A cautionary story is Daniel Defoe's first novel, Robinson Crusoe (1719-1720).

Yet it is much more

than that. Whereas Mary Shelley's Frankenstein can be traced back to the Faust figure, Robinson Crusoe
is a modern myth entirely contributed by the young bourgeois civilization of which England was the
chief representative in eighteenth-century Europe.

The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robisnon Crusoe is not a quest of honour, happiness
or redemption but a factual travel narrative, a story of the struggle for survival and physical comfort.
Robinson is not the daring hero of romance but the prudential protagonist of a non-heroic age. He is
not devoid, however, of his peculiar, new sort of grandeur, which makes him a hero of eighteenth-
century Western Europe: he is the Empire-builder, who carries the benefits of civilization to savage
lands, where he imposes his rule. He is the economic man, who recapitulates on his island the basic
processes of production and consumption. We also agree with Ian Watt [9], that Robinson is not relying
on Providence but rather on a secularized version of Puritanism – the capitalist individualistic doctrine of
self-help, “unwearied diligence and application”. We shall go one step further, and say that Defoe
conscientiously develops a story of disenchantment with Providence, this being the first assertion of the
modern, empirically-minded homo faber. Robinson Crusoe is a modern myth also because it is not
centred in the origin. The hero himself was colonized before becoming himself a colonist. He repeats a
story, he does not create an archetype. His father had come to England from Bremen, had adopted his
wife's English name, and even his son's name – Kreutznaer – had been changed to “Crusoe” by the usual
corruption of words in English.

The age is full of Horatian (sixth Satire from the Second Book) predicaments on the good life.
According to Pomfret or Sir Roger Coverlay, it consists in a leisurely gentlemanly life, preferably in the
country, spent in the reading of books and enjoyment of good company. Robinson's father's point of
view is middle-class complacency, or rather willing self-delusion, betraying both the satisfaction of being
above those in need, and the resentful dismissal of the abused aristocracy's enjoyment of luxury and
pride of caste: He bid me observe it (...) that calamities of life were shared among the upper and lower
part of mankind; but that the middle station had the fewest disasters, and was not expos'd to so many
vicissitudes as the higher or lower part of mankind; nay they were not subjected to so many distempers
and uneasiness, either of body or mind as those were who, by vicious living, luxury and extravagances on
one hand or by hard labour, want of necessaries, and mean or insufficient diet on the other, bring
distempers upon themselves (...) that the middle station of life was calculated for all kinds of vertues and
all kinds of enjoyments; that peace and plenty were the hand-maids of a middle fortune; that
temperance, moderation, quietness, health, society, all agreeable diversions, and all desirable pleasures,
were the blessings attending the middle station of life. In Crusoe there burns the spirit of the new rising
bourgeoisie, which was challenging and reaching up to the supreme power in the state, or in the world.
As noticed by Hogarth, the alliance between the aristocracy and the commercial magnates was the
keystone of the Augustan social and political system. Crusoe will rise above the “middle station” of his
plantation and trade in “Brasils”, he dreams of becoming very rich, even by engaging in the slave trade,
for which special licence was needed in the 166os from Spain and Portugal – the most powerful
colonizers. He teaches savages the language of master and slave, Friday and Master, enacting the
paradigm of capitalist exploitation and imperialist colonialization with the imposition of the European's
values, religion, language. It would have made a stoick smile to have seen me and my little family sit
down to dinner; there was my majesty the prince and lord of the whole island; I had the lives of all my
subjects at my absolute command; I could hang, draw, give liberty, and take it away, and no rebels
among all my subjects. Then to see how like a king I din'd too, all alone, attended by my servants. Poll, as
if he had been my favourite, was the only person permitted to talk to me. My dog, who was now grown
very old and crazy, and had found no species to multiply his kind upon, sat always at my right hand, and
two cats, one on one side of the table, and one on the other, expecting now and then a bit from my hand,
as a mark of special favour. Crusoe does not love cats, for he has shot some of them, nor parrots, as his
first lesson to Friday is not on naming “the bigger and the lesser light”, like Prospero's to Caliban, but on
shooting a parrot. Yet he enjoys a show of what looks like absolutist feudal power. Although completely
merged into the middle-class economy of the production and commercialization of goods, of getting rich
and working his way up into the world, Robinson cannot help admiring and envying the aristocratic
ceremonial, or being fascinated with status. The language of affections as well as the moral sense are
completely missing (see Robinson selling Xury, the moorish boy who had helped his escape from the
pirates' captivity in Guiana), having been replaced by practical morality (do not do unto cannibals what
you would not like them to do unto you), and by the discourse of utility and economic efficiency. The
enumeration of the goods he has rescued from the wrecked ship, the detailed description of the
material conditions of his existence – building and working, and extending into “the country” residence
etc. – help to construct the faber figure which has replaced that of Faustus in a desacralized world.

