CLARENCE CADDELL lives with his wife and three children in western Victoria, Australia, where he works as a high school English and humanities teacher, and writes in spare time he doesn’t have. His first collection of poems, The True Gods Attend You, will be published by Bonfire books in 2022.
Note.The first two poems are situated in the universe of gnostic Christology. The first explores the notion, found in The Second Treatise of the Great Seth, that Simon of Cyrene, who carried the cross for Jesus, was actually crucified in his stead while the Christ spirit watched in amusement from on high. The second, inspired by The Gospel of Judas, contrasts the materialistic consciousness of the other disciples with the superior understanding shown by Judas, who is represented as Jesus’ only faithful follower and receiver of his highest teachings.
I. Vicar of Christ
Fulfilment’s plenitude, the dénouement
Of life’s afflictions—how can one not crave it?
The Easter feast that ends those weeks of Lent,
Of joy postponed in order then to have it,
And more abundantly! What we deplore
Leads on to joy, as if thus to redeem
The one who died therein. The soldiers saw
The man beneath his cross stumble, or seem
To do so; therefore, with true man replaced
Deceptive God. The spark cannot have been
Within that unknown Simon of Cyrene,
Or else it came through his ordeal ungrazed
And rose in glory to the left-hand side
Of him who laughed as Sakla’s creature died.
II. Generations
Some only care for action—mystery
They like, but wish to see resolved before
The light comes on and all’s decoded.
Such stories have their law,
Broken sometimes just to be reinvented.
They’re thrilled by an exciting murder plot,
Don’t see its flaws. Perhaps they envy
The hero what he’s got,
And wish him dead, if not picture themselves
His love-interest (or both, as might a few!).
But when it comes to horror, surely
They would not wish it true!
In fact, some are ambitious to be burnt
And flayed for their opinion of the dead,
While dreaming of the Day when others
Shall suffer in their stead!—
Vicarious atonement! Make me laugh.
But it grows egregoric, their belief
In tales the most permanent of which are
Often, lengthwise, most brief.
True stories they like best (as if a thing
That’s happened in this world were true at all!)
Confused, they look to good’s exemplar
To render evil’s fall,
But should they fail to misidentify
The two, black knight and white in that romance
Of many versions—check their eyesight,
Then lay the blame on chance.
Both absolutes and shades are so opaque
To them, that all are manifest before
Their opalescent eyes as shadows
They feel as if they could paw.
A perfect audience, willing to suspend
All disbelief in all absurdity—
But not so ideal on a jury,
As their God would agree!
But there are those like us who, in our hearts
Possess the answering light to recognise
The figure understood by Judas,
Unseen by mundane eyes.
I. Passover Feasts of the New Covenant
Note. These next two poems engage with some intriguing parallels between Josephus’ account of the siege of Jerusalem in 70 AD and parts of the Gospels and traditions of the early Church. The first is set during the siege when the rebels are going from house to house requisitioning whatever scraps of food they can find. A woman named Mary, driven to insanity by hunger, has turned her infant son into a human Passover lamb (one of only two in the whole of literature, according to Joseph Atwill). In the second, a Jewish rebel leader named Simon plays a part that can be read as a parody of the Apostle Simon Peter’s career. After Jerusalem’s fall, having tried to escape by tunnelling beneath the ruined temple, he is caught, taken to Rome and crucified.
A pair of lambs, each of them Mary’s son;
The second, not the world-upending one
We think of first, was born in time to see,
Not understand, the truth of prophecy!
He was to be a byword till the end,
His mother said. Nothing would ever mend
For her, except, for now, the pain of hunger.
Take what you will! She cried and no doubt flung her
Compliments on their heels as they backed out,
Those demoniac rebels put to rout
Along with Moses’ Law and Abraham’s
Old Covenant by the power of these two lambs,
The younger surely side-by-side with Jesus,
Who’d warned: To Caesar render what is Caesar’s.
Then which did Mary mean, or Joseph muse
Would seal up the calamities of the Jews?
II. The Other Peter
Simon the cutthroat—you had sought to hide
In stolen robes here where no stone’s liaison
With stone remains. Were you not petrified,
Impersonating high priest and stonemason?
Obdurate as stone, in history’s next minute
Buried beneath an unknown myth’s foundation,
You’d sought to carve out on the earth, then in it,
While stones were crying out that here he comes,
This son of man, and, as they soon would spin it,
Of God, a god himself—a place where Rome’s
Dominion would end. But it was lysed,
Your empery of messianic coxcombs,
And unlike him who would be canonised
Despite denying three times his own master,
Your own post-mortem shadow would be life-sized,
Your master not denied, and Rome would cast her
Anchor, dolphin wrapped, where ebb and flow
Would not dislodge, though Goths and Vandals blast her.
CLARENCE CADDELL is a poet currently dwelling in the Riverina district. His second collection, Broken Words, will be published with Bonfire Books later this year
P & J Poetics, LLC, published MIKE ALEXANDER’s first full-length collection, RETROgrade, in 2013. His most recent chapbook, We Internet in Different Voices (Modern Metrics), was released by EXOT books. His poems have appeared in Rattle, River Styx, Borderlands, Bateau, Abridged, Measure, Shit Creek Review, Raintown Review & other journals.
The Salad Course
Single-handed, Don Miguel clears the dinner table,
sets his papers in order. The lone inkpot covers
where his wine spilled.
Fragments of a telling
grind in his mill, like giants in a bad novel.
Start where real people start:
An olla rather more beef
than mutton, a salad on most nights,
the scratching of the ink, all the missing…
There’s an aftertaste left on his tongue.
The failed Crusades.
Pirates, all the king’s
enemies, the king, all sit down to the same slop,
scraps on Saturdays, lentils on Fridays,
a pigeon or so extra on Sundays,
lunatics, all, but the heroes are the worst.
Let there be Victories, but food comes first.
Gustave, striving to put all that pretty style aside,
P & J Poetics, LLC, published MIKE ALEXANDER’s first full-length collection, RETROgrade, in 2013. His most recent chapbook, We Internet in Different Voices (Modern Metrics), was released by EXOT books. His poems have appeared in Rattle, River Styx, Borderlands, Bateau, Abridged, Measure, Shit Creek Review, Raintown Review, and other journals.
JACOB RIYEFF (@riyeff) is a translator, teacher, and poet. His work focuses on the Western contemplative tradition and the natural world. Jacob lives in the Upper Midwestern U.S. with his wife and three growing children.
”A man’s attitude to life.” (Feb 20, 2022)
O Edward Elgar, did you see our faces rapt in darkness, hearts attuned to your cello As you lay upon your deathbed, traces Of joy accompanying the low and mellow Tones the strings invite our ears to hear Amid glissando runs to keep the mind And body clear? You cursed its weak premiere But here a hundred years past you find A willing crowd to celebrate your movements As you lay in Worcester gasping for air‚ From lyric to rondo, fulfillment In sonic pattern, virtuosic fare. Could you see, in your final agony, Our festival of superfluity?
JACOB RIYEFF (@riyeff) is a translator, teacher, and poet. His work focuses on the western contemplative tradition and the natural world. Jacob lives in the Upper Midwestern U.S. with his wife and three growing children.
This is chapter Six of LIAM GUILAR’S almost completed epic of Britain. Chapter One was published in Long Poem Magazine #25 Spring 2021, and Chapters Two, Three, Four and Five in The Brazen Head. For more information about Hengist, Vortigern and the Legendary History, see www.liamguilar.com
The story so far. Mid Fifth Century; Hengist and his brother Horsa have sailed to Britain where they have been taken on as mercenaries by Vortigern, the newly appointed leader of the Province. Having defeated an army of Picts, Hengist has tricked Vortigern’s son into giving him land where he has built a stronghold.
Holding a feast to celebrate its completion, he intends to use the opportunity to introduce his daughter, Rowena, to Vortigern.
At which point I part company with the Medieval Story Tellers. I don’t believe a hard-headed war lord would throw away everything he’d worked for in his rush to get his hands on his servant’s daughter. While the story of the King who throws away his kingdom for ‘the wrong woman’ repeats throughout medieval versions of the Legendary History, it’s hard to find an historical ruler of Britain before the thirteenth century who did it.
The Wasshail ceremony, central to the story of Vortigern, is possibly a memory of a very old English custom.
[i] This scene, where Hengist watches his daughter being decked out in her finery, although expanded here, is Laȝamon’s addition to his sources.
[ii] Aestrild’s story is told in A Presentment of Englishry (Shearsman 2020). Rowena hears it in Chapter one and it haunts her.
[iii] From ‘It is a custom’ to ‘Germany’ is a loose translation of Laȝamon. Even in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s earlier Latin version the words of the ceremony are given in a form of English. It’s possible the custom is very old and also possible it is the origin of ‘wassailing’.
[iv] Nennius, Geoffrey of Monmouth, Wace, Laȝamon. The implication in all four is that had Rowena been baptised first, there wouldn’t have been a problem. Vortigern makes this point in the previous chapter.
[v] Locrin’s story is told in A Presentment of Englishry, Uther’s in the next part of this project. Both men endanger their kingdoms through their infatuation.
LIAM GUILAR is Poetry Editor of The Brazen Head, and the author of several poetry collections, including the series A Man of Heart, Presentment of Englishry and The Fabled Third (Shearsman), set in post-Roman Britain. His most recent publication is a translation of the Mabinogion folk-tale How Culhwch Won Olwen (Shearsman, 2026)
IAN C. SMITH’s work has been published in Antipodes, BBC Radio 4 Sounds, The Dalhousie Review, Griffith Review, San Pedro River Review , Southword, The Stony Thursday Book, & Two Thirds North. His seventh book is wonder sadness madness joy, Ginninderra (Port Adelaide). He writes in the Gippsland Lakes area of Victoria, and on Flinders Island.
