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 protagonist 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

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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 seventeenth 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

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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 suggests that this freedom of movement culminates in the “industrial-technical existence” of the nineteenth century that destroyed “maritime existence” itself (178). As Christopher Connery has observed in a reading of Schmitt at the turn of the twenty-first century, Schmitt never fully theorized the telos of this new form of existence. Connery underscores Schmitt’s prescience regarding a “current global- ist discourse,” at the “threshold of a wholly new conceptual framework, perhaps a postspatial one” (193). Connery published this article in 2001, and events of the past six years have only accelerated processes of post-spatialization, which is to say an abstraction of space from place. The rights to freedom of movement are, for example, at the center of current debates on information flow in the virtual world. How does the free access to information on Internet sites such as YouTube work with copyright? How does national censorship affect the freedom of information flow (a question famously raised when Google exported its search engine to China)? Questions of freedom of movement also take center stage regarding the rights of individuals—for example, in the case of migrants in the global workforce. The uses and abuses of freedom of movement are at the center of debates about the preservation of foundational liberal freedoms in shadowy wars against nonstate

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me . coh n | adventure fiction 293 organizations that are difficult to localize—for example, the Bush administration’s notion of a global war on terror—both for citizens of the United States and individuals held by the US outside US borders. Recent literary criticism has its own strand theorizing freedom of movement. Mobility has notably been a seminal value in poststructuralism, evinced most famously in the writings of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. In the context of noting the importance of maritime globalization in the genealogy of this right, it is worth underscoring that Deleuze and Guattari have their own debt to the early modern freedom of the seas. In their articulation of smooth and striated space in A Thousand Plateaus, they relate the notions of the smooth and the striated to the history of navigation and cartography in a section titled “The Maritime Model.” They write, for example, “[T]he sea is the smooth space par excellence, and yet was the first to encounter the demands of increasingly strict striation” as “a result of navigation on the open water” and as a “function of two astronomical and geographical gains: bearings . . . and the map” (479). In discussing the tensions between the smooth and the striated, Deleuze and Guattari somewhat obscurely point to the difficulty of navigating the world’s oceans before the technology to calculate lon- gitude at sea (which was only developed in the later eighteenth century) and refer the reader to the maritime historian of the early modern Atlantic, Pierre Chaunu, “when he speaks of the sea as an extended confrontation between the smooth and the striated during which the striated progressively took hold” (47). Their citation of Chaunu suggests the debt that Deleuze and Guattari owe to the beginnings of oceanic area studies in France. Chaunu helped found the discipline of Atlantic history with his work on the colonial Atlantic, which took shape in dialogue with the work of his Annales colleague Fernand Braudel on the Mediterranean basin as a unified region. One could, I think, read Thousand Plateaus as a continuation into the dematerialized world of late capitalism of both Braudel’s and Chaunu’s interest in the unity of a region defined by fluid practices of transport, circulation, and mobility. Understanding that freedom of movement is a positive, political right by shift- ing the geographical scale reveals a longue durée narrative subgenre bound up in its expression. This genre is adventure fiction. One subgenre of adventure fiction thematizing freedom of movement as the freedom of the seas is the eighteenth- century genre of the maritime picaresque that Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe helped launch. Other adventure subgenres of the modern novel also explore the content, complexities, and contradictions of freedom of movement, from picaresque novels of the seventeenth century like Don Quixote and Lazarillo de Tormes to postmodern cyber and science fiction. To introduce freedom of movement into the network of values negotiated by adventure fiction is to cast adventure fiction as a genre engaged with the cultural work of globalization. If adventure fiction has been devalued in the dominant paradigms for studying the novel, it may be because these paradigms emerged from critics’ interest in consolidating a “great tradition” that was a national literary tradition, whether it was Ferdinand Brunetière in France or the Leavises in the United Kingdom. Until the mid-1990s, the fundamental scale of analysis of much literary criticism of the novel was at the level of the nation, even when critics examined

