By Benjamin Jones
INTRODUCTION
Reality is messy. Unfortunately, it’s not a kind of messiness that people deal well with psychologically because it’s not so much that stuff is out of its proper place so much as it is that stuff has no proper place at all. In other words: It’s not that there’s meaning out there to find, it’s that events are a gobbledegook of arbitrary chaos, which people can’t handle without feeling crazy. Human consciousness appears to be all about finding sense in the world with the end of proving to ourselves that we are rational beings, doing things for reasons and not because the world controls us and we are its sad little cogs.
It is human nature to attempt to make this chaotic mess of reality comprehensible by representing it to our own minds as something coherent — as something that would be the right material to try to read sense into in the first place. This entails imagining and inventing structures of meaning that can be superimposed upon the disorder to create a retroactive fictional order that we then get to discover, surprise (!), through our structures of meaning. My claim in this paper is that novels are one form of humans’ innate psychological desire to create order and meaning — to fictionalize and thereby retroactively construct a coherent world in which we can be rational, self-same subjects — out of the messiness of reality.
To make this claim, I investigate one of the first English novels, The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, Of York, Mariner: Who lived Eight and Twenty Years, all alone in an un-inhabited Island on the Coast of America, near the Mouth of the Great River of Oroonoque; Having been cast on Shore by Shipwreck, wherein all the Men perished but himself. With An Account how he was at last as strangely deliver’d by Pyrates…Written by Himself by Daniel Defoe. (Yes, long title.)
The book follows one man, Robinson Crusoe, as he travels around the Atlantic and goes on a series of adventures. Having left his homeland, Crusoe has to create a new world in which to live, and, in the process, has to create a new self that will inhabit this world far away from English society. Defoe tells us about Crusoe’s attempts to order reality and to understand his place as a man who believes he is now all alone in the world as he also details Crusoe’s attempts to tell this story himself — that is, Crusoe’s own obsessive attempts to narrativize and re-narrativize his experiences and his own existence. As Defoe’s novel tells us Crusoe’s story, it simultaneously tells us the story of Crusoe’s storytelling — his narration, commentary, and revisions of his life and sense of his place on the island. By creating a second story, that of Crusoe struggling to write his own reality, constantly doubling back to re-assign meaning to events, Defoe effectively undoes the very ordering that Crusoe seeks to impose in his self-narration by undercutting Crusoe’s narrative authority.
In the end, the result of Defoe’s novel is a factually confusing, temporally-disjointed story filled with Crusoe’s many attempts at orderly narration, as Crusoe constructs and reconstructs himself, from dissatisfied Englishman wanting to sail abroad to fainting victim to hardworking explorer to island king and back again to dissatisfied Englishman. The reader is constantly unsure of “the real story” of the novel, filled as it is with Crusoe’s own, often conflicting interpretations of reality, wherein events of the novel and its narration are contained and evaluated within one another in a great involuted tale. The reader gets the sense that the real story of Robinson Crusoe may not be so much the coherent narrative of one man’s adventure so much as it is the story of an every man’s confused but valiant, inevitable but ultimately doomed adventure of imposing his own order on reality, to make the texts of his life and of himself legible so that he can exist sensibly in the world.
CHAPTER I — A BRIEF PLOT SUMMARY
Daniel Defoe’s novel, Robinson Crusoe, centers around a man named Robinson Crusoe, who is the third son of a German merchant living in England. Crusoe’s father wants him to become a lawyer, a safe and stable profession, but Crusoe, for reasons unknown — even to himself, it seems — chooses to try to make his fortune at sea. His first voyage runs into major problems, though he makes it out alive (barely) and with a small profit. Despite warnings from friends and family, he feels driven by the same “evil influence which carried [him] first away from [his] father’s house,” and he embarks on a second voyage to the coast of Africa (30). This time he is captured and enslaved, but eventually manages to escape and find passage to Brazil, where he becomes a successful plantation owner.
Crusoe’s luck runs out, however, when he embarks on a third expedition — this time to Africa to gather slaves. A storm strands him on a seemingly deserted island in the Caribbean. After some time, Crusoe is able to set up camp with materials scavenged from the shipwreck, and much of the plot concerns his solutions to problems of basic necessities. Eventually, Crusoe creates a liveable home for himself on the island, acquiring and training a talking parrot, several goats, and a “Native American” sidekick – a man he rescues from the cannibals who turn out to be the island’s occasional visitors. In the end, Crusoe encounters an English ship that takes him home. Upon his arrival, he discovers that he has few living family members (and that he doesn’t really care about them), but that his plantations have earned him a fortune during the time he was away. Crusoe, despite longing for England for much of the time he was stranded, seems unable to settle down, instead continuing to adventure abroad. Ultimately, he returns to his island to see how it is faring and Defoe’s novel ends by promising an account of more adventures to come in the “second part of [Crusoe’s] story.”
