Picturing the Thing Itself, or Not: Defoe, Painting, Prose Fiction, and the Arts of Describing

Picturing the Thing Itself, or Not: Defoe, Painting, Prose Fiction, and the Arts of Describing Maximillian E. Novak This essay explores the relationship between Defoe's fiction and painting, but, in a broader sense, I hope that my investigations have significance for the novel in general. Since Ian Watt's paradigmatic argument that individualism and realism are the true cause of the proliferation of novelistic texts throughout the eighteenth century, numerous alternative scripts have been proposed: the novel as continuity of romance; the novel as continuation of the picaresque; the novel as representing a dialectic between empiricism and morality; the novel as an essentially feminine text, and so on. Present at the heart of many of these scenarios are the fictions of Daniel Defoe: Robinson Crusoe, Moll Flanders, Captain Singleton, Memoirs afa Cavalier, A Journal ofthe Plague Year, Colonel Jack, and Roxana. If Defoe is not discussed, the decision itself represents a silence that demands discussion. A more customary silence in these paradigms, however, is the lack of any discussion ofrealist painting , the form which, in its "faithful representing of commonplace things," seemed to George Eliot the closest parallel to realism in the novel.1 What I want to do in this essay is, first, to establish Defoe's interest in painting ; second, to argue that the cliché about Defoe's realism resembling a 1 George Eliot, Adam Bede, in Works (London: Howarden Press, 1899), 1:248. EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 9, Number 1, October 1996 2 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION Dutch painting may in fact suggest that Defoe drew much from the contemporary artistic form that best represented the real; third, to maintain that Defoe only gradually came to understand some of the advantages of prose fiction over the established form of realist painting; and finally, to suggest that, for Defoe, painting and prose fiction embodied methods of deception that could be turned to useful ends. More generally, I wish to consider Defoe's sense of scene, his sense of the visual, mainly in terms of realist painting as it developed during the seventeenth century and particularly the realistic rendering of scene which had its centre in Holland and which here I will call Dutch painting. f, I want to begin by considering what Defoe knew about painting, a matter that has never been discussed with any care. We should remember that, as Ian Pears has shown, during the reign of William m, with the great auctions of that period, paintings became an important commodity.2 For someone who considered himself an expert on everything having to do with the building trade, from the manufacture of bricks to the importing of lumber to Britain, from the arrangement of gardens to the improving of estates, it would be odd if Defoe did not have some knowledge of paintings and the painting market. Though his proposal for an academy of painting in the second edition ofhis Augusta Triumphans (1728) appeared as a mere afterthought to the thorough discussion of an academy of music, Defoe did not hesitate to identify himself as an expert on painting. His interest was not so much in getting at "the thing itself," something any writer and artist has to know to be impossible, but in the methods of deceiving the eye and the mind into accepting the presence of the representation as something that might have existed. I want to show how, in mastering the kinds of illusion of the real that is part of the novelists art, Defoe had to learn gradually that the complex system of realist presentation in painting might be surpassed within a work of fiction. In her book on the relationship between realist painting and the development of the cinema, Anne Hollander argued that the paintings of the Dutch and Flemish school from the fifteenth century onward have had so strong an influence on the ways in which we tend to see our world that makers of motion pictures were strongly influenced by them, whether 2 See Ian Pears, The Discovery ofPainting: The Growth ofInterest in the Arts in England, 16801768 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), pp. 57-64. DEFOE AND THE ARTS OF DESCRIBING 3 consciously or "unconsciously." The title...