THE PROSTHETIC

IMAGINATION
A History of the Novel as Artificial Life

PETER BOXALL
University of Sussex
 Economies of Scale from Aphra Behn to Sarah Scott 85
that captures the odd, double legacy of utopian thought, as it shapes the
eighteenth-century fictional imagination. In the gaze that is imagined here
between Oroonoko and Imoinda, one can detect an echo of the gaze shared
between Thomas More and Raphael in More’s Utopia or between
Cavendish and the Empress in The Blazing World. As Oroonoko looks at
Imoinda, as Thomas More looks at Raphael, it is clear that in some sense
they each look into a mirror. More invents the fictional structure of Utopia
to generate a picture of England, and of himself, fully revealed and stripped
of artificial faculties. It is this clear seeing, this snapshot of an inch of the
world which one can ‘see at once, and every moment see’, that is at the
heart of all utopian desire. The gaze shared between Oroonoko and
Imoinda partakes of this utopian nakedness; but, for Behn and for More,
the gaze not only bounces back, not only confirms the boundedness of self-
presence, but also reaches into a distance, to the darkness of Raphael’s
Utopia (a no-place, after all, that can scarcely come to thought), or to the
‘inconceivable wonders’ of the ‘new and strange’ world that Behn finds in
Surinam. In More’s Utopia, it is fiction, the first stirrings of a particular
mode of novel imagining, that enables him to articulate a distanced rela-
tion with self as it installs itself within Freud’s inch of nature, within the
very heartland of the self and the self-same. It is this same fictional junction
that lies at the heart of Cervantes’ great work, as the emergence of a new
form of modernity sets reality at odds with itself. And it is in Behn’s novel
that this work of fiction, as a bridge that ties us to our extensions while
demonstrating the distance that lies at the very heart of our self-perception,
assumes the form that it will take across the novel form in the subsequent
century.

2.2 Invisible Ink: Self-Fashioning and Self-Erasure

in Daniel Defoe
The writer who does the most to fashion this form, to craft a narrative
mode that can give coherent expression to an eighteenth-century European
self at a colonial distance from itself, is Daniel Defoe. Particularly in his
two greatest works – Moll Flanders and, pre-eminently, Robinson Crusoe –
Defoe invents an expressive mode which contains the tension between
distance and immanence that vibrates in Behn’s novel and transforms the
difficult sense that the colonial body is put at a remove from its own central
processing system into the very basis of an emerging model both of
narration and of selfhood.
86 The Prosthetic Imagination
It is in Robinson Crusoe, most strikingly, that Defoe gives us a picture of
the far-flung body, the body cast to the very edge of the earth, and forced to
invent for itself an idea of the world, a new economy of scale, that might
sustain it. Defoe’s novel, like Behn’s Oroonoko, is above all an expansive,
experimental encounter with that which lies beyond the horizon of the
known. As Behn’s tale is engrossed in the ‘strange and new’, Robinson’s
wanderlust compels him repeatedly to defy his father’s advice to devote
himself to the familiar – to the ‘middle station of Life’20 – and to fling
himself into the unknown, into such alien climes that he is unable to tell,
he himself remarks, whether what he encounters is ‘usual or strange’
(p. 30). He travels to Africa and then to Brazil and then finally on an
expedition to Guinea he and his fellow seamen are overtaken by two storms,
the first a ‘violent Tournado or Hurricane’ that ‘took us quite out of our
Knowledge’, and the second a storm which blew with such ‘impetuosity’
that it ‘drove us out of the very Way of all human Commerce’ (p. 42). The
storms wreck the ship just off the coast of an unknown stretch of land, and
Crusoe, alone of all the crew, manages to swim to shore, whereupon he finds
himself cast away on a remote island in the middle of the Atlantic.
The narrative that follows, as is almost universally known, tells the story
of Robinson’s long inhabitation of his island, and of his arduous construc-
tion not only of a human dwelling place in the midst of such inhuman
alienation but also of a kind of rationale for his predicament, a philosophical
and aesthetic apparatus that might allow him to justify his existence in this
little inch of the world. On his arrival on the island, Defoe represents
Crusoe, with the most breathtaking immediacy, as a naked being, as
a shivering animal, as Freud’s ‘helpless suckling’ ‘reduced’, as Crusoe puts
it, ‘to a meer State of Nature’ (p. 118).21 Crusoe is an unwilling and unhappy
version of Rousseau’s ‘natural state of Man’, man as Rousseau imagines he
‘must have come from the hands of Nature’, stripped of his ‘artificial
faculties’ (p. 52). Comparing the ‘Civilized man’ with the ‘savage man’,
Rousseau contends that the ‘savage man’s body being the only implement he
knows, he employs it for various uses of which through lack of training, our
bodies are incapable’. ‘Our industry’, Rousseau writes, ‘deprives us of the
strength and agility that necessity obliges [the savage man] to acquire’ (p. 53).
