International Journal of Research (IJR) Vol -1, Issue -10 November 2014 ISSN 2348 -6848

A Contemporary Arrogant Study on Martin Amis's- “Money-A Suicide Note” Abdul Saleem

(Faculty, Dept. of English. Al Jouf University, Saudi Arabia)

ABSTRACT narrative technique, Money is a vernacular With Money: A Suicide Note (1984) Amis went dramatic monologue in the Russian skaz global, according to Will Self, perhaps Amis’s tradition. Dostoevski's novella Notes From most clearly identifiable stylistic follower. Underground is the master-text of this tradition, ''Money: A Suicide Note'' is also a confession - containing a narrator whose bitter alienation the author's confession of the gratuitous crime of from his society and its most cherished beliefs totaling John Self. This self-conscious and Self- makes him a perversely perceptive critic of that indulgent novel has an impact that is, society. Self is a literary descendant of paradoxically, selfless. Self doesn't remember Dostoevski's protagonist, sharing the writing out his story, his ''suicide note,'' and it Underground Man's brutal, seamy honesty. reads as if Mr. Amis doesn't remember composing it. It's like a tale taken down in a trance by a medium in the grip of a spirit 2. ABOUT THE AUTHOR control, one of those prankish controls waxing autobiographical from a spectral barstool. Martin Amis ( ā´m Ĭs), 1949–, English Money represents a high-water mark in Amis's novelist; son of Kingsley Amis. The younger career, building on the strengths of his earlier Amis, who turned from literary journalism to novels but far exceeding them in scope, depth of fiction, invites comparison with his father characterization, and organic unity. It also through his choice of career and style. Often stands as one of the indispensable novels of and writing satire so bitterly sardonic that it goes far about its decade . beyond the caustic comedy of his father's fiction, he has exposed the darker aspects of Key words- contemporary English society in his novels. trance,gratuitous,paradoxically,autobiographical, Among them are The Rachel Papers (1973), indispensable Dead Babies (1975), Money (1984), London Fields (1990), Time's Arrow (1991), The 1. INTRODUCTION Information (1995), Yellow Dog (2003), The In Money: A Suicide Note (1984) the materialist Pregnant Widow (2010), and Lionel Asbo: State excesses of the late twentieth century are viewed of England (2012). His short-story collections through, and magnified by, the salacious leer of include Heavy Water and Other Stories (1999). its narrator. "I'm addicted to the twentieth Among his non-fiction works are The War century," says the eponymous John Self, and against Cliché (2001), a selection of mainly during his narrative the reader vicariously literary essays and reviews, and Koba the Dread experiences the damage this addiction inflicts on (2002), an examination of Stalinism's horrors Self's physical body--and the larger social body and the attitudes of Western intellectuals toward he also inhabits. Money represents a high water the Soviet regime. The novel House of Meetings mark in Amis's career, building on the strengths (2006) also treats similar themes—the Soviet of his earlier novels but far exceeding them in Gulag and Stalinist atrocities. scope, depth of characterization, and organic unity. It also stands as one of the indispensable novels of and about its decade. In terms of

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2.1 THE ESSENCE AND COMPARISON coming from the mouths of his fellow "Earthlings" (his name for human beings): "the The plot of Money is deceptively simple. As the foreigners around here . . . They speak stereo, novel opens, in early summer, 1981, John Self radio crackle, interference. They speak sonar, arrives in New York to direct what he imagines bat-chirrup. The curious reader, consulting a will be his first major film. He is one of the new medical encyclopedia, discovers that tinnitus is a media hucksters who came of age in the free- condition, not a disease. A "common wheeling sixties, and he struck it rich in the mid- complaint," it is "the annoying sensation of seventies making a series of controversial TV noise in the ear when no sound is present." commercials.More recently, he made a deal with the American producer Fielding Goodney to film a story based on his own life. During the six 3. THE UNIQUE PLATFORM frenetic months his narrative recounts, Self turns 35, shuttles between London and New York, Like so many of the details in Money , John meets with Goodney, auditions actors and Self's tinnitus constitutes part of larger pattern of screenwriters, and wallows in the fleshly vices implication that awaits the reader's discovery. his commercials celebrate. Self