was clearly inclined to do; by the same token, the fact that activities ‘of an irrational and speculative character, or directed to acquisition by force’ are no longer typical of modern capitalism does not mean that they are absent from it. A variety of non-economic practices, violent and often unpredictable in their results—Marx’s ‘primitive accumulation’, or David Harvey’s recent ‘accumulation by dispossession’—have clearly played (and in fact still play) a major role in the expansion of capitalism; and if this is so, then a narrative of adventure, broadly construed—like for instance, in a later age, Conrad’s entrelacement of metropolitan reflection and colonial romance—is still perfectly appropriate to the representation of modernity.
This, then, is the historical basis for the ‘two Robinsons’, and the ensuing discontinuity in the structure of Defoe’s narrative: the island offers the first glimpse of the industrious master of modern times; the sea, Africa, Brazil, Friday, and the other adventures give voice to the older—but never fully discarded—forms of capitalist domination. From a formal viewpoint, this coexistence-without-integration of opposite registers—so unlike Conrad’s calculated hierarchy, to use that parallel again—is clearly a flaw of the novel. But, just as clearly, the inconsistency is not just a matter of form: it arises from the unresolved dialectic of the bourgeois type himself, and of his two ‘souls’:32 suggesting, contra Weber, that the rational bourgeois will never truly outgrow his irrational impulses, nor repudiate the predator he once used to be. In being, not just the beginning of a new era, but a beginning in which a structural contradiction becomes visible that will be never overcome, Defoe’s shapeless story remains the great classic of bourgeois literature.
Nov. 4. This morning I began to order my times of work, of going out with my gun, time of sleep, and time of diversion, viz. every morning I walked out with my gun for two or three hours if it did not rain, then employed my self to work till about eleven a-clock, then eat what I had to live on, and from twelve to two I lay down to sleep, the weather being excessive hot, and then in the evening to work again.33
Work, gun, sleep, and diversion. But when Robinson actually describes his day, diversion disappears, and his life recalls to the letter Hegel’s crisp summary of the Enlightenment: here, ‘everything is useful’.34 Useful: the first keyword of this book. When Robinson returns on board the ship after the shipwreck, its incantatory repetition—from the carpenter’s chest, ‘which was a very useful prize to me’, to the ‘several things very useful to me’, and ‘everything . . . that could be useful to me’35—re-orients the world by placing Robinson at its center (useful to me . . . to me . . . to me . . .). The useful is here, as in Locke, the category that at once establishes private property (useful to me), and legitimates it by identifying it with work (useful to me). Tullio Pericoli’s illustrations for the novel, which look like deranged versions of the technological tableaux of the Encyclopèdie (Figure 3),36 capture the essence of this world in which no object is an end in itself—in the kingdom of the useful, nothing is an end in itself—but always and only a means to do something else. A tool. And in a world of tools, there is only one thing left to do: work.37
Everything for him. Everything a tool. And then, the third dimension of the useful:
At last, being eager to view the circumference of my little kingdom, I resolved upon my cruise; and accordingly I victualled my ship for the voyage, putting in two dozen of loaves (cakes I should call them) of barley-bread, an earthen pot full of parched rice (a food I ate a good deal of), a little bottle of rum, half a goat, and powder and shot for killing more, and two large watch-coats, of those which, as I mentioned before, I had saved out of the seamen’s chests; these I took, one to lie upon, and the other to cover me in the night.38
Figure 3
Here, next to Robinson as the active centre of the story (I resolved . . . I victualled . . . I had saved . . . I took . . .), and to the objects he needs for the expedition (an earthen pot . . . powder and shot . . . two large watch-coats . . .), a cascade of final constructions—for the voyage . . . for killing more . . . to lie upon . . . to cover me—completes the triangle of the useful. Subject, object, and verb. A verb that has interiorized the lesson of tools, and reproduces it within Robinson’s activity itself: where an action, typically, is always done in order to do something else:
Accordingly, the next day I went to my country house, as I called it, and cutting some of the smaller twigs, I found them to my purpose as much as I could desire; whereupon I came the next time prepared with a hatchet to cut down a quantity, which I soon found, for there was great plenty of them. These I set up to dry within my circle or hedge, and when they were fit for use I carried them to my cave; and here, during the next season, I employed myself in making, as well as I could, a great many baskets, both to carry earth or to carry or lay up anything, as I had occasion; and though I did not finish them very handsomely, yet I made them sufficiently serviceable for my purpose; thus, afterwards, I took care never to be without them; and as my wicker-ware decayed, I made more, especially strong, deep baskets to place my corn in, instead of sacks, when I should come to have any quantity of it. Having mastered this difficulty, and employed a world of time about it, I bestirred myself to see, if possible, how to supply two wants . . .39
Two, three verbs per line; in the hands of another writer, so much activity may become frantic. Here, though, a ubiquitous lexicon of teleology (accordingly, purpose, desire, prepared, fit, employed, serviceable, care, supply . . .) provides a connective tissue that makes the page consistent and solid, while verbs pragmatically subdivide Robinson’s actions into the immediate tasks of the main clauses (I went, I found, I came, I set up), and the more indefinite future of its final clauses (to cut down . . . to carry . . . to place . . . to supply . . .); though not much more indefinite, to be sure, because the ideal future, for a culture of the useful, is one so close at hand, as to be little more than the continuation of the present: ‘the next day’; ‘the next season’; ‘to cut down a quantity, which I soon found’. All is tight and concatenated, here; no step is ever skipped (‘whereupon—I came—the next time—prepared—with a hatchet—to cut down—a quantity’) in these sentences that, like Hegel’s ‘prosaic mind’, understand the world via ‘categories such as cause and effect, or means and end’.40 Especially means and end: Zweckrationalität, Weber will call it; rationality directed to, and governed by its aim; ‘instrumental reason’, in Horkheimer’s variation. Two centuries before Weber, Defoe’s page illustrates the lexico-grammatical concatenations that were the first embodiment of Zweckrationalität: instrumental reason as a practice of language—perfectly articulated, though completely unnoticed—well before it became a concept. It’s a first glimpse of bourgeois ‘mentality’, and of Defoe’s great contribution to it: prose, as the style of the useful.
The style of the useful. A novelist as great as Defoe devoted his last, most ambitious novel entirely to this idea. Emile will want to know all that is useful, Rousseau had written, and nothing but that; and Goethe—alas—observed the second clause to the letter. ‘From the Useful by Way of the True to the Beautiful’, we read at the beginning of the Wanderjahre (1829);41 a novel where, instead of the usual ‘pleasure garden or modern park’, one finds ‘fields of vegetables, large beds of medicinal herbs, and anything that may be useful in any way’.42 Gone is the conflict between the useful and the beautiful that had been the key to the previous novel about Wilhelm Meister, the Apprenticeship of 1796; in the ‘Pedagogical
