Time's Arrow by Martin Amis: 2013

This on line resource is based entirely on the Vintage essential guide to Martin Amis by Margaret Reynolds and Jonathan Noakes.

Before you read these pages you should read the novella.

In an interview with Amis included below he identifies a number of key themes to this text:

the narrative structure and method;
history;
political manipulation and moral choice;
the portrayal of atrocity;
time and memory.

We will concentrate on the use of narrative techniques for our written coursework, comparing 'Time's Arrow' to 'HHhH' by Laurent Binet.

Read this interview carefully and try and understand something of his intentions as a writer, and then his intentions as a writer of 'Time's Arrow'.

Interview with Martin Amis

London: 10 July 2002

JN: I'm going to start by asking you about The Rachel Papers. I was intrigued by that line in Experience where you say, In 1973 my life looked good on paper, where, in fact, almost all of it was being lived.' How far then, in 1973, were you actually creating your voice, your career, in the process of writing this story?

MA: I think with a first novel you just have a go, with the courage and folly of youth. You get going and see how you do. I had a sense that I wouldn't just write one novel, and in fact by 1973 I was well into my second novel. I'd finished The Rachel Papers early in 1972. It was a long time in production, and it was the only novel of mine that was significantly rewritten on the advice of the editor. So I was conscious of being there for the long haul - put it that way - but I wasn't career building. I didn't have any kind of overview.

JN: In what ways was it rewritten?

MA: Well, it has a kind of double-time scheme, in that in each chapter you see the narrator on the eve of his twentieth birthday. And my typescript when I handed it in was not consistent then, in that some chapters just ran on, and the editor tightened it up with this suggestion, and improved it by a good fifteen per cent.

JN: Fifteen per cent! That sounds very precise...

MA: Well, that's what it felt like, and it's the only time that I submitted to editorial advice, and I could tell she was right straight away. So there was some tinkering going on with that, but I was already completely preoccupied with my second novel, and you're always wanting to move forward and not go back to what feels done.

JN: This very brittle, sardonic tone that is Charles Highway's voice ... is that your own voice?

MA: You haven't got much else except your own consciousness, and I've always felt my own books are very good and dutiful examples of this. Because the first novel is about me, my consciousness; the second is about a peer group; the third is about a city; the fourth and fifth compare one city to another, New York and London; then, by London Yields, I'm writing about the planet, and by the time you get to The Information then it's the universe; and my present novel is a bit about alternate universes. So there is a steady expansion here. But when you're twenty-one, unless you're very exceptionally empathetic, you're really trapped inside your own consciousness, and what you do, and tend to go on doing, is you take a little bit of yourself and push it very much to the forefront, and all the other facets of your character are suppressed, partly for ironic effect, and it has a stylising effect too. No, the only claim that The Rachel Papers has to originality is that it's not 'the portrait of the artist as a young man', it's more the 'portrait of the literary critic as a young man'. I made him much colder than I am, and also he's an anti-creative figure, he's a pedant, a nineteen-year-old pedant. But even when it came to Money, where I had a debauched first-person narrator, I still took that two percent of me. And what you hope is that everyone has a bit of that in them, and then the novel can claim to some kind of universality.

JN: The Rachel Papers does feel like a young person's book, I suppose partly because of that literary critical element of Charles always teasing ideas through literature. And there's that moment when he's advised to start resorting to his own self.

MA: Well, yes, he's a chameleon and a ventriloquist. Like most people of that age, they're trying on voices and personalities and don't have much idea who they really are, and I think that's a condition of being that age. You've got to pretend an easy and urbane acquaintance with the main currents of life without knowing anything whatever, so it's all a desperate bluff, being nineteen.

JN: There's something that goes through all your books, and that's the playing with words, the extended metaphor. For example, there's a bit at the beginning of 'Experience where you're having a conversation with Louis in the car, but then you get into a whole word-play about 'the Chauffeuring Years' and the 'autobahn' of life. Is that something that happens just because you like words, or is it something that you map out for yourself?

