The gaze that opens at the close. Senses of ekphrasis in Beni by Hebe Uhart

Sentidos de la écfrasis en Beni de Hebe Uhart

Abstract

This paper analyzes Beni, one of the three novels by Hebe Uhart gathered in El amor es una cosa extraña (Adriana Hidalgo, 2021). The narrator observes her own spaces and is contaminated with the gazes of others; she paints her world, describes it and interprets it in a visuality that registers his mother's demands, scrutinizes her loving object and inquires into his own interiority. Anxiety arises between the desire of the body and the forms of intimacy when gaze and thought rest on what does not close. For this, Uhart shows uses of ekphrasis that, far from placing the gaze at a fixed point and seeing from nowhere, are proposed as a vision embodied in a body attentive to dialogue with the place and time it inhabits. Thus, voice and gaze are intertwined with uncertainty, contingency and strangeness and a paradox typical of love appears.