2

Defoe’s Individualism and the Camp Entrepreneurs

‘So certainly does Interest banish all manner of Affection, and so naturally do Men give up Honour and Justice, Humanity, and even Christianity, to secure themselves.’

Daniel Defoe, Moll Flanders (1722)¹

‘Camp life, which surpasses in savagery all that we know about the lives of cannibals or rats, had almost broken him.’

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, In the First Circle (1968)²

The story told in The Rise of the Novel begins in 1719 with the publication of Robinson Crusoe, but Watt’s opening paragraph acknowledges that extended fictional prose narratives predate ‘the novel’ by millennia. Margaret Anne Doody developed the challenge that this longer history of prose fiction presents to Watt’s argument in her erudite and iconoclastic The True Story of the Novel (1996), where the origins of the novel are found instead in the cosmopolitan and polyglot worlds of classical antiquity. Doody identifies in that era’s productions many of the characteristics that we have come to take as decisively constitutive of the modern ‘Western’ novel. In Watt’s influential view, however, what distinguishes the eighteenth-century novel, the first novel, from such prior works is ‘the amount of attention it habitually accords both to the individualisation of its characters and to the detailed presentation of their environment’ (RN 18).

Many critics have complicated or amplified Watt’s argument that the rise of the novel reflects and implicitly advances the rise of individualism and ‘a growing tendency for individual experience to replace collective tradition as the ultimate arbiter of reality’ (RN 14). This has proved to be among the most influential, and thus the most frequently contested, of all the claims made in The Rise of the Novel. Indeed, given that Doody rejects all Watt’s other main premises, it is striking that even she believes that there is a connection between the rise of the novel and the rise of individualism, even if she finds it in an altogether different place and time: the novel, she argues, ‘comes into being and flourishes during a period—an extended period—of self-consciousness and of value for the individual’.³ Much closer to Watt’s eighteenth-century story, Michael McKeon’s essential Origins of the English Novel describes how and why it matters that aristocratic anti-individualism, with its view of worth as birth and its romance sensibility, is still demonstrably present in the early eighteenth century, although his book ends up in a similar place to The Rise of the Novel, with individualism and the realist novel triumphant by the end of the century.⁴ Differently concerned with the novel’s making of the individual, D. A. Miller attributes the dominance of the novel from the eighteenth century onward to its ‘superior efficacy in producing and providing for privatized subjects’, whereas Deidre Shauna Lynch has shown compellingly how this novel-as-individualism equation evades the economic history of character-reading from which emerged only belatedly our familiar conceptions of novelistic subjectivity as deep interiority and particularized personhood—conceptions that Watt and those who followed him present as if they were somehow timeless and self-evident.⁵ Finally, perhaps Nancy Armstrong takes Watt’s thesis about the rise of the novel as the rise of liberal individualism as far as it will go when she proposes that ‘the history of the novel and the history of the modern subject are, quite literally, one and the same’.⁶ In How Novels Think, she argues that the realist novel largely invented the liberal individual, meanwhile edging out of the picture those competing and less easily assimilated notions of selfhood circulating in non-realist forms of fiction.

But what is noticeable and surprising when The Rise of the Novel is read in the contexts of Watt’s historical situation and his other writings is that its understanding of ‘individualism’ is neither innocently descriptive nor, as it is often taken to be, particularly celebratory. Watt is often thought of as the literary-historical spokesman for a Whiggish, Bildungsroman-like narrative of the progressive enfranchisement of the modern individual; in fact, he seems to have understood individualism not so much as a heroic emancipation of the autonomous self from the shackles of pre-Enlightenment caste determinism and benighted religious orthodoxy but as something much more frightening in its capacity to uproot and isolate people, setting them against one another as competitors and rivals. In fact, it is really no exaggeration to say that for Watt the rise of social and economic individualism entails a potentially chilling cultural transformation, because ‘it posits a whole society mainly governed by the idea of every individual’s intrinsic independence…from other individuals’ (RN 60). As a result of ‘the hypostasis of the economic motive [and] a devaluation of other modes of thought, feeling and action’, ‘the various forms of traditional group relationship, the family, the guild, the village, the sense of nationality—all are weakened’ (RN 64). The aftermath of a total war, and of all war’s constitutive involuntary collectivities, from the armed forces and prison camps to the nation itself, perhaps helps to explain why Watt places such emphasis on the fragility of community; and the national community, specifically, is one to which he keeps returning in his account of Defoe: ‘Crusoe, one feels, is not bound to his country by sentimental ties, any more than to his family; he is satisfied by people, whatever their nationality, who are good to do business with; and he feels, like Moll Flanders, that “with money in the pocket one is at home anywhere” ’ (RN 66).

The literature of individualism turns its protagonists into ‘solitary nomads’, Watt wrote in Myths of Modern Individualism, turning at the end of his career to what he saw as the debilitating extent to which individualism precludes personal loyalty and all other forms of human solidarity. ‘Somehow’, J. Paul Hunter muses, in an account of individualism and the novel more sympathetic to Watt than most, ‘the novel has always communicated a terrible sense of isolation and articulated dramatically the breakdown of the relationships between individuals’.⁷ To understand why that sense of breakdown made Defoe a ‘portentous and timely figure’, as Watt put it in a passage that I quoted early in Chapter 1, we need to look at the mid-twentieth rather than the mid-eighteenth century as the decisive moment for thoughts on individualism and the novel.

King Rat

Recounting the critical history of the famous ‘destructive element’ passage in Conrad’s Lord Jim, Watt remarked that every decade ‘has discovered in the passage an image of its own characteristic preoccupations’ (C. 325). As he knew, acts of interpretation have a situational element, and we see this plainly in the modern reception of Defoe’s characters. Between the wars, Virginia Woolf found in Moll Flanders a ‘robust understanding’, ‘noble tolerance’, and ‘good-will’, while her friend and contemporary E. M. Forster presented an even more affirmative Moll, with her ‘decent and affectionate heart’, ‘innate goodness’, ‘humour and good sense’.⁸ Now scholars, rejecting Watt’s much harsher reading, find different ways of accommodating Moll Flanders by, for example, focusing on the redemptive durability of her bonds with other women characters, or recuperating her individualism as Defoe’s critique of corrupted communities.⁹ But, writing shortly after the war, the best Watt could say for Moll’s ‘most positive qualities’ was that she shows ‘a restless, amoral and strenuous individualism’, and the most he could say of her psychological make-up was that she shares the reflexes of ‘Pavlov’s dog’, quick to react to the stimulus of ‘profit or danger’ (RN 114, 108). His robustly instinctive, not to say downright feral, Moll Flanders is no more nor less than a survivor:

Her wisdom is not impressive; it is at best of a low atavistic kind wholly directed to the problems of survival; but nothing could be more impressive than her energy, and it too has a moral premise, a kind of inarticulate and yet fortifying stoicism. Everything happens to Moll Flanders and nothing leaves scars. (RN 132)

Temperamental and political differences surely contribute to Watt’s divergence from canonical prior readings—of course the humanist Forster and the feminist Woolf would be predisposed to offer more redemptive readings of Moll—but there is a key historical difference too.

That is, perhaps Watt’s invulnerable Moll Flanders might be seen as a product of the Second World War, the outbreak of which had helped to create Bertolt Brecht’s profiteering Mother Courage. Watt’s version of Moll shares her ruthless economic priorities, her unreflective fortitude, and what at times feels like a barely human resilience. Mother Courage earns her name because she risks her life by driving through the bombardment of Riga, fearing that the bread in her wagon will go mouldy before she can sell it: ‘what else could I do?’, she asks, and it is not a stupid question when she believes that the alternative is starvation.¹⁰ We might compare Watt’s early post-war summary of Moll Flanders as ‘a comprehensive image of the ambiguous and dehumanizing conflicts into which modern civilization plunges its unhappy natives’.¹¹

Of course, there is plenty in Moll Flanders to support Watt’s dark and disenchanted reading of its principal. Witness the unmixed delight with which she learns of the judicial execution of an accomplice, now incapable of incriminating Moll in their shared crimes: ‘the joyful News that he was hang’d, which was the best News to me that I had heard a great while’.¹² This is among the starkest confirmations in the novel of Moll’s declared view that people ‘naturally…give up Honour and Justice, Humanity, and even Christianity, to secure themselves’. But this is only one facet of Moll Flanders, and for Watt to make her begin and end there is surely to betray the impact of wartime forms of unfeeling. More specifically still, I would argue that Watt’s influential version of Moll Flanders is the product not simply of the war but of the war’s prison camps, and that her closest counterparts are to be found among the camp entrepreneurs of whom former prisoners wrote, envious and appalled, in their memoirs and autobiographical fiction. These were the ‘mighty men’ of Watt’s friend John Durnford’s war memoir: ‘mighty men, nabobs of the black-market in tobacco, clothing and even, it was suggested, quinine, grew fat and sleek like merchants.’¹³ (In desperately short supply, quinine was the only reliable remedy for the malaria that was killing hundreds in the camps.) Durnford was not always derogatory about prisoners’ business activities; he himself briefly sold rawhide sandals for a talented entrepreneur. Some camps had ‘a brisk economic life on strictly free-enterprise lines’, according to another former prisoner acquaintance of Watt’s; he had sold ersatz ‘marmalade’ at Chungkai.¹⁴

These rawhide sandals and fake marmalade make possible a more affirmative reading of the relationship between Defoe and the prison camp than the one Watt’s analysis of Defoe’s characters suggests. Surveying fiction produced by or about former Far East prisoners, Roger Bourke notes the Robinson Crusoe quality of these works, recounting the compellingly Crusoe-like feats of ingenuity performed in the camps: medical equipment was made from bamboo thorns and old bicycle wheels; prosthetic limbs from rubber-tree wood and filing cabinets; toothbrushes from coconut fibre; soap from palm oil.¹⁵ Russell Braddon writes of prisoners making ‘soap, brooms, brushes, false teeth, paper, radios, book bindings, artificial limbs, pressure cookers’.¹⁶ Rohan Rivett and Ernest Gordon describe how surgical supplies were made from butchers’ saws, curettes from sharpened spoons, bedpans from bamboos, anaesthetics from narcotic plants, surgical sutures from dried cow entrails; at a pinch—so to speak—a pair of scissors amputated ulcerated toes.¹⁷ As Robinson Crusoe satisfyingly proclaims, ‘by making the most rational judgment of things, every man may be in time master of every mechanick art’.¹⁸ Indeed, Watt wonders if part of the reading pleasure of Robinson Crusoe in its own time was that Defoe reminded readers of an era before economic specialization. On Crusoe’s island ‘there is an absolute equivalence between individual effort and individual reward’ (RN 72).

