Chapter Four: The Written Voice

“To say! To know how to say! To know how to exist via the written voice and the intellectual image. This is all that matters in life.”

IF WE NOW turn our attention to the narrative technique of The Book, we will not be surprised to discover that Soares brings to it the same quest for “greater completeness” that had led him—with respect to setting, plot, and character—to replace inherited literary conventions with strategies that shape the “narcissistic giddiness” that Marthe Robert attributes to the modernist novel into a new kind of literary monument, one that flaunts its “ruins” rather than hiding them. The ordinary completeness that is achieved by combining dialogue with narration virtually disappears from Soares’s unwritten novel, thus allowing the “written voice” to emerge in its place. This hybrid technique, which produces what we may call a “silent monologue” by blurring the distinction between writing and speaking, allows Soares to write in a way that approximates his speaking voice while achieving kinds of completeness that are not available to ordinary speech.

Text 56, which reads like an especially brief short story, is one of the very few in The Book in which Soares makes conventional use of narration and dialogue. In it, he recounts an episode involving a photograph taken of his boss Vasques, himself, and his fellow employees. This text begins in a conventionally narrative way: “The firm’s monied partner, chronically affected by a grave illness, decided on a whim during one of his healthy respites to have a group portrait made of the office personnel” (56). After providing a few appropriately realistic details surrounding the circumstances of the taking of the photograph, he then shifts to an encounter with two other employees that occurred a couple of days later in which he is confronted with nonnegotiable visual proof of his unimposing physical aspect: “I look like a nondescript Jesuit. My gaunt and inexpressive face has no intelligence or intensity or anything else to raise it out of that lifeless tide of faces” (56). This leads then to a snippet of spoken language, conventionally placed in quotation marks: “‘You came out really well,’ Moreira said suddenly. And then, returning to the sales representative: ‘It’s his spitting image—don’t you think?’” The text then concludes with a brief and laconic bit of narrative commentary: “And the sales representative agreed with a happy affability that tossed me into the rubbish bin” (57).

Similarly, Text 62 opens by establishing the setting of the “story” that will follow: “One of my favorite strolls, on mornings when I dread the banality of the approaching day as if I were dreading jail, is to walk slowly past the still unopened shops and stores, listening to the scraps of conversation that groups of young women or young men, or women with men, let fall—like ironic alms—in the invisible school of my open-air meditation” (62). Soares then offers a paragraph consisting mainly of “scraps of conversation” in which anonymous passersby utter “the same succession of the same old phrases” interspersed with his own brief and unappreciative comments. He then shifts our attention to conversations which he is not actually able to hear but which are, nonetheless, “transparent to my penetrating intuition,” a feat that he illustrates with just one example of quoted speech: “‘The guy was so soused he couldn’t even see the stairs’” (63). The passage then concludes with a narrated account of the effect produced upon him by this “episode” drawn from the daily life of his fellow inhabitants of Lisbon: “Intrigue, gossip, the load boasting over what one didn’t have the guts to do . . . All of this leaves me with the impression of a monstrous and vile animal created in the chaos of dreams, out of desires’ soggy crusts, out of sensations’ chewed-up leftovers” (63).

In Text 74, entitled “Thunderstorm,” an impending storm that has “smudged [the sky] with transparent white” leads the office boy to make a remark that does not, however, elicit a rejoinder from Soares: “‘I can only remember one other like this,’ he statistically remarked.” In place of a response that may have led to yet another “scrap of conversation,” Soares launches into an impressionistic rendering of the scene: “A cold silence. The sounds from the street seemed to be cut by a knife. Then there was a long, cosmically held breath, a kind of generalized dread” (73). In one final example, from among the few available ones, Soares devotes nearly the entirety of Text 370 to a series of “Little nonsense phrases inserted into a conversation we pretend to be having.” What follows is a series of disconnected phrases that he describes as “meaningless affirmations made from the ashes of other, equally meaningless affirmations” (305). The text itself concludes with Soares telling us that he created this purely imaginary conversation for “The two figures sitting at the table set for tea” and then inventing for them omniscient authorial summary of their future lives in which “they go their separate ways, each marrying someone else” (307).

As these examples are likely to suggest, Soares himself has little gift for conversation. Experience has taught him that “The words of others are mistakes of our hearing, shipwrecks of our understanding” (277) and he admits that “I feel physically nauseated by the voice and gestures of my so-called fellow man” (264). Equally revelatory passages occur when he alludes to some obstacle preventing the proper exercise of his own “spoken voice.” He wonders, for example, how his voice will sound to others (283) and hesitates one day at the market to ask the price of bananas because the vendor “might find my voice strange” (152). He likewise thinks of his voice as being “echoed in the echoing cloister of my inglorious isolation” (31), describes it as getting “caught, as if there were a strange audacity in saying these words out loud” (121), and admits that “I dread the gestures I have to make and am intellectually shy about the words I have to speak” (283).

