From: stephenjones
Category: Amis
Date: 6/25/99
Time: 7:25:51 AM
Remote Name: 130.159.248.35
[this is a post I made before the crash, it contains a paper I recently delivered on Other People at a graduate forum at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow. All comments greatly appreciated]
HISTORICISING THE POSTMODERN: MARTIN AMIS' OTHER PEOPLE
The basic idea of my research is to apply New Historicist methods and assumptions to postmodern texts. To do this I have chosen as my historical period the 1980s and as my writers Alasdair Gray and Martin Amis.
The main influence of New Historicism on my approach is its concern with the ways in which a culture's dominant ideology becomes imbedded within literary texts. I aim to show then how the dominant ideology of Thatcherism is embedded within Amis and Gray's texts. The main challenge of this is to find way's of connecting such a self reflexive form as postmodernism to specific historical events.
The best way of explaining this I think is to give an example. So the rest of this paper will concentrate on work I have done on Amis' Other People and its relationship to historical events in Britain between 1978-1980 when it was written. During this period the labour government collapsed and the conservative party came to power and began adopting radical economic policies.
The structure of Other People initially appears to be extremely self reflexive. The narrator constantly foregrounds its cyclical structure and its status as a narrative. Amis employs parallelism and repetition to create a cyclical structure in which the characters repeat their lives endlessly. The novel begins with the narrator's confession to a murder followed by description of a young woman waking in a hospital. She calls herself Mary Lamb but as the novel progresses we learn that she is actually the narrator's murder victim Amy Hide and that she will keep repeating her life and and the narrator will keep murdering her until she "gets it right". The novel ends with the same description it began with only this time it is the teenage Amy waking at home. This is followed by a description of the narrator waiting outside for Amy, ready to begin the cycle again.
The structure then would seem to suggest a deterministic view of life. That individuals' fates are sealed and that there is very little that they can do to change them. The novel's content however constantly contradicts this reading and ultimately appears to move from a deterministic to an individualist viewpoint. But how do the events of 1978-1980 affect a novel that appears to completely ignore the political for the personal and the fictional?
Early on in the novel the narrator tells us about Tramps:
"The reason they are tramps is that they have no money. The reason they have no money is that they won't sell anything, which is what nearly everyone else does. You sell something, don't you, I'm sure? I know I do. Why don't they? Tramps just don't want to sell their time. Selling time, time sold: that's the business we're all in. We sell our time, but they keep theirs, but they don't get any money, but they think about money all the time. It's an odd way of going about things being a tramp. Tramps like it, though. Being a tramp is increasingly popular, statistics show, there are more and more tramps doing without money all the time" (Amis, p.23).
This passage indicates two things useful in historicising the novel. One is the individual's relation to capital, while the other, which I will explore later, is an increase in homelessness.
The narrator's statement that "Selling time [is] the business we're all in" re-expresses Marx's notion of labour power for the late 1970s, reducing it from the capacity to labour to a more basic unit, Time. Marx's interpretation of labour power is:
"... the aggregate of those mental and physical capabilities existing in the physical form, the living personality, of a human being, capabilities which he sets in motion whenever he produces a use-value of any kind" (Marx, Capital p. 270).
For Marx then the fact that all workers have to sell is their capacity to work means that ultimately all workers become commodities bought and sold in the market place. For the narrator however time is the only commodity an individual possesses. Like Marx the narrator presents the exchange of capital for commodities as a necessary requirement for life. The difference being that the narrator sees time as the commodity rather than the individual. This indicates that individuals may have some control over their position in the system.
The narrator reproduces the notion of time as a commodity throughout the novel. For example at one point in the text Prince (the narrator) explains prostitution to Mary:
"'He paid an agency fifty pounds to bring her here tonight. She will keep five, perhaps less. Five pounds, for going out with fat guys. Later they will make a deal. He will give her a hundred pounds, maybe a hundred and fifty. She will spend four of five hours of her time in his hotel, then go home to her children and her husband, who doesn't mind, who can't afford to mind' "(Amis, p.112).
The woman 'spends time' with the man, the emphasis being on the exchange of time and money with the actual exchange of money and sex being only implied. The notion of her selling time de-emphasises the actual act. This could be interpreted as a way of lessening the demeaning nature of her transaction and perhaps creating the illusion that she has some control over the transaction.
