Georgine Hu, Money Bills (detail). (ABCD: Une Collection d’Art Brut [Actes Sud: Paris, 2000]. Photograph by kind permission of Bruno Decharme.)
THE CONCEPT OF MONEY ESCAPES ME. As a child, I never felt that there was a real difference between the bills in my Monopoly set and the ones that came out of my mother’s purse except in a conventional sense: one lot was used in the games I played with my friends, the other in the card games my parents played in the evening. The artist Georgine Hu would draw what she called “banknotes” on toilet paper and use them to pay for her psychiatrist’s consultations.
As a symbol for the value of goods or services, soon after its invention money universally lost its meaning and became merely equivalent to itself: money equal to money. Literary and artistic symbols, instead, allow unlimited explorations because the things they symbolize are real. On a literal level King Lear is the story of an old man who loses everything, but our reading does not stop there: the poetic reality of the story is persistent, echoing throughout our past, present, and future experiences. A dollar bill, instead, is only a dollar bill: whether issued by the United States Federal Reserve or produced by a naïf artist, it has no reality beyond its paper surface. Philip VI of France said that a thing was worth what he said it was worth because he was the king.
Georgine Hu, Money Bills (detail). (ABCD: Une Collection d’Art Brut [Actes Sud: Paris, 2000]. Photograph by kind permission of Bruno Decharme.)
Some time ago, a friend savvy in things financial tried to explain to me the truism that the fabulous sums mentioned in national and international transactions don’t really exist: they are ciphers taken on faith, supported by abstruse statistics and fortune-tellers’ predictions. My friend made it sound as if the science of economics were a more or less successful branch of fantastic literature.
Money is “frozen desire,” as James Buchan calls it in his extraordinary book about money’s meaning: “the desire incarnate” that offers “a reward to the imagination, as between lovers.” In our early centuries, Buchan explains, “money seemed to be guaranteed by rare and beautiful meals, of whose inner nature and capacity men could only dream.” Later, that guarantee became merely “the projected authority of a community,” first of princes, then of merchants, then of banks.
False beliefs engender monsters. A trust in empty symbols can give rise to financial bureaucracies of chance schemes and red-tape regulations, with convoluted laws and fearful punishments for most, devious strategies of accountancy and obscene wealth for a happy few. The time and energy devoted to tangling and disentangling the world financial apparatus puts to shame the inventions of Gulliver’s Academy of Projects, whose bureaucratic members work hard at extracting sunshine from cucumbers. Bureaucracy infects every one of our societies, even those of the Otherworld. In the seventh circle of Hell, those guilty of crimes against nature are made to run incessantly, but as Brunetto Latini explains to Dante, “whoever of this flock stops for a moment, must lie for a hundred years thereafter / without fanning himself when the fire hits him.” As in most bureaucratic procedures, no explanation is given.
During the economic crisis in Argentina in 2006, when banks like the Canadian Scotiabank and the Spanish Banco de Santander closed overnight and robbed thousands of people of their savings, whole sections of the Argentine middle class were left without their homes and forced to beg in the streets. Obviously, no one believed any longer in the justice of a civil society. To blame for this loss of ideology and of faith in a legal structure were the international financial giants and their policies of quick gain and institutional corruption. Admittedly, it was not difficult to corrupt the upper classes, the military, even the leaders of the workers’ unions, to whom smaller or larger handouts were offered de facto in every business transaction. At the same time, the usurers were mindful of not losing their interest. Even after the horrors of the military dictatorship, when it seemed that Argentina had been bled of all its financial and intellectual powers, the usurers made huge profits. Between 1980 and 2000 (according to the World Bank World Development Indicators of 2011), the private lenders to Latin American governments received $192 billion above their loans. During those same years, the International Monetary Fund lent Latin America $71.3 billion and was reimbursed $86.7 billion, making a profit of $15.4 billion.
More than fifty years earlier, during his long regime as president of Argentina, Perón liked to boast that, like Disney’s Uncle Scrooge, he could “no longer walk along the corridors of the Central Bank because they’re so crammed full with gold ingots.” But after he fled the country, in 1955, there was no gold left to walk on, and Perón appeared on international financial lists as one of the richest men in the world. After Perón, the thefts continued and increased. The money lent to Argentina, several times, by the IMF, was pocketed by the same well-known ruffians: ministers, generals, businessmen, industrialists, congressmen, bankers, senators, their names familiar to every Argentinian.
