ESC: English Studies in Canada

David herman defines style as a "jointly formal and social phenomenon" that prompts reflection on discourse as "an instrument that can either work against or reinforce patterns of conflict—more or less unquestioned hierarchies and antagonisms—operative in society at large" (Story Logic 207). Martin Amis appears to concur, claiming that style always carries ethical implications (Experience 121). Amis's novels enact stories' participation in universal masculinist circuits of power in ways that denounce masculinist societal frameworks' malignity, as his nonempathic-to-sadistic protagonist-narrators are allowed to spin outrageous guilt-deflecting fables to the point of self-incrimination. Moreover, his peculiar modes of questioning textual authority enact the narrative nature of cognitive processes and the illusively benign ways in which essentialist subsumptions of otherness breed violence, dehumanization, and pain in interpersonal and global contexts. Adding to recent cognitive-enactivist readings of narrative fiction, this discussion of key rhetorical and narrative aspects of Amis's fiction evinces his commitment to subject masculinism and its various subdivisions (misogyny, heteronormativity, and racism) to haunting scrutiny in order to foreground the toxicity at their core and galvanize powerful reader responses. [End Page 67]

Diedrick, Finney, Miller, Dern, Bentley, and others acknowledge Amis's criticism of atavistic forms of masculinity. Their close readings emphasize his consistent toying with traditional distinctions between textual instances (author, narrator, protagonist), stressing that his sophisticated use of narrative unreliability generates peculiar forms of reader engagement (it consistently places interpretive responsibilities of ethical import on readers). My enactivist reading allows for a more comprehensive demonstration of the scope and potential effects of Amis's critique, as it foregrounds and explicates Amis's condemnation of the deleterious social effects of several masculinist practices read by other critics as benign and potentially apt to attract readers' sympathy (such as self-abuse and false victimization). It also proposes Amis's peculiar and obsessive use of masculinist narrators as the expression of an insight concerning masculinist functioning particularly relevant in today's context of ascension of extreme right movements and increasing impact of "fake news" worldwide.

Herman sees modernist writers' stronger focus on characters' perceptions of events not as a shift from external to inner reality but as a conceptualization of a new "geography of mind" that rejects "Cartesian mappings of the mental as a bracketed-off interior space," imagining the mind as a "distributional flow interwoven with rather than separated from situations, events, and processes in the world" ("Re-minding" 255). He relates this model to Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch's "enactivist approach" to cognition (cognition as enactment or embodied action rather than a matter of representations/projections), noting that "modernists put characters' mental states and dispositions into circulation with the possibilities for action and interaction that, from a postcognitivist perspective, help constitute the mind in the first place" (258). Herman's argument can be extended to Amis's employment of masculinist narrators, whose manipulative, self-serving accounts function as "action loops" that "criss-cross the organism and its environment" (Clark 35, quoted in Herman, "Re-minding" 260). In narrating, John Self (Money), John Prince (Other People), Sam Young (London Fields), the unnamed narrators of Time's Arrow and House of Meetings, and most of Amis's other narrators relentlessly assess opportunities for self-serving action, toiling to generate socially sanctioned contexts for their acts and safeguard their clearly discernible, though vehemently disavowed, sadistic pleasures against a backdrop of increasingly adverse public reactions to exploitation and abuse and increasingly empowering legal protections for potential victims. However, narrative unreliability markers consistently compromise their pursuits, prompting attentive readers to acknowledge their deceit and malignity. [End Page 68] Amis thus uses an enactivist framework to expose masculinist attitudes, discourses, and actions as elements of sensorimotor assemblages exclusively fixated on exploitation and self-perpetuation, whose destructiveness can be eradicated only by expunging all their subroutines from our "value landscape" (Caracciolo 367) and socio-cultural environment. Amis's novels engage readers in complex evaluative actions, prompting their enactment of procedures of diagnosis and rejection at any contact with self-serving and unreliable discourses. They also provide readers with...