The story of the castaway merchant-adventurer, Robinson Crusoe, is among the most widely recognized in world literature, and even those who have never read the book seem to know something of what is in it. The island isolato belongs to the culture as an archetype - a man cast away on a deserted island - and all the speculation attached to that scene constitutes a kind of fictional parlor game. How would any man or woman react? What tools and materials would one want? What books would one wish to bring? What kind of company would prove most desirable, if company were to arrive at some time? How would one pass the hours, days, months? How would one dispose space? As Elizabeth Bishop remarked in her wonderful poem “Crusoe in England,” Crusoe's “brain breeds islands.” The island is a supplement to Crusoe's (or anyone's, for that matter) imagination. Bishop puts it this way: “... But my poor old island's still / un-rediscovered, un-renamable. / None of the books has ever got it right.” I have titled this essay “Varieties of Fictional Experience,” because in the three hundred years since Defoe published The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe the most fertile reader of the Crusoe story is Robinson Crusoe himself.

Swift's satiric vision

It is one of those wonderful quirks of language and history that ‘Yahoo’ is now the name of an Internet search engine, whereas Jonathan Swift invented the word as the degenerate moniker for the most irredeemable creatures on earth ever to sling excrement. Swift approached the early eighteenth century as Luddites today approach the early twenty-first: the new is a source of deep anxiety. Not only did Swift resist experimental science, speculative philosophy, expanded credit-based trade economy, weapons technology and colonisation, but also modern ways of dispensing information – newspapers and journals, self-help literature, mass-culture entertainments, schemes for social improvement and memoir-based narratives. The more modern, progressive, immediate something was, the more Swift's satiric inner voice was suspiciously attuned to it and infuriated by it.

Swift's satire is abundant and various, but several themes and propositions dominate his work, some of which appear in his sermons, essays, and letters as well. One recurrent Swiftian notion holds that the human race is on a degenerative path. Things get worse for Swift; they do not get better: ‘But men degenerate every day, merely by the folly, the perverseness, the avarice, the tyranny, the pride, the treachery, or inhumanity of their own kind.’ Another notion holds that even bad things are made worse by a spirit of opposition that factionalises all institutions, ideas, loyalties. Swift writes to his friend and fellow satirist, Alexander Pope, on 10 January 1721, ‘the spirit of Faction hath so universally possessed the minds of men, that they are not at leisure to attend to any thing else’.

According to Samuel Johnson's great eighteenth-century Dictionary, satire is a censorious poem, properly distinguished by the generality of its reflections but all too often confused with a lesser form, lampoon, distinguished by the particularity of its reflections. Libel is an actionable defamation, but the term was often used synonymously with lampoon. Slander is libel with a casual or callous disregard for truth. In the Restoration and early eighteenth century, satire, libel, lampoon, and slander were inextricably mixed, whether the specific forms they took were poetic, dramatic, narrative, or expository. But when commentators wished to separate good vilification from bad the distinction was one of style. “Loose-writ” libels were never as effective as “shining satire,” according to John Dry den and the Earl of Mulgrave in their joint effort, “An Essay Upon Satire” (1679). Perhaps “shining” does not take us very far conceptually in distinguishing satire from libel, lampoon, or slander as an embodiment of the literary spirit of opposition, but Dryden and Mulgrave have in mind the way effective satire always combines abuse with wit and imagination.

FICTIONAL BONA FIDES

Mariners lie like old sea dogs. In James Joyce's Ulysses (1922), the adventuring hero, Leopold Bloom, never leaves the confines of his native city, but he does run into an old sailor named Murphy who boasts of his travels to several remote regions of the world. Bloom has his doubts about Murphy, “assuming he was the person he represented himself and not sailing under false colours after having boxed the compass on the q.t. somewhere” Listening to the yarns and finding something out of joint about them makes Bloom “nourish some suspicions of our friend's bona fides” (512).

What does it mean to nourish suspicions about a narrator's bona fides? This is the very question that haunts Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels (1726), and for good reason. Gulliver's Travels has been a notable gathering place, almost a convocation, for the severer sort of Western Critic who sees its satiric action as a vicious attack on the political and cultural institutions of eighteenth-century British civilization in the guise of a satiric send-up of travel literature.

But what if Swift's satiric travel narrative is directed not simply at the experience of modern political, social, and intellectual life in England and Europe, but at the narrative bona fides of those middling fictional subjects who emerged during the early decades of the eighteenth century in England precisely to endorse the modern, progressivist, commercial vision of the world that Swift's satire bemoans? The novel is the literary form positing the fitness of a low-life, pseudoprofessional, or merchant-class narrator - Moll Flanders, Robinson Crusoe, Colonel Jack, Captain Singleton - to record the contingencies and changing valences of modern life. As such, it was a likely and predictable Swiftian target.