Precarious Core

Abstract

In this chapter I analyse the impact of economic informality on novels from the core of the world-system. In doing so I advance two related arguments: that economic informality has been a structural feature of core economies at various points across the longue durée and that more recent representations of economic informality evince the same deferral of the cost of the reproduction of labour to families and communities that we observed in the (semi-)periphery. I analyse briefly Oliver Goldsmith’s 1766 novel The Vicar of Wakefield, arguing that the novel is manifestly a liberal satire (at a time when these ideas were only just becoming prominent) on the inflexibility and dogmatism of a rural vicar even as the formal structure of the plot depends—for its closure—upon informal economic relations between an emergent bourgeois class and the English aristocracy upon whom their social reproduction still depends. It would be false to claim that modernity produced in England is nothing but a comprador elite, but even in this core region we can observe forms of economic informality mediating particularly sharp class disparities (often refracted through race) in fiction throughout the longue durée. Next, then, I turn to Sandra Vasconcelos’s startling reading of Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891), which transposes Cândido’s dialectic of order and disorder into the English context, thereby demonstrating the role of economic informality in peripheral modernisation in nineteenth-century England. Finally I analyse the retrenchment of informality and dependency in fiction from neoliberal Britain and the United States. So extreme has been the deferral of reproductive labour to the family unit and feminised people under austerity that the cultural features observed in (semi-)peripheral fiction have recently been observed in more broadly liberal and conventional cultural production such as Sharon Horgan and Holly Walsh’s Motherland (2016). While Madeline St John’s The Essence of the Thing (1997) is preoccupied with the breakdown of the clean and safe heterosexual family while strategically repressing the forms of informality and precarity that attend this social process, texts such as Brian Chikwava’s Harare North (2014) and Hilary Leichter’s Temporary (2020) attempt to represent the rise of economic informality through irrealist aesthetics.