Category: British and Irish Literature

The Guiltless Gliding of Amis’s Time’s Arrow

The success of a gimmick lies in whether it makes any messages in the story more effective, or whether it distracts and annoys us more than anything else. With a subject like the Holocaust, we certainly do not want the latter result. And yet the Holocaust has been the topic of many novels that have used non-standard forms and structures to deliver their messages. From this we might conclude that with such a serious topic the standard narrative approaches simply will not do.

Among others, we have that reconstructional striving we encounter in the works of W.G. Sebald, where characters seem determined to walk and read and effortfully remake the past, scrap by informational scrap. We have the cyclicity of Günter Grass’s Cat and Mouse, where the story can never end because the protagonist can never quite admit their guilt. We even have the time-skips of the thoroughly mediocre The Reader.

Time’s Arrow shares with these works an unusual approach. Martin Amis’s novel is told backwards, from a man’s death to his birth. I can only think of Delillo’s Underworld as having done something similar, and I cannot recall it adding anything there. But here, given the subject matter is a doctor at Auschwitz who successfully flees to the United States before dying of natural causes, we might assume the guilt component to be more prominent. The way, that is, that an earlier mistake might shape the life that follows, and then also how earlier decisions must have made that most mistaken of careers possible as well. This thread of interest must be enough for us, because all tension is removed when every beginning is really an end.

We follow the life of Odilo Unverdorben, who is first an old man alone in the US with the ridiculous name Tod Friendly (though Unverdorben is also dire – it means “untainted” in German), then a doctor both in New York and further afield, before heading to Europe shortly after the Second World War. We spend time in Auschwitz, then watch as he trains to become an SS Officer and courts his wife. Then he becomes a boy and re-enters his mother. We do not have access to Odilo’s thoughts, only to his emotions. We are trapped inside his body with another, unnamed person, the narrator, who may be Odilo’s soul. “Passenger or parasite,” that is our role.

This character – the narrator – is quite odd. He seems deliberately restricted in his access to information in a way that I found unsatisfactory. He knows all about Jews, for example, but nothing about the Holocaust or history. He’s essentially given a random assortment of knowledge, such that he can appreciate the world, while still being utterly bewildered by it. At no point, for example, does he realise that things are going backward. He just comments on how bizarre it is that things are the way they are.

For unlike Delillo’s novel, which is a series of vignettes in reverse chronological order, in Time’s Arrow the narrative is actually reversed. We read dialogue in ordered English, but the end of the conversation comes first. The same is true of actions. Doctors, in this world, cause damage and throw people, bloodied and broken, back onto the streets. Relationships begin with tearful and angry departures. We regurgitate our food and retrieve things from the rubbish. The narrator cannot believe this, it is all so desperately odd to him.

So now the question is, what does all this add? Is it worth it? On a basic level, this approach is excellent for making us pay attention. We need to read each conversation twice to really get the meaning. Various transactions are involved here – whether for sex, for health, or anything else – and by shifting the transfers into reverse we pay more attention to what is actually going on, and whether it makes sense. It is also used for humour, although not in a particularly exciting way. The narrator complains that Odilo checks out women by beginning with their hair and face, and only then going to their body. We, however, are winkingly aware that Odilo is far less chaste than such a sequence assumes. There is also the way that he seems to gain all of his strength for the day by absorbing excrement each morning from the toilet.

But its primary purpose is to confuse our moral compass. Doctors hurting their patients seems bizarre, especially when they are paid for it. People regret things, and then do them anyway. Relationships begin badly, but end with the sweetest of romances. This just doesn’t make sense, as our narrator never tires of telling us. It doesn’t make sense until Auschwitz. There, the doctor is at last healing people. Thousands of thousands of people are created in gas chambers and furnaces, or brought back to life on electric fences, or given miraculous life-giving injections. As the narrator remarks innocently, this is the only thing he has yet seen where things actually make sense.

This could have been extremely tasteless, and it’s a testament to Time’s Arrow’s quality that it is not. The absence of anything but positive judgement on the part of the narrator coupled with our own absolutely certain knowledge of what is truly taking place successfully amplifies a horror that is already almost unbearable to the imagination:

“There they go, to the day’s work, with their heads bent back. I was puzzled at first but now I know why they do it, why they stretch their throats out like that. They are looking for the souls of their mothers and fathers, their women and their children, gathering in the heavens – awaiting human form and union… the sky above the Vistula is full of stars. I can see them now. They no longer hurt my eyes.”

