kazimir 37 Malfatti, Anita 230 Malhoa, José 95, 103 Mallarmé, Stéphane 27–28, 265, 362 Malraux, André 5, 152 Malta, eduardo 325 Mandelstam, Osip 265 Manessier, Alfred 185, 193 Manet, edouard 93

Index Mannerism 113, 218 Mansfield, Katherine 150 Manso, Joaquim 222 Marc, Franz 166 Marchis, giorgio de xv, 4 Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso 24, 29–30, 37, 72, 79, 93, 98, 108, 143, 157, 159, 161–62, 169, 170, 236–38, 240–49, 342 Maristany, Fernando 218, 222–23 Maritain, Jacques 144 Marnoto, Rita 246 Marques, Bernardo 6, 143, 171 Marquina, eduardo 223 Martinho, Fernando J. B. xv, 6, 9, 182 Martini, Simone 189 Martins, Albano 204 Martins, Fernando Cabral 42, 123, 257, 288 Martins, Joaquim Pedro de Oliveira 21, 340, 344 Martins, nobre 324 Marvell, Andrew 281 Marx, Karl 9, 264 Maseras, Alfonso 223 Matisse, Henri 189 Matos, gregório de 230 Matos, gustavo de 324 Maurras, Charles 150, 162 Mavignier, Almir 192 McFarlane, James 251, 335 Mcneill, Patrícia Oliveira da Silva 362 Medeiros, Paulo de 122 Meireles, Cecília 192, 226, 231 Melo, Tomás de 328 Mendes, Inês Alves xv, 8 Mendes, Murilo 192 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 189, 191, 194, 197 Merquior, José guilherme 307 Metzinger, Jean 91 Metzner, eduardo, see César, Olímpio Meyer, Augusto 226 Michelet, Jules 21 Milton, John 20, 282 Miraglia, gianluca xv, 7 Miranda, Vasco 205 Mistinguett 145 Mistral, gabriela 115 Mivart, george 359 Modigliani, Amedeo Clemente 5, 95, 98–99, 103 Mondrian, Piet 191, 194 Montale, eugenio 30 Montalvão, Justino de 230 Montalvor, Luís de 6, 34, 159, 165, 167, 171, 226, 231, 233 Monteiro, Adolfo Casais 171–72, 182, 202, 204, 221, 225, 278, 303–04 Monteiro, Porfírio Pardal 79–80, 88 Monteiro, Robles 316–17, 322

383

Mora, António, see Pessoa, Fernando Morali, Claude 267 Morão, Paula xv, 4 Moréas, Jean 17 Moreira, Álvaro 231 Mosse, george L. 8, 331 Motherwell, Robert 184 Mourão-Ferreira, david 44, 92, 181, 202 Mouta, Oliveira 322 Musil, Robert 290 Mussolini, Benito 140, 142, 144–48, 285, 336 nancy, Jean-Luc 7, 264–68, 271–73 navarro, António de 178, 200, 246 negreiros, José de Almada x-xii, xiv, 4–6, 8, 24–26, 34–35, 38, 40, 55–94, 97, 99–101, 108–10, 136, 138–39, 143, 158, 160–62, 164–67, 169, 171, 177, 200, 204, 211, 216, 220–21, 225–26, 233–34, 238, 243–46, 248–49, 298, 302–03, 309–13, 315–17, 324–26, 328–31, 335–38, 342–43, 345, 348–49, 364–65, 369–71, 375–77 illustrations: ‘Sintra’ [Sintra] x, 65 paintings / compositions: ‘A sesta’ [The nap] x, 80 ‘Auto-retrato’ [Self-portrait] x, 86 ‘Auto-retrato num grupo’ [Self-portrait in a group] x, 75 ‘domingo lisboeta’ [A Sunday in Lisbon] x, 82 ‘Jazz’ [Jazz] x, 76, 78 ‘Partida de emigrantes’ [The emigrant’s departure] x, 82 Retrato de Fernando Pessoa [Portrait of Fernando Pessoa] [1935] x, 83 Retrato de Fernando Pessoa [Portrait of Fernando Pessoa] [1954] x, 85 plays: Antes de Começar [Before Starting] 74, 315–16 Pierrot e Arlequim [Pierrot and Harlequin] 87 poetry: ‘A scena do odio’ [The scene of hatred] 34, 40, 58, 70, 92, 200, 211, 337, 345 ‘Histoire du Portugal par coeur’ [A history of Portugal by heart] x, 65–66, 72–74, 162 ‘Litoral’ [Coastline] 70, 245 prose: A Engomadeira [The Laundry-Maid] x, 58–64, 66–68, 70 A Invenção do Dia Claro [The Invention of the Bright day] 66, 76, 88, 302, 309, 338, 348, 365, 370–71, 377 ‘direcção única’ [One-way street] 79 K4 O Quadrado Azul [K4 The Blue Square] x, 58, 62–64, 67–68, 70, 101 ‘Manifesto anti-dantas’ [Anti-dantas Manifesto] 58, 68, 70, 92, 108–09, 243, 311, 337