is seriously Early in his narration Self describes "four involved with two women in the course of the distinct voices" competing for his attention. novel: Selina Street and Martina Twain. They represent a figurative extension of his Selina betrays Self with at least two men, and tinnitus, filling his head with distracting noises. she ultimately stages Self's betrayal of Martina, The first two render him morall y hard of who represented his only (faint) hope for hearing: "First, of course, is the jabber of renewal and reform. The other major character money, which might be represented as the blur in the novel is one Martin Amis; Self hires him on the top rung of a typewriter-- to rewrite the film's script and they have many £%¼@=&$--sums, subtractions, compound subsequent encounters. Self's high-speed, high- terrors and greed. Second is the voice of rolling life comes to an end when he discovers pornography. This often sounds like the rap of a that Fielding has set him up: the money demented DJ: the way she moves has to be good financing the film and his appetites is news, can't get loose till I feel the juice-- . . .". nonexistent, and all the contracts he signed with These two refrains nearly drown out all the other Fielding hold Self financially liable. He ends up voices Self hears, leading to everything from back in London, broken, having survived a hilarious comic confusions to searing betrayals failed suicide bid. Absent from this brief to life-threatening catastrophes. They speak of summary is the highly charged language, the an invaded Self, a programmed Self, a arresting comedy, the figurative and thematic diminished Self--a "gimmicked" Self, to use one ingenuity that breathe life into every page of the of his favorite terms. The other two voices--one novel. Consider the metaphorical implications of speaking in conscience-stung tones, the other in Self's hearing problem, for instance. At first, it unquiet desperation--imply regret and possible seems to be a purely physical condition. "Owing reform. "Third, the voice of ageing and weather, to this fresh disease I have called tinnitus, my of time travel through days and days, the ever- ears have started hearing things recently, things weakening voice of stung shame, sad boredom that aren't strictly auditory. Jet take-offs, and futile protest. . . . Number four is the real breaking glass, ice scratched from the tray." intruder. Though Self is not aware of this, these Then these sounds begin to shape themselves two voices are in conflict with the first two. toward meaning--odd music, strange languages-- Taken together, all four voices constitute a that Self cannot decipher. One morning he fragmented, decentered Self. wakes up in a New York hotel room hearing Self thinks of these voices as an unwanted "computer fugues, Japanese jam sessions, affliction, like his tinnitus, though he owns up to didgeridoos". Later, sitting in a London pub a small measure of responsibility for their called The Blind Pig, he hears strange sounds presence. "All the voices come from somewhere

P a g e | 103 A Contemporary Arrogant Study on Martin Amis's- “Money-A Suicide Note” | Abdul Saleem International Journal of Research (IJR) Vol -1, Issue -10 November 2014 ISSN 2348 -6848 else. I wish I could flush them out of my head. post-industrial capitalist democracies. Unlike As with vampires, you have to ask them in. But Orwell's protagonist Winston Smith, Self lives once they're there, once you've given them in a "free" society (two of them, in fact). Like headroom, they seem pretty determined to stick Winston, his responses have been conditioned— around". This is because they come to constitute not by a state apparatus, but by an equally Self--who he is, how he sees and hears the powerful economic system that shapes world, how he relates to others. They represent individual subjectivities, fetishizes objects and his subjective experience of the world, what he commodifies relationships. His role in this calls his "private culture." And while the system--as a maker of TV commercials--puts specifics of these voices (especially their him at the center of its mediating machinery. ranking) precisely measure Self's character, they When we laugh at Self, we are laughing at an have a wider application. Their resonance exaggerated version of other selves as well. suggests something about the dialogic design of Money itself. Money can be read exclusively as a 3.1 ONE’S OWN EXPRESSION satirical novel, attacking the dehumanizing influence of capitalism and the specific forms Amis has set severe limits on himself in Money , this has taken in the post-war west. "I think since his narrator is verbally challenged and money is the central deformity in life," Amis