We Must Call the Classics before a Court of Shipwrecked Men

What if we put to our texts the injunction of the Spanish intellectual Jose Ortega y Gasset—"We must call the classics before a court of shipwrecked men to answer certain peremptory questions with reference to real life"? The answer that emerges from an investigation of several literary works depicting a shipwrecked person who has access to one or more texts—Shakespeare's Tempest, Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, Stevenson's Treasure Island, and, at one point, Dante's Inferno—points to the transformative power of such texts. Ortega's own work lead to an exploration of authenticity and vocation in Vergil's Aeneid.