O Leitor Atlântico: entre Moby-Dick e o Fausto Pessoano

Abstract

This dissertation aims to present a comparative study within the scope of Portuguese Literature and American Literature. In this way, the comparative reading that is intended between Moby-Dick (1851), by Herman Melville (1819-1891), and Faust, by Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935), is marked by the intention of understanding the maritime images existing in the textual body of both works as a reading key to how the human mind and thought embrace natural phenomena. Whether in the observation of the vivid maritime scenes found in Moby-Dick, an illustrious novel by Melville or in the recovery of the liquefied maritime figures in Pessoa's Faust, a fragmentary drama or set of poems written by a Faustian aegis, it was possible to establish a connection and a journey of literary understanding of the sea as an essential driver of human thought. Thus, the sea in Moby-Dick would point out the limits of any thought in its mediation with natural phenomena and, in this step, in Faust, there would be the radicalization of such a process, by internalizing the sea as an eternal figure of the human mind. As a methodological basis, this dissertation starts from the perspective brought by Walter Benjamin in the essay “The electives affinities of Goethe” (2009) [1922], found in Ensaios Reunidos: Escritos sobre Goethe (2009), to intuit in the proposed critical work the content of truth of the work of art, considering the sea as a possibility, a key, a fragment of the factual content of the works studied. Likewise, to establish an understanding of the influence of natural phenomena on humanity, the considerations of Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), in “Experience”, from the book Essays: Second Series (1844) and Nature (1838) were essential, for it provided a great theoretical-philosophical framework on the topic