Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet. Imagination, Reality and the Pleasure of Masking and Dreaming
Rodica Grigore
Theory in Action January 25, 2011 DOI: 10.3798/tia.1937-0237.11003 (opens in new tab)
Study at a glance
AI-extracted from the abstract| Characteristics | Theoretical or philosophical paper Peer reviewed |
|---|---|
| Topics | Dreaming |
| Citations | 1 |
| Key points | Argues that Pessoa's heteronyms, especially Bernardo Soares in The Book of Disquiet, both express and hide the author, and that Soares exists half in immediate reality and half in the imagined, being only half himself. The essay contends that Soares consciously 'unknows' himself and revels in the 'poetry of the twilight of disillusion'. |
Abstract
The Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa complicates the idea of fictionality, by underscoring the fact that the personality of Soares (the fictional author of The Book of Disquiet) is neither his own nor completely different, and showing how Pessoa was constrained by his own creations and creativity. This essay, "Fernando Pessoa's The Book of Disquiet. Imagination, Reality and the Pleasure of Masking and Dreaming" explores the implications of the heteronyms that the author created in order both to express and hide himself from the external world. Soares, according to Pessoa, soars above his immediate surroundings, and even his corporeal grounding, into the realm of the tangible, the imagination. Dreams, consciousness, imagined realities, make up the existence of the fictional author of The Book of Disquiet, since he himself is a dream, an imagined personality that has taken on an actual reality, an instantiation of a poet's self-consciousness. However, Soares seems to invert the process of ironic Socratic dialectic; he does not need Socrates to strip his life of immediacy and even corporeality in order to get him to breathe ethereal air. Instead, Soares is quite literally half in the immediate, the real, and half in the "mediate", the imagined, since he is only half himself. Soares leaps from imagined sunset to imagined love, asserting a reality he knows he does not have. In this way, he consciously unknows himself, reveling in the "poetry of the twilight of disillusion".
Comparable studies
Other theoretical and historical papers on dreaming, most cited first.
| Study | Year | Design | Participants |
|---|---|---|---|
| Dreaming: a conceptual framework for philosophy of mind and empirical research | 2016 | Theoretical or philosophical paper | |
| Metaphor and hyperassociativity: the imagination mechanisms behind emotion assimilation in sleep and dreaming | 2015 | Theoretical or philosophical paper | |
| Varieties of Lucid Dreaming Experience | 2000 | Theoretical or philosophical paper | |
| Experimental Research on Dreaming: State of the Art and Neuropsychoanalytic Perspectives | 2011 | Theoretical or philosophical paper | |
| The Neurobiology of Consciousness: Lucid Dreaming Wakes Up | 2009 | Theoretical or philosophical paper |