The excess of life and death in Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 and Horacio Castellanos Moya’s Senselessness

Abstract

This paper examines two novels, both published in 2004 and later translated into English: 2666 by Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño and Senselessness by Honduran-Salvadoran writer Horacio Castellanos Moya. Bolaño and Castellanos Moya write death and dying as a global concern and place readers in the global North at the centre of events that happened, or are happening, in the South. This paper argues that 2666 and Senselessness express the human potential in desire for, and to create, excess, universalising guilt against a tendency to contextualise or localise events of mass murder in Central and South America. Both novels represent death and dying while expressing an uncanny excess of life at the level of form and content. Bolaño and Castellanos Moya bombard the reader with the details of crimes and harrowing witness testimonies in their novels, but deny the reader closure or the ability to mourn the dead. Instead, the excess of life traces a void that, according to French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan and others, is at the centre of the subject of desire. It is at the level of desire that we can locate ourselves in both novels and understand our part in the events of mass murder their writers narrate.