[In the following excerpt, Vernon discusses money in terms of its physical existence and its existence as an abstraction, a social power which characters will do anything to gain but which novelists usually strip from them in the end.]

When members of a culture slip easily into the perspective that enables them to recognize that land and great houses, whatever else they may be, are also dirt and wood and stone, literary realism becomes possible. Realism occurs when the social world undergoes a gradual erosion by the material, a process historically set in motion by the Industrial Revolution and the forms of money that accompanied it. In this chapter … I shall attempt to approach a definition of literary realism … by way of the image of money in novels….

Money is one of the most recurring signs of reality in fiction. As a sign of reality, it takes on an ambivalent physical existence. On the one hand, it is an object among other objects and thus has a material status; in the case of Dickens's dust heaps and "paper currency" (the trash blown down London streets) in Our Mutual Friend, or of Mr. Cheesacre's piles of manure (which are money to him) in Trollope's Can You Forgive Her? or of the misers' piles of gold in Silas Marner, Eugénie Grandet, and McTeague, money becomes the image of a kind of prime matter or raw material, the world reduced to lumps and heaps of denuded objects and waste.

On the other hand, money is an abstraction, a social power, and even (or especially) a sign of the appearances and illusions novelists are fond of stripping from their characters. As we shall see, this is more true of Balzac than of almost any other novelist. In Balzac, appearances are always peeling back like wallpaper to reveal the crumbling plaster beneath.

This schizophrenia of money expresses moral attitudes—money is sordid, money gives us wings—and lends itself in particular to novels of social mobility, in which the contrast between the low and the high is crucial. Behind it lies a sense of material reality implicit in the West's binary habits of thought: matter's nature is to exclude, and it excludes everything that is not matter—space, the abstract, the immaterial—in order to become what it is. Attitudes like this go all the way back to the Greek atomists (by way of Newton and Descartes)¹ but receive a new emphasis with that massive social and economic change in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries known as the Industrial Revolution. The Industrial Revolution confirmed a growing sense in the West that the physical world consisted of largely inert raw material to be shaped into commodities by human industry. Commodities by definition have price tags. In a customary society, some objects are more valued than others not because of their price, but because of their relation to the past or to various members of the social order, such as the king or clergy. But there can be no hierarchy among objects once they all have price tags, except of course the purely quantitative hierarchy of money. Objects were bought and sold long before the nineteenth century, of course; but more than ever, goods previously made by hand and used by the maker (cloth especially) were now made by machine and sold for cash. The story has been told frequently and is familiar: in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the West underwent a dramatic shift from a largely handicraft culture with local markets to a society in which even, or especially, the lowest classes paid with wages for what they consumed, instead of making it themselves, bartering for it, being paid in kind, or all three.

And changes in forms of money expressed this shift. With the growth of paper money, money of account—the notional units of measurement in a currency, such as the pound, the livre, or the sou—became that much more an abstract system of quantification, a means of weighing and measuring the value of commodities. Behind paper money, defined by virtue of its absence, metal currency became reduced to the state of leftover matter. Consequently we see in novels (Balzac is the best example) that objects, clothing, houses, furniture, and flesh all take on a common physical status, all are pieces or fragments of leftover matter, signs of a partial and quantified world. As money becomes more symbolic, reality becomes more reductively material, and in this way a truly physical world first enters literature, a world whose physical existence is actually quite threatening. The sense that Sartre's character Roquentin has in La nausée that the world is de trop begins with nineteenth-century realism, especially with Sartre's countrymen Balzac, Flaubert, and Zola. In the realistic novel all objects have price tags, without which they are worthless matter, and conversely money itself is worthless matter with value attached to it by a social contract. In its unstable worthless/valuable state, money is like the dust heaps that produce a fortune in Our Mutual Friend, or like the cheap paper made from vegetable pulp in Balzac's Illusions perdues that has the potential to earn millions.

