121 Falconer (1998), p. 707.
122 Jorge Luis Borges, ‘The Garden of Forking Paths’, trans. Donald A. Yates, in Donald A. Yates and James E. Irby, eds., Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970), p. 51.
123 [Falconer’s Note - but her page reference is incorrect] Elizabeth Deeds Ermarth, Sequel to History: Postmodernism and the Crisis of Representational Time (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), p. 20.
124 [Falconer’s Note:] Critics who have traced romance roots in short fiction include Propp, Bettelheim, Bierce, Canby, Marcus, May, and Rohrberger, while those who have identified the genre’s realist affinities include Baldwin, Barzini, and Fitzgerald; see the annotated bibliography in The New Short Story Theories, ed. Charles E. May (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1994). pp. 312-37.
125 Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London: Verso, 1991).
126 [Falconer’s Note:] See Italo Calvino, ‘Lightness’, in Six Memos for the Next Mülennium[: The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures 1985-86, trans. Patrick Creagh (London: Vintage, 1996 [1988]), pp.]3-29.
127 Falconer (1998), pp.708-11, 712-17, 718-20.
128 Times (22 September 1989), p. 1. The six shortlisted authors were Margaret Atwood, Cat’s Eye; John Banville, The Book of Evidence; Sybille Bedford, An Unsentimental Education; Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day (the eventual winner); James Kelman, Disaffection; and Rose Tremain, Restoration.
129 Melvyn Bragg, ‘A Novel Experience’, Sunday Times (17 December 1989), Section C, p. 1.
130 Jane Ellison, ‘Battle Fields’, Guardian (12 October 1989), p.21.
131 See the Times (27 October 1989), p. 24.
132 Anon., ‘News’, Times Literary Supplement 4524, Liber section (15 December 1989), p.13.
133 David Lodge, ‘The Novelist Today: Still at the Crossroads?’, in Malcolm Bradbury and Judy Cooke, eds., New Writing (London: Minerva in association with the British Council, 1992), p.208.
134 Ellison (1989), p.21.
135 Penny Smith, ‘Hell Innit: The Millennium in Alasdair Gray’s Lanark, Martin Amis’s London Fields, and Shena Mackay’s Dunedin’, Essays and Studies, 48 (1995), p.115.
136 D.H. Lawrence, Women in Love (Harmondsworth: Penguin, I960), p. 36.
137 See Doan, p. 79.
138 Smith (1995), pp. 120-3.
139 Bernard Levin, ‘Forgetfulness of Things Past’, Sunday Times (8 March 1981), p.43.
140 Charles Trueheart, ‘Through a Mirror, Darkly’, Washington Post (26 November 1991), p.B2.
141 Jean Baudrillard, Simulations, trans. Paul Foss, Paul Patton, Philip Beitchman (New York: Sémiotexte, 1983), p. 11.
142 Melvyn Bragg, The South Bank Show (Martin Amis) (London Weekend Television, 1989).
143 Bragg, South Bank Show (1989).
144 Graham Fuller, ‘Murder He Wrote: Martin Amis’s Killing Fields’, Village Voice (24 April 1989), p.75.
145 Bellante, Carl and John, ‘Unlike Father, Like Son: An Interview with Martin Amis’, Bloomsbury Review, 12:2 (March 1992), p. 5.
146 Finney (1995), pp.8-15.
147 Roland Barthes, ‘The Death of the Author’, in Stephen Heath, ed. and trans., Image-Music-Text (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), p. 146.
148 Mick Imlah, ‘A Dart in the Heart’, Times Literary Supplement (29 September 1989), p. 1051. The bound volume of the Times Index: January-December 1989 (Reading: Research Publications, 1990), p.2l, gives an incorrect date of ‘SEPT 5’ for this issue.
149 [Holmes’s Note:] Imlah rightly concludes that Samson ‘has the personal thinness of a weak invention: his Americanness, for example, is registered by one reference to a “faucet” in nearly 500 pages’ (Imlah (1989)), p.1051.
150 Luc Sante, ‘Cheat’s Tale’, The New Republic (30 April 1990), p.46.
151 Mark MacLeod, ‘Apocalyptic Metafiction in Four British Novels’, Dissertation], Lakehead University (1993), p. 115.
152 Bette Pesetsky, ‘Lust Among the Ruins’, New York Times BookReview (4 March 1990), p.42.
153 Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1991), p.x.
154 MacLeod (1993), p. 113.
155 Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction (New York and London: Routledge, 1988), pp. 207-8.
156 Hutcheon (1988), p. 26.
157 Pesetsky (1990), p. 42.
158 Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), p.xxiv.
