“A writer’s life”, the poet Nick Laird once remarked, with a self-assurance befitting a Royal Society of Literature Fellow, “is a cycle of trying to get to their work, sitting staring at the blank screen, wandering off, steering their reluctant bodies back” to the desk where they compose – out of the ambient, affluent bustle of London or New York, where they live – a “pattern” on the page, to make sense of the “chaos of daily circumstance”. Given the apparently placid tenor of Laird’s own routine, such “chaos” would appear to be largely symbolic, or at least to unfold outside the pale of the writer’s bubbled existence, self-absorbed and self-admiring.
Sometimes, of course, the amiable sequestration of even the most punctilious of poetic solipsists can be disturbed: by disruptive riots or bad reviews, human rights abuses or pesky up-starts who have the audacity to care. It’s then that the holy guardians are called on to defend and re-sanctify the art, imperilled by a round of “daily circumstance” grown all too intrusive. To quote Ireland’s current Chair of Poetry, speaking in 2017:
Must poetry be louder, must it be more active, more politically and socially engaged? I can’t bring myself to believe that the answer to this is yes. Poetry’s response must be to remain true to itself rather than rush into rhetoric. Poems shouldn’t be about getting a point across.
Poetry’s right to be pointless, the poet’s freedom to shun the claims of political or social conscience: these are the resounding criteria, the engraven ingredients, of literary greatness.
A new podcast and article discuss fresh crackdowns targeting the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality, with Fatima Akman Lehmann joining Luke Sheehan.https://t.co/nQzOJ3bxCP
We might wonder how such prescriptions would be received in Turkey, a country which, under the influence of Recep Erdoğan, has undergone a process of forceful “authoritarian consolidation” in recent years: the diversity of a multi-ethnic polity replaced by a top-down state “restructured along hyperpresidential lines” and specialising in “the mass persecution”of perceived “dissidents, who have been jailed in their thousands.” Where censorship and imprisonment are looming realities for citizens (including writers) who dare to ask questions – and even occasionally attempt to get their “point across” – it’s possible that the supposed right of poets not to think or care about very much beyond their own line-breaks would smack of empty-headed conformism, rather than the liberty its advocates pretend.
Perhaps post-doctoral literary scholars of the future will resolve such paradoxes and speculations definitively, for one and for all. For now, readers can occupy themselves with Fog Bells: 8 Contemporary Turkish Poets, a new bi-lingual anthology from Dedalus Press, carefully curated and translated by Istanbul-based poet, Neil P. Doherty.
Doherty’s versions pay tribute to the range and vitality of his chosen poets – spanning multiple generations, but all still in their literary prime. His own style becomes recognisable as the book progresses: each voice he presents has its own kind of under-stated wit and oneirc clarity, catching the rhythms of history in a vivider light. “The world is a saddleless horse”, observes Gökçenur Ç., “we try not to fall off”, though “we whisper ‘you couldn’t be real’ / into its ear.”
There is often a philosophical undercurrent surging just below the surface of these writers’ attentions, poem after poem, in the words of Cevat Çapan, “tirelessly / seeking for the roots of life itself.” The marginality and strange endurance of human yearnings become connecting threads in the expansive tapestry Doherty draws into billowing life. “This graveyard we call memory”, notes Elif Sofya, “grows and grows in our heads”, a “haunting of the body” now metamorphosed into words
Time and again, the richness and intensity of individual perceptions are balanced – granted weight and depth – by a galvanizing recognition of story-telling as a mode of shared (albeit frequently contested) consciousness. Gonca Özmen thus recalls and elegizes the victims of the Roboski massacre, carried out by the state military against a group of (mostly teenaged) Turkish civilians. “Branches entwined in a verdant forest” give way, in the poem, to “arms and legs entwined in an empty forest”, as a spectral crowd of grieving mothers assembles in the aftermath, “day and night clutching these soaking wet photographs”. Mustafa Köz, similarly, manages to hold the broken world, like a fallen teardrop, in delicate suspension: it “was for all of you that we exiles set out on the road at dawn”, he sings, “for the sake of these lands, crushed under bloody, iron heels.”
The full range of felt emotion – encompassing grief, joy, whimsy, longing – seems somehow distilled and honoured in this vibrant anthology. Among other things, its arrival may send a reviving gust of energy through the more insular spaces of Irish culture. Poetry’s horizons have always been broader than the comfortable confines within which many of our cliqued and sinecured gate-keepers have been content to keep it slotted. Its home is the world, and its journeys manifold – across languages and histories, alive with “the honour of carrying / This light.”
My sixteen year old daughter comes to me to complain about
Patrick Kavanagh.
O great irony, hardly are the words out of her mouth
And I can see those fucking potatoes,
The drills and the furrows of old bloody Monaghan!
Why do we do it? Why does every generation get subjected
To this kind of shit?
Isn’t Life bad enough without having to force poetry
About bleeding potatoes down their bloody throats!
And then, just as I am almost in despair,
And I’m a bloody poet myself,
Her voice pipes up again, and she adds;
“Although, Epic isn’t half bad, at least he mentions Homer!”
And, I see again my reading of the poem through her eyes,
When I too saw the ancient importance ricocheting
In Paddy Boy,
As she too recognised the importance of Homer
And his epic take on Life.
Staring across the kitchen table at her,
With not a potato in sight,
I somehow saw the great blind ancient hovering above us
Monumentally human, whispering to us both
Across the infinite.
“It’s been two days. We gotta to do something. It’s gonna go rotten.”
“I know. I’m thinking.”
“About what we talked about?”
“What?”
“Get on the Great Ocean Road. Out past Martyrs Bay.”
“Yeah. I know the place. Near the twelve apostles.”
“We were there with Jessie that time, remember?”
“Yeah, I remember. Alright. Let’s do it then. Get some sleep, we’re leaving here at two.”
“In the morning?”
“Course in the fucking morning.”
“How long will it take to get there?”
“We’ll get there before sun up.”
‘I’ll get the weights.’
“On ya.”
Wilko and Daz settled it that night. How to get rid of the body. They had bought half a kilo of speed from Jock Cooper up in Melbourne and things had gone wrong. In the fight, Daz shot Jock dead and now they had him wrapped in carpet and duct tape in the boot of Wilko’s blue Ford Cortina. They had never killed anyone before and both had a dread feeling about their circumstance. They were consumed with dark emotion. At this point they were the only ones that knew about the murder. No-one had heard the gun shot. The next farm house was four miles away. Anyway, the sound of gunshots out there wasn’t uncommon even if someone had. Shooting kangaroos was one of Wilko’s jobs. In short, no one was looking for them, yet. They hadn’t left Wilko’s farm since the killing. They had been living with the body for two days, wondering what to do.
The adrenaline rush of the kill surprised them by its force. The weight of becoming a killer threatened to overwhelm Daz, but the two days he had spent with the body had given him time to meditate on their situation. The fury that led to the murder was now partly subdued by a lack of remorse. Daz had pulled the trigger, but their history was intertwined closely, and to betray each other would be to betray their childhood selves. A notion beyond their imaginings. They were in it together and they knew it. They both understood that if they didn’t keep cool heads they were done for. And now, after two days, the time had come to act. There had been a heavy rain storm that day and the area around Woodend was drenched through. There was a chill wind in the evening air.
‘Fucking cold.’ Said Wilko as he put on an extra sweater and zipped up his coat.
“Chat.”
Perhaps that’s why the country exists in the first place, so the English, the Scots, the Welsh and the Irish didn’t have to suffer the winters any longer. Wilko looked out the kitchen window as it was being battered by the rain.
“We’ve fucking gone and done it now.” He said to Daz.
“If you haven’t got anything useful to say don’t say it. Alright? Now get ta fucking sleep. We’ve got work to do. If we don’t get it right it’s thirty-five years in the slammer. So, I’m only going to say this once. You be careful hey. Or I’ll fucking kill ya.” Daz turned out the light and soon after began snoring, but Wilko stayed by the window watching the rain. He was too alive to sleep. The game was on. Wilko looked over at Daz sleeping and burned a cigarette, each draw he took carefully and deliberately. Looking carefully, he became fascinated by his sleeping friend. Wilko was scared of Daz at times. Ever since they were kids there had been a hierarchy. Daz was both older and stronger and those two factors clinched it. If it had to be called, Wilko was probably the cleverer of the two but there wasn’t much in it. Neither of them had a handle on science, or God for that matter, they were men who were characterized by action rather than thought. And that, if the truth be known, was how they found themselves in the situation they were now in.
*
The alarm clock went off at precisely 2.00 am and Daz was up and dressed in seconds. He splashed a bit of water on his face from the sink and lit a cigarette, trying to prepare his mind and body for the grim task ahead.
“Oi. Get up ya fucking bludger, we gotta go. Get a move on!” And Daz kicked the edge of Wilko’s cot. As Wilko rose up quickly in the bed something went wrong.
“Ah fuck!” Wilko let out a low, doleful whine.
“Come on, what are ya waitin for?”
“Me fucking neck mate. I’ve pulled a fucking muscle in me neck. Ah ya cunt.” Wilko sat up and almost screamed with pain but managed to suppress it with a chuntering kind of sigh.
“Oh, this is fucking all I need. Where’s the fucking beer? I need a fucking beer. My neck’s fucking crook mate. Ah fuck.” Daz went over to the fridge and pulled out a six pack of beers. As if his mind refused to believe it, he tried to move his neck in a normal way and there it was again. The intense pain of a pulled neck muscle.
“Come on get ready. No drinking in the car though. We gotta keep our heads down and out of any copper’s sight.”
“What about me neck?”
“Fuck ya neck mate!” Came suddenly, shouting. We gotta get rid of him. You hear me? I’m not fucking joking. Get your shit together, we’re leaving. Now.”
A forlorn looking Wilko stood up, clasping his neck, and followed Daz out of the farm house and towards the truck. The rain was coming down hard when they opened the farmhouse door. Wilko looked up into the rain as he stepped off the porch to wake himself up and the pulled muscle gave him a shooting pain that rattled his whole body. He grimaced and left his hand firmly by his throat to remind him of the pain he had suddenly and unexpectedly acquired. The rain pounded them as they walked towards the car, and there was an audible ‘fuck me’ from Daz as he put the key in the door and turned it. Wilko could now only move the top half of his body in a robotic way. If he needed to look in a certain direction he had to move his whole torso towards the object, keeping his head and neck as rigid as possible. As Wilko sat down and shut the car door he turned too quickly and again an intense shooting pain bounced from his neck muscle to his brain. He grimaced and found himself unable to muster words. He felt acutely miserable. He put on his seat belt slowly, taking great care not to turn his head. He still had sleep in his eyes. ‘Drive slow and safe, I can’t move me neck.’ Daz turned the key in the ignition but even the engine starting wasn’t enough to drown out the sound of the drumming rain on the car. The headlights came on and they started moving cautiously along the country lane in the wild storm. Before long they turned on to the main road that would take them south towards the twelve apostles, the great rising stones that awaited them in the fortress of the swirling sea. That would be the three of them. Daz, Wilko and the dead, now decomposing body of Jock Cooper in the boot.
One of the bonuses of trying to dispose of a dead body in Australia is its vast emptiness. It has half the population of Spain spread over a continent almost the size of Europe. The only problem was that driving that late at night might arouse suspicion, in the unlikely event of them passing the police. There had been no sign of the law as they reached the Great Ocean Road. They glimpsed the Southern Ocean, singing in the moonlight. Wilko had one hand on his neck as he lit a smoke and opened the window a few inches, only to feel the rain speckling his face.
‘What do we do if we get pulled?’ Asked Wilko.
“Stay calm. I’ll tell them I just found out me mums had a fall and we’re on our way to the hospital. I’ve done it before. It’s about the performance.”
‘Bit of an actor hey? Fair play. So, what’s the name of the hospital?”
Daz didn’t know.
“Fuck’s sake.” Wilko said in a disappointed, worried way and looked out the window, suddenly mesmerised by the glimmering ocean light. As Wilko turned naturally to take in the view, pain pulsed through his neck and he leant forward with a sigh. They both fell into a melancholy silence.
The one thing they knew to be well careful of was the potholes. Ruin the suspension or burst a tyre out in the wilderness in a storm and you were done. It was still pitch black when they reached the Great Ocean Road and the pelting rain turned the Ford Cortina into a kind of bongo. There was almost no one out there. Every ten minutes or so they would be passed by the rolling headlights of a car, with their eyes peeled for the coppers.
“How much further d’ya’reckon?” Said Wilko.
“Get the map out, it’s in the glove compartment. We’re coming up to Lorne.”
“Righty-o.”
As Wilko studied the map in the passenger seat, a sign flew past in the rainy lights that said ‘THE TWELVE APOSTLES 145 KMS’. They both thought about the body in the boot of car, driving on in silence with the storm making the music about them, Wilko with his head down to the map and Daz with his hands high up on the steering wheel and his eyes fixed on the road ahead, unblinking. They would be there at the cliff in a few hour’s tops.
