by Victoria N. Alexander
Dactyl Foundation for the Arts & Humanities
(from The Antioch Review Fall 1994)
Martin Amis's novels feature heroes of playboy fantasies, unscrupulous upwardly-mobile yobs, and charismatic murderers. With a mixture of anxiety and fascination, Amis chronicles the "cheapening of humanity," a phenomenon he attributes, partly, to the uniquely twentieth century prospect of total annihilation and partly to the fact that much of American (and more lately British) life is dedicated to televised "event glamour"--a phrase borrowed from Amis's mentor, Saul Bellow. Both writers maintain that popular sporting/religious extravaganzas give a false sense of collective life experience. Moreover, says Amis, channel-hoppers skip through tabloid journalism shows, cursory reports of sex scandals and riots, and mini-series on serial killers, delighting only in unsavory special effects. "It's a distracted age," Amis notes gravely; "the narrative line in human life is gone," and with it, he suggests, human decency ("Modernity").
Because the "decline of the West" is Amis's subject, he has earned a bad reputation for playing the social critic, or if you prefer, for being a quixotic champion of bygone values. Amis end-of-the-millennium novel, London Fields (1989), tries but fails to explain how the nuclear threat has led to a disintegration of human decency, and Money: A Suicide Note (1984) tries but fails to prove that the distracting influences of fast-food, pornography, and capitalism contribute to increases in gratuitous crime.
Trying to provide one's readers with advice on life may be a rather puerile inclination. What bearing, if any, his "myths of decline" had on practical politics does not affect the quality of his fiction. Nevertheless, his statement regarding "the narrative line," of which the vicious and moronic are supposedly deprived, is intriguing. He proposes that people profit, intellectually and morally, by reading fiction, by gaining a sense of order and justice. He, himself, writes because he likes to impose order on chaos. But this is a limited explanation. What does Amis mean by "the narrative line"? Does he mean the narrative? Does he mean the human story, which once had an omniscient author, God, and a fairly well-contrived plot called Providence? I think he does. According to Bellow, his important advisor on the subject, distraction is a by-product of nihilism (It All Adds Up 167). Bellow too, has spent much of his career giving his readers advice on life, most particularly encouraging the belief in the human soul.
The condition of distraction, for which Amis seeks a remedy, only explains Amis's motivation for writing. It does not explain why Amis, after offering Answers to big social problems, later rescinds them by stressing the fact of fiction. Amis, obsessed with apparent world-randomness, arranges things the way he wants in his novels. At the same time, however, he is aware that his arrangement is only fiction, and he reminds readers of this by employing certain "postmodern" techniques such as involution, the inclusion of the author himself in the novel. Amis takes this cue from Nabokov, the renown illusionist. In Strong Opinions Nabokov writes, "What I would welcome at the close of a book of mine is a sensation of its world receding in the distance and stopping somewhere there, suspended afar like a picture in a picture: The Artist's Studio by Van Bock (73).
Amis's aesthetic and moral principle, a queer hybrid of a Nabokovian and Bellovian world-views, can be stated as: It is Man's natural tendency to fictionalize, to bestow some kind of order--it is sometimes his comfort, sometimes his affliction, and at all times a quality of being human--but he should not deny the false truth of the narrative he creates.
Because Saul Bellow's narrators speak too closely to his own "truth," he could not discredit them by stressing the gap between fiction and reality. To Bellow, a venerable author has the power of vision, whereas Nabokov and Amis are quite happy to be characterized as illusionists or artists. The dynamics of faith/doubt and idealism/realism which are a source of energy and artistic expression in Amis's tragi-comedies.
Amis once said a writer is like a god--a predictable sentiment given the redeeming potential he attributes to literature. In an interview with Ian McEwan on "Writers in Conversation," Amis said he became a writer because "[Life] is all too random. [I have] the desire to give shape to things and make sense of things," and he added, "I have a god-like relationship [with] the world I've created. It is exactly analogous. There is creation and resolution, and it's all up to [me]" ("Writers").
I reminded Amis of the statement in the McEwan interview. He remembered the comment, and I asked him whether it was the artist's function to "discover" meaning or to "give" meaning.
He answered my question automatically as if he had been asked the time of day. "The artist rearranges things to give point and meaning," said Amis. "The difference between In Cold Blood and The Executioner's Song, say, and Crime and Punishment is that Capote and Mailer are just given the facts and cannot arrange them to point up a moral--or just arrange them to point up various ironies. What they're left with is life, which I say is kind of random."
