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).
The idea of usury is very thought-provoking. It is a business opportunity that really took off with the creation of money and credit as we understand it today as people began taking out loans and borrowing from others. From what I understand of the business world and lending, usury is illegal because of the ridiculous rates of interest that are charged by lenders. Normal lending is completely legal and a legitimate avenue of business, the difference being the line that defines what exactly is too much to charge. What is this line exactly? Who decides how much is too much? It certainly feels like taking out a student loan is taking advantage of students who leave university covered in a mountain of debt.
I feel as though this line between high rates of interest and usury is quite blurred. taking advantage of someone who is in need of economic assistance by charging them large sums of money to make a profit off of their misfortune. Morally, this is understood by the majority of people to be wrong. In the business community that came about with the new wave of capitalism that is explored by the authors we have read, however, this practice of lending is perfectly acceptable. Maybe I’m a little biased, but my feeling is that this is what a term like “business ethics” was created in the first place – because the moral rules that govern money-making don’t align with the standard definition of ethics. It’s a whole different ball game. In the works we have read, this lack of morality follows money wherever it goes and our authors obviously seem to share a common anxiety towards the human departure from natural morality to this new type of capitalist morality. Anne Kibbie writes an article that further explains a similar argument to mine in which she calls usury monstrous and incestuous as money begins to make more money from itself. Here is the citation for anyone interested in the read:
Kibbie, Ann Louise. “Monstrous Generation: The Birth of Capital in Defoe’s Moll Flanders and
Roxana.” PMLA: Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 110.5
(1995): 1023. Web.
I find this post very interesting, as there is a scene in Capital which basically sums up what I can only assume is the yearning feel in that pastoral poem (although I have not read it, just going from your description):
“[Roger] could… drive back to London and announce that from now on they would all be living a different life, a simpler and economically smaller life, that they would go round the world for a year and then he would retrain as a teacher and they would move out of London, somewhere like this where you could walk and breathe and see the sky, and the kids would go to the local school and Arabella would look after them and they would pick out good-value cuts from the local butcher and he would drink tea from a mug while helping the kids with their homework. And every day he would go for a long walk, even when it was wet and windy, and he would come in smelling of the outside…” (95-6).
Long quotation! Roger here is yearning for just what the GMCIVER posted above: “to escape the continuous drive [for] more wealth in exchange for a simple country life.” Roger is a rich man, who believes (at least at the start of the novel), that his company and himself have performed well enough for his Christmas bonus to be 1 million pounds. Interestingly, his company (if I understood it correctly) is a company that makes money off of money — it watches and tracks conversion rates, and makes money off of the ups and downs of money’s worth. While legal, this does seem a little unfair, likening the practise almost to the usury miotoole outlined above.
Roger is a little like the narrator in the poem — he wishes for country life, but he still wants to gain more and more money, most specifically his Christmas bonus which he hopes to use to pay off old debts and incur new ones with the added spending power the bonus would give him. He doesn’t really commit to the idea of a pastoral life — while entertaining the idea, he’s standing in expensive hunting gear, on a weekend trip of such luxury (a barn converted to a spa, another barn a gigantic play house for the kids, food, alcohol, hunting for sport) that it begs the question if he even realizes what a true country side life would be. Definitely his imaging of it in the quotation is idyllic, and not grounded in realistic fact.
Also, last note, the fact that he specifically mentions that Arabella would look after the kids (despite retraining as a teacher giving him more time to be around) — solidifies traditional genders roles in his fantasy. I don’t really have an answer for this, does anyone else?