Satirical motifs
[81] As the preceding
passage suggests, Self is especially expressive about machines. His fetishistic
relationship to his sports car is the ultimate expression of this impulse. One of Amis's
major satirical strategies in Money is his use of proper names; they evoke actual
models or people while partaking of a wholly imaginary realm. Fielding uses a limousine
called an Autocrat; Martin Amis drives an Iago 666. These vehicles share
the road with Acapulcos, Alibis, Boomerangs, Farragos, Hyenas, Mistrals, Tomahawks
and Torpedoes. Fiasco, the name of Self's purple sports car, sounds like a
combination of an Italian Fiat and an American Fiero, while forming a
word that describes the tenor of its owner's life.
In keeping with the novel's satire on commodity fetishism, Self
invests his car with powers well beyond its mechanical function. "It's temperamental,
my Fiasco, like all the best racehorses, poets and chefs" (64). It also
inspires some of his best punk-poetry, as in this passage, which unbeknownst to Self makes
explicit the theme of doubling that echoes throughout the novel. "The car and I
crawled cursing to my flat. You just cannot park round here any more. . . . You can
doublepark on people: people can doublepark on you. Cars are doubling while houses are
halving. . . . Rooms divide, rooms multiply. Houses split--houses are tripleparked. People
are doubling also, dividing, splitting. In double trouble we split our losses. No wonder
we're bouncing off the walls" (64).
Self's ignorance of the implications of many words, his own as well
as those of other people, generates some of the novel's best satirical comedy. When
Fielding tells him that they cannot sign the actress Day Lightbrowne to their film because
she was recently date raped by her therapist, Self is stymied. [82]
"Date-raped, huh. What kind of deal is that? What, sort of with bananas and
stuff?" (26) Later, after his first encounter with Martin Amis, Self visits a New
York brothel called the Happy Isles. One of the prostitutes asks him his name, and he
answers "I'm Martin" (97), confiding to us that he hates his own name ("I'm
called John Self. But who isn't?" (97)). One lie leads to another, and to an
hilarious misunderstanding. It turns out that the prostitute ("they call me
Moby," she tells Self, parodically alluding to "call me Ishmael," the
opening sentence of Moby Dick) is a graduate student in English literature at a
New York University.
When Self tells her he's a fiction writer, she asks him what kind of
fiction he writes. He hears her question as "John roar mainstream." He's never
heard the word "genre," so he can't hear her actual question as "genre or
mainstream?" She has to spell out her meaning: "are they mainstream novels and
stories or thrillers or sci-fi or something like that?" (98). It is the first of many
instances where Self's ignorance of literature will get him in trouble. In fact, his
subsequent rejection of this intimidating woman in favor of a less educated, more
voluptuous prostitute named "She-She" anticipates his later, more fateful turn
from the literary Martina to the pornographic Selina.
Throughout Money, Amis uses comic means to deepen the novel's themes. Nowhere
is this more apparent than in his treatment of Self's relationship to high culture.
Although Self has always turned a deaf ear to literature itself, he appreciates its
commercial currency. One of his best-known TV commercials was an ad "for a new kind
of flash-friable pork-and-egg bap or roll or hero called a Hamlette. We used some theatre
and shot the whole thing on stage. There was the actor, dressed in black, with [83]
his skull and globe, being henpecked by that mad chick he's got in trouble. When suddenly
a big bimbo wearing cool pants and bra strolls on, carrying a tray with two steaming
Hamlettes on it. She gives him the wink--and Bob's your uncle. All my commercials featured
a big bim in cool pants and bra. It was sort of my trademark" (70).
This is the first of many Shakespearean allusions in Money,
all of which echo with serio-comic relevance to Self's situation. Like Hamlet's
relationship to his stepfather, Self has a troubled, violent relationship with his father.
