Great Authors - Literature of the Renaissance - Defoe, Robinson Crusoe

[Music] robinson crusoe is a novel which is sometimes nowadays denigrated as uh being rather insubstantial it's sometimes treated as a rather plural adventure story suitable for adolescence perhaps but not having much in the way of literary substance and i'd like to try and argue against that proposition today i'd like to try and show that robinson crusoe is first of all the first of the great english novels but second of all and i think this is very important i guess it's the crux of my argument i'd like to say that it offers us a way of looking at the enlightenment or rather that robinson crusoe is a sort of epitome of the enlightenment project an epitome of the way the culture of western europe in the beginning of the 18th century looked at nature and the rest of the world and if in fact defoe does that in the course of a 200 or 250 page novel it is a great literary achievement and whatever crude crude qualities we may find in the plot and difficulties we may find in his addiction to encapsulate and epitomize an entire intellectual trend in one work of fiction is a great intellectual achievement independent of any of its other literary merits now one way of thinking about robinson crusoe is to say that it represents the construction of a new hero for a new time in he was published in 1719 and at that time english commercial capitalism was perhaps the most important economic force in the world england was becoming extremely wealthy this wealth had the quality of changing social relations changing society and in particular it raised new questions about how human beings are going to relate to each other how they're going to relate to nature and how they should think about their new condition if you think about the history of western literature you might say that the homeric hero is a perfect epitome of the kind of the mindset and the thought about society and virtue that's characteristic of ancient greece i think it would be equally true to say that the otherworldly medieval saint or the kind of the strenuous and strict pursuer of christian virtue would be characteristic of the middle ages uh you could think of every man the morality play every man as instantiating what the the good or virtuous person of the middle ages strove for and that would be a sort of literary representation of that i'd like to say that robinson crusoe represents the enlightenment man and i would use the term man specifically it's meant to sp to refer directly to males and i'll try and explain why it's specifically enlightenment man that's talked about here let's think about the enlightenment to put this into context there are at least two fundamental themes to the enlightenment to the age of reason which happens roughly speaking between 1600 and 1800 in western culture the first of the main themes of the enlightenment is the domination of nature newtonian mechanics the development of modern natural science was at the foundation of enlightenment thought and the breakthroughs made by enlightenment thinkers in some respects all the other activities of culture social thought political theory and literature as well is in some ways beholden to the development of modern natural science at the marrow or at the core of the enlightenment we have a new relationship with nature our relationship which allows people that understand this new science to manipulate and dominate nature for their own purposes so the manipulation and domination of nature is one of the fundamental characteristics of the enlightenment and amazingly enough it'll turn out to be one of the fundamental characteristics of robinson crusoe point number two a second main theme in the enlightenment is the relationship with other cultures particularly non-western cultures the enlightenment comes in the wake of the age of exploration it is founded on the development of science and technology and in the process of exploring the rest of the world and exploiting the rest of the world economically the existence of cultures that don't know christianity that have completely different orientations towards the world or towards nature or towards society posed a certain kind of problem for western culture how will western man think about the other how will he think about what are described as savages well robinson crusoe epitomizes that problem and articulates some possible responses to that problem so the argument that i want to make here essentially first of all is that robinson crusoe is enlightenment man and the process of robinson crusoe's coming to dominate nature and coming to dominate the other natives that he finds on his island or that he has contact with on his island is a sort of allegory about the relationship between western culture and first of all nature and second of all other societies it's this allegorical element or allegorical kind of marrow to robinson crusoe that i think makes it a great novel now if you think about what robinson crusoe does in the uh when he's on the island what you'll find is that he goes through all the stages of technological and cultural development and he does it as an individual rather than as a society in other words he's shipwrecked with nothing and then he starts from ground zero think of that as being natural man which is perhaps the most important concept in the political theory of the enlightenment natural man thrust into the state of nature forced to manipulate nature in order to satisfy his needs that's exactly characteristic of robinson crusoe uh plato in the republic uh said that the city is like the man or that the individual is like society that there's some sort of isomorphic relationship between the qualities and properties and development of the individual and the society as a whole well what i'd like to suggest is that robinson crusoe's career on the island his relationship with nature and is coming to dominate nature through the use of reason which is always capitalized in this novel incidentally which tips you off to something important his use of reason and is coming to dominate the less developed people that he encounters is a sort of allegory about the way the west dealt with the rest of the world his process then is our process what i'm saying here is something like this that robinson crusoe offers us a new hero for a new age not