The Satirical Theater of the Female Body:
The Role of Women in Martin Amis’s The Rachel Papers,
Dead Babies, and Money: A Suicide Note
Part 2
The Rachel Papers
To understand better the characterization of women in these three
novels by Martin Amis, we can turn to a discussion of his first text, The Rachel Papers.
The novel yields many themes that resonate throughout all of Amis’s later work: the
mediation of identity and sexuality, the effect of male misogyny on women, and a
satirically comic analysis of morally bankrupt characters debased by materialism and
commodity culture. In The Rachel Papers, Amis begins his critical examination of
modern sexuality by satirizing the mediated sexual behavior of Charles Highway.
Amis’s satire is not limited to a comic critique of his protagonist, however. Amis
uses Charles Highway’s sexist behavior as a way to address his larger literary
concerns—i.e., for establishing a literary dialogue with past writers on the issue of
sexuality.
This pattern of dialogue can be illuminated by Harold Bloom’s
theories of literary influence. James Diedrick has pointed out the presence of
Bloom’s "anxiety of influence" in Amis’s writing with respect to the
rivalrous relationship between Amis and his father, Kingsley Amis. "In terms of
Bloom’s theory, the proximity and intensity of his father’s influence have led
him to seek a series of father substitutes whose influence he can acknowledge without
filial conflict" (6). In this search for father substitutes, Amis seems to be
rigorously engaged in "creative misreadings," enabling us to illuminate his work
through Bloom’s second revisionary ratio, tessera: "A poet antithetically
‘completes’ his precursor, by so reading the parent-poem as to retain its terms
but to mean them in another sense, as though the precursor had failed to go far
enough" (Bloom in Richter 709). The principle of tessera is present in
Amis’s preoccupation with the mediation of sexual behavior: the follies and sexual
corruption of Charles Highway become Amis’s philosophical challenge to the romantic
idealism of writers such as D.H. Lawrence. Indeed, Amis situates sexuality between the
tensions of the contemporary world and the age of Romanticism and Lawrentian sexuality:
It’s part of a genuine idea about modern life—that it’s so mediated
that authentic experience is much harder to find. Authentic everything is much harder to
find. In all sorts of behavior, even in the sack, we’re thinking, ‘How does this
measure up? How will this look?’ We’ve all got this idea of what it should be
like—from movies, from pornography. I’m interested in two extremes. The first is
the idea that the earth moves, this great union is formed, and the self is lost. That
comes from D.H. Lawrence and Romantic poetry and is what we all devoutly hope for. The
other extreme is sort of athletic—the hot lay, where the self is in fact not lost in
the moment but is masterful and dominant. And that comes at us from another
direction—from advertising and pornography and trash fiction. (Morrison 101)
Charles Highway symbolizes this mediation of modern life: his intense
self-consciousness (as particularly regards the seduction of women) throughout the novel
reveals that there is hardly anything about him that is authentic. For instance, Charles
"outlines" his bedroom in anticipation of his evening with Gloria:
The room wouldn’t, after all, need much preparation for
Gloria—record-sleeves scattered negligently about the room, certain low-brow
paperbacks displayed advantageously on table and desk, and the colour supplements, open at
suitable pages, on the floor. Gloria probably had no fixed conception of me so there
wasn’t much point in going into detail. (Amis 16)
In his attempts to impress and seduce women, Charles represents a
youth caught in a postmodern world where identity has become another commodity to exploit:
"In my room I looked out my Rachel note-pad in preparation for the telephone
call. I flicked through it making notes, underlining the odd pertinent phrase, sketching
personas" (33). Indeed, the self becomes an article of clothing that is valued only
for representation, when Charles prepares for his encounter with Rachel:
What clothes would I wear? Blue mandras shirt, black boots, and the old black cord
suit with those touching leather elbow-patches. What persona would I wear? On the two
occasions I had seen her last August I underwent several complete
identity-reorganizations, settling finally somewhere between the pained, laconic,
inscrutable type and the knowing, garrulous, cynical, laugh a minute, yet something
demonic about him, something nihilistic, muted death-wish type. Revamp those, or start
again? (42)
Identity, with Charles and his late-twentieth-century environment, has become
commodified: people no longer possess innate or developed characteristics but are
"types" that purchase personality in a marketplace of ideological
self-fashioning.
