
Deficit Seduction: John Updike and the Character of Financial Markets
America’s financial system is intricate and complex. But behind all the technical terminology and statistics is a critical human factor—confidence.
—George W. Bush, September 19, 20081
Although Jonathan Franzen’s Karl Kraus Project (2013) is intended largely as a literary-historical effort to bring the German satirist’s work to public attention, it has received more attention for Franzen’s by-now-familiar screeds against his literary forbearers. In one such footnote, Franzen reflects on his own moralizing arguments about art and bristles at John Updike’s self-obsession. He confesses that he “spent a lot of time assembling a moral case against John Updike” because “Updike had tremendous, Nabokov-level talent and was wasting it” by being “too afraid . . . to take the kind of big literary risks” serious novelists ought to take. Franzen’s criticism continues: Updike’s “lack of interest in the bigger postwar, postmodern, socio-technological picture marked him . . . as a classic self-absorbed sixties-style narcissist.”2 Updike’s fiction supplants post-war social concerns, Franzen argues, with an abiding concern for the “minutiae of daily life”—what Updike calls giving “the mundane its beautiful due.”3
More harshly, Franzen asserts that Updike’s self-obsession derails “otherwise fine stories” with the “anal-retentive preciousness of his prose,” challenging Updike’s “virtuosity” as a chronicler of postwar society.4 Numerous scholars and authors who regard high postmodernism as the postwar literary high-water mark would surely agree with Franzen’s assessment. Perhaps for this reason, Franzen’s criticisms of Updike seem [End Page 97] far less likely to start a row in the pages of Harper’s than his criticism of William Gaddis. Nevertheless, these footnotes are interesting for what they betray about commonly-held views of what constitutes literary engagement with the “postwar . . . picture,”5 as Franzen describes it.
In his critique of Updike, Franzen marshals support from a similar argument David Foster Wallace had made in his review of Toward the End of Time, Updike’s disastrous and assuredly narcissistic foray into speculative fiction. There, Wallace thinks Updike is such a narcissist that he calls him an “asshole.” Yet Wallace writes that despite the fact that Updike’s characters “seemed to become more and more repellent” after Rabbit is Rich (1981), he admires “the sheer gorgeousness of his descriptive prose.”6 Though Wallace loves what Franzen loathes about Updike’s fiction, he goes on to underscore Franzen’s critique in another sense, arguing that “the very world around [Updike’s protagonists] . . . seems to exist for them only insofar as it evokes impressions and associations and emotions inside the self.”7 So, although Franzen and Wallace differ in their taste for Updike’s minutiae, they both view Updike’s myopic focus on the everyday as a narcissistic refusal to engage bigger postwar arguments. Updike’s prose, Wallace and Franzen argue, hangs on problematic and indulgent self-obsession.
These acerbic critiques of Updike and his characters suggest a reversal from the previous generation’s critical accounts of Updike’s fiction, including Rabbit Angstrom.8 In his 1981 New York Times review of Rabbit is Rich, John Leonard praises Updike for his cultural and economic insights.9 And Michiko Kakutani notes that in Rabbit is Rich Updike’s “keen sociological eye” captures the degree to which “America has become an ugly, materialistic place . . . the controlling metaphors of which are shortages of gas and runaway inflation.”10 Yet both Leonard and Kakutani quickly turn away from these economic concerns and instead produce criticisms that prefigure Franzen’s charges of self-obsession and Wallace’s assertion that these economic insights exist primarily as a canvas for “impressions . . . inside the self.”11 Kakutani asserts that in Rabbit is Rich, “Updike . . . seems more interested in delineating his character’s state of mind” than confronting Rabbit’s social and economic moment.12 For his part, Leonard exclaims that he “likes Rabbit very much” and gushes that above all else what makes Rabbit is Rich so compelling is Rabbit’s “radiance.”13 Leonard and Kakutani here agree with Franzen and Wallace to the extent that they view Updike’s fiction as primarily self-obsessed. But each to some degree lauds him for that self-obsession. So whether one finds Rabbit “repellent” as Wallace and Franzen do or “radiant” as Leonard and Kakutani do, criticism of Rabbit is Rich has hinged on arguments about character since its publication. Even those who like what Franzen dislikes about Updike’s prose have tended to accept the terms of his complaint: [End Page 98] Updike writes ornate domestic fiction in which his attention to the metaphysical burdens of psychologically complex characters obliterates any meaningful engagement with postwar socioeconomic issues.
