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Robinson Crusoe

by Daniel Defoe

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Robinson Crusoe

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SOURCE: "Robinson Crusoe," in Defoe and the Uses of Narrative, Rutgers University Press, 1983, pp.25-65.

[In the excerpt below, Boardman considers some of the differing views of the meaning of Robinson Crusoe and argues that Defoe uses a threefold narrative strategy incorporating reportorial, personal, and interactive techniques.]

Employing a Metaphor, as was his wont, to describe narrative unity, Henry James likens The Tragic Muse to "some aromatic bag of gathered herbs of which the string has never been loosed."1 The question of the final fragrance of the bouquet garni known as Robinson Crusoe continues to puzzle at least those students of narrative for whom deconstruction has not invalidated the whole enterprise. Clearly, any theory of narrative development concerned with wholes rather than parts, or even with the possibility of making wholes from parts, must consider the question, as well as the additional complication suggested by James's insistence on employing analogy: Is the unity so many have seen in Defoe's first major narrative a critical ignis fatuus, the delusive product of our continuing struggle to reduce chaotic stories to ordered patterns? Or is the book with all its admitted but remarkable "Variety," literally unified, every part, like Aesop's belly, "in its dull quiet way … doing necesary work for the body"?

The question of coherence floats around other issues that at first perusal do not seem to have much to do with it. For example, what else is at stake in the continuing disagreement about the very subject matter of Robinson Crusoe? Is it a story about solitary adventure, or religion, or economics, to take only the three top contenders? Does one really get anywhere if one must conclude, as did the most recent critic of the book, that it really is about both religion and economics, indeed that it is two stories? Certainly, two stories could coexist uneasily or somehow become a whole. But how? Allowing the two parts to live together, as

this critic did, simply does not explain the wedding: unity is a question of the conditions of oneness, by definition.2

Not a few critics have been content to trace unity to Defoe's ideas. Aside from the almost universally held view of literature as a kind of special discourse, a view by no means originating with recent critics of narrative like Todorov,3 there is some warrant for semantic abstraction in Defoe's stated practice. He consistently promulgated, in his prefaces and elsewhere, the neoclassical ideal of uniting "Diversion" and "Instruction" to generate a kind of sweet didacticism. It has therefore been the stated task of many Defoe critics to "show in detail how Defoe unites narration and instruction," a process that entails splitting asunder what Defoe joined. Occasionally a dissenting voice is heard. McKillop argues that "much of the time, of course, we see Crusoe merely following his 'rambling designs.' He does not always live in the presence of Fate or Providence." This is a sane view, but one that creates as many problems as it solves. For one, McKillop's thesis implies a lack of unity, ideological or otherwise, and in the sixties, at least in American criticism, organic criticism was all the rage, no matter how the coherence had to be located, or created. Most of the readings of Defoe's narratives arguing for some kind of semantic coherence come from that decade and are at least in part a reaction to McKillop. The second problem is related to, and actually the cause of, the first: thematic readings, generated as they are by analogically relating literal action to ideology, are always successful, at least on their own terms. McKillop's view, then, did not rule out further extraction of meaning but virtually guaranteed that it would take place. So it is that Watt, writing about the same time as McKillop, finds that the economic and not the spiritual dominates. The truths communicated beneath the smooth surface of narrative may differ from critic to critic, but the assumptions about narrative meaning remain fairly constant.4

