According to Max Weber,“unlimited greed for gain is not in the least identical with capitalism, and is still less its spirit. Capitalism may even be identical with the restraint or at least a rational tempering of this irrational impulse”
(Weber 2001: 160). Although this affirmation may still be valid in many ways, striving for “profit, and forever renewed profit” (Weber 2001: 160) has been the predominant endeavor of a culture of money that emerged alongside modern capitalism.¹ With the “globalist turn,” liberalism arose as the last victorious ideology.² Henceforth, money has rivaled, or even exceeded political power as the preeminent goal of social activity.
The fact that money is capable of evoking a whole range of emotions, as a measure of identity and self-worth, as fetish and as a religious icon, explains why sociology, psychology, economics as well as the arts, including literature, and philosophy from classical times have undertaken to deal with its power. Al-though separated by eight decades, Thomas Mann’s novel, Buddenbrooks (1901), and Martin Amis’s novel, Money: A Suicide Note (1984), share a sharp focus on money. The former, which was instrumental in the award of the Nobel Prize for Lit-erature to its author in 1929, belongs to the German literary canon and exemplifies European realist and naturalist aesthetics. The latter has been acknowledged as a major achievement of postmodern literary production. Whether they are associated with the commercialization of goods, as is the case for Mann’s novel, or involving a more abstract mechanism, with money standing in for a“pure form of exchangea-bility”(Frisby 2004: xxvii), in the case of Amis’s fiction, both texts endow visibility on the interrelatedness of economics, social and cultural values. In addition, they display the subtle (and not so subtle) ways in which the value of money interferes with one’s freedom and consciousness.
Along with industrialism, coordinated administrative power and military power, capitalism is, in Anthony Giddens’s view, one of the four institutional dimensions central to modernity (Giddens 1990).
In Francis Fukuyama’s words, for example,“[…] a remarkable consensus has enveloped the world concerning the legitimacy and viability of liberal democracy”(Fukuyama 1989–1990: 22).
1
At the onset of Mann’s novel, the eponymous Buddenbrooks enjoy an elevated social status and a high standard of living, thanks to the large amount of money the family has accumulated through inheritance, successive dowries and, above all, the specialization, diversification, and expansion of the family firm over three generations. The novelist engaged in painstaking research on commercial accounting and financial trading in order to ensure a high level of accuracy and sophistication regarding the business and financial facets that are depicted in the novel (Ridley 1987: 22).³ He also conveys moments of strenu-ous difficulties, for example, during the Austrian-Prussian war of 1866, when the Buddenbrooks have to cope with the bankruptcy of a company with which they had a major partnership. Consequently, the novel follows the evolution of the Buddenbrooks’s own firm, throughout its respective different phases, which in-clude risky measures as well as decisions on lending and raising capital, ending with its liquidation in the face of fierce competition from a new form of capital-ism (Ludwig 1979: 9).
The family story of the Lübeck Buddenbrooks covers the period from 1835 to the mid-1870s. Their business extends its commercial reach basically from Lü-beck to Russia, Sweden, Britain and Holland. The family fortune, however, also stems from the prudent administration of its assets, which are always con-trolled by social and family values as well as beliefs involving the firm. These values configure a set of codes and rituals,“enduring dispositions”or habitus, that are passed on down through generations.⁴ They prove vital insofar as they avoid the fragmentation of the family firm over a century.
Amongst other characteristics, these values disclose a growing and not al-ways pacific separation between the inner and outer world–and a far greater one than between the private and public spheres. They include a pleasure in high-value acquisitions, which is exhibited on special occasions, particularly at the dinner table, an accumulation of capital, and a clear allocation of gender roles (Müller-Funk 2000: 59). Simultaneously, these values are imbued with a business ethics inherent in the notion of a rationally-structured society with so-cial class confines that are well established and rooted in an individually-inbuilt
Mann even provided insight into the relationship between public finances, public enterprises and the stock market.
According to Pierre Bourdieu, the concept of“habitus”permits an understanding of beliefs and opinions–referred to asdoxa–that shape people’s views of the world precisely on the basis of“that system of enduring dispositions which I callhabitus”(Bourdieu 1990: 190).
