Re-Reading Robinsonade Literature

In her study Problematic Shores (1990), Diana Loxley acknowledges that the Island has seemingly solidified its place as a trope within contemporary popular culture precisely because of the notion of what she calls the "inevitability" of Robinson Crusoe's emergence into Western literary and cultural discourse. While recognising the apparently serendipitous arrival of Daniel Defoe's The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, Written by Himself at the dawn of the modern exploration age, Loxley rightly argues that there are more culturally determined reasons why Defoe's particular text should have become so monumentally important on its initial appearance, serving, as it did, as a vehicle for the manufacturing of new myths of nation building and imperial strengthening.

Much of the attraction of the Robinsonade genre, Loxley suggests, derives from what she calls the "under-distanciation" of (particularly) the child reader, or the process by which the reader is metaphorically drawn onto the island of the text, and forced to identify personally with (in this case) Robinson Crusoe's situation. The reader alone is aware of Crusoe's predicament on the island as he lives and writes it, and the personal address of the epistolary form in which the novel is structured succeeds in drawing both reader and Crusoe together in an almost exclusive communion. While this method of identification with the literary protagonist is, of course, by no means restricted to the Robinsonade genre, Loxley is correct in her assessment of the symbiotic relationship between the isolated, intra-textual character and the implied reader outside of the text — who, in reading, is presumably engaged in a similarly solitary activity. In an echo of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Loxley foregrounds the position of the signifying individual, and states that Robinson Crusoe is "the model for 'coping' with the world and with otherness, whether environmental, bestial or native," and with the individual's own sense of Otherness, which Crusoe seeks "ultimately to strike [...] out [and] to cut [...] down." Indeed, it was Rousseau who underlined the didactic importance of Robinson Crusoe for the young, empirical mind, even going so far as to suggest that by using Defoe's novel alone his own son, Émile, will learn "everything that is useful" in the world. Loxley somewhat wryly acknowledges that Defoe's text teaches us (and, more pointedly, our colonial forbears) lessons which are to be thought of as "singular and historically transcendental, true for all time, and which may always be relied upon to reaffirm that [the Empire has] not lost, and never will lose [...] greatness." Her comment implicitly suggests that Crusoe's schooling in imperialism and colonial expansion may still be applied to, and have a place within, dubious contemporary global politics.

Above all, Loxley states, the island topos appeals to us as a meditation on cultural origins, "the site of that contemplation being the uninhabited territory upon which the conditions for a rebirth or genesis are made possible." In the case of the Robinsonade genre, the island is, quite literally, the place where the legacy of the trope all began. The term "Robinsonade" itself was first coined in 1731 by Johann Gottfried Schnabel, in his German work Die Insel Felsenburg (translated as The Island Stronghold). The genre was the most widely read of the 1800s, and, in England alone, Robinsonade narratives were produced at the rate of about two per year for most of the long eighteenth century. Loxley claims that it is because of the "procedure of reformulation and renewal" of Crusoe's original island story that Robinson Crusoe and the desert island tradition has become so deeply ingrained within our culture; it is a "'living' classic" that is continually renewed for both adults and children alike on television, stage and radio, and sold to consumers through commercial capitalist exploits, such as advertisements and commercials for tropical holiday destinations. Subsequent generations of Robinsonade narratives — those produced as an homage or in reaction to Defoe's Robinson Crusoe — have demonstrated the ways in which the trope of the island has come to be constructed as a series of fictional meta narratives. Those island narratives produced in Defoe's wake draw both implicit and explicit attention to the intertextual nature of the Robinsonade genre as a whole, as each Robinsonade is always-already invested in the myth of its ürtextual forbears — the original Robinson, and the imaginary island as constructed in Defoe's text. Each Robinsonade must necessarily situate itself within a cultural tradition that will always compare and contrast it with its textual predecessors.

The 1767 text, The Female American, for example, published under the pseudonym "Unca Eliza Winkfield," tells the autobiographical story of Winkfield's abandonment on a deserted island with a man who had long been thought dead — a veritable Crusoe-story-within-a-Crusoe-story. Winkfield's didactic approach to her own and to her predecessors' genre encapsulates quite nicely, the shared, intertextual approach necessary for the survival of subsequent Robinsonades: "How you may subsist you may learn from the history of my life," she informs the reader. Her life, of course, is a literary one, and one that is indebted to Defoe's Crusoe. As Winkfield has "subsisted" by learning and absorbing all that she can from Robinson Crusoe, so too is her own text an injunction to subsequent Robinsonades to follow in her footsteps, so to speak, by harnessing the intertextuality of the genre. The same is true of Johann David Wyss's The Swiss Family Robinson, in which a shipwrecked family rely upon their edition of Robinson Crusoe for advice on how to survive. They refer to Crusoe as "our best counsellor and model," and ask "since Heaven has destined us to a similar fate, whom better can we consult?" Loxley too addresses the relationship between various Robinsonade texts in a brief commentary on Jules Verne's most popular island narrative, The Mysterious Island: "[Verne's is] a novel which will not simply reinvest the authority and primacy of its textual predecessor but which will attempt to perform a radical displacement of it by confronting one form with another [italics in original]." Loxley seems to be quite clear here about the function of the island in Verne's Robinsonade: Verne's Mysterious Island is not self-sufficient, as it is so heavily dependent on Defoe's pre-existing island narrative. As a literary conceit, "Lincoln Island" (so named by the novel's innovative, engineering protagonist, Cyrus Smith, as "a little America") is indebted to its canonical forbears. Verne often makes indirect, and indeed direct allusions to previous Robinsonades, as a means of establishing his Mysterious...