Defoe's Footprints: Essays in Honour of Maximillian E. Novak 9781442697690

Citation preview

DEFOE’S FOOTPRINTS: ESSAYS IN HONOUR OF MAXIMILLIAN E. NOVAK

This page intentionally left blank

DEFOE’S FOOTPRINTS ESSAYS IN HONOUR OF M A XIMILLI A N E. NOVA K

Edited by Robert M. Maniquis and Carl Fisher

Published by the University of Toronto Press in association with the UCLA Center for Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Studies and the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library

© The Regents of the University of California 2009 www.utppublishing.com Printed in Canada ISBN 978-0-8020-9921-1

Printed on acid-free and 100% post-consumer recycled paper with vegetable-based inks.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Defoe’s footprints : essays in honour of Maximillian E. Novak / edited by Robert M. Maniquis and Carl Fisher. (UCLA Center/Clark series ; 11) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8020-9921-1 1. Defoe, Daniel, 1661?–1731 – Criticism and interpretation. I. Maniquis, Robert M. II. Fisher, Carl, 1958– III. William Andrews Clark Memorial Library IV. University of California, Los Angeles. Center for 17th- & 18th-Century Studies PR3407.D44 2009

823c.5

C2009-900623-5

This book has been published with the help of a grant from the UCLA Center for Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Studies. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support for its publishing activities of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP). University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council.

Contents

Introduction 3 robert m. maniquis and carl fisher 1 Defoe’s Silences 12 stuart sherman 2 The Atmospheres of Robinson Crusoe jayne lewis

32

3 Poetic Footprints: Some Formal Issues in Defoe’s Verse j. paul hunter

55

4 Mimesis/mimesis and the Eighteenth-Century British Novel: Representation and Knowledge 71 john richetti 5 Robinson Crusoe and the Semiotic Crisis of the Eighteenth Century 98 robert folkenflik 6 Powerful Affections: Slaves, Servants, and Labours of Love in Defoe’s Writing 126 roxann wheeler 7 Defoe’s ‘Black Prince’: Elitism, Capitalism, and Cultural Difference 153 laura brown

vi

Contents

8 ‘The Project and the People’: Defoe on the South Sea Bubble and the Public Good 170 carl fisher 9 The Writer as Hero from Jonson to Fielding manuel schonhorn 10 Robinson Trousseau: Joyce’s Defoe michael seidel 11 The Novel as Modern Myth john bender Maximillian E. Novak: A Bibliography Contributors Index

251

255

206

223

239

189

DEFOE’S FOOTPRINTS: ESSAYS IN HONOUR OF MAXIMILLIAN E. NOVAK

This page intentionally left blank

Introduction

A Dedication For the last half century, Maximillian Novak has helped mightily to shape our understanding of eighteenth-century British literature. Combining literary with cultural, economic, and political history, Novak’s writings have made him one of the leading scholars not only of Defoe but also of the history of the novel and of eighteenth-century literary culture. He has had important things to say about Restoration drama, Dryden, Etherege, Congreve, the libertine spirit, the literature of sensibility, beliefs about madness, the conceptualization of the primitive, the relationship between literary representation and the visual arts, and twentieth-century Jewish-American writing. He has enlightened and inspired readers and scholars in all these areas. Taken as a whole, Novak’s four full-length works on Defoe – three monographs and a biography – provide one of the most detailed pictures ever presented by one critic of the life and works of one author. His first book, Economics and the Fiction of Daniel Defoe (1962), grew out of his 1958 UCLA dissertation on Defoe. The monograph significantly influenced subsequent studies of Defoe and of the eighteenth-century novel. In contrast to Ian Watt’s The Rise of the Novel, which emphasizes Defoe’s characters as economic individualists and the narratives as leaps of formal realism, Novak emphasizes Defoe’s rather traditional views on mercantilism and trade; he suggests that seeing Crusoe as ‘homo economicus’ and reading the fiction as essentially reflecting evolving capitalist models is too reductive. The fictions are not sudden technical

4

Robert M. Maniquis and Carl Fisher

leaps, but brilliant variations on adventure and exploration fiction; the narratives often critique the character’s individualistic traits, rather than setting them up as models. Defoe conspicuously reveals social problems even as he deals with personal and collective calamity – shipwreck, war, poverty, plague, exploitation – and scrutinizes both the behaviour that threatens the community and that which threatens the individual. In Defoe and the Nature of Man, which appeared in the following year (1963), Novak analyses Defoe’s portrayal of human behaviour. Robinson Crusoe’s claim to live in ‘a state of nature’ of course resonated with political and cultural implications for contemporary audiences. Among the many topics that Novak explores, topics as interesting to us as they were to Defoe’s immediate audiences, are the idea of necessity, the survival instinct, the pleasures and pains of love and marriage, righteousness and criminality, psychological realism, and the complicated ventriloquism of Defoe’s narrative voices. In Realism, Myth, and History in Defoe’s Fiction (1983), Novak emphasizes the subtleties too often overlooked in discussions of the major works. While his earlier monographs often focused on backgrounds of Defoe’s writing, this book establishes patterns of character and action, balances the relationship between myth and fact, and demonstrates Defoe’s not unbiased fitting together of history and ideas. He locates Crusoe not only against historical and intellectual backgrounds but also within contemporary events. He defines Moll and Roxana as hybrids emerging from the conventions of criminal biography and fictional female roguery. The special nature of such characters changes the tone and even redefines what is at stake in contemporary moral questions. Novak’s latest work, the exhaustive biography Daniel Defoe: Master of Fictions (2001), once again joins events and ideas and makes a whole of Defoe’s life. He describes patterns of thought within the light and shadows of large events: the Restoration of Charles II, the great plague and fire of London, the Glorious Revolution, the Scottish Union, the Sacheverell riots, the Jacobite Rebellion. Nor does he neglect smaller political and social events, ephemeral for us from a distance of nearly 300 years, but which Novak brings alive to show not only their momentousness but their fascinating momentary importance. In addition to these book-length contributions – which also include a monograph on Congreve and an overarching study of the period – Novak has published over 100 articles that span the full range of critical studies of the Restoration and the eighteenth century. Always aware of, but not beholden to, theory and contemporary critical approaches, Novak’s oeu-

Introduction

5

vre continues to influence historical and critical questions. Constantly showing up in the writings of others are references to influential essays such as ‘Defoe’s Shortest Way with the Dissenters: Hoax, Parody, Paradox, Fiction, Irony, and Satire’ (Modern Language Quarterly, 1966), ‘Defoe and the Disordered City’ (PMLA, 1977), ‘Gothic Fiction and the Grotesque’ (Novel, 1979), and ‘Warfare and Its Discontents in Eighteenth-Century Fiction’ (Eighteenth-Century Fiction, 1992). Novak’s range is wide but his grasp is steady. Beginning with his first publication on Donne in Notes and Queries (1955), there have been articles on Dryden, Wycherly, Congreve, Steele, Swift, Hogarth, and Johnson, to name a few, and on topics that span a remarkable range of topics and genres (see the bibliography at the end of this volume). Novak’s other contributions to the field are manifold. He has been a general editor for the Augustan Reprint series and the Stoke Newington Defoe series; he has edited numerous books and written introductions to many more. He has published more than fifty book reviews and review essays. His prolific writing testifies to both his critical acumen and his stature in the field, as well as his willingness to contribute to the dialogue of literary criticism. The reviews are far from puff pieces. Novak situates the work under review within the larger contours of the field and engages honestly with the text, often with sharp criticism. Although this volume is called Defoe’s Footprints, and most of its essays deal with Defoe, the focus on Novak’s work on Defoe reflects only part of a remarkably broad scholarly exploration of the eighteenth century, and the publication of books and essays that signpost Novak’s professional profile tell a partial story of his remarkable, and still ongoing, career. After completing his Ph.D. at UCLA in 1958, Novak taught at the University of Michigan until 1962, after which he returned to UCLA, where he has taught ever since. Thousands of undergraduate students, who may not remember all they have been taught about the eighteenth century, usually remember Novak’s gleeful recitations of Rochester or his deep engagement with the subtexts of Robinson Crusoe or Moll Flanders. His graduate students now teach all over the world. In an essay he wrote for the MLA’s Teaching series on Robinson Crusoe, he notes how the novel class of his student days consisted of long lists of novels, which students rarely read, and a mass of historical information. He discusses how his teaching of the novel evolved and how he incorporated close readings and integrated theoretical approaches in order to bring Defoe and other authors alive for his students. It is this connectedness to the present and to the everyday, to large and small questions of politics and morality, and

6

Robert M. Maniquis and Carl Fisher

his concern for the fate of humanity, as well as for the fate of his students and friends, that make him a popular figure at academic conferences, a sought-after teacher, a generous adviser, a wise scholar, and a good and decent man.

The Essays Max Novak will be pleased to discover that the following essays, dedicated to him, are more than a bouquet of academic civility. They signify gratitude for the knowledge Novak has heaped on us. But they also are evidence of two effects of Novak’s knowledge and influence: a constant spurring on to disciplined critical inquiry and a pleasure in pushing some of his perceptions even further than he might have. Robinson Crusoe discovered only one footprint. In the title of this collection, we naturally had to transform that famous image into the plural, so wide and various have been the effects of Defoe on world literature. Traces of his literary presence are abundant, and our authors suggest that Defoe’s writing has left its mark where we may not have suspected it would be found. Stuart Sherman builds upon the insights of Novak into Defoe’s strategies of silence in the portrayal of human expression and consciousness. This essay gracefully demonstrates how one critic’s perceptions can be elaborated by another into even greater insight. Along with some readings of the strategies of represented silence, Sherman brings us up close to a striking thing in Defoe. Defoe was present at the first moments of what was rapidly to become mass culture. Witness to an explosion of print and the beginnings of modern cacophony, Defoe, like Addison and others, recognized the necessity of silence at the centre of communication in order to represent what we imagine to be the real. Our sense of Defoe’s ‘realism’ is enriched in this tracing of Defoe’s rather phenomenological sense of the presence of absences, of things neither said nor heard, and of things not seen. Jayne Lewis writes about nothing more or less than air: how to catch it, how to measure it, how to figure it, how even to speak it, especially when it is eighteenth-century air! Lewis is able to catch the impressions of the air and the atmosphere in Defoe’s writing and use them to point to the specific place that Defoe occupies in modern literary figuration. Without falling into anachronisms about consciousness, Lewis makes no claims for Defoe’s designing, a hundred years before its time, anything resembling a romantic mind that is its own place. Lewis is interested in another indeterminate place that makes many moments in Robinson

Introduction

7

Crusoe cruxes in the temptations to read the world either symbolically, on the one hand, or as empirically ‘real’ on the other. Rarely has the weather been such an interesting topic as it is in Robinson Crusoe, for it reflects much that was at stake in eighteenth-century discussions about the weather, which were occasions not simply for social chit-chat but for examination of political, religious, and scientific quandaries. J. Paul Hunter does not claim that Defoe left large imprints upon the English poetic imagination, but in his description of Defoe’s poetic techniques he suggests why it is that some of his poetry was so popular in the first decade of the eighteenth century. As a negative example of Defoe’s reach into that which resists the ravages of time, Hunter’s discussion of Defoe’s poetry highlights what is successful in his prose. His poetry is clearly marked by a kind of rhyming obviously congenial to readers at that time. That is to say, Defoe’s poetry is too much attached to the specific habitual ‘ear’ of the moment. Secondly, it is clearly marked as a kind of poetry dear to eighteenth-century readers: the argumentative. Robinson Crusoe, on the other hand, is often described – most famously by Poe – as seeming almost ‘unwritten,’ never attached to any particular moment, whatever the historical accidents of his vocabulary. And, just as important, Robinson Crusoe never really tries to argue us into anything, however tendentious it may at times be. Certainly, it could never be entertained as a kind of modern myth if we really felt too much the weight of argument. It is unlikely, then, that we shall ever remember Defoe as a poet, however serious his own poetic ambitions may have been; for unlike Defoe the prose-writer, Defoe the poet could not help but be caught completely within his own time. John Richetti associates Defoe, Haywood, and Fielding in his essay on some early eighteenth-century descriptive techniques. The purpose of this essay is to fill a long-recognized gap in Erich Auerbach’s monumental Mimesis: the absence of any detailed account of British prose in Auerbach’s European progression towards realistic representation. In his analyses of three prose passages Richetti supplements Auerbach without betraying him, for part of that long march towards realism is the play of different realisms, stepping in tune to different vernacular languages at different moments. British realisms have their particularities. They merit the close reading that Richetti gives them, which shows their interplay with social realities. This interplay is as important as any Auerbach describes in his examples from purely Latinate languages. Indeed, one is tempted to say that given the enormous influence of Defoe on European realistic preoccupations, there is no more serious lacuna in Auerbach’s

8

Robert M. Maniquis and Carl Fisher

critical masterpiece than the absence of a discussion of the author of Robinson Crusoe, Moll Flanders, and Roxana. Certainly the most famous of Defoe’s ‘footprints’ is that solitary, frightening one discovered upon the beach by Crusoe. Robert Folkenflik traces what we have made of it since 1720. We have connected it to Friday, as if it were certainly his, although nothing is less certain in the novel. We have made it into an emblem, a sign, a symbol, a tourist souvenir, an icon. Most important, literary criticism has turned it into a problem that we can meditate upon, with less terror but with as much fascination as Crusoe himself. As Folkenflik observes, the footprint has its local habitation in the eighteenth-century confrontation with its own need to adjust its manner of reading the world. Was it to be through the signs that pointed to another or simply to the signs that registered probabilistic worldly processes? Or was it to be a new reading of the things of the world by which somehow we could self-consciously shift from one kind of reading to another? The problem, as Folkenflik argues, is less in what the sign referred to than in what the very idea of a sign had become, a semiotic crisis that included Calvin no less than Defoe. Roxann Wheeler shares the intentions of Novak’s Defoe and the Nature of Man: to place Defoe’s fictions within the enabling context of common assumptions about emotions and their effects upon social order. Wheeler locates the ideological assumptions of power over others within the entwined yet conflicting assumptions about certain emotions. She points to the shift in assumed values implied in ruling through fear to those in ruling through love. And she emphasizes the high value accorded especially to gratitude as a socially binding emotion resulting from patriarchal benevolence, indeed more to be loved than to be feared. Careful to distinguish nineteenth-century ideologies of racism from eighteenthcentury ideologies of social rank and order – to which all races could be fitted – Wheeler enlivens several famous scenes of servitude, gratitude, and domination with explanation of the contemporary ideas embodied in such scenes. Some of our authors show how it can make sense to read Defoe by posing phenomenological questions about the engagement of the mind simultaneously with the material world and with itself. That engagement, even confrontation, of Crusoe with himself can never be dislodged as the central adventure of his story, whether we read it in religious, psychological, or phenomenological terms. It is just as certain that the story can never be completely disengaged from the history of capitalist ideology, however much subtle critics like Max Novak have taught us to

Introduction

9

avoid heavy-handed portrayals of that ideology. Laura Brown avoids the blunt yet portrays the heavy elements of bourgeois and capitalist desire in the elaboration of non-European peoples. Her discussion of the Black Prince in Captain Singleton turns the Black Prince into a multi-faceted example of what historians such as Terry Eagleton and Hayden White have generally argued to be the ingredients of the sentimentally imagined ‘noble savage.’ Moreover, Brown shows how exchange systems, an elitism borrowed in the bourgeois imagination from aristocratic – even feudal – values, and the useful vehicle of the Other as the non-European come together in figures such as the Black Prince or Crusoe and Friday. She makes it clear that far from everything has been said about the noble savage in fiction and its ideological figuration in Defoe. History is dotted with semiotic crises, sometimes in the form of the metaphysically unreliable, as defined, for example, by Pascal’s bet, sometimes merely in the plus and minus signs of stock-market values. Indeed, anyone who has ever cared about a bet can be said to have felt a kind of semiotic crisis, even semiotic panic, in his pulse. Carl Fisher traces the day-in and day-out preoccupation of Defoe with the famous rise and explosion of the South Sea Bubble. It is amusing to watch the creator of Robinson Crusoe, a hero beset with quandaries in the interpretation of signs on a path towards a credo, writing to a large audience beset with the illusions of unending credit. Nothing is more unreliable than the plus and minus signs of stock-market value, of appreciation and depreciation, nothing more superstitiously fetishistic than commodity value itself. And here the real and the apparent axes of market value resembles the unstable interpretations evident in Robinson Crusoe. Are we to see the saving corn of providence or the saving corn of chance? Was the growth of South Sea trade to be based on sound principle or at least on fairly reliable probability? Or was its value simply a matter of mass, hysterical illusion? As Fisher points out, Defoe knew just when to get out of his South Sea investments. Perhaps he knew better than most how to read the market signs. Indeed, was Defoe’s investing judgment guided or was he merely lucky? – a question that Crusoe himself had to reflect upon when considering the events in his life. In any case, it is manifest in both Defoe’s fiction and his popular economic writings that reading the signs of God and reading the signs of the market were two varieties of one problem, which placed the individual always at a point of wondrous potential or pathetic calamity. In Manuel Schonhorn’s and Michael Seidel’s essays, we come upon two grand topics. Looking back to the Renaissance, Schonhorn traces

10

Robert M. Maniquis and Carl Fisher

a thematic tradition that by Defoe’s day had solidly reinforced the idea that the poet – like the soldier, the priest, and the legislator – had social power and authority. Defoe points to the book itself as if it were a historical sword. More powerful than the transitory sermon, the book, he proclaims, can obviously defend and wound constantly through time. Writing was not, for Defoe, only a matter of literature, unless literature is seen as a way powerfully to affect reality. Reality of another kind is pursued by Seidel. He looks ahead and shows Defoe recovered and enveloped by Joyce as brother to a modern authorial hero – the intelligencer of the world, the registrar of things and stuff and clothes and all the words that hold them before our eyes – the hero as ultimate, unyielding realist. Perhaps we could compare the Joycean artist, who forges in the smithy of his soul the uncreated conscience of his race, with Defoe, who more prosaically completes an already present consciousness of ideals and ideology. What such a comparison would yield is uncertain. What is certain, as Seidel makes clear, is that both Joyce and Defoe created not in the realms of abstract consciousness or the otherworldly soul. They were crafters of the images of things and of things as images, anchored in the real world and necessarily rendered in the unrealities of art. John Bender delineates and codifies essential elements of the modern myth and suggests various potential questions: does the essence of myth reside in structure, firstness, absence of a determining style, or some other feature? Each one of the elements Bender puts forward is both plausible and arguable. He insists that the apparitional in his definition of myth is the most psychologically and intellectually productive element. The apparitional is not simply the illusionary. Like trying to speak about the air, our impressions become part and substance of the external object we try to define, and, more important, in the reading of the modern novel we experience that external world in the intimacy of silently ‘read’ impressions. As we follow Bender in his march through the apparitional to his final definition of the modern myth, we come upon a strong definition: ‘the apparitional quality of disappearing as books makes them icons of the modern sense of the paradoxical concreteness and evanescence of reality itself.’ The essence of Robinson Crusoe as a myth, then, along with the story of Frankenstein’s monster and Dracula, is not any one of its themes but its total effect on consciousness. To accept Bender’s argument is to accept the idea that Robinson Crusoe has much more than an effect on our ideas. It has an effect, he argues, upon our very way of thinking. It is in this that the figure of Crusoe achieves the status of mythical consciousness.

Introduction

11

The idea for this collection of essays began at a conference entitled Defoe’s Footprints, held in honour of Maxmillian E. Novak in June 2002 at the William Andrews Clark Library, University of California, Los Angeles. Our work continued long after the conference. Some of the papers offered there form the basis of this collection; others have been added only recently. We are grateful to all the participants at the conference: John Bender, Laura Brown, Robert Folkenflik, J. Paul Hunter, Jayne Lewis, Anne Mellor, Felicity Nussbaum, Alan Roper, Manuel Schonhorn, Michael Seidel, Stuart Sherman, and Roxann Wheeler. Jayne Lewis was an early, enthusiastic supporter of our work and Robert Folkenflik was always ready with advice. At that conference we also enjoyed the presentations of several excellent teachers who recounted their adventures in teaching Robinson Crusoe: Geoffrey Sill, John Barberet, Roxanne Kent-Drury, Manuel Schonhorn, and Matthew Wickman. Their work can be read in Approaches to Teaching Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, ed. Maximillian E. Novak and Carl Fisher (2005). We deeply appreciate the zealous help of our research assistant at UCLA, Helen McManus. Our work would have neither begun nor been completed without devoted staff members at UCLA – those of the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, the Department of English, and the Center for Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Studies, whose director, Peter H. Reill, has guided and supported our work. Robert M. Maniquis Carl Fisher

chapter one

Defoe’s Silences S T U A RT S H E R M A N

I’d like to begin where Max Novak once chose to begin, with a passage he took as an epigraph for the first chapter of Realism, Myth, and History, his third book on Daniel Defoe. The passage comes from the preface to Defoe’s Continuation of Letters Written by a Turkish Spy at Paris, published in 1718, a year before his career as novelist commenced with Crusoe. As Novak points out, the paragraph touches on questions of representation that Defoe will soon take up in his own fiction: It is observ’d by the Curious, that the most difficult thing in the Limners Art is, to represent a Person singing; suppose it be the picture of a young Lady, the utmost he can do is, to shew her Countenance bright, the Company listening, and appearing pleased; but alas towards the Sound, towards the Charm of her Voice, and the Beauty of her Judgment, he can do no more than paint her with her Mouth open, which is the meanest Posture she can, with Decency, be shewn in; and unless the other Passions discover it, she may as well be supposed to be swearing, scolding, sick, or anything else, as well as singing.1

From this short discussion of the painter’s limitations, Novak launches a book about the author’s tactics for transcending them. In Defoe’s fiction, he argues, ‘narrative, often fanciful narrative,’ reconstructs reality in ways the limner fails at; realistic ‘story itself’ proves a sufficient ‘means of communicating’ with its audience.2 Still, as Novak observes, Defoe proposes ‘no satisfactory solution’ for the specific problem he delineates here;3 rather than solve the problem, he insists on it. Within the precincts of the passage, the reader en-

Defoe’s Silences

13

counters three artists at work: singer, limner, author. The first two are, at the moment, in different kinds of trouble. The singer may have power to please ‘the Company,’ but, translated and subdued by the ‘Limner’s Art,’ she surrenders her voice and forfeits the power of her song. The painter confronts his limitations more directly, doing his ‘utmost’ but finding soon enough that ‘he can do no more’; striving to move ‘towards the Sound’ but knowing that he can never (‘alas’) capture it. Deploying a visual medium to render an auditory experience, he has produced a representation that is also an occlusion. Words, in some respects a more supple and capacious medium, might conceivably manage things differently: a writer might describe the voice, track the performance over time and paragraphs, even name the song. But that is not what Defoe is up to here. Instead, he renders the painter’s problem more emphatic and more troubling than it might seem were we actually looking at the picture, since inaudibility is a component of the graphic that we tend to take for granted. Defoe, though, wants his readers’ minds to move upon the singer’s silence. What we have here – to echo a film about another cool hand, a master of fictions, intermittent inmate, and compulsive escape artist – what we have here is a failure to communicate, deftly communicated. What interests me here is Defoe’s interest in the failure. There are signs aplenty throughout his fiction that Defoe finds the painter’s predicament attractive, even compelling, as a model for his own methods. In the painting, by Defoe’s reckoning, the singer’s silence constitutes a genuine shortfall; the painter cannot help but occlude a critical portion of the reality he purports to represent. In narrative, though, comparable occlusions might work as analogue for that element of reality that Defoe most wishes to represent: the insistent, various isolations of his characters, whether psychological or circumstantial, voluntary or enforced. Four years after writing the paragraph on the ‘limner’s art,’ Defoe reworked its key components as the narrative of a small transaction between two of his characters. This time, the singer’s silence is deliberate, tactical, and triumphant. Colonel Jack describes the stratagems by which the woman who was to become both his first and his fifth wife first contrived to woo him. He and she lived in closely neighbouring houses; her parlour window faced his, and from that vantage she contrived a complex and seductive performance: ‘she Sung very often in her Parlour, as well by her self as with two young Ladies, who came often to see her; I could see by their Books, and her Guitar in her Hand, that she was Singing, but she never open’d the Window ... upon my coming to my Window, she kept her own

14

Stuart Sherman

always shut.’4 Novak takes up this male-gaze moment too. Near the end of a recent article on Defoe and painting, he quotes it in order to show how Defoe tries to achieve in language the most striking visual effects of realist Dutch perspective painting: ‘the sense of space involved, the small court, the seeing through windows into other rooms.’5 As an example of such painting, Novak cites in passing a picture by Samuel von Hoogstraeten that Samuel Pepys particularly admired when he encountered it in the collection of his friend Thomas Povey. The painter situates us at one end of a long corridor, looking down which we discern, in the next room but one, two people seated at a table: a man in a black hat with his back to us and a woman in light blue facing him. This little passage in the painting amounts to a Vermeer in miniature, but it is doubly occluded by the distance and the lighting: we occupy a space separate from the sitters; and we see them through leaded glass, darkly. In his display of the picture, Povey contrived to compound all three of its most striking effects: illusion, distance, and occlusion. He hung it at the back of a small, otherwise bare room off the parlour, so that when he threw the door to that room open, his visitor would be surprised first by the revelation of such a vista (all that sudden new space), and second by the discovery of the deception, the recognition that (in Pepys’s enthusiastic account) ‘there is nothing but only a plain picture hung upon the wall.’6 As it happens, Colonel Jack uses almost the selfsame phrase, but about real life rather than painting. He declares that before he met the silent singer, he had no interest in women; ‘they were no more to me than a Picture hanging up against a Wall.’ His future wife’s chief accomplishment is to animate that inert, indifferent outlook by compounding transparency with occlusion; by simulating at her window the silence that is common to all actual pictures, but that here is complicated by its resituation in a more copiously sensory reality. Jack can see that real song is pouring forth in real time, but knows to his irritation that he cannot hear it (in Hoogstraeten’s picture, the window partly obscures sight; in Jack’s narrative, it wholly occludes sound). This singer, then, partly succeeds where the earlier limner wholly failed. Her strategic silence becomes a source of power, a pivotal component of that psychological gap, that deliberately cultivated ‘strangeness,’ as Jack expresses it,7 which she constructs so that he will want to traverse it, as he promptly does by proposing marriage. The doubled windows work also as augury, of the sequence of sunderings and fusions that will mark this relationship for the remainder of the plot. Jack and his wife break apart quickly over her betrayals, only to reunite intensely and remarry happily, years later, in Virginia.

Defoe’s Silences

15

These matched passages, from the Turkish Spy and from Colonel Jack, do establish, as Novak argues, Defoe’s interest in pictorial realism as a paradigm and resource for his own fiction. But they suggest, I think, something more as well. What is perhaps most striking in Defoe’s engagement with painting is his impulse to emulate not only its special powers, but also its peculiar limitations. The silence that in Defoe’s analysis becomes the mark of the painter’s failure becomes in Defoe’s narrative the source of the singer’s success and, by extension, of his own. In this brief passage, he shows how the shut-windowed silence comes to constitute a performative power, a calculated and compelling self-representation; but he also indexes the psychological distance, the baffled, reciprocally ignorant isolation that will take Jack and his wife half a lifetime to overcome, half a world away. Distance is the condition that perspective painting affects; silence the condition that all painting is doomed to. Defoe is deeply interested in both, and in the ways that language and narrative might render them, because they are the modes of being his characters most ineluctably inhabit. In his fiction, he often figures silence as something worth exploring, not lamenting. Like Jack’s wife, he finds the window useful: he makes silence integral to his performance. Hoogstraeten, as it happens, does so too. In his View Down the Corridor, he heightens the sense of silence by conjuring its opposite: sources of potential sound. While the man and woman chat in the occluded background, Hoogstraeten fills the foreground with animals noted for their traffic in the audible: a dog, a cat, and a parrot. But their mouths are closed, and their eyes, aimed directly at the viewer, suggest that it may be our advent – the mere fact of seeing and being seen by us, or of being transposed into a painting – that has struck them into unwonted quietude. Hoogstraeten’s animal gambit figures silence as the painter’s choice, not the medium’s necessity. Defoe makes this choice too: to emphasize those sounds that as absorbers of his art we will not hear. Novak, in an essay entitled ‘The Unmentionable and the Ineffable in Defoe’s Fiction,’ looks at what Defoe does with sound in A Journal of the Plague Year.8 H.F., the narrator who suffered through that distant year, repeatedly dwells on the ‘Crys and Shrieks’ he heard in the streets – and on his own inability to recreate them, in retrospect, by means of language.9 Recalling a mother’s agonized keening for her dead daughter, he remarks, ‘I think I hear the very Sound of it,’ but he knows that we cannot (55). ‘I wish,’ he writes elsewhere, ‘I could make him that read this hear, as I imagine I now hear them [the screams of another victim], for the Sound still seems to ring in

16

Stuart Sherman

my Ears’ (104). Such wishes, he has acknowledged from the outset, defy fulfilment: ‘were it possible to represent those Times exactly to those that did not see them ... it must make just Impressions upon their Minds, and fill them with Surprize ... the Voice of Mourning was truly heard in the Streets, and the shriecks of Women and Children at the Windows ... were so frequent to be heard, as we passed the Streets, that it was enough to pierce the stoutest Heart in the World’ (16). The wishful subjunctive all but gives the game away: ‘were it possible.’ But it is not. In his story of the keening mother, H.F. implicates even himself in the distance that sunders his readers from his narrative: ‘It is so long ago, that I am not certain, but I think the Mother never recover’d, but died in two or three Weeks after’ (56). The inaudible cries of the Journal do manifest, as Novak argues, ‘Defoe’s sense of the inadequacy of language’ to represent certain extreme or extraordinary experiences.10 But Defoe’s language here accomplishes something else as well. H.F. may wish us to ‘hear’ past sounds; Defoe plainly wishes us to notice that we cannot hear them. Language, as he deploys it, is adequate to one recurrent task: it emphasizes the distance of events and the silence of the text. ‘What then is the Silence of Life?’ asks Robinson Crusoe near the start of Defoe’s most sustained discourse on isolation, the essay ‘Of Solitude’ that begins the Serious Reflections, the third instalment in Crusoe’s fictive autobiography.11 Even in context, the question is strangely abrupt. That word then suggests that Crusoe is tracking a train of thought, but he has not mentioned silence till now. Yet here, suddenly, he posits it as a key term, a given: an apparently intrinsic, unarguable condition of ‘Life,’ worthy of urgent investigation. Still, it is readily recognizable as the auditory concomitant of solitude, the term that Crusoe has taken for his topic and his title, and on which he has already offered one of the most hypnotic pronouncements in all Defoe: ‘Sometimes I have wonder’d how it [i.e., ‘a long tedious Life of Solitude ... the Life of a Man in an Island’] could be supported, especially for the first Years, when the Change was violent and impos’d, and nature unacquainted with any thing like it. Sometimes I have as much wonder’d, why it should be any Grievance or Affliction; seeing upon the whole View of the Stage of Life which we act upon in this World, it seems to me, that Life in general is, or ought to be, but one universal Act of Solitude’ (1–2). That second sentence is one of those glorious run-ons whose waywardness we might well deplore in student prose, but whose suggestiveness proves so astonishing in Defoe. There is, first of all, the pleonastic insistence on isolation, three different terms – one, the uni in universal, the solus in solitude – signifying singleness. There is the

Defoe’s Silences

17

odd toggling between the descriptive is and the prescriptive ought to be, and the elusive logic behind that ought (why ought life to be so solitary?). There is the push towards paradox in the mixing of the isolate and the ‘universal’: if all human solitudes converge in ‘one universal act’ then are they not somehow communal after all? Finally, there is the fractured, troubled variant on Shakespeare’s famous metaphor. If, as Crusoe apparently agrees, all the world’s a stage, then what kind of performance can ‘one universal Act of Solitude’ supply? Who, if anyone, is the audience, and what, if anything, can be transmitted to them? In Crusoe’s Shakespearean conceit, Defoe transposes to the theatre, and by extension to the printed page, some of those oddly compelling limitations and occlusions that he has elsewhere associated with the limner’s art. He conjures up a drama in which each character is cut off from the others, and the audience is cut off from all of them, a performance like those the limner and Jack’s wife have differently supplied: a theatre of performed silences. But by such a reckoning, the reader – like Jack at the window, like the viewer of the painter’s insufficient picture – will be occluded, listening to silences, isolated even at the moment of being addressed. With the figure of the playhouse, Crusoe’s theory of life becomes a theory of literature too, a proposition as to what fiction is, or ought to be: an enactment of human solitudes. But to pursue the effects of silence by means of language is very different from accepting it as a limitation imposed by paint. How are such sequestrations supposed to work in words, devices ordinarily deployed to break silence and mediate distance? Defoe highlights the question early in the first volume, at the moment when Crusoe, writing of his arrival on the island, confronts a new and daunting narrative task. He must now, he recognizes, ‘enter into a melancholy Relation of a Scene of silent Life, such perhaps as was never heard of in the World before.’12 This sentence, too, combines a tinge of the theatrical (that ‘melancholy Scene’) with a curiously muted acoustic and hints thereby at an elusive logic of representation. Defoe’s language conjures up the conundrum of a dumb show that must somehow be made audible if it is to become intelligible. And there persists the near paradox of isolation in communion, of the imparted ‘Act of Solitude.’ Crusoe strives by many means – chart, journal, narrative – to transmit to the reader the experience of his remote, solitary, and silent life. He must use words, that is, to transform the silent ‘Scene’ into something ‘heard,’ but he must also contrive somehow to preserve the silence still – to insist on it, as Defoe does in connection with the limner’s picture, and as Jack does in the story of his wife’s oc-

18

Stuart Sherman

cluded song. Only then will Crusoe’s reader be able to measure his isolation, in part by mirroring it. Throughout his fiction, Defoe comes up with nearly innumerable devices for accomplishing this narrative alchemy, but Crusoe, of course, provides him with his first and largest laboratory. One striking moment of invention, compounded of allusion and alteration, occurs on the fourth anniversary of Crusoe’s island arrival; he marks the occasion with this meditation: ‘I look’d now upon the World as a Thing remote, which I had nothing to do with, no Expectation from, and indeed no Desires about ... so I thought it look’d as we may perhaps look upon it hereafter, viz. as a Place I had liv’d in, but was come out of it; and well might I say, as Father Abraham to Dives, Between me and thee is a great Gulph fix’d’ (128). Crusoe echoes Christ’s parable in Luke (16:19–31), where Abraham in heaven addresses the rich man (Dives) in hell. The great gulf Abraham speaks of is one of class and morality, pointedly conflated: it sunders the poor from the rich, the saved from the damned, as though (this is Christ’s point in the telling) those paired categories might be coextensive. Crusoe adds a third and simpler distinction; he adapts Abraham’s utterance as though it were an address to the living from the dead, as though he himself were speaking to the world from the vantage of the ‘hereafter.’ Crusoe bends the scripture to his purposes in other ways as well. For one thing, he changes the pronouns. In the original, Abraham stipulates a ‘great gulf fixed’ between ‘us and you’ (Luke 16: 26); for Crusoe that great gulf sunders me and thee. Such small singularizations pervade Defoe’s fiction; they constitute their own insistent, long-running act of solitude (the single footprint affords the most famous instance, one where we would expect two or more). But Crusoe’s present shift in pronouns maps a particular isolation. Crusoe’s me makes sense: his point is partly that on the island there is no us to speak of. But his thee is more striking, and more odd. It is not only singular but intimate. It applies most readily not to the ‘World’ that Crusoe putatively addresses (for whom the collective you might be more appropriate, as in Abraham’s retort to all who dwell in Gehenna), but to the solitary reader, whose remoteness from the narrator here suddenly attains an almost contractual clarity. At the moment of reading, Crusoe’s misquotation works not only as a report of his thoughts in the past (on that long-ago fourth anniversary), but as an account of his transactions in the present, with a reader with whom he conceives himself compounded, convergent, and firmly fixed: spatial (the 10,000 miles or so that separate the island from the London reader’s chair), spiritual (the less calculable divide between a speaker

Defoe’s Silences

19

embarked on his salvation and a reader perhaps otherwise engaged), and thanatological – the distance attained and insisted upon by a narrator convinced that, by virtue of his now redemptive isolation, he speaks from the vantage of a sublunary equivalent to the ‘hereafter.’ One of Defoe’s most striking accomplishments as novelist is to fix these great gulfs everywhere in his fiction and to build them out of almost any narrative material that comes to hand. The ‘hereafter’ that Crusoe speaks of is for him merely metaphorical, certainly at the time of writing but also at the time of publication. Though he would be pushing ninety in 1719 and 1720, when his three autobiographical volumes first appeared, those books provided readers with plentiful clues – notably his propensity for producing sequels and for responding in later volumes to criticisms of the first – that this author was still present on the planet, still, in effect, his readers’ contemporary. In subsequent novels, though, Defoe set up sustained, intense encounters between living readers and dead storytellers; the Cavalier, Moll, and H.F. (the journalist of the plague year) are all documentably deceased long before their first readers could purchase their first edition. Of the three deaths, H.F.’s is the most expressively orchestrated. A Journal of the Plague Year appeared in 1722, when signs of the plague’s return were compelling much attention. If (as the details of the narrative suggest) H.F. is roughly Crusoe’s contemporary, then the Journal’s first readers would have reckoned with the possibility that what they read was the work of a still living (but aged) man, eager to draw on his experiences of fifty-seven years ago (when the plague last hit London) by way of providing guidance for the present peril. However, very late in the book Defoe abruptly introduces a small complication into this imaginary communion. When H.F. mentions a burial ground at Moorfields, his text gives way to the sole editorial intrusion in the book: ‘N.B. The Author of this Journal, lyes buried in that very Ground’ (233). Up to this point it has been possible to imagine a contemporaneity between the narrator and his original audience. Defoe’s abrupt cancellation of that possibility impinges with peculiar force on the Journal’s closing words a few pages later, where H.F. transcribes the verse that he had composed as the coda to his original manuscript more than half a century ago: A dreadful Plague in London was, In the Year Sixty Five, Which swept an Hundred Thousand Souls Away; yet I alive! (248)

20

Stuart Sherman

The absence of a finite verb in that last, exultant exclamation allows our special knowledge to fill the void and double the application: H.F., ‘alive’ when he wrote, is not so now. The condition that in 1665 distinguished him from ‘an Hundred Thousand Souls’ now separates us from him. As readers, we too are isolated, discovering ourselves to have been long engaged in an encounter that (like so many in this sickness-suffused text) turns out to be a dialogue with the dead. If death dates produce sundering, so, in Defoe, does that other gravestone datum, the proper name of the deceased. As Homer O. Brown has pointed out, among all Defoe’s fictive narrators we learn the full birth names of only one, Robinson Crusoe;13 all the others, each for his or her own reasons, withhold from the reader this simplest means of verbal access, supplanting it with the pseudonyms – sometimes whole sequences or clusters – by which they have contrived, in life as on the page, to make identity more elusive. A comparable occlusion extends over swatches of text much longer than a proper name. Crusoe, for example, promises his reader a ‘Copy’ of the journal he kept during his first year on the island (69), but delivers instead a text that is clearly more complex than a mere transcript; it teems with deletions, revisions, retroactive insertions.14 Such redaction also governs H.F.’s whole journal of the plague year; that closing verse constitutes the only instance where the narrator announces an exact correspondence between the original manuscript and the printed text. The ostensible editors of both Moll’s and Roxana’s memoirs make revision a proud point of policy; each woman (as Moll’s editor phrases it) ‘is made to tell her own Tale in modester Words than she told it at first.’15 The process of textual alteration is sharply gendered: Crusoe and H.F. control their own revisions, whereas Moll and Roxana do not. In all four cases, the printed text supplants the original form of narrative; these representations are also occlusions. But for Moll and Roxana, the occlusion goes farther, functioning as a kind of bell jar. To the extent that their original words constitute their authentic voice, the editor’s ‘modester Words’ reproduce, deliberately and insistently, the ineluctable effect of the limner’s painting: a silencing of the woman’s song. In Roxana, Defoe deploys all his tactics of sequestration – names, dates, occluded texts, and narrative silencings – with an intricacy and impact unmatched by any earlier novel. As has often been remarked, the novel deals in a double time scheme. The details of Roxana’s narrative place her simultaneously, at the height of her powers as formidable woman and ‘Fortunate Mistress,’ during the reigns of both Charles II and George

Defoe’s Silences

21

I. To an alert early reader, Roxana might seem at once a luminary of a vanished age (probably dead now, like Charles’s other mistresses) and a living contemporary. Here again, then, Defoe’s calendrical design inculcates in the reader an immediate experience of the uncertainties and isolations that the novel narrates. Like many characters in the book (most pressingly Roxana’s anguished daughter), we are prevented from readily identifying the protagonist by the most ordinary means: her names, her dates. In the end, as reciprocal secrecy engulfs and alienates the principal characters – Roxana, her lifelong confidante Amy, and her desperate daughter Susan – it encompasses the reader too, from whom, on the final page, Roxana withholds those details of her story for which she has awakened the sharpest desire and expectation: the particulars of her daughter’s murder and of the ‘dreadful Course of Calamities’ that followed.16 Denied the safe haven that Crusoe, Moll, and Jack attain by penitent conversion, she is submerged in greater gulfs than they, and it would be hard to say, at this breathtakingly strange endpoint, who is the more confounded castaway: Roxana, incapable of revelation and repentance; or her reader, abandoned and isolated by a narrative broken off in brutal silence. Roxana’s silence articulates damnation. Her daughter’s murder is an act of solitude so extreme as to be literally unspeakable. Roxana’s last pages perform a reckoning that suffuses all Defoe’s novels, of silence as an attribute paradoxically intrinsic both to new print forms in general and, in particular, to that curious, hybrid genre with which Defoe conducts his most intricate literary experiments, the fictive autobiography. ‘The History of this Beautiful Lady,’ declares Roxana’s putative ‘Relator’ (i.e., editor) in his preface’s opening sentence, ‘must speak for itself’ (1). We discern soon enough, though, that it will not, and cannot. Will not, because, within this same sentence, Roxana’s editor (like Moll’s) makes it clear that he has altered the narrative’s wording (has ‘dress[ed] up the Story’ in ‘Cloaths’ different from those in which ‘the Lady ... prepar’d it for the World’) while at the same time insisting, paradoxically, that he ‘speaks’ her very ‘Words’ (1). Cannot, because, as the teller herself discovers after long equivocation and protraction, she can barely bring herself to begin, let alone complete, the part of her story that matters most. The novel’s dark drama unfolds in part as an increasing discomfort within the reader, an accumulating experience of thwarted access that begins in the occlusion of Roxana’s authentic ‘Words’ and ends in a narrative silence so troubling to the novel’s initial audience that several authors subsequently sought to break it by means of spurious, and lucrative, conclusions.17

22

Stuart Sherman

Autobiographies, Roxana’s first readers apparently felt, ought to end differently – with the story wholly told. The chief business of the genre is ostensibly to speak for the self; it would seem difficult to make sense of, or a place for, an overwhelming silence in the scheme. The critic John Sturrock has usefully parsed autobiography as an emergence out of silence, in a reckoning that helps to highlight what is most strange in Defoe’s manipulations of the mode. The autobiographer, John Sturrock suggests, always works outward from something like solitude to something like communion. ‘The writer’s urge to establish his singularity is an inaugural topos of the genre. It may be expressed very robustly, as it is by Nietzche at the start of the preface to Ecce Homo: “Listen! for I am such and such a person. For Heaven’s sake do not confound me with anyone else.”’ But this ‘inaugural topos’ effectually reverses itself in the very act of writing, as the text itself enables the autobiographer ‘to reemerge from his guilty solipsism in the form of a document whose publication asks that we readmit him to the community, as author and as human being. He is playing a double game.’18 Part of Defoe’s odd accomplishment, at the very moment of the genre’s emergence, is to stymie this implicit communion and to imbue autobiography so deeply with the signs of silence that it becomes, in Crusoe’s haunting phrase, an act not of community but of solitude. Defoe may have developed this method, I’d like to suggest, in part by way of a deliberate dialectic with a powerful, albeit fictive, rival author: Addison and Steele’s Mr. Spectator, who in some respects had dominated print culture during the previous decade and who makes it clear in his first paper that he has hitherto spent his entire life in ‘a most profound Silence’: ‘I threw away my Rattle before I was two Months old and indeed do not remember that I ever spoke three Sentences together in my whole Life’ (No.1). In Crusoe’s essay on solitude, Defoe closely echoes key sentences from the Spectator, partly in order to confirm its arguments and partly in order to pull them another way (during the last years of the Review, Defoe had read that pre-eminent competitor and commented on it often). Mr. Spectator, for example, repeatedly expounds on the pleasure of savouring his insularity while moving among the crowds of London: ‘He who comes into Assemblies only to gratify his Curiosity, and not to make a Figure, enjoys the Pleasures of Retirement in a more exquisite Degree, than he possibly could in his Closet’ (No. 4). By this logic, as Addison makes clear in a later number, Mr. Spectator favours one city site above all others: ‘There is no Place in the Town which I so much love to frequent as the Royal-Exchange,’ where ‘I am known to no Body’ (No. 69).19 Crusoe in his essay returns repeatedly not only to

Defoe’s Silences

23

Addison’s arguments but to his wording, and even to his urban geography of solitude: ‘A Man under a vow of perpetual Silence, if but rigorously observ’d, would be, even on the [Royal] Exchange of London, as perfectly retired from the World, as a Hermit in his Cell; or a Solitair in the Desarts of Arabia.’20 Though Crusoe never mentions the Spectator, he grounds his own argument in a crucial but implicit difference between life histories. Mr. Spectator has opted for silence while savouring society. Crusoe, by contrast, having suffered an enforced silence and sequestration, argues that such a solitude, even when chosen (as by the hermits and monks he is here deriding), is less conducive to physical and moral well being than to the kind of sociable self-containment embodied in the Spectator. ‘I can affirm,’ Crusoe writes, ‘that I enjoy much more Solitude in the Middle of the greatest Collection of Mankind in the World, I mean, at London, while I am writing this, than ever I could say I enjoyed in eight and twenty Years Confinement to a desolate Island’ (4). Here again, as throughout his essay, the echoes of Addison sometimes seem so close as to verge on ventriloquy. In curious ways, as Pat Rogers has remarked, the contemporary who worked most like Defoe was Addison.21 There are, of course, striking differences. In the Spectator, the trope of silence works paradoxically as a means of intimacy between imaginary author and actual audience – as the medium of movement from solitude to sociability that Sturrock marks as the core attribute of autobiography. Mr. Spectator makes such motion explicit in his first number, where he explains his decision to commence a career as published author: ‘When I consider how much I have seen, read and heard, I begin to blame my own Taciturnity; and since I have neither Time nor Inclination to communicate the Fulness of my Heart in Speech, I am resolved to do it in Writing ... I have been often told by my Friends, that it is Pity so many useful Discoveries which I have made, should be in the Possession of a Silent Man. For this Reason therefore, I shall publish a Sheet-Full of Thoughts every Morning, for the Benefit of my Contemporaries’ (No. 1).22 Here, compactly enacted, is the whole Sturrockian script: the writer opts to ‘reemerge from his guilty solipsism in the form of a document whose publication asks that we readmit him to the community.’ For Mr. Spectator, print maps out the perfect middle way between new task and lifelong temperament. The passage gives voice to the paper’s core paradox: a ‘Silent Man’ suddenly bent on a volubility that struck contemporaries as without precedent. No one hitherto had undertaken to publish ‘a Sheetfull of Thoughts [i.e., an essay] every Morning.’ John Gay summed up the collective reaction: ‘We had at first indeed no manner of Notion,

24

Stuart Sherman

how a Diurnal Paper could be continu’d in the Spirit and Stile of our present SPECTATORS; but to our no small Surprize, we find them still rising upon us, and can only wonder from whence so Prodigious a Run of Wit and Learning can proceed.’23 The surprise derived at least partly from the Spectator’s peculiar premise: the paper’s unprecedented art of tacit loquacity. That loquacity, in turn, indexed intimacy. Mr. Spectator makes of his own extraordinary silence the common ground on which he can commune with his readers; it corresponds, as he repeatedly makes clear, with that silent part of themselves, their ongoing, complex private consciousness, which the paper will take as its chief object of exploration. Mr. Spectator asserts early on, ‘the working of my own mind is the general Entertainment of my Life’ (No. 4). Under his tutelage, he implicitly promises, his readers can discover a matchingly reflective and reflexive entertainment of their own. ‘Is it not much better,’ he urges a week later, ‘to be let into the knowledge of ones-self, than to hear what passes in Muscovy or Poland?’ (No. 10).24 Silence, with its attendant inwardness, is in effect (to echo Mr. Spectator’s manifesto) the chief ‘Benefit’ he proffers his ‘Contemporaries’; it is also (to echo Sturrock’s) the writer’s ticket of readmission into the community. It is perhaps characteristic of the Spectator that it amusingly confirms Sturrock’s paradigm, and of Defoe that he immeasurably complicates it. Like Addison and Steele, Defoe often takes up the question of silence at the start of his texts, but less as an in-joke for his readers to smile at than as a problem for them to puzzle out. His fictive autobiographers recapitulate much of Mr. Spectator’s (and Sturrock’s) schema. They emerge from sustained silence (Crusoe’s long exile, H.F.’s solitary ordeal, Moll’s and Roxana’s lifelong secrecy) intent on disclosing their experiences and ‘Discoveries.’ They proceed, like Mr. Spectator, ‘to do it in Writing,’ with a loquacity that is likewise without precedent in English prose, but very differently textured: tumultuous, agitated, ceaselessly engaged in a ‘prodigious run’ (in Gay’s phrase) not of ‘Wit and Learning,’ but of struggle and improvisation, re-enacted in the voluble agitations, repetitions, and careenings of the prose. Defoe’s earliest critics, as Rogers has remarked, made his loquacity their chief focus of attack, describing his political pamphlets as ‘a Heap of Words to no Purpose’; ‘a Bundle of Tautology, and a Heap of Thoughts not rightly digested.’25 Decades later, Defoe’s vituperative antagonist Charles Gildon couched the charge in a newly intricate context, which Defoe himself found considerably more provocative. In The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures

Defoe’s Silences

25

of Mr. D— De F— of London, Hosier (1719), Gildon contrived, albeit in fantasy, to have Defoe deliver the indictment against himself. At the pamphlet’s start, Gildon staged a dialogue between Defoe and his creations Crusoe and Friday, in which at one point Defoe proudly explains that he has been ‘endow’d’ since earliest youth ‘with a wonderful Loquaciousness and a pretty handsome [self-] Assurance.’26 Loquacity here becomes a point of pride, a component of autobiography. So, in effect, does solitude: the pamphlet’s title page describes Defoe as one ‘who has liv’d above fifty Years by himself, in the Kingdoms of North and South Britain.’ Both verbosity and itinerant isolation serve as evidence for Gildon’s chief charge: that Crusoe is neither authentic history nor arrant fiction, but a covert act of authorial autobiography. ‘You are,’ Defoe tells Crusoe, ‘the true Allegorick Image of thy tender father D[anie]l; I drew thee from the Consideration of my own Mind; I have been all my Life that Rambling, Inconsistent Creature, which I have made thee’ (x). Gildon’s satiric insistence on self-portraiture helped to prompt Defoe’s most sustained, though enigmatic, exploration of the links between fiction and autobiography and of the reasons that silence might – perhaps must – suffuse both: his preface to the Serious Reflections. Or rather, as the header has it, ‘Robinson Crusoe’s Preface.’ Much the longest in all Defoe’s fiction, this preface differs in another way as well. It is presented as the work not of a ‘Relator’ or editor, but of the fictive protagonist himself. Novak has deemed the piece an exercise in ‘obfuscation,’27 and readers have long remarked that, in his deliberately elusive argument, Defoe strives to have things both ways: to refute Gildon’s charge that Crusoe is a mere ‘airy Fantom’ and at the same time to hint that he is indeed a deliberate, didactic fictive reflection of his creator.28 To the accusation that ‘the Story is feign’d’ and ‘that there never were any such Man or Place,’ Crusoe retorts that ‘the Story, though Allegorical, is also Historical,’ and (more tantalizingly) that ‘there’s not a Circumstance in the imaginary Story, but has its just Allusion to a real Story’ (A2r–v, A5r). That the ‘real Story’ involves an actual mortal not named Robinson Crusoe, the preface suggests first directly: ‘there is a Man alive, and well known too, the Actions of whose Life are the just Subject of these Volumes’ (A2v); then more obliquely: invoking Don Quixote as precedent, Crusoe describes that text as ‘an emblematic History of, and a just Satyr upon, the Duke de Medina Sidonia, a Person very remarkable at that Time in Spain’ (A3r). Defoe is here setting up a rather ornate retort to Gildon, who, by mocking Crusoe’s ‘quixotism,’ revealed (so Crusoe now asserts) ‘that he knew nothing of what he said; and perhaps will be

26

Stuart Sherman

a little startled, when I shall tell him, that what he meant for a Satyr, was the greatest of Panegyricks’ (A3r). The odd effect of this boast is partly to confirm the critic it refutes. Gildon is right about at least some things: Crusoe is a fiction, and the ‘real Story’ lies elsewhere. However, it does not lie where the reader has any hope of finding it – as Defoe makes clear in the ensuing sentence: ‘Without letting the Reader into a nearer Explication of the Matter, I proceed to let him know, that the happy Deductions I have employ’d myself to make from all the Circumstances of my Story, will abundantly make him amends for his not having the Emblem [i.e., Crusoe’s ‘imaginary Story’] explained by the Original’ (A3v). Defoe here launches his recurrent, and important, second line of argument, that the didactic fruits of Crusoe’s story are worth the fiction. But he does so in a way that gratuitously emphasizes occlusion. The passage decrees distance at its start (we readers will get no ‘nearer’ to the matter), and silence at its end: we will hear no account of the ‘Original.’ Goaded at least in part by Gildon’s imputated duality – of a Defoe for whom Crusoe figures as autobiographic Doppelgänger – Defoe reinscribes ambiguity while strenuously purporting to deny it. He positively asserts a silence, to readers who have hitherto had no reason (at least within his own texts) to suspect one. Or rather, he asserts two silences, intertwined: the putative speaker (Crusoe) doesn’t exist; the actual speaker (Defoe) won’t talk. The preface’s intricately executed ‘obfuscation’ ends by making at least one thing clear. It establishes for its readers what it is that they cannot know: the exact narrative of the real story; the exact truth-status of the imaginary one. The preface enacts with unusual force the mix of proffering and withholding, utterance and silence, revelation and occlusion, that characterizes much of Defoe’s work. Poised on the cusp between Crusoe’s two volumes of narrative Life and his ensuing cluster of Reflections, Defoe resolves to sustain the fictive performance, but to keep the window emphatically shut. In Serious Reflections, Defoe, like Mr. Spectator, makes a point of his own silence from the start. Still, for all the echoes, Crusoe’s and the Spectator’s constructions of the ‘Silence of Life’ differ radically. In the Spectator, silence is fundamentally a comic device, the endearing and expressive eccentricity of a fictive author who plainly exists only on the printed page, where both his silence and his language provide a point of communion for the 60,000 readers who (in his famously cheerful computation [No. 10])29 absorb his words at coffee houses and tea tables all over London. In Crusoe’s essay (and, I would argue, in Defoe’s whole oeuvre), despite the energies ex-

Defoe’s Silences

27

pended in affirming certain kinds of solitude, the accounts of silent life always tug towards the tragic. Early in Reflections, Crusoe devotes much attention to the story of a man who, offended by the conversation of his ‘nearest Relations ... suddenly resolved never to speak any more.’ The ‘Severity’ of his conduct, Crusoe avers, ‘was unjustifiable; it ruined his Family, and broke up his house.’ His wife left him, then went mad. ‘His Children separated some one Way, and some another Way; and only one Daughter who loved her Father above all the Rest, kept with him, tended him, talk’d to him by Signs, and lived almost Dumb like her Father, near 29 years with him’ (4–5). The story conspicuously echoes King Lear, with its depiction of father and daughter fused and sundered, of devastation and devotion grounded in an originary silence. But it also calls to mind comparable familial sunderings in Defoe’s own fictions: the waterman barricaded from his family by threat of plague;30 Roxana embracing her daughter under threat of exposure (she speaks there of finding in the embrace a ‘secret inconceivable Pleasure,’ a notably Addisonian formulation given a notably Defovian tragic twist: she speaks in the same sentence of her ‘secret Horror’ at the intimacy [277]); Mrs. Veal silently dodging Mrs. Bargrave’s kiss;31 Jack watching the woman who will soon betray him singing silently in a window. But the closest parallels in the tale of the silent man concern Crusoe himself. The ‘near 29 Years’ that the father and daughter spend in silence tally closely with the twentyeight years Crusoe spent on the island. And even the language in which he introduces the Lear-like story of the silent man echoes his narrative of his own ordeals: ‘I have heard of a Man, that ... suddenly resolved never to speak any more.’32 The sentence plays along the same line of paradox, of sound (‘heard’) and silence, which Crusoe introduces in that tangled sentence in the first volume, about ‘the Melancholy Scene of silent Life, such as perhaps was never heard of in the World before.’ ‘What, then, is the Silence of Life?’ Defoe never fully answers Crusoe’s question; instead he mirrors it in the silence of his texts. In Defoe’s narratives silences insistently recur as though they were not trope but trait: an attribute intrinsic to the lives his protagonists have lived, to the Lives they’ve written – and even to the ‘real story’ that, in the preface to Serious Reflections, Defoe himself refuses to write. Even Defoe’s discussion of the limner’s art, in the preface to the Turkish Spy, which he wrote on the verge of his career as novelist, is designed to defend an act of literary silence. Defoe evokes the painter’s predicament as exculpatory analogue to his own. Like the limner, he explains, he is engaged in an act of translation, in his case from the Arabic in which the supposed Turkish spy

28

Stuart Sherman

originally wrote into the English that his present readership requires. After his short discourse on the painter’s problems, Defoe clinches the comparison: ‘We can no more represent the Eloquence, the Spirit, the sprightly Turns, and the happy Genius of our accomplish’d, inimitable Arabian, by the most laboured and studied Translation into English, than a Limner can paint the voice, and give the Musick of the Song in the Gestures of the Lady.’33 The analogy posits two parallel modes of remoteness: the foreign, and the female (in a move that anticipates the most famous scene in Roxana, the performing woman becomes equated with the Turk). As so often in texts of the period, the translator’s trope of modesty is actually a tactic of verisimilitude; the reader may be more strongly inclined to believe in the existence of a text that has given the translator so much trouble. But in fact, such a text does not exist; Defoe, like Giovanni Marana, the earlier, Italian promulgator of those putatively Turkish letters whose Continuation Defoe here commences, has actually made up his whole text from scratch. The true reality effect here resides in what Vladimir Nabokov once called the ‘feigned remoteness in the window pane,’34 in the act of occlusion that makes the thing more real, and more desirable, because it is both apparent and sequestered, as Jack’s future wife becomes more compelling to him than a ‘Picture hanging upon a Wall’ at the very moment he perceives her through the window, her song both visible and silenced. Why, in the profoundly innovative fictions, essays, and essay-fictions of the early 1700s, should the performance of silence loom so large and mean so much? The answer may reside partly in a heightened consciousness, within both writers and readers, about the material medium of transmission. Print never, strictly speaking, ‘speaks’; it addresses the eye directly, the ear more elusively. Out of that simple circumstance, both the Spectator and Defoe wove new meanings. If Mr. Spectator’s silence functions as a correlative for his readers’ consciousness, it also proffers a paradigm for the operations of his daily paper. In his first number, Mr. Spectator makes a point of his tacit ubiquity. His routine, he asserts, includes regular visits to the coffee-houses (Will’s, Child’s, St. James’s, the Grecian, the Cocoa Tree, Jonathan’s), the theatres, and all public gathering places: ‘There is no place of general resort, wherein I do not often make my appearance ... though I never open my lips’ in any one of them.35 The behaviour here described would seem eccentric in any ordinary mortal, but it corresponds exactly to the modus operandi that the Spectator itself aspired to and achieved. Distributed daily in all these places of ‘general resort’ and more, it attained omnipresence while tech-

Defoe’s Silences

29

nically sustaining silence. In their fictive persona, Addison and Steele had contrived an apt and durable allegory for the real workings of the new genre – the daily periodical essay – that they had undertaken to invent. Defoe does something similar, but darker. Repeatedly proposing that the text speak for itself, he nonetheless deploys his silences to raise questions about text, self, and speaking to register the great gulfs, the reciprocal remotenesses, that sunder character from character, and narrator from reader. Like Addison and Steele, he fashions from silence both an allegory for the forms he is inventing and a key to their substance. Let me end by citing another of Max Novak’s finds. In Realism, Myth, and History, just after his discussion of the limner passage, he looks briefly at another painterly anecdote, perhaps among the earliest stories Defoe ever set down. It appears in the manuscript called ‘Historical Collections,’ which Defoe in 1682 wrote up as a gift for his own future wife and which Novak discovered decades ago at the Clark Memorial Library. The story is well known and quickly told: ‘Zeuxis the famous Picture Drawer Painted a boy holding a Dishfull of Grapes in His hand Done so lively that the birds being Deceived flew at the grapes to eate them ... Zeuxis beeing in An Ingenuous Choler Defaced his workmanship [i.e., destroyed the painting] Sayeing If I had Drawne the boy as lively as the grapes, the birds would have been Afraid to touch them.’36 As Novak points out, this is a characteristic story for Defoe to have chosen, because it deals with the ‘depiction of the real.’37 But it is also a story about remoteness as a register of the real. Zeuxis deems the birds the most perceptive critics of his labours. And he assumes, like Defoe, that if his silent art is working right, its ideal respondents will choose to keep their distance.

NOTES 1 Defoe, A Continuation of Letters Written by a Turkish Spy at Paris (London, 1718), iv; quoted in Maximillian E. Novak, Realism, Myth, and History in Defoe’s Fiction (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983), 1. 2 Novak, Realism, 2. 3 Ibid., 1. 4 Defoe, Colonel Jack, edited by Samuel Holt Monk (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), 190. 5 Maximillian E. Novak, ‘Picturing the Thing Itself, or Not: Defoe, Painting, Prose Fiction, and the Arts of Describing,’ Eighteenth-Century Fiction 9, 1 (1996), 19.

30

Stuart Sherman

6 Samuel Pepys, The Diary of Samuel Pepys, edited by Robert Latham and William Matthews, Vol. 4 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), 18. 7 Defoe, Jack, 191. 8 Novak, ‘The Unmentionable and the Ineffable in Defoe’s Fiction,’ Studies in the Literary Imagination 15, 2 (1982), 99–102. 9 Defoe, A Journal of the Plague Year, edited by Louis A. Landa, World’s Classics (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 50. Subsequent page references appear in parentheses in the text. 10 Novak, ‘Unmentionable,’ 99. 11 Defoe, Serious Reflections during the Life and Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe: with His Vision of the Angelick World (London: W. Taylor, 1720), 3. Subsequent page references appear in parentheses in the text. 12 Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, edited by J. Donald Crowley (Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 1983), 63. Subsequent page references appear in parentheses in the text. 13 Brown, ‘The Displaced Self in the Novels of Daniel Defoe,’ ELH 38 (1971), 562. 14 Stuart Sherman, Telling Time: Clocks, Diaries, and English Diurnal Form 1660– 1785 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 226–37. 15 Defoe, Moll Flanders, edited by G.A. Starr (Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 1981), 3. 16 Defoe, Roxana, edited by John Mullan (Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 1996), 329. Subsequent page references appear in parentheses in the text. 17 See Spiro Peterson, ‘Defoe’s Roxana and Its Eighteenth-Century Sequels: A Critical and Bibliographical Study,’ Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1953; Robert Griffin, ‘The Text in Motion: Eighteenth-Century Roxanas,’ ELH 72 (2005), 387–406. 18 Sturrock, ‘Theory Versus Autobiography,’ in The Culture of Autobiography: Constructions of Self-Representation, ed. Robert Folkenflik (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), 26, 35. 19 Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, The Spectator, edited by Donald Bond, Vol. 1 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), 2, 19, 292, 294. 20 Defoe, Reflections, 6. 21 Pat Rogers, Robinson Crusoe (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1979), 107. 22 Addison and Steele, Spectator, 5. 23 The Present State of Wit, in a Letter to a Friend in the Country, edited by Donald F. Bond, Augustan Reprint Series 1, No. 3 (Los Angeles: Augustan Reprint Society, 1947), 6. 24 Addison and Steele, Spectator, 21, 45.

Defoe’s Silences

31

25 Pat Rogers, ed., Defoe: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972), 11. 26 Charles Gildon, The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Mr. D— De F— of London, Hosier, 2nd ed. (London: J. Roberts, 1719), x. 27 Novak, Daniel Defoe: Master of Fictions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 538. 28 Gildon, Life, vii. 29 Addison and Steele, Spectator, 44. 30 Defoe, Journal, 106–10. 31 Daniel Defoe, A True Relation of the Apparition of One Mrs. Veal (London: B. Bragg, 1706), 3. 32 Defoe, Reflections, 4. 33 Defoe, Spy, 4. 34 Nabokov, Pale Fire (New York: Vintage International, 1989), 37. 35 Addison and Steele, Spectator, 4. 36 Daniel Defoe, Historical Collections or Memoires of Passages and Stories Collected from Severall Authors, MS H6735M3, William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, Los Angeles, 127–8. 37 Novak, ‘Picturing,’ 5.

chapter two

The Atmospheres of Robinson Crusoe JAYNE LEWIS

If we are to be, we must have a where. Daniel Defoe, Serious Reflections on Robinson Crusoe (1720)

Defoe – fatally – once had its protagonist ‘affirm’ that ‘the story’ of Robinson Crusoe, ‘though allegorical is also historical.’1 Ever since, many of the most influential readings of that story have seemed to tilt in one of three directions: towards the ‘allegorical,’ so that Crusoe appears to be a primarily religious text indebted to allegedly residual forms of Puritan thought and experience; towards the ‘historical,’ so the same work resembles emergent forms of realist narration and presumably enlightened behaviour; and towards neither, thus both, the better to spark a decent conversation between the coming and the going.2 Nonetheless, all these various interpretive ventures tilt across the same plane; for just as all suppose a forward-marching ‘historical’ context, so is the ‘allegorical’ more than one point of the hermeneutic triangle: each approach to Defoe’s text assumes, in the words of the estimable Leslie Stephen, a ‘kind of allegory’ to the extent that each posits a gap between Crusoe’s language and its sometimes emergent, sometimes residual, sometimes interestingly compromised referent.3 It is, of course, the reader (the more professional the better) who bridges this gap. But because, Crusoe-like, this same reader is left to decide how best to build the bridge, Defoe’s novel perpetually manages to mask its own allegorical premises – premises it may thus, comfortingly, remain our eternal part to unmask. Yet when Defoe sets out to characterize Crusoe, he cannot help but add that it is also ‘the beautiful representation of a life of unexampled

The Atmospheres of Robinson Crusoe

33

misfortunes, and of a variety not to be met with in the world.’4 His words raise the possibility that the work is better engaged in terms of aesthesis than in those of allegoresis. It is this vision of Crusoe as a ‘beautiful representation’ that Max Novak embraced, most completely perhaps in his 1983 study of Defoe’s fiction. Realism, Myth, and History in Defoe’s Fiction brought out the unique forms of spatial awareness that inform all of Defoe’s work but particularly Crusoe, reintegrating them with the often haunting movements of dream and imagination that undergird so much of what Defoe wrote. In effect, Novak unlocked a symbolic dimension in which a text may figure forth the conditions of our experience of it. His reading helps us to understand how Defoe – famed no less for his circumstantial accounts of the things of this world than for his mimicry of the voice of the Puritan soul-searcher ever on the lookout for signs of the next – could also have admired the non-mimetic, world-creating ‘Method of great Men in the East in the Ages of Hieroglyphicks, when things were more accurately Describ’d by Emblems and Figures than Words.’5 To the extent that ‘Describ’d’ might mean ‘encompassed,’ we may also see how Defoe’s contemporary Joseph Browne could have charged him with ‘always raising Apparitions in the Air.’6 When we appreciate Defoe the artist and conjuror – the describer, so to speak, of certain figures in the air – we less sidestep the question of what ‘kind of allegory’ Robinson Crusoe might be than reframe it, to reveal the background of imaginative experience against which such questions are posed in the first place. Like many points of view I have adopted over the years, the one I would like to offer here is beholden to Novak, since it too attends to things of – and in – the air in order to probe the relationship between Crusoe and the environments, interpretive and otherwise, in which this singular fiction necessarily takes shape. What catches my eye, however, is not what Novak terms the ‘sublime,’ supernaturally inflected, and even proto-Gothic junctures we begin to notice once we begin to realize how possible it is to approach Defoe’s novel as a ‘beautiful representation.’ Though from time to time we might find ourselves in some of the same places (peering down at the famous footprint, for example), I would like to scan some of Crusoe’s literal atmospheres, considering the singularly eventful airspace that not only surrounds, pervades, and penetrates Crusoe’s island but upholds and conditions his lexical rendering of his experience there. What I hope to show is that one absolute condition of Crusoe’s island, considered both as a literary construct and as a setting within that construct, is also its least immediately visible, just as one of

34

Jayne Lewis

Crusoe’s most realistic features proves one of its most purely notional. For whenever Crusoe invokes the air and its aberrations – as he does on almost every page – he describes around his reader a truly novel symbolic environment, one that at least potentially completes the otherwise incomplete arcs of both ‘allegorical’ and ‘historical’ interpretation.7

‘It’ The world that became even more worldly was a subject whose extension was about as obscure as that of the impersonal ‘it’ in the proposition ‘It’s raining.’ Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age

Dec. 24. Much Rain all Night and all Day, no stirring out. Dec. 25. Rain all day. Dec. 26. No Rain, and the Earth much cooler than before, and pleasanter. Defoe, Robinson Crusoe (1719)8

We scarcely need Crusoe’s register of the rain that fell that Christmas to convince us that his own author and disposer must have loved talking about the weather. Defoe’s A Collection of the Most Remarkable Casualties and Disasters which happen’d in the late dreadful Tempest ([1704]; better known as The Storm) remains an incomparably thorough and instructive amalgam of contemporary responses to the violent storm which ravaged England in November 1703, and Novak reminds us that entries Defoe contributed to both the Weekly Journal and The Mercurius Politicus vividly justified the widespread ‘Terror and Amazement’ that attended a second northern European hurricane in 1717.9 In Robinson Crusoe, of course, Crusoe’s moral life as the interpreter (thus moulder) of his own experience commences with the fear he feels the first time a ‘Wind beg[ins] to blow’ (16) his ship off course. As for plot, the same wind may be held responsible for most of it, even as Crusoe’s survival on his island depends in large part on what sort of relationship he can form to a seemingly unceasing barrage of thunderstorms, dry spells, earthquakes, rains, and gales. Crusoe’s obsession with such atmospheric events, however, far outstrips his human need for shelter from sun and storm, his agrarian need to master the cycle of the seasons, and even his mortal need to know what God might be trying to tell him before it is too late. It seems vital that he write down the weather – so vital indeed that Crusoe apparently starts keeping a journal for that very purpose. For all its heavily documented resemblance to the residual genres of spiritual autobiography and the

The Atmospheres of Robinson Crusoe

35

emergent ones of how-to manual, mariner’s log, and personal history, Crusoe’s ‘Journal of every Day’s Employment’ (51) actually begins, like Defoe’s 1704 The Storm, with the ‘dreadful Storm’ that brought him to his present state, and its first entries are battened down with mention of the ‘Wind,’ ‘Rain,’ and ‘Intervals of fair Weather,’ which themselves framed his first days as a castaway. Yet for all that it goes on to mark most days in terms of what ‘the Weather [is] being’ at the time, Crusoe’s journal is never really ‘about’ that weather. True, it mentions an earthquake at one point. There is plenty of thunder and lightning, of course, and there is always the wind. It rains about half the time, as Crusoe complains when he devotes some pages of his journal to a calendar of half-months grouped ‘not into Summer and Winter, as in Europe, but into the Rainy Seasons and the Dry Seasons’ (78). Yet the first thing to notice is that we scarcely do notice these many splendoured atmospheric events in and of themselves. Should a ‘sudden Flash of Lighting happe[n], and after that a great Clap of Thunder, as is naturally the Effect of it,’ Crusoe will report himself ‘not so much surpris’d with the Lightning as I was with a Thought which darted into my Mind as swift as the Lightning it self’ (45). Indeed, this overbearing ‘Thought’ – worry for the gunpowder the lightning might ignite – continues to ‘surpris[e]’ him whenever ‘it lighten’d and thunder’d’ (47). Particularly when fixed in the graphic space of Crusoe’s journal, what this particular meteor brings to mind is not the eidetic image of a stupendous and appalling celestial spectacle, nor even that of the threatened gunpowder (to which Defoe’s contemporaries believed lightning to be related chemically), but rather the mind itself. Here we ‘see’ nothing so clearly as the mentality that links events with meanings and images with significances. Just so, and in great part because we talk that way ourselves, we pass over Crusoe’s casual reference to the ‘it’ which ‘lighten’d and thunder’d.’ But in fact, Crusoe’s strange picture of an atmospheric event briefly reveals that ‘it’ means the mind as much as it means the world – which world in any case, by means of its here explicit literary inscription, is shown to be not so much perceived as conceived. The winds can also bring this ‘it’ to mind. About to build a raft to bear him to his wrecked ship, Crusoe writes, ‘I found the Sky overcast, and the Wind began to rise, and in a Quarter of an Hour it blew a fresh Gale from the Shore.’ Whereupon, ‘it presently occur’d to me that it was in vain to pretend to make a raft with the Wind off Shore’ and Crusoe shortly abandons the project at hand (43). While we want, to interpret this I think, as the report of a chain of motives and actions – the wind

36

Jayne Lewis

rose; I wisely decided not to make a raft – what Crusoe’s words actually register (as do we, if peripherally) is the uncanny migration of ‘it’ from what ‘blew’ to what ‘occur’d’ to the mind – a migration uncanny because it leads us to believe that ‘it’ is not a ‘what’ at all, and that occurrences in the world are only with violence told from occurrences to the mind. This same, if amphibious, ‘it’ may on occasion assume the force of a spiritual directive. Taking in the ‘dismal prospect of [his] condition’ at one point, Crusoe notes, ‘as I was not cast away upon that Island without being driven, as is said, by a violent Storm quite out of the Course of our intended Voyage ... I had great reason to consider it as a Determination of Heaven, that in this desolate Place and in this desolate Manner I should end my Life’ (46–7). Here, ‘it’ appears to be, first, Crusoe’s ‘condition’; then, the ‘violent storm’ that seems to have created that condition; then again, a ‘Determination of Heaven.’ Significantly, these three possibilities find meaningful organization not under the umbrella of religious conviction, nor under that of a quasi-historical storm or other unfavourable ‘Condition’ but finally within a figure of speech, since Crusoe presents himself as ‘driven, as is said’ to his present state. So the medium of presentation (a colloquial English saying) is foregrounded in such a way as to suspend forever the question of whether ‘it’ was a storm or a determination of heaven that drove Crusoe to his present ‘condition.’ Most likely, ‘it’ is Crusoe’s ‘Condition’ itself. Yet if so, this is a condition best grasped as a meta-textual state, a briefly realized figure of speech ‘located’ somewhere between the reader’s mind and the printed page, which is to say – literally – in mid-air. Though our (I think warped) instinct is to take them as objects of interpretation, the aerial events such as lightning, wind, and rain that Crusoe mentions, as he himself puts it, simply ‘happe[n].’ Their effect is less to generate something we could call Crusoe’s ambience than it is to gesture towards where that ambience already is, and the nature of its activity. (The fact that it is active brings to mind ambience’s root in the Latin and later French verb ambire, whose active meaning of ‘to move around’ complements its current far more dominant but nevertheless passive sense of ambience as something that simply hangs around.10) And when conspicuously written – thus consciously read – these aberrations of the air make briefly but significantly visible the background that surrounds Crusoe and against which everything that he himself does, thinks, and is takes shape. They denote the frame within which he becomes figural and thus (as we’ll see) transmissible in and through a specifically English imagination, which is to say an imagination congruent with its medium, English.

