Anticipations of the Accident: Modernist Fiction and Systemic Risk

Abstract

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Acknowledgements I am grateful to Melanie Waters, Laurent Milesi, Alissa G. Karl, Textual Practice's anonymous reviewers, and audiences at the Centre for Editorial and Intertextual Research at Cardiff University and the ‘Novel and its Borders’ conference at the University of Aberdeen for their valuable comments on earlier versions of this argument. Notes As part of a revivifying interdisciplinary and historicist turn often referred to as the ‘new modernist studies’, recent scholarship has demonstrated the modernist canon's constitutive relation to such important late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century phenomena as exploration, imperial expansion, cartography, mass migration, the fluid circulation of capital and commodities, and the development of faster and more extensive networks of transportation, media, and communications. In a complementary project, critics have expanded the scope of modernist studies to encompass a diverse array of modernisms, ranging from Brazil to Kenya to China to New Zealand. Significant contributions to these various research areas have been made by David Adams, Colonial Odysseys: Empire and Epic in the Modernist Novel (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003); Jessica Berman, Modernist Fiction, Cosmopolitanism, and the Politics of Community (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Howard J. Booth and Nigel Rigby (eds.), Modernism and Empire (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000); Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker (eds.), Geographies of Modernism (Abingdon: Routledge, 2005); Melba Cuddy-Keane, ‘Modernism, Geopolitics, Globalization’, Modernism/Modernity 10.3 (2003), pp. 539–558; Laura Doyle and Laura Winkiel (eds.), Geomodernisms: Race, Modernism, Modernity (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005); Andreas Huyssen, ‘Geographies of Modernism in a Globalizing World’, New German Critique 100 (2007), pp. 189–207; John Marx, The Modernist Novel and the Decline of Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); ‘Modernism and Transnationalisms’, special issue of Modernism/Modernity 13.3 (2006); Andrew Thacker, Moving Through Modernity: Space and Geography in Modernism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003). In this regard, I follow the lead of James Annesley, who argues that criticism should not merely channel ‘the analysis of globalization towards the understanding of literature and literary theory’, but should also ‘interpret literature and literary theory in terms that might aid the understanding of globalization’ (Fictions of Globalization: Consumption, the Market, and the Contemporary American Novel [London: Continuum, 2006], p. 163). Seán Burke, The Ethics of Writing: Authorship and Legacy in Plato and Nietzsche (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008), pp. 25, 23, 22, 24. Michael André Bernstein, Foregone Conclusions: Against Apocalyptic History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), pp. 17–21. Dwayne R. Winseck and Robert M. Pike, Communication and Empire: Media, Markets, and Globalization, 1860–1930 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), pp. 1–2. H.J. Mackinder, ‘The Geographical Pivot of History (1904)’, The Geographical Journal 170.4 (2004), pp. 298–321 (p. 299). Mackinder's work has been of particular interest to scholars of Joseph Conrad: see Con Coroneos, Space, Conrad, and Modernity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 15, 25–26; Christopher Gogwilt, The Fiction of Geopolitics: Afterimages of Culture, from Wilkie Collins to Alfred Hitchcock (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), p. 34; Janice Ho, ‘The Spatial Imagination and Literary Form of Conrad's Colonial Fictions’, Journal of Modern Literature 30.4 (2007), pp. 1–19 (pp. 2–3). Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space, 1880–1918 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983), p. 314. Ibid., ch. 10. David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), pp. 260, 261. Giovanni Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of Our Time (London: Verso, 1994), p. 6. Winseck and Pike, Communication, p. 45. Ibid., p. 340. Harold James, The End of Globalization: Lessons from the Great Depression (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), p. 20. Charles P. Kindleberger, Manias, Panics, and Crashes: A History of Financial Crises, 4th edn (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000), pp. 118, 228–230. Paul Virilio, ‘The Silence of the Lambs’, interview with Carlos