Estructura de la Guía de Prácticas de Laboratorio en el plan E

That Defoe was a profligate teller of tales is somewhat self-evident but some critics have more closely related the emergence of the novel to Defoe’s blurring of fact and fiction in the way he told tales. They suggest that the novel plays upon this blurring. Lennard J. Davis makes this connection explicit in his book Factual Fictions:

The oddity of his own life, so filled with disguise, lies, indirection, forgery, deceit, and duplicity seems to place him constitutionally at the center of questions about the truthfulness of narratives, about the problem of framing and ambivalence, about the breakdown of signification and reliability. 336

Paterson was also a teller of tales. Several commentators attest to his power to capture an audience with his imagination and eloquence. Steele for example praises his ‘strong reason, and great experience’, describing him as ‘acquainted with commerce in all its parts, and having a natural and unaffected eloquence’.337 Macaulay tells us that ‘men spoke to him with more profound respect than to the Lord High Commissioner. His antechamber was crowded with solicitors desirous to catch some golden drops of that golden shower of which he was supposed to be dispenser’.338 As noted above, Paterson’s writing was sometimes confused with Defoe’s, and he was a recognised pamphleteer. The story Paterson told of the possibilities of a Scottish Eldorado captured the imagination of a nation. Both men supported their tales with vivid and detailed accounts of goods and services, of money in and money out. Macaulay profiles Paterson in the following manner, but it could equally have been said of Defoe: ‘He seems to have been gifted by nature with a fertile invention, an ardent temperament and great powers of persuasion and to have acquired somewhere in the course of his vagrant life a perfect knowledge of accounts’.339 Both seem to have been interested in various types of exchanges which could then be made to circulate and so enable new possibilities. Paterson’s over-riding interest in life was the circulation of trade and money, as he recalls in his ‘Brief Account of the Intended Bank of England’:

The want of a bank, or public fund for the convenience and security of great payments, and the better to facilitate the circulation of money in and about this

great and opulent city, hath, in our time, among other conveniences, occasion’d much unnecessary credit, to the loss of millions, by which trade hath been exceedingly discouraged and obstructed. 340

The novel also circulated accounts engendering and reflecting new possibilities – Moll, after all, changes her station from servant girl to Gentlewoman, to literary figure.

3.

Moll and Myself as projectors after Defoe and Paterson

Middling Child

Mum hit dad with a frying pan – a heavy, cast iron, frying pan.

He had called her out, she an Irish Catholic, into Sauchiehall Street to watch the Orange day parade.

She was not amused. She never was really.

Years later, she invited the local priest home, preparing the best china in the front room; dad came in the back door with a couple of nutters he’d set temporarily free from their secure accommodation which he as a builder was renovating. ‘They needed a day out’ he said. It ended badly, blue lights, sirens, that sort of thing. The priest left by the back door. She was excommunicated, for marrying dad, not for the nutters. She had sinned – we were heathens. Our school backed onto the catholic school. ‘Proddy dogs, proddy dogs, you’ll never get to heaven’- they taunted through the fence.

But I could read. My older sister snatched the book, my younger brother sidled up beside me to listen to the tale. Dad pushed for a Doctor in the family, the Scottish ambition; mum pushed for a writer of tales, the Irish tradition. Sure here we are. Well, they’re not. They

died within a year of each other in their early 50s, no luck to those born above the bedsheets as dad once confided. I at 56 have superceded them but am left without a map, yet still a middling child who can read.

It is bizarre to reflect on these expressed ambitions in the context of this thesis, in which I hope to become a Doctor by telling tales.

It is uncanny the degree to which Moll and myself reflect the same backgrounds and characteristics as Defoe and Paterson. Moll is a dissenting outsider, a high-energy, optimistic, risk-taker, and a teller of tales. Like so many of Defoe’s protagonists, Moll is the quintessential outsider, born in Newgate and effectively, orphaned, she is outside society. Moll has to create herself from scratch. Having been placed by the authorities with a ‘good motherly nurse’with the intention that she should go into service, Moll resolves against this fate preferring to become a ‘Gentlewoman’ by which she means, contrary to the usage of the time, a woman who earns her own money. As noted in Chapter Three this resolve is mocked by the ‘motherly nurse’ who considers it a ridiculous idea, beyond the station of such as Moll.341 She is a dissenting upstart in that she rejects the ‘going into service’ that society offers to her. She decides she will become a ‘Gentlewoman’ with all the ironies such a term encompasses in the early eighteenth century, and does so – whatever Moll resorts to, trickery, theft, deceit, she never goes into service, and she earns her own way, a statement some Gentlewomen could not make.

Moll is always outside the family, even her own family, as she disposes of children to various nurses and when she finds her own mother, discovers that she has married her mother’s son and so must once again be cast out.342 Moll is not only outside any kind of establishment groups but she is also outside the community of thieves, nothing being more

odious to her ‘than the Company in Newgate prison’.343 She prides herself on her ‘invention’344 and dexterity in tricky situations. She weaves a tale for possible suitors that they may wish to hear and one which increases her value in the market. She tells her own tale, insisting on her independence and ability to create herself.

I am shocked by the degree to which I can find comparisons in myself, or my projected self, in this narrative. I present myself as something of a dissenting outsider. In my role as organization development consultant my outsiderness is considered of prime value because I am not entangled in the internal politics. In the approach to this thesis, I have positioned myself ‘outside’ English and ‘outside’ a Business School, although compromised, as I am required to use the power and knowledge structures of these disciplines to gain ‘entry’ or validation. I am a high-energy risk taker, something of a chancer. My c.v. is littered with risk-taking projects which attempt to stretch boundaries, social, political and theoretical (Appendix One). I can be persuasive, a teller of tales even. I have been called an ‘upstart’ and a maverick- the first in derogatory terms, the latter in praise and appreciation, although Martin Parker’s clarification that a maverick is an unbranded cow is somewhat unsettling. This thesis could be seen to reflect many of these attributes, particularly the attribute of being ‘an unbranded cow’ as it stands outside the branding of recognised disciplines.

Defoe and Paterson’s lives parallel each other and intertwine as do Moll Flanders and the

Bank. They are all outsiders, they are all rebellious upstarts, they are all risk takers, full of energy and optimism; they all tell a tale and give an account, managing anxiety and uncertainty. Iconic descriptions of the novel echo these characteristics. The novel does all this while becoming part of the literary establishment. The organization attempts the same feat. An organization is always initially an outsider, involved in risk, is always a challenger

to others while seeking to become part of the establishment, a position which is very difficult to realise as any swift look at the history of large organizations crumbling, merging and shape-shifting, reveals.