The Reception of a Journal of the Plague Year and the Nexus of Fiction and History in the Novel

Abstract

Historians and theoreticians of the English novel cannot live without Daniel Defoe, but they cannot live very comfortably with him either. Sir Walter Scott wrote as perceptively about Defoe as any eighteenthor nineteenth-century critic, but he did not at first include Defoe in his Lives of the Novelists. For Ian Watt, Defoe initiated the English novel with Robinson Crusoe and Moll Flanders, but for Ralph Rader, Defoe's stories of the pseudofactual type, especially but not solely Moll Flanders, cannot be regarded as real novels at all.' Defoe presents a case, then, that is crucial and yet singular, peculiar, and vexing, and perhaps no work by Defoe presents as difficult a case as A Journal of the Plague Year. Although regularly identified during much of the history of its reception as a novel, or at the very least as a work of fiction, the Journal has seemingly left readers permanently divided over the fundamental question of whether it is a work of history or fiction. In this essay I shall reconstruct the biography of the Journal of the Plague Year, showing that Defoe's Journal is quite possibly the borderline case in English fiction and as such useful in delimiting and defining the novel.2 I shall also argue that the continuing problematic character of Defoe's most singular work suggests that the Journal has something about it, as indeed do all of Defoe's most famous fictional narratives, that is both essential to and yet difficult to reconcile with the history and the theory of the novel. That something, I shall show, is the nexus of fiction and history in Defoe's text, a dialogue between two forms of discourse which shows that the historicity of fictional texts-repeatedly asserted by creators of the novel form from Aphra Behn to Sir Walter Scott-is a constitutive feature of that form. That a history of the reception of a literary text might be a means of defining the formal nature of that text has been suggested by Hans Robert Jauss, who in his manifesto for Rezeptionsdsthetik reminds us that the history of genres and forms is also, rightly considered, the theory of genres and forms. Jauss's perception was