SOURCE: "A Gallery of Women in Carlos Fuentes's Cantar de ciegos," in Review of Contemporary Fiction, Vol. 8, No. 2, Summer, 1988, pp. 217-24.

In the following essay, Wing examines Fuentes's treatment of female characters in Cantar de ciegos.

It was José Donoso who first drew my attention to what are central features of the six short stories and the novella that Carlos Fuentes published in 1964 as Cantar de ciegos (Song of the Blind). Donoso finds in them a common theme—"the withdrawal of human beings from basic feelings." Fuentes's characters no longer recognize themselves in traditional concepts such as "love," "hate," "justice," etc. They find these abstractions useless precisely because they exist prior to and independently of concrete experience which might make them meaningful. Consequently, neither a fixed order, nor a rational organization of society, nor a transcendent purpose are possible for Fuentes's characters, who are adrift in a world...