Close Reading at a Distance: Genre, Realism, and Ecology in Robinson Crusoe

1 The Unread and Undead

These two epigrams begin my contribution to this special issue of Culture as Text on close reading, but not in a way that positions them as endorsing “more” close reading today. Professional literary scholars will know Moretti’s reference to Margeret Cohen’s term the “great unread.” About reading the unread, he says, “no one knows.” Readers of science fiction, less likely to be academics who read for a living, will know Le Guin’s reference to “hard times.” Times are “hard” because we are about to lose and will need to remember our “freedom.” Moretti’s readers will be able unpack what the “great unread” means without too much trouble. His interest is in the freedom to stop doing one kind of reading, close reading, and start reading in a “distant” way, using computation to process large amounts of text. On computation, perhaps Moretti and Le Guin are different. But what the two epigrams do have in common is a mutual concern with the expansion of literary genres and the subsequent fate of literary studies: What other than – or in addition too – close reading can readers do now?

Whether or not Moretti’s “rediscoveries” will lead to Le Guin’s “freedom” is for the moment unclear. However, one thing is for sure. These epigrams turn into epitaphs once you read them closely and again. The expansion of literary studies vis-à-vis the computational methods Moretti endorses corresponds with a contraction in the opportunity to do close reading in colleges and universities today. In this sense, as greater numbers of texts coincide with the disappearance of the reading disciplines, the unread solicits the undead: “No one will ever read … the great unread,” or at least, far fewer students and proferssors will. The greater enigma, and the one I want to focus on by insisting we figure genre into how we scale up and scale down our reading practices, is evident in the multivalent meaning of the word “great.” It’s a term eliciting a difficult conflict between the qualitative issue of value (i.e. kinds of texts and their worth) and the quantitative issue of size (i.e. larger numbers of texts). But the generative relationship between the qualitative and quantitative aspects of literary studies isn’t just about value and numbers at the level of how big your reading list is. We can also think about value and scale at the level of a single text. Texts are in themselves never fully themselves. Rather, they are both internally and externally differentiated. A close reading can be done in a way that preserves and makes meaningful a single texts capacity to vary over time. The same is true for distant reading’s promise to subject many texts to digital remediation. What needs to be resolved in reading closely and at a distance is how to manage the ebb and flow of liteary value and how scale changes the habits of literary categorization. That’s the general goal of this essay. And it sums up what I’ll call a wave theory of genre.

In part one of what’s below, I offer a short history of close reading as a professional practice within the discipline of literary studies as it once enjoyed academic pride of place. This was the golden age of close reading, in the sense that you could do it and get paid. But to evoke the dead in a different sense, if “no one will ever read … the great unread,” what’s the relationship between the unread (its scale and value) and the undead (the “no ones”) English professors may soon become?

In part two of this essay, I offer a further assessment of close reading by focusing on the issue of literary scale. The issue of scale necessarily calls for a theory of genre, because once old categories prove unable to sort out the addition of new things then new categories are needed. The focus here is on the compatibilities and differences between Ralph Cohen and Frederic Jameson on theories of literary categorization. This conversation is important because it produces a way to do literary studies in the middle of what many English professors are experiencing as a serious crisis of “greatness.” If we’ve gone from literary studies as some of us as once enjoyed it, to inter-, trans-, and even- de-disciplinary forms of inquiry, can we think of re-disciplining literary studies now? The Cohen-Jameson exchange evokes some uniquely practical possilities for tarrying with the undead. These possibilities have to do with participating usefully rather than (or in addition to) working through our grief. The morbid figure of our discipline’s ghost bobs-and-weaves through the history of one genre in especially relevant ways – the realist novel. At a historical moment concurrent with the emergence of the novel itself, realism may have been chased away by the deep subjectivism of modernist experession. But it looks like a new realism is poised to breakout.

In the concluding part of the essay, I narrow down my focus to go further on the question of genre and genre change. Having started from the wider concern with the discipline of literature, then contracting the frame to focus on genre, at the end of the essay I offer a close reading of a single text, Robinson Crusoe. In this reading, as in the previous sections on disciplines and genres, I want to keep exploring the unread-undead connection. This is because it eventually points to a way out of the cyrpt and into being better cyrptologists. Here I go back in time to imagine a future, a temporal move initiating a corresponding spatial paradox: The closer I get in my reading of a Crusoe, the farther I end up from the genre long said to contain it. Call this a wave theory of genre. Robinson Crusoe, like it’s protagonist, is both headed somewhere and adrift, appearing to us as Crusoe eventually appears to himself, fully at home and estranged. Crusoe is of course all about waves, ones that take its protagonist to places he both wants to go and doesn’t. The so-called novel itself oscillates in a similar way in space and time. As we know, Crusoe could not have been called a novel, let alone a realist one, upon publication in 1719. But it could be classified that way by the 1740s when the genre got its name. In retrospect, given variations on realism after the realist novel is said to have first appeared, Robinson Crusoe is now open for re-interpretive business. Thus, I want to suggest, the text can be updated in the context of a an emergent subgenre: ecological realism, also known as climate fiction or “Clifi.” My close reading at a distance is thus meant both make waves and to ride them. It’s meant to hurry Crusoe ahead to an updated form of generic becoming that may never be all the way here. This is not to offer a teleological or presentist reading of the text. Robinson Crusoe, like its castaway hero, has always been both on its way and off course.

2 Disciplinary Death Throes

Comparative Literature in the Age of Multiculturalism… registers agony, in the sense of the death throes, of the traditional discipline of comparative literature as it melts into being just another form of cultural studies. I doubt that this process can or should be stopped.