has resistant to literature, not to mention narrative said. "It's one of the evils that has cheerfully structure. He is also drunk a great deal of the survived identification as an evil. . . . it's a time, which poses a serious threat to sustained fiction, an addiction, and a tacit conspiracy that narrative coherence. Money's 363 pages contain we have all agreed to go along with." In this no chapter titles or numbers; there are nine reading John Self is both target and victim, a unnumbered sections, but the logic of these one-man carnival of junk taste and junk morality divisions is not immediately apparent. As a who has relinquished most of his free will by result, the novel's narrative seems messy, embracing commodity culture in all its sprawling, unfocused--though never less than pornographic excess. The fact that most of Self's compelling. Self's exposition is roughly pleasures are solitary , reinforces the sense that chronological, but it is punctuated by flashbacks, he is a prisoner of his own addictions. Amis's digressions, and frequent omissions. The latter public statements about Self sanction this occur when Self defers disclosing shaming reading: "he has no resistance, because he has no events that have just happened to him. sustenance, no structure." Repression decisively shapes his story, The spectacle of Self's "private culture"--by disrupting chronology, increasing narrative turns appalling, savagely hilarious, touching, suspense, and leading to dramatic revelations and contemptible--represents a tour-de-force of throughout the novel. There is method in this satiric representation. At the same time his narrative sprawl, however, since among other unabashed entrepreneurial greed embodies the things it convincingly captures Self's "private emergent values of Thatcher's England and culture" in all its human density. Early in the Reagan's America. Few, however, will novel, discussing his film outline with experience Self merely as a monster of wretched scriptwriter Doris Arthur, he breaks away from excess. He is so fully, triumphantly realized that his transcription of their conversation, telling us most readers will warm to him in spite of that he's given this speech so many times that he themselves. Once Self enters the reader's can speak while letting his mind "wander consciousness, he takes up permanent residence unpleasantly, as it always wanders now when there, like the best characters in Dickens. unengaged by stress or pleasure." The novel's 1984 publication date is What follows perfectly conveys the associational significant: Orwell's great dystopic novel 1984 is twitchiness of Self's thought: "My thoughts a recurrent motif in Money. 1984 is a seminal dance. What is it? A dance of anxiety and postmodern novel, and Money extends Orwell's supplication, of futile vigil. I think I must have analysis of totalitarian ideology into the realm of some new cow disease that makes you wonder

P a g e | 104 A Contemporary Arrogant Study on Martin Amis's- “Money-A Suicide Note” | Abdul Saleem International Journal of Research (IJR) Vol -1, Issue -10 November 2014 ISSN 2348 -6848 whether you're real all the time, that makes your their two-year relationship, containing the life feel like a trick, an act, a joke. I feel, I feel postscript he finds so seductive ("P.S.--I'm dead. There's a guy who lives round my way pennyless"), Self realizes this is the first time he who really gives me the fucking creeps. He's a has seen her handwriting. He then wonders if writer , too . . . I can't go on sleeping alone--that's she has seen his. "Had I ever shown her my certain. I need a human touch. Soon I'll just have hand? Yes, she'd seen it, on bills, on credit slips, to go out and buy one. I wake up at dawn and on cheques". Self's phrase "my hand" here is an there's nothing". Like his auto-eroticism, Self's example of the pervasive verbal doubling in the self-examination is a constant in the novel. His novel, a form of repetition manifested in self-awareness constitutes a kind of punning, double-entendres, double-takes, psychological doubling, captured in a sentence double-talk, and inversion. "My hand" is a near the beginning of the novel: "Jesus, I never double entendre referring to Self's secrets as meant me any harm". In terms of its verbal well as his penmanship. Amis constantly makes surface, Money mirrors Self's limitations while an artistic virtue out of Self's repetition finding ways around them. Self favors simple compulsion, wresting poetic effects from his words, short sentences and clipped syntax (the narrator's verbal habits. only semicolon in his entire narrative occurs in its last sentence). Yet Amis achieves maximal 3.2 DUALITY AND DOUBLING effects from these minimal