■ Well, you old fogies, you were right after all. Martin Amis has exposed the younger generation for the evil and wretched creatures you always supposed them to be, and his only consolation for them is that, once over the hill of adolescence, they may perhaps improve … … It is obvious that Martin Amis and I come from widely different social circles, since I have never met people like Charles and Rachel. But it turns out that I don’t need to, for Amis has brought them entirely to life. They are so inarticulate and so inadequate that they are quite credible, and Amis has brought off the feat of satirizing his contemporaries while making them both funny and, in a bizarre way, moving. This is the case even with Charles, who is not a character one takes to one’s heart. He casts an extremely cold eye on sex and on life, in that order, and yet remains at the mercy of his moods.
Highway has the young man’s gift for dissecting appearances: accents and social mannerisms are relentlessly exposed, while his own become self-conscious in the extreme. The narrative is often very funny indeed, but I suspect that Martin Amis is getting the last laugh. Charles Highway is so much the archetypal youth, of a certain time and a certain class, that he is necessarily a comic creation. Sex is nowadays the vox populi [the voice of the people] and vox dei [the voice of God] if certain clergymen have anything to do with it, but for Highway it is a road paved with bad intentions. Although his descriptions are lurid and mechanical to the point of nausea, he has all the fascination and prurience of a naughty little boy who has been caught doing something nasty. There is, in fact, a little boy struggling to get out of Highway’s gawky frame - no more so than in the remarkable passages of adolescent angst [anxiety] and nostalgia. Martin Amis has fashioned a substantial character out of the rag-ends of our frantic contemporaries, and he has done so without any facile commitment to their means and ends.18 □
Both Ackroyd and Prince characterised The Rachel Papers as a novel about adolescence and Martin Amis himself, looking back on his first book from the 1980s in a conversation with John Haffenden, categorised it as belonging to the ‘genre’ of ‘the adolescent novel’. The discussion provides Amis, prompted by Haffenden’s questioning, with an opportunity to make two significant observations on his first novel - that Charles is a ‘nascent literary critic’ and that the novel, though comic, subverts the expectations associated with traditional comedy:
■ [John Haffenden:] The only novel you’ve written where irony wasn’t required, it seems, was The Rachel Papers, where Charles Highway is in a way a self-ironist. He has a literary self-consciousness which in other novels you might reserve for the authorial voice…
[Martin Amis:] Yes, the only twist I was conscious of giving to the adolescent novel - the genre to which The Rachel Papers belongs - is that Charles Highway is a budding literary critic, whereas the narrators of such novels are usually budding writers. During one particularly painful and messy episode with Rachel, for example, he says ‘[b]ut these are matters for the psychologist, not for the literary critic’ (p. 179). [The text of the novel in fact reads: ‘[w]hether The Second Incident was a result of The First Incident is a matter for the psychologists, not for the literary critic’.] He is a nascent literary critic, with all the worst faults of the literary critic - that comfortable distance from life. The only come-uppance he gets is from the university tutor who interviews him towards the end (pp. 209-11). Reading the book again after five years I saw with pleased surprise that the tutor was an author-figure, because all my other books have author-figures. He scolds Charles for his misuse of literature. Charles is a crude case of someone who tries to turn literature to his own advantage - using Blake, for example, to seduce girls. Critics do this too, in a sense, the bad ones.
… Would you go along with the idea that whereas the novel traditionally adjudicates right and wrong and punishes bad characters, literature actually offers false models for life, which is in reality more messy and less exact?
