Why Read the Classics? (15 page)

This man who had suddenly turned novelist despite being nearly sixty was Daniel Defoe (1660-1731), well known to political columns of the time particularly for having been in the pillory, and the author of a plethora of works of every kind, either written in his own name or anonymously, as was more often the case. (The most complete bibliographies of his works list almost 400 tides ranging from pamphlets of religious and political
controversy, to short satirical poems, books on the occult, and works on history, geography and economics, in addition to the novels.)

This forerunner of the modern novel, then, first comes to the fore far from the cultivated terrain of high literature (whose supreme model in England at the time was the classicist Pope): instead it emerges amidst the rank undergrowth of commercial book production which was aimed at a reading public composed of serving girls, backstreet traders, innkeepers, waiters, sailors, and soldiers. Though intended to conform to the tastes of this public, such literature was always careful to inculcate some moral lesson (and not always in a hypocritical way), and Defoe is anything but indifferent to this requirement. But it is not the edifying sermons, punctuating the pages of
Crusoe
at regular intervals, that make it a book of sound moral backbone: these are in any case rather generic and perfunctory; rather it is the natural and direct way in which a kind of morality and an idea of life, a particular relationship of man with the objects and possibilities in his hands, are expressed in images.

Nor can it be said that the ‘practical’ origin of the book, which the author drafted as part of a ‘deal’, undermines the prestige of what would come to be thought of as the bible of mercantile and industrial virtues, the epic in praise of individual initiative. That mixture of adventure, practical spirit and moralistic compunction, which would in fact become the staple ingredients of Anglo-Saxon capitalism on both sides of the Atlantic, is not inconsistent with Defoe’s own life, given his paradoxical role as both preacher and adventurer. Starting out as a merchant, Defoe soon became a trusted wholesaler in hosiery and a brick-manufacturer before going bankrupt; he became a supporter and adviser to the Whig party which backed William of Orange, a pamphleteer for the ‘Dissenters’, then he was imprisoned and saved by a moderate Tory minister, Robert Harley, for whom he acted as spokesman and secret agent, before going on to become the founder and sole editor of the newspaper
The Review
, for which he is known as ‘the inventor of modern journalism’. After Harley’s fall he moved first of all closer to the Whigs, then back to the Tories until the financial crisis which turned him into a novelist.

Sure evidence of his story-telling gifts had already surfaced on many occasions in Defoe’s previous writings, especially when narrating contemporary or historical events, which he embellished with imaginative detail, or when recounting the biographies of famous men which were based on apocryphal evidence.

With these experiences behind him, Defoe set about writing his novel. Given the autobiographical thrust of the work, it not only deals with the adventures of the shipwreck and the desert island, but actually starts from the beginning of the protagonist’s life and continues until his old age. In this respect Defoe was paying homage to a moralistic pretext, a kind of didacticism which, it must be said, is too narrow and elementary to be taken seriously: obedience to one’s father, the superiority of middle-class life, and of the modest bourgeois existence over all the blandishments of outrageous fortune. It is for contravening these lessons that Robinson meets such disaster.

Avoiding both seventeenth-century bombast and the sentimentality typical of eighteenth-century English narrative, Defoe’s language has a sobriety and an economy which, like Stendhal’s ‘dry as the Napoleonic code style’, one might compare to that of a ‘business report’: here the device of the first-person sailor-merchant, who is capable of entering in columns as in an accounts book both the ‘evil’ and the ‘good’ of his situation, and of maintaining an arithmetical calculation of the number of cannibals killed, turns out to be as much an appropriate stylistic expedient as a practical one. Like a business report or a catalogue of goods and utensils, Defoe’s prose is unadorned but at the same time scrupulously detailed. The accumulation of detail is aimed at convincing the reader of the veracity of his account, but also expresses better than any other style could the sense of the value of every object, every action, every gesture in the shipwreck’s condition (just as in
Moll Flanders
and
Colonel Jack
the anxiety and joy of material possession is conveyed by the lists of stolen objects).

