Sapphic Crossings: Cross-Dressing Women in Eighteenth-Century British Literature, by Ula Lukszo Klein

Reviewed by Hannah Chaskin

Ula Lukszo Klein’s Sapphic Crossings: Cross-Dressing Women in Eighteenth-Century British Literature (2021) explores the eighteenth century’s simultaneous fascination with and anxiety about the figure of the cross-dresser. Citing previous genre- or class-specific accounts of the phenomenon, Klein argues that the cross-dressed woman needs to be reconsidered as a figure that “comes to take on a central role in the defining and negotiating of gendered and sexual categories in the long eighteenth century” (1) across a diverse set of texts written for diverse audiences. While each chapter of Sapphic Crossings is narrowly focused on a part of the body—as I will discuss below—each is also productively promiscuous in the number and types of texts discussed. Sapphic Crossings accounts for sensationalized biographies of working-class women like The Female Husband (1746) and The Female Soldier (1750) alongside novelistic representations of upper-class cross-dressers in Elizabeth Inchbald’s A Simple Story (1791) and Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda (1801), as well as the “breeches role” popular on the stage. While the narrative function of the cross-dressed woman, and the moral framework of the text she’s in, differs widely, the prevalence of the representation in itself may have given eighteenth-century readers a framework by which they could access or even emulate lesbian desire and lesbian relationships. Klein eschews a chronological account of cross-dressing in Britain, and the recursion of texts, themes, and figures, often through several chapters, imbues Sapphic Crossings with a satisfying interconnectedness, even while each chapter can stand on its own.
By doing a cross-genre study, Klein argues that we can excavate “a lesbian-themed canon of literature that propagated lesbian representations that constructed lesbian desire as between women, for the pleasure of women” (14). In this way, Sapphic Crossings establishes itself as part of a genealogy of lesbian scholarship, joining the work of Terry Castle, Emma Donoghue, Sue Lanser, and Valerie Traub, among others. Klein is rigorous in providing historical specificity that lends context to the cultural norms by which the cross-dressed woman, and her body, would be judged. At the same time, and in common with many of her interlocutors, Klein uses the presentist word “lesbian” to give modern legibility to same-sex relationships and desires in the past. In modern parlance, the word may connote primarily internal or personal identification; however, Sapphic Crossings avoids a conception of “lesbian desire as rigid and identitarian” (18), and does not aim to “locate meaning through one-to-one connections between modern-day lesbians and cross-dressing women” (20). Rather, Klein offers an account of lesbian relationality that is more structural than affective, arguing that the hyper-visibility of the cross-dresser and her exploits “challenges our understanding of gender and its relationships to desire and the body” (3). Focusing on the materiality and ambivalent social gendering of the body, Sapphic Crossings suggests that writers construct, and make legible for their readers, a vision of same-sex desire with or without explicit access to a character’s internal processes.

The argumentative arc of Sapphic Structures speaks to Klein’s investment in the body as a social text. The book is divided into four chapters, each offering a historical, socio-cultural, and literary reading of a single body part: the beard, the breast, the penis, and the legs. With the suggestion that these four body parts are most central to the complex gendering of the cross-dressed woman, each chapter provides a historicist account of the body part’s gendered connotations in the eighteenth century, as well as a more granular account of how the body part is textually represented as an aid or an obstacle to the cross-dressed woman. Thus, Chapter 1 establishes the way that popular conceptions of maleness rested on a person’s ability to grow a beard—although the fashion at the time was to be clean-shaven—and thus highlights the lack of a beard as potentially the biggest obstacle to the cross-dressed woman. Klein argues that when the cross-dressed woman can attract a feminine woman, the femme becomes a metaphorical beard, distracting from and replacing the literal beard. A compelling implication here, borne out by—though not specifically highlighted in—the subsequent chapters, is that the beard is more socially gendered than the breast or the penis (the leg, as Klein notes in Chapter Four, is both enticing and frustrating in its androgyny). The beard (or lack thereof) is immediately legible from the outside, while the other features are only potentially interpretable in specific, often untoward, circumstances. Moreover, as Klein shows in Chapters 2 and 3, neither the breast nor the penis is as easily gendered as we tend to assume. Establishing a pattern of cross-dressed women whose exposed bodies do not fully expose them, Klein shows the body to be as ambiguous as the texts representing it.

This notion of “passing,” in which the body cannot be read as essentially gendered even when seemingly sexed characteristics are visible, highlights the possibility of a transmasculine reading of the figure Klein calls “the cross-dressed woman.” Indeed, Sapphic Crossings offers the tantalizing potential for such a reading in its introduction, where Klein argues that when we “[place] trans and lesbian in binary opposition, we fall into the same trap that trans studies and queer studies themselves have long sought to evade” (11) and suggests that the representations discussed in the subsequent chapters “contain moments for reading gender fluidity and transness in the past” (15). The idea of the trans reading continues throughout the chapters of Sapphic Crossings, but one does notice that it almost always appears at the end of a paragraph focused primarily on a lesbian reading, and that the trans reading is alluded to but infrequently performed. Klein notes in the introduction that the lesbian focus of Sapphic Crossings “does not intend to, nor should it be read to, negate the possibility of reading a trans man loving ciswomen and ciswomen attracted to a trans man” (15). While Sapphic Crossings as a whole surely leaves room for a transmasculine reading of these figures, transness, and, for that matter, butch cisgender expressions, are under-theorized.

For example, one compelling contention throughout Sapphic Crossings is the idea that the cross-dressed woman is desired not for her masculinity but for her femininity (33). The femme, in this reading, is attracted to the cross-dresser precisely because she lacks a beard, has smoother skin, more shapely legs, is better in bed with a dildo than a cisgender man is with a penis, etc. This point is well-established and convincing throughout Sapphic Crossings: the texts at hand emphasize the possibility that a woman might be more attracted to traditionally feminine qualities in both men and women. As a lesbian reading of the cross-dressed woman, then, we see on the writer’s part a refusal or failure to “straighten” the relationship by emphasizing the gender difference between butch and femme, cross-dressed and not. However, as a potential trans reading, we fall short: without sufficient theorization of transness, and transmasculinity in particular, the implication is that transmasculine people are fundamentally more feminine than their cis male counterparts. This seems to contradict the excellent and well-established point throughout Sapphic Crossings regarding the fundamental failure to consistently gender the body. It is not necessarily a problem that Sapphic Crossings does not provide robust trans interpretations of the figures it covers: Sapphic Crossings is an important work of lesbian scholarship and offers important insights into same-sex dynamics and attraction in the eighteenth century. Nor am I, I hope, putting a trans reading “in binary opposition” to Klein’s lesbian reading, as she cautions against. However, the specter of trans potential in a book that primarily focuses on femininity, “female bodies,” and “women cross-dressers” begs the question of how transmasculinity might factor in. Ultimately, the way that trans scholarship manifests in Sapphic Crossings sometimes confuses otherwise convincing arguments without offering substantive payoff for trans studies as a whole.

Part of what’s missing here is a clearer sense of separation between the highly motivated writers and the figures they represent. The understanding of the cross-dresser’s gender in Sapphic Crossings sometimes aligns too neatly with the authors it focuses on, arguing that authors’ persistent feminization of the cross-dresser “betray[s] the men’s discomfort, not necessarily with women dressing as men, but with women’s seducing other women” (123). The assumption here is that authors make most visible what they are least comfortable with: they feminize the cross-dresser because they want to warn against lesbianism more than they want to warn against gender-nonconformity. What would happen if we considered the opposite: that compulsive feminizing moves suggest a persistent anxiety about the cross-dresser’s masculinity; that same-sex attraction is represented precisely because it is less frightening than a figure who fully “passes,” not just within the text, but also, potentially, to the reader? In this reading, a writer highlights same-sex desire in order to downplay the gender-nonconformity of the cross-dressed figure. Writers’ obsession with bringing the reader under a person’s clothes, to constantly evoke what might lie beneath them, strikes me as a disciplinary, rather than a gender-affirming or -confirming, move.

Sapphic Crossings is a complex and wide-ranging study of a figure that has intrigued readers, play-goers, and academics, for a long time. In organizing her chapters around the body, rather than chronology or genre, Klein is able, as she notes, to highlight the consistencies in cross-dressing narratives and to offer a persuasive case for the importance of the figure to the development of gender and sexuality norms. Sapphic Crossings approaches the cross-dresser from diverse angles, frequently surprising the reader with where, and how, the body is gendered (or, even more interestingly, not). Chapter Three, “Penetrating Discourse and Sapphic Dildos,” is especially compelling and varied: I was especially taken by the formal reading of certain narratives wherein Klein compares editor or author notes in later editions to formal dildos, attempting to satisfy previously skeptical readers with a “strapped-on textual appendage” (110). In her discussion of John Cleland’s Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (1748), meanwhile, Klein identifies what she calls the “dildoization of the…penis” (127), suggesting some gender trouble in Cleland’s characters’ suspiciously indefatigable stamina. Overall, Klein’s scholarship joins important conversations in lesbian scholarship, offers a cross-genre approach to the figure of the cross-dresser, and opens the door to further study on transgender history and literature, racialized gender norms, and the materiality of the body.

Hannah Chaskin, Northwestern University

Robinson Crusoe after 300 Years, edited by Andreas K. E. Mueller and Glynis Ridley. Lewisburg, Bucknell University Press, 2021;
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Rewriting Crusoe: The Robinsonade across Languages, Cultures and Media, edited by Jakub Lipski

Reviewed by Emmanuelle Peraldo

Robinson Crusoe after 300 Years, edited by Andreas K. E. Mueller and Glynis Ridley. Lewisburg, Bucknell University Press, 2021. Pp 234. $47. ISBN: 9781684482863 (Paperback);
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Rewriting Crusoe: The Robinsonade across Languages, Cultures and Media, edited by Jakub Lipski. Lewisburg, Bucknell University Press. $34. Pp 220. ISBN: 9781684482313 (Paperback).

Reviewed by Emmanuelle Peraldo

In the same way as, in 1719-1720, Daniel Defoe published Robinson Crusoe in three parts,¹ scholars all over the world organized conferences and published collections of essays to celebrate the 300^th anniversary of this eighteenth-century-novel-turned-global-myth.² In 2020 and 2021, Bucknell University Press published two collections of essays that are quite complementary: Andreas Mueller and Glynis Ridley gathered outstanding essays on Robinsonades and on re-interpretations of Robinson Crusoe, thus showing the huge impact of what Ian Watt called one of “the great myths of our civilization”³ on literary, artistic, and cinematographic creation as well as on academic and philosophical reflection. Jakub Lipski also brought together an excellent range of essays that offers transnational and transmedial perspectives on the Robinsonade. The two volumes pay attention to the afterlives of Defoe’s original text, both in terms of criticism and of adaptation / imitation of the Crusoe story in the three centuries that have unfolded since the publication of Robinson Crusoe, which proves that it is a work that has never stopped engaging readers from all around the world, as a chameleon that adapts to any time and any place.

Robinson Crusoe is indeed so pervasive in global culture that you can be inspired by it while not being aware of it, as Glynis Ridley shows in her essay on The Martian in Robinson Crusoe after 300 Years. Ridley quotes interviews of Andy Weir who claims he has not been inspired by Defoe’s text, and yet he says he does “love a good survival story” (12). The first part of the collection focuses on “Generic Revisions,” and this first essay by Ridley draws attention to the fact that The Martian is a Robinsonade malgré elle, so to speak, whose tremendous success may be explained in part by its plurimediality, as it is a 2015 movie directed by Ridley Scott that started as chapters of a novel published on a personal blog in 2009 before being put together in the book format by Andy Weir in 2014. Ridley adds that the novel was re-written again with no bad language for a children edition. This polymorphic and protean Robinsonade may be seen as a synecdoche for the process of mise en abyme that is at the core of the definition of a Robinsonade, i.e., an intermedial venture with several prerequisites – such as a castaway on a desert island that develops agriculture to survive – in a direct or indirect intertextual connection with Robinson Crusoe.

In an attempt to define and conceptualise this hypertextual relationship between a text and its afterlives, the volume explores the variety of genres of the Robinsonade. Geoffrey Sill’s essay examines the figures of Robinson and Friday in pantomimes, burlesques and melodramas in the nineteenth century, and more particularly the female Robinsonade in theatre, which connects the transgeneric process in the theatrical adaptation of Defoe’s novel to a “transgender voyage,” to quote Sill’s title. Sill inserts several illustrations showing actresses who played the role of Robinson Crusoe (Alice Brookes, Ada Blanche, Alice Atherton, Lydia Thompson, and Georgina Delmar), thereby contradicting the traditional association of the Robinsonade genre with masculinity. The representation of a Blackface Friday subjugated by a female Crusoe (55) is thought-provoking, as it suggests that Friday was associated to a Black African slave in the nineteenth century. The combination of gender and race studies proves efficient to revisit the relationship between Crusoe and Friday.

This gender/feminist discourse on the female Robinsonades and the decentering it entails are taken one step further in the third essay, which which draws its methodology from the growing field of animal studies. Amy Hicks and Scott Pryz focus on a corpus of children’s Robinsonades in which Crusoe is a non-human animal. When the role of Robinson is taken up by an animal, there is inevitably a form of decentering at stake: in the reappropriations of Defoe’s character and novel, Crusoe is no longer a male Christian but can be a woman or an animal, among other forms this chameleon can take. The authors of this chapter argue that if, traditionally, children identify with animal characters, here it is not the case, due to the fear of being eaten.

After the first section on Robinsonades, the second and third parts of the volume come back to Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, alternating between fresh interpretations inspired from material studies, new materialism, ecocriticism and posthumanism on the one hand, and more mainstream eighteenth-century criticism on the other hand, and all essays make you want to read Robinson Crusoe and its sequels again, as they completely revisit some commonly-held beliefs. Part 2, entitled “Mind and Matter,” articulates discourses around the body-soul relationship. Laura Brown compares Newton’s conception of matter in the “Queries” to his Optics (1704) to Crusoe’s gathering of things, in a reflection on the nature of things, the vitality of matter, and the manifestations of materialism. She concludes that both works tackle “the modern engagement with matter” (96).

Daniel Yu and Pat Rogers reconsider the traditional depiction of Crusoe as a prototypical capitalist and as a Protestant that never stops being active and working. First, Yu focuses on tobacco consumption in Robinson Crusoe and observes that, actually, Crusoe can be quite passive and contemplative. He studies Crusoe’s treatment of tobacco as a sacred substance that triggers reflections, conversations, but also a form of idolatry and spirituality. Pat Rogers goes even one step further in showing Crusoe’s true colours by focusing on something unexpected in an adventure novel, that is boredom: He argues that Crusoe cannot not have been bored in the 28 years he spent on this island.

Jeremy Chow’s chapter revisits the violence analysed by some critics in connection with imperialism and colonisation (Christopher Loar, Robert Markley) by adopting an ecocritical perspective, and more particularly by inscribing itself in the emerging field of the blue humanities (focusing on the role of the ocean) and “oceanic new materialism.”⁴ Chow starts from the motif of the storm to interpret the violent relationality between Robinson and the environment, presented as an actor, and talks about “aqueous violence” (115). This time, agency is not granted to women or animals as in Part 1, but to the sea that is said to have the “capacity to segregate Crusoe” (117), and to be at the origin of Crusoe’s violence against the cannibals, which is a rejection of the religious interpretation according to which the storm is a divine punishment for human sins.

Part 3, entitled “Character and Form,”, opens with two essays by Benjamin Pauley and Maximillian Novak. Both focus their essays on the neglected Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, thus contributing to correct the distortion of the Defoe canon perpetrated by the grand narrative of literary history. If The Farther Adventures are considered as part and parcel of Robinson Crusoe, then it is a “stranger and messier book”, says Pauley (152). The process of making the two sequels of Robinson Crusoe invisible in the Defoe canon is nevertheless a distortion that needed reconsideration and these two essays are important to reconsider the reception of Defoe’s work and to understand better the link between Defoe’s fiction and his economic thoughts. Pauley contradicts the belief that Robinson Crusoe, published in the century in which the individual rose, is a celebration of individualism: on the contrary, the inclusion of the Farther Adventures in our reading of Robinson Crusoe makes it clear that Crusoe’s greed and individualism are problematic and not valued. Maximillian Novak similarly corrects another hermeneutic mistake that consists in making the confusion between Defoe (author) and Crusoe (character), articulating his development around the concern with justice.

Finally, one of the volume’s editors, Andreas Mueller, concludes by coming back to Robinson Crusoe’s resonance due to its mythical nature and iconicity, through an analysis of what he calls “the Crusoe phenomenon” (183): he examines how Robinson Crusoe was transformed into products in popular culture, how the reference to the name is used with “commercial purposes” (198) in tourism but also in the video game industry or even in the conception of a note-taking software.

