1When poet Paul Celan was awarded the Bremen Literature Prize in 1958, he declared:
Reachable, near and not lost, there remained in the midst of the losses this one thing: language. It, the language, remained, not lost, yes, in spite of everything. But it had to pass through its own answerlessness, pass through frightful muting, pass through the thousand darknesses of deathbringing speech. It passed through and gave back no words for that which happened; yet it passed through this happening. Passed through and could come to light again, “enriched” by all this.
2British writer Martin Amis uses Celan’s formulation, ‘that which happened’, as part of the title of the epilogue to his 2014 Holocaust novel, The Zone of Interest (303). In doing so, Amis questions the ability of language to pass through to an audience by placing the issue of the capacity of language to represent the trauma of the Shoah at the core of his narrative project, twenty-three years after the publication of Time’s Arrow. Amis thus returns to a literary tradition that has long been reflecting on the possibility and ethics of writing about the Holocaust, following Theodor W. Adorno’s claim that writing poetry after Auschwitz would be barbaric (1986).
3With The Zone of Interest, Amis offers to explore once again the genre of perpetrators fiction as the novel adopts the point of view of Nazi officials and recounts the daily lives of officers working in a nameless camp meant to resemble Auschwitz. This polyphonic novel assembles the voices of three male protagonists: Angelus Thomsen a Nazi officer, Paul Doll a Nazi commandant, and Szmul a member of the Sonderkommando, a group of prisoners forced to dispose of the bodies of the victims. It depicts the extermination process undertaken by the Nazi regime and focuses mostly on the period of time running from August 1942 to the spring of 1943. During this period, Doll works on ensuring the unfolding of the Nazi crime, while Thomsen grapples with his feelings for the commandant’s wife, Hannah Doll. Szmul, on the other hand, attempts to write what he has witnessed in the camps and ultimately buries his testimony.
- 1 Richard Crownshaw identifies ‘a turn towards the figure of the perpetrator’ (75) and observes: ‘Put (...)
4In adopting such perspectives, Amis engages with ethical and political issues that remain tightly linked to aesthetic choices. Scholar in German Studies Stephanie Bird argues that ‘[l]iterary representations of perpetrators that give them a voice, present their point of view, or give access to their subjectivity and motivations frequently cause anxiety, even scandal’ (Bird 301). Texts that adopt the point of view of perpetrators indeed threaten to mythologise the figure of the perpetrator and to overshadow the testimony of the victims by de-emphasising what they went through1. Sue Vice opens her study of Holocaust fiction insisting on this notion of scandal and states that ‘Holocaust fictions are scandalous: that is, they invariably provoke controversy by inspiring repulsion and acclaim in equal measure’ (Vice 2000, 1). If the adoption of the perpetrator’s point of view is bound to challenge the reading process, Amis’s insertion of the German language, the gruesome descriptions of the outskirts of the camp, and his use of humour also created scandal around the publication and reception of the novel, leading up to a controversy when his longtime French and German publishers refused to publish the text. Marie-Pierre Gracedieu, publisher for Gallimard, declared: ‘[Ce texte] met mal à l’aise, non pour des raisons historiographiques, mais parce qu’il reste au niveau d’un vaudeville pornographique et qu’il réunit tous les clichés sur la Shoah’ (Anon. n.p.). Conversely, Florence Sultan, publisher at Calmann-Lévy and who eventually published the text, described it as ‘un objet éminemment littéraire, extrêmement bien documenté. L’humour, certes cynique, confère une puissance supplémentaire au texte’ (Anon. n.p.). The publishing controversy foresaw the challenge that the reading of those three fictional written testimonies represents as ‘here grubbiness threatens to turn to disgust. Disgust with author and disgust with oneself for giving into the rhetorical power of his writing’ (Wynn Weldon n.p.).
- 2 In a conversation with Shoshana Felman, director Claude Lanzmann refers to ‘the obscenity of unders (...)
