The Selected Prose of Fernando Pessoa (12 page)

Sensationism was born in 1914, the same year as Pessoa’s major heteronyms, two of whom were its foremost exemplars. Caeiro, whose poetry (according to Thomas Crosse, p. 53) was based on “the substitution of sensation for thought,” embodied the Sensationist doctrine that reality, for us, is summed up in our sensations, since everything we know comes through them. Campos, whose motto was to “feel everything in every way possible,” exemplified the corollary doctrine that since the only reality we have is that of sensations, we should experience them as intensely as possible. Intersectionism, which is a form of Sensationism but seems to have been born first, can be roughly characterized as literary Cubism, whereby reality is broken down into its temporal and spatial components, which are then organized into a compositional ensemble. The best example of this technique is Pessoa’s poem sequence titled “Slanting Rain,” in which contrasting poetic subjects are superimposed, or the same subject is seen from diverse points of view. (See Campos’s description of these poems on p. 50
).

But Sensationism and Intersectionism, even more than
Paulismo,
exceeded the bounds of Fernando Pessoa and his heteronymic company. By the spring of
1914
a small group of writers had gathered around Pessoa, who was not really their leader, since leadership was not a role that suited his personality, but they were his tacit followers, recognizing and feeding off his genius, and some of their ideas no doubt went into the literary doctrines he forged. They met in cafes, where they discussed, showed each other their written work, and plotted how best to launch themselves and their movement, which was tantamount to launching European Modernism in Portugal. Several of the group’s members, including Mario de Sá-Carneiro, were based in Paris, where they had direct contact with the Futurists and the Cubists, whose tenets were incorporated into Sensationism and Intersectionism
.

It was probably Pessoa’s idea to create a magazine, significantly titled
Europa,
whose pages would have featured Intersectionist theory, Inter-sectionist poetry, and Intersectionist fiction
. A
supplement to the first issue
,
evidently meant for distribution abroad, would have contained work by Pessoa, Sá-Cameiro, and Alexander Search (one of Pessoa’s early hetero-nyms, see pp. 15–16) in French and English. The magazine idea was superseded by a book idea, an
Anthology of Intersectionism,
which likewise fizzled, but in
1915
the group founded and published two issues of
Orpheu,
where five of Pessoa’s masterworks saw print:
The Mariner
and “Slanting Rain,” signed by his own name, and the Campos poems “Opiary,” “Triumphal Ode,” and “Maritime Ode.” The youngest group member to publish in the magazine, Jose de Almada-Negreiros
(1893–1970),
went on to have a long career as an experimental writer and painter. Some of his best works were practical demonstrations of Intersectionist theory, and he may be considered the third leader—after Pessoa and Sá-Cameiro
—
in the triumvirate of Portuguese Modernism. Portugal’s greatest painter of the period, Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso, was also associated with the
Orpheu
group
.

Orpheu
succeeded in prompting violent reactions in the press, where a number of scathing reviews and lampoons appeared, and Pessoa’s genius was also noted, even if grudgingly. Though it sold reasonably well, the magazine couldn’t pay its printing bills, and so the third issue never made it beyond galley proofs. But, short as its publishing history was
, Orpheu
changed the map of Portuguese letters, and it lived on in various avant-garde magazines that were its undeniable heirs, including
Exilio (1916),
whose one issue published a strident critical piece by Pessoa titled “The Sensationist Movement,” and the likewise single-issue
Portugal Futurista (1917),
which published Alvaro de Campos’s
Ultimatum,
written several years earlier as an Intersectionist manifesto
.

Sensationism began with the friendship between Fernando Pessoa and Mário de Sá-Carneiro. It is probably difficult to separate the part each of them had in the origin of the movement, and certainly quite useless
to determine it. The fact is they built up the beginnings between them.

But each Sensationist worth mentioning is a separate personality, and they have naturally all interacted. Fernando Pessoa and Mário de Sá-Carneiro stand nearest to the Symbolists. Álvaro de Campos and Almada-Negreiros are the nearest to the more modern style of feeling and writing. The others are intermediate.

Fernando Pessoa suffers from classical culture.

No Sensationist has gone higher than Sá-Carneiro in the expression of what may be called, in Sensationese, colored feelings. (...)

Fernando Pessoa is more purely intellectual; his power lies more in the intellectual analysis of feeling and emotion, which he has carried to a perfection that renders us almost breathless. Of his static drama
The Sailor
* a reader once said: “It makes the exterior world quite unreal,” and it does. No more remote thing exists in literature. Maeterlinck’s* best nebulosity and subtlety are coarse and carnal by comparison.

José de Almada-Negreiros is more spontaneous and rapid, but he is nonetheless a man of genius. He is younger than the others, not only in age, but in spontaneity and effervescence. His is a very distinct personality, and the wonder is how he came about it so early.

...

How far more interesting than the Cubists and the Futurists!

I never wished to know personally any of the Sensationists, being persuaded that the best knowledge is impersonal.

Álvaro de Campos is excellently defined as a Walt Whitman with a Greek poet inside. He has all the power of intellectual, emotional, and physical sensation that characterized Whitman. But he [also] has the precisely opposite trait—a power of construction and orderly development of a poem that no poet since Milton has attained. Álvaro de Campos’s “Triumphal Ode,” which is written in the Whitmanesque absence of stanza and rhyme, has a construction and an orderly development which stultifies the perfection that “Lycidas,” for instance, can claim in this particular. The “Naval Ode,”* which covers no less than twenty-two pages
of Orpheu
, is a very marvel of organization. No German regiment ever had the inner discipline which underlies that
composition, which, from its typographical aspect, might almost be considered as a specimen of Futurist carelessness. The same considerations apply to the magnificent “Salutation to Walt Whitman,” in the third
Orpheu.*

...