The fact that Rabbit is Rich—the most explicitly economic of his novels—has been met with these precise criticisms suggests there is something here. And to be fair, Updike would seem to invite them, self-obsessed as his fiction is. The persistence of economic detail, however—from deindustrialization and gentrification to speculative markets—alongside the novel’s commitment to character, suggests instead that character is a technology for structuring the novel’s engagement with the economy. In Rabbit is Rich, Updike’s third installment of the Rabbit Angstrom tetralogy, Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom finds himself middle-aged and middle class in the twilight of the Carter presidency. To avoid the rising interest rates and inflation that had been plaguing the United States through much of the seventies, Rabbit invests his family’s savings (mostly his wife’s inheritance) in 30 gold Krugerrands. Like other speculators, Rabbit invests in gold to find an alternative to the leaky dollar. Nevertheless he cannot help but find the precious investment intoxicating. Staring at his recently acquired fortune, Rabbit wonders at its value: “He would have thought something so dense with preciousness would broadcast signals bringing burglars like dogs to a bitch in heat.”14 His wife Janice is also astonished by Rabbit’s speculative haul. “My God,” she says, “I thought only the government could have gold. Don’t you need a license or anything?” (816). Until 1974, she would have been mostly correct. Between 1933 and 1974—when it became legal for Americans to buy and sell gold—owning gold was (mostly) illegal and (basically) pointless. By 1979, however, when Rabbit buys the Krugerrands, the price of gold was skyrocketing on the London gold market. In order to purchase it, Rabbit explains, one needs “Just the fucking bucks” (816).
Overwhelmed by the intensity of the investment, Rabbit spills the coins onto the bed and pulls Janice down among them, consummating their entry into speculative markets. To Rabbit and Janice, gold carries with it the promise of both financial and erotic return, as its value can be realized both within and outside the market. In Rabbit is Rich, the two positions occupied by gold—both as an object of investment and of sexual desire—conflate purely economic value with purely personal value so that profit is reinscribed as concupiscence. Economically speaking, gold functions like any other financial investment (say, junk bonds), while its personal value functions much more like pornography. Indeed “Fiscal Alternatives,” the precious metals shop from which Rabbit purchases the gold, seems as though it might “be peddling smut” (811). As the site of these competing versions of value, gold is not merely an instrument of exchangeability, but of personal pleasure. The difference between these two ways of understanding the [End Page 99] value of a particular investment is crucial and irreducible. While the value of junk bonds is entirely dependent on financial returns, the value of pornography is wholly dependent on self-fulfillment. So if gold is an investment, Rabbit’s tumescence “amid scattered gold” (817) is really beside the point, but if gold is an object of sexual desire, “tumescence” is precisely the point. Rabbit is Rich refuses the distinction. From this vantage, gold’s “payoff” is twofold: it will make you rich and it will get you laid.
In readings such as those suggested by Franzen, Wallace, or even Kakutani, this scene would simply mark the comingling of financial and libidinal desires and would be remarkable only for its licentiousness and questionable gender politics. In other words, it would be completely forgettable like so much of the sex in Updike’s novels (for example Couples). At best, reading Rabbit and Janice’s sex among the gold as merely private and personal (as Franzen suggests we should) would disclose something about what it meant to live as Rabbit and Janice live at the end of the seventies. And though such readings might be attended by ethical, affective, or moral claims, they have little if anything to say about the economic argument Updike invites by bringing gold into the bedroom. That is, to the extent that each of these criticisms argues that character is constitutive of the meaning of Updike’s fiction, they miss the most interesting problem in it precisely because each views his self-obsessed fiction as merely narcissistic or inward-focused rather than as fundamentally social and economic. Kakutani’s review opposes Updike’s interest in Rabbit’s character to his interest in documenting the social without registering the extent to which Updike’s commitment to character is at once personal and economic. And it is a mistake on Franzen’s part to suggest that by virtue of writing about gold and sex rather than, say, V2 rockets and sex, Updike’s novels—the Rabbit novels in particular—refuse engagement with the logic of the postwar picture. Updike’s obsession with the personal as the organizing logic of his novels does not refuse social or economic questions. Rather, it reorders the broader postwar picture by representing the economy as a constellation of individual desires and motivations.
Character, then, is not simply a vehicle for the metaphysical burdens of the middle class. Instead, when Updike treats markets like a bedroom, character becomes a way of articulating an economic moment in which character itself is imagined to determine the value of speculative markets. Gold gives Rabbit a perceptible “intensity of pleasure” that money alone cannot (815). Though cash might “strengthen his nerves” (26), and the knowledge that he “is rich because of [Janice’s] inheritance” can be a form of sex—“comfortable and sly” (656)—gold’s “dense preciousness” fills him with a different, more visceral “intensity of pleasure” (815). Although sex and money might provoke similar affective investments, putting that wealth to work in the market—here in Rabbit’s [End Page 100] decision to purchase gold—is more exciting than either on its own. Betting in the market feels different to Rabbit and Janice than money in the bank, and sex on a pile of gold makes the payoff from sex indistinguishable from that of speculation—gold is desirable because it is valuable, and it is valuable because it is desirable.
The gold market seduces. And the twofold nature of the payoff suggests two closely related answers to the question, “Why does Rabbit invest?” Initially, the novel offers a very brief economic explanation. Rabbit justifies his investment to Janice, explaining the larger investment trend: “At only six per cent [sic] these days you’re losing money, inflation’s running about twelve. The beauty of gold is, it loves bad news. As the dollar sinks, gold goes up” (817). By keeping savings in the bank, Rabbit effectively loses money. Rabbit invests in gold not just because he can, but because he’s getting poorer as long as he does not. But this economic logic—correct though it may be—is itself represented as a kind of seduction, delivered in repose on the bed (for the sake of tact and brevity, those details are omitted here). So, on the one hand, the novel is deeply economic; on the other hand, deeply personal. When Updike measures the payoff in intensity, focusing on Rabbit’s “pleasure” and Janice’s “bewitched” gaze at the “thrillingly hefty cylinder” that houses their “riches” (816), he treats the Angstroms’ economic investment as a personal one: The novel effectuates the shared affective intensity of the investment, representing the market as a site where economic fulfillment is understood as coincident with and determined by personal fulfillment—or self-actualization.
