“Loving by Hating”: Skandalon and the Voluptuousness of the Obstacle in Lúcio Cardoso's Crônica da casa assassinada

Abstract

The Crônica da casa assassinada (Chronicle of the Murdered House) is considered by literary critics to be Lúcio Cardoso's greatest work. The Meneses family, heir to an aristocratic and slave-owning lineage, in the fictional Vila Velha in the interior of Minas Gerais, succumbs to their own pride, represented in the anguish of the inhabitants of the Chácara and in their material downfall. This study aims to interpret the relationships between the central characters in the novel, bringing together the Cardosian notion of “loving by hating”, present in the chapter “Valdo's testimony (IV)”, with René Girard's notes (1990; 2004; 2008; 2009a; 2009b; 2011a; 2011b; 2012), on the concept of mimetic desire, understood in this work from the evangelical notion of skandalon, defined by the French theorist as a “stumbling block” (Girard, 2012, p. 39). Thus, the rivalries between Ana, Nina, Valdo, Demétrio and Timóteo lead to the establishment of mimetic doubles, who reinforce, like mirrors, the voluptuousness of the obstacle that is constitutive of mimicry. In Crônica da casa assassinada, this primordial mechanism for the formation of human cultures, according to Girard (2008), whose paradoxical structure is at the heart of Lúcio Cardoso's novel, becomes decisive for understanding the Meneses' drama in the “Postscript to a letter from Father Justino”, the last chapter of the novel.