Les Bienveillantes Research Articles

L’Ère des non-témoins: la littérature des ‘petits-enfants de la Shoah’. Par Aurélie Barjonet

In 2010, writer-survivor Jorge Semprún expressed his joy at the fact that new novelists were writing about the Nazi genocide of Europe’s Jews, even if five years earlier he had implored the same novelists not to neglect the memory of political deportees such as himself. Semprún’s two statements capture the phenomenon that is the subject of Aurélie Barjonet’s study: a recent surge in literary works about the Holocaust by French writers belonging to the generation of the grandchildren of those targeted by wartime antisemitism. The book takes stock of texts written between 2006, when Jonathan Littell’s Les Bienveillantes was published, and 2012, when, as Barjonet notes, the phenomenon was well established in terms of both themes and narrative strategies. Barjonet’s corpus consists of narratives by the ‘descendants’, as she labels those with a familial link to the Holocaust (Ivan Jablonka, Alexandre Jardin), and by the ‘héritiers’, as she calls those without it (Littell, Yannick Haenel, Laurent Binet). The twenty-two texts she studies, which include those affected by — to use Marianne Hirsch’s terminology — ‘vertical’ and ‘horizontal’ postmemory, fall into additional three categories: ‘enquêtes archéologiques’ (historical narratives marked by self-reflexivity), ‘fictions de témoignage’ (historical novels stamped by anachronism), and ‘histoires croisées’, where an enquiry into the life (and death) of a Holocaust victim intersects with other stories (for example, Binet’s HHhH). By focusing on recent French Holocaust novels, Barjonet fills a lacuna in literary criticism. Despite its steady growth, illustrated by the studies by Catherine Coquio, Yannick Malgouzou, and Fransiska Louwagie, scholarship of French Holocaust literature continues to prioritize canonical narratives by first- and second-generation writers. Taxonomically minded and aiming to be comprehensive, Barjonet’s study nevertheless leaves out francophone authors whose writings approach the Shoah from a non-European perspective and invite its reframing within French colonial history (for example, Michèle Maillet, Nathacha Appanah, and Louis-Philippe Dalembert). Barjonet’s book is divided into an Introduction and four chapters. Chapter 1 (‘Distinctions’) tackles the terminology and categories operational in criticism of Holocaust literature, such as ‘1.5 generation’, ‘2.5 generation’, and ‘génération d’après’. Chapter 2 (‘Description’) addresses the thematic and formal characteristics of the corpus, and the representational and ethical difficulties attached to third-generation Holocaust literature. Chapter 3 (‘Opinions’) revisits the heated debates provoked by some of the novels examined here, emblematized by Les Bienveillantes and Haenel’s Jan Karski. Chapter 4 (‘Confusions’) confronts what Barjonet perceives as misconceptions regarding Holocaust literature, which have emerged in the anglophone world and are exemplified by the terms ‘second-generation survivor’ and ‘prosthetic witness’. Barjonet’s mistrust of these labels is a symptom of her wider ambition to demarcate French criticism of Holocaust literature as a field that is less dependent on anglophone theorizations. While the author demonstrates awareness of the writings of Hirsch, Dominick LaCapra, and Michael Rothberg, her study makes only scant references to them, instead relying on French scholarship and elaborating its own categorizations, such as the titular ‘petits-enfants de la Shoah’.

Trendy Monsters: The Nazis, the Perpetrator Turn, and Popular Culture

Trendy Monsters: The Nazis, the Perpetrator Turn, and Popular Culture

O testemunho do carrasco: da memória ao ressentimento em As Benevolentes

A New Yorker writer that writes a novel in French. A Jewish descendance that twist and turns in a narrative told through the eyes of a nazi officer. We invert the roles in Les Bienveillantes (2006), by Jonathan Littell. We intend to evidence how the studies of memory of a former nazi officer can influence the history of the Second World War, tying and untying knots between memory, history and ficcion. The author brings the history of the human malice camouflaged by the thick robes of war offices. Thereupon, far beyond the studies of thetestimony literature, Jonathan Littell allows his novel to be discussed in various topics. In this work, we will refer to authors such as Seligmann-Silva (2003), Halbwachs (1990), Assmann (2011), Seixas (2004), among others.Keywords: Memory. History. Testimonial Literature. Resentment. Les Bienveillantes.

ИНФАНТИЛЬНОЕ СОЗНАНИЕ И ЕГО НАРРАТИВНОЕ ВОПЛОЩЕНИЕ В РОМАНЕ ДЖОНАТАНА ЛИТТЕЛЛА «БЛАГОВОЛИТЕЛЬНИЦЫ»

