10.2357/ REAL-2021-0008 i sabel c apeloa g il The Risky NPV of Literature in Dos Passos and Pessoa The properties of the text are the product of certain forms of paying attention Stanley Fish, “Is there a text in this class? ” 1 Value(s) Arguably, the value, or rather values, of literature are markedly a result of ‘forms of paying attention ’ 1 And these forms may be organised around aesthetic norms, moral codes and ethical concerns, political ideals, ideology, or even a fiduciary nexus. They are less the outcome of essential properties and normative settings than of a contextual exchange between writers and their multiple readers, notably editors, critics, followers, friends, bloggers, tweeters, publicists, marketers, and a wide panoply of text (re)producers In the opening reflections of his seminal reading of Balzac’s Sarrasine, in S/ Z, Roland Barthes strives to underpin where the value of a text lies The specific difference that substantiates the singularity of the literary text, he concludes “is not, obviously, some complete, irreducible quality (according to a mythic view of literary creation); it is not what designates the individuality of each text […]; on the contrary, it is a difference which does not stop and which is articulated upon the infinity of texts, of languages, of systems: a difference of which each text is the return ” 2 The literary is then neither articulated as a set of normative properties, nor as their subversion Literature occurs in the space of ‘estrangement’ or of the ‘making strange,’ as the Russian Formalists upheld The difference of the text is presented as an exchange that never stops, articulated “upon the infinity of languages, texts, and systems.” And he asks “How then, posit the value of a text? ” For Barthes, value does not come from what he names the ideological value (moral, aesthetic, political) 1 Stanley Fish, Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretative Communities (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1982), 36 2 Roland Barthes, S/ Z: An Essay (New York: Hill and Wang, 1985), 3 168 i sabel c apeloa g il 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0008 The value of the text is ultimately its value of exchange, that is, it arises out of the potentiality of the written to be re-written and not simply read The value of the text is then the writerly, or what can be rewritten. He adds: “Why is the writerly our value? Because the goal of literary work (of literature as work) is to make the reader no longer a consumer, but a producer of the text ” 3 In this exchange between production/ consumption and re-production, the literary is produced as a flow, an exchange of creative capital inflows and outflows, without loss. In managerial terms, a creative cash flow of sorts defines literature’s NPV (Net Present Value) 4 This financial metaphor is representative of a wider question, the nature of the relation between literature and the economy, which I am less interested in discussing from the fiduciary point of view, what Marc Shell has named the real role and the real value of literary work in economic affairs, 5 but rather from the representational perspective of a certain discourse that uses the language and the tropes of the economy to articulate the shape of our common forms of living together Literature as a system and a structure of exchange aggregates the vocabulary and the images of money culture to understand the rhetoric and interpret the narratives of neo-liberalism or socialism, welfare, crisis, austerity, growth, and risk My reflections seek to articulate a representational NPV, the result of the creative flow between literature and the economy, by looking at the specific problem of financial risk in John Dos Passos’ The Big Money (1936) and Fernando Pessoa’s The Anarchist Banker (1922) 2 Risk From the standpoint of cultural anthropology, risk is conceived as a cultural enabler based on a discourse of uncertainty that mediates between the subject’s own beliefs and the uncertain odds of the natural and social worlds It is then stitched into the social fabric by practices of choice, acceptability, selection, and management In this process, the untamed irrationality of risk, that which cannot be controlled and is unacceptable for the community, is transformed into a game of rationally-based probability Thus, while risks are in theory uncontrollable, 6 culture seeks to take control of them by creating 3 Ibid , 4 4 Net Present Value is the difference from cash inflows and cash outflows, which may be positive, negative, or 0 5 Marc Shell, Money, Language and Thought (Baltimore/ London: Johns Hopkins UP, 1993), 150 6 And yet Jerome Ravetz postulates that, as for the Greeks, the odds are always uncontrollable: “[…] risks are conceptually uncontrollable: one can never know whether one The Risky NPV of Literature in Dos Passos and Pessoa 169 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0008 insurance narratives formed out of a selection of hazards managed by probabilistic approaches This spawns the question, how does the aesthetic articulate the risky pull of the social? And, in sum, what are we talking about when we discuss risk and literature? What is now required is a deeper scrutiny of art’s relation with one of its practices most deeply engaged with risk discourse In economic discourse risk resonates both as a symbol and as a tool of the trade, and more often than not, the system’s trust lies in the metaphor Albeit addressed to different interpretative communities, the idea of risk both in literary and in economic speech connotes symbolisation Strikingly, as far as the