The scenes in Auschwitz are the highlight of the book, if we can call it that. Everything is so repugnant, but also so impactful thereby. The breakdown (or build-up) of Odilo’s relationship to his wife and his childhood are all that remains. Here there is not much excitement. Odilo suffers from impotency relating to his systematic murder of undesirable people, and chronologically before that also develops strange sexual proclivities. This affection for sadism and domination in the bedroom is something Odilo shares with Hanna in The Reader. As we go back, Odilo simply becomes less and less interesting as a character, as Amis seemingly decided he needed to tick off the serial-killer-psycho trait list just in case readers did not believe Odilo could actually have done the things he does.

Not that Odilo was ever very interesting. “I’ve come to the conclusion that Odilo Unverdorben, as a moral being, is absolutely unexceptional, liable to do what everyone else does, good or bad, with no limit, once under the cover of numbers.” Basically, he’s one of those brutes Adorno complains of in “The Meaning of Working through the Past” and elsewhere.

Yet that’s not entirely true. We still have the entire first part of Time’s Arrow, set in America. This can’t all be for nothing. Armed with a lot of gold, taken from the dead Jews, Odilo uses contacts in the priesthood to get himself into New York and set himself up there as a real doctor, the type which heals. In these conversations we get a brief view of Odilo’s heart, which is otherwise well-hidden from us: “I have sinned, Father… I still want to heal, Father. Perhaps, that way, by doing good…” So now we have a motive which sits fairly uneasily with the sheer scale of the horrors that Odilo is guilty of. He has had a change of heart. One which comes about only after his camp is set upon by the Soviets, and his family has abandoned him.

In another passage, earlier in the book, when Odilo has to leave New York, he says to his helper “all I ever wanted to do was help people.” This is quite frankly a load of bollocks. It may be true of his time in the States, but it would require extreme mental contortions to consider the administration of lethal poisons in concentration camps “helping”. And because we so rarely hear Odilo speak, and certainly never get into his mind, this approach – where we explore Odilo’s delusions – simply cannot work. As it stands, such statements just make him look a bit silly.

I am a big fan of redemption narratives, of course – it is the religious side of me. But Time’s Arrow cannot be this because we meet Odilo at his end first, and it is impossible to say whether he actually expiated his guilt or not. He donates money to the church, helps prostitutes, and has healed thousands of Americans. Whether we consider that adequate to washing away the sins of Auschwitz is a personal question. As for whether Odilo himself feels that he has worked through it all, without access to his head, it’s impossible to say for certain. All we get are occasional visions of a man who feels shame, who seeks crowds to “shed[…] the thing he often can’t seem to bear: his identity.”

All of this is to say that the decision to go through this narrative backwards both works and doesn’t. It makes us stop and slow down, and it certainly enhances the horror of that central topic – the systematised slaughter of Jews, those with disabilities, and all-too-many others – by portraying it in a way that makes it seem so morally positive. On the other hand, it takes the weight out of nearly everything else. Odilo’s relationships all end badly, so we cannot really enjoy them while they last – there can be no hope, after all, that this time he’ll crack it. As for his guilt, once we know his secret, we cannot really assess whether he feels like he’s successfully redeemed himself or not. Learning that he was hit as a child or mistreated Jews while at school adds nothing except reasons to dislike the person we are stuck with.

The narrator says, in the novel’s final words, “I… came at the wrong time – either too soon, or after it was all too late”. Earlier, he had remarked about his situation, how he had “(effectively) no will, and no body anyway through which to exercise it.” We might think about how all of this relates to the question of guilt. We, too, are in the narrator’s position. As readers, we can only perceive guilt, but never rectify it or prevent the actions that led to its coming. Especially in this story, where everything is so deterministic. Why, then, do we continue to read about these things? Perhaps because, in questions of guilt and responsibility, which are among the most important ones we may face in our own lives, the more approaches to these problems we have, the more likely it is that we may be able to do whatever it is we must to save our own souls.

