Alexandra Dumitrescu

Babeş-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania

dumitrescualec@yahoo.co.uk

 

 

Robinsoniads as Stories of Technology and Transformation

 

 

Abstract: Springing from Defoe’s Enlightenment narrative, the Robinsoniads explore the modern spirit as defined by reason, technology, and self-reliance, which are paralleled by solitude and individualism. Reason has received rather subversive treatments in the wake of the two World Wars. Tournier’s re-writing of Defoe’s story presents interesting patterns of transformation from the hypotext to the hypertext (Genette, Palimpsestes 1982). The robinsoniade is paradigmatic for the Western story of transformation and stands for a founding myth of modernity. The Robinsoniads are opportunities for questioning, for facing the self, for confronting and relating with l’autrui, the other, and, ultimately, for self transformation. They also raise troubled questions: What is the direction and outcome of this transformation? Do the Robinsoniads increase our knowledge and awareness of the self? Do they leave us with a world that is a better place for the experience of the Robinsoniad? What do they tell us about the dialectics of the modern self? While raising the above questions, this article explores Vendredi ou les limbes du Pacifique and its relationship with modernity and postmodernity, while proposing metamodernity as a possible endeavor to bypass some of the difficulties arising in the wake of the Enlightenment.

Keywords: Robinsonad; Daniel Defoe; Michel Tournier; Reason; Emotions, Master; Slave.

 

 

One of the recurring queries in recent years concerns the contemporary paradigm, in relation to which one cannot avoid questions such as: ‘what is modernity? When did it start?’ What does it entail? Attempts to answer such queries fill book-length essays and are placed under the sign of the provisional. Yet any such endeavor is apt to shed some light on the understanding of modernity. Philosopher Lawrence Cahoone wonders in his 1996 Postmodernism Reader:

 

Did modernity in the West begin in the sixteenth century with the Protestant reformation, the rejection of the universal power of the Roman Catholic Church, and the development of a humanistic scepticism epitomised by Erasmus and Montaigne? Or was it in the seventeenth century with the scientific revolution of Galileo, Harvey, Hobbes, Descartes, Boyle, Leibniz and Newton? Or with the republican political theories and revolutions of the United States and France in the eighteenth century? (12 – 13)

 

A possible answer places the incipit of modernity with the Enlightenment or the eighteenth century, but some critics look at Descartes, and even the sixteenth century to find the origins of the modern paradigm. Some major cultural trends became prominent during the eighteenth century: the quest for certainty, the rise of the rationalistic and scientific spirit, as well as increased interest for order and conquering nature and the Europeans’ other. The rationalistic spirit triggers a mechanicist conception of man and nature, encouragement of scientific approaches that are based on observation and universal mathematical truths. This scientific spirit springing (among others) from Descartes’ methodical meditation will mark the entire West starting with the Enlightenment and culminating in nowadays technological culture.

 

Innovation, Science and Technology

 

During the Enlightenment technology most pronouncedly shifts from the area of crafts and trades to the more reputable domain of scientific investigation. In the wake of the Scientific Revolution, world famous scientists innovate in technology in order to aid their research or to improve living conditions for their fellowmen. In a very short time, a stunning number of scientists were active in Europe, many of which were engaged in improving on the technology of the day, in making instruments or developing new ones (Watson 2005: 671). The role of the collective or networking in motivating and sparking scientific development cannot be denied: thinkers were encouraged by regular exchange with like-minded people. This would lead to the establishment of the Royal Society in 1662, and l’Académie Royale in Paris in 1666. These scientists were more concerned with practical than theoretical issues: Bacon (1561-1626), one of the most notable heralds of the Enlightenment, ‘proposed a society of scientists, exploring the world together by experiment and showing no special concern for theory’ (Watson 2005: 665). Moreover, ‘it has been estimated that nearly sixty percent of the problems handled by the Royal Society in its first thirty years were prompted by practical needs of public use, and only forty per cent were problems in pure science.’ These scientists’ buoyant creativity coupled with eagerness to obtain concrete palpable results: ‘they wanted the practical results of experiment to be immediate, they were full of inventions and gadgets, and if the experiment did not come right overnight, they were tempted by morning to move on to another.’ (Bronowski and Mazlish., 1963: 220)

Technological innovations and inventions contribute to bettering the lives of communities, but, in a modern impulse, Daniel Defoe chooses to focus on the way they affect the individual’s existence in the seventeenth century. His 1719 novel The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe eulogizes reason, technology and the practical spirit of the Enlightenment. Stranded on his uninhabited island, and in want of the basic comforts of civilized life, Robinson Crusoe opts for putting despondency aside, and pro-actively sets out to create from scratch the civilization that he misses. In doing so he calls attention to the centrality of reason for his mindset, as well as its relationship with mathematics and technology:

 

So I went to work; and here I must needs observe, that as reason is the substance and original of the mathematics, so by stating and squaring everything by reason, and by making the most rational judgment of things, every man may be in time master of every mechanick art. (Defoe 1992: 56)

 

Intelligence aided by methodical rational thinking makes up for lack of skill in handling tools, experience coupled with observation and hard work being Robinson’s teachers: ‘I had never handled a tool in my life, and yet in time, by labour, application, and contrivance, I found at last that I wanted nothing but I could have made it, especially if I had had tools’ (Defoe 1992: 56). When the appropriate tools are missing, the protagonist makes do with the utensils he could rescue from the wrecked boat, thus showing creativity and resourcefulness, perseverance and diligence, qualities which inspired and endeared him to generations of readers. In time he gradually conquers the island by means of technological innovations and constant application. Defoe’s first novel thus appears as a eulogy to reason, which triggers technological improvement as well as stamina in seeking solutions. As Defoe’s novel illustrates, technology raises one’s degree of confidence in one’s own abilities to master circumstances and nature. The abundance it generates helps the self become satisfied with its condition, to such a degree that comfort and plenty contribute to accepting solitude. Technology (in the form of the potter’s wheel, traps, defense systems and the like) provides protection or self-defense, hastens otherwise tedious projects, makes for efficiency and even beauty, thus leaving time and energy for engaging in meditation. This leisure time for meditation, together with the incentives coming from life threatening conditions gradually prompt Robinson to examine his condition and his soul, with the result that thought of the divinity permeates his frame of mind. Thus, in searching for wealth, Defoe’s Robinson finds God, as his journey motivated by youthful passion (which nonetheless was being phrased in words wearing the guise of reason) leads him back to mythos.

 

Solitude and Individualism

 

Pleased with himself, and with his ability to innovate in order to make his life more bearable, Robinson remarks upon perfecting him umbrella which permits him to venture outdoors on rainy or scorching days:

 

Thus I liv’d mighty comfortably, my mind being entirely composed by resigning to the will of God, and throwing myself wholly upon the disposal of His providence. This made my life better than sociable, for when I began to regret the want of conversation, I would ask my self whether thus conversing mutually with my own thoughts, and, as I hope I may say, with even God Himself by ejaculations, was not better than the utmost enjoyment of humane society in the world. (1992: 114)

 

The passage epitomizes the Protestant idea of individual’s direct communication with God, associated with an ethics of frugality and hard work,[1] reliance on one’s abilities, industriousness, and acceptance of fate. Interestingly, the intercourse with the Divinity is not seen as subverting the emphasis on the immanence of things and on mastering circumstances. For Defoe’s Robinson divine providence or design gradually comes to be regarded as underlying individual’s destiny, and constituting the reality in relation to which human being’s tribulations acquire meaning. In finding God in a life of isolation, Robinson reiterates the destiny of the anchorites, albeit in an Enlightenment setting. Tournier acknowledges this, when, in a conversation with Judith Chapman remarks: ‘L’anachorete n’est pas seul; il est avec Dieu’ (2002: 107).

Thus, the castaway re-enacts the trope of solitary meditation institutionalized by René Descartes. Critics like Jean-Luc Marion, however, believe that Descartes himself was far from an armchair philosopher: ‘Contrary to a widespread legend, he was nothing ‘like a solitary, or even autistic thinker, soliloquizing, in the manner perhaps of Spinoza’ (Marion 1995: 10-11). This, however, does not confute the figure of solitary contemplation which Descartes advances in the Meditations (1641), where he confesses: ‘I […] cleared my mind of all cares and arranged for myself some time free from interruption. I am alone and, at long last, I will devote myself seriously and freely to this general overturning of my beliefs’ (2003: 18). Descartes’ voluntary isolation entails distancing from practical concerns, worries, and emotional distress. His Discourse on Method (1637) is similarly framed by concerns ‘with shielding himself from inner and outer disturbances’ (Bramann 2006): I was caught by the onset of winter. There was no conversation to distract me, and being untroubled by any cares or passions, I remained all day alone in a warm room. There I had plenty of leisure to examine my ideas. Descartes isolates himself as if on a deserted an island, where no society, no ‘disquieting emotions,’ and no ‘physical discomfort’ preclude him from undertaking his philosophical meditation. Nothing of the rumor of the busy Athenian agora, no risk or peril threatens his equanimity and quietness. The environment in which he carries out has meditation ‘corresponds […] perfectly to the concept of self that he was to develop’ (Bramann 2006). Descartes’ no-nonsense outlook and his involvement in solving practical issues notwithstanding, there is a sense in which his solitary meditation (with its emphasis on mind’s reasoning activity as opposed to passions, on interiority versus exteriority) consolidates dichotomies. Other antinomies that subtend his universe are those between mind and body, ‘action and contemplation, […] movement and stillness.’ It has been with Descartes, Yeats suggested, that ‘the disunity of being’ and its ‘integrity’ presumably left the cultural stage to leave room for what Kermode calls ‘superficial contradictions: ‘all passionate integrity was split and destroyed when Descartes, as Yeats put it, discovered that he could think better in his bed than out of it’ ( Kermode 1957: 48).

This solitude in which the rational self reigns supreme – later fictionalized as Crusoe’s uninhabited island – sets the stage for modern individualism. Reacting perhaps to predetermined hierarchies, prescribed social functions and collectivism that the Catholic church had tried to impose during the Middle Ages, Descartes’ enterprise inscribes itself in the larger preoccupations of his time by proposing reason as a universal faculty, specific to any alert and instructed mind irrespective of social background. In a world in which many beliefs were crumbling, together with the allegiance to the authority of the church, while uncertainty dominated, Descartes set out to find that which is certain. Like Crusoe in search for the stability that wealth would afford, Descartes hoped to find the security of the one thing that is beyond doubt, which he does by retreating in his self-created island of solitude.

Whereas in Defoe’s novel, the protagonist’s tribulations led him to perceive the hand of providence of a good, merciful God, thus finding the certitude of belief in divinity, for Descartes the only outcome of his journey for certainty is the sureness of doubt. For him, God’s existence is the quod demonstrandum, not the outcome of experience. The only indubitable thing is the existence of the doubting mind, everything else – the input of senses, emotions, the natural world itself – may as well be the illusion of an evil genie (Descartes 2003: 19).

Descartes was not singular in advancing such concepts. The seventeenth century abounded in literary texts that refer to the unreality of the world, from Calderon de la Barca’s La vida es sueño (1636),[2] to Shakepeare’s As You Like It, where Jaques’ monologue expresses a metaphor common at the time when declaring that ‘All the world’s a stage, /And all the men and women merely players’ (Act II, Scene VII: 139-142). Thus, in assuming the deceptive character or unreality of the world, Descartes expresses a feeling quite potent among some of his contemporaries. Life was a stage on which people put on masks and played parts; it was transient and illusive as a dream. In a letter to a friend, Descartes confesses: ‘So far, I have been a spectator in this theater which is the world, but I am now about to mount the stage and I come forward masked.’[3] One of the masks he assumes in order to avoid getting into trouble with the Inquisition is that of the purely personal scope of his method. But soon enough he reveals the subterfuge: What he has presented in Part II of the Discourse as being a merely autobiographical enterprise meant to clarify his thoughts and shed away error, is denied personal character when, in Part VI ‘he insists on the advantages to mankind that can accrue from the development of science and technology’ which his rational method engenders (Diamond 1982: 1)

He also comes forward by proposing systematic doubt as a means of arriving at the truth: from the certainty of the existence of the doubting mind, and thus of the mind itself, he hopes to work his way back into erecting a body of knowledge made up of simple and distinct ideas. This could be extremely desirable in an age which abhorred uncertainty and Hamletian vacillation.

It is exactly the doubting of philosophers as well as their penchant for dichotomies that William Blake satirizes in his Island in the Moon (cca 1784-85), where his character Obtuse Angle spurts: ‘To be, or not to be/ Of great capacity/ Like Sir Isaac Newton,/ Or Locke, or Doctor South […]/ I’d rather be Sutton’ (Keynes 57). Here Blake, through Obtuse Angle’s voice, expresses a dislike for thinkers in the abstract who dabble in generalizations, and he asserts his preference for practical people, like Thomas Sutton.[4] Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe was such a down-to-earth person, too, about whose adventures Blake had read. Blake satirizes not only philosophers, but also scientists. Sensible people are to be preferred, he suggests, to theorists or researchers undertaking risky tests. In the ‘dangerous experiments’ of Inflammable Gas, Blake ‘hints his fear that Science may’ also be detrimental; it ‘may yet destroy us all’ (Damon 200). Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno (1979: 199) will have a similar story to tell about the Enlightenment and its insistence on science and reason as driving away a sense of the miraculous, and ensuing death and destruction.[5] In his Return to Reason Stephen Toulmin emphasizes in turn the disregard for the context of human life in the wake of the Enlightenment. In exposing the tyrannical nature of the Robinson of the administered island, ended by an explosion, Tournier fictionalizes some of the concerns regarding the modern paradigm and its excessive reliance on reason and science. In An Island in the Moon Blake rewrites several types of literature and philosophy, in a pastiche mode. Later on, Tournier will rewrite the Cartesian isolation trope and the Robinsoniad in a more pronouncedly transformative, and less parodic, mode, re-working Blake’s anti-rationalism and anti-emotionalism, as well as the direct perception of truth that emerge from their dialectic. Stranded on his Pacific island, Tournier’s Robinson enacts the transformations and the angst of the modern self. As apposed to Defoe’s character, surrounded by noisy thoughts, or Blake’s garrulous philosophers, Tournier’s discovers silence in solitude as if a new religion (Tournier 1972: 84).

