The Geopolitics of Modernist Impersonality: Pessoa’s Notes on Joyce

Abstract

Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935), one of the most significant literary figures of the twentieth century and one of the greatest poets in the Portuguese language, owned a 1932 Odyssey Press (Hamburg) edition of Ulysses, noted on the colophon as the “1st definitive edition revised at the author’s request by Stuart Gilbert.” The book is available for inspection at Casa Fernando Pessoa, a cultural center in Lisbon that houses parts of the Portuguese poet’s estate, including his library. It can also be viewed in the Digital Library that the center began making searchable online in 2010.¹ Examination of the two volumes of Ulysses reveals no marginalia, but among the approximately 30,000 unpublished manuscript pages left by Pessoa at his death, the bulk of which were kept in two trunks and are now housed mostly in Portugal’s National Library, there appears an autograph bearing four lines on Joyce. In 2001, the first three lines were translated and published in The Selected Prose of Fernando Pessoa, edited by Richard Zenith. They read: “The art of James Joyce, like that of Mallarmé, is art preoccupied with method, with how it’s made. Even the sensuality of Ulysses is a symptom of intermediation. It is hallucinatory delirium—the kind treated by psychiatrists—presented as an end in itself” (222). Pessoa’s notes on Joyce did not see full publication in the original language until 2006, when Portugal’s national printing house brought out Escritos sobre génio e loucura [Writings on Genius and Madness].