The Atmospheres of Robinson Crusoe

37

But we get ahead of ourselves. To the extent that the aerial phenomena in Robinson Crusoe behave in this way, they are identical to two symbolic phenomena that beg to be considered first. One is the contemporary genre of early English weather writing. I will call this kind of writing ‘meteorography’ to distinguish it from meteorology generally and to foreground the graphic properties through which it supplied to English readers a visual, if non-eidetic, image of their own atmosphere. Early English meteorology has been broadly interpreted as itself an interpretation of the English atmosphere, and thus as a venue for ideological conflict between Christianity and natural philosophy as well as between competing regional and class interests.11 But I want to approach the English weather writing of Defoe’s day as a relatively pure medium, which in some sense carried only itself, and so as an autocritical and graphic inscription of the atmosphere to which, in order to be meaningful, it had to be imagined as belonging. In essence, contemporary English meteorography framed the English atmosphere as an ‘it’ so obscure that it could be mediated only through ‘impressions’ and ‘appearances’ – contemporary terms of art for beautiful (the rainbow, the aurora borealis) and sublime (hurricanes, hail) weather events. Even as such ‘impressions’ briefly illuminated the negative spaces around them, they were increasingly experienced as part of the system of graphic impressions – the writing – that presented them to an even more literate English public as if for the first time. Because Robinson Crusoe literally absorbs some of this kind of writing, it’s appropriate that the meteors mentioned there are identical not just to contemporary meteorography but also to Crusoe’s own graphology: the written pages of his journal as we are called upon to picture them. As David Marshall elaborates in his artful reading of the journal as autobiography, its status within the larger body of the narrative is questionable, if not downright bizarre.12 Crusoe of course claims to have set down his impressions of island life in writing he later ‘copied’ into the larger narrative of his ‘Life.’ Yet the relationship between the journal and the text that surrounds and supersedes it is virtually impossible to chart. While its commencement is boldly posted with the words ‘THE JOURNAL,’ thus promising a simple figure/ground ratio between the journal and its narrative environment, Crusoe warns his reader that ‘THE JOURNAL’ is bound to peter out, for in time, ‘having no more Ink[,] I was forc’d to leave it off’ (52). But no ‘X’ marks the spot where the narrative background reclaims the foreground. Imperceptibly and obscurely, we simply find ourselves at some point outside the journal again. Since most of

38

Jayne Lewis

the dated entries that are surely part of the journal begin with weather notations (‘Nov. 7. Now it begain to be settled fair Weather ... Nov. 13. This Day it rain’d ... but it was accompany’d with terrible Thunder and Lightning’ [54]), it would seem that the journal’s relationship to its narrative environment resembles less that of figure to ground than the atmospheric connection between the rain whose fall here makes such an impression and the ‘it’ that rains. At any rate, it is unclear which narrative frame is in authority at several of the most impressive points in Crusoe’s account as a whole – an account that, viewed from within this particular frame, begins to look less and less like an account and more and more like an impression of its own.

A Short Syllabus of the Air Our first difficulty concerns what we call the air. Aristotle, Meteorologica

No one has seen air at any time. It has this in common with God, if not the other elements. So Aristotle’s Meteorologica begins by confronting air’s unique, necessary, and difficult entwining with what ‘we call’ it, its representation in the shared realm of language, its dependence upon conventions speaking to make itself known to us. This produces an interesting affinity between the way one would speak about the air (literally what one would ‘call’ it) and what Aristotle at the level of his discourse on atmosphere held it to be, which is composed of certain ‘exhalations’ – hot or cold, moist or arid – that rise from particular patches of earth. To ‘see’ air as composed of exhalations is, on another level, to see it as composed of its own literal expressions, the emissions of the voice, to which of course writing has always conducted a highly ambivalent relationship. Nonetheless, it has been possible to block out this background in favour of the thematic foreground: Aristotle’s ‘separate and exact account,’ as he put it, of ‘the space between the stars and the earth and the substance with which it is filled.’13 Hence, Aristotle’s soi-disant ‘description’ of air as a mixture of exhalations supported much of Graeco-Roman natural history, medicine, and cultural anthropology, all of which notoriously surmised that human populations must be shaped physically and characterologically by the climates in which they develop. As recent students of the so-called global eighteenth-century like to remind us, that particular assumption was alive and well in Defoe’s day. Torrid zones, it

The Atmospheres of Robinson Crusoe

39

seems, make torpid people. Nor did Britons exempt themselves from this formula. For instance, the Scottish physician John Arbuthnot’s Essay Concerning the Effects of Air on Human Bodies (1733) availed itself of Robert Boyle’s recent computations to posit that England’s own perpetually unstable barometric pressure stimulated bodily fibres in such a way as to produce a people of exceptional energy, courage, and volatility (though they were nothing to the even more barometrically challenged Scots). In time, David Hume’s essay On National Characters (1748) set out to vanquish the acclimation thesis with the sword of the secularization thesis, declaring that native climate could hardly be said to shape collective character, since that character itself is subject to dramatic change. Echoing Crusoe’s report on the cooling trends that swept his own island, Hume wrote of Britain, ‘our ancestors, a few years ago, were sunk in the most abject superstition, last century they were inflamed with the most furious enthusiasm, and are now settled into the most cool indifference with regard to religious matters, that is to be found in any nation of the world.’14 But Hume’s point had already been answered – and was to be again – by repeated translations of the French aesthetician and divine Jean-Baptiste DuBos, who in the year of Robinson Crusoe, 1719, simply proposed that ‘the difference of the character of nations is attributed to the different qualities of air of their respective countries.’15 With English air so very variable, radical changes in ethnic ‘character’ – as represented by Hume’s secularization process – are only to be expected. The abbé’s own expectations took the form not of a meteorological essay (the logical verbal analysis of space) but rather of an aesthetic treatise on painting (writing concerning the graphic representation of space). His chosen venue reminds us that contemporary debates about the relationship between atmosphere and ‘character’ could be reconciled within the common assumption that, whatever claims one might make about its literal effects, ‘the Air’ invariably served figurally to articulate propositions about collective or individual ‘genius’ and historical change. If character is not actually caused by climate, it may nonetheless be read, and spoken of, as a figure for it. Thus, even Hume allows the tropology of temperature – hot enthusiasm and cool secularism – to formalize his rejection of the allegorical theory (he would say the superstition) of stable correspondence between climate and character. Air here emerges not as a cause or an analogue but rather as a frame of conception, one that upon its inscription in graphic space can make visible that a concept is being framed, or mediated. Indeed, while in our day haste has been made to show that people in Defoe’s time still identified bodily

40

Jayne Lewis

states with atmospheric ones, DuBos’s real claim would appear to be that air cannot be told from a projection of the mind.16 In his meteorology, ‘the fermentation which prepares a storm,’ for example, ‘operates ... on our minds, insomuch as to render us heavy, and debar us from thinking with our wonted liberty of imagination.’ Elsewhere, indeed, air is shown so to alter ‘the work of the imagination’ that ‘our minds may be said to indicate the present state of the air with an exactness almost equal to that of Barometers and Thermometers’ (2:181). As it interacts with the ‘imagination,’ air reveals its own marvelous unity with the frames through which it is at any given moment perceived, experienced, and at last interpreted. This unity is what allows DuBos’s discussion of the ‘emanations ... obvious, in some measure to our senses’ to blend imperceptibly into admission that these same ‘emanations’ are inseparable from what we might call their interpretive representation. He therefore wagers that ‘the color of the ambient air, as also of the clouds ... depend[s] on the nature of the exhalations which fill the air, and mix with the vapors, of which these clouds are formed.’ For, he points out, ‘every body may observe, that the atmosphere and the clouds which glitter on the horizon, are not of the same color in all countries.’ Italy’s ‘atmosphere is of a greenish blue,’ whereas that of the Netherlands ‘is of a pale blue.’ Such differences, however, are to be ‘observe[d]’ not in the tinted airspaces above physical land masses but rather ‘in the painted skies of Titian and Rubens’ (2:218–19). Here, we find ‘atmosphere’ doubly mediated, not only by ‘painted’ canvases but also by DuBos’s verbal description – a description in its turn mediated by Thomas Nugent’s popular English translation, already in its fifth edition by 1748. When we ‘see’ the air DuBos talks about, we see frames within frames of symbolic convention. It is these that literally both influence and are registered by DuBos’s fantastic thermometry of the mind. Air hovers, then, on the horizon where objective reality meets mental realization, and it may be visualized only through certain autocritical figures that less signify it than indicate where it is. As much itself is visible in contemporary and ever volatile squabbles over what English air, in particular, was made of. Here, a sense of the English atmosphere as conceptually inextricable from its graphic representations (increasingly in the minds of its inhabitants) underwrote contemporary conflict between an indigenous conception of local air as the harbinger of specific and divinely instituted messages and a nascent scientific model that has long been supposed to have evacuated the self-same air of ethnic and

The Atmospheres of Robinson Crusoe

41

religious significance, defining it strictly in terms of its physical laws and properties. In other words, Aristotle’s meteorology had long been Christianized, so that a given airspace was visible not merely as a constituent of ethnic identity and predictor of political structure but also as a disconcertingly public place of assignation between the visible and the invisible worlds. In England, of course, the idea that atmospheric aberrations (shooting stars, lightning bolts, rainbows, and the like) are both terrestrial media and celestial messages had hit a high note during the English civil wars, when Puritan redactions of the skies – angelic battles in the clouds, portentous comets and the like – vied with the Church of England’s representations of the same meteorological events to prognosticate (or posit) England’s political future. This ultimately internecine conflict, however, was evidently nothing to the one that scholars such as Lorraine Daston and Michael McKeon have charted, in which preternatural events that had been represented by both religious factions as intentional and divinely instituted signs buckled under the scientific view of the same events as inherently insignificant facts. Meteors ‘once’ viewed as supernaturally caused events were ‘now’ cast as the effects of natural forces – forces themselves subject to physical laws that cannot be understood as the effects of anything other than themselves. Such controversies within English writing about the air would correspond to the general structure of scientific revolutions, except that, unlike other branches of natural philosophy such as physics and chemistry, meteorology inevitably occurs from within the object of observation, and it follows that meteorography, considered strictly as writing, must take shape within the physical sphere provided by its own referent.17 Because writing ‘about’ the air invariably has ‘air’ about it, this writing retains a unique capacity to make visible, as a kind of negative space, the conventions and resulting idiosyncrasies of thought that seem to define the atmosphere. At any rate, that atmosphere itself cannot be abstracted or manipulated, and thus it has always resisted the interpretive paradigms – and famously matter-of-fact signifying conventions – of modern natural philosophy, whose authority, of course, derives from precisely the possibility of abstraction, manipulation, and causal (one is tempted to say historical) narration. But if the atmosphere’s irreducibly atmospheric temperament makes it too immediate, experiential, and ‘real’ to permit full containment within the evidently emergent laws of natural philosophy, this very situation also makes the atmosphere (when it does appear) appear as an object of knowledge, always conspicuously

42

Jayne Lewis

mediated through the figure of what it is not. Akin to the tenor of a metaphor, ‘it’ may be known as a negative space by means of the meteors momentarily suspended in it or, at a second remove, through the media of symbolic devices that do allow some measure of distance. Prominent among the latter would be thermometers, barometers, and hygrometers, inventions of Defoe’s era that function as what Leo Spitzer so evocatively termed ‘warm abstractions’ – legible symbolic notations of something that also, literally, touches them.18 Finally, the represented readings of these devices (i.e., the early writing in English of ‘the’ English weather) may be seen to have graphed in the space of letters the states that make knowledge possible – the frames and structures within which it may be perceived – as a component of that knowledge itself. The English pamphlet wars that were precipitated by unusual weather events, such as the great storm of 1703 and the aurora borealis of 1716, differently exemplify this instrumentally and reflexively figural sense of atmospheric states. As the historian Vladimir Jankovicv has shown, these debates pitted a religious discourse of sublunary revelation against the apparently secular insistence that the meteors in question shared a view of this splendid and enigmatic ‘fulguration’ as a ‘theater of light’ that defied ‘perfect Descriptions’ even as it could be viewed as continuous with the ‘Glory wherewith our painters ... surround the Holy Name of God.’19 Jankovicv believes that the controversy over what the Northern Lights were was the same as the controversy over what they meant, and so he interprets them in political terms as a point of collision between the superstitious labouring classes and the arbiters of a repressive modern state. The same controversy is also highly legible, as it is for Daston and McKeon, as a point where rival epistemological habits clashed. But when the aurora borealis pamphlets are viewed mostly as representations of perceived representations, the meteorographies through which these controversies were pursued may also be seen to organize rival appearances within one encompassing sphere. This sphere’s contents may be interpreted only ironically, which is to say only as signs of what they are not, but which nonetheless surrounds them. Novel as it might seem, no part of this proposition was lost on the ancient Aristotle, who after all noted that, in the air, ‘everything happens ... with a regularity less than’ it happens anywhere else, to sketch an ethereal parody of the way ‘opinions recur in rotation among men.’20 In the air, an evident syntax of cause and effect nonetheless yields not laws but pure evidence; atmosphere may be seen only when it is imagined as an unrestricted and

The Atmospheres of Robinson Crusoe

43

dynamic field of reflexive figuration, one conceptually unified by the renegade laws of novelty and irony. In the hands of natural philosophers like the Honourable Robert Boyle, the fate of Aristotle’s ultimately non-eidetic picture of the air is well known but surprisingly congruent with its less analysed fate in the pages of religious works such as the Reverend Thomas Burnet’s enormously influential The Sacred Theory of the Earth (1681). Just as Boyle’s air pump turned its inscrutable contents into the spitting image of a brand new matter of fact, so Burnet, Miltonically, surmised that our planet originally spun untormented by climatic variation; meteors, he maintained, are an epiphenomenon of the flood, and the first of them – the rainbow, of course – instantiated an entirely novel signifying system. That is, whereas previously meteorological signs, ‘like words, signifie any thing by institution, or may be appli’d to any thing by the will of the Imposer and are signs of something present, and ... signifie only by use and repeated experience; we are speaking [now] of signs of another nature, given in confirmation of a promise ... and given with design to cure our unbelief, or to excite and beget Faith in ... the Promiser.’ In scanning the ancient lexicon of divine covenant, Burnet nonetheless assimilates these signs into his own vocabulary (‘we are now speaking’) as if they were entirely new, not arbitrarily imposed by divine authority but rather determined to create the conditions of their own credit. Such signs, Burnet maintains, ‘must be some new appearance, and must thereby induce us to believe the effect, or more to believe it, than if there had been no sign, but only the affirmation of the Promiser; for otherwise the pretended sign is a meer Cypher and superfluity.’ In fact, a weather sign ‘must indispensably be something new, otherwise it cannot have the nature, vertue, and influence of a sign.’21 In the view of such undisputed authorities as Stephen Shapin and Simon Schaffer, the sceptical chemist Boyle’s ‘General History of the Air’ had also presented air as a new and self-guaranteeing reality.22 Just so, Burnet’s writing of atmospheric event as novel symbolic action uncannily adapts atmosphere to new symbolic formations, and these include not only novels like Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, but also the privately scribbled weather journals that join published genres such as sacred theory, experimental discourse, and ideological reportage to supply both Crusoe’s heteroglossia and its immediate literary environment.23 These free-form notations registered rainfall, air pressure, and the like in particular places, at particular moments in time. Eventually, their quaintly local plots

44

Jayne Lewis

and regular citations of the irregular appear to have been absorbed into ‘syllab[i] of the air’: regularized, coordinated, and, of course, printed charts that both mapped and predicted the weather of the whole of England and made predictions from within this framework.24 Thus, when the English demographer Thomas Short set out to devise his own ‘Syllabus of the Air, Weather and Seasons,’ he naturally first consulted with the ‘many ingenious Gentlemen in different and distant Places [who] have kept Journals of the Weather, Air and it’s [sic] Temperature.’ First sight of these journals turned Short into another Crusoe, distraught that ‘we are left as ignorant of our own Seasons as Foreigners; for we find no Proportion as assigned between our wet and dry Weather.’23 Confronted with a plethora of new representations of the air, Short was daunted by the ‘seeming Inequality and uncertainty of our Weather and Seasons,’ lamenting that ‘the great Agreement of Winds, Weather and Glasses in this Island seldom holds good in a fair Trial’ (126). Yet in time Short came to see ‘Winds, Weathers and Glasses’ as coextensive with their graphic elaboration in literary space – and thus equipped visibly to give rise to their own interpretive environments. This perspective allowed Short to devise a second-order representation in the form of ‘Thermometrical Tables’ and ‘Thermometrical Journals.’ Thus, the frame within which weather happens could be seen only as the selfsame one in which the aerial phenomena we loosely call weather simply appear, thereupon precipitating their own story and its meanings. So, whereas previously ‘fogs and mists in the sundry Phases of the Moon, with several Winds have been thought to portend different Sorts of Weather,’ Short was able to locate truly reliable ‘portent[s]’ and ‘presage[s]’ in the ‘Journals of the Weather’ that reflexively presented fogs, mists, and winds. Once weather signs were seen to share the same space that surrounded the literary signs that mediated them – and vice-versa – it became possible to achieve consensus about their meaning: a shared pretence of belief that we might describe as a novel order of reality.

About the Umbrella I ... had a great Mind to make one. Defoe, Robinson Crusoe

It is this order of reality that Defoe precipitates when he has Crusoe start keeping a weather journal of his own. Meteorography must have felt like second nature to Defoe himself by this point, The Storm having culled a

The Atmospheres of Robinson Crusoe

45

broad sample of the weather writing that proliferated under the balmy conditions of rising literacy and an expanding print culture. The Storm’s title renders it isomorphic with ‘the late dreadful Tempest,’ and this work cites everything from personal weather journals and sacred theories of the earth to rival bits of reportage that were determined sometimes to allegorize the storm and sometimes to sever it of all attachment to transcendental meaning. But while we might call The Storm the simple history of a massive disturbance of the air, Defoe himself (perhaps because this history was so obviously already mediated through literary channels) saw something else in it: ‘Here,’ he wrote, ‘is room for abundance of Romance, because the Subject may be safer extended than in any other case, no story being capable to be crouded with such Circumstances, but Infinite Power, which is all along concern’d with us in every Relation, is suppos’d capable of making true.’26 Fifteen years later, Robinson Crusoe’s supposed ‘editor’ appropriated this ‘Infinite Power ... capable of making true’ in his prefatory claim that, with respect to Crusoe’s story, he ‘believe[d] the thing to be a just History of Fact’ with no ‘Appearance of Fiction in it’ (3). Defoe’s oft-noted irony strikes us all the harder when we come at it from the present, since unlike Defoe’s meteorographic ‘Romance’ of 1703, Crusoe only pretends to copy real weather writing (or, at a further remove, to describe real air). It is, in Sir Walter Scott’s quotable phrase, concerned merely to construct an ‘air of truth,’ not to tell, as The Storm had set out to do, the truth about the air.27 But there is great value in this pretence, for in making it, Crusoe may be said to have made the mediating frames that English meteorography assumed visible as, themselves, appearances. The foregrounding of Crusoe’s weather journal doubles this emphasis. In any case, to apprehend Defoe’s novel as a literary experiment of this sort is to apprehend early English fiction’s unique and potentially ‘Infinite Power’ to make apparent how and that things rise from the mind – or, as the saying goes, how they seem to appear out of thin air. Crusoe pursues its own point, I suppose, through the impressions it makes, both figuratively, upon the reader’s mind, and literally, upon the page. It happens that in the English spoken by Defoe meteors themselves were often called ‘impressions,’ and we have already seen how Crusoe’s manner of speech uses these impressions to make us aware of the immediate acts of mind that surround and uphold them. The novel as a whole works the same way, as Scott perceived when he noted that, in its peculiar fusion of ‘lucky hits and accidents’ with ‘providential occurrences,’ Crusoe produces ‘the same impression ... which the Book of Martyrs would on

46

Jayne Lewis

a young devotee or the Newgate Calendar upon an acolyte of Bridewell.’28 This is to suggest that the historical and religious converge in Crusoe not simply as alternative models of interpretation but also as aspects (conditions, situations, even apparent meanings) of a single ‘impression.’ Furthermore, it was this impression that Scott held responsible for the ‘air of truth about the delightful history of Robinson Crusoe’ – a history that to his mind had earned ‘the merit ... of that species of accurate painting which can be looked at again and again with new pleasure’ (79). Another way that Novak has dramatically advanced our understanding of Defoe’s work is by associating his verbal style with the visual one peculiar to Dutch realist painting.29 That painting is of a famously indoorsy ‘species,’ but what is striking about the impression Crusoe in particular made upon its English readers is that it seems to have been mediated through an image of the outdoors. We may take as an example the Victorian George Borrow’s literary memory of Crusoe as, primarily, a weather picture. When he recalled an early boyhood encounter with an illustrated edition of Defoe’s novel, Borrow saw in his mind’s eye ‘a low sandy beach on which the furious sea was breaking in mountain-like billows; cloud and rack deformed the firmament, which wore a dull and leaden-like hue ... Reader, is it necessary to name the book which now stood open in my hand, and whose very prints, feeble expounders of its wondrous lines, had produced within me emotions strange and novel? Scarcely, for it was a book which has exerted over the minds of Englishmen an influence certainly greater than any other of modern times.’30 Crusoe’s ‘strange and novel’ influence over the English-speaking mind can be compared only to that of English air in Defoe’s own era, and it is an influence that, we saw, went very much both ways. All of which returns us to Crusoe’s curious journal. For as it compulsively registers the state of the air at any given moment, that journal makes this general pattern of impression specific and in some sense visible. Needless to say, this isn’t how Crusoe’s writing to the moment is usually interpreted; more often ‘THE JOURNAL’ seems to perform like the other implements of human culture that Crusoe contrives and describes. Like Crusoe’s clothes, his hat, his tent, and the umbrella that was to inspire an extensive product line of so-called Robinsons in the nineteenth century, his writing may always be seen as a form of defence against the elements, its first, last, and best use being to convert an alien sky into a simulacrum of the one above Crusoe’s own famously drenched (then merely damp, then drenched again) England. From here it is a short step to the rival allegories, historical and religious, that have dominated

The Atmospheres of Robinson Crusoe

47

our sense of what Defoe’s novel as a whole must mean. Leslie Stephen, for one, supposes that Crusoe ‘is the typical Englishman of his time. He is the broad-shouldered, beef-eating John Bull, who has been shouldering his way through the world ever since. Drop him in a desert island, and he is just as sturdy and self-composed as if he were in Cheapside ... He does not accommodate himself to his surroundings; they have got to accommodate themselves to him.’31 Yet it must be said that Crusoe’s surroundings often do not accommodate themselves to him and to the extent that Crusoe uses his journal to make his own inward accommodations with these same ‘surroundings,’ he represents the persistence of religious forms of experience in a secularizing world.32 In the long run, these allegories cancel each other out. But what if we were to commit ourselves to the short run just this once and take Crusoe’s journal as what it at first appears to be: a graphic inscription of the horizon where seeing meets believing, a world presenting its presentation to the mind? Having exchanged use value for its aesthetic equivalent, we might also trade the historico-allegorical question of what kind of figure is writing about the air (John Bull? a latter-day pilgrim?) for the question of what kind of figure is being written and perceived within it. From this point of view, the twin allegories that seem to structure both Crusoe’s ‘journal of every day’s employment’ and Robinson Crusoe as a whole – those of outward, instrumental secularization and inward, interpretive spiritual retrenchment – are merely appearances suspended within a single atmosphere, that ‘it’ we stumbled across a while back. ‘It’ is best described not merely as an obsessive grammatical feature of Crusoe’s writing but also as an impression made by the background that ‘really’ frames that writing. Thus, entries from Crusoe’s first autumn as a castaway constantly manifest ‘its’ actions: on 25 October ‘it rain’d all Night and all Day’ (53); on 4 November, evidently, ‘it did not rain’ (53); and on 7 November ‘it began to be settled fair Weather’ (54) ... until 13 November, that is, on which ‘Day it rained, which refresh’d me exceedingly, and cool’d the Earth, but it was accompany’d with terrible Thunder and Lighting, which frighted me dreadfully’ (54). In all of these instances, ‘it,’ if hard to pin down, is certainly active, at least as much so as Crusoe himself, whose own actions ‘it’ may be said to motivate. But what exactly are these actions? And where in the world do they take place? Crusoe pretends to tell us: ‘Much Rain ... in these Days,’ he writes, ‘tho’ with some Intervals of fair Weather; but, it seems, this was the rainy Season’ (52). ‘It’ in other words ‘seems’ as much as ‘it’ rains or settles or blows. In the chiasmus of that ‘it,’ we catch the novel’s language in

48

Jayne Lewis

the act of creating its own environment, graphing ‘through’ English the sphere of ‘seem[ing]’ in which the novel can at least appear to take place. Under conditions as favourable as these, certain outlines naturally begin to blur. One is the line of demarcation between a character’s inside and his outside. Just so, on 18 June Crusoe remarks: ‘Rain’d all Day, and I stay’d within. I thought at this Time the Rain felt Cold and it was something chilly’ (64). Then the next day: ‘Very ill, and shivering, as if the wind had been cold’ (64). And on 23 June: ‘Very bad again, cold shivering’ (102). Strange indeed, but there is no real way to tell what is cold (Crusoe? the rain?). There is only the cold. Strictly speaking, there is only cold. We perceive, of course, that Crusoe himself has a cold, a very bad one, and his ‘Distemper’ (66), as he later refers to it, resurrects this unjustly dead metaphor, turning a mere figure of speech back into a warm abstraction. This is the perfect climate for a little action on the part of the imagination, and significantly, it is while he is in the throes of his cold that Crusoe seems to see ‘a Man descend from a great black Cloud,’ until ‘all the Air looked, to my Apprehension, as if it had been fill’d with Flashes of Fire’ (75). From here it is but a short step across the room to a salvaged Bible, whose written words commandeer the ethereal vision to make an even more novel – and, for Crusoe’s reader, an exemplary – ‘Impression on [his] Thoughts’ (69). Like Crusoe’s story of the accidentally scattered barleycorn that springs up into a seemingly miraculous crop, this scene has upheld many an allegorical interpretation of Robinson Crusoe, allowing us to see it as a story ‘about’ religious conversion, one linked by analogy to the spiritual autobiographies of the Puritans. But what Crusoe’s distemper more immediately creates is the impression of a truly novel experience, one in which figure and ground are suddenly, radically reversed. In fact, the same may be said of the much analyzed barleycorn episode, for what unifies the twenty notoriously indecisive pages Crusoe spends on the incident is not ultimately the question of where the grain came from, or that of what to do with it, but the atmospheric conditions that allow it to grow. From a cognitive point of view, we can describe these as conditions of suspended disbelief. As it happens, the coiner of that phrase, Coleridge himself, took a special interest in this scene, recognizing it as ‘by far the ablest vindication of miracles that I have met with. It is,’ he declared, ‘the true ground, the proper purpose and intention of a miracle.’33 Here, the romantic poet converts the literal ‘ground’ in which Crusoe had unconsciously scattered his kernels of corn into the figural

The Atmospheres of Robinson Crusoe

49

‘ground ... of a miracle’ and it is this conversion – not of things seen but of the ground against which they are seen – that outlasts, indeed underlies, both Crusoe’s spiritual (or figural) conversion and his agricultural (or literal) conversion of virgin soil into crop-bearing field. As for us, we are left with a frame of purely novelistic experience, one that generates, visibly, its own limits of meaning, its own present, and its own effectual reality. One that opens, we might say, its very own umbrella. This, of course, brings us to Crusoe’s ‘real’ umbrella, which, while it cannot be said to figure prominently in his narrative, nonetheless appears often enough to remind us that in fact it is always there. Crusoe’s journal has much in common with the umbrella, I imagine, though not because, like it, the journal shelters and homogenizes. Their kinship runs more along the lines we appreciate when we note the umbrella’s similar ubiquity in French impressionist painting. Umbrellas are, after all, umbrellas: overarching frames and visible screens for otherwise disorganized and disorganizing phenomena. Well might Freud have wondered why we forget them all the time. In Defoe’s day, umbrellas were too novel to be easily forgotten. They were recent emigrés from China and more immediately from France, the word umbrella itself being a newcomer to the English language. In the context of such novelty, Crusoe naturally records the ‘great deal of time and pains [it took] to make me an umbrella. I was indeed in great want of one,’ he confesses, ‘and had a great Mind to make one; I had seen them made in the Brasils, where they are very useful in the great Heats which are there; and I felt the Heats every jot as great here, and greater too, being nearer the Equinox; besides, as I was oblig’d to be much abroad, it was a most useful Thing to me, as well for the Rains as the Heats’ (99). Crusoe goes on to map the ‘World of Pains’ he took to fashion his umbrella until at last: ‘I had made one ... and covered it with Skins, the Hair upwards, so that it cast off the Rains like a Penthouse, and kept off the Sun so effectually, that I could walk out in the hottest of the Weather with greater Advantage than I could before in the coolest’ (99). While Crusoe almost never lets us see his own body, the umbrella both figures and lies next to it, not only replicating Crusoe’s own hide of skin and hair but also usurping its role as the organizing register of alternating heat and coolness. In this manner, Crusoe’s umbrella both secures the ‘air of truth’ that hangs about Crusoe’s story and undermines it, leaving us suspended between conviction of the story’s reality and certainty that it has been made up. Thus, the umbrella itself can have sprung only from the ‘great Mind’ that enables Crusoe to make it, and for all the cir-

50

Jayne Lewis

cumstantial description we receive, it can be seen only in its likeness to what it isn’t: on the one hand, the parasol ‘made in the Brasils’ and, on the other, ‘a Penthouse.’ While Crusoe’s rather grudging picture of his umbrella might strike us today as a definitive shift from historical reference to pure figuration, it’s worth remembering that the ‘real’ English were slow to suppose that umbrellas were good for much besides decoration. In 1664 John Evelyn called them ‘fans, like those our ladies use, but much larger and with long handles, strangely carved and filled with Chinese characters.’ Evelyn’s words lead me to believe that what Crusoe has so triumphantly invented is a true hieroglyph, or – in the words of Randle Cotgrave’s 1611 Dictionary of the French and English Tongues – ‘a round and broad frame, wherewith the Indians ... preserve themselves from the heat of a scorching sunne, and hence any little shadow, fanne, or thing, wherewith women hide their faces from the sunne.’34 Unlike the umbrellas about whose effeminate charms his contemporaries harboured so many misgivings, Crusoe’s ‘great clumsy ugly goat-skin Umbrella’ is anything but beautiful. But it does appear to keep him so, and in consequence it naturally becomes ‘the most necessary Thing I had about me, next to my Gun’ precisely because it preserves his ‘Figure,’ keeping the ‘Colour’ of his ‘Face ... not so moletta-like as one might expect from a Man ... living within nineteen Degrees of the Equinox.’ Crusoe’s umbrella makes him stand out, but only to the extent that, lady-like, he blends in with our impression of him. Crusoe’s own language of impression, of course, folds when it arrives at ‘the Print of a Man’s naked Foot,’ – the one that leaves him standing ‘like one thunder-struck, or as if’ he ‘had seen an Apparition.’ One of the footprint’s effects is to transform Crusoe’s world into a proto-gothic one in which extreme cognitive events (‘fluttering Thoughts,’ ‘frighted Imagination,’ ‘Terr[or] in the last Degree’) cannot be told from objects of perception (112). If Defoe were Ann Radcliffe, it might well emerge that this ‘apparition’ is nothing but the work of windy weather. Actually, I think it is, as Crusoe’s meteoric response suggests: he is ‘thunderstruck.’ This figure of speech – being thunderstruck – not only doubles as a mentality at the level of the plot but supplies, as Coleridge would say, a ‘true ground’ for all the frantic leaps and pirouettes of Crusoe’s panicked mind. His being thunderstruck also justifies his failure ‘to describe how many various shapes affrighted imagination represented things to me in’ – a failure that further merges inner and outer mises en scène. We scarcely need description to mediate between imaginative ‘shapes’ and ‘represented things,’ for they are one, leaving the literal and the figural

The Atmospheres of Robinson Crusoe

51

– like the ground and the miracle in the barleycorn episode – reversed in the novel space of being thunderstruck. Small wonder that when Crusoe manages to convince himself that ‘there was really nothing in it’ but his ‘own imagination’ and begins ‘to peep about again,’ a second encounter with that shockingly firm ‘Impression’ gives him ‘the Vapours again to the highest Degree,’ so that he ‘shook with cold’ (115). The soul might select its own society, but the mind makes its own environment. And ours. So, while the allegorical and historical axes of Defoe’s novel demand ever more intricate geometries to reconcile them, Crusoe supplies that geometry by showing these axes to be one. The stages of his proof are everywhere apparent: in the footprint, among the barleycorn, under the umbrella, amid ‘its’ perpetual raining and blowing and settling. These graphic junctures might leave us thunderstruck ourselves, but in so doing, they remind us of the ‘where’ we share with Defoe’s text – the air that literally fills the space between the mind and the page, both dividing and joining them. As for what is actually meant by the footprint (or the umbrella, or the barelycorn, for that matter), one guess will always be just as good as another. All the same, the literary inscription of these apparitions reveals not simply the pleasure of being thunderstruck but also its vitality and legitimacy. For it is that state of mind that upholds and sustains the experience of novel fiction itself – the true and only atmosphere of Robinson Crusoe.

NOTES 1 Defoe, Serious Reflections during the Life and Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1720) in The Works of Daniel Defoe, eited by G.H. Maynadier, 4 vols (New York, 1903), 3:ix. 2 Two classic readings of Crusoe that link the novel to earlier forms of spiritual enquiry are J. Paul Hunter, The Reluctant Pilgrim: Defoe’s Emblematic Method and Quest for Form in Robinson Crusoe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1966) and G.A. Starr, Defoe and Spiritual Autobiography (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965). On the side of historical realism may be found Ian P. Watt’s The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957) and Karl Marx’s identification of Crusoe’s activity as an extreme form of emergent capitalist behaviour in Capital (1867). Notable mediators include Michael McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel, 1600–1740 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), and John Richetti, Defoe’s Narratives: Situations and

52

3 4 5

6 7

8

9 10

11

12 13 14

Jayne Lewis Structures (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975). In a recent (and wonderfully unrepentant) essay, Richetti offers an especially deft and instructive account of the critical ‘dilemmas’ staged in and around Crusoe and imagines the novel in a more dialogic configuration than heretofore imagined. ‘Secular Crusoe,’ in Eighteenth-Century Genre and Culture: Serious Reflections on Occasional Forms in Honor of J. Paul Hunter, ed. Dennis Todd and Cynthia Wall (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2001), 58–78. Stephen, Hours in a Library (1892), in Defoe: The Critical Heritage, ed. Pat Rogers (London and Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972), 173. Defoe, Serious Reflections, 3:v. Defoe, Review (11 April 1710), 259, cit. in Maximillian E. Novak, Realism, Myth, and History in Defoe’s Fiction (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983), 17. Browne, A Dialogue between Church and No-Church (1706), cit. in Novak, Realism, Myth, and History, 17. Sarah Kareem explores the extraordinarily rich conception of a novel environment unfolding in a contemporary spy narrative in her ‘Wondering and Wandering about the Spaces of London,’ unpublished essay. Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, edited by Michael Shinagel, 2nd ed. (New York: W.W. Norton, 1994), 56. Subsequent page references appear in parentheses in the text. See Novak, Realism, Myth, and History, 32. A magisterial and evocative account of ambiance’s history through western thought is Leo Spitzer’s ‘Milieu and Ambience,’ in Essays in Historical Semantics (New York: S.F. Vanni, 1948), 179–225. This reading is most vividly advanced in Vladimir Jankovicv, Reading the Skies: A Cultural History of English Weather, 1650–1820 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), but see also McKeon, Origins of the English Novel; Lorraine Daston, ‘Marvelous Facts and Miraculous Evidence in Early Modern Europe,’ Critical Inquiry 18 (1991), 93–124; and Ann Geneva, Astrology and the Seventeenth-Century Mind: William Lilly and the Language of the Stars (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995). Marshall, ‘Autobiographical Acts in Robinson Crusoe,’ ELH 71 (2004), 899– 920. Aristotle, Meteorologica, translated by H.D.P. Lee (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962), 23. Hume, ‘Of National Characters,’ in Political Essays, ed. Knud Haakonssen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 85. For a discussion of Hume’s treatment of climate theory as bankrupt political theory, see Lucian Boia, The Weather in the Imagination, trans. Roger Leverdier (King’s Lynn: Reaktion, 2005), 50–4.

The Atmospheres of Robinson Crusoe

53

15 DuBos, Critical Reflections on Poetry and Painting, translated by Thomas Nugent [1719], 2 vols (London, 1748), 2:224. Subsequent page references will appear in parentheses in the text. 16 The most influential exponent of the bodily view is Terry Castle, whose The Female Thermometer: Eighteenth-Century Culture and the Invention of the Uncanny (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995) explores ways the eighteenthcentury weather glass was feminized – and the eighteenth-century woman thermometrized – via its perceived links to the ‘movements and vagaries of human feeling’ (25). 17 Arden Reed elaborates the implications of this bind for nineteenth-century poetry in Romantic Weather: The Climates of Coleridge and Baudelaire (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1983), 12. 18 Spitzer, ‘Milieu and Ambiance,’ 187. 19 Jankovic, Reading the Skies, 69. 20 Aristotle, Meteorologica, 13. 21 Burnet, The Sacred Theory of the Earth [1681], edited by Basil Willey (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1965), 173. 22 Shapin and Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985). In their powerful analysis of the motives and implications behind Boyle’s chemical model of the air, Shapin and Schaffer see him as having engaged in the ‘experimental production of ... facts.’ But to the extent that their vocabulary matches a terminology of self-guaranteeing reality, Boyle’s writing about the air may be linked to a version of realism associated with novelistic fiction – a version Hans Blumenberg explores in ‘The Concept of Reality and the Possibility of the Novel,’ trans. David Henry Wilson, in New Perspectives in German Literary Criticism, ed. Richard E. Amacher and Victor Lange, trans. David Henry Wilson et al. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), 29–48. 23 The genre of the weather journal as a new form of scientific writing in the early eighteenth century is taken up in Jan Golinski, British Weather and the Climate of Enlightenment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). Ilse Vickers considers Crusoe’s record of wet and dry weather as a version of natural philosophy in the post-Baconian mode in Daniel Defoe and the New Sciences (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 99–131. 24 See Jankovic, Reading the Skies, 79; and Mark Monmonier, Air Apparent: How Meteorologists Learned to Map, Predict, and Dramatize the Weather (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). 25 Short, A Comparative History of the Increase and Decrease of Mankind in England and Several Countries Abroad [1767], edited by Richard Wall (Farnborough: Gregg International, 1973), preface n.p. Subsequent references page appear in parentheses in the text.

54

Jayne Lewis

26 Defoe, A Collection of the Most Remarkable Casualties and Disasters, which happen’d in the late dreadful Tempest [The Storm] (London, 1704), sig. A4r. Defoe goes on to promise, however, that ‘we shall no where Trespass upon Fact as to oblige Infinite Power to be showing more Miracles than it intended’ (sig. A5v). 27 Scott, ‘De Foe’ (1810), in Rogers, Critical Heritage, 75. 28 Ibid., 78. 29 Novak, ‘Picturing the Thing Itself, or Not: Defoe, Painting, Prose Fiction and the Art of Describing,’ Eighteenth-Century Fiction 9 (1996), 1–20. 30 Borrow, Lavengro (1851), in Critical Heritage, 123–4. Borrow’s remarkable account ends with him ‘cantering before a steady breeze over an ocean of enchantment’ (125). Who could ask for anything more? 31 Stephen, Hours in a Library, 176. 32 See Starr, Defoe and Spiritual Autobiography, and Hunter, Reluctant Pilgrim. 33 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ‘Marginalia for Robinson Crusoe,’ in Rogers, Critical Heritage, 82. 34 Both Evelyn and Cotgrave are cited in R.L. Chambers, ‘History of the Umbrella’ in Chambers, Book of Days, 2 vols (London, 1865), 2:241–4.

chapter three

Poetic Footprints: Some Formal Issues in Defoe’s Verse J . PA U L H U N T E R

One of the legends about the comedian W.C. Fields is that a friend once caught him reading the Bible, apparently with rapt attention to textual detail. His response to the bewildered friend’s question about what he was doing supposedly produced the classic Fieldsian phrase, ‘looking for loopholes.’ Those who seek to honour Max Novak’s career by pacing his own fully explored turf, the writings of Defoe, face a related quest: not so much trying to catch Max in an oversight as trying to find openings where his work points to important matters that he has touched on only suggestively. The opening I want to explore involves Defoe’s poetry. I have chosen it for three reasons: first, because Defoe’s poetry has not been regarded very seriously by critics and scholars – and has not been studied in much detail – since the eighteenth century; second, Max himself does take it seriously and, although treating it only briefly and unsentimentally, makes it clear that it has an important place in Defoe’s definition – or sometime definition – of himself and his work; and third, because I am engaged in a larger historical study of poetry, especially couplet poetry, from the Elizabethans to the Romantics and thus am trying to develop a historical sense of some of poetry’s habits and reaches that have not been fully visible to later ages and commentators. Defoe’s poetry enjoyed a certain respect in his lifetime, mainly when he was first emerging as a public voice in his early forties, but it was prose, especially prose fiction, that earned his place in literary history after his death. Subsequent commentators, when they have bothered to notice Defoe’s poetry at all, have usually been disparaging or dismissive. Giles Jacob, trying to record prevailing contemporary opinions towards the end of Defoe’s lifetime, sneered at it patronizingly, noting: ‘This Au-

56

J. Paul Hunter

thor was formerly a Hosier’ who during ‘some Parts of his Life’ had ‘Inclinations [that] have led him to Poetry, which [he has] thrown into the World.’1 ‘Poetry was far from being the talent of De Foe,’ was the summary judgment by mid-century, two decades after his death,2 and by the time Samuel Johnson joined the commercial enterprise that became the canonical Lives of the Poets, Defoe seems not to have been even a minor candidate for inclusion, an opinion that long prevailed. ‘It is certain he was no poet,’ the British Quarterly Review pronounced in 1858 in reviewing a new edition of Defoe’s works,3 and Sir Leslie Stephen a decade later [slightly revised, 1892] was similarly dogmatic: ‘De Foe, in truth, was little enough of a poet,’ though he added an uncomfortable, patronizing historical observation that I want to return to later: ‘Sometimes by mere force of terse idiomatic language he rises into real poetry, as it was understood in the days when Pope and Dryden were our lawgivers.’4 Later biographers and more recent critics are typically less absolute and rigid and show less tendency to deny Defoe the sensibility or ‘soul’ of a poet, but there has been no sustained attempt to explain how poems such as The True-Born Englishman were so powerful or so enthusiastically received. The late Spiro Peterson once intended to do a full critical study of Defoe’s poems, in addition to planning a scholarly edition of them, but neither project was completed before his early death, and most attempts at resuscitating or rethinking the poems are content to explicate or defend their ideas or to situate them in intellectual history, leaving formal and poetic questions largely unregarded.5 In the now extensive Defoe critical tradition, in fact, the formal features of his poems have been almost totally ignored except for brief and general complaints about carelessness and speed of composition; criticism has offered little suggestion about how the poems work and no detailed examination of poetic quality, preferring damnation to analysis. The Cibber/Shiels volume of 1753 complains: that Defoe ‘has taken no pains in versification; his ideas are masculine, his expressions coarse, and his numbers generally rough, ... more from carelessness ... than lack of ability,’6 and an 1830 reviewer in the British Critic and Quarterly Theological Review concludes that Jure Divino ‘is clattered to the rough music of marrow-bone-andcleaver rhyme, the only accompaniment which he had at command’ and generally regrets Defoe’s ‘pertinacious attachment to verse, a species of composition for which it may not be going too far to say that from the badness of his ear he was organically incompetent.’7 The French literary historian Hippolyte Taine in 1863, in fact, set the tone for much do-ityourself exemplification when, to prove that Defoe was ‘entirely destitute

Some Formal Issues in Defoe’s Verse

57

of refinement, enthusiasm, pleasantness’ he simply asks the reader in a footnote to ‘see his dull poems.’8 William’s Lee’s offhand 1869 comment about the ‘frequent occurrences of defective rhymes’ in effect speaks for the next century-plus of formal observation.9 It may be that Defoe was sometimes a hasty poet (just as he was sometimes impatient in prose), and his ear (or typesetter) may sometimes have failed him, and I have no desire to claim for him some laurel that history has so far denied him. But it is worth asking some questions about historical reading practices and expectations, looking at the contextual expectations of his time and thinking in more detail about the dramatic effects his poetry achieved among a wide readership at the turn of the eighteenth century. His reign in poetry was admittedly short: almost all of his effective and influential poems were composed between 1700 and 1706, most of them, in fact, by 1703. The Pacificator (1700) demonstrated his fitness for the acerbic wars of wit that were to follow for two generations, and even if he came to regret and repent those directions, he showed his affinities with the developing conventions that, a generation later, would entirely dominate the public poetic world. The True-Born Englishman, The Mock Mourners (his elegy for William III), and Hymn to the Pillory all were hugely popular, runaway best-sellers at a moment when poetry – though published liberally – was sometimes a drug on the market. Both Reformation of Manners and More Reformation did very well with the new century’s readers, well enough for Defoe to perhaps overestimate the kind of reputation that a long, ambitious work like Jure Divino might provide. It is true that the great-work-to-be – constructed in twelve formal books and published in folio – did not work out: it was overly anticipated, badly timed, ineptly marketed, over-revised, and (among other things) too obsequious. And it is true that Defoe’s poetic career was, in effect, over by 1707, largely because it was overshadowed by his other work, which by then was emerging as more culturally important. So the questions I want to address here involve his demonstrable external success with poetry readers in those few short years. What do we need to know about the situation then to explain Defoe’s effectiveness? Or what do we miss in the poems themselves that might help to explain the testimonies of pleasure and respect that his contemporaries offered? I want to think about Defoe’s verse in relation to the expectations of contemporaries, who read it eagerly and appreciatively and encouraged Defoe’s pride of accomplishment, and I want to look at some of the formal and structural features of the poems that those contemporaries may have understood and responded to more fully, or at least differently,

58

J. Paul Hunter

than we can. This is not to imply that Defoe deserves elevation into the top ranks of poets, but it is to address the question of why his contemporaries found his poetry satisfying and to suggest that a careful reading of it can tell us quite a lot about the nature of poetic utterance at the turn of the eighteenth century.

1 Max Novak has done much over more than forty years to give us a remarkable, complex, and multi-talented Daniel Defoe and to make sure that we no longer regard him as a one-title author. But for many years after his death he was, for most readers, simply the author of Robinson Crusoe. The monument to his memory that stands near his burial place in Bunhill Fields in London, erected by grateful schoolchildren in the nineteenth century, describes him in just those terms, and however more sophisticated we may be about the complexity and variety of his accomplishments, we can still appreciate that impulse and the signal imaginative accomplishment it was based on. But harder for us to understand is the way Defoe frequently insisted in his own time on being known as the author of a different single title – a poem, The True-Born Englishman (1701). Like so much else of Defoe’s work, it was originally published anonymously, but fairly quickly it came to be known as his, and once it was so recognized, for several years Defoe signed nearly everything he wanted to claim publicly as his own writing, as being ‘By the Author of the True Born Englishman.’10 This ascription appeared on the title page of the True Collection of his writings in 1703 and 1705, on the title page of More Reformation, on the title page of Jure Divino, and on several other works, primarily in the first decade of the century. The two years immediately after the success of The True-Born Englishman were not easy, and Defoe’s cultural comfort levels were not high. There were William’s death and Defoe’s subsequent uncertainty of his role with a Stuart queen, there were the Shortest Way episode and its resulting discomfort with both High Tories and Dissenters, there was the pillory episode that cast a long cultural shadow as disgrace on the one hand and public vindication on the other. In those months, the triumphal moment of The True-Born Englishman (echoed in a minor key by another celebratory occasional poem, A Hymn to the Pillory) was surely something to remember, savour, and use: the poet as, however briefly, cultural hero who had magically tapped into a golden lode of popular feeling. Now in his early forties, Defoe obviously relished being known

Some Formal Issues in Defoe’s Verse

59

as author of the best-selling poem of the decade – it had gone quickly through ten authorized editions, and Defoe said that an additional 80,000 copies of pirated editions had been sold – and he used every opportunity to refresh the public memory about his success. But his pride in his writing and his eagerness for identity as a writer involved more than an abstract desire to be known as an success and respected poet. It was a particular kind of poetry that Defoe practised and claimed superiority in – a poetry that was public, accessible, persuasive, patriotic, heroic in his celebration of cultural assumptions, satiric in its examination of national habits, and idealistic (while at the same time pragmatic) about national goals and a national identity. Above all, it was effective – a poetry of practicality and usefulness – demonstrably impacting readers’ everyday attitudes and behaviour, and the poetry that Defoe continued to write well into the Queen Anne years continued to be based in a sense of poetry’s public functions. We call this taste now by many names: didactic or propagandistic when we wish to dismiss it, or the poetry of cultural work of the development of the public sphere when we wish to acknowledge its historic place. I want to argue that recognizing its character and cultural importance, however we feel about those values, is crucial to our understanding of the poetry of Defoe and his contemporaries. I first want to deal with some of the public expectations of public poetry, remembering that the public sphere was both fighting to be born in those years and at the same time inclining towards abortion. I then want to think about readerly expectations of genre and mode. Finally, I want concentrate on some formal features of the poetry, especially rhyme.

2 All three historical considerations that I will take up primarily establish Defoe as a member of a cultural community of poets rather than differentiating him; we need, I think, to understand more fully what the community poetry of readers and writers was like before we are in a position to evaluate Defoe’s contribution. The first consideration is elementary and involves our memory of what poems are for at the end of the seventeenth century. It is a truism that Romantic assumptions about poetry make it difficult for all subsequent readers to regard earlier communal (especially public) poetry sympathetically, for earlier poetry positions itself, however critically and awkwardly, within the power community rather than outside it and seeks to influence public policy rather than decry or denounce it. It is not just that the topics of poetry are different, but

60

J. Paul Hunter

that poetry’s designs are different and its potential audience both larger and harder to persuade. Consequently, the way we have to evaluate its success is different. The snide comment of Leslie Stephen that I quoted earlier – about what poetry was understood to be when Dryden and Pope were the lawgivers – nicely stands for the issue. It is not Stephens’s claim about the lawgiving of Dryden and Pope that is crucial. Indeed, they themselves were almost powerless to do more than transcribe laws, given the assumptions readers were already in the habit of making about what serious poetry was for: it was to instruct and persuade, using (to be sure) delight. But the public usefulness of verse – its artistic ability to make a point persuasive – was the main criterion of excellence. Beauty was not an irrelevant concept by any means (and there are both instrumental and decorative criteria), but it was beauty in the service of usefulness. At a time when poetry and politics were so carefully entangled, rhetorical strategies were forms of beauty; it would have been nonsense, to most readers and to most poets, to talk about art for art’s sake or to think about qualities of poetry apart from its effect and impact. Art was for idea’s sake, and ideas had political, indeed broadly cultural and national, implications. And poetry was just as frequently a vehicle as prose for the persuasive expression of ideas. This is not scholarly news, but we do sometimes forget the primary criterion of use when we come to evaluate rhetorical strategies, especially if they are not fully describable in authoritative terms from the past, if we cannot phrase them in Ciceronian or Horatian or Aristotelian terms or from modern rhetorical or logic manuals such as those of Puttenham and Lyly. We may sometimes need different terms to distinguish what Defoe does from what Dryden does, because Defoe’s training in a Dissenter’s academy involved different, though hardly inferior, texts and terminology and method from those of classical education. But that does not necessarily mean that his poetry was less persuasive or less artful; even prose analysis of Defoe and his cohorts sometimes falters on this terminological and analytical issue, when the undeniable effects of his rhetoric are somehow diminished because we cannot put prestigious names to his poetry’s argumentative techniques. Defoe’s arguments may not be the most logical or classically describable, but their utility, effectiveness, and impact often cannot be denied. We do not have to buy into a utilitarian aesthetic to understand and appreciate it. Ultimately, I do not agree with the assertion of Robert Owens and Nicholas Furbank that Defoe’s poetry ‘dispenses with all the cunning Popean devices of the couplet considered as a closed unit.’11 Most of Defoe’s couplets are,

Some Formal Issues in Defoe’s Verse

61

in fact, as closed as those of Pope (sometimes too much so), but he uses the potential compactness, concision, and balance sometimes just as effectively, though perhaps not in such classically recognizable forms or exactly according to traditional rhetorical tropes. Here, for example, is an especially effective, quick characterization of British character: Seldom contented, often in the wrong, Hard to be pleased at all, and never long. (556–7)

The traditional rhetorical figure terms we are used to hearing in Pope criticism (zeugma, syllepsis, chiasmus, etc.) do not exactly work here, but compactness, equilibrium, antithesis, and category-breaking all are notable and notably effective. Defoe probably did not know the names of these figures, but his rhetorical instincts are good and effective, even if our critical vocabulary doesn’t label them well.

3 A second contextual consideration, one also involving the question of traditional labels, is that of genre identification and modal habit. Genre can be a powerful tool both for analysing artistic decisions within texts and for sorting out actual reading practices as they are influenced by the expectations of titles, generic labels, title pages, prefaces, dedicatory machinery, commendatory poems and other preliminaries. But genres are not simple or transparent, and the labelling process is very slippery. Most of Defoe’s poems are called, on their title pages, ‘Satyrs,’ and the label is accurate and helpful enough as far as it goes. Defoe, in fact, seems to attach some quite special, almost material significance to the term Satyr, investing it with power, moral suasion, and something very close to personal, human, or beyond-human identity. Often, in poem after poem, he directly addresses Satyr and commands or requests it (or her) to do specific things or produce specific effects. Novak notes that she is virtually a Muse in traditional terms, though Defoe never calls on her directly to bless or enable the writer holding the pen; sometimes he actually seems, to be addressing the text itself, trying to command or negotiate its reception, thus making Satyr a kind of creative and receptive field of rhetoric. What is important to note is that he seems to regard her, like the devil, as something that exists as more than an abstract concept, someone or something that makes things happen in the material world, a source of energy and guardian of outcome. His writerly use of Satyr as addressee

62

J. Paul Hunter

here, then, is as a force and focus: he tells her where to concentrate and what to do, what results to produce, and how to be useful not only to him but to readers. Satyr thus is a force for change, and Defoe is just as adamant in his verse as in his prose about the fallen, needy nature of his society and its individuals, including, of course, Defoe himself. Repentance and reform are key words for Defoe everywhere (another thanks to Novak), but they are not simply words, and the desire for alteration, interruption of the status quo, is nearly palpable. Satyr as a figure – a rhetorical figure, certainly, but perhaps also something like a Muse that is little understood but crucially enabling with a readership – thus becomes a kind of companion, servant, and guide to effecting change. Satire as generic description thus becomes something a bit different from, a little larger than, merely a label that suggests specific conventions to be observed in a text. Genre in the eighteenth century is rather like that: both a guide to conventions and a fixer of expectations on the one hand, and a suggestive frame that expands beyond the givens of the past on the other. Here I am concerned not so much to sort out generic labels that are appropriate for individual texts, as to ask about the expectations that lie behind the whole idea of genre. What was it that readers thought they would find when they came upon a label like satire or hymn or elegy or panegyric or epic? What help do these terms offer in terms of tone or the setting up of an argument? I want to depart here from the normal customs of genre criticism and suggest that the precision of labels is actually less important in many cases than we have come to expect, but that some proliferation or combination of names, formal features, and typography becomes a crucial guide for readers in a kind of supra-generic way.12 That is, readers are asked in a broad variety of different ways, only some of them including generic labels, to adjust their reading habits to the expectations the text is about to harvest. Actually, quite a few distinctions obtain for readers that are not, in the usual sense, generic labels. Some of these distinctions are specified verbally or expressed in the prefatory machinery; some are only hinted at because of subject matter, level of style, or tone; others are coded into the book- or page-making process; still others derive from hints or implications that are harder to specify materially or textually. There are, for example, divisions between religious and secular poems and between political and philosophical poems, though in both these binaries there are meaningful overlaps that tend to register the categories nearly meaningless in reading practice. Very few poems from the

Some Formal Issues in Defoe’s Verse

63

civil wars onward for more than a century are not in some crucial sense religious (or anti-religious), and just as few are not political in an intense and often practical way, however philosophical their subject might be. Clearly, for example, Jure Divino is all of the above, plus many more. In practice, therefore, reader expectations have to be articulated in a far more detailed way than either generic or topical labelling implies. And there are, of course, many other binaries that can, at least sometimes, be helpful in setting up the reader for particular kinds of responses:13 for example, poems of praise and poems of blame (though again they may be mixed, as in The Mock Mourners), historical poems, narrative poems, innumerable kinds of occasional poems, and so forth. Two varieties of category, though, seem to be to be especially helpful in distinguishing seventeenth- and eighteenth-century poems, and neither of these categorical distinctions is often applied as a way of considering what readers may rightfully expect. One involves a distinction between meditative poems on the one hand (I use the term meditative to mean exploratory, reflective, informally thoughtful, and ruminative, not to imply religiosity of any kind), and poems of argument on the other. A second distinction, simple-minded though it is, is even more helpful about expectations: a distinction between long poems and short ones. Many meditative poems in Defoe’s time achieved both popularity and distinction; his own poetic apprenticeship, in fact, began in his teens with this kind of experiment. Many meditative poems were cast as letters or epistles, but even in such loose forms, there is a powerful tendency for argument to invade or seep in. It was an argumentative age – an inevitable feature of what many now call the developing public sphere or what in any case involved a widened readership on matters of public policy and opinion – and readers turned just as often to poems as to prose to find arguments about the meaning or direction of contemporary events and controversies. Poems that call themselves ‘Essays’ or ‘Dialogues’ are often, in fact, primarily arguments, however tentative or open-minded they may be, as are most epics, including Paradise Lost, Davideis, and Prior’s ambitious but now almost forgotten Solomon on the Vanity of the World. So, of course, is Jure Divino. Let me say a word about long and short before teasing out for Defoe the implications of the ubiquity of argument. There is, I take it, no absolute way to distinguish between long poems and short ones, and we could easily get into the classic Argument of the Beard here. I don’t know if a hundred lines is long or short, though I suspect the former, because few readers would pick it up for a jolt or hit of momentary plea-

64

J. Paul Hunter

sure, whatever its subject or tone. But most poems in Defoe’s lifetime tended to sort themselves by length without engaging in the classic argument about whether ninety-nine lines or a hundred constitute short. There are some fine short poems in the period, many in the twelve- to twenty-four-line range, and even a few that are eight lines or fewer, but almost all ambitious poems – poems on which poets staked their immediately popularity and long-term reputation – were long, much longer than a hundred lines. When a poem is long enough to justify separate publication, it surely meets the criterion of long, and all of Defoe’s major poems between 1700 and 1706 were long (many thought too long). The Mock Mourners is about 600 lines long, Reformation of Manners about 1,300 (almost twice as long as Pope’s Essay on Criticism), More Reformation is nearly 1,000, and The True Born Englishman more than 1,200 (only slightly shorter than Pope’s Essay on Man), while Jure Divino, in a dozen books, is epical in appearance, intention, scale, and magnitude – far longer than Pope’s lengthened Dunciad. The tendency of these categories – long and argumentative – to overlap is obvious, and just as obvious perhaps is the fact that modern readers find such poems hard to read. We have little experience with length – or with them – in the first place. Most are too long, even when they are accessible, to teach or to anthologize; one of the great problems with anthologies is, in fact, their unintended impact to set a canon of expectations and definitions about what was available to readers in different times, and because long poems have disappeared from classrooms and from our view means that they are less likely to be central to our thinking and ultimately to our scholarship. Questionable quality is not the only reason, though it is usually the given one, that little is ever said at any level about Samuel Wesley’s History of the Old and New Testaments and Life of Christ, about Prior’s Alma, or about Young’s Love of Fame. Few, indeed, are the long poems that are even excerpted and that thus retain at least some familiarity for modern readers and give us a sense of the scope of what ambitious poets tried for. My point is that modern readers are not very good at reading argument in poems, especially long and detailed argument, though it must have been a highly developed skill in Defoe’s time; the taste for long poems with complex arguments was strong then, but we expect our arguments in prose. Now there are a lot of things to examine in evaluating argument, and I do not pretend to do more here than list a few of the issues. But I want to insist, first, that logic is by no means the only test to apply, however much the texts themselves praise it as a test of all

Some Formal Issues in Defoe’s Verse

65

matters. Defoe dedicates Jure Divino to Reason as ‘the First Monarch of the World,’ but that does not mean that reason is his strongest aid in the poem. As Pat Rogers demonstrates in his introduction to Defoe’s reception history, commentators over the last 270 years have been rather hard on Defoe’s ability at argument and, in fact, have found structure to be a recurring problem in longer eighteenth-century poems in general, though it is not always clear that they are looking for the right evidence. They may well be right: certainly it is true that Defoe is better at exemplification than at explicating principles, and he has a tendency to pile up examples, amplify them, and elaborate them, sometimes at the expense of moving forward. Too, his verse-paragraphs (the couplet equivalent of stanzas) are often journalistically short in his long poems, so that he sometimes takes far less space to develop a point than most argumentative poets, Pope, for example. In the final, admittedly highly self-conscious section ‘To the Queen’ in Jure Divino, his verse-paragraphs average 6.4 lines in length, the equivalent of the journalistic prose paragraph that Defoe pioneered. But he can build and develop paragraphs – and paragraphs upon paragraphs – when he wants to, and we are in no position to be definitive about his structuring and arguing abilities until someone looks hard at exactly how his organization works. The fact that it worked at least for a while for some tough audiences in the early eighteenth century should at least give us pause and drive some analytical research. He probably did work fast and revise little – certainly he was neither the line-by-line craftsman or the patient corrector that Pope was – but it is the effects that count in a use economy, and it would be good to know exactly how he achieved the results he did. There is rhetorical art there somewhere, waiting to be named.

4 Most of the complaints about Defoe’s poetry centre on carelessness and clunkiness, and I would like to conclude by thinking historically about some formal features of his work, especially his employment of rhyme. I admit that I do not always find him a sound or well-sounding poet, and I continue (whether it is his fault or mine) to have trouble with some of his poetic habits and choices. Often, for example, his couplets seem almost too closed and regular (even though he takes pains to vary his punctuation and puts quite a few clauses into his average sentence); the rhythms sometimes seem to me too predictable and jog-trot regular compared with those of his more revisionary contemporaries, whereas (contrari-

66

J. Paul Hunter

wise) sometimes I simply cannot parse metrically a few of his problematic lines. And there are, in spite of what I am about to say in defence of his rhyming, some reasons to think that he was not a patient or careful rhymer and that he elaborated rather than revised or compacted. But all in all, I think that, as Twain said of Wagner, Defoe’s poetry is better than it sounds, and I would like to call up the contexts of turn-of-the-century poetic practice – before Pope had raised the standards impossibly and changed the rules – and look especially at the ways he uses rhyme, to see if there really are the ‘frequent occurrences of defective rhyme’14 that critics have habitually charged. Finding defects in rhyme has been something of a preoccupation with critics in repeated moments of critical history; rhyme criticism has typically veered towards carping about variations and imperfections, perhaps because good theory of rhyme has been so elusive. Even now, we are not above prescriptiveness about when rhyme is off or near or slanted, meaning whether it is ‘correct’ or ‘incorrect.’ It is worth noting from the start that defectiveness – or effectiveness – is a relative and often quite subjective matter, dependent on mouth, ear, and imagination: time, location, and class are only a few of the underappreciated factors. Rhyme is generally agreed to be most satisfying when there’s an exact repetition of the stressed vowel and consonant in the final stressed syllable of a line, but with a varied first consonant so that there is repetition, but only partial repetition of a sound. Almost everyone with a normative urge agrees that that pattern is best, at least in English, and so-called perfect or true rhyme, seems, as the standard terminology indicates, superior to off-rhyme, slant rhyme, pararhyme, false rhyme, half rhyme, eye rhyme, or any other variety that seems to name itself as a deviation or fluctuation from what is right. But the problems start with variable readers from variable linguistic backgrounds (region, class, even religion, gender, occupation, and political loyalty), and they proliferate into the uncertainties of historical pronunciation, deprivation hardships with certain English sounds, and the conventional or honorary adjustments that have been made – what we might call the love/move resolution. Social pronunciations complicate the issue: for example, you have to have a good Southern Bible-Belt ear and appreciation of class and local modulations to hear the fine tones in ‘I don’t care if it rains or freezes / long as I got my plastic Jesus / sittin’ on the dashboard of my car’; in fact, if you cannot put enough finely nuanced syllables in ‘car,’ you probably cannot hear the earlier rhyme right. Most intelligent readers cut a little slack for rhymes that do not sound right but might have sounded perfect in the

Some Formal Issues in Defoe’s Verse

67

right time, place, and circumstance. But not much: we think we know a jangle when we hear it, and no amount of theorizing or historical apologetics seems to make the ear grow fonder. Quite a large number of Defoe rhymes jangle or seem forced or stretched. Here, for example, are some of the trying combinations that tend to bring me up short in the early lines of The True-Born Englishman: harangues/tongues; resign/again; make/weak; such/rich; before/ poor; streams/flames; Scotch/Dutch; spirit/inherit; here/character; manners/explainers; know/do; town/own; confess/peace; sense/ prince; found/vagabond; votes/Scots; reign/Englishmen. Defoe’s other poems of the period are much the same; in Reformation of Manners, we confront within and seen; wit and late; town and own; Men and Fifteen; and Rome and Byzantium; and in Jure Divino wrenches such as Sphere/ Jupiter; abode/God; breath/birth; Stars/Spheres; word/sword; Bequest/trust; and repairs/ears. I am perfectly prepared to believe that in some of these cases Defoe’s own vowel pronunciation could have made the rhyme work, and perhaps in others his wide experience with local and regional speech around the island would justify the sounds more closely. But in the end, allowing all the possible grains of historical uncertainty, about 10 to 15 per cent of Defoe’s rhymes are, by the standards of ‘true’ rhyme, imperfect. However, I happened recently to be reading Defoe at the same time as I was reading Brad Leithauser’s Darlington’s Fall, which is subtitled ‘a novel in verse.’ There, I watched with admiration the intricate variations on sound repetitions as ways of holding together elaborate verse forms. His favourite device, I think, is consonance, and he is very good at it. It reminded me of other classic uses of consonance, where the final consonant remains stable but the preceding vowel varies, in, for example, Emily Dickinson, Wilfred Owen, W.H. Auden (who plays some fancy riffs upon it), and (ultimately) Daniel Defoe. Almost all the lines that sound rhymingly odd in Defoe are, in fact, instances of consonance, whatever the spelling or appearance: reign/men; crowd/enjoyed; sense/prince; ran/Dane; long/tongue; Lords/words/records; and appear/spear/ wear. Such usage is not, of course, unknown in Defoe’s Restoration predecessors and heroes: Dryden, Rochester, and Marvell, for example (the poets Novak rightly cites as his frequent models and inspiration). Dryden was relatively pure in his rhyming (i.e., insistently exact in echoing both vowel and consonant), but Rochester loved, or at least allowed himself, variation: Sack/lake; weak/break; done/town; am/shame; thrown/down; late/that; brought/forgot. The proportions of conso-

68

J. Paul Hunter

nance to ‘pure’ rhyme in Rochester are virtually the same as those in Defoe: one or two in every set of ten rhyming lines. Heard melodies, sweet or unsweet, die hard. But the insistent demand for more perfect rhyme seems to have been born, or at least established, at the about the time that Defoe was flourishing and at the height of his poetic popularity. It was in 1702 that Edward Bysshe first published The Art of English Poesy, which went into many editions (at least ten by 1739) and became a popular, standard handbook for readers and would-be rhymers; its dictionary of rhymes in effect set the canon of the permissible.15 It was just about then, too, that William Walsh gave his famous advice to the youthful Pope about the nation’s lack of a ‘correct’ poet, a void that Pope hastened to fill. I am certainly not prepared to argue that Defoe is as good a poet as Pope, and rule revisions and sound expectations did not change overnight. Also, rhyme is far from the only issue in poetic achievement. But it does seem that the rules shift culturally at just about the time Defoe’s verse was flourishing (somewhere between 1702 and 1709) and that subsequently the habits and expectations of rhyme become more clear, tight, and rigid, a taste that carries down to us. Three hundred years later we can read Brad Leithauser without grimace, even with a pleasure of new discovery, long-time rhyme practices having been nearly abandoned, but we may have to be taught to read Defoe, a fate that often befalls readers when they venture into a foreign culture, whether in time or in space. There are other things to be said about Defoe and rhyme – some good, some bad; some in harmony with his time, some against it. Defoe is not generally as witty in rhyme as are his Augustan successors; I have found relatively few startling instances where he builds syntax in rhyme (as Pope does, and as Wimsatt and Kenner have demonstrated), and he is not so associational in using rhymes to contaminate words and imply damaging connections. He does the conventional satirical thing of rhyming king with thing and rule with fool, and there are some more original touches of this kind; rhyming ‘king’ with ‘murmuring’ for example (1004–5) and jubilee with ‘mobile’ and ‘obeyed him’ with ‘betrayed him’ (1059–60; 1035–6); and, fittingly, in the True-Born Englishman, he repeatedly rhymes ‘Dutch’ with ‘much.’ He is often intending subtler sound effects than is apparent, suggesting that he listened more carefully than his reputation has it. Sometimes his imperfect rhymes that cannot be glossed as consonance – word/understood, for example (1050–1) – go on to set up or visually predict the next set of rhymes (record/lord). He was hearing his sounds, and he was seeing them.

Some Formal Issues in Defoe’s Verse

69

I admit that sometimes I still find Defoe’s poems to be hard going formally and too haranguing didactically, and the nagging suspicion persists that he did not always give them the benefit of his full attention. But largely he played by the rules of his day and wrote for readers who knew them, in terms of his assumptions about poetry’s role, in terms of generic expectation, and in formal construction. That those rules are not ours is clear, but like so much else of the past that we unaccountably tend to patronize from our own superior moral and aesthetic stance, there is more art there than meets the eye – or the habitual ear.

