PART VI: Revaluative Realism: Money and Meta-mimesis

If Stanley and the Women resolved the dialectic between realism and fabulation in realism’s favor, Money reverses that decision, antagonizing many of realism’s classical conventions. Disbanding the classical segregation of author and text, rejecting motivation as an aspect of character, eliminating causality and linearity from the narrative frame, Martin borrows freely from Nabokov and Borges to assert a playful postmodern form, a hybrid of realism and fabulation. As did Kingsley, Martin also encoded the Amis family feud into his narrative, both implicitly – through John Self’s relationship with his father Barry – and explicitly, through direct reference. A remarkably self-reflexive text, Money satirizes Self’s neurotic obsessions as well as Martin’s dual struggles as both a developing writer and the son of a famous literary father. Early in the novel, for example, Self informs us that Martin spends a lot of time at a video arcade, or “space-parlour,” named appropriately Family Fun (71). Soon thereafter, he confesses ignorance of Martin’s work, innocently asking the reader, “Do you know his stuff at all?” (72). Later, Fielding Goodney, Self’s producer, reveals that he has heard of Martin, but only through “some cases of plagiarism, of text-theft, which had filtered down to the newspapers and magazines”: “Little Martin got caught with his fingers in the till,” Self concludes, “A word criminal. I would bear that in mind” (218).

These allusions all attest to the liberating irony that distinguishes one aspect of Martin’s character in the novel. The reference to the “space-parlour,” Family Fun, for instance, suggests both the Amis family nexus as well as Martin’s previous literary offering -- his non-fiction treatment of video-games, Invasion of the Space Invaders, published in 1982. The allusion to “text-theft” is similarly autobiographical in origin: though Martin is a self-proclaimed “great lifter of phrases,” the allusion refers instead to a specific incident in 1980, when Martin discovered that Jacob Epstein had plagiarized The Rachel Papers, grafting whole sentences unchanged onto the pages of his novel, Wild Oats (1979). [1] Even the automobile John Self drives seems to attest to Money’s inter-textual continuum: as does Stanley Duke’s perfidious Apfelsine, Self’s Fiasco much prefers “hanging out in expensive garages” to driving. “Your car,” the Martin Amis character tells Self on two occasions, “sounds like a bit of a joke to me” (242, 348) – an inside family joke, that is. Such instances of literary doubling multiply when one considers the affinities between the paired relationships of Kingsley and Martin Amis and the characters Barry and John Self. During their initial encounter, for instance, Self embarrasses Martin, accusing him of nepotism. “Your dad, he’s a writer too, isn’t he?” Self remarks, “Bet that made it easier.” Martin responds sardonically, on edge -- “Oh, sure. It’s just like taking over the family pub” (86). Such genealogical ambivalence is mirrored in Barry Self’s profession as well. Barry Self is the proprietor of a pub named after the quintessential literary patriarch -- the “Shakespeare” – and similar to Kingsley’s professional rejection, Barry too withholds paternal support from his son, having on separate occasions invoiced him for the cost of his childhood and taken out a contract on his life. “Why do I bother with my father?” Self contemplates, “Who cares? What is this big deal about dads and sons? I don’t know -- it’s not that he’s my dad. It’s more that I’m his son. I am aswirl with him,” he says significantly, “with his pre-empting, his blackballing genes” (170). Later, Self goes to see his father, hoping to find some “clues to this whole deal with fathers and sons” (227).

Although the novel is rife with such light-hearted allusions to Martin’s life and work, they do not by any extent summarize the full intertextual resonance of Stanley and the Women and Money. Though comic in nature, these literary jostlings take on added significance when viewed in the light of the many literary conversations between John Self and the Martin Amis character. Throughout the novel, Martin attempts to teach Self about the modal evolutions of literary realism. However, Self refuses to assimilate Martin’s advice, failing to see its relevance to his life. These dialogues furnish the most complete picture of the way Money responds to Kingsley’s text and opinions, simultaneously defining Martin’s technical aesthetic as well as his divergence from Kingsley’s more centrist realistic form.

