Abstract
The central argument of The Financial Imaginary: Economic Mystification and the Limits of Realist Fiction is that the contemporary novel simultaneously deploys, and reveals the limitations of, realist strategies in its representation of late capitalism. On the one hand, realism would seem to be at odds with post-Fordist financial structures, since ‘the growing abstraction of contemporary capitalism demands new imaginative conceptions of the real’ (p. ix). In other words, the derealising shift from the association of value with labour to one linking value with money poses several challenges to the realist literary imagination (p. x). How can realism, a form devoted to describing in painstaking detail the material aspects of a character’s outer appearance, inner life, surroundings and society, adequately represent a system that is ‘less and less tethered to the material, less directly connected to specific modes of production, and therefore less tangible, visible, or controllable’ (p. xi)? On the other hand, ‘the realist novel’s accumulation of detail, its commitment to social description, and its narrative authority would seem a logical form to examine capitalist unreality’ (p. xvi). Noting that ‘the realist impulse’ is to ‘unmask the unreal’, Shonkwiler finds that returning to a realist mode of writing characteristic of nineteenth-century Europe and America enables contemporary writers ‘to examine limitations of understanding in a world more complex than it appears’ (p. xvi). However, because of ‘the structural tensions of a realist representation of unreal capitalism’ (p. xxxii), realist narrative strategies are used by contemporary writers ‘in ambivalent and selective ways’ (p. xvi).
The first chapter focuses on William Dean Howells, Henry James and Theodore Dreiser. For Shonkwiler, it is crucial to understand ‘the formal problems confronted in an earlier period of American economic realism’ (p. xvii), albeit one in which financial abstraction was a nascent aspect of, rather than endemic to, the capitalist system. Important to these works is a preoccupation with ‘character’ as a means ‘to conceptualize a finance capitalism that appeared both increasingly impersonal and personality driven’ (p. 2; emphasis in original). Howells’s The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885), James’s ‘The Jolly Corner’ (1909) and Dreiser’s The Financer (1912) are all preoccupied with questions of ‘responsible personhood’ (p. 13) and ‘economic virtue’ which refers to ‘the ability to maintain the integrity of self in the face of gambling temptations’ (p. 2; emphasis in original). These texts ask how, or if, an individual can maintain his (these texts all centralise male experience) integrity, honesty and/or innocence under a rapidly transforming capitalist system.
In Chapter Two, Shonkwiler reveals that this preoccupation with ‘character’ is not relinquished in more contemporary texts such as a Jane Smiley’s Good Faith (2001), despite the radical transformations undergone by finance in the intervening century. Set during the Savings and Loans Crisis, the novel ‘adapts a Howellsian realism of character-based economic virtue to an analysis of the de-realization of the 1980s economy through real estate’ (p. 33). This adaptation of form to a significantly altered economic context makes itself felt, however, through the novel’s tendency towards ‘abstraction of character of the allegorical or typological’ (p. 49); through its recourse to ‘the stock figure of the con man’ or the ‘villain’ of melodrama (pp. 48, 49). Realism (of character) is put under pressure, in other words, by the increasing abstraction of the capitalist system described in the novel. Good Faith’s ‘misalignment between “realisms” of character and “realisms” of structural abstraction’ (p. 46) is thus a symptom of its engagement with Reaganomics.
The remaining chapters shift the focus away from character, cumulatively expanding the book’s central claim that the realist mode is both pressed into service to represent, but is also in tension with, the abstractions of contemporary finance. Chapter Three focuses on the deployment of ‘epic’ strategies as ‘a way to question capitalism’s power to invoke and naturalize a projection of the “whole”’ (p. 57). Chapter Four foregrounds the splitting of first- and third-person perspectives in Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis (2005), a device that recognises ‘the cognitive mediations necessary to the representation of abstraction’ (p. 90). To this reader, at least, it is not self-evident how DeLillo is deploying the realist mode ‘in ambivalent and selective ways’ (p. xvi); rather, it seems as though the novel is avowedly postmodern. In Chapter Five, there is a clearer explication of how two recent novels – Teddy Wayne’s Kapitoil (2010) and Mohsin Hamid’s How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia (2013) – engage strategies commonly seen as postmodern rather than realist (second-person narration and self-referentiality, for example) but are ultimately ‘less about demonstrating the inadequacies of the realist novel than about radicalizing some of its formal features’ (p. 100).
This is a compelling and important work. It provides a useful framework for understanding the persistence of realism, not only in contemporary financial fiction, but in the contemporary novel more generally. Moreover, Shonkwiler’s juxtaposition of two historical moments challenges any tendency to position nineteenth-century realism as a stable set of strategies and devices. As she puts it, ‘even the original economic realism was always already a vexed enterprise’ (p. 126). However, there is one aspect of the book that, for me, constituted an unfortunate limitation. In the Epilogue, Shonkwiler acknowledges that while global finance has made ‘the boundaries of a national literature’ increasingly ‘difficult to sustain’, any “American” cultural dimension is likely to overdetermine the new global homogeneneity for as long as major world financial institutions and organizations remain so closely tied to US political and economic interests. (pp. 124–25)
This is an important point, but it is a pity that the implied critique of US centricity here is not replicated in the critical conversation into which the book enters. Shonkwiler cites Richard Godden (p. 111) and Walter Benn Michaels (pp. 2, 18, 27), long-established authors of groundbreaking works of economic criticism,1 as well as more recent important scholarship such as Anna Kornbluh’s Realizing Capital: Financial and Psychic Economies in Victorian Form (2013) and Leigh Clair La Berge’s Scandals and Abstraction: Financial Fiction of the Long 1980s (2014). But there is little room in the book for those working in the field who are based outside the US and Canada. I’m thinking particularly, here, of scholarship by Andrew Lawson and, collectively and individually, Paul Crosthwaite, Peter Knight and Nicky Marsh.2 The burgeoning subfields of ‘oil culture’ and ‘petromodernity’ fare better (p. 156n7) but, again, no mention is made of Georgiana Banita’s many and important interventions in this expanding area of scholarly inquiry.3 It is a pity this terrain is not mapped more extensively in the book – which is, after all, a slim volume of 150 pages excluding notes and index. If it had been, Shonkwiler’s enriching contribution to this field would have registered even more strongly than it does at present.
Notes
1. R. Godden, Fictions of Capital: The American Novel from James to Mailer (Cambridge, 1990), Fictions of Labor: William Faulkner and the South’s Long Revolution (Cambridge, 1997) and William Faulkner: An Economy of Complex Words (Princeton, NJ, 2007); W. B. Michaels, The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism: American Literature at the Turn of the Century (Berkeley, 1987).
2. N. Marsh, Money, Finance, and Speculation in Recent British Fiction (London, 2007); A. Lawson, Downwardly Mobile: The Changing Fortunes of American Realism (Oxford, 2012); P. Crosthwaite, P. Knight and N. Marsh (eds), Show Me the Money: The Image of Finance, 1700 to the Present (Manchester, 2014); and P. Knight, Reading the Market: Genres of Financial Capitalism in Gilded Age America (Baltimore, MD, 2015).
3. See, for example, G. Banita, ‘Fossil Frontiers: American Petroleum History on Film’, in R. A. Rosenstone and C. Parvulescu (eds), A Companion to Historical Film (Malden, MA, 2013), pp. 301–27 and ‘Voting for American Energy: Elections, Oil, and U.S. Culture’, in G. Banita and S. Pöhlmann (eds), Electoral Cultures: American Democracy and Choice (Heidelberg, 2015), pp. 99–125.