That’s certainly true. In a comic novel the rejected heroine would usually be given some good lines - lingering to set the record straight - but in The Rachel Papers Charles Highway says on the last page, ‘[s]he left without telling me a thing or two about myself, without asking if I knew what my trouble was, without providing any sort of comeuppance at all’ (pp.218-19). You can see the whole process of meting out apt punishments or improbable conversions becoming rather strained even in the nineteenth century, and indeed in Shakespeare …19 □
Haffenden’s observation about the ‘self-consciousness’ of Charles Highway is echoed by James Diedrick in his exploration of the novel as a ‘comedy of self-consciousness’. Diedrick’s account of The Rachel Papers is the most considered discussion of the novel to date, and the extract that follows covers a number of important aspects: the way in which Charles’s thoughts and actions do not originate wholly with himself but are shaped by a broader cultural logic; the novel’s intertextuality - its network of allusions to other texts; and its methods - of which intertextuality is one - of distancing Charles from his creator:
■ The Rachel Papers … is an audacious first novel. Written by a practicing literary critic about a would-be literary critic, it makes high comedy out of its own self-reflexiveness……In the hands of a less gifted writer, this self-reflexiveness might have become tiresome self-indulgence. But The Rachel Papers possesses a ferocious verbal energy that animates every page, and its author has managed to transform his own artistic self-consciousness into a dramatic monologue on the subject spoken by a fully realized character whose obsessiveness becomes the stuff of serious comedy……There is something chilling about this comedy, however, since the dehumanization it captures has its source in a social and economic system. Charles’s most intimate thoughts and actions are never wholly his own, shaped as they are by a cultural logic that penetrates even the unconscious … The title of the novel is similarly double-voiced. It comes from Charles himself, yet it evokes more famous literary predecessors: The Bickerstaff Papers (1708) [Jonathan Swift (1667-1745)] and The Aspern Papers (1888) [Henry James (1843-1916)]. The ‘Rachel Papers’ are the mass of notes, diaries, and memoranda that Charles spends the last five hours of his nineteenth year shuffling and reshuffling … The novel’s twelve chapters are structured by the clock, beginning with ‘[s]even o’clock: Oxford’ (p. 7) and ending with ‘[m]idnight: coming of age’ (p. 205). While each chapter is rooted in a precisely realized present, much of the novel’s action takes place in a complex series of flashbacks ranging back in time from a few days to several years. By revisiting the past (or rather his literary rendering of it) Charles attempts to construct his currently older, supposedly wiser self. This narrative structure creates much of the comedy of self-consciousness that is The Rachel Papers … [But] Charles’s endless literary self-fashioning is more than a symptom of his self-consciousness; it is part of what Amis has called his own ‘genuine idea about modern life -that it’s so mediated that authentic experience is much harder to find’.20
As befits a novel about self-consciousness, the plot of The Rachel Papers concerns Charles’s own obsessive plotting: to achieve his twin, intertwined desires of entrance to Oxford and Rachel Noyes. He achieves both, the first on the first attempt and the second (as Rachel’s last name implies) after an initial rejection. But his efforts in both cases are so compulsively, self-consciously calculating that they nearly extinguish the genuine passion that may have originally motivated them. From the first, Rachel functions at least in part as a fantasy-projection of Charles’s own upwardly mobile aspirations (her first name is a virtual anagram of his own). Unlike his current girlfriend, who works contentedly at a pet food store, Rachel is studying for university, and has a tony [stylish, fashionable] Hampstead address. Her apparent refinement holds the same allure for Charles as an Oxford degree, and her involvement with another man, an American, increases her desirability. By the time he wins her affections, however, he has already judged her wanting: ‘Rachel’s character was about as high-powered as her syntax’ (p. 72). Reduct
ively imagined by Charles, she is her prose. Midway through his account of their initial lovemaking, Charles’s present-tense voice breaks in to record that his experience was nothing like that which D.H. Lawrence’s novels celebrate; it was ‘an aggregate of pleasureless detail, nothing more; an insane, gruelling, blow-by-blow obstacle course’ (p. 149). Similarly, when Charles writes his Oxford entrance essays, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Blake, and Hardy become occasions for rhetorical performances designed to demonstrate his precocity and ‘characteristic knowingness’ (p. 181). He is finally brought up short late in the novel by the Oxford don who evaluates these essays. His rebuke speaks to Charles’s treatment of people as well as literature: ’”[l]iterature has a kind of life of its own, you know. You can’t just use it… ruthlessly, for your own ends’” (p.211).
This comeuppance is one of the ways Amis places distance between himself and Charles. The others are more subtle, and presume wide acquaintance with many of the writers referred to in the novel. Of the more than one hundred authors and literary texts alluded to in The Rachel Papers, two are of crucial importance to the novel’s themes: John Keats’s The Eve of St Agnes (1820) and [Jonathan Swift’s] Cassinus and Peter (1731). Keats’s poem is a lushly sensuous rumination on the relationship between romantic desire and self-deception. As soon as Madeleine and Porphyro consummate their passion, wind and sleet assail the window-panes of Madeleine’s chamber, portending future troubles. Immediately after Rachel admits to Charles that she has lied to him about her father, and Charles has curtailed an admission of his own waning feelings toward her, Charles reports that ‘the wind outside, which had been strong all evening, started to make comily portentous noises, cooed from behind the cellar door, fidgeted with the window-frames’ (pp. 203-4).
In the previous chapter Charles was confronted by two graphic reminders of Rachel’s bodily nature, and this fundamentally alters a relationship which he reports ‘had been … straightforward and idealized… utterly without candour’ (p. 178). This chapter is subtitled ‘(the Dean of St Patrick’s)’ (p. 162), a reference to Jonathan Swift, and the unnamed poem that shapes this chapter is the once-infamous ‘Cassinus and Peter’, a satirical portrait of a Cambridge undergraduate driven to hysteria by his discovery that his beloved ‘Celia, Celia, Celia shits!’.21 Unlike Cassinus, Charles is aware of the role self-deception plays in his desire, but the sexual double standard still holds sway over him. Despite his longing for authenticity, his Keatsian desire to embrace pure sensation, few of Charles’s experiences are direct ones. In one of his many moments of self-criticism, he indicts himself for this: ‘I will not be placed at the mercy of my spontaneous self (p. 176).
Charles’s preternatural self-consciousness as he composes his one and only narrative is analogous to Martin Amis’s own as he wrote his first novel in the shadow of his famous novelist father.22 How to put oneself on the map, place enough distance between oneself and one’s most significant precursor?……[The relationship between Charles and his father in the novel] is not unlike the relationship between The Rachel Papers and Lucky Jim. Both are first novels by gifted comic writers, and bear many family resemblances, from mastery of dialect and dialogue to delight in comic incongruities. But The Rachel Papers is clearly, defiantly different than Lucky Jim……Charles Highway has clearly read Lucky Jim, because midway through the novel he explicitly rejects Jim Dixon’s maxim [that ‘nice things are nicer than nasty ones‘23] and replaces it with his own down-and-dirty comic aesthetic: ‘[s]urely, nice things are dull, and nasty things are funny. The nastier a thing is, the funnier it gets’ (p. 88). Expressed so crudely, this may sound like little more than an adolescent male’s malicious sense of humor - and Martin Amis’s way of tweaking his father. But it is in fact consistent with Charles’s earlier aesthetic announcement: ‘I had begun to explore the literary grotesque, in particular the writings of Charles Dickens and Franz Kafka, to find a world full of the bizarre surfaces and sneaky tensions with which I was always trying to invest my own life’ (pp. 63-64). The fictions of Dickens and Kafka often combine cruelty and laughter. So do the satires of Jonathan Swift. What is emerging here is Martin Amis’s own literary manifesto - one part exorcism of his father’s precedent, one part declaration that his own province is the comedy of the grotesque.
Charles’s assertion that ‘nasty things are funny’ comes at the beginning of a chapter titled ‘Nine: the bathroom’, where he speculates about his ‘anal sense of humour’ (‘very common among my age group’). As he speculates further about its source, he suggests that it stems from a ‘[s]ound distrust of personal vanity plus literary relish of physical grotesqueries’ (p. 88). This brings Swift to mind, whose own representations of bodily excesses are inseparable from his Christian humanism. Vanity was one of Swift’s favorite satiric targets, and he deflates it by rubbing his readers’ noses in the corruptibility of their fleshly selves. Amis’s own aesthetic of the carnal in The Rachel Papers, however, is less moralistic, and more transgressive, than Swift’s…… All of the potentially serious emotional scenes in The Rachel Papers are … curtailed, or inadequately realized (a weakness that will continue to plague Amis’s fiction). When Rachel initially declines Charles’s advances, for instance, his reaction is surprising (‘I felt completely hollow, as if I were a child’ (p. 86)) because glibness and calculation have so dominated his account of his relationship to her. Charles wants to represent his affair (to the reader and Rachel) as his first emotionally serious relationship, but it is never convincingly rendered as such. Similarly, near the end of the novel Charles has a final confrontation with his father, which becomes a reconciliation. But Charles’s emotional freight is so quickly unloaded, and his expression of solidarity with his father so pat, that it seems like another verbal pose.