Amis referred to his pieces on Truman Capote and Norman Mailer in The Moronic Inferno. From "a piece of event glamour"--that is, the execution of convicted murderer Gary Gilmore--Mailer assembled The Executioner's Song (1977), a work of "fictoid," filled with "factoids" according to Amis. Mailer's work followed Capote's non-fiction-novel, In Cold Blood (1966), which describes the pointless murder of the Clutter Family in Kansas. The American authors are not "artists" according to Amis's definition because neither has Amis's "god-like" control over material. The "narrative line" is absent from the "fictoid" genre because its "resolution" is not author-contrived. As Amis says above, these facts "are given." Amis's preference for his own aesthetic model may prevent him from fairly judging the "true-life" novel. He has definite scruples against confusing life with fiction. Amis writes, "What is missing, though, is the moral imagination, moral artistry... When the reading experience is over, you are left, simply, with murder--and with the human messiness and futility that attends all death" (39).
Among Amis's designated "moral artists" is Saul Bellow. Any discussion of Martin Amis must include the Nobel-Prize-winning author who has greatly influenced Amis in terms of both subject and style. In Saul Bellow's "Jefferson Lectures," delivered in 1977, the John Self character is delineated in his description of "modern man":
This person is our brother, our semblable, our very self. He is certainly in many respects narrow and poor, blind in heart, weak, mean, intoxicated, confused in spirit--stupid. We see how damaged he is, how badly mutilated. But the leap towards the marvelous is a possibility he still considers nevertheless...He dreams of beating the rap, outwitting the doom prepared for him by history. Often he seem prepared to assert that he is a new kind of human being, whose condition calls for original expression, and he is ready to take a flier, go for the higher truth. He has been put down, has put himself down too, but he has also dreamed of strategies that will bring him past all this distraction, his own included. For he knows something...He is (or can be) skeptical, cant-free, heedful of his own intuitions (It All Adds Up 135).
This excerpt is so close to the story of John Self it could serve as Money's synopsis.
When asked which novels by Bellow influenced the writing of Money, Amis said, "It was a collective influence, but I suppose Augie March mainly. In Money, I stopped worrying too much about form. In the introduction to Augie March, Bellow talks about having an inclusive, catch-if-catch-can attitude. I tried to learn from that, to relax and sound-off really, not be too worried about the decor of the novel, the formal decoration."
Amis has written several articles on Bellow and his work. They have appeared in television interviews as a kind of twosome. Bellow looks ready to bequeath his literary acclaim to Amis, who in turn seems eager to carry on a great tradition. Only upon further inspection does one begin to anticipate a "father-son" parting of the ways.
In The Moronic Inferno, Amis favorably reviews Bellow's The Dean's December, but, in fact, Amis modifies Bellow's perspective on a writer's essential business to suit his own. One gets the sense that Amis is slightly embarrassed for Bellow's sake when he discusses transcendentalism, anthroposophy or the existence of the human soul. Amis is something of an agnostic. For him, the writer is an artist-creator of a fictional world; whereas, Bellow, whose strong faith pervades his writing, hints--warily sometimes, but more often with nerve--that the writer is a kind of prophet, visionary, or to be more precise, a medium who interprets this world.
The hero of The Dean's December, Albert Corde, like Bellow and Amis, is a writer concerned with the decline of social values and rise of gratuitous violence. Journalist Corde declares that "chronic lead insult" in urban populations has resulted in laziness, low intelligence, irritability, a predisposition to violence, insanity--societal decay. Like a "new journalist" Corde is given the facts of his "story," but Corde notices the poetic coincidence that for centuries "leaden" has described the degenerate, and he insists the coincidence has metaphysical significance. Thinking objective facts could not communicate the oracular ramifications, he uses metaphor and poetry to give a more intense report of the 'chronic lead insult'.
I wanted to know if Amis thought Corde was indeed a kind of medium. "Does Corde invest the 'situation of chronic lead insult' with meaning, or does he discover meaning?"
Corde "invests it with meaning. He talks about 'chronic lead insult' having the effect of exciting you and stupefying you at the same time, and says that this is a general response to contemporary life."
I agreed that the meaning is "invested" whether it be by Corde or Bellow. I restated my question: "Should we view Corde's vision as poetic or prophetic?"
"Poetic," he said, an answer which describes Corde as more of an artist-creator than as a visionary-medium. In his Nobel Lecture, Bellow clearly states his belief that great literature is not merely poetic. "There is another reality, the genuine one, which we loose sight of. This other reality is always sending us hints, which, without art, we can't receive" (It All Adds Up 93).
