Hello hello! Reading Tratner’s “Derrida’s Debt to Milton Friedman”, there were a couple passages which got me thinking about the postmodern aspects of Martin Amis’ Money: A Suicide Note.

       My first passage of Tratner’s discusses a shift from a nineteenth-century “morality of spending only what one had earned”, to a more consumerist economy (Tratner 794). In Amis’ Money, I think there is a strong relationship between overspending/indulgence and one’s morality. From where I’ve gotten so far in the book, this seems to be reinforced by examples of overspending: tabs being run up due to alcohol indulgence, and money needing to be borrowed due to gambling debts. I also thought that the novel’s cover, where the ribbon of “MONEY” is surrounded by images which imply the illicit, was also interesting. From what I understand, I think the cover is an example of Milton Friedman’s argument of how “money plays an important role in the economy precisely because it is a system for distributing signifiers which have no referent” (Tratner 798). The word “MONEY” doesn’t point precisely to any one meaning or object, as the cover proves. Nothing is fixed. As a result, the novel’s corresponding lack of concrete standards and conventionality in terms of plot also seems to allude to the postmodern, falling in line with a system which consists of blurred boundaries.

       My second passage of Tratner’s notes how “in the nineteenth century, every text began with production and with an account of the needs that production hoped to satisfy; in the twentieth, every text begins with demand, with desires” (Tratner 795). I noticed how Amis’ text opens with a suicide note on its very first page, playing an interesting dynamic between production and demand. The note states “In the planetary aggregate of all life, there are many more suicide notes than there are suicides” and how “It is the note and not the life that is cancelled out. Or the other way round. Or death” (Amis 6). So, does the text began with a production of a suicide note which traditionally fulfills the satisfaction of the individual who writes it and/or addresses, or a demand for a corresponding suicide? As one can “never tell…with suicide notes” (Amis 6), is this ambiguity another reinforcement of postmodernism, an example of deconstruction? I think it is!

So what does it mean when the title is Money: A Suicide Note?!! What’s the connection?

Any thoughts on this? 🙂

I thought I would kick off our discussion of Martin Amis’ Money: A Suicide Note by combining my observations of the novel with our discussion in class today. I think the idea that postmodernism is in some ways aligned with consumerism certainly holds true in Money, as John spends his money at every opportunity. Say’s Law comes to mind when one looks at his spending habits: it appears that he will purchase drinks and other substances whenever the opportunity arises, including his buying several drinks for himself and the stripper Dawn drinks at the suggestion of the waitress. Similarly, he will tip the bellboy Felix with whatever bill he has in his pocket, regardless of how large the amount might be, and pays the pregnant prostitute in return for no services. This excessive consumerism, which is both a freedom and lack of freedom, is reflected in other characters such as Doris Arthur, who compromises her dignity for the sake of the “hundred thousand bucks” she will make for working on the film.

I think a lot of the economic activity in the novel can be read as a form of surplus; there is an excess of money being spent, often in exploitation of human dignity and/or intimacy. John’s use of alcohol and other abusive substances often causes him to vomit, a physical action indicative of a surplus being expelled. This makes me think of Kreisel’s reading in “Superfluidity and Suction”, which similarly cites the explosion of surplus as the cause of the flood in The Mill on the Floss. In Money, however, an excess of consumerism leads to the violence towards the self (pun intended?) and others in the novel.

I’d love to hear your thoughts, and other readings of the economic aspects of Money!

This idea comes directly from Elizabeth Outka’s article “Buying Time: Howards End and Commodified Nostalgia” but I think it adds to some of the recent discussion on this blog as well as the Weihl article we have read. In her article, Outka explains that one of the popular trends that emerged out of England’s growing commercialism was the appeal of commodified nostalgia. At the turn of the century, there was a boom in the desirability for country houses that represented Englands’s agricultural past. These houses were aggressively marketed all throughout Forster’s time, so he would have been highly aware, while writing Howards End, about how England’s past was being commodified in the form of country houses. Although the houses represented history, they were inauthentic and merely a simulacrum of the English agricultural country house. According to Outka, the most popular architect at the turn of the century who built houses in this style was Edwin Lutyens. As you can see, his houses look like traditional country houses but were actually built around 1900, and also incorporate various different eras from the English past into one house.

