Is Robinson Crusoe a “Deserted” Novel? – 4

Robinson may have left his father’s hearth or his home behind, and on his island he may not be able to name everything; yet most of the things he does name are related to home. So much so that—let alone naming his two separate settlements on the island as a “castle” or a “summer arbor”—Robinson is a homo domesticus who, on the very first night he landed on the island, when he had to sleep on a tree branch because he was not sure of the dangers around him, even called it “my apartment in the tree” (rendered in the Turkish translation as “my little house in the tree”) (p. 66). As Pat Rogers writes in his article “Crusoe’s Home,” “The novel’s main subject has little to do with a primitive man in a state of nature or with capitalist ethics applied to the struggle for survival. On the contrary, the novel’s subject is the story of a wealthy Caribbean man who creates a little England in distant lands. Crusoe is a homo domesticus” (390).

Watt seems poised to explain the matter through secularization by claiming that although Robinson has religious concerns, these do not hold any particular priority. According to Watt, of course, both Robinson and his author, Defoe, exhibit Puritan traits; however, these are “too weak to provide a consistent and controlling pattern for the hero’s life. For instance, we see that the actual influence of Crusoe’s religious belief on his behavior is surprisingly minimal” (p. 91). Yet the situation is exactly the opposite. Robinson neither shows signs of “deep secularization,” nor is Robinson Crusoe a novel in which “the secular and economic perspective prevails,” as Watt asserts when he argues that “Defoe’s significance in the history of the novel is directly linked to how he embodied within the narrative structure the struggle between secularization and Puritanism—whose roots lie in material progress.” There is no such struggle between secularization and Puritanism: Puritanism is simply another name for secularization. Moreover, Robinson Crusoe, which can also be read as a book of sermons, is a novel that proclaims how Puritanism establishes its dominance entirely, beginning with the “destruction” that Robinson mentions at the very moment he decides to leave his father’s home.

Thus, Göktürk’s view of Robinson not as an economic individual but as a universalizable myth converges with Watt’s reading of Robinson as a figure of economic individualism at the same point: in seeing him as a diminished “Robinson-like” figure that abstracts the novel along the axis of the deserted island without paying attention to its details. This is a reading that overlooks not only Puritanism but also how it reinvents religion, homeland, sovereignty, and kingship.

So then, how is Puritan sovereignty established in the novel, and with what characteristics does it appear before us?

Robinson first feels like a “king” when, upon first landing on the island, he discovers the area where he will build another shelter—one that he will later call his “summerhouse”—separate from the shelter he constructed by making use of the mouth of a cave (p. 119); in his fourth year on the island, while reflecting on the wickedness of the world and on how, by viewing such a world from the perspective of the afterlife, he has learned things he did not know before through God’s grace, he again feels like a “king”—a king or emperor with a vast fiefdom, with no rival to challenge him or meddle in his affairs; in the sixth year after his arrival on the island, when he sets out to explore parts of the island he had never seen before, carrying the strange umbrella he made, he feels like a king touring his “little kingdom”; here, recalling Puritan captivity narratives, it is worth noting that he uses an expression such as “my kingdom, that is, my captivity” (pp. 158–159). About five years later, while sitting at the table and chair he had made—one of the first things he did upon arriving on the island—and eating, surrounded by the animals he had domesticated, he sees himself as a king attended by servants (p. 170). Of course, all four of these kingdoms can be seen as situations in which, within his solitude, he entertains himself in a fantasy of power in order to feel himself to be, to some extent, a social being.

Nevertheless, it should be noted that each of these four kingdoms is articulated together with different elements. The first is the moment in which he declares himself king; the second is the condition of a king who possesses a realm but has no subjects; the third is the absolute king with no rivals whatsoever; and the fourth is a king whose subjects consist only of animals. Thus, even the possibility that Robinson was merely amusing himself with the idea of kingship follows a sequence and can be seen as a preparation both for the kingship that follows his acceptance of original sin and the rebirth he experiences through this acceptance, and for the kingship that will begin when other people start to appear on his island. In this sense, if Robinson Crusoe is neither the story of homo economicus, nor of the “primitive man in the state of nature,” nor of the “middle class” manifested through “capitalist ethics applied to the struggle for survival,” but rather “the story of a wealthy Caribbean man who creates a small England in distant lands,” if “Crusoe is homo domesticus,” can we then say that he is king only in his own home? Just like the “idle reader” of Cervantes’ Don Quixote: “Just as the king is the master of taxes, so are you the master of your home; you know that everyone is king in their own home” (p. 37). Not “everyone” is a king everywhere; “everyone” is a king in their own home, and whoever can make a deserted island into a home is also its king. Then who is the king, and what kind of king is Robinson?