5When asked by Salman Rushdie about the way he considers the relationship he builds with his readers, Amis declared: ‘At its simplest, it’s a matter of straightforward transmission: I am telling a story’ (Rushdie n.p.). One may wonder if the ‘straightforward transmission’ undertaken in The Zone of Interest might not turn into an obscenity, or pornography, that would threaten to interrupt Amis’s very narrative project of transmission.2 This paper will determine how Amis uses the paratext of his novel to question his approach to the memory of the Shoah and to situate his position regarding the matter. It will then examine how an aesthetic of shock might counteract the inability for language to represent trauma. Ultimately, in light of Rita Felski’s work on the reader’s engagement with a text, it will analyse how Amis resorts to using shock and disgust as a way of letting something of the Holocaust ‘pass through’ while challenging the aesthetic pleasure one might experience in reading those testimonies.
6In engaging with the subject of the Holocaust, Amis participates in what Marianne Hirsch has identified as postmemory: ‘a powerful and very particular form of memory precisely because its connection to its object or source is mediated not through recollection but through an imaginative investment and creation’ (Hirsch 1997, 22). Amis is not of Jewish heritage and therefore does not belong directly to what Hirsch designates as ‘the generation after’ whose life was marked by ‘overwhelming memories’ and ‘narratives that preceded one’s birth’ (Hirsch 2012, 5). However, in coining the term ‘affiliative postmemory’, Hirsch opens a space for the creative production of ‘those less proximate members of their generation or relational network who share a legacy of trauma and thus the curiosity, the urgency, the frustrated need to know about a traumatic past’ (Hirsch 2012, 35; original emphasis). If Amis has shown a long-time intellectual interest in the history of the Holocaust, he has also maintained what he presents as a father-son relationship with Jewish American writer Saul Bellow (Amis 2021, 282) and has dedicated The Zone of Interest to his Jewish wife and daughters (Amis 2014, 311). Drawing from Hirsch, I would therefore suggest that Amis affiliates with the history of the Holocaust and takes part in postmemory.
- 3 In an interview with Donna Seaman, Amis himself uses the terms ‘social realism’ to describe his int (...)
7In both his Holocaust novels, Amis anchors his imaginative investment in thorough historical research. Indeed, as Jean-Michel Ganteau argues in his study of the 1991 novel, Time’s Arrow is woven around intertextual and metatextual references to Robert Jay Lifton’s The Nazi Doctor (Ganteau 123). Such intertextuality, as well as the narrative inversion principle, build a defamiliarising text that pushes the reader to undergo what Diane Leblond has identified as a feeling of vertigo (Leblond n.p.). Conversely, The Zone of Interest offers what one might initially consider as a less subversive mode of narration. The novel is no longer a cryptic one that would require active decoding, but one based on social realism that strives to expose the practical reality of the camps.3 The Nazi crime comes to be represented through Paul Doll’s obsession with the logistic organisation of the camp. His sections are saturated with numerical details while he himself confesses, in between parentheses, to his love for numbers:
(I like numbers. They speak of logic, exactitude, and thrift. I’m a little uncertain, sometimes, about ‘one’—about whether it denotes quantity, or is being used as a . . . ‘pronoun’? But consistency’s the thing. And I like numbers. Numbers, numerals, integers. Digits!) (Amis 2014, 22)
- 4 Amis declared: ‘It’s only in the character of Szmul that I felt I was really confronting it directl (...)
- 5 Didi-Huberman writes : ‘Écriture du désastre, écriture de l’épicentre: les Rouleaux d’Auschwitz for (...)
- 6 For Fortin-Tournes, the polyphonic nature of the novel offers a way to counter the impossibility to (...)
