Dom Casmurro 9.113 · 9.113

The tenor's prophecy is grandly nihilistic: a future in which every book is burned 'por inuteis' — as useless — because his single spoken truth will have made all written wisdom superfluous. It is the fantasy of the man of one idea, that his revelation could replace the entire library. Machado, a bookish ironist to the marrow, plants the vision of universal biblioclasm in the mouth of an unlettered singer and lets it hang, absurd and a little chilling.

There is a private joke here too, aimed at the book we are reading. Dom Casmurro is itself a written account straining to fix a truth, the very kind of volume the tenor consigns to the fire. The old man promises that truth will finally pass by voice, tenor to mankind, not by ink — and Bento, committing his own contested truth to paper, records the prophecy that would burn it.

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