A 2007 salon.com article on the collapse of Wall Street helpfully explained that, “strictly speaking, a derivative is a financial doohickey … Derivatives belong to what should be called – but never is – the unreal economy.”Footnote 1 This plea did not go unheard; as the global economy collapsed, the unreality of these financial tools became a descriptive and analytical touchstone. The Financial Times, for example, labeled the market a “parallel universe,” separate from and inimical to the “real” economy.Footnote 2 Other commentators highlighted the specifically fictional nature of this alternative economy: “what's clearly happening, in this through-the-looking-glass economy of ours, is that nothing is now quite what it seems,”Footnote 3 that “the looming global financial crisis [is] through the looking glass,”Footnote 4 with an “underlying logic [that is] reminiscent of Alice in Wonderland.”Footnote 5 While the conscription of the world of Humpty Dumpty into a consideration of the economy is not without precedent (his ovoid spectre haunted the fiercely contested argument between the “paper money men” and the “gold bugs” in the currency debates of the nineteenth centuryFootnote 6), the framing of the recent crisis is notable in its insistence that the unreality of finance was not merely an ornamental feature, but rather the structural cause of the crisis.
The fictionality of finance is, of course, a fiction itself. Not only is finance a part of the “real” economy, but since the 1970s it has been an increasingly significant part of it. This era of financialization can be theorized both at the macro world-historical scale, and at the micro level of quotidian experience. As an epochal claim, financialization signals a shift in the mode of accumulation, as profit is increasingly made through financial channels rather than trade or production. This argument can be found in Greta Krippner's Capitalizing on Crisis, David Harvey's The Enigma of Capital, and Giovanni Arrighi's The Long Twentieth Century.Footnote 7 While these accounts identify an increasing financialization of the US economy from the 1970s onwards, they do not see finance as a separate field. As Krippner writes, “to suggest that the economy has become financialized is to claim that the balance … has swung strongly toward finance, not that the financial economy has become entirely uncoupled from production.”Footnote 8 In this analysis, financialization is a process of inequitable redistribution, drawing capital both inwards (to the financial centres) and upwards (to the ruling classes). The micro approach, which focusses on the financialization of everyday life, can be found in the work of Randy Martin, Louis Hyman, Maurizio Lazzarato, and Robert Reich.Footnote 9 Here, the focus is on the increasing encroachment of the logics of risk and investment into the daily rhythms of existence, examining the turn from citizen to investor exhibited in the language of “ownership society” in the Bush administration, “asset-based welfare” from New Labour, or the Howard government's “shareholder democracy.”Footnote 10
As the divergent scales of these analyses suggest, to present the unreality of finance with evidence of its solidity is only half the solution, for the lived experience of a narrative of abstraction has both a historical and an affective reality that cannot be wished away. While the narrative frame of any event is part of its historical reality, the intangible nature of the economy lends greater weight to its linguistic formation. In her history of the cognitive mapping of capital, Susan Buck-Morss writes that
the discovery of the economy was also its invention … Because the economy is not found as an empirical object among other worldly things, in order for it to be “seen” by the human perceptual apparatus it has to undergo a process, crucial for science, of representational mapping.Footnote 11
In the current moment, it is exactly this map that is felt to be lacking, particularly with the rise of dark pools that, as Michael Lewis argues in Flash Boys, have led “financial markets [to] have changed too rapidly for our mental picture of them to remain true to life.”Footnote 12 In a moment of crisis when the commonly agreed map for the economy suddenly shows the uncharted waters at its edges, the impulse is to delegitimate these unmapped areas and return to the solid ground of business as usual. However, the infusion of a financialized logic into the vocabulary of selfhood, in combination with the pervasive narrative of crisis, has lived effects that cannot be removed by merely creating a more accurate economic map. Even if we wish to frame the recent collapse as a cyclical return of the contradictions of capital, and to note that the terminal crisis of the credit collapse is merely the stinger in the tail end of what Arrighi would term the signal crisis that began in the early 1970s, we cannot put aside the affective pull of the narrative of crisis.Footnote 13 While crisis may be a problematic optic through which to view events, with its insistence on punctual closure and dehistoricized rupture, the reality of the sudden loss of not only houses, jobs, and economic security, but also the sense of a relatively stable national economic future, is undeniable. If there is a structure of feeling here, it is manifested as a feeling of structurelessness, for, as Lauren Berlant writes, “the affective event is an effect in a process, not a thing delivered in its genre as such,”Footnote 14 and in response to this amorphous event, the desire for a narrative frame is an integral part of the experience of the event itself.
