The Pessoa Syndrome

Katia Mitova

Abstract
Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935), the national modernist poet of Portugal, is famous
for creating numerous authorial personae, which he called ‘heteronyms.’1 These
heteronyms wrote poetry, poetic prose, philosophical essays, literary theory and
criticism, and even crossword puzzles. While indulging in this creative state of
constant switching between one heteronym and another, Pessoa sometimes felt he
had reached the bottom of depression. He believed that his ‘tendency toward
depersonalisation and stimulation’2 was caused by ‘a deep-seated form of hysteria,
[or] pretended communication with diverse spirits,’3 but that his ‘insanity [was]
made sane by dilution in the abstract, like a poison converted into a medicine by
mixture.’4 This chapter examines Pessoa’s interactive arrangement of multiple
creative personalities generated spontaneously in the chaotic domain of the psyche.
By allowing his heteronyms and their works to emerge organically from his
personal experiences, Pessoa cultivated a positive attitude toward his own
multiplicity, nobodiness, and betweenness, which comprise the creative condition
that we term Pessoa Syndrome.
The chapter focuses exclusively on the madness of texts created by male
writers. The legacies of Homer, Plato, Shakespeare, Melville, and Kierkegaard are
of special interest in the context of this volume because they counter the
stereotypical expectations for a clear-cut masculine identity, consistency, and
rationality. The Pessoa Syndrome is briefly explored in several classical works as,
firstly, the artist’s ability to entertain incongruent subjective perspectives and to
make creative use of this plurality, and secondly, the artist’s perspective on the
complex relationship between reality and fiction. Finally, Kierkegaard’s solution to
the potential conflict between the artist’s aesthetic and ethical concerns is
discussed in some detail.

Key Words: Creativity, depersonalisation, dissociation, fiction, impersonation,

Kierkegaard, madness of the text, Pessoa, plurality.

*****

1. The Condition of Nobodiness

Conventionally, the author is understood to be a real person who signs his
published works and, thanks to the laws that protect intellectual property, benefits
from their multiplication and distribution. However, the creative relationship
between the work and its maker is more complex. The work happens between the
authorial persona and the author’s person. The persona creates by using—
selectively and imaginatively—the experiences of the person. In this triangular
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relationship, the author is more than the authorial persona responsible for a
particular work, albeit less than the entire person of the author.5
An artist’s awareness of this peculiar betweenness of the creative process is
often accompanied by a conspicuous sense of nobodiness. Homer’s Odysseus, the
earliest Nobody, literally calls himself ‘noman’6 in the Cyclops episode of the
Odyssey and later returns to Ithaca disguised as a beggar—a nobody. Within the
epic, Odysseus constructs several identities by telling his half-false, half-true
Cretan stories.7 Unlike the warrior Odysseus of the Iliad,8 the Odysseus of the
Odyssey, mostly a storyteller, vanishes between his supposed actual experiences
and their narrative metamorphoses. Importantly, Odysseus’ nobodiness is
perceived as an adaptive advantage rather than a mental or moral flaw or an
aesthetic insufficiency of Homer’s epic.
The first archetypal female storyteller of this kind appears to be Scheherazade,9
whose multiplicity and fluidity as a storyteller turn out to be lifesaving. An entire
corpus of Indian, Arabic, Persian, Egyptian, and Mesopotamian folk stories is
ascribed to a single female storyteller. The stories are so captivating that the
storyteller becomes as desirable as the stories themselves, or, metaphorically,
becomes her own stories. Chaucer’s Wife of Bath10 resembles Odysseus even more
closely because she turns her own experiences into stories. As Nazan Yildiz points
out, by engaging in a quest for self-definition, the Wife of Bath becomes a
madwoman, or a woman without clear identity in the eyes of the church or the
male.11 Indeed, if a woman’s identity depends on the identity of the man with
whom she is associated, a woman who has had five husbands has five stories and
five identities and, as a result, becomes a Nobody. We may add that it is precisely
being a Nobody that allows her to tell her Prologue story and to add to it another
story that confirms not only the nobodiness of the storyteller, but woman’s creative
multiplicity in general. The Wife of Bath appears to propose that although men
could experience women’s multiplicity in one individual woman, women need
several different men (in this case, five husbands) to experience men’s multiplicity;
or, to elaborate even further, just one man who, by virtue of being an artist,
possesses the kind of multiplicity that is characteristic of women.
Keats writes about the tendency of poets to annihilate their own identities by
the chameleon-like absorption of other, more ‘poetic’ identities.12 Emily Dickinson
delights in the meeting of another Nobody: ‘I’m Nobody! Who are you? / Are
You—Nobody—Too?’13 Walt Whitman asks—and answers—with self-assurance,
‘Do I contradict myself? / Very well then I contradict myself, / (I am large, I
contain multitudes.)’14 Nietzsche describes inspiration as an involuntary experience
of absoluteness and freedom, in which the writer’s self disappears.15 Joyce’s
character Stephen Dedalus proposes that through the creative process the
personality of the artist ‘refines itself out of existence.’16 T. S. Eliot sees poetry as
‘an escape from personality.’17 Faulkner wishes for a ‘markless’ life that could be
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summari in one sentence, ‘He made his books and died.’18 Jorge Luis Borges
fantasises about Shakespeare speaking to God:

I who have been so many men in vain want to be one, to be

myself. God’s voice answered him out of a whirlwind: I too am
not I; I dreamed the world as you, Shakespeare, dreamed your
own work, and among the forms of my own dream are you, who
like me are many, yet no one [Italics in the original].19

Czeslaw Milosz’s memorable line, ‘I am no more than a secretary of the

invisible world,’20 developed by J. M. Coetzee in his novel, Elizabeth Costello,21
expresses the artist’s attempt at moral neutrality. Elizabeth Costello, who appears
to be Coetzee’s mouthpiece, declares: ‘That is my calling: dictation secretary. It is
not for me to interrogate, to judge what is given me.’ A fervid statement by Joyce
Carol Oates summarises the many facets of this collage of brief quotes on a
writer’s nobodiness:

While writing exists, writers do not—as all writers know . . . No

one wants to believe this obvious truth: the artist can inhabit any
individual, for the individual is irrelevant to art. (And what is
art? A firestorm rushing through Time, arising from no visible
source and conforming to no principles of logic or causality)
[emphases in the original].22

Writers’ nobodiness, manifested as a contradictory, fluid, or missing self, is

not limited to the duration of the writing process. Depending on the vehemence of
their engagement in that process, writers may remain in a state of nobodiness for
longer periods of time outside the writing process. For incessant writers like
Fernando Pessoa, nobodiness may become the primary mode of existence.

