by Daniel Defoe
Providence, however, works in very subtle fashion, and Crusoe will not have angelic visitors or divine miracles to save him. Defoe’s prose style and narrative approach with their empirical and intensely observational manner are to some extent at odds with the desires of his hero, who longs for signs of divine purpose in a world where only material phenomena can be said for certain to exist. One sequence from early in the island part of the book is especially revealing for this tension between religious longing for proof of God’s operations and the absolutely secular narration of facts and phenomena. Crusoe reports that during his early months on the island he is astonished one day to discover some familiar green stalks growing, which turn out to be ‘perfect green barley of the same kind as our European, nay, as our English barley’. He is much moved by this and jumps to some enthusiastic conclusions about providential intervention in his life:
I had hitherto acted upon no religious foundation at all; indeed I had very few notions of religion in my head, or had entertain’d any sense of any thing that had befallen me, otherwise than as a chance, or, as we lightly say, what pleases God; without so much as enquiring into the end of Providence in these things, or his order in governing events in the world: But after I saw barley grow there, in a climate which I know was not proper for corn, and especially that I knew not how it came there, it startled me strangely, and I began to suggest, that God had miraculously caus’d this grain to grow without any help of seed sown, and that it was so directed purely for my sustenance on that wild miserable place. (p. 63)
But Crusoe’s wonder abates considerably as he realizes that this barley has grown there because of an incident he now recalls with perfect clarity; the miraculous growth is the result of an accident, his shaking out of a bag of chicken feed that he thought was empty:
all this was nothing but what was common; tho’ I ought to have been as thankful for so strange and unforeseen Providence, as if it had been miraculous; for it was really the work of Providence as to me, that should order or appoint, that 10 or 12 grains of corn should remain unspoil’d, (when the rats had destroy’d all the rest), as if it had been dropt from Heaven; as also that I should throw it out in that particular place, where it being in the shade of a high rock, it sprang up immediately; whereas if I had thrown it any where else, at that time, it had been burnt up and destroy’d. (p. 64)
Providence, Crusoe concludes, cooperates with accidents, works God’s will by means of the flux and flow of everyday experience, and what appear to be merely casual incidents and everyday happenings such as Crusoe records, if properly and intensely studied, yield evidence of providential purpose. God can be found in the accidental details such as realistic fiction delivers; divine arrangement is not a matter of spectacular miracles or interventions in the natural order of things but works in subtle fashion through everyday and trivial incidents. Crusoe’s God is like Defoe an empiricist; he respects the drift of material phenomena and his purpose is somehow inscribed in them. But perhaps an eighteenth-century reader would have taken this incident in a slightly different way and heard biblical echoes in the details of the story, reminded of Christ’s parable of the sower, whose seed fell in various places, with some falling ‘among thorns; and the thorns sprung up, and choked them: But other fell into good ground, and brought forth fruit, some an hundredfold, some sixtyfold, some thirtyfold. Who hath ears to hear, let him hear’ (Matthew 13:7–9). Crusoe learns, gradually, to treat his survival as a virtual miracle, and that ability to talk about his experiences as at once natural and supernatural is one key to his survival: he learns ‘to give daily thanks for that daily bread, which nothing but a croud of wonders could have brought. That I ought to consider I had been fed even by miracle, even as great as that of feeding Elijah by ravens; nay, by a long series of miracles, and that I could hardly have nam’d a place in the unhabitable part of the world where I could have been cast more to my advantage’ (p. 105).
