Greetings Workshoppers,
The short piece before you is in-progress to an extent that at moments its texture likely remains allusive rather than explicative. Some of those moments are marked by reference to the proverbial larger project, about which I will say two words at the beginning of our session. Others are probably marked by their opacity. I very much look forward to the lucidity our discussion will doubtless inspire.
Thanks!
Anna

Kornbluh, 1
Anna Kornbluh
University of Illinois, Chicago
January 2009
You ask me my opinion as an economist, but this is a matter for psychology - Fed Reserve
Chairman Ben Bernanke, 2008
As we contemplated the fire, and as I thought what a difficult vision to realize Capital sometimes was, I put my hands into my pockets.
– Great Expectations, 1860
Despite a superabundance of theoretical insight that would ground the current global financial crisis in the vertiginous abstraction of financial instruments like shares, futures, and derivatives – to say nothing of the specularity of value itself - the fervent consensus among the talking heads of Wall Street, the Federal Government, and the media maintains that our current economic instability is not structural but “a matter for psychology.” Just as speculative mania and financial crises are nothing new for western capitalism, the attendant psychologizing notion of a structural and causal continuity between the financial economy and the psyche has its own history. Dating at least from the long nineteenth century, the imbrication of the psyche and the economy views affective life through the prism of economy, envisioning homo economicus as an individual subject of equilibrate pleasures and pains whose aggregation amounts to the psyche of the market. During the mid-Victorian period, the marked preponderance of this rhetorical construct of “libidinal economy” in psychology, utilitarianism, self-help discourse, and marginal utility economics paralleled the process of financialization, the dominance of financial instruments and transactions over and above commodity or industrial production. In the preceding chapters, I have been arguing that this parallel actually effects an ideological intersection: as financialization exacerbated the worrisome
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Kornbluh, 2 unreality of “the economy,” the idea that the psychological interior was itself an economy, and in turn therefore that the economy possessed its own psyche, furnished a putatively real ground for abstract economic relations – it functioned, if you like, to realize capital.
“To realize Capital” is therefore at once the chief imperative of financialization and the chief quandary for the culture of finance. What guarantees that investments outlaid in the present will come back to the future? How can the troublingly rhetorical fabrication of investment be vested with real meaning? These and other questions abounded in the late 1840’s and 1850’s, when the British Parliament ratified the financial logics of stock, corporations, and futures through a flurry of legal acts like The Joint
Stock Companies Act of 1844, the Limited Liability Act of 1856, and the 1860 Barnard’s
Act Repeal. In the wake of these acts, the numbers of joint-stock banks, of corporations, and of individual investors grew astronomically; the economy suffered numerous crises that inspired the original Business Cycle Theory; and the stock market was routinely indicted as a house of cards whose foundation bore a close formal kinship with fiction.
i
Composed and appearing in 1860 ii
against this backdrop of mid-century legislation, epidemic financial crisis, and general contestation of the fictions of economy,
Charles Dickens’s
Great Expectations leverages a powerful critique against the culture of investment. Notwithstanding a scholarly tendency to view Great Expectations as a comic retreat from the more serious socio-political lens of Little Dorrit and Bleak House , it is easily acknowledged that a novel whose protagonist and narrator is at once the object and agent of investments exceeding the margins of legal normalization - a novel astorm with secret endowments, questionable foreign capital, counterfeit money, the national debt,
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Kornbluh, 3 and swindles of many stripes - focuses on the instability of financial relations.
iii
What is more, Great Expectations may be that rare case of a book amenable to being judged by its cover: from the title alone prospective readers can easily glean that this is a text concerned with looking out, looking forward, looking about, all with the affective intensity of anticipation, suspense, longing; with orientation toward the future; with what arises at the intersection of temporality, affect, and looking. Less obvious is that this preoccupation with the affective circumstances of investment primes the novel to scrutinize the scheme of “libidinal economy” that accompanies financialization. The organ of this scrutiny is an irony forged by the blacksmith Joe that welds together the figurative system of Great Expectations .
iv
Modally aimed at the exposure of figurative language, and therefore quite aesthetically adept at critiquing the tropology of finance, irony would also seem the main avenue for contravening first person narration.
v The
Victorians knew their way down that road after the masterful guidance of Robert
Browning’s poetry, but irony was a more unusual route for the first person novel, if for no other reason than that such novels were decidedly rare in the Victorian period. One of only two subjectively narrated Dickens novels (the other was David Copperfield , which he reread just before writing Great Expectations, and of which he feared “unconscious repetitions”),
Great Expectations is widely received as an archetypal Bildungsroman .
Yet at the novel’s end, the vulnerable first person narrator expresses his selfrecrimination and evinces his blossoming moral rectitude through tropes that remain glaringly consistent with the logic of his original misdeeds – tropes of “libidinal economy.” This irony operates to simultaneously impeach Pip’s narrative and to disclose
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Kornbluh, 4 the collusions between the insurgent construct of libidinal economy and the rhetorical sleights-of-hand of investment in the mid-Victorian boom.
