The Experience of Time and the Concept of Happiness in Michel Tournier's Friday and Robinson: Life on Speranza Island

The tale of a human being cast away on a desert isle to survive by his or her own resources has strong appeal to the imagination. Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, the prototype of the genre of the "Robinsonade," and Scott O'Dell's Island of the Blue Dolphins come readily to mind. By highlighting the individual in extremis, the plot of the Robinsonade offers a metaphysically-inclined author the chance to explore such basic philosophical questions as the essence of humanness (can one be human in isolation from others?), the essential meaning of life (what remains when externals are peeled away?) and the concept of happiness (can happiness be found in isolation or in the simplest possible society, perhaps with no other companions than animals—as in the case of Karana of Blue Dolphins?). The Robinsonade poses fundamentally Utopian questions in the sense that it portrays the sweeping away of the preexisting society and the attempt to build a new human life from the ground up; because of its appeal to the basic human instinct for survival, it may also have a special attraction in this age when humanity feels the threat of nuclear extinction.

In Friday and Robinson: Life on Speranza Island, Michel Tournier has endowed the familiar Robinson Crusoe theme with the insights of modern psychology; according to Mary Blume, he claims to have created a "myth" that fulfills his desire to pose metaphysical questions "for 10-yr.-olds" (7). Joseph H. McMahon's recent article perceptively explores the contrasts between Tournier's different manners of writing for children and adults. Since Tournier adapted his children's Vendredi: ou la vie sauvage from his adult novel, Vendredi: ou les limbes du Pacifique, such contrasts can naturally and fruitfully be drawn from the two books. The French children's adaptation was translated into English as Friday and Robinson: Life on Speranza Island; this English version of the 1971 juvenile French text is the basis for my remarks, for it is the text accessible in English to American children. My purpose is to portray the meaning of Robinson's search for happiness as it evolves in the book, and to relate it to his various experiences of time and his consciousness of mortality. That this dimension of the book might be meaningful to children is borne out by Tournier's discussion, in "Writer Devoured by Children," of the drawings made by a class in Vannes of the main episodes of the story "with a frieze beneath recording something like a temperature curve of Robinson's state of mind" (181). "Children," as Tournier notes, "are not afraid of the big questions," nor do they bother to order their questions hierarchically. They might ask him "How can I be happy?" and "What did you eat for breakfast?" in the same breath. Tournier says explicitly,

We may skip breakfast. But what about happiness? Happiness? Very simple. There is only one condition, but it is absolutely essential: you must passionately love something or someone. If you love nothing or no one, you are lost, your life has ended before it has egun.

(187)

The passion may be directed at almost any object—dedication to an intellectual pursuit, adoration of a person; the focus of the love matters little, for it is the passion itself that makes life "worth living." Confronting the "big questions," in Friday and Robinson Tournier explores the nature of human nature, the pursuit of happiness, human perspectives on time and mortality, and cultural relativism, all on a level which has the simplicity, beauty and depth of myth. Commenting on Tournier's adult Vendredi, Thomas Fleming has remarked that Tournier has turned the Robinsonade into a myth exploring "nothing less than . . . the soul of modern man" (551). It is my belief that the adaptation has an even more concentrated mythic quality, and explores the soul on an even more elemental level.

Tournier himself has made three distinctions between his books for children and for adults: the child's book has (a) brevity—being a "distillation" rather...