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Martin Amis’s Time’s Arrow and the Postmodern Sublime
Time’s Arrow (1991) confronts a question that has consumed Amis from an
early stage in his career: is modernity leading civilization to self-destruction? While his main concern remains the world’s development of nuclear weapons, he sees the origins of the West’s drive to implode not just in Hiroshima and Nagasaki but in the Holocaust (Time’s Arrow) and the Soviet gulags (Koba the Dread). The Holocaust is, he has said, "the central event of the twentieth century" (Bellante 16). As Dermot McCarthy observes, “For Amis, his generation suffers from an event it did not experience, and will expire from one it seems powerless to prevent” (301). James Diedrick has called Einstein’s Monsters (1987), London Fields (1989), and Time’s Arrow an “informal trilogy” (104). The first two focus on a nuclear holocaust that threatens postwar civilization, whereas Time’s Arrow returns to the Holocaust, which cast its shadow over the rest of the century. London Fields and Time’s Arrow complement one another in particular. Amis even mentioned in a prefatory note to London Fields that he thought of calling the novel by the latter’s title. Indeed, Hitler remains at the heart of Amis’s belief that we are living in the aftermath of disaster. Penny Smith explains that for Amis, “The big one was the Second World War and what it unleashed, the possibility of nuclear holocaust” (122). Nor did London Fields or Time’s Arrow put these questions to rest. In London Fields Nicola Six remarks that “it seemed possible to argue that Hitler was still running the century” (395); in a 2002 interview, Amis replied: “I feel I have unfinished business with Hitler” (Heawood 18).
If the emancipatory view of modernity began with the Enlightenment, philosophers and historians have continuously questioned its assumptions. Many scholars contend that these questions took on a new urgency after the atrocities accompanying World War Two. Jean-François Lyotard epitomizes this skepticism towards the “grand narratives” of modernity that he sees as responsible for those atrocities. He argues that modernity’s pursuit of liberal humanist, universal standards led to a lethal hostility to deviation or resistance. Lyotard defines as postmodern the large-scale postwar rejection of such metanarratives of rational progress—narratives concerned with truth, justice, and goodness. Both Lyotard and Amis indict consensus as responsible for the German public’s support for Nazi programs of racial purification. Both share Eli Wiesel’s conviction that "at Auschwitz not only man died, but also the idea of man"—that is, the liberal humanist idea of "man” (Rosenfeld 154).
As Lyotard wrote in The Differend (Le Différend), Auschwitz disproves that “[e]verything real is rational, everything rational is real: ‘Auschwitz’ refutes speculative doctrine. The crime at least, which is real, is not rational” (179). Yet, as Zygmunt Bauman has clarified, the Holocaust did employ rationality to horrifying effect. Far from “an antithesis of modern civilization and everything ... it stands for,… the Holocaust could merely have uncovered another face of the same society whose other, so familiar, face we so admire” (7). Time’s Arrow gives fictional life to this Janus-faced modernity, to the fact that, as Walter Benjamin asserted, “there is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism” (256).[i] The systematic extermination of six million innocent civilians, an act of the highest irrationality, relied on rational means for its implementation. This crucial event in modern history (repeated in Cambodia, the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda and Sudan) is a paradox that requires the use of paradoxical narrative techniques on the part of any novelist attempting to evoke it.
Amis’s ambivalence towards modernity migrates to his novels, which present apocalyptic visions of what he calls “the toiletization of the planet.” He informed Melvyn Bragg that this jaded view of modernity accounts for his characters’ behavior—“as if they’re heading towards an ending too”—but to Mira Stout he confessed that he is “trying to get more truthful about what it’s like to be alive now” (35). Darkly comic, his novels attempt to undermine and embody the suicidal behavior of the modern world. He sees himself as representative of those who grew up in the post-World War II world, telling Patrick McGrath that “We are like no other people in history” (194). He perceives himself, therefore, as modernity personified, split between ameliorative and pessimistic versions. The same ambivalence appears in London Fields and Time’s Arrow. Nicola Six, the anti-heroine of the former, exhibits a death-wish which parallels the planet’s; yet only her personal death-wish is fulfilled. The planet lives on after the eclipse that substitutes for an apocalyptic big bang. Similarly, Odilo Unverdorben, the protagonist of Time’s Arrow, lives out the ameliorative and degenerative versions of modernity in his two incarnations, which move in opposing temporal directions. Although London Fields is set in the near future (1989) and Time’s Arrow returns to World War Two, both novels are “about the present” (Trueheart B2)—about, that is, modernity.
