Hi all,

Now that we’re finished with the novel-based portion of the course, I thought I would share a couple of passages I found interesting in a book I’ve been reading for another class. The book is about American modernist poet Hart Crane, and this particular section of the book is concerned with Crane’s elaborate use of descriptive language. While these passages are concerned with verse, I’m wondering if there are any comments we can make on the ‘economy of language’ in any of the novels we’ve read, or novels in general.

“A case can be made, however, on behalf of such an ‘immature’ way of writing. In ‘Writing as a General Economy,’ the Canadian poet-critic Steve McCaffery vigorously defends wasteful expenditure as a defining characteristic of good poetry. He builds upon Georges Bataille’s distinction between a ‘restricted economy,’ one whose ‘operation is based upon valorized notions of restraint, conservation, investment, profit, accumulation and cautious procedularities in risk taking,’ and a ‘general economy,’ which includes ‘all non-utilitarian activities of excess, unavoidable waste and non-productive consumption’ such as ‘orgasm, sacrifice, meditation, The Last Supper, and dreams’. […] McCaffery takes a stand on behalf of that rare poetry that exhibits ‘deployment without use, without aim and without a will to referential or propositional lordship’. Drawing upon Marcel Mauss and Bronislaw Malinowski, he argues that such special poetry operates not according to the restrictive economy of capitalism but according to the logic of the ‘gift exchange,’ in which ‘the object is exhausted, consumed in the very staging’ of the gift and no return or reward is expected. As in a potlatch, a perspicacious poet displays and exhausts the abundance of his or her most prized possession, language. ‘TO WASTE,’ McCaffery writes, ‘IS TO LIVE THE EXPERIENCE OF WEALTH’.” (Reed 84-85, McCaffery and Bataille qtd. in Reed 84-84).

I’d love to know what you guys think!

Reed, Brent. Hart Crane: After his Lights. University of Alabama Press (2006). Print.

Acquiring a large sum of money is, at the outset of the novel, presented as a good thing, and when Roger Yount doesn’t acquire that money, his million pound bonus, he and his family begin to slide just a little faster towards the red. Where for Roger that sum amounts to more or less “maintenance money” for the Younts, when similar sums encroach upon the narratives of Freddy, Zbigniew, and Mary, they are sums that stilt or potentially reverse, rather than maintain, the flow of their individual economic narratives.

Freddy’s payout is reliant upon the agreement and the belief that he will never play again, Mary’s inheritance of her mother’s house ends up taking a large chunk out of her savings to pay for the inheritance tax and preparing the house for sale (Mary and Alan however refuse to take a loan out to cover these expenses for the sheer ridiculousness of the situation), and the case of money much worried over by Zbigniew is, once revealed to Mary, deemed useless not only for the legal trouble it would bring, but for its inability to function as legal tender and the likelihood of its depreciation or taxation.

Receiving a large amount of money, it seems, goes hand in hand with either losing a large amount of money concurrently, or forfeiting a larger influx of money that may be obtained over a longer amount of time – see Freddy’s situation and Albert’s refusal to invest his suitcase full of tenners.

I’d love to hear other thoughts on the uselessness of money, or of legal tender in Capital, as there were so many variations on the theme throughout the novel that I couldn’t quite wrap my head around a coherent way of framing it!

Hey everyone!

In light of us beginning Lanchester’s “Capital”, I thought I’d share this 2015 BBC documentary “Millionaire Basement Wars” I saw about a year ago.

I thought it was especially relevant to the prologue of “Capital” because it’s about the maximization of property value in the heart of London, one of the most expensive places to live in the world. Mega-basements are being built, much like along Pepys Road in the novel, for houses already valued for millions of pounds. The excavation additions, of course, only add more value. The areas covered by the documentary include Kensington and Chelsea, and covers the rapid growth of subterranean building along its streets. Much like how the houses in “Capital” are described to have had “become central actors in their own right” (12), “as if they had come alive, and had wishes and needs of their own” (13), the houses along Kensington and Chelsea are trophy asset purchases, and are significant enough to justify a documentary! They are definitely the main actors, here. While there is an attempt to regulate the number of excavations, there are, in short, constant trucks and construction along the narrows roads, and never-ending complaints from residents about the noise and disturbances. Applications for excavations are absolutely backed up. Though the main motive for the excavations is to further the property value (often doubling the original value) by adding things like cinemas, gyms, and waterfalls, it nevertheless seems ridiculous how peace and quiet in a residential neighbourhood has been exchanged for never-ending and excessive commodification! It really does seem like houses are the ones living on the streets, and not the residents.