In both Stanley and the Women and Money, the opposition between realism and fabulation functions as thematic material as well as the topic of character conversation. Where it is implied in Stanley and Steve’s relationship, however, it is manifest in John Self and Martin’s. The first time that Self and Martin speak, for instance, Self inquires about Martin’s artistic practices, asking whether he invents his fictions or simply reports what happens, recounting his life-experiences. Even when expressed in Self’s broken, inebriated syntax -- “do you sort of make it up, or is it just, you know, like what happens” (86) -- his categories are easily recognizable as Scholes’s between fabulation and classical realism. Significantly, Martin responds “Neither,” prompting Self to suggest a third category, “autobiographical,” that is more relevant to his own narration than to Martin’s other novels.

Money, however, eludes categorization in either of these traditional categories. It is autobiographical solely to the extent that the Martin Amis character is a parodic revaluation of the real Martin Amis. It is realistic to the extent only that it satisfies many of the mode’s primary characteristics, variously defined as anti-heroism, thwarted ambition and passion, representational acuity and detail, and an attention to social status, manners, and class. [2] However, it also consciously erodes many conventionally realistic foundations, rejecting not only narrative causality but authorial objectivity and character motivation as well. In addition, it repeatedly draws attention to its own artifice, subverting the fictional reality it previously proclaimed. In short, Money blends elements from autobiography, realism and fabulation to produce an amorphous, hybrid amalgamation that cannot be easily classified.

As some critics have noted, Money cannot simply be labeled an experimental or postmodern text. Catherine Bernard, for instance, follows David Lodge in arguing that Money is a form of “crossover fiction” which combines “defamiliarized realism,” metafiction, and fabulation. Drawing from George Levine, Amy J. Elias similarly argues that the novel can be viewed within a long tradition of realist revisionings, consciously blurring the boundaries between realism and metafiction to define a new form of “postmodern Realism” or “meta-mimesis.” Martin himself, however, seems to have given the best advice on how to read and respond to his novel: in a review of Angus Wilson’s Diversity and Depth in Fiction, published concurrently with Money, Martin argued that previous literary contexts -- the “great forms” of eighteenth and nineteenth century fiction -- had eroded to the point of exhaustion. Echoing similar sentiments by John Barth and Jean-François Lyotard, Martin explained that “Realism and experimentation have come and gone without seeming to point a way ahead. The contemporary writer, therefore, must combine these veins, calling on the strengths of the Victorian novel together with the alienations of post-modernism.” [3]

Martin’s novel is unquestionably more experimental, more meta-fictional, and more postmodernist than a realist work such as Kingsley’s Stanley and the Women. However, it is decidedly more traditional, more realistic, and less experimental than such postmodernist works as Samuel Beckett’s Murphy or Watt, John Barth’s Lost in the Funhouse, or B. S. Johnson’s The Unfortunates. In opposition to those writers and texts, which owe a great debt to the nouveau roman, Martin uses Money to rework realistic conventions from within the confines of the realistic paradigm, much as he parodically revalued his own persona within the novel itself. Money strives to record the meticulous facts of outward appearances, yet it simultaneously asserts the instability and illusion of that reality. It presents the reader with a character who craves sympathy, awareness, and understanding, yet it locates him within a false, unsubstantial environment that lacks motivation, linearity, and logic. In short, Martin performs another critique upon his father’s insistent work: only this time, his subject is realism itself, as he consciously revalues realistic protocol from within the mode itself, exhibiting the limitations of the mode as well as those writers who, like Kingsley Amis, failed to embrace postmodern experimentation.

