Literature and the Economics of Liberty

7. Cather’s Capitalism

8. Conrad’s Praxeology

9. Hyperinflation and Hyperreality: Mann’s “Disorder and Early Sorrow”

It was during the Inflation that the Germans forgot how to rely on themselves as individuals and learned to expect everything from “politics,” from “the state,” from “des tiny.” They learned to look on life as a wild adventure, the outcome of which depended not on their own effort, but on sinister, mysterious forces. The millions who were then robbed of their wages and savings became the “masses” with whom Dr. Goebbels was to operate. Inflation is a tragedy that makes a whole people cynical, hardhearted and indifferent. (p. 63)

Currency hitherto accepted becomes incalculable, standards fluctuate, and, in spite of all the explanations that can be adduced to account for the irrational, what is finite fails to keep pace with the infinite and no reasonable means avail to reduce the irrational uncertainty of the infinite to sense and reason again. (p. 640)

Economics had represented the world of rationality to Huguenau, but inflation turns that rationality into irrationality:

even that most characteristic mode of the bourgeois existence, that partial system which is hardier than all others because it promises an unshakable unity in the world, the unity that man needs to reassure his uncertainty—two marks are always more than one mark and a sum of eight thousand francs is made up of many francs and yet is a whole, a rational organon in terms of which the world can be reckoned up—even that hardy and enduring growth, in which the bourgeois desires so strongly to believe even while all currencies are tottering, is beginning to wither away; the irrational cannot be kept out at any point, and no vision of the world can any longer be reduced to a sum in rational addition. (p. 641)

Was it purely by chance that the crisis of realism in the novel and in painting coincided with the end of gold money? Or that the birth of “abstract” art coincided with the shocking invention of inconvertible monetary signs, now in general use? Can we not see in this double crisis of money and language the collapse of guarantees and frames of reference, a rupture between sign and thing, undermining representation and ushering in the age of the floating signifier? (p. 3)

For a compressed statement of Goux’s thesis, see his essay “Cash, Check, or Charge?” in Mark Osteen and Martha Woodmansee, eds., The New Economic Criticism: Studies at the intersection of literature and economics (London: Rout-ledge, 1999), pp. 114-27 and especially p. 115:

The fact that our century has experienced what has come to be called the dematerialization of money, leading to a radically nominalist conception of the monetary instrument and culminating in inconvertibility and floating exchange rates, and that this same century is also marked by an unprecedented rupture in the mode of representation as well as by a deepening concern with the nature of the sign and the philosophical status of language, is certainly not a simple coincidence.

Along similar lines, John Vernon, in his Money and Fiction: Literary Realism in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1984), states his thesis this way: “my most persistent analogy is the comparison between the novel’s claim to represent reality and paper money’s claim to represent things of (presumably) enduring value: gold and silver” (p. 7). Jochen Hörisch, in his Heads or Tails: The Poetics of Money, Amy Horning Marschall, trans. (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2000), evaluates the theories of Goux and Vernon (p. 71) and also discusses an article by Ralf Schiebler on “modern art and the gold standard” that appeared in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, April 29, 1995; Schiebler argues “that those times in which the currency has a high percentage of gold are times of pronounced realism in art” (quoted by Hörisch, p. 178). Brantlinger, Fictions of State, pp. 205-06, critically evaluates Goux’s thesis and offers this important caution:

Goux’s insistence on the importance of the shift from the gold standard to inconvertible “token money” is perhaps simplistic, in part because it suggests a monocausal expla nation of cultural change not much different from the old Marxist base/superstructure paradigm (money changes, so culture changes). As Britain’s early paper money era (1797-1821) suggests, the movement away from the gold standard for most modern nation-states has been gradual and uneven, rather than a sudden, turn-of-the-century affair. (p. 206)

Brantlinger’s objections to Goux’s thesis are well-taken and equally qualify my claims about the cultural importance of the German inflation. Finally, on the subject of relating the gold standard to literary realism, see my discussion of Walter Benn Michaels in note 84.

In cultural matters, inflation abstracts anxiety, suspends judgment, multiplies interpretation, diffuses rebellion, debases standards, dissipates energy, mutes confrontation, undermines institutions, subordinates techniques, polar izes theory, dilates style, dilutes content, hyperpluralizes the political and social order while homogenizing culture. Above all, inflation masks stasis.

Unfortunately the book is weakened by Newman’s failure to understand the economics of inflation, which he claims “is primarily caused not by... monetary policy or government spending... but by inflationary assumptions anticipated by the entire culture” (p. 167). This is another case of mistaking the effects of inflation for the cause.

10. The Capitalist Road: The Riddle of the Market from Karl Marx to Ben Okri

bourgeois ideology, or, in our present terms, the middle-class method of repressing reality, is not so much an affair of distortion and of false consciousness in the sense of out right cynicism or lies... but rather, primarily and constitutively, of leaving out, of strategic omissions, lapses, a kind of careful preliminary preparation of raw material such that certain questions will never arise in the first place. (p. 172)

Acids boil outside
Crooked towers of state

Where politicians disgorge our lives
In vomitoriums of power.

We rush through heated garbage day
With fear in morbid blood-raw eyes:

Mobs in cancerous slums
Burn the innocent and guilty

At no on.