That schemes as diverse as Providence, economic necessity, and "the idea of man's isolation" have arisen to explain the book does not necessarily require one to see Robinson Crusoe as fragmented, although that possibility always remains. The procession of competing readings, each somehow claiming authority over the whole, may be enough to cast doubt on Frank Ellis's sanguine statement that reading "the criticism of Robinson Crusoe since 1900 is almost enough to restore one's faith in progress."5 Yet the causes of this plurality of meanings are not self-evident. Is it in the nature of texts, all texts, to mean diversely? Or is it in readers themselves? R. S. Crane, adapting Aristotle's methodological "pluralism," argued that no work of literature yields the same meaning when examined within different frameworks, a theory that seems to locate the problem not in the text but in the tools critics employ to understand it. Any critic can, therefore, select one aspect of Robinson Crusoe to subsume others, allusivity reaching, potentially, into all corners of the cosmos—a situation Tristram/Sterne would delight in, but one more than a little disturbing to a critic searching for probable knowledge about texts. This welter of competing readings, taken without logical warrant as evidence of textual treachery, then leads many critics to eschew the search for any sort of common ground in interpretation. In Frank Kermode's recent use of the terms, one must abandon plodding, "carnal" interpretation questing after shared literary experience and seek instead "spiritual" originality, the insight and even elegance of the personal vision.6 The common assumption, one that is crucial to understanding how recent critics have approached Defoe, of both the unifiers and the deconstructionists, has been that narrativity is but one thing. One can even write a "poetics of prose," as if it really were a single thing (certainly a necessary precondition for Aristotle).7 The novel, then, exhibits cohesion, or flies apart at the slightest touch, depending on one's prior constitution of what narrative is. Having made a prior commitment either to the order or, more commonly today, to the fragmentation of the world mirrored in narrative, one is prevented from even entertaining another possibility—that some narratives hold together and some do not. For better or worse, ontology once adopted limits the kinds of questions one can even entertain as significant.

Crane, whose work deserves more attention, actually set up three categories. Some works are unified but relatively barren, either of pleasure or significance (a number of eighteenth-century English tragedies come to mind). Others, also unified, are rich in local texture, abundantly satisfying Coleridge's standard of "the production of as much immediate pleasure in parts as is compatible with the largest sum of pleasure in the whole." Finally, still others "are rich in local virtues but have only a loose or tenuous overall form."8 It is hardly surprising, since the New Critics in all their guises so assiduously studied their Coleridge, that the second category frequently seemed the only one worth bothering with and that, consequently, they frequently also found unity of some conceptual kind where more literal critics like Crane did not—as for example in the attempts to discover internal coherence in the Canterbury Tales or In Our Time. The quest for oneness as sole or even primary poetic virtue can mislead, especially if the goal is matter-of-fact, like understanding the development of discrete forms. One may learn more about the generation of new subspecies, within narrative as a whole, if one assumes that early examples have not always sprung forth fully mature and coherent. Early narrative comic development, for example, may be clearer after noting that Goldsmith did not entirely succeed in binding together the two halves of The Vicar of Wakefield. One then begins to understand how difficult it must have been in the middle eighteenth century in England to write a first-person comic action, in which moral ambiguities must be clarified by a narrator himself flawed in many ways. Goldsmith's shift to a more direct representation of moral values in the second half makes sense as the uneasy compromise with innovation one might expect from a friend of the man who wrote Rasselas.9 In like manner, if one can accept as a possibility that Robinson Crusoe is pleasing because Defoe created a narrator who functions in several ways, one may begin to see how Crusoe can elicit so many responses, how each of his roles exerts its power on one's memory.10 At times Crusoe is relatively unpersonalized, an "eye," or reporter; at others, he is a developed personage but not a novelistic character; and finally, at times Crusoe seems to interact in novellike sequences with other elements: thought and action. As obvious and unexciting as these functions may be, they hold the key to the mixed form of Robinson Crusoe—if "form" is not completely inappropriate, given the context. These roles neither provide a unifying scheme—one must, in fact, resist providing one by analogy in order to see their real importance—nor are they encompassed by something larger. They are not substructures, except in the barest and most critically fruitless sense of taking up space in the same book. Each use of Crusoe provides an isolable kind of narrative experience and a distinct kind of meaning. Each has been pulled out of the fluctuating context and employed as an organizing scheme.

