I am an academic working at the intersection of literary, cultural and communication studies. My PhD, entitled "A Nightmare or Benevolent Dream: Global Violence and the Libidinal Economy in Latin American Literature," examined narrative strategies to critique historical and ongoing inequality and injustice in Latin America without exceptionalising Latin American violence. My research interests include world literature, popular culture, psychoanalytic theory and adaptation studies. Supervisors: Dr Lesley Hawkes and Professor Sharyn Pearce Address: Brisbane, Queensland, Australia
From child prostitutes in Prague to wogs in suburban Melbourne, Christos Tsiolkas's fiction is fu... more From child prostitutes in Prague to wogs in suburban Melbourne, Christos Tsiolkas's fiction is full of characters defined by the desire for, discrimination against, and addiction to some form of Other. His work traces a libidinal economy that thrives where utopian ideals such as communism, cosmopolitanism and multiculturalism have failed to unify people around anything other than consumption. With particular attention to Dead Europe (2005) and Merciless Gods (2014), this article considers Tsiolkas's work alongside that of Roberto Bolaño, particularly 2666 (2004). Tsiolkas and Bolaño unearth the intersections between desire and violence across cultural, geopolitical and temporal borders. Their work offends because it implicates the subject in violence that is neither sensational nor exceptional. This violence is ongoing and without a clearly identifiable agent. Sometimes set against historical violence, such as the Holocaust, 9/11 or white Australian colonialism, it emerges in the backyard barbecues, drug-fuelled house parties and porn theatres that Tsiolkas's characters populate. This article uses Lacanian psychoanalysis to examine how Tsiolkas's work redistributes the violence from the pathological and geopolitical peripheries to the centre, disrupting Australian narratives of innocence and isolation and bringing together North and South, the Old World and the New.
This article uses Lacanian psychoanalysis to look past the enormous contextual differences betwee... more This article uses Lacanian psychoanalysis to look past the enormous contextual differences between the politically-motivated mass murders and consequent genocide of the Maya in Guatemala during the Civil War, and the frontier massacres in Australia during colonisation, to locate important commonalities. In Horacio Castellanos Moya’s 2004 novel Senselessness, it identifies a libidinal investment in a Maya and Latin American Other as the site of the excessive enjoyment that Lacan calls jouissance: a projection responsible for love, hate and all varieties of discrimination. It identifies a similar investment in an Aboriginal Other in Mark McKenna’s 2002 nonfiction book Looking for Blackfellas’ Point. Castellanos Moya creates a narrator whose intense libidinal investment in the Maya Other’s suffering reveals not only the limits of reconciliation in Guatemala, but also how libidinal investments in Latin America as a site of literary jouissance trap the region between magic and violence. McKenna unearths a local narrative of denial in which Aboriginal Australians are cast as villains; this points to an ambivalent national narrative where Aboriginal Australians are either victims or victimisers, but always exceptional. What connects Guatemala, Australia and the world is a collective responsibility for the production of Others – of and for whom violence is expected.
Even though violence in Latin America varies a lot between and within countries, Colombia has lon... more Even though violence in Latin America varies a lot between and within countries, Colombia has long been seen as the epicentre of an intense kind of Latin American violence that appears fundamentally different from everyday antagonism in what is known as the West, the First World, or the Global North. Colombia has been paralysed for half a century by an undeclared civil war between government and anti-government forces, fought first against the backdrop of the Cold War, and then against the United States-led war on drugs. This article will discuss the Colombian writer Evelio Rosero, who challenges the tendency to look to his country for an exceptional Colombian violence. His short story “Brides by Night” (1998) and novel The Armies (2007) step back from the context of the Colombian conflicts to draw attention to gender violence. This article argues that violence against women is a universal concern, and that the way it is represented by Rosero contests narratives that confine violence to Colombia as a place of exception. Using the psychoanalytic theories of subjectivity developed by Jacques Lacan, Slavoj Žižek, and others, this article discusses how a similar libidinal investment in women and Colombians as Other confines both a gender demographic and a racial demographic to a similarly precarious position. In a globalising world, it is not only counterintuitive, but unethical to imagine and, in so doing, reinforce patterns of marginalisation and violence. A collective effort to traverse the fantasy of otherness in different art forms and media is crucial.
