Retired Dreams: Dom Casmurro, Myth and Modernity by Paul B. Dixon (review)

Book Reviews253 sends the reader spinning from Aristotle to Oliver North, Restoration drama to film, body art to Shakespeare, and more. In placing his study in the context of late twentieth-century literary theory and cultural criticism, Blau relies heavily on the work ofsuch figures as Barthes, Benjamin, Foucault, and Lacan (to cite only the most frequently quoted writers); this tendency alone contributes significantly to the book's complexity. The end result is a sometimes brilliant, sometimes mystifying text that some readers may simply find unreadable. Yet Blau's text forces his readers—the book's audience—to test out the very roles for an audience that he attempts to describe. The nature of the book and its theoretical framework make it impossible for Blau to offer definitive conclusions from these meditations. But the book does offer a compelling new analysis of some venerable critical problems. Although Blau often focuses upon traditional dramatic texts from ancient Greece and Renaissance England, his work is especially good in exploring the role of the audience in modern and contemporary drama and in performance art and experimental theatre. Blau's treatment of Bertolt Brecht and Antonin Artaud as precursors ofpoststructuralism is also insightful: "What has since been elaborated by Foucault and Derrida was more than latent in Brecht and Artaud: there is a sense in which power lives by theater, the duplicity of mere appearance, by which the audience is deprived of power" (42). Finally, Blau makes some stimulating points about the audience created by the entertainment industry through its endless statistical analyses and its packaging and repackaging of art as a commodity. All in all, The Audience is a fascinating but often an overwhelmingly difficult book to read. Steeped as it is in contemporary critical theory and cultural critique, much of the book is probably not accessible to scholars and teachers of a traditional ilk. Literary scholars may also find the work disappointing since Blau never adequately deals with the connection between audience and readers. Still, the book is an important and insightful contribution to performance theory and cultural criticism. RONALD D. MORRISON Morehead State University PAUL B. DIXON. Retired Dreams: Dom Casmurro, Myth and Modernity. West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 1989. 150 p. In his book, Retired Dreams, Paul Dixon examines a novel by, perhaps, the most well known and literarily meritorious of Brazil's novelists. Dixon's critical work is a multifaceted explication of both literary text and literary theory. He places the novel Dom Casmurro, written by Joaquim Manuel Machado de Assis, as one pertaining to that segment of literature known as transitional or pivotal to the understanding of both the late nineteenth-century and the early twentieth-century. Borrowing Frank Kermode's phrase, "introductions to our times," Dixon denotes the importance of this Brazilian narrative first published in 1899 or 1900. 254Rocky Mountain Review Dom Casmurro is studied in all its ambiguity and expressed uncertainty of the human condition in an attempt to understand "the human nature of things." Dixon makes the case for this novel to be a milestone in Latin American literature and a precursor to, if not an instigator of, the generation of novels that comes to characterize the innovativeness ofthe literature of the continent from the 1950s. This particular study treats Dom Casmurro as a late nineteenth-century novel of adultery and as a twentieth-century myth-making process in action. Although Dixon cites various other critical strategies, such as John Gledson's political exposé in the work The Deceptive Realism of Machado de Assis: A Dissenting Interpretation o/Oom Casmurro (1984), he does not concentrate on these newer thematic approaches. He does not, for example, mention the North American minimalist writers who acknowledge the stylistic and thematic influences of Machado de Assis' works on their own writing (I am thinking of remarks made by John Barth and Frederick and Donald Barthelme in particular). Dixon does, however, continue explorations into the function of narrator begun with Maria Luisa Nunes in her seminal study, The Craft of an Absolute Winner: Characterization and Narratology in the Novels ofMachado de Assis (1983), and Enylton de Sá Regó in several articles. In this series of seven separate studies, Dixon...