As Robinson first arrives on his island, he appears as precisely this weakly
civilised man, returned to a state of nature for which he is entirely unfitted.
He is delivered onto the island as a newborn, lacking in the tools with which
to extend himself into the world or to control and master his environment.
His initial response to this predicament is a kind of violent despair – ‘I ran
about the Shore’, he says, ‘wringing my Hands and beating my Head and
 Economies of Scale from Aphra Behn to Sarah Scott 87
Face, exclaiming at my Misery, and crying out, I was undone, undone’
(p. 69). Robinson spends this interval in a kind of unmeaning madness; but
he soon comes to himself and recognises that his task, out here in blank and
unmade space, is to craft a world for himself, to remake those artificial
faculties which the wreck has stripped from him, and thus to transform the
worldless death that he sees before him into a new lifeworld – to ‘deliver my
self from this Death of a Life’ (p. 199).
The first form that this world building takes is the quite literal process by
which Robinson fashions the shapes and forms of human life from the
barren wilderness before him – a process which the narrative follows with
the most extreme exactitude. The state of nature to which Robinson is
condemned is one in which he is deprived of tools, of ‘implements’ –
a deprivation which feels, to Robinson, like the loss of the body itself, so
entwined is the body of ‘Civilized man’ with its technical and mechanical
extensions. He is ‘without tools’, Crusoe thinks, ‘or, as I may say, without
Hands’ (p. 125), and so the endless time that Crusoe has on his island is
devoted to the fashioning of tools, and with those tools, of a dwelling place
which might accord to a human measure, which might comprise
a lifeworld in which he is equipped once more with a human hand.
Robinson salvages what tools and raw materials he can from the ship and
sets himself to the ‘inexpressible labour’ of making tables and chairs out of
intractable wood, building tents from salvaged canvas, stitching clothes
from the skins of slain animals and hewing caves out of the very rock of the
island. The making of a shovel out of iron wood – ‘I work’d it effectually by
little and little into the Form of a shovel or Spade, the Handle exactly
shap’d like ours in England’ (p. 73) – feels like a miracle of transformation,
the summoning of what Crusoe calls ‘humane shapes’ (p. 98) from the
most stubbornly inanimate material. And the making of a dwelling place,
a ‘Cave spacious enough to accommodate me as a Warehouse or Magazin,
a Kitchen, a Dining-room, and a Cellar’ (p. 74) – the wresting of the
familiar from the strange, the homely from the unhomely – is described in
such a way that one can feel the blisters forming on one’s own hands as one
reads. ‘I spent eighteen days entirely in widening and deepening my Cave’,
Robinson records, and the narrative brings us right up against the brute
reality of this undertaking, that of a naked being, alone in borderless empty
space, hammering and digging and shaping the featureless environment,
until it starts to yield to a human will, to become a shaped extension of the
human need to dwell.
Robinson’s first task, then, is to fashion a world out of worldlessness, to
convert non-being into being, in an effort of world forming that has become
88 The Prosthetic Imagination
a foundation not only of our understanding of the cultural role and the
formal qualities of the novel as a mode but also of the very terms in which
human relates to the world in European modernity. And the way that we
conceive the texture of the novel imagination in the early eighteenth century,
and Defoe’s contribution to its development, rests on how we read this act of
enworlding, how we read the process by which Crusoe, alone on his silent
island in his raggedy clothes, goes about bringing human idea into contact
with nonhuman thing. One of the striking elements of this process is the
sheer fortitude and self-possession which Crusoe exhibits, after his initial
bout of wild panic, his capacity, at this extreme of alienation and estrange-
ment, to maintain intellectual contact with the culture and the forms from
which he has been castaway and slowly, methodically, to apply those forms
to the empty place in which he finds himself. As Karl Marx writes in Capital,
when ‘our friend Robinson Crusoe’ is cast away, he does not become animal
or ‘savage’, but rather, ‘having saved a watch, ledger, ink and pen from the
shipwreck, he soon begins, like a good Englishman, to keep a set of books.’22
In carefully measuring out time and space in accordance both with an
emerging capitalist theory of value and with the laws of God – in becoming
a good labourer, and in time (with the arrival of Friday and other ‘subjects’
on the island) a good agriculturist, landowner and employer – Robinson
painstakingly fashions the ‘formulas’, Marx writes, ‘which bear the unmis-
takable stamp of belonging to a social formation in which the process of
production has mastery over man’ (p. 175). Robinson salvages a Bible from
the wreck, alongside the tools with which he fashions his dwelling, and the
paper and ink with which he keeps his journal; these tools together allow him
to convert his distant space of exile into the nursery of what Marx calls
‘Eighteenth-century man’. In the midst of his spontaneous conversion to
devout Christianity, Robinson sits before the blank text of land and sea and
finds, in this very script of nature, the foundation of a new epistemology,
grounded in divine law. ‘I went but a little way’, he says,
and sat down upon the Ground, looking out upon the Sea, which was just
before me, and very calm and smooth: As I sat here, some such thoughts as
these occurred to me.