understanding of risk is concerned, the economy and literature share a foundation They do so because both deal with risk as representation and as conceptual tool The literary adds to these usages of risk two more strategic actions, namely the understanding of literature as a risky undertaking in our cataclysmic world and finally a consideration of literature’s institutional role as an aesthetic risk manager in a hazardous modernity The literary, as the following discussion of John Dos Passos and Fernando Pessoa will suggest, has then built on the energies of the discursive patterns of risk arising out of economic thinking whilst constructing a counter-narrative to the classical, almost destiny-driven theory of the inevitable economic cycles of boom and bust In economics, risk management is permeated, on the one hand, by an overwhelming desire to overcome the innate hazard determined by nature or economic and social threats and to bet against them in order to achieve high returns, and, on the other hand, by a strange level of risk aversion The paradox that pervades both society and its by-product, the economy, is that, as economists Samuelson and Nordhaus argue in their economic risk theory: “People are generally risk-adverse, preferring a sure thing to uncertain levels of consumption: people prefer outcomes with less uncertainty and the same average values For this reason, activities that reduce the uncertainties of consumption lead to improvements in economic welfare ” 7 What economics tries to discern, then, is how to live with uncertainty and is doing enough to prevent a hazard from occurring Even after a hazard has occurred, one is still left with the question of how much more action would have been necessary to have prevented it, and whether such action would have been within the bounds of ‘reasonable’ behaviour ” Ravetz, “Public Perceptions of Acceptable Risks as Evidence for their Cognitive, Technical and Social Structure,” Technological Risk: Its Perception and Handling in the European Community, eds Meinholf Dierkes/ Sam F Edwards/ Rob Coppock (Cambridge, MA: Oelgeschlager, Gunn Hain, 1980), 47 7 Paul Samuelson/ William D Nordhaus, Economics (Boston: McGraw Hill, 2010), 215 170 i sabel c apeloa g il 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0008 profit in risky markets without giving up security and stability. The challenge is to decide what is an acceptable risk in a world that has been consistently constructed as perilous Addressing a different constituency, the question for literature is how to create narratives that will manage the sense of uncertainty and allow the subject to be productive in a framework endangered by the threat of probability going wrong The challenge for literature thus becomes turning risk into art and art into a stimulant for the task of living Two striking texts about the uncontrollable odds of a daunting bear market and the risky psychology of modern money culture are Fernando Pessoa’s conte philosophique The Anarchist Banker (1922) and John Dos Passos’ U.S.A. trilogy, most particularly The Big Money (1936) In the heyday of high capitalism, modernist prose became particularly relevant not only in drawing attention to the paradoxes of society and the aporias of the financial world, but also as a means of communicating and articulating the somewhat impenetrable risk-driven market-relations By means of what Jerome Bruner calls ‘hermeneutic composability,’ 8 modernist prose gives meaning to otherwise thick social dynamics, and helps to select and manage the shared values supporting the spreading of risk in the modern world Moreover, as Pessoa’s dialectical satire 9 remarkably shows, literature has the ability to denaturalise risk and reflect upon its contingent discursive practices. Hence, literature poses another kind of risk management, one that does not depend on the high price of risk to sell, but rather one that instructs the reader in the caveats of the risk doctrine 3 Acceptable Risks: Pessoa and Dos Passos on Money and Culture In a modern world increasingly pervaded by economic narratives, literature has engagingly sought to address this particular form of ‘telling’ and the challenge it poses to the general organisation of culture and society The discourse of risk is just another instance of what Doreen Massey and the signatories of the Kilburn Manifesto (2012) describe as the colonisation of the imagination by fiduciary rhetoric. 10 And yet, there is a counter-narrative to this ‘coloni- 8 Jerome Bruner, “The Narrative Construction of Reality,” Critical Inquiry 18 (1991), 7 9 This is how the poet described this story in a letter to fellow artist José Pacheco Fernando Pessoa, Prosa publicada em vida, ed Richard Zenith (Lisbon: Assírio e Alvim, 2006), 469 10 The Kilburn Manifesto was launched by Stuart Hall, Doreen Massey, and Michael Rustin in 2013, denouncing neoliberal advances in all sectors of society Special attention was taken to address its effects on the structure of the imagination in the first instalment of the project, titled ‘The Vocabularies of the Economy ’ Hall/ Massey/ Rustin, The Risky NPV of Literature in Dos Passos and Pessoa 171 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0008 sation’ that goes precisely against the grain by the literary forms of paying attention Literature’s very own mode of worldmaking inevitably forces it to take risks This is based on the writer’s ability to choose between versions of the world in a selection that, as Nelson Goodman compellingly argues, is never casual or random 11 Art, albeit creating a world with rules of its own, also takes the risk of choosing