Crusoe in the Cave: Defoe and the Semiotics of Desire

Crusoe in the Cave: Defoe and the Semiotics Of DesireGeoffrey M. Sill Recent studies of Daniel Defoe, and particularly ofRobinson Crusoe, show an unprecedented interest in the psychological dimensions of his work. Credit for this new direction in Defoe studies may lie in part with Paula R. Backscheider, whose biography emphasized the close connections between Defoe's life and the "powerful evocation of states of mind" in his major works of fiction.1 In her earlier critical study of Defoe, Backscheider described Robinson Crusoe as "a realistic psychological being" whose efforts to maintain his sanity are the driving force of his narrative, and argued that it is within this context that "Crusoe's spiritual quest assumes thematic centrality, coherence, and credibility."2 James O. Foster, in his "Robinson Crusoe and the Uses of the Imagination," notes that Backscheider "keeps referring to the complex psychology of Crusoe but never discusses it," a deficiency which he endeavours to correct through an examination of the contradictions that led Defoe from 1 Paula R. Backscheider, Daniel Defoe: His Life (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), p. 415. 2 Paula R. Backscheider, Daniel Defoe: Ambition and Innovation (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1986), p. 223. Before Backscheider, the most important recognition of the psychological dimension of Robinson Crusoe is probably James H. Maddox, Jr, "Interpreter Crusoe," ELH 51 (1984), 33-52, who argues that, while the narrative is nominally compatible with the form of spiritual autobiography, Crusoe shows "signs of psychological pressures compelling his narrative into its desired shape," and asserts that Defoe is "more shrewdly aware of the psychological pressure coercing Crusoe toward the 'discovery' [of Christian redemption] than Hunter or Starr would allow" (pp. 34, 51n3). EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 6, Number 3, April 1994 216 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION allegory to a "psychologized" narrative.3 A very different approach to the psychological structures underlying Robinson Crusoe may be found in Dianne Armstrong's "The Myth of Cronus: Cannibal and Sign in Robinson Crusoe," which proposes that the novel makes use of certain mythological signs that can be interpreted with Freudian analytical tools.4 Useful as these two recent studies are, they do not bring us much closer to an understanding of the psychological concepts with which Defoe was working, and both seem to reach conclusions that diminish, rather than support, the proposition that Robinson Crusoe is a complex psychological work. According to Armstrong, Defoe was engaged in shaping a new myth for his time, one which employed the figure of the cannibal to represent the "Other," or the enemy. The myth that she finds in the novel, however, is not an entirely new one, but a version of the old myth of Cronus, or Saturn, who devoured his offspring to prevent their overthrowing him. Crusoe and his father engage in a "war" in which the son fears that the father will "devour his individuality," while the father fears that the son will make a meal of his authority.3 Armstrong admits that associations between cannibalism and the rivalry of fathers with sons were "unavailable" to Defoe, but argues that they can be "retrieved" by the twentieth-century reader for whom Defoe's "vaguely allegorical" rhetoric stimulates the symbolic imagination. The symbolic implications of the myth of Cronus had been noted by Freud, who used it as a paradigm of the Oedipal process through which sons devour their fathers in order to supplant them as "gods and kings." Armstrong therefore sees a "bidirectional " cannibalism in Robinson Crusoe: the father attempts to consume the young man's desires, and Crusoe devours his father in becoming the "cannibal-king" of the island.6 According to Foster, Defoe was a failure in the world of trade who attempted to redeem his shortcomings by improvising a set of compromises between "the ethically problematic attractions of competitive trade and the religious imperatives of an inherited Calvinist theology" (p. 179). 3 James O. Foster, "Robinson Crusoe and the Uses of the Imagination," Journal of English and Germanic Philology 91 (April 1992), 179-202. For Foster's comment on Backscheider's work, see p. 182n3. References to this article appear in the text. 4 Dianne Armstrong, "The Myth of Cronus: Cannibal...