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, are consciously evoked, given their 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 Max’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.
Transgression | The New York Review of Books
Posted 1 year ago
