The Novel as Practice of Consciousness: Locke and Defoe, Revisited

This article models a reading of the novel’s continuous prose as narrative exertion—as an effortful activity embedded in practitioners’ temporally extended doings. It treats the novel in other words as a practice, where practice is defined apart from theoretical abstraction as the concept-rich site of iterative and often tacitly knowledgeable action. The recurrence of one effortful action across early eighteenth-century fiction—first-person prose narration—invites attention as a practice thus defined. The present study traces this enduring literary practice to early modern England’s embrace of life writing: continual, regimen-based acts of writing were widely enjoined across the seventeenth century as the routine care of the conscience. The early novel draws on these practices of the conscience to cultivate a related realm, the domain of consciousness then receiving explicit philosophical definition. Defoe’s practice of prose holds together what this essay shows to be a conscience-consciousness matrix. Such a matrix reopens the perennial question of the novel’s relation to empiricism: as this essay argues, Defoe’s writing calls an emergent epistemology to account. Defoe credits Lockean empiricism with holding out world-historical promises of shared understanding. But the Lockean account of consciousness—especially in its tabula rasa state—can only describe without resolving what Defoe represents as a crisis of epistemological isolation. In the novelist’s view, the empirical promise remains empty if not dystopian without necessary collective practices, including the joint exercises of ongoing narration.