Thursday, July 12, 2018

ROBINSON, CRUSADER OF MEDIOCRITY PT. 1

I've finally read ROBINSON CRUSOE and its lesser-known follow-up, THE FURTHER ADVENTURES OF ROBINSON CRUSOE.

I noted in A SHORT HISTORY OF FANTASY-ADVENTURE how the days of the epic romance were followed by a dearth of adventure in fantasy literature, and that even those novels that had adventure-elements, such as Defoe's CAPTAIN SINGLETON, tended to lack fantastic elements. 
Defoe's best-known novel, ROBINSON CRUSOE, is another novel following in the cultural wake of the epic romances with their “knights of old.” Perhaps appropriately, given the way Defoe's century had turned against the ideals of the aristocracy, Defoe comes up with a protagonist who could not be further from the ideal of the knight. 

Crusoe has some dim ideas of glory when he defies the wishes of her merchant-father and goes to sea. Yet for the rest of the novels, he expresses nothing but pious regrets for his act of defiance, even though in the long run he becomes a rich man as the result of his travels. His first tour of duty at sea doesn’t exactly cover him with glory, and his captain frankly tells Crusoe that he was never meant to sail the seas. Nevertheless, he tries again. But everyone aboard his ship is taken prisoner by Ottoman pirates, and Crusoe becomes a slave. Though he’s treated reasonably well at a lord’s home in Morocco-- indeed, there are no badly-treated slaves depicted in the novels—Crusoe does show some guts by figuring out a way to escape his captors. A young boy named Xury—apparently also a slave, though Defoe does not say so outright—elects to go with Crusoe. Xury is only with the protagonist long enough to show the increase of Crusoe’s fortunes in two ways. The first is that, once Crusoe gets hold of a modern rifle, he uses it to flagrantly kill a lion minding its own business on the coast of Africa—one of many cavalier slayings by the Englishman. The second is that when Crusoe and Xury encounter a Portuguese captain, Crusoe actually sells Xury as a slave to the captain—and Xury is totally fine with it, accepting the provision that he’ll be freed in two years if he serves the captain well.

Since the captain’s port of call is Brazil, Crusoe uses his newfound wealth to buy a plantation there. Defoe doesn’t want this part of Crusoe’s life to become important, so despite being on the plantation for years, Crusoe does not marry or make any friends, and is in a sense almost as isolated as he will be following the third nautical voyage. This one, of course, goes down with all hands except for stranding Robinson Crusoe on a deserted Caribbean island.

This is of course the part of the novel that everyone knows by heart. Crusoe scavenges what he can from the wrecked ship, bewails his isolation for a time, and then slowly makes the island over into his own personal resort. The ship gives him ample firearms and ammunition, as well as a dog and some cats for minor companionship (none of whom he ever names). He soon finds that with patience, he can make by hand anything he really needs. He has any number of “Job moments,” where he wonders what he did to bring his creator’s wrath down upon him. But because he’s pious, eventually he decides to agree with Job, that the creator can do anything he likes with his creation.

Crusoe spends eighteen years on the island before he comes across the famous “footprint in the sand.” He’s freaked out by the lone footprint, surmising—correctly—that it was left by a Caribbean Indian, whose tribe is likely to practice the despicable rite of cannibalism. Some time later, some of the Indians begin landing their canoes on the island, explicitly to devour their captives, and Crusoe finds the gory remains. He entertains fantasies about using his guns to devastate their ranks, though prudence—the realization that some might get away and alert their fellow tribesmen—puts the brake on this resolve. (Again, he frames his prudence in religious terms: it’s not for him to punish the godless tribesmen if God doesn’t. etc.) But he does build up his ego by imagining his puissance—“I was a formidable fellow to look at when I went abroad”—though it’s significant that his ego depends principally on his many weapons.

