Capitu Between Two Enigmas: Veridiction and Fiduciary Contract

Abstract

This work intends to present a new approach to Dom Casmurro, the most enigmatic novel by Machado de Assis, in order to study the features of veridiction and the fiduciary contract in the epistemic relation involving the enunciator and enunciatee of discourse, and the discourse actors, Bentinho/Bento and Capitu/Capitolina. These relations are intermediated in this literary discourse by the subjective point of view of the narrator Dom Casmurro, who is willing to remember, in a new context of time and space, the actions and reactions of his emotional life. His aim was to unveil and understand the chief mysteries involving his terrible passionate impulses. This enunciation procedure makes the novel a special object for a semiotic analysis of the fiduciary contract. Greimas, creator of French semiotics (1983, 1987), Fontanille (1999) and Bertrand (2003) form the theoretical basis of this analysis, which searches for the intersection between veridiction, fiduciary contract, point of view, rhetoric and figurativity of passions in literary discourse. Two literary figures – “dissimulated and oblique gypsy eyes” and “rip tide eyes” (“olhos de ressaca”) – were chosen as isotopic connectors, responsible for the semantic chain and the rhetoric dimension of discourse. The hypothesis to be confirmed is that those figures give support to the meanings of the fiduciary relations analysed in the literary discourse.