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Thursday, March 19, 2009
Littell’s Kindly Ones: 4
Kindly Ones part 4 ‘Sarabande’ (pages 431-534) has the feel of marking time; a pause in the narration during which, at least until the end, little happens. Our man’s skull was wholly bisected by a Russian bullet, a wound which, perhaps surprisingly, failed to kill him. Evacuated from Stalingrad, he wakes in a German hospital and pieces his consciousness together. Himmler visits to award him the Iron Cross. He moves, when he’s well enough, to a hotel in Berlin to convalesce. There’s a lot of wandering around the city. Otherwise, Littell uses this section to elaborate upon his Ulysses-style mythical underpinning: in this case an Orestes schema, as the Aeschylean title tells us, complete with sister-incest and matricide.
A number of things struck me, and a couple of those struck me as good. One is Aue’s reaction to a party at 2am: ‘Even in my hotel, first class though it was, quiet eluded me: the floor beneath mine was having a noisy party, and the music, shouts, and laughter rose up through the floorboards and seized me by the throat’ [446]. He feels a murderous rage at being disturbed, but instead rings his friend Thomas (‘I explained my homicidal urges to him’) who advises he go downstairs and talk to them.
I easily found the right door and knocked. A tall, beautiful woman in somewhat casual evening dress opened the door, her eyes shining. “Yes?” Behind her the music roared, I could hear glasses clinking, mad laughter. “Is this your room?” I asked, my heart beating. “No. Wait.” She turned around: “Dicky! Dicky! An officer is asking for you.” A man in a vest, slightly drunk, came to the door; the woman watched us without hiding her curiosity . “Yes, Herr Sturmbannführer?” he asked. “What can I do for you?” His affected, cordial, almost slurred voice conveyed an aristocrat of old stock. I bowed slightly and said in the most neutral tone possible: “I live in the room over yours. I’ve just come back from Stalingrad, where I was seriously wounded and where almost all my comrades died. Your festivities are disturbing me. I wanted to come down and kill you, but I called a friend, who advised me to come and talk with you first. So I’ve come to talk with you. It would be better for us all if I don’t have to come down again.” The man had turned pale: “No, no …” He turned around: “Gofi! Stop the music! Stop!…” As I was climbing back up, vaguely satisfied, I heard him shout: “Every one out! It’s over. Out!” I had touched a nerve, and it wasn’t a question of fear: he too, suddenly, had understood, and he was ashamed. [447]
I liked this, I think because—and it’s a vanishingly rare thing in this book—it’s quite funny. Who hasn’t wanted to break up a noisy part with ‘I wanted to come down and kill you’?
Otherwise Aue mooches about for a bit, and then meets up with his sister. This leads to detailed reminiscences of their childhood incest together, which she (she is now married to a crippled, famous musician) has grown beyond, although he hasn’t. She asks him whether he killed civilians in Russia. ‘Once I had to give the coup de grâce,’ he replies. ‘Most of the time I gathered information, wrote reports.’ This isn’t true, or at least isn’t quite consistent with his earlier narration (to be fair, Littell puts in several unreliable narrator markers—or more precisely ‘memory’s-a-tricksy-thing’ markers), but never mind that. I’m more interested in how this sister-brother exchange goes on:
“And when you shot at people, what did you feel?” I answered without hesitating: “The same thing as when I watched other people shoot. As long as it has to be done, it doesn’t matter who does it. And also, I consider that watching involves my responsibility as much as doing.” [482]
This goes back to something I wondered about in my first post: the (sur)veillant aspect of Les Bienveillantes. This is a book about being a spectator to horrors—one that makes us into spectators of horrors—that is nevertheless based upon the position that performing evil and watching others perform evil is ethically equivalent. I’m really not sure about that.
Once he’s recovered from his wound Aue wants a posting in France, and gets his friend Thomas to help him out, but a senior Nazi called Dr Mandlebrot has already earmarked Aue to help with the ‘final solution’ so this comes to nothing. After initial resistance Aue agrees. Before he does, though, we get to one of the book’s ‘look how oo-shocking-oo I can be!’ moments. After not having seen them for many years, Aue travels to Italy to visit his mother and stepfather. The vitriol of his hatred for them both, his mother especially, is laid on pretty thick. Both are killed: the mother Althusserianly strangled (Littell’s Aue makes no reference to Althusser, of course), the stepfather chopped up with an axe. Although Aue has no memory of this murder the inference is pretty unavoidable that he committed the crime. He leaves the murder scene, returns to Germany and joins Himmler’s personal staff.