MA: It's all instinct. When anyone asks you Why did you decide in this novel to have ...?', the word 'decide' is always wrong. You grope around your own instincts and move forward reflexively rather than to a plan. Anthony Burgess years ago made the distinction between what he calls the 'A-type novel' and the TS-type novel'. The 'A-type novel' being characterised by a strong narrative, characters, human interest; the 'B novel' being more an order of words. The ultimate 'B novel' is [James Joyce's] Finnegans Wake. And most literary writers are somewhere between the 'A' and the 'B', and I suppose I lean a bit more towards the 'B\

JN: Is there a problem - perhaps this is particular to The Rachel Papers — with being so articulate that it's not commensurate with the lack of maturity in a young person? That one can say things, but not feel them?

MA: That's very much Charles Highway's problem in The Rachel Papers. As he says — if I can remember this, I haven't looked at the novel in a quarter of a century — but something like 'having a vocabulary more refined than your emotions'. The emotions have to catch up with the vocabulary. But I would again claim that that is part of the condition of being that age. I wrote the novel feeling that I'd better get it down quickly because I'll soon forget what being nineteen is like, and it's such a volatile state that you don't really know where you're headed. You're in flux, you don't know what your destination is, you don't know what you've got in the way of talents and capacity for concentration, etc., it's a roller-coaster ride. So I thought 'quick', while it's still fresh in the memory, and I knew I was going to be a different person in a year or two. I instinctively knew that, so that was another reason for haste.

JN: I'm thinking now of London Fields. Having the writer so much in the forefront, and yet then dealing with the characters, it's almost as though you're always working on two levels, with a double perspective. And actually the way you're speaking about that now seems almost to give that double perspective - that you're living it, and you know you've got to get it down now, but at the same time you're outside it.

MA: Yes. Well, it's a dual, it's a divided kind of process. But that's also the case with postmodern novels up to a point. People talk about postmodernism as they do all developments, evolutionary developments, in the novel, as if they were fashions or bandwagons. But when a lot of writers start doing the same kind of thing, it isn't fashion, it's the novel making another lurch forward in its evolutionary path. You can tell when this is happening when a very hard-working, though not necessarily sophisticated, fiction reviewer starts saying things like, 'Can we please have a moratorium on novels about science. I'm fed up with all these novels about science', as if it were a fad. But in fact it's not. You know something's up then, when a lot of writers are doing the same thing. And that's what we were doing then. And postmodernism — I always thought it was kind of a dead end, as it's proved to be, but I thought there were comic possibilities in postmodernism that I hadn't seen exploited much. By the way, I'm being wise after the event here, because you wouldn't think it through like that. So in the novel Money I have a character called 'Martin Amis' who has long discussions with his protagonist, John Self, and gives him great hints about what he has in store for him because he is, after all, in a godlike position vis-a-vis his main character. But of course my main character is never listening. He's always worrying about his car, or his girlfriend. And I thought there was a vein of comedy that was characteristically, essentially postmodern. But I don't feel I'm in that stream any more. I think we're all moving on from that kind of playful, tricksy work. It's like the architecture that has all its innards on the outside — you show the reader what you're doing. I know it was tremendously irritating to many an earlier generation, and when my father tried to read Money — whose first chapter he'd liked — when in the second chapter he came to the character called Martin Amis, he hurled the book across the room because by his lights it was a trick — he used to call it 'buggering the reader about' — and his idea was that it was a much straighter deal with the reader, and you didn't try and stretch or trick or puzzle the reader. But I didn't agree with him ... Now I feel that that's been done and has proved to be something of a dead end, although a theory or an idea with tremendous predictive power, because life became very postmodern, politics became postmodern. Politicians would tell you what they were doing. This was a sort of spin, I suppose, but with a self- consciousness, and an end of the old and more actorly and hypocritical political style.

JN: You're couching this very much in terms of literature, and literary forms, but is there a world spirit which dictates the fact that everybody is interested in a particular method or a particular theme at a particular time?

MA: Oh yes, and if asked to sum up the subject of literary fiction in a couple of words, I would say, 'It's about the near future.' It is about the Zeitgeist and human evolution, particularly of consciousness, as well as furniture and surroundings. It's how the typical rhythms of the thought of human beings are developing.