159 Frederick Holmes, ‘The Death of the Author as Cultural Critique in London Fields’, in Ricardo Miguel Alfonso, ed., Powerless Fictions? Ethics, Cultural Critique, and American Fiction in the Age of Postmodernism (Amsterdam - Atlanta, Georgia: Editions Rodopi B.V., 1996), pp.53-61.
160 Peter Stokes, ‘Martin Amis and the Postmodern Suicide: Tracing the Postnuclear Narrative at the Fin de Millennium’, Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, 38 (1997), pp. 305-6.
161 Will Self, ‘An Interview with Martin Amis’, The Mississippi Review, 21:3 (Summer 1993), p. 150.
162 Self (1993), p. 149.
163 George Szamuely, ‘Something Amiss with Martin’, National Review, 42:10 (28 May 1990), p. 47.
164 Self (1993), p. 149.
165 Michel Foucault, ‘What Is an Author?’, Paul Rabinow, ed.. The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon, 1984), p. 120.
166 Graham Fuller, ‘The Prose and Cons of Martin Amis’, Interview (May 1995), p. 125.
167 Stokes (1997), pp. 306-11.
168 See George Steiner, Language and Silence: Essays 1958-1966. 2nd edn, with new Preface by the author (London: Faber, 1985), and ‘George Steiner’, in Tredell (1994), pp. 75-93.
169 ‘Martin Amis interviewed by Christopher Bigsby’, in Bradbury and Cooke (1992), p. 173.
170 Eleanor Wachtel, ‘Eleanor Wachtel with Martin Amis: Interview’, Malahat Review, 114 (March 1996), p. 47.
171 Frank Kermode, ‘In reverse’, London Review of Books 13:17 (12 September 1991), p. 11.
172 M. John Harrison, ‘Speeding to cradle from grave’, Times Literary Supplement, 4614 (20 September 1991), p.2l.
173 For a discussion of the shortlisted novels, see ‘Six characters in search of a Booker’, Sunday Times (29 September 1991), Section 7, pp. 10-11.
174 Roger Scruton, ‘International Books of the Year’, Times Literary Supplement, 4628 (13 December 1991), p. 12.
175 Donald E. Morse, ‘Overcoming Time: “The Present of Things Past” in History and Fiction’, in Donald E. Morse, ed., The Delegated Intellect: Emersonian Essays on Literature, Science and Art in Honor of Don Gifford, American University Studies Series XXIV, American Literature, vol. 57 (New York, Washington DC/Baltimore, 1995), p.203.
176 Morse’s other example is Sean O’FaoIain’s And Again? (1979; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982).
177 Morse (1995), p.205.
178 J. T. Fraser, ‘Human Temporality in a Nowless Universe’, Time and Society, 1:2 (1992), p. 167.
179 David H. Hirsch, The Deconstruction of Literature: Criticism after Auschwitz (Hanover, New Hampshire and London, UK: University Press of New England, 1991), p. 158.
180 The Tower and the Abyss, quoted in Hirsch (1991),p.159.
181 Dr. Allodì quoted in Don Gifford, The Farther Shore (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1990), p.202.
182 Hirsch (1991), pp. 152-3.
183 Hirsch (1991), p. 152. [Morse’s Note:] Hirsch cites as his source: ‘Terrence Des Pres’s brilliant chapter, “The Excremental Assault”, in The Survivor: An Anatomy of Life in the Death Camps (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976).’
184 [Morse’s Note:] ‘Lords of lies and trash’ is a variant on the traditional title and picture of Satan as ‘Lord of Lies’ whom Dante pictures as trapped at the bottom of hell in the frozen cesspool formed by all the rivers o
f the world dumping their sewage (that is, their crap and trash) down into hell.
185 Friedmann (1990), p. 88, quoted in Fraser (1992), pp. 159-73.
186 [Morse’s Note:] The final revelation is specific about the direction of time’s arrow, but it is not the first or only revelation. In the final weeks of the baby’s life, the narrator attempts to understand what happened and finds many unanswered questions; ‘questions of time: certain durations’ (p. 172). There were also hints earlier in paintings he observed in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York(p.95).
187 [Morse’s Note:] Stephen Donaldson, Epic Fantasy in the Modern World (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Libraries, 1986), no page no.
188 Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five (New York: Dell, 1970), pp. 54-5.
