The Unmade House: The Poetics of Ruin in Milton Hatoum

Abstract

This article investigates the configuration of the family home as a symbolic nucleus in the literature of Milton Hatoum, proposing a reading of the domestic space through the lens of the category of narrative microspace. Based on the formulation of the concept of topoanalysis of destruction, the study analyzes how the house, in novels such as Relato de um certo Oriente, Dois irmãos, Cinzas do Norte, A noite da espera, and Pontos de fuga, ceases to function as a site of emotional refuge and instead assumes the role of intimate ruin, a metonym for familial disintegration and subjective fracture that traverses the contemporary Brazilian experience. Drawing on the theoretical contributions of Gaston Bachelard (1957), Ozíris Borges Filho (2007), Henri Lefèbvre (1974), and Walter Benjamin (1928), the analysis demonstrates that the domestic architecture in Hatoum’s fiction disintegrates in parallel with the erosion of affective bonds and the collapse of memory, becoming a space where intimacy is permeated by history. The study argues that the ruined house is not merely a leitmotif in Hatoum’s oeuvre, but a structuring element of his poetics, in which each narrative cycle appears doomed to collapse and total destruction.