It is as reasonable to represent one kind of imprisonment by another as it is to represent anything that really exists by that which exists not
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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“It is as reasonable to represent one kind of imprisonment by another as it is to represent anything that really exists by that which exists not.” ― Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe (epigraph to The Plague) "In France the best recent allegory of man’s resistance against the power of evil, and the evil of power is Albert Camus’s The Plague. The symbol there is again the city — a plague-stricken city, and Camus takes his justification for this use of allegory from our own Daniel Defoe — from that Robinson Crusoe which he once described as an allegory of his own life. “It is as reasonable to represent one kind of imprisonment by another,” wrote Defoe, “as it is to represent anything that really exists by that which exists not.”--An Assessment Of Twentieth Century Literature (1951) by Isaacs J
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"It is as reasonable to represent one kind of imprisonment by another as it is to represent anything that really exists by that which exists not" is a dictum by Daniel Defoe recorded in the preface of the third volume of Robinson Crusoe.
Fuller fragment:
- "In like manner, when in these reflections I speak of the times and circumstances of particular actions done, or incidents which happened, in my solitude and island-life, an impartial reader will be so just to take it as it is; viz. that is spoken or intended of that part of the real story which the island-life is a just allusion to ; and in this the story is not only illustrated, but the real part I think most justly approved. For example, in the latter part of this work called the Vision, I begin thus : "When I was in my island-kingdom I had abundance of strange notions of my seeing apparitions," &c. All these reflections are just history of a state of forced confinement, which in my real history is represented by a confined retreat in an island ; and it is as reasonable to represent one kind of imprisonment by another, as it is to represent anything that really exists by that which exists not. The story of my fright with something on my bed was word for word a history of what happened, and indeed all those things received very little alteration, except what necessarily attends removing the scene from one place to another."
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