Of course, understanding gold’s economic value as linked to its personal, affective value—as a structure linking the market and character—is contingent upon the emergence of the structures that would produce a gold market in the first place. In historical terms, gold as an investment vehicle that could pay off at all was made available by the emergence of an open gold market following the breakdown of the Bretton Woods Agreement in 1973.15 In 1979, gold ownership and investment were still relatively recent phenomena, and Janice’s excitement at their bewitching investment is far less naive than Rabbit’s glib rejoinder implies. Between 1944 and 1971, the price of gold was $35 per troy ounce—the prices established under the Bretton Woods agreement. Beginning in 1971, when the Nixon Administration made the decision to devalue the dollar and thus closed the gold window, gold prices jumped. In 1973, when Bretton Woods was officially abandoned, the price of gold doubled and continued to increase throughout the decade as investors sought to hedge against inflation and volatile global currencies. By the autumn of 1979, when Rabbit enters the market, gold was trading at $377.16
This exponential increase in the price of gold from which Rabbit profits was the result of decoupling the dollar from gold and the subsequent expansion of financial markets [End Page 101] pursued throughout the seventies. The Nixon Administration’s decision to dismantle the gold-dollar system came at the end of nearly a decade’s worth of structural deficits in the United States. Throughout the fifties and sixties the global economy grew much faster than the production of gold, forcing the United States to print dollars in order to fuel global economic growth, creating massive trade imbalances. To reverse this trend, Presidents Kennedy, Johnson, or Nixon would have had to implement unpopular or potentially depression-inducing policies to curtail deficits (e.g., constraining the money supply, raising taxes, cutting military spending, or exiting the Vietnam War). Because such measures were either impractical or unpopular, the United States continued to run deficits. As trade surpluses disappeared and the U.S. economy slowed, the Bretton Woods system reached a crisis when it became apparent that the United States, because of its deficits, could not fulfill its obligation to exchange gold for the dollars already in circulation. According to the IMF, when the United States closed the gold window it held less than five percent of the gold necessary to fulfill its obligations.17 Coerced by structural deficits and the resulting dollar crisis, U.S. policymakers began pursuing economic solutions outside of the Bretton Woods framework.18 This proved a pivotal moment for the era of financialization, argue Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin in The Making of Global Capitalism, because the decision to close the gold window and float the dollar exposed gold and currencies to global markets for the first time since World War II. Exposure to market volatility meant greater risk and greater potential profits. Seeking to take advantage of this potential, policymakers and their cadre of Wall Street advisors radically restructured the economy by “freeing” capital from regulation and putting it to work in emergent financial markets, ushering in a new era of market volatility that would form the foundation of the economy.19
Indeed, Rabbit Angstrom cleaves to this restructuring of the United States economy through the dissolution of the Bretton Woods framework and its continued effects through 1989 (Spoiler alert: Rabbit dies at the end of history. By 1989, when Rabbit and his tenure expire, so too had socialism’s challenge to liberal capitalism. In this light, his turn as Uncle Sam in an Independence Day celebration in Rabbit at Rest might be viewed as a sort of Friedmanite victory lap). In the introduction to Rabbit Angstrom, Updike describes the collected Rabbit novels as a “running report” on the economic and spiritual state of Rabbit and “his nation.”20 And his “way in” (vii) to postwar America is through “the character of Harry ‘Rabbit’ Angstrom” (vii), who embodies a middle class that experiences and participates in the U.S. shift from a manufacturing economy to a financial one. Between Rabbit, Run (1960) and Rabbit Redux (1971), Rabbit transitions from an unsuccessful white-collar laborer as a MagiPeeler salesman to “an all-too-settled working man” (xiii) as a [End Page 102] linotype operator, finding middle-class stability in skilled blue-collar labor. It is a career change virtually unimaginable by 1979, when Rabbit is Rich is set, because by that time it had become nearly as unthinkable to be upwardly mobile in the manufacturing sector as it was to become rich by speculating in gold in 1969.21 Instead, during the seventies, Rabbit becomes wealthy running a Toyota franchise and, more importantly, by speculating in the gold, silver, and housing markets in the fall/winter of 1979–1980—markets that were made available, directly and indirectly, only after the United States abandoned the Bretton Woods framework. That is, Rabbit becomes wealthier because he, unlike most Americans, latches on to these emerging financial markets: the gutted manufacturing sector that leads to Rabbit losing his skilled blue-collar job in Rabbit Redux also leads to the increase in the imported automobiles and more importantly, in Rabbit is Rich, to the very speculative markets that secure Rabbit’s upward mobility. Framed in terms of the response to U.S. structural deficits, then, Rabbit Angstrom acts as a kind of roadmap for alternative economic trajectories. One involves investing in emerging speculative markets and becoming wealthier and the other involves remaining in the manufacturing sector and becoming poorer. In other words, when the United States floated the dollar and opened its borders, it allowed the economy to continue to grow, but at a cost. As historian Judith Stein shows, the United States began “trading factories for finance.”22 This displacement of manufacturing by banking is the precise trajectory Rabbit Angstrom charts while at the same time putting character at the center of this transition. If Rabbit is, as he says, “for the first time since childhood . . . happy, simply, to be alive” (629), one might say that what makes Rabbit happy are structural deficits.
