The Double-Headed Arrow of Trauma: The Morally Traumatised Perpetrator in Martin Amis’s Time’s Arrow

Martin Amis’s Time’s Arrow (1991) gave rise to much controversy when it came out, for this novella revolves around a traumatised Nazi doctor exiled in the US whose life is narrated in a disorienting reverse chronology by what would seem to be his own dissociated conscience. Despite the abundant academic publications on this experimental narrative, such as those that read it as a posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) piece of fiction, the origin of the protagonist’s damaged psyche and the diverse symptoms he suffers from have not yet been explored from the viewpoint of perpetrator trauma, a moral-related syndrome distinct from PTSD that affects victimisers haunted by remorse. Drawing on trauma theory and the recently developed concepts of perpetration-induced traumatic stress (PITS) and moral injury, this article aims to contribute to the scholarly conversation on Amis’s novella by arguing that its narrative voice, backwards temporality, intertextuality and recurrent motifs perform the perpetrator/protagonist’s moral-based trauma provoked by an acute sense of shameful guilt and the fear of being discovered. The article concludes by suggesting that, through this staggering work, Amis gives readers not only an opportunity to actively remember and reflect on the Nazi genocide but also an insight into trauma from an unusual but necessary perspective.

Purpose

Purpose can be understood in various ways. For Aristotle, purpose is the ‘final cause’ of a phenomenon, its end. Does the Universe have a purpose? It certainly has a history and a direction, and Arthur Eddington coined the phrase ‘time’s arrow’ to indicate its direction. The fine-tuning that the Universe manifests has given rise to various interpretations of the anthropic effect. For biologists, even the simplest organisms seem to manifest purpose, although they cannot act intentionally. Humans (setting aside very young children and those who are severely mentally incapacitated) can act intentionally and can make choices. Someone with a firm religious conviction may see the purpose of their life as responding appropriately to what they believe God is calling them to do.

The Arrow of Time: Can Time be Reversed?

In the year 1928, Arthur Eddington, a British physicist, first introduced the word “time’s arrow” to physics. He believed that the arrow of time is vividly recognized by consciousness and insisted that the reversal of this arrow would render the physical world nonsensical. It is widely known that the laws of physics remain unchanged under the combination C, P, and T and that the laws of physics do not change with the flow of time but that is not the case under the operation T alone. This paper focuses on mainly three arrows of time, the thermodynamic arrow of time, the psychological arrow of time and the cosmological arrow of time and discusses the reversal of the arrow of time and its implications.

Multiscale Temporal Irreversibility of Streamflow and Its Stochastic Modelling

We investigate the impact of time’s arrow on the hourly streamflow process. Although time asymmetry, i.e., temporal irreversibility, has been previously implemented in stochastics, it has only recently attracted attention in the hydrological literature. Relevant studies have shown that the time asymmetry of the streamflow process is manifested at scales up to several days and vanishes at larger scales. The latter highlights the need to reproduce it in flood simulations of fine-scale resolution. To this aim, we develop an enhancement of a recently proposed simulation algorithm for irreversible processes, based on an asymmetric moving average (AMA) scheme that allows for the explicit preservation of time asymmetry at two or more time-scales. The method is successfully applied to a large hourly streamflow time series from the United States Geological Survey (USGS) database, with time asymmetry prominent at time scales up to four days.

Time’s arrow reversed? The (a)symmetry of language change

This paper analyses language users’ participation in real-time grammatical change. The question addressed is the extent to which individuals continue using both the incoming form and the recessive, outgoing form as opposed to using one of them categorically. Variable grammars are related to the sociolinguistic discussion of whether language change is a generational or a communal process. Ultimately, they also raise the question of the predictability of real-time language change