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Crusoe in Exile

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Michael Seidel*
Affiliation:
Columbia University, New Youk, New Youk

Abstract

Defoe calls Robinson Crusoe a “fugitive” fable, an “allegorical” narrative history that records on many levels the strains of displacement and the powers of reconstitution. Crusoe's experience offers Defoe the fictional opportunity to represent different sequences of narrative action that resemble and sometimes duplicate one another. Island exile for Crusoe substitutes for structurally comparable events—imaginative, psychological, religious, and, in the carefully worked out timing of the adventure, political. The politics of exile are especially significant for Crusoe's several transformative conversions, not merely his turning from place to place but his turning of one place into another. The classical exile, displaced abroad and replaced at home, becomes in Robinson Crusoe doubly situated—Crusoe's island home is literally remote but allegorically familiar. This paradox has narrative, historical, and national implications.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1981

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References

Note 1 Joyce, Ulysses (New York: Random, 1961), p. 109.

Note 2 Daniel Defoe, The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, ed. J. Donald Crowley (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1972), p. 142. Subsequent citations, given parenthetically in the text by page, are to this edition.

Note 3 In his essay “The Displaced Self in the Novels of Daniel Defoe,” ELH, 38 (1971), 562–90, Homer O. Brown makes a similar point about temporal doubling in Crusoe's journal: “The journal is an attempt to define a situation by ordering the present as it becomes the past” (p. 585). The present “becomes” the past in the sense that it will both revert to the past in time and reflect the past's essence.

Note 4 Crusoe's very name implies a species of wanderer, one for whom an “irresistable Reluctance continu'd to going Home” (p. 16). In his essay “Robinson Crusoe: 'Allusive Allegorick History,' ” PMLA, 82 (1967), 399–407, Robert W. Ayers ponders the original name of the Crusoe family, Kreutznaer. He suggests various possibilities: Kreutz = cross 'to cross, to cruise' (a religious version would be a Kreutzzug 'crusade'); naer or naher = comparative of near; nahren 'to journey, to approach.' Crusoe's name, as befits the classical exile, seems to mean both to wander and to come home. For a recent study on the origins of a similar notion, see Douglas Frame, The Myth of Return in Early Greek Epic (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1978).

Note 5 See W. B. Stanford, The Ulysses Theme: A Study in the Adaptability of a Traditional Hero, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1963), and a recent study on the poetics of exile, Giuseppe Mazzotta's Dante, Poet of the Desert (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1979).

Note 6 Works of Daniel Defoe, ed. G. H. Maynadier, 16 vols. (New York: Sproul, 1903), iii, xi. Subsequent citations are given in the text by volume and page number.

Note 7 See Maximillian E. Novak, “Defoe's Theory of Fiction,” Studies in Philology, 61 (1964), 650–68. This seminal essay goes far in addressing the entire matter of fiction, romance, and lying in Defoe's conceptual sense of narrative. Novak maintains, among other things, that Defoe took a traditionally Aristotelian position in valuing invention as an informing pattern of probability (mimesis as history) in fiction. What is probable (though not necessarily actual) is what is useful in extracting the meaning from any fable. Of course Novak knows, as all Defoe's readers should know, that in representing what looks to be probable in fiction Defoe also opens veins of psychological complexity and ambiguity that sustain an interest in his work beyond the theory of usefulness Defoe none too modestly advances for it.

Note 8 Defoe, A Collection of Miscellany Letters out of Mist's Weekly Journal (London, 1722–27), iv, 210. Novak cites and discusses this passage and its implications in “Defoe's Theory of Fiction,” pp. 662–68.

Note 9 In “Robinson Crusoe: ‘Allusive Allegorick History,‘ ” Ayers neatly defines the process as “a story whose literal meaning is augmented by a second meaning which is the construct of allusions in the literal narrative” (p. 400).

