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Myth, Morals, and Metafiction in Jonathan Littell's Les Bienveillantes

2012; Cambridge University Press; Volume: 127; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1632/pmla.2012.127.1.77

1938-1530

Jonas Grethlein,

Narrative Theory and Analysis

Jonathan Littell's Les Bienveillantes , the fictional autobiography of an incestuous SS officer, is one of the most controversial novels published in the last decade: it received two prestigious French literary awards but was denounced as kitschy, pornographic, and revisionist. This essay explores the intertext of the Oresteia , which makes the book more complex than most critics have acknowledged. The references to Aeschylus permit the narrator to style himself a tragic hero and thereby to trivialize the Nazi crimes. At the same time, the mythical emplotment, together with other intertexts, indicates that Aue's account is a concoction. Far from simply propagating a revisionist ideology, Les Bienveillantes combines much factual information with a high degree of reflexivity, provoking readers to ponder the Shoah and how to do justice to it.