384

Index

‘Manifesto da exposição de Amadeo de SouzaCardoso’ [Manifesto of the Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso exhibition] 57–58 Mima Fataxa [Mima Fataxa] 70 Nome de Guerra [nom de guerre] 76 ‘Os bailados russos em Lisboa’ [The Russian ballets in Lisbon] 58, 161, 169 ‘Saltimbancos’ [Acrobats] 71, 93, 160, 244 Tekné, a Cabeça da Colectividade [Tekné, the Head of the Collectivity] 79 ‘Ultimatum futurista às gerações portuguesas do Século XX’ [Futurist ultimatum to the Portuguese generations of the twentiethcentury] 58, 71, 73, 78, 87, 169, 244, 248, 302, 309, 337, 365, 369 nemésio, Vitorino 174, 203, 209, 222 neo-paganism 26, 36, 38, 41, 305, 355–56 nerval, gérard de 366 neto, Coelho 230 neves, Laierte 328 neves, Orlando 200 newman, Barnett 184 new State xiii, 78–79, 81, 84, 135–36, 144, 146, 149– 52, 154, 181, 214, 342–47 nicholls, Peter 33 nietzsche, Friedrich 7, 9, 19, 26, 253, 264–65, 301, 305, 343, 355–57, 369 nijinsky, Vaslav 5, 116 nobre, António 13–14, 18–19, 22, 110, 128, 179, 222, 230, 233, 333 O’neill, Alexandre 207 Olisipo 117, 348, 370, 377 Oliveira, Alberto de 230–32 Oliveira, António Correia de 13 Oliveira, Carlos de 203, 207 Oliveira, Correia de 45 Oliveira, Felipe de 231 Oliveira, Joaquim de 325 Oliveira, José Osório de 231, 324 Oliveira, Paulino de 231 Olivier, Lawrence 115 Olmedilla, Juan gonzález 218, 222 Oram, Alice Lawrence 115 Orozco, José Clemente 81 Orpheu (magazine) x-xi, 3–6, 8, 12–16, 18–20, 22, 24–25, 28–32, 34, 36–40, 55, 57–58, 60, 66–67, 70, 84, 92–94, 101, 103–04, 108, 127, 136–40, 151–53, 155–62, 165, 167–71, 173, 176–79, 199–201, 204, 211, 215–16, 219, 226, 231, 233–34, 241–43, 247–48, 294–300, 306–11, 322, 326, 328, 330–31, 335–37, 341–43, 346–47, 350, 364, 376–77 Ors, eugenio d’ 218, 220, 222 Ortega y gasset, José 145, 225 Ortigão, Ramalho 230 Osório, Ana de Castro 220–21, 231 Osório, António 206