What is less comforting, and I think more directly relevant to Watt’s bigger claims about Defoe, is how far the prison-camp ‘triumph of improvisation’, as Braddon called it, was directed towards individually self-serving commercial ends.¹⁹ Among the best known of the prison-camp entrepreneurs is the title character of James Clavell’s King Rat (1962), a bestselling novel also known from the English director Brian Forbes’s film adaptation of 1965. King Rat was the work of a British-turned-American writer otherwise known for authoring the screenplays of, somewhat ironically on both counts, The Great Escape and Shogun. Even aside from its wide dissemination in the 1960s, Clavell’s account of entrepreneurship is worth pausing on because he and Watt were captured around the same time and spent time in at least one of the same camps, Changi on Singapore, where King Rat is set. The title character is Corporal King, a charismatic but intimidating American prisoner who establishes a successful black-market enterprise within the camp, and who is ultimately ruined by the outbreak of peace because his instinct for commercial opportunity flourishes best in conditions of near-total privation. This is why, when all the other camp inmates are mere skin and bone (the liberating officer is aghast at these ‘zombies in rags, zombies in loincloths, zombies in sarongs—boned and meatless’), King, in contrast, ‘ate like a man, smoked like a man, slept like a man, dreamed like a man and looked like a man’.²⁰

Doing whatever is necessary to survive is all that matters in King Rat, and the prison-camp principle of every man for himself proves more durable by far than the conventional ideas of honour that Clavell associates with the life-denying and hypocritical class system embodied in the novel’s English characters. And, notwithstanding the novel’s sometimes fatiguingly macho tenor, the camp-instilled rethinking of values that puts self-interest first is embraced by Clavell’s women as well as his men; among the characters forced to reconsider their pre-war assumptions is the Roxana-like wife of a Scottish prisoner, a young mother whose experience of defencelessness and deprivation as an interned enemy alien means that she quickly adapts to her new situation as courtesan to a Japanese colonel. This anti-ethic of opportunistic adaptation proves pervasive: the mercantile-criminal credo of the racketeering Corporal King is explicitly linked to his American nationality, but its utility in these harsh conditions means that it potentially contaminates everyone in the novel. King sums up that ‘American’ credo: ‘Number one, poverty’s a sickness. Number two, money’s everything. Number three, it doesn’t matter how you get it as long as you get it.’²¹

Clavell’s title refers most explicitly to the rat farm Corporal King establishes in the camp. King raises rats for meat and sells the product as black-market mouse deer to unwitting officers, in a gratifying marriage of war-aggravated class hatred and the irresistible profit motive, and in a darkly ironic, if presumably unintended, echo of Robinson Crusoe’s discovery that his island’s wild goats can be domesticated and bred for food and skins. William H. McDougall, an American journalist imprisoned in a Japanese camp on Sumatra, writes in his war memoir of ‘that barometer of desperation, rodent prices’: the camp price of ‘cooking-rats’, as he refers to them with disarming casualness, could range between one guilder and five depending on how bad conditions were.²² But Clavell’s title also suggests the gruesome folkloric phenomenon of the ‘rat king’. A rat king is said to be formed when rats have been living in such close proximity as a pack that their tails become entangled, fused by blood and excrement, with the result that they gradually become a single animal because their constituent individuals are no longer functionally individual in any meaningful sense. The Ukrainian Holocaust survivor Piotr Rawicz used the crypto-zoological rat king as a grotesque figure for involuntary solidarity in another retrospective novel of the Second World War, Blood from the Sky (1961), in which the narrator tells a story likening his endangered fellow Jews to this ‘monster, created out of sickness and starvation’:

It sometimes happens that one hears squeakings and pipings and yelpings coming from a rafter in some old loft—different and louder than those usually made by rats. It gets on your nerves and you pick up an ax and split the rotten beam. Whereupon it releases a monster, created out of sickness and starvation in the cramped and filthy nest: a score or so skeleton-thin rats have become so conjoined, their legs and their long tails have grown so fused and knotted, that it is no longer possible for them to disunite; the blood system of this collective organism is now one, the same blood flowing through the entanglement of tails and legs. None of them will ever again be capable of leading an independent existence. They will have to live communally, enjoying the incomparable bliss that comes from self-surrender.²³

Thus, when Clavell evokes the simultaneously abject and threatening figure of the rat king, reversing its terms in order to bring out the parasitism always implied in the original, he suggests that the most attractive alternative to such deadly collectivity is exploiting your no-less-brutalized fellows in order to become the king of the rats. Looking back in 1972 on his time on the Burma–Thailand Railway, artist Leo Rawlings evoked similarly figurative rats when he recalled that ‘even the rats among us, and rats there were, can be forgiven their petty crimes. We had now reached the state where every man had to put himself first just to survive.’²⁴ Clavell also presents the temptation as virtually insurmountable, but it means disgrace at the end of King Rat when, able once more to judge by the professed standards of the outside world, the liberated prisoners shun the racketeer whose favour they sought so sycophantically in captivity.

‘Nothing more awful than to watch a man who has been found out, not in a crime but in a more than criminal weakness,’ Conrad wrote in Lord Jim: ‘weakness unknown, but perhaps suspected, as in some parts of the world you suspect a deadly snake in every bush,—from weakness that may lie hidden, watched or unwatched, prayed against or manfully scorned…not one of us is safe.’²⁵ The future Conradian Watt had long since been thinking about such questions of weakness and temptation by the time Clavell addressed them in King Rat. He had already written in the late 1940s a short story titled ‘A Chap in Dark Glasses’ in which the narrator, an urbane, cultured, and (not to put too fine a point on it) thoroughly Watt-like junior officer, saves his own life by becoming a small-scale entrepreneur, one of the camp’s ‘racketeers as we were called’.²⁶

The dark glasses of the story’s title suggest the autobiographical investments of what is substantially a work of fiction; in straightforwardly non-fictional essays, the short-sighted Watt mentions wearing dark glasses throughout his captivity because his ordinary glasses were smashed during the battle for Singapore, and he was still wearing dark lenses (which were all he had) on repatriation, leading an old friend at the railway station in Dover to suppose that he had been blinded in the war.²⁷ These glasses also feature in Watt’s tellingly-titled ‘A Man Must Live’, another unpublished story from the late 1940s, which focuses on rivalries among racketeers in a Thai camp. The entrepreneurial central character, a cynical middleman known as ‘the Professor’, appears to be an unsparing self-portrait of the author as ‘a fat, sallow young man in dark glasses’—‘fat’ being altogether relative here, needless to say, and most likely a symbolic reflection of his racketeering successes. Since it is vanishingly unlikely that Watt was involved in much camp trading—all his friends discuss their own and others’ mercantile efforts, whereas Watt only ever appears in relation to the intellectual activities of the camps—it seems all the more interesting that he identified with the entrepreneur enough to be able to inhabit his world view imaginatively in his fiction a decade before he did so in his writings on Defoe. McDougall, that keen observer of fluctuating rodent prices, found in captivity ‘two classes’ of ‘entrepreneur’: ‘he who works solely for the purpose of keeping himself alive and he who works for profits he can bank…a loan shark or racketeer trading on the cupidity or hunger of his fellows.’²⁸ The pseudo-autobiographical entrepreneurs of Watt’s stories are in the first category, while Clavell’s protagonist is more like the second.

