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

Accounting's claims to represent Truth, require that truth be a distinct discursive category, and that accounting texts be able to segregate fiction and truth. In other words, such texts must be the exact discursive opposite of credit texts described in The Compleat English Tradesman. How is this accomplished? In A New Treatise, Malcolm speaks of "Imaginary" accounts (122). In Principles of Book-keeping, explain'd, Alexander Maghie speaks of "fictitious accounts."(22) The terms sound paradoxical within a discourse of militant transparency, but in fact they make sense: events that must be represented but cannot be accommodated by accounting's representational conventions are given accounts of their own, so that convention remains uncompromised in rendering Truth. "Imaginary," "fictitious" events are reified as separate accounts consistent with the discursive project. The discourse of credit, in which "truth" and "fiction" are indeterminate, is superseded by a logic that maintains both categories in the same discursive space (the ledger), but as distinct.

Malcolm explains that in order to separate determinate and indeterminate, "some Accompts be used, which, for Distinction, I call Imaginary":

Suppose I send Goods as Tobacco to Sea, consigned to my

Factor at Amsterdam, the Creditor Side of the Accompt of

Tobacco, must be made to show, how it is dispos'd of; a

Creditor requires a Debtor, but there is no Person or Thing

come in their Place to be made Debtor; for I cannot charge

my Factor, till he advises me they are come to his Hand,

therefore I erect an Accompt in my Leger by the Title of Voyage

to Amsterdam, &c. which I charge, or make Debtor for

the whole Cargo, and so it will stand till I am advised

that they are Lost, or come safe to my Factor, and then the Accompt

Voyage is discharged, i.e. made Creditor, to my Factor

Debtor.... (122-23)

The system requires creation of a "fiction," an imagined entity, that mediates among real entities (real accounts, representing real phenomena) if an outcome is unknown and therefore unrepresentable. Fiction signifies indeterminacy, and is segregated from other, determinate accounts. Malcolm describes a similar schematic where a debt is "due only upon Condition of a certain Event" (123), and Macghie requires a "fictitious" account when one receives but does not deliver in return (9-10). Thus the possibility of alternative outcomes is not permitted to interfere with the project of knowing the exact state of one's affairs. One knows when and in what particulars the text is uncertain, since contingency is not represented in the same discursive terms as the real; it is identified with fictivity.

The mode of production of accounting texts prohibits them from exhibitng ambiguity, for example, of Serious Reflections during the life and Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe. Accounting is not a product of print culture, and is therefore off limits to Editors, Publishers, and other personae with authority to supervise (to revise?) texts sub silentio. The author is never forced to compromise his agency for reasons relating to the market (which demands that Moll's text be scoured, and which forces tradesmen to promise unconditionally). Rather, the author's agency is asserted, and if he observes accounting protocol, his honesty is prima facie a fact. In Idea Rationaria, or the perfect accomptant (1683), Robert Colinson argues that accounting induces reader confidence in the authorial persona: