O insólito olhar feminino sob o prisma da cegueira nos romances Cem anos de solidão, de Gabriel García Márquez, e Os tambores silenciosos, de Josué Guimarães

Abstract

The purpose of this work was to promote a dialog about the unusual female gaze in One Hundred Years of Solitude, from 1967, by Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez, and The Silent Drums, from 1977, by Brazilian writer Josué Guimarães. Both are Latin American novels full of unusual and mythical elements/values; both are set in a repressive and violent political context (civil war and civil-military dictatorship); both offer allegories of the real political situation in their countries. In both books, there are also two unique female characters: Ursula and Maria da Glória, respectively, who are marked by a common characteristic: blindness. Ursula loses her sight in old age and Maria da Glória was born blind. However, it is through their blindness that the supernatural manifests itself in both of them; it is in solitude and silence that the gaze of these two characters changes from common to unusual and from singular to be multiple. In order to support this argument, we have used materials from the Russian critic Eleazar M. Mielietinski and the Romanian mythologist Mircea Eliade on issues of myth; for the unusual, we have used the Bulgarian theorist Tzvetan Todorov, the Argentinean critic Jaime Alazraki and the Brazilian professor Irlemar Chiampi amongst others. In regard to blindness, though, we have been based mainly on the theories of the French philosophers Georges Didi-Huberman and Maurice Merleau-Ponty; both approach the theme of the gaze from a unique perspective, where female characters who look through the unusual will, in turn, also receive a gaze that will affect them deeply.