A Little History of Literature

by John Sutherland

  There are a number of other aspects in The Pilgrim's Progress that feed into the novel of later centuries. The twentieth-century writer D.H. Lawrence called the novel ‘the bright book of life’ – a modern Bible for an age that had outlived the traditional holy text. The kind of novel that Lawrence wrote (as did Jane Austen, George Eliot, Joseph Conrad and many others) is about how to do the right things in life to find fulfilment – what Bunyan called ‘salvation’ – as the historical and personal circumstances define it. This has been called ‘the great tradition’ of English fiction and that great tradition begins with The Pilgrim's Progress.

  The last of these proto-novels has an added interest in that it is by a woman, the gloriously named Aphra Behn (1640–89). Women would have to wait more than 200 years before they could claim full social equality with men. That fact alone would make this author of interest. But what is still more fascinating about Behn is how cunningly she adapted her literary talents, which were great, to the turbulent historical period in which she found herself, the Restoration.

  Some background history helps us understand Mistress Behn's extraordinary achievement. After the Civil War and the execution of Charles I, the victorious Oliver Cromwell went on to overrule Parliament and set up a republic known as the Commonwealth. He also imposed on the country an iron Puritan dictatorship, backed by the formidable (‘Roundhead’) army of the Protectorate. During these years of war and republic, King Charles's son, who would later come to the throne as Charles II, took refuge with his court in various locations in mainland Europe, particularly enjoying France's sophisticated pleasures.

  Cromwell and his regime were ferociously moralistic. Many taverns were closed, along with the racecourses, cock-fighting pits, houses of ill-repute, and, most damagingly, the country's theatres. The printed word was rigorously censored. It was a difficult time for literature. An impossible time for drama.

  Eventually pressure from below for more liberty (and ‘cakes and ale’, as Shakespeare's Sir Toby Belch calls the fun part of life) brought about the restoration of the monarchy. Prince Charles returned from the Netherlands in 1660 and was crowned the following year. A compromise was reached on the question of religious tolerance and Cromwell's corpse was exhumed from Westminster Abbey and torn into fragments. The theatres, houses of ill-repute and taverns opened again, now under noble patronage and toleration. Charles II particularly loved the stage (not least the women around it – famously Nell Gwynn, an orange-seller) and patronised it, royally.

  Eaffrey (self-renamed ‘Aphra’) Johnson grew up during the civil war. She accompanied her father, a barber who had powerful clients, when he was appointed in 1663 Governor of Surinam, a British colonial possession in South America. Sugar was grown there on plantations worked by slaves who were brutally ill-treated. After her father's death Aphra made her way back to England, with her head packed full of impressions of Surinam, the cruel hardships endured by the slaves and the hypocrisy of their Christian masters. Married and soon widowed, in the early 1670s she took up writing plays for the theatre – the first woman to do so. But her fictional story, Oroonoko, or the History of the Royal Slave, published in 1688, is rightly judged her masterpiece. Aphra Behn is buried in Westminster Cathedral, the first woman author to be so honoured. On her tomb, instructs Virginia Woolf, ‘all women together ought to let flowers fall … for it was she who earned them the right to speak for themselves’.

  The ‘True Story’, as the title proclaims itself, is the manifestly untrue story of an African prince, Oroonoko, along with his wife Imoinda, transported to Surinam to labour in the plantations. His history is ‘set down’ by an anonymous young Englishwoman, the daughter of the newly appointed deputy governor, who has just died. Oroonoko kills two tigers and has a closely described battle with an electric (‘benumbing’) eel. He organises an uprising, and is cheated into surrendering on the point of victory. He is captured and executed, sadistically, for the delectation of a white rabble. Oroonoko is short (about eighty pages, or 28,000 words) and lacks the technical sophistication and masterful suspense that so excited readers when they first read Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe some thirty years later. But it is an extraordinary effort, and qualifies the author as a pioneer writer of fiction which is almost, but not quite, a novel.

  Henry James called the novel a ‘house of fiction’. That house stands on the foundation work of these five writers. And it would rise as itself with the work that is the subject of the next chapter, Robinson Crusoe.

