Narrative Contraries as
Signs in Defoe's Fiction
Robert Jarnes Merrett
We never see the true State of our Condition, till it is illustrated to
us by its Contraries.'
T
he one eighteenth-century novelist literary history has always associated with realism is Daniel Defoe. Since Sir Walter Scott's time, the
episodic nature of Defoe's stories, his colloquial language, and his secular interest in mundane detail have been viewed as a major contribution
to narrative realism.' Recent studies, variously qualifying this orthodoxy,
have yielded a wider sense of his contribution; having stressed the ideological integrity of his fiction, they have also shown that, by the standards
of aesthetic formalism, it possesses conscious artistry, and have traced its
authenticity to mythic, political, and personal strategies.) In this essay,
1 Robrnson Cwsoe. ed. 1. Donald Crowley (London: Oxford University Press, 1976).
p. 139.
References are to this edition.
2 In Scon's view. Defoe's simple, vulgar language possesses an "air of muh or probability" and
gives his writing "an appearance of REALITY." "an air of perfect veracity": see Pat Rogers.
Defoe: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972). pp. 67, 70, and 72.
Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel (Harmondswonh: Penguin Books. 1963). says that "particularity
of description has always been considered typical of the narrative manner of Robinson Crusoe,"
p. 17.
3 David Blewett, Defoe's Art of Fiction (Tomnto: University of Toronto Ress, 1979). in his
emphasis on Defoe's imnic and anistic uses of realism, strongly opposes the conventional view
that Defoe was preoccupied with "suaightfonvard and unrelieved verisimilitude." p. 18; John 1.
Richetti, Defoe's Nnrrativer and Structures (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975). properly regards
Defw as embodying in his narratives an intelligent sense of 'tomplex reality" which fuses
"observed fact" and "extravagant fantasy:' pp. 6 and 18; and Maximillian E. Novak, Realism,
E I G H T E E N T H - C E N T U R Y FICTION. Volume l. Number 3, April 1989
172 E I G H T E E N T H - C E N T U R Y FICTION
in response to current interest in narrative theory, I will further question the appropriateness of taking realism as an explanation of Defoe's
narrative achievement^.^
If single settings, determinate action, and specific characterization are
denominators of realism, Defoe's fictions strive for realism far less than
is usually assumed since he chooses to present these literary elements
He does not restrict the setting of
not straightforwardly but c~ntrarily.~
A Journal of the Plague Year to the London of 1665.6Besides the Great
Fire of 1666 (p. 3 3 , he includes other later historical phenomena. The
narrator may pretend to write to the moment when he discusses the
operation of providence "now the Contagion is over" (p. 75), but more
often he distances himself from "those days," such as when he refers
to the first newspapers (p. l), says the London population has grown
beyond what it was at the Restoration (p. 18), and judges that "Spittlefields" was in 1665 only a fifth of its size "now" (p. 19). That its setting
is the London of both 1722 and 1665 is an important aspect of the hook.
It is, in fact, generically ambivalent or contrary: the Saddler's account is
a journal and a memoir. While an editorial note gives the burial place
of the "Author of this Journal" (p. 233) to substantiate the motif that the
Saddler wrote in the distant past from a general concern for posterity in
case "the like Distress should come upon the City" (pp. 94, 1 IS), the
Saddler claims that "most of this Work" is based on "Memorandums"
Myth, and History in Defoe's Ficlion (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Ress, 1983), argues
compellingly that, far from inventing "circumstantial realism," Defoe makes it serve "abstract
ideas, myth, and fantasy.'' pp. 8-9. See also Novak's seminal anicle, "Defoe's Theory of Fiction."
Studies in Philolo~y.61 (1964). 6 5 M .
4 Homer 0. Brown, "The Displaced Self in the Novels of Daniel Defoe." ELH. 38 (1971). 56290, emphasizes Defoe's exploration of narrative in terns of his narrators' opposing impulses to
conceal and reveal; Paul K. Alkon. De/oe and Ficlionol Tinre (Athens: University of Georgia
Press. 1979). working with concepts of reader-response criticism, skilfully elaborates the ways
in which Defoe's fictions alter readers' perceptions and memories of narrative; Michael M.
Boardman, Defoe and the Uses of Norrafive (New Brunswick, NI: Rutgers University Press.
1983, argues, on the basis that Defoe's narratives "lack single principles of being" and "fit no
prescriptive categories," that he creates the "possibilities for narrative as he goes along" (pp. 2
and 12).
