« Resilience, Narrative Attentiveness and Care(-giving): Martin Amis’s Time’s Arrow. »
Résumé
Contemporary fiction brings in a special knowledge (M.C Nussbaum) that Geoffrey H. Hartman has defined as “not-knowing knowledge,” and that is constitutive of the text’s clinical effectiveness or, at least, care—to take up A. Whitehead’s idea, of the process of “writing with care.” This article focuses on Martin Amis’s Time’s Arrow and on the novel’s double temporal structure according to which the character’s resilience is shown in reverse order, while the narrator’s follows chronological time. It argues that the contradictory or at least paradoxical temporality of such a limit-case fictional narrative duplicates that of Wordsworth’s “Immortality” ode, with its final allusion to trauma (“Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.”), and thereby the double temporality of afterwardsness as described by Freud and developed by Laplanche. It goes on to address the persistence of youthful resilience in the adult—an insight present in Hartman’s analyses—and the healing powers of afterwardsness that helps revisit the locus and nature of the original traumatic breakthrough so as to help narrativise it and open the way towards healing. Throughout, attention is paid to the issue of narrative ethics as encapsulated in the way in which fiction imposes a special, arrested rhythm on reading and addresses a vulnerable reader whose sympathy should not develop into over-identification (Hartman). The “not-knowing knowledge” of fiction guarantees not so much a knowledge as a shared experience that elicits a singular response to events caught in their singularity and thereby opens the door to healing.