Chapter Two: A Show without a Plot
“ . . . life is simply an external picture that includes me and that I look at, like a show without a plot . . . ”
WE ARE OFTEN reminded throughout The Book of Disquiet of Bernardo Soares’s inclination to imbue his self-declared “factless autobiography” with tragic resonances. At times, his resort to this characterization may seem exaggerated, as when he describes the departure of the office boy as “today’s vague tragedy” (241). Perhaps it becomes somewhat more plausible when he reflects that “One of the soul’s great tragedies is to execute work and then realize, once it’s finished, that it’s not any good. The tragedy is especially great when one realizes that the work is the best he could have done” (200). He moves closer to the more specifically theatrical meaning of tragedy when, after reviewing the overall insignificance of his life—in which, rather than dying, he merely “terminates, wilts, devegetates”—he suspects that “not even this tragedy of negation can be staged to applause” (44). The possibility that Soares may have a specifically Greek tragedy in mind is suggested by the dozens of allusions to fate and destiny that appear throughout The Book. He tells us, for example that “My life’s central tragedy is, like all tragedies, an irony of Fate” (164), an idea that appears as well in his references to “the iron hand of an abstract Fate” (158), to fate as “the intellectual monster that is everything” (112), and to his destiny as “having pursued me like a malevolent creature” (169).
The Book is not, to be sure, a tragedy as understood by Aristotle, who defines it in his Poetics as “an imitation of a noble and complete action, having the proper magnitude” (11; my emphasis). After observing that a tragedy has “six parts in accordance with which, as a genre, it achieves its particular quality: plot, character, diction, thought, spectacle and melody” (12), he confers primacy of plot when he stipulates that “the most important of these parts is the arrangement of incidents” (12). In an argument whose relevance to our discussion of the disappearance of plot and its replacement by “show” in The Book will become clear, he contrasts the plot with “spectacle,” of which he says that it “attracts our attention but is the least artistic and least essential part of the art of poetry” (14). In his discussion of the contribution of each of its phases to the plot as whole, Aristotle insists that they must be arranged in a sequence that is both logical and chronological. After explaining that completeness requires a beginning, a middle and an end, he then explains the relationship of each of these parts to the plot as a whole:
By a ‘beginning’ I mean that which is itself not, by necessity, after anything else but after which something naturally is or develops. By an ‘end’ I mean exactly the opposite: that which is necessarily after something else, either necessarily or customarily, but after which there is nothing else. By a ‘middle’ I mean that which is itself after something else and which has something after it. The beginning does not result of necessity from something previous to it but something will necessarily follow from it; the middle has both something before and something after it; the end, which is produced by what preceded it, is followed by nothing. (14)
He concludes his analysis with an observation that highlights the distinction between classical tragedy and The Book: “It is necessary, therefore, that well-constructed plots not begin by chance, anywhere, nor end anywhere, but that they conform to the distinctions that have been made above” (14).
Pessoa’s rejection of Aristotle’s championing of plot is perhaps most apparent in his defense of what he calls “static theater”:
I call it static theater when action does not constitute the dramatic plot, that is to say, when characters not only do not act—because they neither move around nor talk about moving—but do not even have feelings that might lead to an action; in short, there is no conflict and, strictly speaking, no plot. It will be said that this is not theater. But I think it is, for it is my belief that the theater has a tendency toward being simply lyric theater in which plot derives neither from action nor the movements and consequences of action—but, much more comprehensively, reveals the soul through exchanges of words and creation of situation . . . It is possible to reveal souls without action. It is possible to create situations of inertia, moments of soul without doors or windows to reality. (qtd. Monteiro, Fernando Pessoa 65)
Static theater is well exemplified by Pessoa’s play The Mariner, in which a “situation of inertia” is obviously present in the coffin which contains the corpse of “a maiden in white.” A parallel form of inertia is conveyed by the immobile geometry of the setting, which includes “a room in an ancient castle and that appears to be round” in whose precise center the coffin has been placed; four candles, each of which is placed at a corner of the coffin; a vertically rectangular figure in the form of a “tall and narrow window” that echoes the horizontally rectangular form of the coffin; “two distant mountains” between which we see “a small patch of ocean;” and the triangular and chiastic positioning of the three sisters, two of whom are seated on either side of the window while the third sits facing it.