The article examines the narrative organization of Jonathan Littell’s novel Les Bienveillantes [The Kindly Ones], dedicated to the events of World War II and offering the experience of an artistic understanding of the Holocaust. Maximilien Aue, the protagonist and narrator of Les Bienveillantes, is an ex-officer of the SS and SD. The author of the article attempts to explain how his personality traits influence the specifics of the novel’s narrative. She shows that Aue’s important characteristic is infantility; this feature determines his behavior, perception, and, as a consequence, the specifics of the narrative. In the analysis of the novel, the author uses narratological methodology. She studies aspects illustrating manifestations of Aue’s infantility: relationship with his family, joining the ranks of the SD, direct participation in the extermination of the Jewish people and performance of official duties; transformation of his mental state; his behavior in situations that threaten his freedom. The author shows that Aue is unable to break the infantile relationship with his family: the narrative contains his childhood memories and his thoughts about his family as part of the story of the tragic events of the Holocaust. The author reveals that Aue’s involvement in service to the Third Reich is unconscious: his decision to join the SD is not based on ideological reasons, but on the fear of criminal punishment and the physical discomfort he experiences. When completing errands, Aue pursues his own interests rather than official duties (in particular, he compiles a photo album with executions instead of a formalized report). Metamorphoses of Aue’s mental state also testify to his infantile consciousness. The author analyzes dreams and fantasies that indicate Aue’s immaturity. His dreams perform a characterological function in the novel: they show his failure as a leader. Aue’s lack of empathy shows in his inability to sympathize with the victims of the genocide; it determines the speech features of his story such as the neutral narration about the executions, shocking comparisons and associations, the physiological nature of the narrative language. Aue’s infantility also leads to his inability to take responsibility for his actions; his self-consciousness develops many years later. Aue’s maturity shows in the recognition of his own non-exclusivity and in the intention to write a novel—to return to his experience of participating in Jewish actions. The choice of a bearer of infantile consciousness as the narrating protagonist in Les Bienveillantes indicates that modern literature is attempting to comprehend the situation of a person embroiled in hostilities, in the situation of no choice.

Military vocabulary in the translation of J. Littell’s novel Les Bienveillantes (The Kindly Ones) into slovene: between tradition and innovation

Military vocabulary and the vocabulary of war are part of specialized as well as general lexicon. Such language was present in Slovene even before the creation of the Slovene army in 1991. In this context the systematic development of military terminology was left to enthusiastic individuals. Due to the lack of terminological reference works, the creation of military vocabulary was in the hands of people who experienced military service and war, as well as writers and translators. But can literature present a reliable source for terminological research? We also try to answer this question.Our research is focused on the lexis concerning war, the denomination of military functions and ideologies in the context of the Second World War as they appear in the French original and Slovene translation of Bienveillantes (The Kindly Ones) by J. Littell (2006, 2010). Its war lexis is compared to that of some Slovene original works and translations concerning the Second World War. In addition, the monolingual corpus Gigafida is taken into account and the question of the (in)stability of prescriptive norms of Slovene is discussed.

Introduction: The Holocaust in French and Francophone Literature (1997–2017)

Introduction: The Holocaust in French and Francophone Literature (1997–2017)1 Helena Duffy In 1995, during the commemorative ceremony marking the fifty-third anniversary of the rafle du Vél’hiv’, the newly elected French president, Jacques Chirac, implicated the broadly understood French state in the deportation of some 76,000 Jews to the Nazi concentration and death camps. Prior to that, French authorities blamed the Jewish tragedy largely on the Germans and in any case abstained from singularizing it, instead preferring to subsume it within the broader phenomenon of la déportation. In contrast to subsequent postwar administrations, including that of his immediate predecessor, François Mitterrand, Chirac broke with the Gaullist myth of the French as uniquely heroic resisters. Then, with Lionel Jospin’s 1997 speech, the Left itself took distance from Mitterrand’s position. Finally, the leading politicians’ iconoclastic pronouncements were followed by other acknowledgements of institutional responsibility: in 1997 the Catholic church asked for forgiveness for its wartime silence, and a police officers’ union offered an apology for the actions of their predecessors (Clifford 206–07). The recent intensification of French and Francophone writers’ interest in the Jewish tragedy, which is the subject of the present special issue, can certainly be attributed to the encroaching absence of survivors, the influence of thriving Anglophone Holocaust fiction, or the growing threat of negationist tendencies as well as, more broadly, of racism and populism. However, the afore-described breakthrough in French memory politics must be regarded as an important factor in—if not as the trigger of—the recent surge of French-language Holocaust literature. Customarily connected with Jonathan Littell’s hugely successful albeit controversial novel, Les Bienveillantes (2006),2 this surge can be traced back to Patrick Modiano’s Dora Bruder published nine years earlier. It can hardly be a coincidence [End Page 1] that Modiano, who had been chiefly interested in the ambiguities of the Occupation (Morris 22), wrote his only Holocaust-themed novel so far in the immediate aftermath of Chirac’s momentous speech. Moreover, as the narrator’s search for information about the eponymous Paris-born Jewish teenager develops, his tone becomes increasingly critical of the French state that he overtly blames for the arrest, internment, and deportation to Auschwitz of Dora and her parents. Since the publication of Modiano’s Dora Bruder many other French-language writers have taken up the subject of World War II and the massacre of Europe’s Jews; apart from Littell’s already-mentioned monumental novel, recent French-language narratives about the Holocaust include Pierre Assouline’s La Cliente (1998), Soazig Aaron’s Le Non de Klara (2002), Philippe Claudel’s Le Rapport de Brodeck (2007), Fabrice Humbert’s L’Origine de la violence (2009), Yannick Haenel’s Jan Karski (2009), Laurent Binet’s HHhH (2010), Arnaud Rykner’s Le Wagon (2010), or David Foenkinos’s Charlotte (2014). The present issue of French Forum takes stock of some of the developments in French and Francophone Holocaust literature published over the last twenty years. Without being able to deal with all the texts that appeared between 1997 and 2017, the articles gathered here manage nevertheless to explore writings by all three generations of Holocaust authors. The twelve articles also address a variety of genres, including the graphic novel and poetry, and, looking beyond the borders of the Hexagon, focus on texts produced by European and non-European Francophone writers. The analyses undertaken in this special issue have been contextualized by a wide range of theoretical and methodological approaches, such as Marianne Hirsch’s elaboration of postmemory as transgenerational transmission of trauma through objects, stories and photographic images in the context of Holocaust survival. While Hirsch’s theory has proven useful in the examination of the work of second- and third-generation novelists, Michael Rothberg’s study of multidirectional memory as a space where traumatic memories of violence can enter into dialogue with each other, has been helpful in reading Haitian and Mauritian literature. Raul Hilberg’s problematization of the bipolar opposition between victim and perpetrator with the category of bystander has in turn been deployed to interrogate our own position in relation to both Holocaust memory and the crises in...

