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Life’s Moments and Self Creation in Lispector’s Agua Viva

It’s a question I generally leave to those philosophers whom I haven’t yet read: what is life? I always leap ahead, asking myself and the world what I must do with my life or how to live. Yet is it not foolish to skip over that fundamental questioning? If we don’t know what life is, we can hardly know properly how to live it.

Clarice Lispector is the next stop on my unofficial tour of the literature produced by authors that are not Ukrainian but belong, in a better world, in part to the land of today’s Ukraine. She was born in that country in 1920, but swiftly emigrated with her family to escape ongoing pogroms to Brazil, where she is considered one of that country’s greatest authors. She wrote in Portuguese, and in Agua Viva, she tried to work out what life is.

This is a strange book. As with W.G. Sebald, whose Vertigo I recently finished but which doesn’t get a blog post, Agua Viva is one of those works which is not entirely a novel, but not quite anything else either. It is an aphoristic work, made up of short reflections, many only a few sentences long, some connected to one another and some disconnected. And they all aim to work out what life is.

Moments

“I want to grab hold of the is of the thing. These instants passing through the air I breathe: in fireworks they explode silently in space.” Life, for our narrator, is a moment. A thing that passes. But a thing that we can, and should, grab onto. Lispector’s language is lush, and it is linguistically that she attempts to depict this moment. A huge array of images creates cumulatively this impression of the instant passing by. “The next instant, do I make it? or does it make itself? We make it together with our breath. And with the flair of the bullfighter in the ring.”

At times, the narrator is full of enthusiasm. There’s a kind of ecstatic exclamation that seems reminiscent of Whitman, together with an enthusiasm for movement and travel. “May whoever comes along with me come along: the journey is long, it is tough, but lived,” is very like the Whitman of Song of Myself’s section 46, for example. Lispector also has an affinity with Rilke, in that the entire book is an attempt to “live the questions”, as Rilke suggests to the questioner in Letters to a Young Poet. “I find no answer: I am,” She writes.

However, there’s a certain anxiety here too, which Rilke and Whitman are (largely) immune to. This is not the buoyant self-sustaining grandiosity of Whitman – Lispector’s narrator knows that her utterances, though they float in the air, need to be heard. She cannot live alone. “I write to you because I don’t understand myself.” Self-doubt appears in other guises too. In the questions, in the repetitions of what does not to be repeated, such as how “I am myself”. This is not bad writing, but rather anxiety expressed indirectly on the page. This anxiety belying the confidence gives the narrator kinship with the person that Whitman, after years of study, became for me – a self-creating figure whose assertions are designed to hide the sadness and loneliness at the core of his being.

Yet throughout, there is a distinctly feminine angle to Agua Viva that it would be remiss to ignore. Her Whitmanian exclamations are tinged with a sense of her own limitations, specifically as a woman. Where Whitman, in Song of Myself, attempts to identify and praise everything – every profession, every life – Lispector’s narrator here comes up against the limits of a much more bounded existence. The moments she attempts to pour light onto are simple, average. Having coffee outside, having a smoke. The flowers she has in the room. Or the light playing on a tap:

“In this instant-now I’m enveloped by a wandering diffuse desire for marvelling and millions of reflections of the sun in the water that runs from the faucet onto the lawn of a garden…”

This praising of existence is a praising of the existence that is available to her, which is why it appears so undefined to a reader. She lives in her mind, on the page, in words. But not, it seems, in the world. Because she cannot, simply put.

We might also make out the hazy edges of a plot, of a reality lying beyond the experience of individual moments. The narrator seems to deny this: “Do I not have a plot to my life? For I am unexpectedly fragmentary. I am piecemeal. My story is living.” But there is a failure, a broken relationship. The narrator addresses an absent man at certain points of doubt. “But what can I do if you are not touched by my defects, whereas I loved yours. My candour was crushed underfoot by you. You didn’t love me, only I know that. I was alone. Yours alone. I write to no one and a riff is being made that doesn’t exist. I unglued myself from me.”

Creation

And this thread is what lets us construct a hidden narrative for the story of Agua Viva, of a reaction against a life that somewhere went wrong. Our narrator is not a writer, not primarily, but rather a painter. Her writing is not her natural medium, but the style is like a painting in that it attempts to capture the blur of experience in the way that someone like Monet could or Renoir could. She had a relationship, but it has ended. She makes veiled references to “he” as a topic she will discuss – but she never manages to get that far.

Her confidence has been hurt by her rejection. And so she has turned to writing. The narrator’s introspective, aphoristic language is tentative, it is testing the waters of language’s possibility. And it is also an act of creation. All writing creates, but here we have something different from the sentences of realist novelists, who try to build up characters on the page. The impression given by phrases like “this writing I’m attempting is a way of thrashing myself free” is of a real person, trying to gain a reality that their immediate reality does not allow them. The impression of the voice here is much more intimate, human, and emotionally affecting.

