Something Amiss Within the Narrative:
On Author Figures and Authorial Power
in Martin Amis’s The Rachel Papers,
Money, and London Fields.
Dissertation Educational Master. Department of English Language and Culture, University of Groningen
Table of Contents
Abstract 2
Introduction 3
Chapter 1 – Ruthlessly Rearranged: The Rachel Papers (1973) 8 Chapter 2 – “Motiveless Malignity”: Money (1984) 20 Chapter 3 – Authentic Absurdity: London Fields (1989) 32
Conclusion 44
Abstract
Martin Amis employs a variety of author figures in The Rachel Papers (1973), Money (1984), and London Fields (1989), all of which try to exert authorial control over the narrative, but ultimately fail. The three novels consist of complicated narrative hierarchies in which the narrator-protagonists and implied author figures shift between the extradiegetic and diegetic level of narration. This establishes a situation in which the narrator-protagonists encounter their creators and vice versa. Each of the novels contains a governing proposition about the role of the author: in The Rachel Papers literature has a separate ontological status, in Money character motivation is no longer relevant, and in London Fields the authenticity of the story is insignificant. Whereas Amis reinforces the significance of the role of the author in relation to his or her work by having his novels revolve around author figures, these propositions serve to demonstrate the limitations of authorial control. The lack of motivation behind
Amis’s author figures diminishes their status of godlike creator to that of a practical joker who is solely capable of creating illusions and cannot exert full authorial control over the narrative. They are helpless against the sadistic impulses that are inherent to the act of creating, which causes them to lose authorial control as they become too entrenched in their illusions.
Introduction
I was wondering whether I did put ‘me’ in there because I was so terrified of people thinking that I was John Self. But actually I’ve been hanging around the wings of my novels, so awkwardly sometimes, like the guest at the banquet, that I thought I might jolly well be in there at last (Amis qtd. in Haffenden 11).
In his fifth novel, Money (1984), Martin Amis surprises his readers by incorporating a
work. This is in line with the words of Vladimir Nabokov, one of Amis’s great influences: “That’s why he [Nabokov] always says: don’t identify with the hero or heroine of the novel, identify with the author. See what the author is trying to do” (Alexander 584; Amis qtd. in Self 158). Amis enables the readers to do so by incorporating several author figures within his texts, thus including his own alter egos, with which his father adamantly disagrees: “Breaking the rules . . . buggering with the reader, drawing attention to himself” (Kingsley Amis qtd. in Stout 34-35). Nevertheless, Amis persisted with his use of author figures and authorial stand-ins, and his sixth novel London Fields (1989) again features an author figure whose initials are M.A.: Mark Asprey. About authorship, Amis has said: “It’s perhaps of my intoxication caused by the sense of freedom you have as a novelist: there is no limit to what you can do” (qtd. in Haffenden 12), yet the author figures in his novels are often presented as limited in their attempts to assume or maintain full authority over the narrative and its characters. In this paper, I examine the development of Amis’s exploration of the role of the author in The
Rachel Papers (1973), Money (1984), and London Fields (1989) by close reading the
manifestations of authorial influence within the novels, and by focussing on the way in which Amis establishes narrative hierarchies for which I use a structured characterization of the types of characters he employs in order to convey authorial presence in his work. The three novels each contain an explicit proposition about the state of the authorship: the author figure in The Rachel Papers suggests that literature has a “life of its own” to argue that authors cannot use it ruthlessly for their own ends (211); the authorial stand-in in Money argues that “motivation is pretty well shagged out by now” (359); and the implied author figure in
London Fields claims that “[it] doesn’t matter what anyone writes any more” (490).
limitations of authorial control, ultimately indicating that the idea of a fully omniscient or omnipotent consciousness is unattainable.
Although there is quite a large body of research on Amis’s use of author figures, and particularly his use of authorial stand-ins, the majority of this work does not specifically examine the limitations Amis’s author figures have with regards to their ability to exert authorial control, but rather focus on the mere presence of author figures. Robert Duggan writes: “[one] reaction to Amis’s materialization within the narrative [in Money] has been to read the whole conceit as a rather transparent attempt by the author to distance himself from his vulgar, misogynistic and immoral central character” (87). Amis’s own words, however, refute this idea, as he claims to have been close to entering his novels ever since his debut, which suggests that there is more to his use of author figures and authorial stand-ins than to just distance himself from the main characters. While critics tend to agree that Amis offers a “multifaceted examination of contemporary authorship” (Maczynska 193), and employs author figures in order to draw attention to the fictionality of his novels, the propositions that his author figures make about the state of authorship have not received much attention. These propositions offer an interesting perspective, as they signify a development in Amis’s work: in The Rachel Papers, the governing sentiment is that an author should respect the separate ontological status of literature; in Money, the authorial stand-in maintains that character motivation is irrelevant; and in London Fields, the question of authorial influence revolves around the idea that a novel’s content is meaningless. All of these propositions serve to sketch a different picture of the role of the author in Amis’s work, yet, essentially, they all
demonstrate that authors have limited influence over their work.
writing or with the manipulation of narratives and other characters. The narrator is any character that produces and is superior to a narrative, and can be either extra- or intradiegetic, and hetero- or homodiegetic. The narrators in The Rachel Papers, Money, and London Fields are all homodiegetic as they participate in their own narratives. Schlomith Rimmon-Kenan makes an important claim about heterodiegetic narrators: “It is precisely their being absent from the story and their higher narrational authority in relation to it that confers . . .
omniscience” (96). She describes omniscience as familiarity with the characters’ thoughts and feelings; knowledge of past, present, and future; being present where characters are
irrespective of the narrative level it belongs to. Finally, the term authorial stand-in denotes a character that can be seen as a fictional alter ego to the real author of the novel. In my analysis characters can have more than one of these roles at the same time.
