Martin Amis’ Time’s Arrow: A Reverse Journey Through History
Martin Amis’ *Time’s Arrow* (1991)
Amis’ novels express skepticism, urban decay, violence, brutality, the danger of global destruction, and the imminent collapse of modern civilization. The themes and motives he deals with in his fiction—suicide, crime, nuclear weapons, social and sexual violence, the unhappiness of divorce—can be related to childhood fears and to close personal experiences. Despite all the aforementioned, Kingsley Amis is, above all, a comic writer. He uses black and savage humor, and the mood is apocalyptic. In his work, Amis deals with the crimes people commit because they have never been loved, instead of writing about what they would have done if they were loved. Thus, we find out that Odilo’s violence is rooted in his own wretched childhood, when he was battered by his violent father. Furthermore, the narrator also gives us the possible reasons for the violence of this father: the War. This is a sort of vicious cycle; everyone suffers and then imposes suffering upon others.
Narrative Strategy
The narrative strategy of the novel makes us look at the Holocaust in a radically new way. The story is told from the point of view of one of the perpetrators of the massacre instead of by a victim of it. By doing so, it seems that Amis is an accomplice of the perpetrators and, in some way, understands and exonerates the motives that carried them to do what they did, but his intention is to inquire into the causes of the massacre. Amis was seriously criticized on moral grounds because he was accused of using the Holocaust for only one purpose: experimenting with form.
Reverse Chronology and Its Implications
The novel goes backward in time to the time of the awful conjunction in history of the deaths of God and love. Man would replace God with reason, an instrument of creation through death. Constructing one’s identity as a god-like creator, he sets out to exterminate a whole race to give birth to a new one, uncontaminated, unblemished, and untouched by the original sin. (e.g., Oct 2, Oct 1 / we’re getting younger). The daily routines, like eating, are emphasized to increase our knowledge of time moving backward. Soon, the tone is more optimistic because pains and difficulties caused by old age are left behind (I get to places quicker). Here is where we find the irony of the story since, perceived backward, the story is about creation instead of nihilistic destruction.
This inverted chronological order implies a reversion of history and of some traditional literary genres: science fiction and the bildungsroman novel. The point of the arrow flies back to an apocalypse set in the past, and yet, we experience the proximity of catastrophe just as if we were facing a forthcoming future. When the doctor dies, the soul is set free and takes us through the travel of his life backward, from his death to when he was born, which implies a return to a time of innocence. The irony is this path from adult to child instead of vice versa. An example of this lies in the doctor’s German name, Odilo Unverdorben, (uncorrupted, innocent in German), as if the original sin were undone at last. It is metaphorical for both the Nazi aspiration to create a pure race and, ironically, of the doctor’s inhumanity. His marriage to Irene is also another important fact to construct the protagonists’ personality (from sexual sadism and wife battering to the tenderness of the early days of the romance).
At the end of the novel, we perceive the tenderness of Odilo in his earlier days when the tears were wiped off his face with kisses rather than with a punch in the breast. The ending is the culmination of the inverted bildungsroman since the narrator proceeds to the dissolution, rather than the assertion, of the self, e.g., when talking about his father, “he will come in and kill me with his body.”
Style and Narrative Voice
- Style: Use of oxymoronic style (contradictions), like creation=death. E.g., death of Jews=their rebirth. The creation of a race, in the case of the Nazis, meant annihilation on a large scale.
- The novel can also be considered a thriller in reverse because we are expecting something to happen when it has already happened, which can be seen by the use of will (future mood), e.g., I will know how bad the secret is.
- We find an unreliable, intradiegetic narrator (the soul involved in the action), whose innocence and ignorance lead him most of the time to wrong interpretations, so we have to see beyond what the narrator sees.
Going back in time, we follow the protagonist through the various identities on his returning from America to his birth country. One of the most ironic facts is when the doctor miraculously resuscitates the dead Jewish people.
Questioning of Postmodernism
Amis challenges key terms such as truth, meaning, value, subjectivity, or common sense—terms that have been termed as absolute and pre-existing realities. One of Amis’ most characteristic devices is the use of a first-person narrator, who is sometimes a writer, sometimes himself as a literary persona. This allows him to include in the narrative metafictional comments that question the status of the question in times of anxiety and uncertainty. In Time’s Arrow, the narrator is not a physical person; instead, it is the soul of a Nazi doctor. Time’s Arrow deals with and subverts, in science fiction style, the historical end of the world as we know it, or rather as we fantasized it existed in a sort of prelapsarian innocence.