2. The Case of Fernando Pessoa

Pessoa, whose surname means person in Portuguese, was born in Lisbon and
died there in 1935, at the age of 47. From ages seven to seventeen, he lived in
Durban, South Africa, where his stepfather was the Portuguese Consul. English
was the language of Fernando’s education there, and it became—for a long time—
the language of his literary ambitions. Once back in Lisbon, Pessoa almost never
left his city. He had one romantic relationship, but remained unmarried and always
lived with one relative or another. He earned his living as a part-time translator of
business documents into English; spending most of his time in bars and cafés
brought him a circle of acquaintances but no intimate friends.23
Pessoa’s legacy is a trunk containing more than 25,000 documents, signed by
about 75 different names that suggest different writing personae. Among the 17
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more distinct ‘heteronyms,’ as Pessoa called his impersonations, were the poets
Alberto Caeiro, Ricardo Reis, and Álvaro de Campos. Semi-heteronym Bernardo
Soares wrote prose intended for The Book of Disquiet. Alexander Search wrote
poetry in English. Orthonym Fernando Pessoa, or Pessoa as himself, wrote poetry
and prose in Portuguese and English. The most prominent heteronyms had
biographies and horoscopes. Pessoa explains:

A pseudonymic work is, except for the name with which it is

signed, the work of an author writing as himself; a heteronymic
work is by an author writing outside his own personality: it is the
work of complete individuality made up by him, just as the
utterances of some character in a drama would be.24

Throughout his life, Pessoa appears to have followed the ‘rules’ put together by his
early English-writing heteronym, Alexander Search:

1. Make as few confidences as possible. Better make none, but if

you make any, make false or indistinct ones. . . .
2. Dream as little as possible, except where the direct purpose of
the dream is a poem or a literary work. . . .
9. Organize your life like a literary work, putting as much unity
into it as possible.25

In The Book of Disquiet, prose-writing heteronym Bernardo Soares adds

another rule to this manifesto of self-sufficiency: ‘Enlarge your personality without
including anything from the outside—asking nothing from other people and
imposing nothing on other people, but being other people when you have need of
others.’26 The leitmotif of Soares’ reflections throughout The Book of Disquiet is
not-acting, indeed, not-living outside of the imagination.
Pessoa’s writing, published and unpublished, together with his life, can be
considered a sui generis literary work that bears certain characteristics of poetic
drama, as Pessoa himself stated.27 This is a minimalist poetic drama, unfinished
and fragmentary, strikingly aware of its own fictionality. It exemplifies the
composite, contradictory, fluid, missing self of the artist—not a fictional character,
not a metaphor, but a living Nobody. However, because Fernando Pessoa himself
was a real denizen of Lisbon and not a composite creation, and because he was also
a profoundly self-aware artist, we are presented with a unique opportunity to
examine the writer’s creative condition characterised by multiplicity, nobodiness,
and betweenness.

3. Sane Insanity?
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Pessoa described his condition as ‘a relentless, organic tendency toward
depersonalisation and simulation.’28 He believed this tendency was caused by ‘a
deep-seated form of hysteria,’ or ‘hysterical neurasthenia’29 that entailed
‘pretended communication with diverse spirits’30 as well as ‘insanity made sane by
dilution in the abstract, like a poison converted into a medicine by mixture.’31 The
latter also happened to be Pessoa’s definition of genius.32
In 1908, when Pessoa was only twenty, his heteronym Alexander Search
wrote: ‘One of my mental complications—horrible beyond words—is a fear of
insanity, which itself is insanity.’33 At about the same time, heteronym Charles
Robert Anon complained:

[T]hey say I wish to be extraordinary. They neglect to analyse

the wish to be extraordinary. They cannot comprehend that
between being and wishing to be extraordinary there is but the
difference of consciousness being added to the second. It is the
same case as that of myself playing with tin soldiers at seven and
at fourteen years; in one [moment] they were things, in the other
things and playthings at the same time; yet the impulse to play
with them remained, and that was the real, fundamental
psychical state.34

This ability to engross oneself in play as a child while at the same time observing
oneself from outside seems critical for any creative endeavour. The self-awareness
of the authorial persona relieves the author’s playing person from the burden of
self-observation, so that the person could engage fully in the creative process. Thus
the extraordinariness becomes bearable because it is divided.
Pessoa seems to have approached his own suffering the way his heteronym
Charles Robert Anon approached his extraordinariness. In a real letter to his real
friend, Mário de Sá-Carneiro, Pessoa, writing as himself, describes his present state
as ‘the bottom of a bottomless depression,’ and ‘one of those days in which I never
had a future [underlined in the original].’35 Yet there are passages in this letter that
make the complaint ambiguous:

What I’m feeling isn’t true madness, but madness no doubt

results in a similar abandon to the very causes of one’s suffering,
a shrewd delight in the soul’s lurches and jolts.36

Sá-Carneiro committed suicide; the depressed Pessoa outlived him by almost

two decades. Obviously, Pessoa managed to dilute his insanity (or fear of insanity),
to convert the poison into a potion, a pharmakon. But what was the poison, what
was the thinner, and how did Pessoa fight the fire of madness with the fire of
creativity?
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It can be argued that what Pessoa experienced was not a mental disorder per se
but a state close to his idea of madness, an awareness of being ‘extraordinary’ and
a clear wish to be so despite the loneliness this special status entailed. He was
captivated by the intensity of madness but balanced successfully at its edge,
concurrently a participant in this ‘unstageable tragedy’37 and its observer. It seems
that the pharmakon was the saudade,38 a feeling of inexplicable yearning and
solitude that he encountered both as a man and as a man of letters.
Pessoa first experienced deep loneliness at the age of five when his father and
brother died within less than a year of each other. He coped with the trauma by
inventing an epistolary friend:

I can remember what I believe was my first heteronym, or rather,

my first nonexistent acquaintance—a certain Chevalier de Pas—
through whom I wrote letters to myself when I was six years old,
and whose not entirely hazy figure still has a claim on the part of
my affections that borders on nostalgia. I have a less vivid
memory of another figure . . . who was a kind of rival to the
Chevalier de Pas. Such things occur to all children?
Undoubtedly—or perhaps. But I lived them so intensely that I
live them still; their memory is so strong that I have to remind
myself that they weren’t real.39

Pessoa’s literary isolation, probably a result of his aspirations to be much more

than a Portuguese modernist and avant-garde writer, seems to have had a similar
effect on him. He prophesied the coming of a new literary master, a ‘Supra-
Camões,’40 who would relegate great old Camões to a secondary status: ‘We are
not Portuguese writing for Portuguese . . . We are Portuguese writing for Europe,
for all civilisation.’41 And who were these ‘we’? Perhaps, in the beginning, Pessoa
had in mind a movement of poets and artists who would embrace his idea of a new
creative approach called sensacionismo, or sensationism, descending from French
symbolism, Portuguese transcendentalist pantheism, and the spirit of futurism.42
With time, however, he must have realised that no one else was eager to venture on
this path. It was he, Fernando Pessoa, who was destined to make up for—or to
make up—a whole literary movement and create a new Portuguese art in which, as
heteronym Álvaro de Campos put it, ‘Europe would see and recognise itself
without recognizing the mirror.’43 Pessoa was uniquely predisposed to fulfil that
formidable task:

This tendency to create around me another world . . . began in

me as a young adult, when a witty remark that was completely
out of keeping with who I am or think I am would sometimes
and for some unknown reason occur to me, and I would
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immediately, spontaneously say it as if it came from some friend
of mine whose name I would invent, along with biographical
details, and whose figure—physiognomy, stature, dress and
gestures—I would immediately see before me.44

