■ The notion that the entrenched destructiveness of our culture has something to do with the jealously defended imbalance between its sexes finds a place in Einstein’s Monsters only in an inverted form. Bujak, in the story ‘Bujak and the Strong Force’, seeing gay punks in the street, interprets ‘their plight, and their profusion, as an einstein-ian matter also’ (p. 36). The idea seems to be that such violations of the sexual order stem inevitably from the Bomb’s disturbing of cosmic balance. Presumably, then, in a world without the Bomb sexual roles would be properly harmonious. This, of course, is only a passing remark made by a fictional character, but there is an absence of characters who take any sort of opposing tack.
In the story ‘The Little Puppy that Could’, Amis imagines a post-holocaustal future where the sexual status quo has been deformed and distorted along with everything else. Men have become interchangeable - Tim and Tarn and Tom - subject to the rule of monstrous matriarchs who, horribly, demand to be pleasured. Now that fertility is a scarce commodity, the world is held to ransom by a womb and not a penis. The women are given names (Keithette, Clivonne, Kevinia) whose ludicrousness may be meant to derive from the supposed laughter-quotient of the male names on which they are based, but there is a definite edge of hysteria to the humour. What seems to bring out the rancour which the comedy disguises, at least from its author, is the very idea of women with male privileges.
At the end of the story the heroine, the intensely feminine Andromeda, has found herself a real man (a transformed puppy, innocent animal purified by fire): ‘[h]is arms were strong and warlike as he turned and led her into the cool night. They stood together on the hilltop and gazed down at their new world’ (p. 113). The logic here is arsy-versy, but consistent with the rest of the book’s theorising. The Bomb has made men effeminate and women repellently assertive. Now a proper polarization of the sexes will make possible some sort of renewal.
A feminist suggestion might rather be that it was a world in thrall to a distorted male identity that made the Bomb in the first place. It seems unlikely that Martin Amis is unaware of this line of thinking. What seems to be at work, here and elsewhere in Einstein’s Monsters, is disavowal, that useful psychological word that means denying something without mentioning it.
The great irony of Einstein’s Monsters is that a book dedicated to the unapproachable ideal of disarmament should be written by someone so opposed by temperament to disarmament outside the nuclear arena. Martin Amis’[s] progress has not been so much a career as an escalation, the persona increasingly truculent, the style ever more bristling. His very method is overkill. There seems little doubt that in the silos of his notebooks there are stored enough explosive phrases to account for his readers many times over. Though Amis in ‘Thinkability’ may find the idea baffling, any reader of a page of his mature prose has a pretty good idea of what might be meant by retaliating first.
These analogies aren’t flippant. Amis himself, despite his remarks about the need for ‘decorum’ in nuclear discussion, feels free to use the vocabulary of holocaust figuratively. In ‘Bujak and the Strong Force’ alone, a man who is sensitive to potential violence is said to have a ‘fallout detector’ (p. 37), Bujak’s fist is said to be ‘neutronium’, to kill a whole family is to ‘nuke’ them (p. 39) - perhaps to compensate for the nuclear preoccupations in the story seeming rather arbitrarily imposed on its plot. The story of a man whose family is murdered but who takes no revenge could be expressed in terms of the Old Testament giving way to the New, rather than deterrence unilaterally abandoned, but once you’ve used a nuclear vocabulary it’s hard to go back to a conventional one. As the proliferation of nuclear images indicates, whether they are an integral part of the story or not, Amis concentrates on the way the big world infiltrates and corrodes private lives, rather than the other aspect of the traffic, the elusive way that individual behaviour subtends [underlies and upholds] the status quo.
The aggressiveness of Martin Amis’[s] style is of course artificial; it shapes its own highly contrived version of strength and weakness. The monstrous women in ‘The Little Puppy that Could’ are announced as all-powerful, but are relegated to the role of comic bit-players. The narrator of ‘Bujak and the Strong Force’, by contrast, is weak, but insistently, buttonholingly, Woody Allenishly weak, and - naturally enough, being the narrator - has control of the point of view, the true seat of power in a story. The hyperbolic phrases Amis gives him promote every flinch into a stylistic swagger, every whimper into a growl.
