Daniel Defoe, _A Journal of the Plague Year_

ANOTHER OF THIS semester's texts in "Topics in World Literature: Health and Illness," along with Camille--and, for the record, Death in Venice, Pale Horse, Pale Rider, On Immunity, The Empathy Exams, Angels in America, Divine Honors, and Love in the Time of Cholera.

Our class did not engage this particular question, but I sometimes wonder whether the the tradition of the English realist novel, insofar as it is founded by Defoe, is founded on hoaxes. Like Robinson Crusoe and Moll Flanders, A Journal of the Plague Year presents itself as a document: a true account by a London saddler of what he saw and heard during the last major outbreak in London of bubonic plague in 1665. It inaugurates a long tradition of fictions that adopt non-fictional forms--not just the many that present themselves as autobiographies (e.g, David Copperfield and Jane Eyre) or memoirs (Doctor Faustus, Edwin Mullhouse), but as commentaries on poems (Pale Fire) or histories (La Gloire de l'Empire) or literary anthologies (Shining at the Bottom of the Sea) or encyclopedias (See Under: Love).

The difference is that Nabokov's name, not Kinbote's, in on the title page of Pale Fire, while nothing about the early editions of A Journal of the Plague Year (or Robinson Crusoe or Moll Flanders) indicates that it was written by Daniel Defoe, not one H.F., London tradesman. There may be a ready practical explanation for this--Defoe hoping to give his creditors the runaround--but is it possible that he was just trying to pass the books off as something they were not? That he figured more people would buy a (supposedly) actual account of being shipwrecked on a desert island than would buy an avowedly invented tale of same? Did the readers of Journal of the Plague Year assume it was what it seemed to be? If and when they found out otherwise, did they feel cheated?  Is Defoe the literary ancestor not only of Vladimir Nabokov, but of James Frey?

The book certainly avoids seeming like a fiction, in ways that much irritated my students--haphazard organization, repetitions, no plot, no developed characters--ways that also, of course, make it seem all the more like a genuine account by an eyewitness--an artful artlessness. But whose art, that of the novelist or that of the counterfeiter? But maybe they are one and the same and always have been. "If I triumph I must make men mad," wrote Yeats of being poet; for the novelist to triumph, does he or she have to fool us?