Daniel Defoe
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Daniel Defoe

Ambition and Innovation

Paula R. Backscheider

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Daniel Defoe

Ambition and Innovation

Paula R. Backscheider

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About This Book

In this book, Paula Backscheider considers Daniel Defoe's entire canon as related, developing, and in close dynamic relationship to the literature of its time. In so doing, she revises our conception of the contexts of Defoe's work and reassesses his achievement and contribution as a writer.

By restoring a literary context for modern criticism, Backscheider argues the intensity and integrity of Defoe's artistic ambitions, demonstrating that everything he wrote rests solidly upon extensive reading of books published in England, his understanding of the reading tastes of his contemporaries, and his engagement with the issues and events of his time. Defoe, the dedicated professional writer and innovator, emerges with a new wholeness, and certain of his novels assume new significance.

Defoe's literary status continues to be debated and misunderstood. Even critical studies of the novel often begin with Richardson rather than Defoe. By moving from Defoe's poetry, pamphlets, and histories to the novels, Backscheider offers an argument for the thematic and stylistic coherency of his oeuvre and for a recognition of the dominant place he held in shaping the English novel. For example, Defoe deserves to be recognized as the true originator of the historical novel, for three of his fictions are deeply engaged with just those conceptual and technical issues common to all later historical fiction. And Roxana now appears as Defoe's deliberate attempt to enter the fastest growing market for fiction—that for women readers.

What have been powerfully significant for the history of the novel, then, are the very characteristics of his writing that have been held against his literary stature: its contemporaneity, its mixed and untidy form, its formal realism, its concentration on the life of an individual, and its probing of the individual's psychological interaction with the empirical world, making that world representative even as it is referential. It is exactly these characteristics most original, prominent, and subsequently imitated in Defoe's fiction that define the form we call "novel."

