"Robinson Crusoe" as Defoe's Theory of Fiction

Author(s): KEVIN SEIDEL

Source: NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction , SUMMER 2011, Vol. 44, No. 2 (SUMMER 2011), pp.
165-185
Published by: Duke University Press

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 Robinson Crusoe as
Defoe's Theory of Fiction
KEVIN SEIDEL

Nine months alone on his island and terrified that the sickness he was recover-
ing from might return, Robinson Crusoe remembers that the "Brasilians take no
Physick but their Tobacco" (126). He searches for some in a chest salvaged from the
wreck, accidentally discovers a few Bibles, and so brings both a Bible and bundle
of tobacco leaves to his rough-hewn table to experiment for a cure. First, Crusoe
tries chewing on the raw, green tobacco leaves, which, he says, "almost stupify'd
my Brain" (126). Second, he puts his face over a smoking fire of tobacco until he
nearly suffocates from the heat and fumes. Then he takes up the Bible and tries
to read, but his head is so "much disturb'd with the Tobacco" (126) that he can
only open the Bible at random and read a single line. Yet the verse from Psalm
50 - "Call on me in the Day of Trouble, and I will deliver, and thou shalt glorify
me" (126) - somehow speaks to Crusoe through his stupor and causes him to ask
God to fulfill the Bible's promise of deliverance. Finally, after his "broken and
imperfect Prayer" (127), Crusoe completes his last experiment: he drinks some
rum so "strong and rank" with the tobacco leaves he had left soaking in it that, he
says, "I could scarce get it down. . . . [I]t flew up in my Head violently, but I fell into
a sound sleep" (127). Exhausted by sickness, consoled by the promise of Scripture,
passed out from a powerful tea of tobacco leaves and rum, Crusoe finds what he
was looking for - rest.
In writing the Christian conversion of Robinson Crusoe, Daniel Defoe leaves
little trace of irony. We are given just the facts, with a realism that seems to work
as an antidote to the moral ambiguity of Crusoe's actions. The more fact-laden the
report, the less wicked Crusoe's actions seem to be, or, here at least, the less bum-
bling. Yet it is remarkable how many good readers have overlooked the fact that
Crusoe's conversion begins in the interval of his tobacco doping.1 Perhaps, read-
ing from the vantage point of our secular age, we notice no significant difference
between primitive cures of the body and religious cures of the soul. Perhaps we
take realism too much for granted, take as transparent narrative of the real world
what was for Defoe and his first readers still opaque, wonderfully visible, a billow-
ing of smoke shot through with light.
Could it be that Defoe intended his readers to smirk at Crusoe's scientific lan-
guage of certainty and experimentation in this passage? Smile at his confusion
between the power of tobacco and the power of the Bible? Perhaps listen with
delight to the dissonance of the line "I took up the Bible and began to read" (126),
that easy appropriation of the voice that told Augustine at his conversion, "Take

1 Some examples include Backscheider 417; Hunter 158-60; McKeon 317-18; Starr 110-11; Watt
76.

Novel: A Forum on Fiction 44:2 DOI 10.1215/00295132-1260941 © 2011 by Novel, Inc.

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166 NOVEL | SUMMER 2011

and read"? The working hypothesis of this essay is that, yes, Defoe did write Robin-
son Crusoe with a purposeful, sustained irony that combines elements of his earlier
writings, both the watertight religious satires like The Shortest Way with the Dissent-
ers and his didactically more serious, religious works like The Family Instructor.
Defoe wrote his Crusoe novel in three separate books. The first and by far the
best known, The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe , was
published in April 1719. It recounts the story of Crusoe's rebellious setting out
to sea against the advice of his father, his shipwreck on the island, his encounter
with Friday, his eventual deliverance by pirates, and his return to England. Less
well known is The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe , published in August 1719,
which relates Crusoe's return to his island colony, his disappointment at its failure,
his consequent abandonment of the island, and his mercantile exploits around the
Pacific Rim before returning to London fabulously wealthy. Rarely read is The Seri-
ous Reflections during the Life and Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe , published
in August 1720. Offered as the wisdom acquired from a life of "unexampled mis-
fortunes" (51), Crusoe's essays ramble between topics like solitude, honesty, debt,
and the state of religion in the world. The last section is Crusoe's "Vision of the
Angelick World," which contains an account of his journey into "infinite space"
and ends with a long parable about two young men in an atheists' club who are
brought to the edge of conversion by the voice of an unseen man speaking through
the crack of an open door, by a bolt of lightning, and by a few lines from Defoe's
poetry read aloud.
To get at Defoe's theory of fiction, the present essay does two things. First, it sets
out to rediscover irony in Robinson Crusoe itself - particularly the irony that gathers
in its most religiously charged scenes - rather than looking for it, as most critics
do, in the historical gap between our secular age and the late Puritan age of Defoe.
Second, it finds the fullest expression of Defoe's procedures as a novelist in the
parable of the atheists at the end of Serious Reflections , rather than in the prefaces
that begin the three Crusoe books. In that concluding parable, Defoe finally reveals
his ambitions as a novelist, plotting the exposure of his characters' fear and gull-
ibility with regard to the supernatural in order to open them up to a greater sense
of divine providence.
By purposeful, sustained irony, I mean that Defoe's fictional narratives mean
more than what the narrators say. The narrators are not unreliable in the sense
that they lie about, leave out, or confuse the facts, although this does sometimes
happen. Rather, the narrators recognize only intermittently how the moral of their
story exceeds the facts of their narrative. They practice a kind of moral meiosis in
their recollections, a habitual understatement that leaves the readers with a sur-
plus of moral significance, and Defoe's ability to sustain and shape that surplus for
his readers over the length of the novel distinguishes the irony of his fiction from
the rhetorical irony that permeated the intensely polemical, intensely religious
print world of the first decades of the eighteenth century (Rivers 31-50). Rhetorical
irony says one thing and means the opposite in an argument, and Defoe practiced
it so effectively in his poetry, pamphlets, and newspapers that he ended up in jail,
endured public humiliation in the stocks, and earned a lasting reputation as a lying
devil and literary Proteus (Knox 8; Novak). But Defoe does not lash his fictional

