Ideas and Voices: The New Novel in Eighteenth-Century England

Ideas and Voices: The New Novel in Eighteenth-Century England John Richetti Looking back on his heedless youth as an aspiring merchant-adventurer, Robinson Cmsoe wonders what on earth possessed him to persevere in the face of various disastrous set-backs, including his terrifying neardrowning offthe Norfolk coast. Early in his narrative, he contends thatthere is perhaps some sort offate (andthe lack ofcertainty is interesting, pointing to the controversy surrounding the issue of particular Providence at the time), a "secret over-ruling decree that hurries us on to be the instruments of our own destruction."1 Crusoe's life story is, among other things, his attempt to resolve various problems in human destiny and behaviour as they were formulated for many in the early eighteenth century, with their mixture of agency and complicated compulsion, that his individual (if extraordinary) life illustrates. His richly rendered particular story in many ways gestures consistently and self-consciously towards the exploration of general issues and ideas, some of them—such as Crusoe's intelligently thorough debate with himself about his moral relationship to the cannibal visitors—much more far-reaching in their general application than musings on the nature of his individual destiny and personal psychology. Intensely and coherently at such moments as the cannibal debate (to which I return later), Robinson Crusoe is as much what we would nowadays 1 Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, ed. Angus Ross (London: Penguin, 1965), p. 37. References are to this edition. EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 12, Number 2-3, January-April 2000 328 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION call a novel of ideas as of personal experience, and its intense realistic particularity consistently moves towards general implications, or we might want to say that the particular and the general are productively intertwined in Defoe's narrative. From the outset, Cmsoe is reflective and articulate; he examines and argues any number of controversial positions about individual destiny and personal agency. He is a good deal of the time nothing less than an essayist, a thoughtful and polemical controversialist, which is hardly surprising given Defoe's own identity and experience as both for most of his life. Of course, there is nothing like total solitude to make one thoughtful, and Crusoe's mind is forced by isolation towards intellectual exertions, but it can be argued, as many have done, that Crusoe's isolation is simply aliteral version ofthe thoughtful and individualistic apartness that defines the novelistic sensibility. Indeed, Defoe in all his longer narratives is a proto-novelist and instructive precursor of his mid-century successors precisely by virtue of this attention to ideas and arguments and by the essayistic fluency and intellectual curiosity that he lends his thoughtful narrators, isolated and therefore even more intensely thoughtful as they look back on their lives. This is not to say that his evocation of their personalities, of individualized speaking voices formed by exactly rendered personal experiences, is not the crucial factor in Defoe's status as a writer of imaginative fictions . Rather, it is to say that the eighteenth-century English novel as we tend to trace its full flowering in the 1740s and after needs to be reexamined for what Defoe's precursor narratives render so clearly: the new novel as a form of narrative exists precisely in its complicated relationship to ideas and issues that are more than personal. We can locate the novel's discourse as occurring at the intersection of popular or demotic journalism and the serious periodical essay; the novel can be defined often enough as adialogue between personalizedexpressivity and olderforms of"objective " discourse, or, to put it more simply, between an interest in important or pressing ideas and issues for their own sake and an appropriation or exploitation of ideas to project those verbal energies and accents that signify novelistic character at its fullest and most complicated. As my choice of terms to characterize novelistic essence makes clear, I do not fully accept recent nominalistic trends in the study of the eighteenthcentury English novel that avoid valuejudgments and offer neutral cultural analysis in which the canonized few are brought down to the level of the neglected many, with all novels reduced to the status of rivals...