From the decadentist Symbolism to Portuguese Orphism: the deep self in Camilo Pessanha and Fernando Pessoa

Abstract

The peculiar way in which several literary trends in Portugal are articulated simultaneously resulted in a diverse meaning of these movements, given the intricate landscapes in which artistic practices articulate forms of the sayable, the sensible and the feasible in a moment of boiling of political institutions, of the multiplication of imaginary-imaginable worlds and of ideological and cultural clashes on European soil. Our thesis, following a reversible and genealogically inspired reading of the movements, begins with the assumption that Portuguese Orphism, despite its innovations compared to previous movements, preserved confluences of decadent symbolism, making it possible to identify some of these elements, mainly, in the case of this essay, in the poetic materialization of a deep self, both in the work of Camilo Pessanha and Fernando Pessoa. Our research is mainly bibliographic and analytical in nature. We start from the contextualization of decadent symbolist and Orphist tendencies with Moisés (2004) and Balakian (2000); we sought some similarities between the poets in Rubim (2023) and Lourenço (1974); Finally, we analyzed our main objects, the poems “Porque o melhor, Enfim”, by Pessanha (1920) and “Às vezes medito”, by Álvaro de Campos, heteronym of Pessoa (1928) paying attention to Bergson's contribution (1988) in distinction between superficial self and deep self. Our reading aims to demonstrate how these concepts play a central role in understanding some poetic and formal impasses perceived in both poets.