One can discern a further parallel between the novels’ ameliorative and degenerative versions of modernity and Lyotard’s distinction between two modes of (post)modernity—the melancholic and the jubilatory. For Lyotard these comprise a modern esthetics of the sublime. The sublime entails a “combination of pleasure and pain, the pleasure that reason should exceed all presentation, the pain that imagination or sensibility should not be equal to the concept” (Postmodern 81). According to Lyotard, modern art seeks the experience of freedom by staging a permanent crisis in representation. If modern art is distinguished by its presentation of “the unpresentable in presentation itself” (81), then the postmodern mode is distinguished—and leant its jubilatory connotation—by its “invention of new rules” (80), of “allusions to the conceivable which cannot be presented” (81). Using Lyotard’s distinction, both London Fields and especially Time’s Arrow belong to the mode of the postmodern.[ii] These modes of modernity offer critiques of representation, of what Lyotard calls “the ‘lack of reality’ of reality” (77). As in Time’s Arrow, “they often exist in the same piece, are almost indistinguishable; and yet they testify to a difference (différend) on which the fate of thought depends … between regret and assay” (80).
One could substitute “trial” or “test” for “assay,” for either word accentuates the novelty and unrepeatability of such works. The point is that the first mode, like the chronological account of Odilo Unverdorben’s life in Time’s Arrow, induces feelings of regret (albeit supreme), whereas the second mode, like the chronologically reversed account of his life, produces feelings of jubilation—ones that derive from the radical critique of conventional representation inherent in the postmodern sublime. The two modes are separated by a différend that Lyotard defines as “a case of conflict … that cannot be equitably resolved for lack of a rule of judgment” (Differend xi). Amis both knows about and admires the mode of the sublime which he considers the signature mark of Nabokov’s early novels. In his 1979 essay, “The Sublime and the Ridiculous: Nabokov’s Black Farces,” Amis expresses surprise that Nabokov’s work has so seldom been considered in this light: “the sublime directed at our fallen world of squalor, absurdity and talentlessness.” “Sublimity replaces the ideas of motivation and plot with those of obsession and destiny,” he continues. “It suspends moral judgements in favour of remorselessness, a helter-skelter intensity. It does not proceed to a conclusion so much as accumulate possibilities of pain and danger. The sublime is a perverse mode, by definition. But there is art in its madness” (76). This passage reads like a prophetic description of Time’s Arrow in which destiny replaces conventional plot, remorselessness moral judgment, and possibilities of pain and danger a conclusion. The novel perfectly demonstrates the art underlying its perversity.
This essay neither assumes conscious knowledge of Lyotard’s theory on the part of Amis nor claims that Time’s Arrow is postmodern simply because it conforms to Lyotard’s definition of the postmodern within modernity.[iii] But Lyotard does offer a useful definition of the way modern art critiques representational realism, a critique that assumes its most radical form through the postmodern sublime, which simultaneously evokes pleasure and pain in the reader. After Auschwitz and Stalinism, Lyotard insists, no one could maintain that modernity’s hopes had been fulfilled. To write about the Holocaust is to risk estheticizing the unthinkable.[iv] How then can tragedy as massive as the Holocaust be incorporated by a writer who believes that “tragedy and the heroic have disappeared” (Hubbard 118)? In structuring Time’s Arrow Amis employed three interrelated techniques: a narrative form (temporal reversal), a narrative perspective (splitting the protagonist and narrator), and a narrative mode (irony that produces black humor). The narrative simultaneously embodies the pleasure of returning to a less appalling phase of modernity and the painful recollection of Western civilization’s fall from innocence—a fall Lyotard attributes to those grand narratives of rationalist improvement that were invoked by Holocaust perpetrators.