In matters of devotion, there is an evolution in Robinson from blind belief in Providence towards
an empiricism which has extinguished even the last traces of practical or business-like religion. There are
several scenes of obviously programmatic demystification: Robinson thanking God for the unexpected
harvest of barley, and his disappointment at discovering the natural cause of the supposed miracle: the
grains of corn he had carelessly scattered on a piece of fertile ground on emptying out a purse he had
found on the ship. He hears some secret voice calling out to him in his dream, and, on waking up in
terror, he discovers it to be coming from his parrot, whom he had taught a few words. He has a dream
prophesying his meeting Friday, but not all details coincide with the actual events, nor does he rely on
his dream in order to secure himself company. On being asked by Crusoe who he is, the Spaniard he
saves from the cannibals' feast, coming from Old Europe, answers in Bunyan's language, which in the
state of nature sounds rather obsolete and inefficient: “Christianus”. He is very weak and faint, that he
could scarce stand or speak. Robinson urges him, like Shakespeare's Stephano, to “kiss the book”, that is
to drink some rum from his bottle, and to accept some weapons. The effect is miraculous: as if they had
put new vigour into him, he flew upon his murderers like a fury, and had cut two of them in pieces in an
instant. By releasing the captain of the mutinous crew, Robinson and Friday are taken for gods, like
Stephano and Trinculo – a fiction the “master” discourages with the commonsensical argument that the
angels would have been better clothed, while suggesting that, under the circumstances, he makes the
more efficient god: “All help is from heaven, sir”, said I. “But can you put a stranger in the way how to
help you, for you seem to me to be in some great distress”.

The humanity Defoe set out to represent required narrative realism in which his life as a journalist
had long trained him. The I-narrator (narrative in the first person), also dramatized as the hero of the
action (intradiegetic narrator), is a guarantor of truthfulness, reinforced by the author's prefatory
statement that he merely chanced upon the manuscript, which seems to be a just history of fact, with
no fiction in it. The powerful impression of verisimility is indeed ensured by Defoe's perusal of the actual
accounts of Alexander Selkirk and other castaways. The lucid prose, economic, straight to the point,
resembles that of “debtor and creditor”, as the narrator himself confesses about his first “balance
sheet” of good and evil in his wreck. The narrative structure is programmatically chosen to match, in
Augustan fashion, the factual content of the plot. All narrators and observers, whether first or third
person, can relay their tales to us primarily as scene (...), primarily as summary or what Lubbock called
“picture” (Addison's almost completely non-scenic tales in The Spectator), or, most commonly, as a
combination of the two[10]. Robinson illustrates both, the diary being a sort of quantifier (measuring
out in dates, figures, brief summaries) of the actual experience. Inner and outer reality are
interconnected, the representation of the world follows the realist convention of (natural) cause-and-
effect in constructing the plot, and displays a belief in the knowable and “writerly” quality of experience.
The scenic (quote A) yields to the summary (quote B), in Addison's manner, because a selection is
necessary of the significant elements from among the chaotic mass of facts, as well as their
qualification, that is the expression of the narrator's attitude to the situation. The journal is an
objectified and “methodized” version of the real self, Robinson referring to himself as if to an otherness.
Like in Lacan's mirror-stage [11], the hero contemplates his own image in his text, constructed for
intersubjective others. The self-reflexive narrator lays bare his stylistic choices in writing The Journal.
The reader is thus inculpated with the production of the text, noticing, for instance, how the uncurtailed
description, the picturesque and the sentimental, tedious details, the real life redundancies have been
ruled out.

(Quote A) I ran about the shore, wringing my hands, and beating my head and face, exclaiming at
my misery and crying out, I was undone, undone, till tyr'd and faint I was forc'd to lie down on the
ground to repose, but durst not sleep for fear of being devourd.

(Quote B) The Journal. September 30, 1659. I, poor miserable Robinson Crusoe, being shipwreck'd
during a dreadful storm, in the offing, came on shore of this dismal unfortunate island, which I call'd the
Island of Despair, all the rest of the ship's company being drown'd and myself almost dead.