8Despite Amis’s claim for social realism, the horror of the camps resists narrativisation and the extermination process remains assigned to a background position. Indeed, as he discusses a potential reduction in the prisoner’s food rations, Thomsen observes: ‘From outside there came a volley of inarticulate bawling, plus two pistol shots and then the familiar rhythm of the whip’ (88). Szmul offers a way into the core of the zone of interest as he remains impervious to the borders of the camps. He works ‘among the dead’ and ‘move[s] among the living’ (33–34). Amis admitted to the difficulty of using victims of the Holocaust as narrators and argued that the paradoxical nature of Szmul’s position as a member of the Sonderkommando allowed him to face the horror of the camps directly.4 Through Szmul’s testimony, Amis fictionalises the scrolls of Auschwitz as Szmul explicitly refers to one of them being buried ‘under the hedgerow that borders Doll’s garden’ (78). The scrolls gathered written testimonies that were buried by members of the Sonderkommando in the hope that a trace would remain from what they had witnessed. George Didi-Huberman describes those testimonies as writings coming from the disaster, from the epicenter of the catastrophe: ‘Toute leur tentative fut de transmettre la connaissance, autant que possible d’un tel processus’ (Didi-Huberman 137).5 Szmul himself questions his ability to convey what he has seen. After reading another prisoner’s testimony, he wonders: ‘I am a serious man, and I am writing my testimony. Am I writing like this? Will I be able to control my pen, or will it just come out—like this?’ (Amis 2014, 79). Ultimately, Szmul cannot find the words to describe the reality of the camps and claims that he needs ‘something more than words’ (238). Szmul’s words, or lack of, place the novel at the centre of the debate on the say-ability of the Shoah since, as Anne-Laure Fortin-Tournès has stated, Szmul experiences ‘a crisis in language’.6
9Amis declared having ‘dreaded any poetic summoning of the horror’ (Seaman) while in the afterword he questions the responsibility of the author to write about such a subject matter. Amis’s preoccupation falls in line with Irene Kacandes’s injunction to consider the postmemory gap that exists between the event and post-rememberers. She presents such awareness as essential to the ethics of postmemory and states that:
Responsible memory work needs to make perceptible the actions the post-rememberer is taking, as well as the differences between the post-rememberer and the individual who lived through the traumatic experiences being recounted.
10She adds that writers need to be ‘self-consciously vigilant about acceptable and inacceptable forms of appropriation’ (Kacandes 197).
- 7 He declared having wanted to offer ‘an essayistic explanation’ to the writing of the novel. (Amis 2 (...)
- 8 Marianne Hirsch describes the generation of post-rememberers as ‘those who grow up dominated by nar (...)
- 9 Genette presents the paratext in the following terms: ‘Plus que d’une limite ou d’une frontière éta (...)
11The paratext of the novel becomes a space where Amis makes perceptible the process that he undertook as a post-rememberer. It brings together an epigraph, a photograph, an afterword and a dedication, and interlaces fiction and history to the point that the paratext cannot be dissociated from the rest of the novel. Indeed, while the epigraph puts together and re-shuffles fragments from Macbeth, thus referring the text to the canon of British literature, the epilogue retraces the origins of Amis’s text to a historical undertaking. In order to ensure the authenticity of his narrative, Amis has relied on ‘the loci classici of the field’ (Amis 2014, 303): the historians, political scientists and philosophers who have established ‘the macrocosm’ of the Holocaust studies. He presents the numerous works he has leaned on in order to understand the atmosphere of the Third Reich, the exact organisation of the camps, and the history of anti-Semitism, as well as the ones that helped him capture ‘the tics and rhythms of German speech’ and explore the survivors’ testimonies (303). Ultimately, Amis uses the afterword as an essay7 to expose the questions that have guided his thought process regarding the Holocaust and that have long been nourishing the discussion around the very possibility, and need, to understand the Holocaust. Drawing on Primo Levi, Amis writes: ‘There was no why in Auschwitz. Was there a why in the mind of the Reichskanzler-President-Generalissimo? And if there was, why can’t we find it?’ (306). In using the first-person pronoun ‘we’, Amis calls out to a community of post-rememberers8 and turns his afterword into what Gérard Genette has called a ‘zone of transaction’ between the text and the reader.9 The afterword retrospectively informs the way readers engage with the text and it compels them to determine their political and ethical position regarding it.