As far as Clavell’s treatment of racketeering is concerned, Watt’s private impression of King Rat was that it was a bit overblown in its handling of Changi, which they had both known at first hand (Watt, though, had experienced much worse camps than Changi). A scribbled note about King Rat records that there was ‘minor endless crookery; less dramatic conflict’.²⁹ His more considered verdict was that ‘no one crook got quite as much on top as that. But one recognises the picture all right, though one doesn’t want to. Every kind of thieving and brutality.’³⁰

Like the king rat of the prison camp, Watt’s Moll Flanders has no sense of sorority with other members of her oppressed and forlorn group. ‘Who is the convict’s worst enemy?’ asks the gulag veteran Solzhenitsyn: ‘Another convict.’³¹ Watt makes much of such passages as that in which Moll Flanders, her death sentence commuted, buys for herself and her husband better treatment than all the other convicts being transported to Virginia as forced labourers, although few among them could be as infamous as this notorious thief and her highwayman husband. These other transported criminals are ‘a dreadful Gang’ and ‘as harden’d vile Creatures as ever Newgate produc’d in my time’, Moll informs us, as if she had been leading a life of benign respectability all these years, rather than the life we have been reading about up to this late point in the novel.³² The boatswain of the ship is not to be fooled by superficially criminal appearances, Moll urges, but should know that she and Jemy are ‘Persons of a differing Character from the wretched Crew that we came with’.³³ So much, we might say, for the proverbial thickness of thieves. Commenting on Watt’s dark reading of Defoe, Robert Alter wrote in his 1965 study of the picaresque that the ‘moral universe of Moll Flanders, we find, is bare and depressingly cold’, with its subordination of human relationships to the pursuit of gain.³⁴ Interestingly, Watt is much less judgemental than this implies. A ‘healthy amorality’ is how he sums up Moll’s easy ability to shake off the usual claims of conscience (RN 128). In conditions of shared suffering, sympathetic identification with the other prisoners might entail that blissful ‘self-surrender’ of which Rawicz sardonically writes: the death-in-life of the rat king. Watt’s Moll, in contrast, is as healthy and self-sufficient as King Rat. Still, Watt wonders if Defoe is using her to purvey some questionable fictions about the social and psychological impunity of the total individualist: ‘no vicissitude can ever impair her comfortable vitality; our grossest crimes and our most contemptible moral weaknesses, apparently, will never deprive us of the love of others or even of our own self-respect’ (RN 132).

Cannibals

‘He wasn’t evil,’ one of Clavell’s characters protests in King Rat, when challenged to account for his growing admiration for the camp entrepreneur: ‘All he did was adapt to circumstances.’³⁵ Among the most searching literary treatments of the moral costs of adaptation is J. G. Ballard’s Empire of the Sun (1984), a fictionalized treatment of Ballard’s wartime incarceration by the Japanese as a child in the Lunghua civilian internment camp near Shanghai. Ballard’s oeuvre offers multiple versions of his war experience, all a little different in emphasis. His harrowing short story ‘The Dead Time’ (1977) is a surrealistic rendering of his feeling that he was tied forever to those who did not survive imprisonment. The young protagonist drives around the paddy fields outside Shanghai with a truckload of corpses to whom he now feels closer than his own family (which he is ostensibly trying to find) and whom he cannot bring himself to dispose of: an unusually literal example of what Cathy Caruth calls ‘the survivor whose life is inextricably linked to the death he witnesses’.³⁶ Ballard then describes his internment at greater length in a realist idiom in Empire of the Sun and The Kindness of Women (1991), and finally in his autobiography Miracles of Life (2008). Empire of the Sun is particularly significant because it separates the autobiographical child protagonist Jamie, or ‘Jim’ as he grows up, from his family, although Ballard had actually spent the whole period of captivity with his parents and younger sister: he explained in his autobiography that he ‘felt that it was closer to the psychological and emotional truth of events to make “Jim” effectively a war orphan’.³⁷ As he told an interviewer in 1986, the separation of the child protagonist from his parents means that he ‘is forced to live like a sort of young Robinson Crusoe, almost’.³⁸ Like Watt’s, Ballard’s preoccupation with Defoe would last a lifetime.

But Jim is not the most ruthless individualist in Empire of the Sun. Here, the prison-camp entrepreneur is Basie, the American sailor—of course American again, since, as a number of historians have remarked, ‘Americans were the great individualists of the camps, the capitalists, the cowboys, the gangsters’; they were ‘the most entrepreneurial, but some of their rackets were worthy of the Mafia’.³⁹ (Gavan Daws further notes that Americans were the only national group whose members are known to have murdered compatriots in captivity.⁴⁰) Like Moll Flanders, to whom, as Watt wrote, ‘everything happens…and nothing leaves scars’, Ballard’s sinister, opportunistic Basie has ‘a bland, unmarked face from which all the copious experiences of his life had been cleverly erased’.⁴¹ At various points in the novel Basie tries to sell Jim or uses him as a decoy to draw Japanese fire away from himself; Jim even comes to suspect that Basie and the other American prisoners are sending him to the edge of the camp in order to gamble—literally take bets—on how far away Jim can get before being shot by the guards.

This savage pastime echoes one of the most cold-hearted exploitations of others in the Far East camps, when some prisoners literally starved because they had gambled away their rice rations to tougher comrades. Daws describes ‘life and death’ stakes when he tells of two veteran American cardsharps who profited from the willingness of desperate prisoners to gamble for food or cigarettes: ‘the end product of classic American free-enterprise capitalism’.⁴² (Smoking proved an even deadlier habit than usual because some would risk even more severe malnutrition by trading or gambling their food ration for cigarettes.) According to Australian Roy Whitecross, ‘some practically lived on the hunger and stupidity of others’; his memoir describes how American prisoners from the Philippines introduced into the camps capitalist practices such as trading rice on usurious terms—practices previously unknown and initially unthinkable to the more communally oriented prisoners of other nationalities.⁴³ David Piper, imprisoned on Formosa (Taiwan), remembered a fellow prisoner found on the verge of starvation because he had lost six days’ rice playing at Blackjack. ‘In the camps it could seem as if, when it came to the crunch, the ultimate, the only essential quality of man was animal hunger,’ Piper surmises, and ‘all other qualities were but fatty accretions, inessential and permissible only in certain artificially contrived conditions of civilisation’.⁴⁴

Solzhenitsyn’s view that life in the prison camp ‘surpasses in savagery all that we know about the lives of cannibals or rats’ is thus confirmed in the Far East as in the gulags. Watt’s sense of the timeliness of Defoe now becomes most explicable, since the world of the Second World War camps can read so much like the cannibalistic psychological universe of Robinson Crusoe.⁴⁵ Defoe’s hero is a former slave who enslaves others; a man whose greatest fear is of being devoured and yet who can readily envision circumstances in which one might literally consume other people to survive, as when he contemplates the purely hypothetical survivors of the novel’s second shipwreck who, floating on their no-less-hypothetical raft, ‘might by this time think of starving, and of being in a condition to eat one other’.⁴⁶ Watt acknowledged that it might seem a little perverse of him to treat Robinson Crusoe as the first ‘novel’ given its conspicuous lack of interest in personal relationships (RN 92); for all his pained yearning for companionship, thoughts of other people only terrorize Crusoe the moment they threaten to materialize:

Then terrible thoughts rack’d my imagination about their having found my boat, and that there were people here; and that if so, I should certainly have them come again in greater numbers, and devour me; that if it should happen so that they should not find me, yet they would find my enclosure, destroy all my corn, carry away all my flock of tame goats, and I should perish at last for meer want.⁴⁷

Other people are always a threat to Crusoe’s stomach, for instinctively Crusoe senses that, even if incomers will not literally eat him, they will assuredly starve him to death.

John Richetti describes ‘Crusoe’s inner turmoil’ as ‘the psychological effects of a longing for human contact and a terror of unknown others against whom the building of fortified shelter and mastering of the environment are defensive reactions’: this is ‘a productively fearful competitive separation from others’, Richetti writes, putting his finger on the paradoxical way in which civilization (culture, productivity) is dependent upon the individual’s fear of others in Robinson Crusoe.⁴⁸ Thanks to thinkers ranging from Hobbes to Freud, we think of civilization as founded on our fear of other people in a different sense, as the logic of the social contract or the protective ‘civilization’ that stops people from killing or enslaving each other: ‘Homo homini lupus’, Freud writes of the alternative in Civilization and its Discontents.⁴⁹ What incomers are emphatically not in Defoe’s novel is an opportunity for some kind of community, and, when an island community begins to materialize after the mutiny, Crusoe is on the first boat out. On surviving the shipwreck Crusoe finds it ‘particularly afflicting…that I had no weapon either to hunt and kill any creature for my sustenance, or to defend my self against any other creature that might desire to kill me for theirs’; when he flees the sight of the footprint in the sand, he tells us that ‘never frighted hare fled to cover, or fox to earth, with more terror of mind’.⁵⁰ His first night on the island is spent in the treetops for fear of being eaten by wild animals, but it takes him little time to learn to think of himself as predator rather than prey.

This transformation in Crusoe’s self-understanding prefigures the ugly lesson described in prison-camp writings when the naive protagonist’s first arrival at the camp supplies predatory older hands with new opportunities for gain. The war memoir of American literary critic and infantry veteran William V. Spanos recounts his arrival at a German camp following his capture during the Allies’ last major setback of the war, the Ardennes counteroffensive at the end of 1944. (Worse was to come for Spanos, for in the spring of 1945 he not only watched the destruction of Dresden, like fellow Ardennes prisoner Kurt Vonnegut, but was forced to participate in the excavation of corpses from the rubble.) Upon entering the prison camp Spanos is met by two surprisingly well-dressed and self-assured British prisoners, in a rare reversal of the ‘convention’ that prison-camp profiteers are rackety American servicemen whose wartime exploitations are continuous with their lives as peacetime crooks. These sleek men proceed to rifle through his pockets: ‘To these British prisoners I wasn’t a comrade, an unfortunate ally who, like them, had been captured and was suffering the hell of dislocation and the hostility of the enemy. I was, it seemed from their crude manner and actions, simply an object to be exploited.’⁵¹ This ugly introduction to camp life outlines the shape of things to come. Spanos tells of an American prisoner in his cohort who steals from others, and of the brutal retribution enacted by these ‘comrades’ from whom he steals; in fact, the Americans’ only experience of camaraderie during their entire captivity is in this horrible episode when they are united by their lust for revenge against the fellow-American whom they savagely beat up (it is unclear if he even survives).⁵² Best equipped for the world of the prison camp are those who ‘take a severely functional view of their fellows’ (RN 112). The phrase could serve as the verdict of Clavell, Ballard, or Spanos on the camp entrepreneurs and exploiters, but it is actually Watt’s summing-up of Defoe’s protagonists. The ultimate drive of Defoe’s fiction is ‘ego contra mundum’ (RN 132).

