Fernando Pessoa's "Tobacco Shop"
This paper was written as an assignment for ENGL433: Modern Poetry, Dr. Richard Jackson, University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, 9 Nov. 1987. The web link to the biography on Pessoa was added when this page was prepared for the web.
Every time a poet sets pen to paper, he attempts to make some kind of order out of his experiences. One poet may begin consciously, structuring the images, syntax and words of his poetry to create meaning; another may discover it in the subconscious interplay of words and experience in the act of creation. In this way, art eludes mimesis by its very nature of framing reality, giving it structure and meaning. This awareness of the artificiality of art lends an irony to the poetic process. In Pessoa's "Tobacco Shop" this irony is further complicated by a cynical self-deprecation as Pessoa questions his dreamy ineffectual idealism.
The first stanza with its end-stopped abstract statements of fact helps to set up the irony of the poem. Over against Pessoa's thrice-repeated claim to being nothing is set his claim to having "all the world's dreans inside" him (line 4). The stanza serves to introduce the subjects of the tensions of the poem--the reality of the world outside and the unreality of the dream world of aspirations within.
Pessoa seems torn between the real world epitomized by the street outside his window, a "street blocked off to all thought" (line 10), full of "mystery"(line 12) and "death" (line 13) "with fate driving the cart of everything down nothingness road" (line 14)and the neat abstractions of his mind. The poem moves with the poet from window to chair, from outside the room to inside the room, from the external "real" world to the internal world of dreams (lines 25-26). Pessoa who has idealized reality now recognizes his failure. Escaping "learning and training for anything useful" (line 29), he had fled to the country, but what he finds there is the reality of country life "only grass and trees there,/ and when there were people, they were just like any others" (lines 32-33)
Leaving the window for his chair (line 34), the poet retreats into abstraction, nearly the entire stanza is a didactic argument that Pessoa is one of those "who dream of conquering" rather than one "born to conquer." The irony for Pessoa lies in the fact that although he is "just one of millions in the world" he both aspires to be more and is aware that aspirations aren't enough, that "from all those dreams of glory there'll be nothing but manure in the end."
At the core of the poem seems to be a problem with the heart. Earlier Pessoa, enumerating his interior accomplishments, qualifies his humanity, referring to his "so-called heart." Now he sees himself and all dreamers as "cardiac cases enslaved by the stars" who conquer the world in their dreams but are "bowled over" by it when they awaken. Still later his heart is "an emptied pail" incapable of even calling up itself.
For these dreamers, the world is "strange"; the problem is their inability to make their dreams work out in the real world, the "old Indefinitude." The world escapes neat packages like chocolates leaving only the useless tinsel. While the naive child may "gobble down those chocolates . . . trustily" Pessoa can only toss away the tinsel.
Now his irony deepens into sarcasm directed at himself. He's "tossed away his life, but at least he has his poetry, his "dry-eyed contempt", a "noble" and "grand gesture" that flings out dirty laundry like he flung away the tinsel, his life--leaving him "at home, shirtless." The parenthetical stanza causes a shift in the poem. Looking outside the window again, he sees the "street in perfect clarity" its "shops,""pavement," "passing cars,""passersby," "dogs"; and it confirms his sense of alienation. As Pessoa compares his life to the "rags, the sores, the lies" of a beggar he is faced with the emptiness of his own interior world of dreams. Perhaps he has only been going through the "motions" of living like a tail severed from a lizard "beating frantically."
If he has failed to live, to be a part of reality, the fault is his own. He has been living in a "fancy costume," wearing a "mask." The image of the harmless dog stands in marked contrast to the heavy irony of his writing "this story to prove I'm sublime."
Where earlier he had referred to his poetry as "the broken archway to the Impossible," now it has denigrated to the "musical essence of my useless poems." His poetry, like his dreams, are only about reality, not something "really made" but "fixed on the Tobacco Shop across the street." His poems become a useless attempt to come to grips with reality, a "rug some drunkard stumbles over or a doormat the gypsies stole not worth a dime" because it's only good for wiping your feet on before entering the house leaving the world behind.
The Tobacco Shop signboard becomes an epigram for Pessoa's poetry. Like his poetry it signifies a reality it doesn't possess, and like his poetry, it will pass out of remembrance, and yet it is a universal gesture, this attempt to signify reality in words: even others "something like people" on other worlds "will go on making things like poems and living under things like signboards." When Pessoa sees someone enter the Tobacco Shop, he is suddenly struck by the belief that perhaps the signboard, his poems, do signify reality.
For a moment he is isolated from thought, conscious "that metaphysics comes from feeling out of sorts." But Pessoa can't sustain this "freedom from all speculation"; he falls back into his chair and again attempts to fit himself into the real world.
The parenthetical statement "If I married my washwoman's daughter, / Maybe I'd be happy" is a return similiar to his earlier attempt to escape into the country. The effort suggested, he returns to the window and recognizes Stevens leaving the Tobacco Shop, "nonmetaphysical Stevens" because he can't stand in for some higher reality as Pessoa suggested earlier. Pessoa is faced with the universe as it is, "without hope or ideals," and the smile of the Tobacco Shop Owner, like Fate, seems sinister.
The text of the poem analyzed, "The Tobacco Shop" by Fernando Pesso, was taken from a draft copy of an anthology of World Poetry which Dr. Jackson was developing. I do not know the original source of the poem. For copyright reasons, I cannot list the complete text of the poem here; however, an excerpt of the bulk of the poem is availably on the web.