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Adverse Genres in Fernando Pessoa K. David Jackson 2010 Oxford University Press, Inc., publishes works that further Oxford University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education. Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offi ces in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Copyright © 2010 by Oxford University Press, Inc. Published by Oxford University Press, Inc. 198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016 www.oup.com Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press 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, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press. Library of Congress CataloginginPublication Data Jackson, K. David (Kenneth David) Adverse genres in Fernando Pessoa / Kenneth David Jackson. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 9780195391213 1. Pessoa, Fernando, 1888–1935–Criticism and interpretation. I. Title. PQ9261.P417Z719 2010 869.1′41–dc22 2009049012 1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2 Printed in the United States of America on acidfree paper 37 2 Waiting for Pessoa’s Ancient Mariner A Theater of Immanence Fermando Pessoa’s only play, O Marinheiro / The Mariner (1913),1 is one of the most daring experimental plays of the European avantgarde. The play is constructed on allusive referents, paradoxes, and absences; there is a voyage without movement, a maritime idyll without the sea. The title character never appears, yet is called the only thing real in the play. It is the sole work published under Pessoa’s name in the fi rst number of the celebrated vanguard journal ORPHEU (Lisbon, 1915), and draws on the symbolist theater of Maurice Maeterlinck and his contemporary Villiers de L’IsleAdam to carry the sense of mystery and inner life to unexpected extremes of paradox and depersonalization. Pessoa wrote the play in only a few hours during the night of 11 to 12 October. As in L’IsleAdam’s Axel (Axël, 1890)2 or Maeterlinck’s Ariadne and Bluebeard (Ariane et Barbebleue, 1901),3 and contemporaneous with Béla Bartók’s opera Bluebeard’s Castle, with a libretto by Béla Balázs (A kékszakállú herceg vára, 1911),4 Pessoa sets the scene in a medieval castle, reminiscent of an oral or fairy tale where fatal overtones of the lovedeath theme are transmuted into exis tential drama: 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 coffi n 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 fi rst 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. Um quarto que é sem dúvida num castelo antigo. Do quarto vêse que é circu lar. Ao centro erguese, sobre uma eça, um caixão com uma donzela, de branco. Quatro tochas aos cantos. À direita, quase em frente a quem imagina o quarto, há uma única janela, alta e estreita, dando para onde só se vê, entre dois montes longínquos, um pequeno espaço de mar. 38 ADVERSE GENRES IN FERNANDO PESSOA Do lado da janela velam três donzelas. A primeira está sentada em frente à janela, de costas 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. (ORPHEU, 1915) After the play’s title listed on the cover of ORPHEU, Pessoa placed the explanation “static drama” (drama estático) in parentheses, a mode on which he elaborated in a manuscript fragment thought to be from 1914: I call “static drama” the one in which the plot doesn’t include action, that is, drama in which the characters not only don’t act (for they never change position or talk about changing position) but also don’t even have feelings capable of producing action—where there is no confl ict or refi ned plot. Someone may say that this is not theater. I believe that it is, for I believe that theater tends toward merely lyric drama and that plot in theater is not the action or the progression and consequences of action—but more broadly the revelation of souls through the exchange of words and creation of situations [. . .] Souls can be revealed without action, and situations of inertia can be created, moments of the soul without windows or doors out onto reality. Chamo teatro estático àquele cujo enredo dramático não constitui ação—isto é, onde as fi guras não só não agem, porque nem se deslocam nem dialogam sobre deslocaremse, mas nem sequer têm sentidos capazes de produzir uma ação; onde não há confl ito nem perfeito enredo. Dirseá que isto não é teatro. Creio que o é porque creio que o teatro tende a teatro meramente lírico e que o enredo do teatro é, não a ação nem a progressão e conseqüência da ação – mas, mais abrangente mente, a revelação das almas através das palavras trocadas e a criação de situações [. . .] Pode haver revelação de almas sem ação, e pode haver criação de situações de inércia, momentos de alma sem janelas ou portas para a realidade.5 What Pessoa had not thought to reveal is that the concept of “static theater” is defi ned in an almost identical manner by Maeterlinck in his book of essays Le Trésor des Humbles,6 which Pessoa was undoubtedly invoking. In the essay “The Tragical in Daily Life” (“Le tragique quotidien”) Maeterlinck ponders static theater, whether an immobile character would be possible dramatically, to which he appends the thought that Greek tragedies are already immobile, a sentiment that must have attracted the attention of a young Pessoa: I shall be told, perhaps, that a motionless life would be invisible, that therefore animation must be conferred upon it, and movement, and that such varied movement as would be acceptable is to be found only in the few passions of which use has been made. I do not know whether it be true that a static theatre is impossible. Indeed, to me it seems to exist already. Most of the tragedies of Aeschylus are tragedies without movement.7 On me dira peutêtre qu’une vie immobile ne serait guère visible, qu’il faut bien l’animer de quelques mouvements et que ces mouvements variés et acceptables ne se trouvent que dans le petit nombre de passions employées jusqu’ici. Je ne sais s’il est vrai qu’un théâtre statique soit impossible. Il me semble même qu’il existe. La plupart des tragédies d’Eschyle sont des tragédies immobiles.8 WAITING FOR PESSOA’S ANCIENT MARINER 39 Teresa Rita Lopes confi rms Pessoa’s intention to better Maeterlinck, “Pessoa writes ‘The Mariner,’ by his own declaration, to compete with Maeterlinck—to feel supe rior, which means that he considered him to be great” (Pessoa escreve O Marin heiro, segundo declaração feita, para pedir meças a Maeterlinck—para se sentir maior, o que quer dizer que o considerava grande).9 Pessoa’s debt to Maeterlinck, as well as his intention to surpass the symbolist master, is expressed in “his own” brief comment about the play cast in the third person: “Fernando Pessoais more purely intellectual; his strongpoint is the intellectual analysis of feeling and emo tion, which he carried to a perfection that leaves us almost breathless. About his static drama ‘The Mariner’ a reader once said: ‘It makes the outside world com pletely unreal,’ and it really does. There is nothing more remote in all literature. The greatest nebulosity and subtlety of Maeterlinck are, by comparison, gross and carnal” (Fernando Pessoa é mais puramente intelectual; sua força jaz mais na análise intelectual do sentimento e da emoção, que ele levou a uma perfeição que nos deixa quase sem fôlego. De seu drama estático O Marinheiro, disse uma vez um leitor: Torna o mundo exterior completamente irreal e é mesmo. Não existe coisa mais remota em literatura. A melhor nebulosidade e sutileza de Maeterlinck são, em comparação, grosseiras e carnais).10 In Lopes’s groundbreaking study of Pessoa and symbolist drama, she fi nds a precursor in Maeterlinck’s play Les aveu gles (“The Blind,” 1890) in regard to distancing of space, time, and characters through dreaming, while at the same time reaffi rming the originality of The Mari ner.11 The medieval tower also fi gures prominently in Maeterlinck’s Aglavaine and Sélysette (1909).12 Downplaying the identifi cation of the play with Maeterlinck, Italian author Antonio Tabucchi fi nds the originality of The Mariner in the mechanism by which Pessoa exploited his theater in order to create its adverse. Pessoa maintains a symbol ist fl avor in the play’s language, while his construction and meaning are entirely different, being dominated by the dichotomy fi ction/truth and Pessoa’s unmistakable taste for the esoteric.13 Tabucchi fi nds a prototype not in the symbolist theater of Maeterlinck, but rather sees the play shaped around what Pessoa called his “Shake speare problem.” Tabucchi thinks that Pessoa created a set of plays within the play to refl ect labyrinths of identity, such that The Mariner begins where Prospero leaves off in The Tempest: “We are such stuff / As dreams are made on; and our little life / Is rounded with a sleep.” Denied identity, memory, or time, the three women watchers in The Mariner are allegorical and the stage a dream. The Shakespearean strategy enters with the recitation of a play with a play within