Martin Amis’s Money: Negotiations with Literary Celebrity

In January 1995 Martin Amis signed on with American agent Andrew Wylie to publish The Information with Harper Collins, and initiated the media scandal that one paper referred to as his “greed storm” (Amis, Experience 247). The scandal resonated across multiple levels. Having broken his long-term publishing relationship with English agent Pat Kavanagh and Jonathan Cape, an imprint of Random House UK, Amis was seen as having turned his back on the English publishing industry and, indeed, on England itself.[1] Personally, the switch put an end to the friendship with Julian Barnes, Kavanagh’s husband and Amis’s celebrated contemporary in British fiction. And perhaps most importantly, the deal with Wylie, to the tune of a £500,000 advance on The Information, signaled for readers of literary fiction a betrayal of a lofty ideal of authorship in favor of capitalist greed and glamor, a celebrity sell-out.[2]
 
That Amis’s change in agents ignited such an uproar, whether or not the move indicates a greedy complicity with the commercialization of literature, is in itself quite telling. First, the scandal and Amis’s role in it provide a bitter reflection of the way the novel publishing industry works today. As Paul Delany has shown, the 1980s and 90s witnessed a shift “to what may be called a postmodern literary system” (Delaney 180). While literary publishing has always been a business, at least since the emergence of the novel form itself, prior to the 1980s it could be viewed as a trade based on loyalty between a publishing house and its authors. Now, however, most of the fiction industry is controlled by multinational conglomerates—including Bertelsmann and Time Warner at the top—so that relationships between authors and publishers have become more tenuous.[3] Further, this shift has meant a reconfiguration of the players in the marketing of manuscripts, published novels, and future work. Richard Todd shows that since the abolition of resale price maintenance following the end of the Net Book Agreement in 1995, publishing functions within a triangle of forces: the author and agent, the publisher, and retail, with the latter holding the most power (20).[4] Publishers acting within the multinational conglomerate system, for their part, seek out top-selling authors as brand names, “buying a literary property rather than taking on an author” (Delany 182) and investing large advances as a form of speculation, effectively “[gambling] with the company’s money” (Todd 26) on both the sales of a novel and that celebrity author’s future work.[5] Amis’s “greed storm,” in this light, gives the lie to any lingering fantasy of producing literary fiction in a way that’s autonomous from global corporate capitalism. He played the game.[6] “Martin Amis” is a brand name, a celebrity and, as one acting in seemingly obvious self-interest, was temporarily placed in the press’s “shithead factfile” of sensational public outrage (Amis, Experience 248).
 
And yet, while I am interested in the contemporary marketing of literary fiction, I focus here on Amis’s role in forming his own celebrity status, and specifically on how his fiction reflects the ethos of corporate capitalism, often satirizing and participating in its logics simultaneously. That is, how do we make sense of the scathingly satirical depiction of Reagan-Thatcher economic policy in Money, for example, in light of his apparent embrace of the corporate capitalism that helped give rise to the Amis brand? In the simplest sense, Amis’s novels that self-reflexively center on authorial production and the publishing industry employ a cartoonish and self-conscious style to mock the commodification of literature and the vicissitudes of success in an increasingly volatile and polarized literary marketplace.  But what are the effects of this satire when read together with Amis’s public image and the apparent greed that has come to define it? If Amis critiques the corporate publishing model and its place within the global conglomeration of capital and distribution, does he simply wind up critiquing his own authorial brand-name? Certainly. As Delany has suggested regarding Amis’s satire of authorial celebrity in The Information, his “satire cannot escape complicity with its own target” (184).[7]
 
While Delany is right about the limits of Amis’s satire (and the same could be said about much twentieth-century satire, such as that of Wyndham Lewis or Evelyn Waugh), I want to complicate that reading by showing how Amis’s fiction negotiates the economic production of Amis the authorial brand and the symbolic capital that it has accrued. In tracing his satirical treatment of authorial control and corporate publishing across Success (1978), Money (1984), and The Information (1995), we see that these metafictional novels participate in the production of the authorial brand precisely by folding the increasingly dominant corporate model of publishing and marketing fiction into their satire. His depictions of the commercialization of literature and the production of the author-as-celebrity in these novels are more than simply cartoonish caricatures.[8] Rather, these novels satirically reflect the corporatist economic policy that emerged during the Reagan-Thatcher era, while at the same time allegorizing Amis’s own relationship with big corporate publishing, including the way his celebrity status—and the status of “literary fiction”—depends on the contingencies and volatility of a highly speculative market.  In doing so, these novels tell something of an allegorical backstory to the media scandal over Amis’s advance from Harper Collins and reflect the ways in which literary value came to be produced in the 1980s and ‘90s, including the value of the celebrity author as a cultural commodity.
 
While this essay thus focuses on Amis’s position within these recent changes to large-scale corporate publishing and their impact on the social production of literary value, I also show how Amis’s case in particular constitutes both a continuation of and a rupture with literary modernist modes of celebrity production, placing him within a larger historical narrative of literary circulation and authorial celebrity. Literary celebrity, in this view, isn’t new, but the modes of its production, circulation, and economic returns have changed dramatically since the period of high modernism and its sense of relative autonomy from bourgeois and corporate marketing practices. As Lawrence Rainey and Aaron Jaffe have shown, modernists like Joyce and Eliot participated in networks of limited commodity production. Focusing on modernism’s “tripartite production program [of] journal, limited edition and public or commercial edition,” Rainey demonstrates how the limited production and careful marketing of modernist texts like Ulysses reveal a “strategy whereby the work of art invites and solicits its commodification, but does so in such a way that it becomes a commodity of a special sort, one that is temporarily exempted from the exigencies of immediate consumption prevalent within the larger cultural economy” (Rainey 100, 3). For Jaffe, building on Rainey and reframing Bourdieu’s model of cultural capital, this specialized marketing style is ultimately more important than the style or meaning of such avant-garde texts; very few could actually get a complete copy of Ulysses for several years after its appearance, and it’s this inaccessibility that largely shapes the modernist’s name as a cultural signifier of value, or “imprimatur” in Jaffe’s terms. “These luxury commodities,” Jaffe writes, “were designed to be scarce, to be more heard of than come across, and to redound their excess aura to the authorial name” (Jaffe 74).
 
Building on the model of modernist authorial imprimatur, Jonathan Goldman has shown how Joyce and others forged uniquely recognizable styles to solidify a celebrity authorial identity. The text, on this reading, produces the author as celebrity, a figure distinct from a writer’s material existence. Perhaps most important for my argument on Amis, Goldman shows how self-reflexive references to authorial production contributed to a stylistic branding of authorial identity. Joyce’s Ulysses is exemplary. Borrowing from Foucault’s theory of the author-function, Goldman reveals how Joyce the celebrity figure is a product of his own textual strategies. In a nuanced reading of “Scylla and Charybdis,” the episode most explicitly concerned with authorship, Goldman argues that Stephen’s internal asides during his lecture on Hamlet function simultaneously on diegetic and extradiegetic levels, both grounded in the narrative events of the novel and referring outside the text to an orchestrating authorial voice (Goldman, 66-70). The self-reflexive stylistic virtuoso of Ulysses produces the idealized author whose name continues to circulate as the exceptional referent of modernism. The trademark styles of modernists like Wilde, Joyce, or Chaplin produce, in Goldman’s words, “the idea of the author, and therefore the celebrity, as a paradigmatic subjectivity, all the while replicating the process by which one turns the self into an object” (11-12).
 