a path that enables creativity within a specific ‘sociological contingency,’ which is forever at risk Due to its creative non-conformity or social-political critique, literature more often than not runs risks In fact, running risks suggests the engagement with hazard cannot be controlled by the subject, but s/ he will nonetheless try to outwit chance Taking a risk instead implies trying something despite bad fortune being likely Arguably, just as the uncertain world we live in requires the institution of literature to ‘run risks’ in its critical engagement, on a micro-scale literature has also compellingly represented the trials faced by modern societies and the dire modes in which individuals ‘take risks ’ Faced with both the tyranny and the opportunity of rational choice, the modern individual is doomed to take risks in capitalist societies Witnessing the heyday of high capitalism in the first half of the twentieth century, modernist writers diagnosed the symbolical contamination of cultural practices by the discourse of money By making use of literature’s ‘economy of abundance,’ 12 that is, the immense power of words to produce meaning, modernist prose fiction sought to manage the failed promises of capitalism. This is precisely what the following discussion shall seek to engage with, by looking at Pessoa and Dos Passos, two instances of economic risk narratives in modern prose fiction, as modes of literary risk-management. In differing forms, they look at risk as a strategic metaphorical device underpinning the work of capitalism The risk narrative is deployed in the literary space through sub-plots organised around capitalism’s logic of opportunity, the disgrace of failure, and the hollow rhetoric of freedom The novels also work as counternarratives to this appropriation of the imagination by the fiduciary narrative, hence presenting the literary as a stimulant for critical reasoning about the modern money economy “On Vocabularies of Neoliberal Economy: The Kilburn Manifesto,” openDemocracy, 16 July 2013, https: / / www opendemocracy net/ en/ opendemocracyuk/ on-vocabularies-of-neoliberal-economy-kilburn-manifesto/ 11 Nelson Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1978), 10 12 I borrow the concept from Lewis Mumford, who referred to the ‘linguistic economy of abundance’ to address language’s symbolical productivity The Myth of the Machine: Technics and Human Development (New York: Mariner Books, 1967), 94 172 i sabel c apeloa g il 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0008 Let us begin with Pessoa In a letter to his friend Jo-o Gaspar Simões, Fernando Pessoa confessed that only “[…] shortage of money […] and thunder storm [were] capable of depressing [him] ” 13 A professional accountant, the prolific Pessoa was plagued by money shortages, but this did not lead him into writing harsh diatribes about capitalist culture Due to professional expertise, he was well read in the complexity of economics, and in 1926 published four short essays dedicated to commercial life in which he put across his economic liberal views and expressed a critique of the doctrines of both trust-based capitalism and socialism 14 A few years earlier, in 1922, he had written a rather obscure dialogue strongly attacking the unwarranted rationality of accumulative capitalism In the guise of the conte philosophique, The Anarchist Banker is a dialogue between a banker and his guest in the frame of an after-dinner philosophical conversation This dialectical satire is constructed against the grain of the socratic dialogue model, leading not to any enlightenment for the disciple, i e the guest, or even the reader, the ultimate addressee of the story, but rather presenting the ‘logical contradiction’ 15 of the money system The banker, who declares himself a true anarchist, instructs the disciple/ narrator in the “psychological way to anarchism ” 16 Described as a great merchant and notorious hoarder (50), the banker explains that his route to anarchism grew out of dissatisfaction with social conditions and the limits they imposed on human existence He had been drawn to anarchism because it sought to provide leverage to birth inequalities and destroy ‘social fictions,’ ultimately leading to the conquest of freedom by the disenfranchised individual The banker’s social fictions are discursive practices that imprison individuals and lead them to believe in the naturalisation of such discourses However, he soon realises that, despite its good intentions, what anarchy actually managed 13 Fernando Pessoa, Cartas de Fernando Pessoa a Jo-o Gaspar Simões (1932; Lisbon: Europa-América, 1957), 99, my translation 14 The four essays entitled “A Essência do Comércio” (“The Essence of Commerce”), “As Algemas” (“The Shackles”), “Régie, monopólio, liberdade” (“Régie, monopoly, liberty”), and “A evoluç-o do comércio” (“The Evolution of Commerce”) were published in the Revista de Comércio e Contabilidade (Journal of Commerce and Accounting), in 1926 Pessoa was the editor and co-founder of the journal with his brother in law 15 Ellen Sapega, “A Logical Contradiction and Contradictory Logic: Fernando Pessoa’s O Banqueiro Anarquista,” Luso-Brazilian Review 26 (1989), 111 16 Pessoa, The Anarchist Banker [O banqueiro anarquista] Subsequent quotations from The Anarchist Banker are referenced in parentheses in the text See on Pessoa’s engagement with anarchist theory, particularly with Max Stirner and Paul Eltzbacher, Burghard Balrusch, “O banqueiro anarquista e a construç-o heteronímica de Fernando Pessoa,” Lusorama 81-82 (2010), 39-65 On the critique of socialism via Oscar Wilde’s The Soul