Fernando Pessoas Heteronymic Machine

Adam Morris

Abordando a obra de Fernando Pessoa em um nvel conceitual, e no potico

ou esttico, este ensaio identifica as realizaes filosficas do sistema hetero-
nmico pessoano. At agora, muitos crticos tm utilizado conceitos deleuzo-
guattarianos como ferramentas para entender a poesia de Pessoa, mas poucos
consideraram suas contribuies filosofia atravs dos heternimos. Em
particular, sugiro que a heteronmia prope uma rebelio filosfica com-
posta de conceitos que antecipam as ideias posteriormente desenvolvidas por
Gilles Deleuze e Flix Guattari, em obras publicadas dcadas aps a morte
de Pessoa. Mais do que simplesmente rizomtica, a heteronmia emprega
macro e micromultiplicidades que constituem mutuamente sua estrutura;
favorece modos de criao antilineares e anticartesianos a partir de uma
evaso influncia literria hierrquica; e articula uma filosofia que depende
de uma dimensionalidade interativa semelhante ao plano de consistncia
deleuzo-guattariano.

Com uma tal falta de literatura, como h hoje, que pode um homem de
gnio fazer seno converter-se, ele s, em uma literatura?
Fernando Pessoa1

D espite their keen interest in literary exponents of rhizomatics, Gilles

Deleuze and Flix Guattari almost fail to mention the work of Fernando
Pessoa. This is a shame, as it is difficult to imagine a more useful literary
interlocutor for Deleuzo-guattarian theory. I write that they almost fail to
mention Pessoa because Deleuze and Guattari were certainly aware of the
Portuguese poet, and they do in fact refer to him, in passing, on several occa-
sions. These remarks appear in their final collaboration What Is Philosophy?,
where they introduce Pessoa as a foil for Proust, with each writer inventing
different procedures in the search for the sensation as being (167), as well

126 Luso-Brazilian Review 51:2

ISSN 0024-7413, 2014 by the Board of Regents
of the University of Wisconsin System
Morris 127

as when they list him among writers they call half -philosophers but also
much more than philosophers:
There is such force in those unhinged works of Hlderlin, Kleist, Rimbaud,
Mallarm, Kafka, Michaux, Pessoa, Artaud, and many English and American
novelists, from Melville to Lawrence or Miller, in which the reader discovers
admiringly that they have written the novel of Spinozism. To be sure, they do
not produce a synthesis of art and philosophy. They branch out and do not
stop branching out. They are hybrid geniuses who neither erase nor cover
over differences in kind, but on the contrary, use all the resources of their
athleticism to install themselves within this very difference, like acrobats
torn apart in a perpetual show of strength. (What is Philosophy?67)

What seems like a near-miss between Pessoa and Deleuze and Guattari is
attributable less to the philosophers disinterest than to historical contingen-
cies: Fernando Pessoa died when Deleuze and Guattari were still children,
and Deleuze and Guattari developed their revolutionary philosophy of rhi-
zomatics and schizoanalysis2 in the 1970s, years before much of Pessoas volu-
minous writings were finally edited, published, and translated.
My objective here is to offer a reading of Pessoa not as a philosopher, but
as a philosophical thinker. This reading is based less on Pessoas poetry than
on the sprawling system in and for which it was produced: a system I call
the heteronymic machine. Of course, there have always been thinkers who
evoked rhizomatic design, as Deleuze and Guattari point out. My objective
is not simply to defend Pessoas position on their list, but rather to show the
strong resonance between two conceptual projects. The ingenious system
that Pessoa conceived to disseminate (and not contain) his thought articu-
lates the philosophical move later described in different terms by Deleuze and
Guattari, most extensively in A Thousand Plateaus. And so although poems
like Ode Triunfal by heteronym lvaro de Campos have led to Pessoas
poetic reputation as a Portuguese analog of the British and Irish modernisms
that influenced him, we can also regard Pessoas literary machineand the
confusion of identities and ontological genesis3 that attends itas one of the
first stirrings of what is today considered postmodern thought.4
Viewed in the light of theories developed after his death, Pessoa (1888
1935) indeed appears a curious anachronism. At times his descriptions of
heteronymity resemble a post-Deleuzo-guattarian schizoid manifesto, as
when he writes, O que sentimos somente o que sentimos. O que pensamos
somente o que pensamos. Porm o que, sentido ou pensado, novamente
pensamos como outrem isso que se transmuta naturalmente em arte, e,
esfriando, atinge forma (Teoria 235). Pessoas 25,000 manuscripts and ap-
proximately eighty heteronyms were his way of pursuing this art. The urge to
consider and reconsider perceptions as experienced by the other, including
128 Luso-Brazilian Review51:2

the impossible exercise of imagining the experience and reality of the schizo-
phrenic, also lies at the core of the Deleuzo-guattarian strain of postmodern
theory. Though some critics find it convenient to resort to Deleuzo-guattarian
concepts to explain certain elements of heteronymity, few take the trouble
of identifying the specific ways in which Pessoa realizes the schizoanalytic
project of creating a rhizome and not simply creating-rhizomatically.5 This
is amusing, since it is rather tempting to read Deleuze and Guattaris chapter
on Conceptual Personae in What as Philosophy? as a bit of a rip-off of Pes-
soa: Conceptual personae are the philosophers heteronyms, Deleuze and
Guattari write, and the philosophers name is the simple pseudonym of his
personae (64). This of course will sound familiar to anyone who has studied
Pessoa and his heteronyms. And it is why I suggest that we consider the epis-
temological questions and philosophical concepts raised by Pessoas system
of heteronymity equally as important as his poetic feats.

I. Haecceity, multiplicity, and the heteronyms

The assemblage of Pessoas work includes not just the poetry and prose of
his orthonymn, heteronyms, and semiheteronyms, but also includes the
Deleuzo-guattarian bookmachine of heteronymity itself. The person of
Pessoa the writer constitutes the individual heteronyms of Pessoa, and these
individuals also constitute the person Pessoa. His oeuvre thus resembles the
mutually constituting macro and micro multiplicities that Deleuze and
Guattari describe in A Thousand Plateaus.6
To analyze these multiplicities, it is perhaps best to begin with a word
on the heteronyms beliefs on ontology, ideas that hinge on multiplicities
as much on singularity and haecceity, a concept elaborated by medieval
philosopher Duns Scotus and resurrected by Deleuze and Guattari in the
20thcentury. In an oft-cited passage from the poem Num dia excessivamente
ntido, Alberto Caeiroconsidered a master by some of Pessoas other
heteronymswrites:
Vi que no h Natureza,
Que Natureza no existe,
Que h montes, vales, plancies,
Que h rvores, flores, ervas,
Que h rios e pedras,
Mas que no h um todo a que isso pertena,
Que um conjunto real e verdadeiro
uma doena das nossas ideias.

A Natureza partes sem um todo.

