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 2
The Rachel Papers
To understand better the characterization of women in these three novels by Martin Amis, we can turn to a discussion of his first text, The Rachel Papers. The novel yields many themes that resonate throughout all of Amis’s later work: the mediation of identity and sexuality, the effect of male misogyny on women, and a satirically comic analysis of morally bankrupt characters debased by materialism and commodity culture. In The Rachel Papers, Amis begins his critical examination of modern sexuality by satirizing the mediated sexual behavior of Charles Highway. Amis’s satire is not limited to a comic critique of his protagonist, however. Amis uses Charles Highway’s sexist behavior as a way to address his larger literary concerns—i.e., for establishing a literary dialogue with past writers on the issue of sexuality.
This pattern of dialogue can be illuminated by Harold Bloom’s theories of literary influence. James Diedrick has pointed out the presence of Bloom’s "anxiety of influence" in Amis’s writing with respect to the rivalrous relationship between Amis and his father, Kingsley Amis. "In terms of Bloom’s theory, the proximity and intensity of his father’s influence have led him to seek a series of father substitutes whose influence he can acknowledge without filial conflict" (6). In this search for father substitutes, Amis seems to be rigorously engaged in "creative misreadings," enabling us to illuminate his work through Bloom’s second revisionary ratio, tessera: "A poet antithetically ‘completes’ his precursor, by so reading the parent-poem as to retain its terms but to mean them in another sense, as though the precursor had failed to go far enough" (Bloom in Richter 709). The principle of tessera is present in Amis’s preoccupation with the mediation of sexual behavior: the follies and sexual corruption of Charles Highway become Amis’s philosophical challenge to the romantic idealism of writers such as D.H. Lawrence. Indeed, Amis situates sexuality between the tensions of the contemporary world and the age of Romanticism and Lawrentian sexuality:
It’s part of a genuine idea about modern life—that it’s so mediated that authentic experience is much harder to find. Authentic everything is much harder to find. In all sorts of behavior, even in the sack, we’re thinking, ‘How does this measure up? How will this look?’ We’ve all got this idea of what it should be like—from movies, from pornography. I’m interested in two extremes. The first is the idea that the earth moves, this great union is formed, and the self is lost. That comes from D.H. Lawrence and Romantic poetry and is what we all devoutly hope for. The other extreme is sort of athletic—the hot lay, where the self is in fact not lost in the moment but is masterful and dominant. And that comes at us from another direction—from advertising and pornography and trash fiction. (Morrison 101)
Charles Highway symbolizes this mediation of modern life: his intense self-consciousness (as particularly regards the seduction of women) throughout the novel reveals that there is hardly anything about him that is authentic. For instance, Charles "outlines" his bedroom in anticipation of his evening with Gloria:
The room wouldn’t, after all, need much preparation for Gloria—record-sleeves scattered negligently about the room, certain low-brow paperbacks displayed advantageously on table and desk, and the colour supplements, open at suitable pages, on the floor. Gloria probably had no fixed conception of me so there wasn’t much point in going into detail. (Amis 16)
In his attempts to impress and seduce women, Charles represents a youth caught in a postmodern world where identity has become another commodity to exploit: "In my room I looked out my Rachel note-pad in preparation for the telephone call. I flicked through it making notes, underlining the odd pertinent phrase, sketching personas" (33). Indeed, the self becomes an article of clothing that is valued only for representation, when Charles prepares for his encounter with Rachel:
What clothes would I wear? Blue mandras shirt, black boots, and the old black cord suit with those touching leather elbow-patches. What persona would I wear? On the two occasions I had seen her last August I underwent several complete identity-reorganizations, settling finally somewhere between the pained, laconic, inscrutable type and the knowing, garrulous, cynical, laugh a minute, yet something demonic about him, something nihilistic, muted death-wish type. Revamp those, or start again? (42)
Identity, with Charles and his late-twentieth-century environment, has become commodified: people no longer possess innate or developed characteristics but are "types" that purchase personality in a marketplace of ideological self-fashioning.
