The Fiction of Martin Amis

by Nicolas Tredell

  The disparity between Odilo and his narrator-witness models the doublings and reversals that characterize Odilo’s identity as a Third Reich physician. ‘I am omnipotent. Also impotent’ (p. 148), he remarks, underscoring one curious ‘characteristic of Nazi doctors’ [identified by Lifton], their ‘mixture of omnipotence and impotence’.205This mixture was produced, Lifton argues, by the ‘Auschwitz self -defined by

  reversals of healing and killing, the operative Nazi biomedical vision, the extreme numbing that rendered killing no longer killing, struggles with omnipotence (deciding who would live or die) and impotence (being a cog in a powerful machine), maintaining a medical identity while killing, and somehow finding meaning in the environment.206

  The ‘Auschwitz self structured the transformation of morality by logistics [‘logistics’ is, strictly speaking, the ‘art of moving, lodging and supplying troops and equipment’ but takes on here a wider (and darker) meaning, applying to the skills of organising the Nazi concentration camps]; as Odilo comments, ‘the triumph of Auschwitz was essentially organizational’ (p. 132). Amis has closely followed Lifton’s profile of the genocidal mentality, right down to the detail that Odilo, who has ‘a modest talent for neuropsychiatry’ (p. 149), should therefore find himself delivering the Zyklon B, for the gas chamber doctors were most frequently psychiatrists.

  But the Nazi doctors also displayed traits Lifton doesn’t emphasize, such as their lust for wealth and, when apprehended, their ‘chronic diffidence’ (p. 115). Refusing to take responsibility for their actions, they instead incessantly whined about their own suffering,207 nicely represented when Odilo shifts emphasis away from his own incredible evasion of responsibility to the ‘incredible invasion’ (p. 62) of his privacy, which of course is the narrative itself. Since the narrator has no access to Odilo’s thoughts, we only get glimpses of his rationalizations and moral equivocations; awash with his emotions, however, the narrator does witness to the experience of the place.

  And indeed creating analog [ues] of that experience is what constitutes the novel’s brilliance. Time’s Arrow contains several image clusters and recurrent motifs that disclose Odilo’s Auschwitz self. I mention only one: ‘[t]he Auschwitz universe, it has to be allowed, was fiercely coprocentric. It was made of shit’ (p. 132). While at the beginning of the novel the central conceit of recursive temporality [that is, of reversing time] produces merely scatological humour (pp. 18-19), it quickly takes on allegorical resonance - the Nazi doctor gradually expels nourishment to ingest shit: ‘[t]his stuff, this human stuff, at normal times (and in civilized locales) tastefully confined to the tubes and runnels, subterranean, unseen - this stuff had burst its banks, surging outward and upward on to the floor, the walls, the very ceiling of life’. Amis drags us through such ‘[o]rdure, ordure everywhere’ (p. 125). The obvious, telling trope reveals the Nazi cognate of order as ordure [‘cognate’ means ‘of [the] same linguistic family; representing [the] same original word or root’] and Nazi deity the apotheosis of defecation: ‘[w]hen he swears, Odilo invokes human ordure, from which, as we now know, all human good eventually emanates’ (p. 123).

  The novel’s treatment of psychic time makes it a parable of what Freud called Nachträglichkeit, the revisionary retroactivity that belatedly recasts the past as a repetition of the present; it is the rereading or rein-terpretation of past events that then structures ‘primary revision’ in the return of the repressed: ‘[s]omewhere in the severe dance of this roiling sleep I can sense the beginnings of a profound rearrangement, as if everything bad might soon be good, as if everything wrong might soon be right’ (pp. 115-16). It is Nachträglichkeit which directly structures the sort of revisionary history that would obscure or deny the Holocaust.

  In fact, the ethical problems produced by reversing time parallel ironies predicated entirely by the novel’s textuality: ‘[l]ike writing, paintings seem to hint at a topsy-turvy world in which, so to speak, time’s arrow moves the other way. The invisible speedlines suggest a different nexus of sequence and process’ (p. 95). The narrator, everywhere present but nowhere visible, as in Flaubert’s famous phrase,208allegorizes a Jewish double: the narrator literally reads backward (p. 51). What this self-reflexive textuality represents, I think, is the total inability of National Socialism to understand the Other as another Self in the reciprocal relation of intersubjectivity, which Emmanuel Levinas has named ‘being-for-the-other’. We see this denial throughout the novel, beginning with Tod’s refusal to look in the mirror (p. 17). Belatedly, readers recognize the banalization of evil effected by an affected amnesia.

