Chapter Summary and Narrative Analysis
Chapter 46 is a very short chapter, which unfolds in the repeated form of a short narration from the first person perspective of a inanimate object, concept, or structure. In the case of this chapter, the narrator is the market. It details, in almost entirely metaphorical terms, its growth from small, informal, and prehistoric markets into the current state of the world market. The primary metaphor used to describe this growth is that of a body, which depicts the processes and expansion of the market as bodily functions such as digestion and blood circulation.
This chapter is placed at a very specific point in the novel. By itself, it does nothing to further the plot or development that TMFtF is depicting about the hypothetical future. However, its position in the novel contributes to the overall project Robinson is enacting. The chapter directly before it, chapter 45, describes Mary's failed attempt to get the heads of central financial institutions and the Federal Reserve to adopt the carbon coin. Other chapters provide us more information about the development, or perhaps de-development, of the market, with Crash Day in chapter 51, the expansion of worker co-ops like Mondragon in chapter 58, and the transition to decentralized financial co-ops like YourLock in sync with a climactic global depression in chapter 60. Much of the transition that Robinson envisions involves a variety of small and large changes within and to the market itself, as people begin to grapple with the negative effects on the climate, at least in its current form. This chapter takes a look at the market, providing the reader with some level of analysis of its primary societal functions, but through an easily digestible metaphor. Thus, it supports the broader narrative focus that TMFtF places on markets and market functions.
46
I was born small, as so many things are. A marsupial perhaps. People came to me and reached inside me to pass things to each other. I helped them do that. When I was young I had no blood, and people moving things around inside me had to do it by feel. They had to decide by feel alone which things were equally useful to them. And so few things are equally useful. Indeed only two identical things are equally useful; two hearts, two livers, two drops of blood. So in people's attempts to pass things around, there was friction. It was time-consuming and unsatisfactory. People would sometimes say "all things being equal," but this was never the case, so I was judged to have a difficult and unsatisfactory body, until my blood finally came into me, and stomach acids. All the fluids of metamorphosis, of life. Then things dropped into me could be digested and moved elsewhere in my body to do something else.
My stomach made disparate things the same by way of digestion into blood. This made food of all the things brought into me, and I quickly grew. I am an omnivore. And as I grew I ate more and more.
Every thing fed to me made other things. I digested things and turned them to blood, which moved around in me and helped to reconstitute some other thing of use; bone, or muscle, or some vital organ. Helping in this process were my mouth, esophagus, intestine, arteries, and veins, all of which grew with me, making a whole body out of which new things also useful could grow, things people wanted. I grew and grew and grew.
In this process, as in any body, there were useless residues not taken up in the new process, which left me in the usual ways. Thus sweat, urine, shit, tears.
My body worked so well that eventually all things everywhere were swallowed and digested by me. I grew so large that I ate the world, and all the blood in the world is mine. What am I? You know, even though you are like everything else, and see me from the inside. I am the market.
"A marsupial perhaps."
https://www.britannica.com/animal/marsupial
Marsupials are a class of mammals which birth underdeveloped young and have to nurture them in pouches. For example, kangaroos and possums are both marsupials. Perhaps humanity was the parent and caretaker of this marsupial-like market in its infancy. It seems now that the role has swapped, and humanity sits entirely within the market, something this chapter acknowledges by the end.
"...until blood came into me, and stomach acids"
Bodily fluids seem to be the metaphor for money in this chapter. The primary function of money in this analogy is a kind of biological function, in which the materials of life (commodities) are transformed into a fluid and flexible medium of exchange. Marx theorized this kind of function in Capital, proposing a "general formula of capital" (Marx #). This formulas were C-M-C and its inverse M-C-M where C stood for commodities and M stood for money. In Marx's description, the motion of capitalist society followed this path, where money was transformed into commodities and commodities were subsequently turned back into more money.
"...people moving things around inside me had to do it by feel..."
The first paragraph of this chapter describes much of the existence of early markets. This chapter seems to be appealing to some kind of depiction of pre-money systems of barter and exchange. There exists a broad cultural image of barter economies that were full of friction and difficulty because of the lack of money to facilitate exchange. However, this idea of a barter economy is almost entirely a myth, and has been perpetuated by economists for decades, much to the annoyance of Anthropologists, who have insisted for years that no society organized around barter ever existed. As Caroline Humphrey, anthropologist at Cambridge, succinctly writes, "no example of a barter economy, pure and simple, has ever been described, let alone the emergence from it of money; all available ethnography suggests that there never has been such a thing" (Humphrey 48). As Anthropologist David Graeber notes, however, while barter is "almost never employed...between fellow villagers" it was sometimes engaged in "between strangers, even enemies" (Graeber 29). Perhaps this small scale inter-group barter is what Robinson is referencing in this chapter.
"eventually all things everywhere were swallowed and digested by me"
Attached below is a map of global shipping routes.
The bodily metaphor Robinson is employing makes mention to mouths, esophaguses, bones, arteries, etc. One could see shipping routes as the primary arteries of the world, transporting the materials of life around the world. Perhaps, though, it reveals the limits of this analogy. Much of that which is transported, both raw and produced goods, are products of exploitation in countries like the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Well functioning bodies generally do not condemn certain parts of the body to death or subjugation. Unless, perhaps, there is a cancer which is maliciously affecting the distribution of the materials of life.
Works Cited