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Wednesday, March 18, 2009
Littell’s Kindly Ones: 3
After Toccata and Allemandes we get Courante, running (ha!) from p.339 to p.427: the Stalingrad chapter. For most of its length this is pretty impressively done: lots of evocative, vividly horrible details about the winter 1942-3 horrors, the cold, the lice, the danger, mutilation, cannibalism and despair. Some of this was familiar to me (there’ve been no shortage of books about this siege, after all); some weren’t, though I don’t doubt their historical veracity. I was struck, for instance, with the ‘Oberstleutnant from the Forty-fourth Division who had demolished an entire isba [wooden hut] where a dozen of his men were sheltering, to heat water for a bath, and then who, after soaking for a long time and shaving himself, had put his uniform back on and shot himself in the mouth’ [386].
The last quarter of this section is dominated by two things: first one lengthy conversation (notionally an interrogation) between Aue and a captured Soviet Commissar called, maybe a little allegorically-clumsily, Pravdin (that is, ‘Truth man’). I’m getting used, now, to Littell’s habit of simply inserting lectures (often many pages long) into the body of his text; and that’s what we get here. I suppose I’m about one-quarter against, three-quarters in favour of this strategy. The one-quarter is reminded—and this, obviously, is not a good thing—of John Galt’s interminable lecture at the end of Atlas Shrugged. But the three-quarters is compounded partly of (usually) engagement with interesting content, and mostly of admiration for what is evidently a broader aesthetic strategy. This is the idiom of Science itself; telling you a whole bunch of interesting stuff in a way that not only makes no attempt to pander to readers with short attention spans, but which also deliberately disconnects itself from moral judgment. Which is to position the novel, I suppose, as the conceptual child of Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Englightenment argument: the broader cultural idiom of Enlightenment rationality leads directly to the door of Auschwitz. Littell elaborates that throughout the book. In this chapter, for instance, Aue makes friends with a doctor, called Hohenegg, who’s been sent to check out the general health of the Sixth Army.
”I’ve already conducted about thirty autopsies and the results are irrefutable: more than half present symptoms of acute malnutrition … but the curious thing is that despite the reduction in rations, it’s still much too soon to have so many cases … the metabolism itself is affected by the cold and fatigue and can no longer function properly.”—“And fear” [the interlocutor is Aue]—“Fear too, of course. We saw it during the Great War: under some particularly intense bombardments, the heart fails; we find young, healthy, well-fed men dead without the slightest wound. But here I’d say rather that it’s an aggravating factor, not a preliminary cause. Once again, I have to continue my investigations. It won’t be of much use for the Sixth Army. I’m sure, but I flatter myself that it will serve science, and that’s what helps me get up in the morning.” [382-83]
His research has not immediate practical use, but he pursues it anyway, for the sake of this abstracted ‘science’. That’s exactly the tone of Aue’s own narrative project: he’s not telling this story for any immediate purpose. It’s in the service of some chilly, rather pointless abstraction.
The Aue-Pravdin exchange is interesting, although a little sixth-form-debating-society: Pravdin considers National Socialism ‘a heresy of Marxism’ [395], comparing the Soviets to the Jews and the Nazis to the Christians. Aue, in turn, delivers a long speech about the Soviet system as a political iteration of humiliation (‘but one can humiliate only those who can be humiliated; and in turn, only the humiliated humiliate. The humiliated of 1917, from Stalin down to the muzhik, have done nothing since then but inflict their fear and their humiliation on others.’ Russia is ‘this country of the humiliated.’ He goes on:
In Germany, and the capitalist countries, everyone says communism ruined Russia; but I believe it’s the opposite: it’s Russia that ruined communism. It could have been a fine idea, and who can say what would have happened if the Revolution had taken place in Germany rather than Russia? If it had been led by self-assured Germans, like your friends Rose Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht? [Pravidin boasted about liaising with these famous German revolutionaries before the war: that’s how his German is good enough to sustain this exchange] [399]
