10.24053/ REAL-2021-0002 V id S teVanoVić The Pleasures of Circulation: Vicissitudes of the Drive in Robinson Crusoe, Roderick Random, and the Adventures of Money I. From Robinson to Rousseau Now more than 300 years after its publication, Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe is still very likely one of the most popular books of adventure writing� If it holds true that adventure fiction is nowadays relegated to the realm of children and young readers (Bristow 30), then one reason for its ongoing popularity is certainly the fact that it already lent itself well to such an audience in the past� As early as 1762, a little more than four decades after the first publication of Robinson Crusoe in 1719, the text is featured prominently in Rousseau’s Émile, ou De l’éducation, where it is the only book that Rousseau recommends to his hypothetical ward� In focusing only on select aspects of the original volume, Rousseau anticipated what was to become a major trend in the editorial practice around the book� While there had certainly been a number of abridged versions before, these had mainly been led by commercial considerations, and although the text had certainly been read by children before, particularly in the popular chapbook versions, Rousseau was the first to assign it an explicitly pedagogic function and argue in favour of an abridgement according to this function (Petzold 44)� The main result of this abridgement is the sole focus on the island, restricting what critics have called Robinson Crusoe’s “episodes” (Watt, Rise 93) or “anecdotes” (Van Ghent 131, Swenson 16) to a single one, albeit the most prominent� By cutting the parts that deal with the time before the shipwreck, i. e. his upbringing, the first unsuccessful voyages, the enslavement by pirates, his own slaving voyage, and his life after the rescue from the island, a potentially problematic narrative surplus is omitted� Focussing exclusively on the island episode - more so if it is, as in Rousseau’s proposed version, purged of its more controversial parts 1 - allows for understanding Robinson Crusoe as the story of a man surviving against all sorts of adverse circumstances, with its main character either working towards making his abode more hospitable or devising means for an 1 Such as the relationship to Friday, the salvaging of tools, and Robinson’s theological reflections (Petzold 45). 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0002 32 V id S teVanoVić 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0002 escape� Of such a book, Rousseau can claim that it would induce the desire to learn “all that is useful and […] only that” (Rousseau 185)� With Rousseau’s abridgement comes the claim of a specific purposefulness of the text that goes beyond the ‘mere’ pleasure of reading it for its adventures� The original text, however, with the passages that Rousseau dismisses as “its rigmarole” (ibid.), is far more conflictive on that topic and poses some serious problems for the relationship between ‘useful’ and ’pleasurable’ reading� It is particularly interesting here that the very beginning - part of the narrative surplus that Rousseau vows to omit in his pedagogic novel - deals with questions of pedagogical authority. On the first pages, we are told how Robinson Crusoe, born into a well-off family, disregards his father’s advice of pursuing a career in law and instead sets to sea as a venturing merchant� Against the injunction to rest content with his “middle Station of Life” (Defoe, The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe of York, Mariner 2 6), Robinson gives way to what he calls his “wandering Inclination” (ibid�) and “rambling thoughts” (2)� These are strong enough to disregard not only his father’s advice, the entreaties of his mother, and those of various friends but also his own sound reasoning that finds in the “middle Station” 3 the paragon of “Human happiness” (6)� Hence, Robinson sets out to sea in order to make a fortune through trade� This “original Sin”, as Robinson’s yielding to his inclination has been called following Watt’s seminal analysis (Rise 62), is far from the only instance where he acts against his own best interest� He meets with various hardships, amongst which the two years spent as a slave are only the most prominent example� Yet, instead of learning from what the reader now recognizes as a fundamental personal flaw, he sets out time and again, only for bad luck to strike once more and strand him on his island� While most readers will well remember the misfortunes he suffers there, it serves right to remind oneself what happens after he is rescued� Having returned to London after 28 years on his island, Crusoe discovers that the plantations that he set up in Brazil on one of his earlier voyages are still held in his name and embarks on another voyage to claim their profits before returning to the Channel by land� But even then, on the last pages of the text, an urge to set off again keeps haunting any attempt of stable closure that the novel might have hitherto suggested: despite having married and raised kids, we are told that his “inclination to go abroad […] prevailed” in 2 Henceforth shortened to RC in in-text citations� 3 This “middle Station” should not be confused with the idea of a middle class in the contemporary sense of the word� For a nuanced exploration of this problem, see Rogers 51-52� The Pleasures of Circulation 33 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0002 the end (RC 256-257)� How come, then, that this novel, which is so much concerned with impulsive mobility, is so frequently read for the relative stasis of the island episode? II. And Back Again As hinted at already, Robinson’s inclination to wander is not only contested from the outside, by figures of authority and peers alike, but - more significantly - from within. Robinson frequently dwells on the contradiction between his urge to go to sea and his better judgement of remaining content with his current station in life� To understand this puzzling tension that was cut out by concentrating on the island episode, we need to examine what the removal of this material means for the text as a whole� The abridgements in the tradition of Rousseau, and the critical and popular interest that they both reacted to and - in turn - shaped, not only resulted in a change of the textual content but a shift in genre� As Martin Green points out, this editorial tradition turns what was essentially a picaresque text into its reverse (50-51)� When returning to the original text, much more so to the original trilogy, one recovers the episodic structure of the picaresque� 4 The island episode, then, is only one - albeit the longest - of several episodes that constitute the picaresque text of Robinson Crusoe (Green 50)� 5 Whereas the island episode features a story of static survival by a figure that could be read as the example of civic duties, the picaresque would tell the episodic and highly mobile