a play, which is the story of the mariner who creates a fi ctional country and imaginary biography on the island where he is shipwrecked. Descending into the circularity of the dream, however, the play does not reveal whether the mariner ever will retain a residue of his true origin or whether he will return. Pessoa’s principal theme, the idea that consciousness and memory of past time could be no more than illusions, indeed that the universe can recur endlessly, has points in common with the cosmological implications of what is known as the Boltzmann brain paradox, a controversial theory of order and disorder in matter developed by Austrian physicist Ludwig Boltzmann (1844–1906). Working with 40 ADVERSE GENRES IN FERNANDO PESSOA the behavior of gases, Boltzmann attempts to explain why the arrow of time points forward, when the laws of physics work in both directions. Whereas, according to Boltzmann, organization of matter tends to high entropy, which is successively less ordered and more unpredictable, our observable low entropy world may be explainable as an unlikely fl uctuation. Under certain conditions, the fl ow of matter could be reversed. The Boltzmann paradox states that if our current organization into many distinct selfaware entities results from random variation, it is much less likely than a situation that would create a single entity; thus statistically it is more likely that a single brain would form randomly, fl oating in space with false mem ories of its life, than that there would again form an entity with multiple selfaware brains. This world may be therefore no more than a chimera, a fl uctuation or distortion. Whether or not Pessoa was aware of the Boltzmann paradox, it was a subject of contention in Europe during his formative intellectual years, and Pessoa does refer in the play to a “consciousness fl oating” (consciência bóia) in space, independent of a body or sensations. The Treasure of the Humble The Mariner, written in 1913, contains all the elements of the mature author who, on March 8, 1914, would proclaim the “triumphal day” on which three major hetero nyms appeared to him; Zenith suggests that the three major heteronyms may have been foreshadowed by the three characters in the play. Maeterlinck’s essays in Les Trésors des Humbles are an even more signifi cant source, however, for not only do they provide the parameters for philosophical depersonalization in The Mariner but, like the play, they can also be seen to contain the germ of the mature author’s range of themes. In Maeterlinck’s essays one fi nds the spark of depersonalization between actors and ideas as well as the sense of profound mystery of being that would moti vate Pessoa to write The Mariner and fi ve months later to encounter full heteron omy. In a letter to Luís de Montalvor (1891–1947) dated 1914, Pessoa attests to the enervation of his own ideas and writings because of having lived intensely those of others: “I have lived so many philosophies and so many poetics that I already feel old” (Tenho vivido tantas fi losofi as e tantas poéticas que me sinto já velho).14 From living diverse ideas and poetics, it was a natural step to imagine a personal coterie of authors; what was surprising was to present them as vectors intersecting within his own person, individuals with characteristic ideas and styles who wrote through him. Central concepts of the play correspond directly with Maeterlinck’s thoughts in the essays. “The PreDestined” (“Les avertis”) repeats the theme that we are not truly ourselves, nor are we living something real, in and of itself: Our real life is not the life we live, and we feel that our deepest, nay, our most inti mate thoughts are quite apart from ourselves, for we are other than our thoughts and our dreams. And it is only at special moments—it may be by merest accident—that we live our own life. Will the day ever dawn when we shall be what we are? . . . In the meantime, we felt that they were strangers in our midst. (1925: 71) WAITING FOR PESSOA’S ANCIENT MARINER 41 Nous vivons à côté de notre véritable vie et nous sentons que nos pensées les plus intimes et les plus profondes même ne nous regardent pas, car nous sommes autre chose que nos pensées et que nos rêves. Et ce n’est qu’à certains moments et presque par distraction que nos vivons nousmêmes. Quel jour deviendronsnous ce que nous sommes? En attendant, nous étions devant eux comme devant des étran gers. (1986: 41) The essay “Mystic Morality” continues to explore the deeper laws and transgressive power of unseen forces, which like waves of the sea haunt us with an inexpressible presence: How strangely do we diminish a thing as soon as we try to express it in words! [. . .] perhaps more power has come to the waves of the sea within us? And wherein lies their signifi cance? Are there laws deeper than those by which deeds and thoughts are governed? Whence comes the shadow of a mysterious transgression that at times creeps over our life and makes it so hard to bear? One cannot speak of these things— the solitude is too great. (1925: 77–88) Dès que nous exprimons quelque chose, nos le diminuons étrangement. [. . .] les oscillations de la mer intérieure deviennent plus puissantes? Ou’estce que cela signifi e? Et quelles nouvelles ces choses apportentelles? Il y a donc des lois plus profondes que celles qui président auxactes et aux pensées? Et d’ou pro venait donc l’ombre de ces transgressions mystérieuses qui s’étendait parfois sur notre vie et la rendait soudain si redoutable à vivre? Il n’est pas possible de parler de ces chose, parce qu’on est trop seule. (1986: 45–50) In the essay “Silence” (“Le silence”), Maeterlinck decries the impossibility of any true communication in words, as well as the weight and metaphysical burden it entails: It is idle to think that, by means of words, any real communication can ever pass from one man to another. (1925: 20) Il ne faut pas croire que la parole ne serve jamais aux communications vérita bles entre les êtres. (1986:16) We can bear, when need must be, the silence of ourselves, that of isolation: but the silence of many—silence multiplied—and above all the silence of a crowd— these are supernatural burdens, whose inexplicable weight brings dread to the might iest soul. (1925: 24) Nous supportons à la rigueur le silence isolé, notre propre silence: mais le silen ce de plusieurs, le silence multiplié, et surtout le silence d’une foule est un fardeau surnaturel dont les âmes les plus fortes redoutent le poids inexplicable. (1986:17) Pessoa’s letter to Montalvor theorizes that silence, when it replaces expected speech, produces an esthetic effect. Pessoa defends the pleasure of silence and reserves his own expression for moments when, paradoxically, the pain is too great to feel: There is a great esthetic pleasure at times in leaving unexpressed an emotion whose occurrence demands our words. From our interior gardens we should only pick the most remote roses and at the best hours and describe only those twilight moments when it hurts too much for us to feel them. No poet has the right to write verses because he feels the necessity of doing so. One need only write those verses whose inspiration is perfumed by immortality. 42 ADVERSE GENRES IN FERNANDO PESSOA Há um grande prazer estético às vezes em deixar passar sem exprimir uma emoção cuja passagem nos exige palavras. Dos nossos jardins interiores só deve mos colher as rosas mais afastadas e às melhores horas e fi xar só aquelas ocasiões do crepúsculo quando dói demasiado sentirmonos. Nenhum poeta tem o direito de fazer versos porque sinta a necessidade de os fazer. Há só a fazer aqueles versos cuja inspiração é perfumada de imortalidade. (1982: 271–272) Silence is perceived as an absence, a space that is inhabited by unseen, abstract entities outside the human sphere that control fate, denying to human voice any possible knowledge either of its own destiny or of the ultimate nature of its real character: The other great silences, those of death, grief, or destiny, do not belong to us. They come towards us at their own hour. (1925: 36) Les autres grands silences, ceux de la mort, de la douleur et du destin, ne nous appartiennent pas. Ils s’avancent vers nous, du fond des événements, à l’heure qu’ils ont choisie. (1986: 22) When the three watchers in The Mariner contemplate death and absence, the only possible dramatic actions left to them are silence and waiting for the end. Because of the dramatization of existential doubt, and in spite of its medieval and ritualistic character, spectators commonly see in The Mariner a precursor of Samuel Beckett, since the characters wait without hope for what they do not know or when, anticipat ing by forty years the January 5, 1953 production of En attendant Godot (Waiting for Godot) in the Théâtre de Babylone.15 In addition to providing aesthetic and philosophical material for The Mariner, Maeterlinck’s essays directly address the creation of heteronymic personalities in a way that could