Null-Exit Pamphleteering, or #VALUE!

Abstract

In this essay, I want to think about the ways in which creative and critical texts might be read as an oblique record of economic transactions, as accountancy by other means. How do writers and their texts position themselves with regard to accountancy? Or, to be more specific, what is the relationship between Peter Manson’s work and double-entry bookkeeping? In order to answer this question, I offer an exposition of Samuel Beckett’s discussions of narrative and literary criticism as forms of double-entry bookkeeping, and then argue that Manson’s Adjunct: an Undigest playfully asks at key moments to be read as an act of accounting. This text situates itself in Beckett’s line of thought on accountancy and literature insofar as Adjunct and its reception reconfigure and expand our notions of accountancy, offering a mashup of these seemingly immiscible categories. Manson, like Beckett, repudiates the historically dominant form of accounting known as double-entry bookkeeping in favour of a series of single entries in Adjunct, shards shorn of correspondence which, in their seeming arbitrariness, highlight the processes of valorization preceding their entry into the ledger of the text. This repudiation has ramifications for how we read the rest of Manson’s output. I argue that ‘The Baffle Stage’ models on the level of form, and particularly in its rhyme, the constraints of pulsations of credit and debit which manifested in the financial crisis of 2007–8.

Keywords

• Peter Manson
• Double-Entry Bookkeeping
• Financial Crisis
• Accounting
• Samuel Beckett