The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism
Author(s): Walter Benn Michaels
Source: Representations, No. 9, Special Issue: American Culture Between the Civil War and
World War I (Winter, 1985), pp. 105-132
Published by: University of California Press
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WALTER
BENN
MICHAELS
The Gold Standardand the Logic
of Naturalism
Wemust
Democracy
is threatened
notonlybyarmiesbutbydebtand austerity.
liberalize
thetradeoftheworldand givetheworldagain a moneyitcan relyon,a
dollar"as goodas gold."
-Rep. JackKemp,in a speechbeforetheRepublicanConvention,
1984
W H Y D 0 ES the miser save? Trina McTeague, writesFrank Norris,
saved "withoutknowing why"-"without any thought,withoutidea of consequence-saving for the sake of saving."' But to say thatTrina saved forthe sake
of savingdoesn't so much explain her behavior as identifythe behaviorin need
of explanation: whywould anyone save just for the sake of saving? Psychology
in the late nineteenthcenturyhad begun to question whetheranyone actually
did. The "common lot of misers,"accordingto WilliamJames,"value theirgold,
not for itsown sake, but for its powers.Demonetize it,and see how quicklythey
will get rid of it."2In fact,as the economist Ottomar Haupt wrote in January
1897, "a certaintendencyof hoardinghad been developing"in the United States,
"broughtabout by the fear of free coinage of silver,and coupled withthe hope
thatlateron a substantialpremiummightbe obtained forgold."3These hoarders
were clearlynot saving for the sake of savingand, afterBryan'sdefeat in 1896,
when, as Haupt puts it, "the cause for the alarm had been removed,everybody
was glad to get rid of his gold coin.
. . ."4
Trina, however, is never glad to get rid
of her gold. She does, on one occasion,speak of herselfas savingup "some money
against a rainyday" (187), but it is perfectlyclear that not even the electionof
WilliamJenningsBryan could make the day rainyenough forher to startthinking of her hoard as an investmentor a speculation,muchless providean occasion
forher to spend it. Why,then,does Trina save?
The power thatJames thinksmiserslove is, of course, the power to buy and,
in arguing againstthe associationistnotionthatmisershad developed an attachmentto "gold in se,"he was insistingthatthe miser'sreal interestwas in money.
But this,if true, only underlines the puzzle of the miser'sbehavior,since if he
just loved saving gold we could thinkof him as a collectorwho loved gold the
waysome people love stamps,whereaswhathe seems to love insteadis the power
to buy,while at the same timehe refusesever to exercise thatpower.In extreme
cases, James thought,thiscould only be described as "insanity."
The "common"
miser,however,the "excessivelyniggardlyman,""simplyexhibitsthe psychologREPRESENTATIONS
9
*
Winter 1985 ?
THE
REGENTS
OF
THE
UNIVERSITY
OF
CALIFORNIA
105
ical law thatthe potentialhas oftena far greaterinfluenceover our mind than
the actual. A man willnot marrynow,because to do so puts an end to his indefinitepotentialitiesof choice of a partner.He prefersthe latter"(2:423). And this
analysiswas extended by Georg Simmel,who, in ThePhilosophy
ofMoney(1900),
denies thatthe miserhas anyinterestat all in the "possibleuses of money."Rather,
the miser experiences "the power that money-stored-uprepresents... as the
finaland absolutelysatisfyingvalue.?5This power would be "lost" if "it were to
be transposedintotheenjoymentof specificthings.""Old people,"Simmelremarks,
become avariciousbecause, "subjectively,"
"the sensual enjoymentof lifehas lost
itscharm,"and the "ideals" have losttheir"agitatingpower."Withnothingto buy
and nothingto look forwardto buying,theytakepleasure in the "abstractpower"
of moneyitself,the "absolute means" of buying.
As a descriptionof Trina, however,thisclearlywon't do-not only because
Trina isn'told and because her lifenotoriouslyretainsa good deal of its"sensual
charm,"but because Trina's miserliness,as Norris describes it, doesn't exactly
consistin a refusalto spend. It is true,of course, thatshe won'tbuy clothes,and
thatshe spends as littleas possibleon rent,and thatshe "grudged even the food
thatshe and McTeague ate,"preferringto steal scraps froma "coffee-joint"and
"enjoyingthe meal withthe greaterrelishbecause itcost her nothing"(166-67).
But the moment in which Trina's "avarice had grown to be her one dominant
passion" (198) is depictedbyNorrisnotas an absoluterefusalto spend anymoney
but as an absolute unwillingnessto forgo the pleasure of having "her money in
hand,"even ifthatmeans payingforit.Thus she graduallywithdrawsher capital
fromUncle Oelbermann'sstore,"reducingher monthlyincome"(200) butobtaining
forherself"an ecstasyof delight."Norris here representsher savingas a kind of
spending,not only because she pays for her gold withher monthlyincome but
also because refusingto use her gold to pay for food, she is spending it instead
on the gold itself.
Simmel gives an example that shows why this must be so. Noting that the
"wampumof the NorthAmericanIndians consistedof musselshells,whichserved
as money but could also be worn as a decorativebelt;' he pointed out that the
"role of the shells as jewelry"acquires "an air of distinctionby virtueof the fact
thatit requires abstentionfromusing them directlyas money."6What he seems
to imagine here is somethinglike the associationists'collectionof gold. But why
should we saythatusing the shellsas jewelryinvolvesabstainingfromusingthem
as money?Shouldn'twe say instead thatthe shells as jewelryhave been paid for
by the shells as money,and thatthe "air of distinction"Simmel acutelyascribes
to thebeltderivespreciselyfromthefactthatitis at everymomentof itsexistence
as a belt being paid forby its existenceas money?The only differencebetween
Trina and the Indian is thatTrina places no value on her gold as decoration,as
what Simmelcalls an "object" In thisaccount,the attractionof gold is indeed its
106
REPRESENTATIONS
power to buy,but a power that the miser exercises neither(like the Indian) by
buyingobjectsnor (likeavariciousold people) by refrainingfrombuyingobjects,
but instead (like Trina) by buyingmoney.Accordingto Norris,then,what Marx
called the miser's"asceticism"is in facta "debauch,"her hoard is a sort of perpetual buyingmachine,and she herselfis a spendthrift.
But if the miser is a spendthrift,what is the spendthrift?Why does the
spendthriftspend? This question seems at firstsightless puzzling than the questionabout whythe misersaves,no doubt because spendingmoney,even foolishly,
findsitsplace more easilythansavingin whatSimmelcharacterizesas the normal
transactionin a moneyeconomy-the movementfrom"possessionof money"to
''expenditureof money upon the object" to "enjoymentthroughthe ownership
of the object.?7When, forexample, Vandover,Norris'sspendthrift,
begins"flinging away money withboth hands,"he does it by chartering"a yachtfor a tendays cruise about the bay,"buying "a fresh suit of clothes each month,"and
recklesslygiving"suppers" to "actresses.8 And whileitis easy to imaginecircumstances in whichsuch expendituresmightbe unwise (Vandover's,for instance),
the objects and activitiesVandover buys don't seem in themselvesimplausible
sources of enjoyment.But, accordingto Simmel;the recklessnessof expenditure
is not in itselfthe markof the spendthrift:
The pleasureassociatedwithsquandering
is attachedto themomentofspendingmoney
and has to be distinguished
fromthepleasureprovidedby
upon anyobjectwhatsoever,
thefleeting
ofobjects. . . ratheritrelatestothepurefunction
ofsquandering
enjoyment
without
contentand attendant
regardto itssubstantial
circumstances.9
The spendthriftbuys objects, then, not reallybecause he likes the objects but
because he likesbuying; he likes,Simmel says,"the momentof transpositionof
moneyinto other formsof value.'"0
Put withSimmel'sclarity,
thisis nota difficult
pointto grasp,but the difficulty
of distinguishingin practicebetweenspending for objects and spending, as we
mightput it,forthe sake of spending maybe considerable.Since even spending
for the sake of spending involvesbuyingsomething,how can we know that the
"nonsensicalpurchases" don't appear to him as plausible objectsof
spendthrift's
desire, worth buying for the pleasure theywill bring? When Norris describes
Vandover's pleasure in spending as a "hystericaldelight,"he certainlyalerts us
to its unusual character,but, narratingVandover's"degeneration,"he betraysa
certainconfusionabout whatkindof spendingreallyis degenerate.Having made
$15,000 fromthe sale of his "old home,"Vandover"gambledor flung"the money
''awayin a littleless than a year":
He neverinvestedit,butate intoit dayafterday,sometimes
to payhisgamblingdebts,
sometimes
to indulgean absurdand extravagant
whim,sometimes
to payhisbillat the
The GoldStandardand theLogicof Naturalism
107
forno reasonat all, movedsimplybya recklessdesirefor
LickHouse, and sometimes
spending.(290)
here is thatsome of these expendituresseem perfectlyreasonable
The difficulty
(he has to pay his hotel bill), some of them seem at least imaginablyreasonable
(the gamblingdebts), and some of them seem to go beyond even "nonsensical
purchases" ("for no reason at all"). Only the "absurd and extravagantwhim"
presentsa clear-cutcase of spending forthe sake of spending,no doubt because,
although these whimsclearlyinvolvebuyingsomething,by not tellingus what
Vandover buys Norris focuses all our attentionon the act of buyingitself.