Just a Ghost Story? Dickens’s “To Be Read at Dusk”

“To Be Read at Dusk” is a ghost story by Charles Dickens. Or rather, it is emphatically not a ghost story at all – “I don’t talk of ghosts” one of the characters declares. Instead, it is a collection of different encounters with what we might term the inexplicable. We can just leave it there, but as with many other similar tales, we may find something beneath the surface that the characters have missed.

The story begins with our narrator, sitting out in the Swiss Alps, and eavesdropping on the conversation of five nearby couriers, men who have worked in private houses as personal servants. They are discussing their experiences of the supernatural. One, a German, tells three stories and a Genoese man tells another, the longest.

The German’s Stories

At least one of these encounters will be familiar to us. The German tells of an old Marchesa who during a dinner party declared in shock that her sister, far away in Spain, had died. And so it was. My grandmother likes to tell stories about her own talents for detecting the deaths of her relatives. And my own father, the night before he died, visited me in a dream. It is a mystery how such a thing can happen, but since I do not as a rule dream, it feels wrong to call such a thing a mere coincidence. I imagine you, too, reader, can find examples of this mysterious sense.

The German also mentions the time when his mind was suddenly filled with thoughts of an old friend of his, with everyone reminding him of him on the street, and then to his surprise actually meeting the man that day, though he had believed him elsewhere. It is a more innocent version of the story above, for death sits outside of this arrangement. Yet there is something here that does not quite add up – “what do you call that?” he asks.

At the end of “To Be Read at Dusk” the German tells a final story, this time from when he was in the service of an Englishman. Just before he departed on a long journey the man’s twin brother seemed to send him a message in a dream. Sure enough, word soon arrives that the twin is near death from illness. When the first brother arrives his dying twin only has time to declare before expiring: “James, you have seen me before, to-night – and you know it!”

These stories all focus on what we cannot seem to explain. After relating the experience of seeing his friend, another courier, a Neapolitan, compares such things to the blood of San Gennaro liquifying back in Naples. That is a miracle, but to the others it is inappropriate – one gets the impression they are talking about something more serious. “That!” Cried the German. “Well! I think I know a name for that.” Bollocks, in short.

But as with a lot of stories set in the 19th century, we have here a certain uneasy relation to the supernatural. We may disbelieve miracles, but not quite the everyday inexplicable. Though we may try. The Englishman, on receiving his twin’s message, goes to the German with the hope of putting his mind to rest through the latter’s more scientific vision:

“You come from a sensible country, where mysterious things are inquired into, and are not settled to have been weighed and measured – or to have been unweighable and unmeasurable – or in either case to have been completely disposed of, for all time – ever so many years ago. I have just now seen the phantom of my brother.”

But nothing can be done, and nothing can be explained. Each of these stories tells us precisely nothing, except that such things do happen. They remind us that our world is filled with things that cannot be explained, and that mystery is better accepted than denied. For a 19th-century reader perhaps these tales were enough to make one lose sleep, but they did nothing for me. Our eavesdropping narrator, however, feels a chill, because after hearing the stories he goes back to talking to the very American he had avoided by listening in to the couriers in the first place. This man, from his new and naïve country, tells a more prosaic tale about “one of the largest acquisitions of dollars ever made”. The narrator, clearly, prefers a world that can be explained, even if, by comparison with the previous stories, it is hardly an exciting one.

The Genoese’s Tale: The Obvious Reading

The three previous encounters with the supernatural take up about a third of the length of “To Be Read at Dusk”. They set us up to approach the central tale, told by the Genoese courier and sandwiched between the German’s stories, as being another example of things that cannot be explained. Yet somehow, this does not quite add up. Here the mystery seems, if anything, more complex and more worthy of our attention too.

The Genoese courier tells of his hiring by a young English gentleman to accompany him, and his soon-to-be wife, on a trip to a slightly forlorn palace on the coast between Genoa and Nice for a few months of rest and relaxation. “All we had was complete; we wanted for nothing. The marriage took place. They were happy. I was happy, seeing all so bright.” The newlywed couple, the courier, and another servant, the wife’s maid, head to the palace. On the way, however, the courier notices something amiss about his mistress. He sees her “sometimes brooding in a manner very strange; in a frightened manner; in an unhappy manner”. He is perplexed, but eventually manages to get from her maid the information that she “is haunted”.

