Tag: literature

The representation of reality really does seem to be the essential literary exercise; that is, leaving aside aesthetic theories, simply turning experience or observation into literature. In time, the limits that reality itself offers become evident, and then the artist may choose to take a step forward. It is curious to note that the highest works often originate from this motivation: to achieve through art what reality does not allow. There seems to be, in artists taken by this obsession, a point in life when the reality is exhausted, or at the very least becomes insufficient. Hence, all previous training is employed to make mental creation a literary reality as patent as that motivated by direct experience. And to see that, in many cases, the former still manages to stand out.

For the artist, just as experiences are useful to him as they influence his work, it is wrong to judge their importance as one would do with an ordinary man. Whether art is seen as the representation of reality or the creation of an alternative reality, the artist will put into it what really matters to him, that which, transformed into art, represents to him what is most dear and worthy of this crystallization. Therefore, it will almost always be absurd to want to see as determinant in the artist something that his own work refuses to tell us.

This biography of Fernando Pessoa by Richard Zenith will hardly be surpassed by those that succeed it. In the first place, we have here a profound connoisseur of Pessoa’s work, and not only of his life. It seems obvious to say, although perhaps it is not so obvious that the most complex task in making a biography of an intellectual is to narrate his intellectual trajectory. For an artist like Fernando Pessoa, whose for him his greatest virtue was his own multiplicity, this is a very risky undertaking. But Zenith faces it and presents us with a serene vision of the meanderings of the poet’s intellectual evolution, without falling into the temptation of conforming the biography to his personal interpretation. The chapters are intelligently organized, and the narrative, at first chronological, allows itself to go back and forth in time when the theme demands it. And then we see the details, the beautiful details that only acquire their due importance when contextualized by a competent biographer, such as the honorable and moving tribute to Uncle Cunha and his invaluable contribution in amusingly and creatively instigating the imagination of the little poet. Pessoa: a biography is a work worthy of the most sincere praise, and whose author has proven himself worthy of thanks that will extend for many generations to come.

It is irritating, but perhaps simultaneously necessary, to make concessions to the practical world in literary creation. It is natural that there is an urge in the intellectual to isolate himself in abstractions as pleasurable as the intrusions of everyday banality into his work are unpleasant. However, these seeming stains constitute a necessary link with the reality that allows literature to play its aggrandizing role. To isolate oneself on the intellectual plane is to blend in with the philosophers whose idle works have never served as advice to anyone.