Extrapolating from “Autumn of the System”

Extrapolating from “Autumn of the System”

Joshua Clover’s article “Autumn of the System” reads our contemporary (2006-2011) economy as an end of the “reign of finance” because capital has ceased to move; it is mere money. At the same time, global capital is spatial, leaving us with a scattered narrative of economy and, thus, of reality. He writes, “The goal here is to peer a bit further into the confrontation of space and time in the era of late capitalism, and perhaps finally to post a brief on behalf of poetry (or, at least, non-narrative) as the signal literary form of the period, despite its dismal reputation.” In other words, the literature of the moment has evolved to reflect our experience of economic and political realities in its narrative arc or lack thereof -- and that language is poetry.

According to Clover, poetry is the language of the waning of accumulation capital within post modernism because poetry resists narrative and is a fragmented way of communicating, because it inscribes debt or interruption into the logic of itself.  Does this imply that each era has such a complementary language? That is, if we were to read the political economies of the civil war or of the civil rights movement, would they, conversely, offer themselves as complete narratives that suggested an unstuttering logic? Is there ever a language of a self-present politics? Do we ever find the present to be sufficiently understood that we could narrate it smoothly? Or, does poetry seem proper only because we cannot historicize as we go, such as would be true for any age? It seems so: “That the book cannot finally provide a cognitive map of the present, of capital’s material, is of course the point” (Clover 40).

According to Clover’s criteria, poetry might seem to be the appropriate language to any age, since it is impossible for any present to be cognitively mapped. And, by the logic justifying poetry, I could argue that any genre is appropriate to the present, because even a well-constructed narrative fails to grasp a total reality. A narrative in prose is insufficient and opportunistic, choosing only what forwards the narrative and disenfranchising the rest.

The Portrait of a Lady was published serially in 1880-1881. Let us consider: in the 1880s (and the Gilded Age in general), speculation and finance were new forms of capital, based not on the generation of commodities, but in infrastructural investment based on a hunch (oil barons came into being at this time, betting on the importance of the commodity in the future); thus we could say that the present was a time of collapse into the future; finance was generated on the basis of a hope, so that narrative was concentrated on one point in time and then a thin thread let out as the capital developed. What would its literary representation look like? Might it look like a novel whose first several hundred pages yield little action over the course of a few months, followed by five pages that include a marriage, a miscarriage, the dissolution of the same marriage, and then two hundred more that narrate a few more inactive months? Such is The Portrait of a Lady,  accomplishing its action in fits and starts, bursting with action and then holding its breath.

The railroad acquired also new importance at that time (between 1870 and 1880, railroad mileage in the US nearly doubled) especially in light of new technologies that expanded its use (sturdier cars and tracks, which carried more people and goods more efficiently and the refrigerator car, to transport food). I would argue that this new ability to cover distance would have been felt as a spatial condensation on the scale of current globalization. A language that encapsulated this spread might have been composed serially and/or across continents, which was James’ mode; he expatriated himself to England and published Portrait via monthly installments in The Atlantic. Or this language might accumulate a diversity of perspectives and schizophrenically offer differing accounts of the protagonist via sentences that luxuriate and meander: “She was not in love with him and therefore might criticise his small defects as well as his great -- which latter consisted in the collective reproach of his being too serious, or, rather not of his being so, since one could never be, but certainly of his seeming so.”

If either mapping of  The Portrait of a Lady onto the Gilded Age seems plausible, then the bildungsroman may be the narrative mode appropriate to the Gilded Age...but, were we to test them, so might poetry or drama.