Fernando Pessoa’s Heteronymic Machine

Adam Morris

Abordando a obra de Fernando Pessoa em um nível conceitual, e não poético

ou estético, este ensaio identifica as realizações filosóficas do sistema hetero-
nímico pessoano. Até agora, muitos críticos têm utilizado conceitos deleuzo-­
guattarianos como ferramentas para entender a poesia de Pessoa, mas poucos
consideraram suas contribuições à filosofia através dos heterônimos. Em
particular, sugiro que a heteronímia propõe uma rebelião filosófica com-
posta de conceitos que antecipam as ideias posteriormente desenvolvidas por
Gilles Deleuze e Félix Guattari, em obras publicadas décadas após a morte
de Pessoa. Mais do que simplesmente “rizomática,” a heteronímia emprega
macro e micromultiplicidades que constituem mutuamente sua estrutura;
favorece modos de criação antilineares e anticartesianos a partir de uma
evasão à influência literária hierárquica; e articula uma filosofia que depende
de uma dimensionalidade interativa semelhante ao “plano de consistência”
deleuzo-­guattariano.

“Com uma tal falta de literatura, como há hoje, que pode um homem de
génio fazer senão converter-­se, ele só, em uma literatura?”
—Fernando Pessoa1

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

Deleuze and Félix 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 Hölderlin, Kleist, Rimbaud,
Mallarmé, 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 Pessoa’s 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 Pessoa’s 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 Pessoa’s 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 Álvaro de Campos have led to Pessoa’s
poetic reputation as a Portuguese analog of the British and Irish modernisms
that influenced him, we can also regard Pessoa’s literary machine—and the
confusion of identities and ontological genesis3 that attends it—as 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 é somente o que sentimos. O que pensamos
é somente o que pensamos. Porém o que, sentido ou pensado, novamente
pensamos como outrem—é isso que se transmuta naturalmente em arte, e,
esfriando, atinge forma” (Teoria 235). Pessoa’s 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 Review 51:2

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 Guattari’s chapter
on “Conceptual Personae” in What as Philosophy? as a bit of a rip-off of Pes-
soa: “Conceptual personae are the philosopher’s ‘heteronyms,’” Deleuze and
Guattari write, “and the philosopher’s 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 Pessoa’s system
of heteronymity equally as important as his poetic feats.

I. Haecceity, multiplicity, and the heteronyms

The assemblage of Pessoa’s work includes not just the poetry and prose of
his orthonymn, heteronyms, and semiheteronyms, but also includes the
Deleuzo-­guattarian “book–machine” 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
20th century. In an oft-­cited passage from the poem Num dia excessivamente
nítido, Alberto Caeiro—considered a “master” by some of Pessoa’s other
heteronyms—writes:
Vi que não há Natureza,
Que Natureza não existe,
Que há montes, vales, planícies,
Que há árvores, flores, ervas,
Que há rios e pedras,
Mas que não há um todo a que isso pertença,
Que um conjunto real e verdadeiro
É uma doença das nossas ideias.

A Natureza é partes sem um todo.

Isto e talvez o tal mistério 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 é partes sem um todo” discards the
ontological priority of the One over the Many, a position that is also funda-
mental in Deleuze and Guattari’s 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 Caeiro’s 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. José
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-
scendência metafísica,” Diferença, 14). Dr. António Mora, the theorist among
the neopagan heteronyms and “philosophical follower” of Caeiro, expands
Caeiro’s and Soares’s 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 é um antropomorfismo. O erro
fundamental é admitir como real a alma do indivíduo, o erigir a consciên-
cia do indivíduo em consciência absoluta e a Realidade em individualidade.
Individuar a Realidade—eis o primeiro grande erro. Individuar a Consciên-
cia—eis 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 Mário Sá Carneiro and also included het-
eronym Álvaro 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 don’t 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 life’s periphery. Learn not to associate ideas
130 Luso-Brazilian Review 51:2

but to break your soul into pieces instead. Learn how to experience sensa-
tions simultaneously, to scatter your spirit through your own scattered self.
(Prose 64)

The Sensationist prerogative resembles Mora’s pagan creed: sentience, not

sentiments. Sensationism thus provided a relatively rare occasion for Álvaro
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-à-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

Álvaro 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 é apenas
um conceito meu, uma síntese dinâmica e projectada de todas as minhas
sensações. Verifico, ou cuido verificar, que coincidem com as minhas grande
número das sensações de outras almas, e a essa coincidência 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 Guattari’s 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
Plateaus 32)

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

“Unity,” or “Totality,” then Campos’s 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 Álvaro 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 opiniões,
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 Review 51:2

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 various—and 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 essencialmente—por trás das máscaras in-
voluntárias do poeta, do raciocinador e do que mais haja—é dramaturgo.
O fenómeno da minha despersonalização instintiva a que aludi em minha
carta anterior, para explicação da existência dos heterónimos, conduz natu-
ralmente a essa definição.”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 “what’s 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 trás da real-
idade não está nada”18 and his claim “Sou uma sensação minha”19 are poetic
approximations of Deleuze and Guattari’s “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 Guattari’s 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 slowness—which combine haphazardly,
forming “this or that assemblage.” Haecceities form and reform. Like Caeiro’s
subjecthood, which shifts according to his sensations (“I’m one of my sensa-
tions”), no unities are permanent or omnipotent on the plane of consistency.
Described by Deleuze and Guattari in physical–dimensional 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 “substância 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-à-vis haecceities and dimensionality, an exchange assiduously re-
corded by Álvaro de Campos in his Notas para a recordação do meu mestre
Caeiro. According to Campos, the conversation began with a controversial
remark by Fernando Pessoa: “No conceito de Ser não cabem partes nem
gradações; uma coisa é ou não é,” he recalls Pessoa saying, “o conceito de Ser
nem é susceptível de análise [. . .] A sua indivisibilidade começa aí.”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 é real pode ser mais ou menos, e a não
ser o que é 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 Review 51:2

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 Plato’s Philebus and Parmenides that illustrate the
latter’s 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 younger—but 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 concepts—like “hotter” and “colder” or

“younger” and “older”—only 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 Reis’s 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 Plato’s 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 composition—described here with

the physical analogies of vectors like movement and temperature—is 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 Canetti’s 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. Pessoa’s
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 entry—each text or each heteronym—is 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, Pessoa’s declaration that he too was one of Caeiro’s 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 Review 51:2

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 Plateaus 23)

Echoing Caeiro’s “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 machine’s connections with other machines on a plane of com-
position (A Thousand Plateaus 22–23).27 Likewise, heteronymity’s 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 Pessoa’s 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

Pessoa’s opinion that Romanticism failed to make progress after Shelley, and
instead “retrograded” into the Victorian era. Alberto Caeiro becomes Pes-
soa’s remedy to the failed progress of the Romantics: the master heteronym,
as António Feijó 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” (Feijó, paragraph  3). Pessoa inserts
Caeiro into literary history in such a way that he is able to mark a divergence
from poetry’s 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, Caeiro’s 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 Caeiro’s bi-
ography provides additional insight into the workings of the heteronymic
time machine. We know from Pessoa’s 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 age 25, 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 Caeiro’s
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 enormously—I
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.
Pessoa’s borrowings from British poets—particularly the Romantics—do
not end there. According to Richard Zenith, “English writers—including
Shakespeare, Milton, Byron, Shelley, Keats, and Carlyle—were the forma-
tive influence on [Pessoa’s] literary sensibility” (Prose xiii). Indeed, he adds,
138 Luso-Brazilian Review 51:2

“Pessoa’s 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 possibilities—represented by the heteronyms, par-
ticularly Alberto Caeiro—that might retroactively fill some of what Pessoa
regards as lacunae in the Western canon.30
Pessoa’s description of Portuguese transcendentalist pantheism provides
an idea of how this poetic machine functions. Blake–Shelley, 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
Blake–Shelley 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. Pessoa’s 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, Shelley’s pagan theology, Wordsworth’s
hermetic lifestyle, and Blake’s mystic imagery, the poet–assemblage 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
Caeiro’s work, “‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ in relation to its time is, if
anything, less original than Alberto Caeiro’s 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 it—divine, anagogic, historical, economic, structural, hereditary, or syn-
tagmatic” (A Thousand Plateaus 13).
Mora overthrows literary genealogy when he dislodges the term “pagan”
from a teleological linearity:
Mas nós, que somos pagãos, não podemos usar um nome que indique que
o somos como «modernos», ou que viemos «reformar», ou «reconstruir» o
paganismo dos gregos. Viemos ser pagãos. Renasceu em nós, o paganismo.
Mas o paganismo que renasceu em nós é o paganismo que sempre houve—a
subordinação aos deuses como a justiça 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 Pessoa’s 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 “mãe que os deu
à luz” by which he means himself.32 This gender-­bending is not uncommon
in Pessoa’s writing. “[S]ou um temperamento feminino com uma inteligên-
cia masculina,” Pessoa writes, comparing himself to Shakespeare and Rous-
seau.33 Álvaro de Campos also experiences flux in his gender identification.
As Klobucka and Sabine observe, “Campos’s ‘penetration’ by Caeiro’s 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 Pessoa’s 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 Caeiro’s influence. The homoerotic interpretation is not
uncalled for, as Pessoa admits his queer sexuality frankly, even if in terms that
140 Luso-Brazilian Review 51:2

