“That, when translated incorrectly, was saying something like this”: Victorian context and intertext in the works of Juan Benet

The article analyzes Juan Benet’s essays on Victorian literature, short stories “De lejos”, “Una linea incompleta” and “Viator” and his non-fiction book “Londres victoriano” in which the Spanish writer addresses 19th century Anglo-Saxon writers from Charles Dickens to Joseph Conrad. Benet is mostly known as an author who brought the discourse of European and American modernism to Spanish literature and as the creator of the Spanish new novel, who consciously renounced Spanish realism of both 19th and 20th century. However, his standing as a postmodernist writer is often debated, as the neomythologism and complex narrative structure of his novels are more often associated with American and European modernist landmarks. Proustian, Joycean and Faulknerian heritage of Benet is widely studied, while his connection to Victorian literature stays largely overlooked. Meanwhile, in his essays as well as in his short fiction, the author addresses his favourite 19th century writers, and in short stories he establishes intertextual dialogue with many of them, producing some of his greater postmodernist works. It demonstrates that pastiche, parody and allusions to Victorian discourse in his work are examples of Benet’s postmodernist prose, only comparable epistemologically to his novel “En el estado”. Therein, intertextuality serves a goal that is undoubtedly postmodernist - that of showing the textual, fictional nature of narrated events, establishing an ironic dialogue with the reader and revealing the nature of the narrator as an entity that creates an illusion of reality rather than describing it, and deconstructing the author’s own narrative practices.