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 3
Dead Babies
The use of women to foreground patriarchal activity becomes more
complex and takes on greater social significance in Dead Babies, Amis’s second
novel and a formal satire on the state of sexuality during the drug and sex culture of the
1970s. As inscribed in its title, Dead Babies is often considered Amis’s most
egregious, repulsive, and offensive text—a book that has been called "not for
the squeamish" (Diedrick 32), while being labelled by critic Neil Powell as more or
less a failed satire due to its graphically brutal nature (Powell 44). It has also been
labeled a misogynistic satire by critic Shanti Padhi: "Apart from being indecent,
Amis’s satire can be callous especially regarding women" (39).
The problem with these criticisms—most notably
Padhi’s—is that few reviewers, aside from James Diedrick, have attempted to
discuss the form of satire Amis writes in Dead Babies. Dead Babies marks a
progression in Amis’s writing; the novel takes the discussion of sexuality beyond the
comic scatological world of adolescence presented in The Rachel Papers and presents
countercultural sexual behavior as the disease weakening the humanist beliefs that hold
society together. Within this wider socio-sexual concern, however—a concern that Amis
develops further in London Fields—remains the question of the treatment of
women. The problematic treatment of women ultimately lies in Amis’s use of the female
body as a symbol for the sexual decay of this social environment. Thus, the problem with
women in the novel is not necessarily their characterization as shamefully immature sexual
youths (for the men in Dead Babies are equally as callous), but that they are used
to structure Amis’s patriarchal narrative and to produce the satirical meaning he
aims to achieve.
In order to qualify the attacks concerning the presentation of women
and scabrousness in Dead Babies, however, Amis’s role as a satirist must be
carefully considered. Satire is generally defined as "the literary art of diminishing
or derogating a subject by making it ridiculous and evoking toward it attitudes of
amusement, contempt, scorn, or indignation" (Abrams 187). Amis’s writing
embodies these characteristics, and he has even been considered a postmodern Jonathan
Swift. An interesting difference in Amis’s satire, though, is his self-conscious
acknowledgment of the ambiguous state of morality in the late twentieth century. James
Diedrick hints at this difference when he compares the two writers: "A voice of moral
and religious certainty can be heard behind the masks of Swift’s personae; the
critical tones that filter through Amis’s characters register contingent rather than
definitive moral judgments" (15).
This lack of moral certainty seems to lie in Amis’s realization
that the satirist does not possess a set idea of virtue against which to illuminate the
vices of society. He clarifies this ambiguous stance by identifying relativism as the
philosophical dilemma that complicates the consideration of contemporary morality. In a
key passage in The Rachel Papers, Amis once again uses the double-voicing technique
in Charles’s speech to discuss the relativism of contemporary moral values:
It occurs to me that the analogy can be taken further—moral issues, for
example. The so-called new philosophy, "permissiveness" if you like, seen from
the right perspective, is only a new puritanism, whereby you’re accused of being
repressed or unenlightened if you happen to object to infidelity, promiscuity, and so on.
You’re not allowed to mind anything any more, and so you end up denying your
instincts again—moderate possessiveness, say, or moral scrupulousness—just as
the puritans would have you deny the opposite instincts. (130-1)
Amis uses Charles Highway’s dinner speech to articulate the
problem that arises when morality clashes with relativism. In contrast with the puritans,
there are no firm codes or moral absolutes to define behavior in the modern world: Amis
realizes that depending upon the historical context and point of view, morality shifts in
meaning to encompass new behaviors and attitudes.
