Us'd & abus'd by the narrative
Sep. 6th, 2023 11:11 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bloodygranuaileI’m working through my Peebles Classic Library volumes this year, apparently, and also going to the beach occasionally, so my latest beach read was Daniel Defoe’s The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, with a bonus of its little-heralded (for good reason, it turns out) sequel, The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe. The volume, as opposed to the two separate books within it, bears the more recognizable title of merely Robinson Crusoe, leaving me confused about whether I should consider myself to have just read two books or one. For ease of reviewing I am going with one.
While Crusoe is probably the most famous of Defoe’s stories among small children (although I’m sure most of them aren’t reading the original 1710’s text) and Moll Flanders is probably the most famous among English major types who know it’s considered the first English-language novel, my own familiarity with Defoe’s writing has mostly been the excerpts from Journal of a Plague Year that made their way into the Pearson Prentice Hall readers I edited a million of back in 2011-2012, and endless citations of A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the most notorious Pyrates, which pop up in every single history book about pirates ever written, and while to be scrupulously fair it is highly disputed if Captain Johnson was really Daniel Defoe, it appears that every pirate book must name-drop Defoe anyway. I’ve certainly consumed my fair share of lost-on-a-deserted-island media, to the point where I’m unsure if it’s really fair to credit that whole genre to Defoe or if he was just real fast in getting there before a lot of other people.
At any rate, I figured I had a reasonably decent idea of what I was getting into when I started reading this. I’ve read my share of 18th century literature and I know it was all written by chronically drunk people with new and exciting coffee addictions and no access to a backspace key, and tends to read as such. I’ve also read a huge amount of British Empire Fun Explorey Adventure Fiction, from various time periods and in various stages of attempting (and various stages of succeeding) to correct the absolutely rancid assumptions built into the British Empire’s… whole deal, basically. So I wasn’t exactly surprised when Robinson Crusoe turned out to be full of imperialist English white guy bullshit; examining the assumptions built into these early novels is part of what makes them so rich for analysis.
What I turned out to not be quite as prepared for as I thought I was was the specific inconsistencies in the book, giving me constant tonal whiplash. This isn’t a mediocre book; it is just simultaneously a very good and a very bad book, which probably evens out to a mediocre book, but calling it a mediocre book makes it sound like I’m saying it’s consistently mediocre, and it’s not. A lot of it is really engaging and fun and handily indulges the fantasy of self-sufficient problem-solving and Rising To Challenges that provides the survival narrative with so much of its psychological draw, even though these days that sort of “vaguely imagining yourself doing ill-defined problem-solving shenanigans” seems better fitted to games. Robinson has to figure out how to hand-make all sorts of basic things from scratch with no guidance from any other humans, only items scavenged from the shipwreck that brought him there, which is always an interesting constraint to put on someone since it’s so different from how humans have historically pulled off doing literally anything.
The trouble begins when literally any other human being shows up, as it seems to require a minimum of one (1) other living creature who is not a parrot for Crusoe’s imperialist-white-Englishman worldview to reassert itself in ways that are predictably violent and entitled, but also sometimes less-predictably stupid. Like, there is a long history of white Christians renaming any non-white non-Christians they run into because they don’t think “pagan” names really count for anything, and they don’t feel like learning how to pronounce anything that’s not in one of a handful of European languages, and generally being provincial assholes about it. This is still a political hot topic sometimes so I’m familiar with the litany of culturally dominant excuses to blow off or change other people’s names. What I wasn’t quite prepared for was two entire books written without even the slightest awareness on the part of either Crusoe or, apparently, Defoe, that non-white people even have names for white people to change. I knew that there was a native character called Friday who was going to be in this book, but I sort of subconsciously assumed there would be some sort of reason, however half-assed or imperialist, for Crusoe to rename the man Friday–maybe he had amnesia, maybe he didn’t want to tell Crusoe his name, maybe his name is something Crusoe can’t pronounce properly but sounds sort of like “Friday,” Idunno, I hadn’t read the book yet–but it turns out that Crusoe, from his own perspective at least, doesn’t re-name Friday; it simply never occurs to him to ask in the first place, and Friday, a character written so servilely that I am offended on his behalf at almost every single sentence written about him, never says anything or in any way behaves like his name has ever been anything but “Friday” either. You can say what you like about the racism of the portrayals of other “cannibal savages” in 18th century literature (and there’s lots to say! Like the whole notion of “cannibal savages”!) but at least when Ishmael meets Queequeg he gets told that Queequeg’s name is Queequeg because he comes from a place where his parents named him Queequeg; Ishmael doesn’t just run into him into a hotel room as a mid-career harpooner and go “I’m gonna name you Bob” and have everyone just go along with it. The bar’s on the floor, man.