While the explanatory nexus for the global economic crisis has been one of explanation, mapping, framing, and segregation (not just in its segregating good finance from bad, but in the discretely national responses to a crisis that has global implications), the critical response within the humanities has been to think the real and the unreal of this narrative of finance together. One version of this has been a return to the framework of abstract and concrete, which, as Leigh Claire La Berge notes, have become widely used terms to discuss finance within the humanities.Footnote 15 These terms also have the decisive advantage of being in a more symbiotic relation than the polarity of real/unreal, with a rich history of critical theory that has sought to reckon with the exact nature of this relationship. While these terms are invaluable to a consideration of finance capital, this essay also seeks to include the smaller scale that responds to the experience of crisis as well as to its analysis. In order to bring a more experiential lens to these ideas, and to get to the social heart of the abstraction of finance, this essay turns to literature, where the experience of abstraction is registered not through a contemplation of derivative trading, but in the experience of social interactions. Through a reading of Bret Easton Ellis's 1991 financial thriller American Psycho, I offer ways in which the theoretical tensions between abstract and concrete, or unreal and real, are experienced in an explicitly social way. I then move to a consideration of the economic thriller more broadly. This genre, born in 1973 with Paul Erdman's The Billion Dollar Sure Thing and intimately tied to the increasing financialization of the US economy, is an acute seismograph for reading the form of finance. In particular, I will argue that the porous boundary between fiction and fact in the thriller genre, stuffed with data from real events from the financial world, makes it an interlocutor in the debates over the possibility of segregating the real and unreal of finance. I conclude with a comparative reading of financial thrillers written in response to the 2007–9 credit collapse, that not only serve to replicate the desire to segregate unreal finance from the real economy in their narratives, but also make use of the generic strategies of the thriller to do so. The shoring up of the divide between real and unreal in these thrillers (as opposed to their congealing in American Psycho) is not merely an arbitrary choice by their authors, but is symptomatic of the difficulty of theorizing the unfolding present of a moment of crisis. By reading these thrillers alongside American Psycho, a book written before the shock of terminal crisis solidified the binary of real economy/unreal finance out of solution and into fixity, a more historically nuanced positioning of crisis can take place.
I. THE FEEL OF FINANCE
The unhealthy fictionality of finance is not a recent symptom, but can be found in the work of one of its earliest diagnosticians. In the “Externalization of the Relations of Capital in the Form of Interest-Bearing Capital,” Marx's fullest engagement with finance, he writes, “the social relation is consummated in the relation of a thing, of money, to itself. Instead of the actual transformation of money into capital, we see here only form without content.”Footnote 16 Rather than the full formula for capital (M–C–M′), we find here the truncated version M–M′ – the C (capital, but also content) having dropped out. Of course Marx, versed in the queer subtleties and niceties of the movement of capital, is not one to leave a good binary unexamined. A more extensive reading of this section from Volume III shows the author troubling this separation of form and content:
capital appears as a mysterious and self-creating source of interest – the source of its own increase. The thing (money, commodity, value) is now capital even as a mere thing, and capital appears as a mere thing. The result of the entire process of reproduction appears as a property inherent in the thing itself.Footnote 17
Marx hammers the point home; in fictional finance, capital gives off the appearance (a word that occurs ten times in this brief chapter) of reproducing itself; however, this appearance is “distorted,” a “perversion, a mystification.”Footnote 18 While Marx asserts that this content-less version of the formula for capital is a mirage, the concept of finance as actual abstraction has percolated in critical discourse. In Frederic Jameson's 1997 essay “Culture and Finance Capital,” the era of financialization sets capital free from its material bonds: “capital itself becomes free-floating. It separates from the concrete context of its productive geography. Money becomes in a second sense and to a second degree abstract (it always was abstract in the first and basic sense).”Footnote 19 Replacing an appearance of abstraction with an ontology, this account then mischaracterizes Marx twice in its attribution of not one but two levels of abstraction (first money, then finance capital). In Marx the transition to the money form – which for Jameson, but also for Max Haiven, Edward LiPuma, and Benjamin Lee,Footnote 20 is read as a first-order abstraction – is a moment of solidification:
The general equivalent form comes and goes with the momentary social contacts which call it into existence. It is transiently attached to this or that commodity in alternation. But with the development of exchange it fixes itself firmly and exclusively onto particular kinds of commodity, i.e., it crystallizes out into the money-form.Footnote 21
Similarly, in direct exchange, the “fetish character is comparatively easy to be seen through. But when we come to more concrete forms, even this appearance of simplicity vanishes. Whence arose the illusions of the monetary system?”Footnote 22 Here we can see that the narrative from direct exchange to the fetish character of money is not one of increasing abstraction, but a crystallization and concretion. This is not reversed in finance capital, which is merely the fullest blossoming of the fetish form: “in interest-bearing capital, and particularly in its direct form of interest-bearing money-capital (the other forms of interest-bearing capital, which do not concern us here, are derivatives of this form and presuppose its existence), capital assumes its pure fetish form, M–M′.”Footnote 23
