Salon | Cents and sensibility, page 4

T A B L E+T A L K
What books have changed your life? Post your thoughts in the Book area of Table Talk.

A complete list of Salon's Money Week coverage

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)
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
BOOKS ARCHIVE

spacer
A LITERARY HISTORY OF MONEY | PAGE 4 OF 4

If "Pride and Prejudice" is the paradise of middle-class money wish-fulfillment, Theodore Dreiser's "Sister Carrie" (1900) is its hell. It is a novel of almost cosmic entropy: Its characters move hopelessly on like cheap windup toys, buffeted by events they do not comprehend, their little wheels turning slower and slower until, one day, they fall over, kick a few times and lie still. Money alone can briefly stave off this fate, but money doesn't come when it is called any more than Godot does. Carrie, Dreiser's tabula rasa "heroine," stumbles upon money by the merest chance; her success, rather than lightening the prevailing gloom, only makes it darker.
In Dreiser's America, the system breaks people -- and the worst of it is, it isn't even a system, it's just life. He is the miserable poet of capitalism's nightmares, forever enacting the decaying events that happen after an evil "what-if": What if you were born into the MacDonald's hamburger-flipping class? What if that day you met the guy who gave you that big break your car had broken down? What if you were born in the wrong place? What if your life wasn't charmed?
No writer has described the soul-shriveling experience of looking for work better than Dreiser. In "Sister Carrie" there are never any jobs, or somebody mean is looking out the window at you, or your feet are wet. Carrie's husband, the doomed and listless Hurstwood, shuffles endlessly through teeming streets, too afraid to go into factories. He goes in and is rejected. Then he goes home. Then his money starts to run out. Then he goes back on the streets again. Then he goes home again. You keep waiting for the fairy godmother -- don't novels always have fairy godmothers? -- but she doesn't appear. A countdown begins: Hurstwood's money goes down, down, by an easy and natural process, like falling asleep or getting older. Then he has no money at all. Then, by an easy and natural process, he loses his house. Then he is on the streets. His final act of will, his tiny rebellion against the easy, natural declining process of his life, is to kill himself.
For Dreiser, money is worse than malevolent -- it is indifferent. With "Sister Carrie," money becomes absurd: It has nothing to do with man. It may be the darkest, least alluring portrayal of money in all literature.
Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby" (1925) also shows what Dreiser calls the "impotence" of money. But it shows money's other side as well. It is perhaps the most effervescent, champagne-fizzy vision of wealth ever realized in literature. It is the delicacy and fatality with which both visions are balanced that makes "The Great Gatsby" unique, and makes it literature's most haunting study of money. Literature after "Gatsby," in what Harold Bloom calls the "Chaotic Age," deals with money in myriad fascinating ways, from Tom Wolfe's hilarious and sharp-eyed enumeration of why a rich New Yorker needs $500,000 a year to get by in "The Bonfire of the Vanities" to Martin Amis' pell-mell, onanistic wallow in "Money." But no work captures money's double nature, its sadness and allure, like "The Great Gatsby."
Jay Gatsby sums up, for good and evil, the American vision of money. He is a self-created man, a parvenu whose big yellow car and big mansion and easy, golden style hide unsavory secrets. But what makes him a tragic figure is that he is an utter romantic, obsessed with a woman, Daisy, whose very laugh had money in it -- a woman whose wealth, unlike his own, is unquestionable. Gatsby buys his mansion simply so that he can look at Daisy's mansion across the water.
In the most obvious sense, Gatsby loses Daisy because he is an upstart: She rejects him -- if her drifting, what Fitzgerald calls her great "carelessness," can be said to add up to anything as clear as rejection -- when her thuggish, rich husband, Tom, exposes his past. But in a deeper sense, he never had her. He has been pursuing a chimera. "The Great Gatsby" is about the delusiveness of memory -- and its inescapability. The green light across the water that Gatsby stares at, the "orgiastic future," never arrives.
You escape the past by living in the present -- but the present is always escaping, too. Money is what "Gatsby's" characters use to hold onto the present. "The Great Gatsby" is so subversive and complex a book because Fitzgerald is not merely a moralist preaching "money can't buy happiness," he is acutely alive to the lightness of money, its style, its swing, the infinite shadings and pleasures it paints and makes possible. The singular elegance of his style at once explores and evokes the elegance of money. The drunken, vulgar roisterers on Gatsby's lawn are not the ones who communicate the happiness of money; neither is Gatsby himself, nor Tom, nor Daisy. That happiness is glimpsed in passing, always just ahead, around a corner. It is glimpsed, paradoxically, in sadness, in the "poor young clerks who loitered in front of windows until it was time for a solitary restaurant dinner -- young clerks in the dusk, wasting the most poignant moments of night and life." Happiness is knowing that you are sad, making friends with the poignancy of your life. Money, in "The Great Gatsby," is always on the verge of bringing happiness. If one can hold to that twilight moment, then something of the real thing can appear.
The lesson of "Gatsby" is that money can buy an unencumbered present -- but what happens when the present isn't there? When "we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past"? It is a lesson that Aristotle had given a long time ago: Limitless desires create not happiness, but a void, an empty soul, a life like a deserted mansion. Limitless desires are not created by money, although they can be exacerbated by it -- they arise from a flaw that Fitzgerald suggests may be too deep for us to ever mend it, though we can try. The golden sun, the dream of pure wealth and pure happiness, is always setting. The best we can do, rich or poor, is learn to live at dusk, to cling to the most precious moments of night and life before they pass.
SALON | Oct. 31, 1997
What's your favorite literary treatment of money? Come post in Table Talk's new Money discussion area.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -