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.
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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)
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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.
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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 Rushdie as well. However, they have not become “men of the right” (Lloyd). Amis even claims that he did not change his views at all, but that he had “moved quite a distance to the right while staying in the same place” (Topping). They turned against the anti-American left which was “willing to push all else aside to give free way to a refurbished critique of imperialism” and endorsed instead Bush’s politics, which “at least promises to redefine national interests to include the halt of mass murder” (Lloyd). The Second Plane, Amis’ collection of journalism and two short stories on the attacks of 9/11, can be read in this light. Clearly, Amis is not afraid to address great cultural traumas. Neither is he afraid to take a controversial approach to those traumas. The four texts that are the focus of this paper, Time’s Arrow, Koba the Dread, House of Meetings, and “The Last Days of Muhammad Atta”, all explore cultural traumas from the perspective of a perpetrator, or with a strong emphasis on a perpetrator figure. Perpetrator representations are a relatively new territory in trauma literature, as well as in trauma studies. As yet, little research has been conducted on the subject and many questions remain unanswered. For example, there is the technical question of which narrative techniques can be used to represent a perpetrator without provoking identification. Additionally, there are the concerns whether such narratives should offer insight into a perpetrator’s mind, and whether they cloud the reader’s ability to tell right from wrong. Therefore, an analysis of these four perpetrator narratives may shed a light on what the possibilities, and maybe the dangers, of such texts are. In this paper, I will address these question concerning perpetrator representations by means of a comparative analysis of Amis’ work. However, as the study of perpetrator representations is inextricably linked to trauma, I will begin by sketching the theoretical framework which will underlie my analysis. In the first chapter, I will give an overview of some of the key ideas in trauma theory. I will also briefly discuss the trauma literatures that have been generated by the Holocaust, the Gulag and 9/11. Finally, I will discuss the tentative scholarly work that has already been conducted on the representation of perpetrators.
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In the second chapter, I will analyse the representation of perpetrators in Time’s Arrow, House of Meetings, Koba the Dread and “The Last Days of Muhammad Atta”. First, I will discuss the various narrative techniques that Amis uses to approach the figure of the perpetrator for each novel separately. Then, I will compare the effects of those techniques. First, I will analyse to which extent the texts grant the reader insight into the perpetrator’s consciousness. Finally, I will consider whether the different texts provide us with a moral compass to guide our judgement of the perpetrator and his or her evil.
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Chapter 1 Towards a Theoretical Framework
1.1 Trauma theory
Biologically, humans are quite well equipped to handle most situations. We dispose of five senses that enable us to assess different situations and of a brain that processes that information and decides on the appropriate course of actions. Unlike most animals, we are not just driven by instinct, but we are capable of thought and more importantly, we are aware of the fact that we can think. However, most humans are at least once in their lives faced with a situation which surpasses the logic of our biological programming. Confronted with the loss of a loved one for example, some people are numbed for a time. Physically, the body can cope, but the mind blocks out all emotions out because they threaten to overwhelm the person. The numbness is a survival mechanism that enables a person to carry on as normal for a while, before succumbing to the actual experience of loss. Therefore, the grieving process, which often only starts after the funeral, is characterized by its belatedness. Similarly, people who have been in life-threatening situations, like soldiers, often only experience a reaction to the traumatic event afterwards, when the physical danger is over, but not yet processed by the mind. Soldiers who have been in combat and who have narrowly escaped death, often suffer from extreme anxiety afterwards, the illusion of relative safety destroyed by the realisation that every action may potentially lead to death. The anxiety to perform even the simplest task causes considerable difficulties when readapting to normal life. Thus, the person in question is kept prisoner by the past experience of violence, forced to relive it in nightmares and subjected to severe mental distress. People who have had their physical or sexual integrity threatened, such as rape victims, are likely to feel similarly bound to the traumatic experience that their minds seem unable to process. While the term trauma was originally used to indicate physical injuries, nowadays it usually refers to mental injury, “caused by emotional shock the memory of which remains repressed or unhealed” (“trauma”). Despite the fact that trauma, in the physical as well as in the mental sense, is as old as mankind, the academic study of trauma only emerged in the twentieth century. The Austrian psychiatrist Sigmund Freud and his colleague Josef Breuer were among the first to theorize the nature of trauma. In their Studies on Hysteria, Freud and Breuer discern two different kinds of situations in which the condition of hysteria is liable to develop. Firstly, there is the situation in which people did not react to trauma because “the nature of the trauma excluded a reaction”, for example a situation which one simply wished to forget, or the loss of a loved one (Breuer & Freud,
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10). In that case, the distressing idea is “intentionally repressed from consciousness”, in order to protect the mind from the conflict caused by this idea (10). In the other case, it is not the memory itself, but “the physical state in which the patient received the experiences”, for example in paralyzing fright, that causes the hysteria (11). The repressed idea however “takes its revenge […] by becoming pathogenic”: by causing symptoms of physical illness the repressed memory intrudes on the consciousness of the patient (116). Between the act of repressing and the appearance of hysterical symptoms, there is often an incubation period, during which the hysteria remains latent. The conversion of the repressed memory into physical symptoms can be triggered by a second event which recalls the original repressed memory or which puts it in a different light. For instance, in Freud’s Katharina case, a young girl was threatened by her uncle, without her being aware of the sexual nature of the threats. Consequently, her symptoms of sickness, which according to Freud symbolise disgust, only started when she was old enough to realise that her uncle had been about to rape her (129-131). In order to cure patients of their hysteria, Freud and Breuer used hypnosis to reintroduce the repressed idea into the consciousness of the patient, thus “allowing its strangulated affect to find a way out through speech” (17). In his later work however, Freud downplays the cure by hypnosis and refines the concept of repression: in his text “Remembering, Repeating and Working Through”, he describes that some patients, instead of remembering their repressed memory, unconsciously act it out as an experience in the present (36). Freud adds that “the greater the resistance, the more thoroughly remembering will be replaced by acting out (repetition)” (36). In order to be cured from the compulsion to repeat, the patient has to become aware of his or her resistance against the memory, and of the meaning of his or her acting out. By consciously acting out the repressed memory, one can start working through the resistance against it and finally reawaken the memory (40-41). Although in his previous work, Freud accepted that “the evolution of psychic processes is automatically regulated by the pleasure principle”, he finds it difficult to reconcile the idea of acting out with the ultimate search for gratification and happiness (Freud, “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” 45). Especially in cases of fright-induced “traumatic neurosis” in soldiers, whose dreams take them back to the war and give them “a renewed sense of fright” (50). Freud then states that those dreams “seek to assert control over the stimuli retrospectively by generating fear – the absence of which was the cause of the traumatic neurosis in the first place” (71). Freud then speculates on the existence of “death drives”, which operate independently of the pleasure principle. The death drives are “charged with the task of safe-guarding the organism’s own particular path to death”, which is paradoxically the ultimate fulfilment of life (79). Freud concludes his speculations with the following ambiguous observation:
The pleasure principle seems to be positively subservient to the death drives; but it does also watch for any stimuli from without that are adjudged by both kinds of drives to be dangerous, and more particularly for any increases in stimulation emanating from within that make the task of living more difficult. (101-102)
Therefore, both the pleasure principle and the death drives can be seen at work in some cases of hysteria, especially in traumatic neuroses, even though Freud admits that he does not yet fully understand the exact relationship between the two. Although Freud’s work provides a solid groundwork for the modern trauma theories, it did not go unchallenged at the time of publication. The lack of critical acclaim was mostly due to the emphasis on sexuality, although the idea of death drives, self-destructive forces was not received
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with open arms either. It is no coincidence that modern trauma theories only started to emerge at the end of the twentieth century. Despite the fact that the symptoms of shell-shock and war neurosis in soldiers of the First World War did not go completely unnoticed, they did not engender thorough research into the causes. However, the twentieth century - “our worst century yet” – has witnessed an extraordinary amount of violence and bloodshed (Amis, Koba the Dread 5). Although the Holocaust is far from being the only atrocity to taint the twentieth century, it has been a landmark in the evolution of trauma theory. The sheer dimensions of death and destruction had unprecedented consequences. It made the aftereffects of trauma visible on a very large scale, not only in the survivors, but also in their offspring. Still, the reason for the renewed interest in trauma does not only lie in the greater visibility of its symptoms: the most important issue raised by modern trauma studies is that of memory. As Richard Crownshaw remarks in his preface to The Afterlife of Holocaust Memory in Contemporary Literature and Culture, the generation that has actually witnessed and survived the Holocaust is dying out, leaving the next generation to “piece together and articulate memories, not its own, of atrocities witnessed but often unremembered by the preceding generation” (vi). This process is what Marianne Hirsch has termed “postmemory” (106). Dori Laub adds that the Holocaust, in its “radical otherness to all known frames of reference […] was beyond the limits of human ability (and willingness) to grasp, to transmit, or to imagine” (“Truth and Testimony” 68). It is only at a much later date, after almost half a century, that “the event begins to be historically grasped and seen” (69). Therefore, modern trauma theories are not only based on the pathology of trauma, as in Freud’s work, but also on the transmission of the traumatic memories to future generations and how they are received by them. Cathy Caruth is considered as one of the first scholars to bring trauma back into focus, her work largely informed by Freud. In her introductions to Trauma: Explorations in Memory, she observes that the pathology of trauma does not lie in the event itself, but “solely in the structure of its experience or reception: the event is not assimilated or experienced fully at the moment [it occurs], but only belatedly, in the repeated possession of the one who experiences it” (4). The memory of trauma is not readily accessible and only intrudes against the will of the victim in the form of flashbacks, nightmares or compulsive behaviour. The idea of the victim being forced to relive the traumatizing event clearly recalls Freud’s concept of “death drives”. Because of its inaccessible nature, the memory is conserved in all its literality (5). It is then the “truth of traumatic experience that forms the centre of its pathology or symptoms” (5). Thus, traumatic experiences are characterized by the victim’s “inability fully to witness the event as it occurs, or the ability to witness the event fully only at the cost of witnessing oneself” (7). As traumatic experiences are inherently unknowable, since the witnessing of the event goes at the cost of understanding, they challenge us “to a new kind of listening, the witnessing, precisely, of impossibility” (Caruth 10). Contrary to Freud, whose psychoanalytic cure was meant to help the patient forget the traumatizing event, Caruth points out the importance of testimony and the need of a “therapeutic listener” (10). As she writes, “to listen to trauma […] is not only to listen for the event, but to hear in the testimony the survivor’s departure from it" (10). While the integration of the traumatic memory seems necessary, “both for the sake of testimony and for the sake of cure”, its transformation into a narrative memory also allows “the story to be verbalized and communicated”, at the risk of losing its essential truth (153). This paradoxical need to speak, at the risk of losing the essential truth of the memory, combined with the impossibility of telling, lies at the core of Dori Laub’s work on Holocaust trauma. As a Holocaust victim and a psychiatrist, Laub has used his experience on both sides of the fence to write
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extensively on testimony, playing an important role in the creation of archives for testimonies of Holocaust survivors. Like Cathy Caruth, Laub stresses the “imperative need to tell and thus come to know one’s story, unimpeded by the ghosts from the past against which one has to protect oneself”, but he concedes that “silence about the truth commonly prevails” (“Truth and Testimony” 63-64). Silence however, distorts what the events have become for the survivor, to the point of making them doubt the reality of them (64). This results in the “collapse of witnessing”, where survivors are unable to be “an authentic witness” to themselves (65). A second point in Laub’s reasoning is that the Holocaust was essentially “an event without a witness” (65). On the one hand, during the historical event of the Holocaust, there was very little response from the outsiders, the non-victims (65-66). On the other hand, for the actual victims, it was almost impossible to achieve enough mental independence from the “coercively totalitarian and dehumanizing frame of reference” to bear witness to themselves (66). As the survivors themselves could not be witnesses to the historical event, “the listener becomes a witness before the narrator does” (69). Despite their valuable insights in trauma, Caruth’s and Laub’s work has not gone unchallenged. Especially Caruth has been criticised for her too general diagnosis of trauma. If trauma becomes universal and abstract, to the extent that one can be traumatized by a text, or by the language of trauma, everyone potentially becomes a victim (Leys 297). Historian Dominick LaCapra therefore advocates
a differential, careful approach to the study of trauma and the post-traumatic […]that does not become merely psychologizing, consumingly theoretical, oblivious to larger social and political problems, subservient to the quest for heritage or narrowly self-serving forms of identity politics, or the object of a fixation whereby history is simply identified with trauma and one tends indiscriminately to see trauma everywhere. (LaCapra 112)
This would require a more careful distinction between the traumatizing event, the actual experience of trauma, memory and representation, contrary to Caruth, who uses the terms “event” and “experience” interchangeably (112). These distinctions are meant to avoid conflation of the historical event with what LaCapra terms “transhistorical trauma” (116). Transhistorical or structural trauma could be described as a universalised kind of trauma, “a structural absence as opposed to a historical loss” even though it finds its origin in an historical event (Crownshaw, Afterlife of Holocaust Memory 9). LaCapra speculates that “a misrecognition” of the transhistorical dimension of trauma might explain the phenomenon of “wannabe or imaginary survivors”, who did not actually live through the trauma, but who experience as a loss an absence that is related to transhistorical trauma (LaCapra 116). These so-called “wannabe survivors” are victims of secondary traumatization. It is possible to experience symptoms of trauma, without having lived through the traumatic event. In that case the experience may either be vicarious or virtual (LaCapra 125). In the first case one identifies in such a way with the victim (or the perpetrator) that the lines between one’s own and the victim’s identity collapse (125). Obviously, this is not a desirable reaction in a secondary confrontation with trauma. In the virtual experience, the boundaries between the self and the other remain intact. One may “imaginatively put oneself in the victim’s place”, but without appropriating the victim’s voice or suffering (125, 135). The response to trauma that LaCapra considers appropriate is that of “empathic unsettlement”, which involves a virtual experience (135). Empathic unsettlement “aim[s] for a form of historical understanding that recognises rather than disavow[s] the possibility of one’s affective relation with the past and its actors” (Crownshaw, Afterlife of Holocaust Memory 39). The empathic
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unsettlement can take many forms, and should “differ with respect to victims, perpetrators and the multiple ambiguous figures in Primo Levi’s grey zone” (LaCapra 136). A second point of criticism towards Caruth’s theory concerns the process of working-through. While Caruth pleads for the integration of the trauma, LaCapra is slightly more reserved. He describes working-through as “work on posttraumatic symptoms in order to mitigate the effects of trauma by generating counterforces to compulsive repetition (or acting-out)” (119). It is , in other words, a symptomatic treatment, rather than a cure. LaCapra also states that working-through is neither a sublimation, nor a betrayal of the trauma (122). On the contrary, working-through “counteracts the tendency to sacralise trauma” (123). Crownshaw summarizes: “if trauma is rendered sacred or sublime and completely un-masterable, then it is deemed utterly contagious and transferable without mediation or limits” (Afterlife of Holocaust Memory 38). In short, LaCapra’s most important contribution is that he “reinstalls a sense of the remembering self and of objectivity” in trauma theory (Crownshaw, Afterlife of Holocaust Memory 38, 40).
