1This article will purvey William Dean Howells’s middle-style novel work, The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885), as an exemplary text of Walter Benjamin’s monad in its unlikely and yet not entirely untenable pairing of Guy Debord’s theories of the spectacle society, of Benjamin himself and of Howells’s key novel. Debord’s relevant and topical theories of the spectacle society will thus be used to throw attention on The Rise of Silas Lapham. In so doing, the present contribution will essay to illuminate how the literary history that Howells makes finds its sense in work by Benjamin and by Debord, inter alia.1

2First of all, it would be both strategic and useful to define what exactly a monad is for the critic-flâneur and critic-inventor, Walter Benjamin ; for this purpose I adduce the following words from the Paris-based scholar at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Michael Löwy, and his acute work that has been translated as, Fire Alarm : Reading Walter Benjamin’s ‘On the Concept of History,’ in which he comments with admirable clarity on Benjamin’s fertile text of thesis number XVIII that,

Against the quantitative conception of historical time as accumulation, Benjamin here outlines his qualitative, discontinuous conception of historical time. There is a striking affinity between Benjamin’s ideas here and those of Charles Péguy [. . .] According to Péguy, in Clio [. . .] the concept of time proper to the theory of progress, is ‘precisely the time of the savings bank and the great credit establishments. . . it is the time of interest accumulated by a capital. . . a truly homogeneous time, since it translates, transports into homogeneous calculations. . .[and] transposes into a homogeneous (mathematical) language the countless varieties of anxieties and fortunes’. Against this time of progress, ‘made in the image and likeness of space’, reduced to an ‘absolute, infinite’ line, he sets the time of memory, the time of ‘organic remembrance’ that is not homogeneous, but has full and empty moments.
It is the task of remembrance, in Benjamin’s work, to build ‘constellations’ linking the present and the past. These constellations [. . .] are monads [. . .] concentrates of historical totality — ‘full moments’, as Péguy would put it. The privileged moments of the past [. . .] are those which constitute a messianic stop to events [. . .].2

3It is the central thesis of the present article that a monad combining Howells and Debord produces a constellation, or ‘full if not empty ,’!) moment’, for the critical intellect in thinking of cultural modernity and American society. Here is Löwy again on Benjamin’s messianic conception of history and the monad

According to [Benjamin’s] preparatory notes, the universal history of historicism is false [. . .] the way Esperanto is a false universal language. But there will one day be a true universal history, as there will be a true universal language [. . .] This messianic history of delivered humanity will burn like an ‘eternal lamp’ that includes the totality of the past in an immense apokatastasis.
[. . .] Benjamin’s works on Baudelaire are a good example of the methodology proposed in this thesis : the aim is to discover in Les Fleurs du mal a monad, a crystallized ensemble of tensions that contains a historical totality. In that text, wrested from the homogeneous course of history, is preserved and gathered the whole of the poet’s work, in that work the French nineteenth century, and, in this latter, the ‘entire course of history’.3

4In a similar way here in the current article, we seek to make The Rise of Silas Lapham into a composite of tensional points that highlight its cognizance of our central submission, which is that life lives on only within the Debordian spectacle and of advanced capitalist consumerism for those who would not offer up an antidote mode of reality and countervailing mode of perception to the dominant one of sheer servitude under the screen and the thumb of ultra-socialized and commoditized Debord-like spectacularization.

5For a more nuanced sense of this overall conceptual framework for understanding the social and the economic, the distinguished Benjamin-scholar Löwy then goes on to say of Benjamin’s thesis number XVIII, and it is worth quoting at length for its subtlety is difficult to capture in a few words :

Jeztzeit, ‘now-time’ or ‘the present’, is defined [. . .] as the ‘model’ or foreshadowing of messianic time, of the ‘eternal lamp’, of the true history of mankind. [. . .].
[. . .] the monad [. . .] is, in Leibniz, a reflection of the entire universe. Examining this concept in The Arcades Project, Benjamin defines it as ‘the crystal of the total event’. [. . .].
Jeztzeit comprises all the messianic moments of the past, the whole tradition of the oppressed is concentrated, as a redemptive power, in the present moment, the moment of the historian — or of the revolutionary.4

6So then even more exactly, what interests us here, is how Debord and Howells co-constitute a special sort of what Benjamin terms ‘crystal of the total event’ of life within the power of the spectacle specifically in United States culture, both during Howells’s epoch and in our own early twenty-first century. Benjaminian Jeztzeit would for example in this context include the narrative instants that delineate Silas Lapham’s crestfallen state in a world of unremitting social evil — of which he is admittedly a part as a beneficiary of imperial Anglo-American capital (manifestly, which other critics have also noted, such as Daniel T. O’Hara, whose work on our target novel I shall engage at some length below) ; though, at novel’s end Silas attains a kind of enlightened mode in some registers of note as never the less a kind of totemic animal for others who have suffered a similar fate in their own individual life narratives in prose fiction under hard-edged capitalism, human beings who are themselves on some level of course a certain kind of formalization of ordinary actuality, however much these two registers, the imaginary and or the narrative, may only be rough approximations at best of the extra-textual or of the real. Löwy then proceeds to give a simple historical example of ‘now-time’ or of Jeztzeit,

the Spartakist rising of January 1919 sees a unique constellation formed with the Jetztzeit of the ancient slave rising. But this monad [. . .] is an abbreviation of the whole history of mankind as the history of the struggle of the oppressed. Moreover, as a messianic interruption of events [. . .] this act of revolt prefigures the universal history of saved humanity.
We might, then, regard [Benjamin’s] Thesis IX as a stunning example of an immense abbreviation of the history of mankind up to this point, a crystal encapsulating the totality of the catastrophic events that constitute the thread of that history. But in that image the only foreshadowing of redemption is negative : the impossibility, for the angel of history, to ‘awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed’.5

7So then with the foregoing in mind, we may begin to see how Howells’s The Rise of Silas Lapham may be seen to instance a Benjaminmonad in how in the present piece the critical function essays to map the world of Howells’s work onto the theories of Benjamin and of Guy Debord in order to elucidate, by extension, our own age of the early twenty-first century, even while chiasmatically of course taking on board Howells’s 1885-masterpiece as the principal object of critical focus.

