DRAMAS OF SOULS: THE NON-EXISTING CORRESPONDENCE BETWEEN FERNANDO PESSOA AND ABY WARBURG

Abstract

Fernando Pessoa’s poetics is renowned for the creation of heteronyms and for the formation of what he himself called “drama in people, instead of in acts.” Since then, a considerable variety of theoretical and critical approaches have tried to illuminate the meaning of this drama in the poet's work. In fact, a significant part of these attempts at explanation are from Pessoa himself, which has always resulted in new developments in this play of transpersonalization. Thus, in line with literary studies of theory and criticism focused on interdisciplinarity, in this article we are interested in revisiting these Pessoa attempts in order to expand their plan of explanation to the point of contact with another dramatic play equally characterized by operations with heterogeneous elements. It is the heterochrony, the othering of the times, studied throughout his life by the German art historian Aby Warburg, and which he ended up writing as Seelendrama, that is, “drama of the soul”. With that, we do not want to purely and simply equate such “dramas” but to compose, playing with the decisive role that the heterogeneous have for the artistic research of the two, an additional plan of understanding by their own differences and affinities. In order to do so, we end by highlighting and examining the still little studied role that astrology issues played for both authors during their research processes.