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As Watt notes, Robinson Crusoe was a capitalist out for adventure and exploitation who was stranded in a utopia of Protestant Ethics.
One of the crucial elements of that story that rewrote the world is how one acquires wealth. Until Crusoe, wealth was a dream peasants might have, but one they had little expectation of ever coming true. Most stories about acquiring wealth before Robinson Crusoe were stories like Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, or some variant of the Purse That Never Empties, or the story of Aladdin, where wealth comes from rubbing a magic lamp.
Robinson Crusoe acquired his money the hard way. He earned it! Or at least that's how we perceive it.
In truth, Crusoe got rich by entering a natural paradise and being the sole proprietor. He does not begin from scratch. The island is rich, has no owners, and needs improvement. The shipwreck that stranded Crusoe there leaves him as the sole survivor and, more importantly, the sole owner of its treasures.
Illustration by
N. C. Wyeth,
from Robinson Crusoe
Robinson Crusoe is adventurer's capitalism, colonial capitalism, where the message reads that where the white man goes, the wilderness surrenders its riches. Translated into our American mythology, Robinson Crusoe is the classic story of a real estate developer who builds a physical and moral replica of the world he had left behind.
Robinson Crusoe was an immensely popular story to the European colonial mentality. It went to four editions within the first four months, spawned two mediocre sequels, and then went on to be published in over 700 editions throughout Europe and America within a century. The novel has never been out of print. As Watt points out, "By the end of the nineteenth century there had appeared at least 700 editions, translations and imitations, not to mention a popular Eighteenth century pantomime, and an opera by Offenbach."
Daniel Defoe's story of a businessman marooned on a tropical island was an instant hit throughout England and then Europe. Thirty-five years after Robinson Crusoe was published, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the author of The Social Contract, claimed the novel "furnished the finest of treatises on education according to nature. My Emile shall read this book before any other; it shall for a long time be his only library, and shall always hold an honorable place."
A hundred years after Robinson Crusoe was published, Samuel Taylor Coleridge praised its author as being far superior to Jonathan Swift. Coleridge said reading the novel "makes me forget my specific class, character, and circumstances, and raises me, while I read him, into the universal man."
In 1836, 18 years later and on the other side of the Atlantic, Edgar Allan Poe said that Robinson Crusoe "has become a household thing in nearly every family in Christendom." Poe saw how "all are affected by the potent magic of verisimilitude. Indeed the author of Crusoe must be possessed, above all other faculties, what has been termed the faculty of identification — that dominion exercised by volition over imagination, which enables the mind to lose its own in a fictitious individuality."
Thomas Sergeant Perry wrote in 1833 that "The moral of the book (Robinson Crusoe), in short, is this: if a man in solitude, with a few scraps from the wreck and an occasional savage [my emphasis], dog and cat to help him, can lead so civilized a life, what may we not expect of good people in England with abundance about them?"
H. Rider Haggard, the author of She and King Solomon's Mines, wrote in 1887 how proud he was that, one Sunday morning, while reading Crusoe as an eight- or nine-year-old child, he could not be forced by the combined efforts of an older sister and a governess to attend church. In 1894 Walter Raleigh wrote in The English Novel that "Robinson Crusoe typifies the spirit of the Anglo-Saxon race, and illustrates in epitome the part it has played in India and America."
Charles Dickens was revolted by Crusoe's treatment of Friday and women; he found the novel "dry and disagreeable," "the only book" where "no one laughs or cries." Karl Marx flat-out condemned it with his usual flair for hyperbole. And Mark Twain had his Connecticut Yankee announce that he was introducing Crusoean capitalism in sixth-century King Arthur's Court. "I saw that I was just another Robinson Crusoe cast away on some uninhabitable island . . . If I wanted to make life bearable I must do as he did — invent, contrive, create, reorganize things." The Knights of the Round Table become salesmen, while the Round Table itself becomes a corporate boardroom.
The original novel Robinson Crusoe itself doesn't have much of a plot. What it has is episodic and governed by Chance, not Cause and Effect. It seems to have little dramatic design because events occur by chance, and not through cause and effect. There are great scenes (the "footprint," for instance) that reverberate in the mind, but they are not by nature sequential. The novel's special grace is that it "feels" autobiographical. That is, the book appears to be the actual ruminations, almost diary entries, of a real human being named Crusoe.
Crusoe is not a matinee heartthrob. In fact, he's a bit of a stiff. But then he is about as social as anyone who has been marooned on a desert island for almost two dozen years. Aside from Crusoe himself, there is little character development, and the relationship Crusoe has with Man Friday has little development. How could it be otherwise? There is minimal communication between the two men, and most of that is one-sided. Man Friday stays with Crusoe only because he has to choose between hungry cannibals and Crusoe. Heraclitus once said Character is Fate. Crusoe, for all his hard work and religious attitude, is also very, very lucky.
Crusoe is an innocent. He is unaware of how his actions will reverberate through time and space. Crusoe is emblematic of success, talent, and luck. Yet the Dark Side is there. Ambition can become greed. Self-worth can become conceit.
* * *
 Daniel Defoe  |
Daniel Defoe was a Dissenter. He was a Protestant who didn't belong to the Anglican Church. That meant he was a non-conformist. Naturally, Robinson Crusoe's pieties do reflect Defoe the Dissenter's beliefs, and naturally these pieties, these beliefs, succeed better on a deserted island than in the mercantile chaos of eighteenth-century London. (Even a workaholic can be tempted by the pleasures of the city; it was the stodgy Germans who said, "Stadtluft macht frei"; city air makes one free to do all kinds of nasty things! This slogan actually became a medieval legal term. If a serf could manage to live within city walls for a year and a day, he was legally freed of his burdens.)
