As it happens, Richard Godden's Fictions of Finance at the End of an American Century: Punctuating Capital—a text whose commitment to the idiosyncrasies of human-crafted sentences might be judged as methodologically heroic, passé, or (without moral inflection) simply zealous, depending on the judge's taste for the closest of close reading—was published the year of ChatGPT's ascendancy. Immediately upon its publication, Fictions of Finance becomes, by no fault of its authors or editors, an irrevocably antediluvian work. It is a text that respires and perspires, and one whose infatuation with and sensual tending to the brittle lattices of its objects’ prose carries with it now an ambient ethical glow.Given the book's colder ambition to articulate syntax and punctuation to labor throughputs and to monetary flows, that peculiar warmth might have remained undetectable only a few years ago. Fictions of Finance is a highly technical book aimed squarely at specialists. It is also playful and self-aware, goofy in its self-awareness, and rigorously committed to the relation between literature and the wider totality of the world that makes the labor of literature necessary.A large determinant in the goofiness (sometimes charming, sometimes distracting) and in the reflexivity is Godden's evident and explicit commitment to close reading as a method of interpretative revelation. As both close reading and interpretation tout court of literary texts have their own histories of critique and repudiation, Godden pitches the book on the defensive: Fictions of Finance aims to be a demonstration of method adjudged, at least in part, by the richness and singular quality of the insights it can generate. The promise close reading offers the critic is collaboration with the text at the level of the sentence, syntax, grammar, and word selection. Come close, dance with me, leave the architecture of the dance hall aside. Like many other practitioners before him, Godden hustles back and forth from the dance floor, sobering up the headier bits of word-puzzling along signification chains with a grounding historical materialism. A characteristic section from the fifth chapter provides a long exegesis on the “alliance between military and financial sectors” running from the 1980s through 2008 and culminates in a striking, uncharacteristically aphoristic provocation: “What is the War on Terror, if not Afghanistan on the edge of the mall?” (157–58). This, in turn, sets the conditions for a citationally dense series of pages that read militarized underdevelopment and targeted financial abandonment in the internal periphery of American empire (“recursive wars and recursive debts” 168) as expressed in the pain of the titular characters in Jayne Anne Phillips's Lark and Termite. In passages like this one, the book is at its best, demonstrating again why close reading has so often been viewed as an adjunct or supplement to a more expansive and totalizing interpretive argument. The goofiness enters as the book often narrates the switch from one to the other mechanism: “I am aware that in pursuing cryptonyms I grow cryptic: for this I apologize” (103); “Here, I hesitate, aware of the contrivances to follow” (92); “I grow gnomic: instances might help” (164).In these moments where the working critic calls out to his readers, perhaps what we find is a redoubling of the book's organizing theme of financialized labor. The post-GPT context of our encounter with Fictions of Finance conditions the latter's affirmation of close reading as paradoxically—anachronistically—being called upon to mimic, redouble, and critique contemporary machinic forms of “reading” performed by algorithms and “generative” AI alike. ChatGPT, Gemini, and our other new “readers” embody an exhaustive drive toward a kind of literate totality that is combined with and undercut by frequent returns to the “self” of the reader and hermeneut. Fictions of Finance then finds itself in a new caricature of the world that so concerns it, where the relationship between the laboring flesh body and the operating machine finds new forms, new aesthetics. The fetishistic inversion holds fast; the virtuosic machine babbles. Does the critic have a mouth? Can the critic scream? I grow gnomic.Insofar as the book's organizing theme is financialized labor, the title is somewhat misleading. With the exception of a chapter on American Psycho, Godden largely eschews focus on the now-canonical texts of “finance fictions” or the “economic humanities” more generally and, instead, aims to periodize an era of high financialization and poststructural fragmentation according to the familiar framework of 1973–2008. This period has been characterized in a variety of contested ways (e.g., neoliberalism, the high finance of trading pits and Dick Bryan and Michael Rafferty's derivatives, American deindustrialization, floating-dollar hegemony and reorientation to fiat/credit money, postmodernity and the reduction to the self and the body and the present, the waning of affect and of historicity, high multiculturalism and “third wave” feminism, the decadence of American empire, and so on). Godden, to his credit, lets each of these many inflections speak through the novels under consideration at moments, even as his own attention returns consistently to the economic-linguistic nexus. It is, perhaps, this periodizing emphasis that most reasonably motivates his commitment to close reading: for Godden, there is something uniquely poetic, tangled, mystifying, messy, encrypted, and therefore unexplicit about both the market and language exchanges of this era. Here, in the afterword, we find the book's mission statement, its two central and linked purposes: to make a case for the materiality of language, and to demonstrate, through exemplifying instances, how literary language, materially understood, grants access to a form of knowledge unavailable to other disciplines. . . . Stated reductively, I seek to defend the practice of close reading, not simply as a necessary approach to literary texts, but as a means through which to recognize the historical density of utterance, and to sense the complexity of what enters our minds and comes out of our mouths. (207)The complexity of the literary that Fictions of Finance describes, labors over, and redoubles is rendered in Godden's assessment as both a reflection of economic flows and pressures (very much in the sense of reflection theory) as well as a processing of that complexity through this other layer of fictionalization at once aesthetically distinct from and materially beholden to the economic, which is the novel. That is, when Godden says “recognize,” he means both to acknowledge or perceive, and to cognize again, to think