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1.2 Trauma and Literature
Even though academic trauma theories only emerged in the twentieth century, trauma and traumatic events have been a recurring theme in western literature long before any theoretical frameworks existed. Even the Illiad, the very origin of western literary history, recounts the tragedy of a ten-year war, with harrowing losses on both sides. A closer look at literary history reveals trauma to be a very common motive that can take many different forms. There are for example many instances of literature describing cultural traumas, such as the effect of war on a people as a whole, or on families, for instance in Tolstoy’s War and Peace and or in Homer’s Illiad. However, intimate and personal traumas, such as rape, appear frequently in literary productions too. The cruel myth of Philomela, which features in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, is a very poignant example of trauma in classical literature. Nonetheless, it would be wrong to apply the findings of trauma studies to any text featuring a traumatic event. As intimated before, trauma studies are based on the interaction between various fields of research. While trauma theories find their origin in psychiatry and psychology, the phenomenon of trauma has produced interesting research in sociology, philosophy, history, and naturally in literature too. The connection between trauma and literature is a very fruitful one. On the one hand, the renewed interest in trauma is partly due to the emergence of a Holocaust-related literature, consisting of testimonies of survivors and their children, but also of fictional accounts written by people who did not live through the trauma. On the other hand, the findings and progress of trauma studies have influenced trauma-related literary productions, to the point where we can speak of trauma literature. In what follows, I will further explore the connection between literature and trauma in the literary productions generated by the cultural traumas of the Holocaust, the Gulag and 9/11, which Martin Amis has chosen to explore in his work. Despite Adorno’s claim that poetry after Auschwitz would be barbaric, literature has provided a vehicle for testimony as well as the representation of the Holocaust in fiction and non-fiction. In that respect, LaCapra makes a valid observation: in their attempt to represent the experience of trauma, or a traumatic event, testimony, fiction and history may share certain features, but one should keep in mind that they make very different truth claims. Testimony makes truth claims about the experience of an event, while history makes truth claims about the event itself, its interpretation and explanation (LaCapra 131). Fiction then,
if it makes historical truth claims at all, does so in a more indirect but still possibly informative, thought-provoking, at times disconcerting manner with respect to the understanding or “reading” of events, experience, and memory. (132)
These distinctions should be kept firmly in mind when confronted with the different forms that trauma literature can take. The literature engendered by the Holocaust can roughly be divided into the three categories. Firstly, the survivors of the historical trauma generally adopt the narrative mode of testimony, if they speak out at all. As said before, narratives often play an instrumental role in the process of working-through. Susan Brison argues that “trauma undoes the self by breaking the ongoing
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narrative, severing the connections among remembered past, lived present and anticipated future” (41). By creating a narrative that brings together the shards of memory, knowledge and emotions, as well as the bodily reaction to the traumatic event, a trauma victim starts to piece his shattered self together again (Brison 48). However, as Caruth indicated, the act of testifying goes hand in hand with departure from the trauma (10). Therefore, testifying can be a liberating and a very painful experience at the same time. Testimony can be seen as non-fiction, and as LaCapra indicated, claiming truth about the traumatic experience and only to a lesser extent about the event. Primo Levi’s If This Is a Man? and The Truce are well-known examples of testimony. Secondly, the generations following the survivors are liable to adopt the trauma of their parents or grandparents (Hirsch 106). Sometimes, secondary traumatization occurs through contact with stories, photos, diaries, but often children of survivors are themselves traumatized by living in a dysfunctional family. Maus by Art Spiegelman shows the struggle of a second-generation survivor with on the one hand his own trauma – his mother’s suicide – and on the other hand his parents’ traumatic past in Auschwitz. Spiegelman’s father is portrayed as a selfish and grumpy man, with a harsh and hardly compassionate attitude towards his son. Second-generation survivors can also adopt the mode of testimony, as Spiegelman has done. What makes his testimony special, is the fact that it does not only portray his own experience, but that it also testifies of his father testifying. The comic book illustrates Spiegelman’s efforts to almost extract the testimony from his father, although his own search for the truth about his mother proves impossible as his father admits to having destroyed her diaries (and thus her voice). Maus is a typical second-generation narrative insofar that it shows the position of second-generation survivors suffering from the effects of their parents’ trauma, and the sometimes overwhelming shadow of the past on their own lives. However, the farther one is removed from the actual survivors, or witnesses of a trauma, the more difficult it becomes to grasp. When the generation that survived the traumatizing event is no more, their first-hand knowledge experiences are gone, and so is the truth that they carry within them. What remains is a feeling of absence, which originates in the loss suffered by those who experienced the traumatizing event. It is not surprising that texts written by second and third generation survivors are characterized by that absence and often represent a search for truth that just seems impossible, therefore denying closure to the text. Language fails to fill the void, as well as to provide expression for the trauma. The truth of the trauma being beyond words, authors typically rely heavily on intertextuality, for example using fairy tales or mythology to express that what cannot be expressed directly. In that respect, trauma literature has a strong affinity with postmodernism. Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything Is Illuminated illustrates the search for a truth that remains out of reach, layering the different levels of narration to confuse the reader and to make it impossible to discover the truth. The novel also experiments with blank spaces and where there is a void of language and knowledge. Third-, as well as some second-generation narratives often resort to fiction, trying to express their experience of an adopted trauma, without making truth claims to the historical event or the experience of it. Thirdly, there is the literature produced by outsiders, people who have neither experienced the historical event, nor are directly connected to it. The existence of such literature is witness to the extent of the collective trauma. In this category, I use the term “literature” in the narrow sense, excluding scientific texts (historical, philosophical et cetera). I want to focus instead on the texts that do not make truth claims about the traumatizing event, but represent a traumatic event and the experience of a trauma in which the author was not involved. This can be seen as LaCapra’s “empathic unsettlement”. Texts written by outsiders often attempt to put oneself in the position of
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an agent in the trauma. The challenge of this kind of narrative is how far one can go in the identification without appropriating the voice of the victim (or perpetrator, depending on the case). In this category, most texts are fictional, though often based on real events, backed up by historical research. However, some texts are non-fictional, like Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem, which is a report on the Eichmann trial. In this case, the text can take the form of a biography, an essay, or a memoir for example. As I explained, the Holocaust functioned as a catalyst in the development of trauma studies. Consequently, many trauma theories are focus on the Holocaust as opposed to trauma in general. Additionally, there have been many efforts to bring the suffering caused by the Holocaust into the public eye. Shortly after the Second World War, many prominent figures of the Nazi military and bureaucracy were publicly tried at Nuremberg. Even more remarkable was the trial of Adolf Eichmann, whose “case was built on what the Jews had suffered, not on what [he] had done” (Arendt 6). On the victims’ side, there have been many efforts to testify and to make those testimonies accessible to the public, for example in the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies. Furthermore, the sites of former concentration and extermination camps have been turned into museums and memorials. Organisations such as the Belgian Auschwitz Foundation endeavour to keep the memory of the Holocaust alive, and to raise awareness among children and youngsters. Besides these efforts, the Holocaust has also generated a very extensive literature, dealing with all aspects of the trauma. Thus, the Holocaust has become a sort of benchmark to determine whether an event qualifies as a cultural trauma. Despite the fact that most of the ideas expounded in trauma studies can be applied to other traumas, one should take into account the specificity of the trauma in question. Jehanne Geith for example, claims that the experiences of Gulag survivors do not fit the Holocaust-based model of traumatic memory (161). In her opinion, the lack of recognition of the Gulag as a large, cultural trauma can be explained by a number of reasons. First of all, the fact that the Soviet Union was an Allied Force during the Second World War partly explains the reluctance to cast the nation into the same mould of evil as the Nazi perpetrators. On the other hand, Communism was considered as a threat to western democracies, and Geith states that there was an unwillingness to “understand our enemies as a people” (160). Lastly, the Gulag did not only last much longer than the Holocaust, but it was also never exposed by public trials or international dialogue as was the case with the Holocaust. It is indeed a fact that the suffering of Gulag victims, or even the atrocities committed under Stalin in general, are hardly known in the western world. The massive, organised famines in the Ukraine to force peasants into collectivisation, accompanied by the deportation of prosperous farmers; the torture applied to force confessions from innocent people in the paranoid frenzy to uncover a non-existent conspiracy against the state; the mass killings; the forced labour and starvation in the Gulag; those are all unpalatable facts that are glossed over in history lessons. As Geith notes, the cruelty of the Gulag was inherently different from that of the Holocaust: its destructiveness lay in “the horror not of intentionality, but of indifference” (163). This indifference was very general: people literally disappeared into the Gulag. The considerable differences in the various estimates of the Gulag death toll (ranging from 4 to 20 million) underscore “the vast impersonal, mass inhumanity, and collective indifference of the Gulag to human life” (Geith 163). Still, the Gulag camps were envisioned as forced labour camps, not as a part of a Final Solution. Therefore, if people survived the harsh conditions of the camps, they were released after their time was served. However, after serving time in a Gulag camp, one was never really free. As an ex- convict, one was banned from many jobs, as well as restricted in one’s place of residence (which was
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sometimes assigned by the government). Additionally, there was the threat of severe punishment if one ever spoke about the time in the Gulag (Geith 161). Moreover, the external imperative not to speak was often internalized: speaking out more or less equalled social suicide in the suspicious climate of the Soviet Union (Geith 164). This is where the trauma of the Gulag diverges from the Holocaust. Geith points out that most canonized trauma theories simply do not envision a society where testimony was unavailable (165, 171). As the trauma of the Gulag is inherently different from the Holocaust trauma, many Gulag survivors “remember in ways that do not involve repetition compulsion, flashback or direct narration” (Geith 166). Instead, they find creative, but generally non-narrative ways to remember “that involve caring in some daily way for the very things that they associate with the original hurt” (166). Geith, who has interviewed many Gulag survivors, cites two significant examples. First, she writes about an ex-prisoner who named his dog Jozef Stalin, thus symbolically gaining control over the person who was responsible for his suffering. In time however, he began to care deeply for the dog, thus easing the hurt. Another example is that of a woman whose mother was (probably) shot during the German occupation of Kiev. Later, she herself was imprisoned on suspicion of being a German spy, just for having survived the occupation. When released from the Gulag, she was unable to speak about her experience, but she was determined to have a daughter to name after her mother (for which she had to marry a man with the same name as her father). The joy she experienced in her children and grandchildren, enabled her to forgive the Germans and to see them as people, rather than as the enemy, thus finding a fragile peace over the loss of her mother (Geith 166-172). Despite the fact that non-narrative ways to work through the trauma of the Gulag seem very common, there is also a considerable body of testimony literature. Leona Toker makes an important observation:
“From the very beginning, narratives that dealt with political imprisonment in Soviet Russia bifurcated into predominantly factographic materials in émigré publications and the predominantly fictional ones in official Soviet literature” (28-29).
Almost all testimonies of Gulag survivors were published abroad, and many of the authors defected after their release from the camps. The majority of those testimonies take the form of memoirs, stepping into a longstanding Russian literary tradition (Gullotta 75). However, most Gulag memoirists choose to limit their memoirs to the time spent in captivity, summarizing the rest of their lives in a few sentences. Gullotta associates this choice with the need to expel the traumatic experience from their normal life (82). The testimony does not only serve to heal from the trauma, but also to provide a “counter-discourse” against the ideological history of the Soviet Union (Gullotta 82). Some well-known examples of published testimonies are Varlam Shalamov’s Kolyma Tales, or Yevgenia Ginzburg’s Journey into the Whirlwind. Alexandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago is probably the most famous work written by a Gulag survivor. Based on his own experiences, as well as research and eye-witnesses’ accounts, it is an attempt to encompass the history of the Gulag. Almost all works dealing with Gulag imprisonment were published years after their composition, and only appeared in Russia shortly before or after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. While the Nazi concentration camps and the Gulag were in operation for years, as a part of an impenetrable bureaucracy, the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 came out of the blue, one shocking day leaving a body count of 3000 people and billions worth of destruction in its wake. Reminiscent of his earlier description of the Holocaust as an event without a witness, Dori Laub labels 9/11 “an event without a voice” (“September 11” 204). He affirms that, despite the
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disproportionate scale, the Holocaust and 9/11 share an unimaginable quality (207). Another similarity is the absence of narrative after the trauma: “No one can really tell the story of the Twin Tower disaster, and no one is really ready to hear it” (208). Laub identifies a “cognitive paralysis” in the face of the events, the “multitude of diverse voices, public and private” a testimony to the absence of a “coherent narrative voice for the event itself” (209, 211). Despite these similarities with the Holocaust, and other traumas, 9/11 was unlike any other trauma for several reasons. First of all, video images of the planes crashing into the twin towers were broadcast while it happened. These images continued to be played and replayed for days on end, etching themselves into collective memory. Susannah Radstone remarks that these images and events “[did] not impact on a tabula rasa” (119). She claims that the images of destruction vividly recalled certain scenes seen in movies, such as Die Hard (119). Therefore, 9/11 was in a certain, fantastical, way anticipated, with the difference that Hollywood generally provides a happy ending (120). Radstone then speculates that the traumatic impact of an event is not necessarily linked to its complete unexpectedness, but rather to the “puncturing of a fantasy that has previously sustained a sense of identity” (120). This is a view that is closely related to Jean Baudrillard’s. Baudrillard claims that the event of 9/11 is in fact a realisation of a secret, even unconscious desire to see a global superpower destroy itself, “to commit a beautiful suicide” (404). For him, the many catastrophe and apocalypse films attest to this desire (405). Terrorism is the very world resisting against globalization: it is made possible by the culture against which it reacts, like a force of nature. Baudrillard argues that terrorism is inherently immoral, and therefore, in order to understand 9/11 we have to look beyond the Manichean dichotomy between Good and Evil (407). The enormous impact of the terrorist attack of 9/11 can be explained, on the one hand by the fact that the terrorists used “the very weapons of the system itself” (410). They have appropriated the commodities (money, computer and aeronautic technologies) of the society they want to destroy, and used the “daily banality of the American way of life” as a cover, thus throwing “a cloak of suspicion on any individual” (409-410). On the other hand, the terrorists have also used their own death as a weapon, and not just a sacrifice: the will to die is a weapon against a society which preserves life at all costs (408-410) In the tangled confusion after the events, novelists were called upon to provide an account of what happened, in order to counteract the lack of a meaningful narrative. Thus, a “Literature of Terror” with its own “politics and poetics of representation” began to emerge (Randall 2). Kristiaan Versluys distinguishes four kinds of novels in the growing body of 9/11 fiction. First, there is the recuperation novel, “used shamelessly for ideological and propaganda purposes” and without real literary merit (Versluys 68). Secondly, there are witness accounts, in which category Art Spiegelman’s In the Shadow of No Towers is one of the major works. The comic book illustrates Spiegelman’s own experience of the fateful day, but it also contains his contemplations on the larger impact of 9/11. In other words, “9/11 is imagined as a total event” as it unsettles the protagonist’s whole life (Versluys 69). The comic book is also closely linked with Maus, the narrator’s own trauma recalling his parents’ experiences as Holocaust survivors. A third category Versluys identifies, is that of the great New York novel. In these novels the city of New York is the place of action. The most acclaimed novel in this category is probably Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer. The novel describes the quest of Oskar Schell, a 9- year old boy who lost his father in one of the twin towers. He roams through the different boroughs of New York in the hope of finding answers. Finally, Versluys addresses the 9/11 novels written by outsiders, “authors whose link with September 11 is more tangential than tangible” (69). These
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novels show the ripple effect of the trauma on the rest of the world. However, while America’s War on Terror provoked strong anti-American sentiments in Europe, Versluys claims that the novels provide some sort of common ground, a solidarity based on shared values and tradition (70). Although not a novel, Martin Amis’ short story “The Last Days of Muhammad Atta” fits in this category.
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1.3 Representing the Perpetrator
As my brief discussion of trauma theory and trauma literature has shown, trauma tends to be approached from a victim-oriented perspective. Trauma theories are primarily concerned with the traumatic experience and the consequent suffering of victims. Perpetrators are often only obliquely mentioned, not as concrete human beings, but rather as abstract agents of evil. The possibility of perpetrator trauma is actively shunned by many scholars of cultural traumas, most notably by Claude Lanzmann, the director of Shoah (Gibbs 19). As Gibbs remarks, LaCapra is one of the few theorists to admit the possibility of perpetrator trauma (166). However, he struggles to apply his concept of empathic unsettlement, which he deems an appropriate response to testimonies and trauma narratives, to perpetrator trauma as well, since it may promote empathy towards the perpetrator, or even identification (Gibbs 166). Therefore, there seems to be an “implicit conviction that the only experience to which literature about the Holocaust can and should refer is that of the suffering of the victims” (McGlothlin 212). Nevertheless, there have been a number of works in recent historical fiction and cinema that engage with the challenge of portraying perpetrators. Richard Crownshaw suggests that this evolution has “raised the possibility, for the reader, of an empathic or at least an affective relation to the perpetrator” (“Perpetrator Fictions and Transcultural Memories” 75). In accordance with most trauma theories, many perpetrator fictions, as well as critiques about the representation of perpetrators, are focussed on the Holocaust. In my opinion, if one takes into account the historical background and the specificity of the different cultural traumas, most of the ideas voiced about representing Holocaust perpetrators can also be applied to the Gulag and September 11. Despite the emergence of perpetrator fictions and cinema, Erin McGlothlin identifies a reluctance to critically engage with representations of the perpetrator:
[L]ittle extensive analysis has been written addressing the questions of the advisability and possibility of depicting the … perpetrator, or, perhaps more important, how existing representations of perpetrators function. … In particular, in contrast to the literary treatment and critical analysis of the voice of the victims, which abounds in both autobiographical survival accounts and in fictional literature, the perspective of the perpetrators – in particular, the narrative perspective of the perpetrators, meaning their subjectivity, motivations, thoughts, and desires – has been all but ignored (212-213).
In short, the figure of the perpetrator is surrounded by taboo, in literature as well as in criticism. The general hesitancy to depict perpetrators is not hard to understand, especially regarding the Holocaust: while there is a considerable amount of victim testimony, perpetrators have barely spoken out about their actions and experiences. The testimony of Auschwitz camp commandant Rudolf Höss is one of the few exceptions. Additionally, the truth value of perpetrator testimonies can be called into question: can they be taken at face value, or are they coloured by an attempt at exonerating one’s actions? As Susan Suleiman notes, the lack of perpetrator testimony means that one has to rely on historians and philosophers to gain insight into the motivations and actions of perpetrators (1). Fictional representations of the perpetrator also rely on the imagination of the author. However, the “extended representation of a [perpetrator’s] subjectivity, necessarily requires
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a degree of empathy, on the part of both author and reader” (2). This puts both the author and the reader not only on “uncomfortable ethical ground”, but also on “uncomfortable aesthetical ground” (Suleiman 2). Thus, the portrayal of perpetrator figures involves a number of problems. Firstly, the representation itself of the perpetrator seems to imply a risk of “obscuring or de-emphasising victim perspectives and experience” (Adams & Vice 2). There appears to be a general conviction that the perpetrator has forfeited the right to acquire a voice, even in fiction. This might even be ethically justifiable because “the limitation on the perspective of the perpetrator then opens up space for the voice of the victims and endows them with a narrative agency stolen by the perpetrator” (McGlothlin 213). Secondly, the reluctance to portray perpetrators can be interpreted as a “refusal to legitimise or exonerate perpetrator viewpoints” (Adams & Vice 2). Some argue that “we should simply recognize [extraordinary human evil] for what it is and condemn it” (Waller 15). Consequently, the interest in the perpetrator figure is not without suspicion. Several critics, amongst whom the historian Saul Friedländer, are wary of any attention to the perpetrator figure that is not motivated by a desire for understanding, but by a morbid fascination with the spectacle of mass killings (qtd. in Adams & Vice 2). These objections are reminiscent of the fears formulated by Theodor Adorno and Elie Wiesel that the representation of the suffering of Holocaust victims would desecrate their experience (McGlothlin 210-211). Thirdly, James Waller pinpoints a fear that “an attempt to explain extraordinary human evil carries with it an inordinate risk of contamination” (17). In other words, the attempt to plunge into the consciousness of a perpetrator of inexplicable evil makes one susceptible to being tainted with the very evil that one tries to understand. This corresponds to a much criticised point in Cathy Caruth’s trauma theory. As I mentioned before, especially Dominick LaCapra and Ruth Leys have formulated objections to Caruth’s elastic use of the term ‘trauma’. They deem that if trauma is transferable via texts or images, without any mediation, it becomes contagious. However, the fear that a text potentially invites a vicarious experience is not limited to the category of victims. The perpetrator perspective too is feared to encourage vicariously living the perpetrator experience, thus somehow “reperpetrating” their crimes, as James Young has it (qtd. in McGlothlin 213). 1 Although these fears are certainly legitimate, the perpetrator cannot just be obscured, neither from trauma studies, nor from fiction. The perpetrator is as much part of history as the victims and in order to achieve a deeper understanding of past tragedies that might even help avert future traumas, we need an better understanding of the perpetrator too. The first step towards understanding perpetrators is “ripping off the masks that disguise [them] as monsters” (Waller 17). Because they were humans, like any of us, not necessarily particularly good, but neither predestined for evil. Therefore, if perpetrators are ascribed a mythical status of evil, they become one- dimensional and thus unavailable for understanding. In her account of the Eichmann trial, Hannah Arendt illustrates how Eichmann’s behaviour in court belied the image of the sadistic Nazi that he had come to inhabit in the minds of many. Instead, she describes him as the epitome of mediocrity. This is what Arendt calls the “fearsome, word-and-thought-defying banality of evil” (252). Or, as Waller writes, “perpetrators of extraordinary evil are extraordinary only by what they have done,
1 Young, James E. "Holocaust Documentary Fiction: The Novelist as Eyewitness." Writing and the Holocaust. Ed. Lang, Berel. New York: Holmes and Meier, 1988. 200-215. Print.
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not by who they are” (18). Indeed, the very ordinariness of the perpetrator makes their actions even more horrific. While the understanding of perpetrators depends on acknowledging them in a shared human sphere, this also entails a collapse between the binary opposition between the categories of victim and perpetrator. Instead, there emerges some kind of continuum, where the victim and the perpetrator are separated - or united - by what Primo Levi has named the ‘Grey Zone’:
It is a grey zone, poorly defined, where the two camps of masters and servants both diverge and converge. This grey zone possesses an incredibly complicated internal structure and contains within itself enough to confuse our need to judge (“The Drowned and the Saved” 42).
Levi introduced the grey zone with regard to the internal structure of Nazi and Soviet concentration camps. However, with regard to 9/11 the concept seems less fitting at first sight. One can hardly argue that the casualties of the terrorist attack were anything other than victims. Nevertheless, the attack itself was allegedly motivated by America’s less than innocent foreign policy, especially towards the Muslim world. Therefore, the terrorist attack of 9/11 did not only put the United States, undisputedly, in the position of the victim. Despite the initial discourse of “us and them” after the event, the attack also drew attention to America’s role as a perpetrator, or at least as an enabler of other perpetrators elsewhere in the world. The subsequent torture scandals in the Abu Ghraib prison and in Guantánamo Bay seemed to consolidate America’s position in the grey zone. While blurring the categories of victim and perpetrator is certainly disconcerting, it also enables us to think comprehensively about cultural traumas, without resorting to a simplified scheme of good and evil. As Primo Levi indicates, the blurring of clear-cut categories makes it harder to judge anyone who hovers somewhere in the grey zone (“The Drowned and the Saved” 42). Nevertheless, this does not mean that acts of evil should become any less reprehensible to us. Therefore, the fictional representation of a perpetrator as an ordinary human being, without sliding towards a more favourable view of his or her actions, raises a few questions:
Should such a protagonist be allowed the privilege of the narrative voice, given the almost automatic call to empathy that accompanies first-person narrative? On the other hand, how could one possibly adopt the voice of an “omniscient” narrator in exploring the behaviour and perceptions of such a protagonist? (Suleiman 2).
In other words, what are the boundaries of the perpetrator perspective? The various works that focus on the perpetrator explore those boundaries, each in their own way. Most texts that attempt to explore the perpetrator, do so while trying to keep a safe distance from his or her consciousness. The Reader by Bernhard Schlink for example, approaches Hanna, a former Auschwitz guard, via the consciousness of her lover Michael, who at first is ignorant of her past. The reader becomes aware of her crimes at the same time as the protagonist, namely when Michael attends a war trial where Hanna is tried and convicted for her participation in the Final Solution. However, it turns out that Hanna is illiterate, which puts her at a disadvantage in court. Michael feels that the illiteracy partly explains how Hanna became a guard in Auschwitz, where she then forced inmates to read for her. As McGlothlin writes, “the novel ricochets between two opposing forces – Hanna’s guilt and Michael’s ambivalent desire to exonerate her” (215). Since everything is focalized through the narrator-protagonist, Hanna never really receives a voice. She remains ambiguous and inaccessible. Even though the protagonist tries to develop a logical explanation for Hanna’s actions, which gives the reader a satisfying feeling of understanding, this is in fact “self-deceptive speculation” (McGlothlin 219). Hanna’s consciousness remains closed
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to us. Even though this text does not offer a real insight into the perpetrator’s mind, it is nonetheless significant. Through Michael and his crisis of identity for having unwittingly desired a Nazi perpetrator, the novel “vicariously [establishes] for the reader potential bonds of empathy” with Hanna (Crownshaw, Afterlife of Holocaust Memory 151). Thus, the reader is cast in the uneasy position between empathy and condemnation, in a sort of grey zone of his own. Daniel Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners offers a completely different representation of Nazi perpetrators. In this historiographical work, Goldhagen argues that a strong current of Anti- Semitism was able to convert ordinary people into ‘willing executioners’. However, his idea on how to understand the perpetrator comes uncomfortably close to identification rather than empathy:
Explaining the perpetrators’ actions demands, therefore, that the perpetrators’ phenomenological reality be taken seriously. We must attempt the difficult enterprise of imagining ourselves in their places, performing their deeds, acting as they did, viewing what they beheld (Goldhagen qtd. in Crownshaw, Afterlife of Holocaust Memory 134).2
In his representation of perpetrators, Goldhagen uses the active voice and an omniscient narrator. In his descriptions, he tries to imagine what went through the heads of the SS men while they, willingly or not, performed mass executions, “his imagination supported by his own refusal to believe in any vestiges of sympathy they might have had” for their victims (Crownshaw, Afterlife of Holocaust Memory 139). For Crownshaw, Goldhagen’s “ventriloquism” is problematic because it carries the risk of falling into speculation and “sensationalising portrayals” (138-139). However, LaCapra argues that it is in fact not the perpetrator that Goldhagen identifies with, but the victims:
Perpetrator history in Goldhagen becomes the putative history of perpetrators as seen through the eyes of victims … with whom Goldhagen identifies and whose experience of events he imaginatively or phantasmatically recounts (qtd. in Crownshaw 140).3
Even though the book seems to offer a humanized view of Nazi perpetrator, as opposed to the “abstractness of ‘functionalist’ and ‘intentionalist’ theories”, it fails to realise a real possibility of empathy, because ultimately, Goldhagen’s representation of the perpetrator passes via the victim’s gaze (Crownshaw 144). Where both Schlink and Goldhagen ultimately deny access to the perpetrator, Jonathan Littell offers a first-person narrative of an SS-officer. Addressed specifically to the reader, The Kindly Ones recounts the war experiences of the fictional Maximilien Aue, a highly placed SS-officer and an intellectual with a love of literature. As Susan Suleiman notes, The Kindly Ones is different from other perpetrator narratives because “we have never yet seen a comprehensive account of Nazi atrocities during World War II that is told entirely from the perspective, and the voice, of the perpetrator” (5). It is because Aue is a fictional character that he is able to offer a comprehensive account: he is exceptionally observant and seems to have been present in every place where the worst atrocities occurred. Additionally, he is so high up the ranks that he has access to classified information. At the same time, he is able to analyse the events with emotional detachment, while retaining some moral sensibility (Suleiman 5). Aue is hardly a realistic character – which is one of the most criticised elements of the book – but his account of the events is, apart from some minor details, historically
2 Goldhagen, Daniel J. Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust. New Haven: Yale UP, 1996. Print. 3 LaCapra, Dominick. Writing History, Writing Trauma. Baltimore: John Hopkins UP, 2001. Print.
