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Social Semiotics
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Myths of reversal: backwards

narratives, normative schizophrenia
and the culture of causal agnosticism
Robbie B. H. Goh

Department of English Language and Literature , National

University of Singapore , Singapore
Published online: 05 Jun 2008.

To cite this article: Robbie B. H. Goh (2008) Myths of reversal: backwards narratives, normative
schizophrenia and the culture of causal agnosticism, Social Semiotics, 18:1, 61-77, DOI:
10.1080/10350330701838910
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10350330701838910

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Social Semiotics
Vol. 18, No. 1, March 2008, 61
77

RESEARCH ARTICLE
Myths of reversal: backwards narratives, normative schizophrenia and
the culture of causal agnosticism
Robbie B. H. Goh*

Downloaded by [Ume University Library] at 08:31 18 November 2014

Department of English Language and Literature, National University of Singapore, Singapore

There have been a variety of cultural texts that have demonstrated their license to
treat time and causal order differently from the common linear conception, and
this has been particularly true in a late industrial, late capitalist and digital era.
From modernist texts that attenuate the subjective narrative point of view far
beyond common experiences of time and space, to playfully schizoid texts that
celebrate their narrative power over everyday order, to speculative fictions that
focus on space
time disruptions and inversions, and a variety of other texts in
between, there has been a marked proliferation of narratives that revise older
assumptions about linear time and causality. These proliferating texts offer a
narratological mediation of reality
the interpellation of the reader-viewer into
non-linear, disruptive, schizoid conceptions and experiences of space
time and
causal relations
which move us towards a schizophrenic consciousness that has
become normative in contemporary culture. This is nowhere as significant, and as
complex, as in the reverse narratives of a well-known novel like Martin Amiss
Times Arrow, and films like Christopher Nolans Memento and Gaspar Noes
Irreversible. Seemingly thought-provoking revisions of social traumas (genocide,
urban decay, endemic violence and xenophobia) that might at one level place
causality and social consequences under greater scrutiny, at another level they
exhibit what has increasingly emerged as an ideology of causal agnosticism,
rehearsing various forms of abrogation of ethical consciousness and social
responsibility.
Keywords: reverse narratives; Times Arrow; Memento; Irreversible; cultural
schizophrenia; causal agnosticism

That must suck. All . . . backwards . . . Well, like . . . you gotta pretty good idea of what
youre gonna do next, but no idea what you just did. (Memento, dir. Christopher Nolan)
Space and time are situations of instances in phrase universes. (Lyotard 1989, 372)

Towards a schizochronic narratology

The rise of modern (industrial, urban and capitalist) society is also accompanied by
the gradual rise of anti-mimetic theories of art and narrative. While literary theory
has always (to various extents, and in various ways) celebrated the power of the
*Email: Ellgohbh@nus.edu.sg
ISSN 1035-0330 print/1470-1219 online
# 2008 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/10350330701838910
http://www.informaworld.com

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R.B.H. Goh

fictional text to transcend the constraints of extra-literary experience, the

pronounced move away from mimetic narratives (including their more or less
chronological ordering of events) to markedly subjectivist narratives (with increasingly violent contortions of time and space) accelerates at the end of the eighteenth
century with the romantic movement (Abrams 1953, 21
26, 53). William Wordsworths well-known Preface to the 1800 edition of the Lyrical Ballads is in a way a
manifesto of the priority of subjective perception over objective (extra-subjective)
reality: the emphasis spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings as they are
modified and directed by our thoughts thus becomes a claim for the fundamental
power of poetic perception to transform experience, a notion that was close to
Wordsworths scientific interest in and experiments on the nature of perception
(Wordsworth 1969, 157; Byatt 1989, 94). Wordsworths notion of mental and poetic
spots of time, expressed in book XI of The Prelude and in other writings, conceives
of these spots as instances in which the mind/Is lord and master, and that outward
sense/Is but the obedient servant of her will; this psychological process, in which
present time and space are over-ridden by a joint production of past fact and
present feeling, although used by Wordsworth in part for conservative and
traditionalist purposes (to affirm the priority of cultural habits over socio-political
change), also points forward to more recent psychological transformations of time

space experiences (Wordsworth 1970, 213; Chandler 1984, 207, 210). The more
notable literary examples and variants include James Joyces Ulysses, which despite
its title concerns itself not with epic time and events, but with all the little details of a
single day of quotidian bourgeois life drawn out over the course of a massive
narrative; H. G. Wells The Time Machine, which provides a quasi-scientific
paraphernalia to facilitate the exploration of human anxieties through time-travel;
Virginia Woolfs Orlando, whose central (transgendered) character experiences only a
couple of decades of biological time even as more than three centuries transpire
around him/her; and Kurt Vonneguts Slaughterhouse 5, written (according to the
authors blurb on the titlepage) somewhat in the telegraphic schizophrenic manner
of tales, and involving a World War II veteran who is spastic in time, who has
gone to sleep a senile widower and awakened on his wedding day, and has walked
through a door in 1955 and come out another one in 1941 (Vonnegut 1979, 23).
The political intent of such chronologically disruptive narratives intensifies in
postmodern thought and writing. Bakhtins theory of the novel postulates that the
chronotope or time
space embodied in each novel is inherently a response to
the specific social and geo-political moment in which the novel occurs: thus the
completely unrestricted, universal chronotope of human life in Rabelaiss writing
signals the approaching era of great geographical and astronomical discoveries,
while the works of bourgeois novelists like Stendhal and Balzac use the chronotope
of the salon to indicate the atmosphere and movement of socio-political intrigues
typical of restoration France (Bakhtin 1981, 84
85, 241
247). Accordingly, a
postmodern chronotope
issuing out of the rupture of moral and cognitive
categories and the impossibility of history posed by the inconceivable collective
murder of Auschwitz, the geographical speculation leading from European
colonialism into the post-realist modernist sensibility, the rapidly accelerating
speed of technologies of communication and transportation
would be one that
struggles to express the intensely dislocating experience of time
space encountered

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by the subject in the late capitalist, digital era (Lyotard 1989, 364
365; Said 1993, 5,
227; Virilio 1997, 10
11; 1998, 183).
At the level of everyday experience, this post-realist sensibility is rehearsed in
cultural texts that emphasize the normative experience of space
time dislocations.
The mass proliferation of recording technologies (the ubiquitousness of video
cassette recorders and digital video recorders, the diffusion of recording devices such
as home video cameras, traffic cameras and surveillance cameras throughout the
urban landscape) creates a popular culture of reviewing (including rewinding, and
forward-searching and backward-searching) taped programmes. This ritualistic
rehearsal of viewing visual narratives in reverse, in fits and starts (at normal and
fast-forward speeds), piecemeal (with pauses for trips to the kitchen or toilet), and
outside the scheduled programme slots, creates not only a viewerly expectation of
non-linear narrative movements created by the individuals exercise of the
technology, but also a disorienting consciousness in which a texts space
time cues
(e.g. dated advertisements, news briefs and other references to events and objects that
may already be past or removed) invoke a textual reality that (upon the viewers
realization that he/she is watching a taped programme) turns out to be unreal. Reruns of a popular television series create a similar dislocation whereby a series
faithful viewership is taken back to an earlier space
time in the world of that
programme, their enjoyment of the earlier events jarring with their knowledge of the
series ending and the later fate of characters. The proliferation of digital recording
and desktop editing, together with shareware and Internet sites such as YouTube and
MySpace, give individuals the power to re-sequence familiar visual texts (music
videos, film segments, home movies, public domain videos), not only superimposing
different images and accompanying music, but also changing the sequence of events,
removing sections, creating loops of repeated sequences, and so on.
In an expected act of marketing and ideological correspondence (and also as a
playfully self-conscious move), programmed visual culture accordingly pre-empts the
individuals reviewing power, incorporating such sequential dislocations into its own
texts. The more pervasive examples include: speculative fiction texts, with their
exploration of space
time abnormalities and their consequences for human action
(one well-known episode of Star Trek: Next Generation features characters
repeatedly replaying one scene, as they and the viewers gradually come to the
realization that they are caught in an enemys space
time loop; many other texts
feature sequential abnormalities as a result of time travel, and chronological

biological regression caused by warps, fissures or rents in the universes space
time
ordering); humanistic comedy, with its narratives of repetition as a means of calling
attention to emotional
psychological disturbances or failings (Groundhog Day,
various film and television versions of Dickens A Christmas Carol); television
shows that feature reality or homemade videos, and that often replay key
sequences in a loop or reverse them, in order to exaggerate the comedy or impact
(some of the better-known shows include Totally Outrageous Things Caught on Tape
and Now See This); and programmes (including their edited promotional trailers)
featuring violent contact like American Football, Rugby and Professional Wrestling,
which feature not only replays of key sequences, but also repeated loops (especially
to emphasize violent impact, or else to encourage armchair-refereeing of fouls and
dubious calls) and even backward-motion rewinds.1

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Collectively, such popular texts, technologies and experiences create a hyperpresent in which our consciousness of time, if it surfaces at all, is in an
unrecognizable form that destroys the linear sequence of past, present and future
with the logic of the trace which understands the components of any sequence as
constitutive of each other (Heise 1997, 21, 26; Currie 1998, 78). Not to be confused
with the present time (an instant that only acquires significance as one part of the
linear, causal
logical flow of time and events), the hyper-present is a rupture in
chronological progression, an absolute foregrounding of the dazzling materiality of
the signifier (the ostentatious looping or reversing of signifying segments), with an
attendant disintegration of . . . signification (Woods 2004a, 3; 2004b, 3). The sense
of a hyper-present is not merely confined to postmodern theorizing and the
intentionally self-conscious texts it deals with, but has proliferated into popular
culture and everyday experience to become a normative consciousness.
In a sense, this kind of chrono-schizophrenia
the sense of the normative nature
of linear chronological disruptions, replaying loops and achronic overlays
is an
extension of the normative schizophrenia, the schizo as Homo natura and as
universal producer, which Deleuze and Guattari (1984, 4, 7, 346) see as an
inherent part of capitalist processes and the totalizing great flow of its values and
ideologies. Not confined to the narrowly psycho-pathological definition
although it
does resemble the failure of logic, customary associations, intent and the
organization that usually accompanies human thought of the clinical definition
(Tamminga and Medoff 2000, 339)
cultural schizophrenia in this sense is an
inability for the everyday subject to step outside of and separate himself or herself
from the totalizing and disorienting processes of capitalist flows (not merely of
money, but also of related technologies, timing, images and other aspects). It is
the ubiquitous rupture or intrusion of capitalisms fantasized relations into the
real world, to the extent that there can no longer be a reality outside those
simulations (Deleuze and Guattari 1984, 24
25). Drawing on Kevin Lynchs analysis
of urban life, Jameson (1991, 51) sees this overwhelming urban totality as
producing schizophrenic Homo natura by the force of its uncontainable and
incomprehensible complexity and pace.
Chrono-schizophrenia, as one aspect of cultural schizophrenia, normalizes
dislocations and reversals of chrono-linearity, multiple narrative
causal lines and
related effects, presenting it all as the totalizing and inevitable nature of
contemporary lived experience. In the process, one of its ideological thrusts is to
review the notions of causality and consequences that are so closely dependent upon
strict linear order. In the various guises of postmodern jouissance (including the
linguistic response to historical traumas such as Auschwitz, and the liberating
populism of fast-paced communicative and imaging-editing technologies), such
chrono-schisms also rehearse the breakdown of causal analysis, thus reinforcing
certain aspects of capitalisms laxity and license concerning actions and consequences. This change in the subjects perception of signifiers
no longer orderly and
in linear progression, but in a dazzling and perpetually confusion array of
simulacra that come in lieu of any concrete signified reality behind them
has
also been linked to the other technocratic ideologies (such as those of the cyborg,
teleportation, and some aspects of digital technology that offer dramatically
speeded-up virtual communications and visuals) linked with the posthuman
condition (Bendle 2002; Woods 2004b).

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Perhaps the texts that most closely evince the cultural and ideological
ramifications of chrono-schizophrenia are those that attempt the difficult and
spectacular reverse narrative throughout the entire text. Better-known examples
include Martin Amis 1991 novel Times Arrow, a holocaust story that is also a story
of contemporary life, in which the protagonist (a former concentration camp doctor)
struggles through history as he deals (or fails to deal) with memory, guilt and fear;
Christopher Nolans 2000 film Memento, dealing with the irruption of social violence
into the domestic sphere and the individuals psyche; Gaspar Noes 2003 film
Irreversible (in many respects a re-writing of Memento), also dealing with urban
violence and decay; and the band Coldplays 2002 music video The Scientist,
primarily an exploration of individual loss and guilt, but invoking overtones of
anxieties about fast-paced contemporary urban life.2 These texts have in common the
use of reverse narratives (with slightly different nuances appropriate to each
medium, narrative form and set of subthemes) to defamiliarize the reader/viewers
sense of linear time, narrative and causality. Of course a reverse narrative cannot
truly and in every sense of the word be entirely back-to-front: if nothing else, the
normal syntactic order of syllables, words and even sentences have to be observed, in
order for the texts to be at all intelligible. In actuality, reverse narratives usually
follow the normal chronological
causal order within defined segments of the
narrative, although the order in which these segments are arranged reflect a reversal
of the expected chronological
causal order. However, a reverse narrative differs from
other texts that use elements of chrono-schisms
repetitive loops, rewound
sequences, space
time jumps and the like
in that the trope of reversal is central
to and governs the entirety of the text, rather than being only one of the texts themes
and narrative elements. As such, they throw particular emphasis on issues of
memory, identity, causality, blame, guilt and fatalism, particularly as they relate to
the anxieties of late capitalist urban existence.
Martin Amiss Times Arrow: the hollow man, reading-as-play, and the semi-final
solution
For Lyotard (1989, 365, 368, 375), Auschwitz represented a violent rupture to human
history, language and experience
the end of the finite
with a corresponding
breakdown in the texture of the text, a disjoining or unlinking of the
conventions that form the phrase games of language and narrative. Martin Amiss
literary response to this postmodern sensibility, his 1991 novel Times Arrow, deals
with the Auschwitz horror via a reverse narrative that sees the protagonist
narrator,
Tod Friendly, regress through earlier phases of his life (including one as a Nazi
doctor named Odilo Unverdorben), thus beginning with his death and ending
with his birth. Bizarre reversals becoming alienating effects that allow the reader to
piece together something of the reality of Auschwitz, while nevertheless being to a
certain extent immured from a direct encounter with that horror. The results are
often darkly comic and unsettling:
In the Sprinkleroom the patients eventually get dressed in the clothes provided, which,
though seldom very clean, are at least always pertinently cut. Here, the guards have a
habit of touching the women. Sometimes
certainly
to bestow a jewel, a ring, a small
valuable. But at other times quite gratuitously. Oh, I think they mean well enough. It is

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done in the irrepressible German manner: coltishly, and with lit face. And they only do it
to the angry ones. And it definitely has the effect of calming them down. (Amis 1991,
130)

Reversing the temporal order of events in this manner also reverses the causal order,
and thus playfully suggests the revising of the morality and consequences of actions.
As Menke (1998, 963, 968) observes, the narratorial soul of Odilo has made sense of
the Holocaust, but only at the expense of the intelligibility of everything else; the
ironic narrative doubling in which evil can be narrated with a relatively straight face
creates a compartmentalized consciousness that speaks with a diligent but futile
consistency that is positively quixotic. This is particularly ironic in relation to Tods
calling as a doctor: in a chapter entitled Because I am a healer, everything I do
heals, the depressing effects of modern urban violence as witnessed in a hospital
A&E room are ludicrously overturned: it is the hospital (where doctors appear to
cause violence to patients) that is the atrocity-producing situation, and the city
that will have to heal them, with knifeblade and automobile, nightstick, gunshot
(Amis 1991, 93, 102). Yet the narrators comic observations are still close to the
truth, anticipating the later part of the novel (which is earlier in Odilos life) in
which the Nazi doctors will in fact function as atrocity-producing agents. The
narrators conception of violence, apparently laughable and dismissable, turns out to
be a painfully true echo of a violence that is endemic in cities as well as in human
history.
In all these category mistakes, blurring of consciousnesses and socio-historical
echoes and allusions, there are clear resemblances to multiple-personality disorder,
and to the schizophrenic conditions of heightened perception and being cut off
from succession in time, which for Heise (1997, 27) are characteristic of
postmodern pathology. The narrator
ostensibly Tod Friendly, yet also notTod
constantly struggles with his identity, which is most noticeably manifested in
the use of pronouns:
But I was one now, fused for a preternatural purpose.
Your shoulderblades still jolted to the artillery of the Russians as they scurried
eastward . . ..
But it isnt good for him [Tod] to be so alone. His isolation is complete. Because he
doesnt know Im here. (Amis 1991, 22, 124)

The narrator at times also describes an experiential confusion in which he seems

simultaneously to be inhabiting Tods thoughts and emotions and yet to be detached
and distinct from them:
Tod Friendly. I have no access to his thoughts
but I am awash with his emotions. I am
a crocodile in the thick river of his feeling tone. And you know what? Each glance, each
pair of eyes, even as they narrow in ingenuous appraisal, draws a bead on something
inside him, and I sense the heat of fear and shame. Is that what Im heading towards?
(Amis 1991, 15)

Tod/Odilo, in various phases of his life, also has identities corresponding to the
names John Young and Hamilton de Souza, in various parts of the world
a
multifariousness that can only be sustained because the narrators disorienting,

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backward-moving consciousness allows no vantage point from which to impose

conventional moral and psychological judgments.
Like the rewound segments of key moments in sporting events, which ostensibly
seek certitude in the analysis and judgement (refereeing) of the game, but effectively
invoke mass armchair analyses and judgements that only throw the decision into
dispute and contention, Amiss backwards novel has an ostensible moral point
the
nature of the offense (as Amis explains in the Afterword, borrowing a phrase from
Primo Levi, who is one of the inspirations of Amiss novel; Amis 1991, 176) of the
Nazi programme, simultaneously reptilian and logistical
but effectively throws
that moral point into confusing and distracting side-plays. The readers attentive
energies are inevitably expended in working out the correct causal order of the
events the narrator reverses with distracting naivete, in working out the puns and
word-games (some of them bilingual), and in noting and making sense of the
multiple doubles and echoes throughout the narrative. Thus Tods name, which is
German for death, works as grim foreshadowing (in the novels narrative order) or
echo (in the actual causal order) of Odilos work in the extermination camps; yet it
jars against the inanely ironic innocence of Odilos last name Unverdorben, which
means untainted or uncorrupted. In between the jarring contrast of such grim
and inane connotations stands the simple but no less distracting pun, as when the
narrator offers the florid metaphor that he is a crocodile in the thick river of [Tods]
feeling tone (Amis 1991, 15), the latter part of crocodile of course a nearhomophonous prefiguring of Odilos name. To take such connections one step
further, as we are encouraged to do, the crocodile Odilo links to Amiss own
Afterword characterization of the Nazi programme as reptilian.
Narrative puns, allusions and bilingual word-play might be seen as the lexical
version of the doubling or multiplication that goes on at various other levels in the
novel, and which is one aspect of the postmodern falling-off of distinctions in
the novel as a whole (Menke 1998, 966, 977). More fundamental than the multiple
identities that Tod assumes in the course of his life is the impossibility of drawing
strict lines of demarcation between identities, personae and voices. This is
particularly evident not only with the confusion of the consciousnesses of the
narrator and Tod, but also at the junctions of the different phases of Tods life:
We set sail for Europe in the summer of 1948
for Europe, and for war. Well, I say we,
but by now John Young was pretty much on his own out there. Some sort of 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 1991, 107)

Again it is the disorienting nature of the reverse narrative and chronology that
dislocates personae and consciousnesses, creating a kind of indistinguishable wash
(taking up the narrators own metaphor of the river of feeling; Amis 1991, 15) of
different feelings, moods and tones.
The novel thus enacts at several levels the thickening multiplication of mentalities
and consciousnesses which can be compared with schizophrenic continguity
disorders. In a sense, the whole novel is premised on revision, on the act of
incorporating different narratives and texts into its being: Amis says in his Afterword
that much of the inspiration for his novel came from Auschwitz survivor and author
Primo Levi
not only Levis writings, but also his suicide in 1987, which was itself a
kind of chrono-schism, as if the suicide 40 years later was a delayed response to

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Auschwitz, when the efficacy of his words was no longer sufficient to delay his
death (Gambetta 1999). Some of the many other literary sources Amis lists include
Robert Jay Liftons The Nazi Doctors, a certain short story by Isaac Bashevis Singer
and a certain paragraph
a famous one
by Kurt Vonnegut, as well as numerous
other writers of fiction and non-fiction (Amis 1991, 172
176). In addition, as Menke
(1998, 977) observes, the relationship between narrator and protagonist in Times
Arrow is a replaying of the relationships of doubling that feature so markedly in
many of Amiss other novels, so that in a real sense Times Arrow also re-writes
Amiss own novels. Whether re-writing Levis experiences as Auschwitz internee or
chrono-schizo suicide, Levis other works, Vonneguts Slaughterhouse 5, the
narratives of the many other writers, or even his own texts, Amiss novel overtly
invokes literary echoes and links that (in conjunction with the backwards narrative
and word-play) create a reading experience that fosters an attenuation of consciousness that stretches towards infinite replay. Within this readerly schizophrenia, event,
consequences and morality are scooped out, emptied by the readers narrativeinduced inability to take a position and draw things to a close. More than at the
thematic level, it is the narratological and linguistic re-play and extenuations of the
novel which rehearse a suspended and seamless consciousness co-terminous with
the violent anxieties of history and modern life.
Christopher Nolans Memento and Gaspar Noes Irreversible: urbanism, schizophrenic
consciousness, endemic decay
Classic Hollywood cinema, with its continuity editing and emphasis on clear-cut
actions played out within a definite (formulaic) time span, tends to reinforce the
chrono-linear order to a greater degree than most other narrative forms
hence the
tendency for moral simplifications (the revenge story, battles between moral
polarities, variations on the theme of just desserts such as the triumph of the
underdog and the rags-to-riches story), which reinforce the popular narrative
formula and facilitate viewer identification with the good side and its inevitable
triumph. Reverse filmic narratives such as Nolans Memento (2000) and Noes
Irreversible (2003) seem to disrupt this chrono-linear order, ostensibly to overthrow
any simplistic morality and pat representation of contemporary existence. Both these
dark and violent portrayals of contemporary (American and French, respectively)
urban life work against the cathartic effects of the revenge story, in the process
unsettling viewers expectations and assumptions about the nature of evil and the
appropriate response to it.
Memento features a protagonist, Leonard Shelby, who suffers from short-term
amnesia, brought about by the psychological and physiological trauma of a violent
assault in their home in which his wife is raped and murdered (or so he believes,
although there is a twist). Driven by the consuming desire for revenge on their
attackers, he is at the same time severely hampered by his inability to remember
anything that transpires the day before, relying on instant photographs and hastily
scribbled notes (including those he inscribes on his body) in order to construct a
fragile simulacrum of memory and significance. The film, which unfolds in segments
arranged in reverse chronological
causal order (although of course the normal order
is observed within each segment), first shows Leonard killing Teddy (an associate
who is also a corrupt cop manipulating Leonards condition for his own purposes),

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69

believing him to be his wifes murderer. The viewer is only subsequently allowed to
see that Leonard may already have killed the real murderers much earlier and that,
rather than confronting this (and losing his raison detre), in a calculated moment he
fabricates the evidence that at another time will give him all the reason he needs to
kill Teddy:

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Do I lie to myself to be happy?

He looks up at Teddys sedan and copies down the licence number, which is: SG13 7IU.
In your case, Teddy . . . yes, I will. (Nolan 2001, 224)

At the same time, he is surrounded by unscrupulous characters who exploit his

condition: the crooked cop Teddy who lines his pockets from drug deals and tricks
Leonard into acting as his executioner, the femme fatale Natalie who uses her body
to seduce Leonard into protecting and exacting revenge for her, even the motel
owner who rents him two rooms at the same time, and other low-life individuals
(drug dealers, hookers, bums) familiar from common depictions of modern urban
America. Leonards condition thus heightens the sense of danger and vulnerability of
someone living in a world of everyday violence and deception.
Leonards backward-moving odyssey is a kind of variation on the unreliable
narrative, one that cannot fail to implicate the viewer (who is entirely, because
chronologically, dependent upon the involuted narrative and has no basis for
forming an alternative opinion or position), and that has an epistemological moral at
its heart. As Leonard puts it,
. . . Memorys not perfect. Its not even that good. Ask the police; eyewitness testimony
is unreliable. The cops dont catch a killer by sitting around remembering stuff. They
collect facts, make notes, draw conclusions. Facts, not memories: thats how you
investigate. I know, its what I used to do. Memory can change the shape of a room or
the colour of a car. Its an interpretation, not a record. Memories can be changed or
distorted and theyre irrelevant if you have the facts. (Nolan 2001, 135)

Leonards pronouncement is of course ironic, a desperate need to cling to some

illusion of certainty, given his inability to trust anyone else or even himself. He
himself offers no consolation to the viewers need for interpretative clues and
reliability.
An anti-detective film, Memento is in many ways about the unreliability of all the
signs that one might encounter in contemporary urban life. Leonard prides himself

if not on his memory, then on his ability (based on a past life as an insurance
investigator) to uncover facts. In this his career is at least loosely paralleled by the
other inhabitants of his world: Teddy, who as a cop not only reads signs (to help
Leonard catch and kill his wifes second assailant) but also manipulates them to feed
Leonard a distorted version of the truth (in order to get him to kill Jimmy and thus
line Teddys pockets); Natalie, who reads signs and situations well enough to outplay Teddy at his own game and arrange for Leonard to turn on Teddy; even Mrs
Jankis, the long-suffering wife in Leonards interior narrative (whose story may be a
fiction of Leonards own construction), who plays games of detection and deduction
to try to solve her husbands short-term memory problem. The films narrative is also
dependent on a variety of urban signs, which provide both Leonard and the viewer
with what few clues there are to make sense of events: these signs range from the
tattoos that Leonard gets in seedy parlours and also executes on himself, the

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different features of the urban landscape (the derelict house in which Leonard kills
Jimmy, the several motel rooms with their distinct numbers that alone differentiate
them and indicate which part of the sequence of events we are watching,
the bathroom and its broken glass and transparent shower curtain that indicate
Leonards old apartment and mark the flashbacks to the assault on his wife),
photographs (not only those that Leonard compulsively snaps, but also Natalies
keepsake photograph of her and her boyfriend), even signs on bodies (Leonards
writing on his own body, the differences between Natalies face with the bruises that
Leonard inflicts and before those bruises are inflicted), license plates, beer mats,
match-books, scribbled napkins, and others.
The film also constantly suggests that Leonards cognitive, interpretative and
mnemonic processes might not be too far removed from a wider spectrum of human
conditions and activities. Leonard himself, perhaps partly out of self-conscious
defensiveness, constantly compares his actions with those performed by ordinary
people in everyday situations: seeing the messages tattooed on his body anew in the
presence of Natalie, he says Useful. You never write a phone number on your
hand?, while he explains away his need to take polaroids of everyone around him
with the commonplace something to remember you by (Nolan 2001, 138, 192). It
is suggested to the viewer that chronic alcoholism is one cause of short-term
memory loss (as is syphilis); that Leonards wifes trait of constantly re-reading her
favourite novel in some way parallels Leonards own endless repetition of events;
that, like Leonard, we all live according to a few scraps of paper like our laundry
list and . . . grocery list (Nolan 2001, 123, 163, 197). Most of all, in the three parallel
stories of Natalie
Jimmy, Sammy and his wife, and Leonard and his wife (each a
story of loss and the hopeless quest to accurately remember and thus recover the
loved one), the film suggests the universality of desire and longing, and the false
memory and self-deception they often engender.
Thus, despite the bizarre nature of Leonards condition, he is ultimately an
everyman figure, representing our sense of impotence in the face of the Byzantine
complexity and evil of modern life (Gargett 2002, 15). There is a sense in which he
might even be a paradigm of a Christian experience of betrayal, alienation and
corruption in a world so far fallen from the Kingdom of God
although in that
reading he ultimately shares in the worlds failure of ethical responsibility because
of his lack of the true Christian attributes of love and compassion for others
(Whitehouse 2004, 334, 338). Leonard is fully complicit in the processes of deception
and manipulation around him, deriving his lifes purpose by lying (among other
things, about the evidence against Teddy, the fate of his wifes real assailants, the real
cause of Natalies bruises, the real cause of his wifes death, the story of Sammy
Jankis) in order to justify his actions
facts that only emerge confusedly and
belatedly, due to the films peculiar narrative.
What makes the film different from any other film noir with a surprise ending is
not only the basic extensiveness of Leonards lies (which affect everything that he is
and does), but also the subtle and relentless intertwining of characters and their
actions, and the way in which the viewers sympathies and interpretative energies are
so closely aligned with Leonards, in large part because of the reverse narrative. By
necessitating the viewers throwing utter concentration on every object, no matter
how small (room numbers, license plates, models of cars, guns, beer mats, scraps of
paper
a theoretically limitless list, which only ends when the film does), the films

