Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-7c8c6479df-5xszh Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-03-29T13:57:23.114Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

4 - Fictions of stability

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 January 2010

Sandra Sherman
Affiliation:
University of Arkansas
Get access

Summary

REALITY AS ARTIFICE

Defoe's exculpatory strategy in The Compleat English Tradesman hinges on the apparent chronic disjunction in marketplace texts between volition and performance: no text could be presumed to manifest personal agency, and thereby to constitute a willed representation of the self. Yet if The Compleat English Tradesman posits the radical uncertainty of representation, it must still account for, and ideally destabilize, discursive formations that purport to render credit free of ambiguity. Such formations threaten the epistemological posture of the market exploited by Defoe, i.e. that texts which represent the market are generically uncertain and their authorship dispersed. Only if nontransparency is attributable to all texts involved with credit, will readers forego attempts to determine genre and locate accountable authors. The existence of texts claiming both certainty and an involvement with credit is therefore an urgent preoccupation of The Compleat English Tradesman.

Texts that claim absolute transparency subsist as highly wrought artifacts, the perfect expression of volition in performance, where the “intent” is complete self-revelation. The author renders himself with candor and signs his name. This certified clarity, emphatically distilled from the surrounding phenomenal flux, renders such texts fictive – their abstract stability misrepresents the real. The crucial factor is that such texts never acknowledge their abstraction, and do not conceive of themselves as fiction. Purporting to be univalent, certain, and absolutely true, such texts are Fictions of Stability.

However, if one imagines Truth as an abstraction of reality, then fictions of stability are “true.” In contradistinction to the credit/fiction homology, Truth (so represented) is isolable and quantifiable, detachable from potential fiction.

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 1996

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

  • Fictions of stability
  • Sandra Sherman, University of Arkansas
  • Book: Finance and Fictionality in the Early Eighteenth Century
  • Online publication: 12 January 2010
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511582219.005
Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

  • Fictions of stability
  • Sandra Sherman, University of Arkansas
  • Book: Finance and Fictionality in the Early Eighteenth Century
  • Online publication: 12 January 2010
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511582219.005
Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Fictions of stability
  • Sandra Sherman, University of Arkansas
  • Book: Finance and Fictionality in the Early Eighteenth Century
  • Online publication: 12 January 2010
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511582219.005
Available formats
×