OUTRT TTT MARC SHELL Maney, Lapua CH LITERARY AND PHILOSOPHICAL ECONOMIES FROM THE MEDIEVAL TO THE MODERN ERA S= UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS BERKELEY LOS ANGELES LONDONUNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS BERKELEY AND LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS, LTD LONDON, ENGLAND © 1082 By THE RECENTS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA [ee Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Shell, Mare Money, language, and thought Portions previously published in various periodicals Includes index, 1 Economics in literature—Addresses, essays, lectures. “2, Languages—Philosophy—Addreses, esay, lectures. 3, Money—Philosophy—Addiesses, essays, lectures. “1. Tile, PN51.83643 BOS ong Bi-31433, ISBN O520-04379-0 AACRE — PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 123456789 ‘To the memory of my fatherContents List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Introduction: From Electrum to Electricity / The Gold Bug: Introduction to “the Industry of Letters” in America Monetary and Aesthetit Theory 5 The Bug for Gold 8 The Humbug: Entomological Specimen, Species of Madness, and Specie 10 From Nothing to Something 14 The Goolah Bug: Linguistic Goolah cand Monetary Goole 18 Last Words 22 2) The Blank Check: Accounting for the Grail Dearth and Plenitude 27 Promise and Delivery 29 ‘An Exchange Contract 32 Ideal and Real Estate 34 i Checking Out the Eucharist 39 t 3/ The Wether and the Ewe: i Verbal Usury in The Merchant of Venice ix wii 24 474l St coNTENTS Use, Ewes, and lewes 48 From Courtship to Court 55 My Purse, My Person 60 Cancellations 69 Redemption? 76 Language and Property: The Economics of Translation in Goethe's Faust Translation 84 Wealth and Poetry 91 Paper Money and Language 99 ‘The Evocation of Helen 111 ‘The Law ofthe Fist (Faustrech') 117 ‘The Dead Pledge (Faustpfand) 121 ‘The Dialectical Plot 126 Money of the Mind: Dialectic and Monetary Form in Kant and Hegel ‘Suppression and Adequation in Kant 133 Against Formalism 137 ‘Sublation and the Modus Tollens 139 Checkers and Checks 142 The Difference 147 Putting Hegel Down 150 “What is Truth?” Lessing's Numismatics and Heidegger's Alchemy Nathan the Wise 157 On the Essence of Truth 162 On the Epigram 170 Conclusion Appendices [Beyond Chrysography 191 IL Likeness and Likelihood 194 II'The Money Complex of Peychoanalysie 196 Index a3 156 . Cartoon, “Mi Lisl of Hlestrations (FOLLOWING PAGE 219) Cartoon, “A Shadow Is Not a Substance.” United States, nine- teenth century. k-Tickets for Babies, in Place of Milk.” United States, nineteenth century. . Cartoon, “Ideal Money.” United States, nineteenth century, Caricature of a shinplaster, “Great Locofoco Juggernaut.” United States, 1837 Caricature of a shinplaster, “Treasury Note.” United States, 1837. Caricature of a shinplaste, “Gold Humbug,” United States, 1837. Cartoon, “The Bubblers-Kingdom in the Aireal World.” England, 1720. 8 a.and 8 b, Portrait of Matthew and chrysographic initial page, the 10. il. 12, Ebo Gospel of Matthew, France, Carolingian, between 816 and 835, Communion token. Ballingry Church, Scotland, 1864. Muminated Manuscript. Flanders, ca. 1325, Gold octadrachm of Ptolemy III. 246-221 B.C. Mlumination from Lancelot du Lac. Painted by Master of Berry's Cleres Femmes and associates, France, early fifteenth century; re~ painted later fifteenth century. Cartoon, “A Monument Dedicated to Posterity in commemora- tion of y* incredible Folly transacted in the Year 1720.” Engraved by B. Picart, 1720. Bronze coin of Vetranio. Ca. A.D. 350. Medal commemorating John Law and the Mississippi System. France, 1720. ixILLUSTRATIONS 16 @ and 16 b. Medal commemorating John Law and the Mississippi System, Germany, 1720. 17 @ and 17 b, Medal commemorating John Law and the Mississippi System. France and Germany, 1720. 18. Medal commemorating John Law and the Mississippi System. Germany, 1720. 19, Cartoon, “Law, als een tweede Don-Quichot, op Sanches Graau- wt zt ten Spot” (Law, like another Don Quixote, sits on Sancho’ ‘Ass, being everyone's fool). Netherlands, 1720. 20. Assignat. France, January 7, 1795 21. Cartoon, “De Verslagen ACTIONIST in de STOEL met RINKELS, over- reeden geweest van't getauwerd Pard van TRojE” (The defeated Stock-jobber seated in the Chair with Jingles, having been de- feated by the Lavreated Horse of TRoy). Netherlands, 1720. 22, Cartoon, “The Blessings of Paper Money.” England, 1811. 23, ‘Tetradrachm. Abdera, ca. 473/70~449/8 B.C, 24, Bank note, Bayerische Hypotheken- und Wechsel-Bank, Ger many, 1836. 25. Emergency money. Vohwinkel. Faust 1994-99. 26, Emergency money. Vohwinkel. Faust 2540-53. 27. Emergency money. Vohwinkel. Faust 2802~4. 28, Emergency money. Hasloh (Schleswig-Holstein). Faust 2802~4. 29, Emergency money. Schierke am Harz (Sachsen). Faust 4127. 30. Emergency money. Roda. Faust riding on a flying horse (Mephis- topheles). 31, Emergency money. Vohwinkel. Faust 4778-86 and 4799-802. 32, Emergency money. Vohwinkel. Faust 4839~42 and 4847-51 33, Emergency money. Hasloh (Schleswig-Holstein), Faust 4852~54. 34. Emergency money. Hasloh (Schleswig-Holstein). Faust 4889~92. 35. Emergency money. Staufen. Faust 6057~58 (adapted). 36. Emergency money. Schleswig-Holstein. Faust 6119-20. 37. Emergency money. Roda. Faust’s courting of Helen. 38, Emergency money. Hasloh (Schleswig-Holstein). Faust 9229-32 (adapted). 39, Emergency money. Hasloh (Schleswig-Holstein). Faust 9275 (adapted). 40, Illumination, the Court of the Exchequer. England, ca. 1450. 41, Pen and ink sketch, the Court of the Exchequer. Drawn during the reign of Henry IV (1367=1413). ILLUSTRATIONS 42 a and 42 b. Counter, Nuremberg, early seventeenth century. 43. Vignette, the old and new arithmetic. Germany, 1503. 44 a and 44 b, Emergency money. Rheinhausen, 1921 45, Cartoon, “The Survival of the Fittest.” United States, nineteenth century. 46, Five-mark coin. Germany, Nazi regime, 1936.ee For THEIR advice and encouragement, | am privileged to thank Ken- neth Burke, Stanley Cavell, Paul de Man, Daniel Droixhe, Robert Fishman, Geoffrey Hartman, Peter Heller, Horst Hutter, Carol Jacobs, Martin Jay, Will Klings, J. Hillis Mille, Sylvia Osterbind, Ferruccio Rossi-Landi, Neil Schmitz, Judith Shklar, Jean Sommermeyer, George Steines, Fred Turner, and Barry Weller For permission to reproduce the photographs, 1 am obliged to the ‘American Antiquarian Society (Worcester, Mass.), the American Nu- mismatic Society (New York), the Bibliotheque nationale (Paris), the Bodleian Library (Oxford), the British Museum (London), the Buffalo and Erie County Library (Buffalo, N. Y.), the George Arents Research Library (Syracuse, N.Y.), Hirmer Fotoarchiv (Munich), the Johns Hopkins University Library (Baltimore), the Library of Congress (Wash- ington, D.C.), Ann Miinchow (Aachen), the Museum des Deutschen Bundesbank (Frankfurt), Albert Pick (Hypobank, Munich), and the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin (Berlin, German Democratic Republic). ‘Money, Language, and Thought includes revised sections of essays first published in the Canadian Review of Comparative Literature, Genre, the Kenyon Review, Modern Language Notes, and Philosophy and Social Criticism. Tam most grateful to Susan Shell, who reminded me of work that remained—and still remains—to be completed.FROM ELECTRUM TO ELECTRICITY BETWEEN the electrum money of ancient Lydia and the electric money of contemporary America there occurted a historically mo- ‘mentous change. The exchange value of the earliest coins derived wholly from the material substance (electrum) of the ingots of which the coins were made and not from the inscriptions stamped into these ingots, The eventual development of coins whose politically autho- rized inscriptions were inadequate to the weights and purities of the ingots into which the inscriptions were stamped precipitated awareness of quandaries about the relationship between face value (intellectual curtency) and substantial value (material currency). This difference between inscription and thing grew greater with the introduction of pa- per moneys. Paper, the material substance on which the inscriptions ‘were printed, was supposed to make no difference in exchange, and metal or electrum, the material substance to which the inscriptions re- ferred, was connected with those inscriptions in increasingly abstract ways. With the advent of electronic fund-transfers the link between in- scription and substance was broken. The matter of electric money does ‘not matter.’ Ideology, which would define the relationship between thought and matter," is necessarily concerned with this transformation from the ab- 1. CE, D. W Richardson, Electric Money: Evolution of an Electronic Funds “Transfer System (Carnbridge, Mas. 1970) and Paul Matick, "Die Zertorang des GGeldes" in Paul Mattick Aled Sohn-Rethel, and Helmut G. Haass, Betrge ur Kei des ele anit 678) 73 — >. According to Dest de Tracy, who coined the erm in 1765, delagycompeses reductive semantic analysis and ‘he explanation of thought interme of matter. See FE J. Pievet Les Idéclogues Pai, 189) See also chapter §INTRODUCTION solute adequation between intellectual inseription and real substance to the complete disassociation of them. The philosophical and literary component of the story of that transformation begins with the cultur- ally motivating discomfort of the Greeks at the institution of coinage, which, in the sixth and fifth centuries p.c., came to pervade Greek cconomic and intellectual life. For the Greeks coinage coincided with such political developments as tyranny and such aesthetic ones as trag- dy. Some thinkers, moreover, came to recognize interactions between economic and intellectual exchange, or money and language. (Sémé means “word” as well as “coin.”) Heraclitus, for example, described the monetary exchange of commodities in a complex simile and series of metaphors whose logical exchanges of meaning define the unique form of simultancous purchase and sale of wares that obtains in mone- tary transfer,’ And Plato criticized the Sophists and pre-Socratics as mer- chants of the mind not only because they took money in exchange for useful or honeyed words but also because they were producers of a dis- course whose internal exchanges of meaning were identical to the ‘exchanges of commodities in monetary transactions, Plato feared the Political tendency of their moneyed words, and represented their dis course in his dialogues as the audible symptom of an invisible invasion into language of a tyrannical form destructive of wisdom. Plato’ cri- tique extended to the ideal Form itself: Was not even Socratic dialectic, hhe wondered, pervaded by the monetary form of exchange? Was not dialectical division a kind of money changing, and dialectical hypoth- ‘sizing a kind of hypothecation, or morlgaging? The upsetting con- frontation of thought with its own intemalization of economic form ‘motivated thought to become the self-critical discourse of philosophy. Judaea in the third century a,c. and the Arabian Peninsula in the sixth century A.D. experienced similar economic and intellectual quan- daries with the introduction of coined money. The Jewish rabbis came to protest against the information of legal thought by new monetary forms. Making the proposition that “all wares acquire each other” the focus of a far-ranging debate about intellectual as well as material ex- change, they elaborated conflicting interpretations of an asimon—a “current word” that is not yet legally minted or definitely meaningful. 3. “All things ae an equal exchange for fie and fire forall things, as goods are for sold (chrusos| and gold for goods’ (Heraclitus, Fragment go, in H. Diels, Fragment der Vorsokratier, sth ed. [Berlin 1934). For analysis ofthe uniquely monetary form ofthe linguistic exchanges in this fagment, see “Heraclitus and the Money Form,” in my The Economy of Literature (Baltimore, 1978), pp. 49-62, INTRODUCTION Similarly, Mohammed expressed the new economic exchange in the striking commercial content of the metaphors in the Koran, and he Interiorized the new ways of exchanging commodities as modes of metaphorization, or of exchanging meanings.” Christendom in the twelfth century was already much influenced the Greek, Jewish, and Islamic attempts to confront the numismatic money of the mind. Christian thinkers had begun to deal with verbal troping as an economic process when revolutionary fiduciary forms and financial procedures began to develop. At frst Europeans were as incredulous of these institutions as the Greeks had been fearful of coin- age. Marco Polo's description of Kublai Khan's paper moneys, for ex- ample, was dismissed as a lie, and Philip Il claimed to understand nothing about “immaterial money.”* Despite, and perhaps because of, this telling resistance to the new modes of symbolization and produe- tion, the last eight hundred years is the story of the introduction and acceptance of capital institutions and intellectual processes that moved Christendom from the age of electrum coins towards the age of electric money. For most Christian thinkers before the twelfth century, the new ways of exchange and production remained “external” objects for contem- plation. They thought about monelary symbolization and generation as about any other theme or problem. Yet money, which refers to a system of tropes, is also an “internal” participant in the logical or semni- ological organization of language, which itself refers to a system of tropes.’ Whether or not a writer mentioned money or was aware of its 44 For the rabbis, see Babs Mesa trans, Salis Daiches and, Freedman (1935), 44a: in The Babylonian Talmud, ed. . Fpstein (London, 935—48). For the Kora, tee ChatlesC. Tey, The Commercial Terns inthe Koran (Leyden, 1893), 5, For Marco Polo, sce the descriptive notes in The Boot of Ser Marco Plo, ed and trans. Colonel Si Henry Yule, ev. Hens Corie, a vol (London, 1903), 1:435-30. For Pilip of Spain, se his note the nana report presented to him on Feb. 1, ‘so, by Francesco de Garnica (in General Archives of Simancs, "Guetta Antigua, ffe'4, no. 43) and J.-C. da Sil, “Realtes économiques et prises de conscience: «quelques tmoignages sur ie XVle ace,” Arnal Economies, Societe, Cvisations 14 0959) 73 cl agi ii pm al pte. teilated ina few recent works, To the tiles dscused in The Economy of Litrture {exp pp. tio) might be added: Ferruccio Rossi-Lancl, Semiotiet« idelogia: ap- plicesomi dela tcota del linguagio come lavora e come merato.Indagr sulla alien ‘zion inguitia (Milan, sopg Kaus F. Riegel, Foundations of DialectialPeychol- ‘gy (New York, 1979), exp. chapter, "Comperson Between Monetary and Linguistic Srstems"; Kurt Hemzelman, The Ezonomies ofthe Imagination (Amherst, 1989) and ther tiles, noted belowINTRODUCTION potentially subversive role in his thinking, the new forms of metaphor- ization or exchanges of meaning that accompanied the new forms of economic symbolization and production were changing the meaning of meaning itself. This participation of economic form in literature and philosophy, even in the discourse about truth, is defined neither by what literature and philosophy talk about (sometimes money, some- times not) nor by why they talk about it (sometimes for money, some- times not) but rather by the tropic interaction between economic and linguistic symbolization and production. A formal money of the mind informs all discourse and is as unaffected by whether or not the the- matic content of a particular work includes money’ as by whether or not the material content of the ink in which the work may be inseribed includes god. ‘There has been no sustained critique of this interaction between thought and economics in the postelasscal era. Yet some thinkers— the ones we shall study are among them—have recognized and tried to confront and to account self-critically for the money of the mind in- forming their own thought. Elucidating the money talk in their lin- uistie production, as I plan todo in this book, helps to locate the “lan- guage of wares” that speaks ventriloquistically, as it were, through the mouths of theologians, poets, and philosophers. In America, where I write, that language introduces itself in Edgar Allan Poe’ disquieting short story about the gold bug at work within the industry of letters. t/ The Geld Bug INTRODUCTION TO “THE INDUSTRY OF LETTERS” IN AMERICA Ie has lays been one of tie as of U.S] fers toads inal wrt song to human cupid 2s though soil imterst alone was Fe eateling iegence wich scutes mankind. During Jefenon’s [Democratic Republican) aminisstion foregn rapaciy was defended {By he Feel) apd be sas false charged wth producing the com meena wih ed, An beth cowry vas afer ‘Toe sruggling ina sngunay condict with a powerful enemy. the ie of aa py (aren of the Feder, fr ample, earls Fie Thery"and independence of Hie Repl sighed aloud, in Ragubsious tones, forthe golden day of commercial present” The (oie lave charges ate now made aginst dhe present alminstation of the general government [that of the Democratic Republican Van Buren], eine ate foes ae now lowly tered wh the variation ony of = “gle word, occnoned bythe medem whig [Federal dicovery that fold ia “humbug.” and "pope Uerefore subsite for “golden Sauer. youyG, “Otion Dele atthe Demecratc Republican Celebration ithe er Annes of he lndepencenee ‘the Unite Sse” July 4 840 Monetary and Aesthetic Theory AMERICA was the historical birthplace ofthe widespread use of paper money in the Wester world,! and a debate about coined and paper 1, dinginh the popular, ngtem use of papee money in Americ rom it sete wt by merc a aren eevee fay, fr exam) and Fee ie thortsenn we byte Fuerch during the paper money experiment of 720, fr SSimple) Ts dings erp money, whic ceed by he proces of bok, Keeping om fducary moncy, er banknotes (et Femand Bude, Capitation « Nate Li 110-1000 wa, iam Kohan (New Yor, 2075) 357-72) At Mae fom the flcenh to eighetth cents, paper money ceusted i sul Places a Crnata, Nap, Sweden, Calgne ata Vanna ont Wager, Der sei Rent So oo tea Pome mon) ia America ane hoe 1696, se ie Newnan, The Early Per Money of Ame (Racin, Wis, 197)MONEY, LANGUAGE, AND THOUGHT money dominated American political discourse from 1825 to 1875. ‘The “paper money men” (as the advocates of paper money were called) were set against the “gold bugs” (asthe advocates of gold, in opposition to paper money, were called).' Such books as William Cobbett’s long paper Paper Against Gold made plenty of both gold and paper money, The paper money debate was concemed with symbolization in gen- eral, and hence not only with money but also with aesthetics. Symbol- ization in this context concems the relationship between the substan- tial thing and its sign. Solid gold (fiom which the ingots of gold coin were made) was associated with the substance of value. Whether one regarded paper as an appropriate symbol (as did “paper money men”) oor as an inappropriate and downright misleading one (as did “gold bugs”), that sign was “insubstantial” insofar as the paper counted for nothing as a commodity and was thus “insensible” in the economic system of exchange, The paper of money was called an appearance or shadow. Figure 1, a cartoon entitled “A Shadow Is Not a Substance,” depicts the rela. tionship between substance and shadow—paper moneys were called “greenbacks’—which some thinkers believed to obtain not only in ‘monetary but aso in aesthetic representation. That this purported rela- tionship between reality and appearance is both monetary and aes- thetic helps to explain many poets’ and economists’ association of pa per money with ghostliness.” In America, comparisons were made between the way a mere shad- ‘ow or piece of paper becomes credited as substantial money and the ‘way an artistic appearance is taken for the real thing by a willing sus- pension of disbelief. Congres, it was said, could turn paper into gold by an “act of Congress” that made it money. Why could not an artist tur paper with a design or story on it into gold? Thus an American cartoon shows one paper bearing the design of a cow and the inscrip- tion, “This is a cow by the act of the artist,” and another paper that reads “This is money by the act of Congress” (figure 2) 2. Thomas Love Peacock, Paper Money Lyi (83), uses the tem paper mon rman, By “the end ofthe nineteenth century the teri god bug was ase apie! i America to scheming capitalist like Jay Could ef go who tied to comer fe gold imate, ort fanatical advocates of a gold standard over ase tandae (Barton Lenk St. Armand, “Poe's ‘Sober Mysication’ The Uses of Alchemy in ‘The Cold Bugs oe Studies (1971) 7, m, 20) +. Coathe’ Faust, for example, the banknote (Geldchein x ghost (Gespent| is 4 major tops, and in Kar] Mars wots paper money is requenysnciated al the shadow of Peter Schlemihi. aa vhbeiemly 6 ‘THE GOLD BUG Understanding the relationship between substance and sign was complicated by the known existence and practical monetary validity of counterfeit notes (-e., illegal copies of legitimate ghost moneys) and, ‘more significant for understanding such movements as American sym- bolism,, of phantom bank notes: “There were no real banks, no of- ficers, or actual assets of any kind to make these notes by ‘phantom’ banks of any real value,—except the ability to ‘pass’ them on some un- suspecting person.”