Finance, Terror, and Science on Stage

Current Public Concerns in 21st-Century British Drama

Kerstin Frank, Caroline Lusin

• Publisher: Narr Francke Attempto Verlag
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9783823300199
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism History & Theory
• Index: Literature

This collection of essays examines the contribution of British plays to key social, political, and intellectual debates since 2000. It explores some of the most pressing concerns that have dominated the public discourse in Britain in the last decade, focusing on their representation in dramatic texts. Each essay provides an in-depth analysis of one play, assessing its particular contribution to the debate in question. The book aims to show how contemporary drama has developed unique ways to present the complexities and ambiguities of certain issues with aesthetic as well as emotional appeal.

II. Finance and Austerity

Surviving Boom and Bust: Finance, Responsibility, and the State of the World in Nicholas Pierpan’s You Can Still Make a Killing (2012)

Caroline Lusin

1. Contemporary British Literature, Money, and the Financial Crisis

Money has certainly been a constant concern in British literature, from the debate about usury in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice (1605) through the intricate patterns of economic exchange in Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy (1768) to the convoluted “tales of fiscal irresponsibility and financial temptations” (Shaw 4) in Victorian fiction. Money, as John Lanchester puts it in Whoops! Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay (2010), is quite simply “a fundamental fact of the world” (5), and indeed “one of the most familiar and intimate aspects of daily living” (Shaw 1). Yet money has arguably gained even more currency in British literature since the 1980s, what with the increasing expansion of the financial sector and the contested economic politics of Margaret Thatcher, whose repercussions still make themselves felt acutely today (cf. Sierz 101ff.). Designed to boost economic activity, Thatcher’s ‘Big Bang’ reforms of 1986 set in motion a process of individualisation and deregulation seen as one of the major underlying causes of the financial crisis of 2007–08. Simultaneously, Thatcher’s politics of privatisation are largely responsible for the current housing crisis, an acute shortage in affordable living space (cf. Meek). John J. Su therefore considers “contemporary British literature […] defined in terms of responses to a set of political, economic, and cultural forces associated with Margaret Thatcher” (1083), a statement endorsed by singer and songwriter Billy Bragg shortly after the turn of the century in “Take Down the Union Jack” from England, Half English (2002). The disintegration of Britain, the speaker here argues, began “[s]ometime in the eighties/ When the great and the good gave way/ To the greedy and the mean”. What remains, Bragg’s speaker claims in his acerbic diagnosis of the condition of England, is merely “an economic union that’s passed its sell-by date”, a society lacking higher ideals. In the aftermath of the financial crisis of 2007–08, perceptions like these culminated in widespread awe of a financial system generally supposed to have long run out of control.

Contemporary approaches to the condition of England in British literature are crucially concerned with the downsides of a society in which money rules the roost, abetting inequality, irresponsibility and injustice. At the time of its inception in the 1830s, the new genre of Condition of England fiction characteristically focused on the so-called ‘factory question’, the appalling situation of industrial workers as well as the blatant social injustice which Thomas Carlyle criticised most acerbically in his essay “Signs of the Times” (1829). If Carlyle deplored the condition of the workers as a key effect of the ‘Age of Mechanisation’, contemporary Condition of England literature, drama as well as prose, derives its main impetus from the effects of a new ‘Age of Financialisation’. The notion of ‘financialisation’ according to Gerald Epstein refers to “the increasing role of financial motives, financial markets, financial actors and financial institutions in the operation of the domestic and international economies” (quoted in Thomson/Dutta 4). The sector of finance has long overtaken industry as the major economic force in Britain today, a fact exploited by Condition of England literature of the 1980s and 1990s. The infamous, completely asocial protagonist of Martin Amis’ Money (1984), John Self, functioned as a “poster-boy for the individualism and conspicuous consumption that define this era” (Shaw 24); ten years later, Jonathan Coe targeted the ruthless materialism and greed of the decade on a larger scale by charting the economic entanglements of the powerful fictitious Winshaw dynasty in What a Carve Up! (1994).1 The conclusion of this novel leaves no doubt as to the ethics of accumulating wealth: “[T]here comes a point where greed and madness can no longer be told apart.” (Coe 493) Along with the fact that What a Carve Up! ends with an impending plane crash, this conclusion delivers a gloomy forecast for an economic system that seems doomed to fail.

