The Subject between Death Tolls and Testimony

This chapter examines Honduran-Salvadoran writer Horacio Castellanos Moya&s;s novel Senselessness . Set in Guatemala, Senselessness takes place after the country&s;s 36-year civil war when many people involved in various efforts to collect evidence of the military&s;s violence against citizens, which amounted to acts of genocide, were themselves victimised. Castellanos Moya&s;s unnamed narrator-protagonist is a writer from El Salvador who travels to Guatemala to edit a report on the violation of human rights during the civil war despite wanting as little to do with the violence there as possible. As he takes the testimonies out of the context of the human rights report and obsesses over repeated images of violence, he exceeds the attempt to provide closure to the victims. At one point, he decides to turn a particularly gruesome testimony into a magical realist story. At another, he begins to re-enact the violence meted out by the soldiers during a psychotic episode. This chapter argues that Senselessness reveals what often goes unmeasured and unmanaged in work on violence. By decontextualising the report and then reimagining it, the narrator models an intense libidinal investment in the Other&s;s suffering. He embodies the objective violence of narrative complicity in stories of Latin American violence.