money pt 4

I read Martin Amis Writes Postmodern Man by Elie Edmondson in addition to the Money reading and while I'm actually pretty pissed that it gave away the ending of the novel, it also gave me a lot of good insight into Amis' decisions as the author. The article also answered some general questions about the novel as a whole that I had been thinking about, such as "Why would an author make the main character/narrator of a novel such an incompetent slob?" and "Why did Amis introduce himself as a character in the novel?"

Edmondson explains in the article that Amis does two main things in Money that make it such a strong narrative. First, he "introduces a protagonist who is so obsessed with an illusion that he cannot function in his world, cannot even recognize his real environment when it is encountered." This of course, is John Self, whose obsession is money. I began to understand Self more as a character when I read the Saul Bellows excerpt in the article describing the Postmodern Man. "He is certainly in many respects narrow and poor, blind in heart, weak, mean, intoxicated, confused in spirit--stupid." John Self is clearly meant to represent the Postmodern Man here. He is obsessed with money, therefore he has no real center and his "primary emotions are fear and shame". In the midst of his narrative, he has flashes of self awareness that are very distinct from the way that he normally thinks, and that confuse him because he doesn't even know why he is not happy, even with so much money.  He sometimes comes very, very close to realizing what is wrong with his life, but even if he did have that realization, he still would most likely fail at improving his life because he is literally so stupid that he wouldn't even now how.

The second thing that Amis does is "[distance] the reader from anything resembling authority within the text". Usually, a narrator is either omniscient, or is just a character telling the story from their first person point of view. In Money, however, John Self is clearly not omniscient, and isn't even trustworthy enough to narrate objectively, so the audience really gets no sense of security about what is going on in the story at all since the narrator is blacked out/delusional/just wrong for most of it. However, I feel like when Amis introduced the character of Martin Amis into the story, I found myself looking to him to be the voice of reason or moral authority for the novel. To explain the presence of Martin Amis as a character in Money, Edmondson writes, "in Money, Amis himself appears as a character in the text and speaks to the protagonist, John Self. Self then directly addresses the reader, giving his gloss (always wrong) on what the author-character meant. Amis therefore implicates the reader in the narrative by putting him inside the character's head, and at the same time distances the reader by drawing attention to the text as a piece of fiction.... As creator, he shows that the concept of a fully refined and omnipotent consciousness is, by definition, deluded: Consciousness is at one level a narrative that the individual creates through action, but on another level, that individual's reality is constituted by a larger narrative."