Part One: Is Crusoe a Novel?

I thought I should write a few things about Robinson Crusoe before I proceed much farther into it, so I might keep my early reactions in order. Robinson Crusoe is the first novel assigned for the cumbersomely-titled class "Sex, Death, Politics, God, and the Novel in the Long Eighteenth Century" taught by Dr. David Robinson. The class hasn't met yet, but I'm looking forward to it. Dr. Robinson, whom I estimate to be in his mid forties, and who, in addition to specializing in eighteenth century lit, works in gay and lesbian studies, is a relative bright young thing on the English Department faculty, and I'm anxious to see how that plays at UA. The academic culture at NAU was younger and queerer, for sure, and I have to say it was a little jarring to get to UA and discover the extent to which the department is dominated by old, very traditional white guys. Anyway. Robinson Crusoe.


So, in preparation for our first meeting on Tuesday, Dr. Robinson has asked us to:

Come prepared to discuss what does or doesn't make [Crusoe] a novel, as you understand the term and the genre. Feel free to consult any source(s) you like that might inform such a discussion. Of course, you should also do your best to get a handle on what the book seems to be concerned with (explicitly, implicitly, overtly, covertly). But use the question of its "novel-ness" (and possibly novelty) as the focal point of your reading.

All right, so, the novel. "What is a novel?" is not really a question I'd thought much about until last semester, when Dr. William Epstein pointed out in our seminar on British satirical novels that, although we recognize a novel like Vanity Fair to be a novel, Thackeray, et al. in the mid-nineteenth century were still figuring it out (An indication of this is the kind of odd position the narrator of that novel occupies. Perhaps that's something to get into more later). But what is a novel? By the early twentieth century the modernists seemed to have an idea of what the novel had been and why it wasn't working for them anymore. I was trying to remember Virginia Woolf's comment objecting to the style you get in the nineteenth century realist tradition--I think this was it:

Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.

Through the magic of the internet, I was able to find the source of that quote, which (shame on me for not knowing) is Woolf's essay "Modern Fiction," contained in the 1925 book of essays The Common Reader. Incidentally, this book also contains on essay on "Defoe." I should really just add this book to my Amazon wishlist right now. Anyway.

So, because I don't have a good answer to the question "What is a novel?" at this point, I guess the best I can do is to record some of the things that are going on in Crusoe stylistically, that seem kind of odd in light of our modern understanding of what a novel looks like (although, these day, seems like anything goes).

• Cataloguing: There are a lot of lists of things in this novel, so that it reads kind of like what I expect a ship's inventory would read like. Crusoe the narrator gives a painstakingly detailed account of the provisions he has salvaged.
• Journalistic elements: As we all know, Defoe drew inspiration from the (pretty darn remarkable) true story of Alexander Selkirk, a Scottish sailor who survived four years as a castaway on an island off the coast of Chile. Certain parts of Crusoe's account of his shipwreck and survival resemble journalistic accounts.
• Memoir: Though it's really not pertinent to the central plot at all, there's an astonishing amount of backstory Crusoe provides. I believe this has come to be called an "information dump."
• A philosophical reflection on faith: Defoe was a Puritan, and it's apparent that he's not writing in a Church of England framework here. There's a lot of stuff about God, about Providence, about good and evil, and you could almost say the book is an extended allegory illustrating Puritan virtues, like industriousness, etc.
• Epistolary novel: Although the book is mostly an extended memory, long passages of it are given in the form of journal entries.
• Adventure story: Crusoe is clearly a forerunner of the adventure genre, and there are parts that are action packed, with vivid descriptions of storms at sea, hunting wild animals, encountering potentially dangerous natives, etc.

Anyway, that's what I've got for now. I don't like to spend too much time on these entries, and I'm hoping that as I get the hang of it I'll be able to write more substantive and useful content in less time.

*****

Fancy Terms:

• Robinsonade: A term derived from Robinson Crusoe coined by Johann Gottfried Schnabel in 1731 to describe an emerging subgenre of survival or "desert island" stories.