More important for my thesis, the three uses parallel the three lines of development Defoe's narrative career followed. Narrative strategies originate as ways of dealing with remembered or created experience, ways that can vary drastically as the mind works on subject matter and considers effects. As strategies, the reportorial, the personal, and the interactive—to give them arbitrary names—therefore not only entail a number of varying formal relationships within the text, but also betoken significant differences in authorial attitude toward the text and in possibilities for the text as experience or use. For example, the Crusoe who is little more than an observer belongs to a very old tradition of using narrators; one does not ordinarily create a fictional narrator and then deprive him of significant traits of personality unless he is to serve a function conceived of as more important than the representation of personality. This Crusoe leads, by clear steps, to the determinate, referential significance of the Memoirs of a Cavalier and A Journal of the Plague Year. The Crusoe who is a product of Defoe's "keen eye for traits of character and a very vivid idea of persons"11 becomes Moll, Colonel Jack, and the Roxana of most of her story, refinements of personality and epitomes of the pleasures possible in earlier works, such as real memoirs, that concentrated on the inner lives of diarists or autobiographers. Here is, not novelistic character, but "consciousness," following the sense of John Bayley's distinction. Finally, during brief sequences—Defoe never wrote a coherent traditional novel—Crusoe participates in what Bayley calls "a complex process of rapport between author and ourselves" by which "we know what to think" of him and his story.12 This last usage of Crusoe is not easy to locate, in part because Defoe does all he can to hide it, destructive as it is of the illusion of factuality. In brief sections, however, Defoe experiments with the kind of control that will culminate in the novelistic conclusion of Roxana, not to mention other protonovelistic sequenc es scattered throughout the other books. Once these separate impulses are discriminated and their importance for the novel articulated, McKillop's contention that Defoe did not advance by "artistic self-discovery" becomes untenable, but for the most literal understanding of "discovery" as being always intellectual and conscious.

Had Defoe written the Memoirs of a Cavalier or A Journal of the Plague Year before Robinson Crusoe, at least one line of his development would long ago have been recognized. Those two later works clearly make virtues of what in the earlier work are minor annoyances, Crusoe's "rambling." The Memoirs and the Journal are coherent and successful imitations of true stories, and therefore rest securely in a tradition much older than Defoe. With its alternating intentions intertwined and blended into effects suspended often between potentiality and realization, Crusoe's story seems to mock efforts to specify its teleology. Nor is the problem merely one of subject, the variety Defoe seems to have had in mind as he went about collecting or inventing Crusoe's early "strange surprizing adventures." The process of "communication," as Wolfgang Iser terms it, is also confused.13 Apart from the few times Crusoe acts in a context that allows the reader to infer specific information—for example, the sequence of fear-longing-action involving the cannibals-—one's responses are usually "free" to a large extent. In his reportorial and personal uses, Crusoe remains a potential vehicle for whatever idiosyncratic interpretation individual associations produce. Some degree of significant common response to Crusoe is possible only when Defoe novelistically "pins" Crusoe's developing hopes and fears causally to a situation qualitatively predictable. Crusoe yearns, after years on the island, for the sound of just one voice other than his own; but when visitors finally come, they are the ghastliest of human outcasts, cannibals. He is torn between two powerful impulses of attraction and repulsion, with his desire for contact winning out—it will later be seen how—only after a long period. Just how important this careful "justification" of Crusoe's actions, necessarily involving the taking of life, was to the overall aims of the episode can be seen by the effect it had on many viewers of a public-television version of the book a few years ago. What had required a careful juxtaposition of narrative reasons in order not to seem gratuitous violence now became exactly that: Crusoe attacks because his little kingdom has been threatened by the black savages, and his slaughter of them seemed to be a vicious manifestation of imperialist racism. Crusoe, if not Defoe, may be a racist, but the point is that in the midst of this sequence such a judgment has been precluded. Most of the time, however, when Crusoe is just an observer or is vividly but not causally involved in the action sequence, it is impossible to speak of any reader's "appropriate" much less "necessary" reaction to him. And if the text asserts no tyranny, benevolent or otherwise, as the traditional novel does, with all its loose ends, how can the reader determine its meaning? The text itself turns treacherous, as some recent criticism would have it for all narrative.

