Charles Colson

30 September 2009

Theorizing the Novel

            After listening to an abbreviated story of my life, someone once told me that I should write a book.  Whether my experiences are worthy of an autobiographical novel or not, they have prepared me for a graduate course in colonial and postcolonial literature despite the lack of an undergraduate degree in the field.  When I was ten years old, my family moved from the outskirts of Charlotte, North Carolina to Kaneohe, Hawai’i.  Our migration to the island of Oahu was not transnational.  Neither did we move from a colonialized periphery to the colonial center, but I confronted a clash of cultures and stereotypes similar to that experienced by the postcolonial “third wave.”  In the years since Captain Cook discovered the islands he named for an English nobleman[1], traditional Hawaiians had been displaced by white capitalists, their population decimated by imported disease, and their ethnic identity mixed with immigrants from around the Pacific basin.  Hawaiian culture had been devalued to a tourist attraction.  On the other hand, though I was haole[2], representing the dominant “colonizing culture,” I was often part of the ethnic minority in social encounters.  On occasion I was discriminated against due to my skin color, my speech, or my lack of familiarity with local ways.  Nevertheless, there were humanizing encounters between self and other through which I adapted and learned to appreciate the customs, languages, and world views of the islands.  I greeted visitors at the airport with flower leis made from the plumeria trees in our yard.  I learned to speak Hawaiian pidgin.  I came to recognize the crackle of fireworks meant to frighten away evil spirits at Buddhist funerals and the tell-tale white shirt and tie of Mormon missionaries going door-to-door.  Growing up in Hawai’i equipped me in a practical way for understanding colonial and postcolonial issues in other parts of the world.  I had little experience with such literature when I entered the class, but graduate degrees in Latin American history and teaching English as a foreign language supplied me with theoretical background for narrative and dialogue.  The cumulative result is that comparison of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe with Jamaica Kincaid’s Lucy as colonial and postcolonial novels in dialogue leads me acknowledge the novel as the defining genre of modernity.

In the first wave of Caribbean transnational migration represented in Defoe’s work, “poor Robinson Crusoe” has little dialogue on his island except with the trained bird that parrots his self-reflections and the Englishman is free to construct his image of the “other” as the most loathsome of savages.  When he acts upon his interior narrative alone, he tells us he is “so fill’d with indignation at the sight [of their feast] that I began now to premeditate the destruction of the next that I saw there, let them be who, or how many soever ” (Defoe 145).  For a while, the Caribs are dehumanized and worthy of extermination.  As his righteous indignation cools, Crusoe realizes that if he had followed his initial inclination he would “be at length no less a murtherer than they were in being maneaters, and perhaps much more so” (146).  Dehumanizing the other tends to dehumanize the self.

It is not until the indigenous escapee from the cannibal feast first appears at Crusoe’s feet that he begins to identify with the other as human.  At first it is physical recognition: “he had all the sweetness and softness of an European in his countenance” (162).  As Friday attains communicative competence, dialogue becomes possible.  Crusoe begins to appreciate his servant as a being with an eternal soul and is concerned to lead him to salvation.  It is not until Friday challenges Crusoe’s doctrine of Satan that the colonizer acknowledges that “in laying things open to him, I really inform’d and instructed myself in many things” (172-3) and begins to respect the other’s intellect.  It is through dialogue that Crusoe comes to a more nuanced view of indigenous customs of war (176-7) and a deeper understanding of Friday’s loyalty (178-9).  The text had been almost completely narrative from the point of his landing upon the island until the meeting with Friday some twenty-five years later.  The combination of narrative and dialogue not only moves the plot forward more expeditiously but creates the basis for character development in this earliest example of the genre.