TEXT: Journal of Writing and Writing Courses, 2016
This paper examines two novels, both published in 2004 and later translated into English: 2666 by... more 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.
The Chilean author Roberto Bolaño cultivated a contentious (and contradictory) attitude to litera... more The Chilean author Roberto Bolaño cultivated a contentious (and contradictory) attitude to literature, believing that it conceals the fear and self-interest that coordinates its meaningfulness. For Bolaño, great writers should face the abyss of meaninglessness while standing tall, a directive which prohibits drawing conclusions that might ultimately be elevated to the level of fact. Instead, Bolaño commits to a category of truth that cannot be described by inscribing its contingent effects in his writing through what I will call his ‘antiliterature.’ Acknowledging this inaccessible truth, Bolaño’s writing reveals an aversion to all-encompassing literary forms that can be seen in the same light as Jacques Lacan’s term ‘antiphilosophy,’ describing the French psychoanalyst’s position against philosophy. Just as Lacanian antiphilosophy continues to contribute to twenty-first-century philosophical critiques, Bolaño’s antiliterature renders possible novel literary trajectories. Bolaño’s 2009 novel 2666 exemplifies his antiliterary approach, subverting the literary genre of crime fiction by refusing to supply an object to fulfil the reader’s desire for closure and by universalising guilt.
From “The Most Beautiful Woman in the World” to child prostitutes in Prague and the wogs of subur... more From “The Most Beautiful Woman in the World” to child prostitutes in Prague and the wogs of suburban Melbourne, Christos Tsiolkas’s fiction is full of characters defined by the desire for, discrimination against and addiction to some form of Other. His work traces a libidinal economy that thrives where utopian ideals like communism, cosmopolitanism and multiculturalism have failed to unify people around anything other than consumption. Looking particularly at Loaded (1995) and Dead Europe (2005), this article considers Tsiolkas’s work as a kind of world literature alongside that of contemporary writers from the Global South like Horacio Castellanos Moya and Roberto Bolaño. Tsiolkas shirks expectations of regionalism to unearth the intersections between desire and violence across cultural, geopolitical and temporal borders. His work offends because it implicates the subject in violence that is neither sensational nor exceptional. This violence is ongoing and without a clearly identifiable agent. Sometimes set against historical violence like the Holocaust, 9/11 or white Australian colonialism, it emerges in the backyard barbecues, drug-fuelled house parties and porn theatres that Tsiolkas’s characters populate. Understanding Tsiolkas’s work as world literature disrupts Australian narratives of innocence and isolation, bringing together North and South, the Old World and the New.
Amid a deluge of remakes, sequels, prequels and reboots, the accusations of unoriginality levelle... more Amid a deluge of remakes, sequels, prequels and reboots, the accusations of unoriginality levelled at Hollywood are understandable. Using John Milius and Francis Ford Coppola’s exceptional adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness into Apocalypse Now—a process documented in Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse—as a case study, this micro-presentation will evaluate the artistic license and reckless abandon for which Apocalypse Now is notorious in the context of revitalising the contemporary film adaptation.
This paper evaluates a trajectory in recent, popular Latin American narrative away from a focus o... more This paper evaluates a trajectory in recent, popular Latin American narrative away from a focus on geopolitical violence to a focus on sexual violence. In so doing, these narratives respond to the libidinal investment in women as Other to foreground the way that the desire of global audiences for an exceptional, Latin American Other perpetuates violence in the region.
This paper will analyse Colombian author Evelio Rosero’s novel The Armies (2007) and the title story of Argentinean author Mariana Enríquez’s short story collection Things We Lost in the Fire (2016). Rosero’s novel challenges the tendency to look to his country for an exceptional Colombian violence as well as for the generic conventions of magical realism by drawing attention to gender violence and rape culture. This paper argues that violence against women is a universal concern, and that the way it is represented by Rosero contests narratives that confine violence to Colombia as a place of exception. Enríquez’s work is at the forefront of the often marginalised genre of Latin American Gothic, and her short story “Things We Lost in the Fire” empowers the victims of gender violence and rape culture. In it, women surrounded by a culture of discrimination aim to destroy the very reason for which they and their bodies are objectified by men. The result is a harrowing display of how difficult it is for the Other to affirm subjectivity within cultures of objectification and discrimination.