**
A specific moment of investment late in the text establishes these diverse stakes of the novel’s concern. Pip decides to facilitate the fortunes of his friend Herbert Pocket, despite Pocket’s bleak economic forecast. Though he first introduces himself to Pip as
“A Capitalist, an Insurer of Ships,” Pocket must quickly admit that his pockets are unfortunately empty, his mercantile insurance venture languishing in the purely prospective quarter: “I haven’t begun insuring yet, I am looking about me…it doesn’t pay me anything.” Pip appraises the outlook with some chagrin, thinking, “it would be difficult to lay by much accumulative capital from such a source.” Thence ensues
Herbert’s technical précis of the accumulation of capital:
“But the thing is,” said Herbert Pocket, “that you look about you. That’s
the grand thing. You are in a counting-house, you know, and you look about you…Then the time comes,” said Herbert, “when you see your opening. And you go in, and you swoop upon it and you make your capital, and then there you are!” vi
If Herbert is to be pitied for believing in the practical magic whereby the sheer force of desirous “looking about” will secure capital, he is surely in the company of fools from the
British Parliament who lately licensed the smoke and mirrors of high finance. As far as
Pip’s worldly experience goes, capital may very well be delivered by the stork, so it takes a bit of maturing before he concludes that poor Herbert needs a hand. Indeed, Pip eventually claims that very conclusion as the proof of his moral maturation, taking a decision to invest secretly in Herbert’s venture as “the only good thing I had done, and the only completed thing I had done, since I was first apprised of my great expectations”
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Kornbluh, 5
(416). Though Pip’s sentimental education entails the appreciation that capital isn’t realized by “looking about,” the generous expansiveness that atones for his selfish contractions enshrines another source: “as we contemplated the fire, and as I thought what a difficult vision to realize Capital sometimes was, I put my hands into my pockets.” The realization of Capital is the withdrawal of previously hoarded resources from an affective reserve. Putting hands into pockets works distinctly more effectively than “looking about,” but Herbert’s mistaken notions are exchanged for a no less problematic imaginary in which “pocket” signals the private sector where feeling grounds finance.
A typically Dickensian over-determined name, “Pocket” stitches Herbert on the seam of the economic and the small. Ambitious but impoverished, sympathetic but not so sage, Pocket is the host of a tiny humble home sheltering Pip from the London bustle; he is a minor character whose subplot for economic and romantic advancement is enfolded within Pip’s; and after much looking-about his unseeing pockets are lined out of
Pip’s pockets. The continuity thus sewn between Pip’s pocket and Pocket recalls
“investment” to its etymological roots: to clothe, to envelop in a garment. Evoking investment, interiority, the investing of interiority with the promise to ground investment, and the slippage between figurative and literal, the rhetoric of the pocket crystallizes the novel’s overarching concerns. No wonder then that the fabric of the text rather remarkably weaves a garment of many, many pockets: there are “pocket-handkerchiefs,”
“pocket-flasks,” “pocket-money,” and “pocket-books”; “holes in pockets,” “emptied pockets,” “hands in pockets,” and “notes in pockets”; pockets of hypothetical ontology
(“as if his pocket were full of secrets,” “as if his pocket were a drawer”); and, most
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Kornbluh, 6 disturbingly, a corpse “so horribly disfigured that he was only recognizable by the content of his pockets.” Marking the hard “pock” of “pocket,” this latter image of lethal disfigurement alludes to the distortions the novel perceptively detects within the menacingly capacious imagery of the pocket: if “pocket” conjures together both money and intimacy, both interiority and constriction, both aperture and closure, it is this very seaming of affect and economy that betrays a monstrous suture – a point to which I will return shortly.
Great Expectations
’ climactic moment of pocketing activates these multiple meanings. “As we contemplated the fire” clearly sets the fireside scene in first person plural, thereby ambiguating the first person singular possessive pronoun “my” in “I put my hands into my pockets” – in the company of Herbert Pocket, out of mutual affection for and with Herbert Pocket, Pip plots to put his hands into “my dear” Pocket. The novel well knows that to realize capital is to borrow from the virtual, from the future, but through Pip’s gesture it presents a competing paradigm: affective intensity is the real estate of finance. Putting his hands into his Pocket’s, Pip’s paradigm mimics the steps of internal retreat choreographed by the broad Victorian wisdom of the 1860’s: thinkers in political economy, emergent psychology, thermodynamics, self-help, and household management were collectively intoning that the self was best understood as an economy.
As we have seen in the previous chapters, these intonations worked to harmonize the more troubling notes of rapidly innovating financial capitalism, which exacerbated the disjuncture between symbols of value (like cheques, shares, and futures) and the putative referents of those symbols, gold, technology, labor, or land. The libidinal economy notion promised that the financial economy unleashing abstract figures of the abstraction
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Kornbluh, 7
“value” was in fact anchored in the psychological subject, and Pip’s anonymous investment issues that promissory note.
Against this matrix of values, we can begin to understand why the concept of realization operates so peculiarly in this passage. For, even as Pip’s pockets tender something more real than Herbert’s pure prospects, the novel is unconvinced about that reality. The first hint might come from the strange application of the verb “to realize.”
Looking to the OED’s definition, we see that the use of the verb “realize” with reference to economic matters actually originally pertained not to accruing capital but rather to converting capital in to things more “real”: as Chambers’ 1728 Cyclopædia
has it,
“
Realise , in Commerce, a Term little known in Trade before the Year 1719, when those immense Fortunes began to be made by the Business of Actions or Stock.
By Realising, is meant the Precaution many of those who had gain'd most, took, to convert their Paper into real Effects, as Lands, Houses, rich moveables, Jewels,
Plate.”
Only much later, with in fact John Stuart Mill’s 1876
Principles of Political Economy , does the meaning reverse completely: “when he retires from business it is into money that he converts the whole, and not until then does he deem himself to have realized his gain.”