– J. Hillis Miller, An Innocent Abroad ^[1]

(Miller 2015, 55; hence referred to as IA)

In this epigram, J. Hillis Miller, an arch-defender of close reading, registers the future of literary studies in terms of “agony.” The offending up-scaler here is not Moretti’s data makers but “culture,” for Miller, a vacuous term. Frederic Jameson finds within Miller’s “agony” an “apologia for literature,” and a “defense” of what is “not easily defensible” (IA xxi; 27). But Miller has something more than mourning up his sleeve. Miller was not a literary millenarian; nor was he a tenured version of the weeping prophet, Jerimiah. In the end, Hillis celebrated the afterlife of literary studies as he invited his readers to celebrate the end of his own life. He made a move related to the generatively vexed relationship between value and scale I mentioned above using the Moretti and Le Guin epigraphs as epitaphs. Thinking of Jameson on Miller here, recall, the Latin root of “apologia” – app as in moving way, going distant while feeling very close to what’s missing when you go. It’s a nice coincidence that app refers in our contemporary sense to tools, namely digital ones. With the manifold applications of app in mind, would it be possible to do close reading at a distance, and if so, how would that apply to disciplines and genres?

Miller makes a textually as well as geographically far-reaching move at the end of his long and productive career. He writes, “If I had my life to live over again, I would learn Chinese, and I mean really learn it” (IA 201). Here I’d like to pivot from Miller’s emphasis on the term “really” in order to start a conversation about close reading at a distance. This is entirely akin to his wanting to reread Western literature through an Eastern lens. About ending close reading as we knew it, the so-called innocent abroad was entirely guilty. It’s as if literature needed the death of the discipline to have a life worth living. Foreshadowing my distant-close-reading of Robinson Crusoe below, being lost must also end up somewhere, even if that somewhere, as Le Guin insists, forces us to think about reading and writing in “hard times.” No stranger to the ghostly and the absent, Miller in the end was for real. He was for real in the sense that his mode of close reading meant scaling up interpretive possibility in a way that works compatibly with how we alter our understanding of meaning and genre.^[2]

This is precisely where the prospect of Le Guin’s “realism[s] of a larger reality” fits in. In a way not so unlike Moretti’s “distant reading” – where “nobody ever will read” – the “nobody” associated with “the great unread” alludes to reading closely at a distance. The distance would be the reading you will never read but can account for by using applications other than reading the same book the same way or just reading one book at a time. If the meaning of one text can be turned into many meanings, close reading could work compatibly with the distant kind. In finding a way to read a particular text for what it refuses to reveal, the closeness might be too close for comfort. Close reading at distance means reading for what’s unreadable and giving the unread both purpose and value. The purpose here is to scale up and go beyond conventional readings of a text. The value is both to change how texts are categorized as well as change the protocols of categorization.

As I alluded above, close reading at a distance uses quantitative difference to bring about worthwhile qualitative change, even if the quantity is enlarged microscopically, as in reading close. Miller wrote more books and articles than I will ever read. He also died at the threshold of turning toward a wholly different medium – not computation but thinking of Moretti’s use of literary maps, and the function of apps, equally visual – Asian characters, i.e. pictograms. In his reading practices Miller stayed close to go far, which adequately covers both what Moretti means by “worldly” and what I mean by close reading at a distance.

Like J. Hillis Miller, Warren Montag and Nancy Miller begin their essay on distant reading by also paying respects to what literary studies used to be. “The humanities are plummeting,” they observe. “New Technologies [are] revolutionizing [how we used to] privilege the singular text and national literary traditions at a time and for a generation that apparently could not care less about either” (Armstrong and Montag 2017, 338; hence referred to as “ANL”) . The new generation of college and university students are a-literate. Rigorous close reading is foreign to them, as Katherine Hayles says, almost a superpower.^[3] Soon-to-be-educated young readers who don’t care about reading one way or the other furnish yet another example of “nobody” reading the “unread.”

This is no doubt regrettable. But again, what else can close readers do in addition to mouring? Montag and Armstrong offer something more useful than grief, which is akin to the idea of reading closely at a distance. As Montag and Armstrong write, “the greater portion of most texts remains in a very important sense unread, perhaps even, at a given moment, unreadable, invisible, in their graphic visibility” (emphasis mine, “ANL” 340). As I have been suggesting, the use of the term “greatness” should refer to both scale and value, and indeed, those two problems are inextricably linked. Note too how the phrase “at a given moment” evokes historical limitation while promising different measures of readability-and-unreadability over time. After the mourning is done and the requiem is recited, what was unknowable at one time in a text may at another time be known. So, we must add the issue of time to the category-and-scale connection.

Citing Pierre Macherey’s Theory of Literary Production, Montag and Armstrong’s account of “unreadable … graphic visibility” becomes vividly graphic. Macherey says “the literary work has no interior, no exterior; or rather, its interior is like an exterior, shattered and on display. Thus, it is open to the searching gaze, peeled, disemboweled” (Macherey 2006, 96; hence referred to as TLP). He continues, “The literary work … disemboweled … exists like an organism” (TLP 152). For the technophile, “data before the fact” is a reasonable slogan for putting the “disemboweled” text into worthwhile anatomical service.^[4] More data is what’s missing. More means different, and if you’re committed to changing disciplinary categories by adding more objects to the discipline, then difference is good. Like the creature in Shelley’s Frankenstein (he’s not a monster!), the disemboweling of a text can be a first step toward its reanimation. For those thinking on the historical materialist order espoused by Macherey, (and Jameson, as we’ll see) the “more” that’s missing is what commodities function to make disappear. That “more” is labor power, which exists “unreadably” in the sense that money becomes the false equivalent of any given thing once it’s reduced to a mere market value. Hence the importance of the word “production” in Machery’s title, A Theory of Literary Production. That the genre called theory is itself productive for Machery is the “harder” point to grasp. Beyond chasing ghosts or gutting texts, a focus on what reading produces a better way to link Moretti’s “great unread” to my formulation: close reading at a distance. The work of reading creates a new text. At scale, this means that genres, including genres of reading, are generative and subject to change.