Amis sheds light on his narrative form when he writes that the crisis facing our planet “is no longer spatial. It is temporal” (War 33). Time, Nicola reflects in London Fields, “is always pulling us down” (297). It is appropriate that Amis employs temporal anticipation in London Fields and temporal reversal in Time’s Arrow. In the former, Penny Smith writes, “the natural world is on fastforward, rushing towards catastrophe” (120). “We used to live outside history,” Nicola reflects; “But now we’re all coterminous. We’re inside history now all right, on its leading edge” (197). Samson Young, the narrator of the novel, similarly reflects on the landscape of his childhood. “If I shut my eyes I can see the innocuous sky, afloat above the park of milky green” (463). But the London Fields that Sam remembers was the site of High Explosives Research where his father worked on “plutonium metallurgy” (161).[v] Eden was already a fallen state
By contrast, Time’s Arrow takes its readers back to an innocent, mythologized past. The order of narrated events regresses from the ugly and cruel present reminiscent of London Fields to a prelapsarian time when experience is exchanged for innocence. However, the chronologically restored story progresses inexorably through the horrors of concentration camps to the contaminated postlapserian world of Ronald Reagan’s America. The narrative temporally reverses the fortunes of the Nazi doctor, Odilo Unverdorben, who assists with the mass exterminations at Auschwitz. After escaping from the liberating Russians, he fled to Portugal where he assumed the name Hamilton de Souza. Using false papers he then emigrated to America as John Young and assumed the identity of an American physician, Tod Friendly. Reminders of earlier moments in this chronology repeatedly erupt into the inverted narrative—through his dreams or his wife’s rejection of Nazism, for instance. From the opening page Amis plunges the reader into an inverted world where life begins at its end and death becomes a second birth. Through such temporal inversion Amis employs the postmodern sublime alongside his radical critique of presenting so notorious a landmark of modernity as the Holocaust. Lyotard maintains that “[n]arrative organization is constitutive of diachronic time, and the time that it constitutes has the effect of ‘neutralizing’ an ‘initial’ violence” (Heidegger 16). Inverting diachronic narrative organization attempts to avoid this danger.
Lyotard resorts to Kant’s idea of “negative presentation” to elucidate how the modern artist can “make visible … something which cannot be seen”: the “empty ‘abstraction’ which the imagination experiences when [searching] for a presentation of the infinite (another unpresentable)” that itself resembles “a presentation of the infinite, its ‘negative presentation’” (Postmodern 78). Lyotard specifically cites Auschwitz as an example of this “negative presentation of the indeterminate” because the Germans tried to erase its physical existence at the end of the War (Differend 56). Time’s Arrow uses this esthetic of the sublime to present the unpresentable as practiced at Auschwitz. Through temporal reversal Amis simultaneously evokes the unpresentable by invoking its negative presentation—a process which culminates in healing and renewal. “Almost any deed, any action, has its morality reversed, if you turn time’s arrow around,” Amis has remarked (DeCurtis 147). Similarly, his Afterword acknowledges his debt to a famous paragraph in Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five (1970): the Dresden firebombing passage in which Billy Pilgrim watches backwards a late night movie of American bombers recovering their bombs from a German city in flames. (Compare the narrator of Amis’s novel: “It just seems to me that the film is running backwards” (8)). Vonnegut’s passage ends with Billy speculating, “Everybody turned into a baby, and all humanity, without exception, conspired biologically to produce two perfect people named Adam and Eve, he supposed” (54-5), and this brief inversion of chronology inspired Amis’s own attempt to evoke a lost Eden. Amis’s Afterword also acknowledges his debt to Robert Jay Lifton’s The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Suicide (1986). On reading this documentary account of an entire profession perversely adopting an ideology of killing as a means of healing, Amis realized that "[h]ere was a psychotically inverted world, and if you did it backward in time, it would make sense" (DeCurtis 146).
Amis first utilized the idea in 1985, in the short story, “Bujak and the Strong Force or God’s Dice.” Basing his idea on Einstein, Bujak is an “Oscillationist,” who claims that the “universe would expand only until unanimous gravity called it back to start again” (Einstein’s 58). Bujak maintains that time would also be reversed, causing, the narrator speculates, all the events of the story to invert, concluding with Bujak “folding into” his mother’s womb (59). In similar fashion the protagonist of Time’s Arrow ends up entering his mother while she weeps and screams, only to be Oedipally murdered by his father’s penis at the moment of conception (164). Amis also touches on these ideas in London Fields, as Nicola personifies the negative gravity of the black hole of astronomical theory into which the novel’s world seems inextricably borne back. The origins of the “death of love” which this novel takes for granted originate, for Amis, in the “negative gravity” of Nazi death camps.