Working within the Marxist tradition, theorists of “real abstraction” also make clear the impossibility of separating out these two terms. This phrase was first coined by Georg Simmel in his Philosophy of Money,Footnote 24 but is most fully explored by Alfred Sohn-Rethel in his 1970 Intellectual and Manual Labour, where he argues that “the exchange-abstraction is the historical, spatio-temporal origin of atemporal, ahistorical thought,”Footnote 25 finding its full expression in Kant, but identifiable in homologies between the Mediterranean economy and Greek philosophy. The term “real abstraction” is useful here for its non-teleological narrative, which Timothy Bewes draws out in his sharp reading of the concept: “abstraction, as we have already observed, is not a quality that increasingly applies to labour in Marx's analysis; it applies to labour immediately as a consequence of the capitalist mode of production.”Footnote 26 Similarly, Sven Lütticken asks, “was the commodity not always pseudo-concrete, abstract to the core? On what basis can one posit a narrative of increasing abstraction?”Footnote 27 The titles of these works (Bewes's “To Think without Abstraction,” Lütticken's “Attending to Abstract Things,” and Alberto Toscano's “The Open Secret of Real Abstraction,” which also offers a reading of Sohn-RethelFootnote 28) indicate their interest in theoretical claims, and not how this real abstraction is experienced. Similarly, in Louis Althusser's “Cremonini, Painter of the Abstract,” the most extended application of the theory of real abstraction to an art object, the relation between the two terms remains theoretical. Insofar as Althusser identifies the real abstraction in moments of relation this is a useful reading of the possibility of an artwork's depicting this paradoxical form as a structure that “informs the lived ideology of the relations between men and objects and between objects and men.” However, he argues that “this structure, as a structure, can never be depicted by its presence, in person, positively, in relief, but only by traces and effects, negatively, by indices of absence”;Footnote 29 that is to say a necessarily abstract and theoretical account of Cremonini's painting.
One could supplement the theory of real abstraction with another form of nonchronological abstraction. Arrighi's theory of financialization as the end stage of an imperial era (on which Jameson bases his own account) allows space for just such a nonchronological history. Against the charge that his theory of repeated cycles makes history merely a return of the same, Arrighi writes that the “fundamental reorganization of the system occurs precisely when the ‘same’ (in the form of recurrent financial expansions) appears to return.”Footnote 30 That he credits finance with the ability to reorganize the system of capital accumulation from the fundament speaks to his understanding of finance as an integral part of the economy. It also disrupts the teleology that an argument of increasing abstraction relies upon, for here finance returns, but only in the guise of the same. The return of a non-self-identical opens the doorway to timelines of other kinds. Ian Baucom, Joshua Clover, and Nathan Hensley all take the harmonic of the spectral that thrums in the air of Arrighi's history and amplify it in their work. Clover makes use of haunting to disrupt a neat teleology, arguing that the truncated formula for capital is always haunted by the occluded C. He diagnoses this as “the feeling of M–M′, haunted by the C to come,”Footnote 31 implicating all moments of finance in the future crisis on the horizon. On the other hand, Baucom and Hensley argue for the complicity of “our own exorbitantly financialized present” with previous moments of finance,Footnote 32 a “chronological kinship across time” between financial epochs.Footnote 33
If we think of financialization in this way, several things become clear. First, it is not a teleology of increasing abstraction, imbricated as it is with past and future moments of finance. Second, finance is imbued with an awareness of the displaced labour (Clover's “C to come”) that undergirds it, and thus the uneven effects that financialization has geographically within its own time period. Third, and most vitally, it enforces the strictly social nature of what finance might feel like. The solidly social nature of finance can be extrapolated from Marx's knowledge that it is merely the final form of the fetish, a fetish which is the product of the abstraction of labour under capitalist relations, i.e. fundamentally social in nature. This haunting is akin to that identified in Avery Gordon's Ghostly Matters, which compares the “congealed social memory” of ghostliness with the way that “the commodity is congealed labor for Marx.”Footnote 34 The irreducibility of this congealed labour is stubborn: the abstract and concrete are wholly unentwineable, and wholly social.Footnote 35
I am open to other discourses that work to situate finance in this way, and am not tied to the vocabulary of haunting. For example, the anthropologist Karen Ho reaches a similarly grounded and relational theory of finance in Liquidated, her ethnography of Wall Street actors: “part of my argument here,” Ho writes, “is that the construction – the feeling – of abstraction is absolutely about power and hierarchy in that powerful changes stemming from very different values, priorities, and interests ‘feel like’ the triumph of a penetrating, alien abstraction from the point of view of the marginalized.”Footnote 36 Here, the necessity of dealing with real actors and their experience of the narrative of abstraction demands a theory that encompasses social experience. This social abstraction can also be found in the work of Theodor Adorno. While he was influenced by Sohn-Rethel's account of real abstraction, his abiding fidelity to the experience of the particular demands that his theory of abstraction include an experiential axis. Adorno argues that it is not just a mode of sociality, but forms the social: “The abstraction in question here is really the specific form of the exchange process itself, the underlying social fact through which socialization first comes about.”Footnote 37 Further,
