Prophetic Time and the End of Capitalism in Iain Pears's Stone's Fall

ABSTRACT

This essay sets out to examine the connection between capitalism and ideas about time, focusing on Iain Pears's novel Stone's Fall (2009). Capitalism, with its endless promises of future returns, tends to deploy a model of time oriented around progress toward the future. Pears's narrative, by contrast, subverts this by reversing the timeline, each section of the novel a step backwards in time. The first section of the paper examines how other critics, from Walter Benjamin to Mary Poovey, have used similar reversals to undertake critical genealogies of capitalism's emergence. The second section shows how fiction and finance intersect in the credit economy, blending ethics and economies to train subjects who are, in Nietzsche's words, capable of making promises about the future. The essay closes by looking at the notion of prophetic time, which disrupts the capitalist paradigm through the unexpected return of ancient tragedy in the modern novel.

KEYWORDS:

• Iain Pears
• Stone’s Fall
• capitalism
• time
• prophecy
• Walter Benjamin

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Fisher, Capitalist Realism, 2.

2 Pears, Stone's Fall, 37.

3 Ibid., 35.

4 Ibid., 34.

5 Comyn Political Economy, 3.

6 Poovey, A History of the Modern Fact, 17.

7 Ibid., 19.

8 Poovey, Genres of the Credit Economy, 45–6.

9 Ibid., 155.

10 Ibid., 137.

11 Ibid., 138.

12 Pears, Stone's Fall, 502.

13 Stendhal, Love, 66.

14 Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, 57.

15 Ibid., 92.

16 Pears, Stone's Fall, 151.

17 Ibid., 58.

18 Ibid., 422.

19 Wilby, Cunning Folk, 15.

20 Pears, Stone's Fall, 22.

21 Ibid., 22.

22 Ibid., 14.

23 Ibid., 113.

24 Ibid., 48.

25 Ibid., 94.

26 Armstrong, How Novels Think, 6.

27 Pears, Stone's Fall, 384.

28 Ibid., 384.

29 Ibid., 386.

30 Ibid., 379.

31 Ibid., 381.

32 James, French Poets, 91.

33 Pears, Stone's Fall, 277.

34 Ibid., 344.

35 Ibid., 344–5.

36 Ibid., 300.

37 Ibid., 93.

38 Ibid., 512.

39 Ibid., 512.

40 Ibid., 513.

41 Ibid., 566.

42 Ibid., 24.

43 Ibid., 24.

44 Ibid., 427.

45 Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, 33.

46 Pears, Stone's Fall, 267.

47 Ibid., 168.

48 Ibid., 170.

49 Ibid., 24.

50 Pears, The Portrait, 8.

51 Blanchot, The Book to Come, 79.

52 Pears, Stone's Fall, 285.

53 Ibid., 12.

54 Ibid., 446.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the research fund of Hanyang University (HY-2019).