Given the parodic nature of The Rachel Papers, this is not surprising. While the novel can be read as a (male) adolescent coming-of-age story, it can just as easily be taken as a parody of the genre, not to mention a parody of the kind of comic romance Kingsley Amis produced in Lucky Jim. Parody is subversive, representing a rejection of social or aesthetic authority, but it doesn’t elaborate alternatives. Unlike Jim Dixon, who clearly becomes the moral center of Lucky Jim, Charles Highway remains something of an enigma at the end of The Rachel Papers. He is not simply a satiric target; The Rachel Papers may be a satiric comedy, but it is not a full-fledged satire. Author and reader may laugh at Charles’s excesses, but they are also implicated in them. The Rachel Papers is Amis’s first achievement in that most demanding of narrative modes, the dramatic monologue - which requires that the novelist make his own voice heard through and sometimes in spite of the first-person narrator. It is a form Amis raises to the level of high postmodern art in several of his later novels, when his narrators bear fewer resemblances to him than Charles does. In The Rachel Papers, it is not always clear where Amis stands in relation to his narrator.24 □
Diedrick seems to imply here that the confusion he sometimes perceives between Amis and Highway is a weakness. David Hawkes, however, in his essay on Amis for Scribner’s British Writers: Supplement IV (1997) acknowledges the possibility of such confusion but attributes it more to insensitive reading than authorial slackness. Like Diedrick, Hawkes draws contrasts and comparisons between the first novels of father and son, affirming that ‘The Rachel Papers is a response to and an updating of Lucky Jim‘25 and that Charles Highway is ‘Jim Dixon transposed from the 1950s to the 1970s’;26but this makes Charles a different kind of literary character altogether:
■ Another way of putting this would be to say that while Jim Dixon is a realistic character, Charles Highway is a postmodern character who lives through literary texts - both the ones he reads in order to find out how to act in real life and those he writes as records and analyses of his real life … In fact, Highway has no ‘real’ life at all; he experiences the world on an entirely textual basis…… When The Rachel Papers was published, Amis was a clever young man, just down from Oxford, with literary a
spirations. His novel paints a portrait of a clever young man with literary aspirations about to go up to Oxford. As in Lucky Jim, such plot as there is involves the seduction of a young woman, but The Rachel Papers is primarily an analysis of Charles Highway’s adolescent character, written in the tradition of Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther (1744; final version, 1787) or Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye (1951). With such a book there is an inevitable temptation to identify the writer with his creation; Kingsley Amis was so annoyed that people identified him with Jim Dixon that he became Evelyn Waugh instead. The egregious Charles Highway is dangerously similar to what the average reader knows about Martin Amis, and many readers have formed permanent antipathies toward Amis on that basis. A sensitive audience, however, will notice the way in which Highway is subtly but deliberately differentiated from his creator. For example, he puts a good deal of emphasis on his own artificiality, constantly reminding us that he is playing a series of roles, acting out scenes from the books he reads. At times this knowledge seems to develop into an awareness that he is a character in a narrative written by someone else…… … Highway progresses from being a self-conscious manipulator of his own persona to intimating that even his ‘true’ personality is a literary construction. He ultimately tires of Rachel when it is revealed that she, too, has built up a fictional image for herself, inventing stories about a glamorous Parisian father who fought in the Spanish Civil War……When she is no longer a character in one of his stories, or when she invents a character for herself, she loses his attention. Highway can only perceive the world through his writing and his reading: he first greets Rachel with a quote from Alfred Tennyson [In fact, Charles improvises a creative misquotation from Tennyson’s poem Tithonus (1860), rendering Tennyson’s original third line, ‘Man comes and tills the field and lies beneath‘27 as ‘Man comes and drinks the wine and lies beneath’ - though characteristically he thinks ’ [Rachel] wouldn’t get the reference and would simply think I was being hearty’ (p. 34)]; to facilitate seduction he leaves Jane Austen’s Persuasion (1818) on the bed and discusses William Blake; to delay orgasm, he mentally recites the poetry of T. S. Eliot. Other characters are similarly defined by their relation to literature. For instance, when George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda (1876) is mentioned, Highway’s boorish, proletarian brother-in-law remarks, ‘“I’ve seen that. BBC 2”’ (p. 143). Rachel is writing a paper on it in school, and Highway falsely denies having read it. The only significant rebuke Charles receives comes from the tutor who interviews him at Oxford: ’”[l]iterature has a kind of life of its own, you know. You can’t just use it… ruthlessly, for your own ends’” (p. 211). But he can - and does - right up until the end. When Rachel reproaches him for the ‘“horrible’” letter he has written to tell her their affair is over, he replies, ’”[t]he content or the style?’” (p.218). He does not reform, remaining resolute in his determination to manipulate his personality as circumstances dictate: ‘I will not be placed at the mercy of my spontaneous self (p. 176). There is more curiosity than contrition in his musing on the novel’s last page: ‘I wonder what sort of person I can be’ (p.219).28 □
The Fiction of Martin Amis Page 2