The soul’s futile attempts to make sense out of experience fail, therefore, because without the crucial knowledge that time is running in reverse all of its theories or perceptions prove incorrect except the final one achieved in the very last moment of existence:
Look! Beyond, before the slope of pine, the lady archers are gathering with their targets and bows. Above, a failing-vision kind of light, with the sky fighting down its nausea. Its many nuances of nausea. When Odilo closes his eyes I see an arrow fly - but wrongly. Point-first (p. 173).
Intuitively, the soul realizes the implications of this wrong-headed arrow - the arrow of time of the book’s title: ‘Oh no’, he says, ‘but then…’ (p. 173). And the unfinished sentence tells all: Odilo’s closed eyes and contentless dreams indicate how close he is to obliteration. The narrator this ‘passenger or parasite’ (p. 16), this conscience or soul, this spirit or essence, this ‘I within’ realizes at last the awful truth: ‘I within, who came at the wrong time - either too soon [if life is lived backwards], or after it was all too late [if life is lived forwards]’ (p. 173).186 Thus at the end of the novel all illusions of benevolent good will shatter violently upon the soul’s apprehension of the true direction of time’s arrow. The truth about the direction of time and time’s truth about Odilo’s life also dissolve the dramatic tension between the soul - which Odilo long ago jettisoned - longing for redemption and the person actively choosing ruin. Stephen Donaldson contends ‘it is the responsibility of every human being to create the meaning of his/her life’ and the action of Time’s Arrow implies that the large choices for such meaning will be either ‘redemptive [or] … ruinous’.187 The parasitic soul might still wish for redemption, but Odilo long ago chose ruin for them both……
[L]ike virtually all of the Nazi death camp doctors and guards Odilo was as impotent morally and spiritually as he was impotent sexually. He traded his personal potency for omnipotence over others -‘I am omnipotent. Also impotent. I am powerful and powerless’, he boasts and laments (p. 148). Rather than inviting his soul to travel the road with him, he rejected it. Only at death did the forgotten soul appear flung back out of ‘the blackest sleep’ (p. 11) forced to re-enter the corpse, to re-animate it until both could be safely dissolved into sperm and egg.
Amis says he borrowed this reverse movement for his plot from [Kurt Vonnegut’s novel] Slaughterhouse-Five (1970) where Billy Pilgrim watches films backwards of World War II bombing raids over Germany. Each film ends happily with all the fire and destruction safely packed up into the bombs which then disappear into the bellies of the planes and are subsequently returned first to the factories to be taken apart and their components disposed of harmlessly in the earth.188……Unlike Vonnegut…, Amis directs the focus of his novel not upon the innocence of those who suffer, but upon the diabolical psychology of those sworn to heal who volunteer as SS to torture and destroy systematically in clear violation of their Hippocratic oath, their common humanity - which they then forfeit - or any least dedication to the healing arts. But the atrocities committed by these Nazi doctors of which Odilo is the example are so mind-numbing, so brutally inhuman, as to appear almost beyond the reach of imaginative representation ‘in either consciousness or discourse’.189 As Hirsch summarizes:
The futility of all attempts at [such] representation was encapsulated in Theodor Adorno’s famous dictum (which he later recanted), that it is not possible to write poetry after Auschwitz.190… Basically, Adorno raises the issue that any literary representation of Nazi atrocities would aestheticize, and thus make acceptable, the horrors and cruelty.191
Amis’s solution to this problem lies in following Vonnegut’s model of the bombs which suck up fire and inventing a life lived in reversed time which in turn creates the almost diabolical illusion of accomplishing good works. Thus Odilo removes gas pellets from the death camp showers and returns them to the camp pharmacy, ‘knock [s] together a human being out of the unlikeliest odds and ends’ (p. 142), or most spectacular of all ‘make[s] a people from the weather. From thunder, and from lightning. With gas, with electricity, with shit, with fire’ (p. 128). Readers encountering such images but knowing however dimly or in whatever repressed fashion something of the historical truth, must then actively and painfully reverse them. By so involving the reader Amis insures that far from aestheticizing the atrocities or providing aesthetic pleasure from the misery and pain of the victims as Adorno feared,192 this process renders them part of the reader’s immediate experience since in re-reversing time as read the reader must impel time forward towards the full banality of its horror, for of all the potentialities which become possibilities, only one will be actualized. Thus historical reality is brought back to consciousness through imagination.
