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Tuesday, Oct 7, 2008
By Gary Kamiya. A literary history of money, from the Bible to 'The Great Gatsby.'
Oct 31, 1997 | Writing a history of money in literature is as hopeless a task as writing a literary history of love. Like love, or happiness, or truth, money is so vast, protean and mirrorlike a concept that it turns up everywhere. Money has been compared to death, life, blood, shit, sex, guts, oil, water, air, earth, fire, laughter, knowledge, God, the devil -- in fact, like the Freudian phallus (and it's been compared to that, too) you've got to look hard to find something it hasn't been compared to. Once you start looking for money, it turns up everywhere: Every book, every story -- even nursery rhymes -- rings like a cash register. Jack and Jill went up the hill to fetch a pail of water -- because they couldn't afford indoor plumbing.
Still, out of this lucrative multitude, certain works engage more deeply with money, investigate or embody more deeply the infinite range of passions, desires, nightmares and insights loot stirs. From the most stirring exhortations against greed to the most delicious exaltations of the long green, from calm gilt-edged prose to stake-it-all-on-one-throw writing that explodes like a booby-trapped bag of stolen bank bills, it's all there. The most dirty, desired and empty of human possessions, money is a screen on which is projected the myriad personalities of its chroniclers, and the values of the times in which they wrote, like nothing else. What follows is a brief tour of some of the literary works that, in the words of the poet, hold on to the dollar till the eagle grins.
Money gets a bad press from the outset. The two major sources of Western literature, the classical tradition and Christianity, share a mistrust of money -- a noble sentiment that tends to break down in the real world. Plato acknowledges the necessity of money but denies it can bring happiness and assigns it the lowest place in a hierarchy of soul, body and money. In one of the juicier moments in the Dialogues, Socrates carves up a fatuous Sophist named Hippias, who claims to be wiser than his philosophical opponents because he has made more money (possibly the earliest appearance of the venerable "if you're so smart, why aren't you rich" argument so popular among logicians of the School of Newt). "According to your account, earlier thinkers were sunk in ignorance," Socrates sarcastically observes, before asking Hippias in which of the cities he visited he made the most money -- a subversive line of questioning that quickly reduces the boastful cash cow to desperate bluster.
In the creation-myth section of "The Metamorphoses," the Latin poet Ovid relates that money entered the world in the last, debased age of iron, when "men explored the world's very bowels, and dug out the wealth which it had hidden away, close to the Stygian shades." Aristotle, in the "Politics," asserts that those who pursue limitless wealth (as opposed to those who aim at limited wealth as a means to an end) are "intent upon living only, and not upon living well; and, as their desires are unlimited, they also desire that the means of gratifying them should be without limit" -- a searing formulation that falls through time and literature for 1600 years, ending up drifting like a crumpled leaf on Jay Gatsby's swimming pool.
The Bible, of course, also casts a disapproving eye upon money. Matthew 6:24 says, "No man can serve two masters; for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and money." In a larger sense, the very story of Man's fall is the story of money: Before Eve plucked the apple, greenbacks did not exist. Ever since then, cash has given off a faint whiff of the illicit Gravenstein -- or a more pungent odor.
In John of Salisbury's 12th century "The Body Social," John rehearses the well-known conceit in which various members of society are compared to the parts of the human body. The prince is the head, the Senate the heart, judges the eyes. And those who are in charge of business? "Financial officers and keepers ... may be compared with the stomach and the intestines." This may not be precisely the anatomical role that Donald Trump imagines himself playing, but judging from the portion of the body to which the Donald is most frequently compared by his contemporaries, Salisbury's theory should not simply be wiped off.
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