Pessoa - A Post Humanist, and a Metamodernist
Aditi
Mukherjee,
Independent
Researcher,
Kolkata, West
Bengal, India
Abstract:
Fernando Pessoa in his poem, “Legion
live in us” has mentioned the multiplicity of self. The poem ends with a mended
resolution of attending to only those who the speaker knows. Any modernist or
postmodernist thinker would pick it up and hail it as a specimen of post
humanist/post-truth philosophies. Rosi Braidotti’s The Posthuman (2013)
explains the zoe-centric ethics which hint at a generic force of life,
irrespective of species, race, or genetic disposition. The sudden ending of
Pessoa’s poem does somewhat align with this particular aspect of the post
humanist theory. Luke Turner in his Metamodernist Manifesto, instructively states
that “we recognise oscillation to be the natural order of the world” (“The
Metamodernist Manifesto”). The sudden, patched-up ending also falls in line
with this idea; Pessoa does hint at a deliberate choice made by the speaker
when he says he will remain loyal to the “11 know I write.” The speaker freely
acknowledges the truth of multiplicity and even more freely chooses to stick to
one truth from the bunch which befits him the most. Both the post humanist and
metamodern tenets bind the poem to its harmony. This paper seeks to study the
poem structurally through post human and metamodern lenses.
Keywords: post human, post truth, metamodern,
neo-modern
Introduction
Pessoa,
belonging to the Edwardian age, did not apparently abide by the normative
standard as talked about by Mr Arnold Bennett in his review of Woolf’s Jacob’s Room, published in Cassell’s
Weekly. Pessoa’s poems quintessentially lack any linear, proper point of view
which can be hailed as a “speaker”. From his very first published poem, the Portuguese
poet has openly expressed the fragmentation of his poetic psyche, his use of
multiple heteronyms that stand for his own multiple selves. Such a disposition,
directly aligns with “……knotting my tie at a mirror, one of those selves I had
expected steps into the room.” This famous line from David Malouf’s “Revolving
Days” flaunts the hallmark of the High Modern sensibility, also the USP of
Pessoa’s poems. The post humanist giant Malouf, uses this narrative of
plurality for his compelling, emotional and postcolonial pieces. Pessoa’s post
humanism delves deep into the consciousness of the human mind, transcending all
kinds of socio-politics into a meditative nature. Plurality begins with the
avoidance of the deconstruction of the gap between the “subject” and “object.”
Every individual entity is to be acknowledged as the subject and must be viewed
in its own individuality (Wolfe, 116). Luhmann has also pointed out how this
plurality is a lazy compromise with the theories of contemporary cultural
studies (116).
The metamodern
impression on the cultural studies of the late twentieth century and the
on-going twenty-first century must not at all be disregarded. The oscillation
of the metamodern mind from the point of modernist clarity to a point of
postmodern cynicism is the heart of Pessoa’s multiple heteronyms. In one
particular poem, “Legion Live in Us” Pessoa begins with the feelings that
define his humanity. In the disjoint next stanza, he talks about the many souls
he has. The post human Pessoa acknowledges the individuality of all those
souls; the metamodernist Pessoa mentions, how the original self controls them
all, how the parent self lets her other selves to arise and subside as need
occurs. The original self would be the noumena and phenomena as stated by Kant
and the other selves the avant guard features of both the robust ages. The
original metamodern mind of Pessoa’s poem straddles the two ages and by doing
that, it proposes the aesthetic nature of the twenty-first century literature
(Nagpal, 123).This blend of post humanist and metamodern sensibilities by
Pessoa is to open new doors to the new history of English Literature.
Post Humanist Pessoa
Virtual reality
technology is fully capable of cloning human bodies, thereby reducing the need
for its presence and absence (Hailes, 26). The presence of a powerful,
invincible avatar is more relevant and irreplaceable than the actual human
body.
