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CLASSICS REVISITED (7)
Defoe, Robinson Crusoe
T’sao Hsueh Ch’in, The Dream of the Red Chamber
Casanova, History of My Life
Daniel Defoe is perhaps the only writer of fiction whom critics have honored by calling
him a liar. He is rightly distinguished from other novelists because he is not a novelist
in the usual sense of the word at all, but an utterer of false documents, a kind of
literary forger. It is not true, as some modern critics have said, that he did not know
what he was doing, that the novel was so primitive in his day that the dramatic and as it
were, abstract, nature of the art of fiction was unknown to him. It is true that his tales
are real autobiographies with imaginary narrators, as Samuel Richardson was to write
novels of real letters from imaginary correspondents.
Neither writers were primitive or naïve. The modern novel had already come into
existence. Defoe had plenty of examples if he wished to take them. The art of prose
fiction goes back to the beginning of literature. How many medieval romances are novels?
Surely Le Morte d’Arthur is an elaborately constructed dramatic novel, even
if the romances on which it is based are not admitted to the category. No. Defoe was very
well aware of what he was doing. He wrote his novels like an enormously skilled criminal
testifying under oath and throwing his persecutors off the track. He was a master of
imaginary evidence not unlike the great detective novelists, Conan Doyle, R. Austin
Freeman, and Simenon, and he surpassed them in the verisimilitude of his testimonies. In
the opening paragraph of Robinson Crusoe he begins to throw the reader off the
track. There is no dramatic structural reason whatsoever why Crusoe’s father should
be a naturalized German from Bremen or why his name should be Kreutznaer mispronounced.
There is a structural reason — the demands of an elaborate structure of verity. So
the central artistic meaning, the bull’s-eye of the esthetic impact of Defoe’s
fictions, is quite different from that of “the novel as a work of art.”
Unless we are romantic adolescents or barbarians, we never think of Ivan Karamazov or
Emma Bovary as real people, not anyway when we have escaped from the delusion of the
hypnotism of immediate reading. Most novels provide their greatest satisfaction when they
are finished and we look back over them, or rather, through them. The novel as a whole,
not any character, is an artistic structure that reorganizes experience. The narratives of
Crusoe, Moll Flanders, and Roxana are intended to affect us as though we had discovered
them in an old trunk in the attic that had come down through the family, a bundle of
papers that cracked as we opened them, written in a long out-of-date hand and tied with
ribbons that disintegrated at our touch. We are supposed to be put in direct encounter
with persons, a specific man, two specific women. Everything is stripped to the bare,
narrative substance, and it is this that reveals the psychology or morality of the
individual. The most significant details are purely objective, exterior. The interiority
of the characters is revealed by their elaborately presented outside. When they talk about
their own motives, their psychology, their morals, their self-analyses and
self-justifications are to be read backwards, as of course is true of most people,
certainly of any bundle of letters we might find in the attic. This is true even of
autobiographers who are famous for their sincerity. If we believe everything that Amiel
and Marie Bashkirtseff say about themselves, we are going to start off in life with
misleading and sentimental ideas of human nature. It is the naïveté of his critics that
has led to Defoe’s reputation for superficial or nonexistent psychology.
It is very fashionable nowadays — or was at least in the heyday of the faddist
exegesis of Kafka, Kierkegaard, and Henry James — all confused together as though
they were one author — to write of Robinson Crusoe as though it were written
by San Juan de la Cruz, an allegorical spiritual autobiography with dark nights of the
soul and ladders of illumination. Defoe as a matter of fact states quite plainly that
Crusoe’s vision of an avenging archangel was due to a surfeit of turtle eggs. His
terrors and panics of which so much has been made are no more than would be engendered in
the most normal of men by simple loneliness, and they die out as he becomes habituated to
his total isolation. The psychology of a man in solitary confinement is accurate. Crusoe
is afraid of what men might do to him because year after year men do nothing to him
whatsoever. He is terrified by an inexplicable footprint, but master of himself when the
real cannibals finally show up.
