Bourgeois Solitude in Robinson Crusoe

Abstract

BOURGEOIS SOLITUDE IN ROBINSON CRUSOE JÄNIS SVILPIS University of Calgary H a lf w a y through Jules Verne’snovel, L’Ile mystérieuse, Pencroff, Spilett, and Harbert sail to Tabor Island to rescue the castaway, Ayrton, and find that he has become feral—has lost all traces of civilization and become scarcely more than an animal. Of course, Verne’s Ayrton is a complex in­ dividual, an ex-pirate tormented by remorse, and his madness is no simple matter, but at the same time Verne is offering a critique of Robinsonnades generally, and particularly ofDefoe’s construction ofhis hero, who remained sane and comfortably bourgeois “for above Twenty Five Years” (204) before meeting Friday. Those who, like Ian Watt, consider the hardships experi­ enced by actual mariners shipwrecked on desert islands must conclude that Robinson Crusoe’s remarkable success is “a flagrant unreality” (321). There is an instructive irony in the fact that Verne’s extraordinary voyage is more “realistic” than Defoe’s “realistic” novel. Robinson is an unnatural figure, but he is a figure central to Western European culture, one who appears and reappears through a long series of texts, and the impossibility that he represents has had a continuing value for us. If, following Althusser, we regard ideology as representing the individual’s imaginary relation to real conditions of existence, we can see the value of this impossibility in its contribution to the ideology ofcapitalism. In making Robinson a model for his Emile, Jean-Jacques Rousseau gives us a hint at how this works. His educational theory requires an appropriate expository narrative: “If one can invent a situation where all man’s natural needs are shown in a way a child’s mind can sense, and where the means of providing for these needs emerge in order with equal ease, it is by the lively and naïve depiction ofthis state that the firstexercisemust be givento hisimagination” (184). He finds such a narrative in Defoe’s novel: Robinson Crusoe on his island, alone, deprived of the assistance of his kind and the instruments of all the arts, providing nevertheless for his subsistence, for his preservation, and even procuring for himself a kind of well-being — this is an object interesting for every age and one which can be made agreeable to children in countless ways. This is how we realize the desert island which served me first as a comparison. This state, I agree, is not that of social man; very likely it is not going to be that of Emile. But it is on the basis of this very state that he ought to appraise all the others. English Studies in Canada, 22, l, March 1996 The surest means of raising oneself above prejudices and ordering one’s judgments about the true relations of things is to put oneself in the place of an isolated man and to judge everything as this man himself ought to judge of it with respect to his own utility. (184-85) The admission, “This state ... is not that ofsocial man,” recognizes Robin­ son’s special position. On the one hand, he provides an overriding standard of value— “utility”—and demonstrates “all man’s natural needs.” On the other, he is unlike civilized men, who are, by implication, subject to prej­ udice, have no access to “the true relations of things,” and form their judgments on some other basis. But—and this is the part Rousseau ig­ nores—he is a product ofcivilized society who reproduces his civilization in miniature. Robinson’s characteristic conceptual space is both estranged and very fa­ miliar, and he, the inhabitant of that space, is related to other symbolic practices whose cultural function is to provide measures of value and def­ initions of natural wants. And, although the civilization he reproduces is artificial, eighteenth-century thinkers regarded that activity of reproduction as perfectly natural. As Bernard Mandeville comments in Remark L of The Fable of the Bees, If every thing is to be Luxury (as in strictness it ought) that is not im­ mediately necessary to make Man subsist as he is a living Creature, there is nothing else to be found in the World...