In the mirror of The Night: Narcissus

• Autor(a) principal: Pinto, Ana Paula
• Data de Publicação: 2021
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: https://doi.org/10.34624/fb.v0i17.27121

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 con- troversial 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 sym- bolic 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 one- self, 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 spe- cularity 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 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.