This paper compares the treatment of violence against indigenous peoples in two examples of South... more This paper compares the treatment of violence against indigenous peoples in two examples of Southern literature. Firstly, it analyses Mark McKenna’s approach to the history of frontier violence during the settlement of Australia in his 2002 non-fiction book Looking for Blackfellas’ Point. Secondly, it analyses Horacio Castellanos Moya’s engagement with violence against Guatemala’s indigenous Maya majority during the Central American country’s 36-year civil war in his 2004 novel Senselessness.
After McKenna purchased 8 acres of land in south-eastern New South Wales in 1993, he felt like “just another colonist” (4). Looking for Blackfellas’ Point represents McKenna’s coming to terms with the region’s recent past, including instances of frontier warfare and the massacre of Indigenous Australians by European settlers. Alternatively, Castellanos Moya’s Senselessness partly fictionalises the author’s own experience as an adviser for a human rights organisation working to unearth evidence of the numerous human rights violations that the Guatemalan Army committed between 1960 and 1996. The unnamed narrator-protagonist of Senselessness is impelled by “a stupid and dangerous bout of enthusiasm” (5) and a substantial sum of money to edit a 1,100-page report consisting of the testimony of witnesses to massacres, torture, and rape. While McKenna advocates exposing historical injustice, the narrator of Senselessness wants as little to do with it as possible. Nevertheless, both men become vehicles through which oral histories of violence emerge. By comparing the books, this paper argues that otherwise buried, suppressed, or repressed histories of violence must be acknowledged before dialogue and reconciliation can take place.
In this paper I will discuss two books, both published in 2004 and later translated into English:... more In this paper I will discuss two books, both published in 2004 and later translated into English: 2666 by the Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño and Senselessness by the Honduran-Salvadoran writer Horacio Castellanos Moya. Both books approach death and dying as a global concern and place us at the centre of events that happened, or are happening, on the other side of the world. I will argue that both books 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 Mexico and Central 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 book 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 books and understand our part in the events of mass murder they narrate.
The novel 2666 by Chilean author Roberto Bolaño is widely regarded as his magnum opus. 2666 is di... more The novel 2666 by Chilean author Roberto Bolaño is widely regarded as his magnum opus. 2666 is divided into five parts, but the fourth and largest section of the novel, “The Part about the Crimes,” is closest to its centre. There is a semblance of centripetal force in the parts before and after the fourth, as characters are drawn to Santa Teresa, the setting of “The Part about the Crimes.” The eponymous crimes are the killings of women in Santa Teresa, Bolaño’s unambiguous reference to an actual phenomenon now called “femicide”: the 494 women and girls killed in and around the Mexican border town Ciudad Juárez between 1993 and 2007. Bolaño has written the discovery of the dead so that details about the bodies that were once shocking become somniferous, so much so that the presence of corpses becomes banal. In refusing to ascribe coherence to the corpses, or to the elements or “evidence” at the scenes, he has not contained their meaning but presented them as ineffable things. In this way, Bolaño diverges from the analytic journalism that informed his writing of the novel, and from the police procedural subgenre of detective fiction that informs and is subverted in the fourth part of the novel. I will describe the figure of corpses in 2666 in terms of the Lacanian “Thing,” as references to the excessive nature of human desire, and as heralding the shadowy life of the novel that exceeds the contexts into which it is often placed.
This thesis examines three novels by Latin American writers: Roberto Bolaño’s 2666, Horacio Caste... more This thesis examines three novels by Latin American writers: Roberto Bolaño’s 2666, Horacio Castellanos Moya’s Senselessness, and Evelio Rosero’s The Armies. These novels look at actual instances of violence in Mexico, Guatemala, and Colombia, contributing to a social critique of historical and ongoing inequality and injustice in Latin America and the global South. Using Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytic theories of subjectivity, this thesis argues that the novels express the human potential in desire for and to create excess. This has the effect of universalising guilt against the tendency to contextualise or localise events of violence in Mexico, Central, and South America.
