Orbis Litterarum 0:0 1–34, 2015

© 2015 John Wiley & Sons A/S.

Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd

Fiction, History and the Possible

Jonathan Littell’s Les Bienveillantes
Hanna Meretoja, University of Turku

The article explores the problematic assumptions underlying the

traditional view that literature deals with the realm of the
possible and history with the realm of the actual. This
dichotomy risks dismissing how a sense of the possible
constitutes an important dimension of every actual world, how
literary fiction provides interpretations of actual worlds, and
how it has its own literary means of giving us a sense of a past
world as a space of possibilities. This argument is developed by
analysing Jonathan Littell’s Les Bienveillantes (2006, The Kindly
Ones), which has created a heated controversy on the
contribution of literature to the understanding of the Holocaust.
The article contributes to developing narrative hermeneutics as
an approach which, first, suggests that both historiography and
fiction are ways of interpreting the world past and present, and,
second, is sensitive to how fiction requires specific modes of
interpretation and engagement. The analysis of Littell’s novel
shows that the interplay between immersiveness and critical
distance can produce a narrative dynamic that allows the reader
to engage emotionally with an ethically problematic lifeworld
without uncritically adopting the protagonist’s perspective. One
important way in which fiction can produce insights into history
is its ability to cultivate, through its specifically fictional means,
a sense of history as a sense of the possible while at the same
time reflecting on the conditions and limits of narrating,
representing and understanding history.
Keywords: Jonathan Littell, fiction, history, hermeneutics, Holocaust, perpetrator
fiction.

Over the past couple of decades, narrative fiction all over the world has
engaged with history with unprecedented intensity. It seems evident that
people read fiction in part out of a desire to learn about past worlds,
and that literature takes part in negotiating cultural memory. Yet there
is no consensus among literary theorists on whether fiction can
2 Hanna Meretoja

contribute to our understanding of history, or – if it can – how to

conceptualize this potential contribution. Ever since Aristotle famously
argued that while history merely records what has happened, literature
deals with what could happen, scholars have repeatedly drawn on the
dichotomy between the actual and the possible when conceptualizing the
relation between fiction and history. Nevertheless, it is far from evident
that this conceptual dichotomy is the best starting point for making
sense of the way in which fiction can provide insights into history.
In this article, I problematize the standard way of drawing a
dichotomy between literature as the realm of the possible and history as
the realm of the actual. I argue that the use of this dichotomy is
commonly linked to problematic ontological assumptions about the
nature of history and reality. It risks dismissing how a sense of the
possible is a constitutive dimension of every actual world, how literary
fiction provides interpretations of actual (past and present) worlds, and
how it has its own means of contributing to our sense of a past world as
a space of possibilities.
I shall illuminate my argument by analysing a novel that has
probably created the most heated controversy in the recent years on the
contribution of literature to the understanding of the Holocaust:
Jonathan Littell’s Les Bienveillantes (2006, The Kindly Ones). This
perpetrator novel, which consists exclusively of the first-person
narration of former SS officer Maximilien Aue, has been criticized for a
lack of realism and for an ethically questionable attempt to lure the
reader into identifying with a Nazi. At the same time, it has been
repeatedly praised as the most important novel of the twenty-first
century thus far. One of the admirers of the novel, the novelist Jorge
Sempr
un, asserts that in fifty years’ time, our memory of the Second
World War will be shaped less by historical studies than by Littell’s Les
Bienveillantes: ‘Historians will continue to write on the Second World
War. But only novelists can renew memory’ (Sempr
un 2008, 35). Like
the historian Antony Beevor (2009) and many others, Sempr
un believes
that the novel succeeds in producing the kinds of insights into history
that are possible only through fiction. The different ways in which the
novel has been read provide a fertile ground for discussing the
assumptions underlying various ways of understanding the relation
between history and fiction.
Fiction, History and the Possible 3

In a dialogue with Les Bienveillantes, this article contributes to the

development of narrative hermeneutics as an approach that provides us
with a way of advancing beyond the actual vs possible and referential vs
non-referential dichotomies.1 This approach, first, sees both
historiography and fiction as ways of interpreting the world, past and
present, and, second, is sensitive to the distinctiveness of fiction and
how it requires specific modes of engagement. I argue that one of the
central and ethically relevant ways in which fiction can produce
historical insights is through its ability to interpret the past world as a
space of possibilities in ways that cultivate our sense of the possible. In
addition to discussing how the possible is a constitutive aspect of a
historical world, I endeavour to show, through analysis of Les
Bienveillantes, how fiction can simultaneously function immersively,
inviting emotional engagement, and self-reflexively, producing critical
distance. I suggest that this interplay gives rise to a readerly dynamic
that is crucial for the potential of fiction to contribute to our
understanding of history in specifically literary ways, which also involve
reflection on the conditions and limits of narrating, representing and
understanding history.

I. The actual and the possible

Many scholars who have theorized the specificity of fiction have
distinguished fiction from non–fiction on the grounds that only the latter
refers to the actual world and is therefore referential. Most theorists of
fiction share Gottlob Frege’s (1892, 2008) view that fiction lacks truth
value and is hence not, as Dorrit Cohn puts it, ‘subject to judgments of
truth and falsity’ (Cohn 1999, 15). The language of fiction is
performative: it creates the world it refers to precisely by referring to it
(p. 13; Dolezel 2010, 41–42). From this starting point, Lubom
ır Dolezel
develops his theory of possible worlds. He claims that historical research
constructs possible worlds that function as models of actual worlds,
whereas fiction constructs possible worlds that contain fictional elements
and therefore cannot function as models of any actual (past or present)
world: ‘A possible world in which counterparts of historical persons
cohabit, interact, and communicate with fictional persons is not a
historical world.’ (p. 36).
4 Hanna Meretoja

Theorists of fiction often distinguish fiction from other types of

discourse by characterizing it as ‘nonreferential’, by which they stress
that fiction does not – or does not have to – refer to the actual world.
For example, Cohn defines fiction as ‘nonreferential narrative’, and
argues that a fictional world, such as the world of Kafka’s The Castle,
‘remains to its end severed from the actual world’ (Cohn 1999, 9, 13).
Similarly, in their recent essay ‘Ten theses about fictionality’, Henrik
Skov Nielsen, James Phelan and Richard Walsh suggest that fictional
discourse invites us to assume ‘that it is not making referential claims’
(Nielsen, Phelan & Walsh 2015, 68). However, they importantly draw
attention to the need to acknowledge ‘the double quality of some uses of
fictionality, that it is not meant to be understood as true and yet is
meant to shape our beliefs about the actual world’ (p. 68). They thereby
acknowledge that even though fiction belongs to the realm of the
possible, it can still affect our conceptions of what is ‘actual, factual and
real’ (p. 71). They do not further explicate, however, how exactly we
should understand the relation between these two realms. Moreover, it is
worth asking whether such shaping of ‘our beliefs about the actual
world’ is really a characteristic of only some rhetorical uses of
fictionality. Is it not, rather, one of the key features of why we read
fiction?
The way in which the relation between the actual and the possible is
conceptualized depends on one’s assumptions concerning the basic
nature of reality and history. These assumptions, however, generally
remain highly implicit. This is largely because they are frequently
considered to be self-evident, even when in reality they are far from it. A
theory of fictionality necessarily implies a theory of factuality. A theory
of factuality that relies on the conceptual opposition between the actual
and the possible is usually based on the ontological assumption that
only what can be empirically observed – actions, events and facts that
can be verified with observations or documents – is actual and real.2 But
what if reality, past and present, does not consist merely of observable
actions, events and facts? Does reality not also consist in such invisible
phenomena as modes of experience and feeling, ways of giving meaning
and orienting oneself to the past, present and future? Engaging with
these aspects of reality – past and present – arguably involves our
imagination.
Fiction, History and the Possible 5