Time’s Arrow extends this conceit over its entire length, beginning with the protagonist’s death (and narrator’s birth) in America from a car accident. The book concludes in 1916 in Solingen, Germany, the birthplace not only of Amis’s the protagonist but also Adolf Eichmann, the man responsible for overseeing the Final Solution to which Unverdorben contributed (163). Amis’s application of this unusual form to a fictional treatment of the Holocaust involved its own “assay,” in other words, its own break with form.[vi] Paralleling Lyotard’s description of the postmodern within the modern, Time’s Arrow “searches for new presentations, not in order to enjoy them, but in order to impart a stronger sense of the unpresentable” (Postmodern 81). As Amis explains, the effects seem “philanthropic”—that is, life-giving—“if and only if the arrow of time is reversed” (Reynolds and Noakes 21).[vii] In reality, of course, that cannot happen, but fiction succeeds where reality—and modernity—fails.
Numerous elements make narrative inversion a particularly appropriate vehicle for such terrible subjects. First, its dual reversal of chronology and causality perfectly portrays the Nazis’ reversal of morality. Certainly, it is less paradoxical to represent death as birth (and vice-versa) than for Nazi doctors to base their practice on “a manifest absurdity—‘a vision and practice of killing to heal’” (Easterbrook 57). Using a wider perspective, Daniel Oertel suggests that Time’s Arrow’s “incoherent narrative structure”—incoherent to the narrator—“becomes a suitable metaphor for the incoherence of history” (132). The novel fulfils Amis’s impossible fantasy that history could be reversed and the atrocities of the mid-twentieth century undone. As Dermot McCarthy argues, “the ‘terrible journey’ back into WWII and the Nazi Holocaust … is a mirror inversion of the journey Amis sees his own generation taking toward nuclear holocaust” (303). Narrated in inverse order, the Holocaust is portrayed simultaneously as the end-product and the origin of contemporaneity. It reverts to an archaic time in Western history, which “Germans … have been preserved in ice from the beginning of time” (131), and it also reimagined as progress: “But this was our mission, after all: to make Germany whole” (141). It is “a combination of the atavistic and the modern” (168) that produces what McCarthy, using a neologism, calls a “chronillogical world” (296)—precisely how Amis views post-Holocaust civilization.
“Invention,” Lyotard insists, “is always born of dissension” (Postmodern xxv), and indeed Amis strives to dissent from Nazi consensus about racial superiority. Amis’s modern esthetic, like Lyotard’s, “is based on a never-ending critique of representation that should contribute to the preservation of heterogeneity, of optimal dissensus” (Bertens 133). Not just his argument but his entire narrative strategy stands opposed to consensus, especially Nazism. Time’s Arrow,negatively inverts temporality, rationality and causality. The protagonist is characterized by his willingness to accept fascist ideology with what Lipton describes as its “promise of unity, oneness, fusion” (499). Even in later life the protagonist “sheds the thing he often can’t seem to bear: his identity, his quiddity, lost in the crowd's promiscuity” (49).
The consequences of telling Unverdorben’s story backwards are multiple, subtle and highly ironic. As Diedrick observes, the opening description of Unverdorben’s/Tod Friendly’s actions as a postwar American doctor “eerily anticipat[e] his eventual immersion in Auschwitz and intimat[e] the terrible secret of his … past” (139). In reverse chronology a patient enters the operating room looking cured and emerges with a rusty nail planted in his head by the doctor (76). From the opening pages doctors represent figures of authority “containing … “above all power (5). This “precognition,” as Diedrick calls it, comes from the recurring dream of a figure from the “future”: Uncle Pepi, modeled on Dr. Josef Mengele, Auschwitz’s notorious “Angel of Death.” As a “biological soldier”—a term first coined by the Nazis in a manual on eugenic sterilization (Lifton 30)—Unverdorben joins the ranks of these doctors who “must wield the special power” (81). It is ironical, Amis writes, that as a doctor, “[y]ou have to harden your heart to pain and suffering” (82). Yet this is part of the rationale for the Hippocratic oath, which is excerpted in the novel: “I will abstain from all intentional wrongdoing and harm…” (25). In Amis’s inverted time scheme the protagonist deconstructs the oath by supposedly killing to heal; in exercising his power as a doctor he reinscribes the newly inferior term (healing) within the newly superior one of killing.
