John Richetti - The Columbia History of the British Novel

The conventional critical account of the differences between Bunyan and Defoe calls upon similar assumptions about what constitutes a novel-as opposed to other forms of prose narrative-and shows that Defoe's narratives approach the novel more nearly than Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress. Defoe occupies a place in a story that is already about the novel, so that the critic is already committed to certain criteria of judgment that will cause him or her to perceive either certain elements in Defoe, or certain of Defoe's narratives-usually Moll Flanders, Robinson Crusoe , and Roxana-as clearer harbingers than others of what was to come in the classic novels of, say, Samuel Richardson and Henry Fielding.

Critics have argued recently that structures laid down by Richardson and Fielding have become the standard for judging whether a work of prose is truly novelistic. By using their work as the yardstick, the argument goes, critics agree to suppress the extent to which Richardson and Fielding-as well as other writers-both used and discarded the earlier prose narratives of Aphra Behn, Delariviere Manley, and Eliza Haywood. Behn, Manley, and Haywood, that is, wrote narratives whose techniques Richardson and Fielding gentrified and masculinized, thereby obliterating their predecessors from most subsequent accounts of the early novel in England. In other words, we have been so well trained to have certain expectations of what a novel consists of that we find Behn, Manley, and Haywood somewhat incoherent or formless as writers. At this juncture, these critics suggest, we should discard our prejudices, recognize that Behn, Manley, and Haywood had other sorts of things in mind, and judge them according to their own apparent -24- aims, according to the genres with which they were most directly engaged, and according to the cultural and literary expectations of the early rather than the middle years of the eighteenth century. I find this thesis persuasive on most counts, and I think the same approach should be taken with regard to another important and early writer of prose fiction-Daniel Defoe.

I believe that we cannot understand what Defoe succeeds in doing unless we base our interpretation upon the following premises: (1) we should not seek in any given text evidence of what we expect or want a «novel» to do (especially since Defoe explicitly attacks novels); (2) we should search Defoe's main prose narratives for a common nexus of attitudes about narrative, even though some of his stories are less satisfactory to our taste than others; (3) by attending as far as possible to what those narratives tell us about their own procedures, we should look for the literary «unity» that is presented to us (if any), or alternatively for the coherence Defoe sought in writing his narratives; and (4) we should recognize that Defoe operated out of a literate culture that, in practice if not in theory, recognized only the loosest of boundaries between genres, and tended to experiment with forms and techniques from a wide range of sources in both high and low culture.

Although the Restoration and the eighteenth century are often thought of as a period in which literature was governed by strict rules of decorum, it was in fact an age in which literary forms were continually exploding under constant scrutiny and revision: the looseness of the category novel fits an age that celebrates the fluidity of many other literary forms (such as Dryden's Absalom and Achitophel, Pope's Dunciad, or Swift's Tale of a Tub). Moreover, the looseness of generic categories, especially in the early eighteenth century, reflects a series of cultural uncertainties and conflicts which themselves provide topics for Defoe's narratives: the outcome of certain political and cultural controversies was by no means clear to Defoe or his contemporaries. When we examine the characteristic habits of Defoe's presentation, we repeatedly find a number of distinguishing rhetorical features; and yet we find important signs that Defoe was engaged in a debate about the moral and cognitive relationship of prose narrative to the world (both the world it apparently describes and the world encountered by the reader). This debate is part of a wider set of concerns shared by other early eighteenth-century critics and writers, and Defoe's participation in it demonstrates the degree to which he belonged to that milieu, not his -25- uniqueness (except perhaps imaginatively). In particular, it is Defoe's obsession with history as a mode of knowledge, as a mode of writing, and as a setting for character and action that best reveals his ambitions for the nature and function of his narratives.

We should take seriously what Roxana says about the quality of the tale she tells. "My Business," she insists, "is History." Defoe incorporates similar statements about the kind of narratives he is to present in several of his prefaces. The preface to Moll Flanders begins, "The World is so taken up of late with Novels and Romances that it will be hard for a private History to be taken for Genuine"; the «Editor» of Colonel Jack opines, "If he has made it a History or a Parable, it will be equally useful, and capable of doing Good"; we are told of Roxana, that "the Work is not a Story, but a History"; Captain Singleton describes himself as following an historical method. In his Serious Reflections [on] Robinson Crusoe (1720), although Defoe begins by asserting that "the fable is always made for the moral, not the moral for the fable," his energies are directed to claiming that Robinson Crusoe , "though allegorical, is also historical," and that all its details, including Robinson's attempts at providential interpretation, "are all histories and real stories" and "are all historical and true in fact." For Defoe as for any neoclassical author, narratives always have moral purpose, but a moral purpose visible only by observing second causes and common actions (or "the ordinary course of life"). The actions of providence are not immediately evident, so that while Defoe speaks of "emblematic history," he also opposes it to "romance," and writes that "Nothing is more frequent than for us to mistake Providence, even in its most visible appearances." Though we can infer the actions of providence, it is not a simple business:

The only objection, and which I can see no method to give a reason for and no answer to, is, why, if it be the work of Providence, those things should be so imperfect, so broken, so irregular, that men may either never be able to pass any right judgement of them, as is sometimes the case, or make a perfect judgement of them, which is often the case, and so the end of the intimation be entirely defeated, without any fault, neglect, or omission of the man.

Some critics see Defoe's claims about history as linking his narratives to the genre of spiritual autobiography, which is indeed a kind of history -26- but one that does not sufficiently describe the mechanisms that distinguish Defoe's works from, say, Grace Abounding or The Pilgrim's Progress. Indeed, when the editor of Colonel Jack places history and parable before his reader as alternative ways of thinking about the narrative, he reminds his early-eighteenth-century reader of the extent to which history is like parable in that both are supposed, in order to please and instruct, to convey morals or precepts by means of the narrative examples they present. But history is also, and crucially, distinguished from parable, in that the narrative vehicle from which we are expected to draw precepts to govern our moral and political conduct is itself the record of randomly occurring events. If we draw from what we read in history books an order or design, or some clear moral, we do so at the cost of simplifying or editing those narrative particulars that escape or inundate the moral they supposedly serve. In parable, of course, the narrative is predetermined by the moral purpose it expresses. What exists before history is written is raw experience, and the patterns or teleology we find in history come as superimpositions upon that experience. Moreover, I think Defoe was aware that some of those patterns are imposed for ideological purposes: to see it any other way amounts to holding that providence directly controls each and every one of our actions-an idea Defoe carefully refutes in his Serious Reflections.