For Amis, as Martin Dodsworth has noted, "moral positions are
made difficult by a sense of relative values which chimes with the concerns of advanced
thought in this period, as represented by writers like Jacques Derrida or Paul de
Man" (Dodsworth 337). It is thus that the oddly named "Appleseed Rectory"
in Dead Babies makes sense: the name ironically locates a postlapsarian sentiment
within the bounds of a religious institution. The purpose of this juxtaposition is to
define the "new puritanism," as represented by the characters in Dead Babies:
Are we presenting characters and scenes that are somehow fanciful, tendentious,
supererogatory? Not at all. Quite the contrary. The reverse is the case. By the standards
that here obtain Giles and Keith could be dismissed as pathetically introverted, Quentin
and Andy as complacent and somewhat fastidious, and Celia and Diana as sadly, even
quaintly, inhibited. The household, indeed, considers itself a fortress for the old
pieties, a stout anachronism, a bastion of the values it seems to us so notably to lack. (Amis
16-17)
The shocking actions that are found inside of Appleseed Rectory are
not to be necessarily seen as deviant; rather, due to the relativistic nature of moral
values in postmodernity, Amis ironically redefines the "old pieties" as the
contemporary behavior of the Appleseeders: the rectory is a bastion of the pieties of
permissiveness, a castle that guards the new morality of infidelity and promiscuity. Thus,
there is no established code of morality, just a difference in opinion between the
narrator and reader, and the Appleseeders. By examining this relativistic view of
morality, Amis is able to perform a satire that will graphically expose and indirectly
judge the "moral codes" of Appleseed Rectory.
Furthermore, Amis’s third-person narrative tone seems
specifically to place the reader within this relativistic dilemma concerning morality by
making the reader aware of her or his role in determining the judgments on the behavior of
the Appleseeders. It is a postmodern move on Amis’s part, drawing the reader into
complicity in the construction of a work of fiction. This narrative technique also
fulfills some of Amis’s satirical effects: the narrator and reader become separated
from the Appleseeders, allowing Amis to display the cruelty and violence he identifies
with the philosophy of permissiveness while placing the reader and narrator at a safe
distance from Appleseed Rectory in order to laugh at and raise scorn for its inhabitants.
This satirical distance that Amis employs in Dead Babies most
clearly resembles the indirect form of satire, "in which the objects of the satire
are characters who make themselves and their opinions ridiculous or obnoxious by what they
think, say, and do, and are sometimes made even more ridiculous by the author’s
comments and narrative style" (Abrams 188). Similar to Amis’s mockery of Charles
Highway’s mediated sexuality, the narrative style of Dead Babies serves to
ridicule the sexual behavior of the Appleseeders, as in this scene between Andy Adorno and
Roxeanne Smith:
He turned around and sneered sexily at Roxeanne, whose hair lay undisturbed by the
warm wind. Our excellent Adorno was wondering whether to slap her about a bit first, or
rip her T-dress off, or kick her legs out from underneath her—something casual like
that—but suddenly Roxeanne skipped backward and in one double-armed action had pulled
off her nightdress and was naked. (101)
Amis again seemingly includes the reader in the creation of
Andy’s behavior, but does so to deprecate his actions: "Our excellent
Adorno" is a clear example of ironic understatement, which effectively separates the
reader from the presentation of Andy’s thoughts, illuminating and therefore
satirizing his misogyny. The narrator’s use of language is also a mockery of Andy
Adorno: "casual" is a word spoken often by Andy to refer to his breezy
acceptance of violence or heavy drug usage. The use of the word here, however, parodies
his thought, signifying that this "casual" attitude and behavior is really
nothing more than the horribly desensitized mentality that is at the root of Andy’s
moral bankruptcy.
Amis’s satirical portrait of Andy’s behavior extends to a
graphic analysis of Marvell’s penchant for debased sexuality. Marvell represents the
absolute moral nadir of the novel—a character who uses the liberal philosophy of
permissiveness to rationalize the destruction of spiritual bonds with the use of drugs:
Look—fuck—we’re agreed that life is a rat’s ass and that
it’s no fun being yourself all the time. So why not do with your brain what you do
with your body? Fuck all this dead babies about love, understanding,
compassion—use drugs to kind of...cushion the consciousness, guide
it, protect it, stimulate it . . . We have chemical authority over the psyche—so
let’s use it, and have a good time. (44; original emphasis)
Marvell’s ideology is patently ludicrous: his apparent liberal
philosophy is laced with Amis’s cynicism—a cynicism that interprets the
hedonistic use of drugs as a destructive manipulation of the body and human relationships.
