TY - JOUR
AU - Seidel, Kevin
AB - Abstract Daniel Defoe’s fictional narrators talk often about God’s providence but not usually to appeal to an overarching social or natural order, to solve problems of theodicy, or to claim special divine attention. In the Bible scene near the beginning of Defoe’s novel Journal of the Plague Year (1722), a passage of scripture opened to by chance convinces the narrator, H.F., to stay in London and protect his business during the plague. This scene primes Defoe’s readers to recognise later in the novel divine providence acting not through so much as with creaturely agents, human and nonhuman. Near the beginning of the Journal of the Plague Year (1722)—a fictionalised account of the real bubonic plague that spread through London in 1665, killing approximately 100,000 people—Daniel Defoe’s narrator, H.F., describes himself as returning home one evening ‘greatly oppress’d in my Mind, irresolute’.1 He cannot decide whether to leave the city or stay. To leave, he thinks, would be the best way to preserve his life. Most people with H.F.’s resources and connections were leaving to join friends or relatives in the country. To stay would preserve his business. H.F. is a saddler by trade. He does not make saddles; neither does he keep a retail shop, which depends too much, he says, on the ‘Chance Trade’ of customers. Rather, H.F. is a saddler ‘among the merchants, trading to the English Colonies in America’ (p. 11). Through this trade he has acquired ‘Ware-houses fill’d with Goods’ and a ‘Family of servants’ who work for him in London (p. 11). When he asks one servant to prepare a horse for him to leave the city, the servant, ‘being frighted at the Encrease of the Distemper, and not knowing when I should go’, took the horse himself and fled (p. 13). H.F. makes other plans to leave, but they are ‘always cross’d by some Accident’ (p. 13), he says, which leads him to wonder ‘about these Disappointments being from Heaven’ (p. 13), that is, ‘particular Providences’ directing him ‘to stay and take my Lot in that Station in which God has plac’d me’ (p. 13). Hesitant about his responsibilities in a time of plague, trying to discern how God might be leading him, H.F. hears in his failed attempts to leave the city not the direct voice of God but something close—a reminder of God’s calling. Why did Defoe write a story that gave readers a sense of what it was like to live through a plague that had happened more than a half century earlier? There were an increasing number of new outbreaks happening on the Continent between 1720 and 1721, and Defoe was among the journalists reporting those outbreaks.2 People were justifiably afraid that the contagion would reach England. Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year is at least a kind of policy brief for what to do if the plague returns, its concerns then surprisingly similar to ours now during COVID-19. City officials kept track of the number of deaths in each parish or neighbourhood of London, and Defoe’s fictional narrator, H.F., tallies those numbers to show the movement of the disease through the city and estimate its rate of spread (e.g. pp. 6–10). H.F. describes the imperfect protocols by which households were quarantined when someone among them had the plague: a red cross was painted on the door and a watchman, paid by the city, helped arrange deliveries of food and stood guard outside the house to make sure no one entered or exited (pp. 44–5). H.F. also describes the way households evaded those protocols, lowering people out of back windows, for example, or sending away family members who were healthy before notifying city officials that a family member was sick (p. 135). H.F. notes the way poor people in the city were disproportionately harmed by the plague because they did not have the means to leave the city, live apart from sick family members, or survive without working (pp. 78–80). He praises city officials for finding work for the poor and providing for their care when they fell sick (p. 81). H.F. describes asymptomatic superspreaders as ‘walking Destroyer[s]’ (p. 159, cf. p. 151) who spread the disease without showing any signs of being ill. He depicts the mass graves that were dug and filled every night with cartloads of the dead (pp. 54–5, 142–3). He commends the work of medical professionals but notes they could not figure out exactly how the disease was spread because ‘we had no Microscopes at that time’ (p. 159). H.F. describes the surprising drop in death rates that signalled the end of the plague as miraculous, ‘all supernatural’ (p. 191), and accomplished not by any doctor or cure but by ‘the immediate hand of God’ (p. 191). This final theological emphasis—considered alongside H.F.’s initial attempt to discern God’s calling and his frequent, often contradictory religious reflections scattered throughout the novel—suggest that the Journal of the Plague Year purports to be a theological as well as practical preparation for plague. But is it a theological preparation worth listening to today? Maybe not. What H.F. hears calling to him near the beginning of the novel sounds less like the voice of God than the Protestant ethic becoming the spirit of capitalism. When H.F. turns to listen to his individual economic obligations as if they were his ultimate ethical ones, he is also turning away from the potential risks to his bodily life and the lives of those who work for him. It is as if he is hearing the voice of today’s government and business leaders urging citizens to keep the economy open during the COVID-19 pandemic and not hearing the voices of those grieving the early deaths of their loved ones. It is as if he is hearing the voice of people crying out against the destruction of property during street protests in the summer of 2020 and not hearing protestors’ outcries against police brutality in the wake of the killing of George Floyd. Like many people in the din of pandemic suffering, H.F. hears above all else the alarms of property and profits threatened and calling for his protection. If not a model listener, then, H.F. might serve as an object of critique. His talk of God in the opening pages of the novel will remind many readers of the urgent, ongoing task of discerning the difference between the voice of God and the demands of the prevailing economic order.3 For such theologically minded readers, the Spirit of God makes and sustains all things—human and nonhuman, living and nonliving, visible and invisible. It would be blasphemy to conflate that Spirit with whatever drives human beings to create increasing inequality between rich and poor, blasphemy to sanctify practices that destroy the planet and its creatures. For other, more secular readers, those inclined to think that theology is always only a defence and justification of the economic status quo anyway, there is nothing about H.F.’s religious reflections that cannot be explained by his economic fears and desires. What these two groups of critics, religious and secular, likely have in common today—reading during COVID-19—is alarm at H.F.’s being all-too-willing to put lives, his own and the lives of others, at risk for the sake of his business. What about readers then? There are no extant, contemporary responses to H.F.’s story and his sense of calling besides the one that Defoe includes in the novel.4 When H.F. tells his older brother about these ‘particular Providences’ and his growing sense that God will protect