Roberto Bolaño’s novel The Savage Detectives has the effect of the widening gyre; its centre is M... more Roberto Bolaño’s novel The Savage Detectives has the effect of the widening gyre; its centre is Mexico City and the haphazard poetry movement visceral realism, but the centre is falling apart. At every level, the narrative gives way to an empty place that obfuscates meaning. Critics have attempted to address the ambiguity by insisting that the novel correlates precisely to Roberto Bolaño’s tumultuous years as a poet, a 577-page prosaic flagstone under which to bury the author’s bygone poetic ideals and aspirations. More generally, the inconclusive novel mirrors the loose ends left by a generation of Latin Americans who struggled against dictatorships, many of whom were exiled, or worse, disappeared. The novel is about losing focus; as the gyre widens and the narrative spans the globe over twenty years, little remains of visceral realism but the traces of an absence. This thesis develops the empty place in The Savage Detectives and that undermines the milieu of context as the central lack of desire, that which is opened up at the centre of the dialectic of the subject and the Other. Using Lacanian psychoanalysis, specifically the psychoanalytic criticism of Slavoj Žižek, the empty place in The Savage Detectives is identified as an abyss to which the subject is returned when the object of desire is found to be a partial object, not the source of fulfilment. The partial object anguishes the youngest of the visceral realists and the novel’s earliest narrator when it emerges in himself for the Other, disrupting the supposed unity of the self. The narrator is included in his own narrative as a stain whose obverse is emptiness. In the second section of textual analysis, the drive is developed as desire in its final instance, wherein the subject avoids the seemingly arbitrary procession of partial objects but enters a lethal dimension when returned to the economy of desire. Finally, both desire and drive are shown to support a reality that affords the subject consistency, yet a radical dimension exists beyond these supports, which are a kind of fantasy. This unreal reality is the empty place where The Savage Detectives concludes; the way it appears to first interrupt and then ultimately consume the narrative is described in this thesis as a type of writing that mirrors the psyche and perplexities of the Lacanian subject.
From child prostitutes in Prague to wogs in suburban Melbourne, Christos Tsiolkas's fiction is fu... more From child prostitutes in Prague to wogs in suburban Melbourne, Christos Tsiolkas's fiction is full of characters defined by the desire for, discrimination against, and addiction to some form of Other. His work traces a libidinal economy that thrives where utopian ideals such as communism, cosmopolitanism and multiculturalism have failed to unify people around anything other than consumption. With particular attention to Dead Europe (2005) and Merciless Gods (2014), this article considers Tsiolkas's work alongside that of Roberto Bolaño, particularly 2666 (2004). Tsiolkas and Bolaño unearth the intersections between desire and violence across cultural, geopolitical and temporal borders. Their work offends because it implicates the subject in violence that is neither sensational nor exceptional. This violence is ongoing and without a clearly identifiable agent. Sometimes set against historical violence, such as the Holocaust, 9/11 or white Australian colonialism, it emerges in the backyard barbecues, drug-fuelled house parties and porn theatres that Tsiolkas's characters populate. This article uses Lacanian psychoanalysis to examine how Tsiolkas's work redistributes the violence from the pathological and geopolitical peripheries to the centre, disrupting Australian narratives of innocence and isolation and bringing together North and South, the Old World and the New.
This article uses Lacanian psychoanalysis to look past the enormous contextual differences betwee... more This article uses Lacanian psychoanalysis to look past the enormous contextual differences between the politically-motivated mass murders and consequent genocide of the Maya in Guatemala during the Civil War, and the frontier massacres in Australia during colonisation, to locate important commonalities. In Horacio Castellanos Moya’s 2004 novel Senselessness, it identifies a libidinal investment in a Maya and Latin American Other as the site of the excessive enjoyment that Lacan calls jouissance: a projection responsible for love, hate and all varieties of discrimination. It identifies a similar investment in an Aboriginal Other in Mark McKenna’s 2002 nonfiction book Looking for Blackfellas’ Point. Castellanos Moya creates a narrator whose intense libidinal investment in the Maya Other’s suffering reveals not only the limits of reconciliation in Guatemala, but also how libidinal investments in Latin America as a site of literary jouissance trap the region between magic and violence. McKenna unearths a local narrative of denial in which Aboriginal Australians are cast as villains; this points to an ambivalent national narrative where Aboriginal Australians are either victims or victimisers, but always exceptional. What connects Guatemala, Australia and the world is a collective responsibility for the production of Others – of and for whom violence is expected.