A dream before her marriage, of a man wearing black, with black hair and a grey moustache. This is the image that haunts her. The characters fear that they might find such an image at the palace when they arrive, but there is no such likeness anywhere, even among the many paintings. At the same time, our narrator’s description of the palazzo makes us think of gothic tales, and we are on the lookout for any indication of our man, knowing that his presence in the story will probably be fatal.

It does not take long for such a man to arrive, in the form of one Signor Dellombra, whom the Genoese describes as possibly an Austrian noble travelling incognito. When he is shown in for dinner the woman faints, but after her husband talks with her, she agrees to see him again. The couple have had no other guests in all the time they have been there. The husband insists he keep coming, so that his wife might master her fear of him, and this works, albeit incompletely. Eventually, the group go to Rome, where one day the wife disappears. Attempting to find her, the courier and her husband discover that she fled in the carriage of a man they recognise as Dellombra, but as he sent the horses of the station all in different directions, they are unable to give chase, and they never see the woman again.

On the face of it, this is another story about the presence of the supernatural. Like the Englishman in the German’s final story, the young husband here has a largely rationalist viewpoint, and sees himself as needing to go about “curing mistress of her fanciful terror.” Unfortunately, he was wrong in thinking he could fight fate in this manner. Signor Dellombra is a more mythic force, and he achieves what he must have been set on earth to do – to steal away the man’s wife from the bliss of their honeymoon. In this reading, the supernatural seems more hostile than it does in the other stories, but there does not appear to be a greater message here.

The Genoese’s Tale: Alternative Reading

Yet that is far from the case. There are clues in the text that support an alternative reading, things which our Genoese narrator may have missed but which, most likely, will not pass us by entirely unnoticed. We must, for this, consider not the grieving husband, nor the attentive but limited narrator, but rather the wife herself.

What do we learn of her? That she is “a fair young English lady, with a sufficient fortune.” Interestingly, immediately, we might notice that “He was enamoured of [her]”, not that the feeling was mutual. Our only indication, possibly, of that is that “they were going to be married.” As noted, they are married, and the narrator declares that “they were happy.” Perhaps they were, but then why is the woman immediately afterwards gloomy?

This gloom comes upon her when she is alone and appears to be dispelled when he comes and shows her affection. “By and by, she laughed, and then all went well again.” The dream, perhaps, is real, but there are other things that might make any of us unhappy. This is her life: “[she] would sing, and play the harp, and copy the old pictures, and stroll with master under the green trees and vines, all day.” That is her life. And she is happy – isn’t she? For master says so: ““Now Clara,” Master said, in a low voice, “you see that it is nothing? You are happy.”” The narrator says so too. “She was beautiful. He was happy.” But wait, have I not forgotten the “s” on the second sentence? No, we know that the woman is beautiful, but never that she is happy. Indeed, we read this exact sentence twice, with the second time near the end of the story, as if to nudge us towards questioning the sentiments the story contains.

The woman’s life is boring. When Dellombra appears, she is shocked to see the figure in her dream. Her husband, “almost angry”, at this, “and yet full of solicitude” – as I write this, I wonder whether the latter part of the sentence is the Genoese narrator quietly, like Stevens in The Remains of the Day, trying to excuse his master from something that is not quite right. Master forces mistress to see Dellombra again, though she says that the man terrifies her.

““Again? Why, surely, over and over again! Are you cold?” (She shivered)” In a single short speech the master has revealed a certain disregard for his wife and her feelings, which are indicated subtly by Dickens showing us her hidden reaction of horror at his words.

So, then, the woman may not be happy at all in her new relationship. She may need the affection of her husband to remind kindle in her any kind of joy. She has a mysterious dream, a horrific one shortly before her marriage which seems to presage not its end, but rather its lifelessness. When she actually sees Dellombra (and it is she who identifies him as the figure of her dream, while nobody else notices, suggesting that her description of the dream’s contents was perhaps even deliberately vague) and is forced to spend time with him, we read that “she would cast down her eyes and droop her head, before the Signor Dellombra, or would look at him with a terrified and fascinated glance, as if his presence had some evil influence or power upon her.” That rather sounds like a woman who is, at least partly, in love.

