Doing justice to the novel's verbal artistry alone would require a
separate essay, but some avenues worth further exploration can be suggested here. Amis has
set severe limits on [76] himself in Money, since his narrator
is verbally challenged and resistant to literature, not to mention narrative structure
("in my state, you don't want things assuming any shape on you" (131)). He is
also drunk a great deal of the time, which poses a serious threat to sustained narrative
coherence. Money's 363 pages contain no chapter titles or numbers; there are nine
unnumbered sections, but the logic of these divisions is not immediately apparent. As a
result, the novel's narrative seems messy, sprawling, unfocused--though never less than
compelling. Self's exposition is roughly chronological, but it is punctuated by
flashbacks, digressions, and frequent omissions. The latter occur when Self defers
disclosing shaming events that have just happened to him. Repression decisively shapes his
story, disrupting chronology, increasing narrative suspense, and leading to dramatic
revelations throughout the novel.
There is method in this narrative sprawl, however, since among other
things it convincingly captures Self's "private culture" in all its human
density. Early in the novel, discussing his film outline with scriptwriter Doris Arthur,
he breaks away from his transcription of their conversation, telling us that he's given
this speech so many times that he can speak while letting his mind "wander
unpleasantly, as it always wanders now when unengaged by stress or pleasure." What
follows perfectly conveys the associational twitchiness of Self's thought: "My
thoughts dance. What is it? A dance of anxiety and supplication, of futile vigil. I think
I must have some new cow disease that makes you wonder whether you're real all the time,
that makes your life feel like a trick, an act, a joke. I feel, I feel dead. There's a guy
who lives round my way who really gives me the fucking creeps. He's a [77]
writer, too . . . I can't go on sleeping alone--that's certain. I need a human touch.
Soon I'll just have to go out and buy one. I wake up at dawn and there's nothing"
(61). Like his auto-eroticism, Self's self-examination is a constant in the novel. His
self-awareness constitutes a kind of psychological doubling, captured in a sentence near
the beginning of the novel: "Jesus, I never meant me any harm" (16).9
In terms of its verbal surface, Money mirrors Self's
limitations while finding ways around them. Self favors simple words, short sentences and
clipped syntax (the only semicolon in his entire narrative occurs in its last sentence).
Yet Amis achieves maximal effects from these minimal means. He employs allusion, parody,
sudden shifts of tone, and comic irony so that Self's statements echo with additional,
authorial implications. Amis satirizes Self by "doubling" Self's voice with his
own throughout the novel, composing an artful counterpoint that resonates with
implications beyond the range of his narrator's hearing. Self's explanation of the change
he is experiencing under Martina's influence is representative of his staccato style--and
Amis's "double-voicing": "I'm getting chicked. It would explain a great
deal. I have tried in the past to feminize myself. I womanized for years. It didn't work,
though on the other hand I did fuck lots of girls. Who knows? It if happens, it
happens" (306). Unlike Self, Amis (and the ideal reader) recognize that
"womanizing" will not bring Self (or any male self) any closer to feminine, or
feminist, understanding.
Repetition is Self's favorite rhetorical strategy, not surprising
given his self-description ("that's my life: repetition, repetition" (29)).
Fortunately for the reader and the novel's art, this [78] repetition is
never redundant. The word "money" and its variants, for instance, appears on
virtually every page of the novel, since the cash nexus determines and shapes all of
Self's experiences and relationships, but its uses are almost infinitely variable. At one
point, for instance, Self lists the titles of the few books he owns. It is one of many
great comic lists in the novel, and it reveals how Self's money mania reduces all of
culture to the same qualitative level. "Home Tax Guide, Treasure Island, The
Usurers, Timon of Athens, Consortium, Our Mutual Friend, Buy Buy Buy, Silas Marner,
Success! The Pardoner's Tale, Confessions of a Bailiff, The Diamond as Big as the Ritz,
The Amethyst Inheritance" (67). Self tells us that "most of the serious
books are the accumulations of Selina's predecessors" (67), and that he hasn't read
them. Those who have will recognize that they are concerned with the deforming influence
of money--as is the novel Self is narrating. To Self, however, money is formative--especially
of his language. After receiving his first letter from Selina in their two-year
relationship, containing the postscript he finds so seductive ("P.S.--I'm
pennyless"), Self realizes this is the first time he has seen her handwriting. He
then wonders if she has seen his. "Had I ever shown her my hand? Yes, she'd
seen it, on bills, on credit slips, on cheques" (69).