8The American novelist Booth Tarkington, who authored the 1918- classic tome, The Magnificent Ambersons, which was later to find its way into the dynamic of the cinematic world of Orson Welles in Welles’s 1942 directed film of the same title, once wrote of one of his key artistic mentors, Howells :

There was no softness in the gentleness of William Dean Howells. His gentleness was the human kindness of a powerful iconoclast who began the overturning of the false gods [. . .] He remembered that when half-gods go the gods should arrive ; he had the gods with him and he brought them and enthroned them.
They remain enthroned today. Fashions and sales are temporary and often lamentable.6

9In the foregoing we thus see how Tarkington himself was acutely aware of false forms of success that would be part and parcel of the specific ‘society of the spectacle’ in advance of Debord’s theoretical investigations, and the complete obtuseness of those in a culture who would endorse such hollow sorts of victory. In Howells, he observes one able to separate the wheat from the chaff, and one able to see through the ridiculous rigged games of power, and false values, of a phony society predicated on exchange value as opposed to use value, on appearances in contradistinction to reality, and so on and so forth, ad infinitum.

10Now, as far as the content of The Rise of Silas Lapham goes, we read in [the] an extremely fine introduction by the New York-based critic Morris Dickstein of the Coreys and the Laphams that,

The dissonance between the two families comes through best in the celebrated dinner scene in which Lapham, unused to drinking wine with dinner, grows tipsy and begins bragging about his success, his paint, his war record [. . .] As a deeply inbred society, a network of cousins, Boston is a treacherous field for an outsider, as Howells himself had been — and inwardly remained.7

11It was precisely that climactic dinner sequence scene that would later find its way in the pages of Tarkington’s acclaimed novel, The Magnificent Ambersons, and in due course in a rather celebrated way, in the filmic images of the 1942 Welles-picture, The Magnificent Ambersons (it bears repeating because the sequence of these images in this film are highly memorable from Welles’s output of images). Dickstein also encapsulates above in a nutshell possible critical implications for the coda to our Howells-novel under consideration. Here is Tarkington himself as he describes the emotion, the affective being, which the dinner scene from The Rise of Silas Lapham produced in him :

I waited with boyhood’s piggishness at the door for the postman so that I should be the first of the household to learn what happened to ‘Silas Lapham’ at the catastrophic dinner. Then, when I had seized upon the parcel, opened it, and, like a pig indeed, had read the precious instalment in a hidden retreat, I came forth overwhelmed but swaggering to prove that no mere writing could emotionally affect a person so adult in his teens as I. [. . .].
Now here is Mr. Howells’s centenary, and with it [. . .] here is the book Silas Lapham [. . .] it survives because it is a work of art.8

12The aesthetic force of high-level feeling Tarkington then endures to rather excellent effect for its capacity to pay tribute to Howells’s fictional achievement. More importantly, Tarkington’s admission that ‘it survives because it is a work of art’ enables us all the more fruitfully to use it as a launching pad for critical reflection on an ever incubating and ever intensifying spectacle-oriented global society. From the time of Howells to the time of Debord, everyday phenomena and life have become even more spectacularized and visibilized. This is the historical monad of the modern we wish our target figures to illuminate.

13What is even more, to employ the force of cross-cultural juxtaposition, the artistic world of Howells is also rather like what the critic and psychoanalytic thinker Julia Kristeva has written of Howells’s distinguished contemporary, Marcel Proust, when she announces that “the elegant pages of A la recherche come to seem like one of the very first modern visions of the society of the spectacle. In advance of television and the media, Opinion in the Faubourg Saint-Germain, as recreated by Proust, transforms its supposed protagonists into mere apparitions, into ‘looks.”9 In a similar way, the book leave of the classic Howellsian page illumine how deeply entrenched is the spectacle of so called success and of public opinion when it comes to the production of self-perception and self-engenderment of the individual human person in Howells’s vision of the national-cultural post-Civil War American society.

14To return to Dickstein’s critical hand, he writes of the famed dinner event hosted by the Coreys to an unseasoned Silas, and of how thereby,

Tom’s recoil from Lapham shows how much he is a creature of his class and upbringing [. . .] It reflects Howells’s understanding as a novelist that ‘social traditions’ and ‘habits of feeling’ are installed in us at a very early age. But Howells also sees us as moral agents, potentially free beings capable of self-correction, something Tom will do here, as nearly all the Laphams and Coreys do before the end of the novel.
This ability to change [. . .] is what distinguishes them from the minor characters like the villainous Rogers, whom Lapham forced out of his business — his financial dealings will trigger Lapham’s downfall — and the hapless Zerrilla Dewey [. . .] whom Lapham supports because her father saved his life during the Civil War.10

15The facility to transform for the positive figures in The Rise of Silas Lapham must here then be underscored ; for it is this attribute or quality that makes a character meritorious in the Howellsian garden. In a Niklas Luhmann understanding of the self in his pioneering social systems theory, the above extract also shows to what extent Tom simply is the “environment” of which he is a part, and is not per se the basic structure of social fact, for that in Luhmann’s theory of social systems would be communication, as is well known. Indeed, for Luhmann, “There is no individuality ab extra, only self-referential individuality. But this means that cells and societies, maybe physical atoms, certainly immune systems and brains, are all individuals. Conscious systems have no exceptional status.”11

16And in a splendid dialecticization (an acknowledgment of an opposite perspective) of his own individual career successes, Dickstein writes of Howells’s own self-questionings, queries that no doubt beg the question of the whole spectacle of the literary apparatus of which Howells was a part, a beneficiary, and a vitally energetic and important contributor :

But Howells’s very success left him with misgivings, which influenced the shape of Silas Lapham. Boston may have accepted him, but he never fully accepted Boston. He grew rich but fretted in his letters about why he should be so comfortable when others went hungry. In waging his lonely crusade to spare the convicted anarchists in 1887, and later protesting their ‘civic murder’ [. . .] he attracted fierce condemnation and risked a position that had taken him so long to establish.