Despite what Amis says, Bellow does insist upon "visionary truth" in literature, which, he says, "has always referred to a world beyond the threshold" ("Modernity"). I assume Corde is supposed to be seen as a kind of prophet, who does not just invest a situation with his own meaning, but who discovers a truth.
In Amis's review of The Dean's December, he writes that "Early Bellow's heavy emphasis on illusory otherworlds had left him open to charges of crankery and self-indulgence"; however, in "Late Bellow," claims Amis, "transcendentalism has found its true function, which is Yeatsian--a source of metaphor." Amis redefines transcendentalism as "a system of imagery that gives the reader an enduring pang, a sense of one's situation in larger orders of time and space" (10).
I asked him to elaborate upon this definition which seemed to suit his own writing more than Bellow's.
He said, "What religion used to take care of was to give one a sense that one wasn't just living in a meaningless present, and that there were greater contexts. Religion won't quite do this for us anymore," said Amis. "If we're to believe in perfectibility or even improvement, then we need to be able to think of the human soul as an imperishable image of our potential and our battered innocence and so on."
I asked if he used "soul" as a metaphor.
"For Bellow it's probably not just a metaphor. I think it is a real belief in his case. It's a rather weaker belief in my case. Not...a belief, but a kind of inkling, or suspicion."
Amis has suggested literary otherworlds as tropes can do what religion no longer can, that is, "give a sense of one's situation in larger orders of time and space," or "a sense that one [isn't] just living in a meaningless present...that there [are] greater contexts" (see above). Ironically, in his fiction an intruding author rescinds the offer. It was all fiction, a sleight of hand. The author bows. John Self is left in a meaningless present.
Why does Amis do this? Out of maliciousness? To suggest that our sense of "greater contexts," like Self's, is, too, an illusion?
Perhaps the temptation to reveal himself to his creation (to wink at the readers, to show-off really) is too great to resist. Or perhaps he feels he has a moral obligation to his readers ala Shakespeare's rustics in A Midsummer Night's Dream. Whatever the reasons, involution commonly occurs in the literature of "postmodernism."
It should be obvious to the most gullible of readers that fiction is not "real life." So why bother? Given Amis's perception of the world as chaotic and brutal, one understands his compulsion to act as a kind of god. It is harder to understand why Amis restores randomness at the novel's close.
"At the end of Money, you reveal the author who explains 'the game' to his tragic hero. Why do you do this?"
"A great many writers have started doing this in the last couple of decades. I have always done it, up to a point. Even my first novel has an inkling of this author figure. It's really just the way the novel has evolved. It's not really with any hobbyist attitude that one explores these things. It just feels inevitable that the illusion is broken, that one reminds the readers that they are reading."
The answer, 'everybody's doing it, it just feels right' seemed inadequate.
"Were you influenced by Nabokov?"
"Nabokov said in a lecture once you should never identify with the characters of a novel. You should always identify with the author of a novel and see what he is trying to do. And perhaps this is a way of making that unavoidable really, that you're constantly aware of an author's voice and personality."
"Never let the reader suspend his disbelief?"
"That's right," said Amis.
It is true that credulous readers cannot fully appreciate an ironic novel. In Money, Self's tragic flaw is his credulity. He has been novelized by Amis and has undergone a willing suspension of disbelief. In the end, Self admits it all happened because he "wanted to believe" (362). John Self is like any man who--to quote Bellow, as Amis is so fond of doing--"finds himself a creature in the world, he doesn't know how, he doesn't know why" ("Modernity"). Naturally, he hopes that his existence has meaning, but at the same time he fears some agent controls his life.
In the opening pages of Money, Self exhibits superstitious behavior. He says, "something is waiting to happen to me. I can tell. Recently my life feels like a bloodcurdling joke. Recently my life has taken on form. Something is waiting. I am waiting. Soon, it will stop waiting--any day now. Awful things can happen anytime" (9). When he "chances" to meet Martin Amis, Self gets "the creeps" (61). Throughout the novel, he intuitively refers to people on the streets of New York as "bit players," "extras" and "actors." Self is generally paranoid and is equally distracted by significant or random daily events.
Incidently, Amis has similar "inklings." In The Moronic Inferno, he says coincidences make life feel "like a short story." Amis is visiting Bellow in Chicago; they will meet at the Chicago Arts Club. The artist materials store just outside Amis's motel window bears a sign: "for the artist in everyone" (199). Back at his motel after a day of discussing the nature of Art, he notes, "the black, bent, bald shoeshiner who slicked my boots with his fingers (he had his name on his breast, in capitals) was called ART" (207). Vaguely suspicious at first, he decides his own preoccupations supplied significance to unrelated particulars.