Questions about
presence and absence do not yield much leverage in this situation, for the
avatar both is and is not present, just as the user both is and is not inside
the screen. Instead, the focus shifts to questions about pattern and
randomness. (27)
Pessoa in the
poem, “Legion Live in Us” exhibits a demeanour that is both and both not at the
same time of a VR user. The legions in his poem let him participate in the
virtual reality game, perhaps serving as a better medium to view reality. As
Sherry Turkle said in one of her interviews, how a man had once told her,
reality is not his best window. As the poem progresses into the second stanza,
we see Ricardo Reis alias, Fernando Pessoa struck with an epiphanic realm of
individuality. Max Weber wrote that individualism, “embraces the utmost
heterogeneity of meanings.” Lewis P. Hinchman states, “I propose ro call the liberal
ideal of the individual by the name individualism.”
Individualism…disposes
each member of the community to sever himself from the mass of his fellows, and
to draw apart with his family and his friends, so that, after he has thus
formed a little circle of his own, he willingly leaves society at large to
itself. (Tocqueville, 193)
The acquity of
the aforementioned fragment voiced the concern of Pessoa as he begins the
second stanza of “Legions Live in Us.” The isolation which our poet seeks in
this poem is also the reverie that also probes him to control and maintain the
multiple selves that are contained within him. Like any VR game user, Pessoa or
Ricardo Reis, goes on to adjunct the uncountable souls he possesses, one
individual soul is the amalgamation of multiple tenets that affect and produce
significant effect on the human psyche. As Lacan and Jung have talked about a
constructed individuality in a society as well as in a world of spirituality,
Pessoa seemingly chooses to remain in the mediating sphere as he says, “There
are more ‘I’s than myself/And still I exist.” A semi escapism is present in the
tone of the poem as these lines are being written. Even amidst all the
constructed souls that are present, the mother soul did not cease to exist. The
mother soul, that is the VR user, the real self, does provide its evidence of
existence amidst all the confusion with the other adjunct souls. It comprises
manifestations of all those elements that are the forming matter of the adjunct
souls. The VR world that our poet lives in is where his own console is placed.
His real soul plays with all her other souls, operating them, controlling them,
and also dictating them.
As the poem
progresses to its last stanza, the socio-political bit rises to the foreplay.
Human time in the epistemological world overshadows the system of the
metaphysical zone. In this place, all the confusions, responsibilities and
troubles that the “mother soul’ undertook, are all irrelevant. The real body as
the episteme likes to call it, works in the economical time set by capitalism
and further enforced by Marxism. It has no scope for the mind, the mental,
since everything is mechanical and machine-centered. The “11 people” that are
out there in the world, that the body shares it’s space with and another bunch
of “11 people” who are more closely bound to the body akin to their
similarities with each other. Similarity
is felt due to the bond of acquaintance which is caused by a feeling of
connection among a group of segregated individuals. Now this general estimation
of 11 people (in cases of both the known and the unknown to the speaker), is
supposedly a representative variable rendering the solidity of the multitude.
In such a level, any kind of confusion must be minimized and in order to
achieve that the Metamodern half of the poet must take over.
Metamodern Pessoa
Metamodernism
accounts for a kind of distinguished oscillation that extinguishes confusion,
no matter how constructive it is. The Modern and Postmodern confusions that
gave rise to towering philosophies are dissected by metamodernist theorists.
Metamodernism…oscillates
between a modern enthusiasm and a postmodern irony, between hope and
melancholy, between naiveté and knowingness, empathy and apathy, unity and
plurality, totality and fragmentation, purity and ambiguity. Indeed, by
oscillating to and fro or back and forth, the metamodern negotiates between the
modern and postmodern. (Vermulean and Akker, 6)
This negotiation
is left behind by the stalwarts of the modern and post-modern era. Pessoa in
the closing stanza of the poem does not take upon himself the weight of the
grandeur that the succeeding giants of the upcoming era employed. Unlike his
fellow litterateurs, Pessoa does not invoke realism or socialism; neither does he
talk about humane metaphysics in a way all his contemporaries did. The stanza
begins with him simply renouncing the crossroads that occur in his mind during
solitude, without any robust language. The term applied is “crisscross.” Pessoa
carefully avoids any generic confusion that might arise from ornate language by
keeping it colloquial. Thus, the piece emerges as pure rather than ambiguous
(Vermulean and Akker, 6).
