Objects of Desire: Money and Writing in Martin Amis’s Money
p. 119-136
Résumés
This article examines the meaning of money in Martin Amis’ novel Money and shows how money, as the ultimate object of desire, determines the itinerary and the identity of the characters in the story. The novel mirrors the economic and political changes of Margaret Thatcher’s England and Ronald Reagan’s United States. However at a symbolic level in the subterranean layers of the texts money mirrors the American personal and national identity and interacts with major topics such as gender, body and sexuality. Moreover, Money evokes writing and the book itself, which is the very entity that procures the needs and wants of the writer and becomes the object of desire both for the writer and the reader.
Cet article examine la signification de l’argent dans le roman intitulé Money de Martin Amis, et montre comment l’argent, en tant qu’objet ultime du désir, détermine l’itinéraire et l’identité des personnages de l’histoire. Le roman reflète les changements économiques et politiques de l’Angleterre de Margaret Thatcher et des États-Unis de Ronald Reagan. Cependant, à un niveau symbolique, dans les couches souterraines des textes, l’argent reflète l’identité personnelle et nationale américaine et interagit avec des thèmes majeurs tels que le genre, le corps et la sexualité. De plus, Money propose une réflexion sur l’écriture et sur le livre lui-même en tant qu’objet qui stimule les besoins et les désirs de l’écrivain et du lecteur.
Entrées d’index
Mots-clés : Argent, postmodernisme, consommation, capitalisme financier, Martin Amis
Keywords : Money, postmodernism, consumerism, financial capitalism, Martin Amis
Texte intégral
1In 1979, Martin Amis was engaged to write the script of Saturn 3, a film produced and directed by the eminent Hollywood director, Stanley Donen.1 It was during the making of the movie that Amis began to work on his novel Money: A Suicide Note, partially based on his scriptwriting experience and the encounter with the film world. The present article aims to read money as the object of desire in Martin Amis’s novel Money published in 1984.2 It will argue that the novel uses money as a central metaphor for writing and that, in the end, the book itself becomes an object of desire. As shall be observed, money determines the itinerary and the identity of the characters and generates the events that structure the story.
2Money, on account of its ubiquity and its association with different topics, is a complex subject to deal with and can be interpreted from numerous standpoints. However, the economic perception of money as measure, an accumulation of wealth and the medium of exchange governs our general understanding of the subject today and overshadows its symbolic and cultural meanings.
3Money is a primal metaphor, a symbolic entity comparable with language, a quality that accounts for its persistent presence as a metaphor in literature. Anthropologists and historians have shown that money at the time of its invention had nothing to do with economics.3 It was originally a religious and a political instrument. As Henry Miller has observed, “In the days of Periclean Greece money may be said to have occupied the same relation to economics as ballistics to astral physics today.”4 It is therefore important to take into account the symbolic interpretations of money with regard to, or independently from, its economic properties.
4A psychoanalytical reading of money provides us with a different understanding of its nature. As early as 1908, Freud’s article “Character and Anal Eroticism” established the symbolic equivalence of money with excrements. Freud argues that at the anal stage the child takes pleasure in retaining his feces. Consequently, the child’s excrements symbolically become comparable to his savings and remain in correlation with having, hoarding and stashing throughout his life.5 The symbolic equivalence of money with feces manifests itself in linguistics and popular dictums with expressions such as “money is dirty,” “it has no odor,” or in popular folklore with the devil’s gold that turns into excrement. Thus, money, this lustrous object of desire, is attractive and appealing but at the same time dirty, vile and evil. Luther saw it as the Devil’s object, the filth of the world, “Scatet totus orbis” says Luther.6 Martin Amis’s protagonist John Self defines money with the following words:
Money, money stinks. It really does. Dah, it stinks. Pick up a wad of well-used notes, and fan them out in your face. Pick it up. Fan it. Do it. Little boys’ socks and a porno headache tang, old yeast, batch, larders, damp towels, the silt from purses’ seams, the sweat of the palms and the dirt in the nails of the people who handle this stuff all day, so needfully. Ah, it stinks.7
5The association of money with feces and despicable odors in the novel promotes the idea that script money, void of inherent value, is comparable to waste. Furthermore, the “stink” at the level of social metaphors, implies that money is corrupt, immoral and “evil.”