But taxonomizingVandover'sexpenses in thiswaymaydo more thanindicate
Norris'sconfusion; it may lead to a differentway of understandingthe spendthrift'sefforts.Payinghis hotel bill, Vandover buys an "object,"or, at least, the
use of one. Payinghis gamblingdebts,Vandover buys "excitement":"It was not
withany hope of winningthathe gambled .. . it was only the love of the excitement of the moment"(289). But the excitementof Vandover's gamblingis not
just any kind of excitement.It is not,forinstance,the excitementof the football
game thathe passes up foranother game of cards. It is not even the excitement
of perhaps winning a great deal of money-the "desire of money was never
strong"in Vandover.It is instead the excitementof losing money.What you buy
when you pay your gamblingdebts, Norris seems to suggest,is the excitement
of payingyour gamblingdebts,a purchase thatseems nonsensicalonly because
it doesn't seem like a purchase at all. The excitementbought by the ordinary
gambler is nonsensicalbecause, although he hopes to win, he knows he is likely
to lose. He pays forthe excitementof seeing whatwillhappen to his money.But
Vandover doesn't so much pay for excitement;rather he is excited by paying.
Spending his moneyon spending his money,he comes as close as Norris can get
to spendinghis money"forno reason at all,"to the pleasure notexactlyof buying
but ratherof spending withoutbuying.
Simmel'sspendthriftloves buying;he loves the "transpositionof moneyinto
other formsof value" But Norris'sspendthriftloves buyingnothing;into what
then is his money transposed?From the standpoint,at least, of the spendthrift
himself,into nothing-his money simplydisappears. And thisindeed seems to
be Norris'spoint.It is as if,fromthe spendthrift's
pointof view,themiser'srefusal
fromthe moneyeconto
withdraw
a
failed
to spend money represents
attempt
omy,failed because in a moneyeconomy,the power of money to buy can never
be denied. It willalwaysat leastbuyitself.Goingthemiserone better,thespendthrift
triesto buy his wayout of the moneyeconomy.If the miseris alwaysexchanging
his moneyforitself,the spendthrifttriesto exchange his fornothingand so, by
stagingthe disappearance of money'spurchasingpower,to stage the disappearance of money itself.The spendthriftthus embodies a returnto what Ignatius
108
REPRESENTATIONS
Donnelly in TheAmerican
PeopIe6Moneycalled "barbarism,"the conditionof having "no moneyat all.""
For Donnelly,the threatof a societywithoutmoney seemed a directconsequence of adherence to the gold standard. Having demonetized silver in the
"crimeof '73" and thus cut the money supply in half,the "Wall Street Misers"
now wanted "to drive gold out of circulation"and to bringabout a returnto the
"Dark Ages,"which,in Donnelly'sview,had originallybeen caused bythe gradual
exhaustion of the gold and silvermines of Spain. Withoutany new sources of
money,
The supplydiminished;
theusurerpliedhisartsand thecapitalist
graspedtherealestate;
ina fewhands,justas itis becomingtoday;and themultitude
all wealthwasconcentrated
and wretchedness.12
werereducedto thelowestlimitofdegradation
Only the free coinage of silver could keep money in circulationand save the
American people froma similarfate.
But if the imaginationof a societywithoutmoney held obvious terrorsfor
freesilverites,who feared thatthe world'ssupplyof gold was disappearingfrom
circulation,it also playeda centralrole in the economic imaginationof goldbugs,
who were convincedthattherewas more than enough moneyto go around. For
them,the moneylesssociety,"but one remove frombarbarism,"as David Wells
put it,was the inevitablestartingpointforan evolutionaryhistoryof financethat
culminated in what numerous writers,Wells among them, called the "natural
selection"of gold as money.'3In his own RobinsonCrusoesMoney(firstpublished
in the 1870s as an anti-Greenbacktractand reprintedin 1896 as an attackon
freesilver),WellsimaginesCrusoe's wreckas a Donnelly-likereturnto economic
savagery,where nothinghas any "purchasingpower,"but he goes on to narrate
the islanders' natural development throughbarter to the exchange of cowries
and finallyto the discoveryof gold, which, stumbled upon accidentally,soon
became "an object of universaldesire,""acquired spontaneouslya universalpurchasingpower,and fromthatmomenton, became Money"(40). Onlywhen,under
the stressof financingtheirwar withthe cannibals,the islandersbegin to print
paper money and then mistakethat paper (the "representativeof a thing")for
gold (the "thingitself")do theyrun into trouble.
For Wellsand theothergoldbugs,the moralof such storieswas thateconomic
disastercould be broughton not, as Donnelly thought,by the disappearance of
gold but ratherby any attemptto tamperwithits"naturalpurchasingpower."At
the same time,however,imaginingmoney as a "thingitself,"the sort of thing,
for example, that the world mightrun out of, the gold conservativesand the
silverradicals held in common a viewof moneythatwas in certainrespectsmore
powerfulthan theirdifferences.As againstthe Greenbackersor fiat-money
men
like Tom Nugent, who advocated the use of "inconvertiblepaper,"'14 gold and
The Gold Standardand theLogicof Naturalism
109
silvermen both stood for a currencybacked by metal. "Nothing,"Wells wrote,
"can be reliableand good moneyunder all circumstanceswhichdoes not of itself
possess the fullamount of the value whichitprofesseson itsface to possess" (26).
The value of moneywas thus,in Coin Harvey'sword, "intrinsic,"15the value of
the thing,gold or silver,moneywas made of.
What is most obviouslystrikingabout thisconception of money,of course,
is that it identifiesmoney as a kind of natural resource,like coal or cows. And
thus identifyingmoney with its physicalform,one can come to thinkthat the
supplyof moneyin the world is identicalto the supplyof gold (and/orsilver)in
the world. To think(as the fiat-moneymen did) that"paper money"could supplementor replace precious metalswas to succumb to what Wellscalled a "mere
fictionof speech and bad use of language,"forpaper could onlyrepresentmoney;
itcould no more be moneythat"a shadow could be the substance,or the picture
of a horse a horse, or the smell of a good dinner the same as the dinner itself"
(57). Hence Trina, dissatisfiedwiththe "paper" that"representedfivethousand
dollars" given her by Uncle Oelbermann, demands what she thinksof as "the
moneyitself"(199). And hence one of the climacticmomentsof CoinsFinancial
tracts)takesplace when Coin, the "little
School(the mostpopular of the free-silver
demonstratesto a shocked audience that all the gold in the world
bimetallist,"
would fitinside the Chicago wheat pit. Richard Hofstadtercites thisepisode as
an example of Harvey's"staggeringgiftforirrelevancy,"'6
and, in a certainsense,
he is obviouslyright:"No one was disposed to deny thatgold was a scarce commodity.",17But, givenjust this fact and given also the general identificationof
moneywithprecious metals,Coin has made a tellingpoint.
If money is a commoditylike horses or wheat, then what he and the other
bimetallistsfeared was a scarcityof gold preciselyin the same way that people
mightfear a scarcityof wheat. Thus the radical polemics of the '90s are filled
with detailed accounts of exactlyhow much gold and silver there were in the
world,accounts motivatedby the fear that if one day there should be no more
gold or silver,thenon thatday therewould be no more money.And conservative
polemicsas late as 1900 are similarlydominatedby the distinctionbetween"Real
of some kind,"and "Representative
Money,which is "always a commodity
Money,"
whichis "nothingbut a promise,"'8distinctionsmobilizedto warn againstthe folly
of tryingto printor coin more moneythan the world naturallycontained.
"In civilizednations,"wroteWells,"naturalselectionhas determinedthe use
of gold as a standard."But this attempt,common to gold and silvermen both,
to see the precious metals as nature's money embodied a rather complicated
sense of the place of a money economy in nature. For in insistingthat "good
money"must"of itselfpossess the fullamount of the value whichit professeson
itsface to possess" (26), writerslike Wellswere insistingthatthe value of money
as moneybe determinedby (and indeed identicalto) the value of moneyas the
110
REPRESENTATIONS
commodityit would be ifit weren'tmoney.Gold thusoccupies a strangeposition
in themovementfroma bartereconomy,exchangingcommoditiesforeach other,
to a moneyeconomy,exchangingcommoditiesfor money.As money,of course,
it replaces barter,but since itsvalue as moneyis only a functionof itsvalue as a
commodity,the exchange of any commodityforgold as moneyis identicalto the
exchange of thatcommodityfor gold as a commodity.All money exchanges, in
other words,are also simultaneouslybarterexchanges,and the "intrinsic"value
thatfitsthe preciousmetalsto be moneyguaranteesat the same timethatnothing
ever really need be money.The assertion that money exists in nature is thus
identicalto the assertionthatmoneydoesn'texistat all. Defendinggold or silver,
the moneywritersend up articulatingan economic theorythat,in its mostoutlandish and fetishizedclaims on behalf of "real" or "primary"money,actually
stages for itself,like Vandover givingin to the brute,the escape froma money
economy.
This fantasy,in which the circulationof currencybecomes a natural phenomenon and in whichmoneyitselfis alwayseitherthreateningor promisingto
returnto nature,would seem to finditsmostpowerfulfigurein the miser,whose
savingsdeplete the supply of circulatingmoney and whose perfectlyfetishized
love of moneyis alreadya love of thematerialmoneyis made of,gold. Identifying
moneywithitsphysicalform,the commoditygold, the misermakestheexistence
of moneyin one sense precariousand in anothersense superfluous-precarious
because to take away the commodityis to take away everything,superfluous
because to add anythingto the commodityis to add nothing.Hence the threat
is thatmoneywilldisappear and the world willlapse into "barbarism,"while the
promise is that only a money that mightdisappear could possess the "natural
purchasingpower" required by "civilizednations."But we have alreadyseen how
Trina'ssavingfailsto deterher moneyfrombeing money,and, as McTeague'splot
develops,she can'teven keep her gold out of general circulation.McTeague, with
his "old-timeminer'sidea of wealtheasilygained and quicklyspent" (75), steals
it,causing Trina "unspeakable anguish" as she correctlyimagineshim "spending
her savingsbyhandfuls;squanderingher beautifulgold pieces thatshe had been
at such pains to polish withsoap and ashes" (198).
