Fernando Pessoa: A Critical Introduction by Jerónimo Pizarro (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Fernando Pessoa: A Critical Introduction by Jerónimo Pizarro Paulo de Medeiros Jerónimo Pizarro, Fernando Pessoa: A Critical Introduction (Brighton, Chicago, IL, Toronto: Sussex Academic Press, 2021). xv + 230 pages. Print and ebook. Bartholomew Ryan, Giovanbattista Tusa and Antonio Cardiello (eds), Fernando Pessoa and Philosophy: Countless Lives Inhabit Us (Lanham, MD, Boulder, CO, New York, London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2021). xlvi + 387 pages. Print and ebook. Irene Ramalho-Santos, Fernando Pessoa and the Lyric: Disquietude, Rumination, Interruption, Inspiration, Constellation (Lanham, MD, Boulder, CO, New York, London: Lexington Books, 2022). x + 179 pages. Print and ebook. Have we entered a kind of Golden Age of Pessoa studies, and if so, will it last? Or are we merely witnessing a flash in the pan, no more than another ephemeral contingency in the annals of criticism? Divining scholarly trends is a bit like reading a crystal ball: though usually harmless, and possibly even entertaining, it is best left alone. Nonetheless, the recent publication, in English, of several notable studies of Fernando Pessoa deserves special notice. I am here referring specifically to Jerónimo Pizarro’s Fernando Pessoa: A Critical Introduction (2021), the multi-authored volume edited by Bartholomew Ryan, Giovanbattista Tusa and Antonio Cardiello on Fernando Pessoa and Philosophy (2021), as well as to Irene Ramalho-Santos’s Fernando Pessoa and the Lyric (2022). But I could equally add to these Richard Zenith’s monumental Pessoa: An Experimental Life (Allen Lane, 2021) and Nick Burns’s article in The New Left Review, ‘The Politics of Fernando Pessoa’ (2021). In a sense the latter two, though quite different in themselves and in comparison to the volumes under discussion, are perhaps even more symptomatic. For one thing, both Zenith’s biography, the first in English, and Burns’s article indicate the desire of a wider public to know more about Pessoa. Zenith’s biography is distinct from a critical study, as it should be, but it is based on a massive amount of research spanning many years; even so, it wears such scholarship lightly as its eminently readable prose has appealed to a large number of people who, one presumes, will thus have [End Page 91] been introduced for the first time, and in some depth, to the work of one of the preeminent modernists. Burns’s piece, in its turn, even though it is mostly based on previous research, conducted primarily by noted historian and Pessoa specialist, José Barreto, performs a similar task, as it might well be a point of entry for those many intellectuals who would not bother looking at a literary journal but who are eager to expand their horizons. Until Jerónimo Pizarro’s Critical Introduction, readers who wanted a concise but ample initiation into the world of Fernando Pessoa, his varied works, his multiple names, and the context in which he lived, had only once choice, namely Darlene J. Sadlier’s An Introduction to Fernando Pessoa: Modernism and the Paradoxes of Authorship. Published in 1998 by Florida University Press and reissued in paperback in 2009, Sadlier’s book has been a staple for a variety of undergraduate courses and remains valuable in spite of its problems, including some lacunae. Pizarro’s book naturally updates Sadlier’s, but it also goes much further. This is due not only to the fact that much more by Pessoa, and on Pessoa, has come to light since 1998, but, more particularly to the very way in which Pizarro has structured his volume, which can be considered as a true mini-course on Fernando Pessoa. It not only guides its readers with a sure hand through the complexities of Pessoa’s own work but also prepares them to navigate the by now labyrinthine field of Pessoa studies. Contrary to what one might have expected from an introductory work, the volume’s thirteen chapters do not follow either chronological or more conventional genre divisions. Instead, the first four chapters focus on specific questions, beginning with ‘Plurality’, which can be seen as an overarching image with which Pizarro would have us read Pessoa. Following it, we have a chapter on ‘Unity’, another on...