Abstract: This article explores the encounter between AI large language models, like ChatGPT, and fiction, which is a massive large language model developed over centuries, across cultures, and with intertextual and contextual references that reach across time, geography, and genre. Both are hypothetical frameworks that rely upon predictive prose, or the “what if.” Both the algorithm and the author imagine what would come next given the situation and the information available. Fictional depictions of artificial intelligence, automata, and chatbots, some orated or published long before the technologies were possible, have shaped our understanding of human-AI interaction, and current AI-human interaction, in turn, is simulated in part based on AI’s understanding of human dialogue as represented in fictional texts it mines for data. Fiction and the literary language of dialogue, then, is influential in how AI communicates. Testing AI’s ability to recognize and analyze fiction brings to light the complexity of literature. Daniel Defoe’s prose and use of the subjunctive mood in moments of dialogue provides a revealing test case for the limitations of AI analytical abilities. Defoe often relies upon hypothetical constructions, like mandative subjunctives (“I wish that”), modal auxiliaries (“would,” “could”), and conditionals (“if this then that”) when characters are in emotional situations. Inspired by the chatbot-user dialogue that takes place in ChatGPT, and its struggle to articulate the meaning of key literary scenes in which characters shift into the subjunctive mood, this article finds that Defoe’s use of subjunctive constructions interrupts the emotional connection of the speakers, preventing them from reaching empathetic understanding of the other. The hypothetical, then, in literary dialogue and also in AI-human “chat,” creates emotional disruption and resistance to empathy. The article concludes by questioning whether AI’s struggles with fiction may lead to other realizations about the sophistication of literary language and narrative.

Keywords: Defoe, Daniel; Predictive Prose; Artificial Intelligence; Dialogue; ChatGPT; Technology; Fiction; Hypothetical

The 2023 Defoe Society conference Presidential Roundtable asked us to consider “1719-2019, 2019 – ?: Predicting the Future of Defoe Studies.” Though we live in a digital age of data analytics, in which our consumer behaviors are tracked through the machines we use, cell phone apps we access, and surveillance cameras we pass beneath, creating a massive “Big Data” set, prediction does not necessarily require computers. It does not even require numbers. But it does require language and knowledge of how narratives work. That is why chatbots work by locating patterns in language processing models. Large language models, called LLMs, which include the recently created Google chatbot Bard and OpenAI’s ChatGPT, are auto-complete frameworks. They output text that has the highest probability of coming next in a sentence or a structure based on their training data. They write “predictive prose.” Functionally, predictive prose generated by AI is sequenced. Once the LLM locates legally allowed, licensed sources on the internet relevant to the keywords, it then assembles and paraphrases them in an order that makes grammatical and structural sense.¹ More interesting to me, though, producing predictive prose is an act of hypothetical imagination—it always gestures toward the conditional “if this . . . then that”—so everything ChatGPT produces is a possibility. It gives us an essay that might address the prompt. Users can click on the “regenerate response” button to ask it to try again.

This hypothetical framework poses a problem. As reported in multiple reviews in the spring of 2023, AI has a major flaw: it cannot identify fiction. As Benj Edwards observes in the ars technica article that is now foundational in criticism of Chat GPT, “Natively, there is nothing in a GPT model’s raw data set that separates fact from fiction.” Not only does it often report fictional information as if it is fact, it does so confidently (Masnavi). For example, when I asked ChatGPT if it can identify fiction, it wrote:

As an AI language model, I can recognize and understand fiction. I have been trained on a diverse range of texts, including works of fiction, non-fiction, and various other genres. (“Can you identify fiction?” prompt)

I pressed further. “How do you identify fiction?” I asked. It responded that it looks at author intent (if an author says it is fiction, it is fiction); context and reputation; genre or category; plot and narrative elements; and storytelling techniques (if a text contains dialogue, structure, character development, descriptive language). At face value, this appears to be a logical system. Unless your career is working with fiction.

All ChatGPT can do is look for the indicators that have been programmed into its training data by humans who are not literary experts and scan the millions of accessible sources on the internet to make predictions. As it notes here and in the next prompts I asked it, ChatGPT looks for whether sources call a text fiction—the author and scholars, journalists, and publishers. In other words, it searches for the work’s reputation. If it cannot determine whether a text has already been categorized, it looks next for generic conventions, then signals that there is a plot or narrative. Then, it looks for the presence of literary devices, like dialogue, and within that dialogue, descriptive language that indicates emotion. It works through a series of literary markers and, often, makes the wrong call. OpenAI insists that their AI is not producing misinformation or acting dishonestly when it does this; rather, it is hallucinating.²

As the year 2023 opened, educators at all levels, but particularly in colleges and universities, were confronted with the seemingly sudden emergence of these AI auto-complete frameworks as significant agents in our classrooms and research. Will students now be able to completely avoid reading the texts we assign because they can generate a paper on all topics using ChatGPT? How will the nature of literary research change? Will AI locate patterns in historical texts and our accessible scholarship to reveal findings that human readers could not process? Is AI merely a new instrument in the history of technological research tools that we will learn to use expertly, eventually integrating it seamlessly with our archival and secondary methods? Or will AI be the end of eighteenth-century studies and the study of literature as we know it?

I began my pursuit for answers to these questions (or, just some kind of consolation?) by seeking better understanding of how generative AI works, algorithmically, and with curiosity about the conceptual relationship between the tech world’s versions of LLMs and the large language model the readers of this essay have been working with their entire careers: literature. The human corpus of literary production far exceeds the data set that AI is working with. The intertextuality of that corpus is significant, relentless, weaving back and forth across time, geography, and genre. The language model of literature, and the language model of AI, intersect for us, as students of literature, in ways that scholars in other disciplines have not experienced. What we have is an artificially intelligent large language model based only on prediction, conversing entirely in the hypothetical, encountering literature, a masterful hypothetical large language system with centuries of human creativity and craft within it.

The concept of the bot, of course, originates in the literary imagination. Early modern fantasies of automated, intelligent machines were stories first before they were real-world experiments. In Greek mythology, the Κουραι Χρυσεαι, or Golden Maidens, were gold automata with youthful, female figures who guarded the smith Hephaestus’s palace. Much debate surrounds whether René Descartes actually invented an automaton in the figure of his deceased daughter, Francine, as described in Vigneul-Marville’s 1699 publication, Mélanges d’histoire et de littérature (see Kang). In this narrative, the automaton is thrown overboard by the captain or crew as Descartes travels on the Holland Sea. Fact or (most likely) fiction, the idea of it has fascinated writers for over 300 years. In their survey of representations of human-machine co-creation in literature, Anna Kantosalo, Michael Falk, and Anna Jordanous adopt Bruce Sterling’s concept of “design fiction” to characterize literary texts that prepare cultures for technological change, and inspire creativity in designers, by representing that change in fiction first. Fiction can offer new perspectives, they note, and literature of the long eighteenth century is especially rich in examples.

How each generation imagined machines that can simulate human intelligence has changed, as Jessica Riskin points out: “The story of the origins of modern artificial life lies, not in a changeless quest emerging from timeless human impulses, but rather in the experimenters’, philosophers’, and critics’ continually shifting understandings of the boundary between intelligent and rote, animate and mechanical, human and nonhuman” (99). During the late eighteenth century, Riskin finds, inventors attempted to create “sensitive and passionate” mechanisms that were sometimes “wet and messy,” even testing speech simulation (99, 112). Those of us working in literary history may recognize that these interests clearly connected to the concept of sensibility and the novels of the period that attempted to understand and simulate more precisely human emotion and behavior through narrative, often with clear awareness of the period’s interest in mechanization. Julie Park notes that for Frances Burney, for example, the automaton provides “a model of mimesis and regularity” that her characters could emulate as they navigated the restrictions of public life for women (23).

