Precarious, Proletarians, and Itinerants: The Working Class in the Narrative of Diego Armijo

Abstract

After fifty years since the last coup d’état and thirty years since the end of the civil-military dictatorship, literature has maintained an elusive engagement with the working class. Various perspectives from critics have highlighted that recent narrative predominantly feature protagonists from middle classes (Espinosa) and petite bourgeoisie (Areco Morales). However, the dilemmas faced by the popular sectors remain on the margins of novels and stories published in Chile (Amaro). A literary proposal against these trends is that of Diego Armijo. His three novels –Carcasa (2020), Ropa (2022), and Ampliaciones (2023)– emerge as narratives that articulate the dramas of the working-class subjects within a context of precarization subordinated to the neoliberal policies established during the dictatorship and further intensified in the transition period. The outcome has been the decomposition of the working class and its understanding as a subject (Ruiz and Boccardo). This study aims to analyze the contradictions, conflicts, and resistances of the working class as portrayed in these novels, confronting the disintegration of social fabrics, uncertainty, and precarization. This narrative serves as a cornerstone in aesthetic reflections on language, representation, and the possibilities for workers to confront exploitation at a time when the latter is proposed as omnipresent, unyielding, and omnipotent according to capitalist realism (Fisher). In front of this, Armijo's proletarian writing confronts with the incomprehensible global network of exploitation (Jameson).