Isotopias: Places and Spaces in French War Fiction of the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries. By Peter Tame

Studies of war fiction in recent years have frequently focused on memory as their primary analytical lens. While memory is not absent from this study, Peter Tame adopts a rather different approach to his chosen corpus by choosing to focus on the isotopic visions of war represented by a wide range of authors and the interplay of space, place, and literary creation. The major conflicts in question are the two World Wars, although some space is also accorded to the Spanish Civil War. The corpus is wide-ranging and includes both familiar and well-studied titles, such as Roland Dorgelès’s Les Croix de bois (Paris: Albin Michel, 1919), Irène Némirovsky’s Suite française (Paris: Gallimard, 2004), Claude Simon’s La Route des Flandres (Paris: Union générale d’éditions, 1963), and Patrick Modiano’s ‘Occupation Trilogy’ (Paris: Gallimard, 1968, 1969, and 1972) and Dora Bruder (Paris: Gallimard, 1997), as well as lesser-known titles and authors, including three texts by André Chamson and two by Robert Brasillach. While the monograph’s title underlines the ambition of its chosen corpus, in fact the majority of the texts that form the subjects of the twenty chapters are written by authors who lived through one or more of the wars and who wrote their account either during or shortly after the conflict in question. Thus, excluding the works of those writers born after the wars (Modiano and Littell), the timeframe is a rather more constrained one of 1919 to 1960. Indeed, the only authentically twenty-first-century text is Jonathan Littell’s Les Bienveillantes (Paris: Gallimard, 2006) since, while Némirovsky’s novel was, for historical reasons, not published until 2004, it was written during and in response to the débâcle and Occupation. The book is pleasingly symmetrical and is divided into five parts, each one organized around broad chronological themes: the Great War; the Entre-deux-guerres; Invasion; Occupation; Liberation. Within each part, four chapters each take a single novel as the focus of analysis. Each part is followed by an expansive conclusion that brings further works into the discussion. Four isotopic modes are identified within the methodological framework: possession/appropriation, dispossession/loss, alienation, and repossession, with much of the analysis oriented to determining which of these is the dominant mode in any one novel or time period. Tame concludes that while it might be expected, at least in historical terms, that modes of loss and repossession dominate in fictions of war, in fact it is the mode of alienation that features most widely, suggesting that, while history ‘deals in what is logical and quantifiable’ (p. 518), fiction engages more readily with the complexities of the human condition of which alienation is a truer representation in wartime. With its close readings of a wide range of fictions of conflict, the monograph offers valuable insights into the imaginative and creative processes involved in their writing.

Parole vraie, parole vide: des Bienveillantes aux exécuteurs par Élise Lamy-Rested

