Article on the essay that is romance

The miscellanie of genres in Blindness by José Saramago

Abstract

This article aims to carry out a reading of the novel Ensaio sobre a cegueira (1995), by José Saramago, approaching the process of genological mixture that permeates the entire work and that composes the list of characteristics attributed to postmodern novels. The genological mixture questions the fixed function of literary genres, reviewing the comfort of the fictional pact established between the reader and the work of fiction. Despite not being a new artifice in literature, in Ensaio sobre a cegueira we have a deliberate process of mixing genres that goes back to the first works of José Saramago, such as the novel Manual de Pintura e Caligrafia (1977). To carry out the research, we used Lyotard’s theoretical studies (2011) to discuss postmodernity as a new socio-political-cultural moment. Subsequently, we narrowed the debate based on the works of Hutcheon (1991) and Arnaut (2002), presented in dialogue with Luiz Costa Lima (2002), Aguiar e Silva (1993), and Angélica Soares (2007) for the elaboration of the concept of gender textual content, specifically, the literary genre and how they merge in Saramago work. It appears that these characteristics, although discussed separately, contribute to the fragmentation of the narrative and to its reading as a postmodernist work.