H o w t o R e a d L i t e r a t u r e1 0 0Moll Flanders to tell the story would be as unthinkable as allowing
a giraffe to narrate it. For a Christian Dissenter like Defoe, however,
savouring everyday life for its own sake is not morally acceptable,
even though his fiction does just that. The material world is
supposed to point to the spiritual one. It is not to be treated as an
end in itself. Real events must be scanned for a moral or religious
meaning. So Defoe assures us in the style of a tabloid journalist that
he is reporting these sensational happenings (theft, bigamy, fraud,
fornication and so on) only so that we can learn a moral lesson
from them. Yet this is conspicuously not the case. The story and
the moral are absurdly at odds with each other. We are invited to
believe that human history is guided by divine Providence, but
nothing could be more implausible. History is just a chapter of
accidents. It is driven by voracious self- interest, not shaped by
some moral design. Virtue is for those who can afford it. What the
novels say does not fit with what they show.
D.H. Lawrence objected to writers who, as he comments in his
Study of Thomas Hardy, ‘put their thumb in the pan’. He meant by
this that a work of fiction is a balance of forces with a mysteriously
autonomous life of its own, and an author should not disturb this
delicate equilibrium by forcing his own purposes upon it. Tolstoy,
he thought, had done just this, unforgivably, in killing off his own
great creation Anna Karenina. This ‘Judas’ of an author, as Lawrence
calls him, had taken fright at the magnificent flourish of life that
was his heroine, and had cravenly disposed of her by pushing her
under a train. Writers who allowed their protagonists to go under
were in Lawrence’s eyes simply ‘doing dirt on life’. It followed for
him that tragedy was something of a cop- out. In fact, he stands out
among the major modernist authors in his aversion to it. Characters
in Lawrence who cannot attain fulfilment are not generally to be