“We’ll get there well before sun up.” Daz reiterated. ‘Rain’s slowing us down.’ Forgetting about his neck momentarily, Wilko turned to look at Daz and felt a fierce shooting pain shot through his neck again. Now, the agony rendered him silent, and he slowly closed his eyes, wondering whether it was all worth it. Life. Was it worth the suffering. Daz looked at him and knew he wasn’t faking. Then there was a flash of sheet lightening as Daz turned his eyes back on the road and in the illumination, he suddenly saw a fully grown female kangaroo bouncing across the road in the headlights.
“Fuck,” Shouted Daz and he hit the brakes. Never swerve a roo was a thing his dad had taught him from his earliest years. As the pain in his neck subsided Wilko opened his eyes to the sound of screeching wheels, and the first thing he saw was the Kangaroo smashing into the windscreen with an almighty bang.
“Cunt!” Shouted Daz in the death flash. After the great thud there was the sound of shattering glass, then the airbags, and then the halting tyres on the tarmac. Finally, the falling rain from the womb of the car. Inside silence. The vehicle was still on the road as they came to a complete standstill with the dead Kangaroo up on the bonnet, dead in the broken windscreen. Time passed before they began to stir. They came to their senses almost simultaneously.
“Fuck a duck.” Said Wilko. Daz laughed a mad laugh. Wilko turned his painful neck to look at him and Wilko registered the bright red and scarlet in Daz’s face as he laughed, as the insignia of a maniac. The body of the Kangaroo was half inside the car and Daz could see its dead eyes staring vacantly between the air bags.
“Fuck.” Came the groaning Wilko, he now had whiplash on top of the pulled muscle. Daz pushed the airbag away the best he could, opened the door and stepped out into the rain. He retched a little and spat out bile but there was no puking. His heart was beating fast, getting wetter by the second in the downpour. The sight of the dead Kangaroo on the bonnet increased the mania in his laughter. He was feeling the overwhelming sense of providence that surviving death can invoke. He did a little dance in celebration with his arms in the air. Then he heard Wilko’s voice screaming out of the darkness.
“What are doing ya mad cunt?! Remember what we’ve got in the boot? What if someone sees us hey?! Get in the car. Fuck’s sake. Come on. Get in the fucking car! Let’s go.”
Daz looked up and down the rain soaked, night time highway. There was nothing out there, except the great swaying trees and the night. This was the boundless country. They both became lost in thought as they tried to keep calm. Using all their strength they took hold of each end of the dead kangaroo, lifted it off the bonnet and dropped it on the grass by the side of the road. They both stared down at the dead animal, their silence revealing the quick flow of their thoughts. They got back in the car and drove away.
The night sky over the sea, illuminated by the hiding moon, glowed in the grey mist. The seaward clouds cloaked the galaxy from sight, returning their minds to the here and now, to life, the thing that matters only. They were alone on the road. The coast was theirs, the marvellous world around them, brimming at oceans edge. The headlights of the car were being studied by the birds in the sky riding down the dark road, swinging down above the electric headlight beams to investigate this unnatural thing stalking the marsh. The two men in the car drove on in silence. They had survived. The storm came rolling over them, the rain beat down on the windscreen, and nature, the sea, the sky, the rain and the wind, went on behaving as though they didn’t exist. They tingled to be alive.
Rain was seeping through the broken windscreen as the front left wheel hit a pothole and they bumped and lurched violently making Wilko’s neck spasm in agony. He muttered to himself. He took the pain. He knew it was nothing compared to what was to come if they didn’t get rid of the body. Their minds now had a steely focus. Once the body was in the sea their trouble would end. Their worries would be over. Jock Cooper hadn’t even been reported missing. Nothing on the news. The police were nowhere to be seen. If the body was swept away by the ocean and devoured by the bottom feeders, they would be home and dry with only their consciences to trouble them, which wasn’t any real danger at all.
The rain quietened and the forest gave way to barren scrub. They both looked up out of the windows and saw the parting of the clouds revealing the glowing white disc of the moon. Wilko slowed the car and dimmed the headlights. When he was sure there was nothing in their way he turned them off. In the far distance the faint outline of the twelve apostles signalled their destination approaching. The giant cylindrical rocks worn through eons by the punishing waves seemed strange and lonely. They had been forged by time, and birthed by the undying sea.
“Fuckin’ bonza.” Said Daz. It was the first time he had smiled in a while. They took a moment to appreciate the spectacular view, surely one of the rarest on the entire continent, and then trundled on down the vacated road, towards the cliff.
They took the last turning and slowed the car to a crawl. The headlights were off but there was still enough moon light to navigate. They parked the car next to a grass knoll about fifty metres away from the edge. Daz turned the engine and lights off and they sat there for a few moments in the hope the rain would pass.
“Where did you put the weights?”
“I already tied ‘em on. Don’t worry we’re strong enough. Come on. Let’s get a move on.”
They got out of the car and were greeted by a sweeping drizzle, not the heavy battering rain of before. Wilko opened the boot wide and they both looked down at the rolled carpet, with a pair of black shoes visible at the end. Daz took out a Stanley knife and began to saw at the duct tape. Soon the carpet opened and the lifeless corpse of Jock Cooper was revealed, his eyes open, with an eerie, surprised expression on his face. They both were able to ignore it, because of contempt. Daz was tempted to spit on the body but held himself back. “Focus. Focus.” He said to himself, and himself alone.
“What are we going to do with the carpet?”
“Cut it up and burn it.”
“Right-O.”
“Get his legs.” Wilko reached down, obeying the order. Daz threaded his arms under those of Jock Cooper and they headed out towards the cliff with their heads tilted down. The wind was whipping up strong enough to give them the feeling it was raining from the ground.
The cliff was giant. Not as high as the Cliffs of Moher, or the cliffs of Dover, but high enough to put the fear of God into them both. Both of them were scared to look over the precipice. As they approached the edge, the wind came up again and rain began to beat down harder than ever. Maybe nature was trying to stop them. Maybe the wind and the rain did know after all. That’s what Wilko thought as he trudged to the edge with the body, slipping on the muddy, rain sodden grass. It was Daz who was terrified of heights though, but he was the one who did the killing and he was the one who had the idea to throw the body off the cliff and into the sea.
“Nearly there!’ Shouted Daz through the howling wind and rain. Their hair and their clothes were already soaked through after a quick two minutes. There was a slight incline rising up towards the precipice and as they reached it Wilko lost his grip on Jock Cooper’s legs and they fell, splatting into the muddy earth.
“Fuck’s sake!” Shouted Daz, his voice carrying on the wind. “Careful ya fucking dumb cunt!’
“Don’t crack the shits, I’m fuckin trying alright!!”
“Fuck I got blood on me daks.”
“Burn ‘em later.”
“Ah me fucking neck! Cunt.” Wilko had dropped the dead legs hard into the mud, the pain in the muscle in his neck was too much to bear.
“Come on, lift! We’re nearly there!” Shouted Daz. Wilko straightened up his back as the rain beat down on him and the pain subsided enough to grab the dead legs and lift them back up. On they went in the dark and rain.
The wind was coming at them so hard they had their heads bent down towards it like they were pushing in a rugby scrum. The wrath of the storm had no mercy. When they were about ten metres from the very edge, they both lay down and began to roll the body. The wind felt less fierce on the ground but they could feel the wet cold mud and grass soaking through their shirts. As the dead body rolled over, the dead arms of Jock Cooper kept getting stuck underneath the weight of his body. The eyes were now closed as if he were sleeping drunk, getting rolled into the bed after a long night.
The wind abated as they got the body to the very edge of the cliff.
“Alright!” Shouted Daz. “After three, push as hard as you can!! One, Two…. Three!!” And they both simultaneously launched the dead body off the edge of the cliff into the crashing sea below. They both lay there motionless for almost a minute, experiencing an emotion not unlike a mountaineer at a summit. They had no words. It was done.
“Look over the edge.” Said Daz.
“Get fucked! You look over.”
“Fuck that mate.” The wind was blowing so hard it felt like it was pushing them towards the precipice.
“Let’s get the fuck outta here.” Said Daz, keeping his vertigo hidden. They felt the rain again and crawled backwards on their bellies before they stood up, turned and started running back to the car through the night tempest, shouting and cheering and jumping for joy as they went. Daz had taken his shirt off and was swinging the waterlogged garment around his head, laughing the relief of the prisoner freed. They jumped into the car, turned the engine on and sped away down the back roads and country lanes that led to Melbourne.
The body of Jock Cooper fell lifeless from the edge of the cliff. Down it dropped. Fifteen metres below was a ledge the size of a living room. And there the body landed with a quiet thud, made silent by the storm. It bounced slightly forward coming to rest at the edge of the promontory, his left-hand peeking slightly over the edge as if it were a man clinging to the side of his bed. And there it stayed on the ledge, twenty metres above the sea.
*
Almost two weeks went by. Early in the morning Noel Manning and his son Joshua got in their trawler and headed up the coast towards the Twelve Apostles to see what the fishing was like, as they had a couple of times a week for the past few months, concentrating their work in the waters to the west. It was a calm, beautiful sunny morning and the white horses were resting. They went at a steady pace of eight knots, with the nets strung out behind them. They sailed a couple of kilometres from the coast most of way and then turned starboard to see what they could find in shallower waters. Noel turned the engine off and they bobbed a hundred and fifty metres or so from the land. Joshua’s keen eyes spotted it first by chance as he glanced up at a flock of seagulls swooping to feed on the cliff. He saw what he correctly thought to be a human hand, dangling.
“Dad. Can ya see that?”
“What?”
“Up there on the cliff. Is that a hand?”
“You’re havin me on.”
“Look.” Noel went in to the cabin and fetched a pair of binoculars that he used for birdwatching. He stood there on the deck and pressed his face against the eyepieces. It took a few moments to get the binoculars in focus against the edge of the cliff and he tracked the ledge from right to left. He paused as his eyes and brain joined. He put the binoculars down a couple of inches and then back to his eyes in disbelief. A human hand and a denim shirt cuff dangling over the grassy lip.
“Alright I’m turning the boat around. Get on to the police.’ He told his son.
That afternoon a police helicopter swooped in and identified a body on the ledge and before nightfall it had been recovered. Daz and Wilko had stripped the body so it took a while to identify the body, but Jock Cooper was a well-known face around Melbourne and had been reported missing less than a week after his disappearance by his girlfriend Tammy. The cadaver had been partly eaten away by scavenging birds and his remains were a disgusting sight to behold. Tammy had to identify the body and was left a traumatised landlady in Alice Springs.
The forensic team discovered the bullet hole almost immediately and a murder investigation was underway that night. Almost two weeks had passed by but the crick in Wilko’s neck was still giving him jip. He was still holding his neck in his hand as Daz switched the TV on and slumped down on the sofa next to Wilko with a can of VB and a lit cigarette. It was a news story saying the remains of Jock Cooper had been found on the ledge of a cliff near the Twelve Apostles in Victoria. When Wilko and Daz said ‘cunt’ in unison, there was a kind of musicality to the syllable.
I spent a number of years in Zambia, in the early seventies, the mid-seventies and the early nineties, teaching the English language and literature in English to school students in their early and late teens. They were preparing for public examinations including GCE overseas certificate organised by Cambridge University. It was called Literature in English because novels and nonfictional biographies by modern African authors were among the set texts in addition to Shakespeare and novels by George Orwell and Thomas Hardy.
Here is a list of texts I had the pleasure of reading and discussing with my classes. Some of them were written originally in French by writers resident in French-speaking countries of West Africa and translated into English for the benefit of readers elsewhere who could not read French. The year of first publication is given.
All of these were published in the UK Heinemann Modern African Writers series. Visit their website for many more titles.
Cry the Beloved Country, by Alan Paton (1948)
Things Fall Apart, by Chinua Achebe (1958)
No Longer at Ease, by Chinua Achebe (1960)
The African Child, by Camara Laye (1953)
Houseboy, by Ferdinand Oyono (1956)
The River Between, by James Ngugi (1965)
Mine Boy, by Peter Abrahams (1946)
Down Second Avenue, by Ezekiel Mphahlele (1959) autobiography
In Corner B & Other Stories, by Ezekiel Mphalele (1967) short stories
Return to the Shadows, by Robert Serumaga (1969)
Mission to Kala, by Mongo Beti (1957)
Alan Paton was a white South African Christian, probably an Anglican, who was opposed to racial discrimination. Today he might be termed a white liberal. His novel Cry the Beloved Country portrays rural and urban society just before the race laws were passed by the all-white parliament implementing the ideology of Apartheid (so-called separate development). The novel portrays a black village priest and a white farmer who must deal with news of a murder. A Zulu priest, Stephen Kumalo, receives a message that his daughter Gertrude is ill in Johannesburg. Kumalo visits the distant city for the first time and discovers that Gertrude has taken to living from selling illicit alcohol and prostitution. His son Absalom has murdered a white man during a botched burglary. The murdered man had multicultural sympathies and was the son of a white farmer near Kumalo’s simple residence. Other characters appear throughout the novel, which is well-crafted and full of symbolism.
