In every stock-jobbing swindle everyone knows that some time or other the crash must come, but everyone hopes that it may fall on the head of his neighbor, after he himself has caught the shower of gold and placed it in secure hands.

—Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. I

And you may ask yourself: well, how did I get here?

—Talking Heads, “Once in a Lifetime”

The realist novel has been quite successful in rendering the bodily effects of capitalism into literary language, often vividly and meticulously.1 From the protracted deaths of Emma Bovary and Père Goriot, which close their eponymous volumes, to Mr. Tulliver in The Mill on the Floss, whose jointly financial and physical downfall forms the novel’s narrative hinge point, the body struck down by financial ruin is a strikingly common feature of works which have been designated “realist.” If Ian Watt is correct that for formal realism the novel serves as “a full and authentic report of human experience… presented through a more largely referential use of language,” it makes sense that this “full and authentic report” of a world so fundamentally structured by capitalism would necessarily include its effects.2 However, as palpably as its effects are registered, capitalism itself remains an elusive and mysterious force for realism, which (following Watt) has largely been understood as the mode of the empirical and the sensuous.3 Within this mode, the realist novel is able to depict the persons (workers, buyers, sellers), things (commodities), and even the media of exchange (money) that constitute capitalism’s visually empirical reality (or, we might say, its body). In other terms, realism can show us the majority of Marx’s “general formula for capital,” M-C-M’ (or M’), in which the capitalist uses money (M) to purchase a commodity (C) which is then resold for a larger sum.4 The commodity and even the units of exchange fall easily within the realist purview; what remains elusive, however, is the appearance of the “prime,” that mysterious process through which two equivalent exchanges have somehow yielded a surplus. Marx himself resorts to the language of fantasy to describe this exponentiation (or at least how it appears to the capitalist), writing that value “is constantly changing from one form into the other, without becoming lost in this movement… By virtue of being value, it has acquired the occult ability to add value to itself.”5 While realist novels render an abundance of such forms to the reader, their compilation does not in itself provide us with an understanding of the social relations through which capital is generated. As Marx puts it, “one cannot tell by the taste of wheat whether it has been raised by a Russian serf, a French peasant, or an English capitalist… use-values do not bear any marks of the relations of social production.”6

Thus, while the body of the financially ruined protagonist in particular offers an effective substrate on which the realist novel can inscribe, and thus substantiate, capital (whether through prosperity or, more likely, protracted violence), such a substantiation is always after the fact. Capital comes to collect what is due, revealing a story that has been lurking in the shadows of the main narrative, one whose details are largely withheld (the point is the final sum, or rather that it is very large and very negative). Realism here finds itself in a double-bind: it cannot depict capital, but it also can’t notdepict it. The physically/financially ruined body provides realism with one compromised response to this problem, but outside of this empirical (and often brutal) register, where is capitalism’s head? While the realist novel is in no way ignorant of capital, its attempts to ascertain capital-in-itself might appear as so many acts of poetic resignation.7 Given its dependence on “largely referential” language, how is the realist novel to render capital’s laws of motion, which take place largely outside the realm of visual observation, empirical experience, and even psychological categories like intention and desire?8

We find a potential answer in Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, perhaps the quintessential realist novel—or, at least, the novel with and through which nearly any attempt to define realism must grapple.9 Scholarship on Madame Bovary has, for obvious reasons, privileged its protagonist Emma, as well as Flaubert’s descriptive technique. Such readings of Flaubert, as in the influential work of Erich Auerbach, see the novel’s importance to realism in its representation of “an existence in its totality” through “simple everyday activity.”10 In establishing this uneventful (or, more precisely, non-evental) everyday as the purview of the realist novel, Auerbachsuggests that Bovary is ultimately about nothing, though “this nothing has become a heavy, dull, threatening something.”11 Further identification of this nothing’s precise qualities risks undermining the novel’s project, which for Fredric Jameson “takes affect, and the unnamable, as its fundamental subject.” The point of the novel (in Jameson’s deployment of Auerbach) is thus less the plot, or even Emma’s individual psychology, so much as a “flight from classification” towards singular episodes of the readerly present Jameson terms affect.12 Emma’s financial downfall, however, suggests a great deal happens in Bovary, though perhaps not within the purview of Flaubert’s realist description. Consider, for instance, the figure around whom so many of the novel’s identifiable eventsturn, the moneylender Lheureux. His first appearance offers us an intriguing glimpse of capital’s conjectured head:

Gascon by birth but Norman by adoption, he united southern loquacity with Cauchois cunning… No one knew what his previous occupation had been: a pedlar, some said, while others claimed he had been a banker in Routot. What was indisputable, however, was his ability to carry out, in his head, calculations so complex that even Binet himself found them daunting.13

In locating such calculations—a numerical, non-visual narrative of capital accumulation—within the otherwise opaque confines of Lheureux’s skull, Flaubert seems to present us with an absolute limit for the realist novel. Lheureux, as minor and flat a character as we might imagine, safely contains capital’s movements within himself, allowing the realist novel to focus on the threatening nothing of the non-evental everyday, in which capital might be everywhere but is nowhere to be seen. As demonstrated by Alex Woloch, however, minorness need not be equated with unimportance.14 I propose that, in taking seriously the importance and specificity of Lheureux and figures like him, we gain a new perspective on the genealogy of the realist novel and how it has dealt with the problem of representing capital and, specifically, finance. Loansharks, bankers, salesmen, and generally men of ill repute, these financiers—such as Balzac’s Gobseck, Flaubert’s Lheureux, and Dickens’s Merdle—lurk in the background of realist narratives, their unseen movements mirroring the unseen movements of capital. They possess an almost singular comprehension of the same financial system that proves incomprehensible and deadly for the realist protagonist, and our initial reaction as readers might be to see them as pure malevolence personified and thus best avoided. However, to do so, and to search for a place “outside” of capitalism untouched by their specter, itself feeds into capitalist logics. What might we find if we instead venture inwards to the unsavory world of the financier? Rather than as an opaque, unknowable limit point of realist depiction, how might these texts access these logics, aestheticize them, and provide readers with conceptual tools to think across the material/abstract divide of which realism would seem to favor the former?

The realist novel cannot ultimately contain the forces of capitalism within the financier’s bodily trappings. Rather than view this as a failure of realism, however, I will argue that realism’s ambivalent relationship with the financier attests to its engagement with the profoundly realabstractions of capitalism in ways that are not necessarily naturalizing. First, I give further attention to the paradigmatically realist Madame Bovary, considering the way the financier enables and frustrates classical realism’s capacity to depict capitalism’s movement. In Bovary, finance capital is both highly noticeable and highly confounding, yet it remains more legible to the protagonist than the emergent social relations of capitalism, which risk becoming conflated with the “real” itself. I then turn to a contemporary novel, more readily classified as science-fiction, which I argue continues this project of engaging with real abstraction through the financier: Kim Stanley Robinson’s New York 2140. Written in the years following the 2008 financial crisis, this novel captures a moment when finance is so dominant that it becomes practically a metonym for the economy itself, its all-too-public fakeness only enhancing the neoliberal insistence that “there is no alternative.” To the extent that actual value is generated in these novels, which feature bourgeois protagonists and settings far from the centers of production, it is at their furthest margins. Yet, in considering their distinct views of finance from different moments in the history of capitalism, I hope we might gain some insight into the “shadowy zone” that Fernand Braudel sees “hovering above the sunlit world of the market economy… the favored domain of capitalism” (qtd. in Arrighi 25).15 In particular, I will argue that Robinson’s contemporary deployment of the financier allows us to more readily identify what 21stcentury realism actually looks like: that is, a realism that continues the project of representing “the essential dynamic forces” of a capitalist world, rather than merely importing the diegetic and stylistic properties of 19thcentury realism into the present-day.16

That said, while the financier’s activities—trading, loaning, speculating, calculating, accumulating—are ones we associate with the capitalist, these activities are not in themselves constitutive of capitalism. An analysis of the financier as figure might thus risk confusing finance capital and commerce, which in fact predate capitalism as its necessary but insufficient preconditions, with the capitalist mode of production itself.17 Despite this earliness, however, the confused relationship of finance capital and capitalism tout court has also presented a problem for historical and cultural accounts of so-called “late capitalism” in the United States since the 1970s, notably including Jameson’s.18 Such accounts tend to emphasize the way in which, after the end of the gold standard, rampant financial deregulation, and the advent of increasingly complex and automated financial technologies, “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.”19 Postmodernism’s fragmented, abstractive narratives are seen as a cultural response to this new phenomenon, suggesting an historical tendency within capitalism towards ever greater abstraction and alienation, in which the real conditions of one’s existence are increasingly difficult to ascertain (or “cognitively map”). While finance capital surely does enter a distinct period of dominance via the U.S. financial system through the late 20thcentury, the sense of “late capitalism” as an era of increased, unprecedented abstraction risks obscuring finance’s historical role throughout the history of capitalism or even producing the impression that the events of the late 20thcentury begot a distinct mode of production (“late capitalism,” “financialization,” or “neoliberalism”).20