In fact, Barry Self has recently taken out a contract on him--Laertes' employment of
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern echoed in a pulp fiction mode. In addition, the revised
script for the autobiographical film Self is attempting to make echoes the Oedipal
dynamics of Hamlet: the son kills his father hoping to protect his mother. Beyond
these plot parallels, Self's existential soliloquies--which often seem slightly
crazed--crackle with a skewed insight that recalls Hamlet's own high-pitched dramatic
monologues.
Othello is an even more pervasive motif in the novel. Self
tells us that just before he left for New York, he was told that Selina was cuckolding
him. Later, when he reluctantly attends the opera Otello with Martina Twain, he
assumes that Desdamona is cuckolding Othello, missing the point entirely. Self's
subsequent summary of Otello's plot is one of the parodic gems in a novel full of
brilliant parodies. It is also a signal example of how Amis "doubles" Self's
voice, speaking through it of Self's character and limitations:
Luckily I must have seen the film or the TV spin-off of Othello, for
despite its dropped aitch the musical version [84] stuck pretty
faithfully to a plot I knew well. The language problem remained a problem but the action I
could follow without that much effort. The flash spade general arrives to take up a
position on some island, in the olden days there, bringing with him the Lady-Di figure as
his bride. Then she starts diddling one of his lieutenants, a funloving kind of guy whom I
took to immediately. Same old story. Now she tries one of these double-subtle numbers on
her husband--you know, always rooting for the boyfriend and singing his praises. But
Otello's sidekick is on to them, and, hoping to do himself some good, tells all to the
guvnor. This big spade, though, he can't or won't believe it. A classic situation. Well,
love is blind, I thought . . . (277).
"He can't or won't believe it." Although Self finally
resembles Othello less than he does Roderigo, the lecherous spendthrift and victim in
Shakespeare's play, he is like Othello in his double gullibility. He is (often wilfully)
ignorant of the complex web of deception and double-dealing he is enmeshed in. First he
discovers that Martina's husband has been sleeping with Selina (later he will find that
his best friend did too); then he learns that "Frank the phone," the caller who
has goaded and bedevilled him during his time in New York, is none other than Fielding
Goodney, who ruins him financially. Goodney has no clear motive for any of this, but then
neither did Iago: he acted from what Coleridge termed "motiveless malignity."12
The language of Othello actually extends to Self's final,
violent confrontation with Goodney, though Self is deaf to the allusion. Self has brutally
beaten the disguised Goodney, [85] mistaking him first for Frank the
phone, then the red-headed woman who has been following him. After the beating, he asks
the crumpled figure to identify itself. "`Oh damn dear go,' it seemed to say. `Oh and
you man dog'" (322). It isn't until late in the novel, when Self recounts this scene
for the Martin Amis character during their chess game, that he is given a translation of
these lines from the play, spoken by Roderigo as Iago stabs him: "Oh damned Iago. Oh
inhuman dog." Amis remarks "fascinating," and adds "pure
transference" (347). Fluent in the language of Freudian psychology, the Amis
character recognizes that Goodney thought of himself as the wronged Roderigo and Self as
Iago. Even though Martina has given Self a book on Freud to read, part of his "how-to
kit for the twentieth century" (308), he is doesn't yet understand Freudian
terminology or Amis's comment. He even mistakes the Othello quotation for a
reference to the Amis character's car (an Iago 666). "The cunning bastard, I
thought. Oh, I caught that reference to his own little rattletrap. He's definitely after
my Fiasco" (347). Not so: Amis, like every character in the novel save
Martina, is just manipulating Self.
This reference to Self as an "inhuman dog" is no accident.
It takes up and further extends a web of animal imagery that clings to Self throughout his
narrative. A double-edged motif, this imagery functions to extend the satirical portrait
of Self (so debased that he often seems sub-human) while simultaneously engaging the
reader's imaginative sympathy for him. Self reads George Orwell's allegorical novel Animal
Farm during his relationship with the bookish Martina Twain, and while its allegory
is lost on him, the novel still strikes responsive chords. Well before he reads the book,
he describes himself in animal [86] terms. He stares at a barmaid with
"the face of a fat snake, bearing all the signs of its sins" (14). Waking with a
tremendous hangover (one of many), he enters the bathroom, emerging "on all fours, a
pale and very penitent crocodile" (16). The pigs in Animal Farm clearly disturb him,
however--doubtless because they remind him of his earlier self-characterization: "200
pounds of yob genes, booze, snout, and fast food" (35). He thinks of them with high
distaste: "You should see these hairy-jawed throwbacks, these turd lookalikes,
honking and chomping at the trough" (191).