  In the novel’s final paragraphs, Odilo confronts the inevitable, his own dissolution because of his father’s toxic potency. Father erases son by impregnating his mother (p. 172), a hard joke about original sin and the causes of Nazi genocide, a sort of Oedipal double reversal. All of these passages compel readers toward reflection - however banal evil may really be, the most trivial individual, innocent and aimless, perhaps even like ourselves, may one day quietly dedicate himself to genocide.

  Amis superbly realizes Arendt’s declared purpose - to focus our attention on the utter barbarity of the crime - Odilo’s whining sentimentality of his own suffering, his greed, his sadistic cruelty, his ‘coprophagic smile’ (p. 161), his envy and jealousy, his lust for power, a lust that finds exact expression in Amis’[s] phrase which allegorizes the entire Nazi movement: ‘erotic revanchism’ [‘revanchism’ means a ‘policy of seeking to recover lost territory’]. As Amis comments in the novel’s ‘Afterword’, the Nazi ‘offence was unique, not in its cruelty, nor in its cowardice, but in its style’ (p. 176). Odilo’s ‘above all thorough’ style (p. 94) leads him to perform his duty ‘with impeccable ovinity’ (p. 157 [in a sheep-like way]) - without the slightest shred of integrity even for his own beliefs. (Before the Kristallnacht he claims to have been ‘one of nature’s philo-Semites’ (p. 160).)

  All of us dream of turning back the clock to change events. Instead, Amis turns us to remember how events were and to say again, with [Paul] Celan, Never.209 □

  Paul Celan (1920-70) was a German poet who was sent to a forced labour camp and whose Jewish parents were murdered in a concentration camp. He was much preoccupied with the Holocaust in his poetry, which has been seen as the ‘most outstanding’ to have emerged in Germany since 1945.210

  Easterbrook’s concerns with the psychology of the Nazi doctors and with Amis’s use of Robert Jay Lifton’s studies are among the topics that Richard Menke explores in his 1998 essay ‘Narrative Reversals and the Thermodynamics of History in Martin Amis’s Time’s Arrow’. Menke traces the phrase ‘time’s arrow’ to A.S. Eddington’s The Nature of the Physical World (1928), where it is used in relation to the second law of thermodynamics; the second law of thermodynamics, Menke contends, constitutes the field of metaphor active in the novel’s title and its view of the Holocaust. His essay offers a fascinating account of how certain ideas drawn from popular understandings of modern science can illuminate Time’s Arrow:

  ■ … Time’s Arrow [is a] postmodern unbildungsroman [a bildungsroman is a novel that shows the formation, or education by life, of its central character] … What provides the crucial twist in Amis’s scheme is the first-person voice that supplies the novel’s retrograde narrative: although from Tod’s point of view life presumably proceeds normally, to the unfortunate and impotent narrator trapped within him everything happens in reverse, a fact that quickly dawns on the reader but only becomes apparent to the narrator slowly and confusedly. The novel sets forth a life, a traditional project of fictional realism but, by an act of authorial fiat [decree], ‘the film is running backwards’ (p. 16). Instead of providing the seamless transparency attempted by more orthodox realisms, the reversed narrative willfully obtrudes between the imaginary life and the account that constitutes it, occupying an uneasy middle ground between mimesis [imitation, ‘showing’] and diegesis [‘telling’], between representation from within the action and commentar
y from without.211

  Against Tod Friendly’s sometimes brutal, often banal life history, the narrative provides the filigree of art, a stream of ironically inverted meditations, brilliant aperçus, and time-reversal set-pieces. And along with the satisfactions of this showy (and often very funny) literary artistry, the narratorial voice - which is only a voice, a ‘passenger or parasite’ (p. 16) in Tod’s body with access to his emotions and dreams but not to his thoughts - offers the principal source of humanity among the human shapes that hurry backward through Time’s Arrow, their eyes focused on what they have just left, their blind steps leading them ineluctably into the past. For the nameless inner doppelgänger who narrates the events of Tod’s life from finish to start turns out to be more or less Tod’s vestigial conscience or soul, abandoned during the pivotal experience of Tod’s life (indeed, of the twentieth century), or so dislocated by its experience of the Holocaust that it must reverse the sequence of Tod’s biography in order to make sense of his life at all.