“The moments of soul” implied by these geometrical figures that mimic the immobility of the corpse of the maiden prepare us for the “static drama” of the play itself, which will remind us, not of the linear dramatic action of a Greek tragedy, but of the echoing pattern of its choral odes (precisely the “spectacle” that Aristotle had characterized as “the least essential” of its elements). Pessoa sets the triangular pattern formed by the three sisters in “static motion,” as it were, by having them engage in a conversation that shifts among them in a way that tends to turn back upon itself. In this way, their carefully organized exchanges offer us in embryonic form the “revolving triads” that, as we noted in our introduction, proliferate in The Book. The first of the eight sections of their ode (which are separated from each other by a pause) begins with the first sister announcing that “the hour hasn’t struck yet,” to which the second sister counters that “We couldn’t have heard it. There are no clocks around. It should be morning before long,” which elicits from the third sister the rejoinder that “No – the horizon is black.”
A second phase of their conversation is then initiated by the first sister’s suggesting that they should “pass the time by telling stories of what we’ve been” which elicits from the second the objection that “No, let’s not talk about that. And besides have we been anything?” to which the first replies that “in any case it’s always beautiful to talk about the past.” Each of the subsequent sections is generated by the various combinations made possible by this three-part chorus, whose number of speakers allows Pessoa (as merely two would not have) to create both linear and circular patterns which themselves combine to produce the effect of “static movement.” As we shall eventually see, this strategy of abandoning linear plot and replacing it with two forms of inertia—one associated with death, the other with aesthetic patterns that mimic it—provides an invaluable key to our understanding of what we will eventually call the “double-plot” of The Book.
Soares implicitly suggests the applicability of the concept of static theater to his “unwritten novel” when he characterizes life itself as “a show without a plot (169), an idea that reappears in such additional observations—all of which attribute a prominent role to the “spectacle” that Aristotle had so preemptively dismissed—as “We’re something that goes on during the show’s intermission” (63), “We live an intermission with band music” (83), and we “cross the stage as walk-ons who don’t speak” (147). His non-Aristotelian dismissal of action, which is plainly on display throughout The Book, comes especially to the fore when he announces that “I cultivate hatred of action like a greenhouse flower” (99), likens humanitarian action to “rubbish dumped out of a window right on top of me” (143), refers dismissively to men of action as “involuntary slaves” (145), affirms that “to act with others is a metaphysically morbid impulse” (184), and, resorting to an intriguing nuance, describes himself as “venturing without acting” (179).
Soares further marginalizes the organized action of a conventionally plotted novel by confining it largely to the business transactions conducted by his boss Vasques: “Today my boss, Senhor Vasques, closed a business deal that brought a sick man and his family to his ruin. As he negotiated the deal he completely forgot that this man existed, except as the opposing commercial party” (258). One can easily imagine examples of what a “real” novelist would have made of such materials. Soares, however, allows Vasques only perfunctory appearances in his narrative. Similarly, while references to Caesar and the Argonauts remind us of conquests carried out on a much larger and more “noble” scale than what Vasques achieves, they are never accorded more than passing mention in The Book.
Soares tends to replace noble as well as completed forms of action with what, in describing a banal fist-fight on the street, he calls “a modest apocalypse” (153), which clearly possesses neither the magnitude nor the completeness prescribed by Aristotle. In the “show without a plot” to which such apocalypses do contribute, we observe the presence of an uncanny boundlessness in which the hierarchical distinction between noble and banal actions is replaced by the reciprocity between the trivial and the immense. Thus, “a nearby truck produces a thundering sound” (102), literal thunder evokes the apocalypse (117), and the restaurant waiter’s “modest” remark to the effect that he hopes that Soares, who is apparently ill, will feel better leads to the apocalyptic response that “the trumpet blast of this simple phrase relieved my soul like a sudden wind clearing the sky of clouds” (27). In such a world, even something as routine as the end of a rainstorm can produce vastly disproportionate effects:
After the last drops of rain began to fall more slowly from the rooftops and the sky’s blue began to spread over the street’s paving-stones, then the vehicles sang a different song, louder and happier, and windows could be heard opening up to the no longer forgetful sun. From the narrow street at the end of the next block came the loud invitation of the first seller of lottery tickets, and nails being nailed into crates in the shop opposite reverberated in the limpid space. (31)
To this, we may add Soares’s description of another rainstorm, which he characteristically expands into a vision in which “a glass dome shatters on high into large bits” (103), and his account of the routine events that he observes on a Sunday morning in an unnamed church that concludes with his comparing them—in a way that, once again, transforms the trivial and the immense into reciprocities—to “a slumber of mysteries and battlements” (128).
