Narciso e a melancolia do outro lado do espelho

Abstract

The author proposes the unification of the Narcissus myth and the Melancholy theory as terms of the ethopoietic trope in the poetry of Romantic and Baudelairian Modernity. Myth and theory of Antiquity, featuring the transparency of water and the density of the earth, its alienating synthesis will be incarnated by the romantic and modern Man, in the "sad mirror" of his theological and aesthetic orphanhood, which translates a rupture with the order of ideal Good and Beautiful. Starting by representing the return of Narcissus as a symbol of the egotist subjectivity thus rescued, Romanticism, in its evolution during the 19th and 20th centuries, will end up meeting the melancholy figure of Saturn, who becomes the idiosyncratic myth of aesthetic Modernity.