The Writing Of The Self

Hugo Blumenthal © 2006

Robinson Crusoe, Pamela Andrews, And The Writing Of The Self by Hugo Blumenthal

That the assumed origins of the English novel should begin with Robinson Crusoe and Pamela Andrews, two characters apparently quite able to write their own stories, almost to the point of supplanting their respective authors, seems very remarkable; especially if we consider that in the Eighteenth Century approximately only 60 percent of the adult men and between 40 and 50 percent of the women population in England could read and write, figures that were at least double those in the previous century.1 In such circumstances, and within the limits of verisimilitude of the lives of Crusoe and Pamela (a verisimilitude that Defoe and Richardson took so much care to create, pretending to be mere editors of their texts), their capacity for writing is certainly exceptional. But leaving aside the improbable amount of time Pamela spends writing (though it can be argued that she can hardly spend time in anything else), this capacity for writing is more than justified within both novels. Robinson Crusoe is not difficult to conceive within the approximately 30 percent of literate men in England by 1659, when he starts his island diary, if we remember that he belongs to a middle-class family and had received an education specifically directed towards making of him a lawyer.2 Pamela, though, is more of a challenge. The novel doesn’t include explicit historical dates or references, but it’s likely that her story could have taken place between 1715 and 1725.3 By that time, that a maid servant could have been able to achieve the style of Pamela’s letters must be regarded as highly improbable, despite the fact –as Ian Watt pointed out– that they enjoyed more privacy, artificial light and spare time to read than many other women.4 But, according to Richardson’s novel, Pamela is not only the daughter of two teachers (as Robert A. Erickson remind us, her father used to teach grammar, her mother sewing) 5 but an exceptional young woman who has been placed quite above her 1

J. Paul Hunter, ‘The novel and the socio/cultural history’, in The Cambridge Companion to the Eighteenth Century Novel, ed. by John Richetti (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 19-20.

2

Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, ed. by J. Donald Crowley (Oxford: Oxford, 1998), pp. 4, 6. Hereafter all quotations, followed by the letters ‘RC’ and a page number between brackets, are from this edition.

3

Cf. Thomas Keymer and Alice Wakely, note 58, in Samuel Richardson, Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded, ed. by Thomas Keymer and Alice Wakely (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 527. For the ‘origins’ of Pamela’s story, see also Alan Dugald McKillop, ‘The Story of Pamela’, Samuel Richardson: Printer and Novelist (USA: Shoe String, 1960), pp. 26-27.

4

Ian Watt, ‘The Reading Public and the Rise of the Novel’, The Rise of the Novel (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), p. 52.

5

Robert A. Erickson, ‘The Needle and the Pen’, Mother Midnight: Birth, Sex, and Fate in Eighteenth-Century Fiction (Defoe, Richardson, and Sterne) (New York: AMS, 1986), pp. 74-75.

Hugo Blumenthal © 2006

social level by Mr. B’s mother. In other words, it is the exceptionality of her character that helps to render her as probable. That from all the possible forms of writing at their disposition Robinson Crusoe and Pamela would ‘choose’ to write mainly letters and diaries (or journals) also helped to make them more credible. Pamela writes mostly letters to her parents, and when she is imprisoned and restricted from sending letters she starts a diary; a diary that is an extensive and delayed letter, in the same way that from the beginning her letters are closer to the entries of a diary. Robinson Crusoe’s writing of his life and adventures, on the other hand, can be seen from the beginning more like a ‘spiritual autobiography’ (a genre from which Pamela, as a novel, is not far removed, in its insistent didacticism), but all the same he reveals the sources of his writing to be mainly ‘journals’: his well known island-diary, or his ‘Sea-Journals’ and ‘Land-Journals’ (RC289). On top of that, if we agree with Donald Crowley, for whom Defoe’s ‘rambling sentences, often paragraph-long, create a sense of authentic life by seeming to render Crusoe’s experiences precisely at the moment he lives them […]’, Robinson Crusoe doesn’t seem that far from the technique Richardson used to call ‘writing to the moment’, by which the characters are supposed to consign through writing their thoughts and emotions as closely as possible to the events that have originated them. 6 On the popularity of journal-writing at that time, Michael McKeon notes that it was a very common practice among travellers, in part due to a recommendation by the Royal Society.7 But more significantly, Paul Hunter reminds us that: Personal writings were in the seventeenth century private writings, and they were legion. They came to exist because many Englishmen and Englishwomen […] believed that their eternal salvation was closely linked to the events of their everyday lives […] The recording and analysis of these events, in minute and painstaking detail, became a sacred duty and a common Protestant practice, and diary keeping (although primarily insisted upon by Puritan theorists) became a national habit practiced by a large percentage of those who were literate.8 The effectiveness in terms of verisimilitude of the recourse to first-person narratives is evident in terms of authority, regarding experience and life. The format of letters, diaries and journals serve to document ‘history’, rendering ‘fiction’ (in the broad sense of creation) closer to ‘the reality of life.’ In that sense, neither Robinson Crusoe or Pamela is writing a novel. The ‘editor’ of Robinson Crusoe’s writings ‘believes the thing to be a just History of Fact; neither is there any Appearance of Fiction in it […]’ (RC1), in the same way that the 6

