Time's Arrow: Or the Nature of the Offense (1991) - Martin Amis
Related: reverse chronology and literature - 1991 - Martin Amis - British literature - 20th century literature
"Make no mistake, this book is weird. Amis maintains the backwards motif scrupulously, with dialogues printed in reverse order (Amis' one concession to the reader is to render the individual sentences forward) and every event described backwards. For instance: to eat, "You select a soiled dish, collect some scraps from the garbage, and settle down for a short wait. Various items get gulped up into my mouth, and after skillful massage with tongue and teeth I transfer them to the plate for additional sculpture with knife and fork and spoon." a reader via amazon.com
Description
Time's Arrow tells the story of a Nazi war criminal in reverse chronology starting with his death and ending with his birth. Amis has suggested he took the idea from Kurt Vonnegut's "Slaughterhouse Five". --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_chronology [Jun 2006]
The book recounts the life of a German Holocaust doctor in a disorienting reverse chronology. The doctor, together with the reader, experiences time passing in reverse, so he becomes younger and younger during the course of the novel. Amis engages in several forms of reverse discourse including reverse dialogue, reverse narrative, and reverse explanation. Amis' use of these techniques is aimed to create an unsettling and irrational aura for both the reader and the doctor; indeed, one of the recurrent themes in the novel deals with the doctor's persistent misunderstanding of the world. For example, he simply accepts that people are to wait for an hour in a physician's waiting room after being examined, although at some points he has doubts about this tradition; he also likens the act of hailing a cab after being paid by the cab driver to be driven to a destination to which he did not want to be driven to a salute to the efficiency of the taxi service.
It controversially portrays the doctor's torture and murder of Jews. So while at a concentration camp, he returns the dead to life and heals the sick, rather than the opposite. The broader image presented is that all those that died in the Holocaust are revived and returned to their homes. Eventually they become children, then babies, and then reenter their mother's wombs, where they finally cease to exist. The book is narrated from the perspective of the child-like lost soul or conscience of the main character. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time%27s_Arrow_%28novel%29 [Jun 2006]
Amis maintains the backwards motif scrupulously
In Times Arrow, "Amis maintains the backwards motif scrupulously, with dialogues printed in reverse order. Amis' one concession to the reader is to render the individual sentences forward) and every event described backwards." When the lead character eats, it goes like this:
"Eating is unattractive too. First I stack the clean plates in the dishwasher, which works OK, I guess . . . So far so good: then you select a soiled dish, collect some scraps from the garbage, and settle down for a short wait. Various items get gulped up into my mouth, and after skillful massage with tongue and teeth I transfer them to the plate for additional sculpture with knife and fork and spoon. That bit's quite therapeutic at least, unless you're having soup or something, which can be a real sentence. Next you face the laborious business of cooling, of reassembly, of storage, before the return of these foodstuffs to the Superette, where, admittedly, I am promptly and generously reimbursed for my pains. Then you tool down the aisles, with trolley or basket, returning each can and packet to its rightful place" (11). --Time's Arrow quoted in http://www.trinity.edu/cbrown/metaphysics/timeInFiction.html [Jun 2006]
Literature after cinema and television
Maybe Martin Amis is the answer to my question: "has cinematic time influenced time in literature?" Only the cinema of Amis's age is television. I quote from a 1994 book on television:
But a contemporary writer, Martin Amis, also comes to mind as someone who, at least in one of his novels, has taken the ambiguous experience of television time into his fiction, with the aim of fashioning from it a vision of the authentic self, giving an idea of what might be a literature after television. --Literature after Television: Author, Authority, Authenticity Thomas Elsaesser quoted in Writing for the Medium: Television in Transition (1994)
See also: Martin Amis - Irréversible - time - process philosophy
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