From its title onwards, the second collection of essays, edited by Jakub Lipski, makes it clear that it will exclusively focus on Robinsonades, which is the main difference from the volume edited by Mueller and Ridley. Rewriting Crusoe: The Robinsonade across Languages, Cultures and Media (2020) is anchored in a transnational and transmedial perspective from the introduction onwards, in which Lipski describes the genre of the Robinsonade, which is presented as a “global phenomenon” (1), a “genre in a constant state of becoming” (ibid.), “a project for permanent rewriting” (as Robert Mayer says in the Foreword x), as there are dozens of new literary works, plays, television programs, virtual reality games, and movies derived from the Crusoe story every year.

Lipski’s will to try to define the undefinable is first tackled by Rivka Swenson and Patrick Gill in Part 1, entitled “Exploring and Transcending the Genre.” Swenson’s essay goes back to an early example of the genre; Gill’s essay, on twentieth- and twenty-first-century fictions, articulates the “Robinsonade microgenre’s poetics” (9) and the “postmodern Robinsonade’s poetics” (24). It is refreshing not to start a volume on Robinsonades with a contemporary reappropriation of the myth, but with a Robinsonade of the eighteenth century, published in the immediate aftermath of Robinson Crusoe, The Hermit by Peter Longueville (1707), that is a very interesting read in itself and also one of the first Robinsonades.⁵ In her essay, Swenson analyses the sensory descriptive poetics of The Hermit’s version of Crusoe’s island in combination with reflections stemming from the burgeoning field of literature and food studies, and she shows how metafictional the genre is. In the second essay, Patrick Gill summons three postmodern Robinsonades by Muriel Spark (Robinson, 1958), J. M. Coetzee (Foe, 1986), and Yann Martel (Life of Pi, 2001), analysing the nature of the transformation through “counterfactuals” or “imagined realities” (23). Part 1 is very efficient in coming back to the origins of the Robinsonade genre in order to explore the extent of its formal transformations throughout centuries.

After the diachronic exploration of Part 1, the second part of the volume, entitled “National Contexts,” adopts a transnational approach that “transcends languages and geographical boundaries” (1) and that underlines the plasticity of the genre of the Robinsonade as it adapts to different contexts. In Chapter 3, Przemysław Uściński engages with the ambivalence of The Female American (published anonymously in 1767), which features a half “Indian,” half English woman marooned on an American island, and which has imperial and colonial undertones despite a potential for progressive ideology through the figure of a biracial female Crusoe. In Chapter 4, Jakub Lipski tackles the early reception of Robinson Crusoe in Poland as well as the important roles played by translators and publishers, and considers against this background the emergence of the Polish Robinsonade, including a discussion of Ignacy Krasicki’s The Adventures of Mr. Nicolas Wisdom (1776) that Lipski calls a “quasi-Robinsonade” (53) because it is a utopian narrative.

Chapter 5 echoes Geoffrey Sill’s essay in the 2021 collection, as Frederick Burwick explores the theatrical Robinsonade in London and the staging of Robinson Crusoe in an abolitionist harlequinade also analysed by Sill: Robinson Crusoe, or Harlequin Friday (1781) by R. Sheridan. Burwick insists on the satirical engagement with political issues at stake in the Crusoe plays he studies and on the anti-racist and anti-colonial dimension of Sheridan’s and Pocock’s theatrical Robinsonades. The subversive power of the genre is also perceptible in the reactions to the imperial Robinsonade in postcolonial readings that convey an anticolonial resistance, in what Márta Pellérdi calls “Counter-Robinsonades” in the title of her essay on the subversive potential of R. L. Stevenson’s Kidnapped (1886) that deconstructs “the Defoevian representation of the Others as ‘savages’” (4).

As with the collection edited by Mueller and Ridley, Lipski manages to gather contributions on very timely perspectives in order to account for the timeless impact of Robinson Crusoe. Part 3 offers two “Ecocritical Readings,” one of which is reminiscent of Chow’s chapter in the other collection. Indeed, it is difficult to talk about contemporary Robinsonades without mentioning their engagement with ecocriticism and post-humanism, and the role of the Robinsonade and literature in awakening people’s consciences. In Chapter 7, Lora E. Gueriguis comes back to the motif of the storm, and more generally climate, in Robinson Crusoe and many Robinsonades, thus forming a “three-hundred-year record of human apprehension and scientific perception of the environment” (95); she analyses a diachronic and transmedial corpus of three Robinsonades (a novel, The Female American 1767, and two movies, Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe 1997 and Cast Away 2000). In Chapter 8, Krysztof Skonieczny studies how, in Michel Tournier’s Vendredi ou Les Limbes du Pacifique (1967), Robinson no longer sees the island as an object to be colonized but as a person, an empowered subject, and how his “Becoming-Earth” (117) underlines a form of continuity between man and Earth. Ecocritical and posthuman perspectives “create a chance to rethink our relationship to Earth” (130-131), and this brings back to the genre of the Robinsonade that adjusts itself to different social, environmental and political contexts, thus connecting itself to “the Present Condition,” which is the object of the fourth part of the volume.

Part 4 ends with two essays that insist on the enduring relevance of Robinsonades. Jennifer Preston Wilson discusses the alienation of the contemporary worker in the “extreme and life-dominating work environments” (137) in three movies (Cast Away, Moon, and The Martian). Ian Kinane revisits a television Robinsonade that was very successful in the 1960s (Gilligan’s Island CBS, 1964-1967) by comparing it with another Robinsonade that was based on it, Tom Carson’s postmodernist novel Gilligan’s Wake (2003), and he examines the transmedial relationships between these two Robinsonades and Defoe’s 1719 novel in what looks like a mise en abyme of rewriting, focusing on the ways in which literary and popular culture combine to create a “complex web of shared cultural memories” (163). That mise en abyme is repeated in the title of Daniel Cook’s coda, “Rewriting Robinsonades,” that summons the idea of a never-ending process of transformation and of texts feeding on themselves, sometimes loosely connected with Defoe’s original novel.

These two tercentenary publications offer an incredible diversity of theoretical and critical standpoints on Robinson Crusoe and its afterlives, and while they sometimes intersect, they are never redundant. The richness and excellence of the contributions, along with the fresh interpretations of a three-hundred-year novel, prove – if proof was needed – the enduring and always renewed interest in this universal myth of Robinson Crusoe.

Emmanuelle Peraldo, Université Côte D’Azur

Notes

¹ The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of York, Mariner (25 April 1719), The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1719) and The Serious Reflections of Robinson Crusoe (1720).

² Didactics and the Modern Robinsonade (ed. Ian Kinane), 300 years of Robinsonades (ed. Emmanuelle Peraldo, Robinson Crusoe: a Gazeteer, (2019) (a special issue of Etudes anglaises), as well as the two collections of essays under scrutiny in this review.

³ See Ian Watt (1951), “Robinson Crusoe as Myth,” 95.

⁴ He borrows this expression from Stacy Alaimo’s “States of Suspension: Transcorporeality at Sea” (476).

⁵ Some critics argue that there were Robinsonades before Robinson Crusoe, meaning that even if they predate Defoe’s novel, they contain elements belonging to that genre. Françoise Dupeyron-Lafay, for instance, sees Neville’s The Isle of Pines (1668) as a matrix for Robinsonades and island narratives; Emanuele Arioli argues that a thirteenth-century Arthurian romance – Segurant, or the Knight of the Dragon – is a proto-Robinsonade; and Beatrice Durand discusses Hayy bin Yaqzan, an allegorical novel by Ibn Tufayl (1105-1185 AD), as one of the probable sources of Robinson Crusoe. These essays are all in Part 1 of 300 Years of Robinsonades.

Works Cited

Alaimo, Stacy. “States of Suspension: Transcorporeality at Sea.” Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment 19.3 (2010): 476-93.

Kinane, Ian (Ed). Didactics and the Modern Robinsonade. Liverpool UP, 2010.

Peraldo, Emmanuelle (Ed). 300 years of Robinsonades. Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2020.

“Robinson Crusoe”: a Gazeteer. Special Issue, Etudes anglaises 72.2: 2019.

Watt, Ian. “Robinson Crusoe as Myth.” Essays in Criticism: A Quarterly Journal of Literary Criticism (1951): 95-119.

Vanity Fair and the Celestial City: Dissenting, Methodist, and Evangelical Literary Culture in England, 1720–1800, by Isabel Rivers

Reviewed by Nicholas Seager

Isabel Rivers’s Vanity Fair and the Celestial City addresses the production, dissemination, and reception of religious literature among Protestant Dissenters, Methodists, and Church of England Evangelicals in the period 1720 to 1800. In this era, theological writings constituted by far the largest category of published books. Rivers establishes which were the most popular and influential works among these religious groups, also drawing reliable and significant conclusions about who read the books, why, and how. The Bunyan allusion in Rivers’s title invokes the paradox that books which promote the eschewal of worldliness were made possible by the commercialization of the book trade: the journey to the Celestial City was enabled, not jeopardized, by passing through Vanity Fair. Dissenters, Methodists, and Evangelicals saw the writing, editing, publishing, and distribution of books as a crucial means of promulgating Christian belief and practice; but there was money to be made, too. Vanity Fair and the Celestial City is a thorough and authoritative study which does full justice to “the remarkable wealth and complexity of the literary culture it defines and celebrates” (6).

The first of three sections, “Books and their Readers,” surveys the principal publishers among Dissenters, Methodists, and Evangelicals: this includes those who published for particular denominations, sometimes in provincial towns and probably with “godly” motivations in the main; and it extends to larger, metropolitan enterprises with apparently more commercial objectives (10). There are startling data points in this account, such as the fact that, along with his brother Charles, John Wesley was “responsible during his writing and publishing career of almost sixty years for about 450 works by himself and others that appeared in about 2,000 different editions” (14). Several denominational groups besides the Methodists were prolific publishers and distributors of books. Rivers attends to the number and sizes of editions (often the best proxy for readership), formats, and prices. She describes six institutions which disseminated religious writings as widely as possible, including the S.P.C.K. and Religious Tract Society, and details what we know about readers’ access to books through libraries and private collections.

From the voluminous literature Rivers describes, she extracts the theory and practice of “godly reading,” picking up where Andrew Cambers leaves off in his 2011 study of this topic in the early modern period. Rivers explains what people were advised to read, how, when, and where, as well as guidance tailored to lay, ministerial, male, and female readers. This section makes important contributions to the history of reading, such as Rivers’s exploration of Watts’s The Improvement of the Mind (1741), in which he urged readers of religious works to progress from a cursory to a studious reading before forming reading groups for the purpose of critiquing and debating the text under discussion. In Watts’s advice, annotation, abridgement, excerption, indexing, and memorization should follow, as he counsels readers to attend to “a limited number of books with care and meditation” (77). Wesley also promoted a balance between “reading too little and too much,” to steer between the dangers of “superficial knowledge and a dangerous thirst for books” (82–83). Wesley’s “Directions How to Read This and Other Religious Books with Benefit and Improvement,” an appendix to his abridgement of Norris’s Treatise on Christian Improvement (1734), impressed the need for “purity of intention,” a receptiveness to instruction and understanding, encouraging slow reading as the best method. Turning from the advice given by authors to accounts left by readers, Rivers’s evidence is necessarily anecdotal and partial, as must be all accounts of historical reading practices, but she rightly stresses that the imperatives of profit and pleasure guided lay and ministerial readers (117).

The second section, “Sources,” establishes which writers were the “most frequently recommended, edited, published, read and cited” in Dissenting, Methodist, and Evangelical circles (121). The most striking aspect of this investigation is how interdenominational the canon was, including non-Evangelical Anglican and Roman Catholic works, as well as nonconformist mainstays such as Owen, Bunyan, and Baxter. In an important section that treats Edwards’s and Brainerd’s publication and reception in England, Rivers outlines the two-way flow of ideas between Britain and America during the Evangelical Revival. This part of the book is rich in detail about how older theological texts were abridged, edited, adapted, or re-packaged for new audiences, whether to improve their reach through simplification or to “improve” their doctrinal propriety or practical efficacy. Medieval Catholic texts such as Kempis’s Imitatione were predictably pruned, but Watt’s works were altered by Unitarians to downplay the hymnist’s Trinitarianism, and Wesley’s abridgement of The Pilgrim’s Progress made that Calvinist work more palatable to Arminian Protestants.

The third section, “Literary Kinds,” is the largest, constituting about half of the book. In it, Rivers details the major genres produced and consumed, headed by scriptural guides which aided biblical interpretation, prominently Doddridge’s Family Expositor (1739–56), Wesley’s Explanatory Notes upon the New Testament (1755), and Thomas Scott’s annotated edition of the Bible (1788–92). She indicates the wide variety of approaches in annotators and editors, which amounted to “adaptation and exploitation” (219) as well as straightforward exposition, and facilitated in readers not just active interpretation but literary appreciation of scripture. The other major practical genres were sermons and devotional handbooks such as Law’s A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life (1729), which were hortatory and often communal in the sense that they encouraged collective reading.

Rivers’s excellent chapter on published lives, letters, and diaries emphasizes the exemplary functions of these genres, what John Kendall, the Quaker editor of a collection of biographies, Piety Promoted (1789), described as “the promotion of piety and virtue [to] excite others to follow their example” (278). Eighteenth-century Dissenting, Methodist, and Evangelical life-writing continued Restoration nonconformist traditions in this genre, though there were significant developments. These include the greater prevalence of biographies by and of women, dissemination of lives through religious magazines, and increased publication of “raw” (though in truth selected and edited) private documents like letters, diaries, and journals. The publication of these modes came with qualms among some, like Josiah Pratt, who feared the propagation of self-deception, hypocrisy, and “formality,” however much he valued diurnal writing to the self as a way to promote humility and vigilance (310). Regardless, the private writings of religious leaders like Whitefield and Wesley, of ministers, and of laypeople were enormously popular.

The final chapter contends that “religious verse in a wide variety of forms was arguably the most valued component, after the Bible, of the literary culture of dissenters, Methodists, and evangelicals” (338). This was down to poetry’s reach and ability to move readers, an imperative explored so expertly in Rivers’s earlier study in two volumes, Reason, Grace, and Sentiment: A Study of the Language of Religion and Ethics in England, 1660–1780 (1991, 2000). Rivers accounts for the publication and editing of major poets such as Milton, Pope, Young, and Elizabeth Singer Rowe, as well as describing prominent collections of hymns, which she powerfully argues should not be regarded separately from other verse. Her striking claim is that religious literature “transcended” divisions between parties within the Church of England, and divisions between dissenting denominations and the Church (389). That is to say that readers found profit and delight in works they knew to be by Christians of a different persuasion to themselves.

Rivers’s book will transform how literary scholars, religious historians, and book historians approach eighteenth-century culture. It invites comparison in terms of methods and materials with N. H. Keeble’s The Literary Culture of Nonconformity in Later Seventeenth-Century England (1987), a study with a greater sense of the purely literary quality of the writings produced by Dissenters in the wake of the Great Ejection. Enabled by digital resources such as the ESTC and ECCO, Rivers is far less focused than Keeble on aesthetics or even the finer points of religious belief or responses to particular historical events; she is more concerned with the business of books and what they meant to their original producers and readers.

Nicholas Seager, Keele University

Works Cited

Cambers, Andrew. Godly Reading: Print, Manuscript and Puritanism in England, 1580–1720. Cambridge UP, 2011.

Keeble, N. H. The Literary Culture of Nonconformity in Later Seventeenth-Century England. Leicester UP, 1987.

Rivers, Isabel. Reason, Grace, and Sentiment: A Study of the Language of Religion and Ethics in England, 1660–1780. Vol. 1: Whichcote to Wesley. Cambridge UP, 1991.

– – – . Reason, Grace, and Sentiment: A Study of the Language of Religion and Ethics in England, 1660–1780. Vol. 2: Shaftesbury to Hume. Cambridge UP, 2000.

Parroting Solitude: The Alienated Voice in Julio Cortázar’s “Adíos Robinson”

Peter DeGabriele

Abstract: This article argues that Argentine author Julio Cortázar’s Adios, Robinson, a radio play written in the late 1970s, takes up the theme of solitude from Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe by focusing on mechanical repetitions of the human voice. On Defoe’s island, the human voice was ‘recorded’ and repeated by Robinson’s parrot, and the parrot’s voice produced in Robinson a sense of alienation. Cortázar’s play narrates Robinson’s and Friday’s return to his now modernized island in the 20^th century. Both the form of the radio play itself, and various modern apparatuses, such as loudspeakers, radios, and telephones detach the human voice from its point of origin and produce for Cortázar’s Robinson a sense of profound alienation, even in the middle of a modern city. This alienation, the article argues, is related in Cortázar’s play to the capitalist colonialism which Robinson represents. The play demonstrates that this world produces solitude and argues that Defoe’s novel Robinson Crusoe is the herald of this capitalist modernity. Robinson’s loneliness on his return to the island is contrasted with Friday’s profoundly social experience. Friday immediately makes a connection with the indigenous population on the island and enjoys the city without Robinson. Friday, however, does not return to nature, but instead is able to make the most of the culture of modernity without being absorbed by its alienating effects. When Friday quotes Defoe’s parrot at the end of the play, saying “Poor Robinson Crusoe,” he emphasizes that what Robinson hears from the other is always only his own voice repeated back to him. He is thus unable to exist in a future world in which the colonialist masters of “dirt and smoke” will find themselves lonely and powerless. Cortázar thus produces a Robinsonade that looks to a future without Robinsons.

