Crusoes and Other Castaways in Modern French Literature: Solitary Adventures

By Joseph Acquisto

Crusoes and Other Castaways in Modern French Literature: Solitary Adventures by Joseph Acquisto examines the many ways in which the castaway, particularly in the form of engagement with Robinson Crusoe, has been reinterpreted and appropriated in nineteenth through twenty-first century French literature. The book is not merely a literary history of the robinsonnade in France; rather, Acquisto demonstrates how what he calls the genre of “solitary adventure” becomes a vehicle for exploration of much larger questions about the reception of texts, modes of reading, and the relationship between popular and serious literary traditions. The heart of Crusoes and Other Castaways in Modern French Literature examines a crucial moment in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when the history of cultural perspectives on reading and solitude intersect, catalyzing a reconsideration of Defoe’s tale. Acquisto’s philosophically inflected readings of works by writers from Rousseau to Balzac, Verne to Gide, Valéry to Tournier enhance intertextual and cultural approaches to the castaway myth and broaden our appreciation of the dynamic relation it has to modern French literature writ large.

Published by University of Delaware Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Delaware Press
• Release date: Aug 31, 2012
• ISBN: 9781644530955

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acknowledged.

Introduction

Quel est le sens de la fiction «Robinson»? [What is the meaning of the ‘Robinson’ fiction?] —Gilles Deleuze

"Je ne peux pas justifier en toute rigueur, je ne peux pas prouver que j’ai raison par un autre argument que celui-ci, qui est d’abord une question ou une demande: est-ce que cela vous paraît intéressant d’écouter ce que je dis et ensuite de lire autrement Robinson Crusoé? [I cannot rigorously justify, I cannot prove that I am right by any other argument than this one, which is first a question or a request: does it seem interesting to you to listen to what I say and then to read Robinson Crusoe differently?"] —Jacques Derrida

As a child I never read Robinson Crusoe. My first literary contact with the story was in college, when a friend in France sent me Michel Tournier’s Vendredi ou les limbes du Pacifique [Friday or the Limbo of the Pacific] as a birthday present. I was fascinated by these philosophical reflections of a man in solitude reflecting on his situation, this narrative of the life of the mind struggling to retain language and thought, to give voice to desire, to come to terms with the other. I knew then that I had missed something deep and rich by never having read Robinson Crusoe. When I later turned to Defoe’s novel, however, I had an experience similar to the one that, unbeknownst to me at the time, Virginia Woolf had already described so many years before:

The mere suggestion—peril and solitude and a desert island—is enough to rouse in us the expectation [. . .] of man, isolated from his kind, brooding alone upon the nature of society and the strange ways of men. Before we open the book we have perhaps vaguely sketched out the kind of pleasure we expect it to give us. We read; and we are rudely contradicted on every page. There are no sunsets and no sunrises; there is no solitude and no soul. There is, on the contrary, staring us full in the face nothing but a large earthenware pot. (Woolf 54)

Woolf is referring to the matter-of-fact, pragmatic, problem-solving Crusoe who, it seems, seldom has either time for or interest in metaphysical questions about the meaning of his solitude, preoccupied as he is with the basic details of survival and of rebuilding something resembling his familiar civilization. Woolf’s comment about the earthenware pot as symbol of that unromantic, annoyingly practical style of Crusoe’s narration is frequently cited, but critics seldom mention the way she completes that thought later in the essay: Thus Defoe, by reiterating that nothing but a plain earthenware pot stands in the foreground, persuades us to see remote islands and the solitude of the human soul (58). In other words, Crusoe’s castaway narrative hides something, yet reveals it at the same time. His pragmatic realism holds the key to other, deeper aspects of the metaphysical and psychological meaning inherent in his narrative. It is, in other words, a story that invites completion and expansion by both the reader and other writers; a work that, beyond the initial moment of unpleasant surprise, encourages the imagination to enter the game of hiding and revealing. That story has captured the attention of French writers from Rousseau to Balzac, Verne to Gide, Valéry to Tournier, and so many more.

Michel Tournier himself defined myth as une histoire que tout le monde connaît déjà [a story that everyone knows already] (Vent 189). The basic castaway plot in literature has become synonymous with the Robinson Crusoe myth, but its familiar outlines, although they have their origin in Defoe, are the result of a long history of rereading, misreading, rewriting, recasting, and rearranging a select number of elements of the novel. As a result, there is enough distance between the story that everyone knows and the novel that generated it to produce the kind of shock or surprise that a contemporary reader has when confronting Defoe’s text for the first time, in light of all of the intervening textual and cultural history. This book is an account of French literary engagement with the figure of the castaway since the early nineteenth century, a record of the strange and surprising path that leads from Defoe to Tournier and beyond. In order for the Crusoe story to become such a rich field of literary engagement, it needs in some sense to be buried alive so as to emerge transformed. In his last seminars, Jacques Derrida offered an extended reading of Robinson Crusoe in conjunction with Heidegger, and it is precisely through this idea of being buried alive that he characterizes the legacy of Defoe’s novel: Or, cette survie, grâce à laquelle le livre qui porte ce titre nous est parvenu, a été lu et sera lu, interprété, enseigné, sauvé, traduit, réimprimé, illustré, filmé, maintenu en vie par des millions d’héritiers, cette survie est celle d’un mort vivant [Now, this survival, thanks to which the book of this title has arrived to us, has been read and will be read, interpreted, taught, saved, translated, reprinted, illustrated, filmed, kept alive by millions of inheritors, this survival is one of a living dead person] (193). Derrida establishes a parallel between the survival of Crusoe on the island and the survival of the mythic plot of the novel itself; Defoe’s text disappears into the endless variety of rewritings so that it is only by being buried alive that it is preserved.

Why do castaways exercise such a powerful influence on the literary and cultural imagination? The answer will be different from period to period, and the history of those progressive transformations is an important focus of this study. Paul Zweig, in his study of the adventurer in literature, claims that although adventure literature has an escapist dimension, another way to conceive of these stories is not as a kind of vacation from reality, but, rather,

a plunge into essential experience. [. . .] [Adventure stories] offer us heroes obsessed by risk and confrontation, which spell out a choice we glimpse only fleetingly in ourselves: the choice to pursue adventures, to interpret life itself as a series of solitary combats, with death as the adversary.

Adventure stories transpose our dalliance with risk into a sustained vision. [. . .] They remove us radically from ourselves, happening out of this world, if this world is taken to mean the circle of relationships and responsibilities that we know. (Zweig 4)

The texts I analyze do not all fit neatly into any well-established genre category. Adventure fiction typically involves dangerous travel, whereas castaway stories focus on a character’s experience in one place; and indeed Defoe’s novel, if emphasis is placed on the desert island episode that forms only a part of a much longer story, is not a typical example of the adventure genre. Nor are all of the texts that play a role in this book robinsonnades. Although most castaway narratives borrow, to at least some extent, from Robinson Crusoe, many share only a few general characteristics of Defoe’s narrative; hence such a label would be overly restrictive and potentially misleading. I will refer to the texts analyzed here as solitary adventures. I do not intend for this term to designate a genre in the strict sense but, rather, to serve as a kind of shorthand label for the castaway texts that share a certain family resemblance, many of which are generated from Robinson Crusoe, which combines the adventure tale with the experience of the solitary. The solitary adventure thus fuses two kinds of experience, because the geographical adventure is now relocated to the space of the island, thereby allowing for adventure in the sense of exploration of and survival on the island, but also the psychological and philosophical adventure of life in solitude. I understand the term solitary adventure in two senses: first, the characters themselves are isolated adventurers; but beyond this, I claim that the act of reading itself can be considered a solitary adventure. In that sense, readers participate in active mental adventure inspired by the characters, through the act of reading and reflecting on what they read. These two senses of the term begin to fuse in the twentieth century, when the solitary adventurer characters themselves are portrayed, in contrast to Defoe’s hero, as readers and thinkers.