The appeal of AI changed during the nineteenth century, moving away from organic models to interest in energy, neural networks, and the ability of a machine to moderate its own internal environment. Though these imaginary bots were obviously different from current LLMs, particularly in their material embodiments, their “chat” functions are similar. The narratives emphasize the bots’ conversational abilities; the bots ask and answer questions based on algorithms initially programmed by humans and then advance in intelligence through observational, situational adaptation. By the late nineteenth century, the bot became an aesthetic representation of decadence but also highlighted the deep human need for connection and dialogue with another. Decadent French fantasy writer Auguste Villiers De L’isle-Adam’s L’eve Future (Eve of the Future Eden, 1886) depicts a woman android made of metal who develops a soul. She is invented by the fictional Thomas Edison for a male friend whose beautiful fiancé lacks the ability to have an intelligent, emotional, meaningful conversation. The friend falls for the bot created for him, modeled physically after his fiancé, but she is lost at sea when the ship she is traveling in, as cargo, sinks. The conversational allure of this robotic vision was then realized in 1964 in the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, where ELIZA the “chatterbot” was created. ELIZA was of course named and modeled after literary character Eliza Doolittle.³

The chronicle of automata is rich and well covered by scholars working in literary studies, the history of science, rhetoric, technical communication, and other humanist fields. My interest is not in that history but in the ways in which LLMs struggle to identify the very genre in which they were first imagined. And more specifically, how they look to fictional simulations of human conversation—dialogue—to then proceed with a dialogue with their human user. It’s a fascinating hypothetical feedback loop of AI-human conversation based on an understanding of human-to-human conversation through simulated human conversation as mediated through a literary text. And so to understand how AI understands and thus is using dialogue to interact with human users, I found that I need to better understand how dialogue functions in literature as a hypothetical LLM.

Daniel Defoe is an especially rich resource for this exploration. Defoe’s skill with predictive prose, the hypothetical, and the complexity of human conversation cannot be computed by AI. These past couple of years, I have been interested in Defoe’s constructions of dialogue and in the function of the subjunctive, or hypothetical, mood when those interactions become emotionally overwhelming for a character. Hypotheticals are grammatically created through the subjunctive mood: language that expresses a wish, a speculation, a possibility, or a hypothesis. It is could, and would, and should. It is perhaps, if only, a desire and a projection. It can be temporally future, a simulation of a possible later given the fulfillment of particular circumstances in the present. It can also be an alternate past or present: a potential unfulfilled or a shadow reality that may have happened. It is not necessarily a preferred outcome: the subjunctive can be a possible or missed positive opportunity, but it can also be a catastrophe averted or prevented. The subjunctive does not need to be conditional, though it often is, wherein the outcome might happen if only a series of events happen first to allow it. Michael Jay McClure calls the subjunctive the “irreal” to mark its difference from the “unreal”—it is real, and it defines the real as the always-present but unrealized otherness of relativity (22).

Defoe may not be an originator of the novel, but he is a “master of the hypothetical.”⁴ In the first fifteen pages alone of The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of York, Mariner (1719), he employs mandative subjunctives, auxiliary modals, and conditionals in ways that are more complex than AI can process. The mandative is constructed with verbs of projection and variants of “that,” such as “I wish that the weather were better.” The modal auxiliaries use constructions with helping verbs, such as “would,” “could,” “might,” and “should.” And the conditionals use variations of “if this then that” statements. These are algorithmically logical constructions, certainly. But Defoe’s hypotheticals are grammatical methods to serve ends that AI does not recognize, such as representing moderation, a rhetorical strategy he tested in his earlier political writings and that we see demonstrated by Crusoe’s father. Human readers can see that this strategy, though, proves ineffective (for Defoe as well as for the father) in emotionally persuading listeners to behave moderately. What I have found is that when a “chat” shifts into the hypothetical, the potential emotional reaction of the listener is interrupted. This interruption prevents the listener and speaker from fully understanding the perspective of the other. It prevents empathy. If this is true at key moments in Defoe’s dialogues, could it also be true of chatbots? Does the hypothetical framework from within which they work prevent AI from being able to recognize the emotional connection that is necessary for empathy, which is at the core of literature?

As we know, many of Defoe’s fictional works operate within a predictive framework. The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures begins with the father’s predictive prose: his father “foresaw” what would happen (2). Crusoe is writing from the future looking back and always thinking conditionally, in the hypothetical, about how if this right here had not happened, the plot of his life could have, would have developed differently. The Journal of the Plague Year (1722) is similar. It appears to be a recounting of an event that has already happened, but it is a warning—this is what could be repeated if policies are not put in place to prevent the plague from returning to England in the first decades of the eighteenth century. H.F. and his neighbors watch the Bills of Mortality to try to predict if the plague will come and, if so, when. H.F. is repeatedly wondering what the consequences would have been had a particular policy not been put in place. He notes, too, that his journal is a resource for those who may experience plague in the future. Of his struggle to decide whether to stay in London, he writes, in both predictive and subjunctive mood, “I have set this particular down so fully, because I know not but it may be of Moment to those who come after me if they come to be brought to the same Distress, and to the same Manner of making their Choice” (10). He does so with no expectation of empathy, too: “I desire this Account may pass with them, rather for a Direction to themselves to act by, than a History of my actings, seeing it may not be of one Farthing value to them to note what became of me” (10). What is important to H.F., here, is not what has already happened but what might happen in the reader’s future. He is not looking for any kind of response from the reader; the journal is a one-way communication seeking a behavioral change, not a dialogue.

In the opening that Crusoe remembers, when the father predicts his downfall, the father asks Crusoe for an explanation for wanting to leave home. However, his approach does not invite two-way dialogue. He “call’d” Crusoe, “told” him, “bid” him, and “pressed” him (2-4). He never offers an opportunity for an answer. And near the end of what Crusoe calls this “discourse”—not conversation—the father says that he “should have nothing to answer for, having thus discharg’d his Duty in warning me against” leaving home (4). At this important moment, the father shifts into the subjunctive, or hypothetical, mood, in his grammar (“should”), to dismiss his responsibility, then completely cuts Crusoe off from responding. This father and son could have had a truly empathetic moment, a real conversation, but at least according to Crusoe as (admittedly biased) aged narrator recalling the scene, the father shifts into the hypothetical when he becomes emotional. Though his “Tears run down his Face very plentifully” after mentioning the older brother’s death, the father’s conditionals, such as “if I did take this foolish Step, God would not bless me,” puts up a wall (5). So, the hypothetical in this predictive prose dialogue functions as a means of mediating the emotional experience. His father’s tears do persuade Crusoe at first, who was “sincerely affected,” but the impact is not permanent (5). Crusoe wishes again to leave after just a few days, his own hypothetical desires overcoming his concern for his family. He attempts to avoid another discourse with his father by asking his mother to intervene. Though she refuses, she does repeat their conversation to the father, who again relies upon the conditional to cope with the loss of another son: “That Boy might be happy if he would stay at home, but if he goes abroad he will be the miserablest Wretch that was ever born: I can give no Consent to it” (6).

Crusoe’s father’s use of the subjunctive is an example of polite command, ineffective in persuading Crusoe to stay. The father “expostulates warmly” to Crusoe about why he would leave them only on a “meer wandring Inclination,” stressing that there is an alternative option at home, “where I might be well introduced, and had a Prospect of raising my Fortune by Application and Industry, with a Life of Ease and Pleasure” (4). The father’s counsel, here, is suggestive and not indicative. The indicative would be “I WILL network for you, I WILL help you raise a fortune.” He speaks hypothetically—I might help you, you have a “prospect” but not a guarantee. Also, he is not “warm” himself but “expostulates” warmly—at moments of the subjunctive, Crusoe focuses on the emotional performance of the speech act, distancing that emotion from the speaker. Speeches are sad, passionate, moving, or joyous—not the people saying them.