life of a character condemned to wandering (51-52)� The Robinson who sells his fellow escapee Xury into slavery is certainly a more ambiguous figure than the Crusoe who engages in moral self-criticism on the island, but he is certainly not a rogue in the sense of the tradition of the Lanzarillo de Tormes or Richard Head’s The English Rogue. Yet, it is not the restoration of episodes foregrounding a roguish aspect of Crusoe’s character that could vouch for its kinship to that genre but the internal logic of this episodic structure itself� In “Episodic Structure and the Picaresque Novel”, Sheila Ortiz-Taylor proposes a theory of these narrative dynamics (218)� The text she uses for exemplifying these claims is Tobias Smollett’s Roderick Random, published in 1740� Written in the period between 4 One need only consider the original Frontispiece that emphasises the “Strange and Surprizing Adventures” over the rest of the title, framing the island episode as just one amongst many such adventures (Sertoli xiv, Moretti 32)� 5 Interestingly, Dieter Petzold points out how early German Robinsonades did not necessarily contain an island episode but were collections of adventurous travel stories (40-41)� 34 V id S teVanoVić 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0002 the publication of Robinson Crusoe and its proposed abridgement in Rousseau’s Émile, Smollett’s novel shares central problems with that of Defoe: impasses that will shed light on a conflict that goes much deeper. Roderick, a young Scotsman, is shunned by his relatives after the disappearance of his father and given into the care of his grandfather� After a prank on the local schoolmaster gets out of hand, he is turned out by his grandfather and tries to reclaim his father’s social status by becoming a gentleman� After a number of unsuccessful attempts at rising through the social ranks, he obtains the position as a surgeon’s mate on a royal navy vessel, yet subsequently loses this position and falls in love with Narcissa, whom he cannot marry due to his precarious finances. Finally, he is reunited with the long-lost father whose fortune secures Roderick’s ambitions� In a number of close readings, Ortiz-Taylor examines the structure of Roderick Random’s episodes and their relations to each other in order to develop a narrative theory of the picaresque� As in the case of Robinson Crusoe, the term picaresque here relates more to the mobility and permutability of the protagonist than to his roguish schemes� Thus one could follow Simon Dickie, for whom this type of mobility is one of the main characteristics of a genre that extends both above and below the picaresque and that - in accordance to how these texts were classified in their time - he calls the “ramble novel” (102). In contrast to Dickie, however, who focuses on the comic element of these texts, I propose to emphasize the name he gives to the genre itself and focus on the ramble - the “wandering Inclination” (RC 6) in Defoe’s words - as a specific mode of mobility that unites the protagonists of these texts� Indeed, the concept seems fitting for the protagonists of the two texts. Roderick Random is very familiar with the “rambling thoughts” that plague Robinson Crusoe: he goes through the occupations of an apothecary, a surgeon’s mate, a soldier in two armies, a valet, and a professional gambler while travelling from a rural seat in Scotland to the naval offices in London and from the beaches of Sussex to the Spanish forts of South America� For the narrator, the transitions between these social positions are brought about by sudden strokes of fate: a ship is lost; a friend dies; an enemy is brought into a position of power� Yet, Ortiz-Taylor is quick to add that this apparent succession of chance events that serves as a narrative motor tends to correspond to a fault in the picaro himself. This flaw is both inside the subject and outside of his control as if there were something in the picaro that was constantly sabotaging the possible stasis that the episode offers� A prominent example of this is found when Roderick, like Robinson, is stranded� While Roderick Random finds relative stability in serving as a surgeon’s mate on board a navy vessel, the episode is brought to its end by the sudden death of the ship’s captain� By The Pleasures of Circulation 35 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0002 a string of unfortunate incidents, it is Crampley, Roderick’s chief antagonist on board, who succeeds the captain� While trying to leave the ship during a storm, the two men come to blows� As happens frequently in the text, Roderick is provoked into physical violence, inciting a duel in which he sustains heavy wounds and is left to die on the deserted shore� Upon a closer look, such an impulsive urge is at the centre of many of the episodic transitions in the text� The prank on the schoolmaster at the beginning (Smollett 17-18), the confrontation with Gawky (111-113), the striking of Doctor Mackshane that Roderick calls “one of the most unlucky exploits of [his] life” (166), the striking down of Sir Timothy in defence of Narcissa (229), the duel with Quiverwit that leads to Narcissas abduction (364-365) - all of these work towards the expulsion of the protagonist from situations that promise stability� A similar dynamic pervades Defoe’s text: while one might read the first part of Robinson Crusoe as a story of upward social mobility - after all, as various commentators have noted, he is financially better off at the end of the first volume (Watt, Rise 162; Starr 73) - the same argument is harder to sustain in the sequel� In Robinson Crusoe’s Further Adventures, 6 the protagonist, although a wealthy man with a family, is plagued more desperately than ever by his “native propensity to rambling” (1), the difference being that by now he is well aware that there is no material reason for humouring this inclination: I had no fortune to make; I had nothing to seek: if I had gained ten thousand pounds I had been no richer; for I had already sufficient for me, and for those I had to leave it to; and what I had was visibly increasing; for, having no great family, I could not spend the income of what I had […] so that I had nothing, indeed, to do but to sit still, and fully enjoy what I had got, and see it increase daily upon my hands� (2) And yet, the inclination persists� It haunts him “like a chronic distemper” (ibid�), leaving him sleepless at night and breaking “violently into all [his] discourses” (ibid�) at day� Although Robinson is aware that these thoughts are imposing themselves upon him as if from the outside, 7 he is helpless� The urge to go to sea again imposes a strain on his marriage� As a last measure, he goes as far as to buy a farm and employ himself in manual labour in order to find distraction. While this brings a certain momentarily relief to Robinson’s impulsion, the death of his wife a couple of years later paves the way for its return with a vengeance, to