Before/After
Before we broke up we thought we knew about long-haul travel. Days dimmed in mid-afternoon, our attic walls furry, so we walked. Signs pointed across barnyard mud to fields where we lost crooked trails only to find them again pointing the way towards blue smoke above a serrated cottage roofline. Ducks streamed under bridges of stone past black-faced sheep between charcoal-sketched glimpses of a distant spire. Across disused railway embankments we roamed, and through farms, climbing stiles, squeezing between gaps in broad gates. We waited while a herd of cows ambled by, a line of pale hills blurring to violet in the dwindling light. Then a dark shape crested a rise tinkling like a band of wandering minstrels. Muscular horses pulled three wooden caravans against the backdrop of lowering sky. A whippet tethered to the last caravan placed its paws with deliberate care as those travellers nursing the secrets of centuries faced the roads ahead, their shadows falling across us. We didn’t stir until we no longer heard the sound of tiny brass bells. Our breath steamed as we stood there, her hair misted with diamonds, for minutes I wish I could experience again, these details imprinted on memory.
After we broke up, after I finished off our cheap bottle of Pig’s Nose whisky, I tramped November’s fields blackened in slow drenching rain, a train’s horn keening like a cello’s sombre drawn-out final note in the gloaming near the derelict WW2 air force base haunted by distant airwave voices, haven for crepuscular creatures, brave truth we might have sorted out stuck in autumn’s red, raw throat. Our poplars were being stripped of their sensuous splendour, one toppled, matted roots curling, exposed like wild sexual hair, her ripped open note with my cold hand inside the pocket of the seaman’s pea-jacket she gave me to ward off icy wind the previous winter that now lies encrypted in the same pocket hanging in exile in my wardrobe eclipsed by the silent dark. I read of letters turning up lonely years after long-dead soldiers posted them, the bereft gently kissing foxed handwriting, those letters better than grave markers, certain, astonishing, mementoes. I dislike evenings, their blanketing of days, thought I knew about the transnational blueprint, but travellers move on. I didn’t. I don’t need reminders. Rain needs no reminder to softly fall.
Leavetaking
Trees threshed by fierce wind driving cloud, red-tinged, my nemesis, dark smoke plumes ten miles distant, branches cracking, light a hellish burnt umber, the state blazes, temperature soaring over forty degrees again, a regular horror now despite naysayers’ published scorn of climate change. The jack donkey’s coat fluffs in this wind, strands of his hay scudding before it. My neighbours silhouetted on their hill by shifting smoke are leaving. Driving past, they slow, peer at me, frowning, wave.
Possums scoured juiced orange peels on my compost heaps, inverting them to resemble white bra cups, like an art installation, contrasting with the dark teeming below, and now, above. The empty clothesline sways, days of pegged socks’n’jocks, colour, all gone, gone, children grown. Where six pink and grey galahs perch, silent, feathers ruffled, I sit under their melaleuca watching the car disappear, a Beckett character waiting. For what? So much I love is under threat.
I can’t imagine starting again, beauty razed but for echoed voices, these trodden paths to the heart. Walking about in circles, brittle leaves, small branches, crunching underfoot, grevillea, bottlebrushes, bravely flying their colours in this demonic blast, I feel as helpless as a crushed bird. An eerie soundtrack as in a film by Werner Herzog or Terence Malick would be apt.
My neighbours return, relay that we have been advised by phone to leave. Reluctant, I assure them I shall, voice, meant to sound upbeat, hoarse, aware of their kindness, my deserved caste as odd recluse, phone a seldom-used landline. A low-pressure change heads our way. Yay! The cavalry.
The trough arrives, favouring my position , cooling me and galahs, but imperilling others. I play back the evacuation message, make calls. My son in a city far away tells me to get going to my sister’s in town. Now. Ravelled with decision-making: cats, donkey, documents, photographs, cherished journals; my heart brimming, I secure windows, doors, take short-term essentials, leave this place, so beloved, especially its fragrance when soft rain begins to fall.
IAN C SMITH’s work has been published in BBC Radio 4 Sounds, Cable Street, Griffith Review, North of Oxford, Rundelania, The Spadina Literary Review, Stand, & Westerly. His seventh book is wonder sadness madness joy, Ginninderra (Port Adelaide). He writes in the Gippsland Lakes area of Victoria, and on Flinders Island
ROBIN HELWEG-LARSEN has had some 350 poems, largely formal, published in the Alabama Literary Review, Allegro, Ambit, Amsterdam Quarterly, and other international magazines. He is Series Editor for Sampson Low’s Potcake Chapbooks – Form in Formless Times, and blogs at formalverse.com from his hometown of Governor’s Harbour in the Bahamas.
His Mad Skull’s Like
a motorcycle cage of death,
the engines roaring over and beneath:
conflicting paths, crashless machinery –
the crowd roars, hoping for catastrophe.
an alchemist’s laboratory,
he strives through Universal symmetry
alone to conquer nature, friendlessly,
transmuting hopeless to hope endlessly.
a planet with its atmosphere,
blossoming gaudy from beginnings drear;
from grand extinctions and tectonic faults
life reaches out to loot galactic vaults.
a plant with taproot down the spine
side-nerve extractors reaching out to mine
the Universe’s minerals of sense,
make sense, and raise to Mind the mind’s pretense.
Pointillist
(Note: this poem is so named because if you look at it closely you may not find as much meaning as if you step back, let it flow past you, and see an outline of a story.)
Awake
Anew
Awhile
Askew;
Afoot
Among
Amass
Along;
Abet
Aback
Ado
Alack;
Alas!
Abroad
Again
Astride
Amain;
Atop
Alight
Aglow
Afright;
Afar
Ahead
Aloft
Abed;
Alone!
Aware
Amused
Affair
Accused;
Away
Aboard
Affray
Abhorred;
Aground
Alive
Abound
Arrive;
Ahoy!
Array
Await
Assay
Abate;
Appraise
Accord
Amaze
Adored;
Apprise
Appoint
Arise
Anoint;
Adieu!
Leadership Transition
Julius Caesar, Antony, King Lear,
Hamlet, Macbeth – corrupted, vain, impure,
Irrational, bombastic, insecure –
He’s no more clarity or veritas
Than the deceptions of a covert war,
All morals blurred.
That tyrant rant, Tyrannosaurus roar,
Forecasts he’ll suffer a dictator’s fate:
His proud obsessed confusion first seems great,
Then grates, unravels at the seams, slips gear,
Loses its moral metaphors, grows crass;
He dies absurd.
Octavius, Malcolm, Edgar, Fortinbras,
Comes from the wings and strides to centre stage –
Competent, measured, reasonable, sane –
To rule the wreckage of the tragic reign;
Restores some structure, closes out the age,
Speaks the last word.
This archetypal character’s strong thump
Will get his nation out of the morass;
The raucous self-styled hero being dead,
A truer leader takes the throne instead.
(How Shakespeare’d end the Tragedy of Trump
Can be inferred.)
Poems Like Motes of Dust
Like tiny midges, poems in the air
were unseen all my life, presence unclear,
occasionally one would land, bite, sting…
I’d be aware
a poem had come, was singing by my ear.
Now everything, literally every thing,
is a poem: a car, a dog, a glass,
a chair, a seagull, every blade of grass,
all people and each thing they pass.
Now I see swarms, millions of flies,
or like light’s dots of darkness thickening as day dies,
the poems are visible in the air around,
a pointillist canvas, every dot
a poem in itself, an image, word, rhyme, thought,
or like neutrinos streaming from the sun,
billions a second passing with no sound
unseen, unfelt, through everyone,
the poetry of existence, raw, untaught.
The Universe: a cloud of dust that hangs and floats,
dust like a drive of cattle on the range,
or when you fill a barn with dusty motes
by sudden action, and a sunbeam’s slice;
or as Sumerian gods convene, converse,
swarming like flies around burnt sacrifice,
summoned by smell of sacrificial meal…
was it my sacrifices made this change,
made poems visible like motes of dust?
Is this the Universe’s thrust?
Hide them, and then reveal?
For all the poems make one UniVerse.
Pumpkins
I said:
‘Look at the little kids playing Tag round the pumpkins – you can be that age again, if you close your eyes and remember pumpkins almost as big as you, too big to move – the massive newness, strangeness of them, never seen before, so big, but obviously to sight and touch a vegetable – you can reexperience the never before experienced, a world in which everything new absorbs your mind, and every minute you experience something new – playing Tag is a sensory delight, of running-and-not-falling (wobbly) in the half-dark (strange light) around pumpkins (absorbing color and texture) with an older sibling (touch and clutch) across strewn hay (a new but not difficult surface) and sometimes wooden pallets (a new and bizarre and impossible-to-run-on surface) but mostly the joy of running in the dark as a physical delight and not falling over – and then you stop and sit and throw straw in the air, and it doesn’t hurt (unlike gravel) and it doesn’t make a mess (unlike mud) and it doesn’t really get in your hair and eyes (unlike sand) and it also doesn’t really go anywhere no matter how hard you throw it (unlike any of them) and you laugh; you can remember all that if you can remember/imagine all the pumpkins three times as big, nearly as tall as you, too big to move – and adults become a different species, they go “Wa-wa-wa-wa-wa-wa-wa-wa” and make no sense, so you only really talk with other kids until finally an adult breaks into your world and tags your mind, and makes you hear with threats of violent pain, makes you give up your soul in self-defence,
ROBIN HELWEG-LARSEN has had some 350 poems, largely formal, published in the Alabama Literary Review, Allegro, Ambit, Amsterdam Quarterly, and other international magazines. He is Series Editor for Sampson Low’s Potcake Chapbooks – Form in Formless Times, and blogs at formalverse.com from his hometown of Governor’s Harbour in the Bahamas.
DANIEL GUSTAFSSON has published volumes of poetry in English and Swedish, most recently Fordings (Marble Poetry, 2020). New work appears in Ekstasis, The York Journal, Fare Forward, Amethyst Review and elsewhere, and is forthcoming in Temenos Academy Review. Daniel lives in York. Twitter: @PoetGustafsson
DANIEL GUSTAFSSON has published volumes of poetry in both English and Swedish, most recentlyFordings (Marble Poetry, 2020). New poems appear in Temenos Academy Review, Pennine Platform, in several anthologies by Black Bough Poetry, and in Sunken Island: An Anthology of British Poetry (Bournbrook Press, 2022). As an occasional scholar, with a PhD in Philosophy, Daniel has a special interest in William Blake and currently draws much inspiration from A. N. Whitehead. Daniel lives in York. Twitter: @PoetGustafsson
This is Part Five of LIAM GUILAR’S almost completed epic of Britain. Part One was published in Long Poem Magazine #25 Spring 2021, and Chapters Two, Three and Four in The Brazen Head. For more information about Hengist, Vortigern and the Legendary History, visit www.liamguilar.com
The story so far. Mid Fifth Century; Hengist and his brother Horsa have sailed to Britain where they have been taken on as mercenaries by Vortigern, the newly appointed leader of the Province. Their immediate, shared problem is an army of Picts. In the long term, Hengist’s desire to establish a kingdom must bring him into conflict with the Britons. He is scheming to ensure the conflict will be fought on his terms. Vortigern’s desire to save the Province will bring him into conflict with Hengist, but also with Vortimer, his eldest son and those Britons who resent his even-handed rule, while happily benefitting from it. The story of Thongcaester in this chapter marks the continual shift in the Legendary History between possible history and the world of folk tales.
Snap shot of Hengist
‘Fuck me’, said Horsa,
‘that’s a lot of paint.’
The Pictish horde, a festering
howl of painted bodies, surging
towards the silent lines,
stopping, stepping back,
closer each time,
building the rhythm
of their final charge.
‘We should pray now to Woden, god of all battles?’
‘If you wish’, replies Hengist. ‘I’m betting on our Roman.’
No speeching, no boasting,
no threats of discipline.
Vortigern had explained what needed to be done,
trusting his soldiers would do it.
And wonder of wonder, they trust him.
Hengist admires the choice of ground.
The limited front negates the Pict’s numerical superiority.
The lack of slope, conventionally a disadvantage,
leaves the cavalry who loiter on the flanks
an open field to move across.
The pitch perfect voice steeling the ranks.
In an avalanche of noise, the Picts attack.
‘Hold your lines!’ says the voice.
The Picts shatter like glass hurled against a wall.
Brothers in Arms
After they destroyed the Picts
and massacred the survivors,
after they hunted raiders in the west,
after the spoils had been divided.
‘You’re staring at your spear,’ said Hengist, ‘is something wrong?’
‘It would look better’, says his brother, ‘with his head on it.‘
Hengist smiles. ‘The Picts and Scotti, they are worthy enemies?’
Horsa thinks about it, nods, ‘Bold fighters, yes, strong warriors.’
‘In every battle that we’ve fought’, says Hengist, tiptoeing,
‘we’ve been outnumbered but we’ve held the field,
yet lost so few in doing so?’ Horsa, still imagining his spear
adorned with Vortigern’s head, nods, admitting this is true.
‘We gave him our word that we will serve.’
‘Was it still our word in their birdy babble?
We told our people we would find a home.
How is this home if we don’t give the orders?’
‘Everyone but god takes orders.
Fifty of the best fighters these islands have seen
are sparrow fart in a thunderstorm
if we inherit his enemies and turn
his former friends into our foes.
Either we finish off his enemies
and slaughter all his friends
so you can decorate your spear.
Or we serve him well,
bait our trap and when he’s caught
the hired hand becomes the master’s equal
and our grandsons give the orders.’
‘So we’re sending for my niece?’
‘Soon’, says Hengist, ‘soon,
I’ll be sending for my daughter.’
Vortigern lectures his eldest son on recent history
‘Four hundred years the legion kept us soft.
They broke the tribes, removed
their expertise with point and edge.
Head hunters once, we worried about status,
cultivated roses, practised Latin,
patronised the makers of Mosaic floors.
The legions kept the peace and fought the Empire’s wars.
They were the turtle’s shell and we the soft
delicious flesh barbarians dreamt
of feasting on. Now the legions have gone over
and left us on our own. The forts are empty,
the watchtowers home to nesting birds.
The weapons we kept hidden, heirlooms,
are a language we’ve forgotten how to speak.
Time washed us up, defenceless and alone,
like a turtle stranded on its back.
Now the predators are moving in.
Until we train an army, we hire muscle.’
‘These men are pagans, father.
What kind of world will you build with their help?
We should exterminate them all
and build God’s kingdom on their bones.’
‘Oh child, your Jesus loves us all?
He cares and is compassionate?
He is a just and loving God?
Did your mother deserve her fate?
What terrible crime could she commit
to earn such terror and such pain?
Do you believe the Gods are even handed?
Prayer will not drive the raiders back.’
‘You favour them.
I have no land. I have no income.
I have no household of my own.
They point at me and say,
There goes Vortimer nithing.
His father does not trust him.’
‘What is there in what I’ve done
suggests I do not trust you?’
‘You will not let me fight beside you.
You are keeping me from glory.’
‘There is no glory fighting pirates.
I want you to gather Britons
who are willing to fight.
I want you to help Gloucester train them.’
‘Help him? I am your son.’
‘And you have no experience,
no skill, no proven aptitude.
What do you know of training fighting men?
Survival depends on our success.
This is not a time for-self-appointed experts.
Do this and I shall give you land:
and income for your household.’
‘And should I refuse to second Gloucester?’
Vortigern, saying nothing, leaves.
Snap shot of Hengist #2
Gods roll their dice, or fortune cranks her wheel.
You choose your metaphor to regulate the chaos.
Despite the fragile palisade and ditch,
it’s just another village; the usual beehive huts,
LIAM GUILAR is Poetry Editor of The Brazen Head, and the author of several poetry collections, including the series A Man of Heart, Presentment of Englishry and The Fabled Third (Shearsman), set in post-Roman Britain. His most recent publication is a translation of the Mabinogion folk-tale How Culhwch Won Olwen (Shearsman, 2026)
BRENDAN MCNAMEE says that deconstruction is as old as its opposite
Eternity is in love with the productions of time
William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.
Deconstruction is a modern cliché, but it is something much older and more substantive than a passing academic fad. Since it came to prominence in the sixties and seventies the word has been bandied about in general parlance, losing most of its meaning in the process.
It usually indicates a process of taking something apart and not much more than that, so you have films like Woody Allen’s Deconstructing Harry, which consists merely of a character’s evisceration, and restaurants serving desserts called deconstructed cheesecake, which consists of little more than components of cheesecake separated on a plate.
More seriously, it’s often seen as a destructive rejection of cherished beliefs and certainties. But that word ‘certainties’ is the hinge. Certainties have a way of subtly devolving from life-enhancing structures to stifling and destructive oppressions. An attractive form can hide a rotting interior. Many people instinctively recognise this. If cherished lines from widely beloved poets and musicians are an indication of this recognition then Leonard Cohen’s most oft-quoted line, ‘There is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in,’ from his song ‘Anthem’, indicates that deconstruction, as I will read it here, is already subconsciously understood and valued by many. Letting the light in on airless, out-dated structures and practices: that’s the essence of deconstruction.
In this essay, I shall look at deconstruction through a variety of literary quotations, ranging from Heraclitus to Heaney, which show that the practice has been around for as long as philosophy itself, and that it is, and always has been, an integral and vital part of both art and religion. I read it, in fact, as a modern secular form of mysticism, what the American academic John D. Caputo calls ‘religion without religion’ (The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion Without Religion). Caputo and Jacques Derrida, the putative originator of deconstruction, will be my main (actually, my only) links to the practice of deconstruction as it is understood in academia. My focus will be on how it manifests in the world beyond. In the second part of the essay I will attempt to show how deconstruction can be seen at work in widely disparate instances of literature and film.
***
Without consciousness, there is, to all intents and purposes, no world. On that basis, it can be asserted that all time is contained in the present, the past as memory, the future as anticipation. The present consists of two elements, consciousness and nature, the world within and the world without, subject and object. The world without we call ‘actuality’, all the stuff that makes up the visible universe. We see it through this mirror called consciousness. The stuff changes all the time; the mirror remains the same (that is, the phenomenon of consciousness underlies the individual manifestations of that consciousness through sentient beings in time). Consciousness, then, is another word for eternity.
Wherever there is consciousness, it is always now. But because it only knows itself by its productions, the stuff of actuality, the productions themselves come to be considered paramount, come to be thought of as reality itself. And they are necessary. Crops must be planted, cities built, cultures and laws devised. Structure reigns. But with time these structures become stifling, burdensome, tedious – the weight of tradition, the boredom of habit. The mirror becomes fogged. Deconstruction is the wiping of the mirror. Deconstruction is eternity gasping for breath.
Vladimir Nabokov
When asked whether he believed in God, Vladimir Nabokov said, ‘I know more than I can express in words, and the little I can express would not have been expressed, had I not known more’ (Strong Opinions, p45).
Is this what lies at the heart of deconstruction? A sense that the world as it is described in language is missing some vital element, some element that cannot be captured in language, but the vague awareness of which is what largely drives that described world of language? As the theologian Paul Tillich puts it, ‘It is the riddle and the depth of all expression that it both reveals and hides at the same time’ (Art, Creativity, and the Sacred, p221). Derrida echoes that idea in these words: ‘We are dispossessed of the longed-for presence in the gesture of language by which we attempt to seize it’ (Acts of Literature, p78). Poetic language could be seen as both a lament at this dispossession and a desperate attempt to overcome it all in one.
You can extrapolate from Nabokov’s sentence to life itself: ‘I am more than I can express in words, and the little that I can express could not be expressed, were I not more.’ That ‘more’ is what divides the world between materialists and idealists. For materialists, the world we see around us is quite fascinating enough; for idealists there is something essential missing. For idealists (believers and non-believers alike), that indefinable ‘more’ is what keeps the ship afloat. Like a string on a well-tuned guitar it keeps life at a tension, a tension necessary to create the music of life itself. ‘The harmony past knowing sounds more deeply than the known,’ as Heraclitus has said (Fragments: The Collected Wisdom of Heraclitus, p31). Isn’t this why we make art? As Steve Toltz puts it, ‘We make art because being alive is a hostage situation in which our abductors are silent and we cannot even intuit their demands’ (Quicksand, p16).
Take Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. Where, or what, would Beckett’s tramps be without Godot to wait for? They wouldn’t be anywhere. They wouldn’t be. The essence of Godot is his non-arrival, just as – perhaps – the essence of God is his unknowability, his unattainability, and, almost certainly, his non-existence. By his non-existence I mean that God may simply be the idea of God. As Henri de Lubac put it, ‘We do not have desire for God; we are that desire. It is imprinted on our created nature’ (Mystery of the Supernatural pps176-77). Just as Godot is needed to keep the tramps on stage, so is the idea of God (or whatever unattainable ideal one substitutes for God) needed to keep us all trudging through the wastes of time. (Absence pervades presence, may indeed be the larger part of presence, much in the way that dark energy may be the larger part of the universe, even though it cannot be detected.)