the power of that abstraction over humanity is far more corporeal than that of any single institution, which silently constitutes itself in advance according to the scheme of things and beats itself into human beings. The powerlessness which the individual experiences in the face of the totality is the most drastic expression of this.Footnote 38
It is this thickly social abstraction that a reading of American Psycho can illuminate. Previous readings of abstraction in Ellis's novel have tended to focus on Patrick Bateman (the murderous financier at the centre of Ellis's Wall Street thriller) as the heart of abstraction: as an excessive consumer, as a symptom of postmodern ephemerality, or as the embodiment of finance capital.Footnote 39 Within this literature, there have been various permutations of the nature of the relationship between Bateman and the ephemeral, ranging from an insistence on mimetic identity, where Bateman “is the ‘invisible hand’ of the market, wielding a knife concealed in a designer jacket,” “a psychotic subject who embodies neoliberal theory,”Footnote 40 to a “metaphorical equation of the visceral and the discursive,”Footnote 41 a “senseless metonymy for the hollow repetitions of the ‘hyperreality’ of society,”Footnote 42 or a similarity through identity, where “both ‘late’ capitalism and serial murder involve extreme forms of depersonalization,”Footnote 43 to the argument that “Bateman's preferred activities … [are] quasi-allegorical representations of the working of finance capital.”Footnote 44 The dazzling array of possibilities here is indicative of the novel's involvement with how an individual character might exemplify a social structure. Rather than diagnosing Bateman's character as the vessel for abstraction, however, I am interested in what the specific moments of derealization in the novel can tell us about the experience of financial abstraction.
The sociality of abstraction has two variants in the novel. On the one hand, when Bateman is with a group of his colleagues or acquaintances, he experiences the stultifying boredom of a predigested and fully comprehended social field, where individual differences are pared down to a liquid fungibility between characters. The novel is littered with misrecognitions – at least thirty-three separate incidences occur between Bateman and his friends, although often each incident contains multiple proliferating misfirings:
“Who is that?” Price asks, staring over at the bar. “Is that Reed Robinson?” …
“No, that's Nigel Morrison” …
“That's not Morrison,” Price says.
“Who is it then?” Preston asks, taking his glasses off again.
“That's Paul Owen,” Price says.
“That's not Paul Owen,” I say. “Paul Owen's on the other side of the bar. Over there.”Footnote 45
The root of this homogeneity is their wealth, as revealed in a conversation between Bateman and his girlfriend:
“He's rich,” I say.
“Everybody's rich,” she says, concentrating on the TV screen.
“He's good-looking,” I tell her.
“Everybody's good-looking, Patrick,” she says remotely.
“He has a great body,” I say.
“Everybody has a great body now,” she says.Footnote 46
This flattened and arid social field is expressed formally in the endless enumerations of what people are wearing, lists that are not only tedious but also repetitive: when we first meet Courtney, we are told she is wearing “a Krizia cream silk blouse, a Krizia rust tweed skirt and silk-satin d'Orsay pumps from Manolo Blahnik”;Footnote 47 on the following page, we are introduced to Evelyn, who is also wearing “a Krizia cream silk blouse, a Krizia rust tweed skirt and the same pair of silk-satin d'Orsay pumps Courtney has on.”Footnote 48 Ellis's writing is exhausting and exhausted, as even the prose of the book becomes tired of the task of trying to animate the lives of these identical types over the course of its four hundred pages: in a particularly tedious scene in the chapter “Lunch,” the novel simply gives up mid-sentence, defeated by the boredom of narration.Footnote 49
In stark contrast to this intraclass flatness, differences across class, race, gender, and sexuality are exorbitantly elevated, affectively charged with the threat of the unknown. These scenes do not occur that often – only when Bateman interacts with someone in the service industry, or when he goes out of his way to navigate beyond the homogenized environs of limousines, Wall Street, and the round of bars, restaurants, and clubs that he frequents. The bloody and terrible contact that Bateman makes with those he murders is the stunted residuum of a desire for interclass contact outside the stultifying boredom of his own social sphere, combined with the toxically ferocious writing off of the poor as threat. This is exemplified in the first murder Bateman commits. In conversation with a homeless man called Al, Bateman reels off a series of neoliberal stereotypes about the undeserving poor, which descends into a platitudinal lament about difference:
“Listen. Do you think it's fair to take money from people who do have jobs? Who do work? … Get a goddam job, Al,” I say earnestly. “You've got a negative attitude, that's what's stopping you … I'm sorry. It's just that … I don't know. I don't have anything in common with you.”Footnote 50