The Portuguese Sensationists are original and interesting because, being strictly Portuguese, they are cosmopolitan and universal. The Portuguese temperament is universal: that is its magnificent superiority. The one great act of Portuguese history—that long, cautious, scientific period of the Discoveries—is the one great cosmopolitan act in history. The whole people stamp themselves there. An original, typically Portuguese literature cannot be Portuguese, because the typical Portuguese are never Portuguese. There is something American, with the noise left out and the quotidian omitted, in the intellectual temper of this people. No people seizes so readily on novelties. No people depersonalizes so magnificently. That weakness is its great strength. That temperamental nonregionalism is its unused might. That indefiniteness of soul is what makes them definite.

Because the great fact about the Portuguese is that they are the most civilized people in Europe. They are born civilized, because they are born accepters of all. They have nothing of what the old psychiatrists used to call misoneism, meaning only hatred of things new; they have a positive love of novelty and change. They have no stable elements, as the French have, who make revolutions only for export. The Portuguese are always making revolutions. When a Portuguese goes to bed he makes a revolution, because the Portuguese who wakes up the next day is quite different. He is precisely a day older, quite distinctly a day older. Other people wake up every morning yesterday. Tomorrow is always several years away. Not so this quite strange people. They go so quick that they leave everything undone, including going quick. Nothing is less idle than a Portuguese. The only idle part of the nation is the working part of it. Hence their lack of evident progress.

There are only two interesting things in Portugal—the landscape and
Orpheu
. All the packing in between is used-up rotten straw. (...) If there were any instinct of the sensible in modern writing, I would
begin with the landscape and finish up with
Orpheu
. But, God be thanked, there is no instinct of the sensible in modern writing, so I leave the landscape and begin and end with
Orpheu
. (...)
Orpheu
is the sum and synthesis of all modern literary movements; that is why it is more worthy of being written about than the landscape, which is only the absence of the people who live in it.

All sensations are good, as long as we don’t try to reduce them to action.

An action is a sensation that was thrown away.

Act on the inside, using only the hands of your spirit to pluck flowers on life’s periphery.

Fight against the mental slavery represented by the association of ideas. Learn not to associate ideas but to break your soul into pieces instead. Learn how to experience sensations simultaneously, to scatter your spirit through your own scattered self.

We are completely and dynamically indifferent to social and political life. However much they may interest us, they interest us only as things on which to build fleeting theories and irrelevant hypotheses.

All premodern art was based on just one element. This was true for the classical art of paganism as it was for Renaissance art or Romantic art. Only very recently has art begun to evolve outside of this ancient and rigid mold.

The Greeks and Romans (and to a lesser extent the men of the Renaissance) tried to impress, onto the reality of a given object or idea, the sensation it made them feel. But the Romantics realized that reality, for us, is not the object but our sensation of it. They were thus less concerned to present the object itself than to convey their sensation of it. That doesn’t mean they withdrew from Reality; no, they sought it, because our sensation of the object—not the object conceived apart from our sensation—
is
its true Reality, since outside of our sensation nothing exists, our sensation being for us the criterion of existence. “Man is the measure of all things.” Protagoras’s dictum also applies to truth, in its abstract and absolute sense.

It was the internalization produced by Christianity that led man to notice (unconsciously at first) that the fact of reality, the real fact, is not the object but our sensation of it, which is where it exists. Whether it exists elsewhere we cannot know.

But Romanticism did not see very far. True Reality actually consists in two things—our sensation of the object and the object. Since the object does not exist outside of our sensation—for us, at least, and that’s what matters to us—it follows that true reality consists in our sensation of the object and in our sensation of our sensation.

Classical art was an art of dreamers and madmen. Romantic art, despite its greater intuition of the truth, was an art of men who were adolescents in their notion of the reality of things but not yet adults in how they felt that reality.

Reality, for us, is sensation. No other immediate reality can exist for us.

Art, whatever it is, must be founded on this element, which is the only one we have.

What is art? The attempt to give as clear and exact a notion as possible of objects, understood not just as outer things but also as our thoughts and mental constructions.

A sensation is composed of two elements: the object of sensation and the sensation itself. All human activity consists in the search for the absolute. Science seeks the absolute Object, meaning the object as independent as possible of our sensation of it. Art seeks absolute Sensation, meaning sensation as independent as possible of the object. Philosophy (that is, Metaphysics) seeks the absolute relationship of the Subject (Sensation) and the Object.

Art seeks Sensation in the absolute. But sensation, as we’e seen, is composed of the Object of sensation and the Sensation itself.

Intersection of the Object with itself: Cubism. (The intersection, that is, of various aspects of the same Object with each other.)

Intersection of the Object with the objective ideas it suggests: Futurism.

Intersection of the Object with our sensation of it: Intersectionism strictly speaking, which is what we propose.

To feel is to create. But what is feeling?

Feeling is thinking without ideas, hence understanding, since the Universe has no ideas.

Holding opinions is not feeling.

All our opinions come from other people.

Thinking is wanting to convey to others what we believe we feel.

Only what we think can be conveyed to others. What we feel cannot be conveyed. We can only convey the
value
of what we feel. The most we can do is make someone feel what we feel. We can’t make the reader feel the same thing, but it’s enough if he feels in the same way.

Feeling opens the doors of the prison where thought confines the soul.

Lucidity should go only as far as the soul’s threshold. Explicitness is forbidden even in the antechambers of feeling.

To feel is to understand. To think is to err. To understand what someone thinks is to disagree with him. To understand what someone feels is to be him. To be someone else is quite useful metaphysically. God is everyone.

See, hear, smell, taste, feel—those are God’s only commandments. The senses are divine, because they are our relationship with the Universe, and our relationship with the Universe is God.