Fictions of the Balance Sheet: Faulkner, Morrison, and the Economics of Slavery ERIK DUSSERE, Balancing the Books: Faulkner, Morrison, and the Economics of Slavery (New York: Routledge, 2003), pp. 176, cloth, $65.00.

Erik Dussere contributes to the recent scholarship on William Faulkner and Toni Morrison by building on Hortense Spillers. Spillers argues that slavery should be seen as "'primarily discursive': 'a field of possible enunciations ... a group of concepts ... a set of choices' that each generation of writers must reinvent in its turn, opening up the enunciations that are possible at that particular moment of the present."1 Dussere demonstrates that Faulkner and Morrison use the figure of the balance sheet to reinvent the discourse of economics in ways that expand the resources of their medium but nonetheless reflect their historical, racial, and gendered positions.

His argument also builds on Mary Poovey, who, in his words, tells us that

the ledger ... is a written mode of narrating past events, and, like any other form of narrative it is defined by certain generic characteristics. Within the linked duster of figural practices that define the ledger as a form of narrative, the central idea is that of balance; the first assumption of the double-entry system is that, at the end of the day, at the moment of reckoning, the books will be balanced. This balance is the powerful and necessary fiction of the ledger; as Poovey demonstrates in her study of sixteenth-century merchants, at the end of the year an imaginary sum of money must be entered in the ledger (either as credit or debit, depending on which is lacking) in order to force the books to balance, a practice that demonstrates the importance of the balance as a formal element. A narrative that insists that it is factual, the ledger asserts that within its pages experience has been translated into a language transparent, objective, and concise, and the visual balance of the accounts testifies that the books are honest and accurate. (15)2

The concept of balance-with its economic and moral registers that have special pertinence today-depends on double-entry bookkeeping being a closed system. It has its own internal rules and internally consistent logic, which leads to a principle where qualities can be quantified, or where all things can be assigned a financial value. And, as Dussere emphasizes, the system of numbers and signs also depends on conventions, or fictions.

An incisive reader, Dussere analyzes with great dexterity the uses Faulkner and Morrison make of the balance sheet and illuminates the range of their characters' negotiations, successes, and failures. In "The Bear," the ledger not only tells the founding story of Old Carothers' rape and incest but, through its lists of everyday items, conveys the "contours" of slaves' lives. In Ike's readings "these black men and women themselves 'took substance and even a sort of shadowy life with their passions and complexities too as page followed page and year year; all there and not only the general, condoned injustice and its slow amortization but the specific tragedy which had not been condoned and could never be amortized.'" Faulkner suggests the extent to which the ledger provides a model for justice through the lens of commerce, by mingling discourses of justice and debt: "injustice" must be "amortized."

While the impulse to amortize derives from the need to balance the ledger, Ike rejects the discourse by rejecting his inheritance. Nonetheless, despite their reaction to the injustice of slavery, neither he nor Faulkner can imagine the life of black people who endured slavery and its legacy. Faulkner's novels dealing with race, and slavery, for all their genius and insight, return again and again to the concerns and sufferings and dispossession of white male characters. "The Bear" is a parable of the failure of white male selfhood, an identity that had traditionally been defined through possession, through patriarchal power exercised over women, heirs, owned things, and in particular owned slaves. For Faulkner, "the engagement with economic figures, the attempt to disrupt or negate the narrative provided by the ledger, is a problem posed for his white characters as a means to deal with their suffering, the crushing weight of their inherited sin and debt."

On the other hand, in Beloved, Morrison illuminates the impact of slavery's economic structure on the identities and lives of ex-slaves, particularly women. The notebook, also a ledger, in which Schoolteacher requires his nephews to record Sethe's animal and human characteristics in opposite columns, is "a quantitative, clinical, and objective means of describing human action and being." Morrison appropriates the discourse of the ledger and shows characters driven by or escaping from the need to balance their accounts. Dussere develops Trudier Harris's conclusion of how the monetary and debt-based imagery in Beloved shapes the language of free slaves' desires but "sends mixed messages about how well the characters ... succeed in transcending slavery,"3 and he shows that Morrison "creates her narrative specifically out of the knowledge that the books can never be balanced" (26).

Faulkner's and Morrison's insights into the economic bases of racial identity (particularly in relation to ownership) are based on Faulkner's anxiety about white male identity in the 1940s and Morrison's desire to publicly reclaim black women, particularly in the 1960s. In her first two novels, Morrison was concerned with the imbalance that continued into the twentieth century, "with the failure of capitalism and its exchanges in the black community." Throughout her work, Morrison continues to consider the terms and questions that Faulkner posed in different forms and contexts: "What are the possibilities and dangers for African American individuals and communities entering the marketplace, embarking on ownership, experiencing class mobility? How are those possibilities and dangers structured by the history of slavery and its economy, by some recollection of that cracked and faded ledger-book with its histories of the lives of slaves? And when the final reckoning is done and the books balanced, what remains unaccounted?" (36).

Dussere goes on to complicate his argument by focusing on three other tropes related to accounting, which are figured in his subsequent chapter titles: "Grave Marks: The Return of the Unaccounted," "You Want My Life: The Debts of History," and "Figures in Blood: Closed Communities and Free Markets." In "Grave Marks" he extends his analysis of the ledger as a written account and the different ways Morrison and Faulkner respond to the official versions of history by focusing on tombstones-what is written on them, what these markers mark, and what they cover. These are the "remainders ... stories left out of and left over from the official account" (36). Represented as objects, stones, they respond to the dense and difficult language of Morrison and Faulkner and "linger as a textual trace" (43). Faulkner ends Absalom, Absalom!-where the tombstones of Sutpen's family are the starting points of Quentin's "extrapolated story," and which concludes with the howl of Jim Bond, "Charles Bon's grandson and thus the last remaining 'nigger Sutpen,' who like Clytie, embodies the lingering legacy of slavery." The novel, therefore, ends on a note of hopelessness, which is based on "a bond, a debt owed by white Southerners-and perhaps white Northerners-to African Americans as a legacy of slavery" (61). While the howl of Jim Bond echoes the sound made by the women in Morrison's novel who gather to exorcize Beloved, Morrison ends on a note of hope. Paul D comes to put his story next to Sethe's and, when Sethe tells him that she has lost her "best thing," Paul D responds, "You, your best thing," and Sethe replies, "Me? Me?" Nonetheless, the reward of self-possession to the freed slave, is a "'claim' made upon the present which takes the form of particular debts owed by and within black communities as they struggle for economic success in America" (61). And both kinds of debts make a problematic claim of ownership, particularly self-ownership.