‘He’s a survivor, though survivors can be dangerous,’ one of Ballard’s characters observes: ‘Wars exist for people like Basie.’⁵³ When equal shares mean that everyone might die, opportunism, pragmatism, and the morally insensible spirit of capitalist enterprise are potential lifesavers. ‘What is the calorie count on friendship, on personal loyalty, on moral agreements, on altruism?’ asks Daws.⁵⁴ A version of that question was asked by all the early post-war novelists who revisited Defoe, although, perhaps because of contemporary environmental fears, A Journal of the Plague Year rather than Robinson Crusoe seems the twenty-first-century preference, rewritten in a range of contemporary novels from Geraldine Brooks’s Year of Wonders (2001) to Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006) and Jim Crace’s The Pesthouse (2007). But, no less symptomatically, what Albert Camus’s war allegory The Plague (1947) had found in that text back in the 1940s was that ‘there is no denying that the plague had gradually killed off in all of us the faculty not of love only but even of friendship’.⁵⁵

Alone and forced to survive by his own wits, Ballard’s hitherto protected upper-middle-class Jamie learns immediately that ‘kindness, which his parents and teachers had always urged upon him, counted for nothing’.⁵⁶ The idea returns in Ballard’s autobiography when he recalls a minor theft that he had committed at Lunghua. ‘Moral principles, along with kindness and generosity, are worth less than they might seem.’⁵⁷ In Empire of the Sun this epiphany means that Jamie must scavenge from the ruins of his old life, and the ruined lives of others, just as in Robinson Crusoe. It is unnerving how clearly the reader remembers Crusoe’s enterprising salvage from the first shipwreck, of which Crusoe was the solitary survivor, and yet forgets the profit he gleans from the novel’s second foundering, as if by that point the novel has acculturated even its reader into its uncompromising survivalist world: ‘I had indeed gotten two pairs of shoes now,’ Crusoe tells us, ‘which I took off of the feet of the two drown’d men, who I saw in the wreck’.⁵⁸ The shoes are of no use to Defoe’s drowned sailors, of course, but survival in Ballard entails stealing from the old and the dying as well as the dead; and it means strategic alliances with the strong and desertion of the weak so that they cannot drag you down with them.

Like Ballard a British civilian prisoner of the Japanese, Daphne Jackson wondered at

the speed with which some degenerated into little more than animals…Thieving, lying, telling tales to curry favour with guards or staff went on all the time. As far as I could see, the old saying that ‘trouble brought out the best in one’ was very much a half-truth. The good people in camp got better, but the bad ones got far, far worse.⁵⁹

In Empire of the Sun, collaboration with the Japanese is a universally accepted way of getting by: a crime for which no one is blamed, let alone punished, since anyone else would do the same if the opportunity arose. Defoe himself repeatedly stated versions of the old adage that necessity knows no laws, and it is the central insight of prisoners’ memoirs, which I think helps to explain Watt’s fascination with his resiliently entrepreneurial cast of mind, or Defoe’s conviction that ‘he that gave me Brains will give me Bread’.⁶⁰

Ballard shared Watt’s lifelong interest in Defoe, and specifically the Defoe who considered self-preservation the main engine of human activity. In the overlapping sequel to Empire of the Sun, Ballard’s hybrid novel-memoir The Kindness of Women, Jamie’s father tries to distract the boy Ballard from the attractions of Shanghai’s wartime streets by promising him that if he stays home he will be allowed to finish, of all things, Robinson Crusoe.⁶¹ Ballard recalled in his autobiography that he ‘loved’ Robinson Crusoe as a child, and he rewrote Robinson Crusoe over and over across his career.⁶² In his atmospheric early work of science fiction The Drowned World (1962), set amid the (tellingly malarial) cityscape of a flooded London that is (no less tellingly) populated only by looters, the main character undertakes what the novel calls ‘inverted Crusoeism—the deliberate marooning of himself’.⁶³ Ballard’s Concrete Island (1974) offers a postmodern version of Defoe’s novel: a selfish loner is marooned after a car crash on an ‘island’ of waste ground between two highways, falling victim to a dystopian extreme of the familiar social atomization attendant on modern individualism.

With the unrivalled insight of the prison-camp survivor, an unconvinced Watt dryly noted that Defoe’s heroes and heroines must be uniquely fortunate in the unhesitating willingness of other people to serve the protagonist’s interests over their own. Robinson Crusoe ‘is conspicuously lucky to find other people who want to devote themselves to his personal advantage…to exist only to be the perfectly reliable and wholly devoted servants of Crusoe’s interests’ (MMI 170), while Moll Flanders apparently elicits only ‘the most unqualified and selfless devotion’ from the characters around her: ‘Everyone seems to exist only for her, and no one seems to resent it’ (RN 112). (Again, this could not be further from Forster’s pre-war reading: ‘She and most of the characters in Defoe’s underworld are kind to one another, they save each other’s feelings and run risks through personal loyalty.’⁶⁴) Ballard implies similar scepticism in his rewritings of Defoe: the antisocial modernity of Concrete Island means the obliteration of any expectation of aid. This was a ‘completely false’ assumption, the marooned main character recognizes, and merely ‘part of that whole system of comfortable expectations he had carried with him’.⁶⁵

But ‘you were on an island long before you crashed here’, another character tells this proto-yuppie protagonist; Ballard is making the same point about the moral effects of economic individualism as Watt had drawn from Defoe’s characters when he wrote that they are so ‘essentially solitary’ that they ‘all belong on Crusoe’s island’ (RN 112).⁶⁶ For Watt, Crusoe’s ‘inordinate egocentricity condemns him to isolation wherever he is’ (RN 86). Crusoe, he later remarked, ‘is in general devoid of any pretense of “loving thy neighbor as thyself,” or indeed of any civic spirit whatever’—a significant phrasing on Watt’s part, given how close it comes to implying that ‘loving thy neighbor as thyself’ is more a performance (‘any pretense’) than a plausible psychological reality (MMI 162). Their shared background of wartime imprisonment explains why both Ballard’s and Watt’s readings of Defoe should have emphasized so strenuously the inherent likeness between the capitalist and the criminal as literally antisocial forces. In an autobiographical reflection Ballard restated explicitly in Miracles of Life, versatile Jamie in Empire of the Sun is ‘resented…for revealing an obvious truth about the war, that people were only too able to adapt to it’.⁶⁷ ‘It was not that war changed everything’, Ballard writes, ‘but that it left things the same in odd and unsettling ways’.⁶⁸ Or, as Watt wrote in 1959 in even more deflationary terms: ‘The commonest lesson of the prison camp, I think, is one that everybody really knows but does not like to admit: that survival, always a selfish business, gets more so when it is difficult.’⁶⁹

‘Perceptions of not really being alive’

This is a ‘lesson of the prison camp’ that resonates for decades in Watt’s criticism, as we find in his much later thoughts on Conrad and the purported moral benefits of suffering. Describing the end of Conrad’s ‘Narcissus’, in which the narrator recasts as a human triumph what the reader has already witnessed as a disastrous voyage marked by shipboard sickness, death, and social disintegration, Watt attributed to critics the ‘superstition’ that ‘in literature, at least, all suffering and error are automatically digested into maturity of understanding’ (C. 118); Hannah Arendt had used similar terms when she objected in The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) to ‘the superstition that something good might result from evil’.⁷⁰ Watt was writing specifically against humanist strategies of interpretation that ignored the peculiarly unearned optimism of Conrad’s ending, with its laudatory closing address to fellow seamen: ‘You were a good crowd,’ declares the captain of the Narcissus: ‘As good a crowd as ever fisted with wild cries the beating canvas of a heavy foresail; or tossing aloft, invisible in the night, gave back yell for yell to a westerly gale.’⁷¹ But this is almost a mutiny novel. The captain’s peroration is so far removed from the novel’s substance as to sound hollow if not delusional, and only the most uncomprehendingly optimistic could accept it at face value. Watt’s Conrad book is scathing about the consolatory tropes of this kind of criticism, as when he asks of the talismanic phrase ‘in the destructive element immerse’: ‘What can be more universally acceptable than a saying which announces that its user has survived his ritual immersion in life’s destructive traumas and has now emerged into the maturity of tragic acceptance?’ (C. 328). It is all part of what he calls a ‘hunger for a magical transformation of reality’ in much mid-century novel criticism as it strains to find evidence of protagonists’ final atonement or redemption (C. 339); or, for that matter, of their awakened self-knowledge, and, for Watt, the fetish of ‘self-knowledge’ is just ‘another of the modern secularised versions of the consolations which religion offers in the face of suffering, waste, and evil’ (C. 349).

