Protean Ulyssisms in Portuguese Modernism: Reconceptualizations of Nationhood and Interactions with Brazil

Abstract

This thesis investigates the spaces of interaction between Portuguese and Brazilian modernists. Relocations and transfigurations of the Ulysses myth are the main threads reconceptualizing the nation in the works analysed. In this respect, ‘Portuguese Ulyssism’ is an axial cultural construct, which this thesis partially absorbs but also departs from, in order to assert mutating literary experiences referring to the Camonean version of the myth in the Renaissance epic Os Lusíadas/The Lusiads. The research, therefore, suggests a Ulyssian voyaging of the mind in Pessoa’s and the brothers Campos’s works. For this, it reveals a dialogue between the modernists of both countries who, outside of their respective national literatures, open a space of interaction beyond the territories of nation-states through texts on exile, national identity, and colonialism. This thesis suggests that Portugal’s Modernism is evidence of the double-writing on the nation of the country’s leading modernists: Fernando Pessoa, Mário de Sá-Carneiro, and António Ferro. The research focuses on Pessoa’s ‘Ulisses’ in Mensagem; his meditations in Os Portugueses/The Portuguese (1928), and the writer’s ‘invisible translator’ in Pessoa’s heteronymic performance. It also analyses correspondence between Portuguese and Brazilian modernists, including between Pessoa and Brazilian Ronald de Carvalho, and an unpublished letter between António Ferro and Brazil’s Oswald de Andrade. The two issues of the Luso-Brazilian quarterly Orpheu, 1915, and Ferro’s contributions to Brazil’s Klaxon, 1922 (celebrating the centenary of Brazil’s political independence from Portugal), are also examined, as are Brazilian Haroldo de Campos’s later poems Galáxias/Galaxies (1984) and his ‘Finismundo a última viagem’/‘World’s end, the last voyage’ (1997), where Haroldo’s intertext engages in dialogue with Pessoa and Camões.