Indubitable, systematic doubt has affected philosophers more than Descartes’ later building of confidence in the reality of the world, the safeguard of which is his assumption in the benevolence of a compassionate God. By setting up the stage for thinking as lonely meditation (in which no senses and emotions, let alone fellow humans interfere), by isolating the mind from the rest of matter – be it the body or nature itself – and instituting the rational mind as the sole sovereign of world, Descartes establishes individualism. This individualism will be taken up by eighteenth century thinkers and writers, and will shape the modern consciousness. With the reliance on the self, on the powers of the mind to know the world and to create devices that would ease the conquest of nature, individualism associates with and cultivates technology, the amassing of wealth, as well as the aggressive domination of the other:

 

Individualism is one of the hallmarks of Western philosophy and civilization. No other intellectual tradition has been as intensively (some would say: excessively) preoccupied with singling out and defining the individual self than Western philosophy, and no other polity has made the presumed rights and prerogatives of the individual as central a concern as Western societies. Individualism is as defining a characteristic of our present civilization as capitalism, materialism, technology, and global expansion. (Bramann 2006)

 

Thus, from sixteenth century humanism underscoring subjectivity and transience, the quest for certainty leads seventeenth century Descartes to reliance on reason, science, and objectivity, and to arguing that the body is comparable to a machine which the mind governs.

At about the same time when Descartes was elaborating his system, Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe was born (in 1632) in York, where his parents have moved from Bremen, fleeing the devastation of the Thirty Years War, which was responsible for much of the insecurity that people felt at the time. This prompted Descartes’ search for uncontestable universal truth and Leibniz’ for universal language, which resulted in their extolling logic and mathematical reasoning. The formulation of universal laws (of mechanics and gravitation, for example) made possible by abstract thinking, logic and mathematics, would bear fruit in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries’ technological boom. The unfortunate side effect would be the disregard of anything that cannot be quantified, or rationally or logically accounted for. Emotions and imagination were to be the obvious victims. It would take some time before the reliance on reason starts to be questioned, and efforts be made towards giving emotions and imagination their due. The whole corsi e ricorsi of the modern self’s saga, the consequences of excessive credit given to reason and of disregarding emotions, will be captured by Tournier in Vendredi ou les limbes du Pacifique ).

 

Robinson’s Hypo- and Hypertextual Adventures

 

Defoe’s enactment of the story of the modern self, as he perceived it at the beginning of the eighteenth century, stands for the hypotext of Tournier’s later rewriting. In Palimpsestes (1982) Genette lists the five types of relationships that may obtain between texts.[6] Following on the eighteenth century taxonomic bent, Genette classifies with a view to systematize knowledge pertaining to the domain of poétique (Genette 1982: 7), in an attempt to free criticism of undigested prejudices, of the habit of employing insufficiently scrutinized terms, and to promote lucid, rational approaches and analyses. His efforts to elucidate concepts, expose prejudices and unexamined usage of terms, stand for the twentieth-century correlative of Descartes’ shutting away emotions, de-bunking preconceptions and received ideas. Although succumbing to the Enlightenment-extolled tendency to rationalize, Genette shows little of the seventeenth or eighteenth-century philosophers’ uneasiness with previous traditions and texts. His system grows on other thinkers’ as mushrooms thrive on fertile lands or trees. However, his are no parasitic endeavours either: the impulse to examine and rethink previously accepted truths is quite strong with Genette, as with Descartes. Nonetheless, Orr remarks, Renaissance-like agglutinating, and incorporating impulses[7] pervade Genette’s enterprise at times more than Enlightenment rationalization, classification, and distancing from predecessors. Occupying the middle position in a trilogy begun with Introduction à l’architexte (1979) and ending with Seuils (1987), Palimpsestes is part of a constructivist Herculean venture on the part of the critic who sees himself as an architect (Orr 107), or better still, as a demiurgos, a builder of worlds. As writers take over elements of earlier texts and re-mould them in original configurations, Genette appropriates previous models and terms such as Kristeva’s intertextuality and Louis Marin’s architexte (Orr 2003: 107).

Genette’s devices of appropriating and rewriting are used by Michel Tournier in his retelling of Defoe’s novel The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, as Defoe himself has done in his novel. The successive renderings of the castaway’s tribulations present interesting patters of alternative distancing and drawing nearer to the original story: Unfaithful to Silkirk’s tribulation, who had been voluntarily marooned on Mas à Tierra (in the Pacific), where he spent four years in complete solitude, Defoe has his hero shipwreck off the mouth of Orinoco, in the Atlantic, for twenty-eight years, (about) two of which in the company of Friday (Defoe 1992: 151). Tournier will import the idea of the shipwreck, but have his Robinson (joined by Vendredi) inhabit a Pacific island, not an Atlantic one. In rewriting Alexander Silkirk’s adventure or that of shipwrecked surgeon Henry Pitman,[8] Defoe turns these castaway nouvelles into conte, a transformation that will be refined by Tornier in his Vendredi. Genette captures the complexity of the process of transformation which Robinson’s story undergoes from the eighteenth-century original to Tournier’s version:

 

Le Vendredi de Michel Tournier ressortit à la fois (entre autres) à la transformation thématique (retournement idéologique), à la transvocalisation (passage de la première à la troisième personne) et à la translation spatiale (passage de l’Atlantique au Pacifique). (Genette 1982: 237)

 

Tournier turns the values of Defoe’s Crusoe on their head: the Protestant hard-working master who aims to integrate Friday within his own axiological system by means of education ends by being educated by Vendredi. Genette calls this ideological reversal ‘transvalorization,’ which consists in ‘prendre, antithéquement, le parti (des valeurs supposées) de Vendredi contre (celles de) Robinson, et de substituer en conséquence à l’éducation de Vendredi par Robinson une éducation, symétrique et inverse, de Robinson par Vendredi’ (419). This hypertextual transvalorization consists in a double movement of de-valorization (of the values of the hypotext) and contra-valorization in the hypertext of what has been disregarded in the hypotext (Genette 1982: 418).

Although he perceptively notices the transformations to which Tournier subjects Defoe’s text, Genette surprisingly fails to see the point of the French writer’s delaying the adventure of Robinson by a century: ‘le naufrage est retardée d’un siècle, transféré gratuitement au 30 septembre 1759’ (Genette 1982: 420). This century-long delay has a specific thematic function relevant to Tournier’s ideological inversion: in order to be able to enact a critique of the values of Enlightenment,[9] it was essential that the narrative be set in an age in which such critique would make sense and relate to the actual sensibilities of the time. The modified treatment of women in the castaway’s life seems gratuitous to Genette, too: ‘le Robinson de Defoe était célibataire [like Selkirk], celui de Tournier a laisse chez lui une femme et deux enfants, mais ce détail n’influe en rien sur la suite: Robinson évoquera une fois sa sœur Lucy, une autre fois sa mère, jamais sa femme ni ses enfants’ (420). Unlike Genette, I contend that the very absence of feminine figures in Tournier’s novel has the precise function to underscore Robinson’s condition: a solitary even when in society, and orphan by his very nature. Maclean agrees: ‘In Vendredi, Robinson, alone on his island, is an orphan of humanity’ (1988: 323). Women are striking by their unobtrusiveness in Tournier’s work, yet their role is far from being inconspicuous. Distinguishing between the woman-bibelot, decorative and pleasant, and that of woman-paysage[10] (Maclean 1988: 324), Tournier makes the Speranza, an island yet a woman, the landscape-woman, a powerful presence in Vendredi. She witnesses Robinson rationalistic craze, and accompanies his coming of age, while preparing him for the solar ecstasy of the denouement. Also, the memory of his sister Lucy, diaphanous image of a girl long dead, reveals to Robinson the depth of madness into which he has fallen during his souille regression, thus triggering the beginning of his recovery. However, despite the nurturing and redeeming roles that the few feminine figures of Vendredi may have, Robinson’s world is a universe of masculinity in its various avatars: the enticer Pieter Van Deyssel, captain of la Virginie, authoritarian Robinson, child-like Vendredi, plus several rapacious mates accompanying the captain of Whitebird.