We notice yet another departure from Aristotle in the proliferation throughout The Book of aimless movements that are not parts of a completed action. These appear, for example, in passages that describe Soares’s wanderings as well as in descriptions of pedestrians that liken their convergings and divergings to the movement of water in a stream (79). Text 463 concludes with a superb passage in which life itself, rather than being fitted to the constraining requirements of a plot, is described as passing by “like a stream flowing silently under forgotten trees” (381) and in which the soul is likewise invited to undertake a plotless journey: “Go uselessly by, pointlessly by, consciousness conscious of nothing, a hazy flash in the distance amid clearings in the leaves, coming from and going to we don’t know where! Go, go, and let me forget!” (381).
This image of the purposeless journeying of the soul reappears when Soares describes moments when “I launch once more like a paper boat onto the waters of sleep, and once more I return to the fading illusion that cuddles my hazy consciousness of the morning now emerging amid the sounds of the vegetable carts” (103). At another, he describes his passage through life in terms of a perfectly volitionless waiting that concludes in a way that is entirely lacking in the reversal and recognition that Aristotle associated with plot: “I see life as a roadside inn where I have to stay until the coach from the abyss pulls up . . . I’m sitting at the door, feasting my eyes and ears on the colours and sounds of the landscape, and I softly sing—for myself alone—wispy songs I compose while waiting” (12–13).
Soares’s predilection for inertia firmly, as well as amusingly, asserts itself whenever he finds himself seated in a moving train or tram. At such moments, stasis, which applies literally to his sitting position, infiltrates movement itself. Thus, although he looked forward to a business trip to Cascais, he discovers that “on actually going out there, I lost myself in abstract contemplations, seeing but not seeing the riverscapes I’d looked forward to seeing, while on the way back I lost myself in mentally nailing down those sensations” (23). Similarly, in Text 298, he describes a ride on a tram in which he abolishes any sense of sequential movement by focusing his attention entirely on the way that his immediate sensations lead to a boundless perception:
I’m riding on a tram and, as usual, am closely observing all the details of the people around me. For me, these details are like things, voices, phrases [ . . . ] I see beyond all this to the private lives of those who live their social existence in these factories and offices. The whole world opens up before my eyes merely because in front of me—on the nape of a dark skinned neck whose other side has I don’t know what face—I see a regularly irregular dark-green embroidery on a light-green dress. I get off the tram dazed and exhausted. I’ve just lived all of life. (253)
In the text that immediately follows, he similarly describes the brief train ride from Lisbon to Cascas as a “vast journey” because, even though “it all happens in a moment,” his capacity “for simultaneously feeling various and sundry sensations,” leads him to compress into this moment the lives of all the inhabitants of all the houses that pass by (254).
One of the more memorable allusions to Soares’s “motionless journey” appears in Text 45, in which, imagining a state of perfect repose and contentment, he begins by describing it in terms of inertia: “To goldenly stagnate in the sun, like a murky pond surrounded by flowers.” A moment later, however, he shifts to a metaphor that foregrounds movement: “To be in the whirl of the worlds like dust of flowers, sailing through the afternoon air on an unknown wind and falling wherever it falls, lost among larger things” (46). A similar effect is achieved when he tells us that “I promenade my destiny that goes forward though I don’t go anywhere” (44). A particularly charming allusion to the idea that one can travel without ever going anywhere occurs when Soares imagines himself as “a child sailing paper boats in a cistern on the farm” (77). He enlists the image of the road to express his yearning for a “static journey” once again when he says: “If only we could have a road connecting a place no one ever leaves from to a place where no one goes!” He then dreams of a road that, having no beginning or end, “would sublimely remain as only the middle stretch of a road” (278).
Soares likewise creates the effect of a “motionless journey” by writing sentences whose forward movement forms circular patterns. In Text 1, for example, he proposes three parallel phrases that describe the situation of those who, like himself, are unable to live: “as impassive to the solemnity of any and all worlds, indifferent to the divine, and disdainers of what is human (11; my emphasis). In this case, we notice the nearly synonymous terms that form the triad, with an asymmetry produced by the shift from predicate adjectives in the first two terms to a predicate noun in the third. Text 127 begins with two series of negations that circle around a first-person pronoun: “I don’t get indignant [ . . . ] I’m not resigned [ . . . ] I don’t hold my peace [ . . . ] I’m neither strong, nor noble, nor great” (116). A similar effect is achieved with a third-person pronoun as the apex from which three synonymous verbs radiate: “Whoever lives like me doesn’t die: he terminates, wilts, devegetates” (44). A description of his spiritual stagnation is evoked by three terms with similar meanings although their syntax is different: “It’s like being intoxicated with inertia [ . . . ] It’s a sickness with no hope of recovery. It’s a lively death” (45). A succession of prepositional phrases that modify the same noun creates, in its turn, the effect of moving while remaining motionless: “Erudition of acquired knowledge . . . erudition of understanding . . . erudition of sensibility” (122). Yet another syntactical form is called into service when Soares assembles a sequence of direct objects composed of adjectives that he transforms into substantives: “I pity those who dream the probable, the reasonable and the accessible” (127).
