TRAUMA AS A NARRATIVE STRUCTURE

THE CONSTRUCTION OF DAMARIS'S SUBJECTIVITY IN A CACHORRA, BY PILAR QUINTANA

Abstract

This article analyzes A Cachorra (2017), by the Colombian writer Pilar Quintana, focusing on the construction of the protagonist Damaris's subjectivity through the concept of trauma. Its primary objective is to investigate how trauma functions as a constitutive structure of the female subject represented in the narrative, not as an episodic event but as the foundation of her ways of feeling, acting, and relating to the world. The analysis is grounded in three complementary theoretical frameworks: Freudian and Winnicottian psychoanalysis, with emphasis on the concepts of trauma, repetition compulsion, repression, and melancholia; Vera Iaconelli's (2023) anti-maternalism, which makes it possible to understand the symbolic violence inflicted upon Damaris through the social imposition of motherhood as the mandatory destiny of women; and Elaine Showalter's (1994) feminist literary criticism, articulated with Silviano Santiago's (2002) concept of the in-between space (entre-lugar), which situates the novel within a literary tradition that speaks from the margins in order to destabilize hegemonic discourses. The analysis demonstrates that Damaris's behavior—including her ambivalent bond with the dog Chirli and the act of violence that concludes the narrative—constitutes a coherent response to a set of unresolved traumatic experiences whose structure is repeated and intensified throughout the novel. This study is situated within the field of qualitative literary studies and adopts an analytical-interpretative approach.