The skins of fiction

eroticism, psychoanalysis and language in A confissão de Lúcio

Abstract

A narrative about a prohibited homosexual desire, at the beginning of the 20th century, in one of the most Catholic countries in Europe, is not only a moral challenge, but a literary one, since this challenge requires a form as revolutionary as the content presented to it. The narrative structure of A Confissão de Lúcio, by Mário de Sá-Carneiro, enables the intersection proposed by this work between eroticism, psychoanalysis and language. We propose the reading that the work creates a personal narrative account that fluctuates, admittedly, between the implausible and the factual, revealing itself as a work of elaboration of the mourning that caused this confession. In this mourning process, literature proposes itself as the erotic ruse that keeps alive the libido that was invested in the objects at the center of the loss, based on the corporal materiality of language itself in its magnificent achievement of being more sensorial than imitative, more theater than instrument (BARTHES, 2013, p. 17). Mainly guided by Georges Bataille, Octavio Paz, Sigmund Freud and Roland Barthes, we will seek to investigate how the form and content of this work manage to represent the desire between the characters, their veils and unveilings, their secrets and confessions.