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  • Robinson & compagnie: aspects de l’insularité politique de Thomas More à Michel Tournier
  • Maximillian E. Novak (bio)
Jean-Michel Racault. Robinson & compagnie: aspects de l’insularité politique de Thomas More à Michel Tournier. Paris: Éditions Pétra, 2010. 374pp. 29€. ISBN 978-2-84743-033-2.

If the robinsonade has remained a significant sub-genre of fiction since the eighteenth century, the contemplation of this variation on a theme of Daniel Defoe is becoming a sub-genre of the criticism of the novel, from Martin Green’s Robinson Crusoe Story (1990) to Jean-Paul Engélibert’s La Postérité de Robinson Crusoé (1997). Jean-Michel Racault’s Robinson & compagnie, the most recent study to join the sub-genre, attempts to show why the robinsonade was and remains an important literary form—why the pattern of shipwreck, redemption on the island, and return to Western society is so fertile for European literature. He argues that so far from being a somewhat primitive writer with unexamined ideas, Defoe had one of the most complex minds of his time, passing on that complexity to a host of future authors fascinated by the possibilities inherent in Crusoe’s narrative. Defoe’s treatment of guilt, isolation, the concept of the self, the fear of the other (in the form of the cannibals), Crusoe’s socialization with the coming of Friday, his attempt at establishing a kind of contractual government among the settlers, and his emergence as the governor of his island with the suppression of the mutineers all raised serious questions for his time and for the centuries that have followed.

Part of a series on “des Îles,” Racault’s book begins with a section on Thomas More’s Utopia—a revisit to a work that was a key reference point for his own book on Utopias. Racault states the difference between the robinsonade and the Utopia succinctly. In a robinsonade, an isolated character (or a group) struggles to survive and actively transforms the surrounding nature; in a Utopia, a character arrives at an already formed, ideal society for which he usually expresses his uncritical admiration. Since it is already perfect, there is nothing to change. If Utopias depict an ideal society, they nevertheless depend on a dialectic with the real world; similarly, the robinsonade creates a dialectic with the original place of departure, through the creation of a society that, by its relative simplicity, serves as a critique of the outside world. If it is not always on a literal island, the robinsonade nevertheless always has an island mentality. It does not offer perfect solutions to the political, economic, social, and psychological problems of the civilized world in the manner of a Utopia, but rather a new way of seeing them.

In approaching his subject, Racault uses Gérard Genette’s concept of “hypertextualité.” There were robinsonades before Defoe co-opted the form, and to some extent, versions of the Crusoe story written after Defoe’s work modify the ways in which we view the original. The chapter on Shakespeare’s The Tempest is excellent in this regard. Defoe [End Page 716] had probably read the Dryden-Davenant version and certainly knew of the political struggles of those wrecked on Bermuda who inspired Shakespeare. Crusoe as the magician Prospero? Caliban as a Friday incap able of adapting to his master’s whims? And if Ibn Thofaïl’s Hayy ben Yaqdhân and Gracian’s Andrenio give us directions in which Defoe might have gone (but, for the most part, did not), so Jules Verne’s wind-blown balloonists, remnants of America’s Civil War, show how Crusoe’s recreation of human development, with his pottery and bread-making, might have taken shape with the influence of nineteenth-century science.

In his examination of Robinson Crusoe, Racault attempts to reconcile the realism of the style with what he considers to be a symbolic pattern in line with the interpretations of G.A. Starr and J. Paul Hunter. He provides three detailed readings of the novel in the form of the seeming miracle of the European grain growing on the island; of the cave with the goat; and of Crusoe’s assuming his role...

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