Robinson Crusoe: legacies that must be displaced
2019 marks 300 years since the publication of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, or, to use the full title: The life and strange surprizing adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of York, mariner: who lived eight and twenty years all alone in an un-inhabited island on the coast of America, near the mouth of the great river of Oroonoque; Having been cast on Shore by Shipwreck, wherein all the Men perished but himself. With an Account how he was at last as strangely deliver'd by Pyrates. Written by himself.
Robinson Crusoe was a great commercial success for its publisher William Taylor, who published three subsequent editions of the book by hitherto political journalist and pamphleteer Defoe, as well as The farther adventures, a sequel, in the same year of 1719. Michael Schmidt, in The Novel : a biography (2014), outlines Robinson Crusoe’s success: “released on April 25, it was reprinted seventeen days later, again after twenty-five more days, then again on August 8.” Claiming to be autobiography, the book did not name Defoe.
The 32 Robinson Crusoe items held by Sir George Grey Special Collections are indicative of the multitude of adaptations and re-imaginings of the story, and its enduring legacies.
The third edition of the book, and the sequel, both published in 1719, entered Sir George Grey Special Collections in 1980, when Georgia Prince, now Principal Curator Printed Collections, purchased them at rare books store Caravaggio’s in High Street. We don’t know how these came to be in Tāmaki Makaurau.
The preface to the third edition affirms the following:
The fakeness of Robinson Crusoe seems to have become a target of parody in another influential early English novel of travel and adventure published seven years later in 1726: Travels into several remote nations of the world : in four parts : to which are prefix'd, several copies of verses explanatory and commendatory, never before printed. Leo Damrosch quotes the declaration of “the publisher” at the beginning of Jonathan Swift’s novel, best known as Gulliver’s Travels,
There is an air of truth apparent through the whole; and indeed the author was so distinguished for his veracity that it became a sort of proverb among his neighbours at Redriff, when any one affirmed a thing, to say it was as true as if Mr. Gulliver had spoke it (2013: 362)
In The life of Daniel Defoe (2015), John Richetti suggests that Defoe’s inspiration for Robinson Crusoe was the story of Alexander Selkirk. After being marooned, Selkirk spent four years alone on Más a Tierra (now Isla Robinson Crusoe), off the coast of Chile. Sir George Grey Special Collections holds one account of Selkirk’s experience—Edward Cook’s A Voyage to the South Sea, and round the world (1712).
As fictional as Crusoe may be, he has nonetheless significantly shaped what European readers have believed to be true. “In Robinson Crusoe”, Richetti writes, “Defoe conceives a character of archetypical significance, with deep and abiding resonances for modern European self-consciousness” (2015: 185). For Richetti, Crusoe
is, although reluctantly, the ultimate individualist, the man alone, surviving by his wits and relying very quickly as a slave in Morocco on his own resourcefulness, and as such he is a type of modern man, the self-constructed individual who exists (somehow) outside of the social or communal world. With a few other characters such as Don Quixote, Hamlet, and Faust, Crusoe has thus passed into the collective understanding of western humanity (2015: 185).
This survival by wits is written through one of the innovations of Defoe’s novel: its detailed descriptions of the unfolding circumstances in which the narrator finds himself. On Defoe’s method, the contemporary South African-Australian novelist and critic J.M. Coetzee writes admiringly,
For page after page—for the first time in the history of fiction—we see a minute, ordered description of how things are done. It is a matter of pure writerly attentiveness, pure submission to the exigencies of a world which, by being submitted to in a state so close to spiritual absorption, becomes transfigured, real” (Stranger shores, 2001: 24).
Richetti discusses the significance of such detailed description of circumstances,
Defoe’s hero marks the ultimate proposition, basic to the new species of narrative called the novel, that personality is developed by and within circumstances… the idea that identity is developed in experience rather than chosen by an act of moral will or somehow imposed by social status and destiny is a revolutionary idea, an Enlightenment notion that the novel as a genre helps to promulgate as a fundamental assumption about human nature (2015: 196)
Through the very particular circumstances of life on the island, Crusoe undergoes—or actively undertakes—a religious transformation. Several commentators, including Schmidt, note a “scriptural” pattern in the book, “temptation, counsel, wrong action, recognition, acceptance of punishment, repentance, and restitution expressed in worldly terms” (2014: 75). Richetti identifies “two parallel narrative tracks” (2015: 188)—secular and religious, that compete as Crusoe attempts to make meaning out of his situation. In relation to this Richetti discusses how, in his introspection, Crusoe thinks through debates of Defoe’s day. These include the relation between God’s “Providence” (a concept that evolves through the story) and what today we might call human or individual agency. The book’s treatment of this and other questions, Richetti suggests, led to the development of the novel as that form “located at the intersection of popular or demotic journalism… and the serious periodic essay” (2015: 203).
