Page |1

Page |2

The Modern Innovation

Situating the Novel in the Progression of Semantic Meaning
Benjamin Boyce, June 2, 2015

1. A New Fiction?
The modern novel, as it arose in 18th century England, is usually described as an
innovation over the medieval romance and the epic. Ian Watt ascribes to this new form
the qualities of individuality, empiricism, and uniqueness. These qualities were tied to
similar innovations in other realms of culture, such as science and philosophy, and were
rooted in
that vast transformation of Western civilization since the Renaissance which has
replaced the unified world picture of the Middle Ages with another very different
oneone which presents us, essentially, with a developing but unplanned
aggregate of particular individuals having particular experiences at particular
times and at particular places.1
If the modern novel was an innovation on the romance and the epic, then how was
fiction itself modified to accommodate this particularity of experience, individuality, and
context?
I will be looking at literature as an act of constructing virtualized experience which
proceeds from a special use of language. My model proceeds from the sentence to the
modern novel, seeking to show the basic units of fiction, and how these units are used to
form statements of increasing subtlety and complexity.

Watt, Ian. The Rise of the Novel; Studies in Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding. Berkeley: U of
California, 1957. Page 31.

Page |3

2. In the Word was the Beginning

In Interpretation Theory2, Paul Ricoeur writes that semiotics, the science of signs,
proceeds from the separation of language from its use in discourse in order to study the
linguistic code which gives a specific structure to each of the linguistic systems, which
we know as the various languages spoken by different linguistic communities.3 However,
Ricoeur argues, language as a system of signs has only a virtual existence. What emerges
in actuality is the speech act, to which Ricoeur assigns an existential function as the
bearer of a meaning that transcends the isolation of the speaker from the listener, and
vice-versa.4
Through discourse, my experience is translated into meaning, which is carried to you
on the code of language; then you as my listener decode my meaning from our language,
and are then able to incorporate my meaning into your experience. The language we
share is anonymous; our statements, forged out of language, are non-anonymous
instantiations of our linguistic code.
It is this leap from semiotics to semantics (from the self-sufficient meaning of signs
to the inter-subjective meaning of statements) that is the signature leap of the meaningmaking impulse that results in literature (among other forms of discourse). Semantics still
possesses a virtual existence, but its virtuality is substantiated by the meaning that a
speaker is conveying, by their particular and momentary manner of grammaticizing their
state and their intention.
Insofar as the context of a statement is a conversation, the particular conversation
establishes the rules by which we can extract the intended meaning from the statements
within it. One needs to know how to take a statement before they can proceed to
interpret it: is it serious, or a joke? Is it a clarification or obfuscation? Is it a riddle to be
2

Paul Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning, Fort Worth, Texas,
Texas Christian University Press, 1973
3
Ricoeur, 1973, page 2
4
Mikhail Bakhtin pushes things a bit further: Discourse lives, as it were, beyond itself, in a
living impulse toward the object; if we detach ourselves completely from this impulse all we have
left is the naked corpse of the word, from which we can learn nothing at all about the social
situation or the fate of a given word in life. To study the word as such, ignoring the impulse that
reaches out beyond it, is just as senseless as to study psychological experience outside the context
of that real life toward which it was directed and by which it was determined. M Bakhtin
Discourse in the Novel, page 292; quote found in Morson, Gary Saul, and Caryl Emerson.
Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics. Stanford, CA: Stanford U, 1990. Page 58.

Page |4

pondered or a solution to be applied?

It is in the stacking of statements that discourse proceeds; and proceeds to convey a
higher form of meaning, by using statements as the semiotic units which provide a higher
field of semantic conveyance. And though it might be conceivable to abstract all the
various sorts of conversations in order to study how statements may or may not form a
self-referent system of statement-level meaning similar to that of the semiotic code, even
pursuing one form of statement (such as the metaphor) is a daunting enough task. And yet,
by discussing types statements, we might be able to ascertain the generic manner in
which statements manipulate meaning. Gary Saul Morson distinguishes between two
types of statements, the aphorism and the dictum, thus:
The rhetoric of the dictum tends to totality The dictum is certain [it]
demands we attend to it An aphorism, by contrast, seems to be found in
hiding [With the dictum] everything is present in the statement. It is complete
and the author, who is in full control of significance, knows exactly what it means.
We can develop it, apply it, take it as the key to many things, but we do not go
beyond it The dictum is a conclusion, the aphorism is a beginning. Part of the
whole is missing, as is always the case with truth itself The dictum says
Something. The Aphorism says Something Else.5
Using this dichotomy as a starting point for the procedure of the statement, we might
say that the two generic modes in which statements manipulate meaning is by 1)
contracting it toward definite units of sense, or 2) dilating meaning to produce a leap or
reaching-outward of significance.
Taken to the extreme, the most contracting statements belong to formal logic and
legal codes (which establish rigorous values and then make inferences or set precedents
according to these values); whilst the most dilating statements perhaps belong to humor
or to poetry. A logical statement can be infinitely extended through critical analysis, as in
the case of Albert North Whitehead and Bertrand Russells Principia Mathematica6
which sought to establish the logical foundations on which all mathematical statements
could be provedit subsequently took them 379 pages to establish that one plus one does

