I. âINFINITE LABOURâ
Abiding by the contemporary âgospel of workâ (Watt 76), Robinson Crusoe labors tirelessly to shape his island into a workable space in which everything has its place. The very account of his adventures takes its place in an economy of utility by providing proof of his labors: âThis will testify for me that I was not idleâ (RC 161). According to Ian Wattâs influential 1957 essay, âRobinson Crusoe, Individualism and the Novel,â Robinson Crusoe is one of âthe heroes of economic individualismâ (62). In Wattâs view, Defoe presents solitary labor ânot as an alternative to a death sentence, but as a solution to the perplexities of economic and social realityâ (88). Yet, Crusoe variously describes his labor as infinite, hard, vast, and inexpressible (RC 77, 101, 127, 138). These descriptions register the difficulty of capturing the elusive experience of work. Not only is work so attenuated as to be interminable, but it is inexpressibleâit does not have a place in language. Thus, instead of offering a solution to the âperplexities of economic and social reality,â the book reenacts those perplexities without resolving them.
Wattâs beautiful, seductive essay has spawned endless reworkings of the idea of Robinson Crusoe as homo economicus (Watt 63). One way or another, these theories all conclude that, as Watt says, âCrusoe turns his forsaken estate into a triumphâ (88). But what if, contrary to popular belief, Crusoeâs estate is not a triumph but a failure, showing up all that is perplexed, infinite, hard, vast, and inexpressible about the economics of empire? Not only does it turn out that Defoe shows us this, but reading Robinson Crusoe through J.M. Coetzeeâs 1986 rewriting of it, Foe, forecloses a reading of the former as the triumph of bourgeois, colonial man over his environment. Of all Coetzeeâs novels, Foe in particular establishes strong continuities between modern and postmodern, colonial and postcolonial. Easily nominated most likely to appear together on a postcolonial pairings syllabus, the texts do not, however, trace a trajectory of progress and improvement. Coetzeeâs rewriting insists that we read the precolonial story as a prefiguring of postcolonial failures.
The ensuing discussion does what so much of English literature has done beforeâit uses Robinson Crusoe to explicate and ground a theory of nation-building. The difference is that it reads against the grain of the usual triumphalism to uncover instead what Coetzee in White Writing calls âa literature of failureâ: âThe literature of empty landscape ⌠is thus a literature of failure, of the failure of the historical imaginationâ (9). Each part of this chapter explores an aspect of the literature of failure: the failure of work, the failure of narrative, the failure of enclosure, the failure of retelling, and the failure of the real.
James Joyce sums up the case for Crusoe as a colonial success story:
What gets elidedânot just by Joyce, but persistentlyâis the characteristic ineptitude of Crusoeâs conquest. Verbs of failure invariably stamp Crusoeâs description of each new foray. Making pottery, he disparagingly decides that âI might botch up some such pot ⌠as might bear handlingâ (RC 131). Making a waistcoat and breeches, he notes, âI must not omit to acknowledge that they were wretchedly made; for if I was a bad carpenter, I was a worse taylerâ (RC 145). And having made his infamous, immovable canoe, he despairs that âI could no more turn her and set her upright upon her bottom, than I could remove the islandâ (RC 136). By calling on the island as his point of comparison, Crusoe hints at its own inherent instability since, as we shall see, the island is anything but stable.
Addressing the future reader of his journal, Crusoe describes his pottery-making attempts, the way his labor âmiscarriedâ (RC 132), and imagines his readerâs reactions at his efforts:
Crusoe discusses his product in terms perhaps better suited to progeny, blurring the languages of production and reproduction in this description of labor and miscarriages. In Critical Inquiry, Lydia H. Liu expands epically on the pottery-making episode and emphasizes âthe accidental happening of its makingâ (729). For Liu, this casts doubt on Crusoeâs status as âinventor and owner of the earthenware potâ (729) and is âsymptomatic of what I call the poetics of colonial disavowalâ (733). She observes that
Liuâs historical reading introduces another chronic absence. Just as Crusoeâs excessive labors (which result in miscarriage as often as they result in anything viable) get elided by readers and critics of the text, the labor of others gets elided or undone within the text itself.
All of Crusoeâs efforts at making things include the inverse potential for undoing or unmakingâa tension Elaine Scarry explores in her 1985 book The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. Scarryâs brief discussion of Robinson Crusoe concludes that
Defoe âworks to exposeâ Crusoeâs work, or rather, his unexpected relationship to work. Crusoeâs activity of making âmerely to makeâ implies something excessive. He is no longer making out of need, yet, the nature of making remains equivalent to the civilizing impulse. In other words, we can project from this equation a further equation in which making excessivelyâmaking that has become separated from use, making that fails to be useful, making that assumes rapid obsolescenceâis the embodiment of the civilizing impulse.
