Pessoa and the culture of Mitteleuropa – from the perspective of Eduardo Lourenço

Abstract

One of the singularities of Eduardo Lourenço’s reading of Fernando Pessoa is his careful appreciation of a certain affinity (rarely identified by critics) between aspects of the Portuguese poet’s oeuvre and Central European culture. Rejecting the repeated image of Pessoa as a poet with an almost exclusively English or Anglo-Saxon background (with Shakespeare, Milton and Whitman as his masters), Lourenço emphasises the strange presence of the figure of Louis II of Bavaria, Rei-Virgem, Rei-Sombra, Rei-Sonho in Pessoa’s imagination, namely in the post-symbolist prose poem «Marcha fúnebre para o rei Luís Segundo da Baviera», included in O Livro do Desassossego. Lourenço’s evocation of Louis II of Bavaria (a very personal myth of Fernando Pessoa’s, and almost completely absent from Portuguese culture) constitutes the possibility of elaborating a theory about the relevance of the Central European monarch, a mad king in love with Wagner’s music, who dreamt himself Lohengrin or Parsifal, at the heart of Pessoa’s poetic thought, especially with regard to the notions of ‘non-love’, the ‘call of nothingness’ and the ‘desire for death’, which we analyse here as expressions of a pure and eminently poetic existence, or, in other words, an aesthetic existence, exclusively aesthetic, as defined by Schopenhauer’s pessimistic philosophy. Eduardo Lourenço’s essays «Dois príncipes da melancolia: Fernando Pessoa e Luís da Baviera» and «Fernando Pessoa ou o não-amor» are the main objects of our reading, followed by Thomas Mann’s short story Tristan as a conclusion to our brief study.