Uczelnia Lingwistyczno Techniczna w Świeciu

fil.ang. I rok, 1 sem.

Studia Uzupełniające Drugiego Stopnia

Semestr zimowy 2017/2018

Konwersatorium literaturoznawcze:

Ewolucja brytyjskiej powieści realistycznej

Prowadzący:

dr hab. Joanna Burzyńska-Sylwestrzak

 Robinson Crusoe and realism

The following problems will be discussed:

1. Robinson Crusoe, basis in actuality: verisimilitude and
circumstantial detail
2. Daniel Defoe: Individualism and the rise of the novel

3. Crusoe : the embodiment of economic individualism

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Robinson Crusoe free audiobook

www.audiobooks.org/bookDesc.php?id=robinson-crusoe

Homework assignment.

Write a short essay entitled: Economic Individualism in Robinson

Crusoe (min. 500 words). Deadline: 10th Dec. 2017.

 Robinson Crusoe and realism

1.Robinson Crusoe, basis in actuality:

verisimilitude and circumstantial detail

The prototype of Robinson Crusoe was a stubborn Scottish sailor,

Alexander Silkirk who while cruising quarrelled with the captain of

the ship and had himself put ashore in 1704 on the uninhabited island

of Juan Fernandez. After some initial difficulties he was rescued in

1709 but he was discovered quite satisfied with his island life.
Thus, Robinson Crusoe has a firm basis in actuality. His fiction often

starts from and very often stays very close to a fact or even a

series of facts.

In writing Robinson Crusoe Daniel Defoe was not consciously writing

a novel, he was writing a spoof autobiography which was to be taken

by his readers as fact. (Idiosyncratic features of the novel have not

been defined yet, even the term the novel did not exist ).

The secret of the uncanny verisimilitude Defoe achieves has often

been analyzed. He is the master of the literal: he produces his

illusion of complete reality by employing a mass of circumstantial

detail of a kind no one would bother to invent. The exactitude is

characteristic - the dates and geographical place-names are given.

Crusoe was born in the year 1632, in the city of York. He got

stranded on the desolate island on the 30th September 1659. He left

the island on the 19th December 1686, after a stay of 28 years, two

months, and nineteen days. In a way, the improbable adventures have

been caged by the calendar, tamed and authenticated.

The subtitle of the novel plays a prominent role in the process of

authentification as it convinces the readers that what they are going

to read is nothing but the truth.

Robinson Crusoe, in full: The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of

Robinson Crusoe, of York, Mariner: Who Lived Eight and Twenty Years, All
Alone in an Un-inhabited Island on the Coast of America, Near the Mouth
 of the Great River of Oroonoque; Having Been Cast on Shore by
Shipwreck, Wherein All the Men Perished but Himself. With an Account
how he was at last as Strangely Deliver’d by Pyrates. Written by Himself.

In Robison Crusoe , Defoe gave his readers all kinds of minute details

about everyday life. Such details can be seen in Crusoe’s digging the

cave, building the fence, collecting his crops of barley and wheat,

hunting the animals , fighting the cannibals. The reader learns that

one of Crusoe’s most successful projects is the raising of the crops

of barely and rice on the island. In minute detail does he describe

the wrecked ship near the sea shore which enabled Crusoe to bring

the equipment and the material he needed to survive.

Defoe’s narratives are fictional autobiographies always pretending

to be true stories. They are so cleverly authenticated with fictional

detail that at times it is difficult to believe they have no basis in

actuality.

2.Individualism and the rise of the novel

In Defoe’s lifetime in the social, philosophical and literary spheres,

the classical focus on the ideal, the universal and the corporate

shifted completely. The modern field of vision was mainly occupied

by the autonomous individual. In a sense, Defoe’s outlook has much in

common with that of the English empiricism of the 17th century.

Defoe’s work offers a unique demonstration of the connection

between individualism and the rise of the novel. This connection finds

a particularly clear reflection in Robinson Crusoe.

The great English empiricists of the seventeenth century were as

vigorously individualist in their political and ethical thought as in

their epistemology. Bacon hoped to make a really new start in social

theory by applying his inductive method to an accumulation of factual

data about a great number of particular individuals; Hobbes, also

feeling that he was dealing with a subject that had not been properly

approached before, based his political and ethical theory on the

fundamentally egocentric psychological constitution of the individual;

while in his Two Treatises of Government (1690) Locke constructed

the class system of political thought based on the indefeasibility of

indefeasible—not capable of being annulled or voided or undone—

individual rights, as against the more traditional ones of Church,

Family or King. That these thinkers should have been the political

and psychological vanguard of nascent individualism, as well as the

pioneers of its theory of knowledge, suggests how closely linked

their reorientations were both in themselves and in relation to the

innovations of the novel. For, just as there is a basic congruity

between the non-realist nature of the literary forms of the Greeks,

their intensely social, or civic, moral outlook, and their philosophical

preference for the universal, so the modern novel is closely allied on

the one hand to the realist epistemology of the modern period, and
on the other to the individualism of its social structure. In the

literary, the philosophical and the social spheres alike the classical

focus on the ideal, the universal and the corporate has shifted

completely, and the modern field of vision is mainly occupied by the

discrete particular, the directly apprehended sensum*, and the

autonomous individual. [*sensum = sense-datum]

Robinson Crusoe is not primarily a romantic adventurer who goes to

the sea in search of excitement. He participates in the adventures

that are essentially different from the tales of travel and roguery

that poured out profusely during the period. On the contrary, he is

the representative of the individualist social order with its serious

concern with the daily lives of ordinary people.