Amis’s fictions that indulge in the processes of authorial branding reveal self-reflexive affinities with this modernist mode of celebrity production. But, again, the corporate production of top authors works differently and has dramatically altered the relationship between writers and the means of marketing their work. While Amis’s self-reflexive style reproduces Joyce’s production of a split authorial identity—writer and celebrity—it does so within a vastly different market for literature and the circulation of economic and cultural values. Thus, Joyce’s (and others’) dependence on patrons or intentional scarcity has been replaced by a system in which “shrewd authors realize that it is better to get the biggest possible advance, because then the publisher will have a strong incentive to promote the book, having put a substantial sum at risk” (Delany 182), a system concomitant with the “historical shift over the last century from a model of authorship dominated by the signature to one dominated by the brand name” (English and Frow 48). As Amis’s celebrity status accrues across approximately the first half of his career, we see his fiction increasingly taking for its subject the idiosyncratic and increasingly corporate means of producing the authorial brand in particular and literary values more generally. In short, Amis redeploys a modernist mode of reflexive authorial self-fashioning, capitalizing on it in the process of negotiating the postmodern market for literary fiction.
 

Finding Success

Readers often single out Money or The Information to discuss Amis’s problematic postmodern satires on social class, obligatory consumerism, and authorial complicity with the apparent totality of global market logics in the eighties and nineties.[9] And as many critics acknowledge, each of those novels employs complex pairings of characters, unwilling doubles that often bleed into sexual triangles, to create fictional tensions that comically reflect ideological contradictions and polarized class relations that became increasingly transparent in the seventies and eighties.[10] More specifically, the dialogic and frictional relations between Amis’s doubles raise questions about the viability of authorial control, social critique, and complicity with hyper-commercialized cultural production, exemplified by the role of Amis’s fictional surrogate character (named “Martin Amis”) in Money and by the contrast between two writers, the obscure Richard Tull and the revoltingly successful Gwyn Barry, in The Information. But to gauge fully the significance of Amis’s doubles to his ongoing fictional engagement with the commercial production of authorial celebrity, we can begin with Success (1978) and its depiction of the contradictions of social class under the new money economy that led to Thatcher’s election. Success, his third novel, isn’t about writers or the literary marketplace in any diegetic sense, but it initiates Amis’s continuing subjection of Britain’s changing political economy to a fantasy of authorial control and his signature style. The novel’s comic rendition of shifting class identities and anxieties played out by its discursive doubling of “yob” Terence and posh Gregory offers a starting point from which to trace Amis’s allegorical engagement with the cultural production of the Amis brand.
 
The novel is made up of alternating first-person accounts, addressed to the reader, of the unfolding daily events of foster brothers Terence Service and Gregory Riding. Throughout the first half of the novel, Greg regales readers with his lofty old-money exploits of sex, fashion, and narcissistic charm, showering Terry’s name and lower-middle-class identity with smug derision and snobbish dismissal. Terry, having been adopted by the Riders as a child after his father killed his mother and sister, limps through his narratives in abject shame and self-loathing, ever-subservient to Greg’s easy affectations of confident wealth and sneering class insularity. Excessive comic styling reduces each to categorical social types, opposites on the class spectrum, exemplified by their own self-descriptions. Terence’s passages cringe in passive abjection and the bare survival of an unrecognizable “Service” class employed in pointless sales. As he says of his appearance: “I look ordinary, I look like educated lower-class middle-management, the sort of person you walk past in the street every day and never glance at or notice or recognize again” (11); or of his job and social standing: “I do a job. That’s what I do. . . . I was pleased when they gave it to me—I certainly didn’t ever want to give it back. I am still pleased, more or less. At least I won’t be a tramp, now that I’ve got it” (33). Greg, on the other hand, dashingly dandy and redolent of old money and new fashion, begins his days planning his outfits and recounting his elaborate exploits of the night before in cartoonish delight—“We always go to the grandest restaurants. We’re always in those plush, undersea cocktail bars (we can’t bear pubs). We always love spending lots of money”—before breakfasting on fresh orange juice and croissants, “[tolerating] the obsequious banter of liftman, doorman and porter,” and swishing off to his posh job at an art gallery (41).
 
In its caricatures of social class, this is pretty simple satire, a kind of comic book Gulliver’s Travels for 1970s London. But the typological obviousness, while done for comic effect, also serves Amis’s larger ironic designs on the changing conditions of economic class, changes that will inform his later self-reflexive narratives of authorial celebrity and the marketing of literary value. The novel’s narrative arc traces a process of role reversal and a discursive intersection of the identities of Greg and Terry that reflects the lingering anxieties of the economic recession of the early seventies and the “dissolution of the postwar Fair Shares consensus” that followed (Delany 175). Briefly, Gregory gradually surfaces from his denial to reveal to readers that he’s going broke: his job doesn’t pay enough to live on, he can no longer afford his lavish nights out and, most importantly, his father has lost all the value of the family estate through quirky investments and charity. Wallowing in debts induced by total liquidation and the outmoded ease of property owners, Greg succumbs to the paranoid recognition of money’s totality: “My overdraft grows in lines of figures and print, spawning bank charges, interest payments. I can no longer read a book or even watch television without this other drama rearing up inside my mind, mangling page and screen. I cannot do anything without money leering over my shoulder” (182). At the same time, following the failure of unionization coupled with rationalization (or downsizing) at the sales firm where he works, Terry gets promoted and earns increasingly higher commissions for buying and selling products that remain unknown even to him, resulting in inflated confidence and an awareness of a seismic shift in his class relations with Greg. Puffed up on disposable income, Terry “won’t be scared of them [upper-class property owners] any more. … They don’t belong any more. What they belonged to has already disappeared; it is used up, leftovers, junk” (193). 
 
This comic drama of the shifting parameters of social class provides a neat satirical reflection of the increasing corporatization and financial deregulation of British society leading into the 1980s. The Riders’ financial decline is in itself rather typical of a pattern of dwindling estate values in England since the late nineteenth century. But Terence’s “success” reflects the reactions following the oil crisis and recessionary cycles that defined British economics in the seventies and that led to the embrace of a global finance system of floating exchange-rates, dramatic cuts to public spending, and radical deregulation of British banking and stock markets coupled with an increasing rise in unemployment.[11] Only obliquely and subjectively represented by the limited Terry, Amis nevertheless suggests that Terry’s increased earnings result from the contradictions and failure of leftist unionization and the short-term shoring up of virtual capital in a free floating exchange market. Before his good luck strikes, Terry listens to a regional union secretary at his firm who appeals to collective organization “because you want to not get fuckin’ sacked,” and to his boss’s reply that unionization would result in several firings because they would have to pay sellers union rates (100). As Amis’s comic dialogue suggests, unionization ironically favors corporate power and individual entrepreneurship. Later, following unionization and Terry’s commitment to his boss Veale’s vague instructions to buy and sell, he’s raking in the cash because “Veale has already gimmicked it that I get tax relief and supplementary benefits for doing things about being Clerk (i.e., for doing things for him. . .)” (158). In his own thick way, Terry recognizes that he benefits from the deregulation and privatization that began to emerge in the mid-seventies and found their most notorious advocate in Margaret Thatcher. Terry’s in the money while his colleagues face a rapid series of terminations.
 