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• ONE •

THE BENT AND GENIUS OF THE AGE

DEFOE WAS THE most English of the major writers of his time, and therein lies the problem with his literary reputation. Although he knew Latin, had studied the classics, and drew upon the ancients frequently and with facility, Horace and Virgil did not dominate his conception of literature. He brought to his work the Renaissance awareness of the increase in human knowledge, of the richness of experience, and of the complexity of human nature. Widely read in historical collections, universal histories, travel books, conduct books, sermons, political tracts, works of natural science, and theoretical treatises on government and aware of developing forms of prose fiction, such as the picaresque, French memoirs, and novella, he accepted the noncanonical genres and the mixing of forms. Intensely engaged with current issues, he wanted to extend literature to engage rather than to arrest experience.
Unlike his great contemporaries, he did not rely primarily on classical dramatic and poetic forms nor did he attempt to create an object of beauty, one worthy of contemplation because of its structure, language, models, subject, unity, and completion. The measure of art in the eighteenth century, however, has been supplied by Milton and Dryden, Evelyn and Clarendon, Pope and Fielding, and they are misleading and largely irrelevant guides to an evaluation of Defoe. The terms of polarization are clear: Chaucer was a court poet, Shakespeare was a member of the King’s Men, Ben Jonson was poet laureate, and they thought of themselves in those terms. The identification of political power, social rank, and aesthetic superiority was handed down to such socially unlikely heirs as Milton, Addison, and Pope, and they located themselves in the classical tradition. Samuel Johnson spoke for them when he complained, “The province of writing was formerly left to those, who by study, or appearance of study, were supposed to have gained knowledge unattainable by the busy part of mankind. . . .”1 Johnson went on to argue that only such men had the right to instruct others, and Matthew Arnold, T.S. Eliot, and others assumed the position that Pope and Fielding held as instructors and chastisers of “scribblers.” The easy eloquence of their graceful, allusion-rich verse, the continuity of shared imagery and values, their subjects and themes, and the structure and control in all they wrote reinforced the concept of these poets as elite guardians of order, virtue, and power. They allied themselves, even when being critical, with the privileged and the governing. Some critics have found “Augustanism” as far back in English literature as “the circle of King Alfred” (c. 890-99), and others have called it “the ‘orthodox’ ethical and rhetorical tradition” resembling “a sort of central nervous system running through the whole eighteenth century.”2 Wherever one located its origins, its power as a cultural norm in Defoe’s time meant that he contrasted with the writers who set the literary expectations of tradition, grace, and ease, and the modern reader therefore finds his work hard to place and to evaluate.
Some words for this conflict are court/country, Whig/Tory, trade/land, energy/order, empire/republic, and passion/virtue, and more come to mind. One side treated unpleasant social reality in mock pastorals, such as Swift’s “Description of a City Shower,” or in offhand references, as in canto 3, lines 19-23, of Pope’s mock epic, The Rape of the Lock. To devote entire works to petty crime, trade, earning a living, faith in God, or other such embarrassingly mundane topics and to eschew classical models for loose prose was to sacrifice an Olympian position. Decorum, restraint, and reason legislated against these “low” subjects, against the psychological intensity of Robinson Crusoe on the island and H.F. in the midst of the plague, against the undisguised “middle-class morality” of Colonel Jack, and especially against such emotional fervor as found in Farther Adventures when Crusoe seizes the hand of a companion and exclaims, “Blessed be God, we are once again come among Christians.”3 Taught to value classical genres and to admire Dryden, Swift, and Pope, Defoe’s contemporaries and our own accepted “Neoclassicism” and failed to find a place for Defoe in literary history.4 Even his best modern biographer, James Sutherland, described him thus: “For one who was so widely read by his contemporaries he was a strangely isolated figure, both as a man and as a writer,” and so discerning an admirer as James Joyce called him “the first English author . . . to create without literary models.”5
What Defoe did was to join Dryden and other writers in extending the idea of literature beyond the narrow confines of the classical conception—to include periodical essays, history, biography, memoirs, and travel books, all forms that every era since the Renaissance has found troublesome.6 If we grant only that literature is put forth as an act of imagination and interpretation rather than as mere representation and is deliberately written so that pleasure is to be found in its language and construction as well as its ideas, we must acknowledge that many of these noncanonical forms share the nature of literature. The complete acceptance of the requirement that literature should give pleasure and instruction meant that writers attended to purely imaginative forms and to English prose style as they never had before. The proliferation of essays on good English style and of prefaces in which the author promised that the writing would be one of the pleasures of reading testifies to the new self-consciousness of English writers.