How commodified nostalgia relates to the house Howards End is similar to the arguments in Weihl’s article criticizing Howards End’s authenticity. Howards End is merely an illusion of the purified past; its possession by the Schlegel sister’s at the end of the novel does not represent a triumph of the pastoral over the modern. As Outka states in her article, the appeal of commodified nostalgia is paradoxical: it is rooted in the public’s genuine desire for a purified past, while simultaneously the forces of commercialism heavily drive and sustain this desire. Oniton Grange represents commercialized commodified nostalgia; to Henry Wilcox there is a great novelty in owning a traditional English country home. The house also demonstrates the liquidity of commodities as he is able to sell it off quickly when its novelty wears off. Margaret Schlegel’s desire for Howards End is awakened by her experience at Oniton Grange; she starts to imagine more frequently how satisfying life in the country would be. She begins to desire Howards End, a desire sustained by the attraction of nostalgia. However, the nostalgia represented by Howards End does not belong to the half-German Schlegel’s; their history is not the same as Howards End’s history, they merely possess it as a commodity that represents, to them, the idealized English past. This possession is not a triumph, since the novel ends with the idea of a “creeping London”, a city which will eventually assimilate Howards End and the land around it. The possession of the house only delays the unstoppable march of modernization.

I hope that kind of made sense. I’m interested to hear what others think about the idea of commodified nostalgia and how it relates to the novel!

Citation:

Outka, Elizabeth. “Buying Time: Howards End and Commodified Nostalgia.” NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction 36.3 (2003): 330-50. JSTOR. Web. 27 Feb. 2016.

I was wondering if I could get some feedback from you all. In reading through Keynes, I was struck by the following:

Keynes devalues ethics/morality as a structure for stabilizing the economy. However, his motivations for having an intellectual controlling force over the economy seems to stem from empathy, therefore the ethics/morality he is speaking against.

While I understand the contrast between Keynes and Ruskin:

Keynes proposes that there is a need for fluctuating principles and only calculated interference from a governing intellectual body in order to maintain a stable economy

Ruskin proposes that morality can be used as a trellis for the economy, providing structure/a guiding hand to stabilize the economy.

The question is, excluding a sense of human empathy and ethical obligation, why is it necessary to control the market at all?

A free market is certainly not stable, but it finds equilibrium through the natural balancing forces of supply and demand.

Take for example the housing market in Vancouver. If the government lets the market take its course, people who cannot afford to live in Vancouver will move to cheaper locations. Eventually, there will be a lack of labour–take baristas at Starbucks, for example. If Starbucks refuses to pay its employees enough so that they can live in Vancouver, they will have to shut down their businesses. As other businesses follow suit, the city will become a less desirable place to live. This will bring down the cost of housing, and people will be able to move back into the city. The cycle now starts over again.

The only thing preventing us from letting “the nature of the market” take its course is our humanity. We recognize that moving away and finding a new job could mean up-rooting people and their families. This ethical dilemma is what drives us to find systems (like Keynes’) that can foresee and prevent market situations like this.

So my question:

When Keynes denounces ethics as a form of market control, isn’t he undermining the very motivations for his theory to begin with?

And it only came to me as a realization that, throughout the economic readings and novels presented throughout the course, I realized the progressive evolution of economic theories and ideas. They often attempt to replace or negate each other, just as much as previous theories negated. Take a close look, and you’ll realize that during Defoe’s era, one of the only economic ideas present is the notion that “credit is merely the populace’s confidence and trust in each other’s ability to repay, with the crown as the figurehead to place in our trust”.

The novels Emma and Mill on the Floss introduce social classes. The matters of business become more tangible and countable, such as loans, interest, and land/capital, as the various classes. Economics also expands, taking into consideration social aspects such as reputation, class, family, and marriage. Each has intrinsic value that can signal potential economic gains in all traits.

And now we arrive at Keynesian theory. In class, I can only ponder why his name rang a bell, that I’ve heard this name before. Only later on have I realized that Keynes is one of the most important contributors in Macroeconomics and Government Economic Policy, and that the majority of the content in ECON 102 or 311 is based on his theories. In fact, the Keynesian Range is the level of aggregate supply in an economy that remains constant – until a massive shift of consumer demand takes place.