This extreme of mediated behavior, then, conflicts dramatically with
the romantic notions of self-effacement through sexual experience. Amis effectively
employs his use of dramatic monologue in order to articulate this antagonism. As noted by
James Diedrick, the use of this narrative technique is one of Amis’s key
accomplishments in the novel, for it allows Amis to comment on his characters and on
literature in general without interfering with his characters’ thoughts (Diedrick
31). Amis uses this technique during Charles’s foreplay with Rachel to speak through
his character and pose a challenge to D.H. Lawrence’s romantic interpretation of
sexuality: "Had the time come to orchestrate the Lawrentiana?" (151). Charles
discovers rather quickly, though, that the self will not find transcendence through
passion:
How nice to be able to say: ‘We made love, and slept.’ Only it wasn’t
like that; it didn’t happen that way. The evidence is before me...I know what
it’s supposed to be like, I’ve read my Lawrence. I know also what I felt and
thought; I know what that evening was: an aggregate of pleasureless detail, nothing more;
an insane, gruelling, blow-by-blow obstacle course. And yet that’s what I’m
here for tonight. I must be true to myself. Oh God, I thought this was going to be
fun. It isn’t. I’m sweating here. I’m afraid. (152; my emphasis)
In a novel dealing with the comic and disturbing aspects of mediated
behavior, Amis’s intention here is to debunk the lofty idealism of Lawrence and
expose sexuality under the influence of intense self-consciousness. He has Charles
announce this challenge to Lawrence’s idealism, signifying the presence of tessera:
Amis is acknowledging Lawrence’s preoccupation with and interpretation of sexuality,
but extends and redefines its meaning by rewriting sexuality under the influence of
mediation in the postmodern age. Amis presents this redefinition by satirizing the
mechanical aspects of Charles’s sexual encounters:
It wasn’t that bad, as I remember, not significantly worse than usual.
Fifteen, maybe twenty minutes trying not to come, with a beady dread of what was going to
happen when I did; a decent (i.e. perceptible) orgasm; a further two or three minutes in
garrotted detumescence. Cock attains regulation minimum and is supplanted by
well-manicured thumb; Gloria has another...five? orgasms; and so it ends. (19)
There is no great union or Lawrentian "connection" found
in Charles’s sex with Gloria: instead of romantic self-effacement through
intercourse, there is intense self-concentration and anxiety. Amis also carefully chooses
his language to articulate the tired, mediated machinery of sex: the body struggles in a
timed process, its parts operating mechanically ("regulation minimum").
Sexuality, then, becomes a banal act of performance for the self: "I recall turning
at one point from the section of wallpaper I was perusing to check on Gloria’s face
(just for the files): and impressively atavistic it was too" (21). Charles’s
ironic study of the wall debunks the notion of communicative sex, while his inspection of
Gloria’s face becomes a marker of status for the self.
In the process of dialoguing with and critiquing this Lawrentian and
Romantic view of sexuality, Amis uses his female characters to foreground his thematic
concern with mediation. The above satirized description of Charles’s foreplay is
effective only by having Rachel presented as a "blow-by-by obstacle course" that
captures Charles’s stumbling mediated behavior. To continue his deconstruction of
Lawrentian sexuality, Amis casts Gloria as a voyeuristic spectacle in order to provide
Charles with the voice he needs to revise the interpretation of sexual experience:
During the long pre-copulative session I glanced downwards—and what should I
see but Gloria, practising the perversion known as fellatio. Unaccountably, she was doing
this with great rigour and enthusiasm, circling her head so that her long plush hair
skimmed and glided over my hips, thighs and stomach. Visually, it was most appealing, but
all I could feel was a remote, irrelevant numbness—plus, in my legs, cramps and
pins-and-needles respectively. Have I come already, perhaps? I asked myself. (20-1)
In this passage Gloria functions as a vessel through which the
mediated sexual concerns of the novel can be revealed: the visual spectacle of her
"rigorous" sexual behavior serves to construct a titillating image of expected
erotic play that evaporates with the painful sensations registered by Charles. In this
way, Gloria becomes a subjugated textual object, isolated in a pornographic image, that
carries the greater significance of allowing male experience to speak and debunk the
illusion of sexual pleasure.
