1980s fiction

HOME ABOUT ARCHIVE SIDECAR CONTRIBUTORS SUBSCRIBE YOUR ACCOUNT REVIEWS Leigh Claire La Berge, Scandals and Abstractions: Financial Fiction of the Long 1980s Oxford University Press: New York 2015 NICHOLAS DAMES FICTIONS OF CAPITAL More than thirty years later, the onset of the 1980s retains a darkly mythic pull over Western imaginative media. One memorable, iconic version of that transition is Paul Thomas Anderson’s 1997 Boogie Nights, where a murder/suicide at a New Year’s party coincides exactly with the opening moments of 1980; it is the bloody pivot moment in the film’s narrative of the capture and dismantling of an artisanal industry—in this case, pornography—by newly overabundant capital seeking any and all commodities to transform. The banner that stretches outside the scene (‘Good Bye 70s . . . Hello 80s’) might just as well be a Dantean warning. This is not just an American narrative; witness Elena Ferrante, in the final volume of her Neapolitan quartet, The Story of the Lost Child, offering a similar lament: They were complicated years. The order of the world in which we had grown up was dissolving. The old skills resulting from long study and knowledge of the correct political line suddenly seemed senseless. Anarchist, Marxist, Gramscian, Communist, Leninist, Trotskyite, Maoist, worker were quickly becoming obsolete labels or, worse, a mark of brutality. The exploitation of man by man and the logic of maximum profit, which before had been considered an abomination, had returned to become the linchpins of freedom and democracy everywhere. Or take Lars Iyer’s 2013 Exodus, whose narrator offers these dyspeptic thoughts on the Thames Valley: ‘In Reading, history ended in the 1980s, W. says. In Reading, the council houses are eternally being sold off. Housing estates are eternally being built. Golf courses are eternally opening up. The corporations are eternally moving in . . .’ These are nostalgias, frank and unapologetic, that have a utility perhaps nostalgias perform best: to make real historical transitions vivid. The gambit of Leigh Claire La Berge’s Scandals and Abstraction is to explore this periodizing myth from the moment of its inception, in novelistic and filmic narratives from the 1980s themselves; in the process it suggests that ‘the long 1980s’ can scarcely be said to have ended yet. Although the book’s archive is of modest scope—Don DeLillo’s White Noise (1985), Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities (1987), Oliver Stone’s Wall Street (1987), Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho (1991), Jane Smiley’s Good Faith (2001), and a handful of autobiographies, including, most notoriously, Donald Trump’s 1987 The Art of the Deal—La Berge wants to draw the boundaries of a period of economic history that cannot properly be understood without the aesthetic mediations that did not just reflect upon, but in fact helped to constitute its ideological consistency. Despite its carefully circumscribed range of evidence, and a prose style that can be knotted and slipshod enough to suggest that its publisher has forgone the services of a proof-reader, it is an interesting, even at times daring, attempt at literary periodization. As La Berge puts it, her goal was to write ‘a literary history of what happens to narrative form when too much money circulates at once’—when capital, increasingly liberated from supply-side burdens such as fixed manufacturing costs and government regulation, flooded markets. Several moments might properly compete for the claim to be the origin of ‘the long 1980s’, including the 1971 abandonment of the gold standard and the Bretton Woods accords, the oil price shocks of 1973 and 1979, or the October 1979 Paul Volcker-led interest rate hike that attempted to manage the inflationary effects of oil prices; for her part, La Berge places emphasis on the Garn–St Germain Depository Institutions Act of 1982, the deregulation of Savings and Loan activity that set the stage for a new era of commercial banks engaging in real-estate speculation and the highly leveraged transactions in mergers and acquisitions that became the decade’s signal financial activities. But more broadly, the period La Berge is describing is the moment when ‘the economy’ became wholly identified with finance—an act of rhetorical and ideological conflation that was not only described but enacted by the period’s financial narratives. It is a helpfully supple kind of periodization La Berge is producing here, both more expansive than the artificial and mythic divisions of decades, and yet more precise than the usual literary-theoretical invocations of late capitalism. At the core of her exhibits are two narratives, Wolfe’s novel and Stone’s film, both suffused in a traditionally didactic-melodramatic mode, a form of realism as journalistic exposé, that directly tackle the subject of contemporary finance and its new instruments in an up-to-the-minute Manhattan milieu. Yet La Berge builds out from that core to take in narratives that register