of Man under Socialism see Suzete Macedo, “Fernando Pessoa’s The Anarquist Banker and The Soul of Man under Socialism,” Portuguese Studies 7 (1991), 106-132 The Risky NPV of Literature in Dos Passos and Pessoa 173 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0008 to do was replace one social fiction, bourgeois capitalism, with another, and hence one form of domination for another This leads him to question the doctrine’s collective mode of action and to engage in a self-critical reflection on the best way to implement true anarchism and attain freedom In a skilful logical exercise, the story constructs a rational argument that ends by legitimating the banker’s status quo To achieve this, Pessoa deploys the tools of modern critical discourse arguing against the political conquests of modernity - the natural equality of citizens and their equality before the law, the promise of individual freedom and happiness, social contractualism, and Lockean liberalism The argument’s structure confronts the pitfalls of modernity’s pledge of empowerment and freedom with the argumentative skill of philosophical reasoning It thus becomes a sort of tale of modernity against the grain, one that uses the rhetoric of modern philosophical discourse to subvert its promises In a certain way, the story makes a rational argument against the logos, to reveal irrational manic hoarding at the heart of the enlightened modern money culture Quite symptomatically, the banker strikes the reader as a precocious post-modern philosopher revealing the modern master narratives, from liberalism to socialism and communism, as fictions. This is no unique phenomenon in Pessoa’s work, as The Book of Disquiet [Livro do Desassossego], by his heteronym Bernardo Soares, already includes traces of modern self-criticism blended with a deep awareness of the social-political systems as discursive practices imposed upon docile agents 17 As Pessoa criticism has demonstrated at length, Pessoa’s oeuvre 18 cannot be subsumed under strict typologies If anything, contradiction is the most stable trait marking the fictional interaction between the production of Pessoa himself and his many heteronyms, particularly the fabulous three, Alberto Caeiro, Álvaro de Campos and Ricardo Reis Nevertheless, within the complex web of Pessoan poetics, mutual illuminations 19 among its many strands and disparate world pictures help to provide a structural cogency The contradictory logic of the banker not only displays a certain anticipation of post-modern questioning of the self-critical 17 The Book of Disquiet [O Livre do Desassossego] was published post-mortem in 1982 and is dated back to two production periods ranging from 1913-1920 and 1929-35 18 If anything, the term is ironic, as Fernando Pessoa’s work cannot be addressed as an organic whole, but rather as a fragmentary totality in dialogue with itself 19 See, as representative examples of the immense approaches to the many strands of Pessoa readings, Jorge de Sena, Fernando Pessoa e Cª Heterónima (Lisbon: Edições 70, 1982), 10; Eduardo Lourenço, O lugar do anjo: Ensaios pessoanos (Lisbon: Gradiva, 2004), 55ff 174 i sabel c apeloa g il 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0008 logic of modernity, but it is also a symptom of the creative uncertainty that marks the writer’s works 20 The short story sets out to develop a logical argument proving that the path to dominating, not destroying, social fictions is individual, because although human beings are constrained by the social relations they enter into, they are in effect born different and unequal Natural qualities then provide for the development of different skills that will make all individuals naturally different and hence socially diverse In a social Darwinist fashion, the banker argues that the state of inequality will condemn all collective attempts to alter it, because a group of naturally diverse individuals will never be able to destroy the social fictions as such. Henceforth, anarchism as a collective doctrine is doomed, as the anarchist wishes to foster freedom for him/ herself and for all others (59), but resorts to collective means that will nonetheless lead to yet another form of tyranny 21 While the first law the banker arrives at is the natural inequality amongst citizens, the second follows from the realisation that since anarchism is unrealisable, only bourgeois society is just and fair (57) With his tentative Cartesian method, the banker reduces all systems to the common denominator of fictions so as to simply conclude that none is natural per se but becomes natural by habit. Because bourgeois capitalism is the social fiction the banker was born into, it seems to be the most natural of all Nonetheless, as an anarchist, he knows that it is a fiction that promotes social inequality and oppression The way ahead may be tricky, but since all collective actions to destroy it are doomed by the natural inequality amongst individuals, he knows the only path to freedom is personal Yet, as an individual, he cannot destroy the fiction, but solely aim to control it. Therefore, in order to be free, the banker must subjugate the fiction of capitalism, which is based on the accumulation of money, “the most important social fiction ever.” (72) The result is that, to achieve personal freedom, the anarchist must turn into a (neo) liberal and act accordingly, promoting self-interest and doing away with moral concerns and 20 The piece has been discussed as a satirical exercise of modern discursive practice (Sapega, “Logical Contradiction,” 110); within the framework of Pessoa’s work and its negotiations