More optimistically, the idea may be what’s needed to transform those wastes of time into something more like a garden. True religion, like true art, is alchemy. The effect of great art, regardless of what actual events are being portrayed, is exhilaration. In this sense, all great artists are mystics, and art is the most accessible form of mysticism we have, and one of the most effective ‘mirror-cleaners’ we have. Likewise, religion. Seen in this light, both art and religion are forms of deconstruction. Seen in another light, of course – when form overrides mystery, when significance declines into meaning – they are very much in need of deconstruction.
In his book, Deconstruction in a Nutshell, John D. Caputo calls deconstruction love. Love itself cannot be deconstructed because it is not a thing, it is not static. Love happens. How many stories there are that demonstrate this by showing love as a disruptive force: love across the race divide, the class divide, the cultural divide, always disrupting accepted ‘truths’ of life, which of course are not truths at all but merely comfort blankets masquerading as truths. Love underlies all social and cultural expressions of it, which are just that: expressions of an intangible reality, but not the thing itself (much like consciousness and the productions of time).
There’s a scene in a recent sitcom, called Hold the Sunset, which subtly illustrates this idea. John Cleese plays a crusty old codger with a reputation for sarcasm. One of his neighbours, often the butt of his jokes, is a dog lover. One day, the Cleese character encounters this neighbour out walking accompanied only by the dog’s leash. A brief conversation conveys the information that the dog has died, but the neighbour hasn’t quite got over it yet and it comforts him to walk with the leash. Cleese makes some sympathetic comment about this, which the man, knowing Cleese’s general outlook, takes to be mockery, but Cleese hastens to reassure him that it isn’t, that he understands fully the man’s actions, that love is love, whatever the nature or character of the recipient. Finally, the neighbour gets his point and says, ‘You mean, love can’t tell the difference.’
Love can’t tell the difference. In that sense, love doesn’t actually exist until it finds a recipient, just as deconstruction is not a ‘thing,’ and doesn’t actually exist until it has some established ‘truth’ to work on. Just as eternity doesn’t exist until it finds an expression through the productions of time. You can’t have a mirror without a dark back, and vice versa. Perhaps the same thing is meant when people say God is love. God doesn’t exist – or not for us, anyway – until he is manifested in the world. Manifested as the world?
There is an old Sufi legend about a certain Arab who died and left seventeen camels, which he bequeathed to his three sons in the following proportions: to the oldest a half; to the second a third; to the youngest a ninth. The three sons were disputing violently about the proper division of the camels when a stranger rode up to them from the desert and asked them the cause of their anger. When they had explained it to him he said: ‘But this is very simple. I shall give you my camel; so now you have eighteen instead of seventeen, and the sum is easily done. The eldest will take nine, the second six and the youngest two.’ When the three sons had each taken the camels allotted to him, they found that one was left over. ‘And therefore,’ said the stranger, ‘I can now take my own camel back again, and yet leave you with no further cause of dispute.’
This expresses the same idea as Blake’s aphorism, cited at the start. Time is where we live, the land of the tangible (camels and churches, governments, games, art, everything), but all of these productions, all these things, only make sense in light of an intangible force lying behind them. Deconstruction is the attempt to keep that mysterious force in play, to keep that crack open without which life would become stale and airless. In the absence of deconstruction, when there is too much order, too much rigidity, something snaps: ‘Tedium is the worst pain. The mind lays out the world in blocks and the hushed blood waits for revenge’ (Grendel, John Gardner, p109).
The mind lays out the world in blocks: this is a good definition of the world’s structures, whether cultural, social, literary, judicial or whatever. When they become set in their ways and fail to respond to changing circumstances or to the nuances of a situation’s contexts, as they invariably do due to human laziness and complacency, then boredom and discontent sets in. Eventually, something snaps. Modernism in its many forms – cultural, social, political – was perhaps the loudest snap of the twentieth century.
Norman Mailer
Norman Mailer once compiled an extensive list of opposing qualities, entities and concepts that he labelled hip/square, such as wild/practical, romantic/classic, instinct/logic, a question/an answer, self/society, associative/sequential and many more, all of which can be seen to be, in varying degrees, reflections of the chaos/order divide (Advertisements for Myself, pps346-48). The idea of deconstruction could be seen as the academic version of the corresponding societal movement that shook the sixties. Revolution was in the air. But it’s important not to forget the second member of the pairing. One of Mailer’s pairs of opposites, self/society, calls to mind a sentence from Machiavelli: ‘No stability without an institution; no progress without an individual.’You need some degree of stability or there would be no possibility of civilisation of any kind. So you need institutions (something Derrida was always at pains to stress). But you also need innovative individuals who insist on disrupting things when those institutions become stale or unworkable. And where would the innovative, deconstructing individuals be without institutions to work against? You can’t jump into the air without a ground to spring from.
Another, and perhaps more helpful, way of expressing the chaos/order divide is to call it a dynamic/static divide. In Lila: An Enquiry into Morals, Robert Pirsig proposed this as a more fundamental divide in life than the subject/object divide, which is the one that prevails in our current materialistic and common sense based world. And the deeper you delve into deconstruction, the more you find it corresponds to this division: the structures of the world, whether social, cultural, legal, literary, political, etc, all tend toward the static. Rules get laid down, they seem to work (they keep chaos at bay, they explain so much), so they are adopted with fervour and adhered to rigidly. Too rigidly. History is littered with the appalling results of this rigidity, this fundamentalism, mostly in the fields of politics and religion. Every effort to crack open such petrified structures is a form of deconstruction.
Theodore Adorno once described the relationship between empirical reality and works of art as a form of redemption: ‘Everything will be just as it is and yet wholly different’ (John Banville, Athena, p105). Everything will be as it is – that is, the structures of the world will not change in their essence, they will still be structures and continue to serve whatever purpose they were constructed to serve, but they will be wholly different because seen with different eyes, eyes that are open to potential, to nuance, to change. There will still be seventeen camels, but the brothers will have no cause for dispute because their eyes will be open to the possibility of an eighteenth camel, a possibility that, without having to exist in any material sense, redeems all that does so exist. Deconstruction then could be seen as a kind of open-ended, undefined faith.
John Banville
John Banville has written a radio play in which Isaac Newton, the inventor of the calculus (and also a devoted alchemist), says the following:
The calculus operates upon the premise of a closer and closer approach to infinity. Infinity, however, may not be approached. Infinity is, and there’s an end of it. Yet the calculus works . . .
Stardust
The same might be said for language and reality. Language operates upon the premise of a closer and closer approach to reality. Reality, however, may not be approached. Reality is, and there’s an end of it. Yet language works . . . Up to a point, anyway. There is still that tantalising mystery that keeps escaping, that no word seems equal to. But a word had to be found, nonetheless, so we came up with the word God. Yes, that’ll do. God is the name of and cause of everything that is. That settles the question, right?
No, very rightly wrong, as Beckett would say. There is no answer. ‘God’ is just another deferral. The word might have been fine had it not been taken for an answer. ‘He should have had a name that sounded like a question,’ as Cees Nooteboom puts it (Rituals, p42). That would have put deconstruction at the heart of all that is. In the Hindu mythology Prajapati, Lord of the Creatures, has a secret name, Ka, which in Sanskrit means, ‘who?’ ‘Prajapati is the god who has no identity, who is the origin of all insoluble paradoxes’ (Roberto Calasso, Ardor, p8).
***
Consider these two statements, the first from the Spanish writer, Javier Cercas, the second from Clarice Lispector, the Ukranian-born, Brazilian writer sometimes referred to as the Brazilian Kafka:
‘Literature is always anti-literary.’ (The Blind Spot, p36)
‘There’s one thing I understand: writing has nothing to do with literature.’ (The Paris Review, interview)
Both these statements are saying the same thing, though this is disguised by the fact that the word ‘literature’ is used in opposing senses by each writer. Cercas’s ‘literature’ is Lispector’s ‘writing’ and Lispector’s ‘literature’ is Cercas’s ‘literary.’ Both statements are intuitive expressions of deconstruction. This is best explained by recourse to Robert Pirsig’s division of life into what he calls dynamic quality and static quality. Applied to literature, this is the division between pure creativity as it happens, and the result of that creativity as it appears in the world, what Annie Dillard has called ‘the creative process frozen with its product in its arms’ (Living by Fiction, p164).
Cercas is using the word ‘literature’ to refer to the creative process, and by ‘literary’ in the term anti-literary, he means the ‘business’ of literature, the criticisms, the essays, the classification into genres and literary periods, the endless chatter about books, very little of which can claim close kinship with the creative process itself (though some of it can: those readers who, unaware of what they should or should not approve of according to the official tastemakers, are genuinely enraptured by some work or other. Such readers, it could be said, are partaking in that very creative process itself. As Borges has put it, the man who reads a line of Shakespeare becomes Shakespeare. Mind you, that would have to be a man with a very fresh eye). And Lispector is echoing this sentiment. Her ‘writing’ is Cercas’s ‘literature.’ Dillard’s image is a nice one. The frozen product is the hardened lava at the foot of a volcano. The volcano itself has little interest in poring over the remains of its effusions at the foot of the hill. This is why you will often hear writers and artists expressing little interest in past work, however lauded it might be by their audiences. It’s the process itself that truly enraptures them. It also explains the even more common expression from artists that they often feel themselves to be mere conduits for some mysterious force that uses them to reveal itself in the world.[1]
***
‘You are neither here nor there,
A hurry through which known and strange things pass.’
Seamus Heaney, ‘Postscript’
‘There is an absence, real as presence.’
