Robinson Crusoe after 300 Years

Andreas K. E. Mueller, Glynis Ridley

• Publisher: Bucknell University Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781684482887
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

When Defoe published The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe and The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe in 1719, he could not have imagined that Crusoe, Friday, and a footprint in the sand would enjoy global recognition 300 years later. Why—and how—does Crusoe's story resonate today? There is no shortage of explanations for the longevity of Defoe's creation, which has been interpreted as both religious allegory and frontier myth, with Crusoe seen as an example of the self-sufficient adventurer and the archetypal colonizer and capitalist. Defoe's original has been reimagined multiple times in legions of Robinsonade or castaway stories. But there is still much more to say—the Crusoe myth is far from spent. This wide-ranging collection brings together eleven scholars who suggest new and unfamiliar ways of thinking about this most familiar of works, and who ask us to consider the enduring appeal of "Crusoe," more recognizable today than ever before.

Part One

GENERIC REVISIONS

1

THE MARTIAN

Crusoe at the Final Frontier

GLYNIS RIDLEY

IN 2009, SELF-DESCRIBED “SPACE NERD” Andy Weir started self-publishing chapters of a novel on his personal blog. Centered upon the struggles of a wise-cracking astronaut, Mark Watney, whose mission commander mistakenly leaves him for dead on Mars, Weir’s blog soon amassed thousands of regular readers. Among Weir’s early followers, some of those with relevant scientific expertise proved willing to provide feedback on technical aspects of the story, and so the self-published chapters grew into a fully fledged work: The Martian. When Weir’s fan base requested an e-reader version of the finished text, Weir loaded his novel to Amazon Kindle Direct and quickly became an internet publishing sensation. In a cascading series of events that could be possible only in the digital publishing age, Weir’s blog led him to self-publish with Amazon, where his success caused Crown Publishing to negotiate for the rights to bring out a conventionally published novel in 2014.¹ In 2015, a movie version of the novel was released and garnered seven Oscar nominations, including one for Best Picture.² So successful was the movie at bringing the novel to the attention of an ever-widening audience that a specially adapted (that is, redacted) version of the text was produced for use in American grade school science classes: space exploration minus the casual swearing of a variety of characters.³ Across all its formats—perhaps because of its multiple formats—The Martian has been a cultural sensation.

Following the release of the first Crown issue, which debuted at twelfth on the New York Times hardback fiction best-seller list, reviewers were quick to identify similarities between Weir’s creation and Robinson Crusoe, with some linking the two via Byron Haskin’s 1964 movie, Robinson Crusoe on Mars.⁴ Weir has been asked about links between Robinson Crusoe and The Martian repeatedly. A Q&A with Weir on Crown’s own website includes a direct question as to whether Defoe’s text inspired him, to which Weir responds, “Not really, no. I was more inspired by Apollo 13.” Aficionados of director Ron Howard’s 1995 movie Apollo 13 (based upon Commander Jim Lovell’s 1994 memoir, Lost Moon) will certainly recognize its influence on The Martian.⁵ But in additional to crediting Apollo 13 as an inspiration for The Martian, Weir has also said “I do love a good survival story.”⁶ And so Crown Publishing’s press release for the paperback of The Martian seems at pains to avoid direct mention of Robinson Crusoe, while at the same time acknowledging its status as the ultimate survival story, pitching Weir’s novel as “Apollo 13 meets Castaway in this grippingly detailed, brilliantly ingenious man-versus-nature survival thriller—set on the surface of Mars.” Here, Robert Zemeckis’s 2000 retelling of Crusoe’s story (with Tom Hanks cast as a FedEx executive stranded on a desert island) is credited as the archetypal survival narrative, and the press release cites only movie inspirations for The Martian rather than Castaway’s own indebtedness to Crusoe’s tale.

There is no reason not to take Weir at his word that his interest is in “a good survival story” rather than Defoe’s text per se. But if the longevity of Robinson Crusoe in the popular imagination is, in large part, because it is the preeminent example of a survival story, then its influence on any “good survival story” proves impossible to escape, no matter how hard any writer or filmmaker of a survival story might try. Wherever and whenever an individual or group of fictional protagonists is up against the odds and struggling to survive in an inhospitable landscape, the shade of Crusoe will surely always be present. As for the popularity of The Martian, the rapid adaptation of the novel for the American high school market may be seen as replicating the popularity of Robinson Crusoe itself. The Martian should therefore be read or viewed (in all its formats) as attesting to the enduring appeal of Defoe’s original.

