Literature of Violence in Colombia in the 1940s. El Día del Odio by José Antonio Osorio Lizarazo

Abstract

The following article presents a reflection on literature as a resource for the understanding of historical processes, within the framework of a debate on the frontiers of history and literature, based on the analysis of the novel El Día del Odio (The Day of Hate) by José Antonio Osorio Lizarazo. In Colombia, from the assassination of Jorge Eliécer Gaitán to the formation of the National Front, a closed and antidemocratic political regime is configured, something that will provoke the appearance of a series of testimonial documents that represented this violent context. From what literary cultural studies and sociology would call the literature of violence and the testimonial novel, a series of textual and intertextual elements used by the author to give an account of the political and social life of those years are identified. In this case, in Osorio’s work, the city becomes the place where all those elements that make up the bipartisan violence experienced by the country in those years are represented.