But if aggressiveness in a style does not correspond to aggressiveness in the world, it does correspond to the power of will. No other aspect of writing responds to pure willpower: sit down at a desk for four hours and you can’t guarantee to come up with four satisfactory plot twists or nine convincing insights into character. But you can be pretty sure of coming up with twenty startling images or striking turns of phrase. Even when Martin Amis is treading water he breaks the surface so much it looks like a shark attack.
A style like Martin Amis’[s] represents both a fear and a desire. It represents a radical doubt about the business of writing, an authorial identity crisis that can be postponed by having each sentence declare the presence of the author. Amis’ [s] narrators don’t venture abroad without a suit, a shield, without a testudo [in Ancient Roman times, a screen formed by a body of troops in close array, with overlapping shields; more generally, a moveable screen to protect besieging troops] of style to protect them. Here, for instance, are three of his narrators, the weak writer from ‘Bujak’, a disturbed pre-adolescent (‘Insight at Flame Lake’) and a citizen of the year 2020 (‘The Time Disease’), all deploying one of Amis’[s] favourite tropes [turns of phrase], the cadenced triptych of synonyms:
[1] If the world disarmed tomorrow, he believed, the species would still need at least a century of recuperation, after its entanglement, its flirtation, after its thing with the strong force (pp.41-2).
[2] Meanwhile I stare into the brilliance and burnish, into the mauve of the MIRVed lake (p. 59).
[3] [U]p there in the blasted, the totalled, up there in the fucked sky (p. 79).
Fear of inauthenticity here leads to inauthenticity of a different sort, not an unsigned painting but a painting composed entirely of signatures. The reader who is reminded by each succeeding sentence of the looming designs of the author is denied much of the traditional pleasure of literature, the pleasure of surrendering to an imagined world rather than being bullied into finding it impressive. The supposed opposition between highly-wrought and unambitious ways of writing on which Amis’[s] style depends doesn’t hold up in any case. There is writing which advertises its surprises and writing that simply springs them…
It is this absence of a neutral register from Martin Amis’ [s] work, oddly enough, that his father Kingsley complains of, the lack of workaday sentences not hell-bent on shock or charm. Here and there in Einstein’s Monsters Amis hides his hand and aspires to such transparency, notably in the story ‘Insight at Flame Lake’, which alternates two diaries, of a disturbed pre-adolescent and his uncomprehending uncle. But all it takes is one electric adjective too many and the jig is up, the familiar antagonistic persona reaches criticality.
The other aspect of a style like Martin Amis’[s] is the desire to make a mark at all costs - not the strongest basis from which to mount an attack on the moral blindnesses of the nuclear age. It is noticeable for instance that in ‘Thinkability’ he has a shot at rendering nuclear war in his particular tone of voice, in a sentence that ends with the distinctive juxtaposition ‘the warped atoms, the grovelling dead’ (p. 9). Forget the ambition of finding the language of unanimity: this is a holocaust with a monogram, almost a copyright logo.
