Read Waiting for the Barbarians Online
Authors: Daniel Mendelsohn
I tried to imagine my sister with her legs covered in liquid, sticky diarrhea, with its abominably sweet smell. The emaciated evacuees of Auschwitz, huddled under their blankets, also had their legs covered in shit, their legs like sticks; the ones who stopped to defecate were executed, they were forced to shit as they walked, like horses. Una covered in shit would have been even more beautiful, solar and pure under the mire that would not have touched her, that would have been incapable of soiling her. Between her stained legs I would have nestled like a newborn starving for milk and love, lost.
Such passages are, to be sure, part of a carefully plotted progression: Germany’s disintegration is mirrored in Aue’s indulgence in increasingly
grotesque sexual activities and fantasies (not least, of coprophagy), as well as by other, external elements of the narrative. Toward the end of the novel, when the Soviets have entered German territory and are making for Berlin, Aue and his “Pylades,” also trying to get back to Berlin, take up with a band of nightmarish Aryan orphans who wage brutal guerrilla warfare on Soviet troops, and in the book’s final few pages Aue commits his last murders at the zoo: he has, in other words, made a climactic regression first to the infantile and finally to the bestial.
But as much as we may admire these structural touches, the problem, in the end, is that they make it harder and harder—and, finally, impossible—to see Aue as anything but, well, “inhuman,” a “monster,” precisely the kind of cliché of depravity that so many of this novel’s strongest passages successfully resist.
Littell’s insistence on developing the motifs of the fantastical, the grotesque, and extreme sexual excess, which grow out of his Orestes theme, is clearly the result of a choice. He himself has carefully planted clues about the meaning, and the justification, of that choice, one that has little to do with the Holocaust per se, or with novelizing history, and everything to do with something very French and very literary.
Exactly halfway through
The Kindly Ones
, Aue finds himself in Paris—this is in 1943, the trip at the end of which he will go to the South and murder his mother—and, while strolling among the stalls of the
bouquinistes
, picks up a volume of essays by Maurice Blanchot (an author whom Littell has studied seriously and who, by a nice coincidence, has been recently translated by Mandell, the translator of
The Kindly Ones
). Inevitably, Aue is very much taken with an essay that he vaguely describes as being about a play by Sartre on the Orestes theme. The volume in question, then, must be Blanchot’s 1943 collection
Faux Pas
, which, in a section called “From Anguish to Language,”
contains the essay “The Myth of Orestes”; the Sartre drama in question is
Les Mouches
, which was first produced in 1943. Aue says little about the essay, apart from paraphrasing its point that Sartre “used the figure of the unfortunate matricide to develop his ideas on man’s freedom in crime; Blanchot judged it harshly, and I could only approve.” But it will turn out that Aue is seriously misreading Blanchot.
Sartre’s play has famous connections to the Occupation and the moral dilemmas of France. In it, Orestes returns home to Argos to find a corrupted city and, indeed, a corrupted cosmos; he learns from Zeus that the gods themselves are unjust, a discovery that renders absurd his, or anyone’s, wishful yearnings for a life uncomplicated by moral anguish, indeed for a life in which one could simply be a person like any other person, a “human brother.” As in the
Oresteia
, Orestes must kill his mother, although here the act has distinctly twentieth-century meanings that Aeschylus could not have dreamed of, as Blanchot’s interpretation of the matricide indicates:
The meaning of the double murder is that he can only be truly free by the ordeal of an act whose unbearable consequences he accepts and bears.… The hero claims all the responsibility for what he has done; the act belongs to him absolutely; he
is
this act, which is also his existence and his freedom. Yet this freedom is not yet complete. One is not free if one is the only one free, for the fact of freedom is linked to the revelation of existence in the world. Orestes must then not only destroy the law of remorse for himself, but he must abolish it for others and through the unique manifestation of his freedom establish an order from which inner reprisals and the legions of terrifying justice have disappeared.