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

“É uma inversão sexual,” he concludes by way of explanation, adding “Somos
vários desta espécie, pela história abaixo—pela história artística sobretudo.
Shakespeare e Rousseau são dos exemplos, ou exemplares, mais ilustres. E
o meu receio da descida ao corpo dessa inversão do espírito—radica‑mo a
contemplação de como nesses dois desceu—completamente 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 heterónimos é o fundo traço de histeria que existe em mim,” he
writes to Casais Monteiro, “. . . a origem mental dos meus heterónimos está
na minha tendência orgânica e constante para a despersonalização e para a
simulação.”36 Coupled with his self-­description as the heteronyms’ “mother,”
Pessoa’s 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 Guattari’s Anti-­Oedipus [1972], Hélène 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. Pessoa’s 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 função divina de se
criar, como hei‑de empregar o verbo “ser” senão convertendo‑o subitamente
em transitivo? E então, triunfalmente, antigramaticalmente supremo, direi
“Sou-me.” Terei dito uma filosifia em duas palavras pequenas. Que preferível
não é isto a não 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 Guattari’s 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. Soares’s term for this prop-
agation is “perversion.” It is an action, as Richard Zenith’s translation makes
evident, similar to contagion:
Ah, mas como eu desejaria lançar ao menos numa alma alguma coisa de ve-
neno, de desassossego e de inquietação. Isso consolar-­me-ia um pouco da
nulidade de acção em que vivo. Perverter seria o fim da minha vida.38
“How I’d love to infect at least one soul with some kind of poison, worry or
disquiet!” (Disquiet 65).

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 Review 51:2

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 contagion–becoming:
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-à-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 thing—Pessoa’s one perfect work—was 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 Pessoa’s case, as in Kafka’s, 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 simbólicamente 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 Pessoa’s nomadic literary machine; the book’s three dimensions
are more limiting than the two-­dimensional plane of composition. Books
“quantify writing,” Deleuze and Guattari observe (A Thousand Plateaus 4),
and this was never Pessoa’s objective. Instead of producing books, which are
machines for containing ideas, what Pessoa wrote—poetry, prose, correspon-
dence, “fragments,” and otherwise—was not written for this type of capture
and consumption. So Pessoa did not publish the vast majority of his writing.
As Álvaro de Campos reasons in the case of António Mora’s unpublished
work, “Um sistema filosófico precisa um pouco de prendre date, pois que nele
a substância é consubstancial com a forma; uma obra literária, vivendo como
vive só da forma (no sentido completo) pode ficar inédita 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 Plato’s Socrates, Nietzsche’s Dionysus
and Zarathustra (What Is Philosophy 64). Crucially, they make this argument
in Pessoan terms: “Conceptual personae are the philosopher’s ‘heteronyms,’
and the philosopher’s 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, 22–23) 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). António Mora’s 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 Review 51:2

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 direção de
uma sociedade,” he wrote, “O genio está na sua philosophia emquanto tal e
alli (nas theorias politicas) apenas ha attitude critica” (Escritos 71). 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
revolution—the smashing of linear, teleological methodologies into splin-
tering lines of flight and the rejection of individual subject-­based reason in
favor of the schizo’s shifting multiplicities and flows—is well-­articulated in
Pessoa’s texts. Indeed, Pessoa’s literary machine supports Jean-­François Ly-
otard’s claim that “[a] work can become modern only if it is first postmod-
ern” (79). Lyotard’s 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
Pessoa’s 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 Pessoa’s 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 Guattari’s 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 Pessoa’s work, provides citations
to the original published editions of Pessoa’s 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 Pessoa’s 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, Páginas Íntimas e de Auto-­Interpretação. Ed. Georg Rudolf
Lind and Jacinto do Prado Coelho. Lisboa: Ática, 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 Pessoa’s 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 propositions—persons 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-
soa’s 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.  José Gil’s Fernando Pessoa, ou, La métaphysique des sensations (1988) and Dif-
erença e negação 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 Review 51:2