5 The best account of fictional realism is Watt's first chapter in The Rise of the Novel, entitled
"Realism and the Novel Form.'' (pp. 9-35). The present essay, by stressing the dialectical method
which informs Defoe's relation of words to things and his depiction of identity, opposes the
reductive and positivistic aspects of Watt's account. L a m A. Curtis. The Elusive Defoe (London:
Vision Press, 1984), emphasizes the "contradictory drives" in Defoe's consciousness as a way
of qualifying positivistic attitudes like Watt's (see especially pp. 7-15).
6 A Journol of the Plague Year, ed. Louis Landa (London: Oxford University Press. 1969).
References are to this edition.
N A R R A T I V E C O N T R A R I E S I N DEFOE 173
taken down during the plague (p. 76). He rewrites his memorandums,
aware of subsequent history and contemporary d e c 0 ~ m(p. 248); hence,
he withholds his private meditations (p. 77) and suppresses the name of
a suicide because the family is "now flourishing again" (p. 81).
Defoe also employs temporal ambivalence to make the historical setting of Roxana contrary. The novel's title-page sets Roxana down in the
age of Charles 11, validated by the fact that Sir Robert Clayton, who
died in 1707, is her financial advisor. Yet the narrative brings Roxana over from France to England in 1683 at the age of ten and mames
her at the age of fifteen, by which time James I1 rather than Charles I1
was king.' The novel's subsequent chronology means that, when Roxana organizes the masquerades and dances before the king, she does
so in 1723 when masquerades were popular for the first time. In Roxa m , then, the central character reaches the pinnacle of her sexual career
in the reigns of both Charles I1 and George I, and the double temporal settings through which she moves let Defoe criticize the political and
cultural flaws of the Court, past and present. It is usual for his narrators to convey ambivalent historical settings: they often address Defoe's
contemporaries while speaking from within a distant period.
The contrary historical aspects of his settings carry over into Defoe's
treatment of place and geography. The incoherent ending of her autobiography, in symbolizing Roxana's deteriorating spiritual condition, does
so by implying that she cannot unify her sense of place and story. The
two accounts she gives of leaving England for Holland do not match. The
first one reveals that she is ambivalent about leaving England; she resolves nothing while manoeuvring her husband to let her live abroad (p.
243). She does not mention her tormenting, pursuing daughter, Susan, in
the final preparations for the voyage (p. 254). The second account, which
concentrates on Susan's relentless pursuit of her through England, emphasizes Roxana's solitariness, her inability to converse openly with her
husband, her Quaker friend, and her alter ego, Amy. Roxana's haunted
sense of self and shapeless autobiography are related to her vagueness
about place.8 Her contrary geographical impulses, namely to leave Eng7 R o x o ~ed.
, lane lack (London: Oxford University Press. 1964). References an to this edition.
Blewen provides an excellent account of rhe double time scheme in ROUM: see Defoe's A n of
Fiction, pp. 121-27.
8 Roben Hume, "The Conclusion of Wfoe's R o x o ~ , "Eighreenrh-Cenrury Studies, 3 (1970). 47590, argues convincingly that the abrupt ending of the novel is svucturally symbolic to the extent
it seems incomplete.
174 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION
land and to hide in the English countryside, signify that she has habituated
herself to avoiding moral implications to the point of self-destruction.
That Defoe is less single-mindedly interested in depicting setting as a
place than in making it a sign of his characters' moral and spiritual condition is borne out by Cmsoe's contrary views of his island: he calls
it both "the Island of Despair" (p. 70) and "my beloved Island (p.
139). Such polar views establish the contrary aspects of Cmsoe's social, political, economic, and cultural ideas. If, because the island is
remote from Europe, he often looks upon it as different from and better
than civilized society, he also denies this difference by imposing conventional political criteria upon it. In addition to enacting the roles of
lord of the manor, prince, and generalissimo, he invites the reader to decide whether his time on the island was "my Reign, or my Captivity"
(p. 137). It is both, of course, as his polar thoughts about material reality and economic production make clear. On the island, he learns to
make things from scratch and to appreciate ideas about time and labour
as if intent on freeing himself from European culture, but he also duplicates material processes which he observed in England and relies on the
tools and goods which he takes from shipwrecks and without which he
would have been a "meer Savage" (p. 130). Crusoe never learns to analyse why, far from seeing the island on its own terms, he looks at it in
alternating and external ways. For him, the island is "like a planted Garden" (p. 99) and yet it is an "uninhabited Wilderness" (p. 113). It is both
a "Country" over which he mles as "Emperor" (p. 128) and a colony
which he administers "by my Commission" under the British crown (p.
275). Through Cmsoe's discrepantly imaginative sense of the island, Defoe shows that, if Crusoe's ideas of time and space are original, they are
also culturally determined. By showing that Crusoe's sense of the island is as fanciful as it is factual, Defoe makes action and character
ironic and intriguingly problematic.
Although Defoe's plots are linear and episodic, they are also circular
and incrementally repetitious. Such narrative polarity lets him stress contrary aspects of action and agency. The two journeys in Captain Singleton
start and end indeterminately: the repetition emphasizes the tension between motive and purposelessness in Singleton and his f e l l ~ The
~ ~ .
mutineers and pirates are and are not committed to travelling: "we were
upon a Voyage and no Voyage, we were bound some where and no
9 Coptoin Singleton, ed. Shiv K.Kumar (London: Oxford University Press, 1969). References are
to this edition.
N A R R A T I V E C O N T R A R I E S I N DEFOE 175
where" (p. 32). Singleton is both indifferent to and zealous about his captaincy. His indifference derives from his sense that he can adopt "no Side"
when it comes to disputing goals and action. Having "no Home" and finding all the world "alike" to him (p. 35). he lacks political and spiritual
purpose. Yet, when on the journey across Africa he is "forced to command" (p. 54), he becomes a competent leader and adventurer. Moreover,
when he becomes a sea captain on the second journey, his ingenuousness
is always in tension with his skill as a pirate trader. By depicting Singleton's constantly varying sense of environment, action, and self, Defoe is
enabled to undermine society's myths about adventurous action: Singleton's restless life and erratic narrative displace "the flaming Stories of
Captain Avery" (p. 154).
The repetitious and circular aspect of Moll's movements also work
against progressive concepts of action.'O Born in Newgate, she is inevitably imprisoned there (p. 273). Her "Frolick," as "a Countess," to
Oxford (p. 61) and her trip into Lancashire to many a rich husband suggest there is little difference between her excursions and planned actions;
both sorts of movement tend to be self-entrapping. Not surprisingly, when
she returns to Colchester, the families in which she was raised are dead
or have moved away (p. 267). Defoe arranges that her "Country rambles" are pointlessly circular. Her incestuous trip to Virginia ends with
her return to England and prostitution. Her pretence that transportation to
Virginia is a new start-as if she were going there for the first time to establish a new family life--is exposed when she hypocritically takes up
with her former family. Despite her propaganda, the "New World" (p.
312), not new to her, provides no fresh start. She returns to England to
live in secrecy, for, if discovered, Jemy will be hanged.
New starts, distinct middles, and precise endings Defoe treats as
sources of irony rather than as the means of straightforward narrative
progression: he prefers going over old ground, emphasizing repeated discontinuities, and concluding indeterminately in order to show that actions
recoil on their agents and to imply polar ideas about causation and motivation. His narratives suggest that divine omniscience makes perverse
complaints and secret wishes into agents. The storms that cast Crusoe on
his island and Roxana on the English shore prove this. Self-indulgently,
Crusoe thinks that in Brazil he lived "just like a Man cast away upon
some desolate Island" (p. 35) and Roxana "secretly wish'd, that a Storm
10 Moll Flanders, ed. G.A. Stm (London: Oxford Universily Press, 1976). References are to this
edition.
176 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION
wou'd rise" and drive the ship on which she is voyaging to Holland "over
to the Coast of England" (p. 122). Both characters are dislocated by unwarranted mental impulses which the narrative turns into emblematic
punishments. This extended and ironic sense of human agency partly
explains Defoe's wish to end his fictions loosely, that is, in irresolutipn. Although Crusoe's island experience teaches him to value society,
when he returns to England he cannot make effective use of his knowledge. He sets off on his travels again because, still impelled by an agency
which he constantly testifies to but cannot grasp, he is "inur'd to a wandring Life" and unable to "resist the strong Inclination" to revisit the
island (p. 304). He never integrates his competing impulses: during his
stay on the island he is afflicted by contrary motives. Even after repenting, he is still discontented on the island, as is evident when he gets lost
and wanders round "very uncomfortably for three or four days" (p. 111).
His efforts to be content are also undermined when the shipwreck makes
him cry like a child from the lack of society (p. 113). By obliging Crusoe to acknowledge contrary impulses, Defoe deliberately involves action
with irony. Thus, on seeing the footprint and feeling compelled to destroy his works on the island (p. 182), Cmsoe must realize not just that
"the Fear of Man" (p. 163) is temble but also that the prospect of having his wish for society gratified takes off the "Edge of his Invention" (p.