Isto e talvez o tal mistrio de que falam.7
Morris 129

For Caeiro, this thing that we call Nature lacks oneness, which is merely
a chimera brought on by a disease of our ideas. What Caeiro rejects is the
sort of oneness imputed to nature as a transcendental whole to which all
belongs.8 His oft-quoted line A Natureza partes sem um todo discards the
ontological priority of the One over the Many, a position that is also funda-
mental in Deleuze and Guattaris work.9 Oneness, for Caeiro, is that of a dis-
crete, singular thing (flower, stone), of a haecceity. Though a codified concept
of Nature continues to exist, even for Caeiro (who cannot avoid reifying
the concept even as he rejects it), it is a concept that only exists as the result
of false constructions and diseased ideas. Nature is thus artificial, inor-
ganic, man-made. Bernardo Soares, a semi-heteronym who demonstrates
knowledge of Caeiros work in his own writings, agrees: Ignoro como estes
telhados, he writes, while gazing out the window at rooftops, Falhei, como
a natureza inteira.10 For Soares, the notion of a unified nature is illusory. Jos
Gil cites similar passages to support his claim that Pessoa and Deleuze shared
a goal: to do away with transcendental metaphysics (acabar com a tran-
scendncia metafsica, Diferena,14). Dr. Antnio Mora, the theorist among
the neopagan heteronyms and philosophical follower of Caeiro, expands
Caeiros and Soaress impressions in his attempt to arrive at a pagan response
to dominant metaphysical thinking, one that would rethink human experi-
ence without falling into what Deleuze and Guattari call the illusion of tran-
scendence or the illusion of universals (What Is Philosophy?49), such as
the human construction of a unified transcendental, whether called Nature
or Reality. These errors, Mora writes, result from the anthropomorphizing
tendencies of philosophy: Toda a filosofia um antropomorfismo. O erro
fundamental admitir como real a alma do indivduo, o erigir a conscin-
cia do indivduo em conscincia absoluta e a Realidade em individualidade.
Individuar a Realidadeeis o primeiro grande erro. Individuar a Conscin-
ciaeis o segundo grande erro.11 Direct sensory contact with something, the
neopagan heteronyms believe, is the only way to experience it as real.
This claim distills various ideas posed by the neo-pagan heteronyms, as
well as their contemporaries the Portuguese Sensationists, a poetic move-
ment intimately related to the Pessoan project. According to heteronym and
scholar of Sensationism Thomas Crosse, the Sensationist movement was
begun by Pessoa and his friend Mrio S Carneiro and also included het-
eronym lvaro de Campos. Procedural thought is antithetical to the Sen-
sationist project. As Crosse explains in his Preface to an Anthology of the
Portuguese Sensationsts:
All sensations are good, as long as we dont try to reduce them to action. An
action is a sensation thrown away. Act on the inside, using only the hands of
your spirit to pluck flowers on lifes periphery. Learn not to associate ideas
130 Luso-Brazilian Review51:2

but to break your soul into pieces instead. Learn how to experience sensa-
tions simultaneously, to scatter your spirit through your own scattered self.
(Prose64)

The Sensationist prerogative resembles Moras pagan creed: sentience, not

sentiments. Sensationism thus provided a relatively rare occasion for lvaro
de Campos and neopagan heteronym Ricardo Reis to agree in their interpre-
tations of the master Caeiro.
Pessoa ele-mesmo explains this overlap further in To whom can Caeiro
be compared?, a text in which he summarizes the principal heteronyms po-
sitions vis--vis Sensationism:
Ricardo Reis has put the logic of his attitude as purely sensationist very
clearly. According to him, we not only should bow down to the pure objectiv-
ity of things (hence his sensationism proper, and his neo-classicism, for the
classic poets were those who commented least, at least directly, upon things),
but bow down to the equal objectivity, reality, naturalness of the necessities
of our nature, of which the religious sentiment is one. Caeiro is the pure and
absolute sensationist who bows down to sensations qua exterior and admits
no more. Ricardo Reis is less absolute; he bows down also to the primitive
elements of our own nature, our primitive feelings being as real and natural
to him as flowers and trees.12

lvaro de Campos, Pessoa notes, is on the opposite point, entirely op-

posed to Ricardo Reis. Yet he is not less than the latter a disciple of Caeiro
and a sensationist proper.13 Campos proposes not only the speciousness of
a unified reality as the product of the human imagination, but also the
instability and uncertainty of sensations themselves. Suggesting one of the
paths toward heteronymity, Campos differentiates between perception and
sensation, explaining that the way to determine the accuracy of a sensation is
by corroborating its perception with others: Para mim o universo apenas
um conceito meu, uma sntese dinmica e projectada de todas as minhas
sensaes. Verifico, ou cuido verificar, que coincidem com as minhas grande
nmero das sensaes de outras almas, e a essa coincidncia chamo o uni-
verso exterior, ou a realidade (Notas 166). Campos thus locates reality
in the exterior universe, a space that can only be accessed through sensory
collaboration with other souls, but which is still not proof of a transcenden-
tal universal: Isso nada prova da realidade absoluta do universo, he contin-
ues, porque existe a hipnose colectiva (Notas 166). Instead, his concept
of reality is one that constantly evolves through the machinic aggregation of
the communication of ideas among a multiplicity of participants and their
sensations.
Likewise, Deleuze and Guattaris thought valorizes the process and flow of
thought over static empirical truths. As Foucault writes in the introduction to
Morris 131

Anti-Oedipus, the prerogative of schizoanalysis is to [p]refer what is positive

and multiple, difference over uniformity, flows over unities, mobile arrange-
ments over systems and to [b]elive that what is productive is not sedentary
but nomadic (Anti-Oedipus xiii). For Deleuze and Guattari, multiplicity
was created precisely in order to escape the abstract opposition between the
multiple and the one, to escape dialectics, to succeed in conceiving the mul-
tiple in the pure state, to cease treating it as a numerical fragment of a lost
Unity or Totality or as the organic element of a Unity or Totality yet to come,
and instead distinguish between different types of multiplicity. (A Thousand
Plateaus32)

If Delezue and Guattari advocate the overthrow of an empirical reality,

Unity, or Totality, then Camposs radical Sensationism is one approach
to the pure state of the multiple. Contingent on the other as much as the
self, reality becomes an assemblage that depends on relations of exteriority:
the perceptions of its observers, however many or few they are.14 The assem-
blage of these perceptions surpasses the experiential capabilities of a single
rationalist subject. When lvaro de Campos yearns to feel everything in
every way, he evinces a desire for becoming-schizophrenic, that is, the abil-
ity to have multiple experiences that fall outside the accepted vocabulary for
communicating sensations. He expresses that urge in Passagem das horas,
which begins,
Sentir tudo de todas as maneiras,
Ter todas as opinies,
Ser sincero contradizendo-se a cada minuto15

For Campos, sensations do not exclude one another by contradiction or op-

position. His field of sensations resembles the nondiscursive resonance that
Deleuze and Guattari describe as the interaction of concepts, which them-
selves are centers of vibrations, each in itself and every one in relation to
all the others (What Is Philosophy? 23). Furthermore, we can understand
schizoanalysis and heteronymity as concepts resonating together in one
of these vibrational relationships. Schizoanalysis: multiple perspectives, per-
sistent lines of flight from that which is centralized and codified. Heteronym-
ity: the obliteration of the self, an escape into splintering others that produce
their own collaborative and contradicting truths. In both, empirical and ra-
tional deductions based on a transcendent Nature or Unity are overturned by
the ontological primacy of multiplicity.
The constitution of Sensationism as a movement strengthens the compar-
ison to the schizoanalytic project of making a rhizome.16 As an aesthetic pro-
gram, Sensationism functions like the machinic assemblage Deleuze and
Guattari describe in A Thousand Plateaus: it assumes a form and character
132 Luso-Brazilian Review51:2