What is this Earth and Sea of which I have seen so much, whence is it
produc’d and what am I, and all the other Creatures, wild and tame,
Humane and brutal, whence are we?
Sure we are all made by some secret Power, who form’d the Earth and
Sea, the Air and Sky; and who is that?
Then it follow’d most naturally, it is God that has made it all . . . and if
nothing happens without his Knowledge, he knows that I am here, and am
 Economies of Scale from Aphra Behn to Sarah Scott 89
in this dreadful Condition; and if nothing happens without his
Appointment, he has appointed all this to befal me. (p. 92)
This is a key moment in the novel, the moment at which Robinson
discovers a narrative economy which is shaped to the alien world to
which he finds himself exiled – the moment at which he discovers an
accord between the ‘Earth and Sea of which I have seen so much’ and an
‘idea of the world’ which might animate both. It is the moment at which
Robinson divines the ‘secret power’ which allows him to rationalise his
own presence in this distant inch of the world as a natural feature of the
landscape, and to give a justification of the colonial forces that have
brought him to his island and which, Marx writes, ‘appear to the political
economists’ bourgeois consciousness to be as much a self-evident and
nature-imposed necessity as productive labour itself’ (p. 175).
The most influential twentieth-century accounts of Defoe’s novel, and
of its role in the historical development of the eighteenth-century novel,
have tended to turn around this sense that the novel form, as shaped by
Defoe, offers a new means of narrating, and thus naturalising, an emerging
social identity or condition. Ian Watt and Michael McKeon, for example,
in somewhat different ways, provide the critical terms in which Crusoe is
seen as a testing ground for the fashioning of modern subjecthood out of
contact with colonial distance. ‘It is appropriate,’ Watt writes, ‘that the
tradition of the novel should begin with a work that annihilated the
relationships of the traditional social order, and thus drew attention to
the opportunity and the need of building up a new network of personal
relations on a new and conscious pattern’.23 McKeon builds on this
conception of Defoe as the architect of a new form which is ‘fully recon-
ciled to the naturalness and morality of the pursuit of self-interest’.24
Defoe’s narrative gives the ‘history of the individual’, McKeon writes, ‘so
intimate and introspective a form that it comes close to looking more like
self-creation’ (p. 337). Crusoe’s ‘suspended time on the island’, he goes on,
‘has provided the laboratory conditions for acquiring, slowly and with
relative impunity, the psychological equipment needed for possessive
individualism’ (p. 334). Crusoe, by this account, draws on his solitude to
build an internal picture of utopian self-possession, upon which he then
proceeds to erect the edifice of a larger model of capitalist relations –
a process by which what McKeon calls the ‘subjective roots of objective
and empirical reality’ are, for the first time, ‘embedded in narrative sub-
stance’ (p. 337). The growth of a mini nation state on the island in the later
stages of the novel accordingly constitutes, for McKeon, the coming
90 The Prosthetic Imagination
together of the internal world that Crusoe builds in his imagination as he
gazes out to sea with the new terms of colonial sovereignty – the ‘tangible
externalization of Robinson’s now securely internalized utopia’ (p. 335).
In Robinson Crusoe, and later in Moll Flanders, it is hard to avoid this
sense that Defoe is laboriously fashioning a picture of the world that might
accommodate the demands of an emergent model of the self. But if this is
a key moment in the history of the novel, it is central to everything I will be
arguing in this book that such a formal conjunction between interiority
and the exterior manifestations of self and world is shadowed by an
opposite disjunction, and what is more that it is one of the central achieve-
ments of the novel to preserve this disjunction, to enshrine it in the formal
mechanics of the novel itself, and to make it part of the expressive apparatus
of prose fiction as it sets the terms of our own self-congress. Defoe’s image of
the solitary Robinson diligently whittling his wood and digging his cave,
fashioning his dwelling out of earth, not only summons the terms in which
we extend ourselves into body and world; it preserves also, as a kind of
palaeontological record of a difficult becoming, the junction between being
and its prosthetic attachments, between McKeon’s internal and external
forms – the connective element that such naturalised self-fashioning has
necessarily sought to deny or repress. It has preserved this junction, this
twist, not only as a side effect of the mechanical construction of being, a kind
of flipside of the sliding into being of the self, but also as a necessary
proximity to the motor of such becoming, as a formal narrative display of
the secret narrative mechanics of material self-fashioning.
