La historia como conjetura: La narrativa de Jorge Edwards

The principal object of this dissertation is to explore the novels of the Chilean writer Jorge Edwards with a view to elucidating his views on history, fiction and politics. It proposes as well to study the conflicts he depicts within what might be called dissident members of Chile's dominant social class and/or members of the intellectual middle class. Edwards' works chronicle these people at crucial moments of Chilean history, very particularly during the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990), periods of European exile, the transition to democracy, as well as the decades immediately prior to Chile's accession to independence.;Edwards' work develops what might be called an inclusive, democratic counter-discourse which challenges the monolithic, exclusionary rhetoric of the Pinochet regime, while at the same time depicting personalities who supported, made possible, and justified the dictatorship itself. In so doing, he shows how they betrayed the democratic ideals based on the French Revolution which led their ancestors in the nineteenth century to lead the struggle for independence. This dissertation also studies the epistemological character of art and literature in Edwards' work and its influence in awakening the conscience and social sense of the dissident personalities in the context of dictatorship.;Other central aspects of this dissertation include a study of the role of women in exile and in the struggle against the dictatorship; the writer of bourgeois extraction viewed as a "traitor to his class"; the gradual emergence within the dictatorship itself of what later became the country's hegemonic democratic culture; and the persistent economic domination of its elite classes. It looks at the presence of art, literature and architecture in Edwards' narrative and Bertold Brecht's principle of "estrangement"; as well as Edwards' view---based on those of Michelet---that there is no essential difference between the tasks of the historian and the novelist with regard to the selection and presentation of the events.