In light of finance capital’s strange quality of being both too early and too late for capitalism-in-itself, the financier—as the figure most indexical of finance capital in the realist novel—would seem to serve a primary function of ideological obfuscation. Via the same sort of bait-and-switch wherein commerce is confused for capitalism, the financier is confused for the capitalist, and capitalism becomes less a set of social relations and more an object or force brought by the financier into the novel’s world from without.21 Even with full access to the financier’s interior life, we would not expect to find the operative logics of capitalism there so much as the ideological arithmetic whereby capital seems to beget itself.22 The innovations of finance (from interest-bearing capital and credit to contemporary algorithmic instruments) do not actually generate value, but rather create a flurried sensation that “all capital seems to be duplicated, and at some points triplicated, by the various ways in which the same capital… appears in various hands in different guises.” The “greatest part” of this capital is, in fact, “purely fictitious.”23

While this capital is fictitious, it is based on a true story. To reconstruct that story, the work of Giovanni Arrighi helps us understand the dynamic and integral role of finance and its abstractions in the mode of production. Financialization, for Arrighi, is not a new or extraneous process, producing superfluous obfuscation of an otherwise solid and material economic base. It is a recurring response of capitalism to inevitable crises of accumulation, given the tendency of the rate of profit to decline. In Arrighi’s two-part schema, which imagines Marx’s circuit of capital investment (M-C-M’) at the scale of the entire capitalist world-system, phases of material expansion (M-C) alternate with those of “financial rebirth and expansion” (C-M’).24 Arrighi writes that “financial expansions are taken to be symptomatic of a situation in which the investment of money in the expansion of trade and production no longer serves the purpose of increasing the cash flow to the capitalist stratum as effectively as pure financial deals can.”25 That is, in response to declining profit rates from commodity production, the economy of a given world-economic power shifts towards finance, and the locus of commodity production (and thus the accumulation of actual value) inevitably moves elsewhere.26 Finance is thus a consistent and structural part of the capitalist process, whereby sustained crises of accumulation are concealed and delayed. When a sustained crisis erupts from this guise (as in 1987 or 2008), finance further allows these eruptions to be indexed as discreet, cataclysmic events: as purely “financial” crises, rather than crises of capitalism tout court. It is with this understanding of finance’s role that we must undertake our analysis of the financier, especially if we wish to uncover a realist project that is not merely reifying.

This richer understanding of finance’s connection to capitalism reveals the limitations of fictions which seem to expose that, given its abstract qualities, finance simply isn’t real. Such a flat critique is seen even in works that are nominally aboutfinance, such as Martin Scorsese’s 2013 satire The Wolf of Wall Street. Early in the film, shortly after Jordan Balford (Leonardo DiCaprio) begins his career as a stockbroker, he is disabused of any notion that he is generating real value by the firm’s partner, Mark Hanna (Matthew McConaughey): “Nobody knows if a stock is going to go up, down, sideways, or in fucking circles, least of all stockbrokers… You know what a fugazi is?… It’s a whazy. It’s a woozie. It’s… fairy dust. It doesn’t exist. It’s never landed. It is no matter. It’s not on the elemental chart. It’s not fucking real” (my emphasis). This scene demonstrates why the outright dismissal of finance as completely made-up is ultimately an ineffective critique. Finance isfake, but the fakeness of finance is real.27 To dismiss finance as “fairy dust” implies that it is an aberration from a previous, “harder” (and thus more real) capitalism of tangible things and risks reifying “less” abstract capitalist logics (such as the commodity fetish) that, while more directly tied to physical objects, are nonetheless still abstractions. A character like Hanna embraces this implication because it lends his capital all the greater capacity to manipulate and liquefy itself. Rejecting capitalism through a focus on the “real” does not render this power any less potent; in fact, it precludes any particularized critical analysis, hence Wolf of Wall Street’s limitations. Having determined the world of finance is one of pure un-reality, the film can only depict (and keep depicting, with greater and greater intensity) what a bacchanalian farce it all is. The financier’s primary function, in such works, is to let us in on the joke—revealing, all the while, that he doesn’t understand finance any more than we do. To the extent there is a critique here, it is largely ethical. Such depictions expose the greed and villainy of a set individual actors (bankers, stockbrokers, even politicians) but cannot account for the larger forces structuring individual choices.28 Such bad individuals have perverted an economic system otherwise rooted in the “real.” As such, the ethical critique not only obviates material relations but tends to naturalize and legitimize them. Despite their comic vacuity, the targets of this critique remain unscathed, besides the occasional jail sentence.

Beyond these individual fates, the system of finance and capital itself remains untouched, its fundamental fictionality the source of its untraceable power. An array of biographies of every extant stockbroker—or a theoretically ideal actor-network that factored in non-human agencies—would still be lacking the qualities of capitalism that go beyond any locatable agent. This lack of locatable agency leads Mark Fisher to determine that capital “is at every level an eerieentity; conjured out of nothing, capital nevertheless exerts more influence than any allegedly substantial reality.”29 Capitalism forces us to ask questions that are difficult for realism to answer: “What kind of agent is acting here? Is there any agent at all?”30 This is not to say capitalism is fantastical, or not a human creation, but that the abstractions of capitalism (and the affects they produce) arereal forces with tangible, often bodily effects. David Cunningham notes the imperative, for the later Marx, not merely to “render material” abstract Hegelian concepts, but to elaborate “the social forms of what he called realabstraction: that is, those forms of abstraction which, in the specific set of circumstances of capitalist modernity, come to have an actual (and thus paradoxically concrete) objective social existence.”31 I contend that the financier has been one of the key methods through which realism has confronted this problem of real abstraction, complicating the opposition between a realist drive for empirical description and the unreal reality of capitalist abstraction.

The need for a richer accounting of this figure motivates my choice of texts from such distinct historical moments. In examining Madame Bovary, a novel that has been so important to the theorization of realism, I argue that the financier is far from an incidental figure, taken up for diegetic fidelity or, in an instance of Barthes’s reality effect, as an object among others signifying realism itself. The financier, though not ubiquitous as a character in every realist novel and typically minor where he does appear, fills a constitutive role for realist fiction from the start. We might claim that the novel, in identifying capitalism with such figures, confuses commerce for capitalism and money for value, losing sight of capitalism’s defining (and contestable) realities in production. Such a reading would correspond with Jameson’s claim that “the realistic novelist has a vested interest, an ontological stake, in the solidity of social reality, on the resistance of bourgeois society to history and to change.”32 I argue, instead, that attention to the financier as a formal response to the problem of real abstraction allows us to see how realism can depict the undeniable reality of the impersonal, abstractive forces of capital while exposing those forces not as otherworldly but as profoundly historical and material, the product not of nefarious individuals but of emergent social relations.

I locate the contemporary legacy of this realist project in New York 2140, a novel set in a flooded future New York City and featuring, among its protagonists, a strangely sympathetic financier named Franklin Garr (through whom the implications of capturing abstraction in the form of character will literally come to a head). While Franklin might be viewed as a riposte to more farcical and postmodern depictions of finance (such as The Wolf of Wall Streetand American Psycho), I read Robinson’s use of the financier as an endeavor to grapple with this central problematic of realist representation that we see emerging in the foundational and canonical instance of Bovary. As a corollary of this claim, I argue that Robinson’s novel, despite its future (if not quite futuristic) setting, is best understood in the realist tradition. As Robinson himself has claimed, science-fiction “turns out to be the realism of our time.”33 Less interested in imagining a utopian alternative to or dystopian culmination of capitalism, New York 2140’s primary task is to represent the real abstraction of capitalism for an era (following the 2008 financial crisis) that has seen this abstraction seemingly increase—though this realist project actualizes, rather than curtails, the novel’s revolutionary energies. Robinson, through his deployment of the financier, expands the purview of realism for an era in which U.S. hegemony is firmly entrenched in the financialized back-half of Arrighi’s phase of accumulation. His novel understands finance to be both real andfictitious, and it can thus imagine a world in which abstraction is not merely the stuff of obfuscation and false consciousness but a terrain of political action.

I.