Oliveira, trans. Patrice Riemens, CTheory (1996) <http://www.ctheory.net/text_file.asp?pick=38> [accessed 25 November 2008], par. 2. See, e.g., Patrick Brantlinger, Fictions of State: Culture and Credit in Britain, 1694–1994 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996), esp. ch. 4; Borislav Knezevic, Figures of Finance Capitalism: Writing, Class, and Capital in the Age of Dickens (London: Routledge, 2003); Francis O'Gorman (ed.), Victorian Literature and Finance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); Nancy Henry and Cannon Schmitt (eds.), Victorian Investments: New Perspectives on Finance and Culture (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008); Paul A. Jarvie, Ready to Trample on All Human Law: Financial Capitalism in the Fiction of Charles Dickens (Abingdon: Routledge, 2005); Laura Otis, Networking: Communicating with Bodies and Machines in the Nineteenth Century (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001); Mary Templin, ‘Panic Fiction: Women's Responses to Antebellum Economic Crisis’, Legacy 21.1 (2004), pp. 1–16; Gail Turley Houston, From Dickens to Dracula: Gothic, Economics, and Victorian Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Tamara Wagner, ‘Speculators at Home in the Victorian Novel: Making Stock-Market Villains and New “Paper Fictions”’, Victorian Literature and Culture 36 (2008), pp. 43–62; David A. Zimmerman, Panic!: Markets, Crises, and Crowds in American Fiction (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006). Fredric Jameson, ‘Culture and Finance Capital’, The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern, 1983–1998 (London: Verso, 1998), pp. 136–161 (pp. 143, 151, 160). Fredric Jameson, ‘Modernism and Imperialism’, Seamus Deane, Terry Eagleton, Fredric Jameson, and Edward W. Said, Nationalism, Colonialism, and Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990), pp. 43–66, and ‘Cognitive Mapping’, in Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (eds.), Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), pp. 347–360; Harvey, Condition, ch. 16. Harvey, Condition, pp. 261, 265. Christina Britzolakis, ‘Pathologies of the Imperial Metropolis: Impressionism as Traumatic Afterimage in Conrad and Ford’, Journal of Modern Literature 29.1 (2005), pp. 1–20 (p. 7). See Britzolakis, ‘Pathologies’, p. 7; Coroneos, Space, pp. 55–56. Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent: A Simple Tale (1907; London: Penguin, 2007), p. 28. Alex Houen, Terrorism and Modern Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 37. Mark Eyeington, ‘“Going for the First Meridian”: The Secret Agent's Subversiveness’, Conradian 29.1 (2004), pp. 119–126 (pp. 120–121). Joseph Conrad, ‘Travel’, Tales of Hearsay and Last Essays (1923; London: J.M. Dent, 1955), pp. 84–92 (p. 88). Houen, Terrorism, p. 42; Michael Whitworth, ‘Inspector Heat Inspected: The Secret Agent and the Meanings of Entropy’, Review of English Studies 193 (1998), pp. 40–59 (pp. 55–56). Cf. Terry Eagleton, who claims that Stevie's circles exemplify the tendency of the modernist novel to ‘give us … a kind of empty signifier of a totality which is no longer possible’ (The English Novel: An Introduction [Oxford: Blackwell, 2005], p. 19). Ann Banfield, ‘Remembrance and Tense Past’ in Morag Shiach (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Modernist Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 48–64 (p. 59). Virginia Woolf, ‘The Narrow Bridge of Art’, Collected Essays, 4 vols. (1927; London: Hogarth Press, 1966), vol. 2, pp. 218–229 (p. 222). Jennifer Wicke, ‘Mrs Dalloway Goes to Market: Woolf, Keynes, and Modern Markets’, Novel 28.1 (1994), pp. 5–23 (p. 13). Jameson, ‘Modernism’, pp. 58, 53. Wicke, ‘Mrs Dalloway’, p. 16. Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway (1925; London, Penguin, 1992), p. 167. John Dos Passos, Manhattan Transfer (1925; London: Penguin, 1987), p. 247. See William L. Silber, When Washington Shut Down Wall Street: The Great Financial Crisis of 1914 and the Origins of America's Monetary Supremacy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007). Ronald Berman, The Great Gatsby and Modern Times (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994), p. 32. F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925; London: Penguin, 1990), p. 9. Allen Boyer, ‘The Great Gatsby, the Black Sox, High Finance, and American Law’, Michigan Law Review 88.2 (1989), pp. 328–342 (p. 330). Michael Tratner, ‘A Man in His Bonds: The Great Gatsby and Deficit Spending’, in Martha Woodmansee and Mark Osteen (eds.), The New Economic Criticism: Studies at the Intersection of Literature and Economics, (London: Routledge, 1999), pp. 365–377 (p. 369). On the