"ROBINSON CRUSOE:" THE EMPIRE'S NEW CLOTHES

"ROBINSON CRUSOE:" THE EMPIRE'S NEW CLOTHESAuthor(s): Daniel CottomSource: The Eighteenth Century, Vol. 22, No. 3 (Autumn 1981), pp. 271-286Published by: University of Pennsylvania PressStable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/41467250Accessed: 01-04-2020 03:36 UTC

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The Eighteenth Century , vol. 22, no. 3, 1981

ROBINSON CRUSOE: THE EMPIRE'S NEW CLOTHES

Daniel С ott от

There was a man who loved islands. He was born on one, but it didn't suit him, as there were too many other people on it, besides himself. He wanted an island all of his own: not necessarily to be alone on it, but to make it a world of his own.

D. H. Lawrence1

I

Like the unsophisticated child of "The Emperors New Clothes," the deserted island of Robinson Crusoe is meant to penetrate the mystique of arbitrary authority. The governing assumption in the plot of the novel is that one will see the naked body of man - the real man - as the fabric of civilization is torn away from the individual who confronts this testing ground. The inessential will disappear and only that which is truly valuable or humanly important will remain. Thus, Alphonse Daudet was simply judging the novel on its own ground when he remarked, "If I were condemned to a long period of seclusion, and were allowed only one book to read, I would choose Robinson."2 Sim- ilarly, those critics who continue to follow Coleridge's description of Crusoe as Everyman implicitly embrace the idea that Defoe's work is designed to show us how man appears when he is stripped of the complex social environment that ordinarily makes men appear so divided and distinct from each other.3 The assumption is that the conditions specific to different societies at different times are trivial in comparison to a universal nature that all men in all times are presumed to possess and that the unculti- vated nature of Crusoe's island serves to reveal.

In this respect the island is like a number of other eighteenth- century figures: the Noble Savage, Addison and Steele's Specta- tor, Montesquieu's Usbek, and Goldsmith's Citizen of the World, to name some of the most prominent. For all their differences,

1. "The Man Who Loved Islands," The Collected Short Stories of D. H. Lawrence (London: Heinemann, 1974), p. 671.

2. Quoted in Thomas Wright, The Life of Daniel Defoe (London: Farncombe, 1931), p. 250. 3. For examples of this kind of reasoning, see J. Paul Hunter, The Reluctant Pilgrim: Defoe's Emblematic

Method and Quest for Form in Robinson Crusoe (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1966), p. 127; and James Sutherland, Daniel Defoe: A Critical Study (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971), p. 131.

271


272 THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

these figures are alike in their basic literary role. Their vision is presumed to be radically valid because they are outsiders and so are thought to look upon society in an unprejudiced way. Just as the island tests civilization, in the figure of Crusoe, by placing it on unfamiliar ground, so do they test civilization by regarding it from a foreign or detached point of view. In accordance with the prevailing assumptions of Enlightenment philosophy, the justifica- tion for the test is this idea that there exist in man certain defini-

tive and universal characteristics that may be obscured by adven- titious historical conditions but that are still the essence of man behind that troublesome veil of circumstance.

On the other hand, the island differs from these other figures in one important respect. It gives the writer a greater opportunity to use dramatic action in addition to observation and reflection as he seeks to establish the essence of human nature. Defoe created a

plot of extraordinary critical suggestiveness because he hid the values against which Crusoe would react in an inarticulate scene instead of embodying them in a person or a foreign culture. While even Noble Savages have social backgrounds of their own that will affect their view of European society, there is no such back- ground to the island - or so it appears. This plot of land seems to be a completely neutral stage on which one can set man and, through the power of its neutrality, demystify his heritage of cus- tom, prejudice, partiality, and superstition. It seems a stage completely outside of time and thus the perfect place to discover the reality of man beneath the misleading encrustations of history.4 Here, at last, in this "meer State of Nature" (118), 5 man can be free of alienation and can fulfill Rousseau's fantasy of "carrying one's self, as it were, perpetually whole and entire about one."6 It is because it appears in this character that Crusoe's island has proven so fertile a source of popular fantasy - "If you were on a deserted island, and you had to choose between . . . ?" - and also a source of innumerable literary references in the works of writers as various as Rousseau and Marx and Melville, Thomas Hardy and Claude Lévi-Strauss, Jules Verne and James Joyce. It seems only fitting that there has even been a movie called Robinson

4. Pierre Nordon notes that "Robinson's island possesses a concrete character that distinguishes it from the islands in the long history of utopias before Defoe"; but I would argue that this realistic style of its description doesn't alter the fact that its character is primarily understood - by Robinson and by most of his commentators- as being defined by the abstract qualities of isolation, desertedness, and naturalness. See Robinson Crusoe: unité et contradictions , Archives des lettres modernes No. 80 (Paris: Minard, 1967), p. 13.

5. Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, ed. Donald Crowley (London: Oxford University Press, 1972). Pages cited parenthetically refer to this edition.

6. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, "A Discourse on the Origin of Inequality," The Social Contract and Discourses , trans. G. D. H. Cole (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1947), p. 165.


COTTOM - ROBINSON CRUSOE 273

Crusoe on Mars : clearly those who dreamed up such a film understood the nature of the fantasy at the heart of the book's appeal.

This island, however, is not as simple as its popularity may make it appear. As Hayden White has noted in discussing the character of the wild man, figures set up in opposition to civilized values are themselves elements in a civilized discourse of a specific kind and thus are not neutral, or "natural," at all.7 The island may show that the emperor has no clothes, but one must analyze the clothing worn by the island rather than uncritically accept those aspects of Enlightenment ideology that it has served to popularize under the masquerade of "nature." And Defoe's novel does just this, for it is more complex than is recognized in popular fantasy and even in much criticism of the novel. Robinson Crusoe uncovers the paradox in the use of the island as a testing ground. It shows how that naked body which is thought to exist behind the artificialities of civilization can only make its appearance in terms of some kind of fiction - precisely what the island was intended to sweep away. According to Robinson Crusoe , when one places man in a state of nature so as to discover his true being, one discovers that this human nature can only appear as a dependent, imaginary contrast to social appearances, authorities, oppression, and alienation. Defoe develops this paradox to the edge of madness as he shows the final result of the search for a human essence to be the mutual displacements of paranoia and megalomania that will not let Crusoe rest in his state of solitude.

II

Since Crusoe's "Original Sin" (194) is his disobedience to his father - the figure who represents inherited values - it is not going too far to say that he inhabits the deserted island, in effect, even before he sets foot on it. As he himself recognizes at one point in the novel, it is an entirely appropriate expression of his antisocial character. He is, as it were, destined to land on this island because he is destined to be an outsider through whom civilization will be tested. As Ian Watt described this situation, "The egocentricity, one might say, is forced upon him, because he is cast away on an island. But it is also true that his character is throughout courting its fate and it merely happens that the island offers the fullest opportunity for him to realise three associated tendencies of mod-

7. "The Forms of Wildness: Archaeology of an Idea," The Wild Man Within: An Image in Western Thought from the Renaissance to Romanticism, ed. Edward Dudley and Maximillian E. Novak (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1972).



ern civilisation - absolute economic, social, and intellectual freedom for the individual/*8 Although several critics in recent years have analyzed the spiritual significance of his character, then,9 this aspect of his rebellion cannot completely account for the novel's repeated, even overwhelming insistence upon Crusoe's refusal to accept authority of any kind. That this is so is evident in the dif- fuseness of the terms applied to his character within the novel. His father equivocally attributes his rebelliousness to "Fate or Fault" (5), while Crusoe himself variously attributes it to a "Prop- ension of Nature" (3), "a rash and immoderate Desire" (38), and "Fancy rather than . . . Reason" (40) when he does not simply throw up his hands and say, "I know not what to call this" (14). This difficulty in defining the source of his alienation from the usual governance of society emphasizes just how completely he is an outsider. Even words, the contemporary rhetoric of religion, psychology, and philosophy, cannot hem him in. Though it cer- tainly is important, therefore, the spiritual significance of his rebelliousness is subsidiary to the dramatic constitution of Crusoe as a character who must be separated from society so that he may look at all of it - including religion and religious rhetoric - from this detached viewpoint. Crusoe's resistance to those "visible Instructions" (4) that point him towards conformity is so perver- sely incomprehensible, even to himself, so as to emphasize just how radically unsocialized his viewpoint is. It is only to be expected, then, that Crusoe should be continu-

ally forgetting and then regaining his faith even before he arrives at the island just as he does when he finally is shipwrecked there. Since one who rejects all traditional authority has no other ground upon which his judgment can rest except the shifting pressures of his immediate circumstances, his faith can only be expressed in a discontinuous way. Thus, after his father's lecture on the felicities of "the middle State, or what might be called the upper Station of Low Life " (4), Crusoe initially repents of his desire to wander; but "a few Days wore it all off" (6). The same kind of remorse, in what Crusoe calls "those Fits" (10), occurs when he first encoun-

8. The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1957), p. 86. Also, see Leonardo Trisciuzzi, Cultura e mito nel Robinson Crusoe, Educatori antichi e moderni 252 (Firenze: La Nuova Italia, 1970), p. 25: "In Robinson restlessness ... is a new pheno- menon, understood as a 'natural' inclination, as a rational tendency no longer to accept limits imposed by tradition or by any other authority that isn't rational." And Leo Braudy, "Daniel Defoe and the Anxieties of Autobiography," Genre 6 (1973):91: "In the world of Defoe's characters everything that pre-exists the individual - family, society, culture, and Providence - threatens his or her identity." 9. See G. A. Starr, Defoe and Spiritual Autobiography (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965); Hun-

ter, The Reluctant Pilgrim ; and Robert W. Ayers, " Robinson Crusoe : 'Allusive Allegorick History,' " PMLA 82 (1967): 399-407.