John Montague, ‘A Flowering Absence’
Wittgenstein began his TractatusLogico-Philosophicus with the sentence, ‘The world is all that is the case,’ and ended it with this one, ‘Whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must be silent.’ Materialists have concentrated on the first sentence, and the detailed adumbrations that follow it; for idealists, on the other hand, the final sentence is the point where things begin to get interesting. What is it that we cannot speak of? And if we cannot speak of it, how are we aware of it in the first place? Could it be that this mysterious non-entity is what creates everything that is the case (everything that can be spoken of) to begin with? Could that be the reason for its eternal presence (as an absence) in our minds? This is an established religious idea: the world is God’s mirror, which God needs in order to see himself. In order to be? Two of Christianity’s most mystical theologians, the fourteenth century German Dominician, Meister Eckhart and the ninth century Irish philosopher, John Scotus Eriugena, would seem to think so:
This is why I pray to God to rid me of God, for my essential being is above God in so far as we comprehend God as the principle of creatures. . . And if I myself were not, God would not be either; that God is God, of this I am the cause. If I were not, God would not be God
Eckhart, quoted in Dermot Moran, The Irish Mind, p91
It follows that we ought not to understand God and the creature as two things distinct from one another, but as one and the same. For both the creature, by subsisting, is in God; and God, by manifesting Himself, in a marvellous and ineffable manner creates Himself in the creature
Eriugena, ibid. p91
This can be put in less religiously-charged language. This is Alex Dubilet:
The infinite names not a transcendence that ruptures the self-sufficiency of the subject, but an immanent and impersonal process that precedes and exceeds the very difference between self and other. [. . . a hurry through which known and strange things pass] . . . subjective life is always already a deformation, a life made to suffer by being forced into itself
academia.edu
Lawrence Durrell puts the same idea like this: ‘People are not separate individuals as they think, they are variations on themes outside themselves’ (Constance, p378). Love is perhaps the strongest of those ‘themes’ and might go some way toward explaining the ever-yearning nature of humans. We are like Philip Larkin’s young steers, ‘always seeking purer water, / Not here but anywhere’ (‘Wires’). Or, perhaps, anywhere but here, here being the ‘subjective life’ that is ‘always already a deformation’ because it knows intuitively that this sense of separation, of individuality, is unnatural, or incomplete.
***
‘Deconstruction arises in response to an imperative that has to do with the ‘mystery’ of the impossible, not merely the ‘problem’ of the possible’ (Caputo, lix). The idea of mystery lies at the heart of literature. Take Jorge Luis Borges’ definition: ‘Literature can be defined by the sense of the imminence of a revelation which does not in fact occur’ (Selected Non-Fictions, p346). To a certain mindset, this might seem thoroughly pointless. If the revelation does not in fact occur, haven’t you just wasted your time? This attitude, sadly, is very much the prevailing one today, and partly explains, I think, why literature is in decline. Definiteness reigns, and facts are king. But Borges is talking about living within an atmosphere of mystery wherein every aspect of the world is charged with a mysterious significance. He clarifies this in a re-statement of the idea:
Music, states of happiness, mythology, faces worn by time, certain twilights and certain places, all want to tell us something, or have told us something we shouldn’t have lost, or are about to tell us something; that imminence of a revelation as yet unproduced is, perhaps, the aesthetic fact (ibid. p346).
If we are attuned to those ‘known and strange things’ spoken of by Seamus Heaney in the lines above, then we are deconstructionists by default. Those lines continue, ‘As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways / And catch the heart off guard and blow it open’ (‘Postscript’). That, I would say, is a good definition of deconstruction’s purpose – catching the heart off guard, and blowing it open.
***
‘These things never happened, but are always,’wrote Sallust on myth (Roberto Calasso, The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, epigraph). Is myth itself a form of deconstruction? Myths are eternal truths underlying the more tangible realities of life, but they are unamenable to being captured in systems (unless mistaken as actual events). They are continually re-interpreted so that they continue to speak to peoples across a wide range of cultures. They never happened, so they can never take their assigned place in history; they inform all that does happen, giving it significance beyond the time in which actual events take place. ‘What has never anywhere come to pass, that alone never grows old,’ as Schiller has put it (Schopenhauer, p247). It’s been said about Shakespeare, for instance, that we don’t read Shakespeare, Shakespeare reads us. Shakespeare deconstructs us.
‘What has never anywhere come to pass, that alone never grows old.’ This is as good a definition of consciousness, or eternity, as one could ask for. The trouble with our normal understanding of consciousness is that, so thoroughly entwined is it with the stuff of life, we always think of it as consciousness of something. It is literally impossible to imagine consciousness alone (‘Consciousness-without-an-object’ is how one philosopher-mystic, Franklin Merrill-Wolff, describes the mystic state.) Try it and see. The nearest you can come is to imagine an empty space, but even this is ‘something.’ The problem appears to be that as long as you are consciously engaged in imagining, then you are imagining ‘something.’
Roberto Calasso
Hindu mythology can be helpful here. In Hinduism, brahman is ultimate reality. Roberto Calasso describes it thus:
But the brahman, whatever that might be, must necessarily be divided into two parts: the ‘unmanifest’ and the ‘manifest.’ The one is therefore always two. . . The brahman is the wild goose that ‘in rising from the water, it does not extract one foot. If it did, neither today nor tomorrow would exist.’ The water is the unmanifest brahman, the wild goose is the manifest brahman. (K, pps47-48)
The unmanifest brahman here would be consciousness alone, Merrill-Wolff’s consciousness-without-an-object; manifest brahman is the stuff of consciousness, the actual world we inhabit, the wild goose. But the wild goose, independent though it appears to be (and is, according to materialists), has one foot in the water, without which ‘neither today nor tomorrow would exist.’ Time itself, that is, arises from consciousness, the consciousness that is unmanifest, and can never be apprehended, because it is what is doing the apprehending, and what it apprehends is the wild goose, the actual world. So when Caputo talks about ‘the mystery of the impossible,’ this unmanifest aspect of reality is what I take him to mean. It stands apart from ‘the problem of the possible’ because the problem of the possible is the kind of problem that science and reason are equipped to deal with, the definable problems of the actual world. And, again as Caputo says, deconstruction (like art and religion) ‘arises in response to’ this mystery of the impossible. Derrida’s ‘trace,’ that mysterious intangible shadow he finds behind all language, is perhaps the wild goose’s dim awareness of the water from which it gains its life.
Deconstruction in film and literature
Purity is the malign inversion of innocence. Innocence is love of being, smiling acceptance of both celestial and earthly sustenance, ignorance of the infernal antithesis between purity and impurity. Satan has turned this spontaneous and as it were native saintliness into a caricature which resembles him and is the converse of its original. . . . Religious purification, political purges, preservation of racial purity – there are numerous variations on this atrocious theme, but all issue with monotonous regularity in countless crimes whose favourite instrument is fire, symbol of purity and symbol of hell.
Michel Tournier, The Erl-King, p. 70
If deconstruction is, as John D. Caputo has it, love, and, as Derrida says, ‘a response to a call,’ then the Bourne Trilogy can be seen as a subtle cinematic expression of deconstruction in action, and an instance of the power of love.
Jason Bourne is purity personified. He is a pure machine, trained to do one thing and not to let any extraneous factors, such as emotion or complexity, cloud that purpose. The purity derives from an idea. A noble idea. In this case, the idea of the American Way. Freedom. Democracy. It could just as easily be the idea of communism, or Aryan supremacy, or Islamic fundamentalism, or nationhood, anything, that is, with the power to capture people’s imaginations and inspire them to build an impregnable structure housing that idea. Nothing can be allowed to threaten or undermine this structure in any way. Soldiers must be trained to defend it. To be effective, such soldiers must never allow the muddle of human emotions to distract them from their purpose. Hence – ultimately – such soldiers as Jason Bourne. The shell protecting the purity of the purpose must be impenetrable.
But, thankfully, the shell is never impenetrable. There is a crack in everything. The pivotal moment of the Bourne Trilogy occurs towards the end of the first movie, The Bourne Identity, in a flashback scene wherein Bourne remembers the event that set him adrift on the ocean with two bullets in his back and a serious bout of amnesia. He is on a mission to execute an African leader on a ship. All prepared to pull the trigger on his sleeping victim, he suddenly finds himself looking into the clear innocent eyes of a five-year-old child – and the shell cracks. Something penetrates to the core, the core that perhaps attracted him to the purity of his cause in the first place. And this core is innocence in Tournier’s sense of the word, an instinctive recognition that life, in all its tumultuous variety and chaos, is the true value, and that to force this wondrous incorrigible plurality into a pre-conceived shape is the real sin. Trying to put order on the chaos of life is a natural and necessary human impulse, but it can go too far. When it does, life turns into death. In George Eliot’s words, ‘There is no general doctrine which is not capable of eating out our morality if unchecked by the deep-seated habit of direct fellow-feeling with individual fellow-men’ (Middlemarch).
In a word, Bourne is touched by love. And love is a force that will not be corralled into the neat paddock of ideology, whatever that ideology’s declared good intentions. This, I think, is what Caputo means when he calls deconstruction ‘love,’ and what Derrida means when he refers to it as ‘a response to a call’ (Dialogues with Contemporary Continental Thinkers: The Phenomenological Heritage, Richard Kearney , p118). Any idea can be deconstructed because ideas are essentially fictions to begin with, makeshift mental shacks erected to help us navigate the chaos of life. Love, by contrast, is not a construction (and if it is, it’s fake, self-delusion born of a deep need). Love is not a thing at all, but rather something that happens; a force with the power to disrupt all social, cultural and political structures, regardless of how reverently held they may be.
What happens to Bourne finds an echo in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem, ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.’ Like Bourne, the mariner is lost in darkness through an act of murder (the killing of an albatross), and, like Bourne, he too is blessed with an epiphany of sorts – in this case, the sighting of sea-snakes. He is struck by the beauty of the creatures, a beauty beyond the ability of any language to describe (‘No tongue / Their beauty might declare’), and thus beyond capture by any structure:
A spring of love gushed from my heart,
And I blessed them unaware:
Sure my kind saint took pity on me,
And I blessed them unaware
II. 282-87
‘Unaware’ is a key word in that quatrain (as Coleridge indicates by repeating it). It happens beneath the level of conscious thought, beneath the level at which mental structures are erected, and are thus immune from being deconstructed. Jason Bourne’s kind saint, the power of love itself, has stopped him in his tracks for just long enough to disrupt his planned assassination. The putative victim wakes up and takes a few shots at Bourne, who just manages to escape overboard, thus setting in motion a series of events that will in time become the flower of which this initial insight was the seed.