6In 1914, Sandor Ferenczi in “The Ontogenesis of the Interest in Money,” explained that as the child’s sense of hygiene develops, he becomes first interested in playing with sand, which is symbolically excrement that has lost its odor and consistence. Then he collects stones with colors and forms as attractive as possible. Subsequently, he begins to gather glass marbles, buttons and other collectable objects, not only as valuable items but also as standard value or some kind of primitive money. At this stage, children often engage in barter exchange by trading their marbles even though the value of each item is determined subjectively. In the final stage of the process, feces become identified with money that is lustrous hard and odorless. Pecunia non olet, money has no smell by inversion.8
7Thus, money inherits the childhood magic and becomes the ultimate object of desire, all the more so as its universal exchange value provides access to acquiring other objects of desire, or to accumulate wealth in view of future acquisitions. Ferenczi furthermore extends his interpretation of money to the wider society. He observes that collecting futile objects such as stones or marbles for the child is an end in itself that provides immense pleasure. It reveals the irrational and libidinal character of capitalism, the passionate thirst for accumulation of money that cannot be reduced to its mere practical aspects.9
8However, despite such constants, the meaning of money and its manifestations in society, literature or art are not static. Its material transformation from metallic coins with an inherent value, to paper money, to money of account, to electronic and virtual money today has accompanied the increasing power of abstraction of the human mind and has generated major changes in our societies. It is essential to consider the time period as well as the cultural matrix of the society in which money is engaged in order to fully understand its meaning. This is particularly true about the United States where money entwines with the myth of the American dream, personal success and national identity.
9Money may be considered as Martin Amis’s American novel because of the context in which it was written and because much of the action is situated in the United States. Writing a movie script seems to have brought Martin Amis to question the cultural codes and the differences between the United States and the United Kingdom, not only with regard to filmmaking but also in relation to money as the general equivalent for all values. Amis’s novel Money that was in the making at this time seems to crystalize these differentiations in its approach to the subject of money, which is the very title of the book.
10John Self, the protagonist of the novel, is in a sense a surrogate of Martin Amis. John’s surname, Self, also evokes a person’s identity and essential being and suggests that John Self is Martin Amis’s proxy in the novel. He is born of an American mother and an English father, and travels back and forth between London and New York throughout the story in order to make a film that is entitled Money. Amis’s coded writing evokes several texts from the English and American literary canon and thus consciously juggles with the cultural matrix, writing, and the meaning of money. On the one hand, he refers to American novels such as Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter and Melville’s “Bartleby,” and on the other hand he evokes the English cultural heritage through works such as Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, Timon of Athens, Othello and Hamlet.
11Money was published in 1984, the year that coincides—probably by pure chance—with the time set of George Orwell’s celebrated novel 1984. Although extremely different in style, subject and objectives, both novels picture a dystopia of some kind. Amis’s world depicts a society in which the money god rules and has commodified all things and people alike. If the political context of 1949 and the disappointment with Soviet communism provided the circumstantial background for Orwell’s 1984, the 1980s, which were years of profound social and economic transformation, provided the setting for Martin Amis’s Money.
12The 1980s were years when the meaning of Neoliberalism shifted from its traditional liberal interpretation to a more radical set of economic opinions. Ronald Reagan in the United States and Margaret Thatcher in Britain began to apply economic policies that were radically different from their predecessors.10 In order to fight stagflation, among other economic ills, they distanced themselves from traditional Keynesian policies and began to apply economic dogmas that reflected the ideas of the Chicago Monetarist School in line with Milton Friedman who advocated neoliberalism and production side economics.11
13A few years earlier, Ronald Reagan’s predecessor, President Carter, had expressed his apprehension at the rise of a neoliberal capitalist society in which mammon would rule. He set new definitions for interactions among human beings in his speech “Crisis of Confidence” on July 15, 1979:
We’re […] beginning to close the door on our past. In a nation that was proud of hard work, strong families, close-knit communities, and our faith in God, too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption. Human identity is no longer defined by what one does, but by what one owns.12
14President Carter’s words clearly announce and warn of the dangers of the new society on the rise based on consumption with money as the sole measure that determines all values.
15Martin Amis’s novel capitalizes on the surge of globalized financial capitalism and the rising neoliberal American society. It focuses on money as the embodiment of all human desires and the consequences of the new emerging order. Amis expresses his fear of a society in which money determines all human values and one’s relationship with others. In this context, money becomes destructive and stands as an emblem of collective suicide.
Selina’s never there. All the others—it’s just money. Money is the only thing we have in common. Dollar bills, pound notes, they’re suicide notes. Money is a suicide note.13
16To borrow Maurice Bloch’s words: “The impersonality and anonymity of money, it is argued, lends itself to the impersonal and inconsequential relationships characteristic of the market-place and even to a complete anonymity in exchange. Destructive of community, money depersonalizes social relations.”14 Bloch underlines the destructive power of money in terms of social relations. Money as the universal and impersonal means of exchange becomes the all-powerful product, the object of desire, that can acquire all desired objects and simultaneously reduce human relations to mere impersonal exchange.