СОЛОМ-ROBINSON CRUSOE 275

ters a storm at sea, when the barley he carelessly casts upon the ground of the island surprises him by sprouting, and when he falls sick - and always with the same result. Each renewal of his faith in Providence is eroded sooner or later by changes in the circumstances that dictate his needs. As he writes after he discovers that

cannibals have visited his island, "Thus my Fear banish'd all my religious Hope. . .as if he that fed me by Miracle hitherto, could not preserve by his Power the Provision which he had made by his Goodness" (156). The Providential scheme of history cannot be maintained in the mind of a man who has put himself outside of history and thus is bound only to immediacy; and so Crusoe's experience of faith can only appear in erratic counterpoint to his experience of fear, anxiety, and desolation.10

It is for this reason that Crusoe typically describes his experience of Providence by placing it in the context of imaginary situations in which he supposes Providence would be absent. Since he is cut off from all the cultural authorities that could preserve for him the general idea of Providence even when it is not apparent in his immediate individual experience, the only way that he can maintain a belief in Providence beyond his fleeting moments of satisfaction is by continually comparing his situation in life to less satisfying situations. As he puts it, "Thus we never see the true State of our Condition, till it is illustrated to us by its Contraries; nor know how to value what we enjoy, but by the want of it" (139). 11 This kind of negative imagination is all that Crusoe has to take the place of cultural authority; and thus, by a peculiar twist of logic, he most strongly feels the influence of Providence in his life when he represents situations in his imagination that are not those of his own life. Because he has no historical

ground to his life, it is only through negations that he can under- stand Providence in a positive way.12

10. For related analyses of Crusoe's unstable faith from somewhat different critical perspectives, see William M. Halewood, "Religion and Invention in Robinson Crusoe," Essays in Criticism 14 (1964): 345; Everett Zim- merman, Defoe and the Novel (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975), pp. 20-47; and David Blewett, Defoe's Art of Fiction: Robinson Crusoe, Moll Flanders, Colonel Jack, and Roxana (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979), pp. 29-39.

11. Cf. John J. Richetti's description of how Crusoe must always be "keeping before himself the image of various anti-Crusoes" in Defoe's Narratives: Situations and Structures (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), pp. 48-49. Also, for a Lacanian analysis of the novel that concentrates upon this point so as to describe "an obsessive repetition of the claim to a unity and identity of the self coming to grips w ith the obvious proofs of its arbitrarity and insufficiency," see Thomas M. Kavanagh, "Unraveling Robinson: The Divided Self in Defoe's Robinson Crusoe," Texas Studies in Literature and Language 20 (1978): 416-432.

12. It is notable in this regard that when Crusoe's father praises "the middle State," he does so through just such a contrast to other states before he describes its positive virtues. See Robinson Crusoe, p. 4, and the comment on this passage in Curt Hartog, "Authority and Autonomy in Robinson Crusoe ," Enlightenment Essays 5 (1974): 35. For the significance of this parallel between Crusoe and his father, see part IV of this essay.



"I spent whole Hours," says Crusoe in a characteristic moment, "I may say whole Days, in representing to my self in the most lively Colours, how I must have acted, if I had got nothing out of the Ship" (130). A parallel example is the famous balance sheet that serves Crusoe, as he says, "to distinguish my Case from worse" (65). And just as Providence is affirmed through negation, so is it revealed through concealment: "How infinitely Good that Providence is, which has provided in its Government of Mankind, such narrow bounds to his Sight and Knowledge of Things; ... he is kept serene, and calm, by having the Events of Things hid from his Eyes, and knowing nothing of the Dangers which surround him" (196).

Providence is found only after the event, in the negative representation of the event, while in the urgent activity of life it is lost. The only positive way that Crusoe can come close to touching upon Providence is by relying upon "secret Hints, or pressings of [his] Mind, to doing, or not doing any Thing that presented" (175). Even this "certain Rule," though, is a rule of unconscious- ness, and one that he discards as soon as he finds himself in a cri- sis. Thus, although he had carefully thought out a theory of Pro- vidential policy that would forbid him to plan the destruction of any cannibals who might come to his island, he immediately drops this policy as soon as he actually observes them on his terri- tory. Moreover, he repeats the same process when the cannibals arrive after he has Friday with him. Although Crusoe says that he will have to rely upon "a Call" (233) to decide what to do in this situation, his only motive for action turns out to be his instinctive outrage at the discovery that one of the cannibals' captives is a European. Here again, then, the drama of the novel shows Cru- soe's rather unorthodox reliance upon "Discoveries of an invisible World, and a Converse of Spirits" (250) to be an imaginary, negative, and profoundly unstable policy.