Whatever was uppermost in the mind of some of its pious eighteenth-century audience, readers of Robinson Crusoe since then have seen a number of other, decidedly secular meanings in the story, so much so that the book derives a good deal of its enduring power from mythical or archetypal qualities that have taken on a life of their own quite distinct from what actually happens in the book. As Ian Watt pointed out in his essay ‘Robinson Crusoe as a Myth’, the myth has three aspects: Back to Nature, the Dignity of Labor and Economic Man.4 The French eighteenth-century philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau saw in the island section a lesson for how to live a properly human life, an illustration of how to situate yourself fruitfully in nature. In his Émile: ou, de l’éducation (1762), Rousseau’s tutor hero declares that Robinson Crusoe will be the only book his pupil, Emile, will be allowed to read. In his labours on the island, Robinson will offer Emile a model of direct participation in the arts and manual techniques to which modern life and the division of labour have made us all strangers, and in his isolation Crusoe will illustrate and enforce the necessity of radical individualism and independence, of making your own way on your own terms. Crusoe’s island for Rousseau is a paradise, a virtuous retreat from social corruption. But of course for Crusoe the island is for most of his years a terrible trial, a prison, an island of despair (as he calls it), and his solitude is the occasion for constant and intense loneliness and longing for the company of others. His independence is a punishment; his individualism a desperate necessity.
For Rousseau Crusoe’s island is unspoiled nature, offering peace and beauty. For Defoe and the western capitalist, imperialistic culture that he represents and glorifies, the island is an opportunity for colonial expropriation, for development and improvement (exploitation, some might say) by human technology. As Crusoe explores his island, he finds pleasure in thinking that he owns it, that it is his estate: ‘the country appear’d so fresh, so green, so flourishing, every thing being in a constant verdure, or flourish of Spring, that it look’d like a planted garden…surveying it with a secret kind of pleasure, (tho’ mixt with my other afflicting thoughts) to think that this was all my own, that I was king and lord of all this country indefeasibly, and had a right of possession; and if I could convey it, I might have it in inheritance, as compleatly as any lord of a manor in England’ (p. 80). But Crusoe realizes that without the tools salvaged from the ship he would never have survived – or he would have been forced to live a primitive and even bestial existence. His fear of that alternative to civilized life is a powerful undercurrent in the narrative. Without knives and guns, he remarks, he would ‘have liv’d, if I had not perish’d, like a meer savage. That if I had kill’d a goat, or a fowl, by any contrivance, I had no way to flea or open them, or part the flesh from the skin and the bowels, or to cut it up; but must gnaw it with my teeth, and pull it with my claws like a beast’ (p. 104), and he laments from the start his lack of sufficient technology for other purposes. Thus, after he grows his first grain, he describes his difficulties:
When the corn was sow’d, I had no harrow, but was forced to go over it my self, and drag a great heavy bough of a tree over it, to scratch it, as it may be call’d, rather than rake or harrow it. When it was growing and grown, I have observ’d already how many things I wanted, to fence it, secure it, mow or reap it, cure and carry it home, thrash, part it from the chaff, and save it. Then I wanted a mill to grind it, sieves to dress it, yeast and salt to make it into bread, and an oven to bake it. (pp. 94–5)
Among the most fascinating parts of Crusoe’s narrative, then, the moments when he seems happiest and most fulfilled, the least troubled by anxieties and fears, and totally absorbed by his work, are his own technological breakthroughs, as he painfully improvises and learns basic techniques of production, although he tends to emphasize that his products are pale imitations and awkward and laborious versions of actual manufactured goods made by trained artisans.
