Abstract
Jonathan Littell’s novel Les Bienveillantes ( The Kindly Ones ) is challenging in both its subject and approach. Purporting to be the memoirs of SS-officer Maximilien Aue, it represents many of the Second World War’s most grievous atrocities in graphic detail, an approach which has been criticised as a ‘poetics of horror’ created by a ‘pornographer of violence’. However, Littell’s transgression of the literary norms of Holocaust representation through minimalist underwriting by the employment of an aesthetics of excess is not gratuitous; instead, it both revitalises the reader’s reaction to the depicted historic events, and extends their ethical implications beyond their historical moment.
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