A Rhetoric of Ambivalence : The Memory World of the Nazi Perpetrator in Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones

• In Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones (Les Bienveillantes, 2006), a discrepancy is found between the historical account and the personal story, indicating the major ambivalence that arises from the creation of a historical world (noesis) as opposed to a fictional world (poiesis). This major ambivalence is connected to a range of minor ambivalences (and other elements of uncertainty) that are related to the novel’s treatment of the historical period of World War II in ways that unsettle and defamiliarize the typical standards of Holocaust representations. Taking these tensions to their extreme, Littell combines detailed historical accuracy with intertextual play and a thematic focus on perversion, excess, and transgression. Thus, he is testing how far the historically particular can be stretched before it turns into something entirely different. I have named these workings of the novel the rhetoric of ambivalence. At the center of attention in the present dissertation is the inherently ambivalent nature of the novel itself, the way the author describes his literary process, and its public and critical reception. Most prominent is the intradiegetic workings of the fictional world that I have conceptualized as a particular kind of memory world and that I analyze using concepts and methods from the theory of fiction, narratology, character studies, and memory studies. I further suggest that this rhetoric of ambivalence can be illuminated by a perhaps unexpected juxtaposition of, on the one hand, Zygmunt Bauman’s understanding of modernity as the attempted eradication of ambivalence and, on the other, Georges Bataille’s notion of human nature as dependent on the absorption and expenditure of solar energy. As I see it, Littell offers an original insight into Nazism and the Holocaust that takes into account the inherently ambivalent nature of humanity and that elevates the particulars of history through a baroque play of textual aesthetics.

• International scholarly interest in fictional depictions of the Nazi perpetrator has been on the rise during the first decades of the 2000s. In this regard, the American author Jonathan Littell’s novel The Kindly Ones (2009), originally published 2006 in French as Les Bienveillantes, holds a center position because of how the Holocaust has been transmuted into fictional form in a fashion that both fascinates and offends readers. The present dissertation argues that ambivalence can be the key to not just comprehend the rhetoric and the intradiegetic workings of this complex and multi-faceted novel, but also to understand the author’s attitude towards his writings and the conflicted critical discourse surrounding it. To make the rhetoric of ambivalence of The Kindly Ones conceivable in analytical terms, the concept of memory world is developed from theories of fiction, narratology, character studies, and memory studies. Within this framework, Alexander Kofod-Jensen explores the tensions created when a comprehension of modernity as the attempted eradication of ambivalence is brought together with a baroque play of aesthetics and provocative aspects of transgression and excess.

Ämnesord

HUMANIORA  -- Språk och litteratur -- Litteraturvetenskap (hsv//swe)

HUMANITIES  -- Languages and Literature -- General Literary studies (hsv//eng)

HUMANIORA  -- Språk och litteratur -- Litteraturstudier (hsv//swe)

HUMANITIES  -- Languages and Literature -- Studies of Specific Literatures (hsv//eng)

Nyckelord

literature

ambivalence

memory

history

World War II

Nazism

Comparative Literature

Litteraturvetenskap

Publikations- och innehållstyp

vet (ämneskategori)

dok (ämneskategori)