NOTES 1 Jacob, An Historical Account of the Lives and Writings of Our most Considerable English Poets (London: for E. Curll, 1720), 293. Defoe is briefly included in a kind of appendix labelled ‘Modern English Poets and Authors of Single Pieces.’ Jure Divino is described as ‘a Poem of considerable Bulk in Folio,’ and The True-Born Englishman is said to have ‘sold many Impressions; but his Descriptions are generally very low’ (293). 2 The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland To the Time of Dean Swift, 5 vols (London: for R. Griffiths, 1753), 4:315. This collection, which bore Theophilus Cibber’s name, apparently was mostly compiled by Robert Shiels, but in any case it seems to have well summarized contemporary attitudes and evaluations. 3 British Quarterly Review 28 (1858); repr. in Defoe: The Critical Heritage, ed. Pat Rogers (London and Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972), 156. 4 Stephen, ‘Defoe’s Library,’ first published in Cornhill Magazine, 17 (1869); repr. in Hours in a Library, 1st ser., 1874, rev. 1892; quoted here from Rogers, Critical Heritage, 171. 5 Paula Backscheider provides the most lengthy and vigorous recent defence of Defoe’s poetry, rightly contending that for some time Defoe regarded himself as primarily a poet. She is especially helpful in recognizing Jure Divino’s importance to Defoe’s literary ambitions, considering it a serious bid for literary fame. Along with Novak, she is almost alone in refusing to patronize Defoe as a poet. Her chief emphasis is on Defoe’s control of ideas and political, religious, ethical, and philosophical commitments. She is especially good on Jure Divino’s Lockean intellectual ancestry and its similarity in intention to other essays, such as those of Locke or Pope, in prose or verse. See the chapter, ‘Poetry,’ in Daniel Defoe: Ambition and Innovation (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1986), 12–41; Daniel Defoe: His

70

6 7 8 9 10 11

12

13

14 15

J. Paul Hunter Life (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), especially 163–5; and (especially) ‘The Verse Essay, John Locke, and Defoe’s Jure Divino,’ELH 55 (1988), 99–124. Lives of the Poets, 4:324. Repr. in Rogers, Critical Heritage, 114, 113. Taine, Histoire de la Littérature Anglaise (Van Laun translation of 1873; repr. in Rogers, Critical Heritage, 161). Lee, Daniel Defoe: His Life and Recently Discovered Writings, 3 vols (London: John Camden Hotten, 1869), 1:24. Lee, Novak, and Backscheider (among others) have emphasized this point. The True-Born Englishman and Other Writings, edited by Owens and Furbank (London: Penguin Books, 1997), xiii. Subsequent page references appear in parentheses in the text. See J. Paul Hunter, ‘Making Books, Generating Genres,’ in The Commonwealth of Books: Essays and Studies in Honour of Ian Willison, ed. Wallace Kirsop (Melbourne: Centre for the Book, Monash University, 2007), 18–47. J. Paul Hunter, ‘Formalism and History: Binarism and the Anglophone Couplet,’ special issue on ‘Formalism,’ ed. Marshall Brown and Susan Wolfson, Modern Language Quarterly 61, no. 1 (2000), 109–29. Lee, quoted in Mary Elizabeth Campbell, Defoe’s First Poem (Bloomington, IN: Principia Press, 1938), 3. Bysshe, The Art of English Poesy (London: for R. Knaplock et al., 1702).

chapter four

Mimesis/mimesis and the EighteenthCentury British Novel: Representation and Knowledge JOHN RICHETTI

The first word in my title refers to Erich Auerbach’s famous study of classic texts from the European literary tradition, Homer to Virginia Woolf, which features a subtitle that is breathtaking in its ambition: ‘The Representation of Reality in Western Literature.’ The second ‘mimesis’ of my title is lower case and de-italicized, since I will in due course try to describe in an Auerbachian spirit – but not, I hasten to add, with his authority and learning – how some British eighteenth-century novels are mimetic, how they represent what we can see as their ‘reality,’ or, better, how they approach the problem of representation, which for us, more than fifty years on from Auerbach’s book, is a hard nut to crack.1 The impetus for this paper and the source of its reflections on the problem of representation come from the publication in 2004 of a fiftieth-anniversary edition of the English translation (by Willard Trask) of Mimesis in 1954,2 which had been written during the war (finished in April 1945, the month of Hitler’s death),3 published first in German at Berne in 1946, just after the end of the war. In 1935 the Nazis had dismissed the Jewish Auerbach from his German university post at Marburg. He found refuge teaching in Istanbul and eventually at Penn State and then Yale, where he died in his mid-sixties. That anniversary edition featured an introduction by my late and dear friend, Edward Said, who had always been a great defender of Auerbach’s work in the face of recent so-called theoretical criticism that had moved away from the great Germanic tradition of Romance Philology that Auerbach (and his contemporaries such as Ernst Robert Curtius and Leo Spitzer) represented so magnificently and at this point in our intellectual history so inimitably. As Said had wondered some years previously,

72

John Richetti

who nowadays can acquire the learning and the linguistic range that these scholars possessed in order to carry on their tradition?4 Thanks partly to his own situation as a Palestinian resident in America, Said was also stirred by the pathos of Auerbach’s exile and his heroic maintaining of humanist learning in the face of Nazi barbarism. At one point in his introduction to this anniversary edition of Mimesis, Said summarizes Auerbach’s project as involving ‘where and in what literature [reality] was most ably represented’ (xv), and we might pause to remember a time when the words literature and reality could be used without apology. But Said observes that for Auerbach in this regard the Romance literatures from the twelfth through the eighteenth centuries ‘are more representative of Europe than are, for example, the German.’ That resonates in the context of German National Socialism, of course, but Said adds that in his opinion ‘Auerbach scants the substantive English contribution in all this, perhaps a blind spot in his vision’ (xv). When this anniversary edition appeared in Britain, various reviewers, notably Terry Eagleton in the London Review of Books, also wondered about the omission of British narrative, except for Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, and Said’s and then Eagleton’s recognition set me to wondering.5 This essay is a record of my wondering since then about Auerbach’s neglect of British narrative realism and is my modest attempt (extreme modesty is required in the face of Auerbach’s tremendous learning and sheer critical power) to supplement Mimesis. I propose in what follows to write from the point of view of a narrow specialist in the field of eighteenth-century studies the missing chapter or long footnote, as it were, that might have considered the contributions of the British eighteenth-century novel to the problem of literary representation. Unlike some specialists in other fields who, since Mimesis first appeared, have been critical of Auerbach’s understanding of their periods, I take up this challenge as part of my homage to Mimesis, which when I first read it seemed to me the greatest work of literary criticism and scholarship I had ever encountered, and which I still value, indeed revere, as one of the great exemplars of such activities.6 It strikes me that any of the major eighteenth-century British novels would have worked well in Auerbach’s unfolding of the slow insertions of what we might want to call versions of actuality into European literary representation after classical antiquity. A glance at the index to Mimesis, however, reveals that only Fielding among the British novelists is mentioned; no Defoe, no Richardson, no Smollett, no Sterne, no Burney, and certainly no lesser novelists such as Eliza Haywood. Tom Jones, Auerbach

Mimesis/mimesis and the Eighteenth-Century British Novel

73

remarks in passing, has a ‘far more energetic contemporary realism of life in all its departments than do the French novels of the same period,’ but in the end, he adds, Fielding ‘steers away from any problematical and existential seriousness’ (491, 492). Here, it seems to me, is a missed opportunity as well as a crucial misunderstanding of Fielding (and other eighteenth-century British novelists), for as scholarship and criticism of the last fifty years have come to understand all the major novelists of the early and mid-eighteenth century may be said to move very powerfully if erratically and only occasionally in the direction of just such seriousness. To varying degrees, as I hope to suggest in what follows, the three novelists I’ve selected – Defoe, Haywood, and Fielding – stage in their fiction key parts of Auerbach’s narrative of the last phase of the emergence of new realistic forms of representation. Moreover, the work of all three highlights what might be called our own far less confident sense of the real or the actual, since each of these novels provides a radically different perspective on the nature of actuality as it is represented in narrative. Each displays a distinct attitude towards its readers and towards the kind of reality such readers would find relevant and worthy of representation. Let me trace briefly the main narrative thread Auerbach pursues. After contemplating a scene from Petronius Arbiter’s Satyricon, Auerbach pauses to characterize classical antiquity’s understanding of society, whose essentially static existence ‘poses no historical problem; it may at best pose a problem in ethics,’ but not with ‘the motive forces within society’ (32). For Auerbach, Petronius’s work represents a small shift in this static understanding. Trimalchio’s banquet is as he renders it fully realized; the individuals in it speak the cant and jargon of their class and place in Roman society. Auerbach remarks on the specificity of Petronius’s realism, ‘its precise and completely unschematized fixation of the social milieu,’ what he terms its ‘intrahistorical moment’ (30), its rendering of the language of ‘southern Italian freedmen-parvenues of the first century’ that is almost free of ‘literary stylization.’ In this regard, Auerbach explains as he looks back to his brilliant opening chapter, ‘Odysseus’ Scar,’ Petronius’s approach differs radically from Homeric realism whereby phenomena are represented ‘in a fully externalized form, visible and palpable in all their parts, and completely fixed in their spatial and temporal relations’ (6). As Auerbach examines the scene where the returned Odysseus, disguised as a stranger, is recognized by his hunting scar by the old servant, Euryclea, as she washes his feet, the narrative shifts for a time to the story of how Odysseus got that scar. He then develops his famous characterization of the Homeric style, which ‘knows only

74

John Richetti

a foreground, only a uniformly illuminated, uniformly objective present’ (7) and in which every thought and feeling is ‘completely expressed; events taking place in leisurely fashion’ (11). Auerbach contrasts this Homeric style with the epic manner he finds in the Hebrew Bible, in the story of Abraham and Isaac, where only so much is externalized as is necessary for pure narrative purpose, with ‘all else left in obscurity,’ time and place undefined, thoughts and emotions only hinted at, speech fragmentary, outcome uncertain – all mysterious and thereby effectively dimensional in the way that Homeric characters are not. Not only is the Hebrew god mysterious and full of unplumbed depths, ‘even the human beings in the Biblical stories have greater depths of time, fate, and consciousness than do the human beings in Homer’ (12). For Auerbach, however, the decisive break with the conventions of literary representation that dominated classical antiquity comes not in Roman satiric narrative or in the Hebrew Bible but in the New Testament; the story of Jesus and the disciples, he insists, does not fit any of the rhetorical and generic classifications of antiquity. Using the scene in Mark’s Gospel when Peter denies Christ, Auerbach observes the crucial insertion in it and indeed in the Gospels overall of the random, as he calls it, as ordinary folk – fishermen, publicans, servants, prostitutes, the rich young man, the Samaritan – ‘come from their random everyday circumstances to be immediately confronted with the figure of Jesus,’ and in that encounter the ordinary and the random become in Auerbach’s terms profoundly serious ‘and very often tragic’ (44). In the New Testament, the separation of styles that governed in classical antiquity, the division of the social and historical world into distinct and static categories, is dissolved. To quote Auerbach again, ‘the deep subsurface layers, which were static for the observers of classical antiquity, began to move’ (45). Mimesis traces with awe-inspiring learning but also with creatively imaginative close readings the slow crumbling in various texts from late Latinity onwards of the rhetorical assumptions of classical antiquity, most memorably in his chapter on Dante, who ‘brings to life the whole historical world and, within that, every single human being who crosses his path!’ (201). The concrete immediacy and historico-political specificity that surround the persons Dante meets, especially in the Inferno, produce ‘a direct experience of life which overwhelms everything else’ and which evokes the divine and eternal order of things but only in the process of vivid human representation, so that, paradoxically, ‘the image of man eclipses the image of God’ as Dante realizes ‘the history of man’s inner life and unfolding’ (201–2).

Mimesis/mimesis and the Eighteenth-Century British Novel

75

But for my purposes in this essay the most important moment in Mimesis occurs when Auerbach arrives at Cervantes’ Don Quixote and summarizes his critical objectives in very simple terms: ‘we are looking for representations of everyday life in which that life is treated seriously, in terms of its human and social problems or even of its tragic complications’ (342). In Don Quixote Auerbach finds a non-judgmental ‘gaiety,’ an objectivizing and playful spirit of ‘multiple, perspective, non-judging, and even non-questioning neutrality which is a brave form of wisdom’ (357). In a sense, Don Quixote is the high point of Auerbachian realism, and from our perspective on his situation it is also implicitly autobiographical – Auerbach in bitter exile maintaining, like Cervantes, a kind of gaiety and wisdom. What I propose is to approach in Auerbachian fashion, and in the historical contexts and grand narrative his great work provides, three exemplary scenes in the eighteenth-century British novel, hoping in the process to assess their contributions to the representational mission of European literature in that largest of senses that Auerbach seeks to trace and to observe the ways in which they diverge, in fact, from the Auerbachian schema and complicate his fundamental propositions about the development of representation. But before I begin my own set of Auerbach-inspired readings, it is worth arguing, as Hayden White does, that Auerbach, true to his subtitle, is interested in the way representation works in different epochs. He actually is not guilty of simply assuming, as some of his critics have charged, that there is a trans-historical and extra-verbal reality that slowly comes to the fore as classical literary decorum breaks down over the centuries. His approach is not naively teleological. As White says, ‘Auerbach writes the history of mimesis as the story of the development of a specific kind of figuration; and he seeks to document – by offering a series of specific examples – the transformations in the dominant modes of mimesis-as-figuration in Western literary discourse from the time of the Evangelists to the middle of the twentieth century.’7 Or, as Marc Blanchard asks in a review essay of the volume in which White’s essay appeared, is Mimesis, in fact, ‘an investigation into the meaning of representation? What does it mean to represent? Does it mean to show something as a symbol of something else?’8 As White explains, Auerbach was claiming that mimesis renders not actuality but rather the author’s experience of the actual; a text is significant in the history of mimesis for Auerbach when it represents such experience and is thereby a ‘figure’ of it.9 My close examination of three extended passages from three novels is an attempt to see how distinct kinds of novelistic representation work as exemplary of such figuration

76

John Richetti

in the eighteenth century in Britain. These pages are notes towards a chapter on the British eighteenth-century novel that supplements or extends Mimesis rather more than fifty years on, that enquires what it means to represent reality in three very different ways in Britain from 1722 to 1749. In what follows I will first quote these passages in extenso, following Auerbach’s example of using as a point of departure (in German, Ansatzpunkt) a specific text rather than a generalized or abstract notion. But in analysing three passages, I will diverge from Auerbach’s intense focus in his chapters on single texts in which, as Stephen Nichols puts it, the ‘historical specificity, the sense of a given period, might be gleaned.’10 My purpose is to indicate the diversity of representations in a thirty-year span of English narrative. I will begin with a crucial scene from Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders, even if the idea of a separate ‘scene’ in that text’s unimpeded flow of incidents and observations is something of a revealing misnomer: I Was now left in a dismal and disconsolate Case indeed, and in several things worse than ever: First it was past the flourishing time with me when I might expect to be courted for a Mistress; that agreeable part had declin’d some time, and the Ruins only appear’d of what had been; and that which was worse than all was this, that I was the most dejected, disconsolate Creature alive; I that had encourag’d my Husband, and endeavour’d to support his Spirits under his Trouble could not support my own; I wanted that Spirit in trouble which I told him was so necessary for bearing the burthen. But my Case was indeed Deplorable, for I was left perfectly Friendless and Helpless, and the Loss my Husband had substain’d had reduc’d his Circumstances so low, that tho’ indeed I was not in Debt, yet I could easily foresee that what was left would not support me long; that while it wasted daily for Subsistence, I had no way to encrease it one Shilling, so that it would be soon all spent, and then I saw nothing before me but the utmost Distress, and this represented it self so lively to my Thoughts, that it seem’d as if it was come, before it was really very near; also my very Apprehensions doubl’d the Misery, for I fancied every Sixpence that I paid but for a Loaf of Bread, was the last I had in the World, and that To-morrow I was to fast, and be starv’d to Death. In this Distress I had no Assistant, no Friend to comfort or advise me, I sat and cried and tormented my self Night and Day; wringing my Hands, and sometimes raving like a distracted Woman; and indeed I have often wonder’d it had not affected my Reason, for I had the Vapours to such a

Mimesis/mimesis and the Eighteenth-Century British Novel degree, that my Understanding was sometimes quite lost in Fancies and Imaginations. I Liv’d Two Years in this dismal Condition, wasting that little I had, weeping continually over my dismal Circumstances, and as it were only bleeding to Death, without the least hope or prospect of help from God or Man; and now I had cried so long, and so often, that Tears were, as I might say, exhausted, and I began to be Desperate, for I grew poor a pace. For a little Relief I had put off my House and took Lodgings, and as I was reducing my Living so, I sold off most of my Goods, which put a little Money in my Pocket, and I liv’d near a Year upon that, spending very sparingly, and eeking things out to the utmost; but still when I look’d before me, my Heart would sink within me at the inevitable approach of Misery and Want: O let none read this part without seriously reflecting on the Circumstances of a desolate State, and how they would grapple with meer want of Friends and want of Bread; it will certainly make them think not of sparing what they have only, but of looking up to Heaven for support, and of the wise Man’s Prayer, Give me not Poverty least I steal. Let ’em remember that a time of Distress, is a time of dreadful Temptation, and all the Strength to resist is taken away; Poverty presses, the Soul is made Desperate by Distress, and what can be done? It was one Evening, when being brought, as I may say, to the last Gasp, I think I may truly say I was Distracted and Raving, when prompted by I know not what Spirit, and as it were, doing I did not know what, or why; I dress’d me, for I had still pretty good Cloaths, and went out: I am very sure I had no manner of Design in my Head, when I went out, I neither knew or considered where to go, or on what Business; but as the Devil carried me out and laid his Bait for me, so he brought me to be sure to the place, for I knew not whither I was going or what I did. Wandring thus about I knew not whether, I pass’d by an Apothecary’s Shop in Leadenhall-street, where I saw lye on a Stool just before the Counter a little Bundle wrapt in a white Cloth, beyond it, stood a Maid Servant with her Back to it, looking up towards the top of the Shop, where the Apothecary’s Apprentice, as I suppose, was standing up on the Counter, with his Back also to the Door, and a Candle in his Hand, looking and reaching up to the upper Shelf for something he wanted, so that both were engag’d mighty earnestly, and no Body else in the Shop. This was the Bait; and the Devil who laid the Snare, as readily prompted me, as if he had spoke, for I remember, and shall never forget it, ’twas like a Voice spoken to me over my Shoulder, take the Bundle; be quick; do it this Moment; it was no sooner said but I step’d into the Shop, and with my

77

78

John Richetti Back to the Wench, as if I had stood up for a Cart that was going by, I put my Hand behind me and took the Bundle, and went off with it, the Maid or Fellow not perceiving me, or any one else. It is impossible to express the Horror of my Soul all the while I did it, When I went away I had no Heart to run, or scarce to mend my pace; I cross’d the Street indeed, and went down the first turning I came to, and I think it was a Street that went thro’ into Fenchurch-street, from thence I crossed and turn’d thro’ so many ways and turnings, that I could never tell which way it was, nor where I went, I felt not the Ground I stept on, and the farther I was out of Danger, the faster I went, till tyr’d and out of Breath, I was forc’d to sit down on a little Bench at a Door, and then found I was got into Thames-street near Billingsgate: I rested me a little and went on, my Blood was all in a Fire, my Heart beat as if I was in a sudden Fright: In short, I was under such a Surprize that I knew not whether I was a going, or what to do. After I had tyr’d my self thus with walking a long way about, and so eagerly, I began to consider and make home to my Lodging, where I came about Nine a Clock at Night. What the Bundle was made up for, or on what Occasion laid where I found it, I knew not, but when I came to open it, I found there was a Suit of Child-bed Linnen in it, very good and almost new, the Lace very fine; there was a Silver Porringer of a Pint, a small Silver Mug and Six Spoons, with some other Linnen, a good Smock, and Three Silk Handkerchiefs, and in the Mug in a Paper Eighteen Shillings and Six-pence in Money.11

Moll’s continuously flowing narrative stream is an important expressive aspect of Defoe’s text as it seeks to evoke a supremely individualized and to that extent undisciplined and thereby in a simple sense realistic narrative voice. That mere flowing of narrative has the effect of rendering a life that simply unfolds or unravels from fact to fact and from scene to scene without an artificial, supervising narrative structure. And, of course, such a narrative stream matches the improvisatory and varied nature of the heroine’s life. Moll is remembering, Defoe’s simple fictional supposition goes, the chronology and the main events of her life (fairly implausibly, if we think of the detailed rendition and exact recollection she manages at key moments) and her reflections and emphases on some moments more than others are part of the spontaneity the narrative highlights. This feature of all of Defoe’s longer fictions is certainly relevant to an Auerbachian approach, since it represents in his terms the continuation or perhaps the final modern phase of the erosion of stylistic division and rhetorical hierarchy so essential to classical literature.

Mimesis/mimesis and the Eighteenth-Century British Novel

79

This (feigned, of course) spontaneity is a key part of Defoe’s ingenious mimicry of something that claims to be ordinary speech, distinctively easy but successfully plausible in its apparent artlessness and rambling self-absorption. Such unaffected egocentricity is crucial to Defoe’s impersonation, since Moll’s focus is necessarily and obsessively on herself; on her situation; here on her rapidly diminishing, almost exhausted resources now that she is alone; and on the mounting anxiety that accompanies her slide into poverty. What Defoe may be said to be representing most of the time in Moll Flanders, therefore, is not essentially an external or material reality. Rather, he is evoking a voice that contemplates a version of that reality retrospectively, and his narrator’s self-examination, her rendition of her inner condition, is provoked by those external circumstances, which matter for her only insofar as they are the causes of that inner crisis. To follow her narrative to the climax of this scene, one can describe this sequence fairly by noting that this evocation of Moll’s subjectivity prepares us for the precisely stated, exactly rendered material moment of her moral collapse as she commits her first petty crime. What is most fully represented in this passage, what occupies most of the narrative, therefore, is Moll’s attempt to evoke this increasing inner disorientation and panic in the face of a pressing external and objective world, which is not rendered in any detail or depth but is simply pointed to as a fading set of possibilities and diminished opportunities. But when the material world finally appears in all of its concrete particularity, it manifests itself as a replacement for her confused subjectivity, as a kind of alien and clearly rendered objectivity that propels her into crime. Or we might wonder if Defoe’s purpose is in some sense dramatic; we are perhaps meant to question Moll’s motives. She says that she dressed herself properly, claiming that this was instinctive rather than purposeful. Such preparation looks as if it was meant to facilitate her shoplifting, to provide a respectable cover for her entry into crime. This ambiguity is part of Defoe’s realism, of course, and Moll seems almost to protest too much that she was moved by the devil. Whatever we decide, at that moment Moll’s ruminations about her past life and her regrets for her mistakes are replaced, at least in her own rendition, by the compelling materiality of the scene, and her actions, automaton-like, are absorbed into that scene. So, to some extent, the passage renders Moll’s resistance to the material world – composed of financial and social relationships that have eroded, since she has no one to turn to and her resources dwindle apace – and her eventual absorption by it.

80

John Richetti

Worth noting here, as well, is how much of Moll’s world and circumstances Defoe takes for granted, expecting the reader to fill in and flesh out, which any reader in 1722 would have been able to do. His fiction, overall, points or indicates rather than represents or describes, in any full or thorough documentary sense, the way the great realistic novelists of the nineteenth century learned to do. In a sense, Defoe’s accomplishment here, and to some extent in his other long fictions, is to write from inside his character’s and readers’ reality rather than in the manner of nineteenth-century realism (and for that matter in Haywood’s and Fielding’s manner, as we shall see) from an Olympian external and objective perspective. For a couple of paragraphs, Moll’s evocation of her emotional state slides into moral warnings of a fairly banal sort: poverty leads to desperation and surrender to temptation. The striking and unusual part of her narrative is the depiction of the moment of criminal compulsion, which in its concreteness and vividness is in contrast to her attempts to render her deteriorating financial situation. To some extent, Defoe’s Moll is offering social/moral knowledge rather than mimesis, warnings of what poverty will drive one to do. But that is a minor and not extensive or even convincing strain of information in this sequence and in the rest of the novel, as I think every reader will agree and as Moll herself admits later when she calls herself an ‘indifferent Monitor.’ Rather, the knowledge this sequence offers readers is of the precise ways in which the material world intersects with that confused subjectivity, how the miscellaneous facts of London life, its geography and socio-economic arrangements, its random moments – the apothecary’s shop in Leadenhall Street, the shop assistant standing on its counter with a candle searching an upper shelf for something (What? We never find out!), the maidservant with her back turned to her bundle – suddenly provide a temptation that flashes like a moment of clarity, of arrested urban movement and variety. Such clarity, by the way, such precise enumeration of objects and exact arrangement of individual actors, is in contrast to the confused subjectivity that frames it, and the scene has two different tempi, as it were: the slow wasting of despair that precedes the theft contrasted to the fear and panic that come in the wake of that criminal compulsion that Defoe has Moll render so specifically. By immersing himself in a character like Moll – an abandoned child, a servant, then a woman living by her wits in the lower-middle-class marriage market, but now a widow at a low ebb of her fortunes and forced, as she claims, into crime – Defoe does something that Auerbach might well have pondered for his history of representation. In Auerbach’s context,

Mimesis/mimesis and the Eighteenth-Century British Novel

81

Defoe disavows Cervantic gaiety and neutrality, letting his heroine express herself forcefully and completely, so that she becomes a potentially sympathetic character as she faces an inexorable, unforgiving objectivity. Her subjectivity, unlike Quixote’s, drains away; to be a poor widow with no resources is to experience the dependence of the individual upon an external world of social and financial relationships. But more to the point, Defoe avoids what later in the century and across the Channel Auerbach finds in Voltaire’s Candide and treats as the typical Enlightenment response to the representational problem: ‘from among the conditions which determine the course of human lives, none but the material and natural are given serious consideration. Everything historical and spiritual he despises and neglects’ (410). Satiric simplicity and comic reduction such as Voltaire would offer readers in Candide are precisely what Defoe’s psycho-historical (and also, of course, material) account of Moll Flanders never allows. Defoe’s rendering is complex and morally ambiguous; an individual like Moll is expanded rather than simplified, and if there is satire it is muted and double-edged. Defoe’s presentation of such scenes is thickly specific, part of his instinctive attraction (not just in his novels) for the rich particularity of modern urban experience. The knowledge Defoe’s fiction offers is, in the end, complicated, multiple, undecided, as he has his heroine dramatize her defining uncertainties about what has made her the person she becomes. Obviously, she has no coherent understanding of the larger socio-historical circumstances in which she exists, but her account of her response to them leads, we may say, to an implicit representation of them. Thus, the near irrelevance of the material details of the scene in the apothecary’s shop, their arbitrary and accidental nature. Defoe the wholesale merchant is on display here, and the inventory of objects Moll finds in the bundle is exact and knowing; their monetary value helps for the moment to stabilize the material world. But at the same time there is a distinct pathos in the inventory of the maid’s bundle – what is the child to do without that bed linen (expensive by virtue of the lace)? And what is to happen to the maid who has lost three costly, luxurious baby accessories, to say nothing of the money, perhaps her own, amounting to a month’s wages or more? Despite his Puritanism and religio-political identity as a Dissenter, Defoe was a man of the early Enlightenment, English style, and these unspoken questions in Moll’s inventory are more than material; they are deeply sympathetic to specific human and, in this case, female problems. Implicitly in this scene and throughout Moll Flanders, Defoe is leading his readers to ponder the conditions of modern

82

John Richetti

urban existence, its unforgiving and mysterious materiality. The realism in Moll Flanders, if Auerbach had considered it, might be seen as a form of mimesis (lower case) that renders a very precise sense of how the urban socio-economic milieu could absorb and mould individuals like the heroine and the other nameless but vividly present inhabitants of these London streets. Now, realistic representation of this kind of quotidian life such as Defoe attempted was hardly the norm in the narrative universe of the English 1720s. Auerbach might well have supplemented a possible chapter on Moll Flanders (‘Crime and Poverty in London’ shall we call it?) with a very different and equally popular text that would have highlighted the genuinely unresolved issue of narrative representation and the related question of reader response to such representation during the early eighteenth century. He would have been well advised to settle on one of Eliza Haywood’s very popular amatory novellas to illustrate what looks like the polar and romantic opposite of the gritty realism of Moll Flanders. Although I concede that the high-minded Auerbach might have had little taste for the steamy eroticism of Haywood’s first and most successful novel, the three-part Love in Excess of 1719, I submit that it represents nothing less than a competing kind of contribution to the implicit debate in the period about the nature and purpose of narrative representation. In that spirit, I want to examine a scene from the novel and to say, as Mark Twain said of Wagner’s music, that it is not as bad as it sounds. Here is what one needs to know or to remember about the plot of Haywood’s novel, although the exact sequence hardly matters. Count d’Elmont, married to Alovisa, has fallen in love with the beautiful Melliora, daughter of his late friend, the Count de Frankville, who on his deathbed named him her guardian. After a number of preliminary flirtations and teasingly exciting encounters with Melliora, d’Elmont plots to accost her in private. ‘What is it that a Lover cannot accomplish when resolution is on his side?’ asks Haywood.12 So he obtains copies of keys to doors that will admit him to her chamber and then feigns a trip away from home, sending a servant to tell his wife that he will spend the night at a friend’s house. Riding back home in the dark, he ties up his horse, ‘hot and foaming as he was, to a huge oak’ (126), and entering the garden finds his way with his illicit keys to Melliora’s bedroom. Here is the scene that follows: He looked carefully about him, and found no tell-tale lights in any of the rooms, and concluding all was as hushed as he could wish, opened the first

Mimesis/mimesis and the Eighteenth-Century British Novel door, but the encreasing transports of his soul, as he came up stairs, to be so near the end of all his wishes, are more easily imagined than exprest, but as violent as they were, they presently received a vast addition, when he came into the happy chamber, and by a most delightful gloom, a friend to lovers, for it was neither dark nor light, he beheld the lovely Melliora in her bed, and fast asleep; her head was reclined on one of her arms, a pillow softer and whiter far than that it leaned on; the other was stretched out, and with it’s extention had thrust down the bed-cloths so far, that all the beauties of her neck and breast appeared to view. He took an inexpressible pleasure, in gazing on her as she lay, and in this silent contemplation of her thousand charms, his mind was agitated with various emotions, and the resistless posture he beheld her in, rouzed all that was honourable in him; he thought it pity even to wake her, but more to wrong such innocence, and he was sometimes prompted to return and leave her as he found her. But whatever dominion, honour and virtue may have over our waking thoughts, ’tis certain that they fly from the closed eyes; our passions then exert their forceful power, and that which is most predominant in the soul, agitates the fancy, and brings even things impossible to pass. Desire, with watchful diligence repelled, returns with greater violence in unguarded sleep, and overthrows the vain efforts of day. Melliora in spite of her self, was often happy in idea, and possest a blessing, which shame and guilt, deterred her from in reality. Imagination at this time was active, and brought the charming Count much nearer than indeed he was, and he, stooping to the bed, and gently laying his face close to her’s, (possibly designing no more than to steal a kiss from her, unperceived) that action, concurring at that instant, with her dream, made her throw her arm (still slumbering) about his neck, and in a soft and languishing voice, cry out, ‘O! D’elmont, cease, cease to charm, to such a height – Life cannot bear these raptures.’ – And then again, embracing him yet closer, – ‘O! too, too lovely Count – extatick ruiner!’ Where was now the resolution he was forming some moments before? If he had now left her, some might have applauded an honour so uncommon; but more would have condemned his stupidity, for I believe there are very few men, how stoical soever they pretend to be, that in such a tempting circumstance would not have lost all thoughts, but those, which the present opportunity inspired. That he did, is most certain, for he tore open his wastcoat, and joyned his panting breast to her’s, with such a tumultuous eagerness! seized her with such a rapidity of transported hope-crowned passion, as immediately waked her from an imaginary felicity, to the approaches of a solid one. ‘Where have I been?’ said she, just opening her eyes, ‘where am

83

84

John Richetti I?’ – And then coming more perfectly to her self, ‘Heaven! What is this?’ – ‘I am D’elmont’ cried the overjoyed Count, ‘the happy D’elmont! Melliora’s, the charming Melliora’s D’elmont!’ ‘Oh, all ye saints,’ resumed the surprized, trembling fair, ‘ye ministring angels! whose business ’tis to guard the innocent! protect, and shield my virtue! O! say, how came you here, my lord?’ ‘Love,’ said he, ‘love that does all, that wonder-working power has sent me here, to charm thee, sweet resister, into yielding.’ ‘O! hold,’ cried she, finding he was proceeding to liberties, which her modesty could not allow of, ‘forbear, I do conjure you, even by that love you plead, before my honour, I’ll resign my life! Therefore, unless you wish to see me dead, a victim to your cruel, fatal passion, I beg you to desist, and leave me.’ – ‘I cannot – must not,’ answered he, growing still more bold, ‘what, when I have thee thus! thus, naked in my arms, trembling, defenceless, yeilding, panting with equal wishes, thy love confest, and every thought, desire! What could’st thou think if I should leave thee? How justly would’st thou scorn my easie tameness; my dulness, unworthy of the name of lover, or even of man! – Come, come no more reluctance,’ continued he, gathering kisses from her soft snowy breast at every word, ‘damp not the fires thou hast raised with seeming coiness! I know thou art mine! All mine! And thus I’ – ‘Yet think,’ said she interrupting him, and strugling in his arms, ‘think what ’tis you would do, nor for a moments joy, hazard your peace for ever.’ ‘By heaven,’ cried he, ‘I will this night be master of my wishes, no matter what to morrow may bring forth.’ Assoon as he had spoke these words, he put it out of her power either to deny, or to reproach him, by stopping her mouth with kisses, and was just on the point of making good what he had vowed, when a loud knocking at the chamber door, put a stop to his beginning exstacy, and changed the sweet confusion Melliora had been in, to all the horrors of a shame and guilt distracted apprehension. They made no doubt but that it was Alovysa, and that they were betrayed; the Count’s greatest concern was for Melliora, and the knocking still continuing and growing louder, all he could do in this exigence, was to make his escape, the way he came; there was no time for taking leave, and he could only say, perceiving she was ready to faint with her fears, ‘Be comforted, my angel, and resolute in your denials, to whatever questions the natural insolence of a jealous wife, may provoke mine to ask you; and we shall meet again (if D’elmont survives this disappointment without danger of so quick, so curst a separation).’ (126–9)

For all of this scene’s easy eroticism and its utterly predictable, almost laughably formulaic amatory rhetoric, we may notice that d’Elmont’s reactions, as rendered by the narrator in her psycho-moral analysis, are

Mimesis/mimesis and the Eighteenth-Century British Novel

85

fairly complex – moral and idealistic as well as erotic as he looks down at the sleeping Melliora: ‘all that is honourable in him’ is roused. To her knowing psycho-sexual explanations, the narrator adds her awareness of these finer ethical notions that course through d’Elmont at this moment of pathos that accompanies his sexual excitement. But then Melliora, dreaming just then, as it happens, of the Count, her unconscious speaking and manifesting her true desires, as the narrator explains to us, throws her arms around his neck, and he is swept up in the moment and proceeds, thanks to this provocation, with what is nothing less than sexual assault on the now-conscious Melliora, who will not, when suddenly awakened by d’Elmont’s caresses, consent to what she desired when dreaming. But note the narrator’s commentary as the scene heats up: despite the erotic excitement her description of the scene encourages, her narrative includes an ironic analysis of the material circumstances that help to inflame d’Elmont. This is very much a dramatically conceived scene in which the material conditions of perception as supplied by the narrator help to produce the erotic effects, and an alert reader is encouraged to keep that in mind. Haywood notes the flattering light and the exactly arousing disposition of Melliora’s exposed body in that light, so that she is analytic, where her characters are self-absorbed and spontaneous; she is measured, distanced, realistic, implicitly deflating of the romantic obsessions building in the hero by rendering a key detail of the scene that impels d’Elmont towards the sleeping Melliora: ‘by a most delightful gloom, a friend to lovers, for it was neither dark nor light.’ She ponders the impossibility of doing full justice to d’Elmont’s mounting excitement, but her approach includes social and moral as well as psychosexual commentary that renders it as garden-variety lust rather than some mysterious intensity; in this analysis she is implicitly critical of male sexual opportunism (cf. Pope’s lines in ‘The Rape of the Lock’: ‘For when success a lover’s toil attends, / Few ask if fraud or force attain’d his ends’). Her narrative is also inclusive, free, in fact, of gender essentialism when she finds repressed desire operating thus strongly in the sleeping Melliora just as it overwhelms the gazing d’Elmont: ‘Desire, with watchful diligence repelled, returns with greater violence in unguarded sleep, and overthrows the vain efforts of day.’ Smoothly worldly wise, her commentary is quite distinct in tone from the heated and impossibly stilted dialogue between d’Elmont and Melliora that follows, which is conventionally melodramatic and obviously meant to turn up the erotic temperature. Next to their overheated exclamatory rhetoric, she is intellectual,

86

John Richetti

analytic, distanced, and cool; she speaks in quite a different register from her characters. Here and throughout Love in Excess we can speak accurately, I think, of the narrator’s consistent intellectual distance from the fervid romantic goings-on in her plot. Readers are there, of course, precisely to enjoy the various near-consummations; this is a sexy book, what we would call ‘soft core’ pornography. But no one actually has sex in Love in Excess, or at least no completed sex acts are ever described, which is very much not the case in the amatory fiction of Aphra Behn, Haywood’s main predecessor in fiction of this sort. Instead, we have a form of knowledge in Love in Excess, overall a virtual taxonomy of the varieties of obsessive and self-destructive sexual desire among the aristocratic classes, whose only activity in life seems to be jockeying for amorous advantage. To be sure, we are told at the very beginning of the book that d’Elmont and his male friends have served with distinction in the wars between the French and the allies, but the wars are over when the book opens and their peacetime world is exclusively devoted to love – or rather to sexual pursuit. Glamorous and handsome but idle and, as Haywood narrates their activities, essentially trivial people, these characters face her implicit critique in Love in Excess, partly for their ineffectuality as lovers, like d’Elmont in this scene, and partly for their difference from the narrator in terms of practical understanding and psychosexual sophistication about their own desires. Thus, Melliora’s innocence is as flawed and incomplete as d’Elmont’s ineptitude at seduction and sexual assault, just as the jargon of outraged innocence she is given to speak is as empty and formulaic as d’Elmont’s self-interested lover’s sophistry. The sheer literary and romantic/erotic conventionality of this scene (which is quite typical of the novel) is in effect a validation of another sphere of reality represented by the consciousness implicit in the narrator’s discourse. Representation in this case has a negative charge; the real is present by virtue of its deliberate absence. Haywood’s humour and wicked sophistication affirm the existence of the actual by playfully refusing its representation or by gesturing towards it in ways that the characters are too preoccupied and self-absorbed to notice. For that matter, we might say that most of Haywood’s readers have come along for the erotic ride and may not be particularly interested in these implications. In the context of a market for narrative, where Robinson Crusoe, Moll Flanders, and Love in Excess all were best-sellers within a three-year period, Haywood’s insistence on the pursuit of amatory formulae is a visible choice to attract readers, a highlighted advertisement in her dis-

Mimesis/mimesis and the Eighteenth-Century British Novel

87

course for the excitement promised by the book’s title. In fact, such an intense amatory moment is a pointed avoidance of the boring quotidian reality that, in romance’s refusal of it, is always an acknowledgment of its power and presence once the book is closed. Doubtless, Auerbach would have considered Love in Excess a reactionary romance in that refusal, and if Mimesis has a weakness, it is its teleological tendency, which might well have been corrected not so much by descending to the level of popular romance like Love in Excess but by a closer consideration of a British novelist he does mention, as I noted at the outset, with a good deal of approval. Late in Mimesis Auerbach acknowledges the relevance in his survey of the representation of reality in the British eighteenth-century novel, and he singles out Tom Jones in a discussion of nineteenth-century French realism in Stendhal and Flaubert, where, in his words, ‘the serious treatment of everyday reality, the rise of more extensive and socially inferior human groups to the position of subject matter for problematicalexistential representation,’ and ‘the embedding of random persons and events in the general course of contemporary history’ (491) establish themselves as the prevailing representational ambition of the novel. But he also admits that such developments began much earlier in England, without the sharp break he finds in France between 1780 and 1830, and that Tom Jones ‘already shows a far more energetic contemporary realism of life in all its departments than do French novels of the same period’ (491). Yet Auerbach qualifies this praise of Fielding’s novel, saying that ‘the whole is conceived more moralistically and sheers away from any problematical and existential seriousness’ (492). To a large extent, this judgment is shrewd and correct, but I believe that if Auerbach had brought his incisive analytic powers to bear on one of several moments in Tom Jones he might well have qualified this assessment. Naturally, I have one in mind, and I propose to look at it in the spirit of Mimesis, precisely as a problematical moment, moralistic, of course, in Fielding’s playful manner but also existentially serious in implications that disrupt smoothly functioning moralizing. Let me propose for this exercise my favourite comic moment from Tom Jones, from Book V, chapter 5, when Tom pays a visit to Molly Seagrim to break off their love affair once he discovers that his heart belongs to Sophia Western: he stole forth, at a Season when the Squire was engaged in his Field Exercises, and visited his Fair-one. Her Mother and Sisters, whom he found taking their Tea, inform’d him first that Molly was not at Home; but afterwards,

88

John Richetti the elder Sister acquainted him with a malicious Smile, that she was above Stairs a-bed. Tom had no Objection to this Situation of his Mistress, and immediately ascended the Ladder which led towards her Bed-Chamber; but when he came to the Top, he, to his great Surprize, found the Door fast; nor could he for some Time obtain any Answer from within; for Molly, as she herself afterwards informed him, was fast asleep. The Extremes of Grief and Joy have been remarked to produce very similar Effects; and when either of these rushes on us by Surprize, it is apt to create such a total Perturbation and Confusion, that we are often thereby deprived of the Use of all our Faculties. It cannot therefore be wondered at, that the unexpected Sight of Mr. Jones should so strongly operate on the Mind of Molly, and should overwhelm her with such Confusion, that for some Minutes she was unable to express the great Raptures, with which the Reader will suppose she was affected on this Occasion. As for Jones, he was so entirely possessed, and as it were enchanted by the Presence of his beloved Object, that he for a while forgot Sophia, and consequently the principal Purpose of his Visit. This, however, soon recurred to his Memory; and after the first Transports of their Meeting were over, he found Means by Degrees to introduce a Discourse on the fatal Consequences which must attend their Amour, if Mr. Allworthy, who had strictly forbidden him ever seeing her more, should discover that he still carried on this Commerce. Such a Discovery, which his Enemies gave him Reason to think would be unavoidable, must, he said, end in his Ruin, and consequently in hers. Since, therefore, their hard Fates had determined that they must separate, he advised her to bear it with Resolution, and swore he would never omit any Opportunity through the Course of his Life, of shewing her the Sincerity of his Affection, by providing for her in a Manner beyond her utmost Expectation, or even beyond her Wishes, if ever that should be in his Power; concluding, at last, that she might soon find some Man who would marry her, and who would make her much happier than she could be by leading a disreputable Life with him. Molly remained a few Moments in Silence, and then bursting into a Flood of Tears, she began to upbraid him in the following Words. ‘And is this your Love for me, to forsake me in this manner, now you have ruined me? How often, when I have told you that all Men are false and Perjury alike, and grow tired of us as soon as ever they have had their wicked Wills of us, how often have you sworn you would never forsake me? And can you be such a perjury Man after all? What signifies all the Riches in the World to me without you, now you have gained my Heart, so you have – you have – ? Why do you mention another Man to me? I can never love any other Man

Mimesis/mimesis and the Eighteenth-Century British Novel as long as I live. All other Men are nothing to me. If the greatest Squire in all the Country would come a suiting to me to-morrow, I would not give my Company to him. No, I shall always hate and despise the whole Sex for your sake’ – She was proceeding thus, when an Accident put a stop to her Tongue, before it had run out half its Career. The Room, or rather Garret, in which Molly lay, being up one Pair of Stairs, that is to say, at the Top of the House, was of a sloping Figure, resembling the great Delta of the Greeks. The English Reader may, perhaps, form a better Idea of it, by being told, that it was impossible to stand upright any where but in the Middle. Now, as this Room wanted the Conveniency of a Closet, Molly had, to supply that Defect, nailed up an old Rug against the Rafters of the House, which enclosed a little Hole where her best Apparel, such as the Remains of that Sack which we have formerly mention’d, some Caps, and other Things with which she had lately provided herself, were hung up and secured from the Dust. This inclosed Place exactly fronted the Foot of the Bed, to which, indeed, the Rug hung so near, that it served, in a manner, to supply the Want of Curtains. Now, whether Molly in the Agonies of her Rage, pushed this Rug with her Feet; or, Jones might touch it; or whether the Pin or Nail gave way of its own Accord, I am not certain; but as Molly pronounced those last Words, which are recorded above, the wicked Rug got loose from its Fastning, and discovered every thing hid behind it; where among other female Utensils appeared – (with Shame I write it, and with Sorrow will it be read) – the Philosopher Square, in a Posture (for the Place would not near admit his standing upright) as ridiculous as can possibly be conceived. The Posture, indeed, in which he stood, was not greatly unlike that of a Soldier who is tyed Neck and Heels; or rather resembling the Attitude in which we often see Fellows in the public Streets of London, who are not suffering but deserving Punishment by so standing. He had a Night-cap belonging to Molly on his Head, and his two large Eyes, the Moment the Rug fell, stared directly at Jones; so that when the Idea of Philosophy was added to the Figure now discovered, it would have been very difficult for any Spectator to have restrained from immoderate Laughter. I question not but the Surprize of the Reader will be here equal to that of Jones; as the Suspicions which must arise from the Appearance of this wise and grave Man in such a Place, may seem so inconsistent with that Character, which he hath, doubtless, maintained hitherto, in the Opinion of every one. But to confess the Truth, this Inconsistency is rather imaginary than real. Philosophers are composed of Flesh and Blood as well as other human

89

90

John Richetti Creatures; and however sublimated and refined the Theory of these may be, a little practical Frailty is as incident to them as to other Mortals. It is, indeed, in Theory only and not in Practice, as we have before hinted, that consists the Difference: For though such great Beings think much better and more wisely, they always act exactly like other Men. They know very well how to subdue all Appetites and Passions, and to despise both Pain and Pleasure; and this Knowledge affords much delightful Contemplation, and is easily acquired; but the Practice would be vexatious and troublesome; and, therefore, the same Wisdom which teaches them to know this, teaches them to avoid carrying it into Execution.13

Fielding’s narrator is a latter-day version, as odd as it may sound to say it, of Haywood’s sophisticated voice in Love in Excess. Like her, if somewhat slower and more circumstantially, more attuned to class distinctions in speech and knowledge in his characters, he projects under the cloak of a controlling irony a superiority to his characters and their empty and self-serving discourse. The scene leads up to a formulaic exchange of love talk between Tom, the upper-class gentleman, and his former mistress, Molly, the country girl from the rural working classes. In Tom’s case, this side of the conversation is rendered in paraphrase, contextualized in a psychologically perceptive way by his evocation of Tom’s initial silence, full of an implicit, momentary sexual excitement as he sees the confused and also speechless Molly, whose reactions at the sight of him he naturally misunderstands. But then the narrator tells us that Tom is awakened from his spontaneous erotic reverie by memories of Sophia and the purpose of his visit. Note that he renders Tom’s arguments to Molly for breaking off their relationship in a paraphrase that allows Fielding to mitigate what must be the formulaic qualities of Tom’s discourse while at the same time signalling his disdain for such palaver by his refusal of direct quotation. Not so when it is Molly’s turn to respond as both an unschooled country girl and, as it will appear, a sexual manipulator who here gets the amatory jargon just a bit wrong. In Tom Jones, Fielding likes the comic effect of lower-class and non-standard speech, just as he loves to mimic the self-serving jargons of the professions – lawyers, doctors, clergymen, philosophers – and we should include in that list the deeply manipulative clichés of lovers’ discourse, Tom’s as well as Molly’s. All this stylized and parodic representation of speech puts Fielding in the anti-realist camp, since for him the particular is subsumed for comic and moral purposes by the general, the typical, and the recurrent. The characters we hear speaking are meant to be representative of

Mimesis/mimesis and the Eighteenth-Century British Novel

91

comic types as well as of individualized characters called Tom Jones and Molly Seagrim. Yet on another level the whole incident is exceedingly particularized. The narrator offers readers a host of closely observed features of the scene: the initial puzzling denial by Molly’s mother and sister that she is not at home, the locked door Tom finds when he climbs up to Molly’s bedchamber, and then the detailed rendition of the material particulars of her bedroom that interrupt Molly’s outraged response to Tom’s explanation of his breaking things off. Such particularity seems at first very odd, accompanied as it is by the mock exactitude and pedantry of comparing Molly’s garret to the ‘great Delta of the Greeks.’ This fooling around and exaggerated care for material surroundings and temporal sequences and circumstances – a mock-heroic or mock-learned and inflated rendering of the simple and sordid factuality of a poor country dwelling, the Seagrim cottage – is part of Fielding’s somewhat nervous reluctance (as I read it) to treat ordinary and indeed lower-class realities as anything other than opportunities for comedy or sentimental social protest, as he had done earlier in the novel when Tom took Allworthy to the Seagrim cottage to show him their poverty and to elicit his charity to them. In that earlier scene, the same cottage was rendered as a degrading hovel. Nonetheless, there is a complex pathos in the narrator’s inventory of Molly’s closet, containing as it does the remnants of Sophia’s sack dress that Tom had given her and that had led to her physical abuse by her jealous female neighbours after church, a scene narrated in mockheroic fashion in an earlier chapter. But readers will learn soon enough that this circumstantiality, this inventory of Molly’s things, is teasingly incomplete precisely because it is comically functional. In Fielding’s comic universe, where the narrator holds all the cards (and keeps them for the moment close to his vest), there would seem to be no such thing as a random fact, and those pathetic signs of lower-class female vanity and social aspiration turn out to signify comically or to help the comic signification and symmetry that are about to be revealed. As we look back at this passage, certain key evasions appear. In addition to the sack, there are in the closet ‘some Caps, and some other Things with which she had lately provided herself.’ That vagueness and the narrator’s self-imposed limitation or ignorance in the face of the material world he claims to be presenting is fully revealed in the next paragraph as obviously exaggerated when he claims he does not know why the rug covering the closet came down and lists the possibilities, all equally plausible in terms of the random factuality that might obtain

92

John Richetti

in Moll Flanders. Here, the rug comes down because it must; it suits the narrator’s comic purpose. Unlike Moll, who can relate her past only in its more or less chronological sequence, commenting on it but unable to alter its sequentiality, Fielding’s narrator can observe a mock-heroic or pseudo-Homeric slowing down of the tempo and a tongue-in-cheek omniscience; he knows exactly why and what will happen, not only here but everywhere and at all times. So when we reach the end of the paragraph and ‘the Philosopher Square’ is revealed hiding in Molly’s closet, we know that it is comic necessity and moral symmetry that have brought down the curtain, not Fielding’s fidelity to the accidental and the factual world. Indeed, factuality itself is a means of further comic/satiric degradation for Square, who by juxtaposition in Moll’s slanting garret closet squatting ‘among other female Utensils’ is turned into a kind of ambulatory dildo. What appeared to be the ordinary reality of a poor country girl’s closet is a comic mis en scène, not random at all but focused on comic symmetry. Finally, consider the paragraph that follows this comic exposure, which is perhaps the single most resonant and jarring observation in all of Tom Jones. Many years ago, Robert Alter pointed out – and it was a revelation to me – in Fielding and the Nature of the Novel that Square’s humiliating posture resembles not only a soldier tied up to await corporal punishment but also (although the narrator is evasive and circumspect in this regard) a man defecating in the streets: these fellows, says the narrator, are in a posture resembling ‘the Attitude in which we often see Fellows in the public Streets of London, who are not suffering but deserving Punishment by so standing.’14 If Auerbach wanted ‘problematical and existential seriousness,’ he might have found it here in Tom Jones. In the conventional if hilarious satiric revelation of the philosopher, as Swift puts it, ‘betrayed by his lower parts,’ Fielding inserts a richly Hogarthian moment of the brutality of military discipline and punishment and the defiance of urban proletarians or plebeians, unruly soldiers about to be flogged and denizens of the London streets (a long way from the Seagrim cottage in rural Somerset) defying, right in the public urban space, good order and common decency. Of course, it is in part Fielding the lawyer and conservative magistrate-to-be who speaks here, but we may also see it as the temporary encroachment of an intractable and actual urban disorder into the comic symmetry and good humour of this imaginary scene, which quickly reasserts itself as Fielding continues with an account of the inevitability of moral weakness, even in philosophers, or especially in them. The actual impinges just for a moment upon the

Mimesis/mimesis and the Eighteenth-Century British Novel

93

comically contrived; Fielding’s moralism and social anxiety get the better, it would seem, of his good natured tolerance of sexual frailty and comic equanimity, and Square is temporarily part of a disturbing urban reality that, in fact, has little or perhaps no connection at all with him in Molly’s closet. In Auerbach’s terms, we may say that Fielding’s controlled comic moralism is disrupted, however briefly, by a moral outrage over an actuality that defies categorization and is a form of pure defiance, although we might well ask what alternative location those defecating plebeians in eighteenth-century London have for relieving themselves? Suddenly accurate and grossly particular, Fielding’s mimesis leads to a new kind of problematic knowledge (to underline the two main topics of my title), quite distinct from the Enlightenment perspective Auerbach finds so shallow in Voltaire, which avoids the historical, since those soldiers and those squatting ‘Fellows in the public streets of London, who are not suffering but deserving Punishment by so standing’ – defecating or perhaps only begging – represent a historical reality resistant to comic moralism. Here is an intractable social reality, harking back to Defoe’s fictions we may say, where, as we have seen, the social realm is evoked as a kind of unexplainable plenitude. Fielding, however, quickly withdraws his glance from his particular memory of the London streets and instructs us to laugh with Tom at the ridiculous and comically generalized figure of the philosopher surprised in an act he is supposed to have transcended by the powers of his intellect – ‘when the Idea of Philosophy was added to the Figure now discovered, it would have been very difficult for any Spectator to have restrained from immoderate Laughter.’ In that moment the flash of a degrading actuality threatens to encourage a knowledge of social disharmony and defiance that is distinct from the moral and social knowledge of comic inevitabilities that Tom Jones otherwise provides, perhaps provoking in readers a hopeless kind of disgust and outrage that Fielding insists are quickly banished by the return of irresistible and immediate laughter at human inconsistency, the philosopher betrayed by his lower parts, philosophical pretension punctured. In that moment the sequence is at least problematically distinct from that Voltairean self-satisfaction or Cervantic gaiety Auerbach describes. It seems to me that Auerbach in Mimesis might well have considered Defoe’s and Fielding’s novels (if not Haywood’s), since each offers distinct if related forms of complex mimesis that do much to modify the route of his grand march through the representations of reality in European literature. Pausing in eighteenth-century Britain might well have

94

John Richetti

altered the look of Auerbach’s map of European literature, revealing the presence of that ‘problematical and existential seriousness’ that he found lacking in Fielding. If looked at from an Auerbachian perspective, for me at least, the British eighteenth-century novel features nothing less than a competing and even mutually cancelling variety of realisms and narrative methods of representation, with Defoe, Haywood, and Fielding each relating in his or her own manner to the socio-historical world they inhabit and write to serve, each affirming and rendering a different stylistic approach to it. With unprecedented fullness, Defoe attempts to render the world by a projection of the more or less demotic idiom of his heroine. But that idiom in its artlessness and near-transparency inserts readers into the mysterious compulsions of the modern socio-economic order. Haywood and Fielding modify or suppress such plain speaking and bare reportage, in the name of a more controllable, artificial, and predictable substitute world of erotic fantasy or comic symmetry, and to that extent they seek to preserve distinct forms of a more formal and rhetorical high style. But even here an alternative is more or less visible, another signification that is implied, a figural flickering. Through her shrewd narrative voice Haywood projects an intelligence, an understanding of class and psychology distinct from that of her obsessed and selfabsorbed characters, thus complicating the simple erotic thrust of her narrative. Fielding, the most sophisticated of the three novelists, plays with neutral representation for transparently comic-moral purposes, but for a moment, in those similies that he attaches to the squatting and humiliated Square in Molly’s closet, there is another and disturbingly intractable signification, socio-historical material that comic moralizing cannot totally erase. Auerbach would have been drawn, I believe, to that moment of instability in an otherwise rigidly controlled text.

NOTES 1 Numerous commentators of a theoretical bent, in recent years, clearly have bristled at Auerbach’s terms and what seem to have been his assumptions and methods, especially as many critics have become disillusioned with the canonical tradition of ‘western’ literature. As Marc Blanchard notes at the beginning of his review essay treating various articles and books about Mimesis, Auerbach is not in great favour these days, since he ‘represents a criticism associated with the defense of the western heritage in an age when history is seen by many as complicit with the repression of minorities,

Mimesis/mimesis and the Eighteenth-Century British Novel

95

women, and emerging literatures and cultures.’ ‘Mimesis, Not Mimicry,’ Comparative Literature 49 (Spring 1997), 176. In addition, various critics have questioned Auerbach’s seeming indifference to the problems raised by his key terms, representation and reality, which would seem to beg many theoretical and historical questions that current criticism is much exercised about. The deconstructionist David Carroll, for instance, calls Auerbach naive in his theoretical assumptions, since his attempt ‘to portray reality in an objective manner (outside of ideology) fails in that it points rather to the “textuality” of the real.’ Carroll convicts Auerbach of ignoring the problematic nature of the written word and the ‘reality’ that it mediates and, worst of all, of assuming that our vantage point on the past has a unity and security that allows us to understand it in its fullness. In other words, runs the indictment, the assumption behind Mimesis is that Auerbach and his readers know what the ‘real’ is and can judge it from a super-historical perspective that, in fact, does not exist, since our point of view is as historically conditioned as are all others. ‘Mimesis Reconsidered: Literature-HistoryIdeology,’ Diacritics 5 (Summer 1975), 5–12, 12, 9. 2 Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, FiftiethAnniversary Edition, with a new introduction by Edward W. Said (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2003), xv. Subsequent page references appear in parentheses in the text. 3 David Damrosch in his elegant essay on Auerbach’s importance and continuing relevance points this out. ‘Auerbach in Exile,’ Comparative Literature 47 (Spring 1995), 99. 4 ‘Auerbach’s influence,’ Said has argued, ‘was necessarily a negative one therefore: his was an inimitable and irreplaceable critical activity and, left without that sort of substance on which psychologically to rely, critics began shifting uneasily.’ After the war, Said notes, no one ‘was either giving or receiving the classical education Auerbach himself had received.’ ‘Eclecticism and Orthodoxy in Criticism,’ Diacritics 2 (Spring 1972), 3. In a similar spirit, David Damrosch notes that, although Mimesis has perhaps been more widely admired than any other work of modern literary criticism, ‘the scholars who continue to cite and to study the book show little interest in doing anything of the kind themselves.’ ‘Auerbach in Exile,’ 97. In their appreciation of Auerbach’s learning and of his gifts as a critic, commentators such as Said and Damrosch differ, however, from critics such as Carroll. As Damrosch perceptively observes, Auerbach was attempting in his Turkish exile ‘to become an objective relativist, faithful to his texts on their own terms while also acknowledging his own role as observer and interpreter, a role placed under particular stress by the exigencies of the Second World War.’ (Ibid.,

96

John Richetti

98–9). For Damrosch as well as for Said, Auerbach’s book is profoundly selfexpressive as well as scholarly, an attempt to reach objectivity in a context of personal loss and deracination, as well as general cultural disaster. For his part, Marc Blanchard finds a continuing relevance in Mimesis, which continues ‘to be a manual for those of us who remain interested in the relation between literature and daily life.’ ‘Mimesis, Not Mimicry,’ 176. 5 See Eggleton, ‘Porkchops and Pineapples,’ London Review of Books 25, 23 October 2003. 6 Specialists in periods that Auerbach wrote about in Mimesis much more extensively than the British eighteenth century have been critical of his work in their fields. When the book first appeared, classicists quarrelled with his characterization of ancient ‘realism.’ For example, Ludwig Edelstein reviewed the German edition of Mimesis and wondered if Auerbach had not oversimplified matters in locating the rise of realistic representation in the Christian Middle Ages: ‘there was a realistic literature in the centuries immediately preceding the rise of Christianity,’ and he continues, directly contrary to Auerbach’s main thesis, ‘Greek realism is nearer to modern realism, just because it lacks the figurative implications of Christian realism.’ Modern Language Notes 65 (June 1950), 429. Even those reviewers who praised the book (and it was greeted, overall, as a magnificent achievement, an instant classic) tended to object to Auerbach’s choice of texts in their special period. Objections from specialists have continued, and in a volume of essays edited by Seth Lerer, Literary History and the Challenges of Philology: The Legacy of Erich Auerbach (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), medievalists such as Lerer, Brian Stock, Kevin Brownlee, and Steven Nichols, criticize Auerbach for being somewhat careless in his handling of medieval texts or even for seriously misrepresenting, partly because of his exile and isolation, the late Middle Ages. But reviewing Lerer’s volume and commenting on these critics, Michael Holquist comes away from the volume ‘with a new sense of Auerbach’s importance ... a hero of a profession that now badly needs heroes.’ Holquist sees Auerbach as a quintessential Kantian Enlightenment figure, someone who strives towards ‘a perception of the real that is both historical and universal.’ In other words, as Holquist concludes, Auerbach’s heroic attempt to understand ‘representation’ is part of the larger Enlightenment and post-Kantian project ‘to overcome the gaps between mind and world, past and present.’ ‘Erich Auerbach and the Fate of Philology Today,’ Poetics Today 20 (Spring 1999), 87, 88, 90. 7 White, ‘Auerbach’s Literary History: Figural Causation and Modernist Historicism,’ in Lerer, Literary History, 132.

Mimesis/mimesis and the Eighteenth-Century British Novel

97

8 Blanchard, ‘Mimesis, Not Mimicry,’ 178. 9 White, ‘Auerbach’s Literary History,’ 129–30. 10 Nichols, ‘Philology in Auerbach’s Drama of (Literary) History,’ in Lerer, Literary History, 65. 11 Defoe, Moll Flanders, edited by G.A. Starr (London and New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), 189–92. 12 Haywood, Love in Excess: Or, The Fatal Enquiry, edited by David Oakleaf (Peterborough, Canada: Broadview Press, 1994), 125. Subsequent page references in parentheses in the text are to this edition. 13 Henry Fielding, The History of Tom Jones, A Foundling, edited by Thomas Keymer and Alice Wakely (London: Penguin Books, 2005), 202–4. 14 Alter puts it this way: ‘But the real function of the similies, clearly, is to contaminate the already exposed image of Square through association with the scurrilous objects of comparison: and so his posture is likened to that of a trussed-up soldier being punished for moral dereliction, and to the shameless squat of the London rabble in the act of using the streets as a privy.’ Fielding and the Nature of the Novel (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968), 33. In their Penguin edition of Tom Jones, Keymer and Wakely also make this connection in their notes to the scene (905).

chapter five

Robinson Crusoe and the Semiotic Crisis of the Eighteenth Century R O B E RT F O L K E N F L I K

Maximillian Novak, whose Realism, Myth, and History in Defoe’s Fiction considers the topic of myth in Daniel Defoe in relation to other possibilities, says that he began his work on Defoe by reading Ian Watt’s first essay on Defoe, ‘Robinson Crusoe: The Novel as a Myth,’ and ‘arguing against some of his conclusions.’ Michel de Certeau, whom I will discuss later, speaks of Robinson Crusoe as ‘one of the rare myths that Occidental society has been able to create,’ and John Bender’s essay in this volume seeks to explain its role as myth.1 The main problem, however, is to determine of what it is a myth. Is Crusoe’s island a postlapsarian Eden or a Hobbesian fable of society in a state of nature? This ambiguity explains to some degree the role Defoe’s book plays in the admiring Rousseau and in the irritated Karl Marx, the latter of whom considered Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and other political economists to be writing Robinsonades.2 Certainly, the religious versus the materialist interpretations of Robinson Crusoe (‘materialist’ to be understood from Hobbes to Marx to Lukács and beyond) until very recently have been the main lines of interpretation of the book, though Ian Watt’s decision to assimilate his reading to the conventions and canons of Realism was a logical but not inevitable move. The Realism thesis, put forward most persuasively by Watt, is in decline, not because its critics are less Marxist but because they are more.3 Yet what needs initial recognition is that the very status of interpretation within the novel is problematic and that the two main interpretations, the material and the spiritual, replicate Crusoe’s own attempts to read signs. Tzevtan Todorov notices in The Conquest of America that Christopher Columbus was (to use Stephen Greenblatt’s reformulation) ‘less an intense observer than an intense reader of signs.’4 That also may be

Robinson Crusoe and the Semiotic Crisis

99

said of Robinson Crusoe, with this difference: if Columbus reads confidently (though frequently wrongly), for Crusoe the signs are problematic and the reading of them is filled with anxiety, the anxiety of interpretation. This claim needs some qualification: after he saves Friday from the cannibals, Crusoe says: ‘at length [Friday] came close to me, and then he kneel’d down again, kiss’d the Ground, and laid his Head upon the Ground, and taking me by the Foot, set my Foot upon his Head; this it seems was in token of swearing to be my Slave for ever’ – certainly a confident act of interpretation.5 Even here, however, there is a slight cast of awareness (‘it seems’) that he is interpreting, though the dexterity with which Crusoe identifies the gesture as willing lifelong servitude goes too often unnoticed.6 And, of course, in their early days Crusoe must converse by signs with Friday, as he did when he and Xury bargained with the natives following Crusoe’s escape from slavery (24). So, from the outset the narrative foregrounds the sign as a carrier of meaning. The recognition that Crusoe is an interpreter, a hermeneut, is not itself new. Harold Fisch, for example, considers the novel an extended midrash on the Book of Jonah, and makes some pertinent passing observations on Crusoe as reader. George A. Starr convincingly argues that the fictional style of Defoe is not simply ‘factual plainness,’ a registration of the ‘real,’ or objective ‘reporting,’ as it has so often been characterized, but a subjective relation of the narrator’s perception, and this perception is ‘not a passive state but an outgoing process.’ Starr characterizes this style well as ‘the language of interpretation.’ James H. Maddox in ‘Interpreter Crusoe,’ finds that Crusoe ‘approaches his life as a text,’ ‘compulsively projects a form onto his experience,’ and ‘interprets his world as he lives in it; his very living, indeed, is an act of interpretation.’ Even closer to my own concerns, Michael McKeon notes that Crusoe is part of that long epistemological crisis he discusses.7 An epistemological crisis is a semiotic crisis is a hermeneutic crisis, and the upshot in the world of Crusoe is a series of profoundly ambiguous events.8 My emphasis, however, is different from the deconstructive emphasis on the undecidability of language. In addition to the fact that Crusoe does decide at a number of crucial moments, what I am arguing is that this moment represents a crisis in the history of signs, not a universal truth about language. How this situation conditions the narrative may be observed throughout the book. Robinson Crusoe speaks of ‘my Reign, or my Captivity, which you please’ (100). He sees himself as at once in two totally antithetical roles on the island – king and prisoner – or, if we take the lesson

100

Robert Folkenflik

of the Gestalt duck-rabbit conundrum to heart, he sees himself in these roles alternately, but without granting one precedence over the other. Samuel Taylor Coleridge apprehends something of this quality in speaking of Robinson Crusoe oxymoronically as being ‘like the Vision of a happy Night-mair.’ 9 The king becoming a prisoner may be another of the vast series of secularizations of religious understandings of one’s existential plight – from the Christian perspective the earth may be perceived as a prison, and the body may also be perceived as a prison.10 McKeon emphasizes the shift from figurative to literal role as Crusoe moves from monarch and governor of his ‘kingdom’ of cats, goats, and parrot to governor of the island (in opposition to the mutineers and pirates) to governor of the little commonwealth of cannibal, Spaniard, and Englishmen.11 This semi-Utopian state is very important for Defoe more generally, but here I would stress rather the ambiguous readings of his role – extreme and mutually exclusive opposites – the island is his kingdom or prison, and, of course, a whole series of natural events may be read naturally or miraculously, as in the case of the sprouted grain, ‘ten or twelve Ears’ of ‘English Barley,’ which ‘God had miraculously caus’d ... to grow’ (58). When Crusoe realized that he shook chicken feed in the place where it grew, ‘the Wonder began to cease’ (58). This naturalistic explanation won out at the time, but on reflection, the retrospective autobiographer regards it as a special providence, for which he should have been ‘as thankful ... as if it had been miraculous ... that 10 or 12 Grains of Corn should remain unspoil’d ... as if it had been dropt from Heaven’ (58), a topic to which I will return. Again, Crusoe’s shift in understanding of the word ‘deliverance’ and his move from a secular to a religious interpretation have been regarded as the very ‘turning point’ of the book by G.A. Starr in Defoe and Spiritual Autobiography (with several hundred pages and twenty-odd years on the island to go).12 Crusoe makes the point explicitly: while I was thus gathering Strength, my Thoughts run exceedingly upon this Scripture, I will deliver thee, and the Impossibility of my Deliverance lay much upon my Mind in Barr of my ever expecting it: But as I was discouraging myself with such Thoughts, it occurr’d to my Mind, that I pored so much upon my Deliverance from the main Affliction, that I disregarded the Deliverance I had receiv’d; and I was, as it were, made to ask my self such Questions as these, viz. Have I not been deliver’d, and wonderfully too, from Sickness? from the most distress’d Condition that could be, and that was so frightful to me, and what Notice I had taken of it: Had I done my

Robinson Crusoe and the Semiotic Crisis

101

Part, God had deliver’d me; but I had not glorify’d him; that is to say, I had not own’d and been thankful for that as a Deliverance, and how cou’d I expect greater Deliverance? (70)

After what he takes to be the first time he prayed (‘in the true Sense of the Words’), he reinterprets his words: Now I began to construe the Words mentioned above, Call on me, and I will deliver you, in a different Sense from what I had ever done before; for then I had no Notion of any thing being call’d Deliverance, but my being deliver’d from the Captivity I was in; for tho’ I was indeed at large in the Place, yet the Island was certainly a Prison to me, and that in the worst Sense in the World; but now I learn’d to take it in another Sense: Now I look’d back upon my past Life with such Horrour, and my Sins appear’d so dreadful, that my Soul sought nothing of God, but Deliverance from the Load of Guilt that bore down all my Comfort: As for my solitary Life it was nothing; I did not so much as pray to be deliver’d from it, or think of it; it was all of no Consideration in comparison to this: and I add this Part here, to hint to whoever shall read it, that whenever they come to a true Sense of things, they will find Deliverance from Sin a much greater Blessing than Deliverance from Affliction. (71)

Crusoe’s elaborate reinterpretation of the word enables us to decipher religious coding that is often implicit or allusive, for example, the grain, which he regards ‘as if it had been dropped from heaven,’ like manna (probably echoing Psalms 78:24, where it is called ‘the corn of heaven,’ rather than the more familiar passage from Exodus). The elucidation of religious coding, such as J. Paul Hunter on ‘wonders’ and David Radcliffe on ‘reflections,’ has been an important part of the work of recovery.13 The religious interpretation of the novel is particularly easy to sustain. Once Starr and Hunter clearly refuted Watt’s contention that ‘the heritage of Puritanism is demonstrably too weak to supply a continuous and controlling pattern for the hero’s experience,’ there was an outpouring of religious readings.14 It is not difficult to predict that they will continue, and that they will be met by ways of showing how profoundly the religious topoi discovered have been secularized, and so on. To see this dialectical movement in action, we may observe David Hill Radcliffe’s response to the work of Michael McKeon: Michael McKeon describes the biographical realism of Crusoe as a ‘next

102

Robert Folkenflik

step’: ‘In Defoe the balance between spiritualization and the claim to historicity has been reversed [relative to Bunyan], and it is as though he has – not without the spiraling misgivings of the Serious Reflections – taken that perilous next step and, in the name of a “positive” secularization, explicitly sanctioned our resistance to allegorical translation.’ But given the state of narrative fiction in 1719, Defoe’s turn to pious allegory might just as easily be considered a step back to the last century; Gildon thought so: ‘There is not an old Woman that can go the Price of it, but buys thy Life and Adventures, and leaves it as a Legacy, with the Pilgrim’s Progress, the Practice of Piety, and God’s Revenge against Murther, to her Posterity.’ The understandable desire to represent change as progress has led critics to overlook the obvious fact that Defoe was sacralizing genres already secularized: not demystifying Bunyan but ‘Puritanizing’ Behn, not restricting but extending the reach of allegory.15

In another direction, one might argue, for example, that insofar as the book can be taken as autobiography (that is, counterfeit autobiography), there was no developed secular tradition of autobiography, so the reader could expect only a religious narration. The facts of publication also point in this direction: the list advertised by Taylor, the publisher of Crusoe, in the Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe heavily comprises religious books. Indeed, Paul Hunter emphasizes how strongly religious titles predominated throughout the culture of the early eighteenth century.16 Yet it is not hard to show that this was a time of semiotic and hermeneutic crisis. Hans Frei’s The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative convincingly demonstrates the shift that came about in the reading of the Bible itself, and D.P. Walker’s The Decline of Hell can be read alongside Keith Thomas’s Religion and the Decline of Magic as a delineation of a world shifting from a magical and miraculous place in which the natural was saturated with the supernatural. Although the modern idea of probability’s origin is contested, Hobbes may have originated it in the middle of the seventeenth century. John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding establishes a new category in the division of the sciences, ‘Shmeiwtikhv [Semeiotike], or the Doctrine of Signs.’17 In the same decade as Robinson Crusoe, the earl of Shaftesbury’s ‘A Notion of the Historical Draught or Tabulature of Hercules’ (1713) opposed the probable history painting that illustrated his work to the ‘emblematical or enigmatick’ that he wished to replace: ‘We are therefore to consider this as a sure Maxim or Observation in Painting, “That a historical and moral Piece must of necessity lose much of its natural Simplicity and Grace, if any thing of the emblematical

Robinson Crusoe and the Semiotic Crisis

103

or enigmatick kind be visibly and directly intermix’d.”’18 From this perspective of a preference for the historical over the allegorical, Defoe is fighting a rearguard action in attempting to argue for a way of interpreting that is being replaced. The ambiguity on which I am insisting can be seen in the status of the book itself, a counterfeit autobiography, not true history but a feigning of true history, and in Defoe’s (or, more precisely, Robinson Crusoe’s) insistence in the Serious Reflections on his work as ‘allusive, allegoric history’ and that ‘the story, though allegorical, is also historical.’19 When Leopold Damrosch says that ‘Defoe has it both ways’ in relation to nature, the two modes of interpreting things are ultimately at stake. The problem is a problem in Gestalt: if we see the duck, as Ernst H. Gombrich following the psychologists asserts, we cannot perceive the rabbit at the same time, which is different from the assertion that such a scheme of representation in either literature or art is invalid.20 Read Milton, Bunyan, Defoe, and Defoe is a duck. Read Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, and Defoe is a rabbit. This, of course, is to oversimplify. One of the values of placing Defoe among the ducks is to see that he does not quack like a duck. Damrosch, for example, notices that ‘In The Pilgrim’s Progress everyday images serve as visualizable emblems of an interior experience that belongs to another world. In Robinson Crusoe there is no other world.’21 His conclusion, that Defoe ‘gives expression to attitudes that seem to lie far from his conscious intention,’ is based on a close attention to the religious context. To my mind, what McKeon, describing a familiar characteristic of Defoe’s fiction, calls ‘the impulse to materialistic quantification’ needs other explanations besides those of capitalism, science, and journalism.22 I wish to put seriously in question from a different perspective from those of Watt’s critics the Watt thesis that Defoe is a ‘formal realist.’23 Following comments on Defoe’s art, I will look closely at the two best-known episodes in the book, the footprint and the ‘old goat,’ and interpret them.

