Pessoa’s Lisbon: Afterlives in Saramago and Tabucchi

Abstract

Few authors in the twentieth century have been as closely connected with their native city as Fernando Pessoa has been with Lisbon. His prose and poetry portray a melancholy city, often interconnected with issues of memory and nostalgia. Pessoa’s practice of crafting full-blown textual personalities, which he called heteronyms, and writing under their names, in different styles and genres, came to inform how Lisbon would serve as a setting for metaphysical inquiry. Two of these heteronyms are especially important to analyze the characteristics of Lisbon in his body of work: Álvaro de Campos, an engineer who studied and worked in the UK, whose poetry reflects a modernist fascination with the impacts of metropolitan life and technological development on human thought and feeling, and Bernardo Soares, a quasi-heteronym, author of The Book of Disquiet, a series of fragments in which the difficulties of having a sense of self in an urban environment are explored. The influence of Pessoa in creating a specific representation of Lisbon can be especially gauged by reading two authors that took upon his work to model their own narratives set in the city: José Saramago’s The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis and Antonio Tabucchi’s Requiem: A Hallucination are particularly apt examples of this. These novels’ postmodern concerns with metaliterariness and the heritage of modernism give insight into how Pessoa’s 1920s–1930s depiction of Lisbon provides fodder for later sensibilities.