Theorising Literary Islands: The Island Trope in Contemporary Robinsonade Narratives
258
Theorising Literary Islands: The Island Trope in Contemporary Robinsonade Narratives
258Paperback(Reprint)
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781783488070 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 02/09/2018 |
| Series: | Rethinking the Island |
| Edition description: | Reprint |
| Pages: | 258 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.94(w) x 9.05(h) x 0.77(d) |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
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Theorising Literary Islands
The Island Trope in Contemporary Robinsonade Narratives
By Ian Kinane
Rowman & Littlefield International Ltd
Copyright © 2017 Ian KinaneAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-78348-807-0
CHAPTER 1
Re-Reading Robinsonade Literature
In her study Problematic Shores (1990), Diana Loxley acknowledges that the Island has seemingly solidified its place as a trope within contemporary popular culture precisely because of the notion of what she calls the "inevitability" of Robinson Crusoe's emergence into Western literary and cultural discourse. While recognising the apparently serendipitous arrival of Daniel Defoe's The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, Written by Himself at the dawn of the modern exploration age, Loxley rightly argues that there are more culturally determined reasons why Defoe's particular text should have become so monumentally important on its initial appearance, serving, as it did, as a vehicle for the manufacturing of new myths of nation building and imperial strengthening.
Much of the attraction of the Robinsonade genre, Loxley suggests, derives from what she calls the "under-distanciation" of (particularly) the child reader, or the process by which the reader is metaphorically drawn onto the island of the text, and forced to identify personally with (in this case) Robinson Crusoe's situation. The reader alone is aware of Crusoe's predicament on the island as he lives and writes it, and the personal address of the epistolary form in which the novel is structured succeeds in drawing both reader and Crusoe together in an almost exclusive communion. While this method of identification with the literary protagonist is, of course, by no means restricted to the Robinsonade genre, Loxley is correct in her assessment of the symbiotic relationship between the isolated, intra-textual character and the implied reader outside of the text — who, in reading, is presumably engaged in a similarly solitary activity. In an echo of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Loxley foregrounds the position of the signifying individual, and states that Robinson Crusoe is "the model for 'coping' with the world and with otherness, whether environmental, bestial or native," and with the individual's own sense of Otherness, which Crusoe seeks "ultimately to strike [...] out [and] to cut [...] down." Indeed, it was Rousseau who underlined the didactic importance of Robinson Crusoe for the young, empirical mind, even going so far as to suggest that by using Defoe's novel alone his own son, Émile, will learn "everything that is useful" in the world. Loxley somewhat wryly acknowledges that Defoe's text teaches us (and, more pointedly, our colonial forbears) lessons which are to be thought of as "singular and historically transcendental, true for all time, and which may always be relied upon to reaffirm that [the Empire has] not lost, and never will lose [...] greatness." Her comment implicitly suggests that Crusoe's schooling in imperialism and colonial expansion may still be applied to, and have a place within, dubious contemporary global politics.
Above all, Loxley states, the island topos appeals to us as a meditation on cultural origins, "the site of that contemplation being the uninhabited territory upon which the conditions for a rebirth or genesis are made possible." In the case of the Robinsonade genre, the island is, quite literally, the place where the legacy of the trope all began. The term "Robinsonade" itself was first coined in 1731 by Johann Gottfried Schnabel, in his German work Die Insel Felsenburg (translated as The Island Stronghold). The genre was the most widely read of the 1800s, and, in England alone, Robinsonade narratives were produced at the rate of about two per year for most of the long eighteenth century. Loxley claims that it is because of the "procedure of reformulation and renewal" of Crusoe's original island story that Robinson Crusoe and the desert island tradition has become so deeply ingrained within our culture; it is a "'living' classic" that is continually renewed for both adults and children alike on television, stage and radio, and sold to consumers through commercial capitalist exploits, such as advertisements and commercials for tropical holiday destinations. Subsequent generations of Robinsonade narratives — those produced as an homage or in reaction to Defoe's Robinson Crusoe — have demonstrated the ways in which the trope of the island has come to be constructed as a series of fictional meta narratives. Those island narratives produced in Defoe's wake draw both implicit and explicit attention to the intertextual nature of the Robinsonade genre as a whole, as each Robinsonade is always-already invested in the myth of its ürtextual forbears — the original Robinson, and the imaginary island as constructed in Defoe's text. Each Robinsonade must necessarily situate itself within a cultural tradition that will always compare and contrast it with its textual predecessors.
The 1767 text, The Female American, for example, published under the pseudonym "Unca Eliza Winkfield," tells the autobiographical story of Winkfield's abandonment on a deserted island with a man who had long been thought dead — a veritable Crusoe-story-within-a-Crusoe-story. Winkfield's didactic approach to her own and to her predecessors' genre encapsulates quite nicely, the shared, intertextual approach necessary for the survival of subsequent Robinsonades: "How you may subsist you may learn from the history of my life," she informs the reader. Her life, of course, is a literary one, and one that is indebted to Defoe's Crusoe. As Winkfield has "subsisted" by learning and absorbing all that she can from Robinson Crusoe, so too is her own text an injunction to subsequent Robinsonades to follow in her footsteps, so to speak, by harnessing the intertextuality of the genre. The same is true of Johann David Wyss's The Swiss Family Robinson, in which a shipwrecked family rely upon their edition of Robinson Crusoe for advice on how to survive. They refer to Crusoe as "our best counsellor and model," and ask "since Heaven has destined us to a similar fate, whom better can we consult?" Loxley too addresses the relationship between various Robinsonade texts in a brief commentary on Jules Verne's most popular island narrative, The Mysterious Island: "[Verne's is] a novel which will not simply reinvest the authority and primacy of its textual predecessor but which will attempt to perform a radical displacement of it by confronting one form with another [italics in original]." Loxley seems to be quite clear here about the function of the island in Verne's Robinsonade: Verne's Mysterious Island is not self-sufficient, as it is so heavily dependent on Defoe's pre-existing island narrative. As a literary conceit, "Lincoln Island" (so named by the novel's innovative, engineering protagonist, Cyrus Smith, as "a little America") is indebted to its canonical forbears. Verne often makes indirect, and indeed direct allusions to previous Robinsonades, as a means of establishing his Mysterious Island within that particular tradition. Captain Smith, his manservant Neb, the journalist Gideon Spillett, the sea Captain Pencroft and his apprentice Herbert, all quote and paraphrase the aphoristic Robinson Crusoe in their attempts to establish an unofficial American colony on an unmarked island in the South Pacific. Furthermore, their testosterone-fuelled adventure could perhaps further be seen as a graduation, or coming-of-age of those characters from R.M. Ballantyne's The Coral Island, written seventeen years prior to The Mysterious Island. Ballantyne's text shipwrecks three schoolboys, Ralph Rover, Jack Martin and Peterkin Gay, on another unnamed island in the South Pacific, where their survival is predicated on the ability of the schoolboys to meld together effectively, and to reproduce anew the semblances of a functioning (British) society. Peterkin even goes so far as to say that "we'll take possession of [the island] in the name of the King; we'll go and enter the service of its black inhabitants. Of course we'll rise, naturally, to the top." Indeed, as Jacqueline Rose has argued, Ballantyne's text would also become a kind of Crusoe model in itself, as its clear-cut moral didacticism influenced subsequent additions to the desert island tradition, specifically, and children's literature in general. It is also very likely that both Ballantyne and Verne, in reconstructing a microcosmic world of particularly male innovation and advancement — where reproduction is not biological but technological — are reacting against (and, of course, simultaneously acknowledging their indebtedness to) Winkfield, and her textual appropriation of what had hitherto been considered a thoroughly phallocentric genre. Other "female Crusoe" narratives of this kind include Charles Dibdin's Hannah Hewitt, or The Female Crusoe (1792), Lucy Ford's The Female Robinson Crusoe: A Tale of the American Wilderness (1837) and J.M. Coetzee's Foe (1980).