Besides revealing the spontaneous nature of the heteronyms’ creation, this

recollection is a testimony to the peculiar orderliness of Pessoa’s creative mind. It
may seem paradoxical that ‘the man who never was’45 had such a strong sense of
his personality that he would find certain thoughts incompatible with his own
pessôa, or person. This paradox, however, is only apparent. Pessoa possessed a
common sense of consistency of thought and plausibility of character. Unlike
ordinary people, however, he did not reject whatever occurred to him in
contradiction to his prevailing vision of himself. Instead of unconsciously reducing
his consciousness in order to make it cohesive, he reordered it to create room for
different kinds of minds and talents. Thus, Pessoa did not lose his identity—he
developed an identity that consisted of a number of personalities, or a multiple
identity of sorts.
Multiple identity may sound like a contradiction in terms because, traditionally,
identity is associated with wholeness and consistency as well as with oneness and
unity. Dissociative identity is not considered to be identity in the strict sense of the
word but, rather, lack of stable identity, a dysfunctional mental condition.
Individuals with dissociative identity disorder could become aware of their
alternative personalities by keeping a journal. To such individuals, however,
writing would be a tool, a kind of memory support. Pessoa, conversely, became an
individual with multiple personalities through his heteronymic writing. Therefore,
a suitable name for Pessoa’s condition would be Multiple Personality Order,46 or a
self-aware depersonalization.

4. Pessoa’s Multiple Personality Order

Pessoa seems to have been thrilled by this existence on the edge of madness,
smoothened by the joys of creativity—and of wine, which eventually led him to
cirrhosis and death.47 As an artist, he did not try to curb his imagination. His
aesthetic system did not—and could not, by definition—include an opposition
between reality and fiction. He even managed to turn the real Fernando Pessoa into
a kind of heteronym, thus creating the illusion of an independent, self-sufficient,
self-organizing world without a mastermind.
How did the physical man, Fernando António Nogueira de Seabra Pessoa,
handle his condition so successfully without controlling it? Such a question makes
sense only if we assume that mental equilibrium is more or less synonymous with
self-control and that a lack of such control leads to chaos. Self-control, however, is
not an absolute good, nor is chaos merely disarray and confusion. At the heart of
the urge to control lies a vision of perfection, which is reductionist by nature as the
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perfect must be complete and changeless. Thus, metaphorically, perfection is
ultimate loneliness. Pessoa would indeed have had a severe form of dissociative
disorder if he had tried to control the creation and existence of his heteronyms.
Instead, he let them emerge, in an organic way, from the undefined realm of his
constant, creative betweenness. He let his heteronyms simply be, simultaneously.
Or, in Pessoa’s vocabulary, with time some heteronyms attracted more and more
‘witty remarks’ that seemed to be out of character for Pessoa himself; other
heteronyms remained sketchier. Like life and unlike a work of fiction, the world
Pessoa created had no beginning and no closure. In this world, death had no power
to stop a well-developed heteronym from writing—Alberto Caeiro, for example,
wrote poems for a decade after his demise at the age of 26.
Pessoa’s specific form of Multiple Personality Order could thus be defined as
an interactive arrangement of multiple creative personalities generated
spontaneously in the chaotic domain of the psyche, in response to the limitations of
his self-imposed monadic existence.
To attain the self-confidence necessary for social realization, most people
focus only on experiences and thoughts that accord with who they want to be.
Thoughts, emotions, and other experiences that do not fit are remembered in a
repressed or modified form. By contrast, impersonation relies on the multiple
dimensions of an artist’s personal experience, no matter how Escheresque it may
seem. Consequently, artists might develop the ability to live with incongruent
subjective perspectives in order to preserve experiences in their original, fluid
form, without judging or sorting them.
Pessoa’s Multiple Personality Order adds an interesting dimension to the
concept of the hysteric’s knowledge production, explored by Eleanor Bowen and
Laura Gonzalez in their chapter on hysteria.48 The authors discuss the expression of
the hysteric’s insight – a product of dangerous knowledge, which is lost and yet
noticed, or noticed as lost, by the spectator. Following Gérard Wajcman’s
elucidation of Lacan, to which Bowen and Gonzalez refer, we could view Pessoa’s
Multiple Personality Order as a discursive machine consisting of four interacting
elements – truth, agent, other, and production. Unlike the case of a typical hysteric,
however, Pessoa’s ‘deep-seated hysteria’ finds its way of expressing insight not
through his physical body but through creating multiple agents, or multiplication of
his non-corporeal writing personae. As these agents interact with one another, each
of them plays the double role of agent and other. External observers might still
perceive the knowledge production as lost, but they would be convinced that the
insight is available internally, to the privileged ‘diverse spirits’ between whom the
‘pretended communication’ is happening. In other words, if the hysteric is capable
of creative multiplication of her own agency, her truth(s) would be expressed
within the betweenness of her creativity and not through the body; she would be
able to turn the poison into a potion.
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Undoubtedly, there is a price to be paid for containing multitudes—mental
breakdown, depression, and suicide mark the lives of numerous artists.49 But the
magnificent achievements resulting from artists’ ability to depersonalise and
impersonate—an ability most of us had in childhood and blocked later in order to
grow up—should make us reconsider the understanding of mental wellness as a
clear-cut self-identity. Finding oneself, especially finding oneself too early, might
have a negative impact on one’s creativity.

5. The Pessoa Syndrome beyond Pessoa

As shown at the beginning of this chapter, nobodiness as a creative condition is
by no means unique to Fernando Pessoa. Betweenness, on the other hand, although
easily detectable in works with metafictional traits, seems to be only implicitly
present in literature that produces the illusion of a slice of life. Leo Tolstoy’s Anna
Karenina, for example, the paragon of psychological realism in fiction, exemplifies
a subtle version of betweenness in the feedback between quite characters and
events in its elaborate story.50 Notably, such feedback can be detected between two
of the novel’s main characters, Anna Karenina and Konstantin Levin. The
trajectories of their lives appear to be parallel before and after their only meeting.51
However, unlike any other characters in the story, and entirely independently from
each other, these two characters experience similar concern with the question of
the meaning of life. Anna’s intense search reaches a dead end—suicide; Levin’s
search, by contrast, leads him to spiritual insight. It can be argued that Anna’s and
Levin’s respective quests for certitude are projections of Tolstoy’s own
metaphysical concerns, of his own inner dividedness, discussed in Confession,52
which he began writing while still working on Anna Karenina. Ultimately, the
novel invites the reader to experience the author’s mental realm that stretched
between two extreme approaches to life’s meaning and happiness.
A manifest example of betweenness is the plot of Shakespeare’s Othello,53
almost entirely driven by the feedback between Othello and Iago. The catastrophe
at the end of the play comes as a result of Iago’s intentional and Othello’s
unwitting misinterpretation and mistranslation. Iago says something ambiguous,
Othello interprets it in accordance with his unconscious predisposition and presents
his translation to Iago, who, in his turn, shrewdly disguises Othello’s mistranslation
and sells it back to him as an original. Now, of course, the Moor believes honest
Iago’s words without recognizing in them his own disguised unwarranted
suspicion; or, he believes Iago because what he says sounds deeply familiar. With
each round, the two recede further and further from the truth. When staged
masterfully, the play’s plot appears to be building up on its own, to be engendered
here and now, in front of the spectators’ eyes. The bard is, paradoxically, both
absent and present, his creative energy divided between the two main characters.
Recognising the Pessoa Syndrome in the legacy of other artists may open new
avenues for critical interpretation that would take into account the fact that all
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complex products of human imagination contain traces of their own coming into
existence. Acknowledging the nobodiness and betweenness involved in the
creative process, along with any traits of Multiple Personality Order in a writer’s
oeuvre, liberates the critic from the demands of the perfectly coherent
interpretation, which, in any case, is never possible when polyphonic art is
discussed. Acknowledging the Pessoa Syndrome in the works of visionary artists54
such as Homer, Plato, Dante, Shakespeare, Kierkegaard, Melville, Kafka,
Nabokov, Borges, and Philip Roth may lead to more adequate readings of their
multidimensional texts.55 It has been observed that, even though particular
passages of their writings seem unambiguous, such writers’ legacy as a whole
remains to some extent impervious to the analytical eye. Their texts are ‘mad’ in
the sense proposed by Shoshana Felman, who defines literature as ‘that which
suspends the answer to the question of knowing whether the madness literature
speaks of is literal or figurative.’56 The more a text resists interpretation—the more
‘mad’ it is, and the more literary.57
Let us now briefly attempt to dwell in the possibilities58 of a non-reductionist
approach to several classical works that resist interpretation. The madness of the
texts discussed below is of special interest in the context of this volume because
these works, all composed by male artists, appear to counter the stereotypical
expectations for a clear-cut masculine identity, consistency, and rationality; their
complexity is androgynous.

