The Right to Mobility in Adventure Fiction

Novel The Right to Mobility in Adventure Fiction MARGARET COHEN If we were to imagine the kind of novel Mr. Kreuznauer wished Daniel Defoe would have invented, it would be the bourgeois novel of manners. Gracing his son with a modest education and destining him for the law, Crusoe’s elderly father hoped Robinson would settle down in his native country “and raise his Fortune by Application and Industry, with a Life of Ease and Pleasure” (Defoe 4). Would Robinson Crusoe in such a scenario have courted the business and daughters of the local gentry in order to achieve the reward of “all kinds of Vertues” associated with “the middle Station of Life” by Crusoe’s father, viz.: “Peace . Plenty . Temperance, Moderation, Quietness, Health, Society, all agreeable Diversions and All desirable Pleasures” (5)? But Mr. Kreuznauer’s rebellious child is consumed by “rambling thoughts” that take the form of the impulse to go to sea. Rejecting the middle station, despite some ominous hints of misfortunes in the offing, Crusoe goes, in the words of his father, “abroad upon Adventures, to rise by Enterprise, and to make” himself “famous in Undertakings of a Nature out of the Common road” (5). In the second half of the twentieth century, there is an account of the novel launched by Ian Watt that has tried to domesticate Crusoe’s rambling disposition. From Watt’s The Rise of the Novel, critics have evaluated the hero’s accomplishment as establishing a new haven of “Peace, Plenty, Temperance, Moderation,” and so forth on an uninhabited island at the edge of the modern world. But Defoe’s pro- tagonist is so much more restless than this version of his history. To grasp Crusoe’s inveterate rambling, we have only to look at the novel’s close. As the story con- cludes, Crusoe summarizes in one paragraph how upon his rescue he returned to England to marry and have children, less than the space he has expended on any one of his stopgap inventions as a castaway, such as navigating a raft to safety or figuring out how to build a canoe. Then, citing his “Inclination to go Abroad,” Cru- soe takes off for further adventures overseas in the novel’s final paragraphs (219). For Mr. Kreuznauer and for Ian Watt, Crusoe’s urge to ramble is hard to explain. How to make sense of its ineluctable appeal, not just in Robinson Crusoe but in the eighteenth-century genre of the maritime picaresque that Defoe’s novel spawned? This eighteenth-century genre includes Defoe’s other maritime novels like The Life, Adventures and Piracies of the Famous Captain Singleton as well as novels by William Rufus Chetwood, Alain-René Lesage, Tobias Smollett, and the Abbé Prévost. One answer is offered by a Marxian lineage exemplified by Michael Nehrlich’s Ideol- ogy of Adventure. For this lineage, Crusoe’s roving disposition does justice to the risk-taking side of capitalism: the dangerous speculative adventures that pose a puzzle for the side of capitalism depending on rational activity. At the time Defoe wrote, as across the early modern era, one model for this speculation was overseas venture capitalism, and Defoe was more honest about its risks in casting a ship- wrecked mariner as its epitome than Vanguard or Fidelity Magellan at the end Novel: A Forum on Fiction 42:2 DOI 10.1215/00295132-2009-017 © 2009 by Novel, Inc. Published by Duke University Press Novel ME . coH N | AdvENTURE ficTION 291 of the twentieth century when they graced their prospectuses to investors with proud square riggers under full sail. From the perspective of Robinson Crusoe’s historical context, however, there is another value at stake in this roving disposition of Crusoe’s distinct from the eco- nomic advantages of the risk-taking side of capitalism (though certainly in traffic with it). This value was and remains a political right. Crusoe’s roving disposition inscribes the right to freedom of movement that was first understood in the early modern era as the freedom of the seas. The right to move freely across the world’s oceans and seas is not immediately intelligible as a kind of freedom if we think of the civic freedoms at issue in liberal and democratic political projects. Free mobility is an amoral right distinct from the republican right to participate in collective decisions as well as the private, liberal right to life, happiness, and the pursuit of profit. Both these rights are scaled to territorial formations and specifically the institution of citizenship in the modern nation. Such nationally scaled notions of citizens’ rights have figured prominently in literary histories about the novel’s role in forging cultural modernity, where different variants of the novel of manners take center stage. Critics have analyzed in detail how the domestic novel, the sentimental novel, and the bildungsroman are