When Watt derided what he and Arendt called ‘superstition’ about suffering and virtue, he participated in a much wider mid-century debunking of old truisms about the ennobling effects of pain. This was among the redemptive fictions exploded by those contemporaries of Watt who survived even worse forms of wartime imprisonment. ‘It goes without saying’, wrote Jean Améry, Austrian–Jewish member of the Belgian Resistance, ‘that in Auschwitz we did not become better, more human, more humane, and more mature ethically. You do not observe dehumanized man committing his deeds and misdeeds without having all of your notions of inherent human dignity placed in doubt.’⁷²

Among all the literature of mid-century imprisonments, Holocaust writing offers the most extended critique and, at the same time, defence of individualism. To evoke this body of work is emphatically not to suggest that the experience of prisoners in the Far East could ever be considered equivalent to what was done to Jewish contemporaries by Japan’s most powerful European ally. For a start, and completely unlike that of Jewish prisoners in Germany and the countries it occupied, the predicament that Watt shared with other Allied personnel had a comprehensible history and context, since the prisoner of war had for so long been a recognized feature of armed conflict. The OED dates the term’s first English usage to 1608 and its Middle French equivalent to 1475, although the prisoner of war as a historical fact may be about as old as warfare itself. The Japanese treated their prisoners of war as disposable labour, believing their very lives, to say nothing of human dignity and rights, to have no inherent value, but that manifestly is not the same situation as that of people actively intended to die. ‘There are no parallels to the life in the concentration camps,’ Arendt wrote: ‘Forced labor in prisons and penal colonies, banishment, slavery, all seem for a moment to offer helpful comparisons, but on closer examination lead nowhere.’⁷³ But Arendt, who had been imprisoned at the squalid concentration camp at Gurs, also shows that one can make descriptive comparisons that imply no false evaluative equivalences. She offers a taxonomy of camps in accordance with traditional notions of the afterlife: if the refugee or displaced person’s camp is Hades, then the gulag is Purgatory, and the Nazi camps were Hell, where cruelty was not an incidental feature of incarceration but a deliberately refined one. ‘All three types have one thing in common: the human masses sealed off in them are treated as if they no longer existed, as if what happened to them were no longer of any interest to anybody.’⁷⁴ Primo Levi likened his first hours in the camp to ‘being already dead’.⁷⁵ A prisoner of the Japanese wrote that the total severance ‘from our old world…creates perceptions of not being really alive’.⁷⁶

Margot Norris notes in her study of modern war writing that there are similarities between Holocaust experiences and other mid-century imprisonments—she names the civilian internees of the Japanese among them—but rightly proposes that any similarities inevitably stop with ‘the final phase’ of bureaucratized mass killings, which ‘bear no analogues’.⁷⁷ Strictly speaking, the closest parallel is probably to be found between the beginning of the Far East prisoners’ captivity, when many prisoners experienced the albeit highly relative normalcy of Changi, and the end of the Jewish prisoners’ incarceration, as documented in books like Levi’s The Truce/The Reawakening (1963), a world of material scarcity and antic theatrical productions in Red Army camps. (In a well-known interview with Levi, Germaine Greer likened the book to a ‘more sceptical, more pessimistic’ Robinson Crusoe.⁷⁸)

Yet some similar effects obtained across the multiple forms of mid-century imprisonment. I shall return to the social and moral effects, but the most obviously comparable of the physical and psychological effects are evidenced in descriptions of prisoners terminally shattered by the building of the Burma–Thailand Railway. Those in Ernest Gordon’s memoir of Chungkai, where he and Watt were incarcerated, are redolent of nothing so much as the concentration camp ‘Muselmann’: ‘a staggering corpse, a bundle of physical functions in its last convulsions,’ Améry recalled; Levi remembered them as ‘non-men who march and labour in silence, the divine spark dead within them, already too empty to really suffer’.⁷⁹ ‘One hesitates to call them living,’ Levi chillingly wrote: ‘one hesitates to call their death death.’⁸⁰ Gordon’s memoir likewise describes defunct human shells of slave labourers, whom starvation, exhaustion, and disease had rendered wholly oblivious to sensation and incapable of speech. ‘They seemed to have no centre left with which to hear and respond,’ Gordon remembered, and no one could ‘reach them’ as ‘they shuffled along in a grey, twilight existence, waiting for death’.⁸¹ ‘They had been killed in a way more fiendish than physical torture,’ he concluded: ‘They were dead before they stopped breathing.’⁸² Or, as the imprisoned medic Robert Hardie put it in his illicit diary, ‘they are so far gone that there is nothing to work on in attempting to save them’.⁸³ Reg Twigg remembered them with painful vividness: ‘I don’t think they felt anything. You knew by their eyes, they’d got nothing left. They were walking skeletons, blistered and ulcerated, their skin glistening with lesions and lacerations, their tongues thick in their mouth, their stares vacant.’⁸⁴ Prisoners called this last feature the ‘atap stare’, referring to the atap (nipa palm) leaves providing the prisoners with their rudimentary shelters, and it was a virtually catatonic form of withdrawal from which no one was expected to come back. The memoirs are haunted by the image of absolute self-loss these victims embodied.

Writing of a journey down-country with a group of these men, Durnford described them dying at his feet:

So imperceptible was the change, that there was little difference between those who passed as living and those who had died. Their faces drew into a piece of grey gristle, from which the eyes stood like those of wounded cattle. The hair was matted, and arms and legs so thin that they scarcely seemed to own the flesh. Only their bellies, swollen and distended with rice, showed grossly from the cage of bare ribs in which, somehow, beat a human heart…Without the muscular strength to sit upright they lolled against each other, their mouths hanging open without support. And no one in the boat spoke a single word.⁸⁵

Durnford contended that this monstrous spectacle must give the lie to the then-current identification of the reduction of people to things with purely European totalitarian ideologies. This was notoriously an era in which the human being was being ‘alienated and eradicated, altered and undone’, as Mark Greif put it in his study of mid-century thought, although this was happening not only across Europe.⁸⁶ Durnford described what he took to be the unthinking cruelty of a rehabilitation agency showing the newly liberated prisoners newsreels from Belsen and Buchenwald. ‘Somewhat unnecessarily’, Durnford thought, as if former prisoners of the Japanese did not know what (to borrow Levi’s famous phrase) ‘the demolition of a man’ actually looked like.⁸⁷

Durnford is an outlier here, however, because survivors of the Japanese camps were usually very careful to point out that their experience could not meaningfully be likened to the Holocaust—the incomparable horror of which they probably grasped better than most people in the years immediately after the war precisely because they had also experienced starvation, slave labour, and the fear of extermination. Among the saddest treatments of the problems of uneven comparison and sympathetic identification is the memoir of Loet Velmans, who, after a brief stay in London as a Jewish refugee from the occupied Netherlands, had ended up in the Dutch East Indies because it falsely looked to be the safest refuge, after the German invasion of his homeland early in 1940 and before the Japanese conquests of its colonies. Writing about his liberation from the Japanese camps in which he spent years, Velmans recalled hearing for the first time of the Nazi camps from a British officer, himself also Jewish: ‘We, who had considered ourselves hardened veterans and who thought that we had seen and lived through the worst, had great difficulty controlling our emotions. Most could not hold back their tears.’⁸⁸

Japanese ‘brutality did not approach the systematic Nazi torture and extermination of the Jews and others’, Watt stressed, even when ‘the fear of it was always there’.⁸⁹ The fear of extermination reached its height as the war drew to a close and the prisoners believed that they were going to be liquidated en masse in order to obliterate these most material of witnesses to Japanese war crimes; Korean camp guards had told them so, and Japanese orders to that effect were subsequently discovered on Formosa and Borneo.⁹⁰ Historian Clifford Kinvig writes that prisoners had ‘a very close call’.⁹¹ Writing in the mid-1990s, Watt’s friend Stephen Alexander was still referring to the last camp to which he was taken as ‘an extermination camp’, from which prisoners were ‘rescued by the atom bomb’; he recalled having been told by Korean guards that this was ‘the officer bumping-off camp’.⁹² Sir David Piper, after the war the director of the National Portrait Gallery, the Fitzwilliam in Cambridge, and the Ashmolean in Oxford—so another highly educated man—also wrote of ‘our inevitable liquidation’: the atomic bomb, he unequivocally declared, ‘had saved my life’.⁹³ Ballard told an interviewer the same in 1985 (and, so ‘far from being an instrument of death, the atomic bomb has become for me an instrument of protection’), and the fear of extermination is something he revisits constantly in his fiction.⁹⁴ Watt always believed that the Japanese command were intent on ‘liquidating all prisoners in fighting zones’, and thus ‘the atomic bomb had, incidentally, saved the lives of many thousands of Allied prisoners’.⁹⁵ But, even as they believed that they had survived a planned massacre, former prisoners of the Japanese were typically careful to avoid crude comparisons with even worse war-era imprisonments.

