Global Crusoe

Comparative Literature, Postcolonial Theory and Transnational Aesthetics

Ann Marie Fallon

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781409429982
• eBook ISBN: 9781317127987
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Global Crusoe travels across the twentieth-century globe, from a Native American reservation to a Botswanan village, to explore the huge variety of contemporary incarnations of Daniel Defoe's intrepid character. In her study of the novels, poems, short stories and films that adapt the Crusoe myth, Ann Marie Fallon argues that the twentieth-century Crusoe is not a lone, struggling survivor, but a cosmopolitan figure who serves as a warning against the dangers of individual isolation and colonial oppression. Fallon uses feminist and postcolonial theory to reexamine Defoe's original novel and several contemporary texts, showing how writers take up the traumatic narratives of Crusoe in response to the intensifying transnational and postcolonial experiences of the second half of the twentieth century. Reading texts by authors such as Nadine Gordimer, Bessie Head, Derek Walcott, Elizabeth Bishop, and J.M. Coetzee within their social, historical and political contexts, Fallon shows how contemporary revisions of the novel reveal the tensions inherent in the transnational project as people and ideas move across borders with frequency, if not necessarily with ease. In the novel Robinson Crusoe, Crusoe's discovery of 'Friday's footprint' fills him with such anxiety that he feels the print like an animal and burrows into his shelter. Likewise, modern readers and writers continue to experience a deep anxiety when confronting the narrative issues at the center of Crusoe's story.

Chapter 1
Literary Revision and Robinson Crusoe

… But my poor old island’s still
un-rediscovered, un-renamable.
None of the books has ever got it right.

—Elizabeth Bishop “Crusoe in England”1

“I have now done with the island, and all manner of discourse about it; and whoever reads the rest of my memorandums would do well to turn his thoughts entirely from it.”

—Daniel Defoe, The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe2

Elizabeth Bishop’s mournful Crusoe, lonely at home in England and grieving over the loss of his island and Friday beautifully captures a certain nostalgia for heroic adventure stories and self-made narrative homes that many writers explore throughout the second half of the twentieth century. Already in the poem, we hear the echoes of the multiple versions of the island that overwhelm the contemporary reader. While the desert island story was already familiar to Defoe and his readers in 1719, by the late twentieth century, island associations are overwhelming. In fact, there are so many renditions of the island that the reference itself is almost meaningless. None of the books can ever get it quite right because there are in fact too many versions to pin down one particular set of meanings.

Revisions of Robinson Crusoe in the second half of the twentieth century engage with Defoe’s novel, but also with the multiple intertextual reiterations of the novel: the didactic colonial juvenilia, the nineteenth-century adventure stories, and the modernist re-visitations. These texts connect with one another across time and geographic space, creating a new world, a transnational map of literary influence and revision. Throughout Global Crusoe I will demonstrate the ways that revising and unsettling these texts are intimately connected to revising and unsettling space. Reading these texts in relationship to one another literarily, if not literally, changes how we survey world literature and the trajectories of influence. Revision derives from the Latin, revisere literally “to re-see.” According to the OED, revise is defined as: “Look again or repeatedly at, look back on, reflect on. See or look at again … Later, examine or re-examine and improve or amend (esp. written or printed matter); consider and alter (an opinion, plan, etc.) Rare: The fact of seeing a person or thing again; an instance of this and a retrospective survey.”3

The texts in this study revise the Crusoe’s story in several of these aforementioned senses. The texts certainly examine, reflect on, and amend Defoe’s work. But these works also revise in the older sense of revision, providing a retrospective survey of Robinson Crusoe’s narrative and his island. I will argue that the novels, plays, and poems in this study survey the field of Robinson Crusoe literature and re-survey the idea of the island proper. One can imagine that revision is an act of creating a connection between texts of different historic periods, written in different languages and representing different national geographic areas. Inherent in these connections are differential power relations. Consequently, the concept of literary revision has both an aesthetic and a political history. Revision, rewriting, recuperation, intertextuality, and pastiche are critical terms for postmodern, postcolonial, and feminist theorists as well as for Harold Bloom. Revision is consequently imagined as both a descriptive practice of referring back to canonical texts, patriarchal texts, colonial texts, or “strong” poets, to use Bloom’s terminology, and as a political practice that “resists” hegemonic discursive practices in order to create, or represent, alternative ways of knowing. In one of the inaugural texts of postcolonial theory, The Empire Writes Back (1989), the authors describe the “revisioning of received tropes and modes such as allegory, irony, and metaphor and the rereading of ‘canonical’ texts in light of post-colonial discursive practices” as a major path in postcolonial criticism.4 That this particular text is one of the first to coin the term postcolonial consequently underscores how central the act of literary revision is regarded in postcolonial practice.