I read this novel with teenage African students in Livingston, Zambia in 1992-93 just as Nelson Mandela was released from twenty-seven years detention in the notorious Robben Island and was happy to remark that the warped world portrayed in Alan Paton’s text was ending.
Things Fall Apart
Things Fall Apart (borrowing from a poem by Yeats) by Nigerian Chinua Achebe achieved worldwide fame and was translated into many languages. It describes the traditional village life of Okonkwo before colonial forces brought changes that Okonkwo could not cope with. Ultimately his anomie drives him to suicide. In many ways the personality of Okonkwo is unappealing to the modern reader – he is patriarchal and hidebound by customs which are a barrier to social progress. It recalls in a different context of Peig Sayers and her anti-modern idealisation of life on the Great Blasket Island.
In my opinion a far more satisfactory novel by Achebe is No longer at Ease (from a poem by T.S.Eliot) which looks at newly-independent Nigeria and the financial pressures that tribal loyalty exert on the main character, who yields to the temptation of bribe taking in exchange for doing favours. Achebe incidentally published a short collection of essays entitled The Trouble with Nigeria, which deals with corruption, tribalism, militarism and religious-regional tensions. Presidentialism – the cult of the President – is another peeve. He contrasts it with an occasion when he attended a cultural event in Dublin and President Patrick Hillery accompanied by his aide-de-camp arrived and took a seat without anybody in the audience rising to salute him – unthinkable in Nigeria.
Camara Laye from French-speaking West Africa published his autobiographical narrative about simple village life entitled L’Enfant Noir. I read the English version with students in a rural school preparing for the Form Three exam, the equivalent of the Junior Cert. I wouldn’t describe it as an outstanding work. It is rather sentimental and unreflective in parts. But my students enjoyed reading it.
Ferdinand Oyono’s short novel was published in French in 1956 and translated into English. The houseboy performs cleaning and simple cooking chores for the Governor of a West African state during colonial times. It is narrated in diary form, two exercise notebooks such as might be used in a school. The town cemetery has an African section and a European section. A few of the European graves contain the remains of inter-racial children that their white fathers acknowledged. The houseboy learns French taking a peek at Parisian newspapers. His interesting situation becomes dangerous in the second notebook when the Governor’s wife goes on holiday to France and he begins an affair with a white mistress. The houseboy sees too much and… there are consequences. It is a brilliant little novel.
From Kenya
From Kenya in the early twentieth century comes, The River Between by James Ngugi was written while he was studying abroad. It deals with the collision between African culture and foreign Christian missionaries who suspect ‘pagan practices’. On the ridges where members of the Kikuyu tribe dwell many miles north of Nairobi a teenage boy and his sweetheart, Waiyaki and Muthoni, are Christians, but nonetheless want to proceed with the coming-of-age male and female circumcision ceremonies. (In those days female circumcision was not identified as a patriarchal control of female sexual freedom – Ngugi uses it as a symbol of African authenticity.) Tribal rivalries and personal animosity bring matters to the boil. Muthoni says she is a Christian but also wants “to be beautiful in the tribe” through circumcision. My students in Zambia were not familiar with circumcision rites as the male form is practised only in one small area, but they enjoyed this novel, which sold well.
The writer became a cultural nationalist and changed his name to Ngugi wa Thiongo. He wrote many books and essays in Kiswahili, now the second official language of Kenya after English. He taught courses in literature in the UK, the USA and other regions of Africa. He got into deep trouble with Kenyan politicians because he thought they were neo-colonial stooges.
Mine Boy by Peter Abrahams is a sort of coming-of-age novel that describes a migrant worker’s experiences of encountering the big city in South Africa. The village boy sees young city women selling distilled liquor and fighting over their pitches. He sees loose morals everywhere and asks naively Are there any customs here? Abrahams has been faulted in not tackling the racial discrimination in this novel.
A more interesting later novel in which Abrahams draws on personal experiences of studying in the UK is entitled A Wreath for Udomo. After graduating in the UK, Udomo returns to an imaginary country called Panafrica, struggles for independence and becomes Prime Minister. A concatenation of personal and tribal antagonisms destroys freedom ideals and … read this very realistic novel. This work was not on the schools syllabus but copies could be borrowed from school libraries.
Ezekiel Mphalele
Life growing up in a shanty suburb in South Africa is graphically described by Ezekiel Mphalele. We read this set text for GCE certificate in a Livingstone school. In 1993 Zeke Mphalele was an honoured guest at the University of Zambia in Lusaka. It coincided with school holidays and I travelled to a reading and discussion with the writer hosted by secondary school teachers. He was asked why so many writers emerged in West and East Africa and South Africa, but not in Zambia, and answered that intense struggles against colonial and racial situations impel autobiographical and fictive writing. A similar intensity did not exist in Northern Rhodesia before it changed its name to Zambia in 1964.
Mphalele did not become a novelist. He wrote short stories and essays and had a most successful teaching career in USA universities. In Corner B & Other Stories, by Ezekiel Mphalele (1967) published by East Africa Publishing House (Nairobi) was not on the Zambia exam syllabus. I can recommend it for the curious.
Return to the Shadows was written by Robert Serumaga, who studied at Trinity College Dublin before returning to Uganda. The novel is set in the aftermath of a military coup in a country called Adnagu (Uganda spelled backwards) and seems to presage the terrible years of Idi Amin.
Finally, there is the humorous novel of French-speaking author Mongo Beti from West Africa, Mission to Kala, which portrays mischievous intrigue by a chief and his associates when a young city man who failed the baccalaureate is sent on a ‘mission’.
*Books about life in Africa have been written by white writers with British and other backgrounds. Elspeth Huxley, Joyce Carey (Anglo-Irish) and Doris Lessing come to mind. Africa-based writers of different ethnic orientation have published in different languages about many themes. The human condition in all its cultural and geographical variations is worth writing about. One point I wish to make here is that efforts should be made to establish financially viable Africa-based publishing companies. Metropolitan London and Paris with large Afro-populations dominate the Africa publishing scene.
Feature Image: Zambia National Assembly building in Lusaka
Through Fernando Pessoa the flesh was made word. Reminiscent of the renowned Chinese painter Wu Daozi, who, as legend has it, vanished into one of his own landscape paintings, Pessoa (1888-1935), the great Portuguese poet, appears to have disappeared bodily into his written works. Dispersing himself into the many lives of others through the medium of writing, Pessoa became nobody and many others simultaneously.
Pessoa called these many others ‘heteronyms’ (other names). These distinct others who discovered a voice through Pessoa have left behind a treasure trove of philosophically charged poetic works. Their wide-ranging and diverse works created by the ‘secret orchestra’ of Pessoa’s soul have given rise to a choral symphony whose resonance intensifies over time.
One is left in a state of silent wonder and awe at the sheer scale and brilliance of what Pessoa managed to achieve while semantically composing the soul. The challenge for his readers is to break this silence and put into words what it is that Pessoa accomplished, thereby naming precisely his significance for how we humans understand ourselves, the way we see things, and how we dwell upon the earth.
Astute Philosophical Experimentation
A new book, Fernando Pessoa and Philosophy: Countless Lives Inhabit Us edited by Bartholomew Ryan, Giovanbattista Tusa, and Antonio Cardiello (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Maryland, U.S, 2021) takes on this challenge with gusto.
Its aim is to bring to light Pessoa’s in-depth knowledge of philosophy and his ability to engage in astute philosophical experimentation, and at the same time highlight his capacity to confront, appropriate, synthesise, and strip bare complex ideas into art. Additionally, by focusing on Pessoa’s writings through different philosophical lenses the chapters included in this volume seek to reveal novel ways of interpreting some of the seminal problems of philosophy.
Bartholomew Ryan alerts us to the relevance and urgency of this task in his Introduction, where he claims that if ‘philosophy is to survive the various crises of human civilization ahead of us, to respond and open up new pathways of thought’ we will need the assistance of ‘experimenters in literature, in order to help us reconnect with ourselves, others and all living species on the planet.’
Structurally, Fernando Pessoa and Philosophy consists of an Introduction, Exordium, Notes for the Memory of My Master Caeiro, fifteen essays dedicated to Pessoa and philosophy, a detailed appendix, and a critical bibliography. The wide range of elements that make up this volume come together to create a joyous banquet of a book.
Ryan opens this feast for the soul with a fast tempo-ed, polyphonous introduction, entitled ‘An Encounter between the Poet and the Philosopher’. He notes how it is the task of the philosopher not to read a poet in order to appropriate an idea for her/his own purposes. Instead, the philosopher is prompted to engage with literature so as to learn how to dwell in an uncomfortable and uncontrollable region.
For in this strange region where philosophy and poetry meet something innovative can occur. As Ryan writes: ‘It is in this encounter between the philosopher and poet a vulnerability is opened on both sides to inspire the creating of a new concept in the philosopher and a new form and linguistic gesture in the poet.’
One of Pessoa’s astrological charts from 1916.
A Sense of Journey
By entering into such an encounter with Pessoa, the philosopher has a lot to explore and discover. As a poet animated by philosophy Pessoa prioritises a sense of journey over notions of progress, development and evolution, as he writes: ‘I don’t evolve, I JOURNEY’.
Besides his emphasis on journeying, the heteronym Álvaro de Campos shares a similar vision for both the philosopher and artist when he notes in his futurist manifesto ‘Ultimatum’, how the philosopher should contain ‘the greatest number of other people’s personal philosophies; and that the artist should write ‘in the most genres with the most contradictions and discrepancies.’ These insights offer rich food for thought for the philosopher.
The Exordium and Notes for the Memory of my Master Caeiro come after the Introduction. These two marvellous sections are comprised of words from Pessoa and four of his heteronyms, namely, Alexander Search, Alberto Caeiro, Álvaro de Campos, and Ricardo Reis. They serve to attune and acclimatise the reader to the mood and atmosphere of Pessoa’s writings.
Some sentences shine luminously in the Exordium, for example, ‘There is for me – there was – a wealth of meaning in a thing so ridiculous as a door-key, a nail on a wall, a cat’s whiskers. There is to me a fulness of spiritual suggestion in a fowl with its chickens strutting across the road.’
Notably, the Exordium and Campos’s Notes also reveal the humour and irony of Pessoa’s writings. Campos writes in his Notes of the fictitious nature of the orthonym Fernando Pessoa: ‘Even more curious is the case of Fernando Pessoa, who doesn’t exist, strictly speaking.’
And when humorously critiquing the work of the great 19th century writer Giacomo Leopardi, Pessoa claims Leopardi’s philosophical pessimism and overemphasis on suffering stems from a shyness with women. Pessoa remarks: ‘“I am shy with women: therefore there is no God” is highly unconvincing as metaphysics.’
Ricardo Reis, Alberto Caeiro and Álvaro de Campos seen by José de Almada Negreiros.
Four Sections
Fernando Pessoa and Philosophy is then divided into four sections: Spiritual Traditions, Metaphysics and Post-metaphysics, Philosophies of Selfhood, and Contemporary Problems and Perspectives. Each section has three to four chapters. The volume has been arranged by philosophical themes which are both central to Pessoa’s work and to philosophy itself. The first section, Spiritual Traditions, focuses on Neopaganism, Daoism, Indian, and Islamic philosophy.
The first chapter by Antonio Cardiello, ‘Fernando Pessoa’s vision of Neopaganism as Life’s Supreme Art’ explores Pessoa’s project of reawakening polytheism and the Hellenic model of civilisation. Cardiello observes how Pessoa, using his orthonym, calls for a ‘superior paganism’ for modern times in which ‘all protestantisms, all Oriental credos, all paganisms, dead and alive become Portuguesely fused.’
In addition to a ‘superior paganism’ Pessoa makes reference to a ‘superior art’ that can ‘lift the soul above everything narrow, above all instincts, moral or immoral concerns.’, and liberate us from ‘life itself.’ Merging a superior paganism with a superior art, Cardiello claims it was Pessoa’s task to denounce two millennial of moral interpretation and substitute it for an aesthetic one that glorifies human life, thereby dispensing with unhealthy values for healthier ones that encourage humans to flourish.
Paulo Borges’s ‘Fernando Pessoa, Daoism and the Gap: Thought of Insubstantiality, Vagueness and Indetermination’ is the second chapter in this section. It closely examines emptiness and the ‘gap’ in the writings of the orthonym Fernando Pessoa and the semi-heteronym Bernardo Soares, comparing these themes with Daoist principles.
According to Daoist thought, emptiness allows the emergence of the ‘ten thousand beings’ or the infinity of possibilities and the possibility of an authentic life lacking self-centredness. Borges highlights how in Pessoa, the overabundance of becoming other and the experience of heteronymy emerges from that insubstantial emptiness of self and of everything.
While the abyss of being prior to defining oneself by naming oneself, surfaces as the ‘gap’ that ‘is between’ the self and itself. Towards the conclusion he identifies a wonderfully apt quote from Tchouang Tseu to describe Pessoa. Tseu writes that ‘the perfect man is without any I, the inspired man is without work; the holy man leaves no name.’
Marketplace in Goa, as depicted in Jan Huygen van Linschotens Itinerarium.
