Contemporary Literary Novels Are Haunted by the Absence of Money

The following is the second of a six-part collaboration with Dirt about “The Myth of the Middle Class” writer. Check back here throughout the week for more on the increasingly difficult prospect of making a living as a full-time writer, or subscribe to Dirt to get the series in your inbox. _______________________ One of the pleasures of reading 19th-century novels is that authors write openly about money. Take for instance Mr. Bennett, the patriarch in Pride and Prejudice , whose £2,000 a year makes him amongst the wealthier members of the gentry. With that sum, he can comfortably maintain a large household, with a full complement of servants and carriages. On the other hand, he is no Mr. Darcy, who with his £10,000 a year has an immense manor house and accompanying grounds. This attention paid to money accelerated as Romanticism gave way in the mid 19th century to Realism. In Balzac’s Lost Illusions , a man from the provinces sees exactly how the machinery of the arts world works to create celebrated authors. As late as 1891, we have a protagonist in George Gissing’s New Grub Street plotting how he’ll use his small inheritance to secure literary stardom. But after World War I, writers started to use a kind of code. Look at, say, The Sun Also Rises . We know that Brett Ashley, Jake Barnes, and Robert Cohn all travel in the same social circles, but we’ve much less idea of their relative means. In an aside within Capital in the Twenty-First Century , the French economist Thomas Piketty theorized that the high inflation of the post-war period is what led writers to stop using dollar amounts in their fiction—but I would say this increasing vagueness is about more than amounts, it’s also about our understanding of what’s at stake for characters and of what their futures hold. Money forms a backdrop to The Sun Also Rises , but it’s pretty light on the specifics of how much of it each character has. Jake presumably has no money, as he must work as a journalist (a low-class […]

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