At other times, the circular movement of these triads gives way to a more spiraling effect, which reminds us of Soares’s definition of a spiral as “a potential circle that winds round as it rises, without ever completing itself” and, more concretely as “a snake without a snake, vertically wound around nothing” (107). This occurs, for example, when, in describing himself in terms of three roles that he plays, he “rises” from a literal statement, first, to a conventional metaphor and then to an ineffable image: “I will always be, in verse or prose, an office employee. I will always be, with or without mysticism, local and submissive, a servant of my feelings and the moments when they occur. I will always be, under the large blue canopy of the silent sky, a pageboy in an unintelligible rite” (147-8; my emphasis). We experience a similar effect when Soares describes the rising wind in terms of a series of terms whose resemblance we intuitively grasp even though the meaning of each of the terms, taken separately, is ungraspable: “like the voice of a vacuum, a sucking of space into a hole, an absence in the air’s silence” (52).
Text 175, in which Soares describes the misfortune of the generation into which he was born, contains an especially numerous and varied series of triads. He characterizes the world that they inherited as offering “no security in the religious sphere, no guidance in the moral sphere, and no tranquility in the political sphere.” As a result, he and his contemporaries were “born into the midst of metaphysical anguish, moral anxiety and political disquiet.” The biblical criticism of the previous generation had reduced the Bible to “a doubtful heap of myths, legends, and mere literature.” Soares adds to this a triad of things that the previous generation bequeathed or did not bequeath, first, “the impossibility of being Christians” but not “an acceptance of the impossibility”; second, “disbelief in established moral codes” but not “an indifference to morality and the rules for peaceful human coexistence”; third, “the thorny problem of politics” but not indifference “about how to solve it” (156–7). As he moves towards the conclusion of this passage, Soares circles three sentences around the variously formulated idea of destruction: “Our fathers blithely wreaked destruction, for they lived in a time that was still informed by the solidity of the past. The very thing that destroyed was what gave strength to society and enabled them to destroy without noticing that the building was cracking. We inherited the destruction and its aftermath” (157). In the final paragraph, Soares rounds out this overview of human history (which is also a virtuoso display of “static movement”) by asserting that “today the world belongs only to the stupid, the insensitive and the agitated” and that “today the right to live and triumph is awarded on virtually the same basis as admission into an insane asylum: an inability to think, amorality and nervous excitability” (156–7).
We also notice that—along with shaping both physical and verbal forms of movement into triadic patterns based on the co-presence of movement and stasis—Soares creates parallel reciprocities on the level of the larger structures of The Book by replacing the three phases of a plot constructed according to Aristotle’s requirement of order and magnitude with the three subjective activities of feeling, dreaming, and thinking that (to recall the inverted pyramid metaphor) both converge at the “apex” that is Bernardo Soares himself and radiate outwards from him in the direction of an “indeterminate base.” Each of these three activities—which replace the three phases of a unified dramatic action as prescribed by Aristotle with three randomly occurring experiential “episodes”—offers Soares distinct yet overlapping ways of abolishing chronological order in his “show without a plot.” We notice, too, that each of them—rather than simply being parts of the completed whole that Aristotle stipulated—tends to become, each in its own turn, a “whole” unto itself. At any moment, feeling, dreaming, and thinking may become, in an entirely random and (recalling Aristotle’s dismissive term) “episodic” way, not merely a partial feature, but the whole of Soares’s inner life.
In an essay entitled “Sensationism,” Pessoa, speaking in his own name, affirms the boundlessness of feeling: “Feeling opens the doors of the prison where thought confines the soul” (Selected Prose 66) and “the senses are divine because they are our relationship with the universe, and our relationship with the universe is God” (67). The idea that feeling is the path to “greater completeness” rather than merely a partial activity appears as well in his contention that “nothing exists outside our sensations,” an claim that he further expounds when he argues that “all that we truly possess are our own sensations; it is in them, rather than in what they sense, that we must base our life’s reality” (98).
