Topik's Lecture the Historical Reading of RC As a Reflection of the World the Way It Was

Prof. Topik's presented a historical reading of Robinson Crusoe as a reflection of the world the way it was in Defoe's time. From that perspective, the book offers us a window onto the time and place in which the novel was written. RC portayed as a slave-holder and budding capitalist, and the island is situated in the Carribean of early colonialism.

My lecture will focus on the aesthetic and philosophical dimension of the novel as an example of the way European culture, and esp. British culture, made sense out of that world that Prof. Topik described. In other words, rather than examining the correspondence between Robinson Crusoe and the world or its author, I will be considering the coherence of the narrative in which that world is represented as an expression of specific beliefs and values. I will be arguing that Robinson Crusoe is best understood as a combination--and not always a coherent combination--of (1) spiritual autobiography or conversion narrative, and (2) a specific style of writing called "formal realism" or more simply just "realism."

In that sense Robinson Crusoe is much like Mary Rowlandson's narrative: like Rowlandson, RC (who is the narrator of the novel as well as its main character) describes his past experience in order to show how it, and his own character, are shaped by Providence. And like Rowlandson, RC tells us many things that do not fit that model so easily.

There is an important differnce between the two narratives, however. Rowlandson simply ignores aspects of her experience and feelings that don't fit the providential pattern. RC, on the other hand, seems intent on reconciling that pattern with every detail of his life. Thus his narrative can be read as an effort to internalize Providential authority as his own desires and ambition, and to literalize or externalize, through mimetic narrative, the stages of the spiritual journey leading to conversion as the plot of the novel. This lends RC's narrative a thematic coherence that Rowlandson's lacks, and it claims for those spiritual themes a concrete immediacy in everyday experience that contradicts the Puritan's careful distinction between the ways of man and God. Robinson Crusoe can therefore be read as a middle ground between Rowlandson's spiritual perspective on her experience in North America, and Crevecoeur's almost entirely secular account of his life as an "American."

This effort to fuse Providence with experience creates problem for Defoe that Rowlandsaon did not face because she kept the so separate or distinct. The providential narrative winds up being used to help cover over moral and ethical contradictions in the social narrative/experience, resolving them at the spiritual level but their conflict remains as a measure of the extent to which history resisted the traditional religious patterns. That suggests more attention to the secular dimension of the experience that will become increasingly important to Crevecoeur. There, the allusions to Providence will be empty rhetoric, its place taken by Laws and something called America.

Robinson Crusoe as spiritual autobiography

The plot of Robinson Crusoe roughly fits that of the conversion narrative as we have seen it in Rowlandson: the story begins with RC living a life of complacency and contentment as an "adventurer" and Brazilian slaver (housewife). That complacency is suddenly disrupted by a unforeseen and disastrous interruption of the routine, the shipwreck (MR's Indian attack). As a result, RC is isolated from friends and home on the desert island (MR's captivity), and eventually he gives way to despair. In the depths of that despair he realizes his desperate situation is part of God's plan, and he is reconciled to his role in the Providential scheme. He is eventually rescued and returns home, where he marries, has children, and realizes--at least for seven years--that happy middle-class stabitlity his father had wanted for him. You will have to decide for yourself to what extent that conclusion to the tale reflects MR's conclusion, and your answer will depend to some extent on how you think about the relation beween this abstract schema of conversion and redemption and the more concrete, realistic details of RC's experience.

Robinson Crusoe as a novel

"Realism" is such a popular and pervasive style of writing today that we don't even really think of it as a "style" at all, but simply as a direct representation or mimesis of the world around us. That is not the case, however. Realistic prose has specific rules or conventions by which we measure its success or failure, and many of those expectations were in fact radical stylistic innovations when Defoe used them in Robinson Crusoe.

I will examine the extent to which the realism of the novel can be understood as a mode of representation, rather than as a direct reflection of the ways things were at that time. That understanding will be based on the coherence of the novel as an expression of values and expectations current at the time rather than on the correspondence between the novel and the world in which it is set.

I. Robinson Crusoe as a novel

A. Generic precedents: spiritual autobiography, allegory, and parables, yeild narrative pattern

Rowlandson's captivity narrative a good example of the spiritual autobiog., in which actual experience is presented merely to illustrate the spiritual pattern that gives it significance, and that gives the narrator her identity. Unlike allegory and parables, though, there is an inherent tension between the chaos of experience and the pattern of significance. MR's narrative exemplifies that tension dramatically, but she simply ignores it in favor of the pattern imposed upon it. That pattern seems to render certain aspects of the experience that don't fit the pattern not only insignificant but invisible even to the person describing it.

B. Writing and reality: histories, literature of exploration and discovery, the journal the eyewitness

In these genres, the absence of pattern is, in a way, the whole point, i.e., they are presented as an effort to report things simply as they happend, with no shaping or "distortion" by the writer. The writer's authority stems from his or her status as a witness to the events, either through scholarship or, increasingly, as an eyewitness. This emphasis on the authority of the author as eyewitness could distract from the experience being described--a reverse of the tension inherent in spiritual autobiography--so in history and travel literature the author's authority depends entirely on the entent to which you believe his/her own perspective is NOT manifest in the report. Again, there is often a tension in these works as well when the personality and/or beliefs of the author become evident, but here is it those beliefs that are dismissed as insignificant compared to the experience being recounted.

C. "Formal Realism": The novel as a combination of the generic precedents: shaped (formed) experience (reality), usually according to the perspective of an individual character, and/or as the perspective of the narrator as a created character (i.e., vs. the actual author, who usually plays no role in the narrative at all). The point of the novel is therefore to represent experience as it appears to a specific character and/or narrator, and thereby to represent the way such a character comes to view the world as a result of that experience.

D. The emergence of the novel in history

The novel arises as Western European society was shifting from a religious world-view that identified truth with spiritual doctrine and discounted material experience to a secular, "scientific" view based on the empirical study of things as they appeared to the human eye. Because empiricism depended so much on the observer, this scientific "eye" was closely associated with the writing "I" that reported the observation, and this emphasis on individual experience became increasingly important in economics (capitalism), religion (Protestantism), and, as we have seen, literature (the novel). Robinson Crusoe is caught between these two views and attempts to combine them. Generically reconciles the conflict between journal and narrative through the form of spiritual autobiography.

II. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism

That combination is best examined in terms of RC's motives and character. To put the matter simply, is his experience controlled entirely by Providence, as he tells us from time to time? Or can his actions be explained according to economic principles and "natural" behavior driven by the laws of nature (storms, the environment, etc.) and biology (hunger, aggression, etc.)?

Critics have argued for both answers, but I believe Defoe has offered us a third alternative, a world in which Providence operates in and through the personal desire and actions of RC, and that union is what the narrative urges on us.