On the basis of the tradition of thought developed, for example, in

philosophical hermeneutics we can conceptualize the past world as a
space of possibilities in which it was possible to think, experience, feel,
do and imagine certain things, and difficult or impossible to think,
experience, feel, do and imagine other things. As Heidegger (2003, 75)
puts it, every age has an underlying metaphysic with certain
presuppositions about what is real and possible – or, in Foucault’s
(1966, 13) terminology, a historical a priori that underlies that age and
defines its limits of intelligibility. Koselleck, Gadamer’s student, uses the
metahistorical concepts of ‘space of experience’ (Erfahrungsraum) and
‘the horizon of expectation’ (Erwartungshorizont) to analyse how
historical worlds are constituted by frameworks of meaning shaped by
different ways of experiencing time, or ‘the inner relation between past
and future or yesterday, today, and tomorrow’: while the ‘space of
experience’ refers to the manner in which the past and its reception – the
past as remembered, reworked and unconsciously present – constitutes a
space of possibilities within which it is possible to experience certain
things, the horizon of expectation refers to the diverse ways in which we
orient ourselves to the ‘not-yet’ (Koselleck 2004, 258). On the basis of
this way of thinking, current cultural history has challenged the
‘historical realism’ according to which history is composed of observable
actions. It emphasizes that the past world is also constituted by
thoughts, feelings and representations – by what is invisible and
perishable – and it suggests that it is crucial for the study of the past
world to map past possibilities (Salmi 2011, 173–174). In this task, the
historian needs not only documentation of what we can know for
certain about that world, but also the capacity to imagine (Corbin 2002,
9; Salmi 2011, 176–177).
Such a conception of reality is in line with the hermeneutic view that
our being in the world is mediated by culturally and historically
constituted sense-making practices that define a historical world. In this
view, ‘understanding means understanding oneself in the world’, which
entails grasping one’s possibilities of acting and experiencing in a
particular historical world (Gadamer 1993, 345): ‘It is true in every case
that a person who understands, understands himself (sich versteht),
projecting himself upon his possibilities’ (Gadamer 1997, 260). As
Heidegger emphasizes, we understand our possibilities, and, on the basis
28 Hanna Meretoja

narrative that masks its own narrative, interpretative and perspectival

nature and pretends to provide a totalizing explanation.11 Overall, the
ethical evaluation of Les Bienveillantes should acknowledge, first, how
the novel does not ask the reader to accept the protagonist’s perspective
but rather encourages him/her to engage with it in a simultaneously
emotional and critical way, and, second, that the novel does not pretend
to provide an exhaustive narrative explanation or representation of the
Holocaust. As I have argued, the novel reflects both on what made the
Holocaust possible and on the possibility and limits of understanding,
representing and narrating the Holocaust. In my view, taking the nature
of the novel seriously as a literary phenomenon means that one is
attentive to how the work has very specific – aesthetic – means of
developing its own interpretation of history, including reflection on the
limits and possibilities of interpreting that particular historical world as
a space of possibilities.

VI. Conclusion
In this article, I have delineated a hermeneutic approach in which fiction
is seen to interpret the world in ways that problematize the dichotomies
between the actual and the possible and the referential and the non-
referential. The analysis of Les Bienveillantes suggests that one
important way in which a work of fiction can produce insights into
history is its ability to cultivate, through its own literary means, a sense
of history as a sense of the possible, namely our sense of what is
possible in a certain world to think, experience, feel and imagine, and
what is impossible or difficult in that world. These insights can be
truthful – and they are, in my view, when it comes to the way in which
Les Bienveillantes depicts the historical world of Nazi Germany as a
space of possibilities – even if it makes no sense to speak of truth value
in the case of its individual sentences.
The way in which narrative hermeneutics understands the relation
between fiction and history also has ethical implications. This approach
does not divorce the aesthetic from the spheres of ethics and
understanding but, instead, claims that fictional narratives always have
an ethical and a cognitive dimension and relevance. As Ricœur (1990,
167) puts it, no narrative can be ethically neutral. Moral philosophers
Fiction, History and the Possible 7

world in a certain way and at the same time transforms it, being hence
both disclosive and transformative: the ‘critique of the naive concept of
“reality” applied to the pastness of the past calls for a systematic
critique of the no less naive concept of “unreality” applied to the
projections of fiction’ (Ricoeur 1988, 158). In other words, fiction is
‘undividedly revealing and transforming’ (p. 158). The Ricœurian
mimesis can be characterized as a process that is simultaneously
performative and interpretative, and therefore cannot be captured by the
conceptual dichotomy between finding and inventing: ‘Here we reach the
point where discovering and inventing are indistinguishable, the point,
therefore, where the notion of reference no longer works’ (p. 158).
In my view, the current discussion on fictionality and on the relation
between fiction and history does not adequately take into account how
the actual and the possible constantly interpenetrate one another both in
fiction and non-fiction and how actual worlds can be productively
understood as spaces of possibilities. The conceptual frame I have
suggested here enables us to observe how fiction as the art of
imagination deepens our understanding of the past world in terms of the
possible. I shall next elaborate this argument by analysing how Littell’s
Les Bienveillantes produces insights into Nazi Germany as a space of
possibilities.

II. Nazi Germany as a space of possibilities

The question of the possible pervades Les Bienveillantes on several
levels. First, the novel not only tells us what happened, but it aspires
to imagine how it is possible that what happened could actually have
happened. It imagines what the agents of the past experienced to be
possible in that historical world and what might have been possible for
them from a retrospective perspective, marked by hindsight and
temporal distance. The novel also asks what it is possible for us to
know about that world and what possibilities it might open for us in
the current world. I shall first focus on how the novel depicts Nazi
Germany as a space of possibilities, and I shall then move on to
consider the overall narrative dynamic of the novel and how the novel
deals with the possibility of understanding and narrating the
Holocaust.
8 Hanna Meretoja

Les Bienveillantes shows in a multidimensional way how the actual

and the possible constantly penetrate each other; this applies in the
fictional world of the novel to both the present and the past realities. On
the level of the narrated events, Aue, the protagonist–narrator, is present
and sees what happens, but there is no certainty of what is happening
beneath the surface, what happens inside people’s heads, or what the
invisible forces are that make people act in a certain way. Aue looks at
the Ukrainian soldiers forced by the Nazis to massacre the Jews, and he
tries to imagine who they are, where they have come from and what
they would think, in the future, of their actions at this moment:

Je songeai a ces Ukrainiens : comment en
etaient-ils arriv
es l a ? La plupart

d’entre eux s’
etaient battus contre les Polonais, puis contre les Sovi
etiques, ils
devaient avoir r^ev
e d’un avenir meilleur, pour eux et pour leurs enfants, et
voila que maintenant ils se retrouvaient dans une for^et, portant un uniforme

etranger et tuant des gens qui ne leur avaient rien fait, sans raison qu’ils
puissent comprendre. Que pouvaient-ils penser de cela ? Pourtant, lorsqu’on
leur en donnait l’ordre, ils tiraient, ils poussaient les corps dans la fosse et en
amenaient d’autres, ils ne protestaient pas. Que penseraient-ils de tout cela
plus tard ? (Littell 2006, 86)
(I thought about these Ukrainians: How had they got to this point? Most of
them had fought against the Poles, and then against the Soviets, they must
have dreamed of a better future, for themselves and for their children, and
now they found themselves in a forest, wearing a strange uniform and killing
people who had done nothing to them, without any reason they could
understand. What could they be thinking about all this? Still, when they were
given the order, they shot, they pushed the bodies into the ditch and brought
other ones, they didn’t protest. What would they think of all this later on?
[Littell 2010, 85–86])

The way in which the narrator reflects on these issues from the
perspective of an eyewitness highlights that the answer to the question
‘What is this reality, what is this world in which the Holocaust
happened?’ is by no means something that you can simply see, even
at the time of its unfolding. The question was as acute then as it is
now. Responding to the question requires that we imagine the sense
of the possible that structured the mode of experience of those
involved. Consciousness of different possibilities and alternative
courses of life and the need to search for connections between the
past, present and future regulates how things are experienced in the
first place:
Fiction, History and the Possible 9

Je pensais a ma vie, au rapport qu’il pouvait bien y avoir entre cette vie que
j’avais v
ecue – une vie tout a fait ordinaire, la vie de n’importe qui, mais aussi
par certains c^ ot
es une vie extraordinaire, inhabituelle, bien que l’inhabituel, ce
soit aussi tres ordinaire – et ce qui se passait ici. De rapport, il devait bien y
en avoir un, et c’
etait un fait, il y en avait un. (Littell 2006, 95)
(I thought about my life, about what relationship there could be between this
life that I had lived – an entirely ordinary life, a life of anyone, but also in
some respects an extraordinary, an unusual life, although the unusual is also
very ordinary – and what was happening here. There must have been a
relationship, and it was a fact, there was one. [Littell 2010, 95])

The protagonist and the other characters orient themselves to the

present and future on the basis of their horizon of expectation, which
has been shaped by their past experiences: they expect certain things to
happen and consider certain courses of events likely and others unlikely
or impossible. The unfolding of political events transforms their horizon
of expectation and puts them under pressure to modify their behaviour
in order to survive; for example, the protagonist is acutely aware of the
impossibility of expressing his homosexuality under the Nazi regime.
Through its detailed depiction of the rise of National Socialism, Les
Bienveillantes gives us a sense of how the space of possibilities in which
the characters live slowly changes. When the officers hear about the plan
to kill all the Jews, women and children included, their first reaction is
sheer disbelief – they simply cannot believe that it is possible – until
their horizon of expectation is gradually transformed:

‘Mais c’est impossible, voyons’, dit Callsen. Il semblait supplier. [. . .] Oh

Seigneur, je me disais, cela aussi maintenant il va falloir le faire, cela a
et
e dit,
et il faudra en passer par la. Je me sentais envahi par une horreur sans
bornes, mais je restais calme, rien ne se voyait, ma respiration demeurait

egale. Callsen continuait ses objections : ‘Mais, Herr Standartenf€ uhrer, la
plupart d’entre nous sont mari
es, nous avons des enfants. On ne peut pas
nous demander ßca.’ (Littell 2006, 99)
‘But look, that’s impossible,’ Callsen said. He seemed to be begging. [. . .] Oh
Lord, I was saying to myself, now that too must be done, it has been spoken,
and we’ll have to go through that too. I felt invaded by a boundless horror
but I remained calm, nothing showed through, my breathing remained even.
Callsen continued his objections: ‘But Standartenf€ uhrer, most of us are
married, we have children. They can’t ask us to do that.’ [Littell 2010, 100])

After the initial shock, they slowly grow accustomed to the atrocities
and learn to dissociate themselves from what they consider as their
10 Hanna Meretoja

unfortunate but necessary job. The novel depicts the gradual process
through which a sensitive young man who is shocked by this order
develops into a cog in the machinery of industrial mass murder, into
someone who can no longer walk in the forest without thinking of mass
graves:

Une bouff
ee d’amertume m’envahit : Voila ce qu’ils ont fait de moi, me

disais-je, un homme qui ne peut voir une for^et sans songer a une fosse
commune. (Littell 2006, 645)
(A sudden burst of bitterness invaded me: so this is what they’ve turned me
into, I said to myself, a man who can’t see a forest without thinking about a
mass grave. [Littell 2010, 702])

In many respects, the novel can be seen to give a literary form to the
ideas of Hannah Arendt (1964) and Christopher Browning (1992) on the
banality of evil: National Socialism was not enabled by radical evil, but
by banal evil that underpins the logic of modern Western society,
integral to which is the breaking down of responsibility into such small
pieces that no one feels responsible for the actions committed by the
chain of command or even capable of understanding the overall
rationale of the machineries in which they function as small, obedient
cogs. But by giving the reader a sense of what the banality of evil meant
in terms of everyday life and decision-making, and by asking the reader
to live through the temporal process in which that evil transforms the
protagonist, the novel engages the reader in a different way from
abstract academic presentations on the topic, such as historical,
sociological or philosophical studies. The way in which the novel deals
with this problematic in a narrative form, from the perspective of lived
time, is ethically relevant: the reader goes through, imagines and
experiences in an embodied way the temporal process that turns
ordinary men into brutal, cold-blooded killing machines.3 The reader’s
emotional investment intensifies as he/she follows the unfolding of the
story of what war does to human integrity. As the narrator asserts in
the beginning, in wartime man loses ‘his right to life’ but he also loses
another right,

tout aussi
el
ementaire et pour lui peut-^etre encore plus vital, en ce qui
concerne l’id
ee qu’il se fait de lui-m^eme en tant qu’homme civilis
e : le droit de
ne pas tuer. [. . .] L’homme debout au-dessus de la fosse commune, dans la
Fiction, History and the Possible 11

plupart des cas, n’a pas plus demand
e a ^etre la que celui qui est couch
e, mort
ou mourant, au fond de cette m^eme fosse. (Littell 2006, 24)
(one just as basic and perhaps even more vital for his conception of himself as
a civilized human being: the right not to kill. [. . .] In most cases the man
standing above the mass grave no more asked to be there than the one lying,
dead or dying, at the bottom of the pit. [Littell 2010, 17])

National Socialism is depicted in the novel as a power that penetrates

people’s everyday life in such a way that it leads to a sense of a lack of
alternatives. For example, a certain type of bureaucratic language
conditions people to act as if the orders are inevitable:

Cette tendance s’
etendait a tout notre langage bureaucratique, notre

b€urokratisches Amtsdeutsch, comme disait mon collegue Eichmann: dans les
correspondances, dans les discours aussi, les tournures passives dominaient, ‘il
a
et
e d
ecid
e que. . .’, ‘les Juifs ont
et
e convoy
es aux mesures sp
eciales’, ‘cette
t^ache difficile a
et
e accomplie’, et ainsi les choses se faisaient toutes seules,
personne ne faisait jamais rien, personne n’agissait, c’
etaient des actes sans
acteurs, ce qui est toujours rassurant, et d’une certaine facßon ce n’
etaient
m^eme pas des actes, [. . .] il y avait seulement des faits, des r
ealit
es brutes soit
d
eja pr
esentes, soit attendant leur accomplissement in
evitable, comme
l’Einsatz, ou l’Einbruch (la perc
ee)[.] (Littell 2006, 581)
(This tendency spread to all our bureaucratic language, our b€ urokratisches
Amtsdeutsch, as my colleague Eichmann would say: in correspondence, in
speeches too, passive constructions dominated: ‘it has been decided that. . .,’
‘the Jews have been conveyed to the special treatment,’ ‘the difficult task has
been carried out,’ and so things were done all by themselves, no one ever did
anything, no one acted, they were actions without actors, which is always
reassuring, and in a way they weren’t even actions, [. . .] there were only facts,
brute realities, either already present or waiting for their inevitable
accomplishment, like the Einsatz, or the Einbruch (the breakthrough)[.] [Littell
2010, 631])

The narrator reflects critically on the tendency of the Nazis to reify the
social reality they have constructed, but at the same time he himself is
deeply complicit with the Nazi regime. The first-person narration,
however, functions against reification insofar as it draws attention to
how history consists of situations experienced in different ways by
individual subjects and of their concrete actions and omissions – and
these appear in the novel as never simple voluntary choices but as
actions and omissions conditioned by a historical world as a space of
possibilities. The novel links the discourse that presents this world as
inevitable to the logic of modern society governed by instrumental
12 Hanna Meretoja

rationality, and suggests that the concentration camp, ‘avec toute la

rigidit
e de son organisation, sa violence absurde, sa hi
erarchie
m
eticuleuse’ is ‘une reductio ad absurdum de la vie de tous les jours’
(Littell 2006, 572; ‘with all the rigidity of its organization, its absurd
violence, its meticulous hierarchy, [. . .] a reductio ad absurdum of
everyday life’, Littell 2010, 622).
However, it is important that the novel does not merely illustrate
Arendtian theories of the Holocaust (which are central intertexts of the
novel) but contributes in its own right, through its own literary means,
to the understanding of the banality of evil. I agree with Nielsen, Phelan
and Walsh (2015) that fictional and non-fictional narratives invite and
require different modes of reading. When we examine how a novel
interprets history, we need different interpretative strategies and different
modes of engagement than when reading a historical study. To me,
however, it makes sense to speak of both truth value and ethical value
in relation to how fiction interprets history; literature just should not be
evaluated in terms of these values on a sentence-level, but on the level of
the whole work. As Thomas Pavel (1986, 17) puts it, against analytical
philosophers who deny the truth value of fiction, a literary work can be
‘true as a whole’ even when it is ‘useless to set up procedures for
assessing the truth or falsity of isolated fictional sentences’. Fiction
communicates its interpretation of history not just through the
referential language of statements about what happened and why; it
requires from the reader more complex modes of interpreting the work
as a whole, including its structure and narrative organization. In order
to do that, let us take a closer look at the readerly dynamics of Les
Bienveillantes. What kind of engagement does it invite from the reader?

