To open Fernando Pessoa’s
The Book of Disquiet is get a glimpse of still, twilit infinity. This
surprisingly rich, dense, lyrical work defies classification, interpretation
and conclusions. At once novel, journal, poem (or “poeticized prose,” as
translator Richard Zenith calls it), meditation, confession, psychological case
study (from the patient’s point of view), philosophical essay, and description
of the abyss, The Book of Disquiet may well be one of the world’s most
accurately titled works of art.
It also may well be one
of the world’s most amorphous documents, a book only in the loosest sense. Its
history reads like the contrived conceit of some contemporary metafictional
novel: found at Pessoa’s death in 1935 as a collection of bound and loose pages
in a trunk, The Book of Disquiet, from its indeterminate plan as to how its
parts were to fit together, and as to what should and shouldn’t be included,
retains an indefinite, shifting shape.
The indistinct outlines
of its form provide us this: close to five hundred entries in a kind of log in
which the impressions of Bernando Soares, an accounting clerk in an
import/export office in the Rua Douradores in Lisbon (the city that gave birth
to the sublime) are recorded with a repetitive layering, the day by day
accounts of a solitary, depressive yet poetic functionary who goes each day to
his office, performs his duty, dines at the same restaurant each evening, and walks
home through Lisbon’s streets to his spare, humble apartment where he puts down
his observations and reflections. If a more communicative Bartleby or a less bitter
and incapacitated Willy Loman had kept a journal, it might read a little like
this; a devotional exercise in capturing tedium, routine, and the mechanical,
paralyzed life of an office worker.
Amateur Reader at
Wuthering Expectations hosted something of a solo read-along of The Book of Disquiet a couple of weeks ago, pulling the weight himself. In joining this late, I can add
little to the insights provided by his posts and in the accompanying comments, but
among the latter one reader called The Book of Disquiet “frightening,”
while another called it “comfort reading.” I can’t know what’s behind those readers’ disparate poles of
reaction, but since I’ve experienced both of them myself, I’ll argue in favor
of discarding an understandable reluctance to begin this admittedly frightening
prospect - a 450 page book in which melancholy, insomnia, and passive crises of
identity repeat across the entirety of its surface – and even finding solace in
it.
I’d flirted with picking
up a copy of The Book of Disquiet for many years, repeatedly passing it
over out of anxiety that it would prove a dreary, melancholic cult novel
attractive primarily to dreary, melancholic, cultish intellectuals. The first
pages of The Book of Disquiet, however, made me sit up straight. Its
immediate, prescient articulation of modern anxieties and sentiments felt intimately,
eerily, abruptly familiar, yet for all that seemed fresh and illuminating. Pessoa’s
language surprised me even more; in describing a world of the banal and ordinary,
of office work and simple rooms, of passivity and resignation, Bernardo Soares’
gaze is also charged with an intense, ravishing lyricism and a Whitmanian,
biblical cadence. Some passages in the The Book of Disquiet are simply
breathtaking, lending a subversive irony and an intensity of observed life to
the narrator’s meditations on futility.
Soares is a
quintessential modern man, yoked to a workday that repeats itself with no
promise of respite “until the coach from the abyss pulls up” (Zenith, fragment
1). In some ways he’s the flip side of a Kafka character; both are at the mercy
of bureaucratic, impersonal forces larger than themselves, but Soares, rather
than being reduced to the iconic singularity of a dry and dusty beetle, a
badger in a burrow or a hunger artist in a cage, finds, if not escape exactly,
then perhaps a kind of allowance for continuing to live, gained through the
unexpected fruits of his concentrated attempts to melt into his surroundings,
to extinguish himself to the point of refusing an identity, to seek refuge in
nothingness. Like Whitman (whose influence pervades The Book of Disquiet)
Soares, in his naked confrontation with the world and panoramic, encompassing,
personified identification with all that his attention touches, contains
multitudes. Unlike Whitman, whatever celebration of himself he makes is sober and
interior, whatever singing of it but a wistful fado. Pessoa has taken the
ebullient, expansive infinity of Whitman and seated it in 9-to-5 office job. In
place of a desire to merge atomically with the world in a joyous fusion, there’s
an almost pathological compulsion in Soares to obliterate himself in the world.