that shifts according to the inter-contradicting manifestoes of the writers that

constitute it. This could also be said of other artistic movements; the differ-
ence with Sensationism is its coupling with the heteronymic machine, which
fractures and divides Pessoa into variousand sometimes competing
subjectivities. The heteronymic machine enables and justifies the existence
of intellectual entities that purport to oppose all philosophy and symbolism,
a project that seems to contradict the very existence of the heteronyms them-
selves. The histrionic and logical acrobatics required by this assemblage did
not escape Pessoa: O que sou essencialmentepor trs das mscaras in-
voluntrias do poeta, do raciocinador e do que mais haja dramaturgo.
O fenmeno da minha despersonalizao instintiva a que aludi em minha
carta anterior, para explicao da existncia dos heternimos, conduz natu-
ralmente a essa definio.17 Pessoa, then, sees himself as the dramaturge of a
vast and heterogeneous interior life.
As Pessoa attempts to apprehend and articulate this schizophrenic pro-
cess of becoming-other, contradictions like this one will necessarily arise,
exposing the founding paradoxes of the heteronymic system. While Mora,
Caeiro, and Campos trumpet the inexistence of Nature or oneness, Pessoa
smuggles an empirical exterior back into the picture. For Caeiro and com-
pany, a unified concept of that which is external to the self is an invention
that results from the self-deceit of human psychology. Nature is artificial.
Multiplicity of sensations is all that exists, and it is left to the individual to sift
through them. Yet Pessoa indicates that the heteronyms originated from his
individual incapability of feeling all of whats to be felt, a phrase that sug-
gests an objective exterior reality, albeit a reality perceived only as a mosaic of
the heteronyms sensations. In other words: parts forming a whole.
Contradicting Pessoa, Caeiro sees these parts as disconnected. His dec-
laration that nature is parts without a whole anticipates the immanent
multiplicities described by Deleuzo-guattarian theory, which advocates un-
derstanding reality as interacting multiplicities. For Caeiro, reality is an
category like weight and size: a category of consideration or measure-
ment rather than a positive existence. His insistence that Por trs da real-
idade no est nada18 and his claim Sou uma sensao minha19 are poetic
approximations of Deleuze and Guattaris plane of immanence, where lines
of flight ricochet out from assemblages, mapping the frenetic vibrations of
the rhizome across a plane where only haecceities, rather than symbols or
subjects, interact:
Here, there are no longer any forms or developments of forms; nor are there
subjects or the formation of subjects. There is no structure, any more than
there is genesis. There are only relations of movement and rest, speed and
slowness between unformed elements, or at least between elements that are
Morris 133

relatively unformed, molecules and particles of all kinds. There are only haec
ceities, affects, subjectless individuations that constitute collective assem-
blages. Nothing develops, but things arrive late or early, and form this or that
assemblage depending on their compositions of speed. Nothing subjectifies,
but haecceities form according to compositions of nonsubjectified powers or
affects. We call this plane, which knows only longitudes and latitudes, speeds
and haecceities, the plane of consistency and composition (as opposed to the
plane of organization or development). It is necessarily a plane of immanence
and univocality. We therefore call it the plane of Nature, although nature has
nothing to do with it, since on this plane there is no distinction between the
natural and the artificial. (A Thousand Plateaus 266)

Deleuze and Guattaris plane is two-dimensional, a geometric level re-

moved from our three-dimensional world. There is nothing, as Caeiro might
remark, behind it. Actions are reduced to two-dimensional vectors
movement and rest, speed and slownesswhich combine haphazardly,
forming this or that assemblage. Haecceities form and reform. Like Caeiros
subjecthood, which shifts according to his sensations (Im one of my sensa-
tions), no unities are permanent or omnipotent on the plane of consistency.
Described by Deleuze and Guattari in physicaldimensional language, this
flattening of symbols and meaning into their discrete dimensions and ele-
ments is also at work in the physical aspects of heteronymity. Ricardo Reis,
for instance, comes close to the same stark, dimensionally-reduced terms
when he refers to Caeiro as a substncia sem os atributos (substance with-
out attributes).20 For Reis, Caeiro is one of these subjectless individuations,
a substance rather than a fixed authorial identity territorialized in a person.21

II. Heteronymic becomings

The heteronyms enter into a conversation that further illuminates their po-
sitions vis--vis haecceities and dimensionality, an exchange assiduously re-
corded by lvaro de Campos in his Notas para a recordao do meu mestre
Caeiro. According to Campos, the conversation began with a controversial
remark by Fernando Pessoa: No conceito de Ser no cabem partes nem
gradaes; uma coisa ou no , he recalls Pessoa saying, o conceito de Ser
nem susceptvel de anlise [...] A sua indivisibilidade comea a.22 Cam-
pos records himself as disagreeing, claiming that the value of that concept
of being is open to analysis. While Pessoa-ele-mesmo continues to maintain
that a concept is never more or less, but exists or does not, Caeiro weighs
in, claiming, Porque tudo quanto real pode ser mais ou menos, e a no
ser o que real nada pode existir.23 For Caeiro, in other words, degrees of
intensity are all that constitute a thing as real. As Campos presents it, Pessoa-
ele-mesmo is left in a nearly speechless, exasperated wonder.
134 Luso-Brazilian Review51:2

This argument between the heteronyms contains a crucial link between

the thought of Pessoa and Deleuze: the idea of becoming. In The Logic of Sense,
Deleuze quotes portions of Platos Philebus and Parmenides that illustrate the
latters concept of pure becoming:
[H]otter never stops where it is but is always going a point further, and the
same applies to colder, whereas definite quality is something that has stopped
going on and is fixed; ...the younger becoming older than the older, the
older becoming younger than the youngerbut they can never finally be-
come so; if they did they would no longer be becoming, but would be so.24

For Deleuze and Plato, certain conceptslike hotter and colder or

younger and olderonly exist as pure becomings. Caeiro would not dis-
agree. Indeed, he extends this logic to all modes of being, which are always
becoming.
Pure becoming is central to the intervention Deleuze and Guattari make
in A Thousand Plateaus. Concurring with Caeiro, they insist that the haec-
ceities interacting on the plane of consistency or composition25 are in fact
degrees of intensity. Inverting Reiss description of Caeiro, they are attributes
without substance: intensities or gradations. These intensities are subject
to more and less, and constantly enter into relations that transform the mul-
tiplicities to which they belong. Constituted by dimensional components like
speed, temperature, light, and color, the particles of a multiplicity are always
in flux and inter-reactive. Drawing once more on Platos idea of degrees and
becoming, Deleuze and Guattari conceive of individuations that mark be-
comings of the physical type:
There is another, altogether different, problem concerning the laws of nature
that has to do not with demonology but with alchemy, and above all physics.
It is the problem of accidental forms, distinct from both essential forms and
determined subjects. For accidental forms are susceptible to more and less:
more or less charitable, but also more or less white, more or less warm. A de-
gree of heat is a perfectly individuated warmth distinct from the substance or
the subject that receives it. A degree of heat can enter into composition with
a degree of whiteness, or with another degree of heat, to form a third unique
individuality distinct from that subject. What is the individuality of a day, a
season, an event? A shorter day and a longer day are not, strictly speaking,
extensions but degrees proper to extension, just as there are degrees proper
to heat, color, etc. An accidental form therefore has a latitude constituted by
a certain number of composable individuations. A degree, an intensity, is an
individual, a Haecceity that enters into composition with other degrees other
intensities, to form another individual (A Thousand Plateaus 253).

