Money, Modernism & Inflation in The Great Gatsby

Money on the Left

Rob Hawkes (@robbhawkes) and Scott Ferguson (@videotroph) kick off a new Superstructure series about money, modernism, and inflation by revisiting F. Scott Fitzgerald’s widely-read novel, The Great Gatsby (1925).

In this first episode of the series, Rob and Scott complicate orthodox notions of inflation that treat economic crises past and present as mechanical results of excess money printing. They do so by reconsidering modernist art and literature’s fraught relations with notions of austerity and excess. While inflation has been associated, by modernist writers and scholars alike, with a crisis of faith in representation, Rob and Scott problematize reductive narratives that link economic, literary, and aesthetic exuberance to the relativization and loss of all value, offering limitation and privation as the only routes to sustainable creativity. Such narratives, they argue, not only mischaracterize the generativity of modernist experimentation, but also dangerously undermine modernism’s transformative challenges to unjust social orders, including hierarchies of race, class, gender and sexuality.

Working out a heterodox alternative, Rob and Scott turn to Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, well-known for holding the exuberance of the jazz age and the relativising effects of its cubist narrative in tension with the deflationary impacts of the various crashes the novel thematizes and attempts to contain. In the past, scholars and critics have interpreted Gatsby as a cautionary tale, one that apparently warns against the extravagances of the Roaring Twenties and even foretells the coming Wall Street crash of 1929 and ensuing Great Depression. In Rob and Scott’s account, by contrast, Fritzgerald’s text unleashes rich experimental energies that point beyond the rigid austerity/excess binary through which it is frequently framed. They acknowledge how the book’s preoccupation with private persons and desires can abet “monetary silencing,” Jakob Feinig’s term for the repression of monetary knowledge and participation. At the same time, however, Rob and Scott contend that the way Gatsby implicitly connects credit issuance to social critique and creativity harbors urgent lessons for contemporary debates about money, inflation and culture.

Stay tuned for the second installment in this series.

Music: "Yum" from "This Would Be Funny If It Were Happening to Anyone but Me" EP by flirting.
flirtingfullstop.bandcamp.com/
Twitter: @actualflirting