The Fiction of Martin Amis

by Nicolas Tredell

  ■ The self-reflexiveness of Money takes on especially interesting dimensions as we consider the high public profile Martin Amis has maintained in Britain since emerging as a novelist of some stature as early as 1975, while still in his mid-twenties … the son of a famous literary father, [he] has not only had no difficulty in achieving notoriety but has seemed actively to court it, and it has proved hard for London’s literary establishment to speak rationally of his work and personality. To his enemies (and there seem to be many) he is seen as the leader of one of the most powerful and influential literary cliques of this or any other age … But to his admirers Amis is (among many panegyrics [words of praise]) the finest prose stylist of his generation. The title and subject-matter of his third novel, Success, might thus be regarded as fascinatingly self-reflexive. Money is Amis’s fifth novel, and he is still only in his mid-thirties …

  It has been argued by Karl Miller that Amis’s last three novels, Success, Other People, and Money, all share a common interest or even theme, in that all three are ‘fictions … turmoils, in which orphan and double meet’.100 This is certainly true, although one might well develop the point by noticing that Amis has increasingly obsessively started to explore the relationship between what one can only call the different orders of reality to which orphan and double belong……Money …

  turns the screw [still] further. The orphan in this urban satire is named John Self… Self in fact meets two versions of the double: in London he encounters a writer named Martin Amis, whom he eventually coerces into rewriting the script of Money after the previous scriptwriter’s failure to make it sufficiently attractive to the four leads, all of whom have refused their roles; in New York he is pursued by Martina Twain, who introduces the largely unread Self to works such as Animal Farm, [and] Nineteen Eighty-Four, and takes him to see Verdi’s Otello -meanwhile we discover that Martina’s husband Ossie has been having an affair with Self’s girlfriend Selina Street.

  Self is not, in fact, strictly speaking, an orphan, and one of the components of the rather complex denouement of Money concerns his discovery of his true paternity. On his own account Self was born ‘upstairs’ (pp.59, 145) in a London pub called the Shakespeare. Believing himself to be the son of Barry Self, he eventually discovers that his true father is Fat Vince, ‘beer-crate operative and freelance bouncer at the Shakespeare’, who has ‘been in and out of this place every day for thirty-five years’ (p. 145). Martin Amis, also 35 in the year of Money’s publication (although of course younger in the year -1981 - in which the narrative is set), is introduced gradually into the narrative, and, on the first occasion they meet, Self, not notably literate, asks Amis: “‘Your dad, he’s a writer too, isn’t he? Bet that made it easier.”’ Amis’s reply is worth recording: ‘“Oh, sure. It’s just like taking over the family pub”’ (p. 88). The TLS reviewer of Money [Eric Korn] reminded its readers that one fat Englishman had crossed the Atlantic a generation before101 [The reference here is to Kingsley Amis’s novel One Fat Englishman (1963)]. It seems to me that we are presented in Money with a number of instances of self-reflexiveness being confronted so explicitly (the nomenclature is clearly to be seen as part of the process) that we are forced to examine the extent to which the novel’s various voices both are and are not claiming to be aspects of a single consciousness. One of the fascinating features of Money is, indeed, the voice of the narrator, a voice that, stylistically speaking, is explicitly virtuoso, yet whose owner is at pains to tell us that he has read little and absorbed less. This feature of the narrative is closely related to the interesting mis-hearings that are dotted around the text: Self, who in any case suffers from a ‘fresh disease … called tinnitus’ (p. 1), is often ‘hearing things’ as well as frequently blacking out on account of powerful combinations of drink and drugs and not (as he discovers to his cost at the novel’s end) hearing or recalling or being capable of taking in information that really matters. In a brothel in Manhattan he tells a girl called Moby that his name is Martin and that he is a writer: he is flummoxed by her reply: ‘“John roar mainstream?”’ [genre or mainstream?] (p. 100). Talking to his sinister agent Fielding Goodney, Self makes a note of a possible substitute star, Nub Forkner:

  “That’s o-r-k, Slick,” said Fielding.