Defoe and Representation Defoe several times uses the phrase, ‘deceptio visus’ (optical illusion), which is found in the astronomer Kepler’s work but also linked to a range of ways of thinking. In the Essay on Projects (1697) Defoe speaks pejoratively of ‘Projects fram’d by subtle Heads, with a sort of a Deceptio Visus, and Legerdemain, to bring People to run needless and unusual hazards.’ 24 Here the term may be roughly taken as trompe l’oeil. Isaac Barrow

104

Robert Folkenflik

used the phrase in an extended sense in characterizing this world as ‘only deceptio visus; a show without a substance; it doth but delude the careless spectators with false appearance; it hath nothing under it solid or stable; being laid in the balance ... it will prove lighter than vanity itself.’ 25 Such a distrust of visual appearances might accompany a belief in the vanity of human wishes and the vanitas of this world.26 Is this perhaps one of the reasons why signs as visibilia in the Defoe world are so often connected with death? The hats and shoes of the drowned sailors (‘I never saw them afterwards, or any Sign of them, except three of their Hats, one Cap, and two Shoes that were not Fellows’ [35]), the threat of the footprint, the dying goat, the list of the cannibals killed (171), the tables of mortality (the end of journalism) that record deaths by plague in Journal of the Plague Year, the days past marked off by Crusoe: all certainly give poignancy to the survivor’s mentality of Defoe’s heroes, all of whom could say, like H.F. the saddler in the last line of his doggerel poem at the end of the Journal of the Plague Year, ‘Yet I alive.’27 Things turn into signs, matters of fact, markers of the fact that they are not there (like the footprint), traces of something that is gone. Only the ‘I’ survives, the speaking subject counterpoised against a world of death. Calvin claims, ‘We must therefore admit in God’s individual works – but especially in them as a whole – that God’s powers are actually represented as in a painting.’28 For Crusoe this painting often takes the form of a memento mori, his own version of a vanitas canvas, a genre popular among the Dutch artists of the seventeenth century. I have been trying to account for the fact that the seemingly most realistic of novelists, Defoe, is also the most didactic. Like Max Novak, I turn to art, especially that of the Dutch seventeenth century, for clues.29 Perhaps in the secular paintings of Pieter Breughel the Elder one can see an analogue: Netherlandish Proverbs (1559) is at once highly realistic in depiction, yet each activity embodies a moral that consists of a single figure or group representing an individual proverb (plate 1). In some versions of the theme by other artists these morals are written directly onto the painting. Defoe thought of fiction in this way. In a letter (1704?) to Sir Robert Harley, for whom he was spying in Scotland, Defoe claims that his recommended behaviour echoes St Paul’s: ‘Not Unlike what the Apostle Sayes of himself; becoming all Things to all Men, that he might Gain Some’ (1 Cor.: 9). He could not know at the time how true this would be of Robinson Crusoe. In the same letter, quoting Giovanni Paolo Marana’s Letters Writ by a Turkish Spy, Defoe provides at once an epitome of and a prelude to his position on fictions. He instances the book as a ‘Meer

Robinson Crusoe and the Semiotic Crisis

105

Romance, but the Morall is good,’ and he would claim, in the voice of Robinson Crusoe in Serious Reflections, that in his own fictions ‘The fable is always made for the moral, not the moral for the fable.’30 In the letter, he shifts from spying to spy fiction, followed by his justification of fiction on its basis, and he published A Continuation of Letters Written by a Turkish Spy the year before Robinson Crusoe. That is, Defoe narrated in the first person in a series of letters representing what a spy in one country wrote back to his master, a fictional approximation of the role he actually had fulfilled earlier, though the Continuation is not autobiographical. An ‘ethical’ justification of fictional roles in his life led to the justification of a similar sort of fiction on the basis of its moral purpose and his eventual playing of that role in a fiction of his own. The Breughel also provides room for the supernatural (not the doctrinal Christian) along with the everyday, a topic to which I will return. A street filled with groups of realistic people also contains a demon or monster off to the right in the middle of the picture. Tip the scales in the other direction and one starts moving back towards Bosch. In fact, since a number of the activities seem grotesque rather than realistic, one could argue that the painting tends in that direction in any case. However, there are limits to such a comparison. In his preface to More Reformation (1703), Defoe defines the only problem with his ironic Shortest Way with the Dissenters: ‘when I had drawn the picture, I did not, like the Dutch Man with his Man and Bear write under them, “This is the Man” and “This is the Bear.”’31 Although the ironic narration of Shortest Way is not typical of his work, he certainly gives us, in his fiction, first-person narrators whose views are often not Defoe’s. His moralism is more subtle than that of some Dutch realism, as is his artistry. To take one form used differently in his fiction from its earlier use in literature, he mentions emblems, that important seventeenth-century form that joins word and image, infrequently: once each in Robinson Crusoe, Moll Flanders, and Col. Jack. Of course, one need not mention them explicitly to employ them. Paul J. Korshin, noting the ‘specific reference to the typology of Jonah in Robinson Crusoe,’ goes on to claim, ‘the Jonah emblem and type were so widely understood and identified that we may safely expect to find them behind almost every allusion to a shipwreck and the safe recovery from it.’32 Certainly, in ‘Robinson Crusoe’s Preface’ to the Serious Reflections Crusoe claims that he was ‘Shipwreck’d often, tho’ more by Land than by Sea: In a Word, there’s not a Circumstance in the imaginary Story, but has its just Allusion to a real Story, and chimes Part for Part, and Step for Step with the inimitable Life of Robinson Crusoe.’33 But the

Plate 1. Pieter Brueghel the Elder (c. 1525–1569). Netherlandish Proverbs. Oil on oak panel, 117 u 163 cm. Inv. 1720. Photo: Joerg P. Anders. Gemäldegalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Berlin, Germany. Reproduced by permission of Bildarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz / Art Resource, NY.

Robinson Crusoe and the Semiotic Crisis

107

displacement into the ‘real world’ of the tropes of spirituality is a part of secularization, and ‘Crusoe’ is claiming that the events of the story correspond to certain events in his life, that is, are biographical not spiritual, though the specific use of ‘emblem’ in his fiction does point to a spiritual correspondence. Crusoe is an ‘emblem’ of Jonah; Newgate, for Moll, is an ‘emblem’ of Hell; Col. Jack interprets a calm he experiences as an ‘emblem and forerunner’ of heaven. In Robinson Crusoe Defoe (or more properly Crusoe) is explicitly allegorical just once, in referring to his ‘Island of Despair’ (52), but it is that only intermittently; ‘despair’ is not the island’s identity. In Defoe’s major fictions, instead of Hell, Moll experiences Newgate; rather than the Promised Land, she goes to the almost allegorically named Virginia, that place in the New World (not the other world across the Jordan) where an old whore can be a virgo intacta once more. In Crusoe, there are no devils, only cannibals. The cannibals seem to be a displacement into the human realm of the traditional Christian devils. Crusoe describes their ‘inhuman hellish brutality’ (a corruption of human nature): the cannibals are ‘hellish,’ but are not called emblems of the devil. It is not that Defoe never mentions hell to ears polite – the author of The Political History of the Devil could not help but do so – yet in Robinson Crusoe, Hell itself is never mentioned. Watt says, quite fairly, ‘otherworldly concerns do not provide the essential themes of Defoe’s novels.’34

The Footprint and the Goat Synecdoche, as Jakobson suggests, is the very figure of the novel. For the eighteenth century we might think of the metonymy of place in Richardson or the fetishism of Sterne. The uncanny footprint, the sign of a synecdoche, is a trace itself visible, but is it the trace of something invisible – or at least not seen – perhaps the devil? Since early in the history of Robinson Crusoe’s reception, the footprint (along with the old goat in the cave) has been taken as central to the novel. Anna Letitia Barbauld is struck by the footprint and ‘the luminous eyes, glaring like two lamps at the bottom of the cave’ (1810). John Dunlop also instances the footprint and old goat scenes as the most significant in the book (1814).35 But the first to list these episodes as primary was Defoe himself (or, at least, Robinson Crusoe), in claiming that the events of the story ‘allude to the Circumstances of the former Story, all those Parts of the Story are real Facts in my History.’ That is, they are listed first among the episodes that have ‘real Facts’ behind them: ‘thus the Fright and Fancies which succeeded

108

Robert Folkenflik

the Story of the Print of a Man’s Foot, and Surprise of the old goat ... are all Histories and real Stories,’ though before he’s finished even ‘the story of the bear in the tree’ is offered as ‘likewise matter of real history.’36 As an over-the-top gesture of authenticity, he even appends his name, ‘ROB. CRUSOE.’ Crusoe interprets the footprint from the outset of his description. He genders it: ‘the print of a man’s naked foot on the shore.’ Only later does Crusoe disprove the possibility that it is his own print by the simple empirical test of comparison.37 This eighteenth-century bigfoot is not observed, nor is the specific maker of that mark ever determined. The single footprint, when feet normally come in pairs, is in some ways an ironic and comically literal disconfirmation of Crusoe’s earlier expressed belief that ‘no humane Shape had ever set Foot upon that Place’ (72). The notion of a ‘humane Shape,’ human in form but not necessarily human, would seem to allow for the devil as well. The possibility of the devil is enhanced by Crusoe’s coming upon the footprint ‘about Noon’ (112), the time of the appearance of the noontide demon (demonio meridiano).38 (We may remember that while Satan tempted Eve in Paradise Lost, ‘the hour of Noon drew on’ [IX:739].) Defoe is aware of this tradition, which he invokes while ridiculing the credulous at the end of The History and Reality of Apparitions, later retitled The Secrets of the Invisible World Disclosed: ‘The sham Apparitions which people put upon themselves are indeed very many; and our Hypochondriack People see more Devils at noon-day than Galilaeus did Stars.’39 Yet Defoe would agree with Othello when he says of Iago: ‘I look down towards his feet, but that’s a fable.’ In the chapter, ‘Of the extraordinary Appearance of the Devil, and particularly of the Cloven-Foot,’ in his Political History of the Devil (1726) Defoe claims: ‘The Truth is, that among all the Horribles that we dress up Satan in, I cannot but think we show the least of Invention in this of a Goat, or a Thing with a Goat’s Foot, of all the Rest; for tho’ a Goat is a Creature made use of by our Saviour in the Allegory of the Day of Judgment, and is said there to represent the wicked rejected Party, yet it seems to be only on Account of their Similitude to the Sheep.’40 He goes on to note the divided hoof as ‘the distinguishing Character or Mark of a clean Beast, and how the Devil can be brought into that Number is pretty hard to say’ (266). In short, the cloven hoof is a political fiction of the devil, not one of his characteristics. Crusoe also notes that the goat ‘is emblematically used to represent a lustful Temper’ (266), but he does not find this characteristic of the devil. Defoe’s method here seems devoted to demystification, despite his belief in the spirit world. These two references to the

Robinson Crusoe and the Semiotic Crisis

109

goat will later help to gloss the strange episode of ‘the old goat making his will’ in Robinson Crusoe. In connection with this supernatural interpretation, which Crusoe rejects, we should notice that Defoe is a textbook example for D.P. Walker’s The Decline of Hell, though not used. Hell is not a place ‘down there,’ and even if it were, witches cannot conjure up Satan. Satan (Hebrew for ‘devil’ – Defoe uses the labels interchangeably, as he does ‘the Devil’ and ‘devils’) does not have, in Defoe’s words, ‘a Cock’s Bill, Ass’s Ears, Goat’s Horns, glaring Eyes, Bat’s Wings, cloven Foot, and Dragon’s Tail.’41 The Political History of the Devil adds to this litany of misconceptions a ‘forked Tongue’ (222). He is neither omniscient nor omnipresent, though ‘He has Invisibility, and Multipresence’ but not foreknowledge.42 He is, however, shrewd about what will happen; hence, as in this passage, his knowledge of probabilities amounts almost to foreknowledge. Crusoe’s interpretation of the footprint is not simply a matter of the empirical assessment of the evidence of the senses, although that is part of his solution to the problem. Crusoe determines that the footprint is not his own by measuring it. His decision that the footprint belongs to a cannibal, not the devil, is the product not of noticing the difference between the print of a man’s foot and a cloven hoof, but of reasoning out the probable behaviour of the devil had he wished to frighten Crusoe by leaving his footprint in that place. This period displays, as does Crusoe himself, what Ian Hacking has characterized as ‘the emergence of probability,’ and Crusoe uses both empiricism and probability in solving his problem.43

Misinterpretations of the Footprint Moving to modern readings, we can find more empirical attempts than Crusoe’s own account of the footprint to reconstruct the scene. In Can Jane Eyre be Happy?, a sequel to his popular Is Heathcliff a Murderer?, John Sutherland undertakes a series of literal-minded tours de force, in this case ‘Why the Single Print of a Foot?’ (The next chapter is entitled ‘Where does Fanny Hill Keep Her Contraceptives?’). It is as though the hero of Julian Barnes’s Flaubert’s Parrot was brought to life and turned academic. After canvassing some of the less likely possibilities (‘some monstrous hopping cannibal? Perhaps Long John Silver passed by from Treasure Island, with just one foot and a peg leg? Has someone played a prank upon Robinson Crusoe by raking over the sand as one does in a long-jump pit, leaving just the one ominous mark?’), Sutherland goes

110

Robert Folkenflik

into his no-nonsense, corrective, and informative mode. Having noted Crusoe’s description of the tides, he concludes: What we may suppose happened is the following. Crusoe has beached his boat, not on the dead-flat expanse which [Lynton] Lamb portrays, but on a steeply inclined beach. The unknown savage came head-on into the beach and pulled his boat on to the sand. He investigated Crusoe’s canoe, all the while walking below the high-tide line. Having satisfied himself that Crusoe’s vessel had no one in it, he returned to his own craft. Coming or going, one of his feet (as he was knocked by a wave perhaps, or jumped away from some driftwood) strayed above the high-water mark. This lateral footprint (i.e. not pointing to, or away from the ocean) was left after the tide had washed all the others away together with the drag marks of the savage’s boat.44

Although Sutherland pays salutary attention to the errors found in book illustrations of this scene by Lamb, George Housman Thomas, and George Cruikshank, and although some naturalistic explanation of the single foot and the tides will have occurred to many visitors to Cornwall or Laguna Beach, I believe that the lethargic cannibal he posits spends most of his time playing with Lady Macbeth’s children accompanied by Ophelia at her girlhood games. Crusoe, whose ‘terrible Thoughts’ are that ‘having found my Boat ... I should certainly have them come again in greater Numbers and devour me,’ gives us good reason to think the boat was never seen. Additionally, Sutherland imagines the ‘high-tide line’ as if it were drawn with a ruler. Waves come up many beaches unevenly, and he does not need not to posit that the unknown walker ‘strayed above the high-water mark,’ nor that the beach is ‘steeply inclined.’ A very different sort of solution is Roland Barthes’s idea that the irrelevant detail is the very sign of the real, an excess like life itself, its purposelessness the reality effect the novelist desires.45 The footprint is the most famous irrelevant detail in fiction, yet, of course, it is not irrelevant. Although we never know whose footprint it is, it leads directly to two years of work building Fortress Crusoe. And in another sense, the footprint is the most spectacular irrelevant detail in British literary history, so irrelevant that a large number of scholars, otherwise intelligent people, and the public at large continue to narrativize it by making it belong to one of the characters in the novel: Friday. The footprint is not his, or at least not insofar as we can know. This particular misinterpreta-

Robinson Crusoe and the Semiotic Crisis

111

tion is abetted, perhaps, by the fact that feet are mentioned significantly when Crusoe encounters the Native later to be named Friday (recall Crusoe’s words: ‘taking me by the Foot, set my Foot upon his Head’ [147]). Leslie Brothers’s Friday’s Footprint (1997) is fortuitously subtitled How Society Shapes the Human Mind, and I wish to consider how society shapes the minds of those making this particular error.46 I will add parenthetically that when I delivered an early version of this essay as a lecture in Australia, I was taken to the annual dinner of the Rugby Football League’s Manly-Warringah Sea Eagles by my host, the Number One Fan (an official and much coveted title). The president asked me why I was in Australia, and, when I told him I was speaking on Robinson Crusoe at the Australian National University, he responded, ‘Friday’s footprint, eh?’ I answered, ‘Precisely.’ The footprint is embedded in the modern discourse of semiotics itself. Umberto Eco claims: ‘very seldom can imprints and clues be interpreted as the traces of an individual agent (indeed maybe never). When looking at the footprint on the island, Robinson Crusoe was not able to think about an individual. He detected “human being.” When discovering Friday, he was undoubtedly able to express the index-sensitive proposition, “this is the man who probably left the footprint.”’47 ‘Eco’s example goes on to distinguish certain semiological principles, but Crusoe, as opposed to those we are now considering, undoubtedly expressed no such thing. Despite Crusoe’s penchant for probability, he never computes or asserts the odds of the footprint’s being Friday’s, nor with his interest in probability would he have been likely to have considered it probable, for it is not. (Defoe was an early proponent of probabilism and political arithmetic.)48 The Robinson Crusoe of Defoe’s narrative never for a moment stops to consider that the very footprint he saw might have been left by ‘his’ native. This is certainly consistent with his conception of others, who exist only instrumentally for him. It should be noticed that his relationship to Friday forms the very model of his relationships with others in getting off the island. They become his willing slaves because he has saved their lives or because they have been captured and their lives are his to command. What wonder that in the Farther Adventures Crusoe can say when Friday dies that he ‘was as true to me as the very flesh upon my Bones.’49 He views Friday more as prosthesis – an extension of self – than person. Eco’s Crusoe, who ponders about Friday’s probable footprint, is as much a fiction of his own making as Sutherland’s lethargic cannibal. Others have been prone to this error. Even the estimable historian of science, Simon Schaffer, in an otherwise excellent article on Defoe,

112

Robert Folkenflik

claims that ‘Crusoe’s key conjecture is the encounter with Friday’s footprint.’50 Derek Walcott, whose postcolonial hybridizations of Defoe are among the best and most powerful of Robinsonades, said in an interview: ‘The Crusoe fable, as presented by Defoe, is a thing every Caribbean child knew, and maybe still knows – the idea of Friday’s footprint in the sand and then the relationship with Friday, Crusoe’s servant and companion. We all learned that very early, from childhood.’51 Children of the internet evidently were taught the same thing in a game once outlined on the Woodcraft Folk website: FRIDAY’S FOOTPRINTS – an Elfin activity Preparations Have the children each draw around one of their feet as a first activity, or come prepared with enough footprint shapes already cut out. In the circle ask who knows the story of Robinson Crusoe and Man Friday. Allow it to be told by those who do, and tell it yourself if no one does. How to play the game Everyone pairs up to become either Robinson Crusoe or Man/Woman Friday. All the Crusoes stand facing against one wall. The Fridays each have a footprint shape cut out of card. They wander around ignoring one another and each places his or her footprint in a place they choose. Then they go and squat or sit against any of the other walls, carefully watching their footprint. On a command the Crusoes begin to explore the ‘island,’ also completely ignoring each other. They wander about examining footprints on the floor. As soon as they look closely at the one left by ‘their’ Friday that child springs up and shouts out a greeting of their choice and the Crusoe walks across to them still carefully avoiding all the others. Play it until all Crusoes and Fridays are paired up again.52

The making of a new generation of bad readers. ‘Man/Woman Friday’ is a nice contemporary touch and rather more radical than the imaginings of either J.M. Coetzee or Michel Tournier, whose impressive recastings of the Crusoe story go in other directions. In Fife, home of Alexander Selkirk, sometimes thought to be the model of Robinson Crusoe: ‘The Juan Fernandez bar [of the Crusoe Hotel] provides an historical and informal bar setting with its old timber clad sea-faring walls and Man Friday’s footprint highlighted in the floor. A well stocked bar with friendly and knowledgeable staff adds to the lo-

Robinson Crusoe and the Semiotic Crisis

113

cal warmth and charm which await you.’53 Not, I should note, Friday’s footprint, but a cast of Friday’s footprint. Perhaps the most unexpected group of Fridayans, as we may dub these interpreters, is an auxiliary to law enforcement, the Footprinters: ‘Our slogan, “Bigger and Better Footprints,” relates to both the symbol and purpose of our organization. Our symbol, Robinson Crusoe finding Friday’s footprints on the beach, depicts the beginning of a relationship that ultimately leads to excellent cooperation between Crusoe and Friday. This type of cooperation between everyone involved in law enforcement and all law enforcement agencies, as well as private citizens, business and professional people, was the goal of the original eleven Footprint organizers back in 1929.’54 This rendition also multiplies the footprint. I believe many of their alumni have found jobs in the FBI or the CIA. All of these people have something in common: they are not scholars of eighteenth-century British literature, though some who have made the error are. The misinterpretation of the footprint had earlier achieved its literal reductio ad absurdum in Mad magazine’s retelling of the story (1954), where the startled Crusoe, realizing that the print is not simply a print but a foot, pulls Friday bodily from the sand – Joe Friday.55 Another example needs more careful treatment. One can see the drive to make the identification in Michel de Certeau’s account, which represents Crusoe’s ‘scriptural empire’ as ‘his enterprise ... interrupted, and haunted, by an absent other that returned to the shores of the island, by “the print of a man’s naked foot on the shore”’ (154). This is part of a subtle account of the book and to abridge it is to oversimplify it, but I need to focus on the narrative implications: ‘The territory of appropriation is altered by the mark of something which is not there and does not happen (like myth). Robinson will see someone (Friday) and will recover mastery when he has the opportunity to see, that is, when the absent other shows himself’ (154). This does not quite say that the footprint is Friday’s, though he is surely the ‘absent other’ of this formulation. What I think Certeau has perceived is the implication of Friday as a benign other who takes the place of the unknown threatening other who leaves only a trace.56

The Early Modern Footprint One might complain, like Thomas Rymer reprehending the importance of the handkerchief in Othello, ‘so much ado, so much stress’ about a footprint; yet the footprint seems to have a rich cultural weight. In The

114

Robert Folkenflik

Advancement of Learning Francis Bacon uses the footprint as the very figure of the verbal sign, of words themselves. He describes words as ‘the footsteps and prints of reason.’57 Yet in the same century the footprint becomes an image for the teleological proof of the existence of God, and another in the series of events in the novel with a typological resonance. It is just as well that Defoe did not have Crusoe find a watch ticking in his wilderness. In Thomas Burnet’s Sacred Theory of the Earth (1681; enlarged and Englished in 1684), which Defoe knew, and later in William Law’s Serious Call (1728), footsteps appear as teleological metaphors. As Law notes in a passage that appears to echo Burnet but is closer to John Ray, The Wisdom of God Manifested in the Works of Creation (1691): ‘in the great World, the Footsteps of an infinite Wisdom in the Order and Harmony of the Whole sufficiently appear.’58 But the footprint Crusoe discovers, which leads him to think of the occasion in alternating similes, one material, the other supernatural (‘I stood like one Thunder-struck, or as if I had seen an Apparition’ [112]), is finally interpreted by him in worldly terms. The footprint, at the centre of the book and centrally evocative for so many critics and a few centuries of world culture, may be taken as a synecdoche of the island and of the narrative as a whole. It is also the vanishing point of ‘Realism,’ like Courbet’s painting Origin of the World, which represents a splayed and truncated nude female torso. In Restoration and early eighteenth-century Britain, as opposed to France, the scientific understanding of the world was not in opposition to a religious understanding. The passage in John Ray, one of those physico-theologians, pious scientists of the late seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries, of whom Newton and Boyle are others, argues that natural philosophy – that is, science in our sense – rather than theology will enable us to ‘trace the Footsteps of [God’s] Wisdom in the Composition, Order, [and] Harmony’ of the world. What he says has great interest in relation to Defoe’s narrative. Ray claims that God’s existence must be demonstrated by Arguments drawn from the Light of Nature, and Works of the Creation; for as all other Sciences, so Divinity, proves not, but supposes its Subjects, taking it for granted, that by Natural Light, Men are sufficiently convinced of the Being of a Deity. There are, indeed, supernatural Demonstrations of this fundamental Truth, but not common to all Persons, or Times, and so liable to Cavil and Exception by Atheistical Persons, as inward Illuminations of Mind, a Spirit of Prophecy and fore-telling future Contingents, illustrious Miracles, and the like. But these Proofs, taken from Effects and Operations, exposed to every Man’s View, not to be denied or

Robinson Crusoe and the Semiotic Crisis

115

questioned by any, are most effectual to convince all that deny; or doubt of it. Neither are they only convictions of the greatest and subtlest Adversaries, but intelligible also to the meanest Capacities. For you may hear illiterate Persons of the lowest Rank of the Commonalty, affirming, That they need no Proof of the Being of a God, for that every Pile of Grass, or Ear of Corn, sufficiently proves that: For, they say, all the Men of the World cannot make such a Thing as one of these; and if they cannot do it, who can, or did make it but God? To tell them, that it made itself or sprung up by Chance, would be as ridiculous as to tell the Greatest Philosophers so.59

Any reader of Robinson Crusoe will immediately think of those ‘10 or 12 Grains of Corn’ mentioned earlier. But Crusoe’s argument is based not on the teleological argument that God must be the maker of any ear of corn, but on the probabilistic argument that the corn was unlikely to grow at all, or unlikely to grow except in that spot, and therefore that its growth was a special providence. Like the ‘illiterate Persons’ whom Ray instances, Crusoe would insist that the corn had not ‘sprung up by Chance,’ but his reasoning, unlike theirs, is based on probability. We may think of Defoe’s attempt to reconcile his historical and religious worlds as akin in a different register to a work such as Newton’s Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms Amended (posthumously published in 1728), which attempted to reconcile biblical chronology with that of history. In connection with God’s relation to the world, it may be worth noting that Paul, and Calvin after him, stresses that the evidence of things invisible is the world itself. Calvin claims that one must read the book of nature through the spectacles of scripture: ‘Faith is ... the evidence of things not seen, according to St. Paul (Heb. 11: 1),’ but Paul goes farther than this, and Calvin follows him in making the world such evidence. So those ‘illiterate Persons’ need not have made the simple teleological argument but only have had some one read them Paul’s writings and resided in faith. The conclusion of Defoe’s History of Apparitions echoes both the situation and some of the language of the old goat episode: when Crusoe goes into the cave ‘which was perfectly dark, I saw two broad shining Eyes of some Creature, whether Devil or Man, I knew not.’ But he plucks up courage, believing that ‘there was nothing in this Cave that was more frightful than my self,’ and the groaning beast, turns out to be ‘a most monstrous frightful old He-goat, just making his Will ... and gasping for Life and dying indeed of meer old Age’ (128–9). In allegorical religious schemes, as we would recognize even without Defoe’s help in The Politi-

116

Robert Folkenflik

cal History of the Devil, this would be lust or the devil, but here it seems to function as a kind of secular undercutting of the supernatural, though Crusoe will compare himself to the goat at a later point. It is interesting that he instances freedom from lust as one of his blessings on the island, though what he has to say about women suggests that he has one of the highest boiling points in literature. The History of Apparitions passage undermines the allegorical reading of this episode. In fact, it suggests that we need to read Crusoe’s experience of the old goat precisely as a rebuke to superstition: But above all I would beg my reading merry Friends of the thoughtless kind not to be so much surpris’d at the Apparitions of their own Brain; not to fright and be started when they first make Devils by Day-light, and then see them in the dark; and as they may be assur’d they will hardly ever see anything worse than themselves, so let them resolve not to be scar’d at Shadows, or amus’d with Vapours, mistaking the Devil for an Ass, and tell us of the Saucer Eyes of a Pink-eyed Bear; not fansy they see a Hearse with headless Horses, and take the Night-Cart for a fiery Chariot, which one would think they might distinguish by their Noses, unless they will own that their Fear gave them a worse Smell than that of the Devil. (395)

Night-carts carried the contents of chamber pots and privies to the cesspools. Ian Watt claims, not unfairly, that Defoe’s ‘style reflects the Lockean philosophy’ in ‘denoting only the primary qualities of the objects he describes – solidity, extension, figure, motion, and number – especially number’ (102). I would add, however, that the often hallucinatory reality of things (the sprouted grain, the footprint, the old goat) is rooted in the possibility that they are signs of an entirely different reality from what they appear to be. Robinson Crusoe himself seems to be caught in an eye-rubbing, duck-rabbit conundrum: Is it material? Is it spiritual? Crusoe told his ‘Deliverer’: ‘I look’d upon him as a Man sent from Heaven to deliver me, and that the whole Transaction seemed to be a Chain of Wonders; that such things as these were the Testimonies we had of a secret Hand of Providence governing the World, and an Evidence that the Eyes of an infinite Power could search into the remotest Corner of the World, and send Help to the Miserable whenever he pleased’ (197). Defoe here combines religious and forensic language. The footprint, like the later ‘invisible hand’ of Adam Smith and the all-seeing eye in Godwin’s Caleb Williams, is a secularization of a synecdochic spiritual manifestation. The

Robinson Crusoe and the Semiotic Crisis

117

footprint is a real world analogue of the ‘secret hand’: it serves as a synecdoche of what may be a supernatural world existing at the same time and in the same place.60 Defoe uses modern methods in a modern irreligious age to gain credit (paper credit) for religious beliefs under siege, but Robinson Crusoe, perhaps the best document of the semiological crisis of the early eighteenth century, represents the things of this world and rests in the psychology of this world while positing an invisible world whose secret hints we should follow. It is no wonder that, closer to our own time, a late nineteenth-century prosecutor, perhaps holding a copy of Robinson Crusoe aloft, used the footprint episode forensically in the Lizzie Borden case to argue for the relevance of circumstantial evidence. Nor is it any wonder that Wilkie Collins’s character Gabriel Betteredge in The Moonstone finds even more in Robinson Crusoe than Crusoe does in his Bible.61 The title page of Robinson Crusoe and its frontispiece illustration are all secular adventure; the preface is all religion. This bald statement needs both qualification and substantiation. First, ‘strange, surprising’ in a title can also refer at this time to captive queens, comets, or ghosts: extraordinary adventures, but the wonder, the miraculous as well. I would argue that Defoe conceives of his audience as unreligious, at least in the sense that Crusoe insists upon his younger self as not a good Christian, though Defoe regarded the appearance in his day of Arians, Arminians, Socinians, Deists, Freemasons, freethinkers, and atheists (highly overlapping categories for him) as pointing to more serious irreligion.62 Both the Political History of the Devil and Secrets of the Invisible World Disclosed address such a reader. I have been stalking the ‘realism effect’ in Robinson Crusoe, and what may be called the ruse of the novel. I conclude that the literary historian who takes realism as the solution to this book’s problems is a detective looking for a murderer, who does not recognize that the magnifying glass through which he looks for clues is the murder weapon itself.

NOTES Shorter versions of this essay were given at Cornell University, Claremont Graduate University, Georgetown University, University of California, Irvine (Conference in Honor of Homer Brown) David Nichol Smith Seminar, (Humanities Research Centre, Australian National University), The Western Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (UNLV), Society for the History of Authorship,

118

Robert Folkenflik

Reception, and Publication (London). For reading the manuscript and making useful comments, I’m grateful to John Richetti, Jayne Lewis, and Daniel de Roulet. 1 Novak, Realism, Myth, and History in Defoe’s Fiction (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983); Ian Watt, ‘Robinson Crusoe: The Novel as a Myth,’ in Essays in Criticism 1 (1951), 95–119. Watt returned to this theme in his last book, Myths of Modern Individualism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984), 136. Bender, ‘The Novel as Modern Myth,’ in this volume. For some other versions of this theme, see Robinson Crusoe: Myths and Metamorphoses, ed. Lieve Spaas and Brian Stimpson (London: Macmillan; New York: St Martin’s Press, 1996). Defoe himself spoke of his ‘mythological manner’ in 1704, though he did not have such modern conceptions in mind. See Master Mercury, 8 August 1704, 3. 2 For Robinson Crusoe as ‘a complete treatise on natural education,’ see JeanJacques Rousseau, Emilius, or, A Treatise of Education (anonymous trans. of Emile), 3 vols (Edinburgh, 1773), 1:333–4. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy [1867], translated by Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling, 3 vols (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 1909–10), 1:88–91, repr. Twentieth-Century Interpretations of ‘Robinson Crusoe,’ ed. Frank H. Ellis (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1969), 90–2. See also Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, translated by N.I. Stone (Chicago, 1913), 265–6. 3 Watt, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding (London: Chatto and Windus, 1957). Foremost among the newer Marxist readers is Michael McKeon, Origins of the English Novel, 1600–1740 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 65–89, 315–37. McKeon pays intelligent attention to a number of the themes considered in this essay. 4 Todorov, The Conquest of America, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Harper and Row, 1984); Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 86. Since the ‘Requerimiento’ (requirement) that was to be read to the natives (in Spanish if, as usual, there was no translator available) commanded that they convert or die, Columbus may have been humane rather than obtuse in interpreting the natives as acquiescing. 5 Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, edited by Michael Shinagel, 2nd ed. (New York and London: W.W. Norton, 1994), 147. Subsequent page references appear in parentheses in the text. 6 For a discussion of this scene from a different point of view, see Roxann

Robinson Crusoe and the Semiotic Crisis

7

8

9

10

11 12 13

14

119

Wheeler, ‘Powerful Affections: Slaves, Servants, and Labours of Love in Defoe’s Writing,’ in this volume. Fisch, New Stories for Old: Biblical Patterns in the Novel (Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan, 1998); Starr, ‘Defoe’s Prose Style: The Language of Interpretation,’ in Modern Essays on Eighteenth-Century Literature, ed. Leopold Damrosch Jr (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 237–60, 244, 241; Maddox, ‘Interpreter Crusoe,’ ELH 51 (1984), 33–52, 34–5; McKeon, ‘The Evidence of the Senses: Secularization and Epistemological Crisis,’ in Origins, 65–89. One could even add, echoing Robert Markley, a ‘crisis in representation.’ See Fallen Languages: Crises of Representation in Newtonian England, 1660–1740 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993). Coleridge, Marginalia, edited by George Whalley, Vol. 12 of Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, edited by Kathleen Coburn (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 2:167. For a few familiar early modern examples of this sort of thinking, cf. Samuel Johnson, who portrays mankind as ‘Condemn’d to hope’s delusive mine’ in ‘On the Death of Dr. Robert Levet,’ in The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 6, in Poems, edited by E.L. McAdam Jr with George Milne (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1964), 314, line 1; and Sir Philip Sidney, who describes our bodies as ‘clayey lodgings’ in An Apology for Poetry, edited by Geoffrey Shepherd (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1973), 104. McKeon, ‘Parables of the Younger Son (1): Defoe and the Naturalization of Desire,’ in Origins, 315–37. Starr, Defoe and Spiritual Autobiography (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965), 110–12. Radcliffe, Forms of Reflection: Genre and Culture in Meditational Writing (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993). Radcliffe finds post-Restoration writers calling ‘contemplative’ books ‘reflections,’ but notes that such a ‘shift in terminology marks a change in relations between meditation and a whole field of genres reorganized around the new empirical psychology’ (81). For ‘wonders,’ see Hunter, Before Novels: The Cultural Contexts of Eighteenth-Century English Fiction (New York: Norton, 1990), 208–24. See also David D. Hall, Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment: Popular Religious Belief in Early New England (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1989). Watt, Rise of the Novel, 80. See Starr, Defoe and Spiritual Autobiography; Hunter, The Reluctant Pilgrim: Defoe’s Emblematic Method and Quest for Form in Robinson Crusoe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1966). In addition to spiritual autobiography (and biography), Hunter stresses providence literature and guide literature. Although the work of Starr and Hunter was decisive in establishing the importance of religious readings, the religious

120

15

16 17

18

19

Robert Folkenflik

consideration of the novel did not begin with them. Charles Gildon, The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Mr. D— De F— (London, 1719), the earliest substantial response to Crusoe sneeringly puts him in a religious context. In the earliest serious biography of Defoe, George Chalmers calls Robinson Crusoe Defoe’s ‘vindication of the ways of God to man,’ an echo of Pope’s theodicy, An Essay on Man (Epistle I, line 15), which in turn alludes to Milton’s ‘justify the ways of God to men’ (Paradise Lost, Bk I, line 26). See The Life of Defoe (London, 1786), 52. Numerous religious readings precede Starr and Hunter. Radcliffe, Forms of Reflection, 85–6, quoting McKeon, Origins, 319; and Gildon, Mr D— De F— , x. It is worth noticing that since Gildon’s response appeared only five months after Defoe’s book, the notion that Robinson Crusoe was left as a religious ‘Legacy’ by every old woman who could afford it is an obvious fabrication and meant to be perceived as satiric. Although putting the book into a religious context, Gildon casts scorn upon the religious notions of the book and claims that Defoe himself can be seen as Whig, Tory, Atheist, and so on. Gildon is an equivocal choice to substantiate a religious reading. Hunter, Before Novels, 225. Hans W. Frei, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative: A Study in Eighteenth and Nineteenth-Century Hermeneutics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974); D.P. Walker, The Decline of Hell: Seventeenth-Century Discussions of Eternal Torment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964); Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century England (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1971); Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, edited by Peter H. Nidditch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), 4.21.4. Anthony [Ashley Cooper], Earl of Shaftesbury, ‘A Notion of the Historical Draught or Tabulature of Hercules’ (1713) in Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, 5th ed. (Birmingham, UK: John Baskerville, 1773), 3:381–2. Ronald Paulson has often indicated the importance of this essay, especially in Emblem and Expression: Meaning in English Art of the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975), a book with implications for my essay. For Defoe and history, see Everett Zimmerman, The Boundaries of Fiction: History and the Eighteenth-Century British Novel (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996); Robert Mayer, History and the Early English Novel: Matters of Fact from Bacon to Defoe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). Defoe, ‘Robinson Crusoe’s Preface,’ in Serious Reflections of Robinson Crusoe (London, 1720), A2r.

Robinson Crusoe and the Semiotic Crisis

121

20 Damrosch, Jr, God’s Plot & Man’s Stories: Studies in the Fictional Imagination from Milton to Fielding (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 193. Damrosch’s chapter on Defoe is titled ‘Myth and Fiction in Robinson Crusoe.’ Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (London: Phaidon Press, 1962). 21 Damrosch, God’s Plot, 192. 22 McKeon, Origins of the English Novel, 316. 23 Watt, Rise of the Novel, 32. 24 Defoe, Essay upon Several Projects (London, 1702), 15. For some other instances of the term, see [Defoe], The History and Reality of Apparitions, later retitled Secrets of the Invisible World Disclosed, 2nd ed. (London, 1735), 126 (under the pseudonym Andrew Moreton) – subsequent page references appear in parentheses in the text; The Anatomy of Exchange-Alley (London, 1719), 48; A Tour through the Whole Island of Great Britain, edited and abridged by Pat Rogers (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1971), 471. 25 Isaac Barrow, Sermon 41, ‘The Consideration of our Latter End,’ quoted in Martin C. Battestin, The Moral Basis of Fielding’s Art: A Study of Joseph Andrews (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1959), 45. 26 For a similar theme in Samuel Johnson, see Robert Folkenflik, ‘Samuel Johnson and Art,’ in Paul Alkon and Robert Folkenflik, Samuel Johnson: Pictures and Words (Los Angeles: William Andrews Clark Memorial Library Publications, 1984), 103–4, 116n83. 27 Defoe, A Journal of the Plague Year (London, 1722). This poignancy accompanies the condition of literature itself: signs of things that are not present. 28 John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, edited by John T. McNeil, translated by Ford Lewis Battles, 2 vols (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1960), 1:63. 29 Novak, ‘Picturing the Thing Itself, or Not: Defoe, Painting, Prose Fiction, and the Arts of Describing,’ Eighteenth-Century Fiction 9 (1996), 1–20. See also Svetlana Alpers, The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983). 30 The Letters of Daniel Defoe, edited by George Healey Harris (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955), 43, 38. Serious Reflections, A2r. And see Novak, ‘Defoe’s Theory of Fiction,’ Studies in Philology 61 (1964), 650–68. 31 Defoe, More Reformation: A Satyr upon Himself, A True Collection of the Writings of the Author of the True Born English-man (London, [1703] 1705), 2:28. Novak, who does not use this example, gives several versions of ‘Defoe’s ofttold account of the painter who had to write on the canvas to indicate the nature of the object he was attempting to depict,’ including a horse, a dog, and a ‘bear-lyon.’ See Novak, ‘Picturing the Thing Itself,’ 6–7 and n21.

122

Robert Folkenflik

32 Korshin, Typologies in England, 1650–1820 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), 188. 33 Defoe, Serious Reflections, A5r. For a splendid account of Robinson Crusoe’s many ‘autobiographies,’ which I read only after my own essay was complete, see David Marshall, ‘Autobiographical Acts in Robinson Crusoe,’ ELH 71 (2004), 899–920. 34 Watt, Rise of the Novel, 120; John Richetti, ‘Secular Crusoe: The Reluctant Pilgrim Re-Visited,’ in Eighteenth-Century Genre and Culture: Serious Reflections on Occasional Forms: Essays in Honor of J. Paul Hunter, ed. Dennis Todd and Cynthia Wall (Newark: University of Delaware Press; London: Associated University Presses, 2001), 58–78, the best recent essay on Robinson Crusoe as secular and one of the few best ever on Defoe. 35 Barbauld, ‘Preface to Robinson Crusoe,’ in The British Novelists (London: F.C. and J. Rivington, 1810), 16:vi. Dunlop, The History of Fiction (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1814), 2:589. 36 Defoe, Serious Reflections, A3v, A4v. 37 Interestingly, in an unpublished manuscript Jacques Derrida reflects upon Crusoe’s consideration of whether or not the print is his without mentioning Crusoe’s rejection of this hypothesis. Quoted by J. Hillis Miller in the first of three public lectures, on 24 May 2005, University of California, Irvine. The footprint is gendered by Crusoe, but, though lacking signs of civilization, it is not racialized. It took Jack London to give the scene a racist twist in Jerry of the Islands (1917): ‘But, another Crusoe chancing upon the footprint of another man Friday, his nose, not his eyes, shocked him electrically alert as he smelled the fresh contact of a living man’s foot with the ground. It was a nigger’s foot’ (chap. 20). 38 In the King James Version of the Bible, this reads, ‘Thou shalt not be afraid ... for the destruction that wasteth at noonday’ (Psalms 91:5–6). The latter phrase in the Vulgate was demonio meridiano, ‘of the noonday devil.’ This trope has become highly secularized, and two books that invoke it are devoted to boredom and depression: Reinhard Kuhn, The Demon of Noontide: Ennui in Western Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976), and Andrew Solomon, The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression (New York: Scribner, 2001). 39 Defoe, Secrets of the Invisible World, 394. 40 Defoe, Political History of the Devil (London, 1726), 265. Subsequent page references appear in parentheses in the text. 41 Defoe, History of Apparitions, 365. 42 Defoe, History of Apparitions, 30. 43 Hacking, The Emergence of Probability: A Philosophical Study of Early Ideas about

Robinson Crusoe and the Semiotic Crisis

44 45

46

47 48

123

Probability, Induction and Statistical Inference (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975). Hacking claims that ‘what happened to signs in becoming evidence, is largely responsible for our concept of probability’ (35). But cf. Douglas Lane Patey, Probability and Literary Form: Philosophic Theory and Literary Practice in the Augustan Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), for some doubts about Hacking’s historical moment of probability. For another take on probability in Robinson Crusoe, see Paul K. Alkon, ‘The Odds Against Friday: Defoe, Bayes and Inverse Probability,’ in Probability, Time, and Space in Eighteenth-Century Literature, ed. Paula R. Backscheider (New York: AMS Press, 1979), 29–61. John Sutherland, Can Jane Eyre be Happy? (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 5, 9. Barthes, ‘The Reality Effect’ (1968) in The Rustle of Language, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1986), 141–8. For the corollary ‘that realism was the code of the fictional,’ see Catherine Gallagher, Nobody’s Story: The Vanishing Acts of Women Writers in the Market Place, 1670–1820 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994), 174. Martin Price subjects Barthes’s essay to some sceptical analysis in Forms of Life: Character and Moral Imagination in the Novel (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1983), 35. Michael Seidel has noticed the frequency of the foot in Defoe’s narrative: ‘The mark of distinction is always a foot, which here and later, for different reasons, punctuates Crusoe’s island stay: first his foot then another’s.’ See Seidel, Robinson Crusoe: Island Myths and the Novel (Boston: Twayne, 1991), 64, and Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, 63; Brothers, Friday’s Footprint: How Society Shapes the Human Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). Wesley Morris, Friday’s Footprint: Structuralism and the Articulated Text (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1979) is not written under the particular illusion that I am investigating, though the title refers to a witty epigraph drawn from Levi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques, which interrogates ‘an insignificant patch of ground which was trodden daily by the most authentic of savages but from which Man Friday’s footprint was absent.’ That Levi-Strauss thought the footprint was Friday’s seems likely. Friday’s Footprint (London: Gollancz, 1960) is also the title of a collection of stories by the distinguished South African novelist Nadine Gordimer. Eco, Theory of Semiotics, trans. Eco and David Osmond Smith (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979), 224. For political arithmetic and related topics, see Sandra Sherman, Finance and Fictionality in the Early Eighteenth Century: Accounting for Defoe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

124

Robert Folkenflik

49 Defoe, Farther Adventures, 69. 50 Schaffer, ‘Defoe’s Natural Philosophy and the Worlds of Credit,’ in Nature Transfigured: Science and Literature, 1700–1900, ed. John Christie and Sally Shuttleworth (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989), 28. 51 On Walcott, see William H. Ferris ‘A Multiplicity of Voices: A Conversation with Derek Walcott,’ http://www.neh.fed.us/news/humanities/2001-11/ multiplicity.html. 52 This game from the ‘Woodcraft Folk’ no longer seems available on their Web site: www.woodcraft.org.uk. 53 The Crusoe Hotel’s Web site describes the Juan Fernandez bar: http:// www.s-h-systems.co.uk/hotels/crusoe.html. 54 The International Footprint Association’s slogan comes from its Web site: http://www.footprinter.org/index.html 55 Harvey Kurtzman and Bill Elder, ‘Robinson Crusoe!’ Mad 13 (July 1954), 7. 56 Patrick Brantlinger, who uses Certeau’s remarks for his epigraph in Crusoe’s Footprints: Cultural Studies in Britain and America (London: Routledge, 1990) is under no illusion about the footprint’s being Crusoe’s or Friday’s and recognizes it, fairly enough, as ‘the inescapable image of the Other.’ It becomes for him a ‘parable’ of ‘the discourses of “the Other” – of all the others ... which we most urgently need to hear’ (3). 57 Bacon, The Works of Francis Bacon, edited by James Spedding, Robert Leslie Ellis, and Douglas Denon Heath, 14 vols (London: Longman, 1861–79), 3:401. 58 The Works of the Reverend William Law, A.M., 9 vols (London, 1762), 6:21. Similar wording appears in a number of sermons. One might perhaps link the footprint to the angel of the Apocalypse in Revelation, who stands with one foot on land and one on the sea (John 10) and bears some relation to the man in flame with the ‘terrible’ voice whom Crusoe sees in his dream (87). 59 Ray, The Wisdom of God Manifested in the Works of Creation (London, 1691), xxii–xxiii. Such writers are the progenitors of ‘Intelligent Design.’ For Defoe and science, see Ilse Vickers, Defoe and the New Sciences (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 60 Rodney M. Baine discusses this topic in a different way in Defoe and the Supernatural (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1968). For a highly original account of the relation of another Defoe fiction to the supernatural, see Jayne Elizabeth Lewis, ‘Spectral Currencies in the Air of Reality: A Journal of the Plague Year and the History of Apparitions,’ Representations 87 (2004): 82–101. For an intelligent assessment of Smith’s ‘invisible hand’ that greatly underestimates the religious background to the phrase, see Emma Roth-

Robinson Crusoe and the Semiotic Crisis

125

schild, Economic Sentiments: Adam Smith, Condorcet and the Enlightenment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001). 61 On the Lizzie Borden case, see Alexander Welsh, Strong Representations: Narrative and Circumstantial Evidence in England (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 2–7. Here is Collins’s Betteredge: ‘You are not to take it, if you please, as the saying of an ignorant man, when I express my opinion that such a book as Robinson Crusoe never was written, and never will be written again. I have tried that book for years – generally in combination with a pipe of tobacco – and I have found it my friend in need in all the necessities of this mortal life. When my spirits are bad – Robinson Crusoe. When I want advice – Robinson Crusoe. In past times, when my wife plagued me; in present times, when I have had a drop too much – Robinson Crusoe. I have worn out six stout Robinson Crusoes with hard work in my service. On my lady’s last birth-day she gave me a seventh. I took a drop too much on the strength of it; and Robinson Crusoe put me right again. Price four shillings and sixpence, bound in blue, with a picture into the bargain.’ The Moonstone (New York: Modern Library, 2001), 15. 62 On this topic, see Maximillian E. Novak, ‘Defoe, the Occult, and the Deist Offensive during the Reign of George I,’ in Deism, Masonry, and the Enlightenment: Essays Honoring Alfred Owen Aldridge, ed. J.A. Leo Lemay (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1987), 93–108.

chapter six

Powerful Affections: Slaves, Servants, and Labours of Love in Defoe’s Writing ROXANN WHEELER

An incident in Daniel Defoe’s Captain Singleton reminds us of the strange and surprising expectations that were the fabric of patriarchal governance at this time. Once on the continent of Africa, the Englishman Captain Singleton wishes to enslave some Africans. The Portuguese demur that, since the Africans have not harmed them, to enslave them would be wrong. After purposely provoking the inhabitants and waging a day-long battle, the Europeans enslave sixty ‘lusty young fellows.’ Singleton gets what he wants: able-bodied men that will make the Europeans’ arduous trek easier from southeastern Africa, where the pirates first land, across the desert and mountains to the slave factories on the west coast. Strangely, instead of expressing satisfaction with this conquest, Singleton immediately complains that the Europeans are likely to get ‘no Service from them but that of meer Slaves, no Subjection that would continue any longer than the Fear of us was upon them, nor any Labour but by Violence.’1 What could Singleton possibly mean? Isn’t slavish service precisely what he wants? Isn’t inducing fear through a show of violence necessary to force African men to leave their home and carry the Europeans’ baggage? On the face of it, Singleton’s lament that the Europeans will get ‘no Service from them but that of meer Slaves’ seems inexplicable, but, as I shall show, the reasoning inspiring Singleton’s concern is also central to elucidating Defoe’s two other male adventure novels, Robinson Crusoe and Colonel Jack. Defoe’s fictional Englishmen routinely desire obedience from slaves and something more: fidelity, gratitude, even love. Such an overdetermined desire also belongs to the fathers and merchants in Defoe’s con-

Powerful Affections

127

duct manuals in regard to their children, wives, and apprentices. As this essay demonstrates, the manly yearning to be loved rather than feared is a desire much larger than Defoe’s imagination – or the licence of novels. Defoe’s writings repeatedly explore the danger to authority figures of commanding subordinates’ labour without securing their affection, a fear that haunts eighteenth-century British writing, from treatises on natural law to conjectural history, from conduct literature to novels. This ubiquitous fear assumes new life in the wake of the French Revolution and in the first modern overthrow of masters by slaves in St Domingue. Through the very familiar discourses of patriarchy and the passions, Defoe’s novels and conduct manuals treat slavery simultaneously as a personal relationship and a global by-product of commercial expansion. Neither Defoe’s flawed fictional characters nor his tradesmen embrace the more impersonal wage-for-labour exchange characteristic of the commercial market economy in England. Instead, his Englishmen prefer the patriarchal model, which was the more fully fleshed ideology available to represent labour relations. Defoe’s writing transforms patriarchal governance into colonial ideology through the familial role of men. A man’s governance of others rests not simply on the sheer fact of his power, or even on the control of his own passions, but chiefly on a more modern conception of patriarchy: the necessity of winning subordinates’ affection.2 Defoe is one of the first authors to treat the rapidly changing labour relations in both the English context of apprentices and servants and in the imperial context of slaves in Africa, the Caribbean, and Virginia. Below, I explore the love-labour paradigm that underwrites the benevolent slave owner and the grateful slave, the featured couple that Defoe’s novels made memorable and that subsequent authors of West Indian literature adopted. I am particularly interested in the way that the ideology of race adopts without change the emotions customarily attributed to the distinctions of rank. That Captain Singleton’s desire for slaves’ love seems odd in the twenty-first century is, at least in part, a testament to the sea change wrought by the civil rights and feminist movements, not to mention their theoretical counterparts in the academy. As critical attention has understandably shifted from the psychology of sexism and racism – the long-term effects of exploitation and dependence on targeted groups of people – to other theories of power and their effects (e.g., a focus on agency), we have lost touch with the psychology of patriarchy. Other than scholarly amnesia, we may look to the recent heyday of the concept of difference, which has

128

Roxann Wheeler

inadvertently helped to erode a historically precise understanding of the power relations of an earlier era. Particularly noticeable is our disregard for the emotional investment in power relations that persisted well after the close of the eighteenth century. Labour and love were entangled in ways that seem remote to us today. Maximillian Novak’s first two books established the intellectual anchors for interpreting the sometimes conflicting religious, economic, and social motivations that structure Defoe’s novels and illuminate his fictional characters; both reveal crucial insights about patriarchal theory at this time. In Economics and the Fiction of Daniel Defoe, Novak notes that ‘Defoe’s attitude toward self-love must be kept in mind as we try to understand the motivation of his characters.’ And, crucially, ‘we must also remember his acknowledgment that human beings were often moved by considerations both entirely noneconomic and opposed to self-interest.’3 According to Novak, neither profit motive, nor the love of domination, nor the desire for independence in and of themselves are historically valid explanations of early eighteenth-century human motivation, fictional or otherwise. Defoe and the Nature of Man provides an even more detailed account of the factors influencing self-interest by investigating the central place of natural law and property in seventeenth-century philosophy, especially their connection to the passions. The passions, or embodied emotions, were crucial to earlier theories of power and integral to reflections on government and moral conduct, from Aristotle and Seneca to Hobbes and Locke and later on to Hume and Burke.4 Novak provides a compelling investigation of the power of gratitude, featuring Defoe’s repeated return to it as a central motif of his writing on national character, patronage, religion, and domestic and colonial relationships. My essay is indebted to Novak’s scholarship, but my focus is narrower: I explore the emotions entangled in early eighteenth-century power relations, specifically why love and labour were so intimately connected at this time. I hope to explain not only Captain Singleton’s desire for something more than mere service from slaves but also the strangely performative scenes between master and slave in Defoe’s fiction, scenes that we are apt to view today as absurdly racist fantasies of domination. They are that, to be sure, but they were also the most cherished dreams of social order for the English family.

The Patriarchal Labour Contract Late seventeenth- to early nineteenth-century patriarchal theory envi-

Powerful Affections

129

sioned men and their households as a web of marriage and property settlements, labour relations, and, significantly, affections. As is well known, a family was, by definition, all persons, even including hired labourers, who owed obedience to the male head of the family. Defoe characteristically relies on the tradition of seventeenth-century patriarchy that imagined it as a series of smoothly running trade-offs between the head of the household and all subordinates. A central conceit of patriarchy at this time is that master and servant together form a more perfect whole than either does singly, and so on throughout the various patriarchal relations in society.5 Conduct manuals routinely imagine the ideal master-servant relationship in the contrast of the mind to the body’s limbs: ‘As the Hands need the Head for Guidance and Direction, so does the Head need the Hands for work and service.’6 A related truism about the obedience due from servants to masters is that ‘Servants may have more of the Labours of Life, but then they have less of the Cares ... their Bodies are more fatigu’d and exercis’d, but their Minds are less perplex’d.’7 As Sara Maza observes, what is surprising is not that the values of paternalism ‘eventually became obsolete, as indeed, they did, but that they endured for so long,’ She asks: ‘How can we explain the social and ideological atavism implicit in the survival of an ideal of patriarchal authority and personal bonding well into an age of demographic explosion, social mobility, and enlightened reform?’8 Along with many of his contemporaries, Defoe recast patriarchal relations through the notion of contract. In the late seventeenth century, a patriarch’s relationship to his dependants increasingly occurred in the language of material and immaterial exchange, as regulated by a contract and as operating by implied or written consent.9 In this contractual version of patriarchy, duties and affections appeared to be reciprocal, but not equal, binding each party to the other in mutual support and regard. The master’s role was to protect, provide, and temper his authority with mildness. In the case of the wife and children, a man had an additional duty, which was to love them. In return for protection or love, the wife, children, and servants should obey the head of the household. Indeed, the Church of England and non-conformists alike agreed that children and social inferiors owed obedience to the head of the household.10 Hobbes’s Leviathan and Locke’s Two Treatises on Government are the most renowned texts that illustrate the contemporary fluctuation in the meanings of contract, consent, and the nature and extent of governance. With the rise of contract theory in the seventeenth century, the only widely accepted justification for subordination became an agreement, a concept

130

Roxann Wheeler

that Defoe dramatizes in the global confrontations that punctuate his novels. In his theory of the processes operative in a state of nature (en route to civil society), Hobbes makes little distinction between political and paternal power, arguing that male dominion can occur legitimately through conquest or a contract established through generation. Consent, however, is crucial to Hobbes’s and Locke’s notions of a contract, although their approaches are different. While Hobbes suggests that a contract established through fear is valid, Locke reasons that for a contract to be valid, one individual must agree to be ruled by another when violence is not a threat.11 In repeatedly representing the same scene establishing an Englishman’s authority and non-Europeans’ subordination, Defoe’s novels blur the lines between these two kinds of contract and conditions of consent.12 This habit of thinking, Gordon Schochet reveals, was pervasive: ‘The histories of the patriarchal and contractual accounts of politics are very much dependent upon one another. On one level they were rival doctrines; in a more fundamental sense, however, they were complementary theories, for patriarchalism provided some of the presuppositions on which the contract rested.’13 And, as Carole Pateman reminds us, despite its claims to the contrary, ‘Contract theory is primarily about a way of creating social relationships constituted by subordination, not about exchange.’14 Contract theory, then, did not represent a completely new way of having relationships as much as a new form of expressing domination. Contract was best thought of not, as some people think of it today, as neutral or based on the putative equality of the parties, but as structured by inequality and surcharged with emotions.

The Passions and Inequality Male writers on patriarchy did not imagine people as unemotional or power relations without conflict. The passions, a term that encompasses emotions, motives, and actions, constituted the vocabulary for the texture of all relationships. Theorized variously as arising from the heart or soul, or even from the nether regions of the body, the passions’ role was to aid the feebler reaction of reason. Referring to the opposite poles of pleasure and pain, love and fear were conventionally considered to be the two principal passions from which all others derived. Love, then, had a much more capacious definition and application than we concede today. Passions such as anger, esteem, anxiety, and gratitude all possessed intricate genealogies that traced them to either love or fear.

Powerful Affections

131

Passions were regarded as universal; they varied worldwide according to what was desired. In the eighteenth century, ‘universal’ is closer in meaning to ‘similar’ than to ‘the same’; people’s passions fluctuated by climate as well as by rank, age, sex, and even status in the household or their treatment by authority figures. The literature of the passions, in fact, illuminates contemporary responses to inequality. Patriarchal dependants – wives, children, servants, and slaves – were imagined as experiencing a similar range of passions because of their shared disempowerment and onerous duty to obey. While this common sense increasingly shows strain, and most writers make vague attempts to differentiate more strongly among the various dependants throughout the eighteenth century, a strong expectation that love and labour for the head of the household were intertwined did not erode until long after Defoe wrote. A common belief about the passions and subordination from the seventeenth century that infiltrates Defoe’s fiction was that one man would subject himself to another because he knew that that person could do him good or ill but has chosen not to hurt him. By showing his fear and reverence, he would win the favour of the superior.15 A highly stylized and well-known code, the passions were easily legible. In many ways, the passions are best understood as a theory of performance within a political, social, and economic hierarchy. Carol Kay observes that the passions concern ‘how people read one another, how motives are interpreted,’ not necessarily how individuals experience feelings.16 Passions such as terror or veneration manifested themselves in a servant’s facial expression, posture, and actions. Painters, sculptors, dancers, and actors all studied ‘the look’ that designated the various passions. The slant of the eyebrows, raised or lowered eyes, the angle of the arms, an open or closed fist, the hair dishevelled or smooth – no detail was too insignificant in denoting the passions. While writers commonly justified the hierarchy of rank and household as God’s will and as serving the common good, the patriarchy of the late seventeenth through eighteenth centuries garnered additional regard when its exercise of authority elicited subordinates’ obedience because of love rather than fear or hatred.17 The connection of governance to the passions extended from individual heads of household to monarchs. It was widely believed that any empire grounded in violence would not last long: ‘fear makes [governors] only masters of the body,’ but ‘love makes them ruler over the heart,’ in the words of one author.18 A servile passion, fear was a response to violence and was likely to lead its victims to seek an end to their servitude.

132

Roxann Wheeler

One indication of how ubiquitous fear was within actual power relations, particularly intimate ones, was that even the staunchest defenders of traditional patriarchal governance argued that the economy of fear was bad theory and bad economics. The problem with ruling by fear, especially in regard to servants, was that, like all passions, fear was believed to produce deleterious effects in the body and mind. Fear debilitated the mind, contracted the body’s nerves, and slowed the blood flow. Literally, fear reduced servants to their duty; it impeded their performance.19 While it is clear that in practice corporal punishment remained common, the vision of effective discipline did begin to shift in the mid- to late seventeenth century. The most effective punishment was not to crush subordinates but to teach them their duty through gentle admonition and instruction. This disciplinary system for servants, based in education and coercion, was frequently likened to the proper correction of children. Indeed, the comparison between the two groups was habitual because of their economic dependence: servants were widely characterized as ‘Children in understanding.’20 By the eighteenth century, fear was going out of fashion in the discourse, if not the practice, of governance. Accordingly, most writers (after about 1715) devoted more energy to investigating benevolence, or love, as the affection from which both good governance and dutiful performance sprang.21 Love and other pleasurable passions such as gratitude were voluntary and long lasting. The grateful passions were considered powerful mechanisms in maintaining social order. Therefore, servants who loved their master would never dream of recovering their liberty, a belief that Defoe dramatizes in all of his novels, even though he concedes the limitations of benevolence and gratitude in his non-fiction. Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, all household relations were broadly understood as economic, and even master-servant relations were perceived as entailing emotional bonds. The literature exploring the passions elucidates the deepest desire of patriarchs. Heads of the household did not want what conduct manuals called eye service or lip service; they wanted servants’ hearts, souls, and their most grateful affections. This overdetermined vision of love and labour is disturbed, however, by an examination of contemporary reflections on mastery and servitude as well as slavery.

Servitude and Unfree Labour Servitude was a state widely agreed to be ‘the meanest and the most mis-

Powerful Affections

133

erable of all others.’22 The misery of servitude followed from the legal and religious command of obedience: by virtue of being subject to the will of another, a servant’s situation was deemed the unhappiest. For servants, this obedience in particular as well as the conditions of labour generally are best described as what Robert Steinfeld calls unfree labour. In the early modern period and the eighteenth century, freedom and unfreedom, Steinfeld argues, were not as absolute and opposite as they seem today. He convincingly demonstrates that through the early nineteenth century, employers exercised considerable legal control over workers, which included ‘a kind of jurisdiction or personal government’ and ‘a kind of property ... in the services of their workers[:] a legal right to the exclusive use and enjoyment of their workers’ energies for the period or purposes specified in the agreement.’ Steinfeld concludes: ‘In the seventeenth century, unfree labour represented the “normal” legal form that contractual labour took in the Anglo-American world ... Not until the nineteenth century did it [free labour] become the paradigm for normal employment.’23 Contemporary writers routinely allude to habitual conflict between heads of household and their subordinates, especially between masters and servants. Because it was widely believed that people were at the mercy of their appetites, passions, and humours, the patriarchal system routinely addressed failures on both sides of the power dynamic (e.g., tyrannical patriarchs and insolent subordinates). In telling asides, writers of didactic literature frequently accuse masters of irrationally and excessively beating their servants, not feeding them enough, or generally treating them like animals. Servants typically appear in those same pages as ‘domestick Enemies’ who hate their master’s authority, despise his person, and try to injure him whenever the opportunity arises.24 In the extensive literature on servants, there is no expectation that servants can be taught gratitude. Even the most conservative writers did not bother encouraging it, focusing instead on the more practical matters of a servant’s legal obligation or on discouraging lies, idleness, and theft. As one writer trenchantly observes, ‘Servants are commonly a barren Soil in Point of Gratitude, and, however lavishly you scatter your Favours, seldom think themselves oblig’d to make any Return.’25 The increasing demand for regular wages by servants seems especially to have eroded faith in gratitude’s efficacy within the household. As late as 1705 writers observed that instead of regular wages, servants typically contracted with employers for a combination of clothing, lodging, food, and even instruction, along with occasional but irregular sums of money,

134

Roxann Wheeler

but as Sara Maza reminds us, ‘Most of the evidence suggests that no matter how irregularly or arbitrarily wages were doled out to servants, they were always a crucial factor in the relationship.’26 Throughout the eighteenth century, servants and apprentices were increasingly dissatisfied with non-wage arrangements and demanded regular wages, especially in the larger cities. During Daniel Defoe’s lifetime, the premiums that parents paid to masters tripled, and the higher parental payments meant that it became more common for masters to pay apprentices regular wages.27 Today we are apt to assume that employers reluctantly gave up their traditional power, and that they were the main obstacle to the labouring classes’ break with material conditions that did not favour their interests, but the historical record suggests a considerably more complex situation. Labourers, especially in rural areas, did not necessarily view regular wages as an unadulterated advance. Christopher Hill records ‘the “ideological” hostility to the status of wage labourer which many men and women felt in the eighteenth century.’ He attributes their reluctance to claim the title of regular wage earner to the fact that full-time wage labourers had been, in fact (or were assumed to have been), paupers in the two preceding centuries. Those who were wholly dependent on wages had either lost their land or lost their rights to common land. Total economic dependence on another person was the contemporary definition of unfree.28 Defoe was neither alone in believing that wages reduced the dutiful feelings of servants as well as of masters, nor the only eighteenth-century writer to bemoan the modernization of labour relations, especially the shift to higher and more regular wages. In this climate, masters no longer felt as free either to instruct or to correct the servants and apprentices whom they were paying, and many apparently felt relieved of these disagreeable tasks.29 Defoe mentions both possibilities in his writing, but what emerges most clearly in his extensive reflection on this topic is that the exchange of regular wages for work performed seemed antithetical to the mutual duties patriarchal theory had long relied on to describe its power relationships. Defoe’s wish for a bond that superseded the cash nexus occurred precisely during this period of change. A striking example of the ‘something more’ to the master-apprentice or master-servant relationship than the exchange of money for labour appears in The Complete English Tradesman. A faithful apprentice’s reward, Defoe argues, should exceed being taught commercial skills in exchange for money. Once the apprentice’s term has expired, Defoe urges that

Powerful Affections

135

he should be made the master of the business or set up advantageously in a neighbouring town.30 That is, the ideal master-apprentice relationship should not end with the expiration of the term but continue in some other, more equal form, similar to grown male children’s status in a family. In this recommendation, Defoe agrees with other contemporary reformers, such as Addison and Steele. In Spectator 107, for instance, Mr. Spectator notes with approval how Sir Roger De Coverly has treated his servants on his rural estate. Although an extremely rare (and fictional) example, Sir Roger has systematically rewarded good servants with independent livelihoods on his own estate. This method of ‘manumission’ is what is due a good servant who has had to obey his master’s will for a long time; furthermore, the master’s generosity inspires the good servant’s successors to serve well through the expectation of reward for faithful service.31 Fleetwood’s 1705 observation that a servant’s honesty and fidelity are more important even than his industry perhaps seems quaint, but it was typical. Masters were advised to select an apprentice for his character rather than simply for the income he generated. ‘Peace is worth infinitely more than Mony,’ one writer counsels.32 This attitude does not correspond easily with the profit motive strictly defined as economic gain; indeed, even the historian E.P. Thompson records that the rural underclasses believed that domestic service in a gentry household was a favour conferred rather than strictly a business transaction: ‘for a son or daughter to be taken into service at the great house was seen to be, not a necessity, but a favour.’33 Neither wages nor work ethic was understood simply in terms of strict economics, but as utility more broadly construed. This perspective occurs in Defoe’s conclusion that despite all of the inconveniences that servants put masters to, ‘we cannot possibly do without these creatures.’34 The relationships between employers and day labourers, apprentices, and domestic servants, especially in the urbanscapes of England, were arguably the first intimate patriarchal relationships to change dramatically in response to the pressures of commercial capitalism. It is this alteration that Defoe’s novels address repeatedly by focusing on Englishmen whose fortunes accidentally put them, first, in the position of slaves or indentured servants and, eventually, in the position of overseers or slave masters. These fictional Englishmen treat individual Caribbean Islanders and captured Africans with the same understanding of the passions as that applied to apprentices and servants. Considered together, Defoe’s conduct manuals and novels are a perfect case study of the way

136

Roxann Wheeler

that domestic ideology seamlessly became what we now regard as racist colonial ideology, a translation that occurs through the familial role of men and through the passions. This aspect of colonial ideology appears indistinguishable in its dramatization of emotional bonds from the conventional representation of master-servant relations. In Defoe’s novels, a subordinate’s most productive labour results from love. Of course, these interpretations are already part of the literary history of Defoe’s novels, but understanding the performance-driven nature of emotions expected from subordinates helps us to elucidate some very strange passages in the novels and to gain insight into the pleasure that Friday, the Black Prince, and Mouchat provided eighteenth-century readers.

