Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- List of abbreviations
- 1 Romancing the real: the “field” of criminal biography
- 2 Defoe's realism: rough frames, strange voices, surprisingly various subjects and readers made more present to themselves
- 3 The copious text: opening the door to inference, or, room for those who know how to read it
- 4 Intimations of an invisible hand: the mind exercised, enlarged, and kept in play by strange concurrences
- 5 The general scandal upon business: unanswerable doubts, and the text as a field supporting very nice distinctions
- 6 The frontiers of dishonesty, the addition and concurrence of circumstances: more on the strategic situating of names
- 7 Notions different from all the world: criminal stupidity, the self, and the symbolic order
- Closing comments: truth, complexity, common sense, and empty spaces
- Index
Closing comments: truth, complexity, common sense, and empty spaces
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- List of abbreviations
- 1 Romancing the real: the “field” of criminal biography
- 2 Defoe's realism: rough frames, strange voices, surprisingly various subjects and readers made more present to themselves
- 3 The copious text: opening the door to inference, or, room for those who know how to read it
- 4 Intimations of an invisible hand: the mind exercised, enlarged, and kept in play by strange concurrences
- 5 The general scandal upon business: unanswerable doubts, and the text as a field supporting very nice distinctions
- 6 The frontiers of dishonesty, the addition and concurrence of circumstances: more on the strategic situating of names
- 7 Notions different from all the world: criminal stupidity, the self, and the symbolic order
- Closing comments: truth, complexity, common sense, and empty spaces
- Index
Summary
The dialogic means of seeking truth is counterposed to official monologism, which pretends to possess a ready-made truth, and it is also counterposed to the naive self-confidence of those people who think that they know something, that is, who think that they possess certain truths. Truth is not born nor is it to be found inside the head of an individual person, it is born between people collectively searching for truth, in the process of their dialogic interaction.
Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoyevsky's Poetics, ed. and tr. Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis, 1984), p. 110The novel's spirit is the spirit of complexity. Every novel says to the reader: “Things are not as simple as you think.” That is the novel's eternal truth, but it grows steadily harder to hear amid the din of easy, quick answers that come faster than the question and block it off.
Milan Kundera, The Art of the Novel, tr. Linda Asher (New York, 1986), p. 18I would not have you … complain … of the Contradiction of your Character, since that is of a Piece with the whole Design of my Book.
I hate all that's common, even to common Sense.
Defoe to Robinson Crusoe, in Charles Gildon, The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Mr. D— De F—, of London, Hosier (1719), pp. xvi, xv- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Crime and DefoeA New Kind of Writing, pp. 245 - 258Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1993