The sense of sin that haunts the early part of his narrative is no more than what would
be expected of a man of his time brooding on the reasons for his predicament. As time goes
on, it ceases to be a predicament. It is fruitless to search for an allegorical original
sin in Crusoe’s opening pages. He says what it was. He didn’t want to go into
business. He least of all wanted to be a member of the middle class, that “best of
all states” in his father’s words, and he ran away to sea. “Of man’s
first disobedience and the fruit” — indeed. If this is original sin no boat
would ever have been invented and put out to sea.
What is Robinson Crusoe about? The best way to answer is to begin with Moll
Flanders, Roxana, and the stories of highwaymen and pirates. Moll and Roxana
are businesswomen, a wise and a foolish whore. Like all of Defoe’s heroes except the
cavalier and the explorer of Africa, their lives are dominated by money. Moll Flanders
is a kind of audit, a drama of double-entry bookkeeping. Crusoe runs away from the
business ethic and finds on shipboard, with its companionate isolation, and in those days
its constant mortal danger, the withering of self-alienation. It never withers quite
enough. The voyages end, and the cash nexus takes over. Crusoe on his island, as he says
of himself, is a man without money. He has plenty, but it molds in a drawer in his cave,
the most meaningless thing on his island. There is nothing to connect it to. It is cash
but not a nexus. If we believe that money is the root of all evil then presumably it is
the apple of original sin. Crusoe is Adam with an inedible apple. So he gradually grows
back into a state of original grace.
Crusoe has been called a kind of Protestant monk, and it is true that he turns the
chance of his isolation into an anchorite’s career. The story is one of spiritual
realization — almost half a lifetime spent on contemplation works profound changes,
whatever the subject’s religion. We can watch Crusoe become, year by year, a better,
wiser man. He writes little about his interior development and when he does his vocabulary
is mostly inappropriate. We see it happen behavioristically. Defoe has been accused of
insensitivity because Crusoe shows little compassion for Friday or sorrow at his death.
But Defoe is portraying a true-born Englishman whose vocabulary cannot cope with the
deepest personal emotions if they cannot be translated into the symbolical language of
Dissenting piety.
At the end of the story as it first stood we watch Crusoe grow foolish again. He is
back in the world of men and their commerce. It is only when human relationships escape
from commerce that the spiritual wisdom he spent so many years acquiring as a hermit has a
chance to show itself. Of course he has considerable worldly wisdom, and the sequel is
largely the story of a Ulysses of many devices who happened to have spent a few years by
accident in a Zen monastery.
Samuel Johnson said that Don Quixote, The Pilgrim’s Progress,
and Robinson Crusoe were the only three books a mature man wished were longer. In
his time he was close to being right. Robinson Crusoe may still be the greatest
English novel. Surely it is written with a mastery that has never been surpassed. It is
not only as convincing as real life. It is as deep and as superficial as direct experience
itself. The learned but incorrigibly immature will never see in it anything but a
well-written boys’ story interspersed with out-of-date moralizing, best cut out when
it is published as an illustrated juvenile. Others will believe that Defoe placed himself
on record just this once as an unneurotic Kierkegaard, others as a critic beforehand of
Montesquieu and Rousseau; still others will see Crusoe as the archetype of Economic Man.
The book is all these things and more. It is what Defoe intended, a true life narrative.
The Chinese The Dream of the Red Chamber may well be as great a book as the
Japanese The Tale of Genji. Its virtues are not as obvious. In fact, they are not
obvious at all. They are the virtues that distinguish Chinese civilization from Japanese
— the virtues of a vaster humanity. Both novels have a lucidity and immediacy of
narrative seldom encountered in Western fiction of a serious character, but amongst us
confined to cowboys, detectives, and the funny papers. Alex Comfort once compared Chinese
fiction to Pepys’s Diary, “a perfectly translucent medium through which
we see the characters in all their moral nudity.” The contemporary author most like a
Chinese novelist is Georges Simenon. You are too busy with the story to notice
psychological insight or dramatic command until a week after you have finished the book.
