Writer without books: a Pessoa’s <i>topos</i> to the present

Abstract

The article explores Fernando Pessoa’s (almost) unpublished condition as to actual published books during his lifetime as an extreme, albeit exemplary, gesture of a sovereign refusal through his literary writing in face of the logic of an increasingly mind-colonizing market. The hypothesis that develops throughout the article is that Fernando Pessoa’s refusal or impossibility – it’s indifferent to the argument whether one or the other – to publish books in special until the end of his life, when he published Mensagem, holds a thought about books. On the other hand, the writer himself also paid – in life – the price for the radicalism of his sovereign gesture. This ambivalence – so characteristically Pessoa’s – is represented by the expression "writer without books". --- DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.22409/gragoata.2017n43a739.

Keywords

• Fernando Pessoa. Escrita. Livros. Soberania. Cultura literária.