Space of Murder, Space of Freedom

Abstract

During the Second World War, forests were both the stage for mass executions of Jews (“the Holocaust by bullets”) and a space of refuge for fugitive Jews. The chapter examines two French novels, Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones (first published in 2006 as Les Bienveillantes) and Philippe Claudel’s Brodeck (first published in 2007 as Le Rapport de Brodeck), which cast the forest as a Holocaust setting and, in so doing, reinvest it with the symptomatology of human trauma. Reading the novels in dialogue with Caruth’s deconstruction of Tasso’s Jerusalem Delivered, I foreground the evidential and agential role of the trees in the sixteenth-century epic, minimized by Caruth and largely overlooked by her critics. I demonstrate that, by using the forest to refocus our attention on the Jewish tragedy in a novel narrated from the perpetrator’s perspective, Littell redeems the promise of ethical effectiveness that Jerusalem Delivered fails to fulfill and points to the porosity of the human/nonhuman boundary. I then contend that Brodeck, too, posits the traumatized human subject as inextricable from its natural environment and casts this environment as a posttraumatic landscape construed by the protagonist through the processes of projection and identification. While endorsing Caruth’s conception of trauma as a belated response to painful events, and of history as an enmeshment of the victim’s and the killer’s traumas, the two novels broaden this conception by stressing trauma’s embodiment and embeddedness in nature. By challenging a humanistic understanding of trauma, Littell and Claudel reframe the Holocaust as a product of modern ontology with its privileging of the human within the human/nonhuman binary and suggest that it is this binary that has legitimized both our abuse of the nonhuman world and the dehumanization and consequent oppression of human groups, as emblematized by the Holocaust.