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. Both novels approach 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 both novels 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 2666 and Senselessness represent death and dying while expressing an uncanny excess of life at the level of form and content. Reading them, we are bombarded with the details of crimes and harrowing witness testimonies, but neither novel results in closure or allows us 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 they narrate.