Crusoe is an archetypical colonist. Furthermore, when he was shipwrecked on the island, Crusoe was part of a crew bound for West Africa to enslave people for his and others’ plantations in Brazil. Of the relation between Crusoe and his slave and companion Friday, who he eventually meets on the island, Schmidt writes of the book’s ideological effects, “For two centuries and more this picture of subordination in one of the most popular novels ever written seemed to reflect a natural order”, and that the “matter-of-fact” first-person narration “establishes stereotypes through which whole cultures and peoples were viewed” (2014: 74). Such a destructive picture was embedded particularly through the popularity of Robinson Crusoe as a children’s book: “The stereotypes were imprinted on the Anglophone reader from childhood” (2014: 74).
Thus, among the legacies of Robinson Crusoe are those feeding into three linked strands; the development of the novel as a literary form, the emergence of the modern European (male) subject or individual, and the grievous histories of slavery and colonialism. This suggests that this character and story are deeply woven or knotted into our contemporary world. If so, any engagement with the novel today must consider the historical contexts of its production, as well as alter or displace the story in a deeply critical mode.
Among the many critical re-imaginings of Robinson Crusoe is French novelist Michel Tournier’s Vendredi, ou les limbes du Pacifique (1967), the English translation of which, Friday or the Other Island (1974), is held in Auckland Libraries’ general collection. Gerald Bruns writes in On ceasing to be human that in Defoe’s story, Crusoe’s “construction of a human economy from degree zero (his ‘civilizing’ of the island) is a parable of self-justification, an assertion of rational autonomy” (2011: 23). In Tournier’s story, by contrast, in the absence of other people, Crusoe ceases to be human, a change indicated by the fact that the ship’s dog no longer acknowledges him. “The question [Tournier’s] novel raises”, writes Bruns, “is whether this cessation is altogether a bad thing” (2011: 24).
St Lucian poet and playwright Derek Walcott’s play ‘Pantomime’ (1980) humorously dramatises a nuanced sequence of reversals and displacements of the relation between Crusoe and Friday. Crusoe and Friday also feature in Walcott’s poems in his collection The Castaway (1965).
J.M. Coetzee’s novel Foe (1986) is narrated by an additional castaway on the island—Susan Barton. Barton, Friday and Cruso (spelt without the “e”) are rescued from the island, but only Barton and a mute Friday (his tongue having been cut out) survive the journey back to London. There, Barton relays her story in letters to the great (but elusive and financially troubled) writer, Daniel Foe, so that he can tell the story of the castaways. The version of Barton’s story that Foe would like to tell differs from her own, and Friday’s story is marked as absent.
The short story He and His Man, which is included in Coetzee’s book Three Stories (2014), entails a complex interplay of narrator and narrated, between a Defoe travelling widely through Britain, an elderly Crusoe living alone in Bristol, and, by implication, Coetzee himself. He and His Man also draws on Defoe’s A Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain, of which Sir George Grey Special Collections holds a copy from 1769, and A Journal of the Plague Year.
Visit the Heritage Collections reading room during December to view the 1719 third edition of The life and strange surprizing adventures of Robinson Crusoe, on display in the Real Gold case with its sequel, The farther adventures and Edward Cook's A voyage to the South Sea (1712).
You can also listen to rare book specialist Georgia Prince discuss the book and the story behind its publication on our Real Gold podcast, and view more plates on Kura Heritage Collections Online.
Listen to the track here
J.M. Coetzee. Stranger Shores: essays, 1986-1999. London: Secker and Warburg, 2001.
J.M. Coetzee. Three Stories. Melbourne: The Text Publishing Company, 2014.
J.M. Coetzee. Foe. London: Secker & Warburg, 1986.
Leo Damrosch. Jonathan Swift: his life and world. New Haven, Conneticut: Yale University Press, 2013.
Daniel Defoe. The life and strange surprizing adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of York, mariner: who lived eight and twenty years all alone in an un-inhabited island on the coast of America, near the mouth of the great river of Oroonoque; Having been cast on Shore by Shipwreck, wherein all the Men perished but himself. With an Account how he was at last as strangely deliver’d by Pyrates. Written by himself., 1719.
John Richetti. The Life of Daniel Defoe. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2015.
Michael Schmidt. The Novel: a biography. Harvard University Press, 2014.
Michel Tournier. Friday or the Other Island, 1974.
Derek Walcott. Remembrance: And, Pantomime. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1980.
Derek Walcott. The Castaway. 1980.
 |
| Title page from: Daniel Defoe. The life and strange surprizing adventures of Robinson Crusoe. 1719. Auckland Libraries Heritage Collections. |
Robinson Crusoe was a great commercial success for its publisher William Taylor, who published three subsequent editions of the book by hitherto political journalist and pamphleteer Defoe, as well as The farther adventures, a sequel, in the same year of 1719. Michael Schmidt, in The Novel : a biography (2014), outlines Robinson Crusoe’s success: “released on April 25, it was reprinted seventeen days later, again after twenty-five more days, then again on August 8.” Claiming to be autobiography, the book did not name Defoe.
