colonialism and the epistemological underpinnings of the early english novel

Rhodes University

Colonialism and the Epistemological Underpinnings of the Early English NovelAuthor(s): Mike MaraisSource: English in Africa, Vol. 23, No. 1 (May, 1996), pp. 47-66Published by: Institute for the Study of English in Africa, Rhodes UniversityStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40238821 .

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Colonialism and the Epistemological Underpinnings of the Early English Novel

Mike Marais

I

In Factual Fictions (1983), Lennard Davis contends that a distinctive characteristic of the early novel was a peculiar dynamic between fact and fiction which meant that the genre was received with ambivalence by its

readership. So, for example, the eighteenth-century reader's response to the following paragraph from Defoe's Roxana differed from that of the

contemporary reader in that, while the latter has biographical and historical material available which designates Defoe's texts as fictional constructs, the former was never quite certain as to whether they were true or false:

The history of this beautiful lady is to speak for itself: it is not as beautiful as the lady herself is reported to be; if it is not as diverting as the reader can desire ... the relator says it must be from the defect of his performance; dressing up the story in worse clothes than the lady, whose words he speaks, prepared it for the world.

(qtd in Davis 1983, 13)

This inability to take for granted that a passage such as this was fiction

produced an ambivalence in the period-reader which traversed his/her

experience of the new genre. The implication here, then, is that during this

period fact and fiction had not yet become firmly entrenched as the significant discriminants of genre that they later became (Davis 1983, 10). It may thus be assumed that the novel as discourse in the seventeenth and

eighteenth centuries was "considerably wider, with different limits and rules than our modern conception of fiction and the novel would allow us to apply to [this period]" (7). At this early stage, the "discourse of print" (Davis' s term for the undifferentiated ensemble of written texts of which the novel formed part) included not only novels and literary criticism, but also

"newspapers, advertisements, printer's records, handbills, letters, and so on" (1983, 7).

English in Africa 23 No. 1 (May 1996)



48 MIKE MARAIS

Davis' s notion that an undifferentiated discourse of print was extant at this time is confirmed by the findings of other researchers in this field. In

discussing what he describes as the general "generic confusion" endemic in the late seventeenth century, Michael McKeon, for instance, notes that while some of the booklists of publishers and booksellers evince "the absence of

any will to distinguish consistently between 'history' and 'literature,' between 'fact' and 'fiction,'" those of others manifest "a more familiar and

reassuring impulse," that is, they "obligingly separate! ] 'History' from 'Romances, Poems and Playes'" (1987, 26). In the context of Davis's

argument, this coexistence of the will to distinguish between literature and

history with the conflation of the two, a state of affairs which, as McKeon shows, "can even be found in the same writer" (1987, 26), does not so much indicate "generic confusion" as the reality that fact and fiction had not yet been conclusively fixed as signifiers of genre at this time.

Much of Davis's study consists of an attempt to locate the reasons for the later subdivision of the undifferentiated matrix of the discourse of print through the firm installation of the above-mentioned distinction. His

essentially Foucauldian analysis advances the thesis that this subdivision was brought about by the danger posed by the discourse's potential for

politicisation, a danger which arose once serial publications created the

possibility of the growth of a regular readership with shared ideologies. Through distinguishing between fact and fiction, the means to diffuse such a politicisation, by repressing the former and ignoring the latter, was established (Davis 1983, 83).

For the purposes of a discussion which seeks to trace the relation between the rise of the novel and colonialism, however, this part of Davis's

theory is of less importance than is his notion of an undifferentiated discourse of print. Indeed, the reasons which the present paper moots for the installation of the firm distinction between fact and fiction which led to the subdivision of this discourse and so induced the emergence of the novel, have little in common with those advanced in Davis's study. The paper demonstrates through an examination of a part of the discourse of print, namely travel writing, that this distinction was a result of the changes in the relation between subject, word and world brought about by the instatement, during the Enlightenment, of an empirical epistemology based on the certitude of a subjectivity that can fix knowledge. Furthermore, it argues that the formal protocols developed by the early novel colluded with this new epistemology' s occlusion of the discursive mediation of the subject's relation to an objective world. On the grounds of this collusion, it contends



THE EARLY ENGLISH NOVEL 49

that the history of the rise of the novel cannot be separated from the history of European imperialism.

