Robinson Crusoe in Asia (Asia-Pacific and Literature in English) 9811640505, 9789811640506

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ASIA-PACIFIC AND LITERATURE IN ENGLISH

Robinson Crusoe in Asia Edited by Steve Clark Yukari Yoshihara

Asia-Pacific and Literature in English

Series Editors Shun-liang Chao, National Chengchi University, Taipei, Taiwan Steve Clark, University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan Tristanne Connolly, St. Jerome’s University, Waterloo, ON, Canada Alex Watson, Meiji University, Tokyo, Japan Laurence Williams, Sophia University, Tokyo, Japan

The Palgrave Asia-Pacific and Literature in English series presents exciting and innovative academic research on Asia-Pacific interactions with Anglophone literary tradition. Focusing on works from the voyages of Captain Cook to the early twentieth century, it also considers previous encounters in the early modern period, as well as reception history continuing to the present day. Encompassing China, Japan, Southeast Asia, India, and Australasia, monographs and essay collections in this series display the complexity, richness and global influence of Asia-Pacific responses to English literature, focusing on works in English but also considering those from other linguistic traditions. The series addresses the imperial and colonial origins of English language and literature in the region, and highlights other forms of reciprocal encounter, circulation, and mutual transformation, as part of an interdependent global history.

More information about this series at https://link.springer.com/bookseries/16211

Steve Clark · Yukari Yoshihara Editors

Robinson Crusoe in Asia

Editors Steve Clark University of Tokyo Tokyo, Japan

Yukari Yoshihara University of Tsukuba Tsukuba, Japan

ISSN 2524-7638 ISSN 2524-7646 (electronic) Asia-Pacific and Literature in English ISBN 978-981-16-4050-6 ISBN 978-981-16-4051-3 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-4051-3 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Contributor: Sampo Yokoi This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. The registered company address is: 152 Beach Road, #21-01/04 Gateway East, Singapore 189721, Singapore

Contents

1

Introduction Steve Clark and Yukari Yoshihara

2

Defoe and the Problem of the East India Company Robert Markley

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Between Castaways and Traders: Cannibal-Cum-Crusoe in Sumatra and the Andaman Islands Ted Motohashi

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Robinson Crusoe in the Context of Travel Narrative of Early Modern England on Asia Noriyuki Harada

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Robinson Crusoe, Improvement and Intellectual Piracy in the Early Enlightenment Dan Howse

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Religious Conversion and the Far East in the Crusoe Trilogy Laurence Williams “Le coeur fou Robinsonne à travers les romans”: Crusoe’s Farther Adventures in the French Robinsonade Steve Clark

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CONTENTS

Krusoe Robinson’s Adventure: Technology of the Self and Double Consciousness in Joachim Heinrich Campe’s Robinson der Jüngere Chunjie Zhang ¯ Kicking Away the Gold Coins: Otsuka Hisao’s Reading of Robinson Crusoe and the “Human Archetype” of Post-war Japan Masaaki Takeda

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Transforming and Translating the Novel Form: The Examples of Daniel Defoe and Lin Shu Yuanwen Chi

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The Boy and the Sea: Translating Robinson Crusoe in Early Twentieth-Century Korea Eun Kyung Min and Hye-Soo Lee

221

“I Must Endure Courageously and Manfully”—Robinson Crusoe Translated by Minami Y¯ oichir¯ o and Its Influence on Later Translations in Post-war Japan Kazuya Sato

239

Robinsonades in Japan: Colonial Fantasy, Survivalist Narrative and Homo Economicus Yukari Yoshihara

261

Crusoe Comes to Caramoan: The Survival of American Cultural Imperialism in the Philippines Maria Lorena Santos

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Index

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Notes on Contributors

Yuanwen Chi is an associate professor of English at National Tsing Hua University (Taiwan). He holds a Ph.D. in English Literature from the State University of New York at Buffalo. He has published articles on Daniel Defoe, Joyce Carol Oates, Stephen Crane, theory of minority discourse, and African-American studies, including Claude McKay, John Edgar Wideman, and Toni Morrison in American Studies, EurAmerica, Tamkang Review, and Review of English and American Literature. He edited Proceedings of the Fifth Conference on American Literature and Philosophy (Academia Sinica, 1993). He also coedited Life Writing with Yu-Cheng Lee (Academia Sinica, 2011). His current research interest focuses on Daniel Defoe’s discourses on the evolution of prose fiction in his fictive works and political and religious pamphlets. Steve Clark is a professor in the Graduate School of Humanities and Sociology, and in the Department of English Language and Literature, the University of Tokyo. Clark received both a B.A. and Ph.D. from Cambridge University, then was a British Academy post-doc and a fellow of the School of Advanced Studies at the University of London. His many publications include Paul Ricoeur (Routledge, 1990), Travel-Writing and Empire (ZED, 1999), Reception of Blake in the Orient (Continuum, 2006), and Asian Crossings: Travel-Writing on China, Japan and SouthEast Asia (Hong Kong UP, 2008). His most recent book, co-edited with Tristanne Connolly, is British Romanticism in a European Perspective(Palgrave, 2015). vii

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Noriyuki Harada, Ph.D. majors in eighteenth-century English literature and has been teaching it in Japan for more than twenty-five years. He is a Professor of English at Keio University and President of the English Literary Society of Japan (ELSJ); he also serves for Dr. Johnson’s House in London as a member of the board of trustees. His recent publications include “Translation and Transformation of Jonathan Swift’s Works in Japan” in “The First Wit of the Age”: Essays on Swift and His Contemporaries in Honour of Hermann J. Real (Peter Lang, 2013), Full Annotation for Gulliver’s Travels (in Japanese, Iwanami, 2013), “Teaching Eighteenth-Century English Literature in Japan: Purposes, Curricula, and Syllabi (Lit Matters, 2014), An Introduction to Gulliver’s Travels (in Japanese, NHK, 2015), Sexuality and Victorian Culture (co-edited in Japanese, Sairyusha, 2016), “Literature, London, and Lives of the English Poets ” in London and Literature, 1603–1901 (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2017), “Representations of Japan in EighteenthCentury English Literature: George Psalmanazar, Daniel Defoe, and Jonathan Swift” in Eighteenth-Century Studies (Kaitaku-sha, 2018), “Why Was Helen Burns Reading Rasselas ?: A New Perspective on the Literary Legacy of the Eighteenth Century of the Brontës" (Colloquia, 2019), and Power in Modernization of Language and Literature in EighteenthCentury Britain and Modern Japan (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2020). Dan Howse completed his postgraduate studies at the University of East Anglia where he researched the history of governance, popular politics and social relations in eighteenth-century England. His current interests include the social conditions for the construction of knowledge and the role of the gift economy in the early Enlightenment. Hye-Soo Lee is a professor of English at Konkuk University. She received her Ph.D. in English from New York University. Her publications include “Women, Comedy, and A Simple Story” and “Gulliver’s Travels as Menippean Satire.” She has recently published a translation of Gulliver’s Travels into Korean (Eulyoo, 2018). Currently she is at work on comparative studies of eighteenth-century Korean and English novels and the relation between narrative and ethics. Robert Markley is Department Head and W. D. and Sara E. Trowbridge Professor of English at the University of Illinois and editor of The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation. The author of more than

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eighty articles in eighteenth-century studies, science studies, and digital media, his books include Two-Edg’d Weapons: Style and Ideology in the Comedies of Etherege, Wycherley, and Congreve (Oxford UP, 1988); Fallen Languages: Crises of Representation in Newtonian England (Cornell UP, 1993); Dying Planet: Mars in Science and the Imagination (Duke UP, 2005); The Far East and the English Imagination, 1600–1730 (Cambridge UP, 2006), and a volume in the Modern Masters of Science Fiction Series, Kim Stanley Robinson (U of Illinois P, 2019). He has coedited with Peter Kitson Writing China: Essays on the Amherst Embassy (1816) and SinoBritish Cultural Relations (Boydell and Brewer, 2016). In addition to numerous fellowships at the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Centre for Supercomputing Applications, the Society for the Humanities (Cornell), and other venues, Markley is past President of the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts. His current book project examines the emergence of understandings of global climate between 1500 and 1830. Eun Kyung Min is a professor of English at Seoul National University. She holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Princeton University and is the author of China and the Writing of English Literary Modernity, 1690–1770 (Cambridge University Press, 2018). She has published widely on eighteenth-century British philosophy, literature and culture in such journals as Eighteenth-Century Fiction, Eighteenth-Century Studies, The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation, Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, The Adam Smith Review and English Literary History. Her current research interests include early modern women’s writing and the global eighteenth century. Ted Motohashi is a Professor of Cultural Studies at the Tokyo University of Economics. He received his DPhil in literature from the University of York, UK, in 1995. His publications include several books on drama and cultural and postcolonial studies, and most recently he cowrote with Tomoka Tsukamoto an essay on Miyagi Satoshi’s theatre, “Deconstructing the Saussurean System of Signification: Miyagi Satoshi and His Mimetic Dramaturgy in Miyagi-Noh Othello” (in Graham Holderness and Brian Loughrey eds., Critical Survey, forthcoming). He is a leading translator into Japanese of the works by Homi Bhabha, Gayatri Spivak, Rey Chow, Judith Butler, Noam Chomsky and Arundhati Roy, among others.

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Maria Lorena Santos earned her Ph.D. at the National University of Singapore where she wrote her dissertation on the cultural phenomenon of global fan communities surrounding the works of—and inspired by— Jane Austen. She has published and delivered talks based on her research on fandom, adaptation and appropriation, and popular culture. She also has a Master’s degree in English Language Studies from the University of the Philippines and an undergraduate degree in Creative Writing from the same university. She is an Associate Professor of the Department of English and Comparative Literature, teaching both language and literature courses. She hails from Naga City in the Bikol region. Kazuya Sato obtained an M.A. in British Cultural Studies from the University of Tokyo, and an M.Sc. in Economic and Social History from Oxford. He has been teaching British Culture and History at Japan Women’s University in Tokyo for the past twenty years. His academic interest lies in popular literature in pre-industrial England (e.g. chapbooks and broadsides), the birth and development of English children’s literature, and the transformation of Robinson Crusoe, both in Britain and Japan, from its initial publication to the present. He is also interested in the effective use of literary texts in English education in Japan at a tertiary level. He has published a number of articles in Japanese academic journals, including “When Did Robinson Crusoe Become a Children’s Book?: An Aspect of a Publishing History in Eighteenth-Century Britain,” in Area and Culture Studies (Tokyo University of Foreign Studies), No. 51, 1995. Masaaki Takeda is an associate professor at the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, University of Tokyo. He published many articles on Daniel Defoe, Jonathan Swift and other eighteenth-century British writers as well as on modern Japanese literature. His recent articles are included in Comprehensive Annotations to Gulliver’s Travels (co-written with Noriyuki Harada and Noriyuki Hattori, 2013), Ken’ichi Yoshida Revisited (edited by Nao Kawamoto, et al., 2019), British Literature and Film (edited by Kunio Shin, et al., 2019), and The Development of Twentieth-Century British Literature (edited by Kazuhisa Takahashi, et al., 2020). He also translated Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and The Journal of the Plague Year into Japanese. He currently works on the projects called “Nominal Desire: The Generation of the Novel in Eighteenth-Century Britain,” “Anthropological Readings of Modern British Novels” and “Robinsonades in Modern Japanese Economics.”

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Laurence Williams is an Associate Professor in the Department of English Studies at Sophia University in Tokyo. His publications include (with Alex Watson) the edited collection British Romanticism in Asia (Palgrave, 2019), and essays on eighteenth and nineteenth century travel writing in Studies in Travel Writing and Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies. Yukari Yoshihara is an associate professor in the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Tsukuba. Her publications include “Bardolators and Bardoclasts: Shakespeare in Manga/Anime and Cosplay” (2020), “Raw-Savage Othello: the First Staged Japanese Adaptation of Othello (1903) and Japanese Colonialism” (2014), and the “Introduction” to English Studies in Asia (2007). Her current projects are on Anglophone literature in Cold War Asia and Shakespeare and/in Japanese popular culture. Chunjie Zhang is an Associate Professor of German at the University of California in Davis. She works on the long eighteenth century, global modernisms and Asian-German studies. She is the author of Transculturality and German Discourse in the Age of European Colonialism (Northwestern UP, 2017) and the editor of Composing Modernist Connections in China and Europe (Routledge, 2019) and the journal section “Asian German Studies” in German Quarterly (93. 1, Winter 2020). She also co-edited the journal issue “Goethe, Worlds, and Literatures” (Seminar: A Journal of Germanic Studies, 2018) and co-edits the book series “Asia, Europe, and Global Connections” with Routledge.

List of Figures

Fig. 1.1

Fig. 1.2

Fig. 11.1 Fig. 11.2

The first pictorial representation of the island in Serious Reflections. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. https://brbldl.library.yale.edu/vufind/ Record/3827851 A Map of the World on which Delineated the Voyages of Robinson Crusoe. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. https://brblmedia.library.yale. edu/images/1125752_quarter.jpg Title page, Sony˘on, Year 2, Volume 2 (February 1, 1909). The boxed contents include Robinson Crusoe Sony˘on, Year 2, Volume 6 (July 1, 1909), 54

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction Steve Clark and Yukari Yoshihara

A fundamental axiom of World Literature is that the classic possesses durable transmission and ascribed value outside its own cultural context. Robinson Crusoe, in its multiple afterlives, obviously complies with that definition.1 However, despite the second volume, Farther Adventures , including visits to Bengal, Taiwan, China, Japan, the East Indies, and an epic trans-continental trek to Moscow, comparatively little attention has been paid to either representation of Asia or later reception history within that region.2 With the significant exceptions of Robert Markley’s The Far East and the English Imagination (2006), and more recently Eun Kyung Min’s China and the Writing of English Literary Modernity, 1690–1770 (2018), the Asian dimension to Defoe has remained largely unexplored in Anglophone criticism. This is in spite of his eminent compatibility with, and arguably founding role in, both the Postcolonial Enlightenment and

S. Clark (B) University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan Y. Yoshihara University of Tsukuba, Tsukuba, Japan e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 S. Clark and Y. Yoshihara (eds.), Robinson Crusoe in Asia, Asia-Pacific and Literature in English, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-4051-3_1

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the Global Eighteenth Century. Our collection intends to fill this gap, both by restoring Robinson Crusoe to its original historical-geographic context in the early eighteenth century and by tracing its complex proliferation over centuries within multiple Asian traditions through to the present day. Criticism of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe has tended to focus on his residence on the island, or even more narrowly on the initial period of complete isolation prior to the arrival of Friday. Episodes such as Crusoe’s own period of enslavement are usually erased, and comparatively little interest has been shown in the complex constitutional arrangements instituted on his return to the Caribbean in Farther Adventures . Yet if, in the first volume, geographical space is compressed, in the second the action ranges globally. Crusoe not only goes back to his previous island domain, but roams across oceans and continents to Asia. Indeed, this novel may be regarded as much as a Pacific text as an Atlantic one, given that the castaway Alexander Selkirk, the author of one of Defoe’s major source texts, was marooned (1704) on the Juan Fernandez Islands off the coast of Chile, until rescued by Woodes Rogers (1709). Michel Tournier locates his updated version, Vendredi (1967), there, emphasizing in his subtitle, “les Limbes du Pacifique.”3 One of the islands has even been named Robinson Crusoe Island, formerly known as Más a Tierra, closer to land. The other populated island incidentally is called Alexander Selkirk. In an odd inversion, the castaway comes to define the terrain rather than vice versa. The solitary and isolated individual, at first abjectly dependent and vulnerable, comes to identify with and then transform his environment. “No man is an island,” according to Donne, but perhaps an island can acquire human attributes.4 The fantasy of unlimited accumulation that motivates Crusoe’s later travels may be linked to the speculative frenzy of the South Sea Bubble in the 1720s. Shortly before that, the Darien Scheme to connect the Atlantic to the Pacific via the Panama Isthmus had bankrupted Scotland into acceptance of the Act of Union of 1707, for which Defoe acted as a propagandist. Behind both chimera lay the hope of intercepting the fabulous wealth carried from South American mines to Manila by the annual bullion galleons which made the trade route from Mexico to the Philippines the most lucrative in the world for over two centuries.5 This acquisitive drive is dramatized in Defoe’s New Voyage around the World (1725), which also shows awareness that crews were most likely to be driven to “desperate Mutiny” just before the long and arduous Pacific

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crossing.6 Hence the convenience of Juan Fernandez as a dropping-off point for refractory seamen. Criticism tends to contract Crusoe’s life-narrative, perhaps most famously, Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s “The novel disencumbered of all its rigmarole, beginning with Robinson’s shipwreck near his Island, and ending with the arrival of the ship which comes to take him away from it.”7 Yet in the second half of Farther Adventures, the action ranges from Madagascar to the East Indies. It is not the case that the moralreligious rationale established in the island scenes is simply transposed onto later representations of Asia. Crusoe does not engage in primitive barter, but enters into complex negotiation with highly sophisticated trading cultures, including China and Japan, and completes his journey by leading a sizeable caravan across the continental landmass to Muscovy. As Robert Markley reminds us, Crusoe abandons his island as a failed experiment, determined to remake himself as a merchant adventurer, and Protestant iconoclast.8 For a contemporary audience, this transformation was no less appealing than the island scenes. “Farther Adventures went through seven editions by 1747, only two fewer than the original, and was republished regularly with its predecessor well into the nineteenth century.”9 Crusoe may seem condemned to a lifetime of solitary confinement but nevertheless later bestrides the world like a colossus. It becomes tempting to see the island itself as a kind of mobile vessel, propelling itself outwards. The illustration to the third volume, Serious Reflections (oddly the first pictorial representation of the island) itself becomes both micro- and macrocosm.10 The land mass of the island possesses a strictly bounded space that seems to expand to occupy the entire frame. This is in stark contrast to the two spherical maps, attached to Farther Adventures, showing Crusoe’s trajectory across the entire globe.11 While the end-oflife meditations in Serious Reflections seem only loosely connected to the preceding volumes, the aged Crusoe offers an all-inclusive overview of the entire planet in “Of the Proportion between the Christian and Pagan World”12 : The present Case is, to speak of the mathematical Proportion that there is now to be observed upon the Plain of the Globe, and observe how small a Part of the World it is, where the Christian Religion has really prevail’d, and is nationally profess’d, I speak of the Christian Religion, where it is, as I call it, National, that is, in its utmost Latitude…13

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Fig. 1.1 The first pictorial representation of the island in Serious Reflections. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. https://brbldl.lib rary.yale.edu/vufind/Record/3827851

The “utmost Latitude” of this perspective is accentuated into an outward movement beyond the solar system in “A Vision of the Angelick World”14 : [I]t was on this Occasion, I say, that my Imagination, always given to wander, took a Flight of its own; and as I have told you that I had an invincible Inclination to travel, so I think I travelled as sensibly, to my understanding, over all the Mazes and Wastes of infinite Space, in Quest of those Things, as ever I did over the Desarts of Karakathay, and in uninhabited Wasts of Tartary, and perhaps may give as useful Account of my Journey.15

Crusoe has a paradoxical status as a traveler who is confined; space and movement are constricted yet also without apparent limit. Like Hamlet, he could be a “king of infinite space” was he not “bounded in a nutshell.”16 (Figs. 1.1 and 1.2). One question is why a figure so routinely seen as “the true prototype of the British colonist,” as Joyce puts it, has translated so readily into

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Fig. 1.2 A Map of the World on which Delineated the Voyages of Robinson Crusoe. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. https:// brblmedia.library.yale.edu/images/1125752_quarter.jpg

other cultural traditions: “All the Anglo-Saxon soul is in Crusoe: virile independence, unthinking cruelty, persistence, slow yet effective intelligence, sexual apathy, practical and well-balanced religiosity, calculating dourness.”17 This representative quality is endorsed from such antithetical perspectives as Leslie Stephen, who comments in Hours in a Library (1862) on “The stalwart Englishmen of the day; men who were building up vast systems of commerce and manufacture; shoving their intrusive persons into every quarter of the globe”; and Karl Marx, who sarcastically observed in Capital (1869) that “having rescued a watch, ledger and pen and ink from the wreck [Crusoe] commences like a true-born Briton to keep a set of books.”18 In Marx’s influential reading, the novel becomes a phenomenology of labor, with solitary Crusoe engaged in producing surplus value (“wealth of his own creation”) prior to entry into broader relations of exchange with Friday, cannibals, the Spanish and pirates. From this perspective, it dramatizes emergence from the state of nature, with the only original signatory to the social contract Crusoe himself.

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As Walter Scott remarks, “Neither has the admiration of the work been confined to England… The rage for imitating so popular a work seems to have risen to a degree of frenzy.”19 Robinson Crusoe has had an afterlife spanning centuries and showing no signs of exhaustion. Crusoe has become one of the few fictional characters—along with such figures as Hamlet, Don Quixote, Emma Bovary—who exist separate from their textual embodiment, and who not merely survive abridgement and translation, but appear to flourish from such a process of transmission. How can a narrative apparently so contracted and devoid of incident generate such a dynamic process of cross-cultural translation? What is it about the story that allows such a free-ranging proliferation of afterlives? One obvious answer is the utility of the work in abridged and adapted forms, almost immediately since its publication, for language learning. It is frequently the first text encountered, certainly often remembered as such, and resides comfortably within the category of children’s adventure story without losing its economic, political and religious resonances as adult fiction. Commercially, it has always been a reliable stopgap. Imitation and adaptation in the genre of Robinsonade began within months of its original publication, first in France and Germany, and then spreading, or rather cascading, across the world. Its twenty-first century generic mutations now include science fiction, reality TV, comic books, video games, and survivalist fantasy. Criticism of Defoe over the past twenty to thirty years has stressed that the works of the final decade occupy a comparatively small percentage of a prolific writing career. He is at least as much preoccupied by economics and geography as realist fiction, to the extent that now Atlas Maritimus and Commercialis (1728) might be seen as a central work. Previously ignored globe-trotting texts such as Captain Singleton (1720) and New Voyage around the World (1725) have also begun to receive long-overdue attention. Defoe may be regarded as the originator not only of the novel, but also of journalism, as editor of The Review, and of propaganda, for his work facilitating the Act of Union in 1707. His worldview, generally bourgeois, skeptical, and materialist, seems much more compatible with modernity, than once more celebrated contemporaries such as Dryden, Swift, and Pope who now seem distant, even moribund. Robinson Crusoe, and by extension the realist novel, challenges not only the elite Augustan canon in Britain, and the dominance of French and Chinese classical traditions in Europe and Asia, but also offers a model of vernacular usage

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addressed to an expanded readership, which has been eagerly adopted internationally since its original publication. This volume will assess the current status of Robinson Crusoe as a classic of World Literature, and why it resists being reduced to an exemplary parable of economic individualism and colonial appropriation. It seeks to combine attention to the original historical context of the novel (involving politics, finance, religion and geography) with a reception history focusing on its subsequent reworkings in specifically Asian contexts, which have been largely overlooked in comparison to later versions by writers such as William Golding, Michel Tournier, Derek Walcott, and J.M. Coetzee. We hope our collection will help to redirect critical interest onto these diverse and innovative appropriations, and onto the wider issues of global literary circulation which they raise. ∗ ∗ ∗ Robert Markley’s “Defoe and the Problem of the East India Company” explores the treatment of the East India Company (EIC) in Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1719) and A New Voyage Round the World (1725) in order to suggest that these novels—like the novelist’s treatises on trade—critique the Company in ways that have not yet been recognized. For Defoe the EIC embodies the greed, authoritarianism, paranoia, and monopolistic intentions that frustrate the plans that he championed for thirty years to open the Pacific to British commercial expansion. Defoe is hardly alone in his views of the Company, and to contextualize his critique this essay looks at one of the most important contemporary histories of trade in South and Southeast Asia by the Scots merchant Alexander Hamilton. For Defoe, any effort to expand British trade in the South Seas—from Chile to the imagined southern continent of Terra Australis Incognita—depends on circumventing the authority and dodging the ships of the East India Company. Even after the South Sea Bubble in 1720, Defoe persisted in his critique of what he perceived as the two fundamental flaws of the Company’s chartered monopoly rights: first, the Company put its own interests and profits ahead of those of the nation, and, second, it forestalled British ventures into the Pacific and inhibited efforts to expand commerce into the extremely lucrative markets of East Asia. The hyper-charged acquisitive urge in both Farther Adventures and New Voyage might therefore be seen as a kind of compensatory fantasy acted out in a global capitalist unconscious.

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Ted Motohashi’s “Between Castaways and Traders: Cannibal-cumCrusoe in Sumatra and the Andaman Islands” looks at the discourse of cannibalism as a mediator between the travelers/traders and the native populations, by investigating testimonials of their encounters in Sumatra and the Andaman Islands from the seventeenth century onwards. Not only the European travelers but also the natives required the cannibal discourse to be activated in order to mutually establish a humanly recognizable relationship between the alien races. This reciprocity is also the key to read Crusoe’s tale as a castaway who must develop a vital relationship with Friday and his fellow/enemy cannibals as his double self/other. In the local context of Sumatra and the Andaman Islands, as the real contact between the traveler and the native became more frequent and wide-ranging, the discourse of cannibalism inevitably lost its principal aim, when the stable relationship among the three parties—foreigners, local potentates, and interior inhabitants—collapsed, but some discourses of cannibalism prevailed from the early modern period well into the late nineteenth century in the area where the royal family monopolized the mediator role. The colonial power relationship between the two European rivals in the region—the Dutch and the English—determined the degree of prevalence for the discourse of cannibalism, in a manner similar to the rivalry between the Spanish and the English in Robinson Crusoe. As far as the traders-turned-castaways like so many Crusoes in Asia were concerned, the discourse of cannibalism was a useful, even an empowering, means of identity construction for those who propagated it in their own specific local context.20 Noriyuki Harada’s “Robinson Crusoe in the Context of Travel Narrative of the Early Modern England/Asia” sets out to discuss two interesting points about travel narratives of late seventeenth century and early eighteenth century that more or less relate to the geography and culture of Asian countries. One of them is the possible relationships of stories, books, and maps between East and West. The other is the possibility that Asian contexts, whether fictitious or factual, vitalize English prose fiction and contribute to its development. Referring to some narratives and visual images of Japanese or Chinese origin, those two points will be considered mainly through these three important English texts: George Psalmanazar’s An Historical and Geographical Description of Formosa (1703), Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1719), and Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726). Harada concludes that although Asia is commonly seen as a late recipient

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of the novel as an import from Europe, it is already present as a latent but powerful gravitational force at the origin of modern prose fiction. Dan Howse’s “Robinson Crusoe and Early Enlightenment Piracy” begins by emphasizing the prominence of the novel among the literary productions of the eighteenth century by the sheer number of abridgements and imitations it inspired. The success of the Robinsonade as a medium for later writers to develop and publicize ideas about society and economy built on a popularity established by the bootlegs of Defoe’s novel. Piracy is a major and explicit theme in both Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, in the threat offered by intruders to the island, and Farther Adventures , where Crusoe is threatened with execution for having purchased a vessel seized by mutineers. This essay, however, will explore how literary piracy flourished in an environment which possessed only an embryonic recognition of intellectual property rights. Even these were often ill-supported by statutory attempts to regulate the burgeoning popular press. However piracies also afforded an important vector for the diffusion of not only reportage and literary ideas, but technical and industrial know-how. Accordingly a fundamental tension existed between whether the way to encourage progress—both intellectual and economic—was by protecting literary ownership and the craft mysteries, or by minimizing the legal restrictions presented by copyrights and patents. The English Robinsonade, therefore, can be distinguished from contemporary French and German imitation and later Asian traditions by its preoccupation with national development, mercantilism and the role of the knowledge economy in the eighteenth century. It shows the contribution made by intellectual piracy in helping provide a fertile ground for the developments of the later Industrial Revolution and in funding later imperial ventures in Asia and elsewhere.21 Laurence Williams’s “Religious Conversion and the Far East in the Crusoe Trilogy” approaches the interrelation of the three books of the Crusoe trilogy from the point of view of religion. Williams argues that, despite the picaresque, discontinuous nature of Crusoe’s travels, and the differences in genre between the first two volumes and the Serious Reflections, a strong argument can be made for intellectual cohesion and philosophical development across the Crusoe trilogy. Appreciating this unity requires us to revise our ideas of Crusoe as a story about Protestant British imperialism, offering a model of Providence tied to individual labor and economic accumulation. Instead, Crusoe may be regarded as missionary-crusader, whose experiences progressively reveal to him the

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allegorical structure of human history as a war against the Devil and make him aware of the necessity of “Christian Confederacy” to transform the world (a view expounded explicitly in The Political History of the Devil , 1726). The conversion of Friday in the first volume is superseded by the broader challenges of creating a Christian community on the island in the second, a task which requires Crusoe to set aside denominational differences and seek common ground with Catholics. This paves the way for fantasies of holy war in Asia, a scheme whose challenges are presented in miniature in the episode with the Tartar idol in the Farther Adventures , and developed at greater length in the final plans for an invasion of Japan in the Serious Reflections . These changes can, in turn, be related to Defoe’s own long-standing beliefs in the supernatural, in the allegorical structure of human history, and in the necessity of interdenominational “charity,” all of which complicate any simplistic extrapolation of Crusoe’s labors on the island into a more general manifesto for economic expansion and imperial domination. While the end-of-life meditations in the Serious Reflections may seem only loosely connected to the preceding volumes, Williams argues that the aged Crusoe both offers a culminating overview of the entire planet, and invites the proliferation of sequels within the subequent reception history of the novel. The starting point of Steve Clark’s “‘Le coeur fou Robinsonne à travers les romans’: Crusoe’s Farther Adventures in the French Robinsonade” is Rousseau’s remarks in Emile (1762) on “Robinson Crusoe on his island alone, deprived of the help of his fellows and of all artificial aids, yet providing for his own support, for his own safety and even achieving a sort of well-being.” The choice of the novel as required reading to form the mind of the pupil is predicated on the imminent defeat of France in the Seven Years War (1756–1763). Displacement by Britain as the primary imperial power is implicitly attributed to the superior financial mechanisms underpinning the fiscal-military Hanoverian state. The continued rivalry is exemplified in the acerbic commentary on de Bougainville’s account of his circumnavigation (1766–1769; published in French in 1771) in the English translation by Johann Reinhold Forster which rapidly followed in 1772. The impact of geopolitics continues to shape the divergent forms taken by the Robinsonade in diverse national contexts in subsequent centuries. Rousseau also provides a model for the rhapsodic monologs of the French tradition, which proliferated in the decades following the English publication of the novel in 1719. The tradition continued to flourish in symbolist verse. (Rimbaud coins the verb

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“robinsonner” in ‘Roman’ (1870); St John Perse composed “Images à Crusoe” (1909), having translated the novel the previous year). The characteristic rhetorical opulence of its lyrical reverie might appear a form of liberation from the relentless pragmatism of Defoe’s mercantile-utilitarian ethos. Yet Crusoe himself ascribes his wanderings to “excess of imagination” at the beginning of Farther Adventures , and the “ecstasies” have already been undergone by the delirious crew of the French ship encountered on the return to the Caribean. Defoe’s novel already contains the “Extravagances” of the French exoticist mode within itself. Chunje Zhang’s “Krusoe Robinson’s Adventure: Technologies of the Self and Double Consciousness in Joachim Heinrich Campe’s Robinson der Jüngere” focuses on the German reception of Robinson Crusoe, which like the French, began almost immediately, with Johnann Gottfried Schnabel coining the term Robinsonade in 1731. Over a hundred translations and adaptations produced in the course of the century, providing a welcome alternative to the previous French cultural hegemony. Campe’s work has never been out of print and often becomes the basis for subse¯ quent adaptations such as Otsuka Hisao. Its significance lies not only in using Defoe’s work to provide a national allegory of German identity, but seeing its incorporation of non-European elements as crucial to the formation of a modern transcultural identity, Zhang challenges the argument that his novel’s popularity is compensatory, whether for lack of colonial possessions or rarity of experience of maritime adventure.22 Figures such as Georg Forster participated in and helped chronicle the Pacific exploration voyages of the eighteenth century, but Germany itself was not directly engaged in geopolitical rivalry in the region until the late nineteenth century. This allows a relative openness and hospitality to non-European traditions, evident in Goethe’s coinage of Weltliteratur. The French tradition oscillates between lyrical reverie and imperial ambition. Campe, in contrast, celebrates Krusoe’s practical adaptability as an existential virtue in its own right (rather than implying the domination of instrumental reason and subsequent capitalist exploitation), and is able to redefine his relation with Freitag in terms of relative equality and reciprocal benefit. Freitag even returns to Hamburg to lead a life of contented prosperity, whereas Defoe’s Friday is abruptly dispatched in the second volume. The starting point of Masaaki Takeda’s “Kicking Away the Gold Coins: ¯ Otsuka Hisao’s Reading of Robinson Crusoe and the Human Archetype of

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¯ Post-War Japan” is how Otsuka Hisao (1907–1996), an economic historian and leading theorist in the democratic movement of postwar Japan, frequently mentioned Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) as a story embodying the archetype of modern capitalism. Also, he recommended the autonomous and individualistic character of Robinson Crusoe as the “human archetype” that should be imitated by defeated Japanese, who were in need of establishing democracy for themselves rather than under ¯ foreign pressure. However, Otsuka’s analyses of Robinson Crusoe are not always faithful to Defoe’s original. This essay traces the possible sources ¯ of Otsuka’s misinterpretation back to eighteenth-century Germany and France: Joahim Heinrich Campe’s pedagogical adaptation of Robinson Crusoe and Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Emile or the Education. By so doing, ¯ it shows that Otsuka’s purification of the original text was not a digression but a repetition of the history of the misrepresentation of Robinson ¯ Crusoe (the character). This chapter also maintains that Otsuka resorted to the “human archetype” with a view to establishing what he thought ¯ the true liberty in postwar Japan. Despite Otsuka’s hope to rebuild Japan as a truly modern nation (that is to say, unlike pre-war, state-centered Japan), however, his core ideas mentioned above match Rousseau’s concept of liberty, which Isaiah Berlin associated with totalitarianism. This ¯ chapter finally examines whether Otsuka’s ideals have been realized in postwar Japan and emphasizes the significance of his writings especially because they make us reflect on both the positive and negative aspects of contemporary Japan. Yuanwen Chi’s “Transforming and Translating the Novel Form: The Examples of Daniel Defoe and Lin Shu” begins by situating Defoe’s experiments with prose fiction in the context of early eighteenth-century England standing at the threshold of the Industrial Revolution. His attempts to represent the prevailing ideologies of mercantilism and monarchism had a significant influence on the shaping and development of the embryonic form of the English novel per se. Similarly, in China, more than a century and a half later, Lin Shu’s (林紓,1852–1924) translations of Western literature would change Chinese approaches to story and narrative. Thus, this essay examines Lin Shu and Tseng Zong-Gong’s (曾 宗鞏, 1866–1938) translation of Robinson Crusoe (1719) into Chinese as Lu Bin Soon Piao Liu Ji (魯濱孫飄流記) in 1905 and explore how they sought to transform the Chinese traditional narrative into the form of the modern novel via transposing Western literary texts. To be sure, this study of Lin and Tseng’s Chinese translation of Robinson Crusoe is also

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predicated on an attempt to explore and shed light on the evolution of the novel form in both Western and Eastern cultural contexts. It should be noted that the series of Robinson stories witnessed the plunging into, and involvement of, the Asia–Pacific area (China, Formosa, Japan, the Bay of Tonquin, and the like) in the global geopolitical encounters and conflicts since the Age of Discovery. At this historical juncture, the introduction of Western novels to China at the turn of the twentieth century (ca. 1890) was especially significant as it was the product of numerous heated discourses and dialectics on resisting Western imperial invasion and colonial expansions. This multi-faceted and wide-ranging controversy involved the short-lived Wu-Xu Reform Movement (1898), the influence of prevailing social Darwinism, and the urgent need to find a new literary vehicle capable of helping resist the foreign encroachment. Standing alone as a landmark in the history of East–West cultural encounters, Lin Shu’s translations of more than 180 Western literary texts in collaboration with a couple of translators helped pave the way for the polemic establishment of the modern Chinese novel. The aftermath of the transposition had a tremendous and far-reaching impact on social life and thought in turn-ofthe-century China and finally helped usher in the May Fourth Movement (五四運動) in 1919. In “The Boy and the Sea: Translating Robinson Crusoe in Early Twentieth-Century Korea” Eun Kyung Min and Hye-Soo Lee examine two of the earliest Korean translations of Robinson Crusoe: Kim Ch’an’s Ch˘olsae kidam robinson pyoryugi (The Surprising Tale of Robinson’s Adventures on a Deserted Island, 1908) and Ch’oe Nams˘on’s Robinson muin ch˘oldo pyoryuygi (The Tale of Robinson’s Adventures on a Lonely Deserted Island, 1909). These predate the Japanese colonization of Korea (1910– 1945) by just a few years. Although both works are based on Japanese translations of the English original, they exemplify two very different strategies. Kim Ch’an’s version, which is based on Inoue Tsutomu’s 1883 Japanese translation of Defoe’s novel, attempts to recontextualize Defoe’s novel for a Korean audience by translating Crusoe’s Protestant values into Confucian ones and by emphasizing hyo, or traditional filial piety. Unlike Kim Ch’an, who renders Robinson Crusoe into a traditional moral tale, Ch’oe Nams˘on updates the novel for Korean colonial modernity. Ch’oe, who based his translation of Robinson Crusoe on Iwaya Sazanami’s Mujinto Daio (1905), a later Japanese translation of the novel, turns Defoe’s work into a story about adventure at sea for Korean youth,

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emphasizing the virtues of youthful self-help, courage, and resourcefulness. Ch’oe emphasizes not only the individual but also the national value of these virtues, allegorizing Robinson Crusoe as a tale of national progress, independence, and modernization. The chapter analyzes the complications that arise when Korean writers, dependent on Japanese translations of the English original, attempt to recontextualize and reinterpret Defoe’s novel for a Korean nation about to fall to Japanese imperial rule. Kazuya Sato’s “‘I must endure courageously and manfully’: Minami Y¯oichir¯o’s Translation of Robinson Crusoe in Post-War Japan” focuses on Minami Y¯oichir¯o (1893–1980), a prolific writer of children’s stories, who is also well-known for his retelling of European children’s classics. His version of Robinson Crusoe (1st edition 1938, with changes in 1946 and 1950) is not a literal translation, but departs from the original in a number of significant ways. Firstly, Minami begins the story with the scene of the first shipwreck at Yarmouth, retelling the story in medias res, instead of following the chronology of the novel. Secondly, he seeks to make Crusoe more humane and approachable for Japanese juvenile readers by providing a detailed and sentimental description of Crusoe’s attachment to the animals around him. Thirdly, Minami turns Crusoe into a hero with remarkable physical strength, who makes fierce moral judgments against cannibals and mutineers. Minami’s representation of Crusoe seems supportive of British and Japanese imperialism. Interestingly his translations continued to appear after the war, only with the omission of more explicit references to Japanese imperialism. Even more importantly, Minami’s rendition much influenced later retellings, many of which also seem to endorse imperialism and male-chauvinism in his work without knowing it. In order to reveal this hidden buried ideology, this essay argues for the necessity of paying attention to this writer/translator in understanding the perception, status, and influence of Robinson Crusoe in postwar Japan. Yukari Yoshihara’s “Robinsonades in Japan: Colonial Fantasy, Survivalist Narrative, and Homo Economicus ” explores the multiple appropriations of Defoe’s novel from its first translation from a Dutch translation (1849) through to the present day. Crusoe has functioned as a figure for sakoku, Japan’s isolation policy in its feudal past (1639–1854), for its struggle to become a part of the modern economic world system, for the colonial expansion of its maritime empire over Asia and the Pacific (1895– 1945), for its period of neo-colonial economic dominance over Asia (since

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1960s), and for its anxiety over its declining economy in recent decades after the burst of its bubble economy (1990–2020). In Japanese marine novels when it was a colonial empire, Robinson Crusoe was transformed into a Japanese character, as if it were Japan, rather than Britain, that could represent his true spirit, at the time when Japan was claiming that it was a liberator of Asia and the Pacific from Western colonialism. In 1948 ¯ Ooka Shohei quotes the epigraph of Serious Reflections: “it is reasonable to represent one kind of imprisonment by another” in his fictionalized depiction of his experience of imprisonment as a POW in the Philippines during WWII (but also as an analogue to the situation Japan was in under GHQ occupation). In 1949 Japanese “holdouts” who returned from the Mariana Islands (Joseph Sternberg filmed The Saga of Anatahan (1953), based on this incident) were compared to Robinson Crusoe. Generally speaking, postwar Robinsonades in Japan for younger readers are cleansed, gentrified, rendered utopian, and go without much violence; but Crusoe also features as exemplary homo economicus in discussions of postwar reconstruction and the bubble economy. Maria Lorena Santos, in “Crusoe Comes to Caramoan: The Survival of American Cultural Imperialism in the Philippines” examines the massconsumed reality-television-Robinsonade, Survivor, as an example of contemporary literary and cinematic spinoffs. Derived from the Swedish program Expedition Robinson, the highly successful US version capitalizes on the popularity of exoticism and of “roughing it” in a desolate locale: modern Americans are marooned away from civilization, “pitted against the elements,” and “forced to live off the land.” The Philippines, dubbed a location “both beautiful and treacherous” has been the site of four seasons of the US version; the Caramoan islands in Camarines Sur have hosted two American seasons and at least eight more incarnations of the show with “castaways” from France, Sweden, and Bulgaria. This essay reads the Survivor narrative, especially seasons 25 and 26 of the American version set in Caramoan, as a repackaging of Robinson Crusoe’s proto-imperialist themes—more specifically as simulation and reification of American cultural hegemony in the Philippines reformulated as entertainment. Crusoe’s dominion over the island, his embodying of the Anglo-Saxon spirit in the conquest of the cannibals and “civilizing”/subjugation of Friday, and his reconstruction of the land as part of the Empire parallel the usurping of Philippine lands, resources, and culture for foreign use, the (mis)representation of the Philippines as

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remote and exotic, and the ecological impact that Robinsonade tourism has had on places like Caramoan. ∗ ∗ ∗ To close on a topical reference, during the COV-19 pandemic, many people have been reading classic works such as Boccaccio’s Decameron (1353), Camus The Plague (1947), and of course Defoe’s A Journal of Plague Year (whose relevance was duly noted by the contributors to this volume, who we would like to thank for battling through to produce their essays under such difficult circumstances). Masaaki Takeda, the author of Chapter 8 of this volume, wrote an article “What Defoe’s Plague Year tells us who are living in Coronavirus pandemic.”23 He remarks that a merchant in A Journal who would not “touch the money, but has it put into a pot full of vinegar” is like us who are afraid of touching cash and choosing no-touch payment, and Defoe’s observation that it was “mostly poor People, who depended upon their Labour”24 that fell victim to the plague would remind us of the fact that illness and death among minority groups are disproportionally high in the COV-19 pandemic. Under lockdown, “[t]hose cut off from society have been selfcomforting through the arts during long periods of isolation that bring to mind Robinson Crusoe.”25 Animal Crossing: New Horizons, a Nintendo life simulation video game was released on March 20, 2020. It invites the player to “[e]scape to a deserted island and create your own paradise as you explore, create, and customize”26 and so is called “the Game for the Coronavirus Moment.”27 An article titled “The Horror at the Heart of the Island Fantasy”28 analyzes the game as inheriting the history of the colonial island imaginary and compares the gamer to Robinson Crusoe. Defoe’s novel clearly has not lost its topical relevance and power to generate new afterlives.

Notes 1. This has been demonstrated by Martin Green’s The Robinson Crusoe Story (Pennsylvania State University Press, 1990); Paul Englebert, La Posterité de Robinson Crusoe (Geneva: Droz, 1997); Ryutaro Iwao, A Short Book on Adaptations of Robinson Crusoe (Tokyo: Misuzu, 2000); and Jean-Michel Racault’s Robinson & Companie (Paris: Petra, 2010). The Robinsonade genre has also been closely examined in Michael Seidel, Robinson Crusoe: Island Myths and the Novel (Boston: G.K. Hall, 1991);

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3. 4. 5.

6. 7.

8.

9. 10.

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Richard Phillips, Mapping Men and Empire: a Geography of Adventure (London: Routledge, 1996); Rebecca Weaver Hightower, Empire Islands: Castaways, Cannibals and Fantasies of Conquest (Minnesoa: University of Minnesota Press, 2007); and Emmanuelle Peraldo, 300 Years of Robinsonades (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing). Robinson Crusoe: Myths and Metamorphoses (1996), edited by Lieve Spaas and Brian Stimpson (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1996) includes a single page afterword by Kunio Tsunekawa on “A Japanese Robinson” (317). John Richetti’s recent Cambridge Companion to Robinson Crusoe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018) includes essays by Carl Fisher, “Innovation and Imitation in the eighteenth-century Robinsonade” (99–111), Eve Tavor Bannett, “Robinson Crusoe and TravelWriting: the Transatlantic World” (128–41), and Dennis Todd “Robinson Crusoe and Colonialism (142–56), but little on Asia; one essay (Starr, “Robinson Crusoe and its Sequels” (67–83)) suffices for both Farther Adventures and Serious Reflections. Its coverage is even more sparse than the earlier Cambridge Companion to Daniel Defoe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), also edited by John Richetti, which at least has Aravamadum’s “Defoe, Commerce and Empire.” It is striking that neither volume has a single index entry for Asia. Tournier, Vendredi / Friday (1967: Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997). Donne, “Meditation 17,” Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, Complete Poems and Selected Prose (Bloomsbury: Nonsuch, 1929) 537. On the South Sea Bubble, see Jonathan Lamb, Preserving the Self in the South Seas 1680–1840 (Chicago: Chicago UP, 2001) 62–67; on the longer history of the region, see Matt K. Matsuda, Empire of Love: Histories of France and the Pacific (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), and Pacific Worlds: a History of Seas, Peoples and Cultures (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). A New Voyage around the World (1725). Ed John McVeigh, vol. 10 of The Novels of Daniel Defoe (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2008) 61. Emile ou de l’education (1762). Translated and edited by Christopher Kelly and Allan Bloom as Emile or On Education. The Collected Writings of Rousseau, vol. 13 (Hanover, New Hampshire: Dartmouth College Press, 2010) 332–36. “’I have now done with my island, and all manner of discourse about it’: Crusoe’s Farther Adventures and the Unwritten History of the Novel,” in A Companion to the Eighteenth-Century Novel and Culture, ed. Paula R. Backscheider and Catherine Ingrassia (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009) 25–47 (31–32). Ibid. 26. Defoe Serious Reflections, frontispiece, reproduced vol. 3, 48.

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11. See Robert Markley, “Ecological Footprints: Crusoe’s Island and Other Alien Environments,” introduction to special issue Eighteenth-Century Fiction 32.1 (2019) 1–8. 12. Defoe Serious Reflections 201–219. 13. Ibid. 201–02. 14. Ibid. 221–73. 15. Ibid. 236. 16. Act 2 scene 2 254–55, Riverside Shakespeare (Houghton Mifflin: Boston, 1974) 1155. 17. James Joyce, “Realism and Idealism in English Literature (Daniel Defoe— William Blake).” Occasional, Critical and Political Writing (Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 1912) 163–82 (174). 18. Leslie Stephen, “Defoe’s Novels,” Hours in a Library 3 vols. (London: Smith, Elder & Co, 1892) vol. 1, 17–46 (44–46). Karl Marx, Capital: a Critique of Political Economy (1867). Translated by Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling, and edited by Friedrich Engels (New York: Modern Library, 1906) vol. 1, 88–89. 19. The Miscellaneous Works of Walter Scott (1834). Cited from Daniel Defoe: The Critical Heritage, ed. Pat Rogers (London: Routledge, 2011) 79. 20. “Mastering the Savage: Conversion in Robinson Crusoe,” 32–75 and “Defoe: Cannibals and Colonialism,” 158–79 in Dennis Todd, Defoe’s America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). 21. See “Crusoe, Toil and Temptation,” in Stephen H. Gregg, Defoe’s Writings and Manliness: Contrary Men (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009) 59–90. 22. Suzannah Zantop, Colonial Fantasies; Conquest, Family and Nation in Precolonial Germany, 1770–1870 (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1997); Margaret Cohen, The Novel and the Sea (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010). 23. Masaaki Takeda, “Corona virus jidai ni Daniel Defoe no Pesto no kioku ga oshiete kureru koto (What Defoe’s Plague Year tells us who are living in Coronavirus pandemic)”. https://gendai.ismedia.jp/articles/-/72266? page=3. Accessed July 3, 2020. 24. Defoe A Journal of the Plague Year (London: Pickering & Chatto) 38. 25. Paul Crawford, “Arts for Health: Creativity & Coronavirus,” (Melbourne: Emerald Publishing House, 2020). https://www.emeraldgrouppublis hing.com/topics/coronavirus/blog/arts-health-creativity-coronavirus. 26. Nintendo, “Escape to Your Personal Island Paradise,” (Tokyo: Nintendo, 2020). 27. Imad Khan, “Why Animal Crossing Is the Game for Coronavirus Moment,” The New York Times (April 7, 2020). 28. Chelsea Davis, “The Horror at the Heart of the Island Paradise Fantasy,” Electric Lit. (April 23, 2020).