like the medieval saint not like the ancient greek homeric hero robinson crusoe is a hero of productivity he's a hero of prudence a hero of development or if not just development a hero of diligence all these things are usually not associated with a hero you can't it's hard to think of someone like achilles plowing it seems rather unheroic it's hard to think of one of the great medieval mystics being concerned with growing barley and rice remember what jesus says my kingdom is not of this world who cares if you have something to eat as long as you're having ecstatic visions well it doesn't work that way for robinson cruz so he doesn't have much in the way of ecstatic visions he occasionally has the fearful dream but he lives in a very natural world and he is a very practical man one of the reasons why karl marx hated this book so much is that it is such an english book particularly it epitomizes english society at the time of commercial capitalism robinson crusoe is unrelentingly acquisitive at the same time he is also deeply religious not at the beginning of the book but by the end of the book so in some respects you can say that robinson crusoe not only exemplifies and epitomizes enlightenment man you might want to say that he brings together and marries two intellectual traditions which are foundational to western culture the tradition that comes out of athens and the traditions which comes out of jerusalem and these two traditions are married together in a rather uneasy alliance as we will see when we look at the plot of the novel so there's a lot going on philosophically in this novel in other words it's not just a novel for adolescent boys now rousseau thought i mean i don't know if any of you know rousseau's novel the emil well in the emile he is writing about the topic of education and how it is possible to educate a young man in such a way that society doesn't corrupt him and above all it's very important that we keep him away from books except one book robinson crusoe in other words rousseau writing at the middle of the 18th century thinks that robinson crusoe is not just one of the great works of western literature but also that it's one of the very very few that does not corrupt youth and my suspicion is that he thinks so because it epitomizes all these important tendencies in western culture and it leaves out extraneous things that might tempt a young man to go astray so let's look at at the structure of the novel itself now that we know what's going on in other words i'm trying to argue that this is what the real philosophical import of this novel is and that to read it just as an adventure story is fine when you're 15 but if you go back and read it at 30 you'll see something totally different maybe that's true of all novels i'm not entirely sure first of all let's look at the characters now one of the nice things about crusoe is that there's not many people there and it's easy to talk about who does what it's not like doing war and peace where you spend all day talking about who does what to whom same sort of problem we get with cervantes here we have a very small number of characters first and foremost the most important character in this novel is god i know that may sound very strange since he never appears and never says anything but it turns out that from the perspective of defoe god is the strong silent type in other words god is always present and he is always running the world in his providential way for his providential reasons and as the character of crusoe develops his relationship with god changes and he becomes something like job in other words god's faithful servant who accepts whatever providence dishes out and ultimately reconciles himself to the idea that god being perfectly just does things for his own inscrutable reasons so god is very important in this novel and it's not just any god in other words i've often thought that christianity has such a long and varied history that there are many christians who worship different gods or have different conceptions of what the deity is and the deity of robinson crusoe is nothing like the deity of say the middle ages in the middle ages when god somehow reveals himself to an individual it's in the form of ecstatic visions think of someone like or saint teresa of avila or any of the great mystics of the christian tradition when god appears it's always some sort of ecstatic vision some sort of illumination which is direct and powerful something like uh the the night of fire that pascal had that i'll talk about in another lecture direct immediate profound and yet metaphysical apprehension of the divine mind crusoe's god is nothing like that crusoe's god is a very practical god crusoe's god is a very useful god it's the kind of god that would be invented by a bourgeois englishman in the middle of the end of the development of commercial capitalism he's the god that sends good stuff he's the god that rewards diligence that rewards prudence that rewards hard work his god is a kind of celestial foreman he supervises what you do he doesn't say anything so long as you work real hard and when he reveals himself you don't get a vision of jesus on the cross you don't get a direct direct information from angels when god reveals himself to robinson crusoe he does so in the form of barley rice is the way god reveals himself in this novel and you can see in some ways why marx hated this novel so much what is a more crass or in some respect more this worldly interpretation of what divine providence amounts to than the fact that barley sprouts is a long rhapsodic treatment of the development of barley in the middle of this book which is altogether too long but it seems appropriate to defoe because his god is a very practical thing if god didn't give you stuff i'm not so sure that he'd be all that religious but the fact that god reveals his will through the sprouting of rice and through the growing of barley accidentally there's a long passage in which def in which robinson crusoe comes to know that yes god is supervising all the things that have happened to me all the chastisements that i've gotten i've deserved because of my evil here also we'll find that crusoe's or crusoe's god is not the inscrutable god of job if you remember the book of job when god sends bad stuff to job it's for no good reason and that's part of the point you