In the first chapter I examine Amis’s first exploration of authorial power in The Rachel
Papers. The novel’s narrator-protagonist Samson is an aspiring author and tries to assume
authorial control, but fails to do so because he abuses literature for his own egocentric
Chapter 1
Ruthlessly Rearranged: The Rachel Papers (1973)
The exploration of authorial power has been present in Amis’s work ever since his debut novel, The Rachel Papers (1973). Charles Highway, the narrator-protagonist, is a literature student aspiring to be an author. On the verge of reaching the age of twenty, Charles recounts his late teenage years when his life revolved around two major subjects: cramming to be admitted into Oxford and his pursuit of sleeping with someone older than himself. Throughout the novel, Charles tries to exert authorial control by self-consciously
implementing literary techniques and intertextuality in order to transcend his role as narrator and become superior to the narrative by creating the illusion of himself as the novel’s implied author. He tries to manufacture a new narrative reality in which he is able to move beyond the extradiegetic level of narration, regardless of the external control of the novel’s actual implied author. Although he seems to succeed in his efforts to manipulate reality by acting as an illusionist, he ultimately fails to assume authorial control over the narrative, as he does not acknowledge that literature has an existence beyond the influence of its author and tries to use it solely for his own egocentric purposes.
your own ends” (211). As Magdalena Maczynska suggests, Knowd is the one who points out his fatal flaw: his ruthless usage of literature (Maczynska 195). Literature and the author have a separate ontological status, and Charles fails to understand that literature is not just an instrument to be used for personal gain.
Moreover, Brian Finney writes, “[Amis] is . . . introducing an authorial stand-in who reduces the whole of Charles’s narration to a metadiegetic level of narration, that is, to one of subordination to that of the author’s fictional representative” (Martin Amis 125). However, this is not entirely accurate, as Knowd is never portrayed as being superior to the narrative and Amis’s words indicate that he was not intended to be so either. He belongs to the same narrative level as Charles, and his sole function seems to be to demonstrate why Charles fails to assume authorial control. He should, therefore, primarily be seen as a manifestation of the voice of the implied author, who does not yet become an actual character as seen in Money (1984) and London Fields (1989), but rather remains hovering outside the narrative as its governing consciousness. Nevertheless, this does suggest that Knowd’s proposition about authorial power seems to derive from the novel’s overarching system of principles, and can, therefore, be seen as its central message about authorship.
Charles’s misuse of literature is manifested through his tendency to merge reality and fiction in order to advance his own position in the novel from a mere character within a story to the hero of his own narrative. Charles opens his narrative by placing doubt on his own identity: “My name is Charles Highway, though you wouldn’t think it to look at me” (7). He immediately expresses his concerns with regards to the way in which he is perceived and where he stands in relation to the real. He disregards the relation between his name and the person he actually is: “It is such a rangy, well-travelled, big-cocked name, and . . . I am none of these” (7). By re-examining his collection of files, he tries to “locate [his] hamartia and see what kind of grown-up [he] shall make” (8). However, instead of initiating an actual
examination of his identity, this seems to be an early indication of Charles’s tendency to confuse fiction with reality. David Hawkes suggests: “[Charles] has no ‘real’ life at all; he experiences the world on an entirely textual basis” (28). Accordingly, Finney argues that Charles’s reference to his hamartia demonstrates his desire to shape his life and identity in the fashion of an Aristotelian literary template, as he is establishing the framework of a tragedy in which he himself is the hero who will be brought down by his fatal flaw (Martin Amis 35).
arbitrarily alters his identity in order to benefit from it. When he discusses his “fuck and coffee” date (20) with Gloria, he reveals one of his techniques: “I wondered if there were any important lies I had told her which it would be worth reacquainting myself with . . . ah yes, I was twenty-three and an adopted orphan” (20). He constantly changes who he is, depending on his environment and the people he meets, and thus creates illusions that prevent him from distinguishing between fiction and reality. He perfectly captures this sentiment when he visits his crammer for the first time: “we tried, in our small way, to make the place seem nicer than it was” (28). Neil Brooks notes: “[Charles] perceives his solipsistic way of writing the world to be a superior form of understanding—far surpassing mere lived experience” (11). His inflated notion of self-importance, Brooks suggests, is thus a logical result of his substituting the real world within the novel for his literary rendering of it, with him as the central character as well as the “originator of signification” (Brooks 11; Martin Amis 112).
The way in which Charles deals with his flawed perception of reality is bilateral. On the one hand, while seemingly aware of his erroneous understanding of his reality, he appears to consciously avoid addressing it. He claims to be recording “all [he] saw, felt, thought” (30), yet it is rather telling that he drinks coffee in order to “camouflage any darker substances [he] might chance to cough up” (79). He is reluctant to discover the truth behind the illusion that he has created for himself, so he covers it up. Consequently, when he has a spot on his chin, it only because Rachel opens by explicitly referring to it that Charles discovers a sense of relief from admitting the flaws that he tries to ignore: “I laughed with her, in a way relieved that we weren’t going to spend every second of the afternoon not mentioning it” (80). Nevertheless, Charles refuses to elaborate on this revelation, as he keeps trying to escape reality by
denoting the area of fantasy or human desire” (207). His objective of moving beyond the extradiegetic level in order to assume authorial control belongs to the realm of “Maybe Land”, as it does not materialise and only exists within his own fantasy world. Nevertheless, he continuously returns to the things he can manipulate, and refuses to accept his subordinate position in the narrative. It is not until after he has discovered that Maybe Land does not exist that he seems to show signs of his return from the textual utopia he has fabricated for himself, as he “felt hungry, something [he] couldn’t remember ever having felt before” (212).