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Works Cited Aravamudum, Srinivas. 2009. Defoe, Commerce and Empire. Richetti 45–63. Bannett, Eve Tavor. 2018. Robinson Crusoe and Travel-Writing: the Transatlantic World. Richetti 41–28. Carl, Fisher. 2018. Innovation and Imitation in the Eighteenth-Century Robinsonade. Richetti 99–111. Cohen, Margaret. 2010. The Novel and the Sea. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Crawford, Paul. 2020. Arts for Health: Creativity & Coronavirus. Melbourne: Emerald Publishing House. https://www.emeraldgrouppublishing.com/ topics/coronavirus/blog/arts-health-creativity-coronavirus. Accessed July 3, 2020. Davis, Chelsea. 2020. The Horror at the Heart of the Island Paradise Fantasy. Electric Lit. https://electricliterature.com/the-horror-at-the-heart-of-the-isl and-paradise-fantasy/?fbclid=IwAR2YXYFrfcaqaVdHB_HW85q2KDPCKGD IAK7OFpvIymJpQ0WNjQzdpgfXbQY. Accessed July 3, 2020. Defoe, Daniel. 1719; 2008a. The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe. The Novels of Daniel Defoe 1. Edited by W. R. Owens. London: Pickering & Chatto. ———. 1719; 2008b. The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe. The Novels of Daniel Defoe 2. Edited by W. R. Owens. London: Pickering & Chatto. ———. 1720; 2008. Serious Reflections during the Life and Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe with His Vision of the Angelick World. The Novels of Daniel Defoe 3. Edited by G. A. Starr. London: Pickering & Chatto. ———. 1722; 2009. A Journal of the Plague Year. The Novels of Daniel Defoe 7. Edited by John Mullan. London: Pickering & Chatto. ———. 1725; 2008. A New Voyage around the World (1725). The Novels of Daniel Defoe 10. Edited by John McVeigh. London: Pickering & Chatto. Donne, John. 1624; 1929. Meditation 17. Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, Complete Poems and Selected Prose. Bloomsbury: Nonsuch. Englebert, Paul. 1997. La Posterité de Robinson Crusoe. Geneva: Droz. Green, Martin. 1990. The Robinson Crusoe Story. Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press. Gregg, Stephen H. 2009. Defoe’s Writings and Manliness: Contrary Men. Farnham: Ashgate. Hightower-Weaver, Rebecca. 2007. Empire Islands: Castaways, Cannibals and Fantasies of Conquest. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press. Iwao, Ryutaro. 2000. Robinson Crusoe henkeitan shoshi (A Short Book on Adaptations of Robinson Crusoe). Tokyo: Misuzu. Joyce, James. 1912. Realism and Idealism in English Literature (Daniel Defoe– William Blake). Occasional, Critical and Political Writing. 163–82. Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics.

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Khan, Imad. 2020. Why Animal Crossing Is the Game for Coronavirus Moment. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/07/ arts/animal-crossing-covid-coronavirus-popularity-millennials.html. Accesssed July 3, 2020. Lamb, Jonathan. 2001. Preserving the Self in the South Seas 1680–1840. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Markley, Robert. 2006. The Far East and the English Imagination. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2009. ‘I Have Now Done with My Island, and all Manner of Discourse About it’: Crusoe’s Farther Adventures and the Unwritten History of the Novel. 25–47. A Companion to the Eighteenth-Century Novel and Culture. Edited by Paula R. Backscheider and Catherine Ingrassia. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. ———. 2018. Ecological Footprints: Crusoe’s Island and Other Alien Environments. Introduction to special issue Eighteenth-Century Fiction 32.1: 1–8. Marx, Karl. 1867; 1906. Das Kapital. Translated by Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling, and Edited by Friedrich Engel as Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. New York: Modern Library. Matsuda, Matt. K. 2005. Empire of Love: Histories of France and the Pacific. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2012. Pacific Worlds: A History of Seas, Peoples and Cultures. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Min, Eun Kyung. 2018. China and the Writing of English Literary Modernity, 1690–1770. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nintendo. 2020. Escape to Your Personal Island Paradise. Tokyo: Nintendo. https://www.nintendo.com/games/detail/animal-crossing-new-horizons-swi tch/. Accessed July 3, 2020. Peraldo, Emmanuelle. 2020. 300 Years of Robinsonades. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Phillips, Richard. 1996. Mapping Men and Empire: A Geography of Adventure. London: Routledge. Racault, Jean-Michel. 2010. Robinson & Companie. Paris: Petra. Richetti, John, ed. 2008. Cambridge Companion to Daniel Defoe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2018. Cambridge Companion to Daniel Defoe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rogers, Pat, ed. 1972; 1995; 2011. Daniel Defoe: the Critical Heritage. London: Routledge. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. 1762; 2010. Emile ou de l’education. Translated and edited by Christopher Kelly and Allan Bloom as Emile or On Education. The

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Collected Writings of Rousseau, vol. 13. Hanover. New Hampshire: Dartmouth College Press. Scott, Walter. 1834. The Miscellaneous Works of Walter Scott. Rogers 1972. Seidel, Michael. 1991. Robinson Crusoe: Island Myths and the Novel. Boston: G.K.Hall. Shakespeare, William. 1974. The Riverside Shakespeare. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Spaas, Lieve and Brian Stimpson, eds. 1996. Robinson Crusoe: Myths and Metamorphoses. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Starr, G. A. Robinson Crusoe and its Sequels. Richetti 67–83. Stephen, Leslie. 1892. Defoe’s Novels. Hours in a Library. 3 vols. 17–46. London: Smith, Elder & Co. Takeda, Masaaki. 2020. Corona virus jidai ni Daniel Defoe no Pesto no kioku ga oshiete kureru koto (What Defoe’s Plague Year tells us who are living in Coronavirus pandemic). https://gendai.ismedia.jp/articles/-/ 72266?page=3. Accessed July 3, 2020. Todd, Dennis. 2010. Defoe’s America. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2018. Mastering the Savage: Conversion in Robinson Crusoe. Richetti 32–75. Tournier, Michel. 1967.Vendredi ou les Limbes du Pacifique. Paris: Gallimard. ———. 1997. Friday or the Other Island. Translated by Norman Denny. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Zantop, Suzannah. 1997. Colonial Fantasies; Conquest, Family and Nation in Precolonial Germany, 1770–1870. Durham and London: Duke University Press.

CHAPTER 2

Defoe and the Problem of the East India Company Robert Markley

In the last twenty years or so, Daniel Defoe’s second novel, The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, has returned to the canon of eighteenthcentury literature, after a century’s absence, thanks to the efforts of scholars like Hans Turley, Melissa Free, and Lucinda Cole.1 Despite the significance of this body of work, some gaps remain in our understanding of Defoe’s depictions of Asia—and particularly of Asian trade—in this novel and his later works, Captain Singleton (1720) and A New Voyage Around the World (1725). Although Robinson Crusoe, Bob Singleton, and the nameless hero of A New Voyage trade and plunder their ways across the Indian Ocean, the South China Sea, and the Pacific, they exist in a fictional realm of profit-taking that marginalizes—almost to the vanishing point—the role that the English East India Company (EIC) played in the region. Founded in 1600, the EIC legally had a monopoly

R. Markley (B) Department of English, University of Illinois, Urbana, IL, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 S. Clark and Y. Yoshihara (eds.), Robinson Crusoe in Asia, Asia-Pacific and Literature in English, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-4051-3_2

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on British trade to South and Southeast Asia, although in practice independent merchants operated throughout the region, cutting their own deals in the intra-Asian country trade. By Defoe’s lifetime, the Company had long played a major role in British economic policy, debates about the value of foreign trade, moral and economic condemnations of importing luxury goods, and perceptions of Anglo-Asian relations.2 As an organization that holds a privileged, if contested, position in economic histories of the origin and development of the modern corporation, the EIC often is treated as an extension of national and imperial interests that foreshadow late eighteenth and nineteenth-century British colonialism.3 In this essay, I want to suggest that Defoe’s treatment of the Company in Farther Adventures and A New Voyage offers a fascinating perspective on the values and assumptions that shape his fascination with Asian trade. These novels, then, both intervene in contemporary debates about the economics of international trade and give voice to the fantasies of unending profits that delimit Britain’s understanding of the Pacific in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. For Defoe, the EIC embodies the greed, authoritarianism, paranoia, and monopolistic intentions that frustrate the plans that he championed for thirty years to open the Pacific to British commercial expansion. In July and August of 1711, he devoted twelve issues of his Review of the State of the British Nation, to promoting the South Sea Company, arguing that the west coast of South America and the uncolonized regions of the continent offer abundant resources and the prospect of establishing “an easy, godly, and profitable protectorate” (8: 47, July 12, 1711).4 He asserted that the “infinite Advantage” of colonies yet to be planted and a trade yet to be undertaken could secure English interests without provoking war with New and Old Spain: “there is Room enough on the Western Coast of America, call’d the South Seas,” he claims, “for us to Fix, Plant, Settle, and Establish a Flourishing Trade, without Injuring, Encroaching on, or perhaps in the least Invading the Property or Commerce of the Spaniards’” (8: 49, July 17, 1711). For investors in and supporters of the EIC, however, such efforts to expand British trade in the South Seas—from Chile to the imagined southern continent of Terra Australis Incognita—depended on circumventing the authority and dodging the ships of a Company intent on enforcing its own privileges. Even after the South Sea Bubble in 1720, Defoe persisted in his critique of the two fundamental flaws of the Company’s chartered monopoly rights: first, the Company put its own interests and profits ahead of those of

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the nation, and second, it forestalled British ventures into the Pacific and the extremely lucrative markets of East Asia. Defoe is hardly alone in his views of the Company, and to contextualize his critique I turn to probably the most important contemporary history of trade in South and Southeast Asia, A New Account of the East-Indies (1727) by the Scots merchant Alexander Hamilton.5 By emphasizing its moral, strategic, and political limitations, Defoe and Hamilton outline a counter-narrative to progressivist views of the EIC as a modern corporation-in-the-making.

Farther Mercantile Adventures As I have argued elsewhere, when Crusoe abandons his island midway through Farther Adventures, he rejects many of the values and assumptions associated with European colonial ventures in favor of the kind of economic adventurism that characterizes A New Voyage.6 Rather than a template for British colonialism, his island is an out-of-the-way and unprofitable backwater. Having cajoled, proselytized, and shamed the European men on the island into marrying their native wives and having brokered agreements among bickering colonists, Crusoe disclaims any long-term plans or imperialist intentions: “I never so much as pretended to plant in the Name of any Government or Nation; or to acknowledge any Prince, or to call my People Subjects to any one Nation more than another; nay, I never so much as gave the Place a Name; but left it as I found it belonging to no Body.”7 This outright rejection of colonial practices and rhetoric suggests that Defoe recognizes the incompatibility of the languages of administrative control and “infinite Advantage.” In the second half of Farther Adventures, he begins to develop the narrative strategies that shape his subsequent career as a novelist. The myth of economic self-sufficiency that sustains Crusoe for twenty-eight years on his island in the first volume of the trilogy is jettisoned in favor of tales about the sailors, merchants, bankers, moneylenders, factors, and middlemen who were essential to Asian trade. Yet Crusoe remains oddly distanced from these networks, as Defoe idealizes the role of the independent trader, making money outside of EIC regulations and oversight. In New Voyage, this idealization turns the quest for “infinite Advantage” into a fantasy tale of endless profits in the South Pacific and South America. Crusoe’s failure to turn his island into a commonwealth characterized by piety and toleration extends to his inability to control the crew of his ship once they depart; in Madagascar, the crew burns a village to the

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ground because its men dared to punish one of the sailors for raping a native woman. Crusoe’s moral conscience alienates him from his crew: because he keeps remonstrating with the sailors about what he insists on calling “the Massacre of Madagascar,” they demand that his nephew (the captain of the ship) leave him ashore “in the Road at Bengale” (141) presumably Fort William (Calcutta). Although Crusoe has plenty of money, he has, in his sixties, no direction home. His indecision about how to make his way back to England leads him to fantasize about crossing the subcontinent to Surat, sailing through the Persian Gulf to Basra, caravanning to Aleppo, sailing to Italy, and then finding a British ship bound for England. As an alternative, he says, he could “wait for some English Ships, which were coming to Bengale from Achin on the Island of Sumatra, and get passage on Board them for England: But as I came hither without any Concern with the English East-India Company, so it would be difficult to go from hence without their License, unless with great Favour of the Captains of the Ships, or the Companies Factors, and to both, I was an utter Stranger” (143). Defoe is unambiguous in this passage: the Company provides the only transoceanic means for Crusoe to return to England; without securing passage aboard one of its ships, he would be reduced to an arduous, multistage itinerary overland and by sea. Because he does not have a “License” to trade, Crusoe is at the mercy of the “Great Favour” of captains and Company officials, but he has no means of introducing himself into what is, from his perspective, an exclusive and closed commercial system that depends on patronage and the regulations of a private Company. For a lone Englishman stranded in Bengal, the Company’s monopoly on trade and travel to Britain leaves the hero no choice but to seek his fortune outside of its authority. Given his situation, Crusoe easily is talked into two trading voyages to East Asia by an unnamed English merchant, a fellow lodger at an Englishwoman’s house in Ft. William, who conveniently is unaffiliated with the Company. The merchant talks Crusoe into “a trading Voyage to China” by arguing that, “The whole World is in Motion, rouling round and round; all the Creatures of God, heavenly Bodies and earthly are busy and diligent, Why should we be idle? There are no Drones in the World but Men, Why should we be of that Number?” (144). The merchant’s comments naturalize commerce by linking trade metaphorically to Newtonian mechanics and the image of the industrious beehive popularized as a socioeconomic and political metaphor by Bernard Mandeville. These images refashion the restlessness and wandering that

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the hero berates himself for in both Robinson Crusoe and, more than thirty fictional years later, in Farther Adventures: as he departs from the island, Crusoe admits that he is “gone [on] a Wild Goose Chase” and the reader “must be content to follow me thro’ a new Variety of Follies, Hardships, and wild Adventures” (126). Yet in Bengal, Crusoe jumps at the merchant’s proposal, even as he concedes that “if Trade was not my Element, Rambling was, and no Proposal for seeing any Part of the world which I had never seen before, could possibly come amiss to me” (144). Commerce, at least as the merchant states the case, becomes a way to rechannel Crusoe’s unfocused energies, his “Rambling,” into a universalized model of industry, an existence “busy and diligent.” Joining forces and fortunes, Crusoe and the merchant hire a ship, secure a crew, and sail east, into ports and waters that the EIC claimed as its exclusive preserve, at least as far as the intrusions of other Englishmen went. Rather than the kinds of minute descriptions that characterize the hero’s years marooned on his island in Robinson Crusoe, Defoe sums up this voyage, quite literally, in a couple of sentences. Claiming that “there are so many Travellers, who have wrote the History of their Voyages and Travels this way, that it would be very little Diversion to any Body, to give a long Account of the Places we went to, and the People who inhabit there,” Crusoe contents himself with observing, “I made this Voyage to Achin, in the Island of Sumatra, and from thence to Siam, where we exchang’d some of our Wares for Opium, and some Arrack, which at that Time, was very much wanted there; In a Word, we went up to Suskan, made a very great Voyage; was eight Months out, and return’d to Bengale, and I was very well satisfied with my Adventure” (144–45). Defoe turns to a prosaic summation that could have been lifted from dozens or even hundreds of merchants’ accounts of trade in the region.8 In this respect, it is radically different from the kinds of commerce that he takes pains to describe in his accounts of both mercantile and criminal life in Moll Flanders and Roxana and in his imaginative descriptions of trade with indigenous peoples in Africa in Captain Singleton and the imagined realms of Terra Australis Incognita in New Voyage.9 In the latter, scenes abound of indigenous peoples exchanging “large flat pieces of Pure Gold” that weigh more than two ounces for a “rusty Hatchet.”10 The contrast between the specificity of these described transactions and the terse itinerary that Crusoe offers of sailing from Bengal to Achin, Siam, and Zhousan Island on the Chinese coast, is striking. In the unknown (to Europeans) interior of Africa and the imagined lands of Terra Australis

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Incognita, the specific descriptions of trade reinscribe European fantasies about trading trinkets for gold; they have the surreal quality of recurrent dreams. In the lucrative and highly competitive markets of Southeast Asia, however, Crusoe’s trades are barely reported, let alone detailed. In this respect, Defoe’s scenes of trading trinkets for gold seem like compensatory fantasies for the dangers and complexities of international trade in Asia: tough markets, shrewd merchants, storms, piracy, and lost or damaged cargoes. His first voyage from Bengal is lucrative enough that Crusoe uses his “Adventure” as an object lesson to explain, at length, both the prosperity of the East India Company, and the conditions that allow it to prosper: I observe that our People in England, often admire how the Officers which the Company sent into India, and the Merchants which generally stay there, get such very great Estates as they do, and sometimes come Home worth 60, to 70 100 thousand Pound at a Time. But it is no Wonder, or at least we shall see so much farther into it, when we consider the innumerable Ports and Places where they have a free Commerce; that it will then be no Wonder, and much less will it be so, when we consider, that at all those Places and Ports where the English Ships come, there is so much, and such constant Demand for the Growth of all other Countries, that there is a certain Vent for the Returns, as well as a Market abroad, for the Goods carried out. (145)

Defoe’s description of the East India trade is multilayered, and his language draws on a century or so of debate about the EIC’s value to the nation as a whole. The “free Commerce” that Defoe identifies as the source of wealth seems to include both the “Officers” of the EIC as well as the “Merchants that generally stay there”; if Crusoe sees himself as one of the latter, operating independently of the Company, the “Officers” represent a bureaucratic and managerial quasi-state that gathers wealth for the investors in England, while siphoning off money into their own pockets. “The growth of all other Countries”—with the emphasis on “other”—indicates that Defoe is describing “country trade,” that is, the intra-Asian transport of spices, drugs, textiles, dyes, ivory, and so on that the EIC depended on for its profits. Like other European trading companies, however, the Company played a minor role in the longestablished commercial networks of Arabian, Mughal, Armenian, South Indian, Indonesian, Chinese, and Filipino merchants in the region.11 The EIC made money but only at the sufferance of local merchants, states, and

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customs officials. What intrigues Defoe, nonetheless, is the certainty of the markets on both ends of Crusoe’s journey. His phrase, “a certain Vent [sale] for Returns” minimizes any sense of risk or uncertainty: whatever Crusoe buys in East Asia, he can sell at a profit in Bengal or elsewhere. The phrase, “Goods carried out,” gestures to the ambiguity that the EIC promoted about what it was actually trading to Asia for spices, silks, and so on. Well into the late eighteenth century, over three-quarters of British exports to Asia were in bullion, although Company apologists emphasized the wool, saltpeter, and manufactured items that were shipped to ports in India.12 “Carried out,” then, suggests that Crusoe and other “Merchants who generally stay” in Asia become rich by using gold and silver to buy goods in India, then selling those items at a mark-up in the “the innumerable Ports and Places” elsewhere in South and Southeast Asia—that is, at the multiple stops that a European ship invariably would make between Surat or Bengal and Sumatra, Siam, or China. Even as Defoe suggests the wealth of Company officers and merchants depends on the volume of trade and the certainty of markets, the internal workings of the Company are left opaque. Defoe’s phrasing “certain Vent,” makes it seem as though international trade operates on almost mechanistic, causal, even biophysical principles. In this instance, Defoe appropriates for his own use one of the arguments that EIC officials and their defenders made repeatedly—the myth of a self-sustaining and profitable trade in the East that faced disruption only from European competitors or corrupt local officials. In attacking the Dutch near-monopoly of the spice trade in Southeast Asia, Josiah Child, director and sometime Governor of the EIC, maintained in the 1680s that the Company’s trade was essential to England’s wealth and sociopolitical stability. “All other Foreign Trade in Europe doth greatly depend upon East-India Commodities,” he asserted, and announced as an unquestioned principle, “Foreign Trade produceth Riches, Riches Power, Power preserves our Trade and Religion; they mutually work one upon and for the preservation of each other.”13 But Crusoe’s trading ventures in Southeast Asia suggest how private trade could circumvent, or even undermine, the mutually reinforcing ideology that Child describes. In this respect, Hamilton’s A New Account of the East-Indies, published eight years after Robinson Crusoe, provides a unique perspective on the role that Defoe crafts for Crusoe in the second half of Farther Adventures. Hamilton spent thirty-five years in Asia (1689–c.1724), most of

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them as an independent trader. He offers, in many cases, the only eyewitness history of British activities in South Asia in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries that was not authored by Company employees. Hamilton was conversant, if not fluent, in several Malay dialects, Persian, and the Pidgin Portuguese that served as a lingua franca among merchants of different nationalities in the region; because often he could dispense with translators, his version of events—for example, the humiliation of EIC representatives at Aurangzeb’s court at the end of the Mughal War—offers specifics that typically are absent from the Company’s official correspondence. Despite his three decades of flouting its authority, Hamilton was enlisted, more than once, by the EIC in times of crisis, indicating something of his prominence in the transcultural commercial networks of South Asia. Most notably in June 1717, he was given command of the Company’s fleet in its war against Kanhoji Angria, the admiral of the Maratha navy who was disrupting European commerce between Surat and Calicut on the west coast of the subcontinent.14 Seven months later, after quarelling with the Company, Hamilton resigned and resumed his career as an independent trader. Yet after he returned to Britain and lambasted the Company in A New Account, he appears in the minutes of the EIC directorate in June 1733, apparently as an expert on the ongoing maritime conflict with the Maratha “pirates.” As a participant in many of the events he describes, Hamiton frequently lambasts the Company’s authoritarian control and skinflint business practices. In a characteristic and illuminating passage, he compares the Company’s policies unfavorably to the treatment that Britons received from Mughal merchants in South Asia. In the mid-1690s, the period during which Crusoe is trading in Asia, Hamilton writes that the Indian Owners procured English Officers to go in their [merchant] Ships, and allowed them very handsom Salaries and Indulgences. The Captains had from 10 to 15 L. per Month. Mates from 6 to 9 L. and the [Gunners and Boatswains] had also good Salaries, besides the Privilege of carrying some Goods and Merchandizes, Freight free. Mr. Annesley [the president or head of the EIC factory at Surat] thought those Salaries and Indulgences were too great for Seamen, so he went about to reduce them to about one Half, and the other Moiety he lookt on as his own due by virtue of his Post. Some through Fear or Necessity complied, others again, who despised both his Power and Tyranny, would, by no Means, come into his Measures,

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and those he lookt on as Rebels, and persecuted them to the utmost of his Power … (1: 233–34)

The greed and “Tyranny” of Samuel Annesley and other top officials drove many of these “Rebels,” Hamilton notes, “to fall on new Schemes to support themselves, not very well suited to the Company’s Interest, for some went and joyned themselves with the Pirates” (1: 234). The implications of Englishmen leaving the Company to strike out on their own would have been clear to many of the eighteenth-century readers who were concerned with foreign trade. Throughout the first half of the century, the Company was engaged in largely unsuccessful efforts to try to beat back the Maratha navy, led by its resourceful admiral, Kanhoji Angria, that controlled much of the west coast of India.15 British writers, seeking to advance the Company’s interests and curry favor with a Mughal regime almost constantly at war with the Marathas, insistently referred to the Maratha navy as “pirates.” Given the many-sided rivalries, local and dynastic conflicts, and the ongoing hostilities between the Mughal Empire and the Marathas, the designation “pirate” is a slippery term that could be applied to any vessel or mariner that tried to resist or avoid the Company’s demands for a cut of the action.16 As Hamilton’s description of Annesley suggests, the distinctions between “pirates” and independent traders was never firm, and the East India Company’s fear of being cut out of the country trade often verged, as John Keay argues, on paranoia.17 In this context, Hamilton’s account of British sailors deserting the Company for more generous Mughal employers helps illuminate those episodes in Farther Adventures set in South and Southeast Asia. In his second voyage from Bengal, Crusoe and his partner set off to trade among the Spice Islands, … to bring Home a Loading of Cloves from the Manillas, or there abouts: Places where indeed the Dutch do trade, but Islands, belonging partly to the Spaniards; tho’ we went not so far, but to some other, where they have not the whole Power as they have at Batavia, Ceylon, &c.… we made [this voyage] very successfully, touching at Borneo, and several Islands, whose Names I do not remember; and came Home in about five Months; we sold our Spice, which was chiefly Cloves, and some Nutmegs, to the Persian Merchants, who carried them away for the Gulph; and making near five of one, we really got a great deal of Money. (146)

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Crusoe gets a “great deal of money” by circumventing the Dutch monopoly on trade in the Spice Islands; but his language shrouds his itinerary and the exact whereabouts of his dealings in a fog of crafted ambiguity: he and his partner avoid the Spanish-controlled Philippines, but stop at “several islands” that—implausibly—escape the hero’s memory. Yet even in its ambiguity, his geography has been reoriented: Crusoe returns “Home” to temporary lodgings in Bengal rather than to England or to the elaborate fortifications that he had built years earlier on his island. As he now tells his partner, he has become “a Convert to the Principles of Merchandizing” (146), and his use of religious language to describe his ventures speaks volumes about his transformation in Farther Adventures. Rather than the moral and psychological self confined to his island or the moralist horrified by the “Massacre in Madagascar,” Crusoe now embodies an ideology of trade, those “Principles of Merchandizing,” that redefines the idea of a “free Commerce.” When EIC apologists, like Child, use this phrase, they mean “free” in the sense of unfettered access to foreign ports and markets, including low or nonexistent tariffs; this is how “free Commerce” was used in the run-up to the Mughal War in the late 1680s.18 But Defoe extends the implications of “free” to mean something akin to absolute independence from the Company as well as the Dutch. In redefining himself in terms of his conversion to the unstable “Principles” of commercial negotiation, Crusoe finds that his identity becomes a function of the complexities and conflicts of international trade. In a plot twist that, in some ways, anticipates Captain Singleton, Crusoe and his partner buy a ship for a second trading voyage that turns out to have been pirated by mutinous sailors. When they anchor at the mouth of the Mekong River, an English sailor, disgruntled with his life aboard an East India Company ship, warns Crusoe that two English and three Dutch ships are coming to arrest him, his partner, and the crew: “you will be all seiz’d as Pirates,” the sailor tells Crusoe, “and executed, with very little Ceremony; for you know, Merchants Ships shew but little Law to Pirates, if they get them into their Power’” (150). Faced with execution for piracy, Crusoe plays the unwitting victim, telling the sailor, “I cannot imagine what Reason I have to be afraid of any Company Ships, or Dutch Ships; I am no Interloper” (148). “Interloper” was the term that the Company used to condemn any traders operating outside its official sanction; its licenses required that merchants register their goods, turn over a significant percentage of the money and cargo they received, and

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acknowledge the Company’s authority to restrict where and when they traded. His protest notwithstanding, Crusoe either is lying or extremely naïve about his activities because, as we recall, he had no introduction to the Company. Imagining that he can trade outside of its structures takes the idea of “free Commerce” to places that no Company official ever would go. It is significant, in this respect, that Defoe twice links the Company to the Dutch, England’s inveterate rival in the spice trade. To clarify the dangers confronting Crusoe, it is worth returning to Hamilton’s New Account. In a devastating attack on the Company’s corruption and greed, Hamilton reprints a 1695 letter to John Vaux, the new president of the factory at Surat, from Josiah Child, then the Director of the Company in London. The letter came into Hamilton’s hands from a dissatisfied EIC merchant. Child demanded that Vaux exercise “the Power of condemning the Company’s Enemies, or such as should be deemed so, particularly those who should dare to question the Company’s Power over all the British Subjects in India”; rather than the rule of law, Sir Josiah writes that he “expected his Orders, from Time to Time, should be observed and obeyed as statute Laws” (1: 232). This is, in effect, precisely the kind of reaction that the disgruntled sailor describes to Crusoe. When Vaux promised “to acquit himself with all the Integrity and Justice he was capable of” and to adhere to “the Laws of his Country,” Sir Josiah, in reply, “wrote roundly to Mr. Vaux, that he expected his Orders were to be his Rules, and not the Laws of England, which were an Heap of Nonsense, compiled by a few ignorant Country Gentlemen, who hardly knew how to make Laws for the good Government of their own private Families, much less for the Regulating of Companies and foreign Commerce” (1: 232). Child’s comments, as Hamilton reports them, reveal the violence, greed, and paranoia that lie at the heart of the Company’s self-perception. While the long distances between England and India gave officials in India some operational leeway, Child’s letter illuminates what is at stake in the sailor’s warning to Crusoe: the Company poses dire threats to both Crusoe and the larger “Principles of Merchandizing” that he has come to embody. The EIC represents the antithesis of “free Commerce” and the rule of English common law, notwithstanding the tendency of economic historians to treat the Company as a sophisticated forerunner of modern multinational corporations. After Crusoe and his partner are forced to repel an assault on their “pirate” vessel by several Company longboats and escape from the harbor, they realize how close they have come to being executed. “If we had fallen

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into their [pursuers’] Hands,” says Crusoe, “it had been in vain for us to have defended our selves, or to hope for any good Quarter at their Hands, and especially considering that our Accusers had been our Judges, and that we could have expected nothing from them, but what Rage would have dictated, and an ungoverned passion have executed” (153). While there were harsh laws in place to deal with piracy in South and Southeast Asia as well as the Caribbean, Defoe has Crusoe describe his “Accusers” in terms that subordinate whatever legal authority and moral justification the English and Dutch could claim to the kind of unrestrained “Rage” and “ungoverned passion” that characterized both Crusoe’s initial response, years earlier, to his discovery that cannibals had been visiting “his” island and to the sailors’ massacre of villagers on Madagascar earlier in Farther Adventures. In a way that anticipates Hamilton’s critique of the Company, Defoe turns the Company’s exercise of its monopolistic power into a pathological version of the “Tyranny” that Child reveals in his 1695 letter. Although Crusoe and his partner escape to China, their voyage along the coast of Indochina is marred by their fears of being apprehended. At this point in the narrative, the threats posed by the Company merge, in nightmarish fashion, with those represented by the Dutch: both my Partner and I too, scarce slept a Night, without dreaming of Halters, and Yard-Arms, that is to say, Gibbets; of fighting, and being taken; of killing and being kill’d; and one Night I was in such a Fury in my Dream, fancying the Dutch Men had boarded us, and I was knocking one of their Seamen down, that I struck my double Fist against the Side of the Cabin I lay in, with such a Force, as wounded my Hand most grievously, broke my Knuckles, and cut and bruised the Flesh…. Another Apprehension I had was of the cruel Usage we might meet with from them, if we fell into their Hands; then the Story of Amboyna came into my Head, and how the Dutch, might perhaps torture us, as they did our Country Men there; and make some of our Men, by Extremity of Torture, confess those Crimes they never were guilty of; own themselves, and all of us to be Pirates, and so they would put us to death, with a formal Appearance of Justice; and that they might be tempted to do this, for the Gain of our Ship and Cargo, which was worth four or five thousand Pound, put altogether. (166)

In invoking Amboyna, and the Dutch torture and execution of twelve English merchants in 1623 on that small outpost in the Spice Islands,

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Crusoe invokes a century-old horror that festered in the British imagination: Amboyna marked the final exclusion of the English from the spice trade, and came to symbolize Englishmen’s anxieties about their marginalization in Southeast Asia.19 In effect, Crusoe’s nightmare displaces onto the Dutch the anxiety of being treated as an “Interloper” by the English East India Company. This dream marks Crusoe’s transformation from a moral or religious self-concerned about his own sins to a self tormented by the fears that inherent in the “Principles of Merchandizing.” This is not the Crusoe familiar to readers of Defoe’s first novel, given to prayer and moral self-reflection, but a figure threatened—and, in part, constituted by—the threats posed by the English and Dutch East India Companies. In this nightmare, the EIC is subsumed into the visions of torture and cruelty called up by the specter of Amboyna. In “talking [him] self up to vigorous Resolutions, that [he] would not be taken [alive], to be barbarously used by a Parcel of merciless Wretches,” Crusoe declares “that it were much better to have fallen into the Hands of the Savages, who were ManEaters,... than by those, who would perhaps glut their Rage upon me, by inhuman Tortures and Barbarities;... it was much more dreadful to me at least, to think of falling into these Mens Hands, than ever it was to think of being eaten by Men; for the Savages, give them their due, would not eat a Man till he was dead, and kill’d them first, as we do a Bullock, but these Men had many Arts beyond the Cruelty of Death” (167). The threats posed in this passage are not moral, as they are in Strange and Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe. In Crusoe’s voyages from Bengal, to Cambodia, to China, and then his land journey across Siberia, there are no accounts of the kind of temptations that typically befell Europeans in the region: no women, no opium, no arrack, or other kinds of liquor, not even a Moll Flanders-like desire to cheat or shortchange foreign merchants. Strikingly, the “Savages” from Crusoe’s island fare better than the Dutch (and, by implication, the EIC), who let loose their “inhuman Tortures and Barbarities” in response to threats to their monopoly. Yet even as his allusion to Amboyna recalls a defining moment of national trauma, it repositions EIC merchants as persecutors rather than victims. The threat posed by the Company, in one respect, has been deflected onto the nightmarish Dutch—the injustice and tyranny voiced by Child subsumed into the archetypal scene of Englishmen who lose themselves in the throes of “inhuman Tortures” and confess to crimes they have not committed. In this respect, the specter

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of Amboyna becomes worse than cannibalism because it implies a loss of any kind of moral compass—a surrender to a commercial heart of darkness where savagery resides dialectically in the very “Principles of Merchandizing” that have seduced Crusoe.

A New Voyage In Defoe’s final novel, however, Crusoe’s nightmares and the dangers attending a “free Commerce” are shunted aside. In borrowing his title from William Dampier’s 1697 account of his first circumnavigation, Defoe fictionalizes a two-hundred year old literary tradition that harks back to Antonio Pigafetta’s harrowing account of Magellan’s circumnavigation in the sixteenth century.20 He reverses the logic that traditionally had motivated British incursions into the South Seas. From Sir Francis Drake in the 1570s to George Anson in the 1740s, British mariners sailed for the Pacific with a convoluted and often incompatible set of strategies in mind: round Cape Horn into the Pacific and raid Spanish shipping along the west coast of South America; trade clandestinely in Chile and Peru with disgruntled colonists chafing under Spanish rule; foment rebellion against the Spanish among indigenous peoples in South America; scout for likely locations for new British colonies; sail west across the Pacific in search of new lands presumably full of eager customers for British wool; use the bullion seized in New Spain to trade with merchants in East and Southeast Asia; avoid encroaching on the EIC’s monopoly by sailing across the southern Indian Ocean to South Africa; and finally return to England with huge profits and valuable commercial reconnaissance.21 In contrast to historical accounts of circumnavigation, Defoe’s novel imagines a voyage between 1711 and 1714 that depends on ships sailing south along the west coast of Africa, rounding the Cape of Good Hope, and then—rather than trading in India—heading across the southern Indian Ocean, into the waters of Southeast Asia and on to the Philippines. After trading under the noses of Spanish authorities in Manila, the ships then sail to Chile, a party treks across the gold-laden interior of South America, and concludes an extraordinarily profitable voyage by sailing northeast from Brazil to England. Defoe’s full title is revealing because A New Voyage Round the World by a Route Never Before Taken

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minimizes the practical difficulties of such a route and rewrites international rivalries and threats of maritime violence into a vision of infinite profits.22 The first third of the novel is devoted to the unnamed narrator explaining to the reader, but only later to his crew, his rationale for believing that there are huge profits to be made by sailing east from the Cape of Good Hope to the Philippines, and then westward to the coast of South America. This strategy depends on being able to bring European goods directly to Manila without incurring the EIC’s wrath and without raising the suspicions of the Spanish colonial authorities in the Philippines. In A New Voyage, the narrator claims that although his ships, sailing east from Madagascar, “put in at several Ports on the Indian Coast for fresh Water, and fresh Provisions, [they] came near none of the [European] Factories”—or trading outposts in the region. “We had no mind to discover our selves,” he declares, “for tho’ we were to sail thro’ the very Center of the India Trade, yet it was perfectly without any Business among them” (82). Improbably, the crew manages to dock and trade at ports on the subcontinent where there are no European competitors, during a period when the Maratha fleet routinely stopped and demanded payment from all trading vessels. In this regard, A New Voyage conjures into fictive being a worry-free alternative to the nightmares that Crusoe experiences. By having the ships sail directly to the Philippines with their cargo of European goods intact, Defoe imagines a scenario whereby an enterprising trader can evade the restrictions of two European trading “monopolies”: the East India Company’s ships, plying the waters off Surat, Bombay, and Bengal, and the Spanish prohibition on foreign merchants selling European goods in Manila. Spain’s economic position in East Asia depended on the profits from merchandise that had been transhipped from Acapulco across the Pacific and could be sold in the Philippines at vastly inflated prices. In Manila, trading under the cover of a French flag, Defoe’s narrator and his crew make about ten times the value of their initial investment. “Never was Cargo better sold,” the narrator claims, “and as we resolv’d to pursue our Voyage for New Spain,… and so perhaps to double the Advantage we had already made” (93). In unloading English cloth on Spanish merchants in Manila, and buying nutmeg and other spices at a steep discount, the narrator underscores the fundamental principle for this new, if fictional, circuit of trade: “it was always well worth while, for Ships to trade from Europe to the East Indies ;

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from whence they are sure to make five or six of one” (93). This fantastic return on investment, however, exists only in a world where Josiah Child issues no orders and Asian and European officials remain offstage. The narrator’s ships then set sail to the southeast with £100,000 worth of silk, porcelain, tea, and spices, searching for Terra Australis Incognita. This fiction of bypassing the EIC and then more than doubling their profits in the imaginary islands southeast of Indonesia works in two ways: it exploits British fantasies of trading “English woolen Manufactures” to “the People” of what Defoe calls “the southern unknown Countries” for “Gold in specie, and perhaps Spices, the best Merchandise and return in the World” (100) and it conjures up hopes of breaking the control of the EIC. In Farther Adventures, as we have seen, Crusoe makes his fortune by circumventing the East India Company’s trade to profit on precisely the same sorts of goods that the Company tried to monopolize. But in A New Voyage, the narrator goes much further by disparaging the India trade; Defoe echoes complaints among critics of the EIC that shipping bullion to Asia in exchange for luxury items, notably South Asian textiles, harmed British manufactuers. The “necessary or useful Things” brought back to England by this trade—“Pepper, salt Peter, dying Woods and dying Earths, Drugs,… Diamonds,… some Pearl, and raw Silk”— are of far less consequence than such “trifling and unnecessary” imports as “China ware, Coffee, Tea, Japan works, Pictures, Fans, Skreens, &c.” and “Returns that are injurious to [Britain’s] Manufactures”: “printed Callicoes, Chints, wrought Silks, Stuffs of Herbs and Barks, Block Tin, Sugar, Cotton, Arrack, Copper, Indico.” “For all these,” the narrator declares, “we carry nothing or very little but Money [silver and gold bullion], the innumerable Nations of the Indies, China, &c., despising our Manufactures, and filling us with their own” (155–56). In one sense, this passage reiterates points that Defoe had made for thirty years in his fiction and non-fiction, arguing that the yet-to-be-undiscovered resources in the South Seas and the planting of British colonies in Patagonia and southern Chile “will prove… infinitely more advantageous to England, than any of our East India Trade” (130). What is new, however, is the nature of Defoe’s criticism of the East India Company: in the Farther Adventures, the Company’s efforts to rein in “Interlopers” veer into paranoia and tyranny; in A New Voyage, the Company’s faults apparently are a corporate selfishness and shortsightedness that border on unpatriotic greed.

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Rather than scenes of Britons trading trinkets to credulous natives for gold—one of Defoe’s favorite set pieces in Captain Singleton—the East India Company trades gold for “trifling and unnecessary” imports. Among the crucial differences between Farther Adventures and A New Voyage are the goods the heroes bring back to England. In the earlier novel, Crusoe returns with Chinese silks and other luxury items worth approximately £3500; in the latter, the crew brings back to England vast fortunes in gold acquired in East Asia, Chile, and the interior of South America. Among its other fantastical elements, A New Voyage is a bullionist alternative history to the South Sea Bubble in 1720, the collapse of the South Sea Company’s stock, and the ensuing financial and political crises that roiled England for almost a decade. The South Sea Company had been formed in 1711, primarily as a way to convert Britain’s huge war debt into a stock that, by paying six percent interest, would restore investors’ confidence in the nation’s ability to make good on its debts. The EIC, however, vigorously opposed any ventures to the South Seas, and created a crisis in 1711 by threatening to seize the ships of Woodes Rogers, who was completing his circumnavigation and had traded captured Spanish gold for spices and silks in the East Indies.23 Although the South Sea Company was given the right to sell 4800 slaves a year to New Spain, it never sent a single ship to the Pacific, and its governors spent their time and energy in stock manipulation, bribery, and outright fraud that led to the collapse of 1720. In the wake of the Bubble, Defoe in A New Voyage is still giving voice to the logic that he articulated fifteen years earlier when the South Sea Company was founded: Mocking those supporters of the Company who “propose immediately Shipping [to South America], the prodigious Glut of your Manufacture, &c. which now fills your Mouths with Bluster, and talk of nothing but bringing Home Freights of Gold and Silver” (8: 50, July 19, 1711), Defoe envisions a way to secure English interests without provoking another war with New and Old Spain. His assertion in July 1711 that I quoted at the beginning of this article is worth repeating: “there is Room enough on the Western Coast of America, call’d the South Seas,” he asserts, “for us to Fix, Plant, Settle, and Establish a Flourishing Trade, without Injuring, Encroaching on, or perhaps in the least Invading the Property or Commerce of the Spaniards” (8: 49, July 17, 1711). Defoe debunks fantasies of unfettered trade to New Spain by promoting the fiction that he dramatizes in New Voyage: the uncolonized regions of South America offer abundant riches to satisfy both the English

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and Spanish, and to justify the prospect of establishing “an easy, godly, and profitable protectorate.”24 By 1725, though, such colonies remain deferred to an unrealized future, and his fictional voyage around the world imagines a time before the South Sea Company’s on-again, off-again schemes for trade, privateering, and exploration in the South Seas were exposed as a smoke-screen for financial manipulation and corruption. In this strange alternative history that rewrites the end of the War of Spanish Succession, Defoe exaggerates the tendencies in Farther Adventures to promote a “free Commerce” unbound by Company regulations; he creates a fictional alternative to the South Sea Company by describing a privately-funded voyage so secretive that it takes months before his crew realizes that the narrator, rather than the figurehead French captain, is the true leader of their expedition. This strategy allows Defoe, as I have argued, to divorce the prospect of Pacific trade from both the financial schemes that led to the Bubble and from monopolistic companies. As Crusoe’s experiences in Indochina suggest, the “Tyranny” of the East India Company is almost as bad as the criminal activities of the South Sea Company. In an important sense, Defoe deconstructs traditional distinctions between the EIC as a legitimate Company, a forerunner of modern international corporations, and the outright fraud of the SSC. In histories of the EIC that treat its emergence as a prototype or forerunner of the modern corporation, the Company’s organizational virtues turn it into the antithesis of the South Sea Company—a real organization rather than a Madoff-like con game predicated on financial scheming, stock manipulations, and bribes. But Defoe’s narrative in A New Voyage becomes a generic amalgam of what critics of modern science-fiction would call an alternative history set fifteen years before the novel was published; a prospectus for potential investors in trans-Pacific trade; and a floating financial utopia where sailors and crew jovially (for the most part) divvy up vast profits without doing much that can be characterized as actual work. These generic strains interweave in passage after passage as Defoe’s narrator declares that “whoever Sailing over the South-Seas … [at] the Latitude of fifty six, to sixty Degrees, shall never fail to discover new Worlds, new Nations, and new inexhaustible Funds of Wealth and Commerce” (131). But this utopian vision of mercantile aggrandizement holds true only if readers imagine there are no East India Company ships cruising the far southern Pacific, keeping a keen eye out for interlopers intent on trading to Terra Australis Incognita.

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I find that I keep returning to write about A New Voyage Round the World because, it seems to me, that it is the great novel of the capitalist unconscious. In its carefully calibrated narrative, the individual is submerged to the venture rather than to the Company, heroism is defined by managerial acumen rather than morality or courage, and individual integrity can be preserved only by avoiding or outsmarting the Company men who have sold their souls to maintain their profits. Like the Farther Adventures, Defoe’s final novel recasts the economic geography of South and Southeast Asia, but—in order to secure “new inexhaustible Funds of Wealth and Commerce”—it must banish the specter of the Company’s “Rage” and “ungoverned passion.” Crusoe in East Asia still faces the daunting threats of Company tyranny and underhanded Chinese merchants. It is only by sailing across fictional seas free of Company interference that Defoe can imagine endless profits without nightmares.

Notes 1. See Hans Turley, Rum, Sodomy, and the Lash: Piracy, Sexuality, and Masculine Identity (New York: New York University Press, 1999); Turley, “Protestant Evangelism, British Imperialism, and Crusoian Identity,” in Kathleen Wilson, ed., A New Imperial History: Culture, Identity and Modernity in Britain and the Empire, 1660–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 176–93; Melissa Free, “Un-erasing Crusoe: Farther Adventures in the Nineteenth Century,” Book History 9 (2006): 89–130; and Lucinda Cole, Imperfect Creatures: Vermin, Literature, and the Sciences of Life, 1600–1740 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2016). 2. See Richmond Barbour, Before Orientalism London’s Theatre of the East, 1576–1626 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Barbour, The Third Voyage Journals: Writing and Performance in the London East India Company, 1607–10 (New York: Palgrave, 2009); Miles Ogborn, Indian Ink: Script and Print in the Making of the English East India Company (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007); and Robert Markley, “Alexander Hamilton, the Mughal War, and the Critique of the East India Company,” Genre 48, 2 (2015): 237–59. 3. See particularly K.-N. Chaudhuri, The Trading World of Asia and the English East India Company 1660–1760 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978); Chaudhuri, “The English East India Company in the Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Centuries: A Pre-Modern Multinational Organization,” in The Organization of Interoceanic Trade in European

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4.

5. 6. 7.

8. 9.

10.

11. 12. 13.

14.

15.

Expansion, 1450–1800, ed. Pieter Emmer and Femme Gaastra (Aldershot, UK: Variorum, 1996), 187–204; Nick Robins, The Corporation That Changed the World: How the East India Company Shaped the Modern Multinational (London: Pluto, 2006); Philip J. Stern, The CompanyState: Corporate Sovereignty and the Early Modern Foundations of the British Empire in India (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); and Emily Erikson, Between Monopoly and Free Trade: The English East India Company, 1600–1757 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014). Defoe’s Review of the State of the British Nation was published, with some gaps, between 1704 and 1713. An edition of selections from the Review was edited by Arthur Wellesley Secord (New York: Columbia University Press for the Facsimile Text Society, 1938). References are by date of the original publication and Secord’s volume numbers. Alexander Hamilton, A New Account of the East-Indies, 2 vols. (Edinburgh: John Mosman, 1727). All references are to this edition. The Far East and the English Imagination 1600–1730 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 177–209. The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1719), ed. W. R. Owens (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2008), 125–6. All quotations are from this edition. See Sinnappah Arasaratnam, Merchants, Companies, and Commerce on the Coromandel Coast 1650–1740 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1986). See Jeremy Wear, “‘No Dishonour to Be a Pirate’: The Problem of Infinite Advantage in Defoe’s Captain Singleton,” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 24, 4 (2012): 569–96. John McVeagh, ed., A New Voyage Round the World (1725) (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2009), 108. All subsequent quotations are from this edition. John Keay, The Honourable Company: A History of the English East India Company (New York: Macmillan, 1994). See Hosea Ballou Morse, The Chronicles of the East India Company Trading to China 1635–1834, 5 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1926–29). Josiah Child, A Treatise Wherein is Demonstrated… that the East-India Trade is the Most National of All Trades (London: Printed by TF for Robert Boulter, 1681), 26, 29. See Ashin Das Gupta, “Some Problems of Reconstructing the History of India’s West Coast from European Sources,” rpt. in Das Gupta, Merchants of Maritime India, 1500–1800 (Aldershot, UK: Variorum, 1994), 174– 82; and Om Prakash, “English Private Trade in the Western Indian Ocean, 1720–1740,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 50, 2 (2007): 215–34. See Derek L. Elliott, “Pirates, Polities and Companies: Global Politics on the Konkan Littoral, c.1690–1756,” Working Papers 136/10

2

16.