layers of interpretation and influence within works of literature. For his contribution, Houppermans examines networks of meaning in Proust’s novel created by the crosspollination of proper names and by the myriad transformations of the notions of frais and genre. Sandra Cheilan’s enlightening study identifies the episode of the“bonbons inventés par Siraudin” in Huysmans’s À rebours as “l’hypotexte” (85) of the iconic madeleine scene of involuntary memory. She artfully follows the transformation that Des Esseintes’s candies undergo in the Recherche, underscoring their “dimension métapoétique”(94) that links writing and intimacy, narration and the life of the mind, and ultimately, creation and memory. For his part, Bruno Viard analyses the Proustian narrator’s rejection of love and everyday life at the end of the novel and his“saut dans l’Art pur”(98).Viard suggests that the protagonist’s childhood experiences of alternating jealousy and boredom with his mother, together with his gradual forgetting of the “valeurs vitales” (107) embodied by his grandmother, become, in the mind of the mature narrator, characteristics of human existence in general, thereby rendering literature more satisfying and authentic than ordinary life. Edward Bizub outlines a current debate surrounding the Recherche, as to whether it exemplifies principles of neuroscience or those of psychoanalysis, whereas Mauricio R. Narváez focuses on the esthetic and narratological role of l’escalier in the novel. In a fascinating comparison , Sabine van Wesemael deftly presents the works of Michel Houellebecq as a “commentaire méta-discursif” on Proust’s “récit de vie” in the Recherche (144). She accentuates the authors’ shared objectives, such as their exposure of the vanity of human ambitions,their banalization of transgression,and their depiction of the impossibility of communication, especially in matters of love. She throws light as well on their many differences, for instance, their opposing conceptions of the moi social and the moi profond, in addition to the ways in which their language and literary style reflect their respective optimism or pessimism about the human condition. The volume concludes with its customary comptes rendus, this time including issues of the Bulletin Marcel Proust and the Bulletin d’informations proustiennes on the centenary of the publication of Du côté de chez Swann. Brandeis University (MA) Hollie Markland Harder Lamy-Rested, Élise. Parole vraie, parole vide: des Bienveillantes aux exécuteurs. Paris: Garnier, 2014. ISBN 978-2-8124-2042-9. Pp. 182. 26 a. How can an ordinary person become a genocidal killer? Or, to broaden the perspective ,“comment tout un peuple [...] peut-il en venir à accepter de mettre en œuvre les moyens pour exterminer un second?” (30). These are the fundamental questions Élise Lamy-Rested seeks to answer by considering Jonathan Littell’s Les bienveillantes, a fictional autobiography of a former SS officer. Published in 2006, the novel brought overnight fame for its author and raised a considerable controversy. In this regard, 238 FRENCH REVIEW 90.4 Reviews 239 Lamy-Rested’s essay can be seen as an attempt at bringing the debate to a close. Her purpose is to“signer l’échec du projet théorique de Littell, qui n’est pas pour autant un échec littéraire”(101). The central issue to be considered is to know what exactly does the“je”of the narrator stand for. In this regard, Littell’s fictional account suffers from an unsolvable contradiction: on the one hand, the SS officer is an individual psyche that is an integral, organic part of a specific State apparatus; on the other, according to a second thesis implicit in the novel:“les génocides ont la même cause et les ‘bourreaux ’ parlent d’une seule voix”(105). Consequently, Lamy-Rested seeks to develop a new conceptual model, a third thesis that would reconcile the “anthropo-psychological ” explanatory model with the socio-political and historically contextualized approach. Her study proceeds on the basis of several well-known precedents that include Stanley Milgram’s experiments as well as three studies of genocide: Christopher Browning’s Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (2007), Harald Welzer’s Täter: Wie aus ganz normalen Menschen Massenmörder werden (2005), and...

Fiction, History and the Possible

The article explores the problematic assumptions underlying the traditional view that literature deals with the realm of the possible and history with the realm of the actual. This dichotomy risks dismissing how a sense of the possible constitutes an important dimension of every actual world, how literary fiction provides interpretations of actual worlds, and how it has its own literary means of giving us a sense of a past world as a space of possibilities. This argument is developed by analysing Jonathan Littell's Les Bienveillantes (2006, The Kindly Ones), which has created a heated controversy on the contribution of literature to the understanding of the Holocaust. The article contributes to developing narrative hermeneutics as an approach which, first, suggests that both historiography and fiction are ways of interpreting the world past and present, and, second, is sensitive to how fiction requires specific modes of interpretation and engagement. The analysis of Littell's novel shows that the interplay between immersiveness and critical distance can produce a narrative dynamic that allows the reader to engage emotionally with an ethically problematic lifeworld without uncritically adopting the protagonist's perspective. One important way in which fiction can produce insights into history is its ability to cultivate, through its specifically fictional means, a sense of history as a sense of the possible while at the same time reflecting on the conditions and limits of narrating, representing and understanding history.

Kirjallisuus historiantulkintana, mahdollisen taju ja Jonathan Littellin Hyväntahtoiset

Literary Interpretation of History, a Sense of the Possible, and Jonathan Littell’s Les Bienveillantes This article examines the assumptions underlying the view that literature deals with the realm of the possible and history with the realm of the actual. This dichotomy risks dismissing how a sense of the possible constitutes an important dimension of every actual world, how literature provides interpretations of actual worlds, and how it has its own literary means of giving us a sense of a past world as a space of possibilities. The argument is developed by analysing Jonathan Littell’s Les Bienveillantes (2006, The Kindly Ones), which has created a heated controversy on the contribution of literature to the understanding of the Holocaust. The article contributes to a narrative hermeneutics which suggests that both historiography and fiction are ways of interpreting the world past and present, and is sensitive to how fiction requires specific modes of interpretation and engagement. The analysis of Littell’s novel shows that 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. One important way in which fiction can produce insights into history is its ability to cultivate, through its specifically fictional means, a sense of history as a sense of the possible while at the same time reflecting on the conditions and limits of narrating, representing, and understanding history.