It would be a mistake,however,to conclude from Trina's failure that the
miser'stheoryof money goes unenforcedin McTeague.Instead, it is McTeague
himself,despite his temperamental(and, as a former miner,professional)inclination to circulate gold, who bears the responsibilityfor staging its disappearance and so confirmingits natural value. For one thing,he is a dentist-in
the iconographyof the 1890s, a kind of anti-miner."There is good reason to
believe,"worrieda speaker at the Bryan SilverClub of Berkeley,"thatthe annual
additionsto our stockof the precious metalshave been insufficient
to counteract
theirincreased use in the arts. For instance,dentistsnow use large quantitiesof
The GoldStandardand theLogicof Naturalism
111
gold forfillingteeth;considerableamountsare used forsignsand like purposes,
none of which is recovered'19 McTeague, withhis "tapes" of dentist'sgold and
especiallywithhis "big gilded tooth"(47), the "immense""golden molar" he uses
as a sign, is a nightmareembodimentof the Bryanites'fears,draininggold out
of the economymore quicklythan the minerscan bringitin. In fact,even when,
forced to give up dentistryand in flightfrom the law, McTeague returns to
miningin Placer County,he remainseconomicallyan anti-miner.Having stolen
Trina'sentirehoard'thistime,he carries it up into the mountainsas if the point
were not to put the money back into circulationbut instead to put it back into
the ground. The "miner'sidea of moneyquicklygained and lavishlysquandered"
(172) is irrelevanthere, partlybecause, although Norris claims it "persisted"in
McTeague's mind, he seems, in fact,to have forgottenall about it, and partly
because whateveris in his mind doesn't seem to mattermuch to Norris,who is
himselfdeterminedto take the gold out of circulation,to put it in people's teeth,
or under theirbeds, or back in the mines,or finallyin the middle of Death Valley,
where no one willever be able to get at it.
This notorious ending-McTeague and Marcus Schouler destroyingtheir
water,fightingover a treasurethat neitherof them can live to spend-restages
as melodrama the "lesson in politicaleconomy"taughtbyRobinsonCrusoesMoney,
where,wreckedon an island almostas "desolate" as Death Valley,Crusoe begins
by notingthat all the gold and silverhe takes offhis ship is not worthas much
as a single one of the knives.The point of his story,as Wellscharacterizesit, is
to show how gold can "acquire value" (13), how something"useless" can become
"good and true money"(1 18), but,as we have already seen, thischaracterization
is, in certain crucial respects,misleading. Since the value of gold as money is
determined,in Wells'sview,by itsvalue as a useful commodity,Crusoe's bags of
money never reallyacquirevalue, theyjust lie there waitingfor the value they
alreadyhave to be discovered.The real pointofRobinsonCrusoesMoneyis to show
thatnothingever acquires value, thatno moneycan become good and trueunless
it already is good and true, and thereforethat nature's money,like Robinson
Crusoe's, mustbe made of gold.
What then is the real point of McTeague's dyingin the desert withhis five
thousand gold dollars? In what mightbe called the Erich von Stroheiminterpretation,thepointis thatgreed kills.But itisn'texactlygreed thatgetsMcTeague
into Death Valley and, besides, Norris is careful to postpone the fightbetween
himand Marcus untilaftertheyhave losttheirwater-neither of themis fighting
to be rich. Perhaps, instead,reading Death Valleyas the last stage in gold's disappearance fromcirculation,we should understand it as a kind of ironic alternativeto the coffersof the WallStreetMisers.On thisview,McTeagueinvokesthe
free-silver
specterof a contracting
currency,
but ratherthan puttingall the money
intoeasternbanks,Norrisabandons iton a westerndesert,thusstagingthe great
112
REPRESENTATIONS
fear of the silvermen as a fatal triumphfor them. Greed doesn't kill; the gold
standard does.
But to read McTeagueas a silvertractwould be finallyto miss the point of
gold and silver'sshared fantasy,"real" or "primary"money.Stressingthe importance of thisfantasy,I don't mean to slightthe differencebetweenthe gold and
even economically,
silverinterests;socially,politically,
theywere substantial.Rather,
it is just these differencesthatmake the shared commitmentto precious metals
so striking.Neitherthe goldbug fear of inflationnor the free-silverdesire forit
can quite explain the nearlyunanimous hostilityto fiatmoney since, of course,
the essence of legal tenderis thatitssupplycan be controlledby the government
that issues it to produce either of these effects.Indeed, it is just this fact that
excited the most hostility.Nast's famous illustrationfor RobinsonCrusoesMoney
(Fig. 1),20juxtaposing a piece of paper made into milkby an "act of Congress"
witha piece of paper made intomoneyin thesame way,brilliantly
capturesWells's
sense that fiatmoney was nothingbut dangerous "hocus pocus" (84). And the
government'sabilityto enforceitshocus pocus is, of course, preciselywhatstarts
McTeague on hisjourney into the desert.The "authorities"at "CityHall" forbid
him to practicedentistrybecause he hasn't got a diploma, a "kind of paper,"as
Trina describesit to the bewildereddentist,withoutwhich"you can't practice,or
call yourselfdoctor.""Ain'tI a dentist?Ain't I a doctor?" (147), McTeague protests,appealing finallyto the gold tooth she herselfgave him as proof of his
identityand insistingthathe "ain'tgoing to quit forjust a piece of paper" (149).
But, in the event,McTeague can't practicedentistry,
he can't be a dentist,unless
he has the diploma, the piece of paper on his wall that says,"This is a dentist,"
like the piece of paper drawn by Nast that says,"This is money."Paper here is
more powerfulthan gold; dentistscan only be made by preciselythe kind of
governmentalalchemythatWellsimagined in the makingof milk.
It is more accurate, then, to say that McTeague dies for the gold standard
than to say that he dies from it. He and Trina are united in their distastefor
"representative"paper. At the same time, however,as Norris's plot works to
remove all gold from circulationand so authenticateit as nature's money,his
language pulls in the opposite direction.Few criticshave failed to bemoan the
unrelentingaccumulation of gold imagery in McTeague: "The gold tooth, the
$5,000,Trina'stwenty-dollar
gold pieces,theimaginarygold plateof Maria Macapa,
the absurd canary in the giltcage.... The wonder,"wrote Vernon Parrington,
"is that he didn't give Trina gold hair instead of black.?,2' In some respects,of
course, thisproliferationof gold is compensatory.Having lost her money,Trina
takesa temporarypleasure in the sunlightthatfalls"in round golden spots" on
the floorof her room, "likegold pieces" (197), she saysto herself.Nature,which
provided the gold in the firstplace, now offersto replace it withsunlight.But
whatexactlyis the "like"-nessbetween"golden spots"of lightand gold coins? In
The GoldStandardand theLogicof Naturalism
113
.0
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Be{.
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4
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1
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[if
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FIGURE
r i '1
I
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pe Pr?
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n
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T.!r.,; ,
1. JohnHaberle. Reproduction,ca. 1889. From Alfred
Frankenstein,AftertheHunt (Berkeley,1953).
affirmingthislikeness,is Trina (likea prospector)discoveringa mine of nature's
money?Or is she (likeCongress)makingmoneybyfiat?Does McTeague6language
of gold compensate forgold's narrativedisappearance or does it,likebad money
drivingout good, actuallyhelp to produce thatdisappearance?
Norris'smostserious attemptto address, ifnot preciselyto answer,thisquestion involveshis depiction not of Trina but of his other miser,the red-headed
PolishJew,Zerkow.Zerkow is a junk dealer, a trade that seems somewhatodd
fora miser,since thejunk dealer triesto wringeverylast bit of exchange value
out of nearlyworthlesscommodities,whilethe miserseeks to deny the exchange
value of the most precious commodity.But Zerkow,it turns out, doesn't really
deal junk, he collectsit. Described by Norris as "a man who accumulates,but
never disburses,"he buysjunk withoutever sellingit,and so his "shop" is not a
shop at all but rather"the last abiding-place,the almshouse, of such articlesas
had outlivedtheirusefulness"(25). His real "passion,"of course, is forgold, but
instead of tryingto turn hisjunk into gold by sellingit,he keeps it around him
114
REPRESENTATIONS
as if it already were gold. Neithera means to an end nor an end itself,Zerkow's
junk serves instead as a representationof the end. It representsgold by substitutingfor it,but in that act of substitutionit also suggestssomethingabout the
nature of gold and of the miser'speculiar passion for it. For, ifjunk becomes
junk by outlivingits "usefulness,"then,in the hands of the miser,gold becomes
junk, outlivingits value in use by being deprived of its value in exchange. Junk
can representgold, in other words,because the miser'spassion for gold is itself
a passion forjunk.
Demonetize gold, James thought,and the miser will lose interest.In one
sense, he was obviouslywrong. The miser is not, as James imagined everyone
was, interestedin gold simplyas money.Indeed, in one sense, as we have seen,
no one was reallyinterestedin gold as money; the miser'sattemptto escape the
money economy was simplyemblematicof everyoneelse's attemptto deny that
there was any such thing.Gold as "money itself"was gold as no money at all.