But beyond this condensed fictional reflection of economic contradiction and change facing Britain in the 1970s, I’ve traced Success’s class narrative here because it also underpins and initiates Amis’s ongoing experimental negotiations of authorial identity under the increasingly ubiquitous control that transnational corporate marketing has come to exercise over literary production. Specifically, the novel’s subtle self-reflexive hints at Amis’s orchestration of fictional events engage with the production of authorial identity in the face of corporate publishing. Self-reflexive authorial references in the novel operate on two distinct, ultimately conflicting, levels. First, the voices of Terry and Greg alternately point to Amis and his imaginative control over the fictional representation of shifting economic and class relations. As Terry begins to reflect on his changing financial situation, his comments on his own position have a fatalistic ring  and displace the power of economic forces onto authorial control. Specifically referring to his relationship with Greg and his sister Ursula, both beginning to go mad, he says “Things have progressed with steady certainty, with the slow cohering logic of a genre novel, or a chess combination, or a family game. Already I know how it will end—things will suddenly get much worse for two of us and never get better again—but I cannot break out” (170). Of course he doesn’t “break out,” and Ursula commits suicide and Greg slips into poverty and madness. More importantly, this “family game” is part of what could be called a “genre novel”: Success as a nasty “condition of England” novel of the late-seventies organized by Amis’s sadistically “cohering logic.”
 
Greg’s voice also speaks for Amis, but in terms of style. Through Greg, we hear sly references to Amis’s stylistic affectations, his rapid-fire caricatural excess of urbane postmodernist irony. In the first half of the novel, Greg’s stylistic excesses express his big-spending confidence and smugness. Nearing the end of his decline, though, that stylistic panache only gives the lie to the protective sham of wealth. And it’s during this transition that his address to readers takes on a double-voice, simultaneously announcing his demise to readers and referring to Amis’s stylistic orchestration of the whole thing. Disablingly claustrophobic about riding the Tube, he indulges in a triumphant fantasy of overcoming his fear in his usual style of comic book daring: “I was looking in superb form, with my cape fanned out behind me like Superman’s, wearing some crackly new snakeskin boots, my hair spruced high by an expensive haircut,” to conclude the passage with his heroic emergence from “the pit of harm” to the optimistic daylight. Then comes the abrupt shift. “Recognize the style,” he asks us, “(I suppose I’d better change that too now)? If you believed it, you’ll believe anything” (180-1). What follows is a lengthy catalogue of Greg’s lies up to this point in the novel, completely undermining the rhetorical and consumer excesses that have defined him. On a basic diegetic level, Greg’s style is an expression of pompous affectation. But at the moment of this shift, hinging on attention to style, Greg’s voice is less a means of expressing a character’s psychological depth, calling attention instead to Amis’s intense stylistic artifice (“Recognize the style?”) and suggesting a fictional control—where authorial style trumps narrative realism—vying with the vastly indeterminate and unpredictable economic changes that the novel comically reflects.
 
Second, Amis echoes modernist literary precursors in a way that self-reflexively refers to the narrative voice masterminding the fictional reflection of real material processes in England’s political economy. Also through Gregory’s stylistic pomp—and Greg confesses to having never read much—Amis appropriates well-worn fragments from celebrity modernists like T.S. Eliot and Evelyn Waugh. In doing so, he suggests a fantasy of autonomy from market functions—one in which ironic references to highbrow literacy might offer an alternative space from which to critique the sweep of commercialized culture—but one that the novel’s form ultimately undermines. For instance, one of Greg’s more flamboyant rhetorical performances of the posh consumer opens with “April is the coolest month/for people like myself” (89). A cheap ploy, no doubt, but the twist on Eliot and what is perhaps the most clichéd line from all of modern poetry points in two directions at once. On the one hand, “April is the coolest month” translates Eliot’s bleak modernist social vision composed of the fragments of the Western literary tradition into Greg’s cultural and consumerist currency and narcissistic high style. Its irony, on the other hand, obliquely points to Amis’s reading of modernism and his own participation in Eliot’s elitist theory of inserting one’s “individual talent” into the “tradition,” or literary canon. And in this modernist vein, finally, the ironically Eliotic line hints at both formalism’s fantasy of modernist literature’s autonomy from market functions and our more recent understanding of modernist celebrity. Recall that, as Aaron Jaffe has shown, the scarcity built into much of modernist production helped shape the modernist’s name as a cultural signifier of value, or “imprimatur,” so that the scarcity itself acted “to redound [an] excess aura to the authorial name” (Jaffe 74). In this light, Amis’s self-referential borrowing from Eliot is also a borrowing from his cultural capital, suggesting that he, too, can wax ironic on the perversities of contemporary society, benefit from its market logics, and yet do so from an imagined space of relative cultural autonomy.
 
Of course the point is that like Eliot, despite the vastly different means of marketing their work, Amis’s satirically disdainful reflections on market society ultimately depend on its ongoing commercialization of fiction. Success’s self-reflexive characteristics—its references to a controlling authorial figure and its appropriation of modernist literary celebrity—imagine a limited form of literary autonomy, producing an author figure who orders the fictional reflection of otherwise unpredictable economic mechanisms. But the novel’s form reflects a reified economic society, in which characters’ fates are determined by finance and fluctuating market values, making authorial control itself a fiction (operating only within the enclosed diegetic space of the novel), inextricably bound up with the market conditions it satirizes. Success thus introduces an important disjunction in Amis’s work: the fiction points to an author figure in control of its representation of deregulated finance and economic volatility, but the novels themselves are marketed as cultural commodities in a corporate system of profits over which Amis the author has little control. I pursue this disjunction further in what follows and, in a move similar to other critics who have noted Amis’s ironic complicity with the market for literary value and prestige, I show the ways that his fiction reveals an unfolding attempt to negotiate the terms by which the author as celebrity is produced within the global corporate marketing of literature. If Amis the brand is produced by global networks of production, marketing, and circulation, then Amis the author recapitalizes on that mode of commercialized cultural production. This fictional engagement with the production of the Amis brand, and what its curious blend of complicity and critique can teach us about the production of literary value, comes to a head in Money.
 

