Essays
The Dead Author in the novel Dom Casmurro
Ronaldes de Melo e Souza
; Faculdade de Letras, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro
Abstract
Machado de Assis’s invention of the dead author informs the plot weaving not only of The Posthumous Memories of Bras Cubas, but also of Dom Casmurro. Both novels reveal themselves to be posthumous memoires. In the recollection of times gone by the narrator adopts a dual perspective, in which two narrative visions intertwine, the one belonging to the dead author who is ironically distanced from the events, the other to the protagonist emotionally involved with the events. This double narrative mediation is made evident through a comparison with fictional experiments such as Dickens’s David Copperfield and Thackeray’s Henry Esmond. Dom Casmurro’s peculiarity is notable in its shift between internal and external perspective and in its adoption of a multiperspectivism that enables the narrator to take up multiple fictional masks. We demonstrate that the overisight of the narrative multiperspectivism impoverishes the critical reception of the novel, which has predominantly dealt with Capitu’s supposed adultery. After a brief revision of the critical fortune of Dom Casmurro, the essay proposes the theory of the opera as a structural matrix of the novel and highlights the technique of the reversed illusion as key to the transformation of an apparently tragic plot into a tragicomic drama.
Keywords
Hrčak ID:
170997
URI
Publication date:
18.11.2016.
Visits: 1.199 *