The dimensionality of the plane of compositiondescribed here with

the physical analogies of vectors like movement and temperatureis also at
Morris 135

work in heteronymity. The multiplicities of the heteronymic system also exist

on dimensional levels, recalling the Deleuzo-guattarian concept of multi-
plicities within multiplicities, the stacking and nesting of Canettis masses
and packs into masses of masses and masses of packs and packs of packs
and packs of masses, and packs of masses of packs, ad infinitum. Pessoas
multiplicities are visible on the surface as heteronyms: varied personalities
and lives embodied in a single name: Fernando Pessoa. But Pessoa compli-
cates this superficial reading of heteronymity. As Richard Zenith observes
in his preface to The Book of Disquiet, some of the heteronyms, such as the
semi-heteronym Bernardo Soares, indicate that they, too, have heteronyms.
Are we then, as Zenith wonders, to suppose that these subheteronyms had
subheteronyms? (Disquiet xii). And what of the case of Fernando Pessoa
ele-mesmo? By including himself as a heteronym or semi-heteronym that
has fallen under the sway of his own creation, Alberto Caeiro, Pessoa cre-
ates a vortex of paradoxical and recursive influences that are impossible to
untangle.26
Pessoa destroys the possibility that a hierarchy of authorship might exist
between the heteronyms, semi-heteronyms, and the architect of the heter-
onymic system. Heteronymity was thus designed to be approached as a rhi-
zome, a system for which there are multiple points of entry, a system that
is impossible to catalog, bracket, diagram, or totalize due to the paradoxes
and becomings that inhere in it and indeed, constitute it. Perhaps one of
the most important characteristics of the rhizome is that it always has mul-
tiple entryways, Deleuze and Guattari explain (A Thousand Plateaus 12).
Pessoa obliges, to the extent that constant authorial uncertainty means that
every point of entryeach text or each heteronymis not only one among
many, but many-in-one. Despite the figures of Pessoa-ele-mesmo and Master
Caeiro, heteronymity cannot claim a central controlling force. As Richard
Zenith points out, Pessoas declaration that he too was one of Caeiros dis-
ciples was a supreme act of ironic self-effacement (38). The effect of this
effacement is that the concept of authorship is uprooted by the heteronymic
machine, deterritorialized from a creative subject or author and banished
to the nebulous territory of heteronymity and its constantly re-individuating
individuals. Creation is deterritorialized from the person. The figure of
Pessoa-ele-mesmo ensures that the paths of creation are always multiple, rhi-
zomatic. Each of the heteronymic points of entry, frayed by the uncertainties
of influence and authorship, are already forked paths, lines of flight. Packs of
masses and masses of packs. The result:

There is no longer a tripartite division between a field of reality (the world)

and a field of representation (the book) and a field of subjectivity (the author).
Rather, an assemblage establishes connections between certain multiplicities
136 Luso-Brazilian Review51:2

drawn from each of these orders, so that a book has no sequel nor the world as
its object nor one or several authors as its subject. In short, we think that one
cannot write sufficiently in the name of an outside. The outside has no image,
no signification, no subjectivity. (A Thousand Plateaus23)

Echoing Caeiros there is no whole to which all that belongs, Deleuze

and Guattari argue that they know only assemblages of desire and collective
assemblages of enunciation, by which they refer to the constant flows and
flux of every machines connections with other machines on a plane of com-
position (A Thousand Plateaus 2223).27 Likewise, heteronymitys processes
of mutual constitution preclude the possibility of diagramming the heter-
onymic system, which is always undergoing individuations and becomings.
This is especially important, as we shall see presently, when it comes to the
heteronyms position in literary tradition.

III. Heteronymity and literary invention

The assemblage of the interconnecting multiplicities of world, book, and au-
thor allow Pessoas heteronyms to employ another technique of multiplic-
ity: a sort of literary time machine. Rhizomatic connections between reality,
representation, and subjectivity allow the heteronymic system to distort and
disrupt linear temporal limitations. The heteronyms pagan philosophy pro-
vides an example of how this time machine works. Recognizing the lack of
counterpoint to millennia of Christian decadence, or the falling-away from
the pure paganism of the ancients, Pessoa uses his heteronyms to create the
missing voices of pagan philosophy, locating them strategically in time in
order to provide a foundation for a strain of poets that view Sensationism
(rather than Symbolism) as the successor to Romanticism. Declaring Portu-
guese transcendentalist pantheism to be one of the influences of the Sensa-
tionists, Pessoa proceeds to define it in a letter to an English editor:
Portuguese transcendentalist pantheism you do not know. It is a pity, be-
cause, though not a long-standing movement, yet it is an original one. Suppose
English romanticism had, instead of retrograding to the Tennysonian-
Rossetti-Browning level, progressed right onward from Shelley, spiritualising
his already spiritualistic pantheism. You would arrive at the conception of
Nature (our transcendentalist pantheists are essentially poets of Nature) in
which flesh and spirit are entirely mingled in something which transcends
both. If you can conceive a William Blake put into the soul of Shelley and
writing through that, you will perhaps have a nearer idea of what I mean...
To this school of poets we, the sensationists, owe the fact that in our poetry
spirit and matter are interpenetrated and inter-transcended. And we have
carried the process further than the originators...28
Morris 137

When considering the origin of the heteronyms, it is useful to remember

Pessoas opinion that Romanticism failed to make progress after Shelley, and
instead retrograded into the Victorian era. Alberto Caeiro becomes Pes-
soas remedy to the failed progress of the Romantics: the master heteronym,
as Antnio Feij notes, is intended as the first real pagan to have miracu-
lously emerged after the Roman dissolution of the Greek classical tradition
without being tainted by Christianity (Feij, paragraph 3). Pessoa inserts
Caeiro into literary history in such a way that he is able to mark a divergence
from poetrys degeneration into Symbolism. Influenced by Portuguese tran-
scendental pantheism, itself described as an assemblage of various Romantic
poets (among them Blake and Shelley), Caeiro and the other Sensationist
pagan heteronyms reinterpret Romantic concepts and subject matter in a pa-
gan spirit. This might be a typical maneuver of the tradition of revisionist
misreading that Harold Bloom describes as central to literary agon29 were it
not for the fact that Pessoa used his heteronyms to create influences in the lit-
erary canon to which only he had full access. Alberto Caeiro is the foremost
of these. As the master heteronym, Caeiros poems shape the literary tastes
and ambitions of the subordinate heteronyms, including Fernando Pessoa
ele-mesmo.
Pessoa was a sedulous biographer of the heteronyms, and Caeiros bi-
ography provides additional insight into the workings of the heteronymic
time machine. We know from Pessoas records that Alberto Caeiro was born
in 1889 and died in 1915, making him 25 or 26 at the time of his premature
demise from tuberculosis. Ever diligent with his choreography, Pessoa left
nothing regarding the lives of his heteronyms to chance. John Keats also died
at age25, devoured by that very same, very Romantic disease. The parallel to
Keats, the last of the great Romantics in many respects, is instructive. In a
letter to his brothers George and Thomas, Keats outlined a theory of Nega-
tive Capability that bears a striking resemblance to certain tenets of Caeiros
neopagan poems: several things dove-tailed in my mind, Keats writes, and
at once it struck me what quality went to form a Man of Achievement, es-
pecially in Literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormouslyI
mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncer-
tainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and rea-
son (277). Experience unmediated by philosophy, untainted by thought and
reflection: this is similar to the strain of paganism that would later find a
devotee in Alberto Caeiro.
Pessoas borrowings from British poetsparticularly the Romanticsdo
not end there. According to Richard Zenith, English writersincluding
Shakespeare, Milton, Byron, Shelley, Keats, and Carlylewere the forma-
tive influence on [Pessoas] literary sensibility (Prose xiii). Indeed, he adds,
138 Luso-Brazilian Review51:2