material processes via repetition.Though the ostensible period of the book is 1973–2008, the works under close analysis date from 1984 (Phillips's Machine Dreams) to 2011 (David Foster Wallace's The Pale King, published posthumously and unfinished). The first chapter lingers a bit on the 1970s works of Walter Abish, only to move in the end to Christine Schutt's “The Blood Jet” from 2005. Does the slippage toward the contemporary matter? The absence of an emblematic 1970s book—a novel like Ragtime or The Moneychangers or even Song of Solomon would seem to fit the texture—feels like an omission, if a minor one. Similarly, for a work of criticism otherwise so engaged with Fredric Jameson's thought, it seems a missed opportunity not to reengage Jameson's influential allegorical reading of Jaws—the 1974 novel and its 1975 Steven Spielberg adaptation—in “Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture.” Jameson's interpretation of the triptych of Brody, Hooper, and Quint as three competing visions of US hegemony is of direct relevance to this important motif in Fictions of Finance at the End of an American Century. These notes are not offered as complaints so much as a reminder that the compromise of close reading is exactly its closeness. A book that takes this method as seriously as Godden's does must reckon with constriction, the impossible task of selection and omission. And at some point this reckoning leads to the old familiar question: why these novels in particular?Does the structure reveal a logic that justifies its selected objects? The book's structure is certainly notable, in that it resembles two short monographs (chapters 2 and 3 being on Bret Easton Ellis, 4 and 5 on Phillips) bookended by thematically related essays (chapter 1, “Incidents in the Life and Language of Debt,” and the final chapter, cowritten with Michael Szalay, on The Pale King), which are in turn bookended by more theoretical reflections on Marx, Bakhtin, and the triangulations between language, labor, and money. A rationale could be mustered for attending so thoroughly to two authors in particular: Ellis's American Psycho, perhaps, serves as a touchstone familiar to the transdiscipline of economic humanities and thereby anchors exploration into underconsidered works. Still, if the argument of the book includes the extent to which American hegemony (anchored through the military and financial sectors by debt, money, and language) is, in fact, globally hegemonic, it seems that little could be lost and something could be gained by swapping one or two of the four chapters dedicated to Ellis and Phillips for a novel (or two!) written by someone living outside US borders. In a similar vein, the “finance fictions” stream of the economic humanities sometimes gives the impression that finance capital's relationship with fiction and culture is wholly the concern of bourgeois, white, (male) American writers. Fictions of Finance does little to dispel this illusion, even as it argues for perspectival differences between the “core” and the “periphery” of capital. It must be emphasized that this is a problem for the field, not for a single practitioner, but it nevertheless remains a problem.Similar, though now in the context of novel studies more generally, is the problem of close reading's formal anachronism insofar as it remains predicated on a relatively stable text for analysis: the novel as point-of-consumption commodity, a fixed and largely unchanging text. The protean quality of fictional text is only exacerbated by digital, algorithmic, and AI production. It may be true that the novel has long been defined by its plasticity, its ability to incorporate and reshape changing conditions in homology with the forms of capital under which it has predominated as a form. Even where Fictions of Finance flirts with deconstruction, the interpretation relies on a concrete arrangement of words that has by now been relegated almost exclusively to the printed book. Most texts, including most fiction and novels, that humans read now—and most text “read” by the abstract forces of financialized capital—is digital (apps, tabs, games, screens, streams) and in constant, often subtle, metastasis. Novels remain (for now) in physical libraries and bookstores, but they also circulate through fly-by-night publishing editions on Amazon, through Kindle Direct Publishing, and across variably monetized platforms of all kinds. There are undoubtedly “fictions of finance” to be found on Wattpad and Archive of Our Own and other rent-based publishing platforms—in some ways, these are the fictions of finance par excellence. What manner of close reading is suitable to these texts? Does the form of their composition, production, consumption, and distribution warrant adaptation? This is a productive anachronism that cannot help emphasizing the contradictions inside the commodity form, but it seems to me to call into question close reading's ability to reveal much on its own besides its commitment to the fixed book-form of a text commodity now greatly superseded by more volatile and mutable manifestations. The period nominally covered in Fictions of Finance very much includes the germinal seeds of these problematics, but there is something in the book's method that does not permit its author to deal with them. What, in Fictions of Finance, does close reading allow readers of the book to ascertain?Close reading affords Godden a method whereby the literary text is both legitimated according to the sublime aesthetics of finance capital—a novel is just as, if not more, complex and dynamic than high frequency trading!—and, simultaneously, set in motion as a kind of reduced metaphysics of the particular materiality of financialization. In Fictions of Finance, the flows of the literary novel and the flows of finance capital rarely explain each other, but insofar as they work through contradiction they do open gaps for slower consideration of “the broken rhythms of subtending voices” that “trouble literal meaning” (212). The absent third term that anchors the relation between literary and financial is, of course, the laboring (or labored, belabored, labor-potent) body, and in some ways Fictions of Finance, like any work of criticism, poses a basic question about the labor of critique, analysis, and written thought itself. The critic or close reader is the one who belabors the point, reading without momentum to dwell in the “faltering in words, as they reach across the faults within an economy” (213). The “novelistic word,” to paraphrase the closing moments of the book, attunes the critic's ear to contradiction, to fissures and gaps. And it's in the gaps that the bodies are buried.
Nicholas Huber (Fri,) studied this question.