To see how reading for the “unreadable … might well be understood as a surface reading” (“ANL” 340), let’s continue making waves with Moretti. Theorizing according to this oceanic heuristic also brings quantum psychics to mind. Waves in that discipline are visible and invisible insofar as they are also particles, and it takes serious powers of computation to know how to work with energy waves depicted on screen as sets of moving things. Diffraction, interference, polarization, disturbance – these terms are as applicable to transferring physical energy in the scientific sense as they are useful for explaining how the reading disciplines are changing today. Though Moretti is not thinking about quantum physics, conceptualizing change as a series of waves shares kinship with his vocabulary. In the case of computationally mediated distant reading, literary history undergoes transformation by adding a great number of previously invisible texts to the fixed and small number we habitually read. Waves are a more capacious a way of charting change as large-scale repetition with a difference. The “great unread” has always been empirically there, just like sea waves start in places of undeniable force you can’t see from the beach. The so-called there in the case of literary history is the “great unread” that “nobody reads,” i.e., the missing archive brought up to scale, which like a quantum measure of light, is only visible with tools other than your eyes.

To lean on Moretti again, the implication of a wave theory of genre is that literary studies should include “the study of technological diffusion” (Moretti 2013; hence referred to as DR). We don’t have to be a computer scientist to do this, no more than we need to have orbited earth to read a sci-fi novel well. But literary scholars interested in avoiding the grim fate of Machery’s disciplinary rack should at least be sci curious. Moretti continues: “The tree describes the passage from unity to diversity: one tree, with many branches: from Indo-European to dozens of different languages. The wave is the opposite: It observes uniformity engulfing an initial diversity” (DR 67). Evoking water and botany together in this passage, Moretti uses the language of organic systems to think about information exchange. This is handy if you want to scale up realism beyond just human entities, as we’ll learn below regarding the ecological attributes of Robinson Crusoe. And as today’s arbor-realists write about the wood-wide-web (trees really do communicate with each other in the forest, channeling biological data through mycelial conductors in the forest’s understory), networks are both there and unseen.^[5]

The proliferation of print during the Enlightenment is but one instance of the kind of “technological diffusion” referred to by Moretti. In the eighteenth century, waves upon waves of new writing amassed publicly for the first time. This was arguably the first instance of large-language modeling, and then as now, one with mixed assessments. Moretti’s evocation of media waves as “diffuson” is a maximalist way of coneptializing how writing ebbs-and-flows. But waves also have boundaries, even if the boundaries themselves, like coastlines, are subject to alteration according to the rough waters they never finally control. Distant reading uses computation the same way today’s botanists do: to reanimate (there can be no other word) new things at larger scale in order to produce new and more accurate knowledge. As Moretti says, “discordant voices … [,] swarms … [,] hybrids … [,] oddities” (DR 180) are writ as the virtually real. But to revive the archival undead ought to offer more than just a passing scare. As is essential to scaling up in the digital way, “discordant voices” can change disciplines accordingly, and those changes only cause “discord” for a while. “Discord” is both real and virtual, there and absent; and you can produce new knowledge from it, after all. Not to leave Le Guin behind, close reading at a distance assigns lost value to what’s missing, or as she says, “rewards” what is “excluded.”

Le Guin’s remarks are important beyond just my introductory epigraph. Her critique of “developing written material to suit sales strategies in order to maximize corporate profit” (“NBS”), and her insistence that “the profit motive is often in conflict with the aims of art” (“NBS”), is connected to scaling up in two ways, neither having to do with obeying the strictures of “commodity profiteers” (“NBS”). First, Le Guin wants to share her “reward… with all the other writers excluded from literature for so long” (“NBS,” emphasis mine). Second, after “a long career as a writer” where “exclusion” was unnoticed and routine, Le Guin’s expanded sense of time affirms a sense of all-ness that speaks to how literary value changes (“NBS,” emphasis also mine). Her addition of more writing and writers is predicated by playing the literary long game, a career move she shares with J. Hillis Miller. History is essential for understanding how literary value works because change is where the action is, and you can deal with change productively if you you can manage to stay on top of the waves. In this sense, Le Guin’s “all” is Moretti’s “more.” But remember, big waves are liquid storms, and significant change never comes without “hard times.” Further from Le Guin, if you focus collectively on work and workers – there are “a lot of us, the producers” (“NBS”) – you can understand that reality reduction is what commodities are especially effective in doing. Moretti’s point, Le Guin’s, Hillis Miller’s, and mine, is that certain modes of reading reduce reality as well. If close reading traditionally conceived is now in its “residual” phase, as Raymond Williams might say, dead or dying, according to Miller, but also still traceably there, then an “emergent” theory of close reading at a distance might be our next best bet.^[6]

3 Happy Endings

Happy endings are not as easy to bring off as you might think.

– Frederic Jameson, “The Experiments of Time”

(Jameson 2013b, 195; hence referred to as “ET”)

In the Political Unconscious, Frederic Jameson wrote that genre criticism has been “thoroughly discredited by modern theory and practice.”

– Ralph Cohen, “History and Genre”

(Cohen 2017c, 85; hence referred to as “HG”)

The downside of happy endings is that they are hard to bring off. The upside is that endings in general never fully end. Contrary to the kind of genre studies Jameson has in mind – yes, genre studies is itself a genre – the old ways of studying literary categories is replaceable by new and better ones. In the Jameson epigram, literature is the focus. It’s hard for literature to have happy endings, let alone end happily as a discipline, because on Jameson’s reading realist heroes are forced to come to terms with the inadequacy of “mimesis.” At the level of plot, Jameson’s realist heroes are alienated from a reality that represses them but that they cannot articulate to themselves, let alone share with those of their working-class comrades. But as Jameson says, this economic sense of the real in realism can be registered affectively. By reading for the “political unconscious,” we read for that revealing lacuna – the absence containing what escapes admission – the real that is nothing-and-everything, to put this in Freudian (or Lacanian) terms. It’s the desert of the real, if you remember that delicious phrase from The Matrix (not to mention the work of Jean Baudrillard and Slavoj Žižek). The unconscious knows more than we do; or to cite Jameson’s use of Freud for distinguishing between “utopian science and utopian ideology,” realism is all about using “techniques of concealment” (Jameson 2007; 46). But concealment too refers to something there, even if we have to access that something indirectly and with the a new kind of application.