To be scrupulously fair, we must also weigh the evidence that this is not exclusively a racist blindspot of Defoe’s but a general novel-writing blindspot, as our narrator Crusoe rarely appears to think that the audience needs to know anyone’s name at all, to the point where every time a character is given a name it comes off as actively jarring. Other characters are identified mainly by their relationships to Crusoe or their ethnicities and jobs– “the Spanish captain,” “the French priest,” “the three roguish Englishmen” versus “the two honest Englishmen.” In the sequel, one of the three roguish Englishmen is eventually dubbed Will. Atkins; the other twenty or so people living on the island at the time don’t get names, except Will. Atkins’ “wife,” who is dubbed Mary when she is baptized as a Christian, a thing that happens at the very end of her and Will’s story arc, where she goes through several dialogues solely under the name “Wife.” This is a baffling writing choice to me. Like, I understand why eighteenth-century English writers would think it’s a happy story for a bunch of English sailors to “chuse” captive native wives they don’t know and don’t speak the same language as and then after five or ten years convert them to Christianity and have them “consent” to an official marriage one a clergyman shows up on the island so they can pretend that Christian marriages care about obtaining the consent of both parties when that never crossed anyone’s mind when the five native women arrived on the island in the first place and were parceled out as natural resources. But I don't understand why you'd give us like twenty major characters and not give us any names for them.
Also, from a modern perspective, it’s clear that Englishmen decided that Caribbean natives were cannibals solely so they could pretend that whatever Caribbean natives they captured and enslaved were only afraid of the Englishmen because they thought they’d behave like “savages” and eat them, and were totally grateful to be kept alive and owned as beasts of burden instead. I was honestly sort of surprised when Crusoe also went on a long rant about how awful the Spanish genocide of the indigenous populations of the New World was; apparently, if there is one overarching feature of Crusoe’s principles and values as an eighteenth-century middle-class white Englishman, it’s that they change on a dime from moment to moment based on whatever is most flattering to himself. In this I suppose Crusoe is a lot more like most of us than we’d like to think.
To be very clear, the worst excess of Crusoe coming into contact with, then therefore taking actions regarding, and, god save my poor eyeballs, having opinions about other people come in the sequel, which I am clearly putting in the “I Read It So You Don’t Have To” category. The sequel just flatly sucks. It’s entirely just Crusoe bouncing around the world being racist to people on four different continents. It has no redeeming qualities. Friday gets one final indignity by dying in the final tagged-on clause in a sentence that’s about half a page long and also features getting mooned by a canoe full of natives, which is funny, thus ruining any gravitas about poor Friday’s under-described death in battle. I am so mad about Friday I’m this close to writing fix-it fic about the glorious adventures Friday has under his own real name after refusing to go to England with Crusoe as his servant, because again, Friday deserves better at every single turn in both of these books.
The first book I will admit is worth reading if you want to be well-read on classics and the Foundational Texts of various important genres of fiction, and also like reading a lot about raisins, and also like picking apart the political assumptions baked into early modern moral novels. And yes, it’s strongly a moral novel, just with very 18th-century morals–it starts off with basically a three-page sermon from Robinson’s dad about the virtues of being middle-class, and this is used to frame basically all of his adventures as a cautionary tale of the dangers of being too bullheaded to appreciate a nice civilized middle-class British life. A huge part of Robinson’s character arc is the spiritual awakening he experiences from being stranded on a deserted island for decades with nothing to read but the Bible and plenty of raisins to eat. I actually liked the old-fashioned language–the sentences are long but they have some style, which is tragically lacking in the sequel–and I find Crusoe’s philosophizing and moral self-scrutiny to be fascinating to read, given how much the assumptions and received wisdom he’s operating with as an eighteenth-century Englishmen essentially doom him to be an operationally terrible person no matter how much moral reasoning he does, even when there’s nobody about for him to even be terrible to–the decent impulses he has all have to be filtered through a Protestant set of principles that frequently warps or undercuts them, leading to interesting moral feats like a much-lauded religious “tolerance” where he’s nice to Catholics because at least they’re also Christians. I find it genuinely very interesting.
