Licensed Cruelty: Decorum and the Ledger in Amis’s Money and The Information

Abstract

In Martin Amis’s Money: A Suicide Note (1984) a character named Martin Amis tells the narrator that the further down the scale a protagonist stands, the more liberties an author may take with him. Critics have read the lecture as authorial sadism and as a fusion of authorial control with market value. This article reads it as a rule about who may harm whom. Through comparative close reading informed by Northrop Frye and by theories of debt, it shows that Money and The Information (1995) rank their figures twice, by a literary measure and by the ledger of what they hold and owe. John Self stands low on both. While he has anything to sign or pledge, the author’s, the creditor’s, and the buyer’s licences are all exercised on him, and the licences he holds himself turn back on him. In The Information the public measures agree that Gwyn Barry stands above Richard Tull, while Richard ranks the two writers the other way in private. Richard’s schemes against Gwyn fail or land only in private, and none both lowers Gwyn in public and leads back to Richard. The violence that Gwyn’s protectors deal out falls on men whom Richard’s ladder of protagonists places at its bottom, one of them richer than Richard. In Money the author-character ends as Self’s creditor. In The Information the narrator disclaims control of his characters and takes it back, in part, in the ending.