Ao espelho de A Noite: Narciso

Translated title of the contribution: In the mirror of The Night: Narcissus

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

41 Downloads

Abstract

Narcissus guarantees in Ancient Mythology and Literature an aura of enigmatic uniqueness: some sparse allusions to local traditions - conveyed among others by the descriptive eagerness of Pausanias, Colon, Philostratus the Elder, and Calístrato the Sophist - and corroborated by the ancient etymology of the anthroponymous, allows us to suppose that, before it occurred in the perfectly defined - and better known - narrative framework of Ovid's Metamorphoses, the narrative had already rooted in the fertile ground of the ancient mythic imaginary some controversial versions. They will not have, however, to what we can conclude from the aesthetic-literary tradition, a noticeable projection into ancient worldview. Obscurately associated with other myths that share with it significant traits of a broad symbolic spectrum (such as that of other young sevicies), it is striking in the interpretation of the myth the obsidious notation, that the intuition of the artists exhaustively captivated in the wide arc drawn between antiquity and our day, of an intransitive man’s loneliness before oneself, that is, of one's own reflection; Ovid's poetic articulation between the unfortunate fates of Echo and Narcissus will make it possible to multiply this loneliness into a refractive specularity that simultaneously summons voice and gaze as vectors of emission and reception, that is, of communication. Starting from the poetic pretext offered by the notations of the Ancient Literature, we propose with this communication to try the hermeneutics of the symbolic echoes of the myth, and its peculiar acuteness in the framing of the modern tragedies of our daily lives. In this regard we are interested in bringing to the collage, in the tragic frame of the Holocaust, a symbolic reading of Elie Wiesel's The Night.
Translated title of the contributionIn the mirror of The Night: Narcissus
Original languagePortuguese
Pages (from-to)197-210
Number of pages14
JournalForma Breve
Volume17
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 21 Dec 2021

Keywords

  • Narcissus
  • Echo
  • Ovid
  • Ancient mythology
  • Elie Wiesel

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'In the mirror of The Night: Narcissus'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this