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x_losGod what a miserable slog of a novel. Katy tried to defend it on the basis of it being 'the first novel' (though to be fair, she also despises it), but as there are non-English predecessors that Defoe probably would have had knowledge of, and as he had access to theatrical characterization of a markedly higher standard that which is demonstrated in his novel, I don't want to credit him with having had to invent the wheel--in truth he's just not very good. This novel's enjoying a rotten borough seat in the Western Canon purely on the historical accident of having been the First Novel In English. Even if I granted that it represents an innovation--which I'm not entirely sure of--it's still the least fun you can have with 241 pages.
And what a *slow* 241 pages--it felt as long as War and Peace. You spend most of it waiting for him to get Cast Away, then waiting for another character--ANY other character--to show up. Then settle in for a long winter's wait as Crusoe fails to get off the bloody island. Not that he really even /wants/ to, for a large chunk of his stay there--removing the dramatic question/tension from that part of the book entirely.
I thought there were going to be more 'Inginous contrivances!! Anachronistic radios out of coconuts!!1!' building funtimes, but apparently that's more Swiss Family Robinson--Crusoe's a 'fetching pre-made shit out of the boat' kind of guy. A 'whittling a plank of wood' guy, if you're lucky.
And that's not the only kind of guy he is: Crusoe is an utter bastard. Despite having been enslaved, having hated it and escaped, he goes off on a slaving mission to Africa. Despite having been a cast away, he abandons the Spaniards he's run across and has been making an effort to escape with to continue on, marooned, for a further seven years before he can be bothered to go and check on them. He himself raises the potential of taking the ship he's commandeered over to check on/rescue them, but that never happens, for no stated reason. He never learns, he never displays any empathy.
He thinks his problem is that he lacks sufficient respect for his parents/God, and that he always makes poor choices. The only poor choice I see him consistently make is to be a Tool. He wakes up in the morning, and for a moment--there is potential. This could be it, that glistening day when he isn't totally offensive as a person!! But no, the moment is lost, and it's Tool Time, except Tim Allen isn't there, or Fence Guy Who Isn't Pheeny, and no one's happy. Not even Cheerful NativeStereotype!Friday.
I think Defoe intended his hero to seem a bit hapless, but also essentially clever, sane, and likable. Defoe needed a fucking beta. Crusoe comes off as a severe paranoid schizophrenic. I know it's tawdry to diagnose literary characters with modern diseases, but there you have it. His paranoid, largely useless *obsession* with security pervades the book--he expects every non-white man he encounters to kill him sooner than say hello, and a good deal of the white men as well. There's a sad pathos to hauling around a gun for fifteen years whilst entirely *alone* on a desert island that the book doesn't seem cognizant of.
Crusoe's constant assertions that people loved him, were slavishly grateful to him, would die for him, come off as lies or delusions. His obsession with hierarchy and his god-complex seemed at first just part and parcel of his racism and casual imperialism. As these cultural barriers break down and he lords his status as Local God over Friday the native, then a Catholic Spaniard, and then a full-blown English Captain (who surely outranks him socially), simply because Crusoe did what anyone should be humanely obligated to do and saved the lives of men in distress, it becomes clear that Crusoe really just IS that up himself. There's a curious innocence on Defoe's part as to the working of human nature, here. While I would believe these men were perhaps, very initially, slavishly grateful to Crusoe for their deliverance, the fear of death fades, and with it the gratitude at having been spared. No one would put up with Crusoe's imperiousness long--especially not on a liminal space like a desert island, where people are disconnected from social structures and stripped of rank. Crusoe's very assumption that he is Master and Commander of his fellow castaways is a disgusting presumption--teaching Friday, who doesn't speak English initially, to call him this title as his name is especially creepy.
Hornblower as a series has made me very suspicious of the sort of captain who could incite a mutiny against him, and I couldn't look on the books immediate and unquestioned assumption that the Captain was in the right very favorably. The reasons for the mutiny are never touched upon, which is dodgy.
The book pretty much assumes all native americans of any description are 24/7 cannibals, but waving THAT massive!period!racism:
The one interesting moral dilemma in the book--whether or not it'd be murder to kill the cannibals who occasionally visit the island with their human prey, when culturally they don't consider cannibalism at all wrong, and only do it in war time to their foes--leaves out the most important consideration. By not stopping these men in the act of killing others on the occasions when he could do so, Crusoe is culpable for their murders. And he's sure quick enough to stop them when they have a white prisoner. For all his vague 'Have I that Right?/Prime Directive' protestations that this internecine conflict is not rightfully and business of his, the problem is really that only White Life is worth preserving.