Show Me the Money

As several readers have noted, Money (1984) is an inflated satire on the financial deregulation, economic globalization, and consumerist individualism that became increasingly prominent during the early years of the Thatcher-Reagan era.[12] John Self, whose name is appropriately generic and solipsistic, narrates the novel in a continuous present of excessive and self-destructive consumption often fractured by alcoholic black-outs. For Self, an English adman working in New York on a film to be called either Good Money or Bad Money, money is everything. Literally. Not only does he follow a path of insatiable commodified desire, whose appetite ranges from booze and fast food to pornography and prostitutes; he also conflates money as a medium of exchange with the object of desire itself.[13] His desire is completely reified, a symptom of a totally commodified society whose “shady, petty dealings in high finance mirror the supposedly legitimate, grand-scale monetary dealings of Thatcherite Britain,” as Patrick Brantlinger puts it (259). As a figure for such an absolutely commodified desire, Self is also the perfect dupe for the enormous financial swindle that by the end we find has been taking place throughout the novel. Lavishly living it up on credit, Self winds up criminally bankrupt and living in a London slum after a failed suicide bid.
 
My reading of Money advances two claims in light of its story of excessive individual consumerism. First, I show that the novel yokes the imperative to endless and excessive consumption to a corporatist ethos of fast money—speculation and quick-selling—within an allegorical structure. Following Tamás Bényei’s argument that the novel reflects the multiply allegorical nature of money itself—as both “the naming of something abstract” and a representation of empty serial interaction—I show that Amis’s satirical allegory consciously and self-reflexively eschews the claims of literary realism in order to stress the fictive nature of speculation and virtual capital and the real material agency they exercise in global markets.[14] Second, building on this allegorical reading, I argue that Amis—who figures as a fictional version of himself in the novel—tests the limits of his own authorial celebrity against this vision of the omnipresent power of global finance and virtual market values. As such, I build on Jon Begley’s observation of the novel’s “precarious balance between satiric authority and a self-reflexive recognition of authorial and cultural complicity” (84), and argue that that “balance” and “complicity” are means by which Amis stages his ongoing fictional negotiation with the global publishing industry and its production of the celebrity author-figure as distinct from authorial agency.
 
Readers simply cannot ignore Money’s John Self as an extreme caricature of unbridled individual consumption, one that can lead to individual and national self-destruction (indeed, the subtitle of the novel is A Suicide Note). During the first week of his visit to New York to work on the film project, Good Money, Self’s typical day begins with a hangover followed by a gluttonous feed on the quick-fix junk of American industry: “I didn’t feel too great this morning, true. A ninety-minute visit to Pepper’s Burger World, on the other hand, soon sorted that lot out. I had four Wallies, three Blastfurters, and an American Way, plus a nine-pack of beer. I’m a bit full and sleepy, perhaps, but apart from that I’m ready for anything” (32). As his almost pornographic indulgence in fast food suggests, Self is something of a class outsider (having grown up the son of a pub owner), but also a willing apprentice to the new order of fast money. Self is guided in this role in part by his alleged partner, Fielding Goodney, who encourages big credit spending with a nearly religious devotion. In response to Self’s admission that he flew coach on his transatlantic trip to New York, Goodney chastises him to “pay more money, Slick. Fly in the sharp end, or supersonic. Coach kills. It’s a false economy” (24). Fielding’s real economy is the world of high finance, free-floating exchange rates, and speculation, as he tells John in a “voice full of passionate connoisseurship” of “Italian banking, liquidity preference, composition fallacy, hyperinflation, business confidence syndrome, booms and panics, US corporations,” and so on (27).
 
What I want to stress here, though, is Amis’s emphasis that Self’s insatiability is a symptom of a quick-sell economic ethos and of free market deregulation, both conservative “solutions” to economic crises of the seventies and early eighties. Set in 1981, the novel reflects the lingering effects of the 1973 oil crisis and the failure of the Bretton Woods agreement on fixed exchange rates and the ensuing corporatist politics of deregulation and privatization that followed throughout the decade.[15] Through Self, we get a caricatured but oddly accurate sense of those complex international processes, partly because, as Amis’s allegorical siphon for a booming credit economy, he rides the tide of artificially stimulated markets. Observing a “big blonde screamer” on Broadway who repeatedly shouts “‘It’s my money and I want it,’” Self is vaguely aware of the global links between the oil recession and reductions in public spending that came to characterize Thatcher’s England and Reagan’s U.S.:
 

The city is full of these guys . . . . I read in a magazine somewhere that they’re chronics from the municipal madhouses. They got let out when money went wrong ten years ago . . . Now there’s a good joke, a global one, cracked by money. An Arab hikes his zipper in the sheep-pen, gazes contentedly across the stall and says, “Hey, Basim. Let’s hike oil.” Ten years later a big whiteman windmills his arms on Broadway, for all to see. (12)

 
Self’s joke about reduced public spending (slashed funds for “municipal madhouses”) is itself reductive, but indicates a certain awareness of the local impact of deregulated global markets. Indeed, in England he’s both a pawn and player in the new economy of corporate tax deferrals and reduced labor costs. Partner in the London ad agency Carburton, Linex & Self, he’s privy to the benefits and anxieties of privatized money and floating corporate expenses, telling readers, “We all seem to make lots of money. . . . The car is free. The car is on the house. The house is on the mortgage. The mortgage is on the firm—without interest. The interesting thing is: how long can this last? For me, that question carries an awful lot of anxiety—compound interest. It can’t be legal, surely” (78). Benefitting from corporate tax reductions and deferred interest payments, Self’s reality is measured by volatile abstract values and the threat of compound interest, precisely the free market policies that allow Fielding to swindle him with little more than a rally of confidence for the future market for their film and a few quick contract-signing sessions supposedly backed by a troop of domestic and foreign investors.
 
Again, Self’s jokes about the market, as an only partially aware insider, are caricatures, typical of Amis’s rapid-fire cartoonish style of satire. But Amis’s caricatures—of John’s insatiable appetite and of money’s mad liquidity—also support the novel’s allegorical representation of hegemonic corporate capitalism. Amis incorporates several self-reflexive hints that we’re to read the novel as an allegory, and we can briefly chart those clues before returning to the novel’s concern with corporate capital and floating market values—and to the ways they shape Amis’s fictional negotiations of literary celebrity.
 
For one, John’s very appetite, as we saw with his gut-walloping fast food hangover cure, is clearly comic excess: his eating and drinking would kill most anyone within weeks. As an additional comic device, and as in much traditional allegory, characters’ names in Money align them with social functions or moral categories, but usually with an added layer of irony. So John’s London-based girlfriend who openly exchanges sexual favors for High Street fashion and expensive dinners is called Selina Street—“street seller.” Always encouraging John to enjoy the high life and pornographic pleasure industries, Fielding Goodney suggests “feeling good.” Lorne Guyland is a washed-up, insecure, hyper-macho actor with whom John is forced to work and who puts his “guyness” on display whenever possible. And Martina Twain, educated high society woman and temporary love interest for John, doubles with the fictionalized “Martin Amis” as one of the novel’s voices of reason, hence, “Mart-in-twain.” Finally, as a fictional surrogate for Amis, Martina Twain lends John a copy of Animal Farm, perhaps the most famous twentieth-century allegory in English, in her attempt to educate him in high culture. John not only struggles to read Orwell’s short novel, but thinks it’s a children’s book and fails to recognize it’s an allegory, even trying to identify with the various animal figures (190, 193)—a comic blindness to allegory that mirrors his swindling by Fielding (which in turn gets narrated through an extended metaphor, as we’ll see). So John’s misunderstanding of allegorical representation, combined with Amis’s typological naming of characters, all point to Money’s comic allegory of high finance’s virtual—or fictive—reality.
 