The impression of impersonality in a first-person narrative becomes possible through the variation
of perspectives in a consciousness which doubles back upon itself, making an effort to present the
action from different perspectives (an optimistic pitied against a pessimistic view).

Encouraged by the huge public success of the novel, which shows how much affined it was to the
contemporary mode of vision and sensibility, Defoe wrote two continuations: The Further Adventures,
and The Serious Reflections of Robinson Crusoe. The habit of reflection has complexified the empirical
self. A critique of vulgar empiricism coming from Descartes, Leibnitz or even Locke, who nevertheless
allows of autonomous workings of the intellect, may be spotted in Robinson's intimation of the mind
escaping the slavery of sense impressions. As his brother's son, whom he has provided for, as if he had
been his own child, expresses his own secret desire of revisiting the island on which he had spent some
thirty years of his life, Robinson launches on the following speculation, redeeming the former purely
factual account. Nothing can be a greater demonstration of a future state, and of the existence of the
invisible world, than the concurrence of second causes with the ideas of things, which we form in our
minds, perfectly reserv'd, and not communicated to any in the world. (introductory chapter to Further
Adventures...). In The Serious Reflections, Defoe makes a hint that the story is an allegory of his own life.
In the opening chapter, Of Solitude, he converts Crusoe's experience on the island into a metaphor of
man's loneliness as an inescapable predicament: ... it seems to me that life in general is, or ought to be,
but one universal act of solitude. Everything revolves in our minds by innumerable circular motions, all
centering in ourselves... we love, we hate, we covet, we enjoy, all in privacy and solitude. The quote is
symptomatic of the unexpected consequence of Locke's empirical theory of sensations and ideas: the
scepticism of the intellect locked up in its private dream of the world, informing the Romantic cult of the
idiosyncretic individual self. Robinson's conclusion is also symptomatic of the feeling of alienation which
the individualistic capitalist enterprise brought along with it.

His next works of fiction bear titles relating us again to individuals, but the characters are now
closer to the picaro pattern: criminals, whores, pirates. In The Fortunate Mistress (1724), also known as
Roxana, the heroine's life of prostitution brings, according to the sombre Puritanic view, a terrible
punishment upon her head. Unlike it, Moll Flanders (1722), also a first-person narrative, shows the
happy reunion of a reformed prostitute to her Lancashire husband, after years of perdition. The
economic motivation – she was forced to leave her home in order to make a living – is carried into an
amoral picture of a society in which outdated notions like chastity or virtue have been ascribed a certain
monetary value. Yielding under the sway of the generalized social market-place, Moll sells her own body
because she has nothing else to sell.

The shrewd manipulation of the point of view takes us to the other extremity of the 18th-
century narrative range: Gulliver's Travels, by Jonathan Swift, which draws on the fantastic of medieval
romance. It is a novel of pattern, not a novel of life [12], since it is not the illusion of the texture of life,
in its reality and normal chronology, that collects at the end of this splendid fictional satire, but a certain
symbolical design: the characters stand for different aspects of the human race. We may say, therefore,
that this is a thesis novel, or a novel with a key. Gulliver's Travels is also a satirical novel, a naive
narrator travelling among strange peoples – not believable characters and situations – on whom he
comments from an incompatible perspective. A double structure of meaning is thus being encoded:
surface and underlying, literal and of rhetorical deviation (irony). It is also a pioneer work of science
fiction (travel in space and other dimensions), or of utopian fiction, with a pastoral element in the
satirical comment on a society by comparison with another.

No wonder the idea of a book of travels should have suggested itself at a time when daring
colonialist ventures and exploratory voyages had made them very popular, but Gulliver's Travels is in a
higher degree illustrative of the innovating spirit which was galvanizing the ambitious mid-century
English artists. Hogarth was not alone in attempting a formal break-through; Samuel Richardson too
boasted having hit upon a new species of writing – the novel in letters, Pamela –, Henry Fielding himself
took pride in his comic epic in prose, or prose burlesque, a kind of writing which I do not remember to
have seen hitherto attempted in our language (Joseph Andrews). Laurence Sterne, who in his audacious
Tristram Shandy (Book V, Ch. 1) ridicules the technique of emptying old books into new, or walking the
trodden path, exercised himself in a completely new manner of writing. In fact, Henry Fielding concludes
in the first chapter of his Tom Jones, it is novelty of form rather than of subject that bespeaks a writer's
“excellence”. Or, in the terms of his delicious gastronomic metaphor, the reader's mental entertainment
will benefit less from the sort of subject the author is cooking than from its being well dressed-up. If the
piquancy of English eighteenth-century novels has earned them a worldwide readership down to our
days, their formal relevance has made them an apt illustrative material for theoreticians of fiction, as
different as M. Bakhtin, René Wellek and Austin Warren, Wayne C. Booth.

