Allegory and Allegoresis in Martin Amis’s Money--3

Reading the novel as the allegory of money depends upon the status of money in allegorical language. As an analysis of fictional and philosophical discourse on money shows (cf. Simmel, Marx, Spengler), it is at least doubtful whether money can be placed on either of the poles of allegory; on the one hand, it is both an object and a concept; on the other hand—as Simmel demonstrates—its essence is its emptiness, lack of content, infinite interchangeability; it is somewhere between material reality and the world of ideas; it is very much like language, a semiotic system in the field of value which is its transcendental signified. Allegorizing money therefore implies allegorizing language itself as a strategy of meaning-making; it has to be a self-scrutinizing, deconstructive allegory (as allegory is defined by Walter Benjamin, Paul de Man, J. Hillis Miller and Murray Krieger), turning back upon itself as language and aware of the inevitable failure of (allegorical) signification. (Amis's novel is very much aware of this, as it is concerned with systems of significations which have nothing to do with the reality they cover instead of revealing it.)

Amis’s novel offers itself as an allegorical narrative also in the sense that it is the retelling of an arch-story (cf. Honig). This arch-story seems to be the Divine Comedy (there are numerous references to Dante's work: the dog, 666, all the talk about a fallen world, hell, the underworld inhabited by ghosts, pain and punishment). The narrative logic of the novel, however, is not allegorical in the traditional sense; deprived of the teleology inherent in Dante's narrative, and of the possibility of an external position or point of view, the story borrows the logic of the Inferno only. It is purely repetitive; instead of the progress of the allegorical protagonist, there is only a kind of "fraying," "attrition," "erosion," a sense of a slow spiraling down to ever lower levels of energy. 

In Zola, the story clearly has an allegorical shape: the rebellion of man against God's supremacy, the reenacting of man's desire to become god; Saccard's career is modeled on the archetypal structure of rise and fall; his whole struggle has strong theological overtones: his financial enterprise is seen in terms of reconquering the Middle East, the Holy Land, recreating a Garden of Eden. His fight is Christianity's crusade against Jewish plutocracy, represented in the novel by the godlike Gundermann, an invisible yet ubiquitous and omnipotent man, divinely exhausted like Borges's gods. The struggle between Saccard and Gundermann is seen as a Theomachia, a struggle between "two fabulous monsters" (cf. Zola, Money), it is also the struggle of abstract qualities (imagination versus rationality, desire versus asceticism). Finally, the fall of Saccard and his World Bank is described in apocalyptic language, accompanied by the apocalyptic turbulence of the last days of Napoleon III's crumbling empire. In Amis, apocalyptic language is pervasive, but real fall is inconceivable, since it is already Hell. Self is already "down here." The story is "terminal" rather than apocalyptic, pervaded by what Kermode calls an immanent sense of an ending. Amis's novel is too much about the here and now to assume a coherent allegorical shape (even Paul de Man concedes that allegory is a coherent narrative structure, provided that it is set in an ideal time--217).

Amis's novel seems to be an allegory also in the sense that some of the major characters have blatantly allegorical names like Martina Twain and Selina Street; the obvious example is the narrator-protagonist John Self, apparently a kind of contemporary Everyman, inhabiting the empirical level of the allegory. The empirical level, however, which is supposed to be self-effacing in allegory, is very problematic in the novel:  reality is unreal, things  already "mean" something  according  to preestablished systems of signification, where everything (and everybody) becomes a sign, or rather, a palimpsest for changing signs. The self is no exception; it is never identical with itself, it is made up of "timelag, culture shock, zone shift" (264), a de-realized object ("cretinized" like "girls who subliminally model themselves on kid-show presenters," "Men whose manners show newscaster interference, soap stains, film smears"--27). 

Even the body becomes an entity on which the signs of always already present codes are being endlessly inscribed. There is simply no longer any empirical self to be allegorized. The interpretative procedure which Leo Bersani calls "the allegorization of the self" seems to reveal nothing that is not already inscribed on the surface. In Zola, the allegorization of the self is undisturbed; allegorical figures (like La Mechain) function according to clearly definable roles in the text. The protagonist Saccard is also an allegorical figure, both in terms of "standing for" something (say, illimitable desire) and in terms of having a personality that can be allegorically interpreted: Zola's language of character-reading abounds in expressions like "the true face of someone," "delving down into the depths of someone's soul").