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  • Crusoe's Absence
  • Barbara Fuchs (bio)

Robinson Crusoe appears so firmly planted on his island, and that island so abundantly rendered, that it is hard for the reader to think of where he is not. Yet Crusoe's absence is as significant as his presence, enabling the reinsertion of his narrative into broader contexts of interimperial rivalry, Atlantic sugar, and a more nuanced history of the novel. If, as postcolonial criticism has shown, Crusoe's experience is part of the longue durée of race and empire in the West, it must be considered in light of the earlier Iberian as well as the subsequent Dutch, French, and English imperial projects, transcending our standard disciplinary arrangements of Renaissance versus Enlightenment or English versus foreign literature. Reading Robinson Crusoe in relation to the layered and entangled history of colonialism in the Atlantic world reveals the partiality of viewing the protagonist on his island as an English exemplar.

My study has a curious phenomenological history, which I offer to suggest how rarely our readings are jostled beyond our usual lines of inquiry. Scheduled to teach Robinson Crusoe immediately after a family driving trip, I subjected everyone to the audiobook as we drove among the national parks of Utah. Aside from confirming the novel's archetypal status—"when will Friday show up?" my children wanted to know, even though they had never read the book—listening to the entire text along hundreds of miles had a remarkable leveling effect. Instead of focusing on what I had already decided was important, as I would have on rereading it, I heard all of it and discovered much that complicated what I already thought I knew. In [End Page 27] particular, I was struck by the protagonist's lengthy account near the end of the narrative of what had occurred to his investment in "the Brasils" while he spent twenty-eight years on the island. This Brazilian experience—not merely before or after but during Crusoe's time on the island, as he becomes, in essence, an absentee planter—seemed to me newly significant given the remarkable amount of detail that attends this moment in the text.

What happens in Brazil while Crusoe is away? Suspended in an indeterminate state, given the lack of any word that its owner is alive or proof that he is dead, his capital nonetheless grows significantly in the care of his partner, the appointed trustees, and their heirs after their deaths.,1 As Crusoe learns from his old friend, "the Captain of the Ship, who first took me up at Sea, off the shore of Africk" (RC, 201), a complex set of legal and economic mechanisms set in motion by Crusoe's absence has shepherded his estate through the entire period that he has been missing from his plantation:

… upon the general Belief of my being cast away, and drown'd, my Trustees had given in the Account of the Produce of my Part of the Plantation, to the Procurator Fiscal, who had appropriated it, in Case I never came to claim it; one Third to the King, and two Thirds to the Monastery of St. Augustine, to be expended for the Benefit of the Poor, and for the Conversion of the Indians to the Catholick Faith; but that if I appear'd, or any one for me, to claim the Inheritance, it should be restor'd; only that the Improvement, or Annual Production, being distributed to charitable Uses, could not be restor'd; but he assur'd me, that the Steward of the King's Revenue (from Lands) and the Proviedore, or Steward of the Monastery, had taken great Care all along, that the Incumbent, that is to say my Partner, gave every Year a faithful Account of the Produce, of which they receiv'd duly my Moeity.

(RC, 201–2)

This glimpse of "capital's power for self-sustaining growth," as Marxist economist Stephen Hymer perceptively put it long ago, is only the beginning of Crusoe's account of how his Brazilian plantations have fared, which continues for several pages in the text.2 The extraordinary amount of detail about the road not taken is almost disorienting. Yet...

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