As many eighteenth-century philosophes uneasy with authority, Defoe’s Robinson defies his father and God, and leaves the safety of his home, only to come full circle, but enriched and wiser, to a willing submission to authority. What he discovers on his uninhabited island is both self-reliance, confidence in his physical strength and intelligence (where strength fails), and the benefits of technology, of tools that make life easier and work less tedious. Quite importantly, too, he acquires a sense of interiority. The boisterous adventurer, who set out to conquer the world, eventually finds himself, not as a dubitative spirit like his seventeenth century predecessor, but as confident exponent of an age which sought its certainties not in abstractions but in the material world.

There may be a sense in which self-confidence, trust in technology coupled with that in God, plus pragmatism and efficiency, may be crowd-pleasing masks that Defoe lends to his character in order to gain the heart of his readership. And this he does, as Robinson Crusoe enjoys instant success, its large popularity leading to countless editions and pirate copies.

 

Masks and Life Stories

 

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the story of Robinson Crusoe – in its multifarious avatars – is still read and re-written with interest and delight. ‘Robinson Crusoe has been in the world’ for almost 300 years, and ‘continues to show rude health’ Pat Rogers notes in a 1979 study (Spaas, 1996: viii). How can one account for this resilience, given the change in sensibility that occurred in the time that elapsed since 1719? Returning to the issue of mask-assuming, which has presumably played a part in the very good reception Robinson Crusoe enjoyed: In his preface to the Penguin 2001 edition, John Richetti insists on Defoe’s ‘capacity for disguise and impersonation, his facility for projecting himself into the personalities and ideas of other people, to ventriloquize or mimic so effectively the voices of other people’ (xiii).

Nevertheless, many of Crusoe’s traits in Lives and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe are Defoe’s own: the tension between a mercantile career and a life of piety, the fascination with technology, resourcefulness, perseverance, and stamina. Defoe was himself an intrepid self-educated and independent man who succeeded despite adversities. His can-do attitude (mirrored in Robinson’s self-reliance and later rippling in the do-it-yourself craze which Tournier repeatedly mentions as specific to our times) has lead Defoe to take up diverse lines of business. He was a very daring person, eager to take advantage of, and improve on, existing conditions. Rational, practical, with a common sense – Defoe lends to his hero many of his characteristics, as well as the features that appeared as desirable in his time. Defoe sensed the pulse of society and of the market, and used his observations to his advantage. His journalistic and then novelistic career seemed to have taken shape in response to the need of the market, and as a result of advancements in technology. The increased readership created by the spread of print presses and that of literacy represented resources upon which Defoe capitalized efficiently. Richetti links Defoe’s choice of subject matter of Robinson Crusoe to itscommercial potential, i.e. the readiness of the audience for such books:

 

‘Like [his other books] […], Robinson Crusoe is first and foremost a response to commercial possibilities and opportunities in early-eighteenth-century publishing market, Defoe’s effort to give the public what he thought they would buy. Capitalizing on instant popularity, Defoe produced a sequel in that same year, in which Crusoe not only returns to his island but travels to the Far East, to China, and overland through Asia to Russia and then home to England’ (xiii- xiv).

 

The need of the market to which Defoe writes in reaction is the thirst for stories as means of escaping a trite reality that is, a world that has lost its transcendence. This thirst for narratives, for fait divers, is the popular correlative of the Enlightenment thirst for certainty and knowledge. While the philosophes and scientists were hoping to push the limits of knowledge as well as extend man’s capacities, the greater public was readying for stories that expand the boundaries of the real towards lesser-known places (or fantasy-lands). Richetti rightfully notes that Robinson Crusoe ‘appeals breathlessly to an audience envisioned as hungry for narratives of travel to exotic places, for sensational and unusual adventures and breathtaking wonder and mystery’ (xiv). Thus, due to its author’s responsiveness to a need of the reading public, one can say that the creation of Robinson Crusoe had been dictated by what Defoe perceived as a need of the market. The audience indirectly forges objects of pleasure, which would satisfy its fantasy, and its desire to be told stories, to be reassured with regards to unfamiliar ever changing technology, and the unknown lying beyond the limits of the familiar. The public also needed reassurance of its misgivings regarding atheism presumed as ensuing from rationality conjoined with technological advancement.

Tournier’s Vendredi similarly responds to a demand of the market, while capturing what its author perceived as characteristic of the contemporary self, its solitude, its DIY crazes, as well as the search for sensual gratification. Retelling Robinson’s story, Tournier sets it a century later, in 1759, when, presumably, the Enlightenment ideology is in full swing, but also when doubt starts to be cast over the supremacy of reason. In the transition from seventeen century humanism to eighteenth century Enlightenment uncertainty is out, certainty is in, and with it mathematics and unqualified trust in reason and its products: science and technology. The world is no longer a dream, but a clock, a mechanism functioning according to universal laws; landscapes become geometrical diagrams. Nature is trimmed to fit geometrical designs, as in the French gardens surrounding Versailles. In Tournier’s novel all these changes shape Robinson’s world in the era preceding the explosion, the presentation of which nevertheless also contains its own subversive criticism.

Tournier’s own relationship with the mercantile world is rather tenuous. After failing in his attempt to become a teacher of philosophy, Tournier finds himself in a position in which he needs to find ‘another way of earning’ his living, which would, at the same time allow him to dwell upon his love for philosophy (Worton 1995: 191). Literature appeared as the evident answer, still the problem remained how one could accommodate ‘thinking of Plato, Spinoza and Hegel ‘with’ stories about fishing and hunting, traveling, money, adventures’ (Worton 1995: 191). Literature acquires in retrospect a somewhat saving dimension. Writing fiction saves Tournier from the encroaching materialism of the world in which he lives and needs to earn a living, and reintroduces him to the world of ideas. Literature thus becomes a vehicle of philosophical ideas.[11] As stories such as Robinson’s may save from ennui and complacency, and touch the reader, enticing reflection on one’s condition and trigerring decisions with regard to the type of knowledge that one prefers, literature appears not only as a vehicle for ideas, but also potentially redemptive for both writer and reader.

