Constructing the Modern Novel

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The Modern Innovation

Situating the Novel in the Progression of Semantic Meaning

Benjamin Boyce, June 2, 2015

§1. A New Fiction?

The modern novel, as it arose in 18th century England, is usually described as an

innovation over the medieval romance and the epic. Ian Watt ascribes to this new form

the qualities of individuality, empiricism, and uniqueness. These qualities were tied to

similar innovations in other realms of culture, such as science and philosophy, and were

rooted in

that vast transformation of Western civilization since the Renaissance which has replaced the unified world picture of the Middle Ages with another very different one—one which presents us, essentially, with a developing but unplanned aggregate of particular individuals having particular experiences at particular times and at particular places.1

If the modern novel was an innovation on the romance and the epic, then how was

fiction itself modified to accommodate this particularity of experience, individuality, and

context?

I will be looking at literature as an act of constructing virtualized experience which

proceeds from a special use of language. My model proceeds from the sentence to the

modern novel, seeking to show the basic units of fiction, and how these units are used to

form “statements” of increasing subtlety and complexity.

1 Watt, Ian. The Rise of the Novel; Studies in Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding. Berkeley: U of California, 1957. Page 31.

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§2. In the Word was the Beginning

In Interpretation Theory2, Paul Ricoeur writes that semiotics, the science of signs,

proceeds from the separation of language from its use in discourse in order to study “the

linguistic code which gives a specific structure to each of the linguistic systems, which

we know as the various languages spoken by different linguistic communities.”3 However,

Ricoeur argues, language as a system of signs has only a virtual existence. What emerges

in actuality is the speech act, to which Ricoeur assigns an existential function as the

bearer of a meaning that transcends the isolation of the speaker from the listener, and

vice-versa.4

Through discourse, my experience is translated into meaning, which is carried to you

on the code of language; then you as my listener decode my meaning from our language,

and are then able to incorporate my meaning into your experience. The language we

share is anonymous; our statements, forged out of language, are non-anonymous

instantiations of our linguistic code.

It is this leap from semiotics to semantics (from the “self-sufficient” meaning of signs

to the inter-subjective meaning of statements) that is the signature leap of the meaning-

making impulse that results in literature (among other forms of discourse). Semantics still

possesses a virtual existence, but its virtuality is substantiated by the meaning that a

speaker is conveying, by their particular and momentary manner of grammaticizing their

state and their intention.

Insofar as the context of a statement is a conversation, the particular conversation

establishes the rules by which we can extract the intended meaning from the statements

within it. One needs to know how to “take” a statement before they can proceed to

interpret it: is it serious, or a joke? Is it a clarification or obfuscation? Is it a riddle to be 2 Paul Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning, Fort Worth, Texas, Texas Christian University Press, 1973 3 Ricoeur, 1973, page 2 4 Mikhail Bakhtin pushes things a bit further: “Discourse lives, as it were, beyond itself, in a living impulse toward the object; if we detach ourselves completely from this impulse all we have left is the naked corpse of the word, from which we can learn nothing at all about the social situation or the fate of a given word in life. To study the word as such, ignoring the impulse that reaches out beyond it, is just as senseless as to study psychological experience outside the context of that real life toward which it was directed and by which it was determined.” M Bakhtin Discourse in the Novel, page 292; quote found in Morson, Gary Saul, and Caryl Emerson. Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics. Stanford, CA: Stanford U, 1990. Page 58.

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pondered or a solution to be applied?

It is in the stacking of statements that discourse proceeds; and proceeds to convey a

higher form of meaning, by using statements as the semiotic units which provide a higher

field of semantic conveyance. And though it might be conceivable to abstract all the

various sorts of conversations in order to study how statements may or may not form a

self-referent system of statement-level meaning similar to that of the semiotic code, even

pursuing one form of statement (such as the metaphor) is a daunting enough task. And yet,

by discussing types statements, we might be able to ascertain the generic manner in

which statements manipulate meaning. Gary Saul Morson distinguishes between two

types of statements, the aphorism and the dictum, thus:

The rhetoric of the dictum tends to totality… The dictum is certain… [it] demands we attend to it… An aphorism, by contrast, seems to be found in hiding… [With the dictum] everything is present in the statement. It is complete and the author, who is in full control of significance, knows exactly what it means. We can develop it, apply it, take it as the key to many things, but we do not go beyond it… The dictum is a conclusion, the aphorism is a beginning. Part of the whole is missing, as is always the case with truth itself… The dictum says Something. The Aphorism says Something Else.5

Using this dichotomy as a starting point for the procedure of the statement, we might

say that the two generic modes in which statements manipulate meaning is by 1)

contracting it toward definite units of sense, or 2) dilating meaning to produce a leap or

reaching-outward of significance.