which he finally cannot but give way, setting out to sea again� 6 Henceforth shortened to FA in in-text citations� 7 After all, he is quite conscious of this: “all my discourse ran into it, even to impertinence; and I saw it myself” (Defoe, Further Adventures 2)� 36 V id S teVanoVić 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0002 Consequently, one would assume that Robinson now enjoyed the mobility that he has yearned for repeatedly. Yet when he finally finds himself on the move again, he is set back by contrary winds and a variety of adverse circumstances that lead him to muse about how he is destined to “be never contented with being on shore, and yet to be always unfortunate at sea” (FA 7)� His inability to enjoy the consummation of his “rambling thoughts” is less surprising if one considers that the strange urge has already been shown as something that encroaches upon Robinson’s enjoyment� 8 Before he sets out, he testifies to the way it affects him, admitting that he has “no enjoyment of [his] life, no pleasant hours, no agreeable diversion but what had something or other of this in it” (ibid�)� Pleasure itself has already been tainted with something that incessantly points towards this problematic urge� Still, he pursues it against the static enjoyment of his wealth: Nothing else offering, and finding that really stirring about and trading, the profit being so great, and, as I may say, certain, had more pleasure in it, and more satisfaction to the mind, than sitting still, which, to me especially, was the unhappiest part of life� (2) Whatever this tainted pleasure might be, it is certainly not the feeling resulting from the “best state in the world, the most suited to human happiness” (RC 6) that Robinson’s father suggests as the result of the “middle Station” in life� Robinson’s “stirring about” is undertaken in the pursuit of “more pleasure”. Yet, as evident already in the first volume, it is not pleasure in the conventional sense of the word but a troubling insistence that does not abate with satisfaction� The pursuit of this contradictory pleasure is the driving force that Rousseau cuts out in his abridgement� III. A Rambling Drive Under such a contradictory force, the subject must appear as split: a problem that remains an unsolvable impasse for a pre-modern conception of a self-identical subjectivity� Yet, in psychoanalysis, such a split is not only theorized, but it is the constitutive problem from which all its tenets proceed� 9 When Crusoe laments how his rambling thoughts break “violently into all 8 While his analysis of this topic follows a different trajectory than what will be expanded in the following pages, Moretti noticed that enjoyment indeed is a pervasive concept in the novel - despite the emphasis on labour that is central to the island episode (44)� 9 It serves well to remind oneself that, for Freud, the insight that the Ego is not master in its own house is the central blow that Psychoanalysis delivers to human narcissism (“Vorlesungen” 295)� The Pleasures of Circulation 37 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0002 [his] discourses” (FA 2), one is reminded of the way that the psychoanalytic symptom insists in the subject - breaking forth and tainting all aspects of the patient’s life� 10 This foreign speech that infects Crusoe’s daily talk seems to come from a point in the self that is not identical with this self� Ça parle is the dictum that Jacques Lacan proposes for this phenomenon - it speaks (L’Éthique 244). It testifies to the constitutive split that gives rise to the unconscious in the subject, its speech emanating from an interiority that is at the same time an exteriority� The unconscious, so to speak, slips in through language� Where the guard against this slippage is less acute, its demands are voiced most clearly: Robinson relates how he “talked of it in [his] sleep” (FA 2), the paradigmatic domain of unconscious articulation� However, the demands which the protagonists of the two novels suffer are of a special kind: they seem to be directed against the interest of both Robinson Crusoe and Roderick Random� In both cases, they go against their better judgement and direct interest in self-preservation. When he reflects about the urge of going to sea again, Robinson remarks that he: “had no more business to go to the East Indies than a man at full liberty has to go to the turnkey at Newgate, and desire him to lock him up among the prisoners there, and starve him” (FA 88). The domain that Freud first understood as the source from which the fantasies and pleasures of the subject proceed is here apparently oblivious even to the self-preservation of this subject� 11 In Jenseits des Lustprinzips, faced with the neuroses induced by the trench warfare of WWI, Sigmund Freud discovers another, more troubling, dynamic at the heart of the modern subject: something oriented toward a secret urge for self-annihilation� In his unsettling survey of the modern psyche, Freud is fascinated by the same libidinal impasses that Defoe’s protagonist suffers� He touches upon it in the epistemological problem that is posed for psychoanalysis in the repetition of unpleasant dreams and extends this problem to encompass the question of a compulsion to repeat - the repetition of behaviour that the subject experiences as foreign and / or undesirable� Indeed, desire seems the wrong word for the compulsive urge that is articulated in Robinson Crusoe and Roderick Random� In Smollett’s case, we do see Roderick longing for Narcissa, but it is not only her name that casts doubt on the idea that what is at stake here is the desire for an other: although the 10 As Bruce Fink notes, the symptom stands in a peculiar relationship to enjoyment� Even though the symptom is experienced as an inhibition to (libidinal) enjoyment, it at the same time is sustained by the production of another kind of enjoyment (3-4)� 11 Above all, in the idea of the dream as “Wunscherfüllung” (‘wish-fulfillment’) (Freud, “Traumdeutung” 127-138) and the concept of “Unlustprinzip” (‘un-pleasure principle’) and “Lustprinzip” (‘pleasure principle’) (Freud, “Formulierungen”; “Jenseits”)� 38 V id S teVanoVić 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0002 reader might take the love for Narcissa to be the motor of Roderick’s striving for social mobility, this is soon dispelled by an episode in which he takes up correspondence with a wealthy woman� 12 Even though he has fallen in love with Narcissa before (Smollett 219), he loses “all remembrance of the gentle Narcissa” (303), while his ambition draws him to the rich Miss Sparkle� Defoe’s text, on the other hand, is notorious for its absence of sexuality (Watt, Myths 169)� 13 It is only at the very end of the first volume that we learn in plain and utilitarian words that Crusoe “marry’d, and that not either to [his] Disadvantage or Dissatisfaction” (RC 256)� But even then, the death of this wife on the first pages of the second volume swiftly clears the stage for Robinson’s Further Adventures� It is not too far-fetched to follow Simon Dickie and posit that the absence of desire is a characteristic of the ramble novel 14 : “Plot is so rudimentary in these texts and characterization so shallow, that the usual motors of narrative are just not there� Ramble novels are almost without desire, as a narratologist might say� There are no important mysteries to be resolved, no hermeneutic plot” (266)� Instead of aiming at the satisfaction of a specific desire in sexual gratification or socio-economic ascent, the driving force of these narratives seems only to call for infinite repetition. 