- 10 Felski writes: ‘I propose that reading involves a logic of recognition; that aesthetic experience h (...)
12Engagement designates a wide range of reactions from ‘being turned on by, disgusted by, possessed by, or falling in love with characters, . . . as well as identifying with them’ (Felski 2020, 81). For Rita Felski, ‘modes of textual engagement’ represent ‘multi-leveled interactions between text and readers’, among which shock plays an essential part (Felski 2008, 14).10 I would therefore like to consider the aesthetic of shock of The Zone of Interest and how it might come as a recourse to the resistance of language in dealing with historical trauma.
13Shock is defined as a sudden unexpected event or experience which surprises or upsets (OED) and it remains intrinsically related to trauma and its narrativisation. Indeed, Cathy Caruth considers the paradoxical nature of the narrativisation of trauma and how the turning of the trauma into a narrative memory might threaten ‘the precision and the force that characterizes traumatic recall’ and lead to the loss of ‘the event’s essential incomprehensibility, the force of its affront to understanding’. She argues:
The danger of speech, of integration into the narration of memory, may lie not in what it cannot understand, but in that it understands too much. Speech seems to offer only, as Kevin Newmark says, the attempt ‘to move away from the experience of shock by reintegrating it into a stable understanding of it’. (Caruth 153–154)
- 11 On the literary techniques novelists use to represent trauma see Anne Whitehead, Trauma Fiction.
14If shock designates an unexpected event that disturbs one’s balance, it also refers to the sudden, often violent, collision of two things (OED). In The Zone of Interest, Amis strives to build a clash of images and tones, starting with an actual photograph inserted in the paratext, that allows him to preserve the experience of the shock of historical trauma and to counter the resistance of language to the narrativisation of traumatic events.11
- 12 In Images malgré tout, George Didi-Huberman gathers the text originally written for the exhibition (...)
15Indeed, in keeping the extermination process in the background, Amis attempts to find his place in the fundamental debate over the ethics of the visual representation of the Holocaust. Such a debate was crystallised in the controversy that surrounded the exhibition Mémoire des camps. Photographies des camps de concentration et d’extermination nazis (1933–1999) in 2001, in Paris, during which four photographs taken by members of the Auschwitz Sonderkommando were shown. Director of Shoah Claude Lanzmann, as well as Gérard Wajcman and Élisabeth Pagnoux, condemned the showing of those pictures and warned against the risk of fetichising images of the Holocaust. On the other hand, George Didi-Huberman advocated for a representation ‘in spite of all’, and saw in images a possibility to convey something of the past.12 Amis, who is well aware of those considerations that he mentions in his afterword, resorts to using a photograph that he inserts between the end of the novel and the epilogue. After finishing the novel, the reader discovers a picture of Hitler followed by his private secretary Borman. In refusing to use a picture displaying the extermination process or the piles of corpses discovered after the liberation of the camps, Amis confirms his choice of keeping the zone of interest at a distance, and thus brings the focus onto the paradoxical nature of what Michiko Kakutani called ‘ordinary monsters’ (Kakutani n.p.). The picture derives from a particular aesthetic and political choice since it has been cropped out. The original photograph depicts Hitler being surrounded by his officers after a failed assassination attempt in July 1944, while that from the novel has zoomed onto Hitler’s and Borman’s faces. The picture thus acts as what Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer designate as a ‘point of memory’, ‘a point of intersection between past and present’ that ‘interpellates the reader’ (Hirsch and Spitzer 358–359). Indeed, the eruption of Hitler’s face onto the page follows the impossibility for Amis to write his name throughout the novel. In the epilogue, he observes that the time has come to write the name of the dictator in full letters and that it, somehow, seems more manageable when placed in-between quotation marks (Amis 2014, 305). The irruption of Hitler onto the page via an actual photograph is even more shocking since the dictator has remained in the background for the entire novel. Drawing from Barthes’s words on the punctum, the image rises from the page, ‘shoots out of it like an arrow, and pierces [us]’ (Barthes 26). The shocking effect is increased by the appearance of the two men, whom Amis describes as being ‘loutish’ (Amis 2020), and by the contrast between the serious face of Hitler and Borman’s smiley features.