17Thus Howells displays a not unremarked capacity of courage. And in a good point about the self-sunkenness of the vain world of capital, and of how selfish it makes people behave toward one another, there is for Luhmann for instance no individual identity distinct from social identity in a modern social world to which his social systems theory applies, Dickstein aptly notes,

when Lapham tries to save money to save his business, he discovers bitterly that he has no friends [. . .] he finally determines to be honorable rather than successful [. . .] With the young Tom and in Lapham himself, Howells had identified with the romance of business [. . .] But in the end, foreshadowing his later novels, he delivers a stern judgment on capitalism while retaining his faith in the moral agency of the individual.12

18The foregoing could aptly serve as yet another simple example of how people as such do not exist per se outside of their milieux and thus are products of their social worlds of communication and capital ; such a reading would accord again with Luhmann’s social systems theory, where we are given to understand that the individual belongs to an ‘environment’, above all, which has communication as its basic structural element.13 The Rise of Silas Lapham too foretells what would already be in the die for Howells’s negative understandings of forms of late nineteenth-century American capitalism.

19It is crucially important to note too that in writing about the corpus of texts authored by Howells, for the literary scholar Dickstein, “Though A Modern Instance and A Hazard of New Fortunes are more modern novels, more unyielding in their vision, The Rise of Silas Lapham broke new ground with its study of social mobility and its portrait of a crucial new American type.”14 In this way, Howells’s mid-career novel (he was forty-seven when the prose work began to appear in serial form in 1884) both continued and paved the way for other cultural embodiments of the ‘type’ of American businessman to be found with Christopher Newman in Henry James’s The American (1875) with Adam Verver inThe Golden Bowl (1904), with Jay Gatsby in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925), with Charles Foster Kane in Orson Welles’s inaugural feature length film Citizen Kane (1941), inter alia. All of these simple cultural examples illumine Luhmann’s point of how, “Autopoiesis presupposes a recurring need for renewal.”15 For Howells’s pioneering capacity to portray such a business class mode of reality is replenished later on in an autopoietically functioning art system, and concomitantly may help to explain what happened to his psychic system during the writing of the novelistic text, for as one critic writes of Howells’s hard-won cultural achievement,

Some years later, a writer in Harper’s Weekly recorded Howells’s astonishing admission that he had in fact suffered some sort of emotional or psychic collapse during the writing of Silas Lapham : ‘His affairs prospering, his work marching as well as heart could wish, suddenly, and without apparent cause, the status seemed wholly wrong. His own expression, in speaking with me about that time was, ‘The bottom dropped out ! ’16

20In another psychobiographic point, during the compositional work on the novel we read that Howells himself, after he moved into his own Beacon Street domicile, not completely unlike the Laphams who enjoyed their own domiciliation on Beacon Street, was reduced to “a welter of contradictory feelings — satisfied in his rise, aware of the ironic coincidence with his hero Silas, and appalled by the frightful work and expense of social climbing in order, as he put it to one friend, that he might ‘give my daughter her chance in this despicable world.’”17 The medley of internal contradictions of a capitalist system is of course what Howells rightly intuited with his aforementioned ‘contradictory feelings’. And the aforementioned house as such is of course by extension in any theoretical consideration one of the visible commodities par excellence of civilized bourgeois society, of which Greil Marcus submits, “Debord argued that the commodity — now transmuted into ‘spectacle,’ or seemingly natural, autonomous images communicated as the facts of life — had taken over the social function once fulfilled by religion and myth, and that appearances were now inseparable from the essential processes of alienation and domination in modern society.”18 In this context one may argue that Howells himself experienced some kind of ‘alienation’ even while enjoying the fruits of his success in the practical world via his new house. And Marcus adds with a direct quote from Debord himself, “The spectacle is not merely advertising, or propaganda, or television. It is a world. The spectacle as we experience it, but fail to perceive it, ‘is not a collection of images, but a social relationship between people, mediated by images.’”19 The mediation between the image and society then is a well-nigh seamless and fast one. And to throw again valuable focus on Howells’s own disquietudes, I cite Thomas Y. Levin, “A critique of the spectacle is all the more imperative since, as Debord reminds the viewer in a variation of Benjamin’s oft-cited formulation, the spectacle is always the spectacle of the victor.”20 This would indeed be a classic experience of the Benjaminian spirit of things in ordinary day to day reality. All of these observations can be said to map onto the structure of Boston-society in The Rise of Silas Lapham and inform Howells’s disposition during his fictional creation of our chosen novel.

21Now, on to the Howells-novel itself, we read in chapter two of the Laphams material wealth that, “they did not know how to spend on society [. . .] Lapham’s ideas of hospitality was still to bring a heavy-buying customer home to pot-luck ; neither of them imagined dinners.”21 As a member of the nouveaux riches, the Laphams simply lack the capacity to decide with discernment on what many would consider the important things one might do with one’s money capital (as opposed to other forms of capital, hence money capital is just a nuanced way of expressing the notion of money). Theirs is a rather wasteful and extravagant way of expending their capital, for their material riches do not seem to cultivate their individual souls or minds much per se, at all, let alone their sensorial or social lives. As for the Coreys, Persis and Silas discourse with one another : “‘They didn’t seem stuck up,’ urged his wife. ‘They’d no need to — with you. I could buy him and sell him, twice over. This answer satisfied Mrs. Lapham rather with the fact than with her husband.” (26) Whence even this early in the novel text we see how much Silas reduces everything to pure exchange value over against use value. Persis’s balanced sanity is also shown in the same chapter, when she quips to Silas, “we’re both country people, and we’ve kept our country ways, and we don’t, either of us, know what to do. You’ve had to work so hard, and your luck was so long coming, and then it came with such a rush, that we haven’t had any chance to learn what to do with it.” (28) Here Persis seems to possess the greater side of well-grounded clear headedness. Later, deep in the now classic pages of chapter two, Persis takes Silas to task for his questionable behavior toward his business partner, Milton K. Rogers, and in so doing broadcasts the moral imagination of the novel tome : “‘You crowded him out. A man that had saved you ! No, you had got greedy, Silas. You had made your paint your god, and you couldn’t bear to let anybody else share in the blessings.’” (43) Here Silas is shown to be a kind of tyrannical authority figure of self-serving capitalist interest overfond of his own good fortune, and unable to divvy up the spoils in any kind of democratic way.