Graham Hough is an instructive case. A slightly older Cambridge acquaintance of Watt, Hough was captured as an ‘other rank’ rather than an officer; he, too, became a literary critic after the war, crediting the origins of his The Last Romantics (1949)—a survey of late Romantic thought running from John Ruskin to W. B. Yeats—to the fact that he had managed to hold on to his copy of Yeats all the way through captivity. The irony in this would not have been lost on Hough. Yeats’s notorious exclusion of First World War poetry from the 1936 Oxford Book of Modern Verse on the grounds that ‘passive suffering is not a theme for poetry’ must have been at the back of Watt’s mind when he proposed that ‘the actual life of a prisoner of war is probably the last subject in the world for fiction’.⁹⁶ Other than mentioning in his preface the origins of The Last Romantics, Hough typically avoided self-revelation in his critical writing as rigorously as Watt, but in a 1986 review of Ronald Searle’s drawings from the Japanese prison camps he recalled how, shortly after his release, he had found himself scrutinizing the newspaper photographs of the liberation of the Nazi camps:

Not all of it was unfamiliar. We looked on the pictures of individual survivors with a practised eye: this one might pull through; that one, no, he’s finished. But in respect of the sheer scale of the catastrophe, and its hideous deliberation, it was plain at once that we had known nothing like it. Those piles of shoes, those heaps of bodies, the ordered systematic massacre, were perhaps more horrifying to us who had seen other but lesser horrors than to those who had been spared them altogether. No one would talk of it. Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen.⁹⁷

Hough’s assignment was to review Searle’s drawings alongside the Polish underground fighter Gustav Herling’s memoir of the Soviet gulags, A World Apart. ‘Comparative ratings of suffering are always an impertinence,’ Hough declared, but nonetheless he was struck by the varieties of incarceration experience.⁹⁸ To the extent that any ‘comparative ratings’ are implied, his review suggests that Hough considered the gulag experience worse than what he had experienced in the Far East, but viewed the Holocaust as of a different order altogether. ‘Even the Japs didn’t do that sort of thing!’ is how Ian Denys Peek summed up one collective response to watching with his fellow ex-prisoners a film of the liberation of the Nazi camps: ‘We are shaken, disgusted, frightened—all this was happening while we were dying slowly on that accursed railway, and thinking we were having a hard time! Well, we were, but look what was going on in other places.’⁹⁹

Obviously, then, former prisoners of the Japanese were generally careful not to diminish the horror of the Holocaust with false identification (‘it was plain at once that we had known nothing like it’), perhaps because their interest in that experience as the terminally extreme version of their own was so deeply felt. This interest is not surprising, given how many similar concerns circulate across the different literatures of wartime imprisonment. In the context of individualism, what emerges most pressingly is their shared sense that customary moral distinctions have to be suspended. ‘It is difficult for those who consider the morality of this activity from the contented perspective of a full stomach and an unthreatened future to make a satisfactory judgment’, writes Kinvig, discussing the common prison-camp practice of stealing from the dead.¹⁰⁰ Writing by former prisoners in the Far East, like that of former inmates of the concentration camps, typically describes some type of adjustment—Levi wondered at what he called ‘an invaluable activity of adaptation’; Watt wrote of ‘silent and forgotten miracles of adaptation’—as they ask readers to understand why acts that are antisocial or shameful by pre-war or post-war standards cannot be understood outside of their context.¹⁰¹

Levi found the memorable phrase when he wrote of a ‘grey zone’, where customary moral judgements may no longer apply.¹⁰² But few people experienced or elaborated more brutally the gap between the intellectual acceptance of this fact and the emotional impossibility of living in accordance with its furthest implications than the young Polish political prisoner Tadeusz Borowski. In his horrifically self-lacerating story ‘This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentleman’, the narrator, who shares his author’s name, has the ‘privilege’ of unloading transports of Jewish prisoners for the gas chambers, and survives by stealing from them: his great fear is that the Nazis will ‘run out of people’.¹⁰³ (It is impossible not to wonder if his war experience had something to do with Borowski committing suicide by gas a few years later, at the age of only 28.) Levi explains that, because there was no way to live on what was given, the mere fact of a prisoner’s survival was already evidence that he or she had attained a ‘privilege’ that others lacked: ‘large or small, granted or conquered, astute or violent, licit or illicit—whatever it took to lift oneself above the norm’.¹⁰⁴ He regards the individualist scramble for advantage as simply a standard feature of all prison camps and not simply their most extreme iteration, the Nazi death camps; the ‘prominent’ prisoner is built into the brutally hierarchical structure of prison camps more generally, as ‘an indispensable component of camp sociology’.¹⁰⁵

Levi is equally explicit on what happens to human relationships when prisoners are confronted with a struggle to survive that divides them precisely because they share it. ‘One entered [the Lager] hoping at least for the solidarity of one’s companions in misfortune, but the hoped for allies, except in special cases, were not there; there were instead a thousand sealed off monads, and between them a desperate covert and continuous struggle,’ Levi wrote in The Drowned and the Saved: this was ‘a Hobbesian life, a continuous war of everyone against everyone’.¹⁰⁶ ‘The principal rule of the place’, Levi writes, ‘made it mandatory that you take care of yourself first of all’: ‘almost everybody feels guilty of having omitted to offer help. The presence at your side of a weaker—or less cunning, or older, or too young—companion, hounding you with his demands for help or with his simple presence, in itself an entreaty, is a constant in the life of the Lager.’¹⁰⁷ That same atmosphere of struggle and competition persists in Levi’s story of his return home, in which the most memorable characters are ruthlessly self-serving and entrepreneurial, distinguished from each other not according to their particular actions or relative degrees of moral culpability but with reference to Levi’s liking for each of them. Mordo Nahum is ‘a lone wolf, in an eternal war against all, old before his time, closed in the circle of his own joyless pride’, whereas the young Italian Cesare, ‘child of the sun’, receives comprehensive amnesty from Levi for all his thefts and swindles.¹⁰⁸

The moral atmosphere of the prison camp spills over into the fiction of the early post-war era. ‘I was interned near Tripoli in a camp where we suffered from thirst and destitution more than from brutality,’ recounts the ‘judge-penitent’ of Camus’s novel The Fall (1956): ‘I’ll not describe it to you. We children of the mid-century don’t need a diagram to imagine such places.’¹⁰⁹ The Fall is a novel about the guilt of witnessing someone else’s death: the guilt not of perpetrating an active killing but of a passive letting-die, it seems, when the narrator describes how he saw a woman fall from a bridge and made no attempt to save her from drowning. But at the end of the novel the narrator discloses how he stole the water of a dying comrade in a Libyan prison camp where the prevailing logic was ‘my life or yours’, to borrow a phrase from one of Watt’s early post-war stories about the Japanese camps.¹¹⁰ That merely ensuring one’s own survival means risking the lives of others is said outright in The Plague, when the narrator, Dr Rieux, learns that unstinting ‘vigilance’ is required never to be the cause of someone else’s death.¹¹¹ In a stunning reading of culpability in eighteenth-century fiction, Sandra Macpherson finds a form of tragedy there when she considers the emergent novel in relation to a contemporary legal logic based not on liberal concepts of contract, consent, and agency but on the principle of strict liability. According to strict liability, your intention is no longer relevant to a legal judgement; having hurt someone without ever consciously having wished him or her harm, you can be ‘responsible without being at fault’, both ‘innocent and to blame’.¹¹² If there is one question that mid-century incarceration writing also asks, it is how far we are responsible for the lives of others.

‘What care they to Die, that can’t tell how to Live?’

‘Everyone he had ever helped was still clinging to him,’ Ballard’s Jim resentfully notices, in a sentence that recalls Levi’s comments on the oppressive needs of weaker prisoners; Jim’s insight comes on the death march out of the Lunghua camp, when every prisoner is assessing the physical condition of everyone else, critically evaluating each exploitable other to find a potential instrument of personal survival.¹¹³ Imprisonment has turned everyone into a version of Robinson Crusoe, who, Watt wrote, sees other people only ‘in terms of their commodity value’ (RN 69), and tends ‘to judge his friends and acquaintances not as persons in themselves, but as objects he may be able to use for his own personal advantage’ (MMI 167).

These moral claims made by the weaker on anyone perceived to be likelier to survive are also the subject of one of the most developed of Watt’s stories about the camps. Titled in different papers either ‘The Ways of Guilt’ or ‘The Revenge of Mercy’, this story appears to have been written within a year or so of demobilization; the surviving manuscript is dated 9 February 1948, but references in correspondence indicate that it was already drafted at least as early as the previous summer.¹¹⁴ This is the text with which I bring this chapter to a close because it speaks so directly to the interests in individualism that Watt would address a decade later in The Rise of the Novel. As in his other stories, the biographical detail of Watt’s narrator follows Watt’s own even when the names are changed or (as here) simply not provided. The link between the two resembles that between Conrad and his second-self Marlow (Conrad’s ‘in part self-portrait’, Watt designated him (C. 19)), to name the literary model the stories follow most closely.

The narrator of ‘The Ways of Guilt’ is recalling, shortly after the war, his time as a junior officer at Chungkai. It is the summer of 1943, a year into the building of the railway, and parties of desperately sick men are being returned to the base camps in lower Thailand from the even worse camps up country. Other Chungkai memoirists also described this sickening spectacle. Jack Chalker remembered unloading barges full of the ‘dead, dying and desperately ill…few were recognizable and I cannot remember one conscious occupant who was able to speak’.¹¹⁵ For Chungkai’s commanding officer Cary Owtram, ‘only those of us who witnessed it as I did, not once but scores of times, could possibly visualize to what point the human body can suffer and still survive’.¹¹⁶

In this ‘scrap heap for everything the railway had smashed’, as Watt’s story calls Chungkai, ‘the struggle for existence fill[ed] the foreground’. The narrator cherishes his own illness for fear that, if he is thought anything less than deathly unwell, and therefore worthless to the Japanese, he will ‘be forced up the line again on one of those up-country drafts that terrorized the camp like the opening words of a death sentence’. The narrator is hailed by a foully dirty and emaciated body being carried on another soldier’s back; this is the ‘other rank’ Robinson, whom he has previously met in the makeshift Roberts Barracks hospital when Singapore fell. Robinson’s recognizing him leaves the narrator feeling obliged to look out for Robinson: not only because he is an officer, but also because, in a climate of every man for himself, he knows that if he does not help him then no one else will. The ‘guilt’ of the story’s title is overdetermined: the guilt of superior military rank, the guilt of being less deathly ill than some and yet cherishing his illness as his paradoxical best hope of staying alive, and, finally, the guilt at resenting the demands that Robinson’s need for acknowledgement places upon him.

