Begley and Amis in conversation

            If we had any doubts up to this weekend’s reading, now it is certain that Amis is painting a dystopian picture of society. In Jon Begley’s Satirizing the Carnival of Postmodern Capitalism… he suggests (among other possible interpretations) that Money may be a “dystopian representation of a collective postmodern condition.” (80) It is important to consider, however, that this “dystopian” world that Amis creates is one we experience through Self’s eyes.  He takes us to the darkest, most sex-obsessive, money-hungry confused places – both real places and to states of mind.  Yet Self also feels shame.  He does not pride himself in these compulsions, but rather runs away from them: drinking himself into stupors to avoid coming to terms with his behavior and understanding himself better.  Furthermore, in Begley’s essay, he considers Dostoyevsky and his view of character: As in Dostoyevsky, what is important for Amis is “not how his hero appears in the world but first and foremost how the world appears to his hero, and how the hero appears to himself.” (Bakhtin, Problems 47) Self appears to himself as he does to the reader and to the world – ugly, fat, greedy, drunk – and this influences our understanding and interpretation of the world around him.  Is New York really dystopian? Or is this feeling we get when reading the story just a product of Self’s point of view?

            The corruption is not contained in New York, however.  When Self returns home to London, he finds that London, too, had begun to adopt some of the capitalistic, “consumer culture and symptoms of global tinnitus, temporal disorientation, and psychic fragmentation.” (81) Describing his neighborhood in London, he says, “There has recently been a wavelet of fag murders in my neighborhood… Three weeks ago a girl was found strangles in a stolen car… That is the business, isn’t it, paid risk, paid fear?” (215-216) Did Self’s from his experiences in New York with him to England?  Is England really changing or is it just Self’s changing interpretation of his surroundings?  

            Lastly, throughout the novel we experience moments that are often strangely associated with money.  Self will describe a moment that seemingly has nothing to do with money in fiscal terms, resulting in money as motif in the novel (hence the title, I suppose).  For example: “They didn’t need prompting: you see, they really did think it was possible, likely, certain that money and fame had fingered them, that exceptionality had singled them out.” (184) In this way, money is not only how we understand it – as a physical, tangible means or currency.  In Money, money becomes a way through which emotions, actions, thoughts, and events are understood.  It becomes a new kind of currency.  Money pervades through boundaries in ways that only Self could illuminate.