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 SEIDEL | DEFOE'S THEORY OF FICTION 167

heroes and heroines the way he does his rhetorical opponents. The protagonists of
his fiction are subjects of a gentler, more sympathetic irony. With their penchant for
fact gathering, recurring spiritual fevers, and thirst for material acquisition, they
often seem like extensions of Defoe himself. Many of his contemporaries thought
so, and we shall see that Defoe put down his narrator's mask often enough to sug-
gest the same. Instead of everywhere anxiously distinguishing himself from his
characters, Defoe seemed content to stand with them, all unwitting victims of their
own narrating.
To say that irony structures Defoe's fiction is to swim against the tide of much
previous criticism, which considers the religious elements of Defoe's fiction incom-
patible with any purposeful, sustained irony on the part of the author. For some
critics, Defoe's religious loyalties as a Dissenter make him complicit in and largely
blind to the complexities of his cultural moment, when rational economic individ-
ualism was becoming the vehicle for Protestant spiritual crisis. "The moral imper-
ceptiveness which is so laughably clear to us," says Ian Watt, "is in fact a reflection
of one of the psychological characteristics of Puritanism. . . . We, not Defoe, are
ironically aware of the juxtaposition of the powers of God and Mammon" (124,
126). Michael McKeon elaborates the same point when he describes the "inescap-
able aura of irony" in Defoe's fiction as a fluke of the historical distance between
naive author and knowing critic, the accidental by-product of Defoe's empirical
narratives artlessly applied to the inherent contradictions of emergent capitalism
(332). For other critics, the religious elements of Defoe's fiction mark his charac-
ters as surrogates of Dissent; so, for example, Robinson Crusoe becomes "an epic
account of the experience of the English Dissenters under the Restoration" (Paulin
15). Moreover, Defoe's religious commitments obligate him to an always serious
and straightforward appropriation of Protestant narrative traditions like spiritual
autobiography, casuistry, and pilgrim allegories (Hunter 200; Starr 43).
Here one might invoke the dialectic of religion and secularism to resolve the
apparent contradiction between the more secular approach that emphasizes Defoe
as a man immersed in the political and economic affairs of his day and the more
religious approach that emphasizes a Defoe loyal to his religious tradition. This
is something Watt did years ago and that others have since repeated.2 This under-
analyzed binary still generates a great deal of criticism on Defoe: the more reli-
gious Defoe turns out to be, the more delicious the historical ironies. The greater
the historical gap between our secular age and Defoe's, the more pressing the need
to recover for readers the waning religious "tradition" of which Defoe was a part.
The more embedded in that past religious age, the less capable of speaking to this
secular one - and so it goes, the tide of scholarship under secularism. Its ebb and
flow leaves only a trace of religion, washing away the complex, multivalent debates
about authority, pleasure, penitence, fear, superstition, and belief that Defoe gave
voice to in his fiction. So, against the secular approach, I look to see how the reli-
gious scenes work in Defoe's fiction to open a gap between representation and

2 See Watt 130; Hunter 210; Richetti, Popular Fiction 13-18; Richetti, Defoe's Narratives 23; McKeon
319. Cf. Seidel.

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168 NOVEL | SUMMER 2011

reality. Against the religious approach, I look to see how Defoe's characters grapple
with the concerns of a reading audience broader than Dissenters.

Early Reception of Crusoe

To rediscover the sources of the irony in Crusoe , we can begin with its earliest
reception, where Crusoe is consistently considered a laughable character and
his story blatantly fictitious.3 The irony with which the novel was first received
strongly suggests that it was written with a detectable irony. In a July 12, 1719,
"Letter to Mr. Read" - the editor of The Weekly Journal or British Gazetteer - a reader
mockingly insinuates that Defoe is responsible for the faults of a rival paper by say-
ing, "Certainly the infallible Robinson Crusoe , that great Traveller and Geographer,
could not be guilty of so monstrous a Blunder."
In late September 1719, one month after the publication of Farther Adventures ,
Charles Gildon wrote a forty-eight-page tract against Defoe's book that was
shrewdly if unoriginally titled The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Mr.
D

ing a late-night encounter between

they accost him in a field near New
made them, and force him to eat all
his authorial diseases.
In the prologue to Charles Shadwell's play Rotherick O'Connor , King of Connaught,
printed in 1720, one of the characters, Colonel Allen, recounts teasing the play-
wright for borrowing his model of heroic tragedy from the ancients instead of from
Robinson Crusoe :

What need you, for a Tale, so high to go,

Said I, have you not Robinson Crusoe?
There Incidents in full Perfection flow.
(Such a Dramatick, is the fam'd De Foe.) (209-10)

Across the Atlantic in Boston, three pamphlets were published in 1720 that
invoked Crusoe in order to lampoon Governor Samuel Schute of Massachusetts,
although the layers of irony are so thick that it is impossible to tell for sure the tar-
get of satire (Cooke; New News; News). One pamphlet ends, tongue-in-cheek, "rec-
ommending you and yours to the Care of the Divine Providence," signed by your
humble servant, "From the Metropolis of Robinson Cruso's [sic] Island. Decemb.
19. 1720" (New News 8). The pamphlet by Elisha Cooke, supposedly writing from
"Cruso's Island," pokes fun at the castaway's Bible-reading habits by asking, "Has
[Crusoe] ever read Psal. 50.16, and onward?" (8-9). The sixteenth verse, which

3 For Defoe's reputation in print before he begins writing novels, see Payne; also see Downie and
Rogers. Although Payne lists pamphlets published as late as 1731, he says that Charles Gildon's
pamphlet is the only one that talks about Defoe's novel. My discussion that follows includes
Gildon's pamphlet and all additional extant responses to Crusoe that I have been able to find.

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 SEIDEL | DEFOE'S THEORY OF FICTION 169

immediately follows the one that spoke to Crusoe in his stupor, reads: "But to the
wicked, God says: 'What right have you to recite my laws or take my covenant on
your lips? You hate my instruction'" (Ps. 50.16). The pamphlet's author implies that
the second half of the psalm corresponds to Crusoe's case better than the first.
The September 1725 issue of the London Journal printed a letter, commonly
attributed to Bishop Benjamin Hoadley, about how the scarcity of news at that
time of year had been the occasion for an outpouring of stories about "extraordi-
nary Occurrences and marvelous Events," in which "we cannot help discovering
a sensible Pleasure, though at the same Time we are positively sure . . . they are
entirely groundless, false, and fictitious." Hoadley singles out "The Life and Adven-
tures of Robinson Crusoe " as an example of such stories, saying that it "seems to
have had that uncommon Run upon the Town for some Years past, for no other
Reason but that it is a most palpable Lye from Beginning to End." For Hoadley, the
pleasures of reading Crusoe are directly proportional to knowing the whole thing
to be "groundless, false, and fictitious." And Crusoe is widely read in London not
because people thought it was true but because it was known to be a "palpable lye"
from beginning to end and as such was "received with abundance of pleasure."
This initial response to Robinson Crusoe cannot be easily reconciled with Defoe's
much later reputation as the father of a more serious and sacrosanct realism. What
has happened? Perhaps irony is easier to recognize when it is brandished against
public professions of faith, say by Dryden or Swift or Defoe in their poetry. It is
much harder to recognize that irony when it moves indoors, when individual choice
and personal beliefs - so often the domain of the sacred for us today - become the
object of teasing. This is why the Bible and tobacco scene is so important. It shows
that Defoe can take the languages of empirical observation and personal religious
experience, two modes of discourse that he treats very seriously elsewhere in his
writing, that are dear to his own dissenting tradition, and use them in his fiction
to paint in shades of irony that we now have trouble seeing. If Crusoe can "speak
in Colours," as the Portuguese pilot observes in Farther Adventures , if he can "speak
what looks white this Way , and black that Way ; gay one Way , and dull another Way,"
then presumably so can his author (183).