Pach, Walter 98 Pacheco (or Pacheko), José 8, 25, 59, 64, 68, 93, 139, 165–66, 170, 220, 310, 312, 315, 322–25, 328, 338, 348 Pacheco, Fernando Assis 203 Pais, Sidónio 140, 146, 227, 312, 338–39, 343–46 Palmer, Frank 30 Papini, giovanni 150 Parnassian 215, 218, 226, 234 Pascoaes, Teixeira de 35, 37, 117, 215, 218–19, 222–23, 224, 296–97, 333–34, 350, 357, 362 Pater, Walter 167 Patrício, António 19, 179, 231 Paulism (or Paulismo) 4, 25–28, 39, 51, 156, 168, 200, 234, 241, 260, 296–98, 335, 343, 350 Paulo, Rogério 325 Pavia, Cristovam 200, 202 Paz, Octavio 4, 207, 214–15 Pazos-Alonso, Cláudia xvi, 5 Pedro I, dom 19, 227–28 Pedro, António 327 Pedro, Valentín de 218, 221, 223 Pedroso, Consiglieri 232 Peixinho, Jorge Peixoto, Floriano 228 Pereira, Ana Leonor 352 Pereira, Júlio Reis xi, 175 Pereira, Pedro Teotónio 342 Pérez, Rogério garcía 163–64, 220, 222, 318 Perrone-Moisés, Leyla 372 Pessanha, Camilo 4, 8, 13, 18–19, 22, 159, 165, 169, 295–97, 334 Pessoa, epitácio 228, 232 Pessoa, Fernando x–xvii, 1, 3–10, 12–54, 56, 64, 67, 69–70, 72–73, 79, 81, 83–85, 87, 90–92, 94, 108–15, 117–23, 127–29, 131–34, 136–40, 143, 147–48, 150–54, 156–57, 159, 162–63, 165, 167–71, 173, 176–79, 182–83, 191, 199–202, 204–05, 212, 214, 216–17, 219–28, 232–35, 238, 240–43, 245, 247–48, 251, 253–93, 295–306, 308–10, 318, 326–66, 370–77 drama em gente [drama in people] 7, 260, 272, 276, 327–28 heteronyms: Anon, Charles Robert (pré-heteronym) 356 Caeiro, Alberto 3–4, 16, 19, 21, 24, 26, 54, 73, 167, 170, 259, 269, 272, 275, 280, 301–06, 308–09, 335, 356, 364, 371–72, 376–77 Campos, Álvaro de x, 3–5, 15–16, 21, 24, 27, 29, 32–35, 39–40, 54, 58, 64, 70, 72, 104, 125, 127–29, 138, 157, 160, 165, 167, 169–70, 178– 79, 183, 199–202, 204, 211, 241, 243, 244, 257, 264–67, 269–70, 272–77, 280, 283, 287, 293, 299, 301, 303, 305–09, 326, 328, 335, 343, 346, 349, 364, 366–67, 369–70, 376–77 Crosse, Thomas 356 guedes, Vicente 364, 375