In Jonathan Swift the experimenting demon works such wonders that the Gulliver narrative looks
like a prose transposition of Pope's Essay on Man: the same relativistic worldoutlook motivated by the
speculation on the existence not only of different modes of being but also of different modes of
perception (in Spinoza, they are the same totality, Hegel says, regarded from either point of view: as
range or as thought). The doctrinary stringency of Pope's didactic essay is missing altogether, the author
delighting in the upside-down world of Menippean satire (Gulliver finds himself admiring horses, for
instance, and feeling inferior). The broad comedy, with grotesque overtones, of the prejudices and
partialities of all creatures' ego-centrism („centering on ourselves”, as Defoe says) has never ceased to
be of topical interest, particularly today when attempts are being made at a reconstruction of world
literature canons, freed from the biases of Europocentrism. The function of the picaro, fool and buffo,
according to Bakhtin [13], is that of disengaging the modern worldview from the feudal episteme. The
individual is pleading for freedom from all conventional forms of existence, taking the liberty to
challenge the establishment, to remove masks, and tell the truth obliquely by miming the stranger's lack
of comprehension. Don Quixote, the model of the age, is a characteristic blend of the “strange
miraculous world” of the courtly romance “chronotope” and the highway of a familiar world,
characteristic of the picaresque novel. The passion for travel takes Lemuel Gulliver, first a surgeon, and
then a captain of several ships, to remote nations of the world, where scales and values keep shifting:
giants or dwarfs, reasoning horses or human beings without the gift of reason. And yet, from another
point of view, he never leaves home. Wherever he goes he takes with him the day's political disputes,
the philosophical arguments, the realignment of values, the inquiry into the comparative merits of
empiricism and transcendentalism, reason and the senses, pragmatism and idealism. The love of
paradox Swift shares with Pope sets reality in an ever new and surprising perspective, overthrowing
habits of thought and long-cherished values, forcing a fresh response from the bewildered
consciousness. The setting is no longer realistic in novels of pattern, but conventional, symbolic.
Diminutive dimensions symbolize petty pursuits and narrow-mindedness. The inhabitants of Lilliput
have been waging endless civil wars caused by a ridiculous argument over the advisability of breaking
the bigger or the smaller end of their eggs, of wearing low heels or high heels etc. The feeling of a fatal
confinement of understanding within the physical horizon of one's existence contributes an
underground tragical vein to the comical plot. A limited creature will always measure everything by a
yardstick which is in fact his own measure. The Lilliputians trace everything down to their own
dimensions. They have placed themselves at the centre of the universe, and their understanding of
anything in it is reductive, “Lilliputianocentric”. Here is the report on their “pick-pocketing” the
“Mountain Man” (Gulliver has also proved remarkably clever, yet it is only physical prodigiousness that
impresses them): we observed a girdle about his waste made of the hide of some prodigious animal;
from which, on the left side, hung a sword of the length of five men; and on the right, a bag or pouch
divided into two cells; each cell capable of holding three of your Majesty's subjects. In one of these cells
were several globes of balls of a most ponderous metal, about the bigness of our heads, and required a
strong hand to lift them; the other cell contained a heap of certain black grains, but of no great bulk or
weight, for we could hold about fifty of them in the palms of our hands. If we agree with the classical
narrative of the Enlightenment, as a progress from the optimistic belief in the light of reason and the
justness of a rational universe imprinting its harmonious design on society as well, towards a less-
confident and even satirical view, leading to a bleak recognition of the dark side of life and,
consequently, offering up love-kindness, generosity of feeling, sentimentality and the like as solutions,
then Swift is located in the middle stream. Universalizing perspectives and ideas yield to a historicist
awareness of the cognitive structures mediating, for each people, its knowledge of the world. Gulliver's
watch looks totally unfamiliar to the Lilliputians, and, ironically, they take Gulliver for the uncouth
primitive man, praying to idols... Advanced machinery is interpreted as a drawback, a recourse to magic.
Dissatisfaction with the establishment transpires in Gulliver's actual contact with such practices on the
island of sorcerers and magicians. The personages of the past they conjure up – Brutus, Socrates, Cato,
Thomas More – share the same attempt of resisting the power structures. From acquiescence and
promotion of peace and stability, the age is drifting towards contention. The Rabelaisian mix of
imaginary voyage and political satire qualifies Swift's novel for the prestigious tradition of conte
philosophique or philosophical fable, testing philosophical hypotheses and comparative values. Is man a
rational animal? Is universal knowledge possible? Does touring around the world enlighten one's mind?
The Augustan ideal is seriously threatened. Actual experience is derealized as some kind of troping, for
instance, anthropomorphic gigantism. The land of the giants, Brobdingnag, is that of broad-mindedness
as well. From a higher, enlightened perspective, the Torry/Whig confrontation appears as ridiculous as
that between Lilliput and Blefuscu. In the light of common sense and reason, intestine strife is absurd.
Why have secrets of state when there is no threat from a foreign enemy? Why have a government
which should turn half the people against the other half? The comments of the uncomprehending
Gulliver complaining about the Brobdingnag King's lack of comprehension are an oblique attack upon
Gulliver's world, which he naively defends while decrying the intolerable confinement of the art of
government within the “narrow” bounds of common sense and reason, justice and toleration, or of
research to applied science, which can improve living conditions, with no regard for “ideas, entities,
abstractions and transcendental categories” – the scholastic “chronotope”.