  CHAPTER 13

  Travellers' Tall Tales

  DEFOE, SWIFT AND THE RISE OF THE NOVEL

  The previous chapter explored the roots of the modern novel. Now we come to what may be called the plant's first ripe fruit. Daniel Defoe (1660–1731), the author of Robinson Crusoe, is the generally agreed starting point of the genre in England. In the early and middle years of the eighteenth century, with Defoe and other writers like Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, Jonathan Swift and Laurence Sterne, we can see the modern novel emerging from the primal soup of the many kinds of tale-telling that humanity has always gone in for.

  A trigger for all this was needed. Why did what we (but not they) call the ‘novel’, the ‘new thing’, emerge at this particular time and in this particular place (London)? The answer is that the rise of the novel took place at the same time and in the same place as the rise of capitalism. Different as these two things may seem, they are intimately connected.

  Put it this way. Robinson Crusoe, marooned on his island, making his fortune by his own efforts, is a new (novel) kind of man for a new (novel) kind of economic system. Economists have frequently used him as what they call ‘homo economicus’: economic man. Defoe's novel, if we look at it thoughtfully, mirrors what was going on financially at the same period in the City of London – in the counting houses, banks, shops, warehouses, offices and docks on the Thames. It was the age of merchant adventurers, capitalism and entrepreneurship. You made your own way in life and, like Dick Whittington, you might arrive in the city penniless and find the streets paved with gold. Or not. In the medieval world no peasant could hope to become a knight. Social mobility is central to capitalism in this complicated system of human affairs. The lowest clerk in the city could hope to become a captain of industry. Or, like Dick, the Lord Mayor of London.

  The story of Robinson Crusoe and his island will probably be familiar even to those who have never read the actual novel. This, briefly, is how it goes. A young man falls out with his merchant father and runs away to sea without a penny to his name. He becomes, after various adventures, a trader. Among the goods he trades are slaves, coffee and other things worth transporting between the Old and New Worlds. Crusoe is very much a ‘new man’, a man for his time.

  On one of his trading voyages from Brazil, Crusoe's merchant ship is wrecked by a terrible storm. All the crew perish and he finds himself marooned on a desert island for twenty-eight years. He colonises the island and – having made it to shore with nothing but the clothes he stood up in – leaves the island a rich man. How did he do this? By entrepreneurship: by (literally) making his fortune, exploiting the island's natural resources. And throughout all this ordeal he never loses his faith in God. In fact, he believes that his Maker has done this to him, and approves of what he – Robinson – has done on the island. It is God's work as well as his.

  We can get a hint of how the novel – as a ‘genre’ or distinct style of literature – works by examining the title page of The Life and strange and surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe as it was first published (in the environs of the City of London, appropriately). When the book's first buyers looked at this page in 1719, they saw the name of Robinson Crusoe and the line ‘Written by himself’. Defoe's name doesn't appear. The book claimed to be an authentic tale of travel and adventure. Inevitably many first readers were duped into thinking there was a real Robinson Crusoe who had spent twenty-eight years in total isolation on an island off the mouth of the Oronoque River in South Amer
ica and made his fortune there.

  With Robinson Crusoe we come face to face, for the first time, with the full-blown narrative convention known as ‘realism’ – meaning not the real thing, but something so much like the real thing that you have to look twice to tell the difference. In the case of Defoe's novel the confusion about whether it was ‘real’ or merely ‘realistic’ was compounded by the fact that four years before the book appeared, a very similar account of a sailor marooned on an island had become a bestseller (as did Defoe's book). Defoe clearly read it and used it. As it happened, that other marooned man did not make himself rich and had a very miserable time of it. But that was life, not fiction. The gullible reader in 1719, looking at Defoe's title page, would have had no way of knowing that Robinson Crusoe wasn't another ‘true’ traveller's tale.

