The Fiction of Martin Amis
Page 18
As Foucault asks at the close of ‘What Is an Author?’: ‘[w]hat difference does it make who is speaking?’. And as Foucault argues, questions other than the identity of the author need to be asked: ‘[w]hat are the modes of existence of [a] discourse? Where has it been used, how can it circulate, and who can appropriate it for himself?’.165Like Foucault’s essay, Amis’s fiction suggest that discourses need to be thought of in terms of their social function - as means of agency. Amis’s novels argue that postwar nuclear discourse has changed fundamental social relationships in important ways. Rather than try to halt that change, Amis’s work tries to operate within that apocalyptic discourse in order to redirect it. Thus at the end of London Fields the roof is indeed brought down upon Samson and Nicola, but all the novel’s other characters survive - and those that survive carry on with their lives, informed by that apocalyptic experience in miniature. What Amis’s recent fiction underscores, then, is the power of discourse, rather than the power of the author. And as postnuclear subjects everywhere learn to write about nuclear weapons, that discourse will be redirected toward new ends.
In a recent interview with Graham Fuller in the Spring 1995 issue of Interview, Amis reflected on the changes within the discourse of apocalypse in the half dozen years since London Fields: ‘the big question of the second half of this century was, What are we going to do with nuclear weapons? Now that we’ve got out of the emotional idea that it could all end tomorrow, we can look at other things’.166 A feeling of suspense continues to insinuate itself within all manner of public discourses as the twentieth century comes to a close, but Amis argues that a kind of corner has been turned, and that those who have been learning how to write about nuclear weapons are also learning how to act -how to become actors in the endless unfolding of that discourse on the end … now, postmodern fiction pushes literary discourse beyond the apocalyptic horizon - to a place where the future awaits being rewritten, with new endings.167 □
But if, as Stokes suggests, London Fields, for all its apocalyptic quality, finally implies, optimistically, that the future can be rewritten, that apocalypse can be avoided, what about the past, where the script of history, like a pact with the devil, is written indelibly in blood, where, in Heidegger’s famous phrase, ‘the dreadful has already happened’? The past can be rewritten, it can be relived, but it cannot be changed, ever: this is the theme of Martin Amis’s next novel, which takes on that most harrowing and highly-charged of twentieth-century topics: the Holocaust.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Wrong in Time: Time’s Arrow (1991)
MARTIN AMIS was well aware of the dangers of taking on the Holocaust in Time’s Arrow, particularly for a novelist with his reputation. In an interview with Christopher Bigsby, published in 1992, he said:
■ When you start a book like this you are terrified by what George Steiner is going to think of you [George Steiner is a prominent literary and cultural critic who is much possessed by the Holocaust and has himself written a short, powerful novel, The Portage to San Cristobal of A.H. (1981) about Hitler’s reasons for perpetrating it168]. I was astonished that this was my subject. If you had asked me two years ago whether I could write about the Holocaust, something I had long been interested in, I would have said that I was perhaps the least qualified living writer to do it. But once you have got over that you have to say to yourself, very early on, that I bring what I bring to this subject. I can’t become another kind of writer because of the subject.169 □
In a later interview in the USA with Eleanor Wachtel, first published in 1996, Amis expands on how Time’s Arrow came about:
■ I was thinking of writing a story of a man’s life backwards in time and then I read a book by a friend of mine, Robert J[ay] Li [f] ton’s The Nazi Doctors (1986) … after a couple of days of reading Li[f]ton’s book, I saw that in fact I was going to write about [the Holocaust]. I thought if you did this world backwards, there would be a real point - the inversion is so complete. And the inversion that Li [f] ton talks about is ‘the healing-killing paradox’.
I felt I was in a forest of taboos throughout writing this book. This is the most difficult and sensitive subject ever, I think, but I do believe, as a writer, that there are no No Entry signs. People say, legitimately in a way, what am I as an Aryan doing with this subject? But I’m writing not about the Jews, I’m writing about the perpetrators, and they are my brothers, if you like. I feel a kind of responsibility in my Aryaness for what happened. That is my racial link with these events, not with the sufferers but with the perpetrators.170 □
In his remarks to Wachtel, Amis identifies three important aspects of Time’s Arrow: its concern with the responsibility of the perpetrators of the Holocaust; its reverse narrative technique; and the influence of Lifton’s The Nazi Doctors. All of these aspects will be further explored in the critical extracts in this chapter.
