Hello hello! Reading Tratner’s “Derrida’s Debt to Milton Friedman”, there were a couple passages which got me thinking about the postmodern aspects of Martin Amis’ Money: A Suicide Note.

       My first passage of Tratner’s discusses a shift from a nineteenth-century “morality of spending only what one had earned”, to a more consumerist economy (Tratner 794). In Amis’ Money, I think there is a strong relationship between overspending/indulgence and one’s morality. From where I’ve gotten so far in the book, this seems to be reinforced by examples of overspending: tabs being run up due to alcohol indulgence, and money needing to be borrowed due to gambling debts. I also thought that the novel’s cover, where the ribbon of “MONEY” is surrounded by images which imply the illicit, was also interesting. From what I understand, I think the cover is an example of Milton Friedman’s argument of how “money plays an important role in the economy precisely because it is a system for distributing signifiers which have no referent” (Tratner 798). The word “MONEY” doesn’t point precisely to any one meaning or object, as the cover proves. Nothing is fixed. As a result, the novel’s corresponding lack of concrete standards and conventionality in terms of plot also seems to allude to the postmodern, falling in line with a system which consists of blurred boundaries.

       My second passage of Tratner’s notes how “in the nineteenth century, every text began with production and with an account of the needs that production hoped to satisfy; in the twentieth, every text begins with demand, with desires” (Tratner 795). I noticed how Amis’ text opens with a suicide note on its very first page, playing an interesting dynamic between production and demand. The note states “In the planetary aggregate of all life, there are many more suicide notes than there are suicides” and how “It is the note and not the life that is cancelled out. Or the other way round. Or death” (Amis 6). So, does the text began with a production of a suicide note which traditionally fulfills the satisfaction of the individual who writes it and/or addresses, or a demand for a corresponding suicide? As one can “never tell…with suicide notes” (Amis 6), is this ambiguity another reinforcement of postmodernism, an example of deconstruction? I think it is!

So what does it mean when the title is Money: A Suicide Note?!! What’s the connection?

Any thoughts on this? 🙂