Dom Casmurro 23.14 · 23.14

The catalogue of enlargement continues, and grows funnier for being so concrete: under José Dias's voice the lakes hold more water. It is a wonderfully absurd measure of exaggeration — as if a reading could top up a lake. Machado is enjoying himself, itemizing the ways a text inflates when this particular reader gets hold of it.

Yet the joke keeps its edge. To add water to a lake that already exists on the page is to improve on the author, to trust one's own amplitude over the thing given. José Dias always knows better, always fuller, always more. The trait is harmless in a parlor reading of Scott. It will be less harmless when the same confidence — that he can heighten and manage any material — is applied to the affairs of the people who depend on him, Bento first among them.

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