Not only does Marvell’s ideology serve as an ironic comment on his moral corruption,
but Amis also uses his character graphically to expose the consequences of Marvell’s
liberal attitudes toward sexuality, and thus to incite disgust and contempt in the reader:
Marvell snorted a nostrilful of blood onto the grass, wiped his nose with the back
of his hand, and laughed drunkenly.
"Heard about the Body Bar in Santa Barbara? No? Hell of a fuckin’ place.
The waiters and waitresses are nude, natch—and you get fucked there for the cover
charge. But you hear the gimmicks? You can have cunt cubes in your drinks. I mean it. And
not just flavored with cunt. Real juice in the cubes. They got...yeah, they got tit soda,
cock cocktails, pit popsicles...Oh yeah, and ice cream that tastes of ass. Hell of a
place."
Marvell snorted a nostrilful of blood onto the grass. He wiped his nose with the
back of his hand. He laughed drunkenly. (154-5)
The details of Marvell’s description of the club teem with
scabrous and pornographic energy. However, the passage reveals a moment where Amis is not
necessarily complicitous in the portrayal of nastiness he so carefully describes. Amis
distances himself and the reader from Marvell by bracketing the passage with a
purposefully vile characterization of Marvell’s bodily gestures, replacing his use of
commas in the first portrait with periods in the second, to state more emphatically the
corruption of Marvell’s beliefs. Furthermore, the chapter in which this scene occurs,
"Hell of a place," bears ironic relevance: it is a fitting title for a chapter
describing Marvell’s club, for the club is a hell of sexual degeneration for Amis.
The graphic intensity of the scene would also fulfill the requirements of Menippean
satire, as defined by James Diedrick:
Bodily fluids of all kinds flow copiously in Dead Babies, but they are not
purgative. They express the varieties of personal and social disease produced by
everything from parental neglect to the aestheticization of violence. In Menippean satire,
as Bakhtin writes, ‘the idea...has no fear of the underworld or of the filth of
life,’ and Amis, providing proof, rubs the reader’s face in it. (36)
Thus, the explicit treatment of sexuality and presentation of
misogynistic behavior are not simply "callous" characteristics of Amis’s
satire; rather, they are central textual elements needed to construct and ridicule the
brutalized world that Amis sees before him. Indeed, in a comparison of the graphic matter
in the novels of Martin Amis and Ian McEwan, Martin Dodsworth states: "The violence
and nastiness of their books are what they see and an expression of what they feel about
what they see" (337).
However, the novelistic construction and expression of the nastiness
of Amis’s pessimistic vision of society becomes especially problematic once we turn
back to the treatment of women in the novel. Despite the experimentation in satire that
Amis performs in Dead Babies, women seem to be clearly used to foreground various
acts of satirized violence and comic male behavior. James Diedrick provides a path to this
argument when discussing the form of Menippean satire in Dead Babies: "The
worst tendencies of the present are exaggerated and projected into a postseventies future
that has become a theater of cruelty, with the body as its stage" (36). A more
accurate description of the novel’s treatment of violence, though, can be envisioned
by realizing that the woman’s body acts as the stage for this theater of
abuse.
This point is demonstrated in one of the satirized dialogues that
Amis refers to as "Those conversations," when Andy Adorno discusses the
aestheticization of violence: "Violence is innate, so it’s sort of felt
selfhood, realized livingness, it’s expressing life in its full creative
force—it’s sort of creative to do it" (143; my emphasis).
Andy’s philosophy is made ridiculous by the reader’s and narrator’s
awareness that this "full creative force" of violence is the very agent that
destroys the creative energies of life. It seems, though, that in order to develop fully
this satirical comment the female body is staged as the site for Andy to demonstrate his
morally corrupt philosophy.
After he sexually abuses Lucy Littlejohn ("Lucy was then
required to perform fellatio on Andy, who from time to time offered to knock her fucking
head off whether she swallowed it or not..." [29]), Andy explains his behavior to
Quentin, revealing the fulfillment of his destructive ideology: "No, man, it’s creative...—radical
rape, for her own fuckin’ good" (29; my emphasis). James Diedrick argues that in
this scene Amis has Andy mimic the misogyny characteristic of Norman Mailer, and therefore
concludes that "In this passage parody drives a wedge between Andy’s thoughts
and those of the author and reader" (16). But the form of satire that Amis constructs
here is blatantly patriarchal: the parody of Mailer and the demonstration of Andy’s
ironic "creative" behavior provides commentary only on the actions of men (as
well as offering an artistic challenge to Mailer), leaving Lucy’s body as the silent
stage where images of male cruelty can be reproduced and ridiculed.