Amis achieves in Time’s Arrow exactly what Adorno despaired of poetry or any imaginative literature accomplishing for as the reader goes through the novel inevitably, inexorably, the full awful truth of this evil with attendant horrors and cruelty strikes home. Far from being ‘the native medium of evil… [which] obscures things‘193 time in Amis’s novel serves to unmask evil. The reader is left confronting the debris of the past - the mud mixed with ashes …194 □
Morse suggests how Time’s Arrow avoids aestheticising Auschwitz by forcing its reader to re-reverse fictional time and thus imaginatively re-enact real history. The important issue of the way in which Amis’s novel involves its readers is valuably developed further by Neil Easterbrook in his 1995 essay ‘“I know that it is to do with trash and shit, and that it is wrong in time”: Narrative Reversal in Martin Amis’[s] Time’s Arrow’. Easterbrook examines how Amis’s novel explores evil-doing in such a way as to implicate the reader and thereby shake his or her complacent assumption that s/he would not perpetrate such crimes. His essay is also valuable because it takes up Amis’s acknowledgement, in his ‘Afterword’ to Time’s Arrow, that the novel ‘would not and could not have been written without’ Robert Jay Lifton’s The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide (1986), and draws extensively and illumi-natingly upon Lifton’s and Eric Markusen’s The Genocidal Mentality Nazi Holocaust and Nuclear Threat (1990) in analysing Amis’s anatomy of evil.
■ Martin Amis’s short but tremendously moving Time’s Arrow, or The Nature of the Offence (1991) traces what Hannah Arendt once named ‘the banality of evil’, which the novel names as the protagonist’s ‘quiet dedication’ (p. 142) to the Nazi cause. Although late in his life he is deeply critical of those who lack ‘initiative’, actually he was one who ‘just follow[ed] orders’ (p. 17), emphasizing for us the troubling fact that horrors such as Nazism and the death camps were possible only because of the massive scale efforts of ordinary, unremarkable ‘people very much like ourselves’.195 Rather than exculpating the Nazi protagonist, Amis’ [s] genius is to excoriate complacent readers by crafting uncanny patterns so seductive readers can’t help being drawn in, and thereby be implicated in the crime.
In Time’s Arrow time itself runs backward, rendering the narrative ‘a ghost-negative’ that gradually unfolds his buried secret - that he had once assisted ‘the worst man in the worst place at the worst time’ (p. 12). We finally meet that man 114 pages later (and fifty years earlier) at Auschwitz: ‘Uncle Pepi’, the infamous Josef Mengele. As its plot moves backward in time from death toward birth some seventy-five years earlier, the story moves forward toward a reconstruction of a personal and political history hidden, obfuscated, and concealed by the ‘sacred efficacy’ (p. 130) of cash to erase memory and efface truth. Vladimir Nabokov once remarked that ‘[c]uriously, one cannot read a book: one can only reread it’,196 an especially apt description of literary dynamics where plot and story reciprocally reverse one another. Since the novel’s ‘film is running backwards’ (p. 16), such narrative anachrony compels us to begin any exposition with the plot’s conclusion, the narrator’s birth.
‘Odilo Unverdorben’ (which in certain respects might translate as ‘Adam Innocent’) is born in 1916
in Solingen, coincidentally the birthplace ten years earlier of Adolf Eichmann (p. 170), the Gestapo overseer directly responsible for deporting and then murdering Jews at concentration camps. Odilo’s father, wounded and ‘ruined’ (p. 172) by [t]he Great War, soon dies, leaving him to be raised by his mother, a nurse, who inspires Odilo’s early interest in medicine. On a camping trip at thirteen, Odilo visits the site that will later become Auschwitz (p. 170). The only other remembered events of his youth concern rejection by women, homoerotic repression, and abuse by bigger boys: ‘Odilo is innocent. Odilo is, it turns out, innocent, emotional, popular, and stupid’ (p. 157). Stupidity doesn’t stop him from entering medical school, where he marries Herta, a young secretary (all of his affairs with women will concern either immediate subordinates or prostitutes). But ‘[w]hat could appear to be stupidity’, as Robert Jay Lifton reminds us in The Genocidal Mentality … ‘is better explained as an -ideological constellation’,197 which must be the reason for Odilo’s matriculation. Once married, however, he finds himself impotent and subjects his wife to a series of beatings and eroticized humiliations (pp. 157-9); they eventually have a child (Eva), although Odilo will abandon both.