The marginalizing of actual speech caused by Soares’s inhibition prepares for its “return” in sublimated forms that are more “complete” in that they unite the act of speaking with something that it normally excludes. This happens, for example, when Soares notices the musicality of certain voices as when he hears “the voice of an evening crier, crying I don’t know what but with a sound that stands out—an Arabian chant like the sudden patter of a fountain—against the monotony of twilight” (14). Text 408 is similarly devoted to his recollection of a street singer who “sang in a kind of stupor, a kind of ecstasy right there in the street, his gaze oblivious to his listeners” (337). At one point, he even offers his own contribution to the music of voices: “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” (13).

At other times, real voices will be transformed into metaphorical ones, as when he imagines that “the voice of space becomes a shout” (242) or tells us that “the washed plates raise their voice of water and porcelain” (326). A similar effect is achieved when he observes that “the noises from the street talk in a loud and detached voice” (194) or when he hears a voice in “the sounds made by what the wind lifts up or sweeps forward” (178). Likewise, the sounds of Lisbon in the early morning speak to him in a convivial way that relieves him of his grief: “There’s just the sound of the first tram, like a match to light up the soul’s darkness, and the loud steps of my first pedestrian, which are concrete reality telling me in a friendly voice not to be this way” (95). Imagined voices sing to him when he observes, following the end of a rainstorm, that “the vehicles sang a different song, louder and happier, and windows could be heard opening up to the no longer forgetful sun” (31). Yet another virtual voice emerges when, striving to express the impossible things evoked by music or the night, he finds that “As if a long, horizontal peace had raised its voice, the risen voice crashes and then calms, and a dribbling can be heard up and down the invisible beach” (93).

In a particularly insightful moment– a kind of “Eureka” in which he discovers the cure for his allergy to speaking, not in the repression of speech but in its transformation into writing—Soares says: “To say! To know how to say! To know how to exist via the written voice and the intellectual image. This is all that matters in life; the rest is men and women, imagined love and factitious vanities, the wiles of our digestion and forgetfulness, people squirming—like worms when a rock is lifted—under the huge abstract boulder of the meaningless blue sky” (108; my emphasis). This written voice doubtlessly satisfies the desire for “absolute ownership” that, as we saw in the chapter on setting, Soares attributes to “finding ourselves alone in a place that is normally full of people” (338). It allows him, in effect, to create a sublimated form of speaking that does not implicate him in what he calls “the metaphysically morbid impulse” (184) of coexisting with others, which necessarily places him at a disadvantage.

The written voice is not, to be sure, entirely unproblematic. Soares admits, for example, that “writing is like the drug that I abhor and keep taking, the addiction I despise and depend on” (137). He confirms this view of writing as a therapy that uncannily resembles the ailment that it was intended to cure in Text 231, which offers a compelling series of reflections that cast it in a highly unfavorable light, including the admission that he writes because he has not perfected the art of renunciation as well as the recognition that “the greatest punishment is to know that whatever I write will be futile, flawed and uncertain” (200). At moments in which he is assailed by an especially heightened sense of futility, words themselves seem reduced to unintelligible markings: “I’m looking at the grimy white blotting paper, tacked down at the corners and spread out over the advanced age of the slanted desk top. I examine the crossed out scribbles of concentration and distraction” (96). He will even go so far as to question his literary talent itself: “And it suddenly occurs to me how much more eloquently a great prose stylist would say this [ . . . ] But I don’t have an eloquent style” (279–80), a failing that he relates to a profound existential crisis: “I’m unable to write because I’m unable to be” (314). Even those moments when he feels assured of his talent fail to bring him the expected satisfaction: “Even writing has lost its appeal. To express emotions in words and to produce well-wrought sentences has become so banal . . . something I do [ . . . ] without real enthusiasm or brilliance” (386).

However, unlike speaking, to which Soares is unremittingly allergic, his written voice manages to survive the conviction of futility that it inspires. Among the more charming passages in The Book are those in which Soares bravely manages actually to create a kind of reciprocity between failure and achievement. He tells us somewhat defiantly that “I carry my awareness of defeat like a banner of victory” (54), an assertion that reappears in his claim that “I prefer a defeat that knows the beauty of flowers to a victory in the desert” (175).

Writing, in effect, allows Soares to give voice to his frustration in a productive way. In many places, we notice, in fact, that the words that he uses to express his eventual disillusionment are so much less effective and memorable than the somewhat routine expressions that he uses to express his initial pleasure in writing: “I imagined myself the poet of my prose, in the winged moments that welled up in me . . . And today, rereading, I see my dolls bursting, the straw coming out of their torn seams, eviscerated without ever having been . . . ” (150). Soares also sees that imperfection—rather than being simply a flaw in writing, may actually contribute to its success: “I weep over my imperfect pages, but if future generations read them, they will be more touched by my weeping than by any perfection I might have achieved, since perfection may have kept me from weeping and, therefore, from writing” (65). To this, he adds the observation that “We’re well aware that every creative work is imperfect and that our most dubious aesthetic contemplation will be the one whose object is what we write. But everything is imperfect” (12). The idea that, despite its imperfections, the written voice—even more than dreaming—gives us access to the otherwise “silent speech” of human desire comes to the fore when Soares asserts that “Literature—which is art married to thought, and realization untainted by reality—seems to me the end towards which all human effort would have to strive, if it were truly human and not just a welling up of our animal self” (30).

The written voice also provides access to a mutual relationship with a virtual community of future readers that far exceeds the actual community of Lisboetas with whom he had had such difficulty in speaking: “It sometimes occurs to me, with sad delight, that if one day (in a future to which I won’t belong) the sentences I write are read and admired, then at last I’ll have my own kin, people who ‘understand’ me, my true family in which to be born and loved” (167). He likewise declares, in the opening words of Text 260, that “Art consists in making others feel what we feel, in freeing them from themselves by offering them our own personality” (225). Soares similarly wonders—presciently, in the event—“if my apparently negligible voice might not embody the essence of thousands of voices, the longing for self-expression of thousands of lives, the patience of millions of souls resigned like my own to their daily lot, their useless dreams, and their hopeless hopes” (16). He reiterates this idea when he speculates that “What I write, bad as it is, may provide some hurt or sad soul a few moments of distraction from something worse. That’s enough for me, or it isn’t enough, but it serves some purpose, and so it is with all of life” (22).

A comparable form of reciprocity with childhood—from which he had otherwise been separated by the intervening years—is yet another collateral benefit of the written voice, as we discover when Soares observes of his particular way of writing that “I unwind myself like a multicoloured skein, or I make string figures of myself, like those woven on spread fingers and passed from child to child” (21), he tells us at one point; at another, with an implicit “defense and illustration” of The Book surely in mind, he reflects that “The art of children is in non-realization” (406). Pessoa himself said as much about his own work in general:

My writings were none of them finished; new thoughts intruded ever, extraordinary, in excludable associations of ideas bearing infinity for term. I cannot prevent my thoughts hatred of finish; about a single thing ten thousand thoughts, and ten thousand inter-associations of these ten thousand thoughts arise, and I have no will to eliminate or arrest these, nor to gather them into one central thought, where their unimportant but associated details may be lost. (Always Astonished 3)

Thanks, once again, to his written voice, Soares—like children and also like the legendary Sigismund, King of Rome, who claimed to be “above all grammar”—is able to violate the principles of correct syntax at will. He discovers, upon reflection, that his approach to writing is guided by two principles: first, “to express what one feels exactly as it is felt—clearly if it is clear; obscurely if obscure; confusedly, if confused” and, second, “to understand that grammar is an instrument and not a law” (81).

In Text 370, Soares’s claim to be “above all grammar” leads him to declare—via an imaginary conversation between two speakers in which his presence as their ventriloquist is nonetheless apparent—that “I’ve always despised knowing the correct way to say something . . . All I ever liked in grammar books were the exceptions and pleonasms . . . To dodge the rules and say useless things sums up the essentially modern attitude. Did I say that correctly? . . . ” (307). This “conversation” by proxy then continues with an admiring remark about a friend who “was going to dedicate his life to destroying verbs . . . ” and who “wanted to discover and develop a way for surreptitiously not completing sentences” (307). Appropriately, Soares’s cavalier attitude towards syntax coexists in a perfectly reciprocal way with his extreme respect for it, which we notice, for example, in his claim that “There is no enduring emotion without syntax. Immortality depends on the grammarians” (199), to which he adds an especially furious note when he claims, in a charming variation on the adage about hating the sin but not the sinner, that “I hate with genuine hatred, with the only hatred I feel, not those who write bad Portuguese, not those whose syntax is faulty, not those who used phonetic rather than etymological spelling, but the badly written page itself, as if it were a person, incorrect syntax, as someone who ought to be flogged” (225).

