Dom Casmurro, uma elegia moderna: diálogos com Lord Jim, de Joseph Conrad

Abstract

The chapter proposes a comparison between Joseph Conrad and Machado de Assis. It explores a narrative form which creation and development is usually attributed to Joseph Conrad. It is almost certain that Machado de Assis did not read nor know about the existence of Joseph Conrad, despite the book edition of Lord Jim was published in the same year (1900) as the novel Dom Casmurro started to circulate in Brazil. Nevertheless the author finds an unexpected similarity between the two novels, in the foundation of the “modern elegiac romance, a category of narrative form proposed by the critic Keneth A. Bruffee: it is a romance”, because the hero engages himself in a sort of quest, as in the chivalry romance. It is elegiac, because their narrators tell the story of the deceived hero, as in the pastoral elegy. It is modern, because it emerges at the turn of the 19th century, attempting to move away from the realistic paradigm. After an examination of the concept of elegiac romance and its three thematic elements, always according to Bruffee, the author proposes a reading of Dom Casmurro from the perspective of this concept, claiming for the Brazilian writer the position, together with Joseph Conrad, of renovator of an old literary tradition. This reading projects new light on the most popular novel by Machado de Assis (and maybe the most popular Brazilian novel), not only by proving it elegiac character, but, as a consequence, through a new interpretation of the interaction between the narrator of Dom Casmurro and of its female hero Capitu, who is already dead when he engages himself in the narrative of their lives.

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