17The protagonist John Self is invited by an American producer Fielding Goodney to New York in order to make a film entitled Money. Upon his arrival he walks around in the streets of New York and describes his impression of the city: “Everything was on offer outside. Boylesk, assisted showers, live sex, a we-never-close porno emporium bristling in its static. They even had the real thing out there, in prostitute form.”15 The author pictures a society in which everything is for sale and even people are degraded to the status of mere products and presented as objects of desire on a pedestal. As Karl Marx argued, money is the ultimate objectifier that annihilates the connections between the individual and objects. It transforms personal relations into material relations.16
18Money and debt mediate and delineate John Self’s relationships with almost every other character and every-thing in the novel, even with close friends and family members. John Self’s father, Barry Self, presents him with a bill that adds up everything spent on his education and upbringing and asks him to pay it back.
19At the end of the novel, John Self explains his relationships with his friends in terms of money:
I don’t see Terry Linex any more because he owes me money. I don’t see Alec Llewellyn any more because he owes me money. I don’t see Barry Self any more because he owes me money. I don’t see Martin Amis any more because I owe him money, in a sense. Money, it’s always the money. I once thought he and I might be friends. But there’s nothing between us, now that there is no money between us.17
20Money has depersonalized John Self’s interactions with others; his friends avoid him because they owe him money, or the other way round as is the case with the fictional Martin Amis. The author’s projection of himself in the novel, symptomatic of postmodern writing in general, establishes an imaginary exchange between the real world and the fictional sphere. Money functions as the make-believe intermediary; it determines not only the relationship between John Self and Martin Amis in the novel, but also the author’s bond with his book, since he is writing the book in order to earn a living. Moreover, the imaginary Martin Amis, a fictional representation of the author, acquires a status similar to script money void of intrinsic value.
21The fact that John Self is an advertising film director, who is making a feature film called Money immediately establishes money as a metaphor. John Self is there to make money and also to make a film about Money. Moreover, as an advertiser he is an integral part of the capitalist economy. His work directly affects people’s needs and wants by promoting products and making them look attractive to consumers.
22The years that preceded the writing of the novel were particularly important years in this regard since “positioning,” which consists of placing the product in the consumer’s mind, developed as a main strategy in advertising in the 1970s. John Self participates actively in the economic process of fashioning and promoting objects of desire.
23However, John Self is also a compulsive consumer himself. He is addicted to alcohol, tobacco, junk food, pornography and sex. Throughout the novel he systematically vomits or loses consciousness on account of his excessive consumption of alcohol and bad food. From this perspective, his body becomes comparable to a receptacle that ingests and rejects. His corporeal economy mirrors the capitalist economic system that encourages compulsive consumption and waste.
24The body thus functions at different symbolic levels in Amis’s novel. On the one hand, it stands parallel to the economic system on account of its flows and on the other hand, the objectified body—like money—becomes exchangeable and bankable. It draws its value from its appearance and marketability in the marketplace. Desire is always desire for the other, and the other’s desire for oneself. Thus, John Self longs for the ideal body;18 he stares at his overweight figure in the mirror and wishes to repair his haggard face, his decaying teeth and wonders how much it costs to transform his body into a perfect or, if not, an acceptable body:
Jesus, I am so fat these days. I tell you, I appall myself in the tub and on the can. […] How did it happen? It can’t just be all the booze and the quick food I put away. No, I must have been penciled out for this a long time ago. My dad isn’t fat. My mother wasn’t either. What’s the deal? Can money fix it? I need my whole body drilled down and repaired, replaced. I need my body capped is what I need. I’m going to do it, too, the minute I hit the money.19
25Money is the object of desire on account of its quality as the universal means of exchange. It can be traded against all other products such as food or other basic necessities of life. It can equally buy services, medical expertise and aesthetic operations in order to make one’s body and face more attractive. Thus, the novel establishes a parallel between money and the body, particularly that of women, in the sense that in the capitalist society of the eighties the body itself procures the status of means of exchange. The attractive body, in phase with the aesthetic standards of its society of the time, acquires a higher desirability and exchange value. The body, “repaired, replaced” and “capped” would make John Self more attractive and desirable to women in the marketplace.