Text 332 is just one of so many passages in which Soares’s dutiful respect for correctness is on display:

No problem has a solution. None of us can untie the Gordian knot; either we give up or we cut it. We brusquely resolve intellectual problems with our feelings, either because we’re tired of thinking, or because we’re afraid to draw conclusions, or because of an inexplicable need to latch on to something, or because of a gregarious impulse to return to other people and to life. Since we can never know all the factors that a problem entails, we can never solve it. To arrive at the truth we would need more data, along with the intellectual resources for exhaustively interpreting the data. (280)

The text entitled “Kaleidoscope,” on the other hand, provides a perfect example of a passage that flouts conventional syntax, albeit in a poetically effective way that presumably does not invite being “flogged”:

Don’t speak . . . You happen too much . . . If only I didn’t see you . . . When will you be just a fond memory of mine? How many women you’ll be until that happens! And my having to suppose I can see you is an old badge no one uses . . . Yes, this is life. The others have dropped their oars . . . The cohorts have lost their discipline . . . The knights left at daybreak with the sound of their lances . . . Your castles passively waited to be deserted . . . No wind abandoned the rows of trees on the summit . . . Useless porticos, hidden silverware, prophetic signs—all of this belongs to vanquished twilights in ancient temples and not to our meeting in this present moment, for there is no reason for lindens to give shade apart from your fingers and their belated gesture . . . All the more reason for remote territories . . . Treaties signed by stained-glass kings . . . Lilies from religious pictures . . . Whom is the retinue waiting for? . . . Where did the lost eagle go? (333–4)

We notice in this passage that, despite the interruptions created by the first three ellipses (and which are, in fact, optional in the sense that could have been replaced by periods) the sentence begins correctly enough: both individual words and their arrangement conform to the conventions of standard prose.

A shift in the direction of the poetic—which is a hallmark of Soares’s written voice—begins, however, with the emergence within the context of the phrase “old badge,” which Soares uses as a metaphor for his sense of obligation. This is then followed by an ellipsis, that, unlike its three predecessors, is “poetic” in the sense that it requires a certain cognitive leap in order that we establish an intelligible connection between the elements that it joins. This shift then gains in amplitude and intensity as the passage continues. We observe, in particular, that the incorrect syntax that spreads like a contagion through this passage is produced by the reciprocal activity of ellipses and metaphors—both the presence of prosaic words made poetic and their suppression via ellipses—as though both techniques were interchangeable or, as it were, in “perfect equilibrium” with each other.

The possibility of achieving poetic effects by violating normal syntax is beautifully expressed in Text 19, in which Soares speaks of “The magic power of words in isolation or joined together on the basis of sound, with inner reverberations and divergent meanings even as they converge, the splendour of phrases inserted between the meanings of other phrases, the virulence of vestiges, the hope of the woods, and the absolute peacefulness of the ponds on the farms of my childhood ruses” (25; my emphasis). This evocation of words that are isolated from each other—or connected to each other in ways that dispense with conventional syntax—may remind us of an intriguing remark that Roland Barthes makes about haiku in The Preparation of a Novel. The fragments of a haiku, Barthes says, are “present to one another yet they’re not connected; a mode of co-presence that’s very difficult to conceptualize: to conceive of a co-presence without it being metonymical, antithetical, causal, etc.; a consecution without logic yet without signifying the destruction of logic: a neutral connection—such would be the surface of a collection of haiku (33; my emphasis).

The “neutral connections” that can be equally achieved either by isolating words or by joining them together—thus producing what Soares called, in another context, “Siamese twins that aren’t attached” (20)—may be noticed in the ambiguous effect that he achieves through his use of ellipses. At times, he will use them (especially in the medial position) in a perfectly prosaic way in order to mark a pause for which a simple period may have sufficed: “I did my best to lose all attachment to life . . . In time I even shed my desire for glory” (217); “To begin with somebody else’s creation, working only on improving it . . . Perhaps that is how the Iliad was written.” (250); “No, others don’t exist . . . It’s for me that this heavy-winged sunset lingers, its colour hard and hazy” (268); “The voice of brooks that you interpret, pure explicator . . . The voice of trees whose rustling means what we say it means . . . Ah, my unknown love, this is all just us and our fantasies, all ash, trickling down the bars of our cell!” (277).

An equally prosaic effect is created in the several places where Soares has left a blank space in places where he couldn’t decide on the appropriate word. At such moments, our recognizing the author’s hesitation does not provoke even the slightest emergence of the poetic: “His religion was far from the common people and the ” (53); “My hazy but constant sensibility and my long but conscious dream which together form my privilege of a life in the shadows” (165); “Ah, what transcendental sensuousness when at night” (197); “who’s to say that sickness wasn’t preferable or more logical or more than health” (216); “this is the substance from which I carve the imaginary statue of my existence” (216); “The creators of metaphysical systems and of psychological explanations are still in the primary stages of suffering. What is systematizing and explaining but and construction?” (341).