17. 18.

19.

20.

21.

22. 23.

24.

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(Department of Economic History, London School of Economics, 2010), 1–43. A one-sided English version of naval conflict in the period was written by an English officer engaged in the fighting; see Clement Downing, A Compendious History of the Indian Wars, with an Account of the Rise, Progress, Strength, and Forces of Angria the Pyrate (London: T. Cooper, 1737). In addition to Elliott, “Pirates,” see Patricia Risso, “Cross-Cultural Perceptions of Piracy: Maritime Violence in the Western Indian Ocean and Persian Gulf Region during a Long Eighteenth Century,” Journal of World History 12 (2001): 293–319. Keay, Honourable Company, 144. See Robert Markley, “‘A Putridness in the Air’: Monsoons and Mortality in Seventeenth-Century Bombay,” Journal of Early Modern Cultural Studies 10 (2010): 105–26. I treat the history of the execution of twelve EIC merchants on Amboyna in 1623 in Markley, “Violence and Profits on the Restoration Stage: Trade, Nationalism, and Insecurity in Dryden’s Amboyna,” Eighteenth-Century Life 22 (1998): 2–17. On the literature of circumnavigation, see O. H. K. Spate, The Pacific Since Magellan. Vol. II: Monopolists and Freebooters (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983); Philip Edwards, The Story of the Voyage: Sea-Narratives in Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Glyndwr Williams, The Great South Sea: English Voyages and Encounters 1570–1750 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997); Jonathan Lamb, Preserving the Self in the South Seas, 1680–1840 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001); and Avan Judd Stallard, Antipodes: In Search of the Southern Continent (Clayton, Victoria, Australia: Monash University Press, 2016). See Glyndwr Williams, “‘The Inexhaustible Fountain of Gold’: English Projects and Ventures in the South Seas, 1670–1750,’” in Perspectives of Empire: Essays Presented to Gerald S. Graham, ed. John E. Flint and Glyndwr Williams (London: Longman, 1973), 27–53. On Defoe’s fascination with “infinite profits” see Wear, “No Dishonour,” 569–96, and Markley, Far East, 177–83. See Richard Dale, The First Crash: Lessons from the South Sea Bubble (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004); and Helen Paul, The South Sea Bubble: An Economic History of its Origins and Consequences (New York: Routledge, 2011). See Williams, South Sea, 167–69.

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Works Cited Arasaratnam, Sinnappah. 1986. Merchants, Companies, and Commerce on the Coromandel Coast 1650–1740. Delhi: Oxford University Press. Barbour, Richmond. 2003. Before Orientalism. London’s Theatre of the East, 1576–1626. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2009. The Third Voyage Journals: Writing and Performance in the London East India Company, 1607–1610. New York: Palgrave. Chaudhuri, K.-N. 1978. The Trading World of Asia and the English East India Company 1660–1760. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1996. The English East India Company in the Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Centuries: A Pre-Modern Multinational Organization. The Organization of Interoceanic Trade in European Expansion, 1450–1800, ed. Pieter Emmer and Femme Gaastra. Aldershot, UK: Variorum, 187–204. Child, Josiah. 1681. A Treatise Wherein is Demonstrated ... that the East-India Trade is the Most National of All Trades. London: Printed by TF for Robert Boulter. Cole, Lucinda. 2016. Imperfect Creatures: Vermin, Literature, and the Sciences of Life, 1600–1740. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Dale, Richard. 2004. The First Crash: Lessons from the South Sea Bubble. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Das Gupta, Ashin. 1994. Some Problems of Reconstructing the History of India’s West Coast from European Sources. Rpt. in Das Gupta, Merchants of Maritime India, 1500–1800. Aldershot, UK: Variorum, 174–82. Defoe, Daniel. 2008. The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1719). Ed. W. R. Owens. London: Pickering & Chatto. ———. 2009. A New Voyage Round the World (1725). Ed. John McVeagh. London: Pickering & Chatto. Downing, Clement. 1737. A Compendious History of the Indian Wars, with an Account of the Rise, Progress, Strength, and Forces of Angria the Pyrate. London: T. Cooper. Edwards, Philip. 1994. The Story of the Voyage: Sea-Narratives in EighteenthCentury England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Elliott, Derek L. 2010. Pirates, Polities and Companies: Global Politics on the Konkan Littoral, c.1690–1756. Working Papers 136/10. Department of Economic History, London School of Economics, 1–43. Erikson, Emily. 2014. Between Monopoly and Free Trade: The English East India Company, 1600–1757 . Princeton: Princeton University Press. Free, Melissa. 2006. Un-erasing Crusoe: Farther Adventures in the Nineteenth Century. Book History 9: 89–130. Hamilton, Alexander. 1727. A New Account of the East-Indies, 2 vols. Edinburgh: John Mosman.

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Keay, John. 1994. The Honourable Company: A History of the English East India Company. New York: Macmillan. Lamb, Jonathan. 2001. Preserving the Self in the South Seas, 1680–1840. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Markley, Robert. 1998. Violence and Profits on the Restoration Stage: Trade, Nationalism, and Insecurity in Dryden’s Amboyna. Eighteenth-Century Life 22, 1: 2–17. ———. 2006. The Far East and the English Imagination 1600–1730. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2010. ‘A Putridness in the Air’: Monsoons and Mortality in SeventeenthCentury Bombay. Journal of Early Modern Cultural Studies 10, 1: 105–26. ———. 2015. Alexander Hamilton, the Mughal War, and the Critique of the East India Company. Genre 48, 2: 237–59. Morse, Hosea Ballou. 1926–1929. The Chronicles of the East India Company Trading to China 1635–1834, 5 vols. Oxford: Clarendon. Ogborn, Miles. 2007. Indian Ink: Script and Print in the Making of the English East India Company. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Paul, Helen. 2011. The South Sea Bubble: An Economic History of its Origins and Consequences. New York: Routledge. Prakash, Om. 2007. English Private Trade in the Western Indian Ocean, 1720– 1740. Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 50, 2: 215–34. Risso, Patricia. 2001. Cross-Cultural Perceptions of Piracy: Maritime Violence in the Western Indian Ocean and Persian Gulf Region during a Long Eighteenth Century. Journal of World History 12: 293–319. Robins, Nick. 2006. The Corporation That Changed the World: How the East India Company Shaped the Modern Multinational. London: Pluto. Secord, Arthur Wellesley, ed. 1938. Defoe’s Review. New York: Columbia University Press for the Facsimile Text Society. Spate, O. H. K. 1983. The Pacific Since Magellan. Vol. II: Monopolists and Freebooters. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Stallard, Avan Judd. 2016. Antipodes: In Search of the Southern Continent (Clayton, Victoria, Australia: Monash University Press. Stern, Philip J. 2011. The Company-State: Corporate Sovereignty and the Early Modern Foundations of the British Empire in India. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Turley, Hans. 1999. Rum, Sodomy, and the Lash: Piracy, Sexuality, and Masculine Identity. New York: New York University Press. ———. 2004. Protestant Evangelism, British Imperialism, and Crusoian Identity. A New Imperial History: Culture, Identity and Modernity in Britain and the

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Empire, 1660–1840, ed. Kathleen Wilson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 176–93. Wear, Jeremy. 2012. ‘No Dishonour to Be a Pirate’: The Problem of Infinite Advantage in Defoe’s Captain Singleton. Eighteenth-Century Fiction 24, 4: 569–96. Williams, Glyndwr. 1973. “‘The Inexhaustible Fountain of Gold’: English Projects and Ventures in the South Seas, 1670–1750.’” Perspectives of Empire: Essays Presented to Gerald S. Graham, ed. John E. Flint and Glyndwr Williams. London: Longman, 27–53. ———. 1997. The Great South Sea: English Voyages and Encounters 1570–1750. New Haven: Yale University Press.

CHAPTER 3

Between Castaways and Traders: Cannibal-Cum-Crusoe in Sumatra and the Andaman Islands Ted Motohashi

Introduction Before his fateful voyage to the Guinea coast starting on September 1, 1659, Robinson Crusoe had lived almost four years in his thriving plantation in Brazil, conducting trade in which he purchased “upon the coast, for Trifles, such as Beads, Toys, Knives, Scissors, Hatchets, bits of Glass, and the like; not only Gold Dust, Guinea Grains, Elephants Teeth, &c. but Negroes for the Service of the Brasils, in great Numbers.” He had accepted, perhaps unwisely, his fellow plantation owners’ “secret Proposal” that “they desired to make but one Voyage, to bring the Negroes on Shoar privately, and divide them among their own Plantations,” offering Crusoe his “equal Share of the Negroes.”1 An intriguing but perhaps a common aspect of Crusoe’s life as a castaway in a remote island is that the shipwreck is an (un)expected result

T. Motohashi (B) The Tokyo University of Economics, Tokyo, Japan © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 S. Clark and Y. Yoshihara (eds.), Robinson Crusoe in Asia, Asia-Pacific and Literature in English, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-4051-3_3

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of his activities in the slave trade. My hypothesis here is that in the early modern era accompanied by European colonialism, when travel and trade were indistinguishable, castaways like Robinson Crusoe had to imaginarily encounter and tame savage cannibals. This was to compensate for the loss of the profit that might have been potentially gained from the slave trade as the most egregious and lucrative form of colonial exploitation. Within that process, the discourse of cannibalism played a crucial role in successfully mediating between the European travelers/traders and the local authorities who claimed that they could provide a stable ground for successfully negotiating with an alien race. This essay looks at the role of mediators between the travelers/traders and the native populations in the discourse of cannibalism. It will begin with a preliminary survey of early modern visits to Sumatra and the Andaman Islands, by Marco Polo, Nicolo de Conti, and Duarte Barbosa; it will next offer a close analysis of eighteenth and nineteenth century encounters in the region; it will then focus on Robinson Crusoe’s relation to what he regards as savage intruders on his Caribbean island in volume one; and finally examine Crusoe’s trading ventures in Asia in the second volume, situating them in the context of British and Dutch geopolitical rivalry. The investigation will conclude that not only the European travelers but also the natives required the cannibal discourse to be activated in order to mutually establish humanly comprehensible relationship between unfamiliar races and communities. This reciprocal nature is also a key to reading Crusoe’s tale as a castaway who must develop a vital relationship with Friday and his fellow/enemy cannibals as his doubles. In his later voyage to Asia, including visiting Sumatra, the discourse of cannibalism is transferred onto Crusoe’s European competitors, the Dutch.

The Early Discourse of Cannibalism in Sumatra and the Andaman Islands In the case of early European contact with the people in the Andaman Islands, those domineering figures such as local magnates who confidently guaranteed the travelers safety when they met “real” cannibals, in effect created a kind of negotiating space within the “contact zone”2 such as port-towns and fringe villages, providing sojourn and commerce for traders and travelers from various places. What was required of those town bosses and village chiefs as the mediator between the intruding Europeans and the native people who had had no previous contact with them

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was an ability to provide “accurate” information about the cannibals— the aliens’ whereabouts and customs—in their attempts to paint those unknown districts as mysterious, attractive, and unfathomable without their practical help. The extraordinarily graphic details of man-eating acts must have fascinated those curious travelers whose truth-claim in their travelogues had to be underlined by their direct interviews with the cannibals, as contemporary readers of Crusoe’s tale were absorbed too by his supposedly “factual” contact with them. In the local context of Sumatra and the Andaman Islands, as the real contact between the trader and the native became more frequent and wide-ranging, the discourse of cannibalism inevitably lost its principal aim, when the stable relationship among the three parties—foreigners from afar, local potentates at the margin, and interior inhabitants in remote areas—collapsed. However, some discourses of cannibalism still prevailed well into the late nineteenth century and beyond in regions where the dominant rulers continued to monopolize the mediating role. As far as the many traders-turned-castaways who were Crusoe’s counterparts in SouthEastern Asia were concerned, the discourse of cannibalism was a useful, even an empowering means of identity construction under the emergent colonial power relationship for those who propagated it in the specific local context. The rumors about cannibal races in Sumatra and the Andaman Islands recorded by Arab and European travelers were as old as the ninth century, but a specific pattern was established around the fourteenth century in the region. For instance, Marco Polo who reputedly stayed in northern Sumatra at the end of the thirteenth century, heard that there were cannibals in the inner regions of Sumatra as well as in the Andaman islands: Angamanain [the Great and the Little Andamans] is a very large island. The people are without a king, and are idolaters, and no better than wild beasts. All the men of this island have heads like dogs, and teeth and eyes likewise; in fact, in face they are just like big mastiff dogs! They have a quantity of spices; but they are a most cruel generation, and eat everybody they can catch not of their own race. They live on flesh, and rice and milk, and have fruits different from ours.3

Because of this cannibal scare, it is said that Polo and his party stayed at the port town of Samdra and never ventured into the interior or the

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adjacent islands. Significantly, from the fifteenth century onwards, European traders commercially dealt with those at Sumatran port towns such as Samdra, Achen, Balus, and Delli, and avoided exploring further or going into other islands for fear of cannibals. And the more they eschewed any actual encounter, the more vivid their description of this “most cruel generation” became. The tendency to testify as to the presence of the cannibals without actually encountering them is typified by Nicolo de Conti who visited Samdra in 1435: He [Conti] afterwards went to a fine city of the island Taprobana, which island is called by the natives Sciamuthera [Sumatra]. He remained one year in this city (which is six miles in circumference and a very noble emporium of that island), and then sailed for the space of twenty days with a favourable wind, leaving on his right hand an island called Andamania [the Andaman Isles], which means the island of gold, the circumference of which is eight hundred miles. The inhabitants are cannibals. No travelers touch here unless driven so to do by bad weather, for when taken they are torn to pieces and devoured by these cruel savages. He affirms that the island of Taprobana is six thousand miles in circumference. The men are cruel and their customs brutal.... They are all idolators. In this island pepper, ... camphor, and also gold are produced in great abundance.... In one part of the island called Batech, the inhabitants eat human flesh, and are in a state of constant warfare with their neighbours. They keep human heads as valuable property, for when they have captured an enemy they cut off his head, and having eaten the flesh, store up the skull and use it for money. When they desire to purchase any article, they give one or more heads in exchange for it according to its value, and he who has most heads in his house is considered to be the most wealthy.4

These rumors about the cannibals prevented de Conti from setting his foot on the Andaman islands as well as Batak, where gold, pepper, and camphor were produced in abundance. It was those who lived in port towns like Samdra who told such stories about cannibals and gold and other precious commodities. The deal seemed to be mutually beneficial to European travelers and the local traders alike, because these locations, unlike the remote islands of Andaman and inland areas like Batak, were regarded as a safe heaven for their commercial transactions without the danger of being “torn to pieces and devoured by these cruel savages.” Especially for those local magnates, it was essential to hold the interest of

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European visitors who readily believed those stories about the inland and island cannibals. For another instance, the Portuguese writer Duarte Barbosa reported in 1518: There is also another Kingdom called Ara, belonging to the heathen, who are eaters of human flesh, and every foreigner whom they can take they eat without any pity Whatsoever.5

At the time of writing, when Barbosa stayed at the eastern coast town of Ara, these inlanders claimed to be man-eaters were none other than the people who carried their local products from the deep woodland area to the port, where foreign traders waited for and purchased them eagerly. Significantly, however, rumors about cannibalism were quite common in northern Sumatra and the Malay Peninsula, as well as in the nearby islands of Andaman, Nicobar, and Nias, where geographical factors made it easier for the foreign traders to have direct contact with the interior inhabitants, while in southern Sumatra and Java cannibalism was rarely talked about. Our conjecture for this apparent conundrum is that for both the port-town rulers who aimed to monopolize trade, and the inland dwellers who feared outside influences, the discourse of cannibalism served an important purpose to make the foreign visitors hesitate to enter into the interior region.

The Discourse of Cannibalism in the Andaman Islands in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century This pattern of negotiations between European travelers and the local traders, triangulated via hypothetical cannibals, continued for centuries. An Englishman, Captain Alexander Hamilton who visited Achen in 1728 at the northern end of Sumatra wrote about the Andaman islands: The Andamans are surrounded by many dangerous rocks and banks, and they are all inhabited with cannibals, who are so fearless that they will swim off to a boat if she approach near the shore, and attack her with their wooden weapons, notwithstanding the superiority of numbers in the boat and the advantages of missive and defensive arms of iron, steel, and fire.6

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Samdra, Achen, Balus, Delli—these port towns at the coast of Sumatra prospered from the fifteenth to nineteenth centuries as places of deposit and shipment of goods such as pepper, camphor, and gold, serving as the site of mediation between foreign travelers and the inhabitants of the inland areas and surrounding islands. An employee of the English East India Company, John Anderson visiting Delhi in 1823 was first received by the sultan and met his soldiers who had come from the inland area of Seantar. Anderson wrote: Great numbers of the Battas who were employed by the sultan as soldiers, came to visit me to-day; amongst the rest, one of a particularly ferocious and determined appearance, distinguished amongst his companions for his extraordinary courage, and also as an expert marksman with the matchlock. He was a native of Seantar in the interior, and he told me he had partaken of human flesh seven times. He mentioned this in the course of conversation, and of his own accord. He even specified the particular parts of the body which were esteemed the most delicate. With the sword which he held in his hand, he said he had dispatched four men, of whom he had eaten....One or two Battas who came from a place called Tongking, also mentioned their having partaken of human flesh repeatedly, and expressed their anxiety to enjoy a similar feast upon some of the enemy, pointing to the other side of the river. This they said was their principal inducement for engaging in the service of the sultan. Another displayed, with signs of particular pride and satisfaction, a kris, with which he said he had killed the seducer of his wife, and whose head he had severed from his body, holding it by the hair, and drinking the blood as it yet ran warm from the veins. He pointed to a spot of blood on the kris, which he requested me to remark, which he said was the blood of his victim, and which he put his nose, smelling it with a zest difficult to describe, and his features assuming at the same time a ferocity of expression which would not have been very agreeable, had not my safety been guaranteed by my watchful sepoy guard.7

Anderson’s appetite was further whetted by these graphic details of the testimonies, and there was no short supply of “real man-eaters” in the interior of northern Sumatra. Anderson’s narrative reaches its climax, when he describes cannibalism in Munto Panei several miles inward from Batubara: We were now in the heart of the cannibal country, and I was determined to investigate the habits and manners of the people while I remained. I

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again ascended the hill to the Batta village, where a large crowd assembled in and round the balei or hall, sharpening creeses and swords, and making creese handles, &c. I did not observe the heads of any victims here; but upon speaking to the rajah of Munto Panei on the subject, he told me of a man who had been eaten only six days before, at one of the villages close at hand, and that if I wished, he would immediately send and get the head for me. He accordingly dispatched some of his people; and shortly afterwards we observed a large party of Battas coming down the mountain, with this trophy of victory. This unfortunate wretch was devoured, I was informed, in five minutes, each warrior obtaining only a very small piece. The body was shared out as children do cakes at home.... I might have seen the disgusting ceremony of eating human flesh, had I chosen to accompany the rajah to the fort, which he was about to attack ... with 500 men; but thinking it not improbable that some poor wretch might be sacrificed to show me the ceremony, I declined witnessing it. They seemed quite surprised that I should have entertained a doubt of the prevalence of cannibalism.8

It appears that wherever this Englishman went, there were always people—mostly those of power such as the sultan or the rajah—who were ready at hand to bear witness to the “disgusting” (yet fascinating) ceremony of cannibalism which had happened quite recently (but not now) at a place nearby (but not here). Consequently, the local chief invariably succeeded, by his talk of cannibalism, in preventing the curious traveler from encountering the actual scene of devouring human flesh, while the Englishman’s conscience was kept unblemished without becoming an accomplice in the act, having had his “doubt of the prevalence of cannibalism” melted away. The sultan and the rajah, who guaranteed the writer “safety” in meeting the “real” cannibals and displayed their might in overpowering these enemies, provided the space within the “contact zone” such as port-towns and fringe villages which provided sojourn and commerce for traders and travelers from various places. The “extraordinary” features of the cannibalistic soldier and “horrid details of cannibalism” seemed to not only fascinate the curiosity of this traveler, but also impress him with the power of the local sultans and hosts who employed, domiciled, married, and even converted the natives to Islamism, having had a considerable experience in dealing with those “fierce” people.

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Metonymy of Colonization in Robinson Crusoe’s Discourse of Cannibalism This hypothesis on the mediating role of the local magnates may shed some light, despite the geographical differences, on Robinson Crusoe’s obsession about cannibals and his ever-increasing desire to defend his island, particularly his “Fortification,”9 against any outside force. In the crucial moment of discovering the single footprint (“a Man’s naked Foot”10 ), Crusoe’s troubled imagination renders the image at once one and whole, singular and plural, individual and general, iconic and common, isolated and expansive, exclusive and inclusive, right and left. The footprint was a print as well as a foot, a shadow as well as a substance, “an Apparition” as well as “the Thing.”11 Characteristically, however, when Crusoe came across the footprint on the beach, he immediately feared that if it is not an “Apparition,” because it must belong to “the Savages of the main land” rather than to European travelers who might have been cast away like him. It never occurred to Crusoe that the mark might belong to a friendly party, as Rebecca Weaver-Hightower argues.12 It is as if Crusoe required threats from outside such as cannibals’ attacks in order to remind him of the necessity for more tightened control of his island. Here it is important for us to remember how, when, and where the discourse of cannibalism became useful in the context of the encounter between the European traders and the local mediators in the Andaman Islands. As we have seen, the supposed presence of the fierce man-eaters in the inland areas was vital in order to maintain the mutually beneficial and harmonious relationship between the Europeans who wanted to profit from trade and the local potentates who wanted to keep their power over the region. In the case of Crusoe, who became a castaway as a result of an unsuccessful trading voyage, it was precisely the lack of those mediators that invited him to witness the critical “footprint,” which had to belong to none other than “the Savages of the main land.” If the actual European traders in the Andaman Islands cooperated with the local mediators in producing the discourse of cannibalism, Crusoe had to invent single-handedly through his imagination the reality of men-eaters. As far as Crusoe was concerned, the “footprint” was at once a reminder of his failed attempt in the slave trade and a signal of promise for colonization of the island. Therefore, this “footprint” had to immediately indicate the actual and imminent threat, against which Crusoe will devote himself for

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the next few years by fortifying his “Castle” to prepare for the probable, if not certified, attack of the savage cannibals. It was at once a human vestige and non-human sign: this “almost-the-same-but-not-quite” character typifies Crusoe’s discourse of cannibalism, which would make his project of colonization possible through exterminating bad cannibals and rescuing Friday by subjugating him. After this ominous intrusion, Crusoe lived two years in constant uneasiness, when he “saw a Boat upon the Sea, at a great Distance.” Then he came to the shore which was “spread with Skulls, Hands, Feet, and other Bones of humane Bodies,” and “a Circle dug in the Earth, like a Cockpit, where it is suppos’d the Savage Wretches had sat down to their inhumane Feastings upon the Bodies of their Fellow-Creatures.”13 This incident signified the second stage of Crusoe’s supposed encounter with the cannibals: there seems more substantial concreteness in his discovering of “Bones of humane Bodies” and “a Circle dug in the Earth” than in his finding the “footprint on the sand,” it is remarkable that these so-called “evidence” of the cannibal feastings always already lacked the actual agency—bodies of the savages themselves. As in other “eyewitness” accounts of cannibalism in the Andaman Islands, these feasts were always traces, i.e., remains of the “inhumane Feastings.” At the same time, it should not escape our attention that these traces, despite their lack of wholeness of bodies, manifestly belonged to human beings, even if reduced to “Skulls, Hands, Feet, and other Bones.” In other words, Crusoe’s negation of the agency (the bodily wholeness) on the part of savages was accompanied and constituted by his perception of the humanity of the cannibals. Crusoe’s discourse of cannibalism was fundamentally dependent upon his recognition that the savages (including Friday) who were prone to eating human flesh belonged to the race of which he was also a part.14 This understanding would provide a key to Crusoe’s characteristic stance toward his attempt to control and colonize his island, which centers on farming and domestication of animals. His apparent preference for agricultural economy over hunting and gathering must be one of the reasons behind Crusoe’s abhorrence of cannibalism.15 If we follow this line of argument, his project of colonization amounted to depriving the indigenous population of one of their most important sources of nutrition—human meat as far as Crusoe’s imagination goes—and forcing them to adopt a planting way of life.16

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Crusoe came a little closer to witnessing an actual scene of cannibalism in December of his twenty-third year of the island. Upon seeing a fire early in the morning, he prepared to defend his fortress, then “mounted to the Top of the Hill; and pulling out [his] Perspective glass,”17 reminiscent of the “monarch-of-all-I-survey” moments that Mary Louise Pratt detects in many island stories.18 He presently found “no less than nine naked Savages, sitting round a small Fire,” as he supposed, “to dress some of their barbarous Diet of humane Flesh.”19 When he saw them shipped and gone, he went down to the shore, and he “could see the Marks of Horror, which the dismal Work they had been about had left behind it, viz. The Blood, the Bones, and part of the Flesh of humane Bodies, eaten and devour’d by those Wretches.”20 As if to edge closer to be involved with the cannibal feast himself, Crusoe this time saw the “Marks of Horror” that were more graphically concrete than the last time in which he found bones only. It was nearly two years before the savages came to his island again. Before then, Crusoe rescued a dog from a shipwrecked Spanish fleet and had a dream in which the “real” cannibals visited his island. This would not only confirm his suspicion but also provide good reasons to defend the island from any intrusion, because in his vision Crusoe was given a chance to rescue a savage from his enemies who were about to devour him. While it took a long time for Crusoe to actually confront real cannibals in person, this process followed a perceptive trajectory from symbol to entities, that is to say, from the footprint to the remains of human bones, then to blood and flesh, then to the dream of rescuing a savage, then finally to the realization of that dream. This is the moment Crusoe finally succeeded in distinguishing himself from the savage cannibals of whom he was so fiercely afraid since he had become a castaway. In order to prove himself otherwise, he needed one of the others to turn to him for his material and spiritual restoration. There follows a description in which this newly found proof of Crusoe’s civility was revealed through the act of the recently acquired man–servant Friday who ceremoniously burnt the remains of the dead bodies upon the order of his new master: I caus’d Friday to gather all the Skulls, Bones, Flesh, and whatever remain’d, and lay them together on a Heap, and make a great Fire upon it, and burn them all to Ashes: I found Friday had still a hankering Stomach after some of the Flesh, and was still a Cannibal in his Nature; but I discover’d so much Abhorrence at the very Thoughts of it, and at the least

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Appearance of it, that he durst not discover it; for I had by some Means let him know, that I would kill him if he offer’d it.21

The temptation of cannibalism thus deterred, Crusoe and Friday completed the union as if the Christian self and the savage other finally became one. As far as Crusoe’s insular psyche was concerned, the whole point of the discourse of cannibalism seemed to lie in this function of distinction, rather than of mediation or hybridized acculturation, between those whose nature is “hankering Stomach after human Flesh” and those who abhor the custom. There seems to be no room for ambivalent and inescapable fascination toward otherness that characterizes all the testimonies left by the foreign traders and travelers which we have been looking at. To sum up: first, the footprint; second, the bones; third, the flesh; fourth, the dream; fifth, the rescue of a former cannibal; then finally his conversion by forsaking the custom of man-eating. The gradual progression from fantasy to actual encounter and subjugation made a particular trajectory involving Crusoe’s mastery of the island through the colonial control of his own body, and surroundings, a process which became complete with his acquisition of the servant Friday (the name with a connotation of Christian ritual of Holy Communion, consumption of Christ bodies) and his transformation from a savage to a servant. Crusoe’s project of colonization was deeply embedded not only with the Christian ambivalence regarding the consumption of human flesh but also with the enforcement of agriculture over the natives, the English, and the Spaniards alike. Crusoe’s emphasis on the inhumanness and barbarity of man-eating customs allowed his erasure of the bodily agency of the cannibals. As if it were a palimpsest, Crusoe’s apparition of the footprint was overprinted by his own body which finally succeeded in projecting itself over the island, now secured for use as a site of European plantation and trade. It wasn’t only the occasional visit of cannibals that threatened Crusoe’s island. After Crusoe and Friday rescued Friday’s father and the Spaniard from the devouring cannibals, English mutineers came to the island for piratical purposes. Strikingly, it was Friday, not Crusoe, who pointed out similarities between the cannibals and the mutineers, in terms of the intruding capabilities against which Crusoe had to so obsessively defend his island:

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Friday call’d out to me in English, as well as he could, O Master! You see English Mans eat Prisoner as well as Savage Mans. Why, says I, Friday, Do you think they are a going to eat them then? Yes, says Friday, They will eat them: No, no, says I, Friday, I am afraid they will murther them indeed, but you may be sure they will not eat them.22

Why was Friday superior to Crusoe in sensing the danger from the mutineers? Apart from Crusoe’s naïve trust in their common ethnicity (“they were English men”), it was because Friday had come from the “mainland” where people had to negotiate with other tribes (including the cannibals). Therefore, due to his skills and experiences as a go-between, Friday was able to detect imminent threats to his master’s island from the pirates as well as from the cannibals, despite their different skin colors. While Crusoe was confident and comfortable in his belief in cultural dualism between cannibals or pirates, Friday who had been in the “contact zone” between different cultures could easily saw a parallel in that they were both capable of “devouring” others either literally or metaphorically. The crucial ability that Friday possessed (and Crusoe lacked) was not only the consciousness toward otherness, but also the ability to distinguish between those who should be eaten and those who should not. Invariably the European colonizers in the early modern period failed to understand the significance of cannibalistic rites, whether they were actual or imagined. Cannibalism has been and still is an act of cultural negotiation toward unfamiliar otherness, and that characteristic was absolutely foreign to Crusoe who identified any outer influence as a threat to his selfhood. It is here our argument about the significance of cannibal discourse in the trading relationship between the European travelers and the inland population in Sumatra and the Andaman Islands become crucial, for trade and commerce with their essential need for negotiation and cooperation are the exact opposite of Crusoe’s insular obsession and fear of the Other. We would argue that in the actual encounter between the European traveler/trader and the native inhabitants, both parties needed the discourse to maintain the “contact zone” with an appropriate distance and breathing space between them, so that they were mutually able to gain through the process of negotiation. The final section of this essay, however, will examine how the discourse of cannibalism is transformed during Crusoe’s trading voyages in Asia in the second volume of his narrative.

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Discourse of Cannibalism as Mediation in the Contact Zone In Farther Adventures, during his ventures of globally navigational trade, Crusoe himself “made this Voyage to Achin, in the Island of Sumatra, and from thence to Siam, where [they] exchang’d some of [their] Wares for Opium, and some Arrack.”23 The rulers at Sumatran port towns and border villages had successfully constructed independent relationships with both the interior inhabitants and foreign visitors. As the mediator between the two, these potentates at the frontier were able to monopolize foreign trade, and naturally disliked any direct contact of European travelers with the inland tribes. The inhabitants there also had cause for avoiding direct contact with foreigners, believed to bring unfamiliar diseases and slave traders with them, so they tended to leave negotiations with the Europeans with those port-town magnates. In this context, the discourse of cannibalism flourished at the mutually reinforced initiative of the three parties; the rulers at the interfacing frontline who were able to go between inside and outside, the interior inhabitants who feared the direct contact with the West, and the Westerners who were anxious to verify their fantasies about the man-eating tribe. The discourse of cannibalism lost its principal aim when the stable relationship among the three parties—foreigners, local potentates, and interior inhabitants—collapsed. For example, cannibal stories around Achen gradually disappeared during the eighteenth century, when the town introduced migrants to develop production of pepper and rice. In 1663, rural chiefs at Minankabau in the central Sumatra, disliking the ruling monopoly of Achen traders, concluded a treaty with the Dutch East India Company to trade in gold and pepper directly with the Dutch, contributing to the demise of maneating rumors. By contrast, as we have seen in Anderson’s report, the discourse of cannibalism at towns like Balus and Delli prevailed still in the nineteenth century; for, although the Dutch set up their trading house in as early as 1668, trading in this area continued through the mediation of the royal family at Balus. We may also note that colonial power relationship between the two rivals in the region—the Dutch and the English-held a key in the degree of prevalence of the discourse of cannibalism in this area. It was in the mid-nineteenth century that the English started to expand trade at the west coast of Sumatra, trying to barter the local goods mainly with Indian cotton textiles. They had established trading bases at Natal in 1751, and

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at Tappanuli in 1756, in an effort to strengthen their immediate tie with the interior areas to circumvent the Dutch influence which had dominated the west coast since the latter half of the seventeenth century. In June 1772, the English East India Company sent two employees, Charles Miller and Giles Holloway, to the Batta country in order to explore its products, particularly cassia. They went up the river of Pinang Suri for six hours and arrived at a place called Lumut. However, he had chosen as guide the former chief manager of the cassia trade, who was unwilling to diminish his influence as the mediator between the Europeans and the inland population. The familiar story of eating an enemy told by the raja, which was likely to be translated by this same guide for the English travelers, served as a buffer between the intruding Europeans and the “ferocious” man-eaters.24 Another incident suggesting the English difficulty in penetrating into the Sumatran interior also centered around the discourse of cannibalism. In 1775, Nairne, then the English head of its trading house in Natal received a report of infighting between rival Batak tribes, [including incidents of cannibalism. He was killed while leading a punitive expedition, somewhat recklessly as the village concerned was still outside the direct influence of the English.] The discourse of cannibalism was still powerful enough to impress the savage nature of the inland tribes “although I am aware that each and every of these proofs, taken singly, may admit of some cavil, yet in the aggregate they will be thought to amount to satisfactory evidence, that human flesh is habitually eaten by a certain class of inhabitants of Sumatra.”25 Anderson’s testimony illustrates the state of relationship in transition between the English and the inland chiefs. He was a resident employee of the East India Company at Penan, who visited the east coast towns of Batubara and Delli in 1823. That raja of Munto Panei, who, speaking in fluent Malay, explained cannibalism to Anderson by means of human skulls, showed off his ability of negotiation between the European and the “savage” inland people. In 1824, the English and the Dutch concluded the London Treaty, by which Sumatra was to be put under the Dutch rule, whereas the English gained the Malay Peninsula for its monopoly of commercial activities. As the English retreated from Sumatra, the Dutch sought further penetration into the interior regions through fighting against the native Padri forces. In 1840, they sent Franz Junghuhn for a research who stayed at Toba in the Batak area. During the one and a half years which Junghuhn spent

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among the Bataks, he reported there were three cases of public cannibalism. He claimed that he witnessed the official practice of cannibalism under the supervision of the Toba chiefs, and described thus: When an enemy is captured the day is set upon which he should be eaten. Then messengers are sent to all allied chiefs and their subjects inviting them to be present at the feast. Hundreds of people stream to the village. The victim usually is taken out of the village, but the feast itself is held in the village, when this is large enough. The captive is now bound to a stake in an upright position. A number of fires are lighted in the vicinity, the musical instruments are struck, and all of the customary ceremonials are observed. Then the chief of the village in which the ceremony takes place draws his knife, steps forward and addresses the people.... It is explained that the victim is an utter scoundrel, and in fact not a human being at all, but a begu (ghost) in human form, and that the time has come to atone his misdeeds. At this address the people water at the mouth and feel an irresistible impulse to have a piece of the criminal in their stomachs, as they will then rest assured that he will do them no further harm. This is the expression they themselves use to explain their cannibalism. According to their description, the pleasure which they feel in satisfying their revenge in this manner, and the consoling quiet which it gives them, is not to be compared to anything else. All draw their knives. The raja cuts off the first piece, which varies according to his taste, being either a slice of the forearm or a cheek, if this be fat enough. He holds up the flesh and drinks with gusto some of the blood streaming from it. Then he hastens to the fire to roast the meat a bit before devouring it. Now all the remaining men fall upon the bloody sacrifice, tear the flesh from the bones and roast and eat it. some eat the meat raw, or half raw in order to show off their bravery. The cries of the victim do not spoil their appetites. It is usually eight or ten minutes before the wounded man becomes unconscious, and a quarter of an hour before he dies. The remainder of the flesh then is cut from the bones (and eaten that same day) and the skeleton buried outside the village.26

There is nothing new here about this description of a cannibalistic feast, and Junghuhn’s reliance on the traditional topos makes us doubt whether he actually witnessed the ceremony as he claimed. Our concern here lies not in the factual details of cannibalism Junghuhn reported, but in the manner he conveyed this narrative written in the eternal present tense and using hearsay terms such as “usually,” “according to their description.” It is obvious that he relied heavily on the information supplied by the Toba

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hosts, who were well aware that the Dutch envoy Junghuhn was highly interested in the practice of cannibalism as well as cautioned against it. Therefore, on one hand, the local chiefs tried to satisfy his curiosity by rendering graphic details of the act, and on the other, they assured him the practice was firmly under their control. They told Junghuhn that if the natives transgressed the code of “correct” cannibalism, by eating a foreigner such as a missionary, they would be duly punished by God, as one chief at a village of Silindung in Toba district explained to him the reason why the once-prosperous community of Futatingi had become a poor village after violating that code.27 The Dutch judged that they had gained sufficient support to subjugate these chiefs in the Batak district, and declared its formal occupation in 1842 one year after Junghuhn’s travel. It was between those times when the Dutch tried to expand their influence upon the interior regions and the 1870s when they took a firm grip on the district, that the discourse of cannibalism was foregrounded through the mediator’s narratives. By the end of the nineteenth century when most of Toba and Simarungun was under the rule of the Dutch Colonial Office, the discourse of cannibalism had almost entirely vanished from the Batak region, which came under direct Dutch colonial rule by 1907. In the last phase of fables about cannibalism, the discourse itself[,which had fascinated so many people, the travellers, traders, researchers, and inland habitants alike, was gradually disappearing, because those mediator-chiefs became included within the colonial administration as petty officials. When these chiefs died, the Dutch replaced them with civil servants who graduated from training schools for colonial administrators, and the centuries-long function of the local tycoons as mediators between the foreign and the ferocious came to an end. William Arens in his influential The Man-Eating Myth (1979) famously criticized the European discourse of cannibalism as an unwarranted “civilizing” discourse that discriminates between the European “us” and the savage “them.” Crusoe himself also overrides this distinction, during the Asian mercantile ventures, where his constant concern was not to fall into the hands of Dutchmen who would regard him and his company as “pirates” deserving of a summary execution: I would not be taken, to be barbarously used by a Parcel of merciless Wretches, in cold Blood; that it was much better to have fallen into the Hands of the Savages, who were Man-Eaters, and who, I was sure would

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feast upon me, when they had taken me; than by those, who would perhaps glut their Rage upon me, by inhuman Tortures and Barbarities; that in the Case of the Savages, I always resolv’d to die fighting, to the last Gasp; and why should I not do so, seeing it was much more dreadful at least to me, to think of falling into these Mens Hand, than it ever was to think of being eaten by Men; for the Savages, give them their due, would not eat a Man till he was dead, and kill’d them first, as we do a Bullock; but that these Men had many Arts beyond the Cruelty of Death.28

Crusoe’s comparison between the Dutch traders and the Indian maneaters in terms of their degree of cruelty indicates the shifting trading and political relationship between the Dutch and the English in the East Indies in the early eighteenth century, haunted by the memory of the Amboyna massacre of 1623.29 In the West Indies, Crusoe, lacking any local mediators, felt compelled to defend himself from an imaginary threat from the supposed cannibals by fortifying his island. In the East Indies, however, Crusoe himself was in much greater immediate danger from his fellow European Protestants, for infringing upon their trading monopoly, than he ever faced from the “Savages of the main land,” who in oddly poignant aside, must finally be given “their due.”

Notes 1. Defoe, The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, 85. 2. The term is of course used by Mary Louise Pratt, referring “to social spaces where cultures meet, clash and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power, such as colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths as they lived out in many parts of the world today” (Pratt 34). 3. Kloss, 177. 4. De’Conti, 8–9. 5. Dames, 187–8. 6. Hamilton, 36. 7. Anderson, 33–35. 8. Ibid., 147–48. 9. Defoe, The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, 107. 10. Ibid., 170. 11. Ibid., 171. 12. Weaver-Hightower, 92.

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13. Defoe, The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, 178. 14. In the Volume 3 of the trilogy, Serious Reflections, Crusoe, despite his judgment cannibalism as “unlawful” and “unnatural,” observed that “those Savages were as human, as mild, and gentle, as most I have met with in the World, and as easily civiliz’d” (137). 15. It is noteworthy that the practice is considered legitimate in extreme situations in both the Farther Adventures (for crew and passengers on the ship “starv’d for want of Provisions,” 21–2) and Serious Reflections (where five men cast adrift draw lots to see who gets eaten so the others can survive (80–81). 16. In the Volume 2, there is a lengthy account of the incidents after Crusoe left the island, with an emphatic focus on the comparison between the Spaniards who were fit for farming and the three English “rogues” including William Atkins who were used to degenerate ways of life and closely linked with the man-eating tribes of the mainland. The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, 30–75. 17. Defoe, The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, 191. 18. Pratt, 201. For further discussion, see Weaver-Hightower, 11–12. 19. Defoe, The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, 191. 20. Ibid., 192. 21. Ibid., 210. 22. Ibid., 243. 23. Defoe, The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, 145. 24. Marsden, 370. 25. Marsden, 394–95. 26. Junghuhn, 35–36. 27. Ibid., 113. 28. The Farther Adventures, 167. 29. Robert Markley in the essay collected in this volume points out the significance of the Amboyna massacre in Crusoe’s fear of the Dutch cruelty (“Defoe and the Problem of the East India Company”, 16–18).

Works Cited Anderson, J. 1826; 1971. Mission to the East Coast of Sumatra in 1823. Kuala Lumpur, Singapore, London and New York: Oxford University Press. Arens, William. 1979. The Man-Eating Myth: Anthropology and Anthropophagy. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.

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Brenner, Joachim Freiherr. von. 1894. Besuch bei den Kannibalen Sumatras: Eerste Durchquerung der unabh“a“angigen Batak-Lande. W“u“urzburg: Woerl. Dames, Mansel Longwort. trans. and eds. 1921. The Book of Duarte Barbosa: An Account of the Countries Bordering on the Indian Ocean and Their Inhabitants, Written by Duarte Barbosa, and Completed About the Year 1518 A.D., 2 vols. London: Hakluyt Society. De’ Conti, Nicolo. 1857. The Travels of Nicolo de’ Conti, in the East in India in the Fifteenth Century, Being a Collection of Narratives of Voyages To India, in the Century Preceding the Portuguese Discovery of the Cape of Good Hope; From Latin, Persian, Russian, and Italian Sources. Translated from the original of Poggio Bracciolini, with notes, by J. Winter Jones. Ed. by R. H. Major. London: Hakluyt Society. Defoe, Daniel. 1719; 2008. The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe. The Novels of Daniel Defoe 1. Edited by W. R. Owens. London: Pickering & Chatto. ———. 1719; 2008. The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe. The Novels of Daniel Defoe 2. Edited by. W. R. Owens. London: Pickering & Chatto. ———. 1720; 2008. Serious Reflections During the Life and Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe with His Vision of the Angelick World. The Novels of Daniel Defoe. 3. Edited by G.A Starr. London: Pickering & Chatto. Hamilton, Alexander. 1930. A New Account of the East Indies, 2 vols. London: Argonaut Press. Junghuhn, Franz Wilhelm. 1847; 1972. Die Battälander auf Sumatra, 2 vol. Berlin. Translated in Edwin M. Loeb, Sumatra: Its History and People. Kuala Lumpur, Singapore and Medan: Oxford University Press/Toko Baku Deli. Kempees, J. C. n.d. De tocht van Overste van Daalen door Gaj-o-o, Alas- en Bataklanden. Amsterdam. Kloss, C. Boden. 1903. In the Andamans and Nicobars: Adventures in Ethnology and Natural History. London: John Murray. Marsden, William. 1811; 1966. The History of Sumatra. Kuala Lumpur, New York, London and Melbourne: Oxford University Press. Pratt, Mary Louise. 1991. Arts of the Contact Zone, Profession, New York: Modern Language Association, 33–40. Volz, Wilhelm. 1909. Nord-Sumatra, vol. 1. Berlin: Dietrich Reimer. Weaver-Hightower, Rebecca. 2007. Empire Islands: Castaways, Cannibals, and Fantasies of Conquest. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press.

CHAPTER 4

Robinson Crusoe in the Context of Travel Narrative of Early Modern England on Asia Noriyuki Harada

Asia, Japan, and Robinson Crusoe’s Voyages In the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, Portugal, Spain, and some Asian countries began trade and diplomatic relationships across the South China Sea. Macao in China, Hanoi in Vietnam, Ayuthea in Thailand, Batavia (Jakarta) in Indonesia, Manila in Philippine, and Nagasaki in Japan were the main port towns flourishing at the time. Raw silk in China and silver in Japan were the most important items of the trade, but cultural interactions between the East and the West were also developed; missionary activities of Christian priests for Asian countries, too, started from this sphere. In the middle part of The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1719), Daniel Defoe describes the journey of Crusoe’s party to this region such as Cambodia, Cochin China, and China. However, China and Korea began to put some restrictions on free trade and diplomatic

N. Harada (B) Keio University, Tokyo, Japan e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 S. Clark and Y. Yoshihara (eds.), Robinson Crusoe in Asia, Asia-Pacific and Literature in English, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-4051-3_4

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exchanges with European countries; Japan, too, adopted a policy of national isolation (1639–1854) and finally closed the door to foreigners except for Chinese, Koreans, and the Dutch in the middle of the seventeenth century. Japanese people lost the opportunity of mingling with the peoples, cultures, and aspects of civilization of modern Europe until the reopening in the mid-nineteenth century. In The Farther Adventures, Crusoe in the end gives up on his plan of sailing to Japan. However, some eighteenth-century English authors interestingly mentioned Japan.1 The country was of course understood among the authors and readers in eighteenth-century England as a real country situated at the far eastern end of the Eurasian continent, but almost none of them visited the country; what they knew about Japan was only through reminiscences of the trade flourishing between England and Japan in early seventeenth century and some limited sources of journals written by such authors as François Caron (1600–73), Arnoldus Montanus (1625–83), and Engelbert Kaempfer (1651–1716), as well as the memoirs of William Adams (1564–1620), a navigator and the first Englishman to visit Japan, and of Christóvão Ferreira (c.1580–1650), a Jesuit missionary converted in Japan. In particular, the early decades of the century attract our special attention. More than two hundred books published in London in the period have references to Japan; we also know well that in an essay for The Spectator, Joseph Addison describes Mr. Spectator who enjoys hearing “Disputes adjusted between an Inhabitant of Japan and an Alderman of London” at the Royal Exchange.2 Moreover, in the following three famous works of fiction, the reference to Japan seems to get more importance; it plays a meaningful role in the development of each story and also these three works importantly contributed to the development of English prose fiction itself. They are George Psalmanazar’s Formosa (An Historical and Geographical Description of Formosa, an Island Subject to the Emperor of Japan, 1704), Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World, 1726) and of course, Defoe’s The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe. The early eighteenth century was an opportune moment for the English authors who wanted to create a work of fiction, using the image of Japan. The Japanese government (Tokugawa Shogunate:1603–1868) had almost completely closed the country, but such Japanese diplomatic policy does not seem to have been understood fully among English merchants at least until the end of the seventeenth century; in fact, English merchants on the trade ship called “The Return” visited Nagasaki

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in 1673 and asked for resuming the trade, holding a copy of the charter that Ieyasu Tokugawa (1542–1616), the first Shogun, sent to King James I (1566–1625) half century before.3 In 1690, Kaempfer, a German naturalist and physician, visited Japan by way of the Dutch East India Company and he met Tsunayoshi Tokugawa, the fifth Shogun, twice during his two-year stay in Japan. The abridged translation of Kaempfer’s report of Japan was posthumously published in 1727 in London as The History of Japan, just after the publication of Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, and it became one of the chief sources of Western knowledge about Japan throughout the century. The figures of actual Japan and the images made by memories, rumors, and bookish knowledge were mixed in early eighteenth-century England and such circumstances helped literary authors to use references to Japan productively. In this chapter, we will first examine the descriptions of Japan by Psalmanazar, Swift, and Defoe, and argue that Defoe made his protagonist relinquish the plan of sailing to Japan because he was not well informed about the country enough to give detailed description to the journey.

