‘This Incomprehensible Thing’: Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones and the Aesthetics of Excess

Jonathan Littell’s novel Les Bienveillantes (The Kindly Ones) is challenging in both its subject and approach. Purporting to be the memoirs of SS-officer Maximilien Aue, it represents many of the Second World War’s most grievous atrocities in graphic detail, an approach which has been criticised as a ‘poetics of horror’ created by a ‘pornographer of violence’. However, Littell’s transgression of the literary norms of Holocaust representation through minimalist underwriting by the employment of an aesthetics of excess is not gratuitous; instead, it both revitalises the reader’s reaction to the depicted historic events, and extends their ethical implications beyond their historical moment.