The absent witness: Bolaño’s 2666 as a case of fictional accountability

Abstract

This chapter juxtaposes traditional legal approaches to accountability with Roberto Bolaño’s fiction and its potential for making accountability ethical. The main thesis of the chapter is that literature can provide a space for exploring and experiencing the ethical dimensions of events and actions for which legal accountability is difficult or impossible. The argument proceeds by initially outlining two philosophical problems of traditional legal accountability: the impossibility of giving an account of the unspeakable and the subjectivity of the account-giver. Then, Bolaño’s 2666, specifically the part about the crimes, serves as a springboard into a different kind of accountability. Exploring the temporal and spatial dimensions of the plot and narrative styles of the book, this chapter proposes the notion of fictional accountability. Fictional accountability does not strive for facticity, but can serve as an ethical corrective to accounts which cannot or dare not speak about the unspeakable and the conditions which produce it.