Global Male Bonding In Defoe’s novels, the best patriarchal relationships develop in remote places on the fringes of global markets: in the interior of Africa, on a mostly deserted Caribbean island, and in the hinterland of Virginia. Coded as good patriarchs, Crusoe, Captain Singleton, and Colonel Jack want to rule the hearts of their slaves, not just commandeer their labour.35 They want to feel the love, and Defoe lifts that love from the formula of the passions. The plot, verbal exchanges, as well as the remarkable scenes of mercy, instruction, and grateful consent all embody and dramatize the theory of the passions. Looked at in this way, the novels depict what Defoe laments is no longer possible in England: stable, benevolent relations between employers and labourers. In Defoe’s novels, how authority figures manage their own and others’ passions is crucial. Defoe agrees with other contemporary writers that good patriarchs initially must do something to deserve subordinates’ grateful affections (they are not automatic), but he uses the most extreme plot lines to establish the Englishman’s worthiness of esteem. Robinson Crusoe, Captain Singleton, and Colonel Jack all stage a dramatic event in which the Englishman preserves the life of an African or a Caribbean Islander. Crusoe saves Friday from cannibal captors, Captain Singleton orders the surgeon to heal the Black Prince’s gunshot wound, and Colonel Jack saves the slave Mouchat from a whipping that he, in fact, had instigated to establish his own disposition to benevolence. All three novels feature extensive scenes that breathe life into passages from Hobbes, Locke, and myriad other writers on governance and subordination. Colonel Jack most obviously dramatizes the passions to show the way to win over a workforce. Set on a plantation in the Chesapeake

Powerful Affections

137

basin, the novel depicts a master’s difficulty managing his workforce of indentured servants and slaves. At first, the planter finds it impossible to maintain order and industriousness without instructing the overseer to whip the labourers. But the whip, the planter feels certain, elicits the workers’ fear and consequently their hatred and potential rebellion. When Jack is elevated from an indentured servant to an overseer, he initially blames the slaves for their obstinate temperament and disorderly work habits. After some experiments triggering their passions springing from love, Jack comes to realize that the slaves’ surliness and laziness, in fact, has arisen from the previous overseer’s cruelty. Indeed, he suspects that the slaves’ gratitude will arise only in response to the knowledge that they could be pardoned and receive mercy. Jack rehearses the new method of government on the plantation to his master, acknowledging: ‘you had rather have your Work done from a Principle of Love, than Fear.’ The slave owner agrees, replying: ‘I desire nothing (on this side Heaven) more, than to have all my Negroes serve me from Principles of gratitude. I abhor to be fear’d like a Lion, like a Tyrant.’ In keeping with the contemporary assumption about reason needing passion to spur it on, Jack not only manipulates the slaves’ passions but also believes he must ‘work upon their Reason, to make the Mercy that was shew’d them sink deep into their Minds, and give lasting Impressions, explain the Meaning of Gratitude to them, and the Nature of an Obligation.’ Jack later concludes, after swapping theories of gratitude and labour with the slave Mouchat: ‘it was thus managing their Reason, that most of the Work was done.’36 Defoe always joins the dramatic with the quotidian in his depiction of power relations. Generous authority, in particular, reaps calculated rewards, exemplifying the benefits of ruling through love rather than fear. His fictional Englishmen are assiduous in immediately fulfilling the most basic patriarchal attentions: they clothe and feed slaves, or fortify them with rum, usually performing all three duties. This apparently minor narrative detail is a gesture that planters routinely feature in their journals. Both the Virginia landowner Robert Byrd and the West Indian planter Matthew Lewis, although separated by 100 years, record their dram-giving, clothing-bestowing gestures in great detail – as well as their slaves’ gratitude.37 In Defoe’s novels, the Englishman’s initial mercy or generosity lays the groundwork for the subordinate’s receptiveness and obedience. A scene of instruction always occurs in Defoe’s novels, a plot point indebted to political philosophy and conduct manuals; it represents the

138

Roxann Wheeler

duty good patriarchs were expected to perform. The instruction stage shows the master making sure his newly receptive underling understands his duty and the appropriate response to that duty. For example, Singleton observes: ‘I took a great deal of Pains to acquaint this Negroe what we intended to do.’ Similarly, when Colonel Jack has been elevated to the position of overseer, he has to find a way to govern the slaves. He chooses instruction and exhortation over physical punishment. Jack tries to educate the slaves to comprehend why they are being shown mercy, and we have the minute details of his exchanges with Mouchat and other slaves over time. Robinson Crusoe also takes Friday’s instruction seriously, not only in teaching him how to fetch items but also in laying a foundation of Christian knowledge. In all three novels, the chosen slave later on persuades others to be compliant. Essentially, a chain of obligation from master to head slave is created. These powerful affections increase industry and profits, but they also reap the master more than monetary reward. The scenes of slaves’ gratitude and fidelity are the most performative moments in Defoe’s novels, and they are in keeping with the passions expected of any dependant.38 That is, although the scenes culminating in gratitude are full of excessive emotions and dramatic gestures and strike us today as wildly improbable, they were precisely calculated to please readers because of their establishment of social order.39 Friday, the Black Prince, and Mouchat all consent to their inferior status in the recognizable language and gestures of the passions. Their extravagant gestures of deference constitute the desired response from dutiful children, charity cases, as well as servants. In Captain Singleton, for example, after the Europeans subdue the local inhabitants, the African Prince makes signs that he will not run away. To emphasize his sincerity, he ties a rope around his neck and gives Singleton one end of it, signifying that if he is not faithful, Singleton may use it even to the point of his own death. In Robinson Crusoe, Friday displays his gratitude for Crusoe’s protection from his enemies in an equally dramatic fashion by alternately kneeling and walking towards Crusoe. In this famous scene, Friday crouches before Crusoe, kisses the ground, lays down his head, and finally places Crusoe’s foot on his head. Colonel Jack offers an even more extravagant performance of a slave’s gratitude in what John Richetti aptly refers to as ‘a drama of mercy.’ In return for Jack’s pleading with their master for his pardon for getting drunk and disorderly, the slave Mouchat claims that he will let Jack kill him, which he unaccountably translates as running errands for Jack. Nevertheless, Mouchat acknowledges his ‘debt’ the only way he

Powerful Affections

139

can, even volunteering to be punished instead of Jack in a subsequent incident. In response to Jack’s (staged) intervention with the master on his behalf, as well as Jack’s providing him with a dram of rum and nourishing food, Mouchat kneels in front of Jack, grabs his legs, and lays his head on the ground. The slave then ‘sobb’d, and cried, like a Child that had been Corrected.’ His tears prompt Jack’s own, and they carry on in this manner for a quarter of an hour! This scene not only establishes the master’s desire to be loved rather than hated or feared by his servants and slaves, but also explicitly reveals the lack of racial specificity at work at this time. Jack’s editorial about human nature and the passion of gratitude repeats Crusoe’s insight about the Caribbean Islanders: ‘Nature is the same, and Reason governs in just Proportions in all creatures; but having never been let Taste what Mercy is, they know not how to act from a Principle of Love.’40 Defoe’s novels repeatedly invoke consent and the other codes of contractual labour to stage the voluntary, and indeed personal, nature of some forms of slavery. Defoe’s novels creatively blend patriarchal and passion theory with Hobbes’s and Locke’s different visions of contract and consent. As Pateman suggests, rather than replacing patriarchal domination, contract theory infiltrated the expression of those traditional relations, providing a new spin on exploitation by emphasizing mutual agreement. In Defoe’s era, when a person consented to perform specified labour and to be governed for the duration of the contract, a master’s legitimate authority over the worker’s time and services was established. This convention explains the eighteenth-century British belief that domestic service was the opposite of the arbitrary tyranny associated with slavery; by representing the most memorable scenes of slavery through the codes of servitude, Defoe’s novels also allow slavery to seem not only familiar but also familial.41

The Endless Debt of Gratitude The performativity of the scenes of slaves’ gratitude and the pleasure that these tableaux offered readers are best explained by a closer examination of the passion of gratitude. Friday, the Black Prince, and Mouchat are not acting outside the boundaries of European passions or in ways that are at this time specifically indebted to racial ideology. Their conforming to the conventional economy of gratitude would be pleasing to readers because it highlights the characters’ respective benevolence and obedience rather than represents incipient racism, regardless of wheth-

140

Roxann Wheeler

er that racism denoted radical difference or infantilism. While gratitude could subsist between any two people, it was a passion particularly associated with inequality, one that bonded them when no natural affection existed (such as that imagined to exist between parent and child). Gratitude sprang from love, arising in response to a patriarch’s mercy, pity, generosity, or protection. Throughout the eighteenth century, gratitude was widely hailed in Britain as ‘one of the principal bonds of human society,’ a bond so strong that most writers believed it could help to preserve the life and possessions of landowners against the passions of the unlanded.42 Showing gratitude was the closest a worker could approach to rewarding a benefactor for a benefit conferred or promised. Once again, the father-child relationship proves helpful in elucidating gratitude. In his Second Treatise on Government, Locke observes that although the parent has an obligation to nourish and raise his offspring, the child has what he calls ‘a perpetual Obligation’ to honour his parent, which contains ‘an inward esteem and reverence’ that should be shown ‘by all outward Expressions.’ Proper gratitude to a parent entailed loud thankfulness and public praise. According to the theory of the passions, gratitude naturally disposed the grateful one to make the benefactor happy by an alacrity to perform duties.43 The contract that gratitude spawned was not short term. As scores of writers observed, the grateful recipient was to consider himself in a permanent relationship to the benefactor.44 Upon perceiving the obligation, the grateful person would consider himself bound ‘in honour and justice, either to repay or acknowledge the debt, by a bond that [could not] be cancelled.’ 45 Gratitude could not be bought with wages; it had to be earned, and its main result was supposed to be a lifelong labour of love. Gratitude, then, was never strongly distinguished from economic relations; it was an economic relationship surcharged with emotional intensity. Because the passions constituted a well-known, visible economy, the patriarch’s earning a subordinate’s love was an easily recognizable, highly coded performance. Veneration and gratitude bespoke love for a master, not fear of him. The loving obedience that Captain Singleton desires from the strange slaves can be fully explained, then, in terms of patriarchy’s theory of the passions, a performance that comments favourably on the nature of his authority. As conduct manuals never tired of urging, a child’s reverence for a parent ‘was nothing like the fear which a slave feels of an absolute and rigorous master; but the humble veneration of one in

Powerful Affections

141

whom the characters of protector, friend, and governour, [were] all united.’ It was a commonplace of eighteenth-century didactic literature that the worst fathers ruled like slave masters.46 Although conduct writers habitually distinguished a father from a slave owner, Defoe – and later defenders of slavery – characteristically conflated the roles of father and slave owner. Robinson Crusoe, for instance, observes about Friday: ‘never Man had a more faithful, loving, sincere servant, than Friday was to me; without Passions, Sullenness or Designs, perfectly oblig’d and engag’d; his very Affections were ty’d to me, like those of a Child to a Father.’47 Similarly, in Colonel Jack, Mouchat’s response to Jack’s leniency is to sob like a child who has been corrected by a loving but firm parent. Despite this common comparison of a servant or slave to a child, neither Friday nor Mouchat should be mistaken for an infantilized slave, which is a much later construction. Their weeping and other grateful affections attest to a subordinate’s love for a good-natured patriarch, not to his immaturity. That they are treated and respond as sons signals their favoured status. Indeed, veneration and gratitude were exalted passions that did not signify servility in a negative way.48 As Schochet notes, the commandment to honour parents underwrote all forms of social obedience: throughout the eighteenth century the master/servant and landlord/tenant relationship was routinely equated with a father/child relationship. With few exceptions, ‘childhood was not something that was eventually outgrown: rather it was enlarged to include the whole of one’s life.’49 To be sure, Defoe’s grateful slaves seem to bespeak nostalgia for an eroding patriarchy, one that admittedly was passing in regard to apprentices and servants in England or, arguably, one that had never existed at all. The novels portray the colonies and imperial outposts as places that fostered a purer form of patriarchy than existed in England. Tellingly, Defoe studiously removes the master-slave relationship from the luxurious temptations of London and market towns; he also purges the narrative of the general weakness of patriarchs, who were not as diligent in their educative and moral functions as Defoe thought desirable. Mostly, grateful slaves conjure up pleasure because the passion occurs in response to a generous master. As the planter Smith encourages Jack in his tale of reforming the plantation through mercy and love: ‘I am delighted with the Story, go on, I expect a pleasant Conclusion.’50 The benevolent authority figure and the grateful slave epitomize the concept of powerful affections.

142

Roxann Wheeler

Trying to understand gratitude apart from the history of the passions perpetuates misunderstanding about the nature of inequality and racism at this time, particularly the intimacy of labour and the expansive notion of love. In his magisterial book Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made, Eugene Genovese argues that nineteenth-century paternalism was an ideological system that both master and slave accepted and manipulated.51 American paternalism’s greatest virtue – and, to his mind, logical flaw – was that it recognized slaves’ humanity through the doctrine of reciprocal obligations. Genovese concludes that slaveholders’ paternalism ‘implies equality,’ an assumption that he borrows from psychologist Octave Mannoni. In Prospero and Caliban, Mannoni theorizes that ‘dependence excludes gratitude.’52 Here, Mannoni clearly is not thinking in a historically precise way but mapping the twentieth century onto the past, and Genovese reiterates the problem. Based on Mannoni’s insight, Genovese anachronistically observes: ‘The slaveholders had committed the grotesque blunder of assuming that it [gratitude] could be forthcoming from a people who had had an acceptance of inequality literally whipped into them ... Their [the slaves’] version of paternalistic dependency stressed reciprocity’ and was used to demand better treatment.53 But, as I have shown, patriarchal theory had always stressed the necessity for a landowner or employer initiating through food, shelter, and clothing, and perhaps a perquisite, the ‘obligation’ and thus the train of reciprocal (but dissimilar) duties. To be sure, this concept is opposed to a notion of basic human rights or equality, but gratitude had always been understood as a passion structured by dependence. Critics who have examined Defoe’s novels have also drawn interesting but misleading conclusions about the function of gratitude. George Boulukos, for example, convincingly argues that in Colonel Jack and later novels about West Indian slavery, the representation of gratitude is ‘the signature of force.’ The problematic, Boulukos indicates, is that ‘to prove their humanity, they must remain obedient slaves.’ In Defoe’s novels, slaves’ gratitude appears ‘extreme and irrational’ because, unlike white characters, slaves ‘are expected to forgo self-interest entirely – out of gratitude.’54 The gratitude of slaves, he urges us to see, is a sign of their racial difference from Englishmen. Boulukos’s insight about racial difference is provocative, but it anticipates a much later nineteenth-century trend when racism penetrated the interiority of subjects. His argument correctly interprets the longterm effect of stories featuring grateful slaves, particularly from the advantage of our perspective in the present day, but it misses an important

Powerful Affections

143

historical point: in the 1720s these fictional characters exemplify the most prized passions of any patriarchal dependant, regardless of race. Slaves’ gratitude testifies in visible, audible, and transparent ways to good governance and a master’s moral rectitude. Historically, we are still in a world where power relations, while understood broadly as systemic, were thought about as interpersonal. Defoe rarely probes the larger issue of subordination, because he and his contemporaries accepted it as natural and desirable. In his analysis of gratitude, Boulukos assumes that eighteenth-century Britons believed that self-interest was the same for all ranks or that selfinterest always translated as independence. Writings on gratitude, in particular, make it clear that a servant’s self-interest was not and, indeed, could not be the same as the landowner’s (if it were, there would be revolution). In this respect, there is no difference between Defoe’s fictional dramatization and the common advice to servants. Servants were counselled to give up their worldly self-interest in the name of social order. For instance, in A Present for Servants, Mayo sermonizes that since God made inequality, it is a natural condition; accordingly, he urges the servant to materialize his duty to God by selecting service that will offer his soul the greatest advantage: ‘Let not the easiest work, or most wages, be the main thing in your Eye.’ This advice is the counterpart to that of writers who urged masters to select servants whose character would lead to household peace rather than choose the most industrious or cheapest. Mayo further admonishes servants: ‘God has not set you as Companions with your Master.’ Despite the grim reminder of servants’ lowly place, Mayo believes that servants have souls equal to the nobility’s and, in fact, worries that masters dehumanize their servants by treating them ‘like ... Horses, to eat, and to drink, and to work.’55 If there is any doubt about the non-racial character of gratitude and its indication of happy subordination at this time, one need only consult Defoe’s Roxana (who reflects on her gratitude to her wealthy and generous lovers) or Samuel Richardson’s Pamela. Appearing countless times in the final 200 pages of the novel, the drama of gratitude is the servant Pamela’s primary response to the landowner Mr B’s relinquishing his design to rape her. Pamela’s gratitude is activated, however, only by his honourable behaviour, his promise to marry her, and his gifts of land, money, and clothing to her parents and herself. In Pamela’s words, Mr B’s actions confer a responsibility on her to give something back to him: ‘If he intends honour to me, the least I can shew on my part, is, that I have gratitude, and that my heart is free; so that I can return love and duty for

144

Roxann Wheeler

it.’56 Her grateful behaviour is evident in her voluntary return to her former prison and in the dozens of times that she throws herself at Mr B’s feet and embraces his knees, a characteristic posture of Defoe’s grateful slaves. Gratitude becomes most particularly associated with slaves in later literature written about the West Indies. In promoting this paradigm in which consent and contract operate without wages, Defoe (and Richardson) dwells on the role of the subordinate’s grateful passions and the master’s desire for love. Defoe’s interest in the colonial drama of generosity and gratitude that he stages departs, not from the ideal parent-child or master-servant relationship, but from their starker reality (evidence of which occurs in parenthetical statements and digressions in conduct book literature as often as it does in court records). Because patriarchal governance in the family shared a language with the management of the plantation, it was extremely difficult for writers to expose the specific horrors faced by slaves. The most effective tools for masking the particular brutalities of slavery came from a patriarchy infused with the notion of affectionate passions and revitalized through the language of contract. Clearly, slavery and colonialism gave new life to patriarchal ideology, and gratitude continued to be a meaningful European desire through most twentieth-century decolonization struggles in Asia and Africa.57 But it is too simple to claim that gratitude was once a concept that structured patriarchal ideals of governance and then became a concept indexing racial difference. A study of gratitude reminds us that the representation of labour relations evinces a slow transition from a world structured by patriarchy to a world also saturated by capitalism. J.S. Mill calls the vision of class relations that paternalism provides ‘seductive.’ The notion of seduction helps to explain the longevity of the powerful concept of gratitude: ‘Though the facts of [paternalism] have no prototype in the past, the feelings have. In them lies all that there is of reality in the conception.’58 Even in the heyday of industrial capitalism, as Marx suggests, gratitude is alive and well as a concept. In a revealing passage about the common sense of the 1830s, Marx cites the irritating blindness of political economists who were still including gratitude in their theories of labour and wages.59 Mill and Marx are helpful in showing that their own era, much less Defoe’s, had not yet emotionally, logically, or even legally disentangled a concept of free labour from practices of unfree labour. Nor had this world relinquished an investment in the notion that there was affectionate duty or labours of love within the home, plantation, or factory. If class relations long remained uneasily articulated to patriar-

Powerful Affections

145

chy, so did racial ideology. Emotional life was not as quickly subject to racialization as was the body’s exterior. In trying to understand the history of eighteenth-century racial ideology, it is crucial to comprehend its indebtedness to the distinctions of rank and the emotional nature of power relations.

NOTES 1 Defoe, Captain Singleton [1720] (London: Oxford University Press, 1969), 54. 2 Cissie Fairchilds, Domestic Enemies: Servants and their Masters in Old Regime France (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984) characterizes the long historical change in servitude as a contrast between the medieval concept of service, in which servants were likely to be family members or the children of peers, to a concept of duty and obedience in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, to a concept of love in the eighteenth century (5–6). 3 Novak, Economics and the Fiction of Daniel Defoe, English Studies 24 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1962), 36–7. 4 Specifically, Novak argues that ‘the answer to the problem of morality in Defoe’s fiction may be found in his allegiance to the laws of nature’ [or what is called ‘a universal standard of reason’ superior to the positive laws of different countries (3)] (2). See also Novak, Defoe and The Nature of Man (London: Oxford University Press, 1963), 135–7 on the passions in general. 5 Robert Filmer, Patriarcha and Other Political Works, edited by Peter Laslett (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1949), 96. Ideally, the smooth functioning of patriarchy and the distinctions of rank relied on the power of example rather than on custom, force, or the male monopoly on every economic, political, and cultural institution. Men were supposed to be self-monitoring and to curb their appetites, amending their passions and humours with religion at best and philosophy at least. 6 [R. Mayo], A Present for Servants, from their Ministers, Masters, or Other Friends, Especially in Country Parishes (London: T. Warren, 1693), 6. Mayo’s claims, along with many of Hobbes’s and Locke’s, are indebted (but not identical in meaning) to Aristotle, The Politics, edited by Stephen Everson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). On the concept of a natural ruler and subject, Aristotle theorizes: ‘For that which can foresee by the exercise of mind is by nature lord and master, and that which can with its body give effect to such foresight is a subject, and by nature a slave; hence master and slave have the same interest’ (2).

146

Roxann Wheeler

7 William Fleetwood, The Relative Duties of Parents and Children, Husbands and Wives, Masters and Servants (London: Charles Harper, 1705), 384–5. 8 Maza, Servants and Masters in Eighteenth-Century France (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983), 15–16. 9 Fleetwood, Relative Duties, 352, provides a clear sense of the contractual logic: ‘A Servant, when he enters into Service, gives up his time and Labour by agreement, to his Master, in consideration of what Wages, Keeping, and Protection he expects from him.’ He notes that a contract may be ‘either suppos’d in Nature and Reason, or actually agreed upon’ (394). 10 Gordon Schochet, Patriarchalism in Political Thought: The Authoritarian Family and Political Speculation and Attitudes, Especially in Seventeenth-Century England (New York: Basic Books, 1975), 81. As Hobbes succinctly states, ‘to obey, is to Honour,’ explaining that nobody obeys another unless that person can either provide help or inflict harm. See Leviathan [1651], edited by Richard Tuck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 64. 11 Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988), chap. 3, especially 40–8. Hobbes reasons that the paternal contract involves either declared or tacit consent, which is established through actions or silence (Leviathan, 94). In a passage that illuminates the situation of Friday and the Black Prince, Hobbes claims that a slave held captive has no obligation to his captor but one: ‘that being taken, hath corporall liberty allowed him; and upon promise not to run away, nor do violence to his Master, is trusted by him.’ Hobbes concludes: ‘It is not therefore the Victory, that giveth the right of Dominion over the Vanquished, but his own Covenant’ (141). For Locke, paternal and political power is even more sharply distinguished; see John Locke, Two Treatises of Government [1690], edited by Peter Laslett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960), 196, 40. Unlike that of Hobbes, Locke’s vision of mutual consent, or what has been defined as equality in contract, does not mean what we think: equality means being kind and not harming others. Like his contemporaries, Locke believed that inequality among men arose from differences in age, virtue, birth, or beauty. 12 See Novak, Nature of Man, 14–15; Carol Kay, Political Constructions: Defoe, Richardson, and Sterne in Relation to Hobbes, Hume, and Burke (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), 66–7; and Ian Bell, ‘King Crusoe: Locke’s Political Theory in Robinson Crusoe,’ English Studies 69 (1988), 27–36, all have noted the way that Defoe freely culls from Locke and Hobbes and their intellectual influences, as it suited his needs. Stephen Zelnick, ‘Ideology as Narrative: Critical Approaches to Robinson Crusoe,’ Bucknell Review 27 (1982), 79–101,

Powerful Affections

13 14

15 16

17

18 19

147

argues that Defoe’s situating slavery within a notion of contract is one of the novel’s key ideological strategies (94). Schochet, Patriarchalism, 6–7. Pateman, Sexual Contract, 58. Robert Steinfeld, The Invention of Free Labour: The Employment Relation in English and American Law and Culture, 1350–1870 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), distinguishes between conventional patriarchal language and the newer language of possessive individualism associated with contract theory; he notes that the concepts of superior/inferior and governor/governed were translated into notions of independence/dependence and liberty/domination (78–9). Steinfeld argues: ‘The property that masters had enjoyed for centuries in the labour of servants now began to be reimagined as the product of a voluntary transaction between two autonomous individuals, one of whom traded away to the other the property in his own labour for wages and other compensation ... the logic of early modern possessive individualism actually gave unfree labour new life’ (80). Natural History of the Passions (London: T.N., 1674), 91. Kay, Political Constructions, 26. Also see Francis Hutcheson, An Essay on the Nature and Conduct of the Passions and Affections [1728; 3rd ed. 1742], edited by Paul McReynolds (Gainesville, FL: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, 1969), vi. Despite reference to a divine mandate for empowering men and the upper ranks over all others, Defoe’s contemporaries frequently found it necessary to explain the benefits of inequality. Inequality, they believed, arose from the external advantages of birth or acquired rank, education, or geographical happenstance, and, of course, from whether one was born male or female. Men were generally attributed greater strength, of both body and mind, to explain their pre-eminence over women. See Richard Cumberland, A Treatise of the Laws of Nature (London: R. Phillips, 1726), 347. And so it was in the case of other subordinates. In a characteristic hedge between nature and nurture, one writer explains that beings of superior rank either have powers and faculties that inferiors lack, or have more of the same powers and faculties. See John Clarke, An Enquiry into the Cause and Origin of Moral Evil, Vol. 3: A Defence of Natural and Revealed Religion: Being a Collection of the Sermons Preached at the Lecture Founded by the Honourable Robert Boyle, Esq., 3 vols (London: D. Midwinter et al., 1739), 170. J.F. Senault, The Use of Passions, translated by Henry, Earl of Monmouth (London: J.L. and Humphrey Mosely, 1649), 179. Natural History of the Passions, 114–23 [mispaginated as 132].

148

Roxann Wheeler

20 [Mayo], A Present for Servants, 53. 21 The eighteenth-century argument that humans had an innate moral sense that governed behaviour departed from the perspective of Hobbes, Mandeville, and even Locke. As Novak demonstrates, Defoe, too, eschews the concept of an innate moral sense; Defoe assumes that ‘Corruption, not Virtue, is natural to man’ (Nature of Man, 11). 22 Fleetwood, Relative Duties, 384. Robert Dodsley, The Footman’s Friendly Advice to His Brethren of the Livery (Dodsley’s Servitude) (London: T. Worrall, 1729) in Romances and Narratives by Daniel Defoe, edited by George Aitken, Vol. 11 (London: J.M. Dent, 1895), rebuts Defoe’s pamphlet Everybody’s Business is Nobody’s Business. Dodsley felt it necessary to remind masters that servants partook of humanity – just as their employers did. It is notable that Dodsley uses the same rhetorical stance that anti-slave trade activists will use several decades later to characterize slaves. English servants, Dodsley urges, are ‘Men, endued with the same Faculties, Passions, Appetites, and Desires, with themselves; and not as Slaves or Beasts of Burthen, cut out merely for Servitude and incapable of any Thing in the World, but to know what they are commanded, and how to obey’ (6). Dodsley’s criticism is a typical allegation against patriarchal tyranny and the too slender division the upper ranks routinely made between slavery and servitude. 23 Steinfeld, Invention of Free Labour, 103, 104. 24 John Barnard, A Present for an Apprentice: or, a Sure Guide to Gain Both Esteem and an Estate, 2nd ed. (London: T. Cooper, 1740), 57. The logic of patriarchal theory and the passions was clear: through their actions, patriarchs were largely responsible for eliciting the affectionate or fearful passions of their subordinates, a position that Defoe supports in his placing the blame for a family’s problems on the deficiencies of the head of the family. See Paula Backscheider, Daniel Defoe: His Life (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 424. That is, a bad servant was the result of a bad master, a truism that plays, moral essays, and novels trumpeted. The historical record, however, is equally clear that, in practice, it was mainly servants who were blamed for their own faults, as if they were fully self-determining, autonomous agents. 25 Barnard, Present for an Apprentice, 59. 26 Maza, Servants and Masters, 15; Fleetwood, Relative Duties, 397. 27 Peter Earle, The World of Defoe (New York: Atheneum, 1977), 173; see 170–9 for a good general discussion of Defoe’s interest in servants. Some cultural historians argue further that the institution of regular wages resulted in a historical shift in which servants and apprentices were considered less as family members and more as strangers or even hostile outsiders (Fairchilds

Powerful Affections

28

29

30 31 32 33 34

35

36 37

149

17). Backscheider, in Daniel Defoe, claims that Defoe espoused the ‘somewhat old-fashioned but far from unusual opinion that servants should be “adopted children” in the household who owed their masters and mistresses gratitude and faithful service’ (507). Hill, ‘Pottage for Freeborn Englishmen: Attitudes to Wage Labour in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,’ in Socialism, Capitalism, and Economic Growth, ed. C.H. Feinstein, 338–50 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967), 338; see also 339 and 341. In The Complete English Tradesman, Defoe notes that employers were more apt to shun the supervision of their shops, treating the high premiums as a type of insurance that freed them from their traditional duties to mind their own businesses (5th ed., 2 vols. [1726] (London: Charles Rivington, 1741), 185, 189, 191). Ibid., 1.8–11. Richard Steele, Spectator 107, Tuesday, 3 July 1711; repr. in The Spectator, ed. Daniel Bond (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), 1:444–5. Fleetwood, Relative Duties, 384; Barnard, Present for an Apprentice, 62. E.P. Thompson, Customs in Common (New York: New Press, 1993), 43. Defoe, Everybody’s Business is Nobody’s Business, in Romances and Narratives by Daniel Defoe, edited by George Aitken (London: J.M. Dent, 1895), 11:172. Defoe’s position may be compared to John Barnard’s recommendation in Present for an Apprentice that servants were so much bother, so ungrateful, and so demanding that it was better to do without them if possible (60). Even a cursory reading of colonial documents like Captain Dampier’s Voyages indicates the economic usefulness of imagining a colonial world working through gratitude and not fear. In A Collection of Voyages in Four Volumes (London: James and John Knapton, 1729), Dampier’s account has a ring of truth that Defoe’s novels do not in regard to the fact that masters and overseers relied on adversaries to help them. Dampier recounts an arduous journey from the South Seas to the North Sea undertaken by dozens of Europeans, Spanish Indians, Moskito Indians, as well as five slaves captured in the South Seas. The Europeans are continually on edge, posting two armed men to watch at night lest the slaves turn on them. Dampier fears the slaves ‘might have knockt [them] on the Head while [they] slept’ (1:14). Other than the fear of being attacked for subjugating men against their will, Dampier notes that, over a period of ten days in the bush, all the slaves ran away (1:16, 17, 20). Defoe, Colonel Jack [1723], 5th ed. (London: J. Applebee 1739), 141, 147. Food, clothing, as well as instruction were basic patriarchal duties crucial to winning the consent of a subordinate in Hobbes’s and Locke’s philosophy.

150

38

39

40 41

42 43

44

45 46

Roxann Wheeler

For instance, see Locke, Two Treatises, 331; on education. Robert Byrd, London Diary, 1717–21, quoted in Kathleen Brown, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 357. See also Matthew Lewis, Journal of a West India Proprietor (London: John Murray, 1834), especially 80, 89, 125, 126, 191, 337, and 382 on his gifts of clothing and rum to slaves. For insightful studies of gratitude and Defoe’s writing, see Novak, Defoe and The Nature of Man, chap. 5, which is devoted entirely to gratitude, especially 113–21; Kay, Political Constructions, 75–92, especially 77–88; and George Boulukos, ‘Daniel Defoe’s Colonel Jack, Grateful Slaves, and Racial Difference,’ ELH 68 (2001), 615–31. Often the plot device of the language gap seems to require such dramatic action on the part of the non-Europeans, but there is much more political significance to these gestures steeped in the distinction of ranks. Defoe, Captain Singleton, 61; John Richetti, Defoe’s Narratives (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 170; Defoe, Colonel Jack, 142, 146. Steinfeld, Invention of Free Labour, 99–100. It is precisely this liberty of verbal or written consent, in addition to rights in personal property, that distinguishes servants from slaves in a world where negative views of manual labour, deplorable work conditions, and harsh physical treatment often didn’t distinguish between them in fact. Steinfeld develops this line of thinking with legal and ideological continuity and change in mind; see 97–103, especially 99. See, for instance, Natural History of the Passions, 136; Cumberland, Treatise, 88; and Steele, Spectator 107. Locke, Two Treatises, 329. See also The Mirror of Human Nature. Wherein Are Exhibited Analytical Definitions of the Natural and Moral Faculties, Affections, and Passions (London: J. Bew, 1775), 12, 27. In Nature of Man, Novak connects the novels’ depiction of gratitude to Defoe’s political pamphlet The Evident Approach of a War (1727), in which he claims: ‘GRATITUDE never dyes, and Obligation never ceases; nothing can wear it out of the Mind, where the Mind is once possess’d with Principles of Honour, of Religion, and of Justice: A Man of Honour can no more be Ingrate, than a man of Honesty can Steal’ (115). Thomas Cogan, A Philosophical Treatise on the Passions [1800]. From the Last London Edition (Boston: Wells and Lilly, 1821), 145. James Foster, Discourse on All the Principal Branches of Natural Religion and Social Virtue, 2 vols (London, 1752), 2:131. Fleetwood, in Relative Duties, observes that constantly severe fathers produced in their children ‘a slavish and a disingenuous fear of their Parents. They look upon them as their Tyrants,

Powerful Affections

47 48

49

50 51 52

53 54 55 56 57

151

and dread them, as the Slaves do those that punish them; and in-deed a severe and never-pleased Parent, is no better than a little Tyrant, a constant terror to his People’ (97). The father-son relationship was in most respects the ideal patriarchal bond. It was ideal because children were considered natural extensions of the parents’ self-interest, and the child’s youth was supposed to solicit the patience, instruction, and gentleness of the parent. Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, 209. See A Dissertation on the Law of Nature: Its Obligation, Promulgation, and Observance (London: R. Phillips, 1727), appended to Cumberland, Treatise. Religion is the reference point for the claim that a person who responds to authority merely through the notion of reward or punishment is in a servile state; a person who responds to authority because he or she is conscious of the virtue of so doing is in a higher state (67). Schochet, Patriarchalism, 15, 57. John Stuart Mill, Principles of Political Economy [1848] (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), addresses the persistence of the parent/child metaphor for class relations. He argues that while the deference of the labouring classes to those of superior ability (of intellect or knowledge) is natural, the difference that the modern era makes is that deference will now be selectively bestowed on only the members of the upper class who have earned it (138). Defoe, Colonel Jack, 141. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made [1972] (New York: Vintage 1976), 91. Mannoni, Prospero and Caliban: The Psychology of Colonization, 2nd ed. (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1966), 44. Using as his main example a common misunderstanding between the people of Madagascar and French administrators in the twentieth century, Mannoni explains the European interpretation of gratitude: ‘True gratitude seems to be an attempt to preserve a balance between two feelings which at first sight seem contradictory: on the one hand the feeling that one is very much indebted, and on the other the feeling that one is not indebted at all. It implies a rejection of dependence and yet at the same time the preservation of an image of dependence based on free will’ (47). Genovese, Roll, Jordan, 146. Boulukos, ‘Grateful Slaves,’ 625, 622, 624. Mayo, A Present for Servants, 25, 29, 6. Richardson, Pamela [1801], 3rd edited by Peter Sabor (London: Penguin Books, 1985), 288. Its elusiveness is perhaps its primary characteristic. In his introduction to Mannoni’s Prospero, Philip Mason, a former colonial administrator in India,

152

Roxann Wheeler

observes that ‘No one can have spent long among Europeans either in India before partition, or to-day, in East, Central, or South Africa without hearing some such phrase as “the natives don’t know what gratitude means”’ (9). 58 Mill, Political Economy, 133. 59 Indexed under the heading ‘Absurdities,’ the following passage marks the longevity of gratitude as a central concept even within political economy. Marx implies that industrial capitalism should have entirely eradicated the notion of gratitude from issues of labour: ‘In the treatises, therefore, of economists of the stamp of MacCulloch, Ure, Senior, and tutti quanti [writers on wages, manufacturers, and political economy of the 1830s], we may read upon one page, that the labourer owes a debt of gratitude to capital for developing his productiveness, the next page, that he must prove his gratitude by working in the future for 15 hours instead of 10. The object of all development of the productiveness of labour, within the limits of capitalist production, is to shorten that part of the working day, during which the workman must labour for his own benefit, and by that very shortening, to lengthen the other part of the day, during which he is at liberty to work gratis for the capitalist.’ Capital [1867], edited by Frederick Engels (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 1906), 352.

chapter seven

Defoe’s ‘Black Prince’: Elitism, Capitalism, and Cultural Difference LAURA BROWN

The African section of Daniel Defoe’s novel Captain Singleton (1720) provides us with a distinctive example of the imaginative encounter with cultural difference in eighteenth-century prose fiction. I would like to explore that example here, and use it as a means of considering the ways in which an alien culture is accommodated to the English imagination in this period, the relationship of that accommodation to class difference, its implication in assumptions about an expanding capitalist economy, and its role in the formation of primitivist Enlightenment notions of the noble savage. First of all, Defoe’s novel confronts the issue of representing an alien culture by naturalizing the central African character – that is, by representing him as a European ‘prince,’ a practice typical of a group of eighteenth-century English engagements with cultural difference. On the other hand, this elite African is made into a bourgeois hero of sorts through his insertion into a system of capitalist exchange, in Defoe’s detailed representation of trade relations between the Europeans and the Africans. The consequence of these two different approaches to alterity is a contradiction that gives us an insight into the ideological uses of primitivism. I am going to argue, then, that eighteenth-century primitivism can be understood through a critique of Defoe’s treatment of Africa and the tension in that treatment between elitism and capitalism – or, in short, that the idea of the ‘noble savage’ has a particular and powerful ideological function.1 Defoe’s Captain Bob, the protagonist of Captain Singleton, is guided in his trek across Africa by an indigenous character whom he recruits to assist the European travellers when they find they cannot manage the buffalo that the Africans use as beasts of burden. Having no baggage carriers, Captain Bob makes the following proposal: ‘[we can] quarrel

154

Laura Brown

with some of the Negro Natives, take ten or twelve of them Prisoners, and binding them as Slaves, cause them to travel with us, and make them carry our Baggage.’2 Captain Bob’s plan is found ‘very convenient’ (51), and at a rather trivial instigation, the Europeans fire upon the Africans, killing and wounding many of them, and producing a psychological impact that celebrates the awful effect of European weapons technology – a familiar trope of contact literature: ‘when we came up to the Field of Battle, we saw a great Number of Bodies lying upon the Ground, many more than we could suppose were killed or wounded, nay more than we had Bullets in our Pieces when we fired; ... at length, we found ... that they were frighted out of all manner of Sense; ... several of those that were really dead, were frighted to Death, and had no Wound about them’ (53). The Europeans take sixty ‘lusty young Fellows’ as slaves (54), one of whom, Captain Bob notices, is treated with special respect by his peers. This is the Black Prince, ‘son of one of their Kings’ (57), who has been shot in the arm and hip (54) and originally was to be left to die: ‘we were once going to turn him away, and let him die; and if we had, he would have died indeed in a few Days more’ (57). However, planning to make him their slave driver, Captain Bob has his wounds treated and receives in return an oath of friendship, to which the Black Prince adheres loyally for the rest of the Europeans’ travels in Africa. The Black Prince proceeds to take the expedition in hand, managing the baggage, providing beasts of burden and provisions, and offering expert guidance in the progress of the journey. Always designated by his noble name, the Black Prince appears throughout the African section of the novel, arranging comfortable tents for the travellers when they cross the desert, interceding with the wildlife they encounter, lighting burning brands in the night to protect their camp from the wild beasts, even making a pet of a young leopard and staging an adventure with a ‘vast great Crocodile’ (88), and, in one of his tours of inspection in the countryside, discovering gold in a riverbed. In other words, the Black Prince far exceeds the minimal status of slave driver for which Captain Bob originally designed him and performs, instead, the role of facilitator of all the travellers’ projects; he is a kind of proto safari guide and thus stands as an intermediate figure, interceding between the Europeans and the continent of Africa itself. The accounts of the Black Prince’s demeanor function to remove him from the category of difference constituted by the other Africans and the territories and creatures of the continent and to propel him towards a familiar and European identity, which at some points he seems even

Defoe’s ‘Black Prince’

155

to exemplify. The other Africans are variously, and very conventionally, described as ‘Savages ... barbarous and brutish to the last Degree’ (48), ‘fierce, revengeful and treacherous’ (54), and incapable of learning civilized language, or perhaps even of human communication (48). These peoples pose a constant danger to the European travellers; they are aligned in this respect with the threatening landscape and wild animals against which the novel’s story of adventure and survival is placed. At some points, in fact, the Africans are rhetorically indistinguishable from the landscape of the continent; one part of the country, for instance, is described as ‘well grown with Trees, and spread with Rivers and Brooks, and tolerable well with Inhabitants’ (73). Not only is the Africans’ behaviour animal-like, eating their meat raw and, after a strenuous march, lying down and ‘pant[ing], like Creatures that had been push’d beyond their Strength’ (81), but their speech is consistently connected with the wild noises the Europeans encounter in the wilderness around their campsite, when they ‘hear the Wolves howl, the Lions bellow, and a great many wild Asses braying, and other ugly Noises’ that they ‘did not understand’ (81). When the travellers shoot at one of these creatures, an ‘old King’ lion, the Africans ‘raise a hideous Roar, which, as if they had called for Help, brought down a prodigious Number of Lions, and other furious Creatures, [the travellers knew] not what ... for [they] could not see them; but their [sic] was a Noise and Yelling, and Howling, and all sort of such Wilderness Musick on every Side ... as if all the Beasts of the Desart were assembled to devour’ (90). The Black Prince’s own people provide in the novel an early prototype for this ‘Wilderness Musick’ when they are fired upon, and they ‘set up the horridest Yell, or Howling, partly raised by those that were wounded, and partly by those that pitied and condoled the Bodies they saw lye dead’; he ‘never heard any thing like ... before or since’ (53), or when the Europeans promise, once the Africans are enslaved, not to kill or starve them, and ‘all the Prisoners fell flat on the Ground, and rising up again made the oddest, wildest Cries ... ever ... heard’ (61). This ‘Wilderness Musick’ – animal and human – is a signal of difference from a European or Christian norm. Hearing these ‘wild ... Cries’ even precipitates a religious epiphany for Captain Bob, an insight that anticipates his later conversion and that matches the conversions of Defoe’s other spiritual autobiographers from Robinson Crusoe to Roxana; ‘almost [in] Tears,’ Captain Bob feels a ‘Qualm’ ‘in considering how happy it was’ that he ‘was not born among such Creatures as these, and was not so stupidly ignorant and barbarous’ (61).

156

Laura Brown

The Black Prince, on the other hand, is systematically distinguished from the other Africans. He is a ‘tall, well-shap’d, handsom Fellow’ (57), whose physical description implies a conformity to a European notion of beauty. In fact, this allusion to his handsome shape is a telegraphic version of Aphra Behn’s account of Oroonoko, the period’s best-known noble African, who is ‘pretty tall, but of a Shape the most exact that can be fancy’d: The most famous Statuary cou’d not form the Figure of a Man more admirably turn’d from Head to Foot ... The whole Proportion and Air of his Face [is] so noble, and exactly form’d, that, bating his colour, there cou’d be nothing in Nature more beautiful, agreeable and handsome.’3 Again, unlike other Africans, the Black Prince quickly learns to communicate with the Europeans, a talent that the narrator highlights: ‘I took a great deal of Pains to acquaint this Negroe what we intended to do, and what Use we intended to make of his Men; and particularly, to teach him the Meaning of what we said: Especially to teach him some Words, such as Yes and No, and what they meant, and to innure him to our Way of Talking, and he was very willing and apt to learn any thing I taught him’ (59). Directly after his recruitment, we hear him answering ‘Ce Seignior, or, Yes Sir’ to the Europeans’ demands (60). Indeed, so apt is his command of European discourse that in the process of the journey he is represented as giving the travellers ‘Counsel’ and advice of a complex sort, such that, as the narrator says, they ‘easily knew what he meant’ and ‘all approv’d [his] Advice’ (82). The Black Prince manifests his proximity to the Europeans in other ways as well. He eats in the European way: ‘We began to prevail with our Prince to eat his Meat drest our Way, after which, his Men were prevailed with by his Example, but before that, they eat most of the Flesh they had quite raw’ (70). Even in their first encounter, Captain Bob sees ‘evident Signs of an honourable just Principle in him’ (62), in contrast to the treachery with which all other Africans are stereotyped. In fact, the Black Prince is seen to be at least as loyal as Europeans themselves. Captain Bob observes, ‘never was Christian more punctual to an Oath, than he was to this, for he was a sworn Servant to us for many a weary Month after that’ (58). In all these cases, we can see the various rhetorical means by which the Black Prince is detached from the category of alterity – represented by the African continent – and brought into the circle of the civilized, the Christian, the comprehensible, and the familiar. The core of this narrative’s encounter with cultural difference, however, arises with the representation of a proto-colonialist economy that

Defoe’s ‘Black Prince’

157

the Europeans sponsor through the exchange of items. From their first contacts with indigenous peoples in Madagascar until the moment of their return home from the Gold Coast, the travellers exploit a form of exchange that confirms their status as civilized and familiar and defines the Africans as utterly alien and barbaric. At their earliest meeting with indigenous peoples, just after being set ashore on the island, they are not surprised to learn that the ‘Natives,’ who bring them food and drink, ‘did not design to give it away, but to sell’ (22). The travellers’ dilemma is described with especial poignancy by the narrator: We were now at a great Loss; the Natives were civil enough to us ... and they brought down to us Victuals in Abundance, Cattel, Fowls, Herbs, Roots, but we were in the utmost Confusion on our Side; for we had nothing to buy with, or exchange for; and as to giving us things for nothing, they had no Notion of that again. As to our Money, it was meer Trash to them, they had no Value for it; so that we were in a fair Way to be starved. Had we had but some Toys and Trinckets, Brass Chains, Baubles, Glass Beads, or in a Word, the veriest Trifles that a Ship Loading would not have been worth the Freight, we might have bought Cattel and Provisions enough for an Army, or to Victual a Fleet of Men of War, but for Gold or Silver we could get nothing. (27)

Captain Bob’s proposed solution, not surprisingly, is to ‘fall ... upon them with ... Fire Arms; and take ... all the Cattel from them’ (27). On this occasion, however, his adventurist spirit is countered by the alternative of barter, and colonial exploitation shifts its mode from violence to trade. Among their group was an ingenious ‘cutler’ or ‘Artificer’ who took some ‘Pieces of Eight’ and beat ‘them out with a Hammer upon a Stone, till they were very broad and thin, then he cut them out into the Shape of Birds and Beasts: he made little Chains of them for Bracelets and Necklaces, and turn’d them into so many Devices, of his own Head, that it is hardly to be exprest’ (28). Though the ‘Artificer’ is given full and individual credit here for inventing a means of exchange that ultimately saves the Europeans’ lives, in fact these items are the staple goods of an economic theory that was widely current in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, in which the African trade was understood as an exploitative exchange of cheap English manufactured goods for gold. Defoe describes his understanding of this system in detail in A Plan of the English Commerce (1728), a work that appeared in the same decade

158

Laura Brown

as Captain Singleton and in which his language comes close to the description of the Artificer’s inventions in the novel: ‘The Trade carried on [in Africa], whether by the English, or other European Nations, consists in but three capital Articles, viz. Slaves, Teeth, and Gold; a very gainful and advantageous Commerce, especially as it was once carried on, when these were all purchas’d at low Rates from the Savages; and even those low Rates paid in Trifles, and Toys, such as Knives and Siffars, Kettles and Clouts, Glass Beads, and Cowries, Things of the smallest Value, and as we may say next to nothing ... that gainful Commerce ... carried out the meanest of all Exportations, and brought home the richest.’4 In this text, Defoe attacks contemporary European traders for ‘instruct[ing] the Savages in the Value of their own Goods, and inform[ing] them of the Cheapness of [their] own,’ a practice that in his mind has caused the decline of the African trade to ‘a Kind of Rubbish’ from a commerce ‘once superior to all the Trades in the World.’5 In 1709 in the Review, Defoe had described the African trade as ‘in its Degree the most profitable Trade in this Nation,’ because it was based on the exchange of ‘Baubles.’6 And in 1712, in another defence of the Royal African Company, he extolled the trade for this same reason: ‘It would be writing a Panegyrick on the African-Trade to enumerate the Trifles and Baubles that Purchase Gold Dust, Ivory, and Slaves. – The Truth is, the Payment on our side is hardly worth naming, unless Glass Beads, Cowries, and Trinkets are of moment.’7 Throughout his writings on Africa and on trade, Defoe shows himself to be vividly aware of the difference in trading practices between Europe and West Africa and eagerly supportive of the exploitation of that difference, which he repeatedly uses to demonstrate the inferiority of the continent and its people. He says, ‘[the Africans] have the Gold, but know not the Value of it ... They let other Nations fetch that little they find from them, and pay them in Beads and Baubles; and how do we esteem the People of Afric, with all their Gold, but as a poor heap of Useless Creatures, fit to be Bubbl’d, and made Slaves to the rest of the World.’8 In the African trade, according to Defoe, the Europeans ‘buy the country for Trash, and the People for Trumpery,’ and this construction of economic inferiority justifies and even explains the institution of slavery.9 Defoe’s account of this system of exchange based on European ‘Baubles’ was prominent in accounts of the African trade in the decades prior to the publication of Captain Singleton, even though the actual experiences of traders and of the Royal African Company ran counter to this simplistic notion. As Defoe’s own account in the Plan of the English Commerce

Defoe’s ‘Black Prince’

159

demonstrates, the theory lost most of its credibility and currency in the first part of the eighteenth century, as the complexities, sophistication, and variability of trade relations with Africans and with different regions of the continent became impossible to ignore and, especially, as slaves replaced gold as the pre-eminent European trade objective. Captain Singleton anachronistically records the earlier focus on the ‘Baubles,’ in part, perhaps, as a representation of the slightly earlier chronological setting of the novel – though that temporal distance is not highlighted in the book – but also as a necessary structure for the representation of cultural difference. The baubles appear in this novel, specifically, consistently, and exclusively to define a category of difference from the European, and to apply a system of evaluation to that difference. The trinkets that the Artificer invents as a means of exchange, in the crisis of the Europeans’ initial failure to insert themselves into the African economy, bring immediate results. At the Europeans’ next encounter with the natives: We try’d the Effect of his Ingenuity ... [and] were surprized to see the Folly of the poor People. For a little Bit of Silver cut out in the Shape of a Bird, we had two Cows; and, which was our Loss, if it had been in Brass, it had been still of more Value. For one of the Bracelets made of Chain-work, we had as much Provision of several Sorts, as would fairly have been worth in England, Fifteen or Sixteen Pounds; and so of all the rest. Thus, that which when it was in Coin was not worth Six-pence to us, when thus converted into Toys and Trifles, was worth an Hundred Times its real Value, and purchased for us any thing we had Occasion for. (28)

‘Real Value’ refers to the coin’s exchange value as European specie, and Defoe elaborates upon contemporary baubles theory by making the raw material of the baubles actual European coin, so as to emphasize the economic difference at stake by highlighting the uselessness of money for the travellers. The crucial issue here, of course, is the difference between a barter and a money economy and specifically the Europeans’ equation of exchange value with civilization and humanity, and use value with folly and barbarism. Here and throughout the African section of the novel, Defoe is quite insistent upon the Africans’ ‘Folly’ in participating in this form of barter. A later instance again juxtaposes the exchange value of European coinage with the Africans’ different valuation of the bauble, useful to them as personal decoration, at the point when the travellers strike gold:

160

Laura Brown

All the while we were busy washing Gold Dust out of the Rivers, and our Negroes the like, our ingenious Cutler was hammering and cutting, and he was grown so dexterous by Use, that he formed all Manner of Images. He cut out Elephants, Tygers, Civet Cats, Ostriches, Eagles, Cranes, Fowls, Fishes, and indeed whatever he pleased, in thin Plates of hammer’d Gold, for his Silver and Iron was almost all gone ... [a King from a nearby town] was very much taken with our Workman’s Toys, he sold him an Elephant cut out of a Gold Plate as thin as a Six-pence, at an extravagant Rate. He was so much taken with it, that he would not be quiet till he had given him almost a Handful of Gold Dust, as they call it. I suppose it might weigh three Quarters of a Pound; the Piece of Gold that the Elephant was made of, might be about the Weight of a Pistole, rather less than more. (130)

In these accounts of barter, Defoe persistently weighs the bauble against the coin, use value against exchange value, and he records not only the failure of the Africans to understand the exchange value of European coinage, but their inability to assign the accepted European ranking to the metals from which the Artificer produces these baubles, their inability, in other words, to appreciate the universal equivalency of gold or silver as potential forms of exchange value. Later in the journey: ‘our Artificer shewed them some of his Trinkets that he had made, some of Iron, some of Silver, but none of Gold: They had so much Judgment to chuse that of Silver before the Iron, but when we shewed them some Gold, we found they did not value it so much as either of the other’ (107). In short, the Africans, standing outside the system of exchange value, lack even the fundamental notion of universal equivalency, which in Europe places gold and then silver above brass and iron. Thus, Defoe demonstrates their reprehensible failure of judgment in ranking brass higher than silver and gold below both silver and iron. But despite these accusations of simple inferiority, Defoe’s text is explicitly conscious of the relativity of the European economic system, or any system founded in exchange value. When the travellers come upon an Englishman isolated in the inaccessible interior of the continent with no connection to the coastal trading centres, this character’s litany of complaints emphasizes the uselessness of the gold that surrounds him: ‘what Advantage had it been to me, said he, or what richer had I been, if I had a Ton of Gold Dust, and lay and wallowed in it; the Richness of it, said he, would not give me one Moment’s Felicity, or relieve me in the present Exigency. Nay, says he, as you all see, it would not buy me Clothes to cover me, or a Drop of Drink to save me from perishing. ’Tis of no

Defoe’s ‘Black Prince’

161

Value here, says he; there are several People among these Hutts that would weigh Gold against a few Glass Beads, or a Cockle-Shell, and give you a Handful of Gold Dust for a Handful of Cowries’ (127). In the absence of an economic system in which the exchange of a universal equivalent such as gold would be profitable, even gold has no value, while the use value of glass beads or cowries defines the local barter economy to the detriment of the Englishman. But though the Englishman’s account expresses a clear understanding of the relativism of economic systems, in the course of events he becomes the irresistible advocate for the travellers’ extraction of as much gold as possible and finally dies of grief when his share of the wealth is lost to the French in transit to England (137). In fact, the treatment of the Englishman reveals an ambiguity in the text’s privileging of a money economy, a confusion that is expressed also in Captain Bob’s attitude towards money at the end of the African section of the novel: ‘I had no Notion of a great deal of Money, or what to do with myself, or what to do with it if I had it. I thought I had enough already, and all the thoughts I had about disposing of it, if I came to Europe, was only how to spend it as fast as I could, buy me some Clothes, and go to Sea again to be a Drudge for more’ (132). It is striking that neither Captain Bob’s inclination, at this point in his story, to step outside the privileging of a money economy, nor the Englishman’s ability to understand that the Africans operate according to a different economic system – within which he, not they, could be seen as the ‘Fool’ – prevents the novel from using economics to judge the Africans as fools and Africa as barbarous. This text, then, outlines distinct economic systems, but it turns this distinction to evaluative ends, in order to construct a representation of cultural difference through the assumption of European economic superiority. This particular claim to superiority is not unique to Defoe. Bauble theory itself is based on the presumption that a money economy is a natural and normative system, against which any other economic values must be found barbaric, uncivilized, and therefore open to exploitation. An early and famous depiction of this aspect of colonialist ideology occurs in Columbus’s journals. Tzvetan Todorov provides a compact summary of Columbus’s judgments on this topic in The Conquest of America: Lacking words, Indians and Spaniards exchange, at the first meeting, various small objects; and Columbus unceasingly praises the generosity of the Indians, who give everything for nothing; it sometimes borders, he decides, on stupidity: why do they value a piece of glass quite as much as a coin,

162

Laura Brown

and a worthless piece of small change as much as a gold piece? ... ‘All that they have they give for any trifle we offer them, so that they take in exchange pieces of crockery and fragments of glass goblets’ (13/10/1492) ... ‘Whether it is a thing of value or a thing of little cost, whatever the object then given them in exchange and whatever it is worth, they are pleased’ (‘Letter to Santangel,’ February–March 1493). No more than in the case of languages does Columbus understand that values are conventional, that gold is not more precious than glass ‘in itself,’ but only in the European system of exchange. Hence, when he concludes this description of the exchanges by saying: ‘Even bits of broken cask-hoops they took in exchange for whatever they had, like beasts!’ (‘Letter to Santangel,’ February–March 1493), we have the impression that in this case it is Columbus who is worthy of the comparison: a different system of exchange is for him equivalent to the absence of system, from which he infers the bestial character of the Indians.10

Interestingly, for Columbus as well as for Defoe, these assumptions about the normalcy of the European economy perfectly match a parallel set of assumptions about linguistic normalcy. But the Black Prince, unlike Columbus’s Indians and unlike the other Africans, is brought systematically and by stages into the European economic system, a process that perfects his accommodation to the norm of European humanity. After what Captain Bob terms their ‘first Golden Adventure,’ in which the travellers use their enslaved Africans to extract the gold that the Black Prince discovers in the riverbed, they give ‘about a pound’ to the Black Prince as a kind of reward or token of friendship (97). On this occasion, this enterprising proto-European African himself imitates the production of baubles: ‘he hammer’d and work’d [this gold] by his own indefatigable Hand, and some Tools our Artificer lent him, into little round Bits, as round almost as Beads, tho’ not exact in Shape, and drilling Holes thro’ them, put them all upon a String, and wore them about his black Neck, and they look’d very well there I assure you; but he was many Months a-doing it’ (97). The Black Prince here becomes an agent of the bauble industry, echoing the Artificer’s original ingenuity and, more generally, the ‘indefatigable’ energy of European mercantile enterprise, when, in the person of the Artificer, it invented the bauble and originated the trade. The Prince progresses from this point to an even closer proximity to the European standard of economic humanity in his final appearance in the text. At the end of the African section of the novel, following upon the travellers’ second prospecting

Defoe’s ‘Black Prince’

163

expedition in which they accumulate so much gold that they ‘did not care whether [they] got any more ... or no’ (135), the Europeans free the African Prince on the Gold Coast and take ship for Europe: ‘the Negro Prince we made perfectly free, clothed him out of our common Stock, and gave him a Pound and a half of Gold for himself, which he knew very well how to manage, and here we all parted after the most friendly Manner possible’ (137). In this context, knowing how to manage the gold places the Black Prince in the arena of the European colonial economy. We expect him, like the European travellers who engage in a successful trading arrangement with the Dutch factory in the area, to use the gold to his economic advantage, to profit from the exploitation of the continent. This expectation brings him into the circle of European identity and generates the rhetoric of friendship and camaraderie with the European travellers with which his particular part of the story ends. What qualifies the Black Prince for incorporation into the colonial economy, while his cohorts remain features of the landscape, or beasts, at best? It is both interesting and strange that the criterion for entry is the Black Prince’s nobility, which Captain Bob recognizes at first glance. The ‘noble’ African, as we have already seen, is established as a literary prototype by Oroonoko in Behn’s novella and Thomas Southerne’s heroic play. In fact, however, the popular engagement with the ‘noble’ African is based also in a contemporary historical phenomenon whose visibility is increasingly widespread in the course of the eighteenth century: ‘Native princes’ or ‘kings’ were entertained by elite society and royalty in London with great public fanfare. Perhaps the most visible of these native visitors were the ‘Indian Kings’ – the Iroquois sachems who came to London on a diplomatic mission in 1710 and took the city by storm – but Africans, other native Americans, and even a Polynesian occupied the public imagination on many other occasions.11 In this period of increasing contact between Europe and traditional non-urban cultures across the globe, those non-European peoples encountered in London tended to be understood – and treated – either as monsters or as princes. Richard D. Altick’s Shows of London documents the exploitation of the ‘monsters’ – the exhibitions, ticket prices, and broadside advertisements of their various bestial, or surprisingly human, qualities.12 Defoe’s Black Prince stands at the other extreme of the contemporary imaginative encounter with non-European peoples, the position that lines up with the strain of early modern primitivism that finds its fullest popular acceptance later in the century in the widespread understanding of Rousseau’s idea of the natural man, whose very distance from civilization’s ills and

164

Laura Brown

complexities assures him access to the virtues and sentiments that arise from simplicity. Of course, Defoe’s Africa is not a realm of primitive simplicity in this Rousseauian sense, nor does the Black Prince entirely fit that profile of man in the natural state. But the Black Prince’s nobility does entail a natural and simple sense of honour – ‘never was Christian more punctual to an Oath’ – a fundamental quality both of primitivist thought and of aristocratic ideology. These two systems, elitism and primitivism, are joined in Defoe’s Black Prince, in the sense that the attribution of noble status endows the savage with a ‘natural’ virtue, while at the same time his uncivilized state underwrites that virtue and highlights its significance. In other words, the Black Prince’s aristocratic code of honour is especially pure and especially notable because he is not civilized or Christian. Working together, elitism and primitivism serve the process of naturalization that is so central to one pole of the European imaginative encounter with the peoples of the globe in the eighteenth century, by making certain European virtues ‘natural’ to elite status and by seeing that elite status as ‘natural’ to certain non-urban, non-European indigenous peoples. In this imaginative system the savage, through his ‘nobility,’ becomes so familiar that he can even stand as an exemplar of European virtue. The logical extension of this dominant version of eighteenth-century primitivism sees every savage as an elite, an imaginary projection typical of the popular understanding of the visiting ‘native princes’ in London, who were invariably perceived as nobility, even when their access to titular or genealogical structures of power in their home countries gave them no right to such title. The Tahitian Omai, for instance, who was a commoner in his home archipelago, was dubbed ‘Prince Omai’ as soon as he reached London.13 For contemporary followers of Rousseau, of course, the appellation noble is used figuratively: the savage is not noble in the sense of possessing a princely genealogy, but in the sense of being distinguished by greatness of character or moral superiority, in implicit contrast to civilized man. John Dryden’s Almanzor, the protagonist of his heroic play The Conquest of Granada (1670), provides an early example of the confluence of an elitist, feudal code with a system emphasizing magnanimity and greatness of character, directly expressed through the concept of the noble savage. Almanzor is both natural man and aristocrat: his aristocratic status is unknown until a fifth-act revelation of his noble parentage. Thus, his virtues attach to both systems equally, with a flexible ambiguity

Defoe’s ‘Black Prince’

165

that suggests the potential versatility of the ‘noble’ in literary culture. Almanzor describes himself, early in the play, in these lines: I am as free as nature first made man, ’Ere the base Laws of Servitude began, When wild in woods the noble Savage ran.14

Eugene Waith has shown that this versatility of noble magnanimity is a distinctive dimension of the heroic drama and pathetic tragedy in England and France, a quality that serves to link the heroic and the sentimental, or the elitist and the bourgeois.15 The word noble retains an elitist significance throughout the eighteenth century, especially in England. The semantic evocation of elitism is highlighted in the English phrase ‘noble savage.’ Elsewhere in Europe the term did not highlight nobility so directly, as in ‘le bon sauvage,’ ‘el buen salvaje,’ and ‘der gute Wilde,’ whereas various English translations from the French deliberately heighten the elitism of the idea by using ‘noble’ as a translation for ‘grand,’ ‘august,’ or ‘quelque chose de noble.’16 The semantic ambiguity of the term, and its highlighting in English usage, then, betrays its underlying connection with traditional feudal European systems of hierarchy. And the transmission of nobility from the magnanimous aristocrat of the sixteenth- and seventeenthcentury romance tradition to the sympathetic bourgeois hero of the eighteenth century retains a fundamental elitist impulse that is clearly enacted in the imaginary class elevation of the native visitors to London in the period. The Black Prince thus symptomatically demonstrates the way in which the claim to elite rank enables the idea of moral superiority to appear as ‘natural’ in the savage. We would not, perhaps, have a Rousseauan noble savage in the eighteenth century without the precedent of the aristocratic Almanzor in the seventeenth. In Defoe’s Black Prince, we can see this crucial conjuncture of elitism and primitivism in a partial and ambiguous form. Defoe’s characteristic immersion in economic structures exposes the contradictions of eighteenth-century primitivism with particular clarity, and his distance from the affective modes of the later cult of sensibility makes the materialist implications of the noble savage more readily apparent. The Black Prince’s ‘natural’ moral superiority is specifically developed, as we have seen, as his ability to participate in a European exchange economy, unlike the beasts and fools around him: his story represents the exemplary

166

Laura Brown

savage as exemplary capitalist, and it grounds that moral exemplarity in a materialist system. Since, as we have also seen, the Black Prince’s moral exemplarity is directly tied to his elite rank, this exemplarity aligns capitalism and elitism, as if participation in a money economy were a natural quality of princes. The effort to fuse bourgeois and aristocratic values is evident elsewhere in Defoe’s writing, especially in The Compleat English Gentleman (posthumous) and The Complete English Tradesman (1725), where the economic achievements of mercantile capitalism are shored up by the social prestige of the gentry. In this period of the undermining of the hereditary aristocracy by the rise of a money economy, such conjunctions expressed the tensions and hesitancies of historical transition. But Captain Singleton presents this paradox through the distinctive lens of cultural difference and as an early assertion of the significance of the primitive for European culture. In this light, primitivism makes for strange ideological bedfellows. Furthermore, the connection of primitivism with Enlightenment thought in France, and with the bourgeois cult of sensibility in England, would seem to distance the noble savage from an elitist assertion of class hierarchy, since both of those modes of thought explicitly repudiate aristocratic status. The virtues accruing to the natural man – the access to the powers of the sympathetic imagination and its generation of emotions of sensibility, generosity, or fellow-feeling – are often labelled as indicators of inner worth in direct contrast to social status. For instance, George Lillo’s tragedy The London Merchant (1731) makes this repudiation of class hierarchy explicit in its direct rejection of the theme of ‘Princes distrest’ in favour of the more ‘artless’ and thus more ‘moving’ tale of the London apprentice and his merchant family, a story whose affects and lessons are by that means made more relevant to ‘the generality of mankind,’ as Lillo explicitly advocates.17 But the Black Prince and the publicly visible non-European ‘princes’ and ‘kings’ who were entertained in London in the eighteenth century reveal the elitist roots of this universalism. In order for the natural man to embody those inner virtues that define his moral worth – and the moral standards of European sensibility – he must first be naturalized as a European prince or king. As part of this transmission of nobility from the aristocratic to the bourgeois subject, aristocratic values of honour and magnanimity are translated almost seamlessly into those inner virtues that are accorded such a central place in the definition of bourgeois class identity during this period. The Black Prince’s demonstration of honour in his loyalty to his oath to serve the Europeans who save his life – after they have shot

Defoe’s ‘Black Prince’

167

him and his fellow Africans in order to take them on as slaves – shows precisely this code of conduct, a code that allies him with an elitist ideology while it simultaneously enables him to enter the bourgeois realm of capitalist exchange. Elitism, capitalism, and cultural difference each contributes to the ideal of the noble savage, in a way that brings them into intersecting relationships with one another and that undercuts that ideal’s claims to innocence and universalism. This loss of innocence and its significance for our understanding of bourgeois ideology are described in other ways in recent approaches to the noble savage. Terry Jay Ellingson, in a revisionist study of the ‘myth of the noble savage,’ argues that the idea is ‘drawn ultimately from the ideology of feudalist class values,’ and he concludes that in the eighteenth century ‘the rhetoric of “savage” nobility retains its old ... linkages to warfare and class superiority instead of rebonding itself to, or reframing itself in terms of, the emerging philosophical and political discourses of the eighteenth century. Liberty and nobility [are] ... a rather unlikely mixture’ in Enlightenment thought.18 Hayden White, in his essay ‘The Noble Savage Theme as Fetish,’ characterizes this unlikeliness as an ‘ambiguity’ in the bourgeois understanding of elite status, an ambiguity he sees as parallel to the tension in the bourgeois understanding of moral status or ‘humanity’ as well, so that nobility – as elite status – and ‘humanity’ – as moral exemplarity – become symptomatically entangled in eighteenth-century primitivism: What the bourgeoisie and its spokesman were attacking, in their criticism of the nobility, was the nobility’s claim to represent the highest type of humanity. But the attitude of the rising classes of eighteenth-century Europe with respect to the noble classes was a mixture of love and hate, envy and resentment. They wanted for themselves what the aristocracy claimed as its ‘natural’ due. Within the context of a situation such as this, the spokesman for the rising classes needed a concept to express their simultaneous rejection of the nobility’s claims to privilege and desire for similar privileges for themselves. The concept of the Noble Savage served their ideological needs perfectly. For it at once undermined the nobility’s claim to a special human status and extended that status to the whole of humanity. But this extension was done only in principle. In fact, the claim to nobility was meant to extend neither to the natives of the New World nor to the lowest classes of Europe, but only to the bourgeoisie. That this was so is seen in the fact that, once the middle classes had established their right to a claim to the same humanity as that formerly claimed only by the nobility, they immediately turned to

168

Laura Brown

the task of dehumanizing those classes below them in the same way that, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Europeans in general had done to the natives of the New World.19

Eighteenth-century primitivism, in other words, reveals the hidden agenda of bourgeois universalism in its relation to the masses and to nonurban, non-European peoples. But the Black Prince – and his fictional and historical counterparts in the eighteenth century – shows us more. He demonstrates that what White senses generally as an envy or desire by the bourgeoisie in relation to the aristocracy can be specified as an absorption of the values and status of that elitist system into bourgeois ideology through the imaginative encounter with the non-European and via the idealization of the noble savage. Looking at it in this way, we could even argue that the imaginative fascination with the non-European ‘savage’ in the eighteenth century directly facilitated the constitution of this peculiarly paradoxical and powerfully destructive dimension of bourgeois universalism; that, for instance, the process of accommodating the African to the European imagination in Captain Singleton required the insertion of the Black Prince into a familiar established structure of value and order – the aristocratic code of honour – that could make him legible as a human being. And that that insertion provided a future model for the means by which the claim to a universal humanism could be built on the structures of hierarchy and materialism and the systems of oppression and capitalism that Defoe’s story of Africa reveals. Imagining savages as princes has farreaching implications for European culture.

NOTES 1 The noble savage theme has generated a large body of scholarly and critical work. An important current account of the critical tradition is available in Terry Jay Ellingson, The Myth of the Noble Savage (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). 2 Defoe, Captain Singleton, edited by Shiv K. Kumar (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973), 51. Subsequent page references appear in parentheses in the text. 3 Behn, Oroonoko, edited by Joanna Lipking (New York: Norton, 1997), 13. 4 Defoe, A Plan of the English Commerce (London, 1728), 329. 5 Ibid.

Defoe’s ‘Black Prince’

169

6 Defoe, Review of the State of the British Nation (1706–13), edited by Arthur Wellesley Secord, Facsimile Text Society, 22 vols (New York: Columbia University Press, 1938), 12 March 1709, vol. 5, no. 150, 597, (facs. bk 13). Subsequent references to the Review are to this edition. 7 Ibid., 3 January 1712, vol. 1 [IX], no. 41, 81 (facs. bk 22). 8 Ibid., 5 May 1711, vol. 8, no. 18, 69 (facs. bk 19). 9 Defoe, Atlas Maritimus (1728), 237. Cited in Samuel Kwaku Opoku, ‘The Image of Africa, 1660–1730,’ Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, 1967, 16. 10 Todorov, The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Harper and Row, 1984), 38. 11 On the Indian Kings, see Richmond P. Bond, Queen Anne’s American Kings (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952). For an account of the visits of these ‘native princes,’ see Laura Brown, Fables of Modernity: Literature and Culture in the English Eighteenth Century (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001), 177–220. 12 Altick, The Shows of London (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978). 13 See, for instance, the representations of Omai in John O’Keeffe’s opera Omai: or A Trip Round the World (1785). 14 Dryden, The Conquest of Granada, in Restoration Drama: An Anthology, ed. David Womersley (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 2.i:207–9. Almanzor’s status is further complicated by his ambiguous link to the non-European. The relevance of ‘Laws’ in relation to primitivism, expressed in this passage, is developed by Ellingson in his description of the early manifestations of the noble savage. 15 Waith, ‘Tears of Magnanimity in Otway and Racine,’ in Waith and Judd D. Hubert, French and English Drama of the Seventeenth Century (Los Angeles: William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, UCLA, 1972), 1–22. 16 These examples from English translations of French travel writings by Charlevoix and Diderot are provided by Ellingson, Myth of the Noble Savage, 103, 165. 17 Lillo, The London Merchant, ed. William H. McBurney (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1965), Prologue, 2:2, 16, 20. 18 Ellingson, Myth of the Noble Savage, 373, 106. 19 White, ‘The Noble Savage Theme as Fetish,’ in Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), 194.

chapter eight

‘The Project and the People’: Defoe on the South Sea Bubble and the Public Good CARL FISHER

A new trade being now to be set on foot, and in a new manner, with a capital stock, and by the encouragement of the government, it has been long expected when some able pen would have undertaken to guide the people of this unsettled age how to think about it. Defoe, An Essay on the South Sea Trade (13 September 1711)

Daniel Defoe loved a good story and often used exemplary narrative to make abstract and complicated issues more concrete. In his pamphlet An Essay on the South Sea Trade,1 Defoe tells a story supposedly reported from the War of the Spanish Succession: English soldiers based abroad, in the hot climate of Catalonia, eat grapes and other ‘luscious fruits,’ which throw them into ‘fluxes and fevers.’ An order is passed to the army forbidding the consumption of grapes; however, ‘Two English soldiers ... transgress’d the order, and carried the punishment along with the crime, for they fell into a flux, and were dangerously ill. – The Officer order’d them to be brought before him.’ Defoe makes a wry joke about their being forced to stand at attention when they desperately wished to go elsewhere; he relates that when asked by their superior officer why they had broken his order and eaten grapes, the soldiers replied that ‘they were Englishmen and freemen, and thought they ought to be at liberty to kill themselves whenever they had a mind to.’2 Defoe uses this anecdote, the veracity of which we must trust to an ephemeral posterity, as an example of how people cannot be forced into doing what is in their own best interest, as the combination of personal liberty and private caprice leads to self-destructive impulses. He also uses the story,

Defoe on the South Sea Bubble and the Public Good

171

seemingly disconnected from the context of the newly formed South Sea Company,3 to suggest that governmental and business concerns may know the interests of the public better than they know it themselves, and it indicates his desire to reconcile, as he puts it later in the pamphlet, ‘the Project and the People.’4 While we often think of Defoe’s interest in private lives and discrete individuals – highlighted by novels that focus on characters such as Robinson Crusoe, Moll Flanders, Colonel Jack, and Roxana – he was equally concerned with the needs of the collective and what he termed in the Review and elsewhere as ‘the publick good.’ He recognized that the development of the South Sea Company combined issues of private economic interest with public credit and collective behaviour in ways that could lead to profit or disorder. Very simply, there would be either stability or volatility. Defoe describes the credit that underlay the South Sea Company as an unstable goddess, as Catherine Ingrassia shows, representing ‘economic man’s subordination to potentially emasculating allegorical female figures of disorder.’5 Defoe’s mercantilist economic theory depends on custom and convention, on order, for productivity and prosperity. He wants to believe the South Sea Company plans can fit his ideal, but he has doubts. In the interest of order and stability, however, Defoe at first tries to convince a reluctant public that the success of the South Sea project – both the Company and the trade generally – was for the national good as well as private interest, and that reluctance was short-sighted and stubborn. As we will see, Defoe changes his tune as the market changes and the bubble grows more obvious; concern turning to disillusion and damage control can be traced through his writing. Aside from An Essay on the South Sea Trade, Defoe produced dozens of documents concerning the South Sea Company over a ten-year period – pamphlets, tracts, news reports, news analyses, satires, and personal letters – and his commentary consistently shows concern with the volatility of public response. He repeatedly references public confidence, public opinion, public outrage. One of the repercussions Defoe feared most was public violence. Collective behaviour, for Defoe, marks the intersection of the public and the private, whether people act in parallel or in concert. He consistently repeats the idea that if the people were properly advised and informed, if they truly understood, there would be few objections: ‘Our Eyes are all now upon the Trade to the South Seas,’ he writes in the Review. ‘A Trade as proposed, few People understand, and some for that very Reason, viz. Because they understand it not, speak Evil of it – I shall endeavour to turn it round, and shew you its dark and its bright Sides,

172

Carl Fisher

with all possible Clearness and Impartiality.’6 For his own part, he thinks working towards expanding South Sea trade ‘a piece of service done to the Publick,’ and he endeavours with his discussions and explanations ‘to put People into their wits again, which they seem to stand very much in need of in this case.’7 He tries to bring to light information to avoid the ‘absurdity gather’d among ... People.’ According to him the ‘Common People’ cause uproar because they ‘look little farther than the Surface’ of issues. He desires consensus and believes that the people should ‘think all alike about it.’ He worries about ‘gross Errors in the Conceptions of [English] People.’8 In fact, Defoe compares setting up the company to saving houses threatened by fire – a favourite image, which shows people caught between action and inaction, often unaware of everything around them but the spectacle.9 Here, he argues that authoritative action can save the day: Just so when hasty fires alarm the Town, Some houses are blown up, and some pull’d down; None blames the Evil, ’tis but understood, A private Mischief for a Publick Good.10

Defoe’s economic writings are often framed within a discourse of public good as he tries to create an informed public that will accept some of the short-term ‘evils’ done for long-term economic gain for all. Still, public scrutiny in his view should be a check to keep other evils at bay, or within tolerable limits. As early as 1701, in The Villainy of StockJobbers Detected, written in response to a bank run, Defoe complains that Public Trade, Public Revenue, and the ‘Current Credit of the Nation’ have been villainously abused. In this specific instance, he insists that the East India Company needs further checks, so that the trade with India would not be ‘detrimental to [English] manufactures; that it may be carried out without factions among the rich, or clamours from the poor.’11 He lays out precepts for honest trading and complains about the ‘sharping, tricking, intreagueing, scandalous employment of stockjobbing.’ He notes that ‘all honest men’ should know and shun cheaters, because these ‘people can ruin men silently, undermine and impoverish by a sort of inpenetrable artifice, like Poison that works at a distance.’ He describes the people as both credulous and submissive; they often fall prey to dishonesty, and they do not know what is in their own best interest. In Anatomy of Exchange Alley (1719), eighteen years later, he says much the same. Of stock-jobbers he writes: they take advantage by ‘trick,

Defoe on the South Sea Bubble and the Public Good

173

cheat, wheedle, forgeries, falsehoods, and all sorts of delusions; coining false news, this way good, that way bad; whispering imaginary terrors, frights, hopes, expectations, and then preying upon the weakness of those, whose imaginations they have wrought upon.’ 12 Public knowledge and public action/reaction should act as a stabilizing force, at least in principle. For Defoe, stock speculating would be an ‘economically transgressive behavior.’13 Maximillian Novak argues that because of Defoe’s theoretical grounding in mercantilist theory, his ideal of trade ‘was basically communal rather than individualistic.’ Defoe approached the South Sea trade with this communal economic vision; while ‘he may have suggested to Harley the idea of a South Sea company,’ according to Novak, and ‘defended it for Harley in several pamphlets,’ yet ‘his suggestion that the stocks would soon be “Stock-jobbed up” if the trade proved successful can hardly be considered complimentary in view of his dislike of “Exchange Alley.”’ In fact, as Novak points out, it is after Robert Harley’s fall that Defoe begins his attacks on the South Sea Company as ‘an Artificial Trick and Cheat upon the Nation.’14 Defoe’s pre-South Sea Company economic writings reiterate the need for plain dealing and transparency in financial matters, and he writes often of an aspect of trade particularly prone to misunderstanding and abuse: credit.15 In An Essay Upon Publick Credit (23 August, 1710), he argues for the inescapability of credit, yet notes that credit seems to have a life of its own and that it takes ‘the equal conduct of men, bodies of men, nations, and people’ to raise it, nurture it, and use it maturely.16 He compares the possibility of selfish mismanagement to ‘the progress of Dr. Sacheverell, as if the folly and impolitick vanity of that gentleman could influence the People of England, to send up men as mad and foolish as himself.’ He considers, further: ‘if Dr. Sacheverell thinks he serves the interest he pretends to appear for, by his mobbing and riotous progress, he is as much mistaken as they were, who made him popular by a hasty prosecution, instead of committing his sermon to the hangman, and kicking him from the bar for a lunatic.’17 Defoe’s comparison of the Sacheverell affair with economic issues and the possibility of popular disturbances over public credit shows his concern over the potential disruption of business. He continues: ‘I am against furies on both sides; nor do I see any such coming ... if men of moderation, and men of integrity come in, I see no room to fear’ (26–7). What a critical ‘if’! The pamphlet, like many similar works, is meant to assuage public fear and maintain the normal course of business.