In his article “Crusoe the King and the Political Evolution of His Island,” Maximilian E. Novak states that Robinson’s declaration of himself as king—partly in jest, partly in earnest—is in line with Hugo Grotius’s view that islands in the seas belong to the first settler (p. 337). However, his kingship, which was initially “absolute,” gradually undergoes an evolution. Of course, this is an evolution that begins with Crusoe’s arrival on the island, without even taking into account by what law islands in the seas are deemed uninhabited, or how they are considered uninhabited even when they are not. Precisely for this reason, Crusoe, despite having no subjects, regarded the island as his home—that is, his property—and became the sole king of the island.

Thus, apart from the four kingdoms in his fantasy, Robinson’s real kingship begins as the population of his island increases; the presence of Friday alone is not sufficient for this; from two people one cannot have a king and subjects—at most, a master and a slave. Apart from Friday, whom he converts to Protestantism, when Friday’s pagan father—whom he rescues from the savages—and the Catholic Spaniard join them, he makes them feel that they are his subjects. He sends them to bring the other Spaniards to the island only after ensuring that his “kingdom” is not Papist and that no one can treat him as if he were a priest.

After rescuing the captain and his supporters—who were being forced ashore following a mutiny on the English ship that was supposed to save him from the island—from the hands of the mutineers, he takes the mutineers into custody by acting like a “governor” and pardons them as a “governor.” It is he who saves the ship by taking the mutineers captive, and the authority to decide over their lives rests with him. He gives them the choice of either being taken to England in chains to be hanged or remaining on the island; when they choose to stay, he orders them to get along with the sixteen Spaniards whom the Spaniard and Friday’s father had gone to bring to the island, and, with the ship he has saved, he returns to England—his homeland, the country of his king—from which he had been away for almost half a lifetime, exactly “thirty-five years,” seven of which he spent as a merchant, a slave, and a plantation owner, and twenty-eight of which he spent alone (that is, almost entirely alone) on his island.

If the novel ended here, Robinson’s sovereignty over the island could first be interpreted as the fantasy of a solitary man, and later as a game he played together with others who washed up on his island. However, Robinson Crusoe does not end here. Upon arriving in his king’s country, Robinson settles matters concerning his family and the plantation in Brazil; for this purpose, he goes to Lisbon, where—while thinking he has little money—he learns that he is wealthy, particularly due to the income from his plantation. He then returns once more to his homeland. His return from Lisbon is also noteworthy: as if to demonstrate that the land is just as full of dangers as the seas, he crosses into France via the Pyrenees—a journey that includes rather exaggerated scenes of “battles with wolves,” during which Robinson behaves as though he were a military commander throughout all these dangers; from there, he returns to England.

Indeed, as if to demonstrate the invalidity of Watt’s claims (or those of other commentators who agree with him) that Crusoe did not take his religion—that is, his Protestantism—very seriously, after leaving the island he first considers settling not in England but in Brazil, where both his naturalization and his plantation are located, though it is governed by Catholics. However, there is a “religious” obstacle before him. Earlier, on the island, having realized his original sin, he had converted to a natural religion—a religion that could be lived in the most natural setting—a religion to which he had converted by reading the Holy Bible on his own, in accordance with the Lutheran injunction, before returning to his own Protestant faith; he had thought that he could live among the Papists in Brazil, convert to their religion, and even die among them as a Papist (p. 313). Yet now, after his natural experience on the island and the conversion he underwent there, he has “certain doubts about the Roman Catholic religion.” It is no longer possible for him to settle in Brazil without becoming a saint who is a “sacrifice” for his beliefs, without becoming a “martyr for the faith,” or without “dying at the hands of the Inquisition” (p. 330). For this reason, he gives up the idea of settling in Brazil and decides to sell his plantation.

