Reflections: the Moolah

Money it’s a crime
Share it fairly, but don’t take a slice of my pie
~ Money, Pink Floyd

Money! You can’t live with it, and you can’t live without it. I’ve recently been embroiled in a typically nasty discussion of usury, on a site called Zippy Catholic. I have posted as a comment over there parts of this interesting take on money and usury from critic, Frank Kermode, in a review of Frozen Desire: An Inquiry into the Meaning of Money by James Buchan, which appears in Kermode’s book, Pleasing Myself:

Schopenhauer observed that ‘other goods can satisfy only one wish and one need – food satisfies hunger, sex the needs of youth; these are goods which serve a specific purpose. But money ‘confronts not just one concrete need, but Need itself in the abstract’. Thus it becomes a universal, inhuman answer to what Sartre called besoin; or it may even have created that generalized need, which makes it even more hateful. One ancient way of demonizing money was to accuse it of breeding like a sentient being. Aristotle in the Politics noted this indecency, the birth of money from money. His word for ‘interest’ is tokos, which means offspring – money out at interest offers a demonic parody of natural reproduction. A couple of millennia later Shakespeare is writing harsh speeches about the breed of barren metal. Usury was condemned throughout the intervening centuries, and often compared to homosexuality, also regarded as a perversion of the act of breeding; but it was practiced, as it had to be, under other names. Some methods of money-making were called virtuous, for instance adventuring, which entailed genuine risk; Shylock, who made money breed, and Antonio, who risked his wealth in cargo vessels, argue quite schematically about this in “The Merchant of Venice.” The Church, knowing that credit is necessary and that it cannot be had without interest, made the necessary accommodations.

On a subsequent page, we get:

[Buchan] is a radical romantic, despising Adam Smith for his selfish bourgeois certainties, cross with Mill for neglecting the imagination, and contemptuous of Keynes for being, at moments, tiresomely ethical about the proper use of money, while admitting that ‘the money-motive…does its job well’. He prefers Dostoevsky, who saw that the true consequence of money was ‘the world reduced to a scorching slum, its women to whores, its men to murderers’. And he identifies as ‘the great sadness of our civilization’ the fact ‘that by using money, we convert our world into it. Humanity…is estranged by money from its natural habitat, without any hope of appeal.’

Money! No wonder Jesus was so very unenthusiastic about the stuff.
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Readings: Second-hand Prose

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Sometimes it is good to read an author not in quest any major theme or system of thought, but only because he writes well and says interesting things. Thus it was that, having been directed by Paula Fredriksen’s footnote to Frank Kermode’s The Genesis of Secrecy, of which I which I posted below, I went back to the stacks for more Kermode.

I came away with a book of articles, the majority of which had been previously published in The London Review of Books, entitled, Pleasing Myself – from Beowulf to Phillip Roth. The two excerpts below are from “Empson the Poet”:

The radical contradiction is between the hope human happiness, for which, at least at certain moments, we feel our selves so wonderfully suited, and the power of the world as it inescapably is to frustrate or even ridicule that feeling. Hence Empson’s endorsement of the Buddhist position that ‘no sort of temporal life whatever can satisfy the human spirit’. Yet Buddhism also takes account of the fact that ‘birth has a human being is an opportunity of inestimable value. He who is so born has at least a chance of hearing the truth and acquiring merit.’

And,

A much quoted remark occurs in Empson’s notes to the poem ‘Bacchus’: ‘life involves maintaining oneself between contradictions that can’t be solved by analysis’.

Although I’ve never read much, if any, of William Empson’s poetry, he has provided me with food for thought via the medium of Kermode’s journalism.
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Reflections: Just the Facts, M'am...?

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The world has been too much with me these past few days, but one thing I have managed to accomplish in the midst of the chaos is finishing my reading of critic Frank Kermode’s fine little book, The Genesis of Secrecy. Kermode’s topic is the interpretation of texts. His method is to compare biblical exegesis to the critical consideration of fictional and historical texts. His thesis (if I am interpreting him correctly!) is that we can never (and should never) come away from any text (biblical or otherwise) with naught but alleged facts in hand. What we can hope to gain from our careful examination of the structure of a text, or from our painstaking deconstruction of it, is—meaning.