  I glanced down at the page. “That’s what I’ve got.”

  “… You read much, John?”

  “Read what?”

  “Fiction.”

  “Do you?”

  “Oh sure. It gives me all kinds of ideas. I like the sound and the fury,” he added enigmatically. [The Sound and the Fury (1929) is a novel by the American writer William Faulkner (1897-1962) which takes its title from a phrase in Shakespeare’s Macbeth (composed probably 1606) - ‘[Life] is a tale/Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,/Signifying nothing’ (Act 5, Scene 5, lines 25-27).102 Todd also cites the misheard quotation from Othello discussed earlier in this chapter (p. 65) by Amis himself.] (p. 219)……

  Yet when all this is said, the voice, with its hectic pace and tone - even the violence and the profuse and candid sexuality, the urban satire mediated through a flaunted stylistic virtuosity such that the only semi-colon in something like 200,000 words of text occurs in the last sentence (p. 394), after a figurative allusion to their absence (in terms of the novel’s pace) some 80 pages earlier (p. 312: ‘I want to slow down now, and check out the scenery, and put in a stop or two. I want some semi-colons’) - despite all this, the voice of Self is very much the voice Amis uses elsewhere; and this seems to me to represent an explicitly considered solution to the problem of how, in a text of this kind, one conveys a narrator of Self’s philistinism, whose final discovery is that all the money he believes himself to have been earning forms part of an operation he has been tricked into financing himself, a rip-off Martin Amis admits his complicity in. Perhaps emblematic of the difficulty such a text presents is the chess game Self and Amis play towards the end. Self is in fact an excellent player, surely a deliberate and flagrantly unexpected attribute, and he is ‘zugzwanged’ by Amis after a cliff-hanging game. Despite Self’s having used the word earlier in his narrative (p. 119), he now, at the end of their game, has to ask Amis for a definition of it (‘“What the fuck does that mean?”’); Martin Amis replies: “‘Literally, forced to move. It means that whoever has to move has to lose. If it were my turn now, you’d win. But it’s yours. And you lose”’ (p. 379). Elsewhere, both Martin and Martina severally explain aspects of what we must call the experience of literature to Self. Thus Martina:

  talked about the vulnerability of a figure unknowingly watched … The analogous distinction in fiction would be that between the conscious and the reluctant narrator - the sad, the unwitting narrator (p. 132).

  And Martin tells Self:

  ‘The further down the scale [the hero] is, the more liberties you can take with him. You can do what the hell you like to him, really. This creates an appetite for punishment. The author is not free of sadistic impulses’ (p.247).

  It is in the light of this self-reflexive complexity of ‘voice’ in Money that we should also see the pervasively arresting topographical description of both Manhattan and London. Here are two examples selected virtually at random, the first reminding us that Amis has also published a work of nonfiction entitled The Invasion of the Space Invaders (1982):

  I spent an improving four hours on Forty-Second Street, dividing my time between a space-game arcade and the basement gogo bar next door. In the arcade the proletarian ghosts of the New York night, these darkness-worshippers, their terrified faces reflected in the screens, stand hunched over their controls. They look like human forms of mutant moles and bats, hooked on the radar, rumble and wow of these stocky new robots who play with you if you give them money. They’ll talk too, for a price. Launch Mission, Circuit Completed, Firestorm, Flashpoint, Timewarp, Crackup, Blackout! The kids, tramps and loners inhere, they are the mineshaft spirits of the new age … In the gogo bar men and women are eternally ranged agai
nst each other, kept apart by a wall of drink, a moat of poison, along which the mad matrons and bad bouncers stroll (pp.24-25).

  I walked back to my sock in the thin rain. And the skies. Christ! In shades of kitchen mists, with eyes of light showing only murk and seams of film and grease, the air hung above and behind me like an old sink full of old washing-up. Blasted, totalled, broken-winded, shot-faced London, doing time under sodden skies (p. 15 9).