Poetic effects do emerge within this prosaic surface, however, when Soares uses initial and terminal ellipses to enclose a fragment, in such away as to create a reciprocity between completion and incompletion. This strategy produces a “greater completeness” in which the ellipses, while signifying that a piece is missing, also create an aesthetically satisfying experience of closure. Examples include:

“ . . . the sacred instinct of having no theories . . . ” (218)

“ . . . where, curled up on a bench in a railway station, my contempt dozes in the cloak of my discouragement . . . ” (22)

“ . . . the world of dreamed images which are the sum of my knowledge as well as of my life . . . ” (22)

“ . . . and a deep and weary disdain for all those who work for mankind, for all those who fight for their country and give their lives so that civilization may continue . . . ” (37) “ . . . in the sad disarray of my confused emotions . . . ” (47)

“ . . . Absurdity, confusion, oblivion – everything that isn’t life . . . ” (34)

“ . . . with a drawling, moribund murmur, with no light in the increasing light, the rumble of the storm subsided in the distant expanses – it circled over Almada . . . ” (194)

A variant of this technique involves replacing the initial ellipsis with the conjunction “and” which, for a brief moment, is not merely a serviceably prosaic device for transitioning from one element of a sentence to another, but, paradoxically, a sign of disconnection:

“And then it seemed . . . ” (52)

“And they were from the same human race . . . ” (191)

“And thus I’m able . . . ” (212)

“And every sensation is an illusion . . . ” (301)

“And they are shadows, shadows . . . ” (80)

Another technique that produces reciprocities between closure and openness involves Soares’s writing sentences that appear to be syntactically complete, but in which a terminal ellipsis creates the effect of incompletion:

“The distant idylls alongside streams grieve me in this inwardly analogous moment . . . ” (102)

“The rain groans as it listlessly batters the panes . . . ” (126)

“I can’t be certain of the right course of action, nor verify whether the goals have been achieved . . . ” (131)

“My mother died too soon for me to ever know her . . . ” (228)

“Hear me out and then tell me if dreaming isn’t better than life . . . ” (248)

“You are nothing but wings . . . ” (263)

The co-presence of poetic and prosaic effects that we notice in Soares’s use of ellipses may be also observed in the way that Soares shifts between literal and figurative uses of the actual words of The Book. We notice, for instance, that he uses the word “height” in a simple and unproblematically literal way when, speaking of himself, he refers to his “five feet six inches of height” (71) and rewards himself at another with the compensatory observation that when we stand atop a mountain” with our own added height, even higher than the summits” (72). Figurative language, albeit of a comparatively low order of intensity, emerges when he alludes to “the height of wisdom” (158) achieved by a civilization that recognizes the futility of effort, a “dead” metaphor to which he returns when he affirms, in practically the same breath, that the ability to recognize the insignificance of our suffering is both “the beginning of wisdom” and “the height of wisdom” (350).

Figurative resonances intensify, however, when Soares creates an unexpected reciprocity while imagining “the vast wavering mountains known as oceans, which hold the majesty of height in the secret of their depths” (112; my emphasis). A similarly poetic transformation of an erstwhile prosaic word occurs when he observes of the passing clouds that they are “meaningless in the heights of the exhausted sky” (180), or, most powerfully and uncannily of all, when he describes his emotional state as “merely this useless sky’s reflection in a lake in me – a lake secluded among steep rugged rocks, perfectly still, a kind of dead man’s gaze in which the heights distractedly observe themselves” (196).

The word “river,” in its turn, makes many literal appearances, as when Soares, thinking specifically of the Tagus, alludes to “the forever changing views of the wide river and its Atlantic estuary” (23) or when, with a different river in mind, he remembers that “Sometimes I spend hours at the Rerreiro do Paço, next to the river, meditating in vain” (101-2) and that “Often enough, I’ve wanted to cross the river – those ten minutes from the Terreiro do Paço to Cacilhas” (111). A shift to the figurative occurs, however, when “a landscape made for wild ducks unrolls in my imagination,” to evoke a “great and abandoned river [whose] true shore can be glimpsed lying in the depthless distance” (51). Comparable shifts include his desire to “flow like an enchanted river across gentle slopes of my own self, ever further into unconsciousness and the Far-away, to no end but God” (90), his announcement that “the great rivers of non-worlds have flown sovereignly under my watching eyes” (123), and his evocation of “the long leaves of obscene trees whose branches sway on the echoing banks of the soul’s infernal rivers” (137).