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correct. Thus, Suleiman writes: “The combination of participant status as a perpetrator with historical reliability, and with what I call moral witnessing, which Aue possesses, is a new phenomenon in fiction” (5). However, as I mentioned, Littell was heavily criticized for his choice of a perpetrator-narrator who performed “ventriloquism of history books” or for endowing his protagonist, “a ‘hero’ without memory, with the force of History as a memory” at a time when the last real witnesses are disappearing (Lanzmann qtd. in Suleiman 8, and in Ungar 185).4 Suleiman on the other hand applauds the “disguised retrospection” in the narration (8). She claims that the narrator’s retrospective comments on his actions, though lacking in historical veracity, are extremely effective in fiction (9). They introduce a degree of “derealisation” in the text, which makes the reader more aware of the author’s manipulations (Suleiman 9). Liran Razinsky for example, states that the reader should be suspicious of Aue’s discourse: he is out to seduce the reader into falling into step with his ideas (147). Aue often uses Nazi rhetoric, “devious, making only partial use of the truth, tying together half-truths and complete lies, using racial thinking based on arbitrary distinctions”, even though the content of his speech may well be the opposite of Nazi policy (Razinsky 147). Therefore, the reader must be very aware of Aue’s rhetorical powers. One of the most problematic aspects of the novel lies in Aue’s insistence on “everyone’s similarity with regard to the potential or actual carrying out of violence” (Razinsky 151). The novel begins with an address to the reader: “Frères humains, laissez-moi vous raconter comment ça s’est passé” (Littell 13). This address, which echoes “La Ballade des Pendus” by François Villon, seems to coerce the reader to acknowledge the perpetrator in a shared human sphere, as well as to recognize the reader’s own “ethical implication in the narrative” (Adams 30-31). The insistence on the interchangeability of victims, perpetrators and bystander (and thus also the reader) can on the one hand be read as an attempted self-justification of his deeds, despite his claims of unrepentance (Adams 31). On the other hand, the breaking down of the categories of victim and perpetrator falls in line with Arendt’s theory on the banality of evil. However, the opinions differ on whether the novel actually confirms Arendt’s theory or not. Robert Eaglestone on the one hand claims that the “family strand” of the novel, where Aue is shown in an incestuous relationship with his sister, and as the murderer of his mother and stepfather, proves him to be a psychopath (21). In other words, if Aue was driven mad by “complex incestuous and oedipal rage”, we can assume him to be a psychopath, and his evil “as an expression of this pathology” (Eaglestone 21-22). However, Eaglestone also offers another explanation: if Aue was only able to commit matricide while in unconscious sleep, and because he was traumatised by his participation in the atrocities committed in the East, we can conclude that “the impact of the genocidal events on his particular mind drew out his implicit criminality” (22). The murder of his mother and stepfather proves for Eaglestone that Aue is not an ordinary person and that his evil is not ordinary evil (22). Liran Razinsky, on the other hand, argues that “the novel actually contains two stories about evil” (152). There is the “banality-evil explanation”, which fits Aue’s claims to similarity and the potential of evil in everyone (Razinsky 152). However, Razinsky states that Aue is also “a pervert, utterly immature and a tormented soul”, who seems to show a propensity towards evil (152). The tension between those two conceptions of evil is constantly at work in the novel,
4 Lanzmann, Claude. "Lanzmann Juge Les Bienveillantes." Le nouvel observateur (20-27 September 2006). 27.
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particularly in Aue’s relation with his twin sister. Despite their similarity, “he is tormented by the impossibility of transforming [his] body into a woman’s and his life into his sister’s’” (153). Suleiman then is bothered by the fact that the protagonist seems to remember literally everything about his wartime activities, while he does not remember the murder of his mother and her husband. She points out that this partial remembrance might impinge on his status as a moral witness (17). Nevertheless, she concedes that if Aue was able to function as he does, remembering his matricide, he would be “truly monstrous” (18). Therefore, the ability to block out the memory of killing his mother and stepfather ultimately makes Aue more human, while remaining a historical witness (Suleiman 18). Suleiman suggests, that one can read the novel as two separate stories, “the public history and the family tragedy”, that do not bear a causal connection (18). She does however, see a metaphorical connection concerning the question of guilt and responsibility (19). As the title suggests, Aue’s family history is inspired by Greek tragedy, notably the Oresteia, which recounts how Orestes is plagued by the Furies (or the Kindly Ones) because he committed matricide in order to avenge his father. Suleiman concludes that “perhaps the family plot is there to remind us that it is the action that defines the guilt in crimes against humanity, not the intention behind it” (19). In this discussion of some of the most controversial works to feature perpetrators, I have attempted to give an overview of how those authors have provided an answer to the question of how to represent perpetrators. As I have shown, the most obvious answer is to somehow avoid a direct insight into the perpetrator’s mind, as Schlink and Goldhagen have done. Littell on the other hand, has chosen to open the perpetrator’s mind for the reader, but as I have indicated this choice is seen as deeply problematic by many critics. However, he does manage to give a comprehensive view of history from a side that has hardly been seen before. The three examples that I have chosen to illustrate the possibilities of perpetrator representations all attempt to come to a better understanding of history and of evil. For James Waller, understanding perpetrators and evil needs an answer to the following questions:
What factors lead some of us to perpetrate extraordinary evil while others of us stand by indifferently or, occasionally, resist extraordinary evil? In other words, if we are all capable of extraordinary evil, why don’t we all perpetrate extraordinary evil when given the opportunity? How, exactly, do ordinary people come to commit extraordinary evil? (19).
Goldhagen’s book provides, of course, an answer to those questions. Whether those answers are satisfactory, is up to the reader. His theory of Anti-Semitism as an absolute catalyst for the atrocity of the Holocaust has certainly been widely criticised. Perpetrator fiction on the other hand, rarely provides, and even seems to avoid “an engagement with the question of ‘why’ (Eaglestone 15). Primo Levi seems to confirm the impossibility to answer ‘why’: “Hier ist kein warum”, he writes with regard to the inner logic of the camps (If This Is a Man 29). On the other hand, Eaglestone admits that “the desire for an answer to the question of ‘why’ clearly underlies perpetrator fiction” (15). However, he suggest that the “swerve” from this answer that many fictions perform, might in itself illustrate something about the nature of evil (15). Eaglestone therefore applauds Littell’s work for its complexity and almost overflow of information, because he maintains that when looking for evil, “we should not be looking for some core moment or essence … but in precisely the huge mass detail about the genocide, in the production of the day-to-day of the genocide” (23). In short, whatever difficulties Little’s first-person narration may present, it does also provide a unique insight into the perpetrator and the Holocaust, that is denied by Goldhagen and Schlink. As a final point in my overview of the research regarding representation of perpetrators, I would like to briefly discuss the political background surrounding perpetrator narratives. As Richard
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Crownshaw writes, “memory studies’ foundational observation that memories are always (re)constructed according to the desires, conscious or unconscious, that attend that moment” requires that we consider why precisely the perpetrator “figures in the cultural remembrance of the present moment” (“Perpetrator Fictions and Transcultural Memories” 75-76). While the desire for a fuller understanding of history is certainly one of the reasons, the particular choice to represent perpetrators is often politically inspired. For example, Kalí Tal notes that in the 1960s and1970s “comparisons were regularly made between American soldiers committing atrocities in Vietnam and German soldiers committing atrocities during the Nazi regime”, while in the meantime the Vietnam veteran has become an established icon in the “American heroic tradition” (qtd. in Gibbs 162).5 This shows how the perception of the U.S. soldier, alternatively as a perpetrator and a hero, has been influenced by America’s political environment, which, in the 1960s and 1970s, was coloured by strong protests against the Vietnam War. Similarly, Gibbs cites multiple examples of narratives written by Gulf War veterans, who sometimes make “dubious claims to victimhood, or employ rhetorical tropes to overturn the political realities underlying destructive American incursions into Afghanistan and Iraq” (168). The narratives discussed by Gibbs are all written after 9/11, as a reaction against America’s uneasy position in the grey zone. By representing the trauma borne by Gulf War veterans, they try to project a status of victimhood onto America (Gibbs 168). Therefore, it is important to distinguish perpetrator trauma from the trauma suffered by victims, and to bear in mind that while perpetrators can suffer trauma, their suffering does not absolve them of their guilt. Gibbs suggests that perpetrator trauma is less the result of a “single, shattering and overwhelming event” than an “insidious accretion of guilt coupled with disillusionment about the cause being fought for” (168- 169). Thus, perpetrator trauma would be caused by “guilt or shame over a series of acts of increasing intensity or depravity” (169). Richard Crownshaw then describes the recent turn towards slavery narratives, especially from the perspective of the slave master. He argues that by choosing to represent perpetrators of slavery, novelists draw attention to the American perpetrator (“Perpetrator Fictions and Transcultural Memory” 76). This does not only offer a counterbalance to the fictions that explore the terrorists of 9/11, but it also enables us to think about America as a producer of ‘bare life’ (87). Bare life, a concept introduced by the philosopher Giorgio Agamben, is what remains when a person is stripped of his or her subjectivity, and thus becomes socially and politically dead (Crownshaw, Afterlife of Holocaust Memory 13). Crownshaw argues that, in a way the “neo-slave narratives” might be considered to be cultural memories that “screen memories of recent subjection”, namely those of the torture scandals in Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo Bay, where American perpetrators reduced prisoners to bare life (“Perpetrator Fictions and Transcultural Memory” 87). Although we should remain aware that the memories of slavery function as a screen for recent events, “the concept of the screen attends to the ideological work of dislocating memory and allows a transhistorical, transcultural memory that relates different scenarios of bare life” (87). Finally, Raya Morag comments on a recent current in Israeli documentary cinema to depict perpetrator trauma. She states that this new current
5 Tal, Kalí. Worlds of Hurt: Reading the Literatures of Trauma. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996. Print.
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attests to the difficulty that Israeli documentary cinema encounters in breaching the repression and denial prevalent in Israel, which, despite undergoing myriad internal political and ideological ruptures during these years (1987-2006), maintains its self-image of a victimized Jewish society (97).
The struggle to accommodate the trauma of the Israeli perpetrator within the dominant framework of Israel’s founding trauma, the Holocaust, is especially poignant in Ari Folman’s Waltz with Bashir. As a “posttraumatic film”, Waltz with Bashir links Folman’s trauma as a second-generation Holocaust survivor to his trauma as a “complicit indirect perpetrator” in the First Lebanon War (99). Folman experiences mounting feelings of guilt, but does not remember anything about his actions during the genocide in Lebanon. However, it turns out that the “unconsciously assimilated memories of his parents imposed on Folman the role of the Nazi when he was a soldier” (99). Morag then states that
displacement of ambiguous guilt over his indirect complicity in the genocide in Lebanon to the unambiguous past of the Second World War, for which, of course, Folman cannot be blamed, permits his (indirect) refusal to acknowledge his role [as a perpetrator] (100).
Although the film addresses the issue of perpetrator trauma, its attitude towards the perpetrator is ambiguous. As Morag analysis reveals, the film does not take a clear ethical stance towards the historical trauma in Lebanon, and thus neither towards the “Israeli involvement in the Occupied Territories in the intifada era, during which this film was made” (99). Despite its failure to really address questions of responsibility and guilt, I think the film remains highly relevant in the light of current events in the Gaza Strip. In this chapter, I have endeavoured to provide the theoretical background that will underlie my analysis of the representation of perpetrators in the work of Martin Amis. In my discussion of the cornerstones of trauma theory, as well as the literary productions that have been generated by the cultural traumas which Martin represents in his work, I have attempted to offer a clearer view of the literary tradition in which Martin’s work should be interpreted. Although the representation of perpetrators is still subject to controversy, I have attempted to give an overview of the tentative scholarly work that has already been carried out on this topic. In my very brief survey of perpetrator representations in three much-discussed texts, The Reader, Hitler’s Willing Executioners and The Kindly Ones, I wanted to provide an example of the different stylistic possibilities of perpetrator narratives. This may serve as a preliminary guideline for my own analysis of Martin Amis’ perpetrators. Finally, I discussed the importance of a wider political context of perpetrator narratives, which may prove to be of significance in Amis’ work too.