The plot is the familiar, recurrent one of so much great fiction, as it is a specialty
of both Chinese fiction and philosophy of history — “When women rule, the house
decays” — but also its contrary, a celebration of the matriarchy that underlies
and sustains Chinese society. Like all great fiction, it is also the story of the
immensely difficult achievement of personal integrity. The narrative works toward a
transcendental meaning of life through that life itself, which so conspicuously hides all
such meaning. The characters are all “fallen beings.” The hero is an
unprepossessing, idle scholar-gentleman, timid, oversexed, unstable. The two young
heroines are both hysterics, the villainess a stock ruthless sister-in-law. The action is
confined almost entirely to the women’s quarters and consists mostly of vapors,
tantrums, fugues, and quarrels. Time goes by. As in life, the characters run down,
coarsen, sicken, and die. At the end everybody is worn out.
Yet Pao Yu’s meaningless life unconsciously evolves slowly toward illumination. He
is a Taoist saint who doesn’t know he is one and doesn’t want to be one. Like
Prince Genji, he is indifferent to and ignorant of his cosmic role. He struggles, unaware,
against an embodied principle of hate. When salvation comes, it is scarcely
distinguishable from its opposite. Behind commonplace life and death lurks another world
which intrudes at all crucial moments, a mirror-image more real than this life, where
destiny is achieved and manifest; like the dream time of the Australian aborigines where
everybody is his own ancestor that lies dormant below the dust of the desert and is
awakened by penances of blood and feathers.
Genji is a mystical Buddhist work. The Dream of the Red Chamber is
Taoist; its principle of salvation is inaction — wu’wei: the strength
of the still keystone in the arch; the water wandering amongst mountains, seeking its own
level, eventually wearing away the highest peaks. The talisman of Pao Yu’s integrity
is the uncut stone of precious jade with which he is born, which he loses and finds again
at the brink of death. Pao Yu’s father, Chi Cheng, the embodiment of patriarchal
legalism, presides over the waking world with iron rigor and unrelenting contempt for his
son and all his ways; but the dramatic pivots of the novel are a series of dreams,
apparitions of the true world in which doubled images of the girls who love and hate Pao
Yu function as moral determinants, presided over by the great matriarch, the grandmother
of the family.
It is the metaphysical modesty of Taoism that gives The Dream of the Red Chamber
its style, that modesty which is the necessary ingredient of the very greatest style in
any art. The most profound human relationships; the deepest psychological insights; the
most intense drama; the revelation of the moral universe in trivial human action, in the
simple narrative of ordinary happenings — greatness of heart, magnanimity
(“human-heartedness” is the Chinese term) is the substance from which the
narrative is carved.
Reading The Tale of Genji, you are always conscious of the ethereal refinement
of the characters, the profundity of the issues, the skill of the author. In Red
Chamber you are conscious only of what is happening. Lady Murasaki’s Japanese
courtiers seldom eat or drink, and never move their bowels. The Dream of the Red
Chamber is haunted by the faint odor of night soil from which a hundred flowers
spring.
When you first read about all these people with strange names doing curious things in
an exotic setting, you get lost. Then gradually the sheer human mass of Chinese fiction, a
mass whose components are all highly individuated, envelops and entrances you. You realize
yourself as part of a universe of human beings endless as the dust of nebulae visible in
the Mount Palomar telescope, and you are left with the significance of a human kinship
powerful as flowing water and standing stone.
From the date of writing, the mid-eighteenth century, until our time, The Dream of
the Red Chamber was anonymous. In 1921, Hu Shih, after immense research, ascribed the
first eighty chapters to T’sao Hsueh Ch’in and the remaining forty chapters to Kao Ngoh, one
of the editors of the 1791 edition. Evidence later discovered would indicate that Kao
himself had worked from first drafts by T’sao.
