We should try to give ourselves the illusion of freedom, happiness, and peace, all of which are unattainable, since freedom is a privilege denied even the gods (who are subject to Fate), since happiness cannot be felt by someone exiled from his own faith and from his soul’s natural habitat, and since we cannot pretend to be peaceful when we live in the midst of today’s commotion and know all too well that we’ll die. The work of Ricardo Reis, profoundly sad, is a lucid and disciplined effort to obtain a measure of calm.
His entire stance is based on an interesting psychological phenomenon: a true and real belief in the gods of ancient Greece, with Christ (sometimes considered inimical, but only insofar as he arouses the Christian spirit, which is indeed the ...... enemy of paganism) being admitted as one more god, but not more than that—an idea in accord with paganism and perhaps partly inspired by Alberto Caeiro’s idea (a purely poetic idea) that the Christ Child was “the god who was missing.”*
SENSATIONISM AND OTHER ISMS
Besides generating a diversified trio of heteronymic poets, a team of subheteronymic translators and publicists to promote them, and a “Neo-paganist” ideology (see pp. 147–57) to give philosophical weight to their literary works and psychological weight to their invented personalities, Pessoa also invented literary movements for them to spearhead and promulgate. But far from being limited to Pessoa’s notebooks and papers, these movements infiltrated the Portuguese intellectual milieu of the 1910s, and one could argue that they were the raison d’être of Caeiro, Reis, and Campos, and the reason the heteronyms evolved the way they did. Both points of view may be valid, for in that period of Pessoa’s life there was a startling symbiosis between the written world of his fancy and the literary world at large. IfVertiginism, Abstractionism, Dynamism, and Fusionism weren’t much more than evocative names on one or another statement of artistic principles that perhaps no one but Pessoa ever saw, the movements called Paulismo, Sensationism, and Intersectionism were enthusiastically taken up by his writer friends. And even if Pessoa, as we know from his notes and from several letters, sometimes saw these movements as expendable gimmicks, the fact is that they helped transform Portuguese literature. None of them endured long, but they were the instruments by which Pessoa and his compeers brought Modernism to Portugal, whose literature had perhaps been suffering from too much high seriousness. Some playfulness, even in the form of gimmicks, was bound to have a salutary effect.
The name Paulismo comes from the Portuguese word for swamp, paul, which was the first word (but in the plural, pauis) of one ofPessoa’s first two poems to be published, in February of 1914. He actually wrote the poem a year earlier, and like The Mariner, also written in 1913, it hangs in suspension, with more three-dot ellipses than there are verses. Both works are rarefied products of post-Symbolism, but Pessoa’s one-act play, for all its somewhat unreal, sometimes illogical dialogue, isn’t hard to follow, whereas the poem can’t possibly be followed, since it leads nowhere; we simply have to enter it and float among the words and images, which are often striking. It was published (with another poem) under the title “Twilight Impressions,” and these include a “distant tolling of Other Bells,” the “thin autumn of a vague bird’s song,” and “opium fanfares of future silences.” In one of his notebooks, Pessoa cited this poem as an example of Paulismo by virtue of its “strangeness,” a second poem as an example by virtue of its rhythm, and a third poem by virtue of its “metaphysical uneasiness.” The preceding page in the same notebook characterizes Paulismo as the ultrarefinement of sensation, thought, and expression, while a page from another notebook defines it as “the sincere cultivation of artificiality.” Though it owed most of its genetic endowment to post-Symbolism, Paulismo can be distinguished from its predecessor by its greater self-consciousness, or artificiality, by the deliberateness of its creative process.
