Daniel Defoe, Contrarian by Robert James Merrett (review)

This is a smart, learned, genuinely interesting book, if not an easy one to read. Robert James Merrett’s scope is enormous: unlike almost all non-biographical accounts of Daniel Defoe, this study draws on a large number of fictional and non-fictional works and includes observations in the realms of religion, language, politics, culture, literary tradition, marriage, and gender, among others. Methodologically, Daniel Defoe, Contrarian is based on wide reading in discourse analysis, semiotics, and cognitive psychology, and Merrett’s grasp of his secondary sources is matched only by his remarkable command of the varied and voluminous corpus associated with Defoe.

This is not a book susceptible to tidy characterization. Most broadly, Merrett is concerned with Defoe’s use of words—his sense of “how words work, how they are articulated and voiced, how humans perform as speakers, and especially about how we talk to ourselves” (xii). Defoe was, Merrett argues, very conscious “of the inevitability of verbal and narrative illusion” (xii). He traces the ways in which Defoe asks his readers “to draw inferences from his texts rather than to rest single-mindedly on fallible narrative generalizations” (xii). Attention to language is inseparable, for Merrett, from attention to theology: Defoe’s works “open up equally to linguistic, semantic, rhetorical, theological, semiotic, and narratological analyses,” and (crucially) “verbal, situational, and dramatic ironies dominate his writing because of his belief that figures of speech advance spiritual apprehension of the world” (xiii–xiv).

Perhaps the most central of the several big claims made in this book has to do with what Merrett takes to be Defoe’s sophisticated interest in reader response. Many complicated formulations of this argument appear throughout the book, but let me quote one of the simplest: Defoe “encourage[d] readers to develop spiritual acuity by searching for biblical words in their interior monologues” (xv). Defoe’s use of voices, masks, irony, semantic vagueness, polysemy, and a variety of other narrative devices and techniques is explained in terms of didacticism and the promotion of biblical hermeneutics. Merrett offers richly informed, wonderfully nuanced, if varyingly convincing, discussions of Defoe’s sense of form and of theological instruction.

No review can begin to do justice to the entirety of the contents of the eight wide-ranging chapters. The premise of chapter 1 is that we should be reading Defoe’s texts “less from the standpoint of literary realism and more from linguistic and cognitive perspectives” (4). The argument (at this point rather abstract) is “that Defoe is a verbal artist committed more to expressive than logical language and a rhetorician with an acute sense of the reciprocity of semantics and ontology” (44). Chapter 2 traces the multiple uses to which Defoe puts a favourite phrase (“just Reflections”). Merrett’s point, crudely, is that when Defoe’s characters make their “just Reflections,” they are frequently “mentally confused and spiritually unfulfilled,” the acknowledgment of which serves as an invitation to “readers to think reflexively in [the characters’] stead” (45). Defoe’s fiction illustrates the “necessity for readers to draw inferences from narrative contradictions” (66). The subject of chapter 3 is the third volume of Robinson Crusoe: Merrett reads Serious Reflections “in light of the tensions between [Defoe’s] prophetic and self-effacing ... voices as he propounds how he wants readers to interpret his famous work” (xv). One of the more accessible claims of this often indigestible chapter is that “Defoe bases literary theory on theology and biblical hermeneutics,” believing that “rhetoric should serve rather than oppose theology” (104, 105). Defoe, Merrett contends, wished “to root narrative’s purposive functions in ... Christian doctrines” (109). Chapter 4 examines Defoe’s use of “Biblical Allusions as Narrative Resources,” or his embedding of biblical references and parables in texts, so as to push readers to search for them, thereby enhancing their spiritual perspicacity.

Chapters 5 and 6 connect less clearly than the others to the overall argument of the book; their concern is with politics...