A Perfect Vacuum (3 page)

If only it were possible to come to an understanding with Wendy Mae and thereby make the relationship, already very unbusinesslike, more settled, more restricted, more decorous as regards obedience and command, with the sternness and the maturity of the masculine Master! Ah, but it's really such a simple-minded girl; she's never heard of Snibbins; to speak to her is like talking to a wall. Even if she actually thinks some thought of her own, it's certain that she'll never say a word. This, it would seem, out of simplicity, timidity (she's a servant, after all!), but in fact such little-girlishness is instinctively crafty: she knows perfectly well for what—no,
against
what—the Master is dry, calm, controlled, and high-flown! Moreover she vanishes for hours on end, nowhere to be seen till nightfall. Could it be Boomer? Because it couldn't be Snibbins—no, that's out of the question! Snibbins definitely isn't on the island!

The naïve reader (alas, there are many such) will by now probably have concluded that Robinson is suffering hallucinations, that he is slipping into insanity. Nothing of the sort! If he is a prisoner, it is only of his own creation. For he may not say to himself the one thing that would act upon him, in a radical way, therapeutically—namely, that Snibbins never existed at all, and likewise Boomer. In the first place, should he say it, she who now
is
—Wendy Mae—would succumb, a helpless victim, to the destructive flood of such manifest negation. And furthermore, this explanation, once made, would completely and permanently paralyze Robinson as Creator. Therefore, regardless of what may yet happen, he can no more admit to himself the
nothingness
of his handiwork than the real Creator can ever admit to the creation—in His handiwork—of
spite.
Such an admission would mean, in both cases, total defeat. God has not created evil; nor does Robinson, by analogy, work in any kind of void. Each being, as it were, a captive of his own myth.

So Robinson is delivered up, defenseless, to Snibbins. Snibbins exists, but always beyond the reach of a stone or a club, and it does not help to set out Wendy Mae, tied in the dark to a stake, for him as bait (already Robinson has resorted to this! ). The dismissed servant is nowhere, and therefore everywhere. Poor Robinson, who wanted so to avoid shoddiness, who intended to surround himself with chosen ones, has befouled his nest, for he has ensnibbined the entire island.

Our hero suffers the torments of the damned. Particularly good are the descriptions of the quarrels at night with Wendy Mae, those dialogues, conversations rhythmically punctuated by her sullen, female, seductively swollen silences, in which Robinson throws all moderation, restraint, to the winds. His lordliness falls from him; he has become simply her chattel—dependent on her least nod, wink, smile. And through the darkness he feels that small, faint smile of the girl; however, when, fatigued and covered with sweat, he turns over on his hard bed to face the dawn, dissolute and mad thoughts come to him; he begins to imagine what else he might do with Wendy Mae ... something paradisiacal, perhaps? From this we get—in his threshing out of the matter—allusions, through feather stoles and boas, to the Biblical serpent (note, too: servant—serpent), and we have the attempted anagrammatic mutilation of birds to obtain Adam's rib, which is Eve (note, too:
Aves
—Eva). Robinson, naturally, would be her Adam. But he well knows that if he cannot rid himself of Snibbins, in whom he took no personal interest whatever during the latter's tenure as lackey, then surely a scheme to put Wendy Mae out of the way must spell disaster. Her presence in any form is preferable to parting with her: that much is clear.

What follows is a tale of degeneration. The nightly washing of the fluffs and frills becomes a sort of sacramental rite. Awakened in the middle of the night, he listens intensely for her breathing. At the same time he knows that now he can at least struggle with himself
not
to leave his place,
not
to stretch his hand forth in that direction—but if he were to drive away the little tormentor, ah, that would be the end! In the first rays of the sun her underthings, scrubbed so, bleached by the sun, full of holes (oh, the locality of those holes!), flap frivolously in the wind; Robinson comes to know all the possibilities of those most hackneyed agonies which are the privilege of the lovelorn. And her chipped hand mirror, and her little comb ... Robinson begins to flee his cave-home, no more does he spurn the reef from which Snibbins abused the old, phlegmatic whales. But things cannot go on like this much longer, and so: let them not. There he is now, hastening to the beach to wait for the great white hulk of the
Caryatid,
a transatlantic steamer which a storm (very likely also conveniently invented) will be casting up on the leaden, foot-scorching sand covered with the gleam of dying chambered nautili. But what does it mean, that some of the chambered nautili contain within them bobby pins, while others in a soft-slimy slurp spit out—at Robinson's feet—soaked butts of Camels? Do not such signs clearly indicate that even the beach, the sand, the trembling water, and its sheets of foam sliding back into the deep, are likewise no longer part of the material world? But whether this is the case or not, surely the drama that begins upon the beach, where the wreck of the
Caryatid,
ripped open on the reef with a monstrous rumble, spills its unbelievable contents before the dancing Robinson—that drama is entirely real, it is the wail of feelings unrequited....

From this point on, we must confess, the book grows more and more difficult to understand and demands no little effort on the part of the reader. The line of development, precise till now, becomes entangled and doubles back upon itself. Can it be that the author deliberately sought to disturb the eloquence of the romance with dissonances? What purpose is served by the pair of barstools to which Wendy Mae has given birth? We assume that their three-leggedness is a simple family trait—that's clear, fine; but who was the father of those stools? Can it be that we are faced with the immaculate conception of furniture?? Why does Snibbins, who previously only spat at the whales, turn out to be their ardent admirer, even to the point of requesting metamorphosis (Robinson says of him, to Wendy Mae, “He wants whaling”)? And further: at the beginning of the second volume Robinson has from three to five children. The uncertainty of the number we can understand. It is one of the characteristics of a hallucinated world that has grown too complicated: the Creator is no longer able to keep straight in his memory all the details of the creation simultaneously. Well and good. But with whom did Robinson have these children? Did he create them by a pure act of will, as previously he did Snibbins, Wendy Mae, Boomer, or—instead—did he beget them in an act imagined indirectly, i.e., with a woman? There is not one word in the second volume that refers to Wendy Mae's third leg. Might this amount to a kind of anticreational deletion? In Chapter Eight our suspicions would appear to be confirmed by a fragment of conversation with the tomcat of the
Caryatid,
in which the latter says to Robinson, “You're a great one for pulling legs.” But since Robinson neither found the tomcat on the ship nor in any other way created it, the animal having been thought up by that aunt of Snibbins's whom Snibbins's wife refers to as the
“accoucheuse
of the Hyperboreans,” it is not known, unfortunately, whether Wendy Mae had any children in addition to the stools or not. Wendy Mae does not admit to children, or at least she does not answer any of Robinson's questions during the great jealousy scene, in which the poor devil goes so far as to weave himself a noose out of coconut fibers.

“Cock Robinson” is what the hero calls himself in this scene, ironically, and then, “Mock Robinson.” How are we to understand this? That Wendy Mae is “killing” him? And that he holds all that he has done (created) to be counterfeit? Why, too, does Robinson say that although he is not nearly so threelegged as Wendy Mae, still in this regard he is, to some extent, similar to her? This may more or less allow of an explanation, but the remark, closing the first volume, has no continuation in the second, neither anatomically nor artistically. Furthermore, the story of the aunt from the Hyperboreans seems rather tasteless, as does the children's chorus which accompanies her metamorphosis: “There are three of us here, there are four and a half, Old Fried Eggs.” Fried Eggs, incidentally, is Wendy Mae's uncle (Friday?); the fish gurgle about him in Chapter Three, and again we have some allusions to a leg (via fillet of sole), but it is not known whose.