Still, Crusoe's self-reliance and patience were models Englishmen carried as they went out to build an empire. In brief, the white man was made to dominate his surroundings, and thus he would find his own inner peace from his domination.
That "mythos" still lives, although the buckskins have been traded in for pinstripes. In retrospect, much of Crusoe's experiences read like the job description of the high-powered, high-profiled, stress-laden positions of power in this global culture.
Crusoe's life is the businessman's life. At first he was only in Big Business, but with the rise of Big Government, he also entered public service. In World War II, he was a Dollar-a-Year Man. These days, now that he's back in business, he gets paid very well indeed. He knows he earns every penny the hard way. We can see R. Crusoe being interviewed by the international media.
R. Crusoe's job? He's an entrepreneur. He is his own boss. Crusoe now wears — lives in — suits and ties. He is self-motivated, self-absorbed. He doesn't decide as much as he makes decisions. He makes policy! when he makes decisions. He has responsibilities. He has a busy schedule, and he regrets he can't be seen without an appointment. His office follows him, is always within easy reach, always knows where he is, monitors his calls. He regrets how his home life suffers. Probably regrets he's too busy to get to church. Probably forgot a birthday recently, unless his secretary reminded him. (What would he do without his Girl Friday!) And even though he's fabulously wealthy, fabulously successful, he still sees himself as the Common Man.
To repeat the obvious: Crusoe is the hero of the novel. But the classical hero, the traditional hero, is directly linked to his community. The hero dies for us. That's his job. That's why we valorize him. Robinson Crusoe is not involved in humanity. He is alone on a desert island for most of the novel. Crusoe's goal is to leave his island. At the first opportunity, he leaves it. The Island of Despair, as he names it, is not his home. It is away from home. He is responsible to no one on the island. No higher authority, no outside authority, no one. Crusoe is responsible to no one.
"No man is an island," John Donne orated. But the purpose of an island setting in a story is to take the characters, remove them from the Here and Now, and set them in an OtherWhen and an OtherWhere. It keeps outside influences from influencing the action.
But no man is an island.
A leader is known by his followers. Hitler couldn't have caused the Holocaust unless his followers, all good Germans, identified with him and his authority over them and then carried out his orders.
Robinson Crusoe privileges the corporate isolate. The businessman alone, who operates within a vacuum of outside responsibilities. Without intending it, the novel privileges the entrepreneur who walks. (As a sidebar, remember how Rousseau saw the novel as a hymn to childhood, a hymn to his imaginary child Emile? In actuality, Rousseau walked out on his own children.) That's one essential point of Robinson Crusoe. When the going gets tough, the tough bail out, leaving behind the toxic waste dumps, the devastated landscapes, the ruined lives of the indigenous peoples.
The Crusoe attitude finds its worst expression in littering and polluting. Chemical waste dumps, mining operations, logging companies, strip-mining, coal mining, toxic and other hazardous wastes — these enterprises leave the Crusoe "mythos" wide open to criticisms.
Based on the story we read in this single novel, we can see why the United States has a totally ineffectual Superfund. Our master narrative is a history of "throwaway" policies. We as a culture feel we have a right to pollute, to litter, to sail away on the very next ship.
But there is more, too. Western society has conveniently forgotten much of Robinson Crusoe's relationship with Friday. The book is quite clear about it: Friday was Crusoe's slave. That Crusoe was a benevolent master does not change the relationship.
As Robinson Crusoe himself tells us:
"When he espied me, he came running, and laid himself on the ground again, with all the possible signs of a humble, thankful disposition, making many antic gestures to show it. At last he lays his head flat upon the ground, close to my foot, and sets my other foot upon his head, as he had done before, and after this, made all the signs to me of subjection, servitude, and submission possible, to let me know how much he would serve me as long as he lived. In a little time I began to speak to him, and teach him to speak to me; and first, made him know his name should be Friday, which was the day I saved his life. I likewise taught him to say, 'Master,' and then let him know that was to be my name."
Illustration by
N. C. Wyeth,
from Robinson Crusoe
As Watt notes, "Slaves, of course, were (Crusoe's) original objective in the voyage which brought him to the island. And eventually Providence and his own exertions provide him with Man Friday, who answers his prayers by 'swearing to be my slave forever.’"
In her 1976 essay "Ethno or Socio Poetics," Sylvia Wynter points out a strong, and I believe accurate, explanation for the profound (and lasting) effects Crusoe's language made on the Western imagination. She says: "By calling the Indian 'Friday' Crusoe negates his former name, the meaning of his former culture, its architecture of significance. With the past, the cultural world of Friday wiped out, he is reduced to his role as Crusoe's servant."
Not only does this metamorphosis change Friday, it changes Crusoe. "Before he had the power to name things, now he had the power to 'name other men.'" This power comes from Crusoe's gun. As Wynter writes: "Friday, seeing the ease with which the gun has wiped out his at once fellow / and enemy Indians . . . prays to the Gun, pleading that it does not harm him." Wynter is right when she notes, "The gun makes Crusoe a MAN, since he owns it, and Friday a native, since he is without it. Men are masters; natives are servants.’"
I contend the myth of Crusoe has become institutionalized as the cornerstone of our Western culture. That its influences has reverberated across two and a half centuries like the tectonic ripples of a California earthquake.
NEXT: Comfortable with his god