But he does not forget his island. Years later, after marrying in England and having three children—two sons and a daughter—and, following his wife’s death, feeling ready for new adventures, this time setting out toward the Pacific Ocean, the most dynamic field of colonialism, for another journey that would take him to India and China, he revisits it. When he arrives, he realizes that the population of the island has increased considerably; besides the mutineers he had left there—two of whom are well-meaning and three quite rogue Englishmen—there are also the sixteen Spaniards whom Friday’s father and the Spaniard, now referred to as the “governor,” had gone to rescue. There are also “eleven men and five women” whom the English had brought from a nearby island they had raided, as well as “twenty children” born to these women and the English who had taken them as their own. Crusoe himself brings “a carpenter and a blacksmith” to leave on the island. After leaving the island, from Brazil—where he goes to attend to the affairs of his plantation—he also sends to the island “five cows, three of which are pregnant, a few sheep, and a few pigs,” along with some tools and equipment, “a number of people,” and “seven women” who are “suited for service” and whom anyone may marry (pp. 332–333).

Most importantly, although he distributes the island among its inhabitants, he does so on the basis of his “own right of ownership.” After marrying those among the islanders who were not religiously married, after reminding even the most rogue among the English—those so far removed from religion as to require a conversion—of religion, and encouraging the women they married to become Christian; after signing and sealing a document declaring that the island was his own property and that it had been distributed on the condition that a certain tax be paid to him or his heirs after eleven years, the arrangement of the island is as follows: “[M]y colony was organized in this way: the Spaniards had settled in my own home; this was the capital of the island, with its wooded areas stretching along the banks of the stream forming the bay—which I have described many times before—all the way to my arbor; as the agricultural lands expanded, they would spread toward the southeast; the English had settled in the northeast of the island, initially in the place where [the most notorious rogue] Will Atkins and his companions had lived… The easternmost tip of the island had been left entirely empty as a [free zone] so that the savages could come and go freely to hold their barbarous festivities according to their customs” (p. 489).

The captive “savages” on the island, however, will serve as servants to the ‘white’ people engaged in agriculture and animal husbandry and will be Christianized. As for the Catholics, he regards them as Christians “from before the time when the Roman Church began to assert spiritual dominion over people’s faith”—that is, as primitive Christians. Regarding the governance of the island, although he says that “they could not make better laws than those they would set for themselves,” and although he “takes a promise from all of them” that they will “live in friendship and good neighborliness with one another,” there are rules that the island established for itself during the period it lived on its own, and these remain valid. For example, “not planting more crops than necessary” was “a rule I had established” (p. 410). Nor did he leave his island without a government: “I never even considered placing that place [the island] under the sovereignty of a government or a nation, recognizing the rule of a prince, or making the people there subjects of a nation. Moreover, I had not even given the island a name; I left it as I found it, belonging to no one, and I recognized no government over its people other than my own” (p. 508). For, as a “father and a benefactor” to the inhabitants of his island, he possesses neither the “authority” nor the “power” to do anything that would lead them to complain, nor to act or command against their “voluntary consent.” Everything is in accordance with the will of God and of England; it is a matter of his faith. While traveling from China to Moscow with a caravan, when he encounters a prince exiled to Siberia by the Tsar of Muscovy, and as the prince tells Crusoe how great, exalted, and powerful the Tsar is, Crusoe interrupts him and says that, despite the small number of his subjects and the limited extent of his lands, he is a more powerful prince than the Tsar of Muscovy. When the prince is surprised, he tells him about his island, about his “voluntary” subjects who would fight to the last drop of their blood for him, and about how they both love him and fear him (p. 614).