Anyway, just thought this would be interesting to share! I would love to hear any further thoughts!

In my English Seminar course last semester we read a pastoral poem, a translation of one of Horace’s Epodes, about the desire to escape the continuous drive more wealth in exchange for a simple country life. The end of the poem was ironic, as the reader learns that it is actually spoken from the voice of a usurer, or money lender, who’s main objective is to continuously gain more wealth from the faulty payments, or inability to pay, of others. The usurer concludes that this will not and cannot occur, and every month he will continue to collect his payments:

“Gainst the ides, his money he gets in with pain, 

At the calends, puts all out again.”

This poem becomes one highlighting desire. The usurer has no intentions of leaving the city life (the financial, economy life) for that of a simple country life, perhaps dreaming of it in his periphery but seeing that desire through.

I thought about this while reading “Money” because the narrative and dialogue in the novel is, obviously, so innately tied to money. Every action that John takes in his day to day life revolves around buying something, spending an exorbitant amount of money, and trying to fix everything with money. In addition, John makes side comments about settling down with Selina, escaping his world of absolute chaos, moving away and disappearing. The reader is very aware that this is not a realism for John, as he seems to thrive on the chaos that his money allows him to. He is caught on the financial treadmill, where there is always more to gan in front of him, always more to spend, and always a chance to get further ahead.

This might be an extreme example of being caught in the economic world, but I think it directly relates both to the world we live in, and the translation of Horace’s Epode. The economy is, and has to be, a part of our dialogue and life every single day.

(Also, if anyone was able to do a word search for the occurrence of “money” in the novel, please let me know, just for curiosity sake).

One thing that has been mentioned by both Keynes and Friedman is the notion of buying power and how money provides someone with a certain degree of buying power but more money does not always mean more buying power. It is a pretty tricky concept that I have been considering over the last few lectures and has led me to ask a few questions that I am still mulling over and trying to answer for myself. Friedman makes the argument that what makes a person wealthy is their buying power. John Self is always making comments about how when money ‘happens’ to him he can buy this and that. There are references in Emma to a person’s worth and suitability for marriage being directly related to how much money they have and thus their ability to provide for their family. However, in Roxana, Roxana herself does not always have money like John talks about and she does not always have an income like the upperclassmen of Emma, rather, Roxana is in constant possession of a commodity that can be traded, that is always in demand, and that brings returns in the form of shelter, food, and even money itself – her body. What is interesting is that Roxana’s buying power does not stem from the amount of money she has. As Keynes says in his article, if someone has an income of $100 per week and their income doubles at the same time and at the same rate as inflation to the point where that person is making $200 per week, their buying power remains the same. Keynes also notes that inflation and deflation in the valuation of money affect the different classes in different ways, either helping or hurting their ability to exchange money for commodities. To me, this speaks to the uselessness of money and supports the idea of a barter system in which commodities are directly exchanged. Again, I take Roxana as an example as she is able to produce unimaginable monetary wealth with the single commodity of her body. Her body always has value as it is always in demand – fluctuations in the value of currency never hinder her ability to provide for herself and her family.

This all brings me back to the discussion we had in class surrounding the Potlatch and where the function of money in a capitalist society is reversed and it only becomes valuable as it is given away for an intangible return. Is there anyone else who thinks that the novels we have read give evidence to support this idea of money as being this arbitrary mode of exchange that really has no value or at least no stable value? Are there any examples of money providing constant stability?

Hi all,

I’d like to contribute some ideas I’ve been toying with since Tuesday about our Bakhtinesque reading of Money: A Suicide Note. I’m pretty familiar with Bakhtin’s theories of the grotesque and the carnivalesque, and I’m likely reading into this too literally but hey, at least it might provide some more context about these ideas.