JN: Set against that, though, there is the fact that it is a physical existence that we lead, and in all the novels is this interest in the body, how it works. There is that intriguing statement in The Rachel Papers about the existence of the body giving rise to the existence of irony.

MA: Yes, it is a clunking reminder of our physical existence. Another way of putting it is that we write about a parallel track through time. We write about change, planetary change, changes in consciousness, but also about our own ageing, which has a unique unprecedented affinity with the ageing of the planet because a seventeenth-century novelist or eighteenth- century novelist would have no more sense of the planet getting older, than would the dog at his or her feet ... It wasn't in their consciousness. But now we do very much have a sense of finite time, vis-a-vis the planet. So those parallel tracks — getting older, while you write about the same things, which I think, for instance, describes the career of Graham Greene quite exactly — those preoccupations don't change, but the writer gets older as he writes about them. That track, that awareness of age is a great subject, and now I'm fifty-two I think it hasn't been done. Some writers have of course done it brilliantly, but you never do take the advice of literature on these matters. It's only when it happens to you that it feels like a completely fresh experience, as if no one gave you any warning whatever, because it's so much more immediate to feel it than to read about it. But ageing is a terrifying business that seems to have been hedged by a conspiracy of silence, once you get to it. No one would tell you it was going to be like this. So I look forward to chronicling that particular part as well.

JN: London Field'. — you say in Experience that you thought about calling that Time's Arrow — or are you just playing with the reader, are you buggering the reader about?

MA: No, no. I did — the phrase was in my mind, and I didn't know that a whole novel was going to earn that title much more thoroughly than London Fields did.

JN: So why did the phrase 'Time's Arrow' stay with you?

MA: I don't know. I'd been reading popular science, and reading about the arrow of time, and I'd been interested in that, and it's not a totally fanciful notion to turn back, to reverse the arrow of time, because certain theories now exploded about the fate of the universe include this idea of the big crunch when everything has been flung out by the big bang, but then the explosive force of that thrust weakens, and then gravity starts to pull everything back in. And many physicists have theorised about the possibility of time going backwards in that event, and light going backwards too. But a philosopher of science friend said to me, 'Don't get into that, that's a can of worms for you. Just imagine it as a film going backwards.'

JN: How difficult - technically - was that to do? After all, you even try and do the language backwards at one point.

MA: Yes, right at the beginning. But I realised that that would have to be stylised very quickly — only a few bleats of backward speak are allowed. And then I just simply reversed the order of people saying things.

JN: But even the conversations ...

MA: Yes. The conversations are backwards in time, although each particular utterance is given as it were forward in time as a convention, otherwise the novel would have been impossible to read or write.

JN: So running the film backwards, that was the method, that was what you had in mind?

MA: Yes. I thought it was going to be a short story, a poetic short story of four or five pages, of a life done backwards.

And I'd toyed with it in a short story where I'd just done a paragraph like that. But then I thought that, even as a short story, there's not very much point to this. It's a conceit, and a beautiful and sad, tragic conceit. But then I read The Nazi Doctors by my friend Robert J. Lifton, and I thought, now, there would be a point. And I thought a long short story, then I thought a novella, and it became, in the end, a short novel.

JN: To juxtapose something which is tricksy and witty from a literary point of view with a huge ...

MA: ... historical tragedy ... Yes, but I mean I still think I have something to say, and the subtitle of that novel is 'The Nature of the Offence'. And what I'm saying is that the Holocaust would have been exactly what the Nazis said it was — i.e., a biomedical initiative for the cleansing of Germany - if, and only if, the arrow of time ran the other way. That's how fundamental the error was. And I think the novel expresses that. Nazism was a biomedical vision to excise the cancer of Jewry. To turn it into something that creates Jewry is a respectable irony. People who say that you can't use sophisticated means to speak about the Holocaust . .. you know, you can only go near the subject in a sepulchral hush. With the Holocaust, it's a respectable position. Cynthia Ozick has my respect, as does George Steiner for saying that actually you can't write about it. But those who automatically think that sophisticated and witty or ironic means for writing about something serious . .. that that's something impermissible, [that] is just a humourlessness in another guise. You cannot take away your sense of humour. To excise that reduces you. Humour and common sense — as Clive James once said, 'Humour is just common sense dancing'. And those who have no humour have no common sense either, and shouldn't be trusted with anything.

