V - The Tutelar Shadows Of Fernando Pessoa And Cesário Verde

The 50th anniversary of the death of Fernando Pessoa (1985) and the 100th of his birth (1988) gave a pretext to a revived interest for the works and biography of the poet. They also originated the revelation of his influence, over a scenario of commemorations and con-celebrations, in the most unexpected and controversial quadrants of the literary intelligentsia. Well before that, however, Fernando J.B. Martinho had been researching on the presence of the author of Mensagem in the works of previous generations. In his reference book, — Pessoa e a Moderna Poesia Portuguesa, do " Orpheu " a 1960 — he examines exhaustively the virtual connections revealing the strong ascendance of the master of heteronyms ("one of the major voices of modernism, on an international scale") over those who came after him. What Martinho defined then as an invasion (and others as a fernandine inflation) is associated with a collection of initiatives to maintain the public interest for the pessoan heritage, namely: the publication of the review Persona, dedicated to the poet and to Portuguese modernism, the action of the Centro de Estudos Pessoanos, in Portugal and abroad, and other important contributions. Over this matter of "Fernandine inflation" the essayist Eduardo Lourenço had heralded the phenomenon in the following ironical lines: "The entire Earth is populated by pessoan anchorites who dedicate themselves, day and night, to their anthropophagic gloss, consuming, in the same adoring and devouring worship, Pessoa's own poetry and the gloss of their fellow-glossers. Pessoan exegesis is to-day a luminous jungle where no-one is prepared to acknowledge either father or mother. In truth, it has become impracticable to have any free contact, whether "innocent" or spitefully ingenuous, with Pessoa's work. No deity ever escapes the perversion of the ritual invented to make her presence felt. There always comes a day when rejection of the deity is the only way to awareness of her continuing existence."

We must stress here how widely the poetical spectrum is scattered with those "brothers" or "cousins" of the author of Ode Marítima, and even with those whose poetic art, having veered away both in the style and in the objectives, still encompass somehow a "dialogue" with their predecessor in genius. According to Fernando Martinho, no one was immune to the lessons of the inventor of heteronyms, within a certain generation of artists, who questioned the positivist poetic discourse, be it through extreme fragmentation of free verse, or through trans-figurative exploration of the complex paths of meaning. Where some followed him as their incontrovertible guide, others sought his esotericism and obscurity. The latter, however, were always attentive to the proximity of the signs of his light, even when the controversy of art for art's sake radicalised positions between those who defended poetry as a vehicle of social intervention, necessarily corseted by limitative rules, and those who considered poetry as a territory of full freedom of the text, from the restlessness of the significant to the osmoses of signification.

Although the attraction of the naturalist heritage of Cesário Verde (1855-1886) was more strongly felt by the materialists, it is omnipresent in poets from other quadrants of aestheticism, as clearly appears in an inquiry promoted by the review Colóquio Letras in 1986 (no. 93). Armando Silva Carvalho unhesitatingly considers neo-realism as his offspring; Armindo Rodrigues praises his kindness to the poor and the unprotected, as well as his love of the countryside, fully natural and naturally expressed; Fernando Martinho considers him essential for anyone who has made the apprenticeship of the eye, learning to look out of oneself, choosing him as a predecessor "to the standard of the more demanding poetics of national lyricism in the present hour"; for António Barahona, Cesário is the poet of "the discovery and exaltation of the day-to-day objects and of practical life"; Albano Martins sees his poetical work coupled with reality — the observable reality, the real daily life"; as for Nuno Júdice and Fernando Echevarria, the former understands that some of his own poems originate in "the stony light of Cesário's rythm" and the latter even goes as far as to sustain that Cesário contributed, a posteriori, for the demise of Portuguese Neo-Realism; finally Pedro da Silveira writes: "Now are we truly in a position to see clearly how his work, scanty as it is, set the true tone for those years spanning more or less 1876 to 1886."

Cesário's influence on our time, is best expressed in two works (and we do not forget Henrique Segurado's Ressentimento de Um Sentimental): Ressentimento dum Ocidental (1980) de Alexandre Pinheiro Torres and Cesário: Instantes da Fala (1989) de José Jorge Letria. Letria, in a mediumistic process that goes much beyond the anxiety of influences and even has the ambition of giving Cesário the biography he must have, puts himself into the skin of the physically disappeared author, speaks for him, lives virtually as him, with space-time extrapolations that pulverize the chronological time, objectifying within his text the fantastic universe in which multiple references meet:

Alexandre Pinheiro Torres himself explains, in the above-mentioned Colóquio Letras, how he inter-textually communes, in his book, with Cesário: "It should be said of my book that it has taken Cesário's writings as practically its one and only topical source, however in a tone more appellative, more declamatory, and, in two or three instances, deliberately that of the pamphleteer, while the Master always avoided such temptations, not always negative in theory, however." For ourselves, among the present poets, José do Carmo Francisco, because of the attention he pays to the pulse of daily life in a city like Lisbon, that still keeps many cesarista aspects, is the one who, without making any explicit claim, gets closest to the humanized and humanizing glance of his illustrious predecessor. Transporte Sentimental, for instance, is a book that comes very near to what could be imagined as Cesário's vision of an urbs keeping up its character in these last years of the XX^th Century — the Portuguese capital.