The Whale Belly

I’ve been listening to an audiobook rendition of Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year. What would strike anyone living today is the similarities — and differences –of societal and cultural responses between seventeenth century London and our current pandemic. We see the same forms of panic, denial, conspiracy theories and general promiscuity of rationality, political factionalism, refusal to sacrifice menial freedoms for social good, etc., etc. The difference of governmental response though is interesting. Authorities seemed not to care at all about garnering popular support, and at the worst of the scourge they implemented quarantine measures that would be considered draconian by today’s standards, jailing anyone who refused to comply. I’ve yet to learn what the outcome of these measures was, or how well they were enforced.

Defoe spends a lot of time listing historical information, whether it’s statistics of deaths or the ordinances that were imposed. So much so that it is difficult to determine whether or not this is a work of fiction at all. Surely by the standards of Brooks and Warren it is not — at least from what I’ve listened to so far. For them a work of fiction is more than something that has fictional elements. It must have a character who undergoes significant change as a result of his action. In A Journal the narrator decides not to flee to the countryside like the rest of the people with means, but places his faith in God to do with him what He wills, and then becomes a detached observer of various aspects of a society responding and struggling with a plague. We very much lose sight of him all together.

Robinson Crusoe has some of this verisimilitude in it as well, but it is definitely a novel, because we watch the narrator change as a result of his struggle to survive on an island after his shipwreck. The need to make a narrative sound factual with lists and statistics and scientific accounts seems to have been a normal practice in fiction at least up until Moby Dick, with it’s exhaustive and exhausting section devoted to cetology. I wonder why this was seen as necessary, because it’s nearly impossible to read without the mind wandering and imploring that the text get back to the story. I can’t imagine reading a novel because I wanted to learn something objectively factual. I want to read novels because it plays around with the existential questions about our frailties and foolish longings, ultimately giving us some clarity about our own human condition, and maybe even a bit of solace in knowing that we aren’t solitary freaks.

But dismissing such elements in early fictional prose as being formally unrefined would be reductionist. It may simply be that objectivity is what moved people at the time and place the writer was writing. The impact of rationalism through the philosophies of Bacon and Locke perhaps made the getting down of observable facts in words a much more meaningful practice than it does now, or perhaps of constructive narratives around things that really happened or that are scientifically true gave objectivity the human resonance that would be meaningful to a reader of that time. I keep repeating this, but Flannery O’Connor wrote wisely that a great writer is someone who finds the eternal within their own time and place. Maybe this is what Defoe did through his particular way of meshing the objectively true with the fictional.