Here, then, we see the large intellectual aim that the Orestes theme is meant to serve, as mediated by the Blanchot text to which Littell’s
novel so pointedly refers. Very early in
The Kindly Ones
, Aue makes a point of rejecting the solace offered by traditional moral terms: “I am not talking about remorse, or about guilt. These too exist, no doubt, I don’t want to deny it, but I think things are far more complex than that.” And indeed Littell, both in interviews and in the text of his novel, has dwelt on the differences between Judeo-Christian morality (with its emphasis on intent and mental attitude, on sin and the possibility of redemption) and the sterner, less sentimental, “forthright” morality he finds in Greek tragedy. (“The Greek attitude is much more forthright,” he told
Le Figaro Magazine
. “I say it in the book: when Oedipus kills Laius he doesn’t know he’s his father, but the gods couldn’t care less: you killed your father. He fucks Jocasta, he doesn’t know she’s his mother, that doesn’t change a thing: you’re guilty,
basta
.”)
But Littell doesn’t at all want to suggest that Aue is “beyond morality”: quite the contrary, he wants to paint a picture of a character who, just as his actions have placed him beyond the bounds of the moral law, has also put himself beyond the comforts that the traditional concepts of morality and justice afford—like Sartre’s Oreste, in Blanchot’s interpretation:
It would be infantile to think that by his fearful murder he has rid himself of everything, that, free of remorse and continuing to want what he did even after having done it, he is finished with his act and outside of its consequences. On the contrary, it is now that he will sound the surprising abyss of horror and naked fear that dogmatic beliefs no longer veil, the abyss of naked, free existence, free of complacent superstitions.… He is free; reconciliation with forgetfulness and repose is no longer permitted him; from now on he can only be associated with despair, with solitude, or with boredom.
It is no accident that the elderly Aue whom we meet at the beginning of the novel, as he starts composing his vast reminiscence, is a man who lives exactly such a life: quiet but empty, desperate, alone, and above all very, very bored.
The passages I have cited above make it clear that rather than disapproving of Sartre’s play, as Aue suggests is the case in his brief reference to this essay, Blanchot admired it; and indeed his essay begins by extravagantly praising Sartre’s play as being of “exceptional value and meaning.” So where is the “harsh judgment” that, Aue claims, Blanchot has made?
The answer to that question provides the key to understanding why Littell’s book veers off in the direction of the “pornography” that has disturbed so many critics and readers. For, having set out his case for
Les Mouches
as a study of a man who has “decided to strike a blow at the sacred,” Blanchot observes that for the play to work, the blow at the sacred, the “sacrilegious quality,” must be excessive, overwhelming; and worries that the
impression of the sacrilegious is sometimes lacking from the play that it should sustain.… Did [Sartre] not push the abjection that he portrays far enough? Orestes’ greatness falls short of impiety against real piety.
And so, rather than using the graphic details of violence and sex simply (and naively) to shock his reader in a superficial way, the violence, the “pornography of violence” even, is consciously evoked, given its baroquely nightmarish details, in order to heighten the “impression of the sacrilegious”—not to somehow defend Aue because he is outside of morality but to show us, horribly, what a life outside of morality looks, feels, sounds, and smells like. The “pornographic” material is not a shallow symbol of Aue’s evil (a puritanical reading, if anything);
it is, rather, Littell completing Sartre’s unfinished task, “pushing the abjection far enough,” struggling to show “impiety against real piety”—the “piety,” in this case, being our own conventional pruderies and expectations of what a novel about Nazis might look like.
In this sense,
The Kindly Ones
places itself squarely within the tradition of a “literature of transgression,” especially the French lineage that descends from the Marquis de Sade and the Comte de Lautréamont to Octave Mirbeau and Georges Bataille. Particularly in the elaborate sexual fantasies, the sex between teenage siblings, the coprophilia and incest themes, it is hard not to feel the influence, above all, of Bataille, to whose signature work,
Histoire de l’Oeil
, in which a violently detached eye becomes a sexual fetish used with great inventiveness, Littell alludes more than once. (There are a number of scenes in which eyes pop out of crushed or exploded heads.) I think that Littell might say that precisely because we are by now inured to representations of Nazi evil in literature and especially in film, he needs to break new taboos in order to make us think about evil, about a life lived in evil and a mind unsentimentally willing, even eager, to accept the ramifications of that choice. Whatever else he has done, Littell has written a novel that really does horrify. Critics who complain that it is unpleasant to read are missing the whole point.