Between making and unmaking lies the makeshift, an unstable zone in which things might just as easily come undone as get done. In her essay, âBeachcombers, Missionaries and the Myth of the Castaway,â Vanessa Smith suggests that Crusoe and his latter-day mimics labor under âa logic of makeshiftâ (65) and she remarks on the stopgap quality of the castaway enterprise. Modernityâs found objects that enable improvisation include text, ink, and technology but no handbook on how to make do. The circumstances of the shipwreck have made provisions available, but their use is necessarily provisional. âSkill and object are bound by an intimate relationshipâ (66), but Crusoeâs lack of skill and knowledge must be compensated for by experimentation and making-do. Without a vade mecum,1 the process and product of work at first appear wondrous to Crusoe: âIt might be truly said, that now I worked for my bread; âtis a little wonderful, and what I believe few people have thought much upon, viz. the strange multitude of little things necessary in the providing, producing, curing, dressing, making, and finishing this one article of breadâ (RC 130). Once the hidden labor behind the product is broken down into its constituent parts, it is the âmultitude of little things necessaryâ that seems endlessly strange.
Crusoeâs exile from systems of circulation (Smith, âBeachcombersâ 69) takes place literally and figuratively: âI had a dismal prospect of my condition, for as I was not cast away upon that island without being driven, as is said, by a violent storm quite out of the course of our intended voyage, and a great way, viz. some hundreds of leagues, out of the ordinary course of the trade of mankindâ (RC 80). Cast away from the real geography of trade and the real forces of trade winds, Crusoe is also cast away from the imagined community of trade relations, trading nations, and mercantilism. The equation of the course of the voyage and the course of tradeâand the hundreds of leagues between Crusoe and both of themâreifies and quantifies his distance from the mainstream. In âRobinson Crusoeâ: Island Myths and the Novel, Michael Seidel makes the useful point that Crusoeâs exile prevents him from standing in for economic man since economic systems âconsist of delicately calibrated relations among manufactures, labor sources, wages, prices, supply, demand, monetary circulation, trade agreements, debt structure, and exchange ratesâ (100). And yet while Crusoe certainly recognizes his removal from the system, he also retains an abstract link to economics as usual:
More immediate than the abstractions of worth and value, however, are the entangled urges of power, knowledge, and violence, which occupy a central relationship to economics. Stephen Hymerâs remarks on international trade coming out of a discussion of Robinson Crusoe are applicable to economics in general:
In Robinson Crusoe, the predictable relationships between colonizer and colonized, or master and servant, are sometimes overturned as a result of Crusoeâs own capsized situation. When Crusoe reflects on his role in the slave trade, he concludes that he showed bad business sense. He asks, â[W]âhat business had I to leave a settled fortune, a well stocked plantation, improving and encreasing, to turn supra-cargo to Guinea, to fetch negroes, when patience and time would have so encreased our stock at home, that we could have bought them at our own door, from those whose business it was to fetch them?â (RC 199) When Crusoe decides to socialize Friday (socialization being one of Hymerâs three forms of violence), he describes how âI fell to work for my man Fridayâ (RC 210),2 reversing the usual relationship of master and servant to labor.
So Crusoe, the consummate colonizer, works for Friday, the paradigmatic colonized. This example suggests the possibility of an alternative reading of the book, and of how colonization works in general. Subtle dynamics within the relations of power and control may get elided by an enduring belief in the colonial success story. Lewis Nkosiâs essay on Robinson Crusoe, âCall Me Master,â outlines some of the methodology of what he calls the enormous enterprise of empire-building (155):
But the ink runs dry, Crusoeâs record-keeping is haphazard, and his tracking of time is uncertainâare these founding acts of naming, tabulation, and classification then fundamentally unreliable?
The very first words Crusoe teaches Fridayâeven before yes and no, or milk and breadâare their names: âI made him know his name should be Friday, which was the day I saved his life; I called him so for the memory of the time; I likewise taught him to say Master, and then let him know, that was to be my nameâ (RC 209). This key moment is as much an occasion of misnaming as it is of naming. By this point in the story, it is already well-established that Crusoe has lost track of time and does not really know which day of the week it is, although the urgen...