On the other hand, Charles is very outspoken about the way in which he views reality as a construct. Charles explicitly refers to the writings of Dickens and Kafka where he found “a world full of the bizarre surfaces and sneaky tensions with which [he] was always trying to invest [his] own life” (63-64), further emphasizing his tendency to confuse literature and reality. This seems to suggest that he is, in fact, aware that fiction and reality are two separate entities, and that he consciously merges them in order to create the illusion of authorial control. Amis himself has said that Charles uses literature to his own advantage, and as Keulks writes, “[Amis’s characters] often discover that identity and reality are illusory constructs, manipulated by authorial guile” (Haffenden 9-10; Keulks 233). However, as Maczysnka suggests, “Charles lacks the maturity of judgement that would allow him to move beyond an appreciation of reality’s manipulability into a responsible participation in that reality” (195). He recognises his potential in exerting his influence on the world, yet his ruthless use of this knowledge prevents him from successfully exerting his authorial power.
midnight” (7-8). Moreover, Brooks writes: “[Charles creates] elaborate fictions to control his sphere of existence and reduce people to mere papers” (11). Not only is Charles intent on elevating himself, he also treats the people around him as fictional characters that belong to a lower narrative level, ruthlessly diminishing them to inferior constructs. Nevertheless, he is unable to really access their inner thoughts and manipulate their behaviour, which is
demonstrated by the fact that he is recording and rearranging the narrative, rather than creating it. Therefore, although he employs a fictional framework in order to create the
illusion of authorial control, he essentially belongs to the same narrative level as his narratees, which is why he is unable to exhibit actual omniscience.
Furthermore, Charles is actively trying to maintain his fictional framework in order to establish himself as part of the English literary tradition. He does so by continuously inserting phrases such as “epoch-making journey” (16) and “cognitio or anagnorisis” (140), which he uses as signposts to uphold the structural design of an epic tale. He goes even further when he discusses the evolution of the structure of comedy since Shakespeare, arguing that comedy no longer comes with the festive endings that Shakespeare used to conclude with, but that it has developed to focussing on the retributions that supposedly follow the happy endings (147). He uses this perspective to demonstrate how it should be done: “So, in the following phase, with the obstructive elements out of the way (DeForest, Gloria) and the consummation in sight, the comic action would have been due to end, happily. But who is going to believe that any more?” (147). Not only does he employ Shakespeare in order to elevate himself to a position within the English literary tradition, he also uses this allusion to set the stage for the
conclusion of the novel. He is essentially labelling his story with a particular genre in order to set expectations.
narrative, which can be attributed to his practice of shaping the various files and papers that he has assembled (Maczynska 193-194). James Diedrick has argued: “By revisiting the past (or rather his literary rendering of it) Charles attempts to construct his currently older,
supposedly wiser self” (qtd. in Tredell 16). As he is revisiting his past through all his files, he is able to reconstruct the narrative as he desires, as can for instance be seen in the exchange between Charles and Rachel at the party. Charles writes: ‘I notice you haven’t got a drink.’ This was an excellent line because there usually followed : ‘Are you giving this party?’ ‘Are you giving this party?’ she said” (34). Since he is reconstructing the past from the
extradiegetic level, he can create the illusion of him governing Rachel’s response. Moreover, because of his conviction to “not be placed at the mercy of [his] spontaneous self” (176), he attempts to govern everyone’s behaviour on intradiegetic level of narration, too, from arranging his room by furnishing it with identity-markers of one of his many identities, to meticulously planning out the conversations he will have. He constructs his narrative in such a way that authorial characteristics basically become part of his identity. He describes himself, for instance, as being “decked out like a walking stationary department” (52), and apart from blood, his features also include “irony” (73). Furthermore, he has a “shirty erection” (23) when he is leafing through his notes, which, according to Maczynska, serves to confirm his fetishist attachment to textuality (Maczynska 194). Even during sexual intercourse, his head is “a whirlpool of notes, directives, memos, hints, pointers, random scribblings” (155). He appears to be doing everything in his power to convince his audience that he is not merely the narrator functioning as an instrument for the implied author, but rather the implied author himself, involved in the act of writing and creating the narrative.
it sensibly, structurally” (85). He seems to succeed, as he gains new insights: “for once it didn’t seem quite the hilarious whirligig adventure that my self-consciousness would have me believe” (85). Instead of artificially creating the illusion of himself as implied author, he now actually seems to be able to actually be it. However, whenever Charles does step back, he seems to withdraw himself from his own character, and become a completely separate entity. When he breaks down after his developing relationship with Rachel seems to be moving towards failure, he detaches himself from the character of Charles Highway and leave his misery to his fictional self: Charles listened to the car drive away . . . He complained to the mirror that [pills and vodka] only made him feel worse. . . . Let us leave him, then, as the scene fades” (132-133, my emphasis). Thus, the voice within the narrative and the one outside of it do not appear to belong to the same person, and it is not the extradiegetic Charles who transcends his narrative level, but rather a separate manifestation of the implied author’s voice giving its insights.
Essentially, the way in which Charles exercises his supposed authorial powers are in line with Martin Amis’s own opinion on the role of the author. In his interview with Will Self, he said: “[You]’re in a thoroughly godlike position vis à vis what you create” (165). Although Charles is not the creative power behind the narrative, as he is merely arranging and
refers to Wordsworth: “Man was never meant to escape death, jealousy, pain, libido – what Wordsworth calls “the human heart by which we live” (112). He is convinced that people are destined to suffer, so he might as well enjoy it, and his conviction of his own authorial power allows him to capitalise on his sadistic impulses.
is interfering with the intentions of the real implied author.
The state of authorial power that is sketched in The Rachel Papers is, thus, dependent on the way in which author figures treat literature. Charles fails in his attempt at assuming control over the narrative, because, as Maczynska writes, “[his] lack of respect for the
integrity of the other bars him from becoming . . . a mature author” (125). He does not comply with the novel’s central proposition that literature has a life of its own and should not be ruthlessly used for egocentric purposes. Moreover, Finney writes: “Amis appears to mock his own desire to give fictional form to a world he finds increasingly formless by satirizing Charles’s parallel use of nonfiction writing” (Martin Amis 112). Literature and reality are two separate things that are not compatible with each other, and Charles’s failure to give
Chapter 2
“Motiveless Malignity”: Money (1984)
Amis returns to his use of a narrator-protagonist who is not in control of his own narrative in
Money (1984), with the introduction of the character of John Self. This time, however, the
narrator is not impeded by the implied author that purely exists beyond the extradiegetic level of narration, but by a personification of the implied author inhabiting the same narrative levels as he does: the authorial stand-in Martin Amis (Martin Amis 48). Initially, Martin Amis seems to belong to the extradiegetic level, as suggested by the opening note in italics signed with the initials M.A., but he also appears on the diegetic level of John’s narrative and comes into direct contact with the narrator (Compañón 90). Unlike Charles in The Rachel Papers, the fictional Martin Amis is able to exert authorial control from within the diegetic level, and towards the end of the novel he is revealed as the controlling force behind the narrative. However, this novel once again explores the limitations of authorial power, as,
notwithstanding the fictional Amis’s efforts to erase John Self from the narrative, the narrator succeeds in moving from the diegetic level to the italicised extradiegetic level and, thus, becomes independent from the implied author.
comes from inside the head, not from outside” (370). Thus, in his perspective on authorship, character motivation seems to be a demonstration of the authorial power to create on the one hand, but on the other hand he dismisses it as being irrelevant.
