Trading Literature

While the theme "Trading Literature" might seem to invite repetitions of a literary sociologism whose predominance in the literary disciplines has threatened to become, to be kind, rather limiting, I want instead to speculate a little on how literature trades with its others, on the constitutive asymmetry of all trading relationships, and on the subjective, temporal, and historical forms that result from the trading of one narrative device for another. There's no doubt that we're caught up, all the time, us critics, in multiple, nested forms of monetized trade, whether we wish it to be so or not.

To recognize this does not require that one talks, when one talks about literature, only about commodity futures, or finance capital, or about indulgent fantasies of tenured insurrection; only about our fevered imaginings of context, this is to say. Despite decades of attempts to show how close attention to literary form and historical and political modes of reading are not mutually exclusive, the fact that we have to keep reminding ourselves of this is telling, I think; redolent, at the least, of questions inadequately posed. In the micro-readings that follow, the trading of one literary device for another is as capable of reflecting, or perhaps in part instantiating, the folds of time or political force, as any over-hasty appeal to the extra-literary. This is so even as the inevitability of criticism's trading of one form—the literary—for others, in this case theory, will also duly be recognized.

With the latter in mind, I begin with Jacques Derrida trading blows with Charles Baudelaire. Spinning a dense interpretive web out of Baudelaire's recit "Counterfeit Money," Derrida riffs on both the impossibility and necessity of the "pure" gift, different from a simple act of exchange, to say nothing of trade; the gift, most importantly, as an act that donates a certain kind of time, through a particular form of narrative shape and duration (Derrida 1992). In Baudelaire's story, two friends leave a tobacco shop, whereupon they meet "a beggar." One of the friends, significantly enough not the man who is narrating events for us, offers the beggar a counterfeit coin as if it were real; the possible reasons for such cruelty then preoccupy the narrator's thoughts. Here is Baudelaire's narrative "I" in full flow: "I looked him squarely in the eyes and I was appalled to see that his eyes shone with unquestionable candor. I then saw clearly that his aim had been to do a good deed while at the same time making a good deal; to earn forty cents and the heart of God; to win paradise economically" (Baudelaire 1992, 172).

Here is Derrida: "The gift gives, demands, and takes time…This is why we will take account of 'Counterfeit Money' and of the impossible account that is Baudelaire's tale. The thing as given thing, the given of the gift arrives, if it arrives, only in narrative" (1992, 41). But is the everyday act of apparent cruelty pictured by Baudelaire an instance of gift giving, or is it a trade? The offerer of the coin would seem to have traded his counterfeit for the mere outer appearance of good morals; one thinks here of Glaucon's cynicism about the possibility of a pure altruism, entirely unmotivated by the desire for a good reputation, at the outset of Plato's Republic (1993, 44-57). Derrida's deconstruction of the gift, at any rate, would seem to make any strict distinction between gift, trade, and exchange difficult, if not, as is so often deconstruction's wont, sublimely impossible. These already interrelated terms, upon the impress of Derrida's reading, threaten to slide, one into the other, although Baudelaire, before Derrida, shows us how, despite or perhaps because of this undecidability, to opt for one of these acts over another has consequences far beyond the ken of whatever subjective deliberation preceded the decision.

I'm interested in these and other formative asymmetries that multiply in Baudelaire's tale, and what they may tell us about the differing kinds of subjective time and shape that different narrative...