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Tuesday, March 17, 2009
Littell’s Kindly Ones: 2
On with Jonathan Littell’s Les Bienveillantes. The first section (‘Toccata’) was only twenty pages; the second (‘Allemandes I and II’) takes us all the way up to page 337. The ‘I’ part of that title is I take it Aue’s experiences in newly conquered Ukraine, where SS units are going about pacifying the territory and murdering a large number of undesirables: mostly Jews, of course, but also inmates in mental asylums, tubercular kids, partisans and the like. This is all described in meticulous, repellent detail, and makes for thoroughly distressing reading: a function both of the methodically neutral tone and the horrible details. Aue himself finds all this murder thoroughly unpleasant, but he doesn’t question (and in fact he repeatedly asserts in conversation) the racist beliefs underpinning the actions. He perseveres in what he considers an onerous but necessary duty. Nevertheless, particularly once the mass-murder moves from adults male Jews to all Jews he suffers increasingly from psychosomatic nausea and vomiting and comes close to nervous collapse.
He is sent to the Crimea for rest and recuperation; and this leads us into what I take to the ‘II’ of the title: his reassignment into newly captured Georgia, and further SS work. Here, in a similar methodical, piling-up-the-details mode, we get extensive sections of (effectively) travelogue, and personal philosophy. Fewer Jews are killed in this portion of the narrative, although a lengthy chunk of it is given over to a debate between the SS and the Wehrmacht as to whether a population of Jews living in the mountains—known as the Bergjuden—are really Jews or not. By ‘really’, of course, these Nazis mean ‘racially’. One of the book’s more attractive characters is introduced: an academic linguist who specialises in the languages of the region, and given a lengthy speech rejecting the whole concept of race as unscientific [300-03] but apart from that it is all ghastly Nazi pseudo-science and an enormous amount of spurious research (experts are flown into the region) to determine whether the Bergjuden are ‘actually’ Jews, or whether they have been assimilated so thoroughly into the region’s racial makeup, their Jewish blood sufficiently diluted, that they are no longer a threat (‘The Bergjuden are of Caucasian, Iranian and Afghan descent and are not Jews, even if they have adopted the Mosaic religion’, 296) . Practically the SS want to liquidate the Bergjuden (I was going to add: ‘because…’—but really there’s no ‘because’ about it); whereas the Wehrmacht want to keep them alive, to avoid souring the generally pro-German vibe of the region. After long sections of genuinely upsetting detail about mass murder in the Ukraine, this whole ‘are the Bergjuden really Jews?’ section—it’s pretty much 50 pages long—comes over (deliberately, I suppose) as insanely pettifogging and bureaucratic.
Meanwhile we discover more about Aue’s past; his homosexuality (or bisexuality, heavily slanted on the homosexual side) and some details about his broken upbringing. And we get a sense of the prosecution of the war in the East. At the start of section 2 the Germans are rolling fluidly into Soviet Russia. Towards the end of the section the winter has kicked in, and things have started to go bad for the Germans: Soviet counterattack locks the German Sixth Army in Stalingrad (‘The decision not to evacuate the Sixth Army was made by the Führer himself ... The surrounded divisions now formed a giant Kessel, a cauldron as they said, cut off from our lines’, 307). This, we know, is not going to end well.
In the end the Bergjuden are not killed, but Aue—who has made enemies on account of his poorly-concealed homosexuality, and by not prosecuting the SS’s case for the liquidation of the Bergjuden vigorously enough—is sent off by his commanding officer on a plane to Stalingrad.
OK: having finished this section the big question (but, you know, of course) is what to make of the lengthy, detailed descriptions of the murder of many Jews and other people. This, I’d say, is the riskiest part of the narrative, in broader ethical terms; and Littell’s deliberate flattening, almost droning account is presumably intended to address that danger. I suppose the whole thing is recounted with a very deliberate meticulousness and thoroughness precisely to mimic the meticulous thoroughness with which the Nazis perpetrated the greatest of their several crimes against humanity. I can’t really fault the formal fit. Still.
Some of it comes close to Holocaust-cliché (if it’s not too outrageous linking those two words with a hyphen): the 10-year old Jewish boy who’s a brilliant pianist and is adopted by the squad as a sort of mascot (Aue orders sheet music for him) whose death entails sentimental sorrow on Aue’s part (the sheet music arrives too late, hand-delivered by Eichmann, in what seemed to me another central-casting walk-on part: shiny briefcase, little-glasses, petty-bureaucrat mode). Meanwhile the book chronicles the SS’s learning curve: get the victims to dig their own trench then shoot them all in the head—but no, that gets the shooters spattered with blood and brains. So: shoot them in the body—but no, then they don’t necessarily die, and you have to go down into the trench to finish them off. The trenches fill up to quickly, so you try ‘Sardinenpackung’ (horrible word) the victims into the trench and then shooting them. But, look, individual shooting is too inefficient. So you rig up vans as portable gas ovens (adapted Saurer military trucks), but that doesn’t work too well because … and so on. The emphasis throughout is on the holocaust as a series of practical problems to be overcome, rather than as an ethical or even ideological intervention, and the length and specificity is unavoidably deadening. This doesn’t stop the descriptions, particularly the telling details, being genuinely upsetting. But I took Littell’s aesthetic innovation to be not only the flatness of his affective tone, but more significantly the length of it all. Rich, in a comment to the previous post, raises the valid objection to a book like this: ‘the rehearsal of banalities about the banality of evil.’ But—to distance myself from what I said a moment ago about holocaust-cliché—I don’t think Littell does expatiate upon the banality of evil. Rather the impression of this section of his novel is on the monotony of evil.