An important aspect of solitary adventures is that they are always in implicit or explicit dialogue with each other, so although we can refer to each particular text as a solitary adventure, I will claim that all of these texts throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries contribute to a more collective experience of the solitary adventure as the sum total of all of the variations of the castaway story in each era. This collective history moves, in its broad outline, from popular literature to the serious novel with, as I will argue in chapter 4, an important moment in lyric poetry at the turn of the twentieth century as a kind of pivot. This move away from the popular novel also distinguishes the solitary adventure from adventure literature tout court, because the latter is, as Martin Green underscores, an inherently popular genre:

The books we take seriously as literature are incompatible with those we read as adventure, and whatever the rational content of that distinction [. . .], it also signals a nonrational incompatibility of temperament or tendency. There are two dynamic drives within our reading minds, which push away from each other. (Green Seven Types 6)

Paul Zweig acknowledges Robinson Crusoe’s unique position with regard to the adventure novel; he affirms that it is not an adventure novel at all (Zweig 113) because it does not glory in the episodic life and its hero is exasperatingly cautious, paralyzed with terror at the dangers he encounters (113). Zweig claims that in Defoe’s fiction, for the first time, we encounter a new attitude toward adventure, amounting in fact to a new subject matter: the fall of the adventurer (107). Crusoe could certainly be said to represent the fall of the adventurer as typically understood, but what I hope to underscore by my use of the term solitary adventure is that, rather than canceling adventure, the castaway narrative that has its roots in Defoe shifts the terms of the adventure geographically and psychologically in ways that allow for the shift from popular to serious literature.

I call the narratives and poems that I will analyze solitary adventures, then, to recall their origins in and relation to Defoe’s novel, which itself both depends on and differs from the adventure novel strictly speaking. These solitary adventures are a heterogeneous group of texts without any hard-and-fast simple list of shared characteristics. At the most general level they all feature some kind of castaway figure in isolation, but that isolation could be geographical or psychological, or both; and it could be lived either in actual solitude or, in some cases, within a group. Solitary adventures participate in, without being reduced to, many other genres, including adventure novels, robinsonnades, and voyages imaginaires. They all feature some kind of encounter with an other, although here again, the nature of and reaction to that encounter vary greatly from period to period and work to work.

Before going further, it is important to make it clear what I am not attempting to do in this study of the castaway in French literature. It is not meant to be a history of translation of Defoe’s novel into French, nor an exhaustive catalog of all French works that include a castaway figure; such a project would surpass the limits of a book and would no doubt exhaust the patience of the reader. Nor is it meant to be solely an account of the history of adventure literature or of the transformation of Robinson Crusoe, although Defoe’s novel does loom large as the major precursor of and influence on the castaway narrative in France.[1] My subject intersects with, but does not attempt to duplicate, recent works on related subjects, such as Margaret Cohen’s recent book on seafaring literature, Penny Brown’s history of children’s literature in France, and Diana Loxley and Kevin Carpenter’s studies of islands in literature. Although I have not limited my study to reinterpretations of Robinson Crusoe specifically, those reinterpretations do play a prominent role here, and in that sense this book is the first since William-Edward Mann’s 1916 study to take up the specifically French development of the Crusoe story, which, as we will see below, is in some ways quite different from its development in English-speaking countries.[2] Limitations of space and scope have also made it necessary to eliminate what we could call the domestic or idyllic castaway narrative. The reader will not, therefore, find extensive consideration of, for example, Paul et Virginie or reinterpretations of Johann David Wyss’s Swiss Family Robinson.[3] Rather, I expand the portrait of the castaway in French literature by introducing lyric poets into a history that is typically restricted to the novel. My engagement with Tournier places him in a context that underlines his continuity with several writers who came before him and, in turn, analyzes his influence over the next generations of writers up through the early twenty-first century.

