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CHAPTER 1
A Literature of Failure
Reading Foe and Defoe
I. "INFINITE LABOUR"
Abiding by the contemporary "gospel of work" (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: "This will testify for me that I was not idle" (RC 161). According to Ian Watt's influential 1957 essay, "Robinson Crusoe, Individualism and the Novel," Robinson Crusoe is one of "the heroes of economic individualism" (62). In Watt's view, Defoe presents solitary labor "not as an alternative to a death sentence, but as a solution to the perplexities of economic and social reality" (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 inexpressible — it does not have a place in language. Thus, instead of offering a solution to the "perplexities of economic and social reality," the book reenacts those perplexities without resolving them.
Watt's 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, "Crusoe turns his forsaken estate into a triumph" (88). But what if, contrary to popular belief, Crusoe's 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. Coetzee's 1986 rewriting of it, Foe, forecloses a reading of the former as the triumph of bourgeois, colonial man over his environment. Of all Coetzee's 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. Coetzee's 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 before — it 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 "a literature of failure": "The literature of empty landscape ... is thus a literature of failure, of the failure of the historical imagination" (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:
European criticism has striven for many generations, and with a not entirely friendly insistence, to explain the mystery of the unlimited world conquest accomplished by that mongrel breed which lives a hard life on a small island in the northern sea. ... The true symbol of the British conquest is Robinson Crusoe, who cast away on a desert island in his pocket a knife and a pipe, becomes an architect, a carpenter, a knife grinder; an astronomer, a baker, a shipwright, a potter, a saddler, a farmer, a tailor, an umbrella-maker, and a clergyman. He is the true prototype of the British colonist. (24–5)
What gets elided — not just by Joyce, but persistently — is the characteristic ineptitude of Crusoe's conquest. Verbs of failure invariably stamp Crusoe's description of each new foray. Making pottery, he disparagingly decides that "I might botch up some such pot ... as might bear handling" (RC 131). Making a waistcoat and breeches, he notes, "I must not omit to acknowledge that they were wretchedly made; for if I was a bad carpenter, I was a worse tayler" (RC 145). And having made his infamous, immovable canoe, he despairs that "I could no more turn her and set her upright upon her bottom, than I could remove the island" (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 "miscarried" (RC 132), and imagines his reader's reactions at his efforts:
It would make the reader pity me, or rather laugh at me, to tell how many awkward ways I took to raise this paste, what odd mishapen ugly things I made, how many of them fell in, and how many fell out ...; how many cracked ...; how many fell in pieces ...; and in a word, how after having laboured hard to find the clay, to dig it, to temper it, to bring it home and work it, I could not make above two large earthen ugly things, I cannot call them jarrs, in about two months labour. (RC 131–2)
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 "the accidental happening of its making" (729). For Liu, this casts doubt on Crusoe's status as "inventor and owner of the earthenware pot" (729) and is "symptomatic of what I call the poetics of colonial disavowal" (733). She observes that
[w]hereas the scientists unabashedly relied on industrial espionage or stolen specimens brought to Europe by sea merchants, Crusoe's solitary experiment requires no external help. Was porcelain not a type of earthenware that a British man could have invented all by himself? ... Europe's increasing mastery of the technologies of other civilizations produced the very ground on which the primitiveness and backwardness of those civilizations would be mythologized. (Liu 738–9)
Liu's historical reading introduces another chronic absence. Just as Crusoe's 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 Crusoe's efforts at making things include the inverse potential for undoing or unmaking — a tension Elaine Scarry explores in her 1985 book The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. Scarry's brief discussion of Robinson Crusoe concludes that
there is ... something about the nature of making, and the inherent thrust of the civilizing impulse, that Defoe works to expose. Crusoe begins by being a person who "makes" either as a result of acute need ... or as a result of accident ... but increasingly becomes one who willfully "makes" merely to make. That is, in addition to transforming his external world, Crusoe has transformed the nature of the act of creating itself; he has remade making; he has remade the human maker from one who creates out of pain to one who creates out of sheer pleasure. (Scarry 320)
Defoe "works to expose" Crusoe's work, or rather, his unexpected relationship to work. Crusoe's activity of making "merely to make" 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 excessively — making that has become separated from use, making that fails to be useful, making that assumes rapid obsolescence — is 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, "Beachcombers, Missionaries and the Myth of the Castaway," Vanessa Smith suggests that Crusoe and his latter-day mimics labor under "a logic of makeshift" (65) and she remarks on the stopgap quality of the castaway enterprise. Modernity's 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. "Skill and object are bound by an intimate relationship" (66), but Crusoe's lack of skill and knowledge must be compensated for by experimentation and making-do. Without a vade mecum, the process and product of work at first appear wondrous to Crusoe: "It might be truly said, that now I worked for my bread; 'tis 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 bread" (RC 130). Once the hidden labor behind the product is broken down into its constituent parts, it is the "multitude of little things necessary" that seems endlessly strange.
