Technological and Narrative Inventions in Defoe’s The Consolidator

초록

This article examines the literary significance of the “strange” inventions in Daniel Defoe’s fantastic lunar narrative The Consolidator. While critics often comment that these fantastic devices help Defoe’s narrator better understand the problems plaguing the English government in their discussion of the text as a political allegory, they rarely discuss exactly how these machines grant their users such enhanced insight, which I examine by relating them to Defoe’s literary techne. In addition to using the strange technological inventions to illustrate his mild parody of the “strange, therefore true” trope, Defoe employs them as direct analogies for his narrative inventions. I argue it is through such analogies that Defoe expresses his concern regarding the extensive use of imagination, resulting in his adherence to the standards of empiricism in his later imaginary narratives. His imaginative creation of the strange devices to contemplate the most effective way to delivering the “truth” about England not only situates his lunar narrative within the tradition of using the sense of possibility that accompanied sea travel to engage in imaginative speculations, but also helps link The Consolidator to his much better-known work Robinson Crusoe and thereby demonstrates its valuable contribution to Defoe’s literary canon.

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