Discussions of Madame Bovaryunderstandably tend to focus on its titular character and her supposed confusion of life for romantic literature, yet Emma’s decline and death are intimately financial as well.34 The role of Lheureux—the shadowy figure around whom Emma’s debts coalesce—is correspondingly underexamined. Critical attention to Lheureux is generally brief and tends to understand him in demonic or supernatural terms. For Phillip A. Duncan, Lhereueux “is an eruption of the occult in the dismal stagnation of provincial life.”35 Frederick Busi, paraphrasing Marianne Beyerle, writes that “she sees him as the devil in disguise and as such he becomes part of contemporary literary traditions. His complete diabolical personality remains to be evaluated, however.”36 To understand Lheureux, and the system he represents, as simply “evil” reduces us to a flat critique similar to the dismissal of the stock market as “fake.” Such critiques produce the sensation of irresistible, supernatural power through a failure to account for the specificities, limits, and peculiarities ofthat power. Rather than dismissing him as a stock character of the Faustian tempter, we might consider the particular importance Lheureux holds for the narrative and the language through which the text discusses his dealings. Flaubert’s descriptions render Lheureux difficult to situate. Revisiting the moment of his introduction, we see that in the localized setting of Yonville, he is described as a multifaceted outsider:

Gascon by birth but Norman by adoption, he united southern loquacity with Cauchois cunning… No one knew what his previous occupation had been: a pedlar, some said, while others claimed he had been a banker in Routot. What was indisputable, however, was his ability to carry out, in his head, calculations so complex that even Binet himself found them daunting.37

Lheureux’s geographical and professional identities cannot be reduced to simple modifiers but require a string of prevarications and qualifications. Busi describes his initial form as “the tempter disguised as a merchant… his past is not well known, and vague reports circulate about his dealings in Yonville and elsewhere.”38 The extent of Lheureux’s financial network is only implied, but whatever its size, it exceeds the confines of Yonville and of the novel itself. The uncertainty of his past occupation continues into his ambiguous depiction in the narrative: when Flaubert later states what might be taken as a revelation—“Monsieur Lheureux, in fact, was a pawnbroker”—the effect is not to clarify but to extend the web of Lheureux’s dealings.39 The fundamental quality of Lheureux’s character, whose exact position, profession, and personality are in constant flux, is thus not evil but indeterminacy. Even from the narrator’s position of relative omniscience, his true origins are inaccessible, such that the “implied person” behind his narrative minorness—the story of which he might be the protagonist—is thoroughly obscured.40 While Lheureux appears to come from elsewhere, his outsider status does not reflect a specific backstory of movement from one place to another. Rather, Lheureux’s indeterminacy actively produces an “outsideness”—originating nowhere but “not here”—that remains, structurally, inside the larger character-system of the novel. Within this outside, of which we catch only glimpses, lies his mind and its capacity for complex calculations, for tracking values in a way that resists realist depiction or narration. The head of capitalism seems to be Lheureux’s head, though we do not—and perhaps cannot—know much about it despite its “daunting” capacity for computation.

Lheureux is certainly a tempter, displaying his shimmering goods to Emma despite her insistence that “there’s nothing I need.” When asked the price, he responds, “Oh, a mere trifle… a mere trifle; but there’s no rush; whenever it suits you—we’re not Jews!”41 This response is notable for its elliptical nature: money is never mentioned in itself, though it structures the entire sentence from without. Lheureux describes his potential transaction in vague and negative terms; rather than speak of materials, objects, and visible qualities, he describes quantities, vectors, and speeds. The price is a “mere trifle,” a strikingly non-numerical unit for a man of such mathematical acumen. The moment of payment is placed out of empirically measurable time; there is “no rush,” though without any standard to measure it against, this reassurance is logically empty. Lheureux likewise understands his own identity within the transaction in strictly negative terms. By positioning himself to Emma as a non-Jew, he presents a more ethnically familiar and lackadaisical version of finance, one that is in “no rush,” unlike the precise, punctual, Jewish form that is implied through its negation.42 When Emma ultimately rejects him (for now), he replies, “Oh well! Some other time, I’m sure.”43 This combination of confidence and non-specificity captures the strange financial temporality (or non-temporality) that Lheureux inhabits. The “some other time” is completely indeterminate yet somehow inevitable. Lheureux’s capitalism is never late, but it does not hurry; it is always just-in-time.

While Flaubert’s realist narrative can quite successfully describe and even linger upon the particular commodities which move in and out of Emma’s domestic space, Lheureux’s plotting exists more in the two-dimensional realm of bills, receipts, and notes. We are offered a glimpse of Lheureux’s spatial world towards the end of the novel, as Emma pleads for his aid (or mercy):

Against the wall, under some lengths of calico, Emma caught a glimpse of a safe, of a size that suggested it held something other than merely banknotes and coins. Monsieur Lheureux, in fact, was a pawnbroker, and the safe was where he had stored away Madame Bovary’s gold chain, as well as the earrings he had acquired from poor Tellier.44

Here, the text attempts to ascertain Lheureux’s workings through realist description; money itself—mere “banknotes and coins”—is once again ignored in favor of something more solid and concrete: “the safe… where he had stored away Madame Bovary’s gold chain.” The abstract world of fiscal exchange is safely moored in the gold chain—of aesthetic not merely financial value—which is physically secured within the fortified space of the safe. The revelation of Lheureux as a pawnbroker seems to deflate and familiarize him: despite his mysteriousness, he is ultimately a trader in physical goods, material commodities with real value. Capitalism thus seems safely contained, for a moment, within the realist purview. However, while Lheureux’s operation is substantially slower and lower-tech than contemporary finance, it is still fundamentally speculative.45 Lheureux’s grammatical capacity for occupying non-time—that non-specific “some other time,” when there is “no rush”—is particularly so; he at once participates in immediate exchanges while waiting within a speculative future for the moment of reckoning when value is actualized with dire consequences for his borrowers.

Despite the apparent solidity of the safe, his speculation’s actual movements are happening on paper. When Emma implores Lheureux for help, he counters by reciting from his ledger: “Let’s see… Let’s see… Third of August, two hundred francs… Seventeenth of June, a hundred and fifty… And I’m not even mentioning the notes signed by Monsieur… and the interest, there’s no end to it, it’s all a hopeless muddle.”46 Lheureux occupies a contradictory zone of absolute fixity and absolute non-fixity. The unseen, unspecified moves of his operation can be pinpointed to exact dates and figures through the technology of the ledger, yet the totality of the situation remains “a hopeless muddle.” While Lheureux cannot be taken at his word, the reader is not afforded the total view, only the excerpted examples. These examples, however, are merely (to use Anna Kornbluh’s phrase) spatiotemporal situations: temporary sites that are not meaningful in-and-of-themselves, but only as part of a larger context of surroundings. The atemporal and aspatial realm of paper affords Lheureux the simultaneous capacity to ruthlessly acquire that which is his while eschewing all responsibility towards the actual lives on which he feeds. Despite being a man of paper, when Emma “show[s] him the paper” of her debt to Vinçart, Lheureux responds, “Well, what can I do about it?”47 He thus defers any personal agency to the system itself: what is happening is no one’s fault, and there is nothing to be done.

Lheureux’s “impossible” speculation places him in direct opposition to realist description, which for Barthes “is thoroughly mixed with ‘realistic’ imperatives, as if the referent’s exactitude… governed and alone justified its description.”48 Whereas Flaubertian description might go on forever, given the inexhaustible details that might be enumerated, the ledger does not describe actions or objects so much as it contorts them into numbers, allowing for their movement and exchange. The narrative of how precisely one arrives at the final sum is lost, only glimpsed within the realist mode through Lheureux’s elliptical explanation, but that does not prevent that unreal sum from actualizing itself in and on the real world. This contradiction is felt by Emma as she attempts to ascertain the numerical narrative that has been lurking in the background of her lived experience: “she did actually try to work out her finances, but she would come up with such outrageous totals that she found them impossible to credit. Then she would begin afresh, soon grow confused, drop the whole enterprise, and think no more about it.”49 Her inability to “credit” these “outrageous totals” reflects their seeming lack of correspondence to the otherwise empirical/visual nature of her narrative existence. Emma’s incredulity, however, masks the degree to which the materiality of the ledger collapses the distinction between “real” commodities and “impossible” finances. The novel’s narration keeps Lheureux’s ledger at a distance, yet it serves as a potent example of how finance might be visualized and brought into the purview of not only realist literature but popular consciousness.50 In this sense, the ledger is quite analogous to Flaubert’s own descriptions, which likewise visualize that which is not “really” there. Indeed, finance registers itself equally empirically observable within Emma’s domestic space via this very description: “The house was such a dismal place, now! Tradesmen were seen to emerge from it in a fury. Scarves lay around forgotten… and Little Berthe… went about with holes in her stockings.”51 Finance physically rearranges the domestic space, brings individuals in and out of it, and pokes literal holes in things. Yet Emma maintains, “it wasn’t her fault!”52 She may be right, but then whose fault is it?