I quickly skimmed through the remaining economic readings and found that Friedman’s reading is simply a crash course in money theory and micro/macro economics. The New Yorker article is an exposition of how genius financiers have managed to utilize mathematics and current economic theories to “hack” finance to their benefit. And only disciples of finance and economics can decipher these schemes; otherwise, it appears as complex as “this asset’s worth is equal to X equities, backed by a hedge fund Y for each Z security that has W probability of raining in Guatemala while conversing with the Sultan of Brunei.”

And so I wonder. In today’s era, what will the next economic evolution look like?

I though I would take the opportunity to attempt to piece together some of the thoughts invoked from today’s discussion of E.M. Forster’s Howards End in relation to the Bloomsbury group. Bear with me here, this might not be very articulate and will most likely be comprised of many (perhaps unanswerable) questions.

I’ve been ruminating on the last passage we looked at on p.13, where Forster chronicles what I interpret as a metaphorical transition to modernity; Mrs. Munt’s train journey from the countryside to the city. It got me thinking about how Howards End, a novel unanimously understood as a work emblematic of this transitional period in British modernity, grapples with understanding this cosmopolitan space through a new appropriately modernist perspective. This new historical moment calls for a new way of understanding and articulating that moment – one without a moral commentary on society. This is why Forster is considered to be bordering both Victorian and more modernist literary conventions in his novel.

As the correlative to modernity, Forster represents the city as a neither positive or negative; its ephemerality and constant state of flux makes our understanding of it ultimately incomprehensible.The instability and fluidity of the modern world is the only thing we have to hang our hats on. Rather, it is the journey or movement, as a form within itself, that becomes the focus of modern literary conventions.

For the annotated bibliography and lit review assignment, I read an article by Regina Martin who maps the financial shift from industrial capitalism to finance capitalism onto a geographic opposition between country and city. Briefly put, Martin reads Howards End as representative of intrinsic “use value”, whereas London represents the new “exchange value” of finance capitalism. I found this idea supporting some of the things we discusses in class about the modernist focus on form in an ephemeral world. Similar to how modern literary conventions emphasize the process, the new mode of finance capitalism revolves around exchange – a equally fluid movement characteristic of modernity.

Did I understand everything properly? Is this what you gathered from the lecture? I’d love to hear your thoughts!

I’ll cite below the Regina Martin article, in case you want to include it in your own research.

Works Cited

Martin, Regina. “Finance Capitalism and the Creeping London of Howards End and Tono-Bungay.” Criticism: A Quarterly for Literature and the Arts 55.3 (2013): 447-469. MLA International Bibliography. Web. 28 February 2016.

Today’s class – on Bloomsbury Group aesthetics – was difficult. And in some respects that is the point of Bloomsbury Group aesthetics, including Forster’s novel. Forster likes to put the characters in his novels into impossibly complex situations which he referred to (in Howards End, as it happens) as “muddle.” The complexity of life, human relations, desires and wants, expectations and failings, are all thrown together in a puzzling and largely untenable set of predicaments. The point, many critics think, is not for readers to resolve or judge these situations one way or another (as we are invited to do with Roxana or Emma) or even to sympathize with them (as we do Maggie I think) but rather for readers to appreciate that good and bad qualities co-exist with each other and in themselves. The “human condition” is revealed to be in its essence not right or wrong but simply complex.

What does this have to do with money? You all might recall the scene early in the novel where the women in Margaret and Helen’s circle debate “What are we to do with our money.” No one can come to any satisfactory solution – and the women’s inability to decide is in part what leads to the central plot thrust of the rest of the novel. Complexity is causal (as Robert Trigo reminds us all plots are) but not in the direction of resolution (like Emma) but more in the direction of appreciation – for the “beauty” (a word that appears many times in the novel) of what is impossible. To see this muddle though is to appreciate the “form” of the novel – mixed up, messed up, confusing, complex, without it being something that “teaches” anything in particular. The novel becomes an opportunity to see the world – and even the economy as we will see with Keynes – with an eye to all of its difficulties and somehow see it all as an “experience” that we can measure and even possibly appreciate.

The novelist Zadie Smith has a wonderful essay on “muddle” in Forster’s novels. It was published in the Guardian in 2003.