means. He employs allusion, parody, sudden shifts of tone, and Throughout the novel, Self's personal life and comic irony so that Self's statements echo with moral squalor are refracted through the filter of additional, authorial implications. Amis satirizes his film project. The project itself is one of Self's Self by "doubling" Self's voice with his own many attempts to double himself in the novel. throughout the novel, composing an artful Thus it is not surprising that his life and the film counterpoint that resonates with implications project get constantly inter tangled. Caduta beyond the range of his narrator's hearing. Self's Massi, approached to play the role of the explanation of the change he is experiencing mother, takes an immediate maternal interest in under Martina's influence is representative of his the motherless Self, and literally succors him at staccato style--and Amis's "double-voicing": her breast. Butch Beausoleil, sought for the part "I'm getting chicked. It would explain a great of the mistress, embarrasses Self sexually in deal. I have tried in the past to feminize myself. anticipation of Selina's later betrayal. And the I womanized for years. It didn't work, though on revised plot of the film, alternately titled Good the other hand I did fuck lots of girls. Who Money and Bad Money , concludes with a scene knows? It if happens, it happens". Unlike Self, of Oedipal violence that anticipates Self's violent Amis (and the ideal reader) recognize that encounter with his father near the end of the "womanizing" will not bring Self (or any male novel. Just as Self seeks to recreate himself on self) any closer to feminine, or feminist, screen, he also doubles himself with some of understanding. those associated with the film. In near-perpetual Repetition is Self's favorite rhetorical envy of the sleek and suave Fielding (himself a strategy, not surprising given his self-description double of Selina), Self imagines going to the ("that's my life: repetition, repetition"). west coast for a complete physical makeover. Fortunately for the reader and the novel's art, The most extensive of these doublings involves this repetition is never redundant. The word Self's relationship with the character Martin "money" and its variants, for instance, appears Amis, hired to rewrite the film script. He does so on virtually every page of the novel, since the with a blunt honesty worthy of Self's narrative cash nexus determines and shapes all of Self's voice. He creates a protagonist named Self experiences and relationships, but its uses are whose life parallels his own to a surprising almost infinitely variable. To Self, however, degree; he embodies himself in the novel as a money is formative --especially of his language. recurring character; and he doubles this After receiving his first letter from Selina in character through the American Martina Twain

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("twain" literally means two). He even has Self upward mobility or his downward aesthetic that voice the theme: "people are doubling also, Amis and his persona object to, but his moral dividing, splitting". The reader is virtually fatigue syndrome. Nowhere does Amis imply invited to consider Self, Amis, and Martina as that exposure to high culture per se is a aspects of a single consciousness. sufficient inoculation against this condition. Self The presence of Amis's persona in Money has and the Amis character are secret sharers more generated a surprising amount of criticism and than antagonists. Many of Self's experiences are critical misunderstanding. John Bayley has in fact those of his creator viewed through the called the strategy "tiresome," and an "artistic distorting lens of an unlikely double. During trick." Laura L. Doan, following the lead of their first conversation, Self tells Amis he heard earlier critics, claims its sole function is to that his father is also a writer, adding: "Bet that maintain a satirical distance between Self and made it easier." his creator: "Amis takes exceptional care to Amis's sarcastic reply: "Oh, sure. It's just like ensure that the narrator-protagonist, so taking over the family pub". This alludes to the disgusting in his values and lifestyle, cannot be difficulties inherent in the actual Amis's struggle mistaken for the writer by literally putting to establish his own identity and voice in the himself into the text. Martin Amis, the character, shadow of his famous literary father. He has is a suave, intelligent, highly educated, experienced both envious accusations of comfortably middle-class writer who quite nepotism and favoritism and public criticism obviously finds Self, and what he represents, from Kingsley Amis, who has