However, like Winkfield's text, neither The Coral Island nor The Mysterious Island can stand independent of the literary tradition which has borne them. One Robinsonade is inevitably displaced by another as they are, in effect, all jostling with each other to substantiate an authority and literary primacy that is always-already lost to Defoe and his Crusoe. Both Ballantyne and Verne are indebted to Defoe, while simultaneously striving to carve out a new space for themselves in which to retell an old story. But if, as Loxley (perhaps glibly) suggests, "the island itself in fact holds no secrets whatsoever," if there is no real "mystery" to Lincoln Island or to any other island, and no apparent semantic reasons for the continued retelling of these particular stories, then why the enduring cultural fascination with Crusoe ("Who am I?") and the trope of the island ("Where am I?")? It is, perhaps, not quite coincidental that the name "Crusoe" is, as Doreen Roberts points out, "derived from the German noun kreuz (cross) or the related verb kreuzen (to cross)." Etymologically, the very cornerstone of the Robinsonade genre hangs on the conceits of transport, of transition, and of movement, all facilitated by the figure of the isolated Crusoe, who enables this transition, and who carries across place and space the trope of the island. Crusoe, as his very name suggests, alters, changes, morphs and crosses identities from one Robinsonade to the next. Though the figure of Crusoe has been given much attention, and remains of great interest to Defoe scholars and popular culture alike, the trope of the island, the conceptual constant to the physically variable Crusoe figure, has received relatively less critical treatment.
Crusoe's concerns — indeed, the concerns of all castaways: Where am I? How did I get here? Where is "here"? — could, in fact, be echoed in the varied number of critical responses engendered by the Robinsonade genre, as subsequent critics attempt to account for the cultural mania for islands, and, in effect, for the present state of island studies today. Carlo Ginzburg remarks significantly that on "each occasion [of studying desert islands] I felt the sudden sensation that I had come upon something, perhaps even something important; at the same time I felt an acute awareness of ignorance. Sometimes an answer flashed before me [...] But what was the question?" Here, Ginzburg has neither question nor answer, it seems; he is the epitome of the wanderer in search of Utopia, a man going Nowhere. Ginzburg's question, however, could be put another way: namely, why an island? Why not some other landscape or topography? Walter De La Mare wryly cites E.M. Forster's view that there is little critical sense in treating island narratives as a thematic branch of literature, before acknowledging that the island trope is a mystery which has not yet been revealed and made plain. Louis James is undecided as to which myth exactly Defoe's desert island narrative most effectively propagates: "Are we then considering a concept: 'the only man on the island,' or [...] the castaway finding a naked footprint, or Crusoe meeting Friday?" James argues that Defoe's narrative quickly lost its links with its original author, as the Crusoe figure became appropriated in cheap pirate editions, abridgements and chapbook versions, all of which played on variations of the Robinsonade theme. James also cites Mikhail Bakhtin's view that Defoe's island narrative is a "polyphonic" narrative made up of "competing voices, reflecting the inconsistent desires of the reader." These "competing voices" represent the conflation of both traditional and progressive attitudes towards this continually evolving genre. Tim Severin has stated that "Crusoe, like his island, is a composite," thus foregrounding the conceptual layering throughout literary history of not only the castaway figure but of the island topos as well. This further suggests that the island may be considered a multifarious space, constructed and reconstructed in its own image through the interaction of subsequent generations of writers and critics with the original source material: Crusoe, and Defoe himself.