him from the plague if H.F. stays to protect his business, his brother, ‘tho’ a very Religious Man himself, laught at all I had suggested about it being an intimation of Heaven’ (p. 13). H.F.’s older brother mockingly questions him for trusting God with his life but not his trade, as if God could protect one but not the other. After hearing H.F.’s horse story, he asks him why he does not consider his sound body and two strong legs God’s provision to leave the city. H.F.’s older brother is never named. His brief, narrative appearance at the beginning of the Journal of the Plague Year is the only one he makes, but there are enough details to suggest a more than passing resemblance to the famous business hero of Defoe’s first novel, Robinson Crusoe (1719), and its two sequels: The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1719) and The Serious Reflections of Robinson Crusoe (1720).5 Like H.F.’s older brother, Crusoe had business connections in Lisbon (p. 14; cf. RC, p. 255). H.F’s older brother had travelled ‘among the Turks and Mahometans in Asia and in other Places’ (p. 14); Crusoe was captured by Turkish pirates and kept as a slave while living among Muslims in Morocco (RC, pp. 17, 127), and many years later he travelled through Asia (FA, p. 144). H.F.’s older brother, married with two children, lives with his family in Bedfordshire (p. 12); similarly, Crusoe, after his return from the island, takes two nephews into his care, marries, has three children of his own (RC, p. 256), and settles in Bedfordshire (FA, p. 8). H.F.’s older brother retires from overseas business travel to family life in the 1660s; Crusoe tries to do the same in the early 1690s (RC, p. 271). These similarities suggest that Robinson Crusoe and Journal of the Plague Year are parts of a single story world. Both seem to anticipate the psychological and practical dilemmas of modern individualism—an island where all social connections are lost and a quarantined city where all social connections are potential vehicles of harm. Both novels represent similarly extreme sites in which to imagine ourselves existentially alone, each of us ultimately responsible for only our own survival. We may take such individualism for granted today, but Defoe and his readers, including a seasoned businessman like H.F.’s older brother, may have considered it strange, entertaining, even slightly ridiculous. The laughing, sparring criticism of this cameo Crusoe in Journal of the Plague Year opens a space for readers then and now to criticise H.F., to not take his thoughts and actions as exemplary simply because he is talking about God or, as we shall see, because he is reading the Bible. H.F. may begin turned inward, isolated and anxious about his obedience to God’s plan for his individual life.6 At first, he is thrown by the suffering of others more keenly into the pursuit of his own happiness, into minding his own business; but he eventually learns to pay attention to God at work in the larger life of the city, in the care that people provide for one another during the plague. With its disheveled arrangement of parts and peculiar theology of providence, H.F.’s narrative of the plague shifts readerly attention away from providence understood as a system of overdetermining origins or preordained ends. God does not act through creaturely things to force conformity to an unchanging ‘as it was in the beginning’ or ‘so it shall be for evermore’. Instead of insulating him from the needs of others, H.F.’s imperfect experience of Bible reading begins a haphazard, unfinished journey from an anxious, myopic businessman to a more theologically informed citizen of London, a better neighbour to those he meets by accident. Sandra Macpherson’s Harm’s Way: Tragic Responsibility and the Novel Form and David Fergusson’s The Providence of God: A Polyphonic Approach can help us pay better attention to the way Defoe combines chance occurrences and providentialist thought in Journal of the Plague Year.7 In Harm’s Way, Macpherson connects 18th-century fiction and tort law to show how important accidental encounters are to that fiction. Tort law is a branch of civil law that assigns blame and responsibility for harms caused by accident. If the wheel of the carriage I own breaks loose and hurts someone in the street, I am responsible for that harm and its repair. If the cow that belongs to me escapes its paddock and destroys my neighbour’s garden, I am responsible for that harm and its repair. I did not intend for the wheel to break or the cow to escape, but I am responsible nonetheless. Plaintiff and defendant in such cases are tied together more by accident and by the things involved in the accident than they are by choice or intention. A defendant may be found not at fault—in the sense of not intending harm to the plaintiff—but she is still to blame, still responsible for the harm. When Macpherson says, ‘The realist novel is a project of blame not exculpation’ (p. 13), she means that 18th-century novels do not assemble facts the way they do in criminal law, as culpatory or exculpatory evidence. Rather, novels gather facts like a case of tort law to show harm done despite good intentions. Why have critics not noticed these tortious elements in 18th-century fiction before? Macpherson gives two reasons. First, criminal law and its modes of legal reasoning as administered by the state have come to dominate thinking about the law, such that tort law and civil law more generally seem to be minor branches of criminal law. Looking for diverse modes of legal reasoning in Western legal history is like looking for experiments of fiction that do not lead to the realist novel or like looking for modes of interiority and self-reflection that do not lead to the believing, choosing liberal subject.8 It is difficult to see in the history of law anything besides the path leading to criminal law. Second, and more salient for this article, critics tend ‘to call accident something else: Providence’ (Harm’s Way, p. 25). Macpherson shows how discussions of providence in fiction are shaped by thinking about tort law and, in a rare, welcome move by a secular critic, she does so without explaining away the theology as nothing but such law. For Macpherson, the problem with critical discourse about providence is not theology per se, but rather critics’ too easy reliance on the ‘notion that providentialism recasts accident as divine and happy intentionality’ (pp. 25–6). In other words, it is not talk about God that prevents us from attending to the way ethical relationships develop through accidental harms so much as the tendency to think of God as the always intending, purposing primary cause of seemingly random events.9 What we as human secondary agents may do to one another unintentionally, God as primary agent must do on purpose. While Macpherson does not focus on theology, she helpfully criticises this theological move in order to help readers attend to tortious elements of 18th-century fiction. I briefly mention Macpherson’s criticism of monolithic accounts of the law in order to help readers attend, in this article, to Defoe’s peculiar description of providence in his fiction. In The Providence of God: A Polyphonic Approach, Fergusson, a theologian, gives a critical and generous account of thinking about divine providence, beginning with the scriptures and then moving chronologically from the ancient world to the present. Instead of linking certain theologies of providence to certain historical periods, charting the progress or regress of providential thinking over time, or contending for one right view of providence, Fergusson looks for what is best among many—thus the polyphony of his title. Gleaning from and oversimplifying Fergusson’s account, we might say that theologians traditionally have talked about providence in three main ways: (1) God’s creating and sustaining the original laws of nature and society, (2) God’s superintending the course of nature and history, and (3) God’s exerting God’s will (primary cause) through human and creaturely action (secondary causes). Fergusson does not try to refute those traditional positions so much as qualify them, point out their pastoral and political dangers, and add to them. For example, early in the book, in a section on themes of providence in the scriptures, Fergusson writes that the ‘church’s theology of providence has been generally inadequate to the diversity of biblical materials, especially the preponderance of those passages which testify to divine interaction, creaturely causality, contingency and eschatological deferral’ (p. 30). Fergusson will trace these themes through the rest of the book: Providence is not always the power of God acting through creaturely agents but sometimes a divine power interacting with them. Providence is not always the originary condition that determines all subsequent events but sometimes what reminds us that things in the past could have turned out otherwise. Providence is not always what moves history toward a single end but sometimes what shakes us free from our anticipated futures, what keeps the future uncertain and unfinished. When we think today about providence in terms of historical periods, the 18th century tends to get associated with providence as origins (what I will call providence 1); the 19th with providence as the progress of nature and history (providence 2); and the 20th with divine-human interaction (providence 3).10 What may surprise readers used to thinking of providence mainly in terms of origins or ends is how interested Defoe is in providence 3—divine-human interaction—much more so than providence 1 or 2.11 Instead of focusing on God’s orchestrating of events so as to maintain an original system of natural, social, and moral laws (providence 1) or God’s controlling of events to lead to a predetermined natural, social, and moral order (providence 2), Defoe focuses on God’s interacting with creaturely agents (providence 3). And unlike those theologians always anxious to explain providence 3 in terms of providence 1 or 2—that is, theologians who think all creaturely activity always only expresses the secret will of God maintaining the original order or bending history toward its predetermined end—Defoe writes to show the variety of providence 3, to explore the intermittent, unpredictable cooperation of God with material things, human beings especially. Instead of telling stories that let us hear the satisfying click of an individually-experienced event fitting into a larger moral or natural order, Defoe seems more interested in stories where characters come loose from that order and never quite find their way back. If as readers we are only on the lookout for providence 1 (overdetermining origins) or providence 2 (superintending ends), if we think those the only sites of serious theological thinking about providence, we will likely miss what Defoe is up to in Journal of the Plague Year or dismiss it as insufficiently rigorous. Troubled by his older brother’s theological mockery, H.F. decides to search the scriptures for guidance. This is the one scene in the novel where the Bible appears as a physical object, and it provides a good test case for thinking about divine-human interaction. H.F. prepares to read by setting ‘the strong Impressions which I had on my Mind for staying’ (p. 15) against his brother’s arguments for leaving. These include his sense of ‘Calling’ and ‘the Care due from me for the Preservation of my Effects’ (p. 15); given his disappointed plans to leave, which he takes as ‘Intimations which I thought I had from Heaven, that to me signify’d a kind of Direction to venture’ (p. 15), and ‘contain’d’ in that direction, H.F. discerns ‘a Promise of being preserved, if I obey’d’ (p. 15). He may be referring to this last ‘Promise’ or the entire gathering of impressions in this paragraph when he says at the start of the next one: ‘This lay close to me.’ He composes his thoughts almost like type, his mind like paper capable of receiving ‘impressions’, like a book that can ‘lay close to me’. To prepare for our examination of the long excerpt below about H.F. reading the Bible, here are two things to consider: first, as critics, we may miss the instructive potential of this scene because of assumptions we carry into it about religion and secularism. Advocates of religious reading—mindful of the way scripture should be understood in its original historical context; interpreted in its narrative, literary context; read by the interpretive lights of traditional, believing communities; not treated piecemeal in single verses; and definitely not opened at random for guidance—are likely to skip over H.F’s reading of the Bible as pagan, primitive, or superstitious, as a sign that Defoe and his fictional characters were not serious Christians. Advocates of secular reading who see no real distinction between superstitious and religious reading are likely to ignore H.F.’s chance opening of the Bible as a sign of the vestigial religiosity of Defoe’s fiction, British culture, or the age of Enlightenment, a religiosity better skipped, ignored, or trimmed away to get at whatever might be of more lasting importance to the secular novel. Both groups are likely to notice H.F.’s random reading as reason not to notice any more about the scene. Second, H.F. will refer twice to his ‘turning over’ the Bible, which curiously does not mean turning over a closed book from back cover to front or turning over a splayed book with pages facing down to pages up. It refers to something else, to some activity of H.F.’s mind, similar to what we mean today when we talk about ‘poring over’ a text. Or it might refer to some activity of H.F.’s hands, his turning of the pages, similar to ‘flipping through’ a book. Considered separately, these two modes of reading—poring over and flipping through—contradict each other: the first suggests a close, searching devotional reading; the second suggests a casual skimming or browsing. Perhaps ‘turning over’ combines both flipping through and poring over, a kind of inquisitive skimming or random searching, like scrolling down a social media feed. In the 18th century, the phrase ‘turning over’ was used as a synonym for ‘reading’ before and after Journal of the Plague Year.12 What precisely Defoe means by using it here is probably best discerned here: This lay close to me, and my Mind seemed more and more encouraged to stay than ever, and supported with a secret Satisfaction, that I should be kept: Add to this that turning over the Bible, which lay before me, and while my Thoughts were more than ordinarily serious upon the Question, I cry’d out, WELL, I know not what to do, Lord direct me! and the like; and that Juncture I happen’d to stop turning over the Book at the 91st Psalm, and casting my Eye on the second Verse, I read on to the 7th Verse exclusive; and after that, included the 10th, as follows. I will say