Terrible, violence at Genoa - displayed, of course, by the G8 leaders, whose meetings are taking on more and more the air of some ghostly collocation called up by Metternich. That these paladins of globalization on capitalism's terms refuse to acknowledge the legitimacy of the protesters, and that for the most part, in the US, the police lines are backed by the media lines, has a familiar feel to it - it's the US in Vietnam, 1966. Here's a link to Lib�ration - L'information avec l'AFP, which has the most articles.

I posted the last two posts out of order. Read the first before the second.

So when Ferdinand Lopez borrows 750 pounds from Sextus Parker, I get a pleasurable tingle of anticipation. The race has begun. And I know that this is a magical race, in which the runner who chooses to enter it will lose his skin. There are races like that in Greek myths � the suitors who raced for Atalanta�s hand, for instance. I think it was Atalanta � I must look this up. These suitors had to confront a great pyramid of skulls when they came to ask for her hand � all the suitors who had lost.

Trollope, as I said before, is a great favorite of mine. I keep urging him on my friend, Sarah Raff, who is doing a dissertation on Jane Austen. I always connect those two writers � they are both, it seems to me, supremely insular. But so far, Sarah has resisted Trollope, and I have wondered why. Am I wrong about their similarity? More in my next post. Write me at Editor.

The Prime Minister begins with borrowed money. A lot of the great 19th century novels begin with borrowed money � La Peau de Chagrin and Crime and Punishment come immediately to mind. In La Peau de Chagrin, Raphael is first seen losing all his money gambling - but he is gambling because he has come to the end of his rope. He can't think of any other way to pay off his creditors. In Crime and Punishment, Raskolnikov is not only mad enough to think that God is dead, but has just that little extra micron of lunacy that convinces him he can fight Mammon � which he does by hacking up an old money lender. But as every reader knows, Mammon, in the form of borrowed money, always wins.

What is it about borrowed money that encodes a narrative pattern so at home in the 19th century? Well, think about how Marx describes money in terms of dead capital and living capital. The dead and living metaphor isn�t his � it is a commonplace of the time. To animate capital � to use your money - was to make it earn interest. But money, as we all know, is actually dead. It is a coin, or a bill. In the French Revolution it was the terrible assignat. So to animate money is to animate a dead thing, or, even more frightening, a dead troupe � and of course we know how rich that trope is with gothic anxiety. That way lies Frankenstein and Dracula. After all, these novels are appearing in a society that is witnessing the long, prolonged death of feudal culture. And that death, though keenly felt, is not clearly understood. When the fundamental concepts native to peasant Europe are suddenly either in disrepute or void, you get a historic moment in which the metaphors betray a basic confusion of the founding binary opposition of life and death. This confusion had, before, only been dreamt of � now the dream seemed to walk abroad, not a pleasant thought. Once the dead things come alive, they have to do what the live things do, only with a more thought out purpose. They have to reproduce themselves, in other words. So we get the common complaint that the dead feed off the living, and in Dracula we get the combination of feeding and reproduction � it becomes one act. This is a nightmare model of power, but it is a different nightmare depending on the level of power one actually holds (or believes one holds) in society. So for the landed aristocracy, which, contrary to the schematic of classroom historians, did survive the French Revolution, and in fact managed the great latifundia of Pomeria and Galicia in Central Europe, and intermarried with the haut bourgeoisie in England and France, and ground down the wealth of peasants in Southern Italy, this particular nightmare was identical to the Industrial Revolution. The conservative romantics, from Chauteaubriand to Ruskin, saw in the factory only the shadow of death, and in the factory worker the products of death, automatons all.

But Trollope, though influenced by that current, was more deeply tied to another sector of privilege � the merchant/professional class. These people, while heirs to the folkloric archetypes of feudal Europe, were halfway committed to the new economic order. So yes, they wanted to maintain that structure which put the outsider, the slave, the criminal, under the ban of social death. But they had also a sneaking liking � and more, a need � for the energy of the upstart, the tycoon, the mover and shaker mysteriously arisen from out of the depths. Frankenstein could, after all, really be the new Prometheus � a myth viewed with particular fondness by both Balzac, Napoleon and Marx.

So naturally the figuration of the second, social death � death-in-life and life-in-death � will have a different aesthetic footing and effect for this set; a set from which most of the great European novelists came.

