‘Senselessness’ Is Full of Sense (and Power)

In America, the idea of modern genocide is a surreal collage—distorted and unreal, comprised primarily of memoirs about the Holocaust or Khmer Rouge, and pieced together and shaded with the green of “Save Darfur” T-shirts. But in Horacio Castellanos Moya’s “Senselessness,” genocide—real genocide—is far from this abstract idea; it’s rooted in gritty details. Moya does not try to understand “genocide,” but rather examines the notion of genocide as it exists, filtered through one person’s psyche. The result is a shockingly detailed, brutally credible, and unexpectedly comedic novel.

Moya, who was born in Honduras and raised in El Salvador, was exiled because of his socially conscious opinons. “Senselessness” is based on the atrocities of the 40-year Guatemalan genocide and the human rights report of the Guatemalan Catholic Archdiocese that exposed the massacres. It is his first work to be translated into English, and it utilizes material from the real report. The novel is a stream-of-consciousness first-person account of an anonymous writer in an unnamed Latin American country, commissioned to edit 1,100 pages of testimonies from survivors of massacres of Indian villages.

“Senselessness” begins with the words spoken by one survivor: “I am not complete in the mind.” By its end, the same can be said about the narrator, a paranoid alcoholic who loves sex and despises the Catholic Church, a curiously obsessive, self-absorbed man whose overactive mind is most vulnerable to the graphic details of the accounts he has been paid to read.

On the job, he drowns in the accounts he reads. He is so moved by them that he records fragments of the genocide survivors’ testimonies in his notebook, jotting down lines such as, “So much suffering we have suffered so much with them,” and, “Because I don’t want for them to kill the people in front of me,” and “For always the dreams they are there still.” The narrator cannot get over these lines or the suffering of the Indians who spoke them. He revisits the quotes again and again, seemingly without choice or control over his words. After work, he attempts to find refuge from the haunting accounts in drinking alcohol and dreams of getting laid, but the quotes that have invaded his mind also cut into the mundane; his thoughts jerk without warning into explicit renditions of the testimonies. As accounts of death, cruelty, and violence become an unshakeable, inescapable part of the narrator, wreaking havoc on his psyche, he too shares in the same experience of the Indians who survived the genocide. Just like the witness to genocide, the reader of genocide becomes “not complete in the mind.”

Moya depicts the confused mind of his protagonist using run-on sentences that can span several pages. The narrator’s thoughts may begin with the humorously carnal—“That Sunday I stayed in bed...fantasizing about Pilar, but not managing to concentrate long enough to jack off properly”—before bleeding into the violently physical—“[and] one testimony...of the civil registrar in a town called Totonicapán, an idiot whose foolish behavior led to them cutting off with a machete each and every one of his fingers, sliced off he saw his phalanges fall one by one”—before finally ending with the emotionally compelling—“enjoying...so many festive colors, among the most salient being that joyous cheerful red, as if red had nothing to do with blood and sorrow but was rather the emblem of happiness.” The positioning of the fantastical next to the historical and both of them next to the possible throws into question what exactly is real.

Moya examines Latin American politics and nationalism closely, especially the struggle for power between the Catholic Church and the government’s military. His well-traveled outlook on the world, however, lends his book applicability to address more than the geographically immediate subject of interest. “Senselessness” speaks to the fearful atmosphere of a country under control of a military regime, using genocide as an example of the corruption and disaster such a country could suffer as a result. The novel is as much an attack on myopic jingoism as it is an exploration of the deterioration of one man’s mind after exposure to the horrors of genocide.

“Senselessness” may be 142 pages of stream-of-consciousness thoughts that inevitably digress, but it is far from senseless. These page-long sentences are a haunting mélange of the voices of alive-yet-dead Indian survivors, a song drilled into the head of the narrator, who is eventually overcome by these ghosts of the past. Moya’s descriptive language captures the narrator’s progressive deterioration, so that by the end of the book, the author makes us wonder if we haven’t lost a bit of ourselves in this violent, perversely comedic account. We are glad to escape with only the scars of those final, apocalyptic words: “Everybody’s fucked. Be grateful you left.”

—Staff writer Denise J. Xu can be reached at dxu@fas.harvard.edu.