of the Lord, He is my refuge, and my fortress, my God, in him will I trust. Surely he shall deliver thee from the snare of the fowler, and from the noisom pestilence. He shall cover thee with his feathers, and under his wings shalt thou trust: his truth shall be thy shield and buckler. Thou shalt not be afraid for the terror by night, nor for the arrow that flieth by day: Nor for the pestilence that walketh in darkness: nor for the destruction that wasteth at noon-day. A thousand shall fall at thy side, and ten thousand at thy right hand: but it shall not come nigh thee. Only with thine Eyes shalt thou behold and see the reward of the wicked. Because thou hast made the Lord which is my refuge, even the most High, thy habitation: There shall no evil befal thee, neither shall any plague come nigh thy dwelling, &c. (p. 15) Whatever H.F.’s initial, cursory mode of reading, he stops for a more selective, analytical reading of Psalm 91—selective because he starts at the second verse of the psalm, reads to 7, skips 8 and 9, but includes 10. Selectively reading verses from the psalms is an old practice in Christian churches that continues today.13 In H.F.’s case with Psalm 91, leaving out verses 8 and 9 keeps him from having to think about his enemies. Leaving out verses 11 and following keeps him from having to think about the fact that these are the same verses that Satan used to tempt Jesus in the wilderness, telling him to cast himself down from the height of the temple because God would surely protect him (Mt 4:6). How conspicuous would these omissions be to Defoe’s readers? Even though H.F. tells us which verses he excluded in his reading, they get printed anyway.14 Verses 8 and 9 are there. Verses 11 and following are hinted at in the &c printed at the end of the paragraph. Not just alluding to or quoting the Bible in part, the novel for a moment resembles a section of biblical text. It is as if H.F. or his author wanted readers to do the same selective reading that H.F. does: to acknowledge the verses being set aside in order to concentrate on others. It makes the selecting as much as the selection—these verses on trusting God in adversity but not those verses on enemies—an important part of this complex reading process. H.F.’s passive, providential encounter with the Bible includes a surprising number of active, intentional elements: his preparatory gathering of thoughts, turning of pages, praying for direction, selecting verses. But these elements tend to get initially passed over by critics, myself included, because of the strong element of chance, because of H.F.’s ‘I happen’d to stop turning.’ Something similar has happened in the more famous Bible scene in Robinson Crusoe. Like H.F. ‘turning over the book’ (p. 15), Crusoe was in an indeterminate, reading-not-reading state when the words of the Bible ‘occur’d’ to him (RC, p. 81). Crusoe gets to that indeterminate state through a variety of tobacco doping experiments—inhaling, chewing, and drinking a tobacco-infused rum cocktail. H.F. gets there by a variety of more serious religious and secular reading practices—making up his mind about the points of a previous argument, browsing, praying, selecting these verses but not those. In each case, Defoe is careful to describe his characters’ active preparation in a passive encounter with the scriptures. Or instead of calling these elements passive and active and getting bogged down in a discussion of agency, we might describe them more neutrally as aleatory and non-aleatory elements, more or less dependent on chance.15 Instead of assuming one of these is always more true or essential than the other—chance at the heart of things, for example, or irresistible divine intention invisibly controlling all—I want to try to describe how these elements combine in Journal of the Plague Year. For example, H.F.’s narrative moves unpredictably between different kinds of writing: journalistic reporting, history, personal memoir, data analysis, government policy brief, moral instruction, theological reflection. But without recourse yet to ‘the novel’ as the genre that might contain all this diversity, might comprehend it within an overarching set of writerly and readerly expectations—one thinks of criticism about the novel as the great omnivore of genres, devouring all other kinds of writing—H.F. includes the novelistic as one kind among many.16 Two longer inset narratives in Journal of the Plague Year stand out in this regard: the story of the Waterman providing for his family (pp. 87–92) and the story of two brothers, both former soldiers, and their friend (‘my three men’ H.F. calls them), who band together with a small group of others to build a temporary, makeshift community and wait out the plague (pp. 100–21). These novelistic stories do not frame or comprehend the other genres so much as occur alongside them. Instead of each varied bit of narrative combining to create an all-encompassing whole, they work together to keep readers from settling on any one particular set of genre conventions. Journal of the Plague Year combines aleatory and non-aleatory elements not only in its form, but also in the content of particular stories, like the story of the Waterman that H.F. meets by accident. H.F.’s fortunes in trade depend on London shipping, so he decides one day to wander down to the docks where he ‘fell into some Talk, at a Distance’ with a ‘poor Man’ who was living by himself on a small boat, making deliveries of food and supplies to people who had shut themselves up in their ships at anchor on the Thames. This Waterman arranged his deliveries so that he never came into physical contact with the people on those ships. He was careful to purchase supplies from places in and out of the city that were not infected by the plague, and he delivered his earnings to his own family without ever coming into physical contact with them. Nevertheless, one of his children had already died. His wife and another child have recently fallen ill, and as the man begins to weep telling his story, H.F. tries to stop and comfort him with some pious advice, telling him to ‘resign’ himself to the will of God, who, H.F. says, ‘is dealing with us all in Judgment’ (p. 90). The man replies, ‘Oh Sir … it is infinite mercy if any of us are spar’d’ (p. 90). H.F. is so moved by this man’s response that he never again in the novel describes the plague simply as God’s punishing judgement against the city. The Waterman’s providing for his family teaches H.F. to see in that provision, however imperfect, however insecure against harm, God’s provision for the city. Before his chance meeting and conversation with the Waterman, whose name we learn is Robert, H.F. sees in the pandemic only God’s wrath. For example, H.F. criticises a group of men who taunt him for ‘calling the Plague the Hand of God, mocking, and even laughing at the Word Judgment, as if the Providence of God had no Concern in inflicting such a desolate Stroke’ (p. 57, cf. p. 58). He describes ‘this dismal time to be a particular Season of Divine Vengeance’ (p. 59), when God will ‘single out the proper Objects, of his Displeasure, in a more remarkable Manner, than at another Time’ (p. 59). He worries that ‘God was resolved to make a full end of the people’ (p. 84). However, the care with which Robert provides for his family and delivers supplies to ships docked in the Thames—that care combined with Robert’s belief that ‘it is infinite Mercy, if any of us