With the Industrial Revolution money takes on its own autonomy and power, and so do objects. They are no longer part of a continuum of human existence, a means absorbed into human life. The means has become an end. Dickens's most powerful image of this is Venus's shop in Our Mutual Friend, half-dark and cluttered with human parts for sale: hands, eyeballs, legs, skeletons, skulls, fetuses in jars. (The image of the dismembered body part also occurs in later novels dealing with money: McTeague's huge gilded tooth in McTeague, or Doctor T. J. Eckleburg's eyes in The Great Gatsby. In both cases the body and its parts have become objects, commodities.) The experience of money, especially as gold gives way to paper, is the experience of a desire for a certain end transforming itself into the desire for the means by which all material ends are satisfied. In this way desire fulfills its own secret desire to obliterate itself, and into the vacuum rush those fragmented objects cut off from human life that are in a sense the leftover traces of desire. At the end of Balzac's story "M. Gobseck," Gobseck's rooms are thrown open, and the debris he collected in the final months of his life is revealed: moldy and decayed food, half-eaten by rats and swarming with maggots, along with furniture, bales of cotton, casks of sugar, rum, coffee, and tobacco, lamps and plate, and so forth. The passage is a powerful image of dead matter and waste, and of money's transformation of desire into disgust.²

But money is also, as Lionel Trilling says, "the great generator of illusion" in novels.³ In a world where paper is gradually coming to substitute for gold, money itself is a dream, a fiction. With paper, the representation of wealth itself becomes a form of wealth, so that, as J. Hillis Miller points out, "the appearance of money is as good as really possessing it."⁴ So the Lammles in Our Mutual Friend, Becky and Rawdon Crawley in Vanity Fair, Melmotte in The Way We Live Now, or Merdle in Little Dorrit live almost entirely upon the credit extended to them because they present the appearance of wealth. But in all cases the bubble bursts. In its double character of the illusory and the real, money has the power to alter appearances by robbing them of their material base; it can turn reality into dream, but it can also turn dream into reality. One of the typical ways reality closes in on appearances in the realistic novel is the seizure and sale of a character's possessions to satisfy creditors. This occurs so often that we may recognize in it one of the collective nightmares of the middle class in the nineteenth century. It happens in Our Mutual Friend, L'éducation sentimentale, Thackeray's The History of Samuel Titmarsh and Vanity Fair, The Mill on the Floss, David Copperfield, The Mayor of Casterbridge, and The Princess Casamassima; it threatens often in Balzac; and it is barely averted in Dombey and Son, Framley Parsonage, Middlemarch, and Madame Bovary. Possessions in such instances become reduced to mere objects, raw material; they are signs no longer of the social but of the physical world. "After that they sold her dresses, then one of her hats with a limp, broken feather, then her furs, then three pairs of shoes; and the distribution of these relics, which vaguely recalled the shape of her limbs, struck him as an atrocity, as if he were watching crows tearing her corpse to pieces" (L'éducation sentimentale).⁵ A similar scene occurs in Norris's McTeague. In both novels, in being displaced from their arrangement in a domestic round of activities and spaces, objects assume their implicit discreteness. They become pieces, atoms, debris, or in the case of Flaubert (ironically, of course) relics.

As a representation of material existence in fiction, money always has this double aspect: it is the dreams and illusions of characters, their world of appearances, and undermining this it is the world of sordid reality. Money encompasses these two poles, but little in between. This split is of course implicit in fiction from the beginning, in Don Quixote, but in the nineteenth century it becomes much more pronounced. It is a split between the material and the immaterial worlds, between matter become dense, visible, and inert and all that matter has excluded in order to become so. Thus money becomes an ironic substitute for that discredited spiritual world displaced by matter; it becomes a religion, a god, and it makes one's fortune, in both senses, the way the gods once did, To have money is to be virtuous, respectable, worthy; not to have it is to be base. "An income of a hundred thousand francs provides a very pretty commentary on the catechism and gives us wonderful help for putting a stock-exchange valuation on moral principles!" says Raphael in La peau de chagrin. "Vice for me," he continues, "means living in a garret, wearing threadbare clothes, a grey hat in winter and owing money to the concierge." In realistic fiction, the material and the immaterial exist in inverse proportion to each other: as one shrinks the other expands. Of course the material world is far more suited to the novelist's powers of description. Hence genuine virtue often seems shallow and sentimental in Balzac as well as in Dickens. In Balzac it dwells in a world apart, like a nunnery surrounded by gaming houses and brothels.