One can see this disjunction at work in Defoe’s fiction most clearly at
those recurrent moments when his characters are cast into those forms of
non-being that are shadowed forth in Cavendish’s Blazing World, the
suspension of selfhood that attends the striving for the adoption of a new
prosthetic self – those moments, in Hume’s terms, when the person who
‘enters most intimately’ into himself finds that there is ‘nothing simple and
continu’d’ upon which such a perception of self might rest.25 Indeed, the
critical moment I have just discussed at which Robinson is granted a clear
sight of his island world – when he is able, for the first time, to situate the
‘Earth and Sea of which I have seen so much’ within a secure divine
economy – is won from precisely such an experience of non-being. The
clearing of Crusoe’s vision and the awakening of his ‘conscience’ to the
word of God come about, in a scene that is closely reprised in Moll
Flanders, in the wake of a near fatal bout of fever, during which ‘my spirits
began to sink under the Burthen of a strong Distemper’, and ‘a leisurely
View of the Miseries of Death came to place itself before me’ (p. 90). In the
 Economies of Scale from Aphra Behn to Sarah Scott 91
midst of his fever, Robinson enters into the space of his own death, just as
Moll imagines herself to have already died when she is sentenced to death
in Newgate (the judges ‘Pronounc’d the Sentence of Death upon me’, Moll
says, ‘a Sentence that was to me like Death itself’).26 Robinson cries out
‘Lord! What a miserable Creature am I? If I should be sick I shall certainly
die’ (p. 90); Moll says, in a near quotation of Robinson’s despair, ‘Lord!
What will become of me, I shall certainly die’ (p. 358). For both characters,
this brush with death renders them peculiarly numb, as Oroonoko
becomes a ‘thing’ that ‘knew not that it had being’ at the moment of his
transformative meeting with Imoinda. This death seems to Robinson to be
the end result of what he calls a ‘certain stupidity of soul’ that had ‘over-
whelm’d’ him during his seafaring and planting days (p. 88), just as Moll
finds that her living in sin, amongst the criminals of Newgate, causes her to
become insensate, thing-like. ‘Like the Waters in the Cavities, and Hollows
of Mountains’, Moll says, ‘which petrifies and turns into Stone whatever
they are suffer’d to drop upon, so the continual Conversing with such
a Crew of Hell-Hounds as I was, which had the same common Operation
upon me as upon other People, I degenerated into Stone’ (p. 354). Death
for both manifests this degeneracy, so Moll recognises, as she is sentenced
to death, that ‘I had no more Spirit left in me, I had no Tongue to speak, or
Eyes to look up either to God or to Man’ (p. 363).
In obedience to a peculiar kind of logic that recurs throughout the
history of the novel as I will account for it here, coming to consciousness
for Moll and for Crusoe involves this brush with being as insensate
thinghood. Such an encounter is presented here, as so often in the novel
(think, for example, of Miles Coverdale’s later entry into personhood
through death at the heart of The Blithedale Romance) as the prelude to a
rebirth, as the entry into a new kind of richly animated being. As Coverdale
says of his ‘fit of illness’, that it caused him to ‘shed the very substance upon
my bones’ and, ‘after shivering a little while in my skeleton’ to be ‘clothed
anew, and much more satisfactorily than in my previous suit’, dying grants
Moll and Crusoe a new body.27 With the intuition of death, Moll says, she
‘began to think’, and through such thinking to remake herself. ‘He that is
restor’d to his Power of thinking’, she reflects, ‘is restor’d to himself’ (p.
358). With the return of thought comes the return of conscience and self-
consciousness. ‘Reflections I had made upon the horrid detestable Life
I had liv’d, began to return upon me’, she says, ‘and as these things return’d
my abhorrence of the place I was in, and of the way of living in it, return’d
also; in a word, I was perfectly chang’d, and become another Body’ (p. 357).
