Poesia e mito: poemas de Vinicius em face do Mito de Narciso

Abstract

This paper aims to establish an intertext between a few poems by Vinicius de Moraes and the myth of Narcissus, the latter according to the version presented by Ovid in his Metamorphoses. To this end, we are operating on the assumption that there is a “diving in oneself” in Vinicius’ aesthetic, for the purpose of a self-discovery process undertaken by the lyrical subject. Such diving corresponds to an introspective effort, which appears implicitly or explicitly in the treatment of themes dear to the poet, such as love and death. In regard to the myth of Narcissus, we take as a basis an interpretative line, supported by Gaston Bachelard (1989), which states that the myth includes the symbology of the search for self-knowledge. Therefore, we believe it is possible to establish the aforementioned intertext from studies on the perpetuity of myths, symbols and archetypes in humanity’s collective unconsciousness. This paper is structured in five parts: after the introduction, we present, in the second section, a few considerations about the concepts of myth, symbol, image and archetype, all based on the theoretical contribution of Mircea Eliade (1991; 2006), Junito de Souza Brandão (1989; 2008), Carl Jung (2008), among others. In the third section, we review the mythological narrative of Narcissus and then examine it according to Bachelard’s interpretation (1989). In the fourth section, we analyze and comment on the poems that make up our corpus, from which we seek to describe the process of recovering the myth of Narcissus and its relationship to the fundamental themes in the poet’s work. Finally, in the last section, we express our final remarks.