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Chapter 2 Perpetrators in the Work of Martin Amis
2.1 Narrative Strategies
Amis’ apparent fascination with perpetrator figures has enabled him to explore the different possibilities of representation. In the previous chapter, I cited Susan Suleiman’s questions on whether the perpetrator figure ‘deserves’ to be a first-person narrator, and whether an omniscient narrator with insight in the perpetrator’s motivations would even be possible (2). However, Amis’ work demonstrates that those are not the only options available. While Time’s Arrow and House of Meetings do indeed have a perpetrator-protagonist as a narrator, the access to the perpetrator is in fact very mediated. Contrarily, “The Last Days” has a third-person narrator who is much more straightforward in his description of the perpetrator. In Koba the Dread then, Amis recounts his own experiences from a first-person perspective. However, the middle part of the text contains Amis’ analysis of Stalin. In this part, he does no longer speak from personal experience, but with the objective authority of an historian, backed up by extensive background literature, most notably Robert Conquest’s The Great Terror. Whether the image of objectivity is warranted, remains to be seen.
2.1.1 Time’s Arrow: Backward Narration and Doubling
Let us start the analysis with Time’s Arrow, “technically [Amis’] most audacious novel” (Diedrick 21). The novel tells the story of Odilo Unverdorben, an Austrian Nazi doctor who began his killing career at Schloss Hartheim, where old, sick and disabled people underwent ‘euthanasia’. He then went on a bout of military action with a Waffen SS unit in the East, and eventually arrived at Auschwitz, where he assisted ‘Uncle Pepi’ (modelled on Doctor Mengele) in his medical experiments. He is also said to be responsible for delivering the pellets of Zyklon B to the gas chambers. When Auschwitz is about to be liberated by the Russians, Odilo flees and seeks refuge, first in Italy, then in Portugal, where he changes his name to Hamilton de Souza. He then takes the boat to New York, where he becomes John Young. Eventually he ends up in a North East American town as Tod Friendly, where he continues to work as a doctor, until his retirement and subsequent death. However, the novel is not just audacious in that it features a Holocaust perpetrator, but rather in how the perpetrator is represented. Unsurprisingly, Time’s Arrow elicited “notoriously polarized opinions” about the success of its depiction of a Nazi doctor (Vice 11). As I noted before, when
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bringing a perpetrator into focus, many texts tend to avoid a direct confrontation with the perpetrator and his or her actions, for instance by providing characters that function as a barrier between the reader and the perpetrator. Michael in The Reader is such a ‘screen character’ who, while being the reader’s only access point to Hanna, ultimately also stands between her and the reader. In Time’s Arrow the distance between the reader and the protagonist is achieved by means of two important narrative techniques: reversed chronology and the doubling of the protagonist and the narrator. While Amis was not the first to use a reversal of chronology to approach a painful subject (he credits Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five in the afterword), he certainly uses the backward narration to its fullest potential. Not only is the story line reversed, starting with Tod’s death and evolving to his birth, but the reversal affects every action and every conversation to the point where it almost feels like a gimmick. For example, the eating process is described backwards in meticulous detail:
First I stack the clean plates in the dishwasher, which works okay, I guess, like all my other labour-saving devices, until some fat bastard shows up in his jumpsuit and traumatizes them with his tools. So far so good: then you select a soiled dish, collect some scraps from the garbage, and settle down for a short wait. Various items get gulped up into my mouth, and after a skilful massage with tongue and teeth I transfer them to the plate for additional sculpture with knife and fork and spoon. […] Next you face the laborious business of cooling, of reassembly, of storage, before the return of these foodstuffs to the Superette, where, admittedly, I am promptly and generously reimbursed for my pains. Then you tool down the aisles with trolley or basket, returning each can or packet to its rightful place. (Amis, Time’s Arrow 19)
Conversations too are reversed. At one place, in the beginning of the novel, a short conversation between the protagonist and a pharmacist is even spelled backwards. The backward narration has a double effect. On the one hand it is deeply confusing for the reader. This sentiment is shared by the narrator, who calls himself “a passenger or a parasite” in the protagonist’s body (Amis, Time’s Arrow 16). The narrator, who shares everything with Tod, except his conscious thoughts, is as disoriented as the reader and tries to make sense of this hardly recognizable world. While trying to understand Tod’s actions, the narrator detects in him a fear that surfaces in his dreams and leads him to believe that they are journeying towards “a terrible secret” (Amis, Time’s Arrow 12). However, the backward narration does not only serve to defamiliarize the reader. The reversal of time inevitably implies a reversal of logic too, because the effect precedes the cause (Diedrick 134) .When dealing with a subject such as the Holocaust, a reversal of logic has deep consequences. The descriptions of Tod’s work as a doctor illustrate how the inversion of logic involves a reversal of morals too:
You want to know what I do? All right. Some guy comes in with a bandage around his head. We don’t mess about. We’ll soon have that off. He’s got a hole in his head. So what do we do. We stick a nail in it. Get the nail – a good rusty one – from the trash or wherever. And lead him out to the Waiting Room where he’s allowed to linger and holler for a while before we ferry him back to the night. (Amis, Time’s Arrow 85)
Although the reader is able to decode the event described, the narrator’s scathing rejection of Tod’s supposed cruelty shines through in his description. Still, as the reader can deduce from the novel, in the post-war period, Tod seems to be a diligent and conscientious doctor: he is active in a
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crisis centre for battered women, he provides medical care to prostitutes, he attends to the elderly, to babies and to women with unwanted pregnancies. However, for the narrator the medical procedures go deeply against the grain of logic:
Put simply, the hospital is an atrocity-producing situation. Atrocity will follow atrocity, unstoppably. As if fresh atrocity were necessary to validate the atrocity that came before. As if the atrocity that came before was necessary to validate the atrocity that will come after. (Amis, Time’s Arrow 102)
The term “atrocity-producing situation” is borrowed from Robert Jay Lifton’s The Nazi Doctors, where it is defined as “[a situation] so structured externally … that the average person entering it … will commit or become associated with atrocities” (425). However, where Lifton uses the term with regard to Auschwitz, the narrator equates it with a hospital. This shows how deeply the inversion of logic and morals affects the narrator’s interpretation of events. Because, when Tod, who is still named Odilo then, arrives at Auschwitz, everything starts to make sense. In the rigorous reversal of time, the most absurd event of history becomes a logical and humane operation. Instead of encountering the dreaded “terrible secret”, the narrator, who from the arrival at Auschwitz identifies more and more with Odilo, comes to see Auschwitz as a special mission for humankind: “Our preternatural purpose? To dream a race. To make a people from the weather. From thunder and from lightning. With gas, electricity and shit” (Amis, Time’s Arrow 128). As Sue Vice claims, “only seeing [Auschwitz] in reverse can give it a moral and narrative trajectory which seems acceptable and familiar” (13). While Unverdorben’s stay at Auschwitz itself only takes up one chapter in the novel, it is that chapter that “provides the justification for both techniques – temporal inversion and doubling” (Finney 55). This brings us to the second technique used to provide some distance between the perpetrator and the reader: doubling. As I noted before, although Time’s Arrow is a first-person narrative, the narrator is somehow separated from the protagonist: they share a body, but the narrator cannot tap into Tod’s consciousness. Since the text itself does not really specify the exact nature of the narrator, scholars speculate that he might be Tod’s soul, “the sundered remnant of the protagonist’s originally undivided consciousness” (McGlothlin 221), or a “co-consciousness” (Harris 489). However, the narrator does not have any physical or mental power over Tod: “Something isn’t quite working: this body I’m in won’t take orders from this will of mine” (Amis, Time’s Arrow 12). The narrator is a “passenger of a parasite” in Tod’s body, without him even being aware of it (16). This results in an uncomfortable situation: the point of view of the narration does not coincide with the focalization. While Tod is the one to control the eyes (the narrator speaks of a “vertigo effect” when he tries to see something which Tod is not directly looking at), the reader only has access to the narrator’s thoughts and feelings (Amis, Time’s Arrow 40). So why did Amis use doubling if it results in such an unbalanced narrative situation? Doubling is in fact a concept described in Lifton’s The Nazi Doctors, to which Time’s Arrow is heavily indebted. In his book, Lifton describes the evolution of medicalized killing by the Nazis, from the earliest sterilization and euthanasia programmes for the physically and mentally disabled to the establishment of industrialised killing centres such as Auschwitz. His main goal is to understand how physicians of all people came to be the backbone of a genocide. Lifton cites various reasons, most importantly the Nazi biomedical vision, which suggested that the Aryan race needed to be rid from ‘diseased elements’, like people with hereditary conditions or mental illnesses. Later, when the Jews were specifically targeted, they were seen as “a gangrenous appendix in the body of mankind”, as one SS doctor put it (Lifton, 16, 204). The main theory was to subordinate individual health to the
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health and the continuation of ‘das Volk’. Lifton terms this “killing as a therapeutic imperative” (15). Even though this deadly therapeutic imperative was in clear violation of the Hippocratic oath, the doctors’ more immediate loyalties to Hitler and the regime were much more real to them than “a vague ritual performed at medical school” (207). Notwithstanding their deep loyalty to Hitler and his regime, most doctors could not perform mass murder just like that. They adopted a protection mechanism, which Lifton calls “the schizophrenic situation” or doubling (210). Lifton defines doubling as “the division of the self into two functioning wholes, so that a part-self acts as an entire self” (418). By creating an ‘Auschwitz- self’, doctors could perform a “transfer of conscience” (421). The sense of guilt that a doctor would normally have about deliberately killing people was then transferred to the Auschwitz-self, which functioned according to the Auschwitz logic: killing in order to heal. The Auschwitz-self usually emerged during the doctor’s first weeks in the camp, when he had to perform his first selections (422). This was typically a period of intense mental duress for most doctors, and the doubling of the self was the only way to defend themselves against psychological death. Lifton remarks that doubling was almost a prerequisite in order to function in Auschwitz, and even more so in the earlier euthanasia hospitals (427). By doubling the self, they chose to invoke “the evil potential of the self”, evil that is “neither inherent to the self, nor foreign to it” (423). It became apparent during Lifton’s interviews that most doctors’ Auschwitz-self did not, or at least not completely, disappear after the war. While many doctors continued their medical work, in the Hippocratic sense of the word, the interviews showed that they were unable to “confront the Nazi-self or Auschwitz-self in its relationship to medicalized killing” which left them “without moral clarity concerning [their] contemporary self” (Lifton 457). Lifton concludes that the greatest danger for doctors lies in the capacity to “double in a way that brings special power to his killing self even as he continues to anoint himself with medical purity” (458). Many critics have interpreted the bifurcation between the protagonist and the narrator in Time’s Arrow as a “fictional rendition of Lifton’s theory of the doubling of the perpetrator doctor” (McGlothlin 221). John A. Dern claims that
the narrator, if he in fact represents a Hippocratic, pre-Nazi self, is dormant, or rather “powerless” (to use his own word) in the latter half of Unverdorben’s life. As a conscience, his whisper goes unheard; as a soul, he has been sacrificed by the atrocities Unverdorben committed. (127)
Indeed, on his deathbed Tod “gives birth” to his döppelganger self, who then relives Tod’s life backwards (Diedrick 139). Diedrick claims that this can be seen as “an audacious variation to the folk wisdom that just before their death individuals see their whole life flashing before them” (139). According to the logic of reversed time, the narrator should start off “with a complete store of knowledge and progressively ‘unlearn’ the facts of the tale as he tells it” (Slater 142). However, even though the narrator comes into the world as a “fully mature” being with “firm opinions and a sense of humour”, “a decent moral code” and general factual knowledge, he is ignorant of Tod’s past and conscious thought processes (143). As the novel progresses and Tod grows younger, the narrator professes to feel more and more disconnected from Tod:
Well, I say we, but by now John Young was pretty much on his own out there. Some bifurcation had occurred, in about 1960, or maybe even earlier. I was still living inside, quietly, with my own thoughts. Thoughts that were free to wander through time. (Amis, Time’s Arrow 107)
Then, when Tod/Odilo arrives at Auschwitz, there is a distinct change in the narrator’s speech pattern when referring to himself and the protagonist. In the first four chapters, the narrator refers
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to Tod/Odilo as “we”, which reflects the fact that he and the protagonist share a body, but remain two separate mental entities. When using “I”, he specifically refers to himself, expressing his own thoughts and impressions, but never physical actions. This pattern changes when the protagonist first sets foot in Auschwitz: “I, Odilo Unverdorben, arrived at Auschwitz Central” (Amis, Time’s Arrow 124). The emphatic “I” symbolises the merging of the previously separated selves. The change in speech pattern from “we” to “I” is accompanied by the narrator’s comment that the world is going to start making sense now (124). The psychological merging of the narrator with the protagonist is not without repercussions for the narration and the depiction of the perpetrator doctor. First of all, this change exposes the fierce irony of the text. Because of the backward narration, Auschwitz becomes the event which brings about not only the creation of a perfect race, but also Odilo’s psychological healing. Auschwitz becomes the place where the world finally starts to make sense and where common logic applies. Although the narrator is still denied access to Odilo’s thoughts, his need for an explanation has lessened considerably because he feels he understands the situation now. Therefore, the reader is confronted with a narrator who blatantly approves of Auschwitz, except for the filthiness of the camp (“Ordure, ordure everywhere” (Amis, Time’s Arrow 125)). This situation continues until the protagonist devolves into a teenager and then a child, leaving his killing days behind. The narrator then abandons “his preternatural fusion with the protagonist and returns to the role he had in the post-war period as supplemental consciousness” (McGlothlin 222):
I who have no name and no body – I have slipped out from under him and am now scattered above like flakes of ash-blonde human hair No longer can I bear with the ruined god, betrayed and beaten by his own magic. Calling on powers best left unsummoned, he took human beings apart – and then he put them back together again. For a while it worked (there was redemption); and while it worked he and I were one, on the banks of the Vistula. He put us back together. But of course you shouldn’t be doing any of this kind of thing with human beings… […] I’ll always be here. But he’s on his own. (Amis, Time’s Arrow 155-56)
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2.1.2 House of Meetings: Testimony to and Implied Reader
