Del fantasma del siglo XIX al simulacro posmoderno: la figura del «monstruo» en la narrativa fantástica de Landolfi y Bioy Casares

To a reality perceived as ephemeral and inadmissible, Tommaso Landolfi and Adolfo Bioy Casares opposea fantastic writing that sees in literature the only safe foothold from which to denounce the substantial coincidence between reality and unreality. The literature they both look at, then, will necessarily rise on an imaginative writing that draws withboth hands from the vast reserve of thematic-formal strategies represented by the fantastic, in a total rejection of the mimetic conventions of realism. The revisitation by the two authors of what is certainly the most characteristic thematic recurrence of the romantic tradition, the intrusion of a monstrous creature into the peaceful context of daily life, responds to the decisive effort of renewal of the genre that can be found in the work of the Italian author as well as in that of the Argentine one. Thus the monstrous and horror element, in addition to maintaining a disturbing function essential to the achievement of an authentically fantastic tension, gets charged with new and more modern meanings.