The IMF’s refusal to lend more was based on the safe premise that it would simply be stolen again (thieves know one another’s habits all too well). This was no consolation to the hundreds of thousands of Argentinians who were left with nothing to eat and no roof under which to sleep. In many neighborhoods, people resorted to bartering and, for a time, a parallel economy allowed them to survive. Like baking and sewing, poetry became a currency: writers would exchange a poem for a meal or an article of clothing. For a time, the improvised system worked. Then the usurers returned.
And appetite, an universal wolf,
So doubly seconded with will and power,
Must make perforce an universal prey,
And last eat up itself.
—SHAKESPEARE, Troilus and Cressida, 1.3.119–24
Historians of the time were less kind to Manfred than Dante was. At the end of the fourteenth century, Leonardo Bruni stressed the fact that Manfred was “the offspring of a concubine who had usurped the royal name against the will of his relations.” Manfred’s near contemporary Giovanni Villani wrote that “he was as dissolute as his father . . . and delighted in the company of jesters, courtiers and prostitutes, and always dressed in green. He was a spendthrift (and) all his life he was an Epicurean who cared nothing for God nor his saints, but only for bodily pleasure.”1 But Manfred’s sin, like that of Statius (of whom more later), seems to have been prodigality, not avarice.
Of the three beasts who stand in Dante’s path as he attempts to ascend the beautiful mountain after leaving the dark forest the worst, Virgil will tell him, is the she-wolf. The common inspiration for the three beasts is the biblical book of Jeremiah, where they are summoned to punish the sinners of Jerusalem: “Wherefore a lion out of the forest shall slay them, and a wolf of the evenings shall spoil them, a leopard shall watch over their cities; everyone that goeth out thence shall be torn in pieces: because their transgressions are many and their backslidings are increased” (5:6). But as always in Dante, the creatures he mentions and the places he describes are at once real things and symbols of things that are real. His depictions are never merely emblematic: they always allow for the various levels of reading he recommends in his letter to Cangrande in which he expounds his poetic project, saying that his readers should begin with a literal interpretation, followed by the allegorical, moral, and anagogical or mystical ones.2 And even this multilayered reading is not enough.
The first beast, the leopard or panther, “light and very nimble, covered with a spotted coat,” is, according to Latin tradition, like the dogs of desire, one of Venus’s familiars, and therefore in Dante’s bestiary an allegory of lust, the temptation that assaults us in our self-indulgent youth. The second, the lion, “head erect and with rabid hunger,” is not Saint Mark’s emblematic beast but stands as a symbol of pride, the sin of kings, which comes upon us in our adulthood. The third is the she-wolf.
And a she-wolf that seemed laden
heavily with all cravings in her leanness,
and has made many before now live in distress,
she brought such deep sorrow upon me
with the terror caused by the sight of her,
that I lost all hope of ever ascending.3
Up to this point, Dante’s emotions have alternated between hope and fear: fear of the forest followed by the comforting sight of the mountain’s glimmering peak; the image of drowning in a high sea, by the sense of being rescued on the shore; dread of the leopard, by the intuition that in the morning light some good might come from meeting the wild beast. But after the encounter with the she-wolf, Dante feels that he can no longer expect to reach the mountaintop in safety. Therefore, just before Virgil appears to guide him, Dante finds himself bereft of hope.
