John Richetti - The Columbia History of the British Novel

Defoe apparently recognized at least two steps in the process of legitimizing a historical record: the first is simply to record the facts; the second is to render those facts morally significant. Both processes involve a crucial editorializing of the raw materials of experience, which of itself is formless. To give any literary shape to his account, the historian must impose some kind of significance or teleology upon the chaos of facts confronting him, but the moralist repeats this process of truncation and reduction even more vigorously in order to convey a moral to an audience temporally and spatially removed from the historical moment in question. This process of reduction is epitomized in the fundamental distinction Locke draws between the two aspects of our entire mental life: we have experience, then we reflect upon it. Locke's radical politics emerges at the point where he makes clear that the activity of reflection-which is primarily marked by the use of language-incorporates a series of reductions that commit a sort of violence upon the raw elements of the world as well as upon our cognitive life: it inevitably simplifies and thereby controls them to facilitate social and political "commerce." -27-

What seems, then, to be almost obsessively at issue in Defoe is the tension between the local details of a particular person's experience, especially as the narrator recalls them, and the meanings that that individual attempts to impose upon the experience, which the reader is asked to confirm. In this sense, Robinson's experiences and his attempts to rationalize them are equally matters of historical record. This may be the effect of a movement toward secularization in English culture since Bunyan, as some critics assert; according to one argument, The Pilgrim's Progress forges an extraordinary coherence between the allegorical dimension and the narrative vehicle, approaching in many places the condition of Watt's formal realism (for example, in the Vanity Fair episode, which uncannily presents the atmosphere of a Restoration law court like the one that sentenced Bunyan).

But in Defoe we detect a strain, either within the narrator, within the author, or both, as they struggle to assign meanings to what are evidently violent, chaotic, or random events, often exacerbated by the narrator's criminal or eccentric behavior. Thus there is considerable critical commentary, for example, about the extent to which Moll Flanders is an ironic novel. The question is, how can Moll's repentance become the precipitating cause for her reward, when she is actually rewarded for her life of crime rather than for her act of repentance? The explicit providential explanation for the outcome does not fit all the facts of the case. The critics' concern with irony in this context raises crucial questions about the extent to which Defoe was aware of what he was doing as he wrote and whether he consciously strove to endow a completed narrative with a unified moral and formal structure. It is possible to argue that Moll's repentance in Newgate supplies precisely the right ironic commentary upon her earlier experiences, thus bestowing on the novel a coherence its earlier episodic nature lacks.

Such concerns with symmetry do not account sufficiently for Defoe's other narratives, nor do they account for the degree to which Defoe's obsession with history as the chief correlative to his own strategies signals the possibility of another kind of irony altogether. That Defoe is capable of unified plots is evidenced by Memoirs of a Cavalier . But unlike modern critics searching for organic form, Defoe is not primarily interested in formal unity or formal irony: the ironies that occur in Defoe's narratives occur more locally and insistently in response to certain crises that the narrator attempts to render significant. Defoe is correspondingly unconcerned about the tidiness of his narrative endings, — 28- since formal perfection is not central to his purpose: his endings often feel contrived and hurried, or, as in the case of Robinson Crusoe , close the narrative in a rather indeterminate way. Thus, at the beginning of his tale, Colonel Jack writes that "my Life has been such a Checquer Work of Nature"; and the challenge in Colonel Jack 's tale, as in all of Defoe's, is for the narrator to coordinate the details of his or her experience with the language, if not the fact, of providence. (Thus Robinson cries out, "How strange a Chequer Work of Providence is the Life of Man!") The tension between the particulars of the narrators' experiences and the language of moral accounting-whether that of religion, conscience, reflection, or providence-is rendered all the more palpable, in virtually every case, by the sheer force and abundance with which the local details of an individual's history are rendered (Defoe's novels are full of lists, letters, journal accounts, and moments of dialogue, many of which are highly reminiscent of Bunyan). And this tension emerges even more explicitly in Captain Singleton, Colonel Jack, Moll Flanders, Robinson Crusoe , and Roxana, where the means of calibrating from moment to moment the fortunes of the narrator are fiscal or, in a slightly broader sense, economic. The acquisitive energy that many critics celebrate as a feature of Robinson's, Moll's, or Roxana's personalities is also, I think, inseparable from the sheer energy generated by the act of tale-telling itself, an energy that is underscored by the multiple kinds of narratives in any given Defoe story.

Except for Roxana, who becomes progressively richer until the final twist of fortune recorded only in the last paragraph, all the narrators find themselves wealthy at the end; and the reader is left with an uncomfortable sense that the language of reflection, conscience, or providence does not adequately explain the causes or conditions of that wealth. Thus Captain Singleton spends the first half of his career wandering in Africa (here the author finds ample opportunity to incorporate exotic detail beyond the thematic requirements of the story) and the second half as a pirate, accompanied by the canny and pacific Quaker, William. Having become very rich, the narrator is moved by his sojourn in Arabia and by Williams presence to reflect on himself, apparently for the first sustained period in his life. He writes to William:

It is not material to record here what a Mass of ill-gotten Wealth we had got together: It will be more to the Purpose to tell you, that I began to be sensible -29- of the Crime of getting of it in such a Manner as I had done, that I had very little Satisfaction in the Possession of it.

William talks to Captain Singleton further, and our narrator declares that

William had struck so deep into my unthinking Temper, with hinting to me, that there was something beyond all this, that the present Time was the Time of Enjoyment, but that the Time of Account approached; that the Work that remain'd was gentler than the Labour past, viz. Repentance.

But even so, William proceeds to argue that there is no point in disposing of their wealth, and so, in the final few pages of the book, William and Captain Singleton become even richer by selling their goods, and Captain Singleton , upon returning to England, bestows on William's sister a sum of five thousand pounds and proceeds to marry her. The book's ending thus bestows on Captain Singleton rewards in excess of his act of repentance, which immediately precedes his homecoming. The mere fact of repentance does not determine the kind or quantity of reward that follows it.

The apparent effects of conscience upon Roxana's behavior are virtually nil. Such effects would be difficult to detect in any case, since Defoe's characteristic narrative form makes it hard to tell, as the narrator recounts her story, whether she felt pangs of conscience during the actual experiences or whether the intrusion of conscience is merely a reflection of the repentant and virtuous perspective from which she writes. Thus Roxana writes about the interventions of conscience at an important moment as though they are a series of gaps in her experience-as if she were thinking in formal terms about the condition of her own tale: