The Mind of the Holocaust Perpetrator in Fiction and Nonfiction by Erin McGlothlin

Author:Erin McGlothlin [McGlothlin, Erin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: LIT024000 Literary Criticism / Modern / General, LIT025010 Literary Criticism / Subjects & Themes / Historical Events, HIS043000 History / Holocaust
Publisher: Wayne State University Press
Published: 2021-05-04T00:00:00+00:00

12 It is important to note, however, that Todorov’s typology is a separate issue from the narratological distinction I make above between the diegesis of the interview and Sereny’s extradiegetic commentary in the role of narrator. My classification according to diegetic level is a structural one that focuses on the interview scene as the primary narrative and Sereny’s reflections on that scene as a secondary one. Todorov’s framework, on the other hand, helps to distinguish between the principal story of Stangl’s crimes and the second-level story of Sereny’s attempt to uncover the meaning of these crimes. As Peter Hühn helpfully elaborates on Todorov’s model, “The plot of the classical detective novel comprises two basically separate stories—the story of the crime (which consists of action) and the story of the investigation (which is concerned with knowledge). In their narrative presentation, however, the two stories are intertwined. The first story (the crime) happened in the past and is—insofar as it is hidden—absent from the present; the second story (the investigation) happens in the present and consists of uncovering the first story. . . . Employing Gérard Genette’s and Seymour Chatman’s distinction between story and discourse, one can define the narrative organization of a classical detective novel as follows. The usual constellation of story and discourse (the abstractable preexistent sequence of events and acts versus its mediation in a narrative) occurs twice over: the story of the crime is mediated in the discourse of the detective’s investigation; and the story of the detective’s investigation, in its turn, is mediated in the narrator’s discourse” (452). Hühn’s last definition of the structure of the classical detective novel according to the doubled functions of story and discourse seems to me to be the closest approximate to the organization of Sereny’s book.

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