The second thing that dominates the last quarter of this section is very different: an unusually extravagant sort-of dream sequence. Aue is shot in the head, which in turn mutates his narratives into an elaborate phantasmagoria: he walks through Stalingrad, and swims for a long time under the ice of the Volga (‘the air lasted in my lungs … I kept swimming, passing sunken bargesful of handsome young men sitting in rows, their weapons still in their hands, little fish threading through their hair agitated by the current’). Eventually he surfaces and climbs aboard a strange airship piloted by a Nazi scientist called Doktor Sardine, presumably to remind us of the Sardinenpackung in the Ukraine—Herr Doktor is certainly intemperately anti-Semitic, and accuses Aue of being ‘an accomplice of Finkelstein! Of Krasschild! Those envious Yids … Squids! Dwarves! Boot-polishers! Falsifiers of diplomas and of results … [419]. Sardine believes the world to be cone-shaped, and is taking his airship off to explore the flat base, even though ‘beyond the Edge, there is no gravitational field’ [421] (the machine, apparently, will turn into a sort of mechanical spider to cling to the surface). From the airship Aue sees his sister on the steppes below—we’ve learned, in this section, that he considers an incestuous liaison with his sister when they were kids the expression of the great love of his life. Escaping the airship he winds up inside a kurgan with some physically dissimular brothers: a potbellied dwarf and a tall thin man. Aue’s sister is being brought to be married to them. When Aue objects, the dwarf insists he play nardi. ‘“If I win, I kill you, if I lose, I kill you.”’ ‘Fine,’ says Aue. ‘That’s no problem, let’s play.’ [426]. The chapter ends as the sister approaches, parading naked towards the kurgan on foot, Aue fretting about her public nudity.
As with earlier forays into borderline magical-realism (although I suppose this one can be contained by bracketing it under an it’s-all-a-dream rubric), I really wasn’t sure about this last section. It lacked the discipline, in writerly terms, of the historically anchored stuff. It plays a little too ponderously with key themes and tropes: underwater monstrosity; Jules Vernean machines; insects; defecation; dwarfs; sites of death. It’s not that its ineffective; it’s just that it reads a little by-the-numbers.
I suppose giving a chapter set in the seige of Stalingrad the sprinting, onward-moving title ‘Courante’ counts as ironic. And in that sense this sudden fantastical opening up of vistas, this swimming, running and flying onwards at the end, struck me as a false step; a kind of underselling of the ironic potential. In other words I’m echoing something Rich said in the comments to 2: ‘As an aesthetic effect, monotony can be very effective. But for it to work, it has to deliberately refuse to satisfy the reader with some kind of drama, some kind of catharsis. That’s what the Lovecraftian-dream and magical-realism sequences seem to be, at third hand, to be; signs that the author isn’t really committed.’ That, I think, puts its finger on what is wrong with the conclusion of this section.
Comments
I’m avoiding reading these posts until I’ve read the novel—unless one of them is titled “DON’T SEK IT’S A COMPLETE WASTE OF TIME!” or somesuch—but I do want to note how jealous I am of the remarkable, Miriam-esque pace at which you read. Boggles the mind, it does.
Victorian triple deckers: the weights-gym of the reading mind.
I’m enjoying the way in which I appear to be proleptically making comments that you agree applies to the next part of the book in each of your following posts—why read the book if I can put in that kind of performance? But of course a lot of this apparent predictive ability is because books on the holocaust are generally quite overdetermined.
I’ll try to continue my run, based on my reading of this Mendelsohn review. Mendelsohn traces the vaguely pornographic part of the book to a “literature of transgression” that vaguely runs from de Sade through Bataille, Sartre, Blanchot. And, to expand on my previous comments, that line has required, in the 20th century, a good dose of othering, hasn’t it? Look at the existential classics. Camus’ The Stranger kills an Arab, not another Frenchman. When Sartre wants to send a “normal person” to hell in No Exit, bundle him in with a lesbian. (And see here for possibly related comment. Hey, people can comment on my blog!) I vaguely remember reading somewhere that there was an early genre of what we would now call BDSM porn that generally featured a Jewess who you could, of course, do anything to. I think that’s really what it sounds like the second part of the novel is starting to use.
an early genre of what we would now call BDSM porn that generally featured a Jewess who you could, of course, do anything to
Hm. There’s a brief passage in Gravity’s Rainbow that suggests Pynchon may’ve been familiar with that, tho I don’t have my copy handy. Of course BDSM permeates that novel, so a particular reference to a Jewess may not mean anything especially.
(That Mendelsohn review *was* good, btw. Someone needs to write a novel based on Blanchot.)