The Postmodern Meng

“If a car follows me round two corners, I narrow my gaze and tighten my hold on the wheel, covertly, like an actor. Round three corners, and it’s red alert. That’s what paranoia is after all. Red alert. I lock the doors and shut the windows….. Sometimes I get contact paranoia from the cars in front: the cars in front might be paranoid of me, in case I’ following them. Sometimes I think the car behind thinks I’m following the car in front. In an attempt to reassure everyone, myself included, I often overtake- or I try…. I realized why I felt paranoid. No one was following me.” 223
Elie Edmonson’s essay, Martin Amis Writes Postmodern Man, informs us of the actuality of John Self, a character who embodies the predicament of the postmodern man. Self’s narrative above, to me exemplifies this predicament in a number of ways. First and foremost, in context to travel the quote above demonstrates Amis’s delusion and misunderstanding of his time travel, or more simply his proper agency through life. Moreover, in a certain sense, the quote is characterized by John’s desire for something to happen. Indeed, nothing comes of this and to a degree Self realizes the absurdity of this paranoia. However, this yet another instance of Self as a main character characterized by a desire for a “teleological world view”, which, as Edmonson explains, is a delusion of the postmodern man that Amis endeavored to challenge throughout Money. Perhaps the most important element characterized above though is not only the desperate need for narrative but also how the quote demonstrates Edmonson’s assertion that, “in postmodernity a truly autonomous voice, one independent of cultural forces, is an impossibility”(2). I think what’s important is how Self is constantly affirming the characteristics of a postmodern man yet also in a strange sense aware of this absurdity implicitly. That is, here is John Self sharing his thoughts and his ideas about the thoughts’ of others. Yet at the end of the passage and throughout the rest of our reading his desire for both a teleological narrative and his presentation as an autonomous voice is constantly in juxtaposition to a world that presents this pretense as absurd. That is, his sense of autonomy and egomania become more absurd as the plot thickens in the life of John Self. Indeed, as the plot thickens, in rather unusual ways with no sense of pace or reason, his ideas about narrative begin to seem even more absurd as we witness a continuum of action unfold as opposed to a simple “beginning middle and end”(3).