15 Freud’s name for this force is drive, and it is set out as a duality� 16 The manifestation of compulsively repeated behaviour is the product of a death-drive that is working against the life-drive, which seeks to preserve the existence of the individual and / or that of the species� It is precisely such a tension between death and life that Ortiz-Taylor posits as the motor of the picaresque narrative� The individual episode ends in metaphoric death and transitions into the next sequence by the imagery of rebirth. We find such transitions prominently in both Roderick Random and 12 Narcissism is found as a strong theme in both novels� Take, for example, the scene of Robinson’s self-portrait or the allusion to the classical myth of Narcissus in the parrot that Crusoe domesticates and that echoes his name (Spaas, particularly 100-107)� 13 See also James 4, Bell 29, Volkmann 129� 14 This is where my analysis departs from what is otherwise a similar theoretical outline in Peter Brooks’ Reading for the Plot. In the texts that I deal with here, the “forward looking intention of desire” (Brooks 103) is openly superseded by drive: plot, as the structural ground for narrative desire is minimal, instead giving way to the repetition of largely independent episodes� 15 For the systematic distinction between desire and drive, see Moati� 16 Note the problematic rendering of the German Trieb as instinct in James Strachey’s first English translation of Freud’s collected works. The translation relegates Trieb to the domain of the natural or the organic, although nothing could have been further from Freud’s intent as scholars have since then shown (Tomšič 23-24; Lacan, Écrits 803; Lacan, Quatre Concepts 148)� Indeed, even Freud’s early conceptions of the drive insist in its location at the border between the psychic and the somatic (“Triebe” 214)� The Pleasures of Circulation 39 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0002 Robinson Crusoe� Both come close to literalizing the metaphor of death and rebirth when they find themselves alive on deserted shores. Following the Duel with Crampley, Roderick - against all odds - regains consciousness and finds himself stripped of his belongings on the beach: When I received the use of my understanding, I found myself alone in a desolate place […]� - What a discovery this must be to me, who but an hour before, was worth sixty guineas in cash� I cursed the hour of my birth, the parents that gave me being, the sea that did not swallow me up, the poignard of the enemy, which could not find the way to my heart, the villainy of those who had left me in that miserable condition, and in the extacy of despair, resolved to lie still where I was and perish� (Smollett 210) Even though the blow that struck Roderick might have ended his life, the consequences of losing his relatively stable position prevail over any appreciation of the luck of still being alive� His reaction to this miraculous survival is an outburst against a life not worth living and ends in a mimesis of death� With Crusoe, on the other hand, the tone is decidedly different: I walk’d about on the Shore, lifting up my Hands, and my whole Being, as I may say, wrapt up in the Contemplation of my Deliverance, making a Thousand Gestures and Motions which I cannot describe, reflecting upon all my Comrades that were drowned and that there should be not one Soul sav’d but my self; […]� (RC 41) Yet, just as Roderick’s episode is followed by a scene of a metaphorical rebirth when he is rescued and - evoking the new-born Christ - found in a barn, so Defoe’s text is quick to adopt the imagery of death when Robinson finds himself afflicted by his “distemper” after a short time on the island (RC 74-83)� What is more, when Crusoe is stranded on his island and realizes that he is still alive, his rapture is hardly distinguishable from the ravings of Roderick� 17 One could further strengthen the argument Ortiz-Taylor makes by reminding the reader that the very name of the first picaro, Lazarillo (‘little Lazarus’), refers to such a structure of rebirths� Lazarus, brought back to life by Christ, provides a strong figure of circularity and spells out the metaphorical dichotomy of life and death that Ortiz-Taylor uses to develop her argument� Nor is this point too far-fetched for Roderick Random’s story: after all, when Roderick assumes his post as surgeon’s mate on board a vessel of the Royal Navy, 17 Crusoe himself is aware of this blurring between pleasure and pain. Reflecting on his reaction to his miraculous survival, he observes that “sudden Joys, like Griefs, confound at first” ( RC 41)� This foregrounding of a monistic intensity is repeated in Further Adventures, when the narrator describes the raptures of a priest saved from a damaged ship (10)� 40 V id S teVanoVić 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0002 he is involved in the British attempt at storming the Spanish stronghold at the castle of St. Lazarus at Cartagena. The castle is itself a figure of repetition as it is attacked time and again by the body of British soldiers, of which “a sufficient number remained to fall before the walls” (Smollett 186), only for ever new soldiers to retry this ill-fated endeavour� Such scenes suggesting the uncanny movement of revenants, simultaneously alive and dead, point to the frequent associations of the drive with figures of the un-dead (Sigurdson 364, Žižek 54), i. e. figures that point to the increasingly precarious distinction between life and death in the drive� An uneasy constellation between these two poles can be traced back to Freud’s text, where they experience numerous reconfigurations (“Jenseits”). Lacan proceeds from this conflation of death and life in the drive in order to propose a concept of the drive as a monistic force (Ecrits 848)� Here, there is only one drive and its telos is neither life nor death but life in death or a “negative vitalism” (Tomšič 59). Interestingly, the curse that Roderick Random directs against his parents is a curse against his being in the world: it echoes the me phunai - to not have been born - of Oedipus at Colonos. Schuster accordingly alludes to this ontological peculiarity of the drive when he calls it a “failure not to be” (15)� Drive is thus negative in the sense that it is oblivious to the life of the subject, yet it is