26John Self’s relationship with women is not based on love or even friendship but on money and sex. Monetary exchange voids his relationships of human love; it reduces women to simple objects of desire and simultaneously places him in a dominant position as buyer. In order to preserve his liaison with his girlfriend Selena, he needs not only to support her but also to pay her in different ways. She dresses up, acts and speaks like a prostitute for him. She invents stories about her relationships with other men during his absence in order to excite him. She uses her disguised body and sexual narratives in order to turn herself into an object of desire for John. Thus, her body becomes comparable to currency with an exchange value in the vast marketplace of New York and London. Her name, Selina Street, reflects her personality and role in the novel. Selina, written with an “s” and not a “c” combined with her surname, Street, humorously implies that she prostitutes herself. In this perspective, Selina’s body, like the commodified body of the prostitute, represents her capital; it becomes a currency of its own that can be transacted and function as tender for payment.20
Selina Street has no money, no money at all. Imagine. Many times in her life she has lacked the price of a busfare, a teabag. She has stolen. She has pawned clothes. She has fucked for money. No, money hurts, it stings. […] She has always said that men use money to dominate women.21
27If money “stinks,” its absence “stings.” The lack of money to pay the bus fare or buy a tea bag “hurts.” Selina’s poverty to a large extent determines her character and behavior in the novel. “Sexual expenditure” here becomes the metaphor as Peter Brooks argues in Body Works. The term can be interpreted both as achieving orgasm or spending money.22 As Brooks explains, “The social body is the prime token of exchange value in the capitalist economy—the nexus of the exchange between money and desire. In fact the social economy is always already a socio-sexual economy, in which the underlying metaphors of investment, conservation and expenditure refer as much to the economics of libido as to the circulation of money.”23 The comment establishes a parallel between the corporeal economy and finance in the sense that bodily functions such as ingesting food, digesting and expelling waste are comparable to economic functions of investment, consumption and expenditure. The author associates both registers to excess and addiction as John Self’s excessive consumption of alcohol, fast food and sex that often cause nausea and loss of consciousness demonstrate.
28Fielding Goodney, John Self’s American film producer explains the system to him:
I have travelled widely, […], in the world of pornography. Always endeavor, slick, to keep a fix on the addiction industries: you can’t lose. The addicts can’t win. Dope, liquor, gambling, anything video—these have to be deep money veins. Nowadays the responsible businessman keeps a finger on the pulse of dependence.24
29Dependence is the watchword here; it is at the core of a business system that generates objects of desire and encourages disproportionate consumption and waste. It maintains the system and generates capital. Moreover, the image, “anything video,” in Fielding Goodney’s words, functions as an essential metaphor. The image is a representation of reality and not the thing itself. Movies, videos and television advertising, projected on the flat surface of the screen are nothing but two-dimensional illusions. They are made of dreams and fantasy, the very components of human desire. Advertising images promote commodities and in turn become objects of desire themselves.
30Fielding’s remark, “anything video,” obviously ought to be considered in terms of its development in the eighties, which were the years of commercialization of video cassette recorders and the microcomputer revolution. The postmodern age is intensely visual, defined by film, video, dance, performance arts and blockbuster museum shows.25
31It is indispensable to assess the nature of money in general and its development in the seventies in relation to the expansion of pictorial communication in society. Script money, which has neither an inherent value as in ancient times nor does it refer to any real value outside of itself anymore, is reduced to a sign that indicates a supposed value on paper. It becomes comparable to images projected on television or theatre screens, photographs or paintings, artifices that create the illusion of reality. The fact that the film is entitled Money becomes significant in this context. Lawrence Weschler writes about Boggs, an artist who reproduces exact replicas of banknotes and offers them in place of real banknotes to pay for his food in restaurants. Boggs explains to restaurant managers that the notes are drawings of the original, works of art that he sells at the exact price of the original banknote. In addition, he insists on receiving the exact change for the remaining value of the banknote. Here, the value resides in the artwork that reproduces the original banknote. Nevertheless, the process questions the value of money since he sells a drawing of a ten-dollar note for ten dollars and a fifty-dollar note for fifty. The difference is obviously the source of emission and the government signature that guarantees a supposed value.26 It is an image that represents a hypothetical value indicated on paper.