If the sins of the leopard are those of self-indulgence and those of the lion the sins of unreason, the sins of the she-wolf are those of cupidity, the longing for empty things, the pursuit of earthly wealth above all the promises of heaven. Paul’s companion Timothy wrote that “the love of money is the root of all evil: which while some coveted after, they have erred from the faith, and pierced themselves through with many sorrows” (1 Timothy 6:10). Dante, on the path of salvation, is threatened by that greedy hunger, tempting him not perhaps with material gain but desire for things that are nevertheless of this world—fame that comes through wealth, recognition that comes through possession, the acclaim of his fellow citizens—and these secret longings drag him back to the edge of the dark forest and weigh him down so heavily that he feels that he can no longer hope for a spiritual ascent. Dante knows that he has been guilty of other sins—his youthful lust, which made him turn from the memory of Beatrice to the desire for another woman; the recurrent pride that is never completely absent, even in his conversations with the dead, until he is shamed by Beatrice in the Garden of Eden. But the sin of the she-wolf is one that threatens not only him but his entire society, even the entire world. To avoid the threat, Virgil tells him, he must take another path:
Because this beast, because of which you cry out,
allows no man to pass her way,
but so strongly she prevents it, that she kills him;
and has a nature so perverse and vicious,
that she never satiates her craving appetite,
and after feeding, she’s hungrier than before.4
But what exactly is this terrible sin of cupidity? No sin is exclusive: all sins intermingle and feed on one another. An excess of love directed towards a mistaken object leads to greed, and greed is at the root of several other vices: avarice, usury, excessive prodigality, overreaching ambition, and, with it all, anger at those who prevent us from getting what we want and envy of those who have more than ourselves. The sin of the she-wolf, therefore, has many names. Saint Thomas Aquinas (once again an unavoidable source for Dante’s moral tenets), this time quoting Saint Basil, notes: “It is the hungry man’s bread that thou keepest back, the naked man’s cloak that thou hoardest, the needy man’s money that thou possessest, hence thou despoilest as many as thou mightest succour.” And Aquinas adds that cupidity or covetousness, since on the one hand it consists in the unfair taking or retaining of another’s property, opposes justice, and since on the other hand it denotes an inordinate love of riches, sets itself above charity. Though Aquinas argues that when covetousness stops short of loving riches more than God it is not a mortal but a venial sin, he concludes that “lust of riches, properly speaking, brings darkness on the soul.” If pride is the greatest sin against God, covetousness is the greatest sin against all of humankind. It is a sin against the light.5
In Dante’s cosmology the covetous are located according to degree. In the fourth circle of Hell can be found the avaricious and the spendthrifts; in the sixth, the tyrants who robbed their people and the violent highwaymen who despoiled them; in the seventh, the usurers and the bankers; in the eighth, the common thieves and those who have sold ecclesiastical and public offices; in the ninth the greatest betrayer of all, Lucifer, who coveted the ultimate power of God himself. In Purgatory the system is reversed (since the ascent leads from worst to best) and new variations and consequences of covetousness are added. On the second cornice of Purgatory the envious are purged, on the third the wrathful, on the fifth the avaricious.
Covetousness is punished and purged in several ways: in the fourth circle of Hell, guarded by Plutus, the god of riches (whom Virgil calls “a cursed wolf”), the avaricious and spendthrifts must push, in large and opposing half-circles, great boulders, which they slam against one another, shouting, “Why do you hoard?” and “Why do you throw away?” Dante notices that a great number of the avaricious are tonsured: Virgil explains that they are priests, popes, and cardinals. Dante fails to recognize any of them, because, says Virgil, “their undiscerning life which has rendered them obscene, / now makes them too obscure for recognition.” They mocked, he goes on, the goods that Fortune holds, and now “all the gold that is under the moon, or ever was, could not give rest to a single one of these weary souls.” Human beings cannot fathom the wisdom of God that allows Fortune to distribute and redistribute earthly possessions from one person to another, making one rich and another poor in an endless and fluid course.6
Avarice is a recurrent theme in the Commedia; the sin of the spendthrifts is not much dwelt upon. The case of Statius is the exception. In Purgatory, Virgil believes that Statius has been condemned for avarice and asks his fellow-poet how was it that a wise man like Statius could fall prey to such an error. Statius smilingly explains that his sin was the opposite.
Then I realized that our hands could open
their wings too wide in spending, and I repented
of that as of the other offences.7
The subject of prodigality is then dropped, but avarice is pursued further. Within the mysterious workings of Fortune, there are those who are not only avaricious but try to profit from the misery of others: these Dante meets in Hell three circles below the avaricious. After summoning the winged monster Geryon from the abyss, Virgil tells Dante that while he is giving instructions to Geryon about carrying them down, Dante should speak to a group of people huddled on the edge of the burning sand.