22Howells’s deep and even sympathetic understanding of yet another crucial social configuration of the society of the spectacle as it may be generally conceived, the conjugal, meanwhile may be seen here at the beginning of chapter four, “The silken texture of the marriage tie bears a daily strain of wrong and insult to which no other human relation can be subjected without lesion [. . .] It is certainly a curious spectacle, and doubtless it ought to convince an observer of the divinity of the institution [. . .].” (45) The word ‘spectacle’ here only party maps onto Debord’s conceptuality, but transpose on to his edifice, it never the less does. And relatedly in this context for the already-mentioned Howells critic, Dickstein, “A Modern Instance was the first serious treatment of divorce in American fiction, but Silas Lapham is just as subtle in its portrayal of the quotidian dynamics of marriage, with its underlying tensions and unspoken understandings.”22 Even though, as is often the case with Howells, the textual evidence here may be interpreted in more than one way, this exegetical submission from Dickstein seems probable. It is also worth noting that the ability of the Howells-novel to delineate, or to somehow give audience to, signifying silences via its presentation of the ‘underlying tensions and unspoken understandings’ of the conjugal sphere also contribute to the book’s aesthetic merit.

23We read again of Rogers, again to be sure Lapham’s former business partner in the novel work The Rise of Silas Lapham :

[Lapham] had been dependent at one time on his partner’s capital. It was a moment of terrible trial. Happy is the man forever after who can choose the [. . .] unselfish part in such an exigency ! Lapham could not rise to it [. . .].
His course did not shake Mrs. Lapham’s faith in him [. . .] his paint was [. . .] a sentiment, almost a passion [. . .]. (46)

24It may also be something like the natural greediness that gets piped into people by a cruel universe that structures Silas’s behavior. Also, his capitalist egoism blinds him to his individual conduct. And more concretely and in a positive understanding, that Silas at least inches toward ‘a passion’ might be endorsed in a fictional (let alone extra-fictional) world too often devoid of it. It must be said too that his well-nigh ‘passion’ is a survival strategy, and on at least one level, an act of simple self interest in a competitive world of hard economic facts, of hegemonic capital and of big power that takes no prisoners. In a world of capitalist production, the aristocratic leisured class individual, Bromfield Corey, thus announces to his son, Tom Corey, twelve pages later in the novel

It seems to me that it is about time for you to open out as a real-estate broker. Or did you ever think of matrimony ?
[Tom] ‘Well [. . .] I shouldn’t quite like to regard it as a career, you know.’
‘No, no [. . .] I quite agree with you. But you know I’ve always contended that the affections could be made to combine pleasure and profit.’ (58)

25Bromfield’s attitude here may be seen as sheer cynical reason by some, or as pure and simple industrial pragmatics and acumen, by others. Soon after this conversational exchange, Bromfield critically reflects that, “‘Money buys position at once. I don’t say that it isn’t all right. The world generally knows what it’s about, and knows how to drive a bargain. I dare say it makes the new rich pay too much.’” (59) This valorization of money capital Howells then solidifies in this late nineteenth-century literary engenderment well after similar remarks were made time and again in, for example, the prolific French novelist Honoré de Balzac’s collected fiction, La Comédie humaine, which delineates, in instance upon instance, and with unusual acuity, the double and remarkable phenomenon of capital and power.23

26And here is Bromfield after Tom refuses to live on the capital of his parents and insists on going into the line of business that would be the production and the selling of paint,

His father shook his head with an ironical sigh. ‘Ah, we shall never have a real aristocracy while this plebeian reluctance to live upon a parent or a wife continues the animating spirit of our youth. It strikes at the root of the whole feudal system [. . .] I supposed you wished to marry the girl’s money, and here you are, basely seeking to go into business with her father.’ (62)

27Bromfield’s willingness to bankroll his son Tom with family capital in an economic dynamic of family capitalism in the family universe of this family novel flies in the face of the American values of self-creation and individual responsibility, but for all that his remarks have a surprise value of freshness to them amidst a totemic individual American intent on paying her or his own way ; the law of self-reliance à la Ralph Waldo Emerson, that is to say, which rules the individual American consciousness. Bromfield takes Tom’s attitude as disrespectful and low-class. And in a last mention from chapter five we read, “‘Tom needn’t earn his living,’ said Mrs. Corey [. . .]. ‘That is what I have sometimes urged upon Tom [. . .] he need do nothing as long as he lives [. . .] It appears that he wishes [. . .] to do something for himself. I am afraid that Tom is selfish.’” (89) Tom is much in thrall to the acquisitive mode of being so near and dear to the perhaps straight and narrow American capitalist heart of, and as fictionalized in, the late nineteenth century. That, ‘Tom needn’t earn his living’, if true, shows how much material status the Coreys hold. Bromfield Corey, however, takes issue with Tom’s disposition, and chalks it up to a kind of individual selfishness on Tom’s part.