32In August 1971, Richard Nixon took the dollar off the Gold Standard, and although it was announced as a temporary measure yet the United States did not restore the Gold Standard. This meant that the dollar no longer referred to a value outside of itself and became a mere conventional sign.27 A sign that drew its value from itself and was free to float. Consequently, money became the object of intense speculation and insider dealings, which generated numerous Wall Street scandals in the 1980s and 90s. Oliver Stone’s Wall Street or Martin Scorsese’s Wolf of Wall Street interpret some of the well-known scams of the period.28
33The monetary capitalism that developed in the eighties disregarded production to a large extent and relied on pure finance. In other words, money began to reproduce itself through speculation and investment. As Maurice Bloch and Jonathan Perry have observed, money has a “life-like power. Indeed, as Marx saw it, this fetishism of money as the pre-eminent example of the fetishism of commodities is inseparable from capitalism. Here money itself is endowed with fecundity. Money ‘breeds’ money […].”29 The system, particularly after the structural economic changes that took place in the eighties, does not rely on production but on money that reproduces itself.
34John Self’s downfall corresponds to the realization that the entire project of making the film is nothing but a sham. Thus, the objects of his desire, that is money and film, are obliterated simultaneously. Consequently, he no longer perceives money as an object of desire but as a conspiracy. He views money as a fictitious invention that can be eliminated altogether.
If we all downed tools and joined hands for ten minutes and stopped believing in money, then money would no longer exist. We never will, of course. Maybe money is the great conspiracy, the great fiction. The great addiction too: we’re all addicted and we can’t break the habit now.30
35Script money without any inherent or concrete external value becomes a state approved hoax. In this context, it is meaningful that John Self repudiates money and simultaneously loses interest in advertising and sales and feels “nausea” when he watches ads on television. In short, he loses confidence in a system that promotes addiction to consumption by creating objects of desire through advertising and marketing. It is precisely the confidence people have in the system, the government and money that maintains the system. In this perspective, the word “confidence” connotes also the confidence game, which brings the victim to hand over his money voluntarily.31 As John Self explains:
The confidence trick would have ended in five minutes if it hadn’t been for John Self. I was the key. I was the needing, the hurting artist. I was the wanting artist. I wanted to believe. I wanted that money so bad. Me, and my no-confidence trick. ‘Confidence’ I now regard as a psychopathic state. Confidence, it’s a cry for help. I mean, you look out at that out there, and what you feel is confidence?32
36The crisis of confidence in the system and money coincides with the golden age of postmodernism in the 1980s. Postmodernism, which by definition questions objective knowledge, is distrustful of the existence of any real meaning behind the surface. As Jean Baudrillard argues in Simulacra and Simulation, “The Real” is short-circuited by the interchangeability of signs and the signs of the real become substitutes for the real itself.”33
37In Money, Martin Amis establishes parallels between money, the image and writing. He chooses money as the title of his postmodern novel and positions it as the central metaphor in order to disclose the misconception of a society that manufactures illusions. Money, as a pure sign, becomes interchangeable with all signs and in extremis it questions writing and the text itself as representations of reality.
38Frederic Jameson in Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism argues that “the culture of simulacrum comes to life in a society where exchange value has been generalized to the point at which the very memory of use value is effaced,” a society in which “the image has become the final form of commodity reification.”34 In other words, it is not the product—no matter what form it takes—that we desire but its representation. In this perspective, fiat money,35 void of inherent value, such as an image that represents a supposed reality dominates as the ultimate object of desire with the illusion that it can be exchanged against all objects.
39John Self’s fate and the film, Money, that he is commissioned to make, mirror the distrust of money as the general equivalent of all values and the moral crisis of its time. Towards the end of the novel John Self discovers that Fielding Goodney, the producer of the film, is a confidence artist and that the whole project is nothing but a confidence trick. Fielding confesses that the actors were paid to act as actors who are going to play in his film. He explains that all the documents that John Self signed without reading were in fact banking documents that allowed him to borrow money in John’s name. John Self financed the entire scheme and paid for the actors, Fielding Goodney’s sumptuous lifestyle, his own salary and expenses. Thus, Fielding’s confidence game simulates the making of a film rather than actually making it.
40Disguise, masks and role-play—all the artifacts of postmodernism—accompany Fielding Goodney’s confidence scheme. In the end, John Self discovers that both the transvestite prostitute who followed him around and Frank the Phone who harassed him on the phone were none other than Fielding Goodney in disguise. He discovers that it was Fielding Goodney who trampled on and injured his body in the back alley in their first confrontation. Only when John beats up Fielding and dominates him in their final confrontation, does Fielding reveal the truth about his identity and the confidence game to him.
41Fielding’s conspiracy and multiple disguises evoke the stereotype of the American confidence man as a phenomenon deeply entrenched in the American tradition. Amis’s coded writing refers to texts of the American and English literary canon that evoke the stereotype. Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Melville’s “Bartleby the Scrivener,” or Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice and Timon of Athens, all of which in some way deal with money, disguise and trickery. The intertextuality with these works contemplates the confidence game in the United States and England on the one hand as a cultural trait and on the other hand it marks the different stages of John Self’s downfall.