Given all this, what can be said about sovereignty in Robinson Crusoe? Quite apart from the fact that many interpreters of Robinson Crusoe have scarcely addressed the issue at all, can we be content with stating—like Novak—that Crusoe was an absolute monarch while alone on the island; that, as the number of settlers on the island increased, the form of government gradually underwent an evolution; that although Defoe considered “democracy the ideal form of government,” he did not find it practical; that therefore the island, due to its lack of ownership, failed both as a society and as a system of governance; that Crusoe’s claim to sovereignty could at best be regarded as “histrionic”; or, like James Egan—who has written an article titled “Crusoe’s Monarchy and the Puritan Concept of the Self”—that Crusoe’s claims to kingship or sovereignty possess only a “spiritual” value; that he converted on the island and was reborn, acquiring a Puritan self; and that, therefore, what matters for him is not his ironic monarchy or sovereignty, but rather his effort both to secure his now sanctified soul and to transmit his own purity and Puritanism to others (pp. 454–458)?

In the second volume of his seminar The Beast and the Sovereign, Jacques Derrida offers an intriguing reading of Crusoe by taking into account the passage in the novel where Robinson attempts to reinvent the wheel on the island, linking this effort with the prayers he utters as if he were making them for the very first time. Although Crusoe had made various tools while on the island, he complains that he could not manage to make a wheel for the handcart he thought necessary for carrying goods: “As for the handcart, I thought I could make everything except the wheel; but since I did not know how to make a wheel, I could not figure out how it could be made either; moreover, I had no tool to make the iron pins of the axle, so I gave up” (p. 93). Yet he still manages to reinvent the wheel: “I had three large axes and many hatchets… but from cutting knotty hardwood, all of them had become dulled and worn; I did have a grindstone, but since I could not turn it, I could not use it. This matter occupied me as much as a statesman ponders a crucial political issue or a judge a decision concerning a man’s life or death. In the end, I made a wheel and threaded a rope around it; I could turn the wheel with my foot, thus my hands were free” (p. 102).

Thus, he becomes so skilled at making tools and equipment that he is able to practice almost every trade; one of these is pottery, which he also performs using a wheel: “I attained an unexpected mastery in pottery as well; I was now making pots on the wheel, which was both easier and better; whereas my earlier ones were so poor as not to be worth looking at, the present ones were well-shaped, rounded objects.” With this skill, he even makes a pipe and is very pleased. In other words, the pivotal point of all the trades Robinson practices on the island by himself is his reinvention of the wheel. But how does he achieve this? Certainly by thinking in the same way a statesman reflects on a matter before him or a judge considers a decision concerning a man’s life: with a mode of thinking that we also observe in the “prayers” he says he utters “for the first time.”

We read that when he set foot on land after the shipwreck, he gave “thanks to God” for having been saved (p. 64); we also read that he shook out a small amount of wheat that had remained at the bottom of the sacks of wheat among the salvaged items from the wreck onto the base of a rock, and when he later saw that it had sprouted there, he regarded this as a miracle of God (p. 97); we read that when he felt an earthquake on the island, he cried out—albeit out of habit—“God, have mercy on me” (p. 199); and when he was stricken with malaria, he again “prayed to God,” saying, “God, see my condition! God, have mercy on me! God, do not withhold Your help from me!” (p. 106). Yet immediately after reading these, we are left astonished when he says that, despite the religious education he had received at his father’s home, during the “eight years” he had been away from it, “I do not recall ever once raising my eyes upward to turn to God, or looking within myself to examine the rightness or wrongness of my actions” (pp. 105–106). It is as if this were like the wheel he could not reinvent for the handcart. He knows how it works, but he cannot do it. In particular, he lacks the tools and equipment needed to make the axle pins. He is always turning toward God, yet he behaves as if he does not know how to turn toward God. It is as if he has not found the mechanism, the wheel, of his prayers.