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sense of duty and dignity. The best example is Johann Buddenbrook’s advice to his son that business zeal must never prevent one from peaceful sleep (Mann 1982: 46). Other samples include Tony’s subordination of her personal inclina-tions regarding love and marriage⁵to the business and family interests, and Tho-mas’s dismissal of Anna, the flower girl, just before his decision to get engaged to Gerda Arnoldsen (Mann 1982: 147). Tony, in particular, is the best illustration of values inculcated from an early age, including the idea that renunciation is a duty owed to one’s family. Mann’s bourgeois novel anticipated, even if only by four years, Max Weber’s connection between the spirit of modern economic life and the rational ethics of Protestantism. Mann himself acknowledged the af-finities between The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904–1905) and his own novel (Ridley 1987: 27).
The decline of the Buddenbrooks’s firm and family comes about with their economic and social displacement by a class of dynamic business entrepreneurs, who uphold a more hard-line form of capitalism, represented in the novel by the nouveau riche, the Hagenströms. When they buy the Buddenbrooks’s business and family mansion, they signal the emergence of monopoly capitalism and the end of an era characterized by the growth of industrial capital in largely na-tional markets.⁶In this sense, the Buddenbrooks story is embedded not only in the German, but also in the broader context of European economic history. Yet the signs of this decline are manifest inside the Buddenbrooks’s household right from the outset of the novel, as, for instance, in the pervasiveness of the symbolism of the grey color, which is“[…] intimately linked with a process of inner collapse”(Sheppard 1994: 920).⁷Christian’s dissident lifestyle and nervous
When Tony falls in love with the leftist Morten, someone who does not belong in her social class, she is struck by the ingrained notion of the importance of family duty. A letter from her father has a similar effect on her:“We, my darling daughter, were not born for what we consider, in our short-sightedness, to be our small personal happiness, since we are not unbounded, in-dependent and self-sufficient individuals, but members of a chain […] inconceivable without those who came before us and showed us the ways while also following with firmness, without looking right or left, an experienced and dignified tradition”(Mann 1982: 123; see also chapters 13 and 14 of the third part of the novel).
Jameson distinguishes three periods in the development of capitalism: market capitalism, characterized by the growth of industrial capital in largely national markets (from the 1700s to the 1850s); monopoly capitalism in the age of imperialism, when European nation-states de-veloped international markets, exploiting the raw materials and cheap labor of their colonial ter-ritories; and most recently (as from the 1960s), the phase of late capitalism, the multinational corporations with global markets and mass consumption (Jameson 1991: xviii).
In German, the noun“das Grau”means not only the color grey but also a feeling of emptiness and lack of hope. On the other hand,“das Grauen”means the fear or terror when faced with something disturbing or threatening.
Not So Far Apart: Thomas Mann’sBuddenbrooksand Martin Amis’sMoney 145
sensibility also foreshadow the decline of the family business and ethics. Later on, these signs become clear symptoms of an inescapable aversion to all matters connected with business, such as Thomas’s pervasive stress, melancholy and es-capism–by his reading of Schopenhauer–, and Hanno’s musical talent, phys-ical frailty, and premature death.
All these signs and symptoms contrast with the confidence and energy of the elder Johann Buddenbrook for whom running the family business came naturally.
Instead, for Thomas, the responsibility and the tough competition with the Hagen-ströms becomes unbearable (Mann 1982: 98), even though, at an earlier stage, he had managed to expand the firm and gain substantial profits. From the building of the new family house–which marks both the culmination of the family’s success and the turning point in the Buddenbrooks’s fortune–to his death, Thomas faces setbacks that reveal his inability and lack of will to run the firm. This is also the pe-riod when he grows particularly aware of the break-up of those ideals that guided the family over several generations. Moreover, the loss of traditional values and the vulgarization of taste that come along an emergent commodity culture defy Tho-mas’s sense of decorum, as he admits, when referring to institutional politics:
“[…] Standards are being lowered–yes, the general social niveau of the Senate is on its way down […]. It offends something in me. It’s a matter of decorum, it’s simply bad taste”(Mann 1982: 100).
In line with Mann’s symbolism that pervades most of his literary works, vital decay and a stressed or failing will to carry on with the family business become the symptoms of the inevitable agony of the bourgeois era, which characters both embody and precipitate through their search for self-expression via philo-sophical reflection and psychological and aesthetic refinement. In spite of the fact that the Buddenbrooks are not fully representative of Bildungsbürgertum, such symptoms symbolize the moment when the contradictions between the civic program of theBildungideal and the demands of capitalism reach a critical point. In other words, they reveal the decline of the bourgeoisie as a way of life at the point in time when the“affirmative culture”of the secularized German-Jew-ishBildungsbürgertummakes way for the advent of mass society, metropolitan life and cultural industry, examined among others by Georg Simmel, György Lu-kács, Ernst Bloch, Siegfried Kracauer and Walter Benjamin. In one of their essays fromThe Dialectics of Enlightenment, a book in which they also react to the im-pact of Nazism, Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer discuss the political implications of this decline in“high art,”whose essence was its potential for
“aesthetic sublimation,”the“[…] representation of fulfillment as a broken prom-ise”(Adorno and Horkheimer 1999: 38). Abandoning the ideal of spiritual ad-vancement, which the aesthetics of Kant and Hegel fostered, or any other form of liberating social aesthetics, the new culture industry was“repressive,” “por-146 Helena Gonçalves da Silva and Teresa Seruya
nographic and prudish”(38) because it was at the service of organized capital.