Lheureux (as devil) would be the simple answer, but the novel undercuts the easy conclusion that agency and blame can be squarely placed on him (or Emma, or the two in concert). Lheureux’s victimization of Emma is not personal, but part of a larger structural project: Busi, in noting Lheureux’s other victims, concludes that “Emma may seem to be the principle object of his schemes, but in reality she is just a party of his master plan to dominate the business scene of Yonville.”53 Lheureux’s “master plan” certainly has a goal that exceeds Emma’s personal ruin, but the text complicates a reading of Lheureux as the lone agent behind her financial entrapment. When Emma approaches the lawyer Guillaumin for assistance, the narrative voice confirms that this “master plan” is by no means localizable to Lheureux’s mind only:

Guillaumin knew all about it, for he was secretly in league with the merchant, on whom he relied to provide the financing required for the mortgage loans his clients asked him to arrange. He therefore knew (better than she did) the long story of those loans… continually renewed, until the day came when, gathering together all the writes for non-payment, Lheureux, wishing not to appear bloodthirsty in the eyes of his neighbours, had called upon his friend Vinçart to initiate the necessary proceedings in his own name.54

Lheureux is certainly the most potent human actant here, but his scheme relies upon the complacency of at least two other figures. Furthermore, the story is old hat to Guillaumin, who has seen it countless times before, such that the details are unimportant; Emma is rendered just another victim of its ever-repeating cycles of ruination. Any involvement in the unsavory business of finance seems to lead necessarily and automatically to ruin, a deadly fate sealed by Emma’s original transaction. If Lheureux is behind all this, there is a sense that what is going on exceeds his individual will. To place the blame solely on Lheureux—or even the triumvirate of Lheureux, Guillaumin, and Vinçart—participates in what Fisher, channeling Jameson, calls “the abjection of evil and ignorance onto fantasmatic Others.”55 Lheureux’s devilish qualities make him an easy target for such fantasmatic Othering, but from Guillaumin’s perspective, in which Emma’s situation is but the latest particularized instance of a larger formal process, something has been set in motion that no individual can contain, command, or comprehend. In this emergent, vaguely conspiratorial network, the novel begins to glimpse the compulsions, imperatives, and tendencies (Wood’s “laws of motion”) that constitute the capitalist mode of production, beyond any single actor’s intentions, good or ill.

The ways Madame Bovary’s financial schemeexceeds the figure of the financier and his individual will forces us to consider how the text, unable to contain the agency of capitalism solely within this one figure, points outside itself to movements of capital that can only be glimpsed in motion. The sense that Lheureux somehow lies beyond this scope has led, as noted above, to readings that align him with the demonic and the occult, while Jacqueline Merriam Paskow attributes his success at manipulating Emma to an almost supernatural (and narrator-esque) “virtual omniscience” of Emma’s “weaknesses and inner thoughts” that enables him to “produce the effect of a ‘force of fate.’”56 Lheureux is indeed an unreal figure, but this unreality should not be understood as a remnant romanticism from a prior mode of production. Rather, his fluctuating indeterminacy represents the realist novel’s attempt to grapple with the paradoxically real and abstract forces of an emergent capitalism. We see here how the attempt to contain capitalism, in the guise of finance, within the figure of the financier fails. However, it is this very failure which allows the novel to capture the dialectical energies of a capitalist totality. By displacing capitalist logics into Lheureux’s corporeal confines, which the former will necessarily transcend, Madame Bovary explodes understandings of finance as pure fakery, strictly the financier’s concern, and in opposition to “real” capitalism. The head of capitalism proves to be unattached to any one body, its ruinations the product not of villainous schemers but diffuse social imperatives.

As such, the better model for capitalism proves not to be Lheureux’s abstract non-presence, but the novel’s free indirect discourse (perhaps its most famous innovation), which is everywhere and nowhere at once. Jameson has described the cognitive map of the era of market capitalism as following “a logic of the grid” and so producing “a space of infinite equivalence and extension.”57 This description is quite evocative of the two-dimensional, numerical space of Lheureux’s ledger, which the novel, diegetically, resists via its mediated presentation and Emma’s inability to cognitively access its content. Formally, however, the novel in fact adopts it via the technique of free indirect discourse. Through this technique, knowable commodities, unknowable financial transactions, and unspoken desires and thoughts occupy the same plane of narrative reality and are rendered equivalent and exchangeable. Rancière has identified something close to this phenomenon. He sees, in Emma’s compensatory purchases, a yearning for “the law of democracy, a law of universal equivalence: anybody can exchange any desire for any other desire.”58 (236). Emma does not merely confuse literature for life, but rather, wishes to collapse them together, under a logic of emerging realist literature that “makes any subject matter equal to any other.”59 If there is a law of equivalence in Madame Bovary, however, it is less democratic than capitalistic. Lheureux, whose name means “the happy one,” is perhaps happy precisely because of his privileged access to a quality that exceeds even Flaubert’s relentless description of the referent: its price. While Emma’s desire might be for a system of direct equivalences that are not mediated through the price-form, the ledger’s presence makes the medium of such exchanges undeniable. Lheureux’s success is thus less a matter of supernatural omniscience than of his understanding of the numerical non-narratives through which commodities and money transform into each other and back again.

Through Lheureux’s accumulation, glimpsed in the material but not quite legible ledger, Bovarypoints towards the real abstraction that, while actualizing so many of the novel’s distinctly physical events, eludes the gaze of realist vision itself. Even in its formative moments, the possibility of realism is threatened by its simultaneous need and incapacity to approach this abstraction, under which Emma’s death—the definitive “event” of the novel—becomes less a tragic, exceptional occurrence than the ordinary result of an ongoing process. The novel’s lingering on her body (pre- and postmortem) highlights that Emma was dead (or, at least, indebted) on Lheureux’s ledger long before her death is eventuated within the narrative proper. The “black liquid, like vomit” that flows from her corpse’s mouth—the ink of both the récit and the receipt—finally joins these parallel narratives in diegetic time.60 Through her demise, and her daughter’s proletarianization, the novel makes plain that Emma’s desire for exchange is predicated on exploitation and death.61 Such fates are not happenstance misfortunes occasioned by misguided purchases, but the structurally necessary cost of producing the value on which Lheureux’s fictitious exchanges depend.

II.

Understanding the financier as a means through which the realist novel has accounted for the abstractions of capitalism makes it possible to reconsider the form’s legacy for our contemporary moment, in which the status of realism has been particularly vexed. The financialization of the U.S. economy dates back at least to the 1970s, with the Nixon shock’s removal of the dollar from the gold standard and the de factodissolution of the Bretton Woods system. However, the decades since—with increasing deregulation, most famously the repeal of the Glass–Steagall Act’s provisions on securities—have seen exponential increases in financial activity. David Harvey notes that “the total daily turnover of financial transactions in international markets, which stood at $2.3 billion in 1983, had risen to $130 billion by 2001.”62 Such a staggering expansion of the circulation of fictitious capital reflects the inherently unstable, crisis-ridden nature of U.S.-led capitalism since the period of exceptional productive growth that defined the Fordist-Keynesian period.63 The 2008 financial crisis would, seemingly, have been a ripe time to reckon with this instability through sweeping, structural changes, or even revolution. However, as the resulting (if much decried) bank bailouts signified, this road was not to be taken. Recalling Arrighi, this is not surprising: a critique of the financial crisis which limits itself to the realm of finance-in-itself (through focus on deregulation, out-of-control digital technologies, risky financial products, greedy bankers, or selfish home-buyers) cannot address the underlying causes of the needfor financialization (the underlying declines in the production of real surplus-value). To address such causes would be, in fact, to call into question the entire capitalist system.

This apparent inability to question capitalism’s inevitability has inflected discussions of realism (and its relationship to capitalism) since the 2008 crisis. This relationship has largely been understood as one of mutual reinforcement. Such a view is typified by Fisher, whose work has provoked a great deal of scholarly response.64 While from one view the 2008 crisis demonstrated the inherent instability and destructiveness of (late) capitalism, it somehow emerged unscathed, even stronger than ever. Fisher, in trying to understand this apparent paradox, has theorized this period as plagued by an ideology he calls “capitalist realism,” defined as “the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imaginea coherent alternative to it.”65 After the fall of the Soviet Union, there is a sense that all alternatives to capitalism have been discredited. Thus, in the aftermath of the 2008 crisis, the idea of letting the banking system fail appears inconceivable. The system has to be bailed out, rather than replaced or radically altered, because the idea of an alternative is literally unthinkable. Capitalist realism creates a sense that the only way to be “realistic” (in the colloquial sense) is to accept capitalist logic, and in this Fisher implicates the larger project of formal realism itself: “Capitalism realism is therefore not a particular type of realism; it is more like realism in itself.”66 Jameson echoes Fisher’s claim when he states that realism “cannot but be threatened” by the proposition of a changeable reality (political or otherwise) and that, thus, “the very choice of the form itself is a professional endorsement of the status quo.”67

This complicity between realism and the status quo becomes particularly potent as the increasing financialization of the economy—in which more and more economic activity takes place outside the typical realist purview—puts burdens of representation on realism that seem to demand that the financier (a necessarily minor figure for Flaubert) take center stage. As Leigh Claire La Berge has demonstrated, the financiers of the 1980s (exemplified by Oliver Stone’s Gordon Gekko and Tom Wolfe’s Sherman McCoy), in allowing realism to claim a “narrative monopoly” on the representation of finance, produce finance as a “metonymic stand-in for ‘the economy’ as such.”68 This metonymic substitution leads to a necessarily reifying (capitalist) realism which “reimagines the economy while maintaining that the economy cannot be imagined because ‘that’s the way it is.’”69 In a Fisherian sense, the realist depiction of finance—the exposure (even in an attempted critique) of “how things really are”—paradoxically exalts the financier as the individual most adapted to this gritty reality and capitalism as the only system proper to such a harsh, dog-eat-dog world. Once realism had admitted the financier’s interiority and logics into its reality, the novel’s only recourse for critique seems to be a rejection of that reality, as seen in a text like Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho, in which the unreality of finance calls into question the reality of the novel’s plot events (and, by extension, reality itself).70 At the same time, if the contemporary realist work ignores this financial logic, it abandons the realist project proper (that is, representing social reality) in favor of preserving the outward style of its 19th century forebears (a style which capitalist abstraction, as we have seen in Flaubert, pushes to its representative limits from the beginning).