Even though violence in Latin America varies a lot between and within countries, Colombia has lon... more Even though violence in Latin America varies a lot between and within countries, Colombia has long been seen as the epicentre of an intense kind of Latin American violence that appears fundamentally different from everyday antagonism in what is known as the West, the First World, or the Global North. Colombia has been paralysed for half a century by an undeclared civil war between government and anti-government forces, fought first against the backdrop of the Cold War, and then against the United States-led war on drugs. This article will discuss the Colombian writer Evelio Rosero, who challenges the tendency to look to his country for an exceptional Colombian violence. His short story “Brides by Night” (1998) and novel The Armies (2007) step back from the context of the Colombian conflicts to draw attention to gender violence. This article argues that violence against women is a universal concern, and that the way it is represented by Rosero contests narratives that confine violence to Colombia as a place of exception. Using the psychoanalytic theories of subjectivity developed by Jacques Lacan, Slavoj Žižek, and others, this article discusses how a similar libidinal investment in women and Colombians as Other confines both a gender demographic and a racial demographic to a similarly precarious position. In a globalising world, it is not only counterintuitive, but unethical to imagine and, in so doing, reinforce patterns of marginalisation and violence. A collective effort to traverse the fantasy of otherness in different art forms and media is crucial.
TEXT: Journal of Writing and Writing Courses, 2016
This paper examines two novels, both published in 2004 and later translated into English: 2666 by... more 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.
The Chilean author Roberto Bolaño cultivated a contentious (and contradictory) attitude to litera... more The Chilean author Roberto Bolaño cultivated a contentious (and contradictory) attitude to literature, believing that it conceals the fear and self-interest that coordinates its meaningfulness. For Bolaño, great writers should face the abyss of meaninglessness while standing tall, a directive which prohibits drawing conclusions that might ultimately be elevated to the level of fact. Instead, Bolaño commits to a category of truth that cannot be described by inscribing its contingent effects in his writing through what I will call his ‘antiliterature.’ Acknowledging this inaccessible truth, Bolaño’s writing reveals an aversion to all-encompassing literary forms that can be seen in the same light as Jacques Lacan’s term ‘antiphilosophy,’ describing the French psychoanalyst’s position against philosophy. Just as Lacanian antiphilosophy continues to contribute to twenty-first-century philosophical critiques, Bolaño’s antiliterature renders possible novel literary trajectories. Bolaño’s 2009 novel 2666 exemplifies his antiliterary approach, subverting the literary genre of crime fiction by refusing to supply an object to fulfil the reader’s desire for closure and by universalising guilt.
From “The Most Beautiful Woman in the World” to child prostitutes in Prague and the wogs of subur... more From “The Most Beautiful Woman in the World” to child prostitutes in Prague and the wogs of suburban Melbourne, Christos Tsiolkas’s fiction is full of characters defined by the desire for, discrimination against and addiction to some form of Other. His work traces a libidinal economy that thrives where utopian ideals like communism, cosmopolitanism and multiculturalism have failed to unify people around anything other than consumption. Looking particularly at Loaded (1995) and Dead Europe (2005), this article considers Tsiolkas’s work as a kind of world literature alongside that of contemporary writers from the Global South like Horacio Castellanos Moya and Roberto Bolaño. Tsiolkas shirks expectations of regionalism to unearth the intersections between desire and violence across cultural, geopolitical and temporal borders. His work offends because it implicates the subject in violence that is neither sensational nor exceptional. This violence is ongoing and without a clearly identifiable agent. Sometimes set against historical violence like the Holocaust, 9/11 or white Australian colonialism, it emerges in the backyard barbecues, drug-fuelled house parties and porn theatres that Tsiolkas’s characters populate. Understanding Tsiolkas’s work as world literature disrupts Australian narratives of innocence and isolation, bringing together North and South, the Old World and the New.
Amid a deluge of remakes, sequels, prequels and reboots, the accusations of unoriginality levelle... more Amid a deluge of remakes, sequels, prequels and reboots, the accusations of unoriginality levelled at Hollywood are understandable. Using John Milius and Francis Ford Coppola’s exceptional adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness into Apocalypse Now—a process documented in Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse—as a case study, this micro-presentation will evaluate the artistic license and reckless abandon for which Apocalypse Now is notorious in the context of revitalising the contemporary film adaptation.
This paper evaluates a trajectory in recent, popular Latin American narrative away from a focus o... more This paper evaluates a trajectory in recent, popular Latin American narrative away from a focus on geopolitical violence to a focus on sexual violence. In so doing, these narratives respond to the libidinal investment in women as Other to foreground the way that the desire of global audiences for an exceptional, Latin American Other perpetuates violence in the region.