The revisionary writers in my study represent both the pervasiveness of Robinson Crusoe in formerly colonized and colonizing countries and a changing conception of world literature in the late twentieth century. Indeed revision itself is sometimes imagined as its own territory or as a practice that opens up literary territory for further exploration, Ashcroft argues that revision produces “powerfully subversive accounts of “literariness” which open up important new areas of concern.”5 Homi Bhabha’s treatment of the idea of colonial mimicry, for example, discusses revision and the act of copying or “mimesis” in a broader linguistic sense (outside the confines of the novel or artistic text).6

Rob Nixon renames revision appropriation, and he argues that this literary gesture is an essential practice in the decolonization period of Africa and the Caribbean. A study of postcolonial revisions of Robinson Crusoe must also turn to the work done on postcolonial revisions of Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Like Defoe’s novel, The Tempest represents the European man in the New World and his domineering relationship to a native, in this case, Caliban. Nixon’s essay, “Caribbean and African Appropriations of The Tempest,” examines revisions or appropriations of The Tempest during the period of decolonization and the Black Nationalist movements in Africa, from approximately 1957 to 1973. Nixon argues that anti-colonial writers seized on the figure of Caliban as a representative of native nationalist movements. Essayists and artists refashioned or reinterpreted the play to expose the totalitarian authority of the West via the figure of Prospero and the resistant possibilities of Caliban. In readings of writers and essayists including George Lamming, Mannoni, and Césaire, among others, Nixon argues that for this period, readings of The Tempest against the grain of traditional Western or British readings served to undermine the authority of the European cannon and to authorize Caribbean and African literary traditions:

Writers and intellectuals from the colonies appropriated The Tempest in a way that was outlandish in the original sense of the word. They reaffirmed the play’s importance from outside its central tradition not passively or obsequiously, but through what may best be described as a series of insurrectional endorsements. For in that turbulent and intensely reactive phase of Caribbean and African history, The Tempest came to serve as a Trojan horse, whereby cultures barred from the citadel of “universal” Western values could win entry and assail those global pretensions from within.7

In Nixon’s formulation, The Tempest loses its momentum when “the plot runs out” or when the symbolic Calibans come to power, but Prospero’s rule continues from without. In a postcolonial era, the symbolic power of The Tempest fades as the optimism of decolonization wanes. This is perhaps where Robinson Crusoe and The Tempest diverge. While revisions of The Tempest may move into the celebratory reign and then fade as the success of decolonization falls into question, Robinson Crusoe revisions pick up on a mood of dark nostalgia, not a nostalgia or colonialism but, instead, a sense of ambivalence about the late twentieth-century globalizing project.

Clearly, revision does not just resonate for postcolonial critics; postmodernists and poststructuralists employ the term frequently as a way of defining the terrain of the late twentieth-century literary scene in general. For example, Christian Moraru also defines postmodern rewriting as a radical political and aesthetic practice that breaks off and critiques both the “masters” it revises and the present cultural moment, “The postmodern rewriting practices I examine set up a counterwriting distance, a ‘rupture’ between themselves and what they redo—the literary past—as well as between themselves and various hegemonic forces active at the moment and in the milieu of ‘redoing.’”8 The postmodern practice of revision, Moraru argues, is an act of “setting straight the cultural accounts of society.”9 Linda Hutcheon however, argues in a slightly different vein that the relationship between the postmodern and the literary past is more interconnected and less subversive. The postmodern historical novel, for example, demonstrates twentieth-century concerns with “multiplicity and dispersion of truth(s)” and also reveals the “fictitiousness” of eighteenth-century histories.10 Hutcheon implies that only the late twentieth-century novel offers a complex and often ironic aesthetic.