know god knows what he's doing and you don't and that's the way the world is sometimes crusoe does connect himself to job he takes sections out of the book of job he talks about theodicy a great deal and in addition he also tries to figure out why god would do this bad stuff to him he thinks he's a nice guy and some of the explanations that he gives that is to say god has sent uh these evils and these chastisements to him on account of his sins and on account of his uh his uh transgressions well he thinks that that's really what god does in other words god's not entirely inscrutable you can see that because of my sinful nature he's done this to me and we'll talk about the problem of theodicy in this novel because it's an important issue in english literature at least since the time of milton and it's an important issue in western culture at least back to the book of job here we have a rather crass and materialistic interpret interpretation god is up to a point predictable and comprehensible and the only misfortunes that come into the world are supervised and ordained by god but always for a reason and usually accessible to the sort of person that has the sort of religious inclinations of crusoe now so we have a very practical useful god here the god that helps us out with agriculture and things like that the second most important novel is crucial or second most important character is crusoe himself now crusoe is a very unattractive person i mean i don't know how many of you have read this novel but one of the reasons why marx disliked it so much is that he seems to have almost nothing in the way of personality in the first place he is a good instantiation of what the economists like adam smith later on in the century would call homo economicus he lives in order to consume stuff and he lives in order to acquire things he spends the whole novel acquiring stuff even stuff that he has no practical use for why he likes acquiring things it is a very 18th century british novel in that respect in other words the if you can mention the caricature of the kind of swineish consuming englishman the the kind of person who's who who's in whose entirety of their thoughts or organized around the problem of acquiring and consuming acquiring and consuming i think you have a pretty good read on robinson crusoe if you look back at the philosophy of hobbes who says that human beings are socially automata that go and try and and satisfy their desires in as best they can and as often and thoroughly as they can in the course of their encounter with nature that would be a good way of thinking of robinson crusoe the difference between a strictly economic interpretation of crusoe or a strictly hobbs interpretation of crusoe is that you might say that robert crusoe is economic man with a profound religious neurosis because not only does he have to consume stuff but he's obsessed with the problem of how to justify himself how to find out why it is god does this stuff to him because god's existence is never doubted right that's the the kind of portion of this that comes from jerusalem and in addition he somehow feels a sense of guilt the weight of sin even when he's doing wrong intentionally the sin or the idea the misgivings about his motivations misgivings about his moral status are in the novel from the very beginning right as a matter of fact he doesn't he only goes to see against the advice of his father and later on he calls that his original sin right the allegory is quite transparent there uh in addition to being a kind of acquiring acquisitive consuming sort of figure robinson crusoe is unimaginably cold he is perhaps the least emotional figure to central to any novel in the western tradition i can't think of anyone with less emotion and i'll try and give you examples of the hard-heartedness of this guy when i talk about the plot of the novel but he seems to have nothing in the way of human emotions he spends 28 years on a deserted island and you know towards the end of it he gets friday and encounters the savages and the various kind of castaways but at least for the first 20 years or so he's entirely alone and he never taught he doesn't really talk very much about loneliness he doesn't seem to fall into despair you don't get much in the way of emotional reactions his uh journal what he writes about himself or what he says about himself in the course of the novel are things like started sewing for the field today or started domesticating goats last month things like that and the whole of the novel his whole 20 years of being alone are essentially about a his relationships with nature and how he comes to dominate nature to get the things that he wants and be his religious neuroses and why he's finally realized that god did this bad stuff to him he really feels sorry for his sins so apart from that he seems to simply lack the usual compliment of human emotions he doesn't have sex for years and years and you don't notice any problem there um he does finally get married at the end of the novel in like roughly speaking the last page and you don't even meet his wife i mean she just comes in they get married they have some kids and he takes off again so they can write to the secret so the default can write the sequel to the book i'm not joking that's exactly what happens he comes in stays about five months and says you know what i want to do i want to go to c and you got to think that's crazy you just got married to a woman that doesn't get introduced into this novel because she's really peripheral to this novel as all women are i'll try and explain why and he doesn't seem to have anything in the way of emotional attachments does he fall in love well he doesn't talk about love he talks about commerce and that in some respects makes him a kind of parody almost of the perfect enlightenment figure he's not only a rationalist and an empiricist and a manipulator of nature but his emotions are regulated and restricted to the point of sterility i mean there's nothing like him for just total lack of emotion i know the last lecture was on julian sorelle and this guy is nothing like julian sorel he's not a heroic emotional figure now there are two uh actually there's one other no figure in the novel and this one other figure is repeated endless times that's the savage capital t capital s in other words savages don't have a great deal in the way of personality at least not in this novel why well think about the way western culture at the height of its imperialistic ambitions viewed the rest of the world there's us and there's the savages but fortunately for us there are two different kinds of savage there's savage number one who's in this case named friday and savage number one is the good savage capital g capital s and the good savage is the kind of savage that wants to become your butler in other words a good savage is somebody that wants to be economically exploited wants to learn christianity and wants to follow you around and carry your clothing right it's somebody that naturally says well yes i'd like to enslave myself to you thank you for saving me from from cannibalism right that's the good savage that's the western europeans idea of attractable civilizable educable savage and all the other savages in the world are the bad savage capital b capital s and the bad savages are all cannibals and should all be killed and they are doesn't that really encapsulate the entire process of western genocide think about it it's a justification of slavery it's a justification of wars of oppression it's a justification of colonialism and imperialism and this is not just taken i mean off the cuff think of what time of the place and time we're talking about here this is 1719 when the book is published and we're in england they have an enormous commercial empire and they've met good savages and bad savages and the good savages became butlers are one way or another economically exploited by the english and the bad savages have to be killed because they're cannibals and they won't accept christianity and they deserve to be killed get the idea in other words it is a microcosm of the western europeans connection with nature and connection with other societies so we got good savages and we got bad savages and that's all the people in the novel very few okay now let's think about the novel itself there's a saying in biology that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny i know that's a kind of a deep set of words it doesn't mean a great deal beyond this that in the process of coming into being an individual specimen will go through all the stages of development that the species had gone through usually it's referred to when you look at human fetuses uh at the second month the fetus has a tail back to our simian or canine ancestors i don't know what the actual isomorphism is at some level of development the fetus has gills i assume that's back to the fish or whatever it is kind of animals that have gills in other words in the process of coming into being each individual person has to recapitulate the entire history of the species and that is what this novel is about that's the plot what does he do well let's start from the beginning he's with his dad now think of god the father as dad and dad says stay home son stay home live the middling sort of life don't try to be an aristocrat because you're not don't try and be impoverished because then you're impoverished best thing you can do is stay home here i'll give you a comfortable existence and we're here in the garden of eden unless i'm mistaken which turns out to be england think that over all right so here we are in the garden of eden you know what he does he disobeys dad figure it out right so there we get the fall of man and he later on the novel says that was my original fall that was my original sin okay we get the idea you know lays it on a little bit heavy right remember the novel is kind of a new thing in 1719 they haven't worked out all the the kind of kind of finesses and this is not a lava a novel loaded with finesse if he says anything once he says it 20 times if he symbolizes anything once he symbolizes it again and again and again and the kind of heavy-handed symbols well he goes to c and the first thing happens god warns him not god as his father but god as real god capital g and there's a terrible storm and the sailor who or the captain of the ship says this is a providential warning from god do not go to sea so of course robinson crusoe goes back on land and immediately finds another ship so he can go to sea why stubborn satanic pride insistence on having his own way willfulness in the face of god's or you know demands things like that essentially sin i mean to put it really simply sin all the things that crusade does in the first part of the novel are sin or almost all of them and he has the appropriate chastisement for his sins by getting shipwrecked comes to know that comes to repent his sins and amazingly enough he's saved the allegory is quite transparent so he goes to see and what does he do well he decides that he's going to trade on the coast of africa why because he wants to accumulate things he'd like to take advantage of the ignorant savages and give them trinkets and you know go beads and things like that and get back gold dust he is an acquisitive figure he lives in order to consume things so he goes out and makes several trips to africa makes a ton of money makes a great deal of money and says well if i made a lot of money last trip i better make another trip really quickly so i can make even more money he is caught up with the idea uh if you know karl marx's book capital mcm he starts out with money he turns it into a commodity sells the commodity and then he has more money well he keeps on doing that he lives in order to produce money to accumulate wealth he doesn't accumulate a tremendous amount of wealth he accumulates nearly enough to get to the station in life that middling station in life that his father had suggested which shows you the vanity and futility of going against both god the or the the demands of god and his father but of course just when he's getting to that middling stage in life which his father had told him to pursue then tragedy or evil strikes he is captured by muslim pirates now note the connection between muslim and pirate right i mean just not just any old muslims muslim pirates christian pirates know that that wouldn't fit into the overall scheme of this novel i mean that'd make them all uncomfortable so we got muslim pirates they enslave him naturally enough that being what pirates do i mean it's one of the most ethnocentric novels imaginable so they enslave him but clever reasonable robinson crusoe figures