The inverted Ion mirror: the path to truth-telling in the story of Padre Justino in Crônica da casa assassinada

Abstract

Based on the ideas of Michel Foucault in the course The Government of Self and Others, I examine in this article the route of parrhesia, or truth-telling, attributed to the narrator Padre Justino in the five chapters of the novel Crônica da casa assassi­nada, by Lúcio Cardoso. From this perspective, my analysis focuses on two types of parrhesia, very similar to those from the play Ion, by Euripides identified and classi­fied by Foucault as oracular and confessional. While such discourses in Ion have the function of creating a genealogy for the city of Athenas, in Crônica da casa assassi­nada the acts of parrhesia by Padre Justino and Ana Meneses have, as a whole, the opposite function, serving for the abolition of a family tradition.