Commercial paper, commercial fiction: 'The Compleat English Tradesman' and Defoe's reluctant novels

neither is there any fraud but to himself; he is only his own

deceiver, acts to his own loss and wine, and heals his present

wounds at the expence of his own foundation; for indeed he

undermines himself and destroys himself by the very means

which he uses to preserve himself.(11)

As a reader, the Tradesman must negotiate texts that are not transparent, while he has no one to blame but himself if he reads incorrectly. As a source of meaning, the author is diffused by a permitted ("no fraud, no deceit") discursive praxis of multiple derogating signatures. Representational integrity dissolves along with an integral author responsible for discourse.

The market's capacity to diffuse authorial responsiblity is exploited by Moll Flanders, when she and a fortune-hunting suitor joust with texts. Moll tells the truth about her poverty ("I'm Poor: Let's see how kind you'll prove"), yet there is in the air a rumor that she's rich; her claim may therefore be a "jest." Moll is banking on the common knowledge that marketplace language is ambivalent. From the suitor's point of view, such language has a literal sense, but also a hyper-literal meaning informed by rumors (which he hopes may be truer). The suitor appears to disavow the hyper-literal valence ("Be mine with all your Poverty"). But Moll reads his own text against the literal ("Yet secretly you hope I Lye"), since as a practiced maker of marketplace fictions she is suspicious of texts.(12)

In Moll's representation ("I'm Poor"), there is no lie. However, she has been complicit in confusing her suitor's misperception by allowing the market to proliferate fictions around her. Thus while she has never explicitly claimed to be rich, she has promoted the versimilitude of such fictions: "I pretended on all Occasions to doubt his Sincerity, and told him, perhaps he only courted me for my Fortune" (I, 79). By allowing market-place noise into her own text, Moll dislocates the source of misrepresentation, relying on her reader to be confused (and to follow the noise). Not having provided a univalent lying text, Moll escapes culpability:

He has fore closed all manner of Objection, seeing, whether he

was in jest or in earnest, he had declared he took me without any

regard to my portion and, whether I was in jest or earnest, I had

declar'd he took me without any Regard to my Portion, and, whether I

was in jest or earnest, I had declar'd my self to be very Poor, so that,

in a Word, I had him fast both ways; and tho' he might say afterwards

he was cheated, yet he could never say that I cheated him. (I, 81).

Since Moll has not lied, and her suitor has acquiesced, the contract is enforcible. Moreover, by a "jest" in "earnest," Moll dissipates any objective determination of intent, leaving only the penumbra of negotation--the market--in which to search for the cheat.

The incident enacts the ambiguity of credit-based texts that Defoe describes in The Compleat English Tradesman. What should be an intimate transaction between author and reader, is inflected--infected--by currents in the market. The suitor/reader is left with no recourse while Moll remains to dissemble again. Her strategy is like Defoe's. As Joseph Bartolomeo observes, "A reception-oriented aesthetic dominates the preface to Moll Flanders, with multiple references to types of readers and ways of reading .... Defoe, in the preface, has artfully left the question of literal truth up to the reader."(13)