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.