On April 12, 1961, Soviet astronaut Yuri Gagarin became the first man successfully to complete a space flight. On May 5, 1961, U.S. astronaut Alan Shepard followed in Gagarin’s footsteps, and “the space race” had begun. The decade that would culminate in Neil Armstrong’s walk on the Moon on July 20, 1969 also made space exploration a significant fictional trope. In 1966, the television show Star Trek imagined a future in which Earth’s then-rival superpowers were no longer competitors, but all their peoples (not to mention some friendly alien races) had become partners in the exploration of space, famously introduced in each episode’s opening credits as “the final frontier.”⁷ Across the history of the space exploration genre, fiction authors have—understandably—preferred to foreground the stresses that such exploration would place on interpersonal and interspecies relationships, rather than paying sustained attention to the science that could make such exploration possible. Secure in its science, The Martian deliberately upends that convention, as Andy Weir explained in an interview with astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson:

TYSON: In The Martian all we care about is whether the main character survives on his scientific wit. I don’t care about interpersonal relationships. I don’t care if his parents are alive or dead, if he’s married, has kids. I just care if the stuff he’s figuring out is going to work. And he’s tapping science, technology, engineering, and math: all the STEM fields. That may be without precedent.

WEIR: Well, see, no one would accuse The Martian of being literature, right? The main character, Mark Watney, is exactly the same at the end of the story as he is at the beginning. He doesn’t undergo any change—no personality crisis, no nothing. And I don’t feel bad about that. I’m completely unrepentant.⁸

The exchange is intriguing: as an astrophysicist, Tyson admits to the novelty of a reading—and viewing—experience in which the attempted resolution of a series of scientific problems is the page turner. For his part, Weir asks us to consider The Martian as something other than “literature,” and when subsequently asked by Tyson, “Could you have invented a new genre here?” Weir responds, “I’ve heard people describe it as competence porn.”⁹ Certainly by the time of The Martian’s release in conventional novel printed form in 2014, the term “competence porn” had already acquired enough currency to be deemed worth an explanation in one of Britain’s most conservative broadsheets; an article headline in the Telegraph asking readers, “Are you hooked on competence porn?”¹⁰ The phenomenon is described as “entertainment—novels, films or television shows—where enjoyment is garnered form witnessing impressive feats of human capability.… But—and this is important—competence porn doesn’t make you feel inadequate or incompetent. It makes you feel empowered.” Having assured readers of the confidence imparted from reading or watching human wit and ingenuity succeed against all odds, the article proceeds to ground the genre in familiar literary history, and in doing so, it traces a direct line from Robinson Crusoe to The Martian: “There’s nothing new about [competence porn]. One of the first examples of the genre was Daniel Defoe’s 1719 novel, in which the shipwrecked Robinson Crusoe must start from scratch to build a comfortable and civilized life for himself … this year, perhaps the best shipwreck scenario for MacGyvering your way to survival is explored by Andy Weir’s novel The Martian, about an astronaut marooned on Mars whose resourcefulness is stretched to the very limits to stay alive in the brutally unforgiving extraterrestrial environment.”¹¹ Crusoe’s life on the island is, of course, far from the entirety of the first part of his story, and as Benjamin Pauley reminds us (chapter 8), the first part of Robinson Crusoe has a long history of appearing together with The Farther Adventures: the assertion that Robinson Crusoe is one of the first examples of competence porn is therefore true only if one accepts Crusoe’s shipwrecked island experience as synecdochical—the part that has come to represent the whole. But in the global cultural imagination, this conflation of Robinson Crusoe (and its continuations) with the idea (if not the specifics) of a man learning to survive on an island has long since occurred. As Andreas Mueller shows (chapter 10) the name “Crusoe” may only now be in the process of becoming unmoored from the specifics of a survival story. Yet a familiarity with the first-person narratives of any of Defoe’s fictional protagonists from the 1720s shows “competence porn” to be a fitting, albeit anachronistic characterization of the most memorable parts of all these texts. To a greater or lesser degree, all of Defoe’s titular narrators share the common trait of being serial problem solvers, and through solving problems, they survive. (Moll Flanders may even surpass Crusoe in this regard.) One of the closing scenes of the film version of The Martian (a scene that has no basis in Weir’s novel) sh...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• A Note on the Text
• Introduction
• Part One: Generic Revisions
• Part Two: Mind and Matter
• Part Three: Character and Form
• Acknowledgments
• Bibliography
• Notes on Contributors
• Index