In this transition from philosophy to literature, Tournier confesses, the tripartite relationship between Robinson, Friday and the island played an important part: ‘Le passage de la philosophie au roman trouvait dans ce petit drame à trois (Robinson + l’île + Vendredi) une occasion privilégiée’ (Vent Paraclet 223). Tournier explains how he arrived at the solution to his problem of accommodating philosophy and literature:

 

I found a first answer in the figure of Robinson Crusoe. He not only is a historico-fictional personage, he must also today be seen as an exceptionally modern hero – we have only to think of the contemporary crazes for DIY (do-it-yourself), for a return to Nature, and for the balmy islands of the Pacific. (Worton 1995: 191)

 

Tournier’s rendering of the story of Robinson narrates the saga of the introspective modern self:

 

For twenty years, Crusoe lives alone and has to face all the torments of solitude: he is tempted by suicide, he is confronted by the terrifying prospect of going mad, he has to meditate on the meaning of life, he has to question the worth of knowledge, he even wonders what God is […] (Worton 1995: 191).

 

Tournier’s Vendredi stands for the hypertext not only of Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, but also of Descartes’ Discours de la méthode, as well as Paul Valéry’s Monsieur Teste, as well as Spinoza’s Ethics and Biblical episodes, all records of intellectual exploits, of cerebral adventures as thrilling as adventure novels. Nonetheless, Tournier’s Vendredi hopes to be more than a rewriting that implodes the architextual categories of novel, philosophical discourse, and religious literature, as it aims to capture the lifeworld that we inhabit:

 

Car à chaque home, à chaque femme trois voies s’offrent dans la vie : (1) les plaisirs’ – which, taken to extremes become ‘purement passifs et dégradants – l’alcool, la drogue, etc ; (2) le travail et l’ambition sociale ; (3) la pure contemplation artistique ou religieuse. Les trois vies de Robinson jettent ainsi un pont entre notre existence de tous les jours et la métaphysique de Spinoza. (VP 229)

 

Undoubtedly, Robinson is ‘a mythological character’ who ‘is of relevance to all humanity.’ He ‘embodies’ solitude, one of the major aspects of human existence (VP 192), to which young people are condemned as soon as emerging from the maternal paradise of the first childhood. There are several kinds of isolation that Tournier tackles in Vendredi: First, there is the physical isolation on a desert island, which affects profoundly the psychology of the individual: from the temptation of madness, to that of misanthropy, from completely letting go to building an excessively organized kingdom, from recognizing no restrictions, limits or authority and ignoring the divinity, to issuing codes of law, becoming king and even assuming God-like prerogatives in relation to his subordinate, the Araucan slave Vendredi.

This isolation, with the risks of the madness of lassitude and the alternative of excessive organization, stands for the solitude that society presses on young people and bigger children. It may be because of conditionings, coutumes or reason, through the science it engenders, that the self is condemned to solitude: for fear of triggering sexual impulses in their children, mothers too well-read not to have heard of Freud, banish their children and adolescents to the isolation of ‘un désert physique.’ In Vent Paraclet, Tournier exposes the limits of Freudian psycho-analysis:

 

Longtemps la psychanalyse freudienne n’a admis le besoin de contact physique que comme une pulsion libidinale concrétisée d’abord dans la recherche orale du sein maternel par le nourrisson, puis par les relations proprement génitales. (VP 26)

 

Deprived of physical contact for years together, young people find themselves isolated, abandoned, as if on an island, or in a desert (VP 26). Tournier explains that physical contact does not necessarily mean ‘les jeux érotiques et les relations sexuelles,’ being something more significant (VP 25). Tournier’s Robinson impersonates such a young man deprived of affection, for whom, ‘l’amour est original […]’ and it is ‘garant de confiance et de sécurité’ (VP 25). His desire is not (only) for sexual gratification, but for human affectionate contact. He finds this in the person of Vendredi, who, after the explosion that destroyed l’île administrée, turns from slave into a brother and a friend, Robinson’s twin, his more spontaneous, creative half. Whereas his intercourse with Speranza may be interpreted as enacting a Freudian understanding of mother-son relationship, in relation with Vendredi and then Jaan-Jeudi, Robinson seeks comfort, as well as a fulfillment of the self.

Nevertheless, after the initial stage of the souille, to which he regresses due to despair and lack of society, Tournier’s Robinson comes to cherish âpre solitude, seeing in it the fulfillment of a destiny. He echoes Descartes when declaring that:

 

La solitude est un vin fort. Insupportable à l’enfant, elle enivre d’une joie âpre l’homme qui a su maîtriser, quand il s’y adonne, les battements de son cœur de lièvre. […] Je suis entré en solitude, comme on entre tout naturellement en religion après une enfance trop dévote, la nuit où la Virginie a achève sa carrière sur les récifs de Speranza. Elle m’attendait depuis l’origine des temps sur ces rivages, la solitude, avec son compagnon obligé, le silence… (Vendredi 84)

 

Solitude associates with various types of silence, which Robinson gradually learns to decipher and cherish:

 

Ici je suis devenu peu à peu une manière de spécialiste du silence, des silences, devrais-je dire. De tout mon être tendu comme une grande Oreille, j’apprécie la qualité particulière du silence où je baigne. Il y a des silences aériens et parfumes comme des nuits de juin en Angleterre, d’autres ont la consistance glauque de la souille, d’autres encore sont durs et sonores comme l’ébène. (Tournier 1968: 84-85)

 

Silence becomes a state which harmonizes the various aspects of the self: the temptation of the souille, the aerial inclination which he would give free vent to under Vendredi’s guidance, and the hardness of reason. Silence throws bridges between his soul and his environment, which is no longer seen as distinct, or as adverse. Having become part of nature by the mediation of silence, the self feels capable to dissolve in the universe that surrounds him. The almost epiphanic abandonment to night evokes the episode of the souille and anticipates the final epiphany: ‘Pourquoi faut-il qu’au coeur de la nuit je me laisse de surcroît couler si loin, si profond dans le noir? Il se pourrait bien qu’un jour, je disparaisse sans trace, comme aspiré par le néant que j’aurais fait naître autour de moi’ (Tournier 1968 : 85). The first and the third types of knowledge as identified by Spinoza present troubling similitude, Tournier suggests. The knowledge of the senses and knowledge of the absolute both imply a certain bracketing of reason, the former being characteristic of a pre-reason state, the latter of existence following the age of reason. Robinson is no longer his own master during the fall into madness, but after pulling (or bootstrapping) himself from the reign of sensory pleasures symbolized by the marshes, he enjoys an age of rational enlightenment, followed by a realization of the limitations of reason. This post-reason age in which he learns the simple joys of spontaneous creativity under Vendredi’s directions reopen the possibility of mythos, of a kind of innocence-after-experience, which will culminate in the final apocatastasis (Tournier 1972: 254).

