Given World and Time: Temporalities in Context

Introduction

Introduction Tyrus Miller In his 1991 novel Time’s Arrow, the British writer Martin Amis, playing a postmodern “narrative game with time” (as Paul Ricoeur would say) explored the implications of a very simple narrative twist for our historical and moral perception. How would some key twentiethcentury historical event, an event as ineluctable as the Nazi seizure of power and the unfolding of Nazi genocide, appear from a radically different temporal perspective? And what might this perspective shift tell us about the way our historical and moral judgments carry along with them, enfolded into their conclusions, assumptions about the relation of time and its nature to the meaning of history? To what extent are we obligated, ontologically and morally, to yield to the necessities of time and to what extent is it legitimate to give time over to a play of fictions and interpretations? It is on this dangerous, but consequential borderline between freedom and necessity, between guilt and evasion, between responsibility and play that Amis’s novel plays out its thought-experiment. The novel raises a seemingly absurd question, but one fraught with psychological and cultural symbolism, conjuring the various evasions and denials, collective and individual, that this critical moment in contemporary history has provoked. It asks: how would the life of the concentration camp doctor Odilo Unverdorben, who has fled atonement and punishment, changing his identity and emigrating under this cover to the United States, look if it were narrated backwards , with the arrow of time reversed? Regressing backwards in time, the “normal” surgical labors of the post-war American physician appears to Amis’s “third-person” narrator like horrifying violence and torture: wounds are opened in patients, sutures are removed and blood flows out of bandages and sponges, recovery becomes disease. Whereas in contrast, those “exceptional” perversions of medicine in the concentrations camps now appear as miraculous acts of mercy Miller 1 :Whats minta 1 9/3/08 4:40 PM Page 1 towards the favored recipients of the Nazi “charity,” the Jews: the dead are reanimated, the beaten and starved are returned to health, prisoners are released with the happy prospect of repatriation and restoration of property. Amis ends his book with the pathos of Odilo’s approaching infancy, with birth paradoxically marking the moment of his death and disappearance from time’s regressing line. At the same time, however, Amis’s narrator anxiously hints that this fiction is unsustainable, that the very premise of his character’s life, this whole effort to reverse time and cancel history, contains at its innermost core the traumatic force of collective denial that once allowed the obscene, violent, scatological, necrophilic crimes of the concentrations camps to take place under the cover of night and fog and perhaps will allow them to recur in new forms. With this nameless force of denial, the narrator is himself complicitous: the third person narrator and the unspoken first person of his character appear to have the same aim, to regress, to erase, to undo. When the arrow of time threatens to turn around the right way, the narrator “corrects” it, insisting on his favorite character’s childlike innocence, his “Unverdorben -heit” (unspoiledness) by history, to the very end. Everything that took place—earlier in the book—was, we are given to understand , all just a perverse insistence of time running forward, leaving the storyteller stranded in untimeliness and forcing him to tell his story imperfectly, at least this time around: Only a moment. There are no larger units of his time. He has to act while childhood is still here, while everything is his playmate —including his ca-ca. He has to act while childhood is still here before somebody comes and takes it away. And they will come. I hope the doctor will be wearing something nice, something appropriate, and not the white coat and the black boots, which surely. … Myself. Mistake. Mistake. … When Odilo closes his eyes I see an arrow fly—but wrongly. Pointfirst . Oh no, but then. … We’re away once more, over the field. Odilo Unverdorben and his eager heart. And I within, who came at the wrong time—either too soon, or after it was all too late.1 Amis, clearly, is playing a Samuel Beckett-like narrative game with time to suggest the limits of our capacities to reshape time—or at least, the moral desirability that these limits be observed. Yet this question of limits is not merely a question of individual responsibili2 Tyrus Miller...