II

Travel writing's relation to the novel is conventionally construed in terms of the distinction between fact and fiction, a distinction which conceals the interplay which pertained between fact and fiction in travel writing prior to the eighteenth century. In this regard, a cursory glance at Richard Hakluyt's Voyages (1907) reveals that it included both real voyages and projected or

imaginary ones. Furthermore, Percy Adams claims that some travellers

during this "age of plagiarism" frequently appropriated material from other travellers who, in many cases, had themselves resorted to the same practice (1962, 11). Adams's two exhaustive surveys of European travel literature are useful in revealing tie pervasiveness of the imbrication of fact and fiction in travel literature prior to the eighteenth century (1962; 1983). Of equal interest, though, are the assumptions which underpin his critical discourse. As emerges from his use of the word "plagiarism" and from the title of the earlier of his two studies, namely Travelers and Travel Liars ( 1 962), Adams treats the distinction between fact and fiction as an intrinsic and autochthonous marker of genre. Furthermore, his obsession with plagiarists and liars presupposes the possibility of undistorted knowledge and attests to a preoccupation with origins which relies on the post-Enlightenment notion of the subject as founding source of truth and meaning. His interpretation could therefore be described in Jacques Derrida's words as being informed

by a "dream[ ] of deciphering a truth or an origin which escapes play and the order of the sign" (1978, 292). Significantly, Adams's discussion contradicts these foundational premises by revealing - albeit

unintentionally - that the fictional dimension of many of the so-called "travel lies" which he identifies, derives from the fact that European travellers' representations of 'unknown' territories were mediated by a

pre-existent and recognisable European discourse.

Among the numerous instances of this phenomenon which may be detected in his discussion, the story of the Patagonian giants - which concerns Europe's representation of South America - stands out (1962, 43). According to Adams, one of four eyewitness accounts which emanated from Magellan's circumnavigation of the globe between 1519 and 1522

supplied many 'facts' pertaining to an encounter with tall South Americans. This account subsequently served as inspiration for many other travel narratives over the next 250 years. From Adams' s analysis, it becomes clear that successive travellers merely rehearsed the words already spoken by



50 MIKE MARAIS

their predecessors. The outcome of this repetition- with-variation of the same set of 'facts' was the eventual constitution in discourse of the Patagonians as giants.

What is significant about this exposé is not the sensational aspect of the "travel lie" concerned, but that it and many of the other "travel lies" cited by Adams show that the fictional dimension of travel writing during this period was largely a function of the fact that the representations prompted by the European explorations of terra incognita were almost invariably not composed from what was 'really' encountered, but produced by the commerce between existent travel discourse and the expectation that what was represented there was in fact what would be discovered.1 The insight that emerges from Adams's study, then, is that the fictional aspect of travel writing often signals the presence of discursive mediation in this writing's representation of colonial territory. Alternatively put, it exposes the discursive separation of subject, word and world, that is, the fact that the

subject is not the origin of 'truth,' that 'truth' cannot escape "the order of the sign."

Clearly, though, this fictional dimension of travel writing could only have become the subject of commentaries such as mine and that of Adams

following the development of recognisably modern ways of discrim- inating fact from fiction. And since commentaries which presuppose this distinction date back to the eighteenth century, one may assume that in this

period a major transition in cultural attitudes towards the epistemological status of these two categories took place. It is significant, for example, that Adams is able to cite numerous responses from readers of the time in support of his argument that "in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries . . . general observers were finding travel accounts to be something less than history and much like fiction" (1983, 86).

From the above, it is apparent that travel writing had begun to elicit an ambivalent reaction from its readers, a reaction identical to that which Davis detects towards the early novel (1983). Just as the ambivalent nature of the response of readers to the early novel can be located in the convention of authorial disavowal through which the writer asserts the factuality of his/her narrative by insisting that it is not a 'story' but a 'history' (see Davis 1983, 15-16), so too the ambivalence of readers of travel literature can be detected in the constant attacks writers of the time launched on the credibility of other travellers in order to affirm the veracity of their own accounts. In this regard, witness the disclaimer in the following excerpt from the preface to John Bulkeley and John Cummins' s A Voyage to the South Seas, published in 1743: "It has been a Thing, usual, in publishing of Voyages, to introduce



THE EARLY ENGLISH NOVEL 5 1

Abundance of Fiction; and some Authors have been esteemed merely for being marvellous ... we have taken to deviate from [such travellers], by having a strict Regard for Truth" (qtd in Adams 1983, 87). So, while the relation between fact and fiction was indeterminate in earlier travel writing, here we see evidence of a new perception of fact and fiction amongst writers and readers of the eighteenth century.