Despite its
apparent purity, the psychological disturbance that arises from controlling the
various personalities through his mother personality pains Ricardo. The “11”
that he has embedded in himself is probing him to seek a mental freedom from
the burden of carrying all those individual personalities around with him in
his mind. sudden, patched up ending, (as
mentioned before in the abstract) reminds us of the 2024 article by Ali Oubal
and Houban Ibrahim published in the twelfth volume of the International Journal of Literature and Arts. The article analyses
two metamodern novels namely, Sisters and
The Sympathizer published in 2014 and
2015 respectively (Oubal and Ibrahim). The article meticulously criticizes the
continuous oscillation that weakens the foundation that is all about
eliminating all errors and doubts (Oubal and Ibrahim). At the end, the idea of
the self in both the novels is called “patched up” and “a point of
amalgamation” (Oubal and Ibrahim, 172).The closing stanza of “Legions Live in
Us” echoes the essence of the quoted extracts from the much cited article. It
is due to the oscillation from the post humanist individuality to the
metamodern resolution that the poem is unable to provide a clear, straight
ending.
The complexity
of the poem’s ending is the result yielded by the postmodern acceptance of
plurality, lack of anything definite. Thus, it will not be wrong to admit that
Metamodern praxis existed in the postmodernist network itself, and the latter
existed way before the official advent of Modernism. Interestingly enough,
Pessoa incorporates it all, knowingly or unknowingly, is supposedly
speculative. Now this claim might also come up as silly to some critics but the
point to be noted here is, the scrupulously selective use of all the figures in
a unique order that boldly disrupts the orderly drafted history of humanity.
The New History
The dismantling
of a uniform, written history as talked about previously can be put in the same
line as the concept of how the greatest minds of every generation think alike.
However, it is undeniable how the historical genealogy places the Edwardians
after the Victorians, The moderns and post moderns after the two great wars
respectively and the metamoderns as a successor to postmodernism. Pessoa’s
idiosyncratic poetic narrative dissolves all the shadowy lines of transition,
linking the discussed ideals to each other through their individual incomplete
grounds. Each of the theories answers the questions left behind the other theories
and vice versa.
The scruples of
Pessoa that he translated into the poem, “Legions Live in Us” indicate towards
another quite interesting possibility-----the precise selection of cognitive
capability. This idea is partly derived from an important tenet namely,
equilibration of the theory of cognitive development propounded by Jean Plaget.
Like the long process of a child’s cognitive development, Pessoa chose to make
his mind undergo the same process that ended up rewriting history.
Works Cited
Wolfe,
Cary. What Is Posthumanism? U of
Minnesota P, 2010
Nagpal, Ruchi. "Manoeuvring
Metamodernism: An Oscillating Culture." FORTELL, no. 51, July 2025, pp.
122-130.
Hayles, N. Katherine. How We Became
Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics.
University of Chicago Press, 1999.
Turkle, Sherry. "Sherry Turkle Explains
Why Social Technologies Are Making Us Less Social." Scientific
American, 1 Sept. 2014,
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/sherry-turkle-explains-why-social-technologies-are-making-us-less-social/.
Accessed 26 Mar. 2026.
Tocqueville, Alexis de. Democracy in
America. Edited by Eduardo Nolla, translated by James T. Schleifer,
Student ed., Liberty Fund, 2012.
Vermulean,
Timothean, and den Akker, Robin van. “Notes on Metamodernism.”Journal of Aesthetics and Culture, vol.
2, 2010, pp 1-14.
Oublal,
Ali, and Houban Brahim. “Metamodern Subject: towards Metaxy and Fragmentation.”
International Journal of Literature and
Arts, vol. 12, no. 6, 2024, pp. 163-172.
Fischetti,
Mark, “Sherry Turkle Explains Why Social Technologies Are Making Us Less
Social.” Scientific American,
Springer Nature, 1st September, 2014),
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/sherry-turkle-explains-why-social-technologies-are-making-us-less-social)