Dorson, James

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Book ReviewErhan Şimşek. 2019. Creating Realities: Business as a Motif in American Fiction,1865–1929. Bielefeld: transcript. 333pp. ISBN: 978-3-8376-4799-0. € 49.99paperback.Reviewed by Dr. James Dorson, Free University of Berlin, John F. Kennedy Institute for NorthAmerica Studies, Lansstraße 7-9, 14195 Berlin, Germany, E-mail: dorson@zedat.fu-berlin.dehttps://doi.org/10.1515/zaa-2020-2009Business owners and the shifting cluster of ideas associatedwith businesses—fromrationalization to risk-taking—have always played a central economic andpoliticalrole in the United States. But what have businesses meant for American literature?Going against the grain of approaches that seek to uncover the ideological reso-nances of economic themes in literature, Erhan Şimşek’s ambitious first bookCreating Realities argues that the business motif in fiction serves primarilyan aesthetic function. As society modernized and fragmented for millions ofAmericans following the end of the Civil War, the emergence of realist literatureresponded to a need among middle-class readers for experiencing a reality thatseemed increasingly out of reach and out of control. Because nothing signified thefraught realities of the Gilded Age better than the business enterprise, Şimşekargues that representations of businesses were used to satisfy this new craving forreality. As the perception of reality changed, however, so did the function ofbusiness in fiction. By tracing the changing function of the businessmotif from theend of the Civil War to the Great Depression, Şimşek shows how business repre-sentations were used by realist, naturalist, and modernist writers to producedifferent aesthetic effects in response to social needs. Creating Realities thus notonly provides illuminating accounts of threemajor literarymovements through thelight shed on them by a German-style Funktionsgeschichte, but also rethinksAmerican literary history through the lens of the business motif.Creating Realities is divided into five chapters bookended by an introductionand conclusion. In the introduction, Şimşek defines his terms and lays out thestakes of his argument. Here he explains that “business literature or literature ofbusiness refers to fictional works that have commercial activity or institutions andpeople who deal with commercial activities such as companies and businessmenas dominant themes in their plots” (12). From the outset, it is clear that the book’sfocus on business fiction is not to show how literature reproduces underlyingeconomic structures, such as Walter Benn Michaels’s seminal The Gold Standardand the Logic of Naturalism (1987) did. Whereas literature for New Historicists likeMichaels bears evidence of hidden structures manipulating unsuspecting readers,ZAA 2020; 68(3): 333–337Open Access. © 2020 James Dorson, published by De Gruyter. This work is licensed underthe Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.for Şimşek representations of business should be taken at face value servingrecognizable purposes for readers seeking orientation in a perplexing world.Şimşek prefers to use the term Darstellung instead of representation, however,because “writers did not merely represent business, but constructed, performed,staged and figured it as a literary motif” (13). This argument against simplereferentiality emphasizes the literariness of literature. Drawing onWolfgang Iser’sreader-response theory, Şimşek argues that attention to the composition of literarytexts is crucial, not because texts determine how we read, but because they guidethe reading process toward potentialmeanings actualized by readers—i.e. “the textoperates like a rough guideline in the construction of effect” (15). Thus combiningFunktionsgeschichte with reader-response theory along lines already influentiallylaid out by Iser and Winfried Fluck, Creating Realities presents itself as a neededintervention in current debates raging in the humanities. This is made explicit inthe conclusion when Şimşek positions his approach as a middle path betweenclose reading, on one side, which he argues sacrifices general knowledge aboutbodies of literature for detailed descriptions of individual works, and distantreading, on the other, whose computational approach fails to account for theunique composition of literary texts. The ambitious goal of Şimşek’s book, then, isa reading of literature able both to account for the particular aesthetic effects ofliterature and how these are produced across a number of texts at a certain time inresponse to larger social issues.