DOM CASMURRO
A major work of Machado de Assis and one of the most complex achievements of nineteenth-century fiction, Dom Casmurro is a novel about memory, interpretation, and the uncertain foundations of judgment.
First published in 1899, Dom Casmurro occupies a singular place in Brazilian literature. Its apparent subject is the retrospective account of Bento Santiago, who, in old age, attempts to reconstruct his youth, his love for Capitolina-Capitu-their marriage, and the suspicion of adultery that ultimately determines his understanding of their shared past. Yet Machado de Assis transforms this seemingly private history into a far more radical literary problem: the relation between recollection and truth, between evidence and interpretation, and between what a narrator has experienced and what he subsequently persuades himself-and his reader-to believe.
The novel is constructed almost entirely within Bento's retrospective consciousness. Capitu can therefore never be recovered independently of the discourse that describes, remembers, desires, suspects, and judges her. Gestures become evidence; resemblance acquires the force of genealogy; memories are reorganised by later knowledge; and the reader is repeatedly invited to complete arguments whose premises remain uncertain. The celebrated question of Capitu's fidelity is thus inseparable from a more fundamental question concerning narrative authority itself.
Machado's achievement lies precisely in refusing to resolve this epistemological instability. Dom Casmurro is not simply a novel containing an enigma; it is a novel about the production of certainty under conditions in which certainty may be impossible. Its irony, fragmentary chapters, direct addresses to the reader, temporal dislocations, literary allusions, and calculated omissions continually expose the processes by which narratives acquire coherence and judgments acquire the appearance of truth.
This Second Critical Edition presents a revised English text by Gabriela Weisman, edited with particular attention to Machado's distinctive economy of style, tonal instability, irony, and deliberate ambiguities. The annotations by Alexandre H. Reis provide the international reader with the historical, linguistic, religious, literary, and social contexts necessary for passages whose implications are easily diminished in translation, while avoiding explanatory interventions that would prematurely resolve the novel's constitutive uncertainties.
The volume concludes with a substantial critical afterword by Alexandre H. Reis, which approaches Dom Casmurro through the problems of scepticism, evidence, belief, and judgment. Engaging especially with the critical work of Jos Raimundo Maia Neto, and with the interpretative tradition represented by Helen Caldwell, John Gledson, and Roberto Schwarz, the essay situates Bento Santiago's narrative within a broader philosophical and literary history of doubt and interpretation. Particular attention is given to the relation between appearance and assent, to the juridical structure of Bento's retrospective narrative, and to the impossibility of establishing an external standpoint from which Capitu might finally be judged.
The result is an edition intended not merely to make Machado de Assis accessible in English, but to preserve the intellectual difficulty that makes Dom Casmurro inexhaustible. More than a century after its publication, the novel continues to confront its readers with a question more demanding than whether Capitu betrayed Bento Santiago: what, within a narrative governed by memory, desire, and retrospective judgment, could ever constitute sufficient evidence for knowing that she did?
Machado de Assis (1839-1908), founding president of the Brazilian Academy of Letters, united formal innovation, philosophical irony, and psychological depth.
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