TEXT, MYTH, AND IDEOLOGY

There are perhaps too many texts in Tournier's first published novel, Vendredi ou Les limbes du Pacifique: the presence of Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe as a powerful precursor-text remains a constant preoccupation throughout the narrative; the prelapsarian Tarot card preface provides a forestructure to the narrative proper and as such constitutes a predictive sequence, albeit in symbolic form; the Bible is an important resource for Robinson; the narration of his adventures on the island is animated by a series of transformations and renewals on varying scales forming a verbal edifice that seems to take its inspiration from Claude Lévi-Strauss's structural analyses of myth; finally, the exploration of Robinson's consciousness during his time on the island is recorded in his log-book. The interspersed sections of the log-book give some indication of the complexity of textual interplay which runs through the novel, in that the log-book institutes and perpetuates three distinct discourses: between Robinson and himself, in which the self is viewed temporally in terms of past and future states; between Robinson and the island; and between the first-person voice of the log-book and the third-person narrator of Robinson's adventures. Moreover the theme of language, which is viewed in Vendredi as a tool with the potential to open up new areas of cognitive experience, permeates all aspects of the novel. Although Vendredi is, as many have surmised, a novel about philosophy, it is specifically a novel which investigates the possibilities inherent in a philosophy of language. Moreover, absorbed in its own other-worldly self-consciousness, it is a novel in which are staked out the initial parameters of Tournier's figurative discourse, the gateway to his imagination.

The Life and Strange, Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, by Daniel Defoe, was first published in Great Britain in 1719. Since then there have been numerous borrowings, rewritings, and, interestingly, adaptations in the form of childrens’ books of Crusoe's story, to the extent that the character of Robinson has passed into western mythology. Vendredi draws on a number of more or less famous robinsonades, many of which are freely acknowledged by the author. Tournier even describes how he consulted documents which chronicle the true life story of Alexander Selkirk, the original Robinson Crusoe and real-life inspiration to Defoe.