have led Pessoa to his “triumphal day.” “The Deeper Life” (“La vie profounde”) provides a blueprint for the fashioning of a different coexistent personality, originating in an external moral ideal, which may inhabit even the most humble person: It is well that men should be reminded that the very humblest of them has the power to “fashion, after a divine model that he chooses not, a great moral personality, com posed of equal parts of himself and the ideal; and if anything lives in fullest reality, of a surety it is that.” (1925: 187) Il est bon de rappeler aux hommes que le plus humble d’entre eux “a le pouvoir de sculpter, d’après un modèle divin qu’il ne choisit pas, une grande personnalité morale, composée en parties égales et de lui et de l’idéal; et que ce qui vit avec une pleine réalité, assurément c’est cela. (1986: 137) Beyond the fact of universal creation of synthetic, divided personalities, Maeterlinck further asserts that one who listens without knowing, interprets without understanding, little suspecting the indifference of the universe and not suspecting that he has at his disposal all the powers of the earth, has a more profound life than an man of action: I have come to believe that an old man seated in his armchair, waiting quietly under the lamplight, listening without knowing it to all the eternal laws which reign about WAITING FOR PESSOA’S ANCIENT MARINER 43 his house, interpreting without understanding it all that there is in the silence of doors and windows, and in the little voice of light, enduring the presence of his soul and of his destiny, bowing his head a little, without suspecting that all the powers of the earth intervene and stand on guard in the room like attentive servants, not know ing that the sun itself suspends above the abyss the little table on which he rests his elbow, and that there is not a star in the sky nor a force in the soul which is indiffer ent to the motion of a falling eyelid or a rising thought—I have come to believe that his motionless old man lived really a more profound, human, and universal life than the lover who strangles his mistress, the captain who gains a victory, or the husband who ‘avenges his honour.’” [. . .] “It is only the words that at fi rst sight seem useless which really count in a work.”16 Il m’est arrivé de croire qu’un vieillard assis dans son fauteuil, attendant sim plement sous la lampe, écoutant sans le savoir toutes les lois éternelles que règnent autour de sa maison, interprétant sans le comprendre ce qu’il y a dans le silence des portes et de fenêtres et dans la petite voix de la lumière, subissant la présence de son âme et de sa destinée, inclinant un peu la tête, sans se douter que toutes les puissan ces de ce monde interviennent et veillent dan la chambre comme des servantes atten tives, ignorant que le soleil luimême soutient audessus de l’abîme la petite table sure laquelle el s’accoude, et qu’il n’y a pas un astre du ciel ni une force de l’âme que soient indifférents au mouvement d’une paupière qui retombe ou d’une pensée que s’élève,—il m’est arrivé de croire que ce vieillard immobile vivait, en réalité, d’une vie profonde, plus humaine et plus générale que l’amant que étrangle sa maî tresse, le capitaine qui remporte une victoire ou “l’époux qui venge son honneur” [. . .] Il n’y a guère que les paroles qui semblent d’abord inutiles qui comptent dans une oeuvre. (1986:104–105; 107) Maeterlinck’s scenario could serve as well for the dialogue in The Mariner as for the discovery of the master heteronym, Alberto Caeiro, the village sage conceived as a subtle master of the art of unknowing. Enigma Variations Sir Edward Elgar’s (1857–1934) much performed “Variations on a theme for orches tra” Op. 36, which premiered in London in 1899, became known as the “Enigma” variations not only because of a question of what they overtly represented, but also and more signifi cantly because of a suspected external occult melody or motive dis guised within them. The enigmatic existence of inner worlds of referencewas like wise a key ingredient of symbolist theater of the fi ndesiècle. If the goal of Maeterlinck’s theater, as gleaned by Arthur Symons (1865–1945),17 is to reveal the “strangeness, pity, and beauty” of the soul, the signifi cance of mystery in life and art, and to give voice to the silence of mysticism, then Pessoa’s objective is to recast Maeterlinck’s theater of interior meditation into its adverse through his own enigma variations. Pessoa’s “variations” on an enigmatic theme of absence and suspended animation, are meant to carry the sense of paradox and contradiction to its most remote by questioning existence. Symons fi nds in Maeterlinck “a drama founded on philosophical ideas, apprehended emotionally”; Pessoa, to the contrary, founds his drama on emotion apprehended philosophically, at times exclusively by the intellect. 44 ADVERSE GENRES IN FERNANDO PESSOA The Axel of his play is the imagined absent mariner, whose return is expected and awaited by the three women watchers in the early morning hours. His purpose is ontological argument rather than dramatic feeling. The play maintains the childlike simplicity and imagination of women astonished by their own unawareness, yet who face the horror revealed verbally by their uncertainties about reality. The dead damsel in the coffi n represents the question of the meaning of life and the “terrifying eternity of the things about us,” which Symons places at the heart of mysticism.18 The choice of women for the role of communication with the beyond is again supported by Maeterlinck, who attributes to them a special affi nity with the occult, the capacity to experience at a deeper level than a man, and considers that they have a special rela tionship with the infi nite: “For women are indeed the veiled sisters of all the great things we do not see. They are indeed nearest of kin to the infi nite that is about us” (1925:108) / Elles sont vraiment les soeurs voilées de toutes les grandes chose qu’on ne voit pas. Elles sont vraiment les plus proches parentes de l’infi ni que nous entoure (1986: 59). The three watchers confront silence, emptiness, and nothingness; while waiting for the mariner who never appears, they raise doubts about who they are and even whether they actually exist. The crux of their ontological crisis lies in the reali zation that intellectual consciousness comes about only after the formative experi ences and ideals on which it can refl ect are but past, lyrical reminiscences, should they have any basis in reality at all; in the paradox, Ricardo Sternberg perceives a source of Pessoa’s heteronymic world,19 yet there is a much darker strain that would dissolve any positive identity, founded on the present moment, into a revolving and irresolvable paradox of time and memory. When the second watcher offers to tell her dream, the fi rst affi rms the pleasure and supremacy of potentiality over memory: “If it’s beautiful, I’m already sorry I’ll have heard it” (Se é belo, tenho já pena de vir a atêlo outvido). While Lopes muses that The Mariner is perhaps the play that the French sym bolists imagined but were never able to write themselves (esse drama estático que os simbolistas franceses imaginaram sem conseguirem, contudo, realizar),20 Pes soa’s idea is much more radical; he borrows Maeterlinck’s theory of static theater as a foundation on which to create a different theater of immanence. Pessoa’s three damsels imagine an existence beyond the empty, circular castle and confront the horror of knowing the truth about how distant their consciousness lies from reality, should it even exist at all. Present time is likewise denied its validity, since any words spoken are already in the past: “My present words, as soon as I have spoken them, will belong immediately to the past, they’ll be somewhere outside of me, rigid and fatal” (As minhas palavras presentes, mal eu as diga, pertencerão logo ao pas sado, fi carão fora de mim, não sei onde, rígidas e fatais). The women seem to know their fates are sealed: “It’s always too late to sing, just as it’s always too late not to sing” (É sempre tarde demais para cantar, assim como é sempre tarde demais para não cantar). Their doubts yield to desperation and fi nally resignation, in what Lopes describes as a “theater of ecstasy.”21 With The Mariner, Pessoa pushes static theater as tragic drama over an abyss; using techniques of myth and ritual with a medieval aura so particular to Portugal’s own historical formation, his play disarticulates the interior voice of the self from its own consciousness, questions the meaning of enunciations or dialogue, and dissolves any certainty about either the characters’ WAITING FOR PESSOA’S ANCIENT MARINER 45 existence or external reality. In his own terms, Pessoa closes all windows and doors on reality. The drama is made of existential doubt rather than psychological or emo tional; it is, in Eduardo Lourenço’s phrase, a negative ontological adventure. Virtual states of being both