Much attention has been drawn to the success of Defoe's story, by Louis James and others, and to its widespread cultural appeal. No other novel has produced quite so many imitations and adaptations: there have been two hundred English and six hundred international editions of Robinson Crusoe alone, as well as seven reprints in as many years after its first publication, in London. Numerous other Robinsonades were produced in its wake, including some five hundred desert island stories published in England between 1788 and 1910. These figures should go some way towards illustrating just how deeply Defoe's narrative has penetrated Western culture since its initial publication. Many other literary characters (even those not associated with the Robinsonade genre) propound the values of Crusoe's teachings, such that Defoe's character becomes a source of guidance and comfort for other writers and their fictional counterparts. Gabriel Betteredge, the garrulous first narrator of Wilkie Collins's detective novel, The Moonstone (1868), springs to mind for his almost comic overdependence on Defoe's novel (he uses Robinson Crusoe as a portentous almanac of sorts), as does the protagonist of Jane Gardam's 1985 novel, Crusoe's Daughter, who says of Robinson Crusoe that "I read it all the time. I'm a bit peculiar about it. Especially, I think, in troubled times." Caribbean Nobel Laureate, Derek Walcott, also makes use of the problematic relationship between Crusoe and Friday in his seminal 1978 play, Pantomime, which has become an important text in postcolonial reconsiderations of imperial narratives and practices. In popular culture, television shows such as Lost in Space (1965–1968), a science-fiction series that follows the family Robinson as they struggle to survive in outer space, as well as films like Robert Zemeckis's Cast Away (2000), draw directly on the Robinson Crusoe tradition. Various revisions of the Crusoe story have also appeared in children's books, such as Joachim Campe's Robinson the Voyager; or, The New Crusoe (1789), in which a father is seen to retell more suitable, child-friendly versions of Crusoe's exploits to his children in bed; Beatrix Potter's The Tale of Little Pig Robinson (1930); and Racey Helps's Little Mouse Crusoe (1948), in which Crusoe is incarnated as a mouse, and Friday as a turtle. Louis James also notes that the term "Robinsonalter" came to be used in Germany to describe the point in a twelve-year-old boy's maturation when he "discovers himself on the island of responsible life," as he is metaphorically and analogously exiled in adult life. Indeed, so great is the pull of Crusoe, it seems, that, in 1980, British adventurer Lucy Irvine responded to a newspaper advert placed by writer Gerald Kingsland, looking for a veritable "Girl Friday" to join him in self-imposed isolation on the uninhabited island of Tuin, in The Torres Strait. Irvine's book, Castaway (1983), details her time spent with Kingsland on the island (going about "the business of being Adam and Eve Crusoe."), and provided the basis for the Nicholas Roeg film of the same name (1986), starring Amanda Donohue and Oliver Reed.
It may be fair to say that the Robinson Crusoe myth embodies a "sturdy individualism," or what Ian Watt has termed "absolute individualism" of the castaway figure. In Marxist readings of Defoe's novel, Crusoe's solitary labour on the island is often posited as a "solution to the perplexities of [mainland] economic and social [realities]." According to Karl Marx's Capital (1867), Robinson himself, as a model of the homo economicus, embodies a harmonious socio-economic existence, in that his direct relation to the objects of his own production or creation (his shelter, his sourcing of food and provisions) contains "all that is essential to the determination of value" in his society of one. Crusoe reaps the immediate benefits of what he himself produces. But we must also recall Alan Downie's argument that "the myth of Crusoe is inexorably bound up with that imagined island." Indeed, Downie argues that critics generally view The Further Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1719) and its sequel, Defoe's essay on Serious Reflections During the Life and Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe: With his Vision of the Angelick World (1720), as considerably less important than Crusoe's original island episode. Thus, while much critical attention has already been given to the figure of Crusoe, it is also important to account for the role of the island in Defoe's success, and to examine as thoroughly the landscape into which the modern individual was "born." Brian Stimpson speaks in generalities when he states that "the [trope of the] island may be seen as a point in the present, momentarily fixed, but constantly changing, a point where the mind is uncertain of its relation to previous moments of the mind." However, if we imagine for a moment that Stimpson is speaking of any permutation of the Crusoe story, then each Robinsonade is, in relation to the genre as a whole, the fixed "point in the present," "constantly changing" in relation to "previous moments," or previous Robinsonades.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Theorising Literary Islands by Ian Kinane. Copyright © 2017 Ian Kinane. Excerpted by permission of Rowman & Littlefield International Ltd.
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