However, the death may be other than human, it may also be literary (as Bloom’s remarks on the inability to subsume tradition might imply). Not content with remarking on the apocalyptic tone of recent philosophy, Derrida has also described as ‘literary’ those texts ‘which are very sensitive to this crisis of the literary institution … to what is called “the end of literature”’.240 By inviting the impossible question -is this literature? - Amis’s novel is a self-conscious symptom of the crisis Derrida mentions; and for Amis it is apocalyptically associated with the end of the world, with dying, and with the very notion of the ending. This is also generic, in two domains: such crises are part of literature (or reading) in an institutional frame (where does this course end?); and the endings of Amis’s novels, although sometimes courting death and dissolution, attempt a generic openness.
Tragicomedy, the narrator of The Information tells us, is ‘a genre which literature finds hard to do and rarely attempts’ (p. 271). However, that is not quite the genre Amis is working in. Much of Amis’s writing project has been to find and express the tragic, the romantic and the satiric within comedy (or is it the other way round?). The weather has altered the pattern of seasons, and the genres previously associated with them are similarly indistinct. But this is not tragicomedy. We are left with ‘anti-comedy’ (p.491): the seasons are out of sync. Having done ‘satire in summer, and comedy in autumn, and romance in winter’ the spring beckons tragedy. ‘But comedy has two opposites; and tragedy, fortunately, is only one of them’ (p. 479). So what we are left with is a cycle - natural, generic - in disarray. The final page of The Information gestures towards this anti-comedy:
Soon the apple blossoms were everywhere, as an element.
And that was the blossoms gone for another year. But for a little while longer they flew in festive and hysterical profusion, as if all the trees were suddenly getting married (p. 494).
As with the ending of Money, the comedy that closes The Information is not tragic but melancholic.
For Amis, the information (it comes with the MLC) is apocalyptic: it’s about death, local and universal. It is monstrous, the telos [end, final goal] of life. The end of ‘the terrestrial story’ is the end of the act of reading (we’ll no longer be reading Amis then), but not necessarily the end of language. What follows is conceivably the language of death or the afterlife. In the meantime, new transformations of language are in order, the ‘overpowering’ discovery of ‘a new way to write about modern life’.241 According to this, then, Amis’s talent is visibly ‘new … modern’. Perhaps the ‘new rhythms’ (p. 70) that Richard is searching for? Despite the apocalyptic nature of Amis’s writing, then, some other world, an after life, is envisaged as at least conceptually possible. The novel form will continue to mutate, to generate, in real time as it seeks to find a place in literary time.
Writing and sex have long been metaphorically linked, and perhaps somewhat obviously, Richard’s creativity is sexual as well as literary, or rather, his impotence is both. The metaphor works both ways: his impotence is caused by literary envy, and his books are repeatedly described as offspring. Moreover, Richard is a ‘marooned modernist’ who ‘didn’t want to please the readers’ (p. 170). In this he is quite different from Amis. Amis fans will be interested to note that for him writing is more a paternal contract: ‘I feel about the reader the way I feel about my children’.242 For Richard, ‘[i]f you had to settle on a one-word description of his stuff then you would almost certainly make do with unreadable’ (p. 171). It is implied that Richard in the wake of the Wake [that is, James Joyce’s Fìnnegans Wake (1939)], has missed the moment for unreadability.
There is an increasing likelihood that one might well have to settle for a one-word description of a writer. Amis has great fun with the temporal shift this involves, not unlike the shift of register occasioned by the backward direction of time in Time’s Arrow.243 Herein lies one of Amis’s claims to literary status, for he is a stylist of some originality and many followers. One might note that ‘style’ is also related to the name and to the person, the identification of which is a troubled moment in Amis’s fiction. The extent to which a style might be said to belong to an individual writer, with its inevitable intertextuality, renders problematic our organization of canons with their assumptions of propriety and value.
