Anthologies, journal articles, and edited collections about Robinson Crusoe continue to emerge from the presses every year, almost as ubiquitous as the famous Robinsonades that became their own genre in the eighteenth century. The proliferation of scholarship around Robinson Crusoe, like the proliferation of Robinsonades, represents not just the influence of Crusoe as a text, but also the influence of the idea of Crusoe, the myth, to use Ian Watt's description, separate from the existence of the novel.1 As one of the most recent additions to this body of scholarship, Robinson Crusoe after 300 Years traces the influence of both text and myth in the past three centuries. In doing so, it contributes to the continuing legacy of the novel, but also strikingly overlooks the significance of race in that legacy.
The ten essays in this new collection are widely varied. They move between discussions of Robinsonades at 300, including the newest iterations of Crusoe in the early part of the twenty-first century, to discussions of images of Crusoe over the past three hundred years. The collection is divided into three sections: “Generic Revisions,” “Mind and Matter,” and “Character and Form.” In “Generic Revisions,” three essays take up different reimaginings of Crusoe: the first essay looks at the novel and the film The Martian; the next focuses on the gendered characterizations of Crusoe in pantomimes that ran in the late eighteenth century in the UK, and in the late nineteenth century in the United States; and finally, the last essay in this section examines close readings of six distinct “animal Crusoe” tales that, according to coauthors Amy Hicks and Scott Pyrz, define an important and yet overlooked type of Robinsonade. What pulls these three essays together is the authors’ insistence on seeing these Robinsonades as complete works unto themselves, not just as reinventions of the first novel. These stories also serve as commentaries on the ghostly image of Crusoe that haunts different eras and genres.
The second section, “Mind and Matter,” begins with an essay by Laura Brown in which she closely examines the inanimate objects in Crusoe's tale, especially his infamous pot. Brown, looking at Defoe's representation of things, of matter, in the context of Newtonian theory, persuasively argues that modern ideas on the influence of physical forces can be traced to the debate around “matter” in the early eighteenth century. Of the four essays in this section, I found Brown's to be the most compelling; the three other essays look at tobacco, the ocean, and the concept of boredom.
Finally, in the last section of this collection, “Character and Form,” the authors place Crusoe in an international context. In the very brief first essay in this section, Benjamin Pauley considers Crusoe as a rambler, and uses The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe to demonstrate Crusoe's unchanging rambling ways. He never settles in England, as we might assume if we just stop at the more famous volume 1, but remains “a mad rambling boy” through the end of the second volume of Crusoe's adventures (162). This tight study of Crusoe's rambling sets the stage for the essay by the renowned Defoe scholar Maximillian Novak. Novak examines Crusoe's encounters with “others” from around the globe in his “farther” global ramblings and reads Crusoe as a man who is often deeply sympathetic to other points of views and who tries to understand and translate them to his readers at home. In the final essay of the collection, Andreas Mueller considers the name “Robinson Crusoe” as an icon that travels disconnected from the novel through the twenty-first century.
One of the amazing qualities of Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, and perhaps the thing that really supports Watt's claim that the titular character truly has become the myth of the modern individual, is how the novel has come to seem contemporary and relevant to each new generation of readers. First, as the tale of a solitary castaway read by readers in the bustling and growing capital of London, it appealed to crowded Londoners longing for solitude. Today, as Mueller's essay argues, the name “Robinson Crusoe” is so abstracted from the original text that it lives on in the twenty-first century without referent, plastered on advertisements for resorts or bars. Relatedly, the idea of the lone castaway lives on in stories even if readers no longer recognize or are familiar with the original hero. Few general readers today are tackling the original novel or its nineteenth-century century abridgements. Instead, encounters with our hero happen unconsciously, embedded in our shared cosmopolitan culture, but often without us recognizing or acknowledging them. As just one example of this disconnect, Glynis Ridley notes in the opening essay that Andy Weir, the author of the novel, Bring Him Home: The Martian, denies any influence by our ur-castaway, claiming instead that, “I was more inspired by Apollo 13” (12).
One of the striking things about Defoe himself, especially, is the breadth of his writings. He wrote under multiple pseudonyms and for multiple causes as well as publishers. As an entrepreneur, he covered a huge range of subjects, which is one of the things that stands out about this powerful volume; it scans a range of topics loosely connected to the problem of Robinson Crusoe. This edited volume on the 300th anniversary of the publication of Robinson Crusoe almost feels haphazard, as it moves from theme to theme, trying to capture new readings and explain revisions over the last three hundred years. In moving through various topics, from animal Crusoes to tobacco, from gender in burlesque, to connections between Newton's theory of matter and Defoe's novel, the editors run the risk of randomness, but instead manage to pack in a fascinating range of readings that focus on a text, and then move back out to attempt to capture a broader landscape.
Absent in any of these essays, however, is an extended discussion of race; to read Crusoe and Friday after 300 years and not take into account race feels like a profound oversight and a missed opportunity. To read Crusoe in our own age and not recognize the shipwrecked boat as a slave ship and not see what Teju Olaniyan calls “the unforgettable image of submission in Friday's placing Crusoe's foot on his head” is itself a tragedy.2 Much of the Crusoe literature of the twentieth century grappled with this violence, from J. M. Coetzee, in both his Nobel Prize address and in his novel, Foe, to Derek Walcott's Caribbean plays and poems. As the United States and Great Britain both once again attempt to confront blackness today and especially with the “Black Lives Matter” movement in literature and our societies in 2024, this absence becomes especially troubling, like the mysterious footprint in the novel, which tells us something is there, but whatever it is, it remains invisible. I found myself coming to the end of the volume and wondering how we had come so far in our understanding of the place of Robinson Crusoe in British colonial history and yet had failed to come to terms with this legacy in our own critical moment
Notes
Ian Watt, Myths of Modern Individualism: Faust, Don Quixote, Don Juan, Robinson Crusoe (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ., 1997), and Watt, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding (Berkeley: Univ. of California, 1959).
Tejumola Olaniyan, “Derek Walcott,” in Caribbean Romances: The Politics of Regional Representation, ed. Belinda Edmonson (Charlottesville: Univ. of Virginia, 1999), 199 – 214; the quotation is from 210.