  Readers familiar with recent developments in British literature will notice something of the so-called ‘Martian’ school of bizarrely figurative expressiveness, a characteristic use of the English language that has been suggestively compared to the ‘metaphysical’ style of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. My point in drawing attention to this characteristic of Money’s topographical descriptions is to insist that in devising a voice for John Self, the extra-fictional Martin Amis has, it seems to me, quite explicitly chosen to use his own, a voice that is clearly recognizable from his own other published fiction. I am convinced that we should see Amis’s strategy as a deliberate choice that illustrates a self-conscious confrontation of the problem of solipsistic ‘closure’ and not - instead - as illustrating any kind of limitation of which no awareness has been shown.103 □

  Todd concludes that Money and Lanark ‘each represent different ways of responding self-reflexively to a perceived threat of solipsistic closure, a threat that … may be particularly urgent in contemporary fiction in Britain because of the perceived weight and multiplicity of traditional approaches to realism. Gray and Amis have pushed the postmodernist device of the intrusive author to a point where stylistic and topographical elements have become practically autonomous of any reference to that tradition’.104 He suggests that what Amis offers ‘may be, as [Karl] Miller has claimed, generically innovative in its linking of the device of the intrusive author to an obsession with orphan and double in a tradition whose roots can be traced at least as far as a Gothic text such as James Hogg’s Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824)’,105 and affirms that ‘Amis’s treatment of his self-reflexive theme is combined with a stylistic virtuosity (to which topographical elements are subordinated) that suggests a yet more thoroughgoing fragmentation than does Gray’s. Such fragmentation confirms, more strongly still than in Amis’s previous fiction to date, our sense of a single selfhood complexly refracted through the existence of various, duplicitously conflicting, voices.‘106

  In an essay that compares Amis’s Money with Caryl Churchill’s play Serious Money (1987), Laura L. Doan is more critical of Amis than Korn, Miller and Todd. Both Amis’s and Churchill’s texts, Doan proposes, appear to challenge the new Thatcherite attitude that money, like work, should no longer be a ‘dirty word’, and both seem ‘to question the legitimacy of an ideology founded upon the primacy of greed as a motivating factor’. Moreover, both, ‘though at variance with one another, demonstrate how, in the real economy and within the economy of the text, class and gender intersect to maintain or transform existing systems of power’. While Churchill views the economic system as a model for all power structures and can thus incorporate a critique of both class and gender relations, Amis ‘scrutinizes the ideology of the economic system [but] elides a sustained critique of the class system. In this “expose” of capitalist greed, financial success remains an exclusively middle-class, male prerogative’.107 Although Amis shows ‘how the individual - a working-class male - can be easily victimized and lose control’, this ‘restricted focus hinders a critique of the gender system which is, instead, upheld and reified (i.e., maintained). In Amis’s novel, women’s relationship to money must be mediated through men in the form of sexual favors. His resulting equation is thus: woman + money = object.’ This is Doan’s account - and critique - of Money:

  ■ Narrator-protagonist John Self is the victim of an elaborate money conspiracy perpetrated by Fielding Goodney, a financier-cum-confidence man, involving regular surveillance of Self, innumerable anonymous telephone calls, and several actors posing as potential investors. Weakened by his dependence on sex and booze, Self walks straight into the trap set by Goodney, the very fellow Self believes he’s soaking for millions of dollars. Self collaborates with Goodney, a self-described good capitalist (p. 30) and ‘old money’ American, because Goodney promises to secure financial backing for a movie Self wants to direct, variously entitled ‘Good Money’ and ‘Bad Money’. The epitome of the sexist, racist homophobe, Self is a self-made man who has risen from a working-class background - his family runs a seedy strip joint - through his work as a director of crass commercials. Recklessly spending what he thinks is Goodney’s money, Self actually shrinks his own bank account; in the end, his newfound wealth is lost. Destitute, Self returns to his former position as a scrounger from the working-class. His egocentric surname aptly conjures up a char[a]cter whose obsessive self-indulgence leads to his financial ruin and, by extension, invests the narrative with the sense of a cautionary tale for ‘everyman’ who might find himself in Self’s place.