While postmodern fiction, like Ellis’s, embraces finance as a subject uniquely suited to literature’s experimental and abstractive capacities, other contemporary treatments of finance (from novels and films to popular journalism like the Planet Moneypodcast series) have devoted themselves to penetrating its arcane veneer, forming part of a genre Alison Shonkwiler calls “economic realism” (Financial Imaginaryxxx).71 However, even for these ostensibly realist works, the pedagogical burden of explicating finance-in-itself tends to limit their capacity to connect finance to the larger social totality. This conundrum is perhaps best captured by Adam McKay’s 2015 film The Big Short, which, while providing a dramatic narrative about the crisis (and its prediction by a several exceptional individuals), devotes a great deal of screen time to fourth-wall-breaking lessons in financial concepts and jargon (featuring, among others, chef Anthony Bourdain and economist Richard Thaler). Through its emphasis on describing specific financial instruments and technologies, rather than the underlying crisis of accumulation to which these are a necessary response, the film implies that the crisis is caused by a certain (even if very large) set of actors who have perverted the stock market, bending its rules and producing an unfair game. The viewer is left to imagine, with nostalgia, a stock market of days gone by, tied to the material performance and value of actual companies.

In seeking an alternative fate for realism—one that avoids the equally reifying options of representing and not representing finance—I turn to Robinson’s New York 2140. Set in a future New York City which is mostly submerged in water due to climate change, Robinson’s sprawling, episodic novel follows a large cast of characters, most of whom live in a housing cooperative in the MetLife Tower. Each chapter bears the name of a character or pair of characters as its title, most of whose stories are narrated in the third-person. Robinson employs a variety of styles for specific characters, however, including Beckettian theatrical dialogue for the duo Jeff and Mutt, the wider historical and theoretical narrations of a non-character known as “the citizen” (perhaps a stand-in for the author or a Whitmanian personification of the city itself), and, most importantly for my analysis, the first-person narration of high-frequency trader Franklin Garr. Given Fisher’s encapsulation of capitalist realism as the idea (attributed to both Jameson and Slavoj Žižek) that “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism,” New York 2140, at first blush, seems to be a capitalist realist text par excellence.72 Robinson’s novel depicts a distant future in which climate change has had radically palpable effects, yet—beyond a plethora of technological innovations for managing and navigating the water—the political, social, and economic relations of capitalism (and in particular neoliberal finance capitalism) have not changed at all. However, through a complicated and fortuitous series of events—including Franklin’s recognition that the bubble of “intertidal” real estate (variously above and below water with the tide) is about to burst—Robinson’s rag-tag band help organize a “debt coup” through which, in the words of the citizen, finance becomes “for the most part a privately operated public utility.”73

The debt coup, which essentially rehearses the 2008 financial crisis with a different result, might be the least “realistic” aspect of 2140. Particularly from a capitalist-realist perspective, we might be conditioned to regard this coup as a sort of speculative wish-fulfillment that marks the novel as breaking with realism through the tools of utopian literature or science-fiction. However, if read as a utopia, the novel’s vision of a publicly co-opted finance system, while representing a radical alternative to the aftermath of 2008, is rather weak and reformist. As a dystopia, Robinson’s world simply isn’t that bad, since technological advances have rendered the fluctuating water levels about as inconvenient as typical New York City traffic. The novel’s title, cover (portraying a partially submerged New York skyline), and author (famous for his science-fiction work) might tempt us to read it as a work of science-fiction. But besides the diegetic matter of being set in 2140 and replacing cars with boats, the novel in no way engages in the formal project of science-fiction which, since Darko Suvin, has largely been understood as the “literature of cognitive estrangement,” through which “a set normative system” is confronted with “a point of view or look implying a new set of norms.”74 New York 2140, in fact, creates the opposite effect: we are struck by how little has changed, and this unchanged world, far from producing estrangement, offers the possibility of productive comprehension.

Suvin’s definition of science-fiction may be overly restrictive, but I am less interested in answering whether or not 2140counts as science-fiction than I am in arguing that, even if it is science-fiction, this does not prevent it from being realism. In fact, part of the difficulty of identifying a proper “economic realism” of the 21st century—one which meets Lukács’s standard of “grasp[ing] that reality as it truly is” rather than “reproducing whatever manifests itself immediately and on the surface”—might lie in restricting our view of realism to that which bears an external resemblance to classical realism.75 However, Lukács maintains that “free play of the creative imagination and unrestrained fantasy are compatible with the Marxist conception of realism.”76 The purpose of such realism is not “naturalistic detail” but to “express the essential dynamic forces” of social reality.77 This is why I argue that in order to properly understand 2140’s contribution, we must understand it within the tradition of the realist novel and as advancing the project of articulating the real conditions of capitalism (particularly through its deployment of the financier), rather than looking to it as a non- or anti-realist gesture that upends capitalism by imagining outside or beyond it. 2140 engages with these conditions through a profound recognition of the real quality of capitalist abstraction, a willingness to depict said abstraction, and a self-consciousness (on the levels of content andform) of the fact that it is depicting abstraction. Robinson’s narrative thus takes as its central problematic not the particulars of the 2008 financial crisis but the question of why the crisis—which should theoretically have exposed the hard realities undergirding speculative finance—led only to the reification of the status quo: that is, his central problematic is capitalist realism itself. By displacing his narrative into a distant future, he escapes the trap of endless explicating the “just so” particulars of actual events that plagues a work like The Big Short. Instead, Robinson’s novel reveals that the forces underlying all capitalist crises—past, present, and future—are not natural but historical, not the product of phantasmatic finance let loose, but the material relations of production. Robinson’s science-fiction is thus a realist treatment of an unreal situation: a financialized economy of a waning empire careening towards perpetual crisis and environmental devastation. Ultimately, Robinson finds the cure for capitalist realism’s pessimism within capitalist logic itself, maintaining that, if followed through, capitalism holds within itself the capacity for its own dissolution. In a sense, this is nothing new, but rather a classic premise of Marxist dialectics, and a continuation of realist fiction, which Kornbluh notes “makes a world while highlighting the artifice of its making, in the process exposing the untenable opposition of real and made and the contingent fabrication of the life-worlds that parallel its own.”78 That is, by relentlessly depicting the world of finance, including the reality of capitalist abstraction, Robinson exposes capitalism’s contingency and its capacity to be otherwise.

One of Robinson’s most important formal tools for offering a comprehensive, realist account of finance is in getting us inside the financier’s head, but not in such a way that the abstractions of finance (as in American Psycho) take over the narrative. Franklin Garr’s first-person perspective allows Robinson to depict details of the financial system that would otherwise escape the empirical gaze of realist prose. Unlike the capitalist realist financiers La Berge analyzes, Robinson presents Franklin not as a ruthless cutthroat but as an oddly self-reflective, statistics-minded formalist, conscious of the abstracted quality of his work without conceiving of it as mystical fairy dust:

On my screen was displayed all the parts of the global mind most concerned with drowned coastlines, my area of expertise. It wasn’t really possible to understand at a single glance the many graphs, spreadsheets, crawl lines, video boxes, chat lines, sidebars, and marginalia displayed on the screen, much as some of my colleagues would like to pretend that it is… No, one can glance at the totality, sure, but then it’s important to slow down and take in the data part by part.79

Here, New York 2140 recalls Lheureux and his ledger, with the difference that we are afforded access to the financier’s perspective on his tool of representation. Franklin recognizes that this statistical picture provides him with a certain model of totality, recalling Lukács’s longing for the comprehensible and integrated epic universe he attributes to the ancient Greeks, for whom “the world of meaning can be grasped, it can be taken in at a glance.”80 Franklin’s transposition of “at” and “glance” is significant, however; where the Greeks could view totality “at a glance,” Franklin can only “glance at” it, briefly, before returning to his piecemeal data. Unlike his colleagues, Franklin recognizes with Lukács that totality is no longer available for representation, and like the novel, his computer screen serves as the form of a fragmented modern world. He nonetheless finds pleasure or even, as he puts it, “the economic sublime” in his work, giving us a first-hand account of the strange temporalities which Lheureux’s elliptical statements only imply: “my screen was a veritable anthology of narrative, and in many different genres… The temporalities in these genres ranged from the nanoseconds of high-frequency trading to the geological epochs of sea level rise.”81 Of course, to depict these theoretical insights in first-person narrative prose does not in itself comprise a complete articulation of financial logic, but Franklin’s importance as a financier figure lies in the fact that he does not presume to fully articulate such a logic. For figures of the Gordon Gekko stripe, the complex specifics of finance are wiped away in favor of a capitalist realist aesthetic in which the financier’s ruthless, unethical actions are defended as realistic ones. Franklin, by contrast, presents not a total vision but an abstraction—and, most importantly, an abstraction that he knows is an abstraction.82

