Myths of Modern Individualism: Faust, Don Quixote, Don Juan, Robinson Crusoe by Ian Watt (review)

210Rocky Mountain Review seems on surer critical ground in those chapters where she considers visual examples of the topos. The black-and-white illustrations are of particular interest and the copious notes and bibliography provide an excellent source for primary and secondary texts on medieval philosophy, literature, and theology . This text is a boon for medieval studies in general. MARGARET HARP University ofNevada, Las Vegas IAN WATT. Myths ofModern Individualism: Faust, Don Quixote, Don Juan, Robinson Crusoe. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996. 293 Pit is difficult to read this book without melancholy. Was criticism really once this humane, informed, morally resonant? And can it be still? Ian Watt is eighty years old. His book, The Rise of the Novel (1957), has been almost from its publication indispensable to anyone interested in the serious study of literature; his work on Conrad, Jane Austen, and Henry James has been consistently enlightening and seminal. And now he produces Myths of Modern Individualism: in its capaciousness, intelligence, and wit, and in the barren, theory-obsessed and trivial desert of current criticism, it is something of a phenomenon: a triumph of a truly cultured imagination and implicitly a rebuke to the charlatans who, nowadays, largely infest the Lit Departments, the university presses, and the journals. Myths is the kind of book that Northrop Frye famously called—as did the seventeenth century—an "anatomy": a sustained meditation on a particular topic, calling into play all the author's resources. No punch line; no—vile word!—"thesis"; just a look-see into an important area by a hopefully important mind, with conclusions emerging as they choose to: what criticism at its best has always been. Watt's four defining myths of modern individualism are those of Faust, Don Quixote, Don Juan, and Robinson Crusoe. They are true "myths," he explains, precisely because they are characters whose stories somehow transcend the specific works in which they first appear; characters whose names are their stories, and whose stories are the lingua franca, the common coinage, of their culture. Watt cites Michel Tournier's adage that "a myth is a story that everybody already knows" (261). Someone once observed that no Indian ever reads the Mahabharata for the first time; in the same way, no one in Western culture needs to read the original texts to find out who these four central figures are, since they have come to be the semantic counters of our own self-definition. (Does any American born since 1939 need to be taught Clark Kent's other name?) Watt, however, does read—and reread—the ur-texts of his four myths, and their cultural contexts as well, and out of his reading emerges a rich and cautionary vision of the distinctively modern idea of the self, and of its complexities. Book Reviews211 Three of the myths were born, remarkably, within half a century. The first Faustbuch appeared in 1587, Don Quixote in 1605 and 1615, and Tirso de Molina's El Burlador de Sevilla—the first play about Don Juan— around 1629. This is the period that Hiram Haydn called the "CounterRenaissance ." It is also, Watt reminds us, the period of the CounterReformation , of the Council of Trent, and the Catholic reaction to the individualistic promise of Protestantism. In effect, argues Watt, they were the same. "The main problem," he writes, "was not that the positive ideology of the Renaissance was no longer believed to be valid; it was, rather, that those who continued to try to achieve its values ended up disappointed and perplexed" (128). Thus Faust, Quixote, and Don Juan were all originally admonitory figures. Faust, from Protestant northern Europe, bargained his soul for power, leaping the gap between the human and the daemonic which Luther, Melanchthon, and Calvin had expressly defined as a death zone. And Quixote and Don Juan, both from hyper-Catholic Spain —the folks who gave you the Inquisition at its best—tried in their complementary ways to resuscitate or pervert the idea of chivalry and courtly love to suit the dimensions of their own wills, in defiance ofthe social norm. All three are punished for their attempts to be apart. Faust and Don Juan go to hell...