Robinson (review)

REVIEWS 237 Lise Andries, éd. Robinson. Figures mythiques. Paris: Éditions Autrement, 1996. 160pp. FFr89. ISBN 2-86260-621-9. French interest in Robinson Crusoe, as David Blewett's work on illustrations confirms, has always been considerable. This volume's eight essays explore how Defoe's novel has acquired mythical status. In "Les accessories de la solitude," Lise Andries attributes to Defoe's extreme setting the reason why Robinson is "le seul personnage mythique qui ait engendré un genre narratif spécifique" (p. 9). Explorer, colonizer, merchant, and Utopian, Crusoe is a new being, the new genre an enlightenment experiment. Banality, gentility, and love of gardening induce him to transform the island into a little England while signalling his story's exceptional nature. Many rewritings after 1770 match its reception. Its preindustrial setting led robinsonnades to promote natural history and children's asexuality but also led to Jules Verne's positivism and modern adaptations which "s'inscrivent toutes sur fond de distanciation parodique ou de déschantement progressif" (p. 23). William Golding's Lord ofthe Flies, in undermining Defoe's nationalism and imperialism, proves Robinson Crusoe's mythic appeal. In "Les éphémérides de Crusocronos en Atlantide," Claude Gaignebet puts the novel into symbolic contexts, beginning with the spiritual association of dates and places. Robinson comes ashore the day after St Michael's Day, Mont St Michel marking for Europeans the limits of the kingdom of the dead. His fear of losing the measure of time is explained by the constant height of the sun: he arrives at midday when, because of the absence of shadow, demons come out. Hence, his fear of the goat in the cave and the footprint in the sand. Dressing in skins is associated with Saturn's melancholy, while his stay on the island corresponds to that planet's cycle. Since his parrot recalls the tradition of talking birds as companions to anchorites, of St Paul's being fed by a crow, and of the myth of Echo, Gaignebet argues that Defoe's symbols are not limited to Dissenting theology. In "L'île de Jonas ou Robinson, prophète malgré lui," Frank Lestringant traces Defoe's setting to sixteenth-century Huguenot texts in which shipwreck stories are "une sorte de préfiguration du Jugement dernier" (p. 45). Relating the prodigal son and Jonah to Robinson, Lestringant shows that the incomplete analogues convey Defoe's tenets of unmerited grace and the priesthood of all believers. The implications in the story of Jonah about the fear of being swallowed are extended because Robinson is cast ashore where he fears being eaten by cannibals , and where the insular order he makes as a creature of grace is undone by the continental pagans. Robinson's Protestant denial of transubstantiation and hatred of flesh reject otherness: his "rédemption isolée a pour contrepartie un massacre de Cannibales réputés inconvertibles et abominables" (p. 57). Thus, Defoe is a racist imperialist: his ideology is "sans nuance, sans autocritique et sans distance aucune" (p. 58). But Lestringant hails the naive optimism of Defoe's myth. The island is not other, witness the germination of the English wheat. It conflates Eden and England so that Robinson's story involves the illusion of displacement. Lestringant most provocatively claims that Robinson does not, like Ulysses, take real risks. Lestringant neither defines risk, however , nor questions the Roman Catholic theology that allows him to distance 238 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 10:2 himself from Protestant capitalism. The next essays are less polemical. In "Robinson, jardinier en l'île," Michel Baridon, an historian of gardens, comments on the ease and difficulty with which Robinson harvests fruits and farms fields. Crucial to the island episode is the tension between following nature and dominating it by method. Robinson's two island houses represent two political ideologies, progressive and traditional ideas dialectically informing the island. Since Robinson is a nostalgic improver, Baridon discusses Calvinist gardening in France. The aid Defoe gave William and Mary at Hampton Court should be re-examined in the light of Baridon's approach. Haydn Mason's "Robinson dans les récits maritimes et les robinsonnades anglaises du ?????6 siècle," while narrower than David...