In large measure he succeeds, sensing himself only as a concentrated awareness,
a disembodied eye that observes, an existence reduced to a presence that
dreams, with an effacing, disconsolate kind of freedom snatched from trying to
avoid being seen. Dreams trump
reality in The Book of Disquiet, providing a kind of parallel shadow
life for Soares to inhabit, one multiplied by dreams’ capacity - like that of
fiction, one might add - to allow one to lead, in the world of the mind, a
multiplicity of lives other than one’s own (tellingly, Soares dreams of a
romanticized Samarkand of the past, an exotic and impossible destination that
might as well be the back of the moon).
Even dreams, though, as Soares recognizes, have “detestable”
limitations, since the mind recognizes that they are but dreams. Yet neither is
action possible, in that action “offends… sensibility” and threatens to disrupt
– as though sicklied over with the pale cast of thought - the still gaze that provides
Soares the poetic response that sustains him. And so Soares remains something
of a fixed quantity, a gaze that thinks, slotted somewhere between dreaming and
action, between emotion and intellect, flickering but not really moving, a
figure in a zoetrope.
What could be comforting
in this? Routine can provide comfort. Inaction can provide a kind of
tranquility. But a serious person would hardly think of these as more than
illusory. What may be comforting, however, in a philosophical sense, is Soares’
acceptance of the price of routine and inaction, one articulated here as
disquiet, or in the original Portuguese, desassossego
(a word deconstructed by Antonio Tabucchi in a brief essay on the book[i],
as being, like its sister word saudade,
nearly untranslatable in its complexity of associations). Soares provides the
kind of comfort one obtains from having one’s sense of reality affirmed, from accepting
intranquility as a condition of modern life. In other words, Soares provides
the solace of understanding that he does not understand.
One might also find
comfort in the aphoristic quality of Soares’ journal. Much of The Book of
Disquiet consists of meditations, aphorisms that, even in their disquieting
assertions, provide a lulling affirmation of one’s existence. Despite Soares’
determined conviction that action is futile, that the refuge of dreams is
temporary, that thought is of questionable use, there remains a palpable
heroism not only in the poeticism of his response to the world, but in the very
fact that he has one. Perhaps most striking about The Book of Disquiet
is the manner in which Pessoa merges these meditations on routine existence
with a rapturous poeticism that lifts Soares far above his ordinary, day to day
life; it’s no coincidence that so many of Soares’ descriptions involve the sky
above Lisbon. Pessoa/Soares provides us, as Tabucchi points out in his essay, a
metaphysics of the banal. It’s the closest thing we may have to a religious
text for the faithless and dispossessed.
The one activity in
which Soares engages that may be construed as action (apart those minimal
functional tasks required to dress and eat and hold a job) is writing. In this
dense, amorphous collection of what at times appears to be little other than entries
one might shuffle like a deck of cards (one kind of infinity), perhaps the
beginning of The Book of Disquiet is really the end. Here one finds a
short framing device through which Fernando Pessoa first introduces us to Bernando
Soares, a man (like himself) who dines each night (like himself) at the same
restaurant and who (like himself) retires each night to a simple room to
write: a semblable, an intimate if not exactly a friend. At the end of this
preface, Pessoa notes Soares’ contentment in finding someone with whom to leave
his book, a gift Pessoa accepts with an appreciation “from a psychological
point of view” and because he recognizes the writer’s need to have a reader. For
those of us now privileged to be readers of The Book of Disquiet, we may
recognize our own semblable in Pessoa’s
book, which speaks so intimately to the many attributes of our own modern
psychology, and which, by being a work of fiction and not simply a
psychological case study, immortalizes, in an almost infinitely intriguing work
of art (I have scarcely begun to sound its depths), the heroic/anti-heroic
fragility of our dreaming, shifting, insubstantial search for meaning, solidity
and identity in a mechanized and spiritually tenuous world.
One final note on
reading The Book of Disquiet to help mitigate the fright of anyone
approaching it for the first time, particularly those who, like me, expected a
novel. While the book has novelistic aspects, its dense accumulation of
observations and reflections can weigh heavily in one’s reading, and it has
little if anything in the way of plot (unless one might approach Pessoa’s coyly
expressed “psychological point of view” with a psychologist’s interest in
tracing Soares’ pathology). In a comment, Amateur Reader notes translator Alfred
MacAdams’ suggestion to approach the book by reading it through once in the
already somewhat arbitrary order in which it has been assembled, then turning
to its entries randomly for the rest of one’s life. This seems infinitely sound advice.
[i] Antonio
Tabucchi, “L’infinie dysphorique de Bernardo Soares,” in La Nostalgie du
Possible: Sur Pessoa, Éditions de Seuil, Paris, 1998
