When a heteronym commits suicide

thanatography and otherness in Educação do estoico , by Barão de Teive

Abstract

The writing of death, called tanatography, shows itself to be operative in the combination of elements that make literature a prodigious space for discussion of the human condition unrested before the dying. In this article, the relationship between writing and suicide is analyzed from the work of a fictitious author erected by Fernando Pessoa, known as Barão de Teive. We access from this heteronym his only manuscript, The Education of the Stoic(1928), which bequeaths authorial, sepulchral and vital lessons formulated in the mainstay of Stoic philosophy in necessary dialogue with Socratism. Relating the pessoan heteronymous phenomenon to the dialogical process of construction of alterities brought about by the theorist Mikhail Bakhtin, we scrutinize new ways of observing the self-annihilation of an author-created who creates artistic and philosophical prose in the heart of its end.