Daniel Defoe, Contrarian by Robert James Merrett

Reviewed by: Daniel Defoe, Contrarian by Robert James Merrett Maximillian Novak Robert James Merrett. Daniel Defoe, Contrarian. Toronto: Toronto, 2013. Pp. xx + 409. $52.50. There are many excellent things about Mr. Merrett’s most recent book on Defoe. He writes with a full grasp of Defoe’s canon and is not afraid of deviating from the bibliography amassed by P. N. Furbank and W. R. Owens. The judgments of someone so familiar with Defoe’s writings have to be taken seriously. He also writes with a considerable critical sophistication. In a footnote, he quotes Lincoln Faller on Defoe’s ambiguity: ‘‘Defoe alerts his readers to move through them [his writings] with maximal curiosity. Trying to sift the actual out from the invented is not so important as looking for the meaning that stands behind both, and which makes both equally useful.’’ In much the same manner, Mr. Merrett reveals how complex Defoe actually can be—how we must be constantly aware of how Defoe’s texts undercut surface meanings. Indeed in the final chapter, titled ‘‘Defoe’s Imaginary,’’ he shows how full of images the fictional prose can be and how, through those images, Defoe sometimes conducts arguments that may, under certain circumstances, involve directions quite different from that supplied by the flow of the surface narrative. And he demonstrates how conscious Defoe was about the ways in which words convey their meanings. He maintains that Defoe realized that ‘‘fallibility and delusion are narrative resources,’’ and that his invitation to the reader ‘‘consists of inducing readers to read past the inconsistencies of his characters and narrator and to recognize textual aporias with a compassion and reflexive awareness that entails sharing self-consciousness about speech acts and figurative thinking with the implied author.’’ Mr. Merrett brings into his discussions a wide range of modern thought, from Wolfgang Iser to Frank Kermode, from Julian Jaynes to J. L. Austin, and they often afford him provocative ways into Defoe’s texts. His favorite critical approach, however, is contained in the title—Defoe as a ‘‘contrarian.’’ In the quotations at the beginning of his work, he includes Heraclitus on ‘‘opposite tensions’’ and Blake’s ‘‘Without Contraries is no progression.’’ I am not certain that Mr. Merrett’s readings of these concepts produce the feeling that they are alike or compatible. Defoe certainly did not operate with a systematic connection between oppositions such as Blake offered, though he may have been aware [End Page 69] that such a system represented a common enough pattern of thought in the Renaissance. Mr. Merrett offers ‘‘polar’’ thinking as a synonym for ‘‘contrarian,’’ though I am not sure I understand this concept as applied to Defoe. He quotes Peter Thorslev on polar thinking, but Thorslev considered this a wrongheaded way of approaching argument. Thinking in contraries was certainly part of the love of paradox so common in the seventeenth century, and Defoe frequently indulged himself in a pattern of thinking that approached ideas by balancing one view against another without arriving at a firm conclusion. During his early life this would have been considered a way of avoiding the appearance of being overly dogmatic. To some of his eighteenth-century readers, such a paradoxical approach created the appearance of mental confusion. On the other hand, Mr. Merrett rightfully stresses Defoe’s approaching subjects in a way that sometimes seemed offensive and occasionally shocking to his contemporaries. My quarrel with Mr. Merrett’s picture of Defoe is that he reads all of Defoe’s writings as emanations of the young man who was, at one time, training to be a dissenting minister. We do not know why he gave up this profession, but we do know that he abandoned it to engage in various (somewhat shady) business ventures and finally to become a writer on economic, political, and social themes. Mr. Merrett, unfortunately, attempts to read A Tour thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain and The Compleat English Tradesman as essentially works about Christianity. This is simply not viable. For example, it was understood in the seventeenth century that writing on economics was about the world as it was, not as it should be. Any...

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