Imaginary India
The third chapter, ‘Pessoa’s Imaginary India’, by Jonardon Ganeri, looks at Pessoa’s understanding of the ‘Indian ideal’ which he interprets as signifying the transcendence of the illusion that is living a human life.
Pessoa regards the Indian ideal as ‘inhuman’ and speaks of ‘the principle, which we already know to be absurd, that the universe is an illusion.’
Ironically, Hindu thinkers writing at the same time as Pessoa, such as Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan share Pessoa’s critical sentiments towards this ideal. Borrowing a phrase from Nietzsche, Ganeri acknowledges an ‘ironic affinty’ between Pessoa’s position that he occasionally assumes as his own contraposition to the ‘Indian ideal’, and the ideas of his contemporaries in India that he never knew.
In the final chapter of this section, ‘Pessoa and Islamic Philosophy’, Fabrizio Boscaglia, brings to light Pessoa’s engagement with Islamic philosophy and its impact on his writing. Boscaglia draws attention to Pessoa’s interest in the philosophical thought of Omar Khayyām, through Edward Fitzgerald’s translations, and the possible connections of Sufism in Pessoa’s poetry.
Boscaglia also demonstrates how Pessoa’s makes several references to the Islamic civilization as the keeper, interpreter and transmitter of Greek culture between the Middle Ages and the Renaissnance.
In the second section of this book, Metaphysics and Post-metaphysics, the topics of time, nihilism and the nothing, transcendentalism, immanence and becoming-landscape take centre stage. João Constâncio opens the section with ‘Nihilism and Being Nothing in “The Tobacco Shop”’.
The chapter seeks to respond to two significant questions: 1. What is the meaning for Pessoa, particularly in the masterpiece ‘The Tobacco Shop’ (by Álvaro de Campos) of ‘being nothing’ and 2. How can the study of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche’s philosophical writings contribute to the understanding of such a paradoxical way of being, which consists of ‘being nothing’?
Constâncio delves into Campos’s despair for ‘being-nothing’ and reveals it to be tantamount to despairing for having to be a mask, for not being able to avoid adopting an identity that is a mere linguistic construction, regardless of whether it implies some ultimate metaphysical purpose implicit to life within society.
Furthermore, Constâncio shows how Campos’s ‘conscious consciousness’ makes him envy those who, living by way of an ‘unconscious conscious’, manage to believe in an identity that is intersubjectively attributed to them.
‘Pessoa and Time’ by Pedro Duarte is the second chapter in this section. For Duarte, it is possible to grasp the individuality of each of the three heteronyms Caeiro, Reis and Campo, by studying their different approaches and responses to time.
But Duarte also includes Pessoa, the orthonym, in his analysis. For Pessoa the past needs to be rediscovered, and not set aside, because it summons the present to build the future. Caeiro takes time out of things, through detachment and unlearning and to see without thinking. Caeiro writes ‘I don’t want to think of things as being in the present; I want to think of them as things’.
Reis believed that ‘we pass like the river’ through life. For Reis, existence was all about adhering to this passage. Aging should be accepted. On the other hand, Campos desires to feel everything in every way, and find the beauty of the present moment, a beauty unknown to the ancients, hence electric lamps and factories are to be celebrated. Campos says ‘I who love modern civilization and kiss machines with all my soul.’
Walt Whitman aged 35.
American Transcendentalism
Benedetta Zavatta’s chapter entitled ‘Pessoa and American Transcendentalism’, investigates the link between Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman and Pessoa. Emerson’s influence on Pessoa had not received scholarly attention prior to Zavatta’s essay.
Zavatta convincingly hypothesises that Pessoa was drawn to Emerson and Whitman by the notion, repeatedly articulated by these two authors, that every individual latently contains within herself/himself the seeds of an infinite number of different personalities.
This in turn enables an individual to foster an empathetic connection with other humans, to the point where they ‘become them’. Enlarging this empathetic connection allows one experience how the whole world is seen and felt as these others see it and feel it.
In the chapter ‘Bernardo Soares’s Becoming-Landscape’, José Gil explores the use of landscape in The Book of Disquiet. Gil’s philosophical approach to The Book of Disquiet opens up this impossible book for the reader, by revealing that each of its fragments is ‘a veritable landscape-state of emotion’, providing it with ‘both skeleton and flow’.
Gil’s deft analysis of Bernardo Soares’s becoming-landscape culminates with an enquiry into what occurs when the plane of the landscape clashes with the plane of emotions. Gil suggests ‘all distances disappear, and the “I” itself, which functioned like a screen between sensations and the landscapes, explodes, disappears and ceases to exist’.
What remains is the pure landscape of event-sensations. A ‘sensation-universe’. Literary description ceases, and ‘sensations attach themselves to the flow of the landscape because they result from them: it is no longer the sky yonder, or the I, here, like this sky: it is the sensation-sky or the sensation-light.’
The third section, Philosophies of Selfhood, examines the dissolution and plurality of the self and subject in Pessoa’s writings. It commences with Bartholomew Ryan’s chapter ‘Voicing Vacillation, Logos and Masks of the Self: Mirroring Kierkegaard and Pessoa’.
Ryan argues that, in the journey of forging the human self or subject into writing, the achievements of the poet Pessoa and philosopher Søren Kierkegaard remain unsurpassed. Through Pessoa and Kierkegaard, Ryan investigates the making and unmaking the elusive self through vacillation, logos and masks.
At the core of this study lies doubt, which Ryan claims both writers see as the sickness and heartbeat of modernity. Pessoa and Kierkegaard voice doubt and despair, as the poetic-philosopher and philosophical poet.
According to Ryan, Pessoa delights in aesthetic melancholy and being allied to no one or no thing except literature. Describing Pessoa as an Argonaut of Modernity or the Argonaut of true sensations, Ryan envisages him journeying ‘to the abstract chasm that lies at the depths of things’ and questioning the philosophical problems of selfhood by voicing its vacillation, logos and masks. Buffeted by this tormenting journey, Pessoa vacillates between knowledge and faith, and experiencing the elusive moment.
In ‘The Difference between Othering Oneself and Becoming What One is’, Maria Filomena Molder states that the dictum of ‘becoming what you are’ is nowhere to be found in Pessoa, and the concept of ‘othering oneself’ belongs in other waters.
Drawing support from Nietzsche’s insight in Twilight of the Idols that the ‘I’ has become a fairytale, a fiction, a play on words’, Molder proposes that Pessoa has no need for a theory of the subject. Molder then shows how Pessoa coined the term ‘othering oneself’ in order to account for the multiplicity of writers who are born out of his way of writing.
According to Molder, othering oneself, ‘proceeds not from the plurality of the subject but from a precocious, childlike inclination to imagining oneself as multiple characters, a succession of dramatic scenes secreted by creative play.’
This incisive and succinct chapter draws to a close with the claim that Pessoa and his heteronyms are not liberators. What is he, then? Molder asks, and answers through the mouthpieces of Ricardo Reis and Pessoa.
The answer from Reis is: ‘I am merely the place/Where things are thought or felt’. And Pessoa responds: ‘I look at them. None is me, but I am their ensemble’. Not done yet, Molder asks: What does Pessoa want? And this time Pessoa replies: ‘I want to be the creator of myths, which is the highest mystery achievable by a member of the human race.’ And so Molder reveals the undecipherable mystery of the many in one, of the one in the many.
Gianfranco Ferraro’s chapter ‘A Hermeneutics of Disquiet: Approaching Pessoa through Foucault’ concludes is final one in this third section. Ferraro tends to Pessoa’s Book of Disquiet through the ‘toolbox’ provided by Michel Foucault’s in The Hermeneutics of the Subject.
Why Foucault? For Ferraro, Foucault’s terminology, specifically in relation to ‘technologies of the self’, greatly assist us in interpreting Pessoa. These technologies highlight, in Ferraro’s own words, ‘practices which permit individuals to effect by their own means, or with the help of others, a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and way of being,’ so as to ‘transform themselves in order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, or immortality’.
Consequently, approaching The Book of Disquiet through Foucault’s hermeneutics of the self allows us to see how Pessoa recovered many of the ancient practices and technologies of writing and how modernity adopted them again.
Borrowing from Foucault’s hermeneutic toolbox Ferraro reaches the conclusion that we can observe in The Book of Disquiet a work that summons one to oneself and to experimentation of oneself in revealing the many beings that lie dormant in our forms of life.
"lacking Yeats’s ‘grand ambitions and conviction, Fernando Pessoa was more like a jazzman of higher, occult truth, improvising on standard doctrines of the esoteric repertoire and introducing his own variations, without staying in any one place for long."https://t.co/mMvVZAmM5F
The fourth and final section Contemporary Problems and Perspectives concentrates on value theory and secular capitalist modernity; the logic of seeing, ecological thought, and the fundamental relationship between poetry and some contemporary philosophers.
‘Pessoa’s “The Anarchist Banker” and the Logic of Value’, by J.D. Mininger offers a thorough reading of Pessoa’s short story ‘The Anarchist Banker’, which in part is supplemented by Nietzsche’s essay ‘On Truth and Lies in an Extra-Moral Sense’.
Anarchism strives to vanquish all social conventions and fictions, and is thus in a sense morally and politically motivated. Yet it could also be understood as signifying the freedom from such conventions and fictions.
In this story the anarchist achieves his own freedom by becoming a banker. According to Mininger, the essential politics of this story does not lie in the author’s construal of anarchism, but in the silent relation between philosophy and literature, between algebra and story, between proposition and performance, between constraint and freedom.
For Mininger, Pessoa’s story is an anarchistic act to the extent that it expresses freedom through constraint – a paradox made possible by the literary surplus value that is both the story’s cause and effect.
The second chapter in this section ‘For Your Eyes Only: The Logic of Seeing in Alberto Caeiro’s Poetry’, by Bruno Béu, opens with the words of the artist Kazmir Malevich, ‘I have transformed myself in the zero of form’ found on a leaflet distributed at the exhibition Last Futurist Exhibition of Paintings 0.10 (zero-ten).
One of Malevich’s most famous works is his 1918 painting entitled White on White, showing a white square against a white background. As a work of art it calls into question the very possibility of form and representation.
Bèu in this chapter draws connections between Malevich’s paintings, and Caeiro’s poetry, in which language is being forced to reach its zero ability to signify things, while our experience of things is ‘freed’ from any re-presentation that we make of them.
Bèu demonstrates how Caeiro’s tautological discursive and logical performance is a radical negation of all possible predicates. This linguistic process leaves each thing absolute, indescribable and indefinable. As Bèu poignantly remarks ‘It is as if, through this process, each thing revealed itself and spoke from the top of Mount Sinai pronouncing the tautological and biblical words: ‘I am that I am’.’ As such no-thing is said for things to be seen, and ‘Poetry turns white on white’.
Image (c) Daniele Idini.
Ecological Dimensions
In the chapter ‘Where Does Fernando Pessoa Dwell? The Economy and Ecology of the Heteronyms’, Michael Marder illuminates some of the ecological dimensions to Pessoa’s work. This is attained through an analysis of what Pessoa called ‘disquiet’, to outline what Marder names a new ‘economy and ecology of the heteronyms’.
‘Disquiet’, in the sense of being unsettled, describes the possibility that dwelling and the dweller no longer exist, or, perhaps, never have.
For Marder, Pessoa is the place where dwelling might be reimagined, or, the placeholder for the lives of others. Turning his focus to Caeiro, Marder asserts that he wants to dwell in a world unspoiled by the ideal and idealising system of co-ordinates.
For Marder, Caeiro’s poetic project is to liberate the ‘innocent’ green and flourishing earth from the imaginary lines that have divided its surface through social and political conventions.
‘So where does Pessoa dwell?’ Marder asks at the close of this chapter. Marder’s response: ‘Between economy and ecology, between nowhere and everywhere’. Pessoa’s heteronyms outline an ‘economology’, where dwelling and unsettlement are not formally opposed to one another, a place where it is possible to dwell in the very unsettlement that acknowledges the impossibility of dwelling.
Giovanbattista Tusa’s ‘The “Pessoa Event”: Notes on Philosophy and Poetry’ concludes this section. Tusa’s text articulates the fundamental relationship between poetry and philosophy through Fernando Pessoa and the works of Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida, Alain Badiou and Jean-Luc Nancy.
Badiou in particular takes on a hugely significant role in this chapter, for it is he who notes that the poem far from being a form of knowledge, is the instance of thought subtracted from everything that sustains the faculty of knowledge.
Tusa also cites Badiou’s Handbook of Inaesthetics in which he claims to be contemporaries of Pessoa is ‘a philosophical task’, and through the reading of his work, philosophy could experience its own incapacity or perhaps its own impossibility.
After these four sections, Jerónimo Pizarro provides an appendix to the book called ‘Pessoa and Philosophy: Texts from the Archives’. This is a collection of selected Pessoa texts alongside images from the Pessoa archive referencing philosophy and various philosophers.
Pizarro’s fine scholarly research gathers editions and studies on a series of documents from Pessoa’s archive to help with future comparative research. The volume ends with a critical bibliography of Pessoa’s own works published in English, books on philosophy that he owned and secondary works on Pessoa and philosophy.
