Shaping Time
The conception of time in allegory, romance, and epic was nearly amorphous. A causal chain authorized through genealogy was a common organizing locus. However, the dramatic components of comedy and tragedy imply particular shapes for time. In comedy, time is progressive and improving. A series of events that includes setbacks, results in a positive result— often marked in Shakespeare’s plays by a wedding, a form of birth. A downward spiral, usually resulting in death or exile, marks tragedy. The criticism of chronicle as a genre, which reoccurs constantly, is found in its flatness— the chronicle recites facts without imposition of purpose. In this sense, the disappearance of the chronicle in the seventeenth century and its replacement with history is an attempt to provide a shape for time. Genres are seldom pure, and bleed together promiscuously.
There is perhaps no greater demonstration of this promiscuity than Daniel Defoe. Best known for one of the world’s most successful books, Robinson Crusoe, Defoe was the author of over two hundred books and pamphlets. His first successful long composition, An Essay on Projects published in 1698, argues for the establishment of an academy where no one would be admitted but the learned, and “yet none, or but very few, whose business or trade was learning.” There would be room in Defoe’s academy for “neither clergymen, physician, or lawyer”— and its purpose would be to provide sufficient authority for the use of words. In essence, Defoe calls for a new authority, outside the established realm of King, court, and clergy for education. He divides it equally between nobility, “private gentlemen,” and a remaining third to be determined by merit alone. Defoe’s goal was to bring “our English tongue to a due perfection.” He also argues for the construction of an “Academy for Women” where men are excluded— where virtue might rule over custom. While clearly working within custom, Defoe moves to redefine it.
Defoe’s view of history was clearly progressive, though his fame was not established until he published a poem in defense of King William III, True-Born Englishman in 1701. Defoe was not an educated man, and his early failures in business were later repeated through mistakes in publishing. His 1702 satirical pamphlet The Shortest Way with the Dissenters landed him in jail, and in the pillory for sedition. However, gaining the support of Robert Harley in 1704, Defoe became a secret political agent as well as creating a venue for his essays, The Review. The Review changed its politics with each ministry until 1713. After that, his primary task as a secret agent was that of editor, posing as a dissident while editing the opposition pamphlets to keep them ineffectual. Eventually, Defoe’s duplicity became obvious and at the age of sixty he was forced to turn to other means of income through faked confessions and autobiographies. Robinson Crusoe, published anonymously in 1719 to cement its stature as a “True History,” is a fiction passed as moral truth, and the fruition of Milton’s call for a new Christian hero.
Jonathan Swift worked for Defoe’s political patron, Robert Harley, as an unpaid propagandist. The loyalties are difficult to sort out. Harley was a Tory, with Whig sympathies— Defoe was a Whig, and Swift a Tory. The political climate was nothing if not promiscuous as well. While Defoe dabbled in satire, Swift was its master. The progressive, comedic plots of Defoe find their tragic counterpoint in Swift who represents the emergent customs, and battles for authority in an entirely different perspective. Though they were both outsiders working to subvert an existing order, they had nothing in common besides Harley. Their heroic models, their view of history, and their sense of authority were miles apart. Swift’s Tale of a Tub, The Battel of the Books and A Discourse Concerning the Mechanical Operation of the Spirit, published together in 1704, systematically undercut the complex heroic rhetoric and structures of authority in the early eighteenth century through an established restoration form— the satire.
