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COPYRIGHT 1995 Johns Hopkins University Press
Admiring the "Gentlemen's Houses" along the banks of the Thames from Richmond to London in his 1724-26 Tour thro' the Whole Island of Great Britain, Daniel Defoe admits that "many Descriptions have been accurately given" of their "separate, and distinct Beauties." He continues:
But I find none has spoken of what I call the distant Glory of all these Buildings: There is a Beauty in these Things at a distance, taking them en Passant, and in Perspective, which few People value, and fewer understand; and yet here they are more truly great, than in all their private Beauties whatsoever; Here they reflect Beauty and Magnificence upon the whole Country, and give a kind of Character to the Island of Great Britain in general. . . . Take them in a remote view, the fine Seats shine among the Trees as Jewels shine in a rich Coronet; in a near sight they are meer Pictures and Paintings; at a distance they are all Nature, near hand all Art; But both in the extreamest Beauty.(1)
Although this passage has often been noted by commentators on the Tour, little attention has been paid to the prominent role of its narrator, busily constructing and then interpreting the landscape he claims merely to see. The narrator, whom I will call Defoe, claims a unique vision, the capacity to see the cumulative and metonymic significance of what other writers have only catalogued piecemeal. The meaning of the scene, according to Defoe, is fully appreciated only when it is recognized that these houses are not the centerpieces of ancient estates, but rather "Gentlemen's meer Summer-Houses, or Citizen's Country-Houses; whither they retire from the hurries of Business, and from getting Money" (1:169). "All this Variety, this Beauty, this glorious Show of Wealth and Plenty" (1:169), rightly viewed, reveals the character of "the Island of Great Britain in general": joined together, the private artifices of landless citizens form the public, naturalized landscape of the nation.
Defoe's offer to the reader of what "none has spoken of," like his claim to detect in the landscape what "few People value, and fewer understand," is elaborated throughout the Tour. Rightly viewed - that is, as only he has viewed it - the nation provides the ideal literary subject, producing in "every subsequent Year . . . new Materials, and a Variety both profitable and delightful" (2:536). Beginning with his first preface, he repeatedly exploits the fact that a progressive portrait of Britain builds in the need for constant revision and enlargement:
No Description of Great Britain can be what we call a finished Account, as no Cloaths can be made to fit a growing Child; no Picture carry the Likeness of a living Face; the Size of one, and the Countenance of the other always altering with Time. . . .
Even while the Sheets are in the Press, new Beauties appear in several Places, and almost to every Part we are oblig'd to add Appendixes, and Supplemental Accounts of fine Houses, new Undertakings, Buildings, etc. (1:4)
In other words, this vision of the nation as an organic, temporally defined being creates a readership dependent upon an up-to-date image. The plan appears to be that in reading regularly revised editions of the Tour, the reader will reassert membership in a national community, while a uniform image of that community will be reinforced.
Despite Defoe's claim that he is sketching for English readers the hitherto-unknown character of Great Britain, historians of British nationalism who look to the eighteenth century at all have tended to locate the first signs of nationalist vision in the mid-century georgic poets, in disgruntled post-Augustan intellectuals, or in the later primitivists.(2) Yet the Tour is surely significant in light of Benedict Anderson's emphasis on the role of journalistic print culture in the rise of nationalistic discourse. Anderson argues that in exploiting a notion of a simultaneous present moment, shared by each reader with all others, serial publications create a "community in anonymity."(3) Such a community downplays the importance of existing social stratification and economic inequalities, focusing on the ostensibly egalitarian participation of every individual in the whole. At every social level, therefore, the individual is encouraged to confide in what John Lucas has called "an absolute coincidence of self- and national interest."(4) Ultimately, the national community is dependent upon a shared effect of the imaginations of individual subjects.
Readers of the Tour as a literary text have written convincingly of the work's imaginative nature. They have, however, tended to assume Defoe's nationalism as though it were unproblematic and unrelated to his efforts to construct a coherent and pleasurable text.(5) My opening quotation from the Tour, with its speaker's paradoxical claim to be the only one to see what is nevertheless self-evident and true, suggests rather that Defoe is not only self-conscious in his attempt to construct a national image, but also aware of a fragile boundary between that coherent image and the potential for multiple signification, if not for complete fragmentation, of his material. In other words, the Tour indicates that this constructed nation is as much a reflection of Defoe's need to impose some organizing principle upon the chaotic detail of his (and his readers') experience of Britain as it is a confident "Whig" departure from traditional ordering structures.(6)
My reading of A Tour thro' the Whole Island of Great Britain, then, to borrow the words of Homi K. Bhabha,
investigates the nation-space in the process of the articulation of elements: where meanings may be partial because they are in medias res; and history may be half-made because it is in the process of being made; and the image of cultural authority may be ambivalent because it is caught, uncertainly, in the act of "composing" its powerful image.(7)
Defoe's text inscribes a struggle between nationalism's requirement of formal coherence and what the writer is only too able to imagine either as disorder defying any ordering vision, or as all-consuming, self-destructive form.(8) This struggle was resolved by the Tours eighteenth-century readers, who ultimately, through the consumption of increasingly smoothed-over and guidebook-like editions, naturalized this image of the fragmented, ephemeral, and private as the coherent and timeless public glory of the British nation.
Defoe invokes at least four formal models for his portrait, no doubt as devices that will at once order his material and assist his reader in imagining and identifying with a coherent community. These governing images are the nation as aestheticized landscape, the nation as body, the nation as centred circle, and...
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