Index Mora, António 26, 301, 305, 356, 358, 362 Reis, Ricardo 3–4, 19, 24, 26, 54, 167, 170, 272–73, 276, 280, 287, 301–03, 305, 309, 335, 346, 356–57, 364, 372–73, 375–77 Search, Alexander (pré-heteronym) 356, 358 Soares, Bernardo 254, 256, 258, 268–73, 287, 290, 298–99, 302, 305, 353, 364, 375 plays: O Marinheiro [The Mariner] or [The Sailor] 8, 17, 22, 34, 40, 156, 287, 300, 309, 326–27, 330, 364, 376–77 poetry: ‘A passagem das horas’ [The passing of time] x, 34, 35, 299 ‘Chuva Oblíqua’ [Oblique rain] or [Slanting rain] 28, 32, 132, 157, 297, 335 ‘dois excertos de odes’ [excerpts from two odes] 21 ‘gomes Leal’ [gomes Leal] 17, 22, 132 ‘Ode marítima’ [Maritime ode] 21, 32, 40, 58, 157, 335, 376 ‘Ode triunfal’ [Triumphal ode] 32, 39, 58, 138, 157, 241, 299, 306, 308–09, 335, 376 Odes [Odes] 170, 364, 372–73, 376–77 O Guardador de Rebanhos [The Keeper of Sheep] 16, 54, 269, 274–76, 293, 303–05, 364, 371, 376 ‘Opiário’ [Opiary] 128, 335, 376 Mensagem [Message] 50, 73, 109, 150, 202, 227, 235, 282, 295, 301, 345–46, 364, 373, 376 ‘Paues de roçarem ancias pela minha alma em Ouro’ [Swamps of yearnings brushing against my gilded soul] 27, 39, 296–97, 334–35 ‘Tabacaria’ [The tobacconist’s] or [The tobacco shop] 15, 43, 257, 264, 270, 273–74, 343 prose: ‘Apontamentos para uma estética não-aristotélica’ [notes on a non-Aristotelian aesthetic] 125, 170 ‘Carta a um herói estúpido’ [Letter to a stupid hero] 24, 38 Livro do Desasocego / Livro do Desassossego [Book of Disquietude] xvi, 1, 4, 7, 9, 16, 24, 28, 33, 37, 40, 252, 255–56, 258, 261–63, 265–66, 269– 70, 272, 274–75, 277, 281, 287–90, 292–93, 299, 303, 308–09, 364, 374–76 ‘Movimento Sensacionista’ [Sensationist Movement] 34, 169 ‘Tábua bibliográfica’ [Bibliographic table] 50, 182, 328 ‘Ultimatum’ [Ultimatum] 40, 72, 160, 169, 243– 44, 343, 349, 364, 369 Pétain, Philippe 145 Picabia, Francis 103, 166, 169 Picasso, Pablo 27, 37, 72, 74, 80, 94, 101, 166, 169, 372 Picchia, Menotti del 226–27, 233 Pimenta, Alberto 208

385

Pinheiro, Bordalo (Columbano) 93, 95 Pinheiro, Chaby 324–25 Pinto, Álvaro 231, 326 Pinto, Silva 16 Pirandello, Luigi 115, 139, 171, 288, 325 Pitta, eduardo 120 Pizarro, Jerónimo xvi, 4, 283, 350, 370 Plato 265, 358 Poe, edgar Allan 13, 167 Poliakoff, Serge 193 Pollock, Jackson 184 Porfírio, Carlos 244–45 Porfírio, Ventura 222 Portinari, Candido 192 Portugal, José Blanc de 206 Portugal Futurista (magazine) x, xi, 6, 8, 24, 58, 67, 71–72, 93–94, 104, 138, 156, 158–62, 165, 168–69, 234, 244–45, 247–48, 302, 308, 331, 336, 349, 369, 376–77 Pound, ezra 7, 28, 30, 34, 67, 94, 155, 167, 199, 207–08, 248, 251, 277–86, 289–90, 362, 374 Prado, Paulo 227 Presença (magazine) x–xi, 3, 6, 50, 52–54, 83, 139, 168, 171–83, 185, 197, 200–03, 211, 221, 225–26, 234–35, 246, 276, 303, 309, 318, 328, 347, 349–50, 372, 376 Primo de Rivera, Miguel 144–45 Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph 21 Proust, Marcel 113, 171, 251 Quadros, António Queirós, eça de 111, 130, 215, 222–23, 229, 375 Queirós, Ofélia 306 Queiroz, Carlos 83, 179, 202 Quental, Antero de 4, 13–17, 21, 222, 225, 294, 296 Quin, Carmelo Arden 192 Quintanar, Marques de (Count of Santibáñez del Río) 166, 223 Quintela, Paulo 205 Racine, Jean 20 Rainey, Lawrence 170 Ramalho Ortigão, see Ortigão, Ramalho Ramos Rosa, António 202, 207 Rauschenberg, Robert 289 Ray, Man 166 Rebay, Hilla 190 Rebello, Francisco Luiz 328 Régio, José 6, 50, 112, 136, 171, 185, 200, 203 Rego, José Lins do 233 Reis, António 204 Reis, Ricardo, see Pessoa, Fernando Rey-Colaço, Alexandre 64 Rey-Colaço, Alice 328 Rey-Colaço, Amélia 64 Ribeiro, António Sousa xvii, 7 Ribeiro, Aquilino 239–40, 322

