The shadow of himself

The romantic irony as hermeneutic key to Dom Casmurro’s free form

Abstract

The present paper provides an interpretation of Dom Casmurro, advancing as critical hypothesis an attempt to read the novel’s formal fragmentation, one of the characteristics of Machado de Assis’s so called free form, as a mimesis of the subjective structure of Bento Santiago, the novel’s ficcional author, understood from the perspective of romantic irony, as it was theoretically developed by Friedrich Schlegel (1973). In critical dialogue with the works of Roberto Schwarz (1977, 1990), José Guilherme Merquior (1978), Sá Rego (1989), Rouanet (2007), we have researched the different hermeneutical approaches the free form has received, in order to propose the specificity of our own interpretation. Having analyzed Schlegel’s texts and the secondary bibliography on romantic irony, we conclude that Bento Santiago’s narrative situation is concretized within the very novel’s free form, whose fragmentation and highly subjective nature expresses the paradox which constitutes romantic irony: the necessity and impossibility of an absolute communication.