This extreme of mediated behavior, then, conflicts dramatically with the romantic notions of self-effacement through sexual experience. Amis effectively employs his use of dramatic monologue in order to articulate this antagonism. As noted by James Diedrick, the use of this narrative technique is one of Amis’s key accomplishments in the novel, for it allows Amis to comment on his characters and on literature in general without interfering with his characters’ thoughts (Diedrick 31). Amis uses this technique during Charles’s foreplay with Rachel to speak through his character and pose a challenge to D.H. Lawrence’s romantic interpretation of sexuality: "Had the time come to orchestrate the Lawrentiana?" (151). Charles discovers rather quickly, though, that the self will not find transcendence through passion:
How nice to be able to say: ‘We made love, and slept.’ Only it wasn’t like that; it didn’t happen that way. The evidence is before me...I know what it’s supposed to be like, I’ve read my Lawrence. I know also what I felt and thought; I know what that evening was: an aggregate of pleasureless detail, nothing more; an insane, gruelling, blow-by-blow obstacle course. And yet that’s what I’m here for tonight. I must be true to myself. Oh God, I thought this was going to be fun. It isn’t. I’m sweating here. I’m afraid. (152; my emphasis)
In a novel dealing with the comic and disturbing aspects of mediated behavior, Amis’s intention here is to debunk the lofty idealism of Lawrence and expose sexuality under the influence of intense self-consciousness. He has Charles announce this challenge to Lawrence’s idealism, signifying the presence of tessera: Amis is acknowledging Lawrence’s preoccupation with and interpretation of sexuality, but extends and redefines its meaning by rewriting sexuality under the influence of mediation in the postmodern age. Amis presents this redefinition by satirizing the mechanical aspects of Charles’s sexual encounters:
It wasn’t that bad, as I remember, not significantly worse than usual. Fifteen, maybe twenty minutes trying not to come, with a beady dread of what was going to happen when I did; a decent (i.e. perceptible) orgasm; a further two or three minutes in garrotted detumescence. Cock attains regulation minimum and is supplanted by well-manicured thumb; Gloria has another...five? orgasms; and so it ends. (19)
There is no great union or Lawrentian "connection" found in Charles’s sex with Gloria: instead of romantic self-effacement through intercourse, there is intense self-concentration and anxiety. Amis also carefully chooses his language to articulate the tired, mediated machinery of sex: the body struggles in a timed process, its parts operating mechanically ("regulation minimum"). Sexuality, then, becomes a banal act of performance for the self: "I recall turning at one point from the section of wallpaper I was perusing to check on Gloria’s face (just for the files): and impressively atavistic it was too" (21). Charles’s ironic study of the wall debunks the notion of communicative sex, while his inspection of Gloria’s face becomes a marker of status for the self.
In the process of dialoguing with and critiquing this Lawrentian and Romantic view of sexuality, Amis uses his female characters to foreground his thematic concern with mediation. The above satirized description of Charles’s foreplay is effective only by having Rachel presented as a "blow-by-by obstacle course" that captures Charles’s stumbling mediated behavior. To continue his deconstruction of Lawrentian sexuality, Amis casts Gloria as a voyeuristic spectacle in order to provide Charles with the voice he needs to revise the interpretation of sexual experience:
During the long pre-copulative session I glanced downwards—and what should I see but Gloria, practising the perversion known as fellatio. Unaccountably, she was doing this with great rigour and enthusiasm, circling her head so that her long plush hair skimmed and glided over my hips, thighs and stomach. Visually, it was most appealing, but all I could feel was a remote, irrelevant numbness—plus, in my legs, cramps and pins-and-needles respectively. Have I come already, perhaps? I asked myself. (20-1)
In this passage Gloria functions as a vessel through which the mediated sexual concerns of the novel can be revealed: the visual spectacle of her "rigorous" sexual behavior serves to construct a titillating image of expected erotic play that evaporates with the painful sensations registered by Charles. In this way, Gloria becomes a subjugated textual object, isolated in a pornographic image, that carries the greater significance of allowing male experience to speak and debunk the illusion of sexual pleasure.
