The implied reader of Jonathan Littell's novel “Les bienveillantes”: towards a reconstruction of the receptive program

Jonathan Littell's novel “Les Bienveillantes” is dedicated to the events of World War II, and addresses the questions of historical memory, the issue of guilt and necessity. Due to the fact that the novel offers to regard the events of the war from the viewpoint a war criminal, it is structured as a dialogue with the reader. “Les Bienveillantes” introduces a new type of narrative in the Holocaust literature, as well as a new type of narrator-protagonist. At the same time, the question of the receptive potential of the novel still remains poorly explored. The article is devoted to the identification of the receptive program of Jonathan Littell's novel “Les Bienveillantes”. The communicative strategy of the text and the figure of the implicit reader of the novel help recreate receptive-aesthetic and narratological methods. The author of the article relies on the works by H.-R. Yauss and U. Eco, describing the process of transformation of the expectation horizon of an implicit reader. This change is directly dependent on the communicative techniques used by the narrator. The study is based on the first chapter of the novel due to the fact that it explicates the text strategy and the narrative techniques involved by the author to model the figure of an implicit reader. The analysis undertaken by the author enabled her to identify such narrative “tactics” as attaining readers' benevolence and forcing the recipient to co-responsibility. In accordance with the narrative strategy of the novel, the reader experiences a kind of initiation, passing from judging the protagonist (a former SS officer) to confessing being a potential criminal through identifying oneself with the narrator. This metamorphosis determines the angle of reading the next chapters of the novel, the events of which are described from the “executioner's” viewpoint who takes part in the extermination of the Jewish people.