Why Read the Classics?

  Sure evidence of his story-telling gifts had already surfaced on many occasions in Defoe’s previous writings, especially when narrating contemporary or historical events, which he embellished with imaginative detail, or when recounting the biographies of famous men which were based on apocryphal evidence.

  With these experiences behind him, Defoe set about writing his novel. Given the autobiographical thrust of the work, it not only deals with the adventures of the shipwreck and the desert island, but actually starts from the beginning of the protagonist’s life and continues until his old age. In this respect Defoe was paying homage to a moralistic pretext, a kind of didacticism which, it must be said, is too narrow and elementary to be taken seriously: obedience to one’s father, the superiority of middle-class life, and of the modest bourgeois existence over all the blandishments of outrageous fortune. It is for contravening these lessons that Robinson meets such disaster.

  Avoiding both seventeenth-century bombast and the sentimentality typical of eighteenth-century English narrative, Defoe’s language has a sobriety and an economy which, like Stendhal’s ‘dry as the Napoleonic code style’, one might compare to that of a ‘business report’: here the device of the first-person sailor-merchant, who is capable of entering in columns as in an accounts book both the ‘evil’ and the ‘good’ of his situation, and of maintaining an arithmetical calculation of the number of cannibals killed, turns out to be as much an appropriate stylistic expedient as a practical one. Like a business report or a catalogue of goods and utensils, Defoe’s prose is unadorned but at the same time scrupulously detailed. The accumulation of detail is aimed at convincing the reader of the veracity of his account, but also expresses better than any other style could the sense of the value of every object, every action, every gesture in the shipwreck’s condition (just as in Moll Flanders and Colonel Jack the anxiety and joy of material possession is conveyed by the lists of stolen objects).

  The descriptions of Robinson’s manual operations are given in painstaking detail: how he digs his house out of the rock, surrounds it with a palisade, builds himself a boat which he is then unable to carry as far as the sea, and learns how to shape and heat vases and bricks. Because of this interest and delight in reporting Robinson’s technical progress, Defoe is famous even today as the writer who celebrates man’s patient struggle with matter, and exalts the lowliness and difficulty but also the greatness of all activity, as well as the joy of seeing things being created by our hands. From Rousseau to Hemingway, all those writers who have shown us that testing ourselves, and succeeding or failing in ‘doing something’ however great or small, are real measures of human worth, can recognise Defoe as their first model.

  Robinson Crusoe is without doubt a book to be reread line by line, and we will continually make new discoveries. His capacity for avoiding, at crucial moments, any excessive self-congratulation or exultation by using just a few words before moving on to practical questions may seem to contrast with the sermonising tone of certain pages later on, once a bout of illness has led the protagonist back to the thought of religion: for instance, that moment when he realises that he is the sole survivor of all the crew — ‘as for them, I never saw them afterwards, or any sign of them, except three of their hats, one cap, and two shoes that were not fellows’ — and after the briefest of thanks to God he immediately starts to look round and consider his plight.

  But Defoe’s approach in both Crusoe and in the later novels is very similar to that of the business man who obeys the rules, who when it is time for the service goes into church and beats his breast, but then hurries back out so as not to waste time away from his work. Hypocrisy? His behaviour is too open and urgent to deserve such a charge; Defoe maintains even in his brusque alternations of tone a basic, healthy sincerity which is his unmistakable hallmark.

  Then again, sometimes his humorous vein broaches even the battlefields of the political and religious controversies of his age: as when we hear the arguments between the savage who cannot comprehend the idea of the devil and the sailor who cannot explain it to him. Or as in that situation when Robinson is lord of ‘but three subjects, and they were of three different religions. My man Friday was a Protestant, his father was a Pagan and a cannibal, and the Spaniard was a Papist. However, I allowed liberty of conscience throughout my dominions.’ But not even this subtle and ironic emphasis is present when we read one of the most paradoxical and significant moments in the book: after longing for years to reestablish contact with the rest of the world, now every time he sees a human presence appear around the island Robinson feels the threats to his life increase; and when he learns of the existence of a group of shipwrecked Spanish sailors on a nearby island he is afraid of joining them in case they want to hand him over to the Inquisition.