The initial review response to Time’s Arrow suggested that Amis had brought it off. For example, the distinguished critic Frank Kermode, writing in the London Review of Books, affirmed: ‘[f]or the author it was an extraordinary feat - for readers it is a genuine test - of imagination’,171while in the Times Literary Supplement, M. John Harrison declared that ‘as an act of imagination, Time’s Arrow has the hallmark of something earned, struggled for, originated’.172 This time a Martin Amis novel did make the Booker Prize shortlist,173 although the award went to Ben Okri’s The Famished Road, a decision denounced by a writer who - as Martin Amis might once have seemed the least likely living author to tackle the Holocaust - might similarly have seemed the least likely person to approve of a Martin Amis novel: the conservative philosopher and polemicist - who has also himself written two novels - Roger Scruton. Selecting Time’s Arrow as one of his ‘International Books of the Year’ in the Times Literary Supplement of 13 December 1991, Scruton complained of the relative lack of objectivity with which English writers had been treated in that year:
■ Apart from the award of the Booker Prize to the fey and pseudo-sensitive Ben Okri, we have witnessed the slovenly butchering of Martin Amis on grounds of immorality, despite (or maybe because of) the fact that Time’s Arrow is the first Martin Amis novel to contain the faintest hint of a moral idea. It is also, in my view, brilliant.174 □
Scruton’s surprising endorsement epitomised the way in which, as a result of Time’s Arrow, a sense was starting to develop that Martin Amis had sustained and developed his stylistic and structural brilliance while moving into a new area of seriousness and responsibility.
In the years since its first publication, Time’s Arrow has continued to earn critical respect and attention. A sustained and insightful example of this is provided in Donald E. Morse’s 1995 essay ‘Overcoming Time: “The Present of Things Past” in History and Fiction’. Morse begins by addressing what he calls ‘the age-old human fantasy of beginning again, living life again, or of being given another life to live‘175 and points to a variety of forms in which this desire emerges in contemporary popular culture in English, from past regressions to films about vampires who continue to haunt and drain the living. Morse then moves on to offer a perceptive exploration of Time’s Arrow as one example176 of a novel ‘which address [es] the problem of representing the no longer perceivable past within the present’:177
■ In Time’s Arrow as the river of time flows forward the main character Odilo Unverdorben … moves backward [and] a nameless narrator … puzzles over both the movement and nature of time as well as his own nature and identity. Knowing only duration and mistakenly assuming that he has just commenced rather than re-commenced life, the narrator continually misreads signs and misinterprets events including such decisive ones as death and birth and essential distinctions such as backwards and forwards……The narrator’s ignorance of time’s direction creates irony in the novel in much the same way that Oedipus’s ignorance of his past creates irony in Oedipus Rex. In Sophocles’s play the king laudably tries to rid his land of a plague by banishing whomever is res
ponsible but discovers to his horror that the source of the country’s illness lies in past events of which he himself was the cause but which he is now powerless to change. Similarly Odilo in Time’s Arrow condemned to replay his life - for like Oedipus it is far too late for him to change events - runs backward on his timeline until the moment when he anticipates ‘[[m]y father] will come in and kill me with his body’. After that he will divide into sperm and ovum which in turn will be re-absorbed harmlessly into his parents’ bodies. His awareness of the end - in much the same way as Oedipus’s dawning awareness of the truth - adds to his torment: ‘Odilo knows this [that he will perish upon his father entering his mother] and feels this too’ (p. 172) …
At the beginning of the novel Amis capitalizes on the comic effects created by treating literally a life being lived backwards: ‘it is the garbage people [moving backwards] who bring me my reading matter’ (p. 20). The first human conversation in the novel is printed in reverse:
‘Dug. Dug,’ says the lady in the pharmacy.
‘Dug/ I join in. ‘Oo y’rrah?’
‘Aid ut oo y’rrah?’
‘Mh-mm,’ she’ll say, as she unwraps my hair lotion (p. 14).
Readers will quickly reconstruct the conversation as ‘“Gud”.’ or good; “‘harr’y oo”’ or how are you?; ‘“Aid ut oo y’rrah?”’ Harr’y oo tu dia or How are you today?
Amis does not continue using reverse spelling - the joke might quickly wear thin - but continues to indicate time’s reversal by inverting the order of sentences within each conversation. This technique forces the reader to participate in this backwards running world since only by reconstructing the conversation in reverse can the reader affirm the normal temporal order. The words themselves which Odilo speaks backwards are all predetermined because he has said them all before. But then everything in his world - gesture, emotion, action - is completely and fully determined. ‘I speak without volition’, says the narrator, ‘in the same way that I do everything else’ (p. 14). For humans, as [J.T.] Fraser maintains: ‘[e]xpectations, memory and conscious experience - elements of the mental present working together -make us aware that our potentialities are greater than our possibilities. This awareness is manifest in a feeling that has a special name: it is called free will or human freedom’.178 Odilo surrendered his free will and relinquished any claim to human freedom in order to serve evil more fully as a Nazi doctor in the death camps, especially ‘fiercely coprocentric’ [centred on faeces] (p. 132) Auschwitz.