JN: To my mind, it's a way of reversing orders. There's that moment when Odilo says, 'Creation is easy' — and it's brilliant because it does mean that, going backwards, people come out of Auschwitz whole ...

MA: . .. and are then placed in ghettos and concentration camps, and then distributed among the population, and employment is found for them, and all the Nuremberg laws are reversed so they get their pets back, and their radios back. It seems philanthropic, if and only if, the arrow of time is reversed, and that's the most fundamental law of the universe ... that it can't be.

JN: The fact that we don't know what crimes have been committed by the protagonist, because of time going backwards, puts the reader in a very curious position in relation to that character.

MA: The reader has to do all the morality, because these terrible events are described as benevolent, but also in such a way that, I hope, there is a sort of disgust and an unreality and self-delusion in the way it's shown. He keeps wondering why it has to be so ugly, this essentially benevolent action, why it is so filthy and ugly. It was a coprocentric universe. They called Auschwitz 'anus mundi'. So it's there, but the narrator can't spot it, the reader has to do all that.

JN: You end it with that little piece in the acknowledgements saying thank you to your sister Sally for giving you your earliest memory. What function does memory have in that work or any of the others?

MA: I don't think I rely upon it as much as some writers - Nabokov, Ian McEwan. Nabokov says explicitly that your childhood is your treasure chest as a writer. I can't say I find myself feeling that often. But when I wrote Experience you find that the memories are there, and unearthing them is like developing your muscles, and it gets stronger die more you do it. I think it's all there, but unconscious, it's all in the unconscious with me.

JN: Obviously in Experience you are drawing on memories as well as fictions and stories. Once or twice when I've taught it, funnily enough, I find myself calling it a novel ...

MA: Ah, well, I think that's not a bad instinct. I knew when I started it that I couldn't possibly write a conventional A to B chronological memoir. I never contemplated that. Again, this is not a decision, but a decision that's already made for you. I knew I'd have to have some novelistic freedoms - the ability to jump around in time and also to follow themes rather than merely the calendar. So it's very much a memoir by a novelist.

JN: The opening conversation sets up many different things. It's about creation, because so many other stories are being brought into being with this conversation between a son and a father, or two sons and two fathers ...

MA: Well, a writer's life is going to be peculiar. Writers' lives are usually fairly chaotic, despite what Flaubert said. You know, the writer should be orderly and boring in his life so that he can be savage and original in his work. But writers' lives do tend to be a bit savage and a bit original. But you are also placed, as everyone else is placed. You have your parents and you have your children and that is universal. So there is an Everyman, as well as a literary curiosity in every writer.

JN: You talk about reading in terms of writing something and then reading it back. How far is that the double perspective that you're often using: you are both — both the reader and the writer?

MA: You're always the reader and the writer. Writing a memoir is different. You are very much less free. Writing fiction is one of the great human expressions of freedom. You're freer than a poet because of form. You are infinitely freer than a dramatist because you don't rely on actors and props and stages and audiences and all the rest. But when you're writing about your life, you can be a galley slave, if you're actually doing it chronologically. And I wanted some authorial freedom. But when you're writing a novel, absolutely anything in it can happen. You have no restrictions of budget. You can bring about a holocaust, you can turn back the arrow of time, you have godlike powers which you never have over your own life.

JN: You begin Experience with a chapter headed 'My missing . ..'. How much is presence and absence a theme?

MA: What was shocking to me was finding out about my subconscious, which is where it all comes from anyway. The novelist Maureen Freely wrote a piece that really shocked me where she said that - this was on the occasion of my meeting my grown-up daughter, whom I didn't meet until she was nineteen - and Maureen Freely said that, 'in all his fiction, all his novels, there are these lost girls whose paternity or origin is in doubt'. And I suddenly realised that I had been thinking about her, and about my cousin who was murdered. That they had been very present, not in my conscious mind, but in my unconscious mind, and therefore in my fiction.

JN: Talking for a moment, not specifically about your cousin, but about Auschwitz ... do you think it is the role of the intellectual to think about atrocities, to tackle difficult things that perhaps the survivors of such experiences can't?

MA: I wouldn't say that they can't. Primo Levi disproves that, as do many first-person accounts of these things. You don't, you shouldn't go there if you don't want to go there, but I think it would be unusual for a writer placed as we now are at the beginning of this new century not to be interested in extreme human behaviour. It's one of the great mysteries, isn't it? The enormous band of human behaviour — that we can produce a Shakespeare and a Hitler. You do not see such contrasts in the animal kingdom. You can't say, 'This is an absolutely superlative baboon, while this is a highly regrettable baboon.' They're all much of a muchness, aren't they? Human beings effloresce in incredibly different directions and degrees, and I don't see how you could fail to be interested in that. It's all telling you what it is to be human, and that is the subject.

JN: You spoke at one point about the novelist's addiction to parallels, and to making connections. Would that be a fair description of the novel as a form?

MA: Yes. I think Experience might give the reader the impression that every time something happens to you, you say, 'Oh, this is just like that bit in ... Saul Bellow, or Joyce or something.' But while you are living it, you don't actually have time to make those connections. You're trying to make sense of it after the event, and you reach for similar analogous experiences, or representations of those experiences in literature. But sure, when you're writing a novel you're trying to make everything hang together. When you start a novel you're assigning life to these propositions in a kind of reckless way, and when you actually have to write the novel you're trying to control it, and it feels like an inseparable mass of many things. It's like scaling a mountain with various lines. You need themes, you need glutinations of ideas and images that control this mass.

JN: There's a way in which your perception of 'experience', the word, has changed a lot, thinking from The Rachel Papers through to Experience. It begins as something for which the characters are greedy, and it ends as something which is almost harm ...

MA: The other side of it is innocence. I said to a journalist that innocence seemed to me to be the primary value in my fiction, that's what I value most. And he said, Yes, but you always write about experience, not innocence.' And I agreed.

JN: Perhaps it's not possible to know innocence unless you're experienced enough to be able to analyse it?

MA: Or innocence is a kind of tabula rasa on which is piled, stacked, over the years, experience, in the Blakeian sense of being more and more aware of your fallen state ... man's fallen state, which is all nonsense theologically, and so on, but is a good enough image for our condition.

JN: You talked about your father complaining about the way that you were treating the reader. Do you have an ideal reader in mind? Because you demand quite a lot of your readers.

MA: I suppose I do. Well, I think one shouldn't pussyfoot, and just say that you write the stuff that you would like to read. So you write for yourself, no doubt about that. But I do have a sort of romantic idea of someone in their twenties, of a certain bent, and when they pick up a book by me, they think — as I have done on several occasions — 'Ah, here is one for me. Here is a writer who I'll have to read all of, because they're speaking directly to me, and they're writing what I want to read.' And sometimes you're doing the signing queue and a reader comes past and you sign the book, and there's a little exchange of the eyes, where you think, 'Ah, that's one of them.' So there is that ideal reader. And it's someone who's discovering literature and homes in on you. I'm aware of such readers.

JN: Who are the authors who you turn to, about whom you have that feeling?

MA: Well, Nabokov and Bellow are the ones where I really thought, 'That's it, and I'm going to get all their books.' And I've read every word they ever wrote. They have to be contemporary writers. You don't pick up Henry Fielding and think, 'This is one for me.' It has to be the shared experience, the shared century at least.

Time's Arrow by Martin Amis

HHhH Study Guide

What is postmodernism presentation

Essay Title on 'Time's Arrow'

Time's Arrow Study Guide

Interview with Martin Amis

Contexts, comparisons and complementary readings

Time's Arrow - Introductory Lessons

Martin Amis on Bookworm [1992]