Abstract
This paper explores the various ways in which nineteenth century monetary theory and the novel addressed the questions of reality and fiction with regard to the ontological status and social function of money. Departing from Walter Bagehot’s insistence on the reality and realism of finance, and surveying examples of how novels by Dickens, Balzac, Trollope, or Zola represented, or avoided representing, financial realities, I deal with the various notions of money seen either as a neutral or abstract medium facilitating wealth-creating commodity exchange or as an active but mystical agent blurring the division of fiction and fact (Mill, Marx, Simmel). After that the paper gives an overview of economic oriented literary criticism with regard to its investment in relating and/or distinguishing monetary and literary notions of fiction. The essay ends by returning to Bagehot’s argument and raises the question of the appropriation of reality by an increasingly fictitious finance, problematizing the distinction between expedient fictions and deceitful lies.
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Notes
On the Lockean theory of language and its nineteenth-century afterlife: Keach (1993).
On the role of the Real (along with the Imaginary and the Symbolic) in Lacan’s psychoanalysis as the ever-occurring limit of experience excluded from the realm of fantasy: Libbrecht (2001).
During the 18th century aesthetics and economy belonged to the same intellectual endeavor, the complex of moral philosophy, but romanticism introduced a growing hostility towards political economy and its practitioners, opposing imagination to calculation, fancy to fact, humanistic benevolence to mechanical-utilitarian thinking: Connell (2001).
On the alternating dominance of the theories of neutral and active money in the history of economic analysis: Schumpeter (2006, 264–265).
A very fragile nexus indeed, the unreliability of which was revealed by the South Sea Bubble and John Law’s failed scheme in France as early as the 1710–1720s. See Brantlinger 48–87.
One might add, however, that the realist intentions of monetary theory did not pass with the dismissal of the thesis of money`s neutrality. If money is a transparent veil on commodities, then the reader of economic signs has to look through it to get a glimpse of the “real economy” of exchange underneath. When, in turn, Keynes suggests that it is precisely the “monetary economy” that coincides with the “real world” in which “we actually live,” then his argument, in an equally realistic manner, implies that we have to look at (and not through) money to be true realists.
The “willing suspension of disbelief”, the phrase Coleridge coined in 1817, that is, still under the rule of the Suspension Act, that Gallagher reinterprets here has been utilized to interpret monetary representation: Brantlinger (1996, 78).
This neglect of risk in the favor of political self-enjoyment, of course, proved to be very fragile. Partly because its psychology was maintained imaginatively: national propaganda, partly carried out by novelists, channeled the suspicion towards the Austrian money formerly in circulation into an enthusiasm about the new Hungarian money. And the monetary enthusiasm of this kind was never a free imaginative play: political and military forces brought it about and put an end to it.
On the economics of deception: Akerlof and Shiller (2015).
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Hites, S. On monetary and literary fictions. Neohelicon 43, 427–443 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11059-016-0354-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11059-016-0354-9