Defoe's Dry Poetics: The Journalism of Enlightenment Experience

Dr. Howe's comment to Liana's post reminded me of something I've been thinking of since I first read Oroonoko as an undergraduate; our readings of Watt's opening chapters to his Rise of the Novel focus on it, as well. Certainly as modern readers we find ourselves reading to connect - we're all indebted to Freud, among others, for that. I find it a particularly valuable way to read. Yet the revolution of the novel in the 17th & 18th centuries strikes me as one of a very different type.

Defoe's Journal, as well as Oroonoko, owe much of their importance to the ways in which they transformed the historically and realistically unconcerned arts from the Greeks and Romances and such into representations of reality. DeFoe's use of charts of deaths in specific districts strikes us as dry, and even cold, but its inclusion in his account gave a journalistic air of authenticity the readership was not used to. Behn bored me to the point that I stopped reading the book for a week when she began Oroonoko with a lengthy account of the colorful birds she saw. It bored me at first, but it must have thrilled the reading population when they encountered pure sense perception in a "fiction" work (if indeed, they were even considered such at the time). Even the striking titles of these "histories" and "romances" lend a sense that the title page is the only thing that was written with the intent to publish. The title to Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, for instance, ends with the simple words, "Written by Himself." It's as if an editor took the pages Crusoe wrote and created a title page for it that would explain the historical document it contained. It's been done since with much success - Nabakov's Pale Fire, The Blair Witch Project, etc. In much the same way that grainy, dark filmstock makes film viewers feel they are in the midst of real events, I imagine 17th and 18th century readers must have reacted to the charts of Defoe's Plague Year. Defoe's concern seems less with emotional resonance and more with sensory curiosity. The rise of the novel coincides with the Enlightenment, and logic was the order of the day (pun very much intended).

I appreciated Watt's explanation of the philosophical foundations for the rise of the novel in philosophical realism and the deeper focus on sense. I am eager to examine Pamela as an epistolary novel, for it seems to be a prime example of the Enlightenment's desire to sift through evidence for itself. It also speaks much to the rising importance the new middle-class must have been feeling about itself. Reading was no longer meant to be entirely didactic or escapist - it encouraged the reader to glean understanding from sensory experience. Also, the focus on character, rather than the theological or philosophical importance of the plot's events (as we saw even in Fantomina), seems to have derived from what Watt explains is the novel's tendency to identify particular times and settings.

Watt expounded on much of what I had been thinking of in his essay, but I hope I contributed a little to the conversation.