92 The Prosthetic Imagination
This return to life, this ‘flowing’ of thought ‘in upon my mind’, allows
Moll to turn from the criminality of the first half of the novel to the
repentance of the second, to metamorphose from stone to flesh, just as
Robinson’s ‘View of the Miseries of death’ allows him to form his new
picture of the earth and sea before him, his new idea of the world. Once she
has been granted this ‘view into the other Side of time’, Moll thinks, ‘the
things of life, as I believe they do with every Body at such a time, began to
look with a different Aspect, and quite another Shape, than they did before’
(p. 364). Robinson finds, in much the same way, that his encounter with
non-being allows him to rationalise the world before him. ‘I gain’d
a different knowledge from what I had before’, he says, ‘I entertain’d
different Notions of Things’ (p. 128). But if numb stupefaction is the
prelude to the adoption of a new and animated self, of ‘another Body’, then
it is central to the workings of the prosthetic imagination that the new body
that is forged, in the sun and wind of the island, or in the dungeons of
Newgate (or later in Hawthorne’s mock Arcadia), bears the marks of its
becoming and carries the trace of its origin in the experience of becoming
stone, of suffering a leaden ‘stupidity of soul’. The stoniness of Moll’s
stupefied self is not simply overcome in her newfound interiority, the
becoming of her new consciousness; rather, it remains part of the new
artificial lifeworld that Defoe seeks to create in Moll Flanders, and in
Robinson Crusoe. The stoniness of the exterior, of the nonhuman, is
wound deeply, as Jean-Luc Nancy has argued, into the inside of the self,
so the opposition inside/outside, self/world, flesh/stone will not remain
stable or mutually exclusive. ‘A stone’, Nancy writes, is ‘the exteriority of
singularity’, but even as stone belongs to the outside, to the world of non-
living, nonhuman things, it nevertheless belongs to the innermost recesses
of being. ‘I would not be human’, Nancy goes on, ‘if I did not have this
exteriority “in me,” in the form of the quasi-minerality of bone’.28 The
wakening of consciousness in Defoe is conceptualised as a transformation
of numb, rigid stone into flowing, moving, animated self-hood; but even as
his novels narrate and produce this transformation, the materiality of
being, its resistance to the transformative power of consciousness, con-
tinues to assert itself and in so doing to demonstrate the stubborn persis-
tence of the disjuncture between consciousness and its prosthetic
manifestations.
Robinson Crusoe, and Defoe’s fiction more generally, turns around this
disjunction, and the self-conscious invention of narrative forms that it
enacts is an attempt both to map this fault line and to overcome it. The
chief difficulty that Robinson faces, at least as threatening to his survival as
 Economies of Scale from Aphra Behn to Sarah Scott 93
wild beasts or lack of food and shelter, is his sense that ideational forms are
not aligned with his being on the island, that thought and ideas are
distanced from the boundless, shapeless time and space of his solitary
life. The materiality of existence, the lifeworld that Robinson painfully
fashions out of iron wood, resists transformation into animated being, as
Moll’s stoniness resists transformation by and into the ‘thought’ through
which Moll is restored to herself. Words, on Robinson’s arrival on his
island, have no sound, no weight, no purchase, just as things have no words
and resist the quickening touch of language. In the midst of his transfor-
mative fever, as Robinson reads from the Bible, he suffers the full effect of
this sundering between name and substance, as an effect of his ‘stupidity of
soul’. His eye chances to fall upon the line ‘Call on me in the Day of Trouble,
and I will deliver, and thou shalt glorify me.’ The words, Robinson suggests,
‘were very apt to my case’, but in the midst of his deadened confusion,
Robinson as character cannot grasp this aptness, and the words do not
make a sufficient ‘impression upon my Thoughts’, ‘for’, he says, ‘as for
being deliver’d, the Word had no Sound, As I may say, to me’ (p. 94). The
word of God cannot sound in Robinson’s distant exile; when voices do
sound in the island air, they are pure noise, simple material vibrations that
contain no spirit, no consciousness. Robinson catches a parrot and
‘quickly’, he says, he ‘learn’d him how to know his own Name, and at
last to speak it out pretty loud POLL, which was the first word ever spoken
by any mouth but my own’ (p. 119) (one might ask, as an aside: does
a parrot have a ‘mouth’?). The parrot keeps him company and at one point
terrifies him by waking him from a deep sleep, ‘calling me by Name several
times, Robin, Robin, Robin Crusoe, poor Robin Crusoe, where are you Robin
Crusoe? Where are you? Where have you been?’ (p. 142). But, of course, the
parrot is not really speaking to Robin, as Descartes assures us that parrots
do not speak to us (‘parrots can utter words as we do’, Descartes writes,
‘and yet cannot speak like us, that is, by showing that they are thinking
what they are saying’).29 Crusoe’s parrot, Derrida writes, is a ‘sort of living
mechanism that he has produced, that he assembled himself, like a quasi-
technical or prosthetic apparatus, by training the parrot to speak mechani-
cally so as to send his words and his name back to him’.30 The parrot is no
more talking to Robinson when he asks where he is than the volleyball
named Wilson – the prosthetic friend of Robert Zemeckis’s castaway – can
offer real companionship to its owner Chuck Noland in the 2000 film
Castaway.