The descriptions of Robinson’s manual operations are given in painstaking detail: how he digs his house out of the rock, surrounds it with a palisade, builds himself a boat which he is then unable to carry as far as the sea, and learns how to shape and heat vases and bricks. Because of this interest and delight in reporting Robinson’s technical progress, Defoe is famous even today as the writer who celebrates man’s patient struggle with matter, and exalts the lowliness and difficulty but also the greatness of all activity, as well as the joy of seeing things being created by our hands. From Rousseau to Hemingway, all those writers who have shown us that testing ourselves, and succeeding or failing in ‘doing something’ however great or small, are real measures of human worth, can recognise Defoe as their first model.

Robinson Crusoe
is without doubt a book to be reread line by line, and we will continually make new discoveries. His capacity for avoiding, at crucial moments, any excessive self-congratulation or exultation by using just a few words before moving on to practical questions may seem to contrast with the sermonising tone of certain pages later on, once a bout of illness has led the protagonist back to the thought of religion: for instance, that moment when he realises that he is the sole survivor of all the crew — ‘as for them, I never saw them afterwards, or any sign of them, except three of their hats, one cap, and two shoes that were not fellows’ — and after the briefest of thanks to God he immediately starts to look round and consider his plight.

But Defoe’s approach in both
Crusoe
and in the later novels is very similar to that of the business man who obeys the rules, who when it is time for the service goes into church and beats his breast, but then hurries back out so as not to waste time away from his work. Hypocrisy? His behaviour is too open and urgent to deserve such a charge; Defoe maintains even in his brusque alternations of tone a basic, healthy sincerity which is his unmistakable hallmark.

Then again, sometimes his humorous vein broaches even the battlefields of the political and religious controversies of his age: as when we hear the arguments between the savage who cannot comprehend the idea of the devil and the sailor who cannot explain it to him. Or as in that situation when Robinson is lord of ‘but three subjects, and they were of three different religions. My man Friday was a Protestant, his father was a Pagan and a cannibal, and the Spaniard was a Papist. However, I allowed liberty of conscience throughout my dominions.’ But not even this subtle and ironic emphasis is present when we read one of the most paradoxical and significant moments in the book: after longing for years to reestablish contact with the rest of the world, now every time he sees a human presence appear around the island Robinson feels the threats to his life increase; and when he learns of the existence of a group of shipwrecked Spanish sailors on a nearby island he is afraid of joining them in case they want to hand him over to the Inquisition.

Even on the shores of the desert island, then, ‘near the great river Oroonoque’, the ebb and flow of the ideas, passions and culture of an epoch are still felt. Certainly, although in his determination to play the role of adventure-story writer he dwells on the horror in his descriptions of the cannibals, he was not unaware of Montaigne’s reflections on the
anthropophagi (these same ideas had left their mark on Shakespeare in his story of another mysterious island in
The Tempest):
without such ideas Robinson would never have reached the conclusion that ‘these people were not murderers’, but men from a different civilisation, obeying their own laws: They do not know it to be an offence any more than those Christians were murderers who often put to death the prisoners taken in battle.’

[1955]

Geometric characters, animated by a flickering mobility, stretch and twist in a saraband of precision and lightness: that was how Paul Klee illustrated Voltaire’s
Candide
in 1911, giving visual — and almost musical — form to the energetic brio which this book continues to communicate to today’s readers, above and beyond its thick network of references to its own epoch and culture.

