Amis takes exceptional care to ensure that the narrator-protagonist, so disgusting in his values and lifestyle, cannot be mistaken for the writer by literally putting himself into the text. Martin Amis, the character, is a suave, intelligent, highly educated, comfortably middle-class writer who quite obviously finds Self, and what he represents, unsavory. By carefully exploring the minutiae of Self’s daily thoughts and actions, Amis the writer nearly succeeds in calling the newly Americanized British economic system into question. Yet Self’s quest for status in an upper middle-class society that excludes members of the working class is doomed to fail from the start. Self can never shake off the stigma of his working-class manner, accent and values, whether he is in England or America - and he blithely travels between New York and London as though from Pimlico to Portobello Road. When in London, Self manages to avoid Soho, but fraternizes either with down-and-out middle-class drop-outs, or returns to the comforts of the topless bar he calls home. In New York, a city that brings out the worst in him, Self heads directly to seedy bars, nightclubs, porn shops and junk food restaurants. Even in the dubious classlessness of American society, Self finds the world he can afford - expensive health clubs and restaurants, or the highbrow entertainment of opera and literature -uncomfortable and alien. He is nothing more than an upstart who tries to stick his nose where it doesn’t belong and who is ‘rightfully’ excluded by the upper middle-class types whose sensibility he offends and whose security, comfort and financial resources he threatens. In the end, Self’s entrapment in the working class marks a return to the familiar stereotype of the working-class parvenu who, predictably enough, is punished, not for his obsession with money or heady desire for power, but for assuming he could move into this [é]lite club……
[In Serious Money, t]he primary target of [Caryl] Churchill’s sustained critique … is not the class system but the equally oppressive gender system. The stock exchange offers the ideal venue to examine how patriarchy distributes power. John Self’s world of money-making and movie-making would seem an equally suitable venue for Amis to examine the dynamics of the gender sy[s]tem, but, once again, he is reluctant to acknowledge how the economic system works as a paradigm [model] of other power systems. For Amis, to be authentically working-class means to be sexist, and so he imbues Self with the prejudices associated with the working-class stereotype. As a result, Amis’s protagonist resides within, as Beno[î]te Groult puts it, ‘a completely falsified world in which sex is artificially separated from life’.109 Thus the first thing Self asks himself when he meets a woman is ‘will I fuck it?’ (p.238). By substituting ‘it’ for ‘her’, Self, like the pornography he devours, denies woman personhood, placing her in the ultimate state of disempowerment and disembodiment. In fact, Self’s dependence on pornography suggests the crucial nexus [link] between the woman as pornographic image and his own objectification of women.
Because Self views life through the prism of money, he divides women roughly into two categories: whores and non-whores. Self affirms Selina’s assertion that ‘men use money to dominate women’ (p. 90), and complacently recognizes women’s greater potential for victimization but, rather than register concern, the thought fuels his suspicion that women somehow deserve it: ‘[i]t must be tiring knowledge, the realization that half the members of the planet … can do what the hell they like with you’. Masculine identity depends utterly on women who are pleased, in Self’s parlance, to get ‘groped or goosed or propositioned’ (p. 14) - never loved. Women are the vessel for all Self’s beliefs about sex, money and power, and he inevitably imposes his value system on them in the same way he imposes his body:
I saw [Selina’s] performing flesh in fantastic eddies and convulsions, the face with its smile of assent and the complicit look in the flattered eyes … the arched creature doing what that creature does best - and the thrilling proof, so rich in pornography, that she does all this not for passion, not for comfort, far less for love … she does all this for money, (p. 37)
Since, as [Suzanne] Kappeler argues, ‘[t]he objectification of women is a result of the subjectification of man’, Self’s assumption about Selina’s motivation is hardly surprising.110 By persuading himself that she does it all for money, Self justifies his own transference of love from the individual to money. Blinded by such demeaning attitudes toward women, Self misses clues that might have forestalled his own victimization. For instance, the misogyny implicit in his first thoughts upon meeting the lesbian feminist screenwriter for his movie project prevents his assimilating the information she will offer later:
[Doris] stood there … No matter how butch and pushy they get, girls will never lose this air of sensitive expectancy. Or I hope they won’t. She wore roomy dungarees and a much-patched flying jacket - anti-rape clothes, mace clothes. They didn’t work. Now here’s someone, I thought to myself, here’s someone who’s really worth raping (p. 58).