The word of God, then, remains distant from the prosthetic voices that
do sound on the island. The voice of the parrot demonstrates, in Descartes’
94 The Prosthetic Imagination
terms, ‘no mental powers whatever’ and is the effect merely of a ‘nature
which acts in them’ (p. 48). This gap, between word and thing, between
human and nature, between human and animal, between what Derrida
calls the ‘beast and the sovereign’, is the problem to be solved, and the story
of the novel is the story of Crusoe’s attempt to overcome the resistance that
the unregulated ‘natural forms’ that he encounters on the island offer to the
transformative power of the Word. The shovel that Robinson shapes out of
wood cannot quite work as a shovel should, cannot quite become a shovel,
as, for Aristotle, ‘the hand of a dead man’ will ‘be a hand in name only’.31
The wooden shovel, Robinson says, in a striking formulation, ‘did my
Work in but a wooden manner’, as the material of which it is made does
not quite match its use – its ‘essence’, in Aristotle’s terms, does not match
its ‘matter’. The human shapes that Crusoe makes on the island – like the
‘odd misshapen, ugly things’ that he produces when he tries to make pots
out of island clay – repeatedly fail to absorb the island material into their
new human economies. And when Robinson encounters human signs on
the island – most famously in the ‘Print of a Man’s naked Foot on the
Shore’, what Derrida calls the ‘trace of a man’32 – he cannot read them,
cannot render them into human sense. The footprint – ‘exactly the very
Print of a Foot, Toes, Heel, and every Part of a Foot’ (p. 154) – is no more
readable to Crusoe than the body parts that he finds strewn over the shore,
and that signal to Crusoe the dread presence of cannibals on his sovereign
land. It is ‘impossible to express the Horror of my mind’, Crusoe writes, ‘at
seeing the Shore spread with Skulls, Hands, Feet, and other bones of
Humane bodies’ (pp. 164–65); ‘I saw three skulls, five Hands, and the
Bones of three or four Legs and Feet, and the abundance of other Parts of
the Bodies’ (p. 207). These amputated, disfigured human shapes are hands,
feet, legs only to the extent that the misshapen ugly things that Crusoe
makes are pots, and they cannot match with the idea that Crusoe has of
them.
Crusoe’s task is to bring these oppositions into harmony, to compose
a picture of the world, an economy of scale, that will impose a set of
hierarchies on the things, the animals and the people that inhabit his
emerging colony. And if this is so, then, of course, it is the self-reflexive
act of writing, the keeping of a journal, that allows Crusoe to fashion his
new world, and that allows Defoe to enact the process by which fiction
oversees the relation between mind and prosthetic attachment. One of the
oddest, most chaotic elements of Defoe’s odd and chaotic novel is that it
contains, within the first person retrospective account of the adventure that
bookends the novel, a central portion of the narrative that is recorded in
 Economies of Scale from Aphra Behn to Sarah Scott 95
the form of the journal that Crusoe keeps while his is on the island. In
a demonstration of what Denise Schaeffer calls the ‘utility of ink’ in
eighteenth-century culture, the narrator gives us a supremely detailed
description of the process by which Crusoe salvages his pen, ink and
paper from the wreck to provide the technological means by which he
materialises his writing self.33 ‘Among the many things I brought out of the
ship’, he writes, ‘I got several things of less value, but not [at] all less useful
to me . . . as in particular, Pen, Ink, and paper’ (p. 65). It is this material, he
says, that allows him to apply ‘reason’ to his situation, to ‘master his
despondency’, but also to regulate his environment, and himself. We are
given this picture of the amassing of the necessary materials as a precursor
to the moment when we are handed over from the first person narrator to
the voice of the journal itself. Having ‘made me a Table and a Chair, and all
about me as handsome as I could’, Crusoe says, ‘I began to keep my
Journal, of which I shall here give you the Copy (tho’ in it will be told
all these Particulars over again)’ (pp. 68, 69). And indeed, we turn the page
to find a new section, entitled ‘The JOURNAL’ (p. 70), which gives us an
account (‘November 1. I set up my tent under a rock’), for the second time,
of all the laborious details we have just been given by the first person
narrator. There can be no reader who has not found this shift in perspective
bewildering, and also somewhat infuriating in its repetitiveness; but the
initial effect, even in its odd exorbitancy, is to embed the tale we have just
read, to deepen its realism, to effect that marriage of word and thing that is
Crusoe’s chief task, more strenuous and demanding than the whittling of
a shovel out of wood. This writing, the turn to the journal suggests, is not
being produced from some European perspective, some kind of recollec-
tion in tranquillity from a safely rescaled colonial centre. Rather it is being
made now, in the heat and the sun and the wind – the deranged scale – of
the distant island, with the very effort of the writing, the difficulty of the
refractory materials, being impressed on the page, as the print of a foot is
impressed on the sand.