Note 10 These patterns have received considerable attention in J. Paul Hunter's The Reluctant Pilgrim: Defoe's Emblematic Method and Quest for Form in Robinson Crusoe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1966) and in George Starr's Defoe and Spiritual Autobiography (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1965). Everett Zimmerman, “Defoe and Crusoe,” ELH, 38 (1971), 377–410, sums up the issue: “The pattern for The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe is that of a fall, repentance, and redemption—both spiritual and secular” (p. 387).

Note 11 In many attempts to trace the allegorical import of Crusoe's history, commentators have made scant mention of the historical or national coincidence in its timing. J. Paul Hunter is one of the only critics to notice the parallel: “Crusoe's twenty-eight years of isolation and suffering, for example, parallel the Puritan alienation between the Restoration and the accession of William and Mary; the allusion intensifies the sense of Crusoe's alienation from society and suggests the thematic implications of the Puritan emblematic rendering of events” (The Reluctant Pilgrim, p. 204). Douglas Brooks acknowledges Hunter and makes the same point briefly in his Number and Pattern in the Eighteenth-Century Novel (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972), p. 25.

Note 12 In his Daniel Defoe and Middle-Class Gentility (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1968), Michael Shinagel hints at the antagonism Defoe, as Dissenter, would have surely felt against the Stuarts: “The persecutions suffered by the Dissenters during the 1660's served to unite rather than disperse them. They found comfort and succor in their shared afflictions. They felt themselves being tested for their religious beliefs, if not also on trial for their souls” (p. 7).

Note 13 When Defoe first began toying with fictional representation, in his early narrative The Consolidator (London, 1705), he called his work an “allegorick Relation” and placed himself in it as a lunar philosopher who acts out the precepts of the 1688 Glorious Revolution on the moon. The narrative is an implicit attack on the less glorious principles of the Stuart kings and on any who would restore those principles in modern times. Significantly, the ascendancy of William iii in 1688 marked for Defoe the great chance for a new hero, a hero measuring the value of his nation. In Essay upon Projects (London, 1697), Defoe's first full-length work, written in the decade after the Glorious Revolution and a quarter century before Robinson Crusoe, we hear of the Crusoe type and symbol, the merchant-adventurer who, in the face of all manner of risk, is still “the most Intelligent Man in the World, and consequently the most capable, when urg'd by Necessity, to Contrive New Ways to live” (p. 8). Defoe repeats the essence of this conception much later in his career, after Crusoe, when he refers to the English merchant as a kind of cycle in and of himself, both a personal and a national cycle that conforms to the pattern of risk redemption or ruin recovery: “The English tradesman is a kind of phoenix, who rises out of his own ashes, and makes the ruin of his fortunes be a firm foundation to build his recovery” (The Compleat English Tradesman [London, 1726], ii, 198–99).

Note 14 By circumstance or by design Defoe imagined himself to “come alive” after the Restoration. He was born at its outset in 1660; his family suffered under the strict Clarendon Code against Dissenters; he fought in the abortive Monmouth Rebellion of 1685 against lames ii, barely managing to escape the king's forces in the rain and the subsequent Bloody Assizes of Lord Jeffreys; he rode in the advance guard that welcomed William iii, a king Defoe would call his patron and friend, to London. See the early chapters of John Robert Moore's Daniel Defoe: Citizen of the Modern World (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1958). In his Life and Adventures of Mr. D— Def— (London, 1719), Charles Gildon was the first to pick up the allegorical identification of Crusoe's exile with Defoe's life: “You are the true Allegorick Image of thy tender Father D——1” (p. x). And he also sensed that there was a political message in the narrative for which Defoe needed the protection of fiction : “But, honest D——1,

I am afraid, with all your Sagaciousness, you do not sufficiently distinguish between the Fear of God, and the Fear of Danger to your own dear Carcass“ (p. 18). Defoe's biographer Thomas Wright took another tack and argued that the allegory of Crusoe relates to a crisis in Defoe's marital life that resolved itself after his illness in 1714, when he would have been the same age as Crusoe on his return to England (The Life of Defoe [London, 1894], pp. 12–13, 24–28). The most detailed account of the personal and public events possibly allegorized in Robinson Crusoe is offered by George Parker, ”The Allegory of Robinson Crusoe,“ History, 10 (1925), 11–25. Parker concentrates on Defoe's entrepreneurial and political career, citing Defoe's comment in his Appeal to Honour and Justice (1715): ”I have gone through a life of wonders, and am the subject of a vast variety of Providences.“

