MORALITY IN SIX NOVELS OF MARTIN AMIS DISSERTATION Presented to the Graduate Council ...

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MORALITY IN SIX NOVELS OF MARTIN AMIS
DISSERTATION
Presented to the Graduate Council of the
University of North Texas in Partial
Fulfillment of the Requirements
For the Degree of
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
By
Cara L. Snyder, B.A., M.A., M.R.E.
Denton, Texas
May, 1996
37
<1
m is
No. W -/
MORALITY IN SIX NOVELS OF MARTIN AMIS
DISSERTATION
Presented to the Graduate Council of the
University of North Texas in Partial
Fulfillment of the Requirements
For the Degree of
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
By
Cara L. Snyder, B.A., M.A., M.R.E.
Denton, Texas
May, 1996
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Snyder, Cara L., Morality in six novels of Martin Amis. Doctor of Philosophy
(English), May, 1996, 236 pp., references, 116 titles.
Six novels of Martin Amis—The Rachel Papers. Dead Babies, Success, Money:
A Suicide Note. London Fields, and The Information-are analyzed to determine to
what extent they uphold moral standards traditional in Western society, particularly
the categories of virtue that have descended from Aristotle and Aquinas. Thus the
novels are analyzed in relation to what they show about the three theological virtues
of faith, hope, and love, the cardinal virtues of prudence, temperance, courage, and
justice, and the intellectual virtues of knowledge, art, skill, and understanding.
Nearly all of these virtues turn out to be important in varying degrees. Faith
and hope are mocked, and courage is given incidental attention. The other virtues,
however, are strongly upheld, including prudence and temperance, and particularly
love, justice, and the intellectual virtues.
In the earlier novels, the protagonists understand love between adults
egoistically, only as romance or sexual passion, with emphasis not on the welfare of
the other but on getting what one wants. The need for parental love is upheld,
however, with a clear understanding that its lack produces danger for the children and
for society. The protagonists pity the weak, but have little understanding of love as
self-sacrifice. Ego-based justice predominates as the primary motive—obtaining what
the self thinks is deserved. The intellectual virtues then become servants of this self-
centered justice rather than servants of others-centered love. Though the extreme
results of this situation are decried, especially in Dead Babies, generally the
protagonists do not realize the extent of their egoism and lack of love.
In London Fields and The Information, self-sacrifice, particularly for the sake
of children, emerges, and what little hope there is is invested in family love. Love
between adults is still largely justice-based, but there is some evidence that all the
virtues, including justice and intellect, are subordinated to love, especially family
love, love that considers the welfare of others.
Copyright by
Cara Lynn Snyder
1996
111
TABLE OF CONTENTS
page
Chapter
1. INTRODUCTION 1
Importance of This Study
Selection of Novels
Review of the Literature
The Method
2. THE RACHEL PAPERS: LITERATURE AND
THE USES OF LIFE 20
3. DEAD BABIES: WHEN CHARITY FAILS AT HOME 52
4. SUCCESS: THE WHIRLIGIG OF TIME AND MONEY 83
5. MONEY:A SUICIDE NOTE: THE WELL-ORDERED LIFE 98
6. LONDON FIELDS: NEITHER FAITH, HOPE, NOR LOVE 140
7- THE INFORMATION: AT HOME ON PLANET EARTH 182
8. CONCLUSION 218
BIBLIOGRAPHY 228
IV
CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION
Importance of This Study
Martin Amis is one of the United Kingdom's most controversial contemporary
writers, praised and blamed for both his techniques and the contents of his novels.
Attracted by the techniques of post-modernism and magical realism, he is denigrated,
on one hand, by reviewers and critics, including his father, the late Kingsley Amis,
who still want a story to develop its characters and not call attention to itself as a
story (Michener 110). On the other hand, he is respected by critics such as
MacLeod, for using these techniques to critique the decaying post-modern world.
Another set of critics berates him for his traditional humanist morality (Doan, e.g.),
while others, such as Specht, conclude that the obscenity that they find repellent in
the novels is acceptable precisely because of the traditonal morality that is ultimately
being upheld.
Since his first novel in 1972, Amis has survived being known as Britain's
"Brat of Letters" (Michener, e.g.) and "Smarty Anus" (Private Eve, cited in Morrison
101) to being a respected novelist whose works are always awaited with interest, even
when previous ones have disappointed. Attacked and praised from all directions, for
the same reasons at once, Martin Amis demands attention.1
Clarification of the morality presented in the works is important in practical
ways. First, Amis's works might be viewed by some readers as dangerous.
