Philology as curatorship: The Pessoa affair

Abstract

The argument presented throughout this essay is that philology is textual curatorship. “To curate” means “to administer someone else’s assets”; to edit a text is an activity according to which the textual critic administers someone else’s text, which is that author’s asset; therefore, the textual critic is a textual curator. There are two difficulties which this assertion raises, which can be formulated as follows: how can an incorporeal asset be administered? How can one administer texts whose characteristics are similar to those which make up Fernando Pessoa’s work? These texts are incomplete because they were left unfinished, not because portions of them have been lost. When this occurs, it is necessary to understand that besides being a textual curator, the textual critic becomes a sui generis co-author as well, as the critic assumes the responsibility of making decisions which are typically made by authors of literary works.