Shortly before encountering the other best-known character in the novel, Crusoe presciently dreams of befriending one of the natives for a companion. He makes the dream come true days later, rescuing a native from his cannibal captors and killing them before they know what’s happening. He dubs the native Friday after the day on which he was rescued, and proceeds to instruct the willing native in the superiority of a Christian, non-cannibalistic outlook. Friday proves an easy convert, despite wondering why God doesn’t just kill the troublemaking Satan. After a short period of convivial life with Friday, Defoe gives Crusoe an almost anti-climactic out. Mutineers come to the island to get rid of the ship’s loyal sailors, but Crusoe prevents the murder of the crewmen. However, he also takes pity on the mutineers and leaves them on the island with assorted supplies, in lieu of their being hanged for mutiny. Then Cruose and Friday journey back to civilization. The rest of the novel is then devoted to sorting out Crusoe’s finances—his holdings have made him a rich man, even in his long absence—except for one last sortie with Friday.

While Crusoe is blissfully careless about wiping out any life-form that gets in his way, Defoe does play fair in showing Friday’s people to be just as anti-PETA. In the novel’s last chapter, Crusoe, Friday, and some companions have gone out into the wild, where they encounter various animals, including a bear. The bear seems willing to leave the humans alone, but Friday goes out of his way to antagonize the creature, and then shoot it through the head. Friday then justifies his actions by stating that his people killed bears in similar fashion back on their island, which would suggest that Defoe considered it a mark of manhood to slaughter animals, whether one worshipped the True God or not.

THE FURTHER ADVENTURES OF ROBINSON CRUSOE picks up with Crusoe when he’s a comfortable sixty years old, married and settled in England. Yet he can’t let go of adventure, and leaves his wife behind to go to sea on a ship captained by his (never-named) nephew. Crusoe returns to his old island, and many chapters are devoted to conflicts between the lowlife English mutineers and industrious Spanish colonizers. There are also some more attempts at conversion, as one of the mutineers tries to explain Christianity to his Carib Indian wife. There’s a big fight when several canoes invade the island to attack the new arrivals, and the cannibals are outgunned and defeated. Crusoe then leaves the island for good.

However, the fate of the cannibals is a light one, compared to what happens to the natives of Madagascar when Crusoe’s ship makes landfall there. One of the sailors kidnaps a local woman, and while the word “rape” is never voiced, it’s fairly evident that this is what happens. The culprit is captured by the tribesmen, and Crusoe joins a party of sailors to investigate what happened to him. (FWIW, an innocent member of the crew is slain when the natives take the offender.) When the sailors find the rapist dead and mutilated, they lose all control and slaughter at least a hundred of the natives, though supposedly leaving most of the women and children unharmed. Crusoe himself does not take part in the killings, though he doesn’t endanger himself to stop them either. Back on the ship, he often voices his condemnation of the slaughter, to the extent that the sailors demand that the captain leave Crusoe behind in the port of Bengal. This is the closest Crusoe comes to being isolated again, though this time he has money and is able to link up with a trade-caravan on its way to China. The caravan suffers a few attacks by Tartar bandits, who are again vanquished by European weaponry. However, the remainder of the novel emphasizes Crusoe’s righteous scorn for the pagan Chines. There's an extremely chauvinistic chapter in which Crusoe leads a group in destroying a village idol that for some reason irritates the hell out of the pious Englishman. He again returns to England, richer than before, but resolved never to travel forth again, except for the ultimate voyage to meet his Maker.

I’ve often disagreed with the Mickey Marxists who want to see imperialism in every story that stars a straight white male, or fails to portray people of color as they want to see themselves. But I must admit that the CRUSOE novels exhibit a chauvinism so extreme that authors like Haggard, Doyle and Kipling look like models of liberalism by comparison. Defoe allows Crusoe a few moments of cultural relativism—he admits that the Spanish committed many atrocities against the natives of the New World—but at base, the author wants to give his audience a picture of the world as one where nothing, not even a mass slaughter, seriously challenges any preconceptions.

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