Through their eyes their grief was bursting forth;
on this side and that, they attempted to ward off
sometimes the steam, sometimes the burning soil;
not otherwise do dogs in summertime
using their muzzle or their paw,
when they’re bitten by fleas, flies or gadflies.8
This is the first (and only) time that Virgil has sent Dante on his own to observe a group of sinners, and Dante fails to recognize any of them, as he failed before in the circle of the avaricious. Sitting on the burning sand with their eyes fixed on the ground are the bankers, guilty of the sin of usury: from their necks hang money pouches embroidered with their family arms. One of them, who says he is from Padua, tells Dante that the people surrounding him are all Florentines. The passage is short because it seems unnecessary to dwell on these condemned souls, and Dante treats them with utter scorn. They are like beasts deprived of reason, prisoners of their cupidity. They resemble the animals depicted on their money bags—a gorged goose, a greedy sow—in their gestures, like a Pisan, seen here by Dante, whose final grimace is to lick his snout like an ox.
Usury is a sin against nature because it finds increase in what is naturally sterile: gold and silver. The activity of usurers—making money out of money— is rooted neither in the earth nor in care for their fellow human beings. Their punishment is therefore to stare eternally at the ground from which their treasures were taken and to feel bereft in the company of others. A contemporary of Dante’s, Gerard of Siena, wrote that “usury is wicked and bound with vice because it causes a natural thing to transcend its nature and an artificial thing to transcend the skill that created it, which is completely contrary to Nature.” Gerard’s argument is that natural things—oil, wine, grain—have a natural value; artificial things—coins and ingots—have a value measured by weight. Usury falsifies both, charging more for the former and demanding that the latter unnaturally multiply itself. Usury is the opposite of work. The Spanish poet Jorge Manrique, writing in the fifteenth century, recognized that only death would make equal this world of ours, split as it is between “those who live by their hands, / and the rich.”9
The church took a stern view of usury. A series of decrees issuing from the Third Lateran Council of 1179 on through the Council of Vienna of 1311 ordered the excommunication of usurers, denied them Christian burial unless they first repaid the interest to their debtors, and forbade local governments to authorize their activities. These religious prescriptions had their roots in ancient Jewish rabbinical law, which prohibited charging interest on loans to fellow Jews (though interest could be charged to Gentiles). Echoing this, Saint Ambrose wrote, somewhat drastically, that “you have no right to take interest, save from him whom you have the right to kill.” Saint Augustine thought that charging interest in whatever case was no better than legalized robbery. However, though in theory usury was both a sin and a canonical crime, in practice in the thriving monetary economy of medieval Italy, these prohibitions were hardly ever upheld. The citizens of Florence, for example, were from time to time compelled by decree to lend money to their government at an interest rate of 5 percent. And lawyers and accountants found ways to circumvent the anti-usury laws, providing documents of fictitious sales, presenting the loan as an investment, or finding loopholes in the laws themselves.10
The church’s laws against usury can be seen as an early systematic attempt to create an economic theory in Europe. It rested on the assumption that the abolition of interest on loans would result in a consumer credit available to all. In spite of these excellent intentions, the practical exceptions, as Dante makes clear, far outdid the theoretical rule. After three centuries of anti-usury policy, the church changed its tactics and lifted the restrictions on moneylending, allowing moderate interest charges. Usury, however, continued to be considered a moral issue as well as a practical one, and in spite of the growing banking practices of the Vatican, it never ceased to be condemned as a sin.11
Usury has long been a favorite literary subject and, at least in the Anglo-Saxon world, Dickens’s Ebenezer Scrooge is its most famous incarnation. Like the Commedia, A Christmas Carol is divided into three parts and, like Dante, Scrooge is guided through each by a spirit. In the Commedia, Dante is made to witness the punishment of sinners but also their cleansing and redemption. In A Christmas Carol, Scrooge is presented with a similar triple vision: the sinner’s punishment, the offer of purgation, and the possibility of salvation. But while in the Commedia the sins are many, in Dickens’s story the sin is only one, avarice, the root of all others. Avarice makes Scrooge forsake love, betray his friends, reject family ties, withdraw from his fellow human beings. As the young woman to whom he was betrothed tells him, freeing him from his vows, “a golden idol” has replaced her in his heart. To which Scrooge answers with the logic of bankers: “This is the even-handed dealing of the world! . . . There is nothing on which it is so hard as poverty; and there is nothing it professes to condemn with such severity as the pursuit of wealth!”12