The problem with Crusoe, however, is not that his story partakes of some special liability to indeterminacy peculiar to narrative in general, but that sometimes Defoe controls with a certain degree of success all the eclectic diversity of the sequence and sometimes he simply refuses to subordinate his materials to a probabilistic pattern. The "Editor" of Crusoe's words tells the reader that this is the "Story" of a "private Man's Adventures," involving "Wonders" that are "scarce capable of greater Variety." Yet "story" is not quite right, since there is no "Appearance of Fiction" in it; it is rather a "just History of Fact,"14 an emphatic formulation in light of how much weight "just" carried with all neoclassical critics, including Johnson. Clearly, one is faced here with two orders of probability. The first and least common in Robinson Crusoe demands that the reader experience Crusoe, at least tacitly, as an artificial construct in a fabricated structure. This view receives confirmation as well as an indeterminate measure of complication from the external knowledge that the whole is in fact a fabrication. The second order, introduced and bolstered by title page and preface, requires unambiguously that Crusoe be regarded as a natural person. The distinction is obvious, although it is usually ignored as unimportant, especially since the reader knows the book is a fiction. Yet books do not usually require readers, in effect, to alternate between knowing fully the psyche of a character in order that they may participate in the progression of which he is a subordinated element and, at other times, allowing him the natural opacity, the secrecy, of real people. Indeed, few readers can read the book this way, requiring as it does almost a somatic contradiction, and fewer probably would want to if they could.

The result has been that, appetites honed by expectation of full fictional revelation of character, and the "true story" actually hiding more than it reveals, readers have been forced to construe for themselves, to manufacture, a consistent inner life and ethical being for a Crusoe who does not literally reveal such consistency. This makes Robinson Crusoe sound very "modern" in its indeterminacy and capacity for duplicity. The problem is that, with the model of novelistic development I have sketched, this is the opposite direction Defoe should have taken had he wanted to reach the much more determinate significance of the traditional novel. While the formulation may seem both solipsistic and egregiously self-confirming, it is based on literary history. One may, of course, interpret even strong systems such as Pamela and Tom Jones as freely as one chooses. But to the extent that they are systems, the traditional novel after Richardson was not in the business of mystification but revelation. When readers are confused, about Lovelace or Stephen Dedalus, disclosure is inadequate. Indeed, one definition of the action novel, and one indication of how much its birth owes to the importation of semiological strategies from the drama, would be that it is a system strong enough to mold shared belief, if only for the story's time being. Other works that are recognized as fictions exert no such power, or do so feebly. True stories, or imitated ones, do not do so either, but not by choice: natural people hold close to their motivations and their private chronicles often hide more than they reveal. Still other works, like Robinson Crusoe, embody an impossible formal "request," that the reader experience them as both true and fabricated.

