Reappropriating Myth

Eltit's sixth novel, Los trabajadores de la muerte (1998), exposes the furious and vengeful facet of maternity that emerges from a narrative embedded in familial abandonment and betrayal. Eltit has stated that she drew on a murder that occurred in Chile in the 1980s and was reported in the gossipy ‘crónica roja’ (tabloid press) to structure the plot of the novel. The newspaper reports that generated Eltit's interest detailed the murder of a woman by her halfbrother in the southern city of Concepción, after her attempts to bring their sexual relationship to an end. The main body of the novel, framed by an epilogue and a prologue, is dominated by the ruminations of a nameless and abandoned mother in Santiago, deserted by the father of her two sons for a bride in Concepción. From the moment of his birth, the mother grooms her eldest son as the unknowing agent of retribution against the father for reneging on his paternal duties, later inciting her son to follow her urgently whispered instructions to travel to Concepción. There, he unknowingly has sexual intercourse with his half-sister, the offspring of his father's second marriage, and only later, during a feverish conversation with his lover/half-sister, does the son realize that his father did not die during his childhood, as his mother had told him, but moved to Concepción and started another family. His father, he now learns, died many years later.

The powerful sexual attraction between the son and his half-sister, whose names we learn only at the end of the main narrative, overpowers the taboo against incest, and their relationship intensifies for over a year. Only then does the half-sister attempt to end it. Pleading for one last meeting, the son sets the scene for his half-sister's ritual murder, stabbing her to death in a seedy room in Concepción and thus enacting the revenge desired by his mother: the annihilation of his father's honour and the lineage ensuing from his second marriage.