Times arrow or The nature of the offense Martin Amis

Both World Wars in the twentieth century served succeeding generations as markers of a major break with the past. The time before each war was quickly mythologized as a golden age, a time of innocence irretrievably lost. The exaggerated sense of a complete rupture with previous history can be equally evidenced in D. H. Lawrence’s famous declaration, “It was in 1915 the old world ended” (Kangaroo 240), and Martin Amis’s conviction that with the 1941 German invasion of Russia “a line is crossed,” a line between civilization and savagery (Koba the Dread 201). The historical accuracy of these assertions is less significant than the use to which they were put by postwar generations. In the case of novelists the sense of a cataclysmic break with the past frequently gave rise to an apocalyptic sense in the present; this in turn made them feel the need to seek out modes of narration that corresponded more closely to contemporary feelings of confusion and anxiety. In particular, the chronological imperative of realist narrative seemed irrelevant to a generation for whom the present was so determined and fractured by the immediate past. As Italo Calvino explained it in 1979, since “the dimension of time has been shattered” in the postwar world, novels could only represent love or thought “in fragments” in an era when time “seem[s] to have exploded”