Abstract
In B. Traven’s short story, “Assembly Line” (1928), an entrepreneur from New York “tempts” an indigenous basket-maker with the possibility of earning a large sum by expanding the number of baskets he makes. Those scenes parallel closely the temptation narrative of Jesus in Matthew 4, resulting in a similar rebuff of the devil’s clever arguments by the “naïve” native to the temptation of wealth that the entrepreneur/capitalist cannot refute. Traven was very sympathetic to the Jesus of the Gospel. This chapter examines the connection between Traven’s native and Jesus—the idea that capitalism inevitably leads to a “greed” factor. It also shows an intellectual link with the temptation “genre” as presented in the Faust legend, both Goethe’s Faust and Marlowe’s Faustus. Traven’s insights about the harmful influence of capitalist economics and consumerism on all people, but especially on indigenous peoples and cultures, still stand today, revealing how prescient he was about society’s temptation to see money as power, even “magical” in its purported ability to transform us all.
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Grasso C.S.C., A.R. (2017). Money as the Devil in B. Traven’s “Assembly Line,” and Its Sources in Scripture, the Faust Legend, and New England Puritanism. In: Thuswaldner, G., Russ, D. (eds) The Hermeneutics of Hell. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-52198-5_10
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