RSSby Simon Critchley and Tom McCarthy
Of Chrematology orig delivered at International James Joyce Symposium, Trieste, 2002 and pub Hypermedia Joyce Studies Volume 4, 2003
[1]Finnegans Wake is awash with money. There are English pounds, ‘shelenks [2] and pence, American bison nickels, French louis, Russian kopecks, German grosch and ‘dogmarks’ [3]. ‘Woodpiles of haypennies’ [4], the ‘sylvan coyne’ [5] designed for Ireland by William Wood, circulate alongside ‘ghinees’ [6] , ‘tenpound crickler’s [7] and ‘tinpanned crackler’s [8]. Money crinkles, clunks and rings throughout this novel in which nothing’s free, this novel in which roads have tolls, museums entry fees. If Finnegans Wake’s very content is, as its first page reminds us, ‘retaled’, [9] then the space of recirculation in which this retaling occurs is, as Professor Jones suggests in Book One, Chapter Six, an ‘economantarchy’.
Our aim in this paper is simply to read Finnegans Wake by following the chains of coinage that litter the text: of credit, credibility, credence, debt, indebtedness, reneging on debt, bankruptcy, profit, loss, inflation, deflation and counterfeit. We will try and establish what we call a chrematology in this economantarchy, that is, pick out the monetary logic in Joyce’s text. Our hypothesis is that in Joyce and elsewhere (where Joyce might be seen as the index for an elsewhere of absolutely modern literary, visual and musical art), economics is raised to the level of cultural form. [11] For us, artworks are aspects of an agon as to the irreducible determination of contemporary life by economics, engaging us in a process of reflection that might, at best, achieve some distance from the fact of that determination.
But what is money? Many things might serve as an empirical definition, but what is the logic of the concept of money?
The core of money is trust and promise, ‘I promise to pay the bearer on demand the sum of…’ on the British Pound, the ‘In God we trust’ of the US Dollar, the BCE-ECB-EZB-EKT-EKP of the European Central Bank that runs like a Franco-Anglo-Germano-Greco-Finno-Joycean cipher across the top of every Euro note. In other words, the legitimacy of money is based on a sovereign act, or a sovereign guarantee that the money is good, that it is not counterfeit. Money has a promissory structure, with an entirely self-referential logic: the money promises that the money is good; the acceptance of the promise is the acceptance of a specific monetary ethos, a specific, yet often flexible monetary geography.
This ethos, this circular ‘money promising that the money is good’ is underwritten by sovereign power as its transcendent guarantee. It is essential that we believe in this power, that the sovereign power of the bank inspires belief, that the ‘Fed’ has ‘cred’ as it were. The transcendent core of money is an act of faith, of belief and the legitimacy of money is based on the fiction of sovereign power.
In a deep sense, money is not. It exists empirically, but it is not essentially there at all. All money is what the French call escroquerie, swindling, it is a virtual or at best conceptual object. It is, in the strictest Platonic definitional sense (forget Baudrillard), a simulacrum, namely something that materializes an absence, an image for something that doesn’t exist. Money is delusionary and faith in money is a form of collective psychosis. In the godless wasteland of global capitalism, money is our only metaphysics, our only onto-theo-logy, the only transcendent substance in which we truly must have faith. It is this faith that we celebrate, we venerate, in commodity fetishism.
For us, here and now, money has no outside, there is no pure form of economy, no barter system, somehow unsullied by money’s circulation. You are always already locked into a monetary ethos, part of a contour line upon a financial cartography. There is only the sully of money. All money is dirty. From a Freudian perspective, money is deeply anal, it is shit rather than bread, you can use it to buy shit, and a general obsession with money is why people talk so much shit.
Of course, money is also indexed to desire, and there is a strong association between money and the dépense of jouissance sexuelle, and not only when you have to pay for it. Money is power, sex is power, power is sexy and so is money.