However, Amis’s intention in The Rachel Papers is not
simply to rewrite ideas about sexuality. Before his characterization of women can be
further critiqued, his approach to sexuality must be thoroughly understood. Amis presents
the reader with a comic manifesto in The Rachel Papers, clarifying his interest in
scabrous sexual activity: "Surely, nice things are dull, and nasty things are funny.
The nastier a thing is, the funnier it gets" (87). Amis seems to define humor as a
way to satirize the moments of sexual and moral corruption of society: while using
laughter to punish the degeneracy of his characters, Amis also uses comedy to cope with
the nasty realities of domestic violence, sexual aggression, and the proliferation of
sexually transmitted diseases that ooze their way across the pages of his texts. Indeed,
Amis has admitted that the type of humor in which he is interested is one that embraces
the painful situations of life: "What I am interested in is heavy comedy, rather than
light comedy. It’s a wincing laughter, or a sort of funky laughter...Sort of a
hung-over laughter, where it hurts" (Morrison 97). Comedy, then, in the case of The
Rachel Papers, is employed as a means of punishing the corruption of Charles, while
also serving as a kind of lubricator for what Amis sees as the nasty realities of modern
society—as a "method of confronting often-repressed truths, of using humor to
gain a critical leverage on them" (Diedrick 14). A clear example of this
"wincing" humor is Charles’s recollection of his sexual experience at the
Belsize Park flat:
It ended one mid-August morning when I happened to glance down at the undulating
area between my stomach and the stomach of a girl I just so happened to be poking at the
time (in a sweaty, hungover state, I might add). What I saw there were worms of
dirt—as when a working man, his day done, strides home rubbing his toil-hardened
hands together, causing the excess grit to wriggle up into tiny black strings, which he
soon brushes impatiently from his palms. Only these were on our stomachs and therefore
much bigger: like baby eels. (13)
The graphic imagery is purposefully used to criticize the
misogynistic and inebriated sexuality that is characteristic of Charles Highway: it is a
way to laugh at and feel disgust for his behavior. A more effective moment where Amis uses
laughter to deal with Charles’s sexual degeneracy follows his coupling with Pepita
Manehian:
However, on the following Friday or thereabouts I woke up to find that someone had
squeezed a family-size tube of pus all over my pyjama bottoms. A toxic wet dream? On
visiting the bathroom I found also that I was peeing lava. Palpably, something was up. To
deal with the first symptom I fixed up a sort of nozzle over my helmet with a wad of
Kleenex and an elastic band. To ameliorate the second, I took care always to use the
narrow downstairs lavatory, where, with palms pressed flat against the walls, like Samson
between the pillars of the Philistine temple, I would part company with angry half-pints
of piss, pus, blood—you name it. (90)
The comic elements of these scenes serve to attack the promiscuity
of Charles, using laughter to confront the painful consequences of his (mis)use of
sexuality. Amis’s puritanical intention behind this critique of sexuality becomes
evident when he brackets the discussion of Charles’s sexually transmitted diseases
with the satirist’s disapproval: "This be Nature’s way of recommending
monogamy" (89). Thus, despite the undeveloped claim of Shanti Padhi that
"Repulsiveness and grossness are the main elements of Martin Amis’s humour"
(Padhi 40), Amis does have a set purpose to his brutal and explicit treatment of
sexuality. Contrary to Padhi, Amis’s early works are not simply "The
scatological pranks of a young writer trying with utmost panache to outdo his rivals in
porno-peddling" (Padhi 36), since Amis’s wider vision seems to be to relish in
his use of language and imagery in order to expose the decay of a postlapsarian modern
world.
Charles Highway is the first of many misogynists to strut his way
through the pages of Amis’s fiction. Charles holds stereotypical views of women,
mocks their bodies, and willfully plots their seduction without regard to their feelings.