That allegory of spiraling finance in the eighties forms the economic context in which the novel engages with the production of authorial celebrity and its symbolic capital, as a cultural figure produced by those market forces yet distinct from the material existence of the writer. Money is a novel that is about novel writing and the commodification of the author figure, which Amis dramatizes through his own authorial presence in the novel, “lurking in the text like some pantomime monster,” as Philip Tew puts it, a fictional version of himself that plays on the split between writer and authorial brand (Tew 78). Amis is simultaneously a fictional character in the novel and an author-surrogate that expresses his limited control over his own circulating brand name. Martin Amis the fictional author plays the role of the high-minded artist and voice of reason, parodying the image of the writer who eschews the world of commerce, “the money conspiracy,” in devotion to literature. When Johns asks him about his writing schedule, his reply is an arrogant description of an ascetic devotion to high culture and literary autonomy from the market:
 

“I get up at seven and write straight through till twelve. Twelve to one I read Russian poetry—in translation, alas. A quick lunch, then art history until three. After that it’s philosophy for an hour . . . Four to five, European history, 1848 and all that. Five to six: I improve my German. And from then until dinner, well, I just relax and read whatever the hell I like. Usually Shakespeare.” (220)

 
Speaking with “a tone of pompous superiority rather than detached wisdom” (Begley 99), this Amis figure seems a self-consciously constructed parody, his seriousness giving the lie to any latent fantasy of gentrified authorial detachment. Or, as James Diedrick suggests with regard to the Amis figure’s ascetic literariness, the novel exposes a kind of “false consciousness,” the depiction of “a naïve literary modernist clinging to the fiction that he can protect his art from the influence of the marketplace” (Diedrick 98). And since, as we’ve seen, literary modernism produced its own forms of authorial celebrity, the point to stress here is that Diedrick’s sense of a “naïve” modernist autonomy is a myth concealing a highly self-conscious fiction of the author’s identity as it circulates in the market.
 
At the same time, and distinct from this parodied author figure, Martin Amis’s presence also refers to the author of Money, suggested when John thinks, “For some ambiguous reason (and I think it’s to do with his name, so close to that of my pale minder), I feel strangely protective of little Martin here” (222). Following this coy reminder to readers of the character’s real-life “pale minder,” the fictional author-figure begins to speak more frequently for the author of the novel we’re reading. So when Amis’s surrogate begins rewriting the film script for John’s Money, he gives him a lecture on contemporary literature that clearly calls attention to Martin Amis’s allegorical aims in the novel. First, Amis addresses the conventional relationship between author and fictional narrator, telling a distracted John Self that, “‘The distance between author and narrator corresponds to the degree to which the author finds the narrator wicked, deluded, pitiful or ridiculous. . . . This distance is partly determined by convention. In the epic or heroic frame, the author gives the protagonist everything he has, and more. The hero is a god or has godlike powers or virtues’” (229). On the other hand, when dealing with a narrator either lower on the scale of social class or simply despicable (like John Self), “the more liberties you can take with him. You can do what the hell you like to him, really. This creates an appetite for punishment. The author is not free of sadistic impulses” (229). Note that the “heroic” treatment of the narrator echoes a long interpretive tradition of reading Joyce’s Portrait, one that stressed as Joyce’s own Stephen’s aesthetic theory of the artist as a godlike creator hovering behind the work, “paring his fingernails”; while the notion of a sadistic author, clearly alluding to Amis’s treatment of Self, allows for a self-consciously ironic treatment of fictional narrator or alter ego. The novel supports this when Amis’s fictional author continues his lecture, still in the self-reflexive mode, on the demise of literary realism: “‘we’re pretty much agreed that the twentieth century is an ironic age—downward-looking. Even realism, rockbottom realism, is considered a bit grand for the twentieth century’” (231). So why not try metafictional allegory instead?
 
His lecture on the ironic age of postmodernity and the obsolescence of realism positions Amis’s surrogate author as a literary authority: his advice to John speaks to readers on behalf of Amis, the author of Money. But that authority only functions within the self-reflexive fictional space of the novel; enclosed in self-conscious fiction, the idea of the author’s sadistic control becomes itself a fiction produced by the “money conspiracy” (316) of the publishing industry and its speculation on authorial celebrity, as will become clearer when we turn to The Information. Money dramatizes this point in its climactic chess match between Amis’s fictional surrogate and John Self. Having lost everything to Fielding’s financial schemes and barely having escaped from the U.S. authorities back to London where he plans to commit suicide, John calls Amis over to his flat for a final chat. Amis of course has figured out how Fielding duped John (again in reference to the author’s control of his fiction), and he tries to explain the swindle over a game of chess. The chess match serves as synecdoche for the way Fielding locked John into signing away enormous sums of money. Throughout the game, Amis explains Fielding’s moves or money art, a combination of paid-off actors, insurance deals, and computer hacking that left John criminally in debt. At the same time, he plays what appear to John to be oddly defensive or counter-logical moves on the board. John, totally focused on the game, “searching for blueprints, for forms and patterns” (344), fails to follow Amis’s money narrative. Then, as the absolute victim of authorial sadism, John finds himself locked in the loser’s position of a zugzwang endgame: the player whose turn it is is forced into a suicide move. John loses the match precisely as Amis wraps up his narrative of the financial zugzwang that Fielding had played.[16]
 
As synecdoche for the larger narrative of Money, the chess match brings into focus the arguments I’ve been making about Amis and the literary marketplace, and does so around an apparent contradiction. One the one hand, as spokesperson for Amis’s metafictions of the literary market, his allegorical stand-in only retrospectively grasps the abstract functions of high finance and its very real material effects. The novel thus plays with the distinction between Amis the author and his fictional surrogate, figure for the circulating authorial name. In doing so, it contrasts Amis’s strict narrative control over Money and his celebrity double’s limited agency over the literary marketplace in which he circulates. But on the other hand, and following the fictional Amis’s victory in the metaphorical chess match, his narrative conflates authorial control over a self-enclosed, self-referential fiction with control over market values, as he wonders aloud to John why Fielding didn’t quit earlier and cut his risks, and speculates:
 

“Probably he was too deep into his themes and forms, his own artwork. The illusionist, the lie artist, the storyboarder—they have a helplessness. . . . Why didn’t he just let you walk [away from it all]? Because he was hooked. On the fiction, the art. He wanted to get to the end. We all do.” (346-7)

 
Amis insinuates that, like the fictional money man, he treats John Self sadistically out of devotion to “the fiction,” which here means both novels and high finance. Amis’s metafictional trick here thus suggests Jon Begley’s sense that the novel’s dialogical pairing works to “undermine the status of the authorial presence and his narrative designs, thereby reaffirming the premise of his cultural critique by implicating both figures within an economic system that resists the imposition of any encompassing ‘Answers’” (Begley 98). More importantly, though, as the allegorical double of Amis the author, his celebrity surrogate is self-consciously a product of the fictions, novelistic and financial, that produce the Amis brand as it circulates in the market for literary celebrity.
 

The Information on Celebrities

In his 2000 memoir Experience, Amis quotes Ian McEwan in describing the split subject of the celebrity author. Amis had the experience on his spring 1995 North American book tour for The Information and writes, “On such tours, Ian McEwan once said, you feel like ‘the employee of a former self’, because the book is now out there to be championed and squired, while you have moved on” (Experience 275). “Once an outrageous novelty” (like Oscar Wilde’s celebrity U.S. tour),[17] he continues, “the book tour is now accepted as a fact of life and a matter of professional routine. You arrive in each city and present yourself to its media; after that, in the evening, a mediated individual, you appear at the bookshop and perform” (275). This personal reflection on his public tour, in fact, provides a partial summary of The Information and its satirical reflection on the literary star system. As in Success and Money, The Information is composed of antithetical doubles coyly orchestrated by authorial intrusions. But here Amis uses that satirical structure to expose, simultaneously, the lingering fantasy of modernist modes of celebrity-production that have been outmoded by large publishing conglomerates, the contingencies of authorial celebrity under that now fully formed star system, and Amis’s ongoing and uneasy negotiation of the terms of his own celebrity brand.
 
The novel, set in the 1990s, centers on two forty-year-old writers: the increasingly smug Gwyn Barry who writes highly successful drivel, and the quaveringly abject Richard Tull, a failing novelist trying to hold onto some literary dignity by churning out reviews of obscure biographies. While Gwyn’s success on the literary market forms the focus of much of the novel’s satire, it’s important to note that that celebrity status is defined against Richard’s pathetic grip on an obsolete ideal of modernist exceptionalism and difficulty. If in Money, as I argued above, Amis alludes to celebrity modernists like Joyce and Eliot to invest their cultural capital in his own authorial brand within the increasingly corporatized production of fiction, then in The Information he thoroughly and self-consciously exploits and explodes the myth of modernist exceptionalism with the figure of Richard Tull.
 
When not cranking out tedious book reviews, Richard divides his working time between two crumbling bastions of highbrow modernist literary production: private publishing and little magazines. He works as poetry and fiction editor at the Tantalus Press, a private vanity publishing house whose authors, mostly barely literate, pay their own printing costs. But whereas the reputations and cultural capital enjoyed by Joyce and other modernists depended in part on the successful niche marketing of private publishers, the Tantalus exists to mock the contemporary irrelevance of such ventures, denying writers the tempting fruit of publication as cultural capital. Amis bitingly asserts the devolution of private publishing and its modernist associations with authorial exceptionalism when the chief editor at the Tantalus, Balfour, encourages Richard to publish his work under their imprint by holding out the Joycean appeal: “‘One should remind oneself,’” he tells Richard, “‘that James Joyce initially favored private publication.’ Then he added: ‘Proust, too, by the way’” (Information 52). Richard recognizes, however, that private publishing, with its myth of being “a springboard to literary eminence” fully undermined by commercial distribution in the global age, “was not organized crime exactly, but it had close links with prostitution” (53). As a fatalistic hold-out against the prostitution of postmodern private publishing, Richard is also Literary Editor at a little magazine called, yes, The Little Magazine. As if Balfour’s Joycean appeals to private publishing weren’t enough to nail the coffin on the modernist heyday of niche literary marketing, Amis gougingly traces the decline of the little magazine as a final resistance to the pressures of advertising and commercial publicity. The fictional Little Magazine emerged on the tails of high modernism, “born and raised in a five-story Georgian town house next to the Sloane Museum in Lincoln’s Inn Fields (1935-1961),” and housed all the Bohemian trappings of modernist culture—“dusty decanters” and “tables strewn with books and learned journals” (116)—before its gradually declining public presence. “Increasingly nomadic and downwardly mobile,” by the 1990s the magazine’s existence is like a metaphorical vagabond from the modernist period begging money from failed writers and critics. “On the other hand,” Amis writes with a satirical sneer, “The Little Magazine really stood for something. It really did stand for something, in this briskly materialistic age. It stood for not paying people” (117).
 
With Richard a figure for such dying modernist institutions, his writing, always alluded to as tortuously dense and self-consciously learned, fares no better. He is, as Amis’s narrator puts it, “a marooned modernist” (125). Speaking in the guise of his narrator, Amis invites readers to “take a quick look at Richard’s stuff” before waxing ironic on modernism’s flickering historical moment and Richard as abject figure for its cultural demise from the vantage point of postmodern high publicity. “Modernism was a brief divagation into difficulty,” he writes, and Richard, its latent cross-bearer, “didn’t want to please readers.” His prose uses endless layers of “unreliable narrators and author surrogates” in what read as “indistinguishable monologues interieurs.” In other words, Amis tells us, Richard’s problem is that “he was trying to write genius novels, like Joyce. Joyce was the best yet at genius novels, and even he was a drag about half the time. Richard, arguably, was a drag all the time” (125). Amis summarily mocks Richard for trying to redo a modernist myth of exceptionalism, an effort doomed to failure either way. At best, he is a wicked and unknowing parody of Beckett’s The Unnamable and other narratives of undoing: Richard’s collected works can only go by names like “unreadable,” or, as the title of his current manuscript has it, Untitled (“deliberately but provisionally” given that title in imitation of Joyce’s Work in Progress) (125, 5).[18] Passed from one agent to the next in a downward spiral through the literary publicity machine, Richard’s manuscript gives readers migraines or sends them unexplainably to the hospital, usually before they get past page seven.
 
Much of the novel’s satire is leveled, however, at the counter to Richard’s outmoded modernism, Gwyn Barry, a talentless scribbler and temporary success story of global literary marketing. “Gwyn Barry” is a product of media hype, “all fax and Xerox and preselect” (10), and Amis doesn’t even represent his writing within the novel, its absence silently supporting Amis’s insistence, voiced by fictional agent Gal Aplanalp, that the public is “more interested in the writers than in the writing” (94). As Amis’s own publicity scandal over switching agents demonstrated, the role of the literary agent has become increasingly central to the publication and marketing of novels and the circulation of authors as brand names. Sarah Brouillette has shown how this process works in the global marketing of postcolonial writers in a way that is also useful in considering Amis’s case and his satirical representation of the authorial star system in The Information. In a revision of Pierre Bourdieu’s thesis in The Rules of Art, that “the idea of the artist as autonomous from the economic sphere is inseparably linked to the rise of a commercial culture that allowed artists to make a living producing art,” Brouillette argues that, since the rise of multinational publishing organizations, any “claims to an authenticity defined by separation from the market” has become “a near impossibility” (62-3). This corporatization has altered the respective roles of the players involved—authors, agents, and publishers—so that “a dwindling number of ‘star’ authors receive an increasing percentage of a given firm’s available dollars in the form of lucrative advances and royalties,” and agents now play a more central role in auctioning a star’s work to the highest bidder (65).[19] Central to this network, celebrity authors are marketed as unique personae with very little realistic agency in the market for their books in such a way that the author figure becomes a “marker of differentiation” that “[conceals] mass production in individuation” (66).
 
