Machado de Assis (post 3): Revealing true color of Brazil’s celebrated novelist, and multiple personality in his Dom Casmurro
True color: Color version of old black and white photograph reveals that he was black, not white. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/14/books/brazil-machado-de-assis.html
Multiple personality in his masterpiece, Dom Casmurro, was discussed in two posts last year:
July 1, 2018
“Dom Casmurro” by Machado de Assis: First-person narrator says he entered his room behind himself, talked to himself, and persecuted himself
“Bento Santiago, the wildly unreliable narrator of Dom Casmurro, believes …that his wife has cheated on him with his best friend and that her child is not his. Has Capitú, his love since childhood, really been unfaithful to him?…First published in 1900…a classic of Brazilian literature…a sad and darkly comic novel about love and the corrosive power of jealousy.” —quoted from the back cover. The novel is praised in blurbs by Harold Bloom, Philip Roth, Susan Sontag, and The New York Times Book Review.
Halfway through the novel, in a chapter titled “Despair,” is the following:
“I ran to my room and entered behind myself. I talked to myself, persecuted myself, threw myself on the bed, and rolled over and over with myself” (1, p. 148).
As I continue reading, I will see if there is any other description of multiple personality.
1. Machado de Assis. Dom Casmurro. Translated from the Portuguese by Helen Caldwell (1953). New York, Farrar Straus Giroux, 2009.
July 4, 2018
Unreliable Narrator(s) of “Dom Casmurro” by Machado de Assis (post 2): Dom Casmurro and Bento Santiago are alternate narrative personalities
The beginning of this novel is controlled by an alternate narrative personality called “Dom Casmurro.” He explains that people call him by that nickname because they see him as pretentious, morose, and withdrawn. But it is not until the end of the novel that the reader learns his main attribute: an unshakable belief that his son was the product of adultery between his wife and best friend.
Most of the novel, the 99% between the beginning and the end, is narrated by Bento Santiago, the regularly-named narrative personality, who has always loved and trusted his wife and best friend.
Evidently, when inspiration for this novel came to Machado de Assis, he was confronted with two distinct narrative voices, as described above, and a compromise was reached: the trusting and loving Bento Santiago would have control of most of the novel, but in return, the cynical Dom Casmurro would control the beginning, end, and title.
The conventional interpretation, that there is a single unreliable narrator, is implausible. For if there were only one narrator, and he truly believed in the adultery, he never would have devoted 99% of the novel to a seemingly sincere portrayal of his wife and friend as beloved and trustworthy.
(Other evidence for multiple personality is the passage quoted in the previous post on this novel.)
Machado de Assis. Dom Casmurro [1900]. Translated from the Portuguese by Helen Caldwell (1953). New York, Farrar Straus Giroux, 2009.
Added June 16, 2019: Others have noted the feature of doubling and split personality in the writings of Machado de Assis:
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