Scrooge is shunned by everyone, even the friendly dogs who guide the blind. “It was,” says Dickens, “the very thing he liked. To edge his way along the crowded paths of life, warning all human sympathy to keep its distance.” He is “a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner,” and his sin condemns him to be an outcast, like the bankers at the edges of the seventh circle, alone in their singular agonies. His miserable life is a parody of the contemplative life sought by hermits and mystics whom in the fourth century Macarius of Egypt called “drunk with God,” and his work (counting money) a parody of true labor.13
Dickens was the great chronicler of the working life and an angry critic of the sterile labors of bankers and bureaucrats. One of these financiers, Mr. Merdle in Little Dorrit, is “a man of immense resources—enormous capital— government influence.” His are “the best schemes afloat. They’re safe. They’re certain.” Only after he has ruined hundreds with his schemes, is Mr. Merdle recognized as “a consummate rascal, of course, . . . but remarkably clever! One cannot help admiring the fellow. Must have been such a master of humbug. Knew people so well—got over them so completely—did so much with them!”14 A real-life Mr. Merdle, Bernard Madoff, one of the men who made enormous profits out of the economic crisis in 2010, was able to seduce many with his humbug. But unlike the insouciant Madoff, after his schemes fall apart Mr. Merdle cuts his throat in shame. The Mr. Merdles of this world continue to believe in money as a symbol of the good to be attained for the sake of their own selves.
Money is a complex symbol. The Nobel Prize–winning economist Paul Krugman gave, in one of his New York Times columns, three examples of its labyrinthine representations.15 The first is an open pit in Papua New Guinea, the Porgera gold mine, with an infamous reputation for human rights abuses and environmental damage, that continues to be exploited because gold prices have tripled since 2004. The second is a virtual mine, the bitcoin mine in Reykjanesbaer, Iceland, which uses a digital currency, the “bitcoin,” which people buy because they believe that others will be willing to buy it in the future. “And like gold, it can be mined,” says Krugman. “You can create new bitcoins, but only by solving very complex mathematical problems that require both a lot of computing power and a lot of electricity to run the computers.” In the case of the bitcoin mine, real resources are being used to create virtual objects with no clear use.
The third representation is hypothetical. Krugman explains that in 1936, the economist John Maynard Keynes argued that increased government spending was needed to restore full employment. But then, as now, there was strong political opposition to this suggestion. So Keynes, tongue in cheek, suggested an alternative: have the government bury bottles of cash in disused coal mines, and let the private sector spend its own money digging them up. This “perfectly useless spending” would give the national economy “a much-needed boost.” Keynes went farther. He pointed out that real-life gold mining was very much like this alternative. Gold miners go to great length to dig cash out of the ground even though unlimited amounts of cash can be created at essentially no cost with the printing press. And no sooner is the gold dug up than much of it is buried again in places like the vault of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Money is a symbol bereft of all but virtual significance: it has become self-referential, like the pouches of Dante’s bankers that reflect their owners and are reflected back. Money creates usury which creates money.
But where did our obsession with money begin? When was money invented? Our earliest writings mention no coinage, only transactions and lists of goods and livestock. Considering the question, Aristotle argued that money originated in natural bartering: the need for different goods led to the exchange of these goods, and because many were not easily transported, money was invented as a conventional means of exchange. “The amounts were at first determined by size and weight,” Aristotle wrote, “but eventually the pieces of metal were stamped. This did away with the necessity of weighing and measuring.” Once a currency was established, Aristotle continued, the exchange of goods became trade, and with monetary profit commercial activities became more concerned with coined money than with the products bought and sold. “Indeed,” Aristotle concluded, “wealth is often regarded as consisting in a pile of money, since the aim of money-making and of trade is to make such a pile.” Though moneymaking can be, for Aristotle, necessary for administrative purposes, if it leads to usury it becomes something noxious because “of all the ways of getting wealth, this is the most contrary to nature.” For Aristotle, the absurdity stems from a confusion between means and ends, or between the tools and the job.16
Dante, in the Convivio, analyzes this absurdity in a different light.17 Discussing the difference between the two roads to happiness, the contemplative and the active, Dante refers to the example of Mary and Martha from the Gospel of Luke (chap. 10). Unlike the labors of moneymakers, who pretend to be active but don’t do any real work, Mary’s labors are excellent, even compared to those of her sister, Martha, who busies herself with household chores. Dante refuses to consider manual efforts superior to intellectual ones, and likens both to the labors of the bees that produce wax as well as honey.