This economic shift—from Kennedy to Nixon and from “factories to finance”—is coincident with the belief in character as a cause (rather than effect) of the economy. As early as 1962 in Capitalism and Freedom, Milton Friedman had begun formulating an economic vision in which the character of market participants would act as both an economic engine and regulatory body. There, he calls for an end to Keynesian-style interventions on the grounds that government action ought to enable “individuals to produce growth in the economy”23 by encouraging them to exercise their “freedom”—or choice—in the market.24 Individual desires not legislation should regulate the economy. President Carter made essentially the same point in what would become known as the “Malaise Speech” in July of 1979, extending the economic trajectory begun by Kennedy and Nixon and codifying Friedman’s belief that character is—or ought to be—the foundation of the economy. The crisis facing the American people was not only economic, Carter says, it was “spiritual”: “The threat is nearly invisible in ordinary ways. It is a crisis of confidence . . . that strikes at the . . . spirit of our national will. We can see this crisis in the growing doubt about the [End Page 103] meaning of our own lives and in the loss of a unity of purpose for our nation.” Although legislation might help in a limited sense, “all the legislation in the world can’t fix” the “growing doubt about the meaning of our own lives,” Carter explains, which is a crisis that runs “deeper than gasoline lines or energy shortages, deeper even than inflation or recession.” If this crisis was spiritual, it was also economic insofar as it was “causing a decline in the productivity of American workers.”25 In this sense, Carter, like Friedman, ascribes a causal economic role to the attitudes of American workers and in doing so, insists that character is a regulatory force.
So, at the same moment individuals begin to understand the market as a site of self-actualization as Rabbit does, policymakers install the individual as the sine qua non of economic and political thought, reimagining the relationship between individual character and the market. By rejecting “sweeping legislation,” the Carter Administration turned instead to the “confidence” of investors to lift the United States out of a decade of persistent stagnation and structural deficits. In doing so, the Carter Administration, along with the newly appointed Federal Reserve head Paul Volcker, actualized Friedman’s economic commitment to the character of the market by making the decision to forgo policy changes in favor of dramatically higher interest rates. As a result, interest rates rose from just over 11 percent in September of 1979—roughly when Rabbit purchases his gold—to 14 percent in January of 1980.26 The move did tame inflation as Volcker argued it would, but it had numerous other consequences as well. Namely, it essentially freed capital from labor markets and intensified the role speculative markets would play in determining the future of the middle class and, crucially, U.S. global hegemony27—which is to say, the commitment to finance capital diminished the labor’s power in shaping the economy while at the same time it suppressed wages.28 To put a finer point on it, in a matter of months—the very months Rabbit is Rich takes place—Carter and Volcker codified the centrality of both financialization and character—the former relying upon the latter—in organizing the U.S. and global economies for decades to come.
So although Franzen and Wallace are surely correct when they argue that Updike’s novel of character is more interested in theorizing the self than theorizing the postmodern, they overlook the degree to which Updike’s self-obsession has been the obsession of economists and policymakers for nearly 40 years. Character takes on a new literary valence when it becomes determinate of markets. Updike, of course, does not invent the connection between character and the economy any more than floating the dollar created speculative markets. To some degree, neoclassical economics has tended to think about the economy in terms of desires (utility) and motivations (profit). These theories nonetheless understand the market as an external and often antagonistic force. By reframing [End Page 104] speculative markets—economic structures—as a question of the internal motivations of those who comprise them, Updike treats the market as though it is no longer an external force, but rather as something that is at once intrinsic to and emanates from characters. Character itself thus becomes a structuring principle of—rather than determined by—the economy. And what makes Updike an exemplary instance of this logic is the extent to which he insists on the “personal structure” of his fiction by structuring his novels through character; his work is driven by the logic that became the default position of economic policy throughout the seventies as it imagines that the behaviors and choices individuals make are productive forces—of both economies and novels.
Surely, Updike had emphatically grander and more spiritual notions in his memoir, Self-Consciousness (1989), writing that “our subjectivity, in other words, dominates, through secret channels, outer reality, and the universe has a personal structure.”29 We can afford to be more modest and materialist than Updike, however, and argue that by articulating gold’s value through an appeal to the inner lives (e.g., the desires, motivations, dispositions, etc.) of the novel’s principal characters, Updike’s novel of character endows economic forces with a “personal structure.” Rather than a purely personal turn, then, Updike’s commitment to the psychology of his characters as the motivating force in Rabbit is Rich—and the Rabbit Angstrom tetralogy more generally—anchors his fiction in a theory of character in which the inner life of character itself becomes an economic force.
