I find I'm more easily able to connect with Richardson's language, which really doesn't come as a surprise to me, as Richardson's novel is certainly closer to what the contemporary reader would expect from a novel. What I'm finding very interesting as I read further into the book are the numerous contradictions that exist within it, which Watt touches on in his essay "Love and Novel."
Firstly, Watt's novel has some historical information about the change in the institution of marriage that I think is fairly essential for the reader to know in order to understand the impact that Pamela had on its readers. (Incidentally, when asked why he hadn't married his companion of several decades and the mother of his children, Gene Simmons of Kiss said that "marriage is a lovely institution, but you have to be crazy to be in an institution.") As Watts points out, the concept of "marriage" as we think of it today-the severing of family ties as the conjugal tie attains primacy-had developed not long before. Watts traces the development of courtly love, or "love" as an activity to while away boredom, into the idea of the modern marital relationship. According to Watt, the development of the concept of romantic love is linked with the shift in perception of the family as an economic unit to the family as a relationship-based unit, which is how we see it today. Under English marriage laws, marriage could either be a way to attain economic stability but paradoxically also a way to destroy it, depending on the economic state of the woman prior to marriage. For the wealthy, marrying meant delivering all of your property to your husband, but for the poor, the state of an unmarried woman was considered deplorable indeed. I think this paradox mirrors a lot of the contradictions in Pamela. For example, is Pamela wielding power over Mr. B? It would seem so-he's going to a lot of trouble on her account, and we all know that she gets him in the end. But Watt reminds the reader that for women actually in Pamela's situation who aren't privileged to be romantic characters, the potential for exploitation is very great indeed. So, we see Mr. B kidnap and imprison Pamela, smear her reputation to her family and neighbors, and terrorize her repeatedly, all actions that would be criminal today. And yet we're supposed to cheer, and Richardson's readers certainly did, when Pamela and Mr. B eventually get hitched. So, I have different and opposite reactions to the novel. The part of me reading it for entertainment certainly thinks its funny, even cute, but the part reading it conscientiously through a postmodern, feminist hermeneutic is appalled.
This is just a sidenote, but has anyone here read any works by China Mieville? He is an English anthropologist and journalist who started writing novels, and I think his writing inherits a lot from Defoe. His trilogy of Iron Council, Perdido Street Station, and The Scar all have that same preoccupation with location that Defoe's Journal does, in which the geography and city becomes almost another character.
Friday, February 16, 2007
Richardson's Love and Marriage, go together like-well, you know.
Monday, February 12, 2007
Looking back at Defoe through Davis
In reading Davis' discussion of the characteristics of ballads and other printed prose narratives, I was able to more clearly understand Defoe's stylistic choices in writing Journal of a Plague Year.
Through reading Davis' chapters about the origin of the novel, I was able to better understand Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year because it brought to light the historical facts that surrounded the new printed prose narratives and how this novel fit those guidelines. The guidelines themselves are very clearly defined by Davis and gave me an understanding of what the expectations were for a novel when Defoe was writing. Also, I was able to compare the guidelines set forth by Davis against my own notions of the novel and what I would believe to be the expectations our generation would have. Defoe's novel adheres to the popular characteristics of the ballads that Davis describes and since the ballads were so popular, Defoe was able to just expand from a short ballad to an extended story with the same characteristics.
Davis discusses that people were drawn to the journalistic style of the ballads because they gave a sense of recentness to the story which may not have happened recently, or perhaps at all. Defoe's journalistic style keeps us as modern readers however from "getting into" the novel the way we would with a Stephen King or Dean Koontz bestseller.
This also leads one to notice the attention to criminal behavior that Defoe pays, just as Davis describes the ballads as being dominantly about criminal activity. This theme of people being obsessed with deviant, criminal behavior is clearly more timeless than Defoe's journalistic style. While we no longer desire for our novels to give accounts in journalistic fashion, we do tend to be drawn towards the more criminal, risque, and deviant types of novels just as Davis described in his chapters. This voyeuristic quality has proven timeless and continues to bolster istelf in our current media.
Journal of the Plague Year as a journal; as a novel
I must confess that after our class discussion last week that I am still not completely in love with Defoe's style of narration but I do understand and even respect it. I think that in a way, using H.F as a narrator of ordinary status (since we do not even know his full name) is effective, just not in a way that is endearing or enthralling to me as a reader. I also can see the difference in the expectations of a novel- reader of our time and a reader of his time.
In evalutating Defoe in respect to Behn, I see a completely different choice in narrative style. When I read Behn, I felt as if I was reading with my ears plugged securely over my ears to keep the noise of the narrator out so I could digest the story for myself. I felt as if I did not have freedom to make my own conclusions about the story as the narrator belted out her opinions as facts sometimes even before she presented the material she was commenting on. In reading Defoe, it was quite the opposite, I had a narrator who lacked empathy and seemed to tell the story in a monotonous voice. I actually felt like H.F was more of a voice than a possible character in the novel. I felt like he was the voice you hear when you see the large block letters announcing Law and Order:SVU while you never see the owner of the voice, for instance. H.F as we noted in class was an ordinary person. We do not have ample reason to believe that he was of high social class or extravagant means and as readers we never fully get to associate with our narrator as we never even learn his full name. Defoe used H.F as a tool to present his story and that was really what he seemed like to me: a tool.
However, in view and in spite of these differences, I must note that I still enjoyed reading Behn more than I did Defoe. I think this might be because with Behn I felt as if I could almost predict the direction and the end of the story. I saw it almost as soon as I started reading as the story of the tragic hero, the great perfect and hallowed individual who ends up decaying and destroying himself and those around him in the end. It is the same theme I see in Macbeth, in Othello, and several others. Also, the story was the kind that captures attention. I mean as people I think readers always have a tendecy to favor literature that celebrates strengths, like wisdom, comeliness, might, skill in battle etc. So the fact that Behn chose to create characters like Imoinda and Oroonoko in my mind as a reader gave her a boost. Defoe told a story of a dark and gloomy event. One would expect his narrator to be empathetic; to connect with the characters he encountered who were inflicted by the plague. I felt myself expecting him to cry with those who suffered and to write from a personal point of view. That was however, not the case. H.F tells the story like a journalist as has been noted in a former post, disengaging himself emotionally from the happenings of the story. As a reader, I was quite unsure of what to do with that. I mean I found it challenging to follow a story that told of death and dying where the narrator always made sure to wash his hands clean of the certainty of the events by leaving it up to his reader to choose to believe or not to believe some of the things he (the narrator) was told and recorded. Now this is a longshot from Behn.
I can now see what Davis points out as the difference in the expectations of the modern reader as against the expectations of the the reader of Defoe's time. But overall, I think that I still respect Defoe and see why his unique style has remained in publication. I am not in love with his story but I respect his ingenuity.
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.
Keeping With the Trend: Defoe's Narrator, the Journalist
After reading Lennard Davis' Factual Fictions, I have a better understanding of Defoe's style in A Journal of the Plague Year. Last week, Liana brought up an interesting point regarding Defoe - the narrator is much like a journalist.
Defoe's narrator does not get emotionally involved with the stories he is telling. He simply presents them to the reader and lets him or her decided how to interpret them. Also, he gives detailed reports on the deaths, which is similar to something we would see in today's newspapers (an emphasis on hard facts and details). A Journal is full of anecdotal stories and other little details, which, when taken together, encompass the entire story as a whole. Last week, many of us raised concerns with regard to Defoe's style. His material is dense, hard to absorb, and we were having trouble reading into it. It's hard for us to read A Journal as a "novel" when we consider the other materials we've read as modern readers. It doesn't look like or feel like a "novel". However, Davis has given me a new appreciation for Defoe's style in A Journal. He outlines a history of the "novel," pointing to various origins of the word and what was considered entertainment and prose from the 16th century and beyond. What I found particularly interesting was the idea that novels developed from journalistic pieces, such as criminal histories and the like. If we can see Defoe's narrator as a journalist, I think we can look past the difficulties we are having as 21st century readers and have a much better appreciation for his style. After all, keeping what Davis has presented to us, Defoe's style appealed to the audiences of his time. What may seem boring and dry to the modern reader, was a fascinating page turner for the 18th century reader. I understand now why A Journal is written the way it is. We should keep in mind that Defoe wasn't thinking about his works surviving centuries to come - he was thinking only about his immediate time and what would appeal to his audience. The fact that it has survived to be read by us attests to the greatness of his narrative style.