substitute and produce the perceived real, as the three characters oscillate from mental states of fatal ennui to dreamlike states of tantalizing mystery, while watching over the dead maiden and awaiting the absent mariner. A Wake or a Sleep? Latency, Immanence, Presentiment The discourse of the three women is located in an ephemeral space between waking and sleeping, where “what sleepiness, what sleep clouds my way of looking at things” (Que sono, que sono que absorve o meu modo de olhar para as coisas) is equated with time past, from which the speakers are afraid to awake. Like amnesiacs, they struggle to remember the past, yet tremble at the actual possibility that they might remember what it was: “But it was something huge and frightening like the existence of God” (Mas foi qualquer coisa de grande e pavoroso como o haver Deus). If they lose their memory of the past, they are no longer themselves, and their past becomes someone else’s, and is as if it never existed for them: “And then, my whole past becomes another, and I cry for the dead life that I carry with me and that I never lived” (E depois todo o meu passado tornase outro e eu choro uma vida morta que trago comigo e que não vivi nunca). Even the women who remember are left to won der whether their memories are their own or have come from some other life: “Who knows [. . .] whether I was the one who lived what I remember?” (Quem sabe [. . .] se fui eu que vivi o que recordo?). These presentiments are conveyed in torturing expressionism. They hear themselves screaming on the inside, they feel a burning need to be afraid, they no longer recognize their own voices, it is as if they were watching themselves helplessly from the outside: “My consciousness fl oats on the surface of the terrifi ed somnolence of my sensations through my skin” (A minha consciência bóia à tona da sonolência apavorada dos meus sentidos pela minha pele). They sense the presence of a horror that is separating them from their souls and thoughts: “Who is the fi fth person in this room who holds up an arm and stops us every time we’re about to feel?” (Quem é a quinta pessoa neste quarto que estende o braço e nos interrompe sempre que vamos a sentir?). Meaning splinters and strat ifi es, as if the speaker, word, and sound had separate individual identities: “And it seemed to me that you, and your voice, and the meaning of what you were saying were three different beings, like three creatures who walk and talk” (E pareciame que vós, e a vossa voz, e o sentido do que dizieis eram três entes diferentes, como três criaturas que falam e andam). The entrapment they sense before the impossibility of knowing or feelingbecomes the black web of a gigantic spider: “an enormous spider that weaves, from one soul to another, a black web to capture us” (uma aranha enorme que nos tece de alma a alma uma teia negra que nos prende?). The women are aware that they are the prey of a latent reality or being much vaster and more powerful than themselves, a ghastly and unnerving presence in the presentiments of their imaginations, and they tremble with the thought. 46 ADVERSE GENRES IN FERNANDO PESSOA In their clairvoyant stupefaction, the three women watchers in The Mariner fulfi ll multiple interpretive roles through the paradox; they wait in what seems to be suspended time for an imagined or expected bearer of truth, the mariner, to arrive. The women are abstract and interchangeable, having no names or individual identities, only numbers; they observe a wake for the dead maiden throughout the night, and their conversation opens another dimension of fervent desire: the intensely expected arrival of meaning and the possibility of being, latent states that the dead maiden invokes from the beyond. Refl ecting late medieval and renais sance society, the castle and the convent are as confi ning as death itself; here, in circular ruins, in the presence of a dead maiden like themselves, and observing a religious solemnity through the torches, the women wait for release through the return of a betrothed, the mariner, from his epic voyage. While they fulfi ll a histor ical fatality of Portuguese society from the fi fteenth to the seventeenth centuries, in which wives waited for the return of sons and husbands sailing in the seaborne empire, they recall medieval damsels waiting for a prince in their ivory tower, whose circular structure annuls time and suggests eternal repetition of stories within stories, dreamlike realities, and suspended time. The stilled atmosphere in the tower, in the context of the oral tale, is reminiscent of the eerie lull in the winds that stopped Vasco da Gama’s fl eet in the Indian Ocean when, to pass the time, Paulo da Gama told the tale of the twelve knights who went to England to defend the honor of English ladies.22 Three Watchers and a Dead Maiden Center stage is occupied by a young woman in a coffi n dressed in white, while three young women, who are described as “donzelas” in the original, as if medieval maidens in a tower, lack personal names or identifi able surroundings in their circular castle chamber. They are identifi ed only by ordinal numbers. They cannot hear a clock strike the hour (“There is no clock near here” /Não há relógio aqui perto), neither can they see outside (“No, the horizon is black” / Não, o horizonte é negro). In this inbetween and ambiguous space and time, the women decide to tell stories, “beautiful and false” (belo e falso), of what they once were; the stories are consecu tive monologues, constituting a false or incomplete dialogue among the women and superimposing a virtual reality onto the setting. Their aphoristic observations and questions are frequently cast in the subjunctive tenses or the past perfect, which makes them more literary, while dislocating and removing time from the scene. Silence is valued more than telling: “The hours have gone by and we have remained silent” (As horas têm caído e nós temos guardado silêncio). The ephemeral and mysterious nature of time, memory, and language pervades the atmosphere and dis course, so as to destabilize a moment that already symbolizes suspension of identity and meaning. The “static theater,” which does not permit any physical movement on stage, thus propitiating a steady, continuous, and seamless setting, exists in a dra matic tension with the women’s speech, which questions meaning and evokes active, although imagined, maritime voyages and adventures. It is a play of philosophical speculation in which the foundations of cognition and rationality are abolished. WAITING FOR PESSOA’S ANCIENT MARINER 47 Refl ecting a historical past, the iconic and defi ning fi gure of Portuguese nationality and religious faith is the mariner who sailed away, whether in the Crusades or in the voyages of Prince Henry to the seaborne empire.23 Even beyond its defi ant status as “static theater,” the play foregrounds prob lems of genre. The symbolist language and ambience is undercut by the existential doubt and horror of the three damsels. The interior romance of the shipwreck story contrasts incongruously with the static, circular tower; and the temporal wait for the return of the mariner gains messianic or mythological import. The drama is not found in the language alone, but in the question of being. The damsels tell their stories between being and nothingness. The women question whether the past, as remembered, ever actually existed (“a past we might not have ever had” / um passado que não tivéssemos tido) and whether words have any real meaning beyond their sound (“You’re saying nothing but words” / Não dizeis senão pala vras). If the present is only suffering and separation from meaning, their response is not only ascetic but primarily aesthetic: to enter the illusion of a ubiquitous dream, eternal and beautiful: “Only dreams share eternity and beauty” (“De eter no e belo há apenas o sonho”). Stasis is better than action (“No, sister, nothing is worth doing” / Não, minha irmã, nada vale a pena), for the material world hides a “stony secret” it refuses to tell. Expanding on Pedro Calderón de la Barca’s (1600–1681) baroque conceit in his 1635 play, “life is dreaming, and even dreams are dreams” (La vida es sueño y los sueños sueños son),24 Pessoa’s sisters create their own conceit to deceive death: if they forget life by living in dreams, then perhaps death will forget them: “wouldn’t it be better just to shut ourselves up in our dream and forget life, so that death would forget us?” (Não valeria então ape nas fecharmonos no sonho e esquecer a vida, para que a morte nos esquecesse?). Within the rhetorical conceit, dreams could have the power to forestall death: “Why do people die? [. . .] Perhaps because they don’t dream enough” (Por que é que se morre? Talvez por não se sonhar bastante). Rhetorical conceits are sugges tive but insuffi cient to arrive at the levels of negation and circularity, which are the play’s thematic depths. For the three watchers, the sea is a liminal territory with the