out how to get away uh the muslims send them out foolish muslims that they are send them out to do a little fishing in a boat with guns and water and food which shows just how gullible muslim pirates are well after doing that he happens to have a slave boy in the boat with him and his name is zuri and he says hey zuri you know we're out of here i mean here we are they let us out and we're going into deep water we're gone so he manages to coast up and down uh the african the coast of western africa and of course what does he meet there savages some of them are good savages the kind that just give you food for nothing right and are amazed at the fact that you have gunpowder and stuff like that and some of them are bad savages and they're all cannibals and they need to be killed but there aren't enough of us to kill them so we just better get out of their way which is what he does moves up and down the coast of africa and he's eventually rescued by a portuguese mariner a good man even though he is a catholic there's a certain kind of religious uh religiously uh tolerant view or at least within the christian religions there's a certain degree of tolerance advocated in this book and he's picked up by a portuguese mariner says look i'm going to brazil you want to come and since they're in the middle of nowhere and they're going to die he says sure i'll go so now what does he do what does a crusoe do well he says for the you know in the first case i'd like to pay you for my passenger cross because he's a good kind of businessman and look you pay you know you take you oh you got to pay and the captain is a very kind-hearted and kind of christian man says no i won't take any money but i would like to buy zuri from you who's now your slave and he sells them and he says well i have some qualms about this ah shucks you know i mean the kid really doesn't belong to me i used to be a slave i know how bad it is i tell you what i just filmed here as an indentured servant for 10 years how about that and zuri being a good savage capital g capital s says yeah i really want to be a slave says yeah please enslave me i would like to work for this guy for 10 years without getting paid are we very accommodating savages in this novel um so what do we get these guys go to they go to brazil missouri is enslaved and you know what once he gets to brazil he starts a plantation and because he's a diligent hard-working prudent kind of a guy he makes a ton of money but since he's living in a catholic province he has to move from the protestantism that he had in a shallow way been a part of in england to catholicism but he at this point he's not especially religious rather markedly irreligious plays his lip-service religion he said look one religion is one christian religion as good as another here i am making a ton of money i'm not leaving brazil just because i happen to have a different brand of christianity i'm staying here and you know i'll pray to anything as long as as long as it pays and you know what he wishes he says he has some qualms and he says you know i really wish that i hadn't sold zuri not as you might guess because it's a cruel thing to sell someone into slavery that you don't even own but rather you know i could do i get a lot more work done here and i could make a tremendous amount more money if i had somebody that would be willing to work for that would be coerced to work for me entirely cold and unemotional he has an entirely uh instrumental conception of other human beings he uses them for his purposes they are not ends in themselves right he violates what we call the categorical imperative he doesn't use them as ends in themselves he uses him as instruments by which to satisfy his own desires think about how western europeans related to the rest of the world there we go so he's there and he's working real hard because he's a good diligent englishman at the height of the enlightenment coasting along on the the wave of commercial capitalism and some of his for some of the planters around his area and brazil come to him and say you know we know that you have some experience at sea we know that you have some experience trading in africa tell you what we'll fund the cost of a of a slave expedition to africa you go to africa and you get a bunch of slaves for us we're not going to be too choosy about the means we're not going to ask any questions you bring them back and we'll give you your slice of the pie without any capital and he says wow i get labor without putting in any capital oh my i'm an enlightenment man i'm immediately going to go so he says sure get the boat together get the crew together let's go to african enslaved people what a charming guy remember this guy is just out of slavery he knows what it's like to be unjustly oppressed does it slow him down no immediately he says fine i want all i can get send us to africa we're going to bring back a bunch of slaves i get my slice of the pie we're all going to make a ton of money yeah the only difficulty is is that god is watching and god doesn't care for this so what's god going to providentially do shipwreck them and where does he ship wreck them well in a completely deserted place so that we can find ourselves in the state of nature now all of enlightenment political theory revolves around the concept of natural man in the state of nature and what do we get here we get unnatural man in the state of nature who is going to turn natural be naturalized by his expulsion from society forced to get down to human basics again and then reconstruct the entire history of western culture in other words ontogeny is going to recapitulate phylogeny rock and roll i mean this is this this argument dovetails beautifully now we send them out there now notice that the other people on the on the boat they get killed right they're all drowned and he doesn't have anybody else with him and one of the problems we see there is that well god must have his inscrutable reasons they had to be killed he had to be saved we'll find out later on that he attaches some sort of providential interpretation to this which is what you would expect from somebody like robinson crusoe who thinks on the one hand that he's sinful but also that he's one of god's chosen right he's still alive what does he do when he gets to the island well first thing he does is say oh my god what a mess