the spread of finance into the crevices of Midwestern middle-class life, either in the form of DeLillo’s postmodernist glance at personal banking, or Smiley’s virtually Balzacian account of real-estate speculation in the wake of S&L deregulation. She builds to the example of American Psycho as both the summary and brilliant undoing of what she calls ‘financial print culture’, a cunning adaptation of the Trumpian autobiography that also pushes Wolfe’s and Stone’s melodrama into Gothic parody; for La Berge, Ellis’s deliberately affectless narrative of an investment banker and luxe consumer-turned-serial-killer is a highwire act of rhetorical assimilation. Financial print culture is also a frame that gathers together an era of financial deregulation, a generic crossing of realist and postmodernist narratives of financialization, and the moment of high poststructuralist theory in academic literary studies. La Berge argues that the moment when finance ‘took flight’, to use Arrighi’s term, from production was also the period in which production, and the Marxist models of literary history that took production as its grounding, were sidelined in literary theory, in favour of a floating, metonymic conception of plural ‘economies’. The theorists that emerged into prominence at this moment argued that orthodox Marxist categories were insufficient for explaining the new forms economic activity took, and in fact the hyper-speculative environment produced by an excess of capital bore a compelling resemblance to the poststructuralist theories of difference that happened to arrive at the same time. Economic determinism, and a language of base and superstructure, yielded to a discourse of homologies, differences, metonymies—just as, La Berge repeatedly reminds us, a deregulatory environment encouraged the vanishing of any sense of a productive ‘base’ to economic activity. La Berge is careful to avoid nostalgia for the Marxist theory that came under fire in the 1980s, but she wants to signal the blindnesses of the insights that supplanted it. Primarily, the emphasis on the ‘abstraction’ of finance, a term that echoed the sublime aporias of poststructuralist theory in its pomp, slid unhelpfully into a sense of finance as ‘unrepresentable’. La Berge is canny in the way she shows how an acute recognition of the abstractions of post-regulatory capital flows became a (rather aestheticized) capitulation to the self-serving obscurantism of a financialized economy. The abstraction of finance from production, when it is, rightly or wrongly, understood as an abstraction that has always already escaped definition—and, not coincidentally, regulation—becomes a kind of literary-theoretical admonition that whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent. Against this elision of abstraction and unrepresentability—part of the intellectual history of ‘the long 1980s’—La Berge wants to recover a particular representational history in the abstractions of finance. In some ways her account of financial fictions is similar to a longer durée of novelistic form stretching back to its rise to prominence—canvassed by Mary Poovey’s Genres of the Credit Economy (2008) or Anna Kornbluh’s more recent Realizing Capital (2013)—although it is a similarity that remains largely implicit in La Berge’s account. As in examples like Dickens’s Little Dorrit (1855–57) or Trollope’s The Way We Live Now (1874–75), both inspired by speculative bubbles roughly analogous to the S&L crisis or the 1987 stock market crash, two rhetorics and plot designs combine: one that casts blame on a charismatic, Mephistophelian—and often foreign—virtuoso of fraud, and another that positions speculation as an inexplicable force, a virus or natural disaster, beyond the rationality of human causes and effects. What is not ascribed to malevolence, then, can be sublimated into an ineffable threat—to use La Berge’s terms, scandal and abstraction, or as she calls them elsewhere in the book, criminality and complexity; both of them remaining external to the usual functioning of a market, which is comprehensible and commonplace. Dickens’s Merdle and Trollope’s Melmotte are replaced by the latest avatars, fictional and historical alike, this time more charismatic and typically hyper-masculinized, such as Ivan Boesky, Michael Milken, Gordon Gekko; to the occultation of personal responsibility in nineteenth-century investment schemes before and after the formulation of limited liability, add the opacity of the structures of accumulation after early 1980s deregulation, so resistant to ordinary comprehension and to being placed within legal categories. Is there anything genuinely unique to the narrative practices La Berge describes here? Or is this a case of a recurrent set of archetypes, available whenever an economy enters a period of dangerously excessive liquidity? One could imagine, that is, a literary history written according to Arrighi’s cycles of accumulation, where narrative forms are recycled as regimes of capital move through their expected