174

Carl Fisher

His writings on the South Sea project offer a confluence of Defoean concerns: his support for Robert Harley, his belief in the need for stable public credit, his protectionist foreign policy and expansionist colonial policy, and his sense that communality and consensus are the cornerstones of national economic health. Although in retrospect we often think of the ‘bubble’ bursting in 1720 as the central spectacle and object of public concern, Defoe’s writing suggests a decade-long dialogue that shows that contention was high and dissension spirited. In 1711, during the period when the South Sea Company was being incorporated, Defoe’s writings flowed fast and furious.18 At first, he has reservations about the company and puts forth some warnings, but ultimately, far from being against the trade and ‘Discouraging the People,’ he fears only that the public is ‘entertaining a whimsical Notion and building Castles in the Air, stating to [themselves] Notions of the Thing, foreign to the true Design, Improbable, and which is worse, Impracticable.’ He very much favours free trade, open markets, ‘the Removal of the French out of South-America’ and ‘having a Free, open Trade with the Spaniards.’19 Some of his harshest criticisms suggest that the people do not know opportunity when they see it, and that internecine politics will undermine economic opportunity.20 He warns, when discussing ‘violent Party Feuds’ in the preface to the eighth volume of the Review, that ‘the Whigs act upon no foundation of concert with, or confidence in one another, in any thing they do, and that the remains of a publick Spirit, which their ancestors were guided by, are sunk so low, as to be entirely govern’d by their private advantage.’ He complains that the Whigs have acted as ‘Hot People,’ especially in ‘Railing at a South Sea Trade, Cursing and wishing Confusion (at a most Unchristian rate) to the Contrivers of it.’ Ironically, he claims, the same men who were ‘bantering and Ridiculing it, and drinking a health to it in a whip’d Froth, as a suitable emblem of its Invalidity’ had reversed themselves and now were ‘the only men that buy up the South Sea Stock’ (v).21 Throughout the Review Defoe offers a paradigm of later crowd psychology, made all the more complicated by his own at times contradictory participation in the public discourse in myriad venues. Through all of the writing – from issues of the Review, numerous pamphlets, and the transmutation of the bubble into fiction22 – Defoe speaks often about the need to protect the public from greedy businessmen but also from their own visions of wealth. In fact, Defoe’s Review began with the idea ‘that people are possessed with wrong notions of things.’ He felt that people needed information, presented in accessible fashion. While the

Defoe on the South Sea Bubble and the Public Good

175

paper may have originated as ‘an organ for the dissemination of government propaganda,’ it also allowed Defoe to recount and develop ideas of concern for the broader community that he had often expressed elsewhere.23 Defoe shows interest in what, in modern parlance, might be termed ‘consumer confidence.’ In the Review he cultivates a voice meant to calm, control, and convince. He wants order in financial transactions, because order is the cornerstone of continuity; an unbounded stock rise creates disorientation, exacerbates greed and promotes disorder; it undermines community. Defoe uses many tricks in the Review to encourage confidence in his own voice. He claims to have encouraged such an enterprise at least eight years earlier, and he disingenuously defends his disinterestedness in the South Sea trade: ‘that I wrote on that Head to oblige any particular Person, is as false, as it is true, that many rejected that Proposal in Prejudice to Particular Persons, without judging of the Thing, or indeed Enquiring into it’ (8:790); he inserts fake letters praising his analysis of the situation; he compares the prospects of the South Sea project to other successful commercial ventures (8:218–19). Stylistically, he drops easily into the plural pronoun ‘we’ when he tries to create agreement, and uses ‘you’ when he berates the public for what he considers inappropriate or selfish attitudes: ‘It shall be my endeavor to state the real Advantages of this Trade, confute the imaginary ones, and prevent either your wild Expectations on one Hand, or your Phlegmatick Discouraging Notions on the other; and if wrong Measures are pursu’d perhaps this Paper may stand upon Record to have given the Caution’ (8:200). Defoe argues that if people are nervous about South Sea stock, they should ‘let it alone,’ but that it has become an obsessive ‘National Lunacy’ and the ‘Stock-jobbing of Funds, and the Amusements of Parties, have rais’d a Mob upon a Project here’ (8:275). Presciently he argues, as early as 30 August 1711, ‘Suppose the South-Sea Trade was quite confounded and sunk,’ but he also imagines that it would be ‘madness’ to think that this would hurt bank stocks and the economy. Still, greedy people are ‘Mad to run their Estates in to the Publick Funds,’ an unsafe practice in a world in which, without peace, all their ‘Funds, Stocks, and Publick Credit will fall lower’ (8:343). Defoe often combined the practical and the moral, and he expected individuals to forgo selfish action for the public good; his writing is simultaneously idealistic, political, and didactic.24 Defoe sets himself up here, as his narrative voice so often does, as the voice of reason to be

176

Carl Fisher

heard above the cacophony of faction. Against the trade itself, he argues, none could object, as the advantages are so manifest. His essay aims to answer potential objections because it is ‘the evil genius of [the] times’ to go against trade, ‘which in the enemies hands is fatal ... and which in [English] hands might be fatal to them’ (8:6). He claims, in fact, that the biggest problem with resistance to trade is that people lack information and have no access to proper sources of information; he wants to take away ‘the false glosses, mists and shadows’ that lead to prejudice against the scheme, because being ill-informed will ‘render the minds of the people more uneasy than they were before’ (8:10). Defoe’s attempts to quell public uneasiness undoubtedly support the government stance and the business community; he also insists that this plan serves the nation at large, and that the people have a vested interest in developing credit: ‘The forcing therefore the proprieters of publick debts, that is, a multitude of persons of different humours, interests, and views, to agree and meet in one common center, viz. the publick good, and their own private advantage, is certainly a very happy and commendable violence. Not but that such a compulsion may occasion inconveniences to several particular persons: but as salus populi suprema lex, so private ought to yield to public considerations’ (8:34). The argument that ‘the health of the people is the highest law’ is far from disingenuous. Defoe’s economic theory illuminates and embodies the ideas E.P. Thompson describes in relation to the pre-industrial, eighteenth-century moral economy, in the sense that Defoe recognized that the stereotypical impersonality of the market nevertheless had a personal, tangible aspect, and that the vested interests of commerce should not betray the expectations of the public for honest dealing; the people usually had only one recourse for dishonesty in the market, which was riot. At times Defoe even condoned riot, at least theoretically, and both Thompson and George Rudé have pointed out the direct-action riots of the time, where popular disturbances redressed perceived wrongs in the pricing or the quality of goods.25 Defoe emphasizes the need not only to live within the moral economy, but to create a sense of economic morality. The centre of this sensibility can be traced to his sense of communality and the undermining potential of individual greed. Circumstances may at times force men – like Robinson Crusoe – to live alone, but their proper state is within society, and he notes the absurdity of the selfish actions and greedy ways of so many people. In October 1711 he writes that, while ‘Men never find fault where they get Money,’ they often exhibit ‘Humour, or Madness, or Folly’ in their public dealings; in fact,

Defoe on the South Sea Bubble and the Public Good

177

‘many People who had their Mouths as wide open against the South-Sea stock as ever, and that forswore coming into the Subscription, are so far changed in their Notions, as not only to Subscribe what they had, but to Purchase more’ (8:342).26 In 1713, as the company’s stock flourished mildly – in contrast to the wild fluctuations in 1720 – he ironically argues: ‘Why do you buy South Sea stock now, at 84, when you ridicul’d it, and condemn’d it at 63, and refus’d a long while to subscribe your old Debts.’ He notes a certain hypocrisy, as men ‘go railing about town all day’ complaining about economic and political conditions, yet they buy stock and sleep comfortably. However, this comfortable sleep did not last forever. The frenetic activity of 1720 stimulated a new wave of interest and concern in the South Sea Company, in Defoe and numerous other writers. As the value of the stock rose after the Bubble Act, Defoe wrote of the madness of people caught in a frenzy for profit. Exchange Alley was crowded; both Swift and Pope wrote satires on the situation, and the anonymous author of ‘The South Sea Ballad’ wrote that, as ‘merry crowds for riches toil,’ Then stars and garters did appear Among the meaner rabble ... The great ladies thither came, And plied in chariots daily, Or pawned their jewels for a sum To venture in the Alley.27

Defoe describes both sellers and buyers as crazed, and after the stock collapse he noted the people ‘running after one another like a flock of sheep, and now ... left to get out as well as they can.’28 He argues that one of the principal faultlines in the stability of the company stock, besides directorial mismanagement, was ‘popular rage,’ first, because it helped to create the frenzy, and second because it stifled a rational inquiry into what was happening. The few months during which the stock rose and then fell dramatically often have been documented and are the source of much contemporary satire and commentary, from the poem quoted above to hundreds of satiric prints (Hogarth’s infamous emblematic engraving among them). In many ways, the South Sea Bubble became a touchstone for nineteenthcentury crowd theory, particularly as popularized by Charles Mackay in Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (1841).29 Mackay, perhaps a bit melodramatically, claims that ‘dangerous riots were

178

Carl Fisher

every moment apprehended,’ and as the directors were brought to justice, ‘mobs of a menacing character assembled in different parts of London.’ When Aislabie was sent to the Tower, ‘the mob assembled on Tower-Hill with the intention of hooting and pelting him.’30 That night, according to Mackay, bonfires of celebration were lit in many London areas.31 Mackay examines some of the ephemera generated by the crisis, and glosses a poem taken from a Bubble playing card, which criticizes a ridiculous plan to make square bullets and revolutionize weaponry: A rare invention to destroy the crowd Of fools at home instead of fools abroad. Fear not, my friends, this terrible machine, They’re only wounded who have shares therein.32

When a bill to restore public credit was read in Parliament, ‘several hundred subscribers had gathered in the lobby and within the precincts of the house, crying that they were being unfairly treated ... So great was the tumult, that the attendants reporting themselves powerless, the Speaker commanded the attendance of the Justices of the Peace for the city of Westminster and of the constables. Not until the magistrates had twice read the Riot Act could the unruly crowd be persuaded to disperse.’33 Recent historians have emphasized the catastrophic qualities of the episode. Patrick Brantlinger notes the ‘hysteria’ caused by the Bubble, and quotes a contemporary Dutch observer: it was ‘as if all the Lunatics had escaped out of the madhouse as once.’34 Another historian, P.G.M. Dickson, claims that the public was enthralled by the company’s offerings, acting with ‘a blind enthusiasm reminiscent of the Gadarene swine.’35 The rhetoric and reality of a population out of control would strike a chord with Defoe. He understood that avarice combines with fear, that greed is a defence in the face of insecurity (pace Moll Flanders or Robinson Crusoe), and that the ‘madness of crowds’ – a phrase perhaps coined by Swift in ‘The South Sea Project’ – originates in fear, uncertainty, and misinformation. The writers of popular songs and poems may have had little sympathy with those caught in the frenzy; by contrast, Defoe ultimately had great sympathy and his early warnings seem prophetic in retrospect, and in the face of the activities described here he almost immediately began what might today be called damage control. Although he describes the people as under a ‘contagion,’ he still tries to use exemplary narrative to gently chide the public. For example, in The Manufacturer he tells a

Defoe on the South Sea Bubble and the Public Good

179

story in which a landowner gets an exorbitant price for his land from a ‘South Sea Man,’ but then immediately invests in bubbles and loses everything.36 William Lee claims that Defoe’s first piece in Applebee’s Journal was an article in 1721 ‘describing the appearance of the city on the day after the Bubbles were suppressed.’37 In another piece, in Mist’s Journal, Defoe describes a house where subscriptions are being taken as ‘so thronged that there was no coming near the door.’38 A barber next door figures a way to make easy money; he charges those who want entrance a shilling to get in through his adjacent shop. ‘In they crowded,’ writes Defoe, ‘but they were as far from getting at the books as before; so that, what with the Want of Air, the Heat of the Season, and unwholesome Vapours, occasioned by the vast Concourse of People, they found themselves under a Necessity of paying the honest Barber, six-pence apiece to let them out again.’ Defoe, with a marketplace sensibility, recognized that people are anxious and need information, analysis, direction, and even comic stories. Still, just as he imagined that the South Sea trade fulfilled a communal need, he also recognized the horrible aftermath of the stock’s collapse, and the term ‘public’ became a shibboleth he repeatedly invoked: Public Credit, public debt, public faith, and public service. He was not alone in reporting public despair over the stock plunge. One contemporary newspaper reports: ‘The far greater number who are involved in this public calamity appear with such dejected looks, that a man with little skill in the art of physiognamy may easily distinguish them. Exchange Alley sounds no longer of thousands got in an instant, but on the contrary all corners of the town are filled with the groans of the afflicted, and they who lately rode in great state to that famous mart of money, now humbly condescend to walk on foot, and instead of adding to their equipages, have at once lost their estate.’39 Pat Rogers quotes a memoir that describes the scene: ‘June 2: Surprizeing scene in change Alley. South Sea in the morning above 900 ... it has rose 100 p diem for 2 or 3 days. Professions and shops are forgot, all goe thither as to the mines of Potosi. Nobility, Ladys, Brokers, & footmen all upon a level. Great equipages setting up, the prices of things rose exorbitantly. Such a renversement of nature as succeeding ages can have no idea of. Sept. 23, 1720. South Sea fallen from 1000 to 400. The world in the utmost distraction – thousands of families ruin’d.’40 An anonymous pamphlet of the time refers to the desperate situation not as a bubble but as the ‘South Sea Babel,’ as deluded people tried to reach beyond themselves. Defoe himself satirized the public obsession with the catastrophe and the fact that

180

Carl Fisher

every national ill was blamed on the bubble. He published an article in Applebee’s Journal (1720), presumably written by a man making his first visit to the Exchange who notices how the people there look so wretched and pale; he is told that these people are examples of ‘South Sea Faces.’ He includes a mock Bill of Mortality: Drowned herself (in the South Sea) at St. Paul’s, Shadwell, One. Kill’d by a (South Sea) Sword, at St. Margaret’s, Westminster, One. Cut his Throat with a (South Sea) Razor, at St. Anne, Blackfryers, One. Frighted (by the Fall of South Sea Stock) at St. Mary-le-Bow, Two.

Still, Defoe recognized the serious and potentially long-term consequences of the Bubble; the ‘South Sea Faces’ forecast the helplessness and hopelessness he will later portray in Journal of the Plague Year (which highlights bills of mortality). Many critics have assayed the connection between the South Sea Spectacle and this novel.41 Credit, often described during the period as a pestilence, in many critics’ eyes becomes the plague – and in Journal, collective behaviour in a time of crisis mirrors the world of the Bubble. The historical plague, the threat of real plague reported in Marseilles, and the financial plague become imaginatively entwined: ‘The confusion of the people,’ H.F. reports, ‘especially within the City at that time, was inexpressible.’ Plague, like financial collapse, creates hysteria. Defoe, a master of contingency and circumstance, tapped into cultural anxieties. If nothing else, the frenzied rise and spectacular fall of the company stock lingered in the public imagination, and this is what Defoe capitalized on in his fiction. Defoe’s fictions highlighted the enigma of collective behaviour in extreme situations. A prime example is seen in Journal of a Plague Year, when the population of London must cope with the horrors of the plague. The catastrophic atmosphere reverses nature and undermines all social interaction. It closes down the circulation of discourse, and, as Everett Zimmerman asserts, ‘H.F.’s account of the plague year appears sometimes to be an analysis of the failures of public information.’42 As shown earlier, Defoe approached the South Sea enterprise generally from the perspective that people were uninformed or misinformed. Ultimately, however, despite all of his efforts to control through discourse, the numbers went out of control, and the reactions of people both before and after the stocks’ collapse confounded expectation. This is the ultimate irony of language, that it can never adequately predict or fully explain any situation, and it is this instability that enlivens and complicates Defoe’s prose.

Defoe on the South Sea Bubble and the Public Good

181

He finds himself unable to fully grasp group behaviour, and he inexhaustibly attempts to explain if not excuse it. While the analogy of the Bubble to the plague is standard, some critics see a broader implication for Defoe’s fiction. Pat Rogers, for example, argues: ‘it is a commonplace among students of Defoe that fear, especially the fear of sudden reversals of fortune, plays a large part in his imaginative writings. Disaster may have been connected in his mind with his early financial troubles; after 1720, it became associated with the traumatic effects of the South Sea Bubble.’43 Maximillian Novak comes back to this theme often: he points out that Robinson Crusoe, published in the year preceding the bursting of the bubble, ‘is a conservative warning that Englishmen about to embark on the economic disaster of the South Sea Bubble should mind their callings and stick to the sure road of trade.’44 Novak also argues that the themes in Defoe’s fiction of ‘piracy, the value of money, exploitation – are all reflections on what was happening in Britain during the furor over the collapse of the South Sea Company’s manipulation of stock. Defoe was to make the connection explicit in his History of the Pirates, but the paradox of business as crime and crime as a business was a driving force behind almost all of his fiction.’45 Novak historicizes Defoe’s writing on the South Sea collapse in the context of other contemporary episodes of collective behaviour. He notes that ‘dissenters had fallen into warring factions after the Salters Hall meeting in 1719 ... Weavers had been rioting in the streets ... A new Jacobite revolt had just fizzled, but not without the threat of strong support from Spain and Sweden.’ He points out that in pamphlets such as The Anatomy of Exchange Alley, Defoe prophecizes dire consequences for the selfishness and individual profit orientation of the age. Novak notes Defoe’s praise for Alexander Smith’s History of the Lives and Robberies of the Most Notorious Highwaymen (1714), a third edition of which came out just as the speculation in South Sea stock began to rise in 1719; the easy comparisons of criminals to businessmen was exploited by many, but ‘the possibility that a group of businessmen might bring financial chaos on a nation seemed confined to the mythical entrepreneur of mercantile ideology who might, through his greed and self-interest, import goods from plague-ridden nations and therefore infect his countrymen. That a plague of dishonesty could have such a wide effect seemed unlikely before the wave of mass speculation caused by the activities of the South Sea Company. Compared to the despair produced by the directors of that Company, the robberies of hungry and desperate men and women seemed almost heroic.’ In fact, Defoe in the Weekly Journal sympatheti-

182

Carl Fisher

cally portrayed a hungry thief, and argued ‘that the South Sea Bubble had a direct influence on an increase in crime.’46 For Defoe, the people were not naturally criminal or ridiculous; these behaviours were socially conditioned responses. The Bubble exacerbated what Defoe already recognized as characteristic of stock speculation; it took advantage of people’s inexperience with the market, played on their credulity, and heightened the desire for easy wealth and social mobility. The promise of immense, immediate profits created a public situation variously described by many contemporary commentators as madness, infatuation, lunacy, and frenzy. Interestingly, Defoe argued that the big problem was not the stock’s rise, but the way people panic as it falls. He recognized that both credit and crowds have their fearful aspects; credit bolstered the classes that challenged the landed gentry, but when it failed, everyone suffered. Crowd behaviour is often self-protective, yet it creates insubordination and threatens age-old social hierarchies. From his first salvo defending the incorporation to the final shots attacking managerial corruption, Defoe’s deep investment in the South Sea Company showed his concern with communal and collective behaviour, and ultimately he tried to develop constructive ways to bolster public confidence. He attempted to soothe nerves with claims that the moment would pass and the economy would be stronger for the experience. The South Sea Bubble, for Defoe, marked an infelicitous collision of the cultural and the commercial. It signalled both the uplifting possibility and the degrading potential of the market. The Bubble, for better or for worse, allowed him to explore the public’s struggles with economic realities and to project a public potentially pushed to reaction by their betrayed trust. Credit, as he presents it, creates a kind of crowd, a community in any case of like-minded individuals, businessmen, investors, and tradesmen; it is participated in directly or vicariously by the consumer, and is the essence of the market. The discourse of credit constructs a psychological and epistemological paradigm simultaneously individual and collective. Concepts of credit and crowd are logically allied: both are fluid, potentially unstable; both are market driven and market controlled, but one is an intellectual construct and the other a physical force. Just as Defoe’s attack is never so much on credit as on the abuse of it, the forfeited credibility, the same can be said of his attitudes towards crowds. The crowd, in whatever configuration, is essential to the health of the nation, except when pushed to extremes. The developing public he imagines is a site of debate, a potential cacophony of different voices that he hopes will be constructively united. The causality that leads to

Defoe on the South Sea Bubble and the Public Good

183

catastrophe highlights the uneasy alliance of credit and crowd, but it also proves central to Defoe’s social theorizing. John Brewer points out that, in fact, there were some positive aspects to the Bubble. The national debt was ultimately restructured, public credit was restored, and new measures were taken to ensure financial probity.47 Of course, this did little to help the people in the moment. The irony of the exemplary story about the soldiers and the grapes, with which I began this essay, is clear. Undoubtedly the people ate too many grapes and suffered ‘fevers and fluxes.’ As for Defoe, although he was not always his own best economic adviser, in the case of the South Sea Company he seemed particularly astute. He argued in The Commentator in February 1720, as the stock began the rise to unprecedented levels, that only one in 10,000 investors would win the gamble that the inflated stock represented. Defoe, wisely, sold off his South Sea stock in 1719.

NOTES 1 The full title of the pamphlet points towards Defoe’s intent: An Essay on the South Sea Trade with an Enquiry into the Grounds and Reasons of the Present Dislike and Complaint Against the Settlement of a South-Sea Company. In this pamphlet and other writing on the South Sea Company, Defoe struck out at critics and encouraged the economic boom that the scheme projected. As I explain in this essay, Defoe’s concern about speculation and the apparitional quality of credit tempered his optimism. 2 Defoe, South Sea Trade (London, 1711), 26. 3 The South Sea Company was a colonial enterprise that tried to capitalize on the slave trade and monopolize import/export in areas to which it was ceded rights by the British government, which desperately needed cash to apply to the national debt. The investment mania that led to the bubble began in 1711, with corporate manipulation and directors’ corruption, egged on by collective speculation, proceeding to an unrealistic swelling of the stock, and an ultimate and disastrous drop in value. It is a story that we recognize easily in the days of Enron, but that seemed wholly new and extremely frightening at the time. 4 Defoe, South Sea Trade, 33. 5 Ingrassia, Authorship, Commerce, and Gender in Early Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 24. 6 Defoe. A Review of the Affairs of France: and of all Europe, as Influenc’d by that Nation, edited by Arthur Wellesley Secord, 22 vols (New York: Columbia

184

7

8

9

10 11

12

Carl Fisher

University Press, 1938), 8:153. Defoe did imagine his commentary in the Review to be clearly in Harley’s interest. In an obsequious letter to Harley on 19 June 1711 he has something to relate about ‘The Trade to the South Seas, which abundance speak Evill of because they do not Understand.’ The Letters of Daniel Defoe, edited by George Healey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1955), 332. In a subsequent letter, on 26 June, he says, ‘I would gladly have spoken Six words to your Ldpp on the subject of the South Sea Affaire, in which I Perswade My Self I may do some Service in Print’ (333). Defoe, who was certainly sceptical about aspects of the trade, by July 1711 was writing in the Review in support, and he wrote to Harley: ‘I have put a Stop to what I was Saying in Print Till I may kno’ if my Thoughts are of any Consideration in your Ldpps Judgmt, and because I would Not by Distinguishing too Nicely, Discourage the Thing in Generll’ (338). In part because Harley was involved – some felt, in fact, according to one of Defoe’s letters, that Harley had written the Essay Upon Publick Credit – Defoe was generally supportive. In fact, in An Essay on the South Sea Trade he comments: ‘[talk of economic reality with] ‘Butchers, Grafters, cheesemongers, ship chandlers, Smiths ... Brewers, Bakers, Coopers, and the like ... to talk to these of south sea trade is to talk Hebrew and Arabic: like Esop’s Cock, they spurn the diamond with contempt, and will sell two of them for a handful of barley’ (34). He was concerned that the public could not understand economic intricacies that affected both the life of the nation as well as their own lives, such as the national debt, that ‘this backward, unresolv’d Nation’ had become clamorous about the wrong things. An inability to pay down the destabilizingly high national debt, which the South Sea project promised, would ‘leave the Publick bleeding to Death; and the just Ground of Discontent among the People growing, and Naturally tending to Confusions and Distractions.’ By not being fully supportive, in other words, the people would add to the problem rather than be part of the solution. Remember the scene in Moll Flanders, in which Moll describes well-meaning people whom she preys upon as they are anxious and distracted by a house ablaze. All the quotes in this section are from the Review 8: 190–215. Defoe, The Villainy of Stock-Jobbers Detected, 25. This is much the same argument Defoe will later make in defending the weavers’ rioting against the import of calico and other fabrics. The Manufacturer 64 (30 October 1719), 1. Also see Novak, ‘Defoe and the Disordered City,’ PMLA 62 (1977), 246. Earlier, in the Review, he argues that business practices have become worse than highway robbery, pickpocketing, and burglary. He claims, as usual, to

Defoe on the South Sea Bubble and the Public Good

13

14 15

16

17

18

19 20

185

have at heart the ‘publick Good’: ‘In Exchange Alley they buy Cities, sell Armies, make Contracts for Votes, buy and sell P—ts, they take Towns bespeak Victories, Cheat their Fathers, and Stock-Jobb the Nation’ (8:194). I take this term from Sandra Sherman, ‘Servants and Semiotics: Reversible Signs, Capital Instability, and Defoe’s Logic of the Market,’ English Literary History 62 (1995), 556; Sherman discusses Defoe’s negative responses to any potentially disruptive socio-economic activity, particularly the way servants and masters often seem interchangeable in anonymous urban society. Novak, Economics and the Fiction of Daniel Defoe (New York: Russell and Russell, 1976), 6, 13–14. There have been numerous recent writings on Defoe’s ideas of credit; particularly thorough on concepts of credit – which Defoe terms ‘air-money’ – and the fictional construction of the credit nexus is Sandra Sherman, Finance and Fictionality in the Early Eighteenth Century: Accounting for Defoe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). Defoe writes: ‘Publick Credit is the consequence of honourable, just, and punctual management in the matter of funds and taxes, or loans upon them’ (21). He argues that both the Crown and Parliament must ‘upon any complaints of the subject ... enquire into any mismanagement or abuse of the people’ (21). ‘Public credit is national, not personal’ in his mind and it is essential that financial officers do not abuse their position of trust. Dr Henry Sacheverell was a Tory divine who preached incendiary sermons in 1709 and 1710 against the Whig ministry. He became very popular, sparking riots by his followers, and Defoe famously lambasted him both for his beliefs and for whipping up public frenzy. It was against the background and in the context of the Sacheverell disorders that Defoe wrote on South Sea Company issues. Defoe devotes entire issues of the Review to bolstering interest and confidence in the budding trade and parts of at least twenty issues in volumes 8 and 9 to the trade, both before and after the enfranchising of the company. Of course, his commentary must be seen in the light of his allegiance to Harley, his Tory benefactor, for whom he worked as a spy in the events leading to the Scottish Union, and without this connection the tone would have changed dramatically (as it did in later pamphlets when the situation deteriorated), but still it is likely that Defoe had a sincere belief in the value of the project for trade and for the economy generally. Review, 8:201–2, 213. John O’Brien discusses some of the party implications, including Mainwaring’s Whig attack on the Toryism of Defoe’s Essay Upon Publick Credit in ‘The Character of Credit: Defoe’s “Lady Credit,” The Fortunate Mistress, and the

186

21

22

23

24

25

26

Carl Fisher

Resources of Inconsistency in Early Eighteenth-Century Britain,’ English Literary History 63 (1996), 613–14. In fact, O’Brien notes: ‘Having returned to Harley’s service, Defoe was in effect caught at this moment in the middle between Mainwaring’s hard-line Whig journal The Medley and Jonathan Swift’s Tory journal The Examiner, and therefore was subject to attack from both’ (629n21). Defoe, Review, Vol. 8. Subsequent page references appear in parentheses in the text. The discussion of Defoe’s support for Harley is voluminous; Novak points out in Economics that, while Defoe generally attacked the company after Harley’s fall, in his ‘attempt to defend the company in The Commentator, nos. 60–74 (July 29–Aug. 16, 1720), and in The Director (1720) ... [he] was clearly trying to save the Whig government from the embarrassment of the scandal,’ 160. This is an often noted correspondence between fact and fiction, particularly well delineated by Pat Rogers, in ‘“The Calamitous Year”: A Journal of the Plague Year and the South Sea Bubble,’ Eighteenth Century Encounters: Studies in Literature and Society in the Age of Walpole (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1985), 151–67. J.A. Downie discusses the gestation of the Review in Robert Harley and the Press (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 57–79, and ‘Stating Facts Right about Defoe’s Review,’ Prose Studies 16 (April 1993), 8–22. As the textual examples suggest, Defoe consistently asserts his desire to inform the public. The Review of 17 July 1711 begins with a claim to offer information: ‘I would fain have People, when they talk of the Trade to the South-Seas, understand what they are to mean, and labour a little to think all alike about it ... I must tell you what it is, and what it is not; for till we understand this rightly, we shall talk about it to very little purpose’ (8:197). He spends this entire issue defending the South Sea trade, trying to right ‘gross errors in the Conceptions of [the English] People’ because he hopes ‘a little Experience [will] open their Eyes’ and they will ‘remain under the Delusion as little as possible.’ In this endeavour, he will ‘enquire into its Probabilities, Advantages, Hazards, Difficulties, Encouragements and Discouragements, and into what [they] ought to think of it, or expect from it, and what not.’ See Thompson, Customs in Common: Studies in Traditional Popular Culture (New York: Norton, 1993), especially chap. 4, ‘The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century,’ and chap. 5, ‘The Moral Economy Reviewed.’ Also see Rudé, The Crowd in History, 1730–1848 (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1981). Defoe makes a similar argument in volume 9, when the South Sea Company

Defoe on the South Sea Bubble and the Public Good

27

28 29

30

31

32 33 34 35 36 37

38 39

187

is more firmly entrenched: ‘which the loudest Clamours could never cry down, and which those People, who were loudest against its being set up, are now eagerest to have it preserv’d and provided for by the Peace, and forwardest to lay out their Money in the Stock’ (30). According to another ballad: ‘What numbers have got that insatiable itch / And endless ambition of still growing rich’ as ‘all the whole nation attends the South Sea’ (148). Lewis Melville, The South Sea Bubble (New York: Burt Franklin, 1968), reprints a number of contemporary ballads. The Director, 1720–1, quoted in Paula Backscheider, Daniel Defoe: His Life (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 454. Mackay, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds [1841] (repr. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1932), especially 68–83. Contemporary reactions on the repercussions of the stock slump varied widely, from Lord Berkeley’s lament, ‘So many undone people will make London a very melancholy place this winter,’ to Atterbury’s suggestion that the clamour and confusion created an ideal time for a new Jacobite rebellion. See Melville, South Sea Bubble, which also quotes James’s response, that he would not want to take advantage of ‘the misfortune of England groaning under a load of trouble and the severest hardships’ (156–62). John Aislabie was the chancellor of the Exchequer and had helped to negotiate the scheme in which the South Sea Company would take over the national debt; it was subsequently revealed that Aislabie had taken a £20,000 bribe in company stock to help to steer the legislation through the House of Commons. Defoe describes people trampled to death in the fight to gain something for devalued shares, and he suggests: ‘Offices shall be appointed in distant Places of the City’ to avoid the dangers of crowding. Quoted in William Lee, Daniel Defoe: His Life and Recently Discovered Writings, 2 vols (London: John Camden Hotten, 1869), 2:256. Mackay, Extraordinary Popular Delusions,63. Melville, South Sea Bubble, 253. Brantlinger, Fictions of State: Culture and Credit in Britain, 1694–1994 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996), 57. Quoted in ibid., 57. Quoted in Backsheider, Daniel Defoe, 453. Lee, Daniel Defoe, 2:ix. P.N. Furbank and W.R. Owens have recently questioned some of Lee’s ascriptions. See Defoe De-attributions: A Critique of J.R. Moore’s Checklist (London: Hambledon Press, 1994). Lee, Daniel Defoe, 2:219. Quoted in Sherman, Finance and Fictionality, 21.

188

Carl Fisher

40 Rogers, Literature and Popular Culture (Sussex: Harvester Press, 1985), 40. 41 The quintessential essay on the subject is Novak, ‘Defoe and the Disordered City,’ 241–52. 42 Zimmerman, The Boundaries of Fiction: History and the Eighteenth-Century British Novel (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996), 92. 43 Rogers, Literature and Popular Culture, 159. 44 Novak, Economics, 48. 45 Novak, ‘Defoe as an Innovator of Fictional Form,’ in The Cambridge Companion to the Eighteenth-Century Novel, ed. John Richetti (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 55. 46 Maximillian E. Novak, Realism, Myth, and History in Defoe’s Fiction (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983), 59, 130. 47 See Brewer, The Sinews of Power: War, Money and the English State, 1688–1783 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 124–6.

chapter nine

The Writer as Hero from Jonson to Fielding MANUEL SCHONHORN

When Defoe concluded, in 1708, that ‘Soldiers fight, and Schollars read, and Parsons preach; ’tis all for Money,’ he had assessed the fall from grace of his country’s ‘animating centers of society.’1 Great Britain’s major national institutions, the army, the Church, and the university, were to continue the century-long descent that cultural change would accelerate.2 The eighteenth century would be one of disintegration, fragmentation, and revolution – revolution moral, social, sexual, financial, military, economic, and institutional.3 John Richetti adds ‘epistemological and ontological.’4 British society had been undermined by specialization, effeminacy, and corruption.5 Authority had been compromised and complicated. Gibbon’s Oxford, that Jacobite haven, was ‘engaged in debate over the sources of authority.’6 Internally and externally, the 1750s were deplorable years, ‘a decade of one prolonged crisis.’7 Great Britain was a nation threatened within by domestic corruption and without by foreign oppression. By 1758, in the face of military losses, humiliating retreats, rudderless ministries, breakdowns in public order, food riots, and invasion scares, both a twenty-six-year-old shopkeeper in Sussex and the Earl of Chesterfield bemoaned a nation that had lost its institutional vigour: Thomas Turner wrote in his diary: ‘Oh my country, my country! Oh Albion, Albion! I doubt you are tottering on the brink of ruin and desolation.’ Chesterfield wrote in a private letter: ‘Whoever is in or whoever is out, I am sure we are undone both at home and abroad. We are no longer a nation. I never yet saw so dreadful a prospect.’8 Where would renewal come from? Who would be able, in Linda Colley’s phrase, to reforge the nation?9 Who had the art, as Stephen Sondheim writes, of making connections, of putting it all together, when, in

190

Manuel Schonhorn

Paul Langford’s summing up, ‘the traditional structures of corporate and communal life were either absent or inappropriate for the full range of contemporary conditions and aspirations.’10 ‘Moral regeneration [could only come] through national rebirth,’ Gerald Newman has written, but who was to give voice to, initiate, and lead that rebirth?11 Some writers sought to revivify the faded spirits of Britain by recalling England’s mythic past. But they created ineffectual prophets who could only ‘chant the future glories of England.’12 Its past, present, and future may be limned in ‘Rule Britannia,’ but the voice was an ancient venerable bard’s accompanied by a harp. Gray’s bard, of hoary hair and haggard eyes, leaped to his death to plunge ‘to endless night.’13 Pope and Johnson, among many others, helped to set the semisacred triumvirate of Alfred, Edward III, and Henry V. But for others, Britain’s deplorable, feeble state could be repaired only by a dominant leader possessing supreme power.14 One reason, perhaps, for the successes of Handel’s sacred oratorios, from Saul (1739) to Joshua (1748), is their predominant theme: the successful search for a hero. Defoe’s earlier and subversive program had hoped to establish a Supreme Minister who would dominate the business of government, where the monarch would ‘ruleth not though she raign over realmes.’15 One of the conclusions that can be drawn from J.H. Plumb’s magisterial biography of Robert Walpole is that one-party government, like non-party government, can devolve into one-man rule.16 Lord Bolingbroke’s Idea of a Patriot King, written in 1739 though not published until 1749, fused past, present and future, preaching for a benevolent autocrat, ‘a standing miracle.’17 As soon as a Patriot King was raised to the throne, the form and orders of the constitution were to be restored to their primitive integrity. In 1757 Rev. John Brown, in his extremely popular and often reprinted Estimate of the Manners of the Times, fervently wished that ‘some GREAT MINISTER’ might arise to repair his fractured nation.18 And as late as 1787 Thomas Day interrupted his seminal work intended for the use of children, Sandford and Merton, to hope ‘for “some legislator” who could draw up a “code,” some general rules of conduct, by which all could live in harmonious equality.’19 One of the useful conclusions emanating from the collection of essays in The English Hero, 1660–1800 is the sense that, as British writers imagined a hero in literature, it was the writer of that literature who emerged as the agent of renewal and reform.20 Robert Folkenflik’s succinct and correct observation that ‘the writer becomes a central hero for Johnson’ can also serve as the summation for the major writers of the century.21

The Writer as Hero

191

They, and the nation at large, no longer implicitly trusted the integrity and judgment of traditional authority figures. We thus understand why Imlac can exclaim, even before he feels the enthusiastic fit, that the poet must be ‘the legislator of mankind.’22 It is the writer who now establishes himself as reconciliator and redeemer, his mythification paralleling the demythification, in Robert Linton’s phrase, of the ‘optimal’ or ‘status personalities’ of the period.23 It was given to the writer to repair the disruptive functional and social differentiation of society, a role that seemingly had been intuited by Addison, Mandeville, and Smollett.24 His consecration in Great Britain is the picture I would like to sketch here. My concentration will be on William Davenant and Daniel Defoe, with some lesser commentary on some writers who have not been given their full due. When David Kramer comments on Dryden’s poetry, that ‘English military and poetic greatness are often used to signify one another,’25 he reminds us of a symmetry that is classical. The poets of Greece and Rome described the effects of art and victory in similar language, the poet thus making his own achievements seem as significant as the warrior’s. Biographies of men of literature from the beginning were often ‘placed on a parity with the lives of statesmen and generals.’26 It has been argued that the early Renaissance began to define a new reconstituted notion of the author as the hero in his own works.27 Heroes and Poets, Wit and Valor, have always gone together, as Dryden and Rymer wrote, both cast ‘in Heaven’s peculiar mold.’28 But the insistent elevation of the imaginative writer himself to unrivalled heroic stature appears to be the singular achievement of the eighteenth century, when his reflected autonomy became divorced from religious and political domination. It has been written that, for Ben Jonson, ‘the king and the poet empower one another. As a result, Jonson constructs his praise such that its validation depends upon the king’s recognition of the poet’s own authority.’29 Focusing on Orphic imagery, one writer elucidates Jonson’s career as a shift in cultural authority, for it is given now to the writer, not the monarch, to organize the nation.30 As Jonson writes, ‘Poets are far rarer births than kings.’31 And, if his earlier expressed thoughts were tailored to monarchy’s needs, at the end of his life he elevated the poet over the philosopher, the divine, or the statesman.32 Richard Helgerson has written that his contemporaries, Drayton among others, made ‘known their antipathy to Stuart absolutism and their allegiance to a rival source of authority – a source of authority that legitimates that antipathy and enables them as individual authors and as members of several overlapping com-

192

Manuel Schonhorn

munities. In Poly-Olbion the poet, the Muse and the land at last assume the monarchical role.’33 But it is William Davenant, in 1650, from the safety of the Louvre, who signals the shift in cultural authority from the sites of power to the ‘Dominion of Poesy,’ which he insists can becalm his fractured nation as it once did when ‘Adam injoy’d Paradise.’34 There is no mention of any Stuart monarch when Davenant catalogues the miseries that civil disruptions have inflicted on his countrymen. Rather, in his cogent analysis of his politically and morally shattered nation, Davenant indicts all the internal sources of power and authority that have failed the people. The Pulpit, he asserts immediately, has little prevailed in maintaining the integrity of England’s faith. Why? Because Divines have neglected the assistance of poets. All the tokens of cohesion – Leaders of Armies, Statesmen, Makers of Laws, Judges – have neglected them too; all ‘look’d gravely upon Poetry ... as if they beleev’d they could performe their worke without it. But Poets (who with wise diligence study the People, and have in all ages, by an insensible influence govern’d their manners) may justly smile when they perceive that Divines, Leaders of Armies, Statesmen, and Judges, think Religion, the Sword ... Policy, or Law can give, without the helpe of the Muses, a long and quiet satisfaction in government’ (32). Divines may have Humility, Statesmen Gravity, and Leaders of Armies Valor, but ‘it is in Poets a full comprehension of all recited in all these, and an ability to bring these comprehensions into action’ (19). They not only wear the mantle of the prophets of old, but Davenant’s figurative language enables them to reenact their essential jurisdictional functions. They are wise like generals (2), scout and ambush like the best soldiers (23, 26, 27), and, like statesmen and judges make laws (18). Unlike Divines, who persuade ‘with threatnings, and seconded by force’ – methods that have failed, as Davenant repeatedly makes explicit time and time again, ‘the persuasions of Poesy ... are Harmonious and delightfull insinuations, and never any constraint; unlesse the ravishment of Reason may be call’d Force’ (38). How foolish then to think ‘the Cheifs of any profession more necessary to the World then excellent Poets’ (19). By the end of his insistent and sustained accusations, perhaps to moderate their audacity, poetry becomes a ‘collaterall help,’ to enable ‘the Foure cheef aides of Government, (Religion, Armes, Policy, and Law) ... which hath faild in the effects of authority’ (37) to refashion the people and the government. Nevertheless, Davenant has no hesitation in declaring that the ‘Fourfold Power’ that rule, by neglecting, demeaning, and dismissing the man of imagination, have been responsible for the dissolution of his nation.

The Writer as Hero

193

How far, then, from Sidney’s poet in his golden world, released from the mundane affairs of men, is Davenant’s poet, vital for the successful discharge of all the necessary offices of government. But it must be admitted that neither Davenant nor the other mainstream writers of his day had moved the poet into the place formerly reserved for the ruler; the man of literature had yet to challenge the supremacy of the Church and the Crown. Upon his return to England for the Restoration, Davenant returned to the commonplace, linking his muse and his monarch: ‘The Laurel and the Crown together went, / Had the same Foes, and the same Banishment.’35 England’s misconstrued return to normalcy could only return the writer to his auxiliary status. The subordinate nature of the muse, and the limits to her domination and control over the affairs of men, was the characteristic verdict of the times. Robert Herrick bade a moving farewell to his poetic career when he accepted the ministerial life; his Church became the transcendent moral authority. But he could also imagine a time when his diviner Muse Shall want a Hand-mayde, [his poetry will] Bee readye ... to wayte uppon her Thoughe as a servant, yet a Mayde of Honor.36

And Dryden, backtracking from Davenant’s earlier resolute position, humbly confessed that patterns of piety on the stage, the writer’s creations, could only ‘second the precepts of our religion.’37 But other writers did not hesitate to supplant the priest by the poet as the spokesman for morality and order; and it was only a matter of time before the writer would become the secular heir to the traditional orders of society. As Alexander Beljame illustrates more than a century ago, a fundamental change in the status of the writer took place in the late seventeenth century: ‘Exalted in others’ eyes by the position accorded them in society, authors themselves rose higher in their own estimation.’38 Ben Ross Schneider writes that Restoration dramatists were beginning to see the stage as an ‘alternative to the pulpit.’39 (As Samuel Richardson dares to write a century later, ‘When the Pulpit fails, other expedients are necessary.’)40 As the martial image loses its lustre, English writers of the Restoration – and beyond – insistently identify their role as similar to the clerics’ and reiterate similar goals. Edward Ravenscroft, revising an old play about despotism in 1678, prefaces it by insisting that ‘when Ill Manners and Ill Principles Reign in a State, it is the business of the Stage, as

194

Manuel Schonhorn

well as pulpits, to declaim and Instruct.’41 Even Tom Brown concludes that The pulpit alone Can never preach down The fops of the town.42

Another opined that The Law’s Defect, the juster Muse [poetry] supplies, Tis only we [poets] can make you Good and Wise, Whom Heav’n spares, the Poet will Chastise.43

Earlier, in 1693, Bevill Higgons covered all the structures of communal order in his fulsome praise of Dryden, who all sorts of Men doth teach, Philosophers instructs to live, Divines to preach, States-men to govern, Generals to fight, At once Mankind you profit and delight.44

Dryden’s earlier modesty was not maintained, as we have seen, by his admirers. In 1700 Samuel Cobb praises him for doing what English kings before him, kings in the pantheon such as Edward III and Henry V, could not accomplish, that is, subduing French culture to English rule: ‘Poets conquer, when the Heroe fails.’45 But before the English writer could canonize himself and his profession, he had to overturn the established powers of the community, to neutralize their distinctive, time-honoured eminence. There is no more important and revealing, nor more deliberate, work in the century than the Spectator papers. Of the professions, the lawyer and the physician posed no threat, having been mocked since classical times. I recall a Mexican curse, ‘May your life be filled with lawyers.’ Enough has been written of Addison’s gentle satire as he demolished the anachronistic Sir Roger, his obvious unfitness for the urban revolution and the age of commerce that will soon be celebrated in the columns to come. Militancy was never Mr. Spectator’s mode. But consider the soldier and the priest as they are presented to the London audience. Captain Sentry, like his uncle, is a seventeenth-century discard. He wears a rusty sword that he once used at Steenkirk, where, it should be remembered, King William

The Writer as Hero

195

and his allied armies were soundly defeated in 1692 by the French.46 As Stephen Baxter has reminded me, ‘No one is less popular in a trading nation than an army man when there is no fighting to do.’ Or, according to English folk wisdom: ‘Soldiers in peace are like chimneys in summer.’47 The sympathy that will be elicited throughout the century is for a common soldier, either maimed, disabled, or leaning on his crutch. Goldsmith’s 1759 essay in the British Magazine, ‘The Distresses of a Common Soldier,’ notably evokes this sympathy. And the Spectator Club’s Clergyman? As much, even more, than any other member of the Club, he is a classic character out of time. He is introduced, nameless, in the second issue: ‘he visits us but seldom ... He has the Misfortune to be of a very weak Constitution, and consequently cannot accept of such Cares and Business as Preferments in his Function would oblige him to.’ If he falls upon some divine topic, which he rarely does, ‘he always treats [it] with much Authority, as one who has no Interests in this World, as one who is hastening to the Object of all his Wishes, and conceives Hope from his Decays and Infirmities’ (111). Literally and figuratively, like Captain Sentry, he has left the world because he was not fit for it (109). His mind, like nearly every figure in the Club except Sir Andrew, is fixed in another century. Not only is the role of the priest throughout the Spectator papers made marginal, but, as they continue, the Addisonian voice usurps the function of the churchman; many of the papers are little more than sermons for his congregation of readers. If we modify Hegel’s observation, it can easily be admitted that the Spectator papers served the swelling eighteenth-century reading public as substitutes for morning prayers.48 Thus, there is more than rhetorical and polemical exaggeration in Swift’s attack on Steele – and, of course, on Addison – in The Publick Spirit of the Whigs (1714) when he writes: ‘By his pretending to have always maintained an inviolable Respect to the Clergy, he would insinuate, that those Papers among the Tatlers and Spectators, where the whole Order is abused, were not his own.’49 In the Spectator, the most widely read and imitated periodical of the century, the English public was introduced to the portrait of the clergyman that was to be sustained throughout the century: if pious, he is old, impotent, infirm, and detached from the religious needs of his congregants. ‘Priests and pigeons make foul houses.’50 And Mr. Spectator? ‘Speculative Statesman, Soldier, Merchant and Artizan ... very well versed in the Theory of an Husband, or a Father, and can discern the Errors in the Oeconomy, Business and Diversion of others’ (103). Given the dramatically radical change in social structures and

196

Manuel Schonhorn

agencies of significance since the Restoration, perhaps we can say that Mr. Spectator exhibits the full comprehension of many of the qualities of Davenant’s stewards of government. But above all, Mr. Spectator is a writer who commands and assimilates through his text almost every subject, form, and style pursued by authors in his time. Essay, story, history, epistle, comic travel narrative, dream vision, advertisement, ballad: these and others make the Spectator a unique textbook from which the writer could learn to communicate fully to his new, extensive reading public of the day.51 Defoe and Pope make strange bedfellows, the protean journalist of all metiers and the isolated Augustan poet-hero, but each in his own fashion sounded the death knell for traditional organs of authority. Each in his own way claimed a mission for the writer that was commanding and august. ‘Pulpits are Thrones,’ Davenant had prefaced, before he began his analysis of the demoralization of Stuart culture; but he intimated that their powers of persuasion were restricted, given the limitations of place and time (29). Defoe, the most prescient writer of his age, knew that a news revolution was beginning to define his age, and that the first publication of extraordinary news no longer came from the pulpit, as Clarendon had asserted for his seventeenth century. Defoe, in his Preface to The Storm (1704), dismantles the voice of church authority and valorizes the new man of letters as the true surrogate voice of history and authenticity. ‘Preaching of Sermons,’ Defoe begins, ‘is Speaking to a few of Mankind: Printing of Books is Talking to the whole World. The Parson Prescribes himself, and addresses to the particular Auditory with the Appellation of My Brethren; but he that Prints a Book, ought to Preface it with a Noverint Universi, Know all Men by these Presents.’52 The proper inference to be drawn from his remarkable observation, Defoe continues, is That tho’ he that Preaches from the Pulpit ought to be careful of his Words ... yet he that Prints and Publishes to all the World, has tenfold Obligation. The Sermon is a Sound of Words spoken to the Ear, and prepar’d only for present Meditation, and extends no farther than the strength of Memory can convey it; A Book Printed is a Record, remaining in every Man’s Possession, and always ready to renew its Acquaintance with his Memory, and always ready to be produc’d as an Authority or Voucher to any Reports he makes out of it, and conveys its Contents for Ages to come, to the Eternity of mortal Time, when the Author is forgotten in his Grave. (A2, r–v).

The Writer as Hero

197

Sermons can corrupt only a few; the lies of a printed book abuse all mankind. For this reason, Defoe confronts the anticipated scepticism that will greet the anecdotes he has collected about the great storm of 1702; also for this reason, appropriating the priestly mantle, he forcefully tells the reader, ‘I shall act the Divine, and draw necessary practical Inferences from the extraordinary Remarkables of this Book’ (A3r). And he does so, for the Preface continues to assert his authority, to challenge atheism, and to correct the ridiculous stuff of history. Defoe continues to refuse to leave to the men of the pulpit the uses and applications that can be drawn from this disaster. In his accompanying Lay-man’s Sermon, published a few months earlier, he expounded on the same verse from Nahum that linked this finely structured sermon to the later work. In fact, cutting away from some of Defoe’s witty apologies to the reader for sermonizing at an honest coffee-house conventicle, one could easily mistake it for the conventional three-part division and explication of a biblical text that we are so familiar with in Swift and other Anglican divines. ‘And what tho’ your Humble Servant be no Man of the Text,’ Defoe writes, ‘if he be a Man of Honesty, he may have a hand in making you all Men of Application. In publick Callamities, every Circumstance is a Sermon and every thing we see a Preacher.’53 Through the 1720s Pope was occupied with his translation of Homer and his edition of Shakespeare. It would thus appear that the drudgery of translation, tensions with his translators, and matters of publication precluded any intense attention to and concern for politics. But following the publication of the Dunciad in 1728–9, with more insight that they were aware of , his enemies realized that they were now confronting a poet who ‘usurps a Sovereign role.’54 Earl Wasserman observes that in the years following, he frequently thought of himself as a kind of theologian.55 With a satirist’s and moralist’s judgment on the decline of the old values that had once glorified his England, Pope moved first his dear friend Swift and then himself into the offices formerly reserved for the political and moral leaders of the community. Thomas Woodman cautiously writes that in The First Satire of the Second Book of Horace Imitated, ‘Pope seems to be saying that instead of being the spokesman for the laws the poet himself must become the lawgiver and punisher himself, for the laws are now in abeyance.’56 But that ‘seems,’ that earlier reluctance of 1733, is replaced two years later by a forthrightness and bluntness in Pope that underscores his courage, confidence, and artist’s authority. No lines could dramatize more the flawed values of his Hanoverian world than those he addressed to Swift in The First Epistle of the Second Book

198

Manuel Schonhorn

of Horace, Imitated; Swift writes, ‘[these lines would] do me the greatest honor I shall receive from posterity, and will outweigh the malignity of ten thousand enemies.’57 For it is an exiled writer who, because of the defection of the Crown, has found it necessary to appropriate the sacred duties of monarchy, to uphold the cause of justice, to provide for the economic welfare, and to dispense mercy and grace to the sick.58 But it is in An Epistle From Mr. Pope to Dr. Arbuthnot, unconstrained by Horace, that Pope, who envisioned himself as priest, lawgiver, and warrior in truth’s defence, can proclaim, with no irony, ‘Like heaven, I need but only to stand still.’59 Immediately, Pope introduces himself as the Copernican sun, the unmoved mover, enthroned in the centre of his audacious design, around whom the underworld of London, foes and friends alike, revolve, himself a sacred inhabitant of a sacred place. (Earlier, in Satire II, i, Pope was more temperate, more implicit.) And in lines that have yet to be fully imagined by any – at least of his present-day readers – his name glows, ‘rubric on the walls,’ like the red-lettered and consecrated clerics of the Presbyterian calendar, or like the martyrs of the Church of Rome, who are ‘referr’d to in their Calendars, in Red Letters, and esteemed great Saints in Heaven.’60 No lines could reveal more the distance Pope has travelled from Windsor Forest (1713), where his British landscape served as the synecdoche for the moral order and harmony of his country and the universe. John Richetti has written that the eighteenth-century novelists are not only imagining writers as heroes in their fictions, but that their heroic stature is affirmed by their attempts, successes, even failures, to form associations, maintain families, and establish communities.61 Let me consider finally the author of Tom Jones. One should make no mistake about the epigraph on the title page of Henry Fielding’s glorious novel, for it signals Fielding himself as ‘the man who on Troy’s fall / Saw the wide world, its ways and cities all.’62 The vision and worth of Homer and Horace now grace their British disciple, a just and merciful, worldly-wise and compassionately omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent judge, responsive to the foibles of his human subjects. Who but he is the cultural centre of his fictive nation and the real source of all civilized standards? We have begun our unforgettable travels with one who likens himself to one ‘who keeps a public ordinary, at which all persons are welcome for their money’ (31). Eighteen books later, this voice of an enduring civilization, who has affirmed his power, wisdom, and goodness, now chooses to bid farewell to all those readers who have travelled with him, but who have now become his friends.63 Though we seemingly began from the

The Writer as Hero

199

superficial economy of divergent interests, under the writer’s tutelage we have become community, if only as readers, which he has brought into being. Fielding the writer has taught us to negotiate and resolve our differences for the sake of social harmony. What more can we decently ask for?64

NOTES 1 Defoe, The Review of the Affairs of France, edited by Arthur Wellesley Secord, 22 vols (New York: Columbia University Press, 1938), 5:102, 406 (20 November 1708); Clifford Geertz, ‘Centers, Kings, and Charisma: Reflections on the Symbolics of Power,’ in Rites of Power, ed. Sean Wilentz (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985), 15. The first eleven citations are also the introductory notes to my paper, ‘Here Comes The Son: A Shandean Project,’ in The Age of Projects, ed. Maximillian Novak (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008), 271–96. 2 For the army see the works of Alan Guy, Oeconomy and Discipline: Officership and Administration in the British Army, 1714–63 (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1985); Tony Hayter, The Army and the Crowd in Mid-Georgian England (London: Macmillan, 1978); J.A. Houlding, Fit for Service: The Training of the British Army, 1715–1795 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981); R.E. Scouller, The Armies of Queen Anne (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966); J.R. Western, The English Militia in the Eighteenth Century: The Story of a Political Issue, 1660–1802 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1965); and Sir John W. Fortescue, A History of the British Army, 3 vols (London: Macmillan, 1899–1930), 2:32, and his essay ‘The Army,’ in Johnson’s England, ed. A.S. Turberville, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1933), 1:66–87. For the universities: John Gascoigne, Cambridge in the Age of Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); W.R.Ward, Georgian Oxford: University Politics in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1958); D.A. Winstanley, Unreformed Cambridge: A Study of Certain Aspects of the University in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1935); and History of the University of Oxford: The Eighteenth Century, ed. L.S. Sutherland and L.G. Mitchell (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986). For the Church: G. Best, Temporal Pillars (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964); V.H.H. Green, Religion at Oxford and Cambridge (London: SCM Press, 1964); Peter Virgin, The Church in an Age of Negligence (Cambridge: James Clarke, 1989); and contemporary accounts in Spencer Cowper, Letters, 1746–1774, edited by Edward Hughes (Durham: Published for the Surtees Society by Andrews,

200

3

4 5 6 7

8

9 10

Manuel Schonhorn

1956); Thomas Turner, The Diary of Thomas Turner, 1754–1765, edited by David Vaisey (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984); and John Hildrop, The Contempt of the Clergy Considered, The Second Edition (London, 1756). See the studies by Michael McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel, 1600– 1740 (Baltimore; Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987); Dudley Bahlman, Moral Revolution of 1688 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957); John Barrell, English Literature in History, 1730–80 (London: Hutchinson, 1983); Ian Christie, Stress and Stability in Late Eighteenth-Century Britain (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984); P.G.M. Dickson, The Financial Revolution in England (New York: St Martins Press, 1967); Brian McCrea, Impotent Fathers: Patriarchy and Demographic Crisis in the Eighteenth-Century (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1998); Nicholas Rogers, Crowds, Culture and Politics in Georgian Britain (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998); and Kathleen Wilson, The Sense of the People (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). See also the important foundational works by J.G.A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), and Virtue, Commerce, and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). Richetti, The English Novel in History, 1700–1780 (London: Routledge, 1999), 3. See John Sekora, Luxury: The Concept in Western Thought, Eden to Smollett (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977). J.G.A. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, Vol. One: The Enlightenment of Edward Gibbon 1737–1764 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 27. Gerald Newman, The Rise of English Nationalism: A Cultural History, 1740– 1830 (New York: St Martin’s, 1987), 26, citing E.P. Thompson; note his frontispiece, ‘Britannia in Distress’ (1756). See also W.E.H. Lecky, A History of England in the Eighteenth Century, 8 vols (New York, 1888–90), 2:492–3 (‘the years 1756 and 1757 were among the most humiliating in her history’), also 1:14–15. Turner, Diary, 75; Chesterfield’s despair can be read in Lecky, History of England, 2:531–2. The invasion scares that had continually agitated the English public until 1759 are noted in Horace Walpole, Letters, ed. Paget Toynbee, 6 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1903), 4:266, 268; and David Hume, Letters, edited by J.Y.T. Greig, 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), 1:307. See also Alan McNairn, Behold the Hero: General Wolfe and the Arts in the Eighteenth Century (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1997), 7. Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992). Sondheim, Sunday in the Park with George, Act II, scene 12; Langford, A Polite

The Writer as Hero

11 12 13 14

15

16 17 18 19

20 21 22 23

24

201

and Commercial People: England, 1727–1783 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 100. Newman, Rise of English Nationalism, 72. Oliver Elton, A Survey of English Literature, 1730–1780, 2 vols (London: Edward Arnold, 1928), 1:317. The last lines of Gray, ‘The Bard.’ The historical moment is explored by Leonard Krieger, Essay on the Theory of Enlightened Despotism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975), and in his contribution to the Dictionary of the History of Ideas, 4 vols (New York: Scribner’s, 1973), 1:141–62. Manuel Schonhorn, Defoe’s Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 99–109; the quote is on 107n73, citing Tottel’s Miscellany (1557–1587), ed. Hyder Edward Rollins, 2 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1928), 1:212. Plumb, Sir Robert Walpole, The King’s Minister (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1961). Bolingbroke, The Works of Lord Bolingbroke, 4 vols (Philadelphia, 1841), 2:396. Brown, Estimate of the Manners of the Times, 2 vols (London, 1757–8), 1:25. Newman, Rise of English Nationalism, 108. Brian McCrea, in Impotent Fathers, has some lines on the problem but leaves unanswered the essential question: ‘who is to replace the decentered marginalized patriarch?’ 12. The English Hero, 1660–1800, ed. Robert Folkenflik (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1982). Folkenflik, ‘Johnson’s Heroes,’ in ibid., 164; see also ‘The Artist as Hero in the Eighteenth Century,’ Yearbook of English Studies, 12 (1982), 91–108. The History of Rasselas, in Samuel Johnson, edited by Donald Greene, The Oxford Authors (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 353. Linton, The Cultural Background of Personality (New York: Appleton-CenturyCrofts, 1945), 130. See also the indispensable understanding of the cultural crisis in France by Paul Benichou, The Consecration of the Writer, 1750–1830: Le Sacre de l'ecrivain, trans. Mark Jensen (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999), Introduction, chap. 1, and some illuminating endnotes on 347, 348. For Addison the Spectator papers are necessary reading; for Mandeville see J.A.W. Gunn, ‘“State Hypochondriacks” Dispraised: Mandeville versus the Active Citizen,’ in Mandeville and Augustan Ideas: New Essays, ed. Charles W.A. Prior, English Literary Studies No. 83 (Victoria, BC: University of Victoria, 2000), 16–34; for Smollett see Barrell, English Literature in History, 176–209. See also the surprising comment by Clarence Tracy in The Artificial

202

25

26

27

28

29 30 31 32 33

34 35

36 37

Manuel Schonhorn

Bastard: A Biography of Richard Savage (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1953), 100; and Edmund Gosse, Thomas Gray (New York: Harper, 1882), 136. Kramer, ‘Onely Victory in him, the Imperial Dryden,’ in Literary Transmission and Authority: Dryden and other Writers, ed. Jennifer Brady and Earl Miner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 56. Duane Reed Stuart, Epochs of Greek and Roman Biography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1928), 47. There are useful comments by Mary Lefkowitz in The Lives of the Greek Poets (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981) and ‘Autobiographical Fiction in Pindar,’ Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 84 (1980), 29–49. See the many comments infiltrating the essays collected in Concepts of the Hero in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, ed. Norman Burns and C.J. Reagan (Albany: State University of New York, 1975), especially Morton Bloomfield’s essay, ‘The Problem of the Hero in the Later Medieval Period,’ 27–48. ‘Thomas Rymer’s Preface to the Translation of Rapin’s Reflections on Aristotle’s Treatise of Poesie,’ in Critical Essays of the Seventeenth Century, ed. J.E. Spingarn, 3 vols (London: Oxford University Press, 1957), 2:173; Threnodia Augustalis, in The Works of John Dryden, edited by E.N. Hooker and H.T. Swedenberg (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1956), 3:105. Jean LeDrew Metcalfe, ‘“The muses’ empire”: Poetic Authority in Seventeenth-Century Panegyric,’ Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 1992. Lucy Appert, in a Ph.D. dissertation at Duke University, in 1996, which never appears to have been completed. A personal communication. Jonson, ‘To Elizabeth, Countess of Rutland,’ in The Complete Poems, edited by George Parfitt (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1988), 316–17. Jonson, ‘Timber; or, Discoveries,’ in ibid., 405. Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 146. Helgerson also has some thoughtful comments on Spenser, Jonson, and Milton in Self-Crowned Laureates (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983). Davenant, Gondibert, ed. David F. Gladish (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), 30. Subsequent page references appear in parentheses in the text. Davenant, Prologue to his Majesty at the First Play Presented. Nov. 19 [1660], in Michael Dobson, The Making of the National Poet: Shakespeare, Adaptation and Authorship, 1660–1769 (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1992), 19–20. The Poetical Works of Robert Herrick, edited by L.C. Martin (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956), 412. John Dryden: Selected Criticism, edited by James Kinsley and George Parfitt

The Writer as Hero

38

39 40

41 42 43 44 45 46

47

48 49 50 51

52

203

(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), 95. It occurs in the Preface to Tyrannic Love (1670); see The California Edition of the Works of John Dryden, Vol. 19: Plays (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970), 109. Bonamy Dobree, in his Introduction to Beljame, Men of Letters and the English Public in the Eighteenth Century, 1660–1744 [1881] (London: Kegan Paul, 1948), xiii. Schneider, The Ethics of Restoration Comedy (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1971), 7. Richardson, ‘Preface to the Third Edition,’ Samuel Richardson’s Published Commentary on ‘Clarissa,’ 1747–65, edited by Thomas Keymer, 3 vols (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1998), 1:279. Edward Ravenscroft, Preface to Titus Andronicus (1678), cited in Dobson, Making of the National Poet, 73. Brown, Amusements Serious and Comical and Other Works, edited by Arthur L. Haywood (London: Routledge, 1927), xvi. Bevill Higgons, cited in Dobson, Making of the National Poet, 122. Higgons, ‘To Mr. Dryden, On His Translation of Persius,’ in Examen Poeticum: Being The Third Part of Miscellany Poems (London, 1693), 252. Cobb, Poetae Britannici (London, 1700), 20. I owe this reference to Linda Zionkowski. Addison and Steele: Selections from The Tatler and The Spectator, edited by Robert J. Allen, 2nd ed.(New York: Rinehart, 1970). Subsequent page references appear in parentheses in the text. Morris Palmer Tilley, A Dictionary of Proverbs in England in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1950), 616, S60. Benedict Anderson, quoting Hegel, in Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983), 39. Swift, The Publick Spirit of the Whigs, in Political Tracts, 1713–1719, edited by Herbert Davis and Irvin Ehrenpreis (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1964), 36. Tilley, Proverbs, 556, P588. I owe this insight to Barbara Kiefer Lewalski, Paradise Lost and the Rhetoric of Literary Forms (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985). Her list of genres and modes is on 10–11. Defoe, The Storm (London, 1704), A2. Subsequent page references will be noted in parentheses in the text. I have reversed italics and roman. One would like to imagine the prescient Defoe responding to the first earl of Clarendon’s assertion: ‘The first publication of extraordinary news was from the pulpit’; quoted in Christopher Hill, Society and Puritanism in Pre-Revolutionary England (New York: Schocken Books, 1964), 33. The first volume (of

204

53

54 55 56 57

58

59

60

61

62

Manuel Schonhorn

three) of Clarendon’s History of the Rebellion was published in 1702, the second in 1703, the last in 1704. Defoe, The Lay-man’s Sermon Upon the Late Storm (London, 1704), 5. For Swift see Three Sermons, in Irish Tracts 1720–1723 And Sermons, edited by Herbert Davis, with an introduction to the sermons by Louis A. Landa (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1963), 139–98. James Ralph in Sawney (1728), cited in Howard Weinbrot, ‘The Dunciad, Nursing Mothers, and Isaiah,’ Philological Quarterly 71 (1992), 487. Wasserman, Pope’s Epistle to Bathurst (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1960), 13. Woodman, Politeness and Poetry in the Age of Pope (Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickenson University Press, 1985), 130. Correspondence of Alexander Pope, edited by George Sherburn, 5 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956), 4:56. For William Dunkin, Swift was ‘That godlike supplement of law / That held the wicked world in awe,’ cited in New Oxford Book of Eighteenth-Century Verse, ed. Roger Lonsdale (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), 342. See Manuel Schonhorn, ‘Pope’s Epistle To Augustus: Notes toward a Mythology,’ Tennessee Studies in Literature, 16 (1971), 15–33; reprinted in Pope: Recent Essays by Several Hands, ed. Maynard Mack and James A. Winn (Hamden, CT: Archon, 1980), 546–64. Almanzor, wildly unmanageable, in Dryden, Conquest of Granada, Part I, Act III, scene i, 61, line 517, in Works, Vol. 11, Plays (1978). Perhaps indebted to Milton, Paradise Lost, Book III, lines 576–86. See also Dryden’s dedication to Don Sebastian, in Works, Vol. 15, Plays (1976), 60 (‘centring on himself, remains immovable, and smiles at the madness of the dance about him.’). An Epistle From Mr. Pope to Dr. Arbuthnot, in The Twickenham Edition of the Poems of Alexander Pope, 6 vols; Imitations of Horace, edited by John Butt (London: Methuen, 1953), 4:111, lines 215–16. See Defoe, Review, 4: 87, 348 (2 September 1707); also Matthew Postlethwayt, The Moral Impossibility of Protestant Subjects (Norwich, 1719), a 5 November 1718 sermon. He cites Bishop Thomas Barlow and Bishop Edward Stillingfleet on this image. Richetti, The English Novel, 247–8; see also 4–5. Perhaps it should be noted here that Richetti’s praiseworthy comment on Jonathan Arac’s description of the nineteenth-century novelist is obviously indebted to Barrell’s chapter on Roderick Random in ibid. Fielding, Tom Jones [1749] (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1975). The epigraph in Latin is beneath ‘By HENRY FIELDING, Esq’ in all genuine reprints of the novel’s title page. I do not accept Sheridan Baker’s reading in the Norton Critical Edition (1973), 4.

