1980 > Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, Leipzig, 1980, H. 4. — S. 341–349.

Scholars investigating the English novel of the Enlightenment point, as a rule, to the role of publicistic writings and, above all, the literary essay in the formation of the national novel.1 Incidentally a similarly important role in the process was played by diaries and memoirs - genres between which, at the end of the 17th and beginning of the 18th centuries, the borderline was rather uncertain.
Indeed, memoirs and diaries on the one hand and fictional genres on the other in- fluenced one another. Memoirs were influenced by fiction mostly in the aspect of style. Some elements of the memoir and diary forms of narration and composition were readily assimilated by fiction.The very notion of "memoir novel" contains an oxymoron: memoirs envisage above all the biographical element, accuracy and objectivity in the description of people and events, while the novel is based on fiction. This was precisely the way (genuine memoir - fictitious memoir - novel) in which this genre modification developed.
An analysis of the works of the French writer Courtilz de Sandras, author of a number of fictitious memoirs, supplies interesting material for consideration of the borderline between novel and memoir. Mémoirs de Monsieur le C. d. R. (1687) is the first one among them - the West German critic W. Füger calling it "the first memoir novel". In line with other scholars who are not inclined to regard the pseudomemoirs of Count de Rochefort as a novel, one can hardly agree with such a genre definition. Speaking of Courtilz de Sandras as the creator of the memoir novel, literary critics refer to his most famous book, Mémoirs de Monsieur D'Artagnan, which was published in Cologne in 1700 and a century and a half later served as the origin for Dumas- père's trilogy on the musketeers.
The trail blazed by Courtilz was important for the whole of European literature. In England the first fictitious memoirs were written by Mary Manley: Secret Memoirs and Manners of Several Persons of Quality of both Sexes from New Atlantis (1709), Memoirs of Europe (1710). Later a similar development could be observed in Daniel Defoe's works from Memoirs of Count Tariff (1713) and Memoirs of Duke Melfort (1714) to the novels of the early 1720s.
Even more interesting was the relationship between the novel and the diary at the beginning of the 18th century. The diary as a literary genre originated in England in the Restoration period. Samuel Pepys kept his famous Diary in the years 1660-1669. The history of the diary as a genre in European literature of the 17th-18th centuries is ushered in by this book.
The tradition started by Pepys was assiduously elaborated in European literature and above all in the English literature of the Enlightenment. Politicians and men of letters, travellers and scientists, theologists and clergymen presented the diaries to the reading public. The best known of them are: Journals of the quaker G. Fox (1694) and the methodist J. Wesley (1739-1791), Diary of John Evelyn (1641)-1706), the epistolary Journal to Stella by J. Swift (published after his death in 1766-68), Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon by H. Fielding (1754), the epistolary Journal to Eliza by L. Sterne (published posthumously in 1904), Diary of F. Burney (1768-1840), The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson by J. Boswell (1785), Diary of a Country Parson by J. Woodforde (1784) and some others."
Diaries are likely to be found among the legacy of the authors of "Gothic" novels whose artistic world is fully dominated by fiction. The Diary of a West-Indian Pro- prietor left by the author of the famous Monk, M. G. Lewis the one that aroused Coleridge's enthusiasm, can serve as an example.To be able to draw a more or less distinct borderline between memoirs and diary one must define the basic genre characteristics of the latter. The diary is one of the genres of memoir literature, its, so to say, "initial form". Like other genres of memoir lit- erature (notes, autobiography, confession) the diary is based on the life experience of the author and is therefore autobiographical.
It differs from all the other memoir genres by the subjectivity of form, being always presented in the 1st-person narration. The time-and-space continuum of the diary is marked by absolute egocentrism the author is always (if only formally) the centre of the world he describes. Diary notes are not retrospective, they are contemporary to the events described. "The diary makes no attempt to see life steadily and see it whole. It is focused on the immediate present, and finds that the happenings of 24 hours are sufficient unto the day..." Hence it follows that diaries have greater topicality than, for instance, memoirs.
The main compositional principle of the diary is chronology. It can be said that this is the only genre where disposition and composition coincide. Differing from other genres of literary journalism the diary, however, interacts with them. This interaction results in the appearance of different modifications of the genre, such as, epistolary diary, essayistic diary (i. e. a diary containing serious meditations on philosophy, religion, literature) etc.Of special interest is the interrelation between the diary and the novel. Singularly rich sources for the interpretation of the problem have been accumulated in English literature where the diary as a genre historically precedes the novel by half a century. Diary form thus influenced the novel in the period of its formation. This influence is reflected, for instance, in the books of Daniel Defoe, "the father of the English novel".
