Ironic Book-Keeper
Author:
Keith Warnock
[Excerpt] James Joyce reserved a particular pleasure and puzzle for those accountants who persevere in their reading of Ulysses. In Ithaca, the penultimate episode of the novel, a financial statement appears. The statement is presented in response to the instruction "Compile the budget for 16 June 1904." (The date, of course, refers to the day on which Leopold Bloom, in a complicated parallel of the lengthy journey of the hero of Homer's Odyssey, wanders the city of Dublin.)
The first aspect to strike the accountant is the use of the word "budget" for a statement which in fact represents aspects of the past. Modern dictionary definitions of the word coincide with its technical usage as a statement about the future - although the Oxford English Dictionary acknowledges that the term is frequently "applied to the domestic accounts (of income and its manageable expenditure) of a family or individual; also, the money available for domestic spending."
The second striking aspect is Joyce's use of column headings Debit and Credit, where he commits the classic bookkeeping error of reversing debits and credits. The Credit column contains three entries, beginning with the morning's cash in hand; it also includes an amount of commission received by Bloom from the Freeman's Journal and money entrusted to him by Stephen Dedalus, the second major character in the novel. The Debit column contains eighteen payments and a final balance representing the excess of the credit column total over the sum of expenditure. The evidence of its contents and their relationship with the text confirm that the statement is intended as a summary of the cash transactions of the day.
The third striking aspect of the budget for the attentive accountant is its small inaccuracies and omissions.
Several possible perspectives come to mind when considering why Joyce saw fit to include a budget in Ulysses and why it should contain the 'errors' it does. One of the most interesting is that it represents Joyce's perception of the socially constructed nature of accounting, its lack of a simple relationship with an independent financial reality. Shortly before the compilation of the budget, a catalogue is presented of the books on Bloom's shelves. One of them is Soll und Haben (Debit and Credit), a mid-nineteenth century German novel with a plot revolving around a family business. The juxtaposition of this book and the budget increases the possibility that Joyce may be contrasting his vision of a messy and indeterminate reality with the artificial nature of a popular piece of nineteenth century literature whose claim to realism was based mainly on the fact that it dealt with matters previously considered outside the proper scope of literary fiction.
It is noteworthy that the Ithaca episode, replete with details and lists, includes no cash count by Bloom at the end of the day. This would have enabled him to verify the accuracy of his budget. By leaving the closing cash in hand uncounted, Joyce's approach allowed space for readers, critics and editors to dispute whether certain items should be included and at what amounts those included should be measured. For instance, Bloom receives £1 6s. 11d. from Stephen during the nighttown episode (when they visit a brothel) and subsequently repays £1 7s. 0d. With both transactions subsequently recorded at £1 7s. 0d., this should create a discrepancy of 1d. between the balance in the budget and the cash actually in hand at the end of the day.
The original giving of this 'loan' is described as Bloom counts the money he receives from Stephen: "(He counts) One [probably a pound note], seven, eleven [perhaps pence being counted], and five [presumably the shillings being counted]. Six [correcting the original count of five shillings, perhaps]. Eleven [reaffirming the original count of pennies?]." Bloom confirms the overall count ("That is one pound six and eleven.") but then confuses the issue by concluding "One pound seven, say.", probably acknowledging that the rounder sum will be easier to remember.
In the Ithaca episode, shortly before the inclusion of the budget itself, the refund of the loan is recorded, with Bloom returning to Stephen "without interest, a sum of money (£1. 7s. 0.), one pound seven shillings, advanced by the latter to the former."
Although the text specifically refers to the repayment as being "without interest", some favour showing a repayment of £1 6s. 11d. and an interest payment of 1d. (Kidd and Rose, 1998). This approach ignores the clear evidence of the text that Bloom deliberately 'remembers' (in the sense of committing to memory) the amount received for safekeeping as £1 7s. 0d. If he records this in the daybook of his mind, it is logically appropriate that it should be entered at the same amount in the final record of the cash transactions of the day (though it is possible that the compiler of the budget is not Bloom but some unspecified narrator).
A similar problem arises over the incident in which Stephen breaks a lamp. Bella, true to her avaricious instincts, initially claims that the damage is worth ten shillings, but is forced to be satisfied with one shilling which Bloom throws down before departing with Stephen. The shilling does not appear in the budget of the original editions, but has been inserted by Rose.
If we accept the possibility that the budget represents an ironic comment by Joyce on the pretensions and inadequacies of accounting, we may be able to read some of the transactions and their presentation in the budget as evidence for the thesis. Thus, the 'loan' of £1 6s. 11d. which is treated for accounting purposes as a loan of £1 7s. 0d. may deliberately create a confusion between a transaction and its subsequent accounting. The possible disappearance of two transactions, the payment of 10s. for the whore and the further payment of 1s. for the damage to the lamp, may illustrate that what is accounted for is whatever is included in the accounts.
Perhaps too much should not be made of these possibilities. Joyce did not include the budget in the original draft, and the process of turning that draft into the final text was complex. In the original 1922 text the balance of cash at the end of the day was included as 16s. 6d., though the difference between the itemised expenditure and the total was in fact 17s. 5d. The error is probably explained by a late amendment of the expenditure on a bar of chocolate from 1s. to 1d., with a failure to adjust the balance accordingly. This discrepancy is clear evidence of error, and editors such as Rose have used this as an excuse for significant changes to the budget in their revised editions. However, it is difficult to imagine that Joyce with his "prodigious memory" would have forgotten the expenditure in the brothel, particularly since the breaking of the lamp has been seen by at least one critic as the climax of the novel. We might conclude that Joyce intuited the dramatic possibility of financial statements as unreliable narration, but stumbled on this insight and the device of the budget too late in the novel's preparation to enable him to consider all the possible ramifications and how they might be reflected in his text.
Accountancy Ireland Vol 34 No 5 October 2002