Franklin notes that in flooded NYC’s chaotic intertidal zone, “no one knew who owned what, or on which side of the ledger any given asset resided… Were you in debt if you owned an asset… or were you rich? Who knew?”83 While he answers this question confidently—“My index knew”—he immediately undercuts this confident assertion by diving into the details of the index, which is revealed to be, at its core, arbitrary:

My index contained and then concealed some assumptions and analogies, some approximations and guesses… I’m the one who made the choices when the quants laid out the choices for quantifying the various qualities involved. I just picked one… Ultimately the IPPI allowed for people (including WaterPrice) to concoct derivative instruments that could be offered and bought… So people loved the index and its numbers, and did not examine its underlying logic too closely.84

Despite the fact that the quantifiable information the index produces is necessarily arbitrary, abstract, and fictional, the workings of finance nonetheless rely on such arbitrary numbers. To point out the index’s fictionality thus does not stop the complex actors of finance capital from utilizing it towards ends that will ultimately have real effects. Robinson thus captures and aestheticizes the fundamental collective fiction that allows capitalism to function. Fisher, taking cues from Jacques Lacan, calls this the big Other, “the collective fiction, the symbolic structure, presupposed by any social field… the virtual figure which is required to believe when no individual can.”85 No individual financier, least of all Franklin, actually believes these formulas are real, but they all operate under the fiction that they are believed (by someone or something). Rather than naturalize this abstraction as “the necessary way of things,” Franklin materializes it—through the realist depiction of his indexes and abstractions in their specificity—as a contingent aspect of reality under finance capitalism. His investments in finance are not ethical, political, or even personal, but rather formal and aesthetic.

Depicting capitalism is not just a matter of depicting its negative effects, which can play into the gritty, capitalist realist mindset, but of depicting its peculiar form, not quite real and not quite fictional. Audrey Jaffe has noted how, through such forms, finance itself becomes understood through as a sort of personage: “the market is a mass character, the imagined embodiment of an average man.”86 Franklin, as an imagined embodiment of this imagined embodiment, refocuses us to the fact that finance, despite its aggregated, imaginary nature, is an historical entity. He thus serves the role, for the novel, of giving form to things, of rendering finance formally legible enough that the novel may advance its vision of radical social change, reminding us that even such forms are profoundly material, historical, and contestable.

Franklin’s role in that plot of radical change is indispensable, yet while he makes perfect sense as a formally necessary perspective for the novel’s vision, his transformation into a plot-advancing actant is difficult to explain. The novel’s hinge moment occurs when its collective protagonists help to precipitate a financial crisis brought about by a mass refusal to pay rent, loans, and other debts, culminating in the so-called debt coup in which finance is placed into the public’s hands. The most significant factor in actualizing this plan is the partnership of Franklin (who provides the financial know-how) with Charlotte Armstrong, an immigration lawyer and the novel’s most outwardly progressive, politically-minded figure. While Franklin’s non-ethical, aesthetic investment in finance does not preclude him from aiding the coup, the diegetic explanation for his participation is oddly libidinal. His only motivation appears to be an initially subconscious attraction to Charlotte, which is consummated in the novel’s final moments. Only at this point, well after the coup itself, does Franklin become retrospectively conscious of his sexual attraction (and thus his previously mysterious motivation for advancing the novel’s plot): “Okay, I liked her. And more than that, I wanted her. Did that mean I was falling for power?… No; power is not sexy. But Charlotte Armstrong was sexy.” Franklin’s prolonged prevarications over their age difference give narrative time to Franklin’s previously unconscious desires before, finally, he gives into them: “But now was now” (590). In this moment, Franklin follows his sexual propulsion, which has led him, among other things, to the upending of finance capital as we know it, to the more narratively legible endpoint of consummation (and the marriage plot, or, at least, something that is its rhyme).

Through this strange plot element, we can detect the affordances of realism’s embodiment of finance in the figure of the financier. The novel’s reliance upon Franklin’s libidinal drive to actualize its dialectical potential seems rather unrealistic (or, at the very least, silly) if we are to imagine the novel’s project as providing a plot of how the entrenchment of capitalist realism might be escaped (are the progressive lawyers of the world to seduce stockbrokers into becoming communists?). However, while Robinson is not able to narrate a solution to material historical conditions, he is able to narrate a solution (or, at least, a resolution) to the problem of capitalist realism by activating the libidinal force implicit within the financier’s embodiment. If the financier—the human shape within which the realist novel has contained the abstract forces of capitalism—has mostly served to reify those forces, that same physical instantiation makes the financier subject to human desire.87 This is not merely utopian wish-fulfillment, an imaginary solution to an unsolvable social problem. While perceived via abstract, data-mediated forms, finance ultimately directs bodies, materials, and even psychological processes and subjectivities (chiefly Franklin’s own), but this direction is not preordained. Franklin thus serves as a physical, human interface between the abstractions of finance and the material world in which their effects are felt. Franklin is not, in the end, fully determined by either side of this interface.88 This is not a tension which can be resolved in theory; it requires the unity of theory and practice, as when Franklin, realizing his financial models “were simply wrong about certain categories of building,” decides to “go out and put [his] eyeball to reality.”89 Through this act of mediation, of reconciling the abstract and the material, Franklin helps destroy the very system to which he is ostensibly devoted. While it seems that he does this for no reason other than his own internal, unconscious drives, this is precisely the point. Franklin’s intrusion is not preordained, destined, or precipitated by a complex Rube Goldberg machine of plot contrivances; it simply happens. Franklin’s embodiment of abstraction, preestablished as a realist trope, affords Robinson the opportunity to use the body of capitalism against the head. This body serves, for the novel, as the site of abstraction’s materialization; through it, abstractions are revealed as real, material, and contestable.

Robinson thus does not offer a teleological road map for actualizing his novel’s plot in the real world, but a theoretically potent affirmation of contingency and possibility. While there is no reason Franklin’s role or the coup itself hasto happen, there is likewise no reason it could nothappen; even if its conditions of emplotment seem absurd, no natural, ontological law precludes it from occurring. Indeed, the mechanics of how the debt coup is triggered are ultimately less important than how it identifies abstraction itself as an arena of anticapitalist struggle. In a U.S. economy in which the point of production is decreasingly available as a site of political action and older strategies of organization are increasingly foreclosed, 2140 enables us to imagine how the spheres of finance, debt, and circulation remain fertile ground for political action, offering opportunities to expose the underlying crisis beneath finance’s discreet ones, the crisis of capitalism itself. Crisis provides, as Annie McClanahan elucidates, “an invaluable historical hermeneutic, compelling us to anticipate limits, to imagine alternatives, to welcome collapse, and thus to resist the ‘end of history’ triumphalism characteristic of late capitalist ideology in boom times.”90 Robinson forces us not simply to accelerate towards the future but to consider how 2008 offered the same possibility as his fictional future crisis—or, as Charlotte puts it, “Every time this happens there’s an opportunity to seize the reins and change direction, but up until now we’ve chickened out.”91 That said, we struggle to see this possibility as having been extant until it crosses over into actuality. Robinson can narrate the before and after of the financial bubble’s burst, but not the bursting itself: “A new bubble, you might say, and you would be right. But people are blind to a bubble they’re inside, they can’t see it.”92 We never actually see the mass refusal to pay itself, only the call to arms (by an upper-class intellectual vanguard) and, retrospectively, the aftermath. While this focus on the upper-class and refusal to narrate the actual revolutionary moment might be seen as a limitation, I take it as a conscious one on Robinson’s part. The text does not fool itself into thinking that a “realist” reportage of a (fictional) revolution would make it occur. While New York 2140is comfortable dealing in the abstractions of finance, these are real, extant abstractions and thus within its realist purview. The collective political subject necessary for the concrete political change Robinson envisions is notextant, and he thus does not depict it. But in allowing such change to have happened, he can assert its radical possibility and push the reader towards its actualization. 2140’s most revolutionary potential is thus not in its specific politics but in in its reignition of the revolutionary tendency contained within realism: the fact that a full and proper accounting of capitalist reality need not reify that reality but, rather, can expose a profoundly crisis-ridden system that continuously offers opportunities for political action and change. Robinson’s financier, ultimately, does not hold the secrets of capitalism within his head; rather, his secret is that there are no such secrets at all, only the struggle through with the speculative becomes the real.