with heteronimity (Lourenço, Lugar, 10; Balrusch, “O banqueiro,” 39); and from a social-political standpoint and as an exercise in neoliberal economics (Macedo, “Fernando,” 130; David K Jackson: “The Adventure of the Anarchist Banker: Reductio ad absurdum of a Neo-liberal,” Portuguese Studies 22 2 1 [2006], 209-218) 21 According to Pessoa, the same argument can be made for socialism and its aim to impose a dictatorship of the proletariat that, by relying on revolution, will impose a permanent state of war (Anarchist Banker, 56) The Risky NPV of Literature in Dos Passos and Pessoa 175 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0008 solidarity 22 By reducing self-interest to personal egotism, the anarchist understands he may only control the fiction of money by being free of its influence, which means he will need to acquire just as much money as he possibly can “By acquiring money, one is freed of its influence” (73), i.e. of its domineering fictionality. Thus, only the hoarder may become the true anarchist. In the process of anarchic hoarding that underlies accumulative capitalism, the banker manages to reduce risk to a minimum, increasing wealth at the expense of oppressing the workers At this stage, it proves useful to look at the fictional relationship the short story establishes with the commercial pieces Pessoa wrote, despite the fact that these essays for the Revista do Comércio are certainly far in aim and rhetoric from the fictional contradiction of The Anarchist Banker However, they may provide some insights into a suggestive reading of the role risk plays in this self-questioning labyrinth In the articles for this professional journal, Pessoa comes across as a liberal in defence of a free and self-regulating market, advocating limits to government As he claims in “Shackles,” this derives from the fact that a society of equals cannot be self-regulated 23 Equality is here understood as similarity of interest The State is not placed above us, but rather amongst us so that it is moved by self-interest just as the merchant is moved by his interest to sell Because the State’s self-interest will inevitably compete with the individual’s, the former is incompetent at regulating the social egotism of citizens in money economies This leads the State into a conundrum, for whilst government regulation is a form of decay arising from a monopoly over economic life, utter deregulation may also bring about syndication, that is, control of social life by major 22 The banker’s ethics of self-interest clash with the emancipation narratives of modernity Because he abolishes the social contract as a model of class dialogue, he can only conceive of an interaction based on the control of one social fiction by another. It is thus that the social is always and already conceived as a state of war amongst fictions. It is nonetheless striking that the unwarranted promotion of self-interest that some have understood as neoliberal ethics (Jackson, “Adventures,” 210), does actually address some of the concerns of the Austrian school of neoclassical economics and the belief in an utterly self-regulated market where only the best suppliers thrive The banker strikes against Kant’s second critique by arguing that even if the idea of morality and justice is natural and inbred, self-interest will naturally clash with solidarity for the other Clearly, “[…] a ideia de dever só poderia considerar-se natural se trouxesse consigo uma compensaç-o egoísta.[…] sacrificar um prazer, simplesmente sacrificá-lo n-o é natural; sacrificar um prazer a outro, é que já está dentro da Natureza.” (“[…] the idea of duty can only be considered natural if it brings along some sort of personal compensation. […] To sacrifice a pleasure is simply unnatural; to sacrifice a pleasure to the attainment of another, that lies within nature’s purposes ”) (61) The banker does away with any attempt at promoting the categorical imperative as no personal moral rule may be treated as universal for any purpose whatsoever 23 Pessoa, “Shackles,” 429 176 i sabel c apeloa g il 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0008 monopoly trusts 24 In Friedrich Hayek’s fashion, it seems that for Pessoa, the accountant, only individual difference and cautious self-rule may contribute to the market’s utopian self-regulation Because he brands markets, though fickle and feeble, as ultimately psychological phenomena 25 that may be controlled by the rational assessment of the merchant, Pessoa himself, the accountant, concedes that the uncertainty of markets is regulated by the movement of the market itself and that the biggest risk comes from the destabilising of this ‘natural order’ by unwarranted state intervention. This is however not the road Pessoa the fictionist takes. Within the deregulated world of the anarchist hoarder, the only apparent risk is the wrongful use of one’s natural abilities to promote the submission of the individual to social fictions (67). Once the fiction of money is tamed by personal wealth accumulation, the uncertainty that arises from the lack of liberty and the tyranny of social fictions is curbed. The irrational, continuous volition for money George Simmel refers to 26 becomes for the banker the logical argument for the managing of social risk The dialectical satire proves the rational argument utterly irrational, a structured form of the obsessive fictionalising of the discursive practice of hoarding The contradictory logic becomes a logical fiction that whilst revealing the logical banker as the ultimate fictionist of the money narrative, discloses fiction as the last stand of modernity’s