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Narrative Dynamics, Perspective-Taking, and Engagement: Jonathan Littell’s

Hanna Meretoja

in The Ethics of Storytelling: Narrative Hermeneutics, History, and the Possible

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 ... More

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.Less

Conclusion

in The Aesthetics of Hate: Far-Right Intellectuals, Antisemitism, and Gender in 1930s France

This chapter first considers the fate of far-right intellectuals with the demise of the Vichy regime. It then summarizes the themes at the heart of the far-right and fascist writings that these men ... More

This chapter first considers the fate of far-right intellectuals with the demise of the Vichy regime. It then summarizes the themes at the heart of the far-right and fascist writings that these men produced in the interwar period, and suggests a different, synthetic reading that may shed light on the familiar issues of French fascism, anti-Semitism, and citizenship by addressing the remaining gaps in the historiography. The discussion then turns to Littell's Les bienveillantes, the most recent (fictional rather than scholarly) attempt to elucidate the relationship of identity and politics, aesthetics and ideology, fascism and anti-Semitism, sexuality and race.Less

The Good German: The Stauffenberg Plot and its Discontents

Petra Rau

in Our Nazis: Representations of Fascism in Contemporary Literature and Film

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 ... More

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.Less