Choosing to Remain Heteronymous
Fernando Pessoa’s Galaxy of Selves (and Consciousness as “Virtual Reality”)
Of all the thousands of different takes on the “Galaxy Brain” meme, one of my favorites has to be the example below this paragraph. I’ll leave readers to decide for themselves whether the most “enlightened” of these activities is one I’ve personally engaged in. I will, however, own up to doing related things in an offline capacity: during high school periods of detention or study hall, I’d compose full pages of some fictitious hipster music rag (complete with advertisements to lend some sort of added legitimacy, as if anybody would confuse ballpoint pen scrawls on lined paper with the genuine article). The highlight of these pages would be critical articles, interviews, and record reviews of my actually existing “band”. Though that itself was inconsequential enough that it may as well have been fiction, our music merited serious discussion and fiery debate in this alternate universe: so much so, in fact, that a number of different personae, from pompous know-it-all to starstruck acolyte, had to be created to account for the full spectrum of critical opinions about it.
Although I won’t bother arguing with anyone who views this kind of activity as the sole province of clowns and trolls, there do exist more “serious” (i.e. academically acknowledged and studied) variants of this practice. The act of inventing a multiplicity of selves, only to pit them against one another in a protracted family fight, is at the core of Fernando Pessoa’s creative enterprise, with which he became one of the most celebrated literary exponents of Lisbon (if only posthumously). Pessoa’s astonishing success in that regard should be an object lesson in the principle of “fake it ’til you make it”: students and translators of his are familiar with the fact that Pessoa was not one of Portugal’s most esteemed literary exports, but was at least three of them. His poetic aliases Álvaro de Campos and Alberto Caiero, with literary efforts ranging from bold manifestoes to pugilistic “letters to the editor,” attested to the true depth and adaptability of Pessoa’s creative mind. They could easily enough be read as mechanisms to deal with certain deficits of life experience, - Álvaro de Campos, at the very least, was freewheeling and “unfiltered” in a way diametrically opposed to the manners of his creator - though they were unequivocally something more than this.
Pessoa, like many other children with a childhood haunted by uncertainty (namely, the early loss of his father and baby brother), experimented with “imaginary friends” bearing fantastic personae like “Captain Thibaut” and the “Chevalier de Pas.” Dismissing the notion that his dreamed visions were some virtual reality to be cordoned off from waking states, he would defend these in his adult life as “utterly human realities”. This practice would be strongly encouraged by the fantastic stories related to Pessoa by the letters off his beloved uncle, during the time when the boy Fernando was dislocated in Durban. His uncle Cunha’s correspondence came enriched with surreal fictions about, among other things, the military campaigns of different species of insects: though humorous, these were merged with reports of “actual” happenings back in Portugal in such a way that it seemed like there was no intended distinction between the fantastic and mundane worlds.
Pessoa would take such an approach to reality and bring it to rarefied heights in adulthood, creating a hive of personae who hailed from different nations, had a variety of professions, declaimed in literary voices unique to them, and - in a suggestion of Pessoa’s deep interest in esoterica - came with their own astrological charts. To further legitimate them, Pessoa granted them various types of “official” documents of citizenship (I can only imagine what Pessoa would have done with concepts like the micro-nations of the NSK State or the Kingdoms of Elgaland-Vargaland).
Like those nations / extended art projects mentioned just now, Pessoa’s galaxy of heteronyms was formed partially in protest to pervasive conditions of stagnation. Seen another way, it was analogous to alternative culture’s battle cry that we “become the media!” when our communications apparatus has no real incentive to question or upset the status quo. Pessoa’s own words on the subject bemoaned the “absence of literature as can be seen today,” suggesting that the only way out was for the “man of genius” to “convert himself, on his own, into a literature.” So, whether or not they developed out of the needs and anxieties specific to childhood, the heteronyms eventually morphed into something that many adult artists do not attain: a program of radical self-interrogation with the potential for larger cultural transformation. While pseudonymous works, in Pessoa’s reckoning, were “by the author in his own person, except in the name he signs”, heteronymous works were “by the author outside his own person…they proceed from a full-fledged individual created by him, like the lines spoken by a character in a drama he might write.”
So the pseudonym, by contrast, was essentially just a mask being worn over a set of beliefs, behaviors, and aesthetic practices that were not meaningfully distinct from those of the “real”, “primary” creator. (Fans of “brain dance”-oriented electronic music, e.g. Aphex Twin, are doubtlessly familiar with this trend of pseudonymous products bearing minor changes in form or content). The heteronym, by contrast, was a mask allowing the author to indulge ideas and attitudes that would not normally be associated with the unmasked creator. From his surviving writings on the subject, it also appears that Pessoa conceived of his creative universe as one in which the clashing heteronymic personae merged to form a “drama divided into people instead of acts,” and in this drama Pessoa himself was submerged as just another persona whose voice was no more authoritative than those of his creations.
