Sibling incest, madness, and the "Jews"

Social Research, Summer, 1998 by Sander L. Gilman

Success is the tale of three siblings: a brother, Gregory, and sister, Ursula, as well as their adopted brother, Terry. Terry has been adopted by the upper-class Riding family after his father murdered his seven-year-old sister in what is one of the central motifs of child abuse in the tale: "I don't know whether my father killed my mother; but I bloody know he killed my sister, because I was there at the time and watched him as he did so" (p. 25). Terry is adopted into the Riding family because of the curious fact that he and Gregory shared a birthday, a fact that Gregory's father commented on when reading the newspaper account of the murder while sitting at River Hall, "the bent metal knocker, the two urns, the retreating steps... the long black windows, the vine-matted walls, the grand perpendiculars of the house" (pp. 27-28). The estate is emblematic of the family and becomes the marker by which the family's decay is indicated. By the time the novel takes place, some decade after the murder, the solid life of the country squire has eroded. The father is more evidently mad and his madness takes the form of spending his more and more limited income on the "improvement" of his estate, the building of follies and mock ruins. His is just a continuation of a eccentric family history (p. 139) that concludes (as in Thomas Mann's Buddenbrooks) in the next and final generation.

The class difference is also a physical difference. They provide the reader with a catalogue of the markers of "consciousness of kind." Amis gives us the physiognomy of class immediately: Terry is called "Ginger" at school because of his red hair (p. 11) and sees himself as "the sort of person you walk past in the street every day and never glance at or notice of recognize again" (p. 11). He is seen by his step-brother as having an "ill-bred face" (p. 133). He belongs to the category of the parvenu just as Gregory is the upper class degenerate. Gregory has "sickly good looks, delicate and incredible queer" who dresses as a dandy with "vampiric crimson-lined black opera cape, a waistcoat of his father's, harem trousers" (p. 13). Gregory, unlike the rampantly heterosexual Terry, is a bisexual.

And sexuality becomes the measure of success in the novel. Indeed, the very term success is defined as "fucking" on the first page of the novel (p. 7). And Gregory is at least initially the sexual success (at least in terms of his own, very unreliable discourse). He likes "the moneyed chasubles of silence, soft topography of flesh, the trickle of retreating satin" (p. 18) of the women he seduces. It is this discourse that is revealed in the course of the novel to be a set of elaborate lies about his sexual and financial "success." Indeed, by all of his own measures in novel, he is a dismal failure.

Their sister/adopted sister Ursula, according to Terry's first memories of childhood, had a "sharp, knowing face" (p. 28); for Gregory she is remembered as "delicious, vague, sleepy eyed" (p. 51). At nineteen (the same age as Siegmund and Sieglinde in Mann's novella), when the novel takes place, she is Terry's "best friend" (p. 36) and he cannot imagine her as a sexual being; she is "pure." He thinks of her as taboo, evoking the Westermarck incest hypothesis: "I'd fall in love with her instantly if she weren't my sister." She seems to him to have the