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reverse narrative effectively brings the viewer into Leonards frame of experience and
being; this precludes any abrupt detachment or disentanglement, even when
Leonards self-deceptions and complicity are revealed at the end of the film. The
films effect of images swept away by a succession of unwielding neologisms,
creating a world of unruly, seemingly haphazard dissonances (Gargett 2002, 26),
thus creates a schizophrenic obsession with smooth surfaces, a difficulty with
arriving at their significations and consequences, which effortlessly interpellates the
reader as well. In this light, Leonards reflexes
reading, re-reading and misreading
signs, faking responses to people and situations he cannot remember, longing to
recreate (but also to misconstrue) a past and loved one irrevocably lost
become
strategies of bending and revising everyday experience in order to survive, a trait
he shares not only with Natalie (as she observes), but also with Teddy and other
characters, and with a broader humanity:
I have to believe in the world outside my own mind. I have to believe that my actions still
have meaning, even if I cant remember them. I have to believe that when my eyes are
closed, the worlds still there . . ..
We all need mirrors to remind ourselves who we are. Im no different. (Nolan 2001, 225

226)

Like Memento, the equally violent and shocking (if not more, and dramatically,
so) Irreversible also uses the reverse narrative to condition viewers to accept the
ubiquitous horror of contemporary urban existence (here, in France rather than
Mementos USA). A reverse narrative here is reinforced by sense-deranging and
distortive camerawork and soundtrack, to amplify the viewers discomfort at both
a cognitive
causal as well as a physical (visual
aural) level (Shawhan 2002, 2). The
film begins with the casual confession of incest (with his daughter) by an ex-convict
in a seedy motel room, proceeds (backwards, through 12 segments that of course are
each internally causally and chronologically correct) to the beating and murder of
a pimp (nicknamed Tenia, tapeworm) in a gay bar, the search for Tenia by Marcus
and Pierre, the horrifying rape and beating of their friend Alex that occasions the
quest for vengeance, glimpses of the social and private lives of Marcus and Alex, and
finally ending at the beginning of Alexs day as she suspects and later confirms that
she is pregnant. The films title and narrative structure obviously play with the
notion of the irreversible consequences of human actions, with suggestions of
fatalism
the three friends have a conversation late in the film (i.e. early in the causal
chain of events, before the violence) in which they refer to ideas that the future is
already written . . . in premonitory dreams, and Alex also has a dream in which she
is in a tunnel that broke in two, evocative of her later rape and beating in an
underpass tunnel (Noe 2003).
Thus at one level, the films reverse narrative does nothing more than ironically
underline the deterministic agencies that seem to govern human life and happiness.
The scenes of graphically depicted violence (Marcuss beating by, and near-rape at the
hands of, Tenia; Pierres pounding of Tenias head to a pulp with a fire extinguisher;
Tenias sodomizing and beating of Alex) coming near the beginning of the film cast a
gloomy shadow over everything else, and the scenes of intimacy and private happiness
that take place earlier in causal
chronological terms, are unavoidably juxtaposed with
the images of (especially) the broken and battered bodies of Marcus and Alex
imposed from the beginning on the viewers consciousness. The reverse narrative thus

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gives other nuances to the films closing motto Le temps detruit tout (time destroys
everything). Not merely a carpe diem or memento mori reminding us of the fleeting
nature of human health and happiness, it also speaks to the destruction of any
illusion of human control over the events in our lives. The reverse narrative, by
removing the notion of an Aristotelian reversal of fortune or tragic flaw
some
pivotal choice, event or characteristic that then leads to, and to a certain extent makes
sense of, subsequent suffering
creates an inexorable sense of imprisoning
circumstances. The reverse narratives sense of the priority of tragic consequences
over both human action and human happiness thus destroys not only viewerly
expectations (of the usual chronological
causal flow), but also viewerly hopes of any
moral lesson that could lead to an Aristotelian catharsis of human pity and terror at
our contemporary existence.
There is thus another sense in which Le temps detruit tout
in the evocation of
the inescapable cage of contemporary urban societys ills, and the violence that this
inevitably causes. In a play of words, le temps refers not only to chronological time,
but also to the times, contemporary society and things as they are
it is after all true
that one sense of fate is social conditioning. The films backwards narrative
introduces, in characteristically disjointed and seemingly disconnected vignettes, a
number of signs of the violence, discontents and frustrations, sexual tensions, and
predation endemic throughout the urban society that Marcus and Alex occupy. The
gay joint in which Marcus and Pierre search for Tenia is no genteel or trendy gay
hangout, but a depraved and hellish club called Rectum (its darkly-lit and
labyrinthine cellars suggesting the tunnel in which Alex will later be shown to be
assaulted, as well as possibly suggesting the anal anatomy that features so
prominently here and elsewhere in the film), in which fetish-clad and bound men
beg strangers to fist them. Tenia himself is infamous as a brutal dominator, a
reaper-figure of this landscape of perversion and death, who also pimps she-males
(like Guillermo Nunez, who goes by the street name Concha, and whose abuse by
Tenia Alex inadvertently interrupts), and who is best described as omnisexual in his
willingness to rape men, women and (one suspects) anything in-between (Eyny and
Zubatov 2004, 2). Sodomy and extreme gay fetishism in this film are thus not only a
confusion and reversal of the proper orifice through which the sexual function was
meant to be performed (Eyny and Zubatov 2004, 4), but also the signs of a
pervasive and exploitative sexual economy operating throughout this society, in
which any available orifice is violently exploited (to the extent that the victim, like the
submissives in Rectum, may even come to welcome that exploitation) by those at
the top of this dark pyramid, and money and pleasure come to exploiters like Tenia
and other pimps, club-owners and incestuous father-figures. The ultimate displacement (or reversal), sodomy figures a larger urban culture in which pain and abuse
occur without logic, commensurability, or justification.
Sodomy thus comes to symbolize and connect with other symbolic acts of
exploitation and abuse in this society: from the drug market (Marcus at a party is
seen ostentatiously snorting a line of cocaine, the stuffing of the white substance into
his nasal orifice to his bodys detriment a kind of parallel to the act of rape), to social
indifference and callousness to ones fellow humans (Alexs rape takes place when she
inadvertently interrupts Tenias abuse of Concha and thus takes her place as Tenias
victim, while Concha quickly runs away indifferent to Alexs fate; and as Tenia rapes
Alex, the cameras point of view shows a pedestrian entering the tunnel in the

