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

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Jonas Grethlein
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Abstract

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.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 127 , Issue 1 , January 2012 , pp. 77 - 93
Copyright
Copyright © 2012 by The Modern Language Association of America

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