Fernando Pessoa and Philosophy sheds a remarkably illuminating spotlight on the wonderous writings of Pessoa, but most importantly it instils in the reader a sense that sections of his ‘secret orchestra’ have yet to be heard, and that future exploratory journeys await.
Feature Image: José de Almada Negreiros, Retrato de Fernando Pessoa.
One Big Union is a self-published collection of essays by Irish poet Ciarán O’Rourke.The essays, many of which have been previously published in such outlets as Poetry Ireland Review, Irish Marxist Review, and indeed, Cassandra Voices herself, are a mix of literary criticism, political theory, and personal writing.
The book’s introduction locates itself in the burgeoning genre of pandemic writing. Thus he writes:
Between the winter of 2019 and the summer of 2021, a period of cascading social and ecological crises, I found myself returning to the work of a number of poets, artists, and political firebrands, with a fresh sense of discovery and gratitude. This miscellany of essays is the result.
In essence, this book is a polished version of a reading diary, with O’Rourke responding to the artists he was confined with over quarantine. As such, it’s an intensely personal and vulnerable work, even when the directly autobiographical material is minimal.
You finish the book with the impression that Percy Bysshe Shelley plays a leading role in O’Rourke’s inner life ; that Irishness is something O’Rourke feels strongly attached to; and that he is passionately devoted to left-wing political ideals, even though he finds the atmosphere of devoted Communist organisations mentally stultifying.
This is a lot to know about a relative stranger, and it’s a testament to O’Rourke’s ability as a writer that this distinct, personal voice is present throughout, even in moments when the subject matter veers into academic territory.
Hole in the Wall Blues
Perhaps it’s scholarly fatigue, but I must admit I found the moments of personal, autobiographical writing the most compelling parts of the book.
In ‘Hole in the Wall Blues’, O’Rourke writes about a topic made timely by the Save the Cobblestone protest – the erosion of Dublin’s cultural geography – in an endearingly personal way.
The example he uses is the Screen cinema on Townsend street, now a building site for what O’Rourke believes will be a “rental hub”.
It wasn’t like the Screen cinema was some beautiful location, he argues. No, it was dingy, cheap, and outmoded. But, O’Rourke writes, “just by being there and providing the service it did, this rather run-down space had made the city a home of sorts”.
In another essay, ‘Sea Music’, he talks about the strange intimacy that has grown between himself and the other regular bathers at Seapoint. These accounts of his private life made me care about the more abstract essays, helping me, as a reader, trace the thread of emotional necessity behind his discussions of Percy Shelley or Langston Hughes.
Although most of these essays are ruminative and introspective, there are a few that pack a satisfying punch. My favourite is ‘Smashing the Mirror’, where O’Rourke excoriates Poetry Ireland’s toothless humility in front of the strong arms of cultural hegemony, exemplified in their partnership with the Dublin office of Facebook for national poetry day in 2017, and their use of a video of Joe Biden giving a merry, public-relations-approved speech about the beauty of Irish poetry for their fundraising campaign in 2019.
What does it mean for the institutions of Irish poetry to flatter the centres of power so shamelessly? O’Rourke is excitingly sharp in his rhetorical denouncement:
The emerald glint in Biden’s eyes, the nostalgic quaver in his voice, is meant to reinforce, for voters at home and lackeys elsewhere, a relation (between lord and vassal, say, or centre and outpost) that each of these circumstances also exemplifies – all under the guise of celebrating Irish poetry. And Poetry Ireland, it seems, is happy to play along: cosying up to power, for the sake of PR, and presumably on the long-term promise of cash.Admission of Bias
I may be biased when it comes to reviewing this book. In the first year of my English Studies course in Trinity College, Ciarán O’Rourke was working as a teaching assistant while he finished his phD, and I happened to be placed in his Romanticism tutorials.
Ciarán was a wonderful teacher, with a gift for generating class discussion. He also had the touch of eccentricity required to deliver a course on Romanticism. At one point he had the whole class stand up and communally reciteShelley’s ‘Ode to the West Wind’in early Spring; as if we could hurry the pace of the seasons through the right incantation of the words.
With that said, I had no idea I was reading my former teacher’s book until after I had read through the collection. From the tone of the writing, and the subjects covered (bathing in Dun Laoghaire, Marxist politics, nineteenth century poets), I had assumed the author was in his fifties or sixties. I imagined a Terry Eagleton type – hip enough to know about Ursula Le Guin, but whose outlook on life has been shaped by figures from a deeper past. Then I looked up some interviews, and, with a jolt, recognised the fresh-faced, tall figure of my Romanticism tutor.
Critique
One criticism I have is in relation to the structure of the book. First, it lacks certain features of a professionally published work. There is no publication date. The cover image, by Lewis Hine, is not credited on the back cover, or on one of the first pages, but in the ‘Introduction and Acknowledgements’ section.
These may seem minor issues, but by failing to follow conventions, it becomes harder to work with, and conveys an attitude of slight carelessness, unbefitting of its important contents.
My second criticism is of the repetition between essays. As many of the essays were published in different publications, it appears the author was unconcerned at repeating a few key points. When gathered together in a book, however, these repetitions jar on the reader.
For example, several pieces of information related to Shelley in the essay entitled ‘Shelley’s Revolutionary Year’ are duplicated without development in the title essay ‘One Big Union’, for example. This certainly conveys the extent of Shelley’s psychological importance to the author, but it doesn’t expand on the issue.
Overall, this is an intriguing collection of essays from a young Irish poet. Those interested in O’Rourke’s poetrywill gain insights into his artistic influences, and anyone looking for topical cultural critiques will be well served by some of the later essays in particular. Its main value is as a political statement of purpose for the poet. It also represents an opportunity for those interested to support a promising Irish writer, whose work has been hitherto largely available to readers for free.
One Big Union is available for purchase through Ciarán O’Rourke’s website, ragpickerpoetry.net
In how many garrets and non-garrets of the world
Are self-convinced geniuses at this moment dreaming. Álvaro de Campos, ‘The Tobacco Shop’, 1928
In the early days of the Internet – end of the 1990s for me – while a history student in UCD, a friend took a passionate interest in a volatile political situation beyond Ireland’s shores. Although aroused by injustices perpetrated by both sides, the drama itself also seemed to be a source of entertainment. He participated, in a small way, by adopting email aliases that represented varying, even opposing, viewpoints.
In a time before the arrival of a fully-fledged ‘social’ media, friends might call into his smoke-filled non-garret room to find him participating in online fora. There, we might encounter bursts of laughter and guffaws – to the bemusement of anyone lacking an intimate understanding of his predilection.
These were not simply pseudonymous accounts. In creating and projecting characters that seemed to reflect his own uncertainties my friend had, unconsciously, adopted a version of a dramatic form of communication – the heteronym – invented, or at least fully realised, by the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935). This approach is of enduring interest given the extent to which multiple selves prevail in online communication, including in the common use of anonymous handles on Twitter that often depart from a primary, mild-mannered self, into a more transgressive, ‘other’ personality.
A new, ground-breaking biography of Fernando Pessoa in English by Richard Zenith, Pessoa: An Experimental Life (Allen Lane, London, 2021) brings into the mainstream – to the English-speaking world at least – a Portuguese poet, whose extraordinary capacity for invention, sensitivity to language, and, ultimately, attention to human liberation places him in the highest echelon of a discipline he recast in his own images.
Moreover, unlike other Modernist writers of his generation, Pessoa is profoundly accessible. As Zenith puts it: ‘We don’t need to look up words, hunt down references, or read up on some period of history or current of philosophy to follow his poetic trains of thought and feeling. (p.324)’ Indeed, Pessoa expressed reservation regarding the art of James Joyce, which he described in 1933 as ‘a literature on the brink of dawn’ that was ‘like that of Mallarmé… preoccupied with method. (p.831)’
Pessoa was inspired by aspects of the Irish Literary Revival of the early twentieth century, and even drafted a complimentary letter to W.B. Yeats, whose esoteric tastes he shared. However, as Zenith puts it, lacking Yeats’s ‘grand ambitions and conviction, Fernando Pessoa was more like a jazzman of higher, occult truth, improvising on standard doctrines of the esoteric repertoire and introducing his own variations, without staying in any one place for long. (p.849)’
It is the combination of Fernando Pessoa’s simplicity of expression and an apparently endless capacity for experimentation that make him such a valuable guide to our confused and uncertain time.
Lisbon, Portugal, 2019.
The Heteronyms
The poet is a feigner
Who’s so good at his act
He even feigned the pain
Of pain he feels in fact Fernando Pessoa-Himself, ‘Autopsychography’, 1931
Distinguishing pseudonymous works from heteronymous works in 1928, Pessoa wrote that ‘Pseudonymous works are by the author in his own person, except in the name he signs; heteronymous works are by the author outside his own person. They proceed from a full-fledged individual created by him, like the lines spoken by a character in a drama he might write. (p.xviii)’
Pessoa wrote to a relatively small reading public in the early decades of the twentieth century – in 1910 up to 70% of Portuguese adults were illiterate (when it was just 2 percent in England p.291) and his work hardly reached Brazil or other parts of the Portuguese-speaking world. He completed just one book – a visionary work of poetry infused with Romantic nationalism called Mensagem (Message) in 1934 – in his lifetime. Now Zenith’s extensive autobiography, masterfully capturing the historical context, brings global attention to an author whose ‘literary dispersion faithfully mirrors our ontological instability and the absence of intrinsic unity in the world we inhabit. (p.xxvi)’
From his earliest days, Pessoa produced a bewildering array of heteronyms – often as a form of play – amounting to well over seventy throughout his life. Some hardly assumed a life at all, including a personal favourite, the contradictory Friar Maurice: ‘a mystic without God, a Christian without a creed. (p.254)’
These became, according to Zenith, ‘ingenious vehicles for producing literature,’ and ‘also paths to self-knowledge. (p.119)’ The self-fragmentation seemed to come at a serious cost to Pessoa himself, however. Towards the end of his life he remarked: ‘Today I have no personality: I have divided all my humanness among the various authors whom I’ve served as literary executor. (p.41)’
From the outset, Pessoa’s poetry was identified with fingimento, a difficult word to translate, which can mean a kind of ‘feigning,’ ‘faking,’ ‘pretending ’ or forging (which has the double entendre of making and counterfeiting). This extended into an apparent unwillingness, or perhaps inability, to ever consummate a love affair, including his courtship of the forlorn Ofélia Queiroz, his only girlfriend; or to act on apparent homosexual urges – ‘the love that dare not speak its name’ – that pepper his work.
Throughout his life, according to Zenith there was ‘no clear lines of demarcation between’ the heteronyms, or ‘between fiction and reality. (p.146)’ Perhaps, unsurprisingly alcohol featured prominently – he died aged forty-seven after a life of excess – although contemporaries insist he always maintained an appearance of sobriety, perhaps his greatest pretence of all.
According to Zenith, Pessoa was ‘monosexual, androgynously so. The heteronyms can be seen as the fruit of his self-fertilization. (p.871)’ Thus, ‘daunted by the expectation of the world all around him’, he ‘preferred to inhabit the story of his heteronym. (p.192)’
Notably also: ‘Pessoa’s communicators, on at least a couple of occasions, gave him not merely poetic metaphors but actual poems. They were his impromptu muses, vivid manifestations from the spiritual realm where – he liked to think – his poetry and his heteronyms originated. (p.516)’
Alentejo, Portugal, 2019.
Alberto Caeiro
I have no philosophy, I have senses …
If I speak of Nature it’s not because I know what it is
But because I love it, and for that very reason,
Because those who love never know what they love
Or why they love, or what love is. Alberto Caeiro from The Keeper of Sheep, 1914.
In later years Pessoa revealed that Alberto Caeiro began life as a joke figure of ‘a rather complicated bucolic poet’. He claimed he wrote ‘thirty-some poems at one go, in a kind of ecstasy I’m unable to describe. (p.379)’ But Pessoa – ever the feigner – was an unreliable witness. Zenith reveals that a thorough examination of his archive revealed ‘a rather different literary genesis. (p.379)’
Nonetheless, the invention of Caeiro in 1914 brought a creative release for Pessoa; liberating him from what Zenith describes as the ‘chrysalis formed by so much learning’ which had, until that point, inhibited him from coming ‘into his own as an astonishingly original poet’. Albeit this was a status ‘he would never have attained without the chrysalis. (p.159)’ He certainly fully understood the forms and rules of poetry, before breaking them.
Having spent ten years of his life, and schooling, in Durban, South Africa where he gained fluency in English, Pessoa had been vacillating between writing in Portuguese or English. Zenith maintains that Pessoa ‘did not know how to intensely feel in English; his poetic diction in this language was, oddly enough, too “poetical” (p.148)’, although he did produce a chap book of verse that was reviewed favourably in the London Review of Books no less.
One can imagine Pessoa in South Africa as a slightly effete adolescent surpassing his peers in academic learning, but whose accent always marked him as an outsider, a status which he unconsciously absorbed, and which generated a lifelong antipathy to the British Empire.