My approach is necessarily intertextual, but my main concern is not to present a stylistic study of how precise passages in Defoe are reworked by French authors. As I have already suggested, the idea of the Crusoe story as one that everyone already knows matters far more to the writers who are the subject of this study than what Defoe actually wrote in his novel, thanks in part, as we will see below, to the work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau in promoting a very specific reading of Defoe. As Ian Watt has pointed out, "Rousseau’s view [. . .] is actually a betrayal of Defoe’s; [. . .] although Rousseau may have been obsessed by Robinson Crusoe, he did not necessarily consult its text either often or with care; it was only the basic idea that appealed to his imagination" (Watt Modern 176). The solitary adventure tradition very much lives its own life independent of Defoe; in that sense, Derrida’s metaphor of the text’s being buried alive is quite apt, and consequently I will not be quoting and analyzing Defoe’s text itself as much as some readers may initially expect, nor will I focus on contemporary Defoe criticism. I should also emphasize that my study is not a cultural history of the castaway. Although the relationship of popular to serious literature is an important subject here, my focus is on developments in the literary representation of the castaway and not on an empirical history of popular and serious readerships. Other critics have pointed to the ideological function of the popular robinsonnade. Penny Brown notes that they

can be seen as ideologically informed acts of mediation revealing a great deal about how a period wished to see itself and its cultural and ideological paradigms. Intertextual practices, ranging from quoting or allusions to wholesale reworking, not only offered different levels of meaning to the alert and more experienced reader but served as an introduction for young readers to the past culture of their own nations or other nations. (Brown 7–8)

Alain Buisine writes that the primary function of the many rearticulations of the Crusoe myth in the nineteenth century is evident: consolidation, strengthening, reinforcement of a novelistic figure where the ideology of the dominant class is recognized, incessant reminder of the euphoric moment of its coming to power, ritual celebration of a legitimacy (Buisine 117). It would be fairly easy to demonstrate that changing cultural concerns and anxieties are reflected in various transformations of the robinsonnade; exclusive focus on such an approach would be a predictable and ultimately unproductive approach to the topic. Histories of the robinsonnade such as Paul Dottin’s indicate, for instance, that in the revolutionary period, predictably enough, the values of that period effect changes in Defoe’s plot so that new versions of the story feature a Vendredi who refuses to accompany Crusoe because of l’amour de la patrie [love of country] that is greater even than la gratitude envers son maître [gratitude toward his master] (Dottin 407). My own concern lies with the deeper structures of the solitary adventure; although not ignoring the cultural dimension of the genre, I seek to point to both the more evident and more hidden ways in which the solitary adventure story informs reading and writing practices in works that go sometimes quite far beyond the robinsonnade, filling in the gaps via a writerly imagination, as Woolf intimates, by posing a host of questions about the meaning of solitude, its relation to encounters with the other, and the roles of reading and writing themselves in describing or creating that encounter.

Nor am I primarily interested in, or capable of, defining precisely what the essence of the specifically French Crusoe would be. That said, however, French castaway narratives do differ from those in other national traditions in some significant ways, and these will be important for my larger argument, so I will briefly characterize them here. As compared to many English-language versions, French reinterpretations of the Crusoe myth tend to focus far less on the Friday character. Although a Vendredi figure is often, although not always, present in French castaway stories, primary emphasis is on the development of Robinson’s character more than on the proto-colonial relationship he establishes with Vendredi. In this sense, the French are more faithful to the proportions of the novel’s chronology: Robinson is completely alone for a full fifteen years before he discovers a footprint in the sand, and another eight years elapse between this incident and Friday’s arrival, even though the accelerated chronology of the novel gives the impression of a much shorter time.[4] As several critics have noted, British uses of the Crusoe legend have linked it far more directly to the colonial enterprise than have other national traditions.[5] Richard Phillips portrays a textual world where the idea of Britain and the British empire completely pervades the world of Crusoe stories:

Nineteenth-century Robinsons and Robinsonades mapped Britain, on the one hand, and the British Empire, on the other [. . .]. The realistic geography of the Robinsons and Robinsonades was an imaginary space in which constructions of Britain and empire were naturalized. Robinson Crusoe’s island was a middle class, Christian, British man’s utopia. Robinson Crusoe and other adventure stories mapped [. . .] a world view that placed Britain at the (imperial) centre and colonies like Crusoe’s island at the margins. (Phillips 17)[6]

Given such a Britain-centered narrative, how do other national traditions adopt the Crusoe story as their own?