Şimşek launches his investigation into the changing function of the businessmotif in literature with what Chapter 1 calls “The Loss of Reality in LateNineteenth-Century America.” This short chapter sets out the historical contextof the Gilded Age in order to show how social upheaval created a demand forliterature to provide readers with a vicarious experience of the new realitiesbrought about by industrialization, urbanization, and mass immigration. But asthe explanatory framework of antebellum idealism failed to contain the socialfragmentation of a rapidly modernizing nation, the demand for literature toprovide authentic experiences of reality also went hand in handwith the need forliterature to provide social orientation. Şimşek reaches back to key works ofcultural and social history by Robert Wiebe, Alan Trachtenberg, and JacksonLears to show how the increasingly integrated and incorporated economy of theGilded Age made a loss of autonomy painfully felt by middle-class Americanswhose identitywas boundupwith notions of self-reliance no longer supported byeconomic realities. In contrast to more totalizing accounts of power, these ac-counts of incorporation and modernization wonderfully capture the sense ofsweeping change experienced by millions at the time. There is a danger, how-ever, which Şimşek does not entirely escape, of taking this experience asrepresentative of “the American life” (37) without considering the different ways334 Book Reviewthis transition was felt bymanywho never were able to define themselves by self-reliance and autonomy in the first place.Cultural demand for authenticity and orientation in response to social frag-mentation is one thing. But how did literature of the period respond to this de-mand? Chapter 2 turns to Erich Auerbach’s definition of realism in terms of“externalization” for an explanation. Auerbach distinguished between Biblicalnarrative that leaves particulars of time and setting shrouded in mystery andHomeric narrative that foregrounds, or “externalizes,” particular details. Şimşekhelpfully carries this distinction into American literary history by using it todistinguish between the traditions of romance and realism. Whereas reality in theromance is a question of universal, spiritual essence, reality for realism, incontrast, is a matter of particular experience that requires “externalized” narra-tion. As social fragmentation eroded a universalist framework of understanding,the need for a realist aesthetic—an “aesthetics of externalization” (48)—began toreplace the “aesthetics of non-externalization” (51) that characterized the Amer-ican romance tradition. Here Şimşek argues that representations of businesses inall their mundane details were used to create a “reality effect” aimed at satisfyingthe reality hunger of the period. Şimşek builds his argument by tracing the gradualemergence of realism in postbellum America through the changing function of thebusinessmotif.While Edgar Allen Poe’s “The BusinessMan” (1840) still allegorizesbusiness as a universal signifier of greed, through readings of Herman Melville’s“Bartleby” (1853), Horatio Alger’s Ragged Dick (1868), and Elizabeth StuartPhelps’s reform novel The Silent Partner (1871), Şimşek argues that the businessmotif is used increasingly for the purpose of creating a reality effect. Because a textlike “Bartleby” uses the business motif to criticize Romantic universalization,Şimşek writes that Melville “foreshadowed the coming of an aesthetics of exter-nalization with business” (82). Chapter 2 thus provides a provocative account ofthe role that business played in the formation of a realist aesthetic in the U.S.,casting new light on themuch-debated romance-realismdichotomy along theway.Tracing the emergence of American realism out of American romance rather thanin dialogue with European realism—Balzac, Flaubert, and Dickens are nevermentioned in this context—does create a somewhat insular origins story, but thisno doubt speaks more to practical considerations than to any intention of repro-ducing an exceptionalist narrative.The next three chapters each systematically consider the business motif inrealism, naturalism, and modernism, respectively, with novels by William DeanHowells, Theodore Dreiser, and F. Scott Fitzgerald taken as representative of eachmovement. If the business motif generally produces a reality effect, the aim ofthese chapters is to show how it serves quite different purposes within eachmovement. American realism creates a reality effect through externalization, but itBook Review 335is also on a “civilizing” mission aimed at social integration contained within aframework of Victorian morality. Şimşek makes this argument by borrowingFluck’s notion of realism’s “conversational structure” (68), where the Bildung ofcharacters capable of reflecting on and learning from their errors coincides withthe moral education of readers made privy to this developmental process. Chapter3 shows how Howells’s The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885) uses the representation ofLapham’s paint business not only to produce a reality effect but also to orientatereaders toward the “true potential” (71) of society by allowing the naïve Lapham togain insight into himself and society as the business plot unfolds. It is precisely thisduality, however, that, Şimşek argues, led to the decline of American realism bythe 1890s. The growing economic inequality and social tensions following theHaymarket riot in 1886 made the reconciliation of business and morality that TheRise of Silas Lapham