are spared’—leads H.F. to criticise his prior faith as ‘meer Presumption’ (p. 90). H.F. only saw God’s wrath and was overconfident in his ability to see it, but after his encounter with the Waterman, H.F. consistently describes the plague as an ‘Enemy’, the ‘most terrible Enemy in the World’ ( pp. 111, 115). H.F. also begins to take notice of what he calls the ‘merciful Disposition of Providence’ in the fact that there were no fires during the plague (p. 132). Similarly, it was ‘a merciful Disposition of Providence in this time of Calamity’ that the plague did not hit the whole city at once, that it spread slowly enough for people in relatively healthy parishes to care for sicker ones (p. 166). H.F. adds that among ‘the many signal good Providences which attended this great City … this was a very remarkable one, that it pleased God thus to move the hearts of the People in all parts of the Kingdom, so chearfully to contribute to the Relief and Support of the poor at London’ (p. 166). God’s mercy is manifest to H.F. in each of these instances—Robert’s provision for his family and neighbours first, then the absence of other natural hazards like fire, the slow, uneven spread of the disease, and the mobilising of relief for the poor. H.F.’s accidental encounter with the Waterman alters what H.F. looks for afterward. This narrative segment does not illustrate or fit into a larger whole so much as change the course of subsequent narrative and qualify what came before. H.F. does not try to refute his early-in-the-narrative belief that the plague is a providential act of divine wrath so much as add to it his recognition of God’s providence operating with ordinary human provision for one another. The aleatory and non-aleatory also combine in readers’ responses to Journal of the Plague Year, which is true of course for anything we read; but for Defoe, making room for accidental responses to his fiction seems to be a matter of design. Early in the novel, H.F. explains that he wants his account of the plague to be more than autobiography: ‘I desire this Account may pass with [readers], rather for a Direction to themselves to act by, than a History of my actings’ (p. 11). At the end of the novel, emphasising how grateful to God people were when the death rates finally began to decline, H.F. defends himself against imaginary readers who think he has tried to direct them too much and made his book ‘an officious canting of religious things, preaching a Sermon instead of writing a History, making myself a Teacher instead of giving my Observations of things’ (p. 192). Taken together, H.F.’s reflections show him negotiating different genre expectations but not resolving those differences. He writes to tell us what he saw, yes, but more than that, to direct us toward what we should do, and not just what we should do but how we should feel. And yet this diverse, haphazard combination of recognisable kinds of writing creates conditions for readers to be surprised by what may direct them and what it may direct them toward. When H.F. worries about his narrative being taken as mere autobiography or dismissed as a sermon, it is not because he intends to employ some more profound, complex set of generic conventions to guide his readers. Rather, the multiplicity of genres keeps beyond the author’s control exactly how the book will move its readers, what direction or manner of religious instruction they will take from their reading. I could do more here to sharpen my analytical distinction between aleatory and non-aleatory elements and then compare the way those elements combine in Journal of the Plague Year to the way they combine in narrative fiction more generally, but my goal in these last few paragraphs has been only to suggest that Defoe thinks of these elements as reciprocally related rather than opposed: a chance encounter with a Waterman leads to a new capacity for noticing mercy in subsequent events; combining predictable genres of writing can generate unpredictable readerly expectations and connections to the story. Likewise, fanning through pages of the Bible creates conditions for landing and reflecting on certain verses from Psalm 91. Catching the possibility of mutual, reciprocal relations between non-aleatory and aleatory elements can help us catch ways that divine and human agency might be reciprocally related too. When 17th-century theologians used the word concurrence to describe divine activity in the world, they usually did so to emphasise divine agency as prior to and greater than human or other creaturely agency. As Fergusson explains, ‘divine concurrence’ for these theologians ‘is not to be understood in terms of a causal partnership; instead, it is the way in which God as the primal cause works in and through secondary causes’ (p. 93). However, when H.F. uses the language of ‘concurrence’, he does seem to be thinking about something like ‘causal partnership’, which in turn gets him thinking about fiction. H.F. had anticipated telling this piece of fiction about his three men 50 pages earlier: ‘I have by me a Story of two Brothers and their Kinsman’ that ‘may have its Uses so many Ways’ (pp. 51, 52). In the passage below, his reflections on providence seem to prompt him to return to that story and preface it with another version of the novelistic morality claim that begins so many of Defoe’s novels: I often reflected upon the unprovided Condition, that the whole Body of the People were in at the first coming of this Calamity upon them, and how it was for Want of timely entring into Measures, and Managements, as well publick as private, that all the Confusions that followed were brought upon us; and that such a prodigious Number of People sunk in that Disaster, which if proper Steps had been taken, might, Providence concurring, have been avoided, and which, if Posterity think fit, they may take a Caution, and Warning from: But I shall come to this Part again. I come back to my three Men: Their Story has a Moral in every Part of it, and their whole Conduct, and that of some who they join’d with, is a pattern for all poor men to follow, or Women either, if ever such a Time comes again; and if there was no other End in recording it, I thing [sic] this a very just one, whether my Account be exactly according to Fact or no. (p. 100) In the first paragraph, H.F’s reflecting on the ‘unprovided Condition’ of the people becomes the occasion for reflecting on the concurring providence of God, which exists in potential, waiting to be realised in the ‘proper Steps’ that people might have taken to save those who died of the plague, ‘Providence concurring’. H.F. does not invoke the providence of God to justify human inaction. He does not say that it must have been God’s will that the mismanagement of the pandemic left so many to die. Instead, God’s provision depends on or follows from human mutual care, as it does in the sentence above. H.F. makes similar parenthetical references to concurring providence elsewhere in the novel: when he talks about the benefits of social distancing, for example, and says ‘thousands of Families were preserved, speaking with due Reserve to the Direction of Divine Providence, by that Means’ (p. 164, emphasis in original). Likewise, he talks about people who had self-quarantined and ‘by that means, under God’s Providence, been preserv’d thro’ all the heat of that Infection’ (p. 177). Letting H.F.’s style carry some of his theological meaning, we might say that