Transformations, Ideology, and the Real in Defoe’s “Robinson Crusoe” and Other Narratives: Finding “The Thing Itself.” by Maximillian E. Novak (review)

Defoe is sometimes accused of cobbling together the Serious Reflections during the Life and Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1720) out of a motley mix of unconnected essays written many years earlier. The present book comprises eleven of Mr. Novak’s previously published essays, some lightly (and tacitly) revised, with a new introduction and afterword. The oldest essay was originally published in 1982, though most are more recent: eight are from 2007 or later. Mr. Novak explains that the essays are “partly products of my writing the extensive notes and introductions to the three volumes” of Robinson Crusoe that will be published as part of the laggard Stoke Newington Daniel Defoe Edition. Collectively the essays situate Defoe as an experimental and innovative novelist during the “miraculous years of inventiveness and imagination” from 1718 to 1724 in which he produced his major prose fictions. Robinson Crusoe is the focus of all of the essays, though there are insightful comments on the author’s other novels. No less than Defoe’s essays in the final part of Crusoe, Mr. Novak’s pieces hang together surprisingly well in their repurposed form.

In Chapter 1, “Defoe as an Innovator of Fictional Form” (first published in The Cambridge Companion to the Eighteenth-Century Novel in 1996), Mr. Novak demonstrates that Defoe progressively explored ways of rendering “independent characters who tell their stories as emanations of their character and experiences,” as he advanced from works like A Continuation of Letters Written by a Turkish Spy (1718), through Robinson Crusoe (1719) and Moll Flanders (1722), to The Fortunate Mistress (1724). Mr. Novak shows in Chapter 2 how Defoe’s interest in the techniques of realist painting, and in Chapter 3 how his “sense of the inadequacy of language,” informed his practice as an imaginative writer. These aesthetic and intellectual contexts account not only for his vivid attempt to render “the Thing itself”—to find a form of verisimilitude that did justice to lived experience—but also for his conceptual investigation of the inherent difficulty of so doing. Defoe emerges not as a naïve realist and accidental novelist, but as a man with a vast range of interests that he brought to bear on the form and content of his fiction, whether as an effort to capture realistically a seascape during a torrent or to flag the deceptive uses of language by self-apologists like Roxana.

Chapter 4 addresses Crusoe’s early reception, particularly Defoe’s playful yet persistent presentation of the novel, in the Serious Reflections, as an authentic memoir that is simultaneously allegorical and satirical. For Mr. Novak, neither autobiographical allegory nor topical satire satisfactorily explains Defoe’s generic achievement in Crusoe; he prefers the broader label “fiction,” which defines an imaginative work designed to entertain the reader by producing a “world vividly imagined” and foregrounding a “novelistic character, with a variety of emotions and a history that weighs on his memory.” But though Defoe was deliberately working out questions of form, including technique and genre, for Mr. Novak Defoe is above all an artist of ideas, who in Crusoe explored the complexity of social, ethical, and anthropological themes such as cannibalism (chapter 5), utopianism (chapter 6), seafaring (chapter 8), and exile (chapter 10). In these chapters, the practical-minded Defoe, the topical writer who was trying to ascertain how navigation might be improved and how colonies could be established in the Caribbean, exists alongside Defoe the thinker, prepared to investigate utopian possibilities despite his pessimism over their achievability and concerned with “exile as both a painful physical and a psychological state,” a metaphor and a real condition.

The point is not just that Defoe simultaneously established a new realism committed to rendering the physical world and explored the multitudinously symbolic potential of fiction, but also that these aspects of his works are inseparable, just as the distinction...