Mechanisms of Defense and Narrative Authority in Holocaust Fiction: Imagining the Perpetrator in David Grossman’s See Under: Love

Abstract

While perpetrator fiction, which centralizes the perpetrator’s experience, perspective, and mind, is commonly studied through the peril of readers’ possible identification with the executioner, this paper considers the challenges that writers face in creating these characters. First, the question of narrative authority—who is authorized to imagine the Holocaust?—arises anew: do nonsurvivors hold the public and moral legitimacy to imagine perpetrators? Second, there is the risk of writers’ identification with the humanized executioner to the point of losing their moral judgment and critical perspective. Utilizing Holocaust historiography (Yitzhak Arad, Christopher Browning) and recent theoretical work on perpetrator fiction (especially by Erin McGlothlin), this paper identifies some of the textual mechanisms that contemporary authors employ in response to these challenges: metapoetic discourse, the fantastic mode, creative uses of historical facts, first-person and unreliable narration, and alternating textual forms. Following an introductory presentation of the theoretical problem, the paper closely explores mechanisms of defense and narrative authority in the “Wasserman” part of David Grossman’s See Under: Love (‘Ayen ‘erekh: Ahavah), before turning to a briefer consideration of Martin Amis’s Time’s Arrow, Bernhard Schlink’s The Reader, and other second-generation Holocaust narratives. A more extensive analysis of Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones concludes my discussion.