the concurring providence of God happens in the world the way it happens in these sentences—parenthetically. God’s providence intervenes in a way that lends emphasis or support to whatever comes before and after but does so unnecessarily. The sentence like the world would go on without it, whether we digressed to take notice of that providence or not. H.F.’s parenthetical references to God invert a philosophical, artistic commonplace: thinking of human life as a short parenthetical phrase, with our birth the opening parentheses and our death the closing, and what happens in between as inconsequential to the longer, ongoing sentence or story in which we fleetingly appear. But it is precisely in that possible, only-in-potential, unnecessary part of the sentence that H.F. locates divine providence, preventing God’s power from being thought of only as primary, absolute, or irresistible. H.F. is elevating the status of that parenthetical position, making it the locus of divine activity. The story of the three men occupies a kind of parenthetical position in the novel, about midway through, between H.F.’s firsthand accounts and policy reflections. Like the story of Robert the Waterman, the story of the three men is about provision, although not about food so much as shelter, and not just for one family but for a larger, makeshift community. When John the Biscuit Baker, his brother Thomas the Sailmaker, and their friend Richard the Carpenter finally decide to leave London, they discover that many of the surrounding towns outside the city have closed off their streets to prevent refugees from passing through. So the three men stay in a tent made by the sailmaker from a piece of sail cloth he happened to find (p. 104). They argue and plead for provision as they travel, bartering work where they can. They eventually band together with a larger group of 13 to look for more permanent accommodations, a place where they can wait out the plague. When one town refuses to let them pass through and threatens to keep them out by force, a sort of siege occurs. The three men fashion a small arsenal of wooden guns, real enough from a distance, and use that show of force to convince the town to sell them provisions (p. 113). Another country town lets them build temporary housing in a nearby field where they wait out the plague (p. 115). H.F. gives us this story to illustrate the possibilities of mutual provision in the midst of pressures faced by both the city poor, forced to shift for themselves outside London, and people in the country understandably reluctant to make room for them. Two groups with good reasons to treat each other with mutual suspicion and hostility manage a delicate peace. What if when H.F. promises to gives us the story of these three men ‘in their own Persons’ (p. 52), he thinks of his writerly role not as a puppeteer or ventriloquist making his characters move and speak, and not as the primary cause of their secondary fictional speech, but as concurring with them, letting their imagined agency activate his authorial agency?17 And what if Defoe through H.F. is trying to represent not what was or is but what might be? The promise that ‘the Story may have its Uses’ (p. 52) shares the subjunctive mood of potential divine-human interaction in all that ‘might, Providence concurring, have been avoided’ (p. 100). The uses of fiction—like the providences of God—are not foreordained so much as latent, waiting to be realised by readers and neighbours. There is no way to prove that when H.F. or his author are thinking about concurring providence they are also thinking about fiction, but H.F.’s introducing his fictionalised three-men story with those two paragraphs above suggests there might be a correlation. By locating divine providence as parenthetical to human care, Defoe is bound to disappoint readers looking for providence in special, miraculous interventions that reestablish fixed natural and social orders, but that disappointment may be instructive. When H.F.’s initial plans to leave the city failed, he wondered ‘about these Disappointments being from Heaven’ (p. 13). Defoe’s other fictional characters have wondered about divine disappointment too, perhaps most famously Robinson Crusoe: after discovering about a dozen stalks of English barley miraculously growing outside his cave, he then remembers shaking a few seeds out of an old bag of chicken feed scavenged from the ship. Reflecting on his disappointment, Crusoe tries to enchant it, insisting that he ought to be ‘as thankful for so strange and unforeseen Providence, as if it had been miraculous; for it was really the Work of Providence as to me’ (p. 68). This at-first thought miraculous provision later discovered to be ordinary sets a pattern repeated elsewhere in Defoe’s fiction. In The Farther Adventures, Crusoe presents his old Bible to Will Atkins not knowing that Atkins had just prayed for one. Atkins weeps with gratitude and praise, takes it to be a miraculous provision, and Crusoe decides not to tell him otherwise (FA, p. 114). At the end of The Serious Reflections, Crusoe tells a metafictional parable about a young atheist swooning at the thought that he had just heard a supernatural voice speaking to him through the cracked front door of a friend’s house, though it was really just another well-meaning friend impersonating that friend’s voice (SR, p. 272). Defoe writing as Crusoe narrates these stories to let us readers into their ordinariness, but he leaves the young atheist in his swoon and Atkins in his tears, both hovering on the brink of disappointment to come. We are left to wonder what the atheist will say when he finds out the voice he heard was not supernatural, what Atkins will say when he finds out Crusoe was planning to give him a Bible anyway. H.F.’s most explicit defence of God’s disappointing providence occurs in a sharp, three-paragraph reflection where, like Fergusson, H.F. takes a polyphonic approach to listening to providence. In the first paragraph, H.F. tries not to quarrel with writers who focus on disasters as manifestations of God’s wrathful judgement. He says: I would be far from lessening the Awe of the Judgments of God, and the Reverence to his Providence, which ought always to be on our Minds on such Occasions as these: doubtless the Visitation it self is a Stroke from Heaven upon a City, or Country, or Nation where it falls; a Messenger of his Vengeance. (p. 152) H.F. insists that he writes to prompt ‘due Impressions of the Awe of God … not to lessen them it is that I have left those Minutes upon Record’ (p. 152). In the next paragraph, he tries not to criticise writers who collect singular examples of merciful deliverance: I reflect upon no Man for putting the Reason of those Things upon the immediate Hand of God, and the Appointment and Direction of his Providence; nay, on the contrary, there were many wonderful Deliverances of Persons from Infection, and Deliverances of Persons when Infected, which intimate singular and remarkable Providence. (p. 153) H.F. acknowledges that his own deliverance is ‘one next to miraculous,’ he says, and he records it ‘with Thankfulness’ (p. 153), but he does not settle on this view of special, particular providences for individuals any more than on the view of God’s sometimes general wrath against cities and nations. Instead of contending for either one of these views, H.F. tries do something more difficult: take the awe felt at God’s judgement against