Whitman sang of the machines and the “great cathedral sacred industry” that was flourishing around him. But whereas Whitman conflated the reproducible possibilities of printing with his divisible self, Pessoa (who like Whitman, worked as a printer) refrained from publishing his work (or, indeed, that of his heteronyms). Whereas the “American bard” spoke, or better, sang from the perspective of a rising new empire, Pessoa witnessed a disintegrating one. Pessoa’s challenge to authorship was born not of plenitude of self but with its lack. Indeed, Pessoa sang all the higher and more extravagantly about the machinery and industry that his agrarian provincial country did not own, and of which it could not even dream.
The desire “to be large and contain multitudes” emanated from Whitman’s engagement with an ever-expanding physical world. Pessoa’s desire “to feel everything in every way,” however, was both a strategy and poetic of virtuality, of not being there.
Pessoa’s vicariousness has all to do with his relation to the death of the Portuguese Empire in the latter part of the nineteenth century. Issued on August 30, 1890, just a few months before the birth of Pessoa, the British Ultimatum demanded that the Portuguese give up the inner lands between Angola and Mozambique—what is currently Zambia, Zimbabwe and Malawi—in order to allow the British to build a major north-south railway linking Cairo to Cape Town. In the years immediately following this concession to the British, Portugal was shaken by a massive wave of protests. These protests would lead to years of political anarchy and socioeconomic turmoil marked by regicide and the outbreak of the Republican Revolution.
But while the nation mourned the loss of the Empire, there goes Pessoa walking triumphantly and overjoyed down Lisbon’s Rua do Ouro, the poetic equivalent of the Brooklyn Bridge. Indeed, for Pessoa, the death of the empire presaged the much anticipated dawning of greater literature. Unlike his compatriots, he interpreted the conflict over the Ultimatum as the final retreat of the diachronic concept of history and the rise of providential, messianic time. The withdrawal of a territorial empire transposed to a newborn spiritual empire, the Fifth Empire: a timeless linguistic empire formed by poets and grammarians which, as he legendarily puts it, “only a small nation could fulfill.”
For Pessoa, the British Ultimatum stands for the reawakening of a primary loss, one that goes back to the infamous year of 1578, and the disappearance of the body of King Sebastian in the tragic battle of El-Ksar-el-Kebir in northern Morocco.
At just twenty-four years of age, Don Sebastian, a radical bachelor (not unlike Pessoa) had been the darling of the Portuguese nobility whose messianic crusading missions to North Africa proved disastrous. Despite warnings from his closest allies, the young king could not be swayed from invading Moorish territories. The result was an enormous loss of human life, a severe economic crisis, and, as the king left no successor, the loss of political autonomy to the Spanish court.
According to legend, King Sebastian will return one foggy morning to rescue his country and fulfill its glorious destiny. When impostors and pseudo-Sebastians rose repeatedly to claim the identity of the missing monarch, however, they were one by one, sent off to the galleys. The return was repeatedly promised but ever postponed. Over time, the missing body of the king evolved into a site of articulation of a general longing—as framed by the Portuguese phenomenon of saudade (deep nostalgic longing for someone or something that was much loved and is now lost)—sustained by the very poetics of deferral of the body-territory that undergirds the legend of Sebastian.
It is in this traumatic space of deferral that Pessoa will envision the demiurgic moment of the Fifth Empire, an empire of literature composed not by chapters but by people.
Pessoa’s pantheon of heteronyms is nothing else than the spectral reappearing of Sebastian. The sleeping king distributed in, and interconnecting, time and space. Pessoa’s famous cohort of heteronyms talk about and between themselves, about and indeed to “Pessoa-himself,” the most false of all heteronyms. Unlike Whitman’s announcement of “a life that shall be copious, vehement, spiritual, bold,” Pessoa’s heteronyms announce the nothingness that simmers below the “great individual.” Pessoa, after all, is the Portuguese word for person.
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