The subjunctive allows Crusoe, through a reenactment of his parents’ speech, to express feeling and causality, and I think this reveals his struggle for empathy. The discourses reveal a communication problem: the father’s inability to understand what to say to his son that would persuade him, and Crusoe’s failure to truly understand his parents’ perspectives until later, when he reconstructs their speech from a future the reader does not yet know. As Crusoe matures and goes through his own struggles, he uses the subjunctive to revise and even erase past real experiences, minimizing the emotional impact of situations with a “it could have been worse” logic. His subjunctive projects a spectrum of certainty and, finally, it dramatizes the decision-making process in novel situations, where the ability to think hypothetically is a sign of the rational mind working effectively. At key moments, when the hypothetical breaks down, Crusoe is then overwhelmed and ceases to function cognitively—he is “surprised,” a key word in the title—and, in some cases, faints. The subjunctive intervenes in moments of threatened identity erasure, linguistic but also cultural and bodily.

As evidence of Defoe’s craft, the eponymous protagonist of Roxana (1724) works in the hypothetical differently than Crusoe’s father, but the presence of the subjunctive still disrupts the emotional progress of a scene. From the beginning of the novel, readers learn that Roxana is an educated, intelligent woman who longs for meaningful conversation. She describes the frustration she has with attempting to talk to her first husband, for example. His speech is always one-sided, uninteresting, and shallow. He believes that “every thing he said, was Right, was Best, and was to the Purpose, whoever was in Company” (6). So, she refuses to dialogue with him:

I did as well as I could, and held my Tongue, which was the only Victory I gain’d over him; for when he would talk after his own empty rattling Way with me, and I would not answer, or enter into Discourse with him on the Point he was upon, he would rise up in the greatest Passion imaginable, and go away, which was the cheapest Way I had to be deliver’d. (6)

I asked ChatGPT to analyze this important moment. In a previous question, I had asked it if Roxana is fiction (using the current popular title, not The Fortunate Mistress: Or, A History of the Life and Vast Variety of Fortunes of Mademoiselle de Beleau, Afterwards Call’d The Countess of Wintselsheim, in Germany). It hesitantly said yes, since there is a predominance of dialogue in the work. I anticipated that it would have much to say about this scene. However, while for other analyses of topics ChatGPT produced many paragraphs quickly, for this prompt there was a long delay and then only two sentences. It said that this quote is a “snippet” of dialogue from a longer narrative, which is thus likely fiction, and it is about how meaningless conversation frustrates the narrator, who becomes emotional (“Is Roxana fiction?”). As a very simple paraphrase, this is partly true. But where is the recognition of nuance, of what is actually happening here between this couple? Even though I had just asked it about Roxana, too, it does not recognize the work. Certainly, Defoe’s prose here is a puzzle, and if AI is looking for predictable patterns, this passage will alter its sense of what should come next in its sequencing. In this and other tests of its ability to analyze Defoe’s dialogue, I found that the language it has the most difficulty grasping is language that shifts into the hypothetical, or predictive, mood—“if this . . . then this” or “when this would happen . . . this would happen,” the latter construct of which is in this passage of Roxana.

In the first pages of the novel, Roxana writes explicitly about the importance of the hypothetical. Here, she is advising her target reader, the “Young Ladies of this Country,” with a caution for their future: “If you have any Regard to your future Happiness; any View of living comfortably with a Husband; any Hope of preserving your Fortunes, or restoring them after any Disaster,” she advises, “Never, Ladies, marry a Fool” (5). Then, the clear distinction in mood in Defoe’s own italics: “with another Husband you may, I say, be unhappy, but with a Fool you must” (5).

Immediately before her first husband disappears, Roxana explicitly grapples with the problem of the hypothetical in dialogue. Her husband has informed her that he “would go and seek his Fortune somewhere or other,” but she dismisses it, as “he had said something to that Purpose several times before that, upon my pressing him to consider his Circumstances, and the Circumstances of his Family before it should be too late.” She describes his frequent hypothetical plans as “Words of Course” for him—imaginings that are not real (15). Therefore, she did not take them seriously. “When he said he wou’d be gone,” she says, “I us’d to wish secretly, and even say in my Thoughts, I wish you wou’d, for if you go on thus, you will starve us all” (15). She speaks in the subjunctive until that powerful future “will” at the end. When she realizes that he has in fact left and is not coming back, the subjunctive tense—wishes, hopes, woulds and coulds, ifs—are punctuated with her tears. She notes the predictive moments she should have noticed—the “forerunners” of his flight—and she lives in what she calls a “state of expectation”—a suspended, interrupted emotional purgatory (12).

We see moments like this in Moll Flanders (1722) and Captain Singleton (1720), too, when Defoe’s narrators and characters interrupt predictive prose. They call out inauthenticity, meaninglessness, artificiality—chat pretending to be caring, human. They mark moments at which empathy could have been possible but the dialogue fell short. To put it simply, Defoe often uses the subjunctive mood in dialogue to interrupt the emotional consequence of predictive prose, thus preventing characters from experiencing the empathy necessary to change their behavior.

The eighteenth century has received little linguistic attention as a pivotal point in the history of hypothetical syntax. Focus has remained on the medieval through early modern periods and the Victorian period through the twenty-first century. The mandative subjunctive has been found, by Lilo Moessner, to have been the dominant form since Middle English and through the seventeenth century, when it then decreased as modal auxiliary verbs increased in favor. Skipping over the eighteenth century, linguists including Geoffrey Leech speculate that beginning in the Victorian period, the subjunctive mood as a whole began its decline. There is great debate about whether the subjunctive mood is in fact dying out in the English language, particularly polite forms that use auxiliaries like “shall.” Some, like Juho Ruohonen, think that, on the contrary, the subjunctive is surging. I wonder if the frameworks of the hypothetical now so fully encompass our twenty-first-century culture—a historical moment of anxiety, surveillance, alternate realities, and apocalyptic reasoning—that we use fewer subjunctive grammatical structures because we are living in the “what if.”

AI large language processing models like ChatGPT operate from within the “what if,” which is their framework of being. Beyond imagining the damage that this new technology of the hypothetical could cause, to think hopefully, what else might AI’s inability to grasp fiction allow us to notice about the complexity of literature? If we take this as an opportunity to showcase how important human, imaginative storytelling is in our world, how might we respond to this historical moment? The conclusion that I have drawn about the complexity of Defoe’s use of the subjunctive, and the implications for understanding the work of emotion and empathy in moments of dialogue (or “chat”), cannot currently be reached by AI. It cannot access the primary texts, the scholarship, and the understanding of human conversation and emotion that are necessary to work carefully through moments of a story—a story it may think it can identify as fiction but cannot, with nuance, appreciate as a living document about what it means to be human. Yet, curiosity about human-AI chat helped me think more deeply about what it is that makes Defoe’s prose so fascinating.

There are other interesting directions Defoe scholars might go to further explore how AI changes our perspective of his writings. When I first started thinking of connections between what is happening in AI right now and the influence on what we do, I started thinking of Defoe’s narrators as chatbots, and about the chatbot encounters he represents in dialogic moments in his work, in which one character who has power interrogates another character who is set up as a source of information and character contrast but is not represented as fully human and capable of genuine conversation (Friday). Could these kinds of interaction be fictional inspirations for the very framework through which a chatbot converses?

Perhaps Defoe himself could become a chatbot. Such an invention is not unheard of. The Shaw bot was created in 2022 to give the public access to the mind of George Bernard Shaw. It is a marketing tool for the Shaw Festival in Canada, built using the IBM Watson Assistant. This reminds us, though, that chatbots are, first and foremost, marketing technologies. They mediate human interaction not for enlightening conversation, art, or the advancement of knowledge but for profit, for entities like companies or individuals looking to build wealth and power. The Shawbot’s real purpose is to get users to buy tickets to a festival. As a technological mediator between humans and the information they seek, chatbots are instruments of capitalism and human social avoidance—you would rather ask the chatbot than consult sources written by humans, or ask a human who is an expert. Yet, as we see in the lovely hypothetical framework within which Defoe’s fiction, and all fiction, operates, and within which AI also lives, these simulated dialogues dramatize the human need for connection, conversation, and empathy.