However, Amis’s intention in The Rachel Papers is not simply to rewrite ideas about sexuality. Before his characterization of women can be further critiqued, his approach to sexuality must be thoroughly understood. Amis presents the reader with a comic manifesto in The Rachel Papers, clarifying his interest in scabrous sexual activity: "Surely, nice things are dull, and nasty things are funny. The nastier a thing is, the funnier it gets" (87). Amis seems to define humor as a way to satirize the moments of sexual and moral corruption of society: while using laughter to punish the degeneracy of his characters, Amis also uses comedy to cope with the nasty realities of domestic violence, sexual aggression, and the proliferation of sexually transmitted diseases that ooze their way across the pages of his texts. Indeed, Amis has admitted that the type of humor in which he is interested is one that embraces the painful situations of life: "What I am interested in is heavy comedy, rather than light comedy. It’s a wincing laughter, or a sort of funky laughter...Sort of a hung-over laughter, where it hurts" (Morrison 97). Comedy, then, in the case of The Rachel Papers, is employed as a means of punishing the corruption of Charles, while also serving as a kind of lubricator for what Amis sees as the nasty realities of modern society—as a "method of confronting often-repressed truths, of using humor to gain a critical leverage on them" (Diedrick 14). A clear example of this "wincing" humor is Charles’s recollection of his sexual experience at the Belsize Park flat:
It ended one mid-August morning when I happened to glance down at the undulating area between my stomach and the stomach of a girl I just so happened to be poking at the time (in a sweaty, hungover state, I might add). What I saw there were worms of dirt—as when a working man, his day done, strides home rubbing his toil-hardened hands together, causing the excess grit to wriggle up into tiny black strings, which he soon brushes impatiently from his palms. Only these were on our stomachs and therefore much bigger: like baby eels. (13)
The graphic imagery is purposefully used to criticize the misogynistic and inebriated sexuality that is characteristic of Charles Highway: it is a way to laugh at and feel disgust for his behavior. A more effective moment where Amis uses laughter to deal with Charles’s sexual degeneracy follows his coupling with Pepita Manehian:
However, on the following Friday or thereabouts I woke up to find that someone had squeezed a family-size tube of pus all over my pyjama bottoms. A toxic wet dream? On visiting the bathroom I found also that I was peeing lava. Palpably, something was up. To deal with the first symptom I fixed up a sort of nozzle over my helmet with a wad of Kleenex and an elastic band. To ameliorate the second, I took care always to use the narrow downstairs lavatory, where, with palms pressed flat against the walls, like Samson between the pillars of the Philistine temple, I would part company with angry half-pints of piss, pus, blood—you name it. (90)
The comic elements of these scenes serve to attack the promiscuity of Charles, using laughter to confront the painful consequences of his (mis)use of sexuality. Amis’s puritanical intention behind this critique of sexuality becomes evident when he brackets the discussion of Charles’s sexually transmitted diseases with the satirist’s disapproval: "This be Nature’s way of recommending monogamy" (89). Thus, despite the undeveloped claim of Shanti Padhi that "Repulsiveness and grossness are the main elements of Martin Amis’s humour" (Padhi 40), Amis does have a set purpose to his brutal and explicit treatment of sexuality. Contrary to Padhi, Amis’s early works are not simply "The scatological pranks of a young writer trying with utmost panache to outdo his rivals in porno-peddling" (Padhi 36), since Amis’s wider vision seems to be to relish in his use of language and imagery in order to expose the decay of a postlapsarian modern world.