At times his depersonalization was extreme enough that he considered himself, rather than a person, something more akin to a conduit through which a multitude of thoughts and emotions surged: in the words of his heteronym Ricardo Reis, “I am merely the place / Where things are thought or felt.” In a personal note to himself, Pessoa also hints that he saw the conjuring of heteronyms, and other like-minded activities, as a willed process of dislocation that was nevertheless “the initial stimulus leading to victory […] to conceive the dissimilarity between me and what surrounds me - that is the first step, the beginning of wakeful awareness”. Whereas common pseudonyms were something often tacked on to signal a change in creative practices, the heteronyms were, in a sense, meant to initiate those changes in creative practice.
In this way, the creation of the heteronyms even bore similarities to the rituals demanded of Western hermetic or occult systems, and as such it was really no surprise that Pessoa was in touch with Aleister Crowley (by biographer / translator Richard Zenith’s account, Pessoa deeply impressed Crowley despite Pessoa’s total inexperience with the sexuality that informed Crowley’s doctrine of Thelema, and Pessoa aided Crowley in the comically botched faking of the magus’ suicide). Again implying that his menagerie of holographic selves was something to be taken more seriously than, say, the self-amused scribblings of a bored high schooler, Pessoa insisted to Crowley that this was not all “an elaborate joke of the imagination” but rather “a great act of intellectual magic, a magnum opus of the impersonal creative power”. Much as hermetic societies sought illumination via the synthesis of opposing archetypes and disparate energies, Pessoa aimed to domesticate this raging, inchoate collection of virtual selves and channel their combined energies towards a common purpose.
What that common purpose is is not a matter of universal agreement. Although a fictional cosmos of clashing personae interacting with one another another seems like just a vibrant dramatization of the Socratic dialogue, even that is called into question by Pessoa and company. This often dizzying approach extends to The Book of Disquiet, the seminal “plotless novel” which is maybe Pessoa’s most widely read work in the English language, and which is told in the voice of a “semi-heteronym,” Bernardo Soares. It is Soares who gets to the heart of why the heteronymic exercise remains a worthwhile creative tool, mocking the Delphic oracle in the process:
To know yourself is to err…Consciously not to know yourself! That’s the way. And conscientiously to not know yourself is the active task of irony. I know nothing greater, no more befitting the truly great man, than the patient and expressive analysis of the modes of not knowing ourselves, the conscious record of the unconsciousness of our conscious states, the metaphysics of autonomous shadows, the poetry of the twilight of disillusion.1
This is far from an isolated statement in Pessoa’s teeming collection of written papers, in fact it seems to be a point on which at least some of the other heteronyms agree: in the heteronymic guise of Álvaro de Campos (generally brought into play when Pessoa wanted to adopt a more “up front” tone), a poem was written featuring the lines “No, I don’t believe in me…Insane asylums are full of lunatics with certainties!”
Not many in the arts have really built upon Pessoa’s critical attitude towards the stability of identity, and this more predictable than surprising . Even in instances where the non-existence of the heteronymic double is fairly obvious, works written seemingly as a challenge to one’s self have a boundless potential as critical, satirical tools: take for example Norman Spinrad’s 1971 science fiction novel, The Iron Dream: an “alternate universe” scenario in which, once we get beyond the front cover, we find ourselves in the mind of none other than Adolf Hitler, whose supposed sci-fi masterwork Lord of the Swastika we are now reading.
To be sure, we know enough about the Hitler that actually existed (i.e. that he was not in fact a successful pulp sci-fi author upon his migration to the U.S. in 1919 , with success so exceptional that he was awarded a Hugo prize for his work and inspired legions of convention attendees to “cosplay” as the fascistic superheroes of his creation). Yet this doesn’t make the reading experience any less immersive. Brimful of ridiculous anachronisms, implausibly conducted battle scenarios, pompous penmanship and odd features such as the total absence of speaking female characters, The Iron Dream is on one hand exactly what might be imagined if this concept were to be pitched today to a publisher. And yet, it’s something more than the sum of these deliberately awkward components.
Actually, a correction should be made here. Spinrad utilizes two heteronymic characters for the book: both Hitler and a fictional NYU literature professor, “Homer Whipple”, who excoriates the book for the contents briefly touched on above, touching upon its excess of phallic, fetishistic imagery and its being worse than Sade (who, as “Whipple” contends, at least meant for his literary excesses to be “sexually titillating,” whereas sci-fi Hitler “fully expects the average reader to share his point of view as self-evident truth”). Once the hallucinogenic violence of the main narrative and the closing criticism are both taken as a whole, the lasting impression is of an author who fully understands the idea of “losing oneself to find oneself”; of finding a sort of humanity by taking on the guise of inhumanity.