In the time lapse between these two concepts, the legal process of financialization entails a shift in metaphysics, realigning the real from “Effects” to paper figures.
vii Within the novel, then, part of what makes “to realize Capital” a “difficult vision” is capital’s subversion of this relationship between the figure of the real and its ground – its shift, we might say, from a more circumscribed surveying to the less spatio-temporally defined
“looking about.” Much in the vein of that minor Victorian Karl Marx, who formulated the notion of “fictitious capital” at almost exactly the same time, Great Expectations thinks capitalism at this tension between figure and ground, as a system galvanized by
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Kornbluh, 8 deferring reconciliation of the gap between the abstraction “value” and the ontologically positive manifestations of well-being.
viii Animated by this insight, the novel’s interest in irony, the insistent exposure of the figurative, is particularly astute. Irony’s disfiguring interrogation of both image and ground contravenes the investment topos, in which figures of value are projected into a future to which still more figures will accrue. Irony calls figures back, not to their ground, but to their groundlessness, and as such its movement strictly opposes the expectant, propulsive futurity of finance.
The dizzying ironies of these scenes of realizing Capital throw Herbert and Pip’s conflations of libidinous longing, affectionate extension, and capital realization under suspicion. The tension around the realization of Capital zeroes in on the way that the culture of financial investment invests the thought of the psyche with economic imagery.
As that tension winds tighter in the course of the plot, the novel works to expose the pocks of this rhetorical investment. With its intimations of disfigurement, the rhetoric of the pocket finally distills the figurative conjuncture between intimate relationships and financial investment that Great Expectations subjects to a de-figuring irony. Through the rhetoric of the pocket, both Pip’s great act of moral recompense and the processes of investment and capital realization come under the sign of disfigurement. This disfiguring disclosure is the trademark of the irony that surrounds the entire transaction between Herbert and Pip: Pip winks at Herbert’s imprécis of capital but actively facilitates it. Worse yet, the conflict in the plot has been induced by an anonymous investment but somehow Pip alights upon another anonymous investment as the solution to the conflict.
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Most troubling of all, the “great satisfaction” that Pip recoups from this investment does nothing to remedy the misdeeds of which he ought most repent, his cruel abandonment of Joe, his “fellow sufferer” in the house of Gargery. Pip’s investment in
Pocket goes some way to making good on his money, but he never comes round to make adequate amends to Joe. Such recompense is perhaps foreclosed by the suggestion that
Joe’s love is a gift, as illustrated by the stark contrast with Mrs. Gargery’s nasty garnishing of the young Pip’s earnings to repay her for the burden of nurturing an orphan sibling:
“a money box was kept on the kitchen mantelshelf, into which it was publicly made known that all my earnings were dropped. I have an impression that they were to be contributed eventually towards the liquidation of the National Debt, but I know I had no hope of any personal participation in the treasure” (43).
Explicitly aligned here with one of the most common investment vehicles, ix
Mrs. Gargery brokers an emotional parsimony that requisitions monetary repayment. By contrast, Joe operates outside the bounds of such mean economy: freely loving Pip, carefully nursing him back to health after the dramatic denouement (and despite their estrangement), and, most strikingly, paying off all of the debts Pip has accrued in expectation of his
Expectations. Even after his edification, Pip makes only one paltry attempt at regretting his behavior to Joe. It is the disavowed and unrectified asymmetry of this relationship to
Joe that annuls most psychoanalytic readings of Great Expectations , which make so much ado about the disproportion of Pip’s guilt.
x
Far from excessive, Pip’s guilt is insufficient: never apologizing for abandoning Joe, never repaying Joe for his affection,
Pip instead pays forward to Herbert. In this way Pip’s declarations of character growth draft his moral redemption not within an arena of mutuality, reciprocity, or even the gift, but rather within the financial world of investment.
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The inextricability of Pip’s redemptive act from the very network of finance that provoked his original sins surely undermines his apparent Bildung , while in turn that pallor of the dubious reflects in the Victorian normalization of investment procedures.
Ironizing Pip’s progress in this way allows the novel to exact a critique of the financial model of exchange. The pay-it-forward model Pip summons as evidence of his affective correction captures the essence of financial liquidity, but neither capital nor affect can directly redound whence they came. In both cases, the undemanding, abandoned Joe is the mettle of the problem: the origins of both the financial and the affective that never get acknowledged. For Great Expectations , the ultimate trouble with financial investment as substantiation of character growth is conflict of interest: investment deploys a purportedly expansive means to attain a merely solipsistic end - you invest in others, but ultimately the profit comes back to you. When Pip’s friend Wemmick advises against the investment in Herbert, he famously polices separate spheres: “The office is one thing, and private life another.” The heat of the irony casts a refinement of this position: it is one thing to pursue mutually beneficial exchange with a beginning and an end – too root the oikonomos in the oikos , that hearth of living and dying, eating and drinking, dwelling and laboring emblematized in the fires of the forge - and quite another to invent economy anew under the nomos of finance, propelling the infinite deferral of mutuality.
Precisely this problem of deferred reconciliation forms the temporal structure of the narrative, in which we find another register of the novel’s irony: its use of analepsis.
Presenting the past from the point of view of the future, the analepsis of Pip’s narrative is heightened by its subjectivism, because the first person perspective localizes the developmental impetus of narrative within the developing sensitivity of a character.