Obviously familiar with this corporate organization and marketing of books and authors, Amis scathingly depicts it through the smug Gwyn Barry and his interactions with agents and his own media image, in part to distance himself from it, as we’ll see. Gwyn’s success is, of course, a result of a complex network of finance, agents, marketing and distribution; or, as Richard Menke puts it, “novels [in The Information] feature as the excuses for radio and television appearances, newspaper profiles and gossip columns, movie deals” (149). In a publicity event combining interviews, photo sessions, and financial arrangements with Gwyn, Amis shows how such publicity maneuvers serve to package the image of writers whose “personae as authors are crucial to the promotional circuit necessary to a book’s success within the market” (Brouillette 67), and how this mode of production still harbors within it and cultivates a lingering fantasy of the redeeming powers of “literature” for its own sake. After a photo session with a financier, Gwyn’s publisher, “the captain of industry” (sly nod to Carlyle’s rantings?), and “the Shadow Minister of the Arts,” the financier gives a speech—“trying to get something back for his money”—about which literary magazines he would like to be associated with. All agree: one with “high standards,” and the discussion moves on to market research and questions of “targeting” the book (17-18). Gwyn also gloats to Richard about his new agent, the American Gal Aplanalp (having “controversially” switched agents in a possible allusion to Amis’s own immanent controversy), brags about the huge advance he’s getting for his incomplete manuscript, and assures Richard that Gal’s list is moving “upmarket” and becoming “more literary,” a nod to the lingering fantasy of literary exceptionalism (40-1). ^[20] That fantasy is partly upheld by the paradoxical process of authorial “differentiation” concealing mass production that Brouillette outlines, a process in which Gal plays a significant role in the novel and in Amis’s comic deflation. “‘Writers need definition,’” Gal tells Richard at one point, because “the public can only keep in mind one thing per writer. Like a signature. Drunk, young, mad, fat, sick: you know. . . . Ever thought about the young-fogey thing? The young fart. You wear a bowtie and a waistcoat. Would you smoke a pipe?” (94). Richard, being the naïve modernist, suggests that he get published first, and Gal quickly shifts the conversation back to publicity, suggesting that Richard begin with a journalistic piece on “very successful novelist” Gwyn Barry and initiating the plan that Richard tag along on that all-important publicity stunt to generate celebrity hype, the American book tour.
 
In terms of the novel’s structure, the book tour across major U.S. cities serves to further polarize Richard’s failure and Gwyn’s success in the star system. Richard meets with the alleged publisher of his novel, Untitled, only to learn that the firm is a shaky start-up relying on a form of print-on-demand publication. Gwyn, on the other hand, is shepherded around by a publicity crew from photo session to book-signing events to radio interviews, all the while following rumors of his candidacy for the “Profundity Requital” literary prize. As a publicity stunt, the book tour crystallizes, in the figure of Gwyn, the mass commodification of the writer’s “uniqueness” or “signature” and the symptomatic narcissism that emerges from this tension. Following Gwyn’s return to London as a thoroughly “mediated individual,” Amis shows how the material existence of the writer becomes secondary to the author as celebrity, as circulating brand name. Perusing reviews of his work, Gwyn notices a tepid critical dismissal of his recent novel that suggests, “‘It would seem that Barry has somehow tapped a deep collective yearning. This explains the book’s success. Nothing on the page explains it’” (297). As if in response to that “deep collective yearning,” Gwyn starts reading everything that might contain some obscure reference to him or his novels, branching out from fiction reviews to agricultural and real estate reports (299-301). He further feeds this mediated celebrity ego by imagining a glowing Gwyn Barry biography, a projected crystallization of his authorial public persona, a carefully packaged mass product that shapes the image of the author’s unique subjectivity for a consuming public.
 
The novel’s polarization of success and failure, Gwyn’s celebrity and Richard’s abject obscurity, forecloses any alternative mode of literary production. Despite Richard’s increasingly desperate attempts to sabotage Gwyn’s public image, and thus his literary authority, Gwyn remains a media darling through the novel’s end, while Richard, having accepted his inability to write something the public might want to read, gives up writing entirely and dotes on his young sons. If Amis’s presence as author-figure in Money suggests that while the writer may control the fiction, his celebrity status is subject to the contingencies of marketing, then The Information makes that point even more transparently. While the novel frequently insists that the market for fiction and authorial celebrity is arbitrary and vastly in excess of any writer’s immediate control, it also withholds any alternatives to its dictates. This reified view of market culture, where the overarching reach of market forces shapes every character’s desires and fate, is of course not new for Amis. And when the fiction is precisely about the commercial production of fiction, such a restricted vision of writing for the market—either to succeed or to fail—perhaps serves in its simplicity to heighten the satirical impact of the novel that never lets readers forget that Barry’s celebrity status has nothing to do with talent or originality. Were this the only achievement of The Information, however, we might simply dismiss Amis for his cynical complicity with the market, as Delany does, or for an implied authorial smugness as a celebrity author but one distanced from the obviously uninteresting work of his fictional creation, another instance of postmodern irony that has, for most critics, long since run its course.
 
But it is precisely this limit, this foreclosure of alternatives in an apparently hegemonic market for fiction that I want to complicate, by asking how that fictional foreclosure implicates Amis and his ongoing negotiation of the production of authorial celebrity. My reasoning here thus diverges from Catherine Bernard’s argument that Amis’s “disembodied” authorial presence “may be a mere posture to mask his lack of control and self-identity,” but that the whole contributes to a Frankfurt School immanent critique of society by reflecting its contradictions (132). The critique is there, but exists uneasily alongside Amis’s satirical embrace of celebrity production. In a sense, especially if we take Amis at his word, “the two writers, Richard and Gwyn, are [him],” as he stated in an interview with Graham Fuller shortly after the publication of The Information, and Gwyn’s mediated ego certainly reflects Amis’s own experiences of a celebrity alter-ego during publicity events (Fuller 124). The novel also shows Amis using Richard and Gwyn to play with his own public persona. For example, Richard’s Joycean aspirations, while part of his failure in a postmodern literary market, also point to Amis’s admiration for Joyce as a model stylist; introducing Richard and his internal struggles with writing, Amis’s narrator toys with different ways of representing that interiority, revising Richard’s thoughts several times before deciding to drop the “I”: “For the interior monologue now waives the initial personal pronoun in deference to Joyce” (5). Further, Richard’s attempts to slander Gwyn’s image include spreading rumors among the judges for the Profundity prize of Gwyn’s womanizing and misogyny, accusations commonly leveled against Amis. But Amis’s sadistic treatment of both figures, even if they reflect aspects of himself, problematizes such a neat picture, even beyond a widely discredited biographical criticism. Amis makes frequent authorial intrusions throughout the novel (by now one of his signature moves), distancing his own public persona as writer from his fictional author-figures. Amis’s authorial presence in the novel, that is, contributes to its satirical representation of his dubious alter ego, Gwyn.
 