If money is religion or a substitute for religion, then the split between the material and immaterial worlds, between the low and the high, the sordid and the lofty exists by virtue of the secret link between them: money. Numerous characters in fiction reveal this: Pip in Great Expectations, Dorrit in Little Dorrit, Emma in Madame Bovary, Bulstrode in Middlemarch, and any number of characters in Henry James and Balzac.⁶ "When the money slides into the young man's pocket," says Balzac in Le Père Goriot, "an imaginary column is created for his support. He carries himself better than he did before, he meets your eye directly, his movements are more agile…. In short the bird that was wingless has found its powers."⁷ This is similar to the language James uses in The Portrait of a Lady and The Wings of the Dove. "Spread your wings," Ralph says to Isabel Archer. "Rise above the ground." In The Portrait of a Lady, money emanates from the sick and old and corrupts the young and innocent. It doesn't matter that the sick and old are themselves innocent and naive (if a bit dangerous, like overgrown children)—money comes from them, and money is sordid. They want Isabel to soar, and instead she lands in the mud. Over and over again nineteenth-century novelists play variations on this theme. Characters soar on wings of money and land in the muck of material reality. For example, the wonderful scene in Great Expectations in which Pip, decked out like a gentleman, encounters Trabb's boy on the street:

Deeming that a serene and unconscious contemplation of him would best beseem me, and would be most likely to quell his evil mind, I advanced with that expression of countenance, and was rather congratulating myself on my success, when suddenly the knees of Trabb's boy smote together, his hair uprose, his cap fell off, he trembled violently in every limb, staggered out into the road, and crying to the populace, "Hold me! I'm so frightened!" feigned to be in a paroxysm of terror and contrition, occasioned by the dignity of my appearance. As I passed him, his teeth loudly chattered in his head, and with every mark of extreme humiliation, he prostrated himself in the dust.

The gap between Pip's "serene and unconscious contemplation" and the dust where Trabb's boy grovels is there from the beginning of Great Expectations. It exists in Miss Havisham's house, but Pip doesn't recognize it, being blinded by Estella's beauty. Its most powerful form is in the relationship between Pip and his secret benefactor, Magwitch. Magwitch's money makes Pip a gentleman, and as a gentleman he is by definition worthy and respectable. But when Magwitch turns up, the gap between the high and low is shown for a moment to be a link, and it is a link Pip cannot abide. His rejection of the convict's money as a first act of moral courage is convincing precisely because money has been shown to be touching everything. Still, it is also an act of moral snobbery, since even Magwitch proves to be not what he seems.

Nineteenth-century fiction is filled with Magwitches and Gobsecks, outcasts of society firmly in control of those who blithely or desperately regard money as a privilege. Bulstrode and Raffles in Middlemarch are George Eliot's Pip and Magwitch. Money confers power on the powerless, though the limits of such power are also contained within money.⁸ The theme of the high and the low is a direct outgrowth of the two faces of money we have been exploring in this chapter—money as abstract or illusory, and money as matter—and it deserves more attention before we turn to my chief examples, Balzac and Flaubert. Dickens's other great novel on the theme is Little Dorrit, whose two-part division (Book the First, Poverty, and Book the Second, Riches) is intended to establish a contrast between low and high that can repeatedly be exploited as a similarity. For example, in the eyes of Little Dorrit, now wealthy, Venice's tourist society becomes an imitation of her former life in the debtor's prison, the Marshalsea:

It appeared on the whole, to Little Dorrit herself, that this same society in which they lived, greatly resembled a superior sort of Marshalsea. Numbers of people seemed to come abroad, pretty much as people had come into the prison; through debt, through idleness, relationship, curiosity, and general unfitness for getting on at home. They were brought into these foreign towns in the custody of couriers and local followers, just as the debtors had been brought into the prison. They prowled about the churches and picture-galleries, much in the old, dreary, prison-yard manner. They were usually going away again tomorrow or next week, and rarely knew their own minds, and seldom did what they said they would do, or went where they said they would go: in all this again, like the prison debtors.

Behind the apparent (and sentimental) suggestion here that there is no real difference between poverty and wealth lies a subtler theme: that just as "reality" defines itself with difficulty against dream (Which is real, the Marshalsea or Venice?), so poverty defines itself not against wealth, but against the material appearance of wealth—again, with difficulty. Mrs. General, for example, is hired by Mr. Dorrit to produce in his family the varnished surface of wealth, and her function reminds us of the Veneerings's dining room in Our Mutual Friend, or of Pip's pride in his appearance in Great Expectations. To have money is to display money, to triumph conspicuously over others (as in Veblen) by means of appearances. But beneath the varnish, the wealthy are just as constrained by their manners and their dreary routines—by the obligations wealth thrusts upon them—as the debtors in the Marshalsea. The suggestion that the forms of wealth under capitalism are imprisoning is clear. Wealthy, the Dorrits become indebted to an image of themselves just as ruthless in its constraints as the walls of the Marshalsea, and far more threatening too, because "good" society turns out to be swarming with people capable of embarrassing them with reminders of their former position.