But thereis an importantsense also in whichJames was right,forthe miserisn't
to gold as moneyeither.Trina doesn'tjustliketo collectthings,
exactlyindifferent
she likes to collectmoney.And Zerkowlikesjunk, but only because he sees in it
a representationof gold, or ratherbecause in its relationto gold he sees somethinglikethe possibilityof representationitself.If gold, to be moneyitself,need
never be money at all and so, as I have argued, can never be money at all, then
what Zerkow likes is a way of seeing gold that,identifyingit as junk instead of
money,allows it for the firsttimeactuallyto become money.Here the figureof
the miseris turned inside out; insteadof markingthe continuitybetweennature
and the economy,betweena naturalmoneyand no money,he marksthe sudden
emergence both of moneyout ofjunk and of a puzzling question: if there is no
value in nature,how can therebe value at all?
It isjust thisquestion thatthe commitmentto precious metalsis designed to
answeror,better,to forestall-forestallitbyinsistingthatthereis value in nature
and answerit by suggestingthatshould the value in nature run out, then there
would indeed be no value leftanywhere.Thus storiesabout the originof money
tend to be storiesabout the remarkablephysicalpropertiesof gold and about
the natural "instinct"thatleads men to appreciate them. Henry Poor,forexample, begins his Moneyand Its Laws by imaginingthe discoveryof precious metals
not only as the discoveryof moneybut as the discoveryof exchange itself:
The firstlumpof goldor silverdug fromtheearth,as soon as itsbeautyand uses were
displayed,
becametheobjectofuniversal
admiration;
eachbeholdersoughttobecomeits
ownerbyexchanging
therefor
sucharticlesof merchandise
or property
as he possessed,
notnecessaryto his immediatewants.This preference
expressednothingless thanan
instinct
or sentiment
commonto mankind.22
Furthermore,as if to emphasize the primitivestatus of our desire for money,
Poor and Wellsboth insistedon the priorityof gold's aestheticattractionover its
The GoldStandardand theLogicof Naturalism 115
metallurgicalutility."Of all objects those are most prized that ministerin the
highestdegree to our sense of beauty,"23
Poor declares, and Wells describeshis
islander discoveringa metal of "remarkablebrightnessand color" and bringing
it home to his wife,who immediatelyhangs it "by a stringabout her neck as an
ornament"(38). Grounding the economic in the aesthetic,both writersimagine
thatour response to moneyis virtuallyphysiological,on the order of our natural
response to beauty.The existenceof value in nature is thus nothingmore than
an instanceof the existenceof beautyin nature,and our love of gold is as instinctiveas our love of a beautifulsunset.
James himself,arguing in the PrinciplesofPsychology
forthe possibilityof an
instinctive"desire" to "appropriate,"insistedon the primacyof the "aesthetic
sense." Everyone,he wrote,could feel the attractionof "glittery,
hard, metallic,
odd prettythings.""The source of their fascinationlies in their appeal to our
aestheticsense, and we wishthereupon simplyto ownthem"(2:679). Despite his
earlierskepticismabout misers,Jamesassertshere thatwe can have some desires
"quite disconnectedwiththe ulterioruses of the things"desired, and he insists,
against Herbert Spencer and the associationists,that these miserlydesires are
"entirelyprimitive."Spencer agreed that the "act of appropriating"could be
"pleasurableirrespectiveof the end subserved,"but onlybecause the act of acquisitionwould itselfevoke "agreeable associations"24withusefulobjectspreviously
acquired. Thus, savingmoneycould produce a pleasure of itsown,but a pleasure
thatwas ultimatelycompounded out of pleasant associationswithall the things
money had previouslybought, and so logicallyand chronologicallydependent
on a more common and less miserlyconception of the instrumentalvalue of
money.James,on the otherhand, insistingon the "primitive"statusof our desire
for the useless, denies thatit is dependent on our memoriesof havingacquired
useful thingsand, insistingon its "aesthetic"status,locates,like Wellsand Poor,
The aestheticoffershim a way
the attractionof these objectsin theirmateriality.
out of the instrumentaland the economic both; we like the glitteryobjects for
what theyare, not forwhat theywillbuy or what theyrepresent.
But while it is clear that Norris'smisersdon't followthe Spencerian model
(lovingtheirgold as a kind of mnemonicforthe pleasures it has broughtthem),
it is equally clear thatZerkow,at least,doesn'tlove gold because itis prettyeither.
And, as James goes on to give a more detailed account of the objects of our
primitivedesires,he begins to provide some sense of whatit is thatZerkowloves.
For,as much as or even more than we love "prettythings,"James says,we love
curiousthings. .. naturalobjectsthatlookas iftheywereartificial,
or thatmimicother
objects-theseforma classof thingswhichhumanbeingssnatchat as magpiessnatch
us. Whathousedoes notcontainsomedraweror cupboard
rags.Theysimplyfascinate
116
REPRESENTATIONS
fullof senselessodds and ends of thissort,withwhichnobodyknowswhatto do, but
whicha blindinstinct
savesfromtheash-barrel?
(2:679)
At the simplestlevel,James is distinguishinghere betweenwhat it means to
love a sunset and what it means to love the representationof a sunset. But the
differenceis not simplybetweenbeautyand representedbeauty;it is instead the
differencebetween"prettythings"and thingsthat"mimicotherobjects,"between
beautyand mimesis.When we love glitteryobjects,we love beauty;when we love
objects that look like other objects, we love representation.Furthermore,the
suggested paradigm of objects that"mimicotherobjects"is "naturalobjects that
look as if theywere artificial."
Thus the representationthatoriginallyfascinates
us is the naturalreproductionof a man-made artifact,not the man-made reproduction of a natural one. It is as if we can eitherlove the sunset as a sunset or
love it as the representationof a painting.In this analysisof our love of representation,the mark of human agency is simultaneouslyproduced, effaced,and
reproduced: produced because we see in the sunset a representation,effaced
because it turnsout to be nature thatis doing the representing,and reproduced
because nature is representingsomethingthatwas itselfmade by man.
From the standpointof the money controversies,thisaccount of the "primitive"desire to "appropriate"is doing some fairlycomplicatedideological work.
For if the differencebetweenloving"glittery"thingsand lovingthingsthatlook
like somethingelse is the differencebetweenlovingbeautyand lovingrepresentation,then, for the miser,this is the differencebetween loving gold because it
is money and lovinggold because it looks like money,because, in otherwords,it
is a natural object (metal) that looks like an artificialone (money). To thinkof
gold simplyas being moneyis, as we have already seen, at the same timeto deny
the existenceof money,to turn all the money exchanges into barter exchanges
by derivingthe value of gold as money exclusivelyfromits"intrinsic"value as a
commodity;whereas to think of gold as looking like money is to distinguish
between what it is and what it representsand so, admittingthe discrepancy
between material and value, to admit the possibilityof money and a money
economy.Hence the factthatgold isn'tin itselfmoneybut onlylooks likemoney
would be what allows it finallyto become money.But whileJames'slogic repudiates the hard-moneyfantasyof nature as a kind of mint,it by no means denies
nature a role in the productionof money.For although,according to James,we
are not originallyattractedby nature,we are not originallyattractedby artifice
either.What attractsis the natural representationof the artificial.Such representationmustbydefinition
be accidental-Jamesgoes on to call ita lususnaturaebut withoutthisaccident,it seems,therewould be no "primitiveformof desire."
We don'twantthingsin themselves,but we can'tbegin bywantingrepresentations
The GoldStandardand theLogicof Naturalism
117
of thingsin themselveseither; we want thingsin themselvesthat look like representations.We begin,in otherwords,withthe illusionthatrepresentationitself
is natural,and withoutthisillusionwe would never develop any interesteither
in representationor in nature. To the question as to how there can be value at
all if there is no value in nature,James thus responds by locatingthe genesis of
value in an accident,a momentwhen nature seems unnatural. Imitatingsomethingmade by man, nature sets man the example of imitationand produces in
him the primitivedesire formimesis.
It is thus,perhaps,a signof Zerkow's"atavism"thathis passion forgold finds
itsmostpowerfulexpressionin his love of Maria's storyabout her lostset of gold
service. "The story,"Norris says, "ravished him with delight" (28). Indeed, as
Zerkow'spassion progresses,it focusesmore and more on "Maria'srecital,"which
becomes "a veritablemania withhim" (73). He compels her to tellthe storyover
and over again, each repetitionenablinghim to "see thatwonderfulplate before
him, there on the table, under his eyes, under his hand:" sharpening both his
desire and his disappointmentwhen Maria finallyrefusesto tell it another time.
"What a torment!what agony! to be so near-so near,to see it in one's distorted
fancyas plain as in a mirror."Indeed, it is the eventual withholdingof the story
thatprovokesthe crisisin Zerkow'srelationswithMaria and leads to her murder.
"Sweatingwithdesire:"ZerkoWhimselfbegins to tell the storyof the gold-"It
was he who could now describe it in a language almost eloquent" (137)-while
at the same time escalating his violent effortsto "make" Maria "speak." The
distinctionbetweenhis desire forthe gold and his desire forthe descriptiongets
lost here, a confusionanticipatedin Maria's own earlyaccounts of the gold service, when she describesit both as a source of lightand as a reflector:it was "a
yellowblaze likea fire,like a sunset";itwas "likea mirror. .. just likea littlepool
when the sun shines into it" (27). It is as if the gold reflectsitselfand so reallyis
itsown reflection,an object thatbecomes what it is by representingitself.Thus,
it isn'tso much thatthe distinctionbetweenthe gold and itsrepresentationis lost
as it is that the representationis here understood to be an essentialpart of the
gold itself.If Zerkow'sfancyis a mirrorthat reflectsthe gold, and if Maria's
language is a mirrorthat reproduces it in simile,then the gold itselfis also a
mirror,so that in taking the representationfor the thing itself,Zerkow is not
making some quixotic mistakeabout fictionsand the real but is instead rightly
recognizingthe representationas an ontologicalpiece of the thing.Zerkowis a
miserof mimesis,and when he dies clutching"a sack fullof old and rustypansfullya hundred of them-tin cans, and iron knives and forks"(180), he dies
happy. He seems, like Wells'sislanders,to have mistakenthe worthlessartifacts
of men for nature'sgold, but thatmistakeis, in reality,only a kind of tributeto
the mistakeembodied in gold itself,to the necessaryresemblance of material
object to representation.Junk,like language, can representgold only because,
118
REPRESENTATIONS
forNorris,gold, likelanguage, is alreadya representation.Loving language and
loving gold, Zerkow also loves the junk that is the material condition of their
representability
and hence of theiridentity.