In common with the epistemic travails of “distant reading,” our state of being is also delicately predicated on the ability to handle the illusive but also allusive presence of “more.” This idea of the real as what’s both more and what’s absent contrasts with Auerbach’s work on realism as a mimetic genre. Jameson says, mimesis seeks “a conquest of syntactic forms capable of holding together multiple levels of a complex reality and a secular daily life” (Jameson 2013a, 3–4; hence referred to as “RA”). There is no such “conquest,” however, only a conflicted face-off between the smaller real of what’s selectively represented and the larger real of what reality might actually be. There is a conflicted face-off between reality and representation at least until we find better ways of dealing with the “more” than habitually (read ideologically) ruling it out. What Lukacs sarcastically calls “the poetic necessity of the pathological” is a modernist trope that is profoundly insufficient for realist ways of knowing more and acting better (Lukacs 2001, 228). Following Lukacs, as Jameson suggests, good realist fiction exhibits “the capacity of registering the problematization and the irreconcilable contradictions of a purely secular modernity… reified as capitalism.” Moreover, “realism’s task now is the reawakening of the dynamics of history” (“RA 4”). I want to move between Jameson and Cohen as they appear in conflict “now” to join that “reawakening.” I want to do this even if what’s implicit in the “re-” between awakening-and-sleeping is the wave-like problem of how genres and disciplines change. For my purposes, the “re-” in “reawakening” refers to the waxing-and-waning of literary categories, and their values, as texts come and go, eroding their boundaries, and forcing new ones, over various streches of time. As Jameson seems to allude to by connecting “concealment” to “technique,” this is a technical problem as much as a psychological or economic one.

Cohen cites Jameson’s Political Unconscious to move out of the affective realm and into knowledge. Cohen reads Jameson both to disagree with him, and like the expert genre theorist he is, apply to Jameson’s vast oeuvre the same openness to “multiplicity” and “complexity” that Jameson affords to realist fiction. Cohen corrects the old assumptions of “discredited” genre studies. It may have once been taken for granted that literary categories are reducible to what their most obvious features are said to be once-and-for all. But in fact, genres allude to what they proport to exclude, a “multiplicity” of features which at certain historical moments offer negotiable openings for re-arranging them. Texts have a generic unconscious, you could say. Thus, Cohen cites Jameson to counter an overly reductive evaluation of genre criticism as itself wedded to categorical reduction. He also differs from a tradition of genre critics going back to Aristotle and the Christian Scholastics of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The neo-classical genre and the theologians who came after Aristotle espoused “the rigidity of [poetic] forms” (Cohen 2017d, 3; hence referred to as “OI”). They held too tightly to the “distinctiveness of kinds [as] metaphysical absolutes” (“OI” 4). But Cohen is too rigorous to argue simply for a complete and total break with history, a Foucauldian rupture within an Aristotelian absolute. He does with history as he says genres do with texts. If genres are mixed, and histories are subject to rewriting by emphasizing this-or-that cluster of objects in the infinite archive of the past, then the writing of history must be mixed too. Even in the way neo-classicism got genre theory wrong, they got it wrong in some of the right ways. What the Scholastics “specified in [their categorical] hierarchy may not have been all-inclusive,” but they did allude to a combinatory theory of genre: “the inclusion of lower forms into higher” (“OI” 4). For Cohen genres are no more absolute than reality is absolute; or if there is an absolutism of genre or reality, it’s an absolutism, in Jameson’s terms, of “contradiction,” “multiplicity,” and “complexity.”

What Cohen offers about genre is precisely not what Jameson “discredits” in the epigram. Cohen does not offer an idealized or superficial form of unity, or a form of categorical absolutism that pretends to transcend the ebb-and-flow of generic division. Rather, “A genre is a part, at any period in literary history, of a family of forms. [They can be] grasp[ed] in relation to other forms within a [historically determined] hierarchy” (“OI” 30). Note how the word “part” also connotes partial. This speaks to the contestable nature of how changes to literary genres change over time. If genres are said to be unified, then they are only ever partially so. But this doesn’t mean you must jettison the notion of category, which Cohen says is epistemically impossible. Rather, as in Moretti’s “distance reading,” more parts may be determined within a genre at a time that comes later than the date of the genre’s inception. Genres have a use-by date. They age out by failing to add up.

Following Cohen further on the issue of genre change, the more parts of a text we can identify within any given category of writing, the more likely our eventual alteration of the meaning, value, and category of any given text. Thus, for Cohen, the plurality of parts (a spatial matter) is a necessary bases for explaining historical difference (a temporal matter), even as those differences are not fixed absolutely. Historical difference is determined according to a “conjuncture” of influences, to use an Althusserrian term. This means there is an interaction between real and imaginary forces which may appear at different degrees of conflict as texts are variously understood across time and space.^[7] If you conceptualize generic belonging as determined by a given historical “conjuncture,” you must also grant that a text in itself is also always internally divided. A text is always “more” than it is. This accords with what Cohen says about genres. Disciplines change the same way. In all three instances – the textual, the disciplinary, the generic – knowledge production is possible depending on your ability to draw meaning from “a combination of parts or forms” that are already interactive. Cohen therefore “understand[s] ‘unity’ as a combination or interrelation of parts. This unity will make it possible to relate a particular work to other works in the period” (emphasis original “OI” 31). We should add, this “unity” – qualified by its quantitative volatility – makes it possible to move in generative ways between old and new configurations of form. Genres are generative, in Cohen’s sense of the term; or we might say, in Jameson’s sense, genres are a matter of work.

I want to suggest now that Cohen’s combinatory theory of genre is compatible with Jameson’s interest in realism. The thematic contestations Jameson stages between realism and modernism are revealing on this score. We just need to readjust the theoretical frame down a bit from genre as general question to a focus on those two specific genres. Whereas realism points toward the realities of capitalist exploitation “not available to consciousness,” modernism, without always pointing clearly, is nonetheless intriguing as a “‘carrefour,’ a crossroads or meeting place of multiple destinies, [with] multiple récits” (Jameson 2013d, 32; hence referred to as “TSR”). About the realism and modernism divide, Jameson writes, “The definition of realism by way of such oppositions can also take on a historical, or periodizing, character. … [The] realism and modernism [distinction] already impl[ies] a historical narrative which it is fairly difficult to reduce to a structural or stylistic one” (“TSR” 2).

