Rezensionen Erhan Şimşek, Creating Realities: Business as a M otif in American F iction, 1865-1929. Bielefeld: transcript Verlag, 2019. Heinz Tschachler Creating Realities succeeds because of the strengths of its author, as a story teller as well as a meticulous researcher, who at one and the same time uses broad strokes and takes a deep dive. As a storyteller, Erhan Şimşek attempts an “evolutionary” history of American fiction, which, following the break with the romantic tradition, is made to appear as a succession of “organic continuations” (208) from realism to naturalism to modernism and, to an extent, to postmodernism. Successive steps are played out, both on an epistemological and a technical level. Asking, importantly, why a text is constructed in the way it is, the author provides four chapters of historical description, analysis, and discussion, fleshed out by an introduction, a literature review, a socio-historical chapter, a conclusion, and a bibliography (though, sadly, no index). What holds these divergent sections together is the motif of business. Of the two dozen or so different meanings of the word business, Şimşek settles on a simple one, “commercial activity” (12). Business fictions therefore are “works that have commercial activity or institutions and people who deal with commercial activities such as companies and businessmen as dominant themes in their plots” (12). In order to demonstrate that “the evolution of the motif of business coincides with the evolution of American literature” (11), Şimşek focuses on three works of fiction, each representative of a distinct period in American literary history, and each chosen because each has left what the author calls a longlasting “afterimage” (21), Şimşek’s felicitous term for “canonical”: William Dean Howells in The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885), that quintessential realist novel, uses the motif to provide moral and social orientation; in contrast, Theodore Dreiser in The Financier (1912) uses the world of finance to create the naturalistic effect of intensity and shock; as for the modernist agenda, in AAA - Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Band 44 (2019) · Heft 2 Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen DOI 10.2357/ AAA-2019-0010 Rezensionen 218 F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925) business helps reveal the impossibility of accessing reality, which must remain purely subjective. Şimşek appears to owe much of his view to Wolfgang Iser and, especially, Winfried Fluck, in whose Funktionsgeschichte approach he sees “new possibilities for the study of American literature,” in this instance a better understanding of “the aesthetic and thus affective grid inscribed in the literature of the period from a continental perspective” (29). What is “inscribed” is, however, only an aesthetic potential, which can be “concretized” or “realized” by readers (13-14). Readers’ actual concretizations or realizations, their aesthetic experiences, are next to impossible to grasp. Hence critics can only hypothesize what a literary text does to its readers, what its potential functions are (14). Given Şimşek’s overarching theme, his study therefore comes to us as “a Funktionsgeschichte of the motif of business and how the motif creates the potential aesthetic functions of these works of fiction” (16). How, then, are the functions of the business motif revealed? Şimşek here sets up the familiar triangulation of text, reader, and author. The motif, he postulates, “makes the plot possible in the first place” (18). Silas Lapham’s paint business, for instance, enables his financial ruin and moral rise, thus orienting readers towards Howells’s social and ethical ideals. In The Financier, Frank Cowperwood’s financial activities are inseparable from his rise, failure, and final triumph, which comes to readers as a shock. And in The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald uses his protagonist’s doubtful business activities to convince readers that there are only subjective realities. For all their differences, realist, naturalist, and modernist writers were responding to the needs of readers. Those needs, Şimşek elaborates in Chapter 1, were triggered by a profound “loss of reality” (33). Felt by writers and readers alike, loss of reality was caused by broad social changes—industrialization, urbanization, and centralization. These changes unmoored individuals from traditional communities and institutions, pushing them to the peripheries of the social world where they would live on what the market offered and mostly experience impersonal relationships. As a result, “Americans from all walks of life felt disoriented, dislocated, and fragmented—a sense that revealed itself primarily in the way people defined reality: reality was an ‘absent’ category for enlightened middle classes” (36). American writers of the post-Civil War era vastly diverged of how they perceived and defined “reality,” yet in their offering reality to readers they all differed from writers in the antebellum period. American Romanticism, Şimşek argues in Chapter 2, lacked social texture, as writers were primarily interested in mystery, melodrama, or any other larger-thanlife subject matter (47-53). To the extent that the business motif was used at all in this era, it was used either to juxtapose the profane against the sacred, thus offering spiritual comfort, or else, as in the writings by Edgar Allan Poe, to demonstrate human universals such as greed (53-55). 