Vícios e virtudes, de Hélder Macedo: a representação estética do equívoco nas malhas da ironia romântica

Abstract

This dissertation investigates how romantic irony - an aesthetic and philosophical device of Romanticism - is reappropriated in the contemporary novel Vícios e Virtudes (2002), by the portuguese writer Helder Macedo. It examines how this narrative, whose creative thinking is guided by an aesthetics of uncertainty, employs such irony to construct a space of ambiguity and self-reflection within the novel. To this end, the analysis focuses on the figure of the ‘autornarrador’ in Vícios e Virtudes (2002), positioning it alongside the empirical author and considering both as ironists, in accordance with Richard Rorty’s (1994) conception. Given that two centuries separate Helder Macedo from the Romantics writers, the study revisits the roots of Romanticism and its ruptures with Classicism,before turning to the dynamics of the Contemporary period—the temporal setting of our object of study—and the ways in which it engages with Romantic aesthetic principles. Since romantic irony was theoretically formulated during the Romantic period, the dissertation also briefly examines its construction in the nineteenth-century novel Coração, Cabeça e Estômago (1862), highlighting how this irony was employed by Romantic authors and subsequently reinterpreted in Vícios e Virtudes (2002). Ultimately, the research seeks to understand how romantic irony is revived and transformed in Macedo’s work, and how this mode enables the creation of a literary project that, through play and self-staging, breaks with the classical conception of literature as the imitation of reality. Instead, it affirms literature as the construct of an artist, establishing a literary experience rooted in ambiguity and uncertainty—one that, by producing a sense of the erosion of absolute truths, ultimately legitimizes the fictive nature of art.