After graduation, he goes to work at Schloss Harthdm (p. 152), a Renaissance castle converted to medical laboratory198 where doctors experiment with the techniques later fully developed in the death camps, as Odilo discovers in his first posting at Treblinka (p. 151). Commissioned as an officer, he then serves a stint in the Waffen SS. In 1942, at age twenty-five, he joins the Kat-Zet (KZ) and becomes assistant to ‘Uncle Pepi’ (the name always appears within scare quotes) at Auschwitz (p. 142). By 1944 he is helping kill ‘the Hungarian Jews, and at an incredible rate, something like 10,000 a day’ (p. 137).199 The slaughter accelerates until, just before Russian troops arrive, Odilo escapes (p. 124), eventually making his way to Rome, where in exchange for some gold an Irish emissary of the Vatican helps him obtain a new identity (pp. 110-21). The gold, of course, ‘came direct from the Reichsbank’ (p. 130), as extracted from the pockets and wrists and even the teeth of its Jewish victims. These ‘fruits of [his] meticulous vandalism’ (p. 26) both enable his escape and act as the very agency of amnesia, its instrument of historical erasure.
Taking the first of his ‘pseudonyms … noms de guerre’ (p. 110), in 1946 Hamilton de Souza is in Portugal, comfortably ensconced within a rich villa (pp. 110-17); in 1948, he sails for America (p. 98) as John Young (pp. 76-110), who, aided by another Nazi taking the alias ‘Kreditor’ (p. 79), finds work in a Manhattan hospital. At some point in the ’60s, Kreditor discovers accusations have been made against Young, who then becomes Tod Friendly and flees New York (p. 76), ending up a wealthy senior doctor at an HMO [Health Maintenance Organization] in a prototypical American suburb exemplifying ‘America’s pretty pluralism’ (p. 25). Although he retreats into ‘watery oblivion’ (p. 69) and a ‘muffled self (p. 92) as ‘Friendless Friendly’ (p. 71), in his 70s he dies a quiet death - of a heart attack (p. 11), an ironic commentary on the Nazi euphemism Gnadentod (‘mercy death’) that Nazis held they brought to Jewish misery. In German, tod means ‘death’; ‘Tod Friendly’ then explicitly suggests Gnadentod, just as ‘John Young’ earlier signifies his renewed potency.
Devoted to exploring the central conceit of time reversal invariance200 and establishing the pattern of identification which will eventually implicate readers, the novel’s first sixty pages slowly unveil the wholly unremarkable, mundane, and trivial life of Tod Friendly. Beyond the promise that readers will uncover Tod’s hidden secret, what is fascinating about the opening pages is how Amis works through the occasionally comic reversal of time’s arrow. … If time runs backward, then the most quotidian events have an altogether different cast: mail arrives not from the postman but from the trash can (p. 135); food flows from stomach to plate to carton to grocery shelf (p. 19); twice a week housemaids enter a sparkling home, ‘dirty all the dishes’, then drop money on the counter before leaving (p. 102). Comic reversals find their tragic complement in more subtly allegorical events: ‘[w]ith one fierce and skilful kick of his aching foot, he will mend a deep concavity in the refrigerator’s flank. With a butt of his head he will heal the fissured bathroom mirror …’ (p. 63) …
… [T]he narrative serves as the reader’s double, an T who comes to consciousness in Tod’s journey backward into history. This T has ‘no name and no body’ (p. 155), has ‘no access to his thoughts - but I am awash with his emotions’ (p. 15). It begins as the Nazi doctor’s alter ego, but just as the reader’s initial identification with the protagonist is gradually estranged and defamiliarized, it eventually ‘slip[s] out from under him’ (p. 155); produced by a ‘parallax’ of perspective (p. 57), it is ‘nauseatingly sundered’ (p. 100) by the sheer weight of bearing witness to the unconcealment of Tod’s history.
While this observing ‘I’ is the eye-witness, it is not a conscience or a soul; in fact, as one of Tod’s lovers rightly observes, Tod ‘has no soul’ (p. 62). So the narrator-witness hovers above events, experiencing them with precisely the distance of the narratee, thereby doubling readers’ experience. Yet this bifurcation or sundering is true of Tod/ Odilo himself: ‘[h]e sheds the thing he often can’t seem to bear: his identity, his quiddity … ’ (p. 57). As estranged from himself as from all humanity, his ‘search for invisibility’ (p. 71) is ‘evasive action … flight’ (p. 108) from moral consciousness, which he finds ‘weary, multiform, intolerable’ (p. 78), rendering him more ‘like a brilliant robot’ (p. 127) than human being. This heterodiegetic defamiliarization follows the conventions of the central narrative trope and identifies the Nazi rationalizations for genocide: ‘I immolate myself in denial’ (p. 96). [Easterbrook’s endnote (p. 60, note 6) is inserted here for convenience: ‘Heterodiegetic’ denotes a narrator divorced or absent from his own first-person narrative; see [Gerard] Genette’s Narrative Discourse [(New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), trans. Jane Lewin]. The sense of ‘defamiliarization’ I have in mind is developed, in variously differing ways, by Viktor Shklovsky and Walter Benjamin.]