Charles Highway is the first of many misogynists to strut his way through the pages of Amis’s fiction. Charles holds stereotypical views of women, mocks their bodies, and willfully plots their seduction without regard to their feelings. More central to the novel’s main theme, he uses literature to satiate his sexual desires: "Because I really quite liked Blake—and not just for the fucks he had got me, either" (73). Amis has stated his distaste for Charles, remarking that "Charles is a crude case of someone who tries to turn literature to his own advantage—using Blake, for example, to seduce girls" (Haffenden 10). Amis presents Charles’s misogyny in varying degrees: "Ran into Jenny on the front doorstep. She was on her way out to have lunch with a friend. I didn’t think girls did that sort of thing nowadays, and said so. Jenny laughed vivaciously, but looked not at ease" (33). More cruel than Charles’s ignorant views of women, though, is his treatment of women during sex: "Of course: I had never used a sheath before. With those girls who weren’t self-contracepting I had practised coitus interruptus, practising it all over their stomachs or in between the sheet and their bums, depending on locale and whether or not I liked them" (155).
Based upon this behavior, Amis is able to express Charles’s sexual corruption by drawing a symbolic parallel between Charles’s sexuality and the bathroom. After discovering two adolescent memoirs stapled together in his files, describing the appropriate behavior of turds and his desire to have sex with an Older Woman, Charles says: "I free the staple with my fingernails and marry the two items with a paperclip, instead. I don’t think they can be that closely connected" (88; original emphasis). The irony Amis invests in this scene reveals that the memoirs share a crucial similarity. The juxtaposition of the two items suggests how Charles has confused sexuality with defecation, divesting sexual intercourse of its communicative potential and transforming it into a process of expelling bodily fluids because of his selfish and emotionless pursuit of women.
While rendering Charles’s misogyny and degenerative use of sexuality, however, Amis spends little time developing his female characters. Even though The Rachel Papers is a portrait of the sexual behavior of the late 1960s, Amis’s satire in the novel can be best described as being specifically concerned with male uses and abuses of sexuality. Amis continues to express the degeneracy of Charles’s desires for women, by using language to depict his sexual behavior as a kind of bowel movement: "Though—come on—did I really want to show her the other side, my place? Dionysian bathroom sex: troop in, tug back the covers, go through the gaping routine, do everything either of you can conceiveably think of doing, again, lurch lick squat squirt squelch, again, until it’s all over, again. No. And she probably wouldn’t let me" (180). But while expressing this metaphorical connection between Charles’s sexuality and the bathroom, Amis is lightly concerned with the characterization of women: "Made the girl mine in a lavatory at some weekend party. (All the bedrooms were occupied; but it was quite a spacious closet, with a rug, some towels, and tissues a plenty.) We did well, even though, in the dying moments, Pepi smashed her head three times against the lavatory bowl, this giving the cramped cleaning-up operations a still more incongruous air" (89-90). The main focus of the passage is to capture Charles’s debased sexuality by symbolically placing this encounter in the bathroom. The physical condition of Pepita, though, seems only to help construct the debasement of the scene: there is no indication of her consciousness as a character, except that her abused body adds a comic air to this situation.
James Diedrick suggests that some of the mischievous sexual antics of this novel are purposeful: "While the novel can be read as a (male) adolescent coming-of-age story, it can just as easily be taken as a parody of the genre..." (30). But even when Amis parodies these sexual activities (as suggested by the tone and style of listing sexual positions quoted below), the female body stages the incident:
Here we go. An old-school repertoire of minimally sexy positions. Examples: I slung her legs over my shoulder; knelt, bending her almost triple; lay straight as an ironing board; turned her round, did it from behind, did it from the side; I brought my right leg up, kept my left leg straight—I did the hokey-pokey, in fact. But, again, it is change of position that is sexy, not the position itself, and God forbid that I should feel sexy. (161)
Rachel becomes an extremely elastic, pliable object that is "slung and bent," and twisted about in order to characterize Charles’s behavior. The manipulations of her body are presented as a comic dance—"the hokey-pokey"—to evoke parodic laughter at and satirical commentary on the male protagonist. In these moments of parodying sexuality, Amis even seems to become seduced by what he is critiquing and lose his satirical focus: "Tonight, my lad, you are going to get laid. Selfishly. You’re going to get gobbled for a kick-off. You gonna bugger her good. You gonna rip out her hair in fistfuls, fuck her like a javelin hurled across ice, zoom through the air, screaming" (187-8). Even though Amis is seemingly attempting to satirize the narcissistic behavior of Charles in the scene, his intention fails precisely because of the violent antifeminist imagery that is employed in order to comment on Charles. If the passage is meant to ridicule Charles, it is done so by violently abusing the female body.
