The Presence of Pessoa by George Monteiro;

Author:George Monteiro; [Monteiro, George]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780813189390
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
Published: 2019-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

It is interesting to note that Oates first published “Letters to Fernandes from a Young American Poet” in 1972, before the overthrow of the nearly fifty-year-old fascist regime in Portugal on April 25, 1974. Pessoa’s own attitude toward Salazar’s regime in its early years and its more moderate stages is summarized by Jacinto do Prado Coelho, one of his most perceptive readers: “In no way, in working out Mensagem, does the author identify with the official nationalism of 1934, catholic-apostolic, monolithic, rapacious and hypocritical, adorned with the fascist rhetoric of imperialist mystic lore.”14 Notably, Pessoa had begun to satirize the character and personality of the architect of the so-called New State in poems he wrote—but knew he could not publish—in the last summer of his life. Jorge de Sena discovered these poems among the poet’s papers in 1954 and published them in 1960 in Brazil and Portugal.15

Not all the stories in The Poisoned Kiss are as suggestively linked to Pessoa as “Letters to Fernandes” seems to be. Yet I would call attention to two or three others that seem to be richly evocative of a Pessoan world. The Pessoa who wrote a trilogy of poems on the Saints—António, João, and Pedro—and the heteronymic Alberto Caeiro who wrote of the return of the baby Jesus to earth in poem 8 of The Keeper of Sheep would have found something familiar in Oates’s opening story. “Our Lady of the Easy Death of Alferce” centers on a statue of the Virgin, which, to her great astonishment, after centuries of holding the baby Jesus with its visage away from her, is finally able to look upon its face when a fanatic breaks the child from her arms and drops him to the floor. Pessoa might also have admired the Pessoan lineaments of “Plagiarized Material,” with its strong touches of Borges and of Kafka’s “The Burrow.” In this penultimate story of The Poisoned Kiss, the famous writer “Cabral” is pleased to write in fragments, much like Pessoa’s semi-heteronym Bernardo Soares in his Book of Disquiet, and is in no hurry to put the pieces together into a single whole.

Cabral had received dozens of letters from magazine editors, begging him for contributions of any length; even paragraphs or parts of paragraphs. And so he had no reason to hurry, to rush his aesthetic theory into print. In fact, he rather liked the method forced upon him by the multiplicity of journals: he believed in fragments, essentially. He preferred fragments. Like those hideous blue and white azulejos found everywhere in the country, his work was basically in parts, not wholes, and must be put together by someone else, someone who believed in the trashy happiness of the total picture. [172]

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