In the case of France, it is important to consider, first of all, the way that the truncated plot of Defoe’s novel alters our perception of notions of home and away. Jean-Jacques Rousseau recommended reading Defoe’s novel, but only those parts that focused on the island episode.[7] Lost, then, is Robinson’s return to England after further seafaring adventures as well as the post-history of his island itself. For the British, adventure was largely synonymous with the imperial adventure. This aspect of Defoe’s novel, like the Protestant spirituality of which it is, on some influential readings, an allegory, was simply not borrowed wholesale into the French tradition.[8] In his study of adventure fiction, Green writes:

The English-speaking countries have historically been at the leading edge of the empire-building explosion of the white race outward over the rest of the world. That race’s expansion has been the epic story of modern history, at least as the whites themselves see it. [. . .] The English-speaking countries therefore saw themselves, and were seen, as crucibles of the modern adventure spirit and (as a natural consequence) of the adventure tale as well. French critics and scholars, for instance, have said that the main affinity of the English writers is for the novel of action while French writers are better at the novel of passion, that British narratives excel in narrative, French ones in analysis. (Green Seven Types 10–11)[9]

This distinction between adventure and analysis is the first indication of what will be a crucial aspect of the French solitary adventure. A major premise of my study stems from this distinction, although I would phrase it differently and not as a dichotomy. Rather, I will argue that in the French tradition of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the castaway story gradually interiorizes adventure, treating analysis or, as I will often call it, introspection, and the associated acts of reading and writing, as a kind of adventure. As Georg Simmel puts it in an essay on the adventurer:

The adventurer [. . .] treats the incalculable element in life in the way we ordinarily treat only what we think is by definition calculable. (For this reason, the philosopher is the adventurer of the spirit. He makes the hopeless, but not therefore meaningless, attempt to form into conceptual knowledge an attitude of the soul, its mood toward itself, the world, God. He treats this insoluble problem as if it were soluble.) (Simmel 249)

The development of the contemplative adventurer in French literature accounts for the diverging paths of the castaway narrative in the French and British traditions. Green traces, in his history of the transformation of the Crusoe story, the British tendency to relegate adventure fiction to juvenile literature and introduces the important question of gendered readings and readers:

After the mid-nineteenth century the more serious and ambitious versions of the Robinson story were told by non-British authors. The British seem to have given the subject over to juvenile readers and minor writers. Was this because Britain was then in a new historical phase, interested in running an empire, not in starting a colony? Or was it because in the English system of literature the novel was dominated by women, who had never been such great readers of adventure? Was the long prose narrative in England irresistibly affiliated to feminine concerns? American writers like Cooper (but also Twain and Melville) and French writers like Verne (but also Balzac and Dumas) belonged to systems of literature in which serious novels were built around male protagonists, and so the adventure form was not so clearly marked off as alien. (Green Crusoe 125)

If we consider that reflective thought is also traditionally gendered male (and opposed to a purportedly female focus on emotions), it follows that the French solitary adventure would remain a genre still aimed at and written by men (but without the kinds of strong masculinist features of adventure stories aimed at boys by writers such as Robert Ballantine); consequently, the solitary adventure would have a place in serious literature that would be denied to a genre associated, as it was in Britain, primarily with women and children.

This emphasis on analysis and contemplation would also account for the decreased emphasis in France on the colonial aspect of the adventure tale. As the solitary adventure distances itself from popular fiction, colonialism plays an ever-smaller role in it. Even novelists such as Michel Tournier, whose very title Vendredi purportedly aims to shift the focus of the narrative onto the colonial subject, writes a narrative where the reader has little access to Vendredi’s thoughts and where the main emphasis falls on the transformation of the Crusoe character through a series of philosophical reflections and writings. If we can accept, with Green, Phillips, and others, that imperialism was a far more important feature of British adventure fiction than of its French counterpart, this would explain why, in the twentieth century, there has not been the kind of interest in the Crusoe story that we see among postcolonial writers in English such as J. M. Coetzee. The solitary adventure has remained an almost exclusively French, as opposed to francophone, genre, with the occasional exception of a text by a Swiss or Québécois writer. This is not to say, of course, that the colonial question does not haunt the solitary adventure; rather, it is less of a central or explicit concern, which accounts in part for the reasons that the genre develops differently in France than in Britain.