However, the absence of motivation seems to be exactly what limits the fictional Amis in his authorial influence, as it causes him to become trapped in his narrative design to bring down the narrator. Jon Begley points to the intertextual connection of the plot and characters of Money to Shakespeare’s Othello to stress the “motiveless malignity” of the implied author (Begley 98). The fictional Amis is explicitly linked to Iago in the novel, and Robert Duggan connects this to the critical reading of Iago as “the originator of the ‘plot’ . . . who is the controlling influence behind the event it unfolds” (Duggan 95). Duggan draws on Auden’s identification of Iago as a practical joker, and writes: “It is essential for Auden’s practical joker that he does not offer any reason as to why he has deceived his victims” (98). The lack of motivation behind Iago’s plotting is projected onto the character of Martin Amis through these intertextual references. Thus, when Amis describes Fielding Goodney as being “too deep into his themes and forms, his own artwork” (M 376), he simultaneously seems to be describing his own situation. Similar to “[the] illusionist, the lie artist, the storyboarder”, he has fallen victim to the helplessness that comes with creating a narrative, which causes him to lose his authority over the narrator (376).
The distance between author and narrator corresponds to the degree to which the author finds the narrator wicked, deluded, pitiful or ridiculous. . . . The distance is partly determined by convention. . . .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. This creates an appetite for punishment. The author is not free of sadistic impulses (246-247).
The degree to which Amis punishes John implies that the former, as implied author, is indeed influenced by the sadistic impulses that are inherent to his superiority to the narrative. The overarching framework that he creates for the narrative is that of the suicide of John Self, as announced in the opening note, which suggests that the fictional Amis indeed has the freedom to whatever he wants with him. This, in turn, demonstrates that his entire narrative design essentially is the result of the sadistic impulses that originate from his power to create, and that there is no further motivation behind his abusive treatment of the narrator.
The authorial influence of the implied author can be inferred from the way in which John Self’s artificiality and powerlessness are construed. Similar to Charles in The Rachel
Papers, John Self has a myopic view of reality, and his involvement in the television and
movie industry seems to have translated to his perception of reality, as he pictures his life and the world he lives in as a movie throughout the novel: “God I hate this movie. And it’s only just beginning” (3). He describes the people on the street as “extras and bit part players” (5) and he imagines himself “following the script” (140) of everyday events. Furthermore, although he works with professional actors, John is particularly wary of the “actors of real life” (187). Thus, the world depicted in Money is one that appears to have been written by a scriptwriter, which is further emphasised by the recurrent references to scripts and the
one of the actors of John’s movie: “He’s controllable. Doris will account for all that in the script and he’ll fall into line the second he sees hard print. They all will” (142). Once the words are on paper, the actors are no longer in control over their own actions, and there is a strong sense that the same applies to the narrative reality in which John finds himself. It is, therefore, no coincidence that the fictional Amis is eventually employed by John as his scriptwriter on the diegetic level, as it emphasises his parallel status of writer of John’s script from within in the extradiegetic level. John is essentially ceding his control to the implied author figure, yet he does so involuntarily, because he fails to recognise the significance of the author figure having the ability to rewrite the script of a film that is based on John’s own life.
This framework in the form of a script complicates the question of reality in the novel, as the distinction between the roles the characters play and their real identities is
unrecognizable, even to the characters themselves. For example, Lorne Guyland, one of John’s actors, has megalomaniacal ideas about himself as a result of his history of roles as main character, such as Macbeth and Jesus Christ, and he constantly seeks reassurance about the nature of his role (111, 182). John faces similar uncertainty as he spends the novel in search of form and meaning. Although he opens his narrative by claiming: “Recently my life has taken on form” (3), not much later he “felt [his] facial flesh ease out of its recent mould” (38). He cannot seem to discern his real identity, and instead he wants to deviate from the script by going to the “design department over at Silicone Valley” to recreate his own identity according to his own wishes, and not those of his creator (170-171).
prison. During one of their meetings, Alec draws attention to the artificiality of their world by depicting his imprisonment in literary terms:
Listen. It says “Light’s Out At Nine”. L-i-g-h-t-apostrophe-s. Apostrophe-s! It says “One Cup of Tea of ‘Coffee’ “ – coffee in inverted commas. Why? Why? In the library, the library, it says “You can NOT Spit”- cannot two words and the not in capitals. It’s a mistake, a mistake (253).
After making this explicit connection to the textuality of his situation, Alec goes on to say: “It’s a mistake. It’s not me, it’s you! It’s a literal, it’s a fucking typo!” (253). This seems to suggest that John should be the one who is imprisoned, and that it is only because of a typo that he has evaded the control of his writer. His uneasy reaction – “‘Okay,’ I said uneasily” (253) – seems to confirm his preordained subordination to the narrative design of the implied author. This is further emphasised by the anxiety he feels in the presence of the fictional Amis: “A writer lives round my way in London. . . . He gives me the fucking creeps” (38). Thus, John appears to be destined to be imprisoned within the text, yet Alec’s suggestion that John has evaded the implied author as a result of a typographical mistake demonstrates that Amis is not in full authorial control over his narrator.
this sequence of events is that the cab came down and hit him. He perceives himself as the center of the universe and does not recognise that he is being thrown about by forces greater than himself” (149). Indeed, like Charles in The Rachel Papers, John mistakenly considers himself as the heroic figure within the narrative, while, in fact, most characters within the novel are able to take advantage of him, and the implied author is ultimately the one who is throwing John about.
John constantly tries to discern the motivation behind the thoughts and events that the extradiegetic Martin Amis imposes on him, not knowing that it is a fruitless undertaking, as the implied author does not include character motivation within his narrative design. Several times John asks himself: “Why do they happen to me, these numb, flushed, unanswerable, these pornographic things?” (187). He wants to know why things happen to him, yet the only explanation he can come up with is: “I guess if you’re a pornographic person, then
reality, which suggests that he wants to move towards the extradiegetic level from which he can discern the workings of Amis’s narrative design and the lack of motivation behind it, and, at the same time, escape the implied author’s authorial influence.
John’s increasing awareness of his position in the narrative hierarchy indicates that the implied author violates the distance between himself and his narrator, as Amis’s presence within the diegetic level of narration seems to cause John to become wary and encourage him to stand up to Amis’s authorial control. During the early stages of his narrative, John keeps stressing the presence of Amis by stating variations of the phrase “A writer lives round my way in London” (39). The increasing presence of the author figure seems to instigate John’s suspicions about his own artificiality. For example, John says, “I must have some new cow disease that makes you wonder whether you’re real all the time,” which he immediately follows up by referring to the writer living round his way again (60). Moreover, he begins to show awareness of the implied author’s influence on his character: “Something else is new. I feel invaded, duped, fucked around. I hear strange voices and speak in strange tongues. I get thoughts that are way over my head. I feel violated” (66). He becomes aware that he is not in control over his mind and his thoughts, and he is convinced that these impulses carry
significance: “[Once] you’ve given them headroom, they seem pretty determined to stick around. . . . Don’t let them in, whatever you do” (108). Eventually, he appears to realise that these authorial interventions emanate from the extradiegetic level, as he says: “Control, purpose, meaning, they’re all up there. They’re not down here. God has taken columned New York between the knuckles of his right hand – and tugged” (130). On the one hand, this is in line with the idea of the author as godlike creator that was also found in The Rachel Papers, but on the other hand, this suggests that the implied author’s descent into the diegetic level causes him to lose his sense of control, purpose, and meaning. Therefore, John’s
the author and narrator not only creates sadistic impulses, but also determines the degree to which the author has control over his characters.
This is reflected by the introduction of Martina Twain as an extension of the implied author’s voice, as she provides John with devices that help him understand the narrative level that he inhabits. Finney describes her as “a second (twain) female Martin” (Martin Amis 47), which suggests that her character can be read as another manifestation of the implied author’s voice, similar to the tutor in The Rachel Papers. Duggan writes: “Martina Twain can be read as the ‘nice’ side of the author who endeavors to help Self through his troubles,” (100), and she indeed acts as a guiding light by encouraging John to start reading literature and
enlightening him about literary aspects and techniques. John states: “Martina talked about aesthetics more generally. She talked about perception, representation and truth. She talked about the vulnerability of a figure unknowingly watched” (132). Before, these ideas were all alien to John, as illustrated by John’s inability to find a voice with which to summon Martina (119), and they enable him to discern the narrative hierarchy: “On the way back from lunch . . . already the streets felt a little lighter. I could make a little more sense of the watchers and the watched” (136). Martina continues to act as John’s source of enlightenment as she
provides him with books to read through which he acquires a new perception of the world; he becomes aware of the movements behind his back and he begins to understand the
double or alter ego (Martina Twain) who directs him towards potentially revelatory material” (96-97). Thus, essentially, it is the author’s presence within the narrative that enables John to recognise the influence of authorial power and that gives rise to the possibility of breaking out of the narrative design into the extradiegetic level.
The inclusion of the implied author within the narrative creates an interesting situation in which the character of John Self literally meets his own creator and vice versa. Amis has uprooted the nature of this relationship, as the narrator no longer remains constrained by the words on paper, but engages in a dialogue with the person who has created him and governs his thoughts and actions. John Self is not just a “mute, voiceless object of the author’s words” (Begley 85), but, as Begley argues: “the artist figure is answered, criticised, and mocked by his protagonist” (98). Accordingly, he writes, “[rather] than merely stressing Self’s
figure. Nevertheless, this is merely a guise and John does not actually assume the
authoritative position of the implied author, and, therefore, it primarily serves to demonstrate how the narrator is able to mock the implied author by impersonating him for a rather crude reason. The fact that John is able to achieve such a sense of authority by standing up to the implied author and by impersonating him seems to suggest that the implied author’s
superiority is impeded by his descent into the diegetic level.
Towards the close of the novel, the narrator and the implied author have another “meeting of minds” (373) during a game of chess. The fictional Amis is in control of the outcome of the match and he forces John into making a suicidal move, which seems to reflect the overarching narrative, as the extradiegetic Amis states in his opening note to John’s narrative: “This is a suicide note. By the time you lay it aside . . . John Self will no longer
exist” (0). Although he does manage to manoeuvre John into a position of inevitable defeat
during their chess match, he ultimately fails in his intentions to remove John Self from existence, as John survives his actual suicide attempt, and ends up, as Amis explained, “outside of the novel” (Haffenden 24). Similar to the opening note, this final section is in italics, which suggests that John has entered the same narrative level as the fictional Martin Amis and is no longer the diegetic subject of his narrative. When they meet each other one final time, Amis says: “Hey, what are you doing here? You’re meant to be out of the picture
by now” (389), but John explains that “[the] large agencies, the pentagrams of shape and purpose have no power to harm or delight [him] now” (384). This seems to confirm Finney’s
suggestion that “a character can take on a kind of fictional autonomy, that [sic] allows him to escape from an author’s absolute control of him” (Martin Amis 49).