Promiscuous sex, drugs, alcohol, and violence are rampant through most of Amis.
There is danger here, just as there is danger in selling kitchen knives: anyone can buy
them and use them however they choose. Some Amis readers may need some
reminding, from outside sources, what the novels are saying, through and above all
the extreme behaviors in them. It is hoped that such a readership would be small,
and certainly that group is unlikely to read this study.
However, from the other direction, from the perspective of those who see
Amis as a moralist, not an immoralist or an amoralist, the important questions are,
what is the morality which he presents, and how reliable is it? What are its strengths
and weaknesses? Can he be trusted, and how is one to judge? These are key
questions for any literature but are questions often overlooked or skirted in
contemporary criticism. In the predicament of the post-modern world with its sense
of no received standard of morality~a world in which a news magazine can use
"Whose Values?" as its cover story (Newsweek 8 June 1992)—it is all the more
1Amis's life has similarly attracted attention. Born in Oxford on August 25,
1949, to Kingsley and Hilary Bardwell Amis (Ashley 39), he grew up in England, the
United States, and Majorca (Michener 111). He took the B.A. in honors from Exeter
College, Oxford, in 1971, worked in journalism from 1971-79, won the Maugham
Award in 1974, became a writer fulltime in 1979, and married Antonia Phillips in
1984 (Henderson 35). They have two sons, Louis and Jacob (Stout 36). In 1993
Amis left his wife for a relationship with Isabel Fonseca (McKay 11:5). In 1995 he
created a stir in the publishing world with an $800,000 advance for The Information
and his handling of old friends, novelist Julian Barnes and Barnes's wife Pat
Kavanaugh, who was Amis's agent until The Information (Shnayerson 133). Both
Contemporary Authors and Contemporary Novelists include articles on Amis covering
most of these details.
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important to analyze any system of morality presented, following it through to its
fictional results.
In his 1985 interview in Haffendon's Novelists in Interview, Amis said: "I
have strong moral views" and adds that they are about "things like money and
acquisition" (13). By 1989 and London Fields, he has clearly added nuclear arms to
his list. Says Specht: "Amis uses his fiction as a vehicle for his deep concern at the
ways of the world of the late twentieth century" (785). Amis states in an oft-quoted
remark in his 1981 essay on Truman Capote that fiction requires "moral imagination,
moral artistry" (Moronic Inferno 39), and, in a 1995 essay on Saul Bellow,
commenting on the inseparable relationship of style and content, says that "style is
morality" (Atlantic 126). Though this latter remark is enigmatic, if not downright
meaningless~the kind of remark that novelists can get away with, not philosophers-it
is significant in underscoring Amis's own continuing concern with both style and
morality. The point at which style and morality do most overtly converge is in satire,
which is often Amis's mode.
Amis is not purely satiric, however, and while objects of satire abound in the
novels, the characters themselves are usually so thoroughly realized that the novels
succeed more as a kind of extreme realism than as satire. Amis himself says in the
Haffendon interview: '"Writing novels is a kind of high anthropology'" in which the
writer himself is not entirely aware of '"what he is up to'" (15). Amis the
anthropologist so carefully grounds his extreme visions in recognizable human reality
that they become real enough to be taken seriously, not just as satires warning of
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where folly leads, but as psychological analyses of human behavior. The characters
may have extreme and implausible pasts or situations, but as fictional creations are
consistent, fully realized, and psychologically believable. Amis does not, in fact, fit
readily into any category. He is satiric, but the characters have a reality that exceeds
the local points of the satire; he is metafictional, with a fondness for authorial
presence, but his characters manage to live their own lives anyway; he is magical in
some ways, but the magic does not determine the outcome, and his scientific bent
usually outweighs the magic; he is scientific without producing either naturalism or
science fiction, though elements of both are present; he is apocalyptic, but with an
element of optimism that seems to come from both himself and his characters. What
is he? Perhaps he might be called a hypothetical realist. He envisions extreme and
absurd characters in extreme and absurd situations, situations sometimes too horrible
even for satire (Highet 212), and yet treats such characters with moral realism. The
characters reap the fruit of their morality.
However, while it is easy to recognize moral concerns in Amis such as
money, pornography, violence, and nuclear warfare, the underlying morality is harder
to uncover. What sort of morality is at work in a character like John Self, who
abjures his acquisitiveness but continues to pick up and dump women? What sort of
morality is at work in a character like Samson Young, who rescues a baby but
commits a murder? No systematic analysis of Amis's morality has yet been
published; attention to his morality has been largely limited to comments in book
reviews and interviews. Amis is a serious and clever moralistic writer whose works