The French solitary adventure explores a large range of consequences of what I have identified as thought-as-adventure, an interiorization and abstraction of the notion of adventure itself, inspired by the act of reading. A wide variety of thinkers have suggested the affinities between thought and adventure. Hans Blumenberg, for instance, writes that shipwreck, as seen by a survivor, is the figure of an initial philosophical experience (Blumenberg 12) and traces a long history of association between the two ranging from Zeno of Cition through Schopenhauer’s nautical metaphorics of thought processes. The relation is even more direct for the later Derrida, who, commenting on Heidegger in his seminar on the human and the animal, writes that la philosophie, la métaphysique, est une nostalgie, qui nous pousse à être partout chez nous [philosophy, metaphysics, is a nostalgia that pushes us to be at home everywhere] (Derrida 163). This desire for rootedness is comparable to Crusoe’s desire to reproduce in foreign territory as many aspects of home as he can. To contemplate lived experience, however, is to give up that kind of security. The adventure goes against some of our most basic nostalgic desires for home by pushing us further and further away via questions that broaden incessantly:

Qu’est-ce que le monde, la finitude, l’esseulement? Chacune de ces questions demande quelque chose qui va au cœur de l’entier [. . .]. Il ne suffit pas que nous ayons connaissance de ces questions; ce qui devient décisif [. . .] est [de savoir][10] si nous questionnons effectivement ces questions [. . .], si nous avons la force de les soutenir [. . .], de les porter de part en part ou à travers notre existence entière. (Derrida 163–64)

[What is the world, finitude, foresakenness? Each of these questions asks something that goes to the heart of the whole [. . .]. It is not enough that we are aware of these questions; what becomes decisive [. . .] is [to know] whether we are effectively questioning these questions [. . .], whether we have the strength to support them [. . .], to carry them from place to place or through our entire existence.]

When thought takes us far from familiar shores, we find ourselves navigating uncharted territory, a mode of thought that goes beyond conventional knowledge, the familiar, already-lived experience or knowledge.

Mental experience such as reflecting, imagining, and assigning meaning call to mind, in French, the act not just of experiencing but of experimenting, a crucial aspect of adventure where solutions are imagined and then tried out, with varying degrees of success and with results that determine the nature and shape of future experiments. In a recent essay on the philosophical stakes of the novel, Anthony Cascardi chooses Robinson Crusoe as his example of the way in which the novel gives order to fact and value, arguing that Defoe’s novel

illustrates that narrative itself strives to be a value-laden form of discourse in a culture that seems devoted to facts. [. . .] Daniel Defoe cultivates the practice of experimentation and sustains a pretense of historical veracity. Indeed, the very premise of Robinson Crusoe can be taken as an experiment in which an ordinary man is placed in a radically unfamiliar context in order to discover, among other things, what is essential about human nature and what is a product of culture. But Defoe’s quasi-empiricist strategies, with their commitment to the recording of facts and a discovery of the truth, are set within a narrative that ultimately casts the facts within many different frames of value. (Cascardi 173)

The plurality of these many different frames of value is precisely what accounts for the longevity of the castaway narrative as an experimental space for fiction and thought. In fact, whereas Cascardi alludes to empirical method, the fact that the experimentation occurs within the mental rather than the physical world invites comparison not with Locke or Hume so much as Descartes, who in the Meditations on First Philosophy famously couched his own thought experiments in narrative form.[11] Here we have an important, if initially unlikely, point of connection to the French intellectual tradition with which, as we will see in chapter 4, Jacques Rivière aligned the adventure novel as the French understood it. In our own time, Jacques Derrida has made the connection in even stronger terms:

le cogito ergo sum est une robinsonnade hyperbolique, en particulier dans le moment du doute hyperbolique qui insularise absolument le rapport à soi du cogito ergo sum, et nous pourrions pousser très loin l’analyse de cette affinité ou de cette analogie entre le voyageur-philosophe Descartes et Robinson Crusoé. (Derrida 64)

[The cogito ergo sum is a hyperbolic robinsonnade, in particular in the moment of hyperbolic doubt which absolutely insulates the relation to the self of the cogito ergo sum, and we could push very far the analysis of this affinity or analogy between the traveler-philosopher Descartes and Robinson Crusoe.]