Note 15 Defoe's notion of obedience in a political context runs counter to the familial disobedience of Crusoe's presumed original sin. Like Locke, Defoe does not confuse patriarchy and monarchy. In fact, passive obedience stands at the center of Defoe's antagonism toward the Stuarts. In his Jure Divino (London, 1706), a twelve-book satirical poem on state tyranny, Defoe points out that this “Satyr had never been Publish'd, tho' some of it has been a long time in being, had not the World seem'd to be going mad a second Time with the Error of Passive Obedience and Non-Resistance” (p. i). The first time was in the latter days of an increasingly desperate James ii.

Note 16 For a different development of this notion centering on an economic reading, see Maximillian E. Novak's chapter “Robinson Crusoe's Original Sin,” in Economics and the Fiction of Daniel Defoe (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1962), pp. 32–48.

Note 17 Crusoe is on the seas when Oliver Cromwell defeats the remaining Royalist forces at Worcester and Charles ii flees to France. Defoe held no brief for Cromwell the militarist. Crusoe's gradual eclipse from England seems to represent the worsening stages of English rule: he is in prison or in Brazil for the Protectorate and in complete exile for the Restoration.

Note 18 In September of 1659 Lambert dismissed the ineffective Rump Parliament as a ruling body, thus leading to the series of events that ushered in the Restoration of Charles ii.

Note 19 Property and succession were, of course, two key issues of Restoration politics. It is fitting that Crusoe should combine them. Later, toward the end of his island stay, when sovereignty once again goes to Crusoe's head (“How like a King I look'd”), he touches on the third great issue of the Restoration, religious toleration: “My Man Friday was a Protestant, his Father was a Pagan and a Cannibal, and the Spaniard was a Papist: However, I allow'd Liberty of Conscience throughout my Dominions: But this is by the Way” (p. 241). One of Defoe's severest complaints against the Stuarts in his assessment of state politics in The Consolidator was that they used—and misused—toleration as a hypocritical tool to ensure a Catholic succession. Crusoe may be slightly wry on the issue of toleration, but Defoe is dead serious about it as another allegorical parallel to past and present conditions closer to home, as he might put it.

Note 20 Because of his fear of the print and its unknown maker, Crusoe later says that he lived “like one of the ancient Giants, which are said to live in Caves, and Holes, in the Rocks, where none could come at them” (p. 179). If he were a Cyclopean giant, of course, the footprint he sees would be smaller, not larger, than his own. As Rousseau argues in his Essay on the Origin of Languages, size and its perception are often a metaphoric adjustment to fear.

Note 21 Crusoe claims he leaves the island on 19 December 1686 after twenty-eight years, two months, and nineteen days. These calculations would bring the date of arrival back to 30 September 1658, which is a year earlier than he says when he lands. But we ought to credit the later date because Crusoe is more likely to know the correct year when he is in the middle of it than when he counts backward. Defoe makes a number of hopeless mistakes toward the end of the narrative, and to get himself off he has Crusoe say “nor had I kept even the Number of Years so punctually, as to be sure that I was right” (p. 249).