These technical, or aesthetic, issues become the subjects of numerous discussions between John Self and the Martin Amis character. These conversations serve to enlist the readers’ assistance in identifying the novel’s applicable form, orienting them to the interpretive process, but they also operate as a revaluative response to Kingsley’s literary aesthetic. Midway through the novel, for instance, Martin Amis and John Self discuss the “realism problem” which infects Self’s screenplay. Self instructs Martin to make the actors in his movie “behave realistically” without conscious awareness, “just so they’ll do it. Okay?” When Martin objects to the difficulty of this task, Self asks him, sarcastically and ironically, whether he encounters similar difficulties when creating fiction. “Do you have this problem with novels, Martin? . . . I mean, is there a big deal about bad behaviour and everything?” Martin’s response is telling: “No. It’s not a problem. You get complaints, of course, but we’re pretty much agreed that the twentieth century is an ironic age -- downward-looking. Even realism, rockbottom realism, is considered a bit grand for the twentieth century” (230-31).

Speaking with Mira Stout in 1990, Martin admitted that realistic rationales underlie all of his fiction -- that what interests him as a writer is “trying to get more truthful about what it’s like to be alive now.” However, the contemporary scene that he depicts can only be called distinctively postmodernist -- disjointed and fragmentary, dis-unified and mediated, entropic and dynamic. As his fictional namesake makes clear, Martin considers traditional realism to be outworn and outdated, an insufficient mode for capturing modern reality. One year after the novel’s release, Martin elaborated that realism seemed to be a “footling consideration”: “Mere psychological truth,” he said, no longer appeared “that valuable a commodity.” [4]

In Money, Martin launches a multi-flanked attack against the realistic protocol that energize his father’s fiction. Seeking to render the contingencies and excesses of postmodern existence in a rival – and inherently more truthful – fashion, he problematizes the whole concept of a luminous reality, eroding faith in character motivation and identity as well as metaphysical truth and causality. Although Stanley and the Women and Money both depict a similar erosion of transcendent absolutes, Kingsley’s novel relies on the existence of such stabilizing forces for its humor and moral seriousness. Martin’s novel, however, upholds neither logic nor linearity, and it finds only limited stability in the Schopenhaurean imposition of will on the external world. Focused on “the lost subject, . . . waning humanism, disorienting history, unfixed and transient identity,” [5] Money portrays the postmodern condition as one in which the individual is especially vulnerable and in which interpretation -- the act of postulating the real, the true -- is dangerously difficult. In a lengthy conversation towards the end of the novel, John Self meets with Martin to lament the elaborate scheme that liquidated his assets. In his new role as the manipulated manipulator, the trickster tricked, Self is reluctant to challenge Martin’s analysis of events, in contrast to earlier instances where his intractability is unbridled. As Martin explains the intricacies of the conspiracy against Self, Self is baffled by the lack of motivation or reason. “Why? Why did he do it?” Self asks Martin, referring to “Fielding, Frank the Phone, the fight at the rear of the porno hall, the dead room in the Carraway”:

“Where’s the motivation? On the phone he was always saying I’d fucked him up. How could I have? I’d remember. Even with the blackouts and everything, I’d remember.”

Martin considered. I felt a squeeze of warmth for the guy as he said, “I think that was all a blind. You never hurt him.”

“Really? But then it’s senseless.”

“Is it? These days? I sometimes think that, as a controlling force in human affairs, motivation is pretty well shagged out by now. It hasn’t got what it takes to motivate people any more. Go for a walk in the streets. How much motivation do you see?” (331)

In these comments, there exists no discrepancy between the real and the fictional Martin Amis. In interviews, for instance, Martin is fond of repeating his charge that motivation has become “a depleted, a shagged-out force in modern life,” and his fictional namesake echoes the charge later in the novel by stating that motivation is an idea taken from art, not life. It “comes from inside the head, not from outside,” the Martin Amis character charges; “It’s neurotic, in other words” (341). There also exists no discrepancy between John Self’s argument with Martin Amis and Martin’s own arguments with Kingsley: “Martin’s fallen into bad company,” Kingsley suggested to Charles Michener in 1987, three years after Money’s release. “He once remarked to me, ‘Motivation in the novel has more or less had its day.’ I said, ‘Oh, really?’ It’s all those ideas about fiction -- they’re fatal to the novel.” [6] In short, the conversations between John Self and Martin Amis legitimate Money’s dissolution of motivation, identity, and fixed meaning, providing a practical lesson in how to read Martin’s novel and a necessary forum for responding to his father’s realistic objections.

