Alguém mais belo do que eu: Alberto Caeiro, Leopold Bloom, o Portugal de Pessoa, a Irlanda de Joyce e outras Brancas de Neve

Abstract

In a memorable depiction of himself as a house of mirrors, Fernando Pessoa leaves us in an empty room where the looking glass itself becomes the author’s “single previous reality,” the materialization of his inaccessible core, the only tangible certainty common to all the distorted images that are reflected. As Snow White becomes both a final sublimation of the Evil Queen’s usurping beauty, and the embodiment of an original legitimate beauty, so Pessoa’s “numberless mirrors” and Joyce’s “cracked looking glass” become, along with all “realities,” fragmented reflections of a single original reflecting surface. Speculating around the mirror in “Little Snow White,” I will take Caeiro, Bloom, Pessoa’s Spiritual Empire and Joyce’s Caricature of the Serious World, as personal, national and global congregating devices strategically positioned at the origin of all “reflections” and made out to stand for their absent “previous reality.”

Keywords

• Fernando Pessoa
• James Joyce
• Modernism