Inevitable Yet Impossible Impersonality: Martin Amis’s The Information

1In this quotation, literary impersonality is both exemplified and problematised. It is illustrated via free direct thought, as if the character were an independent agent free from any typographical code imposed upon him by such higher entity as the narrator. Moreover, the action of the artist is masked since the subject of the verb ‘to waive’ is an inanimate noun phrase, as though ‘the interior monologue’ could act autonomously. In addition, the reference to Joyce, regarded as one of the narrator’s literary masters, undermines the originality of the passage inasmuch as the narrative voice stresses his awareness of using second-hand devices, which amounts to saying that the creator is dispossessed of his own text— at least partially. Nevertheless, in true postmodern fashion, the narrator effaces so ostensibly the signs of his presence (‘Or rather’) that he bares the devices on which literary impersonality relies and thus proves his eventual dominance over his character.

2Extra-textual elements render the question of literary impersonality even more problematic as the example under scrutiny is extracted from the very beginning of The Information penned by Martin Amis, for whom the question of literary impersonality is particularly acute because he has to come to terms with the literary heritage of his father, Sir Kingsley Amis, a burden that makes it theoretically more difficult for Amis fils to find an original voice. And yet, ever since the publication of his first novel in 1973, Martin Amis has been acclaimed as a unique stylist2 who is something of a public figure since his life and works are continuously discussed on a web site.3 It may consequently sound preposterous to tackle impersonality in The Information since Amis’s media exposure was particularly important in the months prior to the publication of this novel for he was vilified for asking a huge advance from his publisher,4 which explains why his divorce, his affair with an American heiress, his dental surgery along with the agony of his father hit the headlines of the gutter press with a vengeance. Therefore, so much is known about the life of the writer that, to use Frederic Regard’s terms, the ‘concept Martin Amis’ creates so many expectations for both readers and critics that they seem to preclude impersonality.5 Moreover, The Information is arguably the novel in the Amis canon that questions the most self-consciously the link between the author and the text owing to the very absence of the author’s name from the front cover. This absence is culturally conspicuous since, as Michel Foucault has demonstrated in ‘What Is an Author?,’ literary anonymity is not accepted in contemporary Western societies.6 Nonetheless, even though the small case ‘i’ printed on the front cover refers to the first letter of the title, it obliquely flaunts the monstrous ‘I,’ the gigantic ego of the empirical creator. Therefore, Martin Amis and The Information encapsulate the paradoxical ‘two ages’ that are typical of contemporary literature, as Malcolm Bradbury has diagnosed: ‘Thus we indeed live in two ages at once: the age of the author hyped and promoted, studied and celebrated; the age of the author denied and eliminated, desubjected and airbrushed from writing....’7

3It is precisely the exploration of this paradoxical tension between absence and presence to which ‘impersonality’ invites us. Indeed, at its very basic, ‘impersonality,’ when applied to human beings, refers to a lack of identity, subjectivity and individuality, verging on non-existence. Moreover, because ‘impersonality’ may denote the lack of agency, the lack of originality or even the loss of origin, it raises the question of the connection between the literary work of art and real life persons, among whom the creator. ‘Impersonality’ is also defined as not engaging human personality and emotions, as if it were antithetical to the expression or representation of emotions. Remarkably then, ‘impersonality’ is always described negatively, as a lack. The analysis of the tension between presence and absence will be carried out in three successive steps. First, we will analyse how the text stages the ontological collapse of the modern subject. We will then focus on the paradoxical workings of narrative hyper-personality before showing how The Information dramatises the return of the author.