For, increasingly, Robinson’s very existence imposes upon the narrator an unnamable burden—economic in the first instance, but plainly more than economic—that he does not wish to carry, rather like Levi as the liberation approaches and the camps are full of the sick and dying. ‘I felt like crying,’ Levi writes of the dying inmates who learned and called out his name: ‘I could have cursed them.’¹¹⁷ Nonetheless (and like Levi in the episode from which these lines come), Watt’s narrator feels that he must carry the burden of Robinson’s expectations anyhow, even as he knows that the natural outcome of prolonged exposure to one’s own and other people’s suffering is, as Watt crisply puts it, an ‘economy of feeling’. (It is a version of the phenomenon Defoe described in Journal of the Plague Year: ‘Mens Hearts were hardned, and Death was so always before their Eyes, that they did not so much concern themselves for the Loss of their Friends, expecting, that themselves should be summoned the next Hour.’¹¹⁸) Weak and dependent, Robinson wants help with everything, and, just as the Japanese have, once more, almost killed him at the start of the story by shoving him roughly off the cattle truck because he cannot climb down unaided, his own compatriots guarantee his death at the end when they ignore his cries for help. This is partly because they believe that Robinson could help himself, and partly because it feels dangerous in these circumstances to engage in any way with other people’s suffering. Many veterans of the camps attested to this sense that ‘the most valuable—and difficult—lesson you learn is not to get too close to anybody’.¹¹⁹ ‘Once you got started with sentimentality and grief you were a goner’ is how Alistair Urquhart recalled reproaching himself for helping a fellow prisoner on his deathbed.¹²⁰

Unlike his ironic namesake, Watt’s miserable Robinson cannot get over his need for the pity and acknowledgement of others (‘Poor Robin Crusoe’, indeed), and, to borrow from Watt’s account of the sailor dying on Conrad’s Narcissus, ‘he feels morally entitled to any power or privilege he can extort from his suffering’ (C. 107).¹²¹ In this respect Robinson is not unusual, since, as the narrator explains, ‘we were all sick, or recovering from sickness: everyone felt he was entitled to special consideration’. But, if every prisoner is by definition a victim of his terrible circumstances, Robinson’s primary sense of himself as one cruelly guarantees his continued victimization at the hands of the other prisoners, who instinctively resent the claims he makes on their own slender emotional resources. Robinson believes the other prisoners have taken an incomprehensible dislike to him, but the narrator understands it perfectly. ‘Of course they had a down on him,’ he thinks: ‘No one could stand the strain of dealing with someone who made such large demands on the little pity we could spare from ourselves.’ The narrator tries to explain to Robinson that he will need to take the initiative in order to save his own life—‘Everything’s up to you’—but he knows that Robinson is not listening. And so Robinson dies, and his death does not matter at the time, even if it comes to haunt the narrator after the war because of what it has shown him about himself, and about others.

In what is apparently meant to be a rhetorical question, Moll Flanders asks, ‘what care they to Die, that can’t tell how to Live?’¹²² She dismisses as humanly irrelevant the deaths of the abject poor, who have proved incapable of looking out for themselves as she looks out for herself. Robinson is one of the incapable. Watt’s narrator describes how camp inmates would stay in their huts rather than have to make the effort to stand to attention while others carried to the burial ground ‘those who had failed to survive’—a brutal phrasing, characterizing these prisoners’ deaths as no more than the final confirmation of their personal unfitness for life. However broken after their terrible and unforeseen reversals, most of the Chungkai prisoners have picked themselves up and adopted (in Conrad’s phrase) ‘the great mental occupation of wishing to live’.¹²³ The fitter prisoners who can still be bothered looking out for more debilitated others can bring themselves to care only for those who are willing to help themselves; these albeit reluctant caretakers are at least ‘rewarded’, Watt writes, ‘with the unreasoning vigor of their [patients’] urge to live’. For capturing Watt’s unsparing view of Robinson Crusoe and Moll Flanders there could hardly be a better phrase than ‘unreasoning vigour of their urge to live’: Defoe’s victims of an indifferent and unpredictable modern fate command our sympathetic attention not because they suffer but because they survive.

¹ Defoe, Moll Flanders, 58.

² Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, In the First Circle, trans. Harry Willets (New York: Harper Collins, 2009), 261.

³ Doody, The True Story of the Novel, 24. See also her reading of Roman art, with its ‘interest in the inward and the personal’; these are figures who ‘look reflective, self-involved or self-questioning’; ‘we cannot help feeling that here are people capable of internal reflection, of introspection—like the characters in the novels, in fact’ (25).

⁴ McKeon, Origins of the English Novel, see esp. 21, 419.

⁵ D. A. Miller, The Novel and the Police (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1988), 82. Deidre Shauna Lynch, The Economy of Character: Novels, Market Culture, and the Business of Inner Meaning (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 1–20.

⁶ Armstrong, How Novels Think, 3.

⁷ Hunter, Before Novels, 40.

⁸ Virginia Woolf, The Common Reader, First Series (Orlando, FL: Harcourt, 1984), 89, 90, 90. E. M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel (San Diego: Harcourt, 1955), 56, 57, 58.

⁹ Srividhya Swaminathan, ‘Defoe’s Alternative Conduct Manual: Survival Strategies and Female Networks in Moll Flanders’, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, 15/2 (January 2003), 185–206. Melissa Mowry, ‘Women, Work, Rearguard Politics, and Defoe’s Moll Flanders’, Eighteenth Century, 49/2 (Summer 2008), 97–116.

¹⁰ Bertolt Brecht, Mother Courage and her Children: A Chronicle of the Thirty Years’ War, trans. Eric Bentley (New York: Grove, 1991), 25.

¹¹ Watt, ‘The Recent Critical Fortunes of Moll Flanders’, 126.

¹² Defoe, Moll Flanders, 219–20.

¹³ Durnford, Branch Line to Burma, 126.

¹⁴ Graham Hough, ‘Prisoners’, London Review of Books, 8 May 1986, 8.

¹⁵ Bourke, Prisoners of the Japanese, 28–9.

¹⁶ Braddon, End of a Hate, 17.

¹⁷ Rivett, Behind Bamboo, 279–91; Gordon, Miracle on the River Kwai, 165–6. Meg Parkes and Geoff Gill from the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine, where many former prisoners were treated after the war, review medical conditions in the camps and the improvisations that helped to relieve them in Captive Memories: Starvation, Disease, Survival (Lancaster: Palatine Books, 2015), 94–144.

¹⁸ Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe (London: Penguin, 2003), 55.

¹⁹ Braddon, The Naked Island, 228.

²⁰ James Clavell, King Rat (New York: Delta, 1999), 469, 8.

²¹ Clavell, King Rat, 275.

²² William H. McDougall Jr, By Eastern Windows: The Story of a Battle of Souls and Minds in the Prison Camps of Sumatra (London: Arthur Barker, 1951), 192.

²³ Piotr Rawicz, Blood from the Sky, trans. Peter Wiles (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 89.

²⁴ Leo Rawlings, And the Dawn Came up like Thunder (Newcastle upon Tyne: Myrmidon, 2015), 126.

²⁵ Conrad, Lord Jim, 32; ellipsis added.

²⁶ Watt, ‘A Chap in Dark Glasses’.

²⁷ In ‘Reunion on the Kwai’, for instance, Thai civilians whom Watt met as he awaited repatriation remember him decades later for wearing dark glasses day and night. Ian Watt, ‘Reunion on the Kwai’, Southern Review, 5 (1969), 714–15.

²⁸ McDougall, By Eastern Windows, 186.

²⁹ This is on a piece of scrap paper headed ‘King Rat’. Stanford University Special Collections, SC401-ACCN 1994-106, Box 22, Folder ‘Siam Notes’.

³⁰ Ian Watt, ‘Kings, Rats, and Opticians’, Stanford University Special Collections, SC401-ACCN 1994-106, Box 23, Folder 9.

³¹ Alexsandr Solzhenitsyn, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, trans. H. T. Willetts (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2005), 131.

³² Defoe, Moll Flanders, 294, 295.

³³ Defoe, Moll Flanders, 313.

³⁴ Robert Alter, Rogue’s Progress: Studies in the Picaresque Novel (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965), 49.

³⁵ Clavell, King Rat, 487.

³⁶ Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 102.

³⁷ J. G. Ballard, Miracles of Life: Shanghai to Shepperton: An Autobiography (London: Harper Perennial, 2008), 82.

³⁸ Ballard, ‘1986: Solveig Nordlund’, 225. On Ballard’s different versions of his imprisonment, see Roger Luckhurst, ‘Petition, Repetition, and “Autobiography” ’, Contemporary Literature, 35/4 (Winter 1994), 688–708.

³⁹ Daws, Prisoners of the Japanese, 23. Brian MacArthur, Surviving the Sword: Prisoners of the Japanese in the Far East, 1942–45 (New York: Random House, 2005), xxvii.

⁴⁰ Daws, Prisoners of the Japanese, 23.