Self’s inability to heed either Doris’s warning of a scam or any other advice women might offer increases his vulnerability. Women, Self asserts, lend a helping hand because they have ulterior motives, usually involving money; their advice, therefore, is worthless and should be ignored……
The different ways in which Amis and Churchill inscribe the inter-connectedness of money and sex clarify one of the most fundamental differences between the two texts. Amis elects to stay within the patriarchal gender boundaries by upholding the pattern of dominance and submission; hence, John Self wonders if the ‘Quid’ will be ‘slapped about and gangbanged on the international money market’ (p. 242; compare p. 154). When Self talks about being ‘pussy-whipped by money’ (p. 270), the language, laden with pornographic imagery, incorporates sexual aggression and reveals his ambivalence in [priorities] - money or sex……
Amis’s Money and Churchill’s Serious Money are essentially about control. John Self’s victimization is brought about by that which he can control - his own greed - and by that over which he has no control, the class system. And here we find the seeds of Amis’s undoing. The invention of an outrageous anti-hero cannot mask a failure to fulfill the grander aim of unmasking the ideological underpinnings of Thatcherism. Amis gestures towards the daring and radical in order to disguise his conservative appropriation of the classist stereotype of a protagonist who meets his expected demise. The character of John Self simply cannot work as a metonym [that is, a part which stands for a whole] for Thatcherism. The discourse of Amis’s novel ostensibly exposes the false tenets of the new Toryism and impugns the greed of Thatcherite England in order to call for the transformation of the existing capitalist system. However, by casting his protagonist as a member of the working class, Amis endangers this purpose and instead devises a telos [end] that valorizes [upholds the value of] the class and gender systems.111 □
Doan’s strong criticism of the sexism and class bias of Money, her refusal to be seduced by the narrative voice, contrasts with the enthusiastic response exhibited by other (mostly male) reviewers and critics,112 such as Eric Korn. The mixed reactions to Amis’s fifth novel would be echoed and amplified in the arguments over his next and even more controversial novel, London Fields. But this would not appear for five years. Some of the groundwork for it would be laid, however, by the remarkable excursion into the short story form that is discussed in the next chapter of this Guide: Einstein’s Monsters.
CHAPTER SIX
Writing the Unthinkable: Einstein’s Monsters (1987)
MARTIN AMIS has written relatively few short stories. As he himself remarks in his ‘Author’s Note’ to Einstein’s Monsters, in the sixteen years from 1969 to 1985 he had ‘managed’ only four; but in the two years from 1985 to 1987, his productivity increased: five successive short stories came, and then the flow stopped. It is these five stories that, together with the polemical introductory essay called ‘Thinkability’, comprise the slender but potent collection whose title, according to Amis, refers not only ‘to nuclear weapons, but also to ourselves. We are Einstein’s monsters,
not fully human, not for now’ (p. 6).
In the Literary Review of May 1987, David Profumo combined his own commentary on Einstein’s Monsters with an interview with Amis. The result provides excellent insights into the short story collection from the viewpoint of its author and a responsive reader:
■ [As t]hese five stories emerged… [Amis] gradually … realised that they shared a common theme: an indignant concern about nuclear weapons. As he explains in … ‘Thinkability’, this was prompted by [‘impending fatherhood and a tardy reading of Jonathan Schell’s classic, awakening study The Fate of the Earth (1982)’ (p. 11)]. The resulting stories are powerfully chilling illustrations of the ways in which the fearful threat of nuclear destruction has already poisoned the human spirit.
