Anthony Macris’s Capital, volume one: Negating Financial Derivatives and Neoliberalism through Literary Form
Australian author Anthony Macris’s 1997 novel Capital, volume one proceeds by way of two alternating narrative threads. In the more orthodox Bildungsroman-style autobiographical thread discontinuous episodes each depict an aspect of market culture which de-forms, rather than forms, the narrator’s self. These episodes effect a series of unbecomings-of-age: failed Neoliberal Bildung. In the second narrative thread, set in a protean and grungy London Underground, Macris employs a Generative mise en abyme technique to set everyday objects and ‘subjects’ into a play of “mirrors [that] proliferate and distort, converting the text into a field of reflections governed by modalities that go beyond referential and mimetic functions”(Macris). This paper reads this play of the embedding and dis-embedding of the objects and ‘subjects’ represented in the novel as a cultural form of financial derivatives: the avant-garde of finance capitalism which take a ‘grounded’ asset and turn it through a complex set of risk-calculating mirrors, embedding and dis-embedding the financial ‘instrument’ as it changes hands and its integrity is re-parcelled and fragmented.
I will argue that Macris’ debut novel extends the techniques for narrativising social abjection found in the grunge fiction of Christos Tsiolkas and Andrew McGahan. While Capital, volume one, in the novel’s autobiographical thread, negates and denaturalises Neoliberal Bildung – in ways similar to male Grunge fiction – it also presents a negative homology of the operations of the leading instruments of finance capitalism in the form of the Generative mise en abyme, in the London Underground thread. Macris’ novel ties the cultural logic of Neoliberalism to the cultural forms of finance capitalism, entwining the unbecomings of the reified and entrepreneurial self in a network where the waste from value creation is abjected.