 We recall how Defoe's narrator conveys the profanity of the mockers by expurgating it from his memoir. Bakhtin's example (again dealing with Dostoevsky) shows how the sites and ceremonies of death lend themselves especially well to such profanation:
The entire description [by the narrator] is permeated with a markedly familiar and profaning attitude toward the cemetary, the funeral, the cemetary clergy, the deceased, the very "sacrament of death" itself. (138)
As with the mockers in Defoe's tavern, the profanity is meant to cause the "debasing" of death, an act that evokes the carnival sense.
Mockery has a special role in another sense. "The primary carnivalistic act," writes Bakhtin, "is the mock crowning and subsequent decrowning of the carnival king" (124). This form of mocking reversal, says Bakhtin, is at "the very core of the carnival sense of the world—the pathos of shifts and changes, of death and renewal" (124). Mockery, then, is fundamentally associated with reversal. It is, indeed, a reversal that never ends, for the movement that mockery precipitates shifts perpetually to its opposite.
The elements of mockery represent an essential aspect of Bakthin's understanding of the distinctive role of the novel. In the novel, the voices of all characters are expressed and commingled in the narrator's [→page 277] voice, which always registers their influence and interpenetration.23) The tavern serves as a metonym for both the narrator's voice and for the carnival sense of the world. For the loudness and exuberance of the tavern (especially, in the case of the Journal, when set over against the muteness imposed by the Pit) conveys the interpenetration of voices rather than their isolation. The voices in the "carnival square" of the tavern surmount the barriers of hierarchy. In consequence, characters who are usually overlooked or silent are given a voice.
This broadening of the range of voices and the testimony they provide is important for Defoe's rendering of the plague. While the Great Plague of 1665 was referred to as the "poore's Plague,"24) most chroniclers, observes Maximilian Novak, were indifferent, if not hostile, to the predicament of the poor. In contrast, argues Novak, Defoe shows uncommon sympathy for the victims of "disorder," and especially for the poor.25) Defoe's narrator, comments Novak, "is surely the first fictional character whose sympathies embrace the swarming poor of the city" (Realism, Myth, and History 66). In Defoe's concern for the marginalized poor Novak sees a new literary development: "No narrator in realistic prose fiction before H.F. reveals this type of general sympathy for the human condition."26) Such sympathy, as Novak sees it, is not characteristic of Defoe's fiction in general, but is singular to the Journal, associated specifically with the disorder caused by the plague and the narrator's response to it. "I do not find it in those fictions of Defoe influenced by picaresque models," writes Novak.27 Moll Flanders, Colonel Jack, and Robinson Crusoe are all too self−preoccupied to manifest this expansive sympathy for their fellow citizens. The idea of this sympathetic narrator in the midst of catastrophe is indeed pathbreaking: "In the process, [H.F.] set a pattern for fictional narrators that has been central to the development of the novel."27)
The new direction identified with the sympathy of the narrator's voice can be viewed in terms of the contrast between the pit and the tavern. The pit, strongly suggestive of hell itself, is an emblem of the plague. It is, moreover, portrayed as having a voice of its own: "'twill be a Sermon to you," says the Sexton to H.F., "it may be, the best that ever you heard in your Life. 'Tis a speaking Sight, says he, and has a Voice with it, and a loud one, to call us all to [→page 278] Repentance …" (75). The message issuing from the pit, according to its premier interpreter, the Sexton, is a sermon with a universal message. Its "loud" voice, he implies, is meant to overwhelm all other calls. The studied description of the grieving figure reinforces this silencing image of the Pit. The man was
muffled up in a brown cloak, and making motions with his hands under his cloak, as if he was in. (75)
The voice of the Pit, in other words, silences all other voices. This suppression of other voices, according to Bakhtin, is what characterizes monologue.28)
The tavern, on the other hand, represents a multiplicity of voices, particularly those of the poor.29) The carnival sense of the tavern promotes the mockery that, though harsh and blasphemous, illuminates a side of life that otherwise would remain dark. As Bakhtin writes with regard to the "mock crowning and decrowning," the mockery is "not naked, absolute negation and destruction (absolute negation, like absolute affirmation, is unknown to carnival)."30) We can see how this aspect of mockery coincides with Novak's interpretation of the narrator as one who breaks new ground in the range of his sympathy.
The mockers themselves, to be sure, are mocked by the plague, for they eventually succumb to it and to the silence which "God's Terrible Voice" imposes.31) But the voice of mockery asserts itself indirectly throughout the novel. The narrator continues to register the tone of the mockers. The fears of the gentry regarding the poor and unemployed are, for instance, held up to scorn. Again, the story of the three brothers, which qualifies as the longest episode in the Journal, mocks the gross irrationality confronted by the brothers as they attempt to escape London and take refuge in the country.
The voice of the mockers becomes especially prominent at the novel's conclusion. H.F. ends his memoir of the plague with what he refers to as "a coarse but sincere Stanza of my own, which I plac'd at the End of my ordinary Memorandums, the same Year they were written" (302). The "Stanza," then, is meant to have the last word: [→page 279]
A dreadful Plague in London was
In the Year Sixty Five,Which swept an Hundred Thousand Souls
Away; yet I alive! (302)
The sentiment of the mockers returns here, expressed in H.F.'s exultation of survival over those condemned. The survival exulted in, however, is not only that of the narrator but of those voices which have informed and broadened his own.
That the "coarse Stanza" occurs as the last word in the novel suggests an association with Defoe's general approach to catastrophe. Defoe emphasizes the deliberateness behind the particular form of concluding the novel: "… which I plac'd at the End of my ordinary Memorandums, the same Year they were written" (302). The "ordinary Memorandums" presumably belonged to the writings which the narrator used to log the development of the plague as it occured. According to the rhetoric of the narrator, the stanza thus served both as the "End" of the text written at the time of the plague and as the end of the later redaction which is allegedly the Journal. Twice placed as an ending, the stanza emphasizes that the conclusion of this narrative is subject to the discretion of the redactor rather than the judgement of providence.
As I noted earlier, Defoe subverts the typological framework of plague and fire by suppressing the fire in order to supply a tragic mode rather than a redemptive one.32) It was the fire that, in Vincent's typological interpretation, served as the medium for God's Voice to speak a second and definitive time. By contrast, Defoe highlights his unprovidential ending by twice concluding with the mocking stanza. Through this maneuver Defoe suggests that the multiple voices which inform the mockery replace the single voice of God's judgement which conventionally would have marked the conclusion.
The absence of the Great Fire thus has wider implications for Defoe's narrative because it leaves room for new voices to make themselves heard. In terms used by John Cruickshank to characterize the linguistic trauma of a later catastrophe,33) inexpressibility threatens to overwhelm the victims of the disaster and those who report their plight. But, in Defoe's representation of catastrophe, the disaster becomes, in [→page 280] retrospect, an opportunity to extend the range of both the narrator's voice and the voices of those whose fate he describes.
Bar−Ilan University
Ramat−Gan, Israel
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