The issue of ‘writerly’ narration, of the role of the author, is taken up and explored by Frederick Holmes in his intriguing 1996 essay, ‘The Death of the Author as Cultural Critique in London Fields’, which sees the characters of the novel as would-be authors of stories who are really being written by the intertextual web of broader cultural codes:
■ Martin Amis’s London Fields both comically illustrates Roland Barthes’s thesis about the death of the author and parodies it by rendering it literal. The novel self-consciously dramatizes a contest for authorship; all of the characters are ‘authors’ of one sort or another who are vying with each other to shape events into the form of a story that will count as authoritative. None, however, is the real originator of the plots, which issue from the intertextual web formed by the various codes operative in the culture at large. The narratives that supply the subjectivities of the characters are all prefabricated and clich[é]d. They certainly corroborate Barthes’s contention that ‘the writer can only imitate a gesture that is always anterior, never original. His only power is to mix writings, to counter the ones with the others, in such a way as never to rest on any one of them. Did he wish to express himself, he ought at least to know that the inner “thing” he thinks to “translate” is itself only a ready-formed dictionary, its words only explainable through other words, and so on indefinitely.‘147 The most successful surrogate authors in London Fields, the collaborative team formed by the narrator, Samson Young, and the controlling figure, Nicola Six, recognize the received character of their materials and accordingly are able to muster sufficient detachment to deploy them successfully to manipulate others. (Art, in Amis’s world, is a thoroughly impure affair, a surprisingly direct source of power.) But paradoxically, the end which they are working toward is her literal death, since she has assumed the role of ‘murderee’ in the ‘snappy little thriller’ (p. 3) which she has concocted and which Samson transcribes.
This aimed-for and ultimately achieved death is a postmodernist parody of the deconstructionist position on language and meaning. The murder is a way of supplying closure and generating a teleological structure which confers the extratextual meaning denied by post-structuralist theory. Nicola, as the satanic femme noire [woman in black] or la belle dame sans merci [woman without mercy], the killer of love and her own ultimate victim, is a construction designed to provide an inverted, nihilistic significance - a master narrative of dark destiny which trumps the contingency and debasement of mass culture and signals the larger apocalypse towards which the planet is moving in Amis’s futuristic dystopia. She is explicit that her demise, predestined as it is, needs to be significant: ‘“Of course it could be managed. Easy. A bungled rape, strangulation … The time [Keith Talent] followed me home I could have managed that. But what do you think I’m after? A ‘senseless killing’?’” (p. 119). The perverse significance which she seeks consists of the destruction of love, and this necessitates the unwitting participation in her plot of Guy Clinch: ‘[s]he had always been sure … that Guy contained a strong potentiality of love, which she needed, because the equation she was working on unquestionably needed love in it somewhere’ (p. 132). In Nicola’s plan the death of the author becomes a paradoxical assertion of the power of the author, an attempt to reinstall her in a position of authority as one capable of using the available cultural codes to make a purposeful design, if not of creating ex nihilo [out of nothing] in some godlike, Romantic fashion.
But is Nicola actually in control, and is her death really an exit from the labyrinth of the text? As Mick Imlah notes,148 there is a suggestion in the ambiguity of the initials M. A., which appear at the end of the novel’s introductory Note, that Nicola/Samson might be the fictional creation of the writer Mark Asprey, Samson’s shadowy nemesis who never appears ‘in the flesh’ and who might exist on a higher ontological plane as the author of the other characters. The suicide letter which Samson leaves for Asprey concludes with the question ‘[y]ou didn’t set me up. Did you?’ (p.468). And in the following letter to Kim Talent, Samson adds, ‘I feel seamless and insubstantial, like a creation. As if someone made me up, for money’ (p. 470). In the final analysis, though, Asprey, too, is just another character, behind whom is Amis. While eschewing originality in the absolute sense and embracing a parodic, postmodernist intertextuality, he nevertheless puts his own individual stamp on London Fields with a cynical sensibility and an intrusive, highly metaphorical, hard-boiled style which, while nominally that of his fictional narrator, is unmistakably his own.149 I would argue that he performs the paradoxical feat of nihilistically denying the possibility of meaningful creation while simultaneously creating a memorably corrosive, if somewhat compromised, satire of contemporary culture.
