chapter 1
Crusoe is the son of German immigrants. He’s second generation. His parents already stranded on an isle - only, as his father makes clear, happily so. His father urges Robinson to enter the “middle station” in life, which is where he has landed up, working in merchandise. His father stresses that it’s better to be neither in the upper nor the lower classes. Robinson, however, wants to see the world and ignores his father’s advice. He embarks on a ship. The year is 1651, not that long after Shakespeare’s Tempest. The shipwreck was already a key trope. Apart from the Tempest, there is also Pericles, and countless others. The shipwreck as the agency of destiny, precipitating change (likewise in the Odyssey). Of particular note to an island culture; Crusoe’s first journey is from Hull to London, although this too ends in a shipwreck, which is a forbearer of the shipwreck to come.
chapter 2
Slavery. One imagines that Defoe is running the full gamut of contemporary paranoias. That of being on the other side of the slave trade must have been high in the contemporary consciousness. Perhaps what this shows is the awareness of the obscene nature of the condition of slavery. No doubt, many incorporated slaves into normality; but the phobia that “this could happen to me” suggests an awareness that slavery wasn’t an act of god; it was an institution which involved the oppression of fellow humans. Am trying to put my finger on a contemporary idea that exercises similar hold on the imagination, and the one that seems closest is that of the immigrant, from Africa or Asia or Central America. (Once again the trope of the shipwreck.)
chapter 3
So this chapter possibly lays waste to my reflections above. Crusoe escapes from slavery and makes his way to Brazil, where he settles down as a plantation owner and makes a lot of money, planting tobacco. There are two strands to this section of the story. Firstly he experiences loneliness as an immigrant. He feels himself to be on a desert island (did his parents feel the same way when they arrived?) and his wealth means little to him. The other is that he accepts a commission to go and buy slaves from the African coast, at the behest of his fellow plantation owners. Knowing that the plan is to exchange fripperies for humans. Defoe doesn’t seem to offer any kind of judgement on Crusoe for this action, which is taken more in a spirit of adventure than action. He cannot resist the lure of another voyage, after four sedentary years. The chapter closes with another shipwreck, this time one which will land him on the desert island, somewhere in the tropics. Is the shipwreck retribution for his slave trading? It doesn’t appear so. If this is what Defoe intends, the message is subliminal at best.
chapter 4
Arrival on the island. We enter a more technological chapter; albeit one which is driven by the resources Crusoe rescues from the ship. The process of recovering items from the ship takes up much of the chapter. Crusoe salvages all kind of tools, including weapons and gunpowder. In a sense, he is a colonialist, a Pizarro or a Cortes, only one with no apparent empires to conquer. He arrives on uncharted shores with slender but advanced resources, sufficient to offer him a degree of security. Technology is his saviour. There’s also an issue with the timeline; the second half of the chapter relates, briefly, the construction of his camp, which takes over a year and very few pages. Time has ceased to have much relevance. There’s surprisingly little about how he produces food: a few goats are killed and there were provisions from the boat, but as yet no detail regarding crops or diet.
chapter 5
The first half of the chapter feels like filler. Defoe offers Crusoe’s diary, which merely repeats what has occurred in chapter 4, as though he was being paid by the page and needed to pad things out. Half way through the chapter, he more or less abandons the diary exercise, and returns to the first person narration. Here, the issue of food is addressed, with more details regarding his hunting expeditions as well as a segment on his discovery of agrarian agriculture, when the seeds from sacks he has thrown out germinate and grow months later. He has a minor religious episode which he then mocks; Crusoe’s ambivalence with regard to religion appears to chime with his belief in modernity. In a sense, Crusoe, the castaway, might be regarded as the exemplar of enlightenment man: a believer in technology above faith. He’s also a romantic, addicted to experience above comfort. An earthquake briefly disconcerts him, but then becomes the motivation to reconsider his living arrangements. There’s very little ‘dark night of the soul’: his restricted circumstances encourage his creativity and his belief in his ability to conquer nature and survive.
chapter 6
Then all of a sudden, as though Defoe is aware of all the potential criticism of Crusoe’s lack of faith, he gets religion! The chapter starts with a reversion to the diary format, which is then put on hold as Crusoe gets seriously ill (an illness he treats with tobacco and rum) and then goes on a long dissertation where any doubts about his christian leanings are supposedly put to bed. This extended confession feels slightly off-kilter, almost as though the writer is responding to voiced or unvoiced criticism of his protagonist’s lack of faith. It’s one of the least intriguing chapters, which holds no real surprises.
Chapter 7
A chapter largely dedicated to agriculture and exploration of the island. Crusoe’s religious enthusiasm seems to wane. There is a moment as he discovers the island’s variety and wealth when he sounds enamoured of it for the first time, taking on a colonial air, declaring that he could imagine himself the lord of this manor.
