Featured Download
Speak Like a CEO
This chapter describes ten helpful actions and behaviors that will bring you...
Content provided in partnership with
Commercial paper, commercial fiction: 'The Compleat English Tradesman' and Defoe's reluctant novels
Criticism, Summer, 1995 by Sandra Sherman
Students of Daniel Defoe have always read The Compleat English Tradesman (1725-27) as illuminating the tropes of his novels, their ethos, or more generally their implication in an emergent market capitalism.(1) But no one has suggested that the long excurses on the Tradesman's accounts (his "books") have much to say regarding the novels' generic self-conception, their coy reluctance to avow themselves as fiction or truth. The rhetorical agility of such reluctance is a commonplace of Defoe scholarship, indeed of histories of the Novel, and has been parsed by Lennard Davis, Michael McKeon, and most recently Joseph Bartolameo.(2) None of these critics, however, sees the novels' failure to account for themselves as related to their status as commodities, objects for sale in a market still resistant to avowed fiction.(3) In commercial terms, the novels' coyness operates to frustrate suspicion and excite interest without over-promising. If the texts purport neither to lie nor tell the truth, then the "author" (Crusoe, Moll, Roxana) and hence the author (Defoe) cannot be held to account for misrepresentation (if the reader senses any or the text is exposed).(4) The author remains in the market generating more texts. His own accounts (his finances) remain secure.
- Most Popular Articles in Arts
- Art since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism
- Free-standing cardboard sculpture
- What makes a successful business person? Business people who are tops in ...
- Take advantage of local advertising: TV, newspaper or magazines? If your ...
- Tino Sehgal at the ICA
- More »
The novels thus position themselves-alongside other types of "commercial paper," circulating in a market where the voracity of such paper is a major concern. The novels' ambivalent truth-claims therefore jibe with tropes of other texts--bills of exchange, promissory notes--that configure a commercial episteme where determinate knowledge is itself problematic.(5) The novels' generic opacity reifies the dissonance of market-generated texts, the L.O.U.'s, bills, and notes whose uncertain promises disrupt the clarifying assurances of the accountant's ledger. Defoe's non-committal generic posture, constructing an escape from accountability, capitalizes on a complex discourse of emergent market capitalism, in which the veracity of texts, always being assessed, cannot always be determined. In The Compleat English Tradesman, the Tradesman's affairs are radically indeterminate, controlled by texts that operate outside the sphere of his volition, even as he tries to assert that violition, inscribing accounts that purport to rationalize every contingency. The texts of credit-calculated lies, desperate shifts, mere promises of future performance--challenge the texts of accounting, written "to the moment," claiming transparecy, asserting Truth. The ethos of credit is roguish, like Moll Flanders slipping past pursuers (including creditors).(6)
In this article, I argue that the impenetrable truth-claims characterizing Defoe's novels, are logically consistent with the unstable credit--based textuality portrayed in The Compleat English Trademan. Defoe's novels exploit the disjunction in market-place texts: the Tradesman commits his affairs to "definitive" accounts, but he transacts his affairs through texts that are contingent. In the narrative of The Compleat English Tradesman, credit infects accounting, so that market-generated texts elude effective monitoring. The resultant impenetrable textual formations underlie the logic of a credit/fiction crux in emergent capitalism--the shared, impenetrable truth claims of Defoean fiction anti instruments of commercial credit.
I argue further that The Compleat English Tradesman does not merely manifest a market discourse whose logic inhabits Defoe's fictions. It intervenes in that discourse, attempting to destabilize the growing promotion of accounting. The Compleat English Tradesman teaches the instability of marketplace knowledge. It becomes self-reflexive, a meditation on Defoe's own fiction ("compleat" by 1724) that attempts to break down the nation that any text affiliated with the market (even accounting texts) can ever represent phenomena with integrity.(7) The reader in the market is left in a triple bind. Not only are the texts of credit uncertain representations of their authors' intent; not only do the texts of accounting and credit discredit each other's version of textual credibility; but accounting texts themselves are uncertain--they are like credit. If at every level texts in the market are contingent, shielding authors from accountability, then Crusoe, Moll Flanders, Roxana and the others can be held to no higher standard of generic certitude. The reader is daunted in attempting to sort out fiction and truth.
I begin my argument by sketching the environment of credit evoked in The Compleat English Tradesman. I then examine the discourse of accounting as it developed in the eighteenth century and as Defoe may be said to have unsettled it. I conclude by suggesting that Defoe's anomalous version of accounting was a brilliant inversion of its ethos: established as a means of organizing credit, accounting is recast as itself disorganized, instantiating credit. My point is to show that Defoe casts "literary" texts and "commercial" context into a single discursive practice; he disperses authorship into marketplace discourse, delivering unaccountable accounts.