Pessoas original literary ambition was, naturally enough, to become a great

English writer (Prose xvii). It is unsurprising, then, that these writers be-
came the most important ingredients that Pessoa combines in the literary
black box of the heteronymic machine. Loosening the constraints of hered-
itary influence, the heteronymic machine allows Pessoa to reinterpret and
recombine poetic figures, histories, registers, influences, voices, and the like,
to achieve new aesthetic possibilitiesrepresented by the heteronyms, par-
ticularly Alberto Caeirothat might retroactively fill some of what Pessoa
regards as lacunae in the Western canon.30
Pessoas description of Portuguese transcendentalist pantheism provides
an idea of how this poetic machine functions. BlakeShelley, as an assem-
blage, circumvents and surpasses the Tennysonian-Rossetti- Browning
level of poetry that Pessoa classifies as a decadent wrong turn away from the
budding paganism in Romantic aesthetics. This imaginative assemblage of
BlakeShelley traces a new path of influence, a development that never trans-
pired in English literature but which Pessoa claims had surfaced in Portu-
guese transcendentalist pantheism. Pessoas poetic machine works according
to similar logic. He embraces his Anglo formation, recombining Coleridge
and Whitman through Campos, and at Wordsworth and Keats through
Caeiro. Inclined to Keats philosophy, Shelleys pagan theology, Wordsworths
hermetic lifestyle, and Blakes mystic imagery, the poetassemblage Caeiro
makes more sense to Pessoa than any of the poets who actually followed the
Romantics.
Pessoa thus devised a canny remedy for his anxiety of influence. What is
to prevent us, Pessoa suggests, from creating our own influence, or own Mas-
ters? As he writes in a letter he planned to use to promote the publication of
Caeiros work, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner in relation to its time is, if
anything, less original than Alberto Caeiros astonishing volume (Prose 36).
By creating in Caeiro a poet who professes no ideology, no doctrine, and no
influence except for his sensations, Pessoa invents a fresh start for his pagan
poetics through becomings, transformations which cannot be classified ac-
cording to hierarchies of hereditary influence.
In this way, the heteronyms freed Pessoa from the type of influence rep-
resented by genealogical trees. Each of the heteronyms offers an alternate
path through literature, allowing Pessoa to work through and beyond the
limitations of existing literary influences by creating new combinations of
influence for himself. By taking cues from one of his own creations, Pessoa
safeguards his own originality. His literary apprenticeship is not the familiar
Oedipal figure of the young poet jockeying to outdo his masters: Pessoa cre-
ates a master whom he does not intend to outdo, opening a matrix of influ-
ence between and among the heteronyms, which allows their interactions to
resemble those of the plane of composition rather than a static genealogical
Morris 139

tree. This black-box strategy for escaping the anxiety of influence is neces-
sarily non-linear. And this nonlinearity is integral to the Deleuzo-guattarian
variety of post-structuralist thought, writing, and conceptual arrangement:
Schizoanalysis rejects any idea of pretraced destiny, whatever name is given
to itdivine, anagogic, historical, economic, structural, hereditary, or syn-
tagmatic (A Thousand Plateaus13).
Mora overthrows literary genealogy when he dislodges the term pagan
from a teleological linearity:
Mas ns, que somos pagos, no podemos usar um nome que indique que
o somos como modernos, ou que viemos reformar, ou reconstruir o
paganismo dos gregos. Viemos ser pagos. Renasceu em ns, o paganismo.
Mas o paganismo que renasceu em ns o paganismo que sempre houvea
subordinao aos deuses como a justia da Terra para consigo mesma.31

For Reis, paganism is not a concept that follows a historical path of refine-
ment, improvement, or evolution towards a telos. The variations in its reoc-
currences are not for better or worse; its different instantiations are not the
result of evolution, but involution, a process in which evolution does not
go from something less differentiated to something more differentiated, in
which it ceases to be a hereditary filiative evolution, becoming communica-
tive or contagious (A Thousand Plateaus 238).

IV. The heteronyms and non-hereditary genesis

For additional evidence of this post-structural rejection of genealogical and
linear history as pretraced destinies in Pessoas work, one need look no
further than the genesis of the heteronyms themselves. When explaining
their origins, Pessoa disrupts the traditional idea of the sexual generation
that directs genealogies. He writes to Casais Monteiro of me que os deu
luz by which he means himself.32 This gender-bending is not uncommon
in Pessoas writing. [S]ou um temperamento feminino com uma intelign-
cia masculina, Pessoa writes, comparing himself to Shakespeare and Rous-
seau.33 lvaro de Campos also experiences flux in his gender identification.
As Klobucka and Sabine observe, Camposs penetration by Caeiros vision
not only recalls his frequently reaffirmed bisexuality, but also pinpoints his
bigendered identity, assuming a feminine or effeminate role as well as, else-
where, a phallically masculine one (9).
More important than this gender wordplay is Pessoas insistence on a non-
hereditary generative process: after giving birth to Caeiro, Pessoa makes him
his master, displacing himself from the matriarchal role in order to open him-
self, like Campos, to Caeiros influence. The homoerotic interpretation is not
uncalled for, as Pessoa admits his queer sexuality frankly, even if in terms that
140 Luso-Brazilian Review51:2

do not square with contemporary discourse on gay or queer identity politics:

uma inverso sexual, he concludes by way of explanation, adding Somos
vrios desta espcie, pela histria abaixopela histria artstica sobretudo.
Shakespeare e Rousseau so dos exemplos, ou exemplares, mais ilustres. E
o meu receio da descida ao corpo dessa inverso do espritoradicamo a
contemplao de como nesses dois desceucompletamente no primeiro,
e em pederastia; incertamente no segundo, num vago masoquismo.34 As
Klobucka and Sabine observe, Pessoa frequently theorizes his specifically
dramatic path of depersonalization as inherently linked to the psycho-sexual
disorders that stalked both the pseudoscientific and popular imaginations of
his day: masturbation, transsexualism or sexual inversion, and hysteria (16).
This obsession with hysteria is integral to understanding of the critical
role of gender to the generative in the heteronymic system. Etymologically,
hysteria is tied inseparably to gender; the word originates with afflictions of
the womb and disturbing passions believed to be more common to women
than to men.35 Pessoa acknowledges that the heteronyms, including master
Caeiro, were born out of operations brought about by hysteria. A origem
dos meus heternimos o fundo trao de histeria que existe em mim, he
writes to Casais Monteiro, ...a origem mental dos meus heternimos est
na minha tendncia orgnica e constante para a despersonalizao e para a
simulao.36 Coupled with his self-description as the heteronyms mother,
Pessoas belief in the productive capabilities of hysteria suggest a broader
project of articulating a creative method that falls outside the linear, evolu-
tionary, and teleological notion of heredity.
In her 1975 essay The Laugh of the Medusa, published in the wake of
Deleuze and Guattaris Anti-Oedipus [1972], Hlne Cixous writes, There is
hidden and always ready in woman the source; the locus for the other. The
mother, too, is a metaphor (881). Pessoa knew this, and uses the mother-
as-metaphor to explain his creative self-positing. Pessoas notion of self-
birth is not superfluous metaphor; it aligns with the sort of reproduction
that Deleuze and Guattari describe as contagion: How can we conceive of
a peopling, a propagation, a becoming that is without filiation or hereditary
production? A multiplicity without the unity of an ancestor? Deleuze and
Guattari ask themselves (A Thousand Plateaus 214). Soares offers a solution:
Se quiser dizer que existo, direi Sou. Se quiser dizer que existo como alma
separada, direi Sou eu. Mas se quiser dizer que existo como entidade que a si
mesma se dirige e forma, que exerce junto de si mesma a funo divina de se
criar, como heide empregar o verbo ser seno convertendoo subitamente
em transitivo? E ento, triunfalmente, antigramaticalmente supremo, direi
Sou-me. Terei dito uma filosifia em duas palavras pequenas. Que prefervel
no isto a no dizer nada em quarenta frases?37
Morris 141

