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R E C E N T L Y
The role model syndrome
By Jake Lamar
(10/21/97)
From fisting to Flaubert
By Daniel Reitz
(10/15/97)
Satan goes to Harvard
By Mary Gaitskill
(10/13/97)
Why did they ever ban a book this bad?
By Garrison Keillor
(10/13/97)
Declaration of independence
By Joyce Carol Oates
(09/29/97)
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A LITERARY HISTORY OF MONEY | PAGE 2 OF 4
Of course, the Christian rejection of worldly things was compromised from the beginning: Christ's "render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's" provides the Scriptural justification for all kinds of future accommodations with the state and wealth. Nor was the Classical Age all high-minded denunciations of money. Ancient comedy, which like all comedy deflates Big Ideals and gratifies earthly wishes, is money-positive: in Aristophanes' "The Birds," the heroes, fugitives from Athenian taxation, blockade the gods so they can't enjoy the sacrifices made to them on earth. The gods capitulate.
One of the delightful things about the literature of money is its recurrent craziness. One of the wildest things ever written about money is found in Petronius' "Satyricon" (ca A.D. 60), which some call the first novel ever written. "Trimalchio's Feast," the largest part of this fragmentary work, is one of the all-time great depictions of excess -- monetary, sexual, gustatory. The narrator and his oversexed pals are feted by Trimalchio, a merchant of frightening and obscene wealth, in the most lurid, vulgar and over-the-top banquet since George Bush puked on his Japanese host. As the guests stuff their faces with their gross host's nauseatingly ornate food -- pigs stuffed with live thrushes, etc. -- they discourse on the amorality of modern times. "We're in it for bad times," one guest laments between belches. "And you know why? Because no one believes in the gods, that's why. Who observes the fast days anymore, who cares a fig for Jupiter? One and all, bold as brass, they sit there pretending to pray, but cocking their eyes on the chances and counting up their cash." Petronius' voice is at once so ironic and hedonistic that it is impossible to sort out his revulsion at Trimalchio's excess from his enjoyment in it -- a complicated attitude, half sleazy, half moral, that pops up again a couple of millennia later in Martin Amis' grotesquely entertaining "Money: A Suicide Note" (1984).
In the popular literature of the Middle Ages and the early Renaissance, anti-money strictures dominate. As Johan Huizinga points out in "The Waning of the Middle Ages," the contrast between wealth and poverty in the days of feudalism was brutally obvious, and consequently the misdeeds of the rich -- who were thought to be fixed in their state by divine decree -- aroused enormous outrage. Cautionary tales were common, but the age's relationship to money is more complex. The unworthy rich are denounced, but often with an undercurrent of green-eyed irritation that often comes close to outright emulation of the "wicked" character. Thus we find the stock figures of the randy friar, his tumescent purse bulging as he reaches merrily into the hapless merchant's wallet and his wife's cleavage; and the miser, the suspicious, impotent moneybags whose icky congress with a hot babe is solely due to his cash. But the gusto with which these moist-palmed friars and horny old coupon-clippers are portrayed threatens to obliterate the pious message. To engage with the miser can be to accept his terms, to desire what he desires. Like Chaucer's nightmarish Pardoner, who cynically uses the Biblical text "Radix malorum est cupiditas" (greed is the root of all evil) to squeeze money out of his flock, writers who start out attacking money often end up pimping for it.
Until the democratic age, literature is dominated by the metaphor of the Wheel of Fortune. Money is one tangible manifestation of Fortune, but for most of literary history society was too fixed and hierarchical, both in terms of class and money, to allow writers to explore the different points on Fortune's wheel. One who did was the sui generis 15th century poet François Villon, who captured the vicissitudes of his own tortured, sensual life in agonized, mocking, naked poems that are filled with references to sex, the city and money. His poem "The Legacy" (translated by Galway Kinnell) ends: "Done on the aforesaid date/By the very renowned Villon/Who doesn't eat, shit or piss,/Dry and black like a furnace mop/He doesn't have a tent or pavilion/That he hasn't left to a friend/All he's got left is a little change/That will soon come to an end."
It is no coincidence that the sound of jingling coins should echo through the work of the first great poet of the city. For money and urban life go together. The city is the place where everything circulates, where the vertical structures of aristocratic society are overthrown by the power of trade, of commerce, of money. Money does not come into its own as a subject until the city, in all its unruly, democratic splendor, defeats the court.
This process begins in the Renaissance, as writers subject the Christian view of money to a searching, sometimes ironic inquisition. In Cervantes' "Don Quixote" (1615), for example, Don Quixote's first adventure takes him to an inn, where he mistakes some whores for great ladies. When he prepares to spend the night, the innkeeper asks if he has any money. "'Not a cross,' reply'd the Knight, 'for I never read in any History of Chivalry that any Knight-Errant ever carry'd money about him.'" The innkeeper argues that the knights did carry money but that the "Authors (thought) it needless to mention Things so evidently necessary as Money and clean Shirts," and he commands the knight to "never from this time forward ride without Money." The exchange might sum up the whole history of money in literature. The innkeeper's command has come true: Money is a monkey writers have never since been able to shake off their back.
The greatest writer of the Renaissance, Shakespeare, is a universe, and within that universe there are several planets dedicated to money. In general, Shakespeare's attitude toward money follows the standard aristocratic/Christian/classical position: His most ferocious villain, Iago, incites his dupe Roderigo with the refrain "Put money in thy purse," and those characters who seek avidly to get rich are usually seen as base-born clowns, if not outright knaves.
Shakespeare's best-known play on a monetary theme is "The Merchant of Venice" (1595), which denounces the idolatrous, legalistic profit-love of Shylock. Despite the complexity of Shylock's character, however, the play takes a fairly received view of money, as evidenced by platitudes like the famous, "All that glisters is not gold" speech in the casket scene.
A much more intense analysis of money is found in "Timon of Athens" (1607), which tells the story of a wealthy, rashly generous man whose "friends" disappear when his money does. The story is hackneyed, but Shakespeare, through Timon, extends it into an audacious, almost hallucinatory thesis: The mere existence of money means that the entire universe is based on theft. With maniac similes that recall Lear, Timon rants: "The sun's a thief, and with his great attraction/Robs the vast sea; the moon's an arrant thief,/And her pale fire she snatches from the sun ... each thing's a thief." In the play's most memorable scene, Timon, as mad and misanthropic as Lear, roots in the earth and digs up a treasure of gold. The stark physicality of the madman digging up that which he can no longer use reveals the strangeness of the very idea of wealth.
As the Renaissance faded into the increasingly mercantile 16th and 17th centuries, the ancient division of society into "estates" -- king, clergy, aristocrats, merchants, peasants -- began to break down. By the 18th century, money was finally stripped of its lingering religious association with the higher orders: It had not yet become an idol itself, but its corrosive power was undeniable. Concomitantly, literature was no longer produced only by members of the elite classes: More and more writers appeared who had experienced, like Villon, the ups and downs of Fortune. The result was a literature of a gritty new realism and individualism that found its voice in the great realist literary form, the novel.

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N E X T+P A G E+| The amoral gusto of the novel