Allegory and Allegoresis in Martin Amis’s Money--4

If Amis's novel is an allegory, it has to possess a "metaphor of purpose" (Honig 12), i. e. the reason for the allegorical constitution of the text, related to the authority of the writer: the authority that "supports the parabolic way of telling the story" and "validates the allegorical image" (Miller 358). In Amis's novel, however, the figure of the author fails to guarantee the allegorical meaning, to provide a satisfactory authority over the text. Martin Amis is metaleptically present in the story as a character, possessing only a very limited measure of transcendence, which allows him to beat Self in chess (but only just) and to reconstruct the story of how Self has been set up. He is part of Self’s world, his language commingles with that of Self and eventually his creation defies him by staying alive when he ought to be out of the picture. 

The Utopia of art as an autonomous sphere, safely separated from the ordinary world by its aesthetic and ultimately moral superiority, no longer seems to be possible. Amis can be (and is) bought by Self to rewrite the script of the film Self is supposed to be directing; it seems that art cannot avoid becoming "pornography" as soon as it appears as something to be bought ("The books are for buying, gentlemen. You don't read the books here," remarks the assistant in a porno emporium, 323). In Zola, art (and the artist as a character) represents an autonomous sphere which, however, does not insist on its isolation from money culture to assert its autonomy. 

In his essay, "Money in Literature," Zola claims that money, earned by hard work, in fact enables the writer to create his autonomy: "Money has emancipated the writer, money created modern literature ("L'argent ..." 200-201). He insists that writers ought to respect money because "money is the courage and the dignity of us writers who need to be free to be able to tell all; money has made us the intellectual leaders of the century, the only possible aristocracy" (209-10). In Zola's novel, Jordan, the incipient writer, eking out his existence as a hack journalist, is surely on the way towards such autonomy; he  is almost the only character who is not involved in financial speculation; faith in his vocation and perfect domestic bliss support him even in times of economic difficulties. It is a precarious harmony (they are saved from repossession by Saccard who is moved by the affectionate couple), but it is still possible without isolating itself from the outside world. 

The sinister and slightly ridiculous figure of Martin Amis is very far from this idyll. Most of his energy is used up in his constant striving to demonstrate his separateness from the money world, to occupy a position outside the world of the book. The difficulty of this undertaking is shown by the fact that Amis (the "real," implied one) dramatizes his "own" inability to remain in full control of the story, to provide a source of "referential authority" (Man, Allegories 204), a guarantee of allegorical meaning.

Money encourages and invites allegorical reading by almost announcing itself to be in the allegorical mode; if it is indeed an allegory, it is a very problematic one: by choosing money as its "transcendental signified," it explores and questions the very possibility of allegorical signification; the possibility of a coherent allegorical narrative pattern and the coherent empirical self that can be allegorized are both made problematic, together with the possibility of an authentic referential authority.  

WORKS CITED

Amis, Martin. Money. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986.

Baudrillard, Jean. La société de consommation. Paris: Denoel, 1990.

Honig, Edwin. Dark Conceit: The Making of Allegory. London: Faber and Faber, 1959.

Krieger,  Murray.  "A  Waking  Dream:  A Symbolic  Alternative  to  Allegory." Bloomfield 1-22.

Lawrence, David Herbert. "John Galsworthy." Selected Essays. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978.217-230.

Man, Paul de. "The Rhetoric of Temporality." Blindness and Insight. London: Methuen, 1983.187-228.

—. Allegories of Reading. New Haven: Yale UP, 1979.

Marx, Karl. Gazdasági-filozófiai kéziratok 1844-bõl. Budapest: Kossuth, 1962.

Miller, J. Hillis. "The Two Allegories." Morton W. Bloomfield, ed. Allegory, Myth and Symbol. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1981. 355-370.

Simmel, Georg. The Philosophy of Money. London: Henley—Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978.

Spengler, Oswald. The Decline of the West. London: Alien and Unwin, 1954.

Zola, Emile. "L'argent dans la litterature." Le roman expérimental. Paris: Seuil, 1975.

—. Money. London: Chatto and Windus, 1894.