Nor is this kind of exercise exclusive to the literary world. Within the more feverishly contested boundaries of the art world, there have been luminaries like Marcel Duchamp, who might have acknowledged heteronyms as a manifestation of the definitive creative act: the investigation of discontinuities or incongruities between people, states of being, and concepts. (The creation of the pseudonym Rrose Sélavy was just one of Duchamp’s many manifestations of this). More “heteronymous” still, Yves Klein delighted in exploring paradoxical or seemingly irreconcilable personality traits, in the process hinting at the fact that these personae simply provided different points of entry to an otherwise universal realm of “the affective” (Klein regularly referred to “sensibility” as the unifying feature of his many artworks and actions). Klein biographer Nuit Ban acknowledges his skill in how he
…expertly courted, nurtured, and assumed the personas assigned to the artist by both the defenders and detractors of the avant-garde: the elite and the mass public. He seamlessly occupied the role of the avant-garde artist, who could only be understood by a few initiated ‘insiders’, and that of the charlatan, accused of deceiving or pulling a ‘hoax’ on the mass public. By revealing that these two aspects were equal parts of [his] paradoxical persona, Klein dismantled the avant-garde artist’s supposed moral authority and, by extension, the charlatan’s alleged depravity.2
That the peregrinations of Klein or Pessoa still seem radical is quite telling, given the number of artists who have otherwise found it perfectly natural and non-controversial to at least adopt a “chameleonic” sort of approach to style, aesthetics, and philosophical concerns. Artists in general, as Herbert Read contends, have “no identity” and are “continually informing and filling some other body…that is to say, in practice the artist tends intuitively to identify himself with the purpose and achievement of every other artist, and only by an effort confines himself to a characteristic mode of expression.”3 Put somewhat differently, such individuals acknowledge the mutability of expressive categories and aesthetic movements, and, rather than trying to claim mastery over one particular mode of expression that can act as a metaphorical stand-in for all others, create an equally mutable self (or selves) to match this chaotic state of affairs.
Now, there is a non-“art world” significance to all this that may make a better argument for its value than anything mentioned above. Pessoa’s refusal, via his heteronyms, to distinguish dreamed or “virtual” realities from mundane reality may be the most important lesson to be gleaned from his willed multiplicity of being, and this should be considered in light of theories on the philosophy of mind. Namely, Antti Revonsuo’s argument that the only real barrier preventing dreams from being intuited as “reality” is that waking consciousness is “directly constrained by distal causes in the reality outside the brain”4 (or, in an elegant aphorism that Revonsuo borrows from Rodolfo Llinás, life is nothing but “a dream guided by the senses”). In spite of these significant constraints, it can’t be denied that dreaming, as well as just about any imaginative [], still rises to the level of human experience (Revonsuo, again: “the ontology of dreams is the ontology of consciousness”).
Additional insight from Revonsuo is worth quoting at length:
A further mistake is to regard consciousness as something “inner” - and experienced as internal [italics in the original] - and reality as something “outer” - and experienced as external. If we think of consciousness as a “self in the world”, we must note that the processes we positively know to be happening inside the brain can somehow produce an experience of (oneself) being outside the brain […] Our experienced existence outside the brain must, nevertheless, be entirely virtual, since the neurophysiological mechanisms underlying all phenomenological experience sit tightly inside our skulls, never actually reaching out from there.5
I propose that “heteronymous” creativity is a healthy means of resolving all but the most insurmountable differences, already noted by Revonsuo above, between actual and virtual realities. In its assumption that these boundaries of experience are more fluid than popular psychology makes them out to be, this art serves a worthwhile experimental end: proceeding from that knowledge that the boundaries of conscious experience are porous, it then disposes with the obsolete notion of a “true, inner self” that directs all action, and whose pure state must be protected against a corrupted “external” world. It gives us an opportunity to revisit models of self-knowledge still surviving from antiquity (e.g. Plato’s Republic), in which knowledge of self requires not a process of diving into one’s one psyche and re-surfacing with pearls of wisdom, but a journey towards understanding how the known self integrates within a cosmic whole.
Pessoa, F. (1996). The Book of Disquiet. Trans. / Ed. Richard Zenith. Manchester: Caranet Press.
Banai, N. (2014). Yves Klein (Critical Lives). London: Reaktion Books.
Read, H. (1959). A Concise History of Modern Painting. New York: Frederick A Praeger.
Revonsuo, A. (1995): “Consciousness, Dreams and Virtual Realities.” Philosophical Psychology, (8)1: pp. 35-58
Ibid.