Donald Crowley, ‘Introduction’, Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, ed. by J. Donald Crowley (Oxford: Oxford, 1998), p. xvi.

7

Michael McKeon, ‘Parables of the Younger Son (I): Defoe and the Naturalization of Desire’, The Origins of the English Novel 1600-1740 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), p. 316.

8

Paul J. Hunter, ‘The Self and the World: Private Histories’, Before Novels: The Cultural Contexts of Eighteenth-Century English Fiction (New York: Norton, 1990), p. 303.

2

Hugo Blumenthal © 2006

‘editor’ of Pamela’s writings believes they ‘have their Foundation in Truth and Nature’ (P3).9 It could be said, then, that Crusoe and Pamela write to reproduce reality. What is real, however, is shown to be subjective, because all they are interested in is their own individual realities. As Pamela recognises, the truth represented through her writings is not necessarily what others will agree is the objective reality: […] I think I have no Reason to be afraid of being found insincere, or having, in any respect, told you a Falsehood; because, tho’ I don’t remember all I wrote, yet I know I wrote my Heart; and that is not deceitful. (P230) That her ‘Heart’ is not deceitful means that her letters may represent not what others (like Mr. B) would acknowledge as the truth of what had happened but what she felt had happened, reality as she lived it. On the other hand, according to G. A. Starr, Defoe’s writing style in part can also be described as a rendering of things and events ‘as perceived, as in some sense transformed and recreated in the image of the narrator.’10 Reality, then, is not necessarily what is told; the reader just gets one version –as Mr. B at the beginning repeatedly seems to try to warn the reader (see for example P36: ‘[…] she has written letters […] to her Father and Mother, and others, as far as I know; in which she makes herself an Angel of Light, and me, her kind Master and Benefactor, a Devil incarnate!’) Curiously enough, later on the same character no longer recognises the difference anymore between what Pamela writes and what happened. He even praises Pamela for her memory: ‘[…] thou hast a Memory, as I see by your Papers, that nothing escapes it’ (P230). For Pamela, though, there is nothing to be proud of. As she says: […] what poor Abilities I have, serve only to make me more miserable! – I have no Pleasure in my Memory, which impresses things upon me, that I could be glad never were, or everlastingly to forget. (P230) But despite what Pamela says, in her peculiar inversion of the mechanics of memory (where memory is an agent that impresses ‘things’ upon Pamela, rather than ‘things’ leaving impressions upon memory, or the mind, which is the usual metaphor, as in Robinson Crusoe (RC88)), she is determined not to forget.11 As the ‘Editor’ points out, mirroring Pamela’s own words (P44), her compulsive writing seems then due to her desire to:

9

Samuel Richardson, Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded, ed. by Thomas Keymer and Alice Wakely (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). All quotations followed by the letter P (for Pamela) and a page number between brackets are from this edition, which is based on the original text of 1740. Richardson’s rewriting of Pamela, originally printed in 1801, posits slightly different questions on the subject of writing, which I have preferred not to explore here.

10

G. A. Starr, ‘Defoe’s Prose Style: 1. The Language of Interpretation’, Modern Philology, 71 (1974), 281 (author’s italics)

11

Cf. Jacques Derrida, ‘Freud and the Scene of Writing’, Writing and Difference, trans. by Alan Bass (London: Routledge, 2001), pp. 246-291.

