PART IV: Revaluative Feminism?:  Money, Misogyny, and Doubling

© 2002 by Gavin Keulks

             Money’s plot is far from simple.  An English director of campy television commercials, John Self has been hired by an American producer, Fielding Goodney, to direct a screenplay, alternately titled, Good Money and Bad Money.  The movie is doomed to failure, part of an elaborate scheme to dupe Self out of his money.  In the course of the novel, Self vacillates between extremes of self-indulgence and self-improvement.  He craves autonomy yet laments his apparent lack of free will; he acknowledges his actions in the role of victimizer but fears, correctly, that he is the victim of some powerful malevolent force; and in the end, despite his numerous attempts at improvement, events collude to thwart him, and the book culminates in a whirlwind of deceit and painful recognition.

            Upon its release, reviewers attested to the novel’s energy and force.  Karl Miller labeled it “an obscene orphan delirium”; Ian Hamilton praised its “urban-apocalyptic high fever”; and David Lodge called it a “skaz narrative in the Notes from Underground tradition, a demonic carnival, a suicide note from a character who indulges in every excess of the lower body.”  Finally, Jonathan Yardley summarized the plot as “one long drinking bout, interrupted only briefly by a period of relative sobriety”:   “It contains incessant sexual activity, much of it onanistic; it has a generous supply of sordid language . . . and it has an unkind word for just about every race, creed or nationality known to exist.”  In short, Martin garnered a mountain of praise for his novel’s vibrant, complex narration, and little doubt now remained that he had assumed leadership of the Amis literary dynasty, usurping his father’s authority.  As with previous novels, however, Martin’s explicit narration came at a cost.  Despite Ian Hamilton’s contention that Money would be “thought of for years as one of the key books of the decade,” [1] the novel was shunned by the Booker Prize selection committee, as was Kingsley’s Stanley and the Women.  To many people, these snubbings seemed to derive from similar, extra-literary sources -- the presumed misogyny of the Amises’ portraits of women.

            As with Stanley and the Women, evidence of the book’s anti-feminist matrix is easy to locate.  Throughout the novel, John Self revels in a maelstrom of money, pornography, sex, and liquor, glorifying the vices of his entropic, devolutionary, and dehumanized environment.  “You know where you are,” he tells the reader at one point, “with economic necessity.” [2]   Elsewhere, he expresses his desire to be back in London, visiting his lamia, Selina Street. “I only ask one thing,” he remarks, “And it isn’t much to ask.  I want to get back to London, and track her down, and be alone with my Selina -- or not even alone, damn it, merely close to her, close enough to smell her skin, to see the flecked webbing of her lemony eyes, the moulding of her artful lips.  Just for a few precious seconds.  Just long enough to put in one good, clean punch.  That’s all I ask” (23).  In a later, more comic scene, we get yet another example of Self’s tendency to sacrifice higher ideals, including romantic love, at the altar of lust, greed, and power.  Maintaining that it is “essential to her dignity and self-respect,” Selina asks Self to open a joint bank account.  Self, however, tries to disabuse her of the notion, “arguing that her dignity and self-respect can get on perfectly well under the present system, with its merit awards and incentive schemes.”  After Selina breaks his resolve, dressing so unattractively that she cools even Self’s raging blood, Self recounts the changes in their relationship:  “The day before last, however, I decided to open a joint bank account.  I filled out the forms, coldly supervised by the watchful, sharp-shouldered Selina.  That morning she went to bed in black stockings, tasseled garter belt, satin thong, silk bolero, muslin gloves, belly necklace and gold choker.  I made a real pig of myself, I have to admit.  An hour and a half later she turned to me, with one leg still hooked over the headboard, and said, ‘Do it, anywhere, anything.’  Things had unquestionably improved, what with all this new dignity and self-respect about the place” (85).