III. Multilayered readerly contract

Les Bienveillantes has been read mainly as a historical novel. This is
hardly surprising, given that the novel deals with the Second World War
and the Holocaust from the perspective of a character who takes part in
its planning and execution. Littell has studied the Holocaust extensively,
and historians have generally agreed that its historical details are
accurate. Right from the opening sentence, Aue, the first-person
narrator, endeavours to convince the reader that he/she is embarking on
Fiction, History and the Possible 13

an eyewitness testimony of what happened – and ‘how it happened’

(Littell 2010, 3; ‘comment ßca s’est pass
e’, Littell 2006, 11) – in Nazi-
occupied Europe between 1941 and 1945. The narrator portrays himself
as an expert who has not only worked during the war as an intelligence
officer compiling reports about the events and their underlying forces,
but also as someone who holds a doctorate in law and has studied ‘une
quantit
e consid
erable de livres’ (Littell 2006, 13; ‘quite a few books’,
Littell 2010, 6) on the Holocaust.4 In addition to depicting historical
events, the book abounds in reflections on the philosophy of history and
sociology.
Many commentators have discussed how historically and
psychologically convincing the novel is.5 For example, the historian
Jeremy Popkin writes that the novel impressed him ‘as historically
accurate’ in certain respects, but it struck him as ‘unrealistic’ in others:

I found it hard to believe that anyone could survive a bullet through the
head, like the one Aue receives at Stalingrad, and be back on the job in a
matter of weeks with his memory sufficiently unaffected to allow him to
reconstruct, years later, every detail of his wartime experiences. (Popkin 2012,
189)

What is most disturbing for Popkin and many other critics, however,
is the way in which the novel combines historical and imaginative
aspects:
One cannot have it both ways: if The Kindly Ones is meant to tell us
something about what actually happened in Nazi-occupied Europe between
1941 and 1945, then Littell can legitimately be taken to task for ignoring the
historical knowledge we now have about the perpetrators; if it is to be
understood as a non-referential exercise of the imagination, then it is risky to
regard it as a source of factual insight into their psychology. (p. 198)

What he means by historical research on perpetrator psychology here

are studies that ‘demonstrate that the perpetrators of the Holocaust
were, in most respects, rather ordinary individuals, whose extraordinary
behavior can be explained in terms of mundane psychological processes
of rationalization, conformity to group norms, and obedience to
authority’ (p. 197). Popkin acknowledges that such research informs
Littell’s novel, but for him, Littell ultimately undermines this insight
when he portrays the perpetrator as a sexually deviant, monstrous
character who kills his mother and has sex with his sister. A similar
14 Hanna Meretoja

concern is shared by many critics; for example, a more nuanced version

of this concern is voiced by Susan Suleiman (2012), who argues that the
transgressive dimension of the novel potentially weakens its powerful
way of presenting Aue as a historical and moral witness.
It is of course the mythical frame of the novel, the Orestes myth to
which the title already refers, that motivates the matricidal story of the
protagonist. In addition to the Orestes myth, seven baroque dances that
follow the sequence of a Bach suite – from toccata to gigue – form
another structuring principle for the novel (Littell & Millet 2007, 9).
Given the ways in which the novel underlines its own status as
imaginative discourse – for example by its abundant intertextuality and
mythical framing – it clearly invites readings that diverge from simple
realist ones. These elements introduce a self-reflexive level to the novel,
one that works against its realist, immersive level. In my view, the
realist/historical vs imaginative dichotomy is unhelpful in understanding
this complex ‘both-and’ quality that lies at the heart of the novel’s
narrative dynamic.
These frames underline the nature of the novel as an artistic, synthetic
composition, and suggest that the novel does not present itself merely as
an imaginary memoir of a Nazi officer. Let us take a closer look at the
novel’s opening paragraph:
Freres humains, laissez-moi vous raconter comment ßca s’est pass
e. On n’est
pas votre frere, r
etorquerez-vous, et on ne veut pas le savoir. Et c’est bien vrai
qu’il s’agit d’une sombre histoire, mais
edifiant aussi, un v
eritable conte
moral, je vous l’assure. C ß a risque d’^etre un peu long, apres tout il s’est pass
e
beaucoup de choses, mais si ßca se trouve vous n’^etes pas trop press
es, avec un
peu de chance vous avez le temps. Et puis ßca vous concerne : vous verrez bien
que ßca vous concerne. (Littell 2006, 11)
(Oh my human brothers, let me tell you how it happened. I am not your
brother, you’ll retort, and I don’t want to know. And it certainly is true that
this is a bleak story, but an edifying one too, a real morality play, I assure
you. You might find it a bit long – a lot of things happened, after all – but
perhaps you’re not in too much of a hurry; with a little luck you’ll have some
time to spare. And also, this concerns you: you’ll see that this concerns you.
[Littell 2010, 3])

What kind of readerly contract does the opening of the novel propose to
the reader? By directly addressing the reader, the novel thematizes the
question of the readerly dynamic from the beginning. It raises the
question of why one should spend so much time reading a narrative of
Fiction, History and the Possible 15

hundreds of pages that is dominated by the voice and perspective of an

‘evil’ character, a Nazi officer. The narrator attempts to engage the
reader by proposing that the narrated involves him/her too, perhaps
more directly than he/she would like to admit. At the same time,
however, it also presents itself rhetorically as a narrative that does not
want to be read:
Et si vous n’en ^etes pas convaincu, inutile de lire plus loin. Vous ne
comprendrez rien et vous vous f^acherez, sans profit ni pour vous ni pour moi.
(Littell 2006, 28)
(And if you’re not convinced of this, don’t bother to read any further. You’ll
understand nothing and you’ll get angry, with little profit for you or for me.
[Littell 2010, 21–22])

The opening simultaneously invites the reader to immerse him-/herself in

the fictional world while pushing him/her away from it.
The opening sentence also breaks the ‘realistic illusion’ by being
emphatically literary and dense with intertextual allusions. It alludes to
Francßois Villon’s line ‘Freres humaines qui apres nous vivez’ (Villon
2005, 159) and to Charles Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal: ‘Hypocrite
lecteur – mon semblable – mon frere’ (see Koppenfels 2012, 142). Villon
addresses the reader to ask for his/her sympathy; Baudelaire asks the
reader to admit his/her complicity. In Littell’s novel, the narrator seems
to address the reader primarily to stress his/her complicity, but as an
undercurrent, the sentence echoes the thought of a shared humanity.
Intertextual allusions function in the novel as a counterforce to its dark
confessionality and build a self-ironic, self-reflexive, almost playful
dimension to the memoir.
It is therefore evident that the opening passage does not merely sketch
a historical frame for the novel’s events; it also makes clear that what
we are reading is not a typical historical novel. Importantly, it proposes
a readerly contract that asks the reader to do several things at once.
First, on a superficial level it persuades the reader to read in the mode
of the ‘as if’, imagining that he/she is reading the confessional memoir
of an SS officer. Yet, second, the self-reflexive, metafictive level
undermines the foundations of a simple realist reading or na€ıve
identification. It is a thoroughly literary work, dense with literary
allusions, which repeatedly remind the reader that he/she is reading
imaginative discourse, a narrative that is designed not by an SS officer
16 Hanna Meretoja

but by an author who does not share the views of his narrator. The
novel’s intertextual, mythical frame transcends the narrator’s
consciousness, and through it the author draws the reader’s attention to
the nature of the text as a literary composition.
Third, the opening passage thematizes the reader’s resistance, stresses
that the narrated concerns him/her as well, and presents the reader with
a certain personal challenge as a condition for reading further, namely a
willingness to think that he/she too might have done similar things had
the circumstances been different:

Encore une fois, soyons clairs : je ne cherche pas a  dire que je ne suis pas
coupable de tel ou tel fait. Je suis coupable, vous ne l’^etes pas, c’est bien. Mais
vous devriez quand m^eme pouvoir vous dire que ce que j’ai fait, vous l’auriez
fait aussi. [. . .] Je pense qu’il m’est permis de conclure comme un fait
etabli par
l’histoire moderne que tout le monde, ou presque, dans un ensemble de
circonstances donn
e, fait ce qu’on lui dit ; et, excusez-moi, il y a peu de chances
pour que vous soyez l’exception, pas plus que moi. (Littell 2006, 26)
(Once again, let us be clear: I am not trying to say I am not guilty of this or
that. I am guilty, you’re not, fine. But you should be able to admit to
yourselves that you might also have done what I did. [. . .] I think I am
allowed to conclude, as a fact established by modern history, that everyone,
or nearly everyone, in a given set of circumstances, does what he is told to
do; and, pardon me, but there’s not much chance that you’re the exception,
anymore than I was. [Littell 2010, 20])

The narrator goes on to argue that even if there are some psychopaths
in all wars, the state machinery is ultimately made of ordinary men, and
that is where the real danger lies: ‘Le vrai danger pour l’homme c’est
moi, c’est vous. Et si vous n’en ^etes pas convaincu, inutile de lire plus
loin.’ (Littell 2006, 27–28; ‘The real danger for mankind is me, is you.
And if you’re not convinced of this, don’t bother to read any further’,
Littell 2010, 21).
The narrator’s central argument and justification for the claim that
the narrated concerns the reader is the view that National Socialism was
based on the tendency of ordinary people to obey orders, to take care of
their own duties, and to refrain from reflecting on or questioning the
goals that the machinery ultimately serves. This phenomenon is integral
to modern Western society, and hence concerns us all. From this
perspective, Aue provocatively suggests that it is by no means evident
Fiction, History and the Possible 17

that what he is about to tell is actually over. He goes through other,

temporally or otherwise less distant genocides and asks:

Bien s^ur, la guerre est finie. Et puis on a compris la lecßon, ßca n’arrivera plus.
Mais ^etes-vous bien s^ ^
urs qu’on ait compris la lecßon ? Etes-vous certains que
^
ßca n’arrivera plus ? Etes-vous m^eme certains que la guerre soit finie ? (Littell
2006, 23)
(Now of course the war is over. And we’ve learned our lesson, it won’t
happen again. But are you quite sure we’ve learned our lesson? Are you
certain it won’t happen again? Are you even certain the war is over? [Littell
2010, 17])

The novel asks the reader to reflect on how the narrated concerns us in
the current world, and it thereby challenges our tendency to demonize
the evil of others (the Nazis, the terrorists) and to ignore the potential to
evil within ourselves. The way it does this is through a narrative
dynamic that encourages simultaneously both immersion and critical
distance.6 In my view, this interplay lies at the heart of the way in which
the novel deals with the ethics of representing the Holocaust.