positive, vitalistic, in that it is the source of ontological addition - of a constant production: in Lacan’s terms, the production of jouissance� In homology to the breakdown of the distinction between life and death, the distinction of pleasure and pain is rendered meaningless in Lacan’s concept� It is no longer a pleasure that corresponds to a decrease in tension for the subject, as Freud had it at the beginning of his inquiry (“Jenseits” 3), but pleasure that ever increases tension and thereby becomes indistinguishable from pain� As it is not neutralized in a cathartic release of pressure, the special kind of pleasure that is thus produced is not limited but strives towards infinity. Hence the drive introduces a break with any idea of a natural homoeostasis; beyond the organic life of the subject, there is the endless accumulation of jouissance. This conflict between mechanic accumulation and organic homoeostasis is dramatized in the literary texts under discussion here� Robinson’s “original sin” can be re-figured as a break with an organic community that is evoked in the family context and the fatherly advice of staying in the “middle station”, where subjects go silently and smoothly through the world, and comfortably out of it, not embarrassed with the labours of the hands or of the head, […] nor harassed with perplexed circumstances, which rob the soul of peace and the body of rest, nor enraged with the The Pleasures of Circulation 41 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0002 passion of envy, or the secret burning lust of ambition for great things; but, in easy circumstances, sliding gently through the world, and sensibly tasting the sweets of living, without the bitter; feeling that they are happy […]� (RC 6-7) The “middle station” thus promises a peaceful enjoyment that would disengage pleasure from its connection to the drive, allowing for “the sweets of living, without the bitter”, i� e� an enjoyment without its dark underside� Instead of the constant drive of jouissance, it promises the happiness of a homoeostatic pleasure� 18 Thus, when Robinson is advised against going out to sea, this is done in the register of equilibrium and stability� His father cautions him that going to sea is “for Men of desperate Fortunes on one Hand, or of aspiring superior Fortunes on the other” (RC 6), but not for someone who enjoys the equilibrium of the middle station� In such a position, “placed in the Middle of the two Extremes, between the Mean and the Great” Robinson should enjoy the “just Standard of true Felicity, […] to have neither Poverty or Riches” (ibid�)� Ironically, it is precisely the island episode that appears as a consummation of this fantasy of homoeostasis. Reflecting on it, Robinson finds an image of perfect equilibrium and self-sufficiency: I lived in my kingdom, the island; where I suffered no more corn to grow, because I did not want it; and bred no more goats, because I had no more use for them; where the money lay in the drawer till it grew mouldy, and had scarce the favour to be looked upon in twenty years� (FA 4) The island thus provides a space where the logic of the drive seems suspended and replaced by the purposefulness that Rousseau calls for� There is a natural limit to production, corn is grown, and goats are kept, but only in quantities that are needed for Robinson’s survival� The island economy is self-sufficient: money, that symbol of infinite growth, is relegated to the margins of this enclosed world� And yet it is there� The reader might remember one of the most curious scenes of the novel, namely the situation in which Crusoe salvages the shipwreck and encounters a considerable sum in international coins, an incident that sparks a passionate monologue: O Drug! […] what art thou good for, Thou art not worth to me, no not the taking off of the Ground, one of those Knives is worth all this Heap, I have no Manner of use for thee, e’en remain where thou art, and go to the Bottom as a Creature whose Life is not worth saving� However, upon Second Thoughts, I took it away […]� (RC 50) 18 For the conceptual history of the ideas of accumulative and homoeostatic pleasure, see Tomšič 33-99. 42 V id S teVanoVić 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0002 Despite being evidently of no purpose on the island, he runs the risk of taking the gold with him, thereby endangering his life while trying to swim back to shore on the verge of a storm (49-50)� From the very start, the world of accumulation taints the apparent self-sustainability on Crusoe’s island� In the scene in which Crusoe gives in to the strange - and unexplained - urge to take the money, he reiterates his earlier internal quarrels and Roderick’s self-sabotaging actions. Following Jean-Claude Milner and Samo Tomšič, this conflictive dynamic of the drive can be said to result from a parasitism of the infinite on the finite (Milner 67, Tomšič 183). In this, the subject is suffering between the virtual endlessness of the drive, “the constant demand for infinite satisfaction” (Tomšič 184), and the finitude of the body that imposes a ‘natural’ check against it: human finitude is plotted against the non-human infinity of the drive. This clash of the non-human and the human points to the effect of a certain non-human quality in the subject� This is precisely the compulsion to repeat that Freud associated with the death-drive and that is responsible for infinite repetition. It thereby points towards a mechanistic element in the subject, the non-human dynamic of endless repetition, striving for the “more pleasure” that Robinson seeks, thereby bringing to the fore an object-like quality in the subject� 19 On second thought, the protagonists of our text are associated with the inorganic on the very first pages of the respective texts. The story of Roderick Random kicks off with the relation of a dream that his mother had while pregnant with him: She dreamed she was delivered of a tennis-ball, which the devil (who, to her great surprise, acted the part of a midwife) struck so forcibly with a racket that it disappeared in an instant; and she was for some time inconsolable for the loss of her offspring; when, all of a sudden, she beheld it return with equal violence, and enter the earth, beneath her feet, whence immediately sprang up a goodly tree covered with blossoms, the scent of which operated so strongly on her nerves that she awoke� The attentive sage, after some deliberation, assured my parents, that their firstborn would be a great traveller; that he would undergo many dangers and difficulties, and at last return to his native land, where he would flourish in happiness and reputation� (Smollett 1) In this dream the structure of the narrative as a whole is foreshadowed: the protagonist is literally made into a thing - a thing propelled forward by an 19 This can be understood as characteristic for adventure fiction per se, if we subscribe to Hansen-Löve’s observation that the genre strives towards