The deeper we get into the second volume, the more perplexing it becomes. In the second half of it, Robinson no longer speaks to Wendy Mae directly: the last act of communication is a letter, at night, in the cave, written by her in the ashes of the fireplace, by feel, a letter to Robinson, who will read it at the crack of dawn—but he trembles in advance, able to guess its message in the darkness when he passes his fingers over the cold cinders.... “Do leave me be!” she wrote, and he, not daring to reply, fled with his tail between his legs. To do what? To organize a Miss Chambered Nautilus Pageant, to belabor the palm trees with a cudgel, reviling them in the most opprobrious terms, to shout out, on the promenade of the beach, his program for harnessing the island to the tails of the whales! And then, in the course of one morning, arise those throngs which Robinson calls into existence off the cuff, carelessly, writing names, first and last, and nicknames, on whatever comes to hand. After this, complete chaos, it seems, is ushered in: e.g., the scenes of the putting together of the raft and the tearing asunder of the raft, of the raising up of the house for Wendy Mae and the pulling of it down, of the arms that fatten as the legs grow thin, of the impossible orgy without beets, where the hero cannot tell black eyes from peas or blood from borscht!

All this—nearly 170 pages, not counting the epilogue!—produces the impression that either Robinson abandoned his original plans, or else the author himself lost his way in the book. Jules Nefastes, in
Figaro Littéraire
, states that the work is “plainly clinical.” Sergius N., in spite of his praxiological plan of Creation,
could not avoid
madness. The result of any truly consistent solipsistic creation
must be
schizophrenia. The book attempts to illustrate this truism. Therefore, Nefastes considers it intellectually barren, albeit entertaining in places, owing to the author's inventiveness.

Anatole Fauche, on the other hand, in
La Nouvelle Critique,
disputes the verdict of his colleague from
Figaro Littéraire,
saying—in our opinion, entirely to the point—that Nefastes, quite aside from what
The Robinsonad
propounds, is not qualified as a psychiatrist (following which there is a long argument on the lack of any connection between solipsism and schizophrenia, but we, considering the question to be wholly immaterial to the book, refer the reader to
The New Criticism
in this regard). Fauche sets forth the philosophy of the novel thus: the work shows that the act of creation is
asymmetrical,
for in fact anything may be created in thought, but not everything (almost nothing) may then be erased. This is rendered impossible by the memory of the one creating, and memory is not subject to the will. According to Fauche the novel has nothing in common with a clinical case history (of a particular form of insanity on a desert island) but, rather, exemplifies the principle of aberrance in creation. Robinson's actions (in the second volume) are senseless only in that he personally gains nothing by them, but psychologically they are quite easily explained. Such flailing about is characteristic of a man who has got himself into a situation he only partially anticipated; the situation, taking on solidity in accordance with laws of its own, holds him captive. From real situations—emphasizes Fauche—one may in reality escape; from those imagined, however, there is no exit. Thus
The Robinsonad
shows only that for a man the true world is indispensable (“the true external world is the true internal world”). Monsieur Coscat's Robinson was not in the least mad; it was only that his scheme to build himself a synthetic universe on the uninhabited island was, in its very inception, doomed to failure.

On the strength of these conclusions Fauche goes on to deny
The Robinsonad
any underlying value, for, thus interpreted, the work indeed appears to offer little. In the opinion of this reviewer, both critics here cited went wide of the mark; they failed to read the book's contents properly.

The author has, in our opinion, set forth an idea far less banal than, on the one hand, the history of a madness on a desert island, or, on the other, a polemic against the thesis of the creative omnipotence of solipsism. (A polemic of the latter type would in any case be an absurdity, since in formal philosophy no one has ever promulgated the notion that solipsism grants creative omnipotence; each to his own, but in philosophy there is no percentage in tilting at windmills.)

To our mind, what Robinson does when he “goes mad” is no derangement—and neither is it some sort of polemical foolishness. The original intention of the novel's hero is sane and rational. He knows that the limitation of every man is Others; the idea, too hastily drawn from this, which says that the elimination of Others provides the self with unlimited freedom, is psychologically false, corresponding to the physical falsehood which would have us believe that since shape is given to water by the shape of the vessel that contains it, the breaking of all vessels provides that water with “absolute freedom.” Whereas, just as water, when deprived of a vessel, will spread out into a puddle, so, too, will a totally isolated man explode, that explosion taking the form of a complete deculturalization. If there is no God and if, moreover, there are neither Others nor the hope of their return, one must save oneself through the construction of a system of some faith, a system that, with respect to the one creating it,
must
be external. The Robinson of Monsieur Coscat understood this simple precept.