IV. Imaginative resistance, immersion and critical distance

The interplay between immersion and critical distance is essential when
we evaluate how Les Bienveillantes deals with Nazi Germany. It is
precisely through this interplay that the novel responds to the challenge
that scholars have described as ‘imaginative resistance’. This concept
refers to the unwillingness or inability of readers to imagine things that
a fictive text invites them to imagine (Gendler 2013). While we find it
relatively easy to imagine impossible or counterfactual states of affairs in
a fictional world, we find it much harder, as Marco Caracciolo puts it,
‘to take the stance of a character whose thoughts and behavior directly
contradict our own ethical values and evaluations’: ‘In imagining that
something might be the case in a fictional world, we seem to be
relatively freer than in accepting a perspective on the world that we
consider immoral’ (Caracciolo 2013, 31).
As we saw above, Les Bienveillantes presents itself in a certain sense
as a novel that does not want to be read. The way it uses this rhetorical
device signals that the novel is acutely aware of the reader’s resistance
and deals with it by bringing it into play as an essential part of the
18 Hanna Meretoja

novel’s narrative dynamic. The novel responds to this resistance by

showing that it is possible simultaneously to imagine an ethically
problematic life-world and to retain a critical distance from this world.
Although the reader has to imagine the perspective of an SS officer, this
does not mean adopting or accepting his values and ethos (which is itself
remarkably ambivalent). While, for example, Martha Nussbaum (2010,
95–96) seems to assume that perspective-taking involves an identification
with the other, from a hermeneutic perspective the ability to perceive the
world from the perspective of the other does not mean letting go of
one’s own values; instead, it means considering a different kind of
perspective or mode of experience from the perspective of one’s own
horizon of interpretation (see Meretoja 2015). As Gadamer puts it:

a person trying to understand a text is prepared for it to tell him something.

That is why a hermeneutically trained consciousness must be, from the start,
sensitive to the text’s alterity. But this kind of sensitivity involves neither
‘neutrality’ with respect to content nor the extinction of one’s self [. . .]. The
important thing is to be aware of one’s own bias, so that the text can present
itself in all its otherness and thus assert its own truth against one’s own fore-
meanings. (Gadamer 1997, 269)

This is perspective-taking that involves critical distance and allows

‘critical attitude towards every convention’ (Gadamer 1993, 204). In
reading Les Bienveillantes it entails both critically evaluating the
protagonist’s narration and actions and putting our own assumptions at
risk and confronting possibilities in ourselves that we tend to suppress.
Unwillingness to take the perspective of the SS officer is largely about
the reader’s internal resistance, and the novel addresses this resistance by
playing it out and making it a thematic dimension of the novel. Thus,
the novel engages the reader in a way that may well be unique to fiction.
The narrative dynamic of Les Bienveillantes makes it possible for the
reader to be emotionally engaged with an ethically problematic world so
that even when immersing him-/herself in that world, he/she retains the
ability to view it critically. The reader encounters the world-view of Aue
from the horizon of his/her own world and can thereby critically
evaluate what is problematic in it and why it is nevertheless a human
world – a world constructed by human beings and a world that
manifests certain aspects of being human – and a world that may not be
in all respects as different from our own world as we would perhaps like
Fiction, History and the Possible 19

to think. It invites us to reflect on how the Holocaust was made possible

by certain mechanisms in modern Western society that still shape our
everyday lives and what it is like to live in a bureaucratic world in which
most people focus on efficiently and diligently carrying out orders
imposed on them, and few people have the courage critically to reflect
on or question the ultimate values and goals that steer their actions.
As we have seen, the novel deals with the banality of evil in a
narrative form. But it is also essential to the novel’s interpretation of
history that the mythical frame of the novel is placed in a tensional
relation with the novel’s exploration of the modern instrumental
rationality underlying the Holocaust. Through the Orestes myth, the
problematic of responsibility acquires a Greek dimension. According to
the Ancient Greek conception of guilt, we are responsible for our
actions irrespective of whether or not we understand what we have done
(Littell 2006, 546; 2010, 592). The novel suggests that ultimately the
Holocaust eludes the human capacity to comprehend, and yet we are
responsible for it. The dedication of the novel reads: ‘Pour les morts’
(‘For the dead’). It is because of our responsibility to the dead that we
must try to understand how it is possible that what happened could
actually happen; yet at the same time, we must not fall prey to the
hubris of believing that we have reached an exhaustive explanation.
The use of the Orestes myth and Bach’s baroque suite as structural
principles highlights that history in itself does not follow a narrative
order; literature must bring order to it. The myth, however, does not
provide any overall explanation, and the use of the Orestes myth also
includes a playful, parodic aspect. Aue compares the policemen Clemens
and Weser, who act in the role of ‘the Furies’, to Laurel and Hardy
(Littell 2006, 693; 2010, 753) and kills them before they have a chance to
turn into ‘the Kindly Ones’. In the end, it is futile to try to find
correspondences between the characters and the myth. Aue refers to the
Kindly Ones only once, in the final sentence of the novel, when Clemens
and Weser have already been killed:

Je ressentais d’un coup tout le poids du pass
e, de la douleur de la vie et de la

m
emoire inalt
erable, je restais seul avec l’hippopotame agonisant, quelques
autruches et les cadavres, seul avec le temps et la tristesse et la peine du
souvenir, la cruaut
e de mon existence et de ma mort encore  a venir. Les
Bienveillantes avaient retrouv
e ma trace. (Littell 2006, 894)
20 Hanna Meretoja

(I felt all at once the entire weight of the past, of the pain of life and of
inalterable memory, I remained alone with the dying hippopotamus, a few
ostriches, and the corpses, alone with time and grief and the sorrow of
remembering, the cruelty of my existence and of my death still to come. The
Kindly Ones were on to me. [Littell 2010, 975])

Here the Kindly Ones seem to allude to the haunting of a past that does
not let go of us, maybe also to the ‘dead’ to whom the novel is dedicated
and to whom we have an obligation to try to understand the past, not
from the perspective of vengeance (hence the reference is to the Kindly
Ones, not to the Furies) but in order to end the vicious circle of violence.
The mythical frame transcends the consciousness of the narrator and
functions as one way in which Littell emphasizes the difference between
the I-narrator and the work as a whole: the latter is not of Aue’s design
and construction. He is an Orestes figure who does not know it; he is
blind to his own actions and yet guilty. Blindness becomes a central
trope in the novel, and it is personified in the final scene where a blind
man wanders the street to the sound of cannon fire and the Red Army
taking over Berlin:

‘Ou allez-vous?’ demandai-je en pantelant. – ‘Nous ne savons pas’, r
epondit

l’aveugle. –’D’ou venez-vous?’ demandai-je encore. – ‘Nous ne le savons pas
non plus.’ (Littell 2006, 889)
(‘Where are you going?’ I asked, panting. – ‘We don’t know,’ the blind man
replied. – ‘Where are you coming from?’ I asked again. – ‘We don’t know
that either.’ [Littell 2010, 970])

The theme of blindness reinforces the novel’s intertextual relation to

Michel Tournier’s Le Roi des aulnes (1970, The Erl-King), which is an
early example of perpetrator fiction. Its protagonist is a car mechanic
who identifies with mythical ogre figures; as in Les Bienveillantes, the
mythical and the historical-realistic function as parallel levels in the
novel, and the mythical level is linked to the intertextual emphasis on the
nature of the novel as a literary artefact. Like mythical ogre figures, the
protagonist is myopic, and blind to what he becomes: he identifies with
the mythical figure of St Christopher who carries children to safety, but
as he collaborates with the Nazis and recruits boys to a Napola
(Nationalpolitische Erziehungsanstalt) he ends up becoming more like the
Erl-King, who carries children to their death.7 In both cases, the novel as
a whole retells the myth indicated in the title in a way that escapes the
Fiction, History and the Possible 21

awareness of the protagonist and points both to his personal blindness

and to a more pervasive cultural blindness, linked to the limitations and
distortions in cultural self-understanding concerning the Holocaust.

