The Customs House of Hades: Why Dickens and Gogol Traffic with the Underworld

The sixteenth-century Chinese novel Journey to the West contains a striking scene of economic transaction between the land of the living and the land of the dead.¹ Early in the narrative, the deceased emperor T'ai-tsung enters the afterlife armed with a letter of introduction from his minister Wei Chêng. Thanks to Wei Chêng's connections in the Region of Darkness, the emperor secures a twenty-year extension on his lifespan. On his return journey through the City of the Dead, however, he finds his way barred by hideous ghosts who cry "Give us back our lives!" (1.246). His guide, an underworld judge, explains that these spirits have lost their friends and family because of their iniquities and "are now cut off from salvation because there is none to receive them or care for them. Since they have no money or belongings, they are ghosts abandoned to hunger and cold. Only if Your Majesty can give them some money will I be able to offer you deliverance." Although T'ai-tsung's possessions remain in the world of the living, he is able to resolve the situation through a credit arrangement. "There is in the World of the Living a man who has deposited great sums of gold and silver in our Region of Darkness," the judge informs him. "You can use your name for a loan and your humble servant will serve as your voucher; we shall borrow a roomful of money from him and distribute it among the hungry ghosts. You will then be able to get past them" (1.247). After his successful resurrection, the emperor promptly sends wagonloads of money to his spiritual creditors, a water-seller and his wife who are "poor folks in the World of Light," but "leading citizens for whom jade and gold were laid up in the other world" (1.259). Astonished to receive a roomful of money from the imperial treasury, they are told:

Whatever exceeds your necessities you have used to purchase paper money, which you burned in dedication to the Region of Darkness. You have thus accumulated a vast fortune down below. Our emperor, T'ai-tsung, returned to life after being dead for three days; he borrowed a roomful of gold and silver from you while he was in the Region of Darkness, and we are returning the exact sum to you. Please count your money accordingly so that we may make our report back to the emperor.

(260)

When the virtuous couple refuses, the emperor dedicates the funds to build a shrine in their name. This returns the sum to them as a stockpile of spiritual currency.

Obviously, this value that subsists in repeated exchanges across the border of life and death—from a lifetime's poverty wages to a treasure in the afterlife to a wealth of imperial bullion and back to the storehouse of the dead—is not a matter of commodity money. Spiritual debts repaid in material coin can be understood in the specific context of karmic debt in the merchant religion of Chinese Buddhism: "One purchases felicity and sells one's sins," writes the monk Tu Mu (qtd. Graeber 262). However, aesthetic texts are allied more broadly with a value that is expressible in both temporal and eternal terms. The work of art exists at once as a physical object for consumption and as an abstract form that is "immortal," as Charles Baudelaire writes, "for form is independent of matter, and not made up of molecules" (qtd. Binswanger 75). These two aspects communicate with one another. The market, by rendering the immeasurable values of beauty and sublimity into dollar values, translates the sensuous experience of art into commodity terms; at the same time, the aesthetic is often thought of as a wasteful expenditure, an investment into the imagination, a diversion of resources into a non-instrumental form.² Something like the joss paper or "ghost money" burned in Journey to the West, art is a material loss but generates value in another realm.

One way of conceptualizing this...