Robert Eaglestone
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- June 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780198778363
- eISBN:
- 9780191823800
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780198778363.003.0003
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century and Contemporary Literature, World Literature
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 ...
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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.Less
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.
Petra Rau
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- September 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780748668649
- eISBN:
- 9780748689149
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748668649.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century and Contemporary Literature
In the post-war imaginary of the West, ‘the Nazis’ became a cultural trope that served as a justification for defending democracy through military intervention. But in films and in fiction, the Nazis ...
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In the post-war imaginary of the West, ‘the Nazis’ became a cultural trope that served as a justification for defending democracy through military intervention. But in films and in fiction, the Nazis were also camped up, laughed at, eroticised and demonised as evil monsters. In fact, the representational rules of engagement with historical fascism have always been remarkably uncertain. This book examines why and how the penomenon of ‘fascinating Fascism’ has re-emerged once more after the end of the Cold War. What is its cultural function now, in a global era of Holocaust commemoration? How can any representation avoid the impasse of either re-evoking fascism’s original seduction or merely recycling previous fictional and cinematic clichés? This study discusses alternative history (Robert Harris’s Fatherland and Quenting Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds), the noir thrillers of Philip Kerr, perpetrator fiction (Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones) and resistance (Synger’s Valkyrie and Cartwright’s The Song Before It Is Sung). Crucially it suggests that contemporary culture has instrumentalised the Nazi trope for its own agandas: ‘the Nazis’ have become ‘our Nazis’. The book also points to some of the risks and responsibilities attendant on this appropriation as one of the peculiar, late legacies of the Second World War.Less
In the post-war imaginary of the West, ‘the Nazis’ became a cultural trope that served as a justification for defending democracy through military intervention. But in films and in fiction, the Nazis were also camped up, laughed at, eroticised and demonised as evil monsters. In fact, the representational rules of engagement with historical fascism have always been remarkably uncertain. This book examines why and how the penomenon of ‘fascinating Fascism’ has re-emerged once more after the end of the Cold War. What is its cultural function now, in a global era of Holocaust commemoration? How can any representation avoid the impasse of either re-evoking fascism’s original seduction or merely recycling previous fictional and cinematic clichés? This study discusses alternative history (Robert Harris’s Fatherland and Quenting Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds), the noir thrillers of Philip Kerr, perpetrator fiction (Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones) and resistance (Synger’s Valkyrie and Cartwright’s The Song Before It Is Sung). Crucially it suggests that contemporary culture has instrumentalised the Nazi trope for its own agandas: ‘the Nazis’ have become ‘our Nazis’. The book also points to some of the risks and responsibilities attendant on this appropriation as one of the peculiar, late legacies of the Second World War.
Hanna Meretoja
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- December 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780190649364
- eISBN:
- 9780190649395
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780190649364.003.0006
- Subject:
- Psychology, Social Psychology
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 ...
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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
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.
Petra Rau
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- September 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780748668649
- eISBN:
- 9780748689149
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748668649.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century and Contemporary Literature
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 ...
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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
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.
Hanna Meretoja
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- December 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780190649364
- eISBN:
- 9780190649395
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780190649364.001.0001
- Subject:
- Psychology, Social Psychology
Against the backdrop of the polarized debate on the ethical significance of storytelling, this book develops a nuanced framework for exploring the ethical complexity of the roles narratives play in ...
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Against the backdrop of the polarized debate on the ethical significance of storytelling, this book develops a nuanced framework for exploring the ethical complexity of the roles narratives play in human lives. Focusing on how narratives enlarge and diminish the spaces of possibilities in which people act, think, and reimagine the world, it proposes a theoretical-analytical framework for engaging with both the ethical potential and the risks of storytelling. It elaborates a narrative hermeneutics that treats narratives as culturally mediated interpretative practices that can be oppressive, empowering, or both, and argues that the relationship between narrative unconscious and narrative imagination shapes one’s sense of the possible. Its hermeneutic narrative ethics differentiates between six dimensions of narratives’ ethical potential: they can cultivate a sense of the possible; promote self-understanding; enable understanding other lives non-subsumptively in their singularity; transform narrative in-betweens; develop the capacity for perspective-taking; and function as forms of ethical inquiry. These aspects are analyzed in dialogue with literary and autobiographical narratives that deal with the legacy of the Second World War by problematizing the adequacy of the perpetrator–victim dichotomy—exploring how it is as dialogic storytellers, fundamentally vulnerable, interdependent, and implicated in violent histories, that individuals and communities become who they are. The book brings into dialogue narrative ethics, literary narrative studies, narrative psychology, narrative philosophy, and cultural memory studies. It develops narrative hermeneutics as a philosophically rigorous, historically sensitive, and analytically subtle approach to the ethical stakes of the debate on the narrative dimension of human existence.Less
Against the backdrop of the polarized debate on the ethical significance of storytelling, this book develops a nuanced framework for exploring the ethical complexity of the roles narratives play in human lives. Focusing on how narratives enlarge and diminish the spaces of possibilities in which people act, think, and reimagine the world, it proposes a theoretical-analytical framework for engaging with both the ethical potential and the risks of storytelling. It elaborates a narrative hermeneutics that treats narratives as culturally mediated interpretative practices that can be oppressive, empowering, or both, and argues that the relationship between narrative unconscious and narrative imagination shapes one’s sense of the possible. Its hermeneutic narrative ethics differentiates between six dimensions of narratives’ ethical potential: they can cultivate a sense of the possible; promote self-understanding; enable understanding other lives non-subsumptively in their singularity; transform narrative in-betweens; develop the capacity for perspective-taking; and function as forms of ethical inquiry. These aspects are analyzed in dialogue with literary and autobiographical narratives that deal with the legacy of the Second World War by problematizing the adequacy of the perpetrator–victim dichotomy—exploring how it is as dialogic storytellers, fundamentally vulnerable, interdependent, and implicated in violent histories, that individuals and communities become who they are. The book brings into dialogue narrative ethics, literary narrative studies, narrative psychology, narrative philosophy, and cultural memory studies. It develops narrative hermeneutics as a philosophically rigorous, historically sensitive, and analytically subtle approach to the ethical stakes of the debate on the narrative dimension of human existence.