Notes

¹ AI can only access currently licensed material available on the internet, which thus does not include many of the articles we write for scholarly journals, most of our books that are not open access, and many of the historical texts we study that do not have full-text online versions.

² Edwards critiques the term “hallucination” for the disinformation produced by generative AI chatbots as anthropomorphic. He prefers the term “confabulation,” which means that AI fills in content in the narrative when there are gaps in its knowledge or memory.

³ ELIZA’s source code had been lost until 2021, when it was found in MIT files. It is now published under a Creative Common license at https://sites.google.com/view/elizagen-org/try-eliza?authuser=0.

⁴ This was a remark by Jeanne Clegg during a discussion at the Defoe Society conference in New Haven, Connecticut, September 7-9, 2017.

Works Cited

“Can you identify fiction?” prompt. ChatGPT, GPT-3.5, OpenAI, 1 June 2023, https://chat.openai.com/.

Defoe, Daniel. The Fortunate Mistress: Or, A History of the Life and Vast Variety of Fortunes of Mademoiselle de Beleau, Afterwards Call’d The Countess of Wintselsheim, in Germany. Being the Person known by the Name of the Lady Roxana, in the Time of King Charles II. London: Printed for T. Warner at the Black-Boy in Pater-Noster-Row, 1724.

—. A Journal of the Plague Year: Being Observations or Memorials, of the Most Remarkable Occurrences, As well Publick as Private, Which happened in London During the last Great Visitation in 1665. London: Printed for E. Nutt at the Royal-Exchange, 1722.

—. The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of York, Mariner. London: Printed for W. Taylor at the Ship in Pater-Noster-Row, 1719.

Edwards, Benj. “Why ChatGPT and Bing Chat are So Good at Making Things Up: A Look Inside the Hallucinating Artificial Minds of the Famous Text Prediction Bots.” ars technica, April 6, 2023, https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/04/why-ai-chatbots-are-the-ultimate-bs-machines-and-how-people-hope-to-fix-them/. Accessed June 6, 2023.

“Is Roxana fiction?” prompt. ChatGPT, GPT-3.5, OpenAI, 5 June 2023, https://chat.openai.com/.

Kang, Minsoo. “The Mechanical Daughter of Rene Descartes: The Origin and History of an Intellectual Fable.” Modern Intellectual History, vol. 14, no .3, November 2017, pp. 633-660.

Kantosalo, Anna, et. al. “Embodiment in 18th-Century Depictions of Human-Machine Co-Creativity.” Frontiers in Robotics and AI, vol. 8, 2021, pp. 1-13.

Leech, Geoffrey, et. al. Change in Contemporary English: A Grammatical Study. Cambridge University Press, 2009.

Masnavi, Slamak. “Fact or Fiction: The Struggle with Accuracy in AI Chatbots ChatGPT and Bing Chat.” Cryptoglobe, April 8, 2023, https://www.cryptoglobe.com/latest/2023/04/fact-or-fiction-the-struggle-with-accuracy-in-ai-chatbots-chatgpt-and-bing-chat/. Accessed June 6, 2023.

McClure, Michael Jay. “If It Need Be Termed Surrender: Trisha Donnelly’s Subjunctive Case.” artjournal, 2013, pp. 21-35.

Moessner, Lilo. The History of the Present English Subjunctive. Edinburgh University Press, 2020.

Park, Julie. “Pains and Pleasures of the Automaton: Frances Burney’s Mechanics of Coming Out.” Eighteenth-Century Studies, vol. 40, no. 1, 2006, pp. 23-49.

Riskin, Jessica. “Eighteenth-Century Wetware.” Representations, vol. 83, no. 1, 2003, pp. 97-125.

Ruohonen, Juho. “Mandative Sentences in British English: Diachronic Developments in Newswriting Between the 1990s and the 2010s.” Neuphilologische Mitteilungen, vol. 118, no. 1, 2017, pp. 171-200.

ORCID: 0000-0002-9981-2740

Keywords: Daniel Defoe; attribution; authorship

JOHN RICHETTI isn’t with us today, but I want to honor his long service to the Defoe Society by keeping my roundtable remarks brief and casual, as he would prefer.

My general topic comes from two places. One is the short piece I wrote on Defoe’s twentieth-century critical reception for the Cambridge Defoe in Context volume (to which, unsurprisingly, many other people in this room have contributed, generally in more productive ways than I). In it, I suggest that the overall robust good health of Defoe studies is in part the result of scholarly interest shifting away from the tension between biography and bibliography. Much energy, perhaps too much, in the last century of Defoe criticism has been taken up by wars of attribution as we try and fail to settle the boundaries of the Defoe Canon. And yet, while we’re not quite finished with the question of what Defoe wrote, and with whom, and why, we are vibing somewhat differently about it now.

In 1974, as I noted in the Cambridge essay, Rodney Baine complained that the Defoe canon was “a widening gyre whose center will not hold” (484). Or as John Robert Moore memorably put it, “The bibliographer of Defoe would have to begin at the age of the infant Samuel, work as urgently as Noah building the ark, and live as long as Methuselah” (155). In other words, there was something almost apocalyptic, almost religious, hovering around the ever-expanding and ever-disputed list of Defoe attributions and the scholars who ventured near it.

Lately, though, we not only embrace Defoe the novelist (perhaps too fervently, about which more in a moment), we have mostly stopped fussing over his authorship of Moll Flanders, Roxana, and Captain Singleton. This is not to say that we no longer consider questions of authorship—in particular, the list of pamphlets attributed to Defoe continues to waver at the margins, and probably always shall—but the temperature has come down considerably on matters like the stylometric wars.¹

One exception is the oft-referenced work of Ashley Marshall between about 2010-2015. In a series of articles beginning with in her “Did Defoe Write Moll Flanders and Roxana?” Marshall sought to unsettle even the revised canon of Furbank and Owens, particularly with respect to some of his currently most popular novels. Marshall’s conclusion to that essay was this: “If we can supply more than faith or wishful thinking to justify the attribution of Moll, Roxana, and other ‘Defoe’ fiction, then I very much hope we will do so. If we cannot, then we would do well to resign ourselves to studying the poet and journalist we know existed, rather than trying to illuminate the novelist who only might have” (209). As the years go on, she argues with increasing urgency that, “We need to learn to live with a much-reduced canon” (149). Marshall is resistant to the idea of Defoe as a famous novelist in particular, pointing out with some justification that this framing overshadows the majority of work done across his long and prolific career. To classify Defoe with “a canonical writer of fiction like Fielding” is to “do him a great disservice” (28).

To which I respond: why? Defoe wrote Crusoe. I’ll grant that he also wrote a couple hundred other things, but his reputation in educational endeavors has pivoted on Crusoe for better than 300 years, and it is not difficult to make a case for Crusoe as among the most common and formative of Anglophone cultural touchstones. Marshall is right, of course, that Defoe may not have known that his reputation would one day rest on it. Few authors have the gift of such foresight. Richardson probably did, and I don’t like him much the better for it.

I apologize for my apparent hypocrisy here: I have been arguing against conceiving of Defoe’s contemporary, Eliza Haywood, primarily as a novelist rather than a periodicalist for years now; moreover, I am on record as believing (as I do believe) that the term “novel” itself is of very limited utility in eighteenth-century studies, and we would be better off as a scholarly field if we were to try harder to think in terms of prose fictions and multigeneric valances.² I am also no large-canon zealot; I am an absolute crank about attempts to re-attribute the General History of the Pyrates to Defoe. And I even agree with Marshall insofar as I think Defoe wrote a great deal of interesting material and we should embrace as much of it as we can. But I make these arguments because I think they contribute to a better understanding of eighteenth-century print culture, but I do not think we need, as a field, to be more cautious, or to take an attitude of resignation anywhere, or back away from what makes our authors popular. We should be level-headed about fiction, not frightened that it will somehow be our reputational undoing.