Robinson Crusoe is launched during the transitory period, at the end

of feudalism and the beginning of capitalism. This change of

orientation affected society as a whole in the 19th century but the

movement began much earlier. The foundations of the new order

were laid in the period after 1688. The commercial and industrial

classes, who were the prime agents in bringing about the individualist

social order, had achieved greater political and economic

independence. Capitalism brought a great increase of economic

specialization; and this, combined with a less rigid and

homogeneous social structure, and a less absolutist and more

democratic political system, enormously increased the individual’s

freedom of choice. For those fully exposed to the new economic

order, the effective entity on which social arrangements were now

based was on longer the family, nor the church, nor the guild,

nor the township, nor any other collective unit, but the

individual: he alone was primarily responsible for determining his own

economic, social, political and religious roles.

3.Crusoe:the embodiment of economic individualism

Robinson Crusoe has been described by Karl Marx as a

potential capitalist. Literary critic Ian Watt offers a most

stimulating and illuminating interpretation of the novel from the

economic point of view. He relates Crusoe’s predicament on the

desolate island to the rise of bourgeois individualism. He also points

out how all the characters of Defoe pursue money, according to the

profit and loss.

That Robinson Crusoe, like Defoe’s other main characters, Moll

Flanders, Roxana, Colonel Jacque and Captain Singleton, is an

embodiment of economic individualism hardly needs

demonstration. All Defoe’s heroes pursue money, which he

characteristically called “the general denominating article in the

world’’ and they pursue it very methodically according to the profit

and loss book-keeping which Max Weber considered to be the

distinctive technical feature of modern capitalism. Defoe’s heroes,

we observe, have no need to learn this technique; whatever the

circumstances of their birth and education, they have it in their

blood, and keep us more fully informed of their present stocks of

money and commodities than any other characters in fiction.

Crusoe lives with his parents but decides to leave them for the

classic reason of homo economicus. He wishes to improve his

economic condition. At the same time the argument between his

parents and himself at the beginning is a debate not about filial duty,

but about his economic circumstances. They are considering whether

going or staying is likely to bring material advantages . Both sides

accept the economic argument as primary. Crusoe would not be

satisfied if he were to maintain his status quo. Leaving home,

improving on the lot one was born to is a vital feature of the

individualist pattern of life. Crusoe actually becomes richer than his

father was. It is the fundamental tendency of economic individualism

that prevents Crusoe from paying much heed to the ties of family ,

nor does Crusoe at any time show any particular sentimental

attachment to his country. Of all the sea voyages he has made , we

can see Crusoe as a commercial traveller with profit as his motive.

In fact , Crusoe treats all relationships in terms of their commodity

value. The clearest case is that of Xury , the Moorish boy, who

helped him to escape from slavery band who had even offered to
sacrifice his life for Crusoe’s sake. He resolves to love Xury always

and to make a great man of him . But eventually he sells the boy to

the Portuguese sea-caption for a small amount of money. Also

Crusoe’s relations with Man Friday are egocentric. He does not ask

him his name, but gives him one.

One can say that our civilization as a whole is based on

individual contractual relationships, as opposed to the unwritten,

traditional and collective relationships of previous societies. The

idea of contract played an important part in the theoretical

development of political individualism. It had featured prominently

in the fight against the Stuarts, and it was enshrined in Locke’s

political system. Locke, indeed, thought that contractual

relationships were binding even in the state of nature; Crusoe, we

notice, acts like a good Lockean—when others arrive on the island he

forces them to accept his dominion with written contracts

acknowledging his absolute power (even though we have previously

been told that he has run out of ink).

Robinson Crusoe, of course, does not deal with the actual

economic life of Defoe’s own time and place. It would be somewhat

contrary to the facts of economic life under the division of labour to

show the average individual’s manual labour as interesting or

inspiring; to take Adam Smith’s famous example of the division of

labour in The Wealth of Nations, the man who performs one of the
many separate operations in the manufacture of a pin is unlikely to

find his task as absorbing and interesting as Crusoe does. So Defoe

sets back the economic clock, and takes his hero to a primitive

environment, where labour can be presented as varied and inspiring,

and where it has the further significant difference from the pin-

maker’s at home that there is an absolute equivalence between

individual effort and individual reward. This was the final change

from contemporary economic condition which was necessary to

enable Defoe to give narrative expression to the ideological

counterpart of the Division of Labour, the Dignity of Labour.

Robinson Crusoe is the first fictional narrative in which an ordinary

person’s daily activities and daily life, individual effort and individual

award in this world, here and now are of sufficient importance and

interest and constitute the proper subject of literature.

Now please listen to the lecture which provides, among

other things, interesting considerations on economic

individualism in Robinson Crusoe .

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=biQ9reoSsco

Homework assignment.
Write a short essay entitled: Economic Individualism in Robinson

Crusoe (min. 500 words). Deadline: 10th Dec. 2017.