Two points can be emphasized here to narrow the differences and (expand the connections) between Jameson and Cohen on the combinatory theory of genre: First, Jameson’s account of “opposition” – which will be crucial to the way he positions class conflict as a determinant historical force – is careful to admit that there are additional differences that exist within whatever genres are being opposed. This is a difficult yet fundamentally important insight, and it’s worth repeating: Interpretive difference within an individual text can be scaled up to the differences that exist between genres. Because both kinds of differences are subject to historically determinant forces of change, a text can move in and out of a given genre over time. Jameson would argue that realist fiction is antonymous (i.e. containing its opposites) and that the same dynamic of antinomy exists within the oppositions comprising an equally multifarious form of social totally known as economic class relations. Jameson’s reference to Alexander Kluge’s idea of an “insurrection of the present against other temporalities” is useful to understand how time, classification, and class, work together in this way. Kluge compliments Jameson’s investment in Bakhtin, for whom “the novel is the vehicle of polyphony or the recognition and expression of a multiplicity of social voices: It is therefore modern in its democratic opening onto an ideologically multiple population” (“TSR” 3). The ways in which “insurrections” are raised by individual acts of reading, writing, rereading, and rewriting, are compatible with the categorically broader view of the novel as an “expression of a multiplicity of social voices.” Here, as in Cohen, the temporal and spatial dynamics of change are interrelated and historically legible even while being disruptive.

The association between generic and political “insurrection” is explicitly pronounced in Jameson, but less so in Cohen. Yet Cohen is clear on the relationship between genres and politics insofar as such a relationship is permitted by Cohen to exist: “The similarities-and-difference phenomena [between texts in genres as well as between genres] can complement each other or indicate the particular temporal or spatial differences that identify their social, political, religious, or other differences” (Cohen 2021, 123–124) But “the conflict of genres,” as Cohen’s essay is so aptly titled, is writ with a more specific intensity by Jameson as class conflict – call this: The realist friction part of realist fiction. Jameson’s take on realism affirms a specific kind of writing that is compatible with Cohen’s combinatory theory of genre – “multiple,” “complex,” and above all, non-teleological. Insofar as Jameson’s warring economic classes are attuned to real relations, like Cohen on the vicissitudes of classifications, they operate on the order of what Roland Barthes calls a “shared tactical style” (“IR” 9). We’ll leave that war-word “tactical” aside for the moment. For now, note how Jameson emphasizes the secularization of landscapes and physical objects in fiction after the Enlightenment – or more simply, the realist’s sense of setting – in his use of the term: “the scenic impulse.” Here, “impulses of scenic elaboration, description and above all affective investment, allow it [realism] to develop toward a scenic present which… secretly abhors the other temporalities which constitute the force of the tale or récit in the first place.” (“TSR” 11). Now recall “style” as a “tactical” matter on the order of Barthes. This point links with “force” in the line from Jameson because generic differences are an effect of political determination. There is a consistency here between class war, the political unconscious, “the scenic impulse” in realist fiction, and the occulted differences within literary categories that undermine the classical theory of genre. What’s “abhorrent” to traditionalists in all cases is the resistance by collective forces to go on with the present as it exists, restricted, hostile, and enforcing division where better (because bigger) forms of unity might otherwise come to exist. Genres are as insurrection does.

Jameson continues, “The new scenic impulse will also detect its enemies in the hierarchy of characters who people the tale. … It will wage a ceaseless muffled battle against the structures of melodrama by which it is ceaselessly menaced; in the process also throwing off other genres such as the Bildungsroman, which for a while seemed so central to it as to define it. Its final battle will be raged in the microstructures of language and in particular against the dominance of point of view” (“TSR” 11). With this citation about “battles” in mind, it’s time now to count the examples of genre conflict in the varieties I’ve been explaining so far: (1) a multitude of texts, remaindered, ash-canned by historical ignorance, but brought back to haunt literary studies as the “great unread … nobody will read”; (2) combinatory genre, categories undermined by what they exclude and yet also allusively contain, the vicissitudes of interpretation where specific meanings force their way into old categorical systems and genreschange; (3) fictional realism’s own success-in-failing, the Enlightenment’s scientific and fictional goals of presenting things as they are, with the realization, both tragic and affirmative, that the things presented exist at a level of multiplicity that sometimes – “joyfully and painfully” –require an adjustment in the means of presentation; and finally; (4) the “painful cancelation,” a “ceaseless battle raged” against an “enemy” entrenched within our ranks called “bourgeois subjectivity” (“TSR” 4), class antagonism, and “muffled” work that lacks “the unity of struggle” (“TSR” 7).

Jameson is in clear contrast with canonical scholarship on realism as presented by Ian Watt in The Rise of the Novel. (Perhaps it’s worth noting in the context of genric qua political violence that Watt was also a World War II lieutenant in the British Army and was held by the Japanese as a prisoner of war.) Jameson offers a logic of periodization predicated on history’s “bulk, the heterogeneous materials that somehow end up coalescing into what we call the novel – or realism!” (“TSR” 7–8). This “heterogeneity” is what Jameson seeks to activate for political ends by linking class war to the conflict of genres. Watt argues, erroneously, on behalf of an absolute historical break with the earlier genre of romance, going out of his way to delete Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko; or, The Royal Slave (1688) from realism’s historical record. It’s “medieval hagiography,” he remarks. This is meant to provide a strict generic opposition between Oroonoko and Defoe’s more modern realist work, Robinson Crusoe. But as you might recall in Behn’s text, there is clearly a realist “scenic impulse” in the passage where Prince Oroonoko grabs hold of an electric eel and goes falling in an unprincely way into the rushing water below. Watt wishes to demarcate realism as beginning in 1719 after the publication of Robinson Crusoe where, he writes, “all the varieties of human experience” (RN 6) are allowed.