a mechanisation of plot structure (237)� The Pleasures of Circulation 43 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0002 uncanny and malignant force� Roderick is reduced from subject to object in a devilish game of a constant back and forth� In Robinson Crusoe, the association is more subtle, yet nonetheless significant� At the very beginning, we learn that he was not always called by the name that came to title Defoe’s novel� His story begins with the tale of his father’s migration from Bremen to Hull� There, “by the usual Corruption of Words in England” (RC 5), the name Crusoe is adopted as a butchered version of the German “Kreutznaer”, evoking the German low-domination coin, the Kreuzer 20 : from the first page onwards, Crusoe is associated with the non-human� Although the roving protagonists of these two tales are pictured as things at the start of their adventures, in neither case is the non-human associated with rest or stasis but with incessant activity� The quick back and forth of a ball in the game of tennis and the fast-paced circulation of a coin through the marketplace are figures of an extreme mobility beyond the human. Thus, from their very beginning, the texts suggest that what drives their protagonists forward is not human agency that seeks to realize desire but an impersonal drive, a thing-like quality in the subject� IV. The Adventures of Currency The conflict between the human and the non-human that is only hinted at in Robinson Crusoe and Roderick Random is literalized in another example of adventure literature� In Aureus, or the Life and Opinions of a Sovereign, the protagonist of the story is a thing, more precisely: a coin� Although much less known than the two previous texts, it belongs to a sub-genre that enjoyed considerable popularity in its time - It-Narratives (Blackwell 10-11)� Between 1750 and 1850, more than 100 titles of this genre were published (Bellamy 134)� Their defining trait is an idiosyncratic narrative layout: non-human narrators - mostly commodities - relate the stories of their circulation through human societies� Much like the human narrators discussed above, these things are constantly driven forward, passing through the hands of different people in a chain of loosely connected episodes and thereby gaining access to a wide variety of social and geographical spaces� This mobility connects them to the ramble novels and serves as a narrative device for satire as the it-narrators can report on the vices and schemes at all levels of society� These non-human narrators span a wide variety of entities, ranging from a lapdog to a wig and from a quire of paper to a pen� What connects them is that 20 I am indebted to Alexander Regier for this observation� 44 V id S teVanoVić 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0002 they are almost universally styled in the fashion of ‘The Adventures of […]’ and that these adventures are exclusively those of the social sphere, i� e� the adventures of circulation� The largest sub-group of these narrators are coins and banknotes, and it is on these money-narrators that I want to focus on in order to provide a new perspective on the texts discussed above� The hypothesis here is that money narrators were particularly well-suited to realize the logical end of the ramble genre: potentially infinite circulation. They are “objects of circulation par excellence” (Rodrigues 105) because they are perfectly abstract, radicalizing the picaro’s permutability� In the same way that Robinson and Roderick are driven forward by an urge to keep their circulation going, the money narrators embody the propensity of It-Narratives to go from hand to hand at its most extreme level. In one of the first stories of this kind, Joseph Addison’s The Adventures of a Shilling (1709), the eponymous coin reflects upon this urge in words that could well be Robinson Crusoe’s: “I found in myself a wonderful inclination to ramble, and visit all parts of the new world into which I was brought” (Addison 211)� Yet there is a difference between the “wonderful inclination to ramble” and the “rambling thoughts” of Robinson Crusoe� Unlike the roving protagonists of the texts above, their counterparts in It-Narratives are no subjects� Where the concept of agency is complicated by the split in the subject, it is altogether absent in an object� 21 The circulating things in It-Narratives are largely passive: they record the trajectories and circumstances of their movements, but they have no means of altering their course� Impediments to their circulation are thus always fashioned as external and embodied most prominently in the figure of the miser. The central anathema to circulating money, the miser is evoked time and again as an example of how money is bereft of its ‘natural’ propensity to change hands� This is illustrated in particularly vivid terms when the narrator of The Adventures of a Shilling tells of how it was forcibly removed from circulation: The people very much favoured my natural disposition, and shifted me so fast from hand to hand, that before I was five years old, I had travelled into almost every corner of the nation� But in the beginning of my sixth year, to my unspeakable grief, I fell into the hands of a miserable old fellow, who clapped me into an iron chest, where I found five hundred more of my own quality who lay under the same confinement. (Addison 211) 21 Proponents of Actor-Network-Theory might disagree, but the narrative logic of these texts - as it rests on contingent circulation - is realized precisely by an emphasis on the narrators’ lack of agency� The Pleasures of Circulation 45 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0002 For the currency-narrator, the social is natural: it is useful only for what it can be exchanged for, and thus every removal from circulation must be understood as a sin against its nature� In another classical text of the genre, Charles Gildon’s The Golden Spy, a golden Louis d’Or offers a short theory of the miser: “[H]is [the miser’s] Love is as troublesome to us, as odious to all the World besides; for, shut up in his Coffers, we lose this agreeable Quality, which is only maintain’d by an absolute Freedom of circulating with the Sun about the World” (7)� At this point, one must qualify Simon Dickie’s thesis on the absence of desire in the ramble novel� In money-narratives, desire is present after all, just not on the side of the protagonist� In sudden interruptions such as the ones shown above, human desire - the miser’s “[l]ove” - is plotted against the non-human drive and its accumulation of jouissance in circulation� Whereas in Roderick Random and Robinson Crusoe, the conflict between accumulation and homeostasis is fought inside the individual, in It-Narratives it is externalized� In these texts, the circulating protagonist has been purged of all traces of the human - their money-narrators spell out the fantasy of a pure subject of the drive� This observation gains a sharper