4The Information initially exploits the comical potential of the characters’ lack of individuality by staging twins, such as the shady twin brothers, Darko and Ranko, who look and sound so much alike as to be unidentifiable. This gives birth to an almost absurd case of mistaken identity when Richard successively meets both brothers:

‘Who are you?’
‘Ranko.’
‘You mean Darko.’
‘Darko is my twin brother. He’s Croat. I’m Serb. We look the same but we’ve got nothing in common.’
‘Well you both eat pizza. You’ve still got a bit of it hanging from your moustache.’ (175)

5A similar joyous confusion, based on identity swapping, erupts when Richard is mistaken for Gwyn and is then insulted by Demi’s father who ‘didn’t dislike Richard, not personally. He just thought he was Gwyn.’ (277) With Gwyn as his twin brother—the text plays on the homophony between Gwyn and twin—Richard is thus denied any individual notion of self, which is also the case for Gwyn since Richard recognises their mutual lack of ontological completion (‘Whatever happens, we balance each other out.... You’re part of me and I’m part of you’ [475]), the final chiasmus crowning the analogy between the two complementary Siamese brothers. Paradoxically then, their lack of individuality derives from their duplicated personality, an annihilation of their respective identity best encapsulated by the oxymoronic phrase ‘Same difference’ that crops up again and again in the novel. (25) Staging interchangeable cartoon figures, The Information initially exploits the comical tricks inherent in impersonality for the hilarious joy of readers.

6Nonetheless, since the text predominantly uses impersonality to depict much gloomier questions, this jovial vein is overshadowed by the total destruction of identity via the recurrence of onomastic doubles, as when Richard, in the post office, meets ‘a queue of Hildas and Gildas, of Nobbies and Noddies.’ (42) Paronomasia makes the reader understand that Richard encounters mere ‘nobodies’ endowed with a mock identity, a series of clones proliferating according to the rhetorical trick of metagramme. This device also pinpoints the amorphous identity of London hoodlums such as ‘Del and Pel’ (242) who spend their days with Ben and Den. (459) Thus impersonality is staged via overkill, which paves the way for the sombre abjection of Marco, the dyslexic ugly duckling of Richard’s twin sons, who wants to erase his identity by being renamed ‘Nothing,’ (405) a few pages before Richard’s depressive secretary succumbs to self-deprecation by committing suicide. (409)

7Such ontological collapse is crowned by the dominance of the simulacrum. For example, Richard, who sees only a ‘simulacrum’ of himself in the lavatory mirrors (217) before becoming ‘a ghost in his own life,’ (244) satirises Gwyn’s spiritual death on account of his hyper-mediation8 in a gnomic thought that incorporates the whole of mankind seemingly subjected to gradual depersonalisation: ‘Yes, probably, the more you were photographed, the thinner it went for your inner life. Being photographed was dead time for the soul.’ (20-21) Identity is likewise sucked in by simulation when Scozzie looks ‘like a suspect’s face “pixelated” for the TV screen,’ (24) which is echoed by the chess board that suddenly resembles ‘the image of a face, on TV; the smeared cubes of some wrongdoer, some child murderer pixelated—the face of Steve Cousins.’ (474) By reducing characters to media images, the novel relates the total annihilation of human quiddity.

8The grim undercurrent of the text is moreover heightened by the potentially violent impersonality of London that swarms with such blackguards as Scozzie, who, having multiple identities federated by violence (‘Scozz, Psycho, Minder, Adolf’ [33]), before being compared to ‘Mars, the planet of war,’ (230) thus becomes the allegory of the urban violence that persecutes Gwyn. The personified aggressiveness of the city entails the depersonalisation of its dwellers: ‘But now the city behaved as if it wanted to break his face. The city wanted to break his face.’ (401) It is the same feeling of ubiquitous and random persecution that accounts for Richard’s anger directed at the unidentified careless driver, the ‘Road Rager’9 whose anonymity—he is only designated by abusive periphrases (‘that fucking guy,’ [70] ‘that slobbering fuckpig of an Englishman,’ [247] ‘the swine in his German car’ [493])—makes him more threatening and adds to the gloomy tone of the text. Impersonality is then the privileged modality for the representation of urban violence, the proportions of which are almost apocalyptic.