Despite the fact that Crusoe's faith periodically must fail, though, there is no strict correlation between his state of mind and the state of outward circumstances. No experience of satisfaction can be an absolutely certain sign of Providence because he has no formal model for his faith. Whether the situation of a par- ticular moment be relatively favorable or adverse, therefore, Cru- soe's life is essentially an endlessly repetitive series of crises. His world is always a new world wholly discontinuous with any notion of historical influence. Thus, there appears the ambiguous serendipity of the calendar in which embarkations always occur on one date and escapes on another, so that, as Crusoe concludes,


COTTOM- ROBINSON CRUSOE 211

"the same Day of the Year I was born on (viz.) the 30 th of Sep- tember, that same Day, I had my Life so miraculously saved 26 Year after, when I was cast on Shore in this Island, so that my wicked Life, and my solitary Life begun both on a Day" (137).

Symbolically, birth and isolation coincide. In effect, Crusoe is islanded even before he meets the realm appropriate to him in the deserted island. And, as mentioned previously, it clearly is no accident that Crusoe anticipates his own shipwreck by remarking, when he is working his plantation in Brazil, "I liv'd just like a Man cast away upon some desolate Island, that had no body there but himself" (35). If he could establish a faith that could transcend his crises of apostasy, his position would be truly provident; but his role as an outsider makes any such redemption impossible. His backslidings do not so much represent an ordinary human weak- ness akin to that recognized in Puritan spiritual biographies but rather a kind of constitutional incapacity for prolonged commitment based upon the way that he has been defined as a character. Despite his bibliomancy and his allusions to Job and Jonah and the Prodigal Son, the very notion of scriptural guidance is essentially foreign to the discontinuous immediacy of Crusoe's status as a character in the world. Since the island is located at the beginning of his narrative - that is, symbolically identified with Cru- soe's birth - the enclosed and self-sufficient economy that otherwise might make it a positive ground for identity instead becomes symbolic of a radical alienation, separation, or discontinuity that cannot be overcome. Each time that Crusoe finds his faith is

always the first time, or so it seems to him, because there can be no progress where there is no original ground to build on. Thus, in the space of five pages one finds him saying his "first prayer" (91); and then doing what he "had never done before in all [his] Life" (94), that is, praying; and then later saying, "This was the first Time that I could say, in the true Sense of the Words, that I pray'd in all my Life" (96). This repetitive, ahistorical quality of Crusoe's time is further emphasized by the absence of any indica- tions that he physically ages during all his years on the island. In Crusoe's world, repetition is the only structure that orders time.

Ill

As the locus of Defoe's critical irony, then, this island so essentially characterized by solitude forces Crusoe into a position in which he can only be present to himself insofar as he is constantly involved in representing the image of his confinement. Since the island is a neutral ground and Crusoe himself a deracinated out-



sider, the only way that Crusoe can try to gain control over himself is by the repetitive activity of representing his isolation. In the absence of any positive ground for his character, it is only through negative images of confinement that he can imagine his freedom and only through images of the threatened body that he can imagine his soul. Because he has no positive cultural back- ground, he has nothing but negations to build his identity.

So as Crusoe discovers his New World, this New World discovers him. Though it represents an absolute departure from traditional authority and thus seems to leave him completely free, the island in effect completely determines the kind of life that Crusoe must lead. It is only by proving over and over that he is actually imprisoned that Crusoe can maintain himself as something different from the inarticulate, inhuman nature of the island and from the aleatory chaos of the ocean that surrounds it. In other words, the only way that he can discover his natural being on this testing ground is by continually recovering himself in the artificial trap- pings of society. Because of the extremes in terms of which Defoe plotted his novel, no other possibilities are open to Crusoe save a surrender to the muteness of the island or a tortured, negative commitment to the society outside of which he stands. By imprisoning himself, therefore, he defends himself; and in so defend- ing, defines himself.

The result is that Defoe's ironic ground becomes Crusoe's privileged space as Crusoe multiplies enclosures that he then hides either by secluding or by disguising them. By trying to make his enclosures disappear, he tries to make himself disappear. He tries to vanish into nature even as his construction of these imprisoning forms sets him off from nature. Moreover, he himself recognizes this trap in which he is caught. On the one hand, he decides, in his fear of cannibals, "That my Business was by all possible Means to conceal my self from them, and not to leave the least Signal to them to guess by, that there were any living Creatures upon the Island; I mean of humane Shape" (172-73). On the other, however, there is the fact that when he earlier had scouted the possibility of removing himself from the shore of the island to a more habitable region in its center, he had concluded, "to enclose my self among the Hills and Woods, in the Center of the Island, was to anticipate my Bondage, and to render such an Affair [of escape] not only Improbable, but Impossible" (101). He has to conceal himself to protect himself; and yet to conceal himself too successfully would be to reduce himself completely to the utterly



blank, inhuman nature of the island.13 He must multiply his enclosures, then, but he can never entirely complete them or rest easy in them.

