Los asesinados del seguro obrero and the forms of history

Abstract

This article examinates the connections between Los asesinados del Seguro Obrero (1939-1940-1972-2010 [1989]), a founding text for Carlos Droguett’s poetics, and the event referred by it, that is, the traumatic “Massacre of the Seguro Obrero” of 1938, in which nearly sixty young nacistas were killed by police officers at the end of Arturo Alessandri’s government period. When we compare Droguett’s narration with other interpretations of this event that is so important for the history of Chile, we recognize three strategies to approaching it: depoliticizing the event, presenting it under archaic forms and interpreting it in a universal way. Initially these strategies serve to encode a situation of shock. Using these same strategies, however, Droguett’s global literary project proposes, in the long term, a sense of sole and unchanging history, a universally historic narration valid for all humanity, that implies a loss of historicity, that is, the ability to understand facts and actions as products of a particular context and a limited time.