In the task of freeing herself from the world, the narrator relies on writing. She also relies upon a conscious reaction against rationality, which no doubt for her represents an aspect of men that is hateful to her. “I have the mysticism of the darkness of a remote past,” she says. She also talks of her “witching ceremonies.” Through these tropes unclaimed by men, and through the blessing of her reality through its description, the narrator attempts to live a free life in the mind, and build a new life beyond the failure of the relationship to the “he”.

A State of Grace

In spite of the moments of doubt, the narrator succeeds and slips away at the book’s end into something like a state of grace where every moment is blessed. But as with everything mystical in fiction, the success of Agua Viva’s portrayal of its narrator’s ecstasy depends upon our sympathy and our willingness to give ourselves over to the strength of the exclamations and images. “That is living: the joy of the it”. Do we believe in her, or do we doubt her, as we might do Whitman?

I cannot say for sure what I think in my own case. Lispector’s language is very beautiful and full of striking images, but I found it all too abstract for my tastes. There was a disbalance between experience and underlying reality that I disliked, so that I almost have to look down on the narrator. If this is a book of philosophy, rather than fiction, and it perhaps is – arguing by images about the importance of each moment – then it immediately encounters the problem that such arguments are not particularly unconvincing to a cruel and logical mind, such as my own.

Whitman was not wrong when he exclaimed that “Logic and sermons never convince, The damp of the night drives deeper into my soul.” The problem is that, with a few exceptions, literature is not the damp of the night. Those kind of arguments require the reader to get up and go outside. Just like Lispector’s work will succeed or fail based on whether we can look at a mirror or a faucet in the same way again after we’ve read it.

Anyway, Agua Viva is a lovely little book, and my first Lispector. I’m sure I’ll read more of her later, but for now I won’t be sad to return to the earth and the concrete and the conflict of the world outside.

A Question of Tactics – How to Blow Up a Pipeline by Andreas Malm

Fortunately for me, this is not a guidebook. Owning a copy of The Anarchist’s Cookbook is illegal in my country, and it seems like a how-to guide on domestic terrorism would be still harder to excuse in court on the grounds of curiosity, as people have tried to do in the past. But How to Blow Up a Pipeline: Learning to Fight in a World on Fire is no less explosive for this. Written by a lecturer at Lund University, this is a polemical work that argues that acts of violence against property need to become part of any movement against anthropogenic (human origin) greenhouse gas emissions for that movement to have a chance of real success. It is hostile both towards groups like Extinction Rebellion, whose handbook I read earlier this summer and found fairly uninteresting, and also towards those “climate pessimists” who believe that no significant action to reduce emissions is possible and that instead, we should just learn how to die.

Aside from what goes on in the post-Soviet space, the state of the climate is the global problem I expend most of my thoughts on and know the most about. By the time this post is up, I will have started a new job in a major international energy company, where I will be working specifically on strategic direction within the energy transition – think things beyond just wind and solar. This was also what I was doing in Russia before circumstances compelled me to leave. Though I have neither attended energy-related rallies nor committed domestic terrorism against fossil fuel infrastructure, still I have allowed my concern for the state of the planet and its inhabitants to shape in no small way the direction of my own life. And that concern is great. Believe me, I’d much rather be reading 19^th-century novels for the rest of my life in peace.

I found Malm’s book compelling. With The Extinction Rebellion Handbook, I spent most of my time shaking my head. That book was less a series of arguments than a series of paeans to vegan soup kitchens and letting oneself get arrested. Naturally, Malm does not attempt to convince anyone of the consequences of continued large-scale fossil emissions. Readers who want to know more about these should look to the IPCC’s Summary for Policymakers. Those with spurious arguments about why climate change is a hoax, or why human involvement is insignificant next to natural climate change, make me sad and should read no further.

Malm’s book, anyway, is about the tactics necessary for the climate movement to achieve its goals. These being, broadly stated, the prevention of global temperatures rising more than 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels or at the most 2 degrees, which is achieved primarily by reducing fossil fuel use or eliminating it altogether. Though these are somewhat arbitrary numbers, if achieved they would minimise the adverse effects of climate change – things like wildfires and crop failures due to increased random weather. Based on current trajectories, however, it is unlikely that we will manage this. Hence the note of hysteria we may hear in climate activists. Emissions are cumulative, so every year from now climate anomalies are only going to get more pronounced – from atypical heatwaves to forest fires – after accounting for other factors, such as the El Nino effect. Hysteria may be justified, in other words. I would say it is, myself.

