Accounting for value in "The Business Man"

Studies in American Fiction, Spring, 2007 by Elizabeth Duquette

Complicating matters further, the total of the charges listed is wrong: it should be $2 95 1/2, not $2 96 1/2. Although contemporary editors often correct the error, it is present in both the 1840 and the 1845 editions of the tale; that Poe makes minor changes to the invoice but does not correct the computational mistake suggests that the numbers do not figure properly because Poe's numbers here, as elsewhere in the tales and his own record-keeping, generate only the effect of accuracy. (15) The arbitrariness of the numerical value attached to the activities forces a reflection upon the nature of exchange and the status of money (or its invisibility, if July 12 is any indication). Is the value of an action any more or less arbitrary than the 25 cents Proffit charges for "do do do"? The temperature, 706 in the shade, is surely nonsensical according to any actual system of measurement but adequately captures the sense of what it is to be absurdly hot; is it possible that numbers are available for metaphorical reading or does such a use make them unreadable? Is this temperature an example of being overheated or, to borrow an idiom from "Metzengerstein," a heat "without number"? The sundry lies, implicit (the extreme temperature of Aug. 15) and explicit (July 12 and 13), contribute to the confusion. Poe's complicated joke relies on various homophonies, the repetitive rhyming of to and do, the reader's supposed familiarity with average businesses and their basic practices, the obviousness of the manner in which the invoice is presented, and the nonsense it depicts. All these contribute to this satire of American business culture, a satire that seemingly includes a jab at people who think accounting can either justify courses of action or make possible accurate judgments concerning character and commerce.

In a culture of this sort, then, one might even read the invoice as a poem, or as indistinguishable from a poem. This is a point that becomes clear, I believe, when considering Poe's proposal for a new method of scanning the poetic line. In the 1848 essay "The Rationale of Verse," Poe lays out a numerical system for measuring "the exact relative value of every syllable employed in Verse," extolling the "simplicity" of this mode of reckoning and the "time, labor, and ink saved." (16) A numerical charting of relations of stress and value would improve upon the standard graphic marks, Poe demonstrates with reference to some lines from Christopher Pearse Cranch, because they would come closer to conveying specific and accurate information about the relationships between language and time that is the basis of poetry:

                                         3/2
Many are the | thoughts that | come to | me
   6  6  6                      2       2
In my | lonely | musing, |
   2        2     2                   (ER, 59)

Compared to the clarity of the above numerical system, "[d]oes the common accentuation," he asks, "express the truth, in particular, in general, or in any regard? Is it consistent with itself?. Does it convey either to the ignorant or to the scholar a just conception of the rhythm of the lines?" (ER, 60). Poe concludes that each of these questions requires a negative response because a series of graphic marks--crescents or bars--"express precisely nothing whatever" (ER, 60). Building, and punning, on the intimate historical association between numbers and verse, an association Alexander Pope pointed to when he chimed "As yet a Child, not yet a Fool to Fame,/I lisp'd in Numbers, for the Numbers came," Poe suggests that we translate the poetic line back into a numerical equation. (17) The economy of such a system is evident in the time saved (a mere twenty-six accents are needed to convey information that had required forty-one) and in the accuracy about time imparted. Linking time, rhythm ("from the Greek arimos, number" [ER, 56]), mathematics and poetry, Poe concludes that "the pleasure received, or receivable" from poetry relies on the effect created by "mathematical relations" (ER, 39). And if Pope could babble numbers as a babe, why can't Poe rhyme them as an adult, playing in all seriousness on the metaphorical association of numbers with poetry and the contemporary commercial debasement of literature? Proffit's invoice also translates experience into a numerical accounting of time that seeks to get to the truth of the matter but, in an inversion familiar to readers of Poe, translating time into these equations "express[es] precisely nothing whatever." The invoice manipulates the sounds of signification, establishing relations between time, language, and value, getting paid by the line for doing so. Is this so different from the popular writers Poe hypocritically derided, who wrote for financial, rather than literary, effect? (18) If fiction is a lie of sorts, then doesn't it also have a price tag, like the lies of July 12 and 137 That Americans had already accepted the equation of time and money further clarifies this point; if poetry is predicated on time, and time and money are exchangeable, then an invoice is surely a poem. (19)