Power relations favored the Englishman, so the other’s name, speech, and clothing were largely regulated by the “colonizer.”  The colonizers of the Caribbean who followed in Crusoe’s footsteps left behind a legacy of imposed language and culture in the islands that Kincaid’s Lucy Josephine Potter abhors, echoing the author’s sentiment expressed in “A Small Place.”  The colonizers have left and the colonized are leaving, too.  What Lucy finds when she arrives on the new island (Manhattan) does not meet her idealized expectations.  The weather is strange; the people are strange.  At first, she is “afraid even to put [her] face outside the door” because of her mother’s letter describing the savage behavior of those in the new place—“an immigrant girl, someone my age exactly . . . had her throat cut while she was a passenger on perhaps the very same train I was riding” (Lucy 20-21).  The first part of Lucy’s story, like Robinson’s, consists of narrative.

Humanizing encounters begin with dialogue.  At first, the “colonizers” are just as patronizing to their au pair as Crusoe was to his servant.  Lucy’s discourse, unlimited by having to learn a new language, is more challenging from the start.  “You’ve never seen spring, have you?” Mariah asks (Lucy 17).  She seems to associate the daffodils of spring with the sort of spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings expressed in Wordsworth’s “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud.”  After being required to memorize and recite the poem in a land where the flower never grew, Lucy associates them with the sort of sentiment voiced by Kincaid regarding the colonizers’ efforts to turn every place into England and to turn English everyone they met: “But no place could ever really be England, and nobody who did not look exactly like them would ever be English, so you can imagine the destruction of people and land that came from that” (“A Small Place” 92).  As the two women realize how different they are, they both seem to be asking, “How does a person get to be that way?”

Narrative guides the direction of their relationship’s growth through spring, summer, and fall—in the city and at the lake.  Dialogue reveals their radically different world views of the same situations.  When Mariah shares the view from the train window of the freshly plowed fields she loves so much, Lucy’s reaction reveals a slave descendant’s consciousness of the concomitant labor: “Well, thank God I didn’t have to do that” (Lucy 33).  When Mariah announces that she has Indian blood, Lucy rejects her, wondering, “How do you get to be the sort of victor who can claim to be the vanquished as well?” (40-1).  This  sort of postcolonial “backchat” to the colonizer is entirely missing from the first-generation colonized in Crusoe.  Nevertheless, they find commonalities in such things as the feelings aroused by the smell of peonies (60) and disappointment with the men in their lives (128-9).

Studying these two novels in dialogue with each other is valuable for the insights into world history that emerge.  The ability to see the world from the point of view of the “other” is a key component to an understanding of history.  There is a sense in which both personal stories are representative of national stories.  In the early eighteenth century Englishmen were leaving their homeland in the first wave of transnational migration with the hope of making their fortunes abroad in the colonies.  Implicit in Defoe’s novel are attitudes typical of the period concerning race, religion, and economic relations.  These are often more easily comprehended from fictitious characters than from a history text.  In the latter half of the twentieth century, residents of former colonies were leaving their homes with similar hopes of finding success abroad.  They carried with them the cultural baggage implicit in the intertextuality of Lucy’s references to Wordsworth, Gauguin, the Bible, Milton, and Shakespeare (Lucy 18, 95, 152).

Studying the novels together leads to realizations about common human experience across time and space.  Both Robinson and Lucy have conflicts with the same sex parent.  At age nineteen, both are dealing with issues of distinction and identification in their coming of age.  The prodigal Robinson finds a new father figure in his relationship with God; Lucy finds a surrogate mother of sorts in Mariah.  Both are re-inventing themselves in the new place.  Robinson becomes a practical artisan, farmer, and herdsman rather than the gentleman of leisure he had been when he first took to sea.  Lucy abandons her “prim and proper” image and nursing school that had been her mother’s aims for her to work in a photography studio and live a bohemian lifestyle.  Sometimes, it seems, one’s own people are more trouble than the “other.”  Overcoming the English mutineers appears to require more effort and planning on Robinson’s part than repelling the cannibals.  Lucy recalls the viciousness of the women competing with her mother for her father’s favor.  Novels, whether colonial or postcolonial, seem to reflect a world view centered on social relationships between individuals.