History Dispatched

Before trying to describe the peculiar, religiously inflected irony of Robinson Cru-
soe , I need to take up the beguiling claims to historicity that preface Defoe's nov-
els. "The Editor believes the thing to be a just History of Fact; neither is there any
Appearance of Fiction in it" (55) - this is what we are told in the preface to Robinson
Crusoe. Even after Crusoe was exposed to public ridicule by Gildon and others as
fiction, and in the face of Defoe's reputation as an inveterate liar, he persists in the
prefaces to his subsequent novels to make what McKeon calls the "false claim to
historicity" (120). McKeon speaks for many critics (Bender 10-11; Davis 156-57)
when he says that, even after Gildon's attacks, "the standard of historical truth,
and the conviction of its rhetorical efficacy, are so powerful in Defoe's mind that he
continues thereafter to make and to justify the false claim to historicity, although
with ambivalence and accompanied by a variety of uneasy extenuations" (120, cf.

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170 NOVEL | SUMMER 2011

135). How strong a hold does historical truth really have in Defoe's mind? Usually,
Defoe's narrating editors mention historical truth claims in the preface only to dis-
miss them quickly as inconsequential to the moral efficacy of the work, which the
narrators spend the bulk of the preface defending. This anxiety about moral effect
is something that McKeon and many other critics have overlooked, even though a
mix of moral claims and claims to historicity are exactly what one should expect
to find if McKeon is right about the novel's originating from the recognition that
questions of virtue are deeply analogous to questions of truth.4
Let us look together at what is claimed in the preface to Robinson Crusoe : "The
Editor believes the thing to be a just History of Fact; neither is there any Appear-
ance of Fiction in it: And however thinks, because all such things are dispatch'd,
that the Improvement of it, as well to the Diversion, as to the Instruction of the
Reader, will be the same . . ." (55). The often-quoted claim to historicity in the first
line is immediately qualified by the "[editor] however thinks" in the second line.5
The prefatory claim is simply that the historicity of the story is not essential for its
moral success. The improvement of the story - its ability to divert and instruct -
"will be the same" whether it is history of fact or a story with fiction in it.
A fact claim quickly and easily dispatched by the moral claim: this is the pat-
tern for all of Defoe's prefaces. In the preface to Farther Adventures , the narrator
says that charges against the "Errors in Geography" in Robinson Crusoe have failed
to discredit the moral efficacy of the book, its "just Application" and its "religious
and useful Inferences," which legitimate "all the Part that may be call'd Invention,
or Parable in the story" (3). In the preface to Moll Flanders , the narrator describes
the work as a genuine history that is also a purposefully designed fable, noting "a
few of the serious Inferences which we are led by the Hand to in this Book, and
these are fully sufficient to Justifie any Man in recommending it to the World, and
much more to Justifie the Publication of it" (4). Similarly, in the preface to Colonel
Jack : whether Jack has "made it a History or a Parable, it will be equally useful,
and capable of doing Good; and in that it recommends itself without any other
Introduction" (2). About Roxana, the editor says that "the Foundation of This is laid
in Truth of Fact; and so the Work is not a Story, but a History"; but then the editor
candidly admits that he has "adapted" the story "to the Instruction and Improve-
ment of the Reader." He draws special attention to Roxana's reflections about the
reproaches of her conscience, saying, "The Noble Inferences that are drawn from

4 McKeon's criticism of Defoe's fiction too often reduces it to the cultural formation that Defoe
represents in McKeon's thesis (i.e., naive empiricism), but McKeon nowhere credits Defoe's fic-
tion for helping him discern the naivety of empiricism in the first place. While my analysis of
Defoe's prefaces disproves McKeon's particular reading, it confirms his general insight about
the connections between the discourses of truth and virtue.

5 Many modern editions print the line as "whoever thinks," reproducing the error of the first
edition, which makes the meaning of the line impossible to untangle. The error was corrected
to "however thinks" in the second edition of 1719 and remained so in subsequent early editions.
It is also worth noting that the phrase "all such things are dispatch'd" was changed in the third
edition to "all such things are disputed." Perhaps the editor had changed his mind in regard to
debates about historicity: such things are not easily dispatched or resolved but remain disputed
and controversial.

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 SEIDEL | DEFOE'S THEORY OF FICTION 171

this one Part, are worth all the rest of the Story; and abundantly justifie (as they are
the profess'd Design of) the Publication" (36).
In each preface the editor or narrator is asking the reader to believe three things
about these true histories: (1) that they contain empirical facts; (2) that these facts
have been creatively adapted according to the moral design of the author; and
(3) that this blend of fact and invention contributes to the moral improvement of
the reader. If we gather from the prefaces some of the key terms used in each of
these three categories, we see that the editor appeals to fact consistently but infre-
quently, usually only once. He refers more often to the second category with words
like invention, design , parable, and fable. He talks most often about the third category
and with the greatest diversity of terms: recommend, lead, improvement, instruction ,
application, inference, and use. A true or just history is a narrative that contains all
three elements, especially the third - the promise to make the reader better.
The preface narrators in Defoe's fiction are not at all anxious, nor do they expect
the readers to be anxious, about the relationship between the narrative and some
strict standard of historical truth. These prefaces make the more difficult claim
that historicity does not matter when the stories promise to do the reader good;
and it is this claim, rather than the supposed false claim to historicity, that betrays
the editors' anxiety and deserves serious scrutiny. What text can possibly ensure
its own moral efficacy, or safely guide its own interpretation, or advise its own
application? Yet this is precisely what the prefaces promise the stories will do, and
if recent critics have overlooked this fact about Defoe's apparent moral ambition,
Charles Gildon did not.

