Accounting for value in "The Business Man"

Studies in American Fiction, Spring, 2007 by Elizabeth Duquette

Mind Your Business.--Motto on 1787 U.S. cent, Benjamin Franklin

At the beginning of "Metzengerstein" (1832), Edgar Allan Poe's first published tale, a young Baron inherits his "vast possessions":

   Such estates were seldom held before by a nobleman of Hungary.
   His castles were without number. The chief in point of splendor
   and extent was the "Palace Metzengerstein." The boundary line
   of his dominions was never clearly defined; but his principal park
   embraced a circuit of fifty miles. (1)

The passage points to the young nobleman's wealth and power, but what does it mean to say that "his castles were without number"? How many castles must one have for them to be beyond counting, without specifiable numerical value? If it is impossible to count the castles, it is equally impossible to define "clearly" the extent of his holdings; in a tale about the "doctrines of the Metempsychosis" and the permeability of psychic boundaries, the inability to establish material borders troubles not only the possibility of personal possessions, but of self-possession as well (672). As the story continues, narrating the Baron's fate and depicting various gothic horrors, the question of counting is dropped--for this tale at least.

Indeed, examinations into the meaning of numbers and their operations recur throughout Poe's career. Although Pym consistently includes latitude and longitude for the journey southward in The Narrative of A. Gordon Pym (1838), a footnote to the text warns the reader about the numbers' accuracy: "I would also remark, in this place, that I cannot, in the first portion of what is here written, pretend to strict accuracy in respect to dates, or latitudes and longitudes, having kept no regular journal until after the period of which this first portion treats" (848). In both "The Cask of Amontillado" (1846) and "The Thousand-and-Second Tale of Scheherazade" (1845), it is a finally intolerable quantity--one too many insults or bedtime tales--that results in gruesome death. And the late cosmological essay and prose poem Eureka (1848) proposes that "it is folly to attempt comprehending" the numerical values attached to distances between planets:

   I have stated that Neptune, the planet farthest from the Sun,
   revolves around him at a distance of 28 hundred millions of miles.
   ... I have stated a mathematical fact; and, without comprehending
   it in the least, we may put it to use--mathematically. But in
   mentioning, even, that the Moon revolves around the Earth at the
   comparatively trifling distance of 237,000 miles, I entertained no
   expectation of giving any one to understand--to know--to feel--how
   far from the Earth the Moon actually is. (2)

A thorough, visceral comprehension of what 237,000 miles actually means is nothing short of futile, especially given the further fact that it is unlikely that "the man lives who can force into his brain the most remote conception of the interval between one milestone and its next neighbor upon the turnpike." (3) We assume numerical facts are useful and manipulate them computationally, but Poe is clear that use and comprehension are every bit as far apart as a distance of 237,000 miles. What his writings repeatedly suggest is that where numbers are concerned, fact and fiction might be indistinguishable, even if references to numbers and mathematical operations generate a contrary effect. (4)

These concerns are central to one of Poe's lesser-known works, a satire from the early 1840s entitled "The Business Man." In this tale, the narrator, Peter Proffit, recites a rags-to-riches story that celebrates the value of method in achieving financial success. (5) Although the tale's emphasis on method builds on issues raised in the masterful Dupin trilogy, the focus of this article is the tale's critique of American-style moral economy, an undertaking that is enabled by Poe's ongoing exploration of numerical meaning and that takes aim at the assumption that there is a moral currency in which we trade. (6) Thus "The Business Man" asks us to account for why certain narratives count or have especial worth in the construction of cultural values and moral norms; with any "idea of a criterion," Stanley Cavell observes, the issue is raised about how it is that we "[count] something as something." (7) Delving into the nature of the thing, Poe challenges assumptions about value, calculation, and the belief that time and selves can be divvied up into discrete units with fixed costs. Peter Proffit's first-person narrative, which has been insightfully likened to Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography, replicates--and skewers--the efficacy of the exemplary moral narrative by asking what criteria should be used in shaping our examples, models, or norms. As the narrator's name suggests, the punning conflation of profit and prophet necessarily raises doubt about the value of the message being delivered and who, precisely, reaps its rewards. The tale's emphasis on accounting ("telling as numbering or computing") contains, that is to say, an exploration of the premises of recounting ("telling as relating or narrating"); on Poe's view, the stories we value as purveyors of truths, particularly those that recount moral accounts, are predicated on beliefs about value that rely on the effect of moral clarity and epistemological certainty. (8) The special problem of "The Business Man" is that what counts as parody and what counts as normal are so intertwined that discriminating between the two is difficult, a problem that is precisely the point of the satire. (9)