UNIVERSITÀ DEGLI STUDI DI TRENTO Dipartimento di Studi Letterari, Linguistici e Filologici Dottorato di Ricerca in Studi Letterari, Linguistici e Filologici Ciclo XXXIII° Tesi di dottorato Intertextuality and Intratextuality in the Pessoan Epic: Mensagem Relatore: Ch.ma Prof.ssa Valentina Nider Dottorando Coordinatore del dottorato: Ch.mo Prof. Fulvio Ferrari Silvia Annavini anno accademico 2010-2011 Acknowledgments This work is the product of a long study and devotion for Fernando Pessoa‘s oeuvre, that has required the same intensity of research of his passion and life-long concern with literature. However, it is without question, that this exploration within the Pessoan literary galaxy would have not been possible without a much wider and profounder affection for Portugal, its culture and its literature that was inspired by ―my mentor‖. Thus I would dedicate this work to Roberto Francavilla, who gave shape and molded my critical and literary imagination. Additionally, I am profoundly indebted to Valentina Nider, my thesis supervisor, who kindly accepted to follow this work and who not only attentively proof- read my writings but, most of all, helped me in reaching a punctual sense of research and writing I would also like to thank Riccarco Greco, patient enough to explore the workings of my occasionally contentious mind; Gabriele Vitello, who ―spiritually‖ and intellectually stood by me along these years; Simona Alias, assiduous editor of my provisional sketched ideas and for her faultless literary advices; Daria Biagi and Francesca Lorandini, always ready in helping me out with suggestions as well as for sharing an intoxicating friendship. However, my most touching gratitude goes to my family for believing and supporting me, for being my cornerstone during all my disheartenment moments over these three years and as well for accepting the priority I often had to give to my work. A very special thank you to Fabio who patiently and untiringly supported me during these ―writing months‖. Last but not least, I am really grateful to my longtime friends Lorenzo, Marta, Valentina, and Corrado for their unwavering encouragement and companionship 1 with all my choices, sacrifices and movements. And finally, I would really like to thank my Portuguese confidant, José Luis dos Santos for his availability in assisting me with books, book-shops crawlings, and especially for his captivating and cultivating friendship. 2 Contents Chapter 1: Introduction 1.1. Geographies of (Semi-Peripheral) Modernism p.5 1.2. Fernando Pessoa Between Nationalism and Modernism p.9 1.3. Censored Pessoa p.18 1.4. Methodological Foreword p.25 Chapther 2: “My country is where I am not”. Mensagem and the Rewriting of Portuguese Imperialism 2.1. ―Our National Epic Has Yet to Be Written‖ p.29 2.2. Epic, Myth, and Archetypes p.35 2.2.1. The Intertextual and Intratextual Epic p.40 2.2.2. An ―Epic ao Gosto Popular‖ p.55 2.3. An Awkward Forefather: Lusíadas, Anti-Lusíadas, or an Intra- Lusíadas? p.60 2.3.1 At the Roots of the Epic Poetry p.64 2.3.2. Mensagem, Os Lusíadas and the Epic Tradition p.67 2.3.3. A New Epic for a New Empire p.77 Chapter 3: Fernando Pessoa and the Late-Romantic Enchantment 3.1. A Modernist Poet with a Victorian Imagination p.84 3 3.2. From Browning to Pound, the feature of personae and the issue of heteronymy p.89 3.3. Objectivism/Subjectivism p.94 3.4. A Romanticized History for a Modern(ist) Epic p.99 3.5. Hyperion‘s Message p.105 3.6. Tennyson and Pessoa: An Idyllic and Dramatic Epic p.111 3.6.1. Myth and Utopia Within the Re-Writing of Modernist Epic p.121 3.6.2. From Idylls to Epylls: Writing Stories, telling History p.128 3.6.3. Mensagem and the Grail Literary Tradition p.134 Chapter 4: Between the Greeks and the Moderns: Epigraphs, Epigrams, Epitaphs, and Fragments. 4.1. A Fragmented Wholeness p.138 4.2. From ―Orpheu‖ to ―Athena‖ p.146 4.3. Decontructing the Novel, Rewriting the Epic p.153 4.3.1. ―Da Grécia Antiga vê-se o mundo inteiro!‖ p.163 4.3.2 . Inscriptions p.172 Biliography p.179 4 Chapter 1 Introduction O futuro é um nevoeiro fechado sobre o Tejo sem barcos, só um grito aflito ocasional na bruma. António Lobo Antunes (Os cus de Judas) 1.1.Geographies of (Semi-Peripheral) Modernism Rarely the history of a country‘s literature displays such a thematic and coherent circularity as the Portuguese one. The grammar of the Lusitanian poetic language, in fact, unflaggingly leans upon a few firm pillars. Actually, the coordinates of the Portuguese imagery are composed of the Atlantic Ocean and Europe, which are conceptually and ideally silhouetted as two granitic interlocutors and as the fundamental tropes of both literary texturing and geopolitical imagination. Perhaps it would be even more appropriate to affirm that political geography and literature have illustrated, from centuries, the resounding chambers and the philology of this country‘s self-telling and self- representation punctuated by a still unresolved dialogue