Surety and fidelity bond insurance was a relatively small branch of the rapidly growing corporate insurance industry when Wallace Stevens was hired by the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company in 1916, but between the wars, it grew exponentially. Insurance had a long history dating from the ancient world and the widespread use of suretyship, bonds guaranteeing the exercise of contracts, had a history dating back at least to the Renaissance. But in the early twentieth century, insurance became a crucial financial instrument of advanced capitalism, and various forms of insurance became compulsory and touched almost everyone.
By the beginning of the twentieth century, insurance was everywhere. It became a common plot device in hard-boiled fiction and then in its Hollywood film noir adaptations. Such works as Double Indemnityand The Postman Always Rings Twiceby James M. Cain and Ernest Hemingway’s The Killerswere celebrated in fiction and film. The pervasiveness of insurance brought with it a distinct world view, and not simply a nagging sense of risk and loss. This MLA special session will examine how the zeitgeist produced by the world of insurance and twentieth-century capitalism shaped modernism and three of its key figures: Wallace Stevens, Franz Kafka, and Charles Ives, each an insurance executive.
Among his numerous books on Kafka, Stanley Corngold coedited the volume of Franz Kafka’s writings as an insurance lawyer, Franz Kafka: The Office Writings. Kafka was an insurance lawyer, first for the Assicurazioni Generaliin Italy, and then more significantly in Prague as a lawyer for the Workmen’s Accident Insurance Institute for the Royal Imperial Kingdom of Austria-Hungary. Kafka proved himself an astute legal mind specializing in the indemnification of industrial firms against claims for industrial accidents. Corngold’s paper, entitled “Franz Kafka and the Poetry of Risk Insurance,” explores how his daily work in the law and his experience with industrial accidents brought the logic of risk insurance into literary practice. Kafka’s stories allude broadly to many aspects of his culture, but with an astonishing economy of form. This work of allusion through the cultural vehicles of his time, conforms to several logics. One such logic, according to Corngold, comes from Kafka’s preoccupation with the problems associated not only with the disfiguring effects of machine accidents, but also to the modernist problems of trust and truth. Accident insurance was a data driven industry. Industrial actuarial tables were compiled in a world in which people, as Kafka frequently noted, consistently lie and consistently hide the truth.
Charles Ives was an avant-garde composer whose music was characterized by a mosaic of American motifs that moved from sonorities to dissonances, from the melodic and familiar to polytonality and atonality. His originality and compositional genius is now almost universally celebrated. Ives also wrote fiction, while he was a full-time insurance executive for the firm of Ives & Myrick. Tyler Babbie, who teaches at the University of Washington, and his student, Peter Tracy, show how Ives’s role in the insurance industry influenced his artistic production, both musically and in his brief forays into fiction. If insurance created a world view which undermined the stability of the self and functioned to undermine social relationships, it also become an important vehicle for its employees to move into the middle class and to protect the families of its consumers from a variety of risks. Ives was very much an optimist about the role of insurance and saw insurance as an important part of his utopian vision. Babbie and Tracy argue that Ives was not scared of the masses, the “majority,” as he termed it, and saw insurance as a way to distribute wealth and protect families. His music is similarly all-encompassing, drawing from many popular forms and recombining them in distributive forms. Babbie and Merrick argue that W.E.B. Du Bois’s magazine, The Crisis, shared Ives’s optimism about the power of insurance to strengthen communities. The interplay between advertisement and editorial in Du Bois’s publication are in harmony with Ives’ optimism. In pieces such as “The Masses,” Ives embraces all strata of society.
Richard Aberle, who teaches at the SUNY Plattsburgh, focuses on how Wallace Stevens’s role as a surety lawyer underlies his poetic enterprise. Few modernist poets were as consumed with the idea of a self as was Stevens. The terms “self” and “selves” appear over and over in a poet noted for his explorations of interiority. The world of surety and fidelity bonds relies on the belief that individual selves may not be what they appear to be, that they are unstable and pose consistent risks. Opacity, mutability, and instability characterize the self and constitute a risk from which we need indemnification. Insurance further complicates human relationships by acting in the interest of clients when soliciting policies while simultaneously assuming a potentially antagonistic role when settling claims. As a lawyer, Stevens well understood the rhetorical demands of the lawyer as “advocate”—i.e., one who literally speaks for someone else. Truth, in an adversarial system, is always perspectival. “Metaphors of a Magnifico” and “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” are only the most obvious examples of Stevens’s exploration of situatedness in a world that demands “facts,” but in which facts are part of a world of competing interests and competing points of view.