Abstract
Jonathan Littell's novel The Kindly Ones describes the process and details of the holocaust from the perspective of a Nazi officer and in doing so it depicts the protagonist as an ancient Greek tragic hero. This way of appropriating the antagonist to the empathy effect and literary catharsis and sympathy tries to achieve therapeutic purpose, but this way invokes much criticism. How can fiction interact with the (re) construction of emotions associated to mass extermination, especially when such emotions are reactivated from the point of view of an SS officer? After reexamining some of the questions raised by Jonathan Littell's The Kindly Ones, and after reconsidering the recurrent reference to tragedy when fictions dealing with mass extermination are at stake, the paper tries to compare two types of critical approaches to the notion of catharsis. The one is the ethical reluctance to connect the experience of extermination with the effects of "tragedy" in the post-Auschwitch context. The other is that the heterodox attempts questioning the nature (and even the possibility) of the cathartic process and demystifying the "paradigmatic scenarios" tragedies provide to stimulate and share certain kinds of emotions. Can such a detour help us to analyze from a different perspective the impact of art on the way we experience, and characterize and evaluate emotions such as "pity" and "terror" today?
First Page
6
Last Page
14
Recommended Citation
Jean-Charles, Darmon, and Xi Xiao. 2015. "Literature and the Therapy of Passion: Catharsis against the Extreme Violence." Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art 35, (4): pp.6-14. https://tsla.researchcommons.org/journal/vol35/iss4/13