1 Once traditional institutions such as family and church had lost their power of cohesiveness, 1 In my The Monetary Imagination of Edgar Allan Poe I argue that Poe goes well beyond a romantic or transcendentalist agenda, exploring the vicissitudes of American banking and finance in the antebellum period. Rezensionen 219 however, people were in dire need of explicit knowledge, of experience—in short, of reality, which became writers’ premier strategy for coming to terms with “the threats of social change” (Amy Kaplan, qtd. 59). Yet writers, Şimşek is careful to point out, do not simply reflect reality but rather constitute realities, thus making their works feel real (62-63). One way to create the reality effect was to drastically shorten the distance between signifier and signified. Thus, “business” is simply a word, not what it may signify, with the plot acted out by particular people in particular circumstances (65). If characters, not plot, are central to realist fiction, it is easy for writers to represent the social, psychological, and moral growth of their protagonists, thus offering social and ethical orientation to their readers. The endeavor, among American realist writers, culminated in William Dean Howells’s quintessentially realist novel and national bestseller, The Rise of Silas Lapham, the subject of Chapter 3. Fiction, Howells said, “has to tell a tale as well as evolve a moral” (qtd. 104). Accordingly, Lapham’s social and moral growth is inseparable from his business organization. The business motif allowed readers to connect the reality represented with the reality experienced (109) at the same time as it allowed the author to unite diverse social groups in American society, in this instance the middle classes and the leisure class (110). While The Rise of Silas Lapham, in contrast to earlier realist fiction, describes the organizations and activities of business in great detail, it is predicated on its author’s firm belief in the “perfectibility of humanity” (qtd. 101). Thus, the novel does not reflect economic givens so much as it orients readers socially and ethically (128). If Howells has little to say about the harsh realities of the underclasses or the nefarious practices of the robber barons, this is entirely in sync with the realist agenda: confined within Victorian morality, Howells’s purpose was to imagine the “true potential” of business (71), by which he meant that economic self-interest was to play itself out within ethical limits. But “business” is “a versatile tool” (75), which equally lent itself to the “scandalous” intensity of naturalism. Theodore Dreiser’s The Financier, Şimşek demonstrates in Chapter 4, paradigmatically reveals the naturalists’ attempts to offer intense and shocking realities to the reading public. In order to achieve this, the normality of everyday life had to be bracketed, replaced by unleashed passions and other “scandalous” things, which more often than not are mediated, not through a stable and reassuring narrator but through an utterly unreliable narratorcharacter. Dreiser’s protagonist, the successful businessman Frank Cowperwood—based at the same time on the financier and railway tycoon Charles Yerkes and Dreiser’s own dreams of wish fulfillment (174-76)—is immune to moral growth. While he “learns” from past mistakes, his “growth” climaxes only with his shocking success in the financial world of Philadelphia. Frank’s triumph—the result of his “bearish” investment strategies during the crisis of 1873 (192-95)—is also his liberation from all social constraints, a resolution that is indirectly and figuratively anticipated in the beginning. In The Financier, the protagonist learns that society is a hostile environment and that the only way to beat the system is to become ruthlessly individualistic. Rezensionen 220 This individualization goes hand in hand with the subjectivization of readers, an objective that modernist writers would perfect. For modernists, there was no stable, external reality at all; reality was personal, private, purely subjective, and fluid (203). It was F. Scott Fitzgerald who in The Great Gatsby combined the subjectivization of readers with the business motif. Business, Şimşek shows in Chapter 5, renders Nick’s narration utterly unreliable, thus buttressing the novel’s dominant themes, miscommunication and misunderstanding (199-200). Paradoxically, however, there is also trust in the narrator, which comes through the motif of business, as it enables Nick to meet Gatsby in a plausible way (217). But The Great Gatsby essentially is a love story, and so the business motif plays itself out rather more subliminally—in untimely phone calls, secret meetings and rumors, and through hints at Gatsby’s shady dealings (219-23). However, appreciation of Şimşek’s work, which is methodically sound in terms of discursively correlating business and fiction, is compromised by the way it ends. The end sets in with the Gatsby chapter, which is noticeably shorter than the preceding ones. There is little biographical information, nothing on the publishing history (the year of the novel’s first publication, 1925, is cited only in the introduction), and no other frameworks, psychological or otherwise. Has material been edited out? Or did the author somehow run out of steam? In contrast, Fitzgerald’s The Last Tycoon, though left unfinished, does have a protagonist who is inextricably involved with business, in this instance, the motion picture business in America, with Monroe Stahr being, indeed, a heroic businessman, “a marker in industry.” 