28So, on now to chapter ten, and to Silas’s intense involvement with the industrial construction of his spectacle-informed new house on the water side of Beacon Street ; vis-à-vis his architect in the foregoing regard, we read that, “His bull-headed pride was concerned in a thing which the architect made him see, and then he believed that he had seen it himself, perhaps conceived it [. . .]. Mrs. Lapham [. . .] took fright at the reckless outlay at last, and refused to let her husband pass a certain limit.” (120) The cardinal individual error of judgment of pride thus rears its ugly head with Silas, and Persis can see through the irrational and even self-congratulatory over-confident thinking that stands behind such irresponsible financial behavior from her spouse. Indeed, the literary critic Kermit Vanderbilt adds too of how Silas “embarks on the great symbolic venture of aspiring Americans with large or modest wealth : building ‘The House’ as a public statement of self-importance and family or social worth.”24 This prodigious power of habitation of course goes hand in glove with a certain ideology of home ownership that is a key pillar in the goal bound American dream and American way of life.

29In a moment that fictionally swings us back to the fiasco with Milton Rogers, Persis quips to Silas, “‘you owned up to him that you were in the wrong, Silas ? ’ ‘No, I didn’t,’ returned the Colonel, promptly ; ‘for I wasn’t. And before we got through, I guess he saw it the same as I did.’” (122) Thus Silas remains incapable of self-critique, or even better, of being his own worst critic in this moment of ostensible bad faith or mauvaise foi. And, in the next chapter number eleven, Tom may be viewed thus in conversation with his father Bromfield, “‘I don’t believe Mrs. Lapham ever gave a dinner.’ ‘And with all that money ! ’ sighed the father. ‘I don’t believe they have the habit of wine at table. I suspect that when they don’t drink tea and coffee with their dinner, they drink ice-water.’” (129) This illustrates how Silas too is not a particularly good raconteur, as will be confirmed at the dinner party. In the same chapter, and in a highly suggestive narrative moment concerning the limited power of money in a spectacle society that might have one believe otherwise : “The time had been when Lapham could not have imagined any worldly splendor which his dollars could not buy if he chose to spend them for it ; but his wife’s half discoveries, taking form again in his ignorance of the world, filled him with helpless misgiving.” (135) In this fictional extract, one gains a glimmer of the real sense of meaning and value that eludes even the grasping grip of modern nineteenth-century money, in the realm of the imaginary that would be à la Niklas Luhmann, the social sub-system of art. Put otherwise, a puzzled Silas is unable to see anything outside of this screen of representation of money in a synthetic society of appearances and of the show.

30That Silas trades his valuable time for money capital may be confirmed when we read in a conversation between Irene and Persis in chapter eleven in which they bemoan the fate of Silas : “‘I think papa works too hard all through the summer. Why don’t you make him take a rest, mamma ? ’ asked Irene. ‘Oh, take a rest ! The man slaves harder every year [. . .] Seems as if the more money he got, the more he wanted to get.’” (139) Here thus Silas can be seen working himself to death in the specific reality and the specific power of capitalist production, a power system that requires great industry from its competitor participants ; moreover, Silas’s desire for money cannot be quenched and so is accordingly a bottomless well.

31In the following explosive social milieu, Silas’s raging ego may be discerned, an egoism clearly piped into him by a money-oriented fictionalized American social system, when in conversation with Persis

‘Oh, that was different,’ said Mrs. Lapham [. . .] ‘I guess, if he cared for her, a fellow in his position wouldn’t be long getting up his courage to speak to Irene.’
Lapham brought his fist down on the table between them.
‘Look here, Persis ! Once for all, now, don’t you ever let me hear you say anything like that again ! I’m worth nigh on to a million, and I’ve made it every cent myself ; and my girls are the equals of anybody, I don’t care who it is.’ (143-44)

32In the foregoing, Silas shows his socialization as one with a volcanic ego in an American society within the imaginary that would be fictional art ; egoistic that is to say is what society teaches him to be, and so what he becomes.

33And here is Persis to the rather hyper-sensitive, when it comes to his social status, Silas, in chapter thirteen, just before the famed dinner-sequence, “I don’t know what we’re going to talk about to those people when we get there [. . .] Oh, I don’t say they’re any better,” [. . .] “You’ve got plenty of money, and you’ve made every cent of it.” (168- 69) The notion that the Laphams are on an equal footing with the Coreys in virtue of the fact of the rule of money illuminates what money obtains, rules and subtends in Howells’s fictionalized post-Civil War American culture. And in another narrative instant, in a pre-dinner debate about sartorial choices and vestmental concerns, “Drops of perspiration gathered on Lapham’s forehead in the anxiety of the debate ; he groaned, and he swore a little in the compromise profanity which he used.” (171) Wow : Silas is nervous ! That the power of fashion should be so overwhelming well illumines another detail in the monad of a Howells-Debord spectacle society based on life as something mediated by images.

34In another signature moment of the American society of the spectacle, here is Persis discoursing to Silas before the big Corey-hosted dinner party event

‘The book says it’s very impolite not to answer a dinner invitation promptly. Well, we’ve done that all right [. . .] but then it says if you’re not going, that it’s the height of rudeness not to let them know at once, so that they can fill your place at the table.’
The colonel was silent for a while. ‘Well, I’m dummed,’ he said finally, ‘if there seems to be any end to this thing. If it was to do over again, I’d say no for all of us.’
‘I’ve wished a hundred times they hadn’t asked us ; but it’s too late to think about that now. (171-72)

35The Laphams are simply caught in the normalizing spectacle of the dinner party, and cannot now get out of it. It is too late. Also, the etiquette book supports the policing of manners. And in predictable pre-dinner bickering between Persis and Silas, Persis declares, “And now you’re so afraid you shall do something wrong before ‘em, you don’t hardly dare to say your life’s your own.” (172) Here Silas seems afraid of his own shadow, and of his spouse’s sartorial capital, even while ensnared in the trap of the all-encompassing spectacle complete with the imaginary police to adjudicate on bad and on good manners at social functions.