1. I am indebted to Emily Steinlight for her help crafting and improving this article. I am likewise thankful for the advice and encouragement of Jo Park, Knar Gavin, Alex Millen, Zach Fruit, JS Wu, Ann Ho, Aylin Malcolm, Nico Millman, Meghan Hall, and Martín Premoli.
2. Ian Watt. The Rise of the Novel(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1965) 32.
3. This understanding of realism is typified by Peter Brooks, for whom “realism turns crucially on its visuality: its primary attention to the visible world, the observation and representation of persons and things.” Peter Brooks, Realist Vision (New Haven: Yale UP, 2008) 71.
4. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume One, trans. Ben Fowkes (New York: Penguin, 1990) 257.
5. Marx, Capital 255.
6. Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, trans. N. L. Stone (Chicago: C. H. Kerr & Co., 1904) 20.
7. See, for example, Dickens’ Great Expectations: “As we contemplated the fire, and as I thought what a difficult vision to realise this same Capital sometimes was, I put my hands in my pockets.” Charles Dickens, Great Expectations (Mineola: Dover, 2012) 198. For an excellent analysis of Great Expectationsand this passage, see Anna Kornbluh’s Realizing Capital: Financial and Psychic Economies in Victorian Form(New York: Fordham University Press, 2014), particularly chapter 2 (“Investor Ironies in Great Expectations”).
8. Ellen Meiksins Wood defines these “laws of motion” as “the imperativesof competition and profit-maximization, a compulsionto reinvest surpluses, and a systematic and relentless needto improve labour-productivity and develop the forces of production.” Ellen Meiksins Wood, The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View (London: Verso, 2017) 36-7; original emphasis. Crucial for Wood’s understanding of capitalism is that it is a matter of compulsion, rather than will, intention, or greed: those caught in capitalist social relations, in order to self-reproduce, are forced towards participation in these laws of motion. See also Robert Brenner, “The Origins of Capitalist Development: A Critique of Neo-Smithian Marxism,” New Left Review104 (1977): 25-92, on whom Wood draws.
9. See Brooks, who states, “I sometimes think that Madame Bovaryis the one novel, of all novels, that deserves the label ‘realist’” (Brooks, Realist Vision54). Indeed, Madame Bovaryhas proven not just an outsized entry in the realist canon but an important tool through which the theorization of the realist novel—and even the novel more generally—has been approached [see Erich Auerbach, “On the Serious Imitation of the Everyday” Madame Bovary, ed. by Margaret Cohen (New York: W.W. Norton, 2004): 423–448; Roland Barthes, “The Reality Effect” Madame Bovary, ed. Margaret Cohen Norton (New York: W.W. Norton, 2004): 449–454; Fredric Jameson, The Antinomies of Realism (London: Verso, 2013) 148-162; and Jacques Rancière, “Why Emma Bovary Had to Be Killed” Critical Inquiry 34.2 (2008): 233–248.]
10. Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary, trans. Margaret Mauldon (Oxford UP, 2004) 428.
11. Flaubert, Madame Bovary 429.
12. Jameson, Antinomies143.
13. Madame Bovary92.
14. Within the character-system of the realist novel (to use Woloch’s terminology), the minor character’s supposed insignificance—the “appearance of a disappearance” of the implied person behind their flatness—enables the novel to “inscrib[e] the very absence of voice that the distributional system produces,” to “enfol[d] the untold tale into the telling.” Alex Woloch, The One vs. the Many: Minor Characters and the Space of the Protagonist in the Novel (Princeton University Press, 2003) 42.
15. “Certain groups of privileged actors are engaged in circuits and calculations that ordinary people knew nothing of. Foreign exchange, for example, which was tied to distant trade movements and to the complicated arrangements for credit, was a sophisticated art open only to a few initiates at most. To me, this second shadowy zone, hovering above the sunlit world of the market economy and constituting its upper limit so to speak, represents the favored domain of capitalism… Without this zone, capitalism is unthinkable: this is where it takes up residence and prospers.” Braudel, qtd. in Giovanni Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of Our Times (London: Verso, 2010) 25.
16. Georg Lukács, “Marx and Engels on Aesthetics,” Writer & Critic and Other Essays, ed. Arthur D. Kahn (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1970) 79.
17. On the tendency to confuse “capital” or “commerce” with “capitalism,” see Wood, especially chapter 4 (“Commerce or Capitalism?”), and Ernest Mandel’s introduction to Capital, Vol. I, where he writes: “Capital appears initially as usury and merchant (long-distance trade) capital. After a long historical process, and only under specific social conditions, does capital victoriously penetrate the sphere of production in the form of manufacturing capital” Ernest Mandel, Introduction, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume One, by Karl Marx (New York: Penguin, 1990) 55. See also Marx himself: “capital invariably first confronts landed property in the form of money; in the form of monetary wealth, merchants’ capital and usurers’ capital” (Capital247); “Capital cannot therefore arise from circulation, and it is equally impossible for it to arise apart from circulation. It must have its origin both in circulation and not in circulation” (Capital268).
18. For a nuanced discussion of the term “late capitalism” (the intended meaning of which might be better captured by “latest capitalism”), see the introduction to John Patrick Leary, Keywords: The New Language of Capitalism(Chicago: Haymarket, 2019). See also Ernest Mandel, Late Capitalism, trans. Joris De Bres (London: Verso, 1980); Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism(Durham: Duke University Press, 1991); and David Harvey, The Limits to Capital(London: Verso, 2006) and The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Hoboken: Wiley-Blackwell, 1991).
19. Fredric Jameson, “Culture and Finance Capital,” Critical Inquiry 24.1 (1997) 251. See also Harvey’s account, in which “the breakdown of Fordism-Keynesianism evidently meant a shift towards the empowerment of finance capital vis-à-vis the nation state” (Harvey, Limits145).
20. For an explicit critique of this tendency, see Joshua Clover, “Retcon: Value and Temporality in Poetics,” Representations126.1 (2014): 9–30. For literary studies which explicitly and extensively consider the problem of abstraction in 20th and 21st century U.S. literature, with varying degrees of skepticism, see Alison Shonkwiler, The Financial Imaginary: Economic Mystification and the Limits of Realist Fiction (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017),Leigh Claire La Berge, Scandals and Abstractions: Financial Fiction of the Long 1980s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015),and the special issue of Representationson “Financialization and the Culture Industry,” Representations 126.1 (2014). See also Myka Tucker-Abramson’s review of Shonkwiler (“The Financial Imaginary of the American Middle Class?,” Mediations 32.1 (2018): 123–133) for a discussion of the potential pitfalls of such an approach. Note in particular La Berge’s argument that “the assumption of more abstraction is prevalent but never adequately explained, probably because abstraction, by its very nature, is not quantifiable; if it were, it would hardly be abstract” (Scandals15).
21. C.f. Lauren M. E. Goodlad’s account of Lheureux: “As a naturalistic narrative of capitalist globalization which diverges from Balzac’s Bildungsromane, Madame Bovaryevokes the failed revolution of 1848 and the regime that followed when Louis Napoleon declared himself France’s emperor… Modernizing French financial institutions in order to raise credit, Napoleon III helped to launch imperial projects such as the Suez Canal, while rebuilding the capital… This was the ‘universe of commodities’ which Walter Benjamin described in ‘Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century’—a world of speculative finance and fetishized objects which enters Madame Bovarythrough Monsieur Lheureux, the protean moneylender, salesman, and fashion maven.” Lauren M. E. Goodlad, The Victorian Geopolitical Aesthetic: Realism, Sovereignty, and Transnational Experience (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015) 171-72.
22. “Here the absurdity of the capitalist’s way of conceiving things reaches its climax, in so far as instead of deriving the valorization of capital from the exploitation of labour-power, they explain the productivity of labour-power by declaring that labour-power itself is this mystical thing, interest-bearing capital.” Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume Three, trans. David Fernbach (New York: Penguin, 1991) 596.
23. Marx, Capital, Vol. III 601. Harvey defines fictitious capital as “money that is thrown into circulation as capital without any material basis in commodities or productive activity” (Limits95).
24. Giovanni Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power and the Origins of Our Times (London: Verso, 2010) 6.
25. Arrighi, Long Twentieth8-9.
26. Arrighi traces this process from the Italian city-states to the Dutch, the British Empire, and, finally, the United States, while suggesting Japan and, later, China are bound to succeed U.S. hegemony [on the latter, see Giovanni Arrighi, Adam Smith in Beijing: Lineages of the 21st Century (London: Verso, 2009)]. However, the cyclical nature of this process should not be taken to imply capitalism is a Nietzchean wheel of eternal recurrence and that the present moment of U.S.-based financialization is without its particularities. These shifting phases are ultimately moments within a larger process of capitalist expansion, which in our current moment confronts hard and increasingly imminent limits of geography, technological development, and environmental depletion. In this sense, Arrighi’s schema is less a cycle and more a downward spiral. To understand contemporary finance, we must understand its position in regard to both the discreet period of U.S. capital accumulation as well as the longue duréeprocess of capitalism itself.