189 Hayden White, The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), p. 57.
190 [Morse’s Note:] Adorno actually spoke of lyric poetry, rather than poetry in general. Later he added: ‘I have no wish to soften the saying that to write lyric poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric; it expresses in negative form the impulse which inspires committed literature. The questions asked by a character in Sartre’s play Morts Sans Sepulture (1946), “[i]s there any meaning in life when men exist who beat people until the bones break in their bodies?”, is also the question whether any art. now has a right to exist; whether intellectual regression is not inherent in the concept of committed literature because of the regression of society …’ (Theodor Adorno, ‘Commitment’, Aesthetics and Politics (1965), trans. Francis MacDonagh, in Dennis Walder, ed., Literature and the Modern World (London: Oxford University Press, 1990)), p.95.
191 Hirsch (1991), p. 158.
192 [Morse’s Note:] Adorno rightly objected to ‘… victims [being] used to create something, works of art, that are thrown to the consumption of a world which destroyed them. The so-called artistic representation of the sheer physical pain of people beaten to the ground by rifle-butts contains, however remotely, the power to elicit enjoyment out of it. The moral of this art, not to forget for a single instant, slithers into the abyss of its opposite’ (Adorno (1990)), p. 96. Diving head-long into that abyss, however, is an advertized discussion ‘Humor and the Holocaust’ at a recent international scholarly conference.
193 [Morse’s Note:] ‘The fourth dimension is the native medium of evil. Villains traditionally love the night because it obscures their deeds; but no darkness obscures things as effectively as time’ (Robert Grudin, Time and the Art of Living (New York: Ticknor and Fields, 1988)), p.82.
194 Morse (1995), pp.208-10, 211, 212-15, 216-18.
195 Richard Wolin, ‘Schindler’s List and the Politics of Remembrance’, In These Times (21 March 1994), pp. 28-31.
196 Vladimir Nabokov, Lectures on Literature, Fredson Bowers ed. (San Diego: HBJ, 1980), p.3.
197 Robert Jay Lifton and Eric Markusen, The Genoddal Mentality Nazi Holocaust and Nuclear Threat (New York: Basic Books, 1990), p. 196.
198 [Basterbrook’s Note:] Schloss Hartheim is a ‘killing hospital’ or ‘killing center’. Converted ‘nursing homes, mental hospitals, or prisons’ (Lifton (1990), p. 164), the killing centers ‘were run by physicians, usually psychiatrists’ (p. 164); as ‘pre-genocidal institutions’ (p. 166), they were mere studies in the art of butchery.
199 [Basterbrook’s Note:] Between March and June 1944, over 450,000 Hungarian Jews were gassed at Auschwitz alone. Estimates of the total number of Jews murdered at Auschwitz vary widely, from 1.1 to 3 million, although most historians say the smaller number is probably correct. During the period of extermination, beginning with forced-labour camps in 1937 and ending with the German surrender in 1945, some 5.1 to 5.9 million Jews were killed, an astonishing two-thirds of European Jewry and 40 percent worldwide. Auschwitz was liberated on 27 January 1945.
200 [Easterbrook’s Note:] The implicit source of this architectonic [construction] is quantum theory. As the Nobel laureate Richard Feynman notes: ‘[ì]n all the laws of physics that we have found so far there does not seem to be any distinction between past and future’ ([Richard Feynman, ‘The Distinction of Past and Future’, The Treasury of Physics (Boston: Little, Brown, 1991), p. 148)). Physics conceives temporality as mere order rather than meaningful order.
201 Lifton (1990), p. 13.
202 Lifton (1990), p. 197.
203 [Compare] Lifton (1990), p. 148.
204 [Editor’s Note:] For further discussion of the names in Time’s Arrow, see Phil Joffe, ‘Language Damage: Names and Naming in Martin Amis’s Time’s Arrow’, Nomina Africana: Journal of the Names Society of Southern Africa, 9:2 (October 1995), pp. 1-10.
205 Lifton (1990), p. 148.
206 Lifton (1990), p. 106: see also pp. 102-4 and 196-7.
207 [Easterbrook’s Note] Such as Rudolf Hoss; for details on the physician’s greed and whining, see [George J. Annas and Michael A. Grodin, eds., The Nazi Doäors and the Nuremberg Codes (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992).]
208 [Editor’s Note:] Flaubert wrote in 1857, in a letter to Mile. Leroyer de Chantepie: ‘An artist must be in his work like God in creation, invisible and all-powerful; he should be everywhere felt, but nowhere seen’. Trans. Francis Steegmuller, in Richard Ellmann and Charles Feidelson, Jr., eds., The Modern Tradition: Backgrounds of Modern Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965), p. 132.
209 Neil Easterbrook, ‘“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”, Conference of College Teachers of English, 55 (1995), pp. 52-4, 55-6, 57-9.