A friend and colleague of mine (who has already read the novel) is an expert on the Holocaust (he is the author of this book) and from him I learn that a lot of Littell’s material here is recycled, sometimes minimally adapted, from the extensive literature on the topic; and much of this section does read as a slightly ostentatious display of detailed research. But the thing that surprised me is how compelling a read it is, maugre all that.
Two more things: one is that (my ears pricked up sharper than other peoples’ would, I daresay) I noticed allusions to SF. Himmler addresses the SS with visions of the future: each soldier will ‘manage a great rich property’ on captured Russian and Ukrainian land: ‘the labour in the fields would be provided by Slav helots, and the Germans would limit themselves to administering … all these cities would be linked to the Reich by a network of highways and double-decker express trains … [the whole of the Crimea] would become a vacation and leisure territory, directly connected to Germany, via Brest-Litovsk, by an express.’ Aue notes: ‘to me the vision outlined evoked the fantastic utopias of a Jules Verne or an Edgar Rice Burroughs’ [133]. And later on, Aue has a feverish dream in which he is a Lovecraftian squid-monster (‘I was a great Squid God, and I was ruling over a beautiful walled city of water and white stone … I began to thrash violently, churning up the water of the centre with my tentacles’ 151). I’m curious whether Littell does anything more with this Nazism-as-SF trope in the rest of the book.
I could add, I’m not convinced by the dream sequences, generally speaking.
The other thing is a strange interlude in which an elderly though very hale Georgian Jew (and by elderly I mean, somewhere between 120 and 140 years of age) comes specifically to Aue, telling him that he has seen where he (the Jew) is to be buried, and Aue must take him there. This fellow, borm without a philtrum, claims to have had commerce with angels and to be able to see the future. He leads Aue and his orderly high into the mountains, persuades the two Germans to dig a grave, and then stands there whilst Aue shoots him. I wasn’t at all sure about this: the magical-realist aspect of it threw me, and it sorted ill (I felt) with the tone of the rest. Maybe I’m missing something.
Comments
It’s difficult to comment on this, like swinging away at a pinata that you don’t really know the contents of. I mean, I haven’t read the book. But reading a very long book just because I suspect that I would highly dislike it seems like an overreaction.
Here’s the problem with “the monotony of evil” in general. I’ve blogged recently about that, too, as it turns out. 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. Because this is something that needs a certain level of committment in order to take the responsibility of fictionalizing in the first place. It’s a compelling read as nonfiction, presumably. Making it into fiction means that the author is taking responsibility for doing something with it.
Here’s my favored statement on this kind of writing, from Facing the Abusing God: A Theology of Protest by David Blumenthal. Blumenthal refers to Susan Shapiro, Lawrence Langer, Wiesel and Greenberg, and then writes (pg. 9):
“Caesura, brokenness, fragmentation are all we have to express the disjuncture of normal discourse with the reality of the holocaust. Dissociation, rupture, a sudden veering away are all we have to preserve the holocaust in the midst of normal speech. Thought itself must be broken, shattered, fragmented—like a nightmare; for writing theology after the holocaust is living in a nightmare with its sudden turns, its flashbacks.”
I can’t tell, from your description, whether this is the kind of nightmare that occurs in the book, but I suspect not. But anyways, the whole ostentatious psychosomatic-reaction bit from the narrator feels like an insult.
Nazism-as-SF, as you know (Adam), but as others may not, has been done fairly definitively in The Iron Dream.
The greatest election ever: 1936, Minnesota’s Eighth Congressional District (which later on was Bob Dylan’s district). The moderate Democratic candidate was a Communist, and he defeated both the extremist Democrat and the incumbent Republican to become the district’s representative in Congress.
I wrote the above after finishing part 2; I’ve now read part 3 (I’ll try and blog that tomorrow) and it looks like Littell isn’t going to pick up the Nazism-Sf football and run with it after all.*
The Blumenthal quotation is interesting.
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*Which is good, because picking up the football would be handball and against the rules of the game.
I’m curious what your Holocaust-expert friend thought of the book, aside from the research-dumping.
(The Blumenthal quote *is* interesting, but I wonder what a Gulag survivor, or for that matter an escapee from one of the cities slaughtered by Genghis Khan, would say about their experience and its preservation in normal speech.)
Anderson: he was, initially, enthusiastic enough to convince me to read it too. Latterly, though, he says he’s now blowing colder on it.
(He also told me: ‘wait til you get to the bit where he has sex with a tree!’ I haven’t got to that bit yet.)