9The impersonality of the urban setting is intensified by the impersonality of the universe that has switched ‘[f]rom geocentric to heliocentric to galactocentric to plain eccentric.’ (436) Each step of the gradatio unhinges man’s sense of identity. Epistemology dovetails ontology since astronomical findings sap the anthropic, egocentric universe informed by astrology that is based on the assumption that the fate of each individual is connected to each and every planet. This switch is graphically described by a vertiginous space journey that, via a breathtaking inventory of the celestial bodies comprised in our universe, grasps the immensity of the cosmos to illustrate Kant’s ‘principle of terrestrial mediocrity’ (129) which Richard uses to describe his projected book The History of Increasing Humiliation. Man’s loss of bearings is conveyed by the address of every inhabitant of the earth:

This or That Number,
This or That Street,
This or That Conurbation,
This or That County,
This or That Country,
This or That Continent,
This or That Hemisphere,
The Earth,
The Superior Planets,
The Solar System,
Nr. Alpha Centauri,
The Orion Spur,
The Milky Way,
The Local Group,
The Local Cluster,
The Local Supercluster,
The Universe,
This Universe. The One Containing:
The Local Supercluster,
The Local Cluster,
And So On. All the Way Back To:
This or That Street,
And This or That Number. (64)

10In a painful anagnorisis reinforced by the typography reminiscent of a calligramme, The Information forces the readers to visualise their plummeting prestige in the vast universe.10 Impersonality is a tool to stage the ontological collapse of the contemporary subject in the so-called postmodern age dominated by serial or simulated identity and ubiquitous urban violence. Hence, impersonality, underlying the dominant elegiac tone of the text, is likely to spark off a feeling of sadness for the readers. Now, if human existence amounts to nothing, if humans are no longer at the centre of an impersonal universe, who is?

11The space left vacant by cartoon characters is filled in by the autodiegetic narrator who steals the show thanks to his repeated insertions into the frame provided by the extradiegetic, heterodiegetic narration. Right from the very first sentence, his overbearing subjectivity is inscribed into what sounds like a confession: ‘Cities at night, I feel, contain men who cry in their sleep and then say Nothing.’ (9) The incipit sets up a reading pact based on authenticity and sincerity, which imbues the text with romantic lyricism. The voice of the autodiegetic narrator expatiating on his feelings buttresses pathos, metonymically conveyed by the lachrymose opening of the text. Writing from the heart, the narrator poses as a sad and wise individual able to reveal ‘the crisis of the middle years,’ (62) which is repeatedly dramatised by epigrammatic or sententious intimations of mortality encapsulated by the eponymous title: ‘The information is telling me to stop saying hi and to start saying bye.’ (282) The narrator fuses pathos and lyricism to build up his personality on sentimentality and introspection, melodiously thrown into relief by the internal rhyme. Individualisation in The Information turns the Cartesian cogito into ‘I feel therefore I am.’

12In addition to his wisdom acquired by experience, the narrator flaunts his omnipotence, expressed by an extended simile in which he flexes his muscles: ‘Jesus. That fucking dog was all over him like a video nasty. And you can’t call them off. You can’t call them off. Like me in that respect. Call me off? You can’t call me off.’ (72) The pseudo dialogue that is set up by the apostrophe is immediately denied by hypophora. The narrator’s monologue thus exemplifies the hegemonic control he exerts over his characters, which confirms James Diedrick’s contention that The Information is federated by ‘an omniscient but personalized narrator.’11 The narrator’s dominance is further exemplified by the generic predestination to which his characters are subjected. They are but puppets in what is a tragicomedy, as he recalls: ‘Never fear. You are in safe hands. Decorum will be respected.’ (479) In addition to casting light on the characters’ lack of agency and autonomy, as is particularly the case for Richard who apparently has switched from not having a literary agent to not being an agent when he asserts (‘This isn’t me’ [218]), such metaleptic intrusions, when the narrator buttonholes the narratee, tend to blur the distinction between the fictional world of characters and the actual world of readers. His strategy of ostentation produces a distanciation effect, known as the Borges-Brecht effect suggesting, to use Patricia Waugh’s words, ‘that we are all, metaphorically, fictions.’12 Such violations of ontologically distinct levels imply that readers themselves are depersonalised, mere paper readers.13