The 32 Robinson Crusoe items held by Sir George Grey Special Collections are indicative of the multitude of adaptations and re-imaginings of the story, and its enduring legacies.
The third edition of the book, and the sequel, both published in 1719, entered Sir George Grey Special Collections in 1980, when Georgia Prince, now Principal Curator Printed Collections, purchased them at rare books store Caravaggio’s in High Street. We don’t know how these came to be in Tāmaki Makaurau.
The preface to the third edition affirms the following:
 |
| From: Daniel Defoe. The life and strange surprizing adventures of Robinson Crusoe. 1719. Auckland Libraries Heritage Collections. |
 |
| From: Daniel Defoe. The life and strange surprizing adventures of Robinson Crusoe. 1719. Auckland Libraries Heritage Collections. |
The fakeness of Robinson Crusoe seems to have become a target of parody in another influential early English novel of travel and adventure published seven years later in 1726: Travels into several remote nations of the world : in four parts : to which are prefix'd, several copies of verses explanatory and commendatory, never before printed. Leo Damrosch quotes the declaration of “the publisher” at the beginning of Jonathan Swift’s novel, best known as Gulliver’s Travels,
There is an air of truth apparent through the whole; and indeed the author was so distinguished for his veracity that it became a sort of proverb among his neighbours at Redriff, when any one affirmed a thing, to say it was as true as if Mr. Gulliver had spoke it (2013: 362)
In The life of Daniel Defoe (2015), John Richetti suggests that Defoe’s inspiration for Robinson Crusoe was the story of Alexander Selkirk. After being marooned, Selkirk spent four years alone on Más a Tierra (now Isla Robinson Crusoe), off the coast of Chile. Sir George Grey Special Collections holds one account of Selkirk’s experience—Edward Cook’s A Voyage to the South Sea, and round the world (1712).
As fictional as Crusoe may be, he has nonetheless significantly shaped what European readers have believed to be true. “In Robinson Crusoe”, Richetti writes, “Defoe conceives a character of archetypical significance, with deep and abiding resonances for modern European self-consciousness” (2015: 185). For Richetti, Crusoe
is, although reluctantly, the ultimate individualist, the man alone, surviving by his wits and relying very quickly as a slave in Morocco on his own resourcefulness, and as such he is a type of modern man, the self-constructed individual who exists (somehow) outside of the social or communal world. With a few other characters such as Don Quixote, Hamlet, and Faust, Crusoe has thus passed into the collective understanding of western humanity (2015: 185).
 |
| One of seven plates from the 16th edition, 1784, loosely inserted in: Daniel Defoe. The life and strange surprizing adventures of Robinson Crusoe. 1719. Auckland Libraries Heritage Collections. |
 |
| Plate from: Daniel Defoe. The life and adventures of Robinson Crusoe / written by Himself. 1804. Auckland Libraries Heritage Collections. |
This survival by wits is written through one of the innovations of Defoe’s novel: its detailed descriptions of the unfolding circumstances in which the narrator finds himself. On Defoe’s method, the contemporary South African-Australian novelist and critic J.M. Coetzee writes admiringly,
For page after page—for the first time in the history of fiction—we see a minute, ordered description of how things are done. It is a matter of pure writerly attentiveness, pure submission to the exigencies of a world which, by being submitted to in a state so close to spiritual absorption, becomes transfigured, real” (Stranger shores, 2001: 24).
Richetti discusses the significance of such detailed description of circumstances,
Defoe’s hero marks the ultimate proposition, basic to the new species of narrative called the novel, that personality is developed by and within circumstances… the idea that identity is developed in experience rather than chosen by an act of moral will or somehow imposed by social status and destiny is a revolutionary idea, an Enlightenment notion that the novel as a genre helps to promulgate as a fundamental assumption about human nature (2015: 196)
Through the very particular circumstances of life on the island, Crusoe undergoes—or actively undertakes—a religious transformation. Several commentators, including Schmidt, note a “scriptural” pattern in the book, “temptation, counsel, wrong action, recognition, acceptance of punishment, repentance, and restitution expressed in worldly terms” (2014: 75). Richetti identifies “two parallel narrative tracks” (2015: 188)—secular and religious, that compete as Crusoe attempts to make meaning out of his situation. In relation to this Richetti discusses how, in his introspection, Crusoe thinks through debates of Defoe’s day. These include the relation between God’s “Providence” (a concept that evolves through the story) and what today we might call human or individual agency. The book’s treatment of this and other questions, Richetti suggests, led to the development of the novel as that form “located at the intersection of popular or demotic journalism… and the serious periodic essay” (2015: 203).