Throughout The Book, this championing of momentary feelings as a portal to the infinite and the eternal leads to numerous indefinitely extended impressions having Soares as their origin. These include his claim that he enjoys “the permanent novelty of free, uninhibited sensation” (70), which is perfectly illustrated by his description of a “Brief dark shadow of a downtown tree, light sound of water falling into the sad pool, green of the trimmed lawn—public garden shortly before twilight” which leads to the indefinite perception (which also reverses the logical relationship between part and whole) that “you are in this moment the whole universe for me, for you are the full content of my sensation” (97). In another passage, the creaking wheels of a carriage resonate within the purely virtual ensemble formed—not by other ambient sounds that are really there—but by “the depths of the cars’ noisy silences” (129). In yet another passage, he explicitly applies the word “ensemble” to a relationship between incident and completed action that Aristotle would surely not have found acceptable: “Yes, anything that comes from the whole ensemble is enough to console me: a ray of sunlight that eternally enters the dead office, a vendor’s cry that flits up to the window of my room, the existence of people, the fact that there are climates in changes in weather, the world’s astonishing objectivity . . . ” (364). We wonder, as we read this passage, to what possible form of “completion” these particular details could belong. The “whole ensemble” is clearly indeterminate, like the base of Soares’s inverted pyramid.
The indeterminateness as well as the greater completeness of dreaming emerges, in its turn, in Soares’s affirmation that “I see dreamed landscapes as plainly as real ones. If I lean out over my dreams, I’m leaning out over something. If I see life go by, my dream is of something” (93). He repeats this idea at greater length in Text 92, which begins “I’ve never done anything but dream. This, and this alone, has been the meaning of my life. My only real concern has been my inner life. My worst sorrows have evaporated when I’ve opened the window on to the street of my dreams and forgotten myself in what I saw there” (88). He likewise praises daydreamers who dream the impossible and whose reveries are like the soul’s music, lulling them and meaning nothing” (127). Boundlessness joins with the momentary when Soares remarks, after describing “an immense peace [ . . . ] coldly present in the abstract fall air,” observes that “all this is a vision that vanishes as soon as it occurs, a winged interlude between nothing and nothing that takes place on high, in shades of sky and grief, diffuse and indefinite” (196). The boundless striving inherent to his dreaming is also foregrounded by his announced goal, which is to “create in myself a nation with its own politics, parties and revolutions, and to be all of it, everything to be God in the real pantheism of this people-I, to be the substance and movement of their bodies and their souls, of the very ground they tread and the acts they perform! To be everything, to be them and not them!” (140). This complementarity between the boundless imperialism of dreaming and the radical devaluation of action that it requires emerges in Soares’s claim that “inaction makes up for everything. Not acting gives us everything. To imagine is everything, as long as it doesn’t tend towards action. No one can be king of the world except in dreams. And everyone of us who really knows himself wants to be king of the world” (145). The dominion of dreaming over any activity undertaken in the so-called real world is further suggested by Soares’s dismissal of reality as merely an “episode of the imagination” (195).
Thinking is the third alternative to action that we find in The Book; however—as was true with feeling and imagining—its random occurrences, which are both momentary and boundless, eschew any notion of chronological progression. Soares foregrounds the momentariness of thinking when he alludes to “this sudden awareness of my true being” (40), his “sudden awareness of my humiliation among real people” (265), his realization “in an inner flash that I’m no one” (227), and the insight that he achieves when reason “flashes in the blackness of life” (165). The “imperialism” of his thoughts, their tendency to subjugate everything to their sway, emerges in multiple passages in which he suggests that thinking is superior to sensations or dreaming (whose absolute value is, nonetheless, contradictorily affirmed in other passages)—as though thinking has even “greater completion.” Thus, he speaks of “flashes of awareness that we live an illusion” and dismisses his dreams as “a stupid shelter, like an umbrella against lightning” (78) and “those abominations from the soul’s sewers” (208). Sensations, in their turn, are revealed by thinking to be nothing more than “slumbers that fill up our mind like a fog” (76).
The co-presence of the momentary and the boundless that we observe with respect to the three “episodes” of feeling, observing, and thinking are paralleled throughout The Book by the reciprocity between the inanimate state in which Soares’s “lively death” will eventuate and the static movement from which he creates his “show without a plot.” What Soares says of art—that it “frees us, illusorily, from the squalor of being” (234) and that “it takes us away from here” (300)—is, of course, equally true of death. His praise of art as “a substitute for acting or living” (199) parallels his appreciation of death as “a liberation from life” (243) and as a state in which “man is no longer a slave” (244).