In The Information, style, like genre, is linked to a confused temporality. Richard is appalled by a disc jockey (Dub) who seems to think that one invents a slogan and then writes a book about it. Then there is Darko whose pizza is heated in the ‘MW’, where the time-saving device is abbreviated to more syllables than the word microwave. The danger, we are warned, seems to be of becoming like certain cosmo-logists with acronyms for the universe, who look back ‘sixteen billion years’ only to ‘reach for catchphrases that were getting old six months ago’ (p. 174). However, that has long been the lot of readers faced with the unreadable. Joyce wrote to his patroness in 1923, advocating the use of a new term to replace ‘interior monologue’:
They [the reading public] cannot manage more than about one such phrase every six months - not for lack of intelligence but because they are in a hurry.244
This is the importance of a readership: the contemporary audience work in Amis’s real time, but their reception can have an effect within literary time as well.
Amis’s self-allusive, self-parodic narrators raise the question of literary value, the problem of judgement, for the work of Martin Amis. For instance, Amis’s work is often situated in relation to canonical authors, such as his use of Shakespeare in Money (plot structure and characterization self-consciously borrowed from Othello). In The Information, ghosts of literature’s GM Vauxhall Conference float through the working life of Richard Tull, a reviewer of biographies in a place where, ‘[i]f literature was the universal then all you’d ever get in here was space trash’ (p. 424). Not only is a league table of literary value implied, but so is the issue of influence, of literary parentage. The Information, in its content, addresses the relationship between value and intertextuality by invoking plagiarism.
Richard thinks he has discovered a new poet, one Keith Horridge (Amis readers will immediately be alerted by the forename [that is, the allusion to Keith Talent in London Fields]), whose work excites Richard ‘to seek out the pleasures, if any, of the literary middleman’. In the last batch to arrive, in their ‘distinctive’ (the word is used three times) envelope, clip and print, Horridge’s first is ‘Ever’:
In the Gnostic cosmogonies The demiurgi knead and mould A red Adam who cannot stand Alone (p.422).
These lines make Richard consider him to be ‘“the real thing”’ (p.423).
Accompanying the poems is a note from Horridge concerning what he calls his ‘“newborns”’ especially ‘“Woman”’: ’”[h]ere for the first time I cast off all influences and speak in my own voice”’ (p.423). ‘Woman’ is pitiful self-pitying, and Richard recognizes that the lines from ‘Ever’ are lifted from some ‘impregnably famous’ (p. 424) story by Borges. They are from ‘The Circular Ruins’ and the theme and some of the details of this scene in The Information are also reminiscent of Borges’s tale, which is also about paternity, mortality and the impossibility of original creation.245 Richard’s cigarette recalls the fire that could not burn Borges’s magician; Amis’s waning sun, and afternoon moon is similar to Borges’s ‘vain light of afternoon’; Richard’s informing ‘soaring insomnias’ (p.420) recall the magician’s ‘intolerable lucidity of insomnia’;246 and even the surname of the talentless (and son-less) Gwyn Barry (a heraldic term meaning divided by colours) forms an ironic comment on the magician’s ‘colourlessness‘247 of perception when his powers have waned.
One implication of ‘The Circular Ruins’ is that all creators (magicians, writers) are inventions of previous ones who in turn reinvent their predecessors. The Information values its own intertextual relation to Borges (among others). By placing itself in a tradition of canonic value, Amis’s work asks
that it be judged accordingly. Moreover, it asserts a distinction between intertextuality and plagiarism, one which can sometimes be notoriously difficult to define. Horridge has plagiarised Borges, Amis has been self-consciously intertextual.
Amis is presumably quite aware of the legal implications of intellectual property rights since his first novel, The Rachel Papers … was roughly used by Jacob Epstein in his Wild Oats [see pp.22, 185 note 14] and was also made into a shallow and pretentious film [see Bibliography, p. 202]. This gravest of academic crimes is also the subject of some fear in Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim.248 The repeated metaphor of The Information - the novel as a child - helps demonstrate the complexity of the case: an author protects his published work by copyright, but one’s child grows up as quite distinctive from the parent, even in competition with the parent. Martin Amis points out that he and Kingsley Amis are the only case of father and son writers whose work is coterminously ‘out there’ to be judged.249 Literary canons become a paternal form of legal fiction.