According to Luke, six days before the Passover festival in Bethany, Martha and Mary gave a dinner in honor of Jesus who had raised their brother Lazarus from the dead. While Martha was working in the kitchen, Mary sat herself down at the feet of their guest to listen to his words. Overwhelmed by the many tasks to be done, Martha asked her sister to come and help her. “Martha, Martha,” said Jesus, “thou art careful and troubled about many things: But one thing is needful: and Mary hath chosen that good part.” Dante interprets Christ’s words as meaning that every moral virtue stems from choosing the right part, whichever that may be, according to who we are. For Mary, the “good part” is at the feet of her Savior, but Dante does not dismiss the fretting and fussing of Martha.
The scene in the house in Bethany casts its long shadow across our many centuries. Christians and non-Christians alike separate those who tend to menial daily tasks from those who are tended to because the occupations of the latter are supposed to take place on a higher, spiritual plane. At first the dichotomy was understood to be spiritual—between the contemplative and the active life—but this rapidly came to be understood (or misunderstood) as a division between those whom privilege sat at the feet (or in the chair) of divine (or earthly) power, and those who were left to busy themselves in the kitchens and sweatshops of the world.
Mary the sister of Lazarus is exalted in her many guises: as prince and potentate, wise man and mystic, priest and heroic figure, all those to whom fate has allotted “the better part.” But Martha is never absent. Accompanying the Egyptian pharaohs in their sumptuous resting places, surrounding the Chinese emperors as they travel across the magnificent length of a bamboo scroll, embedded in the mosaics of the courtyards of the Pompeian well-to-do, carrying on her unobtrusive life in the background of an Annunciation, pouring wine at Belshazzar’s feast, half-hidden in the capitals of Romanesque church columns, framing a seated god on a Dogon carved door, Martha perseveres with her daily task of providing food, drink, and some measure of comfort. Dante never forgets those “who work by their hands”: in the Commedia we meet masons building bulwarks in the Netherlands, pitch boilers who caulk the damaged ships in the Arsenal of Venice, cooks ordering their kitchen boys to dip the meat into large boilers with their hooks, peasants despairing as the frost covers their early crops, soldiers in the cavalry moving camp just as Dante himself must have done.
The first representations of workers’ activities began to emerge in Europe in the late Middle Ages, no longer as accompaniments to depictions of “Vulcan’s Forge” or “The Miraculous Catch” to justify the portrayal of a smithy or of fishermen, but as explicit subjects, a change that seems to coincide with the post-feudal society’s interest in documentary depictions of itself. The illustration for each month in the famous fifteenth-century illuminated manuscript Les Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry shows farmers, carpenters, shepherds, and reapers all engaged in their particular activities less as signposts for the changing seasons than as self-contained portraits of these members of society. They are among the first specific attempts to single out particular moments of a working life.