CHAPTER II — CRUSOE SETS OUT TO TELL HIS STORY
On the title page of his novel, Defoe seems to indicate that Robinson Crusoe is a memoir, since he entitles the book, The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe….Written by Himself. However, the book unfolds in a way very much unlike traditional memoir since it is filled not with Crusoe’s coherent, finalized life story, but with Crusoe’s many attempts at telling his own story, and ends inconclusively, promising further installments. In obsessively including all of Crusoe’s self-corrections, Robinson Crusoe reveals itself not to be a memoir but instead the beginning of a new genre of literature — the fictional novel — a special attempt of people to create the meaning and psychological coherence necessary to become the rational, individualistic subjects of modernity that at the same time, whether explicitly or implicitly, recognizes that end as a fiction.
Defoe’s novel begins with Crusoe’s story of why he decided to leave England for sea — a disjointed narrative that seems to obsess Crusoe for the entirety of the book. Crusoe says that it was out of his own “rambling thoughts” and a “mere wandering inclination [he] [has] for leaving [his] father’s house and native country” that make him initially want to become an explorer, despite warnings from his father and the rest of his family (18). Two pages later, however, he re-tells this story and attributes his decision to leave England to an external “evil influence” that makes him ignore his father’s warnings (30). And yet, this supernatural explanation also seems to fail to satisfy Crusoe because he re-tells the beginning of his journey again, this time saying that his decision to leave was something “fatal in that propensity of nature, tending directly to the life of misery which was to befall me.” Here, Crusoe attributes his decision to leave England to the “life of misery” in the future — as though he left England because a future narrative, yet unwritten, required him to do so, reading a fictional structure (his own adventure narrative) as a retroactive justification of his inexplicable desire to leave England for the sea.
In the first thirty pages of the novel, Crusoe tells us this initial story that his father “had given [him] a competent share of learning, as far as house-education and a country free school generally go, and designed [him] for the law; but [he] would be satisfied with nothing but going to sea.” He explains that despite a sincere belief in the soundness of his father’s advice, “after few days wore it all off; and, in short, to prevent any of [his] father’s further importunities, a few weeks after, [he] resolved to run quite away from him.” But then it turns out that all of the ‘action’ of the novel so far has all been long in the past, embedded in a much larger adventure narrative that Crusoe promises is to come — a revelation that jolts us out of the timeline we expect. At the end of page 30, Crusoe tells us that he “wrote the English Captain’s Widow a full account of all my adventures, my slavery, escape, and how I met with the Portugal captain at sea, the humanity of his behavior and in what condition I was now in,” all before we even know that he becomes a slave after leaving England. Although we never see this account that he sends to the widow, we learn that Crusoe wrote and sent to her a version of the first thirty pages that we have just read about his decision to leave England as part of an adventure story that winds up taking up most of the rest of the book for us to hear explained.
In some sense, Crusoe seems to understand that there can never be an adequate explanation for why he chooses to leave England — his whole sense of order in his life turns out only to be sustained by a fiction that he tells himself about a seemingly pre-ordained “life of misery” (but also adventure) that awaits him on a deserted island. What’s weird is that this adventure is one that he does not participate in until *after* he has already decided to make his fortune at sea, so it’s one he couldn’t possibly know was to come.
CHAPTER III — CRUSOE’S JOURNAL
Crusoe explicitly begins a written narrative of himself and his circumstances when he is shipwrecked on what appears to be a deserted island. After salvaging some ink and paper from his wrecked ship, he begins to write about his daily activities. He explains that he is writing these accounts “not so much to leave them to any that were to come after me, for I was like to have but few heirs as to deliver my thoughts from daily pouring upon them and afflicting my mind” (53). The implication seems to be that Crusoe needs to create meaning out of his experiences for himself, to stay sane so that his thoughts won’t “afflict his mind.” It seems, then, that Crusoe’s consciousness requires him to narrativize what is happening to him into a fiction so that he can survive, since otherwise, reality would be random and thus incomprehensible, driving Crusoe to a kind of psychosis. However, what results from Crusoe’s attempts to stay sane while he is isolated on the island is an obsessive (and, in this sense, perhaps equally psychotic) need to narrativize and re-narrativize everything that is happening to him to himself to try to make his circumstances make sense.