Chapter 3
Authentic Absurdity: London Fields (1989)
In London Fields (1989), Amis once again questions the significance of authorial power with his narrator-protagonist Samson Young, who can be seen as a synthesis of the author figures in The Rachel Papers and Money. Similar to Charles, Samson is recording and arranging the facts of real life, rather than inventing the narrative, and like the fictional Martin Amis, he descends into the diegetic level of narration to come into direct contact with his characters. However, Samson is not the only author figure in London Fields, as Frederick Holmes argues, “all of the characters are ‘authors’ of one sort or another who are vying with each other to shape events into the form of a story that will count as authoritative” (53). Indeed, the three characters Samson is writing about are all involved in the act of writing: Keith has written a brochure on his own services, Guy has tried his hand at writing fiction, and Nicola has
Amis returns to a now familiar structure in London Fields, as towards the end of the novel the personified implied author directly addresses the narrator to express the novel’s stance on the state of authorship. In his final letter to Samson, Mark Asprey writes: “You don’t understand, do you, my talentless friend? . . . It doesn’t matter what anyone writes any more. The time for it mattering has passed. The truth doesn’t matter any more and is not
wanted” (490). Thus, according to his view, literature does not have a mimetic function, and
instead he advises Samson to “turn to fiction and the joys of unfettered fancy” (326), which is reminiscent of the tutor’s suggestion in The Rachel Papers that literature has a life of its own. Accordingly, Amis himself has said: “I do think it’s a slight humiliation for an imaginative writer to serve ideas; it is much better just to be alive to how ideas filter through into daily life, rather than to have controlling theses” (Haffenden 15). The author should, therefore, not let himself be constrained by the limitations of real life when writing fiction, but rather turn to his imagination.
as he pictures the events that happen as “unified, dramatic, and pretty saleable” (7). This implies that he perceives real life as adhering to literary form, which, as seen by the unsuccesful attempts at merging fiction and reality in The Rachel Papers and Money, is absurd. Instead, it seems to demonstrate that his diegetic reality is manipulated from within the extradiegetic level to resemble a fictional world. He later appears to confirm this himself, as he refutes the idea of reality being suitable for fiction because of its formlessness: “In fiction (rightly so called), people become coherent and intelligible – and they aren’t like that” (262).
Nevertheless, Samson is persistent throughout the novel in his intention to document the story that he is provided with, which explains his failure to exert authorial control over his own narrative. He writes: “I think I am less a novelist than a queasy cleric, taking down the minutes of real life” (7). Because of this, his authorial power is limited to editorial decisions in the sense that he can arrange the story elements, such as the order in which characters enter the story, and decide which elements to leave out. However, the roles of author and fictional character are reversed, as the characters that he writes about govern the narrative and Samson, as author, is dependent on them to see how the story develops. Samson notes: “I couldn’t stop them, I don’t think, even if I wanted to. . . . You can’t stop people, once they start. You can’t stop people, once they start creating” (7). Thus, apart from the fact that his characters are creating the narrative for him, his inability to stop them also shows that he even has trouble enforcing his will to leave certain elements out. However, Samson does not seem to mind that he is an author figure without authorial power, as he does not want to stop his characters from creating the story, and he even worries that “people are going to imagine that [he] actually sat down and made all this stuff up” (327). Authenticity is central to his interpretation of
by the extradiegetic Mark Asprey serves to confirm that his devotion to mimesis is what is causing Samson to fail to exert authorial control.
himself with his characters and offering them suggestions concerning their future actions” (201). Instead of altering the narrative through writing, Samson is forced to manipulate his characters by giving them suggestions through direct contact. Thus, when Guy’s infatuation with Nicola threatens to disrupt the structure Samson envisions for his novel, for example, he writes: “I gave my advice (it was bad advice), and with any luck he’ll take it” (114).
Therefore, although Samson may appear as an omniscient author figure, as he
describes incidents for which he was not present and seems to have knowledge of things that happen in several places at the same time (Rimmon-Kenan 96), his intrusion into the
intradiegetic level of narration discredits this, as he derives this knowledge from his contact with the characters and the accounts they provide him with. Samson acknowledges it himself: “How do I know, for instance, that Keith works as a cheat? Because he tried to cheat me” (17). However, this demonstrates that Samson’s narrative is primarily based on his subjective account, as he projects his personal experiences on the world that he takes as reality. Thus, this is another indication of his failure as author figure, as he succumbs to the subjectivity that seems inherent to authorship, which causes him to be unable to achieve his goal of
Keith’s thoughts creates the illusion that Samson is omniscient, giving him a false sense of authority.
His false sense of authority is emphasised even further by his gradual disappearance from the narrative. Initially, Samson tries to assume the role of implied author by withdrawing behind the scenes: “While the scene developed I melted, as they say, into the background” (20). However, he immediately demonstrates his incapacity, as instead of shaping the narrative, he observes it without identifying it as such: “Of course, I had no idea what was taking shape in front of me” (20). Later in the novel, Samson seems to balance between reality and fiction, as he identifies himself with Guy: “He’s like me, myself. We’re here. But we’re not here” (200). Although it could be argued that this refers to Samson’s constant switching between the diegetic and the intradiegetic level, since he equates himself with a character within his fiction, it is more likely that it signifies his own status as the product of the implied author’s narrative design, and thus, as a product of Asprey’s imagination. On the final pages, after he has taken a suicide pill, Samson writes: “Blissful, watery and vapid, the state of painlessness is upon me. I feel seamless and insubstantial, like a creation. As if someone made me up, for money. And I don’t care” (508). Although he is fading away from the narrative, he seems delighted to be freed from the coherence and intelligibility of fiction, as he moves towards the formlessness that is outside the novel.