Keywords: Defoe, Daniel; Robinson Crusoe; Cortázar, Julio; Adíos, Robinson; parrots in literature; solitude

Julio Cortázar’s radio play “Adíos, Robinson” ends with Friday twice quoting the parrot from Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. Friday, speaking to a Robinson who is disillusioned and depressed after returning to his island in the late twentieth century, calls him “poor Robinson Crusoe,” repeating the message that Robinson first heard from his parrot after he woke up in his ‘country seat’ (Cortázar, 190).¹ In this famous scene from the novel an exhausted Robinson is woken from sleep by a voice calling out “Poor Robin Crusoe” (Defoe, 104).² The parrot startles Robinson and disorients him as he cannot account for the presence of what seems to be human speech on his deserted island, and it is only when he recognizes his parrot Poll that he begins to calm down. Even beyond speech itself, however, what Crusoe finds startling is that the parrot speaks his own name and uses his own words. Robinson finds it arresting to hear back his own message but from an external voice. The parrot is like a recording device, preserving Robinson’s words and having the capacity to repeat them in a different context. It is a strange feature of Defoe’s text that his island would include this kind of device capable of recording human speech and repeating it in an alienated form, and it is precisely this aspect of the novel that “Adíos, Robinson” develops. The play’s use of various forms of disembodied voices ultimately shows the voice to be an index of solitude, and it demonstrates that solitude is not the opposite of the social, but a modality of modern society, perhaps even its secret center.

Julio Cortázar, as well as being one of the major Latin American novelists of the twentieth century, is also the translator of Robinson Crusoe into Spanish. His translation forms the basis of the widely available Penguin edition of the novel in Spanish, and he is thus an author with a close connection to Defoe. “Adíos, Robinson” is his most explicit creative engagement with Defoe’s work. Saúl Yurkievich estimates it was written between 1975 and 1980 and it was first published posthumously in 1984, along with another theatrical piece “Nada a Pehuajó” (226-227).³ To my knowledge there is no published English translation of this work, although it was performed in 2020 by La Lengua Theater in San Francisco, a production which included English subtitles.⁴ Even within studies of Cortázar it counts as a relatively minor piece. It has not received, then, a great deal of critical attention, either by scholars of Cortázar, or by those interested in Robinsonades, though there are of course exceptions.⁵

All this is to say that “Adíos, Robinson” is not a canonical text either within Latin American literary studies, nor in the broader world of Defoe studies. However, its interest for scholars of Defoe should not be underestimated, especially because the form of the work, the fact that it is a play to be performed on the radio, makes it an unusual kind of Robinsonade.⁶ This formal innovation allows us to see in a new light some of the ways Defoe’s own prose, for all its commitment to writing and the written word, relies on specific effects of voice.⁷ Cortázar, for his part, picks up on the importance of the voice in Defoe’s novel by using the form of the radio play, which necessarily consists of recorded, disembodied voices which are detachable from their immediate point of production. If this is a given of the form of the radio play, Cortázar also uses disembodied voices within the play itself, with significant parts of the ‘dialogue’ consisting of one-sided phone conversations, announcements over P.A systems, and radio advertisements. Furthermore, while Ricardo Benavides, in an early review of the first publication of “Adiós, Robinson,” dismissed it as not being of the same quality as the prose fiction for which Cortázar is more well-known, Cortázar’s exploitation of the form of the radio play is careful and effective for his rereading of and reevaluation of Defoe’s text. Indeed, although Peter Standish says the play is more interesting than Cortázar’s other theatrical pieces because as a radio play, it “functions more like a text than like theatre,” it is, on the contrary, precisely his exploitation of the form of the radio play which makes the piece worthwhile (443).

“Adíos, Robinson” begins with Robinson and Friday returning to the island in the twentieth century. The island in this text is not only Defoe’s fictional island, but also the Juan Fernandez of Alexander Selkirk. As Daniel Graziadei notes, the island seems to be located not near the mouth of the Orinoco River, as in Defoe’s novel, but in the Juan Fernandez archipelago (which includes an island called the Isla Robinson Crusoe) off the coast of Chile (89). The setting of the play is thus an overdetermined island which combines the actual island of Selkirk’s shipwreck with the fictional island that it inspired. The island is also clearly overdetermined by the colonial and postcolonial history of Europe and Latin America between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries. The Juan Fernandez of Cortázar is a settler colony living under what Rosa Falcón calls “a police state, in a type of colonial dictatorship” (135). There is a clear distinction in the play between those of European descent, like the functionary Nora with whom Robinson becomes infatuated, and the indigenous population such as the chauffeur Platano who Friday discovers is from his own tribe. This is obviously a postcolonial settler nation, however, as we find out early in the play that the government of the island no longer has good relations with Great Britain (indeed diplomatic relations seem icy if not entirely frozen), and it is only Robinson’s status as the author of Robinson Crusoe that makes him even slightly welcome on the island. In this sense, the play is simultaneously about the legacy of European colonialism and the legacy of Defoe’s novel.

Disembodied Voices and Parrots

The disembodied voice is central to Cortázar’s rewriting of Robinson Crusoe and to his examinations of the legacy of colonialism and the alienation fundamental to modern society. To understand Cortázar’s intervention, then, it is worth looking at how critics have interpreted Crusoe’s parrot Poll, the most significant disembodied voice in Robinson Crusoe. Critics of Robinson Crusoe have identified the parrot as radically questioning Robinson’s sense of self. In calling out his name, it asks him to think about his own solitude, and raises questions about the status of animal speech and animal society. For both Eric Jaeger and David Marshall, the parrot is disturbing to Crusoe’s sense of self because its external voice challenges his own self-composition and establishes a dialectic between self and other even when Crusoe is supposedly alone on the island. While for both Jaeger and Marshall, Crusoe is eventually able to overcome the otherness of the parrot’s voice either through the composition of self in language or in recognizing the other as an image of himself, Cortázar’s play maintains the sense of alienation Crusoe initially feels. In “Adíos, Robinson,” the message that Crusoe hears repeated back to him is one that he cannot recognize and cannot identify with. Otherness, in Cortázar’s text, is not reducible back into an image of self.

Importantly, in Cortazár’s play it is not only the speech of the parrot that seems to be empty of subjectivity, but also human speech itself, especially as it is relayed through the technologies of the radio, the loudspeaker, and the telephone. In this sense, the play forces us to look intently at the relation between speech and human society. While for Jaeger and Marshall the speech of the parrot is a limit case that stands between Robinson’s sense of self and his integration into human society, Heather Keenleyside argues that the parrot is an example of the creaturely society that Robinson lives in while he is on the island. She sees the parrot’s speech, (as well as the various other animals with whom Robinson lives on the island including cats, dogs, goats, and other parrots) as offering Robinson a form of society in its own right, not merely a reduced version of human society. She argues that Defoe’s novel “ultimately develops a vision of society that is not grounded wholly in human speech” (82).⁸ The personification of Poll (and other animals), she shows, becomes a model for human society in general, in which humans too need to be personified in order to become, as Keenleyside puts it in a quote from Robinson Crusoe, “’Some-Body to speak to’” (Keenleyside, 58). Keenleyside thus undoes the distinction between creaturely conversation and human society. Personification, she shows, is necessary to produce a social relation but, just as animals such as parrots can be personified, humans also need to be personified before they can count as members of a society. Keenleyside positions Robinson Crusoe as producing a form of society that is not based on the kind of communicative reason explicitly theorized in Locke, in which a shared language and consensual contracts form the basis of society. In this sense, then, Keenleyside expands the potential of the social and allows us to see society as something other than conversation between those who speak fully developed human languages. Cortázar’s radio play allows us to approach Defoe’s parrot from a point of view which is compatible with, and yet distinct from, Keenleyside’s argument about creaturely society. Instead of validating creaturely society and expanding our concept of the social, “Adíos, Robinson” underscores the radical deficiencies in the sociality supposedly provided through human speech and language. If creatures can be personified, the human voice can also be automated, othered, and alienated.

In “Adíos Robinson,” this othering and alienation of the voice is achieved through the way it uses modern recording and telephonic technologies. Some of this sense of the alienation of the human voice, however, already comes across in the way critics of Defoe’s novel have noted the similarities between Friday as a speaking being and the parrot. Friday is consistently compared to the parrot both in the sense that, like the parrot, he is made subservient to Crusoe, but also in the sense that his speech seems conditioned in the way animal speech is supposed to be.⁹ As Bruce Boerher puts it most bluntly, “Poll is a man Friday with feathers” who “foreshadows [Crusoe’s] eventual acquisition of another human underling” (71). Marshall shows that the moments in which Poll and Friday first speak “serve not only as baptisms of the other but also as acts of self-naming…in which Crusoe’s words…are repeated back to himself” (915). The conditioned and replicative form of speech these readings see as characteristic of both Friday and Poll thus undermines speech as an index of selfhood and agency. In “Adíos Robinson” the echoes of the human voice proliferate with the presence of modern recording technologies (reinforced by the form of the radio play itself) and further destabilize the voice as an anchor of agency and selfhood.

This drama of the voice is played out in “Adíos, Robinson,” therefore, through the media of modern technology. Jacques Derrida’s discussion of the parrot scene in Robinson Crusoe gives us some idea of why this is so appropriate. Derrida argues that the parrot’s call to Crusoe is an auto-appellation and auto-interpellation that, despite coming from the outside, from the other, is circular because “it comes from a sort of living mechanism that [Crusoe] has produced, that he assembled himself, like a quasi-technical or prosthetic apparatus, by training the parrot to speak mechanically so as to send his words and his name back to him, repeating them blindly” (86). Robinson thus hears his own voice but in a fundamentally alienated form, alienated enough that he is at first terrified at hearing the parrot and, even when he realizes that it is Poll, remains disturbed for some time. If the parrot is thus formally Robinson’s voice returned in an alienated form, the specific message the parrot gives is one which confirms and reinforces Robinson’s solitude. The parrot asks “poor Robin Crusoe” “Where are you? Where have you been? How come you here?” (104). These questions are disorienting for Robinson both because they refer to his immediate situation in having just found his way to his country seat after having been lost in his explorations of the island, and to his moral and existential situation as a castaway who blames his fate on his own moral turpitude. Importantly, then, solitude is not entirely an effect of silence, of having no one to speak to or hearing no voices. Solitude is an effect of having one’s own voice echoed back to you in an alien form, of receiving from the other the message that one is all alone. As Nora in “Adíos, Robinson” puts it, it is the experience of meeting “in the hotel lobby for a useless and recurrent drink and to see our own sadness in the eyes of the other” (184). What Cortázar takes from Defoe, then, is not the potential of producing a society without the necessity of a fully communicative human language, but of the radical solitude of modern human society itself. The index of this solitude is not silence, but the disembodied or automated voice who repeats one’s own message in a form one no longer understands.

The Voice in “Adíos Robinson”

While in the example above Nora uses a visual metaphor to explore solitude, the play is more specifically concerned with the effect of the voice as an index of solitude. “Adíos, Robinson” opens with Robinson and Friday in an airplane about to touch down on Juan Fernandez. Robinson is giddy with excitement to return to the island in the twentieth century, noting with astonished glee the “skyscraper of 24…no wait, 32 floors” where his bower used to be (166). He is also proud and fascinated by the cities and oil wells that cover “the forests and plains that I wandered over in my solitude” (167). Friday, on the other hand, is more skeptical about this return. He questions why Crusoe wanted to come back at all, and counters Robinson’s enthusiasm by saying that he knows exactly what he will find on Juan Fernandez because, after all, he has TV, cinema, and National Geographic magazine to tell him all he needs to know about the island. At the beginning of the text Robinson still positions himself as the subject of knowledge, saying to Friday that the joy of seeing the “dreams of progress and civilization” are simply not available to “Indians like you” (167). Robinson, here, is the confident colonialist who is sure he understands progress better than Friday.

Even at this early stage of the play, however, Robinson’s mastery is called into question. Importantly, this questioning comes by way of an involuntary vocal tic which Friday has developed. This tic, in which Friday involuntarily laughs every time he calls Crusoe “master,” detaches Friday’s consciousness from his voice, alienating the voice from its condition of enunciation in a way similar to that of Defoe’s parrot. Like the parrot, Friday seems not to mean anything by this laugh. However, in this case, rather than being an index of servitude, Friday’s similarity to the parrot works to challenge Crusoe’s mastery. Robinson, for his part, is irked by this habit, saying to Friday, “Tell me, why do you laugh every time you address me? You didn’t used to do it, not to mention that I wouldn’t have allowed it, but since a little while ago… Could you let me know what’s so funny about me being your master, the man who saved you from an atrocious destiny, and taught you to live like a civilized being?” (166). Friday himself is disturbed by this recent change, saying to Robinson that indeed “there is nothing funny about it” (166). Friday thus signals that there is no intention of critique and his voice is detached from his own enunciating consciousness.

Friday, we discover, has been examined by “two psychoanalysts, a Freudian and a Jungian” as well as by “an eminent ‘ant-psychiatrist,’ who, by the by, was the only one who accepted without doubts that I was Friday, from your book” (166). In consulting psychoanalysts Friday goes to the latest Western experts on the relation between voice and consciousness. Psychoanalysis is both a therapy that relies on the presence of the human voice, and a method of interpreting the voice that insists that the subject can speak things of which he or she is not conscious. While certainly an ironic stab at psychoanalysis by Cortázar, Friday seems to have some faith in this new science, as he informs Robinson that although he is awaiting confirmation from a lab in Dallas which is processing the results, Jacques Lacan has informed him that it is probably a nervous tic. Friday’s critique of colonialist modernity at this stage of the play does not go much further than this involuntary laugh, and it is still to Europe and the United States that he looks for expert clarification of his situation. If the colonialist West and its civilizing mission is called into question with this laughter at the word master, its intellectuals, its psychoanalytic masters of the voice, seem also to be those with the knowledge to solve, or at least explain, the problem.

The disruption of Friday’s voice thus hints at undermining the authority of colonialist modernity, even if it is then reabsorbed into a system of Western expertise. Upon landing in Juan Fernandez, the unfailing confidence which Robinson has in Western progress is represented again by a disembodied voice. Robinson is highly impressed by the airport P.A, which organizes passengers into corridors marked with different colored arrows based upon their points of departure and final destinations. He admires the efficiency of this machine-like system for organizing people which he says has “eliminated the possibility of error,” and feels honored when he is excepted from this categorization and ushered alone (without Friday) through a door marked “official” (169). Robinson enjoys both the progress of Western civilization, represented by the way a disembodied voice organizes bodies, and his seeming exception from this system of organization.

It is only when he meets Nora, a white government functionary (who is also the wife of the sub-prefect of police) who has been charged to take care of Robinson during his visit, that Robinson begins to become slightly disillusioned with the island. In conversation with Nora, Robinson begins to understand that, because of political tensions between Juan Fernandez and Great Britain, he is not entirely welcome on the island. He is told that the government prefers that he is “distanced” as much as possible from the populace and, far from being able to explore the island, he will have his time regimented (even automated) by an official itinerary (171). He is to be prevented from having “useless” contacts with people in the streets and will be housed in an “isolated” hotel room with its own private elevator (171). Nora tells him that the government always “has some rooms prepared for distinguished guests in order to minimize unnecessary contacts” (171). Robinson’s experience of separation and solitude on the island is thus first announced and performed by the disembodied voice of the airport P.A, and then confirmed in the ‘socially distanced’ itinerary he will have to follow. What Robinson saw as the progress of civilization leads in fact to radical social isolation.

At the same time as this separation is announced, however, Robinson also develops a strong connection with the functionary Nora. In particular, he conceives a desire to speak with her, and she confirms that if it were up to her, she would “very much like to speak to [Robinson] again” (173). The promise of speech, of a face-to-face conversation in a situation not mediated by her position both as functionary and as the wife of the sub-prefect of police, excites Robinson. He feels that Nora understands him, in part because she has both read and reflected on his book. She tells him that “Of course, I know your book. It’s a book everyone here has read. Sometimes I ask why, as it is already about a very different Juan Fernandez. Unless…” (173). Robinson jumps on this conversational bait, replying “unless it is perhaps not so different?” (173). While this conversation goes no further, as Nora retreats into her official persona, what Robinson recognizes in Nora is the possibility that there is still solitude on Juan Fernandez despite the skyscrapers, “the highways, the yachts in the jetty” (173). Between Robinson and Nora, the first and latest representatives of colonialist modernity there is the promise of a conversation based upon the shared experience of solitude.