This is an important idea to mull over for types who like to parachute into a blogger’s comment box equipped with what they claim to be x-ray goggles that render the post wholly transparent to their particular interpretation. These ideas are also important to persons troubled by the contradictions between historical accounts—such as the genealogies of Jesus—in the Gospels. The tortured efforts of the orthodox to reconcile that which cannot be reconciled merely detract from the credibility of orthodoxy in general. It is truth as MEANING, not truth as FACT that will set us free.

I have recently been engaged in two discussions (not to say arguments) centered on interpretation. The first I have previously posted on here. Since that thread seems to have snapped, I won’t go into it further. The second, which has been happening in the thread following this post at Journeys in Alterity involves interpreting the core message of conservative thinker, Russell Kirk.

In the excerpt that follows, where Kermode is quoting, he’s quoting Roland Barthes on the opacity of historical “fact.”:

[N]o narrative can be transparent on historical fact. …Historical discourse is…guaranteed by metatextual announcements, references to sources and authorities, assurances of the credibility of witnesses… In general, history-writing, even more than fiction, relies on third-person narration. Novels quite often have first-person narrators, but their presence in an historical account gives it a different generic feel—it becomes a memoir. The advantage of third-person narration is that it is the mode which best produces the illusion of pure reference. But it is an illusion, the effect of a rhetorical device. We cannot escape the conclusion that “the fact can exist only linguistically, as a term in a discourse,” although “we behave as if it were a simple reproduction of something or other on another plane of existence altogether, some extra-structural ‘reality’.”

This concept—of fact as the result of a rhetorical device—it would seem to me, applies equally to any form of narrative, be it a novel, a work of history, an op-ed piece, journalistic reportage, a Gospel parable, or a blog post.

On the next page, Kermode goes on to say,

Gallie observes that following a story is a “teleologically guided form of attention.” And as many others have argued, to make arrangements for such guidance is to have some ulterior motive, whether it is aesthetic, epistemological, or ethical (which includes “ideological”). These are Morton White’s categories of metahistorical control or motive; others have more complex schemes. According to William James, “the preferences of sentient creatures are what create the importance of topics”; and Nietzsche, in “The Use and Abuse of History,” declared that “for a fact to exist we must first introduce meaning.” All this we know, even if we behave as if we did not. The historical narrative comes to us heavily censored (as the account of a dream is censored) but also heavily interpreted (as that same account is affected by the dogmatic presuppositions of the analyst, which are, as Habermas says, “translated into the narrative interpretation.” The historian cannot write, nor can we read, without prejudice. I hope we have seen that this is true of the gospel narratives. [emphasis added]

Facts, regardless of the authority behind their provenance, are merely loose beads, rolling around at random in a box labeled “context.” Meaning is the string that allows us to thread them into the coherency that is a necklace.
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Readings: How It Works

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Here’s how it’s supposed to work:

On a Saturday morning, I make a routine trip into town to go to the public library. I have a book to return, but no intention of borrowing anything on this visit. Nonetheless, a new memoire by novelist Anne Rice catches my eye, and I take it out on a whim. Somewhere in the book, Rice mentions that one of her sources in researching her two novels about Jesus has been Paula Fredriksen. Since I’d come across that name in reading before and had made a mental note to one day check her out, this reference became the occasion for me to borrow this book from the university library.

In reading Fredriksen, I was led, in a footnote concerning a passage from the Gospel of Mark, to this book by the critic Frank Kermode, and duly borrowed it from the university library as well. In his book, Kermode uses a novel entitled Party Going by Henry Green to illustrate the mechanism of interpreting a narrative. Kermode made the novel seem interesting enough that I wanted to read it too.

Having decided to write about all this, I began searching for a link to a description of Party Going to use for this post. What I learned was that Amazon.com has no information on it, because the book is apparently not currently in print. I went, therefore, to Wikipedia for this article, which mentions Kermode’s use of Party Going, and also notes that Green’s best-known work is another novel entitled Loving. I have since borrowed both of these Green novels from the university library and added them to my "to read" stack. And so it goes.

My intention in writing about these things is that somebody, anybody, happening across my site might be prompted by my serial enthusiasms to hunt down at least some of these books and read them.

Hey, listen—it couldn’t hurt.
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