The sort of self-generation and self-births that Soares describes as his two-
word philosophy is similar to one of Deleuze and Guattaris descriptions of
becoming. Becoming is not an evolution, at least not an evolution by descent
and filiation, Deleuze and Guattari explain (A Thousand Plateaus 238). It is
not a synonym for invention. Nor can it be adequately explained with a bio-
logical metaphor: becoming is a verb with a consistency all its own; it does
not reduce to, or lead back to, appearing, being, equaling, or producing
(A Thousand Plateaus 239). Self-births are as close as Pessoa can get to de-
scribing the process of his becoming-heteronym. Although the analogy is a
crude one, his propagation and peopling of the space of heteronymity is
one that insistently rejects hereditary production. Soaress term for this prop-
agation is perversion. It is an action, as Richard Zeniths translation makes
evident, similar to contagion:
Ah, mas como eu desejaria lanar ao menos numa alma alguma coisa de ve-
neno, de desassossego e de inquietao. Isso consolar-me-ia um pouco da
nulidade de aco em que vivo. Perverter seria o fim da minha vida.38
How Id love to infect at least one soul with some kind of poison, worry or
disquiet! (Disquiet65).

This notion of infection is not unlike the Deleuzo-guattarian contagious

mode of generation. Drawing on vocabularies of folklore and myth and pre-
figuring gender theorists of the 1990s, Deleuze and Guattari suggest that the
slippage between gender and biological sex has led to an over-determined
belief in controlling dualities, especially the idea that two or more strands
of ancestry are required for anything to be generated. This, they complain,
has created an intellectual culture where syllogism enjoys unjustifiable hege-
mony. Beginning with the (only half-facetious) example of the werewolf and
other supernatural entities, they remind their readers of modes of genesis
that do not obey the biological impulse of sexual reproduction that under-
lies the syllogistic method of synthesis. Recalling the power of sorcerers and
others to break what appear to be edicts of nature by changing from male to
female and creating offspring without collaboration, they recreate a discur-
sive space where coming-into-being need not be hereditary:
For us, on the other hand, there are as many sexes as there are terms in sym-
biosis, as many differences as elements contributing to a process of contagion.
We know that many beings pass between a man and a woman; they come
from different worlds, are borne on the wind, form rhizomes and roots; they
cannot be understood in terms of production, only in terms of becoming. The
Universe does not function by filiation. All we are saying is that animals are
packs, and that packs form, develop, and are transformed by contagion. (A
Thousand Plateaus 242)
142 Luso-Brazilian Review51:2

These non-hereditary contagious generations, these becomings: they not

only create multiplicities of personae, they are already multiplicities. Refer-
encing the Medieval belief that improperly disposed-of werewolves could be
resurrected as vampires, Deleuze and Guattari describe the multiplicity im-
manent to a contagionbecoming:
Werewolves become vampires when they die. This is not surprising, since be-
coming and multiplicity are the same thing. A multiplicity is defined not by
its elements, nor by a center of unification or comprehension. It is defined by
the number of dimensions it has; it is not divisible, it cannot lose or gain a
dimension without changing its nature. (A Thousand Plateaus 249)

These Deleuzo-guattarian theories of becoming resonate with the inter-

connectedness, immanent multiplicities, and dimensionality of the process
of becoming-heteronym. Like the becoming/multiplicity that Deleuze and
Guattari here describe, the heteronyms are also becomings that signal their
multiplicity through constant authorial and influential uncertainties created
by the their non-hereditary genesis. The convergence of dimensionality and
multiplicity in these becomings also recalls once more the heteronyms riddle
of Unity vis--vis Nature. Something that is indivisible, Deleuze and Guat-
tari observe, is not the same as something that has unity. Indivisibility does
not reduce to unity. Parts can be indivisible without ever forming a coherent
whole, just as heteronyms do not add up to a single mind.
The dimensional, reverse-gestalt practice of reducing a thing or a person
to its concrete, constituent haecceities and intensities on the plane of consis-
tency (where multiplicities abound but wholes are inexistent) also helps to
explain the lack of any material production by the heteronyms. As Richard
Zenith writes, heteronymity
was a dynamic system, in which all the elements interacted, meaning that
even the apparently finished works were in truth fragments, since they were
only what they were (and still are) in relationship to the rest of the system. The
only whole thingPessoas one perfect workwas the system in its totality.
(Prose xvii)

For reasons that should be obvious by this point, I caution against the use of
the word totality, preferring instead the Deleuzo-guattarian term literary
machine.39

V. The heteronymic machine

The literary machine in Pessoas case, as in Kafkas, was not exactly a
publishing-machine; both writers only found their reading publics after
death. The Pessoan heteronyms were astonishingly productive, but Pessoa
Morris 143

never found a physical medium to transmit their full production. Like Caeiro,
who according to Campos was estragado simblicamente pela forma hu-
mana (Notas 161), Pessoa was constrained by the available media. How
ever to give heteronymity a form beyond abstraction that would not short-
change it conceptually? A book is physical and confined in form: There is
no difference between what a book talks about and how it is made, Deleuze
and Guattari assert, a claim that reminds us of the incompatibility between
books and the heteronymic machine (A Thousand Plateaus). A book would
territorialize Pessoas nomadic literary machine; the books three dimensions
are more limiting than the two-dimensional plane of composition. Books
quantify writing, Deleuze and Guattari observe (A Thousand Plateaus4),
and this was never Pessoas objective. Instead of producing books, which are
machines for containing ideas, what Pessoa wrotepoetry, prose, correspon-
dence, fragments, and otherwisewas not written for this type of capture
and consumption. So Pessoa did not publish the vast majority of his writing.
As lvaro de Campos reasons in the case of Antnio Moras unpublished
work, Um sistema filosfico precisa um pouco de prendre date, pois que nele
a substncia consubstancial com a forma; uma obra literria, vivendo como
vive s da forma (no sentido completo) pode ficar indita durante muito
tempo (Notas 167). Deleuze and Guattari make a similar point about phi-
losophy, remarking that philosophical concepts require conceptual personae
to become actualized. They describe conceptual personae as the becoming
or the subject of a philosophy, such as Platos Socrates, Nietzsches Dionysus
and Zarathustra (What Is Philosophy64). Crucially, they make this argument
in Pessoan terms: Conceptual personae are the philosophers heteronyms,
and the philosophers name is the simple pseudonym of his personae (What
is Philosophy 64). But the concept of heteronymity itself required many of
these personae, perhaps too many for Pessoa to corral in his lifetime.
Deleuze and Guattari understood philosophical concepts as centers of
vibrations that are points of condensation of all their component parts
(What Is Philosophy, 2223) that must always be renewed. They suggest that
in some cases, as with the cogito in Descartes, concepts sometimes have very
close predecessors. Everything seems ready, and yet something is missing
(What Is Philosophy?26). Antnio Moras words suggest that Pessoa under-
stood artistic production in the same way: there are some works of genius
that cannot be conveyed in their contemporary moment. Something is miss-
ing. The artists who create these works, conscious of the anachronism of their
genius, must wait. Defiantly unpublished, but patient with the confidence of
her own genius, this artist awaits the state of affairs that will produce just the
right resonance between concepts; she goes in search of the conceptual per-
sona who will do justice to her thought. This is no doubt the case with Pessoa,
whose literary machine was an exercise in endless becoming-heteronym.
144 Luso-Brazilian Review51:2