Literature also came to accept the tasks of collecting knowledge and of interpreting events. Not only did writers draw historical parallels and point to the lessons of the past, but they also repeatedly expressed the fear that useful information and skills would be lost and reminded their contemporaries that other times and other cultures should be analyzed in order to record their contributions. In The Order of Things, Foucault has demonstrated the crucial centrality of the act of interpretation for the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when writers came to see themselves as bearing the principle responsibility for organizing and explaining data.
Out of this conception of literature came a wealth of unclassifiable and original Renaissance literature; the authors of The Book Named the Governor, The Arcadia, The Unfortunate Traveller, The History of the World, Emblemes, The Anatomy of Melancholy, and poetry such as Poly-Olbion, The Faerie Queene, and Paradise Lost found new uses for narrative, ignored generic purity, and experimented with a vigorous, distinctively English style. To this wealth of books was added a huge number of fine, new translations, including North’s Plutarch, Chapman’s Homer, and the King James Bible. Here is Defoe’s literary world.
Defoe may have been more widely read than any of his literary contemporaries. A comparison of the evidence we have of Defoe’s reading to that of, for example, Pope and Swift, suggests, first, that he read for ideas rather than to gain literary experience and models, and, second, that he read “the wrong books” consistently. For instance, he quotes Raleigh’s History of the World rather than his poetry, Machiavelli’s Discourses on Livy rather than The Prince, and Sallust rather than Tacitus. Careful analysis, however, reveals that the correct perception of his reading is that it is as astonishing as his own literary output. The allusions in his poetry alone are mind-boggling, and, in one essay, he discusses Taylor, Ussher, Tillotson, Burnet, Beveridge, Newton, Flamstead, Littleton, Coke, Milton, Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Dryden, Otway, Cowper, Butler, Addison, Pope, Garth, Rowe, Prior, Dennis, Congreve, Phillips, Jonson, Rochester, Sedley, Buckingham, Farquhar, Steele, Oldsworth, Horace, Virgil, Aristotle, Galen, and Cicero and judges each intelligently.7 He knew Cowley well enough to use eight lines of The Second Olympique Ode of Pindar in the preface to The True-Born Englishman, and he could quote Waller’s “The Muses Friend, Tea, do’s the Fancy aid” in an essay on tea in Mist’s Journal; he knew Sidney and Bacon well enough to refer to “speaking pictures” throughout A Journal of the Plague Year. He quotes Milton and Rochester, writes a life of Sedley, and draws examples from almost all of the Roman histories, but he was also steeped in Renaissance historical collections and books on travel, magic, crime, science, government, and ethics. References and quotations abound from such men as Joseph Glanvill, Thomas Heywood, Richard Brathwait, Thomas Elyot, Peter Heylin, and from translations of Mexia, Grotius, and Bossuet.
After he came to see himself as a professional writer (albeit one in the service of political interests), he seems to have read nearly everything printed, including, predictably, tracts on political and religious controversies, periodicals, poetry, and books on “the present state” of various countries as well as, less predictably, French memoirs, economic geographies, and the new forms of English prose fiction. All of this reading shaped his mind and his writing. He blended the traditional and timeless with fads and invented new forms and invigorated old. He was often a conscious innovator, occasionally pointing out the “improvements” he had made. He singled out some of his novels as being exceptionally good examples of a type or as especially well written. In these works, he was a writer aware of his roots and dedicated to the idea that writers have special gifts of insight and prophecy that allow them to describe social, psychic, and moral phenomena in ways that enlighten and even influence readers.8
In many ways, the canonical writers call their readers back to values and ways of seeing the world. Because they see themselves as bearers of an ideal, a norm, even a Platonic form, their art is constantly moving toward abstraction and affirms permanence. Emotions and even people are described and objectified so that we can see abstraction, understand the moral, and recognize that people are more alike than different. Pope can write, “My Life’s amusements have been just the same, / Before, and after Standing Armies came” (Satire II, ii, 153-54), and Swift can give us Count Munodi in Book III of Gulliver’s Travels. Defoe and writers like him demand that their readers see change, admit the complexities and confusions in the world, and, above all, recognize the possibility of progress in the world, in society, and even in human nature. The restraint, aloofness, and order so characteristic of the writing of men like Addison, Dryden, and Pope even in the times they were most embroiled in immediate events contrast with the sprawling, apparently disorderly, open-endedness of much of Defoe’s best work. His aim is to focus the reader’s attention on a continuous experience rather than upon a finished performance or what would be, in Corneille’s terms, the crucial point in a work with unity of action. Most of Defoe’s works give satisfaction by repeatedly arousing interest and by duplicating the experience of a life in progress rather than by fulfilling the expectation that the work will be “finished.” Significantly, the greatest of the early novelists do the same things, most obviously perhaps in Sterne but also in Richardson, as evidenced by Samuel Johnson’s comment that anyone who reads Richardson for the story “would be so much fretted” as to hang himself. Fielding manages to deliver the same satisfactions as well as to give the experience of a finished work of art because he deliberately shapes, or tries to give the appearance of shaping, his novels according to classical models.
