Mimesis and Informatics in The Information

Abstract

In The Information (1995), fiction has entered a world whose dominant cultural form is named by its title. Martin Amis’s darkly comic tale of literary rivalry does not merely anatomize authorial envy, midlife masculinity, or the high-octane literary scene of the 1990s, but ultimately views these subjects in relation to an era of information overkill, multimedia saturation, and the conversion of cultural expression into “content.” More explicitly than Amis’s earlier novels, The Information locates itself, and literature, within the contemporary media ecology — an information environment on the verge of the Internet Age. The novel treats successful authorship as a media phenomenon — a familiar insight to which Amis brings considerable wit and nuance as well as the inbuilt irony of his own celebrity. But the informatic orientation of The Information also operates more generally, shaping the novel on virtually every level, from its invocations of astrophysics to its self-reflexiveness and store of metaphors. Most strikingly, it enters the texture of the novel’s mimesis, its stylized and self-conscious realism.¹