Only three prose narratives of Defoe (Moll Flanders, Colonel Jacque, and Roxana) do not contain the characteristics of the diary form proper either in the structure or in the narration. As far as his other novels are concerned (Robinson Crusoe, A Journal of the Plague Year, Memoirs of a Cavalier and Captain Singleton) the influence of this form is found in different degrees.
A reservation, though, should be made here. Including A Journal of the Plague Year in the list of Defoe's novels I follow the established tradition; the traditional definition, however, does not solve the problem of the genre attribution of the work in question. Qualifying Defoe as Walter Scott's predecessor, A. A. Elistratova calls A Journal of the Plague Year and Memoirs of a Cavalier historical long short stories. The arbitrary character of this definition being far from satisfactory, we regard it as necessary to draw a certain demarkation line, for the two works referred to cannot be attributed to the same genre.
A Journal of the Plague Year is not a diary in its proper meaning. In the first place the author does not adhere to the day-by-day principle of the diary composition, but more important is the fact that this diary is a figment of the author's imagination. In the opposition "fiction non-fiction" adopted by English literary criticism Defoe's Journal should unreservedly be qualified as fiction. At the time of the London plague of 1664-1665 the writer himself could not have been older than 4-5 years, and it goes without saying that he did not keep a diary at that period. Incidentally the famous "secretary of the epoch", Samuel Pepys, did not keep his diary either when the plague was at its height from May till October 1665 and in that part of his Diary, which covers the period of 1664-65, the plague is only mentioned and not described.
It is true that the author of the Journal of the Plague Year studied a number of historical works and documents of that time such as the collection of weekly bills of mortality published in 1665 and re-edited in 1721. If Defoe's unceasing interest in historical works, rather characteristic of England of that time, be considered, his aspiration for historical sources as the basis for his work was but natural. For all that he made use of his imagination too (though within the limits of historical authenticity) in his work on the Journal.
The form of fictitious memoirs had already been employed by the author before 1720, for example in his Memoirs of Count Tariff (1713), Memoirs of Duke Melfort (1714), A History of the Wars of Charles XII (1715) and some of his other works. At the same time one must admit that in the book in question fiction plays a far more important role.
In the first place the narrator author of the Journal is fictitious. The reader knows only his profession - a saddler - but not his name. The choice of such a com- mon and "low" trade is not accidental, it stems from the author's middle-class outlook. The fact once more stresses affinity of the fictitious diary to the novel, the former, as Georg Lucács correctly remarked, being more than any other genre of the 17th-20th-century literature connected with the middle-class element.
The sphere of the saddler's observations of life is often limited: it is his neighbours and their lives, London street scenes etc. Not only the morals and manners but also the economic background of life during the plague is described. Thus the saddler notices the rising prices of coal and food, the soaring fees of doctors who profit by the fear of the plague, and all kinds of superstitions spread by this fear.
From the first pages of the narration different documents, figures, references to various sources are interpolated the bills of the Lord Mayor and the Council of Aldermen, a kind of report (in five paragraphs) on the state of trade and crafts,14 the table of the death-rate of children etc. Figures (supplied by references to the sources) of the number of the deceased in different months and weeks of the epidemic, beginning from December 27, 1664, are also found in the book.
The Journal also supplies information about minor events which at closer inspection prove to be important and to a certain extent connected with the epidemic. These include stories of individual families and houses infected by the plague, the report on the spreading of printed astrological almanachs and dissemination of all kinds of prophesies, stories of church discords and critical accounts of government policy towards dissenters, which have a great deal in common with the author's pamphlet The Shortest Way with the Dissenters.
The narration in the greater part of the book is characteristic of a diary and sometimes is even sustained in a legal style. This manner of narration is not introduced by opening comments and is already adopted in the very first sentence of the Journal: "It was about the beginning of September 1664, that I, among the rest of my neighbours, heard, in ordinary discourse, that the plaque was returned again in Holland..."
Dialogue seldom occurs in the work. It is, for instance, represented by the dialogue between two brothers a biscuit-baker John and a sail-maker Thomas - or an interesting conversation between a carpenter Richard and a lord who ran away from that part of London which was hit by the plague.