At work,then,in McTeagueare two verydifferentconceptionsof the miser
and his love of gold. In one, the miserloves gold because he thinksof itas "money
itself";like the gold Republicans and the silverBryanites,he identifiesthe value
of money with the value of the materialit is made of. In the other,the miser
loves gold because it emblemizes the impossibilityof anythingbeing "money
itself."Seeing gold in junk, he transformsthe claim that nothingcan be money
into the imperial possibilitythat anythingcan be money,and he does this by
insistingwithJames not onlyon the potentialdiscrepancybetweenmaterialand
value but on the potentialdiscrepancybetweenwhata thingis made of and what
itis. For it is thisthatexcitestheJamesianmiser's"primitive"desire "to own,"the
separationbetweenmaterialityand identitythatmustbe possible if one thingis
ever to be able to count as an imitationof another.This is why,as James recognizes, it isn'tenough simplyto say thatwe like objectsthat"mimicotherobjects."
How do we come to thinkof one as mimickingthe other? Physicalresemblance
is obviouslyan inadequate criterion;we don't thinkof one sunsetor one tree as
an imitationof anothersunsetor anothertree. Two naturalobjectsthatlookjust
like one another are simplytwo examples of the same thing-two sunsets,two
trees.But James'snaturalobjectsthatlook artificialcannotbe understoodon the
model of two trees that look just like each other because theyare, in a certain
sense, the same. Rather,the distinctionbetweennatural and artificialitselfconstitutesan immaterialbut ineradicable and definingdifference.This difference
in originmakesitpossibleto imaginea sunsetthatnot onlylooks likebut imitates
another sunset,a sunset,in other words, that,lookingjust like another sunset,
isn'treallya sunsetat all, but a representationof one. Imaginingour fascination
with natural objects that look like artificialones, James is thus imaginingthe
momentin which we discover a resemblancethat cannot be an identityand so
discover the possibilityof representation.And it is, of course, thisdiscoveryin
nature of accidentalrepresentationthatfirstmakes available to us the possibility
of intentionalrepresentation.
Gold, at once a precious metal and, to Zerkow,a reflectingone, embodies
both the naturalvalue of the hard-moneymen and the accidentalappearance in
natureof value as representation.But if,fromZerkow'sstandpoint,the accident
of mirrorsin natureconstitutesthe possibilityof representationand so of money,
from the standpointof the hard-moneymen, it constitutedthe possibilityof
deception and so of counterfeit.Thus Nast'scartoonjuxtaposes the pictureof a
cow bearing the legend "This is cow by the act of the artist"withthe pictureof
a dollar billbearingthe legend "This is moneyby theact of Congress,"suggesting
thatpaper moneyshould be understoodas an illusionisticpaintingof real money,
The GoldStandardand theLogicof Naturalism
119
an attemptto fool people into mistakingthe "representativefor the real" (94).
And Wells'stextdescribeshow,in the wake of adopting paper money,the islanders extended the domain of exploitativemimesis:
Theyemployeda competent
artist,witha fullsupplyof paintsand brushes,and when
anydestitute
personappliedforclothing,
theypaintedupon his personeverythinghe
desiredin wayofclothing
of thefinest
and mostfashionable
patterns,
fromtop-boots
to
collars,and fromblueswallow-tailed
coatstoembroidered
neckties,
withjewelry
and fancy
buttonsto match.(93- 94)
Justas the counterfeitingCongress can make worthlesspaper look likevaluable
money,so the competentartistcan conjure up a costlysuit of clothes "without
the waste of any raw materialmore expensive than paint."Acceptingthe derivation of value fromraw material,the illusionisticgoal of both these representationsis to disguise themselvesand by looking "so exactlylike the real articles"
to "make the shadow of wealthsupply the place of its substance"(114).
There are, on thisview,two kindsof objects thata paintingcan be: by some
artistic"hocus pocus,"the object thatit representsor, in the demystifying
vision
of the goldbug, the paint and paper it is made of. Money theoristssought to
preventthe ontologicaltransformation
of paper into currencybut, as the vogue
fortrompe
l'oeilduringthisperiod indicates,Americanartistswereeager to exploit
the illusionisticpotentialdefinedby the moneytheorists'terms.The trompe
l'oeil
goal, of course, was to conceal itselfas representation;trompe
l'oeilpainterslike
William Harnett and John Haberle measured their success in the numerous
storiesof viewersmistaking,as Wells mighthave put it, the "representativefor
the real."Wherevertheywere exhibited,as AlfredFrankensteinhas noted, Harnett'spaintingswere protectedwith"guards and rails ... to keep people from
pulling offtheir'real' envelopes and newspaper clippings."25Trompel'oeilpaintings of paper moneywere especiallysuccessfulin thisregard. Frankensteinrecords, forexample, a storyin whichHaberle is supposed to have been persuaded
by "intimatesof Grover Cleveland, in the spiritof practicaljoking ... to paint a
five-dollarbill on a librarytable at the White House. When the Presidenthappened to pass, he, of course, triedto pick it up."26This particularjoke mayhave
derived some of its force from the fact that Cleveland was a notorious hardmoneyman and so alreadycommittedto seeingpaper moneyas a kindof illusion,
but Frankensteinis no doubt correct in attributingthe general popularityof
l'oeilsubject more to its physicalqualities than to its statusas
money as a trompe
a symbolof "the American love of filthylucre in the Gilded Age "27 The "representationof flator veryshallow objects is of the veryessence of trompe
l'oeil,"
according to Frankenstein,since the reductionof depth in the subject reduces
"the discrepancybetween the muscularexperience required for the perception
of nature and that which is required for the perception of painting" and so
120
REPRESENTATIONS
The choice of flatsubjectsis a device
heightensthe "pictorialillusionof reality."28
of
forreproducingin theperception representationsthephysiologyof perceiving
the objects theyrepresent.
But it would be a mistaketo thinkthat thistechnical,even physical,explanationof money'spopularitywithtrompe
l'oeilpaintersemptiesit of itseconomic
significance.Rather,it is just this insistenceon the physicalthat marksthe ecol'oeilsubjects:
nomiccharacterof trompe
l'oeilmoneyand of the otherusual trompe
envelopes,photographs,newspaperclippings,even paintings.Focusingon objects
so flatthattheyare physicallysimilarto the support on which theywillbe represented, the trompel'oeil painter repeats the goldbug demand for a material
equivalence between the representationand the objects represented,an equivalence that guarantees the representation'sauthorityby minimizingthe degree
to whichit is a representation.Flatness,not money,carries the weightof trompe
l'oeil'seconomic commitments.And nowhere is thismore evident,even if somel'oeiland to illusionismin
what paradoxicallyso, than in the hostilityto trompe
general thatwould become (was, indeed, already becoming) a centralpreoccupation of modernistpainting.
The historyof thispainting,as ClementGreenbergcharacterizeditin a series
of brilliantand influentialessays of the 1950s and 1960s, is a historyof the
gradual abandonment of "three-dimensionalillusion" (1954)29 in favorof "the
relativelydelimitedillusionof shallow depth" (1958)30 untilfinally(1962),
It has beenestablished
... thattheirreducible
essenceof pictorial
artconsists
in buttwo
or norms:flatness
constitutive
conventions
and thedelimitation
of flatness;
and thatthe
observanceof merelythesetwonormsis enoughto createan objectwhichcan be experiencedas a picture:thusa stretched
or tacked-upcanvasalreadyexistsas a picturethoughnotnecessarily
as a successful
one.3'
Flatnesshere signifiesmodernism'sbreak withillusion,itsinsistencethatbefore
we see what is "in" a picture,we see the picture"as a picture."GroverCleveland
reachingfor the painted five-dollarbill provides a limitcase, perhaps, of seeing
whatis in the picturefirstwhileGreenberg'sown example of thetacked-upcanvas
provides the limitcase of seeing the picture as a picture. In fact,Greenberg
explicitlyopposed the possibilityof such a pictureto the work of JasperJohns,
whichhe compared to Harnett'sand Peto'sin itsuse of flatnessonlyto produce
the "vividpossibilityof deep space."32
But iftrompe
l'oeilflatnessoperates primarilyto produce the illusionof threeitdoes so onlyby suggestinghow littlespace is required forspace
dimensionality,
to become deep. In Haberle's Reproduction
(Fig. 2), forexample, the edges of the
ten-dollarbill are folded towardthe beholder,establishingon a plane thatis flat
and contains a representationof flatnessat least three differentlevels of deep
space. The photo overlapping a newspaper clipping, which in turn overlaps
The Gold Standardand theLogicof Naturalism
121
3oUSE
as
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FIGURE
THS
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ACT
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LOT
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/
THIS
A
OF-
AR(.HUT~~~~
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ACT O
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M
RT.
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REPRESES22
J1EA
THI
H1c
MONEY
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IK
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122 REPRESENTATIONSY
A
\
another,makes four,and two layered stamps stickingout fromunder the tendollar bill raise the numberto five.The pointof thisvirtuosodisplayis precisely
to demonstratewhat everyone,of course, already knows,that even the flattest
objects are irreduciblythree-dimensional.Insistingon the impossibilityof an
l'oeilproduces a flatnessthat
image thatcan escape three-dimensionality,
trompe
can never be conceived as just a surface. Indeed, trompe
l'oeil paintingsof money
and photographsworkpreciselyby stagingthe triumphantfailureof even those
objectsthatare nearest to being nothingbut surface ever actuallyto be nothing
but surface.