The middle age of reason is, thus, also the age of mastery – of the self, and mastery of reason, science, technology, nature and fellow beings. Both Vendredi and its film version[12] reveal the paradoxical, sad and lonely, condition of the master, who despite the power granted by his use of reason and mastery of technology, has no access to meaning, nor to the third type of knowledge described by Spinoza as knowledge of the absolute. Morrow discusses the solitude of the powerful noting that: ‘The paradox is that the master’s self-realization requires recognition by an equal rather than a slave, but this cannot be achieved because he is incapable of mutuality (1992: 42). For Morrow, patriarchy, ‘both political and gendered,’ presents ‘a self-destructive pathology of the solitude of the absolute power’ (42). King Robinson’s rule may be described ‘as a form mastery’ which ‘culminates in a failed self’ (42). Paraphrasing Hegel’s analysis of the dialectic of mutual recognition, Kojève’s notes:

 

Mastery is an essential impasse. The Master can either make himself brutish in pleasure or die on the field of battle as Master, but he cannot live consciously with the knowledge that he is satisfied by what he is. If history must be completed, if absolute Knowledge must be possible, it is only the Slave who can do it, by attaining Satisfaction. And that is why Hegel says that the ‘truth’ (i.e. revealed reality) of the Master is the Slave. The human ideal, born of the Master, can be realized and revealed, can become Wahrheit (truth), only in and by Slavery. (Kojève 1969: 47)

 

Slavery entails dependence and subordination, as well as certain humility as a counterpoint to master’s power and arrogance. Man Friday, in Richard Roundtree’s impersonation (Man Friday 1975), and Vendredi, reveal the ambiguous status of the master: although self-proclaimed civilized, the master proves more brutish than the slave, whose simplicity acquires a somewhat angelic dimension. The subordinate’s capacity to enjoy, and express himself through the arts (music, dance, or crafts), highlight master’s self-important seriousness and reason-based administration as marked by ‘thoughts of power, guilt and fear’ (Man Friday 1975). Reason and the power that it justifies corrupt, whereas living in the sphere of mythos or of story-telling allows for a preservation of one’s innocence. Tournier daftly rewrites the master-slave dialectic. By having Robinson forsake his privileged position as master and by acquiescing to Vendredi’s aesthetic knowledge, he solves the paradox of mastery, escaping its impasse. Having become emotionally dependent on Vendredi, the slave of affection which Robinson has become accedes to revealed truth by means of epiphany in the form of the final solar ecstasy.

Tournier’ exploring of the Robinsoniad can be circumscribed to a larger trope of revisiting traditions (from the Roman and Greek antiquity to that of the Enlightenment, and thus of modernity[13]) in order to define their times and inquire into what it is to be human. In Vent Paraclet Tournier wonders why it so happened that when Alexander Silkirk – the model of Robinson – returned to England in 1711, his story impressed the public more than any other previous castaway’s tale? Tournier remarks: ‘aucune n’avait eu le retentissement de celle de Selkirk’ (VP 210). Responsible for this is the fact that the public – which was being formed by the increasing number of newspapers and books being published to date – was then ready for such a story; ready to perceive its mythical, paradigmatic dimension: ‘C’est qu’en effet pour la première fois le terrain était prêt à recevoir ce fait divers, semence de mythe’ (VP 210). Selkirk’s was the story of everyman turned hero, though revealed as exceptional due to his inborn qualities, and perseverance, reasonable approach to mishaps, and can-do attitude. Tournier, like Steele, is fascinated with the trial of solitude, which they link with revolutions of the one’s soul: ‘En attendant Selkirk devient un personnage, on accourt, on l’interroge. Les plus perspicaces scrutent les traces qu’a dû laisser en lui cette terrible épreuve de solitude (VP 210). Selkirk is a common sense man and a good, intelligent storyteller: ‘Il était très curieux de l’entendre car c’est un home de bon sens qui sait donner un récit des différentes révolutions de son esprit dans sa longue solitude’ (Steele, in VP 210). Selkirks’s story nurtures a myth:

 

On aurait rêvé pour lui un destin hors du commun, une jeunesse marquée à tout jamais par l’aventure exemplaire de sa jeunesse, orientée par une vocation impérieuse – littéraire, philosophique, religieuse – née dans les montagnes bougeotte pelées de Mas à Tierra. (VP 211)

 

Tournier takes over the motive of the story that nurtures and envelops the self in its mirage and transposes it in Le médianoche amoreux. Sea stories bind Nadège and Oudalle, fostering their love, keeping alive their interest for each other, but when the reservoir of stories runs dry with Oudalle’s retirement on land, their relationship suffers – only to be saved by the fantastic stories, les contes narrated during the midnight feast, the médianoche which turns amoureux.

The four years and four months of solitude on Más a Tierra[14] have visibly marked Selkirk’s exteriority as well as his soul. Defoe will note some of the changes Robinson Crusoe experiences (his shift from indifference to pietism, for example), but these transformations become themselves the real protagonists of the story in Tournier’s rendering.

Solitude becomes obsessive in Tournier’s metatextual Vent Paraclet, where he translates Steel’s notes from The Englishman:

 

Quand je le vis pour la première fois, même si je n’avais pas été averti de son caractère et de son histoire, j’aurais discerné qu’il avait été longtemps privé de compagnie en raison de son aspect et sa solitude. (210)

 

Even while among his fellowmen, Selkirk feels forlorn; he does no longer fit in. His enforced isolation on the island has radically transformed him: ‘il existait une forte et sérieuse expression dans son regard et un certain détachement des choses ordinaires qui l’entouraient comme s’il avait été plongé dans la méditation (VP 210). This meditative spirit, as well as his inability to blend in again prefigure Tournier’s Robinson, who refuses to leave his island. Selkirk himself ‘souvent regrettait son retour dans le monde qui ne pouvait, assurait-il, malgré ses agréments, lui rendre la tranquillité de sa solitude’ (VP 210).

Selkirk, like Defoe’s and Tournier’s Robinson, has crossed the boundary between the practical and contemplative spirit. In a manner similar to Descartes, after ceasing his engagement in the Thirty Years War, he isolates himself in his own island of the self. Thus, the Robinsoniads presuppose isolation, insularity, seclusion in which the protagonist is cast or exiles himself. There seems to be a teleological aspect to this seclusion either determined by circumstances or self-inflicted: The experience of all Robinsons, whether male or female,[15] individual or collective,[16] seems directed towards either solving an apparently insurmountable problem or a certain coming of age, realizing some truth about the self or the world, or accomplishing some sort of revolution within the self. Robinson’s time on his island in Defoe’s novel unfolds a gradual realization of man’s depending for solace and joys on a benevolent Creator whose purpose in facing his creature with trials seems to be that of leading one to a realization of one’s own existence as a spiritual being. A connection is thus established and man is not debased by it – although a certain degree of humility is prerequisite and makes such relationship possible – but ennobled.