The character of Nicola Six offers a contrasting image of authorial control, as she transcends her role as diegetic character within Samson’s novel by enforcing her own
[know] what was going to happen next” (23). She is not omniscient; she has merely
manipulated Samson into believing that she is. Accordingly, she is manipulative throughout the novel, which is reflected by the foundation on which her story rests: a murderee
manipulating someone to become her murderer. Thus, not only does she manipulate the characters into believing her fictions, she also controls their behaviour. She tells Keith, for example: “’My name is Nicola. Not Nicky or’. . . ‘Say it’” (86), with which he immediately complies. Even the supposedly extradiegetic Samson cannot escape her influence: “She summons me. I always show” (177). Furthermore, similar to the fictional Martin Amis in
Money, Nicola is compared to a Shakespearean manipulator, as Samson likens her to “Lady
Muckbeth” (409), an allusion to Macbeth, in which Lady Macbeth is the creative mind behind the plot against the king. Like the implied author figure in Money, Nicola appears to become too entrenched in her own artwork: “Well, in a minute, she thought. A few more choice ambiguities, perhaps. No – all right. Okay: one more” (369). It seems as if she has lost track of the motives behind her manipulations, and that she develops the same motiveless malignity as the fictional Martin Amis.
importantly, Samson writes: “And so she often found herself imagining that she was going out with God. . . . He had slept with her once” (136). This reflects the relationship between her and Mark Asprey, and it indicates that the implied author in London Fields can indeed be seen as an author-god to his characters. Nicola happily invokes this relationship in order to
safeguard her narrative design: “Even if she got pregnant she could spin him the line about immaculate conception. God did it. It was God’s: the oldest trick in the book” (147). Thus, the relationship between the implied author and Nicola simultaneously serves to disclaim
responsibility on her part and to provide the implied author with a means of exerting his authorial control over his narrator without having to descend into the diegetic level as the fictional Martin Amis unsuccessfully did.
Thus, Nicola has a complicated identity in the novel: she is an extension of the implied author and, at the same time, one of his creations. It is this dual identity that enables her to surpass the limitations that her textuality places upon her, because, as Susan Brook argues, “she is an author as well as a text . . . she realises the way in which fictional forms mediate the world, rather than mistaking the representation for reality itself” (87). Unlike Samson, she is able to make the distinction between fiction and reality, or as Brook puts it, between form and content. She uses this awareness to manipulate the other characters by transforming her identity dependent on each character’s fantasies. Samson describes her as “[always] the simulacrum, never the real thing” (146), connecting her to the idea of hyperreality. Finney argues: “In deconstructing the difference between the fictional (i.e., form) and the real (i.e., content) Nicola produces the hyperreal” (Martin Amis 114). She is able to create new imaginative realities to control the characters in the novel by being the author to her own story, inventing roles and performing them at the same time.
author figures and diegetic characters within Asprey’s overarching narrative. Both sides seem to be aware of each other’s role and influence: Nicola knows that Samson is “writing
something” (179), and Samson salutes her for her “power to shape reality” (134). Holmes even suggests that they work as a collaborative authorial team, as they “recognise the received character of their materials and accordingly are able to muster sufficient detachment to deploy them successfully to manipulate others” (53). When Nicola asks Samson what he is dying of, however, he answers: “‘A synergism.’ See our interdependence?” (178). Even though he does not recognise it, his collaboration with Nicola is literally killing him. Holmes argues: “In Nicola’s plan the death of the author becomes a paradoxical assertion of the power of the author, an attempt to reinstall her in a position of authority as one capable of using the available cultural codes to make a purposeful design” (54). Her governing role in the story that she makes Samson write does, indeed, suggest that she assumes authorial control. She is superior to her supposed author in almost every aspect associated with author figures, and Samson, for example, writes: “You have a way with language, and with much else. In fact I’m envious” (72). However, not only is he envious, he also fears her influence. When Nicola undresses for him in order for him to supposedly gather information for the next chapter, she says: “Look at you. You don’t fancy it, do you, in flesh and blood” (376). Like the implied author in Money, Samson seems to realise that he has come too close to the character that he believes to be his creation. He tries to maintain that he is “not a contender in all this” (71), yet he, too, gets caught in her schemes, and eventually he concludes: “She outwrote me. Her story worked. And mine didn’t” (505). However, as Finney points out, this is not entirely true: “But it is his story of her story. He has outlived her. He has contained her within his larger
narrative” (“Narrative and Narrated Homicides” 13).
the other author figures he does appear to be omniscient. Samson wonders: “Now wait a minute. How did Asprey know about me holing up at Heathrow?” (329). Maczynska writes: “Asprey displays many of the authorial features found in Amis’s fiction—he manipulates reality, creating an image of himself as a successful author; he knows too much; finally, he has sadistic drives” (202). Yet, whereas in Money the implied author physically enters the story, Asprey’s voice is primarily present through his letters to Samson and through his characters. Apart from using Nicola as an extension of his own authorial power, he employs his housekeeper Incarnacion as an agent for his own sadistic impulses. As her name suggests, she embodies the spirit of her creator, and Samson is not oblivious to this fact: “It occurs to me that certain themes – the ubiquitization of violence, for example, and the delegation of cruelty – are united in the person of Incarnacion. There is . . . something sadistic in her discourses . . . I wonder if Mark Asprey pays her extra to torment me” (377-378).
Notwithstanding these invocations, Asprey’s presence is perhaps best felt through the metaphorical comparison between authorial power and the sun. The novel is set on the eve of an apocalypse, and although the exact cause is never clarified, the sun plays an important part in it. The sun is a looming presence throughout the novel, and Samson writes: “The sun had so much going for it. It created life; it was profoundly mysterious; it was so powerful that no one on earth dared to look its way” (164). Similar to an author, the sun is depicted as having the ability to create life, and the fact that the characters seem reluctant to confront it reflects the author-character relationship that seems to pervade Amis’s work. The sun, indeed,
sunguard down and it don’t – the sun’s still there” (489). Samson further establishes the connection between the cosmic situation and the author, as he writes: “Above, the sky has a pink tinge to it . . . As if through a screen of stage smoke you can just make out God’s morse or shorthand, the stars arranged in triangles, and saying therefore and because, therefore and
because” (423, my emphasis). Through his godlike presence, the implied author literally
writes conjunctions in the sky, demonstrating his authorial control over the narrative.