In the text entitled “Funeral March for Ludwig II, King of Bavaria,” Death describes her manifold yet debilitating pleasures: “Come to my affection, which never changes, and to my love, which has no end! [ . . . ] Against my breast you won’t even feel the love that prompted you to come and seek it [ . . . ] I will be your maternal wife, the twin sister you’ve at long last recovered” (414). This both resembles and differs from the invocation to the “Madonna of inner silences,” whom he associates with aesthetic experience: “The substance of your flesh isn’t spiritual, it’s spirituality. You are the woman before the Fall, still a sculpture made from that clay that 
paradise [ . . . ] You alone are pure, Lady of Dreams, whom I can conceive as a lover without conceiving any stain, for you are unreal. I can conceive of you as a mother and adore you, for you were never defiled by the horror of being fertilized or the horror of giving birth” (439). The Madonna then becomes the object of a threefold litany in which she is invoked as “the Eternal day [ . . . ] the Invisible Twilight [ . . . ] the Absolute Night” (440).
Death and art conjoin once again when Soares observes that “a statue is a dead body, chiseled to capture death in incorruptible matter” (158) and characterizes statues, paintings, and stained-glass windows as “these special universes marked by death and immobility” (344). One of the most powerful of these passages appears in Text 312, which begins with what appears to be the straightforward expression of a death wish (complete with a likely allusion to Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” soliloquy), which then modulates into the longing to exist in some higher dimension of life:
To cease, to sleep, to replace this intermittent consciousness with better, melancholy things, whispered in secret to someone who doesn’t know me! . . . To cease, to end at last, but surviving as something else: the page of a book, a tuft of disheveled hair, the quiver of the creeping plant next to a half-open window, the irrelevant footsteps in the gravel of the bend, the last smoke to rise from the village going to sleep, the wagoner’s whip left on the early morning roadside . . . Absurdity, confusion, oblivion—everything that isn’t life. (33–4)
This concluding catalogue of the whirl of disparate things that Soares imagines himself becoming makes us aware that what began as melancholic longing for death has modulated into a vital or multiform expression of static movement.
Soares also makes us aware of the proximity of timeless death to its counterpart in equally timeless art when he remarks that “We all know that we die; we all feel that we won’t die. It’s not just a desire or hope that brings us this shadowy intuition that death is a misunderstanding; it’s a visceral logic that rejects . . . ” (388). The knowledge that we will die is continuously present in each phase of Soares’s life whether as memories, as the experience of life itself in terms of monotony or tedium, or as premonitions of his own eventual death. The Book abounds in explicit reminders of death, the least surprising of which is the death of Soares’s barber (391).
A less direct reminder, which suggests his heightened susceptibility to thoughts of his own eventual extinction, appears when he reflects that “each new autumn is closer to the last autumn we’ll have, and the same is true of spring or summer; but autumn, by its nature, reminds us that things will end” (177). Such thoughts can also be provoked in the absence of any identifiable cause: “Sometimes I feel, I’m not sure why, a touch of foretold death” (41). Perhaps the most poignant of these reminders occurs when Soares transforms various signs of daily life into a cluster of memento mori:
The day will come when I see no more of this, when I’ll be survived by the bananas lining the pavement, by the voices of the shrewd saleswoman, and by the daily papers that the boy has set out on the opposite corner of the street. I’m well aware that the bananas will be others, that the saleswomen will be others, and that the newspapers will show—to those who bend down to look at them—a different date from today’s. But they, because they don’t live, endure, although as others. I, because I live, pass on, although the same. (151)
When death itself is not paramount in Soares’s thoughts, it is often replaced by tedium, which he credits with inducing in him a weariness so pervasive that it can arise even from actions that he does not perform: “In my present tedium there is no rest, no nobility, and no well-being against which to feel unwell: there’s a vast effacement of every act I do, rather than a potential weariness from acts I’ll never do” (365). Having described tedium as “possession by a negative demon” (229), he later elaborates on the idea of its being a kind of jail keeper that confines him to a prison whose walls are boundless: “tedium is the physical sensation of chaos, a chaos that is everything. The bored, the uncomfortable and the weary feel like prisoners in a narrow cell. Those who abhor the narrowness of life itself feel shackled inside a large cell. But those who suffer tedium feel imprisoned in the worthless freedom of an infinite cell.” He concludes that, although the walls of the narrow cell in which the merely bored, uncomfortable, and weary are confined may eventually collapse, “the walls of the infinite cell cannot crumble and bury us, because they don’t exist; nor can we be revived by the pain of shackles that no one has put on us” (316).