Furbank and Owens responded to Marshall’s critiques, of course—they always do respond—first by claiming Marshall misunderstood their use of external evidence and then by supplying what they considered additional internal evidence (“On the Attribution”. To show that this is not an invective against Marshall, I’ll add here that their approach to internal evidence among Defoe’s novels has always struck me as a little bit weird. They have, sometimes, a tendency to over-emphasize seemingly random details and descriptions—such as the use of poles to mark Malagasy trading areas in both Singleton and Crusoe—but to avoid larger resonances, such as the thematic longings for human contact expressed repeatedly among Defoe’s protagonists. (Of course, the group here knows all of this better than I do. Max Novak has also written a number of follow-ups to their de-attribution work, objecting to Furbank and Owens’ uses of external evidence, though from a different angle to Marshall’s—while Nicholas Seager is fast becoming our foremost expert on Defoe provenance.)³

This brings me to another recent event that made me think about Defoe attribution, which comes from another small but mighty conference. A few weeks ago, at Indiana University Bloomington’s Annual Workshop at the Center for Eighteenth-Century Studies, Abigail Zitin (who sits with us today) presented a fascinating essay inspired by Eve Sedgwick’s “Epidemics of the Will” that read Roxana through the lens of addiction. Zitin suggested that we should weigh Roxana as an independence junkie, and performed an extended reading of her famous soliloquy that begins, “What was I a whore for now?” (200-201). Roxana blames the devil for her initial temptation, but is at a loss to explain why she continues to engage in fiscally advantageous sexual relationships now that she is quite rich, since she does not especially crave sex. A large factor in Roxana’s decision-making, of course, is that the mercenary-minded Amy is both her confidant and her enabler. Roxana is, as emerged during the workshop’s discussion, what would have become of Bob Singleton if William hadn’t come along to talk him into retirement. She is Moll Flanders without the steadying hand of Mother Midnight.

In other words, this is a trope Defoe wrestles with repeatedly: a protagonist gripped by compulsions who can be urged in different directions by different kinds of friendship. Instead of trying to convince people not to read Moll Flanders with Crusoe (because are we really absolutely, positively certain Defoe wrote Moll?), why aren’t we telling them to read Roxana with Singleton? The bottom line is that with all caveats in place, it is very difficult for me to conceive of Crusoe, Singleton, Moll Flanders, and Roxana as having been composed by a series of different hands. To paraphrase Voltaire, if Defoe didn’t exist, it would have been necessary to invent him.

To wrap up, I want to cite the work of someone else who happened to be present at the IU workshop. In his Everywhere and Nowhere, Mark Vareschi approaches Defoe attribution differently, neither urging caution nor wild expansion. Going a step past Foucault, who formulated the author as a function of discourse, Vareschi argues that “Defoe” the novelist and author is really a network effect, and not the same thing as the historical person Daniel Defoe: “authorial attribution is less a fact that may be verified or disproved and more of a network effect: not necessarily a binary process but one of contingency” a result of which is that “books, through their circulation, make authors” and not the other way around (111, 123).

In other words, Defoe wrote Moll Flanders because we say he did; Moll Flanders makes Defoe Defoe. (And ditto Roxana.) By all means, embrace Defoe as a journalist as well as a fiction writer, but I am disturbed when I hear colleagues telling their undergraduates that the author of Moll Flanders is indeterminate. We in English are an injured group. We need to stop giving our beautiful things away.

Notes

¹ Stylometry is a controversial subject with many literary scholars: Shakespeare and the Brontës have come in for their own statistical-linguistic analysis controversies, but Defoe studies can hold its own in this area. See the lengthy exchange touched off by Furbank and Owens’s Defoe De-attributions, which was attacked by Irving Rothman in “Defoe De-Attributions Scrutinized.” Rothman felt Furbank and Owens ought to have paid more deference to the stylometric method proposed by Stieg Hargevik in The Disputed Assignment of Memoirs of an English Officer to Daniel Defoe, which Rothman had used to dispute fifty-four of Furbank and Owens’s decisions. Furbank and Owens responded in the same journal issue to Rothman, calling him “rather ungenerous to us,” and Hargevik’s corpus data “contaminated” (464-5). Rothman was permitted to respond to their response and characterized it as “the most irrational circularity of reasoning” (467).

² See Powell, “Eliza Haywood, Periodicalist(?).”

³ For example, see Novak’s review of The Canonisation of Daniel Defoe in Eighteenth-Century Fiction, as well as his review of their The Defoe Canon. More recently see “Some Problems in De-Ascribing Works Previously Ascribed to Daniel Defoe.” For some of Seager’s recent work, see “Defoe, the Sacheverell Affair, and A Letter to Mr. Bisset (1709)”; “Defoe’s Authorship of A Hymn to the Mob (1715)”; and “Literary Evaluation and Authorship Attribution, or Defoe’s Politics at the Hanoverian Succession.”

Works Cited

Defoe, Daniel. Roxana: The Fortunate Mistress, ed. Jane Jack, Oxford University Press, 1969.

Baine, Rodney M. “Daniel Defoe and Robert Drury’s Journal.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language, vol. 16, no. 3, 1974, pp. 479-91.

Furbank, P. N. and W. R. Owens. Defoe De-attributions: A Critique of J. R. Moore’s Checklist. Hambledon Press, 1994.

—. “On the Attribution of Novels to Daniel Defoe.” Philological Quarterly, vol. 89, no. 2, 2010, pp. 243-253.

Hargevik, Stieg. The Disputed Assignment of Memoirs of an English Officer to Daniel Defoe. Almqvist & Wiksell, 1974.

Johnson, Rhi. “Comment on the Papers by Abgail Zitin and Sherah Bloor.” The Workshop, vol. 7, 2023, pp. 57-60.

Marshall, Ashley. “Beyond Furbank and Owens: A New Consideration of the Evidence for the ‘Defoe’ Canon.” Studies in Bibliography, vol. 59, 2015, pp. 131-90.

—. “Did Defoe Write Moll Flanders and Roxana?” Philological Quarterly, vol. 89, no. 2, 2010, pp. 209-241.

—. “Fabricating Defoes: From Anonymous Hack to Master of Fictions.” Eighteenth-Century Life, vol. 36, no. 2, 2012, pp. 1-35.

Moore, John Robert. “The Canon of Defoe’s Writings.” The Library, vol. 9, no. 3, 1956, pp. 155-69.

Novak, Maximillian E. “The Defoe Canon: Attribution and De-Attribution.” Review of Defoe De-Attributions: A Critique of J. R. Moore’s “Checklist,” by P. N. Burbank and W. R. Owens. Huntington Library Quarterly, vol. 59, no. 1, 1996, pp. 83-104.

—. Review of The Canonisation of Daniel Defoe, by P. N. Furbank and W. R. Owens. Eighteenth-Century Fiction, vol. 1, no. 3, 1989, pp. 147-49.

—. “Some Problems in De-Ascribing Works Previously Ascribed to Daniel Defoe,” Digital Defoe, vol. 12, no. 1, 2020, pp. 68-74.

Powell, Manushag N. “Critical Reception after 1900.” Rivero and Justice, pp. 355-362.

—. “Eliza Haywood, Periodicalist(?)” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, vol. 14, no. 4, 2014, pp. 163–86.

Rivero, Albert J. and George Justice, editors. Daniel Defoe in Context, Cambridge University Press, 2023.

Rothman, Irving. “Defoe De-Attributions Scrutinized under Hargevik Criteria: Applying Stylometrics to the Canon,” PBSA, vol. 94, vol. 3, 2000, pp. 375-398.

Seager, Nicholas “Defoe, the Sacheverell Affair, and A Letter to Mr. Bisset (1709),” Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 115.1 (2021): 79-86,

—. “Defoe’s Authorship of A Hymn to the Mob (1715),” Notes and Queries, vol. 67, no. .3, 2020, pp. 408-409.

—. “Literary Evaluation and Authorship Attribution, or Defoe’s Politics at the Hanoverian Succession.” Huntington Library Quarterly, vol. 80, no. 1, 2017, pp. 47-69.