42First, in a bar called “Bartleby,” John Self’s credit card is refused.36 The waiter returns the card snipped into four on a tray. In Melville’s short story of the same title, Bartleby, a clerk in a lawyer’s office in Wall Street, refuses to make copies of originals by saying “I would prefer not to,” the very phrase for which the short story is well known. The fact that Bartleby refuses to make copies—that are identical but do not have the status of the originals—is particularly meaningful in relation to “bad money” and the refusal of John Self’s credit card. Bartleby’s refusal questions the value of the copy in view of the original legal document. Comparatively, electronic money—in some ways similar to money of account—differs from the original banknote or coin, since it becomes a dematerialized statement of the original.
43Later, John Self walks through “Carraway foyer” to meet Fielding Goodney and meets his mother Beryl Goodney who is wearing a badge saying “DAISY’S: RETIREMENT LIVING DOESN’T COME ANY FINER.” Both names, Carraway and Daisy obviously refer to Fitzgerald’s novel, The Great Gatsby, in which money is a central figure that defines the protagonists’ personalities and motivations. Like Fielding Goodney, Jay Gatsby is a confidence trickster, who has built an empire on crime money and junk bonds. As Tom Buchanan claims, he is “nobody from nowhere,”37 and has created a persona for himself that playacts respectability. Gatsby is infatuated with Daisy as “the golden girl”, whose “thrilling voice” jingles like money.38 Nevertheless, she too proves to be deceitful, since she commits a crime and lets Gatsby take the blame. Daisy, who is the object of yearning for Gatsby, becomes associated with the American dream and money’s magical jingling sound. Her lies and “carelessness” reflect the corruption and deceitfulness of money as the object of desire in American culture.
44Upon his return to London, John Self falls for another confidence trick; this time operated by his father Barry Self and his girlfriend Vron,39 who draws John to her bedroom and seduces him, only to be perceived by his father Barry. Consequently, Barry has him beaten up and refuses to pay the money he owes him. In addition, Barry acknowledges that he is not John’s true father.
45Here the crisis of identity, generated through the lack of paternity, go hand in hand with the confidence scheme and counterfeiting. The false paternity, which brands John with illegitimacy, is revealed at the same time as Fielding’s counterfeiting scheme and Vron’s planned duplicity. The child with no paternal reference becomes analogous with script money as a sign with no inherent value or external referent.40 Jean-Joseph Goux in Les Monnayeurs du langage discusses the question of paternity and its association with counterfeit money in André Gide’s Counterfeiters. He draws a parallel between counterfeit money and false paternity.
46Amis’s postmodern novel questions the reality behind the façade through money and the paternal name. The novel uses postmodern artifices such as pastiche and travesty to question personal identity, as is the case with John Self and Fielding, and to simultaneously associate money, image and language with counterfeiting.
Counterfeiting runs in John Self’s family; his grandfather’s forged five-pound note hangs in a frame above the bar in his father’s pub. The object is both forged money and a picture decorating the Shakespeare pub. It represents ancestry and family values. It is in me, all this. My father’s father was an oft-busted counterfeiter. One of his sweated fivers still stands framed above the bar in the Shakespeare. It looks hopeless. It looks like a face flannel. My dad himself has lots of form, a really useful show of prior—it’s a funny old London slammer that Barry hasn’t seen the inside of.41
47Gide’s novel identifies money as the object of desire interchangeable with all other objects of desire at a time of severe economic crisis. when the value of money and its purchasing power is in question. The story associates the crisis of identity and paternity, assimilable to the authority of the state that guarantees the authenticity of money. Thus, the object of desire and the universal value of exchange is falsified and its quest equals that of an illusion. Similarly, through multiple counterfeiting schemes, Martin Amis questions the true value of money as object of desire and simultaneously divulges its potency. Thus, the father and the stepmother set up a scheme in order to avoid paying the alleged son. The question of identity and Barry Self’s false fatherhood further questions the true value of fiat money and its status as the object of desire.
48The bedroom above the pub, the very place where John was conceived, is associated with trickery. John Self associates Shakespeare’s portrait that hangs outside Barry’s pub with The Merchant of Venice and Timon of Athens, both of which use money and guile as their central topics. In The Merchant of Venice, Portia, who is in love with Bassanio, dresses as a man and presents herself as an expert in law to trick Shylock and save Antonio’s life, who has not paid his debt to Shylock. Fielding Goodney’s transvestism and confidence schemes calls to mind Portia’s pastiche and trickery.