36Now, to set the stage for the dinner function, we read in chapter fourteen of the twenty-seven chapter-long novel under view, “The Coreys were one of the few old families who lingered in Bellingham Place [. . .]. The dwellings are stately and tall, and the whole place wears an air of aristocratic seclusion, which Mrs. Corey’s father might well have thought assured when he left her his house there at his death.” (175) Laws of inheritance and of family wealth stand up tall here in this new aristocratic class in America. And perhaps with not inconsiderable disquietudes (witness the young Booth Tarkington above) the empathetic reader reads that “[Silas] perspired with doubt as he climbed the stairs [. . .]” to the intense and to the much awaited dinner party (175) and how in terms of individual conduct Silas “felt himself safe from error if he [. . .] did only what the others did [. . .] but now he did not know just what to do about the glasses at the right side of his plate [. . .] he felt that every one was looking. He let the servant fill them all, and he drank out of each, not to appear odd.” (178) For the careful reader of Howells, this kind of microscopic narrative description resonates well with an easily imaginable ordinary reality predicated on visibility and on looking. For first of all, Silas activates the power of mimesis, then only to show his savoir faire about something of which he had very little know-how if any at all ; this has pathos.

37During the actual party itself, with Silas and with Anna Corey, “Their conversation naturally included his architect across the table [. . .] and at something Seymour said the talk spread suddenly, and the pretty house he was building for Colonel Lapham became the general theme.” (179) The all-important domicile and power of domiciliation thus comes to dominate the monad inflected spectacle of the foregoing conversation, all of which is delineated in a realistic manner. And in a moment of self-faltering failure, or of individual inadequacy, on Silas’s part in regard to conversation, “He felt that he was not holding up his end of the line [. . .] that he was not doing himself justice.” (183-84) In the foregoing, Silas simply is not up to the standard in the spectacle-infested world of small talk.

38As for the post-prandial gathering session, “They brought in cigars with coffee” (186) and poignantly Silas fails to ask for extra water while dinner is being served, and instead unleashes with the following asseveration that is as if a bolt from out of nowhere, “‘Thanks, I will take some of this wine,’ [. . . and presently] He not only could not remember what he was going to say, but he could not recall what they had been talking about. They waited, looking at him, and he stared at them in return. After a while he heard the host saying, ‘Shall we join the ladies ?’” (191) Silas now simply does not even know his own mind, for he has submitted himself to the power of the fruit of the vine, and has in the process become a man somewhat off balance. Just after this episode during the dinner party, Silas communes with himself about his elder daughter

if Penelope had come he knew that she would have done them all credit [. . .] Irene was [. . .] not talking, and Lapham perceived that at a dinner party you ought to talk. [. . .] He made an elaborate acknowledgment to Bromfield Corey of his son’s kindness in suggesting books for his library ; he said that he had ordered them all, and that he meant to have pictures. (191-92)

39That Irene was not discoursing might give us something to think about individual words in and of themselves as consumer articles for exchange in the phenomenal reality of the spectacle of capitalist society ; for Debord and for his Situationist International colleagues, conversational words are cheap and do not count for much ; they are merely more consumer products for commodity exchange value, and are in the main in an over socialized social context, devoid of any real truth content, for they are too intimately bound to representation. Also, that Silas is quick to point out the cultural capital that his library would add to his estate speaks volumes for the simple power (even economic) of cultural texts, including of their mere appearance or visibility ; this is part and parcel then of our monadic constellation of Debord and of Howells.

40A little later in the narrative text we read rather comically of a mildly ridiculous swaggering Silas who engages the local élite thus, “He told Charles Bellingham that he liked him, and assured James Bellingham that it had always been his ambition to know him, and that if any one had said when he first came to Boston that in less than ten years he should be hobnobbing with Jim Bellingham, he should have told that person he lied.” (193) The sycophancy of the sentence I have quoted from Silas is even rather unfortunate. Further than this, in the same chapter fourteen, we observe Silas treat his preacher, the minister Mr. Sewell, condescendingly, and swaggers about again only this time concerning the interdiction he encountered with his desire to give more money than he was permitted to Mrs. Corey

‘Why, when your wife sent to mine last fall,’ he said, turning to Mr. Corey, ‘I drew my check for five hundred dollars, but my wife wouldn’t take more than one hundred [. . .]’.
He started toward the door of the drawing-room to take leave of the ladies ; but [. . .] in obeying the direction [Tom] Corey gave him toward another door he forgot all about his purpose, and came away without saying good-night to his hostess. (193)

41Silas’s propensity to boast inform his ‘want to be status’ in Boston society. And in what surely only exacerbates a sub-standard if not atrocious state of social affairs, Tom hales Silas away, causing the nouveau riche guest to fail to give a proper recognition to his hostess, Anna Corey. This then closes the famed dinner party sequence ; the notorious evening of rather spectacular spectacularization in a Walter Benjamin monad of modernity that would be something like a Guy Debord spectacle.

42As for the mode of reality of a leisured class capitalist individual, we might glean the following understandable social fact six chapters later in chapter twenty of

Bromfield Corey, that he never was much surprised at anything [. . .]. His standpoint [. . .] was that of the sympathetic humorist who would be glad to have the victim of circumstance laugh with him, but was not too much vexed when the victim could not. He laughed now when [Anna Corey], with careful preparation, got the facts of his son’s predicament fully under his eye. (250)

43For it must be remembered that with respect to the deeper material conditions and concerns of life, Bromfield can afford to be so laid back when he still has notable material capital and material power in his coffers from which to draw. In a moment of unflinching and unashamed micro-level social critique of his own life-narrative and chosen way of being, and then too of the conversational politics at the dinner event, we read from Bromfield in dialogue with Anna

‘I say to myself that I might as well have yielded to the pressure all round me, and gone to work, as Tom has.’ [. . .].
‘I assure you, my dear,’ he continued, ‘[. . .] their conversation was terrible. Mrs. Lapham’s range was strictly domestic ; and when the Colonel got me in the library, he poured mineral paint all over me [. . .].’ (emphasis added, 252)

44Bromfield’s posited superior social aplomb is then brought into prominence.

