Ensaios sobre a cegueira: espaços e gradientes sensoriais em Saramago e Meirelles

Abstract

It presents a comparative reading of two contemporary cultural productions of different materialities: the book Blindness (1995), by Jose Saramago, and the transposition to film, Blindness (2008), by Fernando Meirelles. Therefore, its epistemological orientation follow the textual criticism, and as a theoretical framework, it adopts the topoanalysis, taking as traders the sensorial gradients evoked to wire both accounts. Thus, the proposed reading focuses on the understanding of the dynamics of macro and micro-spaces and sensorial gradients that drive the characters in their relationship with the environment. The main goal is to conduct a comparative study of the topoanalytical ways human senses and spaces are embodied in the verbal text and the word-musicianvisual text, observing how they are configured and how strategies and sensorial gradients function in literature and cinema, in order to produce certain effects in the instance of reader/spectator. For sensorial gradients we understand the nuances in the perceptual-cognitive relationship between humans and environment, in the case under focus, between space and characters. These elements are defined by Borges Filho (2007, p. 69) as “(…) the human [basic] senses: vision, hearing, smell, touch, taste. The human being is related to the surroundings through their senses. Each establishes a relation of distance/proximity to the space. Therefore, meaning effects are manifested in this important respectsensorial space.” Complements to the above definition is given by the contribution of Del Pino (1998, p. 99), which justifies the analytical perspective guided by observation of “gradients sensuousness” as follows: “Whereas each human senses provides in principle, different distance between subject and object, the analysis of the sensory dominant in the text, or fragments thereof, may consist of efficient heuristic for effective results to be obtained in the course of textual interpretation of the meaning.” On this aspect, as it is intended to demonstrate by comparative reading, predominates in the book the smell and the vision in Meirelles’ film, having a soundscape created especially for the film narrative.