It is surely not coincidental that this fixing of a radical distinction between fact and fiction took place during the Enlightenment since this was the period in which the subject was radically split from the world. Among the consequences of thus making the cogito its own foundation was the occlusion of the mediatory role played by discourse in the subject's relation to the world and therefore a repression of the aesthetic base of existence. Furthermore, one of the predictable outcomes of the Enlightenment's installation of a rational, thinking was the insidious exclusion from the historical world of all that is 'non-rational.'2 For the category of the aesthetic, this exclusionary process involved relegation to a realm utterly distinct from existential 'reality,' namely that of the work of art. Henceforth, its role as a shaping power in the world could be ignored. And, not surprisingly, in the case of travel writing, the inscription of a transcendental, rationalising consciousness effectively removed all traces of the intervention of discourse and therefore of fictionalising from the

representation of colonial space. It now became possible for travel writing to serve as a vehicle for 'factual' information and, as the following comment of Nathaniel Wraxall, an author of the period cited by Charles Batten, reveals, this was considered to be a new development in this form of writing: '"the age of imposition on one side, and of credulity on the other seems now to be past.' 'Truth and sound knowledge' can serve as the subjects of travel literature 'where formerly they scarce ever intruded'" (1978, 5).

In concealing the relation between discourse and knowledge, travel

writing's new-found status as truth discourse generated the illusion that the

subject's experience of the world is pure and unmediated. It was aided in this respect by a new confidence in the ability of language to transcribe the 'truth' of the seen world. The nature of the change which seems to have occurred in the relation between language and the world exterior to the

subject is described as follows by Michel Foucault: "[Language in the Classical age] is not an exterior effect of thought, but thought itself. And, because of this, it makes itself invisible, or almost so. In any case, it has become so transparent to representation that its very existence ceases to be a problem" (1970, 78-79).3 The linguistic change to which Foucault here refers led to a transcendence of the discursive separation between subject,



52 MIKE MARAIS

word and world, a separation which the fictional dimension of earlier travel writing, once it had been rendered visible by the epistemological transformations of the Enlightenment, threatened to expose, thereby making of such writing an object of commentary rather than a seemingly transparent representation of the world. Language now no longer had meaning in relation to its mediation of the subject's construction of an objective world, but only in relation to its innocent indication of a world of objects invested with 'truth.' In thus creating the impression that the subject's experience of the world is pure and unmediated and that 'truth' is acquired through perception, language's newly acquired transparency clearly facilitated the Enlightenment attempt to establish an apodictic subjectivity. Indeed, in postulating a one-to-one relation between language and experience, it enabled the subject to align word against thing and therefore to assume a

position of dominance within the field of experience. So, through transcending the discursive separation of subject, word and

world, the transparency of language generated the illusion that knowledge was constituted entirely according to the structure of a transcendental subject perceiving an object, an illusion which concealed the discursive operation through which the self appropriates that which is other to it within a preconceived cultural system. In other words, by disguising the fact that the subject is always already implicated in a world which pre-exists it, a structure of knowledge was installed during the Enlightenment whose

appropriative mode of operation has been described by Robert Young as a

"politics of arrogation" which "mimics at a conceptual level the

geographical and economic absorption of the non-European world by the West" and which can accordingly "be set alongside the history ... of

European imperialism" (1990, 3, 4).

Together with its inscription of a transcendental subject, this change in the relation of language to experience helped travel writing to develop into a mode of writing which confidently presented itself as a direct transcription of the 'reality' of lived experience and of the 'truth' of the seen world. In so doing, it gained the ability to conceal beneath a facade of 'fact' Europe's discursive appropriation of colonial territory.

The fixing of a firm distinction between fact and fiction, which culminated in the subdivision of the previously undifferentiated matrix of the discourse of print, led not only to the installation of travel writing as truth discourse, but also, as Davis has argued (1983), to the emergence of the novel as genre. Significantly, as I have indicated, the attempt to autonomise the aesthetic




during this period involved relegating it from the realm of the existential to that of the work of art, that is, to a sphere apparently distinct from the historical world. With regard to the repression of the fictional dimension of factual modes such as travel writing, however, this did not mean that the category of fiction would henceforth be confined to the extant mode of fictional writing, that is, the "anti-individualist" genre of romance (McKeon 1987, 3). Instead, the split in print as discourse led to the advent of the novel, a genre which, far from being "anti-individualist," inscribed a Cartesian division between a detached subjectivity and an inert world of objects. Indeed, the distinguishing feature of this new genre was realism, a technique characterised as involving a "Cartesian shift to the point of view of the

perceiving individual ego" which "make[s] possible a more sharply defined

picture of the outer as well as the inner world" (Watt 1957, 295). Heidegger's description of representation in general, namely that it "is

making-stand-over-against, an objectifying that goes forward and masters" (1977, 150), is thus especially true of the representational manoeuvres of the

early novel. In its formation of a technique which inscribed and naturalised the

appropriative subject-object epistemological relation, the novel therefore not only distinguished itself from the "anti-individualist" mode of romance but also aligned itself with other subject-centred modes such as travel

writing, as is particularly evident in this new genre's use of the apparatuses of the latter. In a survey of the many close structural similarities between these two modes of writing, Adams shows that a number of the stock-in-trade devices of the early novelists, such as first-person narration, the epistolary technique, and the device of the memoir and autobiography, to mention but a few, derive from travel writing (1983, 161-271). It is, of

course, these techniques of narrative perspective which enable novelists to construct a sharp division between inner and outer world.

