Romantic irony and contemporaneity: the game of fiction and reality in “A simple flower in your light hair” by José Cardoso Pires

Abstract

In this paper, I intend to analyze the short story “Uma simples flor nos teus cabelos claros” (“A simple flower in your light hair”) by contemporary Portuguese writer José Cardoso Pires, proposing a connection between the way the narrative is organized and the romantic concept of romantic irony – emphasizing important aspects such as the construction of the effect of simultaneity and the ambiguous interplay between fiction and reality. To this end, I revisited the concept of irony in Modernity, bringing to my reflection a little of the narrative construction of the short story “A dama do pé-de-cabra” (“The Lady with the Crowbar”), by Portuguese writer Alexandre Herculano, and also, very briefly – only in relation to the way the narrators use irony – the novel Dom Casmurro, by Machado de Assis, and also Pedro e Paula, by Portuguese writer Helder Macedo. In the second part of the article, I analyzed the aforementioned short story by José Cardoso Pires, with the aim of revisiting and expanding, through it, the concept of romantic irony, as well as to understand what kind of thinking and knowledge production irony is related to in Modernity and in the aesthetic-cultural moment of Contemporaneity, when romantic irony is also associated with the weaving of narratives that are averse to grand narratives and totalizing accounts.