a. Homer
It is not possible to clearly define the meaning and role of fate (moira) in the
story of the Iliad.59 On the one hand, each individual’s fate is a given and cannot be
changed. Fate is one’s not-yet-revealed identity from birth; fate is the length of
one’s life. Therefore, even the all-powerful Olympian gods cannot save a mortal’s
life if it is this person’s time to die. Despite this premise, in Book XVI of the Iliad,
Zeus ponders—as if this were a real option—whether he should save the life of his
beloved son, Sarpedon, or let Patroclus kill him in fulfilment of his fate.60 Even
more tellingly, in Book IX, Achilles mentions that he has two fates and could
actively choose whether to fight at Troy and die as a great hero or to return to his
native Phthia and live a long, peaceful, unheroic life.61
The Odyssey62 presents us with a similarly unsolvable puzzle related to the
character of Penelope, and this time the quandary does not involve the divine. It is
not possible to tell precisely when Penelope recognises her long-missing husband
in the beggar who has come to her with tidings of Odysseus’ return. Almost
everything she tells the stranger can be interpreted as suggestive of cunning
awareness and, at the same time, of naïve, chaste cluelessness. In fact, from the
beginning to the end of the Odyssey, Penelope’s behaviour is ambiguous: it is not
clear whether she wants to remarry or is being forced to do so by custom, whether
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she has summoned the suitors, or if they have been camping at her court for three
years out of mere insolence.
Odysseus tells several stories, some of which are presented explicitly as
inventions; the story he tells to the Phaeacians (Books IX–XII) is introduced as
true but not confirmed by any witnesses. Thus, unless we commit to dwelling in
the undefined space between truth and untruth, we would misconstrue Odysseus’
story as large-scale yarn-spinning or as a survivor’s trick with no power to move us
emotionally. Likewise, the character of Penelope, if misconstrued in opposites
(faithful or unfaithful, chaste or promiscuous, naïve or cunning), would lose its
magical appeal. Even Achilles, who becomes a revenge-seeking monomaniac and
an insentient killing machine after the death of his beloved friend, Patroclus, has a
parallel identity, poetic and peaceful, revealed when he withdraws from the battle
and in his relationship with the captive Trojan woman, Briseis. Were it not for the
energy produced through the feedback between the multiple personalities of
Odysseus, Penelope, or Achilles, the Homeric epics would be just facts of literary
history and not living works of literature, constantly rejuvenated through new
translations.
Both the Iliad and the Odyssey exhibit an Escheresque madness that goes hand
in hand with the two epics’ extraordinary poetic richness. It is possible to expound
on this madness of the Homeric texts as a series of discrepancies resulting from the
oral origin of the stories and their uncertain—likely collective—authorship. Most
importantly, however, hundreds of generations were enticed by these stories
precisely because of their inherent intricacies.

b. William Shakespeare
The abundance of ideas, motifs, themes, and characters in Shakespeare’s
works, along with scarce biographical information, has fuelled hypotheses of
multiple or alternative authorship of his oeuvre. Even though none of these
speculations have been acknowledged as convincing, some interpreters of
Shakespeare appear to be uncomfortable with what they perceive to be
contradictions or discrepancies in his plays. Rather than accepting and appreciating
the madness intrinsic to the writing of a genius, they try to resolve the
contradictions by imposing a reductionist logic onto tragedies such as King Lear or
Othello, whose power is precisely in capturing the irrational and allowing it to
speak in its own poetic idiom.
One classical example of lack of appreciation for the madness of Shakespeare’s
works is Leo Tolstoy’s essay, ‘On Shakespeare and the Drama,’63 whose jarring
criticism focuses on King Lear and Othello.64 Tolstoy perceived the behaviour of
Shakespeare’s characters as unnatural and exaggerated. ‘Without the sense of
measure,’ Tolstoy writes, ‘there never was nor can be an artist . . . . Shakespeare
might have been whatever you like, but he was not an artist.’65 When speaking of
measure, Tolstoy seems to have in mind plausibility, or the ability of art to appear
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truthful to life. By denying the aesthetic right to existence of the mad world in King
Lear, Tolstoy denies the possibility that madness of this kind exists in life.
Ironically, Tolstoy’s vehement reaction to this particular Shakespearean play could
also be explained with his fear of the deep insight of King Lear. As George Orwell
points out, there is symmetry between these two ‘unaccommodated men,’ Lear and
Tolstoy; the ending of Tolstoy’s life has in it ‘a sort of phantom reminiscence of
Lear.’66
By contrast, the political theorist Harry V. Jaffa ‘reasonably and profitably
[seeks] lessons in political wisdom in the works of our greatest poet.’67 He
speculates that Lear, as intended by Shakespeare, had a clear, thoughtful, detailed,
and perhaps too clever political plan with a goal appropriate for a good statesman:
to ensure the stability of the kingdom following his succession. This interpretation
may seem likable for ethical reasons, against the vision of Lear as a senile, or just
irrational, old man. Seen in such a light, Lear appears nobler and, therefore, his
failure seems, somehow, more truly tragic. Although there is room for the suffering
of the king’s madness in this reasoned reading of King Lear, there is no room in it
for the madness of the text as a whole. Granted that Shakespeare’s ambiguity is
difficult to preserve and express on stage (and, therefore, directors inevitably face
difficult choices), undermining that ambiguity in the name of a linear cause-and-
effect reading of the play—disregarding the presence of the Pessoa Syndrome in
it—is bound to diminish the aesthetic experience of the performance. Successful
theatrical renderings of King Lear tend to take into account not only Lear’s
madness but the madness of the play—the madness that stays with the spectators
after the show. Tellingly, Charles Marovitz, in the account of his and Peter Brook’s
aims in their production of King Lear, insists that the audience is meant to leave
the theatre ‘shaken and not assured.’68

