'Will it smash?': Modernity and the fear of falling

Greenslade, William

Abstract

This chapter traces the motif of the financial crash in realist novels by Dickens, Trollope and Eliot in which the inherent irrationality of capitalist relations is revealed within a broadly explicable ethical universe. By the end of the century, in novels by Meredith, Gissing and Galsworthy, the bank crash is presented as violent in its social and psychic effects, naturalised as a periodic explosion in the system of capitalist relations: there can now be no easy recourse to a system of moral accounting since ‘good’, in social Darwinian terms, is what survives. Modernity’s ‘other’ in the non-realist genres of the period encodes the ever-present fear of falling back and down into the primitive slime of homogeneity, as in Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows. The escape from this in an era of the centralised organisation of capital and a plutocracy of fabulous wealth is a new divine order of capitalist relations. In Forster’s Howards End and Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby the promise of being modern is brutally rubbed out by the destructive forces that such power unleashes.

• Publication Date: Jan 1, 2002
• Peer Reviewed: Not Peer Reviewed
• Pages: 15-22
• Book Title: Crash Cultures: Modernity, Mediation and the Material
• ISBN: 9781841500713
• Keywords: modernity, car crash, falling
• Public URL: https://uwe-repository.worktribe.com/output/1082891
• Publisher URL: http://www.intellectbooks.co.uk/books/view-Book,id=4158/