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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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