If Robinson’s introduction to the island is one of distance and alienation with only the promise of a future conversation, Friday fares differently. While he is waiting for Robinson and collecting their luggage, he meets their assigned driver Platano. Friday discovers that he and Platano belong to the same tribe (distinguished by the length of their thumbs), and they form an immediate bond. Indeed, Friday has been able to make friends so quickly in part because (unlike Robinson) “no one pays much attention to” him and he is able to do more or less as he pleases (174). He has, in fact, organized with Platano to go out drinking and chasing girls in the evening.

Robinson’s experience on the island continues to be punctuated by disembodied voices. On the car ride to the hotel, the stage directions ask that stupid music and equally stupid advertisements are played, and when Robinson arrives at the hotel there are the sounds of a hotel lobby, including muzak and the P.A system calling a guest (174). These disembodied voices of capitalist modernity thus form Robinson’s experience of the island. Furthermore, the play figures Robinson’s relation to other people as based on disembodied or alienated voices. Initially, Friday tells Robinson to speak freely in front of their driver Platano because Friday thinks Platano does not understand English. He and Platano have been conversing in their native language, which Robinson of course never bothered to learn. It soon becomes apparent, though, that, while he may not speak English, he at least understands it. When Robinson asks Friday about what kind of schedule he will have on the island, Platano is able to enter their conversation and confirm for Friday (in the native language they share) that Robinson will have an itinerary waiting for him at the hotel which will regiment his visit. Robinson thus gets an answer to his question that confirms the automatization of Robinson’s own time, taking away his freedom of movement and choice. This answer comes not in English, but in a language that Robinson cannot understand and is only relayed to him via Friday’s translation. Friday, for his part, laughs, saying of Platano, “that sneaky bastard hasn’t lost a word, and there was me thinking he didn’t know English…You English have done things well master, this language of yours is spoken by everyone everywhere, even by the seals in Antarctica” (175). What is significant here is both the sense that Robinson has his question relayed back to him in the voice and language of an other, and also that the speaking of English is figured, by Friday, as extended not only to the ends of the Earth, but even to animals.

Robinson’s success, as an Englishman, in the colonial spreading of the English language is here returned to him in the itinerary of soulless solitude that constitutes an official visit to a modern city. Robinson is sentenced to the experience of a late modern capitalist solitude, the kind of experience his own early modern capitalist colonialism initiated. He receives back his own call in the voice of the other. While this sentence is voiced by Platano, Friday’s joke that even the seals could have understood Robinson’s question and relayed him an answer recalls the parrot in Robinson Crusoe. In Keenleyside’s reading of Defoe’s novel, the concept of society is extended to include animals who form a creaturely society in which Crusoe participates. In Cortázar’s play, by contrast, even the animal is drawn into the colonialism, solitude, and automatization of human modernity.

Late Modern Solitude

The play’s treatment of the alienating nature of capitalist modernity comes out most clearly through Robinson’s continuing relation with Nora. Once he is ensconced in his hotel, and has complained that the official program of tours he is expected to go through is “interminable and boring,” he receives a phone call from Nora (176). We hear only Crusoe’s side of the conversation, giving the sense of an alienated connection. This is heightened when Robinson’s eager exclamation that he will wait for Nora below for her to pick him up is followed by his disappointment that it will not be her who takes him on the tour but “another functionary” (177). Nora, here, seems replaceable as any one functionary would be for another, and Robinson must be content with the mediated and distant telephone conversation in place of the personal connection he hoped for. The meeting with Nora remains a disappointed hope that disillusions Robinson, and causes him to lapse into melancholy.

After his arduous first day of tours (during which Friday was living the life with Platano) Robinson is unable to sleep. Friday reminds him that before, in his bower on a deserted island he always slept well, even if the solitude (before Friday’s arrival) must have weighed on him. Robinson replies that “Yes, it was hard to live alone on the island…but I’m beginning to think there are worse solitudes than simply being alone” (179). Indeed, Robinson muses to Friday that despite its 2.5 million inhabitants, the “island is still deserted, much more deserted than when the sea vomited me on to the coast…” (180). Friday’s response that the island is so well populated that the government is working on controlling the birthrate (a specifically modern phenomenon of governmentality) does not convince Robinson, who replies that in Juan Fernandez, just as in London, there are millions of people who do not know each other, “families that are so many other islands” (180). Robinson thus describes his experience of a solitude at the heart of a modern city, and combines it with his own disillusionment, as he tells Friday that “Stupidly I thought…that this could be the place where my solitude from long ago would be replaced by its contrary, by the immense marvel of smiling and talking and being close and doing things together…I thought the book had been worth something, to show people the terror of solitude and the beauty of meeting, of contact” (180-181). While Cortázar’s Robinson saw his book as a warning against solitude and a plea for friendly society, then, the book seems to have been taken in the opposite way, as a description of the centrality of solitude to modernity, even a recommendation of solitude as the modern way of life. Like the English language (understood by not only Platano but even the seals in the Arctic) the book speaks back to Robinson in an alienated form. He hears again his voice as the voice and the message of the other.

The question of the value of the book, of Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, guides the drama of the final part of the play. Robinson himself is proud of the book, saying it “has been read almost as much as the Quixote or The Three Musketeers” (181). The book is the subject of his long awaited but still rushed conversation with Nora. In this meeting, Robinson finds that Nora has come to see him not only because, he says, “you have noticed my disillusionment and sadness, but because you are also disillusioned and sad” (182). As they discuss Robinson’s book Nora tells Robinson that her favorite part is “where you save Friday’s life, and then little by little raise him up from his ignoble condition of cannibal to that of a human being” (183). For her, the value of the book remains the way it describes the colonialist and civilizing mission. It is a message for white people like her and Robinson, and not for those others like Platano and Friday who she describes as people who “think and feel in another manner,” and who “cannot understand us” (182). In her disillusionment, she still places her hope in the progress of a Western, colonialist civilization.

Robinson, however, no longer feels that his saving of Friday can be his favorite part. He tells Nora that what he appreciates now about Friday are what remains of the cannibal in him, the “mental cannibal” or the “interior savage” he qualifies (183). He goes on to explain that it is precisely Friday’s ability to resist the alienation of modernity that he now admires in him, his ability to “only [accept] from our technology the things that entertain or interest [him], the juke boxes, canned beer, and TV shows” (184). He thus begins to see in Friday the possibility of a technological modernity without alienation, a form of life which is neither that of Friday before contact with European civilization, nor that of European civilization itself. He tells Nora that “Friday has shown me in his way that much of him was still able to escape the system that Juan Fernandez imposed on me” (184). While he and Nora are “meeting, all too briefly, on a common ground of frustration and sadness, Friday and his friend are moving happily through the streets, chatting up girls” (183-184). Robinson sees obscurely a form of modernity to which he has no access.

Responding to Robinson’s rereading of his own book, Nora speculates that perhaps the book has a different ending than the one Robinson gave it, an ending in which it is Friday who would have had to have saved Robinson and Nora from their own solitude. Nora, like Robinson, acknowledges the alienation and depression caused by the homogeneous spaces of modernity, the hotel lobbies, skyscrapers, museums, and airports that give no joy or contact with life. Importantly, though, she sees the book as potentially saving her and Robinson, and the rest of Western modernity, by having an ending different to the one which Robinson wrote. The idea that the book Robinson Crusoe could have a different ending than that given it by Robinson/ Defoe emphasizes that the book is itself, as Derrida notes, a “prosthetic apparatus” that speaks “of Robinson Crusoe without him” (87). In this sense, Robinson’s book too speaks to him as an alienated voice, returning to him a message not quite his own and one which repeats and confirms his solitude. Far from confirming his self-composition, as in Jager’s reading, the book decomposes Robinson, with Cortázar’s metafictional Robinson no longer recognizing himself in the book.

Nora’s own reading of the book, however, still takes the kind of colonial form which Robinson could recognize. In her reading, the savage Friday saves the colonialist, leaving the trope of salvation intact, as well as the dichotomy between savage and civilized. Robinson, however, intuits that the ending of the book is different, and significantly more alienated from his own perspective. He himself can only express it in his own colonialist language, saying to Nora that he is “too civilized to accept that people like Friday…can do something for me other than serve me” (184). Robinson, in this sense, refuses the idea that he could be saved by Friday, that Friday could have an agency that could change Robinson or teach him. While this language is clearly colonialist, what it speaks unconsciously and unwittingly is Robinson’s own unteachability, of the impossibility of salvation because of the inability of the colonizer to hear or understand what an indigenous subject may have to say. In this instance, Robinson’s own voice is alienated from him even at the moment of enunciation. He cannot hear or understand the very message that he speaks.

At the end of the radio play, however, Friday speaks more clearly and relays Robinson’s message in a more radical and direct way. As they leave Juan Fernandez, in a scene again punctuated by the voice of the airport’s P.A system, Friday and Robinson reflect on their experience on the island. Robinson tells Friday that up until now he had seen his civilizing mission as good, that he “imagined [Friday] identifying with our way of life, until we arrived here again, and you began to have this nervous tic…at least that’s what you call it” (186-187). Robinson returns to Friday’s involuntary vocal tic, and Friday, in his response again laughs when he calls Robinson master. Moving beyond this involuntary insubordination, however, Friday addresses Robinson by his first name, telling him that “it is true Robinson,” that many things changed upon their arrival on Juan Fernandez, but that “it is nothing next to what is going to change” (187). Friday here begins to speak in something like his own voice, demonstrating his release from Robinson’s mastery more directly and challenging Robinson’s control over the future, over the change that is coming. Echoing Defoe’s parrot, Friday addresses Robinson as “poor Robinson Crusoe” and tells him that “You had to return here with me to discover that among millions of men and women you are just as alone as you were when you shipwrecked on the island” (188). Robinson now hears the message of his own solitude doubly echoed, in the voice of a Friday who is no longer his man, and in the voice of the parrot. These voices that always seemed to be Robinson’s own voices are released from his control, and in the process they speak back to him the message of his own book, but in a form that he could never understand or articulate for himself.

Friday forces Robinson to acknowledge that beyond the restrictions placed upon him by the government, his alienation on Juan Fernandez was due to his own alienation from humanity. Friday assures him that even if the government had not isolated Robinson from the people of Juan Fernandez, the people would have done it themselves, “would have smiled at you in a friendly way and nothing more” (189). Friday tells Robinson, again quoting the parrot, that “It is too late for you, I’m afraid. On Juan Fernandez there is no place for you and yours, poor Robinson Crusoe, poor Alexander Selkirk, poor Daniel Defoe, there is no place for the shipwrecked of history, for the masters of dirt and smoke, for the inheritors of nothing” (190). Friday thus quotes the parrot’s “poor Robinson Crusoe,” adding all the other colonialist writers and explorers to the list, as the truth of the book. The parrot has the last word, echoed through Friday, and, in between boarding calls for his return to London, Robinson thus has the message of his book returned to him as one in which he is not the mythical hero of a progressive and civilized future, but the relic of a past isolated from the present, from presence, and from others.

The play ends with Friday finally disparaging Robinson and castigating him for never having learned his true name. Instead of reclaiming his name, however, Friday claims the name of Juan Fernandez, which he explains to Robinson is like the name John Smith in English, or Jean Dupont in French. It is thus the name of an everyman with whom Friday can connect, but with whom Robinson cannot. Peter Standish suggests Cortázar’s own ambivalence here, arguing that he identifies as much with Robinson as Friday, unable, as a highly cultivated intellectual to communicate with “the man on the street” (443). Francisco Emilio de la Guerra also sees Cortázar as part Robinson, part Friday here. Both these readings suggest a further alienation of voice, as Cortázar himself routes his own voice through two opposed fictional characters from another author’s work. This may help explain why Friday does not reconnect with an authentic voice and name of his own, but instead finds his subversive power and his future in the voice of the parrot.

It is not, however, through making the animal into a speaking agent that this radio play functions, but in making the parrot represent a kind of collective power which solitary individualists such as Robinson cannot understand. Friday says that he and Platano, and all the others that recognize each other in a way Robinson never will, are continuing forward into a future that is unknown. The only thing certain, Friday says, is that “we are going to firm ground, we say we want to leave behind forever these islands of Robinsons, the solitary pieces of your world” (190). De la Guerra sees the optimism of this ending as a reflection of Cortázar’s optimism about the “recent triumph of the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua” (201), and this enthusiasm for the socialist and collectivist revolutionary movement would certainly contrast with the solitude Cortázar associates with Western capitalist modernity. As Robinson listens to the disembodied voice of the airport P.A telling all passengers heading to London to board quickly with their vaccination cards in hand, Friday tells him to hurry up because “Planes don’t wait, Robinson, planes don’t wait!” (190). Robinson is thus left behind by the technological modernity he helped to herald, alienated from the world that is of his own making, and unable to keep up with the new world of Friday, Platano, and all those like them.

An Adíos without a God

“Adíos, Robinson” thus ends with the projection of an exciting and uncertain future and refuses the narrative of salvation that is part of Defoe’s novel. In doing so, the play participates in a tradition of postcolonial Robinsonades which challenge the ideological thrust of Defoe’s novel, as well as that of many of the Robinsonades of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Ian Kinane notes that the island in early Robinsonades is often a place where Europeans imagined they could find redemption (13), and Andrew O’Malley argues that the Robinsonade has long been “implicated in…the imperialist project” (xiii). By contrast, Anne Marie Fallon demonstrates that “the Crusoe that appears in twentieth century literature is a warning against the dangers of individual isolation and colonial oppression” (2). Furthermore, in her discussion of twentieth-century Robinsonades, Rosa Falcón argues that one of the most significant changes to the story is that Friday appears as “parallel hero” and sometimes “the true protagonist who is full of the wisdom and virtues of archaic cultures unknown to the West” (128). Clearly it is into this latter tradition that Cortázar’s work fits. However, the text’s representation of Friday is complex. His indigeneity is important in the text, but so is his modernity, his ability to take from modernity what suits him and to discard what he does not need. Indeed, much of what he discards involves the question of salvation with which both Nora and Robinson remain occupied. This is why the last scene of the play, which sees Friday associated with the aerial speed of the plane and the future, and not with the terrestrial and the past, is so important. It represents Friday as the future, but as a future which implies uncertainty rather than salvation.

To do as Robinson says Friday does, and to take what one can of civilization and leave the rest, looks more like what Robinson does at the beginning of his stay on the island in Defoe’s novel. He salvages things from the ship to help him survive. What “Adíos, Robinson” points to is the possibility, inherent even in Defoe’s own text, of detaching this question of survival, of taking things one by one and leaving others, from the theme of salvation. If Defoe’s novel tries insistently to order all of Robinson’s daily routines into a grand narrative of salvation, in which all is directed by the voice of Providence, “Adíos, Robinson” notes both the colonialism of this narrative, which ultimately looks to the colonized Other and to the imperialist project for salvation, but also its fundamental failure. The voice of Providence cannot order a world which is full of other voices that arrive from the outside and alienate the subject from him or herself. Importantly, Cortázar draws attention to the way voices in Defoe’s novel are already fundamentally othered, something made most clear by the presence of the parrot as a kind of proleptic recording device. Far from being linked to a particular subjectivity or body, voices can be alienated from the beginning, the result of repetition and exteriority. These othered voices represent both the alienation of colonialist and capitalist modernity, as in Robinson’s experience of them as voices he cannot identify with and cannot recognize as his own, and as signals of a future without colonialists like Robinson, as when Friday quotes the parrot in order to give to Robinson his final “adíos.” This is an “adíos,” however, that will send him to no God and no salvation.

Mississippi State University

Notes

¹ All translations from “Adíos Robinson” are my own, as are all translations from other Spanish language sources unless otherwise noted.

² Friday in “Adíos, Robinson” thus does not quote exactly. Both in Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and in Cortázar’s translation of the novel the parrot says “Poor Robin Crusoe.”

³ In 1995 it was republished by Alfaguara as part of its Biblioteca Cortázar series as the title piece of a compilation of Cortázar’s short theatrical works. It is the only piece for radio included.

⁴ My thanks go to La Lengua Theater for providing me with a recording of this excellent performance. There is also a production from 2012 by Radio Nacional Argentina available on YouTube.

⁵ There are at least four recent books in English on Robinsonades: one by Anne Marie Fallon, two by Ian Kinane (one as editor and one as author), and one by Jakub Lipski (as editor). All have a global focus, but none reference “Adíos, Robinson.”