Vareschi, Mark. Everywhere and Nowhere: Anonymity and Mediation in Eighteenth-Century Britain. University of Minnesota Press, 2018.

Zitin, Abigail. “Addiction/Epidemic.” The Workshop, vol. 7, 2023, pp. 54-55.

Keywords: Daniel Defoe, Scotland, Act of Union, Robinson Crusoe, novel, aesthetics, form, nationalism

WHAT IS THE FUTURE of Defoe studies? Defoe has often been considered from a historical or cultural perspective instead of a formalist one. This relative neglect of Defovian form stems in part from what Michael Newton has recently called the “tendency to see Defoe as a hack writer and only an unconscious genius” (41). Defoe wrote for pay, he wrote quickly, he was slovenly in execution—that’s how the traditional storyline goes, as if the dozens of times his protagonist Robinson Crusoe contradicts himself, sometimes on the same page, are evidence of nothing more than carelessness … albeit in a book that is explicitly, overtly concerned with the protagonist’s business of transforming a life into a fabrication. To be sure, some of the scholars who have hewed close to this old truism about sloppy Defoe have written some of the best scholarship that there is on Defoe—that is, they’ve offered compelling arguments about other reasons to read him, despite his supposed stylistic indifference. As for me, I hope and expect that the future of Defoe studies will consist in part of literary scholars using their skills at close reading and formal analysis in order to take Defoe seriously as a writer who was not indifferent to the craft of writing.

Whether or not one embraces Jonathan Kramnick and Anahid Nersessian’s claim that “when it comes to literary criticism, form explains everything” (37), one cannot deny—in the face of strong evidence to the contrary—that Defoe was forthrightly interested in how the workings of literary form could represent and even manifest the cultural and historical moments in which they were received. The fact is, Defoe says many serious things about the affective qualities of aesthetics in general and prose aesthetics in particular, and, as I’ve discussed elsewhere, The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1719) is in my view most profitably read as a story about composing a story through acts of revision and omission that are carefully contrived at achieving an aesthetic whole. My remarks here and elsewhere are certainly not intended to suggest a dull teleology that imagines Defoe’s novels as weak prototypes of “the nineteenth-century novel.” To the contrary. But we do our subject little justice, nor ourselves justice as careful readers, if we decline to consider how Defoe openly laid bare in numerous pieces of writing an intense concern with storytelling as form, as aesthetics, as craft.

Crusoe and Aesthetics in General

There can no doubt Defoe had an eye for aesthetics, and one place we can trace this interest is through the eye of his protagonist Robinson Crusoe. ¹ In The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, the protagonist’s many failed attempts at making clay pots see him cursing his efforts in forming such malformed and ugly creations. His inaugural pots are workable but unsightly. Their unfortunate aspect runs directly contrary to the beauty of Friday when he sleeps in the cave under Crusoe’s acquisitional eye; Friday is very much not “ugly” but is instead “perfectly well made, with straight, strong limbs, not too large; tall, and well-shaped,” with hair “long and black, not curled like wool,” a “forehead very high and large,” eyes of “vivacity and sparkling sharpness,” skin of a “bright […] dun olive colour,” and teeth “white as ivory” (162). In Crusoe’s lengthy and detailed catalogue, Friday’s “stark naked” body is kind of an aesthetic masterpiece—a Gesamtkunstwerk—in part and whole (162).

Part II of the Crusoe story, The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1719), gives rise to a similar concern with aesthetics, lengthily describing the ugly and the beautiful alike. In Tartar-Russian territory, Crusoe encounters an analogue to the ugly and misshapen clay pots of Part I: a “hideous” idol (329). “Vile, abominable,” it was “about eight feet high, yet had no feet or legs, nor any other proportion of parts” (329). The so-called “celestial hedgehog” idol described in the meditative addendum The Serious Reflections of Robinson Crusoe (1720) is even worse:

[i]t had a thing instead of a head, but no head; it had a mouth distorted out of all manner of shape, and not to be described for a mouth, being only an unshapen chasm, neither representing the mouth of a man, beast, fowl, or fish; the thing was neither any of the four, but an incongruous monster; it had feet, hands, fingers, claws, legs, arms, wings, ears, horns, everything mixed one among another, neither in the shape or place that Nature appointed, but blended together and fixed to a bulk, not a body, formed of no just parts. 126

In contrast to his denunciation of these ugly and disproportionate monsters, Crusoe jealously admires in Farther Adventures the synthetic splendor of the house made from China ware; the unity of parts emerges as key to the aesthetic superiority of the fabric. The house is glazed blue and white on the outside, the inside “lined with hardened and painted tiles […] all made of the finest china, and the figures exceeding fine indeed, with extraordinary variety of colours, mixed with gold, many tiles making but one figure, but joined so artificially […] that it was very hard to see where the tiles met” (181). Unlike the monstrous idols, the China house is a synthetic marvel, of a piece with the surrounding “fountains and fishponds” and the “fine statues set up in rows on the walks,” all of which are “entirely formed” to form a “whole” (181).

Even judging by this limited set of examples (clay pots versus Friday’s body, pagan idols versus China warehouse), it would be folly to deny that Defoe was interested in aesthetics generally, and indeed cultivated a vision of selective-synthetic unity as aesthetics.

Defoe and Social/National Formalism

Did Defoe’s interest in aesthetics in general extend to the craft of writing in particular? Yes. And nowhere more so, perhaps, than in Robinson Crusoe. But before Defoe was a novelist he was a political writer, and in his political writing he fairly obsessed over the idea of the nation as an aesthetic object whose cultural and political unity could be achieved through its formal representation on the page and thus in the minds of readers—erstwhile Britons who perhaps had yet to see themselves as part of that whole. Defoe saw himself as a world-builder who was not merely writing “the story of Union” but authoring national unity into being by conveying the aesthetic as well as utilitarian rightness of Union (History 7:82). Defoe’s masterwork, according to him, was The History of the Union of Great Britain (1709). Advertised in 1706, before the Union had become a political reality on May 5, 1707, the History was understood plainly by him as a dedicated effort of prescriptive social/national formalism, and, as such, he clearly stated in personal correspondence his intention to depart from real history in order to construct an aesthetic whole that might “Naturaliz[e]” in readers’ minds an “entire and perfect” Union of England, Scotland, and Wales as Great Britain (Letters 230).²

Defoe expressed that the “story” was the key to forming a British unity in and among reader’s minds. The History fabricates a progressive trajectory, a Whig history, out of the chaos of real history, with the as-yet-unachieved Union as its seemingly inevitable end. As I’ve described elsewhere, Defoe contrived of a “national man” (i.e., the nation personified) who (with Defoe’s help) could be enabled, as Defoe described in his Essay at Removing National Prejudices, to peer back into the abysm of time from a figurative high rock of hindsight and see how the course of his own progress toward this moment, how history itself had brought him “out of the Reach of the insulting Waves, by which he was in Danger of Shipwreck” to stand upon the precipice of almost-Union (Essay 25).³ With Defoe’s help, the reader can discern the linear path, can make a “clear Discovery of the Reality of the Hazards he had run, which perhaps he did not perfectly see before,” and thereby finally “be delivered” (Essay 25). In other words, by reading a highly selective story of synthetic development, by following a fictitious teleological thread, readers might become unified in hearts and minds as one nation.

National disunion, in Defoe’s telling, is rendered as bad aesthetics. Indeed, the disunified nation resembles nothing so much as the Pagan idols that Defoe’s protagonist Crusoe would later remark on with disgust. Copious anti-Union political pamphlets described the Union as a monster, but in Defoe’s telling, the anti-Unionists themselves were a monstrous body. He wrote that the diverse members of the opposition came together all “[t]wisted and all joyn’d” into “one Body”: “the most monstrous Sight in the World” (History 7:33, 23, 20). In Defoe’s telling, Jacobites, Presbyterians, Scots and the rest—“Parties as Opposite as the Elements, as Distant as the Poles”—amounted frankly to a “monstrous Conjunction” (History 7:12), a “perfect Chaos, a Mass of Absurdities which it would be impossible to Reconcile” (History 7:30).