Odilo, however, moves backward from disavowal to reality. Consequently, he passes through one ‘deracinating spectacle’ (p. 125) after another, uprooting and replacing a sense of self articulated only by its ability to forget and to erase and to evade the real meaning of events. While he has no difficulty recognizing human agency, the essence of human subjectivity eludes both Tod and the narrator. For while Odilo and Herta’s baby ‘exerts colossal power as a subject’ (p. 135), Odilo cannot comprehend, cannot countenance this moral and ontological power. The narrator finds this disjunction between human subjectivity and its articulation especially pronounced in German, where for an English audience the pronoun T is divorced from its transparency: ‘“Ich”. Not a masterpiece of reassurance, is it? I sounds nobly erect. Je has a certain strength and intimacy. Eo’s okay… But Ich? It sounds like the sound a child makes when it confronts its own … Perhaps that’s part of the point’ (p. 134; second ellipsis is original). In fact, the narrative is the story of Odilo’s confrontation with his own ordure.
Who this narrating ‘I’ is necessarily never finds exact articulation, but its insistent movement remains absolutely clear. Together, they are headed somewhere: ‘[p]arasite or passenger, I am travelling there with him. It will be bad. It will be bad, and not intelligible … I will know the nature of the offence. Already I know this. I know that it is to do with trash and shit, and that it is wrong in time’ (pp.72, 73). Their journey is to ‘[a] place without depth. And a place without time’: Auschwitz, where time has ‘no arrow’ (p. 151).
Because the narrator moving forward remains always distanced from the events unfolding backward, there exists a bitterly ironic disparity between the memory of events and their revisionary interpretation. In almost every respect, Odilo’s pathology parallels the psychological profile of the Nazi doctor outlined by Lifton, who names the Nazi doctors’ two m[o]st notable traits ‘doubling’ and ‘psychic n
umbing’:
‘Psychic numbing’ is a form of dissociation characterized by the diminished capacity or inclination to feel, and usually includes separation of thought from feeling. ‘Doubling’ carries the dissociative process still further with the formation of a functional second self, related to but more or less autonomous from the prior self.201
What Amis does is manifest these traits in Odilo, whose disavowal is precisely the one Lifton identifies: ‘repudiation not of the reality itself but of the meaning of that reality’.202
As Odilo, the narrator radically misreads every event at Auschwitz. For instance, he thinks himself an angel, a god, a creator restoring dead Jewish bodies to life: ‘[i]t was I, Odilo Unverdorben, who personally removed the pellets of Zyklon B and entrusted them to the pharmacist in his white coat’ (p. 129); who then moves on to return glasses or gold fillings, reunite husband with wife, usher prisoners to trains bound homeward, channel repatriated Jews ‘back into society’ (p. 149). Each physical transformation is miraculous, but utterly unremarkable: ‘stunning successes were as cheap as spit’ (p. 132). Unlike the empirical reversals marking the novel’s early pages, none of these ironies is presented as humorous; instead, their shocking misreadings continually bespeak the barbaric cruelty and ruthlessness of systematic massacre. Gassing, for example, was actually selected because it was ‘humane’,203 even though Himmler admired its efficiency……
Such potent, virulent absurdities are at the core of Time’s Arrow. Amis vividly articulates a consciousness that could so divorce itself from humanity as to serve as a guard, doctor, or officer at Auschwitz. Here, where ‘there was a sadistic irony at work’ (p. 163), names are always pseudonyms, noms de guerre: the officer’s quarters at Auschwitz is ‘our clubhouse’ (p. 127 [Easterbrook’s italics]), the ovens ‘Heavenblock’, the sprinkle room ‘the central hospital’, and an officer’s tour ‘Sommerfrische’, fresh summer air (p. 133). And … the protagonist’s several names offer thinly disguised commentaries on his ideology, beginning with innocence and ending with death.204
The Fiction of Martin Amis Page 19