Detecting Horridge’s crime (Plagiarism: kidnap; seduction; literary theft) inspires Richard to adopt a similar charge against Gwyn Barry, so he writes an ‘earlier version’ of Amelior: a kind of plagiarism in itself. The bland Amelior wins so many readers because it does not challenge them; it is scrupulously inoffensive. Richard thinks that Gwyn has arrived at this method by following his idea of the development of fiction. That is to say, he thinks Gwyn has lifted his own idea.
As Richard puts it, in his unwritten The History of Increasing Humiliation, ‘literature describes a descent’: a decline in the status of fictional heroes.
‘First, gods. Then demigods. Then … failed kings, failed heroes. Then the gentry. Then the middle-class … Then it was about you -… social realism. Then it was about them: lowlife. Villains. The ironic age’ (p.435).
Only, this idea was earlier used by lull’s creator in his left-handed piece on his real-life hero, Saul Bellow, in the London Review of Books and then in The Moronic Inferno.
In thumbnail terms: the original protagonists of literature were gods; later, they were demigods; later still, they were kings, generals, fabulous lovers …; eventually they turned into ordinary people. The twentieth century has been called an ironic age … Nowadays, our protagonists are a good deal more down the human scale than their creators (Moronic Inferno, p. 5).
Distinctions between good and bad writing are broken down just as journalism has been the vehicle for an invited confusion between author and character. Richard’s repetition of Anus’s work has an ironic significance in the light of the context in which he uses it. The fact that Richard is here ‘borrowing’ from Amis’s earlier non-fictional work is an interesting reversal of the plagiarism scenario. Furthermore, just as Richard is a fictional author, who repeats the work of an actual writer, so he invents a further fictional author in order to make the charge of plagiarism.
Having already told Gwyn a shamefaced lie, praising Ameliofs “‘sheer originality”’ (p. 113), Richard contents himself with the thought that plagiary is a hazard ‘that could sneak up on you, at [any] time’ (p.425). Plagiarism, he tells a journalist, ‘“always comes out. It’s just a matter of time”’ (p.481). That is to say, its temporality is long-term; as with literary value, time will tell. Plagiarism becomes a necessary possibility because it can come at any time, and it will come. Literary parentage, influence, is not always determinable, but always necessary, and so illegitimacy is always in the offing. (Amis seems to say: the authentic and the stolen are monstrous twins not to be announced.)
The Information makes an interesting comment on the relation of plagiary to value, for plagiarism implies positive value in the copied text. It would be satisfying had Amelior been copied, but such ‘trex’ (p.43) is legally original. Horridge’s theft is ignored - Richard silently dumps him - for he at least copied something that was good. By implying that Gwyn copied his idea, Richard suggests its positive value. By having Gwyn repeat his own work, Amis suggests the value of that.
An essay about literary value, canons and academic syllabi that focuses upon a particular writer implicitly values that writer, and in this instance the value is interesting because the writer is probably too contemporary to be canonized or academicized. Moreover, any claims for his ‘inclusion’ would not be motivated by biographical politics, by a desire for canons to be culturally representative. Amis is a white, middle-class Englishman, and his audience seems to be largely the same. Amis repeatedly answers the question of his target audience by saying that he writes for a version of his earlier self (a reply which may sustain the remarks of some of his detractors). As shown, The Information is not only about literary value, it is also about the conditions of reception of a work, including its own audience. That is to say, it implicitly recognizes that the two are linked. It is such self-conscious opening of the questions of value, genre and originality that makes The Information a suitable text for the concerns of contemporary literary studies.