This phenomenological problem has its moral side, since Defoe goes on in his preface to suggest that, while this is a true story, with a principle of "Diversion," yet overall rules a didactic intention, "a religious Application of Events to the Uses which wise Men always apply them." Then follows another bifurcation, since the moral consists of Crusoe's negative example, his disobedience, as well as his fate, his final deliverance, intended "to justify and honour the Wisdom of Providence" (p. I). Just as readers' merest instrumental judgments of Crusoe lack moorings at times, their involvement in his moral plight fails of direction and coherence as well when Defoe places his character on the page virtually deprived of a signifying context. Didacticism, certainly of Defoe's plain sort, cannot emerge from such a silence, and events decidedly do not speak for themselves. Yet it would be inaccurate to conclude from this formal and moral liability that Defoe himself has lost touch with the ethical implications of Crusoe's plight. Not only do stories have expectations for readers, they have them for their creators as well, as Sartre reminded us in What Is Literature? If the intention to replicate a true story does not require a coherent configuration of subordinated belief, if, in fact, such belief could destroy the illusion, can an author be blamed for not behaving novelistically? The answer is, of course, that he can, but should not, be blamed, if only because it is more interesting to see what sorts of semantic blind alleys Defoe leads his reader into than it is to impose some analogical scheme that makes "sense" of the confusion. Crusoe, for example, swears one moment that his companion in escape from slavery, Xury, showed him "so much Affection" that Crusoe had to "love him ever after" (p. 25); ten pages later Crusoe has sold him for sixty pieces of eight, with the eleemosynary stipulation that the boy will gain his freedom in ten years if he turns Christian. The juxtaposition seems inadvertent, even unsavory—until one realizes that it literally has no purpose. This is not the same as saying it is inadvertent, which would imply a standard of proceeding that would make of such a contradiction an excrescense. When Defoe's mind is on using Crusoe, or any of his narrators, as reporter—as witness of "wonders"—he thinks only of traits of personality as plausible means of transition. He is not "distanced" from Crusoe, as Joyce is from Stephen; he simply does not think of him as a consistent character. How different such a moment is from the cannibal sequence, in its demands on both Defoe and the reader, should be obvious if somewhat unsettling. Defoe's imagination is no more with Crusoe the "reporter" than it was to be with the Cavalier.

The reportorial strategy even requires that the personality Defoe might routinely endow with vividness be muted in order to maintain the illusion of truth. Regardless, whether Crusoe's aimlessness results from Defoe's adherence to an older tradition, from a fixation on the integrity of "the event," or from a desire to replicate quotidian randomness, in the absence of a pervasive and recognizable teleology, Defoe's values remain unknowable unless they are sought outside the fiction—a practice entailing its own hazards. The novel-to-come would utilize value in a radically different way, subordinating it to a strong sequence of action and character having determinate significance. Such, at least, is the novel's intention, even if no novel perfectly achieves it. Having rejected satire—Defoe was not very good at it, although he handled other kinds of irony and invective skillfully15—as well as more direct narrative means for conveying beliefs, such as Bunyanesque allegory and the sort of parable or apologue form Johnson used so effectively, Defoe leaves himself little direction to go except toward the novel. Replicating the forms and effects of true stories means relinquishing the possibilities for conveying a moral vision, although one can always simply "insert" beliefs, if care is taken not to appear too systematic. When one merely endows a narrator with a personality, frequently pays it only fitful attention, and avoids the creation of significant interaction with the "and then, and then" of the story, the Horatian ideal falters in practice. Drama, with its commitment to public fictionality and formal structure, proffers its patterned fable unabashedly. But Defoe distrusted drama, although he seems to have liked it well enough.16 His clinging to the pseudofactual mode seems indeed to be a kind of reaction against the "untruths" of drama so many critics had railed at during Defoe's lifetime. Yet his doing so is ironic in that his seeking a more moral, because truer, genre leads not only to duplicity but to moral ambiguity. True stories often leave meaning to the reader. Interpretation of fictional narrative may be difficult, especially in regard to values. But what standard of meaning resides in narrative propositions that purport merely to be true? "Lee Harvey Oswald killed John F. Kennedy"—a narrative statement, calling not for interpretation but simple verification. Once the "fact" was established, a context for the determination of meaning might be available. But Robinson Crusoe begs even this question, since Defoe was careful to distance the story from the real events it vaguely resembles—the Selkirk story.

The novel creates and insists on its own artificial context, which is why, perhaps, in all its variations it seems to some unsuited to modern value chaos. Defoe's approximation to novelistic effects can be tested by comparing most of his works to McKillop's formulation of his practice.

