Reader as Witness: First-Person Perpetrators of Political Violence in Contemporary Literature

Abstract

Twenty-first century novels increasingly portray twentieth-century histories of violence in a way that implicates readers: as keepers of public memory, as complicit in ongoing political violence, and even as potential perpetrators. These novels target a global readership and treat the recollections of past atrocities and the prevention of future ones as a global responsibility. This essay describes the reader as a variety of what Geoffrey Hartman calls the “intellectual witness,” people who feel responsible for the maintenance of the stories of an atrocity, even without having personal ties to it. Perpetrator fiction plays a unique role in constructing the reader as witness, because it resists the easy identification of readers with the victim position and complicates the distinctions of perpetrator, freedom fighter, victim, and bystander. Looking closely at three works of perpetrator fiction—Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones, John Berger’s A to X, and Boubacar Boris Diop’s Murambi, the Book of Bones—this chapter discusses the various forms of responsibility they impute to readers. The reader as witness is situated in reference to survivor witnesses, humanitarian witnesses, and the phenomenological understanding of the subject as always already witness.