As it eventually stands, Crusoe's castle is composed of a cave subdivided into numerous chambers; two tents, one inside the other; the double row of stakes that forms his original fence and the rafters raised from it to the side of the hill by which it is placed; a fence of "Chests and Boards, and. . .Pieces of Timber" (71) within this other fence, and a wall of turf outside it; a double row of trees grown from shoots planted around this enclosure (these trees eventually growing so close together that they form a solid wall); a tent for Friday between these two fences; and a wood planted beyond the wall of trees which is impassable except by way of a secret trail. In addition, he builds his bower with its tent and double fence, enclosures around his gardens at the castle and pens for his goats at the bower (with smaller pens within them to aid in catching the goats), a second cave and his third plantation in an even more remote part of the island. Crusoe is thus characterized by the construction of forms that

contain and control space for his private use. Just as he repeatedly has second thoughts about Providence that temporarily serve to reconcile him to his position in the world, so does he accumulate and revise these forms in his repeated attempts to render himself inviolable. They are, as it were, the physical version of his belea- guered and discontinuous spiritual state. The logic behind them is that even if the defenses of one of his homes were to fail, he would have the other residences that modify it to fall back upon, just as the logic of his religiosity consists in the obsessive multipli- cation of imaginary examples of conditions worse than his. As Crusoe's solitude is a fearfully negative state - a state in which he can only be liberated by imagining the oppression of others, and thus a state in which he must always see the appearance of others in his vicinity as a death threat - the way that he escapes this fear is by always seeking to maintain a surplus of literal and metaphor- ical capital that can be called upon in the event of an attack. "I smiFd to my self at the Sight of this Money," as Crusoe says in what is probably the most famous passage in the novel. "O Drug! Said I aloud, what art thou good for. . . . However, upon Second Thoughts, I took it away" (157).

Crusoe fits perfectly Ruskin's description of "the eminent fence-

13. Cf. Homer (). Brown's analysis of Defoe's narrators' "double compulsion to expose and to conceal themselves" in "The Displaced Self in the Novels of Daniel Defoe," ELH 38 (1971): 562-590.



loving spirit of the medievais"14 inasmuch as the empire he desires is not one of vast extension but rather of microcosmic autarchy. He envisions the pantry as the hortus conclusus.15 He creates the next best thing to a division of labor by dividing his day into dis- crete periods assigned to different occupations; he constructs fences, baskets, pots, and canoes; his first trained parrot is but the beginning of a menagerie of dogs, cats, goats, other parrots, and sea-fowl; and thus it is only to be expected that when he prepares himself against the threat of cannibals he should walk about with, as he says, "two Guns upon my Shoulders, and two Pistols at my Girdle" (183). Crusoe does not so compulsively multiply his defensive capital because of an actual experience of scarcity or danger: he reacts in this way because he so fears others that the world must always be a place of scarcity to him. Crusoe, then, may offer a rather slyly distorted homily concern-

ing that difference between use and luxury familiar in eighteenth- century discussions of value - "whatever we may heap up indeed to give others, we enjoy just as much as we can use, and no more" (129) - but he can never cease to elaborate upon his exo- skeletal empire. While his desire is to bring artifice to that state of classical perfection in which it would be indistinguishable from nature, this defensive desire is made impossible by the critical neutrality of the island and by his own corresponding rejection of all authority. That is to say, he could live securely within the shel- ter of his surroundings only if they could protect him from the relentless search for a human essence represented by the island and embodied in his own islanded character - and this they cannot do because there is no positive ground in the island or in himself. Both are founded upon negations. On the one hand, then, he cannot be satisfied as long as anyone might recognize a difference between the island and himself because such a difference makes

him recognize the vulnerable construction of negations which is his identity. On the other, he cannot totally assimilate himself to the island because it is essentially foreign to all humanity, including his own. It is thus that Crusoe is trapped by the paradox of the nature-culture dialectic in eighteenth-century discourse: the paradox that the difference between these concepts was so radically heightened in this age even though the two concepts were

14. John Ruskin, Modern Painters, The Works of John Ruskin, ed. E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn, 39 vols. (New York: Longmans, Green, 1904), 3:261.

15. Cf. Pat Rogers, "Crusoe's Home," Essays in Criticism 24 (1974): 375-390. Also, for different interpreta- tions of Crusoe's use of space, psychoanalytic and archetypal, respectively, see Eric Berne, "The Psychological Structure of Space with Some Remarks on Robinson Crusoe," Psychoanalytic Quarterly 25 (1956): 549-557; and Robert H. MacDonald, "The Creation of an Ordered World in Robinson Crusoe," Dalhousie Review 56 (1976):23-34.