Caeiro therefore represented a form of homecoming – a statement of ‘Portugueseness’ – for a cosmopolitan young man struggling to form an identity. In this sense, Pessoa may be likened to W.B. Yeats, who also spent many years of his development in a country, which he ultimately rejected for an Irish mistress in Cathleen Ni Houlihan.
Caeiro, according to Zenith was also ‘a reaction against Fernando Pessoa – against all learning and incessant intellectual wrangling (p.386)’, thus the heteronym writes: ‘I lie down on the grass / And forget all I was taught.’
Lisbon, Portugal, 2019.
Ricardo Reis
Let us also make our lives one day,
Consciously forgetting there’s night, Lydia,
Before and after
The little we endure. Ricardo Reis, July, 1914
Richard Zenith observes of Ricardo Reis – the second of Pessoa’s three main heteronyms and fictional disciples of Alberto Caeiro – that he ‘espoused a revival of Greek moral, social, and aesthetic ideals, and the introduction of a new paganism, adapted to the contemporary mentality. (p.404)’
In part, Reis represents Pessoa’s view that ‘Religion is an emotional need of mankind (p.541)’, but also – having rejected doctrinaire Christianity, along with monarchy, in his youth – the imaginative possibilities of undogmatic polytheism, alongside a lifelong dedication to astrology and the occult.
Pessoa urged: ‘Let’s not leave out a single god! … Let’s be everything, in every way possible, for there can be no truth where something is lacking.’ Thus, according to Zenith, over the course of his life Pessoa, ‘groped like a blind man in maze of occult mysteries that, by definition, could never be fathomed. (p.541)’
The persona of Reis also represented a stoicism reconciled to the ‘slings and arrows of outrageous fortune’. Acceptance of fate, and the remote tragedies we encounter in news reports, is memorably conveyed in ‘The Chess Players’ (1916), where two protagonists play a game while around them a city is ransacked by an invading army. This is a kind of acceptance of events we generally cannot control that we might do well to learn from Ricardo Reis.
Notably, Ricardo Reis attained a literary afterlife in Portuguese Nobel laureate José Saramago’s 1984 novel The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis, in which the heteronym returns to Lisbon from Brazil in 1935 to meet his death alongside Fernando Pessoa. A film based on the book was released in 2020.
Lisbon, Portugal, 2019.
Álvaro de Campos
Faint vertigo of confused things in my soul!
Shattered furies, tender feelings like spools of thread children play with,
Avalanche of imagination over the eyes of my senses,
Tears, useless tears,
Light breezes of contradiction grazing my soul … Álvaro de Campos ‘Maritime Ode’, 1915
The last and most important of Pessoa’s heteronyms, Álvaro Campos, was born, in Pessoa’s imagination at least, on Friedrich Nietzsche’s birthday. According to Zenith he represents ‘the Dionysian impulse – the intoxicating affirmation of life, felt in all its pains and pleasures. (p.397)’ In profound contrast to Pessoa, who regarded sex as dirty, Campos’s motto was to ‘To feel everything in every way possible. (p.521)’
The open-minded de Campos could be the liberated person Pessoa would never become: ‘Have fun with women if you like women’ he recommended, ‘have fun in another way, if you prefer another way. It’s all fine and good, since it pertains to the body of the one having fun … morality is the ignoble hypocrisy of envy” for “not being loved. (p.626)’
Yet the ghost of de Campos inhibited Pessoa, as ‘he’ attempted to get in the way of a relationship with the tragic Ofélia. ‘Today I’m not me, I’m my friend Álvaro de Campos, (p.589)’ he would warn his only meaningful girlfriend.
According to Zenith, Álvaro de Campos’s appetites in Freudian terms personified Pessoa’s id. Then perhaps the phlegmatic Ricardo Reis operated as ego, mediating the unrealistic id’s relationship to the world. These figures emerge under the tutelage of their acknowledged master, the Zen-like Alberto Caeiro – who was according to de Campos, ‘The Great Vaccine – the vaccine against the stupidity of the intelligent. (p.388)’
Thus, Caeiro can may be seen the superego, the ethical touchstone of a tripartite personality built around his universal Portuguese personality; similar to that constructed around the universal Russian character in Dostoyevsky’s Brother Karamazov that seemed to have informed Freud’s original understanding of these characteristics.
Lisbon, Portugal, 2019.
The Book of Disquiet
Dead we’re born, dead we live, and already dead we enter death. Composed of cells living off their disintegration, we’re made of death.
The Book of Disquiet, Bernardo Soares
Fernando Pessoa described the main author of The Book of Disquiet, Bernardo Soares, as a semi-heteronym, or ‘mutilation (p.721)’ of his personality, and as such The Book of Disquiet served as a semi-factual autobiography. Of course, nothing is ever as it seems with Pessoa, so the character of Soares is an unremarkable bookkeeper who endeavours to avoid contact with the bustling world around him, while Pessoa himself was a relatively sociable bachelor.
Bernardo Soares he confided: ‘always appears when I am sleepy or drowsy, such that my qualities of inhibition and logical reasoning are suspended; his prose is an endless reverie. (p.870)’
In a sense, The Book of Disquiet is a book of the night, if not of quite of dream time, then of solitary down time and retreat. According to Zenith the book, which took years for scholars to reassemble from often scrawled notes, ‘never ceased being an experiment in how far a man can be psychologically and affectively self-sufficient, living only off his dreams and imagination. (p.364)’
It is a book of ideas and self-analysis. Thus, Soares reveals: ‘We never love anyone. What we love is the idea we have of someone. It’s our own concept – our own selves – that we love,’ and also, of self-reliance in solitude, where the intellect rises above material limitations.
It displays a belief in the magical quality of words. At one point he remarks – triggered by Walter Pater’s description of Mona Lisa’s smile containing: ‘the animalism of Greece, the lust of Rome, the mysticism of the middle age with its spiritual ambition and imaginative loves, the return of the Pagan world, the sins of Borgias’ – ‘How much more beautiful the Mona Lisa would be if we couldn’t see it. (p.670)’
In his imagination Soares/Pessoa is ‘the naked stage where various actors act out various plays.’ Thus, The Book of Disquiet, according to Zenith ’magnificently illustrates the uncertainty principle that runs throughout his written universe. (p.xxiii)’
Also, in a time when we are urged to fulfil our potential, as a Capitalist economy demands constant self-improvement, the Book of Disquiet reconciles us to anonymity and the inner life of the imagination that we may rely on in times of adversity.
Alentejo, Portugal, 2019.
Political Commentator
The dazzling beauty of graft and corruption,
Delicious financial and diplomatic scandals,
Politically motivated assaults on the streets,
And every now and then the comet of a regicide
Lighting up with Awe and Fanfare the usual
Clear skies of everyday Civilisation! Álvaro de Campos, ‘Triumphal Ode’, June, 1914,
Hired as a columnist for the newspaper O Jornal in 1925, Fernando Pessoa, writing as himself, proclaimed that ‘only superficial people have deep convictions.’ insisting that a modern intellectual ‘has the cerebral obligation to change opinion … several times in the same day.’ This person, presumably himself, might, for instance, be ‘a republican in the morning, and a royalist at dusk. (p p.450-51)’
Abiding by this injunction, Pessoa presented a dazzling array of viewpoints in the 1920s, having renounced Catholicism in his youth, and embraced republicanism prior to the Revolution of 1910. He also acquired a distaste for British imperialism while living in Durban, albeit not necessarily imperialism itself.
Pessoa was a roving provocateur, who, according to Zenith, ‘had a fondness for ardently defending a certain idea one day and then attacking it the next, with equally impassioned arguments. (p.340)’ Confrontationally, he opined in Nietzschean terms that the ‘plebeian class should be the instrument of the imperialists, the dominating class,’ and ‘linked to them through a community of national mysticism, such that it is voluntarily their slave. (p.453)’ The feigner’s tendency towards outlandish, objectionable views should be taken with a grain of salt, however, as the artist often played with literary tropes in political statements.
This applies to a frankly disturbing 1916 pronouncement that ‘Slavery is logical and legitimate; a Zulu or Landim [an indigenous Mozambican] represents nothing useful to the world. (p. p.533)’ Importantly, however, according to Zenith, who devotes considerable attention to the theme of race he never ‘publicly supported any racist ideology, (p.534)’ and in the 1920s remarked that ‘Mahatma Gandhi is the only truly great figure that exists in the world today, (p.78)’ while he was opposed to fascism from the beginning.
Until the 1930s Pessoa’s political views were in a chrysalis of café talk, untested by real authoritarianism, including censorship and a nascent police state under the dictator António Salazar.
Moreover, Pessoa was expressing his views during the chaotic first Portuguese Republic (1910-26), which experienced a series of political convulsions generating forty-four ministries and nine presidents, with frequent political assassinations. As Zenith puts it: ‘[t]he nation’s political centre, rather than being caught in a tug-of-war between ideological extremes, was caving in on itself. p.220)’
Pessoa was disgusted by the chaos, and rejected ‘the positivist project of certain republicans, who envisioned a science-based society of secular citizens illuminated by the twin virtues of order and progress. (p.424)’ ‘All radicalism fosters reaction,’ he warned, ‘since the informing spirit is the same. (p.312)’ In response, he developed his own reactionary idea an aristocratic republic. Progress, he argued, ‘could be achieved only through an aristocracy of superior individuals’ that, mercifully, have ‘nothing to do with blue blood or inherited privilege. (p.412)’
In 1928 he published The Interregnum: Defense and Justification of Military Dictatorship in Portugal where he argued that Portugal required a new political system but that this system had first to be discovered, and until then a military dictatorship was the best alternative. However, according to Zenith he ‘set himself apart from those who favoured a long-term authoritarian solution. (p.700)’
Only when put to the test would he display his true qualities, dismissing narrow appeals to national identity – proclaiming (as Bernando Soares) ‘My nation is the Portuguese language (p.791)’ – and defending individuals ‘whom he regarded as the true creators and only deserving beneficiaries of civilization. (p.742)’
Alentejo, Portugal, 2019.
Under Salazar
Ah, what a pleasure
To leave a task undone,
To have a book to read
And not event crack it!
Reading is a bore,
And studying isn’t anything. Fernando Pessoa-Himself ‘FREEDOM’, 1935
According to Zenith, Pessoa ‘smelled a rat in Mussolini (p.640).’ The Italian dictator had become a popular figure among the Portuguese intelligentsia of the period in search of a solution to the country’s catastrophic instability.
Zenith writes: ‘Pessoa continually oscillated between a Promethean impulse to help humanity, to be involved in the world, and a contrary inclination to retreat and seek perfection in the artistic space of a poem. (p.217)’ Confronting dictatorships across Europe in the 1930s he ceased feigning and honoured that Promethean impulse, at a significant cost to his career.
Pessoa opined, in the heteronym of Thomas Crosse, that Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin and Salazar were all ‘unbalanced characters,’ whose ‘limited vision of reality’ might, he acknowledged, make them effective but they shared the same ‘hatred of intelligence, because intelligence discusses.’ They were all, therefore, ‘enemies of liberty’, which if ‘not individual, is nothing,’ and saliently observed that, by nature, dictators ‘are unhumorous, because a sense of humour preserves a man from that maniac confidence in himself by which he promotes himself dictator (p.841).’
The priest-like – another lifelong bachelor – Salazar may have been a less monstrous character than other dictators of that era, but his “interregnum” would last almost fifty, stultifying years. A trained economist, who summarily banned gambling halls in Lisbon on taking power, before introducing austerity measures that appear suspiciously similar to those inflicted during our neoliberal era. A motto of ‘faith, moral guidance, and the spirit of sacrifice (p.705)’ is also reminiscent of public health exhortations under lockdown.
According to Zenith, Pessoa ‘instinctively bristled when he was expected to be a willing and even joyous participant in a mass movement, whatever it was. (p.293)’ Unsurprisingly, he reacted against propaganda projecting a ‘myth of a peaceful, bucolic Portugal where peasants joyfully hoed corn, tended cattle, picked grapes and wove baskets, while singing traditional songs and dancing in their spare time. (p.892)’
As a writer he was also infuriated by Salazar’s demand that literary works should observe ‘certain limitations,’ and embrace ‘certain guidelines’ defined by the New State’s ‘moral and patriotic principle.’ Salazar said that writers should be ‘creators of civic and moral energies’ rather than ‘nostalgic dreamers of despondency and decadence. (p.880)’ This remark seemed to have been aimed at Pessoa himself.
In response, he caustically observed that the word Salazar was made up of sal (salt) and azar (bad luck), and that rain had long ago dissolved the sal, leaving Portugal with nothing but azar (p.883). He would also write a sarcastic poem wishing that for once the radio announcer would tell listeners ‘what Salazar did not say (p.891).’
By the time of his death in 1935 Pessoa had come around ‘full circle’ according to Zenith ‘returning to the high-minded and large-hearted ambitions of his youth (p.903)’, arguing democratically that the nation is ‘worth the sum of its individuals (p.914).’
