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Picturing the Thing Itself, or Not: Defoe, Painting, Prose Fiction, and the Arts of Describing

This essay explores the relationship between Defoe's fiction and painting, but, in a broader sense, I hope that my investigations have significance for the novel in general. Since Ian Watt's paradigmatic argument that individualism and realism are the true cause of the proliferation of novelistic texts throughout the eighteenth century, numerous alternative scripts have been proposed: the novel as continuity of romance; the novel as continuation of the picaresque; the novel as representing a dialectic between empiricism and morality; the novel as an essentially feminine text, and so on. Present at the heart of many of these scenarios are the fictions of Daniel Defoe: Robinson Crusoe, Moll Flanders, Captain Singleton, Memoirs afa Cavalier, A Journal of the Plague Year, Colonel Jack, and Roxana. If Defoe is not discussed, the decision itself represents a silence that demands discussion. A more customary silence in these paradigms, however, is the lack of any discussion of realist painting, the form which, in its "faithful representing of commonplace things," seemed to George Eliot the closest parallel to realism in the novel.1 What I want to do in this essay is, first, to establish Defoe's interest in painting; second, to argue that the cliché about Defoe's realism resembling a