            As usual, it is impossible to deny that Martin exceeds his father’s graphic depictions and blunt attitudes.  However, unlike in Stanley and the Women, these elements of Money are not as disturbing as one might expect.  Why, then, one must ask, does Money succeed where Stanley and the Women faltered?  Why did Kingsley’s novel suffer at the hands of publishers and critics whereas Martin’s novel was elevated to its status as a crucial fin-de-millenium text?  To these queries, there seem to be three primary responses, and each illuminates the intertextual resonance of the Amises’ novels, revealing their contrasting narrative methods as well as their literary battles over realism and postmodernism.

            The first explanation for why Money succeeds where Stanley and the Women fails is that Martin provides more than ample justification for his hero’s stereotypical reductions.  The film industry where Self works, the people with whom he comes in contact – even Self himself:  all are masters of deceit and manipulation.  Attesting to the thematic congruence between his and his father’s novel, Martin has argued that every character in Money is “a kind of artist -- sack-artists, piss-artists, con-artists, bullshit-artists.” [3]   Indeed, the characters seem locked in a vortex of corruption, greed, and desire, an interminable black hole of individualism and solipsism.  However, the grandeur of Self’s cinematic experiences gains a narrative credibility that Stanley’s excoriation of wives, women, and therapists does not, even though these characters similarly function as emblematic con- and bullshit-artists.

            Secondly, and perhaps most importantly, Martin maintains the aesthetic distance that vanished in Kingsley’s work.  Money’s inflammatory depictions are less troubling because they are so clearly those of the book’s narrator, John Self.  The reader tends to excuse Self’s incendiary remarks because he is comical, self-mocking, and always emotionally unstable.  Despite his repulsive nature, he is a remarkably endearing narrator who consistently tempers his caustic opinions, either with humor or by blatantly appealing to the reader.  Undeniably one of literature’s most self-absorbed, morally bankrupt characters, Self remains acutely aware of the impression he makes on other people.  “I want sympathy,” he tells us early in the novel, “even though I find it so hard to behave sympathetically” (32).  Elsewhere, he apologizes for his continual relapses into pornography, remarking that he “didn’t dare tell [us] earlier in case you stopped liking me, in case I lost your sympathy altogether -- and I do need it, your sympathy” (196).  Through Self’s excessive self-awareness, Martin anticipates and thereby attempts to silence the objections of his readers:  he embeds a self-reflexive critique within Money that is absent in Stanley and the Women, and this second narrative level affords him the artistic freedom to manipulate and coerce. As does Humbert Humbert in Nabokov’s Lolita, John Self betrays himself directly, reveling in his pornographic dramatic monologue, his elaborate postmodern confession, in ways that Stanley Duke never does in Kingsley’s novel.  As the furor over Lolita demonstrated, however, the public does not always exonerate an author from his fictive transgressions, so to deter readers from this complaint, Martin took an additional step to guarantee he not be affiliated with his charmingly egotistical hero. 

            In a final maneuver, Martin inscribes himself into the novel, artificially enacting a separation between himself and his narrator, regardless of how one interprets such doubling. Although authors as far back as Chaucer have experimented with narrative involution – one could point to Sterne and Rabelais as influences as well – Martin’s fictional semblable derives especially from Nabokov’s carnivalesque forms of postmodern narration.  As do Nabokov’s authorial surrogates, Martin’s function in a complicated amoral fashion, playfully disrupting the framework of the novel.  Ironically calling attention to the artificiality of his narration, Martin’s secret sharers accelerate the thematic tensions between reality and illusion, realism and postmodernism.  “I was wondering whether I did put ‘me’ in the novel because I was so terrified of people thinking I was John Self,” Martin explained to John Haffenden; “But actually, I’ve been hanging around the wings of my novels, so awkwardly sometimes, like a guest at the banguet, that I thought I might jolly well be in there at last.”  Explaining that the precedent for his interpolation was an abandoned novella he began after completing his third novel, Success, Martin reflected that the earlier attempt portrayed him as a heavy-handed moral barometer, a central conscience designed to summon the unrepentant characters from his earlier novels (such as Charles Highway from The Rachel Papers, Andy Adorno from Dead Babies, and Gregory from Success) and “put things right with them.”  He wondered how something so “self-indulgent could be such murder to write” and soon abandoned the project. [4]  

