An Essay about Dialogue: Intertextual Relations between José Saramago, Pieter Bruegel, and Van Gogh

Abstract

The objective of this article is to show, based on Bakhtin’s theory, how the interdiscursive relations between literature and painting are constructed, specifically in a dialogue between the novel Blindness, by José Saramago, and other works of art as the painting The Blind Leading the Blind (1568), by Pieter Bruegel, a European Renaissance artist in the 16th century, and Wheatfield with Crows (1890), by Van Gogh, a Dutch expressionist artist in the late 19th century. We will also analyze how José Saramago’s discourse is constituted in his literary writing by the word of others and how this is characterized as “individual dissonance,” the author’s style, in the midst of heterodiscursivity, which is inherent to the discourse of the novel, as predicted by Bakhtin.