The God of “Deviant transcendence”

a girardian reading of the “Pós-escrito numa carta de Padre Justino” in the Crônica da casa assassinada, by Lúcio Cardoso

Abstract

Since its publication, in 1959, Lúcio Cardoso’s Crônica da casa assassinada (2008) has been the novelist’ s most studied work. Many literary critics have stressed the importance of this novel in Cardoso’s work, such as Álvaro Lins (1963), Alfredo Bosi (2015), Temístocles Linhares (1971), Massaud Moisés (2019) and Manuel Bandeira (1960). Besides them, Wilson Martins (1959) and André Seffrin (2008), in reviews of the novel Crônica da casa assassinada (2008), expose the dramatic retreat to which the central female characters Ana and Nina are subjected in the last chapter of the work. In “Pós-escrito numa carta de Padre Justino”, the chapter that concludes the events at the Meneses’ farm, Ana confesses that André, initially recognized as Nina’s son, is, in fact, her son. The critics in question understand Lúcio Cardoso’s dramatic resource in the final chapter of the novel as an apology for dealing with such a thorny issue as incest. Martins (1959) and Seffrin (2008) also attribute place to the author’s Catholicism and the moralism and conventionalism to which he yielded. This paper aims, then, to observe in what way the “Pós-escrito numa carta de Padre Justino”, differently from what the two critics point out, gives unity to the Crônica da casa assassinada when read from the guidelines made in Mentira romântica e verdade romanesca (2009), by René Girard. To this end, it analyzes, in a detailed way, the trajectory of Ana and Nina throughout the narrative and seeks to understand, in the postscript, how the explanations obsequiadas in the voice of Father Justino manage a less conflictive and Manichean atmosphere in the mimetic understanding of these two characters.