Morson, Gary Saul. "The Aphorism: Fragments from the Breakdown of Reason." New Literary
History 34.3 (2003): page 420-422 & 428.
6
Whitehead, Alfred North, and Bertrand Russell. Principia Mathematica. Cambridge: UP, 1925.

Page |5

in fact equal two.7 This proof doesnt alter the meaning of 1+1=2, but only extends it
into the system of which it is a part (being arithmetic); however, when we engage with a
poetic statementJoys impregnate. Sorrows bring forth.8we proceed to its sense by
allowing the non-logical tensions in the statement to not cancel one another out, but
rather form associative connections that we walk, toward an understanding that is
tentative.9 We must guess what Wm. Blake means to make sense of his statement; we
must agree that 1+1=2 in order to make sense of that formula.10 The sense-difference
between these two statements might be defined by orders of ambiguity, but we propose
that in the conversation of fiction, ambiguity is employed to convey the non-anonymity
of a specific subject who, in producing unspecific sense, exerts themselves more
personally into the semantic field.
However ambiguous or non-anonymous a statement is, its sense is nevertheless
constrained to a single point or point of view, be that view/point a dilation or contraction
of meaning. For subjectivity to be extended, it is required that there be room to express
the dynamics of how and why meaning is being manipulated in a non-anonymous and
ambiguous manner, which requires a series of statements to establish something of a
psychic fingerprint. In fiction (being a virtually non-anonymous instance of discourse)
the semanticization of a series of statements is purposed toward conveying a virtualized
7

In 1931, Gdel's incompleteness theorem proved that any formal system will never be able to
prove its own completeness; either the system will be found to be inconsistent, or there will be
some truth which will not be able to be deduced from this system. Alternately, the more earnestly
I attempt to explain the humor of the statement A Freudian slip is when I say one thing but ****
my mother, the less humor is retained by the phrasegiving rise to the question of the relation
between the dilating statement (such as witticisms and metaphor) and the contracting mode of
rational explanation.
8
William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, plate 8.
9
As concerns the procedures for validation by which we test our guesses they are closer to a
logic of probability than to a logic of empirical verification. To show that an interpretation is
more probable in the light of what we know is something other than showing that a conclusion is
true. So in the relevant sense, validation is not verification. It is an argumentative discipline
comparable to the juridical procedures used in legal interpretation, a logic of uncertainty and of
qualitative probability. Ricoeur, pp. 78.
10
In descriptive writing you have to be careful of associative language. Youll find that analogy,
or likeness to something else, is very tricky to handle in description, because the differences are
as important as the resemblances. As for metaphor, where youre really saying this is that,
youre turning your back on logic and reason completely, because logically two things can never
be the same thing and still remain two things. The poet, however, uses these two crude, primitive,
archaic forms of thought in the most uninhibited way, because his job is not to describe nature,
but to show you a world completely absorbed by the human mind. Frye, Northrop. The Educated
Imagination, Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1964. Page 32.

Page |6

subject encountering virtualized experience. The emergence of the virtually experiencing

subject occurs in the literary forms that are about the length of a page: being the poem
and the parable.
On the level of the page, a subject is presented from two directions: from an interior
and from an exterior point of view. For the interior viewpoint we will ascribe the form of
the poem; for the exterior viewpoint we will ascribe the form of the parable.
A poem produces sense on the most sensual level of language (its sounds and
imagery); and combining a deliberate use of language with a deliberate arrangement of
statements works to produce the exteriorization of an internal state, which is commonly
referred to as a voice. The poetic form of a haiku, being so tightly controlled, affords very
little variability for the voice to acquire subjectivity. But already, on the level of the lyric
or the sonnet, we are able to hear the voice as a particular instance of subjective
experience.
The second principal unit of fiction is the parablenot in the sense of a story with a
specific meaning, but simply a parabola of happeninga sequence of and thens. The
parable sits opposite the poem in that it describes a series of happening which shapes the
virtual subject in action and in a context. The subject of a parable is dissociated from the
teller (in time by speaking of what happened to me, or in body by speaking of what
happened to him). The subject is spoken about rather than through, as is the case with a
poem. Both the poem and the parable present us with an experiencing subject in time, but
the poem is psychological, as the parable is causal.11 When these two forms are bound
together by a name that there is the erection of the next semantic field in fiction, being the
drama.
By setting a poetic subject on a parabolic arc and allowing that subjects voice to
respond to its changing situation, what is formed over the course of events is character;
characters then become the semiotic units being arranged to form statements within a
dramatic field.
11