But the ways in which “allness” falls short in Crusoe are myriad, and the way the realist novel as Watt proscribes its rise is immanently related to its inability to maintain generic absolutism. Watt’s reduction of the realist novel’s origins to just a handful of authors (Defoe, Richardson, Fielding) is a problem returning us to the “great unread.” But read Oroonoko first, then Crusoe, and you will have to contest seriously with the castaway’s “castles” and “fortresses.” Centuries before the fact of the genre’s coming into being, you,will also see zoological curiosities, again call them “scenic impulses,” throughout Behn’s so-called romance. Indeed, foreshadowing Crusoe’s sad relationship with the parrot Polly, and his complex connection with goats, there are ecological attributes that reveal a secret kinship between realism and romance, even though for three-hundred years and more they have been kept well enough apart. Watt’s notion of “translatability” as the “correspondence of words to things” (RN 24) is also a highly contestable, since a “realism of a larger reality” (recall Le Guin) is not reducible to mimetic world “conquering” (apropos Jameson). Crusoe’s sign making puts him in vexed and violent relationships with non-Europeans, and the gaze of Oroonoko’s beloved Imoinda is repeatedly described as beyond heroic language. As both Jameson and Cohen insist, no one genre is capable of existing on its own terms as absolutely distinct from its opposite.

Jameson opposes the idea that “by subtracting the modern from narrative we will be left with the essence of realism, [which] assumes that some general definition of what modernism is (or was) is available. [This is] an optimistic assumption which generally results in a few stereotypical formulae” (emphasis mine, “TSR” 9). Likewise, Cohen calls for a theory of literary change that is critically additive. Rather than reducing the capacities of genres, Cohen writes, “genres and their members [are] combinatory procedures that provide the most effective [way of] dealing with change in literary history” (Cohen 2017a, 166–167). To the extent that genres are “procedures,” like disciplines, and like Jameson’s use of the word “technique,” they are “a means of ordering subject matter … [,] a manner of presenting the ordering [,] and a process of composing committed to historical possibility” (Cohen 2017b, 221, hence referred to as “HK”). Because “genres are open categories [with] multiple definitions … [,] each member [of a genre] alters the genre by adding, contradicting, or changing constituents, especially those of members closely related to it” (emphasis mine, “HG” 86). Critics also “add additional elements to genre,” Cohen says (Cohen 2017f, 17).

By way of transition to the section below on Robinson Crusoe, and in the interest of furthering the dialogue between Cohen and Jameson, I want to hang on just a bit longer to a couple of their terms: “means” and “combination.” The history of “combination” in the late eighteenth century had to do with changes in the “means” of commodity production and a new way of dividing labor. Here I’m thinking about the Combination Act of 1799, “An Act to Prevent Unlawful Combinations of Workmen” (Wikipedian 2025). This legislation prohibited trade unions and sought to eliminate collective bargaining by British workers. Passed under the government of William Pitt, the Younger, the law here signals another “hard” historical moment. What’s made absent by the Combination Act is labor power, but in the sense that strikes withhold labor from the exploitative practices of the bosses, that absence was given real force. Cohen was an astute scholar of eighteenth-century history, as well as a theorist of genre, but it’s hard to say whether he intended the kind of resonance I’m drumming up around “combination.” In any case, it’s a term that cuts across the disciplines of labor history and literary studies and does so in order to expand them.

In Jameson’s terms, “combination” leads to “transformation,” and in both generic as well as economic systems such change is forced by agents both belonging to and other than the identities those systems support to serve. This is one way to describe the unsetting dynamic between what we’ve been calling literary “moreness” – additions that initiate genre change, recognized allusively in their absence – and class war – challenges to an economic system that produces antagonism between the working majority and owners of the means of production. “The construction of realism,” Jameson writes, “at one and the same time turns out to participate in its deterioration (and then, perhaps, to its Rebirth as something as yet unnamed” (Jameson 2013c, 84). So, too, genres are both what they are and something more. The threshold between their presence, their disappearance, and their becoming something else, is both a categorical and temporal affair. “Happy endings are difficult to come by,” to cite the epigram from Jameson once more, because after the end new beginnings emerge in ways no single reader can control. Readers are controlled by readings, you could say, and with an indefatigable emphasis on the plural. This is a good way to sum up the wide agreement in literary history that realist fiction played a determinate role in the invention of modern subjectivity. As it turns out, presuming the individual can exist separate from larger forms collectivity is a bad idea – and as we know about the undead and the unread, such detatchment is fatal. And yet, hard endings necessitate beginning anew.

On the “joys and sorrows of literary theory,” Cohen describes the difficult process of change in this way: “Every text has a subtext, another text concealed in it or implied in it or capable of being derived from it. Whether the subtext undermines the text or supplements it, this hypothesis implies a second: Every text involves a reader or critic who transacts with it and helps construct it” (Cohen 2017e, 72; hence referred to as “JS”). This concept of reading, Cohen continues, “suggest[s] a view that writing and reading involve a communal partnership or enterprise, including a way of questioning or testing this partnership” (emphasis mine, “JS” 73). There are of course more and less “communally” efficacious ways of doing “transactional” work. Representational systems in both the subjective, social and linguistic notions of representation are subject to “undermining.” But note, reading according to a combinatory theory of genre means there’s always something to be gained even if there’s always also something lost. This kind of change does not come easy; nor does it occur by adhering to generic fixity or by greiving discplinary impermanence. These things have been “discredited,” as Jameson says. Rather, the desire to hold on too long to any one genre (or discipline) “undermines” itself. More texts in the sense of “distance reading” produces less certainty about the kinds of texts you thought you had before you dared take the journey. To defend categorical integrity as a literary absolute – a “law” as Derrida famously puts it, and as Jameson would affirm for political reasons – is in each-and-every instance to initiate the endless waves of doing an undoing them (Derrida 1980, 55–81). This doing-and-undoing occurs in different measures of frequency and at higher and lower amplitudes, crest-to-crest, ad infinitum. There are specters haunting genre, says the “great unread.” The “communal” affirmation of the ghosts in our machines may not be perfectly aligned in the work of Jameson and Cohen. Jameson’s idea of the “communal” has a more explicitly political agenda than Cohen’s. But the two readers themselves can be read in theoretically compatible ways. There’s no such thing as perfect alignment. There are only negotiated prospects of togetherness given better and worse kinds of interpretive techniques. Our political and reading practices can be scaled up or down from there.