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294 novel | summ er 2009 how the novel was shaped by international exchange. The recent literary critical taste for fictions imagining and securing the borders of the nation notwithstand- ing, the pendulum of taste has also swung the other way, and novels engaged with the global world order have received their critical due. Even in the nineteenth century, an era we think of as nationalistic, there was an interest in adventure novels addressing geopolitical mobility at the global scale. Thus, for example, George Sand called James Fenimore Cooper and Walter Scott the “the two great poets of the middle class.” When Sand ranked Cooper over Scott for showing “the superi- ority of the individual over the society of his time,” she was thinking of Cooper’s celebrated nineteenth-century sea novels even more than his frontier novels. In Sand’s words, she appreciated Cooper’s novels for capturing “the adventurous spirit of the men who sailed in search of new worlds . . . who stepped out over every reef in the universe; over snowfields as readily as volcanoes, everywhere conquerors of primitive life, of nature itself in its most formidable vastnesses” (Sand, cited in Dekker and McWilliams 265). How might it enrich a literary history of the modern novel to undertake an archaeology of adventure fiction from the vantage point of freedom of movement? One point of entry would be the important role given to spaces—or more properly chronotopes—of mobility in the adventure lineage, such as spaces of dangerous passages outside the domain of organized top-down control. These chronotopes of dangerous passage range from the open roads traveled by Lazarillo and Don Quixote or Moll Flanders to the high seas and coasts of the New World in the maritime picaresque. They include the dangerous mountain passes of the Alps found in the Gothic and the city streets of the nineteenth-century metropolis shad- owed by criminal, bohemian, and other underworld activity. These streets are first delineated in the mysteries of the nineteenth-century city inaugurated by Eugène Sue’s Les Mystères de Paris. They are subsequently transformed in detective fiction, as well as in surrealist narratives of flanerie, crossing zones of obscuring psychic haunting. Such chronotopes of dangerous passage would also include the imaginary spaces of science fiction, from Jules Verne’s underwater and underground odysseys in 20,000 Leagues under the Sea and Journey to the Center of the Earth to the shadowy Zone of Europe at the end of World War II in Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, haunted by struggles for rocket technologies and the breakup of the subjectivity of Slothrop, the American soldier who is Pynchon’s protagonist. The chronotopes of dangerous passage would include the mutation of science fiction into cyberfiction, characterized by the chronotope of the matrix where subject dissolves into spatial grid like the net of William Gibson’s Neuromancer; the sea of pain depicted in the science fiction novelSolaris by Stanislaw Lem partakes of this chronotope as well. As this chronotope of the matrix suggests, freedom of movement in adventure fiction is a question at once of space and character. An understanding of adventure fiction as engaged with freedom of movement could help make sense of the rambling dispositions of adventure protagonists, from picaros, pirates, and mariners to pickpockets, gamblers, social climbers, flaneurs, and cowboys. The character beyond the law is the consummate expression of such freedom of movement in the nineteenth-century novel, and one could in fact connect the dots of a maritime lin-

