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Coda: Robinson Crusoe between Facts and Norms
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185 Coda Robinson Crusoe between Facts and Norms [Robinson Crusoe] is the universal representative, the person for whom every reader could substitute himself. —Samuel Taylor Coleridge [In Robinson Crusoe,] there is no solitude and no soul.There is, on the contrary, staring us full in the face nothing but a large earthenware pot. . . . Reality, fact, substance, is going to dominate all that follows. —Virginia Woolf In his reading of Robinson Crusoe, Ian Watt suggests that Defoe’s novel“annihilated the relationships of the traditional social order”by proposing the life of an ordinary person as the vehicle of a largely secular individualism. For although the novel borrows the form of the spiritual autobiography and is supplied with plenty of appeals to divine Providence,Watt contends rightly that religion has no special status in the novel, which is profoundly secular and worldly in its outlook.1 Beyond Robinson Crusoe looms Watt’s broader thesis —that the English novel rises to prominence and prestige in relation to the emergence of an “ideology based not on the tradition of the past, but on the autonomy of the individual, irrespective of his particular social status of personal capacity” (60). In the novel,Watt sees a radical turn away from Greek and 1. Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957), 80–82. 186 Lines of Equity neoclassical culture with its “intensely social, or civic, moral outlook and [its] philosophic preference for the universal” and toward “the discrete particular, the directly apprehended sensum, and the autonomous individual” (62). On its face, Robinson Crusoe seems a powerful emblem of this innovating epistemological break from tradition and indeed from formal neoclassicism. The novel’s prose style is instrumental and often leaden, but the discrete particular never escapes notice and Crusoe supplies, in often exasperating depth, plenty of direct apprehensions of the material world. Crusoe is no prince or great man; he is an ordinary person whose autonomy is at the narrative and thematic center of the novel. His interests are relentlessly economic rather than geopolitical or reputational. Insofar as he embodies what Watt calls the “dynamic tendency of capitalism itself,” Crusoe is clearly legible as a repudiation of the archaic notions of embodied honor and natural aristocracy that found expression in Behn’s Prince Oroonoko.As Peter Hulme has pointed out, Crusoe is also an imperial entrepreneur whose attitude toward imperial conquest reflects the self-congratulatory and personally acquisitive dimensions of English New World colonialism.2 While Watt’s reading of the novel itself is persuasive, his thesis that Robinson Crusoe annihilates past tradition as part of a broader epistemological break toward secular individualism is misleading. Michael McKeon has provided the most compelling and expansive revision of Watt’s argument in his Origins of the English Novel, wherein he suggests that the novel form commands the unrivaled power to formulate and explain unsettled and socially dynamic epistemological questions of truth and morality .3 In McKeon’s account,such formal authority develops in several stages over many years, and is accompanied by resistance and counter-critique. From this perspective, the celebration of a literary event that annihilates past tradition (Robinson Crusoe) or inaugurates a new one (Pamela) seems impossibly singular and bereft of its descriptive genealogy. It is my contention that Robinson Crusoe, rather than an inaugural or precursor text in the history of the realist novel, 2. Peter Hulme, Colonial Encounters (London: Methuen, 1986). 3. Important revisions of theWatt thesis,in addition to Michael McKeon’s Origins of the English Novel, 1600–1740 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), include Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction:A Political History of the Novel (NewYork: Oxford University Press, 1987); John Bender, Imagining the Penitentiary:Fiction and the Architecture of Mind (Chicago:University of Chicago Press,1986); J. Paul Hunter, Before Novels:The Cultural Contexts of English Fiction (New York:W.W. Norton, 1990); Catherine Gallagher, Nobody’s Story; The Vanishing Acts of Women Writers in the Marketplace, 1670–1820 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); William Warner, Licensing Entertainment:The Elevation of Novel Reading in Britain, 1684–1750 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); Deirdre Lynch, The Economy of Character: Novels, Market Culture, and the Business of Inner Meaning (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998); and Gabrielle Starr, Lyric Generations: Poetry and the Novel in the Long Eighteenth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004). [44.222.149.13] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 11:31 GMT) Robinson...