Behind proverbs and aphorisms and psychological speculation and religious ritual lies the
memory of human experience strung out in time and subject to narrative treatment. Lyric poetry
implies a series of events in which the voice in the lyric is embedded or to which it is related. All
of this is to say that knowledge and discourse come out of human experience and that the
elemental way to process human experience verbally is to give an account of it more or less as it
really comes into being and it exists, embedded in the flow of time. Developing a story line is a
way of dealing with this flow. Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy, London, Routledge, 1988. Page
140

Page |7

The emergence of character as the semiotic unit of the semanticizing drama has wide
ranging effects, for here we see the encoding of social relations into the fictional realm.
The semantic field that arises in the drama is the social strata; dramas statement is one
of relationships being united or separated. Here, we need to differentiate between the
point of a specific drama, and the field of its meaning. A dramas point can be tragic
or comedic, moral or satiric, climactic or anti-climactic, but the field of meaning which a
drama virtualizes in the realm of language is the constellation of characters into dynamic
relationships. In drama, humans are able to encode their understanding of how society
works and how the world works. And though anthropomorphism can have pejorative
connotations (as a nave form of understanding), within literature, anthropomorphism is
the imbuing of personhood onto non-personal subjects, and is an empathetic move. It lifts
the material, vegetal and animal kingdoms into a direct semantic relationship with
ourselves, allowing us to feel for (to relate on a personal level to) that which doesnt
have the same type or complexity of feelingand this is enabled by the relationality
inherent in the dramatic-semantic form.
It is quite possible to abstract drama from its use, in order to analyze its various
formsleading us to a certain number of character types and plots.12 Approaching
drama in this way will provide us with a grab-bag of material from which all stories can
be reduced or from which assembled. However, to grapple with the semantic meaning of
drama, to get a handle on the ever escalating field of meaning which literature is
virtualizing, we must again turn toward use, in order to gauge the effect that drama has on
meaning.
The manner of dramas use can be stretched upon a dichotomy between formal and
informal. At its most formal, drama becomes ritual; at its most informal it becomes a
folktale, an entertainment.
12

The website www.ipl.org provides various lists of plots, ranging from Foster-Harriss singular
all plots are based on conflict; with the extension into plots with 1) a happy ending, 2) an
unhappy ending, or 3) the literary plot, in which the critical event takes place at the beginning
rather than the end; from there, ipl.org lists the 7 basic plots (all having to do with various
forms of conflict); then Ronald Tobias twenty basic plots (ranging from Quest to Love to
Discovery, Sacrifice, Rivalry, The Riddle, and so on); and lastly Georges Polti's Tirty-Six
Dramatic Situations. ["The "Basic" Plots in Literature." Frequently Asked Reference Questions.
N.p., n.d. Web. 30 May 2015, http://www.ipl.org/div/farq/plotFARQ.html]
As for character types, theres the Protagonist and Antagonist, the Confidante, the
Dynamic/Flat/Foil Characters, and so on. We might also go into the archetypal characters, or the
various sorts of caricatures that recur in all sorts of fiction (the trickster, the virgin, etc., etc.).

Page |8

As ritual, the enactment of a drama ties the subject through personal experience to his
immediate social unit. Rites of passage are dramatic forms in which a person is fit into a
certain role in the larger drama of clan life. The ritual drama identifies its practitioners as
semiotic units, which it articulates into a larger semantic whole, being the social-unit of
the tribe. The ritual drama thus defines the tribe through the relationships it establishes of
the individual units in the tribe, which allows for its members to think of other members
as necessary for personal meaning. In a sense, to lose a member of ones tribe would be
like losing a word, were you all a sentence. We see then how a formal dramathat is, a
drama that is taken very seriouslyacts as a higher order working of the same dynamics
that are happening at the basic level of language, where it emerges within discourse.
On the other hand, the informal dramas, those that are not to be taken too literally,
also perform an important function, as the narrative pastime, the storytelling
entertainment, is the digesting aloud, as it were, experiences which have been inspired by
life in the world. Additionally, a good storyteller is able to convey very useful
information while still carrying her audiences attention alongindeed, the narrative
process13 is perhaps the most efficient means of passing information from one person to
the next.
To recap: we put words together to make statements. We put statements together to
make poems and parables. We put poems and parables together to form characters, and
put characters together make dramas. And then what? Well, and then we have a whole
bunch of dramainvolving a steadily increasing set of characters who are being steadily
rounded out and events that are extrapolated both forward and backward in time. This
dramatic sprawl has an urban analogue to it, as different versions of stories, different
causal chains, different origins and outcomes come into contact with eachother and in
their contradiction push the reader out of their emersion in the dramatic field.
All this while, as stories have been progressing from the statement, upward, the
authority of the author has been at work creating these semantic unities, and at the
threshold of the many dramas the author is called to expand their authority over a host
13

