Tag Archives: Daniel Defoe

Joyce’s Literary Tastes

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Surrounding James Joyce and his novels is a conveyor belt of critical texts purporting to help the reader decode Ulysses or Finnegans Wake. Some of these are both readable and rewarding. Of the shorter texts, Eliot’s Ulysses, Order, and Myth [PDF] is valuable. Stewart Gilbert’s James Joyce’s Ulysses looks good, though I have yet to do more than scan its pages.

Frank Budgen’s James Joyce and the Making of Ulysses is a major critical reference, concentrating on the biographical and human details of the text. Budgen knew Joyce well whilst he was writing Ulysses, and he uses that personal knowledge to offer insight into Joyce’s creative practice. Its style is ponderous, and it is the off-hand biographical references that particularly reward the effort, one of which I partially record here:

Joyce was a great admirer of Defoe. He possessed his complete works, and read every line of them. Of only three writers, he said, could he make this claim: Flaubert, Ben Jonson and Ibsen. Robinson Crusoe he called the English Ulysses. Joyce read to me once the Prologue to The Canterbury Tales, stopping often to repeat the lines and retaste the elegant humour of each one.  “Of all English writers Chaucer is the clearest. He is as precise and slick as a Frenchman.”

The English Ulysses comment is fitting as in Ulysses, Joyce gives Leopold Bloom the line, “Robinson Crusoe was true to life. Well then Friday buried him. Every Friday buries a Thursday if you come to look at it.” Three sentences that remark on fiction, realism and plot.

Circumnavigation and Coetzee’s Foe.

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One mild summer in the late eighties, with limited resources and no compelling responsibilities, I set out to circumnavigate the 11,073 miles or about 17,820 kilometres that make up the coastline of Great Britain.

At the time my only foray outside of London and the south of the country had been on an aeroplane diverted to Birmingham airport due to fog at Heathrow. The single thrill of this inconvenience took place on the return train to London, en-route to boarding school, when my train passed through the small town of Leighton Buzzard. One of my favourite songs from a few years earlier had been Saturday Night (Beneath the Plastic Palm Trees)  sung by The Leyton Buzzards, who went on to greater renown as the pop group Modern Romance.

Provoked by a desire to see the country of my birth I walked a little, but mostly hitchhiked, following the coastal roads. This odyssey became the prototype of similar journeys from north to south, then east to west in Ireland, and across the top of North Africa.

On this trip around Great Britain I slept mostly in small harbour side inns, always with a sea view of sorts, but occasionally in bus stops, or sheltered by seaside groynes and, on one occasion, on a park bench. A touch clichéd, but I felt a wanderer’s imperative.

I discovered many things about the country and myself: Gregg’s bakeries sell different delicacies country-wide, discovering these regional specialities became a mission; people who picked me up from the side of the road for both long and short runs were mostly staggeringly kind and generous; it was rare to even see a car (and very, very windy), let alone hitch a lift on the eastern and northern coastal roads of Scotland. What I found in eastern Scotland, perhaps the highlight of a trip that was terrific and terrible in equal part, was the wind lashed village of Lower Largo, birthplace of Alexander Selkirk, the inspiration for Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe.

Statue of Alexander Selkirk in Lower Largo.

Statue of Alexander Selkirk in Lower Largo.

This afternoon I finished reading JM Coetzee’s Foe, which uses Defoe’s book as the metatextual framework to explore the ontological status of fictional characters, the nature of authority and language, all themes that Coetzee goes on to question in later novels. As always with Coetzee, as with Beckett, it is as though the writer published fully formed mature novels from the first instance. There is no sense of the writer having to develop their craft in full gaze of readers, as Zadie Smith has described.