this is next thing he does is the sensible and intelligent thing he gets everything he possibly can off the wreck which is the only smart way to handle that it'll take him a long time to manufacture his own guns and his own gun powder and his own iron work and things like that so he takes all that off and over the next 20 odd i think it's 28 years that he spends on the island he goes through all the phases of the development of civilization out of the state of nature he starts hunting right hunting and gathering why because that's the beginning of of culture what happens next they start to he starts to domesticate plants and start to grow things and domesticate animals because he says he's constantly being prudent and wondering wow i only have 20 years worth of powder here i want to make sure that i conserve it i only have about 40 gallons of liquor i want to make sure that i only have a half an ounce every year in other words if i were there i would certainly pour myself a stiff drink and have to think the problem over when he is rescued 28 years later most of the booze is still there why because he's a good prudent diligent kind of a guy still there well okay he's remorselessly acquisitive he's very calculating he's an extremely i mean an extreme epitome of the ruthlessly rationalistic manipulator of nature characteristic of the enlightenment he goes through all the phases of culture and then of course he encounters the other capital o and in the form of a very famous passage where he finds a naked footprint right on the say now it turns out not to be friday's footprint it's just some anonymous savage but for now i mean the safe thing to assume is that all savages are bad savages and of course you know what that means they have to be killed or they'll kill you they'll eat you something along those lines so he encounters these natural perverse creatures these savages and he hides of course and is very prudent and diligent and constantly banks his fires to make sure that they don't notice him and he's so so careful well he eventually can't avoid a contact with him and he sees that they have two captives that they are going to eat which is remember what savages do savages are all cannibals except of cour and even though even the ones that are good savages have to be weaned away from cannibalism but all savages i mean in other words all people that aren't westerners are essentially cannibals the lowest possible stratum of human existence now he rescues friday friday runs away people pursue him and he kills him and manages to spirit friday away and of course what does friday do gets down on his knees worships him says i'll forever be your slave he's a good savage a good savior somebody immediately says well you're the best thing in the world you are the the uh the kind of acme of human development and i would certainly like to voluntarily be your slave i owe you my life now what this hawks back to incidentally those of you who know john locke's second discourse on government about i don't know 17 1690 or so he makes a defense of slavery said look slaves taken in war as an alternative to killing them immediately can legitimate people taking what can legitimately be enslaved what is he doing reflecting the main trends in enlightenment political thought here right say it's a kind of hobby in relationship uh hobbs likes the idea of slavery too that you give to captains in war member we're all in a state of nature which means the state of war and if i spare somebody out of my munificence well okay then he has to be my slave that makes sense it's a kind of natural law interpretation which always turns out to favor the european next thing that happens more more savages come back as you would expect and this time they have a spaniard who had been shipwrecked on another part of the main continent and they also have as fate would turn out friday's father now one of the problems with this novel is there are few too many easy coincidences remember the novel hasn't been worked through very thoroughly in 1719 so there are a few too many crudities in the plot too many coincidences i mean lucky break it happens to be friday's dad there are 10 million savages back there on the mainland who comes ashore as a prisoner is going to be killed but that okay and there's a part in which uh he has uh crusoe has a dream which prefigures his relationship with friday and the savages that's a little dicey too but don't ask too much of the literary form remember it's infancy at this point if you think about what the allegory amounts to though i think you'll emerge with a kind of respect for this novel you hadn't had before so dad and the spaniard get rescued they kill the savages and now we have four people and for the in the first case since friday by now is not only a christian but a protestant christian crusoe decides that his society is going to have toleration of all christian religion of all religions not just all christian religions because friday's dad is naturally a pagan and a savage and believes in idols and all that sort of business and what he's doing here again back to say locks the arguments about toleration right the evils of religious warfare things like that and it may also i mean to be honest have something to do with a sort of indifference to doctrinal questions hey look look as god as long as god keeps providing barley right who cares about transubstantiation what difference does that make barley is barley who cares about abstract it doesn't matter all right i mean a very strange and peculiar conception of the deity so they get together and they decide they're going to build a big boat to get away sensible idea now here we have a plot twist thank god there's one well right now this is about the only plot twist in the whole novel fortunately and again one of those coincidences happens there's a shipwreck or not a shipwreck but a a band of mutineers comes to the island and they're going to dispose of the captain and the ones who are loyal to the to the mate uh to the captain um on the island and just maroon them and then they're going to go off and we're going to be pirates and plunder and do all the things that pirates do in the caribbean in the 18th century well carefully cleverly rationally crucial outfoxes them he captures them when they come on shore looking for water he eventually manages to get