386

Index

Ribera i Rovira, Ignasi 221, 223 Ricardo, Cassiano 227 Rilke, Rainer Maria 166, 205, 362 Rimbaud, Arthur 17, 265, 268, 280, 294, 301 Rio, João do 230–31 Rivera, diego 81 Robertson, John M. 356 Rocha, Adolfo, see Torga, Miguel Rodrigues, António xi, 149 Roethke, Theodore 207 Rollinat, Maurice 13 Romains, Jules 139, 325 Romero, Sílvio 229, 231 Rorty, Richard 305 Rosa, Henrique 13 Rosado, João 245 Rothko, Mark 184 Ruano, César gonzález 218, 222 Ruiz, diego 220 Russolo, Luigi 169, 247 Sá, Vítor Matos e 205 Saa, Mário 167, 171, 202 Saba, Umberto 30, 206 Sá-Carneiro, Mário xi, xv, xvii, 4–6, 8, 15, 18–19, 34, 37, 42–53, 55, 90 plays: Alma [Soul] 318–19 Amizade [Friendship] 50–51, 318–21, 329 poetry: ‘Alcool’ [Alcohol] 44, 48 ‘Anto’ [Anto] 18 ‘Apoteose’ [Apotheosis] 104 ‘Caranguejola’ [lat.: Cancer pagurus] 50 Dispersão [Scatering] xv, 42–46, 48, 50–51, 53, 109, 200, 257, 322 Indícios de Oiro [Traces of Gold] 18, 44, 45, 49–51, 308 Inter-Sonho’ [Inter-dream] 48 ‘Manucure’ [Manucure] 30, 40, 50–51, 53, 157, 241 ‘Partida’ [departure] 45, 125, 129 ‘Rodopio’ [Whirling] 48 ‘Último soneto’ [Last sonnet] 50 ‘Fim’ [end] 50–51 prose: A Confisão de Lúcio [Lúcio’s Confession] 28, 42, 45, 51, 90, 110–11, 119, 124–25, 133, 307, 309, 319, 322 ‘A estranha Morte do Professor Antena’ [The Strange death of Professor Antenna] 34, 369 ‘Além’ [Beyond] 42, 46, 48, 50, 53, 245 ‘Asas’ [Wings] 48, 53, 307 ‘Bailado’ [dance] 42, 45, 48, 50, 53 Céu em Fogo [The great Shadow] 44, 47, 51 ‘Mistério’ [Mystery] 52, 240

‘O fixador de instantes’ [The fixer of moments] 46, 52 ‘O homem dos sonhos’ [The man of dreams] 42, 52 Princípio [Beginning] 43, 45, 49–51 Sadlier, darlene Joy 3 Sáez delgado, Antonio, see delgado, Antonio Sáez Sagrada Família, see Família Saint-exupéry, Antoine de 370 Saint-Hilaire, Étienne geoffroy 351 Saint-Point, Valentine de 125, 244 Salazar Oliveira, António de xi, xiii, xvii, 5, 78, 135, 137, 144–54, 174, 190, 227, 332, 338, 340, 342, 345–47 Salgado, Plínio 227 Salinas, Pedro 207 Salvador, João 112–13 Sampaio, Maria de Lurdes xvii, 7, 227, 291 Santa Rita, guillerme de (or Santa-Rita Pintor) 30, 37, 48, 50, 56, 63–64, 66, 71, 90, 93–94, 98, 101, 103, 108, 136, 139, 157, 161, 165, 169, 240, 243–45, 300–01, 311, 336 Santa-Rita, Augusto de 159 Santiáñez, nil 216, 224 Santos, José Carlos Ary dos 202 Santos, Maria Irene Ramalho de Sousa xvi, 3, 7, 264 Santos, Vítor Pavão dos 316, 328 Sapega, ellen W. xvii, 4, 55, 67–68, 122, 133 Sappho 130 Saraiva, Arnaldo xvii, 7, 23, 226, 291 Saraiva, Joaquim 231 Saramago, José xiv, 204, 373 Sardinha, António 159, 162–63, 165–66, 169, 222–23, 227 Saudosism (or saudosismo) 6, 13, 25, 36–37, 137, 216, 224, 296–97, 334, 350 Schlegel, Friedrich 300 Schoenberg, Arnold 173, 178, 270 Schreiber, Émile 147 Scliar, Carlos 192 Search, Alexander, see Pessoa, Fernando Sebastião, dom (or King Sebastian) 26, 73, 140, 163, 332, 340, 348, 374 Sedgwick, eve Kosofsky 113 Sena, Jorge de 179, 200–01, 204–06, 209, 320 Sensationism (or sensacionismo) 4, 25–27, 29–30, 32–37, 41, 137, 157, 159, 168–69, 234, 242, 253–55, 259, 283, 289, 306, 335, 350 Sequeira, gustavo de Matos 324–25 Sérgio, António 231, 322, 339–40 Serna, Andrés gómez da la 162 (Corpus Barga), 170 (Corpus Barga) Serna, Ramón gómez de la xi, 77, 88, 142–43, 153, 163, 170, 214, 216, 220–22, 225 Serrão, Joel xi, 13, 219 Severini, gino 95, 98, 100, 169, 247