Defoe’s generation absorbed these literary changes and redefined literature’s relation to reality. Classical and Christian writers had seen the strongest bond as that between man and the supernatural world, whether it was conceived as Platonic forms, fate, or providential order. Defoe brought the relationship of man to society to the foreground, kept this relationship within an eternal world, and gradually replaced “man” with “the individual” in the triangle. By doing so, he adapted fiction to reflect the Renaissance awareness of the diversity and complexity of human nature and experience and of the dynamic interactions that made so many of the greatest thinkers creators of utopias, or what we might call psychological anthropologists. The concentration on the individual, the particular, “man and society,” and interiority, which became some of the novel’s most distinguishing qualities and necessitated such characteristics as the smooth movement between the external world and the characters’ thoughts, came from the reordering of relationships and redefining of personality.
Defoe shared with his contemporaries a view of literature common since before Sidney, who had written, “it is that feigning notable images of virtues, vices, or what else, with that delightful teaching, which must be the right describing note to know a poet by.” They believed that art, especially painting, could express “in natural symbols moral and psychological truth.”9 The art of Dryden, of Pope, and of Swift, however, was obviously art and signalled itself to be so from its opening sentences. Defoe had inherited from earlier controversialists a rich literature that was familiar, idiomatic, often intended to sound like the account of an eyewitness or an individual with strong opinions, and sometimes written in forms perceived to be “true,” such as history, biography, journal, and sermon. As prose fiction disguised itself as memoirs, criminal biography, and history and was combined with forms incorporating such kinds of “truth” as allegory, spiritual autobiography, and travel literature, new protests arose that prose fiction was “Lye” and dangerous deception.
Defoe absorbed these developments, considered the protests, and joined a number of other writers in suggesting a new relationship between the writer and reader, a relationship that reaffirmed even as it transformed the artistic expression of moral and psychological truth. Instead of reporting experiences or feelings, rather than imitating life or art, he invented the imitation of reporting and imitating. He used historical and social actuality to create illusion rather than to render accurately or artificially and, by doing so, redefined art and referential truth. The test of truth came to be within the reader rather than in Nature or the world. As Scholes and Kellogg have said, a shift from rhetorical to psychological presentation and from the creation of the actual to the typical came about,10 and Defoe was central to its discovery and development. Even in his pamphlets, Defoe wanted to communicate a picture of the world that would reveal a truth deeper than the accurate rendering of its surface. Because his primary goal was to move beneath event to causes and implications and to give his readers a picture created from his experience—political, social, religious, and emotional—he often deliberately chose to create “fictions.” By translating his Weltanschauung along with his perception of events into coherent, carefully designed linguistic structures, he moved beyond reportage to art.11 He could accept and convey the seriality of experience, the complication of multiple perceptions and opinions, and the formlessness of life12 without sacrificing the useful instruction and poetic justice he promised in his prefaces, introductions, and dedications to his poetry, fiction, histories, and even travel books.
Novelists since have articulated Defoe’s conception. E.M. Forster complained that “Beauty has arrived, but in too tyrannous a guise” and argued that the demands for polished structure and unity cannot be “combined with the immense richness of material which life provides.”13 Norman Mailer, a writer who won the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award while in his twenties but whose relationship to the literary establishment has come to resemble Defoe’s, admitted that his desire “to have one’s immediate say on contemporary matters kept diverting the novelistic impulse” but argued that “at precisely that point where experience is sufficiently emotional, spiritual, psychical, moral, existential, or supernatural” fiction must take over from history and journalism.14 What Mailer knew is that certain kinds of involvement with the present and certain kinds of innovation are judged inartistic by many in the establishment.
In this study, I trace Defoe’s development as a teller of tales, argue the intensity and integrity of his artistic ambitions, and demonstrate that everything that Defoe wrote rests solidly upon his extensive reading of books published in England, his understanding of the reading tastes of his contemporaries, and his engagement with the issues and events of his time. For example, a stagnant English economy and a new recession raised new interest in colonization in the early 1720s even as countless new fictitious and factual travel books joined new editions of Renaissance classics...

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