Greenberg'sblank canvas, despite (or, rather,because of) its repudiation
of all illusion, participates directlyin the trompel'oeil production of threedimensionality.33
By virtueof its blankness,it has no surface,or rather-since
everythinghas a surfacejust as everythinghas depth-one mightsay thatit has
a surface thatit won'tallow to be a surface.What makes it so flatis thatthere is
nothingon it,but the factthatthereis nothingon it is what makes it at the same
time nothing more than a (very flat) three-dimensionalobject, like any other
object. Thus, while the blank canvas provides,in a certain sense, a ratherspecl'oeil ideal, it is an alternativewitha well-estabtacular alternativeto the trompe
lished place in the trompel'oeil economy,the place, quite literally,of the "raw
material" that Wells opposed to the representation.Replacing the illusion of
three-dimensionality
with the physical fact of three-dimensionality,
the blank
canvas identifiesvalue withmaterial,picturewithsupport.The paintingthatcan
representnothingand stillremaina paintingis "moneyitself,"and the modernist
(or, perhaps, literalist)aestheticof freedom from representationis a goldbug
aesthetic.
This by no means contradictoryprogression from painting as illusion by
wayof flatnessto paintingas object,whateverrelevanceitmayhave fortwentiethcenturyart history,
clearlyfindsan antecedentin whatNorrisdepictsin Vandover
and theBruteas Vandover'sregressionfromman to beast. Vandover,like Norris
himselfin his youth,is a painterwho beginsby sketchingout of books,but whose
''styleimprovedimmenselythe momenthe abandoned flatstudiesand began to
workdirectlyfromNature" (25).34 Convinced,aftera long period of neglecting
his "art,"thatit alone can "staythe inexorable law of nature"thatis turninghim
into"a blind,unreasoning. .. animal" (309), he setsto workon his "masterpiece,"
only to find that his "technicalskill" has mysteriously
vanished; the "formshe
made on the canvas were no adequate reflectionof those in his brain" (224). And
thisinability
to reproduceon canvasthe figureshe sees in his imaginationbecomes
almost immediatelyan inabilityto imagine the scene he wants to represent: a
"strangenumbness"grows"in his head": "All the objectsin the range of his eyes
seemed to move back and stand on the same plane" (226). The failureof Vandover'simaginationis a failureof perspective,and the brute appears as a flatness
The Gold Standardand theLogicof Naturalism
123
thatturnswhat should have been the depiction of a dyingsoldier and his (also
dying)horse into a "tracing"of "emptylines."
The factthat not even Norris regarded Vandover's failureto complete The
LastEnemyas a loss to art should not distractus fromthe interestof the process.
For even though Vandover at his best is no masterof illusion,the disappearance
of his art is exclusivelyidentifiedwith his loss of painting'schief illusionistic
device, perspective,and the appearance of the brute is, by the same token,identifiedwiththeflatteningtransformation
of livingfiguresintocharcoallines: "The
thatwould have
verythingthatwould have made themintelligible,interpretive,
made them art, was absent" (224-25). As a painter,then, the brute is a minimalist;where Vandoverexcels at paintingnature,thebrute replaces the painting
withnature itself.But this,as I have suggested,is ultimatelya distinctionwithout
a difference.Vandover the artistcan so easily devolve into Vandover the brute
preciselybecause both artistand brute are already committedto a naturalist
The
ontology-in money,to precious metals; in art, to three-dimensionality.
moralof Vandover'sregression,fromthisstandpoint,is thatitcan onlytakeplace
because, like the inventionof moneyon Robinson Crusoe's island, it has already
taken place. Discoveringthat man is a brute, Norris repeats the discoverythat
paper money isjust paper and thata paintingof paper money isjust paint.
In the course of reproducingWells'sand Nast's aestheticeconomy,however,
Norris also introducesa crucial variationon theirtrompe
l'oeilmaterialism.Vandover's mostcherished possessionsare the furnishingshe acquired for his fashionable roomson SutterStreet:a tiledstove,a windowseat,castsof threeAssyrian
bas-reliefs"representingscenes fromthe lifeof the king"and a "wounded lioness;' "photogravures"of Rembrandt'sNightWatchand a Velazquez portrait,an
"admirable reproductionof the 'Mona Lisa"' (178). Contemplatinghis reprol'oeilpicturesof money
ductions,he has replaced whatWellsthoughtof as trompe
l'oeilpicturesof other pictures.35But as the brute gains the upper
withtrompe
hand, Vandover is forcedto sacrificehis thingsand to move fromhis apartment
to a hotel room where the "walls were whitewashedand bare of pictures or
ornaments"(270). Only monthsbefore,the sightof"the heavycream-whitetwill"
of his "blank"and "untouched" "stretcher"(223) had inspiredhim to tryto save
himselfby paintingagain; now the emptywalls of his room produce a similar
response:"His imaginationwas forevercoveringthe whitewallswithrough stoneblue paper, and placing screens,divans, and window seats in differentparts of
the cold bare room" (280). But this time,when it comes to producing on those
walls an "adequate reflection"(224) of the formshe has imagined, he pins up
"littleplacards whichhe had painted witha twistedroll of the hotel letter-paper
dipped into the ink stand. 'Pipe-rackHere.' 'Mona Lisa Here.' 'Stove Here.' 'Window-seat Here"' (280). Instead of drawing the forms "in his brain,"he writes
them.
124
REPRESENTATIONS
This substitutionof writingfor illusion is also a substitutionof writingfor
paint or charcoal. Unlike Nast's posters,the painted words on Vandover'swalls
l'oeilnor raw material.They can't be trompe
l'oeilbecause they
are neithertrompe
don't,of course, look likewhattheyname, and theycan'tbe rawmaterialbecause
they do name somethingother than what they are. Writinghere becomes, in
other words,a model for representationwithoutillusionand for a flatnessthat
As opposed to both the trompe
l'oeil
isn'tsimplya shallow three-dimensionality.
reproductionof theMona Lisa and to the minimalistwall leftbare by thatreproduction'sabsence, "'Mona Lisa Here"' is all surface,the art not only of a brute
but of a brute that can write.Thus, if in one of his manifestationsthe brute
representsthe possibilityof reducing everythingto nature, here he represents
the impossibilityof reducing everythingto nature. Norris'stendencyto define
the change in Vandover'sart as a replacementof the "true"illusionistic"children
of his imagination"by unintelligible"emptylines" gives way to an image of the
childrenbecome "changelings,"transformedbut by no means unrecognizable:
"It was as ifthe brute in him,likesome maliciouswitch,had stolenawaythe true
offspringof his mind, puttingin their place these deformed dwarfs,its own
hideous spawn" (229). The problem is not that these children don't represent
you but thattheydo. Where the naturalistbrute reduces the illusionof the man
to the materialof the beast, the malicious witch,producingunnaturaloffspring,
of
gives birth neither to beasts nor to illusions. No longer the demystification
representation,the brute appears here as representationitself.
Of course, thereare at least two waysin whichthose painted words could be
reclaimed for trompe
l'oeil:instead of paintingas writing,theycould be thought
of as paintingofwriting,and so could be construedas an extensionof the physical
flatnessinvolved in paintingsof money and of other paintings;or theycould,
followingthe lead of Vandover's firstteacher,who, "besides drawing,""taught
ornamentalwriting"(13), be emptied of theirmeaning as words and so understood solelyas ornament. But there is one other example of the conjunctionof
writingand visual representationin Vandover
and theBrutethatmakesitclear that
thisis not whatNorrisintended.Reading throughthe morningpaper, Vandover
sees a report of the suit being brought against him by the fatherof Ida Wade
(who killedherselfafterdiscoveringshe was pregnant)and sees "hisname staring
back at him fromout the grayblur of type,like some reflectionof himselfseen
in a mirror"(233). Imagining printas a reflectingsurface,Norris gestureshere
toward a presentationof the self that would involveneitherthe illusion of the
artistnor any markof his physicalpresence. Vandoverfindshimselfrepresented
in the newspaper not by a self-portrait(which would look like him) or by a
signature(whichwould, as an extensionof him, in a certain sense, be him) but
by a set of mechanicallyproduced marksthat,havingno illusionisticlikenessto
himand no materialidentitywithhim,neverthelessmirrorhimvividlyto himself.
The Gold Standardand theLogicof Naturalism
125
Paintingmust be transformedinto scriptand scriptinto type to produce this
image of the brute.
One thingthese transformations
suggestis thatthe brute,like Frank Norris,
has ceased to be a painterand has become insteada writer.But theysuggestalso
a last set of variationson the question and answerswithwhichthisessay began.
Why does the miser save? He saves to escape the money economy; he saves to
reenact for himselfthe originof thateconomy.How can metal become money?
How can paint become a picture?One set of answersto these questions repeats
the escape frommoney:metalsneverdo become money;theyalwayswere; hence
theyneverare; a pictureisjust paper and paint pretendingto be somethingelse.
The logic of these answers is the logic of goldbugs and Bryanites,trompel'oeil,
and a certain strainof modernism. The attractionof writingis that it escapes
thislogic. Neithera formalentityin itselfnor an illusionisticimage of something
else, it marks the potentialdiscrepancybetween materialand identity,the discrepancythatmakes money,painting,and, ultimately,
persons possible.But how
are persons possible? Or, to put the question in its most general form,how is
representationpossible?
