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Confessional Desire: Censorship and Repression in Mário de Sá-Carneiro’s A Confissão de Lúcio

2024; Indiana University Press; Volume: 48; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2979/jml.00059

1529-1464

Thomas Waller,

Cultural, Media, and Literary Studies

Abstract: This article reads Mário de Sá-Carneiro’s 1913 novella A Confissão de Lúcio [Lúcio’s Confession] alongside Lacan’s seemingly dissenting claim that “censorship is not resistance.” A close friend and collaborator of Fernando Pessoa, Sá-Carneiro was a key figure in the “Grupo de Orpheu” that was responsible for the introduction and development of modernism in Portuguese literature and art . A Confissão de Lúcio , Sá-Carneiro’s most famous work, is a first-person confessional narrative that tells the story of a sexual liaison between the eponymous protagonist and his friend Ricardo de Loureiro. Yet, although this liaison is the crux of the novella, it is at the same time banished from the letter of the text, which rather narrates Lúcio’s affair with Ricardo’s wife, Marta, who acts as a mediatory figure for the homosexual desire between the two men. Following Lacan’s argument that censorship is not a form of resistance to desire but rather part of its very expression, I ask: how might the doubts, hesitations, and aporia in Sá-Carneiro’s novella be read as articulations of the text’s repressed and unconscious truth?