So, yes, shock tactics. To continue the tradition of quoting Proleptic ‘And I Haven’t Even Read The Book!’ Rich’s comments, on this occasion quoting this very good New York Review of Books review by Daniel Mendlesohn: ‘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?’ Yes, the othering is, I guess, inevitably tied to the whole theme of a book about and embodying Nazism. But I’m just as interested in the dilution of shock implicit in that ‘literature of transgression’ canon. Shock is a relative, not absolute, quantity; and it is more susceptible to diminishing returns than other aesthetic effects. De Sade is more shocking than Bataille; Bataille is more shocking that Saw IV. And so on.
As a consequence, Littell’s account of incest and matricide here is really not all that shocking really. So, for instance, on p.491 Aue remembers visiting ‘a kind of Torture Museum’ in Nuremberg with his sister and bribing the museum guard to leave them alone in the guillotine room. He puts his sister into the device, ties her hands (‘she was panting’), and has anal sex with her, threatening the while to release the mechanism and decapitate them both. ‘I came suddenly,’ he notes, adding one of the worst orgasm-similes I have ever read: ‘a jolt that emptied my head like a spoon scraping the inside of a soft-boiled egg.’ But in this (and in a couple of similar things in this section) Littell is simply trying too hard to be outrageous. I mean: taking your own sister up the Gary whilst her head’s stuck through the business end of a working guillotine? I ask you. (Littell adds a moment of backpedalling, where Aue immediately doubts this memory: ‘but this memory is dubious, after our childhood we had seen each other only once, that time in Zurich, and in Zurich there was no guillotine, I don’t know, it was probably a dream’).
Maybe it’s a function of reading this large novel relatively quickly, but I’m starting to feel tired of it. I can believe this is a deliberate consequence of the thing’s designedly monotony-of-evil focus; its studied excessiveness—excessive detail, excessive length, exceeding conventional fictive morality—but it’s hard to take comfort from that as I trudge into the lengthy fifth portion.
One more thing: I’m not ‘getting’ Thomas at all. He seems to exist not as a character in his own right, but as a narrative get-out-of-jail-free card: his influence puts Aue in all the dramatically interesting postings, saves him when he need saving, moves the plot on when it needs moving.
Comments
"she is now married to a crippled, famous musician”
Just like “ 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”, right? She has grown up and become an adult, independent of him, and tied herself to the very forces of civilization that he is destroying. Oh the sentimental boo-hoo.
And the shock-sex scene suggests Mad Libs. “(Name of person) did his (name of a relative) in the (name of a part of the body) while they were strapped to a (noun). But it may only have been a (name of an unreliable-narrator convention).” Fun!
“This is a book about being a spectator to horrors—one that makes us into spectators of horrors—that is nevertheless based upon the position that performing evil and watching others perform evil is ethically equivalent.”
Well, this part seems overdetermined again. The conceit of the book is that you, the intellectual reader (no one else will read it, or so you think) will understand how someone like you could have done the actions of a Nazi. But you haven’t done anything, most of the time. So the mere act of reading this big book makes you, in some sense, a Nazi, or at least the temporary-frisson little bit of one. That’s the authorial effect that seems required.
Back to othering again. This may be a little early to be a guess at the next part, but soon this guy is going to be pursued by Furies for murdering his mother. But really, why should anyone care? He’s a Nazi killer who has personally shot in the head perhaps hundreds of people and will soon be organizing the murder of what, tens of thousands? Hundreds of thousands, possibly? It depends on how high he rises in the hierarchy, I suppose. What’s two more? The whole presumption that these are important deaths, sufficient to justify his pursuit, is justified by reference to Greek myth. But really, how insulting. Isn’t it really that these are important deaths because they are non-Jewish, non-authorized? His system is based on such lying categories. But why should the reader’s be? By offering a high-culture framework to try to convince the reader that they should share the priority of interest shown in the novel, the author is really trying to make his readers complicit in a way that’s not as immediately apparent.
“(Name of person) did his (name of a relative) in the (name of a part of the body) while they were strapped to a (noun).”
Well, to be fair, that’s how Sade reads in large part.
Thanks for these posts, Adam. I’m waiting for my copy of the book to arrive and planning to respond to your posts when I’ve actually got an independent response of my own. (Just so you know you have interested readers who aren’t commenting at the moment.)
Thanks John. You remind me that I ought, I suppose, to have put a warning about ‘OMG SPOILERS!!!’ across the headings of all these posts.
Anderson: I could believe that Littell is aiming to position what he’s doing here in a Sadean tradition; although Kindly Ones pretty much wholly lacks the rigorous, systematic approach to nastiness of, say, 120 Days of Sodom.