In what appears to be a cynical act of self-promotion, some of today’s theorists are building high-visibility careers on their “discovery” that the subject is a fiction, that there is only text born of text and leading to more text. Pessoa, acting on better faith, lived out the textual dream, or nightmare, paying the logical price of self-effacement, and he was well aware of the limits and potentialities of his enterprise and of verbal expression in general. Consider the following observation, which many a deconstructionist could subscribe to without qualms:

Everything stated or expressed by man is a note in the margin of a completely erased text. From what’s in the note we can extract the gist of what must have been in the text, but there’s always a doubt, and the possible meanings are many.