СОТТ ОМ- ROBINSON CRUSOE 281

radically indivisible.16 Nowhere is this supposed difference more heightened than in Robinson Crusoe, and nowhere is the falsity of this distinction made more evident. As a result, Crusoe's fortifications, like the castle of Alma in The Faerie Queen and its relatives in other Renaissance works, may be images of the body; but unlike these antecedents they are thoroughly negative images. Since they are erected upon a plot of ground consisting of the rejection of all historical grounds, these fortifications can possess no innate virtues and no fixed form. To the extent that they suc- ceed in protecting Crusoe from the wilderness around him, they only do so by showing his character to be inextricably allied to the characters of his enemies: by imprisoning him in a fearful relationship to these others. Nevertheless, Crusoe's pride in his position as "King and Lord" (100) over the island on which he has "no Competitor" (128) strives to embody a bourgeois complacency even greater than his father's. Not only does he have his country house, but he even manages to make an umbrella for himself. After journeying around his island, he concludes, "This little wandring Journey, without settled Place of Abode, had been so unpleasant to me, that my House, as I call'd it to my self, was a perfect Settlement to me, compar'd to that; and it rendred every Thing about me so comfortable, that I resolv'd I would never go a great Way from it again, while it should be my Lot to stay on the Island" (111). Despite the contradictions in his character and situation, when he is sitting at mealtime with the lives of his dog, parrot, and cats at his "absolute Command," and none of them "Rebels" (148), he can bring himself to revel in the fantasy of empire. And for a while this fantasy survives rather well, until the fact is impressed upon him - that is, upon the sand of his island - that he is not in control and that the world can never be his to monopolize. As he says, he is forced to retreat, "not feeling, as we say, the Ground I went on" (154). 17 The footprint literally forces him to recognize the groundlessness of his existence. After Crusoe considers and finally rejects the possibility that the

footprint he finds was made by the Devil, he decides that it must have been made by "some more dangerous Creature" (155) - i.e., a cannibal - as the extremes of his concern characteristically are delimited to the extremities of his body. This anthropophagie anxiety is always with Crusoe. Thus, when he sees the wreck that eventually turns out to be the ship of the Spaniards whom he 16. On this point see Daniel Cottom, "Of Taste and the Civilized Imagination," forthcoming in The Journal

of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. 17. Significantly, Crusoe notes that it is after this discovery that he begins to call his fortifications his "Cas-

tle" (154).



rescues, one of his first thoughts is of the possibility that the men on it fell to devouring each other. At one point he is even obliged to kill a number of his fecund cats "to keep them from devouring" him (180). Crusoe's anxiety on this point is so strong because the psychology of empire demands that any creature or influence that one cannot master must be seen as a voracious intruder on

one's potency.18 Viewed in this context, Crusoe's fear is that his privileged space, his private property, will be lost if anyone even sees it. He knows that it is only maintained by his imperial self- effacement - which is to say, his systematic subordination of others to himself, either in imagination or in reality. Crusoe can find momentary relief, therefore, in the idea that the print was of his own foot; but as soon as he tests that hypothesis and finds it want- ing, his first impulse is to tear down his tempting enclosures. As it appears to others whom he judges in terms of his own desire for conquest, restraint can only be an added incitement to aggression.

Crusoe writes, "If at last this was only the Print of my own Foot, I had play'd the Part of those Fools, who strive to make stories of Spectres, and Apparitions; and then are frightened at them more than any body," and adds, "and so I might be truly said to start at my own Shadow" (158). Even though he finds that the footprint could not have been his own, the fact that he recognizes the possibility of such a humiliation indicates a recognition that the difference between justified and paranoid fears is, for him, an elusive one. He is, as he says early in the novel, "born to be my own Destroyer" (40), in the sense that his enemies, real and imaginary alike, are the shadows of his own inability to come to terms with himself. As he acknowledges this paradox in his mode of being, "I whose only Affliction was, that I seem'd banished from Human Society. . .was ready to sink into the Ground at but the Shadow or silent Appearance of a Man's having set his Foot on the Island" (156). He who is so constituted as to live by imperial psychology not only must be able to dominate all others but also be a bondsman to himself and must feel within himself the

same unconquerable threat that he perceives in the world around him. The perfect image of this situation appears towards the end of the novel when Crusoe protects himself by appearing to the English sailors who eventually rescue him as his own servant. As he writes, "I retir'd in the Dark from them, that they might not see what Kind of Governour they had" (268). As he conspires with

18. See E. Pearlman, "Robinson Crusoe and the Cannibals," Mosaic 10 (1976): 39-55; and Brown, "The Dis- placed Self." It is notable that, as Pearlman points out, Crusoe's fear of cannibals is entirely incommensurate with the contemporary information about cannibals and even with a "realistic" sense of life in the novel itself (as Defoe seems to imply that Friday had eaten none but human flesh before he met Crusoe).