167). He never comprehends this tension between social and private impulses, which is why, despite relying on providence and the mutiny for
escaping the island, he fails to anticipate that the mutineers will undo his
works there.
Action is hauntingly circular for the other characters. Roxana knows
that dancing in the Turkish costume, besides gratifying her sexual ambition, harmed her, yet she brings further harm on herself by talking
about it compulsively. While covering up her past, she puts on the costume for her husband and the Quaker (p. 247), allowing it to be a clue by
which Susan haunts her (pp. 206,291). Colonel Jack's five marriages expose his self-destructive impulse." That he remarries his first wife, who
secures a pardon for his treasonable conduct, draws attention to his inconsistency and self-entrapment. Promising his fourth wife not to get
involved with the Jacobite Rebellion (p. 250), he restrains himself for a
while but then puts himself at risk by trying to advise the rebels (p. 264).
Monk (London: Oxford University Press, 1965). References
are to this edition. I analyse Jack's self-destructive marital attitudes in an slticle entitled "The
1 1 Colonel Jack, ed. Samuel Hoit
Traditional and Progressive Aspects of Daniel Defoe's ideas of Sex, Family and Maniage,"
English Studies in CO&,
12 (1986). 13-15.
N A R R A T I V E C O N T R A R I E S IN DEFOE 177
Like Roxana's, Jack's past revisits him with a vengeance. Avoiding detection by flight to Havana, he is imprisoned by the Spanish authorities.
He escapes and trades illicitly with Spanish merchants only to be forced
into "Retirement" among them (p. 301). If Jack's accumulation of wealth
and insecurity ironically exposes his personal faults, the Saddler's restless conduct indicates social problems. Confined like other citizens in
the face of death, he often ventures out into the streets: he stays "within
Doors" for a fortnight at the height of the plague but "cou'd not hold it"
(p. 103): he moves "freely about the Streets," without endangering himself (p. 58). His fluctuation between stasis and movement helps convey
the contrary relation of private and public values during the plague. Several times he reports that shutting up infected houses bad "good Success"
(p. 37) and constituted a "puhlick Good" which justified "the private Mischief" (p. 48). He also says it did not "answer the End at all" (p. 53)
and did "little or no Service in the Whole" (p. 71). Through the Saddler's contrary actions, Defoe praises and blames the public policies of
1665 in order to suggest that consistently better ones need to be adopted
in 1722. The Saddler announces that he could propose "many Schemes"
to help government face another plague (p. 198) while, in fact, giving
explicit directions for coping with another visitation (pp. 118, 122).
For several reasons, it is appropriate to think of Defoe's characterization as dialectical rather than consistent. To begin with, he treats the
relations of character and narrator boldly and experimentally. The narrative situation in which Crusoe and the others both tell their stories and
are agents in them is exploited because Defoe makes his narrators identify with and condemn their former selves in hard-to-predict ways. In
other words, the distance between the character and narrator constantly
shifts: the narrators do not have a fixed perspective. Sometimes, by identifying with their former selves, they dissolve the narrative moment, while,
at other times, by condemning themselves out of hand and denying integrity to those selves, they make the narrative censorious and abstract.
To complicate this situation, the narrators often undermine their own
narration, commenting on their inadequacies and inviting the reader to
improve or read beyond the written text. Narrative viewpoint inheres
less in the representation of character and fixed identity than in the processes of writerly retrospection: the tensions between speaking of the
former self and addressing an audience pull the narrating self in opposite directions. If the narrators maintain a distanced perspective on their
former selves and undermine the characters' capacity to make judgments,
the narrators also promote judgments which the characters make, especially social judgments, as when Moll condemns the men of the Mint (p.
178 E I G H T E E N T H - C E N T U R Y F I C T I O N
65) and Roxana declaims against fool husbands (p. 8). Moreover, in occasionally identifying with the emotional manoeuvring of their former
selves, the narrators lead the reader to examine other areas where the relation between disclosure and concealment undermines simple ideas of
narrative reliability. Contrary ways of presenting characters and narrators are authorial means of emphasizing the reader's role: that characters
and narrators are contrarily reliable puts an interpretative burden upon
the reader. Far from making his fictions simply reflect material reality and far from being single-mindedly concerned with verisimilitude,
Defoe produces fictions which oblige the reader to improve them in various ways, as Moll suggests when she says that the "Moral indeed of
all my History is left to be gather'd by the Senses and Judgment of the
Reader" (p. 268).