in contact with the captain release the captain and the loyal crew members from bondage bring them on secretly quietly onto the boat take control of the boat and amazingly enough he's rescued okay so now we have all we have a way of getting home he's been there 28 years but he has thought a great deal about god's providence he has developed a sense of his own sinfulness which he didn't have before and naturally once god is going i mean once he's developed an understanding of how he really relates to god the very peculiar god he worships well then god cuts him a break and sins go home now a couple of things we're thinking about here he leaves the captives or the uh the mutineers on the island he said look we can take you home to england and they're all going to ha you're all going to hang right because that's what we do with mutineers on the other hand since i was sent here for providential reasons i can't see why god's providence wouldn't work in your case there must be a reason why you're here we'll give you a choice you want to stay here i got a couple of nice houses i you know i have tilled fields i have domesticated goats i got all this great stuff so we'll leave you guys here show a certain degree of christian mercy after all you guys are christians and our europeans and we'll leave you here okay you deal with the savages they're your problem right but we'll cut you a break we'll let you stay here he goes home and amazingly enough here's the big break every all his property the property that is in brazil the property they had back in england all that has multiplied enormously i i love the idea of interest isn't it great and when you're away for 28 years and you can't touch the principle compound interest kicks in he's a capitalistic kind of a guy so he comes home and he's hugely successful in everything he's undertaken isn't that amazing and people thought he was dead so they inherited his stuff but when he turns up alive they all give it back to him because they're all perfectly honest they're europeans after all and not only are they all perfectly honest but they're all perfectly diligent just like him and they've made a fortune yeah all right i mean it's like that little happy ending that gets attacked onto the book of job all right all this bad stuff here you you learned what the deal is let's go now you're rich and it's as a kind of afterthought or and then there's a there's a kind of digressive part of the novel which doesn't really belong there where they talk about wolves and bears and the natural dangers that are in that are still in europe at the time but that should have been chucked out i mean the book needs an editor but i mean given that difficulty that kind of difficult kind of crudity in the plot um he comes home and then we've got about three pages left so it's time for crucial to get married i have children we're quite everyone that's been nice to him and that's developed money for him and taking care of his property they all get their slice of the pie as well i mean he's a capitalistic kind of a guy i mean everybody deserves their big you know a bite of the big pie so he gives that to them and he says you know what i should get married and he says uh you you let's get married i mean the woman doesn't get introduced or hardly introduced she doesn't have any personality and and then he says well i better go to c again now psychologically this is not especially plausible i get shipwrecked for 28 years i'm not getting in a boat again i don't know about you i mean think about it he says well now that i'm married i think i'm going to leave and i'm really rich i think i'll go for an adventure a damn fool thing to do if you think about it but he goes back his colony is flourishing he is the the owner of this colony natural law natural right there were savages there before but they don't have natural rights in quite the same sense that europeans do so it's his now and the people there the land belongs to him and the people work for him and he cuts them a slice of the pie and of course he's making even more money and then of course the book ends now there'll be a sequel to this it's kind of return i mean they call it part two but actually return of crusoe or not quite son of crusoe but you get the idea i mean if it were a movie would be just crusoe part two or crusoe too something like that and there uh friday finally dies now it's very interesting charles dickens the english novelist uh was appalled by this novel if you know the novels of dickens right it's constantly about impoverished children that tug at your heartstrings and just break your heart with the sentimentality i mean it's a little too saccharine but dickens read this novel and he said in some ways it's quite moving and gripping but i just can't figure out this guide to foe i mean he's living you know after defoe is dead but he said i looked at this and i said about that death of friday in book two it occupies about a paragraph friday gets sick and then it dies let's move on let's go make some more money you know fridays friday is no big deal dickens said if i had written that passage about friday's death it would have been 10 times longer and when i finished there would not have been a dry eye in the house and he's absolutely right the coldness that we see in crusoe is i think mirrored in defoe's depiction of inter of human interactions i mean you get married well we got a paragraph let's let's get married let's wrap things up friday's dead well let's kick him out and let's go make some more money a very cold and unemotional treatment of the human condition now i want to talk some a little bit about the philosophical implications of this novel he's riding the wave of the enlightenment he's right at the crest of it robin defoe some of the things that come in first of all how about the labor theory of value right real important to english political economy goes all the way back to locke who introduces the idea of the labor theory of value cruci and this is one of the things that appalled marx what a rude guy uh robinson crusoe is because he doesn't want him he doesn't want to squander anything or waste any of his uh of his effort and his activity he keeps a ledger now since you can't have an economy with just one person you can't buy and sell from yourself he keeps a ledger of what he does and how long how much