This paper will analyse Colombian author Evelio Rosero’s novel The Armies (2007) and the title story of Argentinean author Mariana Enríquez’s short story collection Things We Lost in the Fire (2016). Rosero’s novel challenges the tendency to look to his country for an exceptional Colombian violence as well as for the generic conventions of magical realism by drawing attention to gender violence and rape culture. This paper argues that violence against women is a universal concern, and that the way it is represented by Rosero contests narratives that confine violence to Colombia as a place of exception. Enríquez’s work is at the forefront of the often marginalised genre of Latin American Gothic, and her short story “Things We Lost in the Fire” empowers the victims of gender violence and rape culture. In it, women surrounded by a culture of discrimination aim to destroy the very reason for which they and their bodies are objectified by men. The result is a harrowing display of how difficult it is for the Other to affirm subjectivity within cultures of objectification and discrimination.
This paper compares the treatment of violence against indigenous peoples in two examples of South... more This paper compares the treatment of violence against indigenous peoples in two examples of Southern literature. Firstly, it analyses Mark McKenna’s approach to the history of frontier violence during the settlement of Australia in his 2002 non-fiction book Looking for Blackfellas’ Point. Secondly, it analyses Horacio Castellanos Moya’s engagement with violence against Guatemala’s indigenous Maya majority during the Central American country’s 36-year civil war in his 2004 novel Senselessness.
After McKenna purchased 8 acres of land in south-eastern New South Wales in 1993, he felt like “just another colonist” (4). Looking for Blackfellas’ Point represents McKenna’s coming to terms with the region’s recent past, including instances of frontier warfare and the massacre of Indigenous Australians by European settlers. Alternatively, Castellanos Moya’s Senselessness partly fictionalises the author’s own experience as an adviser for a human rights organisation working to unearth evidence of the numerous human rights violations that the Guatemalan Army committed between 1960 and 1996. The unnamed narrator-protagonist of Senselessness is impelled by “a stupid and dangerous bout of enthusiasm” (5) and a substantial sum of money to edit a 1,100-page report consisting of the testimony of witnesses to massacres, torture, and rape. While McKenna advocates exposing historical injustice, the narrator of Senselessness wants as little to do with it as possible. Nevertheless, both men become vehicles through which oral histories of violence emerge. By comparing the books, this paper argues that otherwise buried, suppressed, or repressed histories of violence must be acknowledged before dialogue and reconciliation can take place.
In this paper I will discuss two books, both published in 2004 and later translated into English:... more In this paper I will discuss two books, both published in 2004 and later translated into English: 2666 by the Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño and Senselessness by the Honduran-Salvadoran writer Horacio Castellanos Moya. Both books approach death and dying as a global concern and place us at the centre of events that happened, or are happening, on the other side of the world. I will argue that both books 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 Mexico and Central 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 book 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 books and understand our part in the events of mass murder they narrate.
The novel 2666 by Chilean author Roberto Bolaño is widely regarded as his magnum opus. 2666 is di... more The novel 2666 by Chilean author Roberto Bolaño is widely regarded as his magnum opus. 2666 is divided into five parts, but the fourth and largest section of the novel, “The Part about the Crimes,” is closest to its centre. There is a semblance of centripetal force in the parts before and after the fourth, as characters are drawn to Santa Teresa, the setting of “The Part about the Crimes.” The eponymous crimes are the killings of women in Santa Teresa, Bolaño’s unambiguous reference to an actual phenomenon now called “femicide”: the 494 women and girls killed in and around the Mexican border town Ciudad Juárez between 1993 and 2007. Bolaño has written the discovery of the dead so that details about the bodies that were once shocking become somniferous, so much so that the presence of corpses becomes banal. In refusing to ascribe coherence to the corpses, or to the elements or “evidence” at the scenes, he has not contained their meaning but presented them as ineffable things. In this way, Bolaño diverges from the analytic journalism that informed his writing of the novel, and from the police procedural subgenre of detective fiction that informs and is subverted in the fourth part of the novel. I will describe the figure of corpses in 2666 in terms of the Lacanian “Thing,” as references to the excessive nature of human desire, and as heralding the shadowy life of the novel that exceeds the contexts into which it is often placed.