⁶ It is notable that Derek Walcott’s theatrical Robinsonade Pantomime also focuses on the voice, both through its transformation into song of many scenes from Robinson Crusoe, and through the inclusion of a parrot who voices racist obscenities.

⁷ For more on Defoe and voice see DeGabriele and Stephanson.

⁸ For another reading of the importance of animal speech in reading the parrot scenes in Robinson Crusoe see Borgards.

⁹ Both Marshall and Jaeger argue that even though Friday does have an independence of mind, Crusoe’s conversations with him remain modes of self-composition and self-naming, in a way not entirely different from his interactions with Poll. Keenleyside pushes the similarity between Crusoe’s relation with Friday and his relations with other creatures even further, arguing that Crusoe’s domestication of a goat “becomes the model for the kind of exchange by which Friday ‘consents’ to Crusoe’s society” (86).

Works Cited

Benavides, Ricardo. “Review of Nada a Pehuajó (un acto); Adíos Robinson. Mexico City. Katún, 1984. 70 pages.” World Literature Today, vol. 60, no. 1, 1986, pp. 77-8.

Boehrer, Bruce Thomas. Parrot Culture: Our 2,500-Year-Long Fascination with the World’s Most Talkative Bird. University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, 2004.

Borgards, Roland. “Parrot Poll: Animal Mimesis in Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe.” HUMaNIMALIA, vol. 11, no. 2, 2020, pp. 2-24.

Cortázar, Julio. Adíos Robinson y otros pezas breves. Alfagura, Buenos Aires, 2014.

De la Guerra, Emilio Francisco. Julio Cortázar, de literatura y revolución en América Latina. Unión de Universidades de América Latina, Ciudad Universitaria, 2000.

Defoe, Daniel. Robinson Crusoe, edited by Michael Shinagel. W.W. Norton and Company, New York, 1993.

DeGabriele, Peter. “Intimacy, Survival, and Resistance: Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year.” ELH, vol. 77, no. 1, 2010, pp. 1-23.

Derrida, Jacques. The Beast and the Sovereign, Volume 2. Translated by Geoffrey Bennington. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2011.

Falcón, Rosa. Robinson y la isla infinita: lecturas de un mito. Fondo de Culturo Económica, Madrid, 2018.

Fallon, Ann Marie. Global Crusoe: Comparative Literature, Postcolonial Theory and Transnational Aesthetics. Ashgate, Burlington, 2011.

Graziadei, Daniel. “Islas fantásticas: espacialidades inuslares entre lo (neo-)fantástic y la posmodernidad en las obras de Adolfo Bioy Casares y Julio Cortázar.” La narración entre lo fantástico y la posmodernidad: Adolfo Bioy Casares y Julio Cortázar, edited by Daniel Graziadei and Michael Rössner, Greg Olms Verlag, Hildesheim, 2020.

Jager, Eric. “The Parrot’s Voice: Language and the Self in Robinson Crusoe.” Eighteenth-Century Studies, vol. 21, no. 3, Spring 1988, pp. 316-33.

Keenleyside, Heather. Animals and Other People: Literary Forms and Living Beings in the Long Eighteenth Century. University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, 2016.

Kinane, Ian, editor. Didactics and the Modern Robinsonade. Liverpool University Press, Liverpool, 2019.

—— Theorising Literary Islands: The Island Trope in Contemporary Robinsonade Narratives. Rowman and Littlefield, New York, 2014.

Lipski, Jakub, editor. Rewriting Crusoe: The Robinsonade across Languages, Cultures, and Media. Bucknell University Press, Lewisburg, 2020.

Marshall, David. “Autobiographical Acts in Robinson Crusoe.” ELH, vol. 71, no. 4, 2004, pp. 899-920.

O’Malley, Andrew. “Foreword: The Progressive Pedagogies of the Modern Robinsonade.” Didactics and the Modern Robinsonade, edited by Ian Kinane, Liverpool University Press, Liverpool, 2019, pp. xiii-xiv.

Standish, Peter. “El teatro de Julio Cortázar.” Hispania, vol. 83, no. 3, 2000, pp. 437-44.

Stephanson, Raymond. “’Tis a Speaking Sight: Imagery as Narrative Technique in Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year.” Dalhousie Review Halifax. Vol. 63, no. 4, 1982, pp. 680-92.

Yurkievich, Saul. Julio Cortázar: mundos y modos. Anaya y Mario Muchnik, Madrid, 1984.

The Nature of ECCO-TCP

Stephen H. Gregg

AT ITS LAUNCH in 1999, the Text Creation Partnership was a breakthrough collaboration between libraries and commercial publishers of digitized material. It aimed to provide collections of electronic texts from the early modern period that were freely accessible to the public, transcribed to a high degree of accuracy, and encoded to enable re-use and analysis. Its initial impetus was the collaboration with ProQuest’s Early English Books Online (EEBO), but other collaborations were established with Readex’s Evans Early American Imprints and Gale’s Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO). The TCP website provides a good history of its projects, and Shawn Martin’s 2009 essay “A Universal Humanities Digital Library: Pipe Dream or Prospective Future?” offers useful background as well as reflects on the possibilities and challenges of the TCP project as whole. However, the EEBO-TCP collaboration has generated most scholarly commentary (see, for example, Welzenbach, 2012; Mak, 2014; Mueller, 2018; Gavin 2019; Herman 2020). This interest reflects a number of factors peculiar to the success and visibility of EEBO-TCP. One factor was that, on its publication in 1999, EEBO consisted only of page images; in transcribing these page images, the TCP provided the text that enabled subsequent computational analysis and electronic text editing. The other significant factor was that the large number of texts transcribed—currently now around 65,000 texts—enabled the development of several large-scale projects for exploring and analysing the literature, language, and print culture of the period, for example, The Early Print Library, PRISMS, Visualizing English Print, the Early Modern OCR Project (eMOP), and Linguistic DNA.

In contrast—and although it is also used in several of the projects just mentioned—few analyses focus on the history of the TCP collaboration with ECCO. Consequently, unanswered questions remain about the nature of ECCO-TCP which this short essay aims to answer. Why did ECCO-TCP stop after a relatively small number of texts were transcribed? What organisational pressures and individual human choices shaped the nature and biases of the ECCO-TCP collection? In addition—and aside from academic articles like this—how do we find the answers to such questions? As Roopika Risam has argued, “the reification of canons in digital form is not only a function of what is there—what gets digitalised and thus represented in the digital cultural record—but also how it is there—how those who have created their projects are presenting their subjects” (17). In short, how are such digital collections contextualised and their histories framed?

The scale of ECCO-TCP is relativity small compared to the larger and arguably more successful EEBO-TCP. Initial expectations for ECCO-TCP were high: 10,000 texts were planned to be transcribed.¹ However, between 2004 and 2012 only 3,101 texts were eventually transcribed and encoded, comprising 2,473 fully edited texts, and 628 released without being subject to final proofing and editing.² So, why did work stop? As I have suggested elsewhere, financial factors impinged on the sustainability of ECCO-TCP (75-76). The TCP is funded according to a “quasi-commercial model” in which libraries and institutions that purchased EEBO, Evans Early American Imprints, or ECCO could become contributing partners with the TCP; these funds were then matched by the commercial publishers, ProQuest, Readex, or Gale (Martin, 4). However, in 2006 TCP’s executive board predicted budget deficits and sought to secure more funding from its partner institutions (“TCP Executive Board”). Paul Schaffner, director of the TCP, recalled that, “we never received the financial support that we hoped for” and at some time after 2009, “we ran out of money” and the ECCO-TCP project used “what was left to review and complete the books in the pipeline” (Schaffner). By 2012, these financial constraints prevented ECCO-TCP from populating its site with additional transcribed and encoded texts.

The other problem that seemed to have sapped the energy behind the ECCO-TCP project was the question of its very nature. First, what exactly were the benefits of transcribing material from ECCO? What did the project hope to achieve? As mentioned earlier, TCP’s collaboration with ProQuest’s EEBO responded to a vital need and had a rigorous rationale; namely, it provided the searchable text which EEBO lacked. However, ECCO already had searchable text, produced by OCR software. Of course, it is the accuracy of text transcriptions which underpin any digital scholarship that uses the TCP collections. One of TCP’s missions was to “Present the user with accurately keyed, modern-font texts that are faithful to the spellings and organization of the original works.” ECCO’s notoriously messy OCR-produced text, though, rendered this objective impossible (Gregg 62-66).Nevertheless, TCP’s mission was complicated by the sheer size of ECCO and which clearly presented a huge challenge: what criteria would be used to select texts that would benefit from transcription from over 180,000 titles?

ECCO-TCP, like all human artefacts of collecting, is a product of institutional and human choices. Martin Mueller describes it as “a cherry-picked collection with an emphasis on canonical high-culture texts.” But how did it become that way? The geographic and linguistic biases of ECCO itself undoubtedly shaped its bias towards canonical authors (Tolonen, et al. 22-27). To a significant extent, this legacy can be traced to the foundations of ECCO: the microfilming project which tended to favour canonical male authors and the Anglocentrism of the originary 18^th Short Title Catalogue begun in 1976 (Gregg, 12-13, 23).³ In this context, the criteria established by a TCP “selection task force” set up in August 2005 is illuminating:

ECCO-TCP will use the New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature as a guide to begin the selection process, because this standard reference work is by no means confined in scope to ‘literature,’ but provides a good overview of writing of all kinds — philosophical, religious, travel, periodical, historical, and so on.
ECCO-TCP will supplement these selections with suggestions from scholars, anthologies, and other bibliographies
Titles in languages other than English normally will be excluded from selection in ECCO-TCP.
ECCO-TCP will also, as far as possible, try to include works that will benefit from the added value the project brings (titles with complex structures like encyclopedias and works with bad OCR)
ECCO-TCP will include authors who cross the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, such as Defoe and Swift, and will include their political, religious, and economic texts where appropriate in order to provide complete representation of these authors in the overall TCP collection.⁴

Schaffner noted that, apart from the broad and ambitious aim of identifying “added value,” these criteria were largely workable (for example, non-fictional works by Defoe are very well represented, attribution questions aside). However, these guidelines resulted in an uneven set of texts: decisions were inevitably subject to institutional pressures and individual human choice. For example, the relatively good representation of medical texts and Irish-themed fiction reflect the demands of particular partner institutions; and Schaffner himself acknowledged that his own interest in hymn books probably resulted in the inclusion of Isaac Watts, Charles Wesley, and Philip Doddridge (Schaffner). Decisions about what to include were also influenced by the use of the New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature volume 2: 1660-1800, published in 1971 (!) and its definition of “Major” authors. So, there are no works of fiction by the popular early women writers such as Penelope Aubin, Eliza Haywood, or Delarivier Manley, but—as an instance of individual choice—twenty-two works by “Minor” novelist Samuel Jackson Pratt are included. It seems the selection task force must have argued for Olaudah Equiano’s Narrative to be transcribed for the collection since it is not listed in the New Cambridge bibliography, but works by other writers of the early black Atlantic, including James Albert Ukasaw Gronniosaw, Phillis Wheatley, Ignatius Sancho, or Ottobah Cugoano, were not selected.

The challenge presented by the lack of a clear argument for the project, a wide-ranging set of criteria, and the scale of ECCO resulted in a conservative and idiosyncratic collection that seems to have reflected eighteenth-century scholarship as it stood in the late twentieth century. On top of that, the small scale of ECCO-TCP arguably magnifies ECCO’s own inherent biases. Such biases also have the potential to impact any research based on the projects mentioned earlier. Literary and historical canons change, of course, and it might seem that I have unduly fixated on the use of a 1971 bibliography to decide in 2005 what texts were valuable for a digital collection. But while the ECCO-TCP webpage acknowledges that it is “perhaps better described as a proof of concept than as a completed project,” it avoids detailing the various factors that have shaped the nature of the collection (“Text Creation Partnership”). That is, despite TCP’s laudable claim that “Our policies were imbued with a librarian’s attitude toward content: a resolve to prepare materials without agenda or bias, and with a view toward wide use and reuse,” this oversight remains. The larger point is that we need to understand the nature of these collections and their biases, and that—without users and researchers having to carry out some additional detective work—an explicit framing of the financial, institutional, and human contexts that shape how and why they are made is essential for a more nuanced understanding and use of such digital collections.

Bath Spa University

Notes

¹ Initial estimate courtesy of Jonathan Blaney.

²2Notably, Gale did not ingest the TCP transcriptions into ECCO. In contrast, the UK organisation Jisc, another partner of TCP, ingested ECCO-TCP texts in its Historical Texts platform in 2016 (“Developmental Roadmap”).

³ Relatedly, TCP itself is not without its racial and gendered dimensions, since transcription is outsourced to workers in the Global South. See Mattie Burkert.

⁴ I obtained this unpublished “Selection Task Force Report” (9-10 August 2005) courtesy of Paul Schaffner.

Works Cited

Blaney, Jonathan. “RE: ECCO-TCP research,” Received by Stephen H. Gregg, 2 December 2019.

Burkert, Mattie, “From Manual to Digital: Women’s Hands and the Work of Eighteenth-Century Studies.” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, vol. 52. Forthcoming [2023].

“Development Roadmap.” Jisc Historical Texts, historicaltexts.jisc.ac.uk/developmentroadmap. Accessed 27 August 2020.

Gavin, Michael. “How To Think About EEBO.” Textual Cultures, vol. 11, no. 1–2, 2019, pp.70–105. https://doi.org/10.14434/textual.v11i1-2.23570.

Gregg, Stephen H., Old Books and Digital Publishing: Eighteenth-Century Collections Online. Cambridge University Press, 2020. https://www.cambridge.org/core/elements/old-books-and-digital-publishing-eighteenthcentury-collections-online/058DB12DE06A4C00770B46DCFAE1D25E

Herman, Peter C. “EEBO and Me: An Autobiographical Response to Michael Gavin, ‘How to Think About EEBO.’” Textual Cultures, vol. 13, no. 1, 2020, pp. 207–16. https://doi.org/10.14434/textual.v13i1.30078.

Mak, Bonnie. “Archaeology of a Digitization.” Journal of the Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 65, no. 8, 2014, pp.1515–26. https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.23061

Martin, Shawn. “A Universal Humanities Digital Library: Pipe Dream or Prospective Future?” Digital Scholarship, edited by Marta Mestrovic Deyrup, Routledge, 2009, pp.1–12.

Mueller, Martin, “Collaborative Curation of TCP Texts,” October 2018, https://scalablereading.northwestern.edu/?p=565. Accessed 13 September 2019.

Risam, Roopika, New Digital Worlds: Postcolonial Digital Humanities in Theory, Praxis, and Pedagogy. Northwestern University Press, 2018.

Schaffner, Paul. “Re: DCCHELP-1238 Researching a history of ECCO,” Received by Stephen H. Gregg, 19 Nov. 2019.

“TCP Executive Board Meeting Minutes 2006-09-16.” Archive-It, wayback.archive-it.org/5871/20190806191843/http://www.textcreationpartnership.org/tcp-board-meeting-minutes-2006-09-16/. Accessed 25 August 2020.

“Text Creation Partnership,” University of Michigan Library, textcreationpartnership.org/tcp-texts/eebo-tcp-early-english-books-online/. Accessed 27 September 2022.

Tolonen, Mikko S., et al. ‘Corpus Linguistics and Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO)’, Research in Corpus Linguistics, 9.1 (2021), 19–34.

Watson, George, ed., et al. New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature volume 2: 1660-1800. Cambridge University Press, 1971.

Welzenbach, Rebecca. “Transcribed by Hand, Owned by Libraries, Made for Everyone: EEBO-TCP in 2012,” University of Michigan Library, http://hdl.handle.net/2027.42/94307. Accessed 27 September 2022.

Defoe and the Economic Sublime

Maximillian E. Novak

FEW CRITICS have had difficulty connecting Defoe as a writer of realist fiction and his interest in the economic problems of his time, but any association between his writings on Britain’s trade or labor or stock-jobbing and the sublime might at first thought seem to be a contradiction in terms. In his attack upon what he considered to be the excesses of the French Revolution, Edmund Burke, the great commentator on the sublime in the eighteenth century, followed his sublime image of the besieged queen of France, whom he had once seen, “decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she just began to move in—glittering like the morning-star, full of life and splendour and joy,” with a disparaging picture of a new age from which chivalry, beauty, and the sublime had fled to be replaced by the lifeless products of “sophisters, economists and calculators” (66). According to Burke, these were the kind of thinkers who, in the name of social planning, had divided France into exact geometric squares without any consideration of tradition or the moral nature of human beings. He opined that the “cold hearts” of such thinkers would never be a satisfactory model for Britons (68). Burke’s contempt for “economists and calculators”—for their lack of sensibility and emotion—had some basis in reality. John Grant and Sir William Petty, who introduced political arithmetic to England in the seventeenth century showed a singular lack of feeling for human nature. Grant pondered on whether it would not be more profitable to introduce polygamy into England to increase the nation’s wealth, using animal reproduction in a manner similar to Swift’s future projector in A Modest Proposal. And Sir William Petty defied any notion of chivalry when, in responding to a challenge to a duel, suggested as his choice of weapons, axes in a dark cellar. There was evidence enough then for the image of the cold-hearted and very unsublime economist.

