Picturing the Thing Itself, or Not: Defoe, Painting, Prose Fiction, and the Arts of Describing
Maximillian E. Novak, University of California
Volume 9, no. 1, October 1996
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ABSTRACT
This essay explores the relationship between Defoe’s fiction and painting, but, in a broader sense, I hope that my investigations have significance for the novel in general. Since Ian Watt’s paradigmatic argument that individualism and realism are the true cause of the proliferation of novelistic texts throughout the eighteenth century, numerous alternative scripts have been proposed: the novel as continuity of romance; the novel as continuation of the picaresque; the novel as representing a dialectic between empiricism and morality; the novel as an essentially feminine text, and so on. Present at the heart of many of these scenarios are the fictions of Daniel Defoe: Robinson Crusoe, Moll Flanders, Captain Singleton, Memoirs of a Cavalier, A Journal of the Plague Year, Colonel Jack, and Roxana. If Defoe is not discussed, the decision itself represents a silence that demands discussion. A more customary silence in these paradigms, however, is the lack of any discussion of realist painting, the form which, in its “faithful representing of commonplace things,” seemed to George Eliot the closest parallel to realism in the novel. What I want to do in this essay is, first, to establish Defoe’s interest in painting; second, to argue that the cliché about Defoe’s realism resembling a Dutch painting may in fact suggest that Defoe drew much from the contemporary artistic form that best represented the real; third, to maintain that Defoe only gradually came to understand some of the advantages of prose fiction over the established form of realist painting; and finally, to suggest that, for Defoe, painting and prose fiction embodied methods of deception that could be turned to useful ends. More generally, I wish to consider Defoe’s sense of scene, his sense of the visual, mainly in terms of realist painting as it developed during the seventeenth century and particularly the realistic rendering of scene which had its centre in Holland and which here I will call Dutch painting.
Other ECF articles on the topic of “Daniel Defoe” include:
“A Life of Continu’d Variety”: Crime, Readers, and the Structure of Defoe’s Moll Flanders
by KATE LOVEMAN (ECF 26.1, Fall 2013)
Real Robinson Crusoe
by MICHAEL GAVIN (ECF 25.2, Winter 2012-13)
“Zealous for Their Own Way of Worship”: Defoe, Monarchy, and Religious Toleration during the War of the Quadruple Alliance
by MORGAN STRAWN (ECF 25.2, Winter 2012-13)
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