The Novel of Character
By “novel of character” I do not mean any novel that takes the interiority of a particular character or set of characters as its primary subject and structuring principle, but rather a novel that both links the consciousness of its characters to economic and historical structures and frames those mechanisms in privatized terms, thus displacing the novel’s economic and social content. In the novel of character, to address the political and economic questions posed by the content of the novel is already to speculate about the internal motivations of a particular character or set of characters. For example, in Rabbit is Rich the answer to the question “Why does Rabbit invest?” is simply because it makes him “happy.” The point here is not to suggest that any novel by virtue of representing interiority would fit this category—one would not argue, for example, that writers such as Henry James or, to take an example from Updike’s contemporary moment, Joseph Heller are invested in the novel of character.30 Rather, the novel of character structures its economic content through character by manifesting complex social and economic details as though they are complex human behaviors and motivations, treating the economy as fundamentally driven by character. [End Page 105]
My claim is not then a broad formal one about the novel’s long and often remarked upon commitment to character, but a historically specific claim about the ways novelists and critics—like politicians and economists—understand character in the wake of the structural deficits of the late-sixties and throughout the seventies—the period leading up to and following the breakdown of Bretton Woods. As Rita Felski notes in a 2011 special issue of New Literary History dedicated to character, in the seventies literary criticism responded to the obsessive economic and social interest in the dimensions of character by dissolving it in the “acid bath of critical theory.”31 Thinkers such as Hélène Cixous, J. Hillis Miller, and Michel Foucault put the critique of character—the bourgeois sort in particular—at the center of their writing. Only recently has character re-emerged prominently within literary criticism. And the reason it has returned, argues Felski, is a renewed interest in the ways character, “via the specifics of its formal shaping . . . offers otherwise unattainable insights into the historical inflection of personhood.”32 For Felski, this emphasis allows for a more nuanced articulation of the linkages between “social persons” (i.e., psychological subjects) and particular strands of social thought (for example, art, history, and ethics). And though Felski does not mention economics specifically, her point would remain essentially unchanged if she did. Her introduction suggests the most important thing character can do is sharpen the relationship between social persons and the economy.
Felski is surely correct that character has re-emerged as central to many literary critics (for example, Alan Palmer and Blakey Vermule) because it inflects something about “personhood.”33 But what she likes most about recent scholarship on character actually points to the limits of this resurgence. Although character need not be dissolved in the acid bath of theory, it makes little sense to restore character for many of the same reasons critical theory in the seventies thought it necessary to dissolve it. That is, the point of returning to character now ought not to be in order to provide a more nuanced account of interior life. This would be to treat character as Franzen and Wallace do—as merely personal. Instead, character needs to be rethought in fundamentally economic terms.34 The difference between character as merely personal and character as economic emerges clearly in Felski’s attitude toward the study of character in a work like Deirdre Shauna Lynch’s The Economy of Character. Felski praises Lynch’s work because its “pragmatics of character” 35 illuminates the “changing ways . . . eighteenth-century writers and readers used the characters in their books” to “renegotiate social relations in their changed, commercialized world.”36 For Felski, Lynch’s work is most interesting when it treats character as a way to inflect or mediate the reader’s relationship to the economy by enabling them [End Page 106] to recognize their own experience of capitalism in the text. But Lynch’s argument is most compelling in those moments when it highlights the extent to which novelists via character, mobilize “literary psychology” to articulate economic forces.37 Like Alex Woloch in The One vs. The Many, Lynch insists that economic structures cannot be disarticulated from character because to the degree character acts as the governing force of the novel’s form it makes those economic structures legible in the first place. This linkage has little to do with what Felski calls personhood and everything to do with economic forces.
To put it slightly differently, Lynch links character to the emergence of new forms of capital in much the same way as Woloch’s The One vs. the Many argues that character (or a matrix of characters) organizes and structures the narrative’s economic content. Writing of Jane Austen, he argues that the narrative shape of Austen’s novels articulates emergent economic forms by linking structural shifts in the economy to the psychology of the particular characters. The economic context, he writes, “emerges in the novel through facts, descriptions, and events that are woven into the narrative” while at the same time “the subjective dislocation that accompanies these changes” is registered via the “character space”38—what Lynch terms the “literary psychology” of characters. For both Lynch and Woloch, character mediates and configures the novel’s narrative encounter with economic forces as a whole. More specifically character becomes a way of formally administering the effects of the economic logic of accumulation. Concerning Austen, Lynch argues, “her insistence on articulating the individuated language of the heroine’s psyche with the impersonal language of the commonplace”39 situates her heroine’s character at the intersection between her private life and commodity circulation. Austen’s formal commitment to free indirect discourse, while deeply personal, is always “haunted by the murmuring spirit of mass consumption”40 newly made available by the increased circulation of the commodity form.