Taken to the extreme, the most contracting statements belong to formal logic and

legal codes (which establish rigorous values and then make inferences or set precedents

according to these values); whilst the most dilating statements perhaps belong to humor

or to poetry. A logical statement can be infinitely extended through critical analysis, as in

the case of Albert North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell’s Principia Mathematica6—

which sought to establish the logical foundations on which all mathematical statements

could be proved—it subsequently took them 379 pages to establish that one plus one does

5 Morson, Gary Saul. "The Aphorism: Fragments from the Breakdown of Reason." New Literary History 34.3 (2003): page 420-422 & 428. 6 Whitehead, Alfred North, and Bertrand Russell. Principia Mathematica. Cambridge: UP, 1925.

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in fact equal two.7 This proof doesn’t alter the meaning of “1+1=2”, but only extends it

into the system of which it is a part (being arithmetic); however, when we engage with a

poetic statement—“Joys impregnate. Sorrows bring forth.”8—we proceed to its sense by

allowing the non-logical tensions in the statement to not cancel one another out, but

rather form associative connections that we walk, toward an understanding that is

tentative.9 We must guess what Wm. Blake means to make sense of his statement; we

must agree that 1+1=2 in order to make sense of that formula.10 The sense-difference

between these two statements might be defined by orders of ambiguity, but we propose

that in the conversation of fiction, ambiguity is employed to convey the non-anonymity

of a specific subject who, in producing unspecific sense, exerts themselves more

personally into the semantic field.

However ambiguous or non-anonymous a statement is, its sense is nevertheless

constrained to a single point or point of view, be that view/point a dilation or contraction

of meaning. For subjectivity to be extended, it is required that there be room to express

the dynamics of how and why meaning is being manipulated in a non-anonymous and

ambiguous manner, which requires a series of statements to establish something of a

psychic fingerprint. In fiction (being a virtually non-anonymous instance of discourse)

the semanticization of a series of statements is purposed toward conveying a virtualized

7 In 1931, Gödel's incompleteness theorem proved that any formal system will never be able to prove its own completeness; either the system will be found to be inconsistent, or there will be some truth which will not be able to be deduced from this system. Alternately, the more earnestly I attempt to explain the humor of the statement “A Freudian slip is when I say one thing but **** my mother,” the less humor is retained by the phrase—giving rise to the question of the relation between the dilating statement (such as witticisms and metaphor) and the contracting mode of rational explanation. 8 William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, plate 8. 9 “As concerns the procedures for validation by which we test our guesses… they are closer to a logic of probability than to a logic of empirical verification. To show that an interpretation is more probable in the light of what we know is something other than showing that a conclusion is true. So in the relevant sense, validation is not verification. It is an argumentative discipline comparable to the juridical procedures used in legal interpretation, a logic of uncertainty and of qualitative probability.” Ricoeur, pp. 78. 10 “In descriptive writing you have to be careful of associative language. You’ll find that analogy, or likeness to something else, is very tricky to handle in description, because the differences are as important as the resemblances. As for metaphor, where you’re really saying “this is that,” you’re turning your back on logic and reason completely, because logically two things can never be the same thing and still remain two things. The poet, however, uses these two crude, primitive, archaic forms of thought in the most uninhibited way, because his job is not to describe nature, but to show you a world completely absorbed by the human mind.” Frye, Northrop. The Educated Imagination, Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1964. Page 32.

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subject encountering virtualized experience. The emergence of the virtually experiencing

subject occurs in the literary forms that are about the length of a page: being the poem

and the parable.

On the level of the page, a subject is presented from two directions: from an interior

and from an exterior point of view. For the interior viewpoint we will ascribe the form of

the poem; for the exterior viewpoint we will ascribe the form of the parable.

A poem produces sense on the most sensual level of language (its sounds and

imagery); and combining a deliberate use of language with a deliberate arrangement of

statements works to produce the exteriorization of an internal state, which is commonly

referred to as a voice. The poetic form of a haiku, being so tightly controlled, affords very

little variability for the voice to acquire subjectivity. But already, on the level of the lyric

or the sonnet, we are able to “hear” the voice as a particular instance of subjective

experience.

The second principal unit of fiction is the parable—not in the sense of a story with a

specific meaning, but simply a parabola of happening—a sequence of and then’s. The

parable sits opposite the poem in that it describes a series of happening which shapes the

virtual subject in action and in a context. The subject of a parable is dissociated from the

teller (in time by speaking of what happened to me, or in body by speaking of what

happened to him). The subject is spoken about rather than through, as is the case with a

poem. Both the poem and the parable present us with an experiencing subject in time, but

the poem is psychological, as the parable is causal.11 When these two forms are bound

together by a name that there is the erection of the next semantic field in fiction, being the

drama.

By setting a poetic subject on a parabolic arc and allowing that subject’s voice to

respond to its changing situation, what is formed over the course of events is character;

characters then become the semiotic units being arranged to form “statements” within a

dramatic field. 11 “Behind proverbs and aphorisms and psychological speculation and religious ritual lies the memory of human experience strung out in time and subject to narrative treatment. Lyric poetry implies a series of events in which the voice in the lyric is embedded or to which it is related. All of this is to say that knowledge and discourse come out of human experience and that the elemental way to process human experience verbally is to give an account of it more or less as it really comes into being and it exists, embedded in the flow of time. Developing a story line is a way of dealing with this flow.” Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy, London, Routledge, 1988. Page 140

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The emergence of character as the semiotic unit of the semanticizing drama has wide

ranging effects, for here we see the encoding of social relations into the fictional realm.

The semantic field that arises in the drama is the social strata; drama’s “statement” is one

of relationships being united or separated. Here, we need to differentiate between the

“point” of a specific drama, and the field of its meaning. A drama’s “point” can be tragic

or comedic, moral or satiric, climactic or anti-climactic, but the field of meaning which a

drama virtualizes in the realm of language is the constellation of characters into dynamic

relationships. In drama, humans are able to encode their understanding of “how society

works” and “how the world works.” And though anthropomorphism can have pejorative

connotations (as a naïve form of understanding), within literature, anthropomorphism is

the imbuing of personhood onto non-personal subjects, and is an empathetic move. It lifts

the material, vegetal and animal kingdoms into a direct semantic relationship with

ourselves, allowing us to “feel” for (to relate on a personal level to) that which doesn’t

have the same type or complexity of “feeling”—and this is enabled by the relationality

inherent in the dramatic-semantic form.

It is quite possible to abstract drama from its use, in order to analyze its various

forms—leading us to a certain number of “character types” and “plots.”12 Approaching

drama in this way will provide us with a grab-bag of material from which all stories can

be reduced or from which assembled. However, to grapple with the semantic meaning of

drama, to get a handle on the ever escalating field of meaning which literature is

virtualizing, we must again turn toward use, in order to gauge the effect that drama has on

meaning.

The manner of drama’s use can be stretched upon a dichotomy between formal and

informal. At its most formal, drama becomes ritual; at its most informal it becomes a

folktale, an entertainment. 12 The website www.ipl.org provides various lists of plots, ranging from Foster-Harris’s singular “all plots are based on conflict”; with the extension into plots with 1) a happy ending, 2) an unhappy ending, or 3) the “literary plot,” in which the critical event takes place at the beginning rather than the end; from there, ipl.org lists the “7 basic plots” (all having to do with various forms of conflict); then Ronald Tobias’ twenty basic plots (ranging from Quest to Love to Discovery, Sacrifice, Rivalry, The Riddle, and so on); and lastly Georges Polti's T’irty-Six Dramatic Situations. ["The "Basic" Plots in Literature." Frequently Asked Reference Questions. N.p., n.d. Web. 30 May 2015, http://www.ipl.org/div/farq/plotFARQ.html]

As for character types, there’s the Protagonist and Antagonist, the Confidante, the Dynamic/Flat/Foil Characters, and so on. We might also go into the archetypal characters, or the various sorts of caricatures that recur in all sorts of fiction (the trickster, the virgin, etc., etc.).

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As ritual, the enactment of a drama ties the subject through personal experience to his

immediate social unit. Rites of passage are dramatic forms in which a person is fit into a

certain role in the larger drama of clan life. The ritual drama identifies its practitioners as

semiotic units, which it articulates into a larger semantic whole, being the social-unit of

the tribe. The ritual drama thus defines the tribe through the relationships it establishes of

the individual units in the tribe, which allows for its members to think of other members

as necessary for personal meaning. In a sense, to lose a member of one’s tribe would be

like losing a word, were you all a sentence. We see then how a formal drama—that is, a

drama that is taken very seriously—acts as a higher order working of the same dynamics

that are happening at the basic level of language, where it emerges within discourse.

On the other hand, the informal dramas, those that are not to be taken too literally,

also perform an important function, as the narrative pastime, the storytelling

entertainment, is the digesting aloud, as it were, experiences which have been inspired by

life in the world. Additionally, a good storyteller is able to convey very useful

information while still carrying her audience’s attention along—indeed, the narrative

process13 is perhaps the most efficient means of passing information from one person to

the next.

To recap: we put words together to make statements. We put statements together to

make poems and parables. We put poems and parables together to form characters, and

put characters together make dramas. And then what? Well, and then we have a whole

bunch of drama—involving a steadily increasing set of characters who are being steadily

rounded out and events that are extrapolated both forward and backward in time. This

dramatic sprawl has an urban analogue to it, as different versions of stories, different

causal chains, different origins and outcomes come into contact with eachother and in

their contradiction push the reader out of their emersion in the dramatic field.

All this while, as stories have been progressing from the statement, upward, the

authority of the author has been at work creating these semantic unities, and at the

threshold of the “many dramas” the author is called to expand their authority over a host 13 Process in the sense of processing, for literature is not simply “representing” the world, but rather replicating the datum found in the world and recasting this datum into its own ontological sphere. This processing we assert is so indicative to fiction that we as readers often overlook it, even as everything that fiction accomplishes it accomplishes through this process of virtualization—of abstracting the world into language, and then forming through language a virtual world that is merely based on (and not strictly in) the world we think of as real.

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of dramatic units. There must be a mayor, or war-chief, or judge who organizes the

many-dramas, in order that the audience will not be jarred out of their inclusion in the

story. Furthermore, there tends to be a critical mass of dramas, which provides a prompt

for a singular poet to unify them into a broad, “monoglossic” statement—which is

traditionally named the Epic.

If the semiotic units of the epic are dramas, then the semantic statement of the Epic

Poet is on the level of an Empire. In the case of Homer, we have a poetic voice which is

encoded on the level of the statement (by way of hexameter verse and recurrent epithets

which support the meter), through the subjective position of the actors (described as the

“heroic tradition,” but also including the mythic or divine actors), and unified by a grand

narrative parabola (the fall of Troy, Odysseus’ journey). On the Epic-semantic field is

rendered the cultural identity of the Greeks as a whole. And whether or not Homer was

historically real, it is the unifying authority of the Illiad and the Odyssey that is of such

force that it requires us to ascribe it to a singular poet. Inversely, this poetic authority not

only unifies drama, but it unifies a people, and the power of an epic is such that it is

capable of turning the artists who interact with it into vehicles of its semanticizing force.

The Ancient Greek poet, sculptor, painter, etc., found in the Epics a unified vision in

which their entire output could be placed. The Epic becomes a tradition through which

the identity of the artist interacts with the greater identity of his people. The Epic is the

arena where the semantic project of literature “speaks” an entire culture.

Epics themselves can be arranged on a spectrum similar to that of drama—by

evaluating their use, or interpretation. Whereas a drama becomes ritual when taken very

seriously, an Epic becomes scripture, and the same way in which a ritual semanticizes its

participants into a “social statement” the scriptural Epic semanticizes its adherents into a

greater meaning-making unit. A religion such as Christianity, through the writings of St.

Paul, very explicitly ties its adherents to the drama (the Passion) of Christ, so that

metaphorically—and yet somehow compellingly literally—a Christian is considered a

part of the body of Christ, or a part of the body of the Bride of Christ. The Christian Bible

is an epic that, when internalized as scripture, converts its adherents into extensions of its

semanticizing force, calling them to read into their life the working-out of the Biblical

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drama, as well as calling on them to convert others into this semantic structure.14

Taking such epics too seriously is, in modern times, frowned upon,15 and yet one

could argue that human beings use these grand narrative structures to at once make sense

of the world and to fashion a ground with which they may connect and feel at home with

other humans. Additionally, by touching on religion within this essay on fiction, it is not

to be concluded that the truth statements of religion are inherently fictitious; only that the

way in which religions are built is similar—if not identical—to the way in which we

build narratives of less serious or more informal use.

———

To return to history (to move toward the modern novel), the prosaic literary forms of 17th

and 18th century Europe had achieved a stabilization (perhaps stagnation) in the form of

the romance. The romance being an idealized drama which concerned either the nobility

14 Eric Auerbach details the particular effectiveness of the New Testament in drawing the individual into its semantic structure: “What we witness is the awakening of “a new heart and a new spirit.” All this applies not only to Peter’s denial but also to every other occurrence which is related in the New Testament. Every one of them is concerned with the same question, the same conflict with which every human being is basically confronted and which therefore remains infinite and eternally pending. It sets man’s whole world astir—whereas the entanglements of fate and passion which Greco-Roman antiquity knows, always directly concern simply the individual, the one person involved in them. It is only by virtue of the most general relations, that is, by virtue of the fact that we too are human beings and thus are subject to fate and passion, that we experience “fear and pity.” But Peter and the other characters in the New Testament are caught in a universal movement of the depths which at first remains almost entirely below the surface and only very gradually—the Acts of the Apostles show the beginnings of this development—emerges into the foreground of history, but which even now, from the beginning, lays claim to being limitless and the direct concern of everybody, and which absorbs all merely personal conflicts into itself.” Auerbach, Erich. “Fortuna.” Approaches to the Novel. Ed. Robert Scholes San Francisco: Chandler Publishing Co. 1961. Page 66. 15 Catherine Gallagher argues that it is precisely the modern capacity for provisional belief that gives rise to the novel’s particular degree of fictionality: “Modernity is fiction-friendly because it encourages disbelief, speculation, and credit. The early novel’s thematic emphases on gullibility, innocence deceived, rash promises extracted, and impetuous emotional and financial investments of all kinds point to the habit of mind it discourages: faith. The reckless wholeheartedness of its heroes and heroines, their guileless vulnerability, solicits our affectionate concern and thereby activates our skepticism on their behalf. Hence, while sympathizing with innocent credulity, the reader is trained in an attitude of disbelief, which is flattered as superior discernment… Disbelief is thus the condition of fictionality, prompting judgments not about the story’s reality, but about its believability, its plausibility. One is dissuaded from believing the literal truth of a representation so that one can instead admire its likelihood and extend enough credit to buy into the game. Such flexible mental states were the sine qua non of modern subjectivity.” Gallagher, Catherine. “The Rise of Fictionality.” The Novel. Ed. Franco Moretti. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006. Page 345.

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(e.g. the Arthurian romances) or the peasantry (e.g. the picaresque). The romance was a

working out of the medieval epic, having to do with love and honor or their opposites,16

and while the aesthetic quality may have had its low points or high points just as any

rendition of previous epics in other times and other cultures, I propose that with the

printing-press the ease of its production and reproduction is the main distinction between

the romance and the epic, and not any inherent semantic difference—that is, the romance

is not a semanticizing of the epic, nor a new manner of semanticizing drama—it is the

extension of a certain epic frame, belonging to a Medieval value system (both ethic and

aesthetic). The romance doesn’t do anything new, it just does more or less what the

Arthurian and Catholic grand stories were doing for the preceding centuries. With Don

Quixote we have a critique of the romance; showing how much the romance is no longer

relevant in the post-Enlightenment and post-Renaissance reality. And it is with Robinson

Crusoe that we have a new semantic form; a new way of semanticizing within the

narrative field, but Robinson Crusoe isn’t following the exponential ordering that the epic

performs of the drama, and the drama performs of its characters, and characters do of

their situations and emotions, through poems and parables made of statements made of

words. Robinson Crusoe does not necessarily make a greater parabolic arc through which

it treats a number of epics as semiotic units, but rather it emerges within an Intra-Epic

field, where many Epics are vying for authority over the subject.

If a novel is a development in literature, then this model would indicate that the novel

is the semantic form which uses a variety of epics as its semiotic units. And yet a

semantic unity of a number of these massive units would collapse under the tensions

between the various authorities which semanticize the various epics, as well as the

massive amount of cultural data within any given number of epics. So that the modern

development in literature must be located in a container which will not reduce the epics’

16 “Krueger (the Cambridge Companion, 5) has noted rightly that “For an elite minority, romances were a vehicle for the construction of a social code—chivalry—and a mode of sentimental refinement—which some have called ‘courtly love’—by which noble audiences defined their social identities and justifified their privileges, thus reinforcing gender and class distinctions.” It is also true that there is an essential connection between chivalrous endeavors and love, but romance during this period is ever aware of the contradiction, or at least, of the otherness between this model and the religious model and the resulting tragedy. The world of romance is a frightful nightmare enclosed in a beautiful dream.” Vavaro, Alberto. “Medieval French Romance.” The Novel. Ed. Franco Moretti. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006. Page 160

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complexity or neutralize their conflicting authorities. This container must be the ground

through which these various epics interact, or, the interaction between these various epics

allows for the establishment of a ground for the expression of navigating them.

This ground, this container, is the modern subject, who is found between several

semanticizing epics: the church and the state, Nature and Culture, and so on. Each of

these “epics” (or ideologies, or corporations, etc.) are unified in and of themselves by a

singular authority which the subject is forced to balance with other authorities.17 “Render

unto Caesar” now not only applies to the distinction between the state and God, but as

well various different literary and religious systems. In order for the modern man to stand

“outside” any given epic (which he is compelled to do, being a modern man), he must

locate the authority to evaluate the value of his behavior and experience within himself,

as an agent who agrees some with these systems, and not so much with those. The

modern man, to realize his potential, must claim the role of Epic Poet, Prophet, and Priest

for himself; and the grand parabolic arc need only be his life, and the meter and rhyme of

his writ need only be his own thoughts, which through rigorous “honesty” creates a

document that resonates at the same ontological frequency of other modern persons—that

is, the modern author’s project is to project authority through a subject who is very

similarly verisimilar to the modern readership; conserving the energy which would

otherwise be absorbed by the highly formal poetic interface (i.e. hexameter verse), and

freeing the subject to relate directly of his experience. This directness, with a loss of

aesthetic refinement18, affords a rendering of the world and the subject into fiction that is

