Wars of words are always confusing. So, let’s re-read that passage from Robinson Crusoe: ‘I began to apply myself to make such necessary things as I found I most wanted, particularly a chair and a table; for without these I was not able to enjoy the few comforts I had in the world; I could not write or eat, or do several things, with so much pleasure without a table.’70 From ‘necessary’ to ‘comforts’ and ‘pleasure’, from ‘wanted’ to ‘enjoy’ in fifty-six words: a modulation so rapid that it seems to confirm Mandeville’s sarcasm, or the OED’s non-committal definition of ‘necessaries on the one hand, and luxuries on the other’. But if we look at Robinson’s actual comforts, the notion loses its supposed equidistance: writing, eating, and ‘doing several things’ with a table are all things clearly inclining towards necessity—and with absolutely no relationship to luxury. Luxury is always somewhat out of the ordinary; comfort, never; whence the profound common sense of its pleasures, so different from luxury’s perverse delight in being ‘ornate, grotesque, inconvenient . . . to the point of distress’, as Veblen ferociously put it in Theory of the Leisure Class;71 less caustic, but just as trenchant, Braudel dismissed ancien régime luxury as ‘all the more false’, because ‘it was not always accompanied by what we would call comfort. Heating was still poor, ventilation derisory.’72
Comfort, as everyday necessities made pleasant.Within this new horizon, an aspect of the original meaning of the term returns to the surface. ‘Relief’, ‘aid’, ‘sustenance’ from ‘want, pain, sickness’, the word used to mean. Centuries later, the need for relief has returned: this time though, not relief from sickness but from—work. It’s striking how many of the modern comforts address the need that from work most directly arises: rest. (The first comfort that Robinson wishes for—poor man—is a chair.)73 It is this proximity to work that makes comfort ‘permissible’ for the Protestant ethic; well-being, yes; but one that doesn’t seduce you away from your calling, because it remains too sober and modest to do so. Much too modest, retort some recent historians of capitalism; much too sober to play a significant role in the precipitous changes of modern history. Comfort indicates those desires ‘that could be satiated’, writes Jan de Vries, and that therefore have in-built limitations; to explain the open-endedness of the ‘consumer revolution’, and of the later economic take-off, we must turn instead to the ‘volatile “daydreams of desire”’,74 or the ‘maverick spirit of fashion’75 first noticed by the economists of Defoe’s generation. The eighteenth century, concludes Neil McKendrick, with a formulation that leaves no conceptual room for comfort, is the age when ‘the dictate of need’ was superseded once and for all by ‘the dictate of fashion’.76
Fashion instead of comfort, then? In one respect, the alternative is clearly groundless, as both have contributed to shape modern consumer culture. What is true, however, is that they have done so in different ways, and with opposite class connotations. Already active within court society, and preserving to this day a halo of hauteur, and indeed of luxury, fashion appeals to the bourgeoisie that wants to go beyond itself, and resemble the old ruling class; comfort remains down to earth, prosaic; its aesthetics, if there is such a thing, is understated, functional, adapted to the everyday, and even to work.77 This makes comfort less visible than fashion, but infinitely more capable of permeating the interstices of existence; a knack for dissemination that it shares with those other typical eighteenth-century commodities—they, too, somewhere in between necessaries and luxuries—that are coffee and tobacco, chocolate and spirits. Genussmittel, as the German word goes: ‘means of pleasure’ (and in that ‘means’ one hears the unmistakable echo of instrumental reason). ‘Stimulants’, as they will also be called, with another striking semantic choice: little shocks that punctuate the day and the week with their delights, fulfilling the eminently ‘practical function’ of securing ‘the individual more effectively into his society because they give him pleasure’.78
The accomplishment of Genussmittel, writes Wolfgang Schivelbusch, ‘sounds like a paradox’: Arbeit-im-Genuss, reads his definition: work, mixed with pleasure. It’s the same paradox as that of comfort, and for the same reason: during the seventeenth and eighteenth century, two equally powerful but completely contradictory sets of values came simultaneously into being: the ascetic imperative of modern production—and the desire for enjoyment of a rising social group. Comfort and Genussmittel managed to forge a compromise between these opposite forces. A compromise, not a true solution: the initial contrast was too sharp for that. So, Mandeville was right about the ambiguity of ‘comfort’; what he missed, was that ambiguity was precisely the point of the term. At times, that is the best that language can do.
6. PROSE I: ‘THE RHYTHM OF CONTINUITY’
By foreshadowing Robinson’s actions before they occur, I wrote a few pages ago, final clauses structure the relationship between present and future—I do this, in order to do that—through the lenses of ‘instrumental reason’. Nor is this limited to Robinson’s deliberate planning. Here he is, immediately after the shipwreck: the most calamitous and unexpected moment of his entire life. And yet, he walks
about a furlong from the shore, to see if I could find any fresh water to drink, which I did, to my great joy; and having drank, and put a little tobacco in my mouth to prevent hunger, I went to the tree, and getting up into it, endeavored to place myself so as that if I should sleep I might not fall; and having cut me a short stick, like a truncheon, for my defense, I took up my lodging.79
He goes ‘to see’ if there is water ‘to drink’; then he chews tobacco ‘to prevent hunger’, places himself ‘so as’ not to fall, and cuts a stick ‘for [his] defense’. Short-term teleology everywhere, as if it were a second nature. And then, alongside this forward-leaning grammar of final clauses, a second choice makes its appearance, inclining in the opposite temporal direction: an extremely rare verb form—the past gerund: ‘and having drank . . . and having put . . . and having cut . . .’—which becomes in Robinson Crusoe both more frequent and more significant than elsewhere.80 Here are a few examples from the novel:
Having fitted my mast and sail, and tried the boat, I found she would sail very well . . .
Having secured my boat, I took my gun and went on shore . . .
. . . the wind having abated overnight, the sea was calm, and I ventured . . .
Конец