with the European continent. If the dialogue with the Atlantic Ocean is marked by the epic celebration of the Lusitanian maritime history, the longing towards a European recognition is crafted through a continuous and persistent anxiety of inclusion. Recently, Roberto Vecchi contended that this yearning is emblematically 5 immortalized in the paving opposite the Mosteiro of Jerónimos, at Belém, where a marble memorial tablet celebrates the entry of Portugal into the European Union in 1985: A sorprendere è appunto il luogo: la Praça do Império vera enciclopedia storica a cielo aperto dell‘espansione oltremarina, non solo per la vicinanza, a due passi, della Torre di Belém e dello spettrale e retorico Padrão dos descobrimentos dominato dalla figura del principe Dom Henrique, mitologico promotore quattrocentesco delle scoperte. Ma anche perché questa piazza imperiale fu, nel 1940, sede della più imponente teatralizzazione del Portogallo imperiale, quell‘Esposizione del mondo portoghese che il regime salazariano aveva tenacemente voluto, nonostante il contesto internazionale di guerra, e che esibiva una vastissima sezione coloniale. […]Potrebbe dunque sembrare a qualcuno eccentrica la decisione di fissare il monumento della rifondazione europea del Portogallo nel luogo storicamente più antieuropeo del paese. Invece è una spia significativa di un vero complesso europeo di Lisbona1. (Vecchi 2010, 79-80) Although, if in the late 1970s Eduardo Lourenço proposed a process of demythologization of Portuguese history, a release from its fictive self- perception, from the mid-to-late 1990s, the essayist was convinced that as a consequence of this ―autognosis‖, Portugal was ready to become a key European country, a ―ship-nation‖ capable of ferrying Europe across modernity. As a leading European country, Portugal would have been able to amalgamate and even out differences and diversities to achieve an ever more converging perspective. Nevertheless, in addition to this openly idealistic projection which 1 [«What comes as a surprise is the place: the Praça do Império, the real and under the open sky encyclopedia of the overseas expansions, not only because it is a few steps from the Belém Tower and from the spectral and rhetorical Padrão dos Descobrimentos dominated by the figure of Dom Henrique, mythological promoter of the XV th century‘s discoveries. Moreover, in 1940 that imperial square was the place of the hugest over-dramatization of the imperialist Portugal, the Exhibition of the Portuguese world that Salazar‘s regime had firmly wanted ignoring the international war context, and that displayed a wide colonial section. […] Thus the decision of placing the Portugal‘s European re-establishment monument precisely in the place which was historically more non-European in the country could appear to someone eccentric. By contrast, this is a significant hint of a real Lisbon‘s European complex»]. (my translation) 6 Lourenço himself declared as both utopian and pragmatic, a few dystopian and scientific perspectives have emerged. The entry into the European Union, in fact, was contemporary hailed by José Saramago with A jangada de pedra, issued in 1986, where the Nobel Prize writer imagines the Iberian Peninsula breaking away from the European continent displaying an apocalyptic pan- Iberian utopia. On the other hand, in the same years, the sociologist Boaventura de Sousa Santos developed the concept of semi-periphery coined by Wallerstein in order to single out the Portugal‘s peculiar anomaly. Over the centuries, literature has represented an important mirror of the Portuguese geopolitical dynamics. Probably, Fernando Pessoa‘s poetry outlines a full-bodied image of a crossroads moment in the Lusitanian historical parabola. By the same token, the sociologic perspective offers, in this regard, a two-fold chance of understanding his work and Mensagem in particular. Actually, it makes a close focusing feasible, i.e. the possibility of foreseeing the poetic objective through the Pessoan epic lens which reveals the double tension between Europe and the Atlantic Ocean. On the other hand, it discharges the figure of Fernando Pessoa himself from a certain critique that would fix his image in a yellowed daguerreotype of a small, dusty, and faraway country. It is precisely in an article entitled ―Estado e sociedade na semiperiferia do sistema mundial: o caso português‖ that Boaventura de Sousa Santos places a similarity between Portugal and other semi-peripheral European such as Greece, Spain, and Ireland. In this way, not only does the Portuguese sociologist charts a geographical and economic map of the semi-peripheral conceptualization, but he also makes reasonable the inclusion of Fernando Pessoa in the modernist geography starting from Seferis to Joyce, and Unamuno. A thread passing through the parallel but distant cities of Lisbon and Dublin can be traced 7 unifying the different but yet full of affinities poetics of Joyce and Pessoa.