progressions. The structural similarity between the financial fictions of the mid-Victorian period and the long 1980s masks a significant tonal dissimilarity, however, which La Berge takes it as her task to adumbrate. Her key concept is what she calls ‘the descriptive imperative’: the need for finance, in its post-Bretton Woods guises, to narrate itself in order to propagate itself. Finance achieves its dominance over the economy by representational means: by heroizing itself, by achieving a representational monopoly over other economic sites, by the legitimations of its narrative allure. The dealmaker, in other words, needs to be seen to be a dealmaker in order to make more deals; representation creates value. If Victorian representations of the financier were intentionally, although melodramatically, stigmatizing—including a xenophobic and in most cases anti-Semitic element—no such stigma attached to the financier in the 1980s, for whom any depiction became an advertisement. In particular—one of La Berge’s central claims—the depictions of the period performed a rhetorical reversal of its Victorian norms, rendering the previously masculinized world of production passive and effeminate, while transferring a masculine heroics to the figures of financial speculation. This is the realm of what La Berge, following in the wake of a long and complex theoretical tradition, calls ‘capitalist realism’: the form of realism that cannot help but collude with the objects of its ambivalent regard, in which ‘the structure of financial accumulation it describes ultimately subsumes the novel into its own form’. This is a rather more precise account than the more general and familiar claim that a representation that claims transparent fidelity inevitably reifies what it represents, forfeiting any critical perspective; or the rather banal point that novelists and film-makers—particularly in the period La Berge studies—produce commodities that are distributed by the kinds of multinationals that come under investigation in the fictions themselves. What La Berge studies instead are the demotic, everyday indices of finance in these narratives, the referential field that thematizes the financialization of everyday life. This involves her in two areas: the brand name and the atm. The latter is the most visible outcome of ‘personal banking’ and its development in the 1980s, and receives special attention in DeLillo and Ellis. Here La Berge concentrates on its now-invisible status as a ‘teller’: in both White Noise and American Psycho, the daily confession of the balance check, the daily receipt that confirms a personal intuition, amounts to an outsourcing of the narratorial function from a depersonalized psyche to a personalized machine. With the brand name La Berge goes further. Much work has been done on the status of the brand name in realist fiction, and the way that it transcends the distinction between Roland Barthes’s inert ‘reality effect’, the detail whose mutely quotidian quality resists any figuration, and the detail charged with thematic or symbolic resonance; both stubbornly ordinary and yet possessed of a value—even a trademarked value—that allegorizes all consumer culture, brand names are the qualia of contemporary capitalist thought. This much is not surprising, although La Berge notes that as an argument, this account of the brand name is simply a specification of the more general charge that a verisimilar representation remains immanent to its referent in a way that can only reify the latter. La Berge’s interest is directed more towards the ways that the brand name becomes rife within ‘postmodern’ novels rather than the realist fictions one might ordinarily presume would accommodate them; it is DeLillo and not Smiley who references MasterCard, Visa, Marriott, Freedent, while Ellis turns to Chase Manhattan, Saks, Barney’s. The postmodern novelist, that is, in narrating the depersonalizations of ‘personal finance’, becomes literal, is swallowed by the mechanics of capitalist realism—and as a result ends up facing the impasse that we had thought limited to a naive realism. Realist fiction like Wolfe’s, as La Berge notes, adopts a legal delicacy that is also a representational chastity: it respects the logic of the trademark by more often than not substituting imaginary names for well-known proprietary brand names. In an era where downmarket minimalist writing came to be known as ‘Kmart realism’, it is in fact postmodern fiction that succumbs to the trap whereby depiction becomes a capitulation to the logic of financial value, that advertises as it represents. Or is the distinction between postmodern and realist modes at all helpful here? For literary historians, La Berge’s most striking insight might be that under the pressure of financialization, both narrative modes end up colluding rather than remaining distinct, producing a muddled, mixed mode that we have not yet adequately named. The closest thing to a brand that imaginative literature has, La Berge comments, is the genre, if we understand