Homage à Moll

I'm currently devouring a critical readers' guide to "The Catcher in the Rye," one of my all-time favorite works of fiction. It concerns a kid who's smart and sensitive enough to know that society sucks, but hasn't matured enough to figure out a way to live a decent and satisfying life inside such a beast.

The readers' companion is a very impressive virtuoso performance of scholastic competence, "Ossum" as we say nowadays, and criticism at its best. It's a fun and informative read, to say the least.

No comparable readers' guide exists, as far as I know, to accompany my other favorite work of fiction, "Moll Flanders" by Daniel Defoe, written nearly 250 years before "Catcher" and featuring a female protagonist, but otherwise very similar to J.D. Salinger's celebrated novel about Holden Caulfield. Both works are fictional autobiographies told in the first person. The most important trait they share is their respective authors' abilities to find a "perfect pitch" for their protagonists' voices, thus creating believable characters, we almost might say, "by ear." Defoe accomplished this same feat also in an earlier and highly celebrated work, the story of an isolated human being who had to provide the material necessities for sustaining his life without help, companionship, or reliance on the social web of interdependency through which we normally live. That was "Robinson Crusoe."

Moll Flanders's problems with society stem from her circumstances. At a time when single women were constrained from making a decent living, when society was so thoroughly patriarchal that women were allowed to own property only under the most unusual and rare circumstances, and when the only real opportunity for a woman consisted of making an advantageous marriage dependent on family connections and the wealth she would bring into the matrimonial bargain, Moll Flanders comes of age finding herself alone in the world, a penniless orphan without a family, and with only her good looks, her ambition, and a bundle of healthy instincts to help her make her way.

Daniel Defoe himself was a shadowy and inscrutable character, and his motives for writing "Crusoe" and "Flanders" are unclear. All his life he wanted to be a rich, hot shot business man and entrepreneur, but his every attempt to achieve that station failed and he gradually sank into debt. He behaved unethically at times, and once got himself out of debtor's prison by offering to turn informant and also write political propaganda for his enemies. Defoe was fully embroiled in the complex political and religious disputes of his time, and often worked as a hack writer for broadsheets, producing pamphlets on contract, and that sort of penny-a-word stuff. He wrote complex prose rapidly and never revised anything, sort of like Johann Sebastian Bach wrote music.

Among other things, he wrote half a dozen or so novels within the space of four or five years, starting just before age 60. The degree of mental concentration he brought to the two best of these, "Robinson Crusoe" and "Moll Flanders," was extraordinary, for both exhibit a degree of clarity and seeming authenticity that's scary at times. How he managed to achieve the authenticity of Moll's voice in the midst of an age of high paternalism will forever remain an unanswerable question. My speculative answer is that he became obsessed through repeated failures in his own life with the processes by which we deal with the needs of material existence, and wanted to create, for purposes of making an argument, that person who faced life under the most disadvantageous circumstances, yet found a way to live.

Defoe seems to have concluded that such a person would inevitably turn at least in part to a life of crime. He then had to determine, for purposes of the argument forming in his head, whether such a person is a victim of society, or should be held responsible for his or her criminal behavior on the basis of moral culpability. You can see him debating this topic with himself all through the pages of "Moll Flanders," and he seems never to have arrived at either an answer or an argument.

I would like to know whether he ever took a firm position on this difficult question by the time he died alone at about age 70, while hiding from his creditors in a hovel in London's Ropemakers Alley.