“All we see is something Else”: subjectivity and reality in Pessoa's Faust

Abstract

Faust and his bond with the devil is a long-living theme, since it is possible to link the Doctor's character with Simon Magus, a character in the New Testament. Following the recurrence of such theme allows us to observe important changes  when it comes to the relation between Divine and Human, the natural and supernatural worlds, as well as Good and Evil. The turning point of the theme was Christopher Marlowe's Faust, a play written in the 16th century, in which Faust declares that Hell is the place where one stands. Some centuries later Fernando Pessoa would contribute to the significant deepening of the image constructed by Marlowe – and, to a certain extent, developed by Goethe – when he transferred Faust's problem from an objective to a subjective perspective. Instead of investing in the character's physical laceration by the devil, at the moment when his soul is taken, due to the enforcement of the pact, Pessoa's Faust has a lacerated soul, he is someone tormented by the keen conscience concerning the limits of conscience, someone to whom the lust for knowledge is useless because he knows that everything in the Universe is limited, our condition as individuals to begin with: to look at an external world from an internal, subjective point of view would never be enough to cover any idea of totality. At the same time, he is aware of the inexistence of such external world. This paper aims to investigate Pessoa's contribution to Faust's theme, as the Portuguese author transfers it to the problematic of the subject and its relation to reality.