Power forms a recurrent motif in the novel, often becoming associated with sex. The first (and therefore last) time the protagonist has sex with Irene, the narrator says, “loom[ing] above her,” that he is “flooded by thoughts and feelings I’ve never had before. To do with power” (37). Power is equated with the ultimate authority over life, a fact literalized by the six figures in the photograph from Unverdorben’s Auschwitz period who exercised power over their six victims (72). Sex makes Unverdorben feel lordly: “you get everything on the first date.... Instant invasion and lordship” (51). It is as invasive (war-like) an act as surgery and becomes as perverted (“lording” it over the woman) in Unverdorben’s hands. Power elevates its possessors to the status of gods: Lifton describes how the Nazis “saw themselves as ‘children of the gods,’ empowered to destroy and kill on behalf of their higher calling” (449). Perversion of power characterizes Unverdorben’s sexual encounters with his wife, Herta, when she is “his chimpanzee required to do the housework naked, on all fours” (151). Herta is a young secretary when he meets her, and all his lovers occupy subordinate social positions. Ironically, this sexual power-play proves self-defeating when Unverdorben turns impotent. Perhaps this derives from his discovering an alternative outlet for exercising power in his role with the Waffen SS unit? Or perhaps it comments upon the dead-end where his cult of power terminates? He finds himself “omnipotent. Also impotent…powerful and powerless” (140). Amis appears to have adopted this paradoxical trait from Lifton’s description of Nazi doctors who “called forth feelings of omnipotence and related sadism on the one hand, and of impotence and sometimes masochism on the other” (448). Amis’s inverted narrative deconstructs Unverdorben’s pursuit of power to reveal its attachment to its opposite. In adding his efforts to the consensual metanarrative of racial superiority, Unverdorben has multiplied zero by zero and still arrived at nothing, to adapt one heading of the novel (137).
Other critics have commented on the startling effects of this chronological and causal inversion. Such effects range from the bizarre (factories and automobiles effect an environmental clean-up (48)), through the perverse (Irene is blamed for her untidiness because the apartment is more messy when she leaves—that is, arrives (85)), to the tragic (the Nazis’ purpose is to “dream a race” (120)). Amis never misses the opportunity to put these effects to use. For instance, he adopts the convention of reverse dialog. However, the conversations between Unverdorben and his lovers have an uncanny way of reading just as satisfactorily backwards as forwards, mirroring casual affairs which seem to work equally well recounted in reverse. After one such conversation the narrator comments: “I have noticed in the past, of course, that most conversations would make much better sense if you ran them backward. But with this man-woman stuff, you could run them any way you liked—and still get no further forward” (51). Amis’s use of inverted dialog judges the power-induced encounters that Unverdorben pursues where the symmetry of the encounter reveals the termination of the affair in the opening exchange. Similarly, Unverdorben’s journey by ship backwards across the Atlantic (from America to Europe) carries an ethical charge. The narrator observes, “we leave no mark on the ocean, as if we are successfully covering our tracks” (99). This is precisely what Unverdorben was doing in real chronological time—erasing his past. But in reality he was leaving indelible tracks in his wake that have vexed to nightmare the present age.
To effect this reversal Amis splits the narrating from the narrated subject. It appears that his strange narrator derives from Lifton’s psychological concept of “‘doubling’: the division of the self into two functioning wholes, so that a part-self acts as an entire self” (418). Early in the novel the narrator describes feelings of estrangement from his body: “Something isn’t quite working: this body I’m in won’t take orders from this will of mine” (6). On the next page he explains, “I have no access to his thoughts—but I’m awash with his emotions” (7). The protagonist’s mind therefore directs the actions of his body. But the protagonist must exclude his emotions from his part-self to perform his murderous procedures as a Nazi doctor. According to Lifton: “The requirements of conscience were transferred to the Auschwitz self, which placed it within its own criteria for good (duty, loyalty to group…etc.), thereby freeing the original self from responsibility for actions there.” This leads to “repudiation by the original self of anything done by the Auschwitz self” (421, 422), which leads in turn to an impaired narrating subject that, unlike the reader, is disabled from judging the narrated subject’s actions with coherence. Deprived of life’s experience, driven into a symbolic limbo from which to view his alter-ego’s life in reverse, the narrator is unable to discern meaning and should be thought of as the doctor's soul, "the soul he should have had," according to Amis (DeCurtis 146). This contrasts London Fields in that Keith Talent “thought of time as moving past him while he just stayed the same,” but “in his soul he could tell what time was doing” (172). In Time’s Arrow the narrator/soul stands outside time whereas the protagonist is the one who “didn’t expect time to leave him alone” (London Fields 172).