significance of the automobile in The Great Gatsby, see also Alberto Lena, ‘The Seducer's Stratagems: The Great Gatsby and the Early Twenties’, Forum for Modern Language Studies 34.4 (1998), pp. 303–313 (esp. pp. 307–309). Jameson, ‘Modernism’, p. 58. Jameson writes elsewhere that in the period of modernism ‘the truth of … experience no longer coincides with the place in which it takes place …. We can say that if individual experience is authentic, then it cannot be true’ (‘Cognitive’, p. 349). Figures such as Stevie and Septimus offer an intriguing alternate perspective on Jameson's dictum, in that, although the visions they summon up of the life-world in its global totality are experientially inauthentic (the impression, whether received by themselves or by others observing them, that they possess a privileged awareness of this totality is a mere effect of their automatism or psychosis), they nonetheless offer a glimpse of what such an experience might be like, were it authentically possible. David Adams also notes this commonality between Stevie and Septimus in Colonial Odysseys, arguing that their drawings suggest ‘questions about the meaning of human experience in its totality’ (p. 220). David L. Vanderwerken, ‘Manhattan Transfer: Dos Passos’ Babel Story', American Literature 49.2 (1977), pp. 253–267 (p. 253). See, for example, the following remarks: ‘Gatsby, which was published in 1925, is a historical novel that was written in its own time. Fitzgerald knew exactly what he was creating: an elegy for a present that was already past’ (Vicent Canby, ‘They've Turned Gatsby to Goo’, review of The Great Gatsby [dir. Francis Ford Coppola], New York Times, 31 March 1974 <http://www.nytimes.com/books/00/12/24/specials/fitzgerald-gatsby74.html> [accessed 25 November 2008], par. 10); ‘It is eerie how well The Great Gatsby predicted the end of the Twenties …. The Liberty Bond boom of the early 1920s touched off the stock-market speculation which characterized the rest of the decade. This helped cause the Great Depression, and led, in turn, to the securities legislation of 1933 and 1934 …. In the middle of the Jazz Age, Fitzgerald had seen that the music was bound to stop’ (Boyer, ‘The Great Gatsby’, p. 340). Fitzgerald himself would speak of his fiction of the 1920s in these same terms: ‘All the stories that came into my head had a touch of disaster in them – the lovely young creatures in my novels went to ruin, the diamond mountains of my short stories blew up, my millionaires were as beautiful and damned as Thomas Hardy's peasants. In life these things had not happened yet, but I was pretty sure that living was not the reckless, careless business these people thought – this generation just younger than me’ (‘Early Success’ [1937], The Jazz Age [New York: New Directions, 1996], pp. 77–83 [p. 80]). Jay McInerney, for example, writes, ‘published in 1925, the same year as Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, Manhattan Transfer gives us a very different view of the era … though in retrospect both novels seem to have anticipated the Great Depression’ (Introduction to Dos Passos, Manhattan Transfer, p. 7). According to James Fountain, ‘in Manhattan Transfer, Dos Passos anticipates the Wall Street Crash of 1929 through his portrayal of a network of characters all connected to a vampiric, capitalist machine’ (‘The Majesty of American Citizenhood: Manhattan Transfer and Dos Passos’ Anticipation of the Wall Street Crash', in Rachel Moffat and Eugene de Klerk [eds.], Material Worlds: Proceedings of the Conference held at Glasgow University, 2005 [Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007], pp. 2–14 [p. 13]) Writing in the wake of the crash of 1987, John Gross suggests that, besides Tom Wolfe's recently published The Bonfire of the Vanities (1987), no novel offers a better ‘panorama of New York life’ within which to understand the crisis on Wall Street than Manhattan Transfer (‘The New Greed Takes Centre Stage’, New York Times, 3 January 1988 <http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=940DE1DE143DF930A35752C0A96E948260&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=all> [accessed 25 November 2008], par. 26). Landon Thomas, Jr. praises Fitzgerald's ability in The Great Gatsby to ‘see it all’ – that is, to see the impending crash and resulting depression – well before ‘the game was up’, and suggests that the lesson of the novel is that the ‘game’ that was the ‘dot.com bubble’ of the late 1990s may also now be ‘up’ (‘The Giddy Age of Ambivalence’, New York Observer, 25 March 2001 <http://www.observer.com/node/44165> [accessed 25 November 2008], par. 40). As Peter Lancelot Mallios notes, The Secret Agent has been invoked more frequently than any other novel in media discussions of September 11, featuring in hundreds of articles and reports (see Peter Lancelot Mallios, ‘The Deserts of Conrad’, Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent [1907; New York: Modern Library, 2004], pp. 261–290 [pp. 262–263], and ‘Reading The Secret Agent Now: The Press, the Police, and the Premonition of Simulation’, in Carola M. Kaplan, Peter Lancelot Mallios, and Andrea White (eds.), Conrad in the Twenty-First Century: Contemporary Approaches and Perspectives [Abingdon: Routledge, 2005], pp. 155–172 [p. 155]). James Wood's comments are typical: ‘Joseph Conrad, in The Secret Agent, portrayed the first suicide bomber .