The ironic standard: three poetic dimensions of XIXth Century Brazilian Carnaval

Abstract

Delimited by the timeframe between the years 1853 – in which the burlesque festivities of entrudo are prohibited – and 1907 – founding of the first Samba school –, this essay explores the literary legacy of three poets regarding the Brazilian festival of Carnaval: Luiz Gama’s (1830-1882) poem “Lá vai verso!”, published in Primeiras trovas burlescas de Getulino (1859); “O Entrudo”, from the posthumous work Poesias (1862) of Francisco de Paulo Brito (1809-1861); and the also posthumously published “Asco e Dor”, prose poetry by Cruz e Sousa (1861-1898) found in his volume Evocações (1898). Their perception on the symbolic potency of Carnaval allows for two investigative approaches of the poems: a) one that correlates each of them with the three dimensions of the Carnivalesque identified by Mikhail Bakhtin’s (2002) in the ancient Menippean satire; b) and the conceptual charting of their rhetorical resort to irony, which encompasses Horatian urbanity, the romantic parabasis, and the Baudelairean consciousness (de Man, 1999). Such ironic impulses, manifested in the respective scenic typology of each Carnaval by explicitly black lyrical subjects, performs an amalgam between the social and symbolic aspects of the event in the epiphany of poetic deception.