Why Violence is (supposedly) Necessary

Malm begins his book by describing the experience of protesting with the same joy as some of the writers in the Extinction Rebellion Handbook, but his comment that “we are still perfectly, immaculately peaceful” soon turns out to be ironic. Rather than boasting with the kind of smarmy superiority we may associate with climate activists, Malm is exasperated by this peacefulness. It is bizarre, he notes, that climate change has not prompted more action than just marches and strikes, given:

How much is at stake;
The multitude of available targets (Malm considers some consumers responsible enough to be targeted, such as SUV and yacht owners);
The ease of damaging these targets. (Even a pipeline is easy to damage, while cars can be disabled still more easily);
The awareness of the crisis and its structure is great. (Mostly we know who is to blame, what the problem is, and so on);
The enormity of the injustice. (Especially if you consider arguments about, for example, intergenerational injustice to be sufficiently watertight).

One reason for this peacefulness lies within the influence of nonviolence upon the major groups like Extinction Rebellion. Theoreticians, such as Bill McKibben (whom Malm singles out for criticism), combine their environmentalism with certain ideas coming from Buddhism that abhor violence in all forms. They also argue that any violence, even only against inanimate objects, would turn people away from the movement and thus make it less likely to succeed. Finally, they note that major popular movements succeeded using nonviolent methods, such as the fight to end Apartheid in South Africa, the end of slavery, the campaign to give women the vote in the UK, and the US civil rights movement.

Malm finds these arguments absurd. He notes that rarely were these struggles as peaceful as the environmentalists may suggest. The suffragettes were arsonists, with Pankhurst saying “to be militant in some form, or other, is a moral obligation”. Slavery in the United States was ended in part due to a Civil War, and there were slave uprisings, notably in Haiti, as well. As for Apartheid, sabotage was a key method employed by Nelson Mandela when it became clear that peaceful protest would be insufficient. Malm concludes, on the contrary, that violence – but not murder – is practically a necessity to achieve revolutionary goals. Whether it does this by forcing the ruling powers to submit directly to the saboteurs’ demands, or by legitimising a non-violent alternative (as was the case in Malm’s reading of the US Civil Rights movement, where Malcolm X’s violent radicalism legitimised MLK’s more peaceful approach in the eyes of the US government), destruction is necessary.

The practical benefit of attacking property is that it makes ruling more challenging for the incumbent powers. Even if they just have to invest in more security, it is still a cost. And when it becomes sufficiently great, the alternative will become attractive. As one protest group noted, “we are the investment risk”.

Other than this core of nonviolence in the movement’s philosophy, Malm also blames a lack of politicisation among the population, who may care but don’t care enough, and a decline in revolutionary attitudes in general. He also notes that in Europe at least, violence is considered the domain of the far right. For climate activists, who tend to be on the left, violence is thus tainted.

In any case, Malm concludes that people are unwilling to turn to violence, and this is a great weakness of the climate movement. Without a radical flank blowing things up, politicians can simply continue to ignore their voters, and the rich can continue to live outrageously wastefully. Malm’s source for this idea is Herbert Haines’s view of the “radical flank” required by each movement, where both moderates and radicals play their own roles. Without the moderates, the movement will be too radical to attract popular support and thus avoid a crackdown; without radicals, the popular support will be easy to dismiss. Malm is not asking the lawyers at Extinction Rebellion protests to don ski masks and blow things up, but he argues that the climate movement does need some people who will do this.

So, How to Actually Blow Up a Pipeline?

Having established the logical foundations for a radical flank that destroys property but not life, the second part of How to Blow Up a Pipeline concerns if not the details, then at least the realities of this kind of action. He quotes, amusingly enough, from the Pipeline and Gas Journal in 2005, which contained the comment that “Pipelines are very easily sabotaged. A simple explosive device can put a critical section of the pipeline out of operation for weeks.” This was in connection with the Allied occupation of Iraq. Malm notes that damage to energy infrastructure has been widespread throughout history, going back as far as the Luddites. More recently, there was Iraq, there were the MEND militants in the Niger Delta who at one point shut down a third of Nigeria’s oil production, and there have been militants in Yemen who attacked Saudi production using drones.

Due to the scale of the infrastructure, which often crosses entire countries or else occupies a great area (such as oil refineries), defending it is a challenge. In places like Siberia and Canada pipelines are often above the surface due to risks associated with the permafrost thawing, making them easier to access. Malm notes that especially in an age of drones we now have “asymmetric warfare”, with rebels using cheap handheld planes to potentially disable the pillars of the global energy system. Besides such infrastructure, Malm also advocates for the damaging of items associated with conspicuous energy consumption, such as unnecessary SUVs. This is easier for those based in urban areas. Malm himself was part of a group in Sweden called the Indians of the Concrete Jungle, which damaged SUVs for a period of a few years before petering out. Something similar is going on right now in Cornwall.

