The Myth of Cronus: Cannibal and Sign in Robinson Crusoe

The Myth of Cronus: Cannibal and Sign in Robinson CrUSOeDianne Armstrong In Working with Structuralism David Lodge suggests that "Hemingway 's stories are remarkable for achieving a symbolist resonance without the use of rhetorical figures and tropes." ' So is Robinson Crusoe. In that work Defoe uses the word "cannibal" to mean "man-eating savages ." His twentieth-century readers, however, may retrieve additional meanings not available to Defoe, but which bear nonetheless on the various connotations of the word in the text. While I cannot argue that Defoe's use of "cannibal" is deliberately metaphorical (studies of his work suggesting otherwise), a post-Freudian audience has at its disposal supplementary interpretations attached to the cannibalistic phenomena, recoverable through the symbolic resonance of Defoe's narrative and the mental associations which it stimulates.2 Though the novel purports to describe events in a utilitarian language, its rhetoric is at the same time vaguely allegorical. In tracing some of the figurative meanings of "cannibal ," we find that a diverse picture emerges, one which enriches our understanding of the work's many themes. Among these is the concept 1 Working with Structuralism: Essays andReviews on Nineteenth and Twentieth- Century Literature (London: Roudedge and Kegan Paul, 1981), p. 31. 2 E. Anthony James, Daniel Defoe's Many Voices: A Rhetorical Study ofProse Style and Literary Method (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1972), suggests that Defoe, writing "in his own voice," "eschews irony," and avoids "sustained figurative language" and metaphor (p. 36). An undoubted influence was "Protestantism, with its emphasis on die accessibility of liturgy and Scripture to all [which] favored me vernaculars at the expense of Latin" (Morton W. Bloomfield and Leonard Newmark, A Linguistic Introduction to the History ofEnglish [New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1963], p. 298). EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 4, Number 3, April 1992 208 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION of parricide, inherent in the myth of Cronus, and the link with imperialism and hegemony implied in our activities against the "Other," the enemy.3 Despite Robinson Crusoe's claims to achieve verisimilitude, then, the metaphorical implications of "cannibal," or cannibalism considered as a figure of speech, defeat that objective. The trope becomes a structural principle. Part of the explanation lies in the separative functions of the realist text, which David Lodge, following the Jakobsonian model of language, describes as "dominantly métonymie ... [it] necessarily selects certain details and suppresses or deletes others." The interaction between these details is "aesthetically significant ... [and carries] connotations, building up a still denser pattern of equivalences ... [which] is usually (and rather loosely) called 'symbolism' in Anglo-American criticism. Barthes calls it connotation, the process by which one signified acts as the signifier of another signified not actually named."4 Through the process Lodge describes, Robinson Crusoe becomes not simply the much-loved saga of shipwreck and survival but an archetypal story on many levels, imbued with mythic overtones. Maximillian Novak describes Defoe's era as one which "abandoned older myths and tried to shape new ones." Thus, though "the world of Defoe's fiction gives the impression of historic truth and reality, the underlying material often belongs to a world of abstract ideas, myth, and fantasy."5 A significant aspect of this "underlying material" is indeed a "myth of the self," but not the new one Defoe and his contemporaries believed they were inventing. The pervasive theme of cannibalism in Robinson Crusoe is related to the myth of Cronus. In the legend Cronus (early on identified with Saturn by the Romans) must devour his own offspring to prevent their overthrowing his kingdom. As a deity Cronus is linked with fertility rites (the Roman Saturnalia) and harvest festivals. The concept central to this myth is related to the social practice of totemism, in which some totemic societies consume their totem representative—the father or creator of the tribe. 3 Cf. E. Pearlman's, "Robinson Crusoe and the Cannibals," Mosaic 10 (1976), 39-55. Though his treatment of the topic is similar to mine, his argument has a more markedly psychoanalytic bent and arrives at different conclusions, including Crusoe's relationship with his father. 4 Lodge, p. 22. Kenneth Burke, A Grammar of Motives (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), explains the metaphorical...