Theorizing the 18th C Imagination: Novelty in Roxana

Nicholas Watson’s “The Phantasmal Past” presents Chaucer’s House of Rumour as representative of the recombinative medieval imagination, an “engine of images” driven by “a constant stream of sensory impressions that it instantly manufactures into phantasms…” (14). Viewing the House of Rumour as a virtual machine churning out “tidinges” is partly what enables Watson to recover “the very feature of the past most successfully suppressed and assimilated by modernity: the novelty of the past…” (7). Such a comparison could be extended to the growth of literacy in England in the 17th and 18th centuries, and particularly to the news cycle (and indeed, J. Paul Hunter makes a similar claim linking novelty, imagination, and the 18th c. newspaper in Before Novels).The “engine of images” referenced in Watson would seem to have a real-life counterpart in the printing press, churning out a mixture of fictional forms and social commentary that recall the past as phantasm. Roxana intersects with both Watson’s argument and the celebrations of novelty found in eighteenth-century newspapers, demonstrating a way in which to theorize the 18th c. imagination.

Roxana’s development is deeply informed by Defoe’s preoccupation with novelties and newspaper publishing. Indeed, Defoe’s long-standing fascination with the imagination is evidenced in his Journal of the Plague Year and The Storm, two pseudo-journalistic pieces that document public reactions to disasters. A tidbit of news made equally of “fals” and “soth” elements plays prominently in Roxana’s narrative: the role of Nell Gwyn, mistress of Charles II and famed actress who formed the basis for Roxana’s character. Watson describes how, in medieval imaginative theory, “our perception of all reality, past, present, and future” “is constantly staged as “a negotiation between the false and the true” (18). Extending this theory to the 18th c. requires viewing Roxana as the site where this negotiation takes place, as the reader synthesizes the ambiguous image of Nell Gwynn with Roxana’s own indeterminate traits. Although the Preface insists that the story is “laid in Truth of Fact; and so the work is not a Story, but a History,” this assertion is continually called into question by Roxana’s revisions (2). One might read Roxana’s undermining of the “Truth of Fact” as reminiscent of Dante’s musings on the Geryon, the “nightmare product of the recombinative imagination…the lie with the face of a truth” (19). Watson shows how the unraveling of Geryon’s image reveals the poem as a “comedia” for the first time and highlights its fictionality. Roxana’s truth similarly conjures up an “epistemological uncertainty” that Watson is unable to resist comparing to “that essential, fraudulent modern genre, the ‘novel.’”(22).

Imaginative understanding “first conceives of the object of inquiry in corporeal terms,” Watson notes (5). If the image of the past can be read as a body, Roxana stands in for the imaginary archive, with its many fragmented editions and complicated relationship with truth-telling. Reading Roxana requires a piecing together of the many versions of Roxana, assembling a more-or-less coherent whole. Yet Watson also suggests that the “circulation, the process of question , answer, and exchange….is vital to the mode of imaginative thought” (36). This brings me back to the idea of how the 18th c. newspaper, Roxana’s chosen profession as a prostitute, and Watson’s imaginative theory remain linked: each depend on circulation of textual and literal bodies. Defoe’s fascination with imaginative thought led him to construct Roxana as a “phantasmic presence,” a novelty constantly kept in circulation as she is rewritten and revised (36).

Watson suggests that “the medieval imagination indeed forms an essential part of the history of novelty, which is also part of the history of the modern” (18). I'm curious about whether reading “across the divide between present and past” can help me understand 18th c. novelties, or whether I'm simply succumbing to the teleological reading Watson warns against (7). Is there a place for modernity in Watson's medieval analysis?