Disturbing strangeness in the stories of Huerco by José Pedro Bellán

Abstract

This work aims to address the peculiarity of a type of urban narrative that emerges as dissent in the hegemonic ambit of the “criollista” narrative. This fictional mode gives an account of the urban experience as a new pattern from which characters and situations arise typical of the conflicts installed by modernity. Without departing from the realistic poetics that characterize most of his work, but in the porous coexistence between the possible and the impossible, the author incorporates in his narrative universe some fictions in which the “stable” plane of the everyday and known is eroded. In this way, he establishes contacts with certain conventions of the so-called fantasy genre, such as the unusual or problematic relationship with inanimate beings, the topic of double on characters and situations suggesting and installing supernatural and /or sinister effects. The stories of José Pedro Bellán’s first opera Huerco, published in 1914, dialogue with this universe of change, and by their nature collaborate with the author’s ambiguous place (narrator, playwright, teacher and politician) in the intellectual field of the moment