17 “The early novel concentrates not on true extremes (the unique or near unique) but rather on people who slip beyond the norm and test the social fabric… But even when acts are horrible or characters heinous, the novel finds ways to comprehend them without violating our sense that we are reading about recognizable people in a world we know… The novel’s willingness—indeed, incessant need—to invade traditional areas of privacy…and explore matters traditionally considered too personal to be shared, leads to an entirely new understanding of the relationship between public and private, a moving beyond, even, the ordinary reaches of personal conversation and private discourse.” Hunter, J. Paul. Before Novels. New York: W.W.Norton, 1990. Page 37. 18 Watt speaks of the necessary directness of the novel’s use of language thus: “On the one hand, Defoe and Richardson make an uncompromising application of the realist point of view in language and prose structure, and thereby forfeit other literary values. On the other hand, Fielding’s stylistic virtues tend to interfere with his technique as a novelist, because a patient selectiveness of vision destroys our belief in the reality of report, or at least deviates our attention from the content of the report to the skill of the reporter. There would seem to be some inherent contradiction between the ancient and abiding literary values and the distinctive narrative technique of the novel.” (Watt, p. 95)

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at once fresh and rapidly digestible.

§3. Toward Verification, or maybe Validation19

In the case of Robinson Crusoe, the authority (the semanticizing force) of the modern

novel is Robinson Crusoe, who exists in a semiotic field where multiple epics are

intersecting. One such epic is capitalism, which we see exerting its evaluations of reality

through Crusoe’s constant shopkeeper tallying of accounts owed and due, supplies

retrieved and conserved, and not least of all in his volatile attitude toward money:

I smil’d to my self at the Sight of this Money. O Drug! said I aloud, what art thou good for? Thou art not worth to me, no not the taking off of the Ground; one of those Knives is worth all this Heap; I have no Manner of use for thee, e’en remain where thou art, and go to the Bottom as a Creature whose Life is not worth saving. However, upon Second Thoughts, I took it… (page 43)

That smil’ing to himself, that chastisement of his own greed, is a slim moment of

Robinson standing outside the force of capital (distilled into its excrescence as cash). He

is very concretely outside the system of capitalism, being alone on an island, where his

conditions are such that a rusty knife is of more use than all the jewels of Arabi. But he

has brought Capitalism with him, it is a part of his identity, its force is ingrained in him

such that he can’t look at the world without eyes that valuate it as capital. Crusoe’s

capitalism isn’t an isolated force, for it exists within a network of other values, such as

his attitude toward Labor and Time, which he justifies after a few pages devoted to bread-

making:

This observation of the necessary directness of “reportage” needs be modified to fit with the

Semantic Model, which does propose that the modern novel is inherently more “direct” than the previous literary forms, only, this directness is not situated in the manner of the modern novel’s style or its structure, but rather in the mediation which its virtualized subject performs between their experience and the various forces which intrude upon it. In fact, because the novel exists in an Intra-Epic field, these epics are baring down upon the modern subject indirectly, even subconsciously, so that style and structure in novels later than Defoe and Richardson’s are themselves used to combat and modify these systems, and therefore establish the modern subject as dominant over the epic forces which would appropriate her into themselves, as their extension, mouthpiece, or victim. 19 While the Semantic Model can be used (as will be shown) as another way of reading a particular instance of the novel form, it is primarily concerned with the construction of literature, over its consumption. As a conceptual model, however, it should be useful for either endeavor.

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Any one may judge the Labour of my Hands in such a Piece of Work; but Labour and Patience carry’d me through that and many other Things: I only observe this in Particular, to shew The Reason why so much of my Time went away with so little Work, viz. That what might be a little to be done with Help and Tools, was a vast Labour and requir’d a prodigious Time to do alone, and by hand. (page 84)

“So little Work” does not mean laziness or lack of activity on the part of Crusoe, but

rather a dearth of product resulting from his productivity. Defoe has constructed a poetics

of tedium through Crusoe’s patient (in the sense of long-suffering) industrialism, where

the arena in which Crusoe’s strength, wit, and character are tested is, in the first half of

the novel, a struggle to survive in harsh material circumstances with only his knowledge

and will, which Crusoe presents directly to us in long sentences fraught with commas of

very little rhythmic regularity. All of this goes to heighten the moments of success and

violence which release the tension of Crusoe’s laborious relation of his context.

This analogue of Time which Defoe has created establishes a floor through which the

Intra-Epic field can be navigated, especially in the second half of the novel, when Crusoe

begins to intersect with other cultures. Possibly the most direct “proof” of the extrusion

of a cultural epic onto the personal subject comes on page 124, when Crusoe reconsiders

his attitude toward the cannibals:

How far these People were Offenders against me, and what Right I had to engage in the Quarrel of that Blood, which they shed promiscuously one upon another, I debated this very often with my self thus; How do I know what God himself judges in this particular Case; it is certain these People either do not commit this as a Crime, it is not against their own Consciences reproving, or their Light reproaching them. They do not know it be an Offence, and then commit it in Defiance of Divine Justice, as we do in almost all the Sins we commit, They think it no more a Crime to kill a Captive taken in War than we do to kill an Ox; nor to eat humane Flesh, than we do to eat Mutton… It follow’d necessarily, that I was certainly in the Wrong in it, that these People were not Murtherers, in the Sense that I had before condemn’d them, in my Thoughts

Here we find a virtual subject contending with the relativity of cultural systems. The

one he carries in his breast requires serious contemplation not to apply to persons of

another value system. The Judgment is passed on to a higher authority (page 125: “they

were National, and I ought to leave them to the Justice of God, who is the Governor of

Nations, and knows how by National Punishments to make a just Retribution for National

Offenses”) after which, Crusoe finds a great “Satisfaction” for not rushing to do

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something he’d regret. In the midst of this passage, Crusoe had compared his possible

preemptive strike to the actions performed by the colonizing Spaniards, “a bloody and

unnatural piece of Cruelty,” against the natives of America. He is aware of the abuses of

a different brand of his Christianity, when it is applied blindly, without empathy, to other

cultures. He recognizes that the authority within his culture might not extend beyond his

culture, providing him an opportunity to stand outside that authority, as its adjudicator

and translator.

The opportunity of violence does come, however, and through his confrontation with

the cannibals Crusoe gains his companion Friday. Their relationship is established fairly

quickly in Crusoe’s favor, as if they dynamic of master and servant is a cross-cultural

constant. It is when Crusoe attempts to indoctrinate Friday into the Christian religion that

is shown Crusoe’s ineptitude in the promulgation of the logic of his Christian system:

But, says [Friday] again, if God much strong, much might as the Devil, why God no kill the Devil, so make him no more do wicked?

I was strangely surprised at his Question, and after all, tho’ I was now an old Man, yet I was but a young Doctor, and ill enough qualified for a Casuist, or a Solver of Difficulties… I therefore diverted the present Discourse between me and my Man, rising up hastily, as upon some sudden Occasion of going out; then sending him for something a good way off, I seriously pray’d to God that he would enable me to instruct savingly this poor Savage.

Confounded by his theological system, he is confronted again by his Christianity’s

boundary, which here lies in that he can’t get it to makes sense to Friday. He does persist

in explaining certain aspects of his faith, such as his abhorrence of: “the Policy of making

a secret Religion, in order to preserve the Veneration of the People to the Clergy, is not

only to be found in the Roman, but perhaps among all Religions in the World, even

among the most brutish and barbarous Savages.” (page 157) Like the master-servant

dynamic, so the abuse of authority is trans-cultural.

Ironically enough, Crusoe does act as a sort of priest, initiating his faithful Friday in

the rites of Western weaponry: “I let him into the Mystery, for such it was to him, of

Gunpowder, and Bullet, and taught him how to shoot.” (page 160)

Crusoe’s location of Authority in himself is exemplified with the introduction of first

Friday and then others into his self-referent system of life: “My island was now peopled,

and I thought myself very rich in Subjects; and it was a merry Reflection which I

frequently made, How like a King I look’d.” (page 174) Later on, when a European ship

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arrives, and a dispossessed Captain is brought on shore to be presumably murthered,

Crusoe qualifies his assistance of the Captain:

Well, says I, my Conditions are but two. 1. That while you stay on this Island with me, you will not pretend to any Authority here… 2. That if the Ship is, or may be recover’d, you will carry me and my Man to England Passage free. (page 184)

It is telling that first and foremost, Crusoe wishes his Authority to be preserved (he is

the sole definer of terms, within his system), and then his second condition, though it is

ostensibly about his salvation from his island, is concluded with a monetary caveat: he

will not have any sort of debt held over him, should he be got to England.

Robinson Crusoe, as the story of a man removed from his society, provides a clean

and clear examination of the working out of the modern novel within an “Intra-Epic field.”

The parabolic arc is encapsulated by the interior of the subject, who interacts with his

exterior context by searching for his existential meaning in his relationship with his

environment. This relationship, as detailed above, provides an arena for him to work out

the larger systems of capitalism, Christianity, and what they mean to him personally. By

viewing the modern subject as a crossroads of greater “epic” structures, we are able to

view the novel itself under various lights without those lights necessarily eclipsing the

others. Robinson Crusoe is not about capitalism or about the Protestant Work Ethic, or

Colonialism—rather, it is about a subject who uses these various systems to build (or

semanticize) his own life. Robinson Crusoe and Robinson Crusoe thus necessitate

eachother: the novel and the subject it presents are at the same work: to establish

themselves as distinct and self-willed entities within history and the history of literature.