Defoe makes characterization and narrative interestingly problematic
for the reader by eschewing diction and syntax that are based on plain, unambiguous reference. His characters are contrary users of the language:
they are often wordless and verbose. As explorers of strange physical
and mental territories, they sometimes cannot describe or classify phenomena: lacking words for things and experiences that are strange, they
cannot easily relate to the world or to themselves. On the occcasions
when Crusoe cannot name "great Creatures" (p. 24) or a large bird (p.
73), he is detached from experience and lacks an immediate sense of material and mental reality. Defoe often questions his characters' reasons
for travelling and undermines their awareness of the world by stressing
the opaqueness to them of marine and navigational diction. Hence, Crusoe does not know the meaning of "Founder" (p. 12) and swoons in his
ignorance when a gun is fired as a distress signal; Moll does not know
what is meant by a "Main-mast" (p. 105); and Jack does not understand the words for rigging and whipping (p. 113). It is especially ironic
that the much-travelled Moll should claim towards the end of her account that she did not learn the meaning of the word "geographical"
until underway with her autobiography (p. 322). Frequently, ignorance
of the languages of law and social hierarchy reveals how much of reality
is closed to Defoe's characters. Hence, Moll is unsure about what magistrates are (p. 10), and she and Jack often misconstrue terms to do with
gentility and rank. Besides showing that they are disengaged from material, social, and spiritual reality, the characters' recurrent wordlessness
indicates how removed they are from the political and cultural forces that
govern meaning and word usage. Vagueness about words and names is
not overcome by the end of their autobiographies. Given her forgetting
N A R R A T I V E C O N T R A R I E S IN D E F O E 179
of the name of a river towards the end of her account (p. 319) and her admitting that she never learned the names of other "great vast Waters" (p.
330). Moll's sense of reality cannot be separated from the fallibility and
lack of power that derive from wordlessness.
Though often wordless, Defoe's characters expatiate about themselves
and the world from a strong sense of verbal categorization and polysemy:
not only do they know that one thing may have many names hut they
exploit the plurality of names to direct and control their outlook on
the world. The outstanding example is the way Cmsoe usually makes
himself comfortable by describing his cave.I2 While he demeans himself
by viewing his cave as a "Hutch" (p. 111) and while he repines about
his imprisonment on the island by seeing it as a "Cell" (p. 174). he also
calls it a cellar, kitchen, dining-room, magazine, and vault (p. 74). This
polysemy shows that he domesticates the wilderness out of a need for
mental comfort. Such is the case when he calls the enclosure a green
(p. 58) and a terrace (p. 60). thereby defining his space with words
which carry positive social and aesthetic connotations. His creative use of
diction, his conscious wish to make the social context which give words
meaning mediate between nature and himself, is shown when, temfied
by the cannibals and bent on self-protection, he describes his cave as
his "Castle" (p. 154). When he again calls his cave a hutch (p. 208),
thereby rejecting social and linguistic mediation, he reveals how much
he usually relies on words to shape his knowing and to protect himself
from the phenomenal world. The main point, however, is that Defoe's
characters are both lost for words and have them in abundance: they are
unable to classify material reality yet impose nominal categories upon it.
If this contrary use of words is still more complicated because characters
are occasionally self-conscious about the nominal nature of reality-as
when Cmsoe reports making himself "a Pair of sorne-things" (p. 149-)
Defoe, in having his characters' conduct depend on opposing images
of wordlessness and verbosity, clearly subordinates characterization to
the mediating function of language in order to highlight the reader's
role. When Crusoe mentions "some-things," instead of pantaloons, by
way of emphasizing that his tailoring is "Botching" (p. 134), he also
I2 G.A. Stm, "Defae's Prose Sryle: I . The Language of Interpretation," Modern Philology. 71
(1974). 277-94. holds that Defw's style is subjective rather than objective. Stm effectively
argues that Defoe renders "things and events ... os perceived, as in some sense transformed
and recreated in the image of the narrator" (p. 281). See also "Language and Narrative" in
my Daniel Defoe's Moral on! Rheroricol Ideas (Victoria, B.C.: University of Victoria English
Literary Studies, 1980). pp. 67-87.
180 E I G H T E E N T H - C E N T U R Y F I C T I O N
stresses the close relation between phenomenal and linguistic vagueness,
as does Singleton when he refers to "Gloves for our Feet" (p. 48) and
"Foot-Gloves" (p. 123). In both instances, Crusoe and Singleton suggest
that garments made outside civilization neither conform to conventional
notions nor deserve recognition by specific nouns, thereby amusingly,
if implicitly, inviting the reader to wonder how much a sense of reality
depends on philosophical and social aspects of language.