potential of con necting them with other times and worlds, and above all with the ideals of beauty and contentment that they seek: “I was looking at the sea and forgetting to live [. . .] Only the sea of other lands is beautiful” (olhava para o mar e esqueciame de viver [. . .] Só o mar de outras terras é que é belo). The “sisters,” as they call themselves, seem to remember an archetypal idyllic youth, happily picking fl owers in innocence, whereas now they see only a cycle of meaningless repetition: “It always dawns in the same way, always, always, always” (Ele vem sempre da mesma maneira, sem pre, sempre, sempre). The dreammemory of a halcyon childhood on the other side of the hills, living in a primitive communion with Nature, becomes the fi rst myth created as an interior narrative episode. The reference to tamarind trees (tamarindus indica) suggests a tropical setting, since it is a monotype that spread from tropical Africa to India and the East Indies; the Jesuit order was known for its gardens of tropical fruit trees in Portuguese India. Pessoa could have absorbed the idealization of a colonial isle from Daniel Defoe (Robinson Crusoe, 1719), Bernardin de Saint Pierre’s romance, Paul et Virginie(1787), or from the travel adventures of Robert 48 ADVERSE GENRES IN FERNANDO PESSOA Louis Stevenson, (Treasure Island, 1883), or Rudyard Kipling’s stories of India (The Jungle Books, 1894):25 On the other side (of the hills), where my mother lives, we used to sit in the shade of tamarind trees and talk about going to see other lands [. . .] There everything was distant and happy like the song of two birds, one on either side of the path [. . .] The forest had no clearings except those in our thoughts. And we dreamed that the trees would cast on the ground some other calm besides their shadows [. . .] I lived among rocks and looked out at the sea [. . .] The hem of my skirt was fresh and salty beating against my bare legs [. . .] I was young and wild. Do lado de lá, onde mora minha mãe, costumávamos sentarmonos à sombra dos tamarindos e falar de ir ver outras terras [. . .] Tudo ali era longo e feliz como o canto de duas aves, uma de cada lado do caminho [. . .] A fl oresta não tinha outras clareiras senão os nossos pensamentos [. . .] E os nossos sonhos eram de que as árvores projetassem no chão outra calma que não as suas sombras [. . .] Eu vivi entre rochedos e espreitava o mar [. . .] A orla da minha saia era fresca e salgada batendo nas minhas pernas nuas [. . .] Eu era pequena e bárbara. In their discourse, the “sisters” represent the theological debate of the convent and medieval Catholicism, whereas their questioning undermines any basis of belief. Nonetheless, their souls are at risk, and they fear the immaterial: “Our hands are not true or real. They’re mysteries that inhabit our lives [. . .] Sometimes, when I stare at my hands, I fear God” (As mãos não são verdadeiras nem reais [. . .] São mistérios que habitam na nossa vida [. . .] Às vezes, quando fi to as minhas mãos, tenho medo de Deus). Their love of the dream lies at the opposite spectrum of their fear of the forbidden, the prohibitions of God: “I’m deathly afraid that God might have forbid den my dream. It is undoubtedly more real that God allows” (Tenho um medo disfor me de que Deus tivesse proibido o meu sonho [. . .] Ele é sem dúvida mais real do que Deus permite). The women treat all sensory perceptions as symbolic systems that have, if any at all, only tenuous connections with an exterior reality, as if there were a truer perception that needed no representation: “I stare at you both and don’t see you right away [. . .] I have to wear out the idea that I can see you to be able fi nally to see you” (Fitovos a ambas e não vos vejo logo [. . .] Tenho que cansar a idéia de que vos posso ver para poder chegar a vervos). Pessoa takes advantage of the women’s eerie questioning of their tenuous exis tence to posit a series of theses in the form of questions that recapitulate philosoph ical argumentation on the subject of ontology and being, beginning with the Greeks. The fi rst thesisquestion, “But do we know, my sisters, why anything happens?” (Mas sabemos nós, minhas irmãs, por que se dá qualquer cousa?), returns to the debate between Leucippus, Democritus, and Sextus on the questions of whether anything has to happen, whether nothing happens without a reason, and whether everything that happens has to happen. Pessoa follows the skeptical claim that, rather than misrepresenting reality, the senses can know nothing whatever about it; reality is totally inaccessible. The second thesisquestion concerns the nature of being: “What is anything? How does it happen? What is the way it moves inside like?” (O que é qualquer cousa? Como é que ela passa? Como é por dentro o modo como ela passa?). Departing from Parminides’s questioning of what being is, the play hinges WAITING FOR PESSOA’S ANCIENT MARINER 49 on the distinction between being, in the abstract, and actual existence. Being can be conceived by the imagination alone, as in the tale of the mariner, whereas actual existence, embodied in the women who are speaking, cannot exist on its own with out being, in the abstract, which is but cannot be defi ned. Following Hegel, Pessoa implies that being without all of its predicates is reduced to nothing: “What if everything were, in a way, absolutely nothing?” (Se tudo fosse, de qualquer modo, absolutamente coisa nenhuma?). The Third Watcher remembers a stream from childhood and questions its purpose: “Not far from my mother’s house there fl owed a stream. Why should it fl ow, and why shouldn’t it fl ow father away, or closer?” (Ao pé da casa de minha mãe corria um riacho [. . .] Por que é que correria, e por que é que não correria mais longe, ou mais perto?). This question synthesizes the poetic philosophy of Alberto Caeiro, Pessoa’s master heteronym, who observes the village stream whose fl ow is either always different or always the same, tran scendent when it fl ows into the ocean and only itself when in the village. Both deny instrumentality and conceive a Nature whose purpose is nothing other than itself. In poem XX of The Keeper of Sheep (O Guardador de Rebanhos) Caeiro will write: No one’s ever wondered what lies beyond The river of my village The river of my village makes no one think of anything Anyone standing alongside it is just standing alongside it.26 Ninguém nunca pensou no que há para além Do rio da minha aldeia. O rio da minha aldeia não faz pensar em nada. Quem está ao pé dele está só ao pé dele. With the fourth thesisquestion, the debate between a planned and purposeful or chaotic and random universe leads the discussion from philosophical into theological dimensions: “Is there any reason for anything to be what it is? Is there any real and true reason, like my hands?” (Há alguma razão para qualquer coisa ser o que é? Há para isso qualquer razão verdadeira e real como as minhas mãos?). The question undercuts rational materialism, which supposes the sister’s hands to be true and real, by denying any design or reason for them to be so; thus, even if everything is what it is, there is no intentionality or inevitability for it to be so. The apparent truth of matter conceals, therefore, purposelessness and incoherence. Pessoa plays with the paradox of beinginitself by rejecting our perception of change, fi rst expressed as a simple observation about the temperature, yet leading to the axiom that things cannot be any more or less than that are: “It has turned colder, but why is it colder? There’s no reason for it to be colder. It’s not really much colder than it is” (Está mais frio, mas por que é que está mais frio? Não há razão para estar mais frio. Não é bem mais frio do que está). Change is only apparent; things are inevitable and fatally only what they are. The fi fth question, “Why doesn’t someone knock at the door? It would be impossible” (Por que não bate alguém à porta? Seria impossível), is a predecessor of existential nothingness. That someone is a “Godot” who would confi rm the sisters’ doubts and anguish about the existence of God. 50 ADVERSE GENRES IN FERNANDO PESSOA Pessoa’s Absent Mariner The existence of the absent mariner is implied by the stretch of sea between two distant hills that is visible from the castle’s long, narrow window. The archetypal fi gure of the mariner, whether imagined or real, sustains, deepens, and underlies every facet of the play’s meaning and interpretation. In a purely existentialist vision, the mariner is a Godot, while theologically the mariner may stand for any awaited authority, truth, or messiah. For the expectant watchers, the glimpse of ocean marks the immanence of a greater unknown: the knowledge and power to unite the past and the present, to resolve the Camonian “disconcert of the world”: distance versusprox imity, dream versus reality, movement versus stasis, reunion versus solitude, identity versus alienation, plenitude versus loss, existence (history) versus