This work is exemplified quite clearly in Robinson’s justification for writing down his

circumstances, even though no one will ever read them:

I now began to consider my Condition, and the Circumstances I was reduc’d to, and I drew up the State of my affairs in Writing, not so much to leave them to any that were to come after me, for I was like to have but few Heirs, as to deliver my Thoughts from daily pouring upon them, and afflicting my Mind; and as my Reason began now to master my Despondency, I began to comfort my self as well as I could, and to set the good against from worse, and I stated it very impartially, like Debtor and Creditor, the Comforts I enjoy’d, against the Miseries I suffr’d… (page 53)

§4. Conclusion

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The Semantic Model laid out in this paper is not intended to explain modern literature in

toto, nor could it do such a thing, as it now stands. Rather, it is hoped that by describing

the manner in which literature is assembled, we can see the novel as indeed an innovation

in the way in which meaning is conveyed—through a highly developed manipulation of

textual elements to model a virtualized world full of forces ranging from immediate

physical sensations and mood swings, to haunted castles, island ecosystems, geopolitical

conflicts. The modern novel is a medium which, existing between epics, uses these epics

as scaffolding to erect an epic-sized individual; a modern subject making a modern sense

of things; where that “making sense of things” is a process of semanticizing and being

semanticized by forces which are as it were in the background, on the horizon, exerting

pressures which cause the subject’s experience to take on a certain shape. This shape isn’t

the shape of a parabola anymore, unless that parabola be the gabling on which has grown

this swollen vine producing a wealth of “self” at every stage of its arc.

Yet this question remains: what next? What comes next, after an author has

developed a style, accrued to herself a number of epithets & logical pivots in the form of

statements; after she has learnt the subjective poetics and the devices of plot; after she has

tuned her ear to character and her eye to social relationships; after she has proliferated a

unique lore and then unified this into an epic—and after she has done all that, and then

worked her way to a modern subject, who struggles his way through the space between

her epics and her world and other epics and other worlds—is there an innovation to be

grappled with—is there a further field? Would she use various genres as her semiotic

units, to breach into that uncharted plane of meaning? Or is this already covered in “post-

modernism” or “post-post-modernism”? I am convinced there is innovation to be had,

and not at the expense of relevance. I am drawn to this quote by Wittgenstein, for in it I

hear the greatest possibility for a new literature: “My work consists of two parts, the one

presented here plus all that I have not written. And it is precisely this second part that is

the important one.”20

Literature’s progress has always come from between words, from between images &

thoughts, from between statements and actions, from between characters, between

dramas, between epics—as though fiction were a fabric, as if text were a textile, that

20 Paul Engelmann, Letters From Wittgenstein With a Memoir, Tr. L. Furtmüller, Ed. B.F. McGuinness (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1967), page 143.

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clothe one thing in order to undress21 another.

21 That is, address.

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Works Cited

Auerbach, Erich. “Fortuna.” Approaches to the Novel. Ed. Robert Scholes San Francisco:

Chandler Publishing Co. 1961. Blake, William. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, 1793. Engelmann, Paul, Letters From Wittgenstein With a Memoir, Tr. L. Furtmüller, Ed. B.F.

McGuinness. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1967. Frye, Northrop. The Educated Imagination, Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1964. Gallagher, Catherine. “The Rise of Fictionality.” The Novel. Ed. Franco Moretti. Princeton:

Princeton University Press, 2006. Hunter, J. Paul. Before Novels. New York: W.W.Norton, 1990. Morson, Gary Saul. "The Aphorism: Fragments from the Breakdown of Reason." New Literary

History 34.3 (2003): Morson, Gary Saul, and Caryl Emerson. Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics. Stanford, CA:

Stanford U, 1990. Ong, Walter. Orality and Literacy, London, Routledge, 1988. Ricoeur, Paul. Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning, Fort Worth, Texas,

Texas Christian University Press, 1973 Vavaro, Alberto. “Medieval French Romance.” The Novel. Ed. Franco Moretti. Princeton:

Princeton University Press, 2006. Watt, Ian. The Rise of the Novel; Studies in Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding. Berkeley: U of

California, 1957. Whitehead, Alfred North, and Bertrand Russell. Principia Mathematica. Cambridge: UP, 1925 "The "Basic" Plots in Literature." Frequently Asked Reference Questions. N.p., n.d. Web. 30 May

2015, http://www.ipl.org/div/farq/plotFARQ.html