  Interpreting life backward, this fictional soul is a supremely reliable narrator; he may be relied upon to get things diametrically, and often poignantly, wrong. The scheme allows not only for powerful art but also for a more humane artistic vision than Amis’s usual murderous satire. But at what price? Time’s Arrow presents the act of narrative as the soul of fictional art, with its task of recounting, reordering, and reinterpreting history. Yet, ironically, this extraordinary act of narrative can itself only reimagine history by conceding its powerlessness before it. The novel’s narrative reversals, which present literary art as history’s double, ultimately ratify the one-sidedness of the relationship between the two.

  This pessimistic conception of the relationship between literature and history centers upon the field of metaphor tacitly at work in both the novel’s title and its vision of the Holocaust: thermodynamics, the physics of heat and its relation to other forms of energy. The physicist and science writer A. S. Eddington coined the phrase ‘time’s arrow’ to denote the directionality of time that follows from the second law of thermodynamics, which describes the inescapable increase in entropy in closed physical systems.212 Because this law alone sets the direction of time’s arrow, Eddington accorded the second law of thermodynamics precedence among the laws of physics. The narrative of Time’s Arrow reverses the arrow of time but paradoxically awards the law of entropy an even higher place than Eddington does [entropy here means ‘the measure of the degradation or disorganisation of the universe’]: for all its comedy, artistry, and surprising humanity, Time’s Arrow offers a darkly thermodynamic vision of history……

  Narrative Reversals

  The local reversals of Time’s Arrow range from the jocular to the portentous. A Hollywood movie is a machine for dismantling a couple. ‘Work liberates’ people: as they prepare to begin the week on Friday evenings, ‘they laugh and shout and roll their shoulders’ (p. 57). Indeed, the novel’s backward point of view completely recasts production and consumption, getting and spending, creation and destruction. ‘Creation … is easy, is quick’ (p. 23); objects emerge intact and ready for use from the ‘industrial violence’ of the incinerator, the car crash, and the garbage truck, whose ‘monstrous jaws’ bring Tod trash bags filled with his favorite tabloid paper (p. 20). ‘Destruction’, on the other hand, ‘is difficult. Destruction is slow’ (p.26). As the narrator sees it, Tod spends years ripping up his garden until only the weeds remain.

  What the narrator finds most striking about the processes of destruction and creation is the human body’s role in them … After his retirement ends, Tod’s profession involves methodically mangling the human body just as he has demolished his garden: Tod turns out to be a doctor. As far as the appalled narrator can tell, doctors spend their time wounding patients’ bodies until they are healed by the violence of accident or disease. ‘You have to be cruel to be kind’, he concludes (p. 41). Tod seems unfazed by the practice of medicine, but the narrator feels ‘harrowed by it,… curled up within, feebly gagging, and trying to avert [his] eyes’ from the damage doctors do (pp.33, 34).

  But there would seem to be worse to come. As novel and narrator hurtle into the inevitable past, the narrator senses that they are moving toward the root of Tod’s iciness, his unease, what his most devoted lover identifies as his lack of a soul (at first, admits the narrator, ‘I used to take it personally, and I was wretched’ (p. 62)). Tod’s secret ‘will be bad, and not intelligible’ (p. 72), but the narrator knows one thing about it: ‘that it is to do with trash and shit, and that it is wrong in time’ (p. 73). As Tod’s interest in articles about Nordic super-races and multiple births has hinted, with an irony that links tabloid fantasy and Nazi atrocity, the secret hinges on his involvement in the Holocaust. In fact, Tod turns out not to be the middle-aged, middle-American Tod T. Friendly at all. After seeing Tod through several incognitos, the reader and the narrator learn that Tod once had the identity, and the narrator now occupies the body, of Odilo Unverdorben, one of the Nazi doctors at Auschwitz.

  Making Sense of the Holocaust

  As Tod/Odilo awaits escape to postwar America (from his point of view) or immersion in the Second World War (from the narrator’s), he suffers a recurrent dream that the narrator reads as an omen of ‘a profound rearrangement, as if everything bad might soon be good, as if everything wrong might soon be right’ (pp. 115-16): ‘[h]e dreams he is shitting human bones’ (p. 116). We have no information about the time sequence of the dreams that are the only form of consciousness the narrator shares with his host; we cannot know whether Odilo dreams he is voiding bones forwards or backwards, creating them or consuming them. And we must guess whose bones they are: the victims of Odilo’s malignant medicine, of course - but Odilo’s bones, as well, or Odilo’s soul? The dream offers an image of self-evacuation as well as of cannibalism, of expelling one’s own insides as well as of ingesting the Other.