If as I intend to argue in this essay Defoe found sublimity in matters of trade, he was at least somewhat unusual. Yet it is also clear that economics is not unsusceptible to images of the sublime.¹ Slavoj Zizek argues that the very concept of money contains within it what he calls “sublime material” when conceived of, in Marx’s terms, as that “’indestructible and immutable’ body which persists beyond the corruption of the body physical” (18-19). And Derrida has shown that the sublime ghost of Hamlet’s father wanders through much of Marx’s writing. Of course, there are few more sublime images than Adam Smith’s “Invisible Hand” which somehow guides individual self-interest to the goal of the national good. It is true that Smith deliberately muted this image in The Wealth of Nations, but he was more expansive in his Theory of Moral Sentiments, where he also used the image of the “insatiable desires” of the wealthy, who are led by an “invisible hand” to employ the poor to satisfy their egotism, thereby spreading the wealth of the world. Smith followed this with an expansive image of “the great system of government, and the wheels of the political machine which “seem to move with more harmony and ease” because of individual self-interest (184-185). In his economic treatise, despite all the attention paid to it, the image appears with relatively little fanfare.

Daniel Defoe was numbered by his contemporaries among the important economic writers employing political arithmetic, and not surprisingly, it was he who most obviously provided a sublime image of economic activity. Like Adam Smith, but far more dramatically, he saw an “Invisible Hand,” guiding human economic activity. It is perhaps no accident that Smith was reported to have “quoted some passages in Defoe which breathed, as he thought, the true spirit of English verse” (Amicus 230). Admirers of Defoe’s poetry were rare enough in the late eighteenth century, but it is interesting to know that Smith was among them. For it was in what might be called the poetry of economics that Defoe must have stood out from his contemporaries, in his half mocking, half sublime hymn to money in the Review, his praise of industry in Caledonia (1706), and his glorification of the teleological force behind economic activity in his General History of Trade (1713). His hymn to money eulogized that very notion of money as a magical and unchangeable thing that Zizek considered a sublime object:

Mighty Neuter! Thou great Jack-a-both sides of the World, how hast Thou brought all Things into Bondage to thy Tyranny? How art Thou the might WORD of this War, the great Wheel in the vast Machine of Politick Motion, the Vehicle of Providence, the great Medium of Conveyance, in which all the Physic of the secret Dispensation in human Affairs is administered, and by the Quality of which it operates to Blessing or Cursing? Well art thou call’d the God of this World; for in thy Presence and Absence consists all the heaven or hell of human Affairs; for Thee, what will not Mankind do, what Hazzards will they run, what Villanies perform? For thee, Kings Tyrannize, Subjects are oppress’d, Nations ruin’d, Father murther’d, Children abandon’d, Friends betray’d. Thou art the Charm that unlocks the Cabinet, unscrews Nature. (4:422-423)

When Crusoe was to carry off the gold he discovered on the wreck, despite his knowledge that it was useless on the island, he did not provide an explanation for his actions beyond some additional consideration. The reader is allowed to provide some explanations. Two come to mind along with some combination of both. Perhaps he was being practical in thinking that he might be able to use this seemingly useless commodity if he were rescued some day. Or perhaps, for all his understanding that an object such as a cooking pan would be more useful on the island, he could not rid himself of the symbolic and sublime value which inhered in it.

Although Defoe would hardly have conceived of writing a treatise on the sublime, he gave us enough examples of it throughout his writings to allow us to draw a number of general conclusions about how he used it and for what purposes.² The most significant passage of course is the discovery of the footprint. One critic has pointed to this event as “an event of immense force,” a violent encounter with otherness that brings with it a sense of terror and dislocation (Brown 158). I raise this moment in Defoe’s writing because although he is often associated with the start of realist fiction, as well as fiction with economic concerns, he was also always capable of charging scenes with powerful emotions.³

I want to begin with a wonderful section of the Tour thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain. The narrator along with his companions have struggled through a mountainous region beset by an amazing snowstorm and terrible claps of thunder. At first they suspect it is a frightening explosion in a coal mine, but then confirm the possibility that thunder may accompany the snow. Although the narrow pass seems “horrible” to them, they keep on descending. But amid this “frightful country” the narrator finds a combination of running water and coals on the highest hills.” He ascribes this to

the wise Hand of Providence for the very purpose which is now served by it, namely, the Manufactures, which otherwise could not be carried on …. After we had mounted the third Hill, we found the Country, in short, one continued Village, tho’ mountainous every way, as before; hardly a House standing out of a speaking distance from another, and (which soon told us their Business) the Day clearing up, and the sun shining, we could see that almost at every House there was a Tenter, and almost on every Tenter a Piece of Cloth, or Kersie, or Shalloon, for they are the three Articles dof that country’s Labour; from which the Sun glancing, and, as I may say, shining (the White reflecting its Rays) to us, I thought it was the most agreeable Sight that I ever saw, for the Hills, as I say rising and falling so thick, and the Vallies opening sometimes one way, sometimes another, so that sometimes we could see two or three Miles this way, sometimes as far another; sometimes like the Streets near St.Giles’s, call the Seven Dials; we could see through the Glaces almost every Way round us, yet look which Way we would, high to the Tops, and low to the Bottoms, it was all the same; innumerable Houses and Tenters, and a white Piece upon every Tenter. (2:601)

The entire scene has to be regarded as a whole. The narrator moves from the horror of Black Edge, which seems to call up the supernatural type of explosive sound in the midst of terrifying mountains and a terrible snowstorm, to the scene of human activity in the foothills—equally staggering in its infinite number of tenters reflecting the sun in an amazing way. It is only here that the narrator calls upon the invisible hand of God (“the wise Hand of Providence”) as the ultimate creator of a nature made exactly right for the industriousness of the inhabitants. He is very much the God of industry, seemingly absent in the hills, but present everywhere in the nature that put together coal and water in such a way as to encourage industry. Where there is no industry, as in the area the narrator encounters on leaving Leeds, around Black Barnsley, the land is “dismal…and frightful,” but hardly sublime as he longs once more for a vision of the “Tenters with the Cloths shining upon them” (2:617).

As suggested previously, sublime scenes had almost become Defoe’s specialty by the time he came to write the Tour. His depiction of the Andes, with its terrifying gorges and frightening volcanoes, made up some of the best pages of A New Voyage Round the World (1725), a work Defoe published in the same year as the first volume of the Tour. But while he could depict natural scenery well enough, even scenes of this kind had an aura about them. He was reading Burnet’s Theory of the Earth in these years, and nothing so reminded him of the geological fall from a perfectly round earth as such terrifying spectacles.

The key to all of this is a teleological view of economics. In his General History of Trade, Defoe wrote that God created the world in such a way that the

Originals of Manufacture, the Essentials of Life, or of the Conveniences of Life, such as Physical Plants, Drugs, Spices, Metals, etc. were by the Wisdom of the first Disposer, dispers’d thro’ his whole Creation, so as to make every part of the World useful, nay, I may say, necessary to some, other part of it; which Diversity is the occasion of the Communications of Necessaries or Conveniences, one to another; from whence is raised this useful thing call’d Trade. (2:4-5.)

What follows this statement is a view of the world which would have warmed the heart of Voltaire’s Dr. Pangloss. The world was created the way it was, with various goods placed in countries distant from one another, so that human beings would trade with one another. The ocean was made to bear ships; God made wood and tar to build ships. But the reason all of this was done was “the Employment of the People.” (2:26.)

In laboring over the raw materials of the earth, human beings may produce wealth for the nation, but in another sense, they come closest to imitating the transforming power of God himself. Defining what he calls “Manufactures,” Defoe argues, “Those Materials which passing thro’ the Operation of Men’s Hands, lose the Face or Apearance of their first Quality, assuming New Names and Figures, as the several uses they are design’d for require, these are properly called Manufactures.” But it is in trade itself that man fulfills the will of God in distributing goods around the world. It is by this that man performs according to God’s will:

We Trade with Turks, Infidels, Idolaters, Gentiles, Heathens, Savages, it matters not what Gods they serve, so they serve our end, and we can serve our Interest by Trading with them; what if they Worship the Sun or the Moon, this Idol or that; Vistly-pustly, Teckoacomon, Mahomet, or Lucifer? Getting Money is the only Idol that Trade Worships, and it is nothing to the Merchant who he Trades with, if he can make a good Return. (3:46)

How can it be that so ungodly an action as trading with heathens can somehow be in the interest of the God who “design’d the World for Commerce” (1:10)? The answer is approximately the same as that one finds in Adam Smith. God operates through human self-interest to create a world which is generally happy. And this is so because of employment itself. One of the reasons that the mountains over which Defoe’s narrator has to cross in the Tour are so terrifying is that they are without human habitation and industry. The same is true of the mountains in A New Voyage Round the World. Defoe’s God is very much the invisible God that Goldmann described in his Le Dieu caché. He is most evident for Defoe (and comfortingly so) among scenes of human economic activity. His seeming absence among the mountains of the Andes and Britain is unpleasantly frightening.

In a Lockean passage, in A General History of Trade, Defoe argues that “Man’s utmost extended Capacity does not allow him to Conceive of any thing which is not, but by something that is; He can form no Ideas of what he has not seen, but upon the foundation, and by the Form of something which he has seen, or which has been described to him” (1:6). Although Defoe then proceeds to deride anthropomorphic images of an afterlife and the form of angels as being beyond our knowledge, such an argument rather proves the existence of a God behind nature than destroys it:

all the Power of Man’s Invention and Understanding, could not have conceiv’d any thing of what we call Manufacturing, had not the Materials been furnished by the Author of Nature, which, as it were, led our Forefathers by the Hand to the Improvements of those Materials. Spinning, Weaving, and Knitting had never been thought of, had not the Wool been first furnished by Nature; which by its very Figure and Substance, dictated to the Invention of Men and the Arts of Manufacturing. Nor could all the Wit of Man have form’d an Idea in his Mind of Wooll, Flax, Silk, or Hair, if there had not been such things form’d in the Creation. (1:7.)

Defoe’s God of economic activity does not give humanity manufactured products. He tests humankind to grasp the economic ends of things. In describing this process, Defoe calls upon his powers as a writer of prose to produce images of wonder, vastness, and the miraculous:

The World is now laid open; the Distant and Difficult Parts, are made familiar; the Dangers some have miscarried upon, are thereby avoided; the Dangers others have avoided, are known, and made easy; the Bays, Creeks, Ports, Harbours, Shores, and Seas, formerly Terrible, Unknown, and Unfrequented, are made familiar and easy; compassing the Globe, passing the Streights of Magellan, measuring the vast Southern Ocean, Coasting the Indies, and the Shores of China and Japan, and now no such extraordinary things, every Nation almost have done it as well as we, and we do that now every Year, which was accounted next to miraculous in the first Ages of Trade (1:42).

God’s most wonderful trick is in what Defoe calls, after his contemporary, John Cary, the “circulation” of goods. For Defoe, the circulation of goods throughout Britain is a miraculous way of enriching everyone. The more people who handle a product, the more the nation is enriched. The entire Tour is a hymn to the way in which goods circulate to that “great and monstrous thing” called London, and in the Atlas Maritimus, he used a combination of enumeration along with the language of the ineffable to attempt to describe what was too great to truly represent:

This Trade is so great, that no single Inland Trade in Europe can compare with it. We find it carry’d on by the help of innumberable Pack-Horses, Draught-Horses, Waggons and Carts: and as it employs a great many Ships, Barges, Lighters, etc. For the conveying of such Goods by Sea and in Rivers, as above; so it employs an infinite Number of Carriers, Waggoners, Pedlars, and travelling Chapmen on Shore, as well on Foot as on Horse backs; and maintains a proportion’d number of Publick Houses as Victuallers, Inns, and Ale-houses on the roads, the Number of which , if I should enter into the Particulars of them, would seem incredible. (108)⁴

What I am maintaining is that Defoe was one of the few economists who, while being capable of providing pages of statistics in An Essay upon Projects and Mercator, insisted on raising the spectacle of trade to the level of the sublime. In his Scots Poem, he made this into an ecstatic monologue imagining himself flying through earth’s geography to revel in the possibilities inherent in trade throughout the world:

I’d gladly breath my Air, on Foreign Shores:

Trade with rude Indian and the Sun-burnt Mores.

I’d speak Chinese, I’d prattle African.

And briskly cross, the first Meridian.

I’d pass the Line, and turn the Cap about.

I’d rove, and sail th’Earth’s greatest Circle out.

I’d fearless, venture to the Darien Coast;

Strive to retrieve, the former Bliss we lost.

Yea, I would view Terra Incognita.

And climb the Mountains of America.

I’d veer my Course, next, for our Antipod’s,

I’d hunt for Monkey, in the Indian Woods.

…………………………..

Towards New Holland, I’d my rout advance

And know who harrows this vast Continent

`Where scarce e’re European has even sent

The greatest Dangers, n’ere shou’d make me faint. (lines 144-166)

Although Defoe occasionally speaks of “we” in speaking of the economic adventures that might be achieved by the Scottish nation if it dedicated itself fully to trade, there is little doubt that this passage is dominated by the image of Defoe’s visionary adventures. He is unafraid of experiencing the “greatest Dangers.” If Defoe was astonished by the scene of the products of labor flashing in the sun—by evidence of labor in the real world, he was also capable of conjuring up an imagined world of economic exploitation with himself as the center of these adventures—the hero of his own economic romance.

When he wrote in the Review that “Writing upon trade was the “Whore…[he] really doated upon,” he was not merely using a metaphor to express his preference for writing on economic subjects (1 [IX], 214).⁵ He meant that despite the banality of ordinary economic life, trade (which he depicted at times as a form of crime, and indeed a form of prostitution) inspired him as a writer and raised his passions as nothing else. If later economists such as Hume and Smith were to insist on a dispassionate style and Ricardo an entirely unreadable one, Defoe was to remain the one economist who raised the entire spectacle of manufacturing and the circulation of goods to the level of sublimity.⁶

University of California, Los Angeles

Notes

¹ I used the term “economic sublime” in my biography (632) and writers on Defoe have used it occasionally. See for example, Edward 185.

² For a discussion of the religious sublime in Defoe’s History and Reality of Apparitions, see van Leeuwen.

³ Alexander Welsh used Crusoe’s thorough methods for establishing the nature of the evidence for determining who might have made the print as an example of realist technique in fiction (2-6).

⁴ Defoe wrote only the section on economic geography for this work.

⁵ Defoe’s use of the notion of every man having his “Whore” is somewhat similar to Laurence Sterne’s later use of the Hobby-Horse, a kind of master passion or obsession.

⁶ In his Brief State of the Inland or Home Trade of England, Defoe wrote of the “Beautiful Order of Trade” (26). But his appeal was usually to that element of the sublime that belonged to the vast.

Works Cited

Amicus. “Anecdotes tending to throw light on the character and opinions of the late Adam Smith, LLD.” The Bee, or Literary Weekly Intelligencer, May 11, 1791. Rpt. in Adam Smith, Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, edited by J. C. Bryce, Liberty Fund, 1983, pp. 226-31.

Brown, Tony C. The Primitive, the Aesthetic, and the Savage: An Enlightenment Problematic. Minnesota UP, 2012.

Burke, Edmund. Reflections on the Revolution in France, edited by J. G. A. Pocock, Hackett Publishing, 1987.

Daniel Defoe. Defoe’s Review, edited by Arthur W. Secord, vol. 4, Columbia UP, 1938.

Defoe, Daniel. Atlas Maritimus et Commercialis. London, 1728.

———. Brief State of the Inland or Home Trade of England. London, 1730.

———. An essay on the history and reality of apparitions. Being an account of what they are, and what they are not; whence they come, and whence they come not. London, 1727.

———. A general history of trade: and especially consider’d as it respects the British commerce, as well at home, as to all parts of the world. London, 1713.

———. A Scots Poem, OR a New Year’s Gift, From a Native of the Universe to his Fellow-Animals in Albania. Edinburgh, 1707. Reprinted in Poems on Affairs of State, edited by Frank Ellis, et al., vol. 7. Yale UP, 1954-1975.

———. A Tour thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain. Vol. 2, Peter Davies, 1927.

Edward, Jesse. “Defoe the Geographer Redefining the Wonderful in A Tour Thro’ The Whole Island Of Great Britain.” Travel Narratives, the New Science, and Literary Discourse 1569-1750, edited by Judy Hayden, Ashgate, 2012.

