Echoes from the benjaminian narrator in the film El Laberinto del Fauno: a (re) signification of death by fidelity to Événement

Abstract

The benjaminian narrator is the presence that, doomed to emptying, takes part of a tradition already fragmented, it is the echo that, throughout time, instills values and regulates life concepts. Contemporary presents it in constant exile, corrupted its wisdom: living is trivial and dying does not produce or make sense anymore. In this context, literature and cinema turn the opposition of life and death into an opaque and relativized couplet: living is now and death becomes a plan sign, a simulacrum. This paper aims to reflect about the representation of death from the perspective of the narrator in O Laberinto del Fauno (2006), that is an omniscient voice which presents Ophelia, immersed in a world of oppression and shadow, character who has her perennial existence (re) symbolized in a moment that living means nothing and dying rescues values, turning it into immortality in the sense elaborated by Alain Badiou, that is fidelity to the Event (événement).