‘Style is Morality’? Aesthetics and politics in the Amis era

Abstract

It would seem counterintuitive to look to Money for a demonstration of the moral efficacy of the contemporary novel. But that paradoxical pursuit of the ethico-political dimensions of such a bawdily carnivalesque narrative is one that Amis himself invites us to undertake, though not at the level of matter so much as through form. Amis's assertion that ‘style is morality’ will be familiar enough to any reader of his critical writings. But what does it actually mean? In his fusion of ethics and expression, is Amis pointing to one of the pay-offs of novel-reading or is he identifying the premise of a morally accountable act of novel-writing? This article explores these two sides – the interpretive and the compositional – to Amis's maxim, considering the ways in which his conviction about the moral potential of fictional style is put into practice in the most unlikely and surprising of contexts in Money. By addressing Amis's stylistic innovations historically, it also complicates Amis's affinity with the very postmodern tendencies with which his early work is too often aligned for the convenience of critical categorisation. Instead, Money emerges as a work with a strong allegiance to what Amis calls a distinctly ‘English tradition’, while revealing an underlying impulse to find some kind of stylistic reconciliation between sincerity and satire.