both as ways of managing a horizon of expectation; but as her book progresses, it becomes clear that a culture of excess money has also liquidated the distinction between high postmodernism and low, demotic realism; in the 1980s, if not earlier, postmodernism and realism swap characteristics with peculiar speed. ‘High’ postmodernism dwindles into a pop experimentalism that not only becomes available for film adaptations and a mythic circulation in culture—witness American Psycho and Ellis’s debut, Less Than Zero (1985), as well as Jay McInerney’s cocaine Bildungsroman Bright Lights, Big City (1984)—but also increasingly restricts itself to the family and career, the familiar topoi of middle-class life; realist fiction, on the other hand, becomes shiftier, cannier, more ironic in relation to its own supposed transparency, particularly in the work of post-Carver minimalists like Amy Hempel or Lorrie Moore. This isn’t just a theoretical claim. La Berge pursues it in a contextual study of the conditions under which these various narratives came into being, which are intertwined to a nearly ridiculous degree. Take the genesis of Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities: like his model Dreiser, Wolfe sought first-hand experience in the milieu he would fictionalize, so he spent time in 1984 at the government-bond desk of the now-defunct Salomon Brothers, the signature bond-trading firm of the moment. In this investment in realist reportage Wolfe was not alone, however. Michael Lewis, who would later chronicle his experience as a trainee and bond salesman in Liar’s Poker (1989), was working at the time at Salomon Brothers, and would later recall Wolfe’s outsized presence, as if the observational novelist had become part of the apparatus of bond-trading self-aggrandizement that Lewis, the actual employee, was himself wryly observing; Lewis would in fact cite Bonfire within Liar’s Poker, the fiction standing in for fact. Soon afterward, the Harvard-educated Kenneth Lipper, former managing director of Salomon Brothers, was hired by Oliver Stone as a technical adviser for the filming of Wall Street; Lipper would also write the novelization of the film, published only shortly before the film’s release. Realist fiction, journalistic exposé, sensationalist Hollywood film and parasitic fictional merchandise, all colliding in a short window of time at Salomon Brothers’s 1980s headquarters at One New York Plaza in the city’s financial district: it is less a coincidence than a symptom. The overlapping, incestuous smallness of the world that produced these narratives—indeed of finance itself, however adept it proved at shrinking a culture’s sense of the economy to fit its narrow precincts—was mirrored by the strange sameness of the various artistic treatments it inspired, as if the world of One New York Plaza (and its neighbours) effortlessly funneled disparate aesthetic approaches into similar, and in some sense equivalent, even convertible, styles. To start with, postmodernist fiction—which had, at its ambitious heights, mapped networks of exchange and power that could not be understood within personal or psychological frames—turned, in an effort to understand phenomena like ‘personal banking’, domestic. White Noise is La Berge’s pivotal example, a now canonical instance of the postmodern. La Berge ascribes its canonicity to its familiar, everyday transparency—the new technologies of personal banking demand a smaller, more intimate canvas, even if the ‘personal’ of personal banking is depersonalized. Meanwhile, Wolfe’s Bonfire, which could scarcely have been more Victorian in its conception—it was serialized in Rolling Stone in an explicit nod to Dickens and Thackeray—becomes as a result a kind of postmodern pastiche, as much an act of homage and retelling as a history of the roiling present. American Psycho, which La Berge sees as a parody of Wolfe, is also, when read alongside the repetitive bragging of the economic strongman’s autobiography (in Boesky, Trump and T. Boone Pickens), more precise and more descriptive—put another way, paradoxically more realist. The end of postmodernism’s high phase, the recuperation of traditional realism by the selective use of postmodernist pastiche, and the blurring of their boundaries, in a kind of muddled consensus, characteristic of mainstream literary production of the 1980s: this is, as La Berge demonstrates, one among financialization’s many effects, cultural and other. Perhaps symptomatically, given her interest in the disappearance of ‘production’ in the economic and literary-theoretical discourses of the 1980s, La Berge’s account is throughout oriented toward producers: Wolfe’s research plans, the presence of Oliver Stone in his own film, Ellis’s reading of financial autobiographies; together, albeit often unwittingly, these various artistic producers construct a genre that mythicizes a financialized economy that seemed to render so much production obsolete. What of reception, however—how effective was this genre at communicating, evoking, or