The notion of Crusoe, the paradigmatic man of pragmatic action, as a Cartesian hero, or vice versa, demonstrates how far the solitary adventure has taken Defoe’s character since the early eighteenth century. This book is the story of how that introspective castaway came to be, and in France in particular. As Crusoe maps his island, so I map the literary terrain of the solitary adventure and trace the way that imaginative terrain does or does not translate to the world in which we live, the world Derrida says later in the same seminar is une île dont nous ne connaissons pas la carte. Nous sommes en lui et nous voulons aller vers lui, et nous ne savons pas de quel côté nous tourner pour un premier pas [an island whose map we are not familiar with. We are in it and we want to go towards it, and we do not know which way to turn for a first step] (101).

Thinking, mapping, exploring, experimenting, translating, moving—the metaphors continue to multiply, all of them generated not so much by Defoe’s text as by the accumulated set of solitary adventures that text has generated over nearly three hundred years. This study is an attempt to make a narrative of the solitary adventure itself, which, as I have already suggested, can be read as a collectively evolving genre, a series of imaginative interventions in the castaway narrative, each of which opens up new territory for exploration. In that sense, the act of reading is just as adventurous as the hero’s struggles on the island. Margaret Cohen identifies this adventurous aspect of reading in her study of sea fiction, returning to the notion of imagination as the vehicle of adventure in a vocabulary that echoes the world of experimentation:

While Crusoe struggled for survival with the full might of his embodied craft, the reader enjoyed the cerebral, low-risk pleasures of applying and manipulating information, drawn both from within the novel and without. [. . .] The creative act of reading in sea fiction solicits a pragmatic use of the imagination, as the reader searches for expedients that do not violate the laws of nature, that could be performed, and that could plausibly work. This plausibility of performance contrasts with a plausibility of mimesis, which measures events and characters according to their historical and social verisimilitude. (Cohen 8)

This is an intriguing hybrid view of the act of imaginative reading, because it balances the abstraction with which we typically associate reading with a more pragmatic sense of judging the plausibility of proposed solutions to problems. Those problems suggest that the potential for failure is always present, which thus keeps us on guard against dead-end solutions. Reading is, on this account, anything but a passive activity, and not just because we are able to place ourselves in the role of the hero, but because we as readers of solitary adventures are able to see the writing and reading, the creation and re-creation of the solitary adventure as a perilous and potentially rewarding adventure.[12] These high stakes are what Maurice Blanchot describes in La part du feu:

Ecrire n’est qu’un jeu sans valeur, si ce jeu ne devient pas une expérience aventureuse, où celui qui la poursuit, s’engageant dans une voie dont l’issue lui échappe, peut apprendre ce qu’il ne sait pas et perdre ce qui l’empêche de savoir. Et puis, écrire, oui, mais si écrire rend toujours plus malaisé l’acte d’écrire, il tend à lui retirer les facilités que les mots ne cessent de recevoir des mains des plus habiles. (247–48)

[Writing is only a game without value, if this game does not become an adventurous experience, where the one who is pursuing it, engaging in a path whose exit escapes him, can learn what he doesn’t know and lose what keeps him from knowing. And then, writing, yes, but if writing always makes the act of writing difficult, it tends to take back from him the ease that the words do not cease to receive from more skillful hands.]