More central to the novel’s main theme, he uses literature to satiate his sexual
desires: "Because I really quite liked Blake—and not just for the fucks he had
got me, either" (73). Amis has stated his distaste for Charles, remarking that
"Charles is a crude case of someone who tries to turn literature to his own
advantage—using Blake, for example, to seduce girls" (Haffenden 10). Amis
presents Charles’s misogyny in varying degrees: "Ran into Jenny on the front
doorstep. She was on her way out to have lunch with a friend. I didn’t think girls
did that sort of thing nowadays, and said so. Jenny laughed vivaciously, but looked not at
ease" (33). More cruel than Charles’s ignorant views of women, though, is his
treatment of women during sex: "Of course: I had never used a sheath before. With
those girls who weren’t self-contracepting I had practised coitus interruptus,
practising it all over their stomachs or in between the sheet and their bums, depending on
locale and whether or not I liked them" (155).
Based upon this behavior, Amis is able to express Charles’s
sexual corruption by drawing a symbolic parallel between Charles’s sexuality and the
bathroom. After discovering two adolescent memoirs stapled together in his files,
describing the appropriate behavior of turds and his desire to have sex with an Older
Woman, Charles says: "I free the staple with my fingernails and marry the two items
with a paperclip, instead. I don’t think they can be that closely
connected" (88; original emphasis). The irony Amis invests in this scene reveals that
the memoirs share a crucial similarity. The juxtaposition of the two items suggests how
Charles has confused sexuality with defecation, divesting sexual intercourse of its
communicative potential and transforming it into a process of expelling bodily fluids
because of his selfish and emotionless pursuit of women.
While rendering Charles’s misogyny and degenerative use of
sexuality, however, Amis spends little time developing his female characters. Even though The
Rachel Papers is a portrait of the sexual behavior of the late 1960s, Amis’s
satire in the novel can be best described as being specifically concerned with male
uses and abuses of sexuality. Amis continues to express the degeneracy of Charles’s
desires for women, by using language to depict his sexual behavior as a kind of bowel
movement: "Though—come on—did I really want to show her the other side, my
place? Dionysian bathroom sex: troop in, tug back the covers, go through the gaping
routine, do everything either of you can conceiveably think of doing, again, lurch lick
squat squirt squelch, again, until it’s all over, again. No. And she probably
wouldn’t let me" (180). But while expressing this metaphorical connection
between Charles’s sexuality and the bathroom, Amis is lightly concerned with the
characterization of women: "Made the girl mine in a lavatory at some weekend party.
(All the bedrooms were occupied; but it was quite a spacious closet, with a rug, some
towels, and tissues a plenty.) We did well, even though, in the dying moments, Pepi
smashed her head three times against the lavatory bowl, this giving the cramped
cleaning-up operations a still more incongruous air" (89-90). The main focus of the
passage is to capture Charles’s debased sexuality by symbolically placing this
encounter in the bathroom. The physical condition of Pepita, though, seems only to help
construct the debasement of the scene: there is no indication of her consciousness as a
character, except that her abused body adds a comic air to this situation.
James Diedrick suggests that some of the mischievous sexual antics
of this novel are purposeful: "While the novel can be read as a (male) adolescent
coming-of-age story, it can just as easily be taken as a parody of the
genre..." (30). But even when Amis parodies these sexual activities (as suggested by
the tone and style of listing sexual positions quoted below), the female body stages the
incident:
Here we go. An old-school repertoire of minimally sexy positions. Examples: I slung
her legs over my shoulder; knelt, bending her almost triple; lay straight as an ironing
board; turned her round, did it from behind, did it from the side; I brought my right leg
up, kept my left leg straight—I did the hokey-pokey, in fact. But, again, it is
change of position that is sexy, not the position itself, and God forbid that I should
feel sexy. (161)
Rachel becomes an extremely elastic, pliable object that is
"slung and bent," and twisted about in order to characterize Charles’s
behavior. The manipulations of her body are presented as a comic dance—"the
hokey-pokey"—to evoke parodic laughter at and satirical commentary on the male
protagonist. In these moments of parodying sexuality, Amis even seems to become seduced by
what he is critiquing and lose his satirical focus: "Tonight, my lad, you are going
to get laid. Selfishly. You’re going to get gobbled for a kick-off. You gonna bugger
her good. You gonna rip out her hair in fistfuls, fuck her like a javelin hurled across
ice, zoom through the air, screaming" (187-8). Even though Amis is seemingly
attempting to satirize the narcissistic behavior of Charles in the scene, his intention
fails precisely because of the violent antifeminist imagery that is employed in order to
comment on Charles. If the passage is meant to ridicule Charles, it is done so by
violently abusing the female body.