13The narrator’s omnipotent, almost divine, hyper-personality is also conveyed by his own personal knowledge, which is evidenced by allusions to literary sphinx (Beckett, Kafka Céline, [47] D. H. Lawrence, [308] Henry James, E. M. Forster [310]) and rampant intertextual references to canonical works such as, to name but a few, Sons and Lovers, Brighton Rock, A Handful of Dust, (76) Comus, The Faierie Queene, (197) Little Dorrit (223) or else ‘The Aleph’ by Jorge Luis Borges. (224) Moreover, the narrator stages episodes that directly pay homage to canonical authors, as when Richard drinks too much and has ‘De Quinceyan visions.’ (273) Ultimately such references draw the reader’s attention to the status of The Information as a second-hand artefact indebted to previous writers and works. Thus the narrator’s ostentatious knowledge proves counter-productive since it implies a degree of self-effacement behind masters, which, to use David Lodge’s terms in After Bakhtin, undermines the idea of the creator as ‘a substantial, historic entity, the unique and authenticating origin of the text.’14

14In fact, intertextuality dramatises the apparently impossible originality of the contemporary writer, who is condemned to be at least ‘a second voice in the discourse,’ (Lodge 98) especially since The Information gives pride of place to plagiarism.15 For instance, the would-be poet Keith Horridge succumbs to the anxiety of influence theorised by Harold Bloom since he plagiarises his best poems from ‘The Library of Babel’ and from ‘The Circular Ruins’ by Borges (424) while Richard hatches a plot to write a ‘fake ur-text’ of Gwyn’s best seller (Moran 315) to make people believe that Gwyn is but a plagiarist. (435) Therefore, the ‘I’ printed on the front cover of the novel is a personal pronoun which, although it theoretically refers to one individual, incorporates in reality so many other voices that it becomes, if not a universal, at least a collective pronoun. Hence, the autodiegetic narrator seems doomed to ventriloquism, as if the narrative voice was depersonalised, a posture which tallies with the theories propounded by Roland Barthes who asserted in 1968 that ‘writing is the destruction of every voice, of every point of origin.’16 In this regard, the ‘rumours of wind’ (494) mentioned in the explicit of The Information seem to indicate that the text has reached what Foucault calls ‘the anonymity of a murmur.’ (Foucault 210)

15Nonetheless, although The Information toys with literary impersonality, it would be an imposture to pretend that it lacks originality. On the contrary, its satirical and parodical veins demonstrate that literary impersonality, if partially inevitable, is neither desirable nor attainable.

16Indeed, Gwyn’s attempt at stylistic impersonality by refining gender out of existence is attacked by Richard who thus lampoons Gwyn’s spurious commitments which amount to mere concessions to the changing doxa:

He had a habit, in his prose, of following a neuter antecedent with a feminine pronoun. From Amelior: ‘While pruning roses, any gardener knows that if she...’ Or, from the days when he still wrote book reviews: ‘No reader could finish this haunting scene without feeling the hairs on the back of her...’ Richard clucked away to himself, but these days he often opted for an impersonal construction, or simply used the plural, seeking safety in numbers. (239)

17Besides, The Information seems to stage the critical debate over biographical reading when Richard passes strictures on Gwyn’s preposterous quest for a sort of androgynous impersonality that aspires to refine out of existence the gender of the writer: ‘Gwyn didn’t write like a man. Gwyn didn’t write like a woman. It wasn’t personal, he wrote like something in between.’ (435) Via Gwyn’s mannerism, the text vilifies the extreme consequences of biographical fallacy all the more so as Richard supports his contention that men and women write and read differently by a reference to one of Amis’s literary masters,17 Nabokov who said that ‘he was frankly homosexual in his literary tastes.’ (29) The Information rests on the assumption that biographical fallacy itself is a fallacy.

