R. L. Stevenson’s “The Beach of Falesá” and the Conjuring-Tricks of Capital

THE RECENT global financial crisis has brought critical discourses about capital to the forefront of public debate in the United Kingdom and the United States. The bursting of the American, British and Irish subprime mortgage bubbles was deeply troubling but equally mystifying: how did the purchase of debt—buying with money someone else’s borrowing of money—result in a harsh economic climate for economic sectors not even remotely connected to housing or finance? In the search for answers as to how the economy has ended up the way it is, responding narratives often reach back to the Reagan/Thatcher years that saw the rise of deregulation, the weakening of organized labor and the fall of the Soviet Empire. These developments, so the story goes, allowed for unfettered capital to flow across the globe—first via the existing technologies of mail and phone, and then by newer, speedier methods of telecommunications. The result was a dramatic increase in financialization: in 1970, financial services accounted for fifteen percent of total profits in the United States; by 2005 it was forty percent, with no signs of abating. Longer views often point to the early twentieth-century decline of Great Britain as a manufacturer and its compensatory rise as steward of global markets. Rudolf Hilferding argued in Finance Capital (1910) that capitalism would become increasingly virtual and credit based as it evolved, and 2008 seemed to mark a crisis point in the trajectory he had charted.

As much as there is new about this crisis, however, there is also much that should be familiar to students of the history of capitalism, including the role of finance. It seems that Western societies are periodically shocked by the power and influence of finance and credit, but in fact many economic historians would argue that heavy financialization is periodic and essential to global capital. Thus ours might not be an exceptional era. In The Perspective of the World (1984) Fernand Braudel argued against Hilferding’s teleological narrative and insisted that finance capital has been an inherent part of most forms of capitalism since its earliest origins: “Finance capitalism was no newborn child of the 1900s; I would even argue that in the past—in say Genoa or Amsterdam—following a wave of growth in commercial capitalism and the accumulation of capital on a scale beyond the normal channels for investment, finance capitalism was already in a position to take over and dominate, for a while at least, all the activities of the business world.”¹ Financialization has attracted cultural responses. The high points of Renaissance drama in England were marked by a complicated, mostly adverse relationship to the hegemonic forces of mercantile capitalism.² Colin Nicholson, analyzing what he dubs the Restoration “capital satires” of Swift and Pope in Writing and the Rise of Finance (1994), writes that “[t]he paper-money economy of credit significantly developed during the financial revolution changed in decisive ways how people thought and wrote about themselves and their world.”³ Mary Poovey’s Genres of the Credit Economy (2008) explores the intersections of literary and financial writing throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, noting that money, financial writing, and literature were all genres that “were not consistently differentiated from each other. Not only did they perform variants of a single function, but they sometimes shared formal features as well.”⁴ In the twentieth century, anxiety over finance took the form of anti-Semitism in Ezra Pound’s Cantos and the character of Jason in Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury.⁵ Later canonical works in the subgenre of Anglo-American “financial lit” might include Martin Amis’s Money (1984), Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis (2003) or Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland (2008).⁶

So while the degree of financialization is debatable amongst economic historians, in the field of culture it is a persistent concern. It should come as no surprise, then, that the latter years of the British “Great Depression” (1873–1896) saw similar outbursts of frustration at finance and its proponents. The phrase merits scare quotes because of the...