dramatizes through the maturation of its protagonist soimplausible that it undermined the desired reality effect.As the use of the business motif for purposes of social integration declined, itbegan to serve a new function, which Şimşek delineates in his discussion ofnaturalism and Dreiser’s The Financier (1912) in Chapter 4. The chapter definesnaturalism by its “effect of intensity” (135). In contrast to the focus on ordinary (i.e.middle class) life in realism, naturalist writers emphasized the extraordinary.Sensational themes such as sex, poverty, murder, and greed were described indetail to shock readers out of Victorian mores deemed inadequate for meeting theneeds of fin-de-siècle America. The determination of characters by inner and outerforces in naturalist texts undermined the autonomy of the rational subject, andwith it the possibilities of realist Bildung. To the extent that naturalism uses realistconventions, the shocking unfolding of naturalist plots, where deviance isrewarded or characters degenerate into brutes, subverts realist expectations of amoral universe. “Once readers are trapped by verisimilitude,” Şimşek writes,“naturalists drown them in the shocking intensity of events” (152). His discussionof The Financier, with its insatiable protagonist relentlessly pursuing Dreiser’sstock themes of sex and money, is a case in point. Yet the focus on the businessmotif in this chapter tends to recede into the background of Şimşek’s argument,giving the impression that it would have worked just as well without the businessangle. The spectacular success of Frank Cowperwood in The Financier by followinghis own drives rather than accommodating himself to social conventions certainlyshocked readers, but so had many naturalist novels before, including not onlyDreiser’s first novel Sister Carrie (1900), but even more sensationally Zola’sRougon-Macquart series that was repeatedly accused of pornography, and inwhich only L’Argent (1890), the nineteenth of the twenty novels in the series,makes business central to its “effect of intensity.”336 Book ReviewThe suspicion that the aesthetic necessity of the business motif may besomewhat overdetermined in Şimşek’s account of naturalism is strengthened bythe next chapter on modernism, where he acknowledges that the business motifplays only a minor role. As modernist texts turned inwards, “the functions thatbusiness served were no longer required in this new form of literature” (197). If thebusiness motif in realism served simultaneously to orientate readers towardeveryday reality and social integration, the rejection of referentiality as well as theemphasis on subjectively experienced reality in modernist texts would seem tohave no use for representations of business. Nevertheless, in The Great Gatsby(1925) Şimşek argues that Fitzgerald utilizes the business motif—Nick Carraway’sprofessed interest in the bond business and Jay Gatsby’s shady undertakings—foreffects corresponding with modernism’s new conception of reality. Rather thanindex reality, the business motif in the novel throws into relief Nick’s inability toaccurately represent it. In Şimşek’s words, “the motif of business functions as anunderlying and overarching tool that renders Nick’s narration unreliable, therebyoffering subjectivization to the reader” (200). If the function of the business motifwas first used in realism to orientate readers toward a shared social reality, by the1920s it was being used to demonstrate the inescapably subjective nature of reality.Representations of businesses may be only one way by which realist,naturalist, and modernist writers created their desired aesthetic effects, butŞimşek’s original and richly argued account of the changing function of thebusiness motif in American literary history is nevertheless a valuable contri-bution to American Studies. Not only does it provide illuminating readings thatexplain the aesthetic rather than ideological significance of economic themes inliterature; it also demonstrates how German American Studies may contribute aunique perspective to debates in literary and cultural studies by not merelyfollowing the latest fad coming out of U.S. American Studies. Of course, notfollowing the latest fad does involve the risk of following outmoded ones.Creating Realities illustrates this risk when it resorts to psychobiography toexplain the aesthetic choices of writers, such as attributing Dreiser’s work to his“unresolved Oedipal complex” (160). Observations like these do little to explainthe functions of literature or why they change over time in response to socialpressure. Such peculiarities of argument are by no means representative of thebook, however, and they do not subtract from the significant light that Şimşeksheds on the neglected aesthetic functions of the business motif in literature.Book Review 337

Bielefeld: transcript. 333pp. ISBN: 978-3-8376-4799-0. € 49.99 paperback

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Bielefeld: transcript. 333pp. ISBN: 978-3-8376-4799-0. € 49.99 paperback

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