Alternatively, as Müller-Funk puts it, the end of the bourgeoisie brought about the end of modern art as the latter lost the object of its combat, the bourgeoisie itself (Müller-Funk 2000: 60).
Seen from Müller-Funk’s perspective, the symptoms of the bourgeois decline comprise inBuddenbrooks–the most autobiographical of Mann’s work–a rep-ertoire of leitmotifs, which he builds, with incisive irony, into a cultural critique of this historical transition and evolution of capitalism. Although permeated by nostalgia for the patrician bourgeoisie of Mann’s own origins, these motifs inte-grate into the critical process inherent to modernity. In addition, they carry Mann’s writing well beyond nineteenth-century realism and onto the threshold of the self-reflexive modernisms of the twentieth century.
What this novel manifests is the unsustainable tension between the appa-rently stable values of a German Bildungsbürgertum (including Mann and the world from which he came), and an environment of mounting volatility and con-tingency resulting from the dynamics of capitalism. This tension also testifies to the presence of a distinctively German dichotomy between culture and civiliza-tion, which stretched back to the eighteenth century, as Norbert Elias explained inThe Civilizing Process(1939). The last part of Mann’s novel clearly symbolizes the split between culture and civilization in the falling apart of the inner and outer worlds. Such dichotomy became unmistakably manifest some years later, particularly in his conflict with his brother Heinrich, in Mann’s public de-fense of the“machtgeschützte Innerlichkeit,”or the inner world protected from politics.⁸Although specifically German, the valorization of culture over politics and economy, inBuddenbrooks, renders more intelligible and tangible the diffi-culties of coping with the various changes taking place between the late nine-teenth century and the early years of the twentieth century.
These economic, social and cultural changes continued and picked up pace in the wake of the Second World War. They left behind the“solidity”of Mann’s (or Stefan Zweig’s) bourgeois world in favor of a post-industrial modernity with a
“liquid”(Bauman 2000) and“disjunctive”quality as a“complex transnational construction of imaginary landscapes” (Appadurai 1996: 31), a world of signs wholly unmoored from their social meaning visualised by Jean-François Lyotard and Jean Baudrillard. Such is the world depicted in Amis’s novel.
See the chapter entitled“Bürgerlichkeit”in Mann’sBetrachtungen eines Unpolitischen(1918).
Later on, already in exile in America, Mann reexamined this subject with a critical eye in some of his political essays such asSchicksal und Aufgabe(1944) andDeutschland und die Deutschen (1945).
Not So Far Apart: Thomas Mann’sBuddenbrooksand Martin Amis’sMoney 147
2
Martin Amis’sMoney: A Suicide Noteis a refined literary artefact that combines a profusion of postmodern artifices and narrative devices with a depiction of the 1980s and beyond. The image of a new form of modernity, which is at the core of the novel, indirectly echoes the effects of the 1980s reform processes that took place in Central and Eastern Europe in the context of the rapid move to-wards political and economic liberalism and globalization. As a result, the ex-tension of the Western liberal-democratic model as the final form of government, which Fukuyama announced in his polemic essay“The end of history” (Fukuya-ma 1989), is inscribed in the globalized commodity culture of the novel, along with the rapidly changing order that undermines all bourgeois notions of perma-nence and progress as an evolutionary, unilinear process. Accordingly, what emerges in Amis’s novel is a sense of rootlessness in all forms of social construc-tion, of the disembedding of foundational structures that reduce the social realm to a mere diversity of scenarios, defusing the old system of social classes and the very meaning of social change while creating still more instability of collective and personal identity as well as new forms of alienation.