V. ‘A question without an answer’

Narrative hermeneutics is committed to the hermeneutic conception of
the singularity of each literary text and the need of the interpreter to let
his/her preconceptions be challenged in the encounter with the text. For
Gadamer, an artwork is ‘an event, a thrust that overthrows everything
previously given and conventional’ (Gadamer 1994, 104). As Ricœur
puts it, hermeneutics ‘depsychologizes’ understanding and sees it as a
process of apprehending ‘possibilities of being’ explored by the text
(Ricœur 1991, 66). This ethos is in line with Derrida’s emphasis on the
‘non-psychological structure’ of literature and the freedom of
imagination that is at the core of the literary institution, crucial to which
is its way of suspending the real and exploring the limits of what can be
said and thought (Derrida 1992, 170). A particular strand of ‘unnatural
narratology’ also has a certain affinity with the hermeneutic non-
reductive, non-psychologizing ethos, namely the ‘non-naturalizing
approach’, which, as Stefan Iversen puts it, ‘argues in favor of keeping
open the possibility that unnatural narratives produce effects (emotions
and experiences) that should not be immediately, if at all, transformed
back into graspable proportions’ and ‘investigates the interpretational
consequences of the employment of unnatural techniques, scenarios, and
strategies’ (Iversen 2013, 151; see also Nielsen 2013, 72). However, I find
problematic the concept of ‘unnatural narrative’, which unnatural
narratologists frequently use interchangeably with ‘antimimetic
narrative’. It is based on their shared endeavour to challenge what they
claim to be the dominant ‘mimetic understanding of narrative’, that is, a
tendency to treat fictional works ‘as if they were primarily lifelike
reproductions of human beings and human actions’ (Alber, Iversen,
Nielsen & Richardson 2013, 2, 4). This criticism, however, rests on a
na€ıve conception of mimesis as imitation and dismisses the long
tradition of acknowledging how mimesis is a dynamic poetic activity of
creating and constructing, which is ‘completely contrary to a copy of
some preexisting reality’ (Ricœur 1984, 45).8
22 Hanna Meretoja

Moreover, while I agree that fictional and non-fictional narratives

require different strategies of reading, in unnatural narratology this
emphasis sometimes seems to be wedded to problematic assumptions
about the aesthetic being separate from the spheres of ethics and
understanding. In order to illustrate the difference between how we read
fictive and non-fictive first-person narratives, Iversen (2013, 152)
compares Les Bienveillantes to interviews with former inmates of
German concentration camps: allegedly, we relate to the interviews as
we do to ‘acts of communication’, trying to understand the speaker,
whereas we read a fictive narrative more ‘as an artifact in itself’, which
calls for Kantian ‘interesseloses Wohlgefallen (disinterested pleasure)’.
Here Iversen seems to be committed to the Kantian tradition of
aesthetic formalism in which the sphere of the aesthetic is seen as
separate from the spheres of ethics and knowledge. This tradition risks
reducing the literary work to its function of producing aesthetic pleasure
and ignoring how works of art also function as (ethically charged)
modes of making sense of the world. They are meaningful wholes that
not only produce aesthetic pleasure but also, among other things,
provide interpretations about the (past, present and future) world and
expand our sense of human possibilities.
The difference can be illustrated with the scene from Les Bienveillantes
that has probably given rise to most scholarly debate and which Iversen
also cites: the scene in which a bullet passes through Aue’s head. The
scene has baffled readers because in it an apparently realistically
constructed text begins to break down, rendering a realist reading
insufficient. It is precisely this insufficiency that is the starting point for
non-naturalizing reading. In fact, we are not told here that a bullet hits
the protagonist’s forehead; we can only eventually reconstruct this
storyline. The scene in which Aue is wounded is first depicted thus:

Ivan courait vers moi, mais je fus distrait par un l
eger heurt sur mon front :
un morceau de gravier, peut-^etre, ou un insecte, car lorsque je me t^atai, une
petite goutte de sang perlait sur mon doigt. Je l’essuyai et continuai mon
chemin vers la Volga. (Littell 2006, 383)
(Ivan was running toward me, but I was distracted by a slight tap on my
forehead: a piece of gravel, perhaps, or an insect, since when I felt it, a little
drop of blood beaded on my finger. I wiped it off and continued on toward
the Volga. [Littell 2010, 414])
Fiction, History and the Possible 23

The reader realizes the inadequacy of a realist reading at the latest when
Aue dives under the ice and sees there the smiling body of his former
colleague who had died long ago in another place, or when he climbs up
to a Zeppelin that can turn into a giant spider and leap over the edge of
the world. As he tries to follow his sister Una, whom he sees going
down the river in a bridal boat, he is stopped by violent stomach
cramps, and undergoes an experience that echoes the story of Minos, on
whom Pasipha€e placed a spell that made him ejaculate snakes, scorpions
and the like: ‘plut^
ot que de la merde, ce furent des abeilles, des araign
ees
et des scorpions vivants qui jaillirent de mon anus’ (Littell 2006, 392;
‘but instead of shit, living bees, spiders, and scorpions gushed out of my
anus’, Littell 2010, 424).
Iversen depicts this narration as ‘non-conventional’ and ‘unnatural’
and argues that reading the novel from the perspective of unnatural
narratology enables one to see it as a riddle that concerns the
possibilities and limits of the representation of consciousness (Iversen
2013, 156). In his interpretation, the novel is about aesthetic
experimentation with consciousness representation, and the riddle is
primarily about the narrator: ‘Is Aue unreliable? Unbelievable?
Unlikely? Unreadable? Unnatural?’ (p. 155).
I agree that there is a riddle at the centre of the novel and that this
riddle is ultimately unresolvable. But I am not convinced that this riddle
primarily concerns consciousness representation (which is currently one
of the dominant interests of narratology). We should ask what the
significance of ‘non-conventional’ narration is in the novel as a whole.
In my view, the distinctive narrative strategies of the novel are
intimately linked to the themes of the novel, and hence to its overall
construction as a significant whole.
In my interpretation, the fragmentation of the narration, which begins
in the bullet scene and continues later in the form of hallucinations,
emphasizes the breaking down of narrative mastery. This, in turn, is
central to the way in which the novel takes part in the discussion on the
ethics of narrating the Holocaust. Hence, the way I see it, the narrative
structure of the novel is directly linked to exploring the possibilities and
limits of a narrative understanding of the Holocaust.
While the novel begins with a gesture of narrative authority – ‘laissez-
moi vous raconter comment ßca s’est pass
e’ (Littell 2006, 11; ‘let me tell
24 Hanna Meretoja

you how it happened’, Littell 2010, 3) – that underpins the first half of
the novel, the wound in Aue’s head marks a turning point in the
narration: afterwards, the sense of narrative mastery increasingly begins
to break down. The fragmentation of the narration is linked to the way
in which Aue’s experiences become detached from intersubjective reality.
After being wounded, the subsequent long passage acquires
hallucinatory features, and it is difficult for the reader to know whether
the stream of consciousness should be interpreted as a dream, a
hallucination or some kind of retrospective reconstruction of Aue’s
experiences at the time. The narrating I (the old Aue) does not organize
the narration retrospectively into a coherent, logically proceeding
narrative in the way he had before; instead, the narrating I and the
experiencing I become more and more entangled. Thus, the experience
of disorientation increasingly penetrates the very structure of the
narration.9
As Aue is wounded, he loses his capacity for narrative sense-making:
he can no longer link things to each other in the form of a narrative.
When he is in hospital, Himmler visits him with several SS officers and
the scene is photographed and filmed:

Je compris peu de choses aux propos du Reichsf€ uhrer : des termes isol
es
barbotaient a la surface de ses paroles, officier h
ero€ıque, honneur de la SS,
rapports lucides, courageux, mais cela ne formait certes pas une narration ou
j’aurais pu me reconna^ıtre[.] (Littell 2006, 402)
(I didn’t understand much of what the Reichsf€ uhrer said: isolated phrases
bubbled to the surface of his words, heroic officer, honour of the SS, lucid
reports, courageous, but they certainly didn’t form a narration in which I
could recognize myself[.] [Littell 2010, 434])