Amis’s authorial presence in the novel, while associated with Gwyn, also serves to contradict Gwyn’s success, emphasizing the contingent and ephemeral nature of celebrity, particularly Amis’s own. Consider two examples. First, in a clear authorial intrusion early in the novel, Amis briefly interjects with what sounds like a self-conscious undoing of the controlling Joycean creator, “behind or beyond or above his handiwork . . . paring his fingernails.” The intrusion tells a story about trying to sign with a child in the park whom he thinks is deaf. Self-consciously failing to communicate with the child, he finally attempts to make the signs—“the M, the A”—and thinks to himself, “how can I ever play the omniscient, the all-knowing, when I don’t know anything?” (43). If modernist celebrity depends in part on the myth of relative autonomy from bourgeois systems of production and exchange, Amis’s self-effacing authorial presence points to the postmodern and highly speculative literary market in which he is only “one small part of a vast and complex machine” (Brouillette 67).
 
Second, Amis pits the arbitrary and ephemeral time of authorial fame against the nature of universal time, a trope through which he refers to his own contingent celebrity status. In an interior monologue during a conversation with Gwyn, Richard reflects that “Gwyn’s success was rather amusingly—no, in fact completely hilariously—accidental. And transitory. Above all transitory. If not in real time then, failing that, certainly in literary time. . . . Or else the universe was a joke” (80). After they part ways, Amis intrudes to reflect on the speed of light and the inconceivable and growing distance between points in space. On par with Joyce’s interest in the universal and the particular, the timeless and the trivial, that we see in the “Ithaca” episode of Ulysses, Amis’s interjection on astronomical time answers Richard’s speculation about Gwyn with a comically hyperbolic reflection on his own “literary time” of transitory celebrity in the face of universal time:
 

In a million millennia, the sun will be bigger. It will feel nearer. In a million millennia, if you are still reading me, you can check these words against personal experience, because the polar ice caps have melted away and Norway enjoys the climate of North Africa.
 
Later still, the oceans will be boiling. The human story, or at any rate the terrestrial story, will be coming to an end. I don’t honestly expect you to be reading me then. (81)

 
As Amis jokingly projects his own literary longevity into this grand narrative of apocalypse, he implicitly mocks his fictional author’s desire for an immortality born out of the polish of corporate branding.
 
So through the novel’s foreclosure of any alternatives to success or failure in the global corporate production of literature, Amis’s identification with his author figures, and his authorial reflections on the ephemeral and contingent nature of his own celebrity status, The Information, as several critics have suggested, certainly implicates Amis with the star system and its arbitrary commodification of literature that the novel supposedly indicts.[21] The marketing of the novel, Amis’s self-reflexive complicity, and the novel’s picture of winners-take-all publishing, all point to a totalizing market for literature that is fully and inescapably reified. But that’s precisely the point on which I want to conclude my reading of the novel.
 
In his recent essay on Amis and the marketing of genre, Will Norman argues that Amis’s
 

“Night Train reveals a disjunction between the marketing, design and institutional reception of Amis’s work as literary fiction on one hand, and the author’s own strategies of composition on the other. In the light of this analysis, Amis’s work yields a negative critique of the category of literary fiction from within its own domain, in rendering visible the tensions and compromises necessary to its desire for legitimacy.” (38)

 
I fully agree with Norman’s thesis and its general relevance to Amis’s larger aims across his fiction, especially insofar as it calls attention to a negative critique operative within the very domain of literary production today. I would, however, like to push that argument towards a different conclusion. In exposing the “compromises” associated with the corporate market for fiction, The Information fully undermines any highbrow legitimacy for literature, leaving only an empty desire in its place. The celebrity author, as representative of literary fiction, is an absolute product of successful packaging and marketing, and thus serves for Amis to sweep away any residual claims literature makes to an art that is not bound by capricious and speculative corporate values. Following on this, and building on Success and Money, Amis implicates his own authorial celebrity with the systems of speculation and greed that he so strongly satirizes. But rather than seeing this simply as a problem of complicity with its satirical target, as Delany does, or as a balance between “satiric authority” and complicity with commodification, as Begley argues of Money (84), the strength of The Information is that it collapses any distinction between fictional representation and its mode of production under the new star system of multinational marketing. As such, it culminates Amis’s ongoing fictional drama of the market for literature. The novel concludes by insisting that “the information” is nothing, a kind of existential abyss of a contemporary culture lacking any ontological or moral ground. But it also suggests that the novel is about, is the information on, the process whereby the category of literature has become completely reified, and the contingent status of the celebrity author figure it produces along with it. More specifically, The Information is about the production, and contingency, of Martin Amis’s celebrity.
 

Conclusion

I began this discussion with the story of the media scandal over what some in the British publishing establishment saw as a mercenary move to secure an enormous advance, an outcry based partly on the sense that Amis had sold out the category of literary fiction to the strictly commercial dictates of the mass market. As I’ve suggested throughout the essay, this distinction is something of a fantasy, a holdout on a modernist myth of literary exceptionalism from the homogenizing forces of the conglomerate system that has come to dominate the market for literary fiction. In this sense, Amis’s rising financial success as an author and his transparently commercial move served to expose that fantasy. Further, we might think of the media outrage as participating in the game that Amis’s fiction had been playing all along. From the self-reflexive stylistic experiments with modernist authorial control in Success to the metafictional play with a split authorial identity under the global “money conspiracy” of Money to The Information’s culminating reflection on the total reification of contingent celebrity, Amis has constructed a loosely allegorical trilogy that dramatizes the way in which modernist modes of celebrity—based in carefully cultivated niche markets and a myth of exceptionalism—have been fully absorbed by the global market for literary production and the commerce of cultural values. The scandal of Amis’s commercial greed played its part within a system of commercialized cultural values that, like that of literary prizes, serves to protect the collective belief in artistic autonomy, a form of cultural capital that can translate into other symbolic and economic forms, as James English has shown (189-90). If the outrage over Amis’s alleged sell-out stems from a faith in the independence of cultural capital from economic structures, a faith that at least since Bourdieu has been shown to be naïve of the way those structures prop up cultural production, then the establishment’s ire was already bound up with the commercial game Amis was playing.
 
But beyond this picture of a totalizing market that both rewards and chastises complicity, Amis’s unfolding story about the corporate production of celebrity was a new and perverse means of generating cultural capital. Across these novels, we see Amis increasingly collapsing the distinction between fictions about the market and the market for fiction, such that even the most apparently anti-commercial satirical stance cannot deny its dependence on the systemic commodification that gives it its voice. This is by no means to redeem Amis’s choices or the politics of his fiction, much less the ways in which the market shapes the conditions of visibility for literary fiction. Rather, Amis’s self-reflexive metafictional project on the market for fiction shows that the identity of the celebrity author is itself a fiction produced by “the accumulation of literary capital (or power), and its convertibility into or out of other kinds of capital” as it continues to circulate (English and Frow 55). As Amis’s novels come to engage ever more directly with the commodification of literature and the contingent processes by which literary celebrity is conferred, and does so from the position of a self-conscious insider, he in a sense renounces any claims to cultural values distinct from their economic machinations. But in that renunciation and his full, if ironic, embrace of the corporatization of literary production, he signals a form of cultural capital whose authority is based in dramatizing the production of his own ephemeral celebrity status. Amis’s fictions about the market, read in light of the marketing of fiction, reveal a perverse and limited means of producing cultural capital out of the symbolic and economic structures that it has traditionally disavowed.