and captivity, life-threatening shipwrecks and narrow escapes are all episodes in which it’s impossible to discern the sign of Cohen’s ‘craft’, or Warburg’s ‘mastery of the sea’; while the early scene where ships are ‘driven . . . at all adventures, and that with not a mast standing’11 reads like the striking reversal of Rucellai’s coat of arms. As for Robinson’s financial success, its modernity is at least as questionable: though the magic paraphernalia of the story of Fortunatus (who had been his main predecessor in the pantheon of modern self-made men) are gone from the novel, the way in which Robinson’s wealth piles up in his absence and is later returned—‘an old pouch’ filled with ‘one hundred and sixty Portugal moidores in gold’, followed by ‘seven fine leopards’ skins . . . five chests of excellent sweetmeats, a hundred pieces of gold uncoined . . . one thousand two hundred chests of sugar, eight hundred rolls of tobacco, and the rest of the whole account in gold’—is still very much the stuff of fairy tales.12
Let me be clear, Defoe’s novel is a great modern myth; but it is so despite its adventures, and not because of them. When William Empson, in Some Versions of Pastoral, offhandedly compared Robinson to Sinbad the Sailor, he had it exactly right;13 if anything, Sinbad’s desire ‘to trade . . . and to earn my living’14 is more explicitly—and rationally—mercantile than Robinson’s ‘meer wandring inclination’. Where the similarity between the two stories ends is not on the sea; it’s on land. In each of his seven voyages, the Baghdad merchant is trapped on as many enchanted islands—ogres, carnivorous beasts, malevolent apes, murderous magicians . . .—from which he can only escape with a further leap into the unknown (as when he ties himself to the claw of a giant carnivorous bird). In Sinbad, in other words, adventures rule the sea, and the terra firma as well. In Robinson, no. On land, it is work that rules.
2. ‘THIS WILL TESTIFY FOR ME THAT I WAS NOT IDLE’
But why work? At first, to be sure, it’s a matter of survival: a situation in which ‘the day’s tasks . . . seem to disclose themselves, by the logic of need, before the labourer’s eyes’.15 But even when his future needs are secure ‘as long as I lived . . . if it were to be forty years’,16 Robinson just keeps toiling, steadily, page after page. His real-life model Alexander Selkirk had (supposedly) spent his four years on Juan Fernandez oscillating madly between being ‘dejected, languid, and melancholy’, and plunging into ‘one continual Feast . . . equal to the most sensual Pleasures’.17 Robinson, not even once. In the course of the eighteenth century, it has been calculated, the number of yearly workdays rose from 250 to 300; on his island, where the status of Sunday is never completely clear, the total is certainly higher.18 When, at the height of his zeal—‘You are to understand that now I had . . . two plantations . . . several apartments or caves . . . two pieces of corn-ground . . . my country seat . . . my enclosure for my cattle . . . a living magazine of flesh . . . my winter store of raisins’19—he turns to the reader and exclaims, ‘this will testify for me that I was not idle’, one can only nod in agreement. And, then, repeat the question: Why does he work so much?
‘We scarcely realize today what a unique and astonishing phenomenon a “working” upper class is’, writes Norbert Elias in The Civilizing Process: ‘why submit itself to this compulsion even though it is . . . not commanded by a superior to do so?’20 Elias’s wonder is shared by Alexandre Kojève, who discerns at the centre of Hegel’s Phenomenology a paradox—‘the Bourgeois’s problem’—whereby the bourgeois must simultaneously ‘work for another’ (because work only arises as a result of an external constraint), yet can only ‘work for himself’ (because he no longer has a master).21 Working for himself, as if he were another: this is exactly how Robinson functions: one side of him becomes a carpenter, or potter, or baker, and spends weeks and weeks trying to accomplish something; then Crusoe the master emerges, and points out the inadequacy of the results. And then the cycle repeats itself all over again. And it repeats itself, because work has become the new principle of legitimation of social power. When, at the end of the novel, Robinson finds himself ‘master . . . of above five thousand pounds sterling’22 and of all the rest, his twenty-eight years of uninterrupted toil are there to justify his fortune. Realistically, there is no relationship between the two: he is rich because of the exploitation of nameless slaves in his Brazilian plantation—whereas his solitary labour hasn’t brought him a single pound. But we have seen him work like no other character in fiction: How can he not deserve what he has?23
There is a word that perfectly captures Robinson’s behaviour: ‘industry’. According to the OED, its initial meaning, around 1500, was that of ‘intelligent or clever working; skill, ingenuity, dexterity, or cleverness’. Then, in the mid-sixteenth century, a second meaning emerges—‘diligence or assiduity . . . close and steady application . . . exertion, effort’, that soon crystallizes as ‘systematic work or labour; habitual employment in some useful work’.24 From skill and ingenuity, to systematic exertion; this is how ‘industry’ contributes to bourgeois culture: hard work, replacing the clever variety.25 And calm work, too, in the same sense that interest is for Hirschmann a ‘calm passion’: steady, methodical, cumulative, and thus stronger than the ‘turbulent (yet weak) passions’ of the old aristocracy.26 Here, the discontinuity between the two ruling classes is unmistakable: if turbulent passions had idealized what was needed by a warlike caste—the white heat of the brief ‘day’ of battle—bourgeois interest is the virtue of a peaceful and repeatable (and repeatable, and repeatable, and repeatable) everyday: less energy, but for a much longer time. A few hours—‘about four in the evening’, writes Robinson, ever modest27—but for twenty-eight years.
In the previous section, we have looked at the adventures that open Robinson Crusoe; in this one, at the work of his life on the island. It’s the same progression of The Protestant Ethic: a history that begins with the ‘capitalist adventurer’, but where the ethos of laboriousness eventually brings about the ‘rational tempering of his irrational impulse’.28 In the case of Defoe, the transition from the first to the second figure is particularly striking, because apparently wholly unplanned: on the title-page of the novel (Figure 2), Robinson’s ‘strange surprising adventures’—mentioned at the top, and in larger size—are clearly billed as the main attraction, whereas the part on the island is simply ‘one of the many other episodes’.29 But then, during the composition of the novel, an ‘unforeseen, uncontrolled expansion’ of the island must have occurred, which shook off its subordination to the story of adventures and made it the new centre of the text. A Calvinist from Geneva was the first to grasp the significance of this mid-course re-orientation: Rousseau’s Robinson,
Figure 2
‘cleansed of all its claptrap’, will begin with the shipwreck, and be limited to the years on the island, so that Emile will not waste his time in dreams of adventure, and may concentrate instead on Robinson’s work (‘he will want to know all that is useful, and nothing but that’).30 Which is cruel to Emile, of course, and to all children after him, but right: because Robinson’s hard work on the island is indeed the greatest novelty of the book.
From the capitalist adventurer, to the working master. But then, as Robinson approaches the end, a second about-face occurs: cannibals, armed conflict, mutineers, wolves, bears, fairy-tale fortune . . . Why? If the poetics of adventure had been ‘tempered’ by its rational opposite, why promise ‘some very surprising incidents in some new adventures of my own’ in the very last sentence of the novel?31
So far, I have emphasized the opposition between the culture of adventures and the rational work ethic; and I have indeed no doubt that the two are incompatible, and that the