Likewise clouds are merely literal when Soares observes “A ray of sunlight, a cloud whose shadow tells us it is passing” (149), but then become figurative when he compares his ideas to “windblown clouds” (44), notices that “clouds smother the light with blankets of moisture” (154), or describes them, in an extended personification, as “like me, a ravaged passage between sky and earth, at the mercy of an invisible impulse, thundering or not thundering, whitely giving joy or blackly spreading gloom, stray fictions in the gap, far from the earth’s noise but without the sky’s peace” (180). Journeys, which include such prosaic examples as a ride on a tram (253-4) and train trip to Cascais (254), shift to a poetic register when Soares evokes “the Ulyssean journey through all experiential sensations” (113), compares his dreams to “journeys to unknown, imagined, or simply impossible countries” (348), and claims that “the ritual purpose of the journey was to go in search of nonexistent ports” (461).

When we look more closely at the emergence of poetic figures within the prosaic texture of The Book, we notice that it occurs in the three quite distinct forms of amplification, contradiction, and comparison. Like ellipses, all of these figures create reciprocities where we would expect to find mutual exclusions, although they do this in quite different ways. At first glance, ellipses imply incompletion; as we have already noticed, however, Soares’s ellipses often create co-presences between fragmentation and wholeness. Poetic figures, for their part, implicitly assert the presence of an underlying connection between the words that they comprise. Soares’s figures, however, are often so resistant to logical analysis that they will remind us of Roland Barthes’s remark that the fragments of a haiku are “present to one another yet they’re . . . not connected.”

Amplification frequently appears in the form of hyperbole, a figure that, by definition, illustrates Barthes’s remark about “a mode of co-presence that is very difficult to conceptualize.” We notice this effect, for example, in Soares’s description of the nightly routine of going to bed: “Behind me, on the other side of where I’m lying down, the silence of the house touches infinity” (34). At one point, the futile act of waiting for he knows not what leads him to reflect that “in the end there would be nothing but a slow falling of night, with the whole of space gradually turning the colour of the darkest clouds, which little by little would vanish into the abolished mass of the sky” (51). This example actually contains a sequence of figures that are disproportionate to their occasion, beginning with the relatively banal “slow falling of night,” mounting to a higher level of exaggeration involving “the whole of space,” and culminating in the superlative hyperbole in which it “vanish[es] into the abolished mass of the sky.”

Barthes’s “neutral connections” reappear when Soares admits that he dreads “the banality of the approaching day as if I were dreading jail” (62) and when he confides to his readers that daily contact with his fellow inhabitants “leaves me with the impression of a monstrous and vile animal created in the chaos of dreams, out of desires’ soggy crusts, out of sensations’ chewed-up leftovers” (63). Parallelism joins with hyperbole in Text 162 to create an echoing hyperbole when Soares laments that “my pride was stoned by blind men, my disillusion trampled on by beggars.” In Text 69, the preparatory use of the positive and comparative forms of the same adjective leads to a hyperbolic leap into an unexpected superlative: “It’s raining hard, harder, still harder . . . It’s as if something were going to collapse in the blackness outside” (68). In this example, the use of a standard grammatical device to suggest intensification is replicated, but also greatly intensified, by the extrapolation involved in the sudden (and discontinuous) leap into the figure with which the sentence concludes.

Amplification also emerges in Soares’s use of climax, a rhetorical poetic figure in which words, phrases, or clauses are arranged in the order of their ascending intensity, which, once again, creates a movement towards “neutral connection.” We notice its relatively simple appearance in Soares’s threefold enumeration of the delights that he experiences in his dream about the “marvelous islands” in the South Seas: “It would all be repose, artistic achievement, the intellectual fulfillment of my being” (17). At times, Soares will introduce a variant of the figure of climax by concluding a sequence with a terminal ellipse, thus creating an effect of boundless amplification: “I realize that there are islands to the South and great cosmopolitan attractions and . . . ” (24); “we all desire more perfect life, complete happiness, the fulfillment of our dreams and . . . ” (52); “the capes I rounded with my imagination and the beaches where I landed with my . . . ” (114); “To deny, like the Buddha, its absolute reality; to deny, like Christ, its relative reality; to deny . . . ” (120). An amusing inversion of this movement towards alogical connections occurs in examples of “anti-climax,” as when Soares reflects that “There is, at this hour, a disquieting harmony, extending from the visible invisibility of everything to the slightly rough wood of the white sill, where my left hand rests sideways on the old, cracked paint” (49).

