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The Representation of Perpetrators in the Work of Martin Amis

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The Representation of Perpetrators in the Work of Martin Amis Faculteit Letteren & Wijsbegeerte Tinneke Everaert The Representation of Perpetrators in the Work of Martin Amis A Comparative Analysis Masterproef voorgelegd tot het behalen van de graad van Master in de taal- en letterkunde Frans - Engels 2014 Promotor Prof. dr. Stef Craps Vakgroep Letterkunde Acknowledgements In 2007, I was offered the opportunity to visit Auschwitz in the company of Holocaust survivors, some of whom have passed away since then. It was a disconcerting experience in many ways. Confronted with the personal trauma of the survivors (“my grandmother was gassed here”, “my grandfather was executed against this very wall”), I was at a loss on how to react. I also felt unable to grasp the magnitude of the killing at the camps. After a while, the constant exposure to horror in testimonies, films and photographs had a numbing effect. At the same time, there were also moments of laughter and fun, which breached the atmosphere of gravity that I felt was appropriate in such circumstances. When the study visit was over, I went home with a lot more questions than I arrived with, and with an overwhelming sense that somehow, I had failed to assimilate the experience that the survivors wanted to pass on. Although the study visit to Auschwitz unsettled me in many ways, I have always felt that I needed to do something with it. I am thankful that I was able to write my master’s dissertation on a subject that has great personal significance for me. Most of all, I would like to thank my supervisor Stef Craps for directing my interest towards the relatively new territory of perpetrator representations. Whereas I was closely confronted with the trauma of survivors, I think the study of perpetrators is equally necessary to achieve a comprehensive understanding of traumatic events and trauma, without doing injustice to the victims’ suffering. I am also grateful to Stef Craps for his guidance in my writing process. I would like to give special thanks to Maggie Wilkinson for proofreading my thesis and keeping me optimistic. I also owe thanks to my parents for being my empathic listeners, for reading my drafts and for putting on the pressure when I was slacking off. I am grateful too to Lukas, for being there and keeping me sane. Finally I would like to thank the Auschwitz Foundation, for planting a seed in my mind that bloomed in unexpected ways. iii Table of Contents Introduction ........................................................................................................................................... 1 Chapter 1 Towards a Theoretical Framework ................................................................................ 5 1.1 Trauma theory ..................................................................................................................................... 5 1.2 Trauma and Literature ..................................................................................................................... 10 1.3 Representing the Perpetrator ......................................................................................................... 16 Chapter 2 Perpetrators in the Work of Martin Amis ................................................................... 25 2.1 Narrative Strategies .......................................................................................................................... 25 2.1.1 Time’s Arrow: Backward Narration and Doubling ........................................................... 25 2.1.2 House of Meetings: Testimony to and Implied Reader ..................................................... 30 2.1.3 “The Last Days of Muhammad Atta”: a Terrorist as the Centre of Consciousness ...................................................................................................................... 33 2.1.4 Koba the Dread: a Memoir of Laughter and Death ........................................................... 35 2.2 Infiltrating the Perpetrator’s Mind? .............................................................................................. 37 2.3 The Nature of the Offence ................................................................................................................ 41 Conclusion ......................................................................................................................................... 45 Works Cited ......................................................................................................................................... 46 (23.624 words) v Introduction The twentieth century has often been dubbed ‘the century of violence’. This term, although maybe not historically accurate, hints at the uneasiness people still feel about the horrors that took place during this period. After two World Wars, genocides and conflicts throughout the world, the need has risen for a new framework to understand the world we live in and to redefine the concept of humanity. The need for a framework was felt keenly when survivors from the Holocaust returned and stories, photos and video material of the genocide started circulating. The unimaginable atrocity of Auschwitz and the other death camps seemed to transcend the human capacity of understanding. Despite the Holocaust being extensively documented, language as well as visual mediums fall short as a means to convey and to comprehend the Nazi killing machine. The Nuremberg Trials, which took place from 1945 onwards, were a first step towards a new framework. The Nuremberg principles, drafted in preparation of the trials, provided a preliminary legal definition of ‘war crimes’ and ‘crimes against humanity’. Although legally, the success of the trials is disputed, they have had an important impact on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Genocide Convention, both adopted by United Nations in 1948. However, the need for a new framework was not limited to legal definitions. It affected all levels of society: historiography, sociology, psychology et cetera. Auschwitz caused a caesura in philosophy as well, urging modern philosophers to rethink concepts such as ‘evil’. Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil is a well-known example of a theory inspired by the direct consequences of the Holocaust (i.e. Eichmann’s trial in Jerusalem). On a cultural level questions concerning the propriety of representing the Holocaust caused many polemics. However, Theodor Adorno’s famous declaration that writing poetry after Auschwitz would be barbaric, did not prevent Holocaust literature from becoming a thriving genre. Less visible in the western hemisphere, Stalin and his murderous politics were responsible for another great tragedy of the twentieth century: the death of twenty million people. Although there is a strong continuity of Stalinism in modern-day Russia, the Gulag is nevertheless a scar in the history of the twentieth century. Like the Holocaust, it generated its own form of camp literature and testimony. Ten years after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the twenty-first century was inaugurated with the terrorist attack of September 11, which in turn then became the starting point of many other geopolitical conflicts. As soon as the initial shock of the attack wore off, narratives about terrorism began to appear, not only giving expression to the trauma suffered by America, but also speculating on the wider impact of the attack. Sadly, the Holocaust, the Gulag and 9/11 are far from being the only cultural traumas of the twentieth and twenty-first century. They are, however, the most discussed and best-documented. Additionally, those three traumas take a special place in Martin Amis work. 1 Martin Amis does not shy away from controversy. One look at his oeuvre and his quite remarkable lifestyle confirms that much. While Amis’ early work was mostly satirical, and relatively close to home in topic, he took a turn for the serious in the late 1980s. Amis then started to tackle bigger issues, such as the threat of nuclear warfare in Einstein’s Monsters and London Fields, or the Holocaust in Time’s Arrow, while at the same time maintaining his satirical pen. After a difficult period, in which Amis was not only slaughtered by the press, but also faced with multiple personal tragedies (such as his father’s death and the divorce from his first wife), he surprised his readers with Experience: A Memoir, in which he abandons his satirical style for candid, autobiographically inspired introspection. He follows this new trend in Koba the Dread: Laughter of the Twenty Million, although this time, the book is also part historiographical. After dedicating a novel to the Holocaust, Amis devoted his second memoir to the evil of Lenin and more importantly, Stalin, while voicing strong criticism about the indulgent attitude of western intellectuals towards the excesses of Communism. Most notably, the then political beliefs of Amis’ father Kingsley and his friend Christopher Hitchens are attacked. Amis further pursued the issue of Stalinism in House of Meetings. For this novel he used the research done for Koba the Dread, but this time for a fictional representation of Stalin’s regime. Up until the publication of Koba the Dread, Amis’ political stance could best be described as left-of- centre, much more moderate than the beliefs of his Trotskyist friend Hitchens, but at the same time opposing his father’s switch to conservatism. However, after 9/11 Amis himself slid towards the right. And not just Amis, but former leftists Christopher Hitchens and Salman
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