Novak, Maximillian E. Daniel Defoe: Master of Fictions. Oxford UP, 2001.

Smith, Adam. The Theory of Moral Sentiments, edited by D.D. Raphael and A.L. Macfie, Liberty Fund, 1982.

van Leeuwen, Evert Jan. “The Religious Sublime in An Essay on the History and Reality of Apparitions (1727).” Positioning Defoe’s Fiction, edited by Aino Mäkakalli and Andreas Mueller, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011, pp. 169-185.

Welsh, Alexander. Strong Representations: Narrative and Circumstantial Evidence in England. Johns Hopkins UP, 1992.

Zizek, Slavoj. The Sublime Object of Ideology. Verso, 1994.

Information and Credibility in A Journal of the Plague Year

Aaron R. Hanlon

Abstract: This article revisits the presentation and reliability of information in A Journal of the Plague Year, with particular attention to Defoe’s tendency to set up and interrogate problems of how trust and evaluate information under conditions of extreme uncertainty. It applies approaches in social epistemology to the scenarios Defoe depicts in Journal, showing that emphasis on the forms information takes in Defoe’s text are less epistemically important than the social dynamics Defoe illustrates.

Keywords: information; credibility; Journal of the Plague Year; data; epistemology

WHAT does credible information look like in Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year (1722)? This seems an important question to ask of a text heavily reliant on the aesthetics of information, with its interpolated charts and figures. Credibility is central to how we read Journal, but also to how we evaluate information during any pandemic. The COVID-19 pandemic, ongoing at the time of this writing, has exposed vulnerabilities not only in healthcare systems, but also in civic and epistemic health throughout the world. As academics turn to Journal in the classroom—as I recently have—as a touchstone for thinking through the epistemic challenges of a scenario in which scientific knowledge is considerable, but fear, doubt, superstition, cynicism, and distrust all threaten to undermine the efficacy of what we know, the question of how we distinguish between the appearance of credible information and credible information itself becomes especially pressing. To understand the social nature of epistemic credibility and why vetting information remains so challenging today, it helps to understand how the distributed nature of information came about and the kind of problems it caused for H.F. in Journal.

Much scholarship on Journal focuses on the relationship between its strategies of representing and interrogating information—itself a changing concept during the eighteenth century—and its historicity. Reading Journal as a kind of apparition narrative, Jayne Lewis neatly summarizes such critical interest: “some of the most fruitful and provocative criticism of this manifest piece of ghostwriting turns on its claims to be counted as history, which is to say as a sign of the real” (111). For Lewis, Journal complicates the question of realist representation by foregrounding “writing’s visibility as a mediating frame.” She argues that Defoe aimed to “chart a representational field halfway ‘between imagination and solid foundation’” (Lewis 112, 114). Nicholas Seager reaches a similar conclusion from another angle, arguing that Journal reflects Defoe’s interest in probable rather than certain knowledge. It “endorses fiction, validating a version of honesty that admits the unattainability of absolute truth” (Seager 652). Both accounts portray Journal as using narratives and forms of the imagined, the dubiously seen, or the uncertain masquerading as certain to undermine the text’s surface-level reliance on numerical data and eyewitness testimony.

In what follows, I deemphasize formal matters of representing the real, or of the aesthetics of information in Journal, to focus instead, heuristically, on what Journal has to say about the social processes through which we vet information and come to understand something as credible or reliable. Accordingly, “What does credible information look like?” turns out to be the wrong question. Defoe notoriously used rhetorical forms designed to give the impression of immediacy and increasingly associated, from the late-seventeenth century onward, with epistemic certainty—lists, charts, numerical data—to undermine any notion of epistemic certainty as a function of form. Attention to the appearance or aesthetics of information doesn’t tell us enough about what actually makes information credible. On this point, attentive to the list as a formal feature in Defoe’s writing, Wolfram Schmidgen observes that Defoe owes something to “the desire for epistemological credibility, which some early modern genres articulated by concealing their inevitable selectivity through an appearance of arbitrary inclusiveness” (22). Helen Thompson observes in a similar vein that H.F. “cites the power of his descriptive prose to trigger the response historically produced by his ‘Sight,’” emphasizing Defoe’s preoccupation with empirical knowledge, and defining the text’s relationship to empirical knowledge production through H.F.’s stylistic preference for descriptive prose (153). In all of these critical observations we find that the relationship between Journal’s formal features—what something looks like—and the credibility of information is (to say the least) fraught.

Journal illustrates a familiar and consequential problem: We must make good decisions about information, even though for most people, by necessity, much of that decision-making will be based on what can seem like superficial parameters (What does credible information look like?). Do we stand a better chance of identifying and relaying credible information when it comes in a particular form, such as a chart, a numerical dataset, or an eyewitness narrative account? To what extent do we vest credibility in authorities simply because they are authorities? The paradox of the superficial—as I have characterized it here—is that superficiality is a necessity in vetting information. It’s often our only way of making decisions. But it’s also always socially mediated, contingent on far more than visual rhetoric or the form or presentation of the information at hand.

Information vetting is only partly a problem of virtual witnessing, the name Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer famously give to the seventeenth-century Royal Society practice of illustrating the scene of experiment in scientific atlases so that those not present could buy into the integrity of the experiment and its results (Shapin and Schaffer 60). Royal Society experimentalists in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries certainly emphasized particular forms—illustrations, diagrams, and charts—even while accompanying these with ample verbal description, narration, and explanation. Today, we have primers and explanations about the distinction between vaccine efficacy and effectiveness, or how mRNA vaccines work by triggering our cells to make a protein that brings on an immune response; we have illustrations and diagrams, we talk of R0. But when we decide on a course of action or belief, it’s largely down to trust; the belief that the people and institutions responsible for making and distributing vaccines or studying the public health benefits of mask wearing are not just trained, but personally or institutionally motivated in the right ways to do well by us.

This is partly why we sometimes see vaccine hesitancy in poor and minoritized communities for whom distrust in our scientific and government institutions can be rational, given disasters such as the Tuskegee experiments or the use of paper trails to locate and perform raids on the undocumented. In such scenarios, as in everyday information vetting, people who are not experts in virology or epidemiology or pathology or public health—who aren’t equipped to do their own controlled experiments or read specialist publications with an expert eye—nevertheless must make practical decisions about matters of grave consequence based on incomplete and often conflicting information. Scientific consensus, even, can’t simply be replicated in the minds of laypersons who apprehend, doubt, and benefit from it. Just as we are reasonably confident our phones will work—to the extent we rely on them for scheduling or other important matters—without necessarily understanding at a high level how they work, we have to be reasonably confident in the credibility of the informers and the processes by which we obtain information to believe that information credible. Journal illustrates this conundrum, in particular by taking up the concept of information as a call to epistemic scrutiny, then illustrating the role of credibility in such scrutiny.

I. Information

I have described the widely applicable conundrum Journal presents as one of judging credible information despite being, by necessity, ill-equipped to do so. This requires a brief overview of the development of the concept of information in Defoe’s time. Developing notions of information are key to the credibility issue in Journal and in a wider world of superficial judgments of credibility because, as Paul Duguid explains, “in the eighteenth century information deserves to be read as a keyword in discussions about relations between mind and world and between individual and state.” The “‘arc’ of information” Duguid traces reflects the expansion of the concept of information “from processes within minds to embrace both matter within books and and signals sent by senses and nerves that in their different ways initiate those mental processes” (Duguid 348). The stuff of information would come to include not only sense data, but the relation of data in books and conversations. Seager notes that in Journal, “reality as it is empirically observed must be compared with the numerical evidence for the latter to be either corroborated or invalidated” (640). This reading reflects how Journal involves the triangulation or norming of various types of information, whether observed first-hand, observed in written records, or related between persons.

The upshot of this treatment of information in Journal—the textual details of which I come to momentarily—is that Journal illustrates the challenging process by which information—a concept that shifted during the eighteenth century from a Baconian description of internal workings of the mind, or the mental response to a stimulus, to a description of a thing in the world, a stimulus in its own right—becomes shared knowledge, something we can trust collectively. Duguid argues that information “worked in tandem with knowledge yet escaped as a generally unindicted co-conspirator. Information allowed arguments to bypass epistemological angst and drive over philosophical conundrums with chassis unaffected” (354). In other words, information became something that invited further scrutiny—that required a credibility judgment—precisely because the concept could function as a suspension of claims to certainty and any attendant epistemic anxiety.

Furthermore, information was something for which judgments of credibility, if not made through some kind of triangulated process (comparing and aggregating sources of information as H.F. does), had at least to account for the collaborative nature of information as a thing itself. As Sean Silver notes, “under Bacon’s influence, under the pressure of reimagining knowledge as the stuff of large-scale projects and the exchange of facts, information starts to occupy a new ideal or conceptual role, beginning its long process of hardening into a thing” (278). The instantiation of information—a bill, a ledger, and so on—brought with it an authorship problem that remains relevant to assessing information’s credibility today. As Ann Blair and Peter Stallybrass point out, the media forms accounted for in the “stockpiling of information” that took place between 1450-1800—“blank forms, bills of lading, printed slips, commonplace books, accounts, and paper money”—were products of many hands (140). Author credibility is dispersed, a matter of the integrity of many individuals and systems. H.F. acknowledges as much in his widely observed questioning of the Bills of Mortality, trying his best to work through the implications of the many hands who might have played a role in assembling the Bills and accounting for the rawest of raw data—the bodies the dead—that underwrite them.

When the word “information” comes up in Defoe’s novel, it appears in a couple of different contexts. First, it appears in the context of things related that they may impel action—that is, that one has been informed—but without any further epistemic weight. This is the new sense of “information” that Duguid associates with Vicesimus Knox’s claim that his (c. 1752-1821) was an “age of information,” for which information was a written or related stimulus (Duguid 348, 350). The acts of informing or receiving information are often calls to action based on something related and taken at face value. When, for example, a couple of watchmen relate “information” to the Mayor about strange things going on inside of a shut-up house, the Mayor orders the house be broken into “upon the information”:

He came down again, upon this, and acquainted his Fellow, who went up also, and finding it just so, they resolv’d to acquaint either the Lord Mayor, or some other Magistrate of it, but did not offer to go in at the Window: The Magistrate, it seems, upon the Information of the two Men, ordered the House to be broken open, a Constable, and other Persons being appointed to be present, that nothing might be plundered; and accordingly it was so done, when no Body was found in the House, but that of a young Woman, who having been infected, and past Recovery, the rest had left her to die by her self. (Defoe 44)

In this descriptive usage—descriptive in the sense of not presupposing any evaluative stance on the credibility of what is being related—information is simply the product of the act of informing or being informed, a call to action without epistemic scrutiny. “Information” in this sense also resembles what Duguid identifies as an earlier, legal context of a report given by and informant, reflecting a conceptual merging of “information” as report and as stimulus or call to action (based on the report, as it were) (355).

We get a slightly richer or more multifaceted usage of “information” when H.F. relates that his friend Dr. Heath has considered smelling people’s breath as a way of determining if they’re infected. Dr. Heath doubts this “information” on grounds of its implausibility:

My friend Doctor Heath was of Opinion, that it might be known by the smell of their Breath; but then, as he said who durst Smell to that Breath for his Information? Since to know it, he must draw the Stench of the Plague up into his own Brain, in order to distinguish the Smell! I have heard, it was the opinion of others, that it might be distinguish’d by the Party’s breathing upon a piece of Glass, where the Breath condensing, there might living Creatures be seen by a Microscope of strange monstrous and frightful Shapes, such as Dragons, Snakes, Serpents, and Devils, horrible to behold. (Defoe 174)

In this example, information is, as above, a stimulus based in relation, a call to practice a particular set of methods of knowing (smelling the breath or capturing it on a glass for further examination) for the purpose of diagnosing the infected. But unlike the Magistrate ordering the breaking open of houses according to the information of the two men, Dr. Heath treats information as a stimulus for further inquiry (as opposed to a stimulus to act on the information taken at face value). Here is where Defoe’s novel treats information in an important new way, as something to be scrutinized rather than taken up on its own terms as a basis for action. In this way Journal anticipates a key development in the concept of information that came later in the century, the idea that “information” wasn’t up to the epistemic task of signaling reliable knowledge. Duguid observes “growing doubts about the adequacy of ‘information’” as early as Oliver Goldsmith’s Good Natur’d Man (1768), which features an ironic usage of “man of information” to describe the charlatan Lofty. The phrase “man of information” “increasingly appears with qualification” in the latter half of the eighteenth century, suggesting skepticism about the reliability of information (Duguid 365-66).

Returning to Defoe’s passage about Dr. Heath, knowledge, as opposed to information, would arise not from the act of smelling but from confirmation that one has smelled what one expects to smell in the breath of the infected. Curiously, however, Heath points out a complicating factor for any accounts of this smell-test method being themselves credible information: It’s unlikely that one would risk infecting themselves in an attempt to detect infection in another. Furthermore, the alternative method—having a patient breathe on a glass slide the doctor could then view under the microscope—is a matter of hearsay and speculation: “I have heard, it was the Opinion of others”; “there might living Creatures be.” As in the case of the Magistrate and the two men, for which information is a prompt for verification, H.F.’s account of Dr. Heath’s account (and of hearsay besides) treats information as a credibility-neutral matter for which judgments of credibility are less about form than context. But unlike the Magistrate passage, the Dr. Heath passage illustrates an interest in moving beyond credibility-neutrality, or in vetting the credibility of the information given while suspending any further action.

II. Forms of Information

I have suggested to this point that, in the above usages of “information” in Journal, we can observe an instructive contrast between a concept of information taken at face value and acted upon accordingly and a concept of information that demands epistemic scrutiny. In both usages, what matters is less the form of relation than the attitude toward information, one receptive and the other skeptical. Yet we might push a bit further on the question of the relationship between information and form, or to what extent information itself, in the above examples, could be considered a distinct epistemic form, if not a prominent eighteenth-century genre.^[1] Clifford Siskin offers a helpful way of understanding the genre of information in the period, based in Francis Bacon’s thinking about the “discovery of Forms”: the new and useful. As Bacon writes in the Novum Organum (1620):

He who knows the cause of nature…only in certain subjects has an imperfect Knowledge of it…And he who knows only the Efficient and Material causes (causes which are variable, and merely vehicles and capable of conveying forms in some things only) may achieve new discoveries in material which is fairly similar and previously prepared, but does not touch the deeply rooted ends of things. But he who knows forms comprehends the unity of nature in very different materials. And so he can uncover and bring forth things which have never been achieved…Hence true Thought and free Operation result from the discovery of Forms. (103)

For Siskin, “This is what the word ‘currency’ was coined to convey: the new (what has ‘never been achieved’) and the useful (what is in ‘operation’) as the criteria for putting ‘things’ in ‘form.’ Information.”^[2] Silver observes similarly that “information began . . . at the site where intention meets the material it molds.” Taken together, these accounts of the Enlightenment-era concept of information emphasize what Silver calls the metaphorical function of the concept as that which we put in service of shaping or molding, both materially (following Siskin, shaping the new) and conceptually (following Silver, shaping minds) (277).

From these observations we get a sense of what the Enlightenment genre of information was meant to accomplish, which is shaping and operationalizing the useful and the new. The “form” of information in this sense is not only what we conventionally understand as informational form—the form of a chart, a diagram, a paragraph with interpolated numerical figures, or a particular structure of narrative account—but also a way of organizing or structuring the relationship between the new and the useful. This account of Enlightenment-era information is compatible, moreover, with Duguid’s claim that “changing senses of information accompanied…changing accounts of the gap between mind and world and the theories about how that gap was bridged,” since the concept of information was being asked to serve as such a Baconian bridge (353-54). In practice, as Defoe was certainly attuned to, the organization or shaping of conceptual systems into material ones increasingly manifested throughout the eighteenth century as a scaling-up of the news, the circulation of newspapers and periodicals that demanded the triangulation of observations and accounts.

How then do we address the Dr. Heath problem at scale, or how do we identify credible information if not by and of the forms in which it is presented? For this we need some account of credibility to add to this account of information. Steven Shapin finds such an account in King Lear, though his reading of Lear has become part of a larger program of understanding how scientific credibility works in the world and is mediated by institutions.

In the landmark essay “Cordelia’s Love,” Shapin explains how Cordelia is a modernist epistemologist—like Bacon and Boyle—while Lear “represents obdurate reality.” Cordelia expects that the light of the truth of her love for her father will shine on its own, that it will be enough. As a modernist epistemologist she believes, in Shapin’s words, that “the credibility and the validity of a proposition ought to be one and the same.” But we know that Lear doesn’t experience credibility in that way. For him, the plain-spoken statement and the simple demonstration lack credibility; Lear needs to be persuaded (Shapin 255-56).