After Bateman brutally murders him, he makes the decision “to go somewhere Al would go, the McDonald's in Union Square. Standing in line, I order a vanilla milkshake … and take it to a table up front where Al would probably sit, my jacket and its sleeves, lightly spattered with flecks of his blood.”Footnote 51 This scene is strikingly intimate; the “lightly spattered blood” is perhaps one of the tenderest conjunctions in the novel. This intimacy, however, is formed solely through an actuarial lens, as Bateman reads Al through the typological imagination: he goes “somewhere Al would go,” “a table up front where Al would probably sit.” The devolution of intimate contact to statistical probability is signaled in the epigraph from Dostoevsky that opens the novel:
Both the author of these Notes and the Notes themselves are, of course, fictional. Nevertheless, such persons as the composer of these Notes not only exist in our society, but indeed must exist … [This character] represents a generation that is still living out its days among us. In the fragment entitled “Underground” this personage describes himself and his views and attempts, as it were, to clarify the reasons why he appeared and was bound to appear in our midst.Footnote 52
This statistical form of personhood tracks the individual as a unique yet banalized place-holder of a certain degree of risk, a typology that inevitably leads to typecasting. As Frederick Whiting writes, “just as [statistics-based typologies] provided new ways for people to be, they simultaneously placed corollary limits on what they could be, at least insofar as being depended on having recognizable use and exchange value within the conceptual system. Behavior that could not be parsed within presiding categories was unintelligible.”Footnote 53 This is not the erasure of the social, but its replacement by another form, where, as Annie McClanahan has argued, “ranking becomes, in short, a way to produce sociality … sociality itself is produced through ranking.”Footnote 54 In order to comprehend the social scenario, Bateman murders Al and replaces him with a ranked idea of a probable type, and the serial kind of violence Bateman exhibits is a repeated attempt to render the social through this lens. In his book Serial Killers, Marc Seltzer writes that “‘murder by numbers’ (as serial murder has been called) is the form of violence proper to statistical persons,”Footnote 55 not only in the fungibility of the victims, but in the person of the serial killer himself, who “typifies typicality”Footnote 56 in the circularity of his type, often reading books about serial killers (as Bateman does), which are also the source of information for the criminal profilers who work on serial killing, a tautological loop of statistical personhood. This striated sociality echoes the paradox of the narrative of finance that is asocial in its narration of itself, segregated and more complex than real life, but also asocial in its desiccation of the social field. In an interaction with his porter, “a black Hispanic doorman I don't recognize,” Bateman reflects, “I am a ghost to this man, I'm thinking. I am something unreal, something not quite tangible, yet still an obstacle of sorts and he nods, gets back on the phone, resumes speaking in a dialect totally alien to me.”Footnote 57 While he attributes this derealization to the doorman, the awkward syntax reveals it to be his own thought, “I am a ghost to this man, I'm thinking,” leaving Bateman to feel both unreal and also an obstacle. This is the heart of the theory of real abstraction offered by the novel: the unreal feeling of inhabiting a city invested in finance before sociality. We can begin to see here that the abstractions of the vast economic inequities made possible through finance capital (the novel is set in the mid- to late 1980s during the peak of the Wall Street boom) are manifested as rifts in the social. Rather than an unformed ephemerality, these divisions are born of social quarantining – an echo of which is found in the novel's obsessive fear of HIV and serostatus, an epidemic that similarly sought to label the population through risk.
At a larger scale, these violently serial and serially violent forms of interaction are not even just fleetingly felt between characters, but become literally concretized in the shape of the city and the relations it allows and precludes. The financialization of the economy has led to the flooding of finance capital to urban centres, specifically New York in the US context, and a subsequent moulding of urban space around the demands of finance. As Saskia Sassen describes in her work on global capitals,
The growth of high-profit corporate service firms and of a high-income professional class becomes legible in urban space through the growing demand for state-of-the-art office buildings, luxury residences, and luxury consumption spaces. The growing demand for both leads to often massive and visible displacements of the more modest-income households and modest profitmaking firms, no matter how healthy these may be from the perspective of the economy and of market demand. In this process, urban space itself becomes an object for contestation: the gentrifiers versus the displaced.Footnote 58
This battle over urban space, “urbanism … [as] an expression of the controlled power of finance capital,”Footnote 59 as David Harvey writes, is a violent and vicious one that, through neoliberal policies, reshapes the urban space into ever more divided neighbourhoods. If the liberal urban project was to allow an increased mobility around (and between) urban centres for the cosmopolitan elite, the neoliberal project is to bring all possible amenities to gentrified neighbourhoods so that the rich never have to leave: the urban equivalent of a gated community surrounded by a wasteland of “organized abandonment.”Footnote 60 The project to create the Thatcherite dream of a non-society of individuals is carried out in various imperiling ways that work to increase isolation, competition, and precariousness, while draining solidarity and stability. Again, what becomes visible is a picture of finance as a heavily formed genre, one whose dissecting reach stratifies the urban space that it resides in.
