Voices of the Self in Daniel Defoe's Fiction (review)

REVIEWS 287 of The Beautifull Cassandra (reviewed in this issue on p. 306), written by Jane Austen when she was about twelve years old, also made its first appearance at the conference. McMaster has turned it into a fetching introduction to Jane Austen for children and a collector's item for adults. It was one ofmany books by and about Jane Austen on sale and display at Lake Louise. The first editions of Austen's novels that I saw there gladdened my heart. But they saddened it too. Even seven years of unremitting retrenchment would not put one within reach of my pocketbook. But I did come home with The Beautifull Cassandra in my pocket. One can retrench and be happy. Joseph Wiesenfarth University of Wisconsin, Madison Zaixin Zhang. Voices of the Self in Daniel Defoe's Fiction. Anglo-American Studies, no. 5. Frankfurt am Main and New York: Peter Lang, 1993. viii + 170pp. US$38.80. ISBN 3-631-45605-0. In The German Ideology Marx and Engels described as "homeless" the "particular interest " of the individual person or family that exists in contradiction to the "communal interest" of all individuals. Since this particular interest cannot find full expression except in a classless society, the concept of a "homeless" voice is largely hypothetical in classical Marxism. Zaixin Zhang, however, proposes an "alternative Marxist approach" which discovers (or deconstructs) in the text "a private voice of the self (p. 40). This private voice—"hovering in the open space between text and reader"—is heard as homeless, that is, "articulated outside the institutionalized modes of expression and obliterating any contact with history and ideology" (pp. 38, 33). The homeless voice is inherently radical, or—to use three of Zhang's favourite terms—deterritorialized, degenderized, and androgynized . Zhang relies heavily on psychoanalytic theory, particularly in his discussion of Roxana, to explain the process by which Defoe's protagonists acquire this homeless voice; he argues, for example, that Roxana progresses from a symbolic (paternal) order through an imaginary (maternal) state to a primordial (androgynous) being, which he suggests is "the Lacanian triad in reverse" (p. 1 16). Such freedoms with theory can be expected to please neither Marxist nor psychoanalytic critics, but his book is perhaps the first sustained effort at initiating a dialogue between these critical schools in the context of Defoe's novels, and the results, though decidedly mixed, cannot be dismissed out of hand. In his discussion ofdeterritorialization, for example, Zhang finds that all five of Defoe's major characters "engage in a flight of some kind," but that not all of them follow the line of flight described by Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet in which a geographical departure also marks a "betrayal" of "the traditional, the fixed, and the stable" (pp. 50, 49). It is this betrayal of the communal interest that makes possible the "private voice of the self that is heard in Defoe's texts. But according to Zhang, only Singleton and Roxana succeed in deterritorializing themselves, while Crusoe, Moll, and Jack are "reterritorialized" and accept the authority against which they have rebelled. Crusoe is reterritorialized by his religious conversion, with the result that he "eventually finds a new master in God" and "goes back to where he was when he first started the flight" (pp. 64, 63). Zhang thereby devalues Crusoe's private voice in favour of a public voice, or dominant ideology, that speaks at the end and narrates the entire book. One may very well argue, however, that Crusoe's conversion results not in a return to his starting point, but in an achievement of 288 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 6:3 self-mastery that allows his private voice to emerge as a public one. Similar arguments about the lasting effects of the deterritorializing experience on Moll and Jack might be made, it would seem, without resorting to the notion of Schlegelian irony with which Zhang complicates his discussion of Moll Flanders. Similar problems afflict Zhang's discussion of Roxana. Though he draws on Julia Kristeva to balance Lacan's description of the process through which the self is constituted , neither Kristeva nor Lacan can be used to support his reading of the novel...