THE ORDER OF THINGS: SYMPATHIES AND COLLABORATIONS IN 1930S FRANCE AND THE VICHY REGIME

Sandrine Sanos has taken on a thorny topic inThe Aesthetics of Hate: Far-Right Intellectuals, Antisemitism, and Gender in 1930s France. Sanos opens this compelling study of 1930s far-right French intellectuals by briefly discussing a scene in Jonathan's Littell'sThe Kindly Ones(Les bienveillantes). Greeted with praise and controversy on publication, Littell's highly charged 2006 novel was steeped in sinister perversions and vicious physical perpetrations straight out of Klaus Theweleit's encyclopedic two-volumeMale Fantasies, dedicated to analyzing German anti-Semitic, anti-Bolshevist, and misogynist belligerence. In Sanos's description, the fictional protagonist ofThe Kindly Ones, an SS officer named Maximilien Aue, visits occupied Paris in 1943, where he enjoys the company of two now-infamous and very real French fascists—Robert Brasillach and Lucien Rabatet. Aue muses with the two anti-Semites on the possibilities of a uniquely fascist literature, enacts homosocial bonds over mutual hatred for Jews and communists, and exploits the abject sexual availability of men at a “faggot bar.” The pathology-filled narrative illuminates the mind of the protagonist even as it speaks to contemporary conceptions of the era's fanatical concern with self-regulation and masculinity.

'This Incomprehensible Thing': Jonathan Littell's The Kindly Ones and the Aesthetics of Excess

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.

Literature and History: Around by Richard J. Golsan, Philip Watts

Reviews 219 invitation au voyage: for Fournier, the inviting smile of Leonardo da Vinci’s “anges charmants”in“Les phares”(68) finds echo in the“invitation”of the exotic destinations proposed in “Anywhere Out of the World” (“Batavia te souriait, peut-être?” the narrator asks his own soul, 73), as well as the stationary voyages offered by hallucinogens in “La chambre double” (“un seul objet connu me sourit: la fiole de laudanum,” 78). There are complicated issues of intersubjectivity and solipsism entailed in Baudelairean smiles; as Fournier observes, the narrator/lyrical subject never smiles at another subject (excepting only the“philosophes à quatre pattes”of “Les bons chiens,”112). Laughter, in contrast, can seem to have a more social dimension (for instance, the savagely mocked Belgians collectively laugh at heaven in “La civilisation belge,” 154, while four blasé “vétérans de joie” share a laugh in “Portraits de maîtresses,” 166), though Fournier ultimately characterizes le rire baudelairien not as an opening toward a group, but rather toward “l’abîme intérieur” (250): a mark of distance between artist and others, as the airborne albatross “qui [...] se rit de l’archer,” the reflexive pronoun emphasizing the self-contained detachment of the poet, as Fournier notes (258). Yet, as in “Le fou et la Vénus,” and “Le vieux saltimbanque” (262–63), silence or absence of laughter evoke an image of an artist in decline, still isolated, but no longer triumphant. In short, this work will inform how I read and teach Baudelaire; I highly recommend it. Widener University (PA) Kate M. Bonin Golsan, Richard J., and Philip Watts. Literature and History: Around Suite française and Les bienveillantes. Yale French Studies 121 (2012). ISBN 978-0-300-18477-8. Pp. 266. $30. Late 2012: two major exhibits, 1917 at Pompidou/Metz and L’art en guerre, 1938– 1947 at the Musée d’art moderne de la ville de Paris grapple with the complexities of war’s capacity to generate enduring, if troubling works of art. The second show in particular interrogates the still gaping wound the collaboration blasted into French consciousness. A similar intent animates this provocative issue, in which eleven scholars scrutinize exemplary literary performances originating in the Second World War (Suite française), and emerging out of the darkest period of modern French history (Les bienveillantes). “Literature does not inspire good feelings,” notes Olivier Rubinstein, whose work with Irène Némirovksy’s daughter Denise Epstein resulted in the publication of Suite française (112); it would be an understatement to note that the YFS authors experienced ambivalence around these sweeping, emblematic works. One after another, they acknowledge the difficulties posed by such deeply ambiguous, sensitive material.Was Némirovsky a ventriloquist for the ideology of Vichy (Bracher, 36; Carroll, 74–76)? Was the deportee who perished in Auschwitz a “self-hating” Jew (Suleiman, 12)? Does Jonathan Littell’s seductive brute Max Aue place readers in an impossible position? Just by reading his sophisticated arguments about how circumstance alone separates the reader from the architects of the Holocaust, do we open the door to acquiescence? Or exoneration (Moyn, 128–30; Razinsky, 145)? How does fiction enable a different understanding of the past than history? Antoine Compagnon, ruing le piège littéraire, notes that the dense historical erudition of Les bienveillantes “taught me virtually nothing, yet I did not close the book” (114). More than half of these essays eschew what in war would be called a frontal attack and work instead from the novelists’ prior productions, or from significant affiliations that provide a revealing éclairage for their theaters of cruelty. Thus, parallel production comes to the fore in Marc Dambre’s analysis of Littell’s “ludic intertexuality” (170); or in Lynn Higgins’s use of Julien Duvivier’s film of Némirovsky’s David Golder to better define the melodramatic, noir elements of her representational strategies; or in Steven Ungar’s approach to the perpetrator-as-narrator problem via Littell’s Le sec et l’humide and Belgian fascist Léon Degrelle. Co-editors Watts and Golsan take on the important challenge of epic in Les bienveillantes with their considerations of Littell’s references to...