That Defoe's narrators, as much as his characters, are alert to nominal
conventions is further evidence of his wish to go beyond verisimilitude. In contrary fashion, his narrators comment on words and on verbal
usage, pointing out names and idioms which they do, or do not, use
and with which they are, or are not, familiar. Here are a few examples taken from Moll's narrative commentary: "she was call'd Down, as
they term it, to her former Judgment" (p. g), "my Nurse, as we call'd
her" (p. 10), "my Obstinancy as he call'd it" (p. 41), "impatient of their
present State, resolve, as they call it, to take the first good Christian that
comes" (p. 7 3 , "Servants, such as we call them ... more properly call'd
Slaves" (p. 86), "in black and white, as we say" (p. 158). "my little Income, as I call'd it" (p. 158). There are hundreds of examples of such
verbal self-consciousness in Defoe's fiction. Moll's expressions support
the notion that language is prior to realism by embedding linguistic contraries into the narrative. Her nominal commentary shows that, if she
speaks and writes in the first-person singular pronoun, she does not do
so constantly. Her observations on calling and naming make distinctions
between first and third person and between first-person singular and plural pronouns teasingly problematic. She does not always speak and write
in her own voice: the phrase "call'd Down," which refers to her mother,
Moll uses in a strangely remote way, as if she distances herself from idiom and other speakers. Yet, in the phrase reporting that her proprietary
attitude towards the nurse was held in common by her fellow pupils,
she speaks as a member of a group. The effect of both phrases is to
place her sense of singularity under scrutiny. One conclusion that may
be drawn from this scrutiny is that the first-person form of narrative discourse is polar or contrary rather than single-minded: far from being
fixed, it contains plural viewpoints and conveys multiple aspects of the
narrator's identity. Another conclusion is that, through their parenthetical remarks on naming and language, the narrators place their former
and present selves in varying relations to the speech community. Through
her subject pronouns, Moll contrarily asserts that she speaks both a public and a private language, that she shares in, but is critical of, the speech
N A R R A T I V E C O N T R A R I E S I N DEFOE 181
community, and that she both does not understand, yet purposefully rejects, the otherness of social terms. A thud conclusion is that, far from
discriminating between characters and narrators by having the former
speak as outsiders and the latter as insiders, Defoe has his characters often talk as insiders while his narrators occasionally present themselves
as outside the speech community.
The narrators' contrary relations to the speech community help us
see that, in as much as syntax conveys notions of agency, grammar
often undermines the characters' uniqueness and makes their narrative
reliability questionable. Take, for example, Cmsoe's description of his
journey with Xury (pp. 24-32) and Colonel Jack's account of his adventures with Captain Jack (pp. 96101). In both cases, singular and
plural first-person pronouns are juxtaposed, with the result that the central character is fluctuatingly active and passive. At moments, Cmsoe and
Colonel Jack are differentiated from their fellows; at others, not. Fluctuating pronouns sometimes paradoxically heighten narrators' statements
about having been inferior to their subordinates. Such is the case when
Cmsoe and Jack declare respectively that Friday (p. 200) and the Tutor
(p. 171) are superior Christians. The point is that passive constructions
and fluctuating pronouns implicitly invite the reader to query the identity of characters and narrators. Moreover, syntax also invites the reader
to examine the narrators' perspective on composition and to notice that
narrative involves contraries. For example, when Cmsoe reproduces the
journal he wrote on the island, his preterite soon becomes a past continuous tense (pp. 7&72). He is impelled to intervene between his former
writing and the reader: he unselfconsciously but insistently edits and expatiates upon his journal, unable to let it speak for itself." This example
illustrates the general truth that Defoe's narrators are presented as both
compulsive and deliberate writers.
They also have a contrary rather than unmixed sense of expressive
sequence and narrative future. They often speak of their accounts as
having a strong order and natural logic. Thus, Cmsoe tells the reader that
he "must go on with the Historical Part of Things, and take every Part
in its Order" (p. 222). The narrators frequently hold back details until
the proper place in the story comes along, as is evident when Cmsoe
13 For a compelling account of how Defoe uses Crusoe's journal to heighten the reader's awareness.
see Alkon, Defoe and Fiction01 Time,pp. 1W-56 Revealing evidence of Defoe's exploitation
of aammatical ambivalence is to be found in A Journol of the Plonue Year. for the Saddlernarkor constantly employs singular and p l d first-perso" pmnouk. By &is means, Defoe
breaks down distinctions between the private and public origins of story.