18More generally, Amis’s novel parodies the critical dogma of the death of the author by depicting only the near death experience of both Gwyn and Richard who survive an emergency landing despite Richard’s repetition ‘Death is good.’ (381) Nowhere is the author more alive creatively than when he parodically recycles the literary canon, such as The Tempest. Indeed, Gwyn defines the end of Richard’s writing career for financial reasons in an ironically high-flown ternary rendering of Prospero’s valediction to magic: ‘The End of Fiction, the foreclosure of Richard’s art, the casting of his staff into the cold waters because they couldn’t afford it.’ (206) Originality derives from such a rewriting, from such a fruitful dialogue with tradition that is also encapsulated when the romantic catch phrase ‘emotion recollected in tranquillity’ is remoulded into ‘emotion invented in tranquillity’ (83) and when Dickens’s introductory sentence in A Tale of Two Cities is adapted into ‘This was the best mirror, and it was the worst mirror’ (293) to suit Amis’s ontological preoccupation. This irreverent distancing from the literary tradition symbolises the gradual emancipation of the author who is neither a parrot nor a scriptor condemned to echo in a sterile manner the tutelary voices of literary masters. Despite Bloom’s anxiety of influence, originality is restored all the more so as Richard’s plot to accuse Gwyn of plagiarism founders.

19Furthermore, The Information eschews impersonality for the correspondence between fictitious and real characters is at the heart of the novel, as the American critic Joe Moran recalls: ‘Even before the book was published, the media discussion fed on the notion of The Information as roman à clef; Richard and Gwyn were supposedly modeled on Amis himself and Julian Barnes, a friend who fell out with Amis when Amis dispensed with the services of the agent Pat Kavanagh (Barnes’s wife) in search of a higher advance.’18 (Moran 313) More importantly, it is the individuality of Martin Amis that is poetically inscribed into The Information. Indeed the autodiegetic narrator is depicted as the double or alter ego of the author. They share the same initials since, for his fortieth birthday, Richard receives a letter sent by the narrator on which is written ‘M.A. (Oxon).’ (48) This first hint is intensified when the narrator meets a deaf-and-dumb child and makes ‘the signs—the M, the A—with my strange and twisted fingers.’ (63) Added to this is the fact that the narrator, who is nicknamed ‘Mart’ by his brother, (281) was forty years old at the time of composition since he asserts: ‘I wrote those words five years ago when I was Richard’s age.’ (63) Given that The Information was published in 1995, the date referred to here is 1989 or 1990, which coincides with the age of Martin Amis at the time since he was born in 1949. Finally the size of the narrator in The Information is exactly that of Martin Amis, as is explained in Experience,19 Martin Amis’s autobiography published in 2000, in which the first person pronoun designates as closely as possible the empirical author. In The Information, the narrator reveals that:

As a man who stands five-feet-six inches tall (or 5 61/2 , according to a passport I once had), I know about dating and size.... My mother kept telling me I ‘would shoot up.’ I was still asking her at the age of twenty. ‘What’s all this about me shooting up?’ (281)

20whereas, in the opening pages of Experience, Martin Amis asserts:

The point about Karen and her being nine-foot-six was that I was then about five-foot-two (and had only another four inches to go). Everyone kept saying to me, ‘You’ll suddenly shoot up, and, after a while, I kept saying to everyone, what’s all this about me suddenly shooting up? It hasn’t happened.’ (12)

21Such correspondences between the autodiegetic narrator and the author, reinforced by stylistic similarities, blur the distance that separates the real life author and the autodiegetic narrator,20 as if Martin Amis’s existence and style were inspired by this passage in The Information. The constant obliteration of the distance between The Information’s narrator and Martin Amis21 shows that the individuality of the author is not effaced from the text but is scattered all over it, particularly in the paratext. The book is indeed dedicated to Louis and Jacob—Martin Amis has two sons thus called—and to the memory of Lucy Partington, Martin Amis’s dead cousin whose remains were excavated in 1994 from the garden of the serial killer, Frederick West, as is related in Experience.

