Accessories and Álvaro de Campos

The 13th of June is the centenary of Fernando Pessoa's birth. The works of this unique Portuguese poet born in Lisbon in 1888 have already received worldwide acclaim. RC wishes to contribute to their renown by publishing Tabucchi's article on one of Pessoa's heteronyms.

"We could say that there are two cases in Pessoa's life: one is the case with his manuscripts and the other is Álvaro de Campos'case. It is significant that Almada Negreiros should have noticed this accessory, so essential to understanding Campos, when he was portraying Pessoa's different characters."

Campos, painted by Almada on the façade of the Faculty of Arts in Lisbon, is carrying a case in his left hand. Let us pause to consider the vast amount of information provided by that case. It reveals a wandering spirit, a man with no frontiers but who is also a stranger to geography and existence. That case is much more than just an accessory for the Algarve-born engineer, educated in Glasgow and poet in Lisbon. But this case does not only travel outside the text as an appendage to a fictional character. On the contrary, this case really travels. Even though, at one point, we find it "open, waiting to be packed" ("Grandes são os desertos e tudo é deserto", 1930), this case is the one which has been in the cabin of a great transatlantic steamer on its voyage back from the East through the Suez Canal ("Opiário").

What was the case like? Was it a very elegant leather case, a little bit worn à la Beau Brummel? The objects inside the case seem to point to this conclusion. In the first place there is a case; it is the hypothetical case belonging to Álvaro de Campos. Within the case there is a real case in the true sense of the word and this case holds the same transatlantic steamer which, in turn, is carrying the case. This is to be expected because the transatlantic steamer is also an aesthetic cliché inherent to which is the idea of an unmistakable era and fashion. It is in itself a literary accessory which belongs to the aesthetic luggage of a dandy. There, in the swanky case, we find the "Mercure de France", cigarrettes and a love of England and things English reflected in the weighty Encyclopaedia Britannica of the poem "Há mais de meia hora" (1935), in the Times newspaper ("The Times", 1928) and in a string of vocabulary which runs through all of Campos' work (among them smoking-room, Canadian Pacific, Derby, tramways, Music-hall, Jim Burns, Cardiff, Liverpool, Glasgow, Texas, Carolina, New York, Brooklyn Ferry, bridge, Daisy, Cecily, "Lisbon Revisited", (etc.).

As we all know, the "Mercure de France" was a literary "bible", the true messenger from Paris, a Mercury in name and deed. Phileas Lebesgue, whose name is frequently mentioned in Sá-Carneiro's letters, wrote articles in the "Mercure" about Portuguese literature. I have already discussed the role of the cigarrette in Campos in my book Pessoana Mínima so I shall refrain from repeating myself here. Suffice to say that the cigarrette plays the same role for Campos as opium or absinthe in 19th century literature although he makes it work on a totally new plane contrasting the factual-pragmatic with the onthological-methaphysical. In order to explain the Encyclopaedia Britannica and all the English signboards and brands which abound in his poetry, I would say that Campos has dipped into the anglomania that swept through Europe and particularly France in the middle of the 19th century (Barbey d'Aurevilly, Charles Laffitte, Le Comte d'Orsey, Gautier, Nerval and of course Baudelaire, all of whom followed in the footsteps of Lord Brummel (see Jacques Boulanger: Les Dandies, Paris,. 1907; André Ferrou: L'Esthétique de Baudelaire, Paris, 1968).

I would like to pass on to another part of Campos' case where we can find other accessories which deserve to be included in the present list. These are maps, childhood pictures and illustrations from big coloured books.

"E o espelho dos mapas, caminho abstracto para a imaginação concreta

Letras e riscos irregulares abrindo para a maravilha

O que de sonho jaz nas encadernações vetustas

Nas assinaturas complicadas".

And now let us hear Rimbaud (Alchimie du Verbe) whom Pessoa never mentioned in his aesthetic notes:

"J'aimais les peintures idiotes, dessus de portes, décors, toiles de saltimbanques, enseignes, enluminures populaires; la litérature démodé, latin d'église, livres érotiques sans orthographe, romains de nos aїeux, contes de fйes, petits livres de l'enfance, opйras vieux, refrains niais, rhythmes naїfs"