Hu Shih believed the novel to be autobiographical, but it is significant that until the
twentieth century no one bothered to disturb its anonymity. Like Gothic cathedrals, which
sufficient research can usually demonstrate were built by somebody, the great Chinese
fictions are more anonymous and communal than The Iliad. The Chin P’ing
Mei (Golden Lotus), The Water Margin (All Men Are Brothers),
The Romance of Three Kingdoms are end products of the accretion of hundreds of
tales by street-corner storytellers, and their luxuriance of natural growth is
characteristic of the Chinese novel even today.
* * *
If completely translated, The Dream of the Red Chamber would require about a
million words. The European versions are all drastic abridgments. Bancroft Joly’s
version (Kelly and Walsh, Hong Kong, 1892-93), two large volumes, was only the first third
of the original. Chi Chen Wang’s (Routledge, London, 1929) was drastically cut,
simplified, and secularized until not much more than a Balzacian domestic epic remained.
The English of Florence and Isabel McHugh, from the German of Franz Kuhn (Pantheon, New
York, 1958), preserves the Taoist otherworldly emphasis which surely was all-important to
the author. Chi Chen Wang’s (Twayne, New York, 1958; Anchor Books paperback, 1958) is
a new translation greatly expanded and improved and, so to speak, desecularized.
[NOTE: The Dream of the Red Chamber has now been translated
complete under the alternative title “The Story of the Stone” (Penguin, 5 volumes).
That version is highly recommended. See also Rexroth’s essay The Chinese Classic Novel.]
Purity, simplicity, definition, impact — these qualities of Homer are those of
Casanova too. In addition, he has a special talent for giving the impression of complete
candor. Only when we escape from the swiftness of his narrative and recollect his
adventures in tranquillity do we ever suspect that he is not telling the strict truth.
Candor is the essence of the art of autobiography. Proust, Pepys, Rousseau, Madame
Rolland, Saint Augustine and Henry Adams — as long as we are carried along we cannot
help believing them.
The greatest of adventurers in an age of adventurers, from Catherine and Frederick to
Saint-Germain and Mirabeau, from throne rooms to brothels, Casanova is the most credible
of a century of incroyables. Perhaps there is a deeper social kinship to Homer.
The breakup of feudalism, the loss of Christian belief, the accelerating economic change
created a social chaos in the eighteenth century like a barbarian invasion. The new
classes and their parasites were predators in a Viking age of satin breeches and powdered
hair — an age of transformation, a Heroic Age, the ideal environment for those
blessed with inordinate love of life, for the superlatively healthy amoral animals who
gamble away earldoms and seduce countesses and chambermaids and all in the same night, as
the Berserkers burned monasteries and raped nuns. Casanova is natural man living at the
highest pitch, loving a life made of nothing whatever but a leonine physiology and the
wits of a fox — a self-made man.
People have argued about the transition from “shame culture” to “guilt
culture” during the Heroic Age. Casanova is a freebooter to whom these terms are
meaningless. With its hundreds of sexual capers, his narrative has no prurience whatsoever
and no monotony. It has no malevolence, either, and Casanova’s Italianate vengeances
are without petty malice. He is always being ruined by his naïve good nature. He falls in
love with adventuresses more unscrupulous than himself who tease him with sisterly kisses
and beggar him betimes. He falls for the most hackneyed confidence games, if only they
involve a pretty woman. He hoodwinks an old codger with a magic conjuration to raise an
imaginary treasure. Instead, he raises a terrifying lightning storm and cowers within his
own magic circle, praying for mercy. Always in his love affairs he seeks first the
pleasure, sexual and otherwise, of the girl. This talent made him adored in a brutal time
by countless women of all ages and conditions from Moscow to Portugal.
Sometimes his giddiness pays. Down to his last three gold coins, headed east in Poland
into the unknown, he tips a waitress with the lot and immediately establishes his credit
as a prodigal millionaire. Most gamblers are like arsonists — addicted to the
exquisite, guilty thrills of tempting destruction. Casanova gambled as children gambol,
for the pure love of the great chance of living.
Whatever Casanova does, he assumes responsibility for consequences in the act of doing.