Although energy infrastructure has been damaged in the past, the reasons have rarely been related to climate, Malm notes. The Iraqis wanted an end to the occupation of their land, as the Palestinians did when they damaged British pipelines in the 1930s, while the MEND rebels in the Niger Delta were concerned about (among other things) pollution, rather than climate change. Malm only has one recent example of climate terrorism, and that was the spate of attacks upon the Dakota Access Pipeline carried out by two women, Jessica Reznicek and Ruby Montoya, with blowtorches and other tools in 2016-17. The two women turned themselves in to gain publicity and to inspire others, though so far they seemed to have surrendered in vain.

Some Minor Criticisms

In general, Malm’s proposal about the need for a radical flank makes sense to me, though I have no interest in blowing anything up and cannot say that I would support such action in practice. This is in part because there are a few reservations at my end that Malm does not address adequately. These are energy-related, rather than based on critical theory. However, there appear some seemingly decent criticisms from that angle on Goodreads for those interested in such an angle.

Firstly, it’s worth mentioning that pipelines are relatively poor targets for energy terrorism. When they are taken out of action or their building is stopped, the alternatives are generally worse for the environment and climate. For example, when the Indian reservation that the planned Yellowstone Pipeline was going to run through declared its refusal to the project, the pipeline was replaced by rail transportation through their land instead. What may have seemed a victory at the time to the Indians, is more of a defeat when we consider that on a per-mile basis, pipelines are the safest way of transporting oil and gas, both for the environment in terms of leaks and associated emissions, and for human health. Instead, it makes more sense for activists to damage production facilities, where their actions would directly prevent oil and gas from leaving the ground.

It’s also worth being discerning about which facilities to attack. I cannot agree with a view that says we must get our emissions down to net zero within an extremely tight timeline (2050 is hard but fine, while 2030 is unreasonable), because I find within a utilitarian framework this of dubious value. I would much prefer, then, that activists prioritise those emissions sources that are essentially unnecessary or particularly harmful, rather than all of them. In practice, this would be new oil and gas production facilities, and those which are particularly poor for the environment, such as Canadian oil sands, deepwater rigs, or gas from hydraulic fracking. Saudi and Norwegian oil, by contrast, has a very low carbon footprint (for different reasons in each case, however), and should avoid damage. One cannot forcefully nudge players to improve quickly if one appears to be attacking all players indiscriminately. A certain amount of discretion also undermines the charge that activists are asking for too much. Malm does want to achieve brilliant goals, but the radical flank should not seem so radical that the moderates can no longer agree with it from a distance. If that becomes the case, then the movement risks collapse.

Malm also shares with other activists the relatively niche view among the wider population that poorer countries should not be allowed to build new fossil fuel facilities to spur their economic growth. I do not know enough to make an argument on this, but there are some obvious flaws in Malm’s own view. He writes that “what they need is not emissions but energy”, which is certainly true. However, he makes the mistake of repeating that renewables are cheaper than fossil fuels as if this were true in these cases, when it is much more true for developed countries.

For cash-strapped developing countries, renewables are regularly more expensive and, for other reasons besides, less desirable than fossil infrastructure. The price difference is partly because country risk increases financing costs, partly also because many countries have local content requirements that drive up the costs of individual components. Investments in renewables also produce fewer jobs their fossil fuel alternatives, and intermittency of generation is a problem for countries that may not have sufficient backup generation to account for this, which in reality further drives up costs above what we call the “levelised cost of electricity”. The point, put simply, is that there are good reasons for developing countries to continue to build fossil fuel infrastructure instead of renewables. We may not like those reasons, but they are certainly real.

My purpose with these criticisms is to add a certain amount of nuance to Malm’s argument in How to Blow Up a Pipeline, which on the whole I find reasonable enough. I am not going to any protests, nor am I going to blow up any pipelines. But I consider the current pace of change to be insufficiently fast, and Malm’s argument about the need for some radical violent flank may be one way of resolving the problem, though who knows whether it is the best way. Certainly, it seems a more serious proposal for reducing climate-related damages than that put forward in another climate book I read this year, Assaad Razzouk’s Saving the Climate Without the Bullshit, whose ultimate argument seemed to be that we should just regulate things better.

In general, I remain pessimistic about humanity’s chances of improving the situation before too much damage is done. Humans are very ingenious, but here are demonstrating themselves slow to react, slow to fear. What is frustrating, as someone interested in the area of climate and energy, is that we do, pretty much, have all the solutions we need already. (Bill Gates’s book, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster is a good layperson’s introduction to some of the technologies we have and the variety of challenges they face). We just do not have the will, nor yet the market incentives to implement these solutions.

Activists, bringing climate to the forefront of the popular consciousness, do a good thing by increasing the pressure on governments. But clearly the threat of damages, of pipeline explosions and burning production facilities, would have a still greater impact. And so, once their more extreme demands are moderated, I find it hard to suggest that the climate movement is not asking for the right things.

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.