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background, only to retreat hastily when he sees the assault taking place). The
Rectum is the ultimate space of exploitative entry and human indifference, as the
submissives and dominants who casually fist and otherwise penetrate each other
watch with distant enjoyment (out of sight, man) as Tenia and Marcus fight and
then Pierre beats Tenia to a pulp with the fire extinguisher. It is hardly the only such
space in the film, however: the party to which Alex, Pierre and Marcus go is a similar
exploitative space, in which sex acts are performed (some, perhaps, for money) in
every available corner of the apartment, and ones entry and exit into this social
space is seemingly devoid of any qualifying human and social attachment to the host
or to any other participant
the one, intentionally touching, exception is Alexs
interactions with her pregnant friend.
An endemic racial problem also permeates the film, seen in the presence of
shadowy racial others (the she-male prostitute Guillermo Nunez, another Latinalooking prostitute called Donna, the black woman lounging on the street who directs
Alex to take the underpass, the Asian taxi driver
abused by Marcus as Fucking
Peking Duck
whose vehicle Marcus and Pierre steal, the two street toughs
who
appear to be ethnically Arab or North African) who, for a price, offer to help Marcus
and Pierre circumvent the law and get their revenge, and other such ethnically
marked denizens of this dark space. Ostensibly the criminal elements who have
penetrated French society only to contribute violence and callousness, they might
also (suggested by the films trope of a fundamental reversal of perspectives) be seen
at the same time as the penetrated bodies in this society, placed by society in
positions where they are repeatedly violated (by violent and exploitative pimps, irate
customers, errant passengers, the dominant and racist white French, the police, the
state, and others). Such social evils, like buggery (which is both a rape and a notrape, since it is an act that purports to penetrate and occupy an empty space, not the
legitimate genital space leading to the fruitful passage of conception, but the void
space of low scatological significance), are passed off as being of no social
consequence, involving shadowy marginal characters in the empty spaces of the
city. Yet these characters ultimately turn around (reverse) to penetrate other parts of
society that are ostensibly distinct from it.
This pervasive social violence and pathology is thus striking, and is only muted in
comparison with the overwhelmingly violent nature of the central episode of Alexs
assault. Once again, as in Times Arrow and Memento, it is the reverse narrative that
desensitizes us to these pervading problems of race, violence, sexual exploitation and
crime in this urban landscape. Presenting the viewer with the frantic and violent
quest for vengeance at the beginning of the film, before showing the cruel rape that is
the (at least ostensible) explanation of that quest, impels the viewers curiosity and
sympathies into following the main chain of events backwards to discover their cause
and provocation. In this process of frenetic recovery of meaning, other details tend to
become pushed to the margins; thus the viewer becomes implicated in the process of
marginalization and neglect which is responsible for these social evils.
It is after the climactic rape, when the viewers attentive energies are less on call,
that the disturbing details even in the private life of Alex and Marcus come to the
fore. The uncontrolled sexuality and drugs, the quarrels between Alex and Marcus
on the one hand, and Marcus and Pierre on the other, which are on display at the
party, are then traced backwards to prior (causally, but narratologically posterior)
tensions in the lives of the central characters. Marcuss constant baiting of Pierre (he

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R.B.H. Goh

refers to Pierre as Alexs fag friend, and tauntingly makes to grope his penis) is tied
to his barely-concealed sexual competitiveness with Pierre who is Alexs former
boyfriend; Marcuss ape-like aggression and sexuality result in a fight with Alex
that precipitates her leaving the party alone, which in turn exposes her to the assault.
The events earlier in the film
Marcuss hysterical violence as he abuses gays, shemales and ethnic minorities in the course of tracking down Alexs assailant
now
appear to be symptomatic of a deeper psychological problem in Marcus, tied to his
jealousy, arrested sexual development, and marked homophobia, which is possibly to
cover both a sense of inadequacy and a latent homosexuality. Indeed, the bedroom
scenes later in the film actually have Marcus play out a vestigial version of Tenias
assault on Alex: he growls to her in mock aggression that has more than a hint of
real desire, I want to fuck your ass, and their playful wrestling in the nude has
more than a suggestion of a primitive sexual aggression not too far removed from the
world of Rectum, the party, and the assault. In this world of pervasive and
primitive sexuality and violence, Alex is also complicit
she goes to the party in a
sheer, tiny and low-cut dress that reveals much of her breasts and the outlines of her
nipples (Tenia barely has to shift her clothing to rape and grope her), and mirrors the
role-playing to male sexualitys objectifying impulse seen in the whores scattered
liberally throughout the film when she tells Pierre that he failed to satisfy her sexually
because he could not let yourself go and wholeheartedly enjoy her as a sexual
plaything (Eyny and Zubatov 2004, 2
3).
Ultimately, then, the films reverse narrative delays the shocking revelation of a
dispersed and shared complicity in the central assault; initially so horrifying, by the
end of the film it can be seen to be mirrored by similar acts of sexual violence and
exploitation throughout society (including in the intimate domestic sphere), and to
be of a piece with the xenophobia, homophobia and brutality latent in urban man,
including in the revenger Marcus. The films title, in this context, points not just to
the irreversible nature of fated events, but also to the pointlessness of reversals
(which, as the films reverse narrative ironically demonstrates, are obviously possible,
at least at the narratological and interpretative levels), given the shared blame that
must be dispersed throughout this society. If le temps (the times) comprehensively analysed are ultimately responsible for this tragedy, then whether le temps
(time, including narrative time and sequences) are played out in the normal or
reverse order is immaterial, playfully ironic and provocative, rather than crucial.
Conclusion: causal agnosticism and narratives/technologies of replay
Despite their differences in terms of medium, date of appearance, particular settings
and other features, these key reverse narratives all revolve around certain crises of
modern existence: racial hatred, violence, callousness, rampant crime, drugs,
addictions, exploitative sexuality
all as they play themselves out in (chiefly)
nightmarish urban settings. Against these backdrops, each of the narratives key
episodes
the Final Solution, the brutal intrusion of urban violence into the
domestic sphere, a violent street assault and its equally violent consequences

