the man whose jewels she possesses. He is, of course, correct, but a struggle ensues over who is to have legal possession, and Roxana, who deserves the jewels, treats the Jew to considerable abuse. A Journal of the Plague Year is centrally about the forensic problem of inferring the causes of the plague, of detecting its signs and its course, and of creating an adequate report of the entire event: H. F. uses the empirical vocabulary of experiment, evidence, and hypothesis throughout. At best, he states, we can develop a method of judging the relative validity of signs and evidence: 'Seeing then that we could come at the -33- certainty of things by no method but that of inquiry of the neighbours or of the family, and on that we could not justly depend, it was not possible but that the uncertainty of this matter would remain as above.'
The second thematic implication of Defoe's peculiar irony is more directly political. His novels invite an analogy between the narrators' attempts to force patterns on the flux of experience, and the structure of imperialism, where one nation imposes its will, its language, and its institutions upon another. This is most clearly evidenced in Robinson Crusoe. The distinct vocabulary that emerges in the course of time to fit Robinson's circumstances and behavior is the dual language of family and sovereignty. Like Gray's Elegy, Robinson Crusoe is not about solitary experience, but about how solitary experience establishes the conditions for social and political life. (Typically for the period, Defoe was to write in Serious Reflections that 'Man is a creature so formed for society, that it may not only be said that it is not good for him to be alone, but 't is really impossible that he should be alone.') This view receives support from Novak's argument that Defoe was not a possessive individualist (as Watt assumes), but that he supported an older, mercantilist ideal of trade that was 'basically communal rather than individualistic.' It takes about a third of the book for Robinson to establish himself on the island after his shipwreck, but from that point forward he begins increasingly to imagine himself as the head of a family (if only a family of animals), and as king or lord of the island. Robinson's tenure almost exactly coincides with the Restoration period (1660–1688), which saw the collapse of the Stuart monarchy under Charles II and James II; and Defoe's skepticism about the Stuarts, who attempted to rule without the consent of Parliament, is echoed by Robinson's increasingly absolutist vocabulary. Robinson first speaks of himself as 'King and Lord of all this Country indefeasibly,' and then begins to speak of his 'Family.' He also becomes a lord of manorial property, but he increasingly assumes the garb of an absolutist monarch: '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.' Later, Robinson celebrates his absolute mastery over Friday and the Spaniard he has rescued from the cannibals, speaking proudly of his tolerance even toward pagans and papists: we have witnessed a process through which the language of sovereignty has increasingly defined experience.
The tension between Robinson's impulses toward political patronage and toward control within a context where the desire for sovereignty -34- wins out, is best dramatized in those moments when Robinson, having discovered that the Indians of the region are indeed cannibals, thinks about exterminating them. There is a virtually seamless movement from Robinson's dream about saving a «Savage» and making him his servant, to his conscious decision to enslave one at the earliest opportunity, and then to his saving and subjugating Friday. But Robinson's attitude toward the cannibals veers drastically between a desire to exterminate them and the recognition that they are only accountable to God, not to himself. Whether Defoe intended it or not, this dramatizes the conflict within the European imperialistic sensibility between a genocidal and primitivistic impulse. After witnessing the remnants of the first cannibal feast, Robinson declares, 'I could think of nothing but how I might destroy some of these Monsters,' but he repents, realizing that they are «innocent» as far as he knows. Robinson twice repeats this thought process, each time checking himself; but, significantly, he finally expresses his murderous impulses when he sees that an intended victim is a European. The imperial motives of the narrator are also manifest in Captain Singleton, where Captain Singleton provokes some Africans to attack him so that he can justify enslaving them according to a 'Law of Arms' defined unilaterally by himself. The point comes across clearly in the discrepancy between what we observe and Captain Singleton's language of self-justification.