Like Austen, Updike is committed to threading the personal and the economic, putting the psychologically dense inner lives of characters to work in the market at the same time that they animate the novel’s structure. The key difference here—and what marks the novel of character out as distinctive—is that it reverses Austen’s use of free indirect discourse and literary psychology and instead represents the economy as though it were personal. So, rather than representing the economy as an external force that haunts his characters—as something that could penetrate the private lives of its characters in the first place—Updike yokes the market to the inner lives of his characters. As a consequence, Updike treats character both as the dominant structuring principle of his fiction and as an economic force. [End Page 107]
Character of Markets
When Updike reverses the logic of character, he reverses the logic of the market. In this sense, Updike not only revises Jane Austen’s realism, but also the logic of Frank Norris’s naturalism by reimagining the economic and formal roles of character. When Updike invites gold into the bedroom of Rabbit and Janice, he effectively rewrites a similar—equally licentious—encounter between Trina and her gold in McTeague (1899).41 As Walter Benn Michaels has argued, that novel also stages the logic of the economic debates over gold at the time. Unlike Updike’s coital celebration of the “inflationary abundance” (xv) that emerged after the United States floated the dollar and closed the gold window, Norris’s novel is governed by the contractionary economic violence of the gold standard. And unlike Updike’s characters, the naturalist subject is determined by the violence of economic forces.
In The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism, Michaels opens his essay on Frank Norris and the gold standard by posing a hypothetical question about character: “Why does the miser save?”42 Trina McTeague, he notes, saves without reason, so it makes little sense to speculate what motivates her to hoard her gold or why McTeague spends it. To do so would grant characters agency over forces about which they have no control, and just as importantly, have “no thought,” as Norris puts it.43 Appealing to the motivations of characters is essentially pointless because characters are not ascribed any agency but are themselves expressions of larger economic forces. The identity of the naturalist subject, Michaels argues, “consists only in the beliefs and desires made available by the naturalist logic—which is not produced by the naturalist subject but rather is the condition of his existence.”44 Unlike character in naturalist novels, character in Updike’s realist fiction is constitutive of rather than constituted by the economy. So, as opposed to Rabbit or Janice in Rabbit is Rich, McTeague and Trina embody the logic of scarcity and depression underpinning the gold standard and are thus riven and disfigured by economic forces rather than productive of them.
In his study of postmodernism, Frederic Jameson underscores Michaels’ argument when he describes Trina and McTeague’s behaviors as motivated by the “great inhuman rages that seize on characters . . . and shake them by the neck like forces of nature.”45 Though for Jameson these forces that “shake” the characters are not capitalism and the market per se, as they are in Michaels’ argument, Jameson’s account of naturalism nonetheless holds that the meaning of McTeague cannot be found by parsing out the motivations or desires of its characters. Rather, as I have been suggesting, the intrusive narrator in naturalism penetrates the minds of its characters only to reveal the economic [End Page 108] structures within which its characters are fixed. So, although McTeague carries the gold into the desert and Trina loves her gold “with an intensity she could hardly express”46 it makes little sense to attempt to understand his enmity or her “intensity” as anything but the economic antagonism they embody.
In Updike’s hands, McTeague’s gilded cage becomes Rabbit’s precious investment—the very thing that destroys the McTeagues is celebrated by the Angstroms. This movement from a cage within the market to free access to it is the difference between a novel in which markets determine subjectivity and one in which markets are determined by character.47 So, to understand why the question, “Why does the miser save?”48 cannot be answered by appealing to the character of the McTeagues is to begin to understand why character is crucial in Rabbit is Rich. Representing economic machinations as though they are an expression of the desires of his characters, Updike’s markets are transformed from relational structures to personal motivations as literary psychology and interior life becomes the governing framework of both the novel and the market. Put another way, in Rabbit is Rich, the economy is “shaken” by the individual, not the other way around, as it is in McTeague. Trina and McTeague are obsessed with gold because in the world of McTeague, as “nature’s money,” gold’s value is immanent—it is desirable because it is valuable regardless of character. By contrast, in Rabbit is Rich gold is valuable not because it possesses natural value, but because it does not. So, investing in gold turns an economic problem—inflation—into a financial solution, a “fiscal alternative.” Having sex on one’s fiscal alternative turns economic crises (say, over a decade of structural deficits) into a matter of desire. And though it is certainly a literary point for Updike to imagine that tumescence and inflation can mean the same thing, in fact, this equation functions to radically privatize economic forces in much the same way the economic policies theorized by Friedman and actualized by Carter and Volker did.
Ultimately, then, Updike’s commitment to character as a cause of the economy rather than effect is central simultaneously to the privatized logic of the postwar novel and to economic thought itself. It is not an accident that the years in which Rabbit is Rich is set are also the years in which Michel Foucault, discussing economists like Milton Friedman, argues that the interest in the interior lives of market participants shifts economic analysis from “a relational mechanism”49 of production and exchange to the “internal rationality of . . . human behavior”50 and thus converts structural economic forces into a constellation of motivations and desires. As they become understood in these terms, the relational market structures of neoclassical economics are transformed into isolated instances of self-actualization, dissolving the distinction between the inner lives of market participants and markets.51 And when the self is imagined as the productive engine of [End Page 109] the economy—as Friedman argues—and self-actualization becomes a policy prescription—as Carter made it—people not structures are what the government invests in when it manages the economy.
