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Commercial paper, commercial fiction: 'The Compleat English Tradesman' and Defoe's reluctant novels
Criticism, Summer, 1995 by Sandra Sherman
The Compleat English Tradesman ambiguates the accounting evangelism so prominent in Defoe's predecessors. The difference is one of emphasis, of raising doubts. The point is not to discredit accounting, but to affiliate it with credit, so that commercial textuality becomes uncertain in all its iterations. Defoe's brilliance lies not in any sendup of accounting, but in his ability to blunt its knife-edged perfection.
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The market can be depicted as particularly oppressive because the accounting procedures that Defoe recommends are not technically refined. There is no analysis of the transaction into Debtor and Creditor as in a formal journal entry. More significantly, transactions are recorded only once in the Ledger, under the debtor's account, rather than at least twice and potentially under multiple accounts. As a result, the theoretical justification of classic double-entry falls away: the ledger cannot be rationalzed, cannot be "ballanced" by applying the rule that for every Debtor in one account there is a Creditor in another. Errors are more likely to intrude, and a "trial balance" cannot be struck to determine whether a mistake has crept in.
Defoe's directions to the Tradesman for eradicating error suggest that accounting texts are inherently uncertain. Defoe proposes that accounts be wrenched into transparency by main force, by physically counting one's cash. Prior tracts describe a method that is self-correcting, indigenous to a regime of self-enclosed textuality. In order to "ballance" the Cash Book with the cash on hand, thereby achieving transparency, the Tradesman takes an inventory:
What I call ballancing his Cash-book, is, first, the casting up,
daily, or weekly, or monthly his receipts and payments, and
then seeing what money is left on hand, or, as the usual expression
of the Tradesman is, what money is in cash, secondly,
the examining his money, telling it over, and seeing how
much he has in his chest or bags, and then seeing if it agrees
with the ballance of his book, that what is and what should be,
correspond. (I, 276-77)
Defoe's notion of "ballance" is different from that of classic accounting. In classical theory, balance does not refer to what is actually in the cash chest, determined by physical counting, but to an agreement among discursive categories from which one can derive the state of one's cash. Classical accounting is autotelic, relying on the perfection of a self-referring ledger, annotated by subsidiary texts within a self-referring regime. Defoe's accounting is transgressive, denying the perfection of textuality, moving the ground of affirmation from Text to World. While Defoe states his theory in terms that resemble double-entry ("What is" in the cash chest and "what should be" in the Cash Book "correspond"), he interposes a physicality that denies the immediate correspondence characteristic of classical theory. The text loses the automatic presumption of veracity (though of course it may be true). While Defoe's method is likelier to yield an accurate "picture" than is double-entry, provided the Tradesman actually applies himself to the task, his approach makes concessions to the fragility of the text which double-entry does not. The text becomes contingent, a secondary notation of "what is," rather than a self-sufficient iteration constituting "what is." Since the Defoean text must always be-confirmed extra-textually, it hovers between "what is" and "what should be" with an incalculable margin of Error.
