Matt's Blog the Fourth: Anthony Trollope By Way Of Kenny Rogers

           This will seem a bit obvious to those more familiar with Trollope’s work (this is my first taste), but I have been struck by The Way We Live Now’s just overwhelming satire of the concept of finance capital.  At every turn, we are meant to see its simultaneously evil and hilariously contradictory workings, echoing Marx’s claim that capitalism, at its heart, is a contradictory system.  Perhaps this happens most consistently through the gambling that takes place at the Beargarden, wherein an entire system of value and etiquette is created involving I-O-Us, questions of gentlemanliness and honor, interest rates and various contingencies for schedules of repayment based on the status of one’s family (such as the effort among Beargarden members to cobble together payments for the gambling debts to Fisker before he left London in 1.10).  I am reminded of what Lady Carbury thinks as she laments her son Felix’s status as a sort of fallen gentleman as she hopes he will successfully get in with the Melmotte family: “Of such a one as Mr. Melmotte could not like gambling at a club however much he might approve of it in the City.  Why with such a preceptor to help him, should not Felix learn to do his gambling on the Exchange, or among the brokers, or in the purlieus of the Bank?” (1.12.112-113).  (Tangentially, just the title of that chapter says so much as well, foreshadowing Felix’s doomed from the start asking of Mr. Melmotte for Marie’s hand—“Sir Felix in his Mother’s House.”)  Of course, we learn later that Melmotte himself should have followed the advice of that great American philosopher Kenny Rogers: “You’ve got to know when to hold ‘em, know when to fold ‘em, know when to walk away, and know when to run.”  Apparently, he knew when to run from the continent but saw poison as a more welcome option after dwelling among the Victorians and dealing with the Americans.

            I wonder if the connection between club gambling and the market economy also speaks to Bourdieu’s notion of habitus, wherein we might say that Felix gambles not because he has deficient morals or values, but because he has embodied the mechanism of finance capital.  However, this raises an interesting question, I think, regarding the development of capitalism in light of practical moral reasoning (something Bourdieu implicitly critiques in attacking Kant’s system from the get go):  Does the propensity to gamble—undergoing games or activities of risk or chance with one’s capital—stem from the all-encompassing force of capitalism, or does the idea of gambling, in fact, create the system we know as capitalism based on certain assumptions of what one has a right to do or not do with one’s property?  As Yeats might ask, which is the dancer and which is the dance in all of this?


For those not familiar with the work of the great raspy bard of America's heartland and barbecue chicken franchises, I have included this video (chorus kicks in at 1:12):