French Forum

“Je n’ai pas du tout aimé ce roman”: The Trouble with Acide sulfurique

The release of Belgian author Amélie Nothomb’s Acide sulfurique in 2005 provoked polemic divisions amongst literary critics as a result of its controversial translation of the Nazi concentration camps into a reality television format, and a gross oversimplification of the Holocaust that undermined reader sensibilities to the history and memory of human suffering. In a round-up of that year’s rentrée littéraire, the writer Pierre Assouline denounced Acide as “malsain,” a reflection of the topics it evoked, and summarily dismissed the novel: “Je n’ai pas du tout aimé ce roman” (Le Monde, 8 September 2005). Pierre Vavasseur accused Nothomb of a “banalisation de la Shoah” and of an appalling publicity stunt—“un coup de marketing nauséabond” (Le Parisien, 1 September 2005)—while Baptiste Liger deplored the author’s artificiality and holier-than-thou condemnation of contemporary society and criticized her pseudo-provocative attempts to titillate the reader by marrying reality television and the concentration camps: “le dernier Nothomb est un livre nul” (L’Express, 25 August 2005). Among the few high-profile supporters of the narrative, however, reviews celebrated the author’s attention to modern voyeuristic culture as a sinister threat to complacent belief in human equality and compassionate reaction, and Frédéric Beigbeder, in a counter-critique to Liger, praised the text’s significant and well-timed risks to suggest a viable future dystopia that would confirm the place of fiction in helping us to understand our reality “même et surtout quand elle est terrifiante” (L’Express).

In this paper, I discuss Acide sulfurique as a critique of contemporary [End Page 133] bystander behavior and question the socio-political responsibilities of the intra-textual viewer as a reflection of the genuine ethical demands placed upon viewers of suffering in everyday life.¹ Although Acide sulfurique sparked controversy at its release, it has established itself within Nothomb’s vast oeuvre and among her considerable market of readers, and it plays upon a readily accessible allegory that shifts the reader’s focus from the opposition of good versus evil to the morally ambiguous and seemingly exterior figure of the viewer. Framing the Holocaust through the recognizable format of reality television integrates the third-party viewer into the central actions of the camp as an omniscient and omnipresent but entirely external and invisible participant. Although offered direct access to the camps through the extensive networks of surveillance cameras, the viewer remains distinctly separate, and the sense of watching people “just like us,” touted as the bedrock of reality television, is undermined by the insurmountable exteriority of the viewer. The stark division between self and other, where “you” are on one side and “I” am on the other, established by the television screen builds an indissoluble boundary of alterity that not only prevents an ethical face-to-face encounter, but shields the viewer from “getting their hands dirty,” so that they feel morally acquitted of their murderous complicity. Of course, this is not to suggest that reality television formats can be blamed for inciting murder, rather that the mediation of human life through screens tends to problematize our ethical relationship to the other. Reframing the Holocaust through reality television thus provides an uncomfortable viewpoint from which to consider contemporary attitudes to ongoing events of genocide, displacement and mass racism across the world, particularly where these events are, in the majority, mediated by screens and by temporal or spatial distances that dilute our ethical relations between self and other.

Acide sulfurique follows the peace-time incarceration of random individuals in a simulated concentration camp filled with cameras and taking part—against their will—in the newest televisual craze, the aptly named Concentration. Participant-prisoners are subjected to abhorrent conditions, including malnourishment, physical and verbal abuse, exhausting manual labor and daily selections that determine who will be killed as live entertainment for the cameras under the orders of kapos—selected from willing participants by the show’s organizers—and under the gaze of millions...