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Just as Maggie Nelson’s Jane has a picture of the real (non-fictional) Jane at its center, so does Jonathan Littell’s novel, The Kindly Ones, originate with the photo of a Russian partisan, killed by the Nazis. This chapter is about Littell’s ambition to use her death and the Holocaust more generally to make what he calls “Literature,” an act that involves repudiating the ethical demands of “witness” and replacing them with the idea of a “perfect” work of art. And it’s this commitment to the “perfect” that provides a final emblem of the class aesthetic that this book seeks to describe.

Chapter 6 addresses the ethical issues involved in engaging with the perpetrator’s perspective by analyzing Jonathan Littell’s Les Bienveillantes (2006, The Kindly Ones). It discusses imaginative resistance, difficult empathy, and identification in relation to readerly engagement and perspective-taking. The chapter shows how the interplay between immersiveness and critical distance can produce a narrative dynamic that allows the reader to engage emotionally—but without uncritically adopting the protagonist’s perspective—with an ethically problematic life-world. It analyzes how the novel performatively shows, through the breakdown of narrative mastery, that no exhaustive comprehension is possible. In relation to different logics of narrative, the chapter articulates the ethical significance of self-reflexive narrative form and relates the hermeneutic notion of docta ignorantia—knowing that one does not know—to the novel’s way of dealing with the conditions of possibility of the Holocaust and with the limits of understanding, representing, and narrating it.

Evil—the Nobel laureate William Golding wrote that anyone who lived through the years of the Second World War ‘without understanding that man produces evil as a bee produces honey, must have been blind or wrong in the head’. Why, then, do accounts by Holocaust perpetrators and fictions that focus on perpetrators and which appear to teach us about evil fail to do so, swerve from the issue, and seem shallow and unproductive? By working through Hannah Arendt’s changing view of evil, this chapter develops a way to answer this question and examine the significance of evil, first in relation to texts by perpetrators (often, like Speer with Sereny, by or with proxies) then in relation to fiction about perpetrators, concluding with the most significant work of Holocaust fiction in recent years, Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones.

This chapter discusses the construction of the fascist perpetrator in Jonathan Littell’s controversial novel Les Bienveillantes (The Kindly Ones) and the rhetoric through which the narrator enters into a contract with the reader. The protagonist is seen as an overdetermined figure composed of wealth of intertextual sources from historical studies to Holocaust and perpetrator fiction. The novel’s excess (its graphic, extended details about sex and violence) is examined through Julia Kristeva’s notion of abjection and it is placed in the context of our contemporary consumption of traumatic history, or what Amos Goldberg’s has called ‘melancholic pleasure’. The chapter makes a case for the importance of perpetrator fiction and against Holocaust piety in our overall understanding of violent and traumatic history.