  The dream remains mysterious, but the clarity that the narrator giddily anticipates finally arrives as Odilo moves through a ruined Europe that awaits the violent restorations of war: ‘[t]he world is going to start making sense … / Now’, declares the narrator, as the novel strains the limits of prose typography to proclaim the change. The narrator announces himself as ‘I, Odilo Unverdorben’, without the pronominal distinction that has marked his separation from Tod, for although time still flows backwards for him, he and his host are ‘one now, fused for a preternatural purpose’. At first this purpose seems less than obvious in the chaos attending the Russian liberation of Auschwitz (or, as the narrator experiences it, the ‘Bolsheviks [‘] … ignoble withdrawal’ (p. 124)). But the walls of a hospital at the camp present a sight that, like Odilo’s dream, portends lucidity if only it is read aright:

  marks and pfennigs - good tender - stuck to the wall with human ordure. A mistake: a mistake. What is the meaning of this? Ordure, ordure everywhere … Naturally, I didn’t immediately see the logic and justice of it. I didn’t immediately see this: that now human shit is out in the open, we’ll get a chance to find out what this stuff can really do (p. 125).

  Money has become worthless, but the essence of creation remains intact; in the ‘fiercely coprocentric’ universe of Auschwitz, the toilet, font of all life and meaning, has spilled over to fill the world (p. 132). The officers call Auschwitz ‘Anus Mundi’, observes the narrator, ‘[a]nd I can think of no finer tribute than that’ (p. 133).

  The toilet is the site of a daily miracle of creation, and Auschwitz starts performing a roughly analogous marvel as, under the directorship of ‘Uncle Pepi’, a fictional double for Joseph Mengele, its real work begins. ‘Enlightenment’ - surely the term quietly recalls Adorno - comes to the narrator the day he sees ‘the old Jew float to the surface of the deep latrine, how he splashed and struggled into life, and was hoisted out by the jubilant guards, his clothes cleansed by the mire’ (p. 132). Like the latrine, the camp is unsightly and inelegant, the narrator admits, but ‘[c]reation’ can be ‘ugly’: the ‘pre
ternatural purpose’ he shares with Odilo is ‘[t]o dream a race …’ (p. 128). The work of Auschwitz, as the narrator sees it, is nothing short of the creation of the Jews.

  Auschwitz produces whole trainloads of Jews - and a doctor like Odilo presides over each step in this mass production, from the ovens whose fires assemble human bodies from smoke and ashes, to the ‘Sprinkleroom’ where the Zyklon B that will vivify them is infused, where life arrives with convulsions of pain. ‘[W]e cry and twist and are naked at both ends of life … while the doctor watches’, the narrator concludes. And no doctor has a more central place in this nativity than Odilo, for Odilo himself ‘personally remove[s]’ the pellets of poison gas (p. 129). Tod’s secret indeed has to do with trash and shit, but the narrator’s point of view gets time wrong to make Odilo’s crimes look right, to render the violent creation of a people easier than its brutal decimation. At the expense of the intelligibility of everything else, the narratorial soul of Odilo has made sense of the Holocaust, reliteralizing Nazi eugenics as good birth, recasting genocide as genesis.

  Provided with clothes that fit perfectly, with spectacles and other personal effects, the nascent Jews are united with their loved ones in tearful instant ‘familial unions and arranged marriages’ (p. 131); just as Hollywood dismantles fictional couples, Auschwitz manufactures real ones. When the camp is broken up, the next job of Odilo’s unit is to ‘deconcentrate’ the Jews, to disband the ghettos and diffuse their occupants throughout Europe. ‘[T]his was our mission after all: to make Germany whole. To heal her wounds and make her whole’ (p. 149). The narrator has even appropriated the rhetoric of Nazi militarism to explain the task of creating a middle-European Jewry and integrating it into the society of which it would for so long form a part. Poignantly and pointedly, his inverted prescription for restoring Germany’s wholeness makes far more literal and logical sense than the Nazis’ [prescription].