Les bienveillantes (2006)

One very considerable problem of antisemitism, as a subject to comprehend responsibly as a citizen of coffee, is its infuriating mutability. The horror of the canny molecular mutation, in the back of every retrovirologist's mind, is nothing more than the quotidian face of this desperate sociopathic infection. Even its most notable incidents of inflammation under the twelve-year Reich, 1933-45, have defied comprehension, at their most fundamental level; and yet nobody can be content to resign himself to this protracted enigma, in the way we accept the intractable mystery of heterosexuality. There is the fact that antisemitism is a choice.

The judeocide of the late War in Europe drew breath from the structuring of a choice which was assented to, in various modes and degrees and for various ostensible reasons, with breathtaking multilateralism. These layers of permission have stood in the way of historiography, despite the production of a plethora of sub-masterpieces on one or more of its moving parts. The most urgent first-person narratives and the assaults of poetry, too, have acquiesced in some way to an abiding resistance to comprehension of the whole, as if that would be pretentious, or an exhibition of blasphemy. Now, however, it feels as if a mighty fortress has all but finally fallen to prose fiction.

Jonathan Littell's fictional work, The Kindly Ones, written in French and published in France in 2006 as Les bienveillantes, is notorious for its baggage of literary prizes, exhausting length, and exhaustive catalogue of depravities. The book's existence restored itself to my attention in 2010 and occupied a couple of weeks of my reading calendar, gaining for itself the serious impression that one cannot understand the Holocaust without wading through it.

Remember how little you found you actually wanted to know, about whales? The book, itself, and the best review of the book remark explicitly on that sensation, of reading Moby-Dick. And that review is excellent on the book's self-conscious references to Aeschylus, the Oresteia. You will want to revisit the plays, and when you do, you will gain a necessary vantage point on their fearsome framing relevance in Robert Fagles' introductory essay to his own translation. You will not need to re-read Melville, because The Kindly Ones, itself, will steep you in recollection that Melville could not have 'quarreled with God' any other way. But you will have to read this Augean labour of an absorbingly researched, minutely crafted, fully anatomising book, all the way, to arrive outside the belly of the beast. There is no shortcut, no speed-read, no synopsis to its catharsis. There is no other exit. This is a great achieve-ment.

.. no war, no force, no prayer

can hinder the midnight Fury stamped

with parent Fury moving through the house.

                                Agamemnon, Chorus, 758-60

Only one material element in the judeocide eludes Littell's grasp - antisemitism. Of course this only purifies his accomplishment, to thrust it upon the stage as Aeschylus had done, confiding its human qualities.  

Jonathan Littell, Y'89
The Kindly Ones
  Charlotte Mandell, translation
Harper Collins, 2009©


Robert Fagles
  Late Professor of Comparative Literature
  Princeton University
The Serpent and the Eagle,
  A Reading of the Oresteia
Princeton, 1976©


Aeschylus
Agamemnon
The Libation Bearers
The Eumenides
  All 458 BC
Robert Fagles, translation
Penguin Classics, 1977©