* These papers—with their fictional designs, insig- nia, signatures, and even ciphers—passed for ghost money and hence for solid specie. Even the “bank note reporters” and “counterfeit detec- tors”—the critics in the fray—could be counterfeited or entirely fab- ricated by confidence men.’ Ghosts, counterfeit ghosts, and phantoms passed all alike. ‘The fear that all literature was, like money, in this sense a merely passable “naught”—a mere cipher—troubled Melville, an expert on confidence, for whom the topic center of symbolization is an “alge- braie x” threatening language and money with devaluation and anni hilation.* Credit, of belief, involves the very ground of aesthetic expe- rience, and the same medium that seems to confer belief in fiduciary money (bank notes) and in scriptural money (created by the process of bookkeeping) also seems to confer iti literature. That medium is writ- ing. The apparently diabolical “interplay of money and mere waiting to a point where the two be|come] confused”” involves a general ideo- logical development: the tendency of paper money to distort our “natu- ral” understanding of the relationship between symbols and things. ‘The sign of the monetary diabolus, which many Americans insisted was like the one that God impressed in Cain’s forehead,* condemns 4. Royal Bank of Canada, The Story of Canada’s Curreney, 2nd ed. (Ottawa, ‘Sci N, Weisbuch, “A Note on the Confidence Man’ Comte Dee mon Quarter, 0.19 Second Quartet of), pp. 6-28 sn Wiliam art Note Rpt eed Comte Dan; Numatic Nos end Monogr, nog, Ameren Smite Socey New Ys, og) "Sz Chars Fedchon, Syabolam an! ArenLitentre, Chicago, 1953), "39 =P acaudel, Capitalism and Merl Life, po 5, "You snd thexe notes oot it the wold tamped wih kerb, You pot on them the mak of Can, ad, tie Cain, hey wil go forth oe vagibons nd ftgttves onthe coh. 1" Repesettve Geog Pendleton (Ohio) thus opposed the iumce of opal cde in Jarry 29, 186a (Cngreonel Cle, 7th Cong, tests 1s sa9 erin A. Saucon and HE Kio, Doerr Hite Of Banking and Ciro nthe Unt States wa. (New Werk, soe. 1279.MONEY, LANGUAGE, AND THOUGHT men to misunderstand the world of symbols and things in which they live ‘This debate in aesthetics and economics, with its large, political di- mensions, seemed to require a new kind of study of money together with other kinds of symbols, ‘Thus Clinton Roosevelt, a prominent member of the Locofocos, argued in his “Paradox of Political Econ- ‘omy” in 1859, when Van Buren (advocate for gold) had lost the presi- dency, that the American Association for the Advancement of Science should establish an “ontological department forthe discussion and es- tablishment of general principles of political economy (In Germany, such a discussion already existed in the shape of a far-ranging debate between the proponents of idealism and the proponents of realism. ‘Thomas Nast brought this debate to American newspapers in stch car- toons as “Ideal Money” [Figure 3).)” Joseph G. Baldwin explored how paper money asserts the spiritual over the material, and Albert Bris- bane, in his Philosophy of Money, tried to provide an ontology for the study of monetary signs. " ‘The Bug for Gold Ata time when alchemists were trying to transform tin into gold by means of alchemy and financiers were turning paper into gold by ‘means of the newly widespread institution of paper money, Edgar Al- Jan Poe was a poor author who could only wish to exchange his literary papers for money. Among these papers were those that compose “The 49. Clinton Roosevelt, “On the Puradox of Political Eeonomy in the Coexistence of Excessive Production and Excessive Population,” in Proceeding ofthe American Asso- ciation for the Advancement of Science, 13th Meeting, August 1859 (Cambridge, 1860), pp. 344-52. See Joseph Dorfman, The Economic Mind in American Cilia tion, 1606-1865 (New York, 1948), 2; 660-6. 