As Crusoe’s journal begins, his entries parallel his early attempts at the beginning of the novel to explain why he leaves England, often repeating and modifying their basic explanatory claims. After he secures paper, pen, and ink from the shipwreck, he decides to “draw up the state of [his] affairs in writing,” creating a double-entry ledger in which he “state[s]…very impartially like Debtor and Creditor,” what is unfortunate and fortunate about his current situation (53). In so doing, Crusoe invents an abstract self, another narrator who oversees his life, occupying a disinterested position with regard to the “comforts [he] enjoy[s]” and the miseries [he] suffer[s]” — an omniscient narrative self whose authority he then goes on to undercut by editing, revising, interpreting and reinterpreting those very experiences captured in the ledger throughout his subsequent journal entries (53).
Crusoe appears to intend for the journal to be a measure of past events as they happened, but from the beginning, the enterprise seems fraught, as he reveals to the reader that he has chosen to start the journal not from the present day, but rather from the first date of his arrival. In other words, Crusoe has begun retroactively keeping a fictionalized present-tense journal, which is full of his own later modifications to make sense of the past. And yet, Crusoe claims that his journal is an accurate version of events as they occurred, stating, that his journal represents “a full Account” that keeps things “very exact” (51, 56).
That said, Crusoe at times recognizes his own tendency to revise has led him to alter his narrative, saying that “at first [he] was in too much hurry, and not only hurry as to labour, but in too much discomposure of mind; and [his] journal would have been full of many dull things.” He gives an example of what he might have written had his journal been a real record of his experiences as they presented themselves to him: “30th.—After I had got to shore, and escaped drowning, instead of being thankful to God for my deliverance, having first vomited, with the great quantity of salt water which had got into my stomach, and recovering myself a little, I ran about the shore wringing my hands and beating my head and face, exclaiming at my misery, and crying out, ‘I was undone, undone!’ till, tired and faint, I was forced to lie down on the ground to repose, but durst not sleep for fear of being devoured.” However, this imaginary journal entry that Crusoe decides to discard in favor of a narrative more focused on his survival techniques is actually closer to the truth Crusoe originally relates it to us in his first description of landing on the island.
Crusoe initially promises readers an exact copy of his journal, saying that after “[he] began to keep [his] journal; of which [he] shall here give you the copy” (56). However, he then admits that he ran out of ink and never finished the journal, saying that “it will be told all these particulars over again, as long as it lasted; for having no more ink, I was forced to leave it off” (56). We already know, then, that the journal is incomplete — a fact that seems to bother and confuse Crusoe. He jumps around in his narrative, retroactively describing things that he has never told us about, sometimes in the form of explanations of why they were too mundane to include, further interrupting the temporal flow of the narrative with his journal entries that often re-cast events we have just heard about in a totally different light. In a typical Crusoe journal entry, he writes, “this wall being described before, I purposely omit what was said in the journal; it is sufficient to observe, that I was no less time than from the 2nd of January to the 14th of April working, finishing, and perfecting this wall,” in describing the wall for the first time (63). Ultimately, Crusoe concludes, “[a]s I have troubled you with none of my sea journals, so I shall trouble you now with none of my land journal,” undoing all of his previous work to establish that he has given us access to his realistic and accurate journals of his adventure (224).
And details about his daily life aren’t the only things that Crusoe tries to straighten out in his narrative — he is equally obsessed with time. He attempts to align events on the island with a concrete timeline, but these accounts are often contradictory and serve mostly to reinforce the sense that Crusoe’s journal is a fictional account of events, rather than a reliable reflection of reality. For example, he plants a cross in order to keep track of the days that pass, but like his journal, he does so only after having lived for many days on the island, noting that it was only “[a]fter [he] had been there about ten or twelve days, [that] it came into [his] thoughts that [he] should lose [his] reckoning of time for want of books, and pen and ink, and should even forget the Sabbath days…To prevent this, [he] cut[s] with [his] knife upon a large post, in capital letters – and making it into a great cross, [he] set[s] it up on the shore where [he] first landed – “I came on shore here on the 30th September 1659.” However, Crusoe fails even with this attempt to impose a chronological continuity to events in his story, undermining himself by retelling his cross-planting as “about ten or twelve days” after his arrival on the island, leaving us to infer that the marks on the cross are actually 10-12 days off from the present.
