Dr Jeremy Scott, from the Department of English Language & Linguistics, will be giving a talk at the University of Westminster, tomorrow, Thursday 11 February 2016, on Martin Amis’ 1991 novel, Time’s Arrow.
Jeremy’s talk, entitled ‘Orienting Time’s Arrow: Towards An ‘Ethical’ Narrative Discourse?’ explores the two intriguing conceits of narrative technique in the controversial book. Firstly: the protagonist of the novel, a former Nazi concentration camp doctor on the point of death, re-lives his life in reverse (quite literally, it ‘flashes before his eyes’). Everything in the novel flows backwards, then, from the direct speech at the outset to the movements of people and events. Secondly, the protagonist gives birth (at his own death) to a narrative alter ego, child-like in its naivety, which is handed the task of narrating the novel. This narrative alter ego has a definable character, however rudimentary, has little or no knowledge of human history and provides space for a significant moral dimension in its aversion to cruelty and suffering. In short, it is a tabula rasa upon which the implied author is able both to project and pass indirect judgment upon the subject matter of his novel.
The novel is ‘double-voiced’, then, in that the alter ego narrator appears to take the form of Verdorben’s untainted moral self, neutered at Auschwitz (the word verdorben means ‘tainted’), and ‘doubly-orientated’ in that while its underlying plot travels inexorably forwards in time, the narrative itself travels backwards. This paper will suggest that both this ‘double-voicing’ and ‘double-orientation’ allow Amis’s narrator on the one hand the luxury of an ethical evaluation of the events of Verdorben’s life and, on the other, and most intriguingly, to enact the poetic undoing or actual reversal of the act of the Holocaust itself. Is this, then, an example of an ethical narrative method?
The talk will take place at 6.30pm at Room 106, Wells Street Campus, University of Westminster, London W1T 3UW. Details of the campus are available here:
www.westminster.ac.uk/about-us/our-locations/maps-and-directions/wells-street