Satirizing the Carnival of Postmodern Capitalism: The Transatlantic and Dialogic Structure of Martin Amis's Money

Abstract

n light of its oscillating structure and distinctive idiom, it is hardly surprising that Martin Amis's Money has acquired a critical reputation for its style and transatlantic cultural diagnosis. For many British critics, Money's biculturalism and formal hybridity offered a riposte to the accusations of parochialism that dominated the state of the debates of the 1970s and early 1980s.1 Whether connected to Amis's cultural affinity with the North Atlantic (Martin Amis [Bigsby] 182) or transposed into demarcations realism and experimentalism (Elias, Bernard), Money's experimental narrative was widely upheld as exemplifying both the diversification of English fiction and the revitalizing emergence of a home-grown tradition of postmodern writing. While the fervor of this narratological debate has largely abated, delineations of the novel's cultural and literary accent have persisted in relation to the objectives of its transatlantic satire. For those who locate the novel in a space between national cultures, Money remains a satire of unstable cultural dichotomies (Brown 101), bearing witness to the birth of an Anglo-American