45There is more to mention in this classic text of artistic realism. James Bellingham says to Corey about Silas’s economic status and current true fiscal state of affairs deep in the book in chapter twenty-four, “‘It’s hard to tell just where [Silas] stands. I suspect that a hopeful temperament and fondness for round numbers have always caused him to set his figures beyond his actual worth [. . .] he’s reckoned his wealth on the basis of his capital, and some of his capital is borrowed.’” (282) Here Silas seems to possess a good sum of self-indulgent hopefulness, normal vanity and economic egoism that would go hand in hand with the sort of structures — in an otherwise admirable in many ways can-do-attitude society — which have socialized and ideologized him. In a vital point from chapter twenty-five that was touched on above about Silas’s dearth of friends in his period of significant and of individual need, “Lapham stood in the isolation to which adversity so often seems to bring men [. . .] and he thought with bitter self-contempt of the people whom he had befriended in their time of need.” (300) In the book’s very last chapter, we read that despite it all, and after all, most precisely for it all ,’!) “[Silas] was returning to begin life anew [. . .] to make what he could out of the one chance which his successful rivals had left him.” (330-31) In fine, in this new business and social configuration,

A strange, not ignoble friendship existed between Lapham and the three brothers [his former business rivals. . .]. It was their facilities that had conquered him, not their ill-will [. . .]. He brought to them the flagging energies of an elderly man. He was more broken than he knew by his failure [. . .]. His wife saw in him a daunted look that made her heart ache for him. (331)

46In my judgment, this is immensely moving ; for it is Silas’s capacity to keep his cool and to remain steadfast against all the odds and the social evil with which he has had to experience, to come to terms, and to go beyond, through his own self-surmounting, which make him admirable as an agent of enlightenment.

47Now, as for the book’s future-oriented couple of Penelope and Tom, the latter of whom must go on to Mexico to be part of Silas’s still existing if diminished business enterprise in the industrial world of paint, they constitute the other side of the unthought and so still to be invented part of the book. As for Silas’s own self-critique and self-reflectiveness, about his individual shortcomings, “he owned that he had made mistakes [. . .]. But [. . .] every dollar, every cent had gone to pay his debts ; he had come out with clean hands [. . .].” (338) This kind of virtuous capacity to pay his bills then shows the age-old capitalist adage that the good man is the man who can pay his bills, who can be solvent, and perhaps even more today, can tip a tidy sum, to boot. And last not least, the minister Sewell and his spouse spend the night at the Laphams, and the reader learns detailedly in a dialogue between Silas and the preacher that

[t]he Laphams now burned kerosene [. . .] and they had no furnace in the winter [. . .].
[. . .] ‘And do you ever have any regrets ? [Sewell] delicately inquired [. . .].
‘About what I done ? Well, it don’t always seem as if I done it,’ replied Lapham. ‘Seems sometimes as if it was a hole opened for me, and I crept out of it. I don’t know,’ he added thoughtfully, biting the corner of his stiff mustache — ‘I don’t know as I should always say it paid ; but if I done it, and the thing was to do over again, right in the same way, I guess I should have to do it.’ (339-41)

48In the above, it is Silas’s power of resistance to sell his company to the English business men that would have netted him a tidy sum of money capital to save everything that I propose constitutes the turning point of the book that saves his individual soul, his very individualized kind of being, over against a more egocentric and fashionable one to which he very nearly capitulated and succumbed ; instead, he found a way out of his difficult predicament. Interestingly, that Silas even imagines that he did not commit the problematic act against Rogers himself per se would be ripe for a Luhmann-style social systems approach. Yet that it was a kind of vocational avarice that got the better of Silas would too be open here to another diagnostic, be it Luhmannian, ideological-Marxian-materialist, psychoanalytic, or otherwise.

49In the final accounting, the critic Vanderbilt frames for us what Howells said himself during compositional work on his novel of now classic worth,

In the summer of 1884, [Howells] was writing Silas Lapham in the comfort of his new home in Back Bay, but meditating to his father on ‘how unequally things are divided in this world.’ Because his privileged neighbors (and his own family) had escaped Boston in August, spacious dwellings were standing empty all along Beacon Street. Howells was keenly aware that thousands of urban poor in other neighborhoods were stifling in their wretched quarters [. . .] ‘I wonder,’ he continued, ‘that men are so patient with society as they are.’25

50Here Howells gets it ; he understands the thorny problems and preposterous powers of exploitation and class greed that he observes all around him, and that others somehow or other to his amazement tolerate, perhaps out of fear or indifference to the brutal fact.

51Vanderbilt contextualizes even further for us here in our post-walking-through-the-novel, critical discussion

Howells merges the cult of self-help and success with the popular traditions of American pastoralism [. . .]. Here the virtuous country boy [. . .] confronts the greater opportunities and moral temptations of urban life [. . .]. He emerges scarred but essentially triumphant, and returns to the pastoral landscape of Vermont [. . .]. Although Silas’s final action is closer to retreat than pastoral compromise between old and new, Howells resolves the country-city oppositions in the marriage of Penelope and Tom.26

52This all seems cogent and sound for our thesis argued here about the trials and tribulations of the spectacle society. And quite vitally for Vanderbilt, Howells “also acquaints us in Silas Lapham with the activity and psychology of big business in the modern city [. . .] it may [. . .] be the best we have in our fiction, particularly when Lapham’s business ethics are fully assessed.”27 From my perspective, this is probably true, at least as far as canonical works in U.S. literature go, and moreover Howells’s book offers an indictment of business ethics in a socio-economic reality infested with various individual self-referential egoisms. As for Silas’s individual fate, Vanderbilt notes,

Despite his speculative losses, business setbacks, and uninsured new house burned to the ground, he refuses to engage in perfectly legal charades to acquire vital money from the unwary. And so [. . .] [w]hat follows is bankruptcy (though he later pays all his creditors ‘every dollar, every cent’). Unable to allow his business transactions and private ethics to reside in tidy, separate compartments, Silas at last can only fail in the commercial climate of America.28

53This does not speak well to ‘the commercial climate’ of the United States, of course, nor does it to Western materialism, but then Howells himself never was easy on the brutality of the power of money in the socioeconomic capitalist system. Finally, Vanderbilt argues persuasively and compellingly that, “Through the motifs of chance, will, luck, and fate, Howells weaves a pattern of deterministic irony that lightly mocks Silas’s proud individualism throughout the novel.”29 This is a wonderful kind of inversion of things in the world of the novel, so that the reader may discern Silas’s own comportment very much counterpointed by deeper subterranean structures that show how his run of good luck might only naturally if not statistically turn to a run of bad luck : and so it does in truth of fact.

