Alec Monopoly: Scarface Money Monops (2017)
Acrylic on canvas with resin (30 x 48 inches)
"Money makes the world go around / The world go around / The world go around
Money makes the world go around / It makes the world go 'round." [1]
Despite this dynamic aspect - and all too predictably - D. H. Lawrence hated money - hated it!
In one poem, for example, he calls it our vast collective madness and in another he says that money is a perverted instinct [...] which rots the brain, the blood, the bones, the stones, the soul [2].
In his 'Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine', meanwhile, Lawrence describes money as a golden wall which uniquely cuts us off from life; "not even the most fanatical dogmas of an iron-bound religion, can insulate us from the inrush of life and inspiration, as money can" [3].
Apart from these instances, there are many, many other occasions on which Lawrence delivers this anti-money sermon and even his fictional characters are obliged to trot out the same rhetoric. When not fucking Connie six ways from Sunday, for example, Mellors can't resist informing her that it is money - along with modern technology and forms of popular entertainment - which is to blame for sucking the spunk out of mankind [4].
II.
Interestingly, Lawrence's puritanical attitude towards money (and the love of money) aligns his thinking with those one might otherwise regard as his moral, political, and philosophical opponents: Christians, Marxists, and Freudians ...
This must surely make one suspicious of his thinking on this subject and question whether, as a matter of fact, money might be thought of in a more positive light; as that which creates happiness, rather than being at the root of all evil.
That was certainly the view of the perverse materialist and utopian socialist Charles Fourier, who argued that happiness consists in having a number of diverse passions and - crucially - having the necessary financial means to satisfy them. In Fourier's ideal state, wealth is redeemed and money not only becomes desirable, but "participates in the brilliance of pleasure" [5].
Roland Barthes helps us understand why it is that Fourier insists that les sens ne peuvent avoir toute leur portée indirecte sans l'intervention de l'argent:
"Curiously detached from commerce, from exchange, from the economy, Fourierist money is an analogic (poetic) metal, the sum of happiness. Its exaltation is obviously a countermeasure: it is because all (civilized) Philosophy has condemned money, that Fourier, destroyer of Philosophy and critic of Civilization, rehabilitates it: the love of wealth being a perjorative topos [...] Fourier turns contempt into praise [... and] everything, where money is concerned, seems to be conceived in view of this counter-discourse [...]" [6]
To advise his readers to seek out tangible wealth - gold, precious stones, and those luxury goods despised by our ascetic idealists - is, as Barthes says, a scandalous thing to do; a major transgression against the teachings of all those (including Lawrence) for whom money is something base and corrupting.
I have to admit, I'm sympathetic to Fourier's view and have always smiled at a remark often attributed to Bo Derek: Whoever said money can't buy happiness simply didn't know where to go shopping.
[1] Lyrics from the song 'Money, Money', written by John Kander and Fred Ebb for the big screen version of the musical Cabaret (dir. Bob Fosse, 1972). To watch the song being performed by Joel Gray (as the Master of Ceremonies) and Liza Minnelli (as Sally Bowles): click here.
Whilst this is still my favourite song written about money, mention might also be made of ABBA's 1976 single 'Money, Money, Money', written by Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus: click here. And 'Money (That's What I Want)', a rhythm and blues track written by Berry Gordy and Janie Bradford and originally recorded by Barrett Strong in 1959, but which I remember as a single by the Flying Lizards in 1979: click here.
[2] See the poems 'Money-madness' and 'Kill money' in The Poems, Vol. I., ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 421-22.
[3] D. H. Lawrence, 'Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine', in Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert, (Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 363.
[4] D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover, ed. Michael Squires, (Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 217. See also the closing letter written by Mellors to Connie (pp. 298-302), in which he again expresses his hatred for money and complains about the fact that modern people have conflated living with spending.
[5] Roland Barthes, 'Fourier', in Sade / Fourier / Loyola, trans. Richard Miller, (University of California Press, 1989), p. 85.
[6] Ibid., pp. 85-86.
To read another recent post on Fourier, click here.
