The Gold Standard and Literature: Money and Language in the Work of Jean-Joseph Goux

Abstract

It has been commonplace for critics to read André Gide’s 1925 novel Les Faux-Monnayeurs (The Counterfeiters), as being concerned with the theme of sincerity. Yet, as the novel’s very title suggests, this is also a novel preoccupied with something like the opposite of the sincere, that is, with the insincere, the inauthentic and the fake. Indeed, in a certain sense, the title of Gide’s novel is itself fraudulent. For only a handful of the novel’s three hundred or so pages are directly concerned with the matter of counterfeit money. Moreover, the actual sub-plot concerning the passing of fake gold coins by schoolboys is somewhat tangential to the main thread of the novel. Since Les Faux-Monnayeurs is a novel about a novelist, Edouard, who is himself writing a novel called Les Faux-Monnayeurs, it is perhaps not surprising that the forgers are at one step remove from the narrative. Yet it is possible to argue that whilst the real counterfeiters and actual counterfeit money are somewhat marginal within Gide’s narrative, counterfeit money remains symbolically central to the novel. Indeed this is very much the argument of the French critic and philosopher Jean-Joseph Goux in his influential reading of Gide’s novel Les Monnayeurs du Langage (The Coiners of Language).