Farther Away: Essays Read Online Free PDF

remains the political-economic one that Ian Watt advanced fifty years ago. The birthplace of the novel, in its modern form, happens also to have been Europe’s most economically dominant and sophisticated nation, and Watt’s analysis of this coincidence is blunt but powerful, tying together the glorification of the enterprising individual, the expansion of a literate bourgeoisie eager to read about itself, the rise in social mobility (inviting writers to exploit its anxieties), the specialization of labor (creating a society of interesting differences ), the disintegration of the old social order into a collection of individual isolates, and, of course, among the newly comfortable middle class, the dramatic increase in leisure for reading. At the same time, England was rapidly becoming more secular. Protestant theology had laid the foundations of the new economy by reimagining the social order as a collection of self-reliant individuals with a direct relationship with God; but by 1700, as the British economy thrived, it was becoming less clear that individuals needed God at all. It’s true that, as any impatient child reader can tell you, many pages of Robinson Crusoe are devoted to its hero’s spiritual journey. Robinson finds God on the island, and he turns to Him repeatedly in moments of crisis, praying for deliverance and ecstatically thanking Him for providing the means of it. And yet, as soon as each crisis has passed, he reverts to his practical self and forgets about God; by the end of the book, he seems to have been saved more by his own industry and ingenuity than by Providence. To read the story of Robinson’s vacillations and forgetfulness is to see the genre of spiritual autobiography unraveling into realist fiction.
    The most interesting aspect of the novel’s origin may be the evolution of English culture’s answers to the question of verisimilitude: Should a strange story be accepted as true because it is strange, or should its strangeness be taken as proof that it is false? The anxieties of this question are still with us (witness the scandal of James Frey’s “memoir”), and they were certainly in play in 1719, when Defoe published the first and best-known volume of Robinson Crusoe . The author’s real name appeared nowhere in it. The book was identified, instead, as The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe . . . Written by Himself, and many of its first readers took the story to be nonfiction. Enough other readers doubted its authenticity, however, that Defoe felt obliged to defend its truthfulness when he published the third and last of the volumes, the following year. Contrasting his story with romances, in which “the story is feign’d,” he insisted that his story, “though allegorical, is also historical,” and he affirmed that “there is a man alive, and well known too, the actions of whose life are the just subject of these volumes.” Given what we know of Defoe’s real life—like Crusoe, he got into trouble by pursuing risky business schemes, such as raising civet cats for perfume, and he had intimate knowledge of isolation from the debtors’ prison in which bankruptcy twice landed him—and given also his assertion, elsewhere in the volume, that “life in general is, or ought to be, but one universal act of solitude,” it seems fair to conclude that the “well known” man is Defoe himself. (There is, strikingly, that “oe” at the end of both names.) We now understand a novel to be a mapping of a writer’s experience onto a waking dream, and a crucial turn toward this understanding can be seen in Defoe’s tentative assertion of a less than strictly historical kind of truth—the novelist’s “truth.”
    The critic Catherine Gallagher, in her essay “The Rise of Fictionality,” takes up a curious paradox related to this kind of truth: the