Process in the sense of processing, for literature is not simply representing the world, but
rather replicating the datum found in the world and recasting this datum into its own ontological
sphere. This processing we assert is so indicative to fiction that we as readers often overlook it,
even as everything that fiction accomplishes it accomplishes through this process of
virtualizationof abstracting the world into language, and then forming through language a
virtual world that is merely based on (and not strictly in) the world we think of as real.

Page |9

of dramatic units. There must be a mayor, or war-chief, or judge who organizes the
many-dramas, in order that the audience will not be jarred out of their inclusion in the
story. Furthermore, there tends to be a critical mass of dramas, which provides a prompt
for a singular poet to unify them into a broad, monoglossic statementwhich is
traditionally named the Epic.
If the semiotic units of the epic are dramas, then the semantic statement of the Epic
Poet is on the level of an Empire. In the case of Homer, we have a poetic voice which is
encoded on the level of the statement (by way of hexameter verse and recurrent epithets
which support the meter), through the subjective position of the actors (described as the
heroic tradition, but also including the mythic or divine actors), and unified by a grand
narrative parabola (the fall of Troy, Odysseus journey). On the Epic-semantic field is
rendered the cultural identity of the Greeks as a whole. And whether or not Homer was
historically real, it is the unifying authority of the Illiad and the Odyssey that is of such
force that it requires us to ascribe it to a singular poet. Inversely, this poetic authority not
only unifies drama, but it unifies a people, and the power of an epic is such that it is
capable of turning the artists who interact with it into vehicles of its semanticizing force.
The Ancient Greek poet, sculptor, painter, etc., found in the Epics a unified vision in
which their entire output could be placed. The Epic becomes a tradition through which
the identity of the artist interacts with the greater identity of his people. The Epic is the
arena where the semantic project of literature speaks an entire culture.
Epics themselves can be arranged on a spectrum similar to that of dramaby
evaluating their use, or interpretation. Whereas a drama becomes ritual when taken very
seriously, an Epic becomes scripture, and the same way in which a ritual semanticizes its
participants into a social statement the scriptural Epic semanticizes its adherents into a
greater meaning-making unit. A religion such as Christianity, through the writings of St.
Paul, very explicitly ties its adherents to the drama (the Passion) of Christ, so that
metaphoricallyand yet somehow compellingly literallya Christian is considered a
part of the body of Christ, or a part of the body of the Bride of Christ. The Christian Bible
is an epic that, when internalized as scripture, converts its adherents into extensions of its
semanticizing force, calling them to read into their life the working-out of the Biblical

P a g e | 10

drama, as well as calling on them to convert others into this semantic structure.14
Taking such epics too seriously is, in modern times, frowned upon,15 and yet one
could argue that human beings use these grand narrative structures to at once make sense
of the world and to fashion a ground with which they may connect and feel at home with
other humans. Additionally, by touching on religion within this essay on fiction, it is not
to be concluded that the truth statements of religion are inherently fictitious; only that the
way in which religions are built is similarif not identicalto the way in which we
build narratives of less serious or more informal use.

To return to history (to move toward the modern novel), the prosaic literary forms of 17th
and 18th century Europe had achieved a stabilization (perhaps stagnation) in the form of
the romance. The romance being an idealized drama which concerned either the nobility
14

