The Reader in London Fields An In-Depth Analysis of London Fieds, Emphasising the Play Between Text and Reader and the Consequent Implications for Narrative Authority. Authors: Bo A. Græsborg and Thorbjørn Lind Master thesis at Aalborg University, Denmark, March 3rd, 2000 E-mail: [email protected] CONTENTS INTRODUCTION 2 METHODOLOGY 2 MARTIN AMIS’S LITERARY CAREER 7 THESIS OUTLINE 10 CHAPTER 1: BUILDING A GENRE 15 1.1 THE OPENING 18 1.2 THE DEDICATION 20 1.3 THE TABLE OF CONTENTS 22 1.4 THE NOTE 25 1.5 THE TITLE 26 1.6 THE UNRELIABLE NARRATOR 28 1.7 THE ENDING 34 CHAPTER 2: THE HUMOUR OF LONDON FIELDS 40 2.1 MAKING STRANGE 46 2.1.1 ANTHROPOMORPHISM, HYPERBOLE AND REPETITION 47 2.1.2 COMIC REVERSALS 52 2.2 IRONY 55 CHAPTER 3: THE COMPLICATIONS OF LONDON FIELDS 62 3.1 TEXT AND READER 63 3.2 BLANKS IN LONDON FIELDS 67 3.2.1 REPETITION OF SCENES 70 3.3 ‘PROBLEMS’ 73 3.4 THE COMPOSITION OF LONDON FIELDS: DIARY AND NOVEL 75 CHAPTER 4: NARRATIVE AUTHORITY IN LONDON FIELDS 81 4.1 SAMSON YOUNG 83 4.2 NICOLA SIX 84 4.2.1 NICOLA’S CONTROL 84 4.2.2 NICOLA’S DEATH 91 4.3 MARK ASPREY 95 4.4 MARTIN AMIS 97 CONCLUSION 101 WORKS CITED 106 APPENDIX A: ABSTRACT IN DANISH 112 APPENDIX B: LIST OF RESPONSIBILITIES ERROR! BOOKMARK NOT DEFINED. 1 INTRODUCTION Methodology I’m all for this intense relationship with the reader. I really want the reader in there. I don’t know who the reader is, but I really want him close. (Martin Amis in interview with Susan Morrison 65). The subject of the present thesis is the nature of this desired ‘intense relationship’ between author and reader as it is carried out in Amis’s novel London Fields. Starting with its origins in the text, we seek to account for the effects it has on the reader, and the consequences it has in a wider perspective regarding narrative authority and the borderline between fiction and reality. The text itself being if not our only, then our only persistent guide, we have structured the thesis around the novel’s two main characteristics, which are that it is 1) funny; it makes us laugh and 2) difficult; it sends us on an incessant search for clues to its puzzles. Through an examination of the rhetorical devices employed to bring out these responses, we are led to consider the two other figures of narrative, which, apart from the text, include the reader and the writer. No preconceived intention was responsible for this development, which arose from speculations regarding the text itself. In different ways, the nature of the novel’s humour and its difficulties, while inherent traits of the text, both call upon heavy reader participation. The text foregrounds its reader. When we say ‘reader’ we have in mind not the actual, historical individual, whose reading is determined by his or her psychology as much as by anything in the text, but rather the reader shaped by the text. The ‘ideal’ reader, one might say, the reader who gets the hints and understands the irony. Created by the text, this reader has no psychological existence outside it. We have in mind, in other words, something like Wolfgang Iser’s ‘implied reader’ or the close reader of New Criticism.1 Our aim in this sense, our focus on the text and the aspiration 1 See Maclean 132. Referring to the model of communication in literary works proposed by Seymor Chatman, David Lodge distinguishes between three logical levels of discourse in the novel. There is the speaking voice, 2 Introduction to let it guide the analysis, follows well established critical guidelines. As David Lodge says, ‘each real reader tries to become the implied reader that is inscribed in the text’ (Indeterminacy 145). Since we propose to do a rhetorical study in the sense that we examine the devices and uses of language with which the reader is created, the author as the logical originator of the text and the cause of its effects comes into the picture. When we use the word author in our analyses to designate the originator of effects, we do not mean to refer to Martin Amis, the real author, whose intentions behind and meaning with the text are but sparingly used and only, as M. H. Abrams says of the practice of the New Critics, in relation to the ‘ “internal” realization of that intention in the language of the text itself’ (94). Rather we have in mind the literary incarnation he has created of himself in his text; the author implied by the text, so to speak. Its ‘internal speaker’, or with Wayne Booth, ‘the implied author.’2 As a kind of personification of the text, we refer to the implied author alternately as ‘Martin Amis’, ‘the author’ or, simply ‘the text’. When we say that ‘the text plays with narrative authority’, that ‘a play is staged between author and reader regarding the meaning of the text’, or that ‘the author reasserts his power’ it is to