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Tuesday, March 24, 2009
Littell’s Kindly Ones: 6 & 7
The end at last. And here I’ll say what I should have said at the head of all these posts: there are spoilers.
So The Kindly Ones concludes with two brief sections: ‘Air’ (867-913) and ‘Gigue’ (917-75). In the former, Aue takes advantage of some convalescent leave to go to the country estate of his sister and brother-in-law (he the elderly crippled composer) in the eastern bit of Germany. Sister and brother-in-law are not there, sensibly enough, what with the Russians being close and coming closer every day, but Aue settles in: drinks the wine in the cellar, wipes his arse on the curtains, wanks in, er, every room in the house and generally indulges himself in a variety of peculiar, or revolting, or baffling ways. Some of this time he engages in conversation, or physical intimacy, with phantoms (eidolons, figments of his imagination) shaped like his sister, his brother-in-law and others. On one occasion, as I had been warned, he goes outside and has passive gay sex with a tree. It’s not made clear in the narrative whether the tree itself is gay, or not.
His friend, deus-ex-machina-man Thomas comes to get him before the Russians overrun the place. Which brings us to ‘Gigue’, which is first of all a fairly exciting (after all the tiresome sensual excesses of ‘Air’) dash through Germany, avoiding Soviet tanks and gangs of feral children, back to Berlin; and then a more obvious pastiche of Hirschbiegel’s ’04 flick Downfall: life in the increasingly smashed-up city and the bitter, bitter end of the Reich. We’re even given a going-down (an untergang) into Hitler’s bunker itself. Aue is one of a dozen officers to be awarded the German Cross in Gold by the Führer in person. This is what happens next:
Then the door opened and the Führer appeared … he came forward with a hesitant, jerky, unstable step. Bormann, buttoned up tight in his brown uniform, emerged from the room behind him. I had never seen the Führer so close up. He wore a simple grey uniform and cap; his face looked yellow, haggard, puffy, his eyes remained fixed on one spot, inert, then began blinking violently; a drop of spittle stood out at the corner of his mouth. [858-60]
So far, so clichéd. I assume Littell is content to give us this central casting Hitler (his trembling arm, his ‘hairy paw’, his bad breath) because he knows he has something out of the ordinary coming up:
As the Führer approached me—I was almost at the end of the line—my attention was caught by his nose. I had never before noticed how broad and ill-proportioned this nose was … it was clearly a Slavonic or Bohemian nose, nearly Mongolo-Ostic. I don’t know why this detail fascinated me, but I found it almost scandalous. The Führer approached me and I kept observing him. Then he was in front of me. I saw with surprise that his cap scarcely reached my eyes; and yet I am not tall. He muttered his compliment and groped for the medal. His foul, fetid breath overwhelmed me: it was too much to take. So I leaned forward and bit into his bulbous nose, drawing blood. Even today I would be unable to tell you why I did this: I just couldn’t restrain myself. The Führer let out a shrill cry and leapt back into Bormann’s arms. There was an instant when no one moved. Then several men lay into me. I was stuck and thrown to the ground. [960]
Aue is hauled away, naturally enough, to be interrogated and shot. Then the narrator puts in some stuff about the historical veracity of this (‘Trevor-Roper. I know, never breathed a word about this episode, nor has Bullock, nor any of the historians who have studied the Führer’s last days. Yet it did take place, I assure you.’). Aue escapes his death in much the same manner that Harrison Ford escaped imprisonment in The Fugitive; but he only staggers as far as the policemen Weser and Clemens—who have come to punish him for his matricide. Weser is killed by the Russians. Aue flees into Berlin zoo, where Clemens catches him, but as he is about to summarily shoot him deus-ex-machina-Thomas guns him down. As this latter is going through the dead man’s pockets (‘… waving a thick wad of reichmarks: “Look at that,” he said, laughing. “A gold mine, your cop.”’, 974-5) Aue thwacks him with an iron bar, breaking his neck. He steals Thomas’s false papers, which enable him to impersonate a French worker, and that’s where the book ends.
One brief note, before I go away to digest this book and consider whether it’s any good or not. Andrew Seal’s blog-post on the novel has this interesting link to two letters Littell wrote to his translators, from which I discover that in the original French Aue does not bite, but rather pinches Hitler’s nose. Littell says he always wanted the nose bitten, but that his French publisher thought it too outlandish and substituted a pinch instead. I’m with the French publisher on this one. This penultimate oddness hits the wrong note; not for the first time in this book Littell hasn’t got the mix right between bald factual flattened-affect stuff and weird, bizarro-world surreality. In the comments to the last post (and here, before I end, is my obligatory Rich Puchalsky quotation) Rich wondered if the book isn’t ‘a partial repeat of Michael Moorcock’s Pyat books’. I said I thought not really; since those Pyat books I’ve read are tonally quite different to Littell’s text. But biting Hitler’s nose is exactly the sort of wacky thing Max Pyatnitski would get up to. More, it might itself be a deliberate allusion to the scene in The Vengeance of Rome when Colonal Pyat, compelled for complicated reasons to pretend to be Hitler’s favourite prostitute, walks over the Führer in stilettos and shits on his face.