Where the enemies of Union associated the very idea of Union with a range of monstrous events (monstrous births, unnatural animal behavior, uncanny weather patterns and more were all taken as divine prognostication/judgment) and even termed the Union itself  “a Chimera” (part lion, part she-goat, part snake) “of the English Ministry” (History 7:167), Defoe recuperated the idea of Union as a thing of beauty and proportion. The opposition called Union “an ugly shape,” a thing that can “please neither Eye nor Taste” (History 8:12). In the History’s version of events, by contrast, Union is not the “Monster, as they called” it (History 7:151). What the History envisioned for readers was instead a phenomenal aesthetic object:

a most Beautiful Creature; Admirable in its Contexture, Agreeable in its Figure, Squar’d like a most Exquisite Piece of Architect[ure], both for Ornament, Strength and Usefulness; […] a Compleat Circle, all the Lines of which were drawn from, and depended on upon one General Centre, the Publick Good, a Mighty Arch every Stone of which mutually contributed, not to its Private Support only, but to the Strength of the whole. (7:151)

The History thus conceives of the Union as a whole to which all the parts contribute: a well-proportioned and beautiful Baconian wonder for readers to locate themselves within. The History avowedly hopes to compel readers to find their way toward this beautiful Union through the otherwise “Confused Labyrinth” of raw history, along the “Untrode Path” of becoming that he illuminates for them (History 7:150). The goal: to expose at the heart of things no “Monster,” no Minotaur, no Chimera, but instead a “Beautiful Creature” (History 7:151), a “Beautiful Thing” now “strip’d of all its Monstrous Figure” that it had formerly been given (History 7:167, 305).

Crucially, the History acknowledges that the History is a fiction. Defoe admits, “[i]n this Labyrinth of Untrode Paths, I may easily misplace some things, and omit others; and I cannot but introduce my account of it with this caution” (History 7:143). This “Narration,” as the History calls itself, may be viewed as a “true string” but not as the whole and complete truth (History 7:150). Making a “Path” through the “Confused Labyrinth” (History 7:150) means ignoring offshoots, disregarding details that do not contribute. The History concedes readily and unashamedly to its own prescriptive fabrication. The “String” is “true” because it leads to a desired conclusion; resistances to the story of Union are massaged, moved around to help “smooth” the “Thread of the Story” (History 7:127, 7:10), or are excised.

Defoe, Crusoe, and the Form of Fabrication

Defoe’s labor to fashion a compelling and therefore self-actualizing story of Union in The History of the Union prefigured the aesthetic labors that his protagonist Robinson Crusoe would later undertake in his own allegory of becoming. From one angle, Robinson Crusoe is certainly a story about how Crusoe fashions his own life story. One does not even have to view Robinson Crusoe or its sequel novel as an allegory of national becoming, or of the national man, or of Defoe-as-author-of-Union, in order to see that Crusoe similarly works forging a smooth thread of his own becoming—always worrying over what should be included (only that which contributes to the progress of the whole, he tells us, again and again). Like Defoe, Crusoe makes a path through a labyrinth.

Truth itself—the truth of the Journal, for instance—is not what Crusoe is after. Fictions are fine, if they work. One recalls Crusoe’s pleased apprehension of Will Atkins when the latter tells the island newcomers that Crusoe is the legal governor. A “mere lie,” Atkins’s story is admired by Crusoe because it produces a particular end (215). “[A]lthough it was but a fiction,” Crusoe observes, “it had its desired effect” (215). Like his own maker, Crusoe flagrantly collates multiple versions of reality, selecting from, omitting from, and generally revising the mess of real life, in full view, such that the reader can see Crusoe becoming the self-assured man who no longer has to confess to “losing” himself, to falling apart in the face of various existential threats and having to shore up his fragments after shipwreck (literal or psychological) again and again.

Crusoe expresses straightforwardly that a life not organized by a thread or string of intentional storytelling can only appear as a mess of flotsam, of jetsam, of shoes without fellows. Viewed in situ, without any revision, his life is a mere “collection of wonders” (203), something analogous to Defoe’s own sense of raw history as a tangled maze or chaotic ocean. In the telling, however, Crusoe transforms the motley crew of autobiographical facts into a selective-synthetic “chain of wonders” (215), something akin to Defoe’s freshly forged path through the labyrinth, through the waves. Along the way, in order to make the collection into a chain of consequence and connection, Crusoe makes changes blatantly. Crusoe ponders the crowded jumble of details that comprise his life, likening his mind to a “crowded thoroughfare,” and he vows to brings them into compass by rendering them “in miniature, or by abridgement” (155). The thread or string of the story is not real life, but fabrication.

The inclusion of Crusoe’s journal, which he states he copied from the original, gives rise to the novel’s chief sign of functional fabrication, the spirit of which drives the novel from beginning to end. There is no need to enumerate all the many contradictions here between the journal and the hindsight telling with which the novel begins (did he kill and skin a wildcat, as in the journal, or did he feed and shelter it? And so forth). The contradictions are almost incalculably prevalent, the better to call attention to the writer’s aggressive acts of revision. The journal does not repeat “all these particulars” that he has already given in his new version of events (56). And how boring it would be if it did. Instead, Crusoe is at pains to show how the old voice of the real and the new voice of revision are at odds with each other, and how the new voice eventually wins out. One of the best examples of this process is encompassed by the January 2 and 3 journal entries:

Jan. 2. Very hot still, but I went abroad early and late with my gun, and […] I found there was plenty of goats, tho’ exceeding shy and hard to come at, however I resolv’d to try if I could not bring my dog to hunt them down.

Jan. 3. Accordingly, the next day, I went out with my dog. (61).

The new voice butts into the January 3 entry. The new voice changes what would have been “today, I went” into “the next day, I went” (61). As the journal proceeds, the revisionary voice becomes more and more prominent in this way, long before the time when Crusoe claims to have run out of ink, until finally the new voice subdues and cannibalizes the original version, which is overwritten to the extent that it fully disappears from view. Conveniently, crafty new Crusoe makes the death of his journal / the disappearance of ink coincide with the anniversary of both his birth and his island arrival. It is a kind of birth. The Defoe of The History would have been proud. Ultimately, conveying his transformed story to others, Crusoe makes his jumbly “collection of wonders” into a selective “chain of wonders” (215). In Crusoe’s own estimation, he has “order’d everything for the best” (87).

*

To conclude as I began, I hope that the future of Defoe studies will include plenty of taking him seriously as a writer. And Robinson Crusoe, a novel about a storyteller and writer, is an excellent place to begin. Note, although I often use the word “novel” as an easy shorthand to refer to eighteenth-century prose fictions (whether by Jane Barker, Eliza Haywood, or Daniel Defoe), I will not be mistaken for equating them with nineteenth-century prose fictions. But neither will I choose to apprehend a text like The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe as an aesthetic embarrassment whose author had no idea what he was doing. Doing so would mean ignoring (to my mind) much of what makes such a text interesting beyond (or in context of) its cultural and historical value. Defoe may have written quickly and often (most of us could only wish to be so productive), but his writing is not bereft of craft nor care and I expect that future readers, with access to new editions (print editions, and searchable online editions), will be enabled to examine what seems to me to be a consistent aesthetic program across Defoe’s writerly career. Content and form work together to generate, for this reader, and for my students, the special varieties of eighteenth-century aesthetics, Defovian and otherwise.

Virginia Commonwealth University

Notes

¹ Some of the most interesting recent commentary from the last quarter century on Defoe’s aesthetic eye in the two Crusoe novels can be found in Lydia H. Liu, “Robinson Crusoe’s Earthenware Pot”; Christopher Loar, Political Magic; and Robert Markley, The Far East and the English Imagination, 1600-1730.

² Nicholas Seager’s and Marc Mierowski’s edition of Defoe’s letters, The Cambridge Edition of the Correspondence of Daniel Defoe, is the authoritative source for Defoe’s correspondence.

