Robinsonade is the name given to stories about deserted islands where castaways are thrown to live alone. A name (without a first name) that comes from the eponymous character from whom we have subtracted his second surname: Crusoe – an anglicised form of Kreutznaer, as Robinson’s German father was called when he came to settle in England. In this “Crusoe” we have three of the most reported directions of Daniel Defoe’s novel (1719)[1] . At the narratological level, a series of journeys before and after the one that leads Robinson to the island (where the itinerant structure is repeated) inscribes the narrative in a dimension of adventure and rupture (Crusoe/cruise). Another approach has seen the Robinsonade as a fable (admittedly realistic) inspired by an economic context in which Robinson can be seen as the puritanical representative of a booming individualism and capitalism[2] (kreuzer and cruzade are currencies whose names can be read implicitly in Crusoe’s name – especially the latter: it makes Robinson’s fortune on his plantations in Brazil) At the level of what Defoe himself calls an “allegorical” reading[3] , finally, some critics have made Robinson Crusoe, on the model of the “spiritual autobiographies” encouraged by Protestantism, a novel of repentance and conversion[4] (Crusoe/cross – the cross of a reconquest crusader, the trials thus undergone in order to merit salvation)
When Defoe makes Robinson say that all his reflections “are the exact history of a state of forced confinement which, in [his] real history, [he] represents by a confined retreat to an island”[5] , it is no longer clear what is biographical and what is allegorical. Beyond the interpretations aimed at considering Defoe’s novel as a cryptic autobiography, we would rather be faced with the invention of a myth at the source of innumerable rewritings among which stands out John M. Coetzee’s novel, Foe (1986), which makes the author of Robinson Crusoe, son of his works and father of the Robinsonade, a character at work in his own literary posterity[6] . There are two main reasons for this myth: an identification of the island space with existential experience (desert island = solitude) and of the starting situation with the notion of beginning (shipwreck = origin). However, just as there is a plurality of critical accesses to the
desert island narrative, there is also a great deal of ambiguity in this narrative, which remains enigmatic.
Equivocal, to begin with, is this island, which is supposed to be deserted: “it is […] by ceasing to be so that it becomes representable, the presence in its midst of a shipwrecked person being the only thing that can authorise its description”.[7] This trompe-l’œil origin of an arrival on the island, which is presented to us as a baptism and whose wreckage has all the makings of a technical Noah’s Ark authorising the identical reproduction of the old world, is biased. A double discrepancy prevents the beginning from being an absolute origin, as Robinson claims when he makes each year begin with the anniversary of his shipwreck. A gap between the internal chronological narrative and the Diary (written in the past tense, by the way!) that Robinson begins to keep when looking back on his arrival on the island. Another discrepancy, between the time on the island and “real” time, is the reason for the gap of one year when all the dates are counted, even though they are meticulously mentioned in the novel, and Robinson’s illness, which left him unconscious for several days, deprives him of the necessary credit for the name Robinson gives to Friday to indicate the day of his rescue.
One interest of Michel Tournier’s novel Vendredi ou les limbes du Pacifique (1967) is that it centres the island narrative on the invention of this other named Vendredi: “If Robinson Crusoe is a myth, then it can only be the myth of the origin of the other.[8] Nothing better prefigures this other than the footprint discovered one day on the shore by Robinson. This footprint is that of a single foot. The footprint is a testimony to loneliness to the extent that it prompts the character to make sure that it is not his own foot, and it is the hollowed-out mark of an Other whom he hopes for as a fellow human being and fears as a cannibal or possible enemy. The animals on the island (a billy goat, a parrot, etc.) fulfil an alter ego function in this respect, so that Robinson sometimes believes he sees himself in them, sometimes distances himself from them – in both cases forcing himself to think about his otherness.
One island always hides another. This explains not only the interlocking spaces of the “island within the island” shared by the majority of Robinsonades (antres, enclosures, arenas or pools) but also the simultaneous presence of at least two “codes”, heuristic (island to be cleared), hermeneutic (island to be deciphered), well demonstrated by Roland Barthes in relation to L’Île mystérieuse (1874)[9] and allowing us to distinguish between an island narrative – appropriation of the island on the surface – and an island novel – elucidation of a secret of the island in depth. There is a secret when the always forever lost but always forever already there anteriority of the island narrative is internalised in such a way as to suggest island is deserted it is because it is virgin to any writing and that it is therefore up to each rewriting to invent its other island by founding its own origin on it[10] .
[1] See Éric Fougère, Les Voyages et l’ancrage, représentation de l’espace insulaire à l’âge classique, Paris, L’Harmattan, 1995, p. 61.
[2] See Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel, London, Chatto and Windus, 1957; ‘Robinson Crusoe as a Myth’, in Michael Shinagel ed, Robinson Crusoe, New York, London, Norton & Company, 1975.
[3] In his preface to Robinson Crusoe’s Réflexions sérieuses (1720), Paris, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1972, p. 594.
[4] See George A. Starr, Defoe and Spiritual Autobiography, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1965; John Paul Hunter, The Reluctant Pilgrim, Baltimore, John Hopkins University Press, 1966.
[5] D. Defoe, ibid (emphasis added).
[6] See Jean-Paul Engélibert, La Postérité de Robinson Crusoé, un mythe littéraire de la modernité, Geneva, Droz, 1997.
[7] Jean-Michel Racault, “Le paradoxe de l’île déserte”, in Lise Andries ed, Robinson, Paris, Éditions Autrement, 1996, p. 104.
[8] Jean-Pascal Le Goff, Robinson Crusoe ou l’invention d’autrui, Paris, Klincksieck, 2003, p. 176.
[9] See R. Barthes, “Par où commencer ?”, in Nouveaux Essais critiques, Paris, Points Seuil, 1972, p. 145-155.
[10] See É. Fougère, ‘Un point sur la reprise insulaire’ in Maria de Jesus Cabral and Ana Clara Santos eds, Les Possibilités d’une île, Paris, Petra, 2014, pp. 15-32; ‘Pierre Benoit, récit d’île et roman de l’île’, in Carnets, revue électronique d’études françaises, IIe series, no. 3 (2015).