Robinson Crusoe (45 page)

Such beliefs were, of course, part of the rationale for European imperialism, and some of
Robinson Crusoe
’s mythic force, at least for a long time after the book first appeared, was undoubtedly due to its presentation of a non-European, nonwhite ‘‘other’’ readily embracing ‘‘subjection, servitude, and submission’’ as his natural stance in respect to white European man. This element of the book, happily, has become its most problematic aspect for those who imitate, adapt or otherwise rework Defoe’s novel. Coetzee’s
Foe
raises the problem of Friday by presenting him as a man whose tongue has been cut out and whose true story, as a result, may not be told. Similarly, most of the films based on
Robinson Crusoe
treat Friday in such a way as to critique the racial politics of the original. Buñuel’s Crusoe at first treats Friday (Jaime Fernández) quite cruelly but the Englishman then undergoes a transformation. At one point he begs Friday to forgive him and declares, ‘‘I want you to be my friend.’’
Man Friday
(1975), a British film directed by Jack Gold, represents Crusoe (Peter O’Toole) as a diseased racist and Friday (Richard Roundtree) as morally and spiritually superior to the Englishman. In the American film
Crusoe
(1988), directed by Caleb Deschanel, there is, strictly speaking no Friday; rather, the Crusoe (Aidan Quinn) of that film, a nineteenth-century American slave trader, has an encounter with a black man identified in the film’s credits as ‘‘the Warrior’’ (Ade Sapara). Their meeting leads to Crusoe’s moral transformation. The Warrior saves Crusoe when he falls into quicksand, and when the two quarrel over whose language they will use, Crusoe finally accepts the warrior’s meat and also uses his word for it: ‘‘jala.’’ The two establish a rough equality, and at the end of the film when the Warrior is taken captive by anthropologists, Crusoe frees him. Afterward Crusoe is seen on the ship that will take him home as clean-shaven, clear-eyed, and, we are meant to see, spiritually renewed. That Zemeckis’s
Cast Away
does entirely without Friday, and replaces him with Wilson, undoubtedly has to do partly with the fact that the film is set in our own time; the filmmakers may well have thought that imagining an island visited by non-European ‘‘savages’’ in a postcolonial, globalized world was simply impossible. But the substitution of Wilson for Crusoe’s other is also an implicit acknowledgment that Friday is the book’s most problematic element. Still, the erasure of Friday is not without its own troubling aspects. In
Cast Away
, after all, Crusoe’s ‘‘companion’’ on the island has been turned into a true object, something thrown away, tied down, and finally lost without any real consequence. Seen in another light, Noland’s island might represent the world beyond the reach of the United States (and FedEx) as unpeopled and therefore as open to the West’s occupation and use. No matter how we view Wilson in
Cast Away
, however, the films based on
Robinson Crusoe
from 1952 onward make it clear that race, unlike the representation of loneliness or the fascination with technique, is one element of the original Crusoe narrative that must be radically revised in contemporary refashionings of Defoe’s novel.

In closing, it seems worthwhile to point out that when American television has turned its attention to
Robinson Crusoe
, it has done so in important part by turning the story inside out.
Survivor
and
Lost
make the experience of being cast away into a story of a group stranded on an island together. That story cannot be about loneliness; nor is it particularly about either technique or race. Rather it becomes a story of renewal as the result of the experience on the island. In
Lost
, particularly, all of the major inhabitants have pasts that they regret (lives of crime, familial conflicts, drug addiction, crippling wealth), and the island seems to offer them all an opportunity to start their lives over again. On
Survivor
, too, the contestants are presented with the chance of achieving great wealth and as a result the ability to start a new life. These shows, again particularly
Lost
, suggest that life back home is the problem and that the island offers at least the possibility of a solution to that problem. The ‘‘castaways’’ in
Lost
and
Survivor
, one could argue, share with Defoe’s
Robinson Crusoe
the possibility of transformation as a result of their ordeal, but, in a way that is not true of Defoe’s novel, the television shows also embody a critique of the society from which the islanders have come. Still, although different in crucial ways from Defoe’s story, these offerings of contemporary American television, like the films made over the last sixty years as well as the literary reimaginings published almost from the moment
Robinson Crusoe
appeared, all testify to the continuing adaptability and enduring power of Defoe’s novel.

—Robert Mayer

Selected Bibliography

An Essay upon Projects
, 1697

The True-Born Englishman
, 1701 Poem

The Shortest Way with Dissenters
, 1702 Prose Satire

A Review of the Affairs of France; A Review of the State of the British Nation,
1704-13 Periodical

The True Relation of the Apparition of One Mrs. Veal
, 1706

The History of the Union of Great Britain
, 1709 History

The Secret History of the October Club
, 1711 Secret History

Robinson Crusoe
, 1719 Novel

The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe
, 1719

Serious Reflections of Robinson Crusoe
, 1720

The Life, Adventures, and Pyracies of the Famous Captain Singleton
, 1720 Novel

The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders
, 1722 Novel

The History and Remarkable Life of . . . Colonel Jacque
, 1722 Novel

A Journal of the Plague Year
, 1722 Novel

Roxana
,
or the Fortunate Mistress
, 1724 Novel

A Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain
, 1724-27

Backscheider, Paula R.
Daniel Defoe: His Life.
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989.

Bender, John.
Imagining the Penitentiary: Fiction and the Architecture of Mind in Eighteenth-Century England.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987.

Caldwell, Tanya. ‘‘Sure Instinct: Incest, Politics, and Genre in Dryden and Defoe.’’
Genre
XXXIII (Spring 2000): 27-50.

Hunter, J. Paul.
The Reluctant Pilgrim: Defoe’s Emblematic Method and Quest for Form in Robinson Crusoe.
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1966.

Mayer, Robert.
Eighteenth-Century Fiction on Screen
. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.

———.
History and the Early English Novel: Matters of Fact from Bacon to Defoe.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

Moore, John Robert.
Daniel Defoe: Citizen of the Modern World.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958.

Novak, Maximillian E.
Daniel Defoe—Master of Fictions: His Life and Ideas.
New York: Oxford University Press, 2001.

————. ‘‘Gender Cultural Criticism and the Rise of the Novel: The Case of Defoe.’’
Eighteenth-Century Fiction
12 (2-3) (January-April 2000): 239-51.

Richetti, John J.
Defoe’s Narratives: Situations and Structures
. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975.

Rogers, Pat, ed.
Daniel Defoe: The Critical Heritage
. London: Routledge, 1998.

Said, Edward.
Culture and Imperialism
. New York: Knopf, 1993.

Starr, George A.
Defoe and Spiritual Autobiography.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1965.

Sutherland, James R.
Daniel Defoe: A Critical Study.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971.

———.
Defoe.
Writers and Their Work, No. 51. London: Longmans, Green, 1965.

Swaminathan, Srividhya. ‘‘Defoe’s Alternative Conduct Manual.’’
Eighteenth-Century Fiction
15.2 (2003): 185- 206.

Vickers, Ilse.
Defoe and the New Sciences
. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.

Watt, Ian.
The Rise of the Novel.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957.

Zimmerman, Everett.
Defoe and the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding
. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1975.