Index Shakespeare, William xiii, 20, 26, 39, 279–80, 282, 327, 339 Silva, António 231 Silva, Maria Beatriz nizza da 231 Silva, Maria Helena Vieira da xi, 6, 171, 184–98, 210 ‘Atelier, Lisbonne’ [Studio, Lisbon] 187–88 ‘Bibliothèque’ [Library] 196 ‘Composition’ series [Compostion] 187–88, 190 ‘Composition 55’ [Composition 55] 196 ‘enigme’ [enigma] 194 ‘L’Atelier’ [The studio] 190–92 ‘La Bataille des couteaux’ [The battle of the knifes] 196 ‘La Chambre à carreaux’ [The room with tiles] xi, 188–90 ‘La gare Saint-Lazare’ [Saint-Lazare Station] 196 ‘La Machine optique’ [The optical machine] 190 ‘La Partie d’échecs’ [The chess game] 190–92 ‘La Ville brûlée’ [The city on fire] 196 ‘Le Cataclysme’ [The cataclysm] 196 ‘Le désastre’ [The disaster] 192 ‘Le Promeneur invisible’ [The invisible stroller] xi, 194–95 ‘Les Losanges’ [The lozenges] 190 Silva Pinto, see Pinto, Silva Silva, Raquel Henriques da xviii, 4, 69, 87–88 Silva, Vítor Aguiar e 283 Silvestre, Osvaldo Manuel 283 Simões, João gaspar 6, 47, 51, 113, 119, 120, 152, 171, 173–77, 179, 182, 204, 291, 338, 342, 346, 348–49 Simões, Manuel g. 29 Simões, Veiga 230 Smith, Zadie 207 Soares, António xi, 136, 142–43, 328 Soares, Arnaldo x, 80 Soares, Bernardo, see Pessoa, Fernando Socrates 255 Soulages, Pierre 185, 193 Sousa Ribeiro, see Ribeiro, António Sousa Sousa Santos, see Santos, Maria Irene Ramalho de Sousa Sousa, António de 203 Sousa, ernesto de 78 Sousa, João Rui de 202 Sousa, Júlio de 328 Souza-Cardoso, see Cardoso, Amadeo de Souza Spencer, Herbert 360 Spenser, edmund 281 Staël, nicolas de 185, 193 Stein, gertrude 374 Steiner, george 280–82, 289 Stella, Frank 104 Stevens, Wallace 207, 372 Stirner, Max 355 Storck, Wilhelm 15–16

