To vex rather than to divert
Daniel Defoe.
- The social and literary context of the eighteenth century. The novel as a literary form.
- Daniel Defoe’s biography. Consider his religious views, his economic struggling and attempts to make a living, his prolific literary output and his contributions to the genre of the novel.
- Robinson Crusoe
1.Daniel Defoe called his Robinson Crusoe an “allusive allegoric history”, or a parable comparable to those of the Bible. In the first sentence of the Preface ‘the editor’ declares that the “Story is told with Modesty, with Seriousness, and with a religious Application”. To what extent can Robinson Crusoe be viewed as a religious story and as a symbolic or allegoric form?
When answering this question, consider the following:
· One way of reading Robinson Crusoe is as a spiritual autobiography. The spiritual biography/autobiography portrays the Puritan drama of the soul. Concerned about being saved, having a profound sense of God's presence, seeing His will manifest everywhere, and aware of the unceasing conflict between good and evil, Puritans constantly scrutinized their lives to determine the state of their souls and looked for signs of the nature of their relationship with God (i.e., saved or not). The spiritual autobiography usually follows a common pattern: the narrator sins, ignores God's warnings, hardens his heart to God, repents as a result of God's grace and mercy, experiences a soul-wrenching conversion, and achieves salvation. The writer emphasizes his former sinfulness as a way of glorifying God; the deeper his sinfulness, the greater God's grace and mercy in electing to save him. He reviews his life from the new perspective his conversion has given him and writes of the present and the future with a deep sense of God's presence in his life and in the world.
· In the "Preface," Defoe announces that his intention is "to justify and honour the wisdom of Providence in all the variety of our circumstances" .
· Crusoe receives warnings against his decision of going to sea. What are they? Who do they come from?
· The duplication of dates for significant events is indisputable evidence of Providence at work. Crusoe notes that the date he ran away from his family is the same date he was captured and made a slave; the day that he survived his first shipwreck is the same date he was cast ashore on the island; and the day he was born is the same day he was cast ashore, "so that my wicked life and my solitary life begun both on a day" . Is this similarity of dates the working of Providence or merely chance, meaningless coincidence?
· Does Crusoe use religious language and Biblical references? Is it important if he does?
· Does Crusoe tell his life story at the moment of the events described or long afterward? Does he present events from the point of view of a youth or a convert who constantly sees the workings of the Providence?
2.If Robinson Crusoe has a moral and religious significance, most happenings are supposed to have a spiritual and moral meaning. Is that so in the context of the novel? What spiritual interpretations can some events in Crusoe’s life have? For example, being a slave, a shipwreck, his struggles in the ocean and being cast ashore, his being alone on the island, etc. Does keeping a journal help him to perceive patterns of meaning?
3.What are the other possible symbolic interpretations of Robinson Crusoe?
Is Crusoe presented as a new Adam? Does he recapitulate much of human history in his own experience on the island?
4.Even if we accept that Defoe's intention is to justify and honor Providence, the question still remains whether he carries out his intention.
Consider Crusoe’s adventures from an economic perspective. Is Crusoe more a religious or an economic being? Is concern with worldly affairs and material well-being compatible with a sincere religious faith?
Consider the following:
· What are Crusoe’s relationships with others based on? Does he seem to have any need for a family on the island? How much does he say of the marriage in London?
· How does he treat material wealth?
· Does he act in self-interest? To what extent is he driven by the economic motive, the desire to accumulate?
· What elicits strongest emotions from Crusoe?
· Consider also the details of Crusoe’s religious conversion.
5.Overall, is Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe an overtly symbolic novel or does the text really spend most of its time on the surface and tempt the reader to take it at face value?
What explains the almost universal appeal of Crusoe? Why do so many people, regardless of age, social class, intellectual level, and culture, admire Crusoe?
Gulliver’s Travels
Questions and Tasks
1. The eighteenth century in England. The Augustan Age. Neoclassicism.
2. Jonathan Swift. His life and literary career.
3. Gulliver’s Travels. The history of the book. Gulliver’s four voyages and their possible literary sources.
4. The genre distinctions of The Travels.
- Swift’s method and genre.
- The functions of fantasy and verisimilitude.
- The motives of Utopia in Gulliver’s Travels.
5. The central character of Gulliver’s Travels.
- Gulliver as the compositional centre of the book;
- Gulliver as the average European of the eighteenth century;
- Gulliver and Swift
Additional questions
1. How does Swift use language and style for the purpose of satire? How does his style change as the story progresses?
2. What is the significance, if any, of the order in which Gulliver's journeys take place? How does each adventure build on the previous one?
3. What is the allegorical significance of the floating island of Laputa?
4. Why does Gulliver keep traveling despite his many misfortunes?
5. Why does Gulliver want to stay with the Houyhnhnms? Does his desire make sense in light of the other societies he has visited?
6. Swift was often accused of being a misanthrope who saw human beings as the yahoos. Would you agree with this opinion?
Gulliver’s Travels is Swift’s most universal satire. Although it is full of allusions to recent and contemporary historical events, it is as valid today as it was in 1726, for its objects are man’s moral nature and the defective political, economic, and social institutions which human imperfections call into being.
Lemuel Gulliver, the narrator, is a ship’s surgeon, a reasonably well-educated man, kindly, resourceful, cheerful, inquiring, patriotic, truthful, and rather unimaginative. He is, in short, a reasonably decent example of humanity, with whom we identify ourselves readily enough.
Almost unique in the world literature, the book is simple enough for a child, and complex enough to carry an adult beyond his depth. Swift’s art works on many levels. First of all, there is the sheer playfulness of the narrative. Through Gulliver’s eyes, we gaze on marvel after marvel. The travels, like a fairy story, transport us to imaginary worlds that function with a perfect, fantastic logic different from our own.
Swift exercises our sense of vision. But beyond that, he exercises our perceptions of meaning. In Gulliver’s Travels things are seldom what they seem: irony, probing or corrosive, underlines almost every word. During the last chapter, Gulliver insists that the example of the Houyhnhnms has made him incapable of telling a lie – but the oath he swears is quoted from Sinon, whose lies to the Trojans persuaded them to accept the Trojan horse. Swift trains us to read alertly, to look beneath the surface.
Yet, on its deepest level the book does not offer final meanings, but a question: what sort of thing is man? Voyaging through imaginary worlds, we try to find ourselves. In his last voyage, Gulliver, hating his humanity, forgets who he is. For the reader, however, the outcome cannot be so clear. Swift does not set out to satisfy our minds, but to vex and unsettle them. And he leaves us at the moment when the mixed face of the humanity – the pettiness of the Lilliputians, the savagery of the Yahoos, the innocence of Gulliver himself – begins to look strangely familiar, like our own faces in a mirror.
Excerpts from literary criticism:
TO VEX RATHER THAN TO DIVERT
‘The chief end I propose to myself in all my labours is to vex the world rather than divert it’. So Swift wrote in the autumn of 1725 when he was finishing the most celebrated of his books. Gulliver’s Travels was published a year later, and as Dr. Johnson remarks ‘was read by the high and the low, the learned and illiterate. Criticism was for a while lost in wonder’. What was to have vexed the world diverted it then and has continued to do so ever since.
John Hayward