By rejecting motivation as an active ingredient of behavior, Martin dispenses with the foundation of psychological realism. The scheme against John Self originates neither in reason nor warranted grievance. Fittingly, Self’s world is one in which reality and truth have been supplanted by fantasy and fabulation, where illusion has replaced fact. His reality is mutable, artificial, and staged; he cannot discern falsity from truth. Martin’s remarks also reflect the novel’s reluctance to deal with fixed reference or simple interpretation. Although Martin suggests later in the novel that Self’s name may hold a key to his victimization, onomasticism itself ultimately eludes totalization. It cancels closure, refusing to be pinned down to any single referent. In true dialogic pattern, Self’s patronymic can refer equally to his unbridled narcissism, his lack of identity, or his status as double to the twined pair of Martin Amis and Martina Twain. His patronymic refers to each referent simultaneously, circuitously eroding and reaffirming his nebulous identity as well as his allegorical status.

In contrast to most realistic texts, in which the self remains an ontologically secure construct, in Money the self suggests its opposite -- absence, erasure, and lack. An inverted bildungsroman in which the self gains no insight through growth or experience, the novel portrays Self in a process of gradual dissolution and exhaustion. Eventually, he finds that his whole world is but a fictional frame. His mental and physical decay, his dying tooth, his constant headaches, and his recurrent blackouts: all attest to his status as a superannuated allegorical figure. His inanition is not simply parodic, however; instead, it denotes both literary and cultural exhaustion, a breakdown of unifying structure, of transcendent, signifying meaning.

As does identity, meaning too recedes in the face of Money’s excessive signification, regardless of whether such excess is financial or hermeneutic. This becomes most apparent in the novel’s final chapters, which convey the fullest impression of Money’s meta-fictional matrix. True to his intractable nature, Self never relents from trying to transcend his fate, however temporary such release may be. A victim of his creator’s narrative predilictions, Self must struggle against not only his own limitations but those of his creator’s designs. On at least three occasions, for instance, Martin reassures an emotionally beleaguered Self that everything will come out all right in the end (244, 253, 331). However, the penultimate chapter presents every indication that Martin intends to dispense with his “sad, unwitting narrator” (126). Meeting Self for what he presumes to be the last time, Martin suggests that he should leave and let Self “get on with it” (343), presaging a suicide. They two characters then sit down to a Bergman-esque game of chess, which concludes when Self throws a punch at Martin and later attempts suicide. Significantly, he bungles the act.

Were Money to end with Self’s death, its critique of realism would be less apparent and complete. The novel would conclude with a formal moral reckoning preceded by character enlightenment and repentance. The character of Martin’s namesake would have functioned as an ironic and comic double, but it would have served a traditional purpose – an agent of moral awakening, as old as Everyman’s visit from Death. Although the novel would be more experimental than many traditionally realistic texts, it would nonetheless satisfy even the most flexible definitions of the mode, especially the assimilative theories of George Levine and A. S. Byatt. [7] However, in true meta-fictional, postmodern manner, Self fails to carry out his creator’s designs, ironically empowering him to transcend his fate as well as his narrative imprisonment within the novel. A self-acknowledged “escape artist” (363), Self ultimately asserts his autonomy from the novel’s fictional constructs. He eludes his death as well as his creator’s narration, frustrating the novel’s attempts at closure, linearity, and meaning.