Returning to the fiction of Jonathan Franzen—whose complaint began this essay—reveals the extent to which the obsession with character has persisted throughout the postwar moment, even as writers such as Franzen attempt to distance themselves from it.52 That is, framing character in these terms highlights the extent to which Franzen’s and Wallace’s critiques of Updike’s “novel of character” ignore the ways in which their own novels operate by this very logic—Franzen by attending to the “quiet drama” of the self and Wallace by turning sincerity into a “crucial value”53 of literary production. This is what a critic like Sam Tanenhaus praises in his New York Times review of Freedom, when he celebrates Franzen for cracking the “shell of postmodernism” and replacing “its tangled circuitry” with the “warm, beating heart of an authentic humanism.”54 Franzen, he claims, makes postmodernism into a real, live boy and in the process privatizes and personifies the economy in The Corrections, a novel in which finance and capital flow “through the arteries” of a narrative that at the same time attends “to the quiet drama of the interior life.”55 Tanenhaus’s point is that by simultaneously affirming the primacy of character and personifying the economy, Franzen bridges a perceived gap between the economy and persons. My point throughout this essay has been that for Updike, the economy needs no personification because in his work—especially Rabbit Angstrom—there is no gap to bridge: the economy is already dominated by character. Or, as Rabbit puts it “there is nothing outside” (264) the self at all. From this standpoint, the novel’s “quiet drama” has been an economic cause all along. To see the persistence of character in this light sharpens our understanding of the contours of a contemporary moment equally defined by the excesses of self-fulfillment and the inequalities of self-regulation.
Davis Smith-Brecheisen is a PhD candidate in English Literature at the University of Illinois-Chicago. His areas of research include American literature, the history of the novel, literary theory, and economic thought.
Notes
1. George W. Bush, “President Bush Discusses Economy,” televised speech, The White House, September 18, 2008, accessed January 11, 2016, http://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2008/09/20080919-2.html.
2. Jonathan Franzen, “Franzen on Kraus: Footnote 89,” The Paris Review, September 6, 2013, accessed January 11, 2016, http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2013/09/06/franzen-on-kraus-footnote-89/.
3. John Updike, The Early Stories, 1953–1975 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003), xvii.
4. Franzen, “Franzen on Kraus: Footnote 89.”
5. Ibid. [End Page 110]
6. David Foster Wallace, “John Updike, Champion Literary Phallocrat, Drops One; Is This Finally the End for Magnificent Narcissists?” New York Observer, October 13, 1997, accessed January 11, 2016, http://observer.com/1997/10/john-updike-champion-literary-phallocrat-drops-one-is-this-finally-theend-for-magnificent-narcissists/.
7. Wallace, “John Updike, Champion Literary Phallocrat, Drops One.”
8. Rabbit Angstrom is comprised of the four Rabbit novels published in 1995 as a single volume.
9. John Leonard, “Rabbit Is Rich,” review of Rabbit is Rich, by John Updike, New York Times, September 22, 1981, accessed January 11, 2016, http://www.nytimes.com/1981/09/22/books/updike-rabbitrich.html.
10. Michiko Kakutani, “Turning Sex and Guilt into an American Epic,” The Saturday Review, October, 1981: 15.
11. Wallace, “John Updike, Champion Literary Phallocrat, Drops One.”
12. Kakutani, “Turning Sex and Guilt into an American Epic,” 14.
13. Leonard, “Rabbit Is Rich.”
14. John Updike, Rabbit Angstrom: A Tetralogy (New York: Knopf, 1995), 815. Hereafter cited parenthetically.
15. While gold was traded before 1968, a gold pool was established in 1961 to effectively eliminate public trading.
16. “Gold Fixing Price in U.S. Dollars 1970 to 1980,” Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, accessed January 29, 2016, https://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/graph/?id=GOLDAMGBD228NLBM.
17. “System in Crisis,” International Monetary Fund, accessed January 29, 2016, http://www.imf.org/external/np/exr/center/mm/eng/sc_sub_3.htm.
18. Yanis Varoufakis, The Global Minotaur: America, the True Origins of the Financial Crisis and the Future of the World Economy (London: Zed Books, 2011), 92–96.
19. Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin, The Making of Global Capitalism: The Political Economy of American Empire (London: Verso, 2012), 122–131.
20. Updike, “Introduction,” Rabbit Angstrom: A Tetralogy, vii.
21. By 1979 manufacturing exports had been declining for nearly a decade. See Robert Brenner, The Economics of Global Turbulence: The Advanced Capitalist Economies from Long Boom to Long Downturn (London: Verso, 2006).
22. Judith Stein, Pivotal Decade: How the United States Traded Factories for Finance in the Seventies (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 2010), xii.
23. Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom: Fortieth Anniversary Edition (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2009), 38.
24. Although Friedman does not use the term “character” exactly, his views nonetheless privilege the expressive and possessive individual, which even the most restrictive definitions of literary character assume.
