Why novels are able to present us with valuable information about‘the cultural quality of money’is anything but self-explanatory. After all, fictionality is one of the defining features of literature, and we might do well not to believe that there was a village in Latin America in which it rained continuously for a hundred years, or that a man called Don Quijote enjoyed fighting windmills, for instance.
When one acknowledges that the references to reality even in‘realistic’novels are not necessarily correct and that the aesthetic quality and poetic function of literature does not relate to the real world, then it seems highly improbable that any contem-porary novel may provide us with meaningful information about our culture.
Nonetheless, a quite heated discussion about the knowledge of (or in) liter-ature¹ has been ongoing for some time now. Literary critics assert–and dispute –that literature‘contains’knowledge about life; that the data we find in litera-ture also tells us something worth knowing about‘real life.’Although scholars seem to agree that one can determine what kind of knowledge has been intro-duced into a literary work by the author (that is concentrating on the process of production) or what kind of knowledge readers have to be in command of in order to understand a text (Jannidis 2008: 376), it seems doubtful whether a work of art like a novel presents us with knowledge about anything beyond the realm of art.
In this essay, I want to pursue another route and start from the premise that literature is, as Catherine Elgin puts it, a “thought experiment.” In a very thoughtful essay, Elgin begins by disputing that cognition equals knowledge. In-stead, she emphasizes that we need to“organise, synthesize, properly orient our-selves toward, and judiciously ignore known facts”(Elgin 2007: 44) in order to understand a person or an event. One may be in possession of various data
See, for instance, the discussion in and contributions toZeitschrift für GermanistikXVII (2007, 2008), which was triggered by Tilmann Köppe’s article“Vom WisseninLiteratur.”(Köppe, 2007:
398–410), the seven volumes of studies concerned withLa conoscenza della letteratura/The Knowledge of Literature,ed. by Angela Locatelli, 2005; Claus-Michael Ort 1992: 409–441; and Ottmar Ette 2007: 7–32.
on photosynthesis, for instance, but still not make sense of the actual process; in order to achieve an understanding we have to ignore many facts, and“duly ac-commodate p’s salient properties and relations”(44). The fact that literature nei-ther sports any direct references to the real world nor provides us with data about a phenomenon like money thus does not detract from the value of litera-ture as a means of cognition. Rather, we can conceptualize literalitera-ture as a kind of
‘thought experiment’, which is as divorced from reality as the setup of a labora-tory is from conditions in the real world. The facts which literature represents at the level of the story or through the narrator’s comments cannot be directly re-lated to any situation in real life; however, in their mutual relations, these facts exemplify selected events, agents and circumstances in the real world and pro-vide us with a dense description of them. This again enables readers to identify the salient properties more easily than when faced with a mass of data surround-ing them in the real world–and it may make it easier for them to identify salient data and concentrate on the important factors in similar situations in real life.
Should this suggestion provide an adequate understanding of the function of literature, then it should be possible to gain insight into the qualities of money by looking at literary texts. This should not be confused with one-to-one references to the real world, with isolated facts about the gold-standard or the economic value of different currencies. We do not get any reliable pieces of information, any additional data that we usually define as ‘knowledge’
about a phenomenon. What we might expect, instead, are representations of some salient properties of money and how they relate to each other, as far as their meanings and functions in human life are concerned. Moreover, these rep-resentations always imply particular views on, particular perspectives of money.
Literature does not provide us with‘objective’knowledge, untainted by subjec-tivity. This is a characteristic of literary texts; one of the main differences be-tween a thought experiment in the natural sciences and philosophy on the one hand and a literary text on the other is that the latter is not concerned with an“objective stance”or“a view from nowhere”(Elgin 2007: 51). On the con-trary, novels deal with characters; they represent events and circumstances in so far as they impinge upon these characters’lives and shape their perceptions and feelings. What we might gain from concentrating on literature are therefore not facts concerning the ‘objective’ properties of money, but various perspectives on money, perspectives that are different from our own–and probably also dif-ferent from those of experts on business and economics. It may turn out that with regard to money, the “item’s important properties are […] the ones the view from some other perspective encloses”(51) and not the‘objective’ knowl-edge provided by financial experts. To become aware of the various meanings
166 Vera Nünning
money may hold for people may be just as important as knowledge of certain
‘objective’facts about currencies.
With a conceptual framework in mind, I now turn to contemporary literature in order to gain some insight into the cultural qualities of money. Faced with the problem of selecting from among a host of books in which money plays an im-portant role, two quite famous works–which focus on money to such an extent that the word even makes it into their titles–are obvious candidates for in-depth analysis: Martin Amis’s novelMoney: A Suicide Note(1984)² and Carol Church-ill’s playSerious Money(1987). Both works have the advantage of featuring pro-tagonists obsessed with money and focusing on a representation of the cultural consequences of late capitalism in contemporary Britain. To concern oneself with such texts is certainly rewarding and it is therefore pertinent that at least one of the articles in this volume deals with Amis’sMoney. From the point of view of literary studies, however, it may be just as interesting to focus on a less famous contemporary work that does not put money in the foreground. D.
J. Taylor’s Kept. A Victorian Mystery(2006), a historical novel set in the 1860s, might seem an unlikely choice as the financial conditions at that time are cer-tainly far removed from those we face today. Judging from the point of view of verisimilitude, for instance, it would be difficult to say to what extent the depic-tion of the condidepic-tion of a character such as a servant girl living on the estate for which she works contributes anything about the cultural quality of money in present-day Britain. Nevertheless, should we take the idea of literature as a thought experiment seriously, it does not actually matter whether there is a wealth of fictional facts which directly relate to‘real life.’When faced with a sig-nificant description of salient properties and relations exemplified and placed in specific circumstances, we should be able to enlarge our horizon about the meaning and workings of money even while there are few gains in terms of ver-isimilitude. I therefore turn to Taylor’s novel in order to find out to what extent the fictive literary world, the ordering of events, the constellation of characters, their perspectives on money and narrative techniques enhance our understand-ing of money.
In Taylor’s novel, money is present in tangible as well as intangible ways.
The material aspect is highlighted by several means, ranging from the spectac-ular robbery carried out by the gentleman-like Mr. Pardew and his associates that brings them into the possession of a large amount of gold bars– which later have to be melted down in order to become exchangeable specie – as well as foreign coins from France, which they keep in a bank and which thus
pro-See the essay by Silva and Seruya in this volume.
Meanings of Money in Literature 167
vide the police with a valuable clue. Moreover, the possibility of deceit is related even to specie, as becomes clear when Mr. Pardew’s“clerk”Grace tosses a faked florin to a beggar, whose future difficulties with this coin are only hinted at (Tay-lor 2006: 149). In these instances, the novel seems merely to repeat or exemplify common knowledge about money as a means of exchange, which levels the meanings of substances and makes them interchangeable. In order to turn money into such a means of exchange, which initiates an unbounded flow re-ducing the distance between people, the gold bars have to be melted down. In Marxist terms, this leads to a process of abstraction, which reduces the substance not only of the objects traded, but also of human beings. As Terry Eagleton puts it, money is“a realm of chimerical fantasy in which all identity is ephemeral”
(Eagleton 1990: 201). Applying this premise in order to gain insight into, for in-stance, Amis’s novelMoney, one comes up with interesting results: the claim that postmodern identities are‘invaded’by money and that money becomes a kind of surrogate identity. This has been done by Stephan Laqué with regard to Amis’s Money.Yet I would propose one can find out more about the qualities of money in contemporary fiction when one considers less specific examples and more characters than one idiosyncratic protagonist.