Money As We Knew It?
Lost gestures
What is all this supposed to mean? I believe it is a piece of the historical past of the money experience as well as of individual memory residue, focused in the burning-glass of an unbridled comic imagination. Scrooge [McDuck’s] money-gestures—to some extent those of all Duckburg’s inhabitants—preserve patterns of behaviour from times of old (biting the suspect coin to find out whether it is counterfeit) as well as a rich repertoire of childhood experiences. Scrooge’s privileged Super-Coin—the legendary lucky ‘first dime’—is something like a congealed memory of the incomprehensible attraction that money may have for a child who is not yet familiar with it. The dime is the central cult object in Scrooge’s collection, and its magical powers are highlighted by the unending interest that the witch Magica De Spell takes in it. These powers, though, accrue to it precisely because it is otherwise nondescript; other exhibits singled out as ‘my first dollar’ or ‘my first million’ do not possess them. A passage from ‘Tales of Our Schooldays’ by Machado de Assis may shed some light on this magic spell:
Carefully, he produced [the silver coin] and showed it to me from a distance. It was a coin from the days of the King, probably twelve vintens or two tostoes, I don’t remember exactly; however, it was a coin, and such a coin that my heart began to pound wildly . . . I wanted to keep it at home, telling my mother I had found it in the street. I was feeling it all over so it wouldn’t get lost, rubbing my fingers over its embossed surface, almost reading its inscription by touch alone, and had the burning desire to peer at it. [19]
It seems that in the counter, parallel, ideal and delusionary world of Duckburg all manner of sensuous everyday gestures and childhood myths congregate under the rubric of ‘money’. These are, of course, linked to the fairy-tale figure of Uncle Scrooge, but along with his unimaginable wealth, there is also the conspicuous other end of the spectrum of financial existence: Donald’s eternally precarious lack of means (‘Uncle Donald, have you got any rare coins?’—‘Kids, any coins I get are rare coins!’ [20]). Abundance and scarcity are experienced at close range in these stories. Money hurtles around people’s ears, rolls away down steep slopes, rains down from the sky, disappears down a drain, is hidden and found, freezes and melts. The brazen jingle of money on the counter, the glinting coin abducted by a bird or flattened by a steamroller (like the pennies of one’s childhood, illicitly planted on tram lines), the legend of the rare mis-struck piece, the dime swallowed by a small child, the banknote gnawed by a rat—we are in a world where our experience of money is extremely haptic and attracts all kinds of rumours and legends. Fine in its naive affectivity is the way the Duck family, after a stroke of luck or a successful coup, tends to kiss the coin or the banknote so easily and unexpectedly come by, or acquired through hard work (plump little red hearts fly all around this touch of the lips). In such enthusiastic appropriation, the elated possessor reacts not so much to cash value, as to the sum of his adventure with this singular piece of money—a quite particular unit of currency.