Only once does the author introduce an additional point of view on the events described. In the final part of his Journal enumerating the places of mass burial of victims of the plague Defoe adds an interesting digression in a conversation with a certain "NB": "The author of this Journal lies buried in that very ground, being at his own desire, his sister having been buried there a few years before..."
This phrase seems to introduce a new point of view on the events and enables the writer to refer to the author of the Journal in the third person. These additional "narrative positions" can introduce into a prose work the "dialogical strain" which, in Bakhtin's opinion, represents the very core of the novel.
But Defoe's remark quoted above can only be regarded as an exception from the general rule. On the whole A Journal of the Plague Year cannot be qualified as a novel. It is not the "epic of private life"; the private life of the saddler that is the series of events that could have formed the fabular basis for a novel - is not an object for description.
Only occasionally does the saddler think about his brother and himself, of how to survive during the epidemic, but on the whole he is merely an observer. Man's ex- perience "imitated"19 in the book is not sufficient to acquire personal character.
A Journal of the Plague Year is a mystification of the diary (a fictitious diary), but it is not yet a novel. Its "aesthetic intentionality" (to make use of L. Ginsburg's apt remark) is evident, but its "aesthetic structurality" is insufficient. The book approximates to the novel, representing an "Urnovel", as D. Goldknopf called it."
Another of Defoe's books, Memoirs of a Cavalier, is written in the diary form. Its title is provided with a rather verbose subtitle: "A Military Journal of the wars in Germany and the wars in England; from the year 1632, to the year 1648. Written threescore years ago by an English gentleman, who served in the army of Gustavus Adolphus, the glorious King of Sweden, till his death; and after that, in the Royal Army of King Charles the First, from the beginning of the Rebellion, to the end of that war."
Like in A Journal of the Plague Year the title of Memoirs of a Cavalier gives a clear notion of the historical time of the events described: it is known that in the 1630s and 1640s supporters of King Charles I were called cavaliers. The subtitle even more precisely "attaches" the book to the political history of England and Europe: we learn that the author of Memoirs participated in the Thirty Years' War and then took part in the civil war.Time limits are also definite - from 1632 till 1648. Both dates speak for themselves: in 1632 there was the battle at Lützen and in 1648 the troops of the King were decisively defeated by Cromwell's army. Defoe was the first talented man of letters in England to turn to this material - the events of the stormy years, making use of his knowledge of the historical documents.
Both memoir and diary principles of description are integrated in the narration: it is not accidental that the words "memoirs" and "journal" stand in close contiguity in the subtitle of the book. In many episodes the main "epic situation" of the author, similarly to the memoir novel, is "at the end of the sequence of events which it is the purpose of the novel to describe" In other episodes (they are not numerous in the novel) the narrative manner is closer to that of the diary. The absence of a rigid, stable "epic situation" causes a greater variety of narration in Memoirs of a Cavalier, if compared to A Journal of the Plague Year.
An event can be both described and related. In the text one comes across docu- mentary data on the hero's birthplace and his education, on the route of the troops and their number, on the Landtag's bills, the terms of armistice etc. The book contains essayistic meditations and, not infrequently, dialogue.
Speaking of the formal documentary style characteristic of many passages of Memoirs of a Cavalier one should note the peculiarity of the foreword - an essay on how the manuscript with the memoirs of the cavalier was found. From a short "memorandum" of an unknown man with the initials L. K., included into the foreword, we learn that the father of the man whose initials were L. K., the major of a regiment of Cromwell's army, came into possesion of the manuscript after the battle at Worcester in 1651.
Thus quite a number of intermediaries are placed between Defoe himself and the events: the cavalier; the major of the roundheads army; his son L. K.; the author of the foreword, functioning as the publisher and the commentator of the manuscript. The latter is characterized by the formal style of a historian, the more so because he compares memoirs not with fiction but with historical studies: thus, comparing Memoirs of a Cavalier to History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England by Count Clarendon the publisher gives preference to Memoirs which contain a more exact description of the events.
