Pessoa bancando os beats ... e o crédito dissipado da revolução surrealista

Abstract

This essay examines three texts from the late 1980s that present parodies and recontextuali-zations of Fernando Pessoa: Allen Ginsberg's “Salutations to Fernando Pessoa” (1988), Lawrence Ferlinghetti's Love in the Days of Rage (1988), and Mário Cesariny's O Virgem Negra (1989). The comparison brings the American beat generation closer to Portuguese surrealism-abjectionism, revealing shared themes and literary mechanisms in the treatment of Pessoa's “cadavre exquis.” The three authors juxtapose their own ambitions for poetic-political revolution against the hazardous accumulation of Pessoa's national prestige and the ethnocentric implications of expansive literary projects. To escape the monolithism of cultural co-optation, they weave an intertextual network largely imitative of Pessoa's styles, which short-circuits yet expands as these styles are reconfigured in new contexts of meaning.

Keywords

• pessoa, fernando
• ginsberg, allen
• ferlinghetti, lawrence
• cesariny, mário
• beats (persons)
• surrealism-abjectionism
• geração beat
• surrealismo-abjecionismo