An Unwritten Novel Fernando Pe Thomas Cousineau

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.She concludes with a remark that implies an intriguing parallel between The Cantos and the posthumous fate of The Book: “the history of the Cantos is full of contingencies that are not foreclosed by Pound’s death but continue through the agency of editors, publishers, heirs and literary executors” (117).Despite the fragmentary form in which he was to leave The Book, however, Pessoa himself frequently stressed the fundamental importance of construction to the value of a literary work.He claimed, for example, that the structure of the Pindaric Ode is not merely a literary convention, but, rather, an axiom of the human spirit and complained that the structured literary forms inherited from Pindar “has had very careless handling at modern hands.” He specifically blamed the romantic movement for this state of affairs because it “has indisciplined the capacity of constructing which, at least, low classicism had.” He likewise has construction in mind when he observed Shakespeare’s “fatal incapacity to visualize organized wholes” and praised Milton, as “the great Master of Building in poetry” (Always Astonished 35).Soares, in his turn, resorts to the metaphor of building when he praises the “structure, which the architect must make out of given, hard, external things, and which we build with rhythm, hesitations, successions, and fluidities” (198).So pleased is he with his own (purely imaginary) feats of organization that he claims:I’ve undertaken every project imaginable.The Iliad composed by me had a structural logic in its organic linking of epodes such as Homer could never have achieved.The meticulous perfection of my unwritten verses makes Virgil’s precision look sloppy and Milton’s power slack.My allegorical satires surpassed all of Swift’s in the symbolic exactitude of their rigorously interconnected particulars.How many Horaces I’ve been! (249)His close attention to aspects of construction both large and small is clearly implied by the three tenets of his doctrine of “sensationism”:The first is that art is supremely construction and that the greatest art is that which is able to visualize and create organized wholes, of which the component parts fit vitally into their places.The second is that, all art being composed of parts, each of those parts must be perfect in itself.The third tenet of sensationism, qua aesthetics, is that every little fragment which builds up the part of the whole should be perfect in itself.(Always Astonished 40)In a remark having obvious pertinence to his own failed project, Pessoa criticizes those symbolist poets who, “being temperamentally incapable of creating either great organized wholes or even (as the Romantics) large eloquent stretches, put their activity into the eggshell (nutshell) of producing beautiful individual lines or very short perfect lyrics.” His overall judgment of their achievement is, quite dismissively, that it “is beautiful indeed, when it is beautiful, but it is dangerous to fall under the impression that that is anything but the lowest part of art” (Always Astonished 40).Echoing Pessoa’s praise of construction, Soares offers a number of tributes to the ideal of a completed work and to the “ambivalent envy, a disdainful admiration, an incoherent mixture of mixed feelings” (82) that its achievement by others arouses in him.He invokes this goal in especially compelling terms when he exclaims: “Ah, to be able to construct a complete Whole, to construct something that would be like a human body, with perfect harmony among all its parts, and with a life, a life of unity and congruency, uniting the scattered traits of its various parts!” (248).He marvels at the complete sentences that he was once able to write in French (188), and, in a mocking allusion to his now-diminished powers of construction, he complains that he’s floating “among the dreams of someone who didn’t know how to complete me” (227) [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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