Truth/Fiction in Roxana

In the Preface to Roxana, the narrator assures that “the Foundation of This is laid in Truth of Fact; and so the Work is not a Story, but a History” (Defoe 1). With Derrida’s “Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences” in the back of my mind, I found it easy to be suspicious of the words “Foundation,” “Truth,” and “Fact,” all of which rely on a representational theory of language undermined by poststructuralist criticism. But as Derrida writes, “…we cannot do without the concept of the sign, for we cannot give up this metaphysical complicity without also giving up the critique we are directing against this complicity…” (281). Derrida acknowledges the impossibility of discarding metaphysical thought entirely, leaving us only with the option of deconstructing the system of meaning.

In short, I want to use Derrida’s deconstructive techniques to consider how the story/history—or more accurately, truth/fiction—opposition unravels within Roxana and simultaneously opens the text up to allow an endless play of meaning. A structuralist critic might carve up the text with the opposition of truth/fiction in order to direct us to consider language as a system of signs. Even the narrator of Roxana wants us to evaluate the text with these terms in mind, by insisting that we view the most ridiculous events as a “true history” even while hinting strongly at their fictionality. (Disclaimer: for the sake of this argument, let us assume that Roxana has some basis in truth—and I believe it does. The Storm of 1703 is a dead ringer for Roxana’s storm repentance experience.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Storm_of_1703 But it soon becomes evident that a structuralist critique cannot explain the slippage between truth and fiction. For instance, many of the children Roxana bears simply vanish, without any indication of where they have gone or why the narrator sees fit to introduce them in the first place. While this could be viewed as narrative sloppiness, it happens frequently enough that the reader begins to question how realistic it is that children can be discarded willy-nilly. In this sense, the reader is always being asked to call into question the narrator’s assertion that Roxana is constructed on an “unassailable foundation—an absolute or immutable truth claim” (Derrida). Another (and perhaps better) example can be found in the various untruths Roxana tells and retells in various ways, undermining her own narrative.

So it is at the point when the narrator self-consciously questions the truth claim that, as Derrida says, the novel’s discourse “reflects on itself and criticizes itself” (286). By shutting out “fiction” entirely in the Preface, it is all too evident when fiction inevitably works its way into Roxana’s story. Derrida attempts something similar when he looks for ways in which Lévi-Strauss gestures toward “two directions of meaning” with the use of the word “supplementary” (289). But here is where my argument diverges from Derrida’s. While Derrida examines where Lévi-Strauss’s structuralism is inadequate (and subsequently deconstructs the nature/culture opposition), I am unsure of whether Roxana’s narrator intentionally allows for play in the Preface. The truth/fiction binary is not presented so much as it is toyed with throughout the text. Roxana is ostensibly not literary criticism, and was not written in the context of structuralism and semiotics, so perhaps that is why I feel so uncomfortable subjecting it to the same rigorous criticism that Derrida uses in his essay. I’m also not sure I fully succeeded in deconstructing the truth/fiction opposition in Roxana, since I’m still searching for a new concept to emerge from the collapse of oppositions. Regardless, I hope I have shown that the “Foundation” referenced in the Preface is anything but—rather, it’s a sticky point that the narrator often comes back to contradict.