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Non fiction

OS OLLOS DE VICTORINE E A CONSTRUCIÓN DA CUARTA PAREDE

By GUSTAVO PERNAS CORA

About this book

This admirable book by Gustavo Pernas, apart from an exquisite analysis, is also an excellent exercise halfway between cultural criticism and comparative literature. The text is also remarkable, in that it is written as a stage play. His background as playwright influences reading of modern times. A chorus of narrators brings together the most remarkable voices on art, from Susan Sontag to Edgar Morin, from Benjamin to Eugenio Trias, from Gombrich to Duvergier... The play takes place against the backdrop of this Dèjeuner sur l’herbe we knew so little of. Who are these people, what do they do, and more concretely, who is she and why is she looking? The chorus, that dark mass of voices that are shadows, asks its questions and opens up the unknown, answering some questions or confirming their enigmatic nature.

Book fragment

In the tangent of a triangle, as God is definitely absent, Victorine looks back. Something transcendent is happening. A great conflict underlies the society of the 19th century, and a reaction against its conservatism is about to surface. That secular society created with the rise of Reason and after the industrial revolution, inheritor of Materialism and history, sentenced God to death and inaugurated an obscene gaze. Playwrights and painters since Aristotle have known that has to happen. In the same way Goethe argued that Medea killed her children on the stage, Manet brought the psychology of an obscene gaze to Realism.