The poetics of childhood and old age in two short stories by Joseph Zobel and Gabriel García Márquez
Abstract
In 1974, Joseph Zobel (Martinique, 1915-France, 2006) published the novel La Rue Cases- Nègres, a masterpiece of the so-called “literature of Negritude” in the french-speaking West Indies. In 1968, the colombian Nobel Prize in literature Gabriel García Márquez published the short story Un señor muy viejo con unas alas muy grandes.
The aim of this article is to analyze how Márquez’s text introduces in that short story an imaginary of the childhood / old age that can be found six years later in Zobel’s book.
We will study the symbiotic relations that the absence of parents establishes between the characters of the grandchildren and those of the grandparents in these two texts. Moreover, we will try to show how these old characters can metamorphose, despite their senility and therefore their poetic ambivalence, into guardian angels.
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