Summer 1999
Volume 25, Number 4

Virginia Woolf once made a remarkable observation about Daniel Defoe's novel Robinson Crusoe. Call it intuition or uncanny lucidity. Under her eyes, an insignificant detail, which has largely escaped the attention of Defoe's critics, emerges out of obscurity and becomes luminous all of a sudden. The illumination radiates from a plain earthenware pot that practically dominates the physical environment of Crusoe's world. Although Defoe's reader will remember that this pot is but one of many survival tools that Crusoe has invented during his solitary existence on the island, Woolf insists on seeing more. In her reading, the object acquires an enigmatic symbolism:

Thus Defoe, by reiterating that nothing but a plain earthenware pot stands in the foreground, persuades us to see remote islands and the solitudes of the human soul. By believing fixedly in the solidity of the pot and its earthiness, he has subdued every other element to his design; he has roped the whole universe into harmony. And is there any reason, we ask as we shut the book, why the perspective that a plain earthenware pot exacts should not satisfy us as completely, once we grasp it, as man himself in all his sublimity standing against a background of broken mountains and tumbling oceans with stars flaming in the sky?1

From Science Fiction to Realism

Woolf's reading of Robinson Crusoe is intriguing for a number of reasons. I am particularly drawn to her suggestion of fetishism, and I wonder if we could further elaborate the figure of fetishized metonymy between Crusoe and his pottery not with a view to resolving Woolf's own ambiguity but with a view to following the traces of that metonymy to a larger, possibly global, network of metonymic exchange within which Defoe's earthenware episode was embedded and to which the novel Robinson Crusoe has made singular contributions. I emphasize the global network of metonymic exchange in this essay because we are dealing with some of the consequences of early modern global circulation that had predated and preconditioned European colonialism.

In a recently published study of the early modern economy, ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age, Andre Gunder Frank again reminds us how, from the early fifteenth century through the beginning of the nineteenth century, "Europeans sought to muscle in on 'the richest trade in the world'", referring to the intra-Asian trade, and how colonization finally enabled Europeans to achieve that goal.

Europeans derived more profits from their participation in the intra-Asian "country trade" than they did from their Asian imports into Europe, even though many of the latter in turn generated further profits for them as re-exports to Africa and the Americas. So the Europeans were able to profit from the much more productive and wealthy Asian economies by participating in the intra-Asian trade; and that in turn they were able to do ultimately only thanks to their American silver.3

The artifact Crusoe makes in Robinson Crusoe is called earthenware, not porcelain, and there seems no reason why we should ask the novel to do otherwise. However, Defoe's novel was written at the height of the European craze for true porcelain, and in the same period the author published several journalistic pieces arguing against imported chinaware and its negative impact on the British economy and morals.5 Viewed against this background, the earthenware episode in Robinson Crusoe appears doubly interesting. Defoe's journalistic writing shows that he was not uninterested in the symbolic and technological difference between earthenware and porcelain. In fact, during King William's reign, Defoe himself attempted the manufacture of bricks and pantiles (S-shaped earthenware tiles developed in Holland) in response to the rising demand for construction materials for the rebuilding and expansion of London. In partnership with others, he became proprietor of a brickyard in the 1690s. According to Paula R. Backscheider, the Essex factory was Defoe's major business enterprise, from which he came to clear about six hundred pounds a year and which he believed to be a firmer foundation for his family's future economic security than his other projects.6 But King William's reign was also a time when export Chinese porcelain prevailed on the global market and culminated in the rise of European chinoiserie, which would dictate the taste of the aristocracy in the next few decades. Deeply critical of this new trend, Defoe took King William and Queen Mary to task for having introduced four customs of excess that were imitated by the people and became worshipped by the whole kingdom: gardening, painting, East Indian calicos, and Chinese porcelain. Defoe argued that the royal taste had descended "into the humours of the common people so much, as to make them greivous to our trade, and ruining to our manufactures and the poor; so that the Parliament were oblig'd to make two Acts at several times to restrain, and at last prohibit the use of them." Of export porcelain, Defoe wrote:

The queen brought in the custom or humour, as I may call it, of furnishing houses with china-ware, which increased to a strange degree afterwards, piling their china upon the tops of cabinets, scrutores, and every chymney-piece, to the tops of the ceilings, and even setting up shelves for their china-ware, where they wanted such places, till it became a grievance in the expence of it, and even injurious to their families and estates.7