What most delights us today in
Candide
is not the ‘conte philosophique’, nor its satire, nor the gradual emergence of a morality and vision of the world: instead it is its rhythm. With rapidity and lightness, a succession of mishaps, punishments and massacres races over the page, leaps from chapter to chapter, and ramifies and multiplies without evoking in the reader’s emotions anything other than a feeling of an exhilarating and primitive vitality. In the bare three pages of Chapter 8 Cunégonde recounts how having had her father, mother and brother hacked to pieces by invaders, she is then raped and disembowelled, then cured and reduced to living as a washerwoman, bartered and sold in Holland and Portugal, torn between two different protectors of different faiths on alternate days, and in this condition happens to witness the
auto da fé
whose victims are Pangloss and Candide himself whom she then rejoins. Even less than two pages of Chapter 9 are enough for Candide to find himself with two corpses at his feet and for Cunégonde to be able to exclaim: ‘How did you who were born so mild ever manage to kill in the space of two minutes a Jew and a prelate?’ And when the old woman has to explain why she has only one buttock, she starts by telling the story of her life from the moment when as the thirteen-year-old daughter of a Pope, she had experienced in the space of three months poverty, enslavement, and almost daily rape, before having
to endure famine and war and nearly dying of the plague in Algiers: and all this before she can get to her tale of the siege of Azov and of the unusual nutrition that the starving Janissaries discover in female buttocks … well, here things are rather more leisurely, two whole chapters are required, something like six and a half pages.

The great discovery of Voltaire the humorist is a technique that will become one of the most reliable gags in comic films: the piling up of disaster on disaster at relentless speed. There are also the sudden increases in rhythm which carry the sense of the absurd almost to the point of paroxysm: as when the series of misfortunes already swiftly narrated in the detailed account is then repeated in a breakneck-speed summary. What Voltaire projects in his lightning-speed photograms is really a worldwide cinema, a kind of ‘around the world in eighty pages’, which takes Candide from his native Westphalia to Holland, Portugal, South America, France, England, Venice and Turkey, and this tour then splits in turn into supplementary whirlwind world tours by fellow protagonists, male and especially female, who are easy prey for pirates and slavers operating between Gibraltar and the Bosphorus. A huge cinema of contemporary world events most of all: villages wiped out in the Seven Years’ War between the Prussians and the French (the ‘Bulgars’ and the ‘Abars’), the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, the
auto da fés
organised by the Inquisition, the Jesuits of Paraguay who reject Spanish and Portuguese rule, the legendary gold of the Incas, and the odd snapshot of Protestantism in Holland, of the spread of syphilis, Mediterranean and Atlantic piracy, internecine wars in Morocco, the exploitation of black slaves in Guyana, but always leaving a certain space for literary news, allusions to Parisian high life, interviews with the many dethroned kings of the time, who all gather at the Venice carnival.

A world in total disarray; nobody anywhere is saved except in the only country that is wise and happy, El Dorado. The link between happiness and wealth ought not to exist since the Incas are unaware that the gold dust of their streets and their diamond cobbles is so precious to the men from the Old World; and yet, strange as it may seem, Candide does find a wise and happy society in that exact spot, amidst the deposits of precious metals. It is there that Pangloss might finally be right, that the best of all possible worlds might become reality: except that El Dorado is hidden amidst the most inaccessible mountain ranges of the Andes, perhaps in a piece of the map that has been torn away, a non-place, a utopia.

But if this land of Cockaigne possesses vague and unconvincing touches typical of all utopias, the rest of the world, with its constant tribulations, despite the rapidity with which these are recounted, is not at all a mannered representation. ‘That is the price that must be paid for you to eat sugar in Europe!’, says the Dutch Guyana negro, after telling the protagonists about his punishments in just a few lines; similarly the courtesan in Venice says, ‘Oh, sir, if you could only imagine what it is like to be forced to caress, whether you like it or not, an old merchant, a lawyer, a friar, a gondolier, an abbot; to be exposed to all manner of insults and affronts; often to be reduced to having to beg the loan of a skirt just in order to have it removed by a repulsive old man; to be robbed by one man of what one has just earned from another; to have a price on one’s head set by those who administer justice, and to have nothing else to look forward to but a horrendous old age, in a hospital or a dungheap…’

It is true that the characters in
Candide
appear to be made of rubber: Pangloss is wasted by syphilis, then they hang him, they tie him to the oar of a galley, and then he pops up again alive and kicking. But it would be wrong to say that Voltaire glosses over the cost of suffering: what other novel has the courage to present the heroine who at the beginning had been ‘comely in complexion, fresh, plump, attractive’, later as a Cunégonde who is ‘turned dark in complexion, gummy-eyed, flat-chested, with wrinkled cheeks, and the skin of her arms red and chapped’?