The spatial conception of Amis’s fiction thus grows out of the landscape of London and New York, codified as the space of our world urban culture. Belong-ing to the“literature of the metropolis”genre, the novel discloses a stock of typ-ical characters moving mostly in the contemporary traveler’s and homogenized
“non-places.” As the antithesis of the anthropological locus, the “non-place”
(Augé 1995: 86) is only suitable for contingent and transitory experiences and anonymous solitude. In its assertion of the impossibility of dwelling, in sharp contrast with the importance of the family house inBuddenbrooks, Amis’s liter-ary conception can only tolerate occasional locationliter-ary action and still less fam-ily life. Hence, the main character, John Self has neither famfam-ily nor friends, trav-els incessantly between two of the largest Western capitals, interlinking the old continent with the new world, moving between airports and motorways, living mostly out of hotels, eating junk-food and drinking without restraint. His porta-ble behavior projects an image of abstract, blind, senseless mobility, on the whole associated with sensations of dislocation, haziness, anxiety and fear of self-dissolution. In this respect, he stands at the opposite pole of the Budden-brooks’ restraint and decorum. Nor is Self a sample of the classic flâneur. Al-though an urban being accustomed to the streets of the megalopolis and the “in-finite fluidity,” which Simmel saw as a characteristic of modern life in his Viennese lecture on Rodin (1911), Self’s hunt for money and sex cancels out any prospect of flânerie.
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The interpretation, that views Self as“a representative child of the eighties, for whom money has to compensate for a total absence of culture”(Finney 1995:
4), conflicts with the fact that he is the narrator of his own story, which he also comments upon. His own words do seem to back such a view, for example when he states: “I chose not reading. Not reading – that’s where I put my money”
(Amis 1986: 42), or when he declares his hatred for“the beneficiaries of a univer-sity education […] people with degrees, O-levels, eleven pluses […]”(58). Should we consider that reading was for centuries–and still remains– the initiating ritual in the process of the individual’s formation (orBildung), which entailed a self-referential dimension and stimulated a critical perception of society, Self’s attitude is, on the whole, a denial of any desire for a consistent culture.
John Self, however, is not devoid of critical consciousness and would like to be admitted into the sphere of what he sees as “high culture” (326), which those like his “intellectual” friend and lover, Martina Twain, can access. In fact, he cannot rid himself of the cultural notion that reading or going to the opera are actually relevant matters. Therefore, he is both aware of his difficulties with books and intrigued by them, insisting, over and over again, on reading George Orwell’sAnimal Farm–a present from Martina. He also tries hard to im-prove his film script, and there are occasions when he displays a capacity for critical self-analysis, evident in the perception of himself as“addicted to the twentieth century”(91). Hence, he may want to fool himself and others with stant justifications for not reading, as when he claims that he cannot wear con-tacts because it“hurts his nerves”(42), or advances the excuse that he has no time, but in reality Self is frustrated, resentful and, sporadically, even humiliated for not being culturally more refined. Aware as he is of his shortcomings, he ap-pears as the malformed product of a combination of lower middle-class origins and post-bourgeois culture. In addition to adopting a portable behavior suited to the new times, Self falls prey to the trappings of the same industrial cultures Adorno and Horkheimer criticized in theirDialectics of Enlightenment.In his ad-diction to television, publicity and all sorts of cheap magazines, particularly por-nographic, he is the embodiment of experience as it is mediated by the mass media and images that amount to a series of unrelated presences in time.
John Self, however, is not devoid of critical consciousness and would like to be admitted into the sphere of what he sees as “high culture” (326), which those like his “intellectual” friend and lover, Martina Twain, can access. In fact, he cannot rid himself of the cultural notion that reading or going to the opera are actually relevant matters. Therefore, he is both aware of his difficulties with books and intrigued by them, insisting, over and over again, on reading George Orwell’sAnimal Farm–a present from Martina. He also tries hard to im-prove his film script, and there are occasions when he displays a capacity for critical self-analysis, evident in the perception of himself as“addicted to the twentieth century”(91). Hence, he may want to fool himself and others with stant justifications for not reading, as when he claims that he cannot wear con-tacts because it“hurts his nerves”(42), or advances the excuse that he has no time, but in reality Self is frustrated, resentful and, sporadically, even humiliated for not being culturally more refined. Aware as he is of his shortcomings, he ap-pears as the malformed product of a combination of lower middle-class origins and post-bourgeois culture. In addition to adopting a portable behavior suited to the new times, Self falls prey to the trappings of the same industrial cultures Adorno and Horkheimer criticized in theirDialectics of Enlightenment.In his ad-diction to television, publicity and all sorts of cheap magazines, particularly por-nographic, he is the embodiment of experience as it is mediated by the mass media and images that amount to a series of unrelated presences in time.