Self can imagine aspiring to the status of a dog, on the other hand:
Where would I be in Animal Farm? One of the rats, I thought at first. But--oh, go
easy on yourself, try and go a little bit easy. Now, after mature consideration, I think I
might have what it takes to be a dog. I am a dog. I am a dog at the seaside tethered to a
fence while my master and mistress romp on the sands. I am bouncing, twisting, weeping,
consuming myself. A dog can take the odd slap or kick. A slap you can live with, as a dog.
What's a kick? Look at the dogs in the street, how everything implicates them, how
everything is their concern, how they race towards great discoveries. And imagine the
grief, tethered to a fence when there is activity--and play, and thought and
fascination--just beyond the holding rope. (193)
This entire passage precisely (and touchingly) describes Self, who
earlier confided to the reader that he "longed to burst [87] out of
the world of the world of money and into--into what? Into the world of thought and
fascination. How do I get there? Tell me, please. I'll never make it by myself. I don't
know the way" (118). The spectacle of Self relating to Animal Farm strictly
as an animal story, and relating to it profoundly on that level, is one of the great comic
conceits in the novel. Comic, yet not simply condescending: the Self-referential image of
the dog staked to its animal nature but yearning for the world beyond the restraining rope
is a humanly compelling one and nudges the reader toward genuine sympathy.
Self's case is a hard one, however. He seems allergic to the
sustained effort that thought requires. Like reading, for instance. "I can't read
because it hurts my eyes. I can't wear glasses because it hurts my nose. I can't wear
contacts because it hurts my nerves. So you see, it all came down to a choice between pain
and not reading. I chose not reading. Not reading--that's where I put my money" (44).
As a result, the world of complex thought remains out of Self's reach. Martina talks one
evening about aesthetics, about the "reluctant narrator" in a novel, "the
sad, the unwitting narrator"--Self, in other words. But he can't understand what she
is saying. "I could follow her drift for seconds at a time, until the half-gratified
sense of effort--or my awareness of watching myself--intervened, and scattered my
thoughts" (126).
When he does begin to make the effort, under Martina's tutelage, he
begins to glimpse the truth: literature and other forms of disciplined thinking and
imagining sharpen one's hearing, restore one's responses. "The thing about reading
and all that," Self realizes, "is--you have to be in a fit state for it. Calm.
Not [88] picked on. You have to be able to hear your own thoughts,
without interference. On the way back from lunch (I walked it) already the streets felt a
little lighter. I could make a little more sense of the watchers and the watched"
(130). Besides Freud, Martina has given Self books on Marx, Darwin, Einstein, Hitler, and
a book titled Money (not the novel but an economic history). By reading the
latter, Self almost articulates a recognition that capitalism, and his own greed, go hand
in hand with economic and social inequality: "by wanting a lot, you are taking steps
to spread it thin elsewhere" (263). But he never pursues the moral implications of
this fact. Martina has offered him the lifeline of ideas, and he even recognizes it as
such. He simply can't hold on to it long enough.
Martina is the first woman Self has related to on fully human terms
since his mother died during his childhood. Since then, all his relations with women have
been mediated by money and pornography. His passion for Selina is spoken in these two
voices exclusively, which unite in fetishistic rapture whenever he speaks of the
"omniscient underwear" he eagerly purchases for her. When he dreams of her, he
dreams of "the arched creature doing what that creature does best--and the thrilling
proof, so rich in pornography, that she does all this not for passion, not for comfort,
far less for love, the proof that she does all this for money. I woke babbling in
the night--yes, I heard myself say it, solve it, through the dream-mumble--and I said, I
love it. I love her...I love her corruption" (39-40). Note the significance of
the ellipsis points here: Self loves Selina's commodified sexuality, not Selina herself.