This experience of finance is not geographically homogeneous even within national borders – a novel of de-industrialization such as Philipp Meyer's 2009 American Rust, set in rural Pennsylvania, is as place-specific as American Psycho, but observes the rise of finance from the periphery as a solidly homogeneous force of abandonment and decay. However, in the specific context of 1980s New York, the effect of finance on space is one of dissection. It is also one that can be directly attributed to the financial world. Throughout the twentieth century, the Rockefellers and Morgans slowly reshaped lower Manhattan from a mixed-use industrial port to the re-branded “Central Business District” through an aggressive pushing of zoning regulations that forced heavy industry out of the area by the means of the Regional Plan Association (founded in 1922 by Morgan bankers, Rockefeller Foundation directors, and real-estate developers) and the Downtown Lower Manhattan Association (created in 1958 by financier David Rockefeller). The sway of finance over New York was made strikingly clear in the aftermath of the 1973–75 recession, a seizing of the city's finances that David Harvey has termed “a coup by the financial institutions against the democratically elected government of New York.”Footnote 61 Set in the abandoned city in the wake of this coup, American Psycho asks us to theorize financial crisis not as an abstraction to be explained away, but as a thickly lived experience of inequity that is played out in the concrete surroundings of urban space.
The effect of this segmented geography leads to a city that is experienced as ghostly, fictional, and unreal. While American Psycho is cluttered with the naming of specific places – 139 different locations are mentioned in the book – the vast majority of these locations are on the Upper East Side, in the Village, and Downtown: small illuminated pockets between which the characters are shuttled in limos and taxis. The first time we witness Bateman leaving his usual haunts, it is to visit a dry cleaners “located twenty blocks up from my apartment on the West Side, almost by Columbia, and since I've never actually been there before the distance shocks me.”Footnote 62 The cleaner's inability to get the bloodstains out of Bateman's sheets leads him to spit a tirade of racist insults at her until, “jolted by the sound of a real voice, I turn around and it's someone I recognize from my building.”Footnote 63 The city beyond Bateman's purview is both shockingly distant and jarringly unreal, brought back into sharp focus only when confronted with someone from his own neighborhood. The disorientation he experiences following this scene prevents him from properly navigating the city when he departs the shop: stumbling out of the dry cleaners, he encounters a homeless woman sitting on the steps of a building. Confused and overwhelmed, he drops a dollar bill into her cup, realizing almost immediately that the coffee cup is full, and she is, in fact, a student at Columbia University:
shaken, I walk away, hailing a taxi, and heading toward Hubert's in it I hallucinate the buildings into mountains, into volcanoes, the streets become jungles, the sky freezes into a backdrop, and before stepping out of the cab I have to cross my eyes in order to clear my vision. Lunch at Hubert's becomes a permanent hallucination in which I find myself dreaming while still awake.Footnote 64
Here, the derealization of finance is not prompted by a meditation on the abstractions of the economy (Bateman neither speaks of, nor engages in, anything like work when at his Wall Street office), but in the forced collapse of populations that the city keeps apart as its geography shifts along the ley lines of finance; a dissection that one can also read in Bateman's increasingly violent murders that descend into a gruesome cataloguing of body parts.
II. THE FORM OF FINANCE
American Psycho takes the experience of financial unreality and historicizes and socializes it. While it does this at the level of content, it also plays with the borders of its form, keeping the boundary between the real and the unreal unusually porous. Its unsettling position between hyperbolically fictional and familiarly real provoked an infamously vitriolic critical response. Naomi Wolf took the novel to task for “transgress[ing] not against taste so much as against genre”Footnote 65 in her review for the New Statesman. Writing in the New York Times, Roger Rosenblatt similarly branded American Psycho a “fake” (as opposed to “real books”) in a review entitled “Snuff This Book!” – a sentiment that reiterates distaste at the novel's intrusion into the realm of the animate.Footnote 66 Its overly factual nature was also central to criticism from the National Organization for Women, who termed it “a how-to novel on the torture and dismemberment of women.”Footnote 67American Psycho also stridently avoids textual closure, for, as Bateman notes, “there is no catharsis. I gain no deeper knowledge about myself, no new understanding can be extracted from my telling. There has been no reason for me to tell you any of this. This confession has meant nothing.”Footnote 68 The denial of an easy closure is writ large for the reader: the novel opens with the line “ABANDON ALL HOPE YE WHO ENTER HERE,” written in “blood red lettering”Footnote 69 on the side of the Chemical Bank, and concludes with the sign “THIS IS NOT AN EXIT,”Footnote 70 also written in red capitals, creating a circularity that eludes conclusion (and perhaps gestures to Thatcher's “There Is No Alternative”). This endlessness is carried across Ellis's oeuvre. The character “Patrick Bateman” also appears in The Rules of Attraction (1987), Glamorama (2000), and, most substantially, Lunar Park (2005), where a character of the same name haunts the novel, carrying out a series of copycat murders that mimic the crimes carried out by Bateman in American Psycho. This return occurs within a novel that continues to play with the line between fact and fiction; the narrator of Lunar Park, “Bret Easton Ellis,” writes that “regardless of how horrible the events described here might seem, there's one thing you must remember as you hold this book in your hands: all of it really happened, every word is true.”Footnote 71 However, while the novel begins with an autobiographical tone it descends into a chilling horror story with occult leanings. By giving the blurring of fact and fiction an afterlife in Lunar Park, Ellis refuses to settle the disputes over the status of truth or falsity in American Psycho, disputes that have taken up a large part of the response to the novel.Footnote 72
