Melville’s Money: Chair: Andrew Kopec, Indiana University-Purdue University Fort Wayne

Participants in “Melville’s Money” panel at ALA 2015, from left to right: Madison Furrh, Christine A. Wooley, Yoshiaki Furui, Joe Conway, and Andrew Kopec.

Photo courtesy of James M. Van Wyck

The issue of Herman Melville’s relation to money has generated a wealth of criticism. His work’s complex textual economies and its disastrous relation to dollars, not to mention Melville’s status as a kind of coin, an Ecuadoran doubloon circulating among literary critics and the wider public, have made for a vibrant subfield of Melville studies. Continuing this work on Melville’s currency, the contributors to this panel demonstrate—to borrow Peggy Kamuf’s metaphor in The Division of Literature—the seemingly illimitable line of credit that Melville’s work extends to its readers. Joe Conway, reading the episode involving “A Gentleman with Gold Sleeve-Buttons” from The Confidence-Man, draws attention to the ontology of money and its status in the novel not simply as a vehicle of (symbolic) exchange but as a carrier of disease as well. Madison Furrh, in one of the panel’s two contributions to what Dan McCall in The Silence of Bartleby has coined the “Bartleby Industry,” finds in Melville’s story a scathing critique of wage-labor, an ideology buttressed by a republican commitment to thrift. For Yoshiaki Furui, who finds in “Bartleby” divergences from the era’s post-office fiction, the scrivener’s notorious preference “not to” ultimately jams the communications networks that make exchange possible. And Christine A. Wooley, considering Ishmael’s reference in Moby-Dick to the joint-stock company—an essential institution of Western imperialism—wonders how the novel’s model of liability differs from that found in a text like Uncle Tom’s Cabin. These papers, engaging with fiction from the 1850s, offer exciting work on Melville and money while at the same time pointing to work on the topic that remains to be done across the long arc of Melville’s career.

“A Common Bond of Contamination”: Melville and the Pathology of Cash
Joe Conway
University of Alabama in Huntsville

In The Confidence Man, “the gentleman with gold sleeve-buttons” refuses to touch money. No wonder: the medical and economic literature of the antebellum United States is rife with stories of people catching their death of cash. A cholera outbreak in Baltimore in 1855 was blamed on the circulation of infected bills, for example, leading one currency reformer to call for the ban of paper notes, branding them a “common bond of contamination” that was “well adapted to disseminate disease.” These epidemiological fears resist dominant representations of paper money that treat it as an economic object defined by what it lacks: the presence of gold. Yet as we culturally transition from the end of Carlyle’s “Paper Age” to the dawn of a digital one, the stubborn quiddity of cotton-fiber cash suddenly seems like an excessively obtruding material presence to technocrats heralding the advent of electronic currency. Noting Melville’s attunement to the visual, tactile, and even olfactory qualities of cash in The Confidence Man, I argue that his book is unusual both in its time and our own for approaching global financial abstractions at the level of local practice. By placing Melville in dialogue with Silicon-Valley journalism, sci-fi narratives of money-borne plague, and works of art made from viruses found on cash, “a common bond of contamination” becomes a figure for recognizing the mutual risks incurred across time and space by strangers in a world of shared material.

“The Universal Confounding and Distorting of Things”: Money and Starvation in Melville’s “Bartleby the Scrivener”
Madison Furrh
Colorado State University-Pueblo [End Page 123]

In this paper, Melville’s masterpiece of short fiction is contextualized within the political discourse of the 1850s where chronic hunger and starvation plagued the free laborer and were the focus of criticism leveled at the economic system of the North. That Melville had his character Bartleby die by starvation while in the prime of life is no accident. The inability of narrator...