An Unwritten Novel: Fernando Pessoa’s “The Book of

Disquiet.” Thomas Cousineau. Champaign, London and

Dublin: Dalkey Archive Press, 2013. Pp. 200. $35.00 (paper).

Reviewed by Kenneth David Jackson,Yale University

In his clearly written, well-documented book, Cousineau analyzes Pessoa’s major prose
work—the unfinished, unordered, and “unwritten” Book of Disquiet, attributed to
heteronym Bernardo Soares, the self-confessed “character of an unwritten novel.”
Picking up on Soares’s wry self-description, Cousineau fills a largely missing dimension
in the existing anglophone criti- cism and commentary on Fernando Pessoa’s famous
“Book.” An experienced literary scholar and specialist on Beckett, Cousineau’s approach
to The Book is fresh, because he discovered the work several years ago through a review.
His is a clear example of the exhilaration resulting from an unexpected discovery, leading
to an evaluation of The Book from the comparative perspec- tives of aesthetics,
philosophy, and modernist prose. He joins precise and instructive analysis of Soares’s
writing with a discussion of the comparative context of its unusual circumstances and the
nature of the literary project, which approach results in an essential reading for anyone
interested in the Book of Disquiet.

Fernando Pessoa’s famous “Book of Disquietude” was left unorganized at the time of his
death in 1935, and it was filed among the 25,000 sheets of paper deposited in the wooden
trunk that was his literary archive, now located at the Biblioteca Nacional in Lisbon and
identifiable by the initials “LD,” scribbled on some texts. The idea of an artist’s notebook,
philosopher’s journal, diary, or literary companion dates from 1913, when an early
fragment, “In the Forest of Estrangement,” was attributed to a heteronym, Vicente
Guedes. Pessoa pondered the potential content and arrangement of The Book in at least
five different early sketches, using suggestive, although vague, titles such as “Symphony
of a Restless Night” or “Apotheosis of the Absurd.” Pessoa returned to the project
intensively from 1928 to 1934, at that time attributing the work to Bernardo Soares, who
would be depicted as an assistant bookkeeper in the firm of Vásques & Company on the
fourth floor of the Rua dos Douradores in Lisbon and described by the author as a “semi-
heteronym”: a close, but not exact, literary equivalent to himself. More than half of The
Book was written in this period, and twelve excerpts from it were published: two
appeared in the prestigious Coimbra journal Presença, which certainly indicates that
Pessoa planned to organize, and eventually publish, the fragments as a book. On his death
in 1935, however, The Book became a posthumous project in all its indeterminacy and
incompleteness. Although some pages came out in book form in Porto, 1961, only in
1982 did the phantom text appear in Lisbon. It was followed by a cascade of editions and
translations over the following two decades, each with different editors, translators and
arrangements of the fragmented narrative. Richard Zenith, a scholar, editor, and translator
living in Lisbon, produced a prominent Portuguese version and a widely read English
translation.

Cousineau’s very title, An Unwritten Novel, speaks for the breadth and novelty of his
inter- pretation. While perhaps not written as a novel, The Book has certainly been
structured and presented as such by its editors, each of whom constructed a sustained
narrative voice, estab- lished thematic continuities by grouping texts dominated by the
vivid plastic imagery of Soares’s

MODERNISM /modernity

866 metaphors, and framed philosophical perspectives filled with what Cousineau calls
“exhilarating lugubriousness.” Indeed, it is as a novel that Pessoa’s “Book” joins the
realm of modernist prose found in Kafka or Beckett: to call The Book a novel is to
recognize its achieved status as both a found and a created object. To call it “unwritten”
is to play on the indeterminate nature of Pessoa’s lifetime project and, indeed, on his
“own” existence as, in the words of Jorge de Sena, “the man who never was”—that is,
someone who sacrificed a personal existence for a literary one. The Book is unwritten in
the same way as Pessoa, who passed on his life and writings to invented others: it is all
“unwritten” in that there are no real authors, no definitive arrange- ments, and no
intention that is not mirrored by its own negation. Thus, Cousineau addresses the pseudo-
existence, or quasi non-existence, of The Book in all its indeterminacy, improvisation,
and changeability. He shows how this text resulted from different kinds of shattering, as a
ruin or purposefully incomplete construction, even a failed project, which is now being
recognized for that as one of the masterpieces of modernist writing.