16In the main text, shock often derives from the juxtaposition of contradictory images. The Zone indeed avoids depicting the crimes of the genocide in a voyeuristic way. Rather, the horror is distilled throughout the novel and often surges through banal conversations between Nazi officials. When Thomsen joins Hannah Doll for a cigarette in the greenhouse, he observes:
That last word was still on her tongue when we heard something, something borne on the wind . . . It was a helpless, quavering chord, a fugal harmony of human horror and dismay. We stood quite still with our eyes swelling in our heads. I could feel my body clench itself for more and greater alarums. But then came a shrill silence, like a mosquito whirring in your ear, followed, half a minute later, by the hesitantly swerving upswell of violins. There seemed to be no such thing as speech. We smoked on, with soundless inhalations. (Amis 2014, 14–15)
17The confrontation of two types of images causes a shock to the reader as the mundanities of the camp, a friendly moment in a garden, come to clash with the violence of the crime unfolding in the background. Didi-Huberman refers to this confrontation as ‘a double constraint’:
Double est cette contrainte: simplicité et complexité. Simplicité d’une monade, en sorte que l’image survient dans son texte—et s’impose dans notre lecture—immédiatement, comme un tout dont on ne saurait ôter aucun élément, si minime soit-il. Complexité d’un montage: c’est le contraste déchirant, dans la même et unique expérience, de deux plans que tout oppose. (Didi-Huberman 45)
18The shock of images often intertwines with a shock in tone, as the grave subject of the Holocaust collides with elements of humour spread throughout the text. Sue Vice describes The Zone of Interest as ‘an office comedy about middle management, in which the office is Auschwitz’ (Vice 2016, 311) and in which Paul Doll would come to act as the protagonist. Indeed, while the object of his duties in the camp holds nothing comical, his gauche management of it and his naïve, often ridiculous, self-image lend themselves to comic representation. When Doll appears with two black eyes that he blames on a gardening incident, he describes himself as ‘a pirate or a clown in a pantomime, or a koala bear, or a racoon’ and regrets that ‘they seriously detract from [his] aura of infallible authority’ (Amis 2014, 58). Such contrast turns him into what Mark Lawson has described as ‘the buffoonery of evil’. Vice highlights the difficulty in approaching Amis’s ‘grotesque, carnivalesque’ version of the historical horror and envisages comedy, as Rebecca Abrams did, as ‘the greatest challenge to the reader, since it makes us respond as if pleasurably to real and genocidal enormity’ (Vice 2016, 312). On the other hand, McGlothlin suggests that the generic plurality that the polyphony of the novel deploys tends to ‘mitigate—but not resolve’—the tension between historical horror and comedy. The grotesque dynamic of Paul Doll’s sections indeed collides with the love story depicted by Thomsen and Szmul’s grave testimony as a Jewish prisoner (McGlothlin n.p.).
19I would like to suggest that the contrast effects spread across the novel and the paratext actively participate in Amis’s narrative project in that they offer ‘a way in’ the writing of the Holocaust (Amis 2014, 310). An aesthetic of shock thus becomes what determines the reader’s apprehension of the text. Far from impeding Amis’s transmission process, the experience of shock ensures that something of the past passes through since, as Felski stated, ‘a cognitive and interpretive component clings even to our most visceral reactions, as our minds and bodies register the unnerving impact of the disgusting, violent, or obscene’ (Felski 2008, 133).
- 13 ‘In its intense and unambivalent negativity, disgust thus seems to represent an outer limit or thre (...)