potentiality.27 The tension implied by this constant dialectic breaks with the theory of stasis and creates dramatic confl ict, even if only conveyed through dialogue. Although abstract and messianic, the fi gure of the mariner carries historical and cultural meanings equally. The fi gure resonates with Portugal’s ageold connection with the sea, from the Cru sades to the voyages begun under Prince Henry (1394–1460) that would round Afri ca and carry the Portuguese to Japan by 1543. The fate of all who sailed on the ships of empire was at risk, and accounts of shipwrecks that claimed one third of all who traveled were collected by Bernardo Gomes de Brito (1688–1760) in The Tragic History of the Sea (História TrágicoMarítima, 1735–1736).28 Women who wait anx iously for a mariner’s return are commonly found in Portuguese theater, as in Gil Vicente’s Auto da Índia (1509).29 The mariner refl ects not only the heroes of the Portuguese voyages, for example the Vasco da Gama of Camões’s Lusiads, but also confi rms the theme of the voyages as a necessary experiential quest for meaning, a confi rmation of the existence of the Portuguese. A principal quest in the voyages was the phantom Nestorian Christian known as Prester John, believed to be in Ethiopia; in distinguishing between human and divine essences and postulating the existence of two persons, Nestorianism supports Pessoa’s idea of heteronomy and the exis tence in the play of two distinct mariners, real and imagined. The mariner’s quest further refl ects a biblical theme repeated by Camões in “Babel e Sião,” his poem on a mariner’s exile (Babylon) from the imagined paradise or home (Zion).30 The poem’s narrator questions whether he can have any memory of an ideal place, the dreamed Zion, which he has never known but intensely imagines: Mas, ó tu, terra de glória, O glorious Land of Light, se eu nunca vi tua essência, If I saw not your essence plain, como me lembras na ausência? How remember the absent again?31 Pessoa’s play effectively postulates a quantum gap between memory of timeless spir itual experience and affective consciousness, in its realm of existential and aesthetic emotion. Complementing the fi gure of the mariner who united Portugal with the distant unknown is a parallel catalyst in the play, the young woman in the coffi n, whose body represents occult truths; she likewise unites incomprehensible, opposing spheres of life and death, presence and absence, being and nothingness. Both cross thresholds of WAITING FOR PESSOA’S ANCIENT MARINER 51 time and space, being and nonbeing. The mariner, imagined to have existed and whose providential return is awaited, is key to an epistemological restoration and mes sianic epiphany awaited by Western theology and philosophy: the return and recovery of divine authority, identity, truth, and salvation, now lost in ineffable, lyrical memory. The mariner, ostensibly comparable to the classical gods of the sea, holds power over life and death because he bestows and confi rms meaning, knowledge, and purpose; his return will release the watchers from doubt and disbelief. For the women, he becomes their creator, and they begin to suspect that they exist only as fi gments of his primal imagination: “Why can’t the mariner be the only thing that’s real in all of this, and we and everything else here just one of his dreams?” (Por que não será a única coisa real nisto tudo o marinheiro, e nós e tudo isto aqui apenas um sonho dele?). The trope of the waiting female gives the scenario mythical import, as a recapit ulation of Penelope and Ulysses, where the hero’s return restores continuity and qui escence in place of epic dislocation. Like Ulysses, the mariner is also the wandering husband and adventurer, whom the women await to fulfi ll an existential, a biological, and a social role, sustaining the ideals of union, fecundity, and regeneration. Tying Portugal to the construct of Western classicism and medieval Christianity, the mari ner is husband and lord, awaited savior, a quasimythical entity emanating from the sea, whose purpose is teleological, national, and existential. Foreshadowing Pessoa’s Mensagem (Message, 1934), a chronological poetic sequence on the heroes of Portu guese nationality and the epic of maritime expansion, the mariner may be interpreted as a precursor of the poetArgonaut, Vasco da Gama, whom Pessoa describes ascend ing into heaven in an apotheosis of Portuguese voyages under divine guidance. Viewed historically, the mariner is identifi ed with Sebastianism, a messianic current created after D. Sebastião (1554–1578), Portugal’s king, who disappeared in the bat tle with the Moors at ElKsar elKebir in Morocco in 1578, leaving no heirs. Portu guese captives were spread among the Arab kingdoms of the Middle East, and their return was spread sporadically over subsequent decades. Sebastião’s body was never located, and he was presumed to be alive as a captive. His lost body came to signify the loss of Portuguese independence to Spain in 1580 and gave rise to one of the most enduring myths in Portuguese cultural and political history, a millennial expectation of the country’s transformative restoration by a miraculous return of the absent mon arch. The mariner’s voyage is nothing less than a full archetype of Portuguese being, personifying national experience since the twelfth century in mythical and historio graphical constructions: his role is consonant with that of a knight of the militant Christian Order of Christ,32 explorer of unknown worlds, and god of the sea. By the spring of 1915, Pessoa had written one of his most complex and certainly his longest poem, the “Ode Marítima” attributed to the Scottish naval engineer, Álvaro de Campos, and published in the second number of ORPHEU (AprilMayJune 1915). The Mariner introduces the oceanic theme of the incipient “Maritime Ode” and shares literary characteristics with the voluble and voluminous ode that it antici pates. In Campos’s long, rambling ode, the poet imagines that an Argonaut departs on a voyage from a point of stasis at a Lisbon pier; gyrations of the ship’s wheel carry the Argonaut to heights of ecstasy on distant seas in an orgiastic pirate voyage with no ethical limits. The self disappears to merge with the lives and passions of sailors 52 ADVERSE GENRES IN FERNANDO PESSOA who pass beyond any limits of morality or society. Finally, from their adventures the voyagers return in exhaustion to the pier and to quiescence. As a precursor, the play is a maritime ode without the sea, glimpsed from the narrow window of a castle chamber, whereas in the later ode the vast sea is imagined from a pier; in both works, the sea is viewed from a distance. Both works present the sea from a static point of view, as a manifestation of the imagination or poetic dream of a narrator; the immo bile women in the play fear the collapse of time and memory, whereas the narrator of the ode is horrifi ed by imagined, fantastical scenes of euphoric primitivism, beyond good and evil. In both works, past connections with the sea are projected spatially as problems of identity, historical and individual consciousness, and existential authen ticity: But my soul goes with what I see the least [. . .] With the maritime sense of this Hour, With the sorrowful sweetness that rises up in me like seasickness. Mas a minh’alma está com o que vejo menos [. . .] Com o sentido marítimo desta Hora, Com a doçura dolorosa que sobe em mim como uma náusea. The ode recasts many of the existential concerns of the play:the pier is a “stony melancholy” (saudade de pedra) and the space opened between the departing ship and the pier is one of anguish that revives presentiments of a forgotten past and met aphoric present. The rational construction project in stone of the Great Pier of fre netic modernity (Entidades em PedraAlmas) is the point of departure for a voyage into the solitude and incomprehensibility of an “impossible universe” (Deste impos sível universo), the inchoate origin of anxiety and absurdity. Both the mariner in the play and the sailor in the ode are identifi ed with the Portuguese seaborne empire and sixteenthcentury voyages in Asia, as well as with archetypes of travel and adventure literature. The sailors chant and shout: Fifteen men on the Dead Man’s Chest. Yohoho and a bottle of rum! The mariner fi lls the role of herosailor, sharing a fantasy theme invoking Portugal’s historical seaborne empire, within the haze of an awaited historical and theological apotheosis. In his travels, Fernão Mendes Pinto recreates cruel and fantastic sce narios in Southeast Asian seas that lend both works historical verisimilitude, and both envision the possible messianic return of a lost national past. Just as the mariner is distant from the women in the castle, the sailor in the ode is equally absent, a mysterious memory of perhaps another previous self: “like some one else’s memory / That might be mysteriously mine” (como uma recordação duma outra pessoa/Que fosse misteriosamente