Los asesinados del Seguro Obrero (1939) of Carlos Droguett: Testimony as novel

Abstract

　

This article highlights the originality of Los asesinados del Seguro Obrero (1939), of the Chilean writer Carlos Droguett. This work, which refers to the slaughter of students occurred in Santiago on September 5, 1938, anticipates the features of a literary movement that few decades later was known as novela de testimonio. In Droguett’s novel the narrator’s voice politically guides the story and draws a mythical portrait of the working class, also denouncing the oligarchic politics on the basis of historically verifiable evidence. But Droguett’s text never abandons its status as novel and its undeniable link with the Avant-Garde aesthetics in which irony, dialogue, parody and plurivocity are constantly present. The mixture of political commitment and questioning of the concept of truth, this union of modernity and postmodernity in 1939 gives originality and a pioneer status to Droguett’s text.