As the flames of the Holocaust wane, Odilo ends up creating more people from the violence of fire. But now the process goes awry, for Odilo and his fellow doctors now create not Jews but the physically and mentally impaired - and, as the months roll back, the patients who emerge from the eugenic fires become more and more tragically disabled. Disenchanted with the project, separating from Odilo again, the narrator reconsiders the work he and Odilo have performed:
[c] alling on powers best left unsummoned, he took human beings apart - and then he put them back together again. For a while it worked (there was redemption); and while it worked he and I were one, on the banks of the Vistula. He put us back together. But of course you shouldn’t be doing any of this kind of thing with human beings … (p. 156)
Such scruples arrive too late or too early, for the Final Solution is over or has not yet begun. Odilo has not yet taken part in the Holocaust, has not yet lost his soul, and the narrator now feels as aloof from him as he had felt from Tod. ‘The world has stopped making sense again […]’ (p. 157).
Double Vision
Time’s Arrow achieves its sometimes facetious but ultimately tragic vision by means of an unwavering irony born of its intertwined characterological and narrative doublings. Odilo’s nearly palindromic first name [that is, it is nearly the same name if spelt backwards - Olido] recalls both St. Odilo of Cluny, who established All Souls’ Day to honor the departed spirits of the faithful, and St. Odilia, patron saint of the blind; both would seem appropriate allusions in this treatment of the willful moral blindness and well-intentioned misperceptions of a Nazi doctor and his estranged sense of decency or long-fled soul. His surname, Unverdorben (‘uncorrupted, unspoiled, innocent’ in German), records with irony what Odilo has lost so irrevocably, describing the misapprehending narrator he unknowingly harbors within him. With its implicit, structural antithesis (unverdorben means ‘not verdorben’, ‘not polluted or corrupt’), the name encapsulates the dual structure of the narrative, which opposes the life history of Odilo (hideous and banal, lived forward) to the narrative of his doppelgänger (striking and scrupulous, lived backward) … … [T]he central paradigm The Nazi Doctors employs to discuss this psychology is the idea of ‘psychological doubling‘213……‘Indeed’, asserts Lifton, ‘Auschwitz as an institution - as an atrocity-producing situation - ran on doubling’,214 which Lifton defines as ‘the division of the self into two functioning wholes’.215 … According to Lifton, the Nazi doctors, above all those of Auschwitz, had to develop a murderous self to carry out the day-to-day atrocities required for a genocidal project, in order to allow these mundane individuals to function properly as systematic killers. Lifton points out that their very profession might well have rendered them unusually susceptible to doubling, even to a doubling that inverted their avowed aim of healing; doctors must cultivate a clinical manner, must learn their trade by opening up corpses without becoming sick, must often indeed ‘be cruel to be kind’. During the Holocaust, Lifton argues, a terrifying and extreme form of this psychological doubling became ‘the mechanism by which a doctor, in his actions, moved from the ordinary to the demonic’.216
In his extensive use of Lifton’s historical and psychological accounts, Amis makes much use of this grotesque paradox, that the very techniques of the self that help doctors become healers could be mobilized and extended in the service of genocide. After all, from the narrator’s point of view, standard medical practice appears heartless, while the work of the concentration camp seems lifegiving. ‘Put simply, the hospital is an atrocity-producing situation’ (p. 102), writes Amis, borrowing a term directly from Lifton and applying it not to Auschwitz but to Tod Friendly’s ordinary clinical practice. And in the hospital the doctor becomes a ‘biological soldier’ (p. 36) - a description silently borrowed, via Lifton, from a Nazi manual on eugenic sterilization.217 Whether in medical practice or medicalized mass murder, it seems to be ‘the same story. Render up your soul, and gain power’ (p. 58).