Paralleling Nabokov’s fiction, most of Amis’s narrators serve “as the malevolent force in the book” (“Sublime” 80). In London Fields, for instance Samson Young only understands at the end of the book that he has been callously manipulated—not by Nicola but by the ghostly M.A., the narrator’s narrator, into murdering Nicola and taking his own life. But the narrator of Time’s Arrow is the subject of—not the instrument for—“the spectacular humiliations that [the narrator] is obliged to undergo” (80). Richard Menke has called this narrator “supremely reliable,” although “he may be relied upon to get things diametrically, and often poignantly, wrong” (960). As Amis has observed, “If the trick is to work, the unreliable narrator must in fact be very reliable indeed: reliably partial” (Experience 380). The narrator’s partiality manifests itself in the sympathetic feelings he shows towards the disadvantaged and the marginalized in both American and German societies. In the States he is affronted at the protagonist’s treatment of his patients and his women, while in Europe he applauds the dispersal of the Jews who are no longer victims of discrimination. In this sense the narrator aligns himself with Lyotard’s stand against consensus in favor of heterogeneity—such as the Jewish minority in Europe. The narrator’s exceptional stance parallels Lyotard’s radical esthetic of the postmodern sublime: One can only champion difference by stepping outside the rules governing consensus—both the rules of esthetic practice (hence the inversion) and those of the postwar capitalist world that the narrator constantly condemns for its materialism and unfeeling practices. As Lyotard argues, the effect of the Différend is to turn those outside the consensus into victims because they lack common ground on which to argue their case. This is the case with the narrator, who becomes the victim of his exclusion from the master narrative that legitimated Unverdorben’s wartime conduct in Germany. As Menke aptly puts it, the narrator “recast[s] genocide as genesis” (964). The narrator remains as ignorant of Unverdorben’s criminal participation in the Holocaust as do many of those born since World War II.[viii] The narrator is simultaneously deluded and the embodiment of a contemporary nostalgia for a reversal of the escalating horrors that constitute history after World War II.
What then should we make of the final paragraph in which the arrow of time reverts to its normal direction, point first? Few critics have attended to this crucial swerve in the narrative. Michael Trussler claims that “ghosts can be said to spatialize time: their accusatory presence insists on infinite repetition over the irreversible loss of what we normally associate with the calendar” (28). Yet he fails to apply this insight to the predicament of the narrator at the novel’s end. Is the narrator destined to relive his life in reverse—that is, historical—time, made to experience his life in real time? Or will he be again divided from the intellectual self that cannot feel the consequences of its actions? The hapless narrator embodies the barren fantasy that we could reverse the effects of history while illustrating the naivety that such a forgetting would involve. He is the source of the inextricable combination of pleasure and pain that the postmodern sublime produces in the reader. In earlier novels such as Other People and London Fields Amis stages a murderous act of narrative closure by killing off his narrator. But in Time’s Arrow he rejects closure because this narrative should never be forgotten, only endlessly retold. Far from releasing readers in the final paragraph, the narrative condemns them to share with the narrator an endless oscillation between past and present, incorporating the past into our sense of modernity.
The reader is the missing third entity in the book. Confronted with two selves, each of which exhibits self-denial, the reader is constantly required to supply the historical events the protagonist seeks to forget and the narrator misunderstands. Witness the opening dialog, which offers the only instance of total speech reversal before the narrator learns to translate these words into conventional order:
“Dug. Dug,” says the lady in the pharmacy.
“Dug,” I join in. “Oo y’rrah?”
“Aid ut oo y’rrah?” (7)
The reader is compelled to work out the conventional order:
“How’re you today?”
“Good,” I join in. “How’re you?”
“Good. Good,” says the lady in the pharmacy.