IN SUMMARY:
Things Crusoe Likes To Kill For No Reason:
1. Parrots (to impress Friday with the power of his Boom Stick)
2. Animals he can't eat
3. Baby goats who won't love and cuddle him after he kills their mother
4. Cats/kittens (!!) who hang around his house because they're the children of his rescued ship cat, and are curious and kind of hungry
5. Bears who wanted nothing to do with him--okay this is Friday, but still awkward and pointless, and it's all done to get a laugh out of Crusoe
6. Indians
7. Mutineers
8. 28 years worth of time
9. Your Happiness (retribution for his own squandered years?)
10. Spelling (I know it's not 100% standardized yet, but god /damn/)
And what a *slow* 241 pages--it felt as long as War and Peace. You spend most of it waiting for him to get Cast Away, then waiting for another character--ANY other character--to show up. Then settle in for a long winter's wait as Crusoe fails to get off the bloody island. Not that he really even /wants/ to, for a large chunk of his stay there--removing the dramatic question/tension from that part of the book entirely.
I thought there were going to be more 'Inginous contrivances!! Anachronistic radios out of coconuts!!1!' building funtimes, but apparently that's more Swiss Family Robinson--Crusoe's a 'fetching pre-made shit out of the boat' kind of guy. A 'whittling a plank of wood' guy, if you're lucky.
And that's not the only kind of guy he is: Crusoe is an utter bastard. Despite having been enslaved, having hated it and escaped, he goes off on a slaving mission to Africa. Despite having been a cast away, he abandons the Spaniards he's run across and has been making an effort to escape with to continue on, marooned, for a further seven years before he can be bothered to go and check on them. He himself raises the potential of taking the ship he's commandeered over to check on/rescue them, but that never happens, for no stated reason. He never learns, he never displays any empathy.
He thinks his problem is that he lacks sufficient respect for his parents/God, and that he always makes poor choices. The only poor choice I see him consistently make is to be a Tool. He wakes up in the morning, and for a moment--there is potential. This could be it, that glistening day when he isn't totally offensive as a person!! But no, the moment is lost, and it's Tool Time, except Tim Allen isn't there, or Fence Guy Who Isn't Pheeny, and no one's happy. Not even Cheerful NativeStereotype!Friday.
I think Defoe intended his hero to seem a bit hapless, but also essentially clever, sane, and likable. Defoe needed a fucking beta. Crusoe comes off as a severe paranoid schizophrenic. I know it's tawdry to diagnose literary characters with modern diseases, but there you have it. His paranoid, largely useless *obsession* with security pervades the book--he expects every non-white man he encounters to kill him sooner than say hello, and a good deal of the white men as well. There's a sad pathos to hauling around a gun for fifteen years whilst entirely *alone* on a desert island that the book doesn't seem cognizant of.
Crusoe's constant assertions that people loved him, were slavishly grateful to him, would die for him, come off as lies or delusions. His obsession with hierarchy and his god-complex seemed at first just part and parcel of his racism and casual imperialism. As these cultural barriers break down and he lords his status as Local God over Friday the native, then a Catholic Spaniard, and then a full-blown English Captain (who surely outranks him socially), simply because Crusoe did what anyone should be humanely obligated to do and saved the lives of men in distress, it becomes clear that Crusoe really just IS that up himself. There's a curious innocence on Defoe's part as to the working of human nature, here. While I would believe these men were perhaps, very initially, slavishly grateful to Crusoe for their deliverance, the fear of death fades, and with it the gratitude at having been spared. No one would put up with Crusoe's imperiousness long--especially not on a liminal space like a desert island, where people are disconnected from social structures and stripped of rank. Crusoe's very assumption that he is Master and Commander of his fellow castaways is a disgusting presumption--teaching Friday, who doesn't speak English initially, to call him this title as his name is especially creepy.
Hornblower as a series has made me very suspicious of the sort of captain who could incite a mutiny against him, and I couldn't look on the books immediate and unquestioned assumption that the Captain was in the right very favorably. The reasons for the mutiny are never touched upon, which is dodgy.