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Kornbluh, 11
The future of this first-person is both explicitly and implicitly framed as the moral temporality from which the narrator Pip is repenting of the character Pip’s actions. The implications that a kind of resolution, reflection, and redemption fuel the narrative come frequently, in exclamations like “Wretched Boy!” or “I knew nothing then” or “I know what I know of the pain she cost me afterward” or “I never thought there was anything low and small in my keeping away from Joe” (244) or “I knew very well that it was not all good” (272) which dramatize the experiential, emotional, and temporal distance between character Pip and narrator Pip. It is a perspectival aggrandizement rendered almost graphically in the name Pip , with the majuscule P looking about over the small p.
The psycho-characterological payoff that the narrative framework portends mobilizes literary form and narrative temporality to model the affective logic of investment.
Analeptic temporality anticipates a future to which the past will return, formalizing the temporal logic of investor confidence. Kindling the question of what has happened in the lapse between the time of the action and the time of first person reflective reporting, first person past-tense narration lures the reader with the curve of shifting perspective, for the narrator knows now what he did not know then , and what we do not know yet . But there are many reasons why the time of Great Expectations seems to work less like an exercise in the habitus of investment, and more like a cautionary prospectus. Foremost among them is that the narrative never returns to its own future: though Pip is emphatically precise about time throughout the course of his narration, chronicling the precise intervals of visits, the duration of events, and the hours of the day, in the end the novel steadfastly refuses to directly account for its own time of enunciation. It is mentioned that Pip spends 11 years away, but never explained whether
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Kornbluh, 12 he is ultimately narrating from mid-life, soon after his return, or from very much later in the future. This open question of the beginning provocatively extends the notoriously ambiguous ending, in which an obtuse negative construction in the novel’s final words shades the romantic rapprochement between Pip and Estella: “As the morning mists had risen long ago when I first left the forge, so the evening mists were rising now, and in all the broad expanse of tranquil light they showed to me, I saw the shadow of no parting from her.” The question of whether Pip and Estella again part is superseded, I submit, by the question of when Pip begins his analeptic narrative, a problem that refuses any reconciliation of the narrative’s temporality.
Harkening from an unspecified future, the narrative’s temporality shadows doubts over the investment topos of a future that returns to the past. Such doubts press exigently through the redoubling of Pip’s experience of expecting a fortune that does not come round to its indeterminate origin with our own readerly experience of waiting. Indeed just as a “crowd of speculations and anticipations” (286) encircles Pip’s fantasies of his future, the narrative’s analeptic temporality engenders our own speculative expectancy.
We are catalyzed into a state of great expectation, eagerly awaiting the point at which the action will finally catch up with the narration, and the origin of the narrative will be clarified.
xi
Great Expectations therefore endows us with expectations of narrative unfolding while refusing a final reckoning.
While the narrative architecture of Great Expectations might therefore reverberate its other echoes of Hamlet in alluding that investor ‘time is out of joint,’ the Victorian culture of finance redressed such concerns with the advent of Business Cycle Theory, which prophesied the eventual return, however wayward the loop, of high times. As part
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Kornbluh, 13 of a broader mid-century discourse promulgating the autonomy of “the economy,”
Business Cycle Theory attributed financial swings to vital rhythms. The banker and economist Lord Overstone explained the theory thusly:
The history of what we are in the habit of calling “the state of trade” is an instructive lesson. We find it subject to various conditions which are periodically returning; it revolves apparently in an established cycle. First we find it in a state of quiescence, - next improvement, - growing confidence, - prosperity, excitement, - overtrading, - convulsion, - pressure, -stagnation, -distress, -ending again in quiescence.
xii
Images of cyclical quiescence and convulsion are dispensed throughout Great
Expectations , which expertly plays the resonance between these new theses on finance and the bourgeoning theory of libidinal economy. In just one such example, Pip’s very first encounter with Estella and Miss Havisham leaves him “so humiliated, hurt, spurned, offended, angry, sorry” that he is desperate for release: “As I cried, I kicked the wall, and took a hard twist at my hair; so bitter were my feelings, and so sharp was the smart without name, that needed counteraction” (63). “Counteraction” was precisely the principle of affective “equilibrium” promulgated by the influential psychologist
Alexander Bain in his 1859 The Emotions and The Will :
“When two states of feeling come together, if they are of the same nature, we have a sum total – as when the occurrence of two pleasures gives a greater pleasure. When a pain concurs with a pleasure, we find, as a matter of fact, that the one can neutralize the other. When the pleasure exactly assuages the pain, we say that the two are equivalent, or equal in amount, although or opposite nature, like hot and cold, positive and negative; and when two different kinds of pleasure have the power of satiating the same amount of pain, there is fair ground for pronouncing them of equal emotional power…Such also is the nature of a passionate stimulus, as fear…if we would neutralize it, we must provide some adequate counteractive.” xiii
Perhaps because of the magnitude of his feeling, Pip only briefly finds this counteraction, saying “I got rid of my injured feelings for the time, by kicking them into the brewery
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Kornbluh, 14 wall, and twisting them out of my hair” (63). When he arrives back at the forge, the humble home newly alien to him, the feelings resurface. Asked about his adventures,
Pip invents an outlandish tale to inflate the wonders of Satis House (though just what about a half-mummified deserted bride in a deserted brewery requires embellishing with black velvet, enormous dogs, and veal cutlets is a little unclear). Admitting his fabulations later, Pip sources the story in his pain: “I felt very miserable…and the lies had come of it somehow” (70). Rather than apologize for lying to (to say nothing of newly disdaining) Joe, Pip proposes a cycle theory of economic libido, implying that his story works as another gesture of “counteraction” by releasing his intense misery.