The military analogies are irresistible, though the ugly sound you hear is only the dull clang of polemic against polemic. Martin Amis’[s] anti-nuclear stance is in the nature of a pre-emptive strike, detonating an issue that might otherwise be used against him. A woman’s hand on the butto
n, after all, would do far more damage to his world-view. By striking first, he can cut the supply lines between the nuclear issue and other issues he doesn’t want to engage with: feminism and environ-mentalism, half of humanity and the whole of its home.118 □
In contrast to Mars-Jones, Rachel Falconer, in her 1998 essay ‘Bakhtin’s Chronotope and the Contemporary Short Story’, offered a more positive account of Einstein’s Monsters. As Falconer points out near the start of her essay, the twentieth-century Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin argued that all genres, and distinctions between genres, could be defined by their ‘chronotope (literally, “time space” … the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are artistically expressed in literature)’.119 Little work has been done, however, on the chronotope of the short story. Falconer selects Einstein’s Monsters as one example of a text that has an ‘arresting’ way of representing time. Amis’s collection, Falconer suggests, ‘thematizes the lack of agency entailed by a doomed sense of time on the scientific and technological level, where our cosmo-logical timescales dwarf the human life span, and our ability to destroy the planet reduces all time to present crisis120 … the short story form enables Amis to focus on a single theme, the threat of nuclear holocaust, while presenting a range of different responses to it so that no one perspective dominates and the exercise of agency rests finally with the reader’.121 Falconer develops this argument in a rich and interesting way:
■ The individual stories [in Einstein’s Monsters] effect various compromises between thinkability and unthinkability, insofar as … they do imagine life after [nuclear war]. But they are meant to be thought through and then, if possible, unthought… the temporal spaces they explore must ultimately remain unactualized for - unthinkable to - the reader. Each of the five stories in this collection imagines a different ‘unthinkable’ post-nuclear future as a potential present. The choice of genre is essential to the preservation of each imagined future’s ‘unthinkability’. Together, they effect a Borgesian bifurcation of possibilities, with each projected scenario helping to cancel out the others in the sequence. [The reference here is to Borges’s short story ‘The Garden of Forking Paths’ (‘El jardín de los senderos que se bifurcan’ (1941)), with its famous remark: ‘[i]n all fictional works, each time a man is confronted with several alternatives, he chooses one and eliminates the others; in the fiction of Ts’ui Pen, he chooses - simultaneously - all of them. He creates, in this way, diverse futures, diverse times which themselves also proliferate and fork’.122] Three of the five entail futuristic, post-nuclear disaster settings (‘The Time Disease’, ‘The Little Puppy that Could’, and ‘The Immortals’), while two have ‘realistic’ settings in a suspended present, with the holocaust psychologically imminent but the actual explosion yet to come (‘Bujak and the Strong Force, or God’s Dice’ and ‘Insight at Flame Lake’). Thus the lack of any sequential linkage between one story and the next contributes to the weakened sense of temporal progress as we move out of an extended present (‘Bujak’ and ‘Insight’) and from an immediate future (‘The Time Disease’) to a relatively distant one (‘Little Puppy’, ‘Immortals’). Regardless of the point where it falls along the temporal continuum, each story takes place within a cross section of time that is both ‘already present’ and ‘unthinkably’ possible in the future. Two stories end relatively optimistically (‘Bujak’ and ‘Little Puppy’), while the other three invite the reader to reject their imagined futures. The sequence as a whole is not geared toward a more thinkable and potentially more acceptable post-nuclear future, but neither is the implied reader expected to become ‘wiser’ or ‘better prepared’ as s/he turns from one story to the next. The sequential disconnectedness between each story and the next allows us to reject each possible future as it unfolds, yet the cumulative effect is of a present that branches into numerous possible futures. In this sense, the short story appears better able than the novel to accommodate a proliferation of potential futures while maintaining a basic narrative logic.