Finally, studying the two together allows us to compare novels of both colonial and postcolonial periods for evidence to theorize the novel as the defining genre of modernity.  Following Ian Watt’s argument from “Robinson Crusoe, Individualism and the Novel,” the concept of individualism “posits a whole society mainly governed by the idea of every individual’s intrinsic independence both from other individuals and from . . . allegiance to past modes of thought and action denoted by the word ‘tradition’” (60).  The historical origins of the concept appear to lie in the combination of capitalism and Calvinism present with the evolution of a reading public during Defoe’s time, but there is little doubt of its prevalence by the late twentieth century in which Kincaid’s novel is set.  While both Robinson Crusoe and Lucy deal with “three associated tendencies of modern civilization—absolute economic, social and intellectual freedom for the individual” (86), some things have changed in the last three hundred years.

Watt observes several characteristics which are interesting in terms of comparing the colonial novel to the postcolonial.  “Defoe’s hero is not really a primitive or a proletarian but a capitalist” (87).  Crusoe, the embodiment of homo economicus, is on his way to participate in the slave trade when he is shipwrecked.  Lucy is descended from the Africans brought over to work in the Caribbean sugar cane fields.  The proletarian origins, ethnicity, and gender of Kincaid’s heroine are indicative of the sociopolitical changes between the colonial and postcolonial eras.  Watt notes the importance of contractual relationships for modern civilization and for Crusoe, as he requires later arrivals on the island to “accept his dominion with written contracts acknowledging his absolute power” (64).  Lucy, on the other hand, breaks her contract despite Mariah’s angry complaint: “It’s not a year yet.  You are supposed to stay for a year” (Lucy 141).  Economic individualism weakens the ties of family, Watt explains.  “Leaving home, improving on the lot one was born to, is a vital feature of the individualist pattern of life” (65).  Robinson cannot be satisfied with the status quo, “the upper station of low life” and leaves behind his family for the possibility of economic gain.  In this respect, Lucy is little different.  She is seeking to escape the social ties of family and rejects her mother’s plans to have her provide education for her two younger brothers.  Crusoe, reflecting the Puritan mindset in his tendency to religious self-examination, “tends to see every item of his personal experience as potentially rich in moral and spiritual meaning (Watt 77).  Lucy, raised with a similar religious rigor, hears church bells ringing from her new apartment and reflects, “I supposed I still believed in God; after all, what else could I do?  But no longer could I ask God what to do, since the answer, I was sure, would not suit me.  I could do what suited me now, as long as I could pay for it” (Lucy 146).  Finally, Watt believes that the importance of individual economic advantage minimizes the importance of romantic love and sexual satisfaction.  All we know of Crusoe’s marriage is that it was “not either to my disadvantage or dissatisfaction” (Defoe 240).  The relationship is evaluated in the same terms as a business transaction.  His wife died and off he went on another profit-seeking voyage with no further mention of his three children.  In the postcolonial novel, things are different and yet the same.  Lucy enjoys sex, it is clear, but forms no lasting attachments.  Indeed, she hardly seems to look for them.  She is not surprised by the infidelity of Mariah’s husband; where she comes from, it is expected.  In this context Lucy recalls her mother’s economically sound advice that she “should make sure the roof over my head was my own; such a thing was important, especially if you were a woman” (Lucy 144).  Once again, the economic basis of individualism trumps traditional family relationships.  There are commonalities as well as differences across the colonial-postcolonial divide.

I find it easy to accept the argument that most literature before the European colonial era may be classified as principally narrative or depending largely on dialogue and that the novel, combining the two, is the defining genre of the modern age.  When Europeans began to encounter the “other” as a result of their global exploration, the combination of narrative and dialogue was especially suited to telling stories of an era characterized by encounters with other customs, cultures, and world views.  Narrative gives direction to personal and cultural history; dialogue provides the diversity of voices necessary for a humanizing encounter with the other.  Inasmuch as the novel as a genre combines them, it helps us make sense of our experience in the modern era.

Works Cited

Defoe, Daniel. Robinson Crusoe. 1719. London: Penguin, 2001.

Kincaid, Jamaica. “A Small Place.” A Small Place. London: Virago, 1988.

                Lucy. New York: Penguin, 1990.

Watt, Ian. “Robinson Crusoe, Individualism and the Novel.” The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957.