To this theory, Joe offers an uncharacteristically firm, if characteristically circular, riposte: “Lies is lies. However they come, they didn’t ought to come, and they come from the father of lies, and work round to the same (71). Through additional tautological formulations (what Pip calls his “arguing circularly”), Joe is commissioned as the narrative’s agent for distinguishing between good and bad models of libidinal economy. As just about the only unambiguously good soul in the text, his own pronounced theory of libido carries some heft: affirming the life cycle of excitement and release, he circumscribes Mrs. Gargery’s emotional volatility: “On the rampage, Pip, and off the rampage, Pip, - such is life!” (115). Pip echoes this generality in observing of his sister’s moods “that singular calm and silence which succeeds all uproars” (115), and in repeatedly hypothesizing a continuum in which pleasures pass over to pains and vice-aversa, such as in his description of his obsession with Estella as an “ecstasy of unhappiness” (365) and “all sorts of pleasures” that “were all miseries to me” (301). The cyclical quality of these images of oscillation and of interdependent extremes are further
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Kornbluh, 15 reinforced by the frequency with which such cyclicality scripts the grammar of Joe’s moral guidance: statements like “lies is lies” or “a gridiron is a gridiron” or “your health is your health.”
Through this association with Joe the imaging of libidinal equilibrium circulates without much friction. The model of balance is given further currency by the narrative’s premium on depicting affective economies engaged with one another in reciprocal relationships. Thus parallel constructions like “I may state at once that he was always so zealous and honorable in fulfilling his compact with me, that he made me zealous and honorable in fulfilling mine with him” (197) and “If I had been easier with Joe, Joe would have been easier with me” (222) and so on. The emotional harmony implied by the reciprocity in these parallel figures also appears as a felicitous calibration of feeling, as when Pip avers, “the tenderness of Joe was [so] beautifully proportioned to my need”
(466). In all of these cases, then, the novel seems to suggest that the rhetoric of libidinal economy is acceptable so long as it images equilibrium and reciprocity, stability and mutuality.
That such stability is not a constant but the product of cycles is further elucidated by the narrative’s indisputably circular overarching construction. Dickens described the mission of a novelist as to show “the uncertainty of life, some illustration of its vicissitudes and fluctuations.” xiv
The novel’s convicted endorsement of a libidinal cycle materializes in the circular morphology of the plots. For one thing, as Peter Brooks has formidably demonstrated, a repetitive loop propels Pip repeatedly back to Satis House, the house of sufficiency, satiation, and satisfaction.
xv Satis House sets both the origin of
Pip’s perspective upon himself that allows for narration, and the final resting place of the
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Kornbluh, 16 narrative. As literalized in the lingering scene when he climbs the stairs of the house for the first time, the house instigates Pip’s social ascendancy. Even his activities when he spends time there center on loops, pushing Miss Havisham’s chair around the dining room in “the old slow circuit round about” (239). That a house named for satisfaction inspires dissatisfaction and fervent striving draws a promise that eventually what has been excited will be in some way discharged, even if the final peace comes only in death.
“Satis, which is Greek, or Latin, or Hebrew, or all three – or all one to me – for enough”
(56) is after all also merely one letter away from “stasis,” laying this peace at the home of stopped time and unconsummated desires, of stagnancy and suffering, of deteriorated hearts and desiccated bride cakes. Just as Sigmund Freud’s exploration of repetition and discovery of death drive consolidated his “Economic Hypothesis,” this narrative repetition of satiety and the tendency of things, even in their destruction, to have returned to a realm of sufficiency, amalgamates the novel’s rhetoric of libidinal equilibrium.
xvi
The recurrent returns to Satis House emplot Pip’s circular journeys, but he is also encompassed in a larger loop: Magwitch’s paternity. As we await the return of what has issued forth to its origins, we cannot help but note that the conventionally melodramatic question of a child’s uncertain origins has a curiously condensed answer in this text.
Both an orphan and as beneficiary of anonymous investment, Pip’s doubly occluded origins are excessively trebled by Estella’s. While Pip’s parents cannot return from the dead, Estella’s buried lineage can be uncovered, in a revelation that also finally answers the enigma Pip’s patronage. The peripatetic unveiling of Magwitch standing behind both
Pip and Estella compresses two different types of origination into one character: he is
Estella’s biological father, and Pip’s beneficent one. Such condensation again effects a
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Kornbluh, 17 circularity of the story – both of the text’s questions of origin have the same answer; both of the melodramatic revelations of origin are spoken by the same mouth. For all links in the chain to forge back to Magwitch, for the seminal to converge with the financial, suggests a longing on the part of the plot that however much investor capital may flock to the prosopopoeic corporation sired by the Limited Liability Act, it should still be possible to return to the origins of that capital in a disseminating corpus.
**
The idea of the psyche as an equilibrate system within which were distributed finite quantities of energetic desire was pervasive in Victorian psychological, medical, and scientific writing. Logically continuous with the second law of thermodynamics, the concept of the psyche as an “economy” was propagated in multiple disciplines, working therefore from its inception to excite the interest of manifold descriptive languages, to conform to the precepts of multiple theoretical paradigms, and to bridge the domain of the subject and the economy. Just what cables enforced this bridge are perhaps up for debate; it is my contention in this larger project that the rhetoric of libidinal economy emerged at the moment of financialization because of a cultural and intellectual desire to apprehend the vagaries and convulsions of the financial economy. Great Expectations inspires this contention through its distinction between the heuristic value of this construct and its disfiguring fallout. For no sooner has the novel seemed to endorse the libidinal economy notions of equilibrium and cycle it copiously arrays than it turns to audit the distortions extorted by the figure of libidinal economy.