similarities between Pessoa’s project and Deleuzo-­guattarian thought. Gil’s 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 Pessoa’s and Deleuze and
Guattari’s philosophical–theoretical positions that Gil goes on to make in the latter
work, where he writes, “muitas vezes, o que aparece sob o modo implícito em Pessoa,
ganha contornos explícitos em Deleuze, o que era simples noção no Livro do desas-
sossego, por exemplo, torna-­se conceito claro em Mille plateaux” (Diferença, 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 latter’s
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. 12–13. Nietzsche, of course, is
also one of the practitioners of so-called nomadic thought that inspired Deleuze and
Guattari’s 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-
ing—such 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 Plateaus 32). 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 Landa’s A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory
and Social Complexity. London: Continuum, 2006.
10.  Bernardo Soares “Muitos têm 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 Filosóficos. Vol. I. Ed. António de Pina Coelho.
Lisboa: Ática, 1968. p. 32.
12.  “To whom can Caeiro be compared?” [1917?] English original. Arquivo Pessoa.
<http://arquivopessoa.net/textos/3088>. Original source: Fernando Pessoa. Páginas
Íntimas e de Auto-­Interpretação, 343.
13.  “To whom can Caeiro be compared?” [1917?] English original. Arquivo Pessoa.
<http://arquivopessoa.net/textos/3088>. Original source: Fernando Pessoa. Páginas
Íntimas e de Auto-­Interpretação, 343.
Morris 147

14.  Manuel de Landa’s book, cited in note 9, is also useful for understanding the
distinction between relations of exteriority and relations of interiority in the Deleuzo-­
guattarian ontological framework.
15.  Álvaro de Campos, “Passagem das horas” [a] [1916], Arquivo Pessoa <http://
arquivopessoa.net/textos/814>. Original source: “Passagem das horas”, Fernando
Pessoa, Álvaro de Campos—Livro 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 Monteiro—20  Jan. 1935.] Arquivo Pessoa. <http://
arquivopessoa.net/textos/3014>. Original source: Fernando Pessoa, Textos de Crítica
e de Intervenção. Lisboa: Ática, 1980. p. 211.
18.  “Notas para a recordação do meu mestre Caeiro,” 169.
19.  “Notas,” 158.
20.  “Por detrás de todas as variações permanece” Arquivo Pessoa <http://arquivo
pessoa.net/textos/1799>. Original source: “Comentário de Ricardo Reis”. Poemas
Completos de Alberto Caeiro. Ed. Teresa Sobral Cunha. Lisboa: Editorial Presença,
1994. p. 183.
21.  See note 3.
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 “orthonym”—also 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, Páginas
Íntimas e de Auto-­Interpretação, 11.
27.  Elsewhere Deleuze and Guattari call these “relations of exteriority.” See notes 9
and 11.
28. [Carta a um editor inglês—1916]. Arquivo Pessoa <http://arquivopessoa.
net/textos/1899>. Original source, Fernando Pessoa, Páginas Íntimas e de Auto-­
Interpretação, 126.
148 Luso-Brazilian Review 51:2

