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Universität Augsburg

Philologisch-Historische Fakultät: Englische Literaturwissenschaft

Sommersemester 2007

Proseminar: Literature and the Holocaust

Making Sense of the Holocaust

by Means of Backward Narration: Martin Amis′s Time′s Arrow

Thomas Neumann

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Table of Contents

1. Introduction

3

2.

Criticism and the Form-Content Problem 4

3.

Narrative problems in Holocaust literature 5

4.

The danger of Aestheticising Auschwitz 6

5.

Making sense of the Holocaust 7

5.1. Temporal

Reversal

7

5.2. Moral

Reversal

9

6.

Robert Jay Lifton′s The Nazi Doctors and Time′s Arrow 10

6.1.

Doubling 11

6.2.

The Healing-Killing Paradox 13

7. Conclusion

14

8. Bibliography

15

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1. Introduction

The problem of finding appropriate ways to represent the Holocaust has been haunting

Holocaust literature ever since Theodor Adorno′s famous dictum that there cannot be any

poetry after Auschwitz.1 In fact, the uniqueness of the Holocaust raises serious ethical

questions whether there can be any appropriate representation of these atrocious events at all.

As the horror of Auschwitz goes beyond human imagination, the problem boils down to the

one question: How can you imagine the unimaginable?2

Martin Amis′s novel

Time′s Arrow or the Nature of the Offence

(1991) has a rather bold

answer to this question: by narrating it backwards. In the novel, the story of the Nazi doctor

Odilo Unverdorben is narrated

vice versa

, following his life from end to start through the eyes

of a ghostlike narrator who emerges at the point of his death. As the technique of backward

narration distinguishes

Time′s Arrow

from almost any other Holocaust fiction, in the

following my focus will be on the novel′s use of narrative reversal to represent the Holocaust.

I will argue that the technique of backward narration offers a way to make sense of the

Holocaust and Nazism in general, thereby showing that the novel′s form and content are

inseparably linked. In order to do this, I will first go over some of the negative criticism that

Time′s Arrow

was exposed to, focusing on the problem of form and content. I will then show

how backward narration offers a solution to specific problems in Holocaust literature and how

it helps to avoid the danger of aestheticising Auschwitz. After that, I will point out that

backward narration can help to understand the Holocaust, exploring the connections between

Nazism and the temporal and moral reversal effected by narrative reversal. Finally I will

examine the influence of Robert Jay Lifton′s

The Nazi Doctors

on

Time′s Arrow

. By applying

Lifton′s theory of psychological doubling to the novel, the close connections between form

and content will once again be highlighted.

1 Cf. Alvin H. Rosenfeld,

A Double Dying: Refelections on Holocaust Literature (

Bloomington: Indiana UP,

1980) 13-14.

2 For a more detailed examination of this topic confer Christian Kny,

Representing the Holocaust: Martin

Amis′s Time′s Arrow

(Augsburg: Term Paper PS Literature and the Holocaust, 2007).

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2. Criticism and the Form-Content Problem

Since its first appearance in 1991,

Time′s Arrow

evoked a wide range of critical reactions,

reaching from praise to utter rejection. As one might except of a topic as sensitive and

morally charged as the Holocaust, Amis was criticized for choosing Auschwitz as the theme

of his novel. Critics argued that he only chose the Holocaust because it was fashionable to

write about it; touching on the subject would guarantee Amis public attention. It was also

questioned whether a non-Jewish author should write about the Holocaust

at all

. Holocaust

literature by a member of the race of the `perpetrators′ would diminish the weight of Jewish

voices.3 Furthermore, as

Time′s Arrow

focuses on the representatives rather than the victims

of Nazism, it may lead to the conclusion that the Jews′ sufferings were less important than the

Nazi perpetrators.

However, most of the critical voices were not concerned with these rather general issues but

with the specific feature of

Time′s Arrow

: its use of backward narration for representing the

Holocaust. In the eyes of these critics Amis′s obsession with the technical problems of

narrative reversal and its possibilities for `showing off′ the novelist′s stylistic mastership

prevails the moral concern of writing about the Holocaust. As Sue Vice remarks, this

"subordination of content to form"4 is already suggested by the novel′s title, as it rather points

to the reversion of temporal order by the reversion of narrative chronology than to the actual

theme of the novel.5 In fact, the Nazi past of the novel′s protagonist takes up only the last

third of the novel. The remaining two thirds depict his post-war life in America, introducing

the reader to the topsy-turvy world which results from backward narration. Narrative reversal

often has quite funny consequences, and the narrator goes into great detail describing these

consequences.

The lengthy exploration of the comic effects of backward narration and the seemingly short

treatment of the Holocaust topic are also at the core of Michiko Kakutani′s criticism in his

New York Times

review of

Time′s Arrow

:

Unfortunately, the bulk of the novel seems like an extended setup for this emotional payoff

pages and pages of sophomoric humor laid as groundwork for one hugephilosophical

point. As a result, the reader must wade through the first threequarters of the book, which

reads like a virtuosic but mannered performance by a writer eager to exploit the comic

3 Cf.

Sue

Vice,

Holocaust Fiction

(London: Routledge, 2000) 13-14.

4 Vice

12.

5 Cf.

Vice

11.