182 E I G H T E E N T H - C E N T U R Y F I C T I O N
announces he "shall give a full Account" of how he improved his cave
"in its Place" (p. 62). To a degree, they write as if story is independent of
them, externally fixed, and historically substantial. Yet, they refer to the
narrative future as much in the subjunctive as in the indicative mood, as
much in the passive as in the active voice. Describing the value of making
his habitation invisible, Cmsoe reports that it "may be observ'd hereafter
upon a very remarkable Occasion" (p. 76). This forecast is offered both
tentatively and provocatively. Singleton likewise says that certain facts
about a family he has aided "may be worth reading, if I have room for it
in the Account" (p. 270). He does not include such facts. All the narrators
have a vague as well as a precise sense of the boundaries of story; they all
write as if they have not fully determined what they are going to include
before they start composing. In addition, while they give the impression
of being both first-time and one-time writers, they often speak as if they
are considering the composition of further books. Although Moll insists
that her account is her "own Story" and not Jemy's (p. 301), the idea that
Jemy's life would make a "much more pleasing History" (p. 304) prompts
her to think about "making a Volume" of his life "by itself" (p. 339).
That the narrators have contrary modes of talking about and realizing
the narrative future which gives Defoe's fiction a compellingly recursive
and reflexive aspect is one more indication that the reader will do best
to look beyond nahe notions of characterization and realism. Two more
examples of the ironic use of foreshadowing will, perhaps, clarify the
rhetorical function of narrative contraries. When Roxana reports that her
husband has left her for ever and that she yet might have occasion to write
about him (p. 12). her indicative and subjunctive moods are in conflict.
That she not only sees him again but spends time and money on spying
into his life (p. 94) while withholding herself from him reminds the reader
to be alert to the constant tension between revealing and disclosing in
the narrator. Because Colonel Jack manifests the same contrariness about
the narrative future, it is not simply surprising that, after he dismisses his
first wife from his story (p. 207), he eventually remarries her (p. 263).
Defoe's readers must appreciate that as the characters conceal and
reveal things from their fellows in the fictional world so the narrators rationalize their stories as a result of composing them according to contrary
fictional models. In a sense, because the narrators manipulate and struggle with their autobiographies, because they think of narration as both
free of and dependent on mediation, story itself is an important narrative sign. Like the others, Jack expresses contrary ideas about story. On
the one hand, his story is what happens to him and he participates in it.
N A R R A T I V E C O N T R A R I E S I N DEFOE 183
On the other, his story is the one he possesses; it marks him off from
other people and from history. Yet Defoe makes it clear that Colonel Jack,
try as he might, cannot keep these concepts of story separate. Jack's story
is partly inseparable from those of his two brothers: it is "our Story" (p.
5). Yet, in telling of Major Jack, Colonel Jack promises that the reader
will read "the process of [the Major's] Story" (p. 6). Still, he concentrates on his own story (p. 17). This leads him to exclude what is "no
part of my Story" (p. 88) and to distinguish between Captain Jack's and
his own (p. 95). He tries not to tell the former's story hut continues doing so. He similarly disclaims writing a "Journal of the Wars" (p. 215)
as irrelevant to his own history (p. 223). yet he describes them compulsively. He keeps declaring his intention to be strictly autobiographical
but he finds himself, partly because of his need to differentiate himself
and partly from the pride he takes in being an untutored historian, inevitably giving long accounts of Captain Jack and European wars. Just
as he does and does not control the order of his narrative, so he cannot subordinate context to text or adhere to a narrowly personal sense of
story.
The contrary stances adopted by the narrators towards their texts are yet
another sign that Defoe values narrative flexibility more than verisimilitude. His narrators come across as both writers and speakers. Often,
they adopt an editorial stance. They treat their texts as objects and facts;
they apply to them phrases that signify abbreviation, shorthand translation, repetitious highlighting, and accounting. Through such constantly
repeated phrases as "in short," "in a word," "as above," the narrators emphasize that writing is a process of transcription which is unquestionably
factual, lucid, forward-moving, and visible or legible. That is, they convey the impression they are poring confidently over their texts as if their
writing is capable of completion and formally detachable from themselves, their identities being unassailably solid. But, equally often they
find writing heavy-going: they fault themselves for not having written
memoirs which would make composition authentic and they belittle their
own expressive powers.'* By disparaging the expressive capacity of their
texts and by complaining that their identities are imperfectly substantiated, they appear to write to the moment and, paradoxically, to imply the
need for more adequate texts which will help them develop a true sense
of themselves.
