Downward Mobility: The Form of Capital and the Sentimental Novel by Katherine Binhammer

Abstract

Reviewed by: Downward Mobility: The Form of Capital and the Sentimental Novel by Katherine Binhammer Kristina Booker Katherine Binhammer, Downward Mobility: The Form of Capital and the Sentimental Novel ( Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 2020). Pp. 256; 5 b/w photos. $34.95 paper. "Dear President Obama, Today I was informed that effective June 30, 2009, I will join the rapidly growing numbers of unemployed in this country… As I tucked my children into bed tonight, fighting the panic that is threatening to consume me, I realized that as a parent, I will not have the opportunity that my parents had. I cannot look at my children and tell them honestly that if you work hard enough and sacrifice enough, then anything is possible. I have learned today that you can make all the right choices, do all the right things, and it still might not be enough": in this passage from Barack Obama's memoir A Promised Land, a distressed citizen narrates her tale of downward mobility in a letter to him that is reproduced for the reader's consumption.1 The letter writer, Nicole Brandon, explains her reduced circumstances in moral terms, noting her "right choices" to "work hard enough and sacrifice enough"—virtues that have run aground, in the storm of the 2008 financial crisis. I happened to be reading Obama's memoir at the same time as Katherine Binhammer's Downward Mobility: The Form of Capital and the Sentimental Novel, and I was stunned at the ways that his accounting of his experience of the financial crisis aligned with Binhammer's thesis about tales of downward mobility as integral to "negotiating, on the level of form, a logic of crisis that is central to the culture of infinite growth and to the emergence of the financial imagination" (4). The transformation of money into capital requires narrative to render its contradictions coherent. As Binhammer explains, "when we complicate numerical calculations of economic growth, such as gross domestic product figures or average income rates, with narratives of individual stories, we see how some people's downward mobility underwrites overall growth" (21). Tales of downward mobility like Brandon's, and her predecessors' in eighteenth-century sentimental novels, lay bare the great burden of narrative to frame and naturalize money and capital. Binhammer describes eighteenth-century narratives as "new cultural scripts of finance capital," purveyors of "such assumptions as that debts are purely financial, that wealth is infinite, and that future risks can be managed" (7). Downward Mobility explicitly invites comparative reflections like those that provoked by my reading of Promised Land as I read it. Binhammer argues that stories of downward mobility in late-eighteenth century sentimental novels play a specific role in the transformation of money into capital; however, while she is examining a particular moment in the history of capital (the post-Crusoe, post-Adam Smith, later decades of the eighteenth century), a link to the present bookends and threads through the entire text. She explicitly states, "I hope to denaturalize our current discourse of late capitalism's financialization by unraveling the formal properties under which such financialization comes to appear as common sense," an intention that threads through the entire text (6). Binhammer situates tales of financial loss in the late-eighteenth century sentimental novel at the intersection of literary criticism and critical financial studies, a subfield that is concerned with the impact on society and culture when economies are increasingly financialized, meaning that wealth is severed from material production and circulates productively as capital. As Thomas Bay and Christophe Schinckus have written, the "'idea of finance' is an idea about the future, the promise of an unattainable [End Page 729] future, a future never supposed to arrive, to present itself, become a presence; but which, on the contrary, will remain an idea of the future, of an immediate, unmediated, capital(ized) future now-here."2 By examining the sentimental novel's negotiation of these tensions, Downward Mobility "dialogues with a history of the present to query our current cultural narratives and what they suggest about our continuing attachment to a growth economy" (20). Even as the book engages deeply with the preoccupations of this subfield...