History allowed Pessoa the cold comfort that men of genius are seldom ap-
preciated in their age: O genio sente antes dos outros homens a direo de
uma sociedade, he wrote, O genio est na sua philosophia emquanto tal e
alli (nas theorias politicas) apenas ha attitude critica (Escritos71). Or as he
wrote in English in one of his other notebooks, Whether the present age
is favourable or not to the detection of genius, is a point to be amply mis-
understood. No age is favourable, in the terms of the case, to the detection
of genius (Escritos 426). True genius, Pessoa believed, is only recognized
historically.
Although something is missing, there are many respects in which Pes-
soa proposes concepts that anticipate Deleuze and Guattari by half a century,
making him more a contemporary of their age than his own. The philosoph-
ical and epistemological intervention of the Deleuzo-guattarian rhizomatic
revolutionthe smashing of linear, teleological methodologies into splin-
tering lines of flight and the rejection of individual subject-based reason in
favor of the schizos shifting multiplicities and flowsis well-articulated in
Pessoas texts. Indeed, Pessoas literary machine supports Jean-Franois Ly-
otards claim that [a] work can become modern only if it is first postmod-
ern (79). Lyotards insight, however, is only useful insofar as it indicates the
limitations of the practice of periodization. Postmodernism thus under-
stood is not modernism at its end but in the nascent state, and this state is
constant, Lyotard continues (79). Deleuze and Guattari might likewise un-
derstand modernism as a plateau, not an epoch with a beginning or an end,
but a becoming-modern that is always au milieu. By identifying resemblances
to poststructuralist heuristics such as the rhizome, the plane of consistency,
macro and micro multiplicities, and other components of schizoanalysis in
Pessoas pre-structuralist writings, we learn that epistemological and aes-
thetic periodization can be a limiting, deceiving practice (as it is hereditary,
unidirectional, one-dimensional). Like Pessoas heteronyms, the tendencies
or symptoms often attributed to postmodernism and post-structuralism do
not fit so nicely into a hereditary framework of tradition, influence, or prog-
ress. Neither does any other exercise in philosophical thought or epistemol-
ogy. As with the constant nascent state of modernism that Lyotard observes,
human thought has always resembled Deleuze and Guattaris plateau: it is
always au milieu, never beginning or ending, and extending in all directions.
Generic divisions are as artificial and misleading as periodizations. Pes-
soa is primarily considered a poet, and secondarily as a prose writer; his work
is not given the philosophical attention it deserves, despite the symmetries
between his poetic project and the philosophical project undertaken by
Deleuze and Guattari.40 Though acknowledged as a feat of literature, his po-
etry and the planning of the heteronymic system also sketch the blueprint for
a philosophical upheaval, to be carried out decades later in the more discrete
Morris 145

terms of philosophical and political writings. By converting himself into a lit-

erature that transcends the linearity of precedent and influence in aesthetics
and epistemology, Pessoa not only revealed the limitations of our hierarchi-
cal, tree-structured notion of literary production; he and the heteronyms also
disclose similar difficulties for the historical periodization of ideas.

Notes

1.The Arquivo Pessoa, a free, online database of Pessoas work, provides citations
to the original published editions of Pessoas work, along with an estimated date [in
brackets] of when the cited piece was written, when available. The Arquivo Pessoa al-
lows researchers without access to a comprehensive bibliography of Pessoas original
sources to consult transcriptions of them online. Though no standard formatting ex-
ists for such citations, I have made an effort to provide that information in this other
end-noted citations to the Arquivo in a manner congruent to the one I use here. Page
numbers in the Arquivo Pessoa refer to the page on which the document cited begins.
Aspectos [1930?]. Arquivo Pessoa. <http://arquivopessoa.net/textos/4233>. Original
source: Fernando Pessoa, Pginas ntimas e de Auto-Interpretao. Ed. Georg Rudolf
Lind and Jacinto do Prado Coelho. Lisboa: tica, 1966. p.95.
2. If I use the terms rhizomatics, schizoanalysis, stratoanalysis, pragmatics,
and micropolitics interchangeably as synonyms for what I am calling Deleuzo-
guattarian theory, it is because Deleuze and Guattari emphasize this in the introduction
to A Thousand Plateaus: RHIZOMATICS = SCHIZOANALYSIS = STRATOANALY-
SIS = PRAGMATICS = MICROPOLITICS. A Thousand Plateaus,22.
3. Deleuze identifies three elements of ontological genesis: persons, individuals,
and the multiplicity of classes and properties that constitute them and are constituted
by them. A passage from The Logic of Sense helps clarify the relation of the question
of ontological genesis to Pessoas genesis of heteronyms: Individuals are infinite an-
alytic propositions. But while they are infinite with respect to what they express, they
are finite with respect to their clear expression, with respect to their corporeal zone
of expression. Persons are finite synthetic propositions: finite with respect to their
definition, indefinite with respect to their application. Individuals and persons are, in
themselves, ontological propositionspersons being grounded on individuals (and
conversely, individuals being grounded by the person), 118.
4. I am preceded in my consideration of Pessoa as a postmodern writer by Pes-
soas prominent translator Richard Zenith, who writes, if Postmodernism implies
personal actions and behaviors born out of its discourse, then even before the word
existed Pessoa was one of its practitioners. Fernando Pessoa & Co.,31. In particular,
Zenith understands Pessoa as precocious deconstructionist (28,33).
5. Jos Gils Fernando Pessoa, ou, La mtaphysique des sensations (1988) and Dif-
erena e negao na poesia de Fernando Pessoa (2000) are notable exceptions, in that
both works go beyond the convenient terminology of the rhizome to explore the
146 Luso-Brazilian Review51:2

similarities between Pessoas project and Deleuzo-guattarian thought. Gils first work
is heavily indebted to Deleuzo-guattarian concepts, but he avoids citing their work,
a strategy that weakens the sort of direct parallels between Pessoas and Deleuze and
Guattaris philosophicaltheoretical positions that Gil goes on to make in the latter
work, where he writes, muitas vezes, o que aparece sob o modo implcito em Pessoa,
ganha contornos explcitos em Deleuze, o que era simples noo no Livro do desas-
sossego, por exemplo, torna-se conceito claro em Mille plateaux (Diferena,9).
6. A theory of multiplicities permeates the entire work. Specifically, refer to the
second plateau, 1914: One or Several Wolves?
7. Fernando Pessoa, O Guardador de Rebanhos. First published in Athena 4
(Jan.1925), Lisbon.
8. Translation borrowed from A Centenary Pessoa, 60. With this reference to dis-
eased ideas we can begin to hear the resonance of Nietzsche in Caeiro. The latters
distrust of philosophers and philosophies is born out of the same scorn for eternal
transcendentals. As Nietzsche writes, All philosophers share this common error:
they proceed from contemporary man and think they can reach their goal through
an analysis of this man. Automatically they think of man as an eternal verity, as
something abiding in the whirlpool, as a sure measure of things. Everything that the
philosopher says about man, however, is at bottom no more than a testimony about
the man of a very limited period. Lack of a historical sense is the original error of all
philosophers.... Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All too Human. Trans. R. J. Holling-
dale. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. pp.1213. Nietzsche, of course, is
also one of the practitioners of so-called nomadic thought that inspired Deleuze and
Guattaris A Thousand Plateaus.
9. Though Deleuze and Guattari make some readers suspicious about the exis-
tence of a transcendental universal or of something resembling Heideggerian Be-
ingsuch as their identification of chaos as the milieu of all milieus (A Thousand
Plateaus, 313)one should not mistake the chaotic milieu of milieus for a transcen-
dental field. As they write, multiplicity escapes the abstract opposition between the
multiple and the one (A Thousand Plateaus32). A useful interpretation of this point
is provided by Manuel de Landa, who further develops the concepts of flat multi-
plicities and relations of interiority and exteriority posed by Deleuze and Guattari in
What Is Philosophy? See De Landas A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory
and Social Complexity. London: Continuum, 2006.
10. Bernardo Soares Muitos tm definido o homem from O Livro de Desas-
sossego. Arquivo Pessoa. <http://arquivopessoa.net/textos/4531>.
11.Teoria do dualismo [1916?] Arquivo Pessoa. <http://arquivopessoa.net/
textos/2167>. Fernando Pessoa. Textos Filosficos. Vol. I. Ed. Antnio de Pina Coelho.
Lisboa: tica, 1968. p.32.
12. To whom can Caeiro be compared? [1917?] English original. Arquivo Pessoa.
<http://arquivopessoa.net/textos/3088>. Original source: Fernando Pessoa. Pginas
ntimas e de Auto-Interpretao,343.
13. To whom can Caeiro be compared? [1917?] English original. Arquivo Pessoa.
<http://arquivopessoa.net/textos/3088>. Original source: Fernando Pessoa. Pginas
ntimas e de Auto-Interpretao,343.
Morris 147