The only thing that causes the publisher's (author's of the foreword) dissatisfaction is the fact that the author did not continue his description of the events. This remark as well as a reference to the battle at Worcester places the events described in the pseudomemoirs within exact time limits.Different stages of the cavalier's life are marked not only chronologically but by historical events as well. "When I came to Lyons", writes the fictitious author of the memoirs, "the King was gone from thence to Grenoble to meet the Cardinal, but the Queens were both at Lyons." Another example is of a similar type: "I returned to Frankfort au Main after this action, which happened the 17th of August 1634; but the progress of the imperialists was so great, that there was no staying at Frankfort..." This series of examples could have been prolonged, of course. Time intervals between different events in the life of the cavalier are so accurately fixed in the narration that it is even possible to establish the exact dates, though they are not stated in the Memoirs. On the whole the question of literary time and the system of time-and-space relations in Memoirs of a Cavalier merits special consideration. Similar to A Journal of the Plague Year the time-and-space situation is egocentric there. But the cavalier, as distinct from the saddler, is not a passive recorder of the events, but an active participant.
The fact that Defoe wanted to make his main character's life dependent on the series of historical events determined "the active position" of the protagonist. The saddler's fate is not the factor of the inner world of A Journal of the Plague Year. The cavalier's life no less than history determines the chronotopos of the novel marked by the wideness of time-and-space limits.
The variety of the scenes of action (France, Italy, Germany, England) corresponds to different time spheres; not one but several time spheres are presented in the book: the time of the cavalier, the time of L. K., the time of the publisher and his contemporary the reader. The distance of 60 years separates the time of the cavalier from the time of the publisher; this in fact anticipates the distance marked by Walter Scott in his first historical novel Waverley, or 'tis Sixty Years Since.
Another peculiarity brings Memoirs of a Cavalier closer to the novel. The author does not confine the action to certain caste limits. Firstly, in spite of the noble origin of the protagonist, various strata of society forming the army are involved in the action; secondly, the cavalier in Defoe's book is characterized by a certain bourgeois utilitarianism that creates an affinity between him and other characters of the writer, like his famous Robinson Crusoe among others.
The question of the role of the diary and memoir trend in the artistic system of the novel Robinson Crusoe is also of great interest. A comparatively short introductory part of the novel is written in the memoir form. "I was born in the year 1632, in the city of York, of a good family..." - thus Robinson Crusoe starts the story of his life; and this memoir form dominates about one half of the novel till the moment when the protagonist lands on a desert island after a shipwreck. This moment introduces the main part of the novel which has an intermediate title "Journal". Keeping a diary under such unusual and tragic circumstances may strike the unprepared reader as an unnatural proceeding. Employment of such a form of narration in the book, however, was justified historically.
The tendency of writing spiritual biographies and diaries was widely spread among the Puritans of the 17th century, who formed the hero's social background. During his first days on the island suffering from the lack of emotional stability and mental equilibrium the hero-narrator gives preference to the diary (as a form of confession) over the "spiritual biography". A contemporary investigator writes of Robinson Crusoe:
The journal begins ordinarily enough as a day-to-day account of his experiences, but soon Crusoe interprets events from a later point of view. The departure from the jour- nal is frequently unnoted, but when it becomes apparent, variations of the formula "But return to my Journal" are used to wrench the narrative back to its former structure
And indeed, though the word "Journal" is selected as an intermediate subtitle, dates and days (the formal feature of a diary) are indicated only on several pages. Certain features of the diary narrative manner is manifested in different episodes up to the story of Robinson's departure from the island. On the whole both the interrelation and the integration of the diary and memoir forms are characteristic of the novel. Dwelling on the diary peculiarities of Robinson Crusoe one should not disregard the fact that in this case we deal with another artistic mystification, a fictitious diary. Only ignoring the pseudomemoir character of the book one can assert, as Nigel Dennis does, that Robinson Crusoe is the work of a journalist, it is essentially what we would call a "documentary", or "a blunt impolished recital of the plain facts..."
It is true, though, that originally the book was published anonymously, and Defoe in publisher's disguise assured the reader in the "Preface" of the authenticity of the text, written by Robinson Crusoe himself. The preface, however, could not deceive even his contemporaries, who knew that the real prototype of Robinson Crusoe, the Scotsman Alexander Selkirk, did not keep a diary during the four years and four months spent on the Juan-Fernandez island.