So he never looks back on his life with regret, except for one moment of irresponsible
gossip which damaged the career of a man who was hardly a friend — and the abiding
regret that it is all over. “When I was young I was very fond of sailor’s
hardtack. I had thirty-two beautiful teeth. Now I have only two left and can no longer
enjoy it.” Conscience, even introspective curiosity, are foreign to Casanova.
Nonetheless, the long tale is told with a scarcely audible but persistent note of
melancholy. Men who live like Casanova are seldom interested in themselves; their
egocentricity does not give them time for egotism. Neither was Casanova, probably, until
old age and loneliness came over him — once the king of bohemians, exiled to a castle
in Bohemia.
Time and its ruining passage color all the book. His sense of his own imminent death
lurks in the dark background of every brilliantly lit lusty and bawdy tableau. After all,
Casanova’s memoirs are not a diary but an aged man’s memories of his youth.
Saint Augustine’s Confessions are the confession of the betrayal of his own
youth because he was in love with eternity. Casanova was passionately in love with a
perishing present that long since had perished. The gavel of mortality raps steadily and
beats out a moral judgment of life — the most fundamental judgment, the judgment of
the amoral.
Cellini is an immoral healthy animal, and disagreeable because actually sick in some
irrelevant way. Restif de la Bretonne is a moral imbecile. Casanova is a man without
interiority except for a profound awareness of the vanity of human wishes. Proust seeks
for the meaning of time. Casanova knows it has none. Since this is one of the major
conclusions that wisdom can form from the facts of existence, the book has a peculiar
naked profundity certainly lacking in those other adventurers, Cellini and Restif.
Havelock Ellis said of him that he was the consummate master of the dignified narration of
undignified experience.
It is the wisdom of the doomed flesh that is responsible for Casanova’s redeeming
dignity. He has equals but no superiors in the art of direct factual narrative. Chinese
adventure novels and the greatest modern detective stories do not surpass him. From the
very beginning, the simple facts of his childhood and youth roll along like the wheels of
an express train. The narrative carries all before it and carries the most indifferent
reader with it. This is action writing at the highest pitch — preemptory
story-telling.
When we pause for breath, we notice other qualities that Casanova shares with detective
stories. We feel that we are always skirting the edges of a mystery. Something seems to be
going on that we are not being told about. This isn’t true; it is a tone, which is
due to the fact that Casanova was at the very center of the mystifying occult Freemasonry
of the mid-eighteenth century with its mixture of eroticism, mathematics, deism, and
international espionage. Unlike Saint-Germain, who pretended to be immortal, to speak all
languages, and to have unlimited wealth; unlike Cagliostro, whose speculations must have
astonished him whenever they accidentally escaped from total charlatanism, Casanova had no
need to pretend. His life was illuminated by the glamour of liberated sensual devotion
— the mystery of flesh and blood and nerves and bones in action.
The most mysterious thing about this apparition is that it comes out of nowhere and
returns to nothing. The loving human body hurtles through time like a thrown battle-axe.
“Eminently rapid, plain, direct in thought, expression, syntax, words, matter,
ideas,” said Arnold of Homer, “and eminently noble.” Everyone would agree
that all these terms apply to Casanova, except the last, which many would change to
“eminently ignoble.” Is this true? One meaning of the word “noble” is
“descended from the chiefs of the Visigoths, Ostrogoths, Lombards, or
Burgundians.” It is this blood relation to the epic hero which distinguishes Casanova
from the other rascals of literature.
[NOTE: The best edition of Casanova’s memoirs is the one
translated by Willard Trask (6 volumes). —KK]
Selections from Kenneth Rexroth’s Classics Revisited (copyright 1968
Kenneth Rexroth) and More Classics Revisited (copyright 1989 Kenneth Rexroth
Trust). Reproduced by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.
Both of these volumes are in print and available from New Directions. Do yourself a favor and get them.
[Other “Classics Revisited” essays]
[REXROTH ARCHIVE]
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