Japan in Psalmanazar’s Formosa Formosa was purported to be a detailed description of Formosan geography, history, and customs, but was in fact a complete fiction and the author has been often called an impostor. The work was, however, well received in England and other European countries and its influence is observed, for example, in the literary career of Jonathan Swift and Samuel Johnson.4 Psalmanazar’s description that keeps the form of faithful reports of the history and geography of Taiwan gave a great impact, or shock, to readers in the age of exploration; he made up a seemingly faithful account of Taiwan out of scattered pieces of information, knowledge, and his own imagination on Japan and China. If he had pretended to be a Japanese or a Chinese, the fraud would have been discerned easily because even at the time, people had access to many pieces of information about those countries. However, as for Formosa, they obviously knew little, so his pretence of narrating its faithful history was largely successful. Of course, it is not true that such imposture was unanimously accepted; in fact, learned communities were highly sceptical about Psalmanazar’s veracity. However, the more scholars criticized contradictions, the more they were drawn into the depth of the mysteries of Formosa; accelerated by the popularity of the first edition, Psalmanazar

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published the second edition, adding a new intriguing preface in which he gave answers to twenty-five possible objections from the reader about his descriptions of Formosa. Why did the work get the favour of a wide readership in spite of critical comments about the dubiousness of the author’s life and description? We can point out here at least three characteristics of the narrative of Formosa. First of all, the author obviously succeeds in writing a lively dialogue addressed to the reader, both vividly and enigmatically using the autobiographical first-person narrator. This method may be similarly observed in early English prose fictions like Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko, Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and its sequels, and Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. But Psalmanazar’s use of the first-person narrator is more dexterous; he often uses different kinds of narrative personae, so that he makes effectively the reader feel that his testimony is real and faithful to his actual experience. In the first chapter, for example, he describes “the Situation, Magnitude, and Division of the Isle,” changing the narrative attitude skilfully: Formosa and Japan, are the remotest parts towards the East [. . .] so they are the first Countries that are visited with the Rays of the Morning Sun. Formosa has on the North side Japan, distant about 200 Leagues; on the North and West, China, from which it is distant about 60 Leagues [. . .]. This Isle Formosa extends itself in length from North to South about 70 Leagues, and in breadth from East to West 15 Leagues, being above 130 Leagues in Circumference. [. . .] We have very little Rain till Winter, but then it rains two or three Months together [. . .]. I never learn’d the Mathematicks, therefore I will not pretend to tell you in what Latitude Formosa lies, even the European Geographers cannot agree where to place it, most of them indeed say it is under the Tropic of Cancer, and probably they may be in the right, for at Midsummer the Sun is exactly over our Heads [. . .].5

Quick moves between descriptive narrative and its personal modification are obvious. The author first gives factual explanations of the situation of Formosa, referring to Japan, a real and better-known country. Then, he changes the description into a shared experience with his countrymen, using “we,” the first-person plural. After that, he brings in his personal observation, using the first-person singular like “I never learn’d the Mathematicks, therefore I will not pretend to tell you in what Latitude Formosa lies.” However, the author does not continue the first-person narration;

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instead, he vindicates his position by stating that “even the European Geographers cannot agree where to place it.” In the narrative, factual descriptions and personal observations are mixed, in such a way that it aroused the reader’s sympathy with the narrator’s personal experience. The reader now comes to feel like living in Formosa with the author and no longer tries to inquire after the veracity of historical or geographical facts. The second characteristic of Psalmanazar’s narrative is that he often inserts critical comments on the reader’s conventional notions and effectively shocks his or her fixed idea. In the case of Robinson Crusoe and its sequels, Defoe tactfully exploits the reader’s credulity and succeeds in changing the most unreal behaviour into a realistic one; however, Psalmanazar criticizes the reader’s fixed notion and by doing so, he forcibly draws the reader to his own context. In his preface to the second edition, Psalmanazar answers against the sixteenth possible objection from the reader: 16 Object. But this tragical Story of Meryaandanoo is so full of wonders, that it scarce can be credited. Answer. This is such a silly Objection, that I should not have taken notice of it, had it not given me a fair opportunity of putting the People of this Kingdom in mind of a far more wonderful Tragedy; I mean their falsely accusing, condemning, and at last contrary, directly contrary to their natural and sworn Allegiance, murthering King Charles the First before his own Palace.6

The story of Meryaandanoo’s murder of Chazadijn, a Japanese emperor, is full of grisly tricks and actions and therefore, the reader might think of it as a fiction far from daily occurrences in England. However, Psalmanazar, touching on the “murthering” of King Charles I (1600–49), easily generalizes such events of cruelty. By referring to the execution, Psalmanazar takes notice of the reader’s prejudice and skilfully makes the reader believe the strange and surprizing events in Formosa to be real. The third characteristic of Psalmanazar’s narrative is the dexterity by which he intertwines the narrative thread of factual and imaginary matters. Different from Swift’s description of the scholars of the Academy of Projectors in Gulliver’s Travels (Part III, Chapter 5), who try to invent new words and sentences, Psalmanazar’s explanation of the Formosan language is much more detailed and, as Keevak mentions, the reader

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naturally thinks that “Psalmanazar’s alphabet might not be completely fictitious after all.”7 Contrary to Swift, who satirically refers to an imaginary society where people do not have to use any words, Psalmanazar instead advances his explanation about the fictitious Formosan language, mixing it with reference to actual languages such as Japanese and Chinese: The reason why the Japan Language differs from that of the Chinese and Formosans, is this, because the Japanese being for their Rebellion banish’d from China, settled in the Isles of Japan; upon which account they so much hate the Chinese, that they have chang’d all things they had in common with them, as to their Language, Laws, Religion, Habits, &c. So that there is no affinity between the Japan and Chinese Language. But the Japanese being the first Inhabitants of Formosa, brought their Language along with them into that Island, which is now much more perfect than it was at their first coming. Yet the Formosans preserve still the purity of their Language without any considerable alteration, whereas the Japanese are continually changing and improving it every Day.8

We can see here again that Psalmanazar employs Japan and China in order to explain Formosa. Or, to be more precise, what he wants to say here is not the details of the language of Formosa. He simply states that the language of Formosa is different from Japanese and Chinese, and this description itself is not false. Psalmanazar calls Formosa “An Island subject to the Emperor of Japan” and frequently refers to Japan. This tactic is essential because it makes the reader believe the fictitious story about Formosa as real and faithful. By frequent references to Japan, he succeeds in providing an important glimpse of reality to support his exquisite fraud or fiction.

Japan in Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels Contrary to Defoe, Swift describes Japan as the only real country that the protagonist visits in Gulliver’s Travels. In and around 1709 when Gulliver is supposed to visit Japan, the country had already started its national seclusion and in actuality, it is not probable for an English man to land in the country. In fact, the last chapter of Part III of Gulliver’s Travels where Swift describes Gulliver’s stay in Japan is very short and the description seems to be perfunctory. We should note, however, that Swift refers to Japan not only in the last chapter of Part III, but also in some other scenes throughout the work.

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For instance, the ship which rescues Gulliver at the end of Part I is that of “an English Merchant-man, returning from Japan by the North and South Seas.”9 In Part II, Gulliver is proud of his discovery of the country of Brobdingnag and says: “I cannot but conclude, that our Geographers of Europe are in a great Error, by supposing nothing but Sea between Japan and California.”10 And in Part III, “a Japanese Captain” of “the largest of the two Pyrate Ships” that overtakes Gulliver’s vessel permits his release by setting him adrift in a small canoe; this is the trigger of his new voyages to Laputa and Balnibarbi.11 More interestingly, Gulliver makes an enigmatic comment on Japan just after his visit to Struldbruggs, the society of people who never die: “I thought this Account of the Struldbruggs might be some Entertainment to the Reader [...] There is indeed a perpetual Commerce between this Kingdom and the great Empire of Japan; and it is very probable that the Japanese Authors may have given some Account of the Struldbruggs.”12 Why does Swift often refer to Japan throughout the work? There are some Japanese popular travel narratives published in late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries that have resemblances to Gulliver’s Travels such as Furyu-Shidoken-den (The Surprizing Life and Adventures of Shidoken, A Man of Taste, 1763) by Gennai Hiraga (1728– 80), a versatile man of letters who was proficient in the Dutch, Wasobyoe (The Surprizing Life and Adventures of Wasobyoe, 1774) by Yukokushi (fl. 1770s), a writer whose life was unknown, and Musobyoe (Tales of the Life and Adventures of Musobyoe, 1810) by Bakin Takizawa (1767–1848), a popular author of late Edo period.13 Although these works of Swiftian fiction had been regarded as partial Japanese adaptations of the original through the Dutch translation, yet none of these authors seem to have taken trouble to consult a Dutch version of Gulliver’s Travels that was rare and expensive at the time in Japan. Taking this situation into consideration, we cannot deny the possibility, as William A. Eddy once discussed, that Swift came to be familiar with some stories of Japanese or Chinese origin from a few sources in common with those Japanese fictional travel narratives. Reading B. H. Chamberlain’s translation of Wasobyoe in which people who never die appear, Eddy notices the importance of the relationship between some stories of Japanese or Chinese origin and Gulliver’s Travels and claims the possibility that the original of the former might be one of the sources of the latter, and not vice versa:

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To begin with, the date of the earliest known edition of Wasobyoe, 1774, means little or nothing. The story may have circulated long before, in forms now lost. [. . .] Then, also, the fact that Japan deliberately shut herself off from European influences for a long period of years, would make it more likely that the Dutch traders would bring back a Japanese tale to Europe, than that a Japanese author should copy the work of an Englishman. [. . .] It is certainly possible that Swift may have got hold somehow of the story of Wasobyoe, perhaps from the Dutch traders themselves, while he was secretary to Sir William Temple.14

Here Eddy concisely remarks on the possibility that Swift already knew the stories of Japanese or Chinese origin like Wasobyoe in his years at William Temple’s Moor Park house in Surrey. There seems to be considerable validity to Eddy’s hypothesis, although it should not be pushed too far. Certainly, some Japanese or Chinese books and maps in which fanciful people and nations appear are supposed to have more or less circulated in England or in Europe in late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Swift might see, for example, Naaukeurige Versameling der Gedenk-Waardigste Zee en Land-Reysen (A Series of Accounts of Famous Voyages ), published in Holland in 1707, in which a map of Japan with an illustration of the imaginary audience of William Adams with Tokugawa Shogun was included, and extend his creative imagination to rather mystic customs and cultures of Japan. However, for the present moment, we cannot identify some specific maps or stories with which Swift was actually familiar as the sources of Gulliver’s Travels and we should leave the details to further consideration.15 A more promising discussion is now about the reason why Swift chose Japan in Gulliver’s Travels as an object of frequent but rather minor references. Gulliver makes round-trips between England and fanciful worlds four times within fifteen years and, by making him do so, Swift succeeds in reflecting his satirical insight into human society onto unreal, fictional, but exquisite worlds. One of the reasons why the reader of Gulliver’s Travels can feel a sense of reality for such unreal worlds is that the experience of round-trips between reality and unreality can be shared with Gulliver. In this context, Japan was nicely situated, as it were, on the way between England and several remote nations; for, it was not a simple fictional country, but a real one; nevertheless it was hazy for English people in many ways. Therefore, giving reference to Japan as a knot between fiction and reality, Swift succeeds in making the characteristic framework of the

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work stand out and in drawing the reader’s attention to the reality of satirical descriptions in the unreal worlds. Explanation should be reduced to a minimum in order to clarify a good contrast between satirical fiction and real societies; however, Japan was important for Swift in providing reality for unreal countries and vitalizing them.

Why Does Crusoe Give up His Visit to Japan?---Defoe’s Strategy for Realistic Narrative The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe was published as the continuation of Robinson Crusoe (The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, 1719). In The Farther Adventures, Crusoe starts his travels after going back to the island where once he lived, visits Madagascar and some Southeast Asian countries including China, and returns to England through Siberia. References to Japan appear in the scene just before his party reaches Peking; Crusoe relinquishes his plan of sailing across the sea to Japan and, instead of him, “my young Man,” one of Crusoe’s younger friends, goes to Japan.16 He comes back to England as a wealthy merchant eight years after. Crusoe here inserts a meaningful sentence in his narrative: “I shall take Notice in its Place.”17 In the end, Defoe finished Crusoe’s narration without mentioning the details of the young man’s conduct in Japan. Why did Defoe make the protagonist give up on sailing to Japan and postpone the narration about Japan? In this section, we will first examine some descriptions in Robinson Crusoe to understand Defoe’s characteristic strategies for making realistic fiction and then consider the question above. Defoe first started his career as a hosier, but soon changed it to a journalist. He was versatile and erudite; he liked reading and collecting books. Acute observations of people and societies through the eyes of a journalist as well as his wide range of knowledge about history and geography of many countries enabled him to make elaborate descriptions of protagonists’ lives and adventures. Different from Psalmanazar, Defoe did not intend an imposture; he created his fiction on the basis of his familiarity with its stage and circumstances. In fact, the first-person narrative of the protagonist in Robinson Crusoe and The Farther Adventures is smoothly developed with Crusoe’s autobiographical narration. This characteristic technique appears from the outset of Robinson Crusoe:

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I Was born in the Year 1632, in the City of York [. . .] my Father being a Foreigner of Bremen, who settled first at Hull: he got a good Estate by Merchandise, and leaving off his Trade, lived afterward at York, from whence he had married my Mother, whose Relations were named Robinson, a very good Family in that Country, and from whom I was called Robinson Kreutznaer; but by the usual Corruption of Words in England, we are now called, nay we call our selves, and write our Name Crusoe, and so my Companions always call’d me.18

Beginning with his birth and family, Crusoe explains the transition of the way he is called, the way he calls himself, and the way he writes his name; through this self-designation, the protagonist makes sure of his social position and based on that identity, he narrates his travels. Different from the narrator’s tense unreliability as well as his misanthropy that the reader of Gulliver’s Travels feels, Crusoe’s narrative provides comfortable reliability for the reader. One of Defoe’s characteristic manoeuvres of realistic description may be well observed in the scene where Crusoe narrates his departure from Brazil and finally reaches to the deserted island. The description seems to be factual: The same Day I went on board we set sail, standing away to the Northward upon our own Coast, with Design to stretch over for the Affrican Coast when they came about 10 or 12 Degrees of Northern Latitude, which, it seems was the manner of Course in those days. [. . .] in this Course we past the Line in about 12 Days time, and were by our last Observation in 7 Degrees 22 Min. Northern Latitude, when a violent Tournado or Hurricane took us quite out of our Knowledge; it began from the SouthEast, came about to the North-West, and then settled into the NorthEast, from whence it blew in such a terrible manner, that for twelve Days together we could do nothing but drive, and scudding away before it, let it carry us whither ever Fate and the Fury of the Winds directed; and during these twelve Days, I need not say, that I expected every Day to be swallowed up, nor indeed did any in the Ship expect to save their Lives.19

Some readers might be skeptical about the details of the course of the ship, its position, or the direction that the tornado comes, but they are not doubtful of the veracity of the description about the fear and the sense of helplessness that the crew feel. However, if we take manuals of contemporary seamanship as well as the narratives of real voyages into

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consideration, we can find out that it is impossible for all members of the crew “for twelve Days together” to “do nothing but drive” after being hit by “a Tournado or Hurricane…whither ever Fate and Fury of the Winds directed.” For, sailing ships would go down immediately in such violent weather if any seaman did nothing; all the crew must be engaged in steering many sails, corresponding to minute changes of winds, and the master needs to give detailed directions to every seaman moment by moment. In a sense, it is ironic that one of the most vivid descriptions is illusory and the reader does not feel any scepticism about its reality; the apparently realistic description is most deceitful and not real. Defoe’s most dexterous narrative device is observed here. His narrative is always easily understandable and credible, even if it tells fictitious events, and because of this, he succeeds in establishing his own form of prose fiction. Defoe’s narrative is clearly different from Swift’s. Defoe does not like writing extraordinary adventures like Gulliver’s; instead, he usually sets the main stage at a place where he and the reader are familiar to some degree. Even on the deserted island, each event the protagonist encounters and his actions are natural. We can even say that Defoe’s chosen settings for Crusoe’s adventures do not seem to be artificial; the voyages are located in the main stage of the triangular trade flourishing at the time, and those for his second travels in Eurasia are situated in a second promising direction for contemporary English merchants. Although Defoe harboured a trading scheme for South America as observed in his A New Voyage round the World (1724), such places like Australia, the west coast of North America, and the islands of the Pacific Ocean as Swift dealt with in his Gulliver’s Travels were not attractive for Defoe, because many of those places were unfamiliar for most of the readers at the time. Swift felt magnetism for making his fiction in those places; on the other hand, they were not suitable for Defoe’s creativity.20 Defoe’s inclination to contriving realistic details can also be observed in his use of sources and factual materials. One of the important sources he used for writing The Farther Adventures is supposed to be Adam Brand’s A Journal of an Embassy from Their Majesties John and Peter Alexowits, Emperors of Muscovy, &c. into China, published in 1698.21 Brand’s Journal is a faithful travel narrative; exact dates of the travellers’ itinerary, geographical features of cities and countries, climate, weather, people’s behaviour, languages, and other remarkable cultural characteristics are reported therein. When the party enters the city of Peking, Brand

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begins his explanation with the origin of the name, the location, and other external features: The City of Peking, the Capital of the Empire, and Residence of its Kings, has borrowed its Name from the province of Peking, which on the East Borders on the great Gulph betwixt Corea and Japan; on the North-East upon the Province of Leaotung, on the North upon the Great Tartary, and part of Chinese Wall, and on the West the province of Xansi.22

Then, some comments on the behaviour of the inhabitants follow: “All the Chinese women are of a very low Stature, those of Quality have very little Feet, in which they take a particular pride, for which reason they keep them extraordinary straightened, to such an excess, that many thereby quite lose the use of their Feet.”23 On the other hand, assimilating Brand’s faithful description, Defoe transforms it to an easily imaginable and attractive fiction for the reader: We were five and twenty Days travelling to Peking, through a Country infinitely populous, but miserably cultivated; the Husbandry, the Oeconomy, and the Way of living, miserable; tho’ they boast so much of the Industry of the People; I say, miserable, and so it is, if we who understand how to live were to endure it, or to compare it with our own, but not so to these poor Wretches who know no other [. . .].24

Here Crusoe does not explain in detail the history and the geography of China. Different from Brand, he simply discusses his idea of its “miserable” condition. Usually, Brand does not use the first-person narration, but Defoe’s explanation is straightforwardly narrated in this way; this immediacy of the narrator is favourable for the reader who comes to believe the narrative as reliable and factual. It is when Crusoe’s party stays in Quinchang just before entering Peking that references to Japan appear in The Farther Adventures. At first, Crusoe is pleased to hear the idea of going to Japan to extend his trade, but in the end, he abandons the idea because of the danger accompanying it and instead he leaves the visit to Japan to the hands of his younger friend who offers to embark upon it: [. . .] my Partner, wiser than my self, persuaded me from it [going to Japan], representing the dangers as well as of the Seas, as of the Japoness, who are a false, cruel, and treacherous People [. . .]. But to bring this long

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Turn of our Affairs to a Conclusion; the first Thing we had to do, was to consult with the Captain of the Ship, and with his Men, and know if they were willing to go to Japan; and while I was doing this, the young Man [. . .] came to me, and told me, that he thought that Voyage promised very fair, and that there was a great Prospect of Advantage, and he would be very glad if I undertook it; but if I would not, and would give him leave, he would go as a Merchant, or how I pleas’d to order him; that if ever he came to England, and I was there and alive, he would render me a faithful Account of his Success, and it should be as much mine as I pleas’d. [. . .] about eight Years after, [he] came to England exceedingly Rich; of the which, I shall take Notice in its Place [. . .].25

Here Defoe might hurry up with Crusoe’s return to England, cutting off a detailed description of Japan, but it seems reasonable to suppose that Defoe originally brooded over a plan of describing the protagonist’s voyage to Japan. For, if he had had no idea about the voyage to Japan from the outset of writing The Farther Adventures, he would not have taken the trouble to refer to Japan in the scene of Quinchang and to allude to the future of the young man. Why then didn’t Defoe make Crusoe visit Japan? One of the reasons that we can point out here is that, though Defoe had an idea of writing about Japan in mind, yet he gave it up due to the lack of enough materials to delineate meticulously the country. In fact, we can find no entry of travel narratives on Japan in Olive Payne’s Sales Catalogue of Defoe’s library except for such a general description as that of Arnoldus Montanus, who in actuality never came to Japan.26 He did not know the minute records of Japan in Kaempfer’s The History of Japan. Of course, he could borrow the description of Psalmanazar’s Formosa, for example, but he didn’t; or rather, he didn’t like to use such a hoax as the basis for his description.27 Therefore, it is likely that, thinking of his own characteristic way of making fiction, Defoe chose to leave out a detailed description of Japan because of the paucity of knowledge about the country. His creative imagination fully worked only when he was convinced that he possessed enough knowledge about the objects.28

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Japan, East Asian Countries, and the Formation of English Prose Fiction It seems natural for us to find many fictional travel narratives were written at an early stage of modern prose fiction in English; travels into extraordinary circumstances well provide the trigger of observation of the familiar society from a new perspective. Such fictional travel narratives help to widen and enrich the topics and perspectives of prose fiction, arousing the reader’s interest and imagination. In this sense, Asian countries and, in particular, Japan in the early modern period were undoubtedly attractive for the authors of English prose fiction; their existence was certain, but the languages, cultures, characteristics of the peoples, and their indigenous customs still remained to be clarified and therefore, the countries could provide the English authors with effective stages for their creativity. Psalmanazar referred to Japan and China in order to make the reader believe his hoax about Formosa as real and faithful and Swift used the country as a concise and important knot between reality and fiction to vitalize his satire on human society. The image of Japan as a distant Asian country was hazy and fantastic for the contemporary reader as well as for the authors, but because of this, the use of Japan functioned conveniently in Formosa and Gulliver’s Travels. Defoe was not, however, an author who made his fictions in uncertain territories. With enough assimilation of knowledge and satisfactory understanding about the objects, he made fiction and built up a new “network of personal relationships.”29 His imagination worked elaborately in a matrix of fact and produced realistic fictions. In this sense, he clearly showed a path for the development of European novel that was different from hoax and unrealistic fantasy. From this point of view, Japan was not a suitable stage for his fiction. His hesitation and final relinquishment of describing Japan in Farther Adventures well show an aspect of characteristic mode of composition in the origin of English prose fiction.

Notes 1. For example, Tobias Smollett sets in Japan the stage of the story of The History and Adventures of an Atom (1769), eds. O.M. Brack Jr and Robert Adams Day (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2014), and refers to the country in The Expedition of Humphrey Clinker (1772), ed. Lewis M. Knapp, rev. Paul-Gabriel Boucé (Oxford: Oxford University

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Press, 1984), 213–14. James Boswell also refers to Japan in his conversations with Samuel Johnson: see The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D., ed. George Birkbeck Hill, rev. L. F. Powell, 6 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1934–50), 2. 149. 2. The Spectator, ed. Donald F. Bond, 5 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), 1: 293. As for references to Japan in the books published in early decades of the eighteenth-century England, see Takau Shimada, Japan 1555–1800: A Comprehensive Bibliography of Printed Books in English (Tokyo: Edition Synapse, 2012), 29–52. The bibliography includes more than two hundred books in English published in early twenty years of the century in which Japan is mentioned. Urchin Chevreau’s The History of the World (1703), Awnsham Churchill’s A Collections of Voyages and Travels (1704), Peter Teixeria’s A View of the Universe (1710), Charles Lockyer’s An Account of the Trade in India (1711), and many versions of the translation of Samuel Pufendorf’s geographical descriptions are some of the examples. 3. As for details, see Derek Massarella, A World Elsewhere: Europe’s Encounter with Japan in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), 355–69, and Keizo Asaji, “English Manuscripts in the British Library on the Case of Return and Japan Diary, 1673,” The Review of the Institute of Oriental and Occidental Studies (Kansai University) 40 (2007): 31–40. 4. Psalmanazar is believed to have been born in southern France to Catholic parents sometime between 1679 and 1684. He decided to impersonate a Japanese convert but around 1702, he shifted his supposed homeland from Japan to Formosa (Taiwan), a more remote island, in order to make his fraud more impregnable. Encountering Alexander Innes, a Scottish priest, he converted to Anglicanism and took the name of George Psalmanazar. In 1703, he left for London with Innes and soon became famous because of his strange habits as well as his travel narratives. See Psalmanazar’s autobiography, Memoirs of ****. Commonly Known by the Name of George Psalmanazar (London: R. Davis, J. Newbery, L. Davis, and C. Reymers, 1764), 160–66; Justin Stagl, A History of Curiosity: The Theory of Travel, 1550–1800 (London: Taylor & Francis, 1995), 183–85; and Michael Keevak, The Pretended Asian: George Psalmanazar’s Eighteenth-Century Formosan Hoax (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2004), 6, 37-38. For Swift’s satirical reference to Psalmanazar, see “A Modest Proposal,” Irish Political Writings after 1725: A Modest Proposal and Other Works, The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Jonathan Swift, ed. D. W. Hayton and Adam Rounce (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), Vol. 14. 152; as to Johnson’s favorable opinion about Psalmanazar, see Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D., 3:

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5.

6. 7. 8. 9.

10. 11. 12. 13.

14.

15.

16. 17.

314, 443–49. Psalmanazar also appears in Smollett’s The Expedition of Humphrey Clinker, 133. Psalmanazar, An Historical and Geographical Description of Formosa, the Second Edition (1704; London: Mat. Wotton, Abel Roper, B. Lintott, Fr. Coggan, G. Strahan and W. Davis, 1705), 2–3. Psalmanazar, Formosa, n.p. Keevak, The Pretended Asian, 93. Psalmanazar, Formosa, 123. Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Jonathan Swift, ed. David Womersley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), Vol. 15. 111. Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, 156. Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, 220. Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, 322. The first Japanese scholar who remarked on the relationship between Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels and the three Japanese books is Baikei Takasu. See Takasu, Kokkeishumi-no-kenkyu (A Study of Humorous and Satirical Works in Japanese Literature), (Tokyo: Jitsugyo-no-nihon sha, 1911), 100–53. Eddy, Gulliver’s Travels: A Critical Study (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1923), 70–71. Chamberlain (1850–1935), a professor at the University of Tokyo, is one of the most famous British Japanologists who wrote many articles on Japan and translated many works of Japanese classical literature. Some possible sources that are supposed to be transported from Japan to Europe and might give an inspiration for Swift are: Ryoan Terashima’s Wakan-Sansai-zue (Japanese-Chinese Encyclopedic Descriptions and Illustrations of Peoples, lands, and Celestial Spheres, 1712) that includes the illustrations of many kinds of fanciful peoples and lands; BankokuJinbutsu-zu (An Illustration of Peoples of the World, 1645) which are illustrated with some clearly fanciful dwarves and giants; and BankokuSokai-zu (An Illustrative Map of Lands of the World, 1688), in which some similarly characteristic distortions of the real lands to the cartographical features of the maps attached to Gulliver’s Travels are observed. As for the identification of specific items that Swift might have consulted when he wrote Gulliver’s Travels, the author of this article is now engaged in the researches supported by Grants-in Aid for Scientific Research (C) (26,370,296–00) of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science. Defoe, The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, ed. W. R. Owens, The Novels of Daniel Defoe, 2 (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2008), 171. Defoe, Farther Adventures, 172.

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18. Defoe, The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, ed. P. N. Furbank. The Novels of Daniel Defoe, 1 (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2008), 57. 19. Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, 87. 20. As for Defoe’s interest in South America and his A New Voyage round the World as its fictional representation, see Burton J. Fishman, “Defoe, Herman Moll, and the Geography of South America,” Huntington Library Quarterly 36:3 (1973): 227–38. Alexander Selkirk, a possible model for Robinson Crusoe, lived as a castaway on an uninhabited island off the coast of Chile. 21. As for Brand’s Journal, Richard M. Bridges convincingly demonstrates Defoe’s reliance on it in “A Possible Source for Daniel Defoe’s The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe,” Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 2:3 (1979): 231–36. 22. Brand, A Journal of an Embassy from Their Majesties John and Peter Alexowits, Emperors of Muscovy, &c. into China (London: D. Brown, 1698), 102. 23. Brand, Journal, 105. 24. Defoe, Farther Adventures, 175. 25. Defoe, Farther Adventures, 171–72. The phrase “of the which, I shall take Notice in its Place” is somehow missing in some e-book editions. In the note, the editors of the Pickering and Chatto edition explain that “trade with European countries” in Japan “was protected by granting of special licenses to merchant ships,” but these were not issued in actuality. See n. 293 in, Farther Adventures, 238. Defoe also mentioned Japan and China in Serious Reflections: “their [Chinese and Japanese] Worship is the most brutish, and the Objects of their Worship, the coursest, the most unmanly, inconsistent with Reason or the Nature of Religion of any the World can shew.” See Defoe, Serious Reflections during the Life and Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, ed. G. A. Starr, The Novels of Daniel Defoe, 3 (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2008), 139. 26. Helmut Heidenreich, The Libraries of Daniel Defoe and Phillips Farewell: Olive Payne’s Sales Catalogue (1731) (Berlin: Heidenreich, 1970), 184. 27. Defoe’s description of Taiwan in Farther Adventures is only one page long and any trace of Psalmanazar’s description cannot be observed. 28. In The Life, Adventures and Piracies of the Famous Captain Singleton (1720) and A New Voyage round the World (1724), Defoe describes in rather fantastic ways the protagonists who visit more unfamiliar places like unknown Africa and the interior of South America. A shift of his scope and descriptive mode is observed here. However, as space is limited, we have concentrated on his reference to Japan in this chapter. 29. Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel (London: Chatto & Windus, 1957), 92.

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Works Cited Asaji, Keizo. 2007. English Manuscripts in the British Library on the Case of Return and Japan Diary, 167. The Review of the Institute of Oriental and Occidental Studies (Kansai University) 40: 31–40. Bankoku-Jinbutsu-zu (An Illustration of Peoples of the World, 1645). [The author is unknown; woodblock printing and hand coloring.] Bankoku-Sokai-zu (An Illustrative Map of Lands of the World, 1688). [By Tomonobu Ishikawa; woodblock printing and hand coloring.] Boswell, James. 1934–50. The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. Edited by George Birkbeck Hill, revised by L. F. Powell, 6 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Brand, Adam. 1698. A Journal of an Embassy from Their Majesties John and Peter Alexowits, Emperors of Muscovy, &c. into China. London: D. Brown. Bridges, Richard M. 1979. A Possible Source for Daniel Defoe’s The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe. Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 2 (3): 231–236. Defoe, Daniel. 1719; 2008. The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe. The Novels of Daniel Defoe 1. Edited by W.R. Owens. London: Pickering & Chatto. ———. 1719; 2008. The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe. The Novels of Daniel Defoe 2. Edited by. W. R. Owens. London: Pickering & Chatto. ———. 1720; 2008. Serious Reflections during the Life and Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe with His Vision of the Angelick World. The Novels of Daniel Defoe. 3. Edited by G.A Starr. London: Pickering & Chatto. Eddy, William A. 1923. Gulliver’s Travels: A Critical Study. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Fisherman, Burton J. 1973. Defoe, Herman Moll, and the Geography of South America. Huntington Library Quarterly 36 (3): 227–238. Heidenreich, Helmut. 1970. The Libraries of Daniel Defoe and Phillips Farewell: Olive Payne’s Sales Catalogue (1731). Berlin: Heidenreich. Keevak, Michael. 2004. The Pretended Asian: George Psalmanazar’s EighteenthCentury Formosan Hoax. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. Massarella, Derek. 1990. A World Elsewhere: Europe’s Encounter with Japan in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. New Haven: Yale University Press. Psalmanazar, George. 1704; 1705. An Historical and Geographical Description of Formosa. Second Edition. London: Mat. Wotton, Abel Roper, B. Lintott, Fr. Coggan, G. Strahan and W. Davis. ———. 1764. Memoirs of ****. Commonly Known by the Name of George Psalmanazar. London: R. Davis, J. Newbery, L. Davis, and C. Reymers. Shimada, Takau. 2012. Japan 1555–1800: A Comprehensive Bibliography of Printed Books in English. Tokyo: Edition Synapse. Smollett, Tobias. 1769; 2014. The History and Adventures of an Atom. Edited by O.M. Brack Jr and Robert Adams Day. Athens: University of Georgia Press.

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———. 1772; 1984. The Expedition of Humphry Clinker. Edited by Lewis M. Knapp, revised by Paul-Gabriel Boucé. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Stagl, Justin. 1995. A History of Curiosity: The Theory of Travel, 1550–1800. London: Taylor & Francis. Swift, Jonathan. 1729; 2018. A Modest Proposal. Irish Political Writings after 1725: A Modest Proposal and Other Works. The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Jonathan Swift. 14. Edited by D. W. Hayton and Adam Rounce. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. Gulliver’s Travels, The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Jonathan Swift 15. Edited by David Womersley. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Takasu, Baikei. 1911. Kokkeishumi-no-kenkyu (A Study of Humorous and Satirical Works in Japanese Literature). Tokyo: Jitsugyo-no-nihon sha. Terashima, Ryoan. 1712. Wakan-Sansai-zue (Japanese-Chinese Encyclopedic Descriptions and Illustrations of Peoples, lands, and Celestial Spheres ). Osaka: Kyorindo. The Spectator. 1711–12; 1965. The Spectator. Edited by Donald F. Bond, 5 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Watt, Ian. 1957. The Rise of the Novel. London: Chatto & Windus.

CHAPTER 5

Robinson Crusoe, Improvement and Intellectual Piracy in the Early Enlightenment Dan Howse

Introduction Although the first Robinsonades emerged almost as soon as Defoe’s book was published in 1719, Robinson Crusoe as an archetype of imperial enterprise reached its apogee more than a century after its first publication, when it became, variously, a medium for promoting and celebrating economic self-sufficiency, the Protestant work ethic and the justness of the British colonial expansion.1 It has been argued that much of the intellectual freight carried by the Robinsonades of this period was not present in Defoe’s original, and its deployment as an economic simile only dated from the mid-nineteenth century.2 However, the manner in which Robinson Crusoe and the Robinsonade was employed before this time was rather more varied.

D. Howse (B) University of East Anglia, Norwich, England © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 S. Clark and Y. Yoshihara (eds.), Robinson Crusoe in Asia, Asia-Pacific and Literature in English, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-4051-3_5

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If, by the nineteenth century, Robinson Crusoe was predominantly read as a nascent statement of imperialist endeavour, the earlier Robinsonades were employed differently, for example, as spiritual biography, survival narrative or as a medium for Enlightenment ideas about society and education, an interpretation most notably asserted by Jean-Jacques Rousseau in Émile (1762). Maximilian Novak has shown that Defoe’s journalistic endeavours promoting English colonial settlement in South America influenced his development of Robinson Crusoe, and although the novel might not have been explicitly intended as economic propaganda, with Crusoe cast as homo economicus, it was seemingly shaped by Defoe’s own interest in economic improvement, and his ideas about education and practical experiment.3 One might usefully distinguish between the unauthorised abridgements of Robinson Crusoe which emerged after its initial publication in 1719 and the Robinsonades of a generation or more later, in which the familiar theme of the castaway had become a vehicle for various ideas about society, education or the economy. However, while their contexts and intent might differ, the Robinsonades, as a literary form, built on the popular reception of Robinson Crusoe and were informed by its publication and diffusion in abridged and bastardised editions in the intervening decades. The size of the public audience for novels in early eighteenth-century England was still relatively small. Contemporary estimates for newspaper circulation comprised less than 1% of the population at the beginning of the century, but even by the early 1750s the proportion was only about three times that figure. Even allowing for the likelihood that each copy sold was read by more than a single reader, Ian Watt put the figure at something less than 5% of the population.4 Moreover, at five shillings a copy, it would have materially been beyond the means of the majority to buy a copy of Robinson Crusoe. Consequently, it lent itself readily to chapbook abridgement or periodical serialisation. Many works of a similar price were too dense for this to be done easily, but the apparently simple structure and naturalistic style of Robinson Crusoe proved more amenable to abridgement than many other contemporary works of literature.5 Defoe’s own concern with print piracy, as a professional author who sought to have his work recognised as his property, and the subsequent history of Robinson Crusoe’s reprints, abridgements and serial publications, throw into relief the issues around intellectual property more generally. Ideas of its legal status were still largely embryonic and in this

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context what we would now recognise as intellectual piracy flourished. Indeed piracy of this type was not limited to books, but included maps, engravings and, significantly, manufactures and technological inventions. The fields, although quite different, were related by the vagueness of the rules regarding intellectual property, and how it was defined and policed. However, I would also like to suggest that these conditions also helped create a powerful legacy for the future. Piracy was intrinsic to the diffusion of knowledge, and contributed to a technological culture foundational for the complex of clustered changes which have been usefully designated as the Industrial Revolution. Similarly, pirated editions of texts helped ensure their diffusion, shaping and informing the development of a “public sphere.”

Defoe and Improvement Over the years Defoe’s changing fortunes meant that his writings assumed various distinct positions, on which the shifting political circumstances of the time had a significant bearing. Following his prosecution for seditious libel Defoe came under the protection and patronage of Sir Robert Harley, and his subsequent publication of The Review was central to the cultivation of a propaganda network principally intended to secure the political support of the landed gentry. It has rightly been observed that Defoe’s assurances in print‚ designed to secure the political pre-eminence of the Church of England, although motivated by a pragmatic appeal to mobilise moderate Tories against efforts to prosecute religious nonconformity, nonetheless jar with his earlier polemics in defence of liberty of religion.6 However, the tenor of his economic writings remained fairly consistent across his career as a professional writer, even if the positions he assumed do not uniformly marry with the canonical orthodoxies of later economic philosophy. Defoe advocated trade and commerce as the means to secure social as well as economic progress, and time and again he emphasised the benefits of the constant circulation of goods and money in accruing value and growth; “That the more Hands it goes through, the greater publick Advantage it is in the Country it is carried on or managed in.”7 Defoe’s economic writings for the Review aimed to convince the landed gentry that their interests were congruent with those of trade and industry, consistent with Harley’s efforts to foster a spirit of bipartisan

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moderation. This line of reasoning was subsequently reiterated in Defoe’s writings such as A Plan of English Commerce, written twenty years later. Trade encourages Manufacture, prompts Invention, employs People, increases Labour, and pays Wages: As the People are employ’d, they are paid, and by that Pay are fed, cloathed, kept in Heart, and kept together… for where the Employment is, the People will be… As the Numbers of People increase, the Consumption of Provisions increases; as the Consumption increases, the Rate or Value will rise at Market; and so the Rate of Provisions rises, the Rents of Land rise: So the Gentlemen are with the first to feel the Benefit of Trade, by the Addition to their Estates.8

One must be cautious about exaggerating the historical consistency and immobility of tradition in English society, and it is notable that in the course of the later seventeenth century appeals to improvement became more frequent, as it came to assume its distinctive sense of progress and betterment.9 Throughout the early modern period the notion of innovation was principally used pejoratively, to indicate a novelty which broke with commonly agreed customs, tried and tested by the course of time. However, by the end of the century writers like William Wotton were able to enunciate a distinctively modern belief in progress, that “the world has gone on from Age to Age, improving.”10 In the Preface to A General History of Discoveries and Improvements Defoe echoed that commitment to change as we stand upon the shoulders of three thousand Years application and have all the benefit of their Discoveries, and Experiments handed down, gratis, to improve upon, and to encourage our Enquiries. They have searched Nature to the bottom, inside and out-side; they have as it were anatomiz’d the Globe, and given us the naked Skeleton of its most secret Parts, for us to act upon in our farther Enquiries.11

The notion of improvement became more prominent, both as the means to advance knowledge and understanding, as also to secure national prosperity. Sir Francis Bacon’s advocacy for the utility of an empirical, experimental philosophy assumed a formative influence on the scholarly groups which during the Interregnum of the 1650s clustered around Samuel Hartlib and John Wilkins, respectively. The concerns of the Hartlib circle in particular were not limited to natural philosophy, but

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demonstrated a more immediately practical concern with economic development. They advocated the enclosure of the commons and wastes, and the adoption of new techniques of husbandry, with the intention of increasing agricultural productivity and rural employment, and sought to extend their programme of improvement to colonial plantations in the Americas and Ireland.12 This practical concern with the application of experimental techniques to the improvement of the national economy was carried forward in the projects taken up by the Royal Society after the Restoration. Following the strife of the Civil War period the thrust of the Royal Society’s project, as articulated by Sir Robert Boyle and committed to posterity by the Society’s proselytiser, Thomas Sprat, was to establish a House of Salomon as had been envisaged by Bacon. The Royal Society in its first flourish was informed by a practical commitment to the industrial and commercial improvement of the nation, as well as to scientific enquiry: “to make faithful Records, of all the Works of Nature, or Art, which can come within their reach: that so the present Age, and posterity, may be able to put a mark on the Errors, which have been strengthened by long prescription.”13 In addition to its utility, empiricism seemed to offer the means of resolving disagreements by providing a neutral and objective statement of fact, mutually agreeable and ultimately able to resolve partisan dissension and factionalism. Although the general tendency from the later seventeenth century onwards was towards increasing recognition of private property and the rights of individuals, Ian Watt, in his study of the development of the novel, perhaps overstated the individualism of the period.14 In fact the Royal Society framed its ambitions for empirical observation and documentation in terms of a cooperative endeavour. Although in practice that collective project was principally exercised within the exclusive bounds of a genteel homosociality which belied the nominal egalitarianism of their designs, its practice was far from individualistic.15 The communicative nature of their experimental philosophy was not just a methodological device, but was also envisaged as a national project for social cohesion, as well as for technological and economic improvement. Sprat recorded that the Royal Society’s work provided an assembly for whom no profitable thing shall seem too mean for their consideration, seeing they have some amongst them, whose life is employ’d about little things,

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as well as great. By this they have broken down the partition wall, and made a fair entrance, for all conditions of men to engage in these Studies… compounded of all sorts of men, of the Gown, of the Sword, of the Shop, of the Field, of the Court, of the Sea; all mutually assisting each other.16

It was in this spirit of utility that the Royal Society undertook to compile a History of Trades, “taking notice of all the Physical Receipts, or Secrets, the Instruments, Tools, and Engines, the Manual operations or sleights, the cheats, and ill practices, the goodness, baseness, and different value of Materials, and whatever else belongs to the Operation of all Trades.”17 This sense of practical utility was not shared by all and despite the initial enthusiasm to exhaustively detail information describing the mechanical arts, aiming to improve them and bring them to some kind of regularity and perfection, the Society’s design never came to fruition. One of the reasons that the Royal Society’s scholarly engagement faltered was its failure to engage with those “Envious Plebeian Mechanicks” who displayed little enthusiasm for scholarly attempts to record and improve their crafts.18 This was not merely a matter of complacency and resistance to change but part of the policing of trade mysteries, iterated through the institution of apprenticeship. This is, of course, not to say that in the years that followed the interest in utility fell into abeyance, and the pages of the Philosophical Investigations serve as testament to the ongoing engagement of a section of its membership with such practical concerns. If the London meetings of the Royal Society catered to a fashionable metropolitan circle of virtuosi, the aspirations of the Royal Society for the organised institutionalisation of knowledge was best realised by its publication of the Philosophical Investigations, which provided the means to share and publicise their work: a pillar supporting the emergent “Republic of Letters.” Defoe’s own commitment to empiricism was evident in the matterof-fact narrative style common to both his journalistic reportage and the fictions of the Journal of the Plague Year or Robinson Crusoe. His account of the Great Storm of 1703 presented what were purportedly unaltered eyewitness accounts of events, taking care to “to set every thing in its own Light, and to convey matter of fact upon its legitimate Authority, and no other.”19 Similarly Defoe was aware of the earlier practical and educational projects of the Royal Society and Samuel Hartlib, and his interest was such that in his own General History of Discoveries and Improvements he presented a summary account of the progress of technology and trade

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in the ancient world. Such an engagement was central to his idea of the practical benefits of learning to tradesman and gentleman alike, and was apparently influenced by his own education at the dissenting academy at Newington Green.20 According to Defoe, the projecting spirit of the Age was the result of necessity, the war with France having imposed significant losses on the “Trading Part of the Nation” who in consequence “rack their Wits for New Contrivances, New Inventions, New Trades, Stocks, Projects, and any thing to retrieve the desperate Credit of their Fortunes.”21 However, even if motivated by private interest, the net effect was of more general benefit, securing an increase of public stock and employment of the poor. Provision should be made for such official encouragements to improvement. Defoe argued that there was no reason why the Author of any such fair Contrivances should not reap the harvest of his own Ingenuity; our Acts of Parliament for granting Patents to first Inventors for Fourteen years, is a sufficient acknowledgment of the due regard which ought to be had to such as find out an thing which may be of publick Advantage; new Discoveries in Trade, in Arts and Mysteries, of Manufacturing Goods, or Improvement of Land, are without question of as great benefit, as any Discoveries made in the Works of Nature by all the Academies and Royal Societies in the world.22

Robinson Crusoe and the Robinsonades Defoe wrote in Robinson Crusoe: So I went to work; and here I must needs observe, that as reason is the substance and original of the mathematics, so by stating and squaring everything by reason, and by making the most rational judgement of things, every man may be in time master of every mechanick art. I had never handled a tool in my life; and yet in time, by labour, application, and contrivance, I found at last that I wanted nothing but I could have made it, especially if I had tools.23

Defoe’s Crusoe repeatedly employs a process of progressive experimentation in order to improve his works, although readily conceding their final imperfection, in the absence of appropriate tools, materials and skills. Crusoe’s survey of his island surroundings is reminiscent of the guidelines for making observations of different environments which were published

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in pamphlet form by John Woodward: “Observe to what perpendicular Height the Sea rises at high-water: what Space of Time passes between Flood and Ebb: What kind of Fish reside near the Shores, particularly what Shell-fish: What fowl are most frequent there: What Weeds, Shrubs, &c., also what Shells are flung up by the Sea.”24 He cultivates crops to bake his own bread, manufactures agricultural implements, makes earthenware pots and a sieve from seaman’s clothes washed ashore, as well as fabricating his own clothes and an umbrella. His confinement is one of constant industry, so that when kept from his labours he teaches his parrot to speak and studies scripture. It is this intent, articulating the spirit of improvement, which presumably recommended Robinson Crusoe to Rousseau, and which influenced the Robinsonades which followed a generation after its first publication in 1719. William Arderon’s unpublished Robinsonade was just one aspect of his own engagement in this early Enlightenment world of letters, and in which, like many of the Robinsonades, the familiar narrative themes became a vehicle for the iteration of practical and philosophical discussions. In particular Arderon intended to demonstrate how a practical grasp of science could be applied to aid his own protagonist in establishing himself on his desert island, securing him both material and spiritual benefits. Written around the time of the appearance of various similar Adventures of Peter Wilkins, John Daniel and Captain Tompson, Arderon’s Jack Tomson, when still a boy, runs away from his Lincolnshire home following disagreements with his stepmother, and like Crusoe finds passage on a commercial vessel making its way along England’s North Sea coast. After an attack by French privateers his ship is caught in a prodigious storm which for fourteen days drives the vessel far out to sea, until it is finally wrecked, with Tomson the sole survivor, managing to stay afloat long enough to be washed ashore on an island in the Atlantic. What follows is a relatively straightforward survival story (at least until the second half of the tale, an Indian kidnap narrative), with little or nothing of the spiritual or existential challenges that Crusoe experiences. Tomson’s problems are by contrast almost exclusively practical, to be overcome by sound application of rational and experimental consideration. Like Crusoe, Tomson is washed ashore with little more than the clothes on his back, and for Arderon the appeal of recounting his story seems to insist in his protagonist’s ability to apply himself to improving his situation, with no specialist skills or experience. Initially he surveys the island on foot, foraging for shellfish on the shore which he eats uncooked,

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and sleeps in the rocks. However, Tomson’s application of his school lessons, well learnt, and with the providential assistance of a somewhat implausible sea current, is in fact able to do far more than survive. He eventually succeeds in securing a handsome wife and family who occupy a generously equipped home with their pet dog, and which would not have seemed out of place in the provincial England of his day, replete with a good quality telescope and microscope, “made by Mr John Cuff,” to encourage his own surveys.25 Arderon’s narrative is barely worthy of consideration as literature, but his concern in writing is principally with the technical challenges, which with a little practical know-how and ingenuity can be overcome. It is, in effect, a testament to the benefits of a practical education and of a systematic approach to improvement based on empirical observation and sound reasoning. Having previously observed a basket maker at work close to his father’s home, Tomson follows his example and cuts reeds from the river bank to produce wickerwork panels from which he constructs a hut. Similarly Tomson methodically follows a bee, making a series of observations until he is eventually able to locate the hive and extract its honey.26 While Crusoe maintains notches on a post to keep track of the passage of the days, all too conscious of having “lost a day or two,” so Arderon recounts a method by which the day and his location, with some exactness, be divined, and the Sabbath observed more faithfully.27 Tomson’s methodical approach is consistent with Arderon’s own observations of natural phenomena and practical arts, recorded in the letters he wrote to Henry Baker which were subsequently published in the Philosophical Investigations. Arderon commenced his correspondence with Baker in the 1740s, who in turn relayed his observations on nature and technology to the Royal Society, who duly elected him a Fellow.28 Baker, by his marriage to Sophia Defoe, had been Daniel Defoe’s son-inlaw, and was principally renowned as a successful teacher of deaf people, having developed his own unique methods. If unexceptional as a scientist in his own right, Baker was a prominent figure in publicising innovations to a popular audience. His correspondence was foundational in the popularisation of science and represented the diverse empirical observations of an amateur polymath, more in keeping with late seventeenth-century empiricism than what we would now consider modern enquiry. Arderon’s subject matter reflects the circumstances of his own environment, as manager of Norwich’s municipal waterworks, reporting the measurement of average rainfall and describing the movement of eels through the city’s

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rivers and streams. He ruminated on the sense-organs of fish and the geological structure of limestone hills, on architectural flint-work, the fossilised remains of a mammoth, the physiological proportions of a dwarf from a travelling sideshow, and the design for a rudimentary mechanical alarm clock. Several of Arderon’s findings were both original and significant, as, for example, his descriptions of aquatic micro-organisms and fungal diseases in fish. However, Arderon’s naivety and his lack of scientific specialisation was disparaged by some as trivial dilettantism, and one early nineteenth-century account deemed him little more than a scientific illiterate. Arderon stood at the cusp of the earlier endeavours of the gentleman amateurs of natural philosophy and the more rigid specialisation of scientific disciplines which emerged in the latter half of the century. Similarly, Arderon’s Robinsonade was born out of his commitment to the oft-voiced, and less frequently evinced, commitment to the new learning and its application to practical improvement.

