ABSTRACT
The establishment of masters is never a given, even though it might be perceived as such in a Romantic, pre-Bloomian tradition of criticism. The 'supra', both completing and exceeding the Camonian figure, as the spectre of a past, insufficient body of literature, is haunted and foreshadowed already by the figure on which it is framed from the outset. Given the spectrality of matters concerning the state of Portugal, Fernando Pessoa wrote to Armando Cortes-Rodrigues, evoking the purpose of raising the 'Portuguese name'. The Pessoan text, dealing with the structures of writing in a poststructuralist manner, accepts that meaning and presence merely inhabit the text without residing in it, and that an essentialist view of identities is unsustainable. The 'por fabricar' and the 'por haver' are testimonies to the horizontality of writing, syntagmatic rather than paradigmatic, metonymic rather than metaphoric.