This is what we might think; but, of course, what is even odder about this
adoption of the journal voice is that it is radically unstable, so rather than
embedding the story in McKeon’s ‘narrative substance’, it undermines it at
every turn. Rather than imposing a hierarchy, an economy of scale, it
oversees an astonishing failure of regulation, what Heather Keenleyside
calls ‘the breakdown, or the impossibility, of Lockean politics’.34 ‘In it’,
Crusoe says, ‘will be told all these Particulars over again’, but in repeating the
particulars he changes the details, so that rather than being given an aug-
mented, enhanced sense of the reality of Crusoe’s time on the island, we are
96 The Prosthetic Imagination
cast into doubt concerning the reliability of these particulars. Take, for
example, Crusoe’s description of his arrival on the island (part of which
I have already quoted in this discussion) – the moment when he suffers one
of those crucial evacuations of his human self. We are given three distinct
accounts of this moment, none of which quite matches the others. The first
comes in the voice of the first person narrator, as he tells us of his safe arrival
on the island. ‘I believe it is impossible to express to the Life’, he says, ‘what
the Exstasies and Transports of the Soul are, when it is so sav’d, as I may say,
out of the very Grave’ (p. 46). He is in an indescribable ecstasy in this passage
between life and death, so, he says, his actions are not interpretable or
narratable. ‘I walk’d about on the Shore, lifting up my Hands, and my
whole Being, wrapt up in Contemplation of my Deliverance, making
a Thousand Gestures and Motions which I cannot describe’ (p. 46).
The second account of this moment then comes as we are preparing to be
handed over from the first person narrator to the voice of the journal itself.
‘And now it was’, the narrator says some way into his tale, having laboriously
prepared his table, chair, pen and ink, ‘when I began to keep a Journal of
every Day’s Employment’. His journal will not cover the first period on the
island, he says, because at that time ‘I was in too much Hurry’ and ‘too much
Discomposure of Mind’. ‘For Example’, he goes on, ‘I must have said thus’:
Sept. the 30th. After I got to shore and had escap’d drowning, instead of
being thankful to God for my Deliverance, having first vomited with the
great Quantity of salt water which was gotten into my Stomach, and
recovering my self a little, I ran about the shore, wringing my Hands and
beating my Head and Face, exclaiming at my Misery, and crying out, I was
undone, undone. (p. 69)
This is bizarre enough: he is telling us here what he would have written,
had he not been so busy vomiting and running about (and, presumably, if
he had the materials that cost him so much effort to procure already to
hand). But it is doubly bizarre that the imagined account he gives us here –
that he did not write but would have if he had more composure of mind –
is at variance with the account that he has already given from the first
person perspective. In the first version, he was ‘wrapt up in contemplation
of his deliverance’; in the second, he did not have time for such contempla-
tion, because he was occupied with vomiting and beating himself around
the face and head. But it gets still more bizarre when we turn the page to
find ourselves delivered into the time and space of the island and treated to
the very account that Crusoe has just said that he would not give us, the
account that he did not write and, by all realist logic, would not have had
 Economies of Scale from Aphra Behn to Sarah Scott 97
the means to write: ‘September 30, 1659. I poor miserable Robinson
Crusoe, being shipwreck’d, during a dreadful storm, in the offing came
on shore this dismal unfortunate island. . . . All the rest of that day I spent
in afflicting myself at the Dismal circumstances I was brought to’ (p. 70).
These repetitions and variations have an extraordinary effect on the
mimetic quality of Defoe’s prose. Of course, to some degree, they are the
result of Defoe’s carelessness, mere examples of the many famous errors
and contradictions that run throughout the text.35 But if this is the case, it is
also true that they are symptomatic of the means by which fiction here
works at the ground between being and extension, the way that the
vaporous substance of fiction itself serves as the material that grants
Crusoe embodiment, that allows mind to animate material while preser-
ving also the resistance of that material to animation. Defoe’s novel is
a remarkable record of the capacity of fiction to allow us, in Heidegger’s
formulation, to build, dwell and think, even in the most hostile, most
inhuman of environments.36 It is its irregularity, its tendency to combine
the most material of descriptions with a fictional waywardness, that
reminds us, at every stage, that there is no real referent to this story, that
the journal is not being written, after all, in island ink and is not, after all,
the place where this account is actually stored or materialised; this is not
a failure of its realism, but a remarkable working through, on the fly, of the
way that novel realism, the fictional image, occupies a referential space
somewhere between mind and material, pitched in some vanishing ground
between mimesis and prosthesis. And what is most remarkable of all about
the way that Robinson Crusoe preserves this record is that the journal voice –
the encounter with the world-making power of writing in its volatile,
inconsistent immediacy – is itself subject to a kind of vanishing, itself
disappears over the course of the novel, as it has done its job, as it has
effected some kind of contact between disembodied and embodied voice,
between word and sound. As Crusoe’s time on the island lengthens, he
begins to fret that his supply of ink will run out. He ‘husbanded’ ink and
paper, he says, ‘to the utmost’, because, when the ink runs out, ‘I could not
make any Ink by any Means that I could devise’ (p. 65). As his supply runs
out, he waters down his ink, so that the words that he writes in the journal
become thinner and thinner. ‘My ink’, he writes, ‘had been gone some
time, all but a very little, which I eek’d out with Water a little and
a little, till it was so pale it scarce left any Appearance of black upon the
paper’ (p. 133). His words become paler and paler until, eventually, ‘having
no more Ink I was forc’d to leave it off ’ (p. 69). But what is so fascinating
about this disappearance, this casting of voice into wordlessness, is that it
98 The Prosthetic Imagination
does not simply consign the narrative to silence, but rather to a kind of
absence which is there at the ground of novel being. As his ink runs low, he
writes in his journal, he curtails the content of his account to stretch out his
supply. In the entry for September 30th (the anniversary of his arrival on
the island), he writes ‘A little after this my ink began to fail me, and so
I contented my self to use it more sparingly, and to write down only the
most remarkable Events of my life, without continuing a daily memoran-
dum of other Things’ (p. 104). The question naturally follows – what ink
are these words written in? And it is difficult to resist the thought that they
are written in the invisible ink of a new kind of novel form, a new kind of
first person, native to the novel imagination, grounded in the amalgam of
disappearance and material becoming that is the province of a novelistic
ontology. As the ink runs out, so the journal voice gradually falls away.