Her fainting and illness, her clinging to her husband’s influence, all read now like attempts to ward off this pernicious spirit which she feels as much within herself as within Dellombra – she knows that it will destroy the sacred bonds of her marriage. Yet it does not work. Somehow, in Rome, Dellombra finally gets to her, and they flee together. According to reports in the posthouse, Dellombra passed with “a frightened English lady crouching in one corner.” Yet are we to read her fear simply as that of a person trapped or may there also be a kind of liberated fear here too, which the Genoese narrator is unwilling to pass on to us as his listeners? It is impossible to say.

Conclusion

Sandwiched between tales of funny coincidences, this tale could just be another mysterious inexplicable tale, albeit one with added horror elements. Ironically, however, this tale embodies that classic fantastical trope – that there is always more to things than we may think. Instead of being merely a story about a fatal encounter, we can read this tale as telling us, unwillingly perhaps, about a relationship that merely appears to be perfect, and then only to one member of it. Through the two narrative layers – the Genoese, and the narrator himself – we are limited in what we can glean. But that just leaves an enduring mystery, albeit a much more prosaic one. How can a situation like this arise? How is it that in such a story its main victim is so deprived of her own voice? What was she really thinking?

Alas, we cannot know. But it makes “To Be Read at Dusk” a much more curious little collection of stories than it first appears. Some mysteries, certainly, cannot be explained. Yet some tragedies, equally certainly, can be avoided. Could this one have?

Character and Fate in Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge

We can say that character is our decision when faced with an event. An event, meanwhile, can be a thing of chance, or a thing of fate. Fate suggests an external ordering impulse, unlike random chance . Fate and character can be essentially the same if we say that each event that happens to someone is caused by a previous reaction of that character to an event so that everything is linked. Fate seems to presuppose the impossibility of the growth of character except within defined bounds, while randomness lets character change randomly. Randomness is real, whereas fate is generally reserved for stories that are consciously stories. To give us a neat little moral, this sense of cause and effect ought to be maintained. There is no room for randomness.

Thomas Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge, subtitled “the Life and Death of a Man of Character”, is a grand drama about the fate of Michael Henchard, a man who makes decisions that are not usually very good. It is my first Hardy, and going into it I was aware that I was likely to become acquainted with a pessimistic worldview and challenging local accents. One reason why the work is interesting is that it sheds some light on a problem regarding this connection between character and fate.

The novel begins with Henchard selling his wife and daughter one evening while drunk. It is a shocking scene, as we witness Henchard becoming drunker and drunker, and his attempts to rid himself of his wife Susan ever more serious. At last, he succeeds, and his wife disappears to a sailor (who is only there for a page) in what we could call a thing of absolute chance – indeed, perhaps the only time where chance figures in the novel. The next morning Henchard wakes up and regrets his rash decision, makes a vow to quit drinking for twenty-one years, and half-heartedly tries to find his wife.

The next time we meet him almost twenty years have passed and Henchard is now the mayor of the town of Casterbridge. While he was selling his wife, he declared that she had been holding him back. So, indeed, it seems. But the rest of the novel becomes a downhill race for Henchard, as his wife and daughter return, his past keeps popping up, and he ruins himself through awful decisions. His character, brash, confident, powerful, and mercurial is to blame for these decisions. He fires an excellent manager, the Scot Donald Farfrae because he danced with his daughter. He disobeys his wife’s dying request and in so doing estranges himself from his daughter. It seems, to some extent, that Henchard’s character is responsible for his fate. Things do not happen to him so much as he, through his character, causes the events that bring about his downfall. In a brilliant phrase, Hardy declares that “the momentum of his character knew no patience.”

Henchard believes in fate. He obeys the oath to stop drinking that he swore in a church. And when things start going wrong, he believes a hostile, “occult”, force is working against him and grows increasingly paranoid. But Henchard’s faith in fate, even his damnable one, is not absolute. Late in the novel, Henchard visits a man who appears capable of magic to discover the fate of the upcoming harvest so that he can speculate profitably and destroy Farfrae, now a commercial rival. The seer provides an accurate forecast, but just before the harvest Henchard gets nervous and adjusts his financial position, losing all of his money when things go as predicted.