Eric Auerbach details the particular effectiveness of the New Testament in drawing the
individual into its semantic structure: What we witness is the awakening of a new heart and a
new spirit. All this applies not only to Peters denial but also to every other occurrence which is
related in the New Testament. Every one of them is concerned with the same question, the same
conflict with which every human being is basically confronted and which therefore remains
infinite and eternally pending. It sets mans whole world astirwhereas the entanglements of fate
and passion which Greco-Roman antiquity knows, always directly concern simply the individual,
the one person involved in them. It is only by virtue of the most general relations, that is, by
virtue of the fact that we too are human beings and thus are subject to fate and passion, that we
experience fear and pity. But Peter and the other characters in the New Testament are caught in
a universal movement of the depths which at first remains almost entirely below the surface and
only very graduallythe Acts of the Apostles show the beginnings of this development
emerges into the foreground of history, but which even now, from the beginning, lays claim to
being limitless and the direct concern of everybody, and which absorbs all merely personal
conflicts into itself. Auerbach, Erich. Fortuna. Approaches to the Novel. Ed. Robert Scholes
San Francisco: Chandler Publishing Co. 1961. Page 66.
15
Catherine Gallagher argues that it is precisely the modern capacity for provisional belief that
gives rise to the novels particular degree of fictionality: Modernity is fiction-friendly because it
encourages disbelief, speculation, and credit. The early novels thematic emphases on gullibility,
innocence deceived, rash promises extracted, and impetuous emotional and financial investments
of all kinds point to the habit of mind it discourages: faith. The reckless wholeheartedness of its
heroes and heroines, their guileless vulnerability, solicits our affectionate concern and thereby
activates our skepticism on their behalf. Hence, while sympathizing with innocent credulity, the
reader is trained in an attitude of disbelief, which is flattered as superior discernment Disbelief
is thus the condition of fictionality, prompting judgments not about the storys reality, but about
its believability, its plausibility. One is dissuaded from believing the literal truth of a
representation so that one can instead admire its likelihood and extend enough credit to buy into
the game. Such flexible mental states were the sine qua non of modern subjectivity. Gallagher,
Catherine. The Rise of Fictionality. The Novel. Ed. Franco Moretti. Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2006. Page 345.

P a g e | 11

(e.g. the Arthurian romances) or the peasantry (e.g. the picaresque). The romance was a
working out of the medieval epic, having to do with love and honor or their opposites,16
and while the aesthetic quality may have had its low points or high points just as any
rendition of previous epics in other times and other cultures, I propose that with the
printing-press the ease of its production and reproduction is the main distinction between
the romance and the epic, and not any inherent semantic differencethat is, the romance
is not a semanticizing of the epic, nor a new manner of semanticizing dramait is the
extension of a certain epic frame, belonging to a Medieval value system (both ethic and
aesthetic). The romance doesnt do anything new, it just does more or less what the
Arthurian and Catholic grand stories were doing for the preceding centuries. With Don
Quixote we have a critique of the romance; showing how much the romance is no longer
relevant in the post-Enlightenment and post-Renaissance reality. And it is with Robinson
Crusoe that we have a new semantic form; a new way of semanticizing within the
narrative field, but Robinson Crusoe isnt following the exponential ordering that the epic
performs of the drama, and the drama performs of its characters, and characters do of
their situations and emotions, through poems and parables made of statements made of
words. Robinson Crusoe does not necessarily make a greater parabolic arc through which
it treats a number of epics as semiotic units, but rather it emerges within an Intra-Epic
field, where many Epics are vying for authority over the subject.
If a novel is a development in literature, then this model would indicate that the novel
is the semantic form which uses a variety of epics as its semiotic units. And yet a
semantic unity of a number of these massive units would collapse under the tensions
between the various authorities which semanticize the various epics, as well as the
massive amount of cultural data within any given number of epics. So that the modern
development in literature must be located in a container which will not reduce the epics
16

Krueger (the Cambridge Companion, 5) has noted rightly that For an elite minority,
romances were a vehicle for the construction of a social codechivalryand a mode of
sentimental refinementwhich some have called courtly loveby which noble audiences
defined their social identities and justifified their privileges, thus reinforcing gender and class
distinctions. It is also true that there is an essential connection between chivalrous endeavors and
love, but romance during this period is ever aware of the contradiction, or at least, of the
otherness between this model and the religious model and the resulting tragedy. The world of
romance is a frightful nightmare enclosed in a beautiful dream. Vavaro, Alberto. Medieval
French Romance. The Novel. Ed. Franco Moretti. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006.
Page 160

P a g e | 12

complexity or neutralize their conflicting authorities. This container must be the ground
through which these various epics interact, or, the interaction between these various epics
allows for the establishment of a ground for the expression of navigating them.
This ground, this container, is the modern subject, who is found between several
semanticizing epics: the church and the state, Nature and Culture, and so on. Each of
these epics (or ideologies, or corporations, etc.) are unified in and of themselves by a
singular authority which the subject is forced to balance with other authorities.17 Render
unto Caesar now not only applies to the distinction between the state and God, but as
well various different literary and religious systems. In order for the modern man to stand
outside any given epic (which he is compelled to do, being a modern man), he must
locate the authority to evaluate the value of his behavior and experience within himself,
as an agent who agrees some with these systems, and not so much with those. The
modern man, to realize his potential, must claim the role of Epic Poet, Prophet, and Priest
for himself; and the grand parabolic arc need only be his life, and the meter and rhyme of
his writ need only be his own thoughts, which through rigorous honesty creates a
document that resonates at the same ontological frequency of other modern personsthat
is, the modern authors project is to project authority through a subject who is very
similarly verisimilar to the modern readership; conserving the energy which would
otherwise be absorbed by the highly formal poetic interface (i.e. hexameter verse), and
freeing the subject to relate directly of his experience. This directness, with a loss of
aesthetic refinement18, affords a rendering of the world and the subject into fiction that is
17