Crusoe's exile from systems of circulation (Smith, "Beachcombers" 69) takes place literally and figuratively: "I 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 mankind" (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 trade — and the hundreds of leagues between Crusoe and both of them — reifies and quantifies his distance from the mainstream. In "Robinson Crusoe": Island Myths and the Novel, Michael Seidel makes the useful point that Crusoe's exile prevents him from standing in for economic man since economic systems "consist of delicately calibrated relations among manufactures, labor sources, wages, prices, supply, demand, monetary circulation, trade agreements, debt structure, and exchange rates" (100). And yet while Crusoe certainly recognizes his removal from the system, he also retains an abstract link to economics as usual:
I smiled to my self at the sight of this money. "O drug!" said I aloud, "what art thou good for? Thou art not worth to me, no, not the taking off of the ground; one of those knives is worth all this heap; I have no manner of use for thee, e'en remain where thou art, and go to the bottom as a creature whose life is not worth saving." However, upon second thoughts, I took it away. ... (RC 75)
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 Hymer's remarks on international trade coming out of a discussion of Robinson Crusoe are applicable to economics in general:
international trade ... is often based on a division between superior and subordinate rather than a division between equals; and it is anything but peaceful. It is trade between the center and the hinterland, the colonizers and the colonized, the masters and the servants. Like the relation of capital to labor, it is based on a division between higher and lower functions: one party does the thinking, planning, organizing; the other does the work. Because it is unequal in structure and reward it has to be established and maintained by force, whether it be the structural violence of poverty, the symbolic violence of socialization, or the physical violence of war and pacification. (12)
In Robinson Crusoe, the predictable relationships between colonizer and colonized, or master and servant, are sometimes overturned as a result of Crusoe's own capsized situation. When Crusoe reflects on his role in the slave trade, he concludes that he showed bad business sense. He asks, "[W]hat 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?" (RC 199) When Crusoe decides to socialize Friday (socialization being one of Hymer's three forms of violence), he describes how "I fell to work for my man Friday" (RC 210), 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 Nkosi's essay on Robinson Crusoe, "Call Me Master," outlines some of the methodology of what he calls the enormous enterprise of empire-building (155):
We must remember also the importance of "naming" and classification in building up a civilization. It is significant that not only does Robinson Crusoe have ink and parchment for keeping a diary, he also calculates time by cutting notches on the tree in order to differentiate time in an island in which time and the seasons are amorphous. Tabulation, classification: they are at the very heart of civilization. Friday does not become fully human until he has been given a name by Robinson Crusoe. (Nkosi 155)
But the ink runs dry, Crusoe's record-keeping is haphazard, and his tracking of time is uncertain — are these founding acts of naming, tabulation, and classification then fundamentally unreliable?
The very first words Crusoe teaches Friday — even before yes and no, or milk and bread — are their names: "I 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 name" (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 urgency of knowing one's location in time and space has been made manifest:
It was, by my account, the 30th of Sept. when, in the manner as above said, I first set foot upon this horrid island, when the sun being, to us, in its autumnal equinox, was almost just over my head, for I reckoned myself, by observation, to be in the latitude of 9 degrees 22 minutes north of the line.
After I had been there about ten or twelve days, it came into my thoughts that I should lose my reckoning of time for want of books and pen and ink; but to prevent this I cut it with my knife upon a large post, in capital letters, and making it into a great cross I set it up on the shore where I first landed, viz. "I came on shore here on the 30th of Sept. 1659." Upon the sides of this square post I cut every day a notch with my knife, and every seventh notch was as long again as the rest, and every first day of the month as long again as that long one, and thus I kept my kalander, or weekly, monthly, and yearly reckoning of time. (RC 81)
Crusoe fears losing his "reckoning of time," and this elaborate description conveys that anxiety. Not even the permanent, emphatic inscription of capital letters carved in wood can allay his doubt about the authority of his calculations. Friday's name comes from this uncertain reckoning and so his name is equally uncertain. If Crusoe has misread the signs around him, he has misnamed Friday, and has thus called into question the power and control upon which naming insists. Whether the action here is naming or misnaming, whether the result name or misnomer, it is predicated on Crusoe's necessary suspension of disbelief in his reckonings. Only by overlooking his failings can he exercise power at all.
One essay that challenges the usual reading of Robinson Crusoe as the embodiment of a triumphant economy is Michael White's. White argues that the novel is governed by concerns other than economic and lists evidence to show why Crusoe is not a "calculating economic agent" (122). For instance, he cites Crusoe's failure to calculate an efficient distribution of labor, his waste of ammunition, and his general waste of time and effort (White 122–3). However, the same set of examples goes to show why Crusoe is precisely an economic man. His lapses may not fit the ideal model of teleological capitalism, but they do fit the reality of a modern economy as a series of failures, as a system that moves in fits and starts, and as a process that involves copious waste and infinite labor.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Postcolonial Nations, Islands, and Tourism"
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Copyright © 2017 Helen Kapstein.
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