Cousineau constructs his interpretation around two main observations: the unfinished and
indeterminate status of Pessoa’s grand project, which for that very reason is paradoxically
cast as one of the supreme prose works of literary modernism; and its extreme oscillation
between perspectives—from nothing to everything, from insignificance to universality,
from the isola- tion and entrapment of local circumstance on the streets of Lisbon’s
commercial lower city to the universality of potential that exists in the world of anyone’s
imagination. In the first chapter, Pessoa’s guide to the city (Lisbon: What Every Tourist
Should See1), full of panoramas and harmonious details—indeed a virtual “Paradise
Remade”—is contrasted to the nondescript and undistinguishable city of The Book,
whose parts are interchangeable with the infinite. The second chapter of An Unwritten
Novel, “A Show Without a Plot,” applies to the prose art of “static theater,” which Pessoa
learned from Maeterlinck and dramatized in his 1913 experimental play The Mariner. In
both, the stasis of art becomes an equivalent of the immobility of death.

Soares is incongruously self-diminishing; his dreamt greatness rises in proportion to his

increas- ingly ruined and insignificant state—an equilibrium that also applies to his
writing. His “Book” is thus consciously the shattering of a book, for a completed whole
would imply “a perfect harmony, unity, and congruency” that lies beyond his intentions
or his circumstances. For Soares, writing, dreaming, and thinking are far superior to
being or action. While his relationships with “other people” are adversarial, the literary
predecessors whom he imitates—Horace, Shakespeare, and Whitman, among others—
provide the framework for his strikingly original literary productions. In his fourth
chapter, “The Written Voice,” Cousineau analyzes precise narrative techniques that flaunt
the “ruins” of the modern literary monument: dialogue and narration practically disappear,
to be replaced by a “written voice” in a hybrid technique where silent monologue blurs
the dis- tinction between writing and speaking. Yet Soares’s voice achieves a fullness,
completeness, and volubility that are not available to ordinary speech through scraps of
conversation, held breaths, little nonsense phrases, and meaningless affirmations. Real
voices become metaphorical, while sublimated or musical forms of speech produce
enhanced realities, like that of an evening crier, an Arabian chant, a bubbling fountain.
Writing is both transformative and a “metaphysically morbid impulse,” as Soares
proclaims in his encompassing lament and exclamation:

To say! To know how to say! To know how to exist via the written voice and the intellec-
tual image. This is all that matters in life, the rest is men and women, imagined love and
factitious vanities, the wiles of our digestion and forgetfulness, people squirming—like
worms when a rock is lifted—under the huge abstract boulder of the meaningless blue
sky.2

In the final chapter, Cousineau identifies Soares’s archetype as that of the doomed
journey. It departs from the story of Dedalus, who displaces a form of suffering onto a
surrogate, whom he imprisons, before fashioning wings with which to return home.
While The Book’s negative form of salvation lies in the shadow of Dante’s Inferno,
Ulysses’s journey, Shakespeare’s Hamlet, and

book reviews
T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” Cousineau identifies two important
ways in 867 which it departs from the mold: first, the artist is no longer superior, and
creativity and suffering become indistinguishable; secondly, by leaving his major work
unfinished, Pessoa replicates the surrogate’s fate instead of escaping it. Other high points
of Cousineau’s project include com- parisons of Pessoa to Eliot and Borges, a discussion
of Ulysses’s voyage, the Hamlet complex,

and the presence of Shakespeare. Poeticizing of prose is thoroughly described through

forms of amplification, contradiction, and comparison. Cousineau describes how
metaphors transmute Soares’s insignificance into a universal dispersal, allowing him to
find validity in writing outside the self or its circumstances; in the disassembling of
formal normativity in the novel, the in- determinacy of writing and being becomes
Pessoa/Soares’s supreme, crowning achievement.

Notes
1. Fernando Pessoa, Lisbon: What The Tourist Should See (Exeter: Shearsman Books,
2008).

2. Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet, trans. Richard Zenith (London: Penguin
Classics, 2002): fragment 108.