Over the course of three films, Bourne then spends his time getting to the root of the evil that has been done to him, and doing his best to put it right. The purity he fights is bluntly expressed by a CIA boss in a scene with Pamela Landy, a CIA controller trying to do the right thing by Bourne, in the third film. The boss has ordered that Nicki, the girl sent to talk to Bourne, be killed along with Bourne because he suspects she has gone over to the fugitive’s side. When Landy objects to this, saying, ‘If we start down this path, where does it end?,’ he snarls in reply, ‘It ends when we’ve won.’ The battle-cry of purists and fundamentalists the world over: It ends when we’ve won. When we’ve silenced or killed off all the opposition to our one pure way of life.
Pascal put the idea like this: ‘Man is neither angel nor beast, and unhappily whoever wants to act the angel, acts the beast’ (Pensées, p358). Deconstruction, seen in this light, is a way of guarding against the angel turning into the beast.
The ideal deconstructionist might be the character of Pamela Landy in the third Bourne film. She wants to take the risk of talking to Bourne though, for all she knows, he may well be the renegade assassin her superiors say he is. She certainly has no wish to destroy the institution of which she is a member, but she knows instinctively that it cannot function as a healthy body by simply following blind procedures without regard to other, and possibly dangerous, possibilities; without, in other words, being open to ‘the other.’ In a similar fashion, Derrida has no wish to destroy the philosophies which he deconstructs, but rather to let the fresh air of new thinking into them, in order to keep them alive. Deconstruction is a modern secular way of keeping the fresh air of the infinite blowing through the finite world.
Huckleberry Finn
If deconstruction is spontaneity in action, the law of the heart triumphing over the law of the land, or over the law of whatever social mores or cultural rigidities are currently in vogue, then Huckleberry Finn provides a perfect example.
Huck’s essential being is itself a form of deconstruction of all the social and cultural structures that he’s surrounded and mostly oppressed by, all flying under the banner of ‘sivilisation,’ but the idea is most clearly and sharply focused in the story of the journey down the Mississippi with the escaped slave, Jim. Huck is no intellectual, he fully accepts his society’s view of slaves, which is that they are owned in their entire inferior being by the whites, who have been given this duty of care by God. Slavery, far from being an evil, is God’s law. Huck accepts this. But on the journey down the river, he comes to know and like Jim as an individual human being, one much like himself, and he is tortured by the thought of giving him up to the authorities, something his rational mind tells himis the correct thing to do. The law of the heart (or wherever the seat is of these fleeting, spontaneous impulses) comes up against the law of the head.
This is deconstruction in action. In allowing his heart the victory in this particular battle, Huck is deconstructing a fundamental fixed point of his society’s belief system. This is not at all the same thing as Huck thinking the problem out intellectually and deciding that slavery per se was a bad thing. This would simply be pitting one intellectual position against another. It’s important that Huck ends his inner conflict, not by suddenly becoming enlightened about the evils of slavery, but by obeying the deeper truth he hears within himself, the one that can’t be pinned down in any statute book. Derrida posits justice as the deconstructive element in law. There may be no justice in the world, but the law – fixed statutes and penalties – is fired and inspired by the idea of justice (but too often perverted by the actions of Tournier’s Law: ‘Purity is the malign inversion of innocence’). ‘You’ll get justice in the next world,’ goes the opening line of William Gaddis’s novel, A Frolic of His Own, ‘in this world we have the law.’ With Huck and Jim, justice is the event that has disrupted the rigidity of the law, that event being the un-deconstructible human connection between them. That is, love.
‘no help for that’
At heart, the human being is a lack (we’re all waiting for Godot), and deconstruction is the intuitive awareness of that lack, and of the necessity of keeping a weather eye on the dangers of anything that promises to be ‘the answer.’ I doubt if Charles Bukowski has ever been accused of being a deconstructionist, but he did write this:
no help for that
there is a place in the heart that
will never be filled
a space
and even during the
best moments
and
the greatest
times
we will know it
we will know it
more than
ever
there is a place in the heart that
will never be filled
and
we will wait
and
wait
in that
space.
What is this but Derrida’s longing for the impossible?
Three Colours: Blue
Julie, the protagonist of Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Three Colours: Blue loses her husband and child in a car accident and decides, as a way of alleviating the pain of this loss, to effectively shut down her life. She cuts all ties with friends and family, moves to a flat in the city and establishes a simple routine centred on the local cafe and the swimming baths. She puts her life on auto-pilot; safe, secure, swaddled in pain-free tedium. On a personal level, she echoes those fundamentalist religions and political systems that operate by strict rules and regulations and abhor all innovations and spontaneity.
But life will not have it. Slowly but surely she is drawn back into the flow. As the wife of a famous composer (and a composer herself) music had been her great love, and now, despite efforts to rid herself of this aspect of her past, it keeps stopping her in her tracks, pieces of a musical score suddenly banishing the mundanity around her. And people, too, will not be ignored. Her essential goodness and humanity (which will be made explicit towards the end of the film) is drawn out when she responds to the sounds of a man being attacked by thugs in the street outside her apartment. She doesn’t respond with enough vigour to do the poor man any good, but it’s a start – a start that creates a connection with a young woman living on the floor beneath. Then she refuses to sign a petition got up by the other residents who want to kick out this young woman whom they regard as a whore. As a result, the young woman becomes her friend. Bit by bit, she is drawn back into life – to the point where, finding out that her husband had been having an affair with a young lawyer, she goes to see the woman and, on hearing that she is pregnant, gives her a place to live – her old house (a beautiful chateau) which she had previously put up for sale. And she completes her husband’s final unfinished symphony in tandem with her husband’s assistant, with whom she embarks on an affair.
It’s a classic story arc in both literature and film: the stony heart, cut off from life through pain of one kind or another, gradually melted through contact with people, in effect, through the power of love. So what can it possibly have to do with deconstruction, or any of deconstruction’s extended family? As mentioned earlier, deconstruction is love, a response to a call. Love is the ultimate deconstructing power because it, alone, is not, and never can be, a construction of any kind. Rather, it is what infuses all other structures – families, institutions, philosophies – with their life. Julie has built herself a life which she believes will free her from pain, and love has deconstructed it, prevented it from degenerating into an empty shell. As if to underscore the point, the film ends with the famous words of St. Paul, set to the music she has composed: ‘If I have not love, I am become as hollow brass.’ An empty shell. Whether it’s a personal life, a religious organisation, a political system or a philosophy, without love at the heart of it, it’s worthless. St. Paul’s famous words, seen in this light, may well be western literature’s earliest deconstruction manifesto.
Pride and Prejudice
Possibly the most famous scene in Pride and Prejudice is the one where Darcy, fascinated despite himself by Elizabeth, dares to open a crack in his well-structured stuffy world in order to make her a proposal – and Elizabeth responds by blowing the walls down. She deconstructs his world in the best Derridean fashion: that is, she shatters his false, desiccated notions of propriety and decorum while leaving the solid structure supporting those notions intact (everything will be as it is yet wholly different). After all, she does want to live there.
Works Cited
Banville, John. Stardust. Radio monologues, BBC 3, 11/05/02.
Frye, Northrop. ‘Reconsidering Levels of Meaning,’ Christianity and Literature, 54.3 (Spring 2005), pp. 397-432.
Heaney, Seamus. Spirit Level. London: Faber and Faber, 1994.
Heraclitus. Fragments: The Collected Wisdom of Heraclitus. Trans. Brooks Haxton. New York: Viking Penguin, 2001.
Houellebecq, Michel. Public Enemies. London: Atlantic Books, 2011.
Imhof, Rudiger. ‘An Interview with John Banville: ‘My Readers, That Small Band, Deserve a Break.’’ Irish University Review 11.1 (1981): 5-12.
Kearney, Richard. Dialogues with Contemporary Continental Thinkers: The Phenomenological Heritage. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1984.
Larkin, Philip. Collected Poems. London: Faber and Faber, 1988.
Lispector, Clarice. The Paris Review. ‘Clarice Lispector: Madam of the Void,’ interview with Jose Castello, December 10, 2020. (theparisreview.org.)
Lubac, Henri de. Mystery of the Supernatural. London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1967.
Mailer, Norman. Advertisements for Myself. London: Granada, 1972.
Moran, Dermot. ‘Nature, Man and God in the Philosophy of John Scotus Eriugena’ in R. Kearney, ed. The Irish Mind. Dublin and New Jersey: Wolfhound Press and Humanities Press, 1985. pp. 91-106; pp. 324-332.
Nabokov, Vladimir. Strong Opinions. New York: Vintage International, 1990.
Pascal, Blaise. Pensees and Other Writings. Oxford: OUP, 2008.
Pirsig, Robert. Lila: An Enquiry Into Morals. London: Bantam Press, 1991.
Tillich, Paul. ‘Art and Ultimate Reality,’ in Diane Apostolos-Cappadona, ed. Art, Creativity, and the Sacred. New York: Crossroad, 1984. pp. 219-35.
Toltz, Steve. Quicksand. London: Sceptre, 2016.
Notes
[1] Some testimonies from artists on the subject: The French poet and novelist Michel Houellebecq has said: ‘It is as though – and I know this sounds irrational – it is as though the poem already existed, has existed for all eternity, and that all you have done is discover it’ (Public Enemies 247). John Banville had this to say on the creation of his novel, Kepler:
Always I begin with the shape. But let me make a distinction, a very important one. The form of say, Kepler, is in itself wholly synthetic, by which I mean that it is imposed from outside, yet by synthetic I do not mean false, or insincere. It is, this formal imposition, the means by which I attempt to show forth, in the Heideggerian sense, the intuitive shape of the particular work of art which is Kepler, and which was there, inviolate, before and after the book was written. (Imhof 6)
Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones has said this on the subject of song writing (I’m paraphrasing from a barely-remembered interview): ‘You don’t write songs, you sort of pluck them out of the ether. They’re there, all the time. You just have to find them.’ And speaking of such poets as Keats, Wordsworth and Eliot, Northrop Frye has claimed: ‘They’ve all said the same thing. The poet does not think of himself as making his poems. He thinks of himself as a place where poems happen. (Frye 408)
BRENDAN MCNAMEE is the author of books and articles on John Banville, Michel Houellebecq, Gerald Murnane, Robert Musil, Sean O’Casey, Flannery O’Connor, W B Yeats and others
ALEXANDER ADAMS applauds a comprehensive study of a complicated writer
If, after I die, they should want to write my biography,
There’s nothing simpler.