… It is impossible not to recall Conrad's prophetic powers whenever the mercenaries of no mercy are at work today. Conrad has been unwittingly quoted time and again in the last few years; the al-Quaida crowd are now quite fond of the Professor's life/death opposition’ (‘Warning Notes from Underground’, Guardian, 26 February 2005 <http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2005/feb/26/featuresreviews.guardianreview33> [accessed 25 November 2008], pars. 2, 3). Unsurprisingly, the other three novels I have discussed have been less frequently cited, but various examples nonetheless present themselves. In her work of criticism-cum-memoir, Letters to Virginia Woolf, for example, Lisa Williams writes, ‘I cannot bear to look at what is no longer there. Those brash towers, symbolizing the centre of a city, of a people's psyche, unafraid to build higher and higher, feeling always the rush of invulnerability. All that is certainly gone. As Septimus sits on a park bench in London “the world wavered and quivered and threatened to burst into flames”. Were you, Virginia, some prophet, peering into the terrors of the next century?’ (Letters to Virginia Woolf [Lanham, MD: Hamilton, 2005], p. 77). For Mike Davis, Manhattan Transfer, with its palpable evocation of ‘urban anxiety’ and the ‘sheer out-of-control velocity of the metropolis’ is one of ‘the visions hurled back at us since the World Trade Centre became the womb of all terror’ (‘The Flames of New York’, New Left Review 12 [2001], pp. 34–50, [pp. 42, 43, 35]). Adam Cohen remarks of The Great Gatsby that, ‘in today's increasingly disturbing world, home to Al Qaeda cells and suicide bombers, … the grim backdrop against which Gatsby's life plays out feels depressingly right’ (‘Jay Gatsby, Dreamer, Criminal, Jazz Age Rogue, Is a Man for Our Times’, New York Times, 7 April 2002 <http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9E0CE0D9143DF934A35757C0A9649C8B63&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=all> [accessed 25 November 2008], par. 6). See Paul Virilio and Sylvère Lotringer, Crepuscular Dawn (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002); Paul Virilio, The Original Accident, trans. Julie Rose (2005; Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2007). Elaine Byrne, for example, observes that as the boom years peeter out, ‘we can see our reflection in F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, set in America's roaring twenties’ (‘Extravagant Gatsby Era Leaves Trail of Indebtedness’, Irish Times, 15 October 2008 <http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/opinion/2008/1015/1224020737554.html> [accessed 25 November 2008], par. 18), while William Keegan claims that amid ‘deepening gloom about the US and world economy’, The Great Gatsby – ‘an evocation of the Jazz Age that preceded the Great Depression’ – is a book ‘to re-read’ (‘A New President Will Inherit Bush's Shattered Piggy-Bank’, Observer, 2 November 2008 <http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2008/nov/02/us-economy-bush-recession> [accessed 25 November 2008], pars. 1, 4). For a commenter on an article that draws similar parallels between the credit crunch and the crash of 1929, the only thing to do is ‘go back, dig in, and read Manhattan Transfer’ (anonymous comment on Steve Fraser, ‘The Specter of Wall Street’, CommonDreams.org, 3 October 2008 <http://www.commondreams.org/view/2008/10/02-0> [accessed 25 November 2008]). Advancing a similar argument in relation to The Secret Agent, Peter Lancelot Mallios suggests that rather than imagine that ‘Conrad, through a kind of divine inspiration … transcended his own time … to speak with absolute clarity to and of ours’, we should recognize that it is ‘rather history that has spoken, with Conrad's text absorbing and probing the very historical developments of his own time – for instance, new developments in terrorist practice, new practices and technologies of media – that still structure our own time’ (‘Deserts’, p. 263; emphasis in original).