To reach this understanding the reader must undergo three stages of comprehension. Read in reverse order, the dialog appears nonsensical: readers are presented with the unpresentable found in the postmodern sublime and experience the pain of incomprehension. But before they can reach the “translation”—offering, as Lyotard suggests, pleasure which “derives from pain” (Postmodern 77)—they must first confront the intermediate stage in which ”Good” reads as “Gud” and “How’re you?” as “Harr’y oo?” The full “translation” situates the reader in the unpleasant world of modernity. But the intermediate language suggests an interspace between the repellant modern and the utopian pre-modern, an imaginary space detached from the poor “translation” of the narrator although nonetheless removed, like him, from the protagonist’s hellish experiences. The novel, in other words, instructs its implied reader in positioning himself in relation to both incarnations of Unverdorben. If the experienced protagonist becomes an unsympathetic anti-hero, the innocent narrator proves too naive to be trusted. The narrative construction of Time’s Arrow compels the reader to create meaning independent from the interpretations offered by either self.
Readers are made to vacillate between enjoying the conceits produced by history’s reversal and remembering with horror the disasters that—ironically—the narrator perceives in inverted and therefore celebratory form. An obvious instance is the narrator’s reference to John F. Kennedy’s assassination, a watermark in postwar Western history, mythologized as the downfall of a modern Camelot: “JFK: flown down from Washington and flung together by the doctors’ knives and the sniper’s bullets and introduced onto the streets of Dallas and a hero’s welcome” (81). Readers enjoy the fantasy even as they remember the collective pain which arose as the unfolding event was transmitted over the airways. In Lyotardian terms, the pleasure of this imagined, impossible resurrection “derives from the pain” we experience in recollecting historical markers. The reader must engage with the text in an unusually active way, because, as Trussler writes, “we as readers are party to, if not complicit with, a knowledge that the book desperately desires both to repress and expose” (37). At first, the narrator’s naivety anaesthetizes Unverdorben’s actions from acceptable moral contexts. Yet, as Amis explains, the narrator unconsciously urges readers to provide the missing history through his unease with esthetics: “He keeps wondering why it has to be so ugly, this essentially benevolent action” (Reynolds and Noakes 21). This entire strategy assumes a collective memory of recent Western history, especially the Holocaust, that raises important questions about the literary use of irony. Whereas in London Fields Nicola wagers that Guy won’t recognize the names Enola Gay and Little Boy, in Time’s Arrow Amis places the burden of knowing on the reader.
Amis’s use of irony was attacked by some reviewers of the novel, but he maintains that it is entirely appropriate: “Nazism was a biomedical vision to excise the cancer of Jewry. To turn it into something that creates Jewry is a respectable irony” (20). Irony allows an alert reader to appreciate the fallible narrator’s misunderstanding of his narration: such a reader reconstructs an exactly opposite meaning. The final definition of irony in the Oxford English Dictionary is: “The use of language with one meaning for a privileged audience and another for those addressed or concerned.” According to Lifton, the Nazis’ misuse of language gave their doctors a “discourse in which killing was no longer killing” (445). He reveals how this practice of misnaming was firmly established at Auschwitz where “’Outpatient centers’ were a ‘place for selections’; and hospital areas, ‘waiting rooms’ before death” (186). In Time’s Arrow, Amis effectively undermines Nazi misuse of language to rationalize mass murder, employing irony to assert an opposing ethic. Unverdorben’s various name-changes further confirm the ways Amis reinforces morality through irony. When the novel’s chronology is reversed, Tod Friendly becomes John Young: despite Tod’s association with death (in German), he becomes a younger Jack-of-all-trades). John then transforms into the gold-rich Hamilton de Souza, who assumes his birth name of Odilo Unverdorben. His last name means “un-depraved” or “un-corrupt” in German. Thus he moves from death to innocence. The reader simultaneously transposes the narrative inversion, of course, which shifts Unverdorben’s journey: he becomes a bearer of death, mirroring the change in his ideology. As Diedrick observes, Unverdorben’s name “contains both himself and his double” (138), just as Amis’s use of irony offers both a literal fantasy (a journey to innocence) and a figurative dismissal of that fantasy (an impossible return to childhood or to pre-Holocaust history). The dual use of language parallels the dual time scheme and the dual codes of ethics. Irony, he concludes, “doesn’t incite you to transform society; it strengthens you to tolerate it” (“Jane’s” 35).
