5 - Pessoa's Unmondernity: Ricardo Reis

Summary

According to the story (or at least one of its versions), Ricardo Reis was one of the most important of Pessoa's heteronyms to appear, in June 1914, shortly after his master (actually, the master of them all) Alberto Caeiro (March 1914) and only a few days before the first manifestation of the futurist Álvaro de Campos. (One wonders if there might be any connection in this temporal coincidence between a classical man being born immediately before a futuristic man or, at any rate, one wonders about this strong connection between classicism and futurism.) Reis was a classicist formally trained as a physician, and all his poems incessantly repeat the typical crossing between Epicureanism and Stoicism that Horace's odes, from whom Reis draws so deeply, displayed. In Reis, however, Epicureanism is employed to mask a deep distrust about the self and about the world, and its stoic outcome merges with modernist Pessoa's ‘dor de pensar’ [pain of thinking]. It is this pain of thinking that is re-enacted, time and time again, in Pessoa's poems, via his different heteronymical voices: it is not hard to understand that the futuristic non-conscious machines sung by Campos are the exact counterpart of the trees or the sunflowers found in the poems of Caeiro and Reis himself, as well as of the cats, the reapers or the children in those of Pessoa as orthonym. They all correspond to the contentment felt by the ‘herd’ of those who lived ‘unhistorically’, to whom Nietzsche had referred with disdain in the 1870s.