The early novel concentrates not on true extremes (the unique or near unique) but rather on
people who slip beyond the norm and test the social fabric But even when acts are horrible or
characters heinous, the novel finds ways to comprehend them without violating our sense that we
are reading about recognizable people in a world we know The novels willingnessindeed,
incessant needto invade traditional areas of privacyand explore matters traditionally
considered too personal to be shared, leads to an entirely new understanding of the relationship
between public and private, a moving beyond, even, the ordinary reaches of personal
conversation and private discourse. Hunter, J. Paul. Before Novels. New York: W.W.Norton,
1990. Page 37.
18
Watt speaks of the necessary directness of the novels use of language thus: On the one hand,
Defoe and Richardson make an uncompromising application of the realist point of view in
language and prose structure, and thereby forfeit other literary values. On the other hand,
Fieldings stylistic virtues tend to interfere with his technique as a novelist, because a patient
selectiveness of vision destroys our belief in the reality of report, or at least deviates our attention
from the content of the report to the skill of the reporter. There would seem to be some inherent
contradiction between the ancient and abiding literary values and the distinctive narrative
technique of the novel. (Watt, p. 95)

P a g e | 13

at once fresh and rapidly digestible.

3. Toward Verification, or maybe Validation19

In the case of Robinson Crusoe, the authority (the semanticizing force) of the modern
novel is Robinson Crusoe, who exists in a semiotic field where multiple epics are
intersecting. One such epic is capitalism, which we see exerting its evaluations of reality
through Crusoes constant shopkeeper tallying of accounts owed and due, supplies
retrieved and conserved, and not least of all in his volatile attitude toward money:
I smild to my self at the Sight of this Money. O Drug! said I aloud, what art thou
good for? Thou art not worth to me, no not the taking off of the Ground; one of
those Knives is worth all this Heap; I have no Manner of use for thee, een remain
where thou art, and go to the Bottom as a Creature whose Life is not worth saving.
However, upon Second Thoughts, I took it (page 43)
That smiling to himself, that chastisement of his own greed, is a slim moment of
Robinson standing outside the force of capital (distilled into its excrescence as cash). He
is very concretely outside the system of capitalism, being alone on an island, where his
conditions are such that a rusty knife is of more use than all the jewels of Arabi. But he
has brought Capitalism with him, it is a part of his identity, its force is ingrained in him
such that he cant look at the world without eyes that valuate it as capital. Crusoes
capitalism isnt an isolated force, for it exists within a network of other values, such as
his attitude toward Labor and Time, which he justifies after a few pages devoted to breadmaking:
This observation of the necessary directness of reportage needs be modified to fit with the
Semantic Model, which does propose that the modern novel is inherently more direct than the
previous literary forms, only, this directness is not situated in the manner of the modern novels
style or its structure, but rather in the mediation which its virtualized subject performs between
their experience and the various forces which intrude upon it. In fact, because the novel exists in
an Intra-Epic field, these epics are baring down upon the modern subject indirectly, even
subconsciously, so that style and structure in novels later than Defoe and Richardsons are
themselves used to combat and modify these systems, and therefore establish the modern subject
as dominant over the epic forces which would appropriate her into themselves, as their extension,
mouthpiece, or victim.
19
While the Semantic Model can be used (as will be shown) as another way of reading a
particular instance of the novel form, it is primarily concerned with the construction of literature,
over its consumption. As a conceptual model, however, it should be useful for either endeavor.