In The Differend Lyotard contends that although the Holocaust has robbed “grand narratives” of their legitimacy, it is still possible to legitimize less sweeping narratives [petit recits]: “To learn names,” he writes, "is to situate them in relation to other names by means of phrases. Auschwitz is a city in southern Poland in the vicinity of which the Nazi camp administration installed an extermination camp in 1940" (44). This might seem a modest claim within the realm of philosophy, but in the world of fiction such connections associate style with ethics. For Amis naming, language, style cannot be separated from morality. His essay on The Adventures of Augie March concludes by asserting that “style is morality. Style judges…. Things are not merely described but registered, measured and assessed for the weight with which they bear on your soul” (War 467). In Nabokov’s Lolita as well, Amis discerns a sublime “method of moral focus,” one that invokes ethics through style: “rendering the imaginative possibilities as intensely, as open-endedly and as perilously as [Nabokov] can, and by letting his style prompt our choice” (“Sublime” 82). Amis does not offer a totalizing panacea to replace Holocaust horrors; instead he deconstructs such metanarratives to reinforce our capacity to confront modern contingency, irrationality and instability. In Time’s Arrow he wages an ironic war of words on all users of clichés—“clichés of the mind and clichés of the heart” (War xv)—who employ rationalist narratives to recount and account for the Holocaust and of the blood-dimmed tide that was loosed on the world after that crucial point in Western history.
Notes
[i] In Koba the Dread (2002) Amis similarly identifies the Holocaust with modern technology—itself a product of rational progress: “The exceptional nature of the Nazi genocide has much to do with its ‘modernity,’ its industrial scale and pace” (83).
[ii] Amis has called postmodernism “a dead end,” but confesses that he “thought there were comic possibilities in postmodernism that I hadn’t exploited much.” He adds that postmodernism was “a theory or an idea with tremendous predictive power, because life became very postmodern, politics became postmodern” (Reynolds and Noakes 16-7).
[iii] An earlier version of this essay appears in my book English Fiction Since 1984: Narrating a Nation (2006).
[iv] Of course the same danger made Theodor Adorno formulate his famous maxim in Prisms that “writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric,” although he later withdrew it (19).
[v] Amis associates this Edenic state with his father’s generation as well: “For his generation you were what you were, and that was that. It made you unswervable and adamantine. My father has this quality. I don’t. None of us do” (War 170). He also accuses that generation of getting it “hugely wrong” by endorsing the use of atomic weapons to end the war (Einstein’s 13).
[vi] Diedrick lists other precedents for reverse narratives: Lewis Carrol’s Sylvie and Bruno; the White Queen’s claim to live backwards in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland; Jean Cocteau’s Le Testament d’Orphée; Brian Aldiss’s An Age; Philip K. Dick’s Counter-Clock World; F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button”; and J.G. Ballard’s “Mr. F is Mr. F” (264-5). I wish to add Alejo Carpentier’s Viaje a la Semilla, Carlos Fuentes’s Aura, and Harold Pinter’s Betrayal. In the Afterword Amis refers to “Jachid and Jechidah,” an Isaac Bashevis Singer story in which an angel is sentenced to death and begins with her descent “to that cemetery called Earth.”
[vii] Menke is especially good on how the novel perversely reverses A.S. Eddington’s image of the second law of thermodynamics (imaged as time’s arrow), seemingly defeating the entropic forces of history.
[viii] Instance Prince Harry of England who attended a birthday party in January 2005 wearing a Nazi uniform and swastika. A spokesman for the Board of Deputies of British Jews reported, “The whole event, the prince’s choice of costume included, indicates a worrying trend of ignorance about the Holocaust that is reinforced by the results of a recent survey that 45% of U.K. residents have never heard of Auschwitz.” See John Daniszewski, “Critics Say the Prince Wore His Ignorance on His Sleeve” (Los Angeles Times, 14 January 2005: A8). In Experience Amis recounts his 1995 visit to Auschwitz where his guide told him, “We now have people coming here … who think that all this has been constructed to deceive them. Not just from Germany. From Holland, from Scandinavia. They believe that nothing happened here and the Holocaust is a myth” (369).
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- Vonnegut, Kurt. Slaughterhouse Five. London: Panther, 1970.
Copyright 2006 Brian Finney
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