25. Jimmy Carter, “Crisis of Confidence,” televised speech delivered on 15 July 1979, PBS.org, accessed January 11, 2016, http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/primary-resources/carter-crisis/. [End Page 111]
26. “Effective Federal Funds Rate,” Federal Reserve of St. Louis, accessed 19 October 2015, https://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/FEDFUNDS.
27. As Panitch and Gindin argue in The Making of Global Capitalism, in the seventies the United States actually consolidated its economic hegemony: “The outflow of capital from the U.S. and the balance-of-payments deficits...had actually laid the basis for further dollar-based expansion” (147). By removing capital controls and devaluing the dollar, both the Nixon and Carter Administrations ensured that Wall Street would be flooded with capital from foreign investors. Simultaneously, the United States dismantled trade barriers, meaning that the United States was flooded with foreign goods and the manufacturing sector suffered.
28. For a discussion on the relationship between finance capital and manufacturing wages see Panitch and Gindin, The Making of Global Capitalism and Brenner, The Economics of Global Turbulence.
29. John Updike, Self-Consciousness: Memoirs (New York: Knopf, 1989), 227.
30. Sharon Cameron argues that we should “question the identification of consciousness with psychology” in the work of James and instead understand his aesthetic commitment to interiority as an attempt to “dissociate consciousness from psychology” (1), in Thinking in Henry James (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1989).
31. Rita Felski, “Introduction,” New Literary History, 42 no. 2 (2011): v.
32. Ibid., vi.
33. Ibid., v.
34. Criticism on the Rabbit novels deals largely with the theological or philosophical nature of Rabbit’s internal conflicts: Robert Detweiler’s book-length study, John Updike (New York: Twayne Publishing, 1972) initiated much of this criticism. More recently, Marshall Boswell’s John Updike’s Rabbit Tetralogy: Mastered Irony in Motion (Columbia: Univ. of Missouri, 2001) has taken up that cause. Other works, however, deal with Updike’s catalogue in more historical and cultural terms. John Updike (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988) by Judie Newman; John Updike and the Cold War (Columbia: Univ. of Missouri Press, 2001) by D. Quentin Miller; and Updike’s America: The Presence of Contemporary American History in John Updike’s Rabbit Trilogy (New York: Peter Lang, 1988) by Dilvo Ristoff are the most notable among them. While each of these works is variously insightful each more or less conforms to exactly what Felski wants in the study of character. This is equally true of Catherine Morley who reads Rabbit as an epic hero in the vein of Stephen Daedalus—as a figure who embodies national consciousness in the everyday in, The Quest for Epic in Contemporary American Fiction: Philip Roth, John Updike and Don DeLillo (New York: Routledge, 2009).
35. Deidre Shauna Lynch, The Economy of Character: Novels, Market Culture, and the Business of Inner Meaning (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1998), 4.
36. Lynch, The Economy of Character, 4.
37. Ibid., 210.
38. Alex Woloch, The One vs. the Many: Minor Characters and the Space of the Protagonist in the Novel (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 2003), 62.
39. Woloch, The One vs. the Many, 62. [End Page 112]
40. Ibid.
41. For other accounts of gold and sex in Rabbit is Rich that differ from mine and stress Updike’s affinity with naturalism, see James A. Schiff, John Updike Revisited (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1998) and Victor Lasseter, “Rabbit is Rich as a Naturalistic Novel,” American Literature 61, no. 3 (1989): 429–445.
42. Walter Benn Michaels, The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism: American Literature at the Turn of the Century (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1987), 139.
43. Ibid.
44. Ibid., 177.
45. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1991), 196.
46. Frank Norris, McTeague: A Story of San Francisco (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1995), 236.
47. See Judie Newman, John Updike (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988) and James A. Schiff, John Updike Revisited (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1998) for further discussion on the ways gold links Rabbit is Rich and McTeague. To the extent each deals with this connection, they treat Updike’s citation of McTeague as supplemental rather than as a reversal as I do here.
48. Michaels, The Logic of Naturalism, 139.
49. Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège De France, 1978–79, ed. Michel Senellart (New York: Palgrave Macmillan 2008), 222.
50. Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 223.
51. Anna Kornbluh argues when character comes to “supplant a structural critique of finance . . . Instead of calculating leverage, we lament flagging confidence; instead of legislating regulation we prescribe therapy” (23), in Realizing Capital: Financial and Psychic Economies in Victorian Form (New York: Fordham Univ. Press, 2014).
52. This appeal to character finds its most recent, devastating political expression in the Bush Administration’s 2008 financial interventions, which as the epigraph here suggests, reflect the belief that confidence is the driving force behind the economy.
53. Adam Kelly, “David Foster Wallace and the New Sincerity in American Fiction,” in Consider David Foster Wallace: Critical Essays, ed. David Hering (Los Angeles: Sideshow Media Group, 2010), 131.
54. Sam Tanenhaus, “Peace and War” review of Freedom by Jonathan Franzen, New York Times, August 19, 2010, accessed January 11, 2016, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/29/books/review/Tanenhaus-t.html?_r=0.
55. Tanenhaus, “Peace and War.” [End Page 113]