Caravaggio is perhaps one of the first painters to turn the convention of literary borrowings on its head. Even though on the surface his proletarian models serve as actors in the biblical dramatic scenes he constructs, the biblical scenes in fact are the excuse for the representations of common working people. So obvious was the device and so shocking the apparent intention, that (legend has it) in 1606, the Carmelites refused his Dormition of the Virgin, which they had commissioned, because the painter had used as his model the corpse of a young pregnant prostitute who had drowned herself in the Tiber. What the viewer saw was not, in spite of the title, the Mother of God in her final sleep but the pregnant body of a woman whom society had first exploited and then abandoned. (A similar scandal was provoked by the exhibition, in 1850, of John Everett Millais’s Christ in the House of His Parents, a painting that was attacked by Charles Dickens, among others, for daring to represent the Holy Family less as a spiritual community of contemplative Marys than as a common flesh-and-blood family of Martha-like carpenters.)18
But not until the explorations of the impressionists does work for its own sake, with all its everyday heroic and miserable connotations, become valued as a subject worthy of representation. Vuillard’s seamstresses, Monet’s waiters, Toulouse-Lautrec’s laundry women, and, later, specific depictions of the workers’ struggle in the Italian Divisionism school introduce what seems, if not a new subject, then a subject that has at last been granted its own stage. In these images, human labor is shown and commented upon not only in action but also in its consequences (exploitation and exhaustion), causes (ambition or hunger), and attendant tragedies (accidents and armed repression). Many of these images, often sentimentalized or romanticized, acquired after the 1917 October Revolution in Russia decorative, even purely graphic value in Soviet and later in Chinese poster art. On a far larger scale, they lost in Communist aesthetics much of their combative singularity and, in a sense, reverted to the impersonal role given to workers in the earliest medieval depictions. Political and commercial advertising images of work became a parody of Martha’s part, much as usury became a parody of Mary’s.
Photography, however, the technology that came into being in Monet’s time, helped to lend images of Martha’s labors the dignity of the viewer’s understanding. Manipulating the audience into the position of witness, photography (when outside the field of advertising) framed the activities of the workers both as a document and as an aesthetic object, in images that demanded a narrative political context and, at the same time, followed varying rules of composition and lighting. The minuscule sixteenth-century masons crawling up Breughel’s Tower of Babel (of which three versions exist) are less, in the viewer’s eye, suffering slaves than a collective element in the biblical narrative. Four centuries after Breughel, the Brazilian photographer Sebastião Salgado exhibited a Breughelesque series of images that showed destitute gold diggers swarming up and down the walls of a monstrous Amazonian quarry, images which allow hardly any other reading than that of the worker as victim, fellow human beings condemned to hell on earth in our time. In one of his early exhibitions, Salgado quoted Dante’s description of the condemned souls gathering on the banks of the Acheron:
Sebastião Salgado, Gold-mine workers in Serra Pelada, Brazil, 1986. (© Sebastião Salgado/Amazonas—Contact Press Images)
As in the autumn the leaves fall off
one after the other, until the branch
sees all its spoils upon the ground,
so the wicked seed of Adam
cast themselves from that shore one by one
at summons, like a bird responding to his call.19
Documentary images such as those of Salgado invariably echo established stories that lend them, in metaphorical or allegorical form, a shape and an argument. Salgado’s army of workers can be compared to the punished souls in Hell, but they are also the builders of Babylon, the slaves at the pyramids, the allegorical image of all human toil on this earth of sweat and suffering. This does not detract from the viewer’s literal reading, from the factual value of Salgado’s images, but it allows his photographic depictions to acquire yet another level of story, as Dante would have argued: to reach back into our history and rescue images of Martha that had difficulty in surfacing.
After the birth of his sons Cyril in 1885 and Vyvyan in 1886, Oscar Wilde composed for them a series of short stories which were later published in two collections. The second, A House of Pomegranates, begins with a story called “The Young King.” A young shepherd boy is discovered to be the heir to the throne and is brought to the royal palace. The night before his coronation he has three dreams in which he sees his crown, scepter, and mantle crafted and woven by “the white hands of Pain” and refuses to wear them. To change his mind, the people tell him that suffering has always been their lot, and that “to toil for a master is bitter, but to have no master to toil for is more bitter still.” “Are not the rich and the poor brothers?” asks the young King. “Ay,” they answer, “and the name of the rich brother is Cain.”20
The young King’s third dream shows Death and Avarice watching over an army of workers struggling in a tropical forest. Because Avarice won’t part with a few seeds that it clutches in its bony hand, Death responds by slaughtering all of Avarice’s men. This is Wilde’s description of the scene Salgado was to photograph a century later: “There he saw an immense multitude of men toiling in the bed of a dried-up river. They swarmed up the crag like ants. They dug deep pits in the ground and went down into them. Some of them cleft the rocks with great axes; others grabbed in the sand. . . . They hurried about, calling to each other, and no man was idle.”21 Then, outside the frame of Salgado’s photograph, in the fifth circle of Hell, Avarice closes her fist.