One of the most obvious figures to fall under the category of contradiction is paradox. Pessoa himself said that “all truth has a paradoxical form” (Always Astonished 30), and Soares, as though in compliance with this principle, fills The Book with paradoxes, which, appropriately, range from the intelligible to the fathomless. At the lower end of the ladder, we notice such commonplace paradoxes as “to find personality by losing it” (37), “renunciation is liberation” (111), and “not wanting is power” (111). Moving upwards, we find temporal contradictions such as “like remembrances of what was to come” (between 22 and 31) and “an absurd remembrance of my future death (68) as well as logical contradictions that include his advice that we “let the secrets you tell be secrets you’ve never had” (292) and his description of “a deserted street with people in it” (282). Soares’s fondness for this particular figure seemingly leads him to find it even when the opportunity does not present itself in any obvious way. Thus, he reflects that “whether or not they exist, we’re slaves to the gods” (26), says of an old man seen from his window that “he’s attentive to what doesn’t exist” (59) and of himself that “I’ll be walking down a street as if I were sitting down, and my attention, although alert to everything, will have the inertia of a body completely at rest” (45).

Syllepsis, a rhetorical figure in which a word is made to refer to two or more words in a sentence even though it applies only to one of them literally, produces some especially memorable “neutral connections” in The Book. Among them we find: “I’ve arrived at Lisbon but not at a conclusion” (23); “To choose the wheat or to choose the many was the same” (25); “Forgotten my umbrella and the dignity of my soul” (38); “Pain as of a choked sob or a discovered truth” (47); “A landscape for hunters and anxieties” (51); “As slumber of mysteries and battlements” (128); “I’m suffering from a headache and the universe” (279).

Non-sequitors, which are produced by an inference or a conclusion that does not follow logically from a premise, provide yet another facet of Soares’s repertoire of incongruities. They include such “presences without connection” as: “Women who crochet because life exists” (21); “Everything was sleeping as if the universe were a mistake” (35); “A vast calm made me wish I’d been sleeping” (35); “the sordid monotony of their lives . . . makes me apocryphal and beggarly” (37-8); “a certainty that makes me want to die singing” (47); “Not another sound can be heard except the sounds of the whole city” (98).

The same fluctuation that we observe, with respect to figures involving amplification and contradiction, between examples in which the connections among terms are relatively intelligible and those in which they tend towards the unfathomable may be noticed in the countless metaphors and similes that create comparisons throughout The Book. Intelligibility comes to the fore in such examples as Soares likening his “worthless self” to “an indissoluble residue at the bottom of a glass” (21), the ebb and flow of “[his] confused consciousness” to “two tides in the black night” (36), and his despair to “the sudden feeling of being imprisoned in an infinite cell” (45). Likewise, when he compares life to “a roadside inn” (12) or concludes that “the entire life of a human soul is mere motions in the shadows” (63) we sense that we are on reasonably familiar ground.

The connections involved in many of Soares’s similes and metaphors, however, are so tenuous as to remind us of Samuel Johnson’s celebrated remark about poetic figures in which “the most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together.” Examples include his comparing the “sound of the first tram” in the morning to “a match to light up soul’s darkness” (95), his leap from “incongruities” to “hedges separating deserted paths, suppositions like old pools” (47), his claim that “certain intuitions are like seagulls” (51). This pursuit of “neutral connections” likewise leads Soares to say of “the treading of the last lost men” that it “sounded ever so lightly, their dragging steps opening nothings in the restless greenery” (25), to observe of himself that “with my hands in the pockets of my posthumous coat, I strolled down the avenue of my small room” (31) and that “I promenade my conscious unconsciousness along my tree branch of the usual” (43-4).

Soares prepares us to appreciate yet another hallmark of the “written voice” when he elaborates at some length on the distinction between the “Babelish” language of particularity and the “Adamic” language of universality:

There are basically only two things in our earthly experience: the universal and the particular. To describe the universal is to describe what is common to all human souls and to all human experience—the broad sky, the day and night occurring in and by it; the flowing of rivers, all with the same fresh and nunnish water; the vast waving mountains known as oceans, which hold the majesty of height in the secret of their depths; the fields, the seasons, houses, faces, gestures; clothes and smiles; love and wars; gods both finite and infinite; the formless Night, mother of the world’s origin; Fate, the intellectual monster that is everything . . . Describing these or any other universals, my soul speaks the primitive and divine language, the Adamic tongue that everyone understands. But what splintered, Babelish language would I use to describe the Santa Justa Lift, the Reims Cathedral, the breeches worn by the Zouaves, or the way Portuguese is pronounced in the province of Tràs-os-Montes? These are surface differences, the ground’s unevenness, which we can feel by walking but not by our abstract feeling. (112)