Swift's world is that which had been revealed by the magnifying glass and by the
telescope. They ought to have had the same effect as the invention of the camera, utilizing
long-range and close-up lens. By observing the object at a distance or taking a close look at
it one reaches different conclusions. The self and the world are destabilized, threatening to
vanish into a game of perspectives or a clash of points of view. The modern relativist spirit
has been born, an anxiety can be sensed in the inquiry about the world – not as to being the
best, but as to being at all. Is there anything stable at the core, as its essence? Is it merely a
shifting representation, disclosing more about the observer than about the observed? Are the
supreme Augustan values – reason and judgement – any good? Another symbolical space: a
flying island symbolizing a humanity taken up with its own fantasies, losing all grounding in
reality and common sense. In the country of the most passionate cult of science and the arts,
one cannot find a single straight wall or a single right angle. The land yields little, people are
starving. Science is divorced from the practical ends of a material civilization. The members
of the academy of Lagado (a satirical portrait of the Royal Academy) are employing their
imagination in gratuitous, absurd inventions. Finally there are the reasoning horses. Swift is
an Augustan, yet, like Pope, he responds in a fuller sense to experience, in its entire
complexity: sense and judgement, reason and feeling, abstract concept and sensuous grasp.
The cult of reason as an end in itself may pervert it into something unnatural, inhuman,
stifling affections and crippling the complete human personality. These rational creatures do
not experience the all too human fear of death as the very end of consciousness; they do not
experience love, only coupling for the pragmatic purpose of multiplying the race; their poetry
is didactic, offering instruction but no emotional enjoyment. No wonder the most rational
 creature reaches a point where humanity ceases, going back to beastly mechanical
adaptation or fitness of means to ends. Journeying through the world of the mind, Gulliver
discovers its triumph in the death of the heart. There is a seed here out of which the Orwell
world would germinate. Gulliver's explorative journey into human possibilities has come full
circle, and the best of all possible worlds has not been found. Man is locked in contradictions,
life is such an insoluble lump!

The epistemological impasse is communicated through structural and stylistic devices: irony,
paradoxes, tricks of logic, outrageous conclusions to false premises. Gulliver is un unreliable narrator,
an unstable self, who changes from one journey to another, who is shaped by the discontinuities of
experience, rather than remaining in (rational) control of reality. Not even in control of his own
discourse. He understands less than the reader is given to understand. He aims at one thing, and gets
the opposite. He means to prove the superiority of the human race, but the enumeration of the means
of destruction perfected by man only yields an apocalyptic show of grim humour: I assured him that I
had seen them blow up a hundred enemies at once in a siege, and as many in a ship, and beheld the
dead bodies come down in pieces from the clouds, to the great diversion of the spectators. The implied
author remains at a distance from the dramatized narrator (intradiagetic, who is also a character in the
story), manipulating him as he would a puppet in the public square shows of the time, while building,
through the subverting play of rhetoric, a bridge over to the reader's understanding of the truth of the
situation No reader will fail to retrieve the true rhetorical meaning of Gulliver's literal upholding of the
wrong point of view.