Blanchot’s comments allow us to see the ways in which the concept of reading as adventure goes far past the limited world of adventure fiction strictly speaking. Thus the solitary adventure becomes a sort of paradigm for the adventure of reading fiction more generally; it both contributes to and depends upon the intensity of this adventuresome relationship between thinking and acting, this view of thinking as acting and, by extension, of reading as writing and vice versa. It is this kind of adventure that Michel de Certeau no doubt had in mind when he wrote that Tout récit est un récit de voyage—une pratique de l’espace [Every narrative is a travel narrative—a practice of space] (Certeau 171).[13]

The voyage continues even after shipwreck; one could say that the transition from voyage to shipwreck is emblematic of the shift I have been tracing from outward to inward adventure: it is not that the journey ends but rather that it takes on a different form. The story of the castaway is not a static set of retellings of the same fundamental story but rather a dynamic set of narratives where each new retelling alters the course of the genre. Not every solitary adventurer is explicitly a Crusoe figure, but even within that subset a staggering variety of Crusoes are a result of the many ways that character has been rewritten and reread. Derrida acknowledges the long philosophical tradition with which Defoe’s character interacts:

Vous voyez ainsi tous ces Robinsons se multiplier sous nos yeux (le Robinson du cogito cartésien et son animal-machine, le Robinson du «Je pense» kantien et husserlien, le Robinson de tous les subjectivismes et idéalismes transcendantaux, [. . .] les Robinsons de Rousseau, et celui de Joyce, et tant et tant d’autres, de tous les autres que Robinson, que la figure et le destin de Robinson font rêver).

Non qu’il y ait un seul Robinson ou une robinsonnade en général, mais voilà une grande famille dont nous devons reconnaître les traits communs, les ressemblances, les airs de famille, sans nous hâter d’ignorer leurs traits différentiels et leurs irréductibles singularités. (Derrida 280)

[You thus see all these Robinsons multiplying under our eyes (the Robinson of the Cartesian cogito and his machine-animal, the Robinson of the Kantian and Husserlian I think, the Robinson of all the subjectivisms and transcendental idealisms, [. . .] the Robinsons of Rousseau, and that of Joyce, and so, so many others, all the others that Robinson, that the figure and the destiny of Robinson make us dream of.

It is not that there is only one Robinson or one robinsonnade in general, but here we have a large family in which we must recognize the common traits, the resemblances, the family likenesses, without rushing to ignore the traits that differentiate them and their irreducible singularities.]

This book is the story of those many Crusoes, and his fellow castaways, and how they came to be within the French tradition.

Although my focus is not, as I have said, exclusively on Robinson Crusoe, Defoe’s novel does loom very large in these pages. Therefore a few comments about the early reception of Robinson Crusoe in France might be in order here, as chapter 1 begins with what is arguably the most important event in that history—Rousseau’s recommendation that Defoe’s novel be, for a while at least, the only book his prototypical pupil, Emile, is allowed to read. Rousseau’s recommendation, however, has a long prehistory.

In his study of the extraordinary voyage in French literature, Geoffroy Atkinson defines that genre as

a fictitious narrative, purporting to be the veritable account of a real voyage made by one or more Europeans to an existent but little known country [. . .] together with a description of the happy condition of society there found, and a supplementary account of the traveler’s return to Europe. The Extraordinary Voyage, as defined, is a particular type of Imaginary Voyage. (Atkinson 1700 7)

The genre, Atkinson explains, was developed in seventeenth-century France independent of British influence; his principal examples are La terre australe connue by Gabriel Foigny (1676), L’Histoire des Sévarambes by Denis Vairase d’Alais (1677–79), and Les Aventures de Télémaque by Fénelon (1699). It is because of this well-established genre that Defoe’s novel was classified easily by some French readers at the time of its appearance (Atkinson 1700 165) as an extraordinary voyage. No doubt the way in which readers label a text has important influence on the way they read it, which is what makes Robinson Crusoe such an interesting case, because, if Defoe’s novel was as easily labeled by its first French readers as Atkinson claims, that was not the case for long. Already Atkinson’s definition of the extraordinary voyage shows some hesitation. He claims that the genre includes didactic content (1700 162) but distinguishes the genre from both philosophic works of the Utopia type and from fantastic imaginary voyages to other planets or to non-existent countries because of its geographic realism (162); later he indicates that the extraordinary voyage always has a philosophical or utopian content (1720 8). One wonders, then, whether a work with a realistic geographical setting but devoid of philosophical content, for instance, would count as an extraordinary adventure if it could be said to include a utopian