So the “kitsch” is in fact integral to the novel’s moralizing projects. And yet, as I have said, the effectiveness of the fantastical, mythic/ sexual plane of the novel works against the success of the other large element, the historical/documentary: either Aue is a human brother with whom we can sympathize (by which I mean, accept that he is not simply “inhuman”), or he is a sex-crazed, incestuous, homosexual, matricidal coprophage. But you can’t have your
Schwarzwälder Kirschtorte
and eat it, too. This is not to say that the aim of either element is mistaken or illegitimate, as some critics have argued: I
don’t think they are. (One valid complaint, given Aue’s “Greek” morality, his eagerness to acknowledge his responsibility for actions, is that the matricide and murder are committed during a kind of blackout on his part: he isn’t conscious of what he’s doing, which seems a serious evasion.) But precisely because each element works so well on its own, the novel as a whole falls between two horses.
Still, however badly it may stumble,
The Kindly Ones
brings to mind Blanchot’s judgment, one of which Aue enthusiastically approves, about another enormous, hybrid novel:
Moby-Dick
. “This impossible book,” the French critic wrote, “[the] written equivalent of the universe … presents the ironic quality of an enigma and reveals itself only by the questions it raises.” As another
Kindly Ones
—that of Aeschylus—continues to remind us, there exist strange fictional creatures, improbable hybrids whose two sides seem to have little to do with each other, freaks that, however unlikely we are to find them in nature, can give us nightmares that will haunt us long after the show is over.
—The New York Review of Books
, March 26, 2009
IN AUGUST 1929
, Sigmund Freud scoffed at the notion that he would do anything as crass as write an autobiography. “That is of course quite an impossible suggestion,” he wrote to his nephew, who had conveyed an American publisher’s suggestion that the great man write his life story. “Outwardly,” Freud went on, perhaps a trifle disingenuously, “my life has passed calmly and uneventfully and can be covered by a few dates.” Inwardly—and who knew better?—things were a bit more complicated:
A psychologically complete and honest confession of life, on the other hand, would require so much indiscretion (on my part as well as on that of others) about family, friends, and enemies, most of them still alive, that it is simply out of the question. What makes all autobiographies worthless is, after all, their mendacity.
Freud ended by suggesting that the $5,000 advance that had been
offered was a hundredth of the sum necessary to tempt him into such a foolhardy venture.
Unseemly self-exposures, unpalatable betrayals, unavoidable mendacity, a soupçon of meretriciousness: memoir, for much of its modern history, has been the black sheep of the literary family. Like a drunken guest at a wedding, it’s constantly mortifying its soberer relatives (philosophy, history, literary fiction)—spilling family secrets, embarrassing old friends, motivated, it would seem, by an overpowering need to be the center of attention. Even when the most distinguished writers and thinkers have turned to autobiography, they have found themselves accused of literary exhibitionism—when they can bring themselves to put on a show at all. When Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s
Confessions
appeared, shocking the salons of eighteenth-century Paris with matter-of-fact descriptions of the author’s masturbation and masochism, Edmund Burke lamented the “new sort of glory” the eminent
philosophe
was getting “from bringing hardily to light the obscure and vulgar vices, which we know may sometimes be blended with eminent talents.” (The complaint sounds eerily familiar today.) When, at the suggestion of her sister, Virginia Woolf started, somewhat reluctantly, to compose an autobiographical “sketch,” she found herself, inexplicably at first, thinking of a certain hallway mirror—the scene, as further probing of her memory revealed, of an incestuous assault by her half brother Gerald, an event that her memory had repressed, and about which, in the end, she was unable to write for publication.
As it happens, Woolf, the tentative memoirist, met Freud, who wouldn’t dream of writing one, when both were nearing the end of their lives; Woolf’s nephew Quentin Bell reported that the psychoanalyst presented the novelist with a narcissus. Whatever Freud may have meant by the gesture, it nicely symbolizes the troubling association between creativity and narcissism, an association that is nowhere
as intense as when the creation in question is memoir, a literary form that exposes the author’s life without the protective masks afforded by fiction.