But Crusoe works because he must in order to survive, not because he believes in the saving power or the inherent dignity of labour, which
his story has by some later readers been taken to exemplify. We need to remember that he has been shipwrecked at the head of an illegal expedition to buy slaves, and his happy ending comes when he discovers after leaving his island that his plantation in Brazil has been making money for him in his absence, that he is in fact a rich man. Crusoe is an ‘adventure capitalist’ as well as a slaveholder (he sells Xury, the young boy who accompanies him from his captivity in Morocco, into slavery to the Portuguese Captain); he is essentially a manager and entrepreneur (like Defoe) rather than a worker. He does, however, draw certain economic lessons from production and consumption in isolation, and in moods like the following encourages the primitivist interpretation of his story:
In a word, the nature and experience of things dictated to me upon just reflection, that all the good things of this world, are no farther good to us, than they are for our use; and that whatever we may heap up indeed to give others, we enjoy just as much as we can use, and no more…I had no room for desire, except it was of things which I had not, and they were but trifles, tho’ indeed of great use to me. I had, as I hinted before, a parcel of money, as well gold as silver, about thirty six pounds sterling: Alas! there the nasty sorry useless stuff lay; I had no manner of business for it; and I often thought with myself, that I would have given a handful of it for a gross of tobacco-pipes, or for a hand-mill to grind my corn; nay, I would have given it all for six penny-worth of turnip and carrot seed out of England, or for a handful of pease and beans, and a bottle of ink: As it was, I had not the least advantage by it, or benefit from it; but there it lay in a drawer, and grew mouldy with the damp of the cave, in the wet season; and if I had had the drawer full of diamonds, it had been the same case; and they had been of no manner of value to me, because of no use. (p. 103)
Crusoe lives in what philosophers of the time called the state of nature, which in his case has the advantages of teaching him about the superiority of simple use values and natural subsistence living over the artificial surplus production and consumer values of society but also many disadvantages, among them the lack of essential manufactured goods and skilled services. So in spite of its virtuous simplicity, his island existence is no idyll, and its most troubling feature is its lack of civil order. In the state of nature, as the philosopher Thomas Hobbes had notoriously evoked it in his Leviathan, or the Matter, Form, and Power of a Commonwealth, Ecclesiastical and Civil (1651), man is also in a constant state of war with other men, fearful that they will come and kill him and take his possessions. Although Defoe was no Hobbesian, his hero lives from his arrival on the island in constant dread of unknown enemies, and in fact he has good cause for such fear, as it turns out, when cannibals do arrive and at last when the English mutineers come to his island. Defoe’s narrative is a novel partly because it is attentive to this kind of complexity, with the island and so much else in the hero’s experience open to contradictory and subjective interpretations. Unlike some later redactions of the Crusoe story, Defoe’s novel never simplifies the meanings of the story. It is part of Defoe’s genius that he resists making his tale merely an illustration of a thesis about human nature or society.
Crusoe’s state of mind after he discovers the single footprint on the beach is one of the great psychological moments in all of English fiction, and it begins a new phase in the story of his survival.
It happen’d one day about noon going towards my boat, I was exceedingly surpris’d with the print of a man’s naked foot on the shore, which was very plain to be seen in the sand: I stood like one thunder-struck, or as if I had seen an apparition; I listen’d, I look’d round me, I could hear nothing, nor see any thing, I went up to a rising ground to look farther, I went up the shore and down the shore, but it was all one, I could see no other impression but that one, I went to it again to see if there were any more, and to observe if it might not be my fancy; but there was no room for that, for there was exactly the very print of a foot, toes, heel, and every part of a foot; how it came thither, I knew not, nor could in the least imagine. But after innumerable fluttering thoughts, like a man perfectly confus’d and out of myself, I came home to my fortification, not feeling, as we say, the ground I went on, but terrify’d to the last degree, looking behind me at every two or three steps, mistaking every bush and tree, and fancying every stump at a distance to be a man; nor is it possible to describe how many various shapes affrighted imagination represented things to me in, how many wild ideas were found every moment in my fancy, and what strange unaccountable whimsies came into my thoughts by the way. (p. 122)