            In Money, by contrast, Martin’s namesake has a much greater range of duties and is far from the moral exemplar his earlier model purported to be.  In the same way that Conrad reworked his seafaring experiences through Marlow in Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim, Martin invoked his namesake as a parodic exploitation of the social and literary expectations he faced as a celebrity-author.  Viewed in the context of his narrative rivalries with his father, Martin can be seen as reworking the tonal imbalances that weakened Kingsley’s novel as well as his earlier book, Jake’s Thing.  He swerved to avoid the lack of ironic distance that afflicted Kingsley’s use of Stanley Duke, and in doing so, he effectively requited his father’s most cherished ideal – the inviolable sacred contract between reader and writer.

            Among his many roles in Money, the Martin Amis character acts as counselor and advisor to John Self.  He enlightens him about the limits of his destructive behavior and creates a screenplay to mediate the petty rivalries of the actors in his movie, assuaging their inflated egos.  In other words, Martin lends a touch of normalcy or mediocrity to a novel otherwise composed of eccentric narcissists, and although he appears initially to be an example of moral restraint and rectitude, opposing Self’s alcoholic and pornographic odysseys, he is eventually revealed as yet another con-artist, the most skillful one in the book.  “Every character in the novel dupes the narrator,” Martin remarked, “and yet I am the one who has actually done it all to him.” [5]   In many ways, John Self and the Martin Amis character are postmodern secret sharers, partners in a conspiracy of financial dependence and illusion.  As with all such symbolic doubles, Self and Martin engage each other in a battle to assert the primacy of their worldviews.  Numerous times, Self remarks on Martin’s lack of wealth.  On one occasion, he even chastises him for not spending enough:  “‘It’s immoral.  Push out some cash.  Buy stuff.  Consume, for Christ’s sake.”’  Martin responds by saying he prefers not to enter the “whole money conspiracy” (243), and he tries to neutralize Self’s arrogance by invoking his lack of education.  Throughout the novel, Self is punished for his lack of knowledge, but this becomes especially clear when he comes up against literature, stumbling into discussions, as in those with the Martin Amis character, for which he is ill-prepared and unable to draw the right conclusions.  Even in a brothel, for instance – Self’s personal locus amoenus – literature haunts him, feeding on his lack of culture.  Assuming Martin’s name on one occasion, Self meets a prostitute who is working towards a degree in English literature.  “Call me Moby,” she says, before proceeding to ask what Self does for a living.  Learning that he is a writer (or at least is pretending to be), she quickly breaks through his weakened façade:  asking whether Self writes genre or mainstream fiction, she succeeds in confusing Self, who cannot comprehend her words and hears only the meaningless question, “John roar mainstream?” (97).  In brief, the Martin Amis character offers Self a rival morality based not on consumption or selfishness but on the higher ideals of literature and self-awareness.  As we will see, these elements of characterization, theme, and voice also affect the book’s feminist entanglements, shedding light on Martin’s controversial portraits of ladies and confirming why, even in the light of feminism, Martin’s novel, unlike Kingsley’s Jake’s Thing and Stanley and the Women, can be considered a classic instead of a misogynist exercise.

            Despite the many charges of sexism that attended the book’s publication, Martin has always asserted that he does not consider Money to be a misogynist or even a sexist text.  Speaking with James Naughtie on Radio 4’s “Book Club” in 2001, he stated simply:  “I was a feminist when I wrote Money, which I think is too programmatic a feminist book, although of course it was denounced as sexist at the time.”  Elsewhere, he has called himself one of the declaratively feminist writers of his generation. [6]   If one mistakes the important facets of John Self’s character described above, it is easy to overlook the logic of Martin’s claims.  Money is certainly an aggressive text, which readers with tender sensibilities should probably avoid; underneath John Self’s sexist veneer, however, the novel’s thematic grammar is declaratively feminist … and overly programmatic, as Martin noted.

