De sirenas tecnicizadas (II): lo mítico en ‘La boina roja’ de Rogelio Sinán

The present study is the second part of a critical diptych on the complex short story 'La boina roja' (1954) by Rogelio Sinan. The first part examined the relationship between the narrative and the power of science in the fiction of Sinan; this second part considers the articulation of the discourse of the myth starting from and through the function of the character of the mermaid. The study presents the hypothesis that in the story, the mermaid functions as a revealed and revealing figure, since it is announced by an imaginary linked to aquatic symbology, and this symbolic framework can be unravelled as a result of its appearance. The mermaid plays an intermediate role in the story, because it is placed between two opposing discursive spaces of signification, science and myth, at the same time as it is configured as an instance of mediation between them, which makes the confines between these two spaces osmotic. The duplicity of the mermaid's iconic representation is reflected in the ambiguity that characterizes a discourse divided between the mainstream scientific perspective on the protagonist and the changing focus of the third-person narrator that brings out the rhetoric of the myth.