The countervailing “visceral logic” that rejects the knowledge that we will eventually die emerges throughout The Book precisely at those moments where we experience the presence of what Soares calls “truly static things [ . . . ] woven by eternity” (304; my emphasis). The appeal of aesthetic stasis—in contrast to the physical inanition that it so closely resembles—is also beautifully expressed by Soares’s imagining “if our life were an eternal standing by the window, if we could remain there for ever, like hovering smoke, with the same moment of twilight forever paining the curve of the hills . . . If we could remain that way for beyond for ever! If at least on this side of the impossible we could thus continue, without committing an action, without our pallid lips sinning another word!” (97). In a similar vein, his description of the beauty of stained-glass windows reminds us that they open upon a timeless scene: “eternal stained-glass windows, hours of naïve design and coloration executed by some artist who for ages has slept in a Gothic tomb on which two angels, their hands pressed together, freeze the idea of death in marble” (289). The parallel between death and art is likewise evoked in Soares’s description of an early-morning scene, in which he appeals to a distinction between “stillness” and “torpor”: “The shops are still closed except for the cafés and dairy bars, but the stillness isn’t one of torpor, like on Sundays—it’s just stillness” (376). This same logic allows Soares to transform monotony, a form of stasis that he had likened to demonic possession, into a desirable goal when he declares that “wise is the man who monotonizes his existence” (153) when he utters a surprising request: “Give me monotony—the dull repetition of the same old days, today an exact copy of yesterday—while my observant soul enjoys the fly that flits past my eyes and distracts me, the laughter that drifts up from I’m not sure which street, the liberation I feel when it’s time to close the office, and the infinite repose of a day off” (154).
While none of the published versions of The Book are truly and definitively final since they are chosen by Pessoa’s editors—and a literary work that is “all middle” rather than being organized according to an Aristotelian beginning-middle-end paradigm can never really conclude—it is interesting to notice that all of the concluding passages chosen by his various editors point our attention, whether by design or not, to the aesthetic transformation of death produced by “visceral logic.” Teresa Sobral Cunha concludes her edition, in fact, with the passage (Text 473 in Richard Zenith’s edition) in which this crucial phrase appears: “We all know that we die; we all feel that we won’t die. It’s not just a desire or hope that brings us this shadowy intuition that death is a misunderstanding; it’s a visceral logic that rejects . . . ” (593).
Both Alfred MacAdam’s and the 1988 French edition translated by Françoise Laye end with Text 27 in Richard Zenith’s. In this passage, transformation is alluded to by the initial assertion that literature is “art wed to thought without the stain of reality,” which then leads Soares to remark, by way of illustration, that “flowers, if they are described with phrases that could define them in the air of imagination, will have colors of a permanence that cellular life does not permit.” The contrast between mortality and the visceral logic that resists it is conveyed even more concisely when Soares declares that “to move is to live, to speak is to survive” (MacAdam 277).
Text 463 in Zenith’s edition, with which Françoise Laye’s 1999 French edition concludes, attributes to “peace” the power of transforming a lower form of existence into a higher that had previously been ascribed to literature: “Peace at last. All that was dross and residue vanishes from my soul as if it had never been” (Zenith 381). This leads to a representation of death from which, as it were, the “stain” of real mortality has been entirely removed: “Go swiftly by, life that’s not felt, a stream flowing silently under forgotten trees! [. . .] go to the shadow or to the light, brother of the world, go to the glory or to the abyss, son of Chaos and of the Night” (381–2).
The final text of Margaret Jull Costa’s translation (Text 441 in Richard Zenith’s edition) begins with Soares making an observation that calls attention to the contrast between darkness and light: “High up in the lonely night an unknown lamp blooms behind a window” (Costa 261). The reciprocity between the blackness of the night and the brightness of the lamp (already conveyed by the idea that one has made the other “bloom”) is then developed in the reverse direction by his remark that “it seems as if it is only because that lamp is lit that the night is so dark” (262). The similar relationship between the experience of nothingness that the dark night arouses and its transformation into literature (“art wed to thought”) is conveyed by the lyrical description with which this text concludes: “I feel this because I feel nothing. I think this because this is all nothing. Nothing, nothing, just part of the night and the silence and of whatever emptiness, negativity and inconstancy I share with them, the space that exists between me and me, a thing mislaid by some God . . . ” (262).
The fullest exploration of the relationship between the ultimacy of death and its aesthetic transformation by “visceral logic” is the one chosen by Richard Zenith for his Penguin edition of The Book. This text begins with Soares entering the local barbershop, whereupon he learns of the death of one of the barbers. His initial reaction is a kind of internalization of death: “The whole of my irrational good mood abruptly died, like the eternally missing barber from the adjacent chair. A chill swept over all my thoughts. I said nothing” (391; my emphasis). He then transforms this “disquieting” reaction into a threefold series of rhythmical repetitions that organize it into a motionless pattern. In the first of these, the death of the barber reminds him of the death of other acquaintances: “The nondescript old man with dirty gaiters who often crossed my path at nine-thirty in the morning . . . The crippled seller of lottery tickets who would pester me in vain . . . The round and ruddy old man smoking a cigar at the door of the tobacco shop . . . The pale tobacco shop owner . . . What has happened to them all, who because I regularly saw them were part of my life?” (392).
