Post-dictator ship allegories: trauma, languaje and memory in andrea maturana’s narrative

Abstract

The novel El daño (1997) and the short story “Al fondo del patio” (No decir 2006), by Andrea Maturana, establish an intratextual dialogue that conveys the trauma of incest and children abuse as latent secrets of the Chilean bourgeois family. This research studies how this narrative about the traumatized memory adopts the characteristics of the melancholic mourning (Moreiras, Richard). This particularity transforms it into a post-dictatorship allegory (Avelar) given the difficulty to recall a disastrous, painful, unnamable past. Building on the notions of trauma and melancholy, this analysis also studies how the writing of broken memories finds a parallel in the poisoning and curing duality of the pharmakon (Derrida), because of a conflicting dynamic that encompasses memory and oblivion. In brief, Maturana’s writing presents the contradictions of recalling, while denouncing at the same time, the blame and complicities that besiege the big Chilean family.