I have already indicated at a few points that the novel seems to apprehend a confusion that might stem from the libidinal economy rhetoric. Just as the doubt about
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Pip’s moral reformation stems from his transaction with Herbert, those transactions also comprise the novel’s inventory of disfigurement. To begin, Pip and Herbert engage in an organizational bookkeeping they call “looking into our affairs,” through which they formalize the record of their debts, transcribing scraps of paper into an official ledger.
We spent as much money as we could, and got as little for it as people could make up their minds to give us. We were always more or less miserable, and most of our acquaintance were in the same condition. There was a gay fiction among us that we were constantly enjoying ourselves, and a skeleton truth that we never did…the sound of our pens going refreshed us exceedingly, insomuch that I sometimes found it difficult to distinguish between this edifying business proceeding and actually paying the money…we always ran into new debt immediately, to the full extent of the margin, and sometimes, in the sense of freedom and solvency it imparted, got pretty far into another margin.
But there was a calm, a rest, a virtuous hush, consequent on these examinations of our affairs that gave me, for the time, an admirable opinion of myself. Soothed by my exertions, my method, and Herbert’s compliments, I would sit with his symmetrical bundle and my own on the table before me among the stationary, and feel like a bank of some sort, rather than a private individual (276).
Now, one of the striking things about this sequence is that what would presumably be the stressful activity of reconciling accounts that are “getting on badly” is instead experienced as relaxing, inducing a release whose power is flaunted by its repetition: “a calm, a rest, a virtuous hush.” The brunt of this counterintuitive effect would seem to further uphold the libidinal economy thesis: emotional life subject above all else to a principle of oscillation: from stress to calm, from misery to refreshment, from freedom to rest. But dallying too much with this notion rather precipitously gives rise to category errors in self-perception. Exulting too much in the rhetoric of libidinal economy can make “private individuals” mistake themselves for financial institutions and financial institutions mistake themselves for private individuals (as The Corporation was permitted to do by the birth certificate of the 1856 Limited Liability Act, and as Bernanke fosters
Wall Street to do now).
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Besides being a fallacious construction, the bank of the self is, as the accounting scene shows, not especially financially solvent. The bankruptcy of libidinal economy is further confirmed by the reiteration of Herbert’s erroneous formula of Capital in terms that chart his diurnal emotional vacillations:
“he looked about him with a desponding eye at breakfast-time; that he began to look about him more hopefully about mid-day; that he drooped when he came in to dinner; that he seemed to descry Capital in the distance rather clearly, after dinner; that he all but realized Capital towards midnight; and that at about two o’clock in the morning he became so deeply despondent again as to talk of buying a rifle and going to America, with a general purpose of compelling buffaloes to make his fortune” (273).
In these associations of cyclical affect with poor understanding of finance, the novel embarks on a critique of the imperfect homology between the psyche and the economy.
These imperfections spawn self-delusions, and those delusions in turn stimulate poor ethical choices about the self-other relation. Thus the novel identifies Pip’s relationship with Estella and his relationship with Joe equally as the disfiguring fallout from the confusions of libidinal economy.
In clearly admitting that he was “all the while knowing the madness of my heart to be so very mad and misplaced,” (129), Pip makes no mistake about the confusion of economic and affective registers from which his love springs: “Truly it was impossible to dissociate her presence from all those wretched hankerings after money and gentility that had disturbed my boyhood…in short, it was impossible for me to separate her, in the past or in the present, from the innermost life of my life” (236). From the perspective of narratorial access to the character’s psychic interior, Pip portrays his “innermost” intimate existence as a confusing collapse of romance and ressentiment . The story accords an independent force to this confusion by making it the sole source of Pip’s love
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Kornbluh, 20 for Estella, since their actual interaction would presumably fail to inspire such feelings.
After all, the reader can hardly fail to remark that the lovely Estella never once falters into sweetness to Pip, nor gives him excuse to imagine that she will soften, telling him frankly that such softening is impossible: “you must know that I have no heart…I have no softness there, no – sympathy – sentiment – nonsense” (237). And just a bit later he can discern “she held my heart in her hand because she willfully chose to do it, and not because it would have wrung any tenderness in her, to crush it and throw it away” (270).
In the absence of an emotional rapport, Pip’s feelings for Estella are minted entirely from her glittering surface, from the shame and stirrings of class ambition she ignites in him, and from the sheer force of manipulated repetition, like some kind of compulsory prayer to mold the believer: “Miss Havisham’s words, ‘Love her, love her, love her!’ sounded in my ears. I adapted them for my own repetition, and said to my pillow, ‘I love her, I love her, I love her!’ hundreds of times” (243). We can take Grahame Smith’s observation about romance in Dickens that “love treated with this degree of abandon” has “never before” “been the corrupting factor” (175) and complicate it: it is not love which is Pip’s downfall, for that would make him a rather un-Dickensian, un-Victorian protagonist.
xvii
It is rather the perversion of love with economic morays – the mistaking of aspiration for affection.