minha). The ode recapitulates and augments the second watcher’s dream, in that the narrator, who feels a strange identity with the phantom sailor, also imagines having sailed at some previous time in another self (antes de mim) and from a different kind of port (outra espécie de porto), outside space and time (Espaço e Tempo). Both works exploit the essential mystery of reality WAITING FOR PESSOA’S ANCIENT MARINER 53 and the anguished wait for the revelation of a divine ecstasy (divino êxtase revela dor). In both works, narrators fear their atavistic and primal dreams. The voyage is both an ultimate adventure, yet no more than a dream. The mariner is trapped in a neverending voyage of virtual realities, while archetypal voyages carry the ode into occult, primitive dimensions of behavior and mentality. The former presents existen tially what the latter dramatizes as a battle between Eros and Thanatos. The Homeland that Never Was The inner story on which the play is focused is the myth of the shipwrecked mariner told by the Second Watcher. The story is introduced with a prelude, in which there are presentiments of amnesia and the sighting of a distant, metonymic sail, which can never be bound for any port. One day when I realized I was leaning back on top of a cold cliff, and that I had forgotten I ever had a mother and father, or ever had a childhood or lived other days—on that day I saw distantly, as something that I might have only thought about seeing, the slow passing of a sail in the distance [. . .] Then it vanished [. . .] When I came to, I saw that I had now made my own dream. Um dia que eu dei por mim recostada no cimo frio de um rochedo, e que eu tinha esquecido que tinha pai e mãe e que houvera em mim infância e outros dias – nesse dia vi ao longe, como uma coisa que eu só pensasse em ver, a passagem vaga de uma vela [. . .] Depois ela cessou..Quando reparei para mim, vi que já tinha esse meu sonho. Cast onto an isle without any hope of rescue or return to his country, the mariner avoids the suffering brought on by memory by slowly constructing a new life, as if it were a neverending dream. Over the years, he constructs a new homeland. Pessoa here inverts expectations of the adventure and survival story into a continuum, by making the mariner’s virtual life take the place of his lost, previous existence, sup planting and replacing it in his memory and consciousness until he is unsure whether the original ever existed at all; he even imagines a happy, nonexistent youth. He loses all memory of a previous life, whereas in the one he was dreaming everything became real; it was yet a new past for another substitute life. It is possible that Prospero and the shipwreck in The Tempest is a source, as Tabucchi thinks, given Prospero’s twelveyear isolation and reference to life as a dream; yet the mariner’s reconstruc tion of a full life in the manner of his true country and previous existence suggests that Pessoa is inverting the Robinson Crusoe story, such that adaptation and survival skills, the ability to reconstitute identity, lead to a very strange form of survival: loss of self and national or cultural origin, from which there is no return, but instead eter nal change and voyage, “the vague passing of a sail” (a passagem vaga de uma vela). The three watchers, unsure of their own existence, create and repeat the myth, ideal izing the mariner’s dream that they have conjured. If possible, they would encapsu late themselves into the mariner’s dream and inhabit “his” imagined real and brave new world. 54 ADVERSE GENRES IN FERNANDO PESSOA The fate of the mariner is left inconclusive, although it is certain that he will never return to his original country or regain his lost past. The Second Watcher remembers only a fragment of the end: “One day a boat arrived, and passed by that island, and the mariner wasn’t there” (Veio um dia um barco, e passou por essa ilha, e não estava lá o marinheiro). Not only does no one have an answer to what hap pened to him; the Second Watcher has also become absorbed in the dream and is unsure whether it is still going on. A Theater of Immanence The question of what became of the mariner is left unanswered: “And then what became of the mariner? Does anyone know?” (E o que teriam feito do marinheiro? Sabêloiam alguém?) or unanswerable, and at this point Pessoa’s “ontological adventure” takes a sharp turn toward all the horror (o nosso horror) felt and sensed by the women. The challenge to the foundations of identity and cognition have now become so heavy that the watcher becomes afraid of transgressing a divine prohi bition and inciting unknown horrors: “I already weigh too much in my lap of selfawareness [. . .] I’m deathly afraid that God might have forbidden my dream [. . .] It is undoubtedly more real than He allows [. . .] Who knows where it might lead?” (Peso excessivamente ao colo de me sentir [. . .] Tenho um medo disforme de que Deus tivesse proibido o meu sonho [. . .] Ele é sem dúvida mais real do que Deus permite. Quem sabe o que está no fi m dela?). The sense of immanent pres ence that has inhibited words and thought throughout the play is condensed into the sense of a fi fth person present in the room, the forbidding God whose existence had been felt with dread and strangeness: “How strange I feel! [. . .] I no longer know in what part of my soul things are felt [. . .] They threw a leaden shroud over my awareness of my body” (Que estranha que me sinto! [. . .] Já não sei em que parte da alma é que se sente [. . .] Puseram ao meu sentimento do corpo uma mortalha de chumbo). The women’s dream, described only in the negative, is to restore unity and to fi nd authenticity by once again uniting voice with soul, sensations with thoughts, and in silence to receive the new day and participate in the “unconscious ness of life” (a inconsciência da vida). The God that forces them to “talk and feel and think” (nos faz falar e sentir e pensar) separates them from themselves with a deep sleepiness separating signifi er from signifi ed, the feeler from what is felt, and dulls their perceptions, making life appear strange: “It’s so strange to be alive [. ..] Everything that happens is unbelievable, as much on the mariner’s island as in this world” (É tão estranho estar a viver [. . .] Tudo o que acontece é inacreditável, tanto na ilha do marinheiro como neste mundo). Are dreams forever and beautiful, as the women wish? One of the dimensions of the horror that the second watcher expresses is the sudden realization that the mariner’s dream in all its artifi ciality and loss, might, in fact, be real: “There’s something, although I don’t know what it is, that I haven’t told you [. . .] something that would explain all this [. . .] My soul makes me shiver [. . .] I’m hardly aware if I’ve been speaking [. . .] Talk to me, shout at me, so that I’ll wake up, so that I’ll know that I’m here with you and that there are things that are just dreams” (Há WAITING FOR PESSOA’S ANCIENT MARINER 55 qualquer coisa, que não sei o que é, que vos não disse [. . .] qualquer coisa que explicaria isto tudo [. . .] A minha alma esfriame [. . .] Mal sei se tenho estado a falar [. . .] Falaime, gritaime, para que eu acorde, para que eu saiba que estou aqui ante vós e que há coisas que são apenas sonhos). If “dreams are dreams,” and “life is rounded with a sleep,” following the mannerist conceits, may there be no reality at all to be found on any level in the constructs of identity, memory, and con sciousness? Perhaps, like the mariner’s story, reality is only false and circular, and destined to be repeated without meaning or our being aware of it? The only thing worse than unavoidable fate is for there to be no fate at all, no story, no necessary continuity or connection in anything: “Can it be absolutely necessary, even within your dream, that that mariner and that island existed? —No, my sister. Nothing is absolutely necessary” (Será absolutamente necessário, mesmo dentro do vosso sonho, que tenha havido esse marinheiro e essa ilha?