Paulismo had no noticeable impact on the poetry of the heteronyms, and in the poetry signed by Pessoa himself it quickly evolved into a less “swampy” style that employed a simpler language. But the orthodox, ultrarefined variety continued to be practiced by Mario de Sá-Carneiro (1890–1916), who was in fact its greatest exponent. Pessoa and Sá-Carneiro met in 1912 and immediately realized that they’d found, in each other, their kindred spirit. The existential dichotomy ofl-who-am-I versus I-who-am-another was, if possible, even greater in Sá-Carneiro than in Pessoa. Or if not greater, at least more in evidence, and more agonizing, for Sá-Carneiro did not have Pessoa’s uncommon capacity for making emotions submit to reason. Pessoa was intellectually distressed by the gap between what he was and what he wanted to be; Sá-Carneiro, because of the same gap, committed suicide. The theme of all but his earliest work was precisely the torment he felt for not living up—in his flesh, in his writing, and even in his imagination—to an ideal of beauty he could only intuit, not define, though it was obviously informed by a Decadent, post-Symbolist aesthetic. In Paulismo he found the perfect vehicle to express, through charged images and linguistic “strangeness,” his anguished vision of an unattainable beauty, and in the space of four years he produced one of the most exquisite poetic oeuvres in Portuguese.
Sensationism was born in 1914, the same year as Pessoa’s major heteronyms, two of whom were its foremost exemplars. Caeiro, whose poetry (according to Thomas Crosse, p. 53) was based on “the substitution of sensation for thought,” embodied the Sensationist doctrine that reality, for us, is summed up in our sensations, since everything we know comes through them. Campos, whose motto was to “feel everything in every way possible,” exemplified the corollary doctrine that since the only reality we have is that of sensations, we should experience them as intensely as possible. Intersectionism, which is a form of Sensationism but seems to have been born first, can be roughly characterized as literary Cubism, whereby reality is broken down into its temporal and spatial components, which are then organized into a compositional ensemble. The best example of this technique is Pessoa’s poem sequence titled “Slanting Rain,” in which contrasting poetic subjects are superimposed, or the same subject is seen from diverse points of view. (See Campos’s description of these poems on p. 50).
But Sensationism and Intersectionism, even more than Paulismo, exceeded the bounds of Fernando Pessoa and his heteronymic company. By the spring of 1914 a small group of writers had gathered around Pessoa, who was not really their leader, since leadership was not a role that suited his personality, but they were his tacit followers, recognizing and feeding off his genius, and some of their ideas no doubt went into the literary doctrines he forged. They met in cafes, where they discussed, showed each other their written work, and plotted how best to launch themselves and their movement, which was tantamount to launching European Modernism in Portugal. Several of the group’s members, including Mario de Sá-Carneiro, were based in Paris, where they had direct contact with the Futurists and the Cubists, whose tenets were incorporated into Sensationism and Intersectionism.
It was probably Pessoa’s idea to create a magazine, significantly titled Europa, whose pages would have featured Intersectionist theory, Inter-sectionist poetry, and Intersectionist fiction. A supplement to the first issue, evidently meant for distribution abroad, would have contained work by Pessoa, Sá-Cameiro, and Alexander Search (one of Pessoa’s early hetero-nyms, see pp. 15–16) in French and English. The magazine idea was superseded by a book idea, an Anthology of Intersectionism, which likewise fizzled, but in 1915 the group founded and published two issues of Orpheu, where five of Pessoa’s masterworks saw print: The Mariner and “Slanting Rain,” signed by his own name, and the Campos poems “Opiary,” “Triumphal Ode,” and “Maritime Ode.” The youngest group member to publish in the magazine, Jose de Almada-Negreiros (1893–1970), went on to have a long career as an experimental writer and painter. Some of his best works were practical demonstrations of Intersectionist theory, and he may be considered the third leader—after Pessoa and Sá-Cameiro—in the triumvirate of Portuguese Modernism. Portugal’s greatest pai
nter of the period, Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso, was also associated with the Orpheu group.
