The perverse seductiveness of Fernando Pessoa

It is impossible to spend a few days in Lisbon and to be a compulsive voyeur of bookstores, without noticing almost everywhere the name of Fernando Pessoa. I knew that he was a poet and, vaguely, that his star was on the ascendant because I have seen his name mentioned in a number of publications. But I never read anything written by him. Seeing him now everywhere in Lisbon, in French and English translations, and even in a small bookstore dedicated entirely to his writings, spurred my interest.

I was struck by an eerie similarly between Pessoa and Cavafy: one generation apart (Pessoa 1888-1936, Cavafy 1863-1933), both poets of their own civilizations and cultures, ignored during their lifetimes, homosexuals who almost never left their cities (Alexandria and Lisbon), anglophiles whose poetic fame keeps on rising the further we are from their physical lives (as indeed the glory of all great people does). I have to confess that I am a huge fan of Cavafy’s poetry (in beautiful English translation by Avi Sharon here), but have not, as I mentioned, read any of Pessoa’s. Still luckily for me, the only work in prose that Pessoa published is a short 1922 novella called “The anarchist banker”. And as  soon as I opened the book (in French translation, “Le banquier anarchiste”) I knew it was something that I would be interested in; and indeed I read it in an hour or so.

It is a Dostoyevsky-like monologue of a rich banker who was born poor, in a working class family, and used to be an anarchist. To the question asked by the narrator in the beginning of the novella, why he betrayed his ideals, the cigar-smoking banker bristles: no, he never stopped being anarchist; moreover it was him, unlike other “conventional anarchists” who combined the theory and practice of anarchism, and is helping human society along toward the ultimate goal of “natural freedom”.

How come, you wonder (together with the narrator)? Here is the answer. Every society is composed of inequalities that are “natural” and others that are a “social fiction”. The latter are what John Roemer calls “circumstances”. They are inequalities due to one’s birth, wealth of his/her parents, connections, or money they inherit. These are the inequalities that, our banker-anarchist tells us, have to be eliminated in order for a society to be just and for people to live freely and “naturally”.  Other inequalities (of innate intelligence, effort, stature and strength) cannot be remedied  because they are not produced by society. (So our banker-anarchist is a luck egalitarian.)

Having realized this early in his life, the banker (then anarchist) enrolled in attempts to change society, both through anarchist propaganda and “direct action”. But he realized that the attempts to eradicate money-driven “social fictions” quickly led to a rule of a minority that imposed another set of “social fictions”—a military dictatorship (a clear referee to Bolshevism) that, not differently from capitalism, constrained human freedom. Moreover, he discovered that even within small anarchist circles that were struggling for “freedom”, hierarchical rules soon emerged: some made decisions, others followed.

He was then faced with a choice: either man is born vicious, in need to impose hierarchy and, for the other part of mankind, desirous of submission (“born slave”) in which case all attempts to change capitalist society are vain; or man is made vicious by “social fictions” which ought to be made irrelevant by individual effort; that is, not through social organizations that inevitably re-impose hierarchies. If man is vicious because of society, and not innately, then the way to extricate ourselves from “social fictions” and to reach Marx’s “empire of freedom” where money does not matter is to become wealthy enough so that money becomes irrelevant.  This is why our anarchist decides to become a banker, and to use the most sordid means to become rich. But didn’t he thus exert tyranny over the lives of many other people, didn’t he reinforce the “social fictions” against which he was fighting? No, the banker says, because “social fictions” can be destroyed only by wholesale  revolutions and to bring such revolutions about we need to free ourselves from “social fictions” individually, one by one, by growing rich and extracting ourselves from the vulgar rule of scarcity (“[by getting rich] and overcoming the force of money, by liberating myself from its rule, I become free”).  

The story is to some extent (but only to some extent) absurd. It has a kind of perverse dialectical logic which we also find in some Marxist literature (as here) where the achievement of a society without scarcity requites the utmost development of the productive forces—using the most capitalistic, selfish and destructive means possible. For the achievement of happiness (says Pessoa) can be realized in only two ways: either we reduce our needs and live like animals, or we create an abundance of material goods to such an extent that they do not matter anymore.

To reach the state of freedom we need to go through the “valley of tears”, the Industrial Revolution, Stalinist industrialization, “trickle-down economics” or Maoist Great Leap Forward. All of them are attempts to increase production, reduce or eliminate scarcity and do away with “social fictions”.