Chapter 8
This chapter is effectively split into two parts. The diary structure is cast aside and Defoe offers a description of Crusoe’s explanation of the island. He goes to the other side (the west) from whence he can see what he assumes to be the mainland of the americas in the distance. He calculates this as being somewhere between Brazil and the Spanish speaking lands. He also identifies, somewhat surprisingly, penguins. All of which would put him at a far more southerly latitude than the tropics where one had assumed he was up to now. This side of the island is more fertile than his side, which leads to a reference to Leadenhall Market, something which lends a vertical link to London (not a city that Crusoe knew all that well, although Defoe would have done.) The second part of the chapter is given over to his crop of wheat and his struggle to learn how to make bread out of it. He notes in this chapter that he has now been three years on the island, time flying by rapidly in the narrative.
Chapter 9
This is the boat chapter. Crusoe’s dreams of escape suddenly take hold (after three years) and he seeks to resuscitate the old boat which is beached, with no success. He then goes on to make what he describes as a large canoe out of a vast tree, something that takes him months. However, the canoe is too heavy to move. He can’t get it to the sea, in spite of his best efforts, even though it’s only a hundred yards away. is this the first moment when we perhaps start to think that Crusoe doesn’t really want to leave the island, after all? For all his protestations that it’s impossible to get the boat to the shore, this is all down to his stupidity? It’s as though he’s enjoying the adventure rather more that he suggests.
Chapter 10
Somehow the boat makes it to sea. In the opening two pages. Crusoe sets out to sea, with the intention of circumnavigating the island. Any idea of making it to the mainland is discounted. We are now eight years into the story, the timeline becoming harder and harder to follow. The circumnavigation almost leads to disaster as strong currents drive him out to sea. The dramatic need for obstacles is apparent. Crusoe overcomes the obstacle, (if he didn’t there would be no story), returns to shore where he is greeted by his parrot. The second half of the chapter deals with Crusoe’s goat management tactics. The history of humanity as an agricultural project once again. Milk and cheese and meat and hides.
Chapter 11
Crusoe now states he has been on the island fifteen years. Finally he comes across the first trace of another human- a footstep on the beach. He has overcome every obstacle in his way and his narrative is crying out for a twist. Crusoe the hoarder of capital comes to the fore, as he does everything he can to protect his goods. He is consumed by paranoia that others will seek to pillage his store and kill him. As a result he spends the remainder of the chapter constructing more and more elaborate defences. The mere idea of the presence of another soul is something he sees primarily as a threat.
Chapter 12
The other looms larger now. Crusoe discovers a beach littered with human skulls and signs of fire. He assumes that cannibal savages have been using the island as a kind of picnic venue. He starts to go a bit mad, entertaining fantasies of annihilating the ‘savages’ in all kinds of ways, roaming the island armed to the teeth, then hiding away, talking about living in the “constant snare of the fear of man”. Then he has regrets about his prejudices, comparing this to the actions of the Spanish: “that this would justify the conduct of the Spaniards in all their barbarities practised in America, where they destroyed millions of these people”. A strange side-note which gives an insight into contemporary attitudes towards the Spanish conquista, whilst at the same time revealing the contradictions and intellectual gymnastics which surrounded the whole process of colonisation. Finally in the chapter, Crusoe discovers a wondrous cave, which is the perfect safe space, eclipsing his years of work to construct fortified defences. The cave offers him great satisfaction; it is the safest place in the whole wide world.
Chapter 13
Again a chapter divided between two separate incidents. In one, the cannibals return, provoking fresh paranoia in Crusoe. In the second part, a Spanish galleon founders on the rocks offshore. He hopes that there will be survivors, but there are none. He actually makes it to the ship and rescues a dog, along with large quantities of treasure. One thing that struck me, reading this chapter, was the way in which Friday has yet to appear. We’re 25 years in to his stay on the island and over two thirds of the way through the book. The trouble is that when Friday appears, the story takes a sharp twist. It will cease to be a survival story and become a buddy story or even a love story. Which doesn’t appear to be what Defoe wants to write, no matter how much Crusoe might protest that he longs for company. We start to think - of course the ship doesn’t have any survivors, and of course he never meets one of the ‘savages’ or rescue one of their victims. It would screw with the narrative.