I reminded Amis of this piece and asked if he thought it was common for the average person to feel that he is in a novel, to feel manipulated by an "author."
Amis replied, "They do feel that, but mostly it's on a televisual level. They feel they're in some soap. The common form now, the universal form, is really television rather than [the] novel. That's the mild delusion that most people are suffering from."
"Could it be called superstition?"
"It's a kind of modern superstition. It's a kind of credulity."
I asked Amis about the "awakened" Self's remarks in the last section of the novel. After surviving a heavy dose of pills, he says, "My life is losing its form. The large agencies, the pentagrams of shape and purpose have no power to harm or delight me now" (354).
Amis explained, "'The large agencies' are the one that control the novel in which he's been enmeshed. Self has escaped the novel. He's escaped control of the author figure, me. That's why that last section is in italics because it is, in a way, outside the novel. He really was meant to kill himself, but he screwed it up, as he screwed everything up. So, he's in a poorer but more controllable kind of existence."
Although Self is finally a crack-toothed, impoverished drunkard, according to Amis it is "a happy ending."
I asked, "Is Self happy because the "form" he lost was imposed or false?"
Amis quotes his hero: "Self says, 'before my life was rich, now it's just present.' He feels that it's poorer because it is without form. It is more random, but that does suit him more or less. At least he's not being manipulated."
The "all-too-random" present must suit the author too since it inspires him to write.
In 1990 Amis told Rolling Stone he felt a "God-size hole," in his life, the terrible prospect of human mortality and insignificance. Amis said if the hole were filled one could "get through, but He's not available anymore" (Lemon 153). "Modernity," as Amis has described it, is this "poorer but more controllable kind of existence"; it is chaotic, godless, but has room for the gods of fiction to practice their art.
In Nabokov's Pale Fire, a novel which depends upon coincidences for its effect, the hero's brand of skepticism is particularly intriguing, perhaps because his name, "John Shade," seems playfully indicative of the author's other self, just as "John Self" seems suggestive of his author. Shade, who during a near-death experience sees a vision of a fountain, reads about a woman who had the same vision; however, he visits her and finds there was a misprint. She saw a "mountain" not a "fountain." Shade writes:
Life Everlasting--based on a misprint!
I mused as I drove homeward: take the hint,
And stop investigating my abyss?
But all at once it dawned on me that this
Was the real point, the contrapuntal theme:
Just this: not text, but texture; not the dream
But topsy-turvical coincidence,
Not flimsy nonsense, but a web of sense,
Yes! It sufficed that I in life could find
Some kind of link-and-boblink, some kind
Of correlated pattern in the game,
Plexed artistry, and something of the same
Pleasure in it as they who played it found (803-815).
It seems to suffice Amis to try and "find some correlated pattern in the game," which is, after all, the very thing a fiction writer does to temporarily fill that "God-size hole."
I asked Amis which of Nabokov's novels, if any, influenced the writing of Money:
"Not a particular novel. The vein of Nabokov that I like most includes King, Queen, Knave; Despair, Laughter in the Dark, Lolita, and Transparent Things."
Later, I tried to figure out what he meant by "vein." The first three books mentioned were originally written in Russian, the last two in English. The dates of the novels are, respectively, 1928, 1932, 1938, 1955 and 1972. Too many other novels interrupt to make this "vein" a chronological one. Finally, I realized they have themes in common, themes which pervade Money: sexual deception, perverse greed, insane cruelty and, in three out of the four, murder.
It is worth noting that Martin Amis parts company with Vladimir Nabokov over several issues. First, Nabokov writes fiction because it is "an interesting thing to do...I have no social purpose, no moral message; I've no general ideas to exploit, I just like composing riddles with elegant solutions" (16). Second, Nabokov loathes social satire. He has "neither the intent nor the temperament of a moral or social satirist. Whether or not the critics think that in Lolita I am ridiculing human folly leaves me supremely indifferent. But I am annoyed when the glad news is spread that I am ridiculing America" (23). Third, Nabokov doubts that "we can postulate the objective existence of a 'modern world' on which an artist should have any definite or important opinion" (111).
Amis was criticized for his insistence upon the truth of his "myth of decline," whereas Nabokov was able to comment with impunity. Although he did not satirize philistines, perverts, and vulgar Americans, he did parody them. He abruptly explained, "Satire is a lesson, parody is a game" (Strong Opinions 75). Nabokov knew the danger of applying the rules of a game of fiction to an everyday world. His "rules" work in a well-constructed tale, but bend and break in ambiguous, amorphous "reality."