The development of the technique of realism also led to the installation of a language of experience in the nascent genre. Indeed, according to Davis, realism produces the illusion of reality by decreasing "the cognitive distance between language and reality" (1983, 183). As with the inscription of a Cartesian structure which puts "subject and object of representation into dichotomous positions" (Azim 1993, 20), the realist attempt to obscure the text's mode of signification is clearly a strategy designed to occlude the discursive separation of subject, word and world and thereby create the

impression that the subject's experience of the world is direct and unmediated.



54 MIKE MARAIS

It is in its installation of strategies such as these, which conceal the relation between discourse and knowledge, that the novel colludes with colonialism. And, in the context of the history of European imperialism, this act of occlusion becomes one of collusion. This point can be illustrated

by means of a symptomatic reading of Robinson Crusoe, a reading which shows how the text inadvertently undermines the illusion of a transcendental

subject which it seeks to propagate by means of realism. In undertaking such a reading, I shall show that the metamorphoses which setting and character

undergo in the course of Defoe's novel betray realism's attempt to suppress the transformative impact of discourse on objects and experience. I shall also discuss the corollary of these metamorphoses, namely that human

subject and physical space are discursively connected. In this regard, my argument will be that these transformations point to a contradiction in the realist representation of this relationship - if the subject were transcendental, his identity would be stable and the terrain which he encounters would not be altered by his interaction with it. As my discussion

proceeds, a further symptom of Robinson Crusoe's unconscious exposure of the interrelatedness of subject and space will become evident: that is, that an examination of its setting leads inevitably to an analysis of the

protagonist's sense of self. The self-subversive contradiction between the novel's inscription by way

of realism of a Cartesian division between the subject as res cogitans and

space as res extensa and its unconscious documentation of the transformations which Robinson Crusoe and the island undergo from

castaway to colonist and from alien environment to domesticated settlement

respectively, emerges upon a comparison of the following two passages (see Descartes 1968). The first of these passages recalls Crusoe's initial reaction to the island:

Before, as I walk'd about, either on my hunting, or for viewing the country, the anguish of my soul at my condition, would break out upon me on a sudden, and my very heart would die within me, to think of the woods, the mountains, the desarts I was in; and how I was a prisoner lock'd up with the eternal bars and bolts of the ocean, in an uninhabited wilderness, without redemption;

(my emphasis, 1975, 83-84)

while the second evokes his later response:

I descended a little on the side of that delicious vale, surveying it with a secret kind of pleasure ... to think that this was all my own, that I was king and lord of all this country indefeasibly, and had a




right of possession; and if I could convey it, I might have it in inheritance, as compleatly as any lord of a manor in England.

(my emphasis, 1975, 74)

The difference between these two passages is marked. The first does not so much represent as allude, in highly metaphorical language, to open, uncontained space. Significantly, the subject depicted here lacks control of this world, which threatens to abase and even obliterate him.4 By contrast, the space described in the second passage has been contained and is represented in a transparent language of experience. Moreover, it serves to affirm rather than diminish the perceiving subject's sense of self. Clearly, neither setting nor character is static in this novel: just as the island undergoes a transformation from wilderness to home, so too Crusoe is transformed from castaway to colonist.

In its representation of the subject's relation to space, the second of these

passages furnishes the reason for these metamorphoses by unconsciously capturing the process through which colonial terrain is mediated by European discourse. Although making use of the "monarch-of-

all-I-survey" trope which, in setting up a division between the perceiving subject and the world of objects, asserts the primacy of experience (see Pratt 1992, 60, 213), this excerpt betrays the fact that 'truth' is not acquired through the transparency of perception in the present, but through knowledge already assimilated elsewhere by the subject prior to visual confrontation with the object. In other words, Defoe's portrayal of the

subject's interaction with colonial space inadvertently shows that the former's knowledge of the latter is not determined by the physical terrain. Crusoe sees not a neutral 'space' void of all presuppositions, but a property - that is, a highly specific construction of space which, as Davis has argued, is related to the development in Europe during the seventeenth and

eighteenth centuries of a transcendental subject who evinced a strong desire to dominate space (1987, 52-65).5 So, despite the representational illusion that he is one with the presence of the world which he confronts in the

present through perception, it is clear that what Crusoe is described as seeing is determined by a pre-existing system of sense which transforms its Dasein or "being-there," to use Heidegger's term, into "being-something" (1962). This structure, which pre-exists and governs his visual confrontation with the island, derives from "the modern world system" (Wallerstein 1974), that is, the system that emerged from changes in the political, economic, religious and philosophical fabric of Europe in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and which was characterised by indirect domination, capitalism, protestantism, and rationalism.