called his son's unsavory." Bayley's impatience is hard to credit novels unreadable. This withholding of paternal given the fact that each appearance by the Amis support is mirrored in Self's relationship to his character is unique to the dramatic situation, and father (who owns a pub named after the ultimate reveals additional facets of his real and symbolic literary father: The Shakespeare). Barry Self's relationship to Self. Furthermore, Amis's interactions with his son in the novel range from existence in the novel is handled with such off cavalier to callous to cruel. Their most handedness and comic panache that his presence emotional encounter is a grotesque parody of never feels like the self consciously obtrusive familial intimacy, in which Self is invited to trick it has seemed in other works where it share the joy of his stepmother's appearance in a occurs (from John Barth's Lost in the Funhouse pornographic magazine (this occurs after Self's to John Fowles' The French Lieutenant's father has sent him a bill for his upbringing). Woman ). Under ordinary circumstances, Self might have Since Money is about the way reality is assumed that he would eventually inherit his mediated, and features conversations between a father's pub. filmmaker and the actors who will play his By the end of the novel, however, his father has characters, it seems almost natural that the denied paternity and disowned him. Self's career filmmaker's author would converse with his also constitutes a fun-house mirror image of main character. Doan's charge, on the other Amis's. Both were shaped by the youth culture hand, is seriously misleading--though consistent of the 60's, which is reflected in their work; both with her mistaken assumption that Self is made professional names for themselves in the punished in the novel for attempting to rise seventies; both sought artistic recognition on the above his "station." Doan's claim that the other side of the Atlantic in the eighties; both character Martin Amis finds Self and what he have worked in film. Amis experienced represents "unsavory" is contradicted throughout prominence and success in the 1970s for a body the novel, but especially by the second meeting of work that generated considerable controversy, between the two. The Amis character, including charges of tastelessness and obscenity. thoroughly familiar with Self's television work, Publication of the American edition of his third tells Self "I thought those commercials were novel, Success , was delayed for nine years-- bloody funny"--just before ordering what Self which Amis has attributed to its sexual calls "a standard yob's breakfast". It isn't Self's explicitness. Self's film project has a similar

P a g e | 106 A Contemporary Arrogant Study on Martin Amis's- “Money-A Suicide Note” | Abdul Saleem International Journal of Research (IJR) Vol -1, Issue -10 November 2014 ISSN 2348 -6848 resonance. Two years before Amis began authorship in a capitalist economy that Amis writing Money , he wrote the screenplay for the needed to draw attention to this plagiarism in science-fiction movie Saturn 3 , released in 1980 order to protect his economic viability as a (like his persona in Money , he was hired to adapt unique artistic voice. Both Amises in other someone else's story). An American-British co- words--the author of Money and his persona production, Saturn 3 is a big-budget space opera within the narrative--have been shaped by the featuring one Hollywood legend (Kirk Douglas), forces that have shaped Self. So have all the one emerging star (Harvey Keitel), and one novel's readers. This is made explicit when Self actress attempting to move from television to and the Amis character sit down together to film (Farah Fawcett). The movie itself--as watch the wedding of Charles and Diana, and ludicrous as those Amis parodies in Money-- is a Self describes the face of his secret sharer. "As I triumph of celebrity and special effects over plot twisted in my seat and muttered to myself I and characterization. During his involvement found I kept looking Martin's way. The lips were with the film Amis, like Self, learned first-hand parted, suspended, the eyes heavy and about the unbridled egos of American actors. unblinking. If I stare into his face I can make out . The Amis character's presence in the novel the areas of waste and fatigue, the moon spots highlights the predicament of the serious writer and bone shadow you're bound to get if you in a commodity culture indifferent to traditional hang out in the twentieth century". Although artistic values. In terms of the novel's critique of Self claims that Martina's moneyed background late capitalism, the Amis character is guilty of has protected her from these physical symptoms, false consciousness. He is a naive literary her own experience of loss and isolation-- modernist clinging to the fiction that he can represented both in her situation and in her protect his art from the influence of the dialogues with Self--mark her as another sharer marketplace. When Self learns that Amis makes of the postmodern condition as diagnosed by the "enough" yet doesn't own a video player, he novel. 