The TL;DR: The first book has its ups and downs and is interesting largely as a historical artifact. The second book is also somewhat interesting as a historical artifact but as a book is entirely downs.
While Crusoe is probably the most famous of Defoe’s stories among small children (although I’m sure most of them aren’t reading the original 1710’s text) and Moll Flanders is probably the most famous among English major types who know it’s considered the first English-language novel, my own familiarity with Defoe’s writing has mostly been the excerpts from Journal of a Plague Year that made their way into the Pearson Prentice Hall readers I edited a million of back in 2011-2012, and endless citations of A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the most notorious Pyrates, which pop up in every single history book about pirates ever written, and while to be scrupulously fair it is highly disputed if Captain Johnson was really Daniel Defoe, it appears that every pirate book must name-drop Defoe anyway. I’ve certainly consumed my fair share of lost-on-a-deserted-island media, to the point where I’m unsure if it’s really fair to credit that whole genre to Defoe or if he was just real fast in getting there before a lot of other people.
At any rate, I figured I had a reasonably decent idea of what I was getting into when I started reading this. I’ve read my share of 18th century literature and I know it was all written by chronically drunk people with new and exciting coffee addictions and no access to a backspace key, and tends to read as such. I’ve also read a huge amount of British Empire Fun Explorey Adventure Fiction, from various time periods and in various stages of attempting (and various stages of succeeding) to correct the absolutely rancid assumptions built into the British Empire’s… whole deal, basically. So I wasn’t exactly surprised when Robinson Crusoe turned out to be full of imperialist English white guy bullshit; examining the assumptions built into these early novels is part of what makes them so rich for analysis.
What I turned out to not be quite as prepared for as I thought I was was the specific inconsistencies in the book, giving me constant tonal whiplash. This isn’t a mediocre book; it is just simultaneously a very good and a very bad book, which probably evens out to a mediocre book, but calling it a mediocre book makes it sound like I’m saying it’s consistently mediocre, and it’s not. A lot of it is really engaging and fun and handily indulges the fantasy of self-sufficient problem-solving and Rising To Challenges that provides the survival narrative with so much of its psychological draw, even though these days that sort of “vaguely imagining yourself doing ill-defined problem-solving shenanigans” seems better fitted to games. Robinson has to figure out how to hand-make all sorts of basic things from scratch with no guidance from any other humans, only items scavenged from the shipwreck that brought him there, which is always an interesting constraint to put on someone since it’s so different from how humans have historically pulled off doing literally anything.
The trouble begins when literally any other human being shows up, as it seems to require a minimum of one (1) other living creature who is not a parrot for Crusoe’s imperialist-white-Englishman worldview to reassert itself in ways that are predictably violent and entitled, but also sometimes less-predictably stupid. Like, there is a long history of white Christians renaming any non-white non-Christians they run into because they don’t think “pagan” names really count for anything, and they don’t feel like learning how to pronounce anything that’s not in one of a handful of European languages, and generally being provincial assholes about it. This is still a political hot topic sometimes so I’m familiar with the litany of culturally dominant excuses to blow off or change other people’s names. What I wasn’t quite prepared for was two entire books written without even the slightest awareness on the part of either Crusoe or, apparently, Defoe, that non-white people even have names for white people to change. I knew that there was a native character called Friday who was going to be in this book, but I sort of subconsciously assumed there would be some sort of reason, however half-assed or imperialist, for Crusoe to rename the man Friday–maybe he had amnesia, maybe he didn’t want to tell Crusoe his name, maybe his name is something Crusoe can’t pronounce properly but sounds sort of like “Friday,” Idunno, I hadn’t read the book yet–but it turns out that Crusoe, from his own perspective at least, doesn’t re-name Friday; it simply never occurs to him to ask in the first place, and Friday, a character written so servilely that I am offended on his behalf at almost every single sentence written about him, never says anything or in any way behaves like his name has ever been anything but “Friday” either. You can say what you like about the racism of the portrayals of other “cannibal savages” in 18th century literature (and there’s lots to say! Like the whole notion of “cannibal savages”!) but at least when Ishmael meets Queequeg he gets told that Queequeg’s name is Queequeg because he comes from a place where his parents named him Queequeg; Ishmael doesn’t just run into him into a hotel room as a mid-career harpooner and go “I’m gonna name you Bob” and have everyone just go along with it. The bar’s on the floor, man.