c. Herman Melville
Another remarkable case to consider is Melville’s Moby-Dick,69 which can be
read as a work of implicit metafiction, or a record of its own becoming a whale of a
novel. The novel’s madness is often ignored, underappreciated, or safely limited to
mad characters such as Ahab and Pip. The narrative, however, appears to have its
own special form of madness, a double vision of sorts, not unlike the vision whales
possess, as suggested in Chapter 74.
The reader sees the world of the novel as if with two eyes struggling to focus
simultaneously on two different objects. Besides the narrative’s two main lines—
one comprising the novel’s plot, the other descriptive-reflective—Moby-Dick
contains numerous doubles of characters and events.70 Inexplicably, Ahab and
Ishmael begin to affect each other, although they never appear to converse. Ishmael
knows what is going on in Ahab’s head, as if he were able to overhear his inner
musings; in a sense, Ishmael, the storyteller, becomes Ahab, whose reflectiveness,
in turn, as well as his interest in the metaphysical (for example, Chapter 70, ‘The
 Katia Mitova 165
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Sphynx,’ in which he addresses the whale’s head) resembles Ishmael’s meditations
from the beginning of the novel.
In addition to this dividedness in the novel’s structure, its idiom, too, has a
double origin. The language and imagery of the Bible meet the language and
imagery of Shakespeare: the two great books of the early settlers give birth to a
mad synthesis of sorts—an American book, whose action is taking place around
the world in search of metaphysical knowledge, exemplified by Ishmael, and
metaphysical revenge, exemplified by Ahab. The ambiguity of Ishmael’s and
Ahab’s quests, the prophesies, the unembarrassed cohabitation of fiction and non-
fiction, and especially the ambivalent symbolic meaning of the White Whale,
interpreted as both divine and demonic, account for the unique, visionary madness
of Melville’s novel.

d. Plato
It has been noticed that the multiple Socratic identities Plato created in his
dialogues—cleverly concealing his own fluid philosophical contentions—do not fit
in one cohesive philosophical doctrine. In other words, Plato is not a Platonist.
Gregory Vlastos suggests that it was Plato’s image of Socrates as a paradigmatic
ironist that effected a change in the ancient connotations of the word eirōneia.71
Socrates is the first eirōn, or ironist, not in the sense of saying one thing while
meaning another, but in the sense of being aware of the discrepancies between
appearance and reality and searching for truth with this juxtaposition in mind.72
Socrates’ quest for truth is an activity that happens between his actual person
and his philosophical persona. Socrates’ actual person (as far as we know it from
Plato73 and Xenophon,74 whose portrayals are not consistent with each other) is a
learned individual, a citizen of Athens engaged in the public life of his city, a
courageous soldier, and a man physically unattractive but ever enticed by beauty.
Socrates as a character in the Platonic dialogues, on the other hand, has many
philosophical personae. Vlastos sketches at least twenty such personae, in pairs of
opposites: Socrates the exclusively moral philosopher vs. Socrates the
metaphysician, epistemologist, philosopher of science, language, religion, and
education; Socrates who has a grandiose metaphysical theory of separately existing
forms and of separable soul, able to learn by recollecting vs. Socrates who has no
such theory; Socrates who has a tripartite model of the soul vs. Socrates who
knows nothing of it; Socrates who has mastered the sciences of his time vs.
Socrates who is not interested in them; Socrates’s populist conception of
philosophy vs. Socrates’s elitist conception of it; Socrates who believes in personal
gods vs. Socrates who believes in some kind of impersonal divine; etc.75
The master-persona of the ignorant Socrates, or his Nobody persona, seems
most prominent. It is detached, curious, tirelessly questioning the status quo. The
principal question of this Socrates can be formulated as ‘What does it mean to be a
human?’ To pursue his quest collaboratively, the divided Socrates needs
166 The Pessoa Syndrome
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interlocutors willing to undergo a similar split and construct their own curious,
unprejudiced philosophical personae. Plato’s dialogue Meno, for instance, can be
read as a record of Socrates’ attempt to provoke such a split in young Meno.76 He
does not succeed, but this is not surprising. The task is particularly difficult
because most people would gladly construct an erudite persona of themselves
rather than an ignorant one. Admitting ignorance is a strange ideal whose
negativity makes positive sense only in the Socratic paradox, ‘I know that I do not
know’; or, put differently, ignorance is our only certain knowledge. Beginner
readers of Plato (my own college students, for example) sometimes perceive this
approach to learning as unusual or just plain crazy. More experienced readers, with
some awareness of the complexity and limitations of human knowledge, however,
are able to construct an ignorant persona best equipped for philosophical search.
Socrates’ ignorant philosophical persona of the Apology77—the gadfly—is well
aware of its superiority over any informed person, Socrates’ actual person
included. At the same time, this persona needs the experience and information that
only an actual person can provide. Hence the self-irony of Socrates’ ignorant
persona and his readiness to converse with anyone who approaches him and to
make use of the other’s experience. The genuine, naïve ignorance of Socrates’
interlocutors seems to be a source of inspiration for his own constructed ignorance.
That is why he is always looking for friends, and, as we learn from Plato’s
dialogue Lysis, ‘would far sooner acquire a friend and companion than all the gold
of Darius, aye, or than Darius himself.’78 By the end of this dialogue, Socrates’s
ignorant philosophical persona has befriended his youngest ignorant interlocutors,
Lysis and Menexenus, boys probably twelve or thirteen years old.
Unlike the two young boys who do not need to construct ignorant personae in
order to participate in Socrates’ search for the truth about friendship, some of
Socrates’ older interlocutors feel humbled, even humiliated. They do not realise
that Socrates’ irony, directed toward them, originates in Socrates’ own inner
division and ironic self-awareness. Socrates’ aim is not to humiliate, but to provoke
a split, similar to his own division between actual person and philosophical
persona, balanced by self-irony. Socrates’ ideal company for a philosophical
inquiry would then be someone who responds to irony with self-irony by
constructing his own ignorant philosophical persona, or a Nobody. This rarely
happens in Plato’s dialogues. The Socratic madness in the dialogues seems to scare
even his close followers, most of whom remain amenable listeners rather than
active interlocutors.
Plato, however, appears to have thought of himself as the only follower of
Socrates capable of understanding his irony as a creative tool. Plato’s oeuvre, along
with that of Kierkegaard, exemplifies the Pessoa Syndrome in philosophical
writing. Socrates’ philosophical personae that emerge from the different Platonic
dialogues seem to be in an intense ironic relationship with Socrates’ actual person,
with each other and with Socrates’ ignorant philosophical persona, as well as with
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some other characters. In Protagoras,79 for instance, it is Protagoras whose
teaching is very much like that of Socrates in Meno, while Socrates’ position on
the question whether virtue can be taught makes him comparable with the same
Meno who becomes a target of Socratic irony. This implies self-irony on Plato’s
part as well. As Plato changes,

the philosophical persona of his Socrates is made to change,

absorbing the writer’s new convictions, arguing for them with
the same zest with which the Socrates of the previous dialogues
had argued for the views the writer has shared with the original
of that figure earlier on.80

Socrates’ philosophical personae can be seen as Plato’s personae.