My major thesis, then, is that history describes the mechanisms of Defoe's novels not because it represents some given literary form but because it constitutes a mode, a way of reading or interpreting experience that does not dictate formally perfect endings. Unlike spiritual autobiography, history is open-ended; and even if Defoe owes some debt to spiritual autobiography, Hans Frei suggests that he wrote in an age in which biblical narrative was subject to the same scrutiny as secular history. This is not to repeat the conventional criticism that Defoe is flawed because his plots are too episodic: rather, the episodes serve a cumulative function by revealing how characters become readers within the plots, thus directing Defoe's readers how to read the world. Like the ending of Samuel Johnson's Rasselas in which there is no conclusion, the open forms of Defoe's narratives encourage the reader to apply what they learn. As Moll Flanders puts it, 'The Moral indeed of all my History is left to be gather'd by the Senses and Judgment of the Reader; I am not Qualified to preach to them, let the Experience of one Creature completely Wicked, and compleatly Miserable be a Store -35- house of useful warning to those that read.' In brief, history is, for Defoe's narrators and readers equally, an instrument of knowledge.
The two chief metaphors for this activity are the reading of history-situating the self in time-and the narrator's development of topographical or geographical knowledge-situating the self in space. Both metaphors presuppose that useful knowledge is primarily visual, just as reading must be thought of as a visual negotiation with graphic signs: a tract often credited to Defoe, An Essay upon Literature (1724), analyzes the development of systems of writing in different cultures, and argues that politically and economically viable cultures are literate, not oral. Thus, the claim in Colonel Jack, Memoirs of a Cavalier, Moll Flanders, Robinson Crusoe, and Roxana is that the narrator's account has been transcribed and edited from an orally delivered version. This calls to our attention the fact that the book is an artificial and ultimately arbitrary compilation of manuscripts or accounts. And as the editor or publisher of Moll Flanders points out, we cannot expect these accounts to be complete, since 'no Body can write their own Life to the full End of it.'
Moreover, we see Robinson engaged in the activity of editing his own journal, and Roxana editing her story. Roxana also appears partly conscious that her account, like the accounts of others within her tale, is fragmentary. The end of the novel is taken up with Roxana's longabandoned daughter, Susan, pursuing her mother. Amy acts as a kind of detective shielding Roxana from exposure, and she reports that Susan's discourse 'consisted of broken Fragments of Stories, such as the Girl herself had heard so long ago.' Other spies and observers populate Defoe's narratives: Robinson constantly uses his spyglass from a lookout; the cavalier records how often he patiently observed Gustavus Adolphus's military councils so that he is able to reveal the fatal discrepancy between that king and Charles I ('And here I experienced the Truth of an old English Proverb,' he writes, 'That Standers-by see more than the Gamesters.'); Colonel Jack acts like Addison's Mr. Spectator when he returns to London, because since he is believed to be French, he can observe events from an ironic perspective; H. F. becomes a special observer of events in the plague-stricken city because he is made an inspector; Moll spies on the gentleman whom she has met in Bath; Amy spies on Roxana's first husband; Roxana's Quaker friend acts as her spy, and so on.
The two texts in which the topos of historical reading serves most obviously as a catalytic force are Captain Singleton and Colonel Jack. -36-
Both narrators are educated in the course of time by tutors who teach them literacy and cartography. We can detect a comparable development in Robinson's perspective on his experience when he calculates that his island is located in the mouth of the Orinoco River, and the turn of events during the plague is marked in part by H. F.'s leaving London, traveling to Greenwich, and surveying the Thames from a prospect, as if to provide himself literally and symbolically with a broader perspective on events in the city. Moll writes that, even on her second visit to Virginia, she only had a vague knowledge of the American colonies, and 'I, that till I wrote this, did not know what the word Geographical signify'd': the very act of writing here expands the writer's consciousness of space.
Emerging from no background at all, both Captain Singleton and Colonel Jack aspire to become gentlemen, and their growth in literacy is closely related to a redefinition of the gentleman in which they, along with their creator, are engaged. Their tales thus inscribe both cognitive and social ambitions. Colonel Jack raises the issue of how we are to take his story, since he hopes that 'my History will find a place in the World.' Imbibing the rumor that he is the son of a gentlewoman, he acts as 'a kind of Historian'-though an oral historian who gleans his knowledge from 'old Soldiers and Tars.' His early career as a criminal coincides with his illiteracy: in time, he discovers how valuable it would be