  Partly because Self tells his own story (meaning that he is never in possession of all the information he needs to understand what is happening), and partly because Amis eschews the convention of character motivation in the novel (‘motivation has become depleted, a shagged-out force in modern life’ [see p. 62 of this Guide]) the reader never suspects that Goodney is a scoundrel or even that Self is an unsuspecting victim.108 Amis provides neither advance warning nor ad[e]quate preparation for the revelation. He justifies his disinterestedness by arguing that the scam is irrelevant. Just as Goodney plays a confidence trick on the protagonist, Amis practices his trickery on the reader by setting up an elaborate ruse with no explanation. Yet, by the time the author reveals this twist of events, the scam works more as an unwanted distraction than as a clever trick, producing greater ambiguity than Amis bargains [for]. The novel, Amis explains, is in essence an intense character study of John Self, but the text is in many ways less concerned with Self - and his quest for financial gain - than with the encoding of the life-controlling power systems in discourse that determine the possibilities and constraints of ‘Self-control’……

  John Self fails to recognize his own state of disempowerment within the social structure, but he understands that there are others on the outside who desire inclusion and who want to broaden the parameters of power. He names them in a kind of litany of the marginalized:

  Everyone is determined to be what they are: it’s the coming thing. Women want out from under us men. Faggots and diesels won’t be humped by the hets. Blacks have had it with all this white power … Now even the paedophile … dares show his shadowed face: he wants a little respect around here (p. 324).

  Here the writer Martin Amis betrays his own bourgeois liberal bias through the words he places in the hero’s mouth. Self says ‘women’ and ‘blacks’ as opposed to ‘cunts’ and ‘wogs’, but calls gays and lesbians ‘faggots and diesels’, instead of using the terms they have chosen to identify and empower themselves. Is this the linguistic slip of the hero or his author? If it is supposed to be Self’s slip, it seems inconsistent: he uses negative labels for women elsewhere, and does not show the slightly heightened consciousness that the switch to women in this context would entail. As Amis’s slip, it shows to what extent he is limited by the values he is supposedly criticizing. Conditioned by the liberalizing changes that have granted a degree of validity to the causes of blacks and women, Amis easily uses ‘respectable’ labels for them, but gays and lesbians, who have been less successful at gaining such credibility, retain their marginal status through the use of pejorative labels. In either case, like his hero, Amis seems to recognize the significant relation between social identity and political power, but he tends to diminish its force by subsuming it under the rubric of mere self-identity.

  As Self notes, the incursion of the disempowered into the spheres of power is based on reclaiming the legitimacy of their own identities. Self’s insight is inspired by the incredible
variety of pornography he continually consumes, which, based on the laws of supply and demand, reflects both the diversity of humankind and the objectification of women. Here, ironically, pornography - a form of representation hardly notable for its conspicuous concern for the individual - expands Self’s awareness of others. Class is noticeably absent from the list because, unlike the boundaries of gender, race or sexual preference, Self believes that class barriers can be breached by the acquisition of great sums of money.

  John Self is a parvenu par excellence. In his world view, life presents an endless series of unlimited possibilities for those who possess, and are obsessed with, money. As Self explains, ‘the thing I want more than anything else … is to make lots of money’ (p. 92). Self continually offers praise for the beauty and versatility of money, the one thing he says he loves: ‘Selina [his girlfriend] says I’m not capable of true love. It isn’t true. I truly love money. Truly I do. Oh, money, I love you. You’re so democratic: you’ve got no favorites. You even things out for me and my kind’ (p. 238). However, the financial success promised and facilitated by new Conservative ideology embodies an implicit threat to the class system. Consequently, Self’s absolute and dangerous faith in money as the great equalizer between the social classes leaves him vulnerable, as he himself dimly recognizes:’ [w]ithout money, you’re one day old and one inch tall. And you’re nude too’ (p. 383). Self thinks that money will help him transcend his class, that the ruling class will now treat him as one of their own, and because he wants so much to believe that the empowered will play by the rules of the game, he becomes an easy target for a scam.