387

Stravinsky, Igor 367 Strindberg, August 20 Sudoeste (or SW Sudoeste) (magazine) 20, 79, 168, 177 Surrealism 37, 157, 178, 186, 190, 200, 211, 223 Symbolism 6, 17, 19, 27, 69, 137, 156, 159, 168, 178– 79, 214–17, 238, 261, 283, 297, 311, 316, 320, 323, 326, 340, 345, 347, 365, 368, 375 Synge, John M. 326 Szenes, Árpád xi, 171, 185, 190, 192, 205 Tamen, Pedro 203 Teles, Basílio 332, 334, 345 Telmo, Cottinelli 105 Terence 20 Terra, José 205 Teixeira, Judith 5, 122–34, 162, 165, 221–22 poetry: ‘A estátua’ [The statue] 130 ‘A minha amante’ [My female lover] 129 ‘A Outra’ [The Other] 128 Castelo de Sombras [Castle of Shadows] 127–28 Decadência [decadence] 123, 126–30, 134 ‘Fim’ [end] 123, 128–29, 162 ‘Flores de cactus’ [Cacti in bloom] 126, 130 ‘Ilusão’ [Illusion] 126, 130 ‘Liberta’ [Free] 129, 134 nua [naked woman] 127, 130 ‘Perfis decadentes’ [decadent silhouettes] 129 ‘Predestinada’ [doomed] 128 ‘Ruínas’ [Ruins] 128, 134 ‘Última frase’ [Last sentence] 129 prose: ‘de mim’ [About myself] 123, 125, 130, 133 Satânia [Satania] 123, 133 Thompson, Francis 20 Tirso, Santo 230 Tobey, Mark 185–86 Tomé, eduardo xi, 206 Torga, Miguel 173–74, 177, 178, 181, 202–03, 211, 235 Torre, guillermo de 117 Torrecilla, Jesús 224 Torres, António 227 Torres-garcía, Joaquin 192 Toulouse-Lautrec, Henri de 99 Trakl, georg 265 Travelyan, Jules 190 Trigo, Felipe 223 Trigueiros, Luís Forjaz 114 Tzara, Tristan 37, 157, 248 Ultraism 215–16, 247, 291 Unamuno, Miguel de 115, 145, 215, 217–20, 222, 224–25, 362 Ungaretti, giuseppe 30 Unger, erich 255

388

Index

Valéry, Paul xi, 148, 153, 195, 286, 292, 362, 367 Valle, Adriano del 117, 220–21, 223–25 Valle-Inclán, Ramón María del 145 Vallier, dora 186 Vando-Villar, Isaac del 223 Vanguardias 6, 216, 224 Vasconcelos, Carolina Michaëlis de 15 Vasconcelos, Helena da Silveira de 312 Vauxcelles, Louis de 98, 100 Vaz, Ruy 167 Vázquez díaz, daniel 223 Velde, Bram van 185, 193 Verde, Cesário 4, 13, 16, 19–21, 29, 45, 155, 168, 179, 281, 318–20, 332 Veríssimo, José 229 Verlaine, Paul 17 Vertigism 157 Viana, António Manuel Couto 202 Viana, eduardo 55–57, 63, 74, 84, 87, 90, 93, 100, 101, 108, 136 Vieira da Silva, see Silva, Maria Helena Vieira da Vieira, Afonso Lopes 222 Vieira, António (Padre) 281 Vila-Maior, dionísio 122 Vila-nova, gervasio 90 Villaespesa, Francisco 221, 223 Villaverde Cabral, Manuel, see Cabral, Manuel Villaverde

Virgil 20 Viviani, Alberto 338 Vivien, Renée 126, 130 Vorticism 24, 27, 28, 37, 94, 157, 161, 168, 261, 279, 282, 283, 291 Wagner, Richard 29, 312 Wallace, Alfred Russel 351, 360 Wallace, Jo-Ann 123 Wallerstein, Immanuel 9 Whitman, Walt 26, 32, 204, 266, 272, 275–76, 285, 292, 367 Wilde, Oscar 28, 37, 40, 125–26, 253, 262, 297, 362 Witemeyer, Hugh 281 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 264, 289, 293, 305, 309, 356–57, 363 Woll, dieter 240 Woolf, Virginia 115, 127 Yeats, William Butler 251, 279, 285, 326, 362 Young, edward 20 Yourcenar, Marguerite 166 Zagoriansky, Petrus Ivanovitch 53 Zenith, Richard 288 Žižek, Slavoj 301 Zola, Émile 311, 318–19