To be scrupulously fair, we must also weigh the evidence that this is not exclusively a racist blindspot of Defoe’s but a general novel-writing blindspot, as our narrator Crusoe rarely appears to think that the audience needs to know anyone’s name at all, to the point where every time a character is given a name it comes off as actively jarring. Other characters are identified mainly by their relationships to Crusoe or their ethnicities and jobs– “the Spanish captain,” “the French priest,” “the three roguish Englishmen” versus “the two honest Englishmen.” In the sequel, one of the three roguish Englishmen is eventually dubbed Will. Atkins; the other twenty or so people living on the island at the time don’t get names, except Will. Atkins’ “wife,” who is dubbed Mary when she is baptized as a Christian, a thing that happens at the very end of her and Will’s story arc, where she goes through several dialogues solely under the name “Wife.” This is a baffling writing choice to me. Like, I understand why eighteenth-century English writers would think it’s a happy story for a bunch of English sailors to “chuse” captive native wives they don’t know and don’t speak the same language as and then after five or ten years convert them to Christianity and have them “consent” to an official marriage one a clergyman shows up on the island so they can pretend that Christian marriages care about obtaining the consent of both parties when that never crossed anyone’s mind when the five native women arrived on the island in the first place and were parceled out as natural resources. But I don't understand why you'd give us like twenty major characters and not give us any names for them.
Also, from a modern perspective, it’s clear that Englishmen decided that Caribbean natives were cannibals solely so they could pretend that whatever Caribbean natives they captured and enslaved were only afraid of the Englishmen because they thought they’d behave like “savages” and eat them, and were totally grateful to be kept alive and owned as beasts of burden instead. I was honestly sort of surprised when Crusoe also went on a long rant about how awful the Spanish genocide of the indigenous populations of the New World was; apparently, if there is one overarching feature of Crusoe’s principles and values as an eighteenth-century middle-class white Englishman, it’s that they change on a dime from moment to moment based on whatever is most flattering to himself. In this I suppose Crusoe is a lot more like most of us than we’d like to think.
To be very clear, the worst excess of Crusoe coming into contact with, then therefore taking actions regarding, and, god save my poor eyeballs, having opinions about other people come in the sequel, which I am clearly putting in the “I Read It So You Don’t Have To” category. The sequel just flatly sucks. It’s entirely just Crusoe bouncing around the world being racist to people on four different continents. It has no redeeming qualities. Friday gets one final indignity by dying in the final tagged-on clause in a sentence that’s about half a page long and also features getting mooned by a canoe full of natives, which is funny, thus ruining any gravitas about poor Friday’s under-described death in battle. I am so mad about Friday I’m this close to writing fix-it fic about the glorious adventures Friday has under his own real name after refusing to go to England with Crusoe as his servant, because again, Friday deserves better at every single turn in both of these books.
The first book I will admit is worth reading if you want to be well-read on classics and the Foundational Texts of various important genres of fiction, and also like reading a lot about raisins, and also like picking apart the political assumptions baked into early modern moral novels. And yes, it’s strongly a moral novel, just with very 18th-century morals–it starts off with basically a three-page sermon from Robinson’s dad about the virtues of being middle-class, and this is used to frame basically all of his adventures as a cautionary tale of the dangers of being too bullheaded to appreciate a nice civilized middle-class British life. A huge part of Robinson’s character arc is the spiritual awakening he experiences from being stranded on a deserted island for decades with nothing to read but the Bible and plenty of raisins to eat. I actually liked the old-fashioned language–the sentences are long but they have some style, which is tragically lacking in the sequel–and I find Crusoe’s philosophizing and moral self-scrutiny to be fascinating to read, given how much the assumptions and received wisdom he’s operating with as an eighteenth-century Englishmen essentially doom him to be an operationally terrible person no matter how much moral reasoning he does, even when there’s nobody about for him to even be terrible to–the decent impulses he has all have to be filtered through a Protestant set of principles that frequently warps or undercuts them, leading to interesting moral feats like a much-lauded religious “tolerance” where he’s nice to Catholics because at least they’re also Christians. I find it genuinely very interesting.
The TL;DR: The first book has its ups and downs and is interesting largely as a historical artifact. The second book is also somewhat interesting as a historical artifact but as a book is entirely downs.