Timár, Andrea. “Dehumanization in Literature and the Figure of the Perpetrator”

Andrea Timár’s chapter in The Routledge Handbook of Dehumanization (2021) investigates the representation of dehumanization in fictional works by complicating the notion of perpetration and legality. The author approaches dehumanization as a complex interpersonal process whereby a human actor deprives another subject of its ‘human’ characteristics which, in turn, facilitates the perpetration of moral wrongdoing. She however stresses that a “perpetrator of dehumanization” may commit immoral acts in conformity with the legal frameworks of a given time or place; it is in the very gap between the ethical and the legal, “in the absence of legal transgression” (225), that the most banal instances of dehumanization take place. To support the argument that the non-criminality of perpetrating dehumanization might yield troublesome identificatory reflection, Timár analyzes four literary works wherein the figure of the perpetrator is represented in an ambiguous manner which prompts the reader to imaginatively “engage with the potential perpetrator [within]” (224). 

 In juxtaposing Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) to J.M. Coetzee’s critical rewrite of the classic, Foe (1986), Timár firstly foregrounds how ‘humanness’ is inextricably linked to aesthetic and representational questions. Whereas Defoe’s Crusoe uncritically bestows Friday with a human status on the basis of his ‘European’ appearance – the ‘savage’ actually has “all the sweetness and softness of a European” making him worthy of Crusoe’s ‘civilizing’ tutelage (220) – one of Coetzee’s protagonists troubles over the violence necessary to ‘humanize’ Friday – “[The] silence of Friday is a helpless silence[;] I say he is a cannibal and he becomes a cannibal; I say he is a laundryman and he becomes a laundryman[;] he is to the world [what] I make of him” (219). Existing outside the law insofar as he lives on a pre-colonial Pacific island (Defoe) or does not speak English (Coetzee), Friday’s ‘humanization’ is dependent on the aestheticized processes of dehumanization (i.e. the replacement of his identity and language with English ones) which takes place in an extra-legal space and is perpetrated by non-criminals. More proximate instances of readerly identification with the perpetrator of dehumanization, Timár claims, are those between the reader and Jonathan Littell’s Dr. Aue in The Kindly Ones (2006) or Vladimir Nabokov’s Humbert Humbert in Lolita (1955). Although the extent to which these perpetrators of dehumanization infract the law in their respective contexts differs – an SS doctor who operated under the Nazi rule (Aue) and a literature professor and pedophile in postwar United States (Humbert) – both characters present themselves as victims of circumstance with human flaws and characteristics. What renders Aue and Humbert’s perspective especially relatable to the reader is the ‘destabilization of the narrative voice’ engendered by first-person narration which breaks down the binary between the absolute victim and perpetrator; the reader is, however disturbingly, invited to empathize and identify with the perpetrator, or more precisely, their humor and alleged appreciation of beauty (Humbert), or their intellectual prowess and ‘cultivation’ (Aue). Timár therefore concludes that in addition to the widely held position that the literary depictions of the victims’ point-of-view may prompt readerly empathy, thus “[advancing] the cause of human rights” (224), it is in reading fictional accounts of the perpetrator that we may begin to understand how we might sympathize with and even be intellectually complicit in the “perpetration of dehumanization.” 

 “Dehumanization in Literature and the Figure of the Perpetrator” may be particularly interesting to those studying the ethics behind and (un)critical representations of dehumanization. Although Timár’s selection of case studies could have been motivated and explained more thoroughly, her readings of the fictional perpetrators and perpetration yield compelling insights into the dynamics between ethics, aesthetics, and legality in literary representations of dehumanization. 

Author of this entry: Dušan Janković.

Timár, Andrea. ‘Dehumanization in Literature and the Figure of the Perpetrator’. In The Routledge Handbook of Dehumanization, 214–27. Routledge, 2021.