Jouissance brings us back by a commodious vicus of recirculation to Joyce. Lacan, who was unnaturally obsessed by Finnegans Wake throughout the 1970’s, writes,
‘Joyce is in relation to joy, that is, jouissance, written in lalangue that is English; this en-joycing, this jouissance is the only thing one can get from the text. This is the symptom’.
For Lacan, it is the joy in Joyce that enjoys, just as it is the Freude in Freud that freut sich. This is what one feels in reading Joyce,
‘‘Read Finnegans Wake without trying to understand…One usually reads it because one can feel the presence of the writer’s jouissance’.
In a wonderful formulation, Lacan remarks that Joyce was ‘désabonné à l’inconscient’, namely that he abandoned or gave up his subscription to the symbolic order. In ugly Lacanese, this means that Joyce affirmed the lack in the big Other and experienced the jouissance of the Real. In more everyday parlance, we might say that Joyce progressively shed the legitimating narrative conventions and expectations of the 19th Century realist novel. For some, literature might be understood as the draining of the excitation of jouissance, the zuider zee of the unconscious in Freud, or the Dionysian womb of being in Nietzsche. Literatures symbolizes or gives beautiful Apollinian form to the chaos of desire. As such, Finnegans Wake is literature in reverse, a writing of the symptom that attempts to attend to the clamour of jouissance that subtends literary creation and which cannot be dammed up. This reversal is mirrored linguistically in Lacan’s punning distinction between language (la langue) and lalangue. If the symbolic is the order of language, which is given priority in Lacan’s earlier structuralist-inspired work, then lalangue is his nickname for an experience of language that is itself a form of jouissance and sheer material affect that precedes and resists symbolization, ‘What I put forward, by writing lalangue as one word, is that by which I distance myself from structuralism’. We want to read the planned Babel of Finnegans Wake as a monetary lalangue, a chain of crazy coinage that both subtends and ruins the symbolic universe of literature, reducing letter to litter. [12]Only one town, perhaps, could rival Trieste in its claim as ideal host for this discussion: Dublin – not Dublin, Ireland, but rather Dublin, Georgia, USA. This city, founded on the River Oconee in Laurens County by Irish emigrant Peter Sawyer, finds its way into the Wake’s first complete sentence, whose second clause reads:
nor had topsawyer’s rocks by the stream Oconee exaggerated themselse to Laurens County’s gorgios while they went doublin their mumper all the time [13]
Finnegans Wake is an accumulative novel, a novel in which characters, events, reports and interpretations multiply incessantly, doublin their mumper all the time. Mutt, discussing the relation between printed ‘papyr’ [14] and the significations generated by it, tells Jute:
you need hardly spell me how every word is bound to carry over threescore and ten toptypsical readings throughout the book of Doublends Jined [15]
Meaning itself, it seems, is an accumulation: profit, a return on a text’s investment to the tune of seven thousand percent, of threescore and ten – also, coincidentally, the average return (in years) on the investment of biological existence.
What we have here, then, is a glowing annual report, a multi-levelled tale of profit. But lurking between the lines of this report is another, contradictory one, a tale of loss. To return to our opening twenty-three words, the Latin exaggerare may mean to pile up, but the English exaggerate suggests that the wealth is overstated, perhaps even non-existent. Hiding inside the ‘mumper’ of fertile rocks is mumps, an illness which makes men infertile. The book’s next sentence shows us not aggrandisement but collapse, the fall of ‘a once wallstraight oldparr’ [16] – a reference to Wall Street crashes. The great crash of 1929 was lurking round the corner when Joyce wrote the passage. Values, now as then, have plummeted, ‘one sovereign punned to petery pence’ [17]. The opulent, accumulating landscape of Laurens County gives way to a retreating one whose length ‘lies under liquidation’[18], whose typical inhabitant, ‘living in our midst of debt’[19], will
‘loan a vesta and hire some peat and sarch the shores her cockles to heat and she’ll do all a turfwoman can to piff the business on.’ [20]
The line separating gorgeous bourgeois splendour from frugal poverty, as Joyce knew all to well, is thin.
