Stagnating the Life: Modern Wisdom in Fernando Pessoa's The Book of Disquiet

Abstract

This article aims to draw attention to the existence of a common ground on which modern artist and modern thinker come close to each other in articulating a uniquely modern urgency, which gives shape to a new understanding of wisdom. Departing from the role often assigned to the poets/prose writers as the “stagnators of life” in the ages of turmoil, the article examines The Book of Disquiet, owned by Bernardo Soares, the semi-heteronym of Portuguese writer and poet Fernando Pessoa, as a collection of fragments that stage crucial moments of stagnation. After underlining how modernist literature has often been viewed as a separate realm from the devastating socio-political developments of the twentieth century, it exemplifies some experimenting gestures of the so-called “wise” artist through an analysis of The Book of Disquiet. The analysis focuses on the co-existence of poetry and prose, the exteriorization of interior experience via the notion of landscape, and the idea that life can best be observed from a distance after it is fully stopped. Drawing on literary readings of Walter Benjamin, Maurice Blanchot, and Paul de Man, the article aims to show that The Book of Disquiet, like the works of such poet/prose writers as Rilke and Kafka, illustrates how the destiny of modern artist, unlike that of modern world, was to break with the teleological concerns of daily life in favor of capturing life in its reality.