As mentioned, London Fields is a metafiction which flamboyantly parades its own artificiality. Although its narrator disavows the power of invention and claims a factual status for the events which he says he records directly from life or copies from Nicola’s diaries (p.42), his many confidences about the process of writing the book only have the effect ultimately of highlighting its fabricated nature. So does the fact that all of the other major characters, as authors of one sort or another, focus our attention on the medium, on the process of writing rather than the finished product (even the semi-illiterate Keith is a writer whose struggles with his ‘book’, his darter’s diary, are unintentionally risible). Samson’s constant allusions to the literary works of others and comparisons of his own work in progress with them also contribute to the foregrounding of artifice, as do the implausible, highly stylized names of the characters: we have, to provide a few examples, Guy Clinch, Chick Purchase, Analiese Furnish, Irish Shirt, and Dink Heckler. The characters themselves behave like the one-dimensional cartoon figures that their names suggest. The actions in which they are involved are too bizarre and extreme to seem verisimilitudinous according to the standards of Jamesian realism, but, as Luc Sante states, to call the plot of the novel mechanical ‘would be to belabor the obvious. It is a mechanism, the way a Tom and Jerry escapade is a mechanism, only in this case every pratfall is informed by rich sociological context. It is a panoramic cartoon that takes in a whole world of culture and custom and speech.‘150
What Sante implies, and what I would like to argue overtly, is that the novel’s self-reflexive dispelling of fictional illusion does not signal the unreality of the text in relation to the ‘real’ world. It bespeaks, rather, a mimetic intention to reflect, with a good deal of parodic and comic exaggeration, the culturally constructed nature of what we conventionally think of as psychological and social reality. In the fin de siècle climate of Amis’s London (which seems as much a satiric comment on present-day London as an admonitory prophecy of its future), the only available narratives for constructing the self and interacting socially are either debased and shallow or hopelessly anachronistic. They are the products of mass consumerist culture and the remnants of older patterns of behaviour which no longer have currency in the society which Amis depicts.
Keith Talent’s identity as a womanizing petty crook and darts enthusiast is entirely the construct of the narratives disseminated by television, movies, and the gutter press. The very social milieu which he inhabits, the violent, misogynistic one of dingy pubs and after-hours drinking clubs, where stolen property is fenced and sexual conquests are bragged about, operates according to the not-always-compatible codes which structure advertizing, action movies, television dramas, pornography, tabloid gossip about celebrities, and sportswriting and broadcasting. The stylistic disjunction which can occur when the habitu[é]s of the Black Cross pub shift from one set of codes to another is a source of the novel’s comedy. When the subject of conversation turns to soccer or darts, the demotic Cockney and West Indian dialects of the speakers suddenly give way to the more literate, but heavily clich[é]d, argot of sports reporting … perhaps because he is blind to the contradictions apparent in his presentation of himself, Keith does not recognize the manufactured character of his
own identity and perceptions. He mistakes culture for nature, and accordingly he fails to notice the illusory cast of the images which constitute his reality. His ludicrous readiness to accept the fictions promulgated by the mass media as unquestionable realities is shown in the difficulty which Nicola has in convincing him that his virile movie idol, Burton Else, is actually a homosexual (pp. 189-90). Keith assumes that television discloses a real, attainable world that transcends the poverty and shabbiness of his own: ‘[t]elevision was the great shopfront, lightly electrified, up against which Keith crushed his nose’ (p. 8).
He not only mistakes its illusion for reality; he is also unequipped to recognize the moral contradictoriness and crassness of what he values. Pornography alone, to which he is addicted, engages his aesthetic faculty. His finer emotions attach, in just the way that advertisers intend, to material objects, or rather to the status associated with them, rather than to people. His neglected dog Clive elicits an inconsequential sentimentality, but he is incapable of loving his wife, Kath, or of recognizing how brutally he treats her. When Nicola, who has invaded his council flat masquerading as a social worker, complains about the unhealthy condition of his home and accuses Kath of child abuse, it is the insult to his dog and his smoking that triggers his ire: ‘[h]is protective instincts were stirred. Loyalty: it was a question of loyalty. Nobody talked that way about Keith’s dog - or about his cigarettes, which were superkingsized and had international standing’ (p. 258). In actuality, Keith is incapable of loyalty or honesty, but what is significant for my purposes here is that by selectively invoking an ersatz and hackneyed ethic of male heroism Keith is able to ignore his perfidies and inconsistencies and to see himself as noble. Owing to the parodic style in which the narrator enters into Keith’s emotions, however, the reader has quite a different perspective:
Tears at the dartboard, lachrymae at the oché [the line behind which a player must stand when throwing]: this was Keith’s personal vision of male heroism and transcendence, of male grace under pressure. He remembered Kim Twemlow in the semi of last year’s World Championship……Kim and Keith: they were men. Men, mate. Men. All right? Men. They wept when they wept, and knew the softnesses of women, and relished their beer with laughter in their eyes, and went out there when it mattered to do what had to be done with the darts. Take them for all in all (p. 314).