2 Strangely also, Şimşek’s section on “The Business Motif After the Great Depression” stops in the mid-1970s. True, in the second half of the twentieth century, business fictions appeared only occasionally (11), but why is there nothing after Joseph Heller’s Something Happened (1974) and William Gaddis’s JR: A Novel (1975)? Works like Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities (1987), Oliver Stone’s 1987 film Wall Street, together with its 2010 sequel Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, or Martin Scorcese’s The Wolf of Wall Street (2013) might have provoked a different view of business and businessmen, which Şimşek looks at, not in terms of the “Scrooge syndrome” (27, the term is Emily Watts’s) but “unencumbered by older anxieties” (28). Equally “unencumbered” seems Şimşek’s bashing of the Hegelian tradition in criticism, most notably of left liberals like Amy Kaplan or Walter Benn Michaels (29-31), whose works he dismisses as “literary-economic philosophizing” because for them literary motifs such as business are merely “tools to reach the spirit of the age,” and the literariness of literary texts a mere “nuisance [and an] undesired distraction” (30, 31). While such outpourings against “ideological” approaches are perhaps understandable as a typical “rebellion against the fathers” (Fliegelman 1982: 210), they are followed up by a polemics for a revival of “literary aesthetics” at English departments. Yet students of English, it should be remembered, are not just training as literary scholars, but also to learn to re- 2 F. Scott Fitzgerald (1986). The Last Tycoon: an unfinished novel. Ed. Edmund Wilson [1941]. New York: Collier Macmillan. 28. Rezensionen 221 sponsibly contribute toward solving humanity’s problems and, as well, to the beneficial development of society and the natural environment. 3 Such an understanding of university education is hardly “simplistic” (29), nor does it justify playing off “the autonomy of literary works” against historical consciousness and historical content, least of all under the mantle of “transnational” American Studies (28). Despite the polemics in the introductory chapter, however, the “reading” sections of Creating Realities are not a throwback to the bygone days of New Criticism. Şimşek provides quite a number of extraliterary frameworks, from biography to social history to literary history to psychoanalysis. In fact, the sections devoted to analyses of the key texts are considerably short— altogether some 35 pages (The Rise of Silas Lapham: 20; The Financier: 17; The Great Gatsby: 7) out of a total of 236 pages of text. As Şimşek himself concedes in the conclusion, “mere close-reading is insufficient for literary research” (233). One can only agree with that. On the other hand, it is hard to understand why Şimşek consistently refers to America’s middle classes (itself a most elusive concept) as “enlightened.” Just as consistently, and unnecessarily, he construes the reader as masculine. It helps little that in a footnote to chapter 1 he asserts that “[all] gender-specific pronouns in this study are to be considered to refer to both the feminine and the masculine form, except when referring to a particular person” (35n2). Construing readers as masculine is especially disturbing since elsewhere (105) he notes, correctly, that especially in the years leading up to the turn of century the primary consumers of fiction were women. Still, Şimşek has achieved much in his study, convincing readers of the importance of the business motif in the evolution of American literature. The way writers (and readers, too) defined reality, he concludes, “was the engine of literary evolution: while realists defined it through the ‘middle path,’ naturalists and modernists defined reality as intensity an subjectivity, respectively” (235). The business motif, because of the predominance of business in American culture and society (9-12), provided writers with an important tool, helping them to get their works read and accepted, thus constituting an important communicative function. This function goes beyond dishing up commonplaces such as Calvin Coolidge’s remark that “the chief business of the American people is business” (9). As Şimşek concludes, rightly I think, writers also used the motif of business to “define America in relation to Europe” (233). Creating Realities, which is based on a doctoral dissertation accepted by Heidelberg University in 2016, provides a learned and inspiring study of American fiction from the end of the Civil War through the Great Depression. 3 Austrian university law is quite explicit about this, including, in the first paragraph, the following provision: “Die Universitäten sind berufen, der wissenschaftlichen Forschung und Lehre, der Entwicklung und der Erschließung der Künste sowie der Lehre der Kunst zu dienen und hiedurch auch verantwortlich zur Lösung der Probleme des Menschen sowie zur gedeihlichen Entwicklung der Gesellschaft und der natürlichen Umwelt beizutragen.” § 1 Universitätsgesetz 2002, emphases added. Rezensionen 222 References Fliegelman, Jay (1982). Prodigals and Pilgrims: The American Revolution against Patriarchal Authority, 1750-1800. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press. Tschachler, Heinz (2013). The Monetary Imagination of Edgar Allan Poe: Banking, Currency and Politics in the Writings. Jefferson, NC: McFarland. Universitätsgesetz 2002. Bundesgesetz über die Organisation der Universitäten und ihre Studien. BGBl. I Nr. 120/ 2002. [online] https: / / www.ris. bka. gv.at/ GeltendeFassung.wxe? Abfrage=Bundesnormen&Gesetzesnummer=200 02128&FassungVom=2019-05-14. Heinz Tschachler University of Klagenfurt Austria