“A Checker-Work of Providence”: The Shaping of Robinson Crusoe

Abstract

“ A C H E C K E R - W O R K O F P R O V I D E N C E ” : T H E S H A P I N G O F R O B I N S O N C R U S O E LISA MARGARET ZEITZ fJL 'h eranks of those whom Sir Leslie Stephen once described as “not too proud to take a rather low order of amusement” 1 have multiplied in recent years. Marked neither by a particularly humble stance nor by a predilection for second-rate entertainment, Defoe’s admirers have discovered in Robinson Crusoe everything from “ the elementary processes of political economy” 2 to “oral fixation and the accompanying intense anxiety.” 3 From the plethora of publications, however, two major camps have emerged: one, led by Ian Watt and Maximillian Novak, emphasizes economic themes and natural law,4 and the other, headed by J. Paul Hunter and G. A. Starr, focuses on the theological background, especially Defoe’s debt to spiritual autobiography and the “ Providence” tradition.5 Critics and scholars seem to appeal, then, to either the secular or the religious character of the period, or, as we have seen most recently, acknowledge both. Melvyn New, for example, argues that the meaning of Defoe’s fiction lies in the author’s “moving more or less gracefully between economic opportunism and the providential order, recon­ ciling as best he can these ultimately antithetical world views” ;6 John J. Richetti has found the use of “the secular-religious antithesis . .. the most prominent guide to the uses of fiction for its readers during the early eighteenth century.” 7 What all these approaches have in common is, of course, a respect for the enduring interest of Defoe’s work. Still, at times it seems that we are asked to thank the critics for that interest, rather than the author himself; Robinson Crusoe appears to be successful in spite of Defoe, rather than because of him. The pronouncement of Arthur W. Second in 1924 that Robinson Crusoe “imitates life in its very shapelessness” 8 has long been an accepted critical assumption, and one which discourages a close examination of the structure of the novel. There has also been a tendency to lump all of Defoe’s narratives together in terms of both theme and literary technique (or lack thereof). This tendency, as E. M. W. Tillyard has pointed out, has resulted in a failure to see that “as a work of art Robinson Crusoe is in a different and a higher category. It is constructed with a closeness that the other novels English Studies in Canada, ix, 3, September 1983 (rightly enough in view of their nature) do not attempt.” 9 It is the relation­ ship between that closeness of construction and the providential order which inspires it, and which it, in turn, conveys, that is the subject of my discussion. While I will allow the Oxford editor’s contention that it is “easy to believe Defoe wrote too hastily to control his materials completely,” 10 I shall follow the course of the more difficult belief that there is sustained design in Robinson Crusoe. Although I have pitched my tent in the “ Providence” camp, my examina­ tion of Crusoe differs from that tradition of criticism in one fundamental respect: rather than identifying Biblical allusions, theological issues raised, and the presence of elements of “ Providence” literature and spiritual auto­ biography, I shall attempt, instead, to show how Defoe, through the special use he made of some of the above features, constructed a fiction which was itself a first model of the providential world it imitated. I am only too aware that readers sometimes find in works of the past values which they them­ selves cherish in the present. Modem readers value carefully structured and unified works of art, even after Finnegans Wake (perhaps because of it), and may be guilty of “ filling in the symbolism.” I have tried to avoid this trap by initially calling attention to the critical significance of Defoe’s insis­ tence that we notice repetitions and parallels in his work. Part of his in­ sistence derives from the conventions of spiritual...