Pessoa and personification: The early stories in English

Abstract

This essay focuses on four short stories written in English by Fernando Pessoa in a two-year period (1906-1907), between his definite return to Portugal from South Africa and his reacquisition of Portuguese as a language of literary writing. It argues that personification, or prosopopoeia, is the central figure of Pessoa’s lesser-known fantastic fiction, whereby he explores the metaphorical possibilities of prose while also developing his signature metafictional register. By analyzing the four stories and offering a meditation on their specificities and their different versions of personification, a final hypothesis is formulated as to the relevance of this figure of rhetoric for the creation of characters, or personae, and for Pessoa’s formation as a ‘failed’ or perhaps a successful fiction-writer.

Keywords

• pessoa, fernando
• literature
• short story
• fantastic, the, in literature