3

Hugo Blumenthal © 2006

[…] amuse and employ her Time, in hopes some Opportunity might offer to send it to her Friends, and, as was her constant View, that she might afterwards thankfully look back upon the Dangers she had escaped […] that then she might examine, and either approve of, or repent for, her own Conduct in them. (P98) Memory, despite Pamela’s fears of not been able to forget, is evidently mistrusted from the start. In fear of forgetting his ‘[…] Reckoning of Time for want of Books and Pen and Ink […]’ (RC64), Robinson Crusoe, as well, mistrusts memory: life has to be recorded through writing.12 Pamela and Crusoe resort then to writing as an aid to memory and a guarantee of truth. Their letters and diaries are not only written close to the original events they want to represent, but their function is to preserve their memories in the long term. According to James H. Maddox Jr., however, Crusoe seems to prefer ‘the more distant accounts he wrote later’, in which he ‘most clearly shows his ability to dominate his fate.’13 After all, Crusoe is also his own first editor. But even then he reverts to the ‘original’ versions written in his diaries and journals, refusing to write retrospectively. Maddox Ford also points out that ‘there is from the very beginning of Defoe’s novel writing a strong suggestion of disparity, a reminder of the distance between text and naked event.’14 Such a distance, inherent to the act of writing, is mirrored by Crusoe’s and Pamela’s take of distance from ‘reality’ in order to render it through writing: an inevitable distance in time, since all narration is after the event (even if it pretends to be closer to its origins), and a distance in ‘space’: Crusoe starts his diary in the solitude of his island, Pamela has to retire to her closet. Pamela, however, is more aware of her lack of mastery over her writings, not only because of memory (‘I don’t remember all I wrote’ P230), but also because of possible misinterpretations (‘that is your Comment; but it does not appear so in the Text’ P230), one of her reasons for concealing her writings from Mr. B’s eyes. But despite the risk of misrepresentation, writing is considered, above all, as a form to preserve or reveal the inner truth of the self. Pamela’s compulsive writing seems triggered as a defence mechanism against Mr B’s attempts to her virtue; attempts that she perceives as the ‘greatest Harm in the World’ (P23) because they entail forgetting herself along with the ‘memory’ that –to use Patricia McKee’s words – ‘keep hold of things.’15 Her compulsive writing functions then as a way to affirm her true self, against the censures and misinterpretations Mr B tries to impose on her; a way to regain possession of herself through the memory of the dangers she has to face, which threaten to change who she thinks she really is. What she ignores is that writing would necessarily change her, since writing –as Jacques Derrida has pointed out– ‘is that 12

Cf. Homer O. Brown, ‘The Displaced Self in the Novels of Daniel Defoe’, ELH, 38 (1971), p. 587.

13

James H. Maddox, Jr., ‘Interpreter Crusoe’, ELH, 51 (1984), pp. 35-36.

14

‘Interpreter Crusoe’, p. 35. See also Homer O. Brown, ‘The Displaced Self in the Novels of Daniel Defoe’, p. 585.

15

Patricia McKee, ‘Corresponding Freedoms: Language and the Self in Pamela’, ELH, 52 (1985), p. 625.

4

Hugo Blumenthal © 2006

forgetting of the self, that exteriorization, the contrary of the interiorizing memory […]’16; a ‘forgetting’ by which she, rather than reproducing a supposedly stable self called Pamela, cannot but become her own text, a ‘fiction’ with which Mr B, her most fervent reader, would fall in love. Writing is then the forger of her happiness, because it is through her writing (and ‘through the leading role that she plays in her own romance’)17 that Pamela is rewarded, as she acknowledges to Mr Longman at the end: ‘[…] you don’t know how much of my present Happiness I owe to the Sheets of Paper, and Pens and Ink you furnish’d me with’ (P460). Robinson Crusoe doesn’t have to struggle against censure or misrepresentations, but against the unknown dangers of his adventures and his guilt for the ‘original sin’ of disobedience to his father. Writing is then not only a recourse to memory, to not forget what has happened to him, but a form of ‘thought’, to think about what has happened, in order to understand the possible hidden reasons –a sort of rationalization of ‘Providence.’ (In that sense writing also implies a reading of the world and the self.) By supposedly finding those hidden reasons Crusoe justifies himself, tries to find an absolution for his ‘original sin’; a ‘sin’ he seems unable to stop performing in his incapacity to settle down, by his own will, in one place. Like Pamela, then, Crusoe creates a new ‘self’ through his writing, becoming the product of his writings –what he also sought from the beginning: a representation of his life by which he has accomplished more than his father ever did –a representation that could stand as a justification of his life, in the same way Pamela’s writing stands as a proof of her virtue.

Hugo Blumenthal London, 2006

16

Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (London: John Hopkins University Press, 1997), p. 24.

17

Sheila C. Conboy, ‘Fabric and Fabrication in Richardson’s Pamela’, ELH, 54 (1987), p. 82.

5