The simplest or minimum form of impersonation consists in providing a reporter or narrator who may appropriately give the details in his own way. This is a natural mode of journalism, and admits of considerable variety of intention…. We then proceed in the great fictions to the stage at which the impersonated reporter tells how he was forced to deal with pressing circumstances affecting his own survival or success; the interplay between the impersonated character and the circumstance gets us into a kind of circle, with each giving significance to the other.17

It is impossible to dispute at least the partial accuracy of this description of Defoe's practice, although McKillop leaves out a number of steps in the process and it is hard to predict exactly how Defoe's own beliefs would function in the "interplay." But despite my agreement with McKillop, I cannot see much resemblance between the most complex "interplay" and what ordinarily goes on in the novel. Much the commonest case in Defoe, in addition, is for the "circle" to remain firmly closed and resistant to interpretation. A created personage can interact with his or her environment for hundreds of pages through dozens of fascinating episodes, pronouncing all sorts of verdicts on questions of every kind, and one still does not have the novel. The traditional novel attempts to subordinate the interaction among character, event, and belief to something else, a pattern of represented experience that allows the reader continuing knowledge of the qualitative nature of the pattern itself: a novel of this traditional sort includes beliefs, as it includes everything else, to achieve a predictable and satisfying resolution of instability. Such "neatness" may now be distasteful, but the action novel displayed it. Pamela, for example, finally marries her Squire B. and all her troubles seem over. Except the reader knows they are not, and so did Richardson. The novel must go on, because all the issues are not resolved. The issues, of course, are not ideological but experiential. While readers recognize that marriage to the Squire is best for Pamela, given the odious alternatives, they also know that "best" does not mean "ideal" in Richardson's moral world. I can use such terms of cognitive certainty as "know" and "recognized" because the novel in Richardson's hands presents branching alternatives to the characters, each choice charged with ethical implication because of the traits Richardson has called to the forefront in each character. One knows, therefore, not necessarily what the outcome of pattern will be, even before the marriage, but that whatever it is, it will involve a shade of moral gray, the ethical ambiguity Sheldon Sacks notes is characteristic of the action-type he calls "serious," as opposed to the comic and tragic.18 Yet the ambiguity residing in the conclusion of Pamela results precisely because we have such a quantity of specifiable knowledge about the deficiencies and strengths of character Squire B. and even dear Pamela have shown us. In the serious action, then, ambiguity can result as a positive consequence of the form. While Pamela's character seemed ambiguous to Fielding, in quite different terms, that ambiguity was not a positive, intended consequence of the novel's form. Such is not the case with most parts of Robinson Crusoe. Too often the reader's simplest judgments of better or worse are confused or blocked for lack of evidence and one must, to create the meaning that is not found, yoke traits of personality to events that finally are not mutually illuminating. Causality is a chimera and will remain so until Defoe discovers a narrative structure that makes a positive virtue of represented beliefs.

It might be argued that in my single-minded pursuit of what Defoe does not do, I have forgotten that an author's refusals and renunciations are themselves positive evidence of an important sort. We shall see later on that this is the case, that Defoe's consistent refusal to utilize belief positively does imply much about his view of art and the world. But that is not the question now. Only a knowledge of what the novel was to be can allow critics to dispense with the erroneous view of Defoe as one who refused to judge his material—rather than, as I am arguing, an author who refuses to write works that require precise judgment. Nevertheless, Robinson Crusoe does contain sequences that tease with their novelistic tendencies. Only by seeing how short they stop can one understand where Defoe's real interest and talent lie, in the creation of personality. The third strategy, the reportorial, actually takes up little space, although Defoe will later isolate and use it almost exclusively in such nonnovels as the Journal and the Memoirs. Each of the three has its counterpart in later fiction. A Pamela or Pip can "step back" from the flow of events and comment in more or less neutral ways, although the aims of the traditional novel imply the elimination of anything inert. Then, too, narrators can give an impression of being intensely human without their humanity affecting the progress of the fable, at least in any causal fashion. Probably every traditional novel contains at least one character who exists only so that the reader may take pleasure in the portrayal (although one would look long and hard for such an unsubordinated element in most of Jane Austen's novels). This lucid and mutable aura, floating free, characterizes many real memoirs and some twentieth-century lyric novels, such as Virginia Woolf's, that enlist autobiography in the service of fiction. Character implies reintegration; not only the representation of traits must take place, but those traits must lead somewhere qualitatively determined. To suggest that Defoe, much less Virginia Woolf, did not create character may seem absurdly perverse. The terms are not important; I wish only to point out significant differences occurring on both ends of the development of traditional novelistic types.