However, there are also moments when he begins to speak of the prayers he frequently makes as if he were making them for the very first time. The wheel has begun to turn slowly. Thus, when he is struck with malaria, he refers to his supplication to God, after so many years, as his “first supplication.” Subsequently, when he recovers somewhat, after a meal he will say, “This is the first meal in my entire life for which I gave thanks to God when it was finished” (p. 111). While searching in the chest he had brought from the ship for a medicine to cure his illness, he finds a remedy “for both soul and body”; the remedy he finds for the soul is the Holy Bible. He begins to read it aloud, and when he reads the verse from Psalm 50:15—“Call upon Me in the day of trouble; I will deliver you, and you shall glorify Me”—he says, “I have done something I have never done before,” and kneels down, praying to God for his salvation as if for the very first time (p. 114). A day later, when he reads the verse in Acts 5:31—“God exalted Him to His right hand as Leader and Savior”—he prays aloud, calling out to Jesus. Here, too, we read the words, “This is my first true prayer to God in the full sense of the word” (p. 116). This point is, in fact, the moment at which his conversion takes place. Whereas previously he had been waiting to be rescued from the island, for God to free him from his captivity, he no longer waits for this physical deliverance. He comes to desire his own salvation—his spiritual salvation. He has reinvented the wheel and has begun to construct religion within himself and within the consciousness of the island. He now begins to place above everything else “God’s dialogue with him through supplications” (p. 157).

Jacques Derrida suggests that it would be interesting to read the entirety of Robinson Crusoe by following the “apprenticeship of prayer” (p. 78). He is certainly right. Throughout the book, we can find the same rhythm—not only in the passages where Crusoe says he prays (for the “first” time), but also in the sections describing how he discovers grace and the Will of God, how he gives thanks, how he fasts, and how he observes Friday and converts others to Christianity—a rhythm akin to that of a turning wheel. Therefore, Derrida is also right when he says: “It is as if everything—Robinson Crusoe’s sovereignty, technology, tools, machines, the machine of tools, prayer, God, and true religion—is being reinvented on this imaginary island” (p. 79). What is striking here, among other things, is the inclusion of the machine of tools. “For,” Thomas Hobbes would say in his work Leviathan, or The Matter, Form, and Power of a Commonwealth, Ecclesiastical and Civil, “life is nothing other than the movement of the organs, originating from some principal part within; can we not say that all automata (machines that move by themselves by means of springs and gears, such as a clock) possess an artificial life? What is the heart but a spring; what are the nerves but a multitude of springs; and what are the joints but a multitude of gears that set the whole body in motion according to the maker’s plan?” And the sovereign? And the “commonwealth”—mistakenly translated as “state”? What is it, if not “that great LEVIATHAN called a COMMONWEALTH, or STATE, in Latin CIVITAS, which is but an artificial man” (p. 17)? And what is the Leviathan, if not a great, colossal sea monster like the whale of Moby-Dick? But did Hobbes really give a clock as an example of an automaton? A clock with its gears and springs? Could it not be a wheel instead? Something reinvented like a prayer or a kingdom? Let us then add to what Derrida has said: Robinson’s kingdom, too, is discovered just as the wheel and prayer are rediscovered. Robinson is first a king unto himself; then he roams his domain alone; then he becomes the king of subjects consisting only of animals; and finally, he becomes the king of Protestant Friday, Friday’s pagan father, and the Papist Spaniard; and, of course, ultimately, of the entire island.

So then, who is Robinson, and what is Robinson Crusoe? Robinson Crusoe is a traveler; a merchant; a slave; a pirate; the owner of a colonial plantation; a slave trader; on the deserted island, he is a carpenter, a potter, a farmer, a shepherd who tames wild animals, a soldier rescuing captives from the natives, a sailor; he is a priest, one who reinvents religion and prayer, and many other things; but he is also a king, one who reinvents kingship.

All of this is the autobiography of a “shepherding people” transforming into the “children of the sea”—indeed, confessions titled Robinson Crusoe, much like the Confessions of Augustine of Hippo or Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Thus sovereignty, too, turns; it sails from land to sea, and the pirate becomes a sovereignty reinvented like a wheel or a prayer. Everything that is reinvented is a construct; artificial, in the sense known since Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan, fictional; yet, like the wheel, it is the artificiality of a religion reinvented—a construct that calls itself a religion—of a Protestantism that seeks to set sail and to look freely upon the world from the sea, from that free zone.

Robinson never left his father’s hearth, his home, his homeland, his country in order to become “everyone.” He merely reinvented that hearth, that home, that homeland—as Protestantism and together with Protestantism—against the Papist appropriation of the oceans.