Does it make sense? Perhaps only to the extent that scarcity is scarcity of material goods. Many of such scarcities for many people in the world today have been eliminated (food, water, electricity, housing). But other scarcities, of positional goods, will by definition, be always with us: they cannot be eliminated no matter how many television sets, iPhones, water melons and potatoes we produce. So, post-scarcity Utopia seems to be indeed a “no place” that may ever exist, and the rationale that unscrupulous exploitation of others is a short-cut to the world free from want is indeed perverse.

How I lost my past

In almost all recent literature that analyzes Br-exit and Trump-entry, there is a constant theme of a fall from the heady days at the end of the Cold War, of pining for a time when unstoppable victory of democracy and neoliberal economics was a certainty and liberal capitalism stood at the pinnacle of human achievement.  

Such narratives always filled me with discomfort. It is in part because I never believed in them and because my personal experience was quite different. Rather than believing in the end of history, I saw the end of the Cold War as an ambivalent event: good for many people because it brought them national liberation and the promise of better living standards, but traumatic for others because it brought them the rise of vicious nationalism, wars, unemployment and disastrous declines in income.

I know that I was influenced in that by a very clear realization that, once the Berlin Wall fell, the civil war in Yugoslavia was inevitable (I still remember a rather somber dinner that I shared with my mother on that day in November) and by the first hand experience of sudden misery that befell Russia in the early 1990s when I travelled there working for the World Bank. So, I was aware that my discomfort with triumphalism could be explained by these two, rarely found together, circumstances. It was perhaps an idiosyncratic discomfort.

But reading other books, and especially the highly acclaimed Tony Judt, I realized that the discomfort went further. In a deluge of literature that was written or published after the end of the Cold War, I just could not find almost anything that mirrored my own experiences from the Yugoslavia of the 1960s and 1970s. However hard I tried I just could not see anything in my memories that had to deal with collectivization, killings, political trials, endless bread lines, imprisoned free thinkers and other stories that are currently published in literary magazines. It is even stranger because I was very politically precocious; without exaggeration I think I was more politically-minded than 99% of my peers in the then Yugoslavia.

But my memories of the 1960s and the 1970s are different. I remember long dinners discussing politics, women and nations, long Summer vacations, foreign travel, languid sunsets, whole-night concerts, epic soccer games, girls in mini-skirts, the smell of the new apartment in which my family moved, excitement of new books and of buying my favorite weekly on the evening before the day when it would hit the stands…. I cannot find any of that in Judt, Svetlana Alexeevich or any other writer. I know that some of the memories may be influenced by nostalgia, but as hard as I try I still find them as my dominant memories. I remember many details of each of them to believe that my nostalgia somehow “fabricated” them. I just cannot say they did not happen.

Thus I came to realize that all these other memories from Eastern Europe and Communism that pop-up on today’s screens and “populate” the literature, have almost nothing in common with me. And yet I lived under such a regime for thirty years! I know that my story may not be representative, not the least because the 1970s were the years of prosperity in Yugoslavia and because that peripheral part of Europe then played, thanks to Tito’s non-alignment, a world political role that it never had in 2,000 years—but still, after I adjust for all of that, I believe that some other, non-preordained, stories of “underdevelopment” and Communism have the right to be told too. Or should we willfully destroy our memories?

Yet it is very difficult to tell these other stories. History is written, we are told, by the victors and stories that do not fit the pattern narrative are rejected. This is especially the case, I have come to believe, in the United States that has created during the Cold War a formidable machinery of open and concealed propaganda. That machinery cannot be easily turned off. It cannot produce narratives that do not agree with the dominant one because no one would believe them or buy such books.  There is an almost daily and active rewriting of history to which many people from Eastern Europe participate: some because they do have such memories, some because they force themselves (often successfully) to believe that they do  have such memories. Others can remain with their individual memories which, at their passing, will be lost. The victory shall  be complete.

When I was in 2006 in Leipzig to watch a World Cup game, I was struck to see, displayed in a modest store window, a picture of the East German soccer team that in 1974, in the then World Cup played in West Germany, unexpectedly beat the West German team by 1-0. None of the players in that East German squad went to become rich and famous. They were just home boys. It was I thought a small, poignant, even in some ways pathetic, attempt to save the memories and say: “We also did something in these forty years; we existed; it was not all meaningless, “nasty and brutish”.

Thinking of those years in political terms, one moment now, perhaps strangely, stands out for me. It was the Summer of 1975. The Helsinki conference on peace and stability in Europe was just taking place. It was closing a chapter on the World War II. It came just months after the liberation of Saigon. And I recall being on a beach, reading about the Helsinki conference and thinking, linking the two events: there will be no wars in Europe in my lifetime, and imperialism has been defeated. How wrong was I on both accounts.