Doubles and doubling
Throughout the novel, Self's personal life and moral squalor are
refracted through the filter of his film project. The project itself is one of Self's many
attempts to double himself in the novel. Thus it is not surprising that his life and the
film project get constantly intertangled. Caduta Massi, approached to play the role of the
mother, takes an immediate maternal interest in the motherless Self, and literally succors
him at her breast. Butch Beausoleil, sought for the part of the mistress, embarrasses Self
sexually in anticipation of Selina's later betrayal. And the revised plot of the film,
alternately titled Good Money and Bad Money, concludes with a scene of
Oedipal violence that anticipates Self's violent encounter with his father near the end of
the novel. Just as Self seeks to recreate himself on screen, he also doubles himself with
some of those associated with the film. In near- [92] perpetual envy of
the sleek and suave Fielding (himself a double of Selina), Self imagines going to the west
coast for a complete physical makeover. "When I wing out to Cal for my refit, when I
stroll nude into the lab with my cheque, I think I know what I'll say. I'll say, `Lose the
blueprints. Scrap those mock-ups. I'll take a Fielding'" (207). Even Spunk Davis
inspires a passing infatuation, causing a brief sexual identity crisis until Self takes
his own counsel: "relax, he's just giving you a pang of your younger self"
(301).
The most extensive of these doublings involves Self's relationship
with the character Martin Amis, hired to rewrite the film script (which is also of course
Self's story). All four of Amis's previous novels have contained self-reflexive elements;
in Money he makes this explicit. He does so with a blunt honesty worthy of Self's
narrative voice. He creates a protagonist named Self whose life parallels his own to a
surprising degree; he embodies himself in the novel as a recurring character; and he
doubles this character through the American Martina Twain ("twain" literally
means two). He even has Self voice the theme: "people are doubling also, dividing,
splitting" (64). The reader is virtually invited to consider Self, Amis, and Martina
as aspects of a single consciousness.
The presence of Amis's persona in Money has generated a
surprising amount of criticism and critical misunderstanding. John Bayley has called the
strategy "tiresome," and an "artistic trick."13
Laura L. Doan, following the lead of earlier critics, claims its sole function is to
maintain a satirical distance between Self and his creator: "Amis takes exceptional
care to ensure that the narrator-protagonist, so disgusting in his values and lifestyle,
cannot be mistaken for the writer by literally putting himself into the text. Martin [93]
Amis, the character, is a suave, intelligent, highly educated, comfortably
middle-class writer who quite obviously finds Self, and what he represents,
unsavory."14
Bayley's impatience is hard to credit given the fact that each
appearance by the Amis character is unique to the dramatic situation, and reveals
additional facets of his real and symbolic relationship to Self. Furthermore, Amis's
existence in the novel is handled with such offhandedness and comic panache that his
presence never feels like the self-consciously obtrusive trick it has seemed in other
works where it occurs (from John Barth's Lost in the Funhouse to John Fowles' The
French Lieutenant's Woman). Since Money is about the way reality is
mediated, and features conversations between a filmmaker and the actors who will play his
characters, it seems almost natural that the filmmaker's author would converse with his
main character.
Doan's charge, on the other hand, is seriously misleading--though
consistent with her mistaken assumption that Self is punished in the novel for attempting
to rise above his "station." Doan's claim that the character Martin Amis finds
Self and what he represents "unsavory" is contradicted throughout the novel, but
especially by the second meeting between the two. The Amis character, thoroughly familiar
with Self's television work, tells Self "I thought those commercials were bloody
funny"--just before ordering what Self calls "a standard yob's breakfast"
(165). It isn't Self's upward mobility or his downward aesthetic that Amis and his persona
object to, but his moral fatigue syndrome. Nowhere does Amis imply that exposure to high
culture per se is a sufficient inoculation against this condition.
