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The structure of Pessoa's Mensagem

1982; Liverpool University Press; Volume: 59; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/1475382822000359058

1469-3550

Ronald W. Sousa,

Health, Education, and Cultural Studies

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image sizeBSS Subject Index: MENSAGEM [F. PESSOA]PESSOA, FERNANDO (1888–1935)STRUCTURE [AS LITERARY/CULTURAL TECHNIQUE]/ STRUCTURALISM Notes 1. Mensagem (Lisboa 1934). The book is frequently reedited, though the texts reproduced vary in several details. Mensagem texts hereafter reproduced and referred to are taken from Obra poética, ed. Maria Aliete Galhoz, 3rd edn (Rio de Janeiro 1969). 2. The controversy is summarized and its participants reviewed in Geoffrey R. Barrow, ‘The personal lyric disguised: Fernando Pessoa's Mensagem’, Luso-Brazilian Review, XIII, 1 (1976), 91–92,98. Barrow's own work should, as is obvious from its title, be included as well, as should Amândio César, ‘Sobre Fernando Pessoa, poeta de Mensagem’, Gil Vicente, 2a Serie, XIX, 9–10 (1968), 151–57, a work which falls loosely into the epic camp while pointing the way to mythic-nationalist interpretation of the book. 3. Pessoa himself gave credence to that view of the book in a piece written in 1935 (in Páginas Íntimas e de Auto-lnlerpretação, ed. Georg Rudolf Lind and Jacinto do Prado Coelho [Lisboa 1966], 433–38). In no case, of course, do authorial judgements constitute authority; in addition, Pessoa's remarks about his own work are extremely unreliable when set to any critical purpose. 4. I include in the category ‘books that Pessoa read’ works that he mentions in his correspondence, works that he translated from one language to another, and works found in his library in which he wrote marginal comments. The last group is derived from the listing in Maria da Encarnação Monteiro, Incidências Inglesas na Poesia de Fernando Pessoa (Coimbra 1956). 5. The Brotherhood of the Rosy Cross (London 1925), 630–31; see also, re. use of the same Latin formulae, p. xix. 6. While tripartite structuring is widespread in occultism, that is by no means the only area of Western cultural manifestation in which it occurs. In Mensagem, however, it is inextricably linked to occultist sources, and the conceptual structure bound up with them, through the presence of unmistakeably occultist language. The present study, involving, as it does, primarily questions about Mensagem’s structure, adduces only a fraction of the sources from which Pessoa derived such language—and those only in limited fashion. The Waite title, for example, also stands as a source of the rose-and-cross symbolism of poem 36 and of other features of the volume as well. Aleister Crowley's Magick in Theory and Practice, to be dealt with below, was drawn upon much more extensively than can be detailed here. While it is impossible to go further into the matter without engaging in a full-blown reading of the volume, the following is a list of some principal sources of Mensagem language not touched on in the course of this essay: C. W. Leadbeater, Compêndio de Teosofia, trans. Fernando Pessoa (Lisboa 1915); Annie Besant, Os Ideais da Teosofia, trans. Fernando Pessoa (Lisboa 1925); Mabel Collins, Luz Sobre o Caminho, e Karma, trans. Fernando Pessoa (Lisboa 1921); Aleister Crowley, The Spirit of Solitude (London 1929); Hargrave Jennings, The Rosecrucians, Their Rites and Mysteries, 4th edn (London n.d.); S. L. MacGregor Mathers, The Kabbalah Unveiled (London 1926). 7. A number of titles having to do with Freemasonry-Knight Templarism appear in Monteiro's listing. Several remarks Pessoa made in his life suggest that his connexion with these pursuits was almost entirely intellectual, with perhaps a minimal degree of activism (see, e.g., his letter of 14 Jan. 1935, to Adolfo Casais Monteiro, partially reproduced in João Gaspar Simões, Vida e Obra de Fernando Pessoa [Amadora [1970]], 546–47; subsequent references to this title are to be found incorporated into my text). 8. A Voz do Silêncio, trans. into English by H[elena] P[etrovna] B[lavatsky] and from English into Portuguese by Fernando Pessoa (Lisboa 1916). 9. The Voice of Silence (Peking 1927), esp. 5–8. I use this edition, of a later date than the one from which Pessoa translated, because earlier editions will be difficult to obtain for consultation. I have ascertained that the text of the edition cited does not vary from that of the edition Pessoa translated. 10. Especially clear on the point are Arthur Edward Waite, Emblematic Freemasonry (London 1925), esp. 96–97,253–76, and Manly P. Hall, The Lost Keys of Freemasonry, or the Secret of Hiram Abiff 9th edn (New York 1957), esp. 54–55. The text of the latter title is the same as that of the edition Pessoa owned; the recent edition is cited for reasons similar to those adduced in n. 9. 11. While no individual titles on alchemy can be unequivocally adduced, Pessoa's references make it clear that he was fully aware of the specifics of alchemical lore—much of which is incorporated into the schemes set forth in the works he knew on Freemasonry and on ceremonial magic. See again the letter referred to in n. 7. And, for an analysis that sheds light on Pessoa's understanding of alchemy, see Georg Rudolf Lind, Teoria Poética de Fernando Pessoa (Porto [1970]), 272. As regards the area of ceremonial magic, by at least late 1930 Pessoa possessed Magick in Theory and Practice (Paris [1929?]), sent him personally by its author, the Englishman Aleister Crowley, of the Society of the Golden Dawn. In a letter of 4 Jan. 1931, Pessoa speaks as though he had read the work thoroughly (Cartas de Fernando Pessoa a João Gaspar Simões [Lisboa [1957]], 75–77. Further, Pessoa translated Crowley's introductory poem into Portuguese; see Obra Poética, 638–39, 757–58. 