9 - Inverted Aesthetics: Pessoa, Campos and António Botto's Canções

Summary

Like so much of his literary criticism, Pessoa's writings on his friend and younger contemporary António Botto offer less illumination of their ostensive subject than of Pessoa's own preoccupations – both philosophical and personal – and of the artistic objectives, and inherently dramatic logic, of the concept of heteronymity. The exchange published in José Pacheco's review Contemporânea [Contemporary] in 1922, in which the counterposed identities of Pessoa ‘himself’ and of Álvaro de Campos assert diametrically opposed vindications of Botto and his homoerotic Canções [Songs] (1922), is one of the most striking, and still little-studied, instances of the expressly performative aspect of Pessoa's literary project. The letters address a perceived intersecting of ethics and aesthetics in the representation of dissident sexual desire, and illustrate how Pessoa, while consistently eschewing moral impositions on literary creativity, was repeatedly drawn to negotiate the question of whether or not the erotic (and specifically the homoerotic) has a place in art. Read in isolation, Pessoa's and Campos's competing arguments for the exemplary purity and truth of Botto's artistry are, at best, tendentious. When read relationally, however, and with reference to later texts that develop their key arguments, the two defences of the Canções emerge as collapsible into each other, and as a quasi-Nietzschian affirmation of a harmonic tension between Apollonian and Dionysian principles in art. This cryptic and convoluted rhetorical performance admits of the vindication of homoerotic expression that Pessoa ‘himself’ avoids issuing.