This is a brilliant narrative touch. The island has been explored and Crusoe is established and fairly serene. This single trace of another human being, whether friend or foe, marks a new crisis in Crusoe’s tale and restores tension and uncertainty at a lull in the narrative movement. Reality at its most pressing in Robinson Crusoe, as this passage dramatizes, coincides with the hero’s fantasies, his fearful imaginings of dreadful possibilities that arise from inexplicable phenomena – here, that one footprint. Notice that his first fear is of something supernatural, ‘as if’ he had seen an apparition. A bit later he thinks it must be the devil’s doing: ‘I was so embarrass’d with my own frightful ideas of the thing, that I form’d nothing but dismal imaginations to myself, even tho’ I was now a great way off it. Sometimes I fancy’d it must be the Devil; and reason joyn’d in with me upon this supposition: For how should any other thing in human shape come into the place?’ (pp. 122–3). But in a sense, this moment of wild surmise marks Crusoe’s definitive turn away from his isolation and his search for providential structure. In the long debate with himself about the cannibals (whose occasional visits to the island to consume their prisoners of war he verifies in the years that follow), he establishes a moral and political connection to other human beings. In working out in an internal monologue that stretches over years his emotional and intellectual relationship to the cannibals, his rivals for possession of the island, he defines himself now not in religious terms but in concrete moral and historical terms, as his thoughts about the cannibals help him, paradoxically, to understand himself in a more complex way. His first reactions are personal, visceral and violent. Finding the remains of a cannibal feast on the beach, he vomits and vows to exterminate them. Obsessed at first by the cannibals (‘It would take up a larger volume than this whole work is intended to be, to set down all the contrivances I hatch’d, or rather brooded upon in my thought, for the destroying these creatures’ (p. 133)), Crusoe at last comes to a position which is tactically wise and historically sophisticated: ‘What authority or call I had, to pretend to be judge and executioner upon these men as criminals, whom Heaven had thought fit for so many ages to suffer unpunish’d, to go on, and to be, as it were, the executioners of his judgments one upon another. How far these people were offenders against me, and what right I had to engage in the quarrel of that blood, which they shed promiscuously one upon another’ (p. 135). Just as carnivorous Europeans like himself think nothing of eating pigs and oxen, so do these cannibals eat their enemies. Moreover, he reasons, to kill these men who have done him no wrong is to perpetuate the worst European imperialistic atrocities:
this wou’d justify the conduct of the Spaniards in all their barbarities practis’d in America, and where they destroyed millions of these people, who however they were idolaters and barbarians, and had several bloody and barbarous rites in their customs…were yet, as to the Spaniards, very innocent people; and that the rooting them out of the country, is spoken of with the utmost abhorrence and detestation, by even the Spaniards themselves, at this time; and by all other Christian nations of Europe. (p. 136)
To be sure, this enlightened tolerance and cultural relativism give way to rage and disgust when Crusoe surveys the remains of a cannibal feast a few years later.
Eventually, Crusoe’s solution to his cannibal problem (in addition to making his residence as inconspicuous and inaccessible as possible) exemplifies his larger survival strategy on
the island and summarizes his maturity as a character in this final part of the book. He follows his instincts; he observes things closely, on the lookout for opportunity, ready to intervene for profit and advantage. He has confidence that God’s Providence is working for him in subtle and surprising ways. When he dreams that one of the cannibals’ prisoners escapes and comes to him, he decides that he will try to capture one of these in reality: ‘I resolv’d, if possible, to get one of those savages into my hands, cost what it would. My next thing then was to contrive how to do it, and this indeed was very difficult to resolve on: But as I could pitch upon no probable means for it, so I resolv’d to put myself upon the watch, to see them when they came on shore, and leave the rest to the event, taking such measures as the opportunity should present, let be what would be’ (p. 158). That things happen exactly, or almost exactly, as in his dream is only a possible rather than a likely or probable event, we might say. What actually happens makes sense as it is meticulously elaborated by Crusoe, but that it should happen exactly as Crusoe dreamed it sets up a strange ambiguity. Gradually and subtly, Crusoe becomes the master of his fate who leads a charmed life, the lucky one for whom everything will fall in place, whose desires become reality as subjective and objective come together. He becomes, that is to say, an improbable hero who goes against the grain of the realistic novel committed to the mundane and the ordinary, a character readers expect will somehow triumph even in the worst of situations and against all odds. The exciting incidents that make up the last third of the novel, the acquisition of Friday, the slaughter of the cannibals, the defeat of the English mutineers and the battle with ravenous wolves in the Pyrenees, are extravagant adventures that in some sense negate the careful domestic realism of Crusoe’s island survival and its slow little daily triumphs. And yet the thrilling extravagance of these incidents is balanced and certified in a sense by the same observational exactness and precision that characterizes Crusoe’s establishment on the island. Cool, measured in his rage, precise and efficient in his violent movements and in his enumerations and descriptions of their results, Crusoe is the man of action and administrator all at once. Even in the breathless aftermath of bloody mayhem and slaughter of the cannibals, he gives us an exact tally, a frighteningly precise body count of who killed whom and where and how.