Some men of letters of the middle and the second half of the 18th century believed in the legend that the poorly educated Selkirk gave a detailed account of his adventures to the professional journalist and writer D. Defoe who used it in his book. But already at the beginning of the 19th century, mostly owing to W. Scott's efforts, the groundlessness of this version was established. Moreover, the "aesthetic intentionality" of the memoirs and diary of Robinson Crusoe was evident too.
This evidence, though, did not prevent some critics, contemporaries of the author, from judging Defoe's novel by the criteria of diary literature. "I think", wrote Charles Gildon in his Letter to Daniel Defoe (1729), "there can be no man so ignorant as not to know that our navigation produces both our safety and our riches, and that whoever therefore shall endeavour to discourage this, is so far a profest enemy of his country's prosperity and safety: but the author of Robinson Crusoe not only in the beginning, but in many places of the book, employs all the force of his little rhetoric to dissuade and deter all people from going to sea..." Charles Gildon's pointless and ridiculous arguments show only too plainly that he failed to understand the genre nature of Defoe's book.
The significance of the fictitious element in the book was not always properly appreciated by the author's compatriots in the 18th century, which caused the absence of a unanimous view on the book's genre in the literary and critical thought of the English Enlightenment. Thus, for instance, James Beattie in his Dissertations Moral and Critical (1783) calls the book "novel", Clara Reeve, on the other hand, in her famous treatise The Progress of Romance qualifies it as "romance". Indeed, though the limits of the inner world of the novel are rather expanded by the author's artistic imagination, we deal with the novel of a new, post-Cervantesian type, the one that treats in its specific way the life problems and collisions of the beginning of the bourgeois era.
The memoir and diary narrative forms endowed the novel with specific features, drawing the reader's attention not to the hero's surroundings in the greater part of the novel there is no human surrounding at all but to his actions and meditations on their interrelation. The seeming monological character of the narration was oc- casionally underestimated not only by the readers but likewise by men of letters. The following illustrates this attitude.
Defoe's novel is known to have brought forth a regular flood of both imitations on the one hand and satirical pamphlets and parodies on the other. One of the parodies which appeared in 1719 was called The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Mr. D... De F..., of London, Hosier. The parody, which in its main part represents the dialogue between Daniel Defoe and Robinson, i. e. the author and the hero, is regarded a failure, the cause of which is the unknown parodist's neglect of the monological character of the original's diary form in favour of a dialogue.
As regards the dialogic nature of the novel, it is characteristic of Memoirs of a Cavalier to a considerable extent and especially of Robinson Crusoe in spite of the memoir-and-diary form of its narration.
Although the first-person singular was his favourite literary pose, and he used it in fiction and non-fiction alike, he never spoke in his own voice as Daniel Defoe, the private person. Two voices sound through his work: the public version that speaks in the non-fiction, detailing and explaining his opinions about the issues of the day; and the private impersonation, that first-person voice that gives life to the characters who are the most enduring part of Defoe's legacy as a writer: Robinson Crusoe, Captain Singleton, Moll Flanders, Colonel Jacque and Roxana ... greater freedom and suppleness, their language is refreshed by the non-literary speech elements and by the "novel layers" of the literary language; they acquire dialogical character; laughter, irony, humour, elements of self-parody penetrate into it; and finally which is of primary importance the novel introduces the topicality, the specific incompleteness of the message and fresh contact with the spontaneously developing present.
The results of this process are evident in Robinson Crusoe.
At the formation stage of the Western European novel, the memoir and diary as genre forms played an important role in the process. Novelization of these forms took place in the works of a number of writers and especially those of Courtilz de Sandras in France and Daniel Defoe in England, whose literary experience was of great impor- tance for the literature of the Enlightenment.
As regards the memoir novel and the diary novel these genre modifications soon became "outdated" and did not become very popular in the Western European literature of the mid-18th century. Some elements of the memoir and diary forms, especially their narrative manner, were employed by various novelists and assimilated by different novel modifications. "The aesthetic intentionality can reach the limit", L. Ginsburg remarks, "when letters, diaries acquire an obviously literary character, intended for the reader either posthumous or contemporary... From letters and diaries to biographies and memoirs, from memoirs to novel and long short story the aesthetic structurality increases..." The increase of the "aesthetic intentionality" and the "aesthetic structurality" can be observed, for instance, in Pamela's "Journal" in the first of Samuel Richardson's novels. Pamela, though, belongs to a more mature stage of the development of the novel of the Enlightenment, the discussion of which cannot be covered within the limits of the present essay.