I’ve been thinking in particular about the conflicted gendering of John’s body given the introduction of the grotesque and carnivalesque in Begley’s “Satirizing the Carnival of Postmodern Capitalism” and our conversations in class. Bakhtin’s notions of the carnivalesque and the grotesque bodies are largely indebted to Renaissance French writer François Rabelais and his work Gargantua and Pantagruel, which, as Dr. Dick mentioned on Tuesday, is about giants. Begley points to “Self’s hedonistic cycle of accumulation, consumption, and gratification [which] exists as a grotesque celebration of a proliferating commodity culture” in Money (86), the ‘grotesque celebration’ of which is derived from the motif of surplus in Gargantua and Pantagruel, whose physical sizes, actions, and consumption of food is nothing short of excessive.

However, the idea of the grotesque complicates this reading. In his book on Rabelais, Rabelais and His World, Bakhtin introduces the concept of the grotesque body. The grotesque body is the abject body; it is open, incomplete and leaks internal fluids into the outside world. Due to the extra genital orifice and activities such as childbirth and breast-feeding, the grotesque body is characterized as feminine. While the women in Rabelais inhabit the grotesque, they are often barred in various ways from accessing surplus; they are either punished for participating in festivals (or what Bakhtin would call “positive hyperbolism” (Rabelais and His World 278)), or they die in childbirth.

As John partakes in both of these activities, he could be read as both Bakhtin’s grotesque body or the complete body (masculine, with closed off boundaries to the external world). Begley states that: “Self’s carnival involves neither a suspension of, nor liberation from, hierarchy”, but is more: “a desperate cycle of accumulation and gratification” (91-92). He further suggests that John’s concern with decay is in opposition to this surplus. If we consider Rabelais, John’s abundant consumption aligns with that of the masculine giants, while his abjection (vomit, semen, tears at the royal wedding) sees him “embodying the degradation and ‘material bodily principle’ of grotesque realism” or the feminine body (Begley 91).

I know this might sound super far-fetched, but let me know what you guys think! I’m also trying to work out some ideas about the connection between the grotesque and the potlatch, so any thoughts about that would also be great.

Also: the idea of the abject is from Julia Kristeva’s book Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection.

Money, a novel about, well… money, surprisingly has a lot of mentions about the weather as well. John Self seems to refer to the weather almost as constantly as he does to money––how he’s “dumped out of the sky into nothing weather” (51), and there’s just “no weather” (71), and him asking “where has the weather gone?” (85). I think if we exchange the word “weather” with the word “money”, it’d still make sense: he’s just dumped into nothing money, there’s no money, where has the money gone? It is as if two, money and weather, are synonyms for each other. When John isn’t doing anything for money, there’s no weather. When there some kind of dilemma in him getting money, it’s raining, or snowing, or it’s oppressively hot, or it’s just grey.

Throughout the novel the weather is constantly grey, bleak, and having all kinds of effects (rain, snow), but rarely is there “nice weather”. The only time when it’s considered to be nice is when the royal wedding was happening, and John sat there watching and bawled. He said Princess Diana had the colour of “health or sun… but it is only the colour of money” (263). Weather and money are something you can’t control, John has said it himself, but it seems the people who have money are those who can also control the weather, those who have the weather element. Martina is also weather and money, where she could “fill the air with sun or thunder at the touch of her tap… she’s [John’s] weather god for now” (320), and because she controls the weather and the wealth, she also controls him.

(I hope I’m making sense… I’m still trying to distinguish or clearly identify the relationship between weather and money and this is what I have come up with so far.)

Two things struck me while reading the first few chapters of this novel: the prevalence of different forms of violence and commercial media. Aside from the obvious outward violence of misogyny and general aggression, John Self is constantly doing violent actions to his own body. He continuously assaults his body with alcohol, drugs, cigarettes, sleep deprivation, fast food, etc. There is never a moment in the novel where he is not undergoing some form of pain; even in moments when he appears comfortable he is subjected to the persistent ringing of his tinnitus. I believe that there is a link between the violence done to John’s body and the overwhelming prevalence of commercial media and its related technologies. The postmodern world is a world of high commercialization, where people are constantly bombarded by advertisements in different forms and through new technologies. From radio, movies, and television commercials, to bill boards and massive commercial signs in cities, the postmodern citizen cannot escape the daily imposition of commercialism. Similar to how John lives through various self-inflicted pain throughout the novel, the commercial elements of our life always appear to merge into a type of white noise, a noise that, like John’s tinnitus, is always present but not always noticeable. For example, most commodities that surround you in your room probably possess a corporate logo of some kind. We don’t stop to recognize this logo when we use the item, but it may have played a factor in your decision to purchase it. All these commercial items contribute to create a type of commercial white noise, one that now exists in the private home due to purchased commodities. If one were to think of John Self’s last name as a type of allegory, Amis may be stating that the prevalence of commercial media is a form of assault on our “Selves”, one that contributes to a collective pain which could lead to a societal degeneration that mirrors John’s bodily harm. Amis appears to support this degeneration when he writes about the loss of a family Italian restaurant to make way for multiple fast food burger places. There appears to be a loss of authenticity that is implied to be a product of commercialism. However, similar to how John continues to engage in undisciplined self-abuse, we continue to support and spread the influence of commercialism, regardless of the losses this action entails.

One of the first things that stood out to me when I started reading Money was the immediacy with which transportation was established as a setting in and off itself. Throughout the course, the modes, means, and practices of transportation have been present, if not emphasized so heavily as in Money, and have influenced both the flow and the shape of the texts thus far. In Roxana, her frequent travel is a manifestation of her fluidity, both as an individual and as lady capital. In Emma, it is the means by which Emma identifies and secures social affluence in first her critique of Mr. Knightley for his lack of a carriage, and second through the relative lack of it which allows Highbury to function in a semi-insular social sphere. In Howards End, it is the backdrop for the single-minded purposes of Mrs. Munt and the means by which country and urban, Howards End and Wickham Place intersect.

In Money however, transportation is no longer a means to an end in such a way, but begins to function as an end in itself. Like Roxana, John Self’s continuous movement between nations, New York and London to her England, France, and Holland, facilitates the constantly fluctuating fortunes of the protagonist and results in the ultimate demise of whatever notion of an original self either character initially embodied. Crucially, I believe, it is in one of these sites of transportation, the airplane, when the fiction of Self’s film, Good Money/Bad Money is conceived. This moment ties together the theme of transportation with the quasi-titular subject of the novel – the film and, I would argue, creates an avenue in which the movement of the novel’s various vehicles and their passengers can be paralleled with the movement of money in the novel, the way in which loans and debts are transferred, cancelled, and reconstituted in a new form, much like the protagonist John Self.  

In class yesterday we looked at the paradox in postmodernism. We discussed viewing postmodernism as creating a “blurred line between fiction and fact,” which I take to mean that the ideas presented in postmodernism put readers in a state of suspension where we are never sure whether or not we necessarily should be taking what is to be presented to us at face value. For example, the racism and misogyny evident in Amis’ “Money” may call attention to these issues, or perpetuate them, depending on reader interpretation. I feel like this puts readers in a state of anxiety where we are unsure what to make of what is being presented to us, as meanings/morals are no longer evidently clear, as was the case in the pre-postmodern era (19th century), with the grand narratives with their clear meanings. Keeping this in mind, the paradox between liberation and the confines of commercialism in postmodernism  (Warhol’s portrait example) create even more confusion; ultimately it’s hard to imagine what a crazy time living through the transition to postmodernism would have been like. I’ve noticed John Self seems to live in this paradox of simultaneous liberation and confinement; he willingly spends his money on alcohol only to have himself repeatedly black out, and he allows himself to succumb to his desire for Selina only to be caught by Martina. While in the end of the novel he moves on with his life looking towards the future, he does not reconcile his past issues which foreshadow that he is likely to fall into the same patterns again. Could this be seen as mimicking and criticizing the cyclical nature of a boom-bust economy or is that a stretch?

On a separate note; I have two quick questions about the helicopter fable. Is there something tangible the metaphor of the helicopter specifically represents? Secondly, why was this seen to successfully keep the free market balanced, where the Keynesian model of the government injecting money into the economy could not?

If anyone has any suggestions about piecing this together I’d love to hear your thoughts!