Fiction and the Historical Study of Perpetrators: Insights from Jonathan Little´s The Kindly Ones and Martin Scorsese´s The Irish

This paper explores the epistemological, methodological and theoretical potentials of historical fiction for renewing and exploring the historical study of perpetrators. Drawing from a theory of identity as recognition (Pizzorno), it starts by isolating the “victimizer dilemma” underlying the perpetrator´s usual option for silence and negationist accounts as stemming from their lack of recognition by audiences insensitive to the context of the commission of crimes.
By analyzing the way two pieces of fiction focusing on victimizers —the novel The Kindly ones, by Jonathan Little and the movie “The Irish”, by Martin Scorsese— address the issue of first person account, the paper shows the relevance of the literary field —the interplay between the speaker, the audience and the status of literature in culture— in exonerating victimizers from their crimes, and offers an example of how this issue actually works out in the case of the victimizers from the Spanish Civil War in postFrancoist public sphere.