Towards the end of the first decade of the 2000s, the financial crisis boosted the preoccupation with money inherited from the 1980s and 1990s in various literary and non-literary genres. From a fictional point of view, Condition of England novels like Sebastian Faulks’ A Week in December (2009), Justin Cartwright’s Other People’s Money (2011) and John Lanchester’s Capital (2012) explore the pitfalls of the new banking practices leading to what has become known as the ‘credit crunch’, such as highly risky derivatives, credit default swaps, collateralized debt obligations, subprime mortgages and ever more complex financial entanglements comprehensible, if anything, but to a few.2 Critics have construed the advent of texts like these into a new genre, the so-called ‘crunch lit’, a term coined by Sathnam Sanghera as an analogy to ‘chick lit’ (cf. Shaw 7). Originally designed to denominate “the fad for semi-autobiographical works by young financial professionals describing City careers that have left them with feelings of self-loathing, not to mention huge pads in London” (Sanghera), crunch lit has come to be applied more broadly “to describe a body of writings that collectively function to represent the financial crisis of 2007–08” (Shaw 8). The fact that the term ‘crunch lit’ originally applied to a genre of autobiographical confession literature reveals the main focus of these texts. Besides trying to explore the intricacies of the financial system, ‘crunch lit’ is chiefly concerned with investigating into the moral foundation and side-effects of a system appearing profoundly immoral in many ways. As Katy Shaw maintains, the credit crunch has finally disrupted the “fairy tale narrative of responsibility, ethical mutuality and safety” (xi) long used to veil the dangers of the financial sector. Literature written after the crunch typically examines the failure of responsibility and the proliferation of risk at the core of the breakdown of the financial system.

The fascination of authors and audiences with the topic of finance derives not only from the momentous impact which the collapse of key financial institutions had on people’s lives; the machinations of finance have by now become complex to the point of being almost inscrutable even to insiders, to say nothing of the general public. As John Lanchester argues, the gap between financial insiders and the public is far deeper today even than the gap between the notorious ‘two cultures’ of science and the arts (cf. Everyone Owes, 5f.). If the ‘money economy’ is thus, as Nicky Marsh claims, “one of the most powerful and yet least understood political forces of the contemporary” (1), how can we explain this development? ‘Money’ functions in today’s economy as an abstract which more often than not has no tangible counterpart in reality. This is especially the case with financial tools like derivatives, an umbrella term for “securities with a price tied to an underlying asset”, such as “forwards, futures, options and swaps” (Colon). Particularly credit default swaps, that is, “bilateral insurance contracts between a protection buyer and a protection seller” (ibid.), which were arguably at the core of the financial crisis, potentially harbour high levels of risk if handled in a certain way. As Hector Colon illustrates, the amount of credit default swaps had risen by 2007 to a sum of “around $ 62 trillion, a figure that is more than four times the real U.S. gross domestic product for that year” (ibid.). Within a globalized financial system, buying and re-selling such products creates a web of complex financial entanglements whose separate threads are hard, if not impossible to trace. ‘Money’, in this context, turns into a “sanitized symbol of familiarity and control […] [which] masks financial practices, mobilizes mystifying terminology and disguises the power networks that characterize its movement” (Shaw 1). To pinpoint the elusiveness of finance today, Lanchester establishes an analogy to a certain development in literary history:

If the invention of derivatives was the financial world’s modernist dawn, the current crisis is unsettlingly like the birth of postmodernism. For anyone who studied literature in college, there is a weird familiarity about the current crisis: value, in the realm of finance capital, parallels the elusive nature of meaning in deconstructionism. (Lanchester, Everyone Owes, 78)

Just as moral values and meaning became radically relative in postmodernism, financial values have lost their substance (and their real-world referent) in the crisis of 2007–08. Financial markets today, Nicky Marsh explains, “trade not on commodities but in possibilities and choices” (1). What makes this state of things even more disquieting is the fact that unless we store our money under our pillows, all of us are involved in this system in various ways. In his exploration of the financial crisis, John Lanchester poignantly demonstrates our implication in the system, elaborating on how the numbers of our bank statements remind us of “the terrible potency of those strings of digits, their ability to dictate everything from what you eat to where you live” (Everyone Owes, 8). The consequences of these “abstract numerals” are, John Lanchester concludes, “the least abstract thing in the world” (ibid. 78), not least in connection with the financial crisis. The repercussions of the ensuing politics of austerity (see the article by Dorothee Birke in this volume), along with the crisis on the housing market, certainly impinged on many people’s lives very concretely.

Apart from exploring the preconditions and repercussions of the crisis in Condition of England novels, British fiction writers and dramatists have used various means to approach this ‘abstract thing’ and trace its effects on our lives. In her introduction to Enron (2012), Lucy Prebble’s award-winning play about finance and corporate culture, Rachel Clements draws attention to how “right from the emergence of forms of agrarian and merchant capitalism in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, playwrights and theatres have responded to the changing economic c...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Titel
• Impressum
• Inhaltsverzeichnis
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Current Debates and British Drama since 2000
• I. Politics
• II. Finance and Austerity
• III. Science and Technology
• IV. Cultural Identity
• Fußnoten