Amis suggests that choosing to do such evil negates the possibility of other choices making negation the essence of evil … As Erich Kahler notes: those Nazi doctors such as Odilo ‘professionally attending to the most gruesome activities, seemed to act only with a certain part of their being, while another part was left behind, remained in the background … ‘;179 the Nazi ‘split in the personality reaches into unfathomable depths, it is total, it is consummate schizophrenia … The part that commits atrocities seems wholly impersonal and, accordingly, in-human in the literal sense of the word; indeed, we should rather call it a-human.“180 In Time’s Arrow the part left behind was the conscience, soul, or animating principle which Odilo’s action negated - what remained was inhuman or a-human. Such negation as he practiced involves surrendering human freedom and ultimately hope. As Dante emphasized in the motto he chose for hell’s gate ‘Abandon All Hope / Ye Who Enter Here’ those who forfeit all choice and freedom in effect choose hell - where by definition there can be no further choice. This utter lack of choice becomes Amis’s theme, while his narrative method of moving literally backward through Odilo’s life allows him to ‘attend to the most gruesome activities’ of this ‘life that is unworthy of life’(p. 154)……
[The twentieth century has witnessed both] the increasing scope and efficiency of destruction [and] increasingly widespread state sponsored torture that aims ‘to coerce the personality of the individual into submission, to destroy self-worth’.181… Under the Nazis this purpose of ‘mass dehumanization’ was carried out with inconceivable efficiency using all the resources available to the modern highly industrialized state, yet with the chilling anonymity of the equally efficient modern bureaucracy … Moreover, as David H. Hirsch maintains in The Deconstruction of Literature: Criticism After Auschwitz:
The inescapable essence of Nazism lies not alone in its methods of mass killing nor in the bureaucratization of mass killing (though such monstrous inventions are not to be overlooked) but in its racist ideology, which led all too many of the German people to believe they were a superrace and the SS to believe they were gods … This may be the reason that the SS had not only to kill their victims but to kill them mercilessly and to strip them of all human dignity before destroying them……the SS men’s belief in themselves as gods who not only enjoy the power to decide who will live and who will die, but who can also enjoy toying with their victims.182
It is this set of values that Amis mirrors when he models the traditional ruler of hell on the SS. Customarily, the devil meets people in their own image of him … In Time’s Arrow the towering nightmare figure who presides over hell proves a distorted image of Odilo clothed in a doctor’s ‘white coat (a medic’s stark white smock)’, the black jackboots of the SS, ‘and a certain kind of smile’. He ‘was … a male shape, with an entirely unmanageable aura, containing such things as beauty, terror, love, filth, and above all power’ (p. 12). Clearly this personage enjoys power, smiles while torturing victims - as did the SS ‘who enjoy [ed] toying with their victims’, and is in every way a monstrous perversion of the image of the helpful healer.
For the doctors of the deathcamps, such as Odilo, human beings were so much garbage to be disposed of during and after diabolical experiments in camp hospitals. It is, therefore, doubly fitting in his reversed hellish life that the narrator describe him and his fellow humans as ‘kings of crap and trash’ (p. 51); first: because hell is filled with excrement - Dante, for example, pictures Hell’s inhabitants as not only existing in utter darkness but as themselves being only so much cosmic waste or garbage - and second: the death camps as described by most commentators were ‘deliberately organized to become monuments to filth and excrement’.183
This reversed world perspective of Time’s Arrow yields irony and comedy, while allowing Amis to confront the horror of the a-human:
[People] say hello when they mean goodbye. Lords of lies and trash - all kings of crap and trash.184 Signs say No Littering - but who to? … Government does that, at night, with trucks; or uniformed men come sadly at morning with their trolleys, dispensing our rubbish, and shit for the dogs (p. 51).
That last telling detail - ‘and shit for the dogs’ - convinces the reader of Amis’s fictional reality …
Everything of worth in Odilo’s world - ‘all sustenance, all meaning (and a good deal of money) issues [most appropriately] from a single household appliance: the toilet handle’ (p. 18). He asks rhetorically: ‘Where would Tod [one of Odilo’s several false identities] and I be without the toilet? Where would we be without all the trash?’ (p.40). But the fullest irony derives from the worst events: after encountering the ‘new smell in the air. The sweet smell [of the crematoria]’ (p. 127) and observing ‘the evening sky, hellish red with the gathering souls’ (p. 128), Odilo begins the process of creation:
It was I, Odilo Unverdorben, who personally removed the pellets of Zyklon B and entrusted them to the pharmacist in his white coat
……Entirely intelligibly, though, to prevent needless suffering, the dental work was usually [emphasis added] completed while the patients were not yet alive (p. 129).
* * *
I am not ‘in it’ for the gratitude. No. I am ‘in it’… because I love the human body and all living things … It is a war on death that now comes in many forms. As well as phenol we are obliged to extract prussic acid and sodium evipan (p. 144).
* * *
I now extract benzene, gasoline, kerosene and air … Twenty cubic centimet
res of air … with a hypodermic almost the size of a trombone and my right foot firmly stamped on the patient’s chest, I continue to prosecute the war against nothing and air (p. 145).
His is truly, if ironically, ‘creation’ ex nihilo out of the nothing of trash, excrement, and ashes.
Bereft of choice, a king of crap flung backwards through time, Odilo himself in his torment will experience the privative nature of evil as he arrives at his early months ’ … the world of an infant [where] before-and-after relations have no meaning’.185 … As Odilo moves literally and physically from after to before his memories are erased along with that much consciousness … During his hellish trip to nonexistence Odilo encounters neither understanding nor possibility.