Reflexul privirilor în romanul Vara în care mama a avut ochii verzi, de Tatiana Țîbuleac

In the novel The Summer My Mother Had Green Eyes, published in 2016, Tatiana Țîbuleac examines the evolving and complex relationship between a mother and her son, Aleksy. This difficult relationship is consistently mediated through the motif of the gaze, already foregrounded in the book’s title. While the title refers to the mother’s eyes, the narrative predominantly unfolds through the son’s perspective, transforming the eyes from the subject of the visual act into the object of another’s gaze. As this essay will demonstrate, descriptions of the mother’s eyes primarily reflect the son’s emotions, particularly in the context of his parent’s terminal illness. This event initiates a profound emotional reversal: the adolescent’s initial repulsion, articulated in the harsh and uncompromising tones of the first part of the text, gradually gives way to tenderness and a rediscovery of positive feelings, which guide the reader through the second part of the narrative. The present analysis builds upon Marcello Ghilardi’s reflections on the question of the gaze in Jacques Derrida. It follows a hermeneutic trajectory, first examining the son’s gaze, then the mother’s, and finally the instrument through which the gaze is enacted – the eyes themselves. In depicting the eyes, Țîbuleac employs a series of highly evocative metaphors. Based on these metaphors, this essay considers the symbolic significance of certain images, particularly the chrysalis and the bud, whose connotations of rebirth and regeneration are partially reinterpreted within the text due to the impossibility of a fully positive resolution. Even the summer – the season invoked in the book’s title – assumes a specific symbolic weight within the story’s dynamics. It emerges as a temporal space to be preserved, enabling the protagonist to seek reconciliation with himself. Yet this process remains incomplete, leaving Aleksy with a sense of enduring incompleteness that extends into adulthood, where he pursues painting as his vocation. In the final section of this essay, attention shifts to the gaze of the artist. In the act of reproducing a reference model, Aleksy must inevitably turn away from the real object and rely upon memory. In this sense, his fate parallels that of a modern Orpheus: condemned to inhabit solely the memory of a love forever trapped in an irretrievable past.