PART V: The Amises, Realism, and Postmodernism

© 2002 by Gavin Keulks

             Questions of realism and postmodernism lie at the hearts of both Stanley and the Women and Money, but whereas Stanley strives to assert the legitimacy of realistic protocol, Money undermines the assumptions that support Kingsley’s more traditional brand of moral realism.  For the first time in the Amises’ family feud, however, such revaluative conflict operated on a mutual level, as both Martin and Kingsley contested the other’s narrative foundations and techniques.  A novel that intentionally scoffs at fantasy and fabulation, Stanley and the Women asserts the primacy of conventional realistic norms.  A forum for Martin’s postmodern precepts, Money directly confronts Kingsley’s realistic and paternal critique.  Both novels inscribe the Amises’ conflicts within their work, revealing the parameters of their unique form of genealogical dissent and clarifying their positions within the twentieth-century’s war over mimesis.

            Although one would be wrong to position all of Kingsley’s fiction within a traditionally realistic framework -- his ghost-novel, The Green Man, his James Bond contribution, Colonel Sun, and his alternative-world fictions, Russian Hide and Seek and The Alteration, would reject such a conflation, for instance -- the majority of his work, including Stanley and the Women, validates classically realistic protocol.  Kingsley appeals to a transcendent reality that can be empirically verified; he depicts individuals indelibly locked in larger, social orders; he provides narrative support for the existence of morality, logic, and reason; he renders characters and their environments in remarkably specific detail; and he proclaims motivation as a valid behavioral gauge.  In addition, he strives to maintain the traditional distance between author and text, refusing to undermine the presumed reality of his fictive worlds.  A 9 March 1981 letter to Robert Conquest, for instance, foreshadows Kingsley’s complaints about fabulism, criticizing his son’s more experimental work:  “Young Martin’s new novel [Other People] is out.  Tough going I find.  You see there’s this girl with amnesia shit you know what I mean, so she’s forgotten what a lavatory is and thinks the cisterns and pipes are statuary, but then how does she know what statuary is?  It’s like a novel by Craig Raine, well not quite as fearful as that would be I suppose.”  Loathe to reject causality and linearity, Kingsley instinctively avoids the confusion that H. G. Wells decried when he spoke of “the splintering frame [that] gets into the picture.” [1]

            In Stanley and the Women, Kingsley interpellates the tension between realism and postmodernism as a thematic opposition between reason and madness, order and chaos.  Significantly enough, the two characters who most exemplify this conflict are the father and son tandem of Stanley and Steve Duke. [2]   Stanley’s quest for logical order conflicts with Steve’s schizophrenic fantasies, and their familial tensions mirror the division of realism and fabulation that Robert Scholes famously annotated in The Nature of Narrative (with Robert Kellogg, 1966) and The Fabulators (1967).  According to the paradigm Scholes established, realism “exalts life and diminishes art, exalts things and diminishes words.”  It enacts a self-conscious rejection of romance and fabulation, and seeks to hold fantasy at bay, to make chaos conform to pattern.  Subordinating imaginative extravagance to empirical reality, it strives to present images of that reality that are accountable to fact, whether actual (as in real historical events) or mimetic (imitative of such occurrences).  The foundation of Stanley and Steve’s relationship conforms precisely to such generic divisions, and their tense relationship reveals the extent to which Kingsley, through Stanley, continued to taunt his real-life son, Martin. Through episodes of playful literary encoding, Kingsley used Stanley and the Women to respond to his son’s increasing literary fame and influence.  He re-asserted his own literary authority by reiterating his critical rejection of postmodernism, chiding his successful son in the process.

