O "Fausto" de Fernando Pessoa: criação, edição, recepção

Abstract

This dissertation aims to investigate the processes of creation, editing and reception of Fernando Pessoa's "Fausto", from four distinct but complementary perspectives, as proposed by Carlos Pittella (in PESSOA, 2018): as a fragmentary literary work, a non-linear and unfinished play in five acts, a material archive composed of hundreds of documents archived in Espólio 3 of the National Library of Portugal and, finally, as a posthumous book, in four different editions. The first chapter, therefore, it is proposed to reflect on the process of creation of the poem, taking into account the possible intertextual relations existing between Pessoa's "Fausto" and other texts of the Faustic tradition that are supposed to have served as a archetypes for Fernando Pessoa, even if such affiliation is established by contrast and in the form of a betrayal of some of its models. The fragmentary and unfinished textuality of the poem is also the object of the first chapter, seen as an index of the tensions between organicism and fragmentarity in Pessoa's work, as they are critically appreciated by authors such as Carla Gago (2007), Rita Patrício (2008) and Pedro Sepúlveda (2012). It also dialogues with the Aristotelian concept of potency-of-not recovered by the philosopher Giorgio Agamben (2015; 2018), whose appropriation allows us to think about the unfinished in step with the idea that "Fausto" is not just unfinished, but unending, according to the classic thesis of Manuel Gusmão (1986). The second chapter, in turn, starts from theoretical frameworks such as Jacques Derrida (2001), Jerónimo Pizarro (2012), Fernando Cabral Martins (2003; 2011), and Simone Celani (2020) to focus on the constitution of Fernando Pessoa's espólio and analyze the printed editions that have so far proposed different orderings of Fausto: “Primeiro Fausto” (1952), "Primeiro Fausto" (1986), "Fausto – Tragédia Subjectiva (Fragmentos)" (1988) and "Fausto" (2018). This analysis is based on the hypothesis that the "Fausto"'s editions configure decisive moments in the reception of the work, since they produce several critical implications, whether the level of establishment or organization of the text, reinforced in editorial paratexts such as prefaces and notes. Thus, this dissertation is dedicated to a study committed to the materialities of literature, in order to investigate the collective and historical character of the processes of creation, transmission and reception of literary works, especially when their transmission takes place posthumously.