Robinson Crusoe and the Pirates The power of the Robinsonade as a medium was based in large part on the immediate recognisability of the story, which had at least in part been promoted by the widespread availability of popular versions of Defoe’s story in pirated and abridged versions. The story of the Robinson Crusoe piracies has been well documented before. The first six editions of Robinson Crusoe were published by the printer William Taylor, and in 1726 the copyright was sold to Mears and Woodward. However, demand for the book was such that that cheaper pirated editions appeared soon after its initial publication. Literary piracy was a frequent issue in the early eighteenth century, with the situation for print particularly fluid with changes within the regulation and development of the publishing industry after 1695, when the Licensing Act was allowed to lapse. In fact the question of piracy is rather more difficult to pin down, as many of the issues regarding the text as intellectual property were still embryonic. Many of the issues which emerged in relation to copyright were still only partially defined, at best, and the law, although becoming more attuned to the recent changes to literary production still lagged some way behind, and significantly retained a definite sense of unease about how such issues should be policed.

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In the early eighteenth century the printing industry was by and large a localised affair, with imprints being produced for a relatively limited market. The “pirates” and the “reprinters” in fact overlapped significantly. The wider distribution of books beyond the metropolitan centres was to some extent dependent on the availability of cheaper pirated versions. Adrian Johns has emphasised the formative influence of piracy on the emergence of the “public sphere” in England at that time, and shaped the culture of the Enlightenment by enabling the more extensive circulation of texts, both outside of London’s metropolitan social networks and internationally.29 Habermas’ idealised description of the development of the public sphere postulated that it was only at the end of the seventeenth century that the press was able to assume the kind of regularity which made it generally accessible. By providing a virtual forum for public opinion print fundamentally transformed the nature of politics by mediating a critical dialogue between private citizens and the state‚ in which discussions were in principle open to all.30 It was in terms of the encouragement of learning that Defoe’s 1704 Essay On the Regulation of the Press was couched, asserting that the role of print was to “make men Polite, and encrease the Knowledge of Letters, and thereby all useful Arts and Sciences.”31 Defoe’s essay had been written in response to calls for taxing and reimposing licensing on printed works as the means to control licentious and fraudulent content, but also presented his own proposals against literary piracy, in which he asserted the rights of the author to be recognised as the owner of a work. In the absence of press licensing there was no legal framework for defending against piracy, which “robs Men of the due Reward of Industry… [and] robs the Reader, by printing Copies of other Men uncorrect and Imperfect.”32 Ultimately, argued Defoe, the exclusive right to a work should devolve to its named author. The 1709 Act for the Encouragement of Learning sought to rectify this situation in some measure, even as it ultimately failed to establish the author’s intellectual property, its measures granting the proprietors a monopoly for a period of no more than fourteen years.33 However, if the Act failed to offer a comprehensive legal recognition of intellectual property, in practice it represented “a cultural quid pro quo,” principally concerned with the dissemination of useful ideas.34 The fourteen years’ property of writers and publishers laid out in the legislation was the same as the period afforded to patents, establishing a connection between authorship and other types of invention. However, it was principally the

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opponents of literary property who likened authorship to invention, as this entailed ownership only in the continuation of a monopoly patent, rather than as a natural and inalienable property. As soon as they were published they in practice became items of public ownership.35 Contemporary accounts indicated that demand for Robinson Crusoe was so great that several printers were employed to undertake different editions, but its piracy by Cox’s Amsterdam Coffee House edition was likened by Defoe to “Robbing on the Highway, or Breaking open a House.”36 Reiterating the earlier criticism of piracy made by Defoe in his Essay on the Regulation of the Press, William Taylor, in an advertisement posted for the fourth edition of Robinson Crusoe, decried the “pretended Abridgment of this Book… [which] consists only of some scattered Passages, incoherently tacked together; wherein the Author’s Sense throughout is wholly mistaken, the Matters of Fact misrepresented, and the Moral Reflections misapplied.”37 The introduction to Cox’s edition, unlike other imprints, acknowledged the fact of its own piracy and sought to justify it on the basis of offering a portable and affordable edition, which would otherwise be unavailable to the general reading public, and drew on the same rhetorical appeal to education and improvement.38 The first complete abridgement of Robinson Crusoe was Edward Midwinter’s 1722 edition. That Midwinter was no fly-by-night printer, being well established in the trade, underlines the fact that the legal position of the abridgements was uncertain, and in the book trade were often treated as a perfectly legitimate opportunity for publication. While Midwinter’s abridgement numbered under two hundred pages, later and cheaper chapbook editions appeared which reduced Crusoe’s tale to no more than a few dozen pages, stripping the narrative of the castaway down to its core. We don’t even possess a completely comprehensive list of these cheaply printed editions as their nature tended to ensure that they were produced hastily and left few remains for successive generations of readers. However they enabled the widest diffusion of the narrative, and established it as a commonly recognisable literary form which was easily adapted to different ends by the authors of later Robinsonades. Although most pirated editions were produced rapidly and consequently were of poor quality, the Dublin edition of 1719 reprinted the work in its entirety, even going so far as correcting several typographical errors made in Taylor’s first edition.39 The Dublin edition also emphasises another peculiarity of the copyright laws, inasmuch as it was legally

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exempt because it was produced outside the jurisdiction of mainland Britain. In the eighteenth century the Dublin reprint trade flourished, its presses producing editions for export to Britain or across the Atlantic, as well as for its domestic readership.40 Similarly, in France, under the persistence of a more stringent system of censorship and licensing, the existence of extra-territorial presses played a significant role in the development of literary piracy and was the medium for the dissemination of enlightenment ideas. Robert Darnton goes so far as to estimate that by 1770 the fruits of these pirate presses comprised the majority of publications in France.41

Piracy and Improvement Many of the issues which affected literary productions also applied to intellectual piracy of other kinds in this period. As can be seen in the 1709 statute for the encouragement of learning, state policy was increasingly one of encouraging the diffusion of technology and skills internally, while preventing any national advantage being ceded by their spreading beyond its own national territory. The economic policy assumed by Britain, like other states, emphasised maintaining a positive balance of trade, characterised less than favourably by Adam Smith as consisting in limiting “as much as possible the importation of foreign goods for home consumption, and to increase as much as possible exportation of the produce of domestic industry.”42 Competition between the European powers for overseas trade spilled over into piracy, encouraging privateers’ attacks on other nations’ shipping.43 Both piracy, proper, and the extra-territorial movement of skills and industrial techniques were part of the struggle between nations for advantage, in which free trade in overseas markets was often matched by protectionist restrictions on their home trade. In his General History of Discoveries and Improvements Defoe recounted how the diffusion of skills and goods had enabled the historical development of Italy’s silk industry, after. they found the method of getting the Silk unwrought from the Coast of the Caspian Sea, and learned to manufacture it in their own Countries; and within a few Ages more, they found means to bring over the very Species, (viz.) the Worms, which produced those Silks, and the Mulberry Trees which fed them… The effect of this was, That… the Trade between Europe and Asia, (that is to Persia, Georgia and India) died away.44

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The advantages of taking in foreign craftsmen was a commonplace among economic writers of the period, securing the benefits of their skills to adopt new manufactures and improve the nation’s trading position; “we should quickly attain to the perfection of those manufactures, which now we so highly value and purchase so dear from abroad.”45 Earlier generations of Flemish and Huguenot refugees who found protection in England had brought with them the knowledge and skills to revitalise the country’s textile trades, as well as the brewing, glass and paper industries.46 It is a Kind of Proverb attending the Character of English Men, That they are better to improve than to invent, better to advance upon the Designs and Plans which other People have laid down, than to form Schemes and Designs of their own… Hence most of our great Advances in Arts, in Trade, in Government… are really founded upon the Inventions of others; whether those first Inventers were private Men, or Nations of Men, ‘tis not Material.47

Rather than maintaining a clear distinction between invention and innovation in technological development, it is probably more useful to imagine the practices as complementary. Rather than being solely the result of a “Schumpeterian-style process, with major strides forward giving identifiable discontinuities in innovation,” technological development has more frequently been the result of a continuous process of piecemeal adaptation and improvement which has been referred to by Joel Mokyr as “micro-invention.”48 Consequently improvement by micro-invention was dependent on a degree of latitude in order for it to adopt and refine new methods; in such cases technological progress was dependent on the diffusion of ideas. By pushing for recognition of distinct and discrete breakthroughs, the modern patent system represents progress as discontinuous, and there has been a consequent tendency to efface the debt owed to key antecedents, and in particular to fail to acknowledge the influence of foreign technologies.49 The issue of territoriality is of central importance to our understanding of the role of intellectual piracy more generally, specifically in regard to its role in the diffusion of technological innovations. Frequently the novelty of inventions was only localised, without precedent only within a given territorialised jurisdiction.

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This was certainly the case for Sir Thomas Lombe’s silk mill, which constituted one of the signal events in the introduction of mechanised factory production to Britain. In 1718 a patent was acquired for fourteen years and he constructed a factory on the River Derwent, its engines powered by a large waterwheel, “a curiosity in trade” which was described in Defoe’s Tour. Although the machines performed “the labour of many hands,” Defoe could not say with confidence whether it did so profitably, given the great expense of the enterprise.50 When the term of the original patent drew to an end in 1732, Thomas Lombe petitioned the House of Commons for its renewal, on the basis that he had made a significant investment in the machines, but had not yet been able to bring them to perfection. The use of patents remained contentious, with a commonly held suspicion that the system was as much a discouragement to innovation as a spur to it. The use of patents in Elizabethan England had originally been intended to provide economic incentives and protections to craftsmen and inventors. However, by the 1590s patentees were more frequently speculators or courtiers who worked assiduously to stamp out competitors’ projects, prompting such widespread opprobrium that in the opening years of the seventeenth century their use was effectively restrained.51 Similarly, there was opposition in Parliament to the renewal of Lombe’s patent on the basis that it would similarly put a brake on economic improvements; the prolonging of the term would be not only to prevent the nation’s making any benefit of that invention, but also to give the Petitioner a farther opportunity of disturning all other inventions, works or engines, any way resembling his, which would be a great discouragement to all new improvements or manufactures.52

In the parliamentary debates that followed an account of how Lombe undertook the development of the silk mill was recounted. The production of organzine, or thrown silk, in Savoy was reportedly executed “by the means of large and curious engine which had been set up and kept at work for many years in that country, but had been kept so secret, that no other nation could ever come at the invention.”53 It was consequently by industrial espionage that the technical specifications of the machinery were acquired and brought to England, in violation of capital codes instituted by the King of Sardinia. Mechanised silk-throwing had been a

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fixture of the productions of Piedmont for many years and the machines had in fact previously featured in Vittorio Zonca’s Novo Teatro di Machine et Edeficii (1607). The book’s engravings did not, however, reveal their inner workings in sufficient detail to reproduce exactly and it has been further conjectured that it would have been unlikely that merchants of the time would have been familiar with Zonca’s work.54 In 1716 Thomas Lombe’s half-brother, John, had travelled to Leghorn and secretly obtained drawings of the machines’ workings by adopting “the usual means of accomplishing his end by corrupting the servants.”55 When John Lombe returned to England it was with the designs and two craftsmen who had been persuaded to enter his employ and assist in setting up the machines in England. It was speculated that when Lombe’s mill began to turn a profit they were able to undercut the price of Italian silks, and an assassin was dispatched. John Lombe’s premature death was subsequently accounted as the result of a “slow poison” being administered to him.56 Ultimately Parliament decided against renewing Thomas Lombe’s patent but by way of recompense granted him a figure of £14,000 as an “encouragement” for his invention. With the lapse of Lombe’s patent the field was opened up to competitors and silk mills were constructed at Stockport, which drew away a number of Lombe’s workers including Nathaniel Gartrevalli, one of the Italian craftsmen who had accompanied John Lombe from Italy.57 It is important to note that a critical component in the diffusion of technological innovations was not just the transfer of technical designs, but of the skilled technicians and craftsmen whose practical expertise provided the basis for the necessary adaptation and innovation. Peter Mathias pointed out that in this period technological designs possessed little of the scientific rigour that blueprints would later acquire, and moreover artisanal technology and skills did not lend themselves to formal written instruction or description. Slowly accumulated empirical skills were not amenable to being identified, learned and carried away… The need to adapt materials, the design of plant, and the know-how of its operation, to the tricks of local circumstances also meant that creative and adaptive skills were required, not just those of observation and adaptation. Even the detailed formal knowledge laid out in a patent specification would not be amenable to this sort of cumulative expertise.58

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It has been argued that Britain was at a comparative advantage in this period in terms of implementing improvements by micro-invention due to possessing a large skilled labour force who were able to adapt their mechanical expertise “in the process of ‘learning by doing’ in the capital goods industries and ‘learning by using’ in the consumer industries.”59 By the early eighteenth century the rising fortunes of British manufacturing led to overseas demand for craftsmen who would share their expertise in developing other nation’s trades, effectively marking “Britain’s change from being a debtor to becoming a creditor nation technologically.”60 In the face of concerted efforts by governmental authorities in France and Russia to lure British workers abroad protectionist measures were introduced to legislate against the emigration of skilled artisans taking their arts overseas and spreading their techniques. In the absence of legal protections to defend Britain’s trading advantage the 1719 Artificers’ Act was passed, levying fines against those who would “entice, endeavour to persuade or solicit any manufacturer or artificer… to go out of this kingdom into any foreign country out of his Majesty’s dominions.”61 It can be seen, therefore, that piracy, loosely defined, was central to the diffusion of skills and technology, as well as to the wider distribution of printed texts, and as such made a significant contribution to the process of national economic improvement. Such a process was aided by an as-yet embryonic sense of intellectual property, which over the course of the eighteenth century gained greater definition. However, even as providential explanations waned, Lord Camden ruled in 1774 against the common law right to property in an invention—both mechanical or literary—warning that they had been “entrusted by Providence with the delegated power of imparting to their fellow creatures that instruction which heaven meant for universal benefit” and his gifts in the nations’ progress.62

Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

Phillips, 23–5; Rogers, 30–31. White, 22. Novak, 26. Watt, 36. Ibid., 42–43; Rogers, 27–29. Downie, 72. Defoe (1727), 109. Defoe (1728), 17–8.

104 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27.

28.

29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43.

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Williams, 133. Wotton, xii. Defoe (1725–6), iv. Slack, 92–8. Sprat, 61–2. Watt, 60–62. Dear, 144–161. Sprat, 76. Ibid., 190. Minutes of a meeting of the Royal Society, Journal Book of the Royal Society, vol. X, fol.96. Quoted in Hunter, 107. Defoe (2003), 4. Heidenrich, xxiii. Defoe (1697), 6. Ibid., 14–15. Defoe, The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, 94. Woodward, 2. Norfolk Record Office, The Life and Surprizing Adventures of Jack Tomson, MC500/8, 761 × 6, fo.86. Ibid., fo.68. Defoe, The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, 133; Norfolk Record Office, The Life and Surprizing Adventures of Jack Tomson, MC500/8, 761 × 6, fo.50–53. Giles Hudson, “William Arderon (1702/3–1767),” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2004) online edn. 23 September 2004. Johns, 48–50. Habermas, 36–7. [Daniel Defoe,] An Essay on the Regulation of the Press (London: n.p., 1704), 3. Ibid., 19. 8 Ann c.19, An Act for the encouragement of Learning; Rose, 37–42. Deazley, 46. Johns, 124–7. [Defoe,] The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, [v]. Hutchins, 142–3. Ibid., 142. Ibid., 141. Johns, 145–159. Darnton, 3–29. Smith, 27. D’Avenant, 402–14.

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44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56.

57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62.

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Defoe (1725–6), 154–5. Fortrey, 13. Vries, 87. Defoe (1728), 299–300. Mathias, 38; Mokyr, 4–5. Basalla, 60. Defoe (1971), 458. Thirsk, 57–9. Cobbett (ed.), 925. Ibid., 925–6. Basalla, 198. Hutton, 196. Ibid., 199–200; R. B. Prosser and Susan Christian, rev. Maxwell Craven, Susan Christian, “Lombe, Sir Thomas (1685–1739),” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2004), online edn. Jan. 2008. Hutton, 204. Mathias, 39–40. Berg, 178–9. Harris, 7. 5 Geo.I c.27, An Act to prevent the inconveniencies arising from seducing artificers in the manufactures of Great Britain into foreign parts. Quoted in McLeod, 221.

Works Cited Manuscript Norfolk Record Office, The Life and Surprizing Adventures of Jack Tomson, MC500/8, 761x6

Printed Books Basalla, George. 1988. The Evolution of Technology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Berg, Maxine. 1994. The Age of Manufactures 1700–1820: Industry, Innovation and Work in Britain. London and New York: Routledge. Cobbett, William. eds. 1811. Parliamentary History, vol.VIII . London: T.C. Hansard. D’Avenant, Charles. 1771. The Political and Commercial Works vol.I . London: R. Horscheld et al.

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Deazley, Ronan. 2004. The Origin of the Right to Copy: Charting the Movement of Copyright Law in Eighteenth-Century Britain (1695–1775). Portland, OR: Hart. Defoe, Daniel. 1697. An Essay on Projects. London: Thomas Cockerill. ———.1704; 2003. The Storm. London: Penguin. ———. 1719; 2008. The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe. The Novels of Daniel Defoe 1. Edited by W.R. Owens. London: Pickering & Chatto. ———. 1719; 2008. The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe. The Novels of Daniel Defoe 2. Edited by W. R. Owens. London: Pickering & Chatto. ———. 1724–27; 1971. A Tour through the Whole Island of Great Britain. Harmondsworth: Penguin. ———. 1725–26. A General History of Discoveries and Improvements In Useful Arts. London: J. Roberts. ———. 1727. The Complete English Tradesman, vol.II. London: Charles Rivington. ———. 1728. A Plan of the English Commerce. London: Charles Rivington. Downie, J.A. 1979. Robert Harley and the Press: Propaganda and Public Opinion in the Age of Swift and Defoe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Floud, Roderick and Deirdre McCloskey, eds. 1994. The Economic History of Britain since 1700, Volume 1: 1700–1800. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fortrey, Samuel. 1663. England’s Interests and Improvement. Cambridge: John Field. Grapard, Ulla, and Gillian Hewitson, eds. 2011. Robinson Crusoe’s Economic Man: A construction and deconstruction. London: Routledge. Habermas, Jürgen. 1962; 1992. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. Translated by Thomas Burger. Cambridge: Polity Press. Harris, J.R. 1998. Industrial Espionage and Technology Transfer: Britain and France in the Eighteenth Century. Aldershot: Ashgate. Heidenrich, Helmut, ed.1970. The Libraries of Daniel Defoe and Phillips Farewell: Olive Payne’s Sales Catalogue (1731). Berlin: Heidenreich. Hunter, Michael. 1981. Science and Society in Restoration England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hutchins, Henry Clinton. 1925. Robinson Crusoe and Its Printing 1719–1731: A Bibliographical Study. New York: Columbia University Press. Hutton, William. 1791. History of Derby from the Remote Ages of Antiquity to the Year 1791. Derby and London: Nichols. Johns, Adrian. 2009. Piracy: The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. McLeod, Christine. 1988. Inventing the Industrial Revolution: The English Patent System, 1660–1800. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Mantoux, Paul. 1955. Industrial Revolution in the Eighteenth Century. London: Jonathan Cape. Mathias, Peter. 1979. The Transformation of England. London: Methuen. Novak, Maximilian E. 1983. Realism, Myth and History in Defoe’s Fiction. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press. Phillips, Richard. 1997. Mapping Men and Empire: A Geography of Adventure. London and New York: Routledge. Rivers, Isabel, ed. 1982. Books and Their Readers in Eighteenth-Century England. Leicester: Leicester University Press. Rose, Mark. 1993. Authors and Owners: The Invention of Copyright. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press. Slack, Paul. 2015. The Invention of Improvement: Information & Material Progress in Seventeenth-Century England. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Smith, Adam. 1776; 1999. The Wealth of Nations, Books IV-V . London: Penguin. Sprat, Thomas. 1667. The History of the Royal Society of London. London: J. Martyn. Thirsk, Joan. 1978. Economic Policy and Projects. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Vrie, De Jan. 1976. The Economy of Europe in an Age of Crisis, 1600–1750. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Watt, Ian. 1957; 1987. The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding. London: Hogarth Press. Williams, Raymond. 1976. Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. Glasgow: Fontana / Croom Helm. Woodward, John. 1696. Brief Instructions for Making Observations in all Parts of the World. London: Richard Wilkin. Wotton, William. 1694. Reflections upon Ancient and Modern Learning. London: J. Leake.

Articles Darnton, Robert. 2003. The Science of Piracy: A Crucial Ingredient in Eighteenth-Century Publishing. Studies in Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 12: 3–29. D’Avenant, Charles. 1771. Discourses on the Public Revenues, and on Trade, Part II. In The Political and Commercial Works vol.I. London. Dear, Peter. 1985. Totius in Verba: Rhetoric and Authority in the Early Royal Society. Isis 76 (2): 144–161. Hudson, Giles. 2004. William Arderon (1702/3–1767). In Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford University Press. Online edn. 23 September 2004.

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Mathias, Peter. 1979. Skills and the Diffusion of Innovations from Britain in the Eighteenth Century. The Transformation of England. London: Methuen: 19–32. Mokyr, Joel. 1994. Technological Change, 1700–1830. In The Economic History of Britain since 1700, Volume 1. Edited by Roderick Floud and Donald N. McCloskey. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 12–43. Prosser, R.B., and Susan Christian rev. Maxwell Craven, Susan Christian. 2004. Lombe, Sir Thomas (1685–1739). Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford University Press. Online edn. Jan. 2008. Rogers, Pat. 1982. Classics and Chapbooks. In Books and Their Readers in Eighteenth-Century England. Edited by Isabel Rivers. Leicester: Leicester University Press: 27–45. White, Michael V. 2011. Reading and Rewriting: The Production of an Economic Robinson Crusoe (1982). In Robinson Crusoe’s Economic Man. Edited by Ulla Grapard and Gillian Hewitson. London: Routledge: 12–28.

CHAPTER 6

Religious Conversion and the Far East in the Crusoe Trilogy Laurence Williams

Interpretations of the first volume of Robinson Crusoe’s travels, the Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures (1719), have often focused on the connections between spiritual penance, proselytization of the nonEuropean world, and colonial appropriation. Crusoe is typically seen as a Protestant and British hero, whose religious introspection, founded on self-scrutiny, study of the King James Bible, personal dialogue with God, and Biblical divination, leads to his own deepening understanding of the action of Providence. This in turn provides the catalyst for the conversion of Friday to Christianity, a process which is portrayed as consensual and dialogic, and contrasted with the legendary coercive brutality of Spanish colonialism in South America. By the end of the first volume, the “Island of Despair,” as it is initially labelled by Crusoe, in the mouth of the Orinoco River, has been transformed into a productive Protestant colony, with “Liberty of Conscience” granted to its British, native American, and

L. Williams (B) Sophia University, Tokyo, Japan e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 S. Clark and Y. Yoshihara (eds.), Robinson Crusoe in Asia, Asia-Pacific and Literature in English, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-4051-3_6

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even its Catholic Spanish populations. In the final sections of the book, the island is rhetorically (if not quite legally) incorporated within the British Empire, as Crusoe proclaims himself “Governour” (256) when an English ship finally arrives.2 Although, as John C. Traver (2011) summarizes, “the distinctively Protestant character of Crusoe’s religious experience remains relatively unquestioned,” both the textual detail and the broader narrative sweep of his adventures serve to complicate this religious teleology.3 Crusoe has lived as a Catholic while in Brazil, stating that he “had made no Scruple of being openly of the Religion of the Country, all the while I was among them” (270), and his devotional materials on the island include not only “three very good Bibles which came to me in my Cargo from England” but also “two or three Popish Prayer-Books” (105). In the second volume, Crusoe abandons his island and journeys to Asia (stopping off at Madagascar on his way to China and Tartary), where— in contrast to the colonial fantasy of voluntary submission represented by Friday—he encounters civilizations which seem far more resistant to accepting Christianity, leading him to reflect on the legitimacy of religious coercion. This latter question, interwoven as it is with questions of Providence, theodicy (the problem of God’s toleration of evil), proselytization, and trade, arguably receives more sustained philosophical discussion than any other concept in the trilogy. Crusoe’s growing acceptance of force as a remedy culminates in the essay “Of the Proportion between the Christian and Pagan World” in the third volume, the Serious Reflections (1720).4 This begins by reflecting on “how small a Part of the World it is, where the Christian Religion has really prevail’d” (201–2), and ends by proposing a grand European “Cruisado” (218), involving both Protestant and Catholic powers, to restore Christianity to Japan. The discussion below restores the idea of religious crusade against the non-European world—and particularly Asia—to what I believe to have been its central position in Defoe’s geopolitical imagination and in his sense of the purpose of Crusoe’s character. I read the Strange Surprizing Adventures in the context of its two sequels, the Farther Adventures (1719) and the Serious Reflections (1720), taking Defoe seriously in his claims that these volumes not only conclude Crusoe’s adventures but “crown” their moral and philosophical development.5 I situate the passages on Asia within a series of broader movements across the Crusoe trilogy: from Protestant nationalism to pan-Christian Cruisado; from empirical travel writing to allegorical journeying; and from proselytization

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to religious war. In the first section of this essay, I show how Crusoe’s theological “worldview” changes over the course of the trilogy. The geographical spaces he encounters can be arranged on a gradient, from the predominantly empirical descriptions of Brazil and the island in the first volume, to the more “extreme” and fantastically described nations of Asia in the second, to the closing dream-vision of travel through the solar system to glimpse heaven and hell. As this unfolds, the concern of the first volume with individual salvation is gradually displaced by an eschatological awareness of humanity’s war against the Devil. Asia can be understood as an intermediate point on this gradient: a “real” geography, described in terms of trade routes and anthropological observation, but simultaneously a space in which the allegorical structure of human history, and the imperative of pan-Christian “Cruisado,” is clearly visible.6 In the second and third sections of this essay, I argue that this perspective allows us to understand why Crusoe’s fantasies of violent religious conquest are particularly connected with Asia, focusing on two key episodes: the destruction of the Tartar idol in the second volume, and the proposal to conquer Japan in the third volume. The discussion below also considers the question of Defoe’s sincerity in advocating violent conversion of Asia. There are strong reasons to believe that Crusoe’s inclination towards religious coercion is at least ironically undermined by its proximity to the rhetoric of Anglican bigotry, satirized in earlier writings such as The Shortest Way With the Dissenters (1702), a text whose unresolved ambiguities landed Defoe in the pillory.7 Nevertheless, the project of conquering Japan also advances one of Defoe’s most consistently held beliefs: the necessity of “Christian Confederacy” (Serious Reflections, 218) between denominations, underpinned by religious charity in dealing with doctrinal differences.8 The more that Crusoe understands global history as an ongoing conflict between Christianity and the Devil, the more he perceives the uselessness of what the Strange Surprizing Adventures dismisses as “all the Disputes, Wranglings, Strife, and Contention” between Christians (220). Surprising as it may be for readers used to thinking of Crusoe as solitary castaway, it seems to be the pan-Christian, state-sponsored holy war against the East, rather than the Protestant spiritualism and individual husbandry embraced on the island, that is more central to Defoe’s overall moral conclusion in the trilogy.

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“Abandoned to the Devil’s Government”: Allegorical Geography Across the Crusoe Trilogy Attempting to reread the Strange Surprizing Adventures in the context of the later Crusoe volumes inevitably raises the question of the formal and philosophical coherence of the Crusoe trilogy. Although the Strange Surprizing Adventures ’s traditional status as the first novel in English has been supplanted by more diverse histories of the rise of the genre, there are good grounds for considering Defoe’s second and third volumes (leaving aside of course the later innumerable “Robinsonade” imitations) as among the earliest examples of the literary sequel in English,9 in the sense of a separately published continuation of a fictional narrative, which develops the same characters and themes, and attempts to capitalize on the commercial success of the original.10 Eighteenth-century sequels have often been excluded from traditional histories of the rise of the novel, in part because they often have a “non sequitur” feel,11 challenging ideas of novelistic closure and frequently attempting to amend, complicate, or “create a rupture” with the earlier text.12 This is particularly apparent in the third Crusoe volume, the Serious Reflections, which takes the form of a collection of moral essays (and a closing dream vision) rather than an adventure narrative, and which was only sparsely republished during the rest of the eighteenth century.13 Nevertheless, there have been efforts to return to reading the three volumes together: Virginia La Grand, for example, refers to the books as Crusoe I–III , considering the composite work as engaging in a “three-stage dialogue with its readers.”14 Of the two sequels—published shortly after the first volume, in 1719 and 1720—the Farther Adventures has been the more popular with readers, in large part because it is presented as a direct narrative continuation to the Strange Surprizing Adventures. The full title, which advertises the work as “the Second and Last Part of his [Crusoe’s] Life, And of the Strange Surprizing Adventures of his Travels Round three Parts of the Globe,” echoes the title of the original, promising chronological continuation and geographical expansion.15 Many of the characters and situations from the first book—the island, Friday, even Will Atkins—are reintroduced in the first half of the narrative, before the novel moves into new territory with Crusoe’s visit to Madagascar and China, an increasing focus of British interest as a result of the tea and porcelain trade. Defoe also raises the teasing prospect of a visit to Japan, although Crusoe eventually gives up the idea, reasoning that the Japanese are a “false, cruel,

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and treacherous People” (171). Melissa Free has shown how the Farther Adventures was often published alongside the original into the nineteenth century, gradually falling out of favour as Victorian readers—more comfortable with the scenes of colonial husbandry and proselytization on the island, than with the Eurocentrism and genocidal rhetoric of Crusoe’s adventures in Asia—gradually narrowed their focus to the first volume.16 By contrast, the Serious Reflections, published in the South Sea Bubble year of 1720, represents a decisive break from the earlier volumes, taking the form of a series of six essays on moral topics, and a closing “Vision of the Angelick World.” Sir Walter Scott was critical of the commonplace quality of these reflections—which include “An Essay upon Honesty” (Chapter II) and “Of listning to the Voice of Providence” (Chapter V)— writing that the volume contained “few observations that might not have been made by any shopkeeper living at Charing Cross.”17 The arrangement of the volume is haphazard, suggesting a publication arranged in haste out of heterogeneous material. The book lacks a table of contents, and a map of the island, engraved by Clark and Pine in 1719 and seemingly intended for the second volume (where it would fit better) is included without explanation facing the title page and not referred to in the text. The “Vision of the Angelick World” that occupies the final 84 pages is paginated separately. Of the six essays, only “Of Solitude” (Chapter I) and “Of the proportion between the Christian and the Pagan World” (Chapter VI) make significant reference to Crusoe’s previous adventures, and sometimes the failure to relate the essays to the previous volumes is stark: for example, the sixth chapter talks of Sir Walter Ralegh’s voyage to the Orinoco River and cites “Accounts given” of the “populous Cities and innumerable Nations” of South America, apparently forgetting that Crusoe is supposed to have spent much of his life in the region (204). Overall, it is hard to avoid the suspicion that much of this is material originally written for another purpose, perhaps deriving from Defoe’s interests in religious reflections and occult material.18 Nevertheless, the heterogeneity of the material, and Defoe’s admitted tendency to subvert the consistency of his ideas to their “rhetorical and didactic purpose,” need not lead us to overlook the ways in which the two sequels systematically develop ideas introduced in the first volume.19 These sequels are in many ways more theologically complicated and pessimistic than the original work, presenting a fraught relationship between religion, trade, and colonization. Crusoe’s return to his island in the Farther Adventures reveals a community divided by intra-European

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tensions between the Catholic Spanish and Protestant English settlers, squabbling over the distribution of resources (including the limited supply of native wives) and mired in warfare with neighbouring tribes (“Indians, or Savages, call them which you please,” 57). Friday, the object of Crusoe’s religious labours in the first volume, is killed in skirmishes with a tribe in the Brazils, and Crusoe’s travels in Asia introduce him to nations that actively resist conversion to Christianity, provoking furious outbursts against idolatry from him. New philosophical questions complicate the original text’s conclusions about Providence and religious conversion, such as whether the urge to travel is implanted by God or urged by the Devil, or whether religious violence is more justifiable against pagans than against other Christians. Critics have shown how these two sequels complicate, and even actively repudiate, the aesthetic and moral closure produced in the Strange Surprizing Adventures. Traver argues that they reject the “middle state” of prudence and religious moderation, urged by Crusoe’s father and internalized on the island, showing instead that “the extreme is sometimes necessary for progression.”20 Leah Orr similarly concludes that the Serious Reflections “exposes the inconsistencies present in the other volumes by exhibiting Crusoe’s intellectual struggles more poignantly than his narrative does.”21 A common approach in criticism has connected the wider geographical sweep of the second volume with a growing extremism in Crusoe’s character and opinions. Robert Markley argues that the turn towards Asia—particularly China, a country that Europeans viewed with awe and envy—erodes the previous myths of Protestant superiority and “economic self-sufficiency.”22 John Richetti also finds a schism between the “thoughtful and often enlightened” tone of the first book and the “Eurocentric and racist encounters” of the sequel, although he attributes this change not to geopolitical anxiety but to the changing “personality and moral character” of Crusoe, as a result of age and despair, as well as to Defoe’s sense of the commercial appeal of chauvinistic attitudes towards foreign cultures for British readers.23 In the overall context of the trilogy, the journey to Asia in the second book becomes the midpoint of a broader series of geographical displacements, beginning with the Atlantic slave routes in the first book, broadening to encompass the East Indies spice routes and the overland Silk Road in the second, and ending with Crusoe’s dream journey through the solar system at the end of the third. As it does so, the narrative space evolves from a world empirically described in terms of trade

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networks, geographical referents, and ethnocultural detail, into an explicitly allegorized space in which individual encounters between Crusoe and non-Europeans stand for broader themes in the advance of Christianity and the war between God and the Devil. As merchant, Crusoe scrutinizes foreign peoples and geographies, attempting to find details which can be exploited for profit. As missionary, he elides these differences with rhetorical projections of a war between the two extremes of “civilization” and Devil worship. Admittedly, even in the early sections of the Strange Surprizing Adventures we can see Defoe’s tendency to accentuate the “adventure” elements in Crusoe’s journey by presenting non-European geographies as terrifying wildernesses, as in his early description of Africa south of the “Emperor of Morocco’s Dominions,” “where we could ne’er once go on shoar but we should be devour’d by savage Beasts, or more merciless Savages of humane kind” (73). Nevertheless, Crusoe largely avoids simplistic Othering in his description of the Ottoman Empire in North Africa, and the differences between rival tribes in the Brazils, including their customs and religious beliefs, are sketched out with surprising nuance. Friday’s god, Benamuckee—despite the disparaging hint of “muck” in his name— is presented as an example of natural religion, predisposing Friday to accept Christianity: worshipped by all things, he is “very old, much older … than the Sea or the Land; than the Moon, or the Stars” (217), and souls go to him after death. There is a clear contrast here with “Cham Chi-Thaungu” (197), encountered in Tartary in the Farther Adventures: an “Idol made of Wood, frightful as the Devil,” dressed up “in the filthiest manner,” with two horns on its head (192). The Farther Adventures tends more generally to downplay or erase cultural and anthropological distinctions, which Crusoe now claims, in a notable rejection of the conventions of the eighteenth-century travel genre, are “none of my Business or any part of my Design” (174). His presentation of China, which had been portrayed by Jesuit writers as a model of pagan refinement, is markedly contrarian: the Chinese are “a contemptible herd or crowd of ignorant sordid Slaves” (174), barely worth differentiating from the Tartar nomads at their borders. Crusoe’s description of “the Desarts and vast Wildernesses of Grand Tartary” (176) beyond the Great Wall in fact departs from Defoe’s likely source, a diplomatic narrative by Adam Brand, minimizing Brand’s description of Russian colonial control, and eliding anthropological differences between “Tartar” nations.24

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The deepening of Crusoe’s allegorical worldview is made clear in the sixth chapter in the Serious Reflections, “Of the Proportion between the Christian and Pagan World,” in which he divides the globe into three regions: spaces where Christianity “has really prevail’d, and is nationally profess’d” (202), restricted to Western Europe and a few scattered European colonies; peripheral regions, such as Eastern Europe, where Christianity struggles for predominance over “Superstition, and barbarous Customs” (202); and unconverted regions of the earth, including the majority of Africa, Asia, and the Americas, which are “entirely abandoned to the Devil’s Government” (206). Crusoe’s portrayal of the non-European world as in a Hobbesian state of nature is developed in more detail in the fourth chapter, “An Essay on the present State of Religion in the World,” which denies the possibility of civilization without Christianity: thus in Barbary “there’s neither Society, Humanity, Confidence in one another, or Conversation with one another; but Men live like the wild Beasts, for every Man here really would destroy and devour the other if he could” (135). A hyperbolic, proto-Malthusian discourse about Asian overpopulation (anticipating also De Quincey’s portrayal of the vast size and population of Tartary) is combined with a sense of all human beings as equally endowed with natural reason and openness to Christianity, to present Asia as a moral call to arms to Europe25 : “It is, I say, a melancholy Reflection to think, how all these Parts of the World, and with infinite Numbers of Millions of People, furnish’d with the Powers of Reason, and Gifts of Nature, and many Ways, if not every Way, as capable of the Reception of sublime things, as we are, are yet abandon’d to the grossest Ignorance and Depravity” (133). Across the first two volumes, we can also see Crusoe’s growing tendency to read his own life experiences in allegorical terms. The first novel can be understood as Crusoe’s long journey towards awareness of the role of Providence in indirectly shaping human events, expressed in episodes such as his study of the Bible (which shows him parallels for his experience, such as the parable of the Prodigal Son), and his famous tallying of the good and evil experienced in his life “like Debtor and Creditor, the Comforts I enjoy’d, against the Miseries I suffer’d” (106). By the beginning of the Farther Adventures, this perspective, in which experiences are interpreted for their allegorical or spiritual meaning, is ingrained in his worldview: the story opens with him living “the middle State of Life, that my father [had] so early recommended to me” (8) but also seeing secret visions of the island in his dreams, brought by a

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“secret Converse of Spirits” (7). Daniel J. Johnson points to a growing “spectrality” in the novel, as Crusoe’s own impulses and desires become increasingly externalized as supernatural agents acting upon him.26 His fixation with returning to sea at the beginning of the second volume is attributed either to “some secret powerful Impulse of Providence upon me” (7) or, conversely, to possible demonic temptation (he sceptically asks his nephew, who invites him to travel with him to the East Indies, “What Devil … sent you of this unlucky Errand?”, 11). Crusoe’s preface to the third volume explicitly advertises the Strange Surprizing Adventures and the Farther Adventures as “Parable or Allegorick History” (53), which this final collection of didactic moral essays will “crown” with “the Moral of the Fable” (55). This preface—supposedly written by Crusoe himself, now as the editor of his own text— presents an “infamous tissue of self-contradictions.”27 It has variously been interpreted as an effort to rebut Charles Gildon’s attack on the book as “nothing but a Romance,”28 by insisting on the story’s didactic and moral function29 ; as a coded admission by Defoe of Crusoe’s fictionality; or even as a suggestion that Defoe’s “own life and Crusoe’s life stand in allegorical relation,”30 an argument first made in 1894 by Thomas Wright in The Life of Daniel Defoe.31 The allegorization of Crusoe’s experiences culminates at the end of the third volume, in the interplanetary “Vision of the Angelick World.” In it, Crusoe (after having reprised the debates in the first volume about whether dreams are to be interpreted as mere “fancy” or as spiritual insight) describes an experience in which he travels past the known planets to the edge of the solar system. He presents this as a journey paralleling his earlier physical voyages, insisting that he “travelled as sensibly … over all the Mazes and Wastes of infinite Space … as ever I did over the Desarts of Karakathay, and the uninhabited Wasts of Tartary” (236): significantly, Asia is framed as the closest equivalent on Earth to the spiritual realm. Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667) is of course a crucial influence here, shaping both Defoe’s materialism and his focus on the shadow war between humanity and the Devil as the driving force in history. On the outskirts of the solar system, Crusoe glimpses “innumerable Legions” of demons, a peripheral menace like the Tartars in China, employed like “Aid du Camps to a General” (241) on secret missions to corrupt humanity. Jason Pearl connects the “Vision” to Defoe’s The Consolidator (1705), a political satire set on the Moon, as examples of satirical “view from above,” which places British “narrow-sightedness and

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narrow-mindedness” within “a wider celestial context.”32 In the Vision, however, Defoe mainly uses his expanded perspective to visually confirm Crusoe’s earlier arguments, in “Of the Proportion between the Christian and Pagan World,” about the embattled vulnerability of Christianity in a cosmos mostly governed by Satanic forces. This was an opinion that Defoe was to develop at greater length in his occult writings in the 1720s, particularly The Political History of the Devil (1726).

