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Allegory and Allegoresis in Martin Amis’s Mone I shall start with the discussion of some passages from D. H. Lawrence's essay on Galsworthy, where Lawrence posits a fundamental distinction between what he calls the "true human individual" and the "social being." "While a man remains a man, a true human individual," writes Lawrence, "there is at the core of him a certain innocence of naiveté which defies all analysis" (Lawrence 219). A division--and eventually a split-- between man's subjective and objective consciousness led to the fall from this original state ("conceived as a feeling of at-one-ness with the universe" 220); after the fall, man is degraded to the status of "social Being," subordinated to the reign of money. "Money," says Lawrence, "of course, with every man living goes a long way. With the alive human being it may go as far as his penultimate feeling. But in the last naked him it does not enter" (219). When, however, the alive individual loses his feeling of identity with the living continuum of the universe, he falls into a state of fear where his only conceivable reaction is the striving to protect himself against the world, "to insure himself with wealth... Money, material salvation is the only salvation. What is salvation is God. Hence money is God" (220). It seems that at this stage the state of innocence is irrevocably beyond reach: even rebelling against the money-god is inauthenic as it does not, cannot regain naiveté; the rebel remains "castrated just the same, made a neuter by having lost his innocence" (220). Lawrence's narrative follows a fairly well known mythical and theoretical scheme, where the story of man's downfall is projected onto a topography of the self: the origin of the story (Edenic at-one-ness) is identical with the deepest core of personality. The fall from the original state of innocence (which, incidentally, is posited here as some arcane knowledge) into a state of fear is presented in terms of a shift away from the core of the self. The fallen, divided self, having lost the knowledge of his innocence, creates an inauthentic deity, identified by Lawrence's syllogism as money. In his fear of the outside world (suddenly become alien, other), man accumulates as much of the false god as possible, making out of it a protective layer around himself. While man is entrenching himself in layers of the outside world, his self recedes back into itself, or rather, into the inauthentic, material half of itself. It would seem from this text that the authentic self is irredeemably lost (as is suggested by the word 'castrated'); later on, however, Lawrence implies the possibility of some archeological recovery (or uncovering) of the core of manhood, when he claims that humanity is humanly unconscious, unaware of its hidden naiveté (222). As elsewhere in his writings, Lawrence's language associates this original core of manhood with the body ("naked him"); accordingly, its loss is metaphorized as the loss of bodily energies, potency ("castrated," "neuter"). A recovery of the true self would, then, require the recovery of the body and a consciousness of the body as the source and site of authentic desire and happiness. If we disregard Lawrence's missionary zeal and some implications of his mythical framework, it is obvious that his narrative--and the kind of language he uses--is relevant to Martin Amis's novel, where several key words of Lawrence's story appear (self, fall, fear, innocence), although with ironical overtones (deprived of the teleology of the Lawrentian myth.) Amis's novel seems to be a study of the inauthentic self in the fallen state of fear, seeking false safety in the false god it has created: money. Amis explores some of the problems raised by Lawrence, and other problems raised by the implications of Lawrence's language: the relationship between money and the inauthenticity (or disintegration) of the self; the contemporary social being as a fallen being; money as a transcendental entity (and the problems inherent in allegorical discourse about money); the Utopia of the self in at-one-ness with the body, the self as the source of authentic desire. One of Amis's primary concerns is exactly the inauthenticity of desire in contemporary society; in the (relentlessly) dystopian landscape of the self he presents, desire is transformed before its inception into pornography--it is always already pornographic ("pornography" is used in the novel in a broad sense, meaning something like desire turning into consumption, determined by external systems of signification instead of originating in the self; in terms of the body, for instance, it means what Baudrillard calls the "erotization" of the body, constituting it as a carrier or palimpsest of the exchanged signs of predetermined desire (Baudrillard 208). I shall discuss some of these issues as they are related in Amis's novel to the question of allegory and allegorical interpretation, reading the book in the light of another allegorical narrative about money: Zola's novel of the same title .
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