In House of Meetings, Martin Amis explores another geopolitical subject: the last decades of Stalin’s reign and the aftereffects of the trauma he inflicted on Russia. Like Time’s Arrow, the book relies heavily on secondary literature, most of which Amis had already used for Koba the Dread. However, Amis is particularly indebted to Anne Applebaum’s Gulag: A History, which had not yet appeared when Koba the Dread was published. Applebaum’s description of the House of Meetings, “the building where [Gulag] prisoners were allowed conjugal visits after Stalin’s death in 1953”, inspired Amis to write this novel (Finney 65). Finney identifies another inspiration for the novel in Michael Specter’s article in The New Yorker (“Is Russia Dying?”, 10 November 2004), which discusses the problem of an enormous, hardly acknowledged H.I.V. epidemic in contemporary Russia (65). Contrary to Time’s Arrow, Amis has abandoned his satirical pen for this novel to try his hand, for the first time, at tragedy. This seems fitting with regard to the subject matter: although the back cover suggest that the novel will tell the story of a triangular romance, it is in fact about “ageing, rusting, rotting away” (Harrison), and about “envy, ethics, chaos, resistance, violence, solipsism and confession” (Lichting). House of Meetings does indeed take the form of a confession. A confession narrated by an unnamed man in his eighties who makes a final journey from America back to Russia, where he revisits the Gulag camp he spent 10 years of his life in, and then journeys onwards to the hospital where his brother died, and where he too wants to die. During this journey, the narrator writes a memoir, which he addresses to his American stepdaughter Venus. On the first page of his account, the narrator announces that he is going to tell the story of a “brutally scalene” love triangle between himself, his brother Lev and Zoya, the beautiful Jewish girl they both fell in love with (Amis, House of Meetings 7). However, while part of the memoir is a flashback, roughly from 1948 to 1983, the narrator also describes his journey and comments on the current state of affairs in Russia, most notably the Beslan School Massacre, which took place during the narrator’s journey, in 2004. From the flashbacks, the reader gleans that the narrator was a lieutenant in the Red Army and that in the first three months of 1945, he “raped his way across what would soon be Eastern Germany” (Amis, House of Meetings 26). Back home, in 1946, he falls in love with Zoya, to whom he is attracted in a very sexual way. However, she rejects him and shortly after, the narrator is arrested on suspicion of being a fascist and sentenced to ten years in the Gulag, which after Zoya’s rejection “didn’t feel like the worst thing that had ever happened” (Amis, House of Meetings 44). Two years later he is joined by Lev, who was convicted for praising America (although he was in fact praising the Americas, which is the brothers’ nickname for Zoya). Lev confronts his brother with the news that he and Zoya are married, to which the narrator replies “Lev and Zoya got married. If I can survive that, then I’ll never die” (Amis, House of Meetings 25). Later, when the narrator is over his initial shock, he feels that his thoughts and fantasies of Zoya, which previously sustained him, are now corroding him, attacking the only thing he has got left, his will. Against the backdrop of the horrific camp situation, which Amis describes in a very powerful way, an uneasy rivalry unfolds between the brothers. The narrator torments himself by grilling Lev about Zoya, while trying to convince himself that their love is mainly “a thing of the spirit” (Amis, House of Meetings 76). In the camp, a fundamental difference between the brothers comes to light. Lev is a pacifist: he even refuses to fight for a better sleeping place, which is the key to survival in the camps. When he is attacked, he turns the other cheek. Even when Uglik, a particularly violent
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guard, partially deafens him with a slap on his ears, he does not rise to the bait. The narrator on the other hand, is not afraid to use violence, which he has come to see as “a currency, like tobacco, like bread” (Amis, House of Meetings 79). Even though the narrator tries to protect Lev this way, his gratuitous violence eventually drives a rift between them. Then, in 1956, when Zoya comes to the camp for a conjugal visit, Lev, who previously managed to hold his own in the camp, emerges from the House of Meetings as a broken man. He refuses to tell the narrator what happened, but promises to do so before he dies. After their release from Norlag, the brothers go their separate ways. Lev goes back to Zoya, but his health continues to decline and he withdraws into himself. The narrator travels around and discovers his talent for making money. They continue to meet up, although the narrator concedes that “these outings … were almost openly punitive” (Amis, House of Meetings 153). Zoya eventually leaves Lev, and he marries Lidiya, who gives him a son, Artem. However, Artem is killed during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and Lev dies shortly after his son. When the narrator visits Zoya to acquaint her with the news of Lev’s death, their encounter leads to him raping her. A few days later, the narrator defects to the America. In Lev’s possessions, sent to him in Chicago, the narrator finds a letter addressed to him, containing the answer about the House of Meetings. However, the narrator does not read this letter until he himself is about to die. In the contemporary parts of the memoir, the narrator writes about his journey, which takes place from 1 to 6 September 2004. While he is on his way to Predposylov, a (presumably) fictitious place, where Norlag (equally fictitious) is located, he hears on the radio how Chechen terrorists have taken over a school, holding more than a thousand people hostage. This is an event he continues to refer to, as a symptom of Russia’s sickness. He claims that the Middle School Number One is like “a laboratory and a control experiment”, which shows how you build “Russian totality” (Amis, House of Meetings 116). The narrator states that when the situation inside the school is so bad that only death can make it worse, “death comes at the moment of alleviation … because Russian totality can’t assent to that” (116). He continues on an acid tone:
And if you were a killer, then this was your time. It is not given to many – the chance to shoot children in the back as they swerve in their underwear past rotting corpses. (116).
Amis’ insistence on the connection between the past and ongoing terrors “goads his readers towards a reaction” and forces them to take a position (Chatfield). After his visit to Predposylov, where he manages to locate the House of Meetings in the midst of the ruins, the narrator continues on to Yekaterinburg. As he admits in the letter that accompanies the memoir, he is HIV positive and he is taking matters into his own hands. In Yekaterinburg, in the hospital where Lev died, he will receive euthanasia, or rather, commit assisted suicide. In the same letter, he also concludes, after having done some research on “retrospective sexual jealousy”, that he is in fact “crypto-queer”, and “queer for [his] own brother” (Amis, House of Meetings 195). After raping Zoya, who indeed “masquerades as a love interest”, he crossed from “satyr to senex” in one night, losing his sexual interest in women (Schillinger; Amis, House of Meetings 195) And then, finally, he reads Lev’s letter. In this letter, Lev explains that, that night in the House of Meetings, he felt that the enslavement in the camps took away his identity, and left only his old insecurities (mainly about his appearance), to the point where he lost the ability to love. While in his pacifism, he had tried to preserve a vital part of himself, life in Norlag eventually took it away from him, and left him a cynic.
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You know what happened to us, brother? It wasn’t just a compendium of very bad experiences. The hunger and the cold and the fear and the boredom and the oceanic weariness – that was general, and standard-issue. That was off the rack. What I’m referring to is the destiny that was made to measure. Something was designed inside us, blending with what was already there. For each of us, in different ways and settings, the worst of all possible outcomes, and a price to be paid, not by the spoonful or the shovelful, but by the dayful, the yearful, the lifeful. They did more than take our youth away. They also took away the men we were going to be. (Amis, House of Meetings 188-189)
That, Amis himself points out, is the nature of the offence: “You may live, but you won’t love”, as one of the Norlag inmates has tattooed on his arm (Grossman). The memoir is accompanied by a letter to Venus. In this letter, the narrator describes himself as a “’shock’ writer who is telling the truth”, a truth which will be painful (Amis, House of Meetings, 2). Because, despite the fact that the narrator is innocent of the charges that sent him to Norlag, it is hard to see him as a victim, being a self-admitted “decorated rapist” (Amis, House of Meetings 44). Nevertheless, the confession is not an apologia, but an explanation as to why he never opened up or sought closure (Schillinger). The narrator concedes that assimilating what he did “will be a heavy call on [Venus’] courage and generosity”, but he claims that he does not seriously fear that she will “excommunicate” him from her memory (Amis, House of Meetings 2-3). However, he does expect her censure, but asks that she makes it her own, and not the censure of her ideology. For Amis, the fact that the confession is addressed to Venus, makes the novel special:
And then I realized, if he addressed the whole thing to her, made her the central, the only remaining human being he still loved, then it gives it all kinds of improved focus. I kept on saying, why is he telling us this? It also lodges it in the present day, and contrasts what he went through with what an average Westerner in a market-state democracy is going through. (Grossman)
Venus is very present in the text. She is not only the implied reader to whom the narrator continually addresses himself, but it is also suggested that she has edited the text for us. In the narrator’s introduction to his memoir, he tells her that he has arranged for one copy of his memoir to be printed, for her benefit. However, in the text we read, a few footnotes have been added, supposedly by Venus, containing clarifications and historical details which might escape the western reader. Thus, even though the narrator is reliable, we as readers very much look at the text through Venus’ eyes. Like Venus, we are average Westerners in a market-state democracy, steeped with western ideology, who cannot begin to imagine the narrator’s experiences. Because, in House of Meetings, Amis shows us the more common experience of Gulag prisoners, “epitomized in the narrator unable to transcend this brutality” as opposed to narratives by writers such as Solzhenitsyn, whose “exceptional life force” helped them recover(Lehman qtd. in Finney 66; Finney 66). However, even though the memoir is not without attempts at justification, the narrator offers it to Venus (and to us) as the truth, his personal truth, and leaves the judgement to her.
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2.1.3 “The Last Days of Muhammad Atta”: a Terrorist as the Centre of Consciousness
While Time’s Arrow and House of Meetings explore the possibilities of a first-person narrator, “The Last Days of Muhammad Atta” experiments with a third-person narrator inhabiting the mind of a 9/11 terrorist. “The Last Days”, which first appeared in The New Yorker in 2006, was published in The Second Plane, together with a collection of Amis’ journalism on 9/11, and another short story, “In the Palace of the End”. Amis’ journalism on terrorism was criticised widely, especially because of his rather conspicuous move from the left to the right. However, “The Last Days” too provoked its share of criticism. The Independent for instance claims that Amis “once more [courts] the controversy for which he is now famed” (Jury). Admittedly, the subject matter is controversial. “The Last Days of Muhammad Atta” follows hijacker Muhammad Atta, who piloted American Airlines Flight 11 into the North Tower. The story starts with an excerpt from the 9/11 Commission Report:
No physical, documentary, or analytical evidence provides a convincing explanation of why [Muhammad] Atta and [Abdulaziz al-] Omari drove to Portland, Maine, from Boston on the morning of September 10, only to return to Logan on flight 5930 on the morning of September 11. (Amis, “The Last Days” 95)
As Thomas Meany writes, “by setting his story in the “lost time” of the report, Amis has found a niche where the facts have not caught up yet: his imagination has some breathing room” (173-174). In order to account for this apparently meaningless detour, Amis imagines that Atta went to Portland to visit his dying imam in the hospital. From the imam he obtains a bottle of holy water from Medina, which will absolve him from the sin of suicide he is about to commit. However, Atta does not believe in the powers of the holy water: “Muhammad Atta was not religious; he was not even especially political” (Amis, “The Last Days” 101). However, as Amis reveals later on, he uses the water to undermine the faith of his fellow hijackers, whose religious fervour he despises: “To discountenance Ziad, to send him to his death with a heart full of doubt: this was the reason for the journey to Maine” (Amis, “The Last Days” 114). As Birgit Däwes observes, “instead of identifying with ideological ardour, the narrator offers the psychological portrait of a man who is entirely fed up with life” (503). Amis’ Atta is driven by “nihilistic élan” (Amis, “The Last Days” 107):
He had allied himself with the militants because jihad was, by many magnitudes, the most charismatic idea of his generation. to unite ferocity and rectitude in a single word: nothing could compete with that. … If you took away all the rubbish about faith, then fundamentalism suited his character, and with an almost sinister precision. (Amis, “The Last Days” 101)
Free of religious fervour, Amis’ Atta claims that he is participating in the terrorist attack for “the core reason” (Amis, “The Last Days” 101). The core reason, Amis explains in the last pages, is the killing. Thinking beyond the casualties of the attack itself, Atta is already anticipating the wars that “would flow from this day” (Amis, “The Last Days 122). However, despite his disdain for life, he finds that he underestimated the power of it. When Amis takes us to the moment of the crash, he reveals in free indirect speech Atta’s dying thoughts:
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Yes, how gravely he had underestimated it. How very gravely he had underestimated life. His own he had hated, and wished away; but see how long it was taking to absent itself – and with what helpless grief he was watching it go imperturbable in its beauty and its power. Even as his flesh fried and his blood boiled, there was life, kissing its fingertips. Then it echoed out, and ended. ( “The Last Days” 124)
Even though Muhammad Atta is the focus of the narrative, he is a deeply unpleasant character, full of spite and self-loathing: he can hardly bear to see his own face in the mirror. As Meany writes, “Amis averts an overly impressionistic portrayal of Atta by denying him any sympathy of emotion, concentrating instead on the harder-to-pin-down sympathy of comprehension” (174). Apart from Atta’s hardly likable character, the narrative strategy too provides some distance between the reader and the protagonist. The third-person perspective, “with Atta as the centre of consciousness”, is much less intimate than the first-person narratives in Time’s Arrow and House of Meetings (Däwes 504). Additionally, the narrator’s “occasional swerves into omniscience or authorial comment” increase the distance (Däwes 504). However, he does not meet the expectations of evil and monstrosity that other representations have bestowed on him. Däwes adds that “a certain ironic stance reinforces the detachment between character and readers, especially as the narrator focusses on the terrorist’s physical ailments” (504). Amis’ Atta is hardly an image of monstrosity and evil. He is plagued by headaches and suffers from severe constipation and nausea. The narrator attributes this to his “mind-body problem” (Amis, “The Last Days” 101): Atta’s body has not gone along with his mind. In other words, “his body is politicized as the site of symbolical revenge” (Däwes 504). Ironically, after drinking the holy water, Atta feels “the ungainsayable anger of his bowels”, which results in him having a brief tantrum at the locked doors of the toilets on the place (Amis, “The Last Days” 118). Although, Amis’ insistence on bodily functions (which is, incidentally, a recurrent theme in his oeuvre) almost makes a caricature out of Atta, the “intimacy of his death” counteracts the grotesque (Däwes 505). Birgit Däwes concludes:
Amis constructs Atta as a double: he is both a projection screen for our desire to externalize the Other (tempting us into seeing it as a caricature, making it grotesque, laughing at it) and a reflective device which makes us see precisely those desires in the Other – a mirror in which this desire for the abject returns. (506).