Thus, the apocalypse functions as the overarching narrative in the novel, as it is from this level that the implied author figure can exert his authorial control over all the narrative levels that lie beneath it by ending them. This has consequences for the role of the author within the novel, as Peter Stokes writes: “Amis attempts to problematise the credibility of narrative authority en route to suggesting that such authority is essentially formless,
insubstantial” (306). All narrative levels within the novel are directed towards obliteration as a result of the approaching end of the world, and it is Mark Asprey who seems to direct Samson and Nicola to a state of insubstantiality. According to Stokes, this formlessness is valued positively in London Fields: “Amis’s novel thus plays with the notion of text-theft in such as a way as to suggest that disconnecting a text from its author is the best way to keep it moving, to get it read” (306). For Samson’s and Nicola’s narratives to work, their creators have to die, and thus, be disconnected from their texts. Therefore, Stokes concludes that Amis promotes “the power of discourse, rather than the power of the author” (310). Holmes
connects the ending to Barthes’ essay, “The Death of the Author,” as he writes: “Amis’s
London Fields both comically illustrates Roland Barthes’s thesis about the death of the author
disconnecting a text from its author it loses its contextual meaning as the source becomes unknown. The text can no longer be connected to the author’s environment, and, as suggested in The Rachel Papers, has a life of its own. “Works of art survive their makers” (508),
Conclusion
Although Finney argues: “By inserting the writer’s substitute self, the narrator, into the action, the author is inviting his readers to share with him his unease at the role he is asked to play as novelist” (Martin Amis 126), the author figures are the characters that offer real insight in the role of the author and his position in relation to his characters. Amis employs a variety of author figures in his novels, and as he himself developed as a writer, so did his depiction of the role of the author. Each of the three novels has its own central explicit proposition about authorship given by their respective implied author characters. Firstly, in The Rachel Papers, Charles Knowd argues that literature exists beyond the influence of authors and that they cannot just employ literature for their own ends. Secondly, the fictional Martin Amis the character in Money comments on the artificiality of character motivation, and how its absence creates sadistic impulses on the part of the author. Finally, in London Fields Mark Asprey claims it no longer matters what anyone writes anymore. The way in which each of these propositions is manifested in the novels essentially serves to emphasise the limitations of authorial control, as they all demonstrate that an author cannot be fully superior to his or her work.
Each of the narrator-protagonists in the three novels shows an awareness of his status as a literary construct and tries to undermine the authorial control of the implied author. The resistance the implied authors encounter from their narrator, which is traditionally seen as one of the various voices through which the implied author makes itself known (Chatman qtd. in Rimmon-Kenan 88), demonstrates how characters sometimes write themselves. Amis himself has claimed that his characters are “alive and unstable” to him (Haffenden 11), and the
absurdity of an author figure trying to document real events rather than inventing or at least rearranging a narrative as in London Fields. To return to Amis’s argument on how it is a humiliation for an imaginative writer to serve ideas, and that it is much better just to be alive to how ideas filter through into daily life (Haffenden 15), it can be inferred from this
perspective that an author should not try to stick to the rigidity of the characters and events that he puts on paper, but rather allow them to be coloured by their external forces. This positions the author in a complicated position, because, as Amis argues, “[life] is all too random. [I have] the desire to give shape to things and make sense of things” (qtd. in Alexander 582). Thus, he is trying to impose form on the incoherency of real life, which, as seen in London Fields, is contradictory and demonstrates how the transition from reality to fiction limits the author. Thus, although the author does operate as a godlike presence in the sense that he has the ability to create and arrange his narrative universe, he is also, as
Edmondson suggests, “constituted by a larger narrative line” (149). Whereas Amis highlights the significance of authors by having his novels revolve around author figures and
experimenting with the authorial control they are able to exert within them, at the same time he refutes the idea of the author as a perfectly omnipotent entity by demonstrating how discourse outmuscles the author. This is in line with the contemporary transformation of literary heroes to “anti-heroes, non-heroes, sub-heroes” (Moronic Inferno 17), because, as Finney argues, “the tragic, heroic, and epic genres do not resonate in a postmodern world” (Martin Amis 132). As a result the modern author is partly limited by the dominant discourse of his or her time.
create: Charles’s obsessive self-elevation leads him to abuse the characters he interprets to be his creations, while the fictional Martin Amis and Nicola torture the narrators without motive. Because of this “motiveless malignity” (Begley 98), the author figures become practical jokers rather than godlike figures, and thus only create the illusion of authorial control over the characters and the narrative. Amis argues that “a whole set of notions, of character and motivation, and fatal flaws and so on, are nostalgic creations” (Self 151), with which he seems to suggest that motivation is, indeed, a literary invention, and that authors
fundamentally are illusionists rather than author-gods. From this perspective, it can be
concluded that authors are not superior to their work, but instead operate on a level equal to it, like the fictional Marin Amis in Money. Therefore, while Amis reinforces the importance of the role of the author by employing a variety of author figures throughout his body of work, he also acknowledges that the idea of an omnipotent or omniscient author is not feasible.
Amis presents a depiction of authorship in which the author is deprived of some of the key characteristics of traditional authorship: character motivation, fictional form, and
superiority to his or her work. What then, is the modern author left with? If character
motivation is indeed a literary invention that has become exhausted and is no longer relevant in literature, the author seems to be left with preciously little to write about. Without
motivation, causality becomes artificial, as, for example, demonstrated by the implied author in London Fields writing conjunctions in the sky, causing every literary plotline to resemble a postmodern trick rather than a valuable rendition of, for example, human nature, the
power, they do emphasise the important role the author has in relation to the invention of the narrative. At least within the novel, the author figures are able to exert some degree of authorial control, and it is only when they violate their role that their influence is impaired. Nevertheless, their helplessness against, for example, sadistic impulses and subjectivity seems to indicate that the failure of his characters does not necessarily reflect a failure on the part of authors in general, but rather functions as an inherent characteristic of modern authorship. Therefore, I believe that Amis did not merely use his author figures as a comic device, but employs them as part of an honest intellectual endeavour to explore both the degree in which he himself can be successful in creating such complicated and experimental narrative
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