How apropos to yesterday’s discussion of modernity!

but these comments are unpolitic of me, as these texts are not on our syllabus, and I have yet to plumb those that are!

Gregory Claeys, ed. Modern British Utopias 1700-1850. 8 vols. Pickering and Chatto (fax: +44-0-171-405-6216), 1997. 4128 pp. £550 (approx. $880) cloth.

There is something disconcertingly ironic in the marketing of a multi-volume set of utopias that only the rich can afford—and especially when it comes from an academic publishing house whose logo features a laurel wreath encircling the words “Mundus Intellectualis.” But, be that as it may, this very handsome set of British utopian works from the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries must be seen as a major publishing breakthough. For the first time, to my knowledge, a wide variety of utopian and anti-utopian texts from this period—the famous, the infamous, and the virtually unknown—have been assembled into one series and made accessible to the (library-going) public. For the eighteenth-century literary scholar or historian, these tomes constitute a veritable treasure-trove of primary materials, including:

Annus Sophiae Jubilaeus. The Sophick Constitution: or, the Evil Customs of the World Reformed (1700)

[Ambrose Evans]. The Adventures and Surprising Deliverances of James Dubourdieu (1719)

[Ambrose Evans]. The Adventures of Alexander Vendchurch (1719)

The last line of “The Adventures of Rivella”-
“…that it would have been a Fault in her, not to have been Faulty,” brought to mind something R.D. Laing said in, I think, “The Politics of Experience,” (something I thought at the time I read it must have been inspired by my ex-husband), “There must be something the matter with him because he thinks there’s nothing the matter with him.”

On authentic desire – wanting someone only when others want them – this must be hard-wired. Have you ever seen small children playing with lots of toys around, and when one child picks up a toy that had hitherto been neglected, it’s suddenly a very in-demand plaything, and they start to fight over it? I have…

Candice’s edition of “Rivella” had another narrative in it by Ambrose Evans or Alex Vendchurch, the title of which was something like, “”Adventures and Surprizes of James Duboundieu and His Wife”…I’m going to see if I can find out anything more about it, and will post…

I think that Moll Flanders will provide another level of interpretive complexity–due to the outrageous criminality of the character and the interaction between her culpability and the circumstances in which she finds herself.

There’s a whole other stream of interpretation of the early novel which stresses its allegorical nature…that Crusoe is not meant to be approached as a character with depth–he’s simply an allegory for humanity’s separation from God–and for the Protestant separation from spiritual fellowship. This mode of reading persists for a long time…and even shows up today. I had a professor in grad school who read Richardson’s Clarissa very allegorically–as the tale of a soul “too pure for this world.” [goodness!]

(Also, as Amanda noted, not everyone reads Crusoe with such attention to detail that they’d even be so struck by his shiftiness…)

In the above post, I’m trying to understand if/how the rest of us could relate to him/ sympathize with him even if we can’t directly relate to him… (That is, those of us who catch and are caught on Crusoe’s difficult characteristics.)

Meaning that if you can’t directly relate to Crusoe, the very thing that may keep you from relating to him may ultimately force you to relate to him on some level–or at least to try to understand him. He’s typical enough to catch some people, and messed up enough to catch the rest…? So, yeah, maybe I do agree with Coleridge in some twisted way…

And now I’ll drop this topic… I haven’t been as concise as I wish I’d been, and I don’t seem to be getting much clearer!

Here it is, such as it is…

I think that it was Coleridge whose comments we were referencing in class (right??), but I’m glad you said Wordsworth, Mark, because it reminded me of something I’ve been thinking about and working on recently–namely, different conceptions of sympathy, who counts as a sympathetic character, how does one enact sympathy in his/her readership, etc. And, more specifically, it gives me the opportunity to think about how anyone could feel that Crusoe is a universally sympathetic character. (And I realize that I’m translating “relate to” to “sympathize with,” but the two are at least similar terms…)

For Adam Smith et al., sympathy was dependent on our approval of the emotional reaction of another. We as readers will not sympathize with the Bunyan of Grace Abounding, for example, if we think he is overreacting to his situation. If, on the other hand, we think he is being perfectly reasonable in his reactions, we will, by our imaginations, put ourselves in his position and feel with him. (As Smith writes, “sympathy…does not arise so much from the view of the passion, as from that of the situation which excites it.” But sympathy is stopped in its tracks when we see someone reacting in a way we would never react, i.e. if they’re reacting in an unreasonable or irrational way.)

In my estimation, it would be hard to argue that Crusoe is a universally sympathetic character by Smith’s standards. Maybe if we (like Mark aptly suggests) think about the differences between the reader of 2007 and the reader of 1719, we’ll get somewhere. But I don’t think that even judging by the standards of the time that Crusoe is a universally sympathetic character. Even if lying, revision, and a lack of psychological growth were more normal for characters back then, it can’t have been *that* acceptable. (Right? Maybe not–let me know!) And if we “approve” of Crusoe’s measures towards survival, can we really approve of his psychological reactions to his situation? As we said in class, Crusoe never sits down and thinks about his loved ones. I would think that reflections on the loss of loved ones would be a sure invitation to Smithian sympathy–and how could we sympathize with a character who seems to never dwell on his family and friends?

Anyway, since we’re thinking about Wordsworth and Coleridge now, and I was initially shocked by the fact that the latter (?) could have said that Crusoe is everyman…

For young Wordsworth–and Coleridge, at least sort-of, I’d assume, as they still collaborated in 1802–sympathy was something quite different than it was for Adam Smith. (NB: Sympathy in Wordsworth is a sticky argument right now, and I won’t really get into the thick of it here.)

Anyway, if sympathy exists at all in Lyrical Ballads (1798, 1800, 1802…), it exists for all sorts of characters whose reactions we could never really approve of–madwomen, old men, an idiot boy, a stubborn little girl, a crying shepherd. (Yes, others wrote about those characters at the time, but scholars now pretty much agree that Wordsworth gives these characters unprecedented respect…) In the Preface, Wordsworth emphasizes the fitness of the reader’s mind, but not the minds of his poetic subjects.

In the Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1800 and 1802), Wordsworth also writes that in his poetry, “the feeling therein developed gives importance to the action and situation, and not the action and situation to the feeling.” This (among other things) suggests that feeling (not action) is the point of entry for sympathy–and it’s no longer as important that the reader agree with how the object of sympathy reacts to his situation because the feeling makes the situation matter. And by feeling, I take Wordsworth to largely (if not mainly) refer to our feeling upon reading his poetry (more than the feelings/ reactions of his poetic subjects themselves). And we will feel upon reading Lyrical Ballads because it is well-executed poetry, because we are spun into the narratives, because the poems implicate us in the process of meaning-making.

(Of course my argument for all of this is much, much longer, but believe me when I say I have cause to argue what I argue and cause to read Wordsworth’s sympathy as such …)

(And I won’t follow Mark along the cognitive neuroscience path at the moment, but there are things to be said about it at some other time.)

So anyway, I’ve tried to apply this sketchily described brand of Wordsworthian/ Coleridgian sympathy to Crusoe and try to see how he could become everyman–and it’s problematic, but let me give you a few thoughts…

1) If we ascribe to Wordsworth’s brand of sympathy, it doesn’t matter if Crusoe is at times unreasonable/ irrational–or even downright mad. We (and everyone else) can potentially relate to him nevertheless–as long as our own minds are in decent shape.

2) The situations DeFoe describes can be seen a narrative technique in and of themselves. Building off of what Prof Hintz (and others?) said in class, we can see the situations as extreme, irresistible, and psychologically provocative–and not merely sensational. We cannot but be drawn in by them; they effectively involve us in the story.

3) Crusoe’s flaws become a means of eliciting sympathy. When it comes to Crusoe, my frustration itself suggests that I’m involved in the narrative, and that DeFoe has successfully created feeling within me. I’m annoyed, I’m involved. Because Crusoe reacts so strangely, lies, and revises, I’m left trying to get into his head and heart to figure out why the hell he is who he is and does what he does. I don’t approve of him, and this is why I end up trying to understand his feelings. As I try to figure him out, I cannot but experience some kind of sympathy for him. If he were simple and straightforward and reacted in ways I completely approve of and/or in ways that seem completely reasonable to me, I might naturally relate to him–but it would be an easy (perhaps superficial) emotional transaction. I wouldn’t be sitting at my desk thinking, “If I were on a desert island, wouldn’t I miss my family? Why doesn’t he think about his mother more often? I would think about my mother… And what of his friends?…”

So… Crusoe could be everyman and ultra-relatable because of DeFoe and the narrative, and because he’s a flawed character–*not* because we think we’re actually a lot like him and approve of his reactions.

(…And I realize that I’m ignoring implications of this argument–like the nuances of the feeling/ situation problem, how this applies to stuff other than Crusoe and Lyrical Ballads, etc.)