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.  António Mora, from drafts of “O Regresso dos Deuses.” Arquivo Pessoa. [Não
somos, na verdade, neopagãos, nem pagãos novos—1916?] <http://arquivopessoa.
net/textos/871>. Original source: Fernando Pessoa, Páginas Íntimas e de Auto-­
Interpretação, 286.
32. [Carta a Adolfo Casais Monteiro—13  Jan. 1935]. Arquivo Pessoa. <http://
arquivopessoa.net/textos/3007>. Original source: Fernando Pessoa, Escritos Íntimos,
Cartas e Páginas Autobiográficas. Ed. António Quadros. Lisboa: Europa-­América,
1986. p. 199.
33.  “PREFÁCIO(aproveitarparaShakespeare)”ArquivoPessoa.<http://arquivopessoa.
net/textos/4435>. Original source: Fernando Pessoa, Páginas Íntimas e de Auto-­
Interpretação, 27.
34.  “PREFÁCIO(aproveitarparaShakespeare)”ArquivoPessoa.<http://arquivopessoa.
net/textos/4435>. Original source: Fernando Pessoa, Páginas Íntimas e de Auto-
Interpretação, 27.
35.  “Hysteria.” Def. 1. The Oxford English Dictionary. 2nd ed. 1989.
36. [Carta a Adolfo Casais Monteiro—13  Jan. 1935]. Arquivo Pessoa. <http://
arquivopessoa.net/textos/3007>. Original source: Fernando Pessoa, Escritos Íntimos,
Cartas e Páginas Autobiográficas, 199.
37.  Arquivo Pessoa. <http://arquivopessoa.net/textos/388>. Original source: Fer-
nando Pessoa. Livro do Desassossego. Vol. I. Fernando Pessoa. Lisboa: Ática, 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: Presença, 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 Pessoa’s work conducted
by José Gil. See pages 67, 167, 197, 229–30n5. These references are in addition to the
more oblique, coded influence of Pessoa on their ideas, as evidenced in the quotation
on page 64 of What Is Philosophy? in which they define “conceptual personae” as the
philosopher’s “heteronyms.”

Works Cited

Cixous, Hélène. “The Laugh of the Medusa.” Trans. Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen.
Signs 1 (Summer 1976): 875–93. JSTOR. Web. 10 August 2010.
Deleuze, Gilles. The Logic of Sense. Trans. Mark Lester with Charles Stivale. Ed. Con-
stantin Boundas. New York: Columbia UP, 1990. Print.
Morris 149

Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. Anti-­Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia.

Trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane. London: Athlone, 1984.
Print.
———. Kafka: toward a minor literature [1975]. Trans. Dana Polan. Minneapolis: U of
Minnesota P, 1986. Print.
———. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi.
Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1987. Print.
———. What Is Philosophy? Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell. New
York: Columbia UP, 1994. Print.
Feijó, António M. “Fernando Pessoa’s Mothering of the Avant-­Garde.” Stanford Hu-
manities Review 7.1 (1999): Web. 28 Dec 2009. <http://www.stanford.edu/group/
SHR/7-1/html/feijo.html>.
Gil, José. Diferença e negação na poesia de Fernando Pessoa. Rio de Janeiro: Relume
Dumará, 2000. Print.
———. Fernando Pessoa, ou, La métaphysique des sensations. Paris: La Différance,
1988. Print.
Keats, John. The Complete Poetical Works and Letters of John Keats: Cambridge Edi-
tion. Boston: Riverside, 1899. Print.
Klobucka, Anna M. and Mark Sabine. “Introduction: Pessoa’s Bodies”. Embodying
Pessoa: Corporeality, Gender, Sexuality. Ed. Klobucka and Sabine. Toronto: U  of
Toronto P, 2007. 3–38. Print.
Lyotard, Jean-­François. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Trans.
Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1984. Print.
Oxford English Dictionary Online. 2nd ed. 1989. Web. Green Library, Stanford Uni-
versity, Stanford, CA. <http://dictionary.oed.com>.
Pessoa, Fernando. Arquivo Pessoa. Instituto de Estudos sobre o Modernismo. Web.
9 December 2010. <http://arquivopessoa.net>.
———. The Book of Disquiet. 1998. Ed. Trans. Richard Zenith. New York: Penguin,
2001. Print.
———. A Centenary Pessoa. Ed. Eugenio Lisboa and L.C. Taylor. Corn Exchange:
Carcanet, 1995. Print.
———. Escritos Sobre Génio E Loucura : Tomos I E II. Ed. Jerónimo Pizarro. Lisboa:
Impr. Nacional-­Casa da Moeda, 2006.
———. Fernando Pessoa & Co. Ed. And Trans. Richard Zenith. New York: Grove
Press, 1998.
———. “Notas para a Recordação do Meu Mestre Caeiro por Álvaro de Campos.”
Poemas Completos de Alberto Caeiro. Ed. Teresa Sobral Cunha. Lisboa: Editorial
Presença, 1994. Print.
———. The Selected Prose of Fernando Pessoa. Ed. Trans. Richard Zenith. New York:
Grove/Atlantic, 2001. Print.
———. Teoria da Heteronímia. Ed. Fernando Cabral Martins and Richard Zenith.
Porto: Assírio & Alvim, 2012. Print.
Copyright of Luso-Brazilian Review is the property of University of Wisconsin Press and its
content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the
copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email
articles for individual use.