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2.1.4 Koba the Dread: a Memoir of Laughter and Death
As a non-fiction book, Koba the Dread: Laughter of the Twenty Million stands apart from the other works discussed. It has puzzled critics and reviewers alike. The combination of Amis’ personal experiences with an analysis of Stalinism makes for a very strange hybrid. Diedrick has called it “a coda to Experience” since Amis’ preoccupation with Stalinism stems from his desire to understand why his father subscribed to Communism for such a long time (181). Perhaps unsurprisingly, the book received mostly mixed and negative reviews (Finney 77). The major point of criticism was Amis’ “narcissistic self-positioning” in juxtaposing his own grief at losing his father and sister to the twenty million victims of Stalinism, and in comparing his baby daughter’s crying jags to the screams coming from the Butyrki prison (Cowley). Christopher Hitchens, whose youthful sympathies for Communism are also questioned in the book, reacts to the backlash with a rhetorical question: “What did you imagine would happen if you elected to write on such a Himalayan topic, and then pygmified it by addressing so much of it to me?” (Hitchens). Koba the Dread consists of three parts, which in turn are divided into very short, staccato chapters. In part one, titled “The Collapse of the Value of Human Life”, Amis describes scenes from his own youth, remembering conversations between his father and other Communist friends, or the Communist sympathies of his own friends. He also establishes his own ‘credentials’: “I am a fifty- two-year-old novelist and critic who has recently read several yards of books about the Soviet experiment” (Amis, Koba the Dread 4). The reflections on his personal life are mixed with preliminary remarks about the so-called Soviet experiment. The second part, “Iosif the Terrible: Short Course”, contains a narrative on Stalin’s reign and the twenty million victims he left in his wake. It is this part that accounts for the title. Koba refers to the nickname Stalin chose for himself (after a Robin Hood-like character from The Patricide). The twenty million refers to the victims of Stalin’s policy. Laughter however, “identifies with the literary paradigm that organizes – and strains the reader’s patience with – Amis’s analysis of Stalin’s evil” (Diedrick 191-192). The last part, “When We Dead Awaken”, contains a letter to Christopher Hitchens and one to the late Kingsley Amis (“Letter to my Father’s Ghost). This part is dominated by Amis’ grief at losing his father and his sister. By reflecting on his own grief, he attempts to counterbalance Stalin’s aphorism: “While every death is a tragedy, the death of a million is a mere statistic” (Amis, Koba the Dread 277). Amis claims that on the contrary, “a million deaths are, at the very least, a million tragedies” (Koba the Dread 277). I would like to focus on the middle part, Amis’ chronicle of Stalin’s reign. As I indicated earlier, Amis tends to adopt the tone of a historian here. After all, he has managed to compress “several yards” of books on the subject into a hundred pages. Diedrick writes, “Amis the stylist and master of narrative crafts a compelling story from mountainous historiography on Bolshevism” (192). Indeed, in the space of a hundred pages, Amis
recounts the toll of the civil war, the 1922 famine, the effects of collectivization, Stalin’s purge of the peasantry ending with the Terror-Famine of 1933, the deadly purges of 1937-8, the show trials, the gulags, the losses sustained during World War II, and the period between 1945 and 1953 … ending with Stalin’s death just as he was about to launch a massive pogrom against the Jews. (Finney 76)
Although these pages on Stalin are certainly informed by important historical works, such as Conquest’s The Great Terror, Amis also borrows from a number of fictional works. As the story
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unfolds, the tone becomes more and more acerbic. The portrait of Stalin that emerges is far from objective. Amis’ indignation shines through in the juxtaposition of dispassionate facts and poignant fiction, and his own biting commentaries: “This, perhaps, is the meaning of the Terror-Famine of 1933: the self-cannibalized were destroyed by the self-executed. And this is the surreal moral gangrene of Stalinism” (Amis, Koba the Dread 141). The narrative is interspersed with the question “zachto?”, “why?”, which, according to Conquest, was “often found written on cell walls, carved into the sides of prison wagons, and on the planks of the transit camps” (480). Conquest suggests that “the simplest form of true answer” would be “to destroy or disorganize all possible sources of opposition to Stalin’s progress to absolute rule” (480). However, this answer does not do justice to the complexity of reality (Conquest 480). And as Amis’ book seems to suggest, there is no satisfactory answer to the question why. That might account for Amis’ portrayal of Stalin. Instead of offering the reader an objective portrait, Amis seems intent on showing Stalin at his most unreasonable. As Diedrick observes, “in Amis’s hands, Stalin comes to resemble an outsized, world-historical version of the grotesque villains that populate his novels” (190). He adds that Amis “consistently uses literary tropes and categories to explain the effects of Stalin’s evil (190). At one point, Amis refers to Russia as a “black farce”, which explains the multiple references to laughter in the face of tragedy (Amis, Koba the Dread 258). Amis’ insistence on laugher stems from him wondering why laughter became impossible after Auschwitz, but “refuses to absent itself” in the Soviet case. It is true that jokes and humour have always been a consistent part of Soviet history, as a form of subdued protest. However, as Christie Davies explains,
there were far fewer jokes about Stalin, “Koba the Dread”, the cunning, the cruel, the ruthless, the monster, than about Khrushev, Brezhnev, Andropov, and Chernenko (whom the jokes depicted as buffoons), fewer jokes about Stalin’s violent times than about their routine oppression. (294)
Thus, the criticism of Amis’ lack of decorum might be justified. Orlando Figes, writes,
I understand what Amis means when he says that there was an element of farce in the Bolshevik regime: the spirit of Gogol was alive and well in the Soviet bureaucracy. But to suggest, as Amis does, that there was something funny in a period of history when 20 million people were murdered by the state betrays a gross in sensitivity. (Figes)
However, decorous or not, Koba the Dread offers a “short course” to Stalin, acquainting the western reader with a part of history that has all but been ignored in this hemisphere. And Amis’ indignation on this neglect is maybe a first step towards giving the twenty million the reverence that they deserve, but did not get.
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2.2 Infiltrating the Perpetrator’s Mind?
Having provided an overview of the main issues in each text, I would now like to enter into a comparison. First, I will compare the extent to which each text grants the reader insight into the mind and emotions of the perpetrator. I will also briefly consider how some other characters are represented and how a perpetrator as the centre of consciousness might affect our perception of them. In the next section, I will discuss whether the texts offer the reader a moral compass. Or, in other words, how the texts influence our judgement of the perpetrator and his or her actions. As my discussion of the individual texts has shown, the different narrative techniques all attempt to bring the reader closer to an understanding of the perpetrator. However, each text somehow mediates the reader’s access to the perpetrator figure. For example, while Time’s Arrow and House of Meetings both have a first-person narrator, in Time’s Arrow, the access to the perpetrator is much more restricted. As I said in my analysis of Time’s Arrow, the disembodied narrator shares a body with the protagonist, but he does not have access to Tod’s conscious thoughts. However, the relation of the narrator to the protagonist is more complex than that of a parasite to its host. The narrator is not completely isolated from Tod. As they share the same body, the narrator is “awash” with Tod’s emotions:
Each glance, each pair of eyes, even as they narrow in ingenious appraisal, draws a bead on something inside him, and I sense the heat of fear and shame. Is that what I'm heading towards? And Tod's fear, when I stop and analyse it, really is frightening. And inexplicable. It has to do with his own mutilation. Who might commit it? How can he avert it? (Amis, Time’s Arrow 15)
As the narrator remarks, fear is a very dominant emotion in Tod’s post-war life. He observes that there are certain things which really put Tod on the edge. These triggers, such as the smell of burning nails, hearing German and some of his dreams, are meant to trigger some kind of awareness in the reader that the dreaded “terrible secret” is in fact the Holocaust and Tod’s participation in it (Amis, Time’s Arrow 12). The smell of burning nails is a rather straightforward trigger, which obviously refers to the smell exuded by the constantly burning crematoria, which penetrated the whole camp according to testimonies. However, the narrator’s access to Tod’s dreams is less straightforward: under normal circumstances the he does not have access to Tod’s consciousness. However, I would like to refer to Freud’s theory, which I discussed in the first chapter, and according to which nightmares can be seen as an intrusion of a repressed memory into one’s consciousness. Obviously, in his sleep, Tod’s consciousness is less guarded, which enables the narrator to access the repressed memories which reassert themselves in the form of nightmares. Tod’s nightmares are very informative for the reader. One of his dreams, “full of figures who scatter in the wind like leaves, full of souls who form constellations like the stars I hate to see”, seems to refer to the ashes from the crematoria that are carried away by the wind (Amis, Time’s Arrow 37). Tod also dreams about a figure in a white coat and black boots “straddling many acres” and with between his legs “the queue of many souls” (Amis, Time’s Arrow 48). This images conjures up multiple associations. First of all the figure in a medical coat and black SS boots may refer to the SS
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personnel that manned the buses to transport people selected for the euthanasia programme in the early Nazi period. As Robert Jay Lifton comments in The Nazi Doctors, they wore white coats in order to appear like doctors or medical staff, which supports Lifton’s claim that medical legitimacy clung to the Nazi killing machine from its very origins (70). The other part of the image, a larger than life SS-doctor whose legs seem like a gate that souls pass through, recalls the selections on the ramp: one doctor deciding over life and death, like a gatekeeper. A third important nightmare is that of the “bomb-baby”. The narrator is very intrigued by the dream of a baby wielding “the ultimate power of life and death over its parents, its older brothers and sisters, its grandparents, and indeed everyone who is gathered in the room” (Amis, Times Arrow 54). However, despite all this power, the baby is weeping. While the trigger of this dream is not as transparent as the others, the narrator feels that “the atmosphere is badly wrong” (63). Babies are frequently mentioned in the novel, and the narrator is trying to figure out the meaning of the bomb-baby, at first confusing it with Tod’s own stillborn daughter, whom he later describes as exerting “colossal power as a subject” (135). It turns out that the dream refers to a moment where Tod discovers a secret room full of Jews hiding from the Nazis, because of the baby’s weeping. However, despite the fact that the narrator is able to ‘infiltrate’ Tod’s mind when he sleeping, he is unable to decode the dreams and to see them as a symptom of perpetrator trauma. Instead, those dreams are a test for the reader “to rethink our response to ‘horror-charged images’ by situating them before the time of our reading about the events which inspired them” (Vice 22). Nevertheless, one question remains: in the complex relationship between the narrator and his host, to what extent do they share the responsibility for Tod’s actions? As I established in my earlier discussion of Time’ Arrow, the narrator is generally considered to be “the side of Tod's split personality that managed to avoid indoctrination in Nazi ideology” (Harris 490). He also clearly shows distaste for what he sees as Tod’s cruelty in the first part of the book. However, even though the narrator does not, or will not, acknowledge Tod’s atrocities in Auschwitz, it were his hands too that executed them. Lifton stresses that, as much as doubling is a Faustian bargain, it is a choice for which one remains responsible, whether it was a conscious decision or not (424). Thus, the narrator is very much implicated in Tod’s actions and his consequent guilt, even though he makes claims at innocence to which he has in fact no right. In House of Meetings, the narrative situation seems more straightforward. As readers, we are privy to a confession, which is not addressed to us, but to the person the narrator loves most. The connection between the narrator and his addressee gives the memoir an “improved focus”, as the narrator leaves himself open for censure from his loved one (Grossman). However, as the narrative is told by a first-person narrator, we only see what the narrator chooses to show us. Time’s Arrow is narrated mostly in the present tense, which means that the narrator describes events as they happen, and sometimes stops to contemplate them. House of Meetings on the other hand, is a memoir, consisting mostly of flashbacks. Therefore, the narrator has had ample time to consider the events of the past, and this reflects on how they take form on paper:
When I first assembled the facts before me, black words on a white page, I found myself staring at a shapeless little heap of degradation and horror. So I’ve tried to give the thing a bit of structure. (Amis, House of Meetings 1-2).