Applying the work of Sara Mills on London Fields, Money might be interpreted as indicative of an avant-garde feminism that embraces the contradictions that lie at the heart of the feminist movement.  Citing the work of Shan Wareing, Mills argues that it is possible for a text to present conflicting messages about its female characters, divided between an “older ideology” that portrays women as sexually vulnerable and passive, and a “more modern position” which portrays women women as “strong and active in the public sphere.”  In much the same manner as racist ideologies, she concludes, a reader is confronted with a choice about these “narrative schemata”:  “whether to accept them as part of his/her knowledge and as commonsense or whether to react against them.” [7]   Indeed, Martin embeds such ideological dualism within Money by establishing an oppositional tension among its three major characters:  John Self, Martina Twain, and Selina Street.        

Much as he would later do in London Fields, Money relies on a parallelism of characters to dramatize its feminist energies. [8]   More specifically, Martin polarizes the novel’s two main female characters, the English femme fatale, Selina Street, and the American do-gooder, Martina Twain.  As Martina’s name attests, she garners the majority of Martin’s authorial sympathies, being a playful double (Martin A[mis]’s twain) as well as an embodiment of his feminized and feminizing viewpoints, complete with a terminal a on her name.  The polarity between Selina and Martina manifests itself through numerous thematic oppositions, as both women represent contrasting, though equally valid, responses to the grimy urbanity of modern life.  As her name conveys, Selina Street epitomizes a downward immersion within such griminess, whereas Martina represents transcendence above it.  Street offers Self desire, the pleasures of the body, and baser things, whereas Twain offers him intelligence, the pleasures of the mind, and higher ideals.  Martina tries to redeem Self; Selina continues to exhaust him.  In other words, Selina is an houri, a lamia, a succubus to Self.  By contrast, Martina is an angel, savior, and redeemer.  The insoluable problem for John Self, though, is his schism between perception and action:  Self can see the light that Martina offers him, but he cannot move into it. [9]   Self is hopelessly uni-dimensional, which is one reason he’s so memorable.  Selina Street is equally uni-dimensional, however, which is why they are perfectly compatible:  they are used to using others (and themselves) up.  Self’s choice of Selina over Martina towards the end of the novel represents the melancholy triumph of misogyny, and Self loses everything as a result. 

It is patently wrong, however, to label the book misogynist, as Laura Doan has done; nor is it enough to theorize, as does Robert Martinez, that Martin’s satires use “women as vessels to articulate a vision of modern sexuality polluted by male misogyny.”  Although Martinez is right to contend that Money “rarely attempts to articulate the consciousness of women,” women are certainly not “sexually subjugated”; instead, they are equally as manipulative as Self and, in the case of Martina Twain, more enlightened and hence more powerful. [10]   Instead, it is more illuminating to contextualize Martin’s embedded use of feminism in ways that Sara Mills and Adam Mars-Jones have done, examining the conflicting messages about women that Martin weaves within his text.  These messages emerge when one probes the novel’s treatment of metaphysical issues and their corresponding effects upon authenticity.

John Self revels in his pornographic experiences, but they are part of the general exhaustion, iterability, and superficiality that inflict postmodern existence.  Jean Baudrillard’s famous diagnosis about the “loss of the real” seems especially applicable to Money, as Self’s reality is both an illusion and an elaborate joke.  Money further engages Baudrillard by questioning the nature of authenticity in the postmodern world, especially through the characters of Martin Amis and Martina Twain, both of whom attempt to teach Self lessons in authenticity.  Martina, for example, gives him a “how-to kit for the twentieth century” (308), composed of books written by or about such figures as Freud, Orwell, Marx, Einstein, and Hitler.  Intending to teach Self about higher ideals and the dangers that await those who violate these ideals, she comes to epitomize what James Diedrick and Tamás Bényei define as the moral center of the novel, its crisis-point of value and genuine emotion. [11]   Similarly, the Martin Amis character attempts to explain to Self some of the changes that have beset motivation and character in the twentieth century, warning him about breakdowns in logic, meaning, and closure.