            In a minor episode early in the novel, for instance, Stanley asks Steve whether his girlfriend is still reading The French Lieutenant’s Woman, an allusion to another postmodern novel, like Martin’s Money, in which the author appears in his work, allowing the “splintering frame” to encroach upon the picture.  According to Stanley, the novel is “Quite a read for anybody, of course” (14), echoing sentiments that Kingsley and Elizabeth Jane Howard had both expressed about Martin’s early novels.  Stanley, like Kingsley, has little regard for experimental fiction.  He too dislikes “com[ing] up against any of this modern stuff” (27), whether expressed in literature, psychotherapy, or gender politics.  In a passage that can refer to the Amises’ generational conflict, Stanley confides to the reader that “Poor old Steve belonged . . . to one of the generations which had never been taught anything about anything” (69).  Literature, it seems, is clearly one of the things he had never been taught.  When Stanley and his mother-in-law later discuss Steve’s attempts at writing, it becomes clear just how unmemorable those efforts are.  Responding to an inquiry about “just what it is that [Steve] writes,” Stanley reflects upon his son’s literary efforts, trying to remember “anything about the few badly typed pages that, in response to many requests and with a touching mixture of defiance and shyness, Steve had planked down next to me on the couch one Sunday morning the previous winter.  But it was the same now as then, really.  I had not been able to come up with a single word, not just of appreciation, but even referring to one thing or another about the material.  But surely I had managed to tell whether it was in verse or prose?  Hopeless” (26-27).  Utilizing surprisingly similar syntax, Martin has echoed the cryptographic quality of this passage in interviews, consciously or not.  “My father,” he has remarked, “aided by a natural indolence, didn’t really take much notice of my early efforts to write until I plonked the proof of my first novel on his desk.” [3]   These are not the only references, however oblique, to Martin’s literary preferences; his mentors, too, enter the novel in gleefully teasing ways.

            Inscribing the conflicts the Amises shared over American literature, Kingsley also makes reference to Vladimir Nabokov and Saul Bellow in the novel, chiding his son’s surrogate literary fathers.  At one point, Stanley and his wife discuss Steve’s treatment at the hands of his therapist, Trish Collins. Searching for literary analogues that address the chasm between character motivation and action, Susan settles upon Nabokov.  “You know, Lolita,” she says, “Talks balls by the yard about what he does and yet he’s an absolutely super novelist.”  Immediately, Stanley brings her words to a halt, expounding that he is more concerned about the doctor’s “general approach, as opposed to just her style” (113-14), an echo of Kingsley’s earlier critique of the discrepancy in Nabokov’s work between style and substance.  Elsewhere in the novel, Kingsley refers to Bellow as well, as when a troubled Steve inexplicably rends the cover from Bellow’s novel, Herzog.  As in other novels in which a similar event occurs -- Malcolm Bradbury’s Eating People is Wrong, for example, or John Wain’s Strike the Father Dead -- Steve’s action carries thematic significance.  If, as in Bradbury, ripping Essays in Criticism signifies the end of the liberal tradition, and if, as in Wain, destroying a Greek grammar book precludes a fight with one’s father, then in Stanley and the Women, Steve’s desecration should be seen in the light of the similar literary conflict -- that between fabulation and realism.  It is entirely appropriate, for example, that Steve should select Herzog as his target:  besides being a novel that depicts tortuous metaphysical struggles, to which Kingsley was always averse, Herzog is a decidedly realistic text, antagonistic to the wild, elaborate fantasies of Steve’s creative productions.

            After Steve attacks the book, Stanley tries to speak with him, hoping he will communicate his problems.  In this and in other conversations between them, one gets the fullest impression of the way Kingsley’s novel defends the precepts of realism against the insurrections of Martin’s brand of fabulation and postmodernism.  “There was so much I wanted to ask him,” Stanley remarks,

            no deep stuff, no more than what he had actually been doing before he turned up the previous night and what he had in mind to do, but there seemed to be no way to start. . . .

                        “Do you believe in past lives?” [Steve] asked me, in a rush as before.”

                        “Eh?  I’m sorry, son, I just don’t understand what you mean.”

                        “You know, people living before and then being born again.  Do you believe in it?”

                        “Oh, reincarnation.  No, I don’t think so.  I haven’t really . . . How do you mean, anyway?”

