Bored to death: Violence and narrative indifference in Roberto Bolaño's 2666

The proposed chapter will analyse the curious narrative strategy adopted by Roberto Bolaño in his 2004 novel 2666 whereby the graphic violence depicted in the novel evokes in the reader not shock, but boredom. Drawing on Julia Kristeva's notion of 'abjection' as a technique of subject constitution, this chapter will examine the forensic catalogue of over a hundred victims of the femicides in Mexico, which constitutes the fourth and longest section of the novel, titled 'The Part about the Crimes'. Kristeva perceives horror as an emotional reaction to the threatened dissolution of subjectivity which needs to be constantly kept under check through the act of 'abjection', that is, the violent expulsion of anything that threatens the integrity of the subject. Horror and revulsion are our affective responses to anything that is unclassifiable, that exceeds the boundaries of the Self but is not quite the Other. Kristeva cites open wounds, blood, excrement, and corpses in particular as examples of this unclassifiable non-object or the 'abject'. This chapter will scrutinise Bolaño's rejection of sensationalism in favour of a sustained undercurrent of ennui to underscore the magnitude of violence, misogyny and lawlessness rampant in Santa Teresa, the fictional counterpart of the Mexican city of Ciudad Juárez. It will argue that the forensic gaze mediating the reader's access to the corpses strips them of their abjectness by attempting to comprehend them. Furthermore, it will read the juxtaposition of the violence of that which is narrated and the detached, indifferent tone of the narrative as strategically inconsistent. It will in turn explore how the mediation of the forensic gaze impedes the reader's experience of horror and revulsion upon encountering the corpses. It will attempt to interpret boredom as symptomatic of the undoing of the reader's subjectivity, bereft of the emotions of horror and revulsion.