Part and parcel of this mistake is the conviction that libidinal economy mandates affective scarcity. For, as Estella baldly commands Pip, and as Pip comes quite readily to obey, brutal cuts are necessary in scarce economies: “Since your change of fortune and prospects, you have changed your companions …necessarily…what was fit company for you once, would be quite unfit company for you now” (237). Callously punctuating the
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Kornbluh, 21 disdain and shame Pip has been developing towards Joe, this edict brings new clarity to his economic vision. In order for Pip to become a gentleman and love Estella, he must cease to love Joe, and he simply accepts this imperative, forswearing any effort at a diversified affective portfolio.
xviii
Assuming the law of scarcity codified in the merger of libido and economy, Pip does not wish he had more affection left over for Joe; instead he wishes that Joe too would discover the exchangeability of feeling and finance:
“Let me confess exactly, with what feelings I looked forward to Joe’s coming…
Not with pleasure, though I was bound to him by so many ties; no; with considerable disturbance, some mortification, and a keen sense of incongruity. If
I could have kept him away by paying money, I certainly would have paid money” (218).
The wish remains counterfactual because Joe, in the many contrasts with his wife, has already been staked at odds with this logic. The idea of paying money to avoid expending compassion follows the same management ethos as Mrs. Gargery’s charging of money for expending compassion. Having suffered rather poignantly under those rules as a boy, Pip’s readiness to turn them against Joe betrays his extensive economic restructuring. Even as the narrating Pip’s “confession” is meant to “exactly” unearth his character’s worst deeds, the depravity index still presumes that money is the best measure of feeling.
A similarly unexamined rhetoric foments the searing irony at the moment of Pip’s strongest self-reproach:
All other swindlers upon earth are nothing to the self-swindlers, and with such pretences did I cheat myself…That I should innocently take a bad half-crown of somebody else’s manufacture, is reasonable enough; but that I should knowingly reckon the spurious coin of my own make, as good money! An obliging stranger, under pretence of compactly folding up bank-notes for security’s sake, abstracts
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Kornbluh, 22 the notes and gives me nutshells; but what is his sleight of hand to mine, when I fold up my own nutshells and pass them on myself as notes! (225).
While Pip decries cheating, he does not register the fraud of his own paradigm: the very language he uses to expose his self-delusion perpetrates yet another swindle, the representation of self-concept as “spurious coin.” This ironic insinuation that even as narrator, Pip’s repentances pull off an obscene fraud smolders at the plot’s climax.
Discovering his patronage, despairing that his benefactor is not Miss Havisham but the convict Magwitch, Pip decries an inequitable exchange to convey his unhappiness: “I only suffered in Satis House as a convenience…But, the sharpest and deepest pain of all
– it was for the convict, guilty of I knew not what crimes…that I had deserted Joe” (323).
The unfortunate yet unavoidable implication is that the undesirable alignment with
Magwitch makes a raw deal, but were it “for” Estella, deserting Joe would have been well worth it. Even from the purview of repentant hindsight, the narrator Pip insistently valorizes feelings for Estella and rationalizes downsizing Joe; even allocuting to selfswindling, Pip endorses the exchange of one love object for another. The narrative as a whole is surely bred from Pip’s reflective grief, but an additional level of melancholy is wrought by the irony through which his very expressions of guilt further perpetrate the crime.
**
Though the perennial appeal of Pip’s story may just stir from the irrepressible sadness of his undermined enlightenment, there is a way in which, at his key moment of errant Bildung , he is actually spot-on about the economy of finance. “As I thought what a difficult vision to realize Capital sometimes was” astutely fathoms capitalism in its properly phantasmatic register. As Herbert well knows, to realize Capital is a difficult
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Kornbluh, 23 vision. But Pip knows a bit more: Capital is a difficult vision to realize. While political economy and psychology were busy at that difficulty, inventing “libidinal economy” to lend a plot of the real to the tropology of finance, the irony of Great Expectations rescinded that line of credit. Amidst the din of psychologizing obfuscations of our own financial crisis, we could do much worse than to follow that irony’s lead. i For primary accounts of these Acts, along with statistics, see Poovey’s helpful compendium of documents, The Financial System in Nineteenth Century Britain . New
York: Oxford University Press, 2003. For primary accounts of early business cycle theory, see Harald Hagemann, ed., Business Cycle Theory: Selected Texts: 1860-1939 .
London: Pickering and Chatto, 2002. As Timothy Alborn and other economic historians have shown, this expansion of investment was largely fueled by licensing a new model of doing business, the corporate form. Though laws in 1825 repealed the ban on corporations mandated by The Bubble Act of 1720, prior to 1844 the procedures of incorporation remained expensive and concern about fraud high. Furthermore, prior to the Joint Stock Companies Act and the Registration Act, both of 1844, and the Limited
Liability Act of 1855, the dominant model for companies was “chartered” or “sovereign,” essentially monopolies that existed at the will and service of the state, such as the East
India Trading Company and the Bank of England. In conjuring the corporation as an entity liable for its own business and contractual undertakings even as / because its individual members were not personally liable, the legal changes of 1844, 1855, and 1860 birthed “the corporate person” as the agent of both independent, inexpensive joint-stock investing, and of formal liability that could limit fraud and license the freedom of individual investors. For the Victorians, these legal normalizations were reassuring, but
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Kornbluh, 24 the abstractions they facilitated were troubling, and routinely indicted as rhetorical, symbolic, fictitious. Timothy Alborn, Conceiving Companies: Joint Stock Politics in
Victorian England . London: Routledge, 1998. For a formidable account of the Victorain connections between fiction and finance, see Patrick Brantlinger, Fictions of State:
Culture and Credit in Great Britain 1694-1994 . Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996.
For more theoretical investigations of that relationship see Marc Shell, Money Language
Thought: Literary and Philosophic Economies from the Medieval to the Modern Era .
