“The Pessoa Syndrome” by Katia Mitova: Pessoa’s “Multiple Personality Order” (not Disorder), a theory of literary genius by a professor and poet

You can see the whole text of her 2013 book chapter by searching title and author on Google Scholar. I have cited it previously, but here are excerpts:

“Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935), the national modernist poet of Portugal, is famous for creating numerous authorial personae, which he called ‘heteronyms.’ These heteronyms wrote poetry, poetic prose, philosophical essays, literary theory and criticism, and even crossword puzzles. While indulging in this creative state of constant switching between one heteronym and another, Pessoa sometimes felt he had reached the bottom of depression. He believed that his ‘tendency toward depersonalisation…’ was caused by ‘a deep-seated form of hysteria, [or] pretended communication with diverse spirits,’ but that his ‘insanity [was] made sane by dilution…like a poison converted into a medicine by mixture.’…Pessoa cultivated a positive attitude toward his own multiplicity, nobodiness, and betweenness, which comprise the creative condition that we term Pessoa Syndrome…

“Writers’ nobodiness, manifested as a contradictory, fluid, or missing self, is not limited to the duration of the writing process. Depending on the vehemence of their engagement in that process, writers may remain in a state of nobodiness for longer periods of time outside the writing process. For incessant writers like Fernando Pessoa, nobodiness may become the primary mode of existence…

“Pessoa first experienced deep loneliness at the age of five when his father and brother died within less than a year of each other. He coped with the trauma by inventing an epistolary friend: ‘I can remember what I believe was my first heteronym, or rather, my first nonexistent acquaintance—a certain Chevalier de Pas— through whom I wrote letters to myself when I was six years old’…

“ ‘This tendency to create around me another world . . . began in me as a young adult, when a witty remark that was completely out of keeping with who I am or think I am would sometimes and for some unknown reason occur to me, and I would immediately, spontaneously say it as if it came from some friend of mine whose name I would invent, along with biographical details, and whose figure—physiognomy, stature, dress and gestures—I would immediately see before me’…

“Pessoa...became an individual with multiple personalities through his heteronymic writing. Therefore, a suitable name for Pessoa’s condition would be Multiple Personality Order…

“Pessoa seems to have been thrilled by this existence on the edge of madness, smoothened by the joys of creativity—and of wine, which eventually led him to cirrhosis and death…

“Pessoa’s specific form of Multiple Personality Order could thus be defined as an interactive arrangement of multiple creative personalities…

“Undoubtedly, there is a price to be paid for containing multitudes—mental breakdown, depression, and suicide mark the lives of numerous artists. But the magnificent achievements resulting from artists’ ability to depersonalise and impersonate—an ability most of us had in childhood and blocked later in order to grow up—should make us reconsider the understanding of mental wellness as a clear-cut self-identity…

“Acknowledging the Pessoa Syndrome in the works of visionary artists such as Homer, Plato, Dante, Shakespeare, Kierkegaard, Melville, Kafka, Nabokov, Borges, and Philip Roth may lead to more adequate readings of their multidimensional texts” (1).

1. Katia Mitova. “The Pessoa Syndrome” in Davies, F., & Gonzalez, L. (eds.) Madness, Women and the Power of Art. Oxford, England: Inter-Disciplinary Press, 2013, pp. 153-179.