Biblical Truth of a Piece with Fictitious Story

Gildon's Life divides easily into three sections. The first section, the dramatized
late-night encounter between Defoe and his characters, is like all the other first
responses to Robinson Crusoe: they mock the moral pretensions of the work by
ridiculing the author. The second part of Gildon's pamphlet, however, sets it apart
from the rest of those initial responses; it is a more serious "epistle" about the
errors of "probability and religion" in Robinson Crusoe, respectfully though severely
addressed to Mr. Foe; and the last section is a postscript in which Gildon grumbles
his charges again, this time directing them against Farther Adventures.
Of Gildon's two main accusations against the novel - errors of probability and
errors of religion - his critique of probability takes second place to his more stri-
dent critique of the novel's religion. Gildon tells us what has provoked him to write
at the very beginning of his epistle. If Crusoe were merely filled with impossibili-
ties and improbabilities, Gildon would not have bothered writing his epistle at all.
He says,

I have perus'd your pleasant Story of Robinson Crusoe; and if the Faults of it had
extended no farther than the frequent Solecisms, Looseness and Incorrectness of Stile,
Improbabilities, and sometimes Impossibilities, I had not given you the Trouble of
this Epistle. But when I found that you were not content with the many Absurdities

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172 NOVEL | SUMMER 2011

of your Tale , but seemed to discover a Design , which proves you as bad an English-
man as a Christian , I could not but take Notice in this publick Manner of what you
had written; especially when I perceiv'd that you threaten'd us with more of the same
Nature. . . .If by this I can prevent a new Accession of Impieties and Superstition
to those which the Work under our Consideration has furnish'd us with , I shall not
think my Labour lost. (1-2)

Gildon obviously relishes pointing out the internal improbabilities in the novel.
He says, for example, "I shall not take Notice of [Crusoe's] striping [sic] himself
to swim on Board, and the filling his Pockets with Bisket, because that is already
taken Notice of in Publick" (15). Most of the contradictions that Gildon points out
begin as such: "I shall not take Notice" (15); "But this is not worth stopping at"
(23); "this is a Peccadillo and not worth dwelling upon" (13); "nor shall I stop long
upon" (38). Of course he does stop, take notice, and dwell on these contradictions,
but he does so only for a moment, on the way toward demonstrating Defoe's errors
of religion.
For example, Gildon attacks the way that Defoe, early in the novel, makes Cru-
soe a type of Jonah, thereby implying that a grown man's disobedience to his
father is equivalent to Jonah's disobedience to the command of God. "But you,
indeed," Gildon complains, "every where are pleas'd to make very free with the
Holy Scriptures, which you quote as fluently, as the Devil once did, and much to
the same End; that is, to make a Lie go down for Truth. But more of this hereafter"
(8). Later in the epistle, Gildon wonders why a supposedly prayerless wanderer like
Crusoe would take the trouble to pack three Bibles for his trip to Guinea. Gildon
says, "[I]t was necessary that he should have a Bible, to furnish you with the Means
of Burlesquing the Sacred Writ, in the tedious Reflections you design'd to put into
his Mouth; of which by and by" (15). In contrast to the errors of probability that
Gildon pokes fun of in passing, the impieties of Defoe, specifically his use of the
Bible - "more of this hereafter" and "of which by and by" - are Gildon's ultimate
object of criticism.
Neither is Gildon bothered by invention in the story. He praises fables earlier
in his epistle as "a sort of Writing which has always been esteem'd by the wisest
and best of Men," acknowledging that even "inspir'd writers" of Scripture have
used them to good effect (35). Gildon writes from a vantage point shared by many
other critics in his day who considered invention crucial to the moral success of
a work.6 They thought it would be an artistic failure to portray human characters
and actions as they are rather than as they should be. What troubles Gildon about
Crusoe is not the invention of facts so much as invention without a clear moral.
Why bring in the Bible if not to establish the moral of the story? This is the ques-
tion Gildon seems to be asking when he says that Crusoe's religious reflections
are so often false, yet so frequent and repetitive, that he cannot help wondering
whether they are

6 See Wesley a2.

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 SEIDEL | DEFOE'S THEORY OF FICTION 173

brought in only to encrease the Bulk of your Book; they are seldom Just or truly
Religious; but they have this terrible Circumstance , that they demonstrate that the
Author has not the Fear of God before his Eyes. Ludere cum Sacris is what he has
not at all scrupVd; as if he esteem d it no Crime to set off his Fable with the Words of
the Holy Scripture; nay, he makes a kind of Sortes Virgilianae of the Bible , by mak-
ing Crusoe dip in to it for Sentences to his purpose. To me the Impiety of this Part of
the Book , in making the Truths of the Bible of a Piece with the fictitious Story of Rob-
inson Crusoe, is so horribly shocking that I dare not dwell upon it. . . . (24-25)

Here Crusoe's superstitious dipping into the Bible (the tobacco scene examined
earlier) helps Gildon think about Defoe's fictional designs. Gildon catches the how
of Robinson Crusoe: its random, unpredictable mingling of scripture with the less
than exemplary life of Robinson Crusoe. But what Gildon cannot describe is the
why of such mixing, the "purpose." He considers whether Defoe is like a greedy
clergyman using religion to make a profit by increasing the "bulk" of his book,
or an atheist making fun of sacred things, or a pagan treating the Bible as a magic
book for divination. But none of these explanations suffices for Gildon, who sus-
pects something worse, and when he says "I dare not dwell," he means that he
cannot say. Gildon uses "fictitious" as a term of derision not, again, because of the
mere fact of invention but because of Defoe's uncertain "purpose" in appropriating
the truths of the Bible.
When Gildon's attack against the novel culminates near the end of his post-
script, the accusation that Robinson Crusoe is a fiction and a lie needs to be read
with the moral anxiety that Gildon gives to those terms throughout his essay. In
an amazingly prescient passage about Crusoe and the coming novel as a force of
secularization, Gildon says,

The Christian Religion and the Doctrines of Providence are too Sacred to be delivefd
in Fictions and Lies , nor was this Method ever propos'd orfollow'd by any true Sons
of the Gospel; it is what has been , indeed , made use of by the Papists in the Legends
of their Saints , the Lying Wonders of which are by length of Time grown into such
Authority with that wretched People , that they are at last substituted in the Place
of the Holy Scriptures themselves. For the Evil Consequences of allowing Lies to
mingle with the Holy Truths of Religion is the certain Seed of Atheism and utter
Irreligion. . . . (47-48)

Gildon's criticism is not just predictive but constitutive of the secularism that he
decries and calls "Atheism and utter Irreligion." He may have been right that the
novel would compete with the Bible for authority in the moral imagination of the
people, like stories of the saints' lives did in the Middle Ages. He may have seen
too that "Religion and the Doctrines" would not only be expressed in rhymed
couplets by the clerical and literary elite but also "deliver'd in Fictions." Yet the
shadow of his insight is an imaginary time when the "Holy Truths of Religion"
were not mingled with any other truths, when the Bible was the only story and
therefore the authoritative one. There was no such time, and Gildon's formation
of "Religion" or the "Scriptures" as utterly separate from the world or other kinds

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174 NOVEL | SUMMER 2011

of writing - the wall of separation that he builds between the religious and the
secular - is precisely what Robinson Crusoe is taking down.