becomes the catalyst for a kind of schizophrenic consciousness pervading the texts,
marked most spectacularly in narrative reversals that dislocate the normal relationships of sign
signified and cause
effect, but also in a kind of frenetic overload of
details and sensations that refuse to form a coherent picture of reality. In stark

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contrast to the direct linear development of Aristotelian plots, such narratives thus
constantly deflect and diffuse signification, away from the ostensible central episodes
and characters, and onto a wider social fabric whose limits and boundaries (in a
classic schizophrenic symptom) are nowhere clearly presented or discernible. In these
narrative processes, the reader
viewer also becomes involved in a schizophrenic
dislocation of the usual causal, chronological and signifying orders.
Reverse narratives of this nature thus empty out the signification and import of
the experience of urban life, as part of a diffusion of causality and responsibility for
the social evils endemic in that urban existence. In this sense they are complex textual
corollaries of an ideology of causal agnosticism that, while having its specific
meaning in the sphere of property law, is increasingly proliferating through other
aspects of contemporary society. Emerging in recent years as a recognition of the
inadequacy of formal rational law in dealing with the complex and unpredictable
interactions of law and capitalism, it is also seen in recent philosophical analyses of
the problematics of causality (Bursill-Hall 2002, 26; Von Mehren and Sawers 2002, 2,
4; Hoefer 2003, 1). It has also entered into counselling terminology, as a self-treating
exercise to promote empathy and forgiveness by overturning the instinct
towards fundamental attribution, and into the analysis of patient
caregiver
interactions where it may be used by the patient to deflect delicate questions of
causality in sensitive cases such as testing for HIV (Hoy 1999; Gill, Halkowski, and
Roberts 2001). In essence, the notion of causal agnosticism is simply an acknowledgement of the complex difficulties involved in assigning causality with any degree
of certainty. Although causal agnosticism often occurs in pragmatic discussions

that is, how to proceed (in matters of property law, patient care, recuperative therapy,
philosophical theories of effective strategies and other areas) in spite of the
muddying of causality and causal factors
the term already indicates a significant
resignation about the irrecoverable nature of causality within contemporary society.
The reverse narratives we have examined work very much within the culture of
causal agnosticism, ultimately undermining the moral and causal significance of
their key actions, not only by their primary ironic reversals that in various ways
(through the tropes of hollow absurdity, fundamental self-deceit, irrationally
displaced violence) empty out and dislocate plot and action, but also by their
diffusion of blame onto a wide urban-social landscape. Repeatedly rehearsing the act
of reversal and rewinding to a wide popular audience and readership, such texts
propagate a fundamental de-signification of everyday life and the events therein, just
as the clinical schizophrenics cognitive psychosis is accompanied by an asocial
withdrawal from surrounding people (Tamminga and Medoff 2000, 339). Technologies of reversal thus offer a different and gloomier perspective on the posthuman
condition normally associated with technocracy: as Bendle (2002, 49
51, 55)
observes, technology-fuelled pursuits of human perfection are marked by a
naivete akin to worship, failing to recognize the effects of disembodied
information and de-corporealizing humanity that accompany them. Woods
(2004b, 3, 4) similarly observes that postmodernism effects a troubling schizophrenic transcendence or erasure of the body and its social inscriptions, resulting in
the loss of subjective depth and critical distance. At stake in the cultures,
technologies and texts of reversal is not a postmodern jouissance tied to a posthuman
ideal, but rather the progressive normalization of a posthuman withdrawal from
causal, moral and cognitive judgments.

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Notes
1. Other notable backwards programmes include an episode of X-Files entitled Redrum
(which is murder spelt backwards), which features a judge re-enacting a part of his life
backwards; and segments in the final season of the comedy series Seinfeld (De Groot 2002).
Other key examples of fragmentary narratives involving the constant replaying of key
episodes include The Usual Suspects (1995, dir. Bryan Singer), Mulholland Drive (2001, dir.
David Lynch), and the German film Lola Rennt (1998, dir. Tom Tykwer).
2. There are also other texts that foreground issues and narratologies of reversal and chronoschisms in a rather more serious-minded way than the more fragmentary and playful
instances in much of the popular visual culture, without being reverse narratives in their
totality. These texts include Vonneguts Slaughterhouse 5; Chris Markers 1962 film La
Jetee, a post-apocalyptic science fiction movie interwoven with an individuals psychological exploration of memory, fate and loss; and Terry Gilliams 1995 film Twelve Monkeys,
essentially a remake of Markers film.

Notes on contributors
Robbie B. H. Goh is Associate Professor and Head of the Department of English Language
and Literature, National University of Singapore. His recent research focusses on Christianity
in Asia, cultural studies, and Anglophone writing in the Asian diaspora. Recent publications
include Asian Diasporas: Cultures, Identities, Representations (co-edited with Shawn Wong,
2004); Contours of Culture: Space and Social Difference in Singapore (2005); Christian Ministry
and the Asian Nation: The Metropolitan YMCA in Singapore (2006); and the forthcoming
edited volume Ethnic Nationalisms: Narration and Cultural Politics in Asian Societies from
Independence to Globalization

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