Financial Fictions: Émile Zola's L'argent, Frank Norris' The Pit, and Alfredo de Taunay's O encilhamento

Frank Norris' The Pit and Alfredo de Taunay's O encilhamento are "financial" novels: like Émile Zola's paradigmatic L'argent, both focus on stock or commodities operations, that is, on forms of using or defining "money"; their plots turn on "speculation," the attempt to leverage a small investment into a large fortune, by playing on a combination of market conditions and crowd psychology. ¹ They are not unique for their time--such novels form a cluster during the last two decades of the nineteenth and the first of the twentieth centuries--and are members of a class that Halina Suwala, in her study of Zola, calls the "novel of the stock exchange." ² Their production and reception are concomitant of global cycles of boom and bust spreading out from France, or England, or (a few decades before the time in question here) the New York office of an Ohio life insurance company, ³ to shake up economies around the world.

In France, economic upheavals begin to play an important part in fiction after the spectacular Law bankruptcy at the beginning of the eighteenth century, though it is only a century later that novels will show a more consistent interest in market mechanisms proper. ⁴ It is a commonplace of criticism that a good proportion of novels in the age of realism turns directly--and the rest do so indirectly--on economic motifs and tropes. ⁵ A subset of the realist, and later, naturalist novels, which can be called "financial fictions," deal directly with economic instruments and catastrophes; and they are the subject of this essay. Finance, which in these novels is often represented by stock exchange transactions and fluctuations, appears prominently in the first half of the century, in Balzac's Le baron Nucingen and César Birotteau, but comes into its full form after the 1882 failure, in France, of the Union Générale bank and investment company, an event on which Zola bases his L'argent, published in 1891. ⁶ In the United States, such novels are what Eric Sundquist sees as a response to "the startling acceleration into being of a complex industrial society following the Civil War." ⁷ William Howells, Frank Norris, Theodore Dreiser, and others showed an interest in the stock market, in the expansion of railroads, in international trade, and in speculation as a condition of the rise and fall of fortunes. During the same period, Brazilian novels by Lima Barreto, Julia Lopes de Almeida, and Afonso de Taunay drew, for plot and characterization, on the conditions of living in an export economy dependent on international markets, as well as on the economic and social upheavals of the abolition of slavery, the proclamation of the Republic, and a sudden expansion of the economy. In all these cases, literature was responding to financial conditions both local and international. In all these cases, social and economic instabilities made it appear that meaning itself was at stake, as writers translated current anxieties into the overwrought knot of the turn-of-the-century novel. These, as critics always note, address the rapid growth of cities and the depopulation of the countryside, the migrations between countries and across oceans, the shift from an economy of production to one of consumption as well as the increasing importance of finance, the explosion of scientific knowledge and technological know-how, and the growth of mass media fostering and disseminating pop science and popular culture. These historical processes create an awareness of the uprooted multitude, bring to the surface the instabilities in the concept of money, and threaten to upend the traditional distribution of knowledge/power. There arises then a characteristic insecurity, combined with equally characteristic bravado, neatly instanced, for the contemporary imagination, in the series of episodes of market exuberance and inflation, followed...