The Filipino Primitive. Sarita Echavez See
toy sets complete with Austen doll, miniature desk, and writing quill. Who, after all, can resist the coupling of Elizabeth Bennet’s sparkling wit and Fitzwilliam Darcy’s monied ineptness?
Let us take a closer look at the famed first two sentences of Austen’s Pride and Prejudice: “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife. However little known the feelings or views of such a man may be on his first entering a neighborhood, this truth is so well fixed in the minds of the surrounding families, that he is considered as the rightful property of some one or other of their daughters.” Austen sums up the basic boy-meets-girl story that structures the genre of the novel. The story turns out to be triadic rather than dyadic in nature, however. Boy does not merely meet girl. Primogenitor meets property, the possession of which demands the coupling with girl if the boy heir is to become a real man of property, a man capable of passing on the property to his own boy heir.43 Darcy, the most privileged and propertied of literary characters, turns out to be the rightful property of “some one or other.” In other words, to have is to be had.
At the same that Austen’s Pride and Prejudice naturalizes this well-worn story of gendered, propertied heteroreproduction, it also naturalizes a story not so much of coming-of-age as of coming-into-self-possession. Austen’s novel of propertied heterosexual romance dramatizes how one comes to possess oneself. The real romance turns out to be an affair with the “self.” Both Elizabeth and Darcy learn to define their personality traits—pride and prejudice—as their own. They learn to believe that they own themselves even as their “selves” turn out to be an effect of the structure, as the work of Louis Althusser implies. Elizabeth’s bewitching self-confidence, her primary trait, is itself a story of self-possession.
Writing and Accumulation III: The Novel, Chance, and Speculation
From Austen’s portrayal of the landed aristocracy, we turn to Anthony Trollope’s portrayal of gamblers and finance capitalists. We shift from landed, “fixed” accumulation in Austen to high-risk, speculative modes of accumulation left to chance in Trollope. For example, in Trollope’s novel The Claverings, the shift from property to finance is encapsulated by Captain Boodle’s reference to betting in his advice to Archie Clavering to pursue the wealthy widow Lady Ongar: “He never surrendered a bet as lost, till the evidence as to the facts was quite conclusive, and had taught himself to regard any chance, be it ever so remote, as a kind of property.”44 In the wake of a series of fiscal scandals that rocked nineteenth-century Europe, chance—from the roll of the dice to betting on the stock market to real estate speculation—became a form of property.45
If Austen’s novels in the era of waning landed property perform the subjectivity of possession, Trollope’s novels in the era of finance capital and high imperialism perform the subjectivity of debt, and the double meaning of forgiveness drives several of his plots. We read to find out whether a character’s moral transgression or violation of codes of respectable behavior will be forgiven. We read to find out whether and how a character will pay off a monetary debt. Fiction can work powerfully to reveal the fictitiousness of capital, and none so rivetingly as Trollope’s world of debt, gambling, primogeniture, social ambition, and usury as his characters traverse the politics of the living room, the church, and Parliament. At his best, Trollope manages to make fascinating the most boring people and phenomena. The Last Chronicle of Barset is about a twenty-pound check. The Eustace Diamonds is about a necklace. Framley Parsonage is about an IOU. The eight-hundred-page novel Can Your Forgive Her? turns on Alice Vavasor’s inaction, her refusal until the inevitable end to marry and cede control over her income to her husband. Gambling and speculation emerge as a thematic across much of Trollope’s oeuvre. In novels like Can You Forgive Her? and The Way We Live Now there are scenes involving card or dice play in gentlemen’s clubs or in notorious resort and casino towns like Baden and Lucerne. Morally opposed to and socially barred from the vice of gambling, upper-class women characters use gambling as a metaphor for love. In The Last Chronicle of Barset, Lily Dale says of her love for Adolphus Crosbie: “If it were simply myself, and my own future fate in life, I would trust him with it all tomorrow, without a word. I should go to him as a gambler goes to the gambling-table, knowing that if I lost everything I could hardly be poorer than I was before.”46
Most infamously, in The Way We Live Now the enigmatic financier Augustus Melmotte takes gambling to its highest form of fiscal speculation: gambling with nothing, that is, empty assets. Trollope’s portrait of Gentile gambling tends to be gentlemanly. Near-penniless aristocrats gather at the card table in their exclusive London clubs and gamble with IOUs. But when it comes to Melmotte, who is rumored to be a Jew, the practice of gambling with debt occurs on a monumental scale. Melmotte takes London by storm with outrageously lavish parties, a demure and marriageable daughter, and a dazzling shareholding scheme that would fund the building of a railway from Utah to Mexico. Along the way, we learn about all the practices of swindling, cheating, and forgery that were endemic to the era but conveniently condensed in the racialized figure of the Jew. Trollope’s anti-Semitism lays the blame for fiscal fraud on the figure of the Jew. If we read Melmotte’s crimes of forgery and deception against the grain, however, we see that his falsification of signatures brilliantly reveals the scandalous fictitiousness of capital itself, a phenomenon that has manifested time and again in our own era. As David Harvey argues in his account of the dot-com bust that began in 1999, the resultant economic collapse “soon spread to reveal that much of what passed for finance capital was in fact unredeemable fictitious capital supported by scandalous accounting practices and totally empty assets.”47
In contrast, characters like Lady Carbury turn to fiction and nonfiction as a way to survive the transition to speculative and finance capitalism. Widowed and pursued by creditors, Lady Carbury turns to writing as a source of income to support herself and her children. (The character of Lady Carbury is an autobiographical reference to Trollope’s mother, who also turned to writing as a means of survival for her and her children.) Titled and privileged as she is, the number of respectable paths toward survival is extremely limited. Indeed, her story yet again ends in marriage, this time to an editor. Her attempt at an independent profession becomes merely a means of attaching herself to a man and regaining the position of dependence through marriage. What else is a lady to do? Austen answers this question by mystifying property relations and transactions as relations of love and moral self-discovery, while Trollope literalizes the mystified Austenian relations of capital in the novel of financial capital.
The gendered nature of Lady Carbury’s personal financial troubles signifies the generalized loss of autonomy and increased anxiety that characterize an economy now in the hands of the financier and massive corporate entities. I turn now to alternative responses to non-autonomy, other ways of gambling with debt and gambling with words. As I outline in chapter 3, on Carlos Bulosan’s fiction, the character of Magno Rubio embraces his non-autonomous status as a non-immigrant, noncitizen, illiterate seasonal laborer in Depression-era California. Magno Rubio does not care about being autonomous. Magno Rubio does not care that he has accrued an amount of debt impossible for him to ever pay off. What happens, Bulosan implicitly asks, when we see debt as a positivity and gambling as a necessity?
The Stakes of Gambling with Words
What is the context for asking these questions about debt and gambling? This book is an essay against both economic accumulation and accumulation in the university. It is an attempt to undermine the rationale for accumulation during a renewed, intensified cycle of raiding what is left of the public good—the commons—in the United States in the form of the university. Across the chapters that follow, I argue that “primitive accumulation” can and must be understood as a process that describes not only material entities like land and labor but also knowledge production, and the university and the archive are the ideal sites for the analysis of that process. Even and especially in the face of the urgent call for increasingly defensive and rearguard action to protect what little is left, I want to insist that that act of protection must be expansive, ambitious, and generous, as impossible as it is to conceptualize generosity and abundance in a moment of (manufactured) scarcity.48 I ask what the academic intellectual might have to learn, in such a moment, from those who always have been exploited by the processes of accumulation, the latest versions of which