³ See the first chapter of my Essential Selves and the Idea of Unionism in Anglo-Scottish Literature, 1603-1832.

Works Cited

Defoe, Daniel. An Essay at Removing National Prejudices, 1706.

—. The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1719), edited by W. R Owens. The Novels of Daniel Defoe, general editors W. R. Owens and P. N. Furbank, vol. 2, Pickering and Chatto, 2008.

—. The History of the Union of Great Britain (1709), edited by David William Hayton. Writings on Travel and Discovery by Daniel Defoe, general editors W. R. Owens and P. N. Furbank, vol. 7, Pickering and Chatto, 2002.

—. The Cambridge Edition of the Correspondence of Daniel Defoe, edited by Nicholas Seager and Marc Mierowski. Cambridge UP, 2022.

—. The Letters of Daniel Defoe, edited by George Harris Healey. Clarendon P, 1955.

—. The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1719), edited by John Richetti. Penguin Books, 2001.

—. The Serious Reflections during the Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1720), edited by G. A. Starr. The Novels of Daniel Defoe, general editors W. R. Owens and P. N. Furbank, vol. 3, Pickering and Chatto, 2008.

—. A Tour Thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain (1724-26), edited by John McVeagh. Writings on Travel and Discovery by Daniel Defoe, general editor W. R. Owens and P. N. Furbank, vols. 1-3, Pickering and Chatto, 2001.

Kramnick, Jonathan, with Anahid Nersessian. “Form and Explanation.” Paper Minds: Literature and the Ecology of Consciousness, by Jonathan Kramnick, Chicago UP, 2018, pp. 37-55.

Liu, Lydia H. “Robinson Crusoe’s Earthenware Pot.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 25, no. 4, 1999, pp. 728–57.

Loar, Christopher. Political Magic: British Fictions of Savagery and Sovereignty, 1650-1750. Fordham UP, 2014.

Markley, Robert. The Far East and the English Imagination, 1600-1730. Cambridge UP, 2006.

Newton, Michael. Savage Girls and Wild Boys: A History of Feral Children. Picador, 2002.

Nowka, Scott. “Building the Wall: Crusoe and Other.” Digital Defoe: Studies in Defoe & His Contemporaries, vol. 2, no. 1, 2010, pp. 41-57.

Swenson, Rivka. Essential Scots and the Idea of Unionism in Anglo-Scottish Literature, 1603-1832. Bucknell UP, 2016.

—. “Robinson Crusoe and the Form of the New Novel.” The Cambridge Companion to Robinson Crusoe, edited by John Richetti. Cambridge UP, 2018, pp. 16-31.

ORCID ID: 0000-0002-4018-7581

Keywords: Robinson; Keiller, Patrick; futurity; ruins; decolonization

MY ORIGINAL QUESTION for this roundtable was about a “place-based” Defoe studies: about the promise of a Defoe untethered from the traditions that once defined his relevance, and how we might continue to place Defoe’s writing differently, relocating it to sites of knowledge like the 21st-century Caribbean, and what we might hope to learn through such placements. But as I prepared to make this trip, I couldn’t stop thinking about the epistemological suspense Bob Markley identifies in The Storm between measurable impacts of disaster and the unrepresentable experience of catastrophe. Markley quotes from Defoe’s account of the Great Storm of 1703: “Observations [of the barometer] . . . are not regular enough to supply the Reader with a full Information, the Disorders of that Dreadful Night having found me other imployment, expecting every Moment when the House I was in would bury us all in its own Ruins” (The Storm 26–27; Markley 107). Recontextualizing Defoe in various places may generate new methods of measuring literary value, but I don’t believe it actually helps us with the problem of the future in a moment of ongoing colonial catastrophe.

This roundtable asks about “predicting” the future of Defoe Studies, but I can’t get past the problem of imagining the future of anything from our present world. To get my bearings, I rewatched Patrick Keiller’s trilogy of film essays: London (1994), Robinson in Space (1997), and Robinson in Ruins (2010).¹ London and Robinson in Space both grapple with what the second film calls “the problem of England,” where the problem is futurity itself under late colonial capitalism—the impossibility of imagining a future when you feel uncertain about the present and bad about the past. More than I ever could have predicted, this is how it feels for me to be a professional literary scholar these days. It’s impossible, most days, for me to imagine any future—not just for Defoe Studies, or Eighteenth-Century Studies, but for studies as we know them, for disciplinary expertise as a career track, for the university we imagined as a home in which we could profess what we know. How many years, now, have we been caught up in our own version of The Storm’s “Disorders of that Dreadful Night,” unable to attend to our usual gathering of information and ideas because we are bombarded with “other employment,” because we are preoccupied with sheer survival, “expecting every Moment” that the house we are in—that is, the neoliberal university—“would bury us all in its own Ruins”?

Yet the final film in Keiller’s trilogy suggests that ruins might be our only hope of reconnecting to the possibility of viable futures. Robinson in Ruins turns the enigmatic character of Robinson from the narrator’s friend and collaborator into a specter—someone who has disappeared from the historical present and yet has left enough material traces of his thoughts and activities that they can still be narrated. This film models a way of reading historical time from a perspective at least partially released from any particular temporality. “Robinson had once said,” according to the narrator, “he believed if he looked at the landscape hard enough, it would reveal to him the molecular basis of historical events, and in this way he hoped to see the future.” The film trains its sight on a variety of rural English industrial locations, including government pipeline markers and fuel depots, semi-abandoned structures built to develop nuclear weapons and other short-term manufacture initiatives, broadcasting transmitters, a “disused cement works” where Robinson fantasizes about founding a new utopian society. These are all “ruins”—of the precapitalist commons destroyed to render land more profitable, and of the aspirational kind of colonial capitalism that animated Defoe’s writing, in whose ruins we all presently live.

Ruination is a long process, and not necessarily an unsurvivable one. In fact, many things thrive in the ruins of others, just as the decomposition of formerly living beings generates the possibility of new forms of life. Keiller’s close-ups on stones, flower blossoms, lichen on road signs indicate Robinson’s inclination, in the narrator’s words, “to biophilia, the love of life and living systems.” My remarks today are also motivated by a love of life and living systems. I propose that we approach the future of Defoe Studies not by attempting to prevent its ruin but by embracing it as a starting point. Let’s say: this ship is wrecked. Let’s do as a Robinson would do, and consider what use to make of the wreckage. The Defoe to whom this society was devoted when it was founded has not survived to be theoretically relocated. He has been decaying into other forms for a long time: Friday studies, pirate studies, climate studies. Personally, I yearn for a Celestial Hedgehog studies; I orient myself toward the future in which such a thing exists.

Ruination is not eradication. It is not, god help me, cancellation. It is a form of death, yes, sometimes literally. But whatever we’re all doing here isn’t dead, and I believe we are already doing it in the ruins of Defoe Studies. And so I ask: What have we made of Defoe that helps us imagine a future worth surviving for? With what might we replace him so that we may thrive?

McMaster University

Notes

¹True story: my child was almost named Robinson, not after Crusoe, but after both Keiller’s Robinson and the Yankees’ Robinson Cano, who is, like my student and collaborator Stacy Creech de Castro, from the nearby Dominican Republic. For better thoughts than I can offer on a Caribbean-based way of placing Defoe Studies, see Stacy’s work.

Works Cited

Creech de Castro, Stacy. Whiteness as Terror/Horror: A Black Feminist Reading (of) Long Eighteenth-Century Transatlantic, Colonial Gothic. 2023. McMaster University, PhD dissertation.

Defoe, Daniel. The Storm. 1704. Penguin Books, 2005.

Keiller, Patrick, director. London. London. BFI, 1994.

———. Robinson in Ruins. BFI, 2010.

———. Robinson in Space. BFI, 1997.

Markley, Robert. “‘Casualties and Disasters’: Defoe and the Interpretation of Climatic Instability.” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 8, no. 2 (2008): 102–24. https://doi.org/10.1353/jem.0.0009.