La retorica sconfitta dalla forza del contesto etico-politico. Riflessioni sulla ricezione di due traduzioni

Rhetoric is generally regarded as a quasi absolute authority, though its strength (i.e. its effect) depends on its reception by the public which will be confronting the individual works. This essay analyzes the reactions aroused by the German translations of two French novels, the first of which, Michel Houellebecq’s Les particules elementaires caused a scandal at the time of its publication, while the second, Jonathan Littell’s Les Bienveillantes, was the object of a lively polemical debate in Germany even before the translation appeared. If a troubled response to Littell’s work was predictable, since it narrates the fictional memoirs of an SS officer, the polemic was more intense than expected. More surprising still, however, was the resonance attained by Elementarteilchen. In Germany, the frame of the novel – regarded as "inutile" in France, and evoking a society where cloning has replaced sexuality and reproduction – found itself at the centre of a vexed debate, during which Houellebecq was even acclaimed as a "Kulturphilosoph". As this essay contends, the German reception of these two novels is exemplary of the extent to which the same rhetoric may be implemented differently according to the variations in the ethical-political context.

The Stakes in Holocaust Representation: On Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds

Despite its unalterable march into past history, the Holocaust remains an object of fascination to contemporary novelists and filmmakers as well as to the public. Along with works that are recognized as enduring masterpieces (Lanzmann's Sboah, David Grossman's See Under: Love, Kertesz's Fatelessness), this fascination has produced dozens, if not hundreds, of films and novels that deserve to be forgotten quickly. In the wide terrain between these two extremes, one finds a small number of works that have enjoyed worldwide success even while provoking passionate critical debates: what some viewers or readers consider as an important artistic achievement, others consider as a piece of commercial marketing with no artistic merit, or maybe even as an insult to civilized values. Jonathan Littell's 2006 novel, Les Bienveillantes (The Kindly Ones), featuring a former Nazi as first-person narrator, was extolled by some extremely distinguished critics and received two major literary prizes in France before becoming an international publishing phenomenon, but it was also trashed by other, equally distinguished readers. Similarly divided opinions greeted Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List (1994), Roberto Benigni's Life Is Beautiful (1997), and most recently Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds (2009). Such contested works--we could call them crisis works or weathervanes--point to unresolved ethical and aesthetic issues concerning representations of the Holocaust. can or should be shown or told in a work of art dealing with a historic event that has been called unrepresentable? Even more importantly, what can or should not be shown or told? When Schindler's List first came out, a number of commentators--foremost among them Claude Lanzmann--expressed outrage at the sequence where a group of women deported to Auschwitz are shown naked, entering a room that looks as if it could be a gas chamber. Such a representation is, according to Lanzmann, positively obscene--not to be shown. (1) By showing it, Lanzmann contended, Spielberg had committed both an artistic sin of bad taste and a grave ethical lapse, even if the room in question turned out to be an actual shower room, not a gas chamber. If the question raised by Schindler's List was What can be shown? then the question raised by Benigni's Life Is Beautiful was How should it be shown? Negative criticisms of that film emphasized its unrealistic way of depicting the concentration camp where Guido and his son are imprisoned: the camp looked too manicured, not at all like the real thing. And whoever heard of a Jewish inmate who succeeded in keeping his young child hidden for weeks or months in a Nazi concentration camp? Such criticisms focused on the criterion of historical authenticity--and once again, the issue was both ethical and aesthetic. Those who criticized this aspect of the film maintained that it is ethically reprehensible to go against historical facts in representing the Holocaust. The other, related theoretical issue concerned humor: Was humor, and the comic in general, an acceptable mode for treating this most serious subject? Those who defended Benigni's film declared not only that the artistic imagination must brook no limits, including that of factuality, but that comedy could be a powerful means of expression, even about the Holocaust. The eminent specialist of Holocaust literature Sidra Ezrahi argued that since Benigni presented the film from the start as a fable, it should be interpreted as a comic counterfactual story, a kind of Purimspiel that presented a meliorative version of history and that should not be interpreted with dead-minded literalism. Ezrahi saw in Benigni's film--as well as in several other comic representations of the Shoah, such as Radu Mihaileanu's film Train of Life (also from 1997) or Jurek Becker's novel Jakob the Liar (1969)--a continuation of the tradition of Jewish humor that one finds in the stories of Sholem Aleichem, for example. …

