Baroque suite as a construction scheme in Jonathan Littell’s novel "The Kindly Ones"
Journal Title: Notes Muzyczny - Year 2017, Vol 1, Issue 7
Abstract
Jonathan Littell’s Les Bienveillantes (The Kindly Ones), a novel honoured with prestigious prizes, is an interesting attempt to tell a story of World War II and the Extermination from the standpoint of a former SS officer. The author creates a first-person narrator who by definition presents not just the events but also his feelings and commentaries. This is how the fascinating evil character of Maximilien Aue, an unrealized pianist, holder of a doctorate in constitutional law and a war criminal, was brought to life. For a person studying the border line of music and literature, The Kindly Ones is a very interesting work due to the way how literary text was organised in it. Littell used a scheme of a baroque suite, which became a construction model for his novel. What is important for readers is the specificity of separate movements – parts of the suite (both obligatory and optional ones). The rule of contrast, i.e., the essence of a musical suite, is an element of Littell’s work. In his text readers can also find various kinds of references to the 18th century music and art, such as meaningful names of characters or discussions about composers and pieces of that time. In The Kindly Ones, the ways of talking about and experiencing music are also used to describe protagonists. There is an interesting criterion of early music perception and attitude towards romanticism. It is worth noting that the narrator character was a highly educated man and, despite being born before World War I, he would admire early music even when he was young. As a son of a French mother and a German father, Aue tries to define himself be determining his nationality, and a result of this struggle with his own identity are his opinions about music – German music represented by J. S. Bach, L. van Beethoven, and R. Wagner, and French music represented by French harpsichord players. Littell’s novel belongs to the tradition of organising literary text according to the construction scheme of a selected music genre. In Polish literature, such extremely interesting examples of using a sonata allegro construction model in a novel were Kotły beethovenowskie (Beethoven’s Timpani) by Michał Choromański and a short story Martwa Pasieka (Dead Apiary) by Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz. In foreign lyric verse literature, the model of a fugue was used by Paul Celan in Todesfuge (Death Fugue).<br/><br/>
Authors and Affiliations
Agnieszka Roguska
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