Self and the Amis character are secret sharers more than
antagonists. Many of Self's experiences are in fact those of his [94]
creator viewed through the distorting lens of an unlikely double.15
During their first conversation, Self tells Amis he heard that his father is also a
writer, adding: "Bet that made it easier." Amis's sarcastic reply: "Oh,
sure. It's just like taking over the family pub" (85). This alludes to the
difficulties inherent in the actual Amis's struggle to establish his own identity and
voice in the shadow of his famous literary father. He has experienced both envious
accusations of nepotism and favoritism and public criticism from Kingsley Amis, who has
called his son's novels unreadable.16
This withholding of paternal support is mirrored in Self's
relationship to his father (who owns a pub named after the ultimate literary father: The
Shakespeare). Barry Self's interactions with his son in the novel range from cavalier to
callous to cruel. Their most emotional encounter is a grotesque parody of familial
intimacy, in which Self is invited to share the joy of his stepmother's appearance in a
pornographic magazine (this occurs after Self's father has sent him a bill for his
upbringing). Under ordinary circumstances, Self might have assumed that he would
eventually inherit his father's pub. By the end of the novel, however, his father has
denied paternity and disowned him.
Self's career also constitutes a fun-house mirror image of Amis's.
Both were shaped by the youth culture of the 60's, which is reflected in their work; both
made professional names for themselves in the seventies; both sought artistic recognition
on the other side of the Atlantic in the eighties; both have worked in film.
"Remember the stir in the flaming summer of '76?" Self asks. "My nihilistic
commercials attracted prizes and writs. The one on nude mags was never shown, except in
court" (76). Amis experienced prominence and success in the 1970s for a body of work
that generated considerable controversy, including charges [95] of
tastelessness and obscenity. Publication of the American edition of his third novel, Success,
was delayed for nine years--which Amis has attributed to its sexual explicitness.17
Self's film project has a similar resonance. Two years before Amis
began writing Money, he wrote the screenplay for the science-fiction movie Saturn
3, released in 1980 (like his persona in Money, he was hired to adapt
someone else's story). An American-British co-production, Saturn 3 is a
big-budget space opera featuring one Hollywood legend (Kirk Douglas), one emerging star
(Harvey Keitel), and one actress attempting to move from television to film (Farah
Fawcett). The movie itself--as ludicrous as those Amis parodies in Money--is a
triumph of celebrity and special efffects over plot and characterization. During his
involvement with the film Amis, like Self, learned first-hand about the unbridled egos of
American actors.18
Self's tribulations with his film project slyly mirror the critical
controversies attending Amis's postmodern narratives. When the Amis character agrees to
become Self's script doctor, Self spells out his ailments. "We have a hero problem.
We have a motivation problem. We have a fight problem. We have a realism problem"
(221). Amis's own novels exhibit these "problems" as well. His protagonists are
anti-heroes,19 their motivation seldom fully explained;
they are often involved in grotesque violence; and they inhabit fictional worlds that obey
a literary but not always a conventionally realistic logic. Self's "aesthetic
standards" are driven purely by the conventions of the popular market, so he wants
Amis to provide larger than life heroes, clear-cut motivation, and "realism" as
defined by current mainstream conventions. The Amis character obliges, since the price is
right, all the while schooling Self in his own literary [96] assumptions
(and explaining to the attentive reader why Money is the kind of novel it is).
In all of his appearances, the Amis character is treated with the
same comic irony that is leveled at Self. In the following encounter, Self and Amis talk
about how their similar "problems" effect their chosen genres--films and novels.
Amis explains why heroes are scarce in modern fiction:
"The distance between author and narrator corresponds to the degree to which
the author finds the narrator wicked, deluded, pitiful or ridiculous. I'm sorry, am I
boring you?"
"--Uh?"
"This distance is partly determined by convention. In the epic or heroic
frame, the author gives the protagonist everything he has, and more. The hero is god, or
has god-like powers or virtues. In the tragic . . . Are you all right?"
"Uh?" I repeated. I had just stabbed a pretzel into my dodgy upper tooth.
Rescreening this little mishap in my head, I suppose I must have winced pretty graphically
and then given a sluggish, tramplike twitch . . . .
"The further down the scale he is, the more liberties you can take with him.
You can do what the hell you like to him, really. The author is not free of sadistic
impulses." (229)
Self's complaint about his tooth here comically emphasizes his
status as an anti-hero subject to his author's impulses. But in true dialogic fashion, it
has an additional, countervailing effect. By interrupting the Amis character's would-be
monologue, Self [97] asserts his autonomy, his refusal to be a mere
authorial "gimmick." A few paragraphs later, this impression is strengthened.
The Amis character claims that "the twentieth century is an ironic
age--downward-looking. Even realism, rockbottom realism, is considered a bit grand for the
twentieth century." Self's irrepressible, skeptical response: "`Really,' I said,
and felt that tooth with my tongue" (231). Self and realism alike emerge triumphant
from this encounter.
Self may be the victim of his author's postmodern assumptions about
fiction, in other words, but he never surrenders his fundamental autonomy within these
constraints, nor the freedom of his elemental responses. He retains what the Amis
character calls a fictional character's "double innocence" (241)--ignorance of
his role in a fiction, ignorance of the reasons why things are happening to him in a
particular way. In the final pages of the novel, an italicized section symbolizing Self's
escape from his author's surveillance and control, he has one brief, final encounter with
the Amis character, curses him, and watches him leave the room, looking "stung,
scared" (359). Having survived suicide, Self even survives his author's withdrawal of
authorship. As Amis said in an interview after Money was published, "I
learned very early on that no matter how much you do to forestall it, the reader will
believe in the character and feel concern for them."20
Self's relative autonomy, like the many ways in which he is an
authorial double, is crucial to the dialogic design of Money. While Self is
unmistakably represented as less intelligent, educated, and self-aware than the Amis
character, he still speaks for him on the lower frequencies. Both, for instance, must make
their way in the cultural marketplace. One of the novel's unspoken ironies [98]
is that Self's TV advertisements and mainstream film project are far more viable
commercially than Amis's self-consciously postmodern narratives. The relative print space
given to Self and the Amis character in Money accurately reflects the currency of
their chosen genres. One of the novel's running jokes about the Amis character is Self's
concern about how much money he makes. When Self notices that he washes his clothes at a
laundromat, he says to the reader, "I don't think they can pay writers that much, do
you?" (71). When they converse for the first time, in The Blind Pig pub, Self asks
him, "Sold a million yet?" In response, Amis "looked up at me with a flash
of paranoia" (85). The Amis character's presence in the novel highlights the
predicament of the serious writer in a commodity culture indifferent to traditional
artistic values.
In terms of the novel's critique of late capitalism, the Amis
character is guilty of false consciousness. He is a naive literary modernist clinging to
the fiction that he can protect his art from the influence of the marketplace. When Self
learns that Amis makes "enough" yet doesn't own a video player, he becomes
indignant. "You haven't got shit, have you, and how much do you earn? It's immoral.
Push out some cash. Buy stuff. Consume, for Christ's sake.' Amis's response: `I suppose
I'll have to start one day,' he said. `But I really don't want to join it, the whole money
conspiracy'" (243). He does so when revising the film script, however, and as the
extra-literary Amis knows, it is impossible for any working writer to avoid. His vocation
depends on a market for his books--and legal "ownership" of something as
personal as his verbal style. After Self asks the Amis character to rewrite his film
script, he tells Fielding about it. "Fielding, of course, had heard of Martin
Amis--he hadn't read his stuff, but [99] there'd recently been some cases
of plagiarism, of text-theft, which had filtered down to the newspapers and magazines. So,
I thought. Little Martin got caught with his fingers in the till, then, did he. A word
criminal. I would bear that in mind" (218). As in Self's interpretation of Othello,
just the opposite is true. Jacob Epstein committed "text-theft" on Amis's first
novel The Rachel Papers in composing his first (and only) novel, Wild Oats.21 Such is the nature of authorship in a capitalist economy
that Amis needed to draw attention to this plagiarism in order to protect his economic
viability as a unique artistic voice.
Both Amises in other words--the author of Money and his
persona within the narrative--have been shaped by the forces that have shaped Self. So
have all the novel's readers. This is made explicit when Self and the Amis character sit
down together to watch the wedding of Charles and Diana, and Self describes the face of
his secret sharer. "As I twisted in my seat and muttered to myself I found I kept
looking Martin's way. The lips were parted, suspended, the eyes heavy and unblinking. If I
stare into his face I can make out the areas of waste and fatigue, the moonspots and
boneshadow you're bound to get if you hang out in the twentieth century" (243-4).
Although Self claims that Martina's moneyed background has protected her from these
physical symptoms, her own experience of loss and isolation-- represented both in her
situation and in her dialogues with Self--mark her as another sharer of the postmodern
condition as diagnosed by the novel.
