Narrative Contraries as Signs in Defoe's Fiction

Abstract

Narrative Contraries as Signs in Defoe's Fiction Robert James Merrett We never see the true State of our Condition, till it is illustrated to us by its Contraries.1 The one eighteenth-century novelist literary history has always associated with realism is Daniel Defoe. Since Sir Walter Scott's time, the episodic nature of Defoe's stories, his colloquial language, and his secular interest in mundane detail have been viewed as a major contribution to narrative realism.2 Recent studies, variously qualifying this orthodoxy, have yielded a wider sense of his contribution; having stressed the ideological integrity of his fiction, they have also shown that, by the standards of aesthetic formalism, it possesses conscious artistry, and have traced its authenticity to mythic, political, and personal strategies.3 In this essay, 1 Robinson Crusoe, ed. J. Donald Crowley (London: Oxford University Press, 1976), p. 139. References are to this edition. 2 In Scott's view, Defoe's simple, vulgar language possesses an "air of truth or probability" and gives his writing "an appearance of reality," "an air of perfect veracity": see Pat Rogers, Defoe: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972), pp. 67, 70, and 72. Ian Watt, The Rise ofthe Novel (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1963), says that "particularity of description has always been considered typical of the narrative manner of Robinson Crusoe," p. 17. 3 David Blewett, Defoe's Art of Fiction (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979), in his emphasis on Defoe's ironic and artistic uses of realism, strongly opposes the conventional view that Defoe was preoccupied with "straightforward and unrelieved verisimilitude," p. 18; John J. Richetti, Defoe's Narratives and Structures (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), properly regards Defoe as embodying in his narratives an intelligent sense of "complex reality" which fuses "observed fact" and "extravagant fantasy," pp. 6 and 18; and Maximillian E. Novak, Realism, EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 1, Number 3, April 1989 172 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION in response to current interest in narrative theory, I will further question the appropriateness of taking realism as an explanation of Defoe's narrative achievements.4 If single settings, determinate action, and specific characterization are denominators of realism, Defoe's fictions strive for realism far less than is usually assumed since he chooses to present these literary elements not straightforwardly but contrarily.5 He does not restrict the setting of A Journal of the Plague Year to the London of 1665.6 Besides the Great Fire of 1666 (p. 35), he includes other later historical phenomena. The narrator may pretend to write to the moment when he discusses the operation of providence "now the Contagion is over" (p. 75), but more often he distances himself from "those days," such as when he refers to the first newspapers (p. 1), says the London population has grown beyond what it was at the Restoration (p. 18), and judges that "Spittlefields " was in 1665 only a fifth of its size "now" (p. 19). That its setting is the London of both 1722 and 1665 is an important aspect of the book. It is, in fact, generically ambivalent or contrary: the Saddler's account is a journal and a memoir. While an editorial note gives the burial place of the "Author of this Journal" (p. 233) to substantiate the motif that the Saddler wrote in the distant past from a general concern for posterity in case "the like Distress should come upon the City" (pp. 94, 118), the Saddler claims that "most of this Work" is based on "Memorandums" Myth, and History in Defoe's Fiction (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983), argues compellingly that, far from inventing "circumstantial realism," Defoe makes it serve "abstract ideas, myth, and fantasy," pp. 8-9. See also Novak's seminal article, "Defoe's Theory of Fiction," Studies in Philology, 61 (1964), 650-68. 4 Homer O. Brown, "The Displaced Self in the Novels of Daniel Defoe," ELH, 38 (1971), 56290 , emphasizes Defoe's exploration of narrative in terms of his narrators' opposing impulses to conceal and reveal; Paul K. Alkon, Defoe and Fictional Time (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1979), working with concepts of reader-response criticism, skilfully elaborates the ways in which...