Henchard is right to believe in a hostile fate. His author is not a kind one. While Henchard’s character seems partly responsible for his miseries, it is certainly not the only thing. Hardy’s novel is peppered with ridiculous encounters orchestrated especially to make its protagonist miserable. If halfway through a chapter Henchard declares to himself that he will love his daughter, something is certain to happen a few pages later that dashes his hopes. People turn up who should have been dead precisely at the moment when they will cause the most suffering. It becomes increasingly ridiculous. Where Henchard’s character may have damned him to poverty, Hardy’s fate weaving damns him to an early grave and abject misery.

There is something important in this that is worth looking into. I liked the novel and agree with those assertions that Henchard is this larger-than-life, Shakespearian monster of a man. But there is something about its structure that is unsatisfying, and it relates to this very element of fate.  Stories, at least originally, seem to have been about unstoppable fate. Chosen ones fight chosen enemies. The universe has a plan and order that is God-given. Fate here determines the shape of lives before they are lived. The oracles, the prophecies, that haunt tragedies, are all bearers of this word. Characters attempt to fight their fates, but they always comply in the end, albeit often through ways unexpected.

But the fates that we think of are all simple. A dragon is slain, a mother is bedded, and a child is killed. They can be reduced to a single act. A tragedy, generally, works similarly – a single decision is what is necessary for the fall. Othello’s refusal to reflect, for example, seals Desdemona’s fate. By reducing the number of events to a small number, the character becomes more important. In The Crossing, Cormac McCarthy writes that “in the end… no man can see his life until his life is done and where then to make a mending?” This is the case with lives that are made of small events. Henchard’s life, seen by a reader, has a shape, but for himself, it is like the one McCarthy describes – it takes time for his own character’s role within it to become visible to himself.

In a world where we have to make big decisions, a world of tragedy and high drama where the stakes are high, we see immediately the consequences of our actions and the role of our character in shaping the fundamental direction of our lives. You cannot drift in a tragedy; you can drift through ordinary life. Henchard’s daughter, Elizabeth-Jane, simply lives, passively, for most of the novel. She cannot be the main character. But you only need to force her to make one real decision to have a story. Any more, and you run the risk of getting something that seems picaresque, unreal. There are only so many serious decisions we can face in life. For a story, however, only one is often enough.

We cannot ask our stories both to show us character and to show us the world – the emphasis must be on one or the other for maximum effect. In The Mayor of Casterbridge Hardy seems to want to do both – both show an objectively “sorry world”, and also a character that makes it sorrowful for himself. This undermines his artistic purpose here, I think. If bad things keep happening to Henchard, that is bad luck in real life or authorial cruelty in a work of fiction. If Henchard keeps making awful decisions, then it is his character that is to blame for his bad luck. But in the novel, Hardy seems to orchestrate matters so that it is precisely when Henchard seems most determined to make good decisions that bad luck creeps in. That is not fair, and though life itself is not fair, as noted it seems to dilute Henchard’s responsibility in the text whilst strengthening the resonance of his tragedy.

Donald Farfrae comes to Casterbridge and sets himself up as a successful merchant, eventually toppling without malice the man who gave him his first role there, Henchard himself. He marries, gains prestige, and life is good for him (mostly). His world is not that miserable one inhabited by the other characters, like Elizabeth-Jane or Henchard’s wife Susan. Their misery, however, in many cases stems from a refusal to utter a certain piece of information – in short, from decisions stemming from character, which takes us around in a circle. The point is that misery is the result of character in The Mayor of Casterbridge, except when it is the result of Hardy being mean. 

I spent most of the novel wondering how exactly Hardy was going to make me and all of the characters miserable at the end. He did not, of course, disappoint in this. And it is true that to have character failings make a tragedy, fate, or even just a story, we need events. Information, or its absence, can only have an effect when something happens whose outcome that information could have changed. But Hardy’s events are too much, too cleanly orchestrated. It made me conclude that if we want to make a truly blunt argument about the links between character and fate, we should probably rely upon those single powerful decisions and events that reveal character to the utmost, rather than attempting to substitute for them many smaller events. Or if we wish to use smaller events, making them seem like chance events, rather than forced events. We tolerate the deliberate tendency of a tragedy towards a single grand and silly conclusion, but the composite tragedy, built of many smaller but still deliberate things, is harder to stomach. It is hard to read The Mayor of Casterbridge and not think that Henchard is going to have struggles ahead. But he did not need Hardy standing behind him, constantly kicking him down the stairs.