Amis’s failure to maintain a satirical distance from his
character’s actions continues immediately after this fantasy of Charles’s. When
Charles lies in bed with Rachel, Amis seems to describe the scene so as to illuminate the
misogyny that arises from Charles’s selfish actions: "If you can slash in my bed
(I thought) don’t tell me you can’t suck my cock. So I drive it into her cheek,
practically up her nose, and Rachel takes it in her mouth and releases it almost at once.
With a croak of disgust...And yet I was the one who felt ashamed, dirty, dog-like, in the
wrong. To prove it there were tears on her face when I came up for air" (189).
Charles’s behavior is shown to be completely dehumanizing towards Rachel as signalled
by the tears on her face. But the added descriptions of Charles’s efforts to force
fellatio seem to be tinged with the overtones of comedy, which detract from the satirical
sentiments present in the passage.
Even though one of the goals of The Rachel Papers is to
perform a satiric comedy and criticize the idea of the "hot lay" ("where
the self is in fact not lost in the moment but is masterful and dominant" [Morrison
101]), Amis again stages this humor on a thoroughly objectified female body. Noting this
complicated nature of Amis’s satire in the text, James Diedrick states: "In The
Rachel Papers, it is not always clear where Amis stands in relation to his
narrator" (31). This satirical ambiguity suggests that Amis’s questionable use
of the female body represents the presence of authorial antifeminism that resonates within
the attempted satirical sketches of Charles’s sexuality.
Finally, on a more subtextual level, the use of women to foreground
male behavior finds expression in Rachel’s relationship to Charles. Rachel is hardly
a fully developed character; indeed, her main role is to be a sexual object, to function,
in the words of James Diedrick, "at least in part as a fantasy-projection of
Charles’s own upwardly mobile aspirations (her first name is a virtual anagram of his
own)" (24). As I have shown, however, Rachel plays a more significant role—that
of a narrative vehicle that drives Charles "Highway" to maturity in this
coming-of-age novel. The deeper concerns of The Rachel Papers is Charles’s
search for a resolution with his philandering father, Gordon Highway—an observation
also made by James Diedrick: "Significantly, and despite the novel’s focus on
his pursuit of Rachel, Charles’s relationship with his father forms the emotional
center of the novel" (26).
What has not been acknowledged, however, is how the pursuit of
Rachel structures and resolves this greater patriarchal concern of the text.
In her study "Desire in Narrative," Teresa de Lauretis ruminates on this
question of the feminine giving voice to male desire in narration. She states that
feminist theory must perform a rereading of the "sacred texts" on narrative
theory, and cites Roland Barthes’s interest in language, narrative, and the Oedipus
as the factors that produce the informing logic of male desire in narrative development:
"Pleasure and meaning move along the triple track he first outlined, and the tracking
is from the point of view of Oedipus, so to speak, its movement is that of a masculine
desire" (de Lauretis 107). Amis’s narrative places Charles in the role of
Oedipus, a character who is travelling through his experiences in search of an emotional
resolution with his father. And the character who provides the "road" on which
to construct these travels is Rachel. Rachel and Charles’s father, then, are not
separate concerns of the novel; rather, she serves to inform and provide the landscape in
which Charles can act out and think about the grievances against his father.
The truer significance of Rachel’s character can be found in de
Lauretis’s reconsideration of the feminine in Oedipal narrative structures:
"Medusa and the Sphinx, like other ancient monsters, have survived inscribed in hero
narratives, in someone else’s story, not their own; so they are figures or markers of
positions—places and topoi—through which the hero and his story move to their
destination and to accomplish meaning" (109). Rachel, like Medusa and the Sphinx,
fulfills this role of the "marker of positions" by adding form to Charles’s
narrative perusal of his childhood. Charles "rigorously clerks" his adolescent
files, because he (like Oedipus) is out on a quest: "Because something has definitely
happened to me, and I’m very keen to know what it is" (4).