56 MIKE MARAIS

The fact that the novel subliminally discloses Crusoe's construction of the island as property, thereby suggesting that the subject is separated from the world by discourse, thus undermines the impression of immediacy conveyed by the technique of realism. Since it is immersed in discursive structures, the novel implies, the subject's consciousness is, in

phenomenological terms, "intentional," that is, it is always directed at objects and therefore constitutes them (see Husserl 1931, 257). Accordingly, the transformation which the island undergoes in the course of the novel may be read as a symptom of the intentionality of consciousness which derives from the subject's inescapable condition of

being-in-the-world. In concealing the subject's situatedness in the world, the technique of

realism thus endeavours to disguise the fact that his interaction with colonial

space is mediated by discourse. By extension, it seeks to obscure the containment of the openness and alterity of such space by European discourse. Indeed, realism attempts to naturalise this process of domestication, as emerges in the novel's depiction of the way in which Crusoe takes possession of the island, creates a property and thereby transforms the initially wild territory into a home which he likens to

England. This operation, which takes place on a perceptual, discursive level, is so inconspicuous that Pat Rogers uses it as evidence to support his

argument that Crusoe is not an imperialist but an expression of "homo domesticus," and his story simply that "of a Caribbean nabob who makes a little England in remote surroundings" (1974, 390). However, as Diana

Loxley argues, the "acting out of the normal conditions of existence in a

radically alien atmosphere, the imposition of an orderly and absolute

Europeanness" (1990, 90) is crucial to the elaboration of discursive colonialist enterprises. To domesticate is to appropriate that which is other within a totalising system of knowledge. And, as I have contended, the construction of such appropriative structures of knowledge during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries mimics, at a conceptual level, the actual history of European imperialism.

This collusion is revealed by the subsequent course of events in this novelistic account of the capture of colonial space: the scene of discursive

imperialism in which Robinson Crusoe appropriates the island is followed in time by the colonial fantasy in which he plays the part of governor in an elaborate masquerade which he stages on the island in order to dupe the mutineers. In its turn this fantasy is realised when the island is settled by a

community of these mutineers and the party of Spaniards. Once known, therefore, the island becomes habitable and can be recreated in Europe's




image. Thus, by the end of the novel, Robinson Crusoe is able to refer to "my new collony in the island" (1975, 221). This clear-cut progression in the novel from the level of discursive imperialism to the material realities of imperialism suggests that the one leads to the other, that conceptual settlement is a first step in a more literal process of colonisation.

In terms of the politics of representation, though, Defoe's novel's

depiction of the overt colonisation of the island is of less consequence than its concealment of its conceptual settlement. Indeed, it is principally through its negation of the discursive separation of subject, word and world in its portrayal of Crusoe's relation to the island that this novel colludes with

imperialism. For instance, this negation obscures the fact that, far from

representing the "thing itself of phenomenology in its depiction of colonial

space, the novel imitates descriptions of a space which has already, in the moment of being perceived, and thus prior to being described, been

conceptually settled and thus displaced. Instead of enabling the depiction of the 'real,' then, the technique of realism helps to displace it by overcoding it with the subjective definitions of western culture. In the process, to use Davis' s notion of the "known unknown" (1987, 86), this representational strategy renders unknown that which it purports to make known. It therefore follows that the island in Robinson Crusoe is a displacement and denial of the alterity of colonial space. After all, as the contrasting descriptions in the two passages quoted above indicate, the island is a

representation not of open but of contained space. Being the product of a

representational strategy which is premised on the elision of alterity, it may be construed as a negotiation of the epistemological problem constituted by colonial territory for Europe.

Thus far, my discussion of the representation of the relation between

subject and space in Robinson Crusoe has focused principally on the way in which the realist illusion of a transcendental subject occludes the discursive

capture of colonial space. It needs to be emphasised, though, that this illusion not only hides the construction of space but also the construction of self. To be more precise, it hides the fact that it is through constituting a world of objects that the subject asserts his subjectivity. However, this

interdependence of subject and space is inadvertently revealed in the novel

by the fact that Crusoe's identity expands in direct proportion to the transformation of the island by European discourse. As I have indicated, the first of the two passages quoted above dealing with Crusoe's relationship with the island shows him to be a castaway at the mercy of natural forces. It also hints at the actual source of his terror in the Cartesian division which it constructs between an inner and an outer world. The "tremulous" self