Studies of the thriller as genre, such as Jerry Palmer's Thrillers: Genesis and Structure of a Popular Genre and Ernest Mandel's Delightful Murder: A Social History of the Crime Story, depict it as inherently conservative, “in their very structure, a vessel which shapes, contains and renders essentially conservative any narrative ‘contents.’”Footnote 73 Franco Moretti makes a similar observation of any plot of discovery, where “the weight gravitates towards the ending … there is no ‘voyage,’ only a long wait. In this sense, detective fiction is anti-literary. It declares narration a mere deviation.”Footnote 74 Seen in this light thrillers are not just a kind of genre fiction but its apotheosis, hyperbolically exhibiting the features of genre recognized by Derrida in his essay “The Law of Genre,” where he writes, “genre has always in all genres been able to play the role of order's principle: resemblance, analogy, identity and difference, taxonomic classification, organization and genealogical tree, order of reasons, sense of sense, truth of truth, natural light and sense of history.”Footnote 75 It is this ability to play with the line between fact and fiction that makes the thriller so fecund a form for thinking through finance.Footnote 76
The generic ability of the thriller to navigate between the reality of factual financial data and the rampant fictionality of the plots can work both ways. While American Psycho is intent on muddying these lines, thrillers written in the aftermath of the 2007–9 crisis typically work to shore up these distinctions. This essay will conclude with an overview of four of these recent thrillers (Paul McDonnold's The Economics of Ego Surplus (2010), Teddy Wayne's Kapitoil (2010), J. D. Phillips's The Firewall Sedition (2011), and Timothy J. Korzep's The Prophet's Alibi (2012)) and the strategies they use to uphold the distinction between the healthy economy and its toxic financial other. As the amazon.com blurb for McDonnold's novel claims, these thrillers are “part action novel, part literary novel, part guidebook to economics,”Footnote 77 promising to provide a fast-paced, entertaining, plot-driven read, while simultaneously explaining some detail of the failings of the US economy. They also step in as the voice of conscience for the untrammelled greed of the city boys, presenting the novel's moral and epistemological clarity in opposition to the economy's obfuscatory shadiness. In these novels the relationship between the abstract and the concrete becomes mapped onto a divide between fiction and finance: the novel's values are used to critique the economy's lack of values, and in response to the abstractions of fictional finance, these fictions become chiasmatically factual.
In their relentless segregation of the abstractions of fiction from the solidity of facts, these novels also uphold the difference between good finance and bad, which in turn works to present the economic downturn as a turbulence of bad finance that does not belong to the otherwise reliable flow of global capitalism. This manoeuvre occurs both in the positioning of the narrator and in the formal characteristics of these books. Written in the first person, The Firewall Sedition and The Economics of Ego Surplus are narrated by characters who are economics students or early-career economists, a tactic that allows the narrative to be told from a precise insider/outsider position of expert and watchdog, trained in the complexities of economic theory while separated from the morally dubious environment of its practice.Footnote 78 This move is laid out even more directly in Wayne's Kapitoil, where the protagonist, an economist from Qatar, notes that “because I am a tangential foreign banker in the U. S., possibly I will have a greater chance of locating these tangential data … possibly I will predict events that other people consider random accidents.”Footnote 79 This positioning places stress on the necessity of factual discovery in any critique of the economy, and further entrenches the idea that critique can only come from within the financial realm, thereby reinforcing the idea of the economy as an unknowable abstraction to all but the initiated.
Further, the segregation of factual knowledge from the fictional side of the novels is given a further spin in the way the text is laid out on the page. The Economics of Ego Surplus makes use of footnotes to explain items such as behavioral economics or the theories of Ricardo, thereby keeping the factual separate from the fictional.Footnote 80 In this case, footnotes work to replicate the logic of the positioning of the narrator; as Peter Cosgrove writes, the footnote is the interruption of the fictional by the factual, a moment that has “the privileged exteriority of the independent witness”Footnote 81 stepping in to provide real-world clarification. The novel itself is divided into short chapters of three or four pages, some of which advance the plot while others give a bite-sized guide to aspects of political economy. This division is held up again within the fictional chapters, which provide all of their descriptive passages in the opening paragraph before getting back to the business of plot. The opening paragraphs of many of these short chapters carry a heavy adjectival load, exhibiting a hyperbolic interest in the sky: “The sun turned withering and cruel”; “The sky had a wide, crystalline quality”; “The air turned cold and the sun dropped low on the horizon, coloring the blue sky with stripes of gold”; “I woke up slowly, watching the play of sun spangles on the ceiling over my bed.”Footnote 82 These descriptive curlicues are at odds with the factual language that opens other chapters (“Karl Marx was born into a prosperous Jewish-Lutheran family in 1818 Germany”Footnote 83) or the purely instrumental sections that advance the unfolding of the plot. This structure creates a three-tiered hierarchy of (a) the factual economic data of the footnotes, (b) the fictional plot points, and (c) the diegetically unmotivated lyricism which gets segregated into a flourish at the start of each chapter.