The Writer as Hero

205

63 See Manuel Schonhorn, ‘Fielding’s Ecphrastic Moment: Tom Jones and His Egyptian Majesty,’ Studies in Philology 78 (1981), 305–23, repr. in Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House, 1987), 87–101. 64 I take this phrase from Neil Postman, Building a Bridge to the Eighteenth Century (New York: Knopf, 1999). Perhaps this is that essential ‘deep, horizontal comradeship’ that Benedict Anderson posits as the measure of a democratic society; see Imagined Communities, 16.

chapter ten

Robinson Trousseau: Joyce’s Defoe MICHAEL SEIDEL

This essay is very simply about some of the accoutrements of realism that James Joyce learned from Daniel Defoe, or, if that learning curve is too constricted, that Joyce learned by being part of the tangent of realism along which Defoe also travelled as an accidental Aristotelian. Like Defoe (indeed, like Aristotle), Joyce assumes that narrative is plot driven and circumstantially designed to reflect a probable, if not actual, world. In a famous comment to a friend, Arthur Power, Joyce insists that ‘in realism you are down to facts in which the world is based: that sudden reality which somehow smashes romanticism to a pulp.’1 Joyce’s first comment in Ulysses directly about Defoe is, appropriately enough, about the figure he called the ‘English Ulysses,’ Robinson Crusoe. Leopold Bloom makes a primitive remark about fiction, realism, and a sense of sequence (or plot): ‘Robinson Crusoe was true to life. Well then Friday buried him. Every Friday buries a Thursday if you come to look at it.’2 Of course, for Joyce, Defoe’s realism ultimately went deeper than verisimilitude and temporal sequence. Joyce shared with Defoe something like an exploratory or maritime imagination, an imagination bred from the sense of movement towards real but unknown, risky, or mysterious territory that in many ways encompasses and even predates a novelistic imagination. Joyce firmly believed that western narrative originated in the hard-rock facts of Phoenician and Carthaginian attempts to make remote oceanic and intercoastal trading destinations familiar and memorable. Narrative is a kind of picturing of space in time, and the oldest stories were versions of maritime logs fictionalized for popular consumption as coastal marvels; hence, for Joyce, all the adventures of the Odyssey are allegorical versions of the realistic pitfalls facing mariners

Robinson Trousseau: Joyce’s Defoe

207

along the littorals of trading lanes in the Aegean and Mediterranean: cliff faces, volcanoes, winds, shoals, and whirlpools. In Finnegans Wake he refers to a host of famous maritime adventure stories, from the Odyssey to Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner, and there might be a Defoe pun in the phrase ‘Jason’s Cruise’: ‘the littleknown periplic bestteller popularly associated with the names of the wretched mariner ... a Punic admiralty report, From MacPerson’s Oshean Round By the Tides of Jason’s Cruise, had been cleverly capsized and saucily republished as a dodecanesian baedecker of the every-tale-a-treat-in-itself variety which could hope satisfactorily to tickle me gander as game as your goose.’3 Exploration, maritime adventure, and landfalls all were central to Joyce, and movement over water (and the movement of water) became for him one of the ways to represent the stuff, substance, and universality of fiction and its spaces. Indeed, in Ulysses and again in Finnegans Wake (a water book and a river book) he turns water into the universal matter of narration, an odyssey in which the realistic medium becomes the realistic message and water itself becomes a hero for the ages. What in water did Bloom, waterlover, drawer of water, watercarrier, returning to the range, admire? Its universality: its democratic equality and constancy to its nature in seeking its own level: its vastness in the ocean of Mercator’s projection: its unplumbed profundity in the Sundam trench of the Pacific exceeding 8000 fathoms: the restlessness of its waves and surface particles visiting in turn all points of its seabord: the independence of its units: the variability of states of sea: its hydrostatic quiescence in calm: its hydrokinetic turgidity in neap and spring tides: its subsidence after devastation: its sterility in the circumpolar icecaps, arctic and Antarctic: its climatic and commercial significance: its preponderance of 3 to 1 over the dry land of the globe: its indisputable hegemony extending in square leagues over all the region below the subequatorial tropic of Capricorn: the multisecular stability of its primeval basin: its luteofulvous bed: its capacity to dissolve and hold in solution all soluble substances including million of tons of the most precious metals: its slow erosions of peninsulas and island, and its persistent formation of homothetic islands, peninsulas and downwardtending promontories: its alluvial deposits: its weight and volume and density: its imperturbability in lagoons and highland tarns: its gradation of colours in the torrid and temperate and frigid zones: its vehicular ramifications in continental lakecontained streams and confluent ocean flowing rivers with the tributaries and transoceanic currents, gulfstream, north and south equatorial courses:

208

Michael Seidel

its violence in seaquakes, waterspouts, Artesian wells, eruptions, torrents, eddies, freshets, spates, groundswells, watersheds, waterpartings, geysers, cataracts, whirlpools, maelstroms, inundations, deluges, cloudbursts. (549)

Joyce goes on for another half-page in one of the great bravura performances of Ulysses, and he elaborates the water passage as extensively as he does because he knows it is not simply the milieu of elemental endurance for the Odyssean hero he thought so emblematic of narrative, but also a substance that allows for the accumulation of detail (some of it highly metaphoric) that represents the realistic imagination. In a 1912 lecture designed to get him a teaching credential in Trieste, Joyce speaks directly of Defoe. In that lecture, entitled ‘Verismo’ (set against a lecture on Blake called ‘Idealismo’), he insists that Defoe was the first writer in English to translate the waterlogged tale of Odyssean epic adventure for contemporary spaces over the ‘broad river of the new realism.’4 The shipwrecked mariner, Crusoe, breathes into his island adventure ‘a truly national spirit.’ The only realism in which Joyce was truly interested merged the personal and national; he states that Robinson Crusoe ‘reveals, as perhaps no other book does throughout the long history of English literature, the wary and heroic instinct of the rational animal and the prophecy of empire’ (24).5 Furthermore, when Joyce looks closely at what happens in Defoe’s narratives, they begin to seem much like his own depictions of the concentrated world in which his characters wander and think. Of the Journal of the Plague Year, Joyce observes: ‘The saddler walks through the deserted street, listens to the cries of anguish, keeps his distance from the sick, reads the orders of the Lord Mayor, chats with the sextons, who chew garlic and rue, discusses matters with a waterman at Blackwall, faithfully compiles his statistics, takes an interest in the price of bread, complains of the watchmen, walks up to the top of the hill above Greenwich and estimates how many people have taken refuge on the ships anchored in the Thames’ (17). Joyce’s description of Defoe’s reportorial narrative, The Storm, sounds very like a catalogue of the street furniture (Joyce’s phrase) in his own fiction, where things ‘come alive’ by ‘dint of repetitions, contradictions, details, figures, noises’ (16). As for Defoe’s masterwork, Robinson Crusoe, Joyce concludes his lecture with an extraordinary paragraph that testifies to the strength of realism over and against the more ornate and mystical moments of literary expression. ‘Saint John the Evangelist saw on the island of Patmos the apocalyptic ruin of the universe and the building of the walls of the eternal city sparkling with beryl and emerald, with onyx

Robinson Trousseau: Joyce’s Defoe

209

and jasper, with sapphire and ruby. Crusoe saw only one marvel in all the fertile creation around him, the print of a naked foot in the virgin sand. And who knows if the latter is not more significant that the former?’ (25). Joyce was not the only modernist who saw in Defoe something of the stark paraphernalia of the realist’s trade. Virginia Woolf seems to have come to a similar conclusion about the nature of realistic moments and of their powerful ordinariness in Robinson Crusoe. Woolf writes that no matter what a reader might expect from the adventure of a desert island, ‘there is ... staring us full in the face nothing but a large earthenware pot.’6 People are part of what surrounds them in realism, or, more pointedly, they are what they make, where they live, and what they wear. In her famous essay on modern fiction, Woolf writes that the novelist seems constrained not by his own free will but by ‘an air of probability embalming the whole so impeccable that if all his figures were to come to life they would find themselves dressed down to the last button of their coats in the fashion of the hour.’7 She believes that the modern novelist would do something more and something different, but the novel to the point that she has taken it in her essay is not only thing-obsessed but clothesobsessed. Her particular sartorial emphasis makes a special kind of sense for Defoe, who began his career by factoring haberdashery items in Europe before he settled down in England to bilk various investors out of one or another small fortune. There is also the famous warehouse scene in Journal of the Plague Year, in which the London poor paraded the streets in the Foe family’s stolen hats. Oddly enough, James Joyce, before he managed to publish any of his book-length narratives, shared an ambition, if not a family business, with Defoe. Joyce factored Irish Foxford tweeds in Europe while trying to earn a few lira in addition to his Berlitz wages in Trieste. Neither writer ever could get clothes off his mind and each spent many narrative hours putting clothes on his characters’ backs. Defoe titles one of his famous novels after Flanders lace, and Joyce has Molly Bloom in Ulysses refer to her husband’s attempt to get her to read by giving her a Defoe novel with her own name in it: ‘I don’t like books with a Molly in them like that one he brought me about the one from Flanders a whore always shoplifting anything she could cloth and stuff and yards of it’ (622). Joyce’s two epic narratives, Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, are stocked with more items of clothing than the Sears catalogue, and another of his references to Crusoe includes a reference to a department store where Anna Livia Plurabelle orders her clothes: ‘She wants her wardrobe to

210

Michael Seidel

hear from above by return with cash so as she can buy her Peter Robinson trousseau’ (65). Defoe’s Moll Flanders loves clothes almost the same way she loves the gold coins her first lover places in her hands after every encounter: ‘I lov’d nothing in the World better than fine Clothes.’8 For Joyce, as for Moll Flanders, the clothes issue touches close to the issue of human sexuality. Issy, the sassy sister of the Wake, tantalizes readers, brothers, fathers, and lovers alike when Joyce has her ask, ‘Did you really never ... speak clothse to a girl’s before?’ (148). Her question conflates an interest in what girls wear, how close you can get to them when they wear it, and what a girl’s ultimate possession might really be. One asks of Joyce’s Issy: a girl’s what? Fiction both covers and uncovers (or reveals). Indeed, novelists are always asking, as Joyce does in the Wake, ‘What’s overdressed if underclothed?’ (441). When the serially published chapters of Ulysses appeared in the magazine The Little Review and were legally prosecuted in the United States, a New York attorney drew the line at the ‘Nausicaa’ chapter and told the judge of a district court that Joyce actually described a young girl’s underpants: ‘And Your Honor, the girl was in them.’ One of the clearest and most critically revealing passages in Finnegans Wake explains narrative activity itself in terms of the outward and inward constituency of its parts. The passage begins to describe the discovered mundane, mailed letter that is at the heart of the Wake, but ends by evoking the metaphor of the dressed and the undressed as the emblems of realistic fiction. I will include the entire passage because it touches so squarely on the notion of clothing and fiction, and because it speaks directly of the novelist’s layering of detail and portrayal of desire as part of the material imagination: has any usual sort of ornery josser, flatchested fortyish, faintly flatulent and given to ratiocination by syncopation in the elucidation of complications of his greatest Fung Yang dynadescendance, only the son of another, in fact, ever looked sufficiently longly at a quite everydaylooking stamped addressed envelope? Admittedly it is an outer husk: its face, in all its featureful perfection of imperfection, is its fortune: it exhibits only the civil or military clothing of whatever passionpallid nudity or plaguepurple nakedness may happen to tuck itself under its flap. Yet to concentrate solely on the literal sense or even the psychological content of any document to the sore neglect of the enveloping facts themselves circumstantiating it is just as hurtful to sound sense (and let it be added to the truest taste) as were some fellow in the act of perhaps getting an intro from another fellow turning out to be

Robinson Trousseau: Joyce’s Defoe

211

a friend in need of his, say, to a lady of the latter’s acquaintance, engaged in performing the elaborative antecistral ceremony of upstheres, straightaway to run off and vision her plump and plain in her natural altogether, preferring to close his blinkhard’s eyes to the ethiquethical fact that she was, after all, wearing for the space of the time being some definite articles of evolutionary clothing, inharmonious creations, a captious critic might describe them as, or not strictly necessary or a trifle irritating here and there, but for all that suddenly full of local colour and personal perfume and suggestive, too, of so very much more and capable of being stretched, filled out, if need or wish were, of having their surprisingly like coincidental parts separated don’t they now, for better survey by the deft hand of an expert, don’t you know. Who in his heart doubts either that the facts of feminine clothiering are there all the time or that the feminine fiction, stranger than the facts, is there also at the same time, only a little to the rere? Or that one may be separated from the other? Or that both may then be contemplated simultaneously? Or that each may be taken up and considered in turn apart from the other? (109)

For Joyce the feminine fiction is always a ‘little to the rere.’ And if the endings of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake count for much, the feminine fiction is all about the rere (clothed and unclothed). The essence of this passage, though, is about the art of realism. Interpretation is embedded in circumstance. Actions entail human relations, describe possessions, contain rituals of desire, reveal local colour. Joyce provides a sequence of analogies to fiction here (whether a letter within an envelope, a body under clothes, or a set of desires masked by a set of actions), but his point is the same in each case: reading is necessarily circumstantial, textured, layered, and visual. One sees the figures of fiction in full dress or thinking about dress almost as an extension of the act of imagining bodies occupying space. What characters look like and how they dress determines narrative content from the earliest of novels in the eighteenth century. Samuel Richardson’s Pamela begins with the dispensation of clothes to a lady’s maid and ends with an order to a London seamstress. Pamela is excited about nothing so much as her inheritance of dresses and stockings from Mr. B.’s mother, and Mr. B.’s greatest desire is to unclothe the serving girl his mother so accommodatingly dressed. The whole business becomes overtly sexual and more than slightly comical when Pamela begins to secret letters in her clothes, actually conflating narrative and dress. For Mr. B. to get to the story, he has to strip Pamela down to her letters.

212

Michael Seidel

A prior moment of ritual dress and desire occurs in a famous exotic scene in Defoe’s Roxana at the masked ball before the King, where Roxana leaves the room only to prepare herself for what she does best: substantiate her circumstances, parley her travels, and seduce her lovers: in less than half an Hour I return’d, dress’d in the Habit of a Turkish Princess; the Habit I got at Leghorn, when my Foreign Prince bought me a Turkish Slave, as I have said, the Malthese Man of War had, it seems, taken a Turkish Vessel going from Constantinople to Alexandria, in which were some Ladies bound for Grand Cairo in Egypt; and as the Ladies were made Slaves, so their fine Cloaths were thus expos’d; and with this Turkish Slave, I bought the rich Cloaths too: The Dress was extraordinary fine indeed, I had bought it as a Curiosity, having never seen the like; the Robe was a fine Persian, or India Damask; the Ground white, and the Flowers blue and gold, and the Train held five Yards; the Dress under it, was a Vest of the same, embroider’d with Gold, and set with some Pearl in the Work, and some Turquois Stones; to the Vest, was a Girdle five or six Inches wide, after the Turkish Mode; and on both Ends where it join’d, or hook’d, was set with Diamonds for eight Inches either way, only they were not true Diamonds; but no-body knew that but myself. The Turban, or Head-Dress, had a Pinacle on the top, but not above five Inches, with a Piece of loose Sarcenet hanging from it; and on the Front, just over the Forehead, was a good Jewel, which I had added to it.9

Three hundred years later Joyce in Ulysses sustains his novel’s stylistic fashioning with his tongue-in-cheek pictorial of the young Gerty MacDowell, rocking on her rock before she lures an overeager Leopold Bloom. She wears a neat blouse of electric blue selftinted by dolly dyes (because it was expected in the Lady’s Pictorial that electric blue would be worn) with a smart vee opening down to the division and kerchief pocket (in which she always kept a piece of cottonwool scented with her favourite perfume because the handkerchief spoiled the sit) and a navy threequarter skirt cut to the stride showed off her slim graceful figure to perfection. She wore a coquettish little love of a hat of wideleaved nigger straw contrast trimmed with an underbrim of eggblue chenille and at the side a butterfly bow of silk to tone. All Tuesday week afternoon she was hunting to match that chenille but at last she found what she wanted at Clery’s summer sales, the very it, slightly shopsoiled but you would never notice, seven fingers two and a penny. She

Robinson Trousseau: Joyce’s Defoe

213

did it up all by herself and what joy was hers when she tried it on then, smiling at the lovely reflection which the mirror gave back to her! And when she put it on the waterjug to keep the shape she knew that that would take the shine out of some people she knew. Her shoes were the newest thing in footwear (Edy Boardman prided herself that she was very petite but she never had a foot like Gerty MacDowell, a five, and never would ash, oak or elm) with patent toecaps and just one smart buckle over her higharched instep. Her wellturned ankle displayed its perfect proportions beneath her skirt and just the proper amount and no more of her shapely limbs encased in finespun hose with highspliced heels and wide garter tops. As for undies they were Gerty’s chief care and who that knows the fluttering hopes and fears of sweet seventeen (though Gerty would never see seventeen again) can find it in his heart to blame her? She had four dinky sets with awfully pretty stitchery, three garments and nighties extra, and each set slotted with different coloured ribbons, rosepink, pale blue, mauve and peagreen, and she aired them herself and blued them when they came home from the wash and ironed them and she had a brickbat to keep the iron on because she wouldn’t trust those washerwomen as far as she’d see them scorching the things. (287–8)10

Joyce is still at it in Finnegans Wake with the lovely river-woman, Anna Livia Plurabelle, combining two of his favourite sources for realism, water and clothes. One of the washermen on the banks of the Liffey in Dublin says of Anna Livia, ‘Hellsbells, I’m sorry I missed her!’ (208), and the reason is obvious. The river looked stunning: her bloodorange bockknickers, a two in one garment, showed natural nigger boggers, fancyfastened, free to undo: her blackstripe tan joseph was sequansewn and teddybearlined, with wavy rushgreen epaulettes and a leadown here and there of royal swansruff: a brace of gaspers stuck in her hayrope garters: her civvy codroy coat with alpheubett buttons was boundaried round with a twobar tunnel belt: a fourpenny bit in each pocketside weighed her safe from the blowaway windrush; she had a clothespeg tight astride on her joki’s nose and she kep on grinding a sommething quaint in her fiumy mouth and the rrreke of the fluve of the tail of the gawan of her snuffdrab siouler’s skirt trailed ffiffty odd Irish miles behind her lungarhodes. (208)

The male side of the fashion docket receives no shorter shrift in fiction. Defoe seems to take a great deal of pleasure, for example, imagining

214

Michael Seidel

what Robinson Crusoe would look like were he to show up in Yorkshire appearing as he did on his island: I had a great high shapeless Cap, made of a Goat’s Skin, with a Flap hanging down behind, as well to keep the Sun from me, as to shoot the Rain off from running into my Neck; nothing so hurtful in these Climates, as the Rain upon the Flesh under the Cloaths. I had a short Jacket of Goat-Skin, the Skirts, coming down to about the middle of my Thighs; and a Pair of open-knee’d Breeches of the same, the Breeches were made of the Skin of an old He-goat, whose Hair hung down such a Length on either Side, that like Pantaloons it reach’d to the middle of my Legs: Stockings and Shoes I had none, but had made me a Pair of somethings, I scarce know what to call them, like Buskins to flap over my Legs, and lace on either Side like Spatter-dashes; but of a most barbarous Shape, as indeed were all the rest of my Cloaths. I had on a broad Belt of Goat’s-Skin dry’d, which I drew together with two Thongs of the same, instead of Buckles, and in a kind of a Frog on either Side of this. Instead of a Sword and a Dagger, hung a little Saw and a Hatchet, one on one Side, one on the other. I had another Belt not so broad, and fasten’d in the same Manner, which hung over my Shoulder; and at the End of it, under my left Arm, hung two Pouches, both made of Goat’s-Skin too; in one of which hung my Powder, in the other my Shot: At my Back I carry’d my Basket, on my Shoulder my Gun, and over my Head a great clumsy ugly Goat-Skin Umbrella, but which, after all, was the most necessary Thing I had about me, next to my Gun: As for my Face, the Colour of it was really not so Moletta, like as one might expect from a Man not at all careful of it, and living within nine or ten Degrees of the Equinox. My Beard I had once suffer’d to grow till it was about a Quarter of Yard long; but as I had both Scissars and Razors sufficient, I had cut it pretty short, except what grew on my upper Lip, which I had trimm’d into a large Pair of Mahometan Whiskers, such as I had seen worn by some Turks, who I saw at Sallee; for the Moors did not wear such, tho’ the Turks did; of these Muschatoes or Whiskers, I will not say they were long enough to hang my Hat upon them; but they were of a Length and Shape monstrous enough, and such as in England would have pass’d for frightful. (149–50)

Joyce was inclined to follow suit on the male side as well, as in his description of the Citizen in the ‘Cyclops’ chapter of Ulysses or of the rugged postal adventurer, Shaun, of Finnegans Wake. In both instances the model of Crusoe, I think, is on his mind. Here is the Citizen in the pub at Barney Kiernan’s on Little Britain Street:

Robinson Trousseau: Joyce’s Defoe

215

He wore a long unsleeved garment of recently flayed oxhide reaching to the knees in a loose kilt and this was bound about his middle by a girdle of plaited straw and rushes. Beneath this he wore trews of deerskin, roughly stitched with gut. His nether extremities were encased in high Balbriggan buskins dyed in lichen purple, the feet being shod with brogues of salted cowhide laced with the windpipe of the same beat. From his girdle hung a row of seastones which dangled at every movement of his portentous frame and these were graven with rude yet striking art the tribal images of many Irish heroes and heroines of antiquity. (243–4)

Here is Shaun in his postal get-up ready to deliver the letter of Finnegans Wake: dressed like an earl in just the correct wear, in a classy mac Frieze o’coat of far suparior ruggedness, indigo braw, tracked and tramped, and an Irish ferrier collar, freeswinging with mereswin lacers from his shoulthern and thick welted brogues on him hammered to suit the scotsmost public and climate, iron heels and sparable soles, and his jacket of providence wellprovided woolies with a softrolling lisp of a lapel to it and great sealingwax buttons, a good helping bigger than the slots for them, of twentytwo carrot krasnapoppsky red and his invulnerable burlap whiskcoat and his popular choker, Tamagnum sette-and-forte and his loud boheem toy and the damasker’s overshirt he sported inside, a starspangled zephyr with a decidedly surpliced crinklydoodle front with his motto through dear life embrothred over it in peas, rice, and yeggy-yolk, Or for royal, Am for Mail, R.M.D. (404)

Moments of circumstantial realism, especially in regard to clothing, are not confined to the novel genre, though they predominate there. Samuel Butler (the second Samuel Butler) thought the Odyssey must have been written by a woman because no man could possibly have known so much about clothes. He cites among many other moments from the epic the famous (almost novelistic) scene in which Odysseus, disguised as one of those itinerant mariners washed up on the shores of Ithaca, tries to convince Penelope that he ran into her husband when he was on the way to the Trojan War. If that is so, says Penelope, tell me what he was wearing: ‘Now, stranger, I think I’ll test you, just to see if ... you actually entertained my husband as you say.’ Penelope knows because she had provided Odysseus with his clothes and even some of his decorative jewellery. It was a long time ago, says the now disguised Odysseus, but

216

Michael Seidel

‘Ah good woman’ Odysseus, the great master of subtlety, returned, ‘how hard it is to speak, after so much time apart ... why, some twenty years have passed since he left my house and put my land behind him. Even so, imagine the man as I portray him – I can see him now ... he was wearing a heavy woolen cape, sea-purple in double folds, with a golden brooch to clasp it, twin sheaths for the pins, on the face a work of art: a hound clenching a dappled fawn in its front paws, slashing it as it writhed. All marveled to see it, solid gold as it was, the hound slashing, throttling the fawn in its death-throes, hoofs flailing to break free. I noticed his glossy tunic too, clinging to his skin Like the thin glistening skin of a dried onion, Silky, soft, the glint of the sun itself. Women galore would gaze on it with relish.’11

What Odysseus finally pictures for Penelope is the very image of the younger Odysseus at the time he left her. The particularity about dress touches to some extent on narrative theory or, at least, genre theory, as Samuel Butler intuited. One of the key differences between realistic fiction and romance is the mark of the particular and probable. Aristotle understood as much from the beginning of his analysis of genre, and Max Novak wrote about it in relation to Defoe’s fictional aesthetics in one of the best of his essays, ‘Defoe’s Theory of Fiction.’12 Romance as a mode eschews probability, and ultimately eschews the array of detail so associated with the materiality of circumstantial realism in the novel. Novelists understand as much when they imagine scenes in which the very circumstances of daily life enter into what is essentially a generic battle with ways of representing those circumstances. As Joyce asserts in his conversation with Arthur Power, ‘realism smashes romanticism to a pulp.’ At the very beginning of the novelistic tradition in Europe, Cervantes gets a good deal of comic mileage out of the clash of realism and romance. In a strange way, realism might even be said to resist the flow of narrative or, at least, to stop that flow for verification. There is a marvellous instance in Don Quixote when Sancho intends to tell a story about goats on a ferry to the Don, but he cannot go on unless the realism of

Robinson Trousseau: Joyce’s Defoe

217

the narrative is superimposed upon the memory of the listener: ‘You’ve got to keep count of the goats that the fisherman takes across, because if you let just one of them slip from your memory the story will come to an end and I won’t be able to tell you another word of it.’ Sancho begins his incessant count and Quixote loses patience and loses count when asked to recall the exact number of goats on the ferry so far: ‘How the devil do you expect me to know that?’ Sancho loses the thread of his story because Quixote has lost the tally of goats: ‘It’s just that when I asked you to tell me how many goats had gone and you replied that you didn’t know, at that very instance I clean forgot what I had left to say, and it was full of good things, I can tell you that much.’13 There are a number of narrative and meta-narrative things going on here, but for my purposes Cervantes plays with the idea of telling – that is, counting – and telling, relating. The two are not necessarily the same thing, but he both confuses and toys with them here. Sancho knows there is a story to separate out from the sequence, but to lose the sequence is to lose the realism. It would be as if Robinson Crusoe could not go on with his story if at any time he had forgotten the exact number of cannibals he, Friday, and the Spaniard had killed. Perhaps that is why Defoe includes the tally as part of the printed page of his narrative. In telling – or counting – human agency in fiction can be reduced to the shorthand for secretarial documents. Someone named Ditto has become a murderer in the action of the day.14 The Account of the Rest is as follows; 3 Kill’d at our first Shot from the Tree. 2 Kill’d at the next Shot. 2 Kill’d by Friday in the Boat. 2 Kill’d by Ditto, of those at first wounded. 1 Kill’d by Ditto, in the Wood. 3 Kill’d by the Spaniard. 4 Kill’d, being found dropp’d here and there of their Wounds, or kill’d by Friday in his Chase of them. 4 Escap’d in the Boat, whereof one wounded if not dead. (237)

This list is far from the only artefact of realism in Defoe. His novels are filled with reproduced contracts, bills of lading, calendars, journals, and double-entry account sheets.15 It is just such paraphernalia that Joyce, too, included in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake as textual verification. Ulysses prints within its comic encyclopedic pages almost every kind of docu-

218

Michael Seidel

ment that a day in the life of a Victorian novel could produce, from lists of books in Bloom’s library, to prayer litanies, to bills for bad debts,16 to postcards, to personal advertisements.17 There is even a full accounting of Leopold Bloom’s expenses during the day in a double-entry ledger of the sort Defoe might and did produce in his fiction, and a shrewd reader can analyse the document in the text and actually figure out where Bloom was and how he got there during some missing narrative time periods during the day. The list also enables a reader to make judgments on real and imagined events from morning to midnight, at least within the fictional hours of Bloom’s day. Compile the budget for 16 June 1904. Debit 1 Pork Kidney 1 Copy Freeman’s Journal 1 Bath and Gratification Tramfare 1 In Memoriam Patrick Dignam 2 Banbury cakes 1 Lunch 1 Renewal fee for book 1 Packet Notepaper and Envelopes 1 Dinner and Gratification 1 Postal Order and Stamp Tramfare 1 Pig’s Foot 1 Sheep’s Trotter 1 Cake Fry’s Plain Chocolate 1 Square Soda Bread 1 Coffee and Bun Loan (Stephen Dedalus) refunded Balance

Credit £–s–d 0 – 0 – 3 Cash in hand 0 – 0 – 1 Commission recd. Freeman’s Journal 0 – 1 – 6 Loan (Stephen Dedalus) 0–0–1 0–5–0 0–0–1 0–0–7 0–1–0 0–0–2 0–2–0 0–2–8 0–0–1 0–0–4 0–0–3 0–1–0 0–0–4 0–0–4 1–7–0 0 – 16 – 6 £2 – 19 – 3

£–s–d 0–4–9 1–7–6 1–7–0

£2 – 19 – 3

(584)

I began this essay with some of Joyce’s direct comments on the realism of Defoe, particularly on the realism of Robinson Crusoe. But his comments on realism cast an even wider net. In an early essay, ‘Drama and Life,’ which he wrote while still a student at Dublin’s University College, Joyce considers the modernist options for the realism writer in a way that

Robinson Trousseau: Joyce’s Defoe

219

reflects not only on the ends of the novel form but on its origins. His comments serve as an appropriate coda to an essay on realism: Life indeed nowadays is often a sad bore. Many feel like the Frenchman that they have been born too late in a world too old, and their wanhope and nerveless unheroism point on over sternly to a last nothing, a vast futility and meanwhile – a bearing of fardels. Epic savagery is rendered impossible by vigilant policing, chivalry has been killed by the fashion oracles of the boulevards. There is no clank of mail, no halo about gallantry, no hat sweeping, no roistering! The traditions of romance are upheld only in Bohemia. Still I think out of the dreary sameness of existence, a measure of dramatic life may be drawn. Even the most commonplace, the deadest among the living, may play a part in a great drama. It is a sinful foolishness to sigh back for the good old times, to feed the hunger of us with the cold stones they afford. Life we must accept as we see it before our eyes, men and women as we meet them in the real world, not as we apprehend them in the world of faery. The great human comedy in which each has share, gives limitless scope to the true artist, to-day as yesterday and in years gone.18

NOTES 1 Arthur Power, Conversations with James Joyce, ed. Clive Hart (London: Millington, 1974), 78. 2 James Joyce, Ulysses, edited by Hans Gabler (New York: Random House, 1986), 90. Subsequent page references appear in parentheses in the text and notes. 3 Joyce, Finnegans Wake (New York: Viking Books, 1939), 123. 4 Joyce, Daniel Defoe, edited and translated by Joseph Prescott, Buffalo Studies (Buffalo: State University of New York at Buffalo, 1964), 12. Subsequent page references appear in parentheses in the text. 5 It is interesting how Joyce picks up the same vocabulary when he epitomizes both Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom in Ulysses. Of Dedalus: ‘He affirmed his significance as a conscious rational animal proceeding syllogistically from the known to the unknown’ (572). And Bloom is the rational animal who ‘has proceeded energetically from the unknown to the known through the incertitude of the void’ (572). Together they are Crusoe. 6 Virginia Woolf, Second Common Reader (New York: Harcourt, 1932), 50–8. 7 Woolf, ‘Modern Fiction,’ in Collected Essays, 4 vols (New York: Harcourt, 1967), 2:106.

220

Michael Seidel

8 Defoe, Moll Flanders, edited by Albert J. Rivero (New York: Norton, 2004), 91. 9 Defoe, Roxana: The Fortunate Mistress, edited by Ian Jack (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964), 173–4. 10 Mark Twain had an ear for literature of fashion and the notion (as did Joyce) that novelists at once could employ its resources and make fun of it. He has fun with a small piece, ‘A Fashion Item,’ penned around 1867: At General G__’s reception the other night, the most fashionably dressed lady was Mrs. G. C. She wore a pink satin dress, plain in front but with a good deal of rake to it – to the train, I mean; it was said to be two or three yards long. One could see it creeping along the floor some little time after the woman was gone. Mrs. C. wore also a white bodice, cut bias, with Pompadour sleeves, flounced with ruches; low neck, with the inside handkerchief not visible, with white kid gloves. She had on a pearl necklace, which glinted lonely, high up the midst of that barren waste of neck and shoulders. Her hair was frizzled into a tangled chaparral, forward of her ears; aft it was drawn together and compactly bound and plaited into a stump like a pony’s tail, and furthermore was canted upward at a sharp angle, and ingeniously supported by a red velvet crupper, whose forward extremity was made fast with a half-hitch around a hairpin on the top of her head. Her whole top hamper was neat and becoming. She had a beautiful complexion when she first came, but it faded out by degrees in an unaccountable way. However, it is not lost for good. I found the most of it on my shoulder afterward. (I stood near the door when she squeezed out with the throng.) There were other ladies present, but I only took note of one as a specimen. I would gladly enlarge upon the subject were I able to do it justice. 11 Homer, Odyssey, translated by Robert Fagles (New York: Penguin Classics, 1996), 19.248–50, 254–8, 259–70. 12 Novak, ‘Defoe’s Theory of Fiction,’ Studies in Philology 61 (1964), 650–68. In the context of Novak’s argument, it is interesting that both Defoe and Joyce held remarkably similar views. Of Finnegans Wake itself Joyce writes inside his own book about his own book in a way that Defoe writes inside his own books, the Crusoe volumes, about his own books. Joyce says of the events he records: ‘for utterly impossible as are all these events they are probably as like those which may have taken place as any others which never took person at all are ever likely to be’ (110). Here is Defoe on the nature of his is-

Robinson Trousseau: Joyce’s Defoe

221

land representation: ‘All these reflections are just history of a state of forced confinement, which in my real history is represented by a confined retreat in an island; and it is as reasonable to represent one kind of imprisonment by another, as it is to represent any thing that really exists, by that which exists not.’ Serious Reflections during the Life and Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, in The Works of Daniel Defoe, edited by G.H. Maynadier, 16 vols (New York: 1903), 3:xii. 13 Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote, translated by John Rutherford (New York: Penguin Books, 2001), 159. 14 Joyce is up to some chicanery in Finnegans Wake, when he refers to J.S. Mill’s political tract in the same breath as George Eliot’s novel, ‘Mill (J.) On Women with Ditto on the Floss’ (213). 15 Crusoe even offers on the page a kind of debit-credit sheet of the gains and pitfalls of island life that can be read either across or up and down. He tells as an accountant ‘tells.’ Here are the first two of several entries: EVIL I am cast upon a horrible desolate Island, void of all Hope of Recovery. I am singl’d out and separated, as It were, from all the World to be miserable.

GOOD But I am alive, and not drown’d as all my Ship’s Company was. But I am singl’d out too from all the Ship’s Crew to be spar’d from Death; and he that miraculously sav’d me from Death, can deliver me from the Condition (66–7)

16 Joyce consciously reproduces the nomenclature of the documents he includes just as had Defoe in his novels. In the ‘Cyclops’ episode, Joyce mentions a bad debt and the text performs: For nonperishable goods bought of Moses Herzong, of 13 Satin Kevin’s parade in the city of Dublin, Wood quay ward, merchant, hereinafter called the vendor, and sold and delivered to Michael E. Geraghty, esquire, of 29 Arbour hill in the city of Dublin, Arran quay ward, gentleman, hereinafter called the purchaser, videlicet, five pounds avoirdupois of first choice tea at three shilling and no pence per pound avoirdupois and three stone avoirdupois of sugar, crushed crystal, at threepence per pound avoirdupois, the said purchaser debtor to the

222

Michael Seidel said vendor of one pound five shillings and sixpence sterling for value received which amount shall be paid by said purchaser to said vendor in weekly instalments every seven calendar days of three shillings and no pence sterling. (240–1)

17 In Ulysses the closest Leopold Bloom ever gets to ever leaving Ireland is when he imagines himself taking off from home and Molly Bloom placing an ad for him in the newspaper: ‘£5 reward, lost, stolen or strayed from his residence 7 Eccles street, missing gent about 40, answering to the name of Bloom, Leopold (Poldy), height 5 ft. 9½ inches, full build, love complexion, may have since grown a beard, when last seen was wearing a black suit. Above sum will be paid for information leading to his discovery’ (598). It is interesting that a piece actually appeared in the local London papers when Daniel Defoe, also about 40, was on the lam during the weeks immediately following the arrest warrant for the Shortest Way hoax. The London Gazette ran the following ad for 11–14 January 1702: ‘He is a middle Sized Spare Man about 40 years old, of a brown Complexion, and dark brown coloured Hair, wears a Wig, a hooked Nose, a sharp Chin, grey Eyes, and a large Mole, near his Mouth, was born in London, and for many years was a Hose Factor in Freeman’s – yard, in Cornhill, and now is Owner of the Brick and Pantile Works near Tilbury-Fort in Essex.’ Perhaps the funniest ad buried in fiction is in Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, an ad in that the writer asks for help from a woman, reveals his fascination with women’s undergarments, and appeals for a companion (presumably Nora Barnacle) to go into exile with him in Europe: ‘[Jymes wishes to hear from wearers of abandoned female constumes, gratefully received, wadmel jumper, rather full pair of culottes and othergarmenteries, to start city life together. His jymes is out of job, would sit and write. He has lately commited one of the then commandments but she will now assist. Superior built, domestic, regular layer. Also got the boot. He appreciates it. Copies. ABORTISEMENT.]’ (181). 18 James Joyce, ‘Drama and Life,’ in Critical Writings, ed. Ellsworth Mason and Richard Ellmann (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1959), 44–5.

chapter eleven

The Novel as Modern Myth JOHN BENDER

1 Three novels in English have entered the vernacular of myth so fully that the authors themselves tend to be effaced and surface features of the stories tend to drop away just as myths undergo multiple permutations and become cultural icons. The three works are Robinson Crusoe, Frankenstein, and Dracula. This essay is a thought experiment about the ways in which these three iconic novels may interrelate as myth, about axes that intersect in them and that have allowed them to develop the remarkable power they seem to possess over the longue durée of cultural time. I propose that they have the permeability of myth, the surface transparency of myth, and the structural permanence of myth. I have often imagined that it would be provocative to link these three books. Of course, they share certain superficial traits, one of which could be more deeply significant. Robinson Crusoe (1719) was Daniel Defoe’s first extended work of fiction, or novel. Frankenstein (1818) was Mary Shelley’s first novel. Dracula (1897) was Bram Stoker’s first fully conceived novel, though previously he had published a few short stories in the thriller vein and some serialized fictions reflecting his experiences as an inspector of Petty Sessions that were published as an episodic collection. Among candidates for mythic status, one might think of another first ‘novel,’ Gulliver’s Travels, but it is actually three stories and some fragments, not one novel, and its crisply pointed style hardly suggests literary initiation. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, though a work that originated with a dream, is a long short story produced deep in its author’s literary career. Does Alice in Wonderland have the mythic reach of

224

John Bender

my big three? It qualifies on some counts, but for now I will leave it aside because I do not see it as having the metamorphic dimension of the others – perhaps because its own subject is metamorphosis and its surface effects so compelling. The three novels I am considering seem to me to have a certain rustic or rough-hewn quality that may arise in part because of their ‘firstness,’ though one can name other first novels, apart from Swift’s, of immense stylistic polish, for instance, Les Liaisons Dangereuses of Choderlos de Laclos. I would not claim that firstness alone defines my three novels, but I believe that some of the immediacy and stark energy they project does somehow go to their firstness: above all, that the kind of simplicity or directness or immediacy of style that I want to present as crucial to all three does connect with firstness. This is not a naive simplicity in writing. Indeed, we now know that Defoe habitually revised, despite his earlier reputation as a hack journalist. Certainly, Shelley and Stoker rewrote. So I do not suggest that the air of rusticity derives from carelessness. On the contrary, I would say that it springs from an orientation to the world (to use a term from phenomenology) – an orientation that produces an aura of initiation, beginnings, or, as I am calling it, firstness. Martin Heidegger’s term, ‘the unconcealment of being’ [Entbergung des Seins], which concerns emergence into substantial form, can make a bridge between the quality of firstness pointed to here and the sense of the apparitional that becomes important later on. Firstness, like the appearance of an apparition, could be called the archetypal event – the event per se, an emergence that assumes significance in light of what has been and will be known – like Heidegger’s ‘unconcealment of being.’ Firstness has the effect of revelation, but it also drains substance from what was previously experienced as vivid, in the sense that revelation or unconcealment at the same time obscures and partly conceals or ‘ghosts’ the margins around it, just as a spotlight reveals some things and throws others into shade. Myths, of course, are all but defined by firstness, by our sense that they possess a primal originality. Although two of my three books were extremely popular from the outset – Crusoe and Dracula – all three achieved, within a certain period of time, a truly remarkable popularity, so great in fact that they became standards for ordinary readers, including young people, if not always for critics. In the case of Frankenstein, this process extended somewhat, for the book does not seem to have been a best-seller until after various dramatic adaptations in the 1820s, and its inclusion in Bentley’s Standard Novels series of 1831 launched a growing popularity throughout

The Novel as Modern Myth

225

the nineteenth century. By contrast, Crusoe took off fast and had a flood of editions and translations during its first fifty years. The work achieved enormous popularity in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England. Its popularity in later eighteenth-century America almost approached that of the Bible. In keeping with this history, the basis for Crusoe’s early canonization seems to have been more because of its inspirational spirituality or as a children’s work than as a classic of Literature with a capital ‘L.’ The three novels share attributes of Shakespeare’s reception, for while extremely popular and admired by some critics and literary figures, all three were patronized by the literati and were slow to come to canonization as works of Literature with a capital ‘L.’ Alexander Pope’s Dunciad early set the snobbish pace against Defoe, and even his private praise of Crusoe to his friend Joseph Spence was grudging. Both Dracula and Frankenstein have been canonized as Literature quite recently – indeed, during only the last thirty years, to judge from the reception history I have found. This time frame, of course, coincides with the rise of feminist critique. A search of the Stanford University Library catalogue shows virtually no scholarly book about either novel before 1970. Indeed, it is far from clear that Frankenstein and Dracula could have been thought about critically as novels qua novel any sooner because, at least superficially, they defy the classic criterion for the novel that Ian Watt voiced with the term ‘realism of assessment’ in The Rise of the Novel.1

2 One can certainly find numerous thematic parallels among these books. Frankenstein and Dracula show strong affinities of theme. The vampire stories that those in the Shelley circle were reading at the time Frankenstein’s composition began also are works read by Stoker prior to composing Dracula. The two books commonly have been discussed together, and audio tapes and CDs advertised on Amazon.com link them in sets even now. Adding Crusoe points towards a rather different range of issues, which will be discussed below. Here is a list of some themes and features that do mark all three: • • • •

the super- and supra-natural the inhuman terror the making of things and machines (in Frankenstein, a being)

226

John Bender

• education • frame stories. Dracula in its published form lacks a frame, but Stoker seems to have cut a significant chunk of a frame story from his original manuscript, which could be seen prior to its sale at Christie’s as recently as 2002. The theme of what one might call science and technology is present in all three, along with that of the technology of writing per se – the question of how one writes, what one writes, the tools of writing, and how one tells a story. The theme of travel is crucial, of course, along with overreaching, monstrosity, and survivorship. All are features around which one could construct critical essays. However, many other masterworks and lesser pieces of writing share these themes. In fact, I am not trying to make the claim that the themes in and of themselves define the unique mythic iconicity of these novels. It seems likely, indeed, that the emergence of these three as books of an extraordinary vigour in the popular, the critical, and even the scholarly imagination has to do with the convergence of a number of different factors. I suspect that in this history affinity of theme is no more significant than chance. Rather than theme, the factor stressed here is style in the largest sense. I mentioned before that the firstness of these books could have a role to play in their relative lack of stylistic polish. We know with Frankenstein that, for better or worse, prior to the 1818 publication Percy Shelley heavily edited the prose – altering some 4,000 words – and that Mary Shelley herself made large editorial changes and substantive additions in the interval leading up to the 1831 edition, which presented a polished, revised, and in many ways sophisticated text. The Charles Robinson edition of the Frankenstein Notebooks reveals that the rustic or naive stylistic energy of the first version was considerably submerged.2 Still, some of that rough-hewn quality, some of that sense of raw vigour, does come through the sophistications to which the book was subjected. Its firstness survived its rewritings. Indeed, even the higher-style phrases and literary references in Frankenstein themselves often have a rustic or appliquéd aspect, like an education not yet fully assimilated. Edgar Allan Poe declared of Crusoe: It has become a household thing in nearly every family in Christendom. Yet never was admiration of any work – universal admiration – more indiscriminately or more inappropriately bestowed. Not one person in ten – nay, not

The Novel as Modern Myth

227

one person in five hundred – has during the perusal of ‘Robinson Crusoe,’ the most remote conception that any particle of genius, or even common talent, has been employed in its creation! Men do not look upon it in the light of a literary performance. Defoe has none of their thoughts – Robinson all. The powers which have wrought the wonder have been thrown into obscurity by the very stupendousness of the wonder they have wrought! We read, and become perfect abstractions in the intensity of our interest; we close the book, and are quite satisfied that we could have written as well ourselves. All this is effected by the potent magic of verisimilitude.3

So says Poe, suggesting in ‘abstraction’ that readers become detached from reality through realism and that they, or indeed the text of Robinson Crusoe itself, becomes a kind of apparition by virtue of its supreme realistic transparency – its capacity to disappear as writing. Poe and other critics note that the features one might call Defoe’s ‘style’ tend to disappear into a vernacular English that assumes transparency simply by virtue of its plainness, its ‘everydayness,’ and even its awkwardness. We all know that in ordinary speech even the most sophisticated users of a language make awkward utterances. Much of the point of what we might call ‘educated’ or ‘high’ or ‘literary’ style traditionally has been to efface awkwardness in order to arrive at a perspicacity that is associated with more concentrated and potent forms of expression than can be achieved in common language. This very quality of disappearance that the rough-hewn novelistic style can produce parallels the tendency of style to disappear in mythic or iconic stories. Claude Lévi-Strauss and other structuralists such as Vladimir Propp have effaced the element of style in their treatment of the fundamentals of myth. Lévi-Strauss says, for example, that a myth is ‘felt as myth by any reader anywhere in the world. Its substance does not lie in its style, in its original music, or its syntax, but in the story which it tells.’4 The identities of the authors and the framing features of our three books tend to drop away when the core stories are translated or adapted to other media. In Shelley’s case, even the name ‘Frankenstein’ has migrated in popular culture from the hero of the novel to the monster himself. These are signs of a stylistic vaporization that can happen with archetypal stories. The Literary with a capital ‘L’ has traditionally been associated with finely or highly wrought individual styles. For this reason alone, the three books I am considering slid under the radar of the canon – in the sense of the literary canon – for protracted periods. Shakespeare slid

228

John Bender

under that radar for the first 100 years or more after his death, for rather different reasons having to do with the literary standing of drama and, given a rising neo-classicism, possibly ‘overwroughtness’ of style rather than under-wroughtness. But the extreme adaptation – even mutilation – of his works for staging during the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries must have had a role, along with a certain suspicion of drama as literature. Similarly, the novel as an entire genre slid under the radar and was not perceived as high literature until rather recently. Plainness of style is a definitive aspect of realism’s power to give an impression of the real ‘thing.’ As John Richetti says in a recent introduction, ‘things,’ in the sense of res in Latin, are rendered in realist texts in general and overwhelmingly so in Crusoe.5 But things also hold tremendous importance in Frankenstein and certainly in Dracula. Stoker powerfully places material objects in the foreground, whether they be the earth covering the vampires or the many different dictaphones, typewriters, steamships, railroads, and other pieces of machinery embedded in the plot. In his hands, even the innovative technique of blood transfusion becomes starkly physical. The very quality of realism depends, as Poe indicated, on the capacity of its language to disappear into things and into thought. This is a paradox built into the genre of the realist novel: writing, and therefore style, defines objects as if real in the realm of the novel because they can exist only through the medium of language and style, but the reader’s awareness of style per se is expected to drop away as it does in news reportage. The illusion is of objects per se. Yet these objects, in fact, have no tangibility, no applicability, no dimensional shape. I will explore this paradox later with regard to the notion of realism as itself an apparitional form or mode of writing. Plainness of language has also allowed an extraordinary degree of translatability in our three novels. This rough-hewn style has led to translatability not only in the sense that versions in other languages work well, but also in the sense that the stories can be transmuted from one medium to another with great facility. One of the curious aspects of English high literary culture is that some of its finest, most esteemed writings – by Geoffrey Chaucer, Edmund Spenser, John Milton, for instance – have not translated well in the way Shakespeare did when August Wilhelm von Schlegel assumed his writings into German, and masterpieces such as the Divine Comedy, the Decameron, Don Quixote, and Faust have moved freely into many languages.

The Novel as Modern Myth

229

3 Let us turn now to my claim about the archetypical or mythic status of our three books. One might say, as Bronislaw Malinowski did in Myth and Primitive Psychology (1926), that myth ‘is not of the nature of fiction, such as we read today in a novel, but it is a living reality, believed to have once happened in primeval times, and continuing ever since to influence the world and human destinies.’6 Novelistic fiction and myth lie at opposite poles from one another for Malinowski. It has been a commonplace in myth studies since Emile Durkheim, James Frazier, Sigmund Freud, and Ernst Cassirer to view myth as prior to or more fundamental than any literary manifestations it may have in point of social organization, ritual, or psychology. One way or another, myth is considered deeply symbolic or structural. In a real way, myth and literature – even epic and novelistic ideologies in the case of Georg Lukács – have been set in opposition. In Northrop Frye, along with Roland Barthes the most powerfully literary critic of myth in the twentieth century, the scale of value goes from ancient myth at one end to recent, and lesser, ‘ironic’ forms at the other: forms of writing that share both their modernity and their novelistic potential with prose fiction rather than with early tragedy or epic poetry. Again and again, we encounter the sense that the mythic or archetypal is somehow antithetic to literature, though literature is seen as feeding on, or embodying, or preserving the power of myth. Myth is seen as having the tangibility – the vividness or immediacy – that more finely wrought forms may lack. Malinowski seems to imply, for instance, that the novel attempts to resuscitate or replace the sense of lived reality or experience that is part of everyday life to peoples immersed in myth. Folktales were imagined in this fashion during their reception following Johann Gottfried von Herder and the brothers Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm during the German Romantic period. The notion extends in our own day even to ‘urban legends,’ which somehow have a remarkable grip on our imaginations for all their factual absurdity. Raymond Williams points out that the use of the root term myth as a word on its own in English, its present meanings shaped by Romantic thinking about the folk imagination, itself is a product of nineteenthcentury modernity. It first appeared in 1830. The modern meanings attribute to myth, according to Williams, ‘a truer (deeper) version of reality than (secular) history or realistic description or scientific explanation.’7

230

John Bender

Older words based on this root, going back to the fifteenth century, like the word mythology and its variants, bear no relation to our sense of myth as some kind of primal, enduring, culturally profound story. Rather, the words built on the root ‘myth’ used to refer to ‘fabulous narration,’ to the fictional and unbelievable. One could say, then, that the word itself, and with it the growth of the modern idea of myth, goes hand in hand with the emergence of the realist novel. In general, myth is idealized in these discussions, whether through Frye’s opposition of myth to the ironic modes of modernity, or through Lévi-Strauss’s treatment of tribal myths as having unique structures that can survive enormous surface permutations while continuing to serve profound cultural needs over long periods of time. In Frazer’s more rationalistic version, myth is seen as primitive, deeply rooted, human knowledge. The one critic who has framed myth in largely questioning or even negative ways is Roland Barthes, who shows how semiotic structures work in cultural formations that he designates ‘mythologies.’ Using examples like the image of a French soldier saluting the flag, he reveals how these formations assume the rigidity of linguistic usage and how they are drained of their deeper metaphorical significance, just as are habitual linguistic formations. Myths become naturalized as ideology and block the critical faculty in the same way that our ordinary use of language requires us to pass over profound etymological or metaphorical resonances and contradictions. Naturalized usage causes words, like the myths that Barthes describes, to become unconscious gestures or automaton-like mechanisms.8 Barthes probably was inspired by Durkheim’s treatment of myth and religion as maintaining secular values by projecting them into realms of divinity. The indifference of mythic tales to surface plays out in the realist novel as that plainness of style I have stressed earlier. This way of telling stories finds early analogues in newspapers, in Baconian claims for the accuracy of unornamented writing, and in the kind of transparent scientific reportage that Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer have called ‘virtual witnessing.’9 The implications for technique in novelistic fiction are far-reaching. For plainness of style enables the illusory, even apparitional effects of realism, including free indirect discourse (style indirect libre or erlebte Rede). Free indirect discourse is a grammar within which first-person thoughts are rendered impersonally in third-person linguistic forms in ways that exist only in writing. Neutrality of style is no longer a matter of simple diction and syntax but a vehicle for rendering the entrelacement of external sociolinguistic forms with internal subjective states that char-

The Novel as Modern Myth

231

acterize modernity. Adam Smith, in Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), was one of the first to give a generalized account of the psychosocial mental state that the impersonal narration of consciousness crystallizes in novelistic fiction. This kind of narration heightens in the extreme the readerly absorption that has been thought to characterize realist fiction generally and that is is often considered to make it dangerous to a public vulnerable to apparitions. Delusional belief in myths, including their ritual reenactment, may have been socially constructive or mentally therapeutic for primitive peoples. Moderns must beware of similar forcefulness in novels.

4 I turn now to a final attribute of Crusoe, Frankenstein, and Dracula as myth. It enfolds the others as definitive. This is the aspect of the three novels as apparitions. I suggest here that what becomes iconic or mythic in modernity is an experience of a certain psychosocial kind, whether individual or collective. I suggest that, in modernity, the content per se of the story – and here I may to some extent be inspired by Malinowski and LéviStrauss – becomes less important in works that assume mythic status than the experience of the fiction itself as real or compelling. The solitary experience of silent novel reading in which a text becomes alive to a single individual as if the real were fully present, is a specifically modern experience compared with earlier recitations of tales. The fusion of novelistic texts with the reader’s own emotional and physical experiences from moment to moment was a power commonly remarked in the eighteenth century and was the one most admired by the Chevalier Jaucourt in his articles on ‘Roman’ and ‘Description’ in Diderot’s Encyclopédie. Jaucourt insisted, above all, on the revelation of ‘secret emotion’ in the trajectory of the new novel that he traced from Madame de LaFayette through Samuel Richardson and Henry Fielding. Jean-Jacques Rousseau revelled in this power as a reader of Crusoe and Clarissa and as author of his own Julie, though he scorned it in his comment about novels that one ‘reads with one hand.’ One could say that eighteenth-century claims about the dangers of absorption in novels are pointing to the capacity of realist prose fiction to subject and enthrall readers with apparitional presences privately experienced and inaccessible to society. All three of our novels are apparitional. They present apparitions enacted within the real. At the centre of Robinson Crusoe, when Crusoe first encounters the single footprint, he says: ‘I stood like one Thunder-

232

John Bender

struck, or as if I had seen an Apparition; I listen’d, I look’d round me, I could hear nothing, nor see any Thing, I went up to a rising Ground to look farther, I went up the Shore and down the Shore, but it was all one, I could see no other Impression but that one, I went to it again to see if there were any more, and to observe if it might not be my Fancy; but there was no Room for that, for there was exactly the very Print of a Foot, Toes, Heel, and every Part of a Foot.’10 The story shows Crusoe’s witnessing not only the apparition of the footprint but the apparition of cannibalism and, in the end, shows his turning himself into an apparition for others when he appears as Governor of the island. Even earlier, he assumes such qualities in his own imagination because of his bizarre dress. It is clear that the monster in Frankenstein becomes an apparition, particularly as he disappears over Mont Blanc or across the Arctic ice to immolate himself – or not – for there is always the possibility he will return, apparition-like. Other characters, too, are or become wraith-like in Frankenstein. Dracula is an apparition if ever there was one: he materializes mysteriously, can move over great spaces, and lives on the very essence of human life: blood. Several characters in the novel take on his qualities and, in the case of Lucy, even become vampires. Yet the issue here is chiefly not that these three works thematically involve apparitions in the story, or plot, or events, or characters, but that the apparitional is deeply written into the very fibre of their technique as realist novels. It may seem surprising that I group Frankenstein and Dracula with Crusoe as realist novels, but technically and procedurally they are such. They also are meta-realistic because they bring the apparitional quality of realism itself to the surface: the capacity of realism to give us the impression of real things – to use means other than the direct, sensory apprehension of the real in order to project a reality. In this sense, realism, the genre of the realist novel in itself, is apparitional. The mode of these works connects profoundly with their thematics – with the thematics of apparition – but this is a symptom, not a cause. An analogue would be William Nestrick’s analysis of early film as obsessed, like Shelley’s Frankenstein, with the magic of ‘coming to life’ through the illusion of apparent movement produced mechanically.11 The thematics of zombies, vampires, and ghosts moving between life and death are found everywhere in early film and is a symptom of the grip held on viewers by its own ghostly technology. The thematics are secondary not primary, though their presence may bring to awareness imagery and editing that, in Walter Benjamin’s terms, enact the constitutive character of film illusion as a mode of ‘mechanical reproduction.’12

The Novel as Modern Myth

233

More needs to be said about the apparitional core of realist fiction. I am inspired here by Terry Castle’s use of the term apparition to describe the arc beginning in the eighteenth century and culminating in Freud’s theories. Castle describes a historical complex of psychosocial developments in which ghosts and apparitions, which in prior times had been conceived as agents existing outside the human body, were progressively introjected imaginatively as psychic phenomena, ultimately as symptoms of psychoanalytically accessible conditions. The merger of ghosts, phantasms, landscapes, and inner states that characterizes the haunted experience of heroines in eighteenth-century gothic novels is a literary crystallization of one stage in the process. The quest for phantasmagoric experience of the supernatural that permeates nineteenth-century culture is another. Psychoanalysis, with its theory of curative apparitions in the analytic chamber known as ‘transference’ experiences, both exploits and works to contain the apparitional in a modern psycho-cultural form. The haunted heroine and the gothic genre manifest the modern life of apparitions as internal to the psyche rather than as external agents.13 My sense of the apparitional, in contrast to Castle’s, is linked not to subject matter – to ghosts external or internal – but rather to the technical attributes of realism itself. Crucial here is the long discussion of probability in its traditional commonsensical aspect, not in the modern mathematical sense. Whether in Aristotle or Fielding, the theory of fiction did not admit the vagaries of everyday life, though Fielding pushed the boundaries by articulating a thematics of coincidence in the voice of his narrators. Every newspaper contains events that no one would believe in a novel. Every reflective modern person, not only David Hume as he manipulated his eyeballs to produce double vision, knows how unstable and multiple that perception is. As Alexander Welsh has shown, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century law courts in England progressively abandoned eye-witness testimony in favour of forensic evidence precisely because the real is impossible to stabilize juridically except through probabilistic inference.14 But realist fiction does stabilize the real qua reality. Through its neutrality of style, its profusion of detail, and its causal sequences of action, realism produces a coherent linguistic version of the real that never has been, is, or will be. Expect the principles of realist fiction to apply in everyday life, and you get delusion at best, madness at worst. This is the sense in which I mean that realist fiction is apparitional: it is apparitional not with regard to thematic content or specific characters or actions, but with regard to its very technical procedures. Myth can have the realness of apparition – the vividness that only

234

John Bender

transient things seem to have, the vividness of dreams and phantasms. And in the three novels under discussion here one finds a sense of the transience that underlies the real in everyday life, the apparitional quality of sensory perception that preoccupied Hume and other eighteenthcentury philosophers and supernaturalists who juxtaposed the real with the counter-intuitive. Even when, like Hume, they debunked spiritual interventions in the world, they evoked the apparitional quality of the very experience we call the real. Our three works are meta-novels – modern myths – in their revelation of unreality within the real. Their phenomenology is analogous to the ‘coming to life’ in early horror films inspired by Frankenstein and Dracula or to the revelation of the footprint’s spectral presence to Robinson Crusoe. In modernity, especially the kind of industrial urban modernity that Dracula addresses and in a fashion predicts, the real becomes indistinguishable from media simulations of it. The process already had begun in the eighteenth century, with the insane popularity of Richardson’s Pamela (1740), clearly a media phenomenon in the modern sense according to William Warner.15 The realist novel is part of a long-term history of the invasion of the real by media that enable us to assume, through surrogate projection, the illusion of sharing the first-hand experience of others. The membrane of the real in novels may be stretched gossamerthin – even ruptured – over its linguistic and grammatical means of production, just as film can maintain effects of illusion while flirting with the viewer’s awareness of the mechanical demons that bring it to life. One glimpses the ghost in the machine. The medium or genre that institutionalized this mode of flirtation within the realist novel is called the ‘gothic.’ Indeed, the gothic is in many ways the mode of modern fiction, though invented by Horace Walpole only in 1764. Walpole tapped into crucial aspects of realism as the defining features of the gothic in his prefaces to The Castle of Otranto. ‘Allow the possibility of the facts,’ he declares, ‘and all the actors comport themselves as persons would do in their situation.’16 Walpole ‘wishes ‘to conduct the mortal agents in his drama according to the rules of probability; in short, to make them think, speak and act, as it might be supposed mere men and women would do in extraordinary positions.’17 In disavowing ‘similies, flowers, digressions, or unnecesary descriptions,’ he stresses, in particular, the conscious choice of an unadorned, unmetaphoric simplicity of style that has been noted by critics from Sir Walter Scott onward.15 Looking carefully at Otranto, one sees that, plot and setting notwithstanding, its forms of narration are fundamentally those of the realist novel, including free indirect discourse. Indeed, Otranto argu-

The Novel as Modern Myth

235

ably contains the first sustained use of free indirect discourse in English fiction. The events are extraordinary but the way the story is told is straightforward, simple, and transparent. Although the psychology of characters may not be complex by the standards of a Richardson or a Laurence Sterne, one finds crucial passages of mental reflection under stress in the text of Otranto. One finds the rendering of first-person consciousness in third-person grammar that defines free indirect discourse and that, later, will support the astonishing psychological transparency of Austen’s novels. Paula Backscheider points to Walpole’s strategy in her biography of Defoe when she says that eighteenth-century novelists in general often put ordinary people in extraordinary situations.19 Walpole simply took a basic strategy of realist fiction and pushed it to the gothic extreme. Is the gothic so very improbable after all? Jesse Molesworth has shown, for example, that eighteenth-century gamblers were steadfast in behaving contrary to the new laws of mathematical probability easily accessible in the period’s omnipresent publications of works about gaming by Edmond Hoyle.20 Real gambling behaviour did not follow mathematical probability any more than everyday life follows the rules of realist fiction. In such a context, the delusional embrace of the gothic novel’s supernaturalism can seem like a symbolic recognition of the absurdity of the everyday as we experience it in the flow of existence: of the real that newspapers try to capture in all of its bizarre immediacy. Probability is all well and good, but can it predict the next second of my life or the next card dealt? No: it can predict only the long term, the average, the outcome of countless coin tosses. On the other hand, the underlying realist structure of the gothic novel, in context with its thematics and romantic plot structure, can be described as a mere vehicle for managing the unpredictability of the everyday – the madness of real life. The submerged but omnipresent realistic technique so characteristic of the gothic novel is in this sense spectral or ghost-like. The technique works rather as a digital sorting program might work to contain and corral a flood of data too large to be comprehended by mere human agency. This realist program is, as Flaubert noted in an often cited passage, ‘everywhere felt but never seen.’ The three books that I discuss here combine that sense of the extraordinary within the forms of the ordinary that we associate with the gothic novel’s production of terror and panic. Such forms are fundamental to the apprehension of culture and its values in modernity. So in this sense there may not be a gothic novel but rather a gothic mode marked by its way of pointing up traits that define the realist novel per se. It is com-

236

John Bender

monplace to say that the core of the American novel is gothic, when we think of Brockden Brown in the late eighteenth century or of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, or William Faulkner. Perhaps, in fact, the gothic is not best considered a subset of the modern novel. Rather, the modern novel is best understood in its essence as apparitional, that is, as gothic. After all, even newspapers, those bastions of ‘fact’ from which the novel is said to have evolved, easily spin into the realm of fantasy and factual fiction that we associate with today’s tabloids. What I suggest is that these three most compellingly mythic English novels in the modern period are also the most meta-novelistic. Ian Watt exclaims as follows: ‘Almost universally known, almost universally thought of as at least half real, Robinson Crusoe cannot be refused the status of a myth.’ ‘But,’ asks Watt, ‘a myth of what?’21 He goes on to expose his famous thesis about the homo economicus and the myth of individualism. Yet Watt’s essay, like countless others on Defoe’s novel and those on Shelley’s and on Stoker’s novels, is fundamentally thematic. It is no more than an allegorical exegesis. These works, so it goes, are mythic because they are about individualism, science, motherhood, the silver standard, education, sexual initiation, or what have you. What I would say, instead, is that the mythic standing of these three books is not thematic but rather structurally experiential. Their very apparitional quality of disappearing as books makes them icons of the modern sense of the paradoxical concreteness and evanescence of reality itself. They are myths about the myth of the real. They are not allegorical but direct, demonstrative revelations. They let us glimpse the workings of the novel, much as the illusions projected by film, for Benjamin, are animations that both conceal and reveal the machinery that produces them. Thus, Malinowski got it wrong when he put novelistic fiction against ‘a living reality, believed to have once happened in primeval times and continuing ever since to influence the world and human destinies.’ What is being memorialized in Robinson Crusoe, Frankenstein, and Dracula is the modern belief in the firstness, originality, and continuing workability of what we call ‘reality’ in the face of overwhelming evidence of the ungraspability of the real in our experience.

NOTES 1 Watt, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding (London: Hogarth, 1957).

The Novel as Modern Myth

237

2 Robinson, The Frankenstein Notebooks, 2 vols (New York: Garland, 1996). 3 [Poe], review of The Life and Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, Southern Literary Messenger, January 1836. 4 Levi-Strauss, ‘The Structural Study of Myth,’ Journal of American Folklore 68 (1955), 430. 5 John Richetti, Preface to Robinson Crusoe, by Daniel Defoe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981). 6 Bronislaw Malinowski, quoted by Ian Watt in ‘Robinson Crusoe as a Myth,’ Essays in Criticism 1 (1951), 96. 7 Williams, Keywords (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 212. 8 Barthes, Mythologies (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1957). 9 Shapin and Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985). 10 Defoe, Robinson Crusoe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), 153–4. 11 Nestrick, ‘Coming to Life: Frankenstein and the Nature of Film Narrative,’ in The Endurance of Frankenstein: Essays on Mary Shelley’s Novel, ed. George Levine and U.C. Knoepflmacher (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979). 12 Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,’ in Illuminations (New York: Schocken Books, 1969). 13 Castle, The Apparitional Lesbian: Female Homosexuality and Modern Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), and The Female Thermometer: Eighteenth-Century Culture and the Invention of the Uncanny (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995). 14 Welsh, Strong Representation: Narrative and Circumstantial Evidence in England (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992). 15 Warner, Licensing Entertainment: The Elevation of Novel Reading in England, 1684–1750 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). 16 Walpole, Preface to the 1st ed., The Castle of Otranto, edited by W.S. Lewis (London: Oxford University Press, 1964), 4. 17 Walpole, Preface to the 2nd ed., Otranto, 7–8. 18 Walpole, Preface to the 1st ed. of Otranto, 4. 19 Backscheider, Daniel Defoe: His Life (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989). 20 Molesworth, ‘Against All Odds: The Sway of Chance in Eighteenth-Century Britain,’ Ph.D. dissertation, Stanford University, 2003. 21 Watt, ‘Robinson Crusoe as Myth,’ Essays in Criticism 1 (April 1951), 95–119.

This page intentionally left blank

Maximillian E. Novak: A Bibliography

Books Economics and the Fiction of Daniel Defoe. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1962. Repr. New York: Russell and Russell, 1976. Defoe and the Nature of Man. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963. William Congreve. New York: Twayne, 1971. Eighteenth-Century British Literature. London: Macmillan, 1983. Realism, Myth, and History in Defoe’s Fiction. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983. Daniel Defoe: Master of Fictions. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. I. J. Singer: The Writer as Exile. New York: AMS Press, forthcoming. Introductions, Editions, and Edited Books Introduction to Of Captain Misson by Daniel Defoe. i–iv. Los Angeles: Augustan Reprint Society, 1961. Introduction to Conjugal Lewdness by Daniel Defoe. Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1966. Edited, with introduction. The Empress of Morocco and Its Critics: Settle, Dryden, Shadwell, Crowne, Duffet. i–xxiii. Los Angeles: Augustan Reprint Society, 1968. The California Edition of the Works of John Dryden. Commentary and notes to vol. 10. Edited with George Guffey. 317–488. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970. The California Edition of the Works of John Dryden. Commentary and notes to vol. 17, Notes and Observation on the Emperor of Morocco. Associate editor. 387–411. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971.

240

Bibliography

Introduction to Some Aspects of Eighteenth-Century England by Vinton Dearing and J. H. Plumb. iii–vi. Los Angeles: William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, 1971. The Wild Man Within: An Image in Western Thought from the Renaissance to Romanticism. Ed. with Edward Dudley. 3–33. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1972. Introduction to Two English Novelists, Aphra Behn and Anthony Trollope by George Guffey and Andrew Wright. iii–vi. Los Angeles: William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, 1975. Oroonoko by Thomas Southerne. Ed. with David Rodes. i–xliii, 1–143. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1976. Introductory essay. John Dryden II by Irvin Ehrenpreis and James Osborn. iii–v. Los Angeles: William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, 1977. Ed., with introductory essay. English Literature in the Age of Disguise. 10–14. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977. With David Rodes, introduction to Gallantry A-La-Mode by George Kingsmyll. i–xiv. New York: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, 1980. The Eighteenth Century: A Current Bibliography. Ed. Robert R. Allen. English Books in Literature, ed. Novak. New York: AMS Press, 1981. Introductory essay to The Poetry of Jonathan Swift. Edited by Robert Elliot and Robert Scouten. v–ix. Los Angeles: William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, 1981. Introductory essay to Hurlothrumbo, pseud., The Merry-Thought. Parts 2, 3, and 4. Edited for Augustan Reprint Society. Nos 221–2. iii–xiii. Los Angeles: William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, 1983. The California Edition of the Works of John Dryden. Vol. 13. Edited with Alan Roper and George Guffey. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. Introductory essay to Educating the Audience: Addison, Steele, and EighteenthCentury Culture by Edward and Lillian Bloom and Edward Leites. i–iv. Los Angeles: William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, 1984. Introduction to Politics as Reflected in Literature by R. Ashcraft and Alan Roper. vii–xi. Los Angeles: William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, 1989. Introduction to Context, Influence, and Mid-Eighteenth-Century Poetry by Howard Weinbrot and Martin Price. vii–x. Los Angeles: William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, 1990. Introduction to The Moon-Calf, or, Accurate Reflections on the Consolidator by John Brown. Augustan Reprint Society. No. 269. iii–xiii. New York: AMS Press, 1993. General Editor, Augustan Reprints. Nos 271–6. New York: AMS Press, 1999. An Essay upon Projects by Daniel Defoe. Edited with Joyce Kennedy and Michael Seidel. i–lxxxii. New York: AMS Press, 2000.

Bibliography

241

Passionate Encounters in a Time of Sensibility. Ed. with Anne Mellor. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2000. The Consolidator by Daniel Defoe. Edited with Michael Seidel, Maximillian E. Novak, and Joyce Kennedy. i–lvii. New York: AMS Press, 2000. Political History of the Devil by Daniel Defoe. Edited by Irving Rothman and R. Michael Bowerman. Stoke Newington Edition of Daniel Defoe. General Editor. New York: AMS Press, 2003. Introduction to Enchanted Ground: Reimagining John Dryden. Ed. with Jayne Lewis. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004. Approaches to Teaching Robinson Crusoe. Ed. with Carl Fisher. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2005. An Essay on the History and Reality of Apparitions by Daniel Defoe. Edited by Kit Kincaide. Stoke Newington Edition of Daniel Defoe. General Editor. New York: AMS Press, 2007. General Editor. Augustan Reprints. Nos 277–82. New York: AMS Press (forthcoming). Articles ‘An Unrecorded Reference in a Poem by Donne.’ Notes and Queries 2 (1955), 471–2. ‘Defoe and the Machine Smashers.’ Notes and Queries 7 (1960), 288–90. ‘The Problem of Necessity in Defoe’s Fiction.’ Philological Quarterly 40 (1961), 513–24. ‘Colonel Jack’s “Thieving Roguing” Trade to Mexico and Defoe’s Attack on Economic Indiviualism.’ Huntington Library Quarterly 24 (1961), 349–53. ‘Moll Flanders’ First Love.’ Publication of the Michigan Society of Arts and Letters 46 (1961), 635–43. ‘Robinson Crusoe’s Fear and the Search for Natural Man.’ Modern Philology 58, 4 (1961), 238–45. ‘Robinson Crusoe’s Original Sin.’ Studies in English Literature 1 (1961), 19–29. ‘Crusoe the King and the Political Evolution of His Island.’ Studies in English Literature 2 (1962), 337–50. ‘Defoe, Thomas Burnet and the Deistical Passages of Robert Drury’s Journal.’ Philological Quarterly 42 (1963), 207–16. ‘Robinson Crusoe and Economic Utopia.’ Kenyon Review 25 (1963), 474–90. Repr. in Daniel Defoe, Schriften zum Erzählwerk, ed. Regina Heidenreich and Helmut Heidenreich. 165–181. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1982. ‘Conscious Irony in Moll Flanders.’ College English 26, 3 (1964), 198–204.

242

Bibliography

‘Simon Forecastle’s Weekly Journal.’ Texas Studies in Language and Literature 6 (1965), 433–40. ‘Defoe’s Theory of Fiction.’ Studies in Philology 61 (1965), 650–68. ‘Crime and Punishment in Roxana.’ Journal of English and Germanic Philology 65 (1966), 445–65. ‘Defoe’s Shortest Way with the Dissenters: Hoax, Parody, Paradox, Fiction, Irony, and Satire.’ Modern Language Quarterly 27 (1966), 402–17. ‘The Uses of Irony: Defoe.’ In Irony in Defoe and Swift, ed. N.H. Swedenberg. 7–38. Los Angeles: William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, 1966. ‘Dryden, “Anti-Scot,” and the Daemonology of Tyrannick Love.’ English Language Notes 4 (1967), 95–8. ‘Elkanah Settle and Operatic Tempest.’ Notes and Queries 15 (1968), 263–5. ‘Dryden’s “Ape of the French Eloquence” and Richard Flecknoe.’ Bulletin of the New York Public Library 72 (1968), 499–506. ‘Moral Grotesque and Decorative Grotesque in Singer’s Fiction.’ In The Achievement of I.B. Singer, ed. M. Allentuck. 44–63. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1969. ‘Defoe.’ In Encyclopaedia Americana, 8:630–2. New York, 1969. ‘The Artist and the Clergyman: Congreve, Collier and the Art of the Play.’ College English 30 (1969), 555–61. ‘Incognita and the Art of the Novella.’ Criticism 11 (1969), 329–42. ‘From Formula to Art: Congreve’s Old Bachelor.’ Essays in Criticism 20 (1970), 182–99. ‘Defoe’s Indifferent Monitor.’ Eighteenth-Century Studies 3 (1970), 351–65. ‘A Whiff of Scandal in the Life of Daniel Defoe.’ Huntington Library Quarterly 34 (1970), 35–42. ‘Defoe.’ In The New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature, 2:880–917. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971. ‘Fiction and Society in the Early Eighteenth Century.’ In Culture and Society in the Restoration and the Early Eighteenth Century, ed. H.T. Swedenberg. 51–70. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971. ‘Love, Scandal, and the Moral Milieu of Congreve’s Comedies.’ In Congreve Consider’d. 25–50. Los Angeles: Clark Memorial Library, University of California, 1971. ‘Liberty, Libertinism, and Randomness: Form and Content in the Picaresque.’ Studies in the Novel 4 (1972), 75–85. ‘The Wildman Comes to Tea.’ In The Wild Man Within, ed. Edward Dudley and Novak. 183–222. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1972. ‘Atlas Maritimus.’ UCLA Librarian 26 (June 1973), 32–3.

Bibliography

243

‘Early Fictional Forms.’ Novel 6 (1973), 120–33. ‘Freedom, Libertinism, and the Picaresque.’ Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture. Vol. 3. 35–48. Cleveland, OH: Press of Case Western University, 1973. ‘Defoe.’ In The English Novel, ed. A.E. Dyson. 16–35. London: Oxford University Press, 1974. ‘The Imaginative Genesis of Robinson Crusoe.’ Tennessee Studies in Literature 19 (1974), 57–78. ‘Richardson.’ In Encyclopaedia Americana. 13:508–9. 1974. ‘The Closing of Lincoln’s Inn Fields Theatre in 1695.’ Review of EighteenthCentury Theatre Research 14, 1 (1975), 51–2. ‘Two Arguments Never Brought Yet: An Addition to the Defoe Canon.’ Notes and Queries 22 (1975), 346–7. ‘Congreve as the Eighteenth Century’s Archetypal Libertine.’ Review of Eighteenth-Century Theatre Research 15, 2 (1976), 35–9. ‘Defoe and the Disordered City.’ Publication of the Modern Language Association 92 (1977), 241–52. ‘Margery Pinchwife’s London Disease and the Libertine Offensive of the 1670s.’ Studies in the Literary Imagination 10 (1977), 1–23. ‘Criticism, Adaptation, Politics, and the Shakespearean Model of Dryden’s All for Love.’ Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture. Vol. 7. 375–88. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978. ‘The Extended Moment.’ In Probability, Time and Space in Eighteenth-Century Literature, ed. Paula Backscheider. 141–66. New York: AMS Press, 1978. ‘Gothic Fiction and the Grotesque.’ Novel 13 (1979), 50–67. ‘History, Ideology, and the Method of Defoe’s Historical Fiction.’ Studies in the Eighteenth Century. Vol. 4. Ed. R.F. Brissenden and J.C. Eade, 179–212. Canberra: Australian National University Press, 1979. ‘The Sentimentality of The Conscious Lovers Revisited and Reasserted.’ Modern Language Studies 9 (1979), 48–59. ‘The Literature of Crime as a Narrative System (1660–1842).’ In The Yearbook of English Studies. 11:29–48. Leeds: Maney, 1981. ‘Lost Defoe Manuscript Discovered.’ Clark Newsletter 1 (1981), 1–3. ‘Defoe’s Authorship of A Collection of Dying Speeches.’ Philological Quarterly 61 (1982), 92–7. ‘Recent Studies in the Restoration and Eighteenth Century.’ Studies in English Literature 22 (1982), 531–54. ‘The Unmentionable and the Ineffable in Defoe’s Fiction.’ Studies in the Literary Imagination 15 (1982), 85–102. ‘Humanum est Errare: a New Defoe Manuscript,’ Clark Newsletter 4 (1983), 1–3.