The first one he wrote [placed third in the collection] remains his favourite. ‘The Time Disease’ (pp. 69-84) is a sci-fi parody of a mildly futuristic American city where normal values about health and interpersonal communications have become inverted. ‘The real inspiration was a revenge on Los Angeles’, he explained. ‘I’d hated it so much, I’d felt so ill while I’d been there - the smog - I felt really lousy. And the “live-for-ever” culture; the city of narcissists. I thought it would be funny if there was a disease around that encouraged you to live a very unhealthy life. On top of that it’s a story about the stupefaction of television. It posits a really outrageous idea that this will eventually fuck up reality, and the rule will be that if people believe things, then it will eventually come to pass.’
Sexual inversion is another theme of the story. ‘I find, glancing through the book, there are quite a few AIDS themes, and do you know this charming idea that AIDS may be - and this is a good word - radiogenic [that is, AIDS may be produced by radiation, possibly from atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons]? … And if that’s the case, AIDS is just the first of several lulus coming our way’……
… In Einstein’s Monsters … it becomes clear he has gone into the subject [of nuclear weapons] in considerable depth … But imaginative writing about the subject seems to be notoriously unstable in itself, and I wondered how much he had been influenced by mainstream science fiction, the genre to which the bulk of the literature [about nuclear weapons] seems to belong.
Martin Amis describes sci-fi as ‘a kind of family hobby; also I reviewed it for a good many years in The Observer under the pseudonym of Henry Tilney, the hero of [Jane Austen’s novel] Northanger Abbey!’ (1818). He believes there is a prejudice against it as a genre, and that there are some great practitioners in the field. He agrees with his father [see Kingsley Amis, New Maps of Hell (1960), a pioneering work in the ‘serious’ study of science fiction] that the strength of the genre is that it is completely realistic within its own terms of reference, and offers, especially in the dystopian mode, many serious possibilities [a ‘dystopia’ is a nightmare vision of a future society - as in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) or George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, as opposed to a ‘Utopia’, which is a vision of a supposedly ideal future society, as in Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward: 2000-1887 (1888) or William Morris’s News from Nowhere (1890). As the respective publication dates of all these texts suggests, the twentieth century has been more inclined to dystopias]. The novel on which he is currently working -London Fields - is itself set twelve years in the future, and has a nuclear background.
Other influences that he happily acknowledges in [his ‘Author’s Note’] range from J. G. Ballard [(1930-) - both a science fiction and ‘mainstream’ author - ‘to the Salman Rushdie of Grimus [(1975)]’]. In [regard to] one of the more flamboyant stories, ‘The Little Puppy That Could’, he records a debt [‘to Vladimir Nabokov [(1899-1977)] and Franz Kafka [(1883-1924)]’ (p. 6)]. The story concerns a post-[nuclear] holocaust community menaced by a monstrous hell-hound to which regular sacrifices have to be offered. Lurid mutants abound in this world-turned-upside-down, but the future is redeemed by an apparently normal puppy who lures the monster to destruction, and is then transformed into a shining youth. Amis describes it as ‘a mad literary exercise’, and it conjures entertainingly a number of literary stereotypes, from the heroic pet saga to the sunset optimism of brave new worlds.
The most unnerving and tautly written story [in Einstein’s Monsters] is ‘Insight at Flame Lake’ (pp. 51-67), the fourth to be written [placed second in the collection]. Dan is a disturbed twelve year old American who is trying to recover from the death of his father, one of the Fathers of nuclear research; he stays with his Uncle Ned and his young wife and baby daughter in their lakeside summer cabin, but his schizophrenia induces terrible delusions. The lake itself takes on explosive symptoms, the skyscapes are deranged, the baby is evil. It’s a very unpleasant story, and I asked its author to expand on the background to its composition, and to explain something further about his linking of childhood with the whole business of the nuclear threat.