The book pretty much assumes all native americans of any description are 24/7 cannibals, but waving THAT massive!period!racism:
The one interesting moral dilemma in the book--whether or not it'd be murder to kill the cannibals who occasionally visit the island with their human prey, when culturally they don't consider cannibalism at all wrong, and only do it in war time to their foes--leaves out the most important consideration. By not stopping these men in the act of killing others on the occasions when he could do so, Crusoe is culpable for their murders. And he's sure quick enough to stop them when they have a white prisoner. For all his vague 'Have I that Right?/Prime Directive' protestations that this internecine conflict is not rightfully and business of his, the problem is really that only White Life is worth preserving.
IN SUMMARY:
Things Crusoe Likes To Kill For No Reason:
1. Parrots (to impress Friday with the power of his Boom Stick)
2. Animals he can't eat
3. Baby goats who won't love and cuddle him after he kills their mother
4. Cats/kittens (!!) who hang around his house because they're the children of his rescued ship cat, and are curious and kind of hungry
5. Bears who wanted nothing to do with him--okay this is Friday, but still awkward and pointless, and it's all done to get a laugh out of Crusoe
6. Indians
7. Mutineers
8. 28 years worth of time
9. Your Happiness (retribution for his own squandered years?)
10. Spelling (I know it's not 100% standardized yet, but god /damn/)
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no subject
Date: 2010-08-26 10:00 pm (UTC)And seriously, this post made my afternoon. I was sitting here laughing aloud in my cubicle.
Makes me not miss university, that's for sure.
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Date: 2010-08-31 08:16 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-08-27 12:31 am (UTC)Like I said before, this is far and away my least favorite Defoe, and it's a continual source of irritation that it's the only one most people know. IDK, I think probably a lot of its lasting reputation has to do with it being the #1 Smash Hit of the 1720s (?), in the same way that motherfucking Pamela still gets read and assigned to poor unsuspecting college classes. No doubt in 300 years, college students or the malleable young of the race of sentient cockroaches which will replace us will be getting assigned The DaVinci Code and thinking, "WTF, people of yore. This sucks."
I do think that Defoe was pretty good at constructing a fictional POV; Roxana has some fairly convincing psychology, especially towards the end of the book. And I do adore Moll Flanders. And the pirate books are frequently fun. But yeah, Crusoe is terminally unlikeable to a modern audience, isn't doing anything much of interest for most of the book, and it doesn't help that we've got to hear about all of his accounting issues and hardly ever get any actual scenes. :/
Sorry you had to suffer through that.
no subject
Date: 2010-08-31 08:19 pm (UTC)It makes it worse, in a way, if he really rocks the POV in some books and just--not at all, here. WAS he that Admirable, in his period?
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Date: 2010-08-31 09:21 pm (UTC)Well, the thing about Defoe is that he really wasn't setting out to write novels, per se: he was a journalist/pamphleteer who'd spent some time in Newgate Prison, where the prisoners sometimes dictated accounts of their lives and adventures for publication. These were popular reading, so Defoe apparently decided, hey, why not make one up for a little extra cash, based on a mishmash of stories he'd heard? (He was probably not the first to do this, just one of the first we know about, and who got super popular.) So part of why Robinson Crusoe was such a smash hit is because for the first few editions, people were convinced it was a True Story, and Crusoe was a real guy.
(This is one of many reasons why I'm a little o_O about that First Novel In English claim. In a way, what he was doing was almost pastiche, not to say mild fraud. Also, why not Pilgrim's Progress? IDEK.)
Honestly, with the exception of Journal of the Plague Year, which is
slightly(EDIT: Okay, rechecking dates, highly fictionalized, since he was a little kid at the time and the narrator is an adult. *facepalm*) fictionalized memoir, I think Defoe tends to be better at writing women than men. (Which is not something you can say of a lot of 17th or 18th century dudes.) Roxana was an attempt at a memoir of a courtesan, with some proto-feminist arguments. And Moll Flanders is a Newgate confession/picaresque novel about a con woman who...well, the original full title was:I have to say, I love it a lot.
no subject
Date: 2010-08-27 12:46 am (UTC)The review was fabulous, though. Best not-cliff notes ever. (I'm going to call them x-notes from now on. No relation to x-files.)
Katy tried to defend it on the basis of it being 'the first novel'
As far as not-English novels go, classicists stoutly claim the first as Petronius' Satyricon written around 60 CE. So Defoe doing nothing even *slightly* new.
I think Defoe intended his hero to seem a bit hapless, but also essentially clever, sane, and likable.
Speaking of not new, it sounds like he tried to make an Odysseus character--and failed. (Odyesseus is also a bit of a dick, but he *is* an entertaining dick.)
no subject
Date: 2010-08-31 08:21 pm (UTC)