Crusoe is an archetypical colonist. Furthermore, when he was shipwrecked on the island, Crusoe was part of a crew bound for West Africa to enslave people for his and others’ plantations in Brazil. Of the relation between Crusoe and his slave and companion Friday, who he eventually meets on the island, Schmidt writes of the book’s ideological effects, “For two centuries and more this picture of subordination in one of the most popular novels ever written seemed to reflect a natural order”, and that the “matter-of-fact” first-person narration “establishes stereotypes through which whole cultures and peoples were viewed” (2014: 74). Such a destructive picture was embedded particularly through the popularity of Robinson Crusoe as a children’s book: “The stereotypes were imprinted on the Anglophone reader from childhood” (2014: 74).
 |
| A long time ago : favourite stories, retold by Mrs Oscar Wilde & others. 1891. Auckland Libraries Heritage Collections. |
Thus, among the legacies of Robinson Crusoe are those feeding into three linked strands; the development of the novel as a literary form, the emergence of the modern European (male) subject or individual, and the grievous histories of slavery and colonialism. This suggests that this character and story are deeply woven or knotted into our contemporary world. If so, any engagement with the novel today must consider the historical contexts of its production, as well as alter or displace the story in a deeply critical mode.
Among the many critical re-imaginings of Robinson Crusoe is French novelist Michel Tournier’s Vendredi, ou les limbes du Pacifique (1967), the English translation of which, Friday or the Other Island (1974), is held in Auckland Libraries’ general collection. Gerald Bruns writes in On ceasing to be human that in Defoe’s story, Crusoe’s “construction of a human economy from degree zero (his ‘civilizing’ of the island) is a parable of self-justification, an assertion of rational autonomy” (2011: 23). In Tournier’s story, by contrast, in the absence of other people, Crusoe ceases to be human, a change indicated by the fact that the ship’s dog no longer acknowledges him. “The question [Tournier’s] novel raises”, writes Bruns, “is whether this cessation is altogether a bad thing” (2011: 24).
St Lucian poet and playwright Derek Walcott’s play ‘Pantomime’ (1980) humorously dramatises a nuanced sequence of reversals and displacements of the relation between Crusoe and Friday. Crusoe and Friday also feature in Walcott’s poems in his collection The Castaway (1965).
J.M. Coetzee’s novel Foe (1986) is narrated by an additional castaway on the island—Susan Barton. Barton, Friday and Cruso (spelt without the “e”) are rescued from the island, but only Barton and a mute Friday (his tongue having been cut out) survive the journey back to London. There, Barton relays her story in letters to the great (but elusive and financially troubled) writer, Daniel Foe, so that he can tell the story of the castaways. The version of Barton’s story that Foe would like to tell differs from her own, and Friday’s story is marked as absent.
The short story He and His Man, which is included in Coetzee’s book Three Stories (2014), entails a complex interplay of narrator and narrated, between a Defoe travelling widely through Britain, an elderly Crusoe living alone in Bristol, and, by implication, Coetzee himself. He and His Man also draws on Defoe’s A Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain, of which Sir George Grey Special Collections holds a copy from 1769, and A Journal of the Plague Year.
Author: Dr Brent Harris, Auckland Libraries
Visit the Heritage Collections reading room during December to view the 1719 third edition of The life and strange surprizing adventures of Robinson Crusoe, on display in the Real Gold case with its sequel, The farther adventures and Edward Cook's A voyage to the South Sea (1712).
You can also listen to rare book specialist Georgia Prince discuss the book and the story behind its publication on our Real Gold podcast, and view more plates on Kura Heritage Collections Online.
Listen to the track here
References
Gerald Bruns. On Ceasing to be Human. Stanford University Press, 2011.J.M. Coetzee. Stranger Shores: essays, 1986-1999. London: Secker and Warburg, 2001.
J.M. Coetzee. Three Stories. Melbourne: The Text Publishing Company, 2014.
J.M. Coetzee. Foe. London: Secker & Warburg, 1986.
Leo Damrosch. Jonathan Swift: his life and world. New Haven, Conneticut: Yale University Press, 2013.
Daniel Defoe. The life and strange surprizing adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of York, mariner: who lived eight and twenty years all alone in an un-inhabited island on the coast of America, near the mouth of the great river of Oroonoque; Having been cast on Shore by Shipwreck, wherein all the Men perished but himself. With an Account how he was at last as strangely deliver’d by Pyrates. Written by himself., 1719.
John Richetti. The Life of Daniel Defoe. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2015.
Michael Schmidt. The Novel: a biography. Harvard University Press, 2014.
Michel Tournier. Friday or the Other Island, 1974.
Derek Walcott. Remembrance: And, Pantomime. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1980.
Derek Walcott. The Castaway. 1980.
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