The loss or impotence of Odilo’s soul as a result of his genocidal doubling, and the radical reversal of time that alone can make sense of the Holocaust, constitute the novel’s diegetic account of its own being ……The dual vision that results from the absolute division of Odilo as actor in the plot and Odilo as narrated subject contrasts history and narrative with an ever-present irony, and it is this ironic principle, along with the narrator’s occasionally sardonic judgements about the world he sees, that aligns Time’s Arrow most closely with the vein of satire in Amis’s earlier work. But now irony becomes the essence of narrative technique; readers of the novel must translate the backward processes, plotlines, and conversations into normal time, pressing the audience into the very creation of this irony. After all, the book cannot simply be read backward, as the narrator sees the Japanese and observant Jews doing; the narrator’s flawless English syntax and complex trains of thought still work in the normal order. Neither the narrator’s thoughts nor his words are written from back to front. Consequently, with the exception of the relatively few conversations (which we learn to read by skipping ahead and reading the lines in reverse), … the technique of the narrative forces readers into many of the same misperceptions the narrator makes, except that we are familiar with the forward passage of time and so can always recognize them as misperceptions. Again and again surprised by sequence, as it were, a reader of Time’s Arrow must reassemble history from the literary narrative that imagines it.
Against the now sordid, now monstrous realities of history, the narrator of Time’s Arrow will always misunderstand, although his misinterpretations will often be painfully preferable to history and always rendered in the splendidly wrought prose of Martin Amis. That Time’s Arrow considers potential contrariness to the timeline endemic to the work of art seems clear; visiting the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the narrator notes that he can read visual art and texts in a way that harmonizes with his own view of time, that they offer a solace against the jarring movements of life and history as he experiences them:
Like writing, paintings seem to hint at a topsy-turvy world in which, so to speak, time’s arrow moves the other way. The invisible speed-lines suggest a different nexus of sequence and process … I wonder: is this the case with all the arts? (p. 95)
Whether in the form of a painting or of a novel narrated backward, art can represent a world contrary to the arrow of history. In relation to life and history (and, in the case of Odilo, to lifehistory), art provides the aesthetic - if not quite the political - unconscious, an unconscious that Time’s Arrow imagines as wholly bereft of agency in or access to history. And this is in part because the novel’s understanding of history in general and the Holocaust in particular is, as its title hints, a thermodynamic one …
The Thermodynamic Nature of History
Classical physics (along with many fields of twentieth-century physics, for that matter) describes a universe in which phenomena are in principle reversible. One body collides with another, say, and forces are redistributed; run the events backward and the collision is equally obedient to the laws of classical physics. Yet this temporal symmetry contradicts our human experience of a universe in which things happen forward, in which events do not seem reversible. To cite several of the customary examples: an egg never unscrambles, a cold cup of coffee never regains the heat it has lost to its surroundings, a shuffled deck of cards never returns to its original order by means of any amount of subsequent shuffling, the scattered balls on a pool table never triangulate themselves back into the shape of the rack. Whence, then, arises the apparent directionality of time?
Nineteenth-century physics traced the problem to thermodynamics, the study of heat and energy transfer. According to the first law of thermodynamics, the total amount of energy in a closed system is invariable; energy is conserved. However, according to the second law of thermodynamics, heat will flow from a warmer region to a cooler one, but not vice versa; therefore, in a closed system the amount of energy that is unusable (h
aving already flowed to the cooler region and unable to flow back) will always tend to increase. After the cup of coffee cools, the air around it and the table under it contain much of the energy that once warmed the coffee; the total amount of heat in the room has not changed (if we neglect the fact that the room is not truly a closed system), but the energy is so scattered that it is not recoverable for use. In 1865 the German physicist Rudolf Clausius termed this unusable energy entropy, borrowing the same root as trope (‘turning, transformation’) to devise a neologism in analogy to energy. In its best-known form, the second law stipulates that the entropy or disorder in a closed system will always increase as time passes.218 For the Victorians, this law bespoke the tragedy of the inevitable ‘heat-death’ of the universe, a time when all energy would be dissipated into entropy and all order into anarchy, when all energy transfer, all work, all life would become impossible.
It is the second law of thermodynamics that describes the asymmetry of time, the fact that past does not simply mirror future as left mirrors right; the inescapable increase of total entropy in a closed system marks the direction of time. In The Nature of the Physical World, the British astrophysicist A. S. Eddington awarded the second law of thermodynamics ‘the supreme position among the laws of Nature‘219since it alone was responsible for what he was the first to call ‘time’s arrow’:220
I shall use the phrase ‘time’s arrow’ to express this one-way property of time which has no analogue in space. It is a singularly interesting property from a philosophical standpoint. We must note that -……(1) it is vividly recognized by consciousness.
……(2) It is equally insisted on by our reasoning faculty, which tells us that a reversal of the arrow would render the external world nonsensical…….(3) It makes no appearance in physical science except in the study of organization of a number of individuals [that is, individual molecules, objects, or pieces].221
The directionality of time that results from entropy’s increase, Eddington points out, is intimately installed in our awareness of ourselves in the world, confirmed by human reason, and dependent upon the fact that there are multiple parts to be organized or disordered.222
Eddington, always mindful of the philosophical and psychological (and elsewhere to the theological) aspects of physics, is here especially sensitive to the intimate connection between time and consciousness. Again and again Eddington’s writing stresses the way in which ‘nearly all our knowledge of the external world’ is in fact ‘indirect’, ‘a matter of inference and interpretation’.223 Gillian Beer emphasizes Eddington’s desire to foreground epistemological questions in her account of the relationship of his popular science writing to the literary modernism of writers such as Virginia Woolf.224 Yet in contrast to his assiduous qualification of our knowledge of space, Eddington claims that ‘we have direct experience’ of time,
of the time-relations that we ourselves are traversing - a knowledge of time not coming through external sense-organs, but taking a short cut into our consciousness. When I close my eyes and retreat into my inner mind, I feel myself enduring, I do not feel myself extensive.225
Our experience of it as internal and personal is ‘peculiarly characteristic’ of time. As opposed to our fallacious perception of space as stable and solid, our very intimacy with time renders it (properly, in Eddington’s view) essentially ‘mysterious’.226
In singling out ‘time’s arrow’ as a site for exploration, Time’s Arrow seems to affirm Brian McHale’s overly sweeping but influential thesis that the move from modernism to postmodernism in fiction represents ‘the shift … from an epistemological dominant to an ontological one’.227For Eddington, questions of space are broadly epistemological (how can we know about the universe when our knowledge of it is so oblique and uncertain?), while questions of time are ontological (what is the nature of our sense of endurance in time?). Eddington hails ‘time’s arrow’ as the link between temporality and subjectivity, physics and consciousness; as Amis writes, ‘[t]ime [is] the human dimension, which makes us everything we are’ (p. 76). Writing a novel in which ‘time’s arrow moves the other way’ (p. 95), Martin Amis ratifies the relationship between time and consciousness even as he reverses the arrow: fundamental to the scheme of Time’s Arrow is the revolt of the narrator’s consciousness and his reason against the nonsense of the ordinary world seen chronologically backward.
As it emphasizes the connection between time and consciousness, Time’s Arrow also incorporates what Eddington identifies as the third element of this relationship: entropy. For it is the apparent reversals of everyday thermodynamic activities that provoke many of the narrator’s disquisitions on the remarkable properties of the world he sees, including his Swiftian (and very Martin-Amis like) attention to the grotesque reversed thermodynamics of the body. The body adds caloric energy, forges higher-energy molecular bonds, to make food out of excrement. The violence of accidents restores smashed cars or maimed patients to their proper order. Factories collect streams of pollution from the skies. A fire organizes ashes, smoke, and flames into letters, fingernails, people. All of these interactions bespeak the spontaneous organization and decrease in entropy that characterize the reversal of time’s arrow. Eddington argues that our sense of time’s arrow has fundamentally to do with thermodynamics; Amis’s novel not only borrows Eddington’s phrase as its title but takes this hypothesis for granted and awards the second law of thermodynamics precedence in its gallery of virtuoso inversions.