  To the uninformed eye the straightforward opening paragraph of Robinson Crusoe doesn't offer any clues that we are not reading an authentic autobiography. Read it, and imagine how you would know you weren't being told God's honest truth:

  I was born in the year 1632, in the city of York, of a good family, though not of that country, my father being a foreigner of Bremen, who settled first at Hull. He got a good estate by merchandise, and leaving off his trade, lived afterwards at York, from whence he had married my mother, whose relations were named Robinson, a very good family in that country, and from whom I was called Robinson Kreutznaer; but, by the usual corruption of words in England, we are now called – nay we call ourselves and write our name – Crusoe; and so my companions always called me.

  It reads like ‘the real thing’. The story of a man called Crusoe, formerly Kreutzner.

  As the story progresses, Crusoe has a series of thrilling adventures – one of the reasons young readers have always loved this novel. He's almost drowned; he's captured by pirates; he's enslaved by Arabs; and he wins through all adversity to become a wealthy plantation- (and slave-) owner in South America. But while taking a voyage to make even more money he finds himself alone on an island, having lost everything. On the simplest of narrative levels his story is a page-turner. How will our hero survive against the elements, wild animals and cannibals without supplies or other people to help him, we wonder – secretly suspecting that he will. Below the narrative surface, however, Crusoe is homo economicus. Wealth and the making of wealth is what his story is all about. That is its theme – gripping as the plot and all those adventures are.

  Shortly after the wreck Crusoe makes several arduous journeys back to his ship before it breaks up and its contents are lost forever. He brings back, on improvised rafts, whatever materials he hopes will be useful to him. He gives us a meticulously exact inventory of what he salvages. Among the other items, in the captain's safe he finds £36. While noting that it will not be useful on the island, and recognising that removing it will be theft, he takes it anyway. The incident is telling. What is the most important thing? Money. The incident is inserted to remind us.

  Over the following twenty-eight years Crusoe uses what he has brought ashore to sustain himself and gradually he cultivates the island. Everything on it is his property. He refers to himself as the ‘sovereign’ (king) of his island. From this angle we see Robinson Crusoe as an allegory of empire, and of England, which in this period had begun the process of seizing great chunks of the globe as its imperial property.

  After many years Crusoe acquires a companion, a native from a neighbouring island who has barely escaped with his life from cannibals. Crusoe renames him ‘Friday’ (that being the day he found him) and makes him his servant. More importantly Friday is his chattel – bluntly, his slave. Empires always need slaves.

  Daniel Defoe is one of the most interesting writers in all of English literature – and one of the most versatile. Over the course of a long (for that period) life, he was a pamphleteer, a businessman, a speculator on the recently invented stock exchange, a government spy, and the acknowledged ‘father of English journalism’, writing hundreds of books, pamphlets and journals. He was never well off, sometimes fell foul of the law, and was wholly impoverished in his later years. But it was in those late years that he invented what we know as the English novel. If Virginia Woolf could instruct women to throw flowers on the grave of Aphra Behn, we should throw some pound coins and dollar bills on the grave of Daniel Defoe, the chronicler of homo economicus.

  The novel was not destined to remain shackled to Defoe's rigid realism. The genre could also ‘fantasise’ – maintaining a realistic external structure with contents as imaginary as any fairy tale. The great pioneer of the ‘fantasy novel’, so to call it, is Jonathan Swift (1667–1745).

  Swift, an Irishman, was born into what is called ‘the Ascendancy’ – the upper class of the country who were favoured by their English masters and given privileges denied the Irish population at large. He spent much of his life in his home country, and is considered the first great Irish writer. He received his higher education at Trinity College Dublin, where he excelled as a scholar. He was ambitious and travelled to England to become secretary to a nobleman, in the hopes of advancing his career. Patronage was necessary for any such advancement. This was not yet a world where you could make it on your own.

  His patron introduced him at court and imbued him with the Tory (Conservative) beliefs that stayed with Swift all his life. He eventually earned a doctorate in divinity (‘Dr Swift’ is what he is usually called) and became an ordained priest in the (Protestant) Church of Ireland. The Revd Dr Swift was given a series of parishes and eventually the post of Dean of St Patrick's Cathedral in Dublin. But he never received the great favours he expected from the English court and government. It sharpened his anger to the level of savagery. He felt, he said, ‘like a rat in a hole’.

  In the 1720s, as Robinson Crusoe was at its best-selling height, Swift began writing the work for which he is most remembered, Gulliver's Travels. Like Defoe's story, the book, as it was published in 1726, offered itself as an authentic ‘traveller's tale’ (which some deluded contemporaries, as with Robinson Crusoe, took it to be). It encompasses four voyages. The first is to Lilliput, where the people are tiny yet fancy themselves being of great consequence – Swift was satirising the court and cronies around Queen Anne. The second voyage takes Lemuel Gulliver to Brobdingnag. Here the inhabitants are rural giants and it is the hero himself who is now doll-sized. Brobdingnag is the most agreeable of the four countries created by Swift because it is old-fashioned and traditional, and in every sense ‘unmodern’. Swift loathed progress.

  That loathing is apparent in the story of the third voyage. Gulliver travels to Laputa (Spanish for ‘the whore’), which is a scientific utopia. Swift despised science, which he thought unnecessary and contrary to religion. Here he pictures the advanced scientists of his age as geeks, pointlessly labouring, for instance, to extract sunbeams from cucumbers. The third book also contains the Struldbrugs, who live forever, and decay forever, suffering an eternity of pain and mental infirmity. They fall to pieces but can never die. The travels are becoming progressively more horrible.

  The fourth book is the most perplexing. Gulliver travels to Houyhnhnm Land, the pronunciation of which represents the neighing of a horse. In this country the horse rules and humans are excrement-spraying, mindless filthy apes called ‘yahoos’. Horses, given that they consume grain and grass, have less offensive bodily wastes – something that George Orwell suggested, plausibly, lies behind Swift's strange vision of what is bearable or unbearable in life. Of course horses have no technology, no institutions, no ‘culture’ and no literature. Nor do they in Houyhnhnm Land. But this, apparently, is the nearest to ‘utopia’ that Swift will allow us to come. He does not have a lot of hope for mankind.

  Gulliver's Travels, like Robinson's travels, open the way for innumerable novels to come over the following centuries, in their innovative blendings of the real and the fantastic. For everyone they are the best place to start your own voyage of discovery into the wonderful world of fiction.

>   CHAPTER 14

  How to Read

  DR JOHNSON

  The first literary critic most of us will encounter is our English teacher in the classroom. Someone, that is, who helps us understand, or better appreciate, the more difficult and finer points of literature. Literature is made by ‘authors’. Literary criticism involves something connected, but different: ‘authority’, or ‘the person who knows better than we do’.

  The subject of this chapter is Samuel Johnson (1709–84). He is commonly known as ‘Dr Johnson’, following the example of his admiring friends and contemporaries. Why do we also choose to call him that? We don't, for example, talk about ‘Mr Shakespeare’ or ‘Miss Jane Austen’. We call him ‘Dr Johnson’ for the same reason that in our schooldays we call the teacher ‘Miss’ or ‘Sir’. They are in charge. They have the authority. They know things we don't (yet). ‘Doctor’, literally, means one who has knowledge. Interestingly, the first real job Dr Johnson had was schoolteaching – the chalk in one hand, the cane in the other. In a sense he never put those schoolteacherly instruments down. He was never slow to thrash bad literature, or bad thinking about literature. His pugnacity is one of the things that makes him endearing.

  Literature, as we have seen, goes as far back (via epic and myth) as humanity itself. Samuel Johnson is the first great critic of English literature and he, like the ‘discipline’ he represents, came much later in the day when the machineries of literary production had reached an advanced historical stage. Dr Johnson is very much a product of the eighteenth century – an age which prided itself on its social sophistication and ‘polish’. Literary people of that century liked to see themselves as ‘Augustans’ – named after the high-point of classical Roman culture under the ‘golden age’ of the Emperor Augustus, whose achievements they aimed to copy. It was in the eighteenth century that our great institutions (Parliament, the monarchy, the universities, business, the press) took on their modern form. And, among all that, what we now call the ‘book world’ came into being. Johnson would, in his glory years, rule over that book world. One of his other names was ‘the Great Cham’ (cham being another word for ‘khan’, or ‘king’).