Crusoe leaves the journal form for pages at a time, before reminding
himself to ‘return to my journal’, increasingly halfheartedly, until finally
the journal is heard of no more, and we return to the voice with which we
began. But if the running out of ink frees the narrative voice, by some
peculiar novel logic, from the constraints of the journal, it is nevertheless
the case that the imagined ink remains the medium of self-fashioning here,
the medium in which the free-floating narrative voice meets with the
immediate scene of inscription. As the ink runs out, as we are released
into an island environment made of words that leave no mark on the paper,
we are granted access to a kind of junction between mind and matter, the
most intimate of places, where thought meets the material that clothes it,
where being is restored to itself. To read this novel is to look into the heart
of the writing event – to access the place where writing transforms bioma-
terial into quickened being – and to find there not a substance, or an origin,
but rather a kind of disappearing element, the elusive ground to being that
is made of its own non-being even as it contains the very possibility of
becoming.
It is the discovery of this disappearing element, this ground to life that
resists material form even as it is the basis for the materiality of being, that is
the most enduring legacy of Robinson Crusoe, and that makes it such
a significant moment in the history of the prosthetic imagination. It is
not, I think, that Defoe’s novel establishes the form in which an emerging
individualism might be securely expressed, nor is it the form in which
a new interiority might find itself aligned with the external conditions of
the world. Rather, the gift of the novel is that it works its way deep into the
region between mind and its extensions, the place where Robinson’s ‘soul’
meets with the forms that he fashions, the medium of what he beautifully
 Economies of Scale from Aphra Behn to Sarah Scott 99
calls the ‘secret Communication’ between the ‘embody’d’ and the ‘unem-
body’d’ (p. 176). It opens this region to thought, stains it with island ink,
but captures, as well, its specific resistance to material, its refusal to take on
form. Robinson Crusoe expels a colonial body on to a far shore and watches
as it is forced to make a dwelling for itself, as it is forced to convert
a meaningless set of materials into a human shape. In doing so, it offers
a picture of world making that has become one of the most enduring in the
history of the modern imagination. But even as it gives us this lesson in the
fashioning of a world, it preserves also, in its most intimate recesses, an
encounter with the elusive stuff of being, the connective tissue that holds us
to our prosthetic extensions, even as it withholds itself from thought and
from inscription.

2.3 A Continuation of the Brain: Unregulated Bodies

in Swift and Scott
It is in the utopian and anti-utopian novels that come in the wake of
Robinson Crusoe – in Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726), in Voltaire’s
Candide (1759), in Sarah Scott’s Millenium Hall (1762) – that the expansive
urge that runs through the eighteenth-century novel reaches its maximal
expression. It is here too that the utopian legacy to the eighteenth-century
imagination, and to the imaginative means by which mind fictionalises its
connection to prosthetic matter, is most apparent. If the eighteenth-
century European novel attempts to establish an economy of scale in
which a colonial body, at a remove from itself, might find a means of
regulating itself, a means of imagining a utopian environment in which the
body is at home in its world, then it is in these works that this attempt
might most clearly be seen.
Of course, while these novels are engaged in a dialogue with a utopian
tradition that runs from More to Bacon to Leibniz and Rousseau, the first
thing that one may note about this dialogue is a certain scepticism that
characterises it, a certain failure of the utopian principles that drive Utopia
and The Blazing World, and that are found too in Robinson Crusoe, in those
moments when Robinson and Friday briefly found an ideal community, in
which both are ‘perfectly and compleatly happy, if any such Thing as
compleat Happiness can be form’d in a sublunary state’ (p. 220). At the
heart of the utopian condition are the concept and the ideal of a regulated
body, and a regulated state which is modelled, as in Hobbes’ Leviathan,
upon the principles of that bodily regulation. Even if this modelling
encounters a certain kind of bodily excess – in Robinson Crusoe, as I have