I’ve just two dates – of my birth, and of my death.
In between the one thing and the other all the days are mine. […]
– ‘lf, After I Die’, Fernando Pessoa writing as Alberto Caiero
He led a respectable life. He wore smart clothes to the office. He wrote and translated material, sometimes with a flourish that belied his extramural activities. He was courteous and a touch playful, a bachelor in his thirties. He was given to using spare time to write at his desk. At the end of the work day, he would put on his hat and raincoat and walk through the capital’s streets, thinking of his latest project. Perhaps he would go to his usual café, where he would see friends. They admired him as a writer, appreciating his abilities, chiding him for his perfectionism. He published a little but they knew he wrestled with larger work which was not made public, even to them. When he died he was mourned by his friends and his readers but they did not realise what a giant he had been. In time, he would come to define their whole nation.
This could be a description of Franz Kafka but it is not. American Richard Zenith is a leading authority on Fernando Pessoa. He has edited and translated Pessoa’s writing. Living in Lisbon, Zenith inhabits Pessoa’s home city, relic of a glorious age and scene of an inexorable decline. It is a testament to Zenith’s devotion and ingenuity that he has managed to produce a 1,000-page biography of a figure whom he describes as ‘fanatically private.’ There is no autobiography; there are few revealing letters; the most informative ones are the drafts and unsent (mostly unfinished) letters he kept. There were no direct descendants. There are three diaries with short factual entries that together cover a total of over half a year. Zenith describes the interviews and memoirs of those who knew Pessoa as uninformative – or at least informative on how reserved the subject was. Pessoa was well aware of this and seemed to have actively participated in this occlusion. He was much given to self-reflection and intimations of both immortality and obscurity.
Pessoa claimed to be descended of ‘a mixture of aristocrats and Jews’ although neither predominated nor were proximate to him. His family was largely agnostic (or non-practising) Catholics, more devoted to music than God, who earned a living serving the state. His maternal grandfather was a civil servant and his paternal grandfather was a senior general. Joaquim de Seabra Pessoa (1850-1893), the poet’s father, was a civil servant. He was an opera fanatic and (anonymously) wrote music criticism for a newspaper. In 1887, he wed Maria Madalena Nogueira (1861-1925), the Azorean-born daughter of a civil servant. She was intelligent, well-educated and a keen reader.
Fernando António Noguiera Pessoa (1888-1935) was born on 13 June 1888, in Lisbon. He was delicate, introverted and passionate about literature. He was a voracious reader and writer at a young age. He was encouraged by his cultured family. In 1893, his father died of tuberculosis. The following year, Pessoa’s infant brother died of a fever. In 1895, the widow Pessoa married João Miguel Rosa, another civil servant, this one a diplomat.
Rosa was appointed Portuguese Consul in Durban, South Africa; his new wife and stepson followed in 1896. They would stay (increasing the family with three surviving children) until 1905. They lived through the Boer War and saw rural refugees camped in Durban’s public spaces and outskirts. Pessoa’s schooling and first year of university were in English. The young Pessoa won prizes for English. Winning the Queen Victoria Memorial Prize in 1903 for an original essay (beating 898 other entrants) was one of his proudest achievements, something he cherished until his death. Although Pessoa’s English was fluent, it was unidiomatic and airy, influenced by his reading of Romantic and Victorian poetry, and the bookish Pessoa spent more time reading Carlyle and Keats than bantering on the school playing fields. Pessoa would use his English to good effect in later life and wrote verse and prose in both English and Portuguese.
II
‘I am astounded whenever I finish anything. Astounded and distressed.’
– Pessoa writing as Bernardo Soares
When he was an adolescent, Pessoa began his own newspaper for his family, filling it with fictional news, jokes and poems. The authors were numerous and all pseudonyms. Over his lifetime, Pessoa published under multiple names and wrote under others, over 100 in all. The degree to which he actually inhabited these ‘heteronyms’ is debatable. It seems to have freed him creatively and allowed him licence to intellectually position himself outside of his life experience. There is the question of whether or not these Borgesian alter egos were part of a meta-fiction, additional to the text. Pessoa stated that these were the real authors of his writings. Each had a distinct style and character. Pessoa published verse under pen names Alberto Caeiro, Ricardo Reis and Álvaro de Campos, as well as under his own name, plus others. Like Kafka, who is a useful point of comparison, Pessoa published a fair amount of creative writing and non-fiction prose during his lifetime, but left a sizeable unpublished legacy. In his lifetime, he was best known as a political and cultural commentator. Only in the last year of his life was his stature as a poet generally realised. His unpublished manuscripts were found in a wooden trunk after his death.
‘The trunk indeed existed, and some ten years after Pessoa’s death more than three hundred of the poems it contained found their way into a handsome edition of his poetry, with separate volumes for Alberto Caeiro, Ricardo Reis, Álvaro de Campos, and Fernando Pessoa himself. Since each of the three heteronyms boasted a large and exquisite body of work stylistically unlike the poetry of his fellow heteronyms or of Pessoa himself, one could say that Portugal’s four greatest poets from the twentieth century were Fernando Pessoa.’
Pessoa – and his alter egos – submitted poems, stories and criticism to publications in Portugal and Great Britain. Hungry for success and recognition – hence the decision to often write in English – Pessoa was afflicted with chronic doubt, lapses of confidence and changes of heart. In this biography and editions of Pessoa’s writing, the adjectives ‘unfinished’, ‘incomplete’ and ‘fragmentary’ are commonplace. One could conclude that Pessoa’s use of heteronymic personae is a double-edged sword. It permitted him freedom to develop diverse and distinct bodies of writing but it left him without a core body of writings. The decision to write short texts also allowed him the opportunity to drop projects unfinished without too much investment. Without the impetus to write a novel and publish it, Pessoa could afford to bounce between ideas. His only substantial book published in his lifetime was one year before his death and consisted of poems. Pessoa may have been temperamentally unsuited to write a novel but his propensity to write short, often and under different identities exacerbated his weaknesses of prevarication and detachment. His trunk was filled with unfinished plays, poems, stories, translations and letters.
‘The human author of these books has no personality of his own. Whenever he feels a personality well up inside, he quickly realizes that this new being, though similar, is distinct from him – an intellectual son, perhaps, with inherited characteristics, but also with differences that make him someone else.’
It is possible that – with regard to the legion of heteronyms – readers will experience alternating intrigue and boredom. When Zenith devotes paragraphs to investigating the recurring signature of ‘Gaveston’ – remarking that this is the sole case of an alter ego appearing persistently over time in Pessoa’s jotting without being credited with a single text – how is one supposed to react? It is curious but is it a matter for curiosity for anyone other than a scholar who has spent countless hours poring over Pessoa’s manuscripts? It is a true fact and (presumably) a new fact, but does it mean anything and do we care? The principal heteronyms have bodies of work attached, some of it now published in English, but discussion of peripheral heteronyms (associated with mere jumbled fragments, inaccessible to all except researchers) is more distracting than illuminating.
Zenith diligently hunts down seeds of heteronyms in the writings of past authors, great and forgotten alike. Pessoa’s favourite authors included Thomas Carlyle, Poe, Keats, Milton, Ruskin, Wilde and Baudelaire. A less obvious influence was Max Nordau’s Entartung (Degeneration) (1892), a book identifying and condemning degeneracy. According to this account, it was Nordau’s passages on mania and mental degeneration that fascinated Pessoa most. His grandmother had suffered from severe and atypical dementia, diagnosed as intermittent. He was worried that he too might come to be afflicted. (One also thinks here of Lovecraft’s narrators fearing for their sanity. Lovecraft lost his father to madness, albeit tertiary syphilis, with which Lovecraft himself was not infected.) ‘Pessoa’s fascination, it turns out, was restricted to the relationship that the writer posited between exceptional intellectual or creative activity and psychological deviation from the norm.’
‘It surprises us that Pessoa could have been so enthralled by Nordau – a fluent, effectual writer who was well read but intellectually rigid, priggishly moralistic, and aesthetically reactionary.’
Not at all. Just as Zenith points out that Pessoa had to wait until the end of the twentieth century for a receptive audience for his meta-textually ludic fiction; so Zenith should not be surprised that Pessoa then and others now search for the link between (on one hand) decadence, social atomisation and destruction of tradition and (on the other) liberalism, progressivism and materialism. Pessoa himself was not a traditionalist, but he was eager to understand the causes of social and personal decline. Nordau, Otto Weininger, Herbert Spencer, (later) Oswald Spengler and others advanced ideas that vary in insight and plausibility, but any intelligent open mind would have found such material to be thought-provoking, even if ultimately it disfavoured those authors’ conclusions. Decadence is appealing to vanguardists and the elite but it has characteristics of both pathology and poison.
Images from NCultura.pt, with acknowledgements – https://ncultura.pt/15-fantasticas-curiosidades-sobre-fernando-pessoa/
III
Pessoa used his inheritance to establish Ibis Press in 1909, which would be a commercial printer but also published advanced literature (including Pessoa’s books). It folded almost immediately, due to debt and tough competition. He burned through his inheritance accrued debt in under a year. This put him at odds with his family, then still in South Africa, especially when he requested they pay off his debts whilst at the same time refusing to get a job. The most he would do was provide translations of poems for a giant library of world classics in Portuguese.
In 1914 Pessoa wrote as Álvaro de Campos, Portugal’s first Futurist poet. With author-friend Mário de Sá-Carneiro, Pessoa would act as shadow editor for the avant-garde literary journal Opheu. The journal was published in 1915 and lasted only two issues. Influenced by the Futurist Manifestoes and the British Vorticist Blast, Orpheu caused a sensation. Its radical sensibilities, taboo subject matter (sex) and Cubist collages, ignited debate in Portuguese cultural circles. Who were these madmen? At least three of them were Pessoa. Sá-Carneiro fled to Paris, where he committed suicide after a period of debauchery.