Reading Phil Watts on Les Bienveillantes

Last fall I asked Vincent Debaene to share Phil Watts's book proposal, of with me. The title of Tragedy had also been title of Phil's essay on Jonathan Littell's Les Bienveillantes included in issue of Yale French Studies devoted to Littell and Irene Nemirovsky that Phil and I had coedited in 2012. I had greatly admired Phil's essay on Les Bienveillantes and wanted to see what plans for larger project looked like. I read proposal of Tragedy with renewed sense of admiration and also one of loss, both personal and intellectual. In our last conversations, Phil and I had talked about tragedy, our shared admiration for Hannah Arendt--about whose work Phil knew much more than I--and Arendt's 1963 book, Eichmann in Jerusalem. We had in fact planned conference to commemorate fiftieth anniversary of publication of Arendt's profoundly influential and controversial work, to be held at Glasscock Humanities Center at Texas A&M this year. That conference took place this past January. I am so sorry that Phil couldn't be there. I'm sure he would have enjoyed it as much as I did. of Tragedy remarkable and important project, engaging as it does with crucial philosophical, political, and moral issues in post-Holocaust world, terribly complex subject of contemporary history and its representations, and critical questions concerning cultural appropriateness and longevity of literary genres and tragedy in particular. As Phil writes: examining ways in which literature and film turned to tragedy--or modern remnants of genre--we can better understand relations between fictional narratives and justice, politics, and history in postwar world. From standpoint of genre of tragedy alone--and its very possibility in postwar world--the issue already fraught one, and one that Phil deftly dissects. By definition or by tradition, tragedy an archaic and aristocratic form. Moreover, in postwar world, it has been tainted by its association with totalitarian regimes whose deliberate debasement of through propagandistic excess--what George Steiner refers to as stiffening of language in The Death of Tragedy--has decimated tragedy by stripping it of its true (read linguistic) power. Hence, as Phil notes, Brecht's dismissal of tragedy as an outmoded artifact. And yet historical and human need for tragedy, or tragedy reconceptualized or reconfigured, remains. It may serve as a genre whose rigors are necessary tonic for our postmodern times, as Phil quotes Terry Eagleton as stating. Or it might also be means of enhancing struggles and tragic destiny of common man. In this latter form, it becomes the art of common, figuring fate of Zola's Jacques Lantier, Flaubert's Emma Bovary, or perhaps tragic American Everyman in Arthur Miller's Death of Salesman or View from Bridge. But Phil's project on contemporary tragedy, or its remnants, at once both historically more specific and acute, and analytically more powerful, than either of these options allows. Remnants of Tragedy, Phil writes, is situated along fault line on which archaic literary form confronts modern dictatorships, potentially democratic art tied to abuse of power by state, and Europe's most constantly idealized and de-historicized literary art form confronted with Europe's legacy of violence. Implicit in this broad but succinct description whole host of compelling formal, aesthetic, historical, and theoretical questions, among them: What form, or forms, political or otherwise, can tragic agon assume? Who might tragic hero be? In what does tragic destiny consist? What historical events can be adequately and appropriately represented in tragedy? Can power of tragic be restored? Can traditional definitions or models of tragedy, from Aristotle to Hegel to A. …

Forgetting Auschwitz: Jonathan Littell and the Death of a Beautiful Woman

In 2006, while Laurent Binet was working on HHhH (2010; the title is an acronym for Himmlers Him heist Heydrich, the name of Hitler’s brain is Heydrich and the subject of the book is Heydrich’s assassination by the Czech resistance), Jonathan Littell’s book Les Bienveillantes (2006; published in English as The Kindly Ones [2009]) appeared. Heydrich plays only a very small role in the Littell, but the general “subject matter” of the two books (Binet describes Les Bienveillantes as “the (false) memoirs of an old SS veteran” [“Missing”]) is, as Binet himself noted unhappily at the time, “fairly similar” (HHhH 227). Why unhappily? Because Les Bienveillantes immediately became a publishing sensation, selling over 700,000 copies, winning the Prix Goncourt and even the reluctant respect of Claude Lanzmann for its “formidable documentation” (Etchegoin)— he and Raoul Hilberg, Lanzmann said, were the only two people in the world who could sufficiently appreciate its accuracy. So, if you were yourself in the middle of a book about the Nazis, and you too were particularly committed to the importance of historical accuracy, to knowing and saying “how things really happened” you might plausibly be nervous about how much attention would be left for you (“Missing”). In the event, however, Binet need not have worried. HHhH was also a big success, winning its own Prix Goncourt and more interestingly, while acknowledging Les Bienveillantes and even Lanzmann’s praise for it, producing its own critique of that novel’s claim to truth. In fact, Binet takes Littell on directly, objecting especially to an early scene in which the brutal and drunken Kommandant of

Literature and History: Around 'Suite francaise' and 'Les Bienveillantes'

Literature and History: Around 'Suite francaise' and 'Les Bienveillantes'