20In Ugly Feelings, Sianne Ngai describes disgust as a limit feeling that represents the outer threshold of what she calls ugly feelings (Ngai 354).13 In The Zone of Interest, those feelings of disgust are triggered by the numerous references to smell, taste, corporeal waste or putrefaction. Those references result from Amis’s desire to render the physical reality of the camps that he described as ‘a coprocentric universe’ (quoted in Martinez-Alfaro 143). Maria Jesus Martinez-Alfaro identifies the coprocentric dynamic of Amis’s text as ‘a vehicle for the ethical positioning of the reader’ (Martinez-Alfaro 143). Scatological humour thus acquires an allegorical resonance inherited from Jonathan Swift’s use of graphic illustration of the excremental to satirise man’s corruption from original innocence. Equally, in The Zone, the reader is forced to engage with the gruesome physicality of the camp that becomes a place where boundaries between clean and unclean, innocent and corrupted, are constantly challenged and where contamination becomes the rule. Snow embodies the ongoing contamination in the novel as it is described first as ‘grey snow, the colour of ash’ (Amis 2014, 102), turning into brown snow ‘tinged . . . by the pyre and the smokestacks’ (151). The whiteness of snow, the magnificence of which Thomsen describes when he visits his family for Christmas, is preserved outside of the camp.
- 14 I am here using Leon S. Roudiez’s translation (Kristeva 1982, 53). In the original text: ‘L’intérie (...)
21In Powers of Horror, Julia Kristeva argues that the subject is threatened when limits are challenged, when they ‘no longer guarantee the integrity of one’s “own and clean” self’.14 In the novel, Amis depicts various limits being challenged. When Doll gazes out at the field where victims are buried, he describes it as ‘a vast surface that undulated like a lagoon at the turn of the tide’ (Amis 2014, 66). Borders become even more disturbing in the novel when they appear in unexpected places shedding light on the physicality of the characters’ surroundings. When Doll describes the very air of the camp, he observes: ‘They are the flames and the fumes; even the clearer air ripples and wriggles. . . . Like a sheet of gauze pulsating in the wind’ (Amis 2014, 75). The skin on the surface of milk that Kristeva presents as causing gagging and spasms in the stomach appears in the eyes of Doll’s wife: they have ‘the colour and texture of the skin of crème brûlée’ (Amis 2014, 133). Drawing on Julia Kristeva’s notion of the abject, Sarah Ahmed insists that it is when the border becomes an object that the text becomes sickening and that the effect of surfacing, of skin that shudders and forms, can be felt as a sickening invasion (Ahmed 86).
- 15 In the original text: ‘[D]ans une matière synesthétique qui brouille les limites phénoménologiques (...)
22Ultimately, the text itself materialises as the boundary between the reader and the events and threatens to turn into an object of disgust that the reader might want to keep at bay. The issue of how disgust might structure writing is brought up by the character of Szmul. As he questions his ability to write truthfully what he has witnessed, he declares ‘I know I am disgusting. But will I write disgustingly?’ (Amis 2014, 79; original emphasis). Amis applies such question to his own writing process as he explains in the epilogue having done research to grasp ‘the texture’ of daily life at the time. If the word might refer to the abject physicality of the camps, it seems that ultimately texture becomes text as verbs, in an onomatopean drive, go on depicting bodies that flop (37), pop, splat, and hiss (65). Overwhelmed by shocking images, smells and sounds, the reader is confronted to a text that, as Catherine Bernard writes, has been dipped in ‘a synesthetic substance that blurs the phenomenological limit of the same and the other’ (Bernard 131).15
23Disgust might threaten to render the text impossible to read as the integrity of the reader’s own self is challenged. However, as William Ian Miller writes in his history of the emotion: ‘[e]ven as the disgusting repels, it rarely does so without also capturing our attention. It imposes itself upon us’ (Miller x). In The Zone, disgust becomes a ‘contact zone’, to borrow Ahmed’s terms, a zone where something visceral is transmitted as this performative affect pushes the body to recoil (Ahmed 87).
