A Surrealistic Donkey At A Bourgeois Picnic

Abstract

Having as a starting point the well-known concepts of intertextuality and parody, which I will briefly discuss in an introductory manner, I will then analyze the particular and idiosyncratic way in which Portuguese literary surrealism appropriated parody to convey its iconoclastic guidelines and ideas, making it a language that highly questions the prevailing society and cultural systems. I will focus especially on two key historical parodic texts from Mário Cesariny that intertextually rewrite two poems: one of Fernando Pessoa and the other of Cesário Verde. Therefore, beyond the automatism, the cut-up, the stream of consciousness, there was also a derisory, programmatic side, well anchored in historical reality, in Portuguese literary surrealism, in which its texts, especially through parodic procedures, served, above all, for writers to position themselves assertively, as we can detect in Cesariny, in relation to other literary movements and ideas, and by this taking sides, marking differences, finding cultural similitudes and dissonances, etc. That´s exactly what Cesariny did in relation to Orpheu's modernism and Cesário's literary impressionism.