The bullet through the head acquires a symbolic meaning as it manifests

a hole that structures the whole novel. Aue’s relation to the world is
changed drastically and it starts to revolve around that hole: ‘Ma pens
ee
du monde devait maintenant se r
eorganiser autour de ce trou’ (Littell
2006, 404; ‘My thinking about the world now had to reorganize itself
around this hole’, Littell 2010, 436). This hole stands in a metonymic
relation to the larger lack at the centre of the novel: all the explanations
and narratives cannot change the fact that in the end there is a blind
spot at the centre of everything, a hole that we cannot see, understand
or explain.
Fiction, History and the Possible 25

Aue later hears how he was wounded, but this story, told in a
traditional linear, quasi-causal narrative form, remains emphatically
detached from reality. This version no more captures ‘what really
happened’ than did Aue’s earlier, hallucinatory depiction of the events:

[J]’
ecoutai son r
ecit avec attention, et je puis donc le rapporter, mais moins
encore que le reste je ne pouvais le raccorder  a rien, cela restait un r
ecit,
v
eridique a n’en pas douter, mais un r
ecit n
eanmoins, guere plus qu’une suite
de phrases agenc
ees selon un ordre myst
erieux et arbitraire, r
egies par une
logique qui avait peu a voir avec celle qui me permettait,  a moi, de respirer
l’air sal
e de la Baltique[.] (Littell 2006, 405)
(I listened to his story attentively, and so I can report it, but even less than
the rest, I could connect it with nothing; it remained a story, a truthful one
no doubt, but a story all the same, scarcely more than a series of phrases that
fit together according to a mysterious and arbitrary order, ruled by a logic
that had little to do with the one that allowed me, here and now, to breathe
the salty air of the Baltic[.] [Littell 2010, 438])

The narrator points here to a yawning chasm between his experience –

or his transformed sense of life – and the narrative logic manifested by
the account he reports.
Through the breaking down of the narrative mastery, the novel
conveys the view that in the end the Holocaust cannot be explained; it
remains a question that haunts humanity – a question that ultimately
remains unanswered – but this in no way makes it less important to
reflect on this question: ‘pour moi, comme pour la plupart des gens, la
guerre et le meurtre sont une question, une question sans r
eponse, car
lorsqu’on crie dans la nuit, personne ne r
epond’ (Littell 2006, 30; ‘for
me, as for most people, war and murder are a question, a question
without an answer, for when you cry out in the night, no one answers’,
Littell 2010, 24).
The unresolvable nature of this question acquires a particular urgency
due to the poignant tension between the I-narrator’s apparently calm,
unregretful manner of reporting the events and his bodily symptoms that
express repressed trauma and palpable distress. The process of narrating
is an attempt to confront and tame aspects of himself – and of humanity
– that resist taming, like the scratching, volatile cat to which he
compares his memories, as he tries to convince himself and the readers
that he is acting in good will (like the Bienveillantes who mean well):
26 Hanna Meretoja

Quand je tentais de le caresser, pour faire preuve de bonne volont
e, il filait

s’asseoir sur le rebord de la fen^etre et me fixait de ses yeux jaunes ; si je
cherchais a le prendre dans mes bras, il me griffait. La nuit, au contraire, il
venait se coucher en boule sur ma poitrine, une masse
etouffante, et dans mon
sommeil je r^evais que l’on m’asphyxiait sous un tas de pierres. Avec mes
souvenirs, c’a
et
e un peu pareil. (Littell 2006, 13)
(Whenever I tried to pet it, to show my goodwill, it would slip away to sit on
the windowsill and stare at me with its yellow eyes; if I tried to pick it up and
hold it, it would scratch me. At night, on the other hand, it would come and
curl up in a ball on my chest, a stifling weight, and in my sleep I would
dream I was being smothered beneath a heap of stones. With my memories,
it’s been more or less the same. [Littell 2010, 6])

The engagement with the haunting past proves to be more difficult than
Aue realizes in the beginning, and the very process of telling and
recounting involves re-enactment of the traumatic experiences in ways
that gradually cause the very form of the narration to disintegrate. The
process of confronting the memories and engaging with them entails
becoming vulnerable to forces that are beyond one’s control. Aue reacts
in emphatically corporeal, visceral ways, and suffers from regular
vomiting attacks:

Une breve pause pour aller vomir, et je reprends. C’est une autre de mes
nombreuses petites afflictions : de temps en temps, mes repas remontent,
parfois tout de suite, parfois plus tard, sans raison, comme ßca. C’est un vieux
probleme, ßca date de la guerre, ßca a commenc
e vers l’automne 1941 pour ^etre
pr
ecis, en Ukraine, a Kiev je pense, ou peut-^etre 
a Jitomir. (Littell 2006, 4)
(A brief interruption while I go and vomit, then I’ll continue. That’s another
one of my numerous little afflictions: from time to time my meals come back
up, sometimes right away, sometimes later on, for no reason, just like that.
It’s an old problem, I’ve had it since the war, since the autumn of 1941, to be
precise, it started in the Ukraine, in Kiev I think, or maybe Zhitomir. [ Littell
2010, 8])

The comparison of the memories to the volatile cat is a way of suggesting

that the novel deals with a process of taming an aspect of the human
psyche that we tend to be terrified of and which we are tempted to repress;
the vomiting, in turn, signals that it also gives expression to what Aleida
Assmann calls ‘cultural indigestion’ (Assmann 2013, 156).10 It is a process
of confronting a traumatic past that does not go away no matter how
adamantly it is repressed. The engagement with the traumatic past,
however, is not a task that could be ‘completed’; it is always there and will
Fiction, History and the Possible 27

not vanish or become neatly appropriated and domesticated. Yet, the

novel suggests, putting oneself at risk and engaging with that part of
humanity and history that horrifies us and which we are tempted to
demonize or repress as something completely external to us, is the only
way of avoiding even more damaging blindness.
The very form of Les Bienveillantes dramatizes the way in which no
single narrative can provide a comprehensive understanding of what
happened and why, and it manifests a process of narrative engagement
that becomes increasingly aware of its own limits. I would argue that it
is precisely the novel’s awareness of its own limits that gives it a
particularly hermeneutic flavour. Contrary to a common
misunderstanding, hermeneutics is not about the pursuit of happy,
harmonious understanding but about acknowledging that true
understanding unsettles us and shows us that we do not actually know
what we thought we knew. As Gadamer asserts, at the heart of
philosophical hermeneutics is docta ignorantia, knowing that one does
not know (Gadamer 1997, 365–367). Narrative hermeneutics suggests
that in order to be ethical, narrative understanding should be aware of
its own interpretative nature, of being only one version, always
contestable, limited, incomplete and unfinalizable. Such self-conscious
narrative understanding could be characterized as an affirmative form of
simultaneously knowing and not-knowing. Instead of pursuing absolute
knowledge, it is content with knowing that interpretations are all we
have and that, as Gadamer puts it, ‘Interpretation is always on the way.
The word interpretation points to the finitude of human being and the
finitude of human knowing’ (Gadamer 2001, 105).
Littell stands in the tradition that does not accept the so-called
representation ban, the influential view that fictional representations of
the Holocaust are intrinsically ethically questionable. One of the most
famous representatives of this position, Claude Lanzmann (2006),
considers Les Bienveillantes to be particularly questionable because it
provides a fictional narrative representation of the Holocaust from the
perspective of a perpetrator. However, this position ignores the complex
way in which the novel presents the Holocaust ultimately as a question
without an answer and how a narrative that includes reflection on its
own narrative nature and on the limits of storytelling cannot be
considered to be inherently ethically problematic in the same way as a
28 Hanna Meretoja

narrative that masks its own narrative, interpretative and perspectival

nature and pretends to provide a totalizing explanation.11 Overall, the
ethical evaluation of Les Bienveillantes should acknowledge, first, how
the novel does not ask the reader to accept the protagonist’s perspective
but rather encourages him/her to engage with it in a simultaneously
emotional and critical way, and, second, that the novel does not pretend
to provide an exhaustive narrative explanation or representation of the
Holocaust. As I have argued, the novel reflects both on what made the
Holocaust possible and on the possibility and limits of understanding,
representing and narrating the Holocaust. In my view, taking the nature
of the novel seriously as a literary phenomenon means that one is
attentive to how the work has very specific – aesthetic – means of
developing its own interpretation of history, including reflection on the
limits and possibilities of interpreting that particular historical world as
a space of possibilities.

