The Self as a Linguistic Event: Discourse Functions in the Poetry of Fernando Pessoa

Fernando Pessoa has several fictional characters who are claimed to be the authors of various collections of poetry gathered under his name. In the criticism, these are often seen as figures substituted for himself, while the poems which are not attributed to any of these fictional characters are treated as his own direct speech actions without subterfuge. This is in line with the conventions that have been dominant in discussions of literature, either to start from the author or from what Edward Said calls the ‘social and economic outside facts’. With attention turned elsewhere, the literary work itself tends to figure as an instrument in the hands of the author for use in pursuing some purpose. In this paper, we are going to bring back the works into focus. Discourse analysis is helpful in doing this. It is also applied in this paper to help sharpen focus on the characters of discourse, their identities as discourse agents and the objects which exercise them, in order to achieve interpretation of the poems as discourse events.