Parodia y política en el Fausto de Estanislao del Campo

Estanislao del Campo’s Fausto’ gives the Gauchesco genre a twist by using parody as the central technique of the poem. The parodied text, Gounod’s opera, is based on the long conversation between two gaucho friends in which one tells the other the story of a wise man who sells his soul to the devil. Laguna listens to El Pollo’s story and intervenes at times, making comments and criticizing. The paper discusses the means by which literary “gauchos” parody the mechanisms of Gauchesco literature. The article establishes that through laughter, the poem proposes an irreverent distortion of the given that is eminently political.