58 MIKE MARAIS

which occupies the inner world is obviously other than (and thus detached and alienated from) that which he seeks to apprehend in the outer world (see Barker 1984, 10). Indeed, it is the alterity of this world, its extreme difference, which leads to the selfs terrible isolation. Clearly, seeing cannot here be equated with knowing. Moreover, the opacity of this passage's language - apparent, for example, in the highly metaphorical descriptions of the island - indicates that word cannot be aligned with thing in this alterior field of experience. What Crusoe sees taxes his linguistic control over the "wilderness." And since he is unable to relate word to thing, he is unable to position himself in opposition to an object and thereby construct a coherent sense of self. At this point in the novel, this character's castaway status therefore signifies a collapse of the mind/object/word formula which

grounds the Enlightenment notion of the humanist subject. By contrast, in the second passage Crusoe occupies a controlling role in

his relationship to space, and is in fact a colonist and thus an actant, a figure of achievement. The decentred subject of the first passage has adopted a

position of dominance from which to control items within the field of

experience, a position from which word can be matched with thing. It is for this reason that the language used at this point in the novel is a transparent language of experience which testifies to the percipient's visual control over the world of objects: what is seen has always been there. The illusion is therefore created that the text's verbal design merely copies the island's autochthonous organisation.

The contrast between these two passages implies that the central section of the novel traces Crusoe's composition of self. Eventually, as the second

passage indicates, Crusoe arrives at the assurance of a subjectivity that can fix knowledge. Peter Hulme, for example, suggests that "the island episode should be read as ... a parable of the anxiety surrounding the kind of

'composition of the self performed so emblematically by Descartes" (1986, 196). By implication, then, as with Descartes in his Discourse on Method (1968), Crusoe negotiates selfhood relationally. The differences between the passages point to the importance of language in facilitating this relational procedure - in Defoe's portrayal of the subject's relation to space, it is language that enables the former to relate word to thing and which thus constitutes the world of objects in relation to which the subject assumes an oppositional position. Furthermore, the passages show that, in

constituting this world of objects, language encodes the island according to the values and assumptions of the subject's culture. Indeed, it is through language that the "tremulous" self reaches out and appropriates the outer world. The transformation which the terrain undergoes in the process - its




fearful alterity being elided and displaced by the construction of a comfortable, self-affirming familiarity - serves as an index to the appropriative violence inherent in this relational procedure of self-composition.

I indicated earlier in this article that my discussion of the island modulates into an examination of Crusoe's identity and that this is a function of the close connection which exists between subject and space. It is by obscuring this connection in its installation of a 'worldless' subject that realism occludes the discursive organisation of space, the fact that far from being simply a representation of a geographical entity, the island is a representation of a representation of a discursive construct, one which, having been mapped out according to European culture, serves the function of affirming the European subject's culturally-conferred sense of self. However, as I have argued, the contrast between the two passages in Defoe's

rendering of the colonial encounter undermines the realist illusion of the

subject's transcendental status by positing a strong correlation between the

growth of the subject's identity and the assimilation of colonial space by western discursive orders. Indeed, one may go so far as to say that Robinson Crusoe's successful composition of self signifies the victory of European order and perceptions on the island. As the island becomes known, the anxieties and doubts which initially assail Crusoe are dispelled until, finally, what he sees (that is, not things-in-themselves, but things which have been invested with a set of cultural values) narcissistically affirms rather than

challenges his sense of self. Unconsciously, therefore, this novel indicates that upon being settled linguistically and conceptually, colonial space comes to serve a specular function. In other words, as Christopher Miller cogently states, "[t]he colonial gesture of reaching out to the most unknown part of the world and bringing it back as language . . . ultimately brings Europe face to face with nothing but itself (1985, 5). In constructing colonial space, then, Europe constructs itself.

IV

One of the ways in which colonial space is brought back to Europe in

language is, of course, through its representation in fiction. In this regard, the role of the reader is important. Defoe's novel's construction of this role is evident from the first in its full title, namely The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe of York, Mariner. Apart from

promising an alterity which it - as a realist narrative strategy - actually helps to elide, this title installs the reader as the point of the text's

intelligibility. It inscribes him/her in a transcendental subject position from which the novel may be observed and its "strangeness" and "surprises"



60 MIKE MARAIS

comprehended. In so doing, this novel conforms to Rosalind Coward and John Ellis's description of the manner in which realist narratives in general position the reader:

The whole process [of narration] is directed towards the place of a reader: in order that it should be intelligible, the reader has to adopt a certain position with regard to the text. This position is that of homogeneity, of truth. ... the subject is then in a position of observation, understanding, synthesising.