Orpheu succeeded in prompting violent reactions in the press, where a number of scathing reviews and lampoons appeared, and Pessoa’s genius was also noted, even if grudgingly. Though it sold reasonably well, the magazine couldn’t pay its printing bills, and so the third issue never made it beyond galley proofs. But, short as its publishing history was, Orpheu changed the map of Portuguese letters, and it lived on in various avant-garde magazines that were its undeniable heirs, including Exilio (1916), whose one issue published a strident critical piece by Pessoa titled “The Sensationist Movement,” and the likewise single-issue Portugal Futurista (1917), which published Alvaro de Campos’s Ultimatum, written several years earlier as an Intersectionist manifesto.
Preface to an Anthology of the Portuguese Sensationists
Thomas Crosse
Sensationism began with the friendship between Fernando Pessoa and Mário de Sá-Carneiro. It is probably difficult to separate the part each of them had in the origin of the movement, and certainly quite useless to determine it. The fact is they built up the beginnings between them.
But each Sensationist worth mentioning is a separate personality, and they have naturally all interacted. Fernando Pessoa and Mário de Sá-Carneiro stand nearest to the Symbolists. Álvaro de Campos and Almada-Negreiros are the nearest to the more modern style of feeling and writing. The others are intermediate.
Fernando Pessoa suffers from classical culture.
No Sensationist has gone higher than Sá-Carneiro in the expression of what may be called, in Sensationese, colored feelings. (...)
Fernando Pessoa is more purely intellectual; his power lies more in the intellectual analysis of feeling and emotion, which he has carried to a perfection that renders us almost breathless. Of his static drama The Sailor* a reader once said: “It makes the exterior world quite unreal,” and it does. No more remote thing exists in literature. Maeterlinck’s* best nebulosity and subtlety are coarse and carnal by comparison.
José de Almada-Negreiros is more spontaneous and rapid, but he is nonetheless a man of genius. He is younger than the others, not only in age, but in spontaneity and effervescence. His is a very distinct personality, and the wonder is how he came about it so early.
...
How far more interesting than the Cubists and the Futurists!
I never wished to know personally any of the Sensationists, being persuaded that the best knowledge is impersonal.
Álvaro de Campos is excellently defined as a Walt Whitman with a Greek poet inside. He has all the power of intellectual, emotional, and physical sensation that characterized Whitman. But he [also] has the precisely opposite trait—a power of construction and orderly development of a poem that no poet since Milton has attained. Álvaro de Campos’s “Triumphal Ode,” which is written in the Whitmanesque absence of stanza and rhyme, has a construction and an orderly development which stultifies the perfection that “Lycidas,” for instance, can claim in this particular. The “Naval Ode,”* which covers no less than twenty-two pages of Orpheu, is a very marvel of organization. No German regiment ever had the inner discipline which underlies that composition, which, from its typographical aspect, might almost be considered as a specimen of Futurist carelessness. The same considerations apply to the magnificent “Salutation to Walt Whitman,” in the third Orpheu.*
...
The Portuguese Sensationists are original and interesting because, being strictly Portuguese, they are cosmopolitan and universal. The Portuguese temperament is universal: that is its magnificent superiority. The one great act of Portuguese history—that long, cautious, scientific period of the Discoveries—is the one great cosmopolitan act in history. The whole people stamp themselves there. An original, typically Portuguese literature cannot be Portuguese, because the typical Portuguese are never Portuguese. There is something American, with the noise left out and the quotidian omitted, in the intellectual temper of this people. No people seizes so readily on novelties. No people depersonalizes so magnificently. That weakness is its great strength. That temperamental nonregionalism is its unused might. That indefiniteness of soul is what makes them definite.
Because the great fact about the Portuguese is that they are the most civilized people in Europe. They are born civilized, because they are born accepters of all. They have nothing of what the old psychiatrists used to call misoneism, meaning only hatred of things new; they have a positive love of novelty and change. They have no stable elements, as the French have, who make revolutions only for export. The Portuguese are always making revolutions. When a Portuguese goes to bed he makes a revolution, because the Portuguese who wakes up the next day is quite different. He is precisely a day older, quite distinctly a day older. Other people wake up every morning yesterday. Tomorrow is always several years away. Not so this quite strange people. They go so quick that they leave everything undone, including going quick. Nothing is less idle than a Portuguese. The only idle part of the nation is the working part of it. Hence their lack of evident progress.
