Person in Llansol’s house. 30 years between Lisbon and Leipzig
To end a year (2015) of public histrionic jostling around the celebration of Orpheu, which, not despising it, does not let it down by being so friendly shared mouth to mouth in commercial and/or pandacademic tablets in tabloids and pamphlets. The seriousness shown by the team that carries out the transcription, organization and publication of the unpublished manuscript collection of Maria Gabriela Llansol, of which the Livro de Horas series is the result, is noteworthy, with a rare marginal vigor (this one), rooted in the commitment at a passionate and judicious time to work under (re)manuscripts of a diarist slant that have come to us in volumes of a remarkable coherence, in the absence of commercial pressure, on the one hand, or even that innocibly pseudo-peripheral, engaged in quarrels on the other. against invented enemies who make self-effacing courage.
Apart from systems and counter-systems, this Book of Hours V, The Imperfect Blue (with selection, transcription, introduction and notes by Maria Etelvina Santos) it dispenses with the fanfare of the Pessoa remission of the horizon of the selected texts, although it claims it with complete justice, precisely because it does not fail in an already exasperating pretense of being one more Explained-Person -to-little children, Person-easy-recipes or Person-goes-to-psychiatrist, constituting the most serious approach to the figure of the author that was carried out in the year that now ends. The author’s set of unpublished works, written between 1976 and 2006, are gathered here in the “Lisbonleipzig Project”, in which the figure of Pessoa is central, in line with those of Bach and Espinosa. In an exercise that is not the publicity of an ordinary photograph, of plastic smiles next to the multi-function Pessoa in superstar mode, an exercise that has sufficed several personal tricks for many years, there is effectively a Pessoa in Llansol’s house, in appropriation dialogic and fruitful that has a backing of thirty years of relationship, from the different narratives in which the poet is transmuted into the figure of Aossê, in books like Lisbon Leipzig, A Hawk in the Fist, A Kiss Given Later, Where Are You Going Drama-Poetry?, among many others.
It is worth remembering here that the intimate and verbative dimension of Llansol’s diary does not dispense with a relationship of continuity with his fictional work, creating a genological hybridism that is so dear to him and that recalls that the product of the diary’s writing is a historical enunciation that it recreates – and therefore does not replicate – historical time. This question is not minor, insofar as it leaves us a vision of reality based on a refusal of the great festival effect, on a meditative demand that is exceptional among us and that, under the pretext of self-reflective passages and an exegesis of the writing itself and writing itself, erasures reading protocols and interposes in the usual perception of the exercise of estrangement, that rebound in reality that Llansol spoke about. It is from within his own writing that Llansol discovers and invents his Pessoa, a counterpellet to the artificial flattery of chewing that the poet has dedicated himself to. The fragmentary condition that is the condition of writing and of the Pessoa person, this “immense fragmentation that Pessoa left written” in the absence of a unitary meaning for life, is therefore entirely in the Llansolian project itself, the discovery of a blue that, being ” sign of the terrestrial sphere ”, appears in fact imperfect, at the mercy of the greyness of macambúzia life in Pessoa’s Lisbon.
Now it is precisely this imperfection, this patchwork of heteronymic exercise, that engenders the possibility of Pessoa being thus transmuted into Aossé, a transmutation that is an authentic redemption of said imperfection, by the author’s hand, in an exercise in sewing the rags that Pessoa brought already licked in excess and that Llansol starts within his own work, discovering its remaining unity: “all my layers were broken in combat, I leave a trail that resembles a scattered group of fossil plants, and points to mine heart that does not cease, with a rope, to hit my body (…) I no longer feel the fatigue of my various names (…) I am the simple absolute superlative ”. To do this, he builds a house for him that is the Bach family, in Leipzig, where blue is already “an infinite blue” and where Aossê-Pessoa discovers a unity: “Because Aossê should live longer than his forty-five years already lived – give death wherever it gave (…) its barefoot and taciturn animals, which they called heteronyms, to remain tamed and filled with the unity of Aosê”. Writing here finds its first quality, one of constituting a simulacrum of correction of time itself, in an illusion of perpetuity managed from a crystallization of an enunciative now that refuses the precarious content of what the words affirm. It is therefore not surprising that several pages are found in the Llansolian diaries about the act of writing as a way of detachment from the contingency outside the writing process itself, with its institutional episodes (peers, the History of Literature, the academies, the awards, editorial circuits), as an inscription by the writer on the language side, in the absence of literature
Tuned by the same tuning fork as Pessoa, the Llansolian diarist texts are those who can read (as their fictions are and are not as much, or almost, as their diaries) without a specific order, in an absolute refusal of the order of linear time and of an affirmation of the instantaneous and the dispersed, of the casuistic as a manifestation of a refusal of subjection to chronology, in an attention to the routine that confirms Blanchot, according to which the writing of a diary is still a way of placing the self under protection of the common days. Llansol is therefore realizing a search for a radicalism (to inscribe roots in his own time) as someone who founds through writing the space that the time of real life – of life without it, without writing – does not allow to be fixed . This is an incidence of the ambiguous, uterine relationship with Portugal, between belonging and refusal, and which crosses as one of the most distinctive notes in the Books of Hours to date published, a qualified wave thematized here by the hand of the Lisbon-Leipzig transition that Aossê-Pessoa is the protagonist, seeking to offer the poet the happiness he did not have. To this end, and as the volume’s organizer recalls, the Bach house becomes the space of imagined splicing of the imperfect blue originating in Pessoa, through the creation of female figures of protection (Anna Magdalena Bach), of desire (Elizabeth) and of completeness or revelation (Infausta), just like female figures that Pessoa never had.
In Pessoa’s dramatic and fragmentary existence, which combines so well with his own writing, Llansol rediscovers writing as a palliative, in the architecture of a plural house that imposes itself against the delusional duality, terrain of modern aesthetics, which Deleuze and Guattari assign to of schizophrenia and that requires a liberating schizowriting, mod of Llansol’s literature, to which contribute the proliferation of echoes, the relationships between the different texts he composed, the migration of figures, motifs, actors and fragments between data and fictions. Through this schizowriting it is discovered that, somewhere between Lisbon and Leipzig, between the modern Pessoa anguish and the melancholic solemnity of Bach’s century, another space and another time rises, a house called Lisboaleipzig, where a pacified Person is mended by language of Llansol.