—Não, minha irmã; nada é absolutamente necessário). With the approaching end of the play, Pessoa carries his argument to a more intense level of existential doubt and anguish. The Third Watcher assumes that dawn will come, people will wake up, and the suspended phantasmagorical time of the early morning will come to an end. The watchers must wait, however, for someone actually to wake up and appear. Day has already come, and the natural assumption is that a sense of place and reality will be restored with the return of the diurnal rhythm, the world as the women remember it. With the awakening, what the women have undergone will be placed in perspective as the horror of a long sleep. Yet the awaited change, “Everything’s going to end [. . .] And what’s left from all this” (Vai acabar tudo [. . .] E de tudo isto fi ca), does not occur, although it is imminently expected and implied: “Yes, someone has awakened [. . .] People are waking up” (Sim, acordou alguém [. . .] Há gente que acorda). The women wait for someone to appear, just as they waited during the early morn ing for the return of the mariner. The Third Watcher assumes that the other two are happy, because they believe in the dream, but she has not been following the im plications of the stories. The Second Watcher delivers a fi nal negative twist to the philosophical exposition by stating her disbelief in the dream: “Why do you ask me about it? Because I told it? No, I don’t believe” (Por que é que mo perguntais? Por que eu o disse? Não, não acredito). The dream within a dream within a dream, like the play within a play, has become a condemnation to anonymity, dread, and unreality. Will the expected worldly reality return, to bring an end to the cycle of dreams and resolve the suspension of meaning, allowing the play to conclude? Here, Pessoa only increases the level of metaphysical doubt. The question of whether any real, outside person wakes up is left suspended without an answer, as was the question of the fate of the mariner: “The day never dawns for those who rest their heads in the laps of dreamed hours” (O dia nunca raia para quem encos ta a cabeça no seio das horas sonhadas). In the sudden daylight, the watchers remain silent, looking at each other in their dread. No one appears or speaks. A rooster crows, an augury of denial, while outside, an “indefi nite wagon creaks and groans” (um vago carro geme e chia). Is it a wagon with a driver, headed for a certain port; or is it a wagon, like the mariner’s sail, a Flying Dutchman that could not be bound for any port? 56 ADVERSE GENRES IN FERNANDO PESSOA While elements of Pessoa’s play can be found throughout fi ndesiècle theater, a predecessor for the suspended ending of The Mariner can be found in the clos ing scenes (Part IV, I, scene 5, II) of L’Isle Adam’s Axël. Sara and Axel have passed a night of passion in the cavern of a castle, and Sara imagines a sea voy age covering the most exotic destinations over the earth, from India and Ceylon to Spain and Hungary, Italy and the Nile, following celestial signs toward an oriental dream; her imagination even admits a simple existence in a hut in some Florida, listening to hummingbirds. Sara considers that youthful passion has made them allpowerful, and thus all dreams are equally acceptable and benefi cent: “What difference does it make whether we prefer one dream or another?” (que nous importe de préférer tel rêve entre les rêves?). In Sara’s soliloquy in Scene IV, she covered the world’s potential exotic destinations for a lover’s peregrination: SARA The sea, O my beloved, I want the limitless sea! [. . .] —O voluptuousness of living! Past: [. . .] Old world, you cannot last. SARA La mer, ô mon bienaimé, je veux la mer sublime! O volupté de viver! LE CHOEUR Tu meurs, ancien monde. Rays of dawn reaching the cellar of the castle of Axël d’Auersperg represent a return to the world of existence, where villagers awake: SARA [shouting] Day! dawn! [. . .] Look! It is the future rising! CHORUS: [. . .] If an awakening there be! SARA Soon we shall fl y into the luminous mist [. . .] Soon here are people on the road! then a village! [. . .] then a city! [. . .] more cities! then the sun itself! then the world! SARA Le jour! l’aurore! [. . .] Quel avenir levant! LE CHOEUR [. . .] S’il est un réveil! SARA Nous voici fuyant dans une brume radieuse [. . .] Bientôt voici des humaines, sure les reoutes! puis un village! [. . .] puis une ville! des villes! [. . .] puis le soleil! puis le monde! Axel fears the jealousy of a god, just as the sisters are afraid “that God might have forbidden my dream” (que Deus tivesse probido o meu sonho): AXEL: What is the point of following them? [. . .] they are too beautiful! [. . .] No doubt at this very moment some god is jealous of me, I who am able to die [. . .] Life? What hourglass could measure the hours of this night! The future? [. . .] we have just exhausted it [. . .] What is the point [. . .] in buying the effi gies of dreams! The quality of our hope forbids the world to us now [. . .] it is the Earth which has become illusion.33 AXEL: A quoi bon les réaliser? [. . .] Ils son si beaux! [. . .] Sans doute, un dieu me jalouse en cet instant, moi que peux mourir. [. . .] Vivre? [. . .] Quel sablier comptera les heures de cette nuit! L’avenir? [. . .] nous venons de l’épuiser [. . .] A quoi bon monnayer [. . .] à l’effi gie du rêve! WAITING FOR PESSOA’S ANCIENT MARINER 57 La qualité de notre espoir ne nous permet plus la terre [. . .] C’est elle, ne le voittu pas, qui est devenue l’Illusion!34 When Axel determines that through the heights of passion he and Sara have become their own souls, he moves beyond any voyage: if they accepted a return to mere reality, theywould be committing a sacrilege. Sara had planned to live a dream that bears comparison with that of the sisters in The Mariner, and Axel’s fateful coun terpoint on the futility of awakening came as an unexpected shock to the joy she expressed in all life. Whereas Axel embraces death in order to eternalize a supreme reality, in The Mariner the sisters have explored the horror of a circular existence, their inability to confi rm that any state is anything but an illusion, and wait to be recalled from their suspended animation to a common village reality. The “funerary splendor of this cav ern” (le splendeur funébre de ce caveau)35 where Sara and Axel consummate their passion is accepted by Axel as a superior reality, perhaps the single intense hour that gods allow; the funerary castle room in The Mariner converts the womb symbol, to the contrary, into a threshold between states of reality, expressing doubt, anxiety, and am biguity. It is a passionate state of immanence, which undermines and replaces Axel’s fatal confi dence. The damsels are condemned to wait for Time to fulfi ll its mystery. Pessoa’s Theater of Immanence prolongs the unbearable weight of conscious ness, in its questioning and search for being, while carrying the theme of life as a dream to dizzying levels of unreality and abstraction, as the watchers continue their potentially eternal wait for the return of a savior. As Pessoa the critic confi rmed, “There is nothing more remote in all literature” (Não existe coisa mais remota em literatura). Pessoa did not limit his critique of the play to the thirdperson review, however. In 1915, he added a postscript by the heteronym who would appear along side the play in the fi rst number of Orpheu with his voluble poems “Ode Triunfal” and “Opiário.” Álvaro de Campos, dismissing the play in a few tart lines, sent his own comments to Pessoa in a note: TO FERNANDO PESSOA AFTER READING YOUR STATIC DRAMA IN ORPHEU 1 After twelve minutes Of your drama The Mariner, In which the most agile and astute Feel sleepy and brutish, Without an inkling to its meaning, One of the watchers speaks With a languorous magic: Only our dreams are eternal and beautiful. Why are we still talking? Well now, that is exactly what I was going To ask those ladies. . . ÁLVARO DE CAMPOS 58 ADVERSE GENRES IN FERNANDO PESSOA A FERNANDO PESSOA DEPOIS DE LER O SEU DRAMA STATICO “O MARINHEIRO” EM “ORPHEU I” Depois de doze minutos Do seu drama O Marinheiro, Em que os mais ageis e astutos Se sentem com somno e brutos, E de sentido nem cheiro, Diz uma das veladoras Com langorosa magia: De eterno e bello ha apenas o sonho. Porque estamos nós fallando ainda? Ora isso mesmo é que eu ia Perguntar a essas senhoras. . . . ÁLVARO DE CAMPOS36 Campos is brimming with impatience and shows no sympathy for the experimental “static drama” or for its prolonged metaphysical questioning. He represents those who fi nd the experimental technique and ethereal abstractions to be tedious; if the symbolists sought “divine monotony” in style for its beauty and selfconcealment,37 Campos wrote at the opposite spectrum, loudly singing of his “nonself” and the esthetic of an encompassing universality. Perhaps Pessoa was using Campos’s dev astating “criticism” to stimulate wider interest in his play and to stir debate about its experimental method? Even so, the insouciant critic gives us evidence that Pessoa was sensitive to the limits of performance and reception of his dense drama, undoubt edly impenetrable for theatergoers of the day who were uninterested in experimental theater or abstract existential speculation. Campos’s poemcritique, while confi rm ing the “utter lack of meaning”38 of the play for those incapable or unwilling to fol low its inner depths, may be meant as incentive through its arrogant humor to arouse renewed curiosity about the veiled secrets of “those ladies,” as well as a defense against the charge of incomprehensibility. Pessoa is reminding the reader that the distance between occult symbolism and cosmopolitan modernism, apparently irrec oncilable, was no greater than the pages that separated Campos’s poems from his play in the same journal that launched the avantgarde in Portugal.
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