4 Was Robinsons Crusoe Deranged?

In a word, the nature and experience of things dictated to me, upon just reflection, that all the good things of this world are no farther good to us than they are for our use.

– Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe

(Defoe 2014, 205; hence referred to as RC)

Quite possibly, then, this era, which so congratulates itself on its self-awareness, will come to be known as the time of the Great Derangement.

– Amitav Gosh, The Great Derangement

(Gosh 2016, 11; hence referred to as GD)

If we take Gosh at his word, then the answer to the question – Was Robinson Crusoe “deranged”? – must be inarguably, yes. But there’s more to the story than this, and the “more” can be located both within the tradition of realism and within the novel itself. There’s more to the realist novel’s so-called “derangement,” if we use a wave theory of genre. The realist novel and the text called Crusoe are not tethered absolutely. Once we grant the premise that genres are mixed and the meaning of a text is multiple, then we can move from being deranged to the prospect of rearrangement. Recall in The Great Derangement, the “more” Gosh claims to be missing in his version of the British Englightenment is the real that realism is said to ignore. What’s missing for Gosh in the realist genre is reality at scale, not just Moretti’s “more” as in “great unread” but a sense of “more” that is explicitly “ecological” (GD 3). Ecological reality is writ here in a larger than traditionally realist sense of “the collective” (GD 7) as “geological” (GD 20), “non-human” (GD 56), and most importantly, “climactic” (GD 7, ff.). Gosh’s argument is now canonical, and is situtated at the threshold of what is arguably a new genre movement in the contemporary novel – speculative, ecological, or climate fiction, The Great Derangement has become both an indictment of traditional realism’s tendancy to reduce reality to human beings and a manifesto for Le Guin’s realism with a larger sense of the real.

Gosh’s references to ecological concerns in The Great Derangement inform my reading of Robinson Crusoe – in contrast with Gosh – as ecological realism, avant la lettre. What we have in common is a critical investment, as Gosh says, not just in “ecology but also the ‘ecological refugee’” (GD 3). But beyond Gosh, I want to read Defoe’s castaway as precisely that kind of figure. If my reading is convincing, and if genre works like Jameson and Cohen say, then Robinson Crusoe is a text that’s overdue for generic reclassification. It’s a text like its hero both adrift and going somewhere new. This is where Moretti’s “conjectures on world literature” (my emphasis) appeals to a conjunctural understanding of history apropos Althusser. Genres oscillate dynamically between what’s in the past, how the past is understood now, and whatever futures we might build from there. I’m going to argue that we can reread Crusoe as we recast realism along the lines of being castaway. Robin Crusoe the individual is as Robinson Crusoe the text does. Both the individual character and the novel itself stage adventures in scaling and failing to scale up.

There’s a critical point in Robinson Crusoe where the castaway exhibits traits that are both temporally and generically out of joint. This is where I cite the epigram above: “In a word, the nature and experience of things dictated to me, upon just reflection, that all the good things of this world are no farther good to us than they are for our use” (RC 205). Without taking up the space needed to quote Marx at length, this concept of use-value is echoed in Capital. Here Marx uses “nature” as a point of contrast with the reality-reducing ways commodification shrinks the value of things to mere monetary exchange. The subsequent erasure of “labor power” by “exchange value” enforces an understanding of things not “as they are” (echoing the empirical science of Francis Bacon) but only as they are imbued with the valuation of a product to be merely bought-and-sold. It’s the process of production – i.e. the missing process –  that Marx’s calls real relations. This is a version of the real as precisely what’s erased by the commodity form. “Nature” is a stand in term for a state of relations without “owners of money” as superordinate to the laboring classes.^[8] Class relationships under capitalism produce conflict – indeed violent conflict, recalling Jameson – in the name of cooperation. In this sense, the owner-worker relationship is what’s really deranged.

In Robinson Crusoe, the use-value scene comes about a third of the way through the story and is not at all “deranged,” as Gosh defines the term. It’s one of several moments in this topsy-turvy text where Jameson’s “scenic urge” is activated on behalf of a workerist definition realism. “Things” in the use-value passage – and not least, “the experience of nature” – are understood “justly.” Here, “justly” means both accurately, as in understanding the world, and real as in making things in a way that expands their value beyond the false equivalence of money. Here too, in this fleeting moment of a realist episode worth underscoring, Crusoe’s evocation of “nature” affords a cooperative relationship between human and non-human actors. Gosh’s “ecological refugee,” if we can literalize Crusoe’s storm for a moment, is both lost and found. Later, Crusoe’s “just reflection” includes denouncing “griping misers,” and “the vice of covetousness,” “gold,” “silver,” and “diamonds.” At times like this, he’s happy enough to see his “parcel of money” rot in its chest, where the “useless stuff lay” (RC 205).

