“O Riso Agudo dos Cínicos”: Desassossego e Ironia em Armando Silva Carvalho

Abstract

Departing from a reflection on the response of the poet Armando Silva Carvalho (b. 1938) to the question "Is Poetry a form of resistance?" and on his dictum "The text does not remake the world", this paper seeks to reconstruct in his poetry, since the inaugural Lírica Consumível (1965), the basic principles governing the exercise of the "restless expression", the rhetoric of irony and parodic textuality that have singled the speech of this poet in the panorama of contemporary Portuguese literature. These features have always required the reader active collaboration in a complex game of reconstruction of the authorial intentionality. Such an analysis will aim at a systematic equation of the modulations which the cynical reason, founded on the cult of ironic polyphony, has displayed in a certain lineage of modern and contemporary poetry that aims at the synthesis of Armando Silva Carvalho, "to disturb the living", in order to assume resistance as a mode of poetical enunciation existence.