                        “People that lived a long time ago -- right? -- being born again now, in the twentieth century.”

                        “But they . . . “ I stopped short -- there was no sense in starting on what was wrong with that.”  (40-41)

Steve tries to engage his father in a dialogue about metempsychosis, transmutation of souls, but Stanley refuses to transcend the realm of commonsensical everyday reality, much as Kingsley and other Movement writers rebelled from modernist efforts to diagnose the post-war Zeitgeist.  The conversation ends, as do most of the dialogues in the novel, on a note of broken communication, of faulty connections.  “I must remember to get petrol,” Stanley says, counterbalancing his son’s transcendental leanings, “Would you keep a look out for a place on the way?  I had a full tank on Tuesday, you know.  It’s all the low-gear work in town” (41).

            Towards the end of the novel, a similar conversation takes place, only this time, it leaves Stanley completely dumbfounded, amazed at his son’s ecstatic ramblings and convinced of Trish Collins’s incompetence.  Driving with his son, inquiring whether he remembers assaulting his stepmother with a knife, Stanley implores Steve to think back over the previous days’ events.  Steve remarks that he remembers something but is afraid of Stanley’s reaction.  In return for Steve’s confidence, Stanley promises not to be angry.  He then proceeds to reveal Steve’s surprising revelations for the reader:

                        “Well,” he said, staring straight in front of him, “I remember being born.”  I just managed not to drive into the side of a bus.  “What?” I said.  “I remember being born.  Everybody’s done their best to make me forget by telling a different story.  Mum says she brought me into the world and you say you’re my father and I don’t really blame either of you -- you probably believe it yourselves by this time. . . . [But] I can remember it, actually being born.  Well, I say born, attaining consciousness would be better, more precise.  It was like a great light being switched on.

                        “Yeah, I was put together by these alchemists using the philosopher’s stone. . . . Kept in a vault in Barcelona till needed, then triggered off by radio beam.  And here I am, ready to begin my task.”  At that he looked guilty and nervous, as though he felt he had let slip something important.  “Er, I want to thank you for all your kindness, Mr Duke.  Oh, and I think we should go on calling each other father and son in public.  For security reasons.  You understand.”  (223-24)

Stanley’s response is to pull to the side of the road, “behind a van delivering a lot of eggs.”  He contemplates whether Steve’s words derive from current madness or from childhood conflict, “rejecting me or his mother.”  Admitting that he would always feel responsible for Steve’s condition, Stanley decides that “Nobody could prove the contrary.  Perhaps nobody could prove anything of importance.  Having reached this conclusion I drove on, since I was going to have some time” (223-24).  Immediately afterwards, Stanley accosts Trish Collins, accusing her of medical malpractice and flawed prognoses.

            As during other times when Steve exhibits irrational behavior -- smashing Nowell’s television, spouting racist gibberish, removing himself to the branches of a tree, completing his “Potentium” manifesto -- Stanley operates as an exemplar of classically realistic values in this scene. [4]   Throughout the novel, Stanley labors to discern causality and motivation, searching for the logic that underlies behavior.  He seeks to uncover the reasons for his son’s irrational actions; he strives to decipher Trish Collins’s self-serving diagnosis; and he forces himself to accept Susan’s jealous self-mutilation.  The fictive world that he inhabits closely mirrors a non-fictional external reality, which is presented in an un-romanticized, intentionally anti-sentimental light.  A decidedly moral and social figure, despite his unsavory conclusions, Stanley struggles to maintain faith in a causal chain of action, even when this causality is threatened.  He appeals to reason and logic in an effort to recover a metaphysical stability, and he opposes Steve’s wild fabulations with his commonsensical, real-world perspective, however limited and mundane it may appear.  The madness of Stanley’s son, Steve, therefore functions metonymically, allowing Kingsley to indict the errors of literary fabulation as well as his own son’s equally maddening experimentations with the mode. 

NOTES