“J’ai tué": violence guerrière et fiction ed. by Déborah Lévy-Bertherat, Pierre Schoentjes

by dead or living authors, and paves the way for future research on an archeology of intimacy in the nineteenth century. Written with rigor and elegance, her book can indeed provide a model for the study of other periods and other types of letter-writers. New York University Claudie Bernard LÉVY-BERTHERAT, DÉBORAH, et PIERRE SCHOENTJES, éd. “J’ai tué”: violence guerrière et fiction. Genève: Droz, 2010. ISBN 978-90-70489-21-2. Pp. 306. 40 a. The plethora of recent studies, colloquia, and essay collections examining relations between history and literature or between history and memory in literature has overwhelmingly focused on contemporary wars. This volume is no exception, spanning from World War I to Rwanda. It treats ‘conventional’ wars, insurgent revolutions, and genocides, not to erase fundamental distinctions among them but, on the contrary, to better delineate what sets the three contexts apart. Moreover, in a century that condemned wars of aggression and thus privileged victims’ perspectives, these scholars take the opposite tack by peering into dark and troubling works which represent “la violence guerrière du point de vue de celui qui l’inflige” (9). In the first section of the volume, a short piece by Monique Canto-Sperber and a substantial survey by Schoentjes seek to sketch out theoretical frames— esthetic and ethical—for broaching such literary (and on occasion here, cinematic) undertakings. The second section features articles on World War I by LévyBertherat (discussing Blaise Cendrars and Mikhail Bulgakov) and Corinne François-Denève (examining Aziz Chouaki’s play, Les coloniaux [Mille et une nuits, 2006]). The third contains works on World War II: Yan Hamel on Sartre’s La mort dans l’âme (Gallimard, 1949), Alain Kleinberger on American war films, and Vicky Colin on Jonathan Littell’s Les bienveillantes (Gallimard, 2006). The fourth section turns its attention to Algeria and Vietnam as examples of wars for independence (studies by Laurent Véray, Philip Dine, and Catherine MilkovitchRioux ), followed by a section addressing Rwanda’s civil war strife (Anneleen Spiessens on Jean Hatzfeld and Gilbert Gatore; Jean-Pierre Karegeye on fictional portraits of executioners; and Catherine Coquio on Gatore’s Le passé devant soi [Phébus, 2008]). The collection concludes with the transcription of a roundtable discussion among documentary producer François Bernard, renowned combat photographer Patrick Chauvel, playwright Gatore, and noted author Laurent Mauvignier (whose recent novel on the Algerian War—Des hommes [Minuit, 2009]—is especially relevant here). Among the most noteworthy studies, Milkovitch-Rioux devises a compelling interdisciplinary approach to these themes. As a point of departure for her reflections on the Algerian War, she contrasts historical testimony provided by perpetrators well after the events (collected in Patrick Rotman, L’ennemi intime [Seuil, 2005]) with fictional accounts. In successfully teasing out the psychological dynamics germane to such ‘confessions,’ she is able to contextualize the choices confronting authors such as Assia Djebar and Mohammed Dib who on rare occasions attempt to project their imagination into the world of assassins and torturers. The study is nuanced in its theoretical moves. Moreover, one would be interested to see how her analysis would approach Henri Alleg’s La question (Minuit, 1958)— 574 FRENCH REVIEW 86.3 the first significant historical account from a victim tortured by the French army—banned immediately in France upon publication. Colin’s discussion of Les bienveillantes eschews Milkovitch-Rioux’s psychoanalytic angle and opts instead for a framework inspired by clinical psychology. After an at times awkward prologue needed to establish her conceptual battery, Colin very ably negotiates a discussion of the protagonist Max Aue (played off of remarks made by Littell in interviews) that highlights an attention to symptomology and the metaphorical registers used to evoke said signs of trauma. This volume does not make contributions as substantial as those in the compelling special issue of Le Débat 165 (May-August 2011) titled L’histoire saisie par la fiction. The individual studies of “J’ai tué” come across as somewhat scattered; more contributions to the theoretical section would no doubt have served to deploy a broader hermeneutic umbrella. However, the majority constitutes serious scholarly discussions of frequently non-canonical figures and at...

HISTORICAL AND LITERARY APPROACHES TO THE “FINAL SOLUTION”: SAUL FRIEDLÄNDER AND JONATHAN LITTELL

ABSTRACTThis article discusses together two recent prize‐winning works of epic proportions that have received much attention: Saul Friedländer's two‐volume historical study Nazi Germany and the Jews and Jonathan Littell's novel Les Bienveillantes (The Kindly Ones), the former of which focuses on victims and the latter on perpetrators of the “Final Solution.” I provide a critical analysis of Littell's novel, especially with respect to its seemingly fatalistic mingling of erotic and genocidal motifs and its disavowal or underestimation of the difficulty and necessity of understanding victims of the Nazi genocide. My analysis raises the question of the extent to which the notoriety of the novel may be due to the way it instantiates influential approaches to both literature and the Holocaust in terms of an aesthetic of the sublime, excess, radical ambiguity (resolvable at best into irony and paradox), and fatalistic entry into an incomprehensible “heart of darkness.” Crucial here is the notion that an object (paradigmatically, the Holocaust) both demands representation or explanation and ultimately is beyond comprehension, narrative, or even words. I also reevaluate the bases for the justified praise accorded Friedländer's masterwork and question certain claims made on its behalf by commentators, especially with respect to literary and historiographical innovation. In so doing, I explore and defend the role of critical theory in relation to historical narrative.