(1977,50)

In Robinson Crusoe, though, the reader's apparently transcendental position is undermined by the fact that, as I have indicated, the alterity of colonial space has already been denied by the novel's representational manoeuvres. Moreover, at the same time that it centres the reading subject as the place of its intelligibility, the novel's title unconsciously décentres this subject since the words "strange" and "surprising" imply a particular cultural perspective from which s/he views the text - one that s/he shares with the author and narrator and from which s/he is able to contain otherness. The novel's presentation as a travel report is yet another example of the way in which the strategy of realism betrays the 'worldliness' of the reader, that is his/her implication in culture, even as it attempts to promote the illusion of transcendence. Indeed, this presentational device contradicts the promise of alterity contained in the novel's title by suggesting that the text has been written for the "domestic audience of empire" (see Pratt 1992, 63) from the perspective of an English traveller who has returned and been

safely reintegrated into English society. Accordingly, the work's realism of

presentation serves to reassure the reader that the epistemological problem supposedly constituted by the island for Europe has been successfully resolved. Not a 'worldless' reading subject, then, but 'home,' that is, the cultural context to which Robinson Crusoe returns and within which the putative report is read, forms the site of ultimate meaning into which the island as illusory site of otherness is finally assimilated.

One of the implications here, namely that Crusoe is familiar with both 'home' and alien land, points to another ideologically significant aspect of the novel's 'realistic' presentation as a travel report, namely its division into the following three stages: the setting forth of the hero, the exploits of the hero as "displaced percipient" (Said 1985, 22) in an unknown land and, finally, the return of the conquering hero. This tripartite structure provides the formal underpinning for Defoe's use of the return-of-the-hero-as-master-of-two-worlds topos, a common element in the journey structure of both romance and travel writing (see Adams 1983,



THE EARLY ENGLISH NOVEL 6 1

150). According to Adams, this topos involves the traveller-hero's return home as "the conqueror of great forces . . . master of the world he started from as well as all those worlds he encountered during his ... years of wandering" (1983, 160). In Robinson Crusoe, the effect of this topos is to dissolve the distinction between the two realms in which its European traveller-hero participates, that is, English society and apparently alterior space. By showing that the subject is equally 'at home' in both, it domesticates the latter (see Loxley 1990, 96). The implication here, then, is that the novel serves ultimately to conflate terra incognita to the known terrain of England. Its realism of presentation assists in the capture of space.

Eventually, therefore, the presentation of the novel in line with the standard apparatuses of travel writing is at odds with the prospect of alterity suggested by its title. Since it purports to be told from the point of view of the returned traveller, its end - fraught as it is with suggestions of

reintegration into English society - is implicit in its beginning. Consequently, any possibility of "surprise" and "strangeness" which the reader may encounter is always ultimately récupérable. In fact, as I have indicated, the novel's presentational strategies constantly reassure the reader that s/he will not be delivered to a world of utter "strangeness" since, rather than being "surprised" by a radical discontinuity between the familiarity of home and the alterity of the alien, strategies such as the return-of-the-hero-as-master-of-two-worlds topos ensure that the reader will simply be confronted with a replica of the familiar. Instead of

presenting the reader with an epistemological problem that challenges his/her culturally-conferred identity, then, the novel simply confirms that

identity. In Robinson Crusoe, a parallel thus exists between the character's

relationship with the domesticated island and the European reader's relationship with the text: the latter is encoded according to the same structure of knowledge as the former and, indeed, mimics it. This parallel extends to the object of observation: like the island, the literary object serves a specular function, reflecting back at the perceiving subject his/her culture's sense-making mechanisms.

V

In discussing Robinson Crusoe, I have attempted to show the degree to which the form of the novel was affected by the discursive ruptures, linguistic changes and epistemological shifts of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. I have argued that, in response to these changes, the novel as genre developed realism as its distinguishing feature, a representational strategy



62 MIKE MARAIS

which colludes with a mode of knowledge implicated in imperialism. My contention has been that realism produces the illusion of 'reality' and that, in the context of representations of the colonial encounter, this involves the

appropriation by European discourse of colonial objects. In this regard, my argument on the homogenising tendencies of western realism intersects with Homi Bhabha's contention, in a somewhat different context, that the

ideological and historical determinants of "mimeticism" prevent it from

representing the colonial subject (1984, 95), and by extension that, in

attempting to represent the colonial subject and thus make it known, this aesthetic actually renders it unknown.

In conclusion, it is necessary to point out that the central argument in this

paper, namely that the novel is an infected site in which a nexus can be located between the violences of imperialism and the modalities of

