A confissão de Lúcio (1914) à luz do impressionismo literário

Abstract

The Industrial Revolution in the 19th century triggered a series of innovations that had a profound impact not only on the industrial sector, but also on the arts. Among the innovations that changed the artistic scene and the history of art, the invention of photography and the printing press stand out, revolutionizing the way in which the arts were produced, disseminated, and received. It was in this context of strong technological and cultural changes that Impressionist painting emerged. Led by painters such as Monet, Renoir, and Pissarro, Impressionist paintings were met with harsh criticism, with critics attempting to delegitimize the quality of the works at all costs. In addition to transgressing the classical standards of the time, Impressionism also reached the literary sphere, manifesting itself in three theoretical currents: negativist, comparatist, and narrativist. The first tendency argued that it was impossible to transpose the techniques of pictorial Impressionism to literary art. The second approach argued that literary Impressionism incorporated aesthetic characteristics of Impressionist painting, that is, it was an offshoot of pictorial art. The latter trend viewed literary impressionism as an independent movement from the pictorial, having as its aesthetic premise experimentation, impression and suggestion in the meaning of the diegesis. Thus, when faced with the fragmentary and ambiguous narrative of the novel Lucius's Confession (1914), by the writer Mário de Sá-Carneiro (1890-1916), we intend to analyze such aspects in the light of literary impressionism, through the theories of Todd Bender (1997), Pierre Francastel (1964), Jesse Matz (2001), José Guilherme Merquior (1996), Xavier Placer (1962) and Franco Sandnello (2017a, 2017b, 2019).