Much of the originality of Tournier’s rewriting consists in having Robinson dramatize the three types of knowledge that Spinoza proposed:

 

Les trois stades de l’évolution de Robinson s’apparentaient aux trios genres de connaissance décrits par Spinoza dans l’Ethique. La connaissance du premier genre passe par les sens et les sentiments, et se caractérise par sa subjectivité, sa fortuite et son immédiateté. A la connaissance du deuxième genre correspondent les sciences et les techniques. C’est une connaissance rationnelle mais superficielle, médiate et largement utilitaire. Seul la connaissance du troisième genre livre l’absolu dans une intuition de son essence. Il est certain que la souille, l’aile administrée et l’extase solaire reproduisent dans leur succession les trois genres de connaissance de L’Ethique. (VP 228-229)

 

In his experiencing the degradation of falling back to pre-human condition under the pressure of his disappointment and despair, then in pulling himself together and organizing his island, followed by the solar ecstasy after Vendredi’s defection – Robinson enacts these three types of knowledge. Thus, his experience stands for an allegory of the modern spirit – relying on reason to rise from the marsh of half-truths and superstitions (with Descartes), then allowing reason to take over and control all aspects of life (as illustrated by Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe), until reason starts to be challenged – with counter-culture, and postmodernist Vendredis insisting on emotions, spontaneous enjoyment and unleashed energy of game and creativity. Thus, Robinson’s three lives suggest that beyond rationalist modernity and postmodernist emotionalism, there is a third solution, which may be called metamodern.

The Robinsoniads are perhaps the narratives most characteristic of the modern spirit. Born during the Enlightenment, these narratives of conquering the hostile nature and taming it (by means of industriousness, ingenuity, rational organization and planning) describe the Odyssey of the modern man, as well as the stages he had to go through in order to reach modernity. Robinson goes from nature, to culture, via the intermediary stages of agriculture, domestication and breeding animals. Culture culminates with the age of crafts and the economy of technology and accumulation, coupled with a politics of power and dominance. The stage of culture is the stage of the written word, not as records, but mainly as narratives of spiritual transformation. Robinson is the culmination of an ideal of a self-reliant autonomous self, which nevertheless yokes God to his pursuit of comfortable life – material and spiritual.

The Robinsoniads explore what it means to be human in the age of great scientific discoveries. The seeking is not primarily for spiritual revelation but for material betterment, for improving living conditions, for turning the unfamiliar into familiar, for taming the overwhelming. Nonetheless, as suggested by the myth of progress which posits perfection of humanism as the prize awaiting behind the next corner on the path to scientific and technological advancement, spiritual fulfillment is expected to follow – by a reasonable causality that however belie reason – from material betterment.

A partial answer to the fascination that Robinson Crusoe’s story exerted from the Age of Reason to the present day, rests in its confirming a hope of the modern man: that epiphany awaits around the corner on the way to progress, that advancement in science and technology must needs have some positive correlative at the level of the psyche, i.e. must be paralleled by improvement or betterment of the soul.

Tournier’s Robinson is made to live another, later, age. A century later, the unconditional confidence and trust in progress comes to bear the weight of skepticism. The values of Enlightenment are no longer accepted uncritically. This makes the second half of the 18^th century a suitable time for staging the story of this new Robinson who no longer lives entirely by Enlightenment precepts, or rather, whose Enlightenment-like confidence in reason, order, structured existence is challenged by Vendredi. In Vent Paraclet, Tournier explains Vendredi’s transformation from a willing slave to a challenger of the establishment, while exposing the absurdity of Robinson’s administration:

 

Vendredi parait d’abord justifier l’organisation maniaque de l’île par Robinson. Il va être le sujet unique de ce royaume, le seul soldat du général Robinson, le seul contribuable du percepteur Robinson, etc. Il se plie apparemment à tout avec une docile bonne humeur. Mais sa présence suffit déjà à ébranler l’organisation de l’île, car visiblement il ne comprend rien à tout cela, et Robinson se voit dans ses yeux et ne peut plus désormais ne pas juger sa propre folie. Vendredi sème le doute dans un système qui ne tenait que par la force d’une conviction aveugle. (Vent Paraclet 1977: 227).

 

Then Vendredi becomes inspiring and inspired inventor of an Aeolian harp and a boar-hide kite, both symbols of ascension, air and wind. Vendredi and the transformation he affects on Robinson evoke Joachim of Fiore’s three ages: of the father (of organizing, rules, and obedience, similar to Robinson’s l’île administrée), and the one of the son (an age of brotherhood and forgiveness), followed by an epoch of the Holy Spirit.

 

Nouvelle and conte

 

Defoe’s re-imagining the story of Alexandre Selkirk reveals not only the distance between his own hypotext[17] and the text of Robinson Crusoe, but also les ‘écarts entre l’histoire et l’oeuvre littéraire’ (Genette 1982: 419), to which corresponds the distinction between nouvelle and conte. In Medianoche amoreux, the narrator elucidates this difference: whereas nouvelles, with their crude realism, deepen the chasm between Nadege and Oudale, contes bridge the abyss created by lack of communication and common purpose. The unfolding of recits, both contes and nouvelles, come spontaneously to accompany or rather to celebrate the farewell medianoche which, instead of sealing their separation, metamorphoses the relationship of the two.

The details accompanying the spontaneous telling (raconter) or genesis of stories are themselves symbolic, evoking both the apparently unplanned character of the art of storytelling, and the almost mythical, archetypal even, atmosphere in which stories are generated or remembered. Nadege and Oudalle, like a (virtually befuddled) mythical couple, host and witness an event beyond their control. All they can do, once they intuit its significance, is record it:

 

Un groupe de convives s’était rassemble sur la haute terrasse dont les pilots s’avançaient jusque sur la grève. Ni Nadege, ni Oudalle n’aurait pu dire qui eut l’idée de raconter la première histoire. Elle se perdit dans la nuit, ainsi sans doute que la deuxième et la troisième. Mais, surpris par ce qui était en train de se passer chez eux, ils firent en sorte que les récits suivants fussent enregistres et conserves. Il y a en eut ainsi dix-neuf, et ces récits étaient tantôt des contes inaugures par le magique et traditionnel « il était une fois », tantôt des nouvelles racontées à la première personne, traces de vie souvent saignantes et sordides (40).

Nadège et Oudalle écoutaient, étonnés par ces constructions imaginaires qu’ils voyaient s’édifier dans leur propre maison, et qui s’effaçaient dès le dernier mot prononce pour faire place à d’autres évocations tout aussi éphémères. (40)

 

They evoke the Adamic couple transposed in an esthetic context: like some primeval writers, they record the stories with innocence and wonder. The fragility of stories, their lack of solidity or permanence, their fluidity resemble that of sand statues erected on the beach, for the next tide to wash away. They claim no beauty or stability other than those of the moment. The apparent gratuity of such creative gestures raises questions pertaining not only to the finality of the work of art, but also, extrapolating, to the teleology of the world itself.

A possible answer is offered immediately: listening to stories transforms the couple:

‘Il leur semblait que les nouvelles, âprement réalistes, pessimistes, dissolvantes, contribuaient à les séparer et a ruiner leur couple, alors que les contes, savoureux, chaleureux, affables, travaillaient au contraire à les rapprocher. Or, si les nouvelles s’étaient imposées d’abord par leur vérité pesante et mélancolique, les contes avaient gagné au fur de la nuit en beauté et en force pour atteindre enfin un rayonnement d’un charme irrésistible’ (40-41). Thus, Tournier’s narratives reveal not only the comforting or healing dimension of literature, ‘la littérature comme panacée’ (MA 42), but, through their repetitions and rituals of narration resembling the sacraments, they also (re)confer to life itself a spiritual dimension which the rush for progress, ordering, rationalizing as it is, tends to push aside.