24If disgust conditions the reading experience of The Zone, the reader’s engagement with the text is also determined by the point of view adopted by the narration. Holocaust fiction, and trauma fiction to a larger extent, have brought light onto the issue of identifying with victims of trauma and equating identification with empathy. In coining the term ‘empathetic unsettlement’, Dominick LaCapra attempts to draw a limit between the two notions: empathy establishes a tie with the person while retaining a sense of one’s otherness. Conversely, identification loses such sense and erases the boundary between the subject and the other, threatening to make ‘oneself a surrogate victim who has a right to the victim’s voice or subject position’ (LaCapra 78). The process of identification takes a new turn in fiction adopting the point of view of perpetrators. Such perspective might indeed favour some kind of exculpation and validation of the perpetrator’s perspective while confronting the reader to his or her potential pleasure in reading about the suffering of others. Once again with The Zone of Interest, the reader is compelled to adopt the point of view of perpetrators and to reproduce what Martinez-Alfaro had identified in Time’s Arrow as ‘an ethical exercise to open one’s eyes to the terrifying commonality of the perpetrators’ (Martinez-Alfaro 131). McGlothlin discerns the heterogeneous discourses of The Zone as a way to force the reader into ‘an intricate process of empathic alignment’ with the perpetrators so that the readers come to respond emotionally to the characters ‘almost in spite of themselves’ (McGlothlin n.p.). Catherine Bernard describes it as an ‘ultimistic test of empathy’ (Bernard 127), while Fortin-Tournès approaches it as an invitation to the reader to question his or her ethical and political engagement with the text.
25In her recent work on attunement, Rita Felski challenges the everyday use of the term identification as a way to ‘describe an affinity that is based on some sense of similarity’ (Felski 2020, 81). She refuses to equate ‘being like’ with ‘liking’ and outlines different strands to the identification process, including alignment and recognition, thus offering a way out of the identification/empathy binary. Alignment refers to ‘the formal means by which texts shape a reader’s or viewer’s access to character’ (Felski 2020, 94) while recognition designates ‘an experience of coming to know: of being struck by some kind of insight about the self” and ‘affords new forms of self-knowing’ (Felski 2020, 101). The Zone of Interest seems to intertwine those two strands as readers follow a formal alignment with the perpetrators, through the use of the first-person and its attendant point of view, and ultimately might come to recognise something of themselves in the characters. The points of view adopted in the novel shed light on Hannah Arendt’s concept of the banality of evil and the frightening ordinariness of the perpetrators. In doing so, Amis offers to break what Saira Mohamed has identified as ‘the metaphor of the glass cage’ (Mohamed 1161). Drawing on Eichmann’s trial in Jerusalem during which the Nazi official was placed in a glass box, Mohamed describes the tendency to isolate and expose the perpetrator, as if in a glass cage, thus creating ‘a relationship of objectification’. She invites critics and readers to take the perpetrator out of the glass cage and to look at him out of ‘the caged context of objectification’ so as to ‘realize that he [the perpetrator] is someone we can recognize—almost accidentally, against our urges, as human, a man rather than a monster’ (Mohamed 1162). That might come as the final shock of the novel and might be what seals the reading of the text as a limit experience—this frightening possibility to recognise something of oneself in it.
26A few years after the liberation of the camps, the character of Hannah Doll reflects on what is left of what happened and she declares: ‘Imagine how disgusting it would be if anything good came out of that place’ (Amis 2014, 300). In light of Hannah Doll’s words, The Zone of Interest assembles three testimonies that ‘came out of that place’ and offers to reflect on Adorno’s initial fear regarding a literature of the Holocaust, namely that one might experience pleasure in the representation of the suffering of others (in Vice 5). Amis builds his transmission process on an aesthetic of shock and disgust bound to challenge the reading experience and thus provides a text that, as the controversy around the publication has shown, teeters between the threats of two reactions to shock that Felski identifies as follows: ‘the potential humiliation of audience indifference [to shock] and the permanent risk of outright and outraged refusal’ (Felski 2008, 131).
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