These lessons in authenticity assume the status of a stereotypical or programmatic feminist rhetoric in the novel.  For Adam Mars-Jones, such maneuvers are indicative of Martin’s secreted desire to “align himself with qualities traditionally associated with women, with a certain tender-mindedness.”  This sub-text, he contends, “bears witness to the tidal pull of feminist thinking, and to a nagging doubt about the authenticity of male experience.” [12]   In other words, one can recognize in Martin’s work a tendency to triangulate when speaking about feminist issues, or to employ feminist rhetoric in a complementary fashion, couching it within the rubric of larger metaphysical threats.  In later works such as Einstein’s Monsters (1987) and London Fields (1989), for instance, feminist rhetoric is couched in the language of nuclear war, which threatens to obliterate authentic emotive relationships.  In Money, however, the threats are capitalistic:  money, commodification, desire, pornography.  

            In terms of representational verisimilitude, Martin has little choice but to portray the interests of his characters as vividly as he does.  As its title conveys, Money is energized by a thematic attack upon class and upon market capitalism, along many of the same lines that inform Fredric Jameson’s Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.  Much as it does with the characterizations of Martina Twain and Selina Street, Money interrogates two polarities of class:  one that pulls downward, feeding upon the commodified images that conflict desire, and a contrary impulse to attain higher ideals usually represented by “culture.”  Regardless of how much money he has, Self is denied the boons of intellect, reason, and logic.  In this respect, he suffers from what Martin once labeled the “terror of ignorance.”  Cultural refinement will forever elude Self because such things come only from understanding the altruistic impulses within society.  Self, however, understands only the rhetoric of consumption, and his ignorance of altruism thwarts his numerous attempts at self-improvement, regardless of whether he craves acceptance by class or by women.  Similar to Nicola Six’s relationship with Keith Talent in London Fields, Selina Street operates as both manipulator and mirror for John Self:  she feeds his desires and reflects to him the image of woman he seeks – the image of consumeristic commodification common to pornography. [13]

            What seems to bother certain readers of Money, at least in relation to feminism, is the novel’s unstable morality.  Unlike Martin’s earlier, aborted novella – in which he attempted to arraign the most immoral characters from his first three novels – Money is not an overtly moral or instructional tale.  Instead, it is an entropic postmodern allegory that endorses no truth, upholds no transcendent value.  In keeping with his postmodern leanings, Martin does not prescribe utopaic formulations of gender, capitalistic, and political relations.  Such over-simplification falls outside his literary radar.  To Adam Mars-Jones, this produces a “rhetoric deeply suspect and divided” when confronting issues such as gender and nuclear war:  “It is actually [Martin’s] need for absolution in the modern manner, surfacing most plainly in Einstein’s Monsters, that most threatens his stature as a writer.” [14]   By contrast, however, I contend that it is precisely this interpretive plurality, this divided rhetoric, that makes Martin’s work so revolutionary, not simply in a feminist context, but in a much larger and more important generic context as well.  In numerous dialogues throughout Money, the Martin Amis character lectures John Self about the evolution of literary conventions.  Although these discussions seem mostly annoying and irrelevant to Self, they are of great significance to the novel and provide a new intertextual dimension to the relationship between Money and Stanley and the Women. 

            Martin’s metafictional, self-reflexive dialogues provide the reader with the necessary theoretical framework to conceptualize the novel.  Analogous to Pound’s “The Jewel Stairs’ Grievance,” Money provides practical training in the art of reading, teaching the reader how best to respond to his postmodern maneuvers.  More importantly, however, these discussions depict Kingsley and Martin’s own feuds over the evolution of literary modes, especially realism and postmodernism.  Both literally and symbolically, the conversations between John Self and the Martin Amis character interrogate the bases for the Amises’ generational conflict.  The Martin Amis character does not simply speak to John Self in these scenes.  Instead, he more importantly responds to Kingsley Amis’s own critique of postmodernism, as epitomized in Stanley and the Women that same year.