Trusts, Trust, and Trust: Hernan Diaz’s Liberal Pedagogy

Abstract

This article reads Hernan Diaz’s Trust as a contemporary commentary on, and reimagining of, literature’s entanglements with capitalism, liberalism, finance, and law. Beginning with an outline of the history of legal and corporate trusts and connecting that history to the rise of the modern novel, the article spotlights the complex role played by the notion of trust in Diaz’s metafictional text. Trust tells the story of a Wall Street financier, his philanthropist wife, and the ghostwriter of his memoir through a four-part structure, moving from a realist novel called Bonds through two memoirs and ending with a diary titled Futures. This structure serves the aim, reaffirmed in Diaz’s interviews, of teaching his novel’s reader about the ideological implications of literary forms and about the kinds of power—financial and patriarchal—involved in turning reality into fiction. The article explores Trust’s revision of these forms and the ways in which its aesthetics forge an alignment among modernism, feminism, and financial expertise. Reflecting on the novel’s metacommentary on its own values and operations, the article concludes by asking whether Trust’s liberal pedagogy offers a persuasive alternative to the narrative forms it sets out to critique.With its carefully wrought aesthetic architecture . . . Trust confidently insists on its own autonomy from complicity, reaffirming the liberal idea that art symbolizes, and exists in, a realm outside the market.