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 analyzes the female characters in Cantar de ciegos, noting that they are different from the sentimental female characters in Fuentes's novels. Instead, the critic finds that the women of the short stories are similar to the men—"incapable of mutual love or shared equality. "

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 ofthe 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...