Revision can also refer to reiteration of a myth. Ian Watt argues that revisions of Robinson Crusoe reflect the ambivalence and the anxiety around modern individualism.11 Taking a more psychological approach, Harold Bloom, in his trilogy that ends with Agon: Towards a Theory of Revisionism, argues that creative misprision defines “strong” poets. Poetic revision or misreading is fundamentally a struggle of the son to usurp the strong poet father figure through creative misreading. While the gender dynamics of this example are obviously troubling today, this vision of psychological anxiety in coping with the past presents a nice footnote for complicating anxiety in postcolonial revision.

Yet, taken separately, these readings of revision seem too limiting to fully explain the multiple and transnational revisions of Robinson Crusoe. To always read revision as a psychological or even militaristic “resistance” to either politics or fathers erases the imaginative connections between the “canonical” text and the “revised” text even as it perversely reinforces the hierarchical positioning of texts. It becomes almost inevitable that the canonical text is positioned as a foil to the revolutionary text, an oppressive and even monolithic entity. The implication of this mode of interpretation would seem to be that all canonical British texts are inherently the conservative mouthpieces of empire, rather than sites of parody and pastiche or the Bahktinian carnivalesque. Such a model reinforces a progressive idea of literature that “bad” work will be remade into “good.” Alternatively, Hutcheon’s model of intertextuality fails to address the political or “counterdiscursive” possibilities of postmodern aesthetics, let alone postcolonial practice. Bloom’s portrait of the artist as a disgruntled son seems almost hopelessly outdated, that is until we consider the work of St. Lucian poet Derek Walcott, who usefully exploits the father/son paradigm, using this relationship as a metaphor to complicate the literary connections between European poetic traditions and Caribbean traditions.

I argue instead that many postmodern and postcolonial revisions are subversive because they “borrow” the structures of liminality and subversion that are part of the English literary canon. The metaphors of resistance and counter-discourse powerfully describe the ways in which late twentieth-century literature often seeks to redress past social injustices and literal/literary erasures. As Gloria Anzaldúa powerfully writes in her own memoir of resistance: “I write … to rewrite the stories others have miswritten about me.”12 These models of literary revision in general are useful for thinking through the overarching consequences for revision, and even the “desire” for literary revision. And yet these critical misreadings of these “canonical” works and genres potentially overlook the artistic subversions of the past. In celebrating the reinvention of language and culture in postcolonial literature, we leave ourselves vulnerable to the oppressive suggestion that because we can never actually escape language, we are continually trapped in the hegemonic discourses of colonialism or, to use another example from feminism, “phallocentric language.” In this sense, these modes of theorizing revision are less helpful in thinking through the artistic practices examined in Robinson Crusoe and also in the twentieth-century texts. Defoe himself suggests several models of revision in his novels, including his representation of Crusoe’s journal, the parrot, the footprint, the island, and the circulation of capital. In the next chapter I will give a fuller account of my readings of these narrative practices in Defoe, each of which connects the act of writing to the “composure” of self, the creation—or destruction—of a domestic space and the landscape of the island. The texts in this project also suggest other revisionary strategies, including racial reversals, gender reversals, layered allusion, “cartographic intervention,” and a more elusive category I label “strategic erasure.” Texts do not necessarily, or even ever, employ just one mode of revision, often combining, layering, or juxtaposing different modes. These strategies intersect within different texts and also the subsequent meanings that consequently cohere within and then across the narratives.

This awareness of the aesthetics of revision, particularly a self-conscious drawing attention to the act of rewriting, distinguishes all of the work here. To illustrate, Bishop’s poem, “Crusoe in England” brings many of the central issues that haunt Global Crusoe to bear. Bishop’s...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Literary Revision and Robinson Crusoe
• 2 Revision and Dislocation in The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe
• 3 “The First True Creole”: Creation Stories in Derek Walcott and Sam Selvon
• 4 South African Revisions: J.M. Coetzee, Nadine Gordimer, and Bessie Head
• 5 Cannibal Desires: Feminist Revision and Marianne Wiggins’ John Dollar
• 6 Beloved Island: Transnational Revision, Translation, and Victoria Slavuski’s Música para olvidar una isla
• 7 “The World is Full of Islands”
• Bibliography
• Index