deeply invested in the relation of republican and liberal rights, the two sides to the liberal-democratic ideologies of citizenship that take shape in the Enlight- enment. The domestic novel and the novel of education seek balance and com- promise between the negative right to life, liberty, property, and happiness and the positive, republican right to participate in the workings of the collective. The sentimental novel, in contrast, pushes each value to the paroxysm of its expression in a situation of contradiction and reforges community among spectators in the wake of this tragedy. All these subgenres work with a collective scaled to the level of territory, and above all the territory of the nation. But the right to move freely across the world’s seas is nonetheless a positive political right: at the scale not of the nation but rather of the globe. The freedom of the seas is indeed the foundational right for any account of global modernity at the basis of modern international law. This right is first articulated coincident with the European exploration of what the early moderns called the terraqueous globe, starting at the turn of the sixteenth century. In The Nomos of the Earth, Carl Schmitt details how European nations’ competition and conflict for the vast wealth and power of the newly discovered lands and seas pushed nations to figure out some protocols for their management. Within this new world, there were two kinds of spaces, the “free land,” in the sense of land “free for appropriation by Europeans,” and “the newly discovered oceans, conceived by the French, Dutch and English to be a realm of freedom” as freedom of movement (94). Schmitt traces the growing primacy of England on the world’s oceans in the sixteenth century, along with the English attempts to claim large swaths of the oceans off its coasts, as for example in De Mare Clausum, the treatise of the English jurist John Selden. The view that came to be recognized across Europe in the early seven- teenth century was, however, seminally defined by the Dutch juristH ugo Grotius in De Mare Liberum: the sea is the property of either no one or everyone—a point of debate—and open to navigation by all vessels regardless of aim. Underpinning Published by Duke University Press Novel 292 novEL | summ ER 2009 the view of the seas as a zone of free transport was a distinction between what Schmitt calls the “firm land” and “free seas”; in other words, between the private rights on land to secured property and the private rights on the ocean that in some sense is against property. The right to freedom of the seas is the amoral right of any navigating vessel to unimpeded motion across the ocean’s surface (Schmitt 183). While perhaps superficially appearing to be a simple principle of mutual toler- ance, the freedom to navigate raised a host of problems in practice. These problems derived from the fact that the sea is an uneven space of what might be called different kinds of transport regimes. On the world’s oceans, a range of vessels came into contact: vessels of different nations and communities, traveling with military, scientific, and commercial projects; vessels that were state sponsored, mercantile, or outlaw. As Schmitt explains, freedom of the seas encompassed the nonpoliti- cal “freedom of merchant traders whose ships were essentially non-state vessels” (174). At the same time, “[I]n war, the freedom of the sea means that the entire surface of the world’s oceans remains free and open to any warring power as a theater of war, as well as of prize law” (177). European powers managed these tensions in the early modern period by divid- ing the globe into zones ruled by different kinds of law. Through a series of treaties, European nations agreed on what were called amity lines to divide the world into an Old World of “treaties, peace, and friendship,” which they demarcated from the New World (92). In the Old World, transport across the seas was respect- ful of these treaties as well. In the New World, public law ended, seas and coasts were wild, and “the struggle for land appropriation knew no bounds” (93). In Schmitt’s archaeology, the freedom of the seas was a transitional notion from an older form of law rooted in place to a modern notion of law where space is increasingly abstracted from place. Schmitt saw the process as culminating in “a spaceless, universalist, international law” (290). He was also interested in “the total rootlessness of modern technology,” suggesting England as historically its “opera- tional base” (Schmitt 178). Schmitt’s analysis takes a dialectical turn when he sug- gests that this freedom of movement culminates in the “industrial-technical existence” of the nineteenth century that destroyed “maritime existence” itself (178).

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