Kirjallisuus historiantulkintana, mahdollisen taju ja Jonathan Littellin Hyväntahtoiset

• Hanna Meretoja Tampereen yliopisto / Turun yliopisto

DOI: https://doi.org/10.30665/av.74986

Abstract

Literary Interpretation of History, a Sense of the Possible, and Jonathan Littell’s Les Bienveillantes

This article examines the assumptions underlying the view that literature deals with the realm of the possible and history with the realm of the actual. This dichotomy risks dismissing how a sense of the possible constitutes an important dimension of every actual world, how literature provides interpretations of actual worlds, and how it has its own literary means of giving us a sense of a past world as a space of possibilities. The argument is developed by analysing Jonathan Littell’s Les Bienveillantes (2006, The Kindly Ones), which has created a heated controversy on the contribution of literature to the understanding of the Holocaust. The article contributes to a narrative hermeneutics which suggests that both historiography and fiction are ways of interpreting the world past and present, and is sensitive to how fiction requires specific modes of interpretation and engagement. The analysis of Littell’s novel shows that the interplay between immersiveness and critical distance can produce a narrative dynamic that allows the reader to engage emotionally – but without uncritically adopting the protagonist’s perspective – with an ethically problematic life-world. One important way in which fiction can produce insights into history is its ability to cultivate, through its specifically fictional means, a sense of history as a sense of the possible while at the same time reflecting on the conditions and limits of narrating, representing, and understanding history.