a journal of a plague year (defoe)

Whilst reading Journal of a Plague Year it struck me that the narrator seemed almost preternaturally relaxed about the whole affair. Yes, people were falling down dead in the street, yes, society was on the brink of collapse, but all the same, our unflappable narrator calmly guides us through the terrible year of 1665. Which is a great consolation, in the year 2020, that reassurance that there is a normality on the other side, not so far away, we will be able to return to doing those social things which we as a species tend to enjoy, unless you’re a Schopenhauer or a Saint Simon Stylites. The novel, (for that is what it is), includes typical Defoe-ian digressions, individual tales and anecdotes tucked away, unusual personalities who the narrator comes across in his wanderings around the city, in spite of the peril. There’s also a highly contemporary fascination with figures, with frequent tallies posted of how the plague affected the different London boroughs. For Londoners there’s the ghoulish fascination of locating where in the city the plague pits were dug and the descriptions of the circumstances of the burials of the sick are some of the most harrowing elements of the book, something our generation had never known the like of, until now. The tone of the book, it struck me, was remarkably similar to that of Robinson Crusoe, a laconic way of dealing with fate, making the best of things. Something which once upon a time we might have called inherently British. There’s no wailing or gnashing of teeth. The retrospective perspective consoles: the narrator lived this time, and got through to the other side and we shall too, god willing. (It is in times of plague that the instinct to believe in god seems most acute, for who else is it who should decide who lives and who dies, if not god?). 

So there was something reassuring about reading this novel, not least in the last thirty pages, as the plague recedes and people start to go about their business again. Until I clocked the publication date. 1722. Some sixty years after the events being recounted. As though someone was writing about 2020 in 2080. My stupidity immediately struck me; I know that Defoe is an 18th century writer. Yet, in the reading, I never once doubted that the narrator was Defoe himself. Because, and this is self-evident, this is what I wished to believe. I wanted that confident, fearless voice to be completely authentic. It was my consolation. 

Something which tells us as much about the process of reading as it does anything else. (It makes me think about the gospels for example.) Journal of a Plague Year is a masterly work of recreation, of pseudo-documentary writing, very much of a piece with Robinson Crusoe. Yet whether it has anything to teach us about how to manage the anxiety of living through plague is doubtful. I can imagine my niece’s grandchild wanting to write about the great confinement of 2020 and talking to her grandmother about it, and there will be value in those memories, and they might make for a great book, but time will have lent its balm to the actual events, because time ameliorates like nothing else can. 

robinson crusoe [daniel defoe]

How to place a novel whose impact on the Western psyche has been so immense? There can be few novels more famous than Crusoe, and the image of a man alone on his island has invaded the consciousness of every British child growing up, perhaps, since it was written.

Atomisation - Crusoe is the Garbo of imperialism. He wants his own island, but he wants to be left alone on his island. Long before he reaches the island, Crusoe is a loner. He quits his family, takes to the sea, is captured by Moors, escapes, returns to the sea, goes to Brazil, lives a solitary life on his own plantation there. He simultaneously laments his solitude but also relishes it. Even in the final chapter, when he supposedly finally acquires a family on his return to England after over thirty years, he soon ups and leaves again. He’s a restless soul who is also a progenitor of Mersault, the original anti-social man. In spite of the famous idea of Crusoe and Friday, Friday only actually appears as a fleeting figure in the book, alone with Crusoe for little more than a chapter. Above all, what emerges is the vision of a man who it comes to feel hasn’t ended up in isolation by accident. There’s a dangerously strong urge in the modern psyche, an urge assisted by technology, to break away from society and construct a world where the individual is lord and master, freed from the chains of social relationships. Crusoe isn’t actually all that far from the mainland (he can see it from his island), and it isn’t until the island begins to become overrun by visitors (cannibals, mutineers, Spaniards etc) that he finally commits to leaving. 

Globalisation - Crusoe is the son of immigrants who settled in Hull. He inhabits an expanding world. South America, Africa and Europe are all inter-connected, with the slave trade one aspect of this. Trade is booming and Crusoe ends up rich, not as a result of the treasure he finds on board the Spanish galleon that founders off his island’s coast, but the investment in his sugar plantation in Brazil. This is not a closed, inwards looking society. Even on his island, he finds himself visited by people of various races and cultures. 

Slavery - The great underpinning motor of the story is the slave trade. Crusoe himself is a slave at one point, in West Africa, before he escapes. He ends up on his island because he agrees to go on a slaving expedition to get labour to work the sugar fields of Brazil. When he comes across Friday, he instantly assumes that Friday will become his servant, as he does. Said’s Orientalisim detailed the significance of the Orient as underpinning British literature, but in Crusoe, it’s the driving winds of trade, and specifically the slave trade, which lure the protagonist to his shipwrecked destiny.

Shipwrecks - Shipwrecks were the sliding door of the day. As in Shakespeare, with the Tempest, Pericles and Winter’s Tale, the shipwreck is the deus ex machina, the hidden hand of fate, which permits a character to undergo transformation. In this sense, for much of the world, little has changed. People are still risking their lives on the seas in search of another life, which is at the mercy of the lottery of the tides. There are so many shipwrecks in Crusoe it’s hard to keep up. They provide a religious dimension to the narrative, the hand of god.