12. The concept that debasement is the path to rebirth appears in areas other than alchemy. In an expression that he later applies to alchemy, John Senior, The Way Down and Out: The Occult in Symbolist Literature (Ithaca 1959), 13, has observed: ‘The profound symbolism of the [classical] mysteries appears in all subsequent occult systems. The soul is a grain, and unless it die, it cannot flower. The way down—into Hell, into mortification, into the abyss of the unconscious—is the way up. The descent into Hell is the way to Heaven. ‘ The equation ‘the way down’ = ‘the way up’ is in fact central to the alchemical concept embodied in Mensagem; the last paragraphs of the section of the present study dealing with structural analysis touch—but only barely—on the rôle of that concept in the book. 13. Magic, White and Black, 5th edn (London 1904), 86, 269, and, perhaps, 231–33. Later editions are rewritten and do not represent the text Pessoa knew. 14. Quinto Império (Lisboa 1934), xvii–xx. A few remarks aid in putting this curious piece into proper perspective. First, Gomes, the author of the book being prefaced, was Pessoa's intimate friend; in my opinion, his book and Mensagem, both published in 1934, were companion pieces—or, more likely, the former was conceived of as a companion of the latter. Quinto Império is dedicated: ‘A Fernando Pessoa, Nascido no Ano Certo’; that dedication's numerological implications can, I believe, be read into the structure/thematics of Mensagem as I see and analyse them in the present essay. 15. This tenet represents merely one facet of a complex of tendencies characteristic not only of Pessoa but also of many other artists of his time. The basic presumption is that certain ‘language’ operations—the carrying-out of ritual acts, the making of cryptic emblems or designs, or simply the use of words—may constitute power operations—i.e., may relate to and direct the forces of reality. The emblem-creating/reading in ‘Brasão’, discussed in the following pages, draws upon that notion. There is, however, another dimension to this complex—one pointed out succinctly by George Steiner, After Babel (London 1975), 176–178. It involves the modern Western poet's loss of any sense of ‘housedness’ in language and his consequent quest to ‘resuscitate the magic of the word’ (178). This antinomy—in which one tendency continually energizes its opposite—is central in Pessoa in general and specifically in the thematics of Mensagem, and is, I think, allied to what I, in ‘Estruturas para uma Imagem do “Eu” ‘, Persona, No. 3, 51–59, analyse, with respect to conceptual rather than purely linguistic aspects of Pessoa's art, as his struggle between neo-Romantic ‘intuition’ and post-Positivistic, critical ‘scientism’. 16. William Butler Yeats too, writing from a perspective in many ways similar to Pessoa's, confronted the problem of the relationship between actual belief in the occult and the poetic use of occultist symbols—and came to conclusions similar to Pessoa's about myth. For an analysis with specific application to A Vision, see Helen Hennessey Vendler, Yeats’ Vision and the Later Plays (Cambridge, Mass. 1963), esp. 16–20 and the bibliography to those pages. 17. In Portugal, Vasto Império: Um Inquérito Nacional, comp. Augusto da Costa (Lisboa 1934), 36, Pessoa remarked that Sebastianism offered a ready-made, emotionally-charged system that needed only to be revived to provide the ‘myth’ necessary to animate his nation. 18. The seven remaining poems of Mensagem's total of forty-four should be dealt with. In 11–15, 22, and 32, there is no foreground speaker at all. The subjects themselves do the speaking. The subjects of all seven poems are in one way or another martyrs to the Portuguese ethic that they incarnate, and their dedication and martyrdom are perhaps more successfully expounded through confession that they might have been through third-person exposition. What is said, however, is similar in content to what Pessoa, as the speaker, relates in the rest of the poems. Thus the seven exceptions do not stand out as radically different from the other poems. What difference there is seems only technical; the words are Pessoa's, put in the mouths of the poetic subjects. 19. This factor should be borne in mind in reading Mensagem. If it is not, one runs the risk of repeating the error committed by a number of critics and epitomized by Barrow (see n. 2). To be sure, in some of the lyrics attributed to ‘Fernando Pessoa ele mesmo’, a corpus rhetorically marked as, in the main, autobiographical, Pessoa attempts applications to his poetized ‘self of some of the same notions—many of them derived from esoterica—that he incorporates into Mensagem. It would, indeed, have been remarkable had he not done so. (In fact, in so doing he creates several interesting parallels with Portugal as depicted in Mensagem: both the poet and his nation are debased, chaotic, characterless; both need to undergo a process of rebirth.) None the less, as my present analysis indicates, it is a grave error to see Mensagem as in any way a simple outpouring of ‘lyric poetry in disguise’.