  Even on the shores of the desert island, then, ‘near the great river Oroonoque’, the ebb and flow of the ideas, passions and culture of an epoch are still felt. Certainly, although in his determination to play the role of adventure-story writer he dwells on the horror in his descriptions of the cannibals, he was not unaware of Montaigne’s reflections on the anthropophagi (these same ideas had left their mark on Shakespeare in his story of another mysterious island in The Tempest): without such ideas Robinson would never have reached the conclusion that ‘these people were not murderers’, but men from a different civilisation, obeying their own laws: They do not know it to be an offence any more than those Christians were murderers who often put to death the prisoners taken in battle.’

  [1955]

  Candide, or Concerning

  Narrative Rapidity

  Geometric characters, animated by a flickering mobility, stretch and twist in a saraband of precision and lightness: that was how Paul Klee illustrated Voltaire’s Candide in 1911, giving visual — and almost musical — form to the energetic brio which this book continues to communicate to today’s readers, above and beyond its thick network of references to its own epoch and culture.

  What most delights us today in Candide is not the ‘conte philosophique’, nor its satire, nor the gradual emergence of a morality and vision of the world: instead it is its rhythm. With rapidity and lightness, a succession of mishaps, punishments and massacres races over the page, leaps from chapter to chapter, and ramifies and multiplies without evoking in the reader’s emotions anything other than a feeling of an exhilarating and primitive vitality. In the bare three pages of Chapter 8 Cunégonde recounts how having had her father, mother and brother hacked to pieces by invaders, she is then raped and disembowelled, then cured and reduced to living as a washerwoman, bartered and sold in Holland and Portugal, torn between two different protectors of different faiths on alternate days, and in this condition happens to witness the auto da fé whose victims are Pangloss and Candide himself whom she then rejoins. Even less than two pages of Chapter 9 are enough for Candide to find himself with two corpses at his feet and for Cunégonde to be able to exclaim: ‘How did you who were born so mild ever manage to kill in the space of two minutes a Jew and a prelate?’ And when the old woman has to explain why she has only one buttock, she starts by telling the story of her life from the moment when as the thirteen-year-old daughter of a Pope, she had experienced in the space of three months poverty, enslavement, and almost daily rape, before having to endure famine and war and nearly dying of the plague in Algiers: and all this before she can get to her tale of the siege of Azov and of the unusual nutrition that the starving Janissaries discover in female buttocks … well, here things are rather more leisurely, two whole chapters are required, something like six and a half pages.

  The great discovery of Voltaire the humorist is a technique that will become one of the most reliable gags in comic films: the piling up of disaster on disaster at relentless speed. There are also the sudden increases in rhythm which carry the sense of the absurd almost to the point of paroxysm: as when the series of misfortunes already swiftly narrated in the detailed account is then repeated in a breakneck-speed summary. Wh
at Voltaire projects in his lightning-speed photograms is really a worldwide cinema, a kind of ‘around the world in eighty pages’, which takes Candide from his native Westphalia to Holland, Portugal, South America, France, England, Venice and Turkey, and this tour then splits in turn into supplementary whirlwind world tours by fellow protagonists, male and especially female, who are easy prey for pirates and slavers operating between Gibraltar and the Bosphorus. A huge cinema of contemporary world events most of all: villages wiped out in the Seven Years’ War between the Prussians and the French (the ‘Bulgars’ and the ‘Abars’), the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, the auto da fés organised by the Inquisition, the Jesuits of Paraguay who reject Spanish and Portuguese rule, the legendary gold of the Incas, and the odd snapshot of Protestantism in Holland, of the spread of syphilis, Mediterranean and Atlantic piracy, internecine wars in Morocco, the exploitation of black slaves in Guyana, but always leaving a certain space for literary news, allusions to Parisian high life, interviews with the many dethroned kings of the time, who all gather at the Venice carnival.

  A world in total disarray; nobody anywhere is saved except in the only country that is wise and happy, El Dorado. The link between happiness and wealth ought not to exist since the Incas are unaware that the gold dust of their streets and their diamond cobbles is so precious to the men from the Old World; and yet, strange as it may seem, Candide does find a wise and happy society in that exact spot, amidst the deposits of precious metals. It is there that Pangloss might finally be right, that the best of all possible worlds might become reality: except that El Dorado is hidden amidst the most inaccessible mountain ranges of the Andes, perhaps in a piece of the map that has been torn away, a non-place, a utopia.

  But if this land of Cockaigne possesses vague and unconvincing touches typical of all utopias, the rest of the world, with its constant tribulations, despite the rapidity with which these are recounted, is not at all a mannered representation. ‘That is the price that must be paid for you to eat sugar in Europe!’, says the Dutch Guyana negro, after telling the protagonists about his punishments in just a few lines; similarly the courtesan in Venice says, ‘Oh, sir, if you could only imagine what it is like to be forced to caress, whether you like it or not, an old merchant, a lawyer, a friar, a gondolier, an abbot; to be exposed to all manner of insults and affronts; often to be reduced to having to beg the loan of a skirt just in order to have it removed by a repulsive old man; to be robbed by one man of what one has just earned from another; to have a price on one’s head set by those who administer justice, and to have nothing else to look forward to but a horrendous old age, in a hospital or a dungheap…’

  It is true that the characters in Candide appear to be made of rubber: Pangloss is wasted by syphilis, then they hang him, they tie him to the oar of a galley, and then he pops up again alive and kicking. But it would be wrong to say that Voltaire glosses over the cost of suffering: what other novel has the courage to present the heroine who at the beginning had been ‘comely in complexion, fresh, plump, attractive’, later as a Cunégonde who is ‘turned dark in complexion, gummy-eyed, flat-chested, with wrinkled cheeks, and the skin of her arms red and chapped’?

  By this stage we realise that our reading of Candide, which was intended to be totally external, a surface reading, has taken us back to the core of its ‘philosophy’, of Voltaire’s vision of the world. Which is not solely the polemical attack on Pangloss’s providential optimism: if we look closely, we see that the mentor who accompanies Candide longest is not the unfortunate Leibnitzian pedagogue, but the ‘Manichean’ Martin, who is inclined to see in the world only the victories of the devil; and if Martin does embody the role of anti-Pangloss, we cannot definitely say that he is the one who triumphs. It is pointless, says Voltaire, to seek a metaphysical explanation for evil, as the optimist Pangloss and the pessimist Martin do, because this evil is subjective, indefinable, and unmeasurable; no design of the universe exists, or if one does exist, it is God who knows it not man. Voltaire’s ‘rationalism’ is an ethical, voluntaristic attitude, which stands out against a theological background which is as incommensurate with man as Pascal’s was.

  If this carousel-round of disasters can be contemplated with a smile playing around our lips it is because human life is brief and limited; there is always someone who can call himself worse off than ourselves; and if there was someone who by chance had nothing to complain about and had every good thing that life can give, he would end up like Signor Pococurante, the Venetian Senator, who turns up his nose at everything, finding fault where he ought only to find reason for satisfaction and admiration. The really negative character in the book is the bored Pococurante; deep down Pangloss and Martin, though they give hopeless, nonsensical replies to questions, fight back against the torments and risks which are the stuff of life.

  The subdued vein of wisdom which emerges in the book through marginal spokesmen such as the Anabaptist Jacques, the old Inca, and that Parisian savant who so much resembles the author himself, is articulated in the end by the mouth of the dervish in the famous maxim to ‘cultivate our garden’. This of course is a very reductive moral; one which ought to be understood in its intellectual significance of being anti-metaphysical: you should not give yourself problems other than those that you can resolve with your own direct practical application. And in its social significance: this is the first enunciation of work as the substance of all worth. Nowadays the affirmation ’il faut cultiver notre jardin sounds to our ears heavy with egotistical, bourgeois connotations: as inappropriate as could be, given our present worries and anxieties. It is no accident that it is enunciated in the final page, almost after the end of this book in which work appears only as a curse and in which gardens are regularly devastated. This too is a utopia, no less than the realm of the Incas: the voice of reason in Candide is nothing but utopian. But it is also no accident that it is the sentence from the book that has become most famous, so much so that it has become proverbial. We must not forget the radical epistemological and ethical change which this phrase signalled (we are in 1759, exactly 30 years before the Bastille fell): man judged no longer by his relation to a transcendent Good or Evil but in the little or much that he can actually achieve. And this is the source both of a work ethic that is strictly ‘productive’ in the capitalist sense of the word, and of a moral of practical, responsible and concrete commitment without which there are no general problems which can be resolved. In short, man’s real choices in life today stem from this book.

  [1974]

  Denis Diderot, Jacques le Fataliste

  Diderot’s status amongst the founding fathers of contemporary literature is continually rising, and mostly because of his antinovel, or metanovel, or hypernovel, Jacques the Fatalist and his Master, the text’s richness and innovative thrust will never be fully exhausted.

  The first thing to note is that Diderot reverses what was the principal intention of all authors of the time, that of making the reader forget that he is reading a book, and of then having him abandon himself to the story being narrated as though he were experiencing the events for himself. Instead Diderot foregrounds the conflict between the author who is telling his story and the reader who is waiting only to hear it: the curiosity, expectations, disappointments and protests of the reader, which are pitted against the intentions, polemics and whims of the author in deciding how the plot will develop, constitute a dialogue which frames the dialogue between the two protagonists, which in turn acts as a frame for other dialogues…

  Diderot transforms the reader’s relationship to the book from one of passive acceptance to that of continuous debate or rather one of constant surprise which keeps his critical spirit alive. In doing so he anticipates by two centuries Brecht’s aims in the theatre. The only difference is that Brecht will do so on the basis of very precise didactic aims, whereas Diderot gives the impression of wanting only to abandon any deliberate authorial intention.

  It must be said that Diderot plays a kind of
cat and mouse game with the reader, opening up a range of different possibilities at every turning in the plot, almost leaving him to select the development which he prefers, only then to delude him by rejecting all of them but one, and that one is always the least ‘novelistic’ development. In this respect Diderot is a forerunner of the idea of ‘potential literature’ which would be so dear to Raymond Queneau, yet he also rejects it to a certain extent: for Queneau will set up a model for his Un Conte à votre façon (Yours for the Telling) in which we seem to hear Diderot inviting the reader to choose a sequel, whereas in fact Diderot wanted to prove that there could only be one sequel to the plot. (And this corresponds to a precise philosophical option, as we shall see.)

  Jacques the Fatalist is a work that eludes rules and classification, and acts as a kind of touchstone against which to test several definitions coined by literary theorists. The structure is one of ‘deferred narrative’: Jacques starts telling the story of his love affairs but, after interruptions, digressions, and other stories inserted into the middle of his own, only concludes them at the end of the book. This structure, articulated in a Chinese-box pattern of stories inside other stories, is not only dictated by a taste for what Bakhtin will term ‘polyphonic’, ‘Menippean’, or ‘Rabelaisian’ narrative: it is for Diderot the only authentic image of the living world, which is never linear nor stylistically homogeneous, though its linkages, while discontinuous, always reveal an inner logic.

  In all of this one cannot ignore the influence of Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, an explosive novelty of the time in terms of literary form and of attitude towards the things of this world: Sterne’s novel is an example of a freewheeling, digressive narrative which lies at the opposite extreme from eighteenth-century French taste. Anglophilia in literature has always been a vital stimulus for the literatures of continental Europe: Diderot made it his emblem in his crusade for expressive ‘truth’. Critics have pointed out phrases and episodes which have migrated from Sterne’s novel to Jacques; and Diderot, in order to prove how little he cared about charges of plagiarism, actually declares before one of the final scenes in the book that he has copied it from Tristram Shandy. In truth whether he lifted the odd page either word for word or paraphrased does not matter very much; in its broad outlines Jacques; a picaresque story about the wanderings of two characters on horseback who narrate, listen to and live through various adventures, is as different as could be from Tristram Shandy, which embroiders on largely domestic episodes involving a group of family members or people from the same parish, dealing in particular with the grotesque particulars of a birth and the early misfortunes of the infant. The similarity between the two works should be sought at a deeper level: the real theme of both books is the concatenation of causes, the inextricable linkage of circumstances which determines every event, even the most insignificant, and which has taken the place of Fate for modern writers and readers.