In the second of these repetitions, his attention shifts to the eventuality of his own death: “Tomorrow I too will vanish from the Rua da Prata, the Rua dos Douradores, the Rua dos Fanqueiros. Tomorrow I too—I this soul that feels and thinks, this universe I am for myself—yes, tomorrow I too will be the one who no longer walks these streets, whom others will vaguely evoke with a ‘What’s become of him?’” (392). He then concludes with rhythmical enumeration of the three aspects of his life that will disappear with him: “And everything I’ve done, everything I’ve felt and everything I’ve lived will amount to merely one less passer-by on the everyday streets of some city or other” (392).
Taking Soares’s entry into the barbershop as a prologue, we notice that the body of this final text is divided into two parallel parts, each of which begins with a specific event: the actual death of the barber, followed by Soares’s imagined death. Each of these events becomes, in turn, boundless and indeterminate: Soares wonders, at first, “what has happened to them all” and then contemplates the eventual disappearance of “everything.” We further notice that both of these transformations point toward two different forms of eternity: one in which, not only the barber, but all of us will eventually be “missing” and the other created by the emergence of timeless patterns. The stasis of death is, in effect, metamorphosed into the “static movement” of the passage itself.
We began this chapter by arguing that Soares’s “factless autobiography,” despite the tragic overtones with which the author would imbue his destiny, cannot be considered a tragedy in the sense given to this genre by Aristotle in his Poetics, in which plot is judged to be the essential feature. In support of this contention, we adduced Pessoa’s own declaration of his anti-Aristotelian aesthetic as well as Soares’s utter disinterest in writing a work that fulfilled Aristotle’s requirements of magnitude and completeness. However, as we reflect further on the way in which “visceral logic” operates throughout The Book—transforming Soares’s “disquiet” into an aesthetic pleasure bordering on “bliss” —we may suspect an underlying connection—perhaps, even, a profound similarity—between it and what Aristotle called “catharsis.” The relevant passage in the Poetics occurs in Chapter VI in which Aristotle says that tragedy “achieves, through the representation of pitiable and fearful incidents, the catharsis of such pitiable and fearful incidents” (11).
As O. B. Hardison explains in his commentary to the Poetics, what Aristotle apparently had in mind was the idea that tragedy produces a satisfying “clarification” (his choice for the most accurate translation of “catharsis”) of pitiable and fearful events by representing them as parts of an overarching plot whereby the events leading up to the hero’s tragic suffering are shown to be intelligibly related:
The tragic poet begins by selecting a series of incidents that are intrinsically pitiable or fearful [ . . . ] He then presents them in such a way as to bring out the probable or necessary principles that unite them in a single action and determine their relation to this action as its proceeds form its beginning to its end. When the spectator has witnessed a tragedy of this type, he will have learned something—the incidents will be clarified in the sense that their relation in terms of universals will have become manifest—and the act of learning, says Aristotle, will be enjoyable. (117; my emphasis)
Having established that catharsis is essentially achieved by the plot, Hardison then continues: “The modern aesthetician might say that a work of art is successful insofar as it achieves ‘coherence’ and that the discovery of this ‘coherence’ is the essential aesthetic pleasure” (117). As Hardison’s commentary helps us to see, Soares has, in effect, recast “catharsis” as “visceral logic” but with the striking difference that the coherence that he offers throughout The Book is to be found in a “show” that is based, not on the subordination of its individual episodes into an organizing plot, but on the sublimation of Soares’s “disquiet” into an elusive yet nonetheless palpable and gratifying form of immobility.
The “show without a plot” that Pessoa weaves from feeling, dreaming, and thinking—and which rehabilitates the “spectacle” that Aristotle had dismissed—may remind us of Françoise Laye’s remark that The Book is “one of the most explicit as well as the most poetic of the Portuguese ‘saudade,’ reformulated by Pessoa in a highly personal way” (34). Both the saudade (which expresses nostalgic longing) and The Book—like the choral singing that we find in Greek tragedy—have in common the ambition of transforming “disquiet” into a compensatory lyrical expression that sublimates it while implicitly recognizing that no overt action that one could possibly conceive is capable of banishing it. The play that Aristotle singled out for special praise—Sophocles’s Oedipus the King—had, as responses to human suffering, both choral lamentations and a ritualized plot that led to Oedipus’s banishment. Pessoa, foregoing the illusion of a definitive cure to suffering and to the eventuality of death through a salvific sacrificial act, contents himself with its aesthetic transformation.