COTTOM-ROBINSON CRUSOE 283

the English captain to put down the mutiny on his ship, "we never suffered them to see me as Governour, so I now appear'd as another Person, and spoke of the Governour, the Garrison, the Castle, and the like, upon all Occasions" (271). Not only must Crusoe define himself through the oppression of others; but he must even appear in a negative, oppressed relation to himself in his life just as he does in his journal when he balances his condition against worse fates that might have been his. At the end of the novel as throughout it, his positive triumph on the island remains entirely invisible, imaginary, and fictional.19 After meeting with the footprint, as if he were not insecure

enough already, Crusoe gains sufficient reason to notice this vulnerability in his own imposition upon the landscape of the island when he comes upon a second cave. When he rushes in brandishing a torch, the staring eyes within its darkness that could betoken either "Devil or Man" (177) are found to be those of a dying goat: a symbol of impotence that parodies Crusoe in the same way that Crusoe's clothes of goatskin parody civilized attire. Within the security of that cave, Crusoe then fancies himself "one of the ancient Giants" (179); but in his continuing paranoia he does recognize that his castle, his caves, his body, and his island are all simply different kinds of coffins as long as he can only perceive his relationship to the world in terms of negations. Even his approbation of Friday, when it finally comes, is expressed in a rhetorical cave. Almost every positive statement he makes is bal- anced by a negation so that he can appropriate Friday into his obsessed world of contrasts:

He was a comely handsome Fellow, perfectly well made; with straight strong Limbs, not too large; tall and well shap'd, and as I reckon, about twenty six Years of Age. He had a very good Countenance, not a fierce and surly Aspect. . . .His Hair was long and black, not curl'd like Wool. . . .The Colour of his Skin was not quite black, but very tawny; and yet not of an ugly yellow nauseous tawny... but of a bright kind of dun olive Colour, that had in it something very agreeable; tho' not easy to describe.... His Nose small, not flat like the Negroes. (205-206)

That the style of this description does not simply reflect Crusoe's conventional European racism is made evident by further contrasts he makes elsewhere in the novel. At one point, for instance, he allows that barbarians "were yet, as to the Spaniards, very innocent People" (172) and favorably compares cannibals to "those Christians . . . who often put to Death the Prisoners taken in

19. The only critic I have found who comments upon this passage - which seems to me to be a crucial one that contradicts the usual analysis of Crusoe as one who achieves a positive triumph in his desire for control - is Brown, "The Displaced Self," p. 581.



Battle" (171). One notices, too, that he has to gird himself "with more Caution" (253) when he prepares to meet the English sailors than when he prepares to meet cannibals. Virtually every postive statement that Crusoe makes throughout the novel is thus sha- dowed by negation, contrast, or contradiction because he cannot escape from the oppressive shadow of his own constitution as a character.

IV

Like the other containers in the novel, which often are botched in their original construction and even when successfully com- pleted always need to be revised and supplemented, the narrative itself is a body of various chambers added together. First of all, there is the introductory section of the novel, which recounts Cru- soe's adventures up to and slightly past the time of his shipwreck on the island; the journal, which repeats much of the introduction; digressions and comments made upon the journal within the journal; the calendar post that serves as a physical complement to the journal, mirroring the problems of Crusoe's faith as in its mark- ings he soon loses track of Sundays and once, during an illness, of an entire day; the final section of the novel, written after the rescue along with the first section and the editorial comments (although there often is no clear separation between the intruding voice and that of the journal itself); and, of course, The Farther Adventures and The Serious Reflections.

The narrative itself, then, is part of Crusoe s capital. The Eng- lish captain who rescues him might not have been surprised that Crusoe had failed to reinvent ink while being so ingenious otherwise if he had recognized Crusoe's construction of his autobiography as but one representation of himself among many other forms of property - the buildings, the boats, and so on - all of which serve the same purpose as the reassuringly redundant capital strengthening the economy of his own body. All are part of the anxious defenses that constitute his commanding identity. While it is no small part of the novel's charm to read it as a man- ual for survival, then, its interest should only be augmented when one sees that the survival with which it is most deeply concerned is the survival of imperial fantasy.20

20. Cf. James Joyce's characterization of the novel as "the prophecy of empire" in "Daniel Defoe," ed. and trans. Joseph Prescott, Buffalo Studies (Buffalo: SUNY-Buffalo, 1964), p. 24; Watt's description of the appeal of description of "crafts" in a society undergoing the division of labor in The Rise of the Novel, pp. 71-74; William Bysshe Stein's lively if overblown argument that Defoe was exploiting middle-class fantasy and frailty in "Robinson Crusoe: The Trickster Tricked," The Centennial Review 9 (1965): 271-288; Michael Shinagel's