This is not the version of Crusoe Ian Watt awards for helping to invent possessive individualism, nor as I said is it the one Gosh would be able to cite as an example as realism “deranged.” As I’ve already mentioned, in contrast to Cohen and Jameson, Watt’s Crusoe exhibits realism’s concern with what he generically calls “all varieties of human experience” (RN 6). But note Watt’s reality-reducing notion of the “human” form of “all” to the capitalist organization of individual experience. Here “humanity” is reduced to: “The autonomy of the individual [who exists] irrespective of his particular social status” (RN 60). Where Watt’s classless Crusoe collides with my own reading of the text is how individualism connects to “the rise of modern industrial capitalism” (RN 60). I’d say it’s a very troubled connection, one worth disconnecting and then reconnecting to more expansive and more historically specific ways of thinking about “nature,” “just reflection,” and “things.” This rethinking would include the ecological expansion of realism apropos Gosh. Watt honors Defoe’s realism for giving us the “ideology” (his term) to participate freely in “capitalism’s… great increase in economic specialization, [and take part in] an increase [of] the individual’s freedom of choice” (RN 61). For “specialization,” read factory work, the division of labor, and the violent removal of subsistance farmers from common land; for “freedom of choice” read commodity fetishism, and you’ll understand how my Crusoe and Watt’s Crusoe are bound to diverge. “I smiled to myself at the sight of this money: ‘O drug!’ said I, aloud, ‘what art thou good for?!” (RC 90), Crusoe laments. Capital is what’s denounced here, and use-value is what’s affirmed.

But of course, if Crusoe has a sort of proto-communist awaking in this scene, he is sadly a communist of one.^[9] Crusoe moves out of the “upper station of low life” (RC 4), and decidedly away from his father’s recommendation to seek “the middle station [where there are] few disasters” (RC 4). And “disastrously,” he moves back-and-forth between being castaway, a “mariner” (RC title page), a “merchant” (RC 27), a “miserable slave” (RC 27), a “master” (RC 331), a “workman” (RC 43), and not least, “an apparition… not feeling the ground I walked on” (RC 245). Most students of Crusoe can recite the standard reading of the story as a non-debatable example of colonialist literary fiction. But is it merely that? True, Crusoe puts himself as master to Friday; sells his “fellow slave” – the Muslim boy and his rescuer Xury – to a Portuguese slave trader; does a little bear baiting; and returns to England a wealthy man. And true, in the end, Crusoe finally gets hold of the great wealth created from a sugar plantation he owns in abstentia on the coast of Brazil. He cashes in what he calls, his “bills of exchange” (RC 483) and returns home having made his fortune from the work of slaves on the outskirts of empire. These are all true instances of Watt’s emergent capitalist hero, warts and all.

But Crusoe is also miserable at the end of the book. Robinson Crusoe doesn’t have Watt’s cold-war happy ending, which to recall Jameson once more, “are [also] hard to come by.” Crusoe is haunted by the report of insurrection on the island with “300 Caribees” invading, just as he is haunted by the enigmatic sign of a single phantasmatic footprint. The generic mixing here between romance and realism, and avant la lettre, gothic novels, recalls Jameson’s interest and mine in representation and war. One of Crusoe’s brothers, it must also be noted, is referred to early in the text as a “Lieutenant-colonel to an English regiment of foot in Flanders” (RC 2). But there’s no going home to his family, and in the end there’s no peace for Crusoe. It’s as if once rescued the castaway is still cast out. Crusoe’s return to England is a fortunate turn in his growing ability to ride the waves; but it’s all wrong. He’s “a perfect stranger to all the world” (RC 444). My emphasis on “all” is key since the notion of Crusoe as a singular man in his own mind emphasizes the missing links between the character, the world, and the kinds of “communal” connection – both human and ecological – that the castaway never stops craving. These repeated forms of self-estrangement are worth holding onto because they relate to reading Crusoe closely and at a distance. If the text combines new and old genres, and if that combination becomes significant in aways that connect with emergent fictional forms, then we can think about generic change in historically expansive ways. Crusoe ends up “a stranger to all” because the “all” and the “strange” are essentially connected. Crusoe repeatedly misses the opportunities to experience real relations (i.e. use value, common cause with his “fellow slave,” Xury, the ability to learn from Friday, “nature,” and so on).

Whatever you think about Crusoe – capitalist hero, colonialist demon, a man out of sorts with his political unconscious – it’s not hard to condemn him with Amitav Gosh’s “derangement” dictum. But if the realism 1.0 was similarly “deranged,” then now what; or better, what might realism 2.0 aspire to instead? Recall once more Watt’s rejection of “collectivism,” and understand that this rejection, like Gosh’s focus on “ecological refugees” as a newly prominent planetary reality, is both political and generic. Watt’s Crusoe seeks to rectify a contradiction where modern individuals are presumed to be both isolated from each other, dedicated to the commodification of things, and unified by a universal concept of the human being per se. But the contradiction, like the realist hero who is battered by the waves, keeps on coming-and-going. If Robinson Crusoe teaches us nothing else in the castaway’s craving to move beyond a communism of one, it’s that he’s lonely to the point of disappearing into the “natural” relations he learns to enjoy but then sadly rejects. I don’t want to take anything from the psychoanalytic appeal of Crusoe’s parrot, Poll, repeating his name while he dreams – the empty signifier scene that is favored by some readings. But goats are more important in Crusoe because they provide his food and drink, and his and Friday’s clothes, and are at times the castaway’s most valued, comforting, and productive companions.

In one revealingly enigmatic scene, Crusoe opens and closes his goatskin umbrella, modulating the way his white skin lightens and darkens in the tropical climate. Here ecology, category, and rearrangement come together. With his goatskin umberalla in hand, Crusoe ponders how the sunshine will eventually turn him “mulatto.” The scene works nicely alongside having “Mahometan whiskers,” which he sheepishly enjoys while enjoying the “monstrous” visage that would be “frightful [in] England” (RC 236). My point is that at certain times Crusoe affirms anomoly as a generative feature in his own different stages of existence. The goatskin umbrella is best regarded as an animal-aperture for showing how classification is subject to a triple dynamic of rearrangement instead of one of derangment alone: first, rearrangement depends on when and how wide Crusoe opens the animal-aperature to change the color of his skin; a second rearrangement happens in a generic way, where romance and realism recombine, and where that recombination can be read as forward looking; and third, rearrangement works at an ecological level, where sea waves are ridden, ships get wrecked, so-called nature is recognized as “all” there is, and the adventurer is forced to give up old connections to home. Category change in all three ways depends on how wide and how far you want to go with the challenge of rearrangement.