14 For Defoe's use of the motif of the failure to keep a journal or to write travel accounts, see
Caplain Singlefan, pp. 3, 4, and 39: Moll Flanders, p. 85; and R m n a , p. 103.
184 E I G H T E E N T H - C E N T U R Y F I C T I O N
If Defoe exploits the paradoxes of writerly competence, he compounds
his narrative contraries by having his narrators write as if they are audible: they often treat the reader as an interlocutor and member of an
immediate audience. The colloquial aspects of narrative voice, frequent
affirmations about writing, and insistence on personal authenticity form a
rhetoric which, while pulling the reader close to the narrator, is, as a narrative sign, a warning not to get too close. The habitual way in which
narrators repeat "you may be sure" or "you may easily see" is a sign that
assertions of trustworthiness are not to be taken at face value. This is also
the case because the narrators speak to different audiences: Moll and Roxana specifically address women as well as the common reader, and Jack,
who along with Moll expatiates upon transportation to the colonies, considers that the criminal element forms a part of his readership. Since
the rhetorical appeals of the narrators range so widely, the reader cannot help noticing how the audience is generalized or fragmented and
how rhetoric and narrative are held contrarily together. What the tension
between the literary and the colloquial modes of address signals is further evidence of Defoe's ability to give first-person narrative a range of
stances, to give a singular form of grammar plural functions and to make
it serve as the basis for multiple points of view.
If Defoe does not present setting, action, and character in order to engage his readers single-mindedly in verisimilitude, if he shows through
narrative contraries that these literary elements are interestingly problematic, this is not to claim there is nothing substantial about his fictional
practice. His lively interest in the plural and contrary functions of narrative is clearly related to his sense of how fiction is lived and invented.
His characters inhabit worlds where the telling of stories is a perpetual daily activity, and his narrators comment on the way stories are part
of living as well as of writing. While the narrators frequently insist on
leaving out details because time is pressing, and while they sometimes
avoid repeating stories, they are compelled to elaborate details and to repeat themselves. Such polar habits have the effect of inducing the reader
to question every narrative statement and to fill in gaps where such statements are obviously missing. The use of story by characters who try to
shape their lives and by narrators who try to shape their writing makes
contrary ideas of story the substance of narrative. After educating us to
enjoy the plurality of setting, action, and character, Defoe invites us to
enjoy the dialectical nature of narrative.
Neither in experience nor in story-telling do Defoe's characters grasp
material substantiality or attain perceptual steadiness. Had they done so,
N A R R A T I V E C O N T R A R I E S I N DEFOE 185
he would have betrayed his intuitions about the contrary function and reality of narrative. When Cmsoe for the thud time repeats his account
of landing on the island (p. 70), we learn that, exactly when he experienced relief, he felt distress: in the act of admitting the selectivity of his
earlier accounts and disclaiming narrative realism, he undermines the tedious and mundane details, while upholding their reality. The relation
between the withholding and the presentation, between the negative and
positive attitudes, is more substantial than the details themselves. Defoe,
furthermore, creatively exploits the notion that, just as narrative perception is variable and unsteady, so narration is subject to conceptual fatigue
and arbitrary impulses. Evidently, he derives story from telling stories and
develops a powerful reflexive sense of narrative. This is not to suggest
that he dissolves subject and reference. The dialectical nature of his narrative significantly matches his ideological and rhetorical contraries. The
fact is that, because his characters live stories and yet as writers cannot grasp the relation of text and context, because his characters often
speak about story in the way that only narrators might be expected to do,
and because his narrators are speakers as well as writers, Defoe makes
distinctions between fiction as social and writerly actions untenable: in
other words, he makes his characters' and narrators' polar reliance on
story into a literary resource. His fictions are concerned with the recursive nature of narrative. Because his characters have contrary attitudes
to audience, story, and writing, he insists on narrative's mediating function. For Defoe, story and narrative need not be transparent: through the
opaqueness of narrative contraries he refers to private and public meaning
at the same time. Since he ironically implies that experience and writing are dialectical, the reader learns to enjoy his fictional texts as flawed
systems of competing signs. If inevitably but partially reliable, his narratives are severally inadequate: they need to he completed, reconceived,
and improved. In performing these functions, the readers never feel superior to the characters or narrators because the narrative contraries alert
them to their own fallibility as readers and moralists: the narrative signs
which arouse readers to their role at the same time deny them perceptual and moral superiority. Ultimately, his contrary use of narrative for
the benefit of his readers is the sign that Defoe profoundly cares about
writerly and fictional authenticity.
University of Alberta