In 1703, the English novelist Daniel Defoe anonymously published the pamphlet “The Shortest Way with Dissenters.” It almost ruined his career. In the text, Defoe pretends to be a right-wing religious fanatic who proposes that people opposing the Church of England ― puritans and other dissidents ― should be killed. The pamphlet produced a great furor ― the puritans were horrified that it might stir up an already considerable amount of hostility among adherents of the Church of England, whereas the moderates believed that the text seriously damaged their attempt to create a more tolerant religious atmosphere. Only the extreme right-wing celebrated the text. Indeed, some believed the pamphlet was authored by the then well-known right-wing writer, Dr. Sacheverell. No one, however, questioned the anonymous author’s intentions. The government was outraged and initiated a wild manhunt which eventually led to the arrest of Daniel Defoe, himself a puritan, who had written the text to satirize the religious right-wing. Everyone, apart from the facetious author, had been duped.

The anecdote constitutes an important moment in the history of modern fiction. Defoe had employed an ironic persona to voice viewpoints that were not his own. Moreover, he had done it so well that no one questioned the text’s authenticity. The court reasoned that in expressing himself publicly, but using an ironic persona (or fictional first-person narrator), Defoe had failed to acknowledge responsibility for the viewpoints expressed. Thus, he had deliberately misled the public with the intention of creating civil unrest. On July 7, 1703, Defoe was charged with seditious libel and sentenced by the court of England to spend three days of public humiliation in a pillory.

Today, we remember Daniel Defoe as one of the founding figures of the modern novel. As a contemporary reader, one cannot help feeling a degree of unease about this anecdote. After all, was Defoe’s crime ― to impersonate someone else ― not precisely what he was subsequently celebrated for? If anyone reads “The Shortest Way with Dissenters” today, it is surely because it is written by Defoe, the great master of fiction ― rather than because of the text’s political content. The pamphlet, however, belongs to the early period of Defoe’s career. Only in later years would he turn to the novel form ― publishing, among others, the well-known Robinson Crusoe in 1719, and Moll Flanders in 1722. One may conjecture that his interest in fiction was in some ways influenced by his experience in the pillory. Fiction seemed to provide a form capable of dealing with the irony that Defoe found so profoundly intriguing.

Irony is one of the aspects that make Defoe’s style so outstanding ― a style that made him such a crucial figure in the history of the modern novel’s development. Irony is also closely related to imaginative writing. Imaginative writing, to which Defoe eventually devoted his career, is the art of imitation; it can imitate any genre, and thus, potentially, fool anyone. Of course, Defoe did not invent literature or imaginative writing. His contribution to the development of imaginative writing was that he initiated the process of what one may call the institutionalization of literature. Literature as an institution creates a clear boundary between what are real and not real intentions in writing. As such, it constitutes a way by which one may deal with the inherent ambiguity and uncertainty of writing, writing’s potential to fool everyone. It was an ambiguity that Defoe’s contemporaries clearly felt uncomfortable with, and which we still feel uncomfortable with today.

Defoe started out as a journalist, one of the world’s first hack writers; he wrote prose for the market, creating a product to sell, to earn money. This contractual relationship is by no means incidental in terms of Defoe’s subsequent contribution to the development of modern literary writing. Literature too involves a contractual relationship, albeit of a different kind. Literature presupposes a mutual agreement between writer and reader to momentarily suspend the responsibilities, assumptions and lawful implications that are normally imposed on texts made public. In other words, literature possesses what is called “poetic license” ― a certain liberty that only fiction writers enjoy.

But since literature involves a contract that exempts the author from his or her usual obligations and legal responsibilities as a writer, one might assume that the concept of the author becomes less significant. In fact the opposite is the case. It is only with the institutionalization of literature ― as a distinct and unique kind of writing ― that the concept of the author receives its full meaning. As the French philosopher Michel Foucault points out, the author becomes a “construction,” a “function.” The “author” becomes a separate figure, to be distinguished from the real writer. Foucault writes: “The author is a certain functional principle by which, in our culture, one limits, excludes, and chooses; the author is the ideological figure by which one marks the manner in which we fear the proliferation of meaning.”

Whereas God endows the biblical text with divine, authoritative meaning, the modern concept of the “author” castrates the text’s radical potential: the havoc that an authorless text ― or a text claimed by a false author ― may create. We need the notion of the author to tame the radicalness of the text ― and no more so than in the case of fiction. Indeed, without the notion of the author, the very possibility of fiction would cease to exist; we would be left with nothing but ambiguity and uncertainty. The case about South Korea’s infamous Internet blogger “Minerva” ― who anonymously predicted a series of economic events, and subsequently was identified and tried in court ― underlines this point. One might also think of the 2011-film Anonymous (directed by Roland Emmerich) which purports that the Earl of Oxford wrote the plays usually attributed to Shakespeare. Although the film’s claims have been rejected by all major Shakespeare scholars, one can barely imagine what might happen if it turned out to be true. Not only would a whole industry based on the author name “Shakespeare” need serious revision, but the very works themselves would change as well in the sense that we would have to read them in an entirely different light.

Defoe was not the first (or the last) to be punished for having published an anonymous text whose intention was gravely misunderstood. But the story of Defoe’s development from a political hack writer in “The Shortest Way with Dissenters” to a fictional writer in Robinson Crusoe reveals something crucial about what fiction essentially involves; a poetic licence to play with the uncertainty that emerges when writing divides a person into a writer and a narrator ― but only insofar as the text is signed with an author’s name. The author’s name is like the signature on a contract, one that grants the writer a special licence (e.g. to pretend to be someone else), albeit only within a clearly demarcated textual space.

Whether Defoe’s intentions with the pamphlet “The Shortest Way with Dissenters” were merely satirical, or whether he actually wanted to create a public uprising against the political system is ― interestingly ― unknown. It is possible that he wanted to do both. Never again, however, did the world want to be fooled. As a consequence, one is tempted to conclude that never since has writing ever been so dangerous, so subversive, than during the years it flowed from the hand of Defoe. If literature as an institution has taught us anything today it is that the world needs imaginative writing because we cannot deal with writing’s radical uncertainty, its radical irony. An apocryphal anecdote recounts that while Defoe was in the pillory people showered him with flowers and drank to his health. It is a suitable image that contains all the irony that one would want from a figure credited with the birth of the modern novel. 

By Eli Park Sorensen

Eli Park Sorensen is an assistant professor in the College of Liberal Studies at Seoul National University. He specializes in comparative literature, postcolonial thought and cultural studies. ― Ed.