As in Great Expectations, money in Little Dorrit serves the purposes of both irony and romance. The novel is "realistic" in the most common sense, as a story of characters who fail (mostly financially), whose lives are a downward curve, but it is also one of those improbable romances of success, of finding, being given, or marrying into a treasure. And, as in Great Expectations, the hidden links between poverty and wealth assert themselves all the more forcibly the more the characters attempt to effect an absolute separation between the two states. The dream of poverty is wealth, and the nightmare of wealth is poverty. Because wealth contains its own loss—a kind of trapdoor through which the money may disappear (Merdle's financial bubble is the novel's paradigm of this)—the Dorrits spurn with paranoid desperation all reminders of their former state. They even turn their backs on Clennam, who in a sense is this novel's congenial, more well-bred Magwitch, the one who in assisting their transition from low to high is in their eyes discredited, not elevated, by his efforts—precisely because of his connection with their poverty. All of this finds its climax in one of the great scenes in nineteenth-century fiction, Mr. Dorrit's "Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Marshalsea" speech, delivered in his delirium at a formal dinner in high society in Rome (in fact, a farewell dinner for Mrs. Merdle, whose husband's financial schemes are about to collapse in London). In this scene the low finally overtakes the high, and Mr. Dorrit's fear of being embarrassed by someone from his past is confirmed—but the someone turns out to be himself. This image of the low, as it were, appropriating the high from within is subsequently echoed by that of the faceless Merdle, who in death is described as having "an obtuse head, and coarse, mean, common features." Of course we are intended to conclude from this that Merdle was corrupt; but Dickens's metaphor has to do with social class—"common." Dickens's own ambivalence about poverty is reflected in the contradictory valuations of the low in Little Dorrit. The low is surely something "common" and sordid, like Merdle's face. But strangely enough, it is also a lost paradise, a lost home—the Marshalsea—a place where Dorrit and his daughter were once affectionate and close. Only in Dickens could such a startling reversal grow so naturally out of the premises of the text: the shades of the prison house are the home we have lost, not the world that closes around us. On the other hand, in the world that closes around us the prison has found its reflection—the world has truly become a prison—in the sham homes we have created with money, the best example of which is Merdle's house in Cavendish Square.

Little Dorrit finds its unlikely echo in the century's last great novel of the high and low, James's The Princess Casamassima, in which a prison also plays a significant role. Like Dickens, James discovered that the contrast between high and low provided for his middle-class audience a bold sense of drama: the contrast, for example, between the greasy, murky, festering cockpits of London with which Book Second ends—the worm's eye view of London, to use Braudel's phrase⁹—and the Princess's country estate (Medley Hall) with which Book Third begins. As in Dickens, the high and the low find their ironic reflections in each other: Hyacinth Robinson, the lowly bookbinder with (possibly) aristocratic blood, becomes attracted to the artistic and architectural wonders of Europe, while his friend the Princess gives her money away to revolutionaries, rents a shabby little house, and fills it with tasteless petit bourgeois bric-a-brac. Hyacinth and the Princess find in each other the qualities each wants to shun but cannot—the low and the high—and as a result they wind up, like Mr. Dorrit before and Mr. Dorrit after, mirroring what each perceives to be his or her own worst side.

The split beween the high and the low was a rich theme for the novel only as long as it could shun Gnosticism, that is, as long as the links between high and low could also be revealed. But with the growing sense of physical objects as reductively material, this became less possible. Repeatedly in the nineteenth-century novel we witness the revenge material reality takes upon a morality that regards it as fallen, unredeemed. The final image of Zola's Nana is the death blow, not the triumph, of realism, for in this portrait of physical disgust and corruption—the human face not merely as coarse, mean, and common but as rotten meat—the dialectic is stilled, and matter can only decay, can only break down into the "lower" states implicitly present in all its organizations. The trajectory from realism to naturalism completes its course in the theme of entropy, in Beckett and Pynchon in the twentieth century. Of course, we can see the process just beginning in Persuasion: the implicit threat of Mr. Elliot's hammer (though never carried out) is that it will break beautiful objects down into chunks of matter. But a better example is perhaps Balzac, in whom objects first explicitly lay siege to the novel's world.