The coincidences between Pessoa and Rimbaud are too obvious to be overlooked and it is not to inconsequential to recall other coincidences even if they do not occur in the above mentioned poem by Campos. We must bear in mind that Church Latin is part of Campos' cultural heritage thanks to his uncle who was a priest in Beira as well as being his teacher. He brushes upon this experience in an undated poem ("Gostava de gostar de gostar") based on a memorized line of St. Augustin, "Nondum amabem et amara amabam". There are also "idiot paintings" in Campos' works even if they are not described as such. Something of the kind can be found in the poem "A casa branca nau preta" (1916) which awakens Campos' fantasies as he slumbers on a summer afternoon. Equally, the oil-painted islands in "Ode Marнtima", where exaggeration conveys the idea of a hyper-reality, are very similar to the childish drawings with too much pink and too much blue. For Rimbaud, bric-a-brac is essentially a passport to the oneiric and I should like to point out how avantgarde movements such as Dadaism, Futurism and Surrealism used and abused these bits and pieces. In Campos, however, and particularly in the "elderly" Campos, the poetic use of bric-a brac assumes an onthological question and a methaphysical arrangement which perhaps allows comparison with the role of accessories in Mondale's poetry. It seems obvious that Campos' "visible" and "enigmatic" accessory was very close to the philosophy of phenomenology which is based on a methaphysical conception and I dare say it was sometimes even a precursor of certain currents in contemporary philosophy i. e. Husserl.

Moving on to yet another aspect of Campos, the one which could be classed as "decadent", we find a mask, a mirror and a pierrot costume ("Tabacaria"). The aesthetic context is obvious: "Pierrot Lunaire", Laforge, Wilde and in Italy Goldoni and Pallazzeschi.

In view of this hurried but nonetheless extensive list of accessories it may seem that with the character of Бlvaro de Campos, Pessoa creates the perfect avant-garde man of the beginning of the century: bored, blasй, dandy, witty, "futurista e tudo" (futurist and all that) according to Almada Negreiros' simplistic description. But, of course, with Campos things are not that simple because Campos is a character with a dual function insofar as he is a fictional character who creates fiction and he is a literary character who, in turn, creates literature. Thus Campos is much more than a portrait or a self-analysis; he is a reflection, a kind of distancing from the self. He is Pessoa watching himself as an avant-garde artist. Implicit to distance there is a gap, and implicit to the gap there is irony. The great novelty that Campos brings to the character of the avant-garde poet lies exactly in this specific quality. This quality belongs to a philosophycal category, the "ironic conscience". According to the definition of ironic conscience given by Jankйlйvitch, we could say about Campos that "c'est la conscience de la rйvelation par laquelle l'absolu, dans un moment fugitif, se rйalise et du mкme coup de dйtruit; et l'art n'est rien d'autre que l'instant du passage, la belle et fragile apparence qui а la fois exprime et anйantit l'idйe. Ainsi se constitue, par opposition au "Witz" rйflexif, acide et persiflueur du XVIII e siиcle, une ironie un peu sauvage, une ironie exaltйe et ambitieuse. L'ironie n'est plus heuristique, mais nihilisante" (Jankйlйvitch, L'Ironie, Paris, 1979).

Thanks to this kind of ironic conscience, Campos can destroy the interior of the avant-gardist or, rather, he destroys himself. By dismantling the aesthetic dйcor of his time, he himself, he purges himself of all filth and attains not a merely aesthetic frugality but rather a vacuum, a desert, a blank screen at which he stares.

There is also another accessory connected with Campos' case. That one is not inside but outside it: it is the Sud-Express.

I think it is reasonable to imagine Campos carrying his case to Rossio station and, contrary to what the Portuguese poets of the same time were doing, leaving his suitcase and all its contents there and then returning to his room with its one pure, essential accessory: a chair. There is a huge chair in Campos' work, the one in which he sits looking at the window, at the harbour and at Nothing. It is the chair in Tabacaria which leads the way from inside the room to the window, it is the chair on which Campos stretches out on a summer's day, it is the chair in the Cafй where Campos sits accompanied by Spinoza in the poem "Nas praзas vindouras":

It is here, in this poem, in some chairs in a Lisbon cafй that Campos strips out nobility from philosophy and, acting as the "conscience ironique", better attains the idea behind Spinoza's philosophy. The idea of God as the sum of cafй methaphysics and all the failures sitting in all the little corners of all the "Brasileiras"** of the world is perhaps the best methaphor for Бlvaro de Campos' disturbing chair, a chair which has already appeared with apparent futility in the poem "Opiбrio":

"Deixem-me estar aqui, nesta cadeira

atй virem meter-me no caixгo".

It is a chair that possesses an icy and mysterious character which symbolizes an eternal Inertia confronting the futile vitesse of the 20th century.

** Famous cafй in Lisbon frequented by the "Orpheu" group of whom Fernando Pessoa was a member.

* Graduate of Pisa University; Professor of Portuguese Literature in the Faculty of Arts at Geneva University, Writer and author of several essays on Portuguese Literature, he has translated some of Pessoa's works into Italian and written several essays on his work.