Note 22 The year 1674 marks, for the narrative's historical parallel, a crucial shift in English political opposition, a shift marked by contemporaries and modern historians alike. Those, like Andrew Marvell and John Locke, who were actively involved in the politics of the period and those, like Laurence Echard, Defoe, and John Oldmixon, who later wrote so forcefully about the period, saw that the Stuart reign changed dramatically between Charles ii's first fifteen years and the thirteen remaining to him and his brother. The initial period reflected consolidation of power at home, and the latter an increased spirit of opposition heralded by the factional appearance of named rival parties, the paranoia of the Popish Plot, and the renewed rhetoric of civil war. In his Account of the Growth of Popery and Arbitrary Government in England (1678), Marvell attacks the Royalist propagandists for stirring up the old cavaliers: “They begun therefore after fifteen years to remember that there were such a sort of men in England as the old Cavalier party; and reckoned, that by how much the more generous, they were more credulous than others, and so more fit to be again abused” (Works, ed. Alexander B. Grosart [London, 1875], iv, 303–04). A modern authority on Charles's reign, David Ogg, sees 1674 as the year in which “an opposition now national in character” appeared (England in the Reign of Charles II, 2nd ed. [London, Oxford Univ. Press, 1956], ii, 544). Although it is indeed tempting to see the parallel in Crusoe's condition, we also have to see that, for Defoe, Crusoe's fifteen years of “settling in” can produce a manic form of sovereignty, an image of the sovereign as self-protective tyrant that has to be worked through, and out of, Crusoe's system before Crusoe can recivilize himself.

Note 23 The temporal comparison of Crusoe's adventures from the twenty-fifth year of his reign with events at home before and during the hectic last three years of Stuart reign suggests that in both places Providence seems to be readying for something momentous. Invasions, conspiracies, betrayals, cabals, and counter-alliances are unusual, to say the least, on Crusoe's island after his years of isolation, but if they are projected allegorically toward the scramble for power back home they make a certain sense.

Note 24 The aptness of the sovereign pun on I-land, even if Defoe was unaware of it, was pointed out to me by Richard Braverman of Columbia University. For the wider sets of relations between Crusoe's experience and the law of nations, see Maximillian E. Novak, Defoe and the Nature of Man (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1963).

Note 25 What Crusoe works out in his response to the cannibals touches on the natural propensity toward tyrannical violence that Defoe saw in mankind. He observes in Jure Divino: “Nature has left this Tincture in the Blood, / That all Men would be Tyrants if they cou'd. / If they forbear their Neighbors to devour, / 'Tis not for want of Will, but want of Power” (“Introductory Verses,” p. 1). Everett Zimmerman points out that, from Crusoe's early experiences off Africa to the island cannibals to the wolves in the Pyrenees, his fear of being devoured is related to the general fear “of being dematerialized—the reversal of the desire to accumulate. It is a fear shared by author and character” (“Defoe and Crusoe,” p. 385).

Note 26 Defoe may be casting a glance at the illegal cabal of James ii in the last days of what Defoe saw as an increasingly illegitimate rule. Charles Gildon assumed that Defoe's hatred of the English in this scene was more general. In his pamphlet attack, Gildon has Defoe remark: “for I always hated the English, and took a Pleasure in depreciating and villifying of them” (Life and Adventures of Mr. D— Def—, p. xiv). Another possibility is pursued by Defoe's biographer John Robert Moore, who argues that Defoe's representation of the English in the Crusoe volumes was repayment in kind for the Englishman's usual xenophobia. At the time, according to Moore, Defoe had an interest in a policy of good will toward Spain in order to keep open or create trade routes off the coast of South America. Most of his English countrymen did not see the matter his way.

Note 27 If this particular island sequence seems to allude to Shakespeare's Tempest, Defoe has a Winter's Tale of sorts in mind for Crusoe when, several years later, Crusoe crosses the Pyrenees in winter on the long-way-round trip back from Brazil.

Note 28 Not only is this date of historical importance to Defoe for personal reasons as the second anniversary of Monmouth's rebellion against James n, in which Defoe himself took part, but it was precisely at this time in England that leading national figures officially invited the Protestant Dutch prince, William, to mount an invasion and wrest the monarchy from Stuart possession. In a sense, Crusoe's salvation and rearrival home allegorize the English salvation to follow.

Note 29 Homer is careful to make certain that when Odysseus returns to Ithaca he does so with a rich store given him by the Phaeacians. He hides the booty in a cave until he restores his land to its true worth. The exile thus brings value back to his home.