“Judge and Executioner”: Crusoe’s Embrace of Religious Coercion Crusoe’s conversion of Friday to Christianity in the Strange Surprizing Adventures is central to his unfolding understanding of his own purpose on the island, inspiring a feeling of “secret Joy” at being “made an Instrument under Providence, to save the Life, and for ought I knew, the Soul of a poor Savage” (220). Nevertheless, as the narrative progresses it becomes clearer that Defoe sees this model, based on personal obligation and extended dialogue between Crusoe and Friday, as of, at best, local and limited applicability in converting the rest of the “pagan” world. Friday’s individual conversion, although presented as sincere, is understood by Crusoe as a fragile achievement, as long as his tribe remains unconverted: “I made no doubt, but that if Friday could get back to his own Nation again, he would not only forget all his Religion, but all his Obligation to me” (222). The first half of the Farther Adventures —in which Crusoe returns to his island, now a multiracial colony with distinct English, Spanish, and indigenous Brazilian populations—sees Defoe broaden his focus to examine the challenges of achieving mass conversion to Christianity, with particular interest in the native wives of European colonists. Paternalistic, ad hoc religious instruction still plays an important role: the dialogue on the nature of God between Will Atkins and his wife, for example, echoes Crusoe’s earlier catechism of Friday (104–8). However, the Farther Adventures also envisions an expanded role for professional missionaries (in the form of a young French Catholic priest, whom Crusoe rescues at sea and brings to the island) and for a more clearly defined system of property rights (112), to strengthen the patriarchal family structure of the island. In tandem with this, Crusoe comes to realize the necessity of co-operation between Protestant and Catholic settlers. The

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priest, who is presented as a model of missionary zeal and interdenominational “charity,” importantly presents Catholic conversion as an important model for Crusoe to follow: The Christian Knowledge ought to be propogated [sic] by all possible Means, and on all possible Occasions: ’Tis on this Principle that our Church sends Missionaries into Persia, India, and China; and that our Clergy, even of the superior Sort, willingly engage in the most hazardous Voyages, and the most dangerous Residence amongst Murtherers and Barbarians, to teach them the Knowledge of the true God, and to bring them over to embrace the Christian faith. (90)

Gildon, who sees Crusoe’s ecumenical tendencies as one of the most troubling aspects of the first two volumes, attacks this passage as pro-Catholic propaganda, finding “scarce one Word of Truth in all this Quotation.”33 For Crusoe, however, the conversation seems to mark an important turning point in the priority that he gives to proselytization over trade. Before his final departure, he achieves a pact between his Protestant and Catholic communities that “they never would make any Distinction of Papist or Protestant, in their exhorting the Savages to turn Christians; but teach them the general Knowledge of the true God, and of their Saviour Jesus Christ” (113). Although, as Markley argues in an essay in this volume, Crusoe rejects the possibility that his island might serve as a “template for British colonialism,”34 the religious settlement he achieves there may indeed be intended as a model for European proselytization, particularly in the way it envisions co-operation between moderate Protestants and Catholics.35 In the second half of the Farther Adventures, Crusoe’s voyages eastwards allow him to contrast the Christian community achieved on the island with the actual state of missionary activity in Asia. His observations reveal the faltering efforts of Christian missionaries in the region, and lead him to renewed outbursts against the failures of Catholic and Orthodox proselytization. In China, he meets Father Simon, one of the last representatives of the Jesuit mission, which had been discredited in Europe by the Chinese Rites controversy (in which seventeenth-century Jesuit missionaries had agreed to tolerate Chinese ancestor veneration practices) and weakened by growing repression under the Kangxi emperor (reigned 1661–1722).36 Crusoe faults the Jesuits for making “sorry Christians,” through instruction which amounts to “little more, than letting them

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know the Name of Christ, and say some Prayers to the Virgin Mary, and her Son, in a Tongue which they understand not, and to cross themselves and the like” (168–9). If Crusoe here expresses a general scepticism about Chinese Catholicism as a marginalized and impotent presence, it is notable that he is no more positive about the progress of Christianity in the Russian Empire, where conversion policies under Peter the Great (reigned 1682–1725) were intensified with “fiscal incentives and draconian laws,” directed especially against Muslim Tatars.37 Crusoe, in his brief trip through Tartary, sees little evidence of Christianization, and the Russians are mocked (in the words of Crusoe’s travelling companion, a “brave Scots merchant”) as “an odd Sort of Christians,” who have introduced “very little of the Substance” of religion to their dominions, which are “inhabited by the worst, and most ignorant of Pagans” (190). The forms of proselytization that Crusoe seems to prefer in the Farther Adventures are Protestant, smaller in scale, and more closely aligned with the needs of trade. He singles out Formosa (Taiwan), where Christianity had been introduced by Dutch East India Company missionaries, rather than by the Jesuits, as an example of the power of conversion to benefit trade by instilling moral behaviours and good “manners.”38 He reports that the Formosans dealt very fairly and punctually with us in all their Agreements and Bargains; which is what we did not find among other People; and may be owing to the Remains of Christianity, which was once planted here by a Dutch Missionary of Protestants, and it is a Testimony of what I have often observ’d, viz. That the Christian Religion always civilises the People, and reforms their Manners, where it is receiv’d, whether it works saving Effects upon them or no. (159)

As Markley points out, Defoe is elsewhere critical of the monopolistic practices and authoritarianism of the English East India Company.39 This praise of the Dutch Company seems to contain another implicit criticism of their English counterparts for failing to live up to the religious obligations contained in the East India Company charter (as Penelope Carson has explored, the Company had typically tried to evade these, by strategems including keeping its ships below the five-hundred-ton limit for including a chaplain, and declining to pay to build places of worship).40

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As the geographical scope of Crusoe’s journeying expands in the Farther Adventures, bringing him into contact with peoples and governments that actively resist Christianity, the fantasies of consensual conversion that had been possible on the island are increasingly replaced by debates about the ethics of coercion. Crusoe’s emergence as a religious crusader by the end of the Farther Adventures may seem surprising, given Defoe’s own status as a nonconforming Protestant, and his opposition to Anglican bigotry in contemporary England, including the anti-Dissenter riots provoked by the Sacheverell affair (1709–10) and by the coronation of George I (the so-called “Coronation Riots” of 1714). Following seventeenth-century philosophers such as John Locke and Pierre Bayle, Defoe seems to have rejected religious coercion in Europe for both moral and pragmatic reasons.41 Theological quarrels were, in the later words of David Hume, of a “peculiar nature” which was “enflamed by violent remedies”: persecution tended to harden people’s opinions, leaving a policy of violent extermination as the only course for those determined to impose uniformity.42 Are readers therefore meant to see a contradiction between Defoe’s advocacy of toleration for Dissenters in England, and Crusoe’s denial of it to “pagans” in Asia? The answer to this raises a number of complicated philosophical questions, including the ontological difference between heresy and paganism; God’s purpose in denying knowledge of Christianity to much of the world; and the relationship of individual Christians to divine Providence. Many of these questions are first introduced in Crusoe’s vacillations, in the first volume, about whether to use violence against the cannibals (although initially this is a debate focusing on self-defence, rather than on conversion).43 The discontinuous, often logically inconsistent way in which Defoe explores these issues can be seen in the episode where the cannibals return in Crusoe’s twenty-seventh year on the island. Feeling himself now in a position of strength, Crusoe plans to attack them with Friday, but is checked by concerns about “What Call? What Occasion? much less, What Necessity I was in to go and dip my Hands in Blood” (228). Without attempting a fuller analysis of the difference between call, occasion, and necessity as moral imperatives, he moves quickly on to the thought that perhaps God may have reserved punishment for the cannibals through “national Vengeance” (228). This is succeeded by the thought that perhaps military rules of engagement should apply, in which case Friday would be a more appropriate leader of the attack, “because he was a declar’d Enemy, and in a State of War with those very particular

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People” (228–9). In the event, the question is left unsettled, with Crusoe resolving instead to “observe” the cannibals and “act then as God should direct” (229). When the next paragraph reveals that one of the prisoners of the cannibals is a “white Man” (229), this is finally taken as justification for an assault (presumably readers are meant to find Crusoe’s reasoning obvious, although the moral difference between saving white captives and those who are non-white is never made explicit). The “question of what could warrant mass violence against heathens” is, as Nicholas Seager points out, a recurring problem in the Farther Adventures, where it is increasingly connected with questions of proselytization.44 The second volume contains one of Defoe’s most harrowing descriptions of European brutality, after one of Crusoe’s shipmates attempts to rape a local woman at Madagascar, provoking fighting that ends in a massacre by European sailors. Crusoe is bitterly critical of the violence, which he compares to Cromwell’s massacre of Catholic Irish at Drogheda, and he ironically quotes the genocidal words of his boatswain, “all cover’d with Blood and Dust”: “villainous [sic] Hell-hound Dogs, I’ll kill as many of them as poor Tom has Hairs upon his Head: We have sworn to spare none of them; we’ll root out the very Nation of them from the Earth” (136). Seager, drawing on Claude Rawson’s work on the rhetorical instability of genocidal desires, argues that the similarity of the boatswain’s rhetoric to language used by Crusoe himself on earlier occasions, as well as Crusoe’s own admission that he also felt “urg’d” (137) to participate in the massacre, illustrates the narrow “line between attraction and repulsion” for Crusoe, and the fragility of his claim to an identity based on non-violent “civility” towards the Other.45 It is notable that, when Crusoe finally crosses the line into unprovoked violence later in the Farther Adventures, it is under a religious pretext. His reaction to Cham Chi-Thaungu adopts similar dehumanizing and genocidal language to the Madagascar episode: the idol is a “vile abominable” (193) object, “frightful as the Devil” (192), whose worshippers prostrate themselves like “Logs of Wood,” lost in “Stupidity and brutish Worship” (192). In order to free the Tartars from “hellish Devotion” (193), Crusoe comes up with the plan of gagging and binding Cham Chi-Thaungu’s worshippers, and forcing them to watch as he destroys the idol with gunpowder in order to “let [the Tartars] see that it had no Power to help itself, and consequently could not be an Object of Worship, or to be pray’d to, much less, help them that offer’d Sacrifices to it” (193). The narrative shows this Quixotic mission to be pointless and self-defeating, as

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the destruction of Cham Chi-Thaungu causes an uprising of thirty thousand Tartars on horseback, from which Crusoe narrowly escapes, and does nothing to change the Tartars’ religious opinions.

Part III: Holy War and Japan A persistent challenge in interpreting the final two volumes of the trilogy has been how far to read ironic intention, on the part of Defoe, into Crusoe’s violent outbursts against Asians: these include not just the Tartary and Madagascar episodes but also his fantasies of how “30,000 German or English Foot, and 10,000 French Horse” (173–4) might smash through the Great Wall and conquer the Chinese empire. La Grand suggests that, like Defoe’s notoriously oblique satire The Shortest Way with the Dissenters (1702), the trilogy creates an ironical trap designed to lure Anglican readers into identifying with an extreme position of intolerance.46 For Gildon, by contrast, the apparent contradiction with Crusoe’s earlier repudiation of violence merely reflects the “Rambling, Inconsistent” worldview of Defoe himself, who has spent his life wandering between religious and political positions, in a manner surpassing even the “Fabulous Proteus.”47 Other critics have generally suggested that Crusoe’s xenophobia in large part reflects Defoe’s own political and theological preoccupations. Markley and David Porter interpret Crusoe’s aggression as a form of compensatory fantasy, which serves to alleviate British anxieties about the wealth, power, and cultural antiquity of a China-centred Asia.48 In a persuasive reading of Defoe’s broader advocacy of holy war in texts such as A Plan of the English Commerce (1728), Seager rejects the idea of the final volumes as a “mischievous jeu d’esprit,” arguing that “such readings fail to account for Defoe’s religious sentiments, which make holy war not merely attractive but in some respects imperative.”49 Seager proposes that the equivocal expression of Crusoe’s plans can be read in terms of what Claude Rawson analyzes as the “slippery” and “evasive” language of Enlightenment xenophobia, in which “fictions of extermination” are sanitized with ironic or figurative language that signals their “disengagement from the practical sphere,” and in which the hierarchy of civilization and barbarism is, simultaneously, sincerely believed and ironically questioned.50

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The problem of interpreting Defoe’s intentions surfaces with particular force in the final moral essay in the Serious Reflections, “Of the Proportion between the Christian and Pagan World,” in which Crusoe uses the example of Japan—a country that he failed to visit during his travels— to develop a more detailed plan for implanting Christianity by force. He proposes that ten million pounds should be raised to send missionaries to Japan, supported by a huge “Fleet and Army to conquer Heathenism and Idolatry” (215). The negative example of the Spanish colonization of South America is used to argue that this campaign, by contrast, would be just and moderate: force would be used only to make an “open Door… for the preaching of the Word of God” (209), while inhabitants would be used with “Humanity and Justice” and would “suffer no Oppression, Injury, or Injustice” (217). That is, idols and temples are to be burned, priests should be “removed, if not destroyed” (217), and festivals and customs banned. Children should be educated in a European language (Crusoe is deliberately vague on which) rather than their native tongue. Those who “adher[e] obstinately to … Idolatry” despite “gentle and christian Usage” are to be dealt with by “suitable Methods” (218): a chilling phrase which suggests that Crusoe is less willing than Locke had been to make any form of exemption for private religious belief. This scheme, which Crusoe significantly labels “my Cruisado” (218), is thus presented as his final message to his readers, and as the culmination of his trilogy-long interest in proselytization of the non-European world. The proposal contains numerous ironies and philosophical evasions, beginning of course with its impracticality and ridiculous cost. Given Defoe’s keen ear for special pleading and sophistry, it is indeed hard not to read authorial satire into Crusoe’s efforts to distinguish between “forcing Religion upon People,” which he deprecates, and “opening the Door for Religion to come among them,” the latter being merely the removal of “a Force unjustly put already upon the Minds of Men by the Artifice of the Devil” (210). Crusoe’s blithe dismissal of possible objections to his plan— “it has not the least Tincture of Persecution in it” (214)—is reminiscent of Jonathan Swift’s ironized narrators, who often plead their moderation even while urging extreme measures (for example, in A Modest Proposal [1729], whose narrator writes that “I can think of not one Objection, that will possibly be raised” to his plan for cannibalizing Irish children).51 Nevertheless, there are good reasons for understanding the invasion of Japan as intended to be taken seriously, both as geopolitical strategy, and as the thematic endpoint of Crusoe’s own evolution from merchant

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into crusader. Although, as Seager points out, references to crusades are usually deployed ironically in Defoe’s other writings to criticize the persecution of the Dissenters by the Anglican Church, the word “Cruisado” also suggests an etymological connection with Crusoe’s own name (both words deriving from the Latin word crux).52 In the opening lines of the first volume, we are told that Crusoe’s original surname is Kreutznaer, changed to “Crusoe” by “the usual Corruption of Words in England” (57). This German name, with its implied etymology of “near the cross,” suggests that religious questing, and questioning, is central to Crusoe’s identity.53 The word crusade does not occur in the first volume, however, except in the form of the crusado, the Portuguese coin with a cross on one side that Crusoe uses in his business dealings in Brazil (perhaps an appropriate symbol of Crusoe’s “double-sided” identity as merchant and missionary).54 The later connection made between Crusoe and crusade retrospectively and subtly alters the symbolism of his name, making religious violence central to his character. In addition, the impracticability of Crusoe’s proposal does not mean that it is not intended to be taken seriously as a thought-provoking philosophical exercise. The choice of Japan might seem arbitrary and is presumably in part motivated by simple geography. As an archipelago distant from the mainland, it permits a particular kind of self-enclosed philosophical speculation: it is in fact the last of a series of islands that Crusoe lists as possible targets for invasion, after Madagascar, Ceylon, and Borneo (Serious Reflections, 216). Nevertheless, Japan also offers the important historical context—one surely still familiar to Defoe’s readers— of the historical persecutions of Christians under the Tokugawa shogunate in the early seventeenth century, which had expelled the Jesuits and successfully reduced one of the largest Christian congregations in Asia into a scattered underground community. Ironically, the country could thus be understood as a historical example of the effectiveness of religious violence. Defoe may also have been familiar with Jesuit descriptions: Crusoe’s statement that “the Japonnese are said to be a most sensible sagacious People, under excellent Forms of Government” (216), reversing his earlier assessment of them as “false, cruel, and treacherous” (FA, 171), seems to derive from earlier Jesuit presentations of the country as an exemplar of pagan rationality and openness to Christianity.55 This crusade—intended as a pan-European project to be undertaken by a “Christian Confederacy” (Serious Reflections, 218)—also marks the culmination of the trilogy’s concern with ecumenical co-operation

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between different Christian denominations. Crusoe himself is notably tolerant of doctrinal differences, living in the Strange Surprizing Adventures as a Catholic in Brazil, and writing that the instruction that he gives Friday is all the better for its vagueness: “As to all the Disputes, Wranglings, Strife and Contention, which has [sic] happen’d in the World about Religion, whether Niceties in Doctrines, or Schemes of Church Government, they were all perfectly useless to us; as for ought I can yet see, they have been to all the rest of the World” (220–1). This is a recurring idea in Defoe’s other novels: in A Journal of the Plague Year (1722), “Charity” and “Christian Union” between Anglicans and Dissenters are presented as benefits brought by the Plague of 1665,56 and Moll Flanders declares that “I saw little, but the prejudice of Education in all the Differences that were among Christians about Religion” (although, typically, this is self-interested reasoning, made while she is trying to inveigle her way into a Catholic family in Lancashire).57 As the trilogy progresses, Crusoe becomes dependent on the support of moderate Catholics, most notably the French Catholic priest in the Farther Adventures, in order to achieve his religious goals. He praises the “Sincerity and Temper of this truly pious Papist,” who insists on the importance of converting the native Americans on the island, and reflects “that if such a Temper was universal, we might be all Catholick Christians, whatever Church or particular Profession we joyn’d to, or joyn’d in; that a Spirit of Charity would soon work us all up into right Principles” (101). Crusoe’s interactions with the priest can be related to the important Enlightenment principle of ecumenical “nondiscussion” identified by Ingrid Creppell, in which theological “minefields” such as the Eucharistic rites are tacitly avoided by both sides, allowing “common identity” and a sense of “brotherhood and mutual love” to develop.58 Defoe’s openness to interfaith co-operation with Catholicism in the Crusoe trilogy might also be connected—as Morgan Strawn proposes in a reading of Defoe’s Memoirs of a Cavalier (1720)—to the ongoing War of the Quadruple Alliance (1718–20), during which Britain was allied to Catholic countries to preserve the balance of power in Europe.59 Chapter IV of the Serious Reflections contains a digression on “Differences in Religion,” which argues that the differences between Christian sects essentially stem from misunderstandings and confusion created by the limitations of human minds, and that earthly charity prefigures the more elegant theological reconciliation that will take place in Heaven: “all Separations will be there

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taken away, and the Mind of every Christian be entirely reconcild [sic] to one another” (163). Finally, Crusoe’s ambitious plan for “Christian Confederacy” (Serious Reflections, 218) can be read in the historical context of the South Sea Bubble year of 1720, in which the third volume appeared. This was a period in which numerous speculative “projects,” many of them centred on Asia, “deployed fantasies of colonial wealth to resolve funding problems for the British state and to enable financial fraud.”60 The idea of the invasion of Japan as a “project”—an idea that at first appears outlandish, but which becomes more viable and real the more that others can be persuaded to “invest” in it—provides a useful way to reconsider the question of Defoe’s sincerity here. Crusoe invites readers to imagine what might be realized if religious goals attracted the same energies and funding as the development of trade: “how do the labouring Heads of the World club together to form Projects, and to raise Subscriptions to extend the general Commerce of Nations into every Corner of the World: But’twould pass for a Bubble of all Bubbles, and a Whimsy that none would engage in, if ten Millions should be asked to be subscribed, for sending a strong Fleet and Army to conquer Heathenism and Idolatry” (Serious Reflections, 215). It seems appropriate that Crusoe, whose identity as merchant seems to have become increasingly displaced by his religious zeal, now invites the whole British nation to make the fight against “Heathenism and Idolatry” central to its role in the world. This essay has argued that, despite the picaresque, discontinuous nature of Crusoe’s travels, and the differences in genre between the first two volumes and the Serious Reflections, a strong argument can be made for intellectual cohesion and philosophical development across the Crusoe trilogy. Appreciating this unity requires us to revise our ideas of Crusoe as a story about Protestant British imperialism, offering a model of Providence tied to individual labour and economic accumulation. A reading that better reflects the overall trilogy, by contrast, would focus on Crusoe as missionary-crusader, whose experiences progressively reveal to him the allegorical structure of human history as a war against the Devil and make him aware of the necessity of “Christian Confederacy” to transform the world. The conversion of Friday in the first volume is succeeded by the broader challenges of creating a Christian community on the island in the second, a task which requires Crusoe to set aside denominational differences and seek common ground with Catholics. This paves the way for fantasies of holy war in Asia, a scheme whose challenges are presented in

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miniature in the episode with the Tartar idol, and developed at greater length in the final plans for an invasion of Japan. These changes can, in turn, be related to Defoe’s own long-standing beliefs in the supernatural, in the allegorical structure of human history, and in the necessity of interdenominational Christian “Confederacy.” Although at times Defoe allows satirical echoes of his writings on religious toleration at home to complicate the text and to undermine his protagonist, Crusoe’s religious intentions in Asia are not essentially ironized. The goal (admittedly faroff and daunting) of converting Asia to Christianity was shared by Defoe and perhaps many of his readers, and the complex ethical questions that it raised could be largely considered in separation from the question of toleration for Christians at home.

Notes 1. Daniel Defoe, The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1719), ed. W.R. Owens (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2008): 109, 235. 2. The word also has military and nautical meanings in this period, but Defoe seems to use it in a manner that bridges “A person … who exercises direct authority over a people or a place; a ruler,” and “a representative of the British Crown in a colony.” See OED, “governor, n.,” 5a. and 6a. 3. John C. Traver, “Defoe, Unigenitus, and the ‘Catholic’ Crusoe,” Studies in English Literature 51, 3 (Summer 2011): 545. 4. Daniel Defoe, Serious Reflections During the Life and Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe(1720), ed. G.A. Starr (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2008): 201–19. 5. Defoe, Serious Reflections, 55. 6. See also Noriyuki Harada’s discussion of Defoe’s speculative geography of Japan in Chapter 4 of this volume. 7. Daniel Defoe, The Shortest Way with the Dissenters (1702), in Political and Economic Writings of Daniel Defoe: Volume 3: Dissent, ed. W.R. Owens (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2000): 95–110. 8. See Traver’s discussion of the important concept of “charity” in “Defoe, Unigenitus, and the ‘Catholic’ Crusoe.” 9. See Emmanuelle Peraldo’s study, 300 Years of Robinsonades (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2020). The Asian adaptations of Robinson Crusoe discussed in the second half of this volume (Chapters 7–14), although usually viewed in terms of “reception,” could also be considered as a form of sequel.

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10. This thesis is proposed influentially by Ian Watt (The Rise of the Novel, University of California Press, 1957) as a tradition of “formal realism” (31) centred on Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding, connected to Protestantism, economic individualism, and the rising British middle class. Responses to Watt, although too numerous to survey here, have included feminist critiques; studies of the influence of Classical or “Oriental” narrative forms; and debates about epistemology and the origins of “fictionality.” See Ros Ballaster, Seductive Forms: Women’s Amatory Fiction from 1684 to 1740 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992) and Fabulous Orients: Fictions of the East in England 1662–1785 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); Catherine Gallagher, “The Rise of Fictionality,” in The Novel, ed. Franco Moretti (2 vols) (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006): I, 336–63; Michael McKeon, The Origins of The English Novel, 1660–1740 (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987); Nicholas D. Paige, Before Fiction: The Ancien Régime of the Novel (Pennsylvania, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011). 11. See Margaret Eustace France, “Now For Something Completely Different: Non Sequitur Sequels in Daniel Defoe, Sarah Fielding and Sarah Scott,” PhD. Dissertation, University of California Davis. ProQuest Dissertations Publishing (2010). UMI 3,422,769. 12. John C. Traver, “The sense of amending: Closure, justice, and the eighteenth-century fictional sequel,” PhD Dissertation, University of Notre Dame. ProQuest Dissertations Publishing (2007): xvi. UMI 3,406,932. 13. Jeffrey Hopes notes that the Serious Reflections were not republished on their own after 1720, and only “infrequently added” to the first three volumes (“Real and Imaginary Stories: Robinson Crusoe and the Serious Reflections,” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 8, 3 [April 1996]: 313). One rare later eighteenth-century appearance of the Serious Reflections occurs in the three-volume Logographic Press edition of the Crusoe trilogy, The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (London, 1790). 14. Virginia La Grand, A Spectacular Failure: Robinson Crusoe I, II, III (Amsterdam and New York: Editions Rodopi, 2012): 2. 15. Defoe, Daniel, The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1719), ed. W.R. Owens, (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2008): 1. 16. Melissa Free, “Un-Erasing Crusoe: Farther Adventures in the Nineteenth Century,” Book History 9 (2006): 89–130. 17. Walter Scott (Miscellaneous Works, 1834), quoted in Pat Rogers, ed., Daniel Defoe: The Critical Heritage (London and Boston: Routledge, 1972: 2011): 70. 18. Particularly Defoe’s later occult works, The Political History of the Devil (1726), and An Essay on the History and Reality of Apparitions (1727).

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19. Hopes, “Real and Imaginary Stories,” 313. 20. Traver, “The sense of amending,” 10. 21. Leah Orr, “Providence and Religion in the Crusoe Trilogy,” EighteenthCentury Life 38, 2 (2014): 4. 22. Robert Markley, The Far East and the English Imagination, 1600–1730 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006): 179. 23. John Richetti, “Eurocentric Crusoe: The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe,” Études anglaises 72 (2019): 213, 216. 24. R.M. Bridges, “A Possible Source for Daniel Defoe’s The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe.” British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 2, 3 (1979): 231–7. 25. Thomas De Quincey, Revolt of the Tartars. First published 1837. Ed. George Armstrong Wauchope (Boston, NY, and Chicago: D.C. Heath & Co., 1897). 26. Daniel J. Johnson, “Robinson Crusoe and the Apparitional EighteenthCentury Novel,” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 28, 2 (2015): 240–2. 27. Sandra Sherman, Finance and Fictionality in the Early Eighteenth Century: Accounting for Defoe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996): 79. 28. Charles Gildon, The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Mr. D– – De F–, of London, Hosier. Second edition (London: J. Roberts, 1719): 33. 29. Hopes, “Real and Imaginary Stories,” 314–5. 30. Joanna Picciotto, “Circumstantial Particulars, Particular Individuals, and Defoe,” in Reflections on Sentiment: Essays in Honor of George Starr, ed. Alessa Johns (Lanham, MD: University of Delaware Press, 2016): 40. 31. Thomas Wright, The Life of Daniel Defoe, 2 vols (London: Cassell and Company, 1894): 2, xiii–xv. 32. Jason Pearl, “The View from Above: Satiric Distance and the Advent of Ballooning in Britain,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 51, 3 (Spring 2018): 279. 33. Gildon, Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Mr. D–– De F–, 42. 34. See Robert Markley, “Defoe and the Problem of the East India Company,” Chapter 2 above. 35. Travers argues that the depiction of the unnamed Catholic priest may be influenced by Defoe’s interest in French Jansenism: see “Defoe, Unigenitus, and the ‘Catholic’ Crusoe,” 545. 36. On the intellectual legacy of the Chinese Rites controversy in the European Enlightenment, see Yu Liu, “Behind the Façade of the Rites Controversy: The Intriguing Contrast of Chinese and European Theism,” Journal of Religious History 44, 1 (2020): 3–26. 37. Michael Khodarkovsky, “‘Not by Word Alone’: Missionary Policies and Religious Conversion in Early Modern Russia,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 38, 2 (1996): 279.

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38. Defoe interestingly does not take the opportunity here to engage with George Psalmanazar’s famous fraudulent description of Formosa as a land of pantheistic worship and human sacrifice, in An Historical and Geographical Description of Formosa (London: Dan. Brown and W. Davis, 1704). 39. See Robert Markley’s essay in Chapter 2 of this volume. 40. Penelope Carson, The East India Company and Religion, 1698–1858 (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2012): 7. 41. Juan Pablo Domínguez, “Religious toleration in the Age of Enlightenment,” History of European Ideas 43, 4 (2017): 278–9. 42. David Hume, History of England (1786), quoted in Domínguez, “Religious toleration in the Age of Enlightenment,” 279. 43. For an exploration of the discourse of cannibalism in the first two volumes, see Ted Motohashi’s essay in Chapter 3 of this volume. 44. Nicholas Seager, “Crusoe’s Crusade: Defoe, Genocide, and Imperialism,” Études anglaises 72, 2 (2019): 203. See also Claude Rawson, God, Gulliver, and Genocide: Barbarism and the European Imagination, 1492–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001). 45. Seager, “Crusoe’s Crusade,” 204. 46. La Grand, Spectacular Failure, 207. 47. Gildon, Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Mr. D–– De F–, 280, 277. 48. See Markley, Far East and the English Imagination, 177–209; David Porter, Ideographia: The Chinese Cipher in Early Modern Europe (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001): 237–40. 49. Seager, “Crusoe’s Crusade,” 210. 50. Rawson, God, Gulliver, and Genocide, 12–13. 51. Jonathan Swift, A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of poor People in Ireland, from being a Burden to their Parents or Country. First published 1729. In Irish Tracts 1728–1733, ed. Herbert Davis (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1964): 116. 52. Seager, “Crusoe’s Crusade,” 206. 53. Owens suggests “near the Cross” or “nourished by the Cross” as possible etymologies: see Crusoe, Strange Surprizing Adventures, n.288. 54. See Strange Surprizing Adventures, 268 and n.322. 55. On Jesuit representation, see Michael Cooper, They Came to Japan: An Anthology of European Reports on Japan, 1543–1640 (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1965: 1981). 56. Daniel Defoe, A Journal of the Plague Year (1722), ed. John Mullan (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2009): 156. 57. Daniel Defoe, The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders (1721), ed. Liz Bellamy (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2009): 127.

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58. Ingrid Creppell, Toleration and Identity: Foundations in Early Modern Thought (New York and London: Routledge, 2003), 62–3. David Alvarez argues that Defoe uses the Tartar episode to display the collapse of Crusoe’s efforts “to construct a progressive narrative of modernity in which a global Protestant form of religion enables religious toleration, self-control, and a beneficent global order.” However, the Serious Reflections shows the clear distinction that Defoe makes between toleration for Christians and denunciation of idolatry, and shows how “charity” is actually enhanced by fantasies of collective Christian violence against Asia. See Alvarez, “Daniel Defoe’s Protestant Roman Catholics. Global Religion, Colonialism, and the Limits of Toleration in The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe,” I castelli di Yale online VI, 2 (2018): 26. 59. Morgan Strawn, “‘Zealous for Their Own Way of Worship’: Defoe, Monarchy, and Religious Toleration During the War of the Quadruple Alliance,” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 25, 2 (2012): 327–357. 60. Robert Clark, “Robinson Crusoe’s Implausible Palisades: Privateering, Colonialism, Realism, Myth and the South-Sea Bubble,” Études anglaises 72, 2 (2019): 167.

Works Cited Alvarez, David. 2018. Daniel Defoe’s Protestant Roman Catholics. Global Religion, Colonialism, and the Limits of Toleration in The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe. I castelli di Yale online VI, 2: 1–28. https://doi.org/10. 15160/2282-5460/1955. Ballaster, Ros. 1992. Seductive Forms: Women’s Amatory Fiction from 1684 to 1740. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bridges, R.M. 1979. A Possible Source for Daniel Defoe’s The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe. British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 2, 3: 231–7. Carson, Penelope. 2012. The East India Company and Religion, 1698–1858. Woodbridge: Boydell Press. Clark, Robert. 2019. Robinson Crusoe’s Implausible Palisades: Privateering, Colonialism, Realism, Myth and the South-Sea Bubble. Études anglaises 72, 2: 167–181. https://doi.org/10.3917/etan.722.0167. Cooper, Michael. 1965; 1981. They Came to Japan: An Anthology of European Reports on Japan, 1543–1640. Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press. Creppell, Ingrid. 2003. Toleration and Identity: Foundations in Early Modern Thought. New York and London: Routledge. Defoe, Daniel. 1790. The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of York, mariner. 3 vols. London: Logographic Press.

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———. 2000. The Shortest Way with the Dissenters. In Political and Economic Writings of Daniel Defoe: Volume 3: Dissent. Ed. W.R. Owens, 95–110. London: Pickering & Chatto. ———. 2005. An Essay on the History and Reality of Apparitions (1727). Ed. G.A. Starr. London: Pickering & Chatto. ———. 2005. The Political History of the Devil (1726). Ed. John Mullan. London: Pickering & Chatto. ———. 2008. The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1719). Ed. W.R. Owens. London: Pickering & Chatto. ———. 2008. The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1719). Ed. W.R. Owens. London: Pickering & Chatto. ———. 2008. Serious Reflections During the Life and Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe. Ed. G.A. Starr. London: Pickering & Chatto. ———. 2009. The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders (1721). Ed. Liz Bellamy. London: Pickering & Chatto. ———. 2009. A Journal of the Plague Year (1722). Ed. John Mullan. London: Pickering & Chatto. De Quincey, Thomas. (1837) 1897. Revolt of the Tartars. Ed. George Armstrong Wauchope. Boston, NY and Chicago: D.C. Heath & Co. Domínguez, Juan Pablo. 2017. Religious toleration in the Age of Enlightenment. History of European Ideas 43, 4: 273–87. https://doi.org/10.1080/ 01916599.2016.1203590. France, Margaret Eustace. 2010. Now For Something Completely Different: Non Sequitur Sequels in Daniel Defoe, Sarah Fielding and Sarah Scott (PhD Dissertation). University of California, Davis. ProQuest Dissertations Publishing: UMI 3422769. Free, Melissa. 2006. Un-Erasing Crusoe: Farther Adventures in the Nineteenth Century. Book History 9: 89–130. https://doi.org/10.1353/bh.2006.0004. Gallagher, Catherine. 2006. The Rise of Fictionality. In The Novel. Ed. Franco Moretti, 2 vols. I, 336–63. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Gildon, Charles. 1719. The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Mr. D---De F--, of London, Hosier. Second edition. London: J. Roberts. Hopes, Jeffrey. 1996. Real and Imaginary Stories: Robinson Crusoe and the Serious Reflections. Eighteenth-Century Fiction 8, 3: 313–28. Johnson, Daniel J. 2015. Robinson Crusoe and the Apparitional EighteenthCentury Novel. Eighteenth-Century Fiction 28, 2: 239–61. Khodarkovsky, Michael. 1996. ‘Not by Word Alone’: Missionary Policies and Religious Conversion in Early Modern Russia. Comparative Studies in Society and History 38, 2: 267–293. La Grand, Virginia. 2012. A Spectacular Failure: Robinson Crusoe I, II, III . Amsterdam and New York: Editions Rodopi.

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Liu, Yu. 2020. Behind the Façade of the Rites Controversy: The Intriguing Contrast of Chinese and European Theism. Journal of Religious History 44, 1: 3–26. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9809.12638. Markley, Robert. 2006. The Far East and the English Imagination, 1600–1730, 296–310. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Milton, John. (1667) 1998. Paradise Lost. In The Riverside Milton. Ed. Roy Flannagan. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin. Orr, Leah. 2014. Providence and Religion in the Crusoe Trilogy. EighteenthCentury Life 38, 2: 1–27. https://doi.org/10.1215/00982601-2645918. Paige, Nicholas D. 2011. Before Fiction: The Ancien Régime of the Novel. Pennsylvania, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Pearl, Jason. 2018. The View from Above: Satiric Distance and the Advent of Ballooning in Britain. Eighteenth-Century Studies 51, 3: 273–87. https://doi. org/10.1353/ecs.2018.0000. Peraldo, Emmanuelle. 2020. 300 Years of Robinsonades. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Picciotto, Joanna. 2016. Circumstantial Particulars, Particular Individuals, and Defoe. In Reflections on Sentiment: Essays in Honor of George Starr. Ed. Alessa Johns, 29–55. Lanham, MD: University of Delaware Press. Porter, David. 2001. Ideographia: The Chinese Cipher in Early Modern Europe. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Psalmanazar, George. 1704. An Historical and Geographical Description of Formosa. London: Dan. Brown and W. Davis. Rawson, Claude. 2001. God, Gulliver, and Genocide: Barbarism and the European Imagination, 1492–1945. New York: Oxford University Press. Richetti, John. 2019. Eurocentric Crusoe: The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe. Études anglaises 72: 213–224. https://doi.org/10.3917/etan.722. 0213. Rogers, Pat (ed.). (1972) 2011. Daniel Defoe: The Critical Heritage. London and Boston: Routledge. Seager, Nicholas. 2019. Crusoe’s Crusade: Defoe, Genocide, and Imperialism. Études anglaises 72, 2: 196–212. https://doi.org/10.3917/etan.722.0196. Sherman, Sandra. 1996. Finance and Fictionality in the Early Eighteenth Century: Accounting for Defoe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Strawn, Morgan. 2012. ‘Zealous for Their Own Way of Worship’: Defoe, Monarchy, and Religious Toleration During the War of the Quadruple Alliance. Eighteenth-Century Fiction 25, 2: 327–357. https://doi.org/10. 3138/ecf.25.2.327. Swift, Jonathan. (1729) 1964. A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of poor People in Ireland, from being a Burden to their Parents or Country. In Irish Tracts 1728–1733. Ed. Herbert Davis, 107–118. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

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Traver, John C. 2007. The sense of amending: Closure, justice, and the eighteenth-century fictional sequel. PhD Dissertation, University of Notre Dame. ProQuest Dissertations Publishing. UMI 3406932. ———. 2011. Defoe, Unigenitus, and the ‘Catholic’ Crusoe. Studies in English Literature 51, 3: 545–63. Wright, Thomas. 1894. The Life of Daniel Defoe. 2 vols. London: Cassell and Company.

CHAPTER 7

“Le coeur fou Robinsonne à travers les romans”: Crusoe’s Farther Adventures in the French Robinsonade Steve Clark

I wish to begin by posing a deceptively simple question about “le coeur fou Robinsonne,” a line from Arthur Rimbaud’s poem, “Roman”: whose is the “coeur fou”? Does the “mad heart” apply to Crusoe’s “mere wandering Inclination”?1 “Robinsonner” has two senses: “vivre en solitude,” to live alone, but also to travel imaginatively. The genre of the “voyage imaginaire” was already long-established in French, for example, Gabriel de Foigny’s La terre Australe connue (1676), vigorously reemerging in the nineteenth century in the romances of Jules Verne.2 Perhaps surprisingly, English has no equivalent verb; according to the OED, “Robinson Crusoe” can be used transitively as to set ashore or maroon, but very few usages are given; the noun gets used as a synonym for solitude, often seen as voluntarily self-imposed.

S. Clark (B) University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 S. Clark and Y. Yoshihara (eds.), Robinson Crusoe in Asia, Asia-Pacific and Literature in English, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-4051-3_7

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“À travers les romans,” across novels, is undoubtedly appropriate for Crusoe’s multiple afterlives. The specific focus of this essay is the French Robinsonade, which has fervently assimilated Defoe’s text almost from its inception. The first translation, or more accurately free adaptation, by Saint Hyacinthe and Justus van Effen, appeared in 1720.3 The term Robinsonade was coined by Johann Gottfried Schnabel ten years later in 1731; there were 41 imitations in the next forty years.4 Why should this stolid manifesto for Protestant capitalism have such powerful international appeal? Given the fiercely protective attitude of the French towards their own culture, one might have expected wariness if not open disdain. This sceptical attitude is exemplified by Giraudoux’s heroine in Suzanne and the Pacific when she fortuitously discovers a copy of Defoe’s text—“Don’t waste three months to make yourself a table. Squat”—and echoed in the grudging animosity of Gilles Deleuze’s 1954 review-essay of that book: “One can hardly imagine a more boring novel and it is a shame to see children still reading it today.”5 Yet Defoe famously insists that an Englishman is a “heterog’neous thing”: From whence a mongrel half-bred race there came, With neither name nor nation, speech or fame. In whose hot blood new mixtures quickly ran, Infus’d betwixt a Saxon and a Dane.

He was an enthusiastic propagandist for a Dutch monarch, and Crusoe has a German father (his name is a naturalization of Kreutzner).6 What makes his endeavours so translatable while simultaneously identified with a specific national tradition? Scott remarks that “The anti-social philosopher Rousseau will allow no other book than Robinson Crusoe in the hands of Emilius.”7 His famous endorsement begins with the declaration, “I loathe books” (though Rousseau himself is of course writing one); “they only teach one to talk about what one does not know”: If one can invent a situation where all man’s natural needs are shown in a way a child’s mind can sense, and where the means of providing these needs emerge in order with equal ease, it is by the lively and naïve depiction of this state that the first exercise must be given to his imagination.8

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The castaway situation becomes the test of genuine value: “I want him to learn in detail, not from books but from things, all that must be known in such a situation.” Hence “disencumbered of all its rigmarole,” the book should be “beginning with Robinson’s shipwreck near his Island and ending with the arrival of the ship which comes to take him from it.” This state, I agree, is not that of social man; very likely it is not going to be that of Emile. But it is on the basis of this very state that he ought to appraise all the others. The surest means of raising oneself above prejudices and ordering one’s judgements about the true relations of things according to the real relations of things is to put oneself in the place of an isolated man and to judge everything as this man himself ought to judge of it with respect to his own utility.9

This gives rise to the long tradition of commentary by political economists on Crusoe’s labour as an exemplar of generating surplus value. It should be noted firstly that Rousseau himself elsewhere regards the situation of having “to identify with Robinson” as an opportunity for lyric reverie rather than pragmatic adaptation, in accordance with his prelapsarian view of primitive society. Secondly, the date of publication of Emile in 1762 was at the conclusion of the Seven Years War, a crucial point of transition of global dominance from France to Britain. Tournier also moves the date in which his novel is set to 1759, and at the conclusion of Vendredi, France and Britain have resumed hostilities.10 I now wish to examine Bougainville’s Voyage around the World (1771) and Forster’s annotations to his translation (1772), as exemplifying the Great Power rivalry latent in the competing traditions of French and English Robinsonades.

I Lewis de Bougainville himself served with distinction under Montcalm in the defeated French army in Canada, and helped to negotiate the Treaty of Paris (1763).11 His circumnavigation began in 1766, and ended in 1769, with the remarkably low number of merely seven casualties out of a crew of over 350. The travel account was published in French in 1771, with an English translation by Johann Reinhold Forster rapidly following in 1772. His own narrative as companion of Cook becomes a major travelogue in its own right, but here I wish to emphasise the

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impact on Pacific voyage-narratives of geopolitical rivalry, which in turn shapes the divergent traditions of the eighteenth-century Robinsonade. Forster’s preface opens graciously enough: I beg leave to offer you the translation of a work written by a learned, judicious and intelligent traveler, which abounds with remarkable events and curious observations; equally instructive to future navigators and interesting to science in general, and Geography in particular.12

One might have anticipated an Enlightenment ideal of cosmopolitan inclusiveness, a disinterested republic of letters. Instead in the aftermath of the Seven Years War, the Pacific becomes the site of imperial catchup, with the French desperate for territorial gains and restored national self-esteem to compensate for losses in Canada and India.13 The competing versions of the British Pacific voyages produced frequent acrimonious dispute, so it is unsurprising that Forster (of Scottish descent, though born in Poland and German-educated) takes the opportunity for score-settling: The superiority of the British discoveries in the great Ocean between America and Asia cannot be ascertained, unless by an authentic account of the discoveries by the rival nation. The honour of the discoveries made within two centuries, in those remote seas, is entirely reserved for the British nation, and their spirit and perseverance in conducting this great and interesting event.

Even British charts are “infinitely superior” to those of the French “in point of neatness, convenience and accuracy.” Though Mr de Bougainville is a man of veracity and abilities, he has however in a few instances been misled by false reports, or prejudiced in favour of his nation; we have in some additional notes corrected as far as it was in our power these mistakes, and impartially vindicated the British nation, where we thought the author had been unjustly partial; for love of one’s country is, in our opinion, very consistent with common justice and good breeding; qualities which should never be wanting in a philosopher.

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The “additional notes” continuously rebuke “the mistakes and omissions of our author in regard to these navigators of the South Seas who did not sail around the world.” From this list it appears that the English have undertaken the greatest number of voyages with the design to make discoveries, unattended by that selfishness with which the majority of Dutch voyages were entered upon, merely with a view to promote the knowledge of geography, to make navigation more safe and likewise throw further lights on the study of nature.

Surely this is a case of pots calling kettles black in terms of “selfishness.” Forster is unembarrassed about potential profit, aware that his text is among many other Pacific voyage-narratives which, whatever their claim to disinterested scientific knowledge, at the same time become the means of discovering many new and useful branches of trade and commerce; and there is likewise the highest possibility, that some unsearched island with which the Eastern seas abound might produce the various spices which would greatly add to the rich returns of the Indian cargos, and amply repay the expenses of such an expedition.

“Unsearched island” neatly maps castaway narrative onto global capitalism. Even Bougainville’s handsome tribute to his companions provokes condemnation. I shall conclude this preliminary discourse by doing justice to the zeal, courage and unwearied patience of the officers and crew of my two ships. It has not been necessary to incite them with any extraordinary enticement, such as the English thought necessary to grant to the crew of Commodore Byron. Their constancy has stood the test of the most critical situations, and their good will has not for one moment abated. But the French nation is capable of conquering the greatest difficulties and nothing is impossible to their efforts, so long as she thinks herself equal at least to any nation in the world.

To which Forster replies: It would be improper to derogate from the merit of any nation, unless that same nation intends to obtain it by destroying the character of another.

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Since he without the least necessity casts a reflection on the English officers under Commodore Byron’s expedition, it is no more but justice to retort the argument.

It becomes undeniable proof of the badness of the constitution and arbitrary government of that country when a set of worthy men who have braved the most imminent danger, with an undaunted courage for the welfare of their fellow-citizens, remain without any reward whatsoever, except that philosophical one, the conscientiousness of good and laudable actions. These rivals attempt to quiet the uneasy minds of their poor dissatisfied officers with a vain and empty compliment.

Bougainville laments of the Journals of Narborough and Beauchesne that “their aim is to compile a work agreeable to the effeminate people of both sexes, and their labour ends in composing a work that tires everybody’s patience and is useful to nobody.” (Though his own work became famous for representing Tahiti as “Garden of Eden,” prompting Diderot’s famous Supplement ). Forster retaliates, The complaint of our author is applicable only to French publication for it is well known that the English voyages, chiefly when published by authority, are remarkable both for the fine language and strict keeping of the marine phrases, that are so necessary to make these publications useful to future navigators, and which are understood by the greater part of this nation, so much used to the sea and its phrases, that our romances and plays are full of them, and they have a run even in common life.

Here is it the English who are celebrated for the overlap of maritime navigation with “romances and plays.” There is an odd sense that the Pacific, far from being uncharted, is already over-crowded: Bougainville constantly encounters traces of prior British presence, if not contamination. I learned from Aotourou that about eight months before our arrival at his island, an English ship had touched there. It is the same which was commanded by Mr Wallace… I am yet ignorant whether the people of Tahiti, as they owe their first knowledge of iron to the English, may not likely be indebted to them for the venereal disease, which we found had been naturalized among them.

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There is something more than a little farcical about the successive ceremonies of appropriation and displacement. A sailor belonging to my barge, being in search of shells, found buried in the sand a piece of plate of lead, on which we read the remains of these English words HOR’D HERE ICK MAJETY’S There yet remained the mark of the nails with which they had fastened this inscription, that did not seem to be of any ancient date. The savages had doubtless torn off the plate and broken it in pieces.

The “savages” themselves have of course not been consulted. The Pacific becomes an increasingly contentious site of imperial rivalry from the second half of the eighteenth century onwards. This is reflected in the genre of the French Robinsonade, which often contains antithetical impulses of appropriation and withdrawal. The basic narrative context implies transoceanic voyaging as a prelude to conquest, yet this implied European domination is disrupted by the event of shipwreck: the individual is suddenly deprived of technological support and must reestablish control over an unfamiliar lifeworld. The famous opening lines of Cowper’s “Verses supposed to be written by Alexander Selkirk” are frequently cited as example of the imperial gaze.14 : I am monarch of all I survey; My right there is none to dispute; From the centre all round to the sea I am lord of the fowl and the brute. (1–4)

Yet can one be a “monarch” without any subjects (“none to dispute”)? As the original illustrations to Defoe’s novel demonstrate, there is no “centre” to the island guaranteeing a privileged vantage or complete overview. Crusoe himself only ventures round its coastline at a comparatively late stage. The “fowl” (punning on “foul”) and the “brute” (in contrast to the later more neutral “beasts” (13, 50)) may perhaps regard their supposed “lord” as subhuman rather than defer to his anthropocentric dominance.

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O Solitude! where are the charms That sages have seen in thy face? Better dwell in the midst of alarms Than reign in this horrible place. (5–8)

“Sages” would presumably include Rousseau; “charms” suggests enchantment but also abrupt dispelling of illusion. The “midst of alarms,” the vicissitudes of warfare, piracy and mutiny are preferable to “this horrible place.” (Grammatically it is “Solitude” rather than Selkirk who must “dwell” and “reign” in isolation). The French Robinsonade attempts to counter-balance this test of endurance with its lyric rhetoric of abundance, It fluctuates between extreme linguistic registers in often static declamatory mode, a characteristic that runs from Rousseau, through Chateaubriand and Claudel, up to Tournier. Most recent critical attention to the Robinsonade has been directed to narrative adaptations. I wish instead to focus on the voluminous poetic tradition which has been largely overlooked.15 It is striking how many of these writers were personally engaged in the colonial project. Rimbaud famously decamped to become a slave-trader and gun-runner in Abyssinia; St John Perse served as a diplomat for nearly 40 years. I now wish to look at “Le Bateau Ivre” and “Images à Crusoe” as examples of this tradition.16

II What does Rimbaud the bisexual boy genius, “mystic in the savage state,”17 have in common with Crusoe, the humdrum epitome of the most pedestrian Anglo-Saxon spirit? “Le Bateau Ivre” (1871) could qualify as a Robinsonade simply for its vivid succession of voyages, shipwrecks, savages, flight from Europe, exile, lament, dawns, sunsets, waves, and drowned men.18 It is haunted by visions of “échouages hideux” [hideous shipwrecks] (56), and there are repeated glimpses of “victimes” (15); “flottaison blême / Et ravie un noyé pensif parfois descend” [floating livid and entranced a pensive drowned man sometimes descends] (23–4); “Des noyés descendent dormi” [drowned men descend to sleep] (68); and “Carcasse ivre d’eau” [corpses drunk with water] (72). Yet the poem also insists on the possibility that “La têmpete a béni mes éveils maritimes” [the storm has blessed my awakenings at sea] (13). It offers a celebration of movement, release, accelerated purification (“Dispersant gouvernail et grappin’” [getting rid of rudder and anchor] (20)),

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and intimations of ecstatic transformation (“L’aube exalté’ ainsi qu’un peuple de colombes’” [the dawn exalted like a flock of doves] (31); “Millions d’oiseaux d’or ô future Vigueur” [the future power of millions of golden birds] (88)). Yet ultimately there is compelled return; however, reluctantly the narrator acknowledges, “Je regrette l ‘Europe aux anciens parapets” [I long for the ancient parapets of Europe] (84), and is reduced to no more than. Un enfant accroupi, plein de tristesses, lâche Un bateau frêle comme un papillon de mai. (95–96) [a child, crouched, full of sadnesses, releases a boat frail as a May butterfly]

Could Crusoe have written this poem? It would seem far too high flown, too rhapsodic to express his ethic of thrift and pragmatism, and unrelenting commitment to task, routine and productivity. As a simple point about “Le Bateau Ivre,” there is plenty of alcohol consumption (in contrast to “Roman” where the boy-narrator is still drinking lemonade)19 : “Plus léger qu’un bouchon j’ai dansé sur les flots” [as light as a cork I danced upon the waves] (14). Other references include “taches de vins bleus” [blue winestains] (19); “plus fortes que l’alcool” [stronger than alcohol] (27); “sèves inoues” [unheard-of saps] (39); “Fermenter less marais énormes” [ferment the huge marshes] (49); and “L’âcre amour m’a gonflé de torpeurs enivrants’” [bitter love has swollen me with drunken torpors] (91). Perhaps one would expect no more than a sailor used to a daily quota of rum, but I would nevertheless stress the extreme youth of the author, only seventeen years old. This is the same age as St John Perse when he wrote “Images à Crusoe” (1904). However that is his first work, whereas in the context of Rimbaud’s highly compressed career, “Le Bateau Ivre” appears as almost a late masterpiece. This is still close to the point of development at which Rousseau considered Robinson Crusoe the only book suitable for Emile. Rimbaud wishes both to address and become the child: J’aurais montrer aux enfants ces dorades Du flot bleu… (57–58) [I would have shown to children the dolphins of the blue wave]20

Like “Voyelles,” the poem can be read as a kind of catechism or spelling lesson. Reading it is like flicking through a picture book: there is a

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similar miscellany of exotic creatures including “panthères” [panthers] (46), “glauques troupeaux” [blue-green herds] (48) “Leviathan” (50), “serpents géants’”[giant snakes] (53) and “hippocampes noirs” [black sea-horses] (74).21 Even in Defoe, it becomes tempting to see the island as a kind of mobile vessel; in Rimbaud, the boat itself breaks free from the continental mass of the Old World: Et les Peninsules demarrées N’ont pas subi tohu-bohus plus triomphantes… [and the unmoored Peninsulas were no less triumphant at the beginning of the world]22

This severance occurs “Sans regretter l’oeil niais de falots” [with no regret for the stupid eyes of lighthouses] (16). The absence of harbor illumination allows full appreciation of the light of the stars, themselves seen as islands spread through galaxies23 : J’ai vu des archipels sidéraux et des îles Dont les cieux délirants sont ouverts au vogueur. (91–92) [I have seen starry archipelagoes and islands whose delirious skies are open to the voyager]

The boat at times acquires the capacity of a spacecraft “Jeté par l’ouragan dans l’ether sans oiseau” [thrown by the hurricane through the birdless ether] (70), proudly boasting, “Moi qui trouais le ciel rougeoyant comme un mur” [myself who has gouged the reddening sky like a wall] (74). At other times, it becomes a submarine plunging into “les lointains vers les gouffres caractant” [distance cataracting into depths] (52) and “Golfes bruns” [brown gulfs] (58). It belongs alongside Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea, written in the preceding year, 1870. Captain Nemo also reappears as a providential deity in the Mysterious Island (1874), an explicit rewrite of Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. In terms of residual Anglo-French rivalry, Nemo fought against the British in the 1857 Indian Uprising as an ally of Prince Dakkar, nephew of TipuSahib, Rajah of Bundelkhand in the prolonged eighteenth-century wars in Mysore. The narrator declares “J’étais insoucieux de tous les équipages” [I was careless of cargos] (5) in contrast to Crusoe’s meticulous book-keeping.