In Balzac there is always a strange world of matter that exists in a sense on either side of reality. It is a series of pictures in a tour guide, a series of economic relationships, but it is also as sordid and cold as clay. It is what is left over when an object's price has been named, the superfluity of matter in its public state, the shell of material appearances: flaking paint on chairs and mantlepieces, threadbare coats, crumbling, worn, and pock-marked friezes and facades. This world of matter is actually abstract, since it usually leaves an aftertaste of reality, a sign of the place where reality used to dwell. It is the shadow of the real world; within it Balzac's characters act out their ambitions and desires. These ambitions and desires alone are real—that is, autonomous, substantial, and in possession of a life, will, and necessity of their own.

Never before and perhaps never since has there been such a sheer abundance of objects in literature, and never have objects been so carefully articulated. Still, they often seem fake, as if the world were papier mâché. Balzac is always telling us what objects are made of, as though they couldn't be made of themselves. Curtains are made of silk, hinges of brass, dishes of china, floors of wood or tile, and so forth. He is profoundly conscious of materials, as the long digressions on paper manufacture in Illusions perdues demonstrate. Objects have a double nature in Balzac: they are a face presented to the world, and they are a material from which the face is shaped. This view of objects is new to literature—again, largely because of the Industrial Revolution—but implicit in Western culture in Aristotle's notions of form and matter and Locke's primary and secondary qualities. Often in Balzac, the face an object presents to the world is wearing away, and the object has begun to assert itself as sheer matter. "Above the arch a long frieze represented the four seasons by figures carved in hard stone but already corroded and blackened." "There, worn and blackened window sills appear, their delicate carvings scarcely visible" (both examples from Eugénie Grandet).¹⁰ As objects break down and their faces wear away, their material nature steps forth and they become present, visible, heavy, dense, no longer part of the normal social flow. In Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes, Asia deals in splendid gowns that ladies have been forced to sell to obtain money; they are "no longer gowns but are not yet rags."¹¹ They are illegible—not signs of wealth, but not signs of poverty either. This is a fascinating no-man's-land for Balzac, since objects for him are usually windows through which one views money, or the lack of it ("Paris porters take things in at a glance; they never stop decorated gentlemen of heavy gait who wear blue uniforms. In other words, they recognize money when they see it"—La Cousine Bette).¹²

Objects in Balzac are a transparent facade, and they are opaque material reality. "In the drawing room the furniture was upholstered in shabby cotton velvet, plaster statuettes masquerading as Florentine bronzes, a badly carved sconce, merely painted, with molded glass candle-rings, a carpet whose cheapness was belatedly explaining itself in the quantity of cotton used in its manufacture, which had become visible to the naked eye…. That horrible room, where everything sagged, where dirty socks hung on the chairs stuffed with horse-hair, whose brown flowers reappeared outlined in dust" (La Cousine Bette). Objects present a face, but at the same time the face is peeling, flaking, worn through, no longer adequate to the job of illusion; thus, objects are emblems both of sham and of the poverty of sheer unredeemed material reality beneath the sham.

In a sense Balzac's world is one in which solid things are breaking down and being replaced by their paper representations, just as gold is being replaced by bank notes. It is a material world emptied of value and becoming an image of itself, a shell. Neither the paper image nor the lost reality has any redeeming qualities. Paper is always unstable in Balzac; bank notes and notes of hand are continually discounted and devalued, and the reader always senses their immanent worthlessness. A variation of this theme is David Séchard's search in Illusions perdues for a process to manufacture cheap paper: "He had to invent a cheap paper, and that promptly; he had also to adapt the profits from the discovery to the needs of the household and his business."¹³ One feels that he is trying to invent a cheap money, like John Law in the eighteenth century. Similarly, literature in Illusions perdues is being replaced by journalism, which Balzac makes clear is nothing more than cheap writing—throwaway words.

Occasionally the paper peels back and we glimpse something underneath. This is a favorite image in Balzac: tarnished or worn or peeling surfaces that show glimpses of objects in their former states. In this sense reality in Balzac is often the nostalgia for reality. Paper representations cover a dense materiality that is a kind of distant lost world, a lost home. Misers hoarding their gold have reverted to that lost world. Gold for the miser actually becomes a kind of manna, in the language of anthropologists, a primitive thriving substance with a magical life of its own. "Really coins live and swarm like men," says old Grandet in Eugénie Grandet; "they come and go and sweat and multiply."¹⁴ But of course this is only a short step away from a disgust with matter, since gold for the miser is also excrement.