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 4. CONCLUSION Christ's sake.' Amis's response: `I suppose I'll have to start one day,' he said. `But I really don't When Self reads 1984 , he is attracted to want to join it, the whole money conspiracy'". the world it depicts: "A no-frills setup, run He does so when revising the film script, without sentiment, snobbery, or cultural however, and as the extra-literary Amis knows, favoritism, Airstrip One seemed like my kind of it is impossible for any working writer to avoid. town. (I saw myself as an idealistic young His vocation depends on a market for his books- corporal in the Thought Police)". The reader -and legal "ownership" of something as personal familiar with Orwell's savage satire will note as his verbal style. After Self asks the Amis that Self already lives in a version of Airstrip character to rewrite his film script, he tells One. The totalitarian state of Oceania is Fielding about it. "Fielding, of course, had heard dedicated to reducing human freedom and of Martin Amis--he hadn't read his stuff, but choice by steadily narrowing the range of there'd recently been some cases of plagiarism, thought. In the mass-mediated commodity of text-theft, which had filtered down to the culture Self has temporarily thrived in, newspapers and magazines. So, I thought. Little advertising and film have engendered a similar Martin got caught with his fingers in the till, effect. Like Winston Smith, the doomed hero of then, did he. A word criminal. I would bear that 1984 , Self spends most of his narrative in mind". As in Self's interpretation of Othello , discovering that he is trapped--not by a just the opposite is true. Jacob Epstein totalitarian state, but in the prison of a debased committed "text-theft" on Amis's first novel The private culture. "I sometimes think I am Rachel Papers in composing his first (and only) controlled by someone," Self says late in his novel, Wild Oats . Such is the nature of narrative. "But he's not from out there. He's from

P a g e | 107 A Contemporary Arrogant Study on Martin Amis's- “Money-A Suicide Note” | Abdul Saleem International Journal of Research (IJR) Vol -1, Issue -10 November 2014 ISSN 2348 -6848 in here". Near the end of 1984 , Winston Smith is jumping lights and cutting corners, guzzling gas led away to "Room 101," where he is threatened and burning rubber, staring through the foul with torture and loses his last shreds of freedom screen with my fist on the horn". The word and dignity. It is no accident that Self's "screen" here has a double significance, expensive New York hotel room, arranged for referring not just to a windshield but to the him by Fielding, has the same number. Among debased cinema of pornography and money that other things, Money represents a narrative takes up so much room in Self's imagination. 'representation of the "shock experience" that the Like modernity, it threatens to crowd out Marxist writer Walter Benjamin saw typifying contemplation itself. modern urban life. Writing in the 1920s, Benjamin foresaw the destruction of what he called the space of contemplation by the forces of modernity, in particular the aggressive, inescapable influence of advertising and its technological ally, film. "The most real, the mercantile gaze into the heart of things is the advertisement. It abolishes the space where 5. REFERENCES contemplation moved and all but hits us between the eyes with things as a car, growing to gigantic 1. 1. Bellante, Carl and John. "Unlike proportions, careens at us out of a film screen." Father, Like Son. An Interview with John Self, who made himself through Martin Amis." The Bloomsbury Review advertising, who has a "screening-room inside 12. 2 (1992): 4-5, 16. my head", is the embodiment of modernity as 2. 'Money: A Suicide Note' by Martin Benjamin conceives it. He careens at us from the Amis. pages of his narrative, recording the spectacle of 3. The Oxford Companion to English his life careening out of control. "At sickening Literature , 6th edition, edited by speed I have roared and clattered, I have Margaret Drabble (Oxford: Oxford rocketed through my time, breaking all the University press, 2000), p. 806. limits, time limits, speed limits, city limits,

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