Crime and Defoe: A New Kind of Writing (review)

REVIEWS 153 Lincoln B. Faller. Crime and Defoe: A New Kind ofWriting. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993. xix + 263pp. ISBN 0-521-42086-5. This is an excellent account of how Defoe's fiction compares with criminal biographies. Lincoln Faller examines a wide range of works in, outside, and on the now blurry margins of Defoe's œuvre, but appropriately concentrates on Moll Flanders, Colonel Jack, and Roxana. By "situating Defoe's pseudo criminal biographies within and against the forms and conventions that governed the writing and (presumably, too) the reading of actual criminals' lives" Faller intends to "speculate on what, or rather how, they may have meant to üieir original audience" (p. xiii). By thus focusing on readers, Faller shows how Defoe's often remarked but still far from completely understood techniques of realism can be more precisely described. Faller argues in convincing detail that Defoe's fictions were a new kind of writing because their effects were achieved by "deletion of the official, sanctioned voice of standard criminal biography, which allows criminals to say only so much as can be absorbed or rebutted, overwhelmed or discredited" (p. 238). Whereas actual criminal biographies tended to suppress moral ambiguities by including only details that pushed readers towards judgment of their subject's depravity, Defoe's narrators become riddles without a solution. They cannot easily—or in some cases ever—be comfortably assigned to conventional moral or psychological categories. Consequently in Moll Flanders, Colonel Jack, and Roxana "What seems monologue is actually Defoe's way of opening up his texts and making them more dialogic, of freeing up relations between his protagonists and his readers " (p. 249). Defoe thus elicits strong imaginative as well as intellectual involvement with his stories. Of course that achievement has not gone unnoticed. The originality of Faller's study lies in its precise analysis of how Defoe's narratives achieved what must have seemed to their first readers very conspicuous variations from the familiar models of criminal biography . That such variation was more entertaining than disturbing is suggested by the popularity of Defoe's new kind of writing. Faller cites much evidence to support his cautious speculation that "an audience that read these novels against the background of criminal biography might well have found in the 'Exercise' or 'Work' these texts provided them a sense of personal empowerment and a simulacrum, at least, of moral authority" (p. 136). But, however pleasantly empowering Defoe's novels may have seemed, Faller discovers no evidence that they found imitators in their own century: "Richardson, Fielding , Sterne, Austen made their starts elsewhere, and each went his or her own way. Nor is it obvious that Defoe exerted any significant influence on subsequent writers of criminal biography" (p. 246). These conclusions will disturb those made uncomfortable by historians honest enough to avoid unwarranted assertions about influence and causation . Even more provocative to those who crave proof of influence, especially influence of literature upon life, will be Faller's conclusion that "Defoe produces greatly enriched versions of criminal biography but does not seem to have enriched, or much changed, his society's attitudes toward criminals" (p. 246). If during the remainder of the eighteenth century he influenced neither fiction, nor writing about real criminals, nor attitudes towards crime, what then did Defoe accomplish? Faller's answer to this question is clear and compelling, although at first obscured (in the manner of the Master) by a preface crammed with misleading conventional pieties. Faller is quick to disclaim "the taint" of formalism or any attempt "merely to reproduce 'aesthetic' or 'literary' categories" by "arraying Defoe's 'art' against the forms, concerns, and strategies of a 'popular' literature" (p. xiv). Immediately following this blizzard of quotation marks stigmatizing incorrect concepts lest anyone think him theoretically challenged, Faller piously hopes that when Hans Robert Jauss talks of measuring a work's 154 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 8:1 aesthetic value in relation to its readers' horizons of expectations "he does not mean to leave room for the supposition that a literary work (however defined) might somehow be extractable from its surround, that it can somehow exist independently of particular social, historical, and political contexts...