Robinson
Crusoe
: the Project of Self Autogenesis and the problem of the Other
Through the technologies of writing and reading, one produces an account (a narrative and an assessement) of experience so that one’s life can becomes one’s own property.
| Extending ownership over space (the Island) and over time (one's life) | |||
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100: I descended a little on the side of that delicious vale, 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. But, what has given Crusoe legitimate claim to ownership over the island? |
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| the Island |
ß ((((((((((------transport between-------)))))) à |
the Self | |
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Therefore: The Island = the self
Other objects take on an emblematic spiritual meaning:
| Ownership as contentment through being master (of others) |
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148: It would have made a stoic smile, to have seen me and my little family sit down to dinner. There was my majesty, the prince and lord of the whole island; I had the lives of all my subjects at my absolute command. I could hang, draw, give liberty, and take it away; and no rebels among all my subjects. Then to see how like a king I dined, too, all alone, attended by my servants. Poll, as if he had been my favorite, was the only person permitted to talk to me. My dog, ...my two cats... |
What is the most terrifying moment in all Crusoe's years on the Island? What event causes him the greatest anxiety?
| single footprint on the sand as trauma |
| 153-154: It happened one day, about noon, going towards my boat, I was exceedingly surprised 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 listened, I looked round me, I could hear nothing, nor see anything. 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 confused and out of myself, I came home to my fortification, not feeling, as we say, the ground I went on, but terrified 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; ... |
| Paradox: time passes but anxiety increases |
| 154: I slept none that night. The farther I was from the occasion of my fright, the greater my apprehensions were; which is something contrary to the nature of such things, and especially to the usual practice of all creatures in fear. But I was so embarrassed with my own frightful ideas of the thing, that I formed nothing but dismal imaginations to myself, even though I was now a great way off it. Sometimes I fancied it must be the devil, and reason joined in with me upon this supposition; for how should any other thing in human shape come into the place? Where was the vessel that brought them? What was there of any other footsteps? ... |
| Anxiety takes a particular form: that he will be devoured by cannibals |
| 155: Then terrible thoughts racked my imagination about their having found my boat, and that there were people here; and that if so, I should certainly have them come again in greater numbers, and devour me; that if it should happen so that they should not find me, yet they would find my enclosure, destroy all my corn, carry away all my flock of tame goats, and I should perish at last for mere want. |
Negotiating a response to the Cultural Other:
| Response #1:
moral nausea |
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164-165: When I was come down the hill to the shore, as I said above, being the SW. point of the island, I was perfectly confounded and amazed; nor is it possible for me to express the horror of my mind at seeing the shore spread with skulls, hands, feet, and other bones of human bodies; and particularly, I observed place where there had been a fire made, and a circle dug in the earth, like a cockpit, where it is supposed the savage wretches sat down to their inhuman feastings upon the bodies of their fellow-creatures. I was so astonished with the sight of these things that I entertained no notion of any danger to myself from it for a long while. All my apprehensions were buried in the thoughts of such a pitch of inhuman, hellish brutality, and the horror of the degeneracy of human nature which, though I had heard of often, yet I never had so near a view of before. In short, I turned away my face from the horrid spectacle. My stomach grew sick, and I was just at the point of fainting, when Nature discharged the disorder from my stomach. ... |
| Response #2:
thanks God for the English Christian culture he’s born into |
| 165: When I came a little out of that part of the island, I stood still a while as amazed; and then recovering myself, I looked up with the utmost affection of my soul, and with a flood of tears in my eyes, gave God thanks, that had cast my first lot in a part of the world where I was distinguished from such dreadful creatures as these; and that, though I had esteemed my present condition very miserable, had yet given me so many comforts in it, that I had still more to give thanks for than to complain of; and this is above all, that I had, even in this miserable condition, been comforted with the knowledge of Himself, and the hope of His blessing... |
| Response #3: intends to hide himself from them |
| 166: I knew I had been here now almost eighteen years, and never saw the least footsteps of human creature there before; and I might be here eighteen more as entirely concealed as I was now, if I did not discover myself to them, which I had no manner of occasion to do; it being my only business to keep myself entirely concealed where I was, unless I found a better sort of creatures than cannibals to make myself known to. |
| Response #4: has fantasies of destroying monstrous cannibals |
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168: But my invention now run quite another way; for, night and day I could think of nothing but how I might destroy some of these monsters in their cruel, bloody entertainment, and, if possible, save the victim they should bring hither to destroy. ... then proposed that I would place myself in ambush in some convenient place, with my three guns all double-loaded, and, in the middle of their bloody ceremony, let fly at them, when I should be sure to kill or wound perhaps two or three at every shot; and then falling in upon them with my three pistols and my sword, I made no doubt but that if there was twenty I should kill them all. This fancy pleased my thoughts for some weeks; and I was so full of it that I often dreamed of it, and sometimes that I was just going to let fly at them in my sleep. |
| Crusoe’s second thoughts: |
| 5: Providence
had excluded Caribs from the Christian enlightenment |
| 170: [the savages] had-been suffered by Providence, in His wise disposition of the world, to have no other guide than that of their own abominable and vitiated passions; and consequently were left, and perhaps had been so for some ages, to act such horrid things, and receive such dreadful customs, as nothing but nature entirely abandoned of Heaven, and acted by some hellish degeneracy, could have run them into. But now when, as I have said, I began to be weary of the fruitless excursion which I had made so long and so far every morning in vain, so my opinion of the action itself began to alter; and I began, with cooler and calmer thoughts, to consider what it was I was going to engage in. |
| 6: Who am I
to be both judge and executioner? |
| 170-171: 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, unpunished, 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. I debated this very often with myself, thus: How do I know what God Himself judges in this particular case? |
| 7: A difference in custom and culture is at work here |
| 171: They do not know it to be an off and then commit it in defiance of Divine justice, as we do in almost all the sins we commit. They think it no more a crime to kill a captive taken in war than we do to kill an ox; nor to eat human flesh than we do to eat mutton. |
| 8: How different is their savagery than European behavior in war? |
| 171: When I had considered this a little; it followed necessarily that I was certainly in the wrong in it; that these people were not murderers in the sense that I had before condemned them in my thoughts, any more than those Christians were murderers who often put to death the prisoners taken in battle; or more frequently, upon many occasions, put whole troops of men to the sword, without giving quarter, though they threw down their arms and submitted. |
| 9: If I acted out this violent justice, wouldn’t I be just as genocidal as the Spanish? |
| 171: In the next place it occurred to me, that albeit the usage they thus give one another was thus brutish and inhuman, yet it was really nothing to me; these people had done me no injury. ...and therefore it could not be just for me to fall upon them. That this would justify the conduct of the Spaniards in all their barbarities practised 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, such as sacrificing human bodies to their idols, were yet, as to the Spaniards, very innocent people; |
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But, the coherence of Crusoe's
self depends upon ownership of the island: so he still has two contradictory
responses to the cannibals: 1:
hide from them (so he can just survive,
though not in full possession of the island/self): but
this means losing the self.
2:
destroy them all
(so he can maintain sole possession of the island/self): but
this is immoral |
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Crusoe’s Roles: |
Traveler | Home-Maker | "Shrink" | Teacher | Founder |
| Symbolic Event | Father’s Prediction & Ship-wreck | Footprint& cannibals | Saving Friday | Vast $ | |
| Problem: the other | the self defined by others | wreck as punishment | I’m not alone; island not mine? | Friday a savage | Rule others |
| Response: | run away from home: become an adventurer | Not hide & not massacre, but save and destroy | Education and found a colony | Return to his colony | |