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me . coh n | adventure fiction 295 eage that leads from Crusoe’s roving disposition to the pirates of James Fenimore Cooper and Sue, and on to Balzac’s Vautrin and Dumas’s Count of Monte Cristo. In this archaeology of adventure fiction exploring freedom of movement, it is also important to understand shifts in the value of movement itself across global modernity and the impact of these shifts on mobility’s narrative inscription. In the maritime picaresque of the eighteenth century, for example, Crusoe’s freedom of movement reaches its full expression in what the early modern period called the world beyond the line. To return to Schmitt’s account, in the early modern era it was imperative for the Old World to maintain a comparatively peaceful, law-abiding zone distinct from the lawless zone of New World transactions. This zone of stability was established in treaties when European powers agreed on a longitudinal line to be drawn through the Atlantic, separating the Old World regulated by European treaties from a New World in which only the natural right of the stronger prevailed. The power politics of such separation are, Schmitt points out, at stake in Pascal’s dictum “A meridian decides the truth” (95). When Defoe sent his rambling protagonist off from his native land to prosecute his schemes for profit in the unregulated New World, he was participating in the adventure novel’s cultural work of defining and maintaining the separation between the values and practices on either side of this line. The contours of freedom of movement would shift when maritime adventure fiction was retooled into a major international genre of the nineteenth century. This transformation occurred after a hiatus in the maritime picaresque. After Smollett, the genre was not used until James Fenimore Cooper retooled it in the 1820s, launching it into a trans-Atlantic success. Cooper’s first maritime novel was The Pilot, published in 1823, detailing the exploits of John Paul Jones in the Ameri- can Revolution. Cooper’s second maritime novel, published in 1827, was named The Red Rover after its title character: a glamorous pirate of the Eastern seaboard in the colonial era. Both novels celebrate roving mariners who are the successors to Crusoe, though they reconfigure the impulse to roam for an era when the New World has been settled with its own republics and nations. In December 1823, one month before The Pilot’s publication, the Monroe Doctrine codified a decade of reflection on the role the United States should take vis-à-vis the European struggles to control the New World. In Schmitt’s account, the Monroe Doctrine articulated the end of the era of the New World as the world beyond the line. With the establishment of inde- pendent republics epitomized by the United States and occurring across the Amer- icas, the New World was transformed into the Western hemisphere, peopled by countries with their own interests. In the case of the United States, these interests included the maritime frontier. US nationalism in the first half of the nineteenth century was a maritime nationalism and overseas trade was viewed as America’s destiny. The mariners in Cooper’s maritime adventure fiction are accordingly patriots as well as pirates and privateers, devoted to both their “profession and their country,” in the words of an anonymous American periodical reviewer at the time the novel appeared (New York Mirror, in Dekker and McWilliiams 75). Cooper does not cordon off freedom of movement into a zone beyond the law or line but

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296 novel | summ er 2009 instead lays a claim to global freedom of movement as a right essential to the wel- fare of the United States. In mooring the roving disposition to patriotism, Cooper renewed the e ighteenth- century maritime picaresque for an era dominated by nationalism. His sea novels launched a renewal of sea fiction, which became one of the most successful mid-nineteenth-century subgenres in a trans-Atlantic republic of letters. The nineteenth-century maritime novel is one among a number of examples of how adventure subgenres are eminently translatable. An archaeology of adventure fiction from the vantage point of freedom of movement could help explain the roaming impulses of the genre itself—the fact that adventure fiction is a constitutively international or nonnational form. One final issue for understanding the significance of mobility in adventure fiction would be to compare the case of premodern adventure genres. There certainly is a lot of roaming in classical and medieval adventure narratives over roads, for- ests, and seas. But is this roaming in premodern genres about freedom of movement as a positive political value, or is it involved with testing the limits of the human to reaffirm its specificity in relation to the divine? Odysseus pulled back before the pillars of Hercules (the straits of Gibraltar) and did not venture out into the Atlantic to access the oceans of the globe. And the ultimate return to Ithaca and family rewarding Homer’s storm-tossed king would bore the rambling Crusoe, who ends his castaway narrative with the promise of a “farther account” of “some very surprising incidents in some new Adventures” (Defoe 220).

Works Cited

Connery, Christopher. “Ideologies of Land and Sea: Alfred Thayer Mahan, Carl Schmitt, and the Shaping of Global Myth Elements.” boundary 2 28.2 (Summer 2001): 173–202.

Defoe, Daniel. Robinson Crusoe. Ed. Michael Shinagel. New York: Norton, 1994.

New York Mirror (1824). “Review of James Fenimore Cooper’s The Pilot.” In James Fenimore Cooper: The Critical Heritage. Ed. George Dekker and John P. McWilliams. New York: Routledge, 1973. 74–75.

Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1987.

Sand, George. “Extract from ‘Fenimore Cooper.’ ” Autour de la Table. Paris: Michel Levy, 1856. In James Fenimore Cooper: The Critical Heritage. Ed. George Dekker and John P. McWilliams. New York: Routledge, 1973. 261–72.

Schmitt, Carl. The Nomos of the Earth. Trans. G. L. Ulman. New York: Telos, 2003.

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