Another thing to notice is that borrowed money ticks. There�s a race (as in running a race, not races of mankind race) element here � a race against the clock. Because the law of borrowed money is you have to pay it back, and you have to pay back the money owed for having it (which mounts, the longer you have it) and you have to live at the same time. So, metaphorically, the man who borrows money is on a run. Raskolnikov couldn�t solve that problem with an axe. Baron Hulot in Cousine Bette (the most interest- battered character in all literature, all dick and empty pockets) couldn�t solve it with his intricate maneuvers, his superabundance of paper. Interestingly, Jules Verne extracted the element of the race and made it the template for a certain type of novel, the novel as contest � Around the world in 80 days, etc. (and remember, that novel begins with a bet).

The British, that was going to be the topic of this post. I've been watching the battle of the Tory pretenders - not that I fully understand it. The party seems to operate on the survivor principle - put four or five Tory leaders who hate each other together, have them whisper about which one of them is gay, which a Jew, and which one is in the pocket of the French, and then unleash the hatred of the backbenchers, in the form of a vote, to decide who gets to lead the party into its next major defeat. Read about it in the
Spectator. The surprise defeat so far is of Michael Portillo - a loyal Thatcher-ite who got too wobbly for the grande dame. Really, Thatcher is an odious figure, one of the great disasters of modern times. But I do like the way her pronouncements always seem like they are outtakes from the movie, The Ruling Class. Apparently she has taken to calling Portillo "the Spaniard" - can't you just hear it? Which is why I was reminded of the Ruling Class - the way the Gurney paterfamilias pronounces the word "foreigner."
All of this Tory foolery, with the trial of Archer in the background, was on my mind yesterday when I started Trollope's The Prime Minister (by the way - I'm reading the book on-line, but the on-line version is badly transcribed. Usually Gutenberg, which is the version everybody steals, does a pretty good job of proofing their e-texts, but in this case they fell down on the job). So far, my acquaintance with Trollope has been with the Barsetshire novels. This summer has been so driven by my need to read and review and make money that I've had very little time to read for ... the reasons I usually read. Joy, I guess. Well, the first two chapters of the Prime Minister are as sharp as anything I've read by Trollope - and wierdly apposite, given that Trollope is presenting a character named Lopez who is mixing among bluebloods with the disadvantage of having no "ancestry." The book begins with Lopez getting a loan and having a lunch - in fact, the perfect beginning for a British scandal. And perfectly done. I'll get into that in my next post. E-mail comments to: Roger

I haven't figured out how to put my e-mail address up in the column to the left. So here it is - e-mail me at rgathman@aol.com. I think I will use the e-mail address as a sign off for each of my posts, so that it is available for the stray reader.

The British. I'm going to post tomorrow, but I went today to the Guardian and was rather shocked that Jeffrey Archer is going to prison.Guardian Unlimited Politics | Special Reports | Political chancer with lots of fizz Notice that none of the conservative bluebloods have the guts to stand up for him, except for John Major. Hey, I think Archer's politics are contemptible, and his wonking around with the press - his lying in court to extract libel money from the tabloids - is, obviously, the kind of thing you must deal with by extracting some comparably ruinous sum from Archer. But why send the guy to prison? Not that I think he deserves some special immunity from the cell - I believe that most imprisoned folk, from drug users to forgers to drug dealers, would be better dealt with outside of prison. The monstrous machinery of the penal system does little good to the people inside it, doesn't compensate the people they have damaged outside it, and serves mainly as a monument to the state's own fatuous sense of power. In fact, it is people like Archer who are always urging that people be sent to prison, which is why I am directing this comment at his comeuppance. The guy committed 'perverse' acts with a prostitute, and then made her life miserable when she revealed this. Well, that was bad. By all accounts, the first trial was a farce, and if anybody is really to suffer for it, it should be the judge who presided as a sort of caricature of John Bull stupidity over the proceedings.
Now of course Archer is receiving the vials of press indignation - a mass outpouring of moral harumphing that is truly indicative of a class that seems to have long memories of tutors equipped with canes keeping order in Latin class. Give him a whack, pull down his breeches. Well, do, but send him off to jail for four years?
What is truly sad, however, is that so few of the people who so ostentatiously palled around with him stick with him in adversity. Like, say, Dean Acheson stood by good old Alger Hiss.