Pessoa described himself as elitist, nationalist, imperialist (Portugal at this time still had a substantial empire) and (nominally) a republican, although one disillusioned with the corruption of the republican government established in 1910. He antagonised republicans in a newspaper letter and he had to evade a gang that came to assault him. It was one of the few physical escapades of this normally timid man. He was unenthusiastic about the Great War and critical of Portugal’s entrance into direct hostilities against the Central Powers on the continent, reasoning that war in France against the Germans did not contribute to protecting and ruling colonies in Africa. Pessoa’s unformed aspiration was the foundation of an aristocratic republic of Portugal, led by great men. He himself had no political aspirations. Zenith never mentions Pessoa delivering a public speech or broadcast.
At this time, Pessoa became involved with esoterica, mysticism, magic and spirit reading, all complementing an established commitment to astrological predictions. He was in the habit of gauging planetary alignments when submitting manuscripts to London publishers. The publishers were uniformly unreceptive to his submissions and proposals, though his chapbooks of poems won praise for the author’s accomplishment. He dabbled in secret societies, but (as a lover of mystery stories) Pessoa seemed more stimulated by the intrigue than the reality.
In 1930, Pessoa was Aleister Crowley’s companion on a visit to Lisbon. Pessoa, a native of Lisbon, steeped in occult knowledge and fluent in Portuguese and English, was the ideal choice. Crowley’s reputation as an indefatigable fornicator, Satanist and drug fiend put Pessoa on edge before Crowley’s arrival by ship. Crowley wanted Pessoa to head the Portuguese chapter of his spiritualist society; Pessoa wanted Crowley to publish his writings in England. They both assumed the other was richer than he actually was, which entailed mutual disappointment. Crowley departed after staging a hoax suicide, which Pessoa partially corroborated. This is one of the most amusing passages in a biography that makes an intelligent and lively read.
IV
‘I’m suffering from a headache and the universe.’
– Pessoa
In 1919, Pessoa started work at an import-export firm, using his knowledge of English and French. This was where (in 1920) he met the only woman he courted, Ophelia Queiroz.
Pessoa was averse to sexual intimacy. There is plenty of evidence in Pessoa’s writings of sexual attraction but also physical repulsion, perhaps linked to venereal disease. Love arises in the poems in an abstracted sense, derived from his reading. Zenith has good reason for assuming Pessoa died a virgin. Zenith also finds ample examples of misogyny in Pessoa’s writing and marginalia, provoked by fear (and disgust) regarding female libido. There are a number of sensitive and passionate homoerotic love poems ascribed to heteronyms, though Zenith (and others) do not believe this ever translated into carnal fulfilment.
Ophelia was nineteen years old and employed to act as a secretary. Pessoa was thirty-two but youthfully unattached, respected by colleagues as a great poet yet one unaccountably unrewarded. She was strongly attracted to Pessoa. Pessoa kindled to the affection and they carried on a romance of trysts, walks and love letters. It was imbalanced, with Ophelia taking the lead and wanting commitment. Pessoa was too detached and cautious for the relationship to develop straightforwardly. Unusually for Pessoa, their letters survive and are quoted in this account. Ophelia is insistent and puzzled by Pessoa’s reticence. Pessoa is playful and affectionate but unwilling to translate that into an engagement. (Him writing as his heteronyms was an augury of a poor outcome.) The impasse led to estrangement, though they did resume writing over the period 1929-30. By temperament and choice, Pessoa was determined to remain unencumbered by the emotional or domestic burden of partnership. Ophelia married the year after the poet’s death.
Pessoa’s apparent support for homosexual men as men and as writers comes as no surprise considering the poems he wrote. Even if Pessoa was not himself homosexual, he displays empathy and must have gained some pleasure from imagining himself as a homosexual poet, modelled on Walt Whitman. He publicly defended two homosexual writers whose work was banned. This attitude aligns with the idea of an aristocratic elite heading a nation founded on excellence and spurning the distractions of materialistic progress. In Pessoa’s vague imaginings, it was priest-scholars rather than Spartan warriors. Women in politics was anathema to him.
In 1921, Pessoa planned to publish The Protocols of the Elders of Zion in Portuguese. He did not do so. Instead, he wrote an essay about what he saw as the malign influence of Jews. ‘Without any perceptible animus toward Jews, writing as a calm analyst who happened to be informed by reactionary ideas, he noted that the three hundred members of the oligarchy allegedly plotting to overthrow the world order were not all Jews but were imbued by the spirit of what he called “sub-Judaism,” characterized by crass materialism and support of democracy and humanitarian causes.’ Later, he wrote about Jews in less charged terms, assigning to races ‘characteristics, however, [that] were neither genetic not altogether static; they depended on a complex web of historical, geographical, and sociological circumstances.’ Interesting lines of thought for an author who claimed Christianised Jews in his lineage to take.
Zenith criticises Pessoa for not being an egalitarian (while admitting that such an attitude was not incompatible with the poet’s outlook) and condemns Pessoa for wearing blackface as a prank (‘the inherent offensiveness of blackface’). What, a reader may wonder, is gained by wagging the measuring stick of American morality of 2021 at a Portuguese who grew up in Victorian-era colonial Africa? For the most part, such presumptions are not too intrusive.
Pessoa was both an artistic Modernist and a political reactionary; he was empathetic towards certain minority groups, indifferent towards others. He approved of the suppression of Communists and Socialists but was hostile towards Italian Fascism. (Perhaps he discerned within Fascism a core of Socialism.) Zenith thinks, ‘The “real Fernando Pessoa” was always someone else.’ I disagree. I see Pessoa as perfectly consistently himself in his apparent contradictions; he was honest enough to fully inhabit contradictory ideas. We have the concept of cognitive dissonance. However, there is no dissonance when there is no urge to harmonise contradictory ideas. Pessoa never believed he had to hold a consistent position. It seems he realised that a human being without contradictions is an impossibility.
V
‘An original, typically Portuguese literature cannot be Portuguese, because the typical Portuguese are never Portuguese’
– Pessoa
In 1928, António de Oliveira Salazar (1889-1970) was appointed finance minister and he would remain the directing force in the technocratic Portuguese government until a brain aneurysm in 1968. He would see out the last two years of his life as only the nominal (rather than actual) head of government of Portugal. His dryness – a devout Catholic, private, personally reserved, not given to rhetorical excess – and his competence as a director of the state finances won him widespread support. Pessoa supported Salazar’s measures, which stabilised Portugal’s finances and curbed the hedonistic excesses of Lisbon’s nightlife.
Almost a decade after their split, Ophelia and Pessoa reconnected during 1929-30. They resumed their correspondence and meetings. Again, they fell into the old pattern of conflict. Ophelia wanted marriage and companionship; Pessoa wanted to write. She was worried about his heavy drinking. It would leave him severely ill in the summer of 1932. He evidently enjoyed the excitement and experience of being desired but perhaps he felt guilty for giving Ophelia (about whom he evidently strongly cared) false hope of matrimony. Maybe he suspected he was not a writer in love but a writer researching love.
His Mensagem (Message) (1934) collection of poems won a prize from the government for its contribution to patriotic renewal. Pessoa was ambivalent, appreciating the recognition and the cash, but wary of official honours. The following year, Pessoa opposed a bill to outlaw secret societies, specifically the Freemasons. Pessoa had an affinity for societies so he took the legislation personally and wrote in the press strongly opposing the law. It was a futile effort because the parliament would rubberstamp the legislation. In his last months, he turned definitively against the regime for restricting personal freedom, especially freedom of artistic expression. His anti-Salazar poems could not be printed, but they apparently were circulated in a limited form. Zenith discloses that in his last months, Pessoa was writing an essay against Italy’s invasion of Abyssinia. Also, he was weighing up the merits of equality and humanitarianism. Death – intestinal obstruction (or possibly pancreatitis) apparently caused by alcoholism – intervened. Pessoa died on 30 November 1935, in hospital.
VI
‘Everlasting remembrance, how briefly you endure!’
– Pessoa
Over the subsequent years, volumes of the erroneously titled Complete Works of Pessoa were published by colleagues, amounting to a fraction of the slew of 25,000 sheets. The verses can be a little abstract and diffuse but often deploy pleasing irony, cutting humour and mordant insights. The best poem by Pessoa I have read is one of the longer ones, 1928’s ‘Tobacconist’s’ (written under the heteronym Álvaro de Campos) – one of his most involved and most concrete poems, featuring the poet’s thoughts upon watching a tobacconist and his store from across the street. It combines melancholy, levity and grandiosity.
The only lengthy work of fiction that Pessoa brought close to completion was The Book of Disquiet, which is assigned to Bernardo Soares. It consists of over 500 entries written over 1913-35, and was only published in 1982. It comprised hundreds of pages in an envelope. (One is put in mind of B.S. Johnson’s The Unfortunates (1969). His famous ‘book in a box’ is composed of individual sheets and sheaves.) The ordering and transcription are debated and since the first publication there have been new editions, some dramatically different. One English edition has been edited and translated by Zenith. The entries range from single sentences to passages of many pages. They are meditative, alternately detached and intensely personal, forming what Pessoa called a ‘factless autobiography’. It has a detached quality, splenetic humour and despairing melancholy that presages existentialist literature and the internal monologues of Beckett.
In an age of Borgesian meta-narratives and Post-Modern playfulness – as well as a (sadly) reduced capacity to concentrate on more involved lengthy prose – The Book of Disquiet and Pessoa’s heteronymic transformations have found warm appreciation. There is no doubt he was a serious, world-class writer and richly deserves this handsome biography.
Zenith is adept at sketching the situation of Portugal during the Belle Époque, republican and Salazar periods. He knows his subject matter inside out and speaks the languages of his subject. On balance, Zenith’s assertion that Pessoa’s heteronymic alter egos (at least, the major ones) are genuinely felt expressions of different intellects with unique voices, and not gimmicks, carries weight and is eloquently argued, with evidence. Once one grants Zenith his ethical and political interjections, even the most negative of critics is left with mere cavils. The biography hits the rare sweet spot of being as comprehensive as one might wish for while not lingering too long on any point. The amount and depth of research is humbling. Pessoa: An Experimental Life is a grand achievement – thorough, thoughtful, insightful and generally sympathetic, it does what all the best literary biographies do: inspire us to seek out the writings of its subject.
ALEXANDER ADAMS is an artist, art critic, novelist and poet. His most recent book is Artivism: The Battle for Museums in the Era of Postmodernism (Societas/Imprint Academic, 2022)