244

Bibliography

‘Johnson and the Wild Vicissitudes of Taste.’ In The Unknown Samuel Johnson, ed. John Burke and Donald Kay. 54–75. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983. ‘Foresight in the Stars and Scandals in London: Reading the Hieroglyphics of Love for Love.’ In From Renaissance to Restoration: Metamorphoses of the Drama, ed. Laurie Finke and Robert Markley. 181–206. Cleveland, OH: Bellflower Press, 1984. ‘Shaping the Augustan Myth.’ In Greene Centennial Studies, ed. Robert Allen and Paul Korshin. 1–21. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1984. ‘Defoe.’ In Dictionary of Literary Biography, ed. Martin Battestin. 1:143–66. Detroit: Gale, 1985. ‘A Prompt Book for An Evening’s Love.’ Clark Newsletter 8 (1985), 1–3. ‘Sincerity, Delusion and Character in the Fiction of Defoe.’ Augustan Studies, ed. Douglas Patey and Timothy Keegan, 109–26. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1985. ‘Swift and Defoe: Or, How Contempt Breeds Familiarity and a Degree of Influence.’ In Proceedings of the First Münster Symposium on Jonathan Swift, ed. Hermann J. Real and Heinz Vienken. 157–73. Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1986. ‘The Importance of Probability.’ Virginia Quarterly 62 (1986), 156–62. ‘Defoe, the Occult, and the Deist Offensive during the Reign of George I.’ In Deism, Masonry, and the Enlightenment, ed. J.A. Leo Lemay. 93–108. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1987. ‘Rotation of Interests: Johnson’s Concept of Social and Historical Encounter and Change.’ In Fresh Reflections on Samuel Johnson: Essays in Criticism, ed. Prem Nath. 43–62. Troy, NY: Whitston, 1987. ‘A Vindication of the Press and the Defoe Canon.’ Studies in English Literature 27 (1987), 399–411. ‘The Collapse of the Critical Model: Or, Was There a Rise of the Novel.’ Review 10 (1988), 59–72. ‘Hogarth and Realistic Prose Fiction in the Eighteenth Century: The Dutch Connection.’ In Reading Hogarth: Annual Lectures by Murray Roston, Ronald Paulson, and Maximillian Novak. 45–65. Los Angeles: Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts, UCLA, 1988. ‘Biography as Execution and Feast: Boswell’s Life of Johnson.’ In The Biographer’s Art, ed. Jeffrey Myers. 31–54. London: Macmillan, 1989. ‘Satirical Form and Realistic Fiction in Tristram Shandy.’ In Approaches to Teaching Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, ed. Melvyn New. 137–45. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1989. ‘The Discourse of Criticism and the Discourses of History in the Restoration

Bibliography

245

and Early Eighteenth Century.’ In Theory and Tradition in Eighteenth-Century Studies, ed. Richard Schwartz. 95–117. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1990. ‘Gulliver’s Travels and the Picturesque Voyage: Some Reflections on the Hazards of Genre Criticism.’ In The Genres of Gulliver’s Travels, ed. Frederick Smith. 22–38. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1990. ‘Query [re: A Most Impartial Account].’ Scriblerian 22, 2 (1990), 232–3. ‘Israel Joshua Singer.’ Written with Estelle Novak. In Literary Exile in the Twentieth Century, ed. Martin Tucker. 621–2. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1991. ‘Defoe’s Interest in Painting and the Development of the Novel.’ In Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century. Vol. 305. Transactions of the Eighth International Congress on the Enlightenment. 1434–5. Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1992. ‘Savinkov: History, Revolution, and the Alienated Hero.’ Written with Estelle Novak. Yiddish 8, 2 (1992), 23–34. ‘Natural Law.’ In The Blackwell Companion to the Enlightenment, ed. John W. Yolton. 351–2. Oxford: Blackwell, 1992. ‘Robinson Crusoe’s Song on the “Country Life” and Defoe’s Knowledge of Music,’ Notes and Queries 237 (1992), 40–2. ‘Warfare and Its Discontents in Eighteenth-Century Fiction.’ Eighteenth-Century Fiction 4 (1992), 185–205. ‘Defoe and the Art of War.’ Philological Quarterly 75, 2 (1996), 197–213. ‘Making it Novel: Defoe as an Innovator of Fictional Form.’ In The Cambridge Companion to the Eighteenth-Century Novel, ed. John Richetti. 41–71. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. ‘Picturing the Thing Itself, or Not: Defoe, Painting, Prose Fiction, and the Art of Describing.’ Eighteenth-Century Fiction 9, 1 (1996), 1–20. ‘The Sensibility of Sir Herbert Croft.’ In The Age of Johnson. Vol. 8. 189–207. New York: AMS Press, 1996. ‘Whither the Defoe Canon.’ Eighteenth-Century Fiction 9, 1 (1996), 89–91. ‘The Defoe Canon.’ Huntington Library Quarterly 59 (1997), 189–207. ‘Drama.’ In The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism. Vol. 14, ed. H.B. Nisbet and Claude Rawson. 167–83. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. ‘Friday, or the Power of Naming.’ In Augustan Subjects: Essays in Honor of Martin C. Battestin. ed. Albert J. Rivero. 110–22. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1997. ‘Primitivism.’ In The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism. Vol. 14, ed. H.B. Nisbet and Claude Rawson. 456–67. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

246

Bibliography

‘Dryden 2000.’ With Jayne Lewis. Clark and Center Newsletter 36 (Fall 2000), 3–5. ‘Gendered Cultural Criticism and the Rise of the Novel: The Case of Defoe.’ Eighteenth-Century Fiction 12, 2–3 (2000), 239–52. ‘Suicide, Murder, and Sensibility: The Case of Sir Herbert Croft’s Love and Madness.’ In Passionate Encounters in a Time of Sensibility, ed. Novak and Anne Mellor. 174–192. Newark: Delaware University Press, 2000. ‘The “Fashionable Cut of the Town” and William Congreve’s The Old Batchelour.’ Eighteenth-Century Contexts, ed. Howard Weinbrot, Peter Schakel, and Stephen Karian. 26–43. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2001. ‘Libertinism and Sexuality.’ In A Companion to Restoration Drama, ed. Susan Owen. 53–68. Oxford: Blackwell, 2001. ‘Meatless Fridays,’ transl. as ‘Der Fleischlose Freitag’ by Fred Burwick. In Das Andere Essen: Kannibalismus als Motiv und Metaphor, ed. Walter Pope and Daniel Fulda. 197–216. Freiburg im Breisgau: Rombach, 2001. ‘The Age of Projects: Changing and Improving the Arts, Literature, and Life During the Long Eighteenth Century, 1660–1820.’ Clark and Center Newsletter 42 (Fall 2003), 2–3. ‘Defoe.’ In Encyclopedia of the Enlightenment, ed. Alan Charles Kor. 1:334–5. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003). ‘Hogarth’s Masquerades and Operas and Defoe’s Political History of the Devil.’ Notes and Queries 50, 2 (2003), 202–4. ‘A Narrative of the Proceedings in France: Reattributing a De-Attributed Work by Defoe.’ Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 97, 1 (2003), 69–80. ‘John Dryden’s Politics: The Rabble and Sovereignty.’ In John Dryden (1631– 1700): His Politics, His Plays, and His Poets, ed. Claude Rawson. 86–105. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2004. ‘Hogarth and Defoe’s Political History of the Devil.’ Notes and Queries 247 (2004), 202–4. ‘Teaching Robinson Crusoe in a Survey of the Novel Course.’ In Approaches to Teaching Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, 191–7. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2005. ‘Daniel Defoe.’ In Encyclopedia of Witchcraft: The Western Tradition, ed. Richard Golden. 255–6. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2006. ‘Defoe as a Biographical Subject,’ Literature Compass 3 (2006), 1218–34. ‘“Like Trying to Fit a Sponge into a Matchbox”: Twentieth Century Editing of Eighteenth Century Journals.’ In Recording and Reordering: Essays on the Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Diary and Journal, ed. Dan Doll and Jessica Munns. 211–27. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2006. ‘Edenic Desires: Robinson Crusoe, the Robinsonade, and Utopias.’ In Historical

Bibliography

247

Boundaries, Narrative Forms, ed. Lorna Clymer and Robert Mayer. 19–36. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2007. ‘“Looking with Wonder upon the Sea”: Defoe’s Maritime Fictions, Robinson Crusoe, and the “Curious Age We Live In.”’ In Sustaining Literature: Essays on Literature, History, and Culture, 1500–1800, ed. Greg Clingham. 171–194. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2007. ‘Novel or Fictional Memoir: The Scandalous Publication of Robinson Crusoe.’ In The Age of Johnson. Vol. 18. 207–23. New York: AMS Press, 2007. ‘The Cave and the Grotto: Realist Form and Robinson Crusoe’s Imagined Interiors.’ Eighteenth-Century Fiction 20 (2008), 445–68. ‘Defoe as a Defender of the Government, 1727–9.’ Huntington Library Quarterly 71 (2008), 503–12. ‘Defoe’s Political and Religious Journalism.’ In The Cambridge Companion to Daniel Defoe, ed. John Richetti. 25–44. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Reviews and Review Articles Robert Drury’s Journal, by Arthur Secord. Philological Quarterly 41 (1962), 578–9. Defoe and Spiritual Autobiography, by G.S. Starr. Journal of English and Germanic Philology 66 (1967), 153–5. The Shaping Vision, by Robert Donovan. Nineteenth-Century Fiction 22 (1967), 406–7. Fielding’s Moral Psychology, by Morris Golden. Novel 1 (1968), 286–8. Defoe and Middle Class Gentility, by Michael Shinagel. Philological Quarterly 48 (1969), 348–9. The Reluctant Pilgrim, by J. Paul Hunter. Journal of English and Germanic Philology 47 (1969), 159–61. Defoe and the Supernatural, by Rodney Blaine. Review of English Studies 21 (1970), 215–17. Popular Fiction Before Richardson, by John Richetti. Modern Philology (1971), 606–8. Defoe, by James Sutherland. Philological Quarterly 51 (1972), 665–6. Defoe and Casuistry, by G.S. Starr. Modern Language Quarterly 33 (1972), 456–9. Congreve, ed. Brian Morris. Scriblerian 6 (1973), 105–6. Defoe, A System of Magic, ed. Richard Landon. Philological Quarterly 53 (1974), 685–6. The Spanish Plays of Neoclassical England, by John Loftis. Philological Quarterly 53 (1974), 613–14. The Gothic Imagination, ed. G.R. Thompson. Nineteenth-Century Fiction 30 (1976), 516–19.

248

Bibliography

William Congreve, by Harold Love. Scriblerian 8 (1976), 109–11. Defoe and the Novel, by Everett Zimmerman. Modern Language Quarterly 38 (1977), 194–6. The Development of English Drama in the Late Seventeenth Century, by Robert Hume. Eighteenth-Century Studies 10 (1977), 512–16. Defoe’s Narratives, by John Richetti. Modern Language Review 73 (1978), 606–8. The English Jacobin Novel, by Gary Kelly. Nineteenth-Century Fiction 33 (1978), 248–50. Epic to Novel, by Thomas Maresca. Eighteenth-Century Current Bibliography for 1975 (1978), 222–3. Politics and Poetry in Restoration England, by Michael McKeon. Modern Language Review 74 (1979), 275–6. An Approach to Congreve, by Aubrey Williams. Scriblerian 13 (1980), 32–4. Defoe and Fictional Time, by Paul Alkon. Eighteenth-Century Studies 13 (1980), 449–51. The Economy of Literature, by Marc Shell. Modern Language Review 75, 2 (1980), 352–3. Robinson Crusoe, by Pat Rogers; Defoe’s Art of Fiction, by David Blewett; Defoe’s Gesellschaftkonzeption, by Klaus Degering. Modern Language Review 77 (1981), 168–72. The World of Defoe, by Peter Earle. Eighteenth-Century Current Bibliography for 1977 (1981), 188–91. David Garrick: A Critical Biography, by George Winchester Stone and George Kahrl. Shakespeare Quarterly 33 (1982), 251–2. The Gothic Tradition in Fiction, by Elizabeth MacAndrew; Ghosts of the Gothic, by Judith Wilt. Nineteenth-Century Fiction 36 (1982), 471–5. Dryden’s Heroic Plays, by Derek Hughes. Modern Language Review 80 (1984), 906–908. Philosophical Writing, by John Richetti. Journal of English and Germanic Philology 86 (1985), 124–6. Money and the Novel, by Samuel Macey. Modern Language Review 81 (1986), 448–9. Politics and Language in Dryden’s Poetry, by Steven Zwicker. Eighteenth-Century Studies 19 (1986), 570–3. Defoe and the Idea of Fiction, 1713–1719, by Geoffrey Sill; Defoe’s Fiction, by Ian Bell. Yearbook of English Studies 18 (1988), 293–6. Defoe and the Uses of Narrative, by Michael Boardman. Eighteenth-Century Current Bibliography for 1983 (1988), 561–3. A Mirror to Nature: Transformations in Drama and Aesthetics, 1660–1732, by Rose Zimbardo. Eighteenth-Century Studies 21 (1988), 506–8.

Bibliography

249

The Canonisation of Daniel Defoe, by P.N. Furbank and W.R. Owens. In EighteenthCentury Fiction 1, (January 1989), 147–50. The Canonisation of Daniel Defoe, by P.N. Furbank and W.R. Owens. EighteenthCentury Studies 22 (1989), 579–84. Defoe and Economics, by Bram Djikstra. Modern Philology 87, 1 (1989), 89–92. John Dryden and His World, by James Winn. Scriblerian 22, 1 (1989), 49–52. Order from Confusion Sprung, by Claude Rawson. Journal of the British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies 12 (1989), 579–84. The Origins of the English Novel 1600–1740, by Michael McKeon. Modern Language Review 84 (1989), 440–2. ‘The Dangerous Conclusion.’ Review of Defoe, by Paula Backscheider. Times Literary Supplement, 4–10 May, 1990, 469–70. Imagining the Penitentiary: Fiction and the Architecture of the Mind in Eighteenth-Century England, by John Bender. Yearbook of English Studies 20 (1990), 276–7. ‘How the Novel Got That Way.’ Review of Before Novels, by J. Paul Hunter. Times Literary Supplement, 25 January 1991, 8. Eighteenth-Century Sensibility and the Novel, by Ann Van Sant. Journal of English and Germanic Philology 94 (1994), 130–3. When Beauty Fires the Blood, by James Winn. Scriblerian 26 (1994). Crime and Defoe by Lincoln Faller. Journal of English and Germanic Philology (1997). ‘Having it Both Ways.’ Los Angeles Times Book Review, 7 December 1997, 29. Sexual Freedom in Restoration Literature, by Warren Cherniak. Scriblerian 29–30 (1997), 244–5. The Noble Savage: Allegory of Freedom, by Stelio Cro. Eighteenth-Century Current Bibliography for 1990 (1998), 262. Myths of Modern Individualism, by Ian Watt. Scriblerian 32 (2000), 350–2. ‘Boundaries of the Self; Crises of Mind and Body.’ Eighteenth-Century Studies 37 (2004), 683–6. ‘William Congreve,’ Oxford Dictionary of National Biography entry by C.Y. Ferdinand and D.F. McKenzie. Scriblerian, 38 (2006), 222–4. The Life of Daniel Defoe, by John Richetti. 1650–1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era 14 (2007), 375–8. The Illustrations of Robinson Crusoe, by David Blewett. Eighteenth-Century Current Bibliography (forthcoming).

This page intentionally left blank

Contributors

john bender is Jean G. and Morris M. Doyle Professor in Interdisciplinary Studies at Stanford University, in the Departments of English and Comparative Literature. He is author of Spenser and Literary Pictorialism, Imagining the Penitentiary: Fiction and the Architecture of Mind in Eighteenth Century England (which won the 1987 Gottschalk Prize for the best book on an eighteenth-century topic), and co-editor (with Simon Stern) of Tom Jones (Oxford University Press, 1996); (with David Wellbery) of The Ends of Rhetoric: History, Theory, Practice and Chronotypes: The Construction of Time (Stanford University Press, 1990); and (with Michael Marrinan) of Regimes of Description: In the Archive of the Eighteenth Century (Stanford University Press, 2005) and The Culture of Diagram (Stanford University Press, forthcoming). laura brown is John Wendell Anderson Professor of English at Cornell University. She is the author most recently of Fables of Modernity: Literature and Culture in the English Eighteenth Century and Ends of Empire: Women and Ideology in Early Eighteenth-Century English Literature. The essay included here forms a part of a new monograph on ideas of alterity in eighteenthcentury literary culture. carl fisher is Professor of Comparative Literature at California State University, Long Beach. He has published on Defoe, Fielding, Sterne, Rousseau, Godwin, Hannah More, and the representation of pigs in the eighteenth century. He edited (with Clorinda Donato) the book review section of Eighteenth-Century Studies (2000–3) and (with Maximillian Novak) edited Approaches to Teaching Robinson Crusoe (Modern Language Association Press, 2005).

252

Contributors

robert folkenflik, Professor Emeritus of English at the University of California, Irvine, has published several books on narrative, Samuel Johnson, Biographer (Cornell University Press) and The Culture of Autobiography: Constructions of Self-Representation (Stanford University Press). He has also published editions of Swift’s A Tale of a Tub (Joseph Simon), Smollett’s Sir Launcelot Greaves (University of Georgia Press), and Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (Modern Library), as well as numerous essays on the novels of Richardson, Fielding, Smollett, and the eighteenth-century novel more generally. j. paul hunter is Professor of English at the University of Virginia as well as the Barbara E. and Richard J. Franke Professor Emeritus at the University of Chicago. His books include The Reluctant Pilgrim, Occasional Form, Before Novels (which won the Louis Gottschalk Prize in 1991), and the Norton Introduction to Poetry (9th ed., 2006). His recent essays are centred on early modern and eighteenth-century poetry, and he is at work on a history of the couplet, tentatively titled Sound Argument. jayne lewis is Professor of English at the University of California, Irvine. She is the author of The English Fable: Aesop and Literary Culture, 1651–1740 (Cambridge University Press, 1995) and Mary Queen of Scots: Romance and Nation (Routledge, 1999), as well as numerous articles on eighteenthcentury topics. She was Max Novak’s grateful colleague at UCLA for sixteen years and with him co-edited Enchanted Ground: Re-Imagining John Dryden (University of Toronto Press, 2004). robert m. maniquis teaches in the English Department at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is the author of Lonely Empires: Personal and Public Visions of Thomas De Quincey, the English Opium-Eater; editor of British Radical Culture of the 1790s; editor (with Clorinda Donato) of The Encyclopédie and the French Revolution; and editor (with Oscar Marti and Joseph Perez) of The French Revolution and the Iberian Peninsula. john richetti is A.M. Rosenthal Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Pennsylvania. His most recent book is The Life of Daniel Defoe: A Critical Biography (2005). He has also edited The Cambridge History of English Literature: 1660–1780 (2005) and The Cambridge Companion to Daniel Defoe (2009). manuel schonhorn is Professor of Literature and History Emeritus at

Contributors

253

Southern Illinois University-Carbondale. He edited Defoe’s General History of the Pyrates (1972, 1999) and is the author of Defoe’s Politics (1991), reissued in paperback. In addition to articles on Defoe, Fielding, and Pope, he has also published on Twain and Hemingway. He is the coeditor (with Maximillian Novak) of The Stoke Newington Daniel Defoe Edition. His current project is entitled ‘The Tripartite Ideology, Paradigm Change, and The Consecration of the Artist.’ michael seidel is currently the Jesse and George Siegel Professor of Humanities at Columbia University. He earned his Ph.D. at UCLA and taught at Yale before moving to Columbia in 1977. His first book was Epic Geography: James Joyce’s Ulysses (1976). He has edited (with Edward Mendelson), Homer to Brecht: The European Epic and Dramatic Traditions (1977) and (with Maximillian Novak and Joyce Kennedy) two volumes of the Stoke Newington Works of Daniel Defoe. He has published a book on narrative satire, Satiric Inheritance: Rabelais to Sterne (1979); on the novel, Exile and the Narrative Imagination (1986); on Robinson Crusoe: Island Myths and the Novel (1991); and another Joyce book, James Joyce: A Short Introduction (2002). He has also written two books on baseball history, Streak: Joe DiMaggio and the Summer of ’41 (1986) and Ted Williams: A Baseball Life (1991). stuart sherman, Associate Professor of English at Fordham University, is editor of the section on the Restoration and eighteenth century in the Longman Anthology of British Literature. He received the Gottschalk Prize from the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies for his Telling Time: Clocks, Diaries, and English Diurnal Form, 1660–1795 (1996). He is currently at work on a book entitled News and Plays: Evanescences of Page and Stage, 1620–1779. roxann wheeler is an Associate Professor of English at Ohio State University. Author of The Complexion of Race: Categories of Difference in Eighteenth-Century British Culture, she has also published essays on Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and Captain Singleton; African-British writers Ottobah Cugoano and Olaudah Equiano; and whiteness and the eighteenth-century novel.

This page intentionally left blank

Index

Addison, Joseph, 6, 22–3, 24, 27, 29, 135. See Spectator; Steele, Richard Advancement of Learning, The (Bacon), 114 Africa: in Defoe’s works, 136, 153, 158, 161, 164, 168; Gold Coast, 157; island of Madagascar, 157; slaves of, 127, 144; trade and exchange with, 157–9; West, 158 air, 6, 33, 46, 47; Aristotle on, 36, 38, 42, 43; Boyle on, 39, 43, 53n22; character and, 39; DuBos on, 39–40; as ‘frame,’ 36, 39, 40; representation of, 38–44; Short’s syllabus of, 44. See also atmosphere; meteorography Aislabie, John, 178, 187n30 Alice in Wonderland (Carroll), 223 Alma (Prior), 64 ‘Almanzor’: as ‘noble savage, 164–5, 169n14, 204n59 Alter, Robert, 92, 97n14; Fielding and the Nature of the Novel, 92 alterity: in Captain Singleton, 153, 156. See also ‘Other’ Altick, Richard D.: Shows of London, 163

Anatomy of Exchange Alley, The (Defoe), 172, 181 Anderson, Benedict, 205n64 Applebee’s Journal: Defoe’s essays in, 179, 180 Arbuthnot, John: Essay Concerning the Effects of Air on Human Bodies, 39 Aristotle: analysis of genres, 216; on master and slave, 145n6; Meteorologica, 38; meteorology, 38, 41, 42, 43; narrative theory, 233 Art of English Poesy, The (Bysshe), 68 atmosphere: and character, 38–40; in Crusoe, 33, 43, 47, 51; framed as an ‘it,’ 37; as an object of knowledge, 41–2; as reflexive figuration, 42–3. See also air; frames Atterbury, Francis, 187n29 Auden, W.H., 67 Auerbach, Eric, 71; and British narrative realism, 7–8, 72, 87, 93–4; and Candide, 81; Carroll on, 95n1, 95n4; critical assessments, 72, 75, 94–5n1, 95–6n4, 96n6; and Defoe, 80–1, 82, 93, 94; on Don Quixote, 75; and Fielding, 93, 94; and Haywood, 82, 87, 93, 94; on the

256

Index

Hebrew Bible, 74; on Inferno, 74; narrative of the development of literary realism, 7, 72, 73–5; on the New Testament, 74; on Odysseus, 73–4; Said on, 71–2, 95–6n4; on Satyricon, 73; and Tom Jones, 73, 87, 92; White on, 75. See also Mimesis autobiography, 22, 23, 25, 37, 100 Backscheider, Paula, 69n5, 148n24, 148–9n27, 235 Bacon, Francis, 114 Barbauld, Anna Letitia, 107 Barnard, John: Present for an Apprentice, 149n34 Barnes, Julian, 109 Barrow, Isaac, 103–4 Barthes, Roland: detail as sign, 110; on myth, 229, 230; Price on, 123n45 Behn, Aphra, 86, 102, 156, 163 Beljame, Alexander, 193 Bell, Ian, 146n12 Bender, John, 10, 98 Benjamin, Walter: on ‘mechanical reproduction,’ 232, 236 Berkeley, Lord, 187n29 Bible: Auerbach on, 74; in Crusoe, 48; demonio meridiano in, 122n38; Frei on, 102 ‘Black Prince’ (‘African Prince’), 136, 146n11, 153; and alterity, 154, 156; conjuncture of elitism and primitivism in, 163, 164, 165, 166–7; function of nobility of, 163–4; as ‘noble savage,’ 9, 168; performance of gratitude and fidelity by, 138, 139; proximity to the European, 156, 162–3. See also Captain Singleton

Blanchard, Marc, 75, 94n1, 95–6n4 Blumenberg, Hans: on the impersonal ‘it,’ 34; on realism, 53n22 Bolingbroke, Lord: Idea of a Patriot King, 190 Borrow, George: on Crusoe, 46, 54n30 Boulukos, George: analysis of gratitude, 142–3 Boyle, Robert, 39, 43, 114; ‘General History of the Air,’ 43; Shapin and Schaffer on, 53n22 Brantlinger, Patrick, 124n56, 178 Brewer, John, 183 Britain (Great Britain), 93, 114, 181; crisis and renewal, 189–90; Davenant on, 192; ‘gratitude’ in, 140; Hume on, 39; role of writer in, 190–1; text as figure in, 76 British Critic and Quarterly Theological Review (1830), 56 British Magazine, 195 British Quarterly Review (1858), 56 Brothers, Leslie: Friday’s Footprint: How Society Shapes the Human Mind, 111 Brown, Brockden, 236 Brown, Homer O., 20 Brown, Laura, 9 Brown, Rev. John: Estimate of the Manners of the Times, 190 Brown, Tom, 194 Browne, Joseph, 33 Brownlee, Keith, 96n6 Brueghel, Pieter: Netherlandish Proverbs, 104, 105, 106 (pl.) Bunyan, John: Pilgrim’s Progress, The, 103 Burnet, Rev. Thomas: The Sacred Theory of the Earth, 43, 114 Burney, Fanny, 72

Index Butler, Samuel: on Odyssey, 215, 216 Bysshe, Edward: The Art of English Poesy, 68 Caleb Williams (Godwin), 116 Calvin, John, 8, 104, 115 Can Jane Eyre be Happy? (Sutherland), 109–10 ‘Captain Bob’ (‘Captain Singleton’): attitude towards money, 161; and the Black Prince, 136, 138, 154, 156, 162, 163; conversion of, 155; as good patriarch, 136; and slaves, 126, 127, 128, 136, 140, 153–4, 157; ‘Wilderness Musick’ and, 155. See also Captain Singleton Captain Singleton: account of barter in, 159–61; account of protocolonialist economy in, 156–8; approaches to alterity in, 153; the ‘Artificer,’ 157, 158, 159, 162; category of difference in, 153, 154,–5, 156–7, 159, 161, 166, 168; category of proximity, 156, 162–3; compared with Crusoe and Colonel Jack, 126, 136; conjunction of elitism and primitivism, 164, 165–6, 168; conversion theme, 155; and patriarchal governance, 126, 136, 138; scenes of slaves’ gratitude and fidelity in, 138; ‘Wilderness Musick’ trope, 155. See also ‘Black Prince’; ‘Captain Bob’ ‘Captain Singleton.’ See ‘Captain Bob’ Caribbean, 127, 136 Carroll, David, 95n1, 95n4 Cassirer, Ernst, 229 Castle, Terry, 53n16, 233 Castle of Otranto, The (Walpole), 234–5

257

Certeau, Michel de, 98, 113, 124n56 Cervantes: Don Quixote, 25, 75, 216– 17, 228 Chalmers, George, 120n14 Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms Amended (Newton), 115 Cibber, Theophilus: on Defoe’s poetry, 56; Lives of the Poets, 56, 69n2 Clark Memorial Library. See William Andrews Clark Memorial Library Cobb, Samuel, 194 Coetzee, J.M., 112 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 50; ‘Ancient Mariner,’ 207; on Robinson Crusoe, 48–9, 100; ‘suspended disbelief,’ 48 Collection of the Most Remarkable Casualties and Disasters which happen’d in the late dreadful Tempest (Defoe). See Storm Colley, Linda, 189 Collins, Wilkie: The Moonstone, 117, 125n61 ‘Colonel Jack’ (‘Col. Jack’): as a good patriarch, 136–7, 138, 141; on human nature and gratitude, 139; interprets calm as an emblem, 107; as narrator, 13, 14, 17. See also Colonel Jack Colonel Jack: benevolence in, 136, 137, 141; Boulukos on, 142; compared with Captain Singleton and Robinson Crusoe, 126, 136; consent in, 136, 138–9; and Defoe’s interest in pictorial realism, 15; emblem in, 105, 107; instruction in, 138; lack of racial specificity in, 139; occlusion in, 28; passions in, 136–7, 138–9; patriarchy in, 136, 138, 141; performance of slave’s gratitude

258

Index

in, 138–9; performed silences in, 15, 17 Columbus, Christpher, 98, 99, 118n4, 161–2 Commentator, The, 183, 186n21 Complete English Tradesman, The (Defoe), 134, 149n29, 166 conduct manuals, 129, 132, 137, 140–1; Defoe’s, 127, 135 Conquest of America, The (Todorov), 98, 161–2 Conquest of Granada, The (Dryden), 164. See also ‘Almanzor’; Dryden, John Continuation of Letters Written by a Turkish Spy at Paris (Defoe), 28, 105; on painter’s limitations, 12, 15, 27–8 contract: consent and, 129–30, 139, 146n9, 146n11; in Defoe’s writings, 129–30, 139, 144, 147n12; Fleetwood on, 146n9; gratitude and, 140; Hobbes on, 129, 130, 139, 146n11; Locke on, 129, 130, 139; Pateman on, 130, 139, 147n14; and patriarchy, 129–30, 144, 146n11; Schochet on, 130, 141, 151n49 Cotgrave, Randle: Dictionary of the French and English Tongues, 50 Crusoe: See Robinson Crusoe ‘Crusoe, Robinson’ (as fictive author): as autobiographer, 24, 100, 155; Certeau on, 113; compared with Mr. Spectator, 22–3; Damrosch (Leopold) on, 102; as Defoe’s Doppelgänger, 26; describes his work as ‘allegorical-historical,’ 103; on Don Quixote, 25; Eco on, 111; Gildon on, 25–6; as good patriarch and master, 136, 138, 141; Greenblatt

on, 98; as interpreter, 34, 51, 98– 101, 102, 108–9, 111, 115, 116, 139; language of impression, 37, 45–51; as narrator, 17, 18–19, 20, 23; obsession with air and atmospheric events, 34–6, 48; Schaffer on, 112; and silence, 16, 17, 23, 24, 26–7; Stephen on, 32, 47; use of the impersonal ‘it,’ 35–6, 38, 47–8; use of probabilistic argument, 109, 115; use of scriptural echoes, 18–19, 100–1; weather journal, 34–8, 44, 45, 46–8. See also Robinson Crusoe Curtius, Ernst Robert, 71 Dampier, Captain: Collection of Voyages in Four Volumes, 149n35 Damrosch, David, 95–6n4 Damrosch, Leopold, Jr, 103 Dante, 74 Darlington’s Fall (Leithauser), 67 Daston, Lorraine, 41, 42 Davenant, William, 191; on Britain, 192, 196; on poets’ roles, 192–3, 196 Davideis (Cowley), 63 Day, Thomas, 190 Decline of Hell (Walker), 102, 109 Defoe, Daniel: attempts to reconcile historical and religious worlds, 115–17; on Britain, 189, 190; early career, 209; efforts to fuse bourgeois and aristocratic values, 166; and Harley, 104, 105, 173, 174, 184n6, 185n18, 186nn20–21; ideas of human nature and motivation, 128, 148n21; ideas of masterservant relationships, 129, 132, 134–6, 148n24, 148–9n27, 149n29, 149n34, 185n13; ideas on patriar-

Index chy, 129, 141, 148n24; interest in pictorial realism, 12–15, 46; and limner’s art, 12, 13, 17, 27–8; and Lockean philosophy, 116; and Marana, 28, 104; ‘mythological manner of,’ 118n1; as a poet, 57–8, 59, 65, 68; realism of, 4, 6, 51n2, 79, 80, 94, 206, 217, 218; as realist, 1, 73, 103, 104, 209; recast patriarchal relations through the notion of contract, 129, 144; on slavery, 127, 139, 141, 147n12, 149n35, 158; and The Spectator, 22–3, 28 Defoe, Daniel – interpreters and critics: Backscheider, 69n5, 148n24, 148–9n27, 235; Bender, 10, 98; Boukulos, 142–3; Brown (Laura), 9; Browne and, 33; Chalmer, 120n14; Damrosch (Leopold), 103, 121n20; Dodsley, 148n22; Fisher, 9; Folkenflik, 8, 190; Furbank, 60; Gildon, 25, 26, 120nn14–15; Hunter, 7, 51n2, 101, 102, 119– 20n14; Joyce, 206, 208–9, 218; Lewis, 6; Marshall, 37, 122n33; Novak, 3–5, 6, 8, 12, 14, 15, 16, 25, 29, 33, 34, 46, 55, 58, 61, 62, 67, 69n5, 98, 104, 121n31, 128, 145n4, 148n21, 150n44, 173, 181, 186n21, 216, 220n12, 222n17; O’Brien, 185–6n20; Owens, 60; Poe, 226–7; Richetti, 7–8, 52n2, 118, 138, 189, 198, 204n61, 228; Schonhorn, 9–10; Seidel, 9, 10, 123n46; Sherman (Sandra), 185n13, 185n15; Sherman (Stuart), 6; Starr, 51n2, 99, 100; Stephen, 32, 47; Walcott, 112; Watt, 3, 51n2, 98, 101, 103, 107, 116, 236; Wheeler, 8; Woolfe, 209; Zelnick, 146–7n12

259

Defoe, Daniel – journalism and other prose: on African-European trade and exchange, 157–61; concern with collective behaviour, 171, 174–5, 177, 178–9, 180–2, 184nn7– 8; concern with the ‘publick good,’ 171–6, 184n8, 184n11, 184–5n12; conduct manuals, 126–7, 135–6; 84–5n12; on greed, 176–7, 178, 186–7n26; ideas on credit, 171, 173–4, 182–3, 183n1, 185nn15–16; 185nn15–16, 185–6n20; interest in ‘consumer confidence,’ 174, 175– 6, 185n18, 186n24; letters to Harley, 104–5; pre-South Sea Company economic writings, 173, 185n17; on the South Sea Bubble, 177, 178–80, 181–2, 186n21, 187n31; on the South Sea Company, 171, 173, 174, 177, 181, 182, 183, 183n1, 183n3, 185n17, 186n21, 186–7n26; on the South Sea project, 174, 185n18, 185–6n20; use of demystification, 108; on wages-for-labour, 127, 134; weather writing, 34, 44–5; on the writer’s mission, 196–7. See Anatomy of Exchange Alley; Collection of the Most Remarkable Casualties and Disasters which happen’d in the late dreadful Tempest; Complete English Tradesman; Essay on Projects; Essay on the South Sea Trade; Essay Upon Publick Credit; Everybody’s Business is Nobody’s Business; Evident Approach of a War; ‘Historical Collections’; History and Reality of Apparitions; History of the Pirates; Lay-man’s Sermon; Manufacturer; Plan of the English Commerce; Political History of the Devil; Review; ‘Romance’; Secrets of

260

Index

the Invisible World Disclosed; Shortest Way with the Dissenters; Storm; True Collection; Villainy of Stock-Jobbers Detected. See also Applebee’s Journal; Commentator; Mercurius Politicus; Mist’s Journal; Weekly Journal. Defoe, Daniel – narrative devices, tactics, and techniques: allusion and alteration, 18; ambiguity, 79; continuously flowing narrative stream, 78–9; ‘Crusoe’s’ weather journal, 35, 37, 44–5, 46, 47–8; dead storytellers, 19–20; descriptions of material detail, 81; distance between narrators and readers, 18–20, 29; evocation of subjectivity, 79–81; exemplary narrative, 170–1, 178, 183; fictional editors, 20, 45; fictive autobiography, 21–2, 24; frames, 36, 38, 45, 47, 49, 50, 80, 226; ‘impressions,’ 45–46, 48; irony, 45, 105, 180, 183; language gap, 150n39; loquacity, 24; male-gaze moment, 13–14; narrative voices, 4, 78, 79, 175–6; occlusions, 13, 17, 19, 20–1, 28; realistic moments, 209; realistic story, 12; realistic voice, 78; realistic transparency, 227; scenes of instruction, 137–8; scenes of patriarchs’ benevolence, 136; scenes of slaves’ gratitude and fidelity, 8, 138–9; sequestration, 20, 21, 24; silence, 13, 15, 16–18, 24, 26–7, 29; sunderings, 14, 20, 27; verisimilitude, 28 Defoe, Daniel – novels and other fiction: alterity and, 153; contract and consent in, 129–30, 139; depiction of power relations, 137; dramatize the passions, 136; methods of in-

terpreting signs, 107–8; mimesis in, 93; moralism in, 104–5, 107–8; and myth, 98, 223, 231, 234, 236; patriarchal model of labour relations in, 127; portrayal of the colonies and imperial outposts, 141; and questions of representation, 12–16, 20, 32–3, 80–2, 94, 103–7, 142, 153, 156, 159, 161, 221n12. See Captain Singleton; Colonel Jack; Continuation of Letters Written by a Turkish Spy at Paris; Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe; Journal of the Plague Year; Moll Flanders; Robinson Crusoe; Roxana; Serious Reflections. See also ‘Black Prince’; ‘Crusoe, Robinson’; ‘Colonel Jack’; ‘Friday’; ‘H.F.’; ‘Moll’; ‘Roxana’ Defoe, Daniel – poetry: Backscheider on, 69n5; British Critic and Quarterly Theological Review on, 56; British Quarterly Review on, 56; Cibber on, 56; critical assessments, 55–7, 69; dramatic effects with readers, 57, 59, 60, 65; employment of rhyme, 65–6, 67–8; Furbank on, 60; genre questions, 61–2, 63,64; Jacob on, 55–6; Lee on, 57; Novak on, 61, 69n5; Owens on, 60; rhetorical aspects, 60–1, 65; Rogers on, 65; Stephen on, 56, 60; Taine on, 56–7; use of consonance, 67–8; use of Satyr, 61–2, 68. See Hymn to the Pillory; Jure Divino; Mock Mourners; More Reformation; True Collection; Pacificator; Reformation of Manners; True-Born Englishman Defoe, Daniel – themes and tropes: air, 6, 33, 34, 36, 45, 46, 47, 48; baubles, 159–60; benevolence, 132,

Index 136, 139; benevolent slave owner, 127; business as crime and crime as business, 181; clothing, 209, 210, 212, 213–14; 130; conversion, 48–9, 155; Crusoe’s island, 107, 114, 221n12; distance, 15–16, 17, 19, 26, 29, 159; emblem, 26, 105, 107, 108; ‘footprint,’ 18, 107–13, 116, 117; ‘goat,’ 107–8; good patriarchs, 136, 138; grateful slaves, 127, 141, 144; gratitude, 128, 132, 138–9, 141, 142, 143, 150n44; houses on fire, 172, 184n9; passions, 127, 131, 136–7, 139, 148n24; patriarchal relationships, 135, 136, 148n24; repentance, 21, 62; silence, 6, 13, 15, 16, 17, 24, 26–7, 29; solitude, 16–18, 21, 22–3, 25, 27; subordination, 129–30, 131, 136, 143; value of money, 159–61, 181; weather, 7, 34–6, 38, 43, 44–5, 46, 47, 49, 50, 53n23; ‘Wilderness Musick,’ 155 Defoe and Spiritual Autobiography (Starr), 51n2, 100 ‘Defoe and the Disordered City’ (Novak), 5, 184n11, 188n41 Defoe and the Nature of Man (Novak), 4, 8, 128, 148n21, 150n38, 150n44 ‘Defoe’s Shortest Way with the Dissenters’ (Novak), 5 ‘Defoe’s Theory of Fiction’ (Novak), 216, 220n12 Derrida, Jacques, 122n37 Dickinson, Emily, 67 Dickson, P.G.M., 178 Dictionary of the French and English Tongues (Cotgrave), 50 didactic literature, 133, 141 discourse, free indirect, 230, 234–5

261

distance, 16, 17, 19, 26, 42, 86, 159; in perspective painting, 14, 15 ‘Distresses of a Common Soldier’ (Goldsmith), 195 Dodsley, Robert: Footman’s Friendly Advice to His Brethren of the Livery (Dodsley’s Servitude), 148n22 Don Quixote (Cervantes), 25, 75, 216–17, 228 Downie, J.A., 186n23 Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (Stevenson), 223 Dracula (Stoker): apparitional aspects, 231, 232; compared with Crusoe and Frankenstein, 223, 224; 225–6, 228, 231, 232, 234, 235, 236; ‘firstness,’ 224; as meta-novel, 234, 236; as myth, 223, 234, 236; plainness of style, 228; realist and metarealist aspects, 228, 232; reception, 224, 225; themes, 225–6 ‘Drama and Life’ (Joyce), 218–19 Drayton, Michael, 191 Dryden, John, 67, 191, 193, 194; Conquest of Granada, 164. See also ‘Almanzor’ DuBos, Abbé Jean-Baptiste, 39, 40 Dunciad (Pope), 64, 197, 225 Dunkin, William, 204n57 Dunlop, John, 107 Durkheim, Emile, 229, 230 Eagleton, Terry, 9, 72 Eclipse of Biblical Narrative (Frei), 102 Economics and the Fiction of Daniel Defoe (Novak), 3, 128, 186n21 ‘Economic Background to the Fiction of Daniel Defoe’ (Novak, PhD diss.), 3 Eco, Umberto, 111

262

Index

Edelstein, Ludwig, 96n6 Ellingson, Terry Jay, 167, 168n1, 169n14, 169n16 emblems and the emblematical, 8, 25–6, 35, 102, 103, 105, 107, 108 England, 87, 127, 233; Defoe in, 209; drama of, 165; labour relations, 135, 136, 141; semantics of ‘noble’ in, 165–6; weather; 34, 39, 41, 44; writers and poets on, 190, 192, 193, 197. See also Britain; London Epistle from Mr. Pope to Dr. Arbuthnot, An (Pope), 198 Essay Concerning the Effects of Air on Human Bodies (Arbuthnot), 39 Essay on Criticism, An (Pope), 64 Essay Concerning Human Understanding (Locke), 102 Essay on Man (Pope), 64, 120n14 Essay on Projects (Defoe), 103 Essay on the South Sea Trade, An (Defoe), 170–1, 183n1, 184n7 Essay Upon Publick Credit, An (Defoe), 173, 184n6, 185–6n20 Estimate of the Manners of the Times (Brown), 190 Evelyn, John, 50 Everybody’s Business is Nobody’s Business (Defoe), 148n22, 149n34 Evident Approach of a War, The (Defoe), 150n44 Examiner (Swift), 186n20 Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (MacKay), 177–8 Fairchilds, Cissie: Domestic Enemies, 145n2, 148n27 Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (Defoe), 102 Faulkner, William, 236

Fielding, Henry, 103, 231, 233; compared with Defoe and Haywood, 7, 73, 80, 93, 94; controlled comic moralism of, 92–3, 94; mimesis of, 93–4; role as writer, 198–9; Tom Jones, 72, 87–94, 198–9 Fielding and the Nature of the Novel (Alter), 92, 97n14 Fields, W.C., 55 Fife, 112 Finnegans Wake (Joyce): narrative strategies, 220n12, 221n14; realism in, 211, 213, 217, 222n17; trope of clothing in, 209–11, 213, 214–15, 222n17; trope of water in, 207 First Epistle of the Second Book of Horace, Imitated (Pope), 197–8 First Satire of the Second Book of Horace Imitated (Pope), 197 Fisch, Harold, 99 Flaubert, Gustav, 87, 235 Fleetwood, William, 135; Relative Duties of Parent and Children, Husbands and Wives, Masters and Servants, 146n9, 150n46 Folkenflik, Robert, 8; The English Hero, 1660–1800, 190 footprints: as apparition, 231–2; in Bacon, 114; Brantlinger on, 124n56; in Burnet, 114; Certeau on, 113; ‘Crusoe’s’ interpretations of, 6, 51, 108, 109, 111, 114, 122n37, 231–2; Derrida on, 122n37; in Eco’s semiotics, 111; as Friday’s, 110–13, 122n37, 123n46; in Gordimer’s short stories, 124n56; in Law’s works, 114, 124n58; London on, 122n37; Morris on, 123n46; in Ray, 114–15; in Robinson Crusoe, 6, 33, 51, 103, 107,

Index 231; Schaffer on, 112; as sign, 8, 104, 110, 116; as synecdoche, 107, 114, 116–17; and theme of solitude, 18; Sutherland on, 109–10; and teleological proofs for the existence of God, 114–15; in Tristes Tropiques, 123n46 frames: air as, 36, 39, 40; in Crusoe, 38, 45, 47, 49, 50, 226; for Defoe’s economic writings, 172; in Dracula, 226; for the English atmosphere, 37; and genre, 62; in meteorography, 42, 44; in Moll Flanders, 80 France, 49, 87, 114, 165, 166 Frankenstein (Shelley): apparitional aspects, 231, 232; compared with Dracula and Crusoe, 223, 224, 225–6, 228, 231, 232, 234, 235, 236; ‘firstness,’ 224; as meta-novel, 234, 236; as myth, 223, 234, 236; plainness of style, 228; realist and metarealist aspects, 228, 232; reception, 224–5; themes, 225–6 Frankenstein Notebooks (Shelley), 226 Frazer, James, 229, 230 Frei, Hans W.: Eclipse of Biblical Narrative, 102 Freud, Sigmund, 229 ‘Friday’: Crusoe and, 99, 136, 141, 217; gratitude of, 138, 139; and the footprint, 8, 110–13, 123n46; Gildon on, 25; Joyce on, 206; as Other, 9. See also Robinson Crusoe Friday’s Footprint: How Society Shapes the Human Mind (Brothers), 111 Frye, Northrop, 229, 230 Furbank, Nicholas, 60 Gay, John, 23–4 Gray, Thomas: ‘bard,’ 190

263

‘General History of the Air’ (Boyle), 43 Genovese, Eugene: Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made, 142 Gildon, Charles: The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Mr. D— De F— of London, Hosier, 24–5, 120nn14–15 Godwin, William: Caleb Williams, 116 Goldsmith, Oliver: ‘Distresses of a Common Soldier,’ 195 Gordimer, Nadine: Friday’s Footprint, 123n46 ‘gothic,’ 234–6 ‘Gothic Fiction and the Grotesque’ (Novak), 5 gratitude: associated with inequality, 140, 142; associated with slaves, 142–3, 144; Boulukos on, 142–3; colonial interpretations, 151n57; in Defoe’s works, 126, 128, 137–9, 140–1, 142, 143, 149n27, 150n44; Mannoni on, 142, 151n52; Marx on, 144, 152n59; Mill on, 144; non-racial character of, 143; in planters’ journals, 137, 149n3; in Richardson’s Pamela, 143–4; in theory of passions, 8, 130, 132, 139–40; wage demands and, 133. See also Defoe, Daniel; patriarchal theory; servitude; slavery Greenblatt, Stephen, 98 Grimm, Jacob, 229 Grimm, Wilhelm, 229 Gulliver’s Travels (Swift), 223, 224 ‘H.F.,’ 15, 16, 19–20, 24, 104, 180. See Journal of the Plague Year Hacking, Ian, 109, 122–3n43 Handel, George Frederick, 190

264

Index

Harley, Sir Robert, 104, 173, 174, 184n6, 185n18, 186nn20–21; Defoe’s letter to 104–5 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 236 Haywood, Eliza, 7, 72; Love in Excess, 82–7; narrative methods, 84–6, 90, 94; and realist representation, 73, 80, 82, 86, 94 Heidegger, Martin, 224 Helgerson, Richard, 191–2, 202n33 Herder, Johann Gottfried von, 229 hero, 9, 10, 58, 153, 165, 190, 191, 194, 196, 198 Herrick, Robert, 193 Higgons, Bevill, 194 Hill, Christopher, 134 ‘Historical Collections’ (Defoe), 29 History and Reality of Apparitions, The (Defoe), 108, 115–16. See also Secrets of the Invisible World Disclosed History of the Lives and Robberies of the Most Notorious Highwaymen (Smith), 181 History of the Old and New Testaments (Wesley), 64 History of the Pirates (Defoe), 181 Hobbes, Thomas, 98: consent and contract theory, 130, 146n11; debt to Aristotle, 145n6; in Defoe’s writings, 136, 146n12; Leviathan, 129, 146nn10–11; passions and governance, 128, 130; and probability theory, 102 Holquist, Michael, 96n6 Hume, David, 128; and the acclimation thesis, 39, 52n14; On National Characters, 39; and sensory perception, 233, 234 Hunter, J. Paul, 7, 101, 102, 119– 20n14

Hymn to the Pillory (Defoe), 57, 58 Idea of a Patriot King, The (Bolingbroke), 190 ideology, 8–9, 144, 139, 145, 161, 181; myth as, 230; translations, 127, 136, 168 inequality, 130, 131, 140, 142–3, 146n11, 147n17 Inferno (Dante), 74 Ingrassia, Catherine, 171 ‘Interpreter Crusoe’ (Maddox), 99 ‘Jack.’ See ‘Colonel Jack’ Jacob, Giles, 55–6, 69n1 Jakobson, Roman, 107 James (Stuart pretender to English/ Scottish throne), 187n29 Jankovicv, Vladimir, 42 Johnson, Samuel, 56, 121n26, 190; ‘On the Death of Dr. Robert Levet,’ 119n10 Jonson, Ben, 191 journals, weather. See weather writing Journal of the Plague Year, A (Defoe), 15–16, 19, 104, 180, 208, 209 Joyce, James: and Defoe, 10, 206, 207, 208–9, 210, 214, 218, 219n5; ‘Drama and Life,’ 218–19; Finnegans Wake, 207, 209, 210, 213, 214, 215, 220n12, 221n14, 222n17; on Journal of the Plague Year, 208; on The Storm, 208; realism of, 206–7, 208, 211, 212–13, 214,–15, 217–19, 219n5, 220n12, 221n16; and Robinson Crusoe, 206, 208–9, 214, 218, 220n12; Ulysses, 206, 207–8, 209, 210–11, 212–13, 214– 15, 219n5, 222n17; ‘Verismo,’ 208

Index Jure Divino (Defoe), 57, 58, 63, 64, 65, 67, 69n5; critics of, 56, 69n1, 69n5 Kay, Carol, 131, 146n12 Keymer, Thomas, 97n14 King Lear (Shakespeare), 27 Korshin, Paul J., 105 Kramer, David, 191 Laclos, Choderlos de: Les Liaisons Dangereuses, 224 Langford, Paul, 190 Law, William, 114, 124n58; Serious Call, 114 Lay-man’s Sermon (Defoe), 197 Lee, William, 179, 187n31 Legitimacy of the Modern Age (Blumenberg), 34 Leithauser, Brad, 68; Darlington’s Fall, 67 Lerer, Seth: Literary History and the Challenges of Philology, 96n6 Les Liaisons Dangereuses (Laclos), 224 Letters Writ by a Turkish Spy (Marana), 104 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 123n46, 227, 230, 231; Tristes Tropiques, 123n46 Leviathan (Hobbes), 129, 146nn10–11 Lewis, Jayne, 6 Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Mr. D— De F— of London, Hosier, The (Gildon), 24–5, 120nn14–15 Life of Christ (Wesley), 64 Lillo, George: London Merchant, 166 Linton, Robert, 191 Little Review, 210 Lives of the Poets (Cibber/Shiels), 56, 69n2 Locke, John, 148n21; contract, consent, and governance, 129,

265

130, 139, 146n11, 149n37; debt to Aristotle, 145n6; Defoe and, 69n5, 116, 136, 146n12; Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 102; on paternal obligation, 140, 149n37; Second Treatise on Government, 140; semiotics and, 102; Two Treatises on Government, 129 loquacity, 24–5 London, 4, 19, 93, 163, 164, 178, 180, 187n29; Defoe’s fiction and, 26, 80, 82, 141, 209; Defoe’s monument, 58; in Fielding, 89, 92, 93, 97n14; in Pope, 198; in Spectator, 22–3, 26, 194 London, Jack: Jerry of the Islands, 122n37 London Merchant (Lillo), 166 London Review of Books, 72 Love in Excess (Haywood), 82–6; descriptive techniques, 85; narrator’s methods, 85–7, 90, 94; representation in, 86–7 Love of Fame (Young), 64 love-labour paradigm, 127–8, 131, 132, 136. See also gratitude; patriarchy; servitude; slavery Lukács, Georg, 98, 229 MacKay, Charles: Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, 177–8 Maddox, James H. ‘Interpreter Crusoe,’ 99 Mainwaring, Arthur: Medley, 186– 7n20 Malinowski, Bronislaw, 229, 231, 236; Myth and Primitive Psychology, 229 Mandeville, Bernard, 148n21, 191

266

Index

Mannoni, Octave: Prospero and Caliban, 142, 151n52, 151n57 Manufacturer, The (Defoe), 178–9, 184n11 Marana, Giovanni Paolo, 28, 104; Letters Writ by a Turkish Spy, 104 Marshall, David, 37 Marvell, Andrew, 67 Marx, Karl, 51n2, 98, 144, 152n59 Mason, Philip: Introduction to Prospero and Caliban, 151–2n57 master-servant relationships. See Defoe, Daniel; gratitude; passions; patriarchy; servitude; slavery Mayo, Richard: A Present for Servants, 143, 145n6 Maza, Sara, 129, 134 McKeon, Michael, 103, 118n3; on ‘Crusoe,’ 99, 100; epistemological crisis in England, 41, 42, 99; Radcliffe and, 101–2 Medley (Mainwaring), 186n20 Melville, Herman, 236 Melville, Lewis: South Sea Bubble, The, 187n27, 187n29 Mercurius Politicus, 34 meteorography, English, 37, 41–4, 45. See also air; atmosphere; weather; weather journal Meteorologica (Aristotle), 38 meteorology, 37, 41. See also air; atmosphere; meteorography; weather metonymy, 107 Mill, John Stuart (J.S.), 144; Principles of Political Economy, 151n49, 221n14 Milton, John, 103, 228; Paradise Lost, 63, 108, 120n14 mimesis, 71, 75–6; 80, 82, 93. See also Auerbach, Eric; Mimesis; realism; representation

Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (Auerbach), 7, 74, 75, 76, 87, 93, 94n1, 95–6n4, 96n6; Blanchard on, 75, 94n1, 96n4; Damrosch (David) on, 95nn3–4; Eagleton on, 72; Edelstein on, 96n6; Holquist on, 96n6; Said’s Introduction to, 71, 72; Trask translation, 71. See also Auerbach, Eric; mimesis; realism; representation Mist’s Journal, 179 Mock Mourners, The (Defoe), 57, 63, 64 Molesworth, Jesse, 235 ‘Moll’: as narrator, 19, 20, 24, 76–80, 92, 184n9; as emblem, 107 Moll Flanders (Defoe), 5, 8, 76–8, 86, 184n9; clothing trope in, 210; irrelevance of material details in, 81–2; Moll’s subjectivity in, 79–80; narrative techniques, 78–9, 80; question of mimesis in, 80–2; use of ‘emblem’ in, 105, 107 Moonstone, The (Collins), 117, 125n61 More Reformation: A Satyr upon Himself (Defoe), 57, 58, 64, 105, 121n31 Moreton, Andrew (pseud. of Defoe). See Secrets of the Invisible World Disclosed Morris, Wesley: Friday’s Footprint, 123n46 ‘Mr. Spectator,’ 22–4, 26, 28, 135, 195–6 myth: Barthes on, 229, 230; Cassirer and, 229; Defoe and 98, 118n1; Dracula as, 223, 226, 229, 231, 234; Durkheim and, 229, 230; elements, 223, 224, 227–31, 233–4; Frankenstein as, 223, 226, 229, 231, 234;

Index Frazer and, 229, 230; Freud and, 229; Frye on, 229, 230; Lévi-Strauss and, 227, 230; Lukács on, 229; Malinowski on, 229, 231, 236; modern, 10; Propp and, 227; and the realist novel, 229, 230–31; Robinson Crusoe as, 10, 223, 226, 229, 231–2, 234, 236; Williams on, 229–30 Myth and Primitive Psychology (Malinowski), 229 Nabokov, Vladimir, 28 Nestrick, William, 232 Newman, Gerald, 190 Newton, Isaac, 114; Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms Amended, 115 Nichols, Steven, 96n6 ‘noble African,’ 156, 163 ‘noble savage,’ 153, 164–8, 168n1, 169n14; Ellingson on, 167; 164; White on, 167–8 ‘Noble Savage Theme as Fetish’ (White), 167–8 ‘Notion of the Historical Draught or Tablature of Hercules’ (Shaftesbury), 102 Novak, Maximillian (Max), 3–6, 55, 70n10; bibliography, 239–49; on Defoe, 6, 9, 29, 58, 69n5; on Defoe and Dutch realist painting, 14, 46, 104; and Defoe’s account of the painter’s limitations, 12, 121n31; Defoe’s poetic models, 67; on Defoe’s Satyr, 61; Defoe’s themes of repentance and reform, 62; on Defoe’s weather writings, 34; discovers Defoe’s ‘Historical Collections,’ 29; historicizes Defoe’s writing on the South Sea collapse, 173, 181, 186n21; on myth in Defoe, 98;

267

power of gratitude in Defoe’s work, 128, 150n44; problem of morality in Defoe’s fiction, 145n4, 148n21; on realistic fiction and romance, 216; on Robinson Crusoe’s Preface, 25; and Watt, 3, 98 Novak, Maximillian: works. See Daniel Defoe: Master of Fictions; ‘Defoe and the Disordered City’; Defoe and the Nature of Man; ‘Defoe’s Shortest Way with the Dissenters: Hoax, Parody, Paradox, Fiction, Irony, and Satire’; ‘Defoe’s Theory of Fiction’; ‘Economic Background to the Fiction of Daniel Defoe’; Economics and the Fiction of Daniel Defoe; ‘Gothic Fiction and Grotesque’; Realism, Myth, and History in Defoe’s Fiction; ‘The Unmentionable and the Ineffable in Defoe’s Fiction’; ‘Warfare and Its Discontents in Eighteenth-Century Fiction’ Nugent, Thomas, 40 O’Brien, John, 185–6n20 occlusions, 13–14, 17, 20, 21, 26, 28 Odyssey (Homer), 206–7, 215–16 On National Characters (Hume), 39 ‘On the Death of Dr. Robert Levet’ (Johnson), 119n10 ‘Other, the,’ 9, 124n56. See also alterity Owen, Wilfrid, 67 Owens, Robert, 60 Pacificator, The (Defoe), 57 Pamela (Richardson), 143–4, 211, 234, 235 Paradise Lost (Milton), 63, 108, 120n14

268

Index

passions: as code,131; in Defoe’s works, 126, 127, 136–9, 140–1, 142; and governance, 127, 128, 131–2, 148n21; and inequality, 131–2; Novak on, 128, 145n4; as theory of performance, 131; theory of, 130–1. See also gratitude; patriarchal theory; servitude; slavery Pateman, Carole, 130, 139, 147n14 patriarchal governance, 132, 144 patriarchal theory, 128–9, 142, 148n24; Defoe and, 129, 134, 145n5. See also patriarchy patriarchy: contractual version, 129–30, 146n9; in Defoe’s works, 127, 129, 141, 145n5; Dodsley on, 148n22; Fleetwood on, 146n9, 150–1n46; Hobbes on, 129, 130, 146n10, 149n37; Locke on, 129, 130, 149n37; master-servant relationships in, 129, 132; Pateman on, 147n14; Schochet on, 130, 141, 151n40; and slavery, 144; and theory of passions, 130–1, 140–1, 148n24. See also patriarchal theory; servitude; slavery; slaves Paul (Saint), 104, 115 Paulson, Ronald: Emblem and Expression: Meaning in English Art of the Eighteenth Century, 120n18 Pepys, Samuel, 14 performativity, 139 Peterson, Spiro, 56 Petronius Arbiter: Satyricon, 73 Pilgrim’s Progress (Bunyan), 103 Plan of the English Commerce (Defoe), 157, 158–9 Plumb, J.H., 190 Poe, Edgar Allen: on Crusoe, 7, 226–7, 228

poetry: argumentative, 7, 64; beauty and, 60; category of use and, 60; consonance and, 67–8; Davenant on, 192–3; genres, 61, 62–4; meditative poems, 63; public, 59–60; rhyme, 66–7. See Defoe, Daniel; Dryden, John; Pope, Alexander Political History of the Devil (Defoe), 107, 108, 109, 115–16, 117 Pope, Alexander, 68, 190, 197–8; Defoe compared with, 56, 60, 61, 64, 65, 69n5, 196; Dunciad, 64, 197; An Epistle from Mr. Pope to Dr. Arbuthnot, 198; An Essay on Criticism, 64; An Essay on Man, 64, 120n14; First Epistle of the Second Book of Horace, Imitated, 197–8; First Satire of the Second Book of Horace Imitated, 197 Povey, Thomas, 14 Power, Arthur, 206, 216 Present for Servants, A (Mayo), 143, 145n6 Price, Martin, 123n45 Prior, Matthew: Alma, 64; Solomon on the Vanity of the World, 63 primitivism, 153; 163–4, 165, 166 probability, 109, 123n43 Propp, Vladimir, 227 Prospero and Caliban (Mannoni), 142, 151n52, 151n57 Publick Spirit of the Whigs, The (Swift), 195 racism, 8, 127, 139–40, 142–3 Radcliffe, Ann, 50 Radcliffe, David Hill, 101–2, 119n13 Ravenscroft, Edward, 193–4 Ray, John, 124n59; The Wisdom of God Manifested in the Works of Creation, 114–15

Index realism: apparitional quality of, 232, 233; Auerbach’s narrative of, 73–5, 87, 96n6; of Crusoe, 101, 117, 218, 227, 221n15; Defoe’s, 3, 6, 79, 80, 206, 208, 217, 218; and the ‘gothic,’ 234; Joyce and, 206, 208, 211, 213, 216, 2–8–19, 221–2n16, 222n17; in Moll Flanders, 80, 82; of the novel, 53n22, 123n45, 215, 216, 225, 228, 232; plainness of style and, 230; technical attributes, 233. See also representation Realism, Myth, and History (Novak), 4, 12, 29, 33, 98 Reflections. See Serious Reflections Reformation of Manners (Defoe), 57, 64, 67 Religion and the Decline of Magic (Thomas), 102 representation: of air, 38–44; Auerbach and, 7, 72, 73–5, 81–2, 87, 93, 94–5n1, 96n6; British eighteenth-century novel and, 3, 71, 72, 75–6, 87, 94; ‘crisis’ in, 119n8; of cultural difference, 159, 161; Defoe and, 12, 13, 15, 17, 20, 33, 80–1, 82, 103, 153, 156, 159, 220–1n12; Fielding’s, 90, 94; of gratitude, 142; Haywood’s, 86; of labour relations, 144; of masterservant relations, 136; narrative, 82; Novak and, 3; and occlusion, 13, 20. See also mimesis; realism; signs Review (Defoe), 22, 158, 171, 174–6, 184n6, 184n10, 184n12, 185n18, 186n21, 186n23, 186n24 Richardson, Samuel, 72, 103, 107, 193, 231, 235; Pamela, 143–4, 211, 234

269

Richetti, John, 7, 52n2, 138, 189, 198, 204n61, 228 Robinson Crusoe (Defoe), 8, 32–51, 58, 98–117; allegorical-historical nature of, 103; compared with Dracula and Frankenstein, 223, 224–6, 232, 236; elusive logic of representation in, 17–19; function of weather in, 34–5; gratitude in, 138; literal atmospheres in, 33–8; myth elements, 223–8, 231–2, 234, 236; patriarchal benevolence in, 136; pretence of fact in, 45, 46; probabilistic arguments in, 109, 115; readings and interpretations, 7, 10, 25, 32–3, 34, 46, 47, 48–9, 51–2n2, 98, 101–2, 103, 118n2; reception, 107, 224, 225; realist and meta-realist aspects, 228, 232; semiotic ambiguity in, 98–101, 103, 117; slaves and slavery in, 126, 138, 147n12; synecdoche in, 107, 116–17; translatability of, 228; use of ‘emblem’ in, 105, 107 Robinson Crusoe – interpreters: Borrow, 46, 54n30; Certeau, 98, 113; Coleridge, 48–9, 100; Damrosch (Leopold), 121n20; Fisch, 99; Gildon, 25, 26, 120nn14–15; Hunter, 101, 102; Joyce and, 206, 208–9, 214, 218, 220n12; Maddox, 99; Marshall, 122n33; McKeon, 99, 100, 101–2, 103, 118n3; Novak, 33, 181; Poe, 226–7; Radcliffe (David Hill), 101; Richetti, 228; Scott, 45–6; Starr, 100, 101; Stephen, 32; Sutherland, 109–10; Walcott, 112; Watt, 98, 101, 103; Woolf, 209 Robinson Crusoe – narrative strategies: journal, 17, 34–8, 44, 45, 46–8;

270

Index

realism, 98, 101, 117, 208–9, 218, 221n15, 227; scene of instruction, 138; scene of slave’s gratitude and fidelity, 138, 141 Robinson Crusoe – themes and tropes: air and aerial phenomena, 36–7; barleycorn, 115; benevolence and gratitude, 136, 138; clothing, 213–14; the footprint,’ 107–13, 116, 117, 122n37; the goat, 107, 115–16; the ‘island,’ 107, 114, 221n12; solitude, 17–18; the ‘umbrella,’ 49 Rise of the Novel, The (Watt), 3, 51n2, 225 ‘Robinson Crusoe: The Novel as a Myth’ (Watt), 98 Rochester (John Wilmot, 2nd earl of), 67–8 Rogers, Pat, 23, 24, 65, 179, 181, 186n22 romance, 87, 165, 216, 219; Defoe and, 45, 104–5 ‘Romance’ (Defoe), 45 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 98, 163, 164, 231 ‘Roxana,’ 171; as narrator, 20, 21, 27, 143, 155, 212; Novak on, 4 Roxana (Defoe), 8, 22; fictional editor in, 20, 21; masked ball scene, 28, 212; tactics if sequestration in, 20–1; trope of clothing, 21, 212; trope of silence, 21, 24, 27 Rudé, George, 176 ‘Rule Britannia,’ 190 Rymer, Thomas, 113, 191 Sacheverell, Dr Henry, 173, 185n17 Said, Edward W, 71–2, 95–6n4 Satyricon (Petronius), 73

Sacred Theory of the Earth (Burnet), 43, 114 Schaffer, Simon, 43, 53n22, 111–12, 230 Schneider, Ben Ross, 193 Schochet, Gordon, 130, 141 Schonhorn, 9–10 Scott, Sir Walter, 45–6, 234 Second Treatise on Government (Locke), 140 Secrets of the Invisible World Disclosed, The (Moreton; Defoe pseud.), 108, 117, 121n24. See also History and Reality of Apparitions Seidel, Michael, 9, 10, 123n46 Selkirk, Alexander, 112 sequestration, 17, 20, 23 Serious Call (Law), 114 Serious Reflections (‘Crusoe’/Defoe), 16–17, 25–6, 27, 32, 103, 105 servitude, 99, 132–6; Addison and Steele on, 135; Barnard on, 149n34; Dampier on, 149n35; Defoe’s views, 134–6, 148n24, 148– 9n27; distinguished from slavery, 139, 150n41; Fairchilds on, 145n2; Fleetwood on, 135; Hill on, 134; Mayo on, 143, 145n6; Maza on, 134; religion and, 151n48; role of gratitude in, 133–4; Steinfeld on, 133, 147n14, 150n41; Thompson on, 135. See also gratitude; inequality; passions; patriarchal theory; patriarchy; slavery Shaftesbury (Earl of): ‘A Notion of the Historical Draught or Tablature of Hercules,’ 102 Shakespeare, William, 17, 197, 225, 227–8; King Lear, 27 Shapin, Stephen, 43, 53n22, 230

Index Shelley, Mary, 224, 226, 227; circle, 225; Frankenstein, 223, 232, 236. See Frankenstein Shelley, Percy, 226 Sherman, Sandra, 185n13, 185n15 Sherman, Stuart, 6 Shiels: Lives of the Poets, 56, 69n2 Short, Thomas, 44 Shortest Way with the Dissenters (Defoe), 58, 105, 222n17 Shows of London (Altick), 163 Sidney, Sir Philip, 119n10, 193 signs, 121n27: in Burnet’s Sacred Theory of the Earth, 43; Columbus and, 98; Crusoe and, 98–9, 110, 116; in Fielding, 91; ‘footprint’ as, 8, 107, 114, 116, 122n37; irrelevant detail as, 110; literary, 44; Locke and, 102; probability and, 102, 123n43; and semiotic crisis, 8, 9, 99; of silence, 22; as visibilia, 104; weather, 41, 43, 44. See also representation silence: Defoe’s strategies of, 6, 13– 17, 21–9; in The Spectator, 22–4, 29 slavery: in Defoe’s works, 127, 139, 141, 142, 147n12, 158; patriarchy and, 144 slaves: in Captain Singleton, 126, 127, 128, 136, 140, 154, 158, 159, 167; in Colonel Jack, 137, 138–9, 142; Dampier on, 149n35; in Defoe’s works, 111, 127, 128, 135, 136, 137, 141, 144; Dodsley on, 148n22; in Fleetwood, 150n46; ‘grateful,’ 141, 142, 143, 144; and gratitude, 137, 138, 139, 142, 144; imagined as patriarchal dependents, 131, 143; Lewis (Matthew) on, 150n37; in Robinson Crusoe, 126, 138; in

271

Roxana, 212; Steinfeld on, 150n41. See also servitude; slavery Smith, Adam, 98, 116, 124n60; Theory of Moral Sentiments, 231 Smith, Alexander: History of the Lives and Robberies of the Most Notorious Highwaymen, 181 Smollett, Tobias, 72, 191 solitude, 16–17, 18, 21, 22, 23, 25, 27. See also silence Solomon on the Vanity of the World Prior), 63 Sondheim, Stephen, 189 South Sea Bubble, 177, 178, 183n3, 187n29; ballads and ephemera on, 178, 179, 187n27, 180; Brantlinger on, 178; Brewer on, 183; Defoe on, 177, 178–80; Dickson on, 178; MacKay on, 177–8; Rogers on, 179, 186n22; Swift and, 178 South Sea Company, 177, 183n1; Aislabie and, 187n30; Defoe and, 171, 173, 174, 177, 181, 182, 183, 183n3, 185n17, 186–7n26 ‘South Sea Project’ (Swift), 178 Southerne, Thomas, 163 Spectator, The (Addison/Steele), 135, 194–6; Gay on, 23–4; trope of silence in, 22–4, 26, 28–9 Spitzer, Leo, 42, 71 St Domingue (island), 127 Starr, George A., 99, 100, 101, 119– 20n14; Defoe and Spiritual Autobiography, 51n2, 100 Steele, Richard, 22, 24, 29, 135, 195. See Addison, Joseph; Spectator Steinfeld, Robert, 133; Invention of Free Labour, 147n14, 150n41 Stephen, Sir Leslie, 32, 47, 56, 60 Sterne, Laurence, 72, 107, 235

272

Index

Stock, Brian, 96n6 Stoker, Bram, 224, 225, 226, 228, 236. See Dracula Storm, The (Defoe), 34, 35, 44–5, 54n26, 196–7, 208 Sturrock, John, 22, 23, 24 Sutherland, John: Can Jane Eyre be Happy?, 109–10, 111 Swift, Jonathan, 5, 92; Dunkin on, 204n57; The Examiner, 186n20; Gulliver’s Travels, 223, 224; and Pope, 197–8; Publick Spirit of the Whigs, 195; ‘South Sea Project,’ 177, 178 synecdoche, 107, 114, 117, 198 Taine, Hippolyte, 56 Theory of Moral Sentiments (Smith), 231 Thomas, Keith: Religion and the Decline of Magic, 102 Thompson, E.P., 135, 176 Todorov, Tzevtan: Conquest of America, 98, 161–2 Tom Jones (Fielding): Alter on, 92, 97n14; Auerbach on, 72–3, 87, 94; comic function of circumstantiality in, 91–2; comic symmetry in, 92–3, 94; epigraph, 198–9, 204n62; mimesis of, 93–4; narrator, 90, 91, 92; parodic speech in, 90–1 Tournier, Michel, 112 Trask, Willard, 71 Tristes Tropiques (Lévi-Strauss), 123n46 True-Born Englishman, The (Defoe), 56, 57, 58, 59, 64, 67, 68, 69n1 True Collection, 58 Turkish Spy. See Continuation of Letters Written by a Turkish Spy at Paris

Twain, Mark, 66, 82, 220n10 Two Treatises on Government (Locke), 129 Ulysses (Joyce), 211; allusions to Defoe, 206, 208–9, 214, 219n5; realism in, 207–8, 212–13, 214–15, 217–18, 219n5, 221–2n16, 222n17; trope of clothing, 209, 210; 212– 13, 214–15 ‘The Unmentionable and the Ineffable in Defoe’s Fiction’ (Novak), 15 ‘Verismo’ (Joyce), 208 View Down the Corridor (von Hoogstraeten), 15 Villainy of Stock-Jobbers Detected, The (Defoe), 172, 184n11 Virginia: in Defoe’s novels, 14, 107, 127, 136 Von Hoogstraeten, Samuel (painter), 14 Waith, Eugene, 165 Wakely, Alice, 97n14 Walcott, Derek, 112 Walker, D.P: The Decline of Hell, 102, 109 Walpole, Horace: The Castle of Otranto, 234–5 Walsh, William, 68 ‘Warfare and Its Discontents in Eighteenth-Century Fiction’ (Novak), 5 Warner, William, 234 Wasserman, Earl, 197 Watt, Ian: on Defoe, 3, 51n2, 101, 103, 107, 116; on Robinson Crusoe, 98, 236; ‘realism thesis,’ 98; The Rise of the Novel, 3, 51n2, 225;

Index ‘Robinson Crusoe: The Novel as a Myth,’ 98, 236 weather. See air; atmosphere; ‘Crusoe’; meteorography; Robinson Crusoe weather journal: Crusoe’s, 34–8, 44, 45, 46–8; as genre, 53n23. See also meteorography weather writing. See meteorography Weekly Journal, 34, 181–2 Welsh, Alexander, 233 Wesley, Samuel: History of the Old and New Testaments, 64; Life of Christ, 64 Wheeler, Roxann, 8 White, Hayden, 9, 75; ‘Noble Savage Theme as Fetish,’ 167–8 William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, 29 Williams, Raymond, 229–30

273

Windsor Forest (Pope), 198 Wisdom of God Manifested in the Works of Creation, The (Ray), 114 Woodman, Thomas, 197 Woolf, Virginia, 209 writer/poet: as agent of renewal and reform, 190–1, 193–4, 196; Beljame on, 193; Drayton on, 191; Dryden on, 191, 193; Fielding’s idea of, 198–9; Helgerson on, 191; as hero, 10, 190, 191, 198; Jonson on, 191; poets’ roles, 192–3; Pope’s ideas of, 197–8; Ravenscroft on, 193; Richetti on, 198; Schneider on, 193; in The Spectator, 194–6 Young, Edward: Love of Fame, 64 Zelnick, Stephen, 146–7n12