‘Well, he’s a kind of nuked schizophrenic, and it takes the form of guilt on his father’s behalf. And being able to see wickedness in a baby is more or less the crux of how deformed his mind is. Babies are very much at the forefront of all of this’. … it’s a question of translating the danger back into accessible human terms. Amis also recalls an early disgust with the idea of nuclear weapons. When he was a child at school he used to leave the room whenever the target maps of the London area were discussed, and he was looked after by a Welsh lady who ascribed her ‘heroic migraines’ to the atom……
[Einstein’s Monsters] is rounded off with a story entitled ‘The Immortals’ (pp. 115-27), which looks on a first reading to be a more light-hearted piece. The narrator is indestructible, a permanent observer of the cycle of human history who witnesses its final achievements of autodestruction. Cynical, sophisticated and blase, he seems to enjoy the god’s-eye view of the Wandering Jew, Orlando, or a Struldbrug[g] [the legendary Wandering Jew, having refused Christ rest as he carried his cross to Calvary, was ‘condemned to wander the world until Christ’s second coming’;113 in Virginia Woolf’s fantasy novel Orlando (1928), Orlando lives from the late sixteenth century into the 1920s; the Struldbruggs are the immortals in Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726) whose longevity becomes a curse as they decay]. [B]ut it transpires that this is all a hallucination suffered by a ‘second-rate New Zealand schoolmaster who never did anything or went anywhere and is now painfully and noisily dying of solar radiation along with everybody else’ [although it should be noted that the narrator describes this perception of himself and his situation as ‘a delusion’, a ‘weird idea’ (p. 126) - the reader is probably expected to assume that the ‘second-rate … schoolmaster’ dying of solar radiation is the truth of the matter, but an interesting note of doubt remains]. To the bitter end, the sphere of nuclear experience is seen as a round of successive delusions.
This is gloomy stuff indeed. Martin Amis’s version of the world into which his sons have been born is grim, and the apathy level is dangerous. ‘All the things we’re doing to the planet, like the erosion of the topsoil, all that Green stuff, is very true. But no-one will stop anyone from doing it. And we’re hurtling towards an entropy watershed when all the fossil-fuels and the oil run out, and no-one’s thinking about change [in this context, entropy means the ‘measure of the degradation or disorganisation of the universe’ - or, in this case, the planet earth] … Because the nuclear weapons, by possibly embodying an end to the human story, seem to have fucked up everyone’s idea of where the future is supposed to be’.114 □
As the short-story writer and novelist Adam Mars-Jones pointed out three years later, however, Amis’s charge of apathy in regard to nuclear weapons was not wholly justified. Amis makes no reference in the introduction to Einstein’s Monsters to what Mars-Jones calls ‘the most single-minded demonstration of nuclear protest [in the 1980s], the Peace Camp at Greenham Common, or the larger movement of which it was part’. The reason for this omission, Mars-Jones provocatively suggests, is that the Greenham Peace Camp was a W
omen’s Peace Camp, while Amis’s ‘anti-nuclearism is conspicuously male’.115
Mars-Jones made this argument in his pamphlet, Venus Envy (1990), published in Chatto and Windus’s ‘Counterblasts’ series, a series that aimed to provide provocative, polemical essays on important contemporary issues. Mars-Jones challenged the way in which masculinity had redefined itself in response to feminism - ‘not in the way that feminists might have hoped’,116 but ‘in terms of responsibility’. ‘A new style has arisen of faintly synthetic introspection, presented as a maturing process unprompted by contemporary debates, which nevertheless reads more convincingly as a rhetorical response to cultural pressure’.117 Mars-Jones explores this style as it addresses the prospect of destruction by nuclear weapons, and he takes as his examples Einstein’s Monsters and Ian McEwan’s The Child in Time (1987). He begins his attack on Einstein’s Monsters by analysing the introductory essay and arguing that it should be seen as a rhetorical construction which proffers a male anti-nuclearism that marginalises women’s voices and disavows the possibility of a link between gender inequality and the threat of nuclear destruction. He then moves on to focus on some of the short stories themselves; the following extract starts with his discussion of these and builds up into a slashing assault on Martin Amis’s style in general:
The Fiction of Martin Amis Page 11