14. Manuel de Landas book, cited in note9, is also useful for understanding the
distinction between relations of exteriority and relations of interiority in the Deleuzo-
guattarian ontological framework.
15. lvaro de Campos, Passagem das horas [a] [1916], Arquivo Pessoa <http://
arquivopessoa.net/textos/814>. Original source: Passagem das horas, Fernando
Pessoa, lvaro de CamposLivro de Versos. Ed. Teresa Rita Lopes. Lisbon: Estampa,
1993. p.26a.
16.Schizoanalysis, or pragmatics, has no other meaning: Make a rhizome.
Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 251.
17.[Carta a Adolfo Casais Monteiro20 Jan. 1935.] Arquivo Pessoa. <http://
arquivopessoa.net/textos/3014>. Original source: Fernando Pessoa, Textos de Crtica
e de Interveno. Lisboa: tica, 1980. p.211.
18. Notas para a recordao do meu mestre Caeiro, 169.
19. Notas, 158.
20. Por detrs de todas as variaes permanece Arquivo Pessoa <http://arquivo
pessoa.net/textos/1799>. Original source: Comentrio de Ricardo Reis. Poemas
Completos de Alberto Caeiro. Ed. Teresa Sobral Cunha. Lisboa: Editorial Presena,
1994. p.183.
21. See note3.
22. Uma das conversas mais interessantes, em que entrou o meu mestre Caeiro,
[1931] Arquivo Pessoa. <http://arquivopessoa.net/textos/893>. Pessoa por Conhecer
Textos para um Novo Mapa. Ed. Teresa Rita Lopes. Lisboa: Estampa, 1990. p.373.
23. Uma das conversas mais interessantes, em que entrou o meu mestre Caeiro,
[1931] Arquivo Pessoa. <http://arquivopessoa.net/textos/893>. Pessoa por Conhecer
Textos para um Novo Mapa. Ed. Teresa Rita Lopes. Lisboa: Estampa, 1990. p.373.
24.Plato, Philebus, trans. R. Hackforth; Parmenides, trans. F. M. Cornforth; cited
in Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, p.2.
25. In this context, the terms consistency and composition are used with rel-
ative interchangeability: We call this plane, which knows only longitudes and lati-
tudes, speeds and haecceities, the plane of consistency or composition (as opposed to
the plan(e) of organization or development). A Thousand Plateaus, 266.
26. Zenith also observes that by removing himself from himself, Pessoa was able
to make the orthonymalso called Pessoa ele-mesmo or Pessoa himself into in
a certain way the falsest poet of all See Introduction Fernando Pessoa & Co. New
York: Grove Press, 1998. p.27. Pessoa further complicates matters by admitting his
proclivity to falsehood: But since I have consciousness of myself, I have perceived
in myself an inborn tendency to mystification to artistic lying. From The earliest
literary food of my childhood was in the numerous novels... [1906?] Arquivo Pessoa
<http://arquivopessoa.net/textos/2183>. Original source: Fernando Pessoa, Pginas
ntimas e de Auto-Interpretao,11.
27. Elsewhere Deleuze and Guattari call these relations of exteriority. See notes9
and11.
28.[Carta a um editor ingls1916]. Arquivo Pessoa <http://arquivopessoa.
net/textos/1899>. Original source, Fernando Pessoa, Pginas ntimas e de Auto-
Interpretao, 126.
148 Luso-Brazilian Review51:2

29. See Bloom, Agon: Towards a Theory of Revisionism. New York: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 1982.
30. For further analysis on the link between Pessoa and Anglophone poetry, see
Patricia Silva McNeill, Yeats and Pessoa: Parallel Poetic Styles. Oxford: Legenda, 2010.
31. Antnio Mora, from drafts of O Regresso dos Deuses. Arquivo Pessoa. [No
somos, na verdade, neopagos, nem pagos novos1916?] <http://arquivopessoa.
net/textos/871>. Original source: Fernando Pessoa, Pginas ntimas e de Auto-
Interpretao, 286.
32.[Carta a Adolfo Casais Monteiro13 Jan. 1935]. Arquivo Pessoa. <http://
arquivopessoa.net/textos/3007>. Original source: Fernando Pessoa, Escritos ntimos,
Cartas e Pginas Autobiogrficas. Ed. Antnio Quadros. Lisboa: Europa-Amrica,
1986. p.199.
33. PREFCIO(aproveitarparaShakespeare)ArquivoPessoa.<http://arquivopessoa.
net/textos/4435>. Original source: Fernando Pessoa, Pginas ntimas e de Auto-
Interpretao, 27.
34. PREFCIO(aproveitarparaShakespeare)ArquivoPessoa.<http://arquivopessoa.
net/textos/4435>. Original source: Fernando Pessoa, Pginas ntimas e de Auto-
Interpretao,27.
35. Hysteria. Def.1. The Oxford English Dictionary. 2nded. 1989.
36.[Carta a Adolfo Casais Monteiro13 Jan. 1935]. Arquivo Pessoa. <http://
arquivopessoa.net/textos/3007>. Original source: Fernando Pessoa, Escritos ntimos,
Cartas e Pginas Autobiogrficas, 199.
37. Arquivo Pessoa. <http://arquivopessoa.net/textos/388>. Original source: Fer-
nando Pessoa. Livro do Desassossego. Vol. I. Fernando Pessoa. Lisboa: tica, 1982.
p.19.
38. Arquivo Pessoa. <http://arquivopessoa.net/textos/1762>. Original source:
Fernando Pessoa. Livro do Desassossego. Vol.II. Fernando Pessoa. Ed. Teresa Sobral
Cunha. Coimbra: Presena, 1990. p.119.
39. See Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka, p.29.
40. Deleuze and Guattari mention Pessoa directly several times in What Is Phi-
losophy? and also praise the Deleuzo-guattarian reading of Pessoas work conducted
by Jos Gil. See pages67, 167, 197, 22930n5. These references are in addition to the
more oblique, coded influence of Pessoa on their ideas, as evidenced in the quotation
on page64 of What Is Philosophy? in which they define conceptual personae as the
philosophers heteronyms.

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