Rewriting Crusoe: The Robinsonade across Languages, Cultures, and Media

By Robert Mayer, Rivka Swenson, Patrick A. Gill and 8 more

Published in 1719, Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe is one of those extraordinary literary works whose importance lies not only in the text itself but in its persistently lively afterlife. German author Johann Gottfried Schnabel—who in 1731 penned his own island narrative—coined the term “Robinsonade” to characterize the genre bred by this classic, and today hundreds of examples can be identified worldwide. This celebratory collection of tercentenary essays testifies to the Robinsonade’s endurance, analyzing its various literary, aesthetic, philosophical, and cultural implications in historical context. Contributors trace the Robinsonade’s roots from the eighteenth century to generic affinities in later traditions, including juvenile fiction, science fiction, and apocalyptic fiction, and finally to contemporary adaptations in film, television, theater, and popular culture. Taken together, these essays convince us that the genre’s adapt- ability to changing social and cultural circumstances explains its relevance to this day.

Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bucknell University Press
• Release date: Sep 17, 2020
• ISBN: 9781684482337

Robert Mayer

Robert Mayer has written for Vanity Fair, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Newsweek, GQ, and more. His first novel, Superfolks, changed superhero fiction forever. Best-selling author John Grisham called his The Dreams of Ada "a fascinating book, a wonderful reminder of how good true-crime writing can be." Mayer lives in New Mexico with his tapestry-weaving wife, La Donna, and their people-loving pit bull.

Book preview

Crusoe

INTRODUCTION

JAKUB LIPSKI

HOW DOES ONE WRITE ABOUT the Robinsonade after three hundred years in the life of the genre? The common denominator behind the multitude of possible answers is likely to be a belief that in order to grasp its complexity, one must go beyond traditional ways of writing about literature. Indeed, how else to study a genre—if one does understand the Robinsonade as a genre—that has been continuously reworked in such disparate fields as literature, theater, television, gaming, and the visual arts? One must also go beyond national boundaries: the Robinsonade has always been a global phenomenon by virtue of both represented realities and publishing contexts. The example was set by Daniel Defoe and the three volumes of the Robinson Crusoe trilogy—encapsulating, as it were, the whole globe and inherently diversified in terms of form.

The present collection of tercentenary essays, while it has no pretense of offering a definitively comprehensive study of the phenomenon, is based on the conviction that one can do justice to the Robinsonade only when adopting a perspective that transcends languages, geographical boundaries, modes of expression, and theoretical preconceptions—a perspective that is reflected not only in the contents and thematic structure of the book but also in the truly international set of contributors and variety of critical standpoints they adopt. The final product offers a multifaceted account of both the transformations undergone by the genre throughout the centuries and the changing patterns of reception. Our main concern here then is studying the Robinsonade as a genre in a constant state of becoming, transcending, as it were, any formal restrictions one might impose on it, a genre, as Ian Kinane succinctly puts it, caught in this state of never-completed-completion.¹ Accordingly, we adopt a relatively broad understanding of the form. Recent criticism of the Robinsonade has oscillated between two extremes: on the one hand, the genre has been identified with the castaway narrative;² on the other, it has been treated as a subcategory within this tradition, depending for its identity on the relationship with (the first volume of) Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. While the subsequent chapters in this collection do establish links between the studied texts and Robinson Crusoe, thus subscribing to the latter critical tradition, we do not consider a specific variant of this relationship as a fundamental generic prerequisite.³

The book is divided into four sections, each highlighting a particular aspect of the Robinsonade’s transformations. The two chapters making up the first of them—Exploring and Transcending the Genre—address the issues of genre and literary form. Appropriately, they juxtapose material from Defoe’s time with twentieth- and twenty-first-century reworkings of the pattern, which elaborate on the possibilities that were, in a sense, projected by Defoe himself. This heterogeneous set makes it possible to ponder some more general questions about the Robinsonade as a genre. What is it exactly? Where are its limits? How does one define it? These questions will reappear throughout the volume and will be further problematized in the closing essay.