The possibility of an Einsteinian reversal of time occurring at the point of the ‘firebreak’ is explored in ‘Bujak and the Strong Force, or God’s Dice’. Here the notion of ‘holocaust’ is applied to an individual’s experience of time. Tragedy (if that is the word) occurs out of the blue; it has no motive, no teleology, and no apparent sequentiality until events are later retraced in the court scene. Bujak returns home to find wife, mother, and daughter raped and murdered, then discovers their killers asleep in the house. Instead of taking revenge, he drags them off to the police station and thereby fails to fulfill the reader’s (and the narrator’s) expectation; for some reason, Bujak chooses disarmament. When the narrator asks Bujak about this years later, he simply says, ’”[y]ou must make a start”’ (p. 49). For Bujak, this (non)act constitutes a temporal reversal, marking a break between one ‘life’ and the next, in which various aspects of himself are reversed (becoming physically weak where once he was strong, e.g., and verbal where once he was forceful). Curiously, the reversal of time in Bujak’s case is made possible by unthinkability. Why does Bujak not kill the two sleeping men? (As the narrator reminds him, ’”[n]o court on earth would have sent you down”’ (p.48).) Bujak does not kill them because they have become unthinkable to him - untouchable: ’”[r]eally the hardest thing was to touch them at all. You know the wet tails of rats? Snakes? Because I saw that they weren’t human beings at all. They had no idea what human life was. No idea! Terrible mutations, a disgrace to their human moulding”’ (p.49). The narrative becomes highly paradoxical here, with the ‘unthinkable’ attaining a regenerative power by virtue of remaining beyond touch. In order to bring the reader to that paradoxical point, the narrator must himself think through the ‘unthinkable’. If that unthinkable act is the detonation of a nuclear bomb by one of the superpowers, it is addressed indirectly by means of this ‘untouchability’. Amis himself says only, ‘[m]y impression is that the subject resists frontal assault. For myself, I feel it as a background … which then insidiously foregrounds itself (pp.23-4). In allegorically reducing the superpower mentality to Bujak’s mindset, Amis reduces the decision-making scale to the individual level. The point of unthinkability is further distanced by being deflected from the narrator, the speaking voice, to another character. The narrator himself fails to imagine his own family destroyed and concludes: ‘[b]ut in fact you cannot think it, you cannot go near it. The thought is fire’ (p.48). Moreover, Bujak’s reaction to the murderers is described and analyzed only retrospectively rather than by ‘frontal assault’ at the time he discovers them. By such narrative indirection, Amis keeps the event of nuclear holocaust remote, both temporally and spatially, while establishing correspondences between our present situation and the imagined future. If this story is ‘only’ about ordinary human criminality, it is also about the damage that humanity as a whole will do and suffer from in the event of nuclear war. The Glasgow youths who murder Bujak’s family already represent, allegorically, the genetic mutations of a post-nuclear future (‘“I saw that they weren’t human beings at all… Terrible mutations, a disgrace to their human moulding’” (p. 49)).
The possibility that the ‘apocalypse’, whenever it occurs, might throw time into reverse (as Einstein theorized happened at the beginning of the universe) is one that Amis explores at novelistic length in Time’s Arrow and in short form in ‘The Time Disease’ … ‘The Time Disease’ … describes a world turned upside down by the effects of nuclear fallout, including distortions of the ‘normal’ temporal patterns. Survival here depends on doing nothing, so no one expends much emotional, physical, or mental energy. The ironic twist is that the ‘time disease’, a form of radiation sickness, does not accelerate the ageing process but the reverse; ‘coming down’ with ‘time’ here means dying of youth. Amis thus deploys the concept of time reversal to defamiliarize and satirize aspects of our present culture that reflect a time ‘gone wrong’ (fear of ageing, inability to distinguish real events from
media fictions, etc.)……The concept of time reversal receives its perhaps most lyrical and terrifying expression at the end of ‘Bujak and the Strong Force’, however (pp.49-50)……
‘Insight at Flame Lake’ explores how the very existence of nuclear arms exerts an insidious psychological pressure on contemporary Western society. Here … the ‘future’ holocaust is projected onto present-day ordinary experience rather than vice versa. The narrative consists of a series of entries in Dan’s notebook and Ned’s diary during the course of a summer. From these stories, we piece together a ‘sequence’ in which Ned invites his nephew Dan to share a family holiday with his wife and child at their lakeside cottage. Dan, still recovering from the trauma of his father’s suicide, has just been diagnosed with schizophrenia. He is determined to cure himself without the prescribed drugs, and his condition begins to worsen. This process goes unnoticed by his uncle, who continues to encourage the boy to play with the baby, Harriet, as a form of natural therapy. The double first-person narrative allows Amis to explore his notion of a pervasive cultural anxiety operating here upon two very different mindsets. Dan’s imagination operates on both macro- and microcosmic scales. As the son of a nuclear physicist, he has a heightened awareness of ‘subatomic’ and ‘superlunary’ (p. Ill) forces. Ned’s concerns, by contrast, are all on a resolutely ordinary scale: daily newspapers, slightly paranoiac relations with a neighbor over his jeep, the growth of his baby. And yet both characters feel an ‘exponential violence’ building up in their world. Ned measures an increasing violence by reported instances of child abuse; Dan feels it in the ‘bigger picture’, the ‘distortions and malformations’ (p. 58) of nuclear power. For Dan, the lake is some kind of nuclear missile being fueled daily by the sun’s heat pouring into the water……
The Fiction of Martin Amis Page 12