Lo The sinister, the police or the speculative: narrative engines in Di Benedetto

Abstract

First, we propose the following hypothesis of reading. Di Benedetto’s authorial poetics works the narrative form from limits of the mimetics. That Poetics proposes exploring the possibilities of a new mimesis from a novelistic form and a relatively open narrative. From here on that poetics designs its singular work with the distribution of the sensitive; aesthetics of story that serves as a continuous inquiry of what’s real from sinister, which acquires different variations throughout its corpus. As a complementary hypothesis, we highlight the dialogue with the philosophical-conceptual and the psychoanalytical as generative elements of fiction in this work, in particular by assuming from here on the relevance of the sinister as a disturbing omnipresent aspect for all subjectivity. El silenciero and Los suicidas show that in an exemplary way, and with them numerous stories. Likewise, for that reason, in order to display that open but structured mimesis that seeks above all to manifest in language the subjects who interact in the narrative world, the Di Benedetto’s writing uses parody of various genres to maintain that relatively open form. In this sense we emphasize here, due to its novel twist with respect to the mimetics, the police, the fantastic and even the speculative fiction or science fiction, which usually provide keys not only to understand the transformation of forms and languages, but also the disturbing of that is being told, as it happens with intertexts of James Ballard (in a very close quote to that of Freud) or Ray Bradbury in two different stories. The latter constitutes the complementary third hypothesis that expands the present interpretation.