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993; and Jean Joseph Goux, Symbolic
Economies: After Marx and Freud . Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990. ii
Looking backward, 1860 stands an unmistakable mile-marker on the tangled route along which everyday British citizens began routinely looking about for investment opportunities, and looking forward to vested returns. Indeed, economic and cultural historians of many stripes therefore routinely track 1860 as the terminus of the industrial revolution, and origin of the financial one. See for example Donald (Deirdre)
McCloskey’s multivolume series
Economic History in Britain Since 1700 . Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1981; and David Itzkowitz, “Fair Enterprise or Extravagant
Speculation: Investment, Speculation, and Gambling in Victorian England.” Victorian
Studies Autumn (2002): 121-147. iii
In emphasizing the critical energy leveraged by the novel toward financialization and the attendant rhetoric of psychic economy, I follow the lead of more recent readers of
Great Expectations such as Sue Zemka, Gail Turley Houston, and Clare Pettitt, who have argued that Great Expectations “begins a remarkable investigation of the mechanisms of market capitalism.” Pettitt, “Monstrous Displacements: Anxieties of Exchange in
Great
Expectations
.”
Dickens Studies Annual 30, 2001: (244). Gail Turley Houston, “Pip and
Property: the (re)production of the self in Great Expectations
.”
Studies in the Novel 24, 1
(Spring 1992): 13-25. Sue Zemka, “Chronometrics of Love and Money in Great
Expectations .” Dickens Studies Annual 35 (2005). iv
By arguing for this irony, I should like to interrogate the commonplace that Great
Expectations is a novel of redemption, returning rather to the deficits of character to which the pervasive tropes of libidinal economy point. In taking the first-person narrative structure as the impetus of the novel’s thought, and more generally in locating its economic acumen in its aesthetic system (rather than in its referential depiction of the economy), my analysis is surely indebted to the lucid new formalism of Alex Woloch and
Caroline Levine. Woloch, The One Versus the Many: Minor Characters and the Space of the Protagonist . Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003. Levine, “Strategic
Formalism” Victorian Studies 48, 4 (Summer 2006). v
Taking this broad view of irony, I essentially follow Paul de Man’s theorization, itself based on readings of nineteenth-century thinkers, that irony is the “trope of all tropes” engaged in disclosure of figuration. See “The Rhetoric of Temporality” in Blindness and
Insight . Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1971. George Lukacs also of
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Kornbluh, 25 course conceived irony as the constitutive figure of the novel. See Theory of the Novel .
London: Merlin, 1971. vi
Charles Dickens, Great Expectations . New York: Penguin, 2002 (185). Hereafter cited parenthetically. vii
In 1857, Dickens’ own publication Household Words (in which Great Expectations was serialized) depicted the financial center as “The City of Unlimited Paper”: “its rulers
– solid and substantial as they appear to the eye – are made of paper. They ride in paper carriages; they marry paper wives, and unto them are born paper children; their food is paper, their thoughts are paper, and all they touch is transformed to paper.” John
Hollingshead, “The City of Unlimited Paper.”
Household Words December 1857:1. viii
Though there is not space for it here (but perhaps there should be), this reading of capital’s poetic and metaphysical principles unfolds in my chapter on Karl Marx. ix
The National Debt was one of the main vehicles for investment in the mid-Victorian period. Its liquidation, in addition to requiring some new sources of national revenue, would entail moderately profitable repayment to a large class of investors, those who would have “personal participation in the treasure.” See “From Money to Capital, 1801-
1851” in Ranald Michie,
The London Stock Exchange, A History . Clarendon: Oxford
University Press, 2001. x
For the best examples, see William Cohen’s “Manual Conduct in Great Expectations
” in Sex Scandal: The Private Parts of Victorian Fiction . Durham: Duke University Press,
1996. xi
On the complexities of narrative temporality, see Gerard Genette, Narrative Discourse .
Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980. xii
Quoted in Wesley C Mitchell, Business Cycles: The Problem and its Setting . New
York: National Bureau of Economic Research, 1927 (11). xiii
Alexander Bain, The Emotions and the Will . New York: Appleton & Co, 1888 (404-
6). xiv
Charles Dickens, “Speech to the Newsvendors’ Benevolent Institution,” (20 May
1862) in K.J. Fielding, ed. The Speeches of Charles Dickens.
Oxford: Clarendon, 1960
(310). xv
In brilliantly mining the psychoanalytic valence of the plot’s structuring repetitions,
Brooks has convincingly illuminated the novel’s connections between between plotting and repression. I would like to attend a bit more closely to the connections between the novel’s circular structure and its over-arching investigation of figures of economy – and thereby, as I do in other chapters, explore more fully the constellation of ideas shining over Freud’s theory of repetition compulsion, his Economic Hypothesis. “Repetition,
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Kornbluh, 26
Repression, Return” in
Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative .
Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984. xvi
Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle . New York: Norton, 1990. My chapter on the metapsychological Economic Hypothesis argues that, as the inheritor of the libidinal economy tradition of the long nineteenth century, Freud actually radically breaks with his predecessors, turning the analytic focus away from the subject and back upon the structure of economy itself. xvii
Smith, Grahame. Dickens, Money, and Society . Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1968 (175). xviii
In this respect, as Michael Hollington notes, Pip differs from Oliver Twist and David
Copperfield before him, as he “accepts the categories and power relationships () instead of rebelling against (them).” Dickens and the Grotesque . New Jersey: Barnes and Noble,
1984 (223).
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