⁴¹ J. G. Ballard, Empire of the Sun (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2005), 69.

⁴² Daws, Prisoners of the Japanese, 147, 311.

⁴³ Whitecross, Slaves of the Son of Heaven, 199. Daws confirms Whitecross’s claim that British and Australian prisoners were disgusted by this ‘American’ practice (Prisoners of the Japanese, 309).

⁴⁴ Piper, I Am Well, Who Are You?, 23.

⁴⁵ Although I use the term only figuratively, cannibalism featured in the Pacific War, as when Japanese troops invaded (and were left to die on) islands that could not support them. Lizzie Collingham treats the issue with restraint in her impressive food history of the war, The Taste of War: World War II and the Battle for Food (London: Penguin, 2011), 297–300.

⁴⁶ Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, 148.

⁴⁷ Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, 123.

⁴⁸ John Richetti, The English Novel in History, 1700–1780 (London: Routledge, 1999), 67.

⁴⁹ Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents, trans. James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1961), 69.

⁵⁰ Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, 39, 122.

⁵¹ William V. Spanos, In the Neighborhood of Zero: A World War II Memoir (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2010), 67.

⁵² Spanos, In the Neighborhood of Zero, 87–9. Terrence Des Pres recounts similar stories from camps and gulags where a bread-thief is beaten up, murdered, or in some unspecified other way ‘punished…so severely that he lost his taste for stealing’ (Terrence des Pres, The Survivor: An Anatomy of Life in the Death Camps (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), 140–2).

⁵³ Ballard, Empire of the Sun, 166.

⁵⁴ Daws, Prisoners of the Japanese, 19.

⁵⁵ Albert Camus, The Plague, trans. Stuart Gilbert (New York: Vintage, 1991), 182.

⁵⁶ Ballard, Empire of the Sun, 62.

⁵⁷ Ballard, Miracles of Life, 94.

⁵⁸ Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, 153.

⁵⁹ Daphne Jackson, Java Nightmare (Padstow: Tabb House, 1979), 77.

⁶⁰ Quoted in Novak, Daniel Defoe, 232.

⁶¹ J. G. Ballard, The Kindness of Women (New York: Picador, 1991), 8.

⁶² Ballard, Miracles of Life, 20.

⁶³ J. G. Ballard, The Drowned World (London: Fourth Estate, 2014), 48.

⁶⁴ Forster, Aspects of the Novel, 56–7.

⁶⁵ J. G. Ballard, Concrete Island (New York: Picador, 2001), 43.

⁶⁶ Ballard, Concrete Island, 141.

⁶⁷ Ballard, Empire of the Sun, 163. Ballard wrote in Miracles of Life: ‘In many ways I was the opposite of a misfit, and adapted too well to the camp’ (81).

⁶⁸ Ballard, Empire of the Sun, 46.

⁶⁹ Watt, ‘Bridges over the Kwai’, 218.

⁷⁰ Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (Orlando, FL: Harcourt, 1979), 442. Watt and Arendt knew each other in the 1970s because they both served on the taskforce that led to the creation of the National Humanities Center. See Watt, ‘The Humanities on the River Kwai’, 12.

⁷¹ Joseph Conrad, The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ and Other Stories (London: Penguin, 2007), 136.

⁷² Jean Améry, At the Mind’s Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and its Realities, trans. Sidney Rosenfeld and Stella P. Rosenfeld (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980), 20.

⁷³ Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, 444.

⁷⁴ Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, 445.

⁷⁵ Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz: The Nazi Assault on Humanity, trans. Stuart Woolf (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996), 22.

⁷⁶ Peek, One Fourteenth, 478.

⁷⁷ Margot Norris, Writing War in the Twentieth Century (Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 2000), 117; emphasis in original.

⁷⁸ Primo Levi, ‘Germaine Greer Talks to Primo Levi’, in Primo Levi, The Voice of Memory: Interviews 1961–87, ed. Marco Belpoliti and Robert Gordon, trans. Robert Gordon (Cambridge: Polity, 2001), 6.

⁷⁹ Améry, At the Mind’s Limits, 9. Levi, Survival in Auschwitz, 90.

⁸⁰ Levi, Survival in Auschwitz, 90.

⁸¹ Gordon, Miracle on the River Kwai, 183.

⁸² Gordon, Miracle on the River Kwai, 183–4.

⁸³ Robert Hardie, The Burma–Siam Railway (London: Imperial War Museum, 1983), 91.

⁸⁴ Twigg, Survivor on the River Kwai, 160.

⁸⁵ Durnford, Branch Line to Burma, 116–17.

⁸⁶ Greif, The Age of the Crisis of Man, 3.

⁸⁷ Durnford, Branch Line to Burma, 196. Levi, Survival in Auschwitz, 26.

⁸⁸ Loet Velmans, Long Way back to the River Kwai: Memories of World War II (New York: Arcade, 2003), 186.

⁸⁹ Watt, ‘The Liberty of the Prison’, 523.

⁹⁰ MacArthur, Surviving the Sword, 383. See also Jack Chalker, Burma Railway: Images of War: The Original War Drawings of Japanese POW Jack Chalker (Shepton Mallet: Mercer Books, 2007), 119–20.

⁹¹ Kinvig, River Kwai Railway, 191.

⁹² Alexander, Sweet Kwai, 2, 2, 208.

⁹³ Piper, I Am Well, Who Are You?, 13, 21.

⁹⁴ J. G. Ballard, ‘1985: Tony Cartano and Maxim Jakubowski. The Past Tense of J. G. Ballard’, in Ballard, Extreme Metaphors, 222. Empire of the Sun includes a death march that never happened; ‘The Dead Time’ alludes to ‘rumours we had heard that before they surrendered the Japanese planned to slaughter their civilian prisoners’ (J. G. Ballard, ‘The Dead Time’, in The Complete Stories of J. G. Ballard (New York: Norton, 2009), 927). The Ballard character in The Kindness of Women recalls learning from war crimes trials that the Japanese planned to move their prisoners up-country where ‘they would have been free to dispose of us’ (60–1).

⁹⁵ Watt, ‘The Liberty of the Prison’, 514.

⁹⁶ W. B. Yeats (ed.), The Oxford Book of Modern Verse, 1892–1935 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1936), xxxiv. Watt, ‘Bridges over the Kwai’, 218.

⁹⁷ Hough, ‘Prisoners’, 8.

⁹⁸ Hough, ‘Prisoners’, 8.

⁹⁹ Peek, One Fourteenth, 648.

¹⁰⁰ Kinvig, River Kwai Railway, 97.

¹⁰¹ Levi, Survival in Auschwitz, 56. Ian Watt, ‘The Ways of Guilt’, Stanford University Special Collections, SC401-ACCN 1990-131, Box 56, Folder ‘Revenge of Mercy’.

¹⁰² Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (New York: Vintage, 1989), 36–69.

¹⁰³ Tadeusz Borowski, This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen, trans. Barbara Vedder (London: Penguin, 1976), 31.

¹⁰⁴ Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, 41. Levi describes the camps’ black-market economy in the chapter titled ‘This Side of Good and Evil’ in Survival in Auschwitz, 77–86.

¹⁰⁵ Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, 99.

¹⁰⁶ Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, 38, 34.

¹⁰⁷ Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, 79, 78.

¹⁰⁸ Primo Levi, The Reawakening, trans. Stuart Woolf (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995), 80.

¹⁰⁹ Albert Camus, The Fall, trans. Justin O’Brien (New York: Vintage, 1991), 123.

¹¹⁰ Watt, ‘The Ways of Guilt’.

¹¹¹ Camus, The Plague, 253.

¹¹² Sandra Macpherson, Harm’s Way: Tragic Responsibility and the Novel Form (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), 9, 12.

¹¹³ Ballard, Empire of the Sun, 194.

¹¹⁴ The story is described in a 10 June 1947 letter from a ‘Mark S’ at the University of California, Berkeley—almost certainly Mark Schorer—whose advice Watt appears to have sought.

¹¹⁵ Chalker, Burma Railway, 74.

¹¹⁶ Owtram, 1000 Days on the River Kwai, 67.

¹¹⁷ Levi, Survival in Auschwitz, 166.

¹¹⁸ Daniel Defoe, A Journal of the Plague Year (London: Penguin, 2003), 18.

¹¹⁹ Twigg, Survivor on the River Kwai, 254.

¹²⁰ Urquhart, The Forgotten Highlander, 168.

¹²¹ Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, 113; emphasis in original. Watt’s reading of James Wait is relevant here: ‘pity…may seem to be based on a wholly altruistic concern for the welfare of others, but in reality it is intimately connected with the individual’s unconscious fear of his own sickness and death’ (C. 109).

¹²² Defoe, Moll Flanders, 255.

¹²³ Conrad, The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’, 65. Another contemporary manuscript (dated September 1946) offers a more fable-like treatment of resilience. Japanese guards have locked up a working-class soldier to die in a Tamil cholera hut. Watt’s undaunted Bob Dawkes escapes and makes his way back to his camp: he has had no food or water, and was surrounded by dying labourers, and yet he tells his comrades in the story’s final line that at least he had ‘me fag-paper and me lighter—I could’ave a roll when I felt like it’. Watt’s epigraph is from The Bhagavad Gita: ‘The strangest thing is that a man, seeing others die, does not think that he will die’ (Ian Watt, ‘The Strangest Thing’, Stanford University Special Collections, SC401-ACCN 1990-131, Box 56, Folder ‘The Strangest Thing’).