Rivka Swenson’s chapter on Peter Longueville’s The Hermit (1727) zooms in on what might be termed the Robinsonade microgenre—that is, a narrowly understood genre of the Robinsonade developing in the immediate context of Robinson Crusoe encompassing works following Defoe’s lead and written as a direct response to him. Swenson’s case study brings us back to a specific historical moment—the 1720s—and foregrounds Longueville’s novel as a gem in the already rich tradition of the early transformations of Defoe’s model. Indeed, Longueville himself remarks in his preface that bookshops have been "already crowded with Robinson Crusoe, Moll Flanders, Colln. Jacks."⁴ It is worthwhile to note here that the first examples of the microgenre had appeared already in 1719, shortly after Crusoe itself: a bound edition of The Adventures, and Surprizing Deliverances, of James Dubourdieu and The Adventures of Alexander Vendchurch.⁵ That year was also when the first chapbook abridgements of Robinson Crusoe came out: editing, adapting, and abridging Defoe’s narrative have always constituted a vital part of the Robinsonade phenomenon.

Rather than reconstructing a wider panorama of the Robinsonade in the 1720s, given the fact that there have already been successful attempts at this,⁶ Swenson offers a micro-scale study, which, on the one hand, establishes the significance of The Hermit, especially in terms of its sensually descriptive poetics, and, on the other, sheds light on the metafictional strategies determining the life of the genre in general. These are conceptualized in the metaphor of pickling, which may stand for the idea of remaking genre.

The following essay by Patrick Gill illustrates some of the ways in which the formal possibilities contained in the Robinsonade have been employed in twentieth- and twenty-first-century fiction, in particular by such writers as Muriel Spark, J. M. Coetzee, and Yann Martel. Gill elaborates upon what is, paradoxically, both absent and implicitly present in Defoe’s model, thus shedding light on the nature of Robinsonade transformations in general. He concentrates on the category of the counterfactual, understood as an alternate version of events suggested intradiegetically, for example, by way of the narrator’s internal monologues or authorial narrative experiments. This significant element of the Robinsonade poetics, already employed by Defoe, conceptualizes the mentioned paradox of absence and presence: just as Robinson’s musings about the way things might have turned out differently constitute a vital part of his frame of mind, the various forms taken by the Robinsonade genre might be seen as realizations of the implicitly contained alternate versions.

The contemporary Robinsonade has also taught us that what is absent from Defoe’s realm is meaningful on its own merit and as such is artistically and ideologically inspiring.⁷ This is the premise on which counter-Robinsonades are based; works such as Coetzee’s Foe (1986), which bestows agency on a female character and thematizes Friday’s silence, or, perhaps less seriously, The Wild Life from 2016—a French-Belgian animated motion picture telling Crusoe’s story from the perspective of a parrot named Tuesday.

The second section of the volume comprises chapters studying the Robinsonade in the varying national contexts of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: both geographically—from England and Scotland, to France, Poland, and America—and ideologically, by making sense of the local transformations. The contributors elaborate on the potential of the Robinsonade to adapt to changing circumstances, in terms of content and genre, and on its continuous relevance in new contexts. Collectively, the chapters account for the globalization of the pattern and show that the process itself depended on transnational mediation—with special credit given to the French—and underscored the role of Defoe himself, who was universally cherished neither as the author of Crusoe (promoted as Written by Himself on the title page) nor as a proper novelist until the late eighteenth century.

Przemysław Uściński analyzes the complexity and contradictions of colonial ideology as reflected in The Female American, an anonymous Robinsonade from 1767, in particular its implied tentativeness in offering a coherent critique of British imperialism. Uściński argues that while the figure of a biracial female Robinson carries an inherently subversive potential, her willing subjection to the role of a Christian missionary guided by Providence inevitably reinforces the conventional ideological message. The following chapter by Jakub Lipski traces the early steps in the development of the Robinsonade in Poland. The emergence of Robinson Crusoe in Polish translation is here taken as an incentive to provide more general insights into the evolution of modern print culture in Enlightenment Poland and the Rousseauvian influences in the circle of King Stanislaus August. French mediation in the Robinsonade phenomenon is also addressed by Frederick Burwick, who traces the history of the theatrical Robinsonade in London, from the late eighteenth century to the mid-nineteenth. Burwick acknowledges the role of French adaptations as well as showing that the political context, including the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, was a determining factor for the subsequent London performances. The section closes with Márta Pellérdi’s discussion of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped (1886) as a counter-Robinsonade. Pellérdi argues that the novel’s message depends on an ideological shift that deconstructs the Defoevian representation of the Others as savages. Specifically, it problematizes the position of Scotland within the British Empire from the eighteenth century to the late Victorian period. Similar shifts in representation, ever since Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726) and its revision of the cultural encounter and its implications in book IV, have constituted an intriguing possibility in the Robinsonade tradition, and as such are also addressed elsewhere in this volume.