It is hardly surprising, then, that the novel’s backward understanding of Nazi genocide should also turn out to be a thoroughly thermodynamic one, as if to affirm the grim aptness of the term Holocaust. From end to beginning, Time’s Arrow treats the Holocaust as a consummately thermodynamic event. Reducing entropy right and left, the thermodynamics of Auschwitz pieces together Jews and Gypsies out of scattered molecules of haze, sorts stashes of clothes and dental work, assembles perfect families out of a human chaos. The narrator’s mission is ‘preternatural’ in precisely this respect: it contradicts the ordinary rules of life, history, thermodynamics, and nature more thoroughly than anything before or after it in the novel. The final deconcentration of Central European Jews from the ghettos offers another thermodynamic allegory, although not now a reversed one; created from the violence of fire, the Jews are dispersed through the rest of society, their ethnic or cultural ‘difference’ no longer recapturable as the fuel for Nazi rhetoric and the occasion for systematic genocide. Even ‘Arbeit macht frei’ [‘work liberates’], the infamous Auschwitz inscription echoed in the narrator’s interpretation of TGIF [Thank God It’s Friday] - has a certain thermodynamic plausibility; doesn’t ‘work’ (the transfer of physical energy) liberate electrons, molecules, and potential energy in a way that occasions entropy in the first place?
The Holocaust realizes in extremis [at an extreme] the tragically thermodynamic nature of history in Time’s Arrow, for history becomes tragedy when it is dreadful and unpreventable: ‘[w]hat goes around comes around. 1066, 1789, 1945’ (p. 16). As one of the most horrifically irreversible processes of the twentieth century, the Holocaust crystallizes Amis’s idea of a backward narrative, especially when coupled with Lifton’s attention to the Nazi doctors’ part in genocide, a role imbued with [a] specifically medical irreversibility … “Time is now heading on towards something’, proclaims the narrator as he begins to move from private life in America into the monstrous history of Nazi Germany; ‘[i]t pours past unpreventably, like the refections on a windscreen as the car speeds through city or forest’ (p. 67). Transitively as well as intransitively, history ‘pours past’ in Time’s Arrow: it both streams by the narrative and extrudes the ineluctable past as a series of half-shocks to the narrating subject. Reversing chronology, Time’s Arrow depicts a world in which, instead of one thing leading to another, everything leads to one thing: the past. The past is unchangeable and, for its part, ‘[t]he future always comes true’ (p. 162). Once history becomes thermodynamics in Time’
s Arrow, it becomes as inescapable as the second law.
Only viewed in reverse does the second law of thermodynamics appear unambiguously deterministic, for it actually describes the calculably large probability that entropy will increase, not necessarily the specific way in which this increase will happen. In fact, more recent philosophical investigations based on theories of chaos and complexity have stressed the way in which the statistical nature of thermodynamics allows the unpredictable appearance of local pockets of order, dubbed ‘negentropy’, even as the total entropy in an entire system increases; consequently, ‘[t]he future does not derive from the past in strict linear fashion’.228 Postmodern historical fiction is similarly supposed to reject understandings of history as deterministic and stable in favor of treatments of history as ambiguous, textual, aleatory.229Yet Time’s Arrow sets up the relationship between literature and history as divorce rather than dialectic, leaving no place for their synthesis as historiography. Its carefully constructed narrative, almost impeccably mimetic, even carefully ‘realistic’, within its donnée of temporal reversal and narratorial powerlessness, treats history as the atrocity-producing situation that narrative, passenger or parasite, can only view as an image on the windscreen: outside, overhead, upside-down.
The Fiction of Martin Amis Page 21