be understood that we attribute these ‘messages’ to the implied author. In our efforts to find the right set of analytic tools for London Fields we have not followed any established theory of interpretation. There are several reasons for this decision: the novel’s mix of genres and its persistent disruption of reader expectations, as well as our general lack of affiliation as readers to any particular theory or method have certainly all made their influence, but in the end it was our reluctance to reduce the novel more than necessary that prompted our eclecticism. We found that the gains of applying any of the well- tested sets of analytic tools would not match the losses suffered by a reduction of the novel to the point of view of a given critical theory. The necessarily limiting view of one’s own the narrator (in London Fields, Samson Young), and the recipient of this voice, the ‘narratee’, a term coined by Gerald Prince to designate the reader who takes the narrator’s words for granted and does not question his reliability. Both Chatman and Lodge agree this term to be optional. On a higher level of knowledge runs the communication between the implied author and the implied reader. Particularly obvious and useful in works with unreliable narrators and with irony as a main mode (as London Fields), these figures are still ‘in the text.’ Outside the text, are the real author and the real reader. The reading in this thesis concentrates on the level of the implied versions of reader and writer. For criticism which deals with the real reader, see the subjective criticism of Norman Holland. 2 See The Rhetoric of Fiction, 67-77. 3 Introduction perspective was felt to be reduction enough. Instead we have chosen eclectically to use whatever theorists might help us explain the features of the novel. The obvious advantage of this approach is the liberty to use theories from different literary traditions as tools to further our understanding. Whenever an interpretative problem or a significant feature that demands explication is encountered, we have found it most appropriate not to limit ourselves to a particular field of theory or method but to stay open for the best explanation to the specific problem or feature at hand. Alternately aiding, prompting or contradicting our explanations, reviews and critical essays as well as interviews with Martin Amis have been consulted in this spirit. Generally, we have not paid much attention to where the critical comments come from, but focused on the arguments themselves in their capacity of providing various degrees of illuminating information. The extra-textual comments are not to be understood as ‘evidence’ justifying our reading as the only correct one; indeed, such evidence is purely circumstantial compared with references to the text itself. While the sources to the findings presented in the thesis are multiple: Critical comments, reviews, interview comments and own ideas, common to all is that they have been checked against the novel itself. The text remains the object for analyses and the foundation against which their probability should be tested. The critical direction which probably influenced us the most is the one known as ‘reader- response’ criticism (see 3.1). Shared with this loosely organised direction of criticism is our focus on the reader in the text, and the influence from reader-response criticism is detectable in at least two other aspects.3 First, our analyses are informed by an understanding of the reading process as basically temporal, occurring in time. While banal, this fact has nevertheless been consequential in that it has drawn inevitable attention to the fact that while the text can be viewed as ‘a whole,’ we need to consider it as a collection of parts, as well. As such, recognising the temporality of the reading process correlates with our determination to do close reading and encourages a kind of interpretative activity with clear affinities to the hermeneutic circle (see 16). It also leads us to construct a dynamic view of the concept of genre (understood as a frame of understanding from the point of view of the reader rather than as an objective classification of the text). The key concept here is that of the reader’s 3 For a listing of established ‘critical moves’ of reader-response criticism, see Mailloux. 4 Introduction expectations. Throughout we look at the effects of the text in terms of how they shape, disrupt and reshape the reader’s expectations: the theoretical discussion in chapter one regarding genre and expectation; the micro-analyses of comic devices in chapter two; and our explication in chapter three of the difficulties with a fragmented narration only make sense with the understanding in mind that the reading process is temporal.