49However, the greatest confidence man of all is the author himself who invents the characters and sets up a plot for the reader to follow. From the beginning, Amis establishes a parallel between John Self who is making a film called Money and Martin Amis, the author who is writing the book Money. The choice of the name Self for the protagonist becomes significant in this perspective. John Self’s adventure is an initiatory voyage in order to discover his identity, his “self,” and the true paternal name.
50In the course of the story, John Self meets Martin Amis several times and maintains a conflictual relationship with him throughout the novel. John Self who has difficulty writing his script for the film offers the fictional Martin Amis a large sum of money enticing him to do the screenplay for him. Amis snobs him first and refuses, but when John Self doubles the stake he reluctantly accepts. The process establishes equivalence between money and writing, all the more so as John writes a check as payment. In a novel entitled Money, the fictitious character that bears the same name as the author accepts money to write a film script entitled Money.
51At the end of the novel, during a chess game, the fictional Martin Amis that qualifies the game as the “meeting of the minds,” proves to be a great tactician. The dialogue that takes place between them during the game reveals that the fictional Martin Amis has detailed knowledge of all the events and the confidence tricks to which John Self has been exposed. During the physical fight that takes place between them John Self accuses him of being the one who engineered the whole scheme. His accusation makes Martin Amis the ultimate strategist and the illusionist both as the character in the book who wrote the screenplay Money and as the author who wrote the book Money. The book from this perspective becomes the material object that symbolically establishes the impossible mediation between the real world and the fictional sphere, between the author and the characters.
52The novel in the end is nothing but a scam. The author engages in a speculative investment as in any business adventure. He invents a story with imaginary people, sets up a scheme and seduces the hypothetical reader who voluntarily pays to buy the book. With the story and his mastery of writing techniques, the author captivates the reader and makes the book an object of desire to be bought and read. Writing the book and creating an appealing consumer product becomes a way of making money and achieving the object of desire. The novel begins with a suicide note signed with Martin Amis’s initials M. A. that ends with the following lines.
To whom is the note addressed? To Martina, to Fielding, to Vera, to Alec, to Selina, to Barry—to John Self? No. It is meant for you out there, the dear, the gentle.42
53The suicide note—like the book—is not addressed to any of the fictional characters in the novel but to the “Reader” who will pay good money to buy the book called Money. Money and the book become one and the same object of desire both for the reader and the author who aims to make a living with his writing.
Notes de bas de page
1 Saturn 3 (1980), dir. Stanley Donen, story by John Barry, Screenplay by Martin Amis, with Kirk Douglas, Farah Fawcett, Harvey Keitel
2 On Martin Amis and his work, see in particular: Tredell, N., The Fiction of Martin Amis, London, Palgrave, 2000; Diedrick, J., Understanding Martin Amis, Columbia, SC, University of South Carolina Press, 2004; Keulks, G., (ed.), Martin Amis, Postmodernism and Beyond, Basingstoke, Palgrave McMillan, 2006; and Tredell, N., Anatomy of Amis: A Study of the Work of Martin Amis, London, Paupers’ Press, 2017.
3 Servet, J.-M., Nomismata, État et origines de la monnaie, Lyon, Presses Universitaires de Lyon, 1984. See in particular chapter one, “Le temps et l’objet d’une nouveauté,” p. 23-41. See also Schacht, J., Anthropologie culturelle de l’argent, Paris, Payot, 1973.
4 Miller, H., “Money and How It Gets That Way,” in H. Miller, Stand Still like the Hummingbird, New York, A New Direction Book, 1962, p. 119. The text was first published as a pamphlet by the author in Paris, and later in America by Bern Porter.
5 Freud, S., Character and Anal Erotism [1908], The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume IX [1906-1908], London, The Hogarth Press, 1959, p. 167-175. See also Borneman, E., Psychanalyse de l’argent, trans D. Guérineau, Paris, PUF, 1978, p. 85-90. See also Reiss-Schimmel, I., La Psychanalyse et l’argent, Paris, Éditions Odile Jacob, 1993, p. 47-62.
6 See Brown, N. O., Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History, Middletown, Connecticut, Wesleyan University Press, 1959, p. 226.
7 Amis, M., Money [1984], London, Penguin, 1985, p. 389. All quotations will be from this edition.
8 Ferenczi, S., “The Ontogenesis of the Interest in Money” [1914], in S. Ferenczi, Sex in Psychoanalysis, volume I, New York, Basic Books, 1950, p. 319-331.