the city and the wonder at God’s deliverance of individuals and make more awesome, more wonderful God’s activity in a disease spread and stopped by natural means. H.F. begins the crucial third paragraph by saying that when he speaks of the plague as ‘arising from natural Causes’ and ‘propagated by natural Means’, we should not consider it ‘at all the less a Judgment for its being under the Conduct of humane Causes and Effects’. The awe we feel at supernatural judgement should be the same awe we feel about a disease spread and slowed by natural means. What we feel toward a disease absolutely above and beyond human control should be the same as what we feel toward a disease ‘under’ our ‘Conduct’. H.F. explains why he thinks so: for as the divine Power has form’d the whole Scheme of Nature, and maintains Nature in its Course; so the same Power thinks fit to let his own Actings with Men, whether of Mercy or Judgment, go on in the ordinary Course of natural Causes, and he is pleased to act by those natural Causes as the ordinary Means; excepting and reserving to himself nevertheless a Power to act in a Supernatural Way when he sees occasion. (p. 153) Deists are usually accused of limiting God’s activity in creation to beginnings, to the initial formation of the ‘whole Scheme of Nature’, but H.F. focuses on how God sustains or ‘maintains Nature’. More than that, and in a phrase that anticipates the concerns of 20th-century theologians writing about divine action, H.F. says the same divine power that creates and sustains the world has thought fit ‘to let his own Actings with Men … go on in the ordinary Course’ of things.18 The phrase ‘Actings with Men’ is wonderfully ambiguous because it suggests both God’s actions toward human beings through natural causes and God’s cooperation with human beings. The first implies that God uses the ordinary course of things to act on humanity; the second implies that the ordinary course of things sometimes acts upon God and humanity, as if God sometimes suffers events too. H.F., however, not content to settle on any one mode of divine activity in the world, reminds us that God may sometimes act without the means of any natural causes. One such occasion for the supernatural action of God seems to be the end of the plague, an end that H.F. carefully anticipates before writing about it in the last section of the novel.19 There H.F.’s usual thematic, stylistic, and rhetorical emphasis on God’s activity mediated through creation seems almost undone by his final emphasis on the miraculous decline in death rates: ‘Nothing, but the immediate Finger of God, nothing, but omnipotent Power could have done it; the Contagion despised all Medicine’ (p. 190).20 H.F. insists ‘it was all supernatural, that it was extraordinary, and that no Account could be given it’ (p. 191). It may be that H.F. and his author were preparing us all along for this final moment of theological uplift, only emphasising earlier God’s mediated action during the plague to set us up for this moment of God’s greater, unmediated action to stop it. If so, God would become at the end of the novel the God of our medical science and social policy gaps, mercifully doing what we cannot. Or maybe H.F.’s author ends his account with talk of the miraculous for other reasons. We have been here before with Defoe’s fictional characters—noticing now the miraculous growth of barley, not yet the empty sack of chicken feed, on the verge of finding God present in both that sack and in the disappointment that made it so important. Turning over the last pages of this novel, mindful of the all-supernatural, extraordinary end of the 1665 plague, we are primed for a similarly divine disappointment, braced to discover again God’s providential action in the care we provide for one another, in the developing and distributing of vaccines, in the reform of public policies that allowed this natural disaster to become an even worse social catastrophe. Closing this book on the plague feels less like arriving at an exclusive, God-ordained end and more like the closing of a parenthetical, or, as we turn back to our lives in the world, the opening of a new one. Footnotes 1 Daniel Defoe, A Journal of the Plague Year, ed. Paula R. Backscheider (New York: Norton, 1992), p. 14. 2 See, for example, excerpts from Applebee’s Original Weekly Journal, The Daily Journal, and The London Gazette in Defoe, Journal of the Plague Year, pp. 218–28. 3 See, for example, Kathryn Tanner, Christianity and the New Spirit of Capitalism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2019); Rev. Dr William J. Barber II and Rev. Dr Liz Theoharis, co-directors, ‘Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival’, https://www.poorpeoplescampaign.org. 4 On the reception history of Journal of the Plague Year, see Rober Mayer, History and the Early English Novel: Matters of Fact from Bacon to Defoe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 207–26. 5 Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, ed. Thomas Keymer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), hereafter cited in text as RC; Daniel Defoe, The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, ed. W.R. Owens (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2008), hereafter cited in text as FA; Daniel Defoe, Serious Reflections During the Life and Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, ed. G.A. Starr (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2008), hereafter cited in text as SR. 6 H.F. later says he should have left: ‘I repented several times that I had ventur’d to stay in Town’ (p. 141) and ‘’tho Providence seem’d to direct my Conduct to be otherwise; yet it is my opinion and I must leave it as a Prescription, (viz.) that the best Physick against the Plague is to run away from it. I know People encourage themselves, by saying, God is able to keep us in the midst of Danger’ but such belief caused thousands to die that might otherwise have been safe (p. 156, emphasis in original). 7 Sandra Macpherson, Harm’s Way: Tragic Responsibility and the Novel Form (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010); David Fergusson, The Providence of God: A Polyphonic Approach (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018). 8 A generation of scholarship in 18th-century studies has helpfully shifted the goals of character analysis away from plumbing psychological depths to noticing the shifting variety of things and social connections that constitute literary characters. For an early example, see Deidre Lynch, The Economy of Character: Novels, Market Culture, and the Business of Inner Meaning (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1998); for more examples, see Macpherson, Harm’s Way, p. 199 n. 69. On the benefits of reading 18th-century fiction for its deviations from later canons of realism, see Patricia Meyer Spacks, Novel Beginnings: Experiments in Eighteenth-Century English Fiction (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006). 9 Macpherson’s work suggests a different way of thinking about theodicy: as a problem not of criminal law but of tort law, that is, not about divine intention so much as about divine liability. The cross, then, would become a site not of God’s choosing to substitute God-self for our violations of criminal law so much as of God taking the blame for what is not God’s fault. 