Interpretação e imaginário: uma análise da ficção de tribunal na recepção crítica de Dom Casmurro, a partir de Blanchot

Abstract

This dissertation examines how the Brazilian classic Dom Casmurro (1899) came to be read as a kind of “courtroom fiction” and argues that the novel’s enduring ambiguity emerges from the pact between narrative form and the literary imaginary theorized by Maurice Blanchot. The objective is threefold: (i) to map the pre-1960 critical reception that consolidated Capitu’s alleged adultery as dogma; (ii) to analyze the rupture inaugurated by Helen Caldwell’s 1960 study, which repositions Bentinho as an unreliable narrator and reopens the case for Capitu’s innocence; and (iii) to relate this reception shift to Blanchot’s concepts of image, void, and the “death of the author,” proposing that the novel sustains itself in the space of absence that the reader necessarily fills. Methodologically, the research combines reception history, close reading of key chapters with “judicial” rhetoric, and a theoretical framework anchored in Blanchot to articulate how image (as presence of absence) structures both the text and its criticism. The results identify a tripartite trajectory: an initial phase that treats Capitu as definitively guilty and Bentinho as trustworthy; a caldwellian turn that turns suspicion upon the narrator and reframes the book as an argumentative plea and a subsequent consolidation of ambiguity as a scholarly norm linked to Blanchot’s imaginary/void. The conclusion is that Dom Casmurro persists not by resolving the “case,” but by staging an inexhaustible space where form invites judgment without delivering verdict, it means that the novel’s vitality arises from its constitutive void, which converts readers into jurors and transforms the fortune of the work into a history of interpretive oscillation with the thereby contributing both to Machado studies and to debates on literature’s relation to image, absence, and reception.