outline once we consider the narrative macrostructures of these texts� The circular structure that Ortiz-Taylor proposes is not only valid on the level of the episode but on that of the entire picaresque narrative: the individual circular episodes are themselves sublated in a circular narrative arc (218)� Here, the dream related at the beginning of Roderick Random comes to mind� When the tennis-ball is struck, Roderick’s mother loses sight of it, but shortly after, she sees it “return with equal violence, and enter the earth, beneath her feet, whence immediately sprang up a goodly tree covered with blossoms” (Smollett 1). As the first part of the dream comes true, so does the last: uprooted from his native Scotland in the beginning, Roderick finally manages to find his father - incidentally named Roderick himself 22 - and returns to take possession of his family seat as a wealthy man and husband to Narcissa, who conceives his child and firmly encloses the narrative arc in a genealogical framework� In the end, the episodes are thus re-framed in a higher order, a movement that the text accompanies by frequently evoking the workings of providence� 23 Robinson Crusoe, at first, seems much more open. After all, the book ends with the prospect of another voyage� Yet, this openness can only be maintained if the sequels are wilfully ignored� It is true that Robinson sets out 22 He is introduced as “Don Rodriguez” by his Spanish acquaintances (Smollett 412)� 23 Most prominently in the scene of the central anagnorisis between father and son (Smollett 413), but also at numerous other key moments in the text (230-231, 368, 425)� 46 V id S teVanoVić 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0002 again, driven by the same “rambling thoughts” that pushed him forward in the first volume. However, at the end of the second volume, he repeats his father’s migration, returning to England via what is nowadays Germany (FA 142-143)� Finally, the Serious Reflections, the third volume, is cleansed of any traces of the rambling spirit. Instead, the narrator reflects upon a number of theological questions, prominently featuring the concept of divine providence (204-238), suggested as the ordering force that can integrate the apparently contingent succession of events in an overarching plan� Whereas Serious Reflections still suggests that it is told by the narrator of Robinson Crusoe, its addendum, A Vision of the Angelick World, bears no apparent relationship to the prequels� Yet, by following Jeffrey Hopes’ observations on the concept of providence in Defoe (324), one recognizes that theology is always an implicit poetology for Defoe and that the circularity of Robinson Crusoe’s story is finally transposed onto an eschatological horizon in its last instalment (Serious Reflections 1-84)� 24 Thus, in both cases we can recognize the circular structure that Ortiz-Taylor proposes� The protagonists are returned to an ‘organic’ social or religious community at the end of their travels� In money-narratives, by contrast, the situation is different: the infinity of the drive is dislodged from its finite carrier. If misguided human actors do not intervene, then their circulation is potentially endless� Still, these narratives cannot escape finitude altogether: the medium itself imposes an external limit. This is a conflict that is apparent in the idiosyncratic ways in which money-narratives tend to end as the idea of an infinite drive clashes with the finite textual form� In The Adventures of a Shilling, this results in a violent cutting off of the narrative� While the coin foreshadows events that it will relate in the next chapter - promising an additional “two adventures” (Addison 213) - the text suddenly ends� Such a lack of closure is found in several similar narratives� Consider the ending of Aureus, or the Life and Opinions of a Sovereign (1824)� Following genre fashion, the coin itself is the main narrator of the text� In an instance of the ‘found manuscript’ trope, however, the last chapter is written from the perspective of the editor, who tells the tale of how he obtained the main story which was entrusted to him by the coin-narrator� The text ends with relating how this coin was lost at sea and “has met with a fate tantamount to dissolution, from which even a metallic Sovereign is not exempt” (Oakely 438)� This ending, although very sudden, seems to promise a closure of sorts� Yet, 24 The theological and eschatological discussions of the Serious Reflections can thus also be understood as an attempt on the side of Defoe to reassert control over the text (Hopes 314)� The Pleasures of Circulation 47 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0002 just below the last sentences of the narrative, one encounters a post-script: “* An indistinct rumour has been lately circulated, respecting a visit, in a diving-bell, to that part of the ocean in which the Sovereign was submerged� If this account be authenticated, the result will be regularly announced to the literary public” (ibid�)� Hence, at the very moment when closure is suggested, a paratextual surplus pries open the narrative circuit. The infinity of circulation is re-instated by circulation itself: that of a rumour� Here, the operation of an accumulative drive in the text intersects with the dynamics of a literary market, in which a lack of closure always means the possibility of adding a sequel, should the text prove profitable. If adventure literature as a whole is characterized by the collapse of contingency into providence (von Koppenfels and Mühlbacher 8), this group of It-Narratives resists this type of closure: while the ramble novels that feature human protagonists have been shown to exemplify the conflictive urge of the drive in a split subject, currency-narrators cater to the fantasy of a pure drive� But whereas the former are reeling in the infinite accumulation of jouissance by neutralizing it in a return to an ‘organic’ and ’purposeful’ community, the latter are confronting the infinite drive with the finitude of the form itself. V. From Pleasure Reading to Domestic Enjoyment What does this mean then for the initial observations around the pleasure(s) of adventure reading? The argument started with Rousseau’s cutting down Robinson Crusoe to the island episode� This can only be fully understood once the Strange and Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe is situated in the history of its publication - as one of three volumes with a very specific position in the literary marketplace� In this context, it set off an excessive production: as a text, it opened up its own semantic horizon to the further production of adventures, while as a product in the literary marketplace, it set the stage for a hitherto unprecedented amount of unauthorized copies, sequels, and adaptations� Defoe’s own sequels to Robinson Crusoe, finally, can be understood as attempts to both capitalize on this excess and reign it in� Only by extracting