54More exactly, it is the basic material fact of being caught in the meshes of the net of late capital with which Silas must deal, something that also offers a textual example of what the Situationist-critic Thomas Levin communicates about Guy Debord : “Debord’s rhetorical employment of the notion of spectacles qua images or representation to concretize his reading of ‘spectacle’ as the allegory of late capital.”30 In a similar vein, we should also roll out the literary scholar Daniel T. O’Hara, who writes about the servitude of the spectacle and of representation via life under visibility and appearance in Howells’s novel :

Lapham agrees to let his young West Virginia rivals in the paint business buy him out on two conditions ; that he keep control of [. . .] the Persis brand [. . .] and that Corey be taken into their newly expanded business as a partner [. . .] the marginal utopian venture of the English aristocrats that causes Lapham so much moral anguish and enables his rise in moral stature, is also intricately intertwined [. . .] with the torturous schemes of various entrepreneurs [. . .]. Experience in the novel is wholly conditioned by the imperialist economic order that is necessarily defined by the growing rationalization of the world and consequent diminishment of the sense of the infinite [. . .].
By sense of the infinite I mean what Kant in The Critique of Judgement analyzes as the sublime [. . .]. A sublime aesthetic, therefore, necessarily depends upon texts of self-transcending images, upon an imagination that is radically and intentionally at odds with itself. And in a world where the experience of the sublime is increasingly rationalized out of existence, just as [Walter Benn] Michaels rationalized away the sublimely conflicted nature of Howells’s novel, the only place where the ascetic spirit can practice and realize the sublime imagination is such self-opposing texts, which are the sites for our modern self-opposing culture to reveal itself.31

55O’Hara indeed takes Michaels to task here, not without reason for diminishing the complexity of Howells’s achievement, and continues

Foucault in ‘What is Enlightenment ?’ provides a useful gloss on what I am reaching for. He focuses there on Kant and Baudelaire as defining figures of our ‘modernity,’ which he finds necessarily entails an ‘ironic heroicization of the present’ involving an ‘ascetic elaboration of the self’ in the ‘different place’ of art [. . .]. The Rise of Silas Lapham would be the place where the emerging culture of speculative capitalism suffers an ascesis in the exemplary fate of its hero as sublimely embodied by this self-opposing text. An immanent critique, a negative transcendence, enacts itself here in an ascetic transgression of the aesthetic limits of a novel that condemns itself as sublimely as its finally antiheroic hero does himself [. . .].32

56I have quoted this at length in order to convey that it would then be the signal accomplishment of Silas Lapham to have embodied one such way of being in a self-referential world, and so a certain kind of monad, under the thumb of the power of the spectacle ; as such he would be a splendid example of a very human, yet prevailing spirit within it, who by living, and at one juncture, even embracing the conflict of the spectacle, is able to get beyond it. A totally opposite mode of being to his prior one more deeply embedded in the spectacle concentrates the reader’s attention on the very picture of an individual life story able to metamorphose and so to grow in form and in spirit. A certain understanding of a primal reality that is essentially rich beneath the society of the spectacle then would be endorsed. Yet that Silas’s opponents may well be the status quo structures that would be for Luhmann, communications themselves, is what should give the reader something to think. Also, it should be considered that how Silas manages to overcome pleonexy (greed) and his preoccupation with being à la mode combine to make him a prize example of what is most deserving of our focus of attention, and of future research, in a worldwide society of the spectacle.

57In the final tally, whether The Rise of Silas Lapham could be said to instance a Benjaminian place or topography of historical ‘remembrance’ or ‘true universal history’, what I cited earlier as a “messianic history of delivered humanity [that] will burn like an ‘eternal lamp’ that includes the totality of the past in an immense apokatastasis” is of course not for the present writer, but instead is for the individual reader, to decide ; so too would be the notion that Howells’s 1885- tome constitutes, to borrow the words of Löwy, a Benjaminian monad, a “crystallized ensemble of tensions that contains a historical totality [. . .] wrested from the homogeneous course of history, [which] preserved and gathered the whole of [Howells’s] work, in that work the [American] nineteenth century, and, in this latter, the ‘entire course of history’” ; nevertheless, it is the basic contention here that it indeed can as most precisely a Benjamin-like monad replete with Jetztzeit, which is again just to remind the reader from what I already quoted above : ‘all the messianic moments of the past, the whole tradition of the oppressed is concentrated, as a redemptive power, in the present moment, the moment of the historian — or of the revolutionary.’

58The articulation of the above cultural fact accords too by a principle of analogy with how Howells fell out of critical favor in the first half of the twentieth century for a time (and so was ‘oppressed’) and is now back on the critical radar screen as a source of academic and aesthetic, if not redemptive force. Further, the present study hopes to contribute to that current state of research in regard to the generality of the situation of Howells-reception, so as thereby to give audience to the main comic-tragic events of the Luhmann-like system of Silas’s individual life-narrative, a happening as the plot of a human life that ultimately services a certain kind of evolutionarily autopoietic self-referential system of the individual as once again to be clear Luhmann’s systems theory would give us to think ; the text of Silas’s life process also embodies a spiritual accomplishment within the web-work of co-appearances that is, more and more today even than in Howells’s own time, a spectacularized neo-Walter Benjamian monad of modernity, our very time of collective belonging today amidst the regularized chaos of the spectacle as theorized by Guy Debord.