O hiper-autor

UID/ELT/00657/2013Reading once more, besides other critical texts, some excerpts of the letters written by Fernando Pessoa and sent to Adolfo Casais Monteiro, on January 13 and January 20 of 1935, this paper tries to reconstruct Pessoa’s idea of authorship as an idea deeply connected to the concept of genius and, therefore, to a superior order where writing and publishing always obey to historical and transcendental designs. As “author of authors”, creator of the heteronyms, this hyper-author that Pessoa tried to be is not the outcome of a critique or of the destruction of the modern idea of author, but indeed the effect of its hyperbolic exacerbation. This idea is consistent with a fragment written in English (probably, in 1913) where Pessoa sustained that art (mainly, literary art) “is self-expression striving to be absolute”. In the end, a remark is made on the difficulties of Pessoa’s fight for the status of European “supreme poet”, mainly because it hardly can be said that there was in the 20th century any European culture for which such status still made any sense at all.publishersversionpublishe