9 Loc. cit.
10 See Brooker, J., “Sado-Monetarism: Thatcherite Subjects in Alasdair Gray and Martin Amis,” Textual Practice 26.1, 2012, p. 135-154.
11 See among others Harvey, D., A Brief History of Neoliberalism, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2005, and Collins, R. M., Transforming America, Politics and Culture in the Reagan Years, New York, Columbia University, 2007. See in particular chapter 3 “Reaganomics,” p. 59-92.
12 http://www.historyplace.com/speeches/carter-confidence.htm- (accessed on 19 July 2020). See also Horowitz, D., The Anxieties of Affluence, Boston, University of Massachusetts Press, 2004 and, in particular, chapter 8, “Three Intellectuals and a President, Jimmy Carter, ‘Energy and the Crisis of Confidence,’” p. 225-244.
13 Amis, M., Money, op. cit., p. 116.
14 Parry, J., and Bloch, M. (eds.), Money and Morality of Exchange, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1989, p. 6.
15 Amis, M., Money, op. cit., p. 10.
16 Zelizer, V. A., The Social Meaning of Money, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2017, p. 7.
17 Amis, M., Money, op. cit., p. 388.
18 Jean Baudrillard argues that the body has become an object of consumption as any other. La Société de consommation, ses mythes ses structures, Paris, Denoël, 1970, p. 201-202.
19 Amis, M., Money, op. cit., p. 5.
20 On sexual economy see among others Broqua, C., and Deschamps, C., L’Échange économico-sexuel, Paris, Édition EHESS, 2014, and P. Tabet, La Grande arnaque: Sexualité des femmes et échange économico-sexuel, Paris, L’Harmattan, 2004.
21 Amis, M., Money, op. cit., p. 90.
22 Brooks, P., Body Works, Objects of Desire in Modern Narratives, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1993, p. 69.
23 Ibid., p. 87.
24 Amis, M., Money, op. cit., p. 93.
25 Brooks, P., op. cit., p. 278.
26 Weschler, L., Boggs, A Comedy of Values, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1999.
27 Marsh, N., “Money’s Double: Reading, Fiction and Finance Capital,” Textual Practice 26.1, 2012, p. 118.
28 See Rotman, B., Signifying Nothing: The Semiotics of Zero, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1987, for his analysis of money/sign and value. See in particular chapter 4, “Absence of an Origin,” p. 87-107.
29 Parry, J., and Bloch, M. (eds.), Money and the Morality of Exchange, op. cit., p. 6.
30 Amis, M., Money, op. cit., p. 384. The italics are the author’s.
31 The crisis of confidence here is reminiscent of Herman Melville’s The Confidence Man (1857).
32 Amis, M., Money, op. cit., p. 393. The italics are the author’s.
33 Baudrillard, J., Jean Baudrillard, Selected Writings, M. Poster (ed.), Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1988, p. 166-184.
34 Jameson, F., Postmodernism or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Durham, Duke University Press, 1991, p. 18. See also Currie, M., Postmodern Narrative Theory, New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 1998, p. 104.
35 Fiat money is a term that is often used in analytical literature about money. It is government-issued currency that is not backed by a physical commodity, such as gold or silver, but by the government that issued it. It is a relatively well-known and common term used to refer to script money.
36 Melville, H., “Bartleby, the Scrivener” [1853, 1856], in The Piazza Tales, Evanston, Northwestern University Press, 1987, p. 21.
37 Fitzgerald, F. S., The Great Gatsby [1925], London, Penguin, 1926, p. 123.
38 Ibid., p. 115.
39 Vron is a “model,” who has just had her nude pictures published in a men’s magazine. Her name Veronica, meaning “true image,” was the name of a legendary saint who wiped Jesus’ face with a cloth and found that his image was imprinted on it. Thus, the name evokes an image, in contrast with reality, and simultaneously Jesus’ suffering and crucifixion.
40 “Le père (ici le géniteur) est celui qui par la conception apporte une forme ; comme le sceau sur la cire, comme l’effigie frappe sur la médaille ou la pièce de monnaie. La paternité naturelle est la frappe d’une monnaie, son impression, son estampillage. Comme un souverain bat monnaie, en marquant de sa noble et royale effigie la matière d’or dont il garantit l’authenticité et la légalité pour l’échange, le père apporte son image et ressemblance à l’enfant qui va naître.” J.-J. Goux, Les Monnayeurs du langage, Paris, Éditions Galilée, 1984, p. 60.
41 Amis, M., Money, op. cit., p. 253.
42 Ibid., preamble to the story, n.p.
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