Finnegans Wake, then, is a tale of two economies, two co-existing ones: one characterised by surplus, profit, wealth, and another characterised by bankruptcy and debt. This is true semantically as well: alongside a great glut of meanings runs a continual failure to establish any:
The unfacts, did we possess them, are too imprecisely few to warrant our incertitude, the evidencegivers by legpoll too untrustworthily irreperible… our notional gullery is now completely complacent, an exegious monument, aerily perennious. [21]
In the Wake’s negational language, ‘Sense’ becomes ‘sinse’ [22] - without (sin) sense, senza: ‘Enquiring’ becomes ‘unquiring’ [23]; Fiat (it was thus) becomes ‘fuit’ [24] (it eluded us, escaped) and, eventually, ‘pfooi’ [25] i.e. ‘rubbish!’ ‘In this scherzarade of one’s thousand one nightinesses,’ we are told, ‘that sword of certainty which would indentifide the body never falls’ [26]. The book fails to return its readers’ investment with fixed dividends of meaning, instead ‘borrowing a word and begging the question and stealing tinder and slipping like soap’ [27], sliding further and further into the red of indeterminacy.
Finnegans Wake is a tale of two economies in more ways than one. Not only do the economy of surplus and that of loss tussle with one another for supremacy: so, too, do two differing versions of economy itself. We will call these versions ‘economics’ and ‘chrematistics’ respectively. The distinction is borrowed from Aristotle, where, crudely stated, it is the difference between the good natural economy of the oikos and the bad, artificial economy that arises when money (to khrema) appears on the scene. Derrida, in a fascinating passage from Donner le temps – la fausse monnaie, summarises Aristotle’s distinction between economics and chrematistics thus:
For Aristotle, it is a matter of an ideal and desirable limit, a limit between the limit and the unlimited, between the true and finite good (the economic) and the illusory and indefinite good (the chrematistic). [28]
Economics comes from oikos – home, hearth, seat of the family, the household, indeed of all those things that Derrida lists under ‘the proper’, the sovereign – and ‘chrematistic’ from to khrema, money, the unlimited exchangeability of goods that occurs when money appears on the scene. The distinction between economy and chrematistics is reflected not only in that between the limited and the unlimited but also in that between, continuing the above quote, ‘the supposed finiteness of need and the presumed infinity of desire’. Once money, to khrema, has appeared on the scene, the infinity of desire will always transcend the finitude of need. Money is the desire of desire itself, apriori unsatisfied by any object one might actually need – behold, the logic of shopping! The fact that Derrida’s language recalls that of Levinas (need/desire, finitude/infinity) is perhaps not accidental, for in opposition to an anti-monetary tradition in philosophy that begins with Aristotle and culminates with Marx (recall that a communist society would be a society without the spectrality of money), Levinas is one of the rare thinkers who reserves a privileged place for money in his work.
Connecting his line of thought with Derrida, he continues the passage with a gesture that will be familiar to readers of his work: ‘As soon as there is the monetary sign - and first of all the sign – that is, différance and credit, the oikos is opened and cannot operate its limit’. Money, in effect, is deconstruction, opening the closure of the oikos, what Levinas calls totality, to the unrestricted ‘economy’ of desire where money circulates and where wealth is accumulated or squandered.
Turning back to Joyce, this movement from the oikos to khrema, breaching the possibility of Home Rule in all senses of the word, occurs constantly in Finnegans Wake. HCE, the patriarch, ‘Highup Big Cockywocky Sublimissime Autocrat’ [29], finds himself repeatedly turned inside out, ‘allaroundside upinandoutdown’ [30]. His private life is made public, subject to speculation. He is tried, fined, bankrupted. He has to pawn his furniture, the landscape of his oikos. It gets auctioned off – that is, assigned value according to how much and how many other people desire it, becomes currency. He becomes currency himself: people, first blackmailing him and then selling his story, make money from him (from him, they make money). He is coined, stamped, circulated, sent abroad and then called back again. As a fallen, broken Ur-god (Humpty Dumpty, or ‘Hump Cumps Ebblybally’ [31]) he becomes a tip, a scrapheap full of items of ‘pecuniar interest’ through which other people sift. His fall, a fall into both sin and debt (the German Schuld, combining both these terms, crops up in several guises), makes him ‘oblious autamnesically of his very proprium’ [32]: it is a fall from the limited propriety of economics into the an-economic openness of chrematistics. Finnegans Wake is a retale that is retailed – again and a gain – a story of ‘One sovereign punned to petery pence’: the sovereign economy of meaning punned chrematistically into grubby public circulation.
This rupture of the limits of economics, which are the limits of the family, hearth and home rule, makes possible, writes Derrida, ‘the chance for any kind of hospitality… the chance for the gift itself. The chance for the event.’ Derrida is suggesting here that money is the possibility of a form of an-economic giving, for a donation without return, for an event. As a long and intriguing footnote to Donner le temps makes clear, the word ‘event’ is to be understood in its Heideggerian sense as das Ereignis. Derrida associates money, to khrema, with der Brauch or usage, to khreon, which, according to Heidegger, names Being as the presencing of the present in early Greek thinking. Thus, the possibility of money, that is to say, the possibility of ‘différance and credit’, breaking the restricted economy of finite need, is also the possibility of the gift, of another ethicality of the gift, hospitality. What Joyce calls ‘creed crux ethics’ [34] might be replaced with a new ‘ethical fict’ [35] – and here a further series of connections with Levinas’s work might be imagined.
Finnegans Wake, like many of Shakespeare’s plays – or, for that matter, Hergé’s Tintin books – abounds in instances of host-guest encounters, often fraught. As Hosty, publican perhaps of foreign origin, HCE plays host to people who, turning on him, become an alien host; Mutt, playing host to Jute’s Danish invader, ‘trumple[s] from rath’ [36]. It also abounds in instances in which a gift is sought, a line of credit opened. One of the primal events of Finnegans Wake is the encounter in the park between HCE and the cad. The episode is replayed at least twice (in Book One, Chapters Two and Four). It is based on a report Joyce found in a regional Irish newspaper, The Connaught Enquirer, which told of how a drunk accosted another man demanding money, and a scuffle followed, after which the other man agreed to lend him some. This small news item caught Joyce’s eye as it echoed a story his own father had told him about being accosted by a tramp (who John Stanislaus described as a ‘cad’) in Phoenix Park one evening. Joyce told Frank Budgen that these twin events – or, rather, twin second-hand accounts, formed the basis of the novel [37]. In Joyce’s versions of the incident (or incidents, the one which ‘prerepeated itself’ [38]), HCE plays the lender. In the second, the accoster:
…to know wanted…if his change companion…happened to have the loots change of a tenpound crickler about him at the moment, addling that hap so, he would pay him back the six vics odd [39]
HCE replies:
Woowoo would you be grossly surprised, Hill, to learn that, as it so happens, I honestly have not such a thing as the loo, as the least chance of a tinpanned crackler anywhere about me at the present mohomoment …to buy J. J. and S. with. [40]
What’s at stake in this encounter? HCE’s reputation, certainly, as well as his money, his watch and his life. The cad’s next drink is in the balance too: J.J. and S. denotes Jameson’s whiskey. But it also denotes James Joyce and Son. There’s a sense that Joyce is writing his own history, opening a line of credit, the continuum in which his mumper can be doubled. The cad’s words ‘I have met with you, bird, too late, or if not, too worm and early’ [41] echo those Joyce claims to have said to Yeats on their encounter (‘I have met with you too late to help you’ [42], folding literary history itself, its struggles of succession and anxieties of influence, in which pretenders to the literary crown are recipients of ‘loans’ unwillingly made by - and unlikely to be returned to – their predecessors, into the mix.