Initially, Self has no way at all of relating to Martina; outside the language of
pornography, women have no identity for him. "I [89] can't find a
voice to summon her with" (114) he says of her at first, before imagining her as a
kind of alien (her name is after all an anagram for Martian): "she is a woman of
somewhere else" (128). The story of Martina and Self's evolving
relationship--ill-fated, interrupted throughout by the shouts of money and pornography--is
genuinely moving. When he finally, temporarily wakes from his pornographic stupor, he
glimpses the difference between fetishistic desire and human connection:
I know I'm a slow one and a dull dog but at last I saw what her nakedness was
saying. I saw its plain content, which was--Here, I lay it all before you. Yes, gently
does it, I thought, with these violent hands . . . And in the morning, as I awoke, Christ
(and don't laugh--no, no, don't laugh), I felt like a flower: a little parched,
of course, a little gone in the neck, and with no real life to come, perhaps, only sham
life, bowl life, easing its petals and lifting its head to start feeding on the day. (310)
By the time Self relates this experience, Martina has taken in a dog
she names Shadow, who keeps tugging at his rope when she or Self walk with him near
Twenty-Third Street, "where everything was unleashed, unmuzzled. . . . He looked
baffled and hungry, momentarily wolverine, answering to a sharper nature" (267).
Martina says that each night Shadow's desire to return to this region, where he once
lived, "gets weaker," but says "sometimes . . . he wants to go." Self
reassures her that Shadow "knows what the good life is," that it is with her.
Self's attempted reassurance here is double-voiced: he is speaking
of himself as well as Shadow. He wants to stay with [90] Martina, to live
in her world of order and contemplation. But part of his nature, or more precisely his
mediated desires, pull him in other directions. In response to Self's comforting words
about Shadow, Martina frets that "it's his nature" to seek that other
region. While in America, the land of second chances, Self entertains the possibility of
change and reform. But just when Martina seems to have made this possible, Selina arrives
from England, where second chances don't come quite so easily. And she stokes the fires of
his pornographic desires. His subsequent loss of Martina is accompanied by a symbolic
devolution. Selina calls Self while he is exercising, "wiggling my legs in the air
like an upended beetle" (312). After Selina has seduced him into bed, Martina
appears. Self is on his back, and he describes what Martina sees: "the decked joke,
flummoxed, scuppered, and waving his arms" (319). Like Kafka's Gregor Samsa in The
Metamorphosis, Self has become an insect.
He does not remain one, however. Despite his debasement, Self's
radical honesty and capacity for shame raise him above the level of many other characters
in the novel. Reformative change remains a (faint) possibility for him, even at the end of
his narrative. If anything, the American film actors Self deals with are more debased than
he is, and certainly more deluded. In Lorne Guyland, the actor signed to play Gary, Self's
father, Amis has written the last word on the aging male narcissist. Self wants his film
to accurately echo his own lower-class roots; Lorne wants to rewrite the father's
character, so that he becomes a "lover, father, husband, athlete, millionaire--but
also a man of wide reading, of wide . . . culture, John . . . I see Garfield at a lectern
reading aloud from a Shakespeare first edition, bound in [91] unborn
calf" (172).
The role of Garfield's son in the film has been assigned to Spunk
Davis, fresh from his first successful film role and thus in high demand. He was poor
before discovering fool's gold in Hollywood, and at one time "never wanted to forget
what it was like to be poor" (315). But he has fallen for the actress Butch
Beausoleil, who has taught him to deny his past. "I'm through with all that now and I
feel good about my money," Spunk says defiantly, which inspires Self, wiser at least
than this, to indulge in an observation about American-style self-deception worthy of his
creator: "So this philosopher had frowned his way to a conclusion. The pity was that
the whole of tabloid and letterhead America had reached it before him" (315-16).
Next: Doubles and doubling
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