210 See Anthony Thorlby, ed, The Penguin Companion to Literature: Europe, revised edn (London: Allen Lane, The Penguin Press, 1971), p.173.
211 [Menke’s Note:] In his [‘Afterword’] to the novel, Amis acknowledges the influence of ‘a certain paragraph - a famous one - by Kurt Vonnegut’ (p. 168): the passage of Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) in which Billy Pilgrim, unmoored in time, watches a late movie about World War II ‘backwards, then forwards, again’ (Vonnegut (1991)), p. 53.
212 A. S. Eddington, The Nature of the Physical World: Gifford Lectures 1927 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1928), p. 68.
213 [Menke’s Note:] For another discussion of Amis’s use of The Nazi Doctors, with different examples from Lifton, see Diedrick (1995), pp. 165-68. As Diedrick comments, ‘virtually every aspect of Time i Arrow - historical setting, plot, characterization, even language - is informed by The Nazi Doctors’; his concession that there are ‘many more parallels than those discussed here’ (p. 173, n22) must apply to my discussion as well. [Editor’s Note:] See also Easterbrook’s discussion in this Guide (pp. 134-41).
214 Robert Jay Lifton, The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide (New York: Basic Books, 1986), p. 425.
215 Lifton (1986), p.418.
216 Lifton (1986), p. 427.
217 Lifton (1986). p. 30.
218 [Menke’s Note:] In fact the second law of thermodynamics does not declare that entropy cannot decrease in a closed system, merely that the probability that it will decrease is mathematically infinitesimal.
219 Eddington (1928), p. 74.
220 Eddington (1928), p.68.
221 Eddington (1928), p. 69.
222 [Menke’s Note:] For an exploration of time’s arrow in a more recent popular scientific work, see [Stephen W.] Hawking, A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes (Toronto: Bantam, 1988), pp. 143-53. Here Hawking investigates the relationship between the thermodynamic and psychological arrows explored by Eddington and the cosmological arrow that marks the direction of time according to the universe’s expansion.
223 Eddington (1928), p. 51.
224 Gillian Beer, ‘Eddington and the Idiom of Modernism’, in Henry Krips, J.E. McGuire, Trevor Melia, eds.. Science, Rhetoric, and Reason (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1995), pp.295-315.
225 Eddington (1928), p. 51.
226 Eddington (1928), p. 51.
227 Brian McHale, Postmodernist Fiction (New York: Methuen, 1991), p. 10.
228 Eric Charles White, ‘Negentropy, Noise, and Emancipatory Thought’, in N. Katherine Hayles, ed., Chaos and Order: Complex Dynamics in Literature and Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), p.263.
229 McHale (1991), pp.84-96; Amy J. Elias, ‘Defining Spatial History in Postmodernist Historical Novels’, in Theo D’haen and Hans Bertens, eds.. Narrative Turns and Minor Genres in Postmodernism, Postmodern Studies 11 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1995), pp. 105-14.
230 J(ames] Clerk Maxwell, Theory of Heat (New York: Appleton, 1872), p. 308.
231 Maxwell (1872), pp. 308-9.
232 Richard Menke, ‘Narrative Reversals and the Thermodynamics of History in Martin Amis’s Time’s Arrow’, MFS: Modern Fiction Studies, 44 (1998), pp.959-75, 976-77.
233 Adam Mars-Jones, ‘Looking on the Blight Side’, Times Literary Supplement, 4799 (24 March 1995), p. 19.
234 Quoted on back cover of first UK hardback edition of The Information. No source given.
235 ‘Trex’, originally the brand-name of a type of cooking fat, and used in a way which alludes to this at one point in The Information (‘slapping some slice of trex on to a frying pan’ (p. 444)), is a recurrent term in the novel to mean junk or rubbish, mainly but not exclusively of a literary or subliterary kind - see pp.43, 75, 133, 138, 156, 171, 214, 289, 319, 421.
236 Julian Loose, ‘Satisfaction’, London Review of Books, 17:9 (11 May 1995), pp.9-10.
237 [Nash’s Note:] Martin Amis, interviewed by Melvyn Bragg on the South Bank Show, London Weekend Television (19 March 1995).
238 Sally Vincent, ‘In the Boy, Find the Man’, The Guardian Weekend Section (18 March 1995), pp. 12-23.
239 Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books and Schools of the Ages (London: Macmillan, 1994), pp.30, 32.
240 Jacques Derrida, ‘“This Strange Institution Called Literature”: An Interview with Jacques Derrida’, in Derek Attridge ed., Acts of Literature (New York: Routledge, 1992), p.42.
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