Such disgust is evident everywhere in Flaubert. Roland Barthes points out in Writing Degree Zero that there is a world of difference between Balzac and Flaubert, and I presume he means at least in part that Flaubert is Balzac perfected and become Literature.¹⁵ Still, this world of difference exists only by virtue of the similarities between the two. Both write about characters who victimize themselves by means of money. Madame Bovary's gesture of tossing her last five francs to a blind man while her house and property are being seized is straight out of Balzac, as is the character of Lheureux in that novel, or of Arnoux in L'éducation sentimentale.

But above all, Flaubert takes the disgust at material existence that is implicit in Balzac and makes it explicit. Balzac has sufficient energy and even goodwill that such disgust still seems to play a secondary role. In Flaubert it pervades every page and becomes inseparable from the cold light in which his language bathes everything. Material things are usually the sign of material imperfection—grease spots, drops of sweat, moles, pores, stains, patches of raw skin, bad breath, heavy folds of cloth, and so on.

He tucked the catechism into his pocket and stood swinging the heavy vestry key with his hand.

The setting sun glowing down on his face bleached his woolen cassock. It was shiny at the elbows and frayed at the hem. Grease spots and tobacco followed the line of small buttons down his broad chest. There was a great accumulation of them near his clerical bands, on which the abundant folds of his red skin were resting. His complexion was dotted with yellow blemishes that disappeared under the stubble of his graying beard. He had just had his evening meal and was breathing heavily.¹⁶

This is realism, but it is also a highly selective vision, like that, for example, in the photographs of Diane Arbus. Its inevitable culmination lies in images of dismemberment and death: the amputation of Hippolyte's leg in Madame Bovary after Bovary's farcical operation to correct his clubfoot, the dead baby whose portrait is painted in L'éducation sentimentale, the bailiffs fingers "as soft as slugs" in Madame Bovary, and the stream of black liquid that flows out of the dead Emma's mouth. As Sartre points out throughout L'idiot de la famille, all of this is symptomatic of extreme self-loathing by Flaubert. It is a self-loathing that in Zola finds its echo in Nana's dead face and in the twentieth century is expressed in the climatic moment of Joyce's "Clay," in Beckett's images of bodily disgust, and in Sartre himself by the nausea his character Roquentin feels at the sheer materiality of objects.

Fredric Jameson sees in Flaubert a lack of the Real, of "that which resists desire," because in fact desire has been replaced by bovarysme, the '"desire to desire' whose objects have become illusory images."¹⁷ In a sense this is correct, but perhaps it is misleading as stated. In Flaubert the social and the physical worlds have collapsed together, allowing the latter's sordid or "greasy" quality to become not an object of desire but an object of loathing, an occasion for shutting one's eyes and dreaming one's dreams…. [This] collapse of the social and material becomes inevitable the further down one goes on the social scale. In Gissing and Zola, for example (as in American society today), most social relations center on the workplace. For Flaubert's bourgeoisie, the case is slightly more ambiguous. Social relations are dominated by hypocrisy because they mask material needs and desires, most of them petty. The material world thus becomes a comment upon the illusory freedom of those who pretend to disregard it, and the social world becomes subject to a downward movement as inevitable as the laws of physics.

"Greasy," by the way, applied to the material, became a favorite word of the naturalists who followed on Flaubert's heels (in French, graisseux or gras)…. The word itself contains associations that play variations upon the theme of high and low. Grease reminds us of those who cook their food in grease or oil (hence the American word "greaser") and thus applies to Mediterranean peoples, those darker, poorer, and more idle races who live below the cooler-headed northern Europeans. In Zola's L'assommoir, two of the principal characters, Gervaise and Lantier, come from a town near Marseilles. In Norris's McTeague, Maria Macapa is described as a greaser. Both novelists, and Gissing too, use the adjective "greasy" to describe physical environments, and in all three the material world becomes what Sartre defines as slime or stickiness (visqueux): "the revenge of the In-itself."¹⁸ All of this is implicit in Flaubert, for whom the physical realm is without value and the immaterial or moral realm a matter of the romantic imagination, no more real than knights on white horses.

If Flaubert (as so many assert) is the beginning of modern literature, he also reveals the process by which one strain of realism seeded its own destruction. The gap between the material and immaterial in Flaubert is finally so great that even money cannot act as a link between them. Given such a gap, the novel loses its ability to deal with the very moral issues money raises, and the social world becomes one-dimensional, absorbed into the physical, a kind of machine. For this reason, Flaubert's plots have an overriding sense of necessity that totally excludes the nervous, energetic presence of obsession and chance we find, say, in Balzac or Dostoevsky.

In a sense what we see in Flaubert is a split of self and world so profound that they simply fail to intersect. Bovarysme, the desire to desire, makes of the self a monad, contained within the larger but separate monad of physical reality. The social world disappears in between, and money becomes part of the unobtainable not-I that continually recedes beyond Emma's grasp….

Notes

¹ See my The Garden and the Map: Schizophrenia in Twentieth Century Literature and Culture (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1973), especially chapter 1.

² The irony of "M. Gobseck" is also this: that the miser who loves gold because it doesn't perish has also hoarded perishable things, which in fact have begun to decay.

³ Lionel Trilling, The Liberal Imagination (New York: Doubleday, 1953), p. 203.

⁴ Afterword to Our Mutual Friend (New York: Signet Classics, 1964), p. 904. Compare Trilling: "To appear to be established is one of the ways of becoming established." Liberal Imagination, p. 204.

⁵ The translation of L'éducation sentimentale, Sentimental Education, is by Robert Baldick (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1964).

⁶ Cf. Edward Said: "Both Dickens in Great Expectations and Flaubert in Madame Bovary use money to signify the protagonists' transitory power to shore up their authority to dream and even for a while to be something they cannot long remain being." Beginnings (New York: Basic Books, 1975), p. 98.

⁷ The translation of Le Père Goriot is by E. K. Brown (New York: Modern Library, 1950). Compare these nearly identical passages in Trollope and Gissing. The first is from The Small House at Allington: "Moneys in possession or in expectation do give a set to the head, and a confidence to the voice, and an assurance to the man, which will help him much in his walk in life." The second is from New Grub Street: "Money is a great fortifier of self-respect. Since she had become really conscious of her position as the owner of five thousand pounds, Marian spoke with a steadier voice, walked with a firmer step."

⁸ Cf. Edward Said: "Although the novel itself licenses Pip's expectations, it also mercilessly undercuts them, mainly by showing that these expectations are inherently self-limiting…. The more Pip believes he is acting on his own, the more tightly he is drawn into an intricate web of circumstances that weighs him down completely; the plot's progressive revelation of accidents connecting the principal characters is Dickens's method of countering Pip's ideology of free upward progress." Beginnings, p. 90.

⁹ "The London drama—its festering criminality, its underworld, its difficult biological life—can only really be comprehended from this worm's eye view of the poor." Fernand Braudel, The Structures of Everyday Life: The Limits of the Possible, vol. 1 of Civilization and Capitalism, 15th-18th Century, trans. Miriam Kochan and Siân Reynolds (New York: Harper and Row, 1981), p. 555.

¹⁰ The translation of Eugénie Grandet is by Dorothea Walter and John Watkins (New York: Modern Library, 1950).

¹¹ The translation of Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes, A Harlot High and Low, is by Rayner Heppenstall (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1970).

¹² The translation of La Cousine Bette, Cousin Bette, is by Kathleen Raine (New York: Modern Library, 1958).

¹³ The translation of Illusions perdues, Lost Illusions, is by Herbert J. Hunt (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1971).

¹⁴ According to Marc Shell, tokos, the Greek word for biological offspring, also came to mean interest in the economic sense. The Economy of Literature (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1978), pp. 93-94.

¹⁵ Though his first meaning is that 1848 changed everything. Roland Barthes, Writing Degree Zero, trans. Annette Lavers (New York: Hill and Wang, 1968), p. 38.

¹⁶ The translation of Madame Bovary is by Mildred Marmur (New York: Signet Classics, 1964).

¹⁷ Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), p. 184.

¹⁸ Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (New York: Philosophical Library, 1956), p. 609. A typically sticky description of a physical environment in the naturalists occurs in Gissing's The Nether World: "Rain had just begun to fall, and with it descended the smut and grime that darkened above the houses; the pavement was speedily over-smeared with sticky mud, and passing vehicles flung splashes in every direction. Odours of oil and shoddy, and all such things as characterised the town, grew more pungent under the heavy shower."