Enlightenment thought, partly explains the suspicion of realism evident in the efforts of various postmodernist and post-colonial novelists to

renegotiate the modes of ratiocinative, subject-centred consciousness which have structured the politics of the west. In the case of postmodernist writers, this process of renegotiation has involved a sustained challenge to the coherent, autonomous subject of humanism, a challenge which forms part of its "critique of Enlightenment epistemology as rooted in the instrumental domination of inert object (body, world, nature, woman), by a detached and transcendent subject (mind, self science, man)" (Waugh 1992, 120). With

post-colonial writers, this critique of Enlightenment epistemology extends to the representation of the colonial subject and evinces an awareness that realism's 'reality' is produced, not given, and that its meanings are not

revelatory, but historical, cultural and, ultimately, transformative (see Bhabha 1984, 96). A writer such as J.M. Coetzee, for instance, shatters realism's illusion of a direct, unmediated representation of reality by using self-reflexive devices to foreground the constitutive role of colonial discourse in the European selfs encounter with alterity. In the presentation of the colonial encounter in "The Narrative of Jacobus Coetzee" (1974, 68-70), for example, the scenarios which Jacobus Coetzee constructs as he rides out to meet the Khoi are easily recognisable as standard variations on the formulaic plot which characterises the colonial adventure story engendered by Robinson Crusoe. Consequently, they expose the fact that Jacobus Coetzee positions himself in relation to the Khoi according to those

expectations concerning the 'savage nature' of the 'native' that are

generated by colonial discourse. Through metafiction, then, Coetzee renders visible the relation between colonial discourse and knowledge in Jacobus Coetzee' s encounter with the Khoi. The autotelic dimension of this




description thus marks a complete departure from the realism of the

archetypal colonial encounter depicted in Robinson Crusoe. Where realism, in Defoe's novel, attempts to transcend the discursive separation between

subject, word and world in the colonial encounter, the self-reflexive devices in Coetzee's text foreground this separation. Coetzee's novella is therefore informed by an epistemology which acknowledges and even attempts to

redeem, rather than elide, the radical alterity of the colonial subject. Instead of presuming to make known the unknown, it points to its destabilising, relativising existence - to the existence, that is, of that which the

novel-as-genre's representational strategies preclude it from representing. In so doing, this text explores the im/possibility of decolonising the novel.

NOTES

1. Compare Tzvetan Todorov's contentions regarding the "hermeneutic behavior" of Christopher Columbus when encountering the indigene in the 'New World':

Columbus believes not only in Christian dogma, but also (and he is not alone at the time) in Cyclopes and mermaids, in Amazons and men with tails, and his belief, as strong as Saint Peter's, therefore

permits him to find them. ... He is not concerned to understand more fully the words of those who speak to him, for he knows in advance that he will encounter Cyclopes, men with tails, and Amazons. He sees clearly that the 'mermaids' are not, as he has been told, beautiful women; but rather than conclude that mermaids do not exist, he corrects one prejudice by another: 'the mermaids are not so beautiful as is claimed.' (1984, 15-16)

On the grounds of the commerce which is here evident between existent discourse, expectation and experience, Todorov is able to conclude that with Columbus "the decisive argument is an argument of authority, not of experience. He knows in advance what he will find; the concrete experience is there to illustrate a truth already possessed" (1984, 17).

2. In a discussion of Martin Heidegger's suggestion that an ambivalent attitude is required to technology, Karsten Harries makes the point that a "no" to technology is "rendered precarious by the way [modernity] tend[s] to measure what is to count as real by objectifying reason. And once science and technology have become the arbiters of reality, the 'no' can only lead out of reality, to what is merely subjective, unreal and aesthetic" (qtd in Olivier 1990, 121). My argument thus far implies that



64 MIKE MARAIS

this objectification of reason with its profound impact on western culture's construction of 'reality' resulted from the anthropocentrism of modernity, the installation of the human subject as the relational centre of all that is.

3. Compare Firdous Azim's contention that "Eighteenth-century linguistic speculation is characterised by a desire to make a perfect correspondence between language and subjectivity" (1993, 18).

4. Compare Wayne Franklin's discussion of American discovery narrative (1979, 42-57). See also Wendy Martin (1994, viii) who argues that "captivity and travel narratives make it quite clear that travel, whether voluntary or forced, presents a radical challenge to the notion of a fixed stable self." Although Defoe's narrative is a novel, its representation of the subject's encounter with colonial space is remarkably similar to that found in travel literature. However, this similarity points to an obvious difference, namely that there is no representation of an actual island in Robinson Crusoe. The novel can only imitate descriptions of colonial space and of the subject's encounter with such terrain. Furthermore, as I have indicated, the spaces described in travel accounts are themselves discursively mediated at the moment of being beheld. In effect, then, the description of the island in Robinson Crusoe is a representation of a representation of a discursively mediated entity. The referent of this representation thus disappears in an infinite regression of discursive mediation. The convoluted nature of the representational process involved here

poses many stylistic difficulties. For example, it would be awkward to gloss the above whenever I refer to Defoe's representation of the colonial encounter in the discussion which follows. Accordingly, I shall assume that such references are understood to include all the levels in this representational process.

5. See, for example, René Descartes' concern in the Discourse on Method to establish a "practical philosophy" by which knowledge could be so deployed as to "make ourselves, as it were, masters and possessors of nature" (1968, 78).

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