P a g e | 14

Any one may judge the Labour of my Hands in such a Piece of Work; but Labour
and Patience carryd me through that and many other Things: I only observe this
in Particular, to shew The Reason why so much of my Time went away with so
little Work, viz. That what might be a little to be done with Help and Tools, was a
vast Labour and requird a prodigious Time to do alone, and by hand. (page 84)
So little Work does not mean laziness or lack of activity on the part of Crusoe, but
rather a dearth of product resulting from his productivity. Defoe has constructed a poetics
of tedium through Crusoes patient (in the sense of long-suffering) industrialism, where
the arena in which Crusoes strength, wit, and character are tested is, in the first half of
the novel, a struggle to survive in harsh material circumstances with only his knowledge
and will, which Crusoe presents directly to us in long sentences fraught with commas of
very little rhythmic regularity. All of this goes to heighten the moments of success and
violence which release the tension of Crusoes laborious relation of his context.
This analogue of Time which Defoe has created establishes a floor through which the
Intra-Epic field can be navigated, especially in the second half of the novel, when Crusoe
begins to intersect with other cultures. Possibly the most direct proof of the extrusion
of a cultural epic onto the personal subject comes on page 124, when Crusoe reconsiders
his attitude toward the cannibals:
How far these People were Offenders against me, and what Right I had to engage
in the Quarrel of that Blood, which they shed promiscuously one upon another, I
debated this very often with my self thus; How do I know what God himself
judges in this particular Case; it is certain these People either do not commit this
as a Crime, it is not against their own Consciences reproving, or their Light
reproaching them. They do not know it be an Offence, and then commit it in
Defiance of Divine Justice, as we do in almost all the Sins we commit, They think
it no more a Crime to kill a Captive taken in War than we do to kill an Ox; nor to
eat humane Flesh, than we do to eat Mutton It followd necessarily, that I was
certainly in the Wrong in it, that these People were not Murtherers, in the Sense
that I had before condemnd them, in my Thoughts
Here we find a virtual subject contending with the relativity of cultural systems. The
one he carries in his breast requires serious contemplation not to apply to persons of
another value system. The Judgment is passed on to a higher authority (page 125: they
were National, and I ought to leave them to the Justice of God, who is the Governor of
Nations, and knows how by National Punishments to make a just Retribution for National
Offenses) after which, Crusoe finds a great Satisfaction for not rushing to do

P a g e | 15

something hed regret. In the midst of this passage, Crusoe had compared his possible
preemptive strike to the actions performed by the colonizing Spaniards, a bloody and
unnatural piece of Cruelty, against the natives of America. He is aware of the abuses of
a different brand of his Christianity, when it is applied blindly, without empathy, to other
cultures. He recognizes that the authority within his culture might not extend beyond his
culture, providing him an opportunity to stand outside that authority, as its adjudicator
and translator.
The opportunity of violence does come, however, and through his confrontation with
the cannibals Crusoe gains his companion Friday. Their relationship is established fairly
quickly in Crusoes favor, as if they dynamic of master and servant is a cross-cultural
constant. It is when Crusoe attempts to indoctrinate Friday into the Christian religion that
is shown Crusoes ineptitude in the promulgation of the logic of his Christian system:
But, says [Friday] again, if God much strong, much might as the Devil, why God
no kill the Devil, so make him no more do wicked?
I was strangely surprised at his Question, and after all, tho I was now an old
Man, yet I was but a young Doctor, and ill enough qualified for a Casuist, or a
Solver of Difficulties I therefore diverted the present Discourse between me
and my Man, rising up hastily, as upon some sudden Occasion of going out; then
sending him for something a good way off, I seriously prayd to God that he
would enable me to instruct savingly this poor Savage.
Confounded by his theological system, he is confronted again by his Christianitys
boundary, which here lies in that he cant get it to makes sense to Friday. He does persist
in explaining certain aspects of his faith, such as his abhorrence of: the Policy of making
a secret Religion, in order to preserve the Veneration of the People to the Clergy, is not
only to be found in the Roman, but perhaps among all Religions in the World, even
among the most brutish and barbarous Savages. (page 157) Like the master-servant
dynamic, so the abuse of authority is trans-cultural.
Ironically enough, Crusoe does act as a sort of priest, initiating his faithful Friday in
the rites of Western weaponry: I let him into the Mystery, for such it was to him, of
Gunpowder, and Bullet, and taught him how to shoot. (page 160)
Crusoes location of Authority in himself is exemplified with the introduction of first
Friday and then others into his self-referent system of life: My island was now peopled,
and I thought myself very rich in Subjects; and it was a merry Reflection which I
frequently made, How like a King I lookd. (page 174) Later on, when a European ship

P a g e | 16

arrives, and a dispossessed Captain is brought on shore to be presumably murthered,

Crusoe qualifies his assistance of the Captain:
Well, says I, my Conditions are but two. 1. That while you stay on this Island with
me, you will not pretend to any Authority here 2. That if the Ship is, or may be
recoverd, you will carry me and my Man to England Passage free. (page 184)
It is telling that first and foremost, Crusoe wishes his Authority to be preserved (he is
the sole definer of terms, within his system), and then his second condition, though it is
ostensibly about his salvation from his island, is concluded with a monetary caveat: he
will not have any sort of debt held over him, should he be got to England.
Robinson Crusoe, as the story of a man removed from his society, provides a clean
and clear examination of the working out of the modern novel within an Intra-Epic field.
The parabolic arc is encapsulated by the interior of the subject, who interacts with his
exterior context by searching for his existential meaning in his relationship with his
environment. This relationship, as detailed above, provides an arena for him to work out
the larger systems of capitalism, Christianity, and what they mean to him personally. By
viewing the modern subject as a crossroads of greater epic structures, we are able to
view the novel itself under various lights without those lights necessarily eclipsing the
others. Robinson Crusoe is not about capitalism or about the Protestant Work Ethic, or
Colonialismrather, it is about a subject who uses these various systems to build (or
semanticize) his own life. Robinson Crusoe and Robinson Crusoe thus necessitate
eachother: the novel and the subject it presents are at the same work: to establish
themselves as distinct and self-willed entities within history and the history of literature.
This work is exemplified quite clearly in Robinsons justification for writing down his
circumstances, even though no one will ever read them:
I now began to consider my Condition, and the Circumstances I was reducd to,
and I drew up the State of my affairs in Writing, not so much to leave them to any
that were to come after me, for I was like to have but few Heirs, as to deliver my
Thoughts from daily pouring upon them, and afflicting my Mind; and as my
Reason began now to master my Despondency, I began to comfort my self as well
as I could, and to set the good against from worse, and I stated it very impartially,
like Debtor and Creditor, the Comforts I enjoyd, against the Miseries I suffrd
(page 53)
4. Conclusion