Nabokov's villains, in fact, are artists at large who treat life like a game, who invent and enforce their own rules. Consider Hermann in Despair, whose art form is murder. Consider Kinbote, failed poet, exiled king or madman, who appropriates and distorts the meaning of John Shade's poem. As Martin Amis points out in "Lolita Reconsidered," Humbert is a failed artist who imprisons a child in his fantasy: "Humberts, because they cannot make art out of life, make their lives into art" (119).
Perhaps this is all the explanation we need of why Amis underscores the fact of fiction at the end of his novels. He himself does not want to be an artist-at-large. He wants nothing in common with the self-deceived charismatic murderers, unscrupulous yobs, and playboy-fantasy heroes who populate his novels. Although Bellow is something of a well-meaning artist-at-large, he recognized the risks of credulity when corrupt beliefs are involved, and he suggests Hitler was an inhuman artist whose medium was politics (It All Adds Up 133). Amis admittedly has less faith than Bellow, and in good conscience can only make art out of life, not life into art.
Martin Amis's father, the prolific and knighted author Kingsley Amis, detests the modern elements of Money and has informed reporters that he could not finish Money. He blames "one of Martin's heroes--Nabokov. I lay it all at his door" (Michener 110).
Martin can point to the exact place where Kingsley stopped reading, "That's where the character named Martin Amis comes in. Breaking the rules, buggering about with the reader, drawing attention to [my]self" (Stout 33).
I asked Amis about his father's influence.
He said, "As a member of the same household and as a reader of his books he's influenced me. It's more a kind of humour really than anything else. I've always thought that if our birth-dates were transposed then he would have written something like my novels, and I would have written something like his."
"One critic claims that in Kingsley Amis's Anti-Death League (1966) God's role is a 'sub-human joker responsible for catatonic states, limbless children and women's cancers'" (McDermott).
Amis replied, "That shows [Kingsley's] birth-date is 1922. Mine is 1949, a much more godless period, so I don't tend to think in that way. Although it's natural for him to do so."
As far as Martin is concerned, today a Divine Being does not deserve the role of sub-human joker; the author does. As intruding author, Amis is always "buggering about" with Self. A supreme example occurs when near the end of Money, Self begins to realize, "I'm the joke. I'm it! It was you. It was you"(39).
Throughout the novel, Self yearns for his author's advice. Self says: "I long to burst out 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 just don't know the way" (118). In an unlooked-for act of prudence, the would-be social critic/author does not tell Self the way, and in the end, Self is left outside the novel to fend for himself, like you and I, in the all-too-random world.
Although Amis has not been overly dependant upon his father for literary counsel, throughout his career, he has relied heavily on his two mentors for guidance, instruction and respectability. I found his latest collection of journalism, Visiting Mrs. Nabokov, and Bellow's new collection of journalism, It All Adds Up, lying side by side on the book store counter. To bolster his reputation as a writer, Amis has quoted Bellow and Nabokov and borrowed their phrases. Amis's choice of title for his most recent work makes one think of Amis hovering around the widow, hoping to be infused with some of the lingering greatness.
Amis has decisively positioned himself between both the cool, evasive Nabokov and the passionate, outspoken Bellow. Influenced by both great authors, Amis writing exhibits the tensions between disbelief/belief, illusion/vision, which so far have provided for great comedy and marvelous energy in his writing. But his kind of ruthlessly brilliant comedy does not recommend him for the Nobel Prize, and Amis's ambition is to win the Booker and Nobel Prizes (Lemon 153). When he stops trying to emulate his writing heroes, when he is in full possession of his own fame and his own wisdom, then he may develop his potential.
With the publication of his last book, It All Adds Up, a title which sounds like the final equation, Bellow prepares for his death, getting his works in order, and modifying the tone of his lifelong message; rather than complaining about distraction, he encourages attentiveness. Coincidently, Amis's reflection has turned to himself. Perhaps he is taking a final piece of advice from Bellow--to concentrate on his own attentiveness and not obsess about the world's power to distract. Recently, Amis has grown resigned and cautious, and if he has not lost his intensity in the process, perhaps his greatest work is forthcoming.
all rights reserved by the author
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---. "Lolita Reconsidered." Atlantic Sept. 1992. 109-120.
---. Money: A Suicide Note. New York: Penguin, 1984.
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---. Visiting Mrs, Nabokov: and Other Excursions. New York: Harmony Books, 1994.
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---. It All Adds Up: From the Dim Past to the Uncertain Future. New York: Penguin, 1994.
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---, Strong Opinions. New York: Vintage Int'l, 1973.
Stout, Mira. "Down London's Mean Streets." The New York Times Magazine. 4 Feb. 1990: 6, 32-36, 48.
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