The cad asks for ten pounds, and is offered four and sevenpence: the encounter involves not just indebtedness and impropriety (Schuld) but also bartering, like the bartering Heidegger describes when discussing the Anaximander Fragment. Beings come, then go back whence they came, thus rendering justice and paying penalty to one another for their injustice, according to the ordinance of time, the fragment tells us. ‘Thus,’ Heidegger writes, ‘they exhibit a kind of barter system in Nature’s immutable economy’ [43]. What the Fragment, an incomplete account from deep, deep in the past – just like the Wake’s accounts of the encounter, or encounters, of which Joyce himself only received partial accounts – represents to Heidegger is the dawn of that destiny whereby Being, the presencing of what is present, is sent to us – the dawn, that is, of the possibility of the Ereignis, the event, ‘in which the history of the Western world comes to be born out, the event of metaphysics’ [44]. Finnegans Wake, the book of history, of knowledge and of ignorance, of rereadings, repetitions and exegeses, turns around the possibility of the event: of the event that might have happened way back in the park, or might happen again, or maybe is continually happening and has never stopped – and round the possibility of understanding it, of finally containing it in thought. In Joyce’s text, the event unfolds as possibility, as destiny. It comes round again and again; it is retaled. But what it brings round is not Being, presencing and presence – rather, it reopens all lines of difference and credit around a monetary sign, an event of economic exchange. It is a tale that is retailed, again and a gain. Joyce’s Ereignis is not that of presence, but rather of différance. In it, es gibt Sein becomes es gibt Geld.
Joyce believed that Finnegans Wake would be the last book, the one in which the destiny of literature realised itself. We would argue that he was exactly wrong: Finnegans Wake is the first book, the very possibility of literature become visible: as letter and as litter . One could almost say that it is money, the currency (to khrema) that has haunted literature’s home and hearth since its beginnings, enabling its various closed economies (the Homeric epic, the picaresque adventure, the nineteenth century novel, etc. etc.) as it lays them waste.
[1]A full version of this paper which was presented at the James Joyce Symposium, Trieste, 16-22 June 2002, can be found in Hyper Media Joyce Studies, Vol. 4, Issue 1 (July 2003).
[2]FW, p 8.
[3]FW, p 161.
[4]FW, p 11.
[5]FW, p 16.
[6]FW, p 16.
[7]FW, p 82.
[8]FW, p 82.
[9]FW, p 3.
[10]FW, p 167.
[11]We borrow this formulation from Peter Osborne.
[12]Quotations from Lacan are from his 1975 paper, ‘Joyce le sinthome 1’, here translated by Lorenzo Chiesa (unpublished typescript). See also ‘Joyce le symptome’ in Autres Ecrits (Seuil, Paris, 2001), pp.565-570. Our interpretation of Lacan’s reading of Joyce is deeply indebted to a paper by Lorenzo Chiesa, ‘Writing Enjoyment: Lacan, Artaud’, given at the University of Essex, June 2002.
[13]FW, p 3.
[14]FW, p 20.
[15]FW, p 20.
[16]FW, p 3.
[17]FW, p 13.
[18]FW, p 12.
[19]FW, p 12.
[20]FW, p 12.
[21]FW, p 57.
[22]FW, p 83.
[23]FW, p 3.
[24]FW, p 128.
[25]FW, p 125.
[26]FW, p 51.
[27]FW, p 93.
[28]Jacques Derrida, Given Time: 1.Counterfeit Money, trans. P. Kamuf (University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, 1992), p.158.
[29]FW, p 612.
[30]FW, p 612.
[31]FW, p 612.
[32]FW, p 19.
[33]FW, p 251.
[34]FW, p 525.
[35]FW, p 523.
[36]FW, p 16.
[37]We are grateful to Finn Fordham for drawing our attention to this.
[38]FW, p 81.
[39]FW, p 82.
[40]FW, pp 82-3.
[41]FW, p 37.
[42]Richard Ellmann, James Joyce, 1959, Oxford University Press, p 101.
[43]‘The Anaximander Fragment’, in Early Greek Thinking, trans. D.F. Krell & F.A. Capuzzi (Harper and Row, New York, 1984), p.20.
[44]Ibid, p.51.