Consequently, there is little detail in the dialogues about Socrates’ actual person,
and Plato, although a major follower of Socrates,’ is entirely absent as a character
from the Socratic conversations.
The Platonic dialogues do not demonstrate the Socratic split and irony as a
successful method for converting minds to philosophy. The Socratic irony appears
to be working better for the readers of the dialogues than for the characters in them.
However, the dialogues demonstrate how Socrates’ Pessoa Syndrome alarms
characters who desire certainty and believe it can be achieved. As outside
observers, the readers do not feel directly targeted by Socrates’ ironic sting and are
more likely to detect and appreciate his self-irony, or awareness of his own internal
contradiction between appearances and reality. Thus, the ideal audience of the
Platonic dialogues would be the same one that appreciates the works of Homer,
Shakespeare, and Melville in their complexity.

e. The Kierkegaard Syndrome

Søren Kierkegaard, like Plato, wrote in the no man’s land between philosophy,
religion, mythology, poetry, theatre, and storytelling. Moreover, there is a
conspicuous resemblance between Pessoa’s oeuvre and Kierkegaard’s
pseudonymous authorship. Kierkegaard’s major works were published under
pseudonyms with playful names such as Victor Eremita (Either/Or81), Johannes de
Silentio (Fear and Trembling82), Johannes Climacus (Concluding Unscientific
Postscript83), or Anti-Climacus (The Sickness unto Death84). In addition,
Kierkegaard left several works, such as The Point of View for my Work as an
Author, that provide insights about the character of his creative genius.85
A more detailed comparison between the contexts of Pessoa’s and
Kierkegaard’s Multiple Personality Orders reveals striking similarities. Both
struggled with loneliness and melancholy; both decided not to marry—probably
out of fear that the responsibilities and intimacy of married life would distract them
from their calling. Both were sociable but had no close friends. Both were deeply
168 The Pessoa Syndrome
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attached to their native cities, Lisbon and Copenhagen respectively, and rarely
travelled. At the same time, both of them ‘suffered from being a genius in a
provincial town,’ as Kierkegaard put it.86 Pessoa’s self-imposed mission as a writer
was to become a ‘mirror of Europe,’87 while Kierkegaard strove to answer the
question of what it is to be a true Christian in Christendom.
In ‘A First and Last Declaration,’ which ends the Concluding Unscientific
Postscript, Kierkegaard acknowledges his authorship of all the books he published
pseudonymously and then makes the following statement:

My pseudonymity or polynimity . . . has an essential ground in

the character of the production . . . What is written therefore is in
fact mine, but only in so far as I put into the mouth of the
poetically actual individuality whom I produced, his life-view
expressed in audible lines . . . I am impersonal, or am personal
in a second person, a souffleur who has poetically produced the
authors, whose preface in turn is their own production, as are
even their own names. So in the pseudonymous works there is
not a single word which is mine, I have no opinion about these
works except as third person, no knowledge of their meaning
except as a reader, not the remotest private relation to them,
since such a thing is impossible in the case of a doubly reflected
communication . . . So I am in the position of indifference . . .88

The Pessoa Syndrome, which includes deceiving the audience in the way
fiction is meant to deceive, through a tacit agreement with the reader, is easily
recognizable in Kierkegaard’s statement. However, Kierkegaard—as we learn from
his ‘direct communications’89— intended to deceive his readers in a much more
complex and purposeful way. He meant, through the ‘indirect communication’ of
his aesthetic works, to seduce the reader into longing for something beyond the
aesthetic and thus to make his audience read and reflect on his religious writings.
His plan was inspired by Divine Governance.90
Shall we take Kierkegaard at his word and believe that he was sincere and
truthful when discussing the intentionality of his pseudonymous authorship? Or
shall we think of him as the master of irony who is always deceiving—even when
he is confessing his deliberate deceptions? A journal note about On My Activity as
a Writer makes it clear that, in the beginning, Kierkegaard followed his creative
intuition rather than a plan:

Even if I had known, or been able to survey, my whole

authorship in advance in the most minute detail, what I say here
about my activity as an author should never have been said in
the beginning. For it would then have shifted the point of view,
 Katia Mitova 169
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and the reading public would have interested itself in it out of
curiosity, to see whether I was actually doing what I said or
making good my predictions.91

The structure of Kierkegard’s pseudonymous authorship—unplanned but

divinely governed, as Kierkegaard experienced it—emerges in the process of its
own creation in a way that can be called organic. The switching from one writing
persona to another, and especially the shifts between ‘indirect’ and ‘direct’
communication, seem to have nourished Kierkegaard’s own tendency toward
depersonalization and simulation. By nurturing this tendency, he gave himself the
ethical permission to produce work of great seductive power, of which Either/Or is
perhaps most representative. Through works of ‘indirect’ communication, the
reader’s desire for the pleasures of beauty is meant to be fully satisfied. When this
happens, the reader must realise something is missing and seek it outside the
aesthetic experience—in the realm of the ethical or, ultimately, in the realm of the
true religious experience. Perhaps this happened for some readers of Kierkegaard
but, apparently, his audiences continue to delight in his aesthetic works and to
dwell on their complexity rather than move on—and up—to the Upbuilding
Discourses92 that Kierkegaard kept publishing, under his own name, concurrently
with his aesthetic works.

6. Concluding Remarks on Imagination and Madness

Pessoa and Kierkegaard attain a variety of different creative possibilities
through multiple writing personae. Pessoa’s writing, which remains in a perpetual
state of becoming, with no beginning or end, and gives the impression of a self-
organising chaos, draws the reader’s attention to the nature of the creative process.
At the aesthetic level, the movement is horizontal. By contrast, in Kierkegaard’s
pseudonymous authorship, the process of becoming is vertically oriented. His
aesthetic works are expected to point up, towards his religious works. Therefore, if
we can talk of a Kierkegaard Syndrome, it should be defined as a tendency toward
depersonalization and simulation, motivated by a purpose beyond the aesthetic—in
this particular case, a plea for true faith, or for ‘absolute relation to the absolute.’93
In short, it can be said that Kierkegaard had the Pessoa Syndrome but Pessoa did
not have the Kierkegaard Syndrome. Likewise, Homer, Shakespeare, and Melville
had the Pessoa Syndrome; Plato and Tolstoy, who attempted to put the aesthetic in
service of the ethical, had both the Pessoa Syndrome and the Kierkegaard
Syndrome.
Questions about the relationships between the aesthetic and the ethical, beauty
and truth, and fiction and reality are as old as human attempts to make sense of art
as a realm distinct from life. Most characteristically, Plato, in his anti-utopian
dialogue, The Republic, has Socrates propose that the poets have no place in any
ideally constructed city where everything must be just and healthy. 94 Poets’ power
170 The Pessoa Syndrome
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to stir the minds of the citizens by appealing to their imagination is seen as
impossible to control by the power of well-meaning politicians, whose noble aim is
to enforce justice. Homer, in particular, is singled out as the main culprit in
misrepresenting the nature of the divine through the poetic images of the Olympian
gods—all too anthropomorphic and thus imperfect. This, according to the Socrates
of The Republic, lessens the population’s respect for the divine and affects society
in a twofold way: first, even the best laws will not be obeyed without divine
authority behind them; and, second, people would be inclined to imitate the
imperfections of the poetic gods.
In Phaedrus, another Platonic dialogue written about the same time as The
Republic, Socrates talks about the madness (mania) of the poets in positive terms:

Third comes the kind of madness that is possessed by the Muses,

which takes a tender virgin soul and awakens it to a Bacchic
frenzy of songs and poetry that glorifies the achievements of the
past and teaches them to future generations. If anyone comes to
the gates of poetry and expects to become an adequate poet by
acquiring expert knowledge of the subject without the Muses’
madness, he will fail, and his self-controlled verses will be
eclipsed by the poetry of men who have been driven out of their
minds.95

It appears that Plato entertained the idea that, as far as art is concerned,
madness is necessary (or, in the vocabulary of this chapter, depersonalization is a
condition for simulation). Complex, deeply human, impactful art is impossible
without the Pessoa Syndrome. On the other hand, because of its inherent
nobodiness and betweenness, art is by nature uncontrollable. Consequently,
Multiple Personality Orders happen in the individual artist’s imagination, and are
recorded in their works, but are not possible in real life, with its materiality and
with time that runs indifferently from past to future. Hence, we either consent
never to live in a perfectly organised, perfectly just society or we must purge life
from the many madnesses of human imagination, and above all, from art. Artists
who happened to be deeply concerned with this irresolvable conflict may end up,
as Tolstoy did, denouncing their own art and may go even further to deny the value
of imagination. However, great art outlives this kind of logical rigidity. It proves
the reality of the human need for madness and, at the same time, fulfils this need.