What I am trying to suggest here is that the rivalries among economies and civilizations in the eighteenth century seemed to have undergone an extraordinary process of metamorphosis in Defoe's novel for it to become a tale of (white) man's solitary survival in nature. In that sense, Crusoe's experiment with earthenware is symptomatic of what I call the poetics of colonial disavowal. The analysis that follows is an attempt to show that this poetics of colonial disavowal informs Defoe's storytelling in profound ways, both stylistically and contextually. To understand how it functions in the text, one cannot simply substitute one allegorical reading (of the survival tale) for another but would do well to interrogate the very absence of porcelain in the Crusoe episode and to try to explain how that absence conditions what the earthenware pot is doing, metonymically, in the novel. For porcelain is a significant absence in volume 1 of Robinson Crusoe. Like a ghost, the foreign object hovers over the borders of Defoe's writing and wrestles with the authorial hand that tries to exclude it from signification.

Even as the solidity and singularity of Crusoe's earthenware pot as recognized by Woolf seem ready to dissolve and metamorphose into something else, there is yet another level of complexity to be considered in this study. In keeping with the desire to control and regulate the value of luxury commodities on the inventory list of imported goods and to manufacture imitation products for competition on a global market, early eighteenth-century Europe witnessed a growing scientific interest in how one might distinguish among true porcelain, soft-paste porcelain, and other types of ceramics, and how to fix those distinctions categorically. Alchemists and/or scientists put years of painstaking research into discovering and determining the differential scientific (interior) value of white porcelain as opposed to the more familiar European soft-paste (pâte tendre) ware and earthenware. My research shows that the meaning of true porcelain at this time was shot through with Europeans' curiosity about the basic components of chinaware, then reported to be the Chinese clay kaolin and the porcelain stone petuntse. The quest for the local variants of these materials, therefore, introduced an interesting metaphysical disjuncture between true porcelain on the one hand and earthenware and soft-paste porcelain such as faïence and delftware on the other. In other words, chinaware was singled out to represent essential difference from ordinary ceramics and soft-paste porcelain from a scientific point of view, because that difference and the distinction it conferred on the object mattered a great deal in terms of quality and value to contemporary merchants, scientists, collectors, and manufacturers.8

1. Virginia Woolf, "Robinson Crusoe," in The Second Common Reader (New York, 1960), pp. 48-49.

2. The classical political economists from the eighteenth century onward often used Robinson Crusoe as their favorite model of illustration. The solitary individual on a desert island served as a convenient starting point for building their systems. Concerning the "primitive" character of Crusoe's production, Marx offers a sarcastic comment: "Necessity itself compels him to apportion his time accurately between different kinds of work. Whether one kind occupies a greater space in his general activity than another, depends on the difficulties . . . to be overcome in attaining the useful effect aimed at. This our friend Robinson soon learns by experience, and having rescued a watch, ledger, and pen and ink from the wreck, commences, like a true-born Briton, to keep a set of books" (Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, trans. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling, 3 vols. [New York, 1967], 1:76-77). Marx criticizes David Ricardo for using Crusoe in this manner: "He makes the primitive hunter and the primitive fisher straightway, as owners of commodities, exchange fish and game in the proportion in which labour-time is incorporated in these exchange-values. On this occasion he commits the anachronism of making these men apply to the calculation, so far as their implements have to be taken into account, the annuity tables in current use on the London Exchange in the year 1817. 'The parallelograms of Mr. Owen' appear to be the only form of society, besides the bourgeois form, with which he was acquainted" (ibid., 1:81 n) Insisting on the social nature of economic production, Marx rejected Adam Smith's and Ricardo's fiction of homo economicus, pointing out that

the individual and isolated hunter or fisher who forms the starting point with Smith and Ricardo, belongs to the insipid illusions of the eighteenth century. They are Robinsonades which do not by any means represent, as students of the history of civilization imagine, a reaction against over-refinement and a return to a misunderstood natural life. They are no more based on such a naturalism than is Rousseau's "contrat social," which makes naturally independent individuals come in contact and have mutual intercourse by contract. They are the fiction and only the aesthetic fiction of the small and great Robinsonades. [Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, trans. N. I. Stone (Chicago, 1913), pp. 265-66].

Lydia H. Liu teaches in the departments of comparative literature and East Asian languages at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of Translingual Practice: Literature, National Culture, and Translated Modernity--China, 1900-1937 (1995) and the editor of Tokens of Exchange: The Problem of Translation in Global Circulations (1999).