There are only two interesting things in Portugal—the landscape and Orpheu. All the packing in between is used-up rotten straw. (...) If there were any instinct of the sensible in modern writing, I would begin with the landscape and finish up with Orpheu. But, God be thanked, there is no instinct of the sensible in modern writing, so I leave the landscape and begin and end with Orpheu. (...) Orpheu is the sum and synthesis of all modern literary movements; that is why it is more worthy of being written about than the landscape, which is only the absence of the people who live in it.
“All sensations are good”
All sensations are good, as long as we don’t try to reduce them to action.
An action is a sensation that was thrown away.
Act on the inside, using only the hands of your spirit to pluck flowers on life’s periphery.
Fight against the mental slavery represented by the association of ideas. Learn not to associate ideas but to break your soul into pieces instead. Learn how to experience sensations simultaneously, to scatter your spirit through your own scattered self.
We are completely and dynamically indifferent to social and political life. However much they may interest us, they interest us only as things on which to build fleeting theories and irrelevant hypotheses.
[Intersectionist] Manifesto
All premodern art was based on just one element. This was true for the classical art of paganism as it was for Renaissance art or Romantic art. Only very recently has art begun to evolve outside of this ancient and rigid mold.
The Greeks and Romans (and to a lesser extent the men of the Renaissance) tried to impress, onto the reality of a given object or idea, the sensation it made them feel. But the Romantics realized that reality, for us, is not the object but our sensation of it. They were thus less concerned to present the object itself than to convey their sensation of it. That doesn’t mean they withdrew from Reality; no, they sought it, because our sensation of the object—not the object conceived apart from our sensation—is its true Reality, since outside of our sensation nothing exists, our sensation being for us the criterion of existence. “Man is the measure of all things.” Protagoras’s dictum also applies to truth, in its abstract and absolute sense.
It was the internalization produced by Christianity that led man to notice (unconsciously at first) that the fact of reality, the real fact, is not the object but our sensation of it, which is where it exists. Whether it exists elsewhere we cannot know.
But Romanticism did not see very far. True Reality actually consists in two things—our sensation of the object and the object. Since the object does not exist outside of our sensation—for us, at least, and that’s what matters to us—it follows that true reality consists in our sensation of the object and in our sensation of our sensation.
Classical art was an art of dreamers and madmen. Romantic art, despite its greater intuition of the truth
, was an art of men who were adolescents in their notion of the reality of things but not yet adults in how they felt that reality.
Reality, for us, is sensation. No other immediate reality can exist for us.
Art, whatever it is, must be founded on this element, which is the only one we have.
What is art? The attempt to give as clear and exact a notion as possible of objects, understood not just as outer things but also as our thoughts and mental constructions.
A sensation is composed of two elements: the object of sensation and the sensation itself. All human activity consists in the search for the absolute. Science seeks the absolute Object, meaning the object as independent as possible of our sensation of it. Art seeks absolute Sensation, meaning sensation as independent as possible of the object. Philosophy (that is, Metaphysics) seeks the absolute relationship of the Subject (Sensation) and the Object.
Art seeks Sensation in the absolute. But sensation, as we’e seen, is composed of the Object of sensation and the Sensation itself.
Intersection of the Object with itself: Cubism. (The intersection, that is, of various aspects of the same Object with each other.)
Intersection of the Object with the objective ideas it suggests: Futurism.
Intersection of the Object with our sensation of it: Intersectionism strictly speaking, which is what we propose.
Sensationism
To feel is to create. But what is feeling?
Feeling is thinking without ideas, hence understanding, since the Universe has no ideas.