Amis’s conceptualization of the literary is thus complex. Although he speaks of ‘talent’, and implies a transcendent value, his notion of the literary is more than a formalist assumption. Amis’s work goes beyond such formalism by openly engaging a generic crossover between the plots of popular fiction and serious writing, testing Nabokov’s saying that style is morality. Whereas this essay argues the literary relevance of the content of Amis’s novel, Amis clearly wants to be known as a stylist (and as I have indicated, his preoccupation with time makes him an interesting stylist). It also tests the notion of a division between popular and literary in its promotional aspect: the paperback covers of the early novels prominently suggest sex and drugs, and as shown, Amis’s interviews and journalism have invited a certain obfuscation between writer and character, even to the extent where a fictional writer, Richard Tull, ‘plagiarizes’ his author’s previous journalism. However, style and content cannot be so easily distinguished, for one of the most challenging aspects of Amis’s work is its gift of a seductive story-telling ability to morally offensive characters, the best example of which remains John Self in Money. In that sense, such a character ‘borrows’ the author’s style.
The Information asks that a concept of the literary - and hence of canons and syllabi - be directly related to a problematics of writing, that is, of language and style, of genre, and of the attendant institutions of literature. Amis seems to endorse the view (expressed also by Bloom) that it is generic or stylistic innovation that shapes canons. Such a view of literary history is at odds with a syllabus that attempts ‘field coverage’ not only chronologically and generically (in Gerald Graff’s sense of the term) but also culturally.250 One of the problems of Gwyn’s bestseller is that it offends no-one [except, of course, Richard Tull!]. Ironically, it is precisely the content of The Information which raises this issue. This is important because it highlights the historical specificity of a work that explicitly expresses the concerns of academic criticism.
Amis’s guarded promotion of intertextuality may be thought to be somewhat at odds with his invocation of the canon, for the indeterminable character of linguistic enmeshing may disrupt the clear delineation of a canon of great writers, to which the paternity metaphor used by Amis is quite appropriate (at least in Bloom’s sense of the canon). However, such work as Amis’s, which makes explicit a major concern of contemporary critical practice, is not simply a rearticulation or reflection of critical issues but a symptom of the extent to which fiction and criticism can do each others’ jobs, and therefore indicative of changes in the institutional organization of literature.
Novels such as The Information, then, are part of a particular historical moment in the institutional development of a discipline of literary studies. The self-consciousness of much modernist and later fiction is both a form of self-criticism and a statement of criticism. The discipline’s own self-consciousness about its modernity and social relevance are now the subject of a fiction that deliberately blurs academic/popular (literary
and marketplace) distinctions. Furthermore, by asking the impossible question of its own value, Amis’s work both invokes and disrupts canon-formation, be it on aesthetic or political agendas. The very notion of a canon, ‘the canon-debate’, is now a canonical text for literary studies.251 □
Nash’s essay suggests the significance of The Information’s concern with literary reputation, evaluation and endurance. It is one of the many ironies of Martin Amis’s career that the novel which so directly engaged with these issues should also be the one which detracted from the higher esteem he had begun to earn with Time’s Arrow. Throughout his writing life, Amis had shown a capacity to take punishment; but after the public bruising he had suffered with The Information, the question inevitably posed itself: what sort of novel would he write next?
CHAPTER TEN
Cops and Slobs: Night Train (1997) and Heavy Water and Other Stories (1998)
AMIS’S NEXT novel, Night Train, was a tour de force, a metaphysical thriller with a female narrator, a ‘police’ (not a ‘policewoman’) investigating an apparent suicide. But it received mixed reviews. In the Independent on Sunday of 28 September 1997, John Walsh suggested that the senior American novelist John Updike (1932- ) was ‘one of the few literary commentators that the America-loving Amis would go out of his way to impress’.252 But, as Walsh pointed out, Updike was not impressed by Night Train. He acknowledged that he wanted to like the book ‘because Martin Amis, for all his spectacular talents and fierce dedication, has received a lot of bad press lately … and because he is one of the few English writers of any era who has attempted to learn anything from the Americans’.253 But he still ended up hating Amis’s latest novel, and the rest of his review explained why:
The Fiction of Martin Amis Page 24