Beyond Private Mere Reading

Crusoe learns to be a better student of the Bible after his initial hazy encounter
with the text. A week later he says, "In the Morning I took the Bible, and beginning
at the New Testament, I began seriously to read it, and impos'd upon my self to
read a while every Morning and every Night, not tying my self to the Number of
Chapters, but as long as my Thoughts shou'd engage me" (128). Later in the book,
Crusoe mentions Bible reading as an important part of his three-times-a-day devo-
tions (141), but it is not until Crusoe reads the Bible with Friday that he recognizes
the insufficiency of his previous experiments with Bible reading. Struggling to
answer Friday's questions about God and the devil, Crusoe admits that though an
old man, he is still a young doctor of divinity. He says, "I always apply'd my self
in Reading the Scripture, to let [Friday] know, as well as I could, the Meaning of
what I read; and he again, by his serious Enquiries, and Questionings, made me, as
I said before, a much better Scholar in the Scripture Knowledge, than I should ever
have been by my own private meer [sic] Reading" (220). Crusoe's progress in Bible
reading makes it clear that his earlier nicotine-inspired reading was not meant to
be exemplary. Even his subsequent serious and pious reading of the Scripture is
described here as "my own private meer Reading," which suggests that reading
the Bible alone was a poor substitute for learning about the Bible in conversation
with Friday.
Crusoe's account of reading in dialogue with Friday is a good deal more
compelling - religiously and morally - than the theory of reading espoused in the
prefaces to his novels. In the preface, the claim is that the text itself will lead us by
the hand to its own appropriate uses, as if readers could apply and use the stories
without any conversation partner besides the text. Yet the private reading that
promises to suffice in the prefaces proves insufficient for Crusoe in the novel. One
way to explain this discrepancy between the moral of the preface and the moral of
Crusoe's reading with Friday is that Defoe's novels do not begin after the preface;
they begin with the preface, and I think Defoe expected his readers to know that
the preface was to be read as part of the fiction. Critics have too quickly taken the
prefaces as coming straight from Defoe's mouth, as Defoe's own primitive, early
modern theory of fiction, stumbling over the simplistic and awkward claim that
there are no good stories besides empirically true ones. Thus far I have tried to
show that, read more carefully as the rhetoric of a disguised editor, these prefaces
grapple with a claim that historicity does not matter when the stories promise to
do the reader good. The scenes of Bible reading, however, throw this self-sufficient
moral claim into question and caution us against identifying any preface claim as
the author's last word about how his fiction works.
From Crusoe's first salvific though superstitious encounter with the Bible to his
better Bible reading with Friday, one could chart Crusoe's steady progress in faith,
according to certain patterns of contemporary spiritual autobiography. However,
Crusoe depicts his own religious journey as a kind of regress, as his having less

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 SEIDEL | DEFOE'S THEORY OF FICTION 175

religious certainty as the three-book novel proceeds, and it is this diminishing

religiosity that I want to call the secular vantage point of Crusoe's narrating.

Harder To See In than Out

We catch a glimpse of that vantage point in Crusoe's account of the conversion of

Will Atkins. When Crusoe returns to his island in Farther Adventures , he brings
supplies and a new group of settlers to help the old groups of Spaniards, natives,
and Englishmen who are struggling to live together in the fragile colony. Will
Atkins leads the small band of Englishmen who have settled down with native
wives that they abducted from the mainland nearby. Will and his men are known
for their violence and treachery toward the Spaniards and natives on the island,
yet they have also fought bravely against invading tribes. Crusoe decides he can
promote the political stability of his island by having Will and his men legally
married to their wives, something the newly arrived French priest agrees to do on
one condition: that each man promise to instruct his wife in Christianity. Will is
the only man conscience-stricken by the request to teach his wife something that
he himself knows nothing about, and what the scene of his subsequent conversion
represents to us as readers is not just Will's religious experience but also Crusoe's
secular interest in that experience.
Crusoe and the priest decide to trail Will secretly through the woods as he goes
to talk to his wife about Christianity. Crusoe carefully describes the position that
he and the priest take up to observe Will: "the Trees were so thick set, as that it was
not easy to see thro' the Thicket of Leaves, and far harder to see in, than to see out "
(98). Crusoe and the priest are not close enough to hear Will, but they can see the
exact moment of his conversion:

. . . two or three times we could see him embrace her most passionately; another time
we saw him take out his Handkerchief and wipe her Eyes , and then kiss her again
with a kind of Transport very unusual; and after several of these Things we see him,
on a suddain, jump up again and lend her his Hand to help her up, when immediately,
leading her by the Hand a Step or two, they both kneel'd down together. . . . (99)

What is so striking about the account are the repeated reminders that Crusoe
and the priest are watching - "we could see him" and "we saw him" and "we
see him" - as if Crusoe were enjoying the secrecy of his position, his view of the
couple's intimacy, as much as the intimacy itself.
Where is the author, Defoe, hiding in this scene? By putting the Catholic priest at
Crusoe's side, Defoe gives an ambiguous sanctity to the focal position from which
Crusoe narrates, with its strange combination of surveillance and voyeurism. In
general, prose fiction makes it harder to see into its peculiar secularity than out
to the religion it represents. But Defoe's fiction is more disclosing about its secu-
larity; insofar as it represents the secular, Defoe's fiction is not itself secular. Like
the tobacco smoke that curls through the earlier scene of Crusoe's conversion, the
leaves that rustle during Will's conversion remind readers of the secular vantage
point that orders so much of Crusoe's narration.

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176 NOVEL | SUMMER 2011

It turns out that Will prayed for a Bible while he was on his knees with his wife,
a fact Crusoe only discovers sometime later, when he pulls a Bible from his pocket
and presents it to Will and the colonists as a parting gift. Crusoe says, "I did not
perceive they had any Book among them," then adds, "tho' I did not ask" (114), and
it is that presumption about what the colonists need, Crusoe's presumption that
he would be the first to give the scriptures to his colonists, that contributes to the
irony of the scene. "Here's the Book I pray'd for," Will exclaims to his wife. "God
has heard us, and sent it," Will says, and overcome by this seemingly miraculous
answer to prayer, Will "fell into such Transports of a passionate Joy" that "Tears
run down his Face like a Child that was crying" (114). Will's thanks for God's
provision get mixed with thanks for the island proprietor Crusoe, and the future
peace of the colony seems secure. Yet, immediately after Will's transports, Crusoe
explains that another colonist, a young woman, although also "very glad" about
Crusoe's gift, already had a Bible among her goods, as did a young man (115). In
effect, Crusoe is for Will what the sprout of barley seed spilled from the sack of
chicken feed was for him: the at first seemingly miraculous means of provision
only later discovered to be "common," though effectual still (115). The irony in this
Bible scene, anticipated by Crusoe's "tho' I did not ask," happens in the drop in
elevation from miraculous to ordinary action, what one might call the religious let-
down of Defoe's fiction. Such letdowns carry with them a residual sense of divine
providence, as Crusoe is quick to point out (Farther 114-15). Yet, insofar as Defoe
uses the Bible as a kind of lodestone to draw irony into a scene, his fiction is not
itself religious. Catching this neither-secular-nor-religious tone of Defoe's fiction,
holding onto these conversion and Bible scenes, will prove crucial to understand-
ing the passages at the end of Serious Reflections , where Defoe is more candid about
the benefits of his fiction.