Self's phrase "my hand" here is an example of the
pervasive verbal doubling in the novel, a form of repetition manifested in punning,
double-entendres, double-takes, double-talk, and inversion. "My hand" is a
double entendre referring to Self's secrets as well as his penmanship. Amis constantly
makes an artistic virtue out of Self's repetition compulsion, wresting poetic effects from
his narrator's verbal habits. Self's use of the word "true" and [79]
its variants in the following passage is a telling example. It conveys the perverse depth
of his emotional investment in money: "Selina says I'm not capable of true love. It
isn't true. I truly love money. Truly I do. Oh, money, I love you. You're so democratic:
you've got no favourites" (221). Later in the novel, when Self's money malignancy is
in temporary remission, he uses repetition a different kind of longing. "Me, I don't
like what I want. What I want has long moved free of what I like, and I watch it slip away
with grief, with helplessness. I'm ashamed and proud of it. I'm ashamed of what I am. And
is that anything to be ashamed of?" (299). "I" is used eight times in four
sentences here, effectively capturing its speaker's self-absorption. Moreover, Amis teases
the reader into thought by reversing the order of the verbal pairs ("like/want"
becomes "want/like") and by using "ashamed" three times in close
succession but with entirely different connotations. The last sentence here carries an
arresting comic charge (via verbal doubling) that effectively conveys Self's confused
struggle to change.
Like his syntax, Self's vocabulary is rough and ready. It also
reflects a dialectical doubling appropriate to his transatlantic background (his mother
was American, and he spent several childhood years in New Jersey). Few of his words are
more than two syllables in length, and many are of the four-letter variety. His word
choices give his voice a unique accent nonetheless. Some of them are simply working class
Britishisms ("brill" for brilliant, "knackered" for exhausted,
"sock" for apartment); some are favored Americanisms that take on an added
charge coming out of a British mouth ("deal," "gimmick,"
"upshot"). Others are slang terms whose meaning Self expands ("rug"
becomes his [80] word for any hair, not just a toupee) or uses in an
altered context ("re-do" is generally used as a verb, and applied to renovation,
but Self turns it into an all-purpose noun, as in "rug redo"--which translates
as "haircut"). "Redo" and "rethink" are two of his favorite
terms, reflecting his mechanistic self-conception (he refers to himself repeatedly as a
robot, a train, and a cyborg). Most of these terms are conventionally masculine, if not
macho, and so are his favored phrases, especially "butch it out," "shagged
out," "there was nothing more to say."
There is something more to say about Self's voice, however--its
alternation between the tough guy and the teenager, for instance. As Ian Hamilton has
noted, Self's voice often "comes out sounding like Holden Caulfield done over by
Mickey Spillane."10 Or like Martin Amis. Readers
familiar with Amis's other novels and nonfiction will notice that Self's voice often
partakes of Amis's distinctive accents, from Martian-style descriptions to sharp social
satire. Hamilton describes its tone as "an urban-apocalyptic high fever," adding
that it is "somehow kept steady, helped across the road, by those old
redoubtables--wit, worldly wisdom, and an eye for social detail."11
Qualities that inform Amis's writing generally, in other words. Yet for all of the vocal
"doubling" whereby Amis's voice inhabits Self's, Self never seems a mere
mouthpiece for his creator. He retains his uniqueness, as his description of Manhattan
street life demonstrates: "I strode through meat-eating genies of subway breath. I
heard the ragged hoot of sirens, the whistles of two-wheelers and skateboarders, pogoists,
gocarters, windsurfers. I saw the barreling cars and cabs, shoved on by the power of their
horns. I felt all the contention, the democracy, all the italics, in the air" (12).
Self's language is visceral, elemental; even his abstruser musings are experienced as
sensations.