P a g e | 17

The Semantic Model laid out in this paper is not intended to explain modern literature in
toto, nor could it do such a thing, as it now stands. Rather, it is hoped that by describing
the manner in which literature is assembled, we can see the novel as indeed an innovation
in the way in which meaning is conveyedthrough a highly developed manipulation of
textual elements to model a virtualized world full of forces ranging from immediate
physical sensations and mood swings, to haunted castles, island ecosystems, geopolitical
conflicts. The modern novel is a medium which, existing between epics, uses these epics
as scaffolding to erect an epic-sized individual; a modern subject making a modern sense
of things; where that making sense of things is a process of semanticizing and being
semanticized by forces which are as it were in the background, on the horizon, exerting
pressures which cause the subjects experience to take on a certain shape. This shape isnt
the shape of a parabola anymore, unless that parabola be the gabling on which has grown
this swollen vine producing a wealth of self at every stage of its arc.
Yet this question remains: what next? What comes next, after an author has
developed a style, accrued to herself a number of epithets & logical pivots in the form of
statements; after she has learnt the subjective poetics and the devices of plot; after she has
tuned her ear to character and her eye to social relationships; after she has proliferated a
unique lore and then unified this into an epicand after she has done all that, and then
worked her way to a modern subject, who struggles his way through the space between
her epics and her world and other epics and other worldsis there an innovation to be
grappled withis there a further field? Would she use various genres as her semiotic
units, to breach into that uncharted plane of meaning? Or is this already covered in postmodernism or post-post-modernism? I am convinced there is innovation to be had,
and not at the expense of relevance. I am drawn to this quote by Wittgenstein, for in it I
hear the greatest possibility for a new literature: My work consists of two parts, the one
presented here plus all that I have not written. And it is precisely this second part that is
the important one.20
Literatures progress has always come from between words, from between images &
thoughts, from between statements and actions, from between characters, between
dramas, between epicsas though fiction were a fabric, as if text were a textile, that
20

Paul Engelmann, Letters From Wittgenstein With a Memoir, Tr. L. Furtmller, Ed. B.F.
McGuinness (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1967), page 143.

P a g e | 18

clothe one thing in order to undress21 another.

21

That is, address.

P a g e | 19

Works Cited
Auerbach, Erich. Fortuna. Approaches to the Novel. Ed. Robert Scholes San Francisco:
Chandler Publishing Co. 1961.
Blake, William. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, 1793.
Engelmann, Paul, Letters From Wittgenstein With a Memoir, Tr. L. Furtmller, Ed. B.F.
McGuinness. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1967.
Frye, Northrop. The Educated Imagination, Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1964.
Gallagher, Catherine. The Rise of Fictionality. The Novel. Ed. Franco Moretti. Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2006.
Hunter, J. Paul. Before Novels. New York: W.W.Norton, 1990.
Morson, Gary Saul. "The Aphorism: Fragments from the Breakdown of Reason." New Literary
History 34.3 (2003):
Morson, Gary Saul, and Caryl Emerson. Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics. Stanford, CA:
Stanford U, 1990.
Ong, Walter. Orality and Literacy, London, Routledge, 1988.
Ricoeur, Paul. Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning, Fort Worth, Texas,
Texas Christian University Press, 1973
Vavaro, Alberto. Medieval French Romance. The Novel. Ed. Franco Moretti. Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2006.
Watt, Ian. The Rise of the Novel; Studies in Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding. Berkeley: U of
California, 1957.
Whitehead, Alfred North, and Bertrand Russell. Principia Mathematica. Cambridge: UP, 1925
"The "Basic" Plots in Literature." Frequently Asked Reference Questions. N.p., n.d. Web. 30 May
2015, http://www.ipl.org/div/farq/plotFARQ.html