Having distinguished between the languages proper to the universal and the particular, however, he then continues by suggesting—in a remark that will remind us of his quest for “greater completeness”—that the two, however distinct from each other they may be, are, at the same time, reciprocal:

What’s universal in the Santa Justa Lift is the mechanical technology that makes life easier. What’s true in the Reims Cathedral is neither Reims nor the Cathedral but the religious splendor of buildings dedicated to understanding the human’s soul’s depths. What’s eternal in the Zouaves breeches is the colourful fiction of clothes, a human language whose social simplicity is, in a certain way, a new nakedness. What’s universal in local accents is the homely tone of voice in those who live spontaneously, the diversity within groups, the multicoloured parade of customs, the differences between peoples, and the immense variety of nations. (112; my emphasis)

The idea that the universal and the particular may, indeed, be two interchangeable ways of perceiving the same thing reappears in Soares’s remark that “The world is a set of distinct things with varied edges, but if we’re nearsighted, it’s a continual and indecipherable fog.” (148) as well as in his observation that “Over the diversely high rooftops the light lets its hands slip away until, in the unity of those same rooftops, the inner shadow of everything emerges” (190). At another point, he notices the way that the diverse group of pedestrians that passes by on the street coalesces into a unifying image: “Whirls, whirlpools, in life’s fluid fluidity! In this large downtown square, the soberly multicoloured flow of people passes by, changes course, forms pools, divides into streams, converges into brooks” (79). In a similar way, he speculates that “perhaps it’s this skepticism vis-à-vis our understanding that makes me look at a tree and a face, a poster and a smile, in exactly the same way. (Everything is natural, everything is artificial, everything equal)” (299).

One of the most extended illustrations of the reciprocity between the particular and the universal occurs in Text 70, which presents a street scene that begins with a brief sequence of particularities but ends with an Adamic vision that transforms even the most fundamental of distinctions into reciprocities. The text begins with Soares, who is walking along a street in Lisbon, suddenly noticing a fellow pedestrian: “He carried an old briefcase under his left arm and his right hand held the curved handle of a rolled-up umbrella, which he tapped on he ground to the rhythm of his walking” (68-69). The “tenderness” that Soares feels for this particular man then leads to a universalizing perception of their common humanity: “I feel an enormous tenderness that encompasses the whole of childish humanity, the whole of sleeping society, everyone, everything” (69). The concluding phase of this lengthy text elaborates in a prolonged and rhapsodic way on the co-presence of unity and diversity:

The whole lot is just like him: the girls chatting on their way to the workshop, the young men laughing on their way to the office, the big-bosomed maids returning with their heavy purchases, the delivery boys running their first errands—all of this is one and the same unconsciousness, diversified among different faces and bodies, like marionettes moved by strings leading to the same fingers of an invisible hand. They go on their way with all the manners and gestures that define consciousness, and they’re conscious of nothing, for they’re not conscious of being conscious. Whether clever or stupid, they’re all equally stupid. Whether old or young, they’re all the same age. Whether men or women, all are of the same sex that doesn’t exist. (70)

The quasi-mystical vision of the unity of all things with which this passage concludes may remind us that Soares’s own personal experience is of the irremediable conflict between dream and reality that resulted from the loss of unity. No sooner does Soares desire something than satisfaction is denied to him, as though the stumbling block that he encounters on the path to fulfillment were intrinsic to the path itself. If he wants to speak, an inhibition intervenes to assure that he won’t; the nubile girl that he sees on the street has (or so he surmises) a boyfriend; he can’t play with his toys because the gods have taken them from him; if he wants to know who he is, the answer is withheld from him; his dubious self-promotion as a superior man inevitably produces reminders of his actual mediocrity.

Soares adopts the “written voice” as the narrative medium in which he will compose his “factless autobiography” precisely because it provides him with a way of redeeming on the level of literary creation the otherwise unresolvable opposition between what he wants from life and what it gives him. It allows him to transform contradiction into complementarity and (recalling his own words) to see a hindrance as a marvel and a problem as a path. Soares offers us—in the form of yet another double-stranded Ariadne’s thread—an even more clarifying guide through the meandering paths of The Book when, in Text 204, he describes his fall in terms of a gap—“I’m the gap between what I am and am not, between what I dream and what life made of me” (180) and then likens his writing to a ray of light: “The only tolerable form of communication is the written word, since it isn’t a stone in a bridge between souls but a ray of light between stars” (185). It is thanks to writing that Soares is able to bypass the “stone in a bridge” of speaking and to leap, without the slightest fear of falling, from the narcissistically disquieting observation that “the universe isn’t mine” to the narcissistically giddy conviction that “it’s me” (112).