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institution of the English novel: Defoe's contribution, The
Novel: A Forum on Fiction, Spring 1996 by Brown, Homer
Astute and careful readers, even when acknowledging that what we now call the novel did not then exist, proceed as if Daniel Defoe were seized by the dynamics of the genre he unselfconsciously employed. Indeed, arguably none of us has been free of the platonic ideality or natural/supernatural power of form in our reading of Defoe, and it is this insistent force of genre that has given us the picture of the bumbling, artless, near illiterate, political journalist/hack, chronic liar, who stumbled into the invention of the novel somewhat on the model of the man who invents the telephone and immediately tries to wash his hands with it. In fact, our retrospective sense of genre and our knowledge or frustrating lack of certainty about much of Defoe's life have always worked together to generate readings of his works.
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According to Defoe's contemporaries and critics during most of the eighteenth century, Defoe didn't invent anything or conversely he invented everything. That is, he had a powerful reputation for lying, for want of a better word, as Sir Leslie Stephen said (1: 3-4). Increasingly, he was credited with somehow producing a single mythic character whose story was sometimes thought, particularly in the nineteenth century, more fit for children or social theorists than for general adult readers. At any rate, he was not always considered the inventor of the novel. How does one writer invent a genre? How does a new way of telling a story become a genre? How is the legitimacy of its name established and accepted? It would not seem irrelevant that this last question points to one of the predominant plot patterns and themes in what we now call the classic novel. And the question seems peculiarly apt given the fact that so many eighteenth-century fictions have as their title a proper name and at that, a name that turns out in the story to be false or inaccurate or misleading. Take, for example, Defoe's own novels, or even Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones.
We also know that the canonic three founders, Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding, took great pains to distinguish what they wrote from what were then called novels. Defoe said very little about genre. He was too busy claiming factual truth or at least authenticity for his narratives. Given the more explicit assertions of a new species of writing by Samuel Richardson and Henry Fielding, and given their greater discussion of the problem of genre, particularly by Fielding, it is a lot easier to see in their works the invention of a new or transformed genre than it was for contemporaries to discover such novelty in Defoe. At any rate, what Fielding and Richardson wrote came to be called novels rather late in the eighteenth century, and Defoe was often not included in those discussions or paired with Jonathan Swift when he was. The discussions themselves gave only vague definitions at best for the concept of the novel or the problem of genre. Consequently, we know little about how this new meaning given the term novel crowded out the earlier meanings, other than the fact that the production of the earlier kind of novel declined.
We do know that Defoe was virtually ignored for most of the eighteenth century. If he was remembered, moreover, it was as a political writer, for he had a reputation both as a patriot/statesman and as a historian that grew during the nineteenth century. If he did invent the novel in 1719, his invention had been ignored and lay dormant for more than twenty years when it was taken up by Richardson and Fielding, whose novels resemble his not at all, and who rarely, if ever, mention him, and not as a precursor. There may be some vague resemblances between the themes and plots (but not the form) of Defoe's conduct books, particularly Religious Courtship, and Richardson's novels, which as Nancy Armstrong points out, Richardson regarded more as conduct books than as novels. What is clear is that the linear history of the novel as having an "origin" and "rise," the history we have been brought up on, with its genealogies, lines of descent and influence, family resemblances, is itself a fictional narrative-a kind of novel about the novel. Moreover, such a story represses the irreducible heterogeneity of the discourses and forms that contribute to the institution of the English novel in a way that seems analogous to the usual English suppression of the heterogeneous sources of British culture and identity?
The fact is, as one of Defoe's principal twentieth-century biographers and bibliographers John Robert Moore pointed out in 1941, that while there were collected editions of Richardson, Fielding, and Smollett in the eighteenth century, there was no collected edition of Defoe until the nineteenth century (710). "Until near the end of the eighteenth century," what is more, "there was no considerable biography or critical study of Defoe. No book lover is known to have assembled a collection of his writings. For nearly a century most of his works had been reissued (if at all) with no indication of his authorship. The less known writings had become almost totally lost, and the better known ones (like Robinson Crusoe) had become almost independent of his name. The anonymity which was a matter of choice or of professional necessity in his lifetime was apparently becoming permanent" (710). Moore also believed that "Defoe has been to a large extent the victim of a literary clique which determined more than two centuries ago (as Professor William T. Laprade once pointed out to me) that no writer of the Age of Anne should be known to fame except themselves and their friends" (734). One might add that this was the very clique who was busy producing the modern sense of what literature is. Defoe's chosen and sometimes necessary anonymity was apparently taken up and reinforced by the official Augustans. The remark to Robert Harley of Defoe's erstwhile fellow agent, Jonathan Swift, in his Letter Concerning the Sacramental Test, seems aptly characteristic of this intention: "One of these Authors (the Fellow that was pilloryed, I have forgot his Name) is indeed so grave, sententious, dogmatical a Rogue, that there is no enduring him" (qtd. in Rogers, Defoe 38).