In response to Mussolini’s invasion of Abyssinia in 1936, Pessoa would ask: ‘what are we all in the world if not Abyssinians?’ Between us and them he saw a ‘vast and broad human fraternity (p.915)’
In response to the censorship of an article he wrote condemning Mussolini’s invasion, as well as discrimination against openly gay poets such as António Botto and the banning of the Freemasons and other secret societies, he took the dramatic decision to quit publishing in Portugal. In return for this he received an unwelcome visit from Salazar’s secret police, although he was largely left to his own devices until his death aged just forty-seven.
Lisbon, Portugal, 2019.
In History
No, I don’t want anything.
I already said I don’t want anything
Don’t come to me with conclusions!
Death is the only conclusion.
Don’t offer me aesthetics!
Don’t talk to me of morals!
Take metaphysics away from here!
Don’t try to sell me complete systems, don’t bore me with breakthroughs
Of science (of science, my God, of science!)–
Of science, of the arts, of modern civilization!
Álvaro de Campos ‘Lisbon Revisited’ (1923)
What to make of an artist such as Fernando Pessoa almost a century on from his death?
First, huge credit goes to his biographer Richard Zenith, who has assiduously assembled the parts of an extraordinarily complex life. Readers may feel daunted by such a weighty tome, but this represents a bible for English speakers, at least, conjuring a literary titan, deserving our attention alongside Shakespeare, and few others, such is his contribution to world literature.
Once suspects that Zenith himself must have struggled to maintain a coherent sense of self in the face of such a fecund imagination as Fernando Pessoa’s.
In the characters of the three heteronyms, the semi-heteronym and Pessoa as himself we find spiritual resources that may guide us – like Virgil in Dante’s Divine Comedy – through the labyrinth of an increasingly mediated age of increasing homogenisation and fake authenticity in the arts. And, like Virgil perhaps, he takes us to the gates of heaven, and no further.
With Alberto Caeiro – the vaccine against the stupidity of the intelligent – we may see nature in its glorious parts, at a remove from crippling intellectual conceits. Or we may dance with Ricardo Reis, maintaining order and composure in the face of chaos and deceit. That arch-sensualist, Álvaro de Campos, meanwhile, demands we appreciate all aspects of our journey through life, while taking aim at hypocrisy when required.
Then Bernardo Soares should be appreciated for his self-sufficiency and celebration of the interior world of the mind. Lastly, Fernando Pessoa as himself represents a narrative arc, wherein a true love of humanity, and human wellbeing, eventually asserts itself in the face of tyranny.
All these voices, and more, are what make Fernando Pessoa an essential poet for age.
Poetry translated by Richard Zenith, Fernando Pessoa, A Little Larger Than the Entire Universe, Penguin Classics, London, 2006.
Whenever I think about Literature I think about Love. Both are written with big Ls. The Elles. Like an enjambment of run on legs, going on ad infinitum.
And when I think of Love I think also, inevitably, of betrayal. One cannot be without the other; the two legs upon which humanity stands. Only in their resolution can we find peace. So, Literature – like His story – is very personal. Let me tell you my own.
It is a story about numbers, mainly Thee and Four. Here I am borrowing from Joyce and Beckett, both of whom in their turn drew from Giambattista Vico, the Neapolitan philosopher, a genius unjustly ignored in his lifetime. Even today, if you ask an educated people about Gimbattista Vico chances are most won’t know anything beyond his Three Ages of Man theory that helped Joyce formulate the structure of Finnegans Wake.
Now let me go back to the women in my life. There were three, you see. I said that this was a story about the numbers Three and Four, but in order to tell this story, I first need to tell you about these three women.
It is a story about Power; all history concerns Power after all.
With the first I was in a situation of Power. I could do anything. Or so it seemed. She clung to me. She lay at my feet and looked up to me like I was a God. And I was too. For when you are so very young, you feel God-like. Such is youth!
Look at them now, the youth of today, walking on the street! Love for them is the eternally INFINITE. That is why with youth there is still hope. As they are believers in the truth. It spreads out before them in space and time. Boundless. They are perpetually in a mindset ready for exploration. Of all kinds. This is why some of them love Art and Literature.
I am in my fifties now. I no longer believe in infinity. For me things are all too FINITE. Where I once saw open space, I now see enclosure.
She used to lie at my feet like I was a God. It’s a great feeling, isn’t it, to have that power! You stand above them like a God or a Goddess, looking down upon them, deciding on their fate.
And of course – as we all know – with such power comes enormous responsibility. The only problem is that when you are young you rarely feel like being responsible. Then one day you decide to do a terrible thing. Everyone does it, at some point. You kill them!
Metaphorically, at least. But this is the first real taste of death, and it is a truly terrible thing. Now, you have the taste of death upon your tongue. The one that you used to kiss. Now, s/he only tastes of poison.
You move on.
It is that simple. It’s called survival. Call this the first age when everything was divine and when you discovered metaphor and the apocalypse of dying.
The Soler Family, Pablo Picasso, 1903.
Nemesis and Trinity
So, time passes. You meet another one. Number Two. S/he is your Nemesis. For she will destroy you. Just like you destroyed number One, now your time too will come. Somehow this enters into our conception of justice. What goes round comes round. Karma.
Just as you had looked down, all those years ago, on your first lover; just as you looked down on the one who crawled around at your feet, now you are in that very same position! Who would have thought it? There now, look at you! That miserable specimen down on both your hands and knees before Her, who is looking down upon you. Like she’s contemplating an insect. And, of course, She eventually squashes you under Her boot heels. She crushes and grinds you into the earth so that there is no longer any trace of you. You are extinguished. Finally. You are dead.
There now. That is the story of numbers One and Two.
What happens next? And what, by the way, does any of this have to do with Messrs Beckett and Joyce? Everything, my dears. Just wait. Be patient, as I will explain. I will take you by the hand and help you to join up all the dots.
But first, let me introduce you to number Thee.
Isn’t she a beauty? Now, remember the score is one-all now. Even Stephens, as we say. You are finally at the age of equality. It happens early on for some; for others later on. And for some poor buggers, it never even comes!
You have to will it. But if s/he does come, you will finally have a chance to redeem yourself. For, like her, you too have been broken. You are no longer the youth you once were. Infinity has been clouded by impossible violence. You need to thread carefully now, and hold onto what you have with more caution.
And you do. Whereas before your relationships – that is with numbers One and Two – may have lasted only five or so years, with number Three it is all-enduring. Before you know it, twenty years have passed and you have children growing up around you; who you now cherish as you once cherished your own life.
This is the story of Three. The Trinity, if you will.
Illustration by Malina/Artsyfartsy.
How It Is
Moving on to Samuel Beckett and a story from his How It Is(1961) that has obsessed me like no other in Literature. This novel by the Irish Modernist writer has obsessed me throughout most of my adult life. It acts like a portal into human history through Literature, travelling back to the Ancients of Greece, and Rome. But before exploring this, I must first tell you about Giambattista Vico.
When talking about Giambattista Vico and Samuel Beckett, we must also consider James Joyce. The number three is there again! They form a triad. A holy Trinity. It was Joyce, after all, who asked the young Beckett to write an article about Work in Progress – the working title for Finnegans Wake (1939) – when they first met in Paris in 1928.
This was when he wrote his famous essay Dante…Bruno.Vico..Joyce(1929), in which he singles out Vico – more than the other Italians mentioned in the title – for particular attention, and the important influence of this Neapolitan thinker on James Joyce, in particular on the structural composition of Finnegans Wake.
But it also demonstrated Vico’s influence on Samuel Beckett, a point that has tended to be ignored by Beckett scholars.
Let us consider the essence of Vico’s ideas on the Three Ages of Man, and how Joyce was to incorporate Vico’s theories on history into his epic final novel.
In the La Scienza nouva or A New Science (1725), Vico attempts to break history down into a cyclical process, as natural as the four seasons. In fact, Vico’s Three Ages of Man idea actually contains four parts, and in this Joyce is a stickler. For this reason, though not alone, that Finnegans Wake is made up of four books. One being for each Age.
The Muses Melpomene, Erato, and Polyhymnia, by Eustache Le Sueur, c. 1652–1655.
The Four Ages
What then are these Four Ages? The First is called the Divine Age and language in particular, but also laws, are divinely thought of, or God-given. God in this case is Jupiter, as we are in the Pagan era.
Though, coming from a Christian era, we should recognise the intermediary nature of the Muse Uranus, mother of all the Muses, assigned the role of intermediary between God and man. However, She, in turn, needs a human vessel in order to transfer her God-given knowledge, and this, according to Vico, is where the poets come in.
As it was a theological age, so all poets were theological, unlike today. That is to say, they were only concerned with divine matters.
Language itself was divine. And metaphor played an incredibly important role, as signs and symbols were all-important.
Vico singles out the bolt of lightning, for example, as the first sign of Jupiter. This is simply to show how terrified these primitive people were in the beginning. They lived in caves, like Home’s Cyclops. This was a period of epic wandering. Man was chaotic and unruly. The Muse, through her instruction, tamed him. Such are the divine origins of language.
Joycean scholars have had great fun deciphering the various myths from the Bible and Antiquity that register in Book 1 of Finnegans Wake. It is indeed a really funny book – as Joyceans constantly highlight –full of puns referring back to famous figures, such as the Duke of Wellington and Ishtar, the ancient Babylonian Goddess of Love and War, and the Scottish empiricist philosopher David Hume, and so many more.
It is a great sprawling narrative divided into eight chapters each one given over to one of the major characters who are called the Earwickers. Father and Mother – Humphry and Anna, and their three siblings Shem, Sham and Issy. The first chapter is a kind of prelude given over to history and the origins of the Muse.
Beckett in How It Is begins his novel in similar fashion. Just as Joyce derives his ideas from Vico on the origins on human societies, Beckett too points to the Muse at the very beginning of the novel by starting with an invocation.
Although unconventional, as you would expect from Beckett, that he uses the structural form tells us everything.
The great Russian comparatist Mikhail Bakhtin, in The Dialogical Imagination(1975), is at pains to point out the origins of the novel as a genre and its debt to epic poetry, from which it took many structural features. Most novels are of tri-partite structure in theory, as Aristotle in his Poetics asserts, telling of events before, during and after – which is exactly what Beckett does in How It Is: events before Pim, with Pim and after Pim.
Who is this Pim, you might be asking? To answer this we move on now to Vico’s Second Age, which is given over to violence.
Odysseus and his crew are blinding Polyphemus. Detail of a Proto-Attic amphora, circa 650 BC.
Female Domination
Recall my story with girl Number Two? How She kicked my sorry little ass! Yes, I am talking about Female Domination of the male species, just as I spoke about Male Domination of the female in the First Age. This is karma. Although with Beckett the characters are practically sexless.
Similarly, Joyce parodies Hitler and the Nazis in Book 2 of Finnegans Wake, who were on the rise during Joyce’s lifetime. Book 2 of Finnegans Wake is full of wonderful puns at the expense of the Nazis, referencing particularly their atrocious treatment of Jews.
Beckett in How It Is uses the most crude and forceful comedy. It is truly grotesque. The only comparison that I can think of in literature is a Satyr play – bringing us back to Ancient Greece.
There is only one surviving Satyr play: The Cyclops by Euripides. Anyone who is familiar with this hilarious text will be aware that it is a parody of Homer’s Odyssey. A grotesque parody in the style of Rabelais.
Essentially, Euripides takes the myth of Zeus and Ganymede which sees the king of the gods having his way the beautiful youth.
Ganymede is synonymous with the submissive person in an amorous relationship. The Bottom, in short. As opposed to the Top. We here use the language of S&M, which is what we are talking about. Bottoms and Tops. Dominants and submissives. This is what Beckett is obsessed with in How It Is. This is what I have come to call the maths of rejection.
Set Theory
As the novel progresses, Beckett becomes more and more obsessed with the numbers Three and Four. In fact the quartet, not the trilogy, is the ideal set.
I am using the mathematical term now, taken from set theory. As this is how Beckett chooses to enter into the subject matter. It went on to become a major obsession of his during his later writing career. Consider there were two decades between the publication of How It Is in 1961 and his play Quad, completed in 1981, although tit wasn’t published until three years later.
Beckett spends the greater part of parts 2 and 3 of How It Is going over the innumerable permutations of movements. We are back with girlfriends One and Two, which started this small discourse on Love and Literature. Remember 1 + 2 = 3. Therefore, if we were to progress to 4, that would mean a return to 1 – to my mind anyway. Meaning I would have to become the bastard again.
Beckett uses the terms Victim and Torturer. These are the two modes of so-called human behaviour. In Beckett’s world, or, at least in the universe of How It Is, you are one or the other. I wonder which one are you?
This is a slight simplification, as the movement of the couples in How It Is is in permanent flux.
Beckett was also obsessed by Heraclitus and Democritus, the crying and laughing philosophers who form the two masks of theatre showing both aspects, extreme poles of human nature: the Tragic and the Comic; the legacy of the Ancient Greeks, which Beckett – without a doubt the greatest playwright of the twentieth century – revitalized.
What other playwright uses farce to such a violent advantage? Think of the Tramps Estragon and Vladimir contemplating hanging themselves from the tree, as a form of entertainment in Waiting for Godot; Nag and Nell consigned to the dustbins in Endgame; or Winnie up to her neck in it in Happy Days.