In the course of this temporally obsessive journal, Crusoe discovers a “strange concurrence of days, in the various providence which befell me,” realizing that he ran away from his parents and was captured as a slave on the same date, that he “escaped out of the wreck of that ship in Yarmouth Roads” on the same date that he escaped from slavery, and that he was born and stranded on the island on the same day (105). Crusoe’s journal thus reveals the patterns that Crusoe believes are woven into his life, rather than reflecting random circumstance, patterns that we might believe are not Crusoe’s own fictionalizing impulse, except for that Crusoe soon admits to himself that he has messed up in his counting of the days.
He tells us that he “soon neglected keeping Sundays; for, omitting my mark for them on my post, [he] forgot which was which.” This mistake is worsened because Crusoe starts keeping track of time a while after he lands ashore, but he still marks the first day in his journal as the day he landed, his birthday. When he finally escapes the island, he says that he “left the Island, [on] the nineteenth of December as I found by the ship’s account, in the year 1686, after I had been upon it eight and twenty years, two months and 19 days” (216). The math does not work out, though, since Crusoe again realizes that he has somehow lost “a day out of my reckoning in the days of the week…some years after,” thus undermining any external order and pattern to events beyond Crusoe’s own narrativization of himself and his life (76). However, despite the inconsistencies of Crusoe’s date keeping, the human impulse to find order and construct meaning out of life’s random occurrences resonates strongly in his attempts to construct a cohesive narrative of his life.
CHAPTER IV — CRUSOE’S RETELLING OF HIMSELF TO THE MUTINEERS/HIS RESCUERS
As he prepares to leave the island, Crusoe summons the defeated mutineers who have agreed to stay behind and tells them, “I would let them into the story of my living there and put them into the way of making it easy to them: Accordingly, I have them the whole history of the place…I gave them every part of my own story” (215). He then gives them yet another version of how he survived on the island, the story gets re-told again, further revising his history to become an epic story of a hero-king.
Crusoe has already begun to tell this new narrative of himself on the island before the sailors arrive, saying, “I was Lord of the whole manor, or if I pleased I might call myself King, or emperor over the whole country which I had possession of. There were no rivals. I had no competitor, none to dispute sovereignty or command with me” (105). However, when he comes upon the mutineers, Crusoe’s narrative no longer fits reality, for he does have competitors on the island. To resolve this tension in his new narrative of island life, Crusoe demands that the sailors make a “solemn oath that they should be absolutely under my leading as their commander and captian…” Moreover they are to “swear upon the Holy Sacraments and the Gospel to be true to their benefactor and to “be directed wholly and absolutely by myself” (191). He also demands a written “contract…under their hands” that will guarantee that the ship’s captain cannot “pretend to any authority” on his island (199). Crusoe as narrator promotes himself to ‘Generalissimo’ leading an ‘army’ of eight men, which becomes just a page later into an army of “fifty” by the next page (207-208). By forcing the sailors to agree with his sense of reality, Crusoe is able to temporarily assert narrative dominance.
The seemingly arbitrary manner by which Crusoe assumes power and titles is both satirical and genuine. While it does seem ridiculous for him to be able to claim a collection of caves, semi-domesticated animals, and scrap metal as his estate or even his kingdom, there is real power in his claims – power enough to allow him to force men to swear loyalty to him. This power stems, unsurprisingly, from the narrative that he created with himself as the sole governing power on the island. By claiming authority and having constructed a legitimizing basis for that claim, his power is not questioned, much like the power of any sovereign ruler. In the end, Crusoe’s dominant narrative seems to be that he has left England to become a king — the best possible outcome of an inexperienced boy leaving for sea and disappearing from society for 28 (ish) years.
EPILOGUE — CRUSOE’S RETURN TO ENGLAND
Once he returns home to England, Crusoe’s tale fails to close. While he has spent his years on the island longing to return home, he finds himself again dissatisfied and mysteriously called to leave to adventure. Instead of ending his story conclusively, he instead promises “ for ten years more, I shall give a farther account of in the Second Part of my Story.” It is as though Crusoe’s need to account for his initial decision to leave England with an extended adventure narrative — even one where he has made himself into hero-king at the end — has failed yet again as an adequate justification for his actions. Crusoe is forced to leave the story open, returning both physically and narratively to England to continue to try to give coherence to his life-defining (but arbitrary) choice to make his fortune at sea, obsessively weaving a narrative which imposes order and meaning on his reality to his eternal dissatisfaction.