123hop at comcast.net wrote:
>
> Yes, this is interesting. The founding myth of capitalism is found in the story of Robinson Crusoe -- the original self made man who, after spending some years on a desert island reinventing himself from the ground up, returns to society to discover that he is now a rich man because some plantation he owned made a lot of money in his absence.
I'm not sure what you mean by "founding myth." Do you mean the myth which makes intellgible to members of the society where they came from? Isn't it far too concrete, in fact, to be myth at all. I think you are wrong, and that focusing on Defoe is greatly misleading. The myth of capitalism must be a myth which dramatizes the _formation_ of social relations, not the survival of the individual 'outside' of any society. The myth must make clear, first, how, given only isolated individuals (recognized by all as impossible and grotesque but nevertheless a necessary assumption) those individuals by free acts of choice _formed_ a society, and of how that formation cannot be a single non-repeatable act but must, rather, be endlessly repeated. (Unlike in a tributary social order, where the real is the past, incapitalism the real is the future. Odysseus _returns_ to a family: his task is to preserve the past in the present. The hero of a capitalist myth, coming fron nowhere, must _found_ a family, pointing to the future.)) Robinson Crusoe cannot begin to catch that myth, since Crusoe comes from thickly socialized worlds and struggles to return to them. The use of the Robinsonades was to illustrate exchange by showing how Crusoe related his different activities. But Crusoe's story as a whole not only is not the or a capitalist myth, but Crusoe doesn't even _belong_ to capitalism. The book might be seen as dramatizing a subordinate myth, that of petty commodity production as constituting the orign of capitalism.)
If you want the myth of capitalism in literature the three great figures are Milton, Richardson, Austen. And at its most condensed, a singe speech by Adam in PL, in which he argues with God over his need for a mate. Man was not made to live alone, he says. I am incomplete until I have relations with anlther. (Sex does not enter until he sees that the otherhe gets is sexy.) Milton had an advantage which his successors in the drmatizing of this myth had not: his characters literally came from nowhere, autonomous, 'free' from social relations until they formed those relations by a free choice. The history of the novel is primarioly the history of how this problem was variously solved.
Remember that Maggie Smith allowed not only individuals but _families_ to be real (as opposed to society which did not exist.)
Don't build your own resentment of capitalism into the literature of capitalism.
Carrol