Chapter 14
As though reacting to the need to move his tale along, Friday finally appears. Two years pass between the previous chapter and this one, years marked by paranoia and fantasies of capturing the “cannibals” and converting them into his slaves. Finally, bizarrely, Crusoe starts to contemplate the notion that if the ‘savages’ are capable of crossing the sea from the mainland to the island, then perhaps he might be capable of doing the same, but this thought, (which we know won’t lead anywhere because we by now suspect that Crusoe has no intention of leaving the island if he can help it), is interrupted by the appearance of Friday, who he helps escape from said cannibals on one of their periodic feasting visits. His first thoughts regarding Friday are that he is not too ugly, with comments about skin tone and his nose, and that he would make a fine slave. The Edward Said Orientalism thesis has a variation: there is clearly a subtext running throughout the novel regarding the matrix of slavery. Crusoe is himself a slave at times, his eventual isolation comes as a result, (as he meditates upon in this chapter), of a failed slaving trip, and when a human finally appears his first thought is that this would make a fine slave. Without as yet seeking to draw any conclusions as to how Defoe finally comes down on this issue, one thing that seems clear is the centrality of the issue within the contemporary consciousness. Perhaps also worth noting that the slave trade itself was one of the prime movers of globalisation. The other side of this it seems to me is the way that Crusoe’s fate mirrors a capitalist drift towards atomisation within society. Crusoe is a prototype of Mersault or Joseph K; a determined outsider from the outset who struggles to square his individualistic instincts within a societal structure, only to find via the device of the shipwreck a convenient get-out-of-jail card (which is also a go-to-jail card).
Chapter 15
Crusoe gets to know Friday. Which means, more than anything else that Crusoe gets to indoctrinate Friday into the ways of Christianity and enquire about how easy it might be to escape from the island. It’s finally defined more precisely where the island is: in the carribean, not far from the mouth of the Orinoco, only 40 miles offshore. Crusoe takes Friday to the high point of the island and when Friday sees the distant mainland, he identifies it as his territory. Crusoe explains that England, a country he can but have a distant, nostalgic memory of now, was part of Europe: “I described to him the country of Europe, particularly England, which I came from; how we lived, how we worshipped God, how we behaved to one another, and how we traded in ships to all parts of the world.” Within a chapter of Friday’s arrival, the end already feels in sight, with Crusoe showing him the boats he made so many years ago, and Friday suggesting that the bigger one might do for a journey to the mainland.
Chapter 16
So, Crusoe and Friday make a boat. But they don’t just leave. Instead, Crusoe prevaricates. He can’t leave until it’s the right season. He has to wait. He actually initially tells Friday he should go without him. He really doesn’t want to leave the island and he’d rather he was on his own again, but Friday refuses to leave without him. So Crusoe takes his time and makes ‘preparations’. Which are then interrupted by the arrival of another party of cannibals, come to feast on the island. Crusoe and Friday attack and overwhelm the cannibals, in the process freeing two prisoners, one a Spaniard, and the other who just happens to be Friday’s father. In true colonial style, Crusoe now declares he has three subjects, with three different religions. However, one wonders how this is going to tally with the protagonist’s Garbo complex, his need to be alone: four men on his island is not a sustainable situation.
Chapter 17
Neither is 20. Crusoe’s push-me pull-you situation is repeated. After putting off departure from the island for another six months or more in order to grow crops, he gets rid of the Spaniard and Friday’s father, sending them back to the mainland. Travel between mainland and island now seems so regular it’s as if there is a shuttle service, but still Crusoe remains. When a boat appears on the horizon, it isn’t them coming to take Crusoe and Friday away; it’s a group of British mutineers. Crusoe and Friday liberate the mutineer’s three hostages and succeed in overwhelming the mutineers without too much trouble. However, Crusoe now has the problem of yet more people populating his island, his solitary idyll coming to a definitive end.
Chapter 18
Crusoe would now appear to have multiple options for leaving the island. He doesn’t leave. Defoe spends the chapter giving a convoluted boy’s own account of the plot to overwhelm the mutineers and take back control of the ship. Friday is barely mentioned. The most interesting aspect of the chapter is that Crusoe insists that some of the worst mutineers are given the option of staying on the island, rather than going back to England and facing the gallows. He has no option but to leave, but he ensures that his legacy, his feverdream, will continue to be lived, vicariously, through the prisoners who will inherit his legacy.
Chapter 19
And then he finally is gone. After 28 years on the island, he returns to England on the boat. But he doesn’t stay long. Almost straight away he heads to Portugal to find out what happened to his Brazilian lands. The good news is he’s rich. He gives a long account of his finances, contemplates going back to Brazil but decides against it, and sets off on his travels again, looking to go back to England via land.
Chapter 20
The final chapter is constructed around a long description of Friday fighting a bear. Was Defoe in any way conscious of the metaphor? The wily Carib out-thinking the lumbering giant. In the end we don’t learn anything about the fate of Friday. The closing pages describe Crusoe’s decision to travel again (after having married and had children?). This includes a return visit to “his” island, where he finds the Spaniards and the convicts have somehow muddled through, still alive. In addition some women have come to the island and there’s now some twenty children living there. A thoroughly modern representation of the colonised nation state in miniature. Defoe promises that there will be more adventures in the next instalment, the second volume.
