Crusoes and Other Castaways in Modern French Literature: Solitary Adventures by Joseph Acquisto (review)

Should we read the words ‘Robinson Crusoe’ as a name, an identity, a condition, or as a symbol, a trope, a fable infinitely adaptable to different times and perspectives? There is no doubt that the seemingly perpetual rediscoveries and rewritings of Defoe’s tale surpass immeasurably the specificities of the story of the shipwrecked sailor Alexander Selkirk on which the original novel was based. It is, in the words of Michel Tournier, ‘une histoire que tout le monde connaît déjà’ (Le Vent paraclet (Paris: Gallimard, 1976), p. 189), a story known without one needing to read it, and for that very reason all the more susceptible to a variety of interpretations and alternative configurations: these may extend, interrogate, subvert, or transform completely the original theme as writers exploit the foundational story for different didactic, philosophical, moral, social, or aesthetic purposes. Joseph Acquisto states that the mythic value of ‘Crusoe’ functions as an idea rather than a text, and his study, accordingly, is not restricted to reinterpretations of Robinson Crusoe but extends to ‘solitary adventure’ narratives and poems that feature a castaway figure in a more general sense, whether via explicit reference to Defoe or by indirect — and sometimes brief — allusion. Isolation may be geographical or psychological, the adventure outwards into a wider, estranging world, or inwards towards the unfathomable depths of the psyche. Acquisto argues convincingly that in successive French rewritings from the nineteenth century to the present day the practical and essentially pragmatic concerns of Defoe’s hero are gradually infused with an exploration of the mental terrain of the protagonist. The castaway story is interiorized as the space of the remote island is metamorphosed into the space of the mind: experience becomes imaginative, activity becomes contemplation, and the voyage is transformed into the exploratory adventure of reading. The first chapter examines Rousseau’s heritage and the movements away from his particular and selective response to the novel in works by Étienne Pivert de Senancour, Pétrus Borel, and Balzac. Chapter 2, after surveying a series of popular robinsonnades that, if little read now, serve to articulate the moral and educative concerns of the time, moves on to consider the key transitional role of Jules Verne’s philosophical questioning and deconstructive narration. The third chapter addresses the shift towards a more introspective approach and links the solitary adventure to the act of individualized reading, which leads in turn to a reinvigoration of the castaway figure in twentieth-century poetic writing: in works by Léon Dierx, André Gide, Saint-John Perse, Francis Jammes, and Paul Valéry the exploration of subjectivity and the act of introspection become integral to the action that unfolds. The final two chapters examine the modern period from Jean Giraudoux, Henri Crouzat, through the transformative narration of Tournier — with appropriate reservations about its claim to openness of interpretation — and on to more recent experimentations that play upon issues of language, reality, and social identity. All in a sense are translations operating within an intertextual frame even when radically subverting the form of the narrative.