If one accepts this view of traditional character as an element in a progressive action, then Defoe created few examples of character. In the novel, the "I" reveals himself, or is revealed by a narrator, so that the reader may understand and even anticipate what the "I" is to become. The world of the novel indeed implies a connection between what one has been and what one will be in the future. Whether the movement is from happiness to misery, the reverse, or some other significant transmutation of status, character, or belief, the fate of a character in an action results as no matter of chance even, in what only masquerades as a paradox, if events fall out from "Fortune." Fielding manages to attain a kind of high and serious decorum with his ludicrous tale of Tom in part because the ordered comic world of Tom Jones implies an external world of moral and social chaos.19 The novel depends on a belief in order. Even Hemingway, whose universe was populated by no gods, benevolent or malign, abided in the clean well-lighted place of art. The novel, then, demands that the people of the book not simply reside as nonpaying guests but contribute their share to the upkeep of the story. It will only be Defoe's discovery of how to reintegrate into the flow of narrative previously revealed information about Roxana that will permit him to approach the threshold of the novel. In Robinson Cruseo the three uses of the narrator remain disjoined, as if Defoe contented himself, in this his first effort, with their exemplification. He has created a structure of sorts, but one that makes no systematic use of anything but the moral commonplaces of the age….

Notes

1 Henry James, Preface to The Tragic Muse, p. 81.

2 See Quentin Kraft, "Robinson Crusoe and the Story of the Novel."

3 See, for example, Todorov, The Poetics of Prose.

4 Starr, Spiritual Autobiography, p. 72; McKillop, Masters, p. 21; Watt, Rise, Chapter 3.

5 Frank Ellis, Introduction to Twentieth-Century Views of Robinson Crusoe, p. 1.

6 R. S. Crane, The Languages of Criticism and the Structure of Poetry, esp. pp. 3-38. For the fullest treatment of the implications of critical pluralism, see Wayne C. Booth, Critical Understanding: The Powers and Limits of Pluralism. For Kermode, see The Genesis of Secrecy, esp. pp. 1-21.

7 Todorov's "undertaking" is based on Valéry's remark, "Literature is, and cannot be anything but, a kind of extension and application of certain properties of language" (Poetics of Prose, p. 19). For my purposes, it will be useful to consider narrative as just another choice, among many, that authors make to solve the particular problems their own brands of creation present. Defoe, of course, does not initially "choose" narrative—the pseudofactual mode demands it, just as it does I-narration—but he and later writers discover through experimentation its inherent strengths and liabilities for portraying inner states of being.

8 Crane, Languages, pp. 182-183.

9 See David H. Richter, Fable's End, pp. 171-176.

10 Paul Alkon argues that "the final shape of memories induced by a text would have to be accepted as one of its formal attributes" (Defoe and Fictional Time, p. 11). While responses to a text cannot really be said to be a part of the text itself, it is true that one must boldly commit the affective fallacy to understand Defoe's forms.

11National Review, in Rogers, Critical Heritage, p. 129.

12 John Bayley, "Character and Consciousness," pp. 225-226.

13 See Wolfgang Iser, The Implied Reader.

14 Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, p. 1. Subsequent references are in the text.

15 See Chapter 1, n. 2.

16 See John Robert Moore, Daniel Defoe: Citizen of the Modern World, p. 25.

17 McKillop, Masters, p. 10.

18 Sacks, Fiction and the Shape of Belief, pp. 22-24.

19 See R. S. Crane, "The Concept of Plot and the Plot of Tom Jones," esp. pp. 637-638; and Sacks, Fiction and the Shape of Belief, p. 107.

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Crusoe in Exile

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Robinson Crusoe: A Miserable and Almost Hopeless Condition