Robinson Crusoe Page 0,2

comes up, the name Alexander Selkirk is mentioned. Selkirk (1676-1721), a Scotsman from the village of Largo in Fifeshire, was a contemporary of Defoe. He was a seaman and notorious for his pugnacity—well-known for his having thrown his father down a flight of stairs. During a voyage on a privateer in the Pacific, he quarreled with his captain and demanded to be put ashore on the remote (and deserted) island of Juan Fernandez, off the coast of Chile. There he remained for five years, 1704-09. He became a popular hero on his rescue and return to Britain. Details of his life as a castaway were published: his living off the land, his thatched-roof huts, his goatskin wardrobe. He said that he hankered for the tranquillity of his simple life on the island. The celebrated essayist Richard Steele interviewed Selkirk and used him as a living illustration of the maxim ‘‘that he is happiest who confines his wants to natural necessities.’’

There is no evidence that Defoe ever met Selkirk, but as a journalist he obviously knew the story and Selkirk was undoubtedly the inspiration for Robinson Crusoe. But though Selkirk was apostrophized as a simple-lifer, he was in effect no more than a survivor in extraordinary circumstances. The differences between Crusoe and Selkirk are more significant than the similarities. Selkirk’s story is a fairly simple tale of survival on a barren island, while Crusoe’s is at once a story of atonement and colonization; it is about becoming civilized—at least in eighteenth -century terms, when forcible conversion and slave trading were regarded as elements of civilization.

Selkirk was a pirate who remained a pirate. Crusoe, also an unruly son, is supremely disobedient; his experience on the island (at the mouth of the Orinoco) is both his punishment and his reward, as his island prison is transformed into his kingdom. Crusoe epitomizes perspective. The issue of survival is secondary to the whole debate circling around the matter of point of view, which is summed up in his stating that on the island, ‘‘I entertained different notions of things.’’ Ambition and arrogance and greed got him into this fix; rationalism gets him out of it. When he sees the futility of riches on the island, the meaninglessness of money, the vanity of hoarding, and reaches the conclusion ‘‘That the good things of this world are no farther good to us, that they are for our Use,’’ he is on the way to salvation.

The odd thing is that Selkirk is usually represented as a kind of marvel and of course he isn’t. He is just the singular fellow who returned to tell his tale of solitary survival. Crusoe insists that the reader see him as an unexceptional but a vivid warning, a living example of the ills of man, beset by hubris and discontent. ‘‘I have been in all my circumstances a memento to those who are touched with the general plague of mankind. . . .’’

Crusoe is only solitary for part of his ordeal. The dramatic, and poignant, appearance of the footprint and the serious meditation that follows is one of the episodes that lifts this novel to another level of meaning. It also shows Defoe as someone who could speak in the plainest and most convincing way about tools and seeds and grape growing, while at the same time being capable of the most profound rumination about the invasion of solitude and society and the definitions of space and time. Crusoe had lamented his solitude earlier, but no sooner has he conquered it and prevailed over his isolation than he has to reckon on the complexities of human company. The footprint is the beginning of this test of his understanding and the end of his Eden. What follows is like an allegory of the Ascent of Man, for he has to cope with cannibalism, aggression, warfare, and the competitive instinct. By overcoming these obstacles, Crusoe grows stronger. And yet, though he is a hero in a literary sense, he is not heroic in his deeds. His most persuasive quality is his humanity; he is the congenital bumbler who is challenged by circumstances to become competent. And one might add that though the Bible strengthens him, he does not become visibly religious until Friday appears, and then he is sanctimonious.

If Robinson Crusoe were a story about holding out against the odds, then everything would hinge on Crusoe’s rescue. But this is not the case. By mastering himself, Crusoe masters the island and makes a world