VI. Conclusion
In this article, I have delineated a hermeneutic approach in which fiction
is seen to interpret the world in ways that problematize the dichotomies
between the actual and the possible and the referential and the non-
referential. The analysis of Les Bienveillantes suggests that one
important way in which a work of fiction can produce insights into
history is its ability to cultivate, through its own literary means, a sense
of history as a sense of the possible, namely our sense of what is
possible in a certain world to think, experience, feel and imagine, and
what is impossible or difficult in that world. These insights can be
truthful – and they are, in my view, when it comes to the way in which
Les Bienveillantes depicts the historical world of Nazi Germany as a
space of possibilities – even if it makes no sense to speak of truth value
in the case of its individual sentences.
The way in which narrative hermeneutics understands the relation
between fiction and history also has ethical implications. This approach
does not divorce the aesthetic from the spheres of ethics and
understanding but, instead, claims that fictional narratives always have
an ethical and a cognitive dimension and relevance. As Ricœur (1990,
167) puts it, no narrative can be ethically neutral. Moral philosophers
Fiction, History and the Possible 29

have argued that the ability to imagine alternative scenarios is central

for moral agency (see e.g. Carroll 2000, 362; Nussbaum 1997, 90; 2010),
and empirical studies suggest that narrative fiction plays a particular role
in developing our ethical imagination (see Hakemulder 2000). In a
recent study that has received high media visibility, Kidd and Castano
(2013) show that the affective and cognitive skills involved in
understanding others’ mental states are improved by reading literary
fiction compared with reading non-fiction, popular fiction or nothing at
all. After reading literary fiction, people perform better in tests that
measure empathy, social perception and emotional intelligence. Yet there
is a leap from the ability to imagine the perspectives of others and from
hypothetical statements of what one would do in imaginary scenarios to
actually carrying out concrete actions in the real world. There is plenty
of evidence that reading fiction is no guarantee of ethical action. As
George Steiner famously put it, the Holocaust seriously undermined the
long unquestioned belief in the ‘humanizing force’ of literature: ‘We
know now that a man can read Goethe or Rilke in the evening, that he
can play Bach and Schubert, and go to his day’s work at Auschwitz in
the morning’ (Steiner 1967, 15). Les Bienveillantes, too, reminds us that
many of those who took part in the planning and execution of the
Holocaust were well read and lacked no imagination or good will. The
fact that reading fiction does not necessarily make us better persons,
however, does not imply that a sense of the possible – and cultivating
our awareness of the multiplicity of possible perspectives from which the
world can be perceived – would be ethically irrelevant. Such perspective
awareness and the concomitant narrative imagination may be a
necessary condition for ethical agency even if it is not a sufficient
condition.
I have suggested in my article that perspective-taking is a more
complex phenomenon than many literary/cognitive theorists and moral
philosophers (like Nussbaum) seem to assume. We should not think of it
merely in terms of empathetic identification; it does not involve letting
go of one’s own values and beliefs but, instead, relating them to – and
engaging with – a different perspective. The analysis of Les Bienveillantes
shows how the interplay between immersiveness and critical distance can
produce a narrative dynamic that allows the reader to engage
emotionally – but without uncritically taking the protagonist’s
30 Hanna Meretoja

perspective – with an ethically problematic life-world. It suggests that it

can be ethically relevant to engage with the perpetrator’s perspective in
such a way that makes us encounter what we perhaps would not like to
know about ourselves and the dark moments of history. Fiction can also
expand our limits of action, thought and experience by cultivating our
sense of what in the past, perplexing world was experienced as possible
and what possibilities the reinterpretation of the past opens up for us in
the current world.
I have argued in this article that opposing the factual, actual and real
to the fictional, possible and unreal makes it difficult to conceptualize
how a fictional world can – precisely by creating its own world –
function as an interpretation of the (past, present or future) world. For
example, in the case of Les Bienveillantes, such an approach has trouble
explaining why and how the novel succeeds in producing insights into
the historical world of Nazi Germany. While defending the view that
both history and fiction provide interpretations of the past, I have also
sided with those who emphasize that fiction requires specific modes of
engagement. But instead of understanding this specificity in terms of a
separation of the aesthetic sphere from the spheres of ethics and
understanding, I have emphasized their interpenetration, arguing that
fiction requires complex interpretations that engage with the literary
work as a whole, including its narrative organization and overall
narrative dynamic. Such an approach allows us to see, for example, how
Les Bienveillantes presents its interpretation of the Holocaust through
specifically literary means, how it invites us to engage with Nazi
Germany as a space of possibilities that encouraged certain types of
experiencing, speaking and acting and discouraged others, and how it at
the same time reflects on the possibilities and limits of representing the
Holocaust and acknowledges the ultimate impossibility of narrative
appropriation. In my view, understanding both fictional and historical
narratives as interpretations of the human being in the world is a
productive starting point for analysing how fictional and historical
narratives imagine the past as a space of possibilities, allowing us to
proceed from there to reflect on the specific ways in which fiction can
produce new insights into history. This requires rigorous textual analysis
that explores not just isolated passages but also what the work as a
whole communicates through the interplay of its various, often tensional
Fiction, History and the Possible 31

dimensions. Integral to such an analysis, I suggest, is the exploration of

how fiction can cultivate our sense of history as the sense of the possible
as we struggle to understand the past and the present – and try to
imagine the not-yet.12

NOTES

1. On narrative hermeneutics, see Brockmeier & Meretoja 2014 and Meretoja 2014.
2. Narratology has been generally dominated by a conception of history that
emphasizes the history of events and political history; for example, according to
Fludernik (2010, 46), ‘historical’ refers to such ‘historically significant’ events as
wars, the American moon landing and the fall of the Berlin Wall.
3. This is consistent with the empirical findings of Frank Hakemulder (2000).
4. As Lothe puts it, ‘there is a sense in which his brutal honesty and lack of regret
make him more, not less, reliable as a reporter’, even if this does not ‘grant him
narrative authority, and certainly not moral authority’ (Lothe 2013, 108–109).
5. This perspective has particularly dominated the German reception of the novel.
See Asholt 2012.
6. As Merja Polvinen (2012) argues, metafictivity and immersiveness often function
in texts simultaneously and are not mutually exclusive, contrary to what many
representatives of cognitive narratology seem to assume. See also Caracciolo
2013.
7. For a more detailed discussion of Le Roi des aulnes, see Meretoja 2014.
8. See also Halliwell 2002; Polvinen 2012 and other articles in that edited volume;
Meretoja 2014. ‘Non-naturalizing narratology’ might be a more appropriate term
for those ‘unnatural narratologists’ who want to distance themselves from a
na€ıve criticism of mimesis and do not wish to commit themselves to the
concomitant dichotomy unnatural/antimimetic vs natural/mimetic and, instead,
insist on the importance of non-naturalizing reading strategies. One might ask,
however, is not all good literary research that does justice to the specificity of
literature ‘non-naturalizing’ in this sense? This ethos of reading is hardly unique
to ‘non-naturalizing narratology’.
9. Suleiman (2012, 116) acknowledges that the ‘loss of control in the narration’ can
be seen as ‘textually mirroring the disintegration of Berlin’, of Aue himself and
of ‘realist narrative’, but does not discuss the significance of the loss of narrative
mastery to the novel’s overall interpretation of – and ethics of representing – the
Holocaust.
10. As Assmann puts it, the ‘phenomenon of regurgitating undigested food’ is ‘a
remarkable image for memory that, unlike the widespread metaphors of writing,
rooms, and buildings, highlights the time dimension involved in the act of
remembering’ (Assmann 2013, 155).
11. For further discussion of this idea in the context of the different ways of
responding to the post-war crisis of storytelling, see Meretoja 2014.
12. I would like to thank Marco Caracciolo, Colin Davis, Henrik Skov Nielsen, the
two anonymous readers of Orbis Litterarum and the audiences at the Centre for
Modern European Literature, University of Kent (31 October 2014), the
32 Hanna Meretoja

International Conference on Narrative (Chicago, 5–8 March 2015) and the 4th
Conference of the European Narratology Network (Ghent, 16–18 April 2015)
for their insightful comments on versions of this article.

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Hanna Meretoja (hailme@utu.fi) is professor of Comparative Literature at the

University of Turku and director of SELMA: Centre for the Study of Storytelling,
Experientiality and Memory. Her most recent publications include The Narrative
Turn in Fiction and Theory: The Crisis and Return of Storytelling from Robbe-Grillet
to Tournier (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), ‘Narrative and human existence: Ontology,
epistemology, and ethics’ (New Literary History, vol. 45, no. 1, 2014) and Values of
Literature (co-edited, Brill Rodopi, 2015).