Norris's favoriteteacher at Berkeley,the geologistJoseph Le Conte, had
raised thisquestion in these termsin the second edition of his Evolution (1892):
how were "physicalphenomena" like the "vibrationsof brain molecules" related
to "psychicalphenomena" like "thoughts"?
The one is thebrain,
Thereare,as itwere,twosheetsof blotting
paperpastedtogether.
on theone,soak
or blotches,
theotherthemind.Certainink-scratches
utterly
meaningless
buthowweknownotand cannever
through
and appearon theotheras intelligible
writing,
hope to guess.36
Le Conte's is the tone of those who, as WilliamJames mockinglyput it, "find
relief . . . in celebratingthe mysteryof the Unknowable" (1:178), but James
himselfhad no more convincingaccount of the relationbetweenmind and brain,
and he ends his own discussion of the subject by imaginingimpatientreaders
muttering,"Whyon earth doesn't the poor man say thesoul and have done with
withjust saying"the soul" and havingdone withit is,
it?" (1:180). The difficulty
of course, the confusionthiswould cause for a psychologythatwas seeking "to
Thus
avoid unsafe hypotheses,"to "remain positivisticand non-metaphysical."
Jamesresolves,at leastuntil"some day"when thingshavebeen "more thoroughly
thoughtout,""in thisbook" to "takeno account of the soul" (1: 182). But, simply
in acknowledgingthe distinctionbetween brain and mind,James has already
admitted the existence of somethingvery like the soul and, in fact,we have
already begun to see in his discussion of our "primitive"love of objects that
'mimic other objects" how littlehe was able to honor the resolutionto remain
The point of thatdiscussionwas to explain the "acquisitive"non-metaphysical."
126
REPRESENTATIONS
ness" of such people as misersand, in keeping withhis positivistcommitment,
Jamesemphasized the "entirelyprimitive"statusof the miser'sdesire,describing
itas a "blindinstinct,"
a "blindpropensity,"
and comparingthe wayhuman beings
collect"curiousthings"to theway"magpiessnatchrags" (2: 679). Magpies snatch
rags, however,because theythinktheylook nice or because theycan use them
forsomething,whereas beachcomberssave "curious things"not fortheirbeauty
or utilitybut for theirmimickinglikenessto other things.Hence the conclusion
we drew fromJames was that the miser loves gold neither for its beauty as a
metal (cf. Wells) nor for its buying power as money (cf. Spencer) but for its
resemblanceas a natural object (metal) to an artificialone (money). Misers love
gold because theylove representation,and when we, like misers,bring curious
withour own instinctivebehavior
thingshome fromthe beach, we are testifying
to the primitivepossibilityof representationand the equally primitivepossibility
of a moneyeconomy.
The presence of the magpie in thisexample marksJames'sambitionto keep
the instinctsas "non-metaphysical"as he can, but just as no magpie can love
somethingthat is neitherbeautifulnor useful, so, by James'sown account, no
human being, loving representation,can ever remain as non-metaphysicalas a
and materialstandpoint
magpie. In nature-which is to say,fromthe positivistic
of the brain-objects maylook likeone anotherbut neverrepresentone another.
Only the unnatural makes representationpossible, and it makes it possible by
imaginingthe naturalas artificial.In a certainsense, of course, thisproves to be
a mistake;the objectswe findon the beach aren'treallymimickingotherobjects.
But in imaginingthat theyare, we imagine for the firsttime the possibilitynot
just of otherbrainsbut of otherminds. Indeed, we imagine forthe firsttimethe
possibilityof our own minds. The mistakenlove of representationthat makes
representationpossible must firstappear as a mistakeabout itself,as when we
take the magpie's love of beautyfor the human love of mimesis.In thisrespect,
the love of naturalthingsthatresembleartificialones is itselfan instanceof that
resemblance,epitomizingthe immaterialdistinctionbetweenwhat we are made
of and whatwe are. Thus our primitivelove of naturalthingsthatlook artificial
turnsout to be nature'swayof revealingto our brainsthe existenceof our minds.
And when the brute in Vandover paints "writingon the wall" (220), it horrifies
him by reflectingnot his body but his beastlysoul. Or, to put it another way,
seeing himselfreflectedin writing,he sees in the failureof his own materiality
the inevitability
of paper money.
The interchangeability
of these terms-soul and money-is itselfmirrored
on the goldbug side by a somewhatmore elaborate set of transformational
possibilities.The love of precious metals is just the fear that men will regressinto
beasts,which is, in turn,the fear that money will disappear, which,transposed
and inverted,is the love of trompe
l'oeil painting.It would be possible,in myview,
The GoldStandardand theLogicof Naturalism
127
to extend these transformations-inthe case of painting(as I have already suggested),forwardintominimalism;more typically,
as in the case of anarchistlabor
agitation,laterally:"the human law-maker,"
wroteAlbert R. Parsons in 1886, is
(likethe human moneymaker)"a human humbug"because "laws" (likegold and
silver)"are discovered,notmade.?37Parsons,convictedfor murder in the Haymarkettrial,is even fartherfromGrover Cleveland thanJohn Haberle is from
minimalism,but theyare all equally committedto hard money-which is not to
say that theywere all aware of thiscommitmentor even thattheywould necessarilyhave recognized or acknowledged it if it had been pointed out to them.
Such speculations are somewhatbeside the point. What I mean to say is that,
having taken up a position (on the similarityof men to animals, say) or having
adopted a practice (for example, illusionistpainting),they had involved themselves in a logic that,regardless of theirown views,entailed a whole series of
other commitments,and that it is this logic and these commitmentsthat locate
them in the discourse of naturalism.
There are at least two such logics runningthroughthisdiscourse,or rather,
two such logics that constituteit. One could, perhaps, best describe naturalism
as the working-outof a set of conflictsbetween prettythingsand curious ones,
materialand representation,hard moneyand soft,beastand soul. But thisdoesn't
mean that the naturalistwriteris someone who has chosen the beastlyside of
these dichotomies (the side literaryhistoryordinarilyassociates with naturalism)38or even that he is someone who has chosen withany consistencyeither
side. The consistency,
indeed the identity,
of naturalismresidesin the logics and
in theirantitheticalrelationto one another,not necessarilyin any individual,any
text,or even any single sentence. Le Conte, for example, describesthe relation
of animals to men in termsthat repeat the goldbug descriptionof the relation
betweenpaper and preciousmetals:"The resemblanceis great,but thedifference
is immense.... It is the shadow and substance,promiseand fulfillment";
but he
goes on to finishthe comparison."Stillbetter,it is like embryoand child.?39The
weirdnessof this set of similes is that while it begins by imagininganimals as
l'oeilrepresentationsof men (understandingthewordsutteredbya trained
trompe
magpie, to use a Jamesianexample, as trompe
l'oeilrepresentationsof language),
it ends by imaginingthe reflectingshadow turned into an anticipatingembryo
(as if the talkingmagpie were not imitatinghuman speech but originatingit). In
thefirstinstance,animalsare deceptiverepresentationsof humans; in thesecond,
theyhave already become humans preciselybecause of theircapacityto reprein Vandover
sent.And thisoppositionis repeated more penetratingly
and theBrute.
Vandover,prowlingabout his room on all fours,utters"a sound, halfword,half
cry,'Wolf-wolf!"' (310). In the mouth,or ratherthe "throat"of the brute,the
name of a thingis revealed to be reallythe sound the thingmakes. Norrispresses
home the denial of representationby wayof onomatopoeia; words are reduced
128
REPRESENTATIONS
to the sounds theyare made of and, instead of the magpie imitatinglanguage,
language imitatesthe magpie. But, at the same time,Vandover'sgamblingcompanion, a deaf-muteknownas "the Dummy,"is made so drunk that,as Vandover
does his "dog act,"theDummybeginsto "talk;'"pouringout a stream"of "birdlike
twitterings"
among which one could "now and then ... catch a word or two"
(298). Never havingspoken anywords,nevereven havingheard any,the Dummy
(like the magpie) neverthelessproduces sounds thatinexplicablyturn out to be
language.
and theBrutedoes not resolvethesecontradictionsand, more imporVandover
tantly,it does not thematizethemeither-it isn'taboutthe conflictbetweenmaterial and representation,itis an example of thatconflict.And itdoesn'texemplify
highlevelof sophistication)
theconflictbecause literarylanguage (at a sufficiently
characteristically
enacts some such conflict.To thinkthis is only to imagine a
thematicsin which authors have been replaced by language, the characteristic
gesturenot of literaturebut of a certainliteraryformalismso eager to preserve
theontologicalprivilegeof the textthatitbecomes in itsmostdesperate moments
indistinguishablefromgoldbug materialism.But mypoint here is not to criticize
that literarymaterialismper se any more than it is to attack the notion that
democracy needs a dollar "as good as gold." I want only to locate both these
positionsand theirnegationsin the logic,or ratherthe double logic,of naturalism,and in so doing, to suggestone wayof shiftingthe focus of literaryhistory
fromthe individualtextor author to structureswhose coherence, interest,and
effectmaybe greaterthan thatof eitherauthor or text.
Notes
1. Frank Norris,McTeague,ed. Donald Pizer (New York, 1977), 72. Subsequent references are cited in parenthesesin the text.
2. WilliamJames, The PrinciplesofPsychology
(1890; reprint:New York, 1950), 2: 424.
Subsequent referencesare cited in parenthesesin the text.
3. Ottomar Haupt, "Is Gold Scarce?" in The Gold Standard:A Selection
fromthePapers
IssuedbytheGoldStandardDefenceAssociation
in 1895-1898 (London, 1898), 56.
4. Ibid.
5. George Simmel, The Philosophy
of Money,trans. Tom Bottomore and David Frisby
(Boston, 1978), 245.