What Charles stumbles upon in the opening of this narrative is the
question of his "absent" father: "It’s strange; although my father is
probably the most fully documented character in my files, he doesn’t merit a note-pad
to himself, let alone a folder...Why nothing for my father? Is this a way of getting back
at him?" (8). After this point, Charles’s encounters with Rachel throughout the
text are tellingly juxtaposed with thoughts for his father. Immediately after Rachel
surprises Charles at the Notting Hill Gate Smith’s—almost forcing him to speak
without his usual mediated self-consciousness—Charles writes: "I think it was
that afternoon I began work on the Letter to My Father, a project which was to take up
many a spare moment over the following weeks" (66). Furthermore, after Charles
narrowly escapes receiving a beating from Derek at the tutors, he announces:
"Patently, I was in a state about something. Not so much about Rachel—for I was
cockfree until the end of next week, so nothing dramatic could happen. Perhaps it was the
idea of having some sort of showdown with my father" (121). In these scenes, Rachel
marks the development of Charles’s destination: she is the current that washes
Charles through his narrative to articulate his real internal struggle with his father.
Ultimately, this relationship with Rachel allows Charles to achieve
meaning, which he has been looking for during the narrative perusal of his past. In the
last section of the novel "Midnight: coming of age," Charles desultorily
prepares for his appointment at Oxford, "fumbling with clothes and Interview
literature" (209). Curiously, though, Charles chooses a different guide to help him:
"On an impulse, I decided to take The Rachel Papers with me, instead" (209).
This decision can be understood from the fact that Rachel symbolizes Charles’s
younger, mediated self: she is the space of the text through which Charles has stumbled,
tripping over his elaborate plottings and seductions that have only deluded himself. His
own commentary on his relationship with Rachel reveals this self-delusion: "I tried
writing letters to Rachel but although elegant and conscientious they made no sense to me
and I merely filed them away. I seemed incapable of using words without stylizing
myself" (144).
His interactions with Rachel give voice to his central
problem—how he has selfishly used words and literature consistently to seduce women
and inflate his ego. Thus, carrying The Rachel Papers into the interview signifies how
Rachel has carried Charles to his textual corrective—i.e., the debunking of his
stylized self he receives at the hands of the Oxford professor, punningly named Dr. Knowd:
"...Literature has a kind of life of its own, you know. You can’t just use
it...ruthlessly, for your own ends...Just read the poems and work out whether you like
them, and why" (215). Knowd delivers this knowledge to Charles, urging him to be
himself, to find authenticity. He serves as a kind of father figure, giving Charles the
parental guidance he has been lacking throughout his narrative, according to Amis:
"The only come-uppance he [Charles] gets is from the university tutor who interviews
him towards the end. Reading the book again after five years I saw with pleased surprise
that the tutor was an author-figure, because all my other books have author-figures. He
scolds Charles for his misuse of literature" (Haffenden 10).
Thus, no longer possessing the mediated self that was identified
with Rachel, Charles loses interest in their relationship, and finds symbolic
reconciliation with his father: "I return to the wastepaper basket and find
Rachel’s mascara-ed ball beneath the layers of tissue steeped in my own snot and
tears. I examine it, then let it fall noiselessly from my hand. I cover it now with the
Letter to My Father" (222-3; my emphasis). The supplanting of her tissue with the
letter implies how Rachel has foregrounded the patriarchal conflict of father and son.
Rachel is not separable from Charles’s issues with his father:
she provides the obstacle for Charles to overcome in order to receive his come-uppance and
gain a new consciousness. She is thus the textual stumbling block that provides meaning
for Charles’s story, fulfilling the de Lauretian role of the feminine in male
narratives: "They are obstacles man encounters on the path of life, on his way to
manhood, wisdom, and power; they must be slain or defeated so that he can go forward to
fulfill his destiny—and his story. Thus we don’t know, his story doesn’t
tell, what became of the Sphinx after the encounter with Oedipus..." (de Lauretis
110). While Charles progresses toward the achievement of manhood, Rachel suffers the same
fate as the Sphinx: the reader never learns more about the ambiguous state of her possible
pregnancy; she is simply whisked away by her former boyfriend, Deforest, leaving a
slightly altered Charles Highway at the end of the novel.