10. For the German debate, see chapters 4 and s. Thomas Nast was born in Ger ‘many (1840) and studied in America with German emigiés. 11, Joseph G. Baldwin, The Flush Times of Alabama and Mississippi: A Series of ‘Sketches (New York, 1853), concerns “that haleyon period, ranging from the year of Grace, 1855, to 1837. that golden era, when shinplasters were the sole cur reney .. and credit was a franchise” (p. 1). who "bought goods 3: but he got them under a state of poetic i- lusion, and paid for them in an imaginary way” (p. 4). "How well [he] asserted Spiritual over the Material!” exclaims the stonteler(p. 5). (On Baldwin, sce Neil ‘Schmitz, “Tall Tale, Tall Talk: Pursuing the Lie in Jacksonian Literature""American Literature 48 (19771: 473~77.) For Albert Brisbane, see his Philosophy of Money (np [US], 18632), 8 — THE GOLD BUG Gold-Bug” (1843), a popular tale that tells how a certain Legrand (an impoverished Souther aristocrat in many ways resembling Poe him- self) used his intellect to decipher a paper and thus find gold."* Money in the sense of treasure is one theme of “The Gold-Bug.” “The intent of [Poe),” wrote one reviewer in 1845, “was evidently to write a popular tale: money, and the finding of money being chosen as, the most popular thesis.”” Poe knew the popularity of the topos. He twrote in 1841 that “a main source of the interest which [Samuel War- ren’s “Ten Thousand a Year" possesses fr the mass, is to be referred toas the pecuniary nature ofits theme . . . it isan affair of pounds, shillings and pence”; and in “The Gold-Bug” the narrator and the treasure hhunter Legrand discuss the many histories and stories about “money- diggers” (822, 833-34)."* However, “The Gold-Bug” itself differs fom most tales about money as treasure. For example, as Legrand points out, in “The Gold-Bug” the gold seekers become gold finders (834), which. was not the usual topos in America, Moreover, although the ostensible theme of “The Gold-Bug” is the search for money in the sense of trea 12. Poe derided attempts to get rich quick, His tale “Von Kempelen and His Dis- covery" mock alchemy, for example, an,» Hany Levin agus (The Powe of Black. ness: Hawthome, Poe, Melville [New York, 1964), exp. pp. 138~ 39), Poe “was to take a dim view of the California Gold Rush [of 1849] in the poem ["E] Dorado”), and to argue that the succes of alcheny would deft the fale foe” Yet oe tered Hinelfas a Virginia gentleman, and be was disappointed in his expectation of being heir to one of the wealthiest men in aa eee Alen, Terafel: The Life and Times of Edgar Allan Po, 2 vol, [New York 1936], 18) Misia cmc indice te ery ain we oc wre in caper ob his Democracy im America (1835-40) ented “The Industy of Leiter,” In that Srdust Poe wast, Charles Badelate noted, a “money-making author” (Charles Bavdelies "Edgar Allan Poem vie ets ouvrages," in Charles Baudelaire: oeuvres comple, ed. Yves Florenne Pats, 1966), p. 8) Bavdelaite complains that Poet ‘Rnericay biographers ote erie him for nt having made more money and he Caples that Poe woe "too mich above the common iflletua eel for him to be sel paid (p23), 13, Thomas Dunn English, Aristidean (October 1845); quoted by Thomas Olive Mabbott in his introduction to “The Gold-Bug,” in Mabbot, ed, Cllacted Works of Edgar Allan Poe, 3 vols (Cambie, Mas, 1969-78), :799: teat referred toa cw. Poe, review aticle, Graham's (November 1843) 15. Numbers in the text efrto pages of “The Gokd-Bug” in CW. Mabbott follows the text ofthe J. Lorimer Graham copy of Tales and Sketches ‘Washinglon irvings "The Money-Diggers” is discussed by Robert], Blanch, “The Background of Poe's "Gold-Bug,” English Record 16 (April 1966): 44-45. Seba Smiths “The Money Diggers,” which was published in Burton's Magazine (7 (August 1842}: 81-93), is discussed by Kills Campbell, “Miscellaneous Notes on Poe.” Mod- ‘em Language Notes 38 (March 1913): 65~66. 9