Vision Worth Traveling For

At the end of the Serious Reflections , the so far subtle qualities of Crusoe's secular
perspective and corresponding religious letdown are made the explicit themes of
his "Vision of the Angelick World," Crusoe's farthest adventure yet, his imaginary
journey to the outer edge of the solar system.
The "Vision" dramatizes the shortsightedness of Crusoe's moral imagination,
and in it we can hear the self-teasing voice of the author, Defoe, wryly defend-
ing his decision to focalize the story through such a narrator. In other words, the
"Vision" shows us the narrative perspective of Crusoe - how Crusoe sees. To better
understand why Crusoe was made to see that way, what possible good it could do
for us as readers to travel with such a narrator, we have to wait until the conclud-
ing "parable of the atheistical club," where Defoe finally discloses his role as the
author.
Crusoe's "Vision" occurred, he tells us, soon after he began wondering about
the company of invisible beings; whether angels or devils seems not to matter
much to Crusoe. He reasons with biblical examples first, concluding that when the
Bible reports that people "see" a spirit or "hear" voices, the description must be
figurative (222). Next he considers his own experience on the island, attributing his

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 SEIDEL | DEFOE'S THEORY OF FICTION 177

fears about the devil to his own "Vapours/' "Imagination rais'd up to Disease," and
"brain-sick Fancy" (227). Yet Scripture and his own experience concur that there
are "Spirits unembodied conversing with, and taking Care of the Spirits embod-
ied" (223). How does such converse happen between bodied and "unembodied"
souls? A reasoned examination of scripture and experience will take Crusoe only
so far, and when he leaves off to recount a conversation with an astronomer friend,
his discourse fills with a different air, buoyed by Defoe's carefully controlled self-
irony.
The astronomer - a deeply scientific and spiritual man - asks Crusoe why he
is so inquisitive about dreams yet doubtful "of the Reality of the World of Spir-
its." "[W]hat think you of waking Dreams, Transes, Visions, Noises, Voices, Hints,
Impulses," the astronomer asks, "and all these waking Testimonies of an invisible
World" (235)? Crusoe tells his readers the effect rather than the substance of their
conversation in a passage that is surprisingly candid about Crusoe's habit of fic-
tion making:

I had one Day been conversing so long with him upon the common received Notions
of the Planets being habitable , and of a Diversity of Worlds , that I think verily, I
was for some Days like a Man transported into these Regions myself; whether my
Imagination is more addicted to realizing the Things I talk of as if they were in View ,
I know not; or whether by the Power of the Converse of Spirits I speak of I was at
that time enabled to entertain clearer Ideas of the Invisible World , I really cannot
tell; but I certainly made a Journey to all those supposed habitable Bodies in my
Imagination. . . . (235)

In the last line, Crusoe lets the word certainly play over "made a journey" until the
very end of the sentence, where he finally admits traveling only in his imagina-
tion. Candid if syntactically teasing about not having traveled in fact, Crusoe is
diffident about what inspires such an imaginative journey: it may be his fictional
travels are self-generated by an imagination "addicted to realizing" or communi-
cated to him by an invisible being.
Whatever the case, Crusoe is elated by conversation with the astronomer and
rises to the heights of the created universe, setting his "Foot upon the Verge of [the]
Infinite" (237). There his sight is unconfined, and he sees "the whole solar System
at one View" (237). He also sees other solar systems, other suns and their attendant
planets, and from this great height mundane Crusoe - the man who waxed poetic
at the sight of money and swooned at the news of his great wealth - remarks "how
little the World and every Thing about it seemed to me" (237). He cannot keep up
this stoic strain of "sedate Inquiry" (238) for long, however, and his thoughts turn
quickly back to the question that first fired his imagination in conversation with
his astronomical friend, namely, the question of habitable worlds.
As he travels the solar system, Crusoe brings his usual preoccupations when
visiting any new place: its prospects for settlement, commerce, usefulness. Just as
typical is his disappointment. He finds no planets habitable except the moon, and
that "a poor little watery damp Thing, not above as big as Yorkshire , neither worth
being called a World, nor capable of rendring Life comfortable" (238). Few places

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178 NOVEL | SUMMER 2011

live up to Crusoe's mercantile expectations, not even those he can see from the
heights of the created universe.
What Crusoe does see at the peak of his "sublime Journey" (239) is not Almighty
God in lofty conversation with the Son but only "Sathan [sic] keeping his Court"
and the "innumerable Legions that attended his immediate Service" (240). This
vision of invisible bureaucracy, with Satan's ministers of state all "continually
employed," carrying "his Orders" and executing "his Commissions in all Parts
of the World" (241), proves to Crusoe that "the Devil is not capable of doing half
the Mischief in the World that we lay to his Charge" (240). What he accomplishes
is less by supernatural power than by "Dexterity and Application" (240)7 In fact,
Crusoe praises the devil in the same equivocating terms that critics often bestow
on Crusoe and his author as exemplars of the Protestant work ethic. The devil's
accomplishments owe a "great deal ... to his Vigilance and Application; for he
is a very diligent Fellow in his Calling" (240). Thus Crusoe, instead of lifting the
reader to a vision of eternity, offers only a more complete view of Satan and his
ways, which are disappointingly bureaucratic - a vision of evil that has less to do
with the superstitions of the poor than the banal work of the powerful. Crusoe
may have even caught a glimpse of his author, Daniel Defoe, secret agent, busily
scribbling missives to Secretary of State Robert Harley.
Crusoe's final reflections on his space travels blend admiration, envy, and criti-
cism of Milton's achievement in Paradise Lost. Unlike Milton, Crusoe never catches
a glimpse of heaven itself, the "Country infinitely beyond" (239). Although, "If I
should have any superior Elevations," Crusoe says, "and should be able to see the
Oeconomy of Heaven in his Disposition of Things on Earth, I shall be as careful to
convey them to Posterity as they come in" (245). Elsewhere, Crusoe suggests that
the sublime heights achieved by Milton in his poetry were only useful for giving
us a better glimpse of the workings of the devil, the prince of the power of the air:
"Mr. Milton , whose Imagination was carried up to a greater Height than I am now,
went farther into the Abyss of Satan's Empire a great Way" (245). Behind Crusoe's
humility one can hear the teasing envy of Defoe, who treats with irony what Blake
and Shelley would take very seriously years later - that Milton is at his best when
he is talking about the devil.
In the preface to Serious Reflections , Crusoe claims Don Quixote and the teach-
ings of Jesus as his literary predecessors (51, 53), but it is in the "Vision" at the end
of Serious Reflections that Defoe comes closest to naming his models for writing:
from biblical rationalist, to curious astronomer, to detached stoic, to disappointed
colonialist, to busy civil servant, Crusoe combines and moves easily between all
these modes of seeing other worlds.
Crusoe's standing on the verge of the created world also tells us something
about the moral vantage point of his fiction. Though it may be higher than the
biblical moralist, astronomer, stoic, or colonialist, it affords no view of heaven, no

7 Crusoe garners a little sympathy for the great adversary when he describes the devil's work
around the world. "It would take up a long Tract by itself, to form a System of the Devil's Poli-
ticks, and to lay down a Body of his Philosophy" (243). This is something that Defoe does some
years later in The Political History of the Devil.