The last chapter, presented wholly in italics, signifies Self’s release from the world of definition and form, from the world of dependency, narration, and plot. Whereas he had earlier described forebodings of illusive reality, or “ulteriority,” sensing that his existence was manipulated by external powers, Self notes in the final chapter that his “life” has begun “losing its form,” that he can identify only “present . . . continuous present.” [8] “Rogue memories” come streaming discontinuously to his mind, filling the gaps previously furnished by his blackouts (355). One of these memories presents a recalcitrant Martin Amis apologizing for subjecting Self to his fictive machinations. Later, Self recounts the final confrontation with his authorial tormentor, who had previously wondered whether there existed a “moral philosophy of fiction.” [9] “Mind you, I did see [Martin] once,” Self tells the reader, “Our eyes met as he came through the door: he looked at me in the way he used to before I ever met him -- affrontedly, with a sudden pulse in the neck. . . . ‘Hey, what are you doing here?’ he asked. ‘You’re meant to be out of the picture by now.’ I just glanced over my shoulder and said -- I don’t know why: some deep yob gene must have prompted me – ‘Fuck off out of it.’ In the bendy mirror behind the bar I saw him leave, woodenly, stung, scared” (358-59). The novel’s ending therefore suggests an ironic continuation, a circuitous redoubling of narrative. The Martin Amis character cannot understand how Self has eluded his narrative fate, and although Self appears to have excised himself from his earlier indulgences, he confesses that with more money, he will likely return to his previous behavior, rejecting any hope of enlightenment and closure.

The inverted, negative logic of these events orients the reader to the shifting nature of reality, identity, and meaning in the novel. Money struggles against closure and totalization, problematizing narrative fixity as well as extrapolative interpretation. Martin interpellates the historical divisions between mimesis and fabulation, realism and metafiction, in order to dramatize realism’s illusory stability. He blends elements from each disparate mode to create a hybrid form of experimental postmodern realism, one that enters into debate with not only literary history and critical theory, but also with his father’s correspondent text and deepest literary values. As a revaluative literary figure, John Self represents the enervation of Kingsley’s realistic methods, asserting Martin’s presumably superior technique. Given the contemporaneous publication dates of the Amises’ novels, it is not surprising that Kingsley similarly utilized his main character to criticize Martin’s literary strivings, enlisting Stanley Duke to interrogate the fabulism underlying his own son’s madness and delusions of grandeur.

When viewed as companion texts, Stanley and the Women and Money help contextualize the Amises’ controversial portraits of women as well as their contrasting perspectives on literary realism and postmodernism. Encoded instances of literary competition and familial chiding, the novels fictionalize the Amises’ professional tensions, invoking the Amises’ literary conflict as a source for playful yet serious parodic revisioning. Illuminating both authors’ technical aesthetics as well as their subversive revaluative critiques, these novels attest to the ways the Amises mutually engaged each other’s most cherished literary values. Acutely perceiving the shifting status between Martin and himself, Kingsley used parts of Stanley and the Women to contest the foundations of Martin’s experimental postmodern form. Perhaps attempting to dethrone his father’s methods once and for all, Martin used parts of Money to subvert Kingsley’s literary valuation of commonsense, logic, and reason, leveling the foundations of his father’s classically realistic form.

Whereas aspects of Martin’s earlier novels depicted an artistic struggle against his father’s more famous example, Stanley and the Women and Money depict a significant reversal in that burden of influence. More than a one-sided act of adolescent misprison, both novels in this instance are powerful expressions of confident, independent voices. Fully cognizant of their aesthetic assumptions, the Amises implicitly challenged the foundations that supported each other’s fiction, and they did not have to misinterpret each other in order to legitimate their own practices. Rather, their literary quarrels extend beyond the narrowly personal realms of Oedipal or Bloomian conflict, and their two 1984 novels reveal them engaged in a sophisticated literary debate, interrogating the status and future of the realistic novel. In Stanley and the Women, Kingsley created a realistic text that rejects and ridicules the exertions of fabulation and metafiction, affirming the vitality of more traditional conventions. In Money, Martin created an elaborate metafictional text that scrutinizes realistic conventions from within the parameters of the mode, forsaking causality and meaning as well as character identity and motivation. To Kingsley, Martin’s effort was literary blasphemy, unreadable and contemptuous; to Martin, Kingsley’s effort represented a form of literary regression, a willful rejection of evolutionary advancement. The results were two novels that separately attempted to presage the future of contemporary fiction, affirming the continued vitality of the Amises’ fictional battles, their unique form of inter-textual genealogical dissent.