Amis’s failure to maintain a satirical distance from his character’s actions continues immediately after this fantasy of Charles’s. When Charles lies in bed with Rachel, Amis seems to describe the scene so as to illuminate the misogyny that arises from Charles’s selfish actions: "If you can slash in my bed (I thought) don’t tell me you can’t suck my cock. So I drive it into her cheek, practically up her nose, and Rachel takes it in her mouth and releases it almost at once. With a croak of disgust...And yet I was the one who felt ashamed, dirty, dog-like, in the wrong. To prove it there were tears on her face when I came up for air" (189). Charles’s behavior is shown to be completely dehumanizing towards Rachel as signalled by the tears on her face. But the added descriptions of Charles’s efforts to force fellatio seem to be tinged with the overtones of comedy, which detract from the satirical sentiments present in the passage.
Even though one of the goals of The Rachel Papers is to perform a satiric comedy and criticize the idea of the "hot lay" ("where the self is in fact not lost in the moment but is masterful and dominant" [Morrison 101]), Amis again stages this humor on a thoroughly objectified female body. Noting this complicated nature of Amis’s satire in the text, James Diedrick states: "In The Rachel Papers, it is not always clear where Amis stands in relation to his narrator" (31). This satirical ambiguity suggests that Amis’s questionable use of the female body represents the presence of authorial antifeminism that resonates within the attempted satirical sketches of Charles’s sexuality.
Finally, on a more subtextual level, the use of women to foreground male behavior finds expression in Rachel’s relationship to Charles. Rachel is hardly a fully developed character; indeed, her main role is to be a sexual object, to function, in the words of James Diedrick, "at least in part as a fantasy-projection of Charles’s own upwardly mobile aspirations (her first name is a virtual anagram of his own)" (24). As I have shown, however, Rachel plays a more significant role—that of a narrative vehicle that drives Charles "Highway" to maturity in this coming-of-age novel. The deeper concerns of The Rachel Papers is Charles’s search for a resolution with his philandering father, Gordon Highway—an observation also made by James Diedrick: "Significantly, and despite the novel’s focus on his pursuit of Rachel, Charles’s relationship with his father forms the emotional center of the novel" (26).
What has not been acknowledged, however, is how the pursuit of Rachel structures and resolves this greater patriarchal concern of the text. In her study "Desire in Narrative," Teresa de Lauretis ruminates on this question of the feminine giving voice to male desire in narration. She states that feminist theory must perform a rereading of the "sacred texts" on narrative theory, and cites Roland Barthes’s interest in language, narrative, and the Oedipus as the factors that produce the informing logic of male desire in narrative development: "Pleasure and meaning move along the triple track he first outlined, and the tracking is from the point of view of Oedipus, so to speak, its movement is that of a masculine desire" (de Lauretis 107). Amis’s narrative places Charles in the role of Oedipus, a character who is travelling through his experiences in search of an emotional resolution with his father. And the character who provides the "road" on which to construct these travels is Rachel. Rachel and Charles’s father, then, are not separate concerns of the novel; rather, she serves to inform and provide the landscape in which Charles can act out and think about the grievances against his father.
The truer significance of Rachel’s character can be found in de Lauretis’s reconsideration of the feminine in Oedipal narrative structures: "Medusa and the Sphinx, like other ancient monsters, have survived inscribed in hero narratives, in someone else’s story, not their own; so they are figures or markers of positions—places and topoi—through which the hero and his story move to their destination and to accomplish meaning" (109). Rachel, like Medusa and the Sphinx, fulfills this role of the "marker of positions" by adding form to Charles’s narrative perusal of his childhood. Charles "rigorously clerks" his adolescent files, because he (like Oedipus) is out on a quest: "Because something has definitely happened to me, and I’m very keen to know what it is" (4).
