Encounters with the undead: Reading the Other(s) in Bolaño’s 2666

In Bolaño’s 2666, all roads seem to lead to Santa Teresa and its 108 dead women. This, I suspect, follows from the production of the murdered women/the murder of women as seductive spectacle – one that, while discomforting, is yet familiar. This chapter, conversely, is grounded in the conviction that the murdered 108 women of Santa Teresa offer no new or unique knowledge. They are, instead, the confirmation of a knowledge always already understood and articulated by those still living, with whom they – the dead – share an embodiment. Accordingly, I eschew here the spectacle of the dead in order to follow two figures – yet living – who get more or less lost and forgotten in the pages and narratives that make up 2666. But it is precisely this kind of marginality that makes them significant. For it is their ability to get lost and forgotten in favour of the spectacularised dead that marks their inability to access narrative signification. This circumstance, I suggest, imitates the condition of the (racial and gendered) Other in organisation. Reading Bolaño’s text through the undead, then, offers a necessary lesson for comprehending the unfolding of organizational violence.