The female body, however, is not limited to the reproduction of
satirized images of male violence. As in all of Amis’s works, comedy becomes a
central element in structuring his satires on sexual behavior and attitudes. Even though
Amis’s use of humor is often employed to confront repression, violence and other
painful realities of modern life, women seem to have a subjugated textual role in this
process. Amis’s intention, indeed, is to use laughter as a buffer for moments of
egregious actions; and it is precisely the role of humor that Amis identifies as the main
concern of his fiction: "If you start off with the premise of me being a comic
writer, you are taking an interesting line because there are clearly things in my novels
that shouldn’t really be in comic novels...But I think that comedy never works when
all it is, is comedy" (Morrison 97).
Amis often creates characters of exaggerated dimensions to achieve
his comic intentions, perhaps most notably in Dead Babies where the narrator
provides the following response to the repulsive Keith Whitehead’s query concerning
all the comic misfortunes that befall him: "Well, we’re sorry about it, Keith,
of course, but we’re afraid that you simply had to be that way. Nothing personal,
please understand—merely in order to serve the designs of this particular
fiction" (146-7). Here, Amis is borrowing the philosophy advocated by one of the
writers who has influenced him the most, Vladimir Nabokov: "Nabokov used to say that
what the reader shouldn’t do is identify with the character. What the reader
should do is identify with the writer. You try and see what the writer is up to, what the
writer is arranging and what the writer’s point is. Identify with the art, not the
people" (Morrison 98; original emphasis).
But even if concern for the character is abandoned and authorial
intention is investigated, it still seems apparent that female abuse becomes an artistic
function used to create moments of novelistic humor. Immediately after Andy violently
forces fellatio on Lucy (this time following the Appleseeders’ visit to the
Psychologic Revue), the comically disgusting image of Keith Whitehead enters the scene:
"Down the kitchen passage Keith Whitehead fried on his hot mattress. He was burping
terribly every few seconds. They were the very worst sort of burps to which he was
subject, like hardboiled eggs imploding at the back of his throat. ‘Mouth farts’
was what Keith had once called them" (99). Perhaps this juxtaposition defines one
aspect of Amis’s use of humor—to ease the reader’s confrontation with the
shocking brutality of sexual aggression. It seems more likely, though, that Amis’s
interest lies in the comic dimensions of Keith Whitehead’s character.
In response to readers’ sympathetic concerns for Keith, Amis
has said: "I wrote about Keith with a sort of horrible Dickensian glee, and it never
occurred to me that his unloveableness could awaken love" (Haffenden 12). Thus, the
cartoon-style and grotesque Dickensian features of Keith can be seen as the real concern
of Amis in this scene. The violence enacted on Lucy’s body, then, remains as a
backdrop to emphasize Keith’s follies rather than to articulate the atrocities
committed against women. Indeed, Andy’s attack on Lucy creates a setting for her
trauma to give space to Keith’s comically rendered attempt to seduce her: "Keith
could scarcely keep his little red eyes open. It was 5:30, and he had long relinquished
any intention of—you had to laugh—‘making a pass’ at the white-haired
girl in the bed over which he leaned" (103).
As the scene ends, Lucy has been basically forgotten; her presence
is necessary only in serving to construct "the designs" needed to portray the
pathetic antics of Keith’s frustrated lust: "He put the light out and walked
toward the door. On the way he stubbed his toe viciously on the metal-based coffee table,
but he was half in tears anyway, tears of tiredness and contrition and self-disgust, and
didn’t bother to register the pain" (103). The process of supplanting
Lucy’s pain with Keith’s has come full circle: a scene that began with Keith
finding Lucy in tears from sexual violence ends in a detailed caricature of his
sexual frustration and tears.