The key insight of Shapin’s reading of King Lear is that there is no pure knowledge independent of credibility. No credibility, no knowledge. But a secondary insight is as I explained above, that, however rigorous is the scientific process by which we generate matters of fact, establishing the credibility by which matters of fact become seated knowledge often relies on what can seem superficial: What does credibility look like? At stake here is not simply the forms information takes, or how it’s represented, but the forms credibility takes. In the seventeenth century and into the eighteenth, one might have been tempted to take the looking part literally. The Royal Society motto, “nullius in verba,” or “take no one’s word for it,” meant building credibility through “referring the reader to the figure,” as Robert Hooke does so frequently in Micrographia (1665) (211). This was a key strategy in virtual witnessing.

We see this strategy plenty in Journal, in its interpolated charts and ledgers. Journal frequently links H.F.’s “observations” to tables of numerical data, typically bills of mortality. “The figure” in this case isn’t a diagrammed illustration as in Micrographia, but numerical data that function both as a form of computational information and, aggregated, as a kind of paper trail or primary source documentation that, like the numerical figure, is recognizable as evidence at a glance. In other words, one version of credible information in Journal looks like stuff you can look at. The pioneering economist and demographer William Petty claimed, for example, that in expressing himself “in Terms of Number, Weight, and Measure” he might avoid dependence “upon the Mutable Minds, Opinions, Appetites, and Passions of particular Men” (24). Weaving numbers into the narrative alongside narrative gestures to the tables, Defoe’s Journal bears strong resemblance to William Petty’s Political Arithmetick (1690) essays, which also rely on interpolated figures to bolster and sometimes distract from subjective judgments or undemonstrated claims. “But to return to my particular Observations,” writes H.F., “during this dreadful part of the Visitation: I am now come, as I have said, to the Month of September, which was the most dreadful of its kind, I believe, that ever London saw…the particulars of the Bills are as follows, (viz.)” (Defoe 153-54). Petty, along with John Graunt, whose 1662 Natural and Political Observations […] upon the Bills of Mortality “aimed to show how statistics could and should be used to direct state policies,” frequently portrayed credibility as a function of form (Seager 643).

Beyond the charts and figures in Journal, Defoe deploys a rhetoric of the visual similar to what we find in Petty, Graunt, and Hooke, using language that conjures or connotes referentiality and visuality, such as “observe,” “see,” and “show.” He also makes reference to visuals in order to show instead of tell. H.F. gestures toward the chart with “viz.” (videlicet, from videre, “to see,” and licet, “it is permissible,” hence “it is permissible to see”) (179). Hooke makes similar gestures in Micrographia, as when he notes that “there are many other particulars, which, being more obvious, and affording no great matter of information, I shall pass by, and refer the Reader to the Figure” (211).

In one sense of “form” these are clearly formal features of the writing of Defoe, Petty, and Hooke alike—interpolated figures and charts, narrative references to the figure, rhetoric of the visual—but in another sense these are ways of showcasing an underlying interest in the minute particular as currency of information, the building blocks or means of scaling-up Siskin describes. In the foregoing examples from Journal, H.F. qualifies his “observations” as “particular” and then describes the evidence in the bills of mortality to which he refers the reader as “particulars.” These are not merely stylistic elements of Defoe’s writing; they are staging grounds for epistemological inquiry and the foundation of how Defoe imagines how assessments of credibility function and fail.

The trouble, of course, is that rhetoric of the visual and “show, don’t tell” aesthetics are signals of unreliability at least as much as of credible information. Visuality is also at the center of the incredible in Defoe’s text. Addressing the apparitions some Londoners claimed to see upon arrival of the plague, and the interpretations of the comet visible in the sky for months before the plague struck, H.F. writes “I could fill this account with the strange relations such people gave every day of what they had seen; and every one was so positive of their having seen what they pretended to see, that there was no contradicting them without breach of friendship, or being accounted rude and unmannerly on the one hand, and profane and impenetrable on the other” (21). In a key moment in the text, H.F. even undermines the credibility of the figures he presents. He reasons that the Bills of Mortality likely under-report the number of dead, since those employed to carry off the bodies were often working in the dark, or working under extreme pressure to keep up with the magnitude, so would not always keep accurate count of what they carried (Defoe 85-86). But then H.F. does something intriguing. He appeals to the figures in the Bills of Mortality themselves to verify his questioning of their accuracy. “This account is verified by the following Bills of Mortality,” he writes, before displaying the Bills (Defoe 85). Here we see hints of Lewis’s claim that Journal frequently works through equivocation and paradox, reflecting Defoe’s interest in finding “some ‘indeterminate’ ground between the visible and invisible worlds,” in this case the manifest figures in the Bills and the imagined scenarios that would have led to their inaccuracy (Lewis 113-14). H.F.’s rationale is that if the Bills show 50,000 dead in the span of only two months, and the reported total dead for the duration of the plague was 68,590, and the rate of death didn’t come down so drastically as would be required to square these figures, it’s unlikely that the total figure could be so low.

We can see in these brief examples that “nullius in verba” doesn’t quite hold up; that King Lear’s obdurate reality prevails. Information spreads with considerable efficiency throughout H.F.’s London, but the vetting process turns out to be trickier than referring the reader to the figure. Such moments are at the heart of how Journal represents the difficulty of ascertaining credible information and the futility of using what I’ve called the aesthetics of information as a signal of—much less a criterion for—credibility. In closing I’ll say a bit more about what we need for credible information in Journal, over and above what credible information looks like.

III. Credibility

Doing so requires us to consider the obverse of “nullius in verba”: Whose word do we take and why? Surveying the sociology of social and natural science, Shapin writes:

the study of credibility…became simply coextensive with the study of knowledge, including scientific knowledge. In sociological terms of art, an individual’s belief (or an individual’s claim) was contrasted to collectively held knowledge. The individual’s belief did not become collective—and so part of knowledge—until or unless it had won credibility. (257)

An important principle of Shapin’s observation that the study of knowledge production is coextensive with the study of credibility is that “if we say that scientific claims have always got to win credibility, then that makes them like the claims of ordinary life” (257). For Shapin, the fact that the study of credibility is a matter not strictly of scientific claims and methods but also of the claims of ordinary life “means that we can make use of many of the resources and procedures that features in academic inquiries about other practices” (259). Further, he remarks that “there is no limit to the considerations that might be relevant to securing credibility, and, therefore, no limit to the considerations which the analyst of science might give attention” (260). Examining how Journal portrays what Shapin calls the “credit-economy” of knowledge in Journal means attending not only to Defoe’s stylistic choices for representing information, but also to the social dynamics of information sharing that animate Journal, bearing in mind what we know of information’s history as a concept: that it is the product of many hands, or of a frequently invisible network of assemblage (Shapin 258). Defoe’s characters vest credibility in other characters in a number of ways, from evaluating storytelling and relation to considering the conceptual distance between the storyteller and the evidence behind the story.

H.F. certainly complains of what he calls “mere stories.” One such story is a repeated tale about nurses who smother their patients, either out of mercy or of haste. He writes:

They did tell me indeed of a Nurse in one place, that laid a wet Cloth upon the Face of a dying Patient, who she tended, and so put an End to his Life, who was just expiring before: And another that smother’d a young Woman she was looking to, when she was in a fainting fit, and would have come to her self: Some that kill’d them by giving them one Thing, some another, and some starved them by giving them nothing at all: But these Stories had two Marks of Suspicion that always attended them, which caused me always to slight them and to look on them as meer Stories, that People continually frighted one another with. (73).

The two reasons H.F. gives to disbelieve these stories are: (1) That the person relating the information always placed the scene of the incident at the other end of town, presumably to disarm suspicion that if such a thing happened locally people would have heard about it or known something further; and (2) That “the Particulars were always the same” across versions of the story (Defoe 74). This seems a probabilistic judgment of credibility: if all such incidents, independently related by direct observers, one would expect more variation.

If we look at the kind of story H.F. finds credible, we find a similar rationale based on the probability of direct observation. The story is that there is an indigent piper who wanders around door to door at public houses playing songs and entertaining people in exchange for victuals. As H.F. relates:

I know the Story goes, he set up his Pipes in the Cart, and frighted the Bearers, and others, so that they ran away; but John Hayward did not tell the Story so, nor say any Thing of his Piping at all; but that he was a poor Piper, and that he was carried away as above I am fully satisfied of the Truth of. (79)

H.F. hears the story from an undersexton he characterizes as “honest John Hayward,” an individual he can name, whose information is related directly to H.F. John Hayward helps care for the sick, and apparently treated this piper, so H.F. remarks: “It was under this John Hayward’s care, and within his Bounds, that the Story of the Piper, with which People have made themselves so merry, happen’d, and he assur’d me that it was true” (78). So here we have a “meer Stor[y]”—a story not without omissions that H.F. notes—but the proximity and specificity of it is enough to compel H.F. to believe Hayward’s part of it. The omission H.F. notes—that the piper “set up his Pipes in the Cart, and frighted the Bearers”—would go against Hayward’s credibility, but is balanced by H.F.’s impression of Hayward as “honest” and the fact that Hayward relates his story of the piper directly to H.F. (that is, this is not hearsay of the sort H.F. passes along to readers—“I know the Story goes”—to qualify Hayward’s account). In this otherwise unremarkable scene, we can observe in just a few of H.F.’s intimations of rationale how H.F. triangulates his own judgment, what he has heard, and his assessment of the trustworthiness of the teller (Hayward) and the extent to which what Hayward tells agrees with what H.F. has heard.

What we are left with is a basic problem of social epistemology. H.F. trusts a courageous undertaker, John Hayward, with the piper story but not the collective chatter about the smothering nurses or the “old women”—in his words—who see ghosts or dire warnings in the sky (Defoe 18-20). This is how H.F. describes their interpretation the comet that appeared in the leading up to the visitation of the plague as an omen, compared with his first thoughts on the comet as well:

[T]he old Women, and the Phlegmatic Hypocondriac Part of the other Sex, who I could almost call old Women too, remark’d (especially afterward tho’ not till both those Judgments were over) that those tow Comets pass’d directly over the City, and that so very near the Houses, that it was plain, they imported something peculiar to the City alone; that the Comet before the Pestilence, was of a faint, dull, languid Colour, and its Motion very heavy, solemn and slow: But that of the Comet before the Fire, was bright and sparkling, or as others said, flaming, and its Motion swift and furious; and that accordingly, One foretold a heavy Judgment, slow but severe, terrible and frightful, as was the Plague; But the other foretold a Stroak, sudden, swift, and fiery as the Conflagration…I saw both of these Stars; and I must confess, had so much of the common Notion of Things in my Head, that I was apt to look upon them, as the Forerunners and Warnings of Gods Judgments. (18-19)

We can see in this passage a negative, gendered judgment of the character of those who interpreted the comets preceding the fire and the plague as omens (“Phlegmatic Hypocondriac”). But in the next passage we also see H.F. appealing to expertise as a way of checking his fears about the comets-as-omens:

But I cou’d not at the same Time carry these Things to the heighth that others did, knowing too, that natural Causes are assign’d by the Astronomers for such Things; and that their Motions, and even their Revolutions are calculated, or pretended to be calculated; so that they cannot be so perfectly call’d the Fore-runners, or Fore-tellers, much less the procurers of such Events, as Pestilence, War, Fire, and the like. (19)

H.F. not only makes credibility judgments on those who hold or relate information, but also appeals to expert knowledge to scrutinize and contextualize such claims. H.F. attempts to put all of this in perspective, noting the heightened degree of fear and concern among the people of London as the plague set in: “[T]hese things [superstitions, taking comets as omens] had a more than ordinary Influence upon the Minds of the common People, and they had almost universal melancholly Apprehensions of some dreadful Calamity and Judgment coming upon the City; and this principally from the Sight of this Comet” (19).

We find in the end, then, that trust and reputation, prejudice, probabilistic thinking, and independent verification all inform H.F.’s sense of what to believe. Credibility in Journal is not a function of form as such; it is rather a function of an assessment of an entire network of sources. Here my reading of Journal departs, by way of comparable observations, from those that understand Defoe as undermining the certainty of numerical data and other forms of visual rhetoric meant to convey immediacy or the absence of mediation. In suggesting that the form of information is, in Journal and in general, a poor indicator of credibility, I understand the credibility problem in Journal less as a problem of Defoe’s stance on certain knowledge (versus probable knowledge) than of Defoe’s interest in sociality of epistemic judgment.

In short, lacking the tools and expertise for any kind of large-scale analysis of the information networks he attends to, H.F. muddles through an epidemiological problem in the way one might a social-epistemic problem, like whether to trust a neighbor to watch the dog while you are away, or whether to open up to someone you have just met. Compatible with Shapin’s argument about social epistemology, we find in Journal that even questions about the workings of the natural world turn on interpersonal assessments of character, testimony, and rationale far more than on the forms of information presentation. Further, the social-epistemic quality of vetting information—even that which we would call scientific information—that Journal portrays is a function of how the concept of information developed during the historical Enlightenment. While it is true that information became a material thing—a chart, a ledger, a bill, a list—capable of shaping mental impressions (as opposed to merely a reflection of sense data), we also know that such forms were not constitutive of knowledge. Rather, they were rhetorical invitations to credibility vetting in the pursuit of knowledge, whether we think of knowledge on the scale of interpersonal relationships (Is this person trustworthy?) or scientific determinations (Is this person infectious?).

Colby College

Notes

¹ Rachael Scarborough King makes a compelling case for distinguishing between form and genre as terms for different scales of analysis: “the key distinction between form and genre is that they operate at different scales” (261). Here I invoke King’s argument to suggest that the scale of the chart or numerical figure is a form, whereas the scale of information is more of a genre.

² Clifford Siskin, “Enlightenment and the Vectors of Information.” This is from the unpublished manuscript of a talk Siskin delivered on September 18, 2020 as part of the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence seminar.

Works Cited

Bacon, Francis. The New Organon, edited by Lisa Jardine and Michael Silverthorne, Cambridge UP, 2000.

Blair, Ann and Peter Stallybrass. “Mediating Information: 1450-1800.” This is Enlightenment, edited by Clifford Siskin and William Warner, U of Chicago P, 2010, 139-163.

Defoe, Daniel. Journal of the Plague Year, edited by Louis Landa, Oxford UP, 2010.

Duguid, Paul. “The Ageing of Information: From Particular to Particulate.” Journal of the History of Ideas, vol. 76, no. 3, 2015, pp. 347-368.

Hooke, Robert. Micrographia. London, 1665.

King, Rachael Scarborough. “The Scale of Genre.” New Literary History, vol. 52, no. 2, 2021, pp. 261-284.

Lewis, Jayne. Air’s Appearance: Literary Atmosphere in British Fiction, 1660-1794, U of Chicago P, 2012.

Petty, William. Political Arithmetick. London, 1690.

Schmidgen, Wolfram. “Robinson Crusoe, Enumeration, and the Mercantile Fetish.” Eighteenth-Century Studies, vol. 35, no. 1, 2001, pp. 19-39.

Seager, Nicholas. “Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics: Epistemology and Fiction in Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year.” The Modern Language Review, vol. 103, no. 3, 2008, pp. 639-653.

Shapin, Steven. “Cordelia’s Love: Credibility and the Social Studies of Science.” Perspectives on Science, vol. 3, no. 3, 1995, pp. 255-275.

Shapin, Steven and Simon Schaffer. Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life. 1985. Princeton UP, 2011.

Silver, Sean. “Information and Irony.” Emergent Nation: Early Modern British Literature in Transition, 1660-1714, edited by Elizabeth Sauer, Cambridge UP, 2019, 276-291.

Siskin, Clifford. “Enlightenment and the Vectors of Information.” Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence Seminar, 18 September 2020, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK and virtual (Zoom).

Thompson, Helen. “‘It Was Impossible to Know These People’: Secondary Qualities and the Form of Character in A Journal of the Plague Year.” The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation, vol. 54, no. 2, 2013, pp. 153-167.

Digital Defoe

Studies in Defoe & His Contemporaries

Category Archives: Issue 14.1-Fall 2022

Sapphic Crossings: Cross-Dressing Women in Eighteenth-Century British Literature, by Ula Lukszo Klein

Robinson Crusoe after 300 Years, edited by Andreas K. E. Mueller and Glynis Ridley. Lewisburg, Bucknell University Press, 2021;
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Rewriting Crusoe: The Robinsonade across Languages, Cultures and Media, edited by Jakub Lipski

Vanity Fair and the Celestial City: Dissenting, Methodist, and Evangelical Literary Culture in England, 1720–1800, by Isabel Rivers

Parroting Solitude: The Alienated Voice in Julio Cortázar’s “Adíos Robinson”

The Nature of ECCO-TCP

Defoe and the Economic Sublime

Information and Credibility in A Journal of the Plague Year