Never Again, or Nevermore
Never Again, or Nevermore
Just as Maggie Nelson’s Jane has a picture of the real (non-fictional) Jane at its center, so does Jonathan Littell’s novel, The Kindly Ones, originate with the photo of a Russian partisan, killed by the Nazis. This chapter is about Littell’s ambition to use her death and the Holocaust more generally to make what he calls “Literature,” an act that involves repudiating the ethical demands of “witness” and replacing them with the idea of a “perfect” work of art. And it’s this commitment to the “perfect” that provides a final emblem of the class aesthetic that this book seeks to describe.
Keywords: Jonathan Littell, Maggie Nelson, The Kindly Ones, aesthetic, Holocaust, witness
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