Notes
 Katia Mitova 171
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1
Eugenio Lisboa, ed., A Centenary Pessoa (Manchester: Carcanet Press, Ltd.,
1995), 8.
2
Fernando Pessoa, ‘Letter to Adolfo Casias Monteiro of January 13, 1935,’ in The
Selected Prose of Fernando Pessoa, ed. and trans. Richard Zenith (New York:
Grove Press, 2001), 254.
3
Pessoa, Selected Prose, 94.
4
Pessoa, Selected Prose, 254.
5
This triangulation is discussed at length in Katia Mitova, ‘Erotic Uncertainty:
Toward a Poetic Psychology of Literary Creativity’ (PhD diss., University of
Chicago, 2005).
6
Homer, The Odyssey, trans. A. T. Murray (Cambridge, Mass.: The Loeb Classical
Library, 1984), v. I, 330-331.
7
By introducing himself as someone coming from Crete, Odysseus hints that his
stories might be invented. However, the statement, ‘‘All Cretans are liars,’ said the
Cretan’ ascribed to Epimenides (7-6 c. BC), stops being a paradox if the speaker is
a fiction maker—it can be true and untrue at the same time.
8
Homer, Iliad, trans. A. T. Murray (Cambridge, Mass.: The Loeb Classical
Library, 1998).
9
Daniel Heller-Roazen and Muhsin Mahid, eds., The Arabian Nights, trans. Husain
Haddawy (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1995).
10
Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales (London: Penguin Books, 2003).
11
Nazan Yildiz, ‘A Medieval Madwoman in the Attic: Chaucer’s Wife of Bath in
The Canterbury Tales’ in this volume.
12
John Keats, ‘Letter to Richard Woodhouse of October 27, 1818,’ in Selected
Letters of John Keats, ed. Grant F. Scott (Cambridge, Mass.: 2002), 194-196.
13
Emily Dickinson, The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed. Thomas H.
Johnson (New York: Little, Bown and Company, 1960), 133.
14
Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass and Selected Prose (London: Everyman, 1994),
79.
15
Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None,’ in On
the Genealogy of Morals. Ecce Homo, trans. Walter Kaufman and R. J.
Hollingdale (New York: Vintage Books, 1989), 300-301.
16
James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (New York: Penguin,
1993), 233.
17
T. S. Eliot, ‘Tradition and Individual Talent,’ in The Sacred Wood (New York:
Barnes & Noble), 58.
18
Both quotes are from William Faulkner, ‘Letter to Malcolm Cowley of 11
February 1949,’ in Selected Letters of William Faulkner, ed. Joseph Blotner (New
York: Random House, 1977), 285.
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19
Jorge Luis Borges, ‘Everything and Nothing,’ in Collected Fictions, trans.
Andrew Hurley (New York: Viking, 1998), 320.
20
Czeslaw Milosz, ‘Secretaries,’ in New and Collected Poems (1931-2000) (New
York: Ecco, 2003), 343.
21
J. M. Coetzee, Elizabeth Costello (New York: Viking, 1998), 199.
22
Joyce Carol Oates, ‘JCO and I,’ Antæus 73/74 (1994): 45.
23
For biographical information on Pessoa, see L. C. Taylor, ‘Life and Times,’in
Lisboa, Centenary Pessoa, 115-158.
24
‘Nothing But a Name: A Conversation with Chris Daniels and Dana Stevens.’
Crayon 3 (2001). Viewed 1 March 2013,
http://www.cfh.ufsc.br/~magno/nothingbutname.htm
25
Pessoa, Selected Prose, 17.
26
Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquietude by Bernardo Soares, Assistant
Bookkeeper in the City of Lisbon, trans. Richard Zenith (New York: The Sheep
Meadow Press, 1996), 139.
27
Pessoa, ‘Letter to Gaspar Simões of December 11, 1931,’ in Selected Prose, 246.
28
Pessoa, Selected Prose, 254.
29
Pessoa, Selected Prose, 94.
30
Pessoa, Selected Prose, 254.
31
Ibid.
32
Pessoa, ‘Erostratus,’ in Lisboa, Centenary Pessoa, 281.
33
Richard Zenith, ‘The Artist as a Young Man and Heteronym,’ in Pessoa,
Selected Prose, 8.
34
Charles Robert Anon, ‘Three Prose Fragments,’ in Pessoa, Selected Prose, 12-
13.
35
Both quotations are from ‘Letter to Mário Sá-Carneiro of March 14, 1916,’ in
Pessoa, Selected Prose, 90-91.
36
Ibid.
37
Ibid.
38
Saudade has no English equivalent. Is meaning is perceived as overlapping with
the that of longing, hope, fatality, nostalgia, yearning, missing, fondness,
endearment, loneliness, feeling, emotion. See ‘Saudade’, Portuguese Language
Blog, Posted on 15 August 2007, Viewed 1 March 2013,
http://blogs.transparent.com/portuguese/saudade/
39
Pessoa, ‘Letter to Adolfo Casais Monteiro of 11 January 1935,’ in Selected
Prose, 255.
40
Darlene J. Sadlier, Introduction to Fernando Pessoa: Modernism and the
Paradoxes of Authorship (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1998), 13.
41
Sadlier, Introduction to Pessoa, 67.
42
Sadlier, Introduction to Pessoa, 42-43.
 Katia Mitova 173
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43
‘Nothing But a Name: A Conversation with Chris Daniels and Dana Stevens.’
44
Pessoa, ‘Letter to Adolfo Casais Monteiro of 11 January 1935,’ in Selected
Prose, 255.
45
The papers presented at the First International Symposium on Fernando Pessoa
in 1981 were published under the title The Man Who Never Was.
46
In DSM-IV—4th ed., text revision (American Psychiatric Association, 2000), p.
526-529) the old term, ‘Multiple Personality Disorder,’ was replaced with
‘Dissociative Identity Disorder.’ Thus the term Multiple Personality Order
introduced here is not meant to be a diagnosis but, rather, a pun on the old term. If
we are to look for a clinical diagnosis for Pessoa’s case, then ‘Dissociative
Disorder Not Otherwise Specified,’ which includes ‘dissociative trance disorders,’
such as amok and possession, might be a possibility (pp. 532-533).
47
Lisboa, Centenary Pessoa, 157.
48
Eleanor Bowen and Laura Gonzalez, ‘Between Laughter and Crying’ in this
volume.
49
Carl Jung, Psychology and Literature, The Collected Works, v. XV (Princeton,
N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1966-1992), 101. The idea is developed at length
by Anthony Storr, ‘Genius and Psychoanalysis: Freud, Jung and the Concept of
Personality,’ in Genius: The History of an Idea, ed. Penelope Murray (New York:
Basil Blackwell, Inc., 1989).
50
Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, trans. Richard Pevear and Larisa Volokhonsky
(New York: Penguin Books, 2004).
51
Ibid., 696-701.
52
Leo Tolstoy, A Confession, in A Confession and Other Religious Writings, trans.
and ed. Jane Kentish (London: Penguin Books, 1987). A Confession was finished
in 1879 and published 1882.
53
William Shakespeare, Othello, ed. E. A. Honigmann (Arden Shakespeare;
Walton-on-Thames Surrey: Thomas Nelson & Sons, 1998).
54
A discussion of the visionary mode of artistic creation, as opposed to the
psychological mode, is available in Jung’s Psychology and Literature, in The
Collected Works, v. XV, 89-91.
55
For an elaborate exploration of the Pessoa Syndrome in the works of Homer,
Plato, Dante, Shakespeare, Kierkegaard, Melville, Nabokov, Borges, and other
writers, see Mitova, ‘Erotic Uncertainty.’
56
Shoshana Felman, Writing and Madness (Literature / Philosophy /
Psychoanalysis), trans. by Martha Noel Evans and the author (Palo Alto,
California: Stanford University Press, 2003), 253.
57
Ibid., 254.
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58
A paraphrase of Emily Dickinson’s ‘I Dwell in Possibility—/ A fairer House
than Prose—/ More numerous of Windows—/ Superior—for Doors,’ in Complete
Poems, 657.
59
Homer, Iliad, trans. A. T. Murray (Cambridge, Mass.: The Loeb Classical
Library, 1998).
60
Ibid., v. II, 196-197.
61
Ibid., v. I, 410-413.
62
Homer, Odyssey, tr. A. T. Murray (Cambridge, Mass.: The Loeb Classical
Library, 1984).
63
Leo Tolstoy, ‘On Shakespeare and the Drama,’ in Tolstoy on Shakespeare, ed.
V. T. Tchertkoff (New York, London: Funk & Wagnalls Company, 1906), 80.
64
For an elaborate discussion on this question see Katia Mitova, ‘Why Did Tolstoy
Hate King Lear?,’ in Language, Culture and the Individual, ed. Catherine O’Niel,
Mary Scoggin, and Kevin Tuite (Muenchen: Lincom Europa, 2006), 247-61.
65
Leo Tolstoy, ‘On Shakespeare and the Drama,’ p. 80.
66
Both quotes come from George Orwell, ‘Lear, Tolstoy, and the Fool,’ in
Shooting an Elephant and Other Essays (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World,
1950), 45.
67
Harry V. Jaffa, ‘The Limits of Politics: An Interpretation of King Lear, Act I,
Scene I,’ in The American Political Science Review 51 (1957): 405.
68
Clifford Leech, The Dramatist Experience (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1970),
125.
69
Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, ed. Hershel Parker and Harrison Hayford (New
York: W. W. Norton Company, 2002).
70
Harrison Hayford, ‘Unnecessary Duplicates: A Key to the Writing of Moby-
Dick,’ in New Perspectives on Melville, ed. Faith Pullen (Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press, 1978), 128-161.
71
Gregory Vlastos, Socrates: Ironist and Moral Philosopher (Ithaca, New York:
Cornel University Press, 1991), 29.
72
Ibid.
73
Plato, The Collected Dialogues, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (New
York: Pantheon Books, 1961).
74
Xenophon, Symposium. Oeconomicus. Symposium. Apologia (Cambridge,
Mass.: Loeb Classical Library, 1997).
75
Vlastos, Socrates, 47-49.
76
Plato, Meno, in The Collected Dialogues.
77
Plato, Apology, in The Collected Dialogues.
78
Plato, Lysis, in The Collected Dialogues, 154.
79
Plato, Protagoras, in The Collected Dialogues.
80
Vlastos, Socrates, 53.
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81
Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or, tr. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987).
82
Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling/Repetition, trans. Edna H. Hong and
Howard V. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983).
83
Søren Kierkegaard, Kierkegaard’s Concluding Unscientific Postscript, trans.
David F. Swenson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1944).
84
Søren Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death: A Christian Psychological
Exposition for Upbuilding and Awakening, trans. Edna H. Hong and Howard V.
Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983).
85
Søren Kierkegaard, The Point of View for My Work as an Author. A Report to
History and Related Writings, trans. Walter Lowrie (New York: Harper and Row,
1962).
86
Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling. Repetition, 56.
87
Lisboa, Centenary Pessoa, 157.
88
Søren Kierkegaard, Kierkegaard’s Concluding Unscientific Postscript, trans.
David F. Swenson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1944), 551-552.
89
For Kierkegaard’s distinction between ‘indirect’ and ‘direct’ communications,
see Kierkegaard, The Point of View, 338. The most relevant ‘direct
communications’ that comment on the nature of Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous
authorship are The Point of View for My Work as an Author (1848, published
1859), The Individual (1846, published 1847), and My Activity as a Writer (1851).
90
Kierkegaard, The Point of View, 41.
91
Kierkegaard, Papers and Journals: A Selection, trans. Alastair Hannay (London:
Penguin Books, 1996), 531-532.
92
Søren Kierkegaard, Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits, trans. Edna H.
Hong and Howard V. Hong (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2009).
93
Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling. Repetition, 56.
94
Plato, The Republic, in Collected Dialogues, 154. See Books II, III, and X,
especially the conclusion in Book X, p. 830.
95
Plato, Phaedrus, trans. Alehander Nehemas and Paul Woodruff (Indianapolis,
IN: Hacket Publishing Company, 1995), 28-29.

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Katia Mitova is Associate Professor at The Chicago School of Professional

Psychology and Lecturer in the Basic Program of Liberal Education for Adults at
University of Chicago. She is the author of a poetic exploration of the relationship
between dreaming and living, Dream Diary (Chicago, IL: Virtual Artists
Collective, 2013).

[Published in Davies, F., & Gonzalez, L. (eds.) Madness, Women and the Power of
Art. Oxford, England: Inter-Disciplinary Press, 2013, pp. 153-179. Please send
comments and questions to kmitova@uchicago.edu]