Like the revision to which Crusoe's state of mind is continually subject, the continual revision to which he subjects his work may be said to result from the irony of the novel disrobing itself, revealing that vision which penetrates imperial pretensions as itself being based upon an arbitrary claim for an authentic vision. One cannot look at Crusoe from the "natural" viewpoint of the island without a distortion of vision, just as one cannot take Cru- soe at his word - for that word slips, slides, decays and changes throughout the text.21 The vexed question of Defoe's intentions, at least in the way it usually is posed, can here be seen to be practi- cally meaningless. Since intentions can only be evaluated where there is a generally accepted public ground for the interpretation of individual behavior, the fantastic nature of Crusoe's island is really no nature at all. The island is essentially a fiction masquer- ading as a physical place - that is, a fiction so constituted as to deny its fictionality, burying the assumptions that created it in a natural and neutral ground - and this character makes it impossible to discover the sincere view of man, or the essential man, in Defoe's narrative.

In other words, the island is Vaihinger's "fiction of the simple case,"22 and Defoe's narrative exposes this fiction. It shows that the method of using an outsider to criticize civilization only serves to reaffirm civilization and all its "artificial" values. From the

viewpoint of the island, man has his essential being outside of society and history; he is born into the world independent, free, and original; and consciousness is definitive of man and defini- tively whole. This is the ideology concealed by the innocent clothes of the island- by its blankness, muteness, foreignness, and naturalness - but Robinson Crusoe sees through these clothes as it shows how the fiction of the deserted island is dependent upon the psychology of empire.

Robinson Crusoe shows that England displaced to a neutral stage remains England. As John J. Richetti has written, "The long haul toward the island and back eventually is a journey into 'nature' to bring back an acceptable version of official ideol- description of the appeal the novel could have to middle-class economic fantasy in Daniel Defoe and Middle- Class Gentility (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1968), pp. 126-30; and G. A. Starr, Defoe and Casuistry (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), p. 95n: "Defoe proffers both an economic and a religious expla- nation' of Crusoe's success, but this success cannot fully be accounted for in any such terms, and one function of such explanations may be to provide a rationale for what we might otherwise balk at as fantasy."

21. Cf. E. Anthony James's description of Crusoe as "a habitual semantic quibbler" in Daniel Defoe's Many Voices: A Rhetorical Study of Prose Style and Literary Method (Amsterdam: Rodopi N. V., 1972), pp. 165- 199; and Starr's description of how Crusoe's style shifts the reader's attention "from the ultimate act to the various factors that influence it," even though they may be contradictory, in Defoe and Casuistry, p. 52.

22. The Philosophy of 'As if : A System of the Theoretical, Practical and Religious Fictions of Mankind, trans. C. K. Ogden (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1924), p. 25.



ogy."23 Crusoe's problem is not that he disobeys his father, but that he obeys him too well as he exhibits the fanatical logic hidden behind the prosaic surface of middle-class egoism. His escape from history is the escape that commands bourgeois ideology as the essential consciousness of bourgeois individualism is its belief in itself as the culmination and transcendence of history. Crusoe is not a rebel but a paradigm, though a paradigm taken to extremes so as to expose this ideology. In this unveiling, Robinson Crusoe demonstrates that one can only discover a self by dismantling another. (In this respect, it is significant that Crusoe does not land on the island bereft of all possessions but instead is able to sca- venge goods from his own shipwreck, from the shipwreck of the Spaniards, and from the mutiny on the English vessel that finally rescues him.) According to this novel, man can only discover his nature by dominating and exploiting others, whether in fantasy or reality, so that the very ideas of nature and of the natural man are rent by insoluble contradictions. To return to the mainland, then, is to return to a region of altered but no less terrifying insecurities. Crusoe worries, "I had ne'er a Cave now to hide my Money in" (286), and after being confronted with the wolves of the Pyrenees - man-eaters, again - decides that the dangers of the sea were comparatively mild. Civ- ilized society is dismissed only to be reestablished by the neces- sity of fiction - which is to say, the essentially fictional nature of man. The civilization and the history into which man is born cannot be rejected but only hidden or disguised. True, Crusoe is profoundly uncomfortable when he first reassumes European clothes so that he can meet the English sailors, commenting, "never was any thing in the World of that Kind so unpleasant, awkward, and uneasy, as it was to me to wear such Cloaths at their first putting on" (274). This discomfort, however, is just as profoundly neces- sary to his self-definition as the master of the island and of the other men who have appeared on it. He can only define himself by putting on these "foreign" clothes; and thus this moment exemplifies that fantastic, paradoxical logic through which a European may triumphantly confirm his own civilized identity by submitting it to the discomfiting critical perceptions of the outsider.

23. Defoe's Narratives, p. 27.


"ROBINSON CRUSOE:" THE EMPIRE'S NEW CLOTHES

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