Cast by Nicola into the role of Keith’s foil, Guy is equally the product of his culture, but in this case the formative narratives are those of an antiquated gentility which are no longer honoured or even widely understood in Amis’s London. As one critic succinctly states, ‘Guy enacts the literary code of a romantic hero who is absurdly out of context’.151 His displays of magnaminity and gentlemanly fair play are ruthlessly seized by the other characters as opportunities to trick and exploit him. The epic extent of his credulousness, in conjunction with the fact that he alone is capable of selfless actions, supports Bette Pesetsky’s charge that Amis ‘seems unable to equate goodness with anything other than a gullibility bordering on imbecility’.152 Guy’s devotion to high culture, which Nicola pretends to share in order to inspire his love for her, is shown to be ineffectual and irrelevant in a society too decadent to be morally improved by art. Guy’s high-minded short stories rest unpublished, and the people around him remain unaffected by the refining sentiments which art breeds in him. His wife Hope, who bullies and deceives him shamelessly, clearly believes that his idealism is foolish. And Keith, to provide a second example, simply subsumes the little he knows of high culture into the tawdry narratives which fuel his fantasy life. Television dramas of the artistically ambitious, Masterpiece-Theatre sort are just another source of pornographic images for him; he finds, to his surprise, that they are more likely to contain nudity than seemingly more risqufé] fare (p. 165). After feigning to be Nicola’s student in a literary session on Keats, which Nicola videotapes in order to prove to Guy that Keith’s frequent visits to her flat are innocuous, he has the following thoughts:
John Keith… [t]op wordsmith, and big in Pharmaceuticals. Books: one way to make a fast quid. Breakfast by the pool. Wife in good nick. ‘Really, dahling, I got to stop writing them Hollywood scripts and get down to serious writing.’ Fucking great study full of leather. Snooker! Jesus. Lady Muck with the schoolmarm skirt round her waist. Wasn’t bad. No. In the end I thoroughly enjoyed it … Keith wondered, parenthetically, if Keats had ever played a form of darts (pp.356-7).
What Keith is referring to about Nicola is the fact that, by sitting with her back to the camera and letting her skirt fall open, she had secretly turned a tutorial on the exalted theme of Keats’s yearning for immortality into yet another of the many pornographic sessions which she arranges for him. This is clearly not Educating Rita (1981) with gender roles reversed. In the postmodernist context of London Fields, high culture is not set above mass commercial culture in hierarchical fashion, as it typically is in modernist works, but is assimilated paro-dically into mass culture. Another example involves Lawrence’s The Rainbow, which is one of the monuments of the past discussed with exaggerated reverence by Nicola and Guy. The following description of Keith by the narrator is a close parody of the famous, emblematic opening of Lawrence’s novel, which celebrates the participation of the Brangwen men in the rhythms of nature:
He sensed the pulse and body of the street-trade and heard the cars lowing in the furrows. Like new corn the young Swedes and Danes formed lines at his stall, and were reaped … The hot macadam pulled on his shoes, like desire, and he had the surety a man knows when there is a sickly Saudi Granny in the back of the Cavalier. He harkened to the chirrup of fruit-machine and the tolling of pinball table, humped the dodgy goods and defrayed life’s pleasures with sweat of brow and groin and armpit, knew also the firm clasp of Analiese’s ankles around his neck, the coarse reassurance of Irish Shirt’s hair in his fist. And ever dazed from staring at the sun, the source of all generation. Heaven and earth was teeming around him. And how should this cease? (p. 114)
How are we to interpret this parody in particular and the diminish-ment of high culture generally in the novel? Has Amis inherited the notorious philistinism of his father’s Lucky Jim? Or is high culture, in fact, not being levelled at all in London Fields but rather being used as a standard of value? Is it Lawrence who is being ridiculed, or is it, rather, Keith and his unwholesome way of life? It might be possible to affirm the latter possibility and say that the function of the parody is to satirize the debased condition of contemporary society, to show, for example, the falling off of urban life from Lawrence’s pastoral ideal (this could explain the significance of the title London Fields). Amis’s method in this regard could be said to resemble the use of classical or biblical stories and allusions in Dryden’s or Pope’s satires or even the use of the cultural and literary past in Eliot’s poetry.