22On top of this autobiographical subtext, The Information comprises sentences that point to Amis’s previous non-fictional works, whether they be essays, literary criticism or interviews. For example, The Information describes the demise of literature as follows:

First, gods. Then, demigods. Then epic became tragedy, failed kings, failed heroes. Then the gentry. Then the middle class and its mercantile dreams. Then it was about you—Gina, Gilda: social realism. Then it was about them: lowlife. Villains. The ironic age. (435)

23Now the origin of this idea is to be found in a book review that Martin Amis wrote about Saul Bellow in 1982,22 which was reprinted in his collection of essays The Moronic Inferno23:

In thumbnail terms, the original protagonists of literature were gods; later they were demigods; later still, they were kings, generals, fabulous lovers, at once superhuman, human, and all too human; eventually they turned into ordinary people. The twentieth century has been called an ironic age, as opposed to a heroic, tragic or romantic one; even realism, rock-bottom realism, is felt to be a bit grand for the twentieth century. (17)

24Now the exact same idea is developed by Martin Amis in a 1986 interview given with Saul Bellow24 in which Amis confided:

In the textbooks, it’s all pretty plain that literature used to be about gods, then it was about kings, then it was about heroes, then it was about you and me. And now it’s about them. We live in the ironic age—even rock-bottom realism is considered impossibly exotic and grand for the twentieth century. (19)

25The author’s personality is thus manifested by the fact that The Information borrows from Martin Amis’s non-fictional writings and words, which proves that Amis’s recent fiction is fertilised by the writer’s subjectivity expressed in previous essays and interviews in which the ‘I’ of the writer and speaker designates one individual only.25 Like a phoenix, the author cannot be effaced from his works and manages to get reborn over and over again as a distinct individual in whom miscellaneous discourses originate which he only has the ability to unite.

26The Information describes a poetics of personality based on the author’s ostentatious refinement out of existence, a paradoxical technique which firmly grounds Martin Amis in postmodernism since, according to Brian McHale, ‘[t]his oscillation between authorial presence and absence characterizes the postmodernist author.’26 As regards the effects produced on the readers, David Lodge’s verdict regarding Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting is applicable to The Information because ‘[i]t never allows the reader the luxury of identifying with a secure authorial position that is invulnerable to criticism and irony. But that it is the work of a distinctive, gifted, self-conscious “author” is never in doubt.’ (Lodge 167) The author’s changing posture enables him to denounce a few impostures and critical clichés, among which figure prominently biographical fallacy, the death of the author and the arrogance of omnipotent critics who pretend they can reach interpretative impersonality, i.e. scientific objectivity, an imposture denounced early on by the narrator: ‘We can quickly agree about beauty, in the heavens and in the flesh. But not everywhere. Not, for instance, on the page.’ (15)

27If The Information is committed to denouncing critical clichés, it also derides stylistic clichés. Amis has a high idea of writers who are much more than disengaged selectors because ‘[t]hey are competing for something there is only one of: the universal.’ (312) Said differently, they want to attain the ‘High Style’ of the universe, (65) which grants immortality. This goal corresponds to Martin Amis’s literary and ethical manifesto on which he expounds in the introduction of The War Against Clichés, a collection of his literary reviews and articles: ‘To idealize: all writing is a campaign against clichés. Not just clichés of the pen but clichés of the mind and the heart.’27 It is only when writers have acquired a well-defined stylistic personality that they can become immortal. Now, Martin Amis’s quest for stylistic immortality and universality is another way of reaching impersonality, isn’t it?