time it takes to do it in other words the amount of labor that goes into a given activity is what the activity is worth that's what the labor theory of value is go back and read lock the second second treatise another idea if you look at the ancient political tradition that goes back to aristotle aristotle says that the minimal unit of society is the family this flatly contradicts that the reason why there are no women in this novel is because he's trying to suggest the minimal unit of society is the atomized individual that's why women are more or less superfluous you don't have to reproduce you by yourself are sufficient to be a whole society whereas anyone in the ancient and medieval political tradition would not have accepted that idea that is a particular an idea characteristic of the enlightenment we're going to add to my society down to its minimal unit and the minimal unit is no longer the family okay his experiences on the island in a kind of uncanny way reflect the alienation and loneliness of the bourgeois individual of the ego that exists only in order to consume things and in order to get a new angle on how to make money that has very little in the way of emotional or ties or ties to a community he is a community what does he need to be tied to anybody for he can actually recapitulate the entire history of western of western development and my favorite passage of this book and i can't help but read you a little bit is theodicy ah it's really heartwarming crusoe's idea of theodicy involves double entry bookkeeping which is what you would think of a kind of commercial kind of a thinker he says at one point why am i here what's going on here so he actually makes up a list he says here's the good things about being here and here's the bad things let's see how god comes out point number one evil i'm cast upon a horrible desolate island void of all hope of recovery on the other hand good but i am alive and not drowned as all my ship's company was under evil i'm singled out and separated as it were from all the world to be miserable good but i'm singled out too from all the ship's crew to be spared from death and he that miraculously saved me from death can deliver me from this condition i have no clothes to cover me he says look god come on quick quick quick where are the clothes but i am in a hot i'm in a hot climate where if i had clothes i could hardly wear them right i had to put them away somewhere and i could sell them when i finally get to get away from here in other words there's a long list of things he says well here's the good things god god has done for me here's the bad things god has done for me he gets down to the bottom line he does the mathematics and it turns out that god is in the black god has been doing good stuff from and that's the odyssey there's god's revelation of his plan to the world what a crass and materialistic interpretation you can see why marx hated this and in some respects it's not entirely clear why russo liked it so much or at least that part that passage anyway now the problem of theodicy is dealt with quite extensively in the course of the book and not just in the form of double entry bookkeeping friday is having christianity explain to him and he says in his usual kind of garbled version of english so uh since god is all-powerful and the devil is really bad how come god just doesn't kill him why hasn't he killed him a long time ago and crusoe first asked first is puzzled and doesn't want to seem puzzled because he's european so he acts like he doesn't hear it right which is kind of evasive unpleasant response and so friday repeats the question he says look why doesn't you tell me that god is there and that this bad stuff happens so why doesn't god just eliminate the bad stuff what's going on crucifer says look i'll explain it to you some other time uh look it all works out in the end trust me about this in other words he doesn't know right he can give you certain explanations he can try and be like job's friends i could think oh yeah i understand this but in fact he doesn't so he can't quite respond to the fair and complete legitimate questions that friday offers now let me conclude by thinking a little bit about uh the overall significance of this novel one way of thinking about it would be that here we have the enlightened the man of the enlightenment epitomized all right and shown in his relationship to nature which is the and the domination nature is a foundational element in the enlightenment project and it is domination of the rest of the world particularly the rest of the world societies and this is you know at the bottom of the enlightenment we might also want to think a little bit i mean to move away from the novel a little bit about our own condition and how we relate to this novel it's often seemed to me that the image of crusoe's wrecked ship tells us or at least hints to us certain things about our relationship to biblical religion i know that may sound like a big jump but i don't think it is we live now in an age in which we some respects have been cast amidst a desolate nature in which it's harder and harder for biblical religion to be taken seriously by the professoria or the kind of the intellectuals of our culture and yet we relate to this tradition of biblical religion in some respects the way crusoe related to the hulk of his ship even though the ship is grounded on a reef and will never sail again there are many things of enormous value here that might well be stripped off before we let it go these things have taken an age to accumulate and represent the representative wisdom of the entire western tradition in many respects and we ignore that and kind of waste that at our peril that is one of the possible morals to take from this and it's the most arresting image of the in the novel so it's not only an important statement about the culture of enlightenment it may well tell us something about the world in which we live

Channel: Michael Sugrue

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Keywords: Michael Sugrue, Dr. Michael Sugrue, Lecture, History, Philosophy, Western Culture, Western Intellectual Tradition, Western Literary Tradition, Author, Literature, Great Authors, Renaissance, Defoe, Robinson Crusoe

Id: CoktDNZ9Wx0

Length: 47min 2sec (2822 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 10 2020