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.

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.

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!

My apologies in advance for the lack of page numbers- my e-text doesn’t have any!

Reading Chapter III of The Mill on the Floss, I was struck by the use of the language of education to convey credit, particularly that of Mr. Stelling. Mr. Tulliver wants his son Tom to go to a school where he can learn a skill set more appropriate for a middle-class career, and seeks the advice of his middle-class friend Mr. Riley. Mr. Riley realizes the capability of education to raise one’s social credit, and recommends the Clergyman Mr. Stelling, recognizing that an education from a person of this profession will add to Tom’s social credit. The lower-class Mr. Tulliver seems to have difficulty understanding this, and is concerned that a Parson would “be almost too high-learnt to bring up a lad to be a man o’business” such as Tom, while expressing that Clergymen possess “a sort o’ learning as lay mostly out of sight”. While Mr. Tulliver recognizes that Clergymen have great learning, he is unable to identify this knowledge exactly and labels it as “out of sight”, yet the Clergyman’s educational credit leads Mr. Tulliver to assume it exists. However, Mr. Tulliver does not initially see this form of credit as being applicable to Tom’s, who will be going into ‘business’, which Mr. Riley refutes by stating: “a clergyman is a gentleman by profession and education and besides that, he has the knowledge that will ground a boy, and prepare him for entering on any career with credit”, implying that educational credit is required in order to start a career that generates credit in itself.

Towards the end of the chapter, we learn that Mr. Riley is also forming assumptions about Mr. Stelling’s qualifications, as he does not actually know him. However, Mr. Riley is able to recommend him based on other people of credit, stating that “he believed Mr. Stelling to be an excellent classic, for Gadsby had said so, and Gadsby’s first cousin was an Oxford tutor; which was better ground for the belief even than his own immediate observation would have been, for though Mr. Riley had received a tincture of the classics at the great Mudport Free School, and had a sense of understanding Latin generally, his comprehension of any particular Latin was not ready”. Mr. Riley takes on a role similar to Roxana at this moment, whose own account is not reliable but is validated by other creditable sources, and can therefore be taken as truth.

Interestingly, Mr. Riley’s assumption of Mr. Stelling’s credit, though he knows it is not founded in personal experience, convinces him of Mr. Stelling’s merits. By the end of the discussion, Mr. Riley has decided, “that if Mr. Tulliver had in the end declined to send Tom to Stelling, Mr. Riley would have thought his ‘friend of the old school’ a thoroughly pig-headed fellow”, expressing both his newfound conviction of Mr. Stelling’s qualifications and of his own class-based credit over Mr. Tulliver. It is also based in the credit of other people that Mr. Riley is able to make assumptions about Mr. Stelling’s economic credit, including the amount Mr. Stelling would charge for his time and services, and about what Mr. Stelling is qualified to teach. Though “he knew very little of that [Stelling’s] M.A. and his acquirements”, Mr. Riley still feels confident enough to tell Mr. Tulliver that “when you get a thoroughly educated man, like Stelling, he’s at no loss to take up any branch of instruction.” This passage demonstrates a moment where education becomes synonymous with personal credit and economic credit in the text, which, if Tom goes on to be educated by Mr. Stelling, might be a continuing theme in the novel.

Any thoughts about the relation between education and credit, or anything to add about this passage?