Martin Amis
Martin Amis is a representative of 20th-century British critical realism literature, such as "Money: The Book of suicide", "London Venue" and "Information".
Martin Amis was born in the Shuxiang Mendi house, his father was Kingsley Amis, and Lucky Jim was written by Kingsley Amis. Thus, from an early age, Martin Amis was influenced by his family environment and showed exceptional talent and talent in literature.
In 1974, when Martin Amis was 25 years old, his first work, The Rachel Papers, won the Maugham Prize for Literature, and a series of works since then have pushed him to the pinnacle of the literary world.
His work focuses on lust, violence, sexual promiscuity, murder, death, pornography, drug addiction, nuclear terror, apocalyptic plots, and more. It describes the filth and indecency of daily life, the vileness and filth in the depths of human nature, and the ugliness and depravity of modern society. For example, "Baby Of Death".
Baby Death
Dead Baby is about a house in the English countryside where six residents, three visitors and a prostitute spend an indulgent and horrific weekend. It is a shady world of THAAD, where moral judgments are shelved consciously or unconsciously, and indulgence and masochism and debauchery form the main theme of three days and two nights. Negative images such as alcoholism, drug abuse, promiscuity, violent performances, sexual impotence, psychological insanity, murder and sadism abound, and spectacular desires and violent narratives are shocking and breathtaking.
And even more profound of these themes is "London Venues".
London Venue
"London Venue" is martin amis's most representative work, the protagonist of the story is called Samson, he is an American writer, but he has been unsuccessful in his literary creation, living a poor life, and later learned that he was terminally ill, lonely and desperate he came to England. When he came to England, he stumbled upon a shocking secret, that is, Nicola's story and plans, and he was thrilled that his chance to become famous had finally arrived.
So he traced the footsteps of Nicola's life, ready to write down all the stories he knew about Nicola, and finally write them into a book, and he himself will surely become famous.
The heroine of the novel, Nicola, has a special ability to predict the future, and she knows that she will be murdered in the future. So she had to pick the one who would murder her in the future. At her side are two men: Guy, a decent gentleman in high society, and Keith, a rogue villain living at the bottom of society.
Guy is rich, rich but unhappy, and his relationship with his wife has waned since he had a son. Their only son was rebellious and eccentric and withdrawn at a young age, all of which made Guy feel that the family was unhappy, depressed and lonely. When he meets Nicola by chance at the Black Cross Bar, he decides that this woman can bring him happiness, so he is deeply infatuated with Nicola.
Keith lives at the bottom of society, he is a complete villain, a cheater, a pornographer, and a bad person. He also had a wife and daughter, but he never fulfilled the responsibilities of a husband and father. Ever since he met Nicola, he had maintained a lover's relationship with her and was willingly driven by Nicola.
Nicola toysed the two men between the two men with her beauty and superb acting skills, and she wanted Keith to murder herself and seduce Guy because she could get his money for Keith to squander so that she could control and control Keith.
However, the story does not end as Nicola had hoped, and Samson, the writer who has always wanted to become famous, eventually murders her.
There are actually two main aspects of Martin Amis's work to criticize: one is the supremacy of money, and the other is technical rationality.
Story backdrop
At the end of the 20th century, after several decades of rapid economic development after the war, material resources have been extremely rich, people's lives should be happier, but this is not the case, the long-term pursuit of material and wealth, so that Britain into a materialism, money worship and hedonism prevailed era.
People worship money, money worship pervades society, and the moral norms of the past are lost. People have no pursuit, no faith, no concept of right and wrong, and they are confused and insensitive all day long. In order to gain profits and grab money, he will not hesitate to sell his body and soul. The distortion and deformation of human nature, the decline and decay of morality
Under the control of instrumental rationality, people are emotionally deficient, more and more selfish, and fall into a situation of moral loss of control and spiritual scarcity.
Instrumental rationality
After human beings entered the industrial civilization, they entered the stage of industrialization, urbanization and modernization. This process greatly inflates "instrumental rationality". Instrumental rationality means that action is driven only by the motivation to pursue utilitarianism, action uses reason to achieve the expected purpose of its own needs, and the actor considers purely from the perspective of maximizing effect, ignoring people's emotional pursuit and spiritual values. Material and money became the direct ends of people's pursuits, so instrumental rationality went to extremes, and means became ends, and became iron cages set on people.
Under the enslavement of instrumental rationality, human emotions are discarded, and people's emotional pursuits are completely ignored. However, when instrumental reason resists and banishes man's emotional desires, it eventually plunges the human soul into nothingness and absurdity. The rapid development of science and technology has led to the consequences of human spiritual poverty and dehumanization, the unity of human nature and reason has broken down, and the spiritual world and emotional life of human beings have become a wasteland, and the emotional relationship between human beings has become cruel and ruthless.
The expansion of materialism caused by instrumental rationality also exposes the selfish nature of some people, so that they become more arbitrary evil and cruel under the premise of emotional perversion. Thus, in the context of prison, people either kill people expressionlessly or violence against themselves expressionlessly.