In all the unforgettable imagery conjured in Beckett’s theatre we find unforgettable visual metaphors encapsulating, in their simplicity, human tropes, which endure eternal.
In this Beckett is the poet of catastrophe and disaster, a role he inherited from the French poet Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867).
Baudelaire was the first to mine the negative aspect in man to such a profound and relentless degree, in this sense Beckett is really his doppelgänger. It was Beckett’s genius to align himself so much to the dark side, as it were, which Baudelaire had ploughed so successfully in Les Fleurs Du Mal.
Featured Image: Louis Jamnot (1814-1892), Le Vol de l’âme
In Ireland, North and South, the Arts Sector, currently, is a sinecure. Those middle-class mentalities which dominate, and, indeed, hold most high profile positions, would argue vehemently against such – as they would see it – an offensive statement, but nevertheless I believe it to be a fair characterisation.
‘Stephen says bitterly, “It is the symbol of Irish Art. The cracked lookingglass of the servant.” This was Stephen Dedalus’s view in Joyce’s modernist magnum opus, Ulysses, and we find this idiom pre-settling into an ‘independent’ Republic as a statement on colonial subjugation, and a lack of confidence in the national character. And since that imperial rule withdrew, neoliberal, self-serving attitudes, have moved – and settled – in as they have done across the Western World.
With the arrival of mass market production, relentless advertising and consumerism, which took over Irish sensibilities around twenty years ago, Ireland became no different to elsewhere.
Up to €7 for a pint of ‘Stout’ in Temple Bar?! Dublin rents going through the roof, past the cloud-clapped ivory towers and beyond into the dazzling astral heights, for pure unadulterated profit. This is an Ireland I do not care to recognise anymore. Everything, including morality, is up for sale.
With the internet, one can purchase the ‘lookingglass’ and have it in your hand the next day if one so wishes; but it will, inevitably, end up being tossed away, into landfill, soon thereafter. We live in ephemeral ‘throwaway’ times. Qualities like validity, truth and morality are diminished – and indeed ‘blend’ into ‘fiction-meets-truth’ in an Orwellian-era of ‘fake news’, outright lies and endless spin.
Ireland enjoys intellects but only if they are not overtly clever, and don’t create a sense of inferiority. Does the cracked lookingglass serve as a basis for the national character or identity?
A deep resonance of shame bubbles up from oppressiveness, whether it is indoctrination through the Catholic Church and a State which could not separate the two; and, in the wake of centuries of Viking, Norman, and indeed Anglo-Saxon, subjugation a deep hurt has not even been addressed. The need for a healing process in the collective psyche has not been considered by the remote heads of the post-modernist, mildly liberal, and increasingly secularised state.
Ireland was banished, but she was not razed and buried; she would return. And return she did onto her fertile isle, on the edge of Western Europe – the land of milk and honey, so rich in potential and verdant imagination.
It is true: I am in love with Ireland as landscape; and the mythical potency brings to mind an unconforming otherness – which espouses freedoms that rouse the romantic variant in a wanderer.
There is, however, now the prescient, palpitating and unresolved issue of the published writer: the ego, which conflates on the surface area of their proposed brilliance, leading to the belief that they, and their literary output, rival, and even surpasses the authors of literary Classics. In effect, canonising their own brand – this is where we are.
Let me add, that the Western World’s Canonical Works are up there for a reason, they are regarded as ‘the Classics’ and should be read and championed as such. A ‘Classic’ can be considered a strongly composed noteworthy book.
Among the writers who are generally considered the most important in Western literature are: Homer, Aeschylus, Euripides, Virgil, Horace, Geoffrey Chaucer, Dante Alighieri, William Shakespeare, François Rabelais, Jean Racine, Molière, Miguel de Cervantes, Michel de Montaigne, John Milton, Samuel Johnson, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, William Wordsworth, Jane Austen, Stendhal, Walt Whitman, Gustave Flaubert, Emily Dickinson, Honoré de Balzac, Charles Dickens, Herman Melville, George Eliot, Leo Tolstoy, Henrik Ibsen, Sigmund Freud, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Marcel Proust, Thomas Mann, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Franz Kafka, William Faulkner, Jorge Luis Borges, Pablo Neruda, Albert Camus and Samuel Beckett.
The first writer to use the term ‘classic’ was Aulus Gellius, a second century AD Roman writer who, in the miscellany Noctes Atticae (19, 8, 15), refers to a writer as a classicus scriptor, non proletarius (‘A distinguished, not a commonplace writer’). Such classification began with the Greeks’ ranking their cultural works, with the word canon (‘carpenter’s rule’).
Moreover, early Christian Church Fathers used canon to rank the authoritative texts of the New Testament, preserving them, given the expense of vellum and papyrus and mechanical book reproduction. Thus, being placed in a canon ensured a book’s preservation as the best way to retain information about a civilization.
Contemporarily, the Western canon defines the best of Western culture. In the ancient world, at the Alexandrian Library, scholars coined the Greek term Hoi enkrithentes (‘the admitted’, ‘the included’) to identify the writers in the canon.
If you are a writer with a couple of books in print, and if you deride these works because you are so high upon your stamping, nose-blustering, mighty charger, due to being published, I am sorry, but this is out-and-out naïveté. It is emotional, inferior narcissism and ego-led savagery and in its way, denigrates the reputations of great writers of the past and their output.
Recently, reading an interview in which a writer stated that they did not, or could not, raise a little interest towards Jack Kerouac’s Beat Classic, On the Road, equating the experience with hitting one’s head ‘with a plastic spoon.’ – a petulant and unworthy response.
Infantilised Youth Culture
Infantilization of culturally accepted ‘norms’ through Happy Meals’ language, ‘LOLs’, and other solipsistic accepted ‘bant’ has led us down this cul-de-sac. Snowflake is used as a pejorative term. Other ‘trendy’ Smartphone-induced abbreviated terms such as ‘Merch’ and ‘Bae’: are now the common argot of an infantilised youth culture that permeates mainstream discourse.
Any perceived ‘criticism’ of these so called ‘established writers’ i.e., a writer who has a recent published book on the shelves, is meted out with condemnations and calls the gallows! In this solidarity, an insidious, irrational, emotionally-charged cabal is missing the point.
The media in Ireland love to promote long established writers and their works, but they routinely forget the Garret-based writers who slog bravely away by a figurative candle over their ‘Art’.
Please, fellow scribes, do not ‘Drown’ your ‘book’ like Prospero. Do not become disheartened because you are not alone. Your magic is your own and do not let it die because of the success of mediocre fare, which publishing houses choose to release.
Irish publishers, like UK publishers, and American publishers, are greedy for a quick return on profit and this mantra only serves their deity, the golden calf of money. Forget this wide-eyed, commandeering for a few hedonisms, and continue on.
Yeatsian Revival
Simply because Ireland has a vibrant literary-cultural inheritance – which came to the fore especially during the Yeatsian Irish Literary Revival from the turn of the twentieth century – should not, ergo, give prominence to literary reputations simply on the assumption they are part of a great tradition. Extreme reverence is the death-knell of strongly composed literature, which is kept in its primordial place for lack of oxygen, dragging itself off to the literary hinterlands, to peer through fissures of granite rock – redundant.
There are simply too many Creative Writing Courses being run in universities, which gladly take a student’s money – assuming they pay it up front and often – in order to place their ego on a pedestal; but the massive issue with this kind of fawning is that it misses the whole point of literature, which is to enjoy the simple immersive experience of reading something new, fresh, challenging that sets you upon the unknown territories of an adventure, knapsack in tow.
In Brian Friel’s Philadelphia, Here I Come, the main protagonist, ‘Gar’ Gareth O’Donnell, has a public and private self, played by two actors. The mimetic structures of the ego, in the Irish Literary Art’s Scene(s) do not allow for any logical critique – this kind of thought is placed in emotional narcissism, firmly rooted in insecurity: the public image of oneself in a position of power and the private self behind pulled chintz curtains. Seemingly, the paradoxical self is difficult for the Irish mentality to examine closely.
The Commentariat
Who are the Irish commentariat on which these assertions are based? One does not have to look too far: remember when Roddy Doyle, a decent Dublin novelist, took a few naïve swipes at Joyce’s masterpiece:
‘Ulysses could have done with a good editor,’ Doyle told a stunned audience in New York gathered to celebrate the great man who is credited with inventing the modern novel.
‘You know people are always putting Ulysses in the top ten books ever written but I doubt that any of those people were really moved by it.’
‘I only read three pages of Finnegans Wake and it was a tragic waste of time,’ he added. ‘Dubliners was Joyce’s best work, but Ulysses was undeserving of reverence.”
According to Richard Ellmann’s biography Joyce was once described as ‘A corner boy who spits in the Liffey.’ Jealously appears to lie behind denunciations such as Roddy Doyle’s.
The reality is that many aspiring Irish novelist are forced into work that prevents them from writing: no one doubts this, but many working class writers are living on the breadline; the cultural establishment response: ‘Ah, he’s grand’ desensitizes them to this struggle.
They may console themselves, ‘Sure, he was rejected thirty-seven times.’ Well, Robert M. Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance was rejected over a hundred times – so statistics have little relevance, especially considering a lot of agents don’t know their furnished onions from their hot potatoes? The author of Moby Dick, Herman Melville, died in abject poverty. Those who seek justification in ‘statistics’ lack in the cold reasoning of logic.
The effete North – once a fertile ground for freedom of expression, and in around the harrowed fields of poetry, has been conquered by a small literary clique, who look out from their parapets, pouring scorn on anyone who dares to have the tenacity to write ‘good’ work – work which they see as threatening to their output.
A few diminutive literary-based, artsy, types run pop-ups and suchlike, now and again, as an alternative to the mainstream, but some, most, fall like a bright star into the slopping wetness of the Lagan, or the Foyle, only to have their inner-core frazzled and inevitably extinguished – another avenue burnt-out.
There will be those who will be quick to trot out, on horseback, with lances aloft, with ‘Ah, sure he has a chip on his shoulder,’ and other negative, quick-to-judge, comments. My riposte to this is: yes, I do have a chip, or rather the plural, ‘chips’, one on each shoulder, which helps balance me out. They will use the term ‘bitterness’, but ‘frustration’ is more apt. Ingratitude will be another conceited proclamation.
Also, the Halo-Effect: this being the over-promotion of well-established writers, with no love left for the outsider, unknown writer. Ireland’s cultural media embargo on new and fresh writing is wan to say the least; anytime an important event comes along they wheel out figureheads. Michael Longley’s poem, ‘Ceasefire’ is often wheeled out upon a gurney; again to be speculated upon; again in times of conflict; but I can safely say Ulster Unionism, which Longley would identify himself with, would never get down upon their knees to kiss anyone’s hand except their aristocratic, they believe, betters.
Ireland’s media has an infatuation with their well-established poets – poets who have been hanging around for thirty years – waiting for them to come on stage to deliver homilies of breathy, dramatic words. A false panacea for ongoing violent times.
The cult of literary reverence and priesthood in the Irish poetry scene is archaic, embarrassing, and non-progressive, and equates to the mystical sorcery in a Harry Potter inspired world of fakery. The ‘everyone wants to be famous’ and well-regarded, and thought highly of as a ‘writer’ is a trope which has simply gone too far.
It is fine to have dreams and aspirations, but one has to put the hard work, through falling, in failure, by rejection, after derision, and in managing jealousy. One only has to look at the work which is coming out of university produced magazines to see this. Recently, I read a short story in an Irish newspaper, online edition, and I despaired. What I see is diaphanous clichéd fare time and time again.
Not so long ago, I conversed with a very fine, and clever, female Irish poet who is not well known in Ireland. She told me that she has given up trying to have her work published in any Irish Arts-led magazines as her work is continually rejected.
I have read her work, it is good, and all that I can summarise is that some of these Arts folk do not know what they are doing, but, or rather, what they really are doing is selecting the work of their chums and, indeed, the work of themselves, for publication.
These are magazines which are supposed to have a fair-handed, even democratic, selection process for work which is submitted from the four tent-pegged corners of the island of Ireland. Nepotism is rife in the Irish Arts scene. If you are a friend of a friend, nudge-nudge, wink-wink, then you are ‘A-Okay, pal…I will get you published,’ literary merit notwithstanding.
There are of course exceptions, with real talents. Colm Tóbín is up there with the alive Irish intelligentsia, as is John Banville, both are true novelists in the sense of sitting down to read, to learn, then to write their own work, in conformity with the traditional literary model, and they should be applauded for their due diligence. They have hauled long nets and reeled in empty lines for their patience and perseverance to their Art, to pay off in the end.
What is to be done?
Easy – read more books. Read the Classics. A good novel will lead you to a wood at dusk, whereupon you will find a finely woven thread of golden-silk, and, as night falls, slowly traverse the wood and feel, along with the golden-thread, a growing self-belief. That is the power of strong writing. Do not shy away from challenging yourself with any prejudicial assumptions around what a reading experience is, should, or could, be.
Admission of Bias
