To read the novels of Diamela Eltit is to enter a narrative world of crisis in which the most basic precepts and assumptions that we hold of language, culture and society verge on collapse. Her writing emerges from marginal areas where general and universal categories and meanings founder, which prevents the utterance of any totalizing judgements and truths about her work or the marginal world it portrays. While Eltit's novels demand interpretation, these same novels challenge and frequently subvert the power of established interpretative frameworks.

By means of a predominately psychoanalytic approach, my reading of Eltit's novels has focused on the insight that they provide into the possibilities for reinstating the mother and wresting maternal experience from prevailing political and cultural discourses that have appropriated motherhood for their own purposes. Eltit emphasizes throughout her narrative that the representation of the maternal has profound psychic and social consequences, not only for mothers, but also for their children and male–female relations. In her novels, therefore, the textual emphasis on the mother has as its aim the reconceptualization of maternal subjectivity. The maternal body is portrayed as a terrain of semiotic pulses and affects that can and will rupture symbolic structures to open up maternal and feminine subjectivity to a rich variety of interpretations that are potentially empowering for all women, and not just mothers.

The work of Irigaray and Kristeva has productively served to explore some of the themes common to Eltit's novels: the urgent need to redress the absence of the mother from symbolic representations; the semiotic as a privileged means of unsettling symbolic representations; the textual construction of subjectivity; and the necessity of rethinking family relations. In short, their psychoanalytic work has enabled an examination of the repressed and often unconscious maternal terrain inscribed by Eltit in her narrative.

My reading of Lumpérica aimed to illustrate how Eltit sheds particular light on the repression of the mother in symbolic representations as a means to disrupt dominant discourse. The occluded maternal body that was shown to underlie linguistic and social structures was incorporated into the novel as a means to allow woman's relationship to the maternal body at the level of the imaginary to be reclaimed. This, in turn, formed the basis of a possible feminine language and subjectivity that did not preclude female specificity and desire.