6. Ibid., 155.
7. Ibid., 248.
8. FrankNorris,Vandover
and theBrute,intro.byWarrenFrench(1914; reprint:Lincoln,
1978), 290. Subsequent referencesare cited in parentheses in the text. Although
Vandoverwasn'tpublished until afterNorris'sdeath,James D. Hart argues convincinglythatitwas "prettywellfinished"in 1895, the yearthatalso saw mostof McTeague
The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism
129
completed (Frank Norris,A Novelistin theMaking,ed. withan intro.byJamesD. Hart
[Cambridge,Mass., 1970], 27).
9. Simmel,ThePhilosophy
ofMoney,248.
10. Ibid.
11. Ignatius Donnelly,TheAmerican
PeoplesMoney(1895; reprint:Westport,1976), 34.
12. Ibid., 45
13. David A. Wellswas a civilservant(chairmanof the Special Revenue Commissionfrom
1865 to 1870) and journalistwho wrotewidelyon the moneyquestion. Readers interested in the oedipal questionin Americanhistorymaywishto consultWells,TheSilver
Question:TheDollar oftheFathersVersustheDollar oftheSons (New York,1877). My own
referencehere is to RobinsonCrusoe6Money,withillustrationsby Thomas Nast (1896;
reprint:New York, 1969), 5. Subsequent referencesare cited in parenthesesin the
text.
14. Thomas L. Nugent,in a speech deliveredto thestatemeetingof the Farmers'Alliance
at Campasas, Texas, in August 1895, reprintedin part in ThePopulistMind,ed. Norman Pollack (New York, 1967), 326. Nugent argues that there must be no silver
"compromise"betweenthe populistsand the gold men: "Populistsfavorthe freeand
unlimitedcoinage of gold and silverat the presentrate, and the emissionof inconvertiblepaper to supply any lack of circulation.... We cannot compromiseon the
perilous plan proposed by silverdemocrats."
15. William H. Harvey,CoinsFinancialSchool,ed. withan intro.by Richard Hofstadter
(1895; reprint:Cambridge, Mass., 1963), 164. Coin is actuallyquoting Webster:"It
has been said that silverand gold have no intrinsicvalue; thisis not true. They are
the onlythingsused byWebsterin the copy of his dictionarywhichI have to illustrate
the meaning of the word 'intrinsic"'
16. Ibid., 34.
17. Ibid.
18. David JayneHill, "An Honest Dollar the Basis of Prosperity"(Chicago, 1900), 3.
19. General Theo. Wagner,in a speech delivered before a meetingof the Bryan Silver
Club of Berkeley(Berkeley,1896), 6.
is also reproducedin MarcShell,Money,
20. This illustration
Language,andThought
(Berkeley,
1982), in the contextof an interestingand informativediscussionof Poe's "The Gold
Bug."
21. Vernon Louis Parrington,The Beginningsof CriticalRealismin America:1860-1920
(1930; reprint:New York, 1958), 331.
22. Henry V. Poor,Moneyand Its Laws (1877; reprint:New York, 1969), 1.
23. Ibid., 2.
24. Herbert Spencer, "Review of Bain," quoted in WilliamJames, The PrinciplesofPsychology
(New York, 1950), 679-80.
25. AlfredFrankenstein,AftertheHunt (Berkeley,1969), 81.
26. Ibid., 120. There are numerous storiesof this kind, most involvingbeholders who
failto realize thatthe moneyis fake,thatitisjust a painting,but some involvingcritics
who set out to expose the paintingas fake by showing that it is just money.An art
criticforthe Chicago Inter-Ocean,
forexample, described Haberle's "alleged stilllife,"
U.S.A., "supposed by some to be a paintingof money,"as a "fraud": "A $1 bill and
the fragmentsof a $10 note have been pasted on canvas, covered by a thinscumble
of paint,and furthermanipulated to give it a paintyappearance" (quoted in Afterthe
Hunt, 117). The career of Emanuel Ninger (alias Jimthe Penman), the most famous
130
REPRESENTATIONS
American counterfeiterof the late nineteenthcentury,is exemplary in both these
regards,since afterhis arrestthe hand-drawn$100 billsthathe had been passing as
money were worth more as works of art, thus raising the possibilitythat real $100
bills mightbe put into circulationas forgeriesof the forged $100 bills that Ninger
had been circulating.For an entertainingaccountof Ningerand othercounterfeiters,
see MurrayTeigh Bloom, MoneyofTheirOwn (New York, 1957).
27. Frankenstein,AftertheHunt,43.
28. Ibid., 54.
29. Clement Greenberg,Artand Culture(Boston, 1961), 137.
30. Ibid., 211.
31. Clement Greenberg,"AfterAbstractExpressionism,"ArtInternational
6, no. 8 (October 1962), 30. My attentionwas firstdrawn to thisexample by a footnotein Michael
Fried's seminal essay "Art and Objecthood" (in MinimalArt,ed. with an intro. by
GregoryBattcock [New York, 1968], 116-47). My use of the term "surface"in the
followingparagraphs,mysense in particularof "surface"as a plausiblealternativeto
"flatness,"derives largelyfroma certain tension in Fried's wonderfuldescriptionof
Jules Olitski'ssculptureBunga: "The use of tubes,each of whichone sees, incredibly,
asflat-that is, flatbut rolled-makes Bunga' surfacemore likethatof a paintingthan
like thatof an object; like painting,and unlikeboth ordinaryobjectsand other sculpture,Bunga is all surface"("Artand Objecthood," 139). My own experience of recent
paintings by Olitski and of the photographs of James Welling convinces me that
surface remainscrucial,and I note thatFried has recentlyremarkedthatwhile "the
concept 'flatness'. . . has lost much of its urgency,"the "pressure"to "come to terms
withissues of surface. .. is more intense than before" ("How Modernism Works,"in
ThePoliticsofInterpretation,
ed. withan intro.byW.J. T. Mitchell[Chicago, 1983], 232
n. 16).
32. Greenberg,"AfterAbstractExpressionism,"26.
33. In discussingGreenberghere, I should make it clear thatI am concerned only with
the consequences of thisparticularexample. My quarrel, in other words,is not with
his attack on minimalism'scommitmentto "the third dimension" ("Recentness of
Sculpture,"in MinimalArt[see n. 31], 182), but onlywithhis failureto recognize the
congruence betweenthe values of minimalismand the values of flatnessas embodied
in the unpainted canvas.
34. For a good discussion of Vandoverin the contextof early 'ninetiesaestheticism,see
Don Graham, TheFictionofFrankNorris(Columbia, 1978), 16 - 42. Graham'ssense of
the "subversionof art by economic power" (29) in Vandover,
however,is about on a
par withthe "filthylucre" interpretationof trompe
l'oeilmoney paintings.
35. Discussing Haberle's Tornin Transit(the pictureof a paintingwrapped for shipping
from which most of the wrapping has been torn to reveal the painted landscape
underneath), Frankensteinnotes suggestivelythat the remainingpaper, string,and
shipping labels are all "illusionistic"but "occupy a minimumof space": "When one
arrives at the point at which the nonillusionisticelements in a work of trompe
l'oeil
occupy nearlyall the space, one can go no further;thisis the end of the line" (After
theHunt, 121). But, followingthe trompe
l'oeillogic that I have been tracinghere, we
can see that the end of the line doesn't quite consist in reducing the trompel'oeil
elementsto the minimumbut insteadin eliminatingthemaltogether-painting nothing but paintingor (as withthe blank canvas) paintingnothingat all.
36. Joseph Le Conte,Evolution(New York, 1892), 310. The best general discussionof Le
The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism
131
Conte's influenceon Norris is by Donald Pizer,TheNovelsofFrankNorris(Bloomington, Ind., 1966), 12-22.
37. Albert Parsons, "Autobiography,"
in TheAutobiographies
oftheHaymarket
Martyrs,
ed.
withan intro. by Philip Foner (New York, 1969), 44. Parsons goes on to imagine a
societyin which"naturalleaders" replace governmentand "self-preservation
becomes
the actuatingmotiveas now,minus the . .. dominationof man by man" (45).
38. In his chapteron Norris in TheAmerican
Noveland Its Tradition
(New York,1957), for
example, Richard Chase describesMcTeague as an "animal likeman" and the "naturalisticnovel" as one in which "the beast shows throughthe human exterior"(188),
whiledescribingNorrishimselfas a sortof literaryMcTeague, who succeeds because
"he is able to writeinstinctively
out of his natural genius" (191). And Donald Pizer,
determinedto rescue naturalismfromChase's wittydeterminismand to secure forit
"an affirmativeethical conception of life,"neverthelessfollowsChase in asserting
Norris's primarycommitmentto "the strengthof man's animality"(Donald Pizer,
inNineteenth-Century
American
Literature
RealismandNaturalism
[Carbondale, Ill., 1966],
14, 19). My own point is not so much to quarrel withthese characterizationsas to
suggestan understandingof naturalismin whichtheirnegationswould also have a
place.
39. Le Conte, Evolution,324. In addition to Wells,see, for example, Edward Atkinson,
who (against the term"fiatmoney")urges thatmoneybe defined"in such a waythat
the substance cannot thereforebe confounded withthe shadow-the thingfor the
promise of the thing carryingno obligation for the performanceof the promise"
(Edward Atkinson,The Distribution
of Products[New York, 1885], 5-6). I owe this
referenceto Howard Horwitz. For directingmyattentionto severalother documentarytexts,I would also like to thankGillian Brown, and for more general discussion
of the questionsexplored here, I wantto thankFrances Fergusonand Steven Knapp.
132
REPRESENTATIONS