embodying the new dematerializations and precarities of finance? Are there pleasures to be had here, pleasures related to a financialized world, however conscripted those pleasures might be? On this point La Berge is largely silent, but her book offers some potential avenues for thought. A starting place is her chapter on Wolfe, Stone, and the realist narratives surrounding the 1987 market crash, in which she alludes to two affective elements common to these texts: an interest in a kind of pure affect-as-such—adrenaline, arousal, heightened anxiety, the panoply of excitements offered by financial ‘shocks’ big and small—and melodrama, the moralizing arc common to Wolfe’s Bonfire and Stone’s Wall Street, which offers a reassuring comfort to soften the harder edges of the adrenaline rushes both are also seeking. Both arousal and melodrama, however, are in the service of information: the elucidation of opaque financial processes such as leveraged buyouts, complexly structured bond transactions, hedging strategies. Such an aesthetic task seems as cumbersome as any deal. Did it succeed? On this score La Berge herself hedges: ‘The spectator may have been seduced by the power, money, excitement, and quick editing of the film thus far, which now seems to have been necessary in part to prepare her for this contextless, formless information about the causes and effects of the financial present in which she dwells.’ La Berge stops short of saying this is what something like Wall Street actually does; she prefers to work in the world of intention, whether the intention of producers or the implicit intention of narrative form. Her hesitancy here is likely to have been, at least in part, inspired by the poor reviews virtually all of her central instances received: whatever it was they thought they were up to, not everyone agreed they had achieved it. Indeed, if there is a success in La Berge’s book, it is the sheer success of representation itself: by simply depicting finance, whatever the collateral effects—or affects—of these representations, her texts helped cement the metonymic substitution of finance for the economy tout court that was the great cognitive shift of the long 1980s. But we might have good reason to linger a while longer on the question of the possible failures of these texts—even to suspect that failure might have been their greatest aesthetic success. Critics of Stone’s Wall Street made much of the clumsiness of the very melodrama La Berge discusses; in particular, of the infamous scene where Bud Fox, the ingénu in the process of being seduced by the masterful financier Gordon Gekko, wanders onto the terrace of his newly-acquired Upper East Side penthouse at sunrise and asks, ‘Who am I?’ As Vincent Canby, then the New York Times film critic, averred, ‘rude answers may come from the back of the theatre’. As it happens, I myself recall howls of laughter in the theatre at exactly that moment: if financial information was being presented elsewhere in the narrative, the accompanying melodrama and the film’s flirtation with the Bildungsroman mode were a dismal failure. But what if we were to take bathos as at least one affective signature of this genre? Failed melodrama of this kind produces disbelief—the feeling of not having been taken in, of successfully not having been played for a sucker. Whether it is the deliberately failed climaxes of White Noise, or the Grand Guignol acts played for laughs in American Psycho, or the ridiculous incongruities of Wall Street’s moments of introspection, the financial fictions La Berge marshals here seem to inspire an amused, critical detachment that is virtually, if largely unintentionally, Brechtian. An aesthetic of information—one that, by explaining or depicting the abstraction that is finance, naturalizes it at the same time—ends up evoking a reflexive suspicion of all abstractions not called financial. Claims of personhood elicit scornful or amused incredulity. The simplest, starkest moments are inherently preposterous. Complexity, on the other hand—the sublimity of systems that hover on the edge of our understanding—seems intuitively true, convincing. This is the solution, perhaps, that financial narratives of the 1980s reach in the effort to negotiate the split reality of capital, ‘very abstract and terribly concrete at the same time’, as Lefebvre put it. Bathos is its affective sign; it raises our guard in order to relax it elsewhere. Perhaps, then, the tonal failures and affective glitches of what La Berge calls ‘financial form’ are our best guide to its cultural work: to make the complex and abstract into a Barthesian reality effect. Only when abstraction no longer speaks for ‘the real’ can the long 1980s be said to have ended. BACK TO ISSUE 99•May/June 2016 SHARE Facebook Twitter Email Download PDF ABOUT HISTORY NEWSLETTER ADVANCED SEARCH CONTACT SUBMISSIONS PRIVACY ACCESSIBILITY FOLLOW US TWITTER FACEBOOK RSS NEW LEFT REVIEW 6 MEARD STREET, LONDON W1F 0EG UNITED KINGDOM +44 (0)20 7734 8830 © NEW LEFT REVIEW LTD 2020