10 On 18th-century deism and its legacies, see Fergusson, pp. 115–23 and 289–94. On 19th-century revisions to earlier thinking about origins and ends in light of Darwin’s theory of evolution, see Fergusson, pp. 167–216. On 20th-century writing about divine interaction and double agency, see Fergusson, pp. 217–40. 11 On popular belief about providence in England leading up to the 18th century, see Alexandra Walsham, Providence in Early Modern England (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999). On the late 17th-century ‘providence tradition’ that informs Defoe’s work, a tradition that gathered and published accounts of particular providences against deist defenders of general providence only, see J. Paul Hunter, The Reluctant Pilgrim: Defoe’s Emblematic Method and the Quest for Form in Robinson Crusoe (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1966), pp. 51–75. See also J. Paul Hunter, Before Novels: The Cultural Contexts of Eighteenth-Century Fiction (New York: Norton, 1990), pp. 195–224. For a more recent account of providence in Defoe’s fiction, see Leah Orr, ‘Providence and Religion in the Crusoe Trilogy’, Eighteenth-Century Life 38.2 (2014) 1–27. Orr like Hunter traces recurring references to providence in Defoe’s fiction to providence 1 and providence 2, but neither critic considers providence 3. 12 See ‘turn, v.’ def. 8 and 11a and ‘to turn over’ def. 2 (rather than 1), OED Online, accessed 17 December 2020. A full-text keyword search for ‘turning over’ in Eighteenth-Century Collections Online (ECCO) returned 50 entries. All of the entries through 1722, seven total, used the phrase to describe a form of reading: e.g. ‘turning over [a] book’. 13 Christian virtue is often thought best displayed by excising verses from the Psalms that radiate anger, denounce enemies, question God, or cry out in grief. Instead of making room for God’s people to acknowledge and work through their grief and anger in worship, the psalms are used to edit and leave unexpressed those dangerous feelings, a kind of emotional supersessionism. For an early defence of such editorial practices, see Isaac Watts, The Psalms of David Imitated in the Language of the New Testament, and Apply’d to the Christian State and Worship (London: Printed for J. Clark, R. Ford, and R. Cruttenden, 1719); for a fictional example, see Samuel Richardson, Pamela: Or, Virtue Rewarded, eds Thomas Keymer and Alice Wakely (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 140–2, 321. For a better, more recent take on the psalms, see Walter Brueggemann, Spirituality of the Psalms (Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg Fortress, 2002) and Sally A. Brown and Patrick D. Miller (eds), Lament: Reclaiming Practices in Pulpit, Pew, and Public Square (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2005). 14 The text of Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year (p. 15) matches exactly the 1722 copy available on Eighteenth-Century Collections Online, and the quotation from Psalm 91 matches the Authorised or King James version exactly except for a few minor differences in punctuation. 15 On chance and the history of probability theory, see Ian Hacking, The Emergence of Probability, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Lorraine Daston, Classical Probability in the Enlightenment (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988); and Gerd Gigerenzer et al., The Empire of Chance: How Probability Changed Science and Everyday Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). On chance in Journal of the Plague Year, see Macpherson, Harm’s Way, pp. 15–49; Nicholas Seager, ‘Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics: Epistemology and Fiction in Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year’, Modern Language Review 103.3 (2008) 639–53. On the relative agency of persons and things, see Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010). 16 Contending for the dominance of the novel as a literary genre, M.M. Bakhtin does not describe it as an omnivore consuming all other genres or an organic whole that contains all other genres as parts. Rather, the novel so revitalises other genres that it touches that we need to change the way we think about the relationships among them. See M.M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, trans. Michael Holquist (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1981), pp. 5–7. For Defoe’s promotion of ‘infinite variety’ in his work, see Wolfram Schmidgen, ‘The Metaphysics of Robinson Crusoe’, ELH 83.1 (2016) 101–26. 17 My speculations here are inspired in part by J.M. Coetzee’s 2003 Nobel Prize lecture, ‘He and His Man’, https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/2003/coetzee/25261-j-m-coetzee-nobel-lecture-2003. Coetzee finds in Defoe an exemplary ethical concern for the relationship between authors and their narrating characters. The shape of Coetzee’s concern strikes me as very close to what Macpherson describes as Defoe’s concern for tort law, especially in Defoe’s novel Roxanna, dealing with how far masters are responsible for the actions of their servants: ‘Defoe uses the law—in particular a newly refined doctrine of agency making masters vicariously liable for the acts of their servants—to reimagine and revalue providentialism as a tragic ethos’ (Macpherson, Harm’s Way, p. 13). Like Defoe, it seems to me, Coetzee writes fiction aware of this vicarious liability as an author, writes to accept and draw attention to that responsibility rather than trying to evade or deny it. 18 On the divine action project—a theological effort to use scientific insights to show how God might be involved in the world beyond initial creation and ongoing preservation, and involved in a way that honours creaturely agency without overriding it—see Fergusson, Providence of God, pp. 217–24. 19 H.F. anticipates the end a little more than halfway through the novel, when he says, ‘it pleased God to stay his Hand, and to slacken the Fury of the Contagion … and that above, if not without the Agency of Means, as I shall take Notice of in its proper Place’ (p. 136). H.F. anticipates the end several more times: ‘But of this I shall speak again presently’ (p. 163); ‘I shall come to speak of that part again’ (p. 166); and ‘It remains now, that I should say something of the merciful Part of this terrible Judgment’ (p. 175). But that ‘now’ does not occur until the last pages of the novel. 20 H.F. falters slightly when he repeats in the next paragraph this claim about the declining death rates: ‘in that very Moment it pleased God, with a most agreeable Surprize, to cause the Fury of it to abate, even of it self’ (p. 190). That phrase ‘even of it self’ shows that H.F. is still thinking about God’s mediated, reciprocal activity happening in and generated by created things. It is not just God causing the fury of the plague to abate but also something of the plague itself, a changed relationship between the bubonic plague bacterium and its human host. © The Author(s) 2021. Published by Oxford University Press 2021; All rights reserved. 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TI - The Disappointing, Parenthetical Providence of God in Daniel Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year
JO - Literature and Theology
DO - 10.1093/litthe/frab013
DA - 2021-06-07
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/the-disappointing-parenthetical-providence-of-god-in-daniel-defoe-s-CJON6UxJuK
SP - 1
EP - 1
VL - Advance Article
IS - 
DP - DeepDyve
ER -