What Charles stumbles upon in the opening of this narrative is the question of his "absent" father: "It’s strange; although my father is probably the most fully documented character in my files, he doesn’t merit a note-pad to himself, let alone a folder...Why nothing for my father? Is this a way of getting back at him?" (8). After this point, Charles’s encounters with Rachel throughout the text are tellingly juxtaposed with thoughts for his father. Immediately after Rachel surprises Charles at the Notting Hill Gate Smith’s—almost forcing him to speak without his usual mediated self-consciousness—Charles writes: "I think it was that afternoon I began work on the Letter to My Father, a project which was to take up many a spare moment over the following weeks" (66). Furthermore, after Charles narrowly escapes receiving a beating from Derek at the tutors, he announces: "Patently, I was in a state about something. Not so much about Rachel—for I was cockfree until the end of next week, so nothing dramatic could happen. Perhaps it was the idea of having some sort of showdown with my father" (121). In these scenes, Rachel marks the development of Charles’s destination: she is the current that washes Charles through his narrative to articulate his real internal struggle with his father.
Ultimately, this relationship with Rachel allows Charles to achieve meaning, which he has been looking for during the narrative perusal of his past. In the last section of the novel "Midnight: coming of age," Charles desultorily prepares for his appointment at Oxford, "fumbling with clothes and Interview literature" (209). Curiously, though, Charles chooses a different guide to help him: "On an impulse, I decided to take The Rachel Papers with me, instead" (209). This decision can be understood from the fact that Rachel symbolizes Charles’s younger, mediated self: she is the space of the text through which Charles has stumbled, tripping over his elaborate plottings and seductions that have only deluded himself. His own commentary on his relationship with Rachel reveals this self-delusion: "I tried writing letters to Rachel but although elegant and conscientious they made no sense to me and I merely filed them away. I seemed incapable of using words without stylizing myself" (144).
His interactions with Rachel give voice to his central problem—how he has selfishly used words and literature consistently to seduce women and inflate his ego. Thus, carrying The Rachel Papers into the interview signifies how Rachel has carried Charles to his textual corrective—i.e., the debunking of his stylized self he receives at the hands of the Oxford professor, punningly named Dr. Knowd: "...Literature has a kind of life of its own, you know. You can’t just use it...ruthlessly, for your own ends...Just read the poems and work out whether you like them, and why" (215). Knowd delivers this knowledge to Charles, urging him to be himself, to find authenticity. He serves as a kind of father figure, giving Charles the parental guidance he has been lacking throughout his narrative, according to Amis: "The only come-uppance he [Charles] gets is from the university tutor who interviews him towards the end. Reading the book again after five years I saw with pleased surprise that the tutor was an author-figure, because all my other books have author-figures. He scolds Charles for his misuse of literature" (Haffenden 10).
Thus, no longer possessing the mediated self that was identified with Rachel, Charles loses interest in their relationship, and finds symbolic reconciliation with his father: "I return to the wastepaper basket and find Rachel’s mascara-ed ball beneath the layers of tissue steeped in my own snot and tears. I examine it, then let it fall noiselessly from my hand. I cover it now with the Letter to My Father" (222-3; my emphasis). The supplanting of her tissue with the letter implies how Rachel has foregrounded the patriarchal conflict of father and son.
Rachel is not separable from Charles’s issues with his father: she provides the obstacle for Charles to overcome in order to receive his come-uppance and gain a new consciousness. She is thus the textual stumbling block that provides meaning for Charles’s story, fulfilling the de Lauretian role of the feminine in male narratives: "They are obstacles man encounters on the path of life, on his way to manhood, wisdom, and power; they must be slain or defeated so that he can go forward to fulfill his destiny—and his story. Thus we don’t know, his story doesn’t tell, what became of the Sphinx after the encounter with Oedipus..." (de Lauretis 110). While Charles progresses toward the achievement of manhood, Rachel suffers the same fate as the Sphinx: the reader never learns more about the ambiguous state of her possible pregnancy; she is simply whisked away by her former boyfriend, Deforest, leaving a slightly altered Charles Highway at the end of the novel.