The two chapters constituting the third part of the book—Ecocritical Readings—transcend conventional disciplinary limitations in responding to Defoe’s Crusoe and the Robinsonade. Informed by posthumanist criticism, the chapters point to new interpretative possibilities granted by a paradigmatic shift in our understanding of agency. The issue of agency, as has been touched on above, has long constituted a vital element in the history of Crusoe’s transformations and has appeared particularly prone to feminist and postcolonial readings.⁸ This volume’s Ecocritical Readings go even further in empowering the silenced voices and highlighting the importance of the world of nature.

Lora Geriguis concentrates on the narrative and ideological functions of representations of climate and specific environments in Crusoe and three seemingly dissimilar Robinsonades: The Female American, Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1997), and Cast Away (2000). Geriguis shows that a shift in perspective that leads to more attention paid to such representations may become a useful critical strategy in uncovering the otherwise elusive links between a target Robinsonade and (post)colonial discourse. In the following chapter, adopting Rosi Braidotti’s concept of becoming-Earth, Krzysztof Skonieczny offers a reading of Michel Tournier’s Vendredi ou les Limbes du Pacifique (1967), focused on Robinson’s and Friday’s relationship with the island Speranza, which, rather than an object of conquest, becomes an empowered subject in the novel. Skonieczny discerns an ideal of interpersonal communion with Mother Nature that is suggested in Vendredi, an ideal that questions the mythical story of civilization, especially in terms of Robinson’s agency.

The volume closes with two chapters exploring the relevance of the Robinsonade for what might be labeled the present condition. It is not accidental that in doing so they both expose the genre’s protean form and transmediality: oscillating between literature and cinema, showing how literary form becomes televised and vice versa—how contemporary fiction may feed on television. One might claim that, among other reasons, the formal adaptability of the Robinsonade to new social, historical, and cultural realities—a conviction that is expressed throughout this book—is the main explanation for its enduring pertinence.

Jennifer Preston Wilson focuses on the figure of contemporary worker in three relatively recent film Robinsonades: Cast Away, Moon (2009), and The Martian (2015). Wilson shows how the motif of the shipwreck, taking up various forms in the films discussed, helps capitalize on the spiritual crisis evoked by contemporary workplace environments. The three Crusoe figures are here analyzed as characters whose individuality is threatened by their employers’ work systems, and for whom being stranded on the island (or the Moon or Mars for that matter) constitutes an opportunity to reconsider their allegiance to the corporate world and its ideologies.

Ian Kinane’s focused reading of Tom Carson’s 2003 Gilligan’s Wake traces yet another trajectory of the Robinsonade’s transformations: it shows how the texts making up the tradition can feed on themselves, at times being entirely or almost entirely disconnected from Defoe’s model. Gilligan’s Wake revisions a popular TV show from the 1960s—CBS’s Gilligan’s Island—rather than Defoe’s Crusoe, and other examples of such secondary Robinsonades include, for example, a number of Young Robinsons written in nineteenth-century Europe in the wake of Joachim Heinrich Campe’s Robinson the Younger (1779), which followed the ideas of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, or—even more famously—William Golding’s Lord of the Flies (1954), written as a response to R. M. Ballantyne’s The Coral Island (1858). This confirms the status of the genre as a body of work that further fictionalises (and is fictionalised by) its own cultural history.⁹ Like Crusoe, the later Robinsonade tradition has also established its own mythology and iconography, gradually becoming part of the mass culture industry: Chuck Noland’s Wilson in Cast Away and the witticisms of King Julian from the Madagascar series (2005–2012) are the best known examples