The Problem of Realism in Defoe's "Captain Singleton"

Abstract

TN WRITING his adventure stories, Daniel Defoe seems customarily 1to have begun with a fairly simple idea which he then elaborated through a string of narrative incidents and surrounded with extensive factual material gleaned from the works of other men. Scholars have naturally found it worthwhile to discover the sources of this material; but the search for sources, by stressing the similarities between Defoe's fiction and the fact of the genuine accounts, has led to less satisfactory argument about his credentials as a realist. It is right to place Defoe's stories against their background, but not so that we can acclaim or deny their realism. Rather, by studying what Defoe chose to emphasize either by inclusion or by omission, we can learn the nature of his interests in writing fiction. The African journey in Captain Singleton is especially useful for this purpose, because at the time of its composition Africa had never been crossed by Europeans, there was no earlier account of such a crossing in any literature, and Defoe therefore had a free hand with his materials. Comparison of the African journey with its sources and analogues is productive, not because we are enabled by such a comparison to make the simple point that Defoe's knowledge of Africa was patchy and his realism limited, but because, by seeing what Defoe used of the available information and what of it he ignored (or forgot), we can also see that his fictional interests were very different from those of a self-conscious literary artist.' For purposes of comparison I have chosen seven sources from the many available. The earliest (first translated from the Italian in 1597) is A Report of the Kingdom of Congo, by Filippo Pigafetta, based on the travels of Odoardo Lopez. Next is A Curious and Exact Account, by the missionary Denis de Carli, who traveled through the Congo in i666. Two more accounts are by commercial visitors-A