N a r r a t i v e9 9Milton the theologian takes over from Milton the humanist, as
doctrine gets the better of drama.
There are similar conflicts between what we see and what we are
told in the fiction of Daniel Defoe. Defoe’s novels are fascinated by
the workaday material world. What we find in his writing is a kind
of pure narrativity, in which the overriding question is always
‘What comes next?’ Events are important in so far as they lead to
other events. These restless narratives plunge forward without
much sense of overall design. There is no logical conclusion or
natural closure to Defoe’s tales. They accumulate narrative for its
own sake, as a capitalist accumulates profit for its own sake. It is as
though the desire to narrate is insatiable. In a world where to stop
is to stagnate, you settle down only to take off again, and with
Defoe this is true both of the narrative and of the characters them-
selves. Robinson Crusoe is no sooner home from his island than he
is off on his travels once more, stockpiling further adventures
which he promises to share with us in the future. Characters like
Moll Flanders move so fast, swapping one husband for another and
hopping from one form of petty crime to the next, that they seem
to have no continuous identity. Instead, they live off the top of their
heads, by the skin of their teeth and (literally in Moll’s case) by the
seat of their pants.
Defoe clearly relishes realism for its own sake. As James Joyce
once said of himself, he has the mind of a grocer. In fact, the
English novel takes off at the point where everyday existence
begins to seem endlessly enthralling. This was hardly true of the
literary forms which preceded it: tragedy, epic, elegy, pastoral,
romance and the like. Genres like this deal in deities, high- born
characters and extraordinary events. They are not much interested
in prostitutes and pickpockets. The idea of allowing a whore like