Comments
"It’s not made clear in the narrative whether the tree itself is gay, or not.”
Classically, if the tree is the penetrative partner, it doesn’t matter, right? In antiquity, there were only acts, not orientations—and even now many people think it makes a big difference depending on what you’re doing (nsfw link). But more to the point, it could be a female tree, which would made this the appropriately wooden “pegging”. Those trees are always involving everyone in their sex life by getting their pollen all over; I’m not too surprised that this time one of them went further.
Doesn’t the deus ex machina stand in for the author? The book ending with his being killed makes that even more probable. So what is Littell telling us with this ending? That a book in which he writes an impersonation is a gold mine? The “false papers” bit seems like evidence of a guilty conscience.
The Pyat books do not have the flattened affect, but for the other half—the combination of obsessive, twisted sex and impotent crank-SF imagination—it sounds like there may be some similarities. You wrote before that the Pyats books are not your favorite Moorcock, and I don’t see how they could be anyone’s; I couldn’t read past the first one either. But that seems to me like a sign of his artistic integrity. He carefully, painstakingly constructed the most unsympathetic narrator ever, and refused to give him any redeeming qualities or standard “character growth”. Isn’t that a kind of triumph in itself? It seems better to me than the narrative of freedom-through-transgression, which as Mendelsohn pointed out leaves the narrator bored and sated at the end, and folds the whole thing into a familiar sexual structure.
Adam,
After a great deal of frustrated thinking, the only way I can read the nose-biting scene is that it’s Littell’s way of showing the absurdity of the habit of explaining Nazi anti-Semitism away with crude psychological categories like “madness” or “delirium.” Effectively, Littell’s saying, “this never happens, and here’s how stupid it looks.”
This may sound like a weird explanation for anyone who hasn’t read the novel, but the moments immediately preceding the nose-biting, Aue becomes fixated with Hitler’s nose, obsessed with its shape, which he describes as basically the uber-stereotypical Jewish schnozz. He also recalls his weird vision the other time he saw Hitler, where he seemed to see a talith (a prayer shawl) around Hitler’s shoulders and head. This disturbs Aue extremely, as does an observation that people generally use the slurs they are most afraid they resemble, and even suggests that this might apply to Hitler’s anti-Semitism.
There are numerous instances when Aue makes explicit disavowals of the idea that the Holocaust happened because Germany was possessed by some sort of anti-Semitic delirium; I feel like in this scene, Littell is offering the reader an example of what this delirium actually looks like, only to explode its credibility--it explains nothing, he says.
This fits into a larger argument I’m trying to formulate about the novel’s surreal elements, but I’m going to save that for a whole ‘nother post.
Oh, right, you quoted the whole thing about the nose--sorry to be redundant--got a head of steam going and forgot that it was right above.
No but you’re right to mention the scene where Aue is at a public event and hallucinates Hitler wearing the talith ... important, that, and something I should have (but didn’t) mention.
I like your explanation; which is cannier than what’s actually (I mean exlpicitly) offered in the novel—what’s actually offered in the novel is Una’s speech: ‘By killing the Jews we wanted to kill ourselves, kill the Jew within us, kill that which in us resembles the idea we have of the Jew ... kill the petty reassuring morality of the bourgeoisie, kill thriftiness, kill obedience, killthe servitude of the Knecht, kill all those fine German virtues.’ [874] I suspect there’s an at root fairly straightforward theoretical interrogation of Self/Other in all this.
Re: Rich Puchalsky’s comments. I think Rich is sorta there (not catching, but at least he slowed down that greased pig). After finishing the book, figuring it out, then looking back at this scene, I think Littell was trying to show how each and every one of us, now, after the fact, after the winner has been announced, all of us know, we just know, what we woulda done had we been face to face with Hitler: we woulda hurt him. Someway. Somehow. “I’m not like you sheep, you tv watchers: I would have smacked that man,” we all say. Alternate translations of the title: the watchers, the good-surveillers. Amid all this tumult, this world being such a mess, I have time for my fine wine, my gourmet food, awesome music, my lit; but then the war gets closer and closer to Aue, as evidenced by his menu shrinking, then the wine goes, some kids take away his driver; near the end all that’s left of his pampered life is he still gets to read his great novel, sure it fell into the river, but only a few pages got wet… There’s all this awfulness going on, but we still have time to read… cuz we are all the little Eichmans in the Twin Towers, just following orders. Spoiler alert! The Kindly Ones is the best thing I’ve read since The Restraint of Beasts by Magnus Mills.
Oops. That should read “re Andrew Seal’s comments.”
Aside from many other allusions I found Thomas character strikingly similar to Robinson in Celine’s “Journey to the End of the Night”. But unlike Thomas, who constantly saves and guides Max, Robinson drags Bardamu, the protagonist, into trouble, appearing again and again, like a desperate reminder of cruel determination. Plus, both characters die right at the end of narration.
So, that could be an inversed parody on Celine’s character, continuing twin symbolism.
I also found parallels with “Gravity’s Rainbow” - namely, bouts of diarrhea which engulf Slothrop in doomed Berlin, and the apocalyptic disarray in the last days of WWII.