self-critique. Because fiction is the place where the contradictory master narratives of modernity are confronted and their risky rationality questioned, the satirical argument ultimately discloses the banker’s certainty as yet another mask of modernity Emplotting the logic of contradiction is arguably a good description for Dos Passos’ discussion of American capitalism Following The 42nd Parallel (1930) and 1919 (1932), The Big Money (1936) is the third part of John dos Passos’ U.S.A. trilogy reflecting on the discursive management of the promises of success dealt out by American democracy and its counterpart American capitalism The fragmented nature of Dos Passos’ novel embodies the modern sense of sensorial override marking the experience of modernity 27 The novel 24 Ibid , 447 25 Ibid , 429 26 Georg Simmel, “Zur Psychologie des Geldes,” Jahrbuch für Gesetzgebung, Verwaltung und Volkswirtschaft 13 (1889), 320 27 The trilogy presents four different modes of narration: a third-person narrator that tracks the lives of the contenders, usually told in free indirect speech; the Camera Eye, snapshots of modern urban experience that provide a kind of moral undertone to the promises of modern America; Newsreel, a collage of contemporary front page headlines, which in The Big Money come from The New York World, a local popular paper, or even fragments of popular songs and shows Finally, there are biographical depic- The Risky NPV of Literature in Dos Passos and Pessoa 177 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0008 brings to a close the life story of several characters, whose development had been followed since 42nd Street, weighing their odds and opportunities, their potential for success and their failures. Unlike Pessoa’s short story, which provides a satirical guideline on how to tame risk and control money, Dos Passos presents the embedding of spectacular promise and disappointment, of euphoric success and crushed disgrace that is at the heart of the modern narrative of America In a sense, The Big Money scans risk and uses fragmented focalisation and different text types to denaturalise the dream of capitalist discourse, or rather to de-essentialise the fiction. Focusing on the post-war years and the Golden Age of high capitalism before the market crash of 1929, the novel ‘tells’ of the birth and the rise of risk society In this world where, as Niklas Luhmann argues, there are no heroes and no absolute rulers, but where for better or worse everyone is a player, money is the sole master narrative 28 Charley Anderson, the decorated war hero who returns to New York after having overcome the trials of combat in the French trenches, epitomises the pitfalls of chance Having invested his family money in the emerging aeronautics business, he rides the rollercoaster once the company’s stock is put on the market and bucks or dips with the interest of investors, gaining and losing fortunes The social recognition a wealthy marriage wins him is soon endangered by lack of self-rule Alcohol and sex combined with ill-conceived market betting become the fast lane to death on Florida’s roads The killings in the stockmarket 29 eerily disclose a hidden victim at the other end of the rainbow Considered by Lionel Trilling as an apology for the moral integrity of America in his discussion of the novel for the Partisan Review in 1938, 30 The Big Money is a keen instance of literature’s negotiation of the narrative of capitalism and the danger it injects into the moral core of the nation The promise of American democracy that “pushes its best forward” (1019) becomes the bottom line of a discourse of economic growth Henry Ford, one of the characters hailed in the novel’s short biographies as the hallmark of American capitalism, summed it up with the industrial factory production of the Tin Lizzie The key to success is “[…] economical quantity production, quick tions of some of America’s modern heroes and villains, from Henry Ford, Frank Lloyd Wright, Isadora Duncan to Thorstein Veblen or the Wright Brothers John Dos Passos, U.S.A.: The 42nd Parallel/ 1919/ The Big Money (New York: The Library of America, 1996) 28 Niklas Luhmann, Soziologie des Risikos (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1988), 141 29 John Dos Passos, U.S.A.: The 42nd Parallel/ 1919/ The Big Money (New York: The Library of America, 1996), 988, 1042, 1224 Subsequently, quotations from The Big Money are referenced in parentheses in the text 30 Lionel Trilling, “The America of John dos Passos,” John dos Passos: The Critical Heritage, ed Barry Maine (1938; London: Routledge, 1988), 159 178 i sabel c apeloa g il 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0008 turnover, cheap interchangeable easily replaced standardized parts ” (808) Automotive production provides the blueprint for a model of economic development that draws on quick, standardised assembly, and builds on a social model where a few decide and many execute As it turned out, “there were strings to it ” (809) On the downside stood not only bad investors, like Charley Anderson, but also the impoverished working class, defiled and abused by both capital and political interests, from the U S Congress to the persecuted socialist groups, depicted in the story of social worker Mary French In a certain way, both Charley Anderson’s desire for big money and Mary French’s hopes of an equitable society are crushed by the radical inhumanity of America’s risky Gilded Age The stock market’s promise of large returns on high risk and the drive for productivity are finally symbolised by the third route on the roadmap of American happiness: show business In the end, it is Margo Dowling, emerging actress and show girl, who epitomises the road to success on Broadway and in the movies and ultimately becomes the only successful character in the novel 31 Before the market crash and the aporias of oppressive labour, it is, after all, on the screen that the hollow promise of America’s capitalist democracy continues to hold, as a ghostly presence in Hollywood’s dreamy landscape As argued in The Anarchist Banker, Dos Passos also conveys a world where money is society’s strongest social fiction. However, unlike the banker who engages in hoarding procedures as the individual way to subdue the fiction that will, in the end, totally immerse him (Anarchist Banker 55), the urban characters in the Dos Passos’ novel struggle throughout to tame the money plot, as an object with both material and symbolic appeal Money becomes a telos and a quagmire It is both a promise of hope and a high road to hell, it is a fiction of happiness, and its lack a gruesome sign of despair. Embedded in the deep tissue of the narrative of America, money is precisely the tall tale the U.S.A. trilogy clearly aims to denaturalise; money is not actually tantamount to American success, most particularly after the First World War In fact, this is not simply a critique of money, it is a statement of the hollowness of Deweyan ‘moral democracy ’ The target of moral recovery brings the Dos Passos project very close to the ideas of another icon of socialism in America, Thorstein Veblen, also depicted in The Big Money. The contrasts between the clashing social worlds of corporate America and labour, which the novel carefully constructs, acquire a certain programmatic outlook in the biographical presentation of Veblen’s proposal of a new social diagram in The Theory of 31 See on the relation of spectacle and money culture in Hollywood film Elisabeth Bronfen, “The Violence of Money,” Revista de Comunicaç-o e Cultura 6 (2008), 53-66 The Risky NPV of Literature in Dos Passos and Pessoa 179 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0008 the Leisure Class (1899) However, Dos Passos depicts the two social models Veblen envisages, those of the warlike society vs the common-sense society, as limited The novel does, in fact, move closer to the realism of the warlike society, where social Darwinism rules Whether in the wake of the Spanish American War, for Veblen, or in the aftermath of WWI, for the Dos Passos characters, these offer a powerful diagnosis of how the social continues to be guerroyant beyond the politically defined violence of war. This is contrasted with the social utopia of a ‘matter of fact, common sense society’ (Big Money 852) where private skills are developed to the best of one’s abilities, though crushed in the raw diagnosis of socialist America and in the utopian selflessness of the social worker, Mary French Veblen, in fact, like other Dos Passos’ biographies of the American tale, from captains of industry to genial inventors, such as the Wright Brothers, or artistic characters, such as Isadora Duncan, joins the ranks of those who are ultimately normalised by the society they aim to renew. In other words, he is crushed by the social fiction he aims to deconstruct These true players of American culture end up unable to overcome the risks dealt to them by society I contend that Dos Passos paints a remarkable picture of the risk society Losers are guilty of unreasonable wager and winners attain their profits by skilfully handling hazard and distributing risks amongst the less knowledgeable, who find themselves on the short end of the stick. Risk is not simply a hazard that will undoubtedly bring about doom for the gamer, but within the novel’s economy may be considered from a threefold perspective: first as an opportunity; secondly as an uncontrollable hazard, and thirdly as a spectacular practice Risk is presented as an opportunity for those on the winning end, or at least while they are on the winning end As another Dos Passos character in Manhattan Transfer, muckraker journalist Jimmy Herf, claims, New York and America are mesmerised by the fiction of a “land of opportoonity,” 32 where nothing succeeds like success Should money be the founding American fiction, opportunity and risk are its guiding doctrines. The novel follows the pull towards investment spreading into speculation and wagering on the odds prevailing in the stock market, completely oblivious to the real conditions of the labour market or the economy in general Charley Anderson, Dick Savage, and the host of lawyers and bankers who follow big capital are well trained in the task of risk assessment (Big Money 1133-34) and in the need for ‘moulding the public mind’ (1199) to ‘take risks ’ The road to the crash of 1929 is paved precisely with the encouragement to take risk and overcome the aversion to hazard, as expressed in the headlines of Newsreel 32 John Dos Passos, Manhattan Transfer (1925; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986), 242 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0008 180 i sabel c apeloa g il LX: “Speculative sentiment was encouraged at the opening of the week by the clearer outlook Favourable weather was doing much to eliminate the signs of hesitation lately evinced by several traders ” (1041) The irrationality of the market and its psychological fickleness comes clearly across. Yet, although the coming crash upsets exchange for a while, the risk doctrine is presented as a resilient fiction, clearly betting on the cyclical waves of boom and bust that Joseph Schumpeter named capitalism’s ‘gales of creative destruction ’ The mimetic nature of the crisis recalls that market failure will be followed by big killings on the stock market, 33 as moral hazard and adverse selection are the necessary downsides of the successful risk incurred by others Precisely on the downside of the investment merry-go-round are those, such as Mary French, who perceive risk as an unwarranted danger, uncontrollable for those affected by the irrational speculative sentiment of investors, like Charley Anderson: “I got a kind of feel for the big money […] Nat Bentley says I got it … I know I got it I can travel on a hunch, see ” (1069) The contrast between the sentiments of the worker and the investor reflects the growing gap between those for whom money has a material-substantial meaning and those perceiving money as a self-referential ghost-like value For the workers, survival is continuously at jeopardy and they are forced to take risks while fully aware that the certainty of failure overpowers the feeble odds of success Arguably then, what mediates between the two disparate concepts is the co-opting of the risk doctrine by the spectacular culture of American showbiz The Big Money thus works the negotiation between the promise of democracy and capitalism that brands the fabric of America with the growing industry of film and showbiz. Finally, the actress Margo Dowling is the only character on the rise in the novel and the one who manages to overcome the hazard of disadvantaged social conditions and glow in the limelight of Hollywood It has been argued by Stanley Cavell, amongst others, that Hollywood helped to foster a place where the contradictions of the social are convincingly sewn together 34 Whilst theatre had been a continuous source for the renegotiation of the disparaged social pact and had helped bring together a split country in postbellum America, 35 the novelty of film was that it rapidly became a very popular medium, giving way to a sharp increase in the number of movie 33 “Wall Street stunned This is not Thirty-Eight but it’s old Ninety-Seven” (Big Money, 1205) This headline from Newsreel LXVIII brings the 1929 crash in line with the Big Fear of 1838 and the speculative crash of 1897, two economic crises from which the market resourcefully recovered 34 Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1979), 25 35 Rosemary K Bank, Theatre Culture in America, 1825-1860 (Cambridge: CUP, 1997), 225 181 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0008 The Risky NPV of Literature in Dos Passos and Pessoa theatres and appealing to a very wide audience This convincingly fostered a national community of feeling, whilst giving vent to the contradictions of the system Films such as Busby Berkeley’s Gold Diggers of 1933 (1933) reflected the pitfalls of the money economy and reflected on money as symbol and fiction, 36 as promise and quagmire, but at the end of the day resolved the conflict by means of a spectacular on-screen happy ending. Dos Passos’ U.S.A., just as Manhattan Transfer, is strongly indebted not only to film montage but also to film culture, as a means of coming to terms with the very discourse of America Whilst the novel’s fragmented montage discloses the disjointed nature of the social, conveying the structural work of film as foundational for the cultural and literary work of modernity, on a representational level, showbiz acts as a self-reflexive trope of the paradoxes of modern American money culture For not only does it denounce the spectacular dissolution of moral democracy into the phantasm of film and theatre, but it also draws attention to the individual failure to uphold rational choice As a popular song in Newsreel L claims: “Don’t blame it all on Broadway […] You have yourself to blame/ Don’t shame the name of dear old Broadway ” (844) The Big Money drifts as a phantasm in the minds of the unlikely contenders, but the novel’s appeal is for the individual to act responsibly and use choice as the final resort of humanity in the last ditch competitive nexus of capitalist culture. On Broadway, the risk doctrine is finally presented as a spectacular hoax that supports the structural work of entertainment, but which also provides the self-critical means to diagnose the unreasonable hazards dealt out by social life From a representational and conceptual perspective, the two prose works disclose risk as a major narrative of modernity The uncertainty dealt by money culture becomes both a stimulant and a limit that dares individuals to run risks in order to succeed Either in the subversive logical operations of the conte philosophique, or in the presentation of the fragmentary lives of urban America, these pieces of modernist prose challenge the phantasm of wholeness and homogeneity suggested by social fictions. Within this framework, risk is a foundational trait supporting the instability of the money narrative, a leap of faith that promises opportunity and deems failure an acceptable hazard for the success of others Nevertheless, I suggest that this structural narrative of modernity does not simply serve a subversive logic As a conceptual metaphor of modernity’s ambivalence, the risk doctrine prepares the ground for individual resil- 36 The routine ‘We’re in the money,’ led by Ginger Rodgers, provides a mise en abyme for economic discourse in the film. ience, diagnosing hazard and instructing the reader about the pitfalls of moral choice before the perils dealt by the social fictions we inhabit. And literature is ultimately revealed as the platform managing the inand outflows of cultural and fiduciary capital. 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