Tournier’s Vendredi explores one of the founding myths of modernity as well as its limitations. It expounds the usefulness of reason in organizing life, in providing technological aids to human strengths and intelligence, but also its dangers – when Robinson becomes a bureaucrat and a mindless dictator, deluding himself and justifying his cruelty to Vendredi. In the figure of Vendredi Tournier exposes some of the greatest losses the West traded away in the modern pact for reason, certainty and order. One of these is the human contact with nature. The western man has conquered nature by means of technology, but lost contact with it as a living organism.[18] Tournier acknowledges this in portraying the island Speranza as a feminine presence, loving, creative, supportive and nurturing; she is the agency that occasionally tempers Robinson’s aggressive administrative, and ruling, impulses. After the explosion, Robinson relinquishes his position outside the order of nature; he becomes part of it, able to enjoy its creativity and respond to it by manifesting his own. Interestingly, after the explosion, tools and technology play little part in Robinson’s and Vendredi’s lives. The two live like the birds in the evangelical parable, on what nature offers them. No exhausting work, just the mere enjoyment of living is needed for such existence. Yet, in this age of liberation from the constraints of reason and technology, of necessity and order, Vendredi feels the need to create, thus realizing the synthesis that Toulmin (2001) envisaged between science and the humanistic spirit: the Aeolian harp and the boar-hide kite are symbols of (spiritual) ascension, of an age in which signs of the spirit as breath and wind dominate. His inventions have little practical usefulness, being aesthetic objects of child-like joy and delight. Thus Vendredi replaces Robinson’s rationalistic knowledge with an aesthetic approach.

Following after Vendredi’s defection, however, disappointed and grieving Robinson, who, at the araucan’s prompting had learned to abandon every plan and ambition for the sake of enjoying the fleeting moment as it comes, suspends all hope and emotions. He feels betrayed, yet Speranza and the rising sun inspire him with the power to forgive and to abandon himself once again to the present moment, now invested with deeper meanings as an aesthetic visionary experience. In this state of surrender Robinson experiences something nearing epiphany:

 

Une glaive de feu entrait en lui et transverbérait tout son être. Speranza se dégageait des voiles de la brume, vierge et intacte. Enfin l’astre-dieu déploya tout entière sa couronne de cheveux rouges dans des explosions de cymbales et des stridences de trompettes. Des reflets métalliques s’allumèrent sur la tête de l’enfant. (Tournier 1972: 254)

 

Visionary perception as opposed to the empirical perception that sciences entail informs the last pages of Vendredi. Thus, Tournier tries to humanize modernity by rediscovering the imaginative aesthetic perception, the epiphanic which restores the visionary dimension to reality. In so doing, he shows that the modern spirit of rationalism, of order, certainty and laws, is beneficial inasmuch as it saves the self from the souille, the marsh of confusion and subhuman impulses. The order, technology, and progress, which reason engenders led away from the dangers of chaos and from one’s shadows; but when the spirit succumbs to meaningless accumulation and useless rationalizations and taxonomies, reason loses its grounding and becomes an oppressor rather than a liberator. However, true freedom of spirit is achieved when both the temptations of instinct and those of ratiocination are overcome, and the self learns (from Vendredi and from nature itself) to enjoy the present in spontaneity and joy. There is a dialectic perceptible here in the progression from indulging into instinctual drives to worshipping reason, and then to surpassing both these impulses when Vendredi takes over. However, the transformation is complete only after Vendredi’s forsaking Robinson, thus indicating aesthetic awareness as a mere step on the way to visionary aesthetic perception, which Spinoza called absolute knowledge. Thus, Tournier’s Vendredi ou les limbes du Pacifique is modern in its focus on the individual, whose survival and welfare is ensured by technological innovations springing from rationality, but surpasses both modernity (with Vendredi’s challenging the supremacy of reason) and postmodernity (in overcoming emotions), thus arguably proposing a metamodern paradigm.

Bacon’s ‘knowledge is power’ loses some of its appeal and persuasive power in an age in which data and information are electronically available for virtually anyone with an access to the web, and even more so, for anyone belonging to a professional network or institution. The stage belongs, we like to believe, not only to the powerful, but to the ones, who, like Tournier, know how to tell a story: beautifully, convincingly, meaningfully. Stories are tools for resisting the onslaught of aggressively globalizing multinationals, the impersonal leveling of individuals into consumers, into absorbent sponges of mediatized national or transnational policies and vested interests (which Roszak, for good reason, feared). Stories soothe, distinguish and outline the contours of personalities and communities; they keep the roots alive and nurture personal efforts. They constitute islands of meaning that provide significance to daily existence. They help one live significantly, or they simply help one live. And occasionally, they trigger epiphanies.

 

 

References

Bronowski, Jacob and Bruce Mazlish. The Western Intellectual Tradition. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963.

Cahoone, Lawrence. From Modernism to Postmodernism: an Anthology. Oxford: Blackwell, 1996.

Marie Josephine Diamond, ‘The Social Configuration of Descartes’ Discourse on Method.’ Dialectical Anthropology. Volume 7: number 1/Sept 1982.

Gaukroger, Stephen. Blackwell Guide to Descartes’ Meditations. Oxford: Blackwell, 2006.

Genette, Gérard. Palimpsestes. La Litterature au second degree. Paris: Seuil, 1982.

Horkheimer, Max and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment. London: Verso 1979.

Kermode, Frank. Romantic Image. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1957.

Kojève, Alexandre. Introduction to the reading of Hegel. Ed. Alan Bloom. Tr. James H. Nichols Jr., New York and London: Basic Books, 1969 [1947].

Maclean, Mairi. ‘Michel Tournier as Misogynist (Or Not?): An Assessment of the Author’s View of Femininity.’ The Modern Language Review Vol. 83, No. 2 (Apr., 1988), 322-331.

Marion, Jean-Luc. ‘The Place of the ‘Objections’ in the Development of Cartesian Metaphysics.’ In Roger Ariew and Marjorie Grene (eds). Descartes and his Contemporaries, Mediations, Objections, and Replies, 7-20. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1995.

Morrow, Ray. ‘Patriarchal Bodies and Premodern Subjects: Grotesque Realism and Domination in Garcia Marquez’s El otoño del patriarca.’ Anthony George Purdy (ed). Literature and the Body. Amsterdam, Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 1992: 29-58.

Roszack, Theodore. The Making of a Counter Culture. Reflections on the Technocratic Society and Its Youthful Opposition. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1995.

Spaas, Lieve and Brian Stimpson (eds). Robinson Crusoe: Myths and Metamorphoses. Palgrave Macmillan, 1996.

Tournier, Michel. Le Médianoche Amoreux. Contes et nouvelles. Paris : Gallimard, 1989.

Tournier, Michel. Le Vent Paraclet. Paris: Gallimard, 1977.

Tournier, Michel. Vendredi ou les limbes du Pacifique, Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1969.

Watson, Peter. Ideas: A History from Fire to Freud. London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 2005.

 

On-line source:

Bramann, J. (2006). Marx: Capitalism and Alienation. The Educating Rita Workbook, Retrieved July 29, 2009, from http://faculty.frostburg.edu/phil/forum/Marx.htm

 

Filmography:

Man Friday (1975). Director Jack Gold. Script Adrian Mitchell.

 

 

Notes