Thus, House of Meetings gives the impression of being a straightforward and honest narrative, lulling the reader into complacency, while in reality our perception of the truth is mediated by the narrator’s selection of facts, as well as his representation of those facts. What we read in House of
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Meetings, is the account of an 84-year old man who looks back on his actions from decades earlier, with the benefit of hindsight, which is often expressed in his comments to the implied reader. Therefore, the reader gets an insight into the mind of a perpetrator looking back on, and evaluating his past actions, rather than in the immediate thoughts of a perpetrator committing his crimes. The word ‘perpetrator’ is to be used with care in this case. The narrator in House of Meetings finds himself in very ambiguous moral territory, which recalls Primo Levi’s grey zone. On the one hand he is a victim of the state, sent to the Gulag on false grounds. However, within the structure of the camp, he is also a victimiser, using violence to survive, but on occasion also gratuitously. In that sense, the narrator fits into Primo Levi’s concept of the grey zone, where the categories of victim and victimiser “both diverge and converge” (“The Drowned and the Saved” 442). Nevertheless, the narrator’s innocence was already compromised before he was sent to the camp. As a soldier in the Second World War, he “raped his way” through Nazi Germany. While soldiers at war might be considered to be in the grey zone, being perpetrator and victim at the same time, with rape however, a line is crossed. Nevertheless, the narrator defends himself by saying that “the peer group can make people do anything” and that the Second World War is a mitigating factor (Amis, House of Meetings 27). When the narrator rapes Zoya, later in the book, there are no mitigating circumstance and there is no why. The line is very clear: he is the perpetrator and Zoya is the victim. It is not just the narrator’s past as a rapist that makes the reader think of him as a perpetrator rather than a victim. The juxtaposition with Lev reinforces this idea. The narrator and Lev are like two sides of the same coin, much like the narrator in Time’s Arrow and his host Tod. They are each other’s opposite. Lev is ugly but pure, while the narrator is handsome, but tainted by the war. The narrator is violent, while Lev is a pacifist. Eventually, Lev is broken by the Gulag, while the narrator seems better equipped to handle the world. Even in the camp, the narrator is perceived as a perpetrator, rather than because he is constantly compared to Lev, who is his moral superior. Still, much of the narrator’s violence is committed in order to protect Lev, a role pattern that was formed in their childhood. In this light, Lev’s pacifism is not as pure as it seems at first sight. In his letter, Lev admits that his attitude in the camp was nothing short of hypocritical, and that he has always admired his brother’s ability to protect him. Therefore, Lev is very much an “implicated subject” in the narrator’s violence, as he benefits from it, without taking part in it directly (Rothberg). However, while Lev is broken by the enslavement in the camp, the narrator’s spirit is only truly broken in his post-coital sadness after raping Zoya:
A new feeling was born in me. At first it seemed at least vaguely familiar, and, one supposed, just about manageable – no more, perhaps, than a completely new way of being very ill. I sat down at the table, under the light and examined it, this birth. It was invisibility. It was the pain of a former person. (Amis, House of Meetings 161)
On the one hand, the book shows the reader the effect of the Gulag on a person who is not morally strong enough “to transcend the brutality” of the experience (Finney 66). Both Lev, with whom we are most likely to identify, and his brother survive, but they have lost their ability to love. On the other hand, House of Meetings also confronts the reader with the thoughts and feelings of a rapist. We are privy to his repentance (for raping Zoya) and the feeling that the rape “made a reckoning” with him, making sexual love impossible (Amis, House of Meetings 195). And then there is the overwhelming feeling of bitterness. The narrator feels embittered because of the hand life has dealt him and his brother: “always the compound nightmare”, which culminates in the narrator raping Zoya while she was thinking of Lev (Amis, House of Meetings 196). Nevertheless, there is also a desire for forgiveness. In some of the last pages of the memoir, the narrator describes confession
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and remorse as “a dirt-poor necessity” (Amis, House of Meetings 171). He adds that “the conscience … is a vital organ. And when it goes, you go” (171). Therefore, the memoir in House of Meetings meets the most fundamental need of a perpetrator on his death bed: confession. From the four texts, “The Last Days of Muhammad Atta” gives the most direct insight in a perpetrator’s mind. It is told by a third-person narrator, with Atta as the “centre of consciousness” (Däwes 504). Thus, the reader has access to the terrorist’s thoughts and also his motives for the crime he is about to commit. As Birgit Däwes observes, “by appropriating the perspective of Atta, Amis caters to the psychological need for comprehension from a perspective that is ‘safe’ in the sense that it undercuts empathy” (503). In this sense, the representation of Atta as a loathsome figure enhances rather than impedes the possibility of understanding. Additionally, there are “occasional swerves into omniscience or authorial comment” (504). Those foreshadowing moments momentarily broaden the distance between the reader and the protagonist, but they also remind the reader about the finality of the narrative: “He didn’t expect paradise. He expected oblivion. And strange to say, he would find neither.” (Amis, “The Last Days” 102). One could wonder whether such a dispassionate immersion in the perpetrator’s mind actually leads to satisfying answers. What we see is a man who is so sick of everything, sick of his own life, that he is prepared to kill thousands almost out of spite. He relishes the idea of wars to come, provoked by the attack. Yet, in his dying moment he is profoundly human. The perpetrator’s mind proves to be an empty, lonely place. There is no fundamentalist religious belief, no grand ideas. Nothing that really accounts for Atta’s participation in the attack, except his self-hate and a death- wish. Nevertheless, this image is far more alarming than a demonized religious fundamentalist, full of righteousness, would be. Precisely because this representation is so emotionally unsatisfying, it offers a better understanding of Muhammad Atta. Koba the Dread finally, does not offer any insight into the Stalin’s mind. In the middle part, “Iosef the Terrible: Short Course”, Amis gives the reader facts and fiction attesting to Stalin’s disastrous politics. He also frequently comments on those facts and although he does not use the first person, it is clear that those comments are Amis’ voice: “Stalin was never really sure that he was the cleverest or the bravest or the most visionary or even the most powerful. But he knew he was the hardest.”(Amis, Koba the Dread 167). While Koba the Dread does give the reader a factual understanding of the workings of Stalinism, accompanied by a good dose of indignation, Stalin’s mind remains closed.
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2.3 The Nature of the Offence
As I mentioned before, trauma tends to be approached from the perspective of the victim. That way, the readers’ sympathy is almost automatically directed towards the victims. When texts adopt the point of view of a perpetrator, the idea of eliciting the reader’s sympathy is suddenly unseemly. Additionally, there is the question of morality. When inhabiting the perspective of a perpetrator, and using his or her language, can a text still provide a moral compass to guide the reader’s judgement? For Koba the Dread, the answer is very simple. Amis’ simmering indignation, not only about Stalin’s murderous politics, but also about the lack of a critical attitude towards Communism in the West, sets the moral tone for the book. As Koba the Dread is a non-fiction text, Amis can afford to show so much of himself and his convictions. The fact that the book works towards an understanding of Stalin’s evil, does certainly not exclude the condemnation of that evil. This might even be the book’s greatest merit: an attempt at historical understanding of past atrocities which goes hand in hand with condemnation of those atrocities. Judith Butler stresses the importance of this idea (although with regard to 9/11) in her study Precarious Life:
If the events are not understandable without that history, that does not mean that the historical understanding furnishes moral justification for the events themselves. Only then do we reach the disposition to get to the “root” of violence, and begin to offer another vision of the future than that which perpetuates violence in the name of denying it, offering instead names for things that restrain us from thinking and acting radically and well about global options. (18)
Although less explicit, condemnation of the hijacker’s actions also colours “The Last Days of Muhammad Atta”, but not at the cost of understanding. In the short story, Amis convincingly appropriates the nihilistic logic with which, he imagines, Atta justifies his actions:
He didn’t believe in the Devil, as an active force, but he did believe in death. Death, at certain times, stopped moving at its even pace and broke into a hungry, lumbering run. Here was the primordial secret. No longer closely guarded – no longer well kept. Killing was a divine delight. And your suicide was just a part of the contribution you made – the massive contribution to death. All your frigidities and futilities were rewritten, becoming swollen with meaning. This was what was possible when you turned the tides of life around, when you ran with the beasts, when you flew with the flies. (“The Last Days” 122)
While this excerpt may explain the attraction of a ‘meaningful’ suicide mission to life-weary man, it does nothing to justify his actions. On the contrary, there is almost an animalistic quality to Atta’s attraction to killing. Ironically, at the moment of his death, Atta’s argumentation dissolves, rendering his suicide ultimately meaningless in the face of the destruction he wreaked:
The joy of killing was proportional to the value of what was destroyed. But that value was something a killer could never see and never gauge. And where was the joy he thought he had felt – where was that joy, that itch, that paltry tingle? (Amis, “The Last Days” 124).
Thus, “The Last Days of Muhammad Atta” attempts to imaginatively understand the character of a “mysterious, Western-educated man who harboured deep hatred for his adopted civilization” without reducing him to a one-dimensional religious fundamentalist (Meany 174-175). However, the
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preclusion of sympathy, as well as the inner logic of the text and our own historical knowledge of the attack, strongly colour our moral reaction to the text. However, because Atta is not portrayed as a monster, but as a human being whose emotional wasteland almost invokes pity, condemnation is directed towards his actions and decisions, more than towards him as a person. In House of Meetings, matters are more complicated as the narrator is also a perpetrator. As I have indicated before, the narrator is reliable, as well as quite frank in his speech. However, due to his ambiguous status, perpetrator, but also a victim of the Gulag, it is somewhat problematic to blindly follow his interpretation of events. Nevertheless, his is not the only voice in the memoir, although the dominant one. The narrator frequently invokes Lev’s voice, and sometimes Venus’, anticipating her questions, or imagining her response. During the flashbacks about the camps, Lev’s voice is very present, especially when it comes to moral questions, such as the narrator’s participation in violence in the camp:
‘What I’m saying,’ he said, ‘is that you’re unrecognizable. You’re like Vad1. Do you know that? you’ve joined the herd. Suddenly you’re just like everybody else.’ (Amis, House of Meetings 83)
In Lev, the reader finds a moral compass, as he is often the one to reject the violence that the narrator has come to see as normal. However, the narrator’s hindsight also functions as a conscience: he clearly denounces his own atrocities, and expresses regret:
Now you must believe how passionately, how tumultuously I wish that had been the end of it, and that she had never come into my rooms at the Rossiya. (Amis, House of Meetings 152)
House of Meetings is the memoir of a man who is “in a terminal panic about his life”, and who, knowing that he will soon die, wishes to “make a reckoning with the dead” (Amis, House of Meetings 116-117). In this confession, the reader is confronted with a multitude of sins, crimes, such as rape and murder, but also jealousy of his brother to the point of wishing him dead. Nevertheless, the narrator is not a wholly unlikeable character. Maybe because of his candid tone, maybe because he is partly a victim of circumstances, maybe because someone who is clearly loved by his daughter cannot be all bad. Despite our reluctant sympathy for the narrator, we are still able to condemn his actions, the rapes, the killing, his unhealthy jealously. There are enough moral anchors in the text, for the reader not to lose sight of what is right and wrong. In Time’s Arrow, on the contrary, the technical complexity of the novel confuses the reader morally. The inversion of time and logic, as well as the doubling of the narrator, turn the universe op Time’s Arrow upside down. Everything needs to be decoded, even a simple act like eating. However, as Harris remarks,
by progressing backwards, the narrative style in and of itself comments on the Nazi’s paradoxical version of “progress” – that is revitalization of archaic myths in the name of national renewal. (489)
Nevertheless, Time’s Arrow use of Nazi rhetoric is rendered ironic by the doubling of the narrator: Tod’s pre-war self “surfaces from its latent period as Tod's backwards journey through life reactivates the counter-intuitive (or Nazi-intuitive) discursive mode” (Harris 490). The irony lies in the fact that, in the backward evolution of time, Tod’s pre-war self (the narrator) experiences the
1 Lev’s violent twin brother and the narrator’s half-brother
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normal situation as counter-intuitive, because when cause and effect are reversed, healing looks like hurting. Therefore it is up to the reader to perform “a critical act of reading” and to decipher the situation which the narrator obstinately misreads by insisting on interpreting all actions “through the lens of forward time” (McGlothlin 223). As, Martínez-Alfaro points out, “the reader has to do all the morality” (143). Despite, his moral code, the narrator is essentially unreliable, because “he is not dealing honestly with us: sometimes he is a sophisticated observer who knows his situation, while at other times he plays the uncomprehending innocent” (Slater 146). Recalling Lifton’s theory, doubling enables one part-self to shift responsibility and guilt towards the other, isolated self. However, Harris claims that, as a consequence “no one is guilty” (495):
Each part-self that exist within Tod gets to see whatever it does, or does not, want to see: the narrator blames Tod for committing inhumane acts while his double renders these same acts as being in the best interest of humanity. … While moments of grief or confusion manage to surface in the narrative, they are always compensated for via the alarming psychological capacity for dissociation. (Harris 496)
This is the crux of the problem in Time’s Arrow. The combination of doubling and backward narration is like a house of mirrors: deeply disorientating, and distorting. However, once the reader has decoded the system of backward narration, it becomes clear that what the narrator sees as harm, is in fact healing, and that the preternatural purpose of dreaming a race is the extermination of the Jews. It is harder to confront the issue of responsibility and guilt, as neither the protagonist, nor Tod seem to acknowledge their part in the Holocaust. Nevertheless, as Harris writes, the capacity for psychological dissociation does not absolve them (496). On the contrary, it is up to the narrator to condemn their actions, even if they do not.
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Conclusion
In his book Bloodlands, Timothy Snyder writes,
Since life gives meaning to death, rather than the other way around, the important question is not: what political, intellectual, literary or psychological closure can be drawn from the fact of mass killing? Closure is a false harmony, a siren song masquerading as a swan song. The important question is: how could (how can) so many lives be brought to a violent end? (387)
In my analysis of Amis’ four perpetrator-focussed texts, I have attempted to show that the study of the perpetrator is a vital part of the answer to Snyder’s question. When trying to understand the cultural traumas of our past, and when trying to conceive the evil of them, the perpetrator’s voice cannot be excluded from the equation. On the contrary, understanding evil begins with recognizing the perpetrator in a shared human sphere. While the objections and fears concerning perpetrator representations are not wholly unjustified, Amis’ work shows that there are many ways to depict a perpetrator, and even to inhabit a perpetrator’s consciousness, without devaluating the victim’s trauma and suffering. Amis also proves that, even when a perpetrator is the centre of consciousness, the (critical) reader is still able to see through the perpetrator and make his own moral judgement. Moreover, texts such as Time’s Arrow and “The Last Days of Muhammad Atta” appropriate the perpetrator’s logic, but then proceed to undermine it. Instead of devaluating the victim’s suffering, perpetrator representations add a dimension of deeper understanding to it, as they offer explanations, fictional or factual, for how ordinary people came to commit atrocities to their fellow human beings. This makes representations of the perpetrator an undeniable enrichment to the study of trauma and trauma literature. However, perpetrator representations are not a panacea for all mysteries that still surround the unfathomable tragedies of the twentieth and the twenty-first century. The only question to which perpetrator representations purport to formulate an answer is the question of how. As Koba the Dread illustrates, the answer question of “zachto?” remains out of reach.
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