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Nevertheless the poem shows continual awareness of global “circulation” (39) of trade-routes and commodities. The “Porteur de blés flamands ou de cotons anglais” [carrier of Flemish wheat and English cotton] (6) disdained at the opening reappears in the final stanza’s “porteurs de coton” (104). For all the visionary delirium, business goes on as usual. Ni traverser l’orgeuil des drapeaux et des flammes Ni nager sous les yeux horribles des pontons… (105–06) [Nor pass through the pride of flags and pennants Nor swim past the horrible eyes of the prison-ships]

The emphasis on “drapeaux” and “flammes” refers to the attempted embargo imposed on the Southern States in the American Civil War, in which case it is tempting to read “pontons” (hulks, prison ships) as slaving vessels, whose captives peer out with “yeux horribles.” Tidal surges often acquire industrial overtones: Quand les juillets faissient crouler à coups de triques Les cieux ultramarins aux ardents entonnoirs… (75–76) [when julys were beating with savage blows ultramarine skies into steam funnels]

“Ardents entonnoirs” brings us abruptly into the age of steamships and international shipping routes. There are initial hints of a North American context. “Comme je descendais les fleuves impassibles” [as I was going down impassible rivers] (1), following the course of the Quebecois coureurs de bois down the St Lawrence through the Mississippi Basin past the “Peaux-Rouges” [RedSkins] (3), following an Acadian rather than Anglo-Saxon geography. Then the backdrop becomes oceanic: Je sais les cieux crevant en éclairs, et les trombes Et les ressac et les courants … (29–30) [I know the skies bursting with lightning and the waterspouts and the breakers and the currents]

The Pacific meterology is reinforced by references to “L’ éveil jaune et bleu des phospheres chanteurs” [the blue and yellow awakening of the singing phosphorous] (40), ‘La houle a l’assaut de récifs’ [the swells

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attacking the reefs] 42) and “Le mufle aux Oceans poussifs” [the muzzle of wheezing Oceans] (44). As in Coleridge’s “Ancient Mariner,” imagery of the South Seas merges with that of polar exploration—“La nuit verte aux neiges éblouies” [the green night with dazzling snow] (37)—in a world in which “Glaciers, soleils d’argent” [glaciers, silver suns] coexist with “flots nacreux, cieux des braises’” [pearl waves, skies of red-hot coals] (53); the boat itself becomes “Martyr lassé des pôles et des zones” [martyr weary of poles and tropics] (61). The narrator of the poem is the craft itself. There are certain moments where a similar fusion occurs in Defoe such as the storm on the early voyage from Hull, or Crusoe’s return to the shipwreck, where he poignantly identifies not so much with the dead crew as the broken vessel. The narrator of Defoe’s A New Voyage around the World (1697) might (in terms of eighteenth-century thing-narratives) be the voice of the boat itself, animated by the spirit of global capitalism which erases individual identity: “I shall at present conceal my name and that of the ship also.” Intriguingly the persona adopted is French: “The captain in whose name I write this gives me leave to make use of his name and conceal my own” who is revealed to be “Our French captain Jena Michael Mirlotte with 32 French seamen.” During the war between Britain and Spain, “French trade into the South Seas” was allowed to continue so it was opportune to use their flag as a convenience. National identities become as interchangeable as the categories of piracy and of commerce. As in “Le Bateau Ivre,” following such an itinerary, Defoe’s narrator promises that “we might discover even to the pole itself and find out new Worlds and new Seas which had never been heard of before.”24 St John Perse (pseudonym for Alexis Leger) was, like Rimbaud, only seventeen when he composed “Images à Crusoe,” a sequence of nine prose-poems.25 This work had been preceded by a translation of Defoe’s entire novel (Rousseau had also planned a version). The title indicates images taken from the novel but also pays homage to its mythic force. For a writer born in Guadaloupe, one might assume an accentuation of Caribbean features of the setting; however, the conventions of the Robinsonade introduce Pacific resonances, and the stylistic precedent of Rimbaud’s “Le Bateau Ivre” (1871) also exerts a powerful gravitational pull.26 The tropical setting of the second half of “La Ville,” for example, seems to imply a reversion to primeval slime rather than a geographical location: “les vases sont fecondes” [the muds are fertile].

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Perse worked for the French diplomatic service, playing a leading role in the delegation at Munich in 1938, before moving into exile in the United States after the fall of France in 1940. It is striking how direct the links are between the Robinsonade and policy-making in French Orientalism: René de Chateaubriand had a high profile if uneven political career under Napoleon, reaching the rank of consul; Pierre Loti’s profession was naval captain; and Paul Claudel held a succession of senior diplomatic posts including consul in China. It is a tradition of extremely worldly exoticism. Visionary discovery is far from incompatible with the pursuit of material reward, as Rimbaud’s own later career as gun-runner and slave-trader would confirm. If Rimbaud merges boat and island into a high-velocity kaleidoscopic swirl, the narrator “Images à Crusoe” is divided between urban squalor (“Leur haleine se déverse par le canal des cheminées… Graisses! haleines reprises et la fumée d’un people très suspect—car toute ville ceint l’ordure” [their breath spreads over the canals of the factories… Greasy, breaths drawn in and the smoke of a suspicious people, because all towns are surrounded by manure] (iii 2, 8–9) and dream of a “exil lumineux” [luminous exile] (ix 4) both spatial and temporal. The first poem, “Les Cloches” opens abruptly: Vieil homme aux mains nues remis entre les hommes, Crusoé! [old man with bare hands thrown back among men, Crusoe] (i 1–2)

In Defoe, Crusoe’s age seems largely irrelevant; he shows no hesitation about embarking on further global peregrinations in his 60s.27 He remains largely unchanged over twenty-eight years on his island, whereas Selkirk had almost completely lost his power of speech after four years marooned on Juan Fernandez.28 The third volume, Serious Reflections, supposedly meditations in old age, consists of loosely connected essays rather than a personal recollection of the earlier experience.29 Crusoe is largely indifferent to memories of England when on the island, and to the island when away from it. “Remis entre les hommes”: he is now castaway among men rather than on a desolate beach. Perse’s narrator has been “nourri du sel” of his own “solitude” [nourished with the salt of his solitude] (ix 8–9); it is return to civilization that leaves him listless and apathetic.

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tu pleurais, j’imagine, quand des tours de l’Abbaye, comme un flux, s’épanchait le sanglot des cloches sur la Ville… O Dépouille [you would cry I imagine when the bells of the Abbey like a flood spread the tears of the bells over the town O outcast!] (i 2–6)

In Defoe, Crusoe seldom weeps, and when he does it is usually more out of apprehension of divine punishment than sentimental contrition. In Perse, the “flux” of the chimes (reminding us of Crusoe’s difficulties with time-keeping) contrasts with the later image, “La Ville par le fleuve coule à la mer comme un abcès” [the town through which the river flows to the sea like an abscess] (iii 18–19). The aged narrator (“vieil homme”) has returned to an industrial city rather than a provincial town, blighted by factories, canals, smoke, and rubbish, simultaneously inhabiting what has been lost. He is “Dépouille’,” naked without his goatskins, but also skinned alive, reduced to a “poor bare forked animal” once back in his own society.30 Harraps Dictionary defines this as “reduced to essentials, spare, severe,” perhaps a fair description of Defoe’s style, but the opposite of Perse’s luxuriant rhetoric of tropical abundance. The scene is curiously uninhabited. There are no references in “Images à Crusoe” to cannibals or pirates, and Friday has returned to Europe; presumably Guadaloupe in 1904 had its own industrial zones as well. The island has reverted to its former prelapsarian state. It is restored to paradise because Crusoe is no longer there. Tu pleurais de songer aux brisants sous la lune; aux sifflements de rives plus lointaines; aux musiques estranges qui naissant et s’assourdissent sous l’aile close de la nuit… [you weep to think of the breezes under the moon, to the whistling of faraway shores, to strange musics which are born and grow louder under the wing of night] (i 7–10)31

Do sounds exist if no one hears them? Or are “unheard melodies,” as Keats insists, “sweeter”?32 pareilles aux cercles enchaîné’s que sont les ondes d’une conque, à l’amplification de clameurs sous la mer… [similar to the enchained circles which are the waves of a conch, amplifying the clamours of the sea] (i 11–12)

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“Enchaînés” means literally imprisoned, but is also the cinematic term for a dissolve cut, appropriate to the constant criss-crossing between worlds. “Cercles” could refer to the shores of the island but also to trade networks, and the sensory boundaries of the body. “Conch” as well as a shell symbolising poetic inspiration means the external ear; later the teeth (“tes gencives” [gums] (ii 5)) are experienced as a kind of physical constraint. Le pan de mur rest en face, pour conjurer le cercle de ton rêve… Et tu songes aux nuées pure sur ton île, quand l’aube verte s’élucidé au sein des eaux mystérieuses. [the section in front of you conjures up the circle of your dream… you think of pure clouds of your island, when green dawn brightens on the breast of mysterious waters] (ii 1–2, 7–8)

The “cercle” both encloses and releases just as the island combines individual confinement and spatial expansion.33 The middle section of “La Ville” apostrophizes: Crusoe! - ce soir pres de ton île le ciel qui se rapproche louangera la mer, et la silence multipliera l’exclamation des astres solitaires. Tire les rideaux; n’allume point. C’est le soir sur ton île et à l’entour ici et là partout où s’arrondit le vase sans défaut de la mer; c’est le soir couleur de paupières, sur les chemins tissés du ciel et de la mer. Tout est salé, tout est visqueux et lourde comme la vie des plasmes. [Crusoe! This evening close to your island, the approaching sky will praise the sea and silence multiples the exclamation of solitary stars. Draw your curtains, light nothing. It is evening on your island and it is surrounded by the flawless beach of the sea; it is an evening with the colour of eyelids, on paths woven by sky and sea. Everything is dirty, everything is viscous and heavy like the life of plasma] (iii 20–29)

Anything brought back from the island serves as an accusation rather than a company or relief. Friday now engages in petty theft combining gestures of submission with treacherous deceit: “tes yeux devenus fourbes et ton rire, vicieux” [your eyes become savage and your laugh vicious] (iv 11– 12). The parrot “tourne sa tete pour tourner son regard…tu regardes le deuxième cercle comme un anneau de sève morte” [the parent turns

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its head to catch your gaze… you regard the second circle like a ring of dead sap (yet another confining circle)] (v 12–13). The bow “ouvre tout au long de sa fibre secréte, comme la gousse mortes aux mains de l’arbre Guerrier” [opens all the length of its secret fibre like dead garlic implanted in a warrior tree] (vii 4–6). Most tersely, “Dans un pot tu l’as enfouie, la graine pourpre demeurée a ton habit de chère. Elle ne point germe’” [in a pot that you have buried, the purple seed that clung to your goatskin costume. It does not sprout] (viii 1–3). “Images à Crusoe” ends in a kind of self-reflexive loop. - Ainsi, tu te plaignais, dans la confusion du soir. Mais sous l’obscure croisée, devant le pan de mur d’en face, lorsque tu n’avais pu ressuciter l’éblouissement perdu, alors, ouvrant le Livre, tu promenais un doigt usé entre les prophèties, puis le regard fixé au large, tu attendais l’instant de départ, le lever du grand vent qui te descellerait d’un coup, comme un typhon, divisant les nuées devant l’attente de tes yeux. [thus you lament in the confusion of evening, but under the obscure nook before the facing section, you have not been able to resuscitate the lost dazzlement; then opening the Book, you move a worn finger among the prophecies, gaze fixed to the beyond, you wait for the moment to leave, the rising of the great wind that will like set you loose like a typhoon, dividing the clouds before the expectation of your eyes] (xi 12–21)

The prospect of departure provides immediate relief, as in Baudelaire’s “L’ Invitation au Voyage” or Mallarmé’s “Brise Marine.” The impending typhoon is longed for as a means of restoring a lost paradise. The gesture of opening the book (“ouvrant le Livre”) merges with the sacred text of Crusoe itself, which becomes a volume of prophecies. It prefigures not only the world of colonialism and capitalism, but also the tradition of the Robinsonade that asserts an opposing ethic of joy and abundance, in which Rimbaud’s “coeur fou” becomes Perse’s “Joie! ô joie deliée dans les hauteurs du ciel!” [joy O mad joy in the heights of the sky’] (ii 17; repeated iii 60). However one must be cautious about any too simplistic opposition between British Puritan work-ethic and French pleasure-principle. In both, the island has a micro and macrocosmic potential as the site of both confinement and expansion. Spatial finitude does not preclude involvement in global circulation. The Pacific has a history of trade, migration,

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and conflict that long predates European intervention. The prelapsarian rhetoric of Bougainville is inseparable from colonial rivalry with Britain, and as previously noted, Rousseau’s ceding of precedence to an English book in 1762 conveniently intersects with the transfer of colonial possessions in the Treaty of Paris in 1763. Hence the new urgency with which Pacific expansion was regarded. Lyrical celebration of abundance arguably accentuates a consumerist ethic: as Deleuze notes, Giraudoux’s Suzanne finds on the island all the goods available at a Parisian department store, and so need not even have left home.34 The ethic of idleness yearned for by Perse’s narrator requires the surplus produced by anonymous labour, and implicitly slavery. The customary mode of heightened declamation might be seen as a projection of commodity fetishism onto proliferation of linguistic utterance. The incessant idealisation of solitude as liberation has a factitious and chimerical quality, arguably fixated in solipsistic reverie. Perhaps it is appropriate to let Defoe himself have the final word on the astonishing proliferation of the Robinsonade tradition that he had inaugurated. I would suggest that the genre itself can be seen as preinscribed in Farther Adventures. The two wrecked boats encountered on the journey back to the island embody two divergent options within the Robinsonade. I would not wrong them neither, there may be many that were thankful afterward, but the Passion was too strong for them at first, and they were not able to master it, they were thrown into Exstasies and a Kind of Frenzy, and it was but very few that were compos’d and serious in their joy. Perhaps the Case may have some addition to it from the particular Circumstances of that Nation they belong to: I mean the French, whose temper is allowed to be more volatile, more passionate and more sprightly and their spirits more fluid than in any other Nations.

The first is a grim survival narrative, for the English threatened with starvation (among the most powerful scenes in the entire novel).35 In contrast, the passengers of the “French Merchant Ship… homeward bound from Quebec’ experience “inexpressible Joy” (15–16). It is impossible to express the several Gestures, the strange Extravagancies, the Variety of Postures which these poor deliver’d People run into to express the Joy of their Souls at so unexpected a Deliverance; Grief and Fear are easily described. Sighs, Tears, Groans and a very few Motions of the Head and Hands make up the Sum of its Variety. But an Excess of

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Joy, a Surprize of Joy has a thousand Extravagancies in it; there were some in Tears, some raging, and tearing themselves; as if they had been in the greatest Agonies of Sorrow; some stark-raving and downright lunatic; some ran about the Ship stamping with their Feet, others wringing their Hands; some were dancing, some were singing, some laughing, more crying; many quite dumb, not able to speak a Word; others were sick and vomiting, several swooning, and ready to faint; and a few were crossing themselves and giving God thanks.36

It is tempting to speculate that many of these “poor deliver’d People” would return home to initiate the “thousand Extravagancies” of the French Robinsonade tradition.

Notes 1. Arthur Rimbaud, “Roman,” Oeuvres (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 1991) 72 (line 17). Merlin Coverley links the coinage to Defoe, but as urban flâneur of Journal of the Plague Year rather than Crusoe’s oceanic voyaging: Psychogeography (Harpenden: Pocket Essentials, 2006) 68–70. 2. De Foigny was translated as A New Discovery of Terra Incognita Australia, or the Southern World (London: John Dunton, 1693) so may have been known to Defoe. See Richard Phillips, “Reading and Resistance: Anarchy and Anti-Imperialism in French Extraordinary Voyages,” Mapping Men and Empire: A Geography of Adventure (London: Routledge 1997) 113– 42. 3. La vie et les adventures surprenants de Robinson Crusoe (Amsterdam: L’ Honore et Chatelain: 1720). 4. For fuller discussion, see Mary L. Belhouse, “On Understanding Rousseau’s Praise of Robinson Crusoe,” Canadian Journal of Social and Political Theory 6 (1982): 120–37. 5. Jean Giraudoux, Suzanne and the Pacific (1923; trans. Ben Ray Redman, New York: Howard Fertig 1975) 226; Gilles Deleuze, Desert Islands and Other Texts (Los Angeles: Semiotexte 2004) 9–14 (12). 6. The True-Born Englishman and Other Writings, ed P.N. Furbank and W.R. Owen (London: Penguin 1997) 25–59 (lines 335, 341–44). 7. The Miscellaneous Prose Works of Sir Walter Scott (Edinburgh: Cadell, 1834). Cited from Rogers, Daniel Defoe: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge, 1972) 79. 8. Emile or on Education,The Collected Writings of Rousseau, trans. and ed. by Christopher Kelly and Allan Bloom ([1762] Dartmouth College Press: Hanover and London, 2010) 331.

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9. Emile 334. Scott suggests the novel should break off before the introduction of Friday (Rogers, 78). Campe’s Robinson der Jüngere (1779–80) follows Rousseau’s prescription, becoming the standard European version over the next century. 10. “The British defeat at Saratoga, which had brought France into the war on the side of the colonists, and France’s sea victories off Grenada and Tobago had inspired Hunter with a permanent hatred of the French; and the shame of the eventual British capitulation, the surrender of what was then the brightest jewel in the English crown, had cause him to resign his commission”: Friday, or the Other Island, trans. Norman Denny (1967; Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997) 221. 11. On Bougainville’s service in Canada, see Frank McLynn 1759: The Year Britain Became Master of the World (London: Random House, 2005) 22– 29. He was later to gain partial recompense by playing a leading role in American War of Independence. 12. Lewis [Louis-Antoine] de Bougainville, A Voyage Around the World, Performed by Order of His Most Christian Majesty, in the Years 1766–1769, trans. George Reinhold Forster (London: J. Nourse and T. Davis, 1772). Cited from archive.org/details/VoyageAroundTheworldbyLewisDeBougainville1766– 9. 13. Forster observes that “Spice trade, grandeur and wealth will soon be divided among them, the French and the English.” 14. The Poems of William Cowper, 3 vols., ed. James D. Baird and Charles Rykamp (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980–95) I 403–4. 15. Robinson Crusoe: Myths and Metamorphose., ed. Lieve Spaas and Brian Stimpson (London: Macmillan, 1996), based on a conference sponsored by the Institut Francais de Royaume-Uni is perhaps more significant for what is not included. (Even the concluding essay by Brian Stimpson on Valery (294–315) only deals with a fairly perfunctory short story). Perhaps equally surprising is the complete omission of Verne. 16. St John Perse, “Images à Crusoe” (1904). Oeuvres Complètes, 2 vols (Paris: Gallimard, 1972) I 9–20. 17. Paul Claudel, Nouvelle Revue Francais (1912). Cited from Catharine Savage Brosman, French Culture 1900–75 (Gale Research, 1995) 82. 18. Oeuvres 128–31. 19. He even retains his taste for “confiture exquise” [high-class jam] (71). 20. This is reinforced by references such as “Plus sourd que les cerveaux des enfants’” [heavier than children’s heads] (10); “Plus douce qu’aux enfants la chair des pommes sures” [sweeter than the taste of firm apples to children] (17).

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21. In this, Rimbaud follows the tradition of casual zoological eclecticism of Johann David Wyss’s The Swiss Family Robinson (1800) and continued by Verne. 22. Tohu-bohu is a world without geographical form: OED cites Genesis 1:2. 23. This location is repeated in “Presque île, ballotant sur mes bords les querelles / Et les fientes d’oiseaux clabadeurs aux yeux blonds” [almost an island tossing on my beaches the squalling and droppings of blond-eyed gossiping seabirds] (65–66). 24. All quotations from A New Voyage Around the World (1725), ed. John McVeagh (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2009) 31–32. 25. “Les cloches” [the bells]; “Le mur’”[the wall]; “La ville” [the town]; “Vendredi” [Friday]; “Le perroquet” [the parrot]; “Le parasol de chèvre” [the goatskin umbrella; “L’arc” [ the bow]; “La graine” [the seed] and ‘Le livre” [the book]. These will be referred to as i–ix. 26. Compare “Ce sont des grandes fleurs mouvantes en voyage, des fleurs vivants à jamais, et qui ne cesseront de croître par le monde” (iii 50–52) [These are the great flowers moving on the voyage, flowers living for ever, that never cease to spread through the world] with “Le Bateau Ivre”: “J’ai heurté, savez-vous, d’incroyables Florides / Mêlant aux fleurs de panthers à peaux / D’hommes” [I have struck, do you realise, unbelievable Floridas where flowers mix with panther-skinned men] (45–47). 27. Moll Flanders incidentally is 61 when she embarks on her new life in Virginia at the conclusion of the novel. 28. This is noted by Cowper: “Never hear the sweet music of speech, / I start at the sound of my own” (“Verses”11–12). 29. For example “Of Solitude” (57–66) is generalised meditation rather than re-enactment of Crusoe’s own extensive experience of the condition. 30. The goatskins are singled out by Rousseau, who even wishes Emile to dress in them. “Unaccommodated man is no more than such a poor, bare, formed animal as thou art” King Lear (Act 3 scene 4 106–09). 31. This is oddly reminiscent of “this island is full of noises, sounds and sweet airs that delight and hurt not” of Shakespeare’s The Tempest (Act 3 scene 2 135–36). 32. “Heard melodies are sweet but those unheard / Are sweeter”: “Ode to a Grecian Urn” (11–12). 33. “Le parasol de chèvre” also closes with a cat-litter tray “decerclé où s’entasse la plume” [enclosed where you pile up feathers] (vi 3–4). 34. Desert Islands 12–13. 35. Farther Adventures 21–26. 36. Farther Adventures 15–16.

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Works Cited Belhouse, Mary L. 1982. ‘On Understanding Rousseau’s Praise of Robinson Crusoe’, Canadian Journal of Social and Political Theory 6: 120–37. De Bougainville. Lewis [Louis-Antoine] de Bougainville. 1772. A Voyage Around the World, performed by Order of his most Christian Majesty, in the Years 1766–1769. Translated by George Reinhold Forster. London: J. Nourse and T. Davis. Archive.org/details/VoyageAroundTheworldbyLewisDeBougainville1766-9. Claudel, Paul. 1912; 1995. Nouvelle Revue Francais. Cited from Catharine Savage Brosman. French Culture 1900–75 . Gale Research. Coverley, Merlin. 2006. Psychogeography. Harpenden: Pocket Essentials. Cowper, William. 1782; 1980–1995. The Poems of William Cowper, 3 vols. Edited by James D. Baird and Charles Rykamp. Oxford: Clarendon Press. De Foigny, Gabriel. 1693. A New Discovery of Terra Incognita Australia, or the Southern World. London: John Dunton. Defoe, Daniel. 1719; 2008. The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe. The Novels of Daniel Defoe 1. Edited by W.R. Owens. London: Pickering & Chatto. ———. 1719; 2008. The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe. The Novels of Daniel Defoe 2. Edited by W. R. Owens. London: Pickering & Chatto. ———. 1720; 2008. Serious Reflections during the Life and Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe with His Vision of the Angelick World. The Novels of Daniel Defoe. 3. Edited by G.A Starr. London: Pickering & Chatto. ———. 1725; 2009. A New Voyage Around the World, by a Course Never Sailed Before, Being a Voyage Undertaken by Some Merchants, Who Afterwards Proposed Setting Up an East-India Company in Flanders. Edited John McVeagh, Vol. 10. London: Pickering & Chatto. ———. 1997. The True-Born Englishman and Other Writings. Edited by P.N. Furbank and W.R. Owens. London: Penguin. Deleuze, Gilles. 2004. Desert Islands and Other Texts, 9–14. Los Angeles: Semiotexte. Fisher, Carl. 2018. Innovation and Imitation in the Eighteenth-Century Robinsonade, 99–111. Richetti. Hyacinthe, Sainte and Justus van Effen. 1720. La vie et les adventures surprenants de Robinson Crusoe. Amsterdam: LeHonore et Chatelain. Giraudoux, Jean. 1923; 1975. Suzanne and the Pacific. Translated Ben Ray Redman New York: Howard Fertig. Keats, John. 1970. The Poems of John Keats. Edited by Miriam Allott. London: Longmans McLynn, Frank. 1759: the Year Britain Became Master of the World. London: Random House.

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Perse, St John. 1904; 1972. Images à Crusoe. Oeuvres Completes. 2 vols. Paris: Gallimard: 19–20. Phillips, Richard. 1997. Mapping Men and Empire: A Geography of Adventure. London: Routledge. Richetti, John, ed. 2018. Cambridge Companion to Robinson Crusoe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rimbaud, Arthur. 1971. Oeuvres. Paris: Classiques Garnier. Rogers, Pat, ed. 1972; 1995; 2011. Daniel Defoe: the Critical Heritage . London: Routledge. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. 1762; 2010. Emile or on Education, The Collected Writings of Rousseau. Translated and Edited by Christopher Kelly and Allan Bloom [1762]. Hanover and London: Dartmouth College Press, 2010 Scott, Sir Walter. 1834. The Miscellaneous Prose Works of Sir Walter Scott. Edinburgh: Cadell. Cited from Rogers. Shakespeare, William. 1974. The Riverside Shakespeare. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Spaas, Lieve and Brian Stimpson, eds. 1996. Robinson Crusoe: Myths and Metamorphoses. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Tournier, Michel 1967.Vendredi ou les limbes du Pacifique. Paris Gallimard. ———. 1997 Friday or the Other Island. Translated by Norman Denny. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Verne, Jules. 1870; 1998. Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. Oxford: Wordsworth Editions. ———. 1874; 2010. Mysterious Island. Oxford: Wordsworth Editions. Wyss. Johann David. 1800; 2006. The Swiss Family Robinson. London: Penguin Random House.

CHAPTER 8

Krusoe Robinson’s Adventure: Technology of the Self and Double Consciousness in Joachim Heinrich Campe’s Robinson der Jüngere Chunjie Zhang

Introductory Note This abridged chapter was originally published in its full length as part of my book Transculturality and German Discourse in the Age of European Colonialism (2017).1 In the book, I aim to delineate the contours of transculturality in travel writings, literary works, and philosophical treatises written in German and read them from the perspective of how nonEuropean cultures have impacted the architecture of German thinking.

C. Zhang (B) University of California, Davis, Davis, CA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 S. Clark and Y. Yoshihara (eds.), Robinson Crusoe in Asia, Asia-Pacific and Literature in English, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-4051-3_8

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The eighteenth century is a crucial period of global modernity because a number of European oceanic expeditions in this time period laid the foundation for expanding the trade network on sea connecting almost all parts of the world. Significant literature and intellectual work emerged and documented this transcultural moment. The reason why I call it transcultural instead of using the theoretical notion of Orientalism, coined by Edward Said, lies in the reason that I intend to emphasize the impact of non-European cultures on the architecture of German and European thought, in addition to critiquing the Eurocentric and racist misrepresentations of non-Europeans. The notion of transculturality allows us to see the humble learning attitude and the admiration of the Europeans toward non-European cultures before the arrival of nineteenth-century imperialism with a much higher degree of violence and exploitation aided by advanced science and technology. I endeavor to unearth the agency of non-European figures and cultures in German literature and philosophy and read texts as intertexts—as a porous discourse that contains a multiplicity of agencies and subjectivities. The author is not the only voice in the text but a transmitter of discursive knots. Germany did not exist as a nation-state in the eighteenth century. German-speaking principalities including Prussia or Saxony had smallscale colonies for a very short period. This, of course, does not mean that German-speaking culture did not indirectly participate in European colonialism and did not actively negotiate with non-European cultures. I understand “German” in the eighteenth century more as an ethnic and linguistic denominator than a national political and rigidly geographical determination. Campe’s Krusoe Robinson’s provenance from Hamburg is not an arbitrary choice as Hamburg was or still is probably the most important German harbor city with the most extensive connections to the global trade network. Since my book was written from the vantage point of texts that are written in German that document global influence, the chapter on Robinsonades is not exclusively geared toward Asia but serves as an example of non-European impact on popular literature. Although Campe’s Krusoe Robinson is stranded on a Caribbean island, I imagine that the location could also be in Asia Pacific and everywhere in the nonEuropean world—other contributions in this volume point out interesting connections between Japanese, Chinese, Korean and Philippine literatures related to Robinson Crusoe.

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Introduction The land was still at a great distance, and the storm was so violent, that everyone thought it impossible to reach the shore. However they rowed with the utmost diligence, and very luckily, the wind blew them toward land. Suddenly they saw a wave as high as a mountain rolling after their boat. At this dreadful sight, they all stiffened with terror and dropped their oars. Now the frightful moment approached them! The monstrous wave reached the boat, overset it—and they all sunk into the raging sea!2

Yet no matter how gruesome the shipwreck is, Krusoe Robinson, the protagonist in Joachim Heinrich Campe’s novel Robinson der Jüngere (Robinson the Younger, 1779–1780), survives the storm and embarks on his adventure on a deserted island. Indeed, the shipwreck is the end and the beginning of Krusoe’s fortunate and unfortunate journeys in many adventure stories: not only in Daniel Defoe’s canonical novel The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe of York, Mariner (1719) but also in numerous Robinson stories in German literature throughout the eighteenth century. Johann Christian Ludwig Haken, the editor of the five-volume Bibliothek der Robinsone (Library of the Robinsons, 1805–1808), reports on the pervasive popularity of these adventure stories known as Robinsonades: There was a period in German literature, in which the never ending need for literary entertainment and the writers’ activities favored this type of story with such an ardent zeal, that later the sinful flood of the sentimental novels about knights, ghosts, and robbers threatened to overflow all embankments. Inspired by Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, numberless Robinsons rained down for several decades throughout the last century.3

Apparently, Defoe’s fiction plays an essential role in the conception of German Robinson stories. Even a new word was invented to name this narrative genre—Robinsonade, a neologism first used by Johann Gottfried Schnabel in 1731. Wilhelm Retchir, the author of Der Sächsische Robinson (Robinson of Saxony, 1722), reports that in German the word “Robinson” has adopted a meaning like that of the French word avanturier: it describes a person who experiences all kinds of extraordinarily lucky and unlucky situations in his life.4 By 1800, 128 Robinsonades had been produced in Germany, far more than any other European

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Language, including English.5 Campe’s Robinson der Jüngere is one of the most important examples. Soon after it was published, Campe’s Robinsonade for children’s education was translated into French, English, and other European languages. Remarkably, it is still in print today in the twenty-first century. Robinsonades’ popularity is significant for the study of German transcultural discourse around 1800.6 In particular, the multilingual and multicultural sources of Robinsonades, by no means confined to Defoe’s work, demonstrate their transculturality and broaden the conventional interpretation of this genre as a national allegory of the German bourgeoisie. A detailed analysis of Campe’s novel renders visible the indispensable non-European component in the making of the modern self, as defined by technology and a double consciousness consisting of both the German Krusoe Robinson and the islander Freitag. German Robinsonades, either before or after the publication of Defoe’s novel, constitute a discursive network of maritime adventure fictions, to borrow Margaret Cohen’s term, in which Robinson Crusoe is not the origin but definitely plays a decisive role.7 German Robinsonades are not merely inextricably connected to the transcultural genealogy of British and French novels. More importantly, compared to other European languages, the exceptionally high quantity of Robinsonades in German also contributes to this new ground of studying novels’ transculturation and bears the potential to enrich the national tradition of German literature with non-European components.

National Allegory or Transcultural Tale Many critics, however, have seen Robinsonades as the national allegory of the German bourgeoisie. August Kippenberg argues that, in comparison to French, Dutch, and English readers, Robinson’s maritime adventures provide room for fantasy and imagination for the Germans who are not as familiar with the ocean as some other European nations. Kippenberg sees in Robinson’s psychological and physical struggles the quintessential metaphor for the German bourgeois identity that has won prominence over the course of the eighteenth century. The strict one-dimensional state control gave rise to Robinsonades, which combined the advantages of heroic and love romances, craft novels (Kunstroman), and picaresque narratives, integrating psychological characterization with practical tips of

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survival. Instead of dry morals, the character of Robinson vividly explicates and practices the desire for freedom, a unified nation-state, and a spirit of tolerance, compassion, and religious piety, all of which represent Germanness with enduring exactitude and validity.8 Jürgen Fohrmann disputes Robinsonades’ status as a “low” literary genre because he observes that the writers and readers of Robinsonades all belonged to the educated bourgeoisie (Bürgertum): they were teachers, higher officials, clerics, and businessmen—the only groups of people besides the aristocrats who could read and write in the eighteenth century. Statistically speaking, the educated bourgeoisie numbered approximately two hundred thousand and were spread across seventy cities, while the entire German population at that time totaled a maximum of 23 million. They were the producers and receivers not only of Robinsonades but also of the “high genres” of literature, after all. Hence, Fohrmann contends, Robinsonades were not produced by and for the allegedly lower classes. To the contrary, Robinsonades articulate the wishes and desires of German bourgeois culture and reflect the process in which individuals encounter social instability with creative survival skills and transform themselves from the object to the subject of history.9 Precisely because of Robinsonades’ significance for the German bourgeoisie, we should emphasize the non-European components in them and render visible the transculturality in German discourse. Susanne Zantop highlights the non-European locations and cultures in Robinsonades and their real-world significance. She points out that the arguments, which are purely concerned with inner German circumstances, ignore Robinsonades’ connections to the European expansionist and colonialist project. Zantop contends that, in Campe’s novel, which uses the story of Robinson Crusoe for pedagogical purposes, “education is metaphorically equated with colonization and colonization with education, the domestication of little savages. As Robinson colonizes his Freitag on the island, creating the perfect colonial society, so Father Campe educates, colonizes, and colonializes his young audience to prepare them for their role as future colonizers.”10 Yet while Zantop is right about the narrator’s condescending attitude toward the “savages,” Robinsonades’ indissoluble relation to the ocean and the pervasive descriptions of manual labor provide new grounds for further explorations into these stories’ profound entanglement with the impact of non-European culture and nature. Moreover, Zantop does not identify the contributions of Freitag to Robinson’s survival and thus fails

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to acknowledge the non-European maritime challenge and the mutuality in the dynamic process of the making of the modern self in Campe’s novel.11 Margaret Cohen’s approach to interpret Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe from the perspective of technology offers an innovative way out of the antagonistic binary between colonizers and colonized. Although she does not mention and perhaps is not aware of German Robinsonades, in The Novel and the Sea Cohen considers Robinson Crusoe the prototype for maritime adventure fictions, a neglected genre in the history of the novel. Cohen emphasizes the description of handicrafts and their performance in these fictions. These descriptions do not propel the movement of the narrative plot; rather, they “are fascinating and thought-provoking, both for governments and entrepreneurs thinking about profiting from foreign lands, as well as for armchair sailors seeking entertainment.”12 Cohen thus calls Robinson Crusoe a “mariner’s manual lite.” Rather than offering their readers a nuanced and differentiated introduction toward ethics, Cohen argues that maritime adventure fictions invite their readers to solve practical problems with Robinson Crusoe beyond good and evil. Ethics, according to Cohen, does not occupy a privileged position in the interactive relationship between the protagonist and the reader. Rather, the readers are encouraged to imaginatively engage with the situations of Crusoe and psychologically practice flexibility and creativity to survive. The temporality in adventure stories always implies future prospects, even if the future is related to an imagined past. Cohen argues that this narrative futurity illuminates why Robinson Crusoe “has been hospitable to sequels, both by Defoe and by subsequent writers—as is adventure fiction more generally.”13 This statement of futurity helps explain the huge quantity of German Robinsonades. Focusing on British and French novels, Cohen wonders why there was a gap between 1748 and 1824 in which adventure fictions did not thrive. However, if she only moves one step eastward, to the Germanspeaking regions, then the chronological problem she posed becomes a geographical and linguistic one. While Cohen stresses handicrafts’ practicability, I am more intrigued by the question of why the performance of handicrafts is staged on an isolated island outside European cultural and geographical boundaries. Indeed, in Campe’s novel, unlike in Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, the protagonist Krusoe Robinson does not have any European tools from the shipwreck. In order to survive, his technological skills are inextricably connected to the natural environment of the

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Caribbean island. The performance of practical handicrafts depends on his learning about the climate, flora and fauna, and maritime conditions of the non-European island. Moreover, the islander Freitag contributes significantly to Krusoe’s survival by teaching him how to make fire and other useful techniques. Krusoe gradually develops an emotional tie to Freitag, without whom he cannot imagine life anymore. All these nonEuropean natural and cultural elements, I argue, shape the making of Krusoe’s German identity in Campe’s coming-of-age novel. I read German Robinsonades not merely as enrichment to the discourse of maritime adventure fictions Cohen delineates. More importantly, they demonstrate how non-European geographies and cultures co-construct and influence the German discourse through technology and emotion. The local German identity and the global insular consciousness are closely intertwined with each other. In the ensuing pages, I will first investigate how the natural environment of the Caribbean island determines the performance of technology and the making of the modern self in Campe’s Robinson der Jüngere; second, I interpret the emotional connections between Krusoe and Freitag as constituting a double consciousness within German identity.

Sentimentalism, Technology, and the Making of the Self Campe’s Robinson der Jüngere, published in 1779/1780, was so popular that it was in its 6th edition in 1797, the 17th in 1827, the 40th in 1848, and the 122nd in 1923. It was translated into Italian, Hebrew, Latin, and French in the same year it was published, and later from French into English. The story is written in the style of a dialog and chiefly narrated by a father to his children. In addition to the father narrator, there are six children—Gotlieb, Nikolas, Johannes, Lotte, Diederich, and Fritzchen. In the twenty-fifth of the thirty chapters, six other children join the evening story time. They are Matthias, Ferdinand, Konrad, Hans, Christel, and Karl. A mother, a friend B, a friend H, and a friend R are also present. While the friends and the older children help the father comment and pass judgment on the behavior of Krusoe Robinson, the small children ask questions about the motivations of Krusoe’s actions, the meanings of words, or other things they don’t understand. Certainly, the father narrator is the absolute authority who “corrects” the children’s “wrong” judgments and opinions, teaches them “healthy” morals, and instills trust

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in divine providence. In such a constellation, the story has two layers: one is the world of Krusoe Robinson and, later, Freitag; the other is the circle of the father narrator and his listeners. The readers of Campe’s novel form the third stratum of Robinson’s story. Produced during the heyday of the sentimentalism induced by Goethe’s Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (The Sorrows of Young Werther, 1774), which took the youth’s heart by storm, Campe’s work aims to debunk this weeping cult in German culture by emphasizing the healthy practice of handicraft and technology. In his essay Über Empfindsamkeit und Empfindelei in pädagogischer Hinsicht (On Sentimentality and Sentimentalism from a Pedagogical Perspective, 1779)—published shortly before Robinson der Jüngere—Campe considers it necessary to cultivate healthy emotions (Empfindsamkeit ) and get rid of the unwanted weeds of sentimentality (Empfindelei). While the former is true and natural and conforms to public mores, the latter is artificial, forced, and damaging. The former is shy, simple, short, and serious; the latter is loud, flamboyant, and vain. The former articulates less in words than in unnoticeable deeds; the latter appears playful, dramatic, declamatory, and frivolous. Healthy emotions are rooted in one’s firm belief and reason (Vernunft ) and are in accordance with human nature; unhealthy sentiments always depend on other people’s unpredictable feelings and are thus mercurial and unaccountable. Campe contends that healthy emotions come from a good education of body and mind. Only through physical training and mental cultivation can a young person possibly approach the perfection of humanity. Handicraft (Handwerksarbeit ) is considered the foremost important pedagogical method. Campe also lists the principles for emotional education: no exaggerations, no unrealistic feelings, emotional control toward all kinds of passion except the love for God, more emphasis on the positive sides than on the negative sides of human characteristics, no suggestions of the emotions that children cannot yet feel themselves, always connecting emotion to useful deeds to avoid idleness and overindulgence, the awareness of the gender differences that allow women to have more emotions than men, and careful book choices for children. At the end of his treatise, Campe also more concretely explicates what he means by good and bad emotions in a fictional conversation between two girls. One girl, Leonore, reads a tragic love story and becomes melancholic, indolent, and uninterested in taking care of others, whereas Charlotte, the other girl, happy and healthy, does lots of handicraft work and takes care of her

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little brother. Campe sees the greatest danger in the emotional responses caused by love affairs and sentimental literature that negatively influence a reasonable education of the youth. According to Campe, technology and handicrafts in Defoe’s novel are the most effective way to debunk the encroachment of harmful emotions caused by fashionable love fictions. Yet Campe considers an adapted version necessary to more effectively achieve his pedagogical goals.14 It is a huge disadvantage, Campe argues, that, in Defoe’s story, Robinson is already equipped “with all kinds of European tools” (mit allen europäischen Werkzeugen). Such a tool kit, Campe avers, already provides the comfort of civilization and promises the success of Robinson’s survival. It does not allow readers to realize what our hands and common sense can develop and accomplish. Campe thus reorganizes the story into three parts: in the first part, his protagonist Krusoe Robinson from Hamburg is deprived of everything. Campe aims to showcase the helpless barrenness of an individual cast out of society and what this person can achieve to reintegrate into society merely with the power of self-reflection and the will toward improvement. In the next phase, Campe gives Robinson a companion, Freitag (Friday), so that Robinson may learn to appreciate human companionship. Only in the third phase does Campe’s Robinson gain access to European tools and other necessary utensils through a shipwrecked European vessel so that Robinson, and the readers, can really appreciate these tools’ usefulness and value. Most importantly, Campe’s technological education also conveys the transcultural consciousness by putting the scene of Krusoe’s schooling on a non-European island. Toward the end of the story, as the narrator summarizes in chapter 26, Krusoe Robinson has learned almost all types of handicraft after the shipwreck: the baker, the smith, the tailor, the shoemaker, the carpenter, the cabinet-maker, the wheeler, the potter, the gardener, the farmer, the hunter, and the fisher. The narrator comments that Krusoe has actually mastered even more artisan skills and can make hundreds of things for which the lazy Europeans need help from many other people. Krusoe is now different from his fellow Europeans. The personal benefits of learning and doing manual labor are also visible: the more craft Krusoe and Freitag do, the stronger their bodies are and the happier and more mentally stable they become. Indeed, from the third chapter through the last chapter, Krusoe never ceases to learn to use objects for practical purposes. Handicraft is the central activity throughout the story.