27. Kornbluh notes that “the opposition ‘fictitious/real’ cannot hold in capitalism, when the fictitious isthe real” (8; original emphasis). Citing a House of Commons report declaring its inability to delineate between “real” and “fictitious” transactions, she writes how, for Marx, the report reveals “that capitalism is always already a machine of virtualizations, that something within all capital is fictitious” (Realizing Capital7).
28. This is typical not only of fiction but even (and perhaps more so) of journalistic, academic, and economic narratives of financial crisis. For how a focus on individuals occluded the understanding of the 2008 financial crisis, see Annie McClanahan’s Dead Pledges, especially the introduction and chapter 1 (“Behavioral Economics and the Credit-Crisis Novel): “Behavioral economists understood the financial crisis as a consequence of individual choices and cultural climates.” Annie McClanahan, Dead Pledges: Debt, Crisis, and Twenty-First-Century Culture. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2017) 16.
29. Mark Fisher, The Weird and the Eerie (London: Repeater, 2016)11.
30. Fisher, Weird11.
31. David Cunningham, “Capitalist epics: Abstraction, totality and the theory of the novel,” Radical Philosophy 163 (2010) 16. Original emphasis.
32. Antinomies5.
33. Helena Feder, Interview with Kim Stanley Robinson, Radical Philosophy 2.1 (2018) 88.
34. For discussions of Emma Bovary as a desiring subject and consumer of literature, see Jacqueline Merriam Paskow, “Rethinking Madame Bovary’s Motives for Committing Suicide,” The Modern Language Review 100.2 (2005): 323–339 and Jacques Rancière, “Why Emma Bovary Had to Be Killed” Critical Inquiry 34.2 (2008): 233–248.
35. Phillip A. Duncan, “Symbolic Green and Satanic Presence in Madame Bovary,” Nineteenth-Century French Studies 13. 2/3 (1985) 101.
36. Frederick Busi, “Emma Bovary and the Pursuit of Happiness” Dalhousie French Studies30 (1995) 59.
37. Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary, trans. Margaret Mauldon (Oxford UP, 2004) 92.
38. Busi, “Emma Bovary” 60.
39. Flaubert, Madame Bovary253.
40. Alex Woloch, The One vs. the Many: Minor Characters and the Space of the Protagonist in the Novel(Princeton UP, 2003) 13.
41. Madame Bovary93.
42. C.f. Goodlad, who claims that though “Lheureux may be a secret Jew, like Trollope’s Lopez, in the end, this consummate figure of a post-heirloom social order is as much Emma’s mentor as her nemesis.” Victorian Geopolitical Aesthetic172.
43. Madame Bovary93.
44. Madame Bovary253.
45. See Kornbluh: “Speculation takes place as soon as the most basic exchange relation is submitted to the very idea of formal equality in the name of ‘value,’ for equality between two qualitatively different goods, in two different spatiotemporal situations, is, as Marx put it, ‘in reality impossible.’” Realizing Capital7.
46. Madame Bovary254.
47. Madame Bovary253.
48. Roland Barthes,”The Reality Effect,”The Rustle of Language, trans. Richard Howard, ed. François Wahl. (Berkeley: University of California Press, [1969] 1989) 145.
49. Madame Bovary256.
50. Alongside Lheureux’s ledger we might add another technology of visualization, the stock-market graph, which Audrey Jaffe analyzes in The Affective Life of the Average Man: The Victorian Novel and the Stock-Market Graph. In a method similar to my own interest in real abstraction, Jaffe, “rather than break down abstractions to reveal the fractured realities they conceal” is “interested in the way these cohesive images themselves not only become social realities, but structure representations of internal or psychological realities as well.” Audrey Jaffe, The Affective Life of the Average Man: The Victorian Novel and the Stock-Market Graph (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2010) 5.
51. Madame Bovary256.
52. Madame Bovary256.
53. “Emma Bovary” 60.
54. Madame Bovary269.
55. Capitalist Realism 15. For a fuller discussion of the limits of the ethical, see Jameson (Political Unconscious114-17 and Antinomies116-119): “Not metaphysics but ethics is the informing ideology of the binary opposition… it is ethics itself which is the ideological vehicle and the legitimation of concrete structures of power and domination.” Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981) 114.
56. Paskow, “Rethinking” 326.
57. Fredric Jameson, “Cognitive Mapping,” Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, eds. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1988) 349.
58. Rancière, “Why Emma” 236.
59. Rancière, “Why Emma” 237.
60. Madame Bovary295.
61. Following the timely deaths of Emma, Charles, and her grandmother, Berthe Bovary “became the responsibility of an aunt. She is poor, and sends the child to earn her keep at a cotton mill.” Madame Bovary 311.
62. David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005) 161. Harvey continues: “The $40 trillion annual turnover in 2001 compares to the estimated $800 billion that would be required to support international trade and productive investment flows. Deregulation allowed the financial system to become one of the main centres of redistributive activity through speculation, predation, fraud, and thievery.” Harvey, Brief History 161.
63. Though, as Christopher Nealon notes, such instability is always implicit within capitalism: “For Marx the possibility of crisis is implied at every moment in the circulation of capital, which is inherently volatile—not only because of the way money is obliged to serve contradictory purposes, as a medium of exchange and as an individual commodity, but also because value is produced out of exploitation.” Christopher Nealon, “Value | Theory | Crisis,” PMLA 127.1 (2012) 106.
64. For a diverse sample of scholarship in explicit dialogue with Fisher, see Alison Shonkwiler and Leigh Claire La Berge, eds. Reading Capitalist Realism (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2014).
65. Capitalist Realism2. Original emphasis.
66. Capitalist Realism4.
67. Antinomies215.
68. Leigh Claire La Berge, Scandals and Abstraction: Financial Fiction of the Long 1980s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015) 74.
69. La Berge, Scandals75.
70. For a fuller discussion of the financial fiction of the 1980s, including readings of Stone, Wolfe, and Ellis, see La Berge.
71. Planet Money, which was launched specifically to cover the 2008 financial crisis (as a spinoff of the popular edutainment podcast This American Life), describes itself as “The Economy Explained.” Planet Money. NPR, https://www.npr.org/sections/money/.
72. Capitalist Realism2.
73. Kim Stanley Robinson, New York 2140 (London: Orbit, 2017) 602.
74. Darko Suvin, Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979) 4-6.
75. Georg Lukács, “Realism in the Balance,” The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, ed. Vincent B. Leitch (New York: Norton, 2001) 1037.
76. Georg Lukács, “Marx and Engels on Aesthetics,” Writer & Critic and Other Essays, ed. Arthur D. Kahn (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1970) 78.
77. Lukács, “Marx and Engels” 79. The full quotation reads, “Marxist aesthetics, which denies the realism of a world depicted through naturalistic detail if it does not express the essential dynamic forces, accepts the fantastic tales of Hoffmann and Balzac as among the highest achievements of realistic literature, since these essential elements are exposed through the very fantasy.”
78. Anna Kornbluh, Realizing Capital: Financial and Psychic Economies in Victorian Form(New York: Fordham University Press, 2014) 4.
79. Robinson, New York 2140 18.
80. Georg Lukács, The Theory of the Novel, trans. Anna Bostock (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989) 32.
81. New York 214018.
82. Much as Franklin insists to the reader that finance be understood as abstract but real, the novel as a whole frequently reminds the reader that they are not, in fact, seeing the whole picture. “Ease of representation… It’s an availability heuristic. You think what you see is the totality,” one character states. New York 2140400. This is then repeated by the semi-omniscient citizen’s summation of the novel’s debt coup: “Note that this flurry of social and legal change did not happen because of Representative Charlotte Armstrong… Nor was it due to any other single individual. Remember: ease of representation. It’s always more than what you see, bigger than what you know.” New York 2140603. By actively dissuading the reader from thinking the novel’s many aggregated characters constitute a totality, the novel attempts to actively train its reader in the sort of dialectical thinking through which to cognitive map and access capitalist totality. This is captured not only by the novel’s outright statements but by the odd repetition of phrases (like “ease of representation”) across characters who have not diegetically interacted (disrupting our sense of their coherent individual psychologies).
83. New York 2140120.
84. New York 2140122.
85. Capitalist Realism44.
86. New York 214015.
87. Such potential desire was recognized but left unexplored by Flaubert, as when the indebted Emma “pressed her lovely long, slender hand on [Lheureux’s] knee,” and he responds, “Don’t touch me! Anyone would think you’re trying to seduce me!” (261).
88. We might imagine this figure as mediating the space “between,” the analysis of which Louis Althusser identifies as the space of Marxist critique: “Marx has at least given us the ‘two ends of the chain,’ and has told us to find out what goes on between them: on the one hand, determination in the last instance by the (economic) mode of production; on the other, the relative autonomy of superstructures of their specific effectivity.” Louis Althusser, For Marx, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Vintage, 1970) 111. Original emphasis.
89. New York 2140 279.
90. McClanahan, Dead Pledges 15.
91. New York 2140575.
92. New York 2140123.