Martin Amis
Time's Arrow
Genre: revisionist historical novel
Narrative situation: first person n. s./autodiegetic
Characters: Odilo Unverdorben
There is one possibility of understanding the Holocaust: through fiction
TA, a radical experiment, is a revisionist historical novel and an example of innovative handling of time structure. Sematicization of time structures functions as an implicit means of presenting (revisionist) history. The story of a fictitious Nazi war criminal is told 'backwards', i.e. regressively narrated from his death to his birth with a consistent inversion of the natural course of events (which render the novel grotesque; i.e. there is a tension between amusing and horrifying components of one and the same event). During the second part of the novel which deals with the narrator's participation in the Holocaust the inversion of all events and processes becomes a means of grotesque, surreal presentation of history. In a logical step, the extermination of the Jews and human experiments become, in the narrator's point of view, acts of creation; the actual imprisonment of the Jews is turned into an act of deconcentration. Ironical inversions emphasize the degree of suffering experienced by the victims ("Women went out of that lab looking twenty years younger"). Chapter headings and the narrator's description of Treblinka as "[a] place without depth"/"a place without time" suggest that organized mass murder cannot be subsumed under conventional categories and that under such circumstances questions of sense and purpose become meaningless. Thus monoperspectival and regressive narration is the central strategy of a grotesque presentation of history which serves to expose the utter bestiality of Nazi war crimes.
The principal character's name is ironically emblematic: 'unverdorben' is both metaphorical of the insane Nazi enterprise –to create a 'pure' human race- and 'ironically of the doctor's own inhumanity. A biography written backward: an inverted Bildungsroman, in which the narrator proceeds toward the dissolution rather than the assertion of the self. In TA the very possibility for language to mediate the increasing violence of reality is problematized. By folding back the fabroic of life and time, Amis questions the notion of teleology andthe logic of interpretation. The notions of cause and effectare reversed. The protocol of the Bildungsroman is inverted.
Source: N .N. (soon to follow)
In order to find out more about Martin Amis try the following links:
http://martinamis.albion.edu/
http://martinamis.albion.edu/crit.htm
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