What I would argue is happening is that Amis is presenting a right wing rationalisation of Marxist doctrine. In this rationalisation by presenting time as the commodity rather than the individual the individual is presented as having a certain amount of freedom. The narrator then contradicts this by showing a woman who's choice to exchange time for capital is exploited. In short a fundamental principle of socialist thinking is watered down to mask exploitation. This slight rethinking of Marx I would argue signals the beginning of a shift into Thatcherite individualism which gets stronger as the novel progresses. But what evidence is there in the text to connect this reworking of Marx to actual historical events?
In my original example of the tramps the narrator comments that "being a tramp is increasingly popular, statistics show. There are more and more tramps doing without money all the time" (Amis, p.23). This ironic statement hints at a homelessness problem which in turn suggests a general problem with the country's economy. In fact through out the novel money is repeatedly referred to as being scarce. The source of this scarcity is however only briefly touched upon during a description of a shopping trip.
"Mary went out in [the rain], past the porous houses, stalwart and dreary in the wet, to the rained-under commerce of the junctions and shops. You could say one thing for rain: unlike so much else these days, it was clearly in endless supply. They were never going to run out of it. People shopped with wintry panic, buying anything they could get a hand to. They shouldered and snatched among the stalls, at the drenched vegetables and the sopping sobbing fruit. Like the holds of ships in tempest, the shop floors swilled with the wellington-wet detritus of the streets, each chime of the door bringing deeper water, umbrellas working like pistons, squelching galoshes and sweating polythene, all under the gaze of the looted shelves. Things were running out, everything was running out, things to buy and money to buy them with. But the rain would not run out" (Amis, p.178).
This passage can be placed in the winter of 1978-1979, commonly referred to as the 'winter of discontent', during which pay disputes and strikes caused severe disruption to parts of Britain. Joel Barnett, Chief Secretary to the Treasury from 1974 to 1979, recalls that:
"The first three months of 1979 were the longest three months in the whole five years. ... . While [the Prime Minister] was being televised from Guadeloupe, we at home had the strikes rendered more effective by the worst winter for many years ... There were daily reports of petrol and food shortages. Lists of items said to be in short supply were reported nightly on our TV screens. If they were not in short supply before the broadcasts, they were soon afterwards, as supermarket shelves were stripped" (Inside the Treasury p.169).
Amis' description of Mary's shopping trip reflects these conditions. The scarcity of money and the perceived food shortages are stressed throughout the passage which begins and ends by stressing a lack of commodities and an abundance of bad weather. Considering that this situation contributed to the Conservatives victory in the general election it is then possible to interpret the narrators rationalised Marxism as reflecting a general shift to the right in Britain. By the end of the book shortly after the unmentioned election Mary has regained her Identity as Amy and also developed a new attitude to money:
"Money, of course, was still in everyone's bad books; in shops and coffee-bars people talked bitterly about it and its misdeeds. But Amy had a lot of time for money and thought that people seriously undervalued it. Money was more versatile than people let on. Money could spend and money could buy. Also you could save money whilst you spent it. Finally, it was nice spending money and it was nice not spending it - and of how many things could you say that?" (Amis, p.193).
Amy appears to recognise money's power and usefulness as a tool. In fact Amy appears to have become a Thatcherite. The narrator began the novel by demonstrating a right wing illusion that hides exploitation. He now shows us Amy apparently in control of her life and embracing another Thatcherite ideal, the notion of money as a tool of independence rather than repression.
Amis reworks Marx's notion of labour power within the text of Other People to reflect its status in early Thatcherite Britain. This reworking relates money to time, making time a commodity while simultaneously reflecting a freedom that this exchange gives the worker. He then demonstrates how this reasoning masks the exploitation that Marx's original statements revealed.
This reworking I would argue manifests within the text the beginnings of Thatcherism in Britain demonstrating how its reasoning created an illusion of individualism that masked exploitation. By the end Amy appears to have gained control over her life and has become an individual. But ultimately she is still trapped within the novel's structure and must repeat the cycle with little hope of escape.
I would argue then that although Amis' novel initially appears to be isolated from its contemporary world its conflict of form and content reflects the conflicts within Britain's new dominant ideology. The text's conflict between a structure that denies self-determinism and its characters attempts to become individuals mirrors the contradiction within Thatcherism of creating an illusion of individuality to maintain the inequalities necessary for capitalism.