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 SEIDEL | DEFOE'S THEORY OF FICTION 179

vista of time from the perspective of eternity. He writes his fiction less from the
view of the converted than from that of the stubborn worldling. To read Defoe's
novels is to read with the damned, those who travel without making any moral
progress, who never acquire a vision of eternity, who worry about religion without
ever experiencing God. No matter how far Crusoe travels, he carries his world
with him. He never makes it beyond himself. Moreover, in grappling with Milton's
example, Crusoe reminds his author that no matter how high or far he may travel
in his imagination, he cannot transcend the bureaucratic evils of politics. Fiction
offers no escape from the affairs of this world.
Yet, there is something playful still about the "Vision of the Angelick World/'
something cheerful and optimistic lurking beneath this portrayal of the devil
residing at the heights of human imagination. Notice the way Crusoe juxtaposes
spatial and moral metaphors as he cautions novelists to come, those who will build
on the "foundation" of his imaginative work:

Let me therefore hint here, that supposing my self, as before, in the Orbit of the Sun,
take it in its immense Distance as our Astronomers conceive of it, or on the Edge only
of the Atmosphere with a clear View of the whole Solar System, the Region of Satan's
Empire all in View, and the World of Spirits laid open to me.
Yet let me give you this for a Check to your Imagination, that even here the Space
between Finite and Infinite is as impenetrable as on Earth, and will for ever be so, till
our Spirits being uncased, shall take their Flight to the Center of Glory, where every
Thing shall be seen as it is; and therefore you must not be surprized, if I am come
down again from the Verge of the World of Spirits, the same short sighted Wretch, as
to Futurity and Things belonging to Heaven and Hell as I went up; for Elevations
of this Kind are meant only to give us a clearer View of what we are, not of what we
shall be; and 'tis an Advantage worth Travelling for too . All this I thought necessary
to prevent the whimsical Building of erroneous Structures on my Foundation, and
fancying themselves carried farther than they are able to go.
I come therefore back to talk of Things familiar. . . . (248)

Crusoe cannot build for himself any moral, scientific, or political ladder to climb
from temporal things to eternal ones. After ascending for a "clear View of the
whole Solar System," Crusoe comes down "the same short sighted Wretch" with
only "a clearer View of what we are." Having left to improve himself at the outer
limits of creation, he returns no better. Nevertheless, Crusoe insists - and here the
reader can catch the voice of Defoe defending his fiction - this kind of "elevation"
is worth traveling for. When the novel is finished and the imaginative journey
ends, there is something of value in the turn "back to the talk of things familiar."

There May Be Such Things

Having described the moral benefits of his imaginative journeys, Crusoe, at the
end of the "Vision," lets the reader farther into his author's mode of truth-telling
with a short history of the members of an atheistical club. It begins with the claim
that prefaces so much of Defoe's later fiction, namely, that we can overlook truths

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180 NOVEL | SUMMER 2011

of fact for moral usefulness: "But I have a Mind to conclude this Work with a short
History of some Atheists, which I met with many Years ago, and whether the Facts
are testified or not, may be equally useful in the Application, if you not think them
a little too Religious for you" (260). There are four main characters in this parable
of novelistic truth-telling: a young Gentleman, a pious Friend, an Atheist, and a
Student.
A young Gentleman was on his way to a meeting of an atheist club that had
formed among some of the divinity students at the university. Unaware of the dark
clouds gathering overhead, the Gentleman was caught in a storm and took shelter
in the gateway of an inn. Suddenly, a bolt of lightning cracked so terrifyingly close
to the Gentleman that he became confused about where he was going. He began to
ask himself why there were storms like this at all and where they came from, and
then, "warm and swift as the Lightning," came the thought, " What if there should
be a God! What will become of me then!" (262). Terrified by such thoughts, the young
Gentleman ran back home to give vent to his reflections.
A near relation of his - "a pious good Man, who had often used to speak very
plainly to him of the horrid Sin he was guilty of, happened to come to visit him"
(262). Conversation with the pious Friend fills the young Gentleman with such
emotions that he is forced to retreat into his closet where he can express himself
more freely. "His Friend, taking a Book in his Hand, staid in the outer Room"
(262).
At that moment, another young man came to the door of the young Gentle-
man and knocked. The pious Friend looked through the grate of the door and
recognized the Atheist as one of the members of the notorious club, but instead of
inviting him inside, the Friend opened the door only a little, so as not to be seen,
and said in the disguised voice of the distraught young Gentleman, "'O Sir, Beseech
them all to repent ; for depend upon it, There is a GOD; tell them, I say so ; and with
that he shut the Door upon him violently" (262). The young Atheist is so stunned
by the slammed door and the voice of his supposed friend that he leaves in confu-
sion, nearly forgetting where he was going. He cannot shake off the words "There
is a God."
The storm continues, and the young Atheist, still troubled by the words, stops
by a bookseller's shop to "stand up a little out of the wet" (264). He happens to
meet there a "very sober, studious, religious young Man, a Student in Divinity of
the same College" (264). This Student is reading an "old Book" to help him com-
pose a short dialogue. He says "four Lines written on the Back of the Title Page"
had brought the Atheist to mind just moments before he entered the bookshop.
The Atheist is eager to know the lines, but the Student will only show them if he
agrees to a rather bizarre physiological test of conscience. The Student asks to hold
the Atheist's hand while he reads in order to feel how his body responds to the
lines of poetry. The two young men retire into a backroom of the bookshop for the
experiment. When the Student asks the Atheist to report how he felt while reading,
particularly the words God , heaven , and hell, tears stand in the Atheist's eyes as he
answers, "I don't know but there may" be such things (266). The Student responds,
"Well, I see it begins to touch you, if you are uncertain, that is a Step to Convic-
tion" (266). The Student explains why he thought the lines so apt to the Atheist's

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 SEIDEL | DEFOE'S THEORY OF FICTION 181

case: "I thought, that such a Reflection in the Case of Atheism, so natural, so plain,
especially blessed from him, whose secret Voice can effectually reach the Mind, might be
some Means to open your Eyes" (266).
Who is the author of these lines "especially blessed," whose "secret voice"
reaches the mind? Is it God who blesses? The author? Although not cited in Seri-
ous Reflections , the lines happen to be from Defoe's poem "The Storm. An Essay."8
It seems the Student was reading a book by Defoe, the author who here seems
to delight in the possibility of his words taken up by God as divine speech to
others.
The Atheist remains stubbornly agnostic: "I tell you, I don't know, but there
may be a God." And the Student - sometime friend, sometime interrogator, a curi-
ous blend of psychiatrist and social scientist - scolds him for qualifying his belief.
" Don't you know but there may! O SIR, I beseech you repent; for certainly THERE IS A
GOD, depend upon it, I SAY SO" (266). The young Atheist is undone by these last
words, the very ones that he heard through the partially opened door at his friend
the young Gentleman's house earlier. And it is this coincidence of words more
than the lines of poetry that convinces the Atheist, looking "wildly" now, that
"there must be A GOD or A DEVIL in Being" (267). The book of providence seems
to be working against the Atheist, terrifying him as the Bible did John Bunyan
at first, and as the Bible does to many of its first-time readers in Defoe's conduct
manuals.
The Atheist and Student go to the young Gentleman's house to hear about his
case of repentance. The pious and mysterious Friend is gone. The Atheist tells the
young Gentleman about his earlier visit and thanks him for what he said through
the cracked door. He says, "I hope I may have Reason to be thankful for what
you said to me, and look upon it as spoken from Heaven; for I assure you, it has
been an Introduction to that Light in my Thoughts which I hope shall never be
extinguish'd" (271). Now it is the Gentleman's turn to marvel. He explains that he
never went to the door, said no such thing, and that the voice must have been, quite
literally, "some Voice from Heaven, it was nothing of mine" (271). The Atheist turns
pale, overwhelmed at the thought that he has heard a supernatural voice, and falls
into a swoon to end the parable.
As the parable readers, we know that the "voice from heaven" was no more
a miracle than, again, the grain that grew up on Crusoe's island, which he later
discovers to be kernels spilled from a sack of chicken feed. What will happen to
the Atheist when he learns that the "voice from heaven" is no such thing? Will the
"light in his thoughts" so recently introduced get snuffed out by shame and embar-
rassment? Will it be fanned into flame by a laughter-filled repentance? Crusoe does
not say, and the parable ends where it does because what interests Defoe most as
a fiction writer is not the outcome of the Atheist's repentance but the moment of
his uncertainty. What Defoe is trying to cultivate in his fiction is not a secularized

8 "The Storm" was first published in Elegy (1704); it was also included in Second Volume (1705)
and in the first volume of an anthology titled A Collection of the Best English Poetry (1717). On the
appearance of these lines in works by Defoe, see G. A. Starr's editorial note in Serious Reflections
330n253.

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182 NOVEL | SUMMER 2011

version of his dissenting Christian faith so much as an ordinary, tentative admis-

sion that "there may be such things/'
Crusoe's last meditations in Serious Reflections are on the usefulness of doubt,
gullibility, and fear - it was fearful uncertainty that inspired so many of Crusoe's
projects on the island - and in them, in Crusoe's asking what to make of the human
tendency to believe more than we know, one can hear Defoe constructing his the-
ory of the novel. Serious mistakes of seeing ghosts and hearing voices "should not
at all hinder us from making a very good Use of such Things," Crusoe says, "for
many a Voice may be directed from Heaven, that is not immediately spoken from
thence" (272).
The fiction of Defoe is like the voice of the Friend. This is the point that Crusoe
finally makes when extracting the lesson from his short history of the atheistical
club. He says that the concluding scene shows "how the Power of Imagination
may be work'd up, by the secret Agency of an unknown Hand, how many Things
concurr'd to make this Man believe he had seen an Apparition, and heard a Voice,
and yet there was nothing in it but the Voice of a Man unseen and mistaken"
(272). The young Atheist "concluded it had been all a Vision or Apparition that
opened the Door . . . and yet here was neither Vision or Voice, but that of an ordi-
nary Person, and one who meant well, and said well" (272). If there is something
worthwhile in the imaginative letdown to "things familiar," so too is there value in
the discovery that the disguised voice of Robinson Crusoe is that of an "ordinary
person," Daniel Defoe, speaking through the narrowly opened doors of his novel,
an author who means well and says well.

The Crowing Cock

The Crusoe who styled himself a type of prodigal son or Jonah at the beginning
of Robinson Crusoe matures by taking himself less seriously at the end of Serious
Reflections. No longer the basically good middle-class boy trying to puff up his
modest rebellion into biblical proportions, he compares himself in the end to the
rooster who signaled Peter's betrayal. On the very last page of Serious Reflections ,
Crusoe says that the concurring circumstances leading to the Atheist's stopping
first at the door of the Gentleman and then at the bookshop where the Student was,
and to his hearing the same surprising words in both places, were all "order'd in
the same Manner as the Cock crowing when Peter denied Christ, which though
wonderfully concurrent with what his blessed Master had foretold, yet was no
extraordinary Thing in a Cock, who naturally Crows at such a Time of the Morn-
ing" (273). Letting this line reflect back on its author, as I think Defoe intended
here, one can say that Defoe makes up stories as naturally and easily as a rooster
crows at dawn. And if God can use a rooster to bring Peter to repentance, then he
can use Defoe's fiction to do the same for Defoe's readers. The beastly analogy is
a fitting conclusion to Defoe's fable of novel writing because it keeps its religious
and satiric edge without completely eschewing claims to moral efficacy and divine
inspiration.
By writing as an ordinary man about ordinary persons and things, Defoe opens
up the possibility of extraordinary concurrences between the lives of his fugitive

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 SEIDEL | DEFOE'S THEORY OF FICTION 183

characters and those of his wayward readers. The playful self-effacement that one
finds in this concluding fable, along with the refusal in Defoe's novels to subject
the picaresque everywhere to the spiritual autobiography, shows Defoe striving to
leave the connections between reader and text open to providence, to trust them
to be variously perceived by the reader, and to avoid making all such concurrences
the result of his own literary artistry Instead of writing novels that appropriate the
role of providence to readers, Defoe writes novels that providence can appropriate
on the readers' behalf.
If Defoe's fiction encourages a kind of providential thinking about one's life, it
does so by reminding us that we are prone to misperceive the hand of providence,
that the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves are often deeply flawed, laugh-
ably self-serving, and fearfully self-protecting - and that such insight is something
worth traveling for. The self-reflective ironies of Crusoe's storytelling at the end of
Serious Reflections show Defoe poking fun at his own faith and lack of it, making
his religious embarrassments and imaginative limits a risible fuel to his fiction
writing.
Defoe has served enough time as a kind of preface to the story of the novel,
someone to skip quickly past in order to get to the real literary art. He is conde-
scendingly given the honor of priority but dismissed as the vestige of an earlier,
more religious and less literary age. Crusoe's concluding "Vision of the Angelick
World" - with its meditations on invisible and figurative voices, on movement
between worlds, and on the power of concurring events, and with its playful
defense of its moral authority and insistence on the impossibility of transcending
politics - is a far better introduction to Defoe's fiction than any of his prefaces. Put
into the hands of students and first-time readers of Defoe, the "Vision" may help
reintroduce Defoe to the company of modern fiction writers and readers.

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