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Commenting on Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, Karl Marx considers the selfsufficient way of life through handicraft as the ideal mode of production for a society without inequality and the fetishism of commodity. Marx stresses Robinson’s economic independence and his needs as the primary motivation for labor and production. Robinson’s labor is not defined by material objects, not reified, but solely serves his needs—he is thus free and independent. Marx further imagines that if a society consists of “free men, working with the same means of production held in common, and expending their many different forms of labour-power in full selfawareness as one single social labour force,” then Robinson’s independent labor based on personal needs serves as the model for a need-based society with more equality and less exploitation: “The total product of our imagined association is a social product. One part of this product serves as fresh means of production and remains social. But another part is consumed by the members of the association as means of subsistence. This part must therefore be divided among them.”15 Obviously, Marx takes Robinson’s tale seriously as the starting point of an alternative society— a society without the alienated relationships between laborers and their products, between consumers and the values of commodities, a society with a simpler and more transparent system of production and distribution than a capitalist society based on commodity production. Although Marx does not specify the cultural and geographical aspects and exercises a thought experiment in the social realm with a potentially international gesture, in Campe’s novel the non-European location of the island, I argue, is crucial for Krusoe Robinson’s creative mode of production. It is crucial that Robinson’s survival—especially, in Campe’s story, when he is bereft of all man-made tools—is far away from European circumstances. To survive in this new world Krusoe learns about the climate and the flora and fauna on the island and makes useful tools. His production is not only based on need but also depends on what’s available. The supply in the tropical island is key to his survival. When Krusoe finds a small cave in the rock, he needs to enlarge it to make it suitable as a bedroom. The narrator comments that if only he had some tools such as a tool bit (Hakeisen) or a stone chisel (Steinmeissel ), it would not be a problem to fulfill this wish—but he has nothing. Krusoe uses big shells as spades and water containers; discovers a fiber plant to make ropes and rope ladders; finds suitable stones to use as ax, wedge, and mallet (Beil, Keil, and Klöpfel ); creatively fashions an umbrella using coconut leaves, fish bones, and tree branches; and makes many other household utensils

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as well. He also learns to appropriate plants and animals for his survival: he eats oysters, coconuts, and sea turtles; he plants trees and builds a wall around his hideout; he dries hay to make a bed, makes a calendar on a tree, and learns to cultivate potatoes, corn, cocoa beans; and he keeps llamas for milk, meat, and fur. Krusoe’s survival adventure is not merely a self-sufficient production, as Marx sees it in Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. Rather, it is a process of the transformation of European knowledge in non-European circumstances. The natural environment on the Caribbean island challenges and enables Krusoe’s survival—the remaking of his selfhood happens at the same time. Krusoe’s survival adventures are not merely fictional inventions but are also connected to important events in the history of European exploration and colonization in the early modern period. For example, when Krusoe finds potatoes, the father first tells the children the physical appearance of the potato roots and asks the children to guess what plant it is. The young listeners swiftly jump to the right answer so that the father can briefly review when and how potatoes were imported to Germany: in the 1730s through colonial trade. The father also teaches the children that the Peruvians domesticated llamas long before the “discovery” and the colonization of the Europeans in the Americas. He also confirms their query that Peru is the land from which the Spaniards massively export silver and gold. In a similar vein, the father talks about the cultivation and economic values of corn and cocoa beans in European colonies. Unlike Defoe’s story, in which the protagonist works alone, Campe’s narrative tells the reader that the young listeners greatly admire and eagerly imitate Krusoe’s practical ingenuity in overcoming the scarcity of tools and supplies. On the fifth evening, after the father has related Robinson’s resourceful construction of an umbrella, one of the children, Nikolas, comes to the story time with a self-made bag and a kitchen sieve installed on a wooden handle to imitate Robinson’s parasol. The father calls Nikolas “our friend Robinson” and then shows an umbrella he himself has made. These imitations within the narrative framework encourage the readers to imitate Krusoe and adopt his technological conception of the world. The desire to live like Krusoe, however, is not only a domestic matter. When Hans expresses his desire to be with Robinson and make the raft with him, Diderich comments that he does not need to travel to a remote island to do manual labor. It is equally good to work at home. At first glance, this small conversation between the two children brings

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the exotic story back home. Yet it also bears the story’s global concern. While we can definitely argue in the fashion of exoticism that Campe uses the remote island and maritime adventure as a narrative convenience to educate children at home, why then didn’t he use a domestic story, as many of his contemporaries did? I argue that Campe uses the story not only as a fictional and exotic context but also as a real-world geographical description to teach about the entanglement between non-European geography and culture, European maritime enterprises and colonialism, and the role of technology in the process of individual identity formation around 1800. For Campe, it is the combination of domestic rootedness and the knowledge of non-European culture and geography that should define the German identity of a new generation. From Campe’s perspective, it is necessary to keep the world in mind, to know the details of the challenges from the non-European world so that the Germans of future generations can live a reasonable and practical domestic life—to be at home in the world. Krusoe’s story of finding useful things on the non-European island and using craft and technology to enable his survival offers a narrative metaphor for the history of technology. On the desert island, the order of Krusoe’s German world has disappeared—he is forced to prove himself and to re-create a different identity and personhood, which is new but, at the same time, also inherently connected to his former self in his German home. Krusoe’s new identity is fundamentally defined by handicrafts and the discovery of useful things in a little-known non-European site. When Krusoe searches the shipwrecked vessel on his shore, he finds a barrel of gold coins and a bag of diamonds. The narrator tells us that though this bag is the one that Europeans would grab first, Krusoe does not show any interest in possessing this treasure, because in his situation gold and diamonds are ultimately useless. Hence technology, materialism, and utilitarianism construct the foundation of Krusoe’s insular existence and his new personhood. His survival is not only a result of his own labor but, more importantly, also the recognition of and the commitment to technology and its usefulness. If Krusoe’s transformation symbolizes the emergence of the modern individual based on technology, then this modern identity is inherently connected to both the European and the non-European world. Krusoe’s transformation on the Caribbean island not only illustrates the process in which the new conception of the self emerges with technology but also

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renders visible the non-European participation in the making of the European modern individual. Campe’s story tells us that it is not enough to confine the technological era within the European cultural realm: technology has to be the skillful connector between European individuals and the non-European natural world. In order to become a capable modern man like Krusoe Robinson, Campe sees that it is necessary to become aware of the challenges from the non-European world and use technology and manual labor to effectively handle problems and make the world intelligible and livable. From this perspective, the Swiss pastor Johann David Wyss’s Der schweizerische Robinson (The Swiss Family Robinson, 1812)— a classic of children’s literature in English-speaking cultures that is still internationally popular today, with multiple film adaptations—follows and expands Campe’s program. A Swiss family of two parents and five children is stranded on a Pacific island, though not only Oceanic plants and animals but also Asian, African, and Caribbean flora and fauna are introduced, described, and incorporated into the family’s living conditions. Their island is not located at a specific place—rather, their island represents the entire non-European world. The Swiss family Robinson replaces the male individual (i.e., Campe’s Krusoe) with a nuclear family as the singular unit of society. Written approximately three decades later than Campe’s book, Wyss’s novel is embedded more in the time of European colonialism and imperialism of the nineteenth century. Hence Wyss’s family already has a complete European structure for teamwork, procreation, and then colonization in the non-European island. Campe’s Krusoe, however, is closely related to the islander Freitag after the first phase of his survival endeavors. The relationship between Krusoe and Freitag is not necessarily colonial, I argue; instead, Krusoe’s technological re-creation of the self heavily depends on Freitag’s presence and help. The making of the self is inherently inscribed in a double consciousness incorporating both the European and non-European world.

Freitag’s Contribution or Double Consciousness The duality of Krusoe and Freitag symbolizes a double consciousness that acknowledges, integrates, and negotiates with the maritime challenges from the non-European world and global differences. My reading reveals Freitag’s input into Krusoe’s survival. While not downplaying Krusoe’s master narrative, I also want to make clear his fears, uncertainties, and dependence on Freitag’s knowledge and existence. I emphasize

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the mutuality between Krusoe and Freitag in order to redirect our critical attention from the oppositions between the European colonizers and the non-European colonized toward the intimate connections between the two parties both internally and externally. Three themes are important in Krusoe and Freitag’s mutual relationship: emotion, cannibalism, and key skills for survival. When the father describes the actions of Freitag and Krusoe, he often refers to Krusoe as Freitag’s master (Herr) and uses the verb befehlen (to command, to order). But if the narrator describes Krusoe’s intention toward Freitag, the islander is usually referred to as Krusoe’s friend (Freund). Obviously, while the narrator makes clear the hierarchy between Krusoe and Freitag, Krusoe himself often treats Freitag as his friend. Although Krusoe teaches Freitag European-styled handicrafts and the German language (while he himself never makes an effort to learn Freitag’s language), Freitag significantly contributes to the improvement of Krusoe’s life. First of all, fire. The narrator tells us that Krusoe fails to make this himself and only comes to use fire accidentally caused by a thunderstorm. After a flood extinguishes this, Krusoe does not have fire for eight years. After Krusoe meets Freitag, however, the first thing Freitag does is to make a fire. If fire symbolizes a foundational feature of human civilization beyond cultural boundaries, as Goethe’s poem Prometheus metaphorically illustrates, then Krusoe is indebted to Freitag for this decisive improvement of his living condition as a human being. Krusoe also plans to build a boat so that he can eventually sail to the American continent and then go back to Europe, but he does not have efficient tools for carving out the wood. Freitag, however, immediately suggests that he use fire to complete this job in a better and faster way. Krusoe feels enlightened by this advice. As was common in eighteenth-century German discourse, the narrator calls Freitag and other islanders Wilden (savages)—so did Georg Forster, James Cook, Otto von Kotzebue, and others. Despite this problematic appellation, however, Freitag’s contributions are well acknowledged. The working community and the mutual friendship are celebrated. Freitag is also much superior to Krusoe in swimming and diving—very useful abilities for survival on an island. The narrator also calls Freitag a master (Meister) in making and using a bow and arrow. Freitag knows how to make clothes using tree fibers, so Krusoe can now finally take off the uncomfortable fur. By mixing coconut fibers with the fiber plant Krusoe has used, Freitag also makes much better (bei weitem überlegen) ropes

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than those Krusoe had made. Freitag also knows how to make tools such as knives, chisels, graters, and files out of bones, stones, shells, corals, and fish skins; he also uses these tools to make household utensils that seriously enhance the quality and comfort of their lives. Freitag is skillful in cooking, too: his llama stew is much more tender and delicious than Krusoe’s simple grill. Even after Krusoe has managed to survive and before the European tools arrive from the shipwreck, Freitag significantly improves Krusoe’s life with a series of technological advances. Krusoe’s existence is inextricably connected to Freitag and his skills, which the narrator acknowledges and values. These examples of Freitag’s skills are balanced by the comic scenes in which Freitag is mocked and laughed at. For example, he is frightened to death simply by touching hot water or hearing a gunshot, experiences that are quite common to Krusoe; he then considers Krusoe a sorcerer or a god. These comic scenes portraying Freitag as ignorant, superstitious, and inferior, however, are efficiently debunked by the passages describing Freitag’s skills and expertise. The seemingly conflictive portrayal of Freitag also reveals the narrator’s double standard in depicting Freitag as someone who is knowledgeable and skillful, yet inferior to other European achievements. Hence the narrator tells us that, after seeing the ship’s supplies and hearing the gunshot Krusoe fires, Freitag is so in awe and admiration (Ehrfurcht ) of the European that for days he does not feel comfortable in using a familiar tone of speech with him. And the father narrator, in particular, considers Christianity superior to Freitag’s “superstition” and believes that Freitag needs to be “civilized” and Europeanized by Christianity. Krusoe’s effort to Christianize Freitag, however, does not merely stem from his Eurocentric arrogance. It is also based on the fear of cannibalism. Indeed, cannibalism is a recurring theme that accompanies Krusoe’s insular stay from the very beginning. Although Krusoe is alone, his fear leads him to arm his home against possible onslaughts of cannibals. When he spots footprints in the sand, Krusoe is first filled with fear and anxiety because “he did not think of any civilized Europeans at the sight of this trace; rather he thought about one of the savage cannibals, who should have lived, as you know, on the Caribbean islands at that time.”16 The wording “should have existed” (sol gegeben haben) betrays a conjecture on cannibalism but by no means conveys a confirmed fact. Still, the novel’s many condescending remarks and descriptions express concern about this “barbarian custom.” Krusoe’s survival involves not only the

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external destruction caused by shipwreck but also the essential annihilation of the self through cannibalism. If a shipwreck causes the complete devastation of the familiar material world of Europe, then cannibalism dismally promises the extinction of human flesh as the material basis of life itself. When Krusoe asks Freitag if people after death are well treated by Toupan, the god of thunder, equivalent to the Christian God, Freitag answers that they will be treated well only when they have killed and eaten lots of their enemies. This brutal vision shocks Krusoe and compels him to “teach” Freitag “better” ideas about God and the life hereafter. Freitag is gradually Christianized and admits that cannibalism is evil, which he did not previously believe. After Freitag becomes a Protestant and the urgent danger of cannibalism gradually vanishes, the narrator also advocates religious freedom when the Spaniard (a Catholic) and the father of Freitag (a pagan, according to the narrator) join them on the island. The narrator asks the listening children whether Krusoe as the owner of the island has the right to force his subjects (Untertanen) to convert to his religion. All the children answer “Absolutely no!” (O bei Leibe nicht!) because religious belief is an individual matter and cannot be forced upon one by others. Forced belief does not reflect what one truly thinks, hence Krusoe is firmly determined to protect religious freedom on his island. Again the narrator’s double standard results in two quite different ways of dealing with religion: on the one hand, Freitag is converted to Krusoe’s religion so that Krusoe secures his own survival; on the other hand Krusoe grants religious freedom not only to a fellow European but also to another islander. Even though Freitag’s father is dismissed as a savage pagan his belief is recognized and protected by Krusoe. Common humanity’s sense of equality is also reflected in the narrator’s condemnation of European colonial slavery and the slave trade. Unlike in Defoe’s novel, where Robinson Crusoe is directly involved in the slave trade, slavery in European colonies and the slave trade itself are condemned in Campe’s novel. When the shipwreck is introduced in the novel, the theme is made explicit in the narrative. The ship should bring hundreds of Africans to Barbados in America. The father explains to his children: In Africa, in which the blackamoors live, most of the people are still raw and uncivilized like those beloved animals. Their chiefs or kings who are

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not much smarter themselves, also treat them accordingly. If any Europeans arrive there, they are offered crowds of black people for sale, just like one sells the cattle on the market here. Fathers even bring their own children and exchange them for trifles; thus the Europeans purchase a great number of them every year and carry them to America, where they must do the hardest work and are kept in pretty miserable living conditions. Such a slave (as people call them) suffers a lot and prefers often to die than to live like that.17

Clearly, the father’s explanation of the circumstances in Africa is deeply troubling and untrue. One of the children, Gotlieb, comments immediately that it is not right to treat human beings this way. The father comforts the children by telling them that this gruesome slave trade will soon be abolished. Even though the father describes the Africans in a derogatory way, the child’s remark confirms them as human. In other words, although the father’s account of the situation in Africa is deeply disturbing, the child’s comment eradicates the degradation of the Africans and insists on human equality. Krusoe’s further reflection that the terrible storm that caused the shipwreck actually spares those Africans on board of their gloomy fate as slaves reinforces Gotlieb’s remark. In particular, Krusoe’s emphatic glorification of divine providence which must have intended to use the storm to save the Africans, bathes the readers in a strong religious passion that enhances the child’s comment on God’s will. Along with the narrator’s disturbing depictions of the Africans, Campe’s novel also critiques colonial slavery and the slave trade. Emotion supports the moral condemnation of slavery and genuinely connects Krusoe and Freitag in addition to technology and religion. Although Campe aims to campaign against the weepy sentimentalism in German culture, his heroes are not emotionless automatons that are merely equipped with technology. While Krusoe and Freitag are bound by technology for the sake of their survival, emotion plays another important role in their mutual ties. Robinson der Jüngere contains greater emotional expressions and communications toward the end of the novel. However, Campe’s agenda of emotional education is exclusively concerned with friendship between men. Indeed, the world of Campe’s Krusoe Robinson is a world without women, as in Defoe’s work. Even children’s affections toward parents are also exemplified only through Freitag’s love for his father and the children’s admiration for their father, the narrator.

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Krusoe is at first reserved in expressing his emotion to Freitag. Before Freitag joins him, Krusoe’s emotions are primarily concerned with his remorse for not following his parents’ instructions and his gratitude to divine providence. After Freitag joins him, he warns Freitag to curb (mäßigen) his happy emotions after escaping a storm, be grateful to God, and focus on getting back to the island. In this phase, Krusoe’s feelings are more or less confined within the theological and ethical dimension but not directed toward a concrete event or a real person. When Freitag cries and jumps for joy because Krusoe agrees to travel to Freitag’s island to visit his father, the narrator does not reveal any of Krusoe’s emotions, only tells us how Krusoe carefully and practically prepares the trip. The mother in Campe’s novel, however, calls the children’s attention to the positive characteristics of Freitag, the noble savage, and asks the children to learn from his affection toward his parents. After this event during the story time, the father starts to say more about Krusoe’s emotion. When Krusoe spots the first European ship, however, he is for the first time unreservedly excited, like Freitag: Robinson did hardly know how to express his joy. Sometimes he jumped up, sometimes he cheered up, and sometimes he embraced Freitag and asked him, with glittering tears of joy in his eyes, that he should also be happy about it! Now off to Europe; now off to Hamburg! There, Freitag should see how the people lived in Hamburg! What kind of houses people could build there! How comfortable, peaceful, easygoing their lives are!18

Clearly, Krusoe’s desire to return to Europe always includes Freitag. His emotional outburst on seeing the ship involves not only his escape from the island but also Freitag’s visit to his home. Now, later in the novel, Krusoe more frequently uses his language and his body to express his happiness. Krusoe hugs Freitag when he volunteers to swim to the ship to check out the situation. When Freitag is scared by the gunshot Krusoe fires to entertain him, Krusoe immediately feels sorry, realizing that Freitag does not enjoy it and that he should have warned him beforehand. Krusoe “affectionately raised the trembling Freitag, embraced him, and told him to take courage.”19 When Robinson wakes up and asks where he is, Freitag answers: “In my arms, dear sir!”20 Tears roll down Freitag’s cheeks. The narrator continues: “Now a moving scene took place: Robinson thanked his savior, and Freitag hardly knew how to

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express his joy at seeing his beloved master restored to himself.”21 The father then tells the children that such a moving scene is the best conclusion for that day’s story time. Interestingly, the narrator refers often to the speechlessness of Krusoe and Freitag when they are overjoyed. Toward the end of the novel, the body overrides language and becomes the dominant medium for articulating emotion for the scene in which Krusoe realizes that his return to Europe is finally possible. He “flung his arms around Freitag’s neck, who sat asleep on the grass slope of the terrace; Robinson embraced him and bedewed his face with his tears, unable to utter a single word. ‘What happened, dear sir?’ asked Freitag waking up, and terrified at the stormy caresses. Robinson, overjoyed, could only say: Ah, Freitag!”22 Freitag is not as excited as Krusoe, however, because he does not want to leave his island home. The father narrator then warns his children to control their emotions and not to be as excessively emotional as Krusoe. This is because he suffers a huge disappointment when he can no longer see the ship and presumes that it has sailed away without him. (In fact the captain has simply moved the ship to another location.) Yet no matter how the narrator criticizes Krusoe’s sentimentalism, it is clear that Krusoe’s tie to Freitag has grown stronger. Comparing this passage with the one about Krusoe’s happiness when he views the first European ship, we realize that the level of excitement is completely different. Krusoe’s caress and hugs reveal that these two men have a much closer relationship now than at the beginning of their relationship. Even though Krusoe hopes to return to Germany his connections to the islander do not begin to loosen but grow closer. Krusoe and Freitag maintain a lifelong friendship. Freitag accompanies Krusoe to Hamburg and learns a trade. The narrator comments that they stay together for the rest of their lives. If Campe’s story is about the rebirth of the self after the destructive shipwreck, then it is the rebirth with a transcultural consciousness consisting of both the German/European and the non-European world. In Shipwreck with Spectator, Hans Blumenberg discusses the metaphor of shipwreck throughout German and Western intellectual history and argues that “explaining the exotic foreign body as ‘just a metaphor’ is an act of self-assertion: the disturbance is described as an aid.”23 That is to say, the foreign body does not function merely as a metaphor but proves a fatal challenge to the existing order. To claim it as a metaphor is the attempt to integrate it but, at the same time, to wishfully assign it to the margin, although the challenge of the foreign already hits

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at the core of the system. In Campe’s novel, non-European knowledge, symbolized by Freitag and the island’s natural world, disturbs the conceptual and empirical harmony Krusoe Robinson has acquired back in Hamburg and demands a new subjectivity that can integrate the estranged circumstances. The incorporation of the foreign element in the style of a double consciousness is an inevitable move. The genre of Robinsonade also proves a disturbing element that provides a metaphorical locus in which non-European and non-conceptual knowledge finds its persistent articulation in the German transcultural discourse.

Notes 1. Chunjie Zhang, Transculturality and German Discourse in the Age of European Colonialism (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2017). 2. Joachim Heinrich Campe, Robinson der Jüngere, zur angenehmen und nützlichen Unterhaltung für Kinder (Stuttgart: Reclam, 2000), 45. All English translations in this chapter are mine. 3. Johann Christian Ludwig Haken, Bibliothek der Robinsone: In zweckmässigen Auszügen vom Verfasser der Grauen Mappe, 4 vols. (Berlin: J. F. Unger, 1805–1808), i–ii. 4. See Wilhelm Retchir, Der sächsische Robinson, oder Wilhelm Retchirs, eines gebohrnen Sachsens, wahrhafftige Beschreibung seiner in die acht und zwantzig Jahr von Leipzig aus, durch Holland, Engeland, Franckreich, Spanien, Portugall, die Barbarey, Griechenland, Servien, und Ungarn gethanen Reisen (Leipzig: Friedrich Lanckischens Erben, 1748), 2. 5. See Hermann Ullrich, Robinson und Robinsonaden: Bibliographie, Geschichte, Kritik (Weimar: Verlag von Emil Felber, 1898). Also see Jürgen Fohrmann, Abenteuer und Bürgertum: Zur Geschichte der deutschen Robinsonaden im 18. Jahrhundert (Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler, 1981). 6. In the history of the European novel, the German Roman turned from the French romance to the English novel, especially Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, as its primary generic model after 1720. See Bethany Wiggin, Novel Translations: The European Novel and the German Book, 1680–1730 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press and Cornell University Library, 2011). 7. See Margaret Cohen, The Novel and the Sea (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010). 8. See August Kippenberg, Robinson in Deutschland bis zur Insel Felsenburg (Hanover: Th. Schäfer, 1892). Like Kippenberg, Nicholas Boyle reads Johann Gottfried Schnabel’s Wunderliche Fata einiger See-Fahrer, absonderlich Alberti Julii... (Wonderful Stories of Some Seamen, especially Albert

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Julius..., 1731–43) as a metaphor for the German social order in the eighteenth century. See Nicholas Boyle, Goethe: The Poet and the Age (Oxford: Clarendon, 1991), 16. See Fohrmann, Abenteuer und Bürgertum, 37, 210, 216. Susanne Zantop, Colonial Fantasies: Conquest, Family, and Nation in Precolonial Germany, 1770–1870 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), 105–6. Zantop is right to point out that Campe’s education project prepares the Germans to become colonizers. The father’s idea that people can claim lands as their own where no others live also ignores the culture of the islanders. It is also true that Robinson claims the island as his own. However, Robinson in the end abandons the island and returns to Hamburg with his best friend. Hence I would not give greater weight to this element of colonization, which was mentioned in passing, than the long passages on handicrafts, survival, and friendship. Cohen, The Novel and the Sea, 76. Ibid., 74. For more details see the forword in Joachim Heinrich Campe, “Die Entdeckung von Amerika,” in Sämmtliche Kinder- und Jugendschriften (Braunschweig: Verlag der Schulbuchhandlung, 1831). Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1 (London: Penguin, 1976), 171–72. Campe, Robinson der Jüngere, 185. Ibid., 281. Ibid., 309. Ibid., 281. Ibid., 259–60. Ibid., 273. Ibid., 284. Hans Blumenberg, Shipwreck with Spectator: Paradigm of a Metaphor for Existence, trans. Steven Rendall (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1997), 83.

Works Cited Blumenberg, Hans. 1997. Shipwreck with Spectator: Paradigm of a Metaphor for Existence. Translated by Steven Rendall. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Blumenberg, Hans. 2009.Geistesgeschichte der Technik. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Boyle, Nicholas. 1991. Goethe: The Poet and the Age, vol. 1 of The Poetry of Desire (1749–1790). Oxford: Clarendon. Campe, Joachim Heinrich. 1831. Die Entdeckung von Amerika, in Sämmtliche Kinder- und Jugendschriften. Braunschweig: Verlag der Schulbuchhandlung.

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Campe, Joachim Heinrich. 2000. Robinson der Jüngere, zur angenehmen und nützlichen Unterhaltung für Kinder. Stuttgart: Reclam. Cohen, Margaret. 2010. The Novel and the Sea. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Fohrmann, Jürgen. 1981. Abenteuer und Bürgertum: Zur Geschichte der deutschen Robinsonaden im 18. Jahrhundert. Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang. 1808. Faust. Eine Tragödie. Erster Teil. Tübingen: Cotta. Haken, Johann Christian Ludwig. 1805–1808. Bibliothek der Robinsone: In zweckmässigen Auszügen vom Verfasser der Grauen Mappe, 4 vols. Berlin: J. F. Unger. Kippenberg, August. 1892. Robinson in Deutschland bis zur Insel Felsenburg. Hanover: Th. Schäfer. Marx, Karl. 1976. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1. London: Penguin. Retchir, Wilhelm. 1748. Der sächsische Robinson, oder Wilhelm Retchirs, eines gebohrnen Sachsens, wahrhafftige Beschreibung seiner in die acht und zwantzig Jahr von Leipzig aus, durch Holland, Engeland, Franckreich, Spanien, Portugall, die Barbarey, Griechenland, Servien, und Ungarn gethanen Reisen. Leipzig: Friedrich Lanckischens Erben. Schnabel, Johann Gottfried. 1743. Wunderliche Fata einiger See-Fahrer, absonderlich Alberti Julii … Nordhausen: Groß. Ullrich, Hermann. 1898. Robinson und Robinsonaden: Bibliographie, Geschichte, Kritik. Weimar: Verlag von Emil Felber. Wiggin, Bethany. 2011. Novel Translations: The European Novel and the German Book, 1680–1730, Signale: Modern German Letters, Cultures, and Thought. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press and Cornell University Library. Wyss, Johann David. 1812. Der schweizerische Robinson, oder, Der schiffbrüchige Schweizer-Prediger und seine Familie. Ein lehrreiches Buch für Kinder und Kinderfreunde zu Stadt und Land. Zurich: Orell, Füssli. Zantop, Susanne. 1997. Colonial Fantasies: Conquest, Family, and Nation in Precolonial Germany, 1770–1870. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Zhang, Chunjie. 2017. Transculturality and German Discourse in the Age of European Colonialism. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.

CHAPTER 9

¯ Kicking Away the Gold Coins: Otsuka Hisao’s Reading of Robinson Crusoe and the “Human Archetype” of Post-war Japan Masaaki Takeda

¯ This chapter discusses an interpretation of Robinson Crusoe by Otsuka 1 Hisao, a Japanese economist who introduced the spirit of capitalism and democracy into post-war Japan. Putting his interpretation into a genealogy of pedagogic adaptations consisting of Joachim Heinrich Campe’s Robinson der Jüngere and Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Émile, it will consider how these present an ideal image of the modern citizen which is unrealistic and possibly dangerous. It will also examine whether ¯ Otsuka’s project for modernizing Japan through the “human archetype” of Robinson Crusoe succeeded in the post-war period.2 Finally, this ¯ chapter suggests the importance of reading Otsuka Hisao’s text now, because it makes us see the merits and demerits of post-war Japanese society.

M. Takeda (B) Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 S. Clark and Y. Yoshihara (eds.), Robinson Crusoe in Asia, Asia-Pacific and Literature in English, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-4051-3_9

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¯ Otsuka Hisao (1907–96) taught at the University of Tokyo from the 1930s to the 1960s. He was a specialist in the history of economics and famous for his argument on the history of European capitalism. After World War II, he published several articles and books on Western democracy in which he clearly and accessibly introduced Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Thus, he became one of the leading theorists in the democratic movement of post-war Japan. It seems ¯ that Otsuka thought of it as a kind of mission to introduce the “true” idea of Western capitalism (he was a pious Christian, much influenced by Uchimura Kanzo, a priest who promoted Christianity independent of any churches). Imbuing Japanese with the spirit of capitalism, he hoped to prevent post-war society from succumbing again into irrational, short-sighted nationalism. ¯ Otsuka idealized British society as the pure embodiment of Western capitalism. That is probably why he repeatedly mentioned Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe in his post-war writings on economics. Based on his lectures before the general public, he wrote two famous books entitled The Methods of Social Science (1966) and Humanity in Social Science (1977). A passage from the former reads: “Well, if we are to understand the type or archetype of man called homo economicus that was presupposed when Adam Smith wrote his Wealth of Nations, we must study his Theory of Moral Sentiments closely; however, if you ask me to explain it easily, I would like to advise you to read Robinson Crusoe.”3 ¯ Then Otsuka explains how Crusoe on the desert island behaves like a rational and ethical man who dedicates his life to the steady management of his land. According to him, Crusoe, the incarnation of the spirit of capitalism, is free from any fetish attachment to money: In one scene, Robinson finds gold coins in the wrecked ship and kicks them saying that they are actually worthless although his countrymen contend for and even shed blood for them. You may suspect that this opinion contradicts the lifestyle the British middle-class approved when the Industrial Revolution was about to start. As a matter of fact, however, that is not the case.4

Crusoe’s abhorrence of selfish pursuit of profit does not contradict but ¯ corresponds to what Otsuka considers “the lifestyle the British middleclass approved.” In Humanity in Social Science, he goes so far as pointing

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out that they share with Crusoe “the ethos of … the rational industrial management” or “the spirit of capitalism”: Around the beginning of the eighteenth century, it seems, most British labourers … have already acquired the ethos of cooperating with the rational industrial management. … It was this ethos that Weber called “the spirit of capitalism.” If that is the case, you might think, this spirit is embodied in “Robinson Crusoe as a human archetype.” Yes, that’s true.5

¯ Although this chapter does not delve into whether Otsuka understands the ethos of the British middle-class correctly, one clear fact must be mentioned here: in Robinson Crusoe, the protagonist never kicks the coins found in a chest in the wrecked ship. Actually, we can hardly imagine how one might carry out such an action. It seems to be more plausible for Robinson to scornfully throw them away. In the original text, however, he does not do this, either: [T]ho’ I thought I had rumag’d the Cabbin so effectually, as that nothing more could be found, yet I discover’d a Locker with Drawers in it, in one of which I found two or three Razors, and one pair of large Sizzers, with some ten or a Dozen of good Knives and Forks in another I found about Thirty six Pounds value in Money, some European Coin, some Brasil, some Pieces of Eight, some Gold, and some Silver. I smil’d to my self at the Sight of this Money, O Drug! Said I aloud, what art thou good for, Thou art not worth to me, no not the taking off of the Ground, one of those Knives is worth all this Heap, I have no Manner of use for thee, e’en remain where thou art, and go to the Bottom as a Creature whose Life is not worth saving. However, upon Second Thoughts, I took it away ….6

So the original Robinson Crusoe takes the coins away, “upon Second Thoughts.” A recent study interprets this scene as follows: “Although the island’s social vacuum has voided their monetary value, the coins’ sudden uselessness endows them with new symbolic value. No longer useful as money, the coins now serve as tokens of their own usefulness.”7 In this passage, Eugenia Zuroski Jenkins insists that because of their “uselessness” on the desert island, the coins let Crusoe realize their “new symbolic value,” namely, the value endowed not through communal approval but by their beauty as ornaments. Jenkins then goes on to

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discuss Defoe’s Captain Singleton, in which the protagonist visits Madagascar and succeeds in producing a new value from useless European coins through the aid of a metal worker who “transforms money into trinkets.”8 Although Jenkins asserts that in both Robinson Crusoe and Captain Singleton the coins have become “tokens” or “trinkets” rather than real, current money, there is no passage in the former that positively supports her interpretation. Rather, Crusoe seems to be obsessed with criticizing their uselessness. In his fourth year on the island, Crusoe reflects: “I had, as I hinted before, a Parcel of Money, as well Gold as Silver, about thirty six Pounds Sterling: Alas! There the nasty sorry useless Stuff lay.” Then he wishes he would rather have “a Gross of Tobacco-Pipes,” “a Hand-Mill to grind my Corn,” or even “Sixpenny-worth of Turnip and Carrot Seed out of England.”9 The same observation can be found in an event that happened as late as in the twenty-fourth year (that is, only four years before his departure for Europe), when Crusoe discovers a Spanish ship wrecked off the coast of the island. Searching into the wreck, he finds a chest which contains “three great Bags of Pieces of Eight,” “six Doubloons of Gold,” and “some small Bars or Wedges of Gold.” He then makes the following reflection on money: “’Twas to me as the Dirt under my Feet; and I would have given it all for three or four pair of English Shoes and Stockings.” With all these scornful words against useless coins, he once again makes “Second Thoughts” and “lug[s] [all of] this Money home to [his] Cave.”10 When he leaves the island at last, Crusoe takes only “the great Goat’s-Skin-Cap,” “[his] Umbrella,” “[his] Parrot,” and “the Money” he had amassed from the two ships, which “had lain by [him] so long useless, that it was grown rusty.”11 All we can say from Defoe’s text is, therefore, that Crusoe, despite his frustration with their uselessness, does take away the coins he discovers and keeps them until he leaves the island. This may seem contradictory, but Crusoe does not have to fully embody either the spirit of capitalism or the symbolic nature of money. On the contrary, such inexplicable details often enhance the reality of literary fiction, because they represent a character as an individual rather than an archetype. When he discovers money in the Spanish ship, as we have seen, Crusoe compares coins with “the Dirt under my Feet,” adding that he “would have given it all for three or four pair of English Shoes and Stockings.” ¯ These expressions remind us of Otsuka’s interpretation of the novel, especially the mysteriously hysterical action of kicking away the gold coins.

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Did he confuse this scene with an earlier one in the same novel and create his own episode? Rummaging into the adaptations of Robinson Crusoe, however, I happened to find a passage in Joachim Heinrich Campe’s New Robinson Crusoe (Robinson der Jüngere, in original German) in which the protagonist does kick the gold. As Chunje Zhang’s chapter in this volume analyzes, Campe’s work is one of the most important adaptations of Robinson Crusoe. Campe (1746–1818) was an educationist, active in the latter half of the eighteenth century. He is mostly remembered now as a private tutor of Wilhelm and Alexander von Humboldt, the former being “a classical scholar and linguist … and founder of the University of Berlin (1810), which now bears the two brothers’ name” and the latter “the celebrated explorer of South and Central America and the leading German scientist in the fields of geology, plant geography, vulcanology and climatology.”12 Campe’s adaptation of Robinson Crusoe, originally published in 1779 and 1780 was immensely popular in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Over a hundred editions of the original German text had been printed by 1882.13 The book was soon translated into English by Campe himself under the title of Robinson the Younger, probably for teaching English to his students. However, it seems that another translation made from a French work called The New Robinson Crusoe, first published in 1788, was more popular in Britain than Campe’s version.14 So this chapter basically quotes from The New Robinson Crusoe. In this adaptation, Crusoe never brings any goods from the wrecked ship. Instead, he finds a lump of gold interred in the ground. “Mr. Billingsley” in the following quote is the father of a family who tells the story of Robinson Crusoe to his children (most of whom are adopted) every night, though in Campe’s original, the father is simply called “Vater”: [Mr. Billingsley:] As it was still day, … Robinson … took up his spade again, and began to hollow out the ground for his kitchen. In doing this, he struck all at once upon something hard that was in the earth, and was very near breaking his spade. He took it at first for a stone; but what was his astonishment, when, having drawn out a great heavy lump of something, he discovered it to be—pure gold! Rich[ard]. Gracious! Well, he certainly has surprising luck, this Mr. Robinson Crusoe. Mr. Bill. Surprising luck indeed! This mass of gold was so thick, that, has it been coined, it would have produced upwards of 10,000 l ….

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Geo[rge]. Ay; but … [in his island,] [t]here was nobody there that had any thing to sell. Mr. Bill. Oho! I had forgot. —Robinson, however, did not; so that, instead of rejoicing for the treasure that he had found, he kicked it from him with contempt, and said, “Lie there, miserable metal, which men in general covet so greedily, and which they purchase with so many base actions and even crimes! Of what use art thou to me? Oh! that, in thy place, I had found a good lump of iron, with which I might, perhaps, have made myself a hatchet or knife! …”15

In this passage, Robinson Crusoe kicks a “great heavy lump” rather than gold in the form of coins. Also notable is that in this quote, we ¯ can find several expressions that resemble Otsuka’s following description cited above: “[Crusoe says] that they are actually worthless although his countrymen contend for and even shed blood for them,” whereas in Defoe’s novel, there is no obviously relevant passage. What is more, ¯ Campe’s Crusoe, rather than Defoe’s, fits Otsuka’s description of the homo economicus because the former never has “Second Thoughts” and consistently expels gold from his property. Later on the desert island, Campe’s Crusoe confirms his hatred for the useless “lump” of metal, “spurning” or kicking it again: What would he have given for a small piece of iron to point his arrows with! But wishing was to no purpose. As he stood at the door of his cave, considering how he might supply the want of iron points to his arrows, he turned his eyes, by chance, on the lump of gold which lay there still on the ground as a thing of no use. “Go,” said he, spurning it with his foot, “go, useless metal, and become iron, if you wish that I should value you!” And, with these words, he turned away from it, not deigning to look at it again.16

¯ As Otsuka’s Methods of Social Science does not mention Campe, these ¯ correspondences could merely be coincidental. Considering that Otsuka’s ideas on economic history were formed through his reading of German theorists such as Max Weber and Karl Marx, however, it is not implausible that he had read or known Campe and that the adaptation and ¯ was not the original were mixed up in his memory.17 Even if Otsuka directly influenced, Campe’s method in adapting Robinson Crusoe exhibits a typical case in the history of the Robinsonade. Both of them simplify or purify the complicated and contradictory character of Defoe’s Crusoe

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into consistent, archetypal ones. It is not digressive, therefore, to see if there is any genealogy for such purification of Crusoe’s character. Under the influence of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, it seems, Campe amended Crusoe’s character into a more consistent one. In the preface to his adaptation, Campe quotes a long passage from Rousseau’s Emile or the Education (Émile ou de l’éducation) that recommends Robinson Crusoe as a book describing “a situation … in which all the natural wants of man were displayed … in a manner suitable … to the infant mind, and in which the means to supply these wants were by ingenuity and a lively imagination hit upon and discovered.”18 This is because, according to Rousseau, “R obinson Crusoe, alone in his island, without the least assistance of every instrument of Art*, is nevertheless busy in providing for his subsistence, for his preservation, and even procures to himself a very comfortable state of life.”19 As Robinson Crusoe naturally leads children to learn how to satisfy their basic wants for themselves, Rousseau recommends it as the only book to be read in early childhood rather than writings by such encyclopaedic scholars as Aristotle, Pliny, and Buffon. Although Campe agrees with Rousseau’s idea, he considers Robinson Crusoe an imperfect work for children. In a footnote to the previous quote, Campe maintains that his adaptation embodies Rousseau’s idea more perfectly than Defoe’s original: “* In this Mr. Rousseau is mistaken. Old Robinson had saved a number of tools from the wreck, whereas our younger Robinson had nothing but his hands and his head, to procure himself subsistence.”20 Campe’s idea is more clearly expressed later in the preface: And has this wonderful book [that matches Rousseau’s description of an ideal book for children], we hitherto seemed to want, been in the world these many years?—Yes! and no! According as either the chief idea, or the intire execution of such a book be meant. The former … does exist, has long existed, and its title is R obinson Crusoe; but alas the latter is still wanting. … [S]o much prolix, superfluous chat, that fulsome overstrained style … are in no wise desirable qualities, of a book for children. … Besides this, we find something in the history of old R obinson, which destroys one of the chief advantages … ; I mean R obinson’s being provided, with all the necessary european [sic] instruments to procure him many of those conveniencies, which social life affords among civilized people.21

Thus, Campe’s New Robinson Crusoe could be considered as an early version of Bildungsroman, in which a poor man, having drifted to a

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desert island, discovers Providence and establishes his life with steady labor and thus improves a wasteland into a wealthy country. Of course, this also is the basic plot of Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, but the original does not provide the protagonist’s mental growth as a linear, irrevocable process. While in Campe’s educational textbook the narrator (the father) and the listeners (the children) obsessively confirm how Crusoe matures and grows in confidence gradually, Defoe’s Crusoe sometimes degenerates into a state of helplessness and confusion after apparently establishing his lifestyle on the desert island. In the latter half of Campe’s New Robinson Crusoe, the protagonist makes a canoe with Friday and they attempt a voyage to the mainland; unfortunately, however, they are caught in a wild current and Friday becomes desperate because his “piety [is] neither so firmly established, nor so well tried by the number of duration of his distresses, as that of his master,” whereas Crusoe “mildly reproach[es] him for not putting his trust in the wisdom of Providence.”22 He continues eloquently as if the current is subsiding temporarily: Robinson said, “We are but doing our duty: for while we have a spark of life remaining, we are bound to do every thing in our power to save it. If we fail, we die with the comfortable assurance that such is the will of the Supreme Being; and his will, my dear friend,” added he, raising his voice to a tone of generous animation, “his will is ever wise, even when we, miserable worms, cannot interpret it.”23

When all hopes seem to have disappeared, however, they find the current really subsiding and manage to get back to the island. In Defoe’s original, a similar scene appears in the former half of the novel, namely, well before his encounter with Friday. In this version, Crusoe solely gets on a canoe not to sail to the Continent but to look around the island. After his canoe is driven by a violent current to the open sea, he has “no Prospect before [him] but of Perishing.”24 Far from trusting to the wisdom of Providence, Defoe’s Crusoe deplores his plight: And now I saw how easy it was for the Providence of God to make the most miserable Condition Mankind could be in worse. Now I look’d back upon the desolate solitary Island, as the most pleasant Place in the World. … I stretch’d out my Hands to it with eager Wishes. O happy Desart, said I, I shall never see thee more. O miserable Creature, said I, whether [sic] am I going ….25

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Although Crusoe soon reproaches himself for his “unthankful Temper,”26 the infirmness of his mind is obvious, compared with Campe’s adaptation, which constantly reminds the reader of why his Crusoe is so tough and composed. To cite another, more explicit example, on the day when Crusoe and Friday are planning to make the second attempt on the canoe, a dreadful storm hits the island. As Crusoe distinguishes from thunderclaps the roar of a gun from a ship, he tries to light a fire as signal, despite the heavy rain. When a child asks the father if Crusoe “was not afraid … of the storm, as formerly,” the father, Mr. Billingsley, answers, “No; you see him now perfectly cured of that senseless fear … by a firm persuasion that the Almighty is a being of the purest benevolence, and that … nothing happens to those who are endowed with true piety and virtue but what conduces finally to their greatest happiness.”27 From these descriptions and commentaries, it is clear that Campe’s Crusoe gradually becomes an independent and self-reliant person through confirming his faith in Providence. Also, Crusoe’s mental growth is often illustrated by the contrast between the strong Master and the frail Man Friday. Although Campe’s adaptation does not simply advocate the superiority of Western civilization,28 it never doubts the hierarchy between Christianity and paganism. Defoe’s original, however, exhibits some tension, if not open scepticism, on the supremacy of Christianity.29 In sum, Campe’s Crusoe is meticulously recreated as an allegorical person perfectly fitting Rousseau’s brief description of the ideal model of education for infants. Together with the comments by the storytelling father and his family, the consistently self-educating protagonist in Campe’s book serves well as a model to be imitated by young children. These adaptations on the other hand spoil the vividness and verisimilitude for which the original novel is renowned. Real humans are not usually so consistent as Campe’s Crusoe, and pedagogical comments inserted in between Crusoe’s adventures mar the sense of direct connection between the reader and the protagonist. ¯ Getting back to Otsuka Hisao, one of his earliest references to Robinson Crusoe can be found in a collection of essays named The Human Basis of Modernization, originally published in 1948: It seems that the life of Robinson Crusoe on the desert island, which Defoe so vividly depicted, was nothing but the life of the early industrial bourgeoisie (i.e. the petit bourgeois) in England at that time. … What I want to point out further is that the ethos (the mental archetype as a

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human being) of the former is quite similar to, or rather, exactly the same as that of the latter if we take their essence.30

¯ It can safely be said, therefore, that Otsuka deliberately introduced Robinson Crusoe, the character, as (to cite a phrase he often uses in this book) “a human archetype” in post-war Japan. He considered such a model necessary in order to rebuild Japan as a democratic and prosperous nation-state. His vision of the Japanese future is stated as follows: Needless to say, it is now our highest, unavoidable obligation to rebuild our national economy in the democratic way. We do not need any discussion, either, on the point that this democratic reconstruction of economy must appear as an independent and spontaneous one, namely, a truly democratic one that is born from the restored Japan rather than as an empty, soulless shell of the democratic system … that is brought about through the coercive pressure from outside.31

¯ Having faced the failure and defeat of the military administration, Otsuka and many other post-war Japanese intellectuals recognized the necessity ¯ of restoring Japan in a democratic way. Otsuka’s uniqueness lies in his emphasis on the spontaneous, independent nature of this process. This might be partly because he feared the permanent loss of national independence (Japan was under the occupation of the Allied Powers from 1945 ¯ to 1952). More importantly, however, Otsuka must have attributed the failure of modernization in pre-war Japan to its rapid, superficial importation of the Western system. Japan as a state might have become modern, but the Japanese people were not modernized enough to check and resist the reckless ambition of the army. Intellectuals were not excepted: most of them were either silenced, converted into acquiescence, or eagerly championed the military expansionism under the name of liberation from the ¯ turned to what he called Western powers.32 This is probably why Otsuka “the human archetype.” The new Japan had to be established by a new kind of Japanese. ¯ What Otsuka tried to launch through recommending Robinson Crusoe as a “human archetype” was, therefore, a project for enlightening a still immature people, using a familiar type. Such a role model, however, should not be a contradictory person who takes away gold coins from ¯ the wrecked ship “at Second Thought.” It is more natural for Otsuka’s Crusoe to kick the coins, however antic this performance looks. So

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¯ Otsuka’s attitude toward post-war Japanese bears a close parallel to Campe’s towards eighteenth-century Germans: they were mentors with ¯ the mission to enlighten their contemporaries. Whether Otsuka read Campe’s Robinson der Jüngere or not, their similarity is not superficial. ¯ As is shown in the passage cited above, Otsuka equates Crusoe as a “human archetype” with “the early industrial bourgeoisie … in England” in Defoe’s time. He attempted to introduce the eighteenth-century British model of economy into post-war Japan because he thought it was a good example for democratic institutions. According to his book titled The National Economy: [The British industrial system at the time of Daniel Defoe embodies “the national economy” in the true sense of the word.] Putting this fact in our mind, we can clearly understand the historical reason of why nationalism (not the one centred on the state, of course) and democracy developed hand in hand in eighteenth-century Britain. They were as if two trunks having grown up from one root.33

This British model is contrasted with another one, namely, the Dutch: In the case of British economy, its national system contains all basic elements of production: that is to say, the mobilising points of economic circulation lie in the inside of the domestic reproductive activities. This type of industry is nationally independent. Based on or accelerated by this independent industry, Britain built up the trade system in which they conduct commercial export. Characters contrary to this British type of economy can be found in the Dutch industries. It is conducted through giving additional or subordinate treatments … on foreign goods that are temporarily stocked at the entrepôt market ….34

If the British example is rephrased as the “national economy,” the Dutch ¯ one might be called the global model. Otsuka repeatedly states that the former is sounder, more stable, and fitting for post-war Japan. As he thought (as we have seen) “nationalism.. . and democracy devel¯ oped hand in hand in eighteenth-century Britain,” moreover, Otsuka admitted the necessity of nationalism in the democratization of post-war Japan, provided that it was distinguished from pre-war militarism. Oguma Eiji, a sociologist, points out in his notable study of post-war Japanese nationalism:

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¯ In the post-war era, Otsuka’s opinion on nationalism was almost the same as Maruyama Masao’s opinion. Namely, nationalism needs to be directed “not towards dark, ‘state-centred’ direction but towards bright, ‘public-centred’ direction,” which would “naturally direct the nationalistic sentiment of the Japanese people to liberty and democracy.”35

¯ Because of his belief in this liberal nationalism, Otsuka distinguished the selfish pursuit of personal interest from the disinterested freedom that can be obtained through overcoming one’s desire and dedicating oneself to the public good. He says in The Human Basis of Modernization: “We must keep in mind that, in the evolutionary process of the world history, the ‘liberty’ that ‘human beings’ endlessly seek for has always been built up on the denial of our direct, instinctive desire.”36 Then comes a dialectic eulogy on this quality: “The instinct that was heightened, namely, sublated through denial is truly beautiful. … This denial of denial, this true denial not only enables the true liberation of human beings but also reveals the true figure of the ‘human’.”37 The dichotomy between the false liberty and the “true” one is clearly defined as follows: “In the case of the liberty based on selfishness, humans are slaves of their desire and they do not enjoy true ‘liberty’ at all. Truly ‘free’ people must be liberated from such desire through mental control and capable of doing, nay, earnestly wishing to do everything that is good, beautiful, and praiseworthy.”38 ¯ Let us summarize Otsuka’s argument on the national economy and Robinson Crusoe as a “human archetype.” At first, he idealized eighteenth-century Britain because it seems to have succeeded in developing its economy mainly from domestic reproductive activities. This was enabled by the ethos of the early industrial bourgeoisie that is free from the selfish pursuit of its own interest. Robinson Crusoe is the very work, ¯ according to Otsuka, that allegorically exhibits this ethos. His post-war writings repeatedly recommend the Japanese to read Robinson Crusoe for their reformation of mind, which he thought should be a solid foundation for post-war Japan to be restored as a liberal and prosperous nation. Thus, Robinson Crusoe now becomes an ideal citizen of the nation, ¯ although he left his native country in Defoe’s original. Otsuka’s purification of Crusoe’s contradictory behavior allowed him to adapt Robinson Crusoe for an enlightening or pedagogic cause. He, just like Campe,

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praised Crusoe’s contempt for vulgar interest and his spirit of selfhelp. One might still wonder how such a recommendation of indi¯ vidualism could be compatible with Otsuka’s argument for “bright, ‘public-centred’” nationalism, but a similar paradox can be found in the political theory of an earlier Crusonian, namely, Rousseau. In 1958, Isaiah Berlin gave a famous lecture on positive and negative concepts of liberty. According to Berlin, many political writings in the West vindicated the former, while warning against the latter, which assumes “all coercion is, in so far as it frustrates human desires, bad as such … while non-interference … is good as such.”39 However, the former concept derives from the wish of an individual “to be the instrument of my own, not of other men’s, acts of will,” and “to be moved by reasons, by conscious purposes, which are my own, not by causes which affect me, as it were, from outside.”40 In sum, the former is “[t]he freedom which consists in being one’s own master” and the latter, “the freedom which consists in not being prevented from choosing as I do by other men.”41 All interpreters of Robinson Crusoe mentioned in this ¯ chapter—Rousseau, Campe, and Otsuka—can be regarded as champions of the positive concept of liberty. A contemporary philosopher Derek Matravers, discusses Berlin’s positive concept of freedom in a radio lecture on Rousseau’s theory of the social contract. In this lecture, Matravers clarifies how Rousseau justifies coercion under the name of liberty: [According to Rousseau