The difficulty with this reading, though, is that the novel does not really seem to allow for the existence of a base outside mass culture from which it could be repudiated. All of the narrative patterns which comprise this culture are parodically exaggerated, it is true, but so are those which might otherwise be held to transcend it. To treat Keats as pornography or Lawrence as a joke or as bait in a sordid trap is to forfeit the potential to see them as a real alternative to the ephemeral and demeaning narratives of the commercial media. It is tempting to apply Fredric Jameson’s general thesis about postmodernism to London Fields and to conclude that it manifests the aesthetic logic of late capitalism in which ‘“culture” has become a product in its own right; … modernism was still minimally and tendentially the critique of the commodity and the effort to make it transcend itself. Postmodernism is the consumption of sheer commodification as a process’.153 In support of this position, we could note, in company with Mark MacLeod,154 that the motives of all the characters in the novel who perform as author-figures (with the exception of the ineffectual Guy) are mercenary and venal. Nicola is an inverted author-god who is incapable of original creation a
nd whose literary efforts serve the end of destruction. Samson is willing to deceive and even to murder in order to complete what he expects to be nothing more significant than a ‘pretty saleable’ thriller (p. 1). (He does not seem bothered by the irony that he will not live to enjoy the proceeds.) The wealthy pulp novelist and playwright Mark Asprey enunciates the literary credo of a society in which aesthetic experience has no other function than as a commodity: ‘[i]t doesn’t matter what anyone writes any more. The time for it mattering has passed. The truth doesn’t matter any more and is not wanted’ (p.452).
The problem with viewing the novel in the terms explained immediately above is that they cannot account for what readers sense to be the novel’s intention to lament the very cultural sickness in which it participates. Samson may, as I just stated, treat his novel-in-the-making as nothing more lofty than a potentially lucrative commercial venture, but he also insists throughout, in contrast to what Asprey says, that it must express the truth about its subject (pp.43, 240). However paradoxical such an aim might be in a metafictional context in which no narrative has a foundational reality, Samson shows that he wants something more than money. And ultimately he condemns his project, which suggests that he can stand apart from it morally: ’”[i]t’s a wicked book. It’s a wicked thing I’m doing … ”’ (p.435).
Perhaps the most satisfactory way to make sense of the ambiguous quality of London Fields is to invoke another theorist of postmodernism, Linda Hutcheon, who opposes Jameson’s position and argues that postmodernism’s complicity in the capitalist process of commodifica-tion does not negate, although it does compromise, its political critique of that same process.155 According to Hutcheon, such double-ness is an inherent feature of postmodernist parody, which is defined by ‘repetition with critical distance that allows ironic signalling of difference at the very heart of similarity’.156 This idea explains our uncertainty about how to react to Amis’s parodic representations of the images and narratives which circulate in mass culture. It also accounts for the dissatisfaction of those who would like Amis to separate himself unequivocally from and repudiate points of view and behaviour which they find retrograde or offensive. Consider Pesetsky’s objection, for example, the tentative language of which suggests that she is not quite as certain as she claims that Nicola should be read as evidence of Amis’s sexism and not as a negative comment on the culture at large: ‘Nicola is a problem, though; she makes us yield to a sneaking suspicion that a misogynist lingers here somewhere. She is not truly satisfying as character or caricature. She seems to be another of Mr. Amis’s plastic women’.157 One could accuse him in a similarly hesitant way of racism or of class prejudice, owing to the presence in the novel of black, working class, and upper class characters who conform to derogatory stereotypes. This sort of charge is understandable because, if Amis does not seem directly to endorse such oppressive categorizing, he seems unwilling or unable to privilege as authoritative any other discourses, including those which could contest it.
The Fiction of Martin Amis Page 16