Robinson Crusoe from this context can Rousseau again be confronted with the problem of the book’s apparent purposelessness� In order to give purpose to what seems only the self-movement of the drive, the traces of Robinson’s connections to the outside world are left out: the money, the tools brought over from the ship, the institution of slavery, etc� Just as Robinson Crusoe does at the beginning of Further Adventures, when he replicates island life in England, Rousseau seeks refuge in the georgic mode that supplies a fantasy of homeostatic self-sufficiency. In this, Émile - a young Crusoe - is 48 V id S teVanoVić 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0002 temporarily sheltered from the vagaries of the commercial world and can learn (and find pleasure in) “all that is useful and […] only that” (Rousseau 185)� 25 Rousseau is thereby separating an unproblematic enjoyment from the jouissance of endless accumulation that lies beyond the pleasure principle delimited by the borders of the abridged version� But, as the further publication history of Robinson Crusoe, and indeed Defoe’s own framing of his work in Serious Reflections show, Rousseau’s abridgement is not the product of an idiosyncratic interest in pedagogy but indicative of a contradiction that permeates the cultural background in which these texts were written� 26 Just as Robinson Crusoe’s infinite circulation is neutralized in Serious Reflections, Roderick Random is brought back full circle in the end, trading merchant adventures for domestic tranquillity and the protean permutability of the picaro for the genealogic stability of the returned son� While the contradiction is defused, this operation leaves its mark on the narrative structure of the text: the sudden reversal of fate that brings about the resolution in the manner of a deus ex machina and results in the clash of two textual worlds (Stephanson 105)� The ways in which these endings are achieved - both Robinson Crusoe and Roderick Random are notoriously ripe with talk of providence - leaves a point of fracture in the text from which the antinomies of the drive can be reconstructed� As the popularity of the English picaresque or the ramble novel wanes around the middle of the eighteenth century, the problem of circulation is taken up in new literary forms� In It-Narratives, particularly those featuring money narrators, the drive is separated from its conflictual incarnation in the human subject� By embodying a pure relationality - that between all other commodities - the currency-narrators realize the tendency towards abstraction that is at the centre of the drive� Coins and banknotes now circulate detached from direct purposefulness: their purpose is realized in the circulation for the sake of circulation� The human subject is now removed from this operation, no longer the subject of an - albeit problematic - agency as in the ramble novel but the object of satiric commentary� This radical openness, however, did not last long� The popularity of money-narrators reached its apex towards the end of the eighteenth century� By the 1830s, their share among published It-Narratives had declined markedly, 25 In this regard it is maybe no coincidence that in Émile, after discussing Robinson, Rousseau tackles the problem of money, the embodiment of the purposelessness against which Émile is to be sheltered (189). 26 The narrator of Serious Reflections stresses this conservative teleology in the preface, subordinating the writing of the first two volumes to the ‘usefulness’ of the moral lesson provided in the third ( SR Preface)� The Pleasures of Circulation 49 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0002 often giving way to stories told by animals (Bellamy 130, 134)� Having said that, it is interesting that the currency narratives of the nineteenth century took up a decidedly different tone than their satiric predecessors� 27 This tendency was foreshadowed as early as 1780 by the publication of ‘Mr Truelove’s’ The Adventures of a Silver Penny� Here, the bitingly satirical tone of previous It-Narratives was replaced by a focus on pedagogy - the target audience are children (Bellamy 132)� 28 This shift in emphasis from the vagaries of the marketplace and chronotopes of circulation to the domestic context of homoeostasis in which education takes place hinges on the evocation of a moral economy in which “[o]ne good turn deserves another” (Mr� Truelove 26)� Accordingly, the oftentimes bleak outlook on systemic social vice permeating previous narratives was replaced by a textual world that is streamlined for a didactic purpose, as children’s tales such as Richard Johnson’s The Adventures of a Silver Penny (1787), the anonymous The Adventures of a Silver Three-Pence (1800), and Rusher’s The Adventures of a Halfpenny (1830) followed� 29 The ‘purposeless’ pleasure reading of the biting satire found in eighteenth-century It-Narratives gives way to texts that are firmly embedded in functionality: Victorian It-Narratives are increasingly received as children’s literature� Thus, while the British Empire goes through its second phase of expansion and the circulation of people and commodities increases, the accumulative drive that lay bare in this subgenre is neutralized in the fantasy of a domestic pleasure that is sheltered from the perils of the commercial world� Virtually forgotten for the better part of the last century, it is only recently that It-Narratives such as the ones discussed here have attracted wider critical attention� Yet they offer a unique and hitherto neglected perspective on topoi that were central for their time� They might serve not only to question received ideas about the intellectual history of circulation and its importance for adventure fiction but also shed new light on the ideological operations that are under way at a historical moment that sees the large-scale return of organic communities� 27 Liz Bellamy shows that, against the understanding of It-Narratives as a phenomenon exclusive to the end of the eighteenth century, texts like these are still being produced throughout the nineteenth century� Yet, the relative share of currency-protagonists in It-Narratives decreases from the turn of the century onwards (134)� 28 Incidentally, the text is also featured in the Oxford Companion to Children’s Literature (Hahn 4)� 29 Moretti puts forth the idea of a Victorian “infantilization of the national culture” (23), as the result of an anti-Weberian re-enchantment of social relations� Without having to adhere to this argument concerning Victorian culture as a whole, one can certainly uphold it for a subgenre that trades the world of commerce for the sphere of domestic happiness� 50 V id S teVanoVić 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0002 Works Cited Addison, Joseph� “The Adventures of a Shilling�” The Tatler, vol� 249, 1710, pp� 209-213� Anonymous� The Adventures of a Silver Three-Pence. 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