In addition to the position of the narrators and the formal techniques they deploy, these books also conclude with a neat resolution. Blame is prevented from proliferating by placing it onto financiers acting without the authorization of the economy, a structure of containment that is intensified when those rogue traders are “terrorists,” and therefore considered alien interlopers. This logic is taken a step further in McDonnold's novel, where the rogue economist (from the United Arab Emirates) is also depicted as suffering from an inflated ego, firmly placing the blame into the psyche of one misguided individual.
For these books, the rampant fictionality of finance creates a space for genre fiction to take up the cudgel of the real, and bludgeon the economy for its abstractions. In so doing they serve to further reify financial crisis as the unexpected eruption of abstraction, rather than a characteristic of this stage of capitalist accumulation. However, as the first literary response to the economic turbulence of the last decade, their obsessive segregation of unreal and real is indicative of the centrality of this question in the wake of the most recent financial crisis. My intuition that these thrillers are reacting to the genrelessness of crisis that Berlant identifies is corroborated by Nicky Marsh's work in Money, Speculation and Finance in Contemporary British Fiction. Marsh traces the rise of the financial thriller since the 1970s, and is interested in tracking where these novels can disrupt and critique the naturalization of the vocabulary of the economy, and where they lapse into a mere celebration of capital accumulation. Her two chapters that consider the financial thriller focus on the early 1970s and the early 1990s, and in both cases she finds some thrillers that sustain the fictions of the economy, and others that intervene in it. While she does not make a geographical argument for this, one can be read from the diagnoses she offers. Thus in her work on both the 1970s and 1990s thrillers, it is the American novels that provide a critique of the lawlessness of financial capital (Paul Erdman's The Billion Dollar Sure Thing (1973), Po Bronson's Bombadiers (1995), and Don DeLillo's Cosmopolis (2003)), while the British thrillers (A Treasury Alarm (1976) by Chaim Raphael, and the glut of books by bankers-turned-authors in the 1990s – Michael Ridpath, Linda Davies, Paul Kilduff, James Harland, and David Schofield) serve to uphold the legitimacy of the economy.Footnote 84 While she does not draw out an argument from these geographic differences, she does indicate the differing economic fortunes of Britain and America in these decades, noting that Nixon's closing of the gold window in the 1970s led to a huge economic boom in the US and guaranteed the hegemony of the dollar, whereas in England any profit was “at the mercy of the unregulated and volatile international monetary system and at the cost of national autonomy,”Footnote 85 and that the glut of British thrillers that occurred in the 1990s were written in direct reaction to the collapse of Barings bank.Footnote 86
If we include Marsh's observations within an Arrighian theory of finance, we can see that the failure of critique Marsh finds in the British thriller is indicative of an imperial power whose national ascendancy is over. The US thrillers, however, even those that depict crisis, are still enjoying the benefits accruing to the end of the American century, and are therefore free to lambast the economy. I read the apologetics of the recent thrillers as an awareness of their place at the end of a period of American economic dominance, an ending that leaves them anxious to shore up the lines between good and bad finance, between fictional and factual economies, and fictional and factual genres.Footnote 87
This essay, then, is an argument for taking genre (and genre fiction) seriously. As Adorno writes “instead of vaguely appealing to form, one must ask what form itself, as sedimented content, does.”Footnote 88 Thinking of form as a shaping force that can do something in the world allows for a history of the financial thriller that reads its variable forms as affective responses to the experience of financial boom and bust, and the attendant debates over the reality and unreality of the economy. In the same ways that financialization has shaped the infrastructure of New York, it has also shaped the outline of the thriller, the form that finance itself gave birth to. By looking at specific instances of a genre, as well as their place within the history of that genre, we can think across the scalar differences necessary to comprehend the relationship between the individual and the economic. Thus, by looking at the financial thriller from the 1970s to the present day, an epochal argument for finance can be made within the longer historical trajectory of this terminal moment; by looking in depth at one specific thriller that shows the formation of the social by the dictates of finance, the depth and extent of finance's abstraction can be read. This spatially embedded yet temporally elongated parallax view that the financial thriller can offer is a necessary counternarrative to the punctual temporality, unmoored geography, and assertions of unreality that continue to frame our narratives of global economic collapse.
