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

Abstract: 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.