This thesis examines three novels by Latin American writers: Roberto Bolaño’s 2666, Horacio Caste... more This thesis examines three novels by Latin American writers: Roberto Bolaño’s 2666, Horacio Castellanos Moya’s Senselessness, and Evelio Rosero’s The Armies. These novels look at actual instances of violence in Mexico, Guatemala, and Colombia, contributing to a social critique of historical and ongoing inequality and injustice in Latin America and the global South. Using Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytic theories of subjectivity, this thesis argues that the novels express the human potential in desire for and to create excess. This has the effect of universalising guilt against the tendency to contextualise or localise events of violence in Mexico, Central, and South America.
Roberto Bolaño’s novel The Savage Detectives has the effect of the widening gyre; its centre is M... more Roberto Bolaño’s novel The Savage Detectives has the effect of the widening gyre; its centre is Mexico City and the haphazard poetry movement visceral realism, but the centre is falling apart. At every level, the narrative gives way to an empty place that obfuscates meaning. Critics have attempted to address the ambiguity by insisting that the novel correlates precisely to Roberto Bolaño’s tumultuous years as a poet, a 577-page prosaic flagstone under which to bury the author’s bygone poetic ideals and aspirations. More generally, the inconclusive novel mirrors the loose ends left by a generation of Latin Americans who struggled against dictatorships, many of whom were exiled, or worse, disappeared. The novel is about losing focus; as the gyre widens and the narrative spans the globe over twenty years, little remains of visceral realism but the traces of an absence. This thesis develops the empty place in The Savage Detectives and that undermines the milieu of context as the central lack of desire, that which is opened up at the centre of the dialectic of the subject and the Other. Using Lacanian psychoanalysis, specifically the psychoanalytic criticism of Slavoj Žižek, the empty place in The Savage Detectives is identified as an abyss to which the subject is returned when the object of desire is found to be a partial object, not the source of fulfilment. The partial object anguishes the youngest of the visceral realists and the novel’s earliest narrator when it emerges in himself for the Other, disrupting the supposed unity of the self. The narrator is included in his own narrative as a stain whose obverse is emptiness. In the second section of textual analysis, the drive is developed as desire in its final instance, wherein the subject avoids the seemingly arbitrary procession of partial objects but enters a lethal dimension when returned to the economy of desire. Finally, both desire and drive are shown to support a reality that affords the subject consistency, yet a radical dimension exists beyond these supports, which are a kind of fantasy. This unreal reality is the empty place where The Savage Detectives concludes; the way it appears to first interrupt and then ultimately consume the narrative is described in this thesis as a type of writing that mirrors the psyche and perplexities of the Lacanian subject.
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Papers by Mark Piccini
Conference Presentations by Mark Piccini
This paper will analyse Colombian author Evelio Rosero’s novel The Armies (2007) and the title story of Argentinean author Mariana Enríquez’s short story collection Things We Lost in the Fire (2016). Rosero’s novel challenges the tendency to look to his country for an exceptional Colombian violence as well as for the generic conventions of magical realism by drawing attention to gender violence and rape culture. This paper argues that violence against women is a universal concern, and that the way it is represented by Rosero contests narratives that confine violence to Colombia as a place of exception. Enríquez’s work is at the forefront of the often marginalised genre of Latin American Gothic, and her short story “Things We Lost in the Fire” empowers the victims of gender violence and rape culture. In it, women surrounded by a culture of discrimination aim to destroy the very reason for which they and their bodies are objectified by men. The result is a harrowing display of how difficult it is for the Other to affirm subjectivity within cultures of objectification and discrimination.
After McKenna purchased 8 acres of land in south-eastern New South Wales in 1993, he felt like “just another colonist” (4). Looking for Blackfellas’ Point represents McKenna’s coming to terms with the region’s recent past, including instances of frontier warfare and the massacre of Indigenous Australians by European settlers. Alternatively, Castellanos Moya’s Senselessness partly fictionalises the author’s own experience as an adviser for a human rights organisation working to unearth evidence of the numerous human rights violations that the Guatemalan Army committed between 1960 and 1996. The unnamed narrator-protagonist of Senselessness is impelled by “a stupid and dangerous bout of enthusiasm” (5) and a substantial sum of money to edit a 1,100-page report consisting of the testimony of witnesses to massacres, torture, and rape. While McKenna advocates exposing historical injustice, the narrator of Senselessness wants as little to do with it as possible. Nevertheless, both men become vehicles through which oral histories of violence emerge. By comparing the books, this paper argues that otherwise buried, suppressed, or repressed histories of violence must be acknowledged before dialogue and reconciliation can take place.
Theses by Mark Piccini
Using Lacanian psychoanalysis, specifically the psychoanalytic criticism of Slavoj Žižek, the empty place in The Savage Detectives is identified as an abyss to which the subject is returned when the object of desire is found to be a partial object, not the source of fulfilment. The partial object anguishes the youngest of the visceral realists and the novel’s earliest narrator when it emerges in himself for the Other, disrupting the supposed unity of the self. The narrator is included in his own narrative as a stain whose obverse is emptiness. In the second section of textual analysis, the drive is developed as desire in its final instance, wherein the subject avoids the seemingly arbitrary procession of partial objects but enters a lethal dimension when returned to the economy of desire. Finally, both desire and drive are shown to support a reality that affords the subject consistency, yet a radical dimension exists beyond these supports, which are a kind of fantasy. This unreal reality is the empty place where The Savage Detectives concludes; the way it appears to first interrupt and then ultimately consume the narrative is described in this thesis as a type of writing that mirrors the psyche and perplexities of the Lacanian subject.
This paper will analyse Colombian author Evelio Rosero’s novel The Armies (2007) and the title story of Argentinean author Mariana Enríquez’s short story collection Things We Lost in the Fire (2016). Rosero’s novel challenges the tendency to look to his country for an exceptional Colombian violence as well as for the generic conventions of magical realism by drawing attention to gender violence and rape culture. This paper argues that violence against women is a universal concern, and that the way it is represented by Rosero contests narratives that confine violence to Colombia as a place of exception. Enríquez’s work is at the forefront of the often marginalised genre of Latin American Gothic, and her short story “Things We Lost in the Fire” empowers the victims of gender violence and rape culture. In it, women surrounded by a culture of discrimination aim to destroy the very reason for which they and their bodies are objectified by men. The result is a harrowing display of how difficult it is for the Other to affirm subjectivity within cultures of objectification and discrimination.
After McKenna purchased 8 acres of land in south-eastern New South Wales in 1993, he felt like “just another colonist” (4). Looking for Blackfellas’ Point represents McKenna’s coming to terms with the region’s recent past, including instances of frontier warfare and the massacre of Indigenous Australians by European settlers. Alternatively, Castellanos Moya’s Senselessness partly fictionalises the author’s own experience as an adviser for a human rights organisation working to unearth evidence of the numerous human rights violations that the Guatemalan Army committed between 1960 and 1996. The unnamed narrator-protagonist of Senselessness is impelled by “a stupid and dangerous bout of enthusiasm” (5) and a substantial sum of money to edit a 1,100-page report consisting of the testimony of witnesses to massacres, torture, and rape. While McKenna advocates exposing historical injustice, the narrator of Senselessness wants as little to do with it as possible. Nevertheless, both men become vehicles through which oral histories of violence emerge. By comparing the books, this paper argues that otherwise buried, suppressed, or repressed histories of violence must be acknowledged before dialogue and reconciliation can take place.
Using Lacanian psychoanalysis, specifically the psychoanalytic criticism of Slavoj Žižek, the empty place in The Savage Detectives is identified as an abyss to which the subject is returned when the object of desire is found to be a partial object, not the source of fulfilment. The partial object anguishes the youngest of the visceral realists and the novel’s earliest narrator when it emerges in himself for the Other, disrupting the supposed unity of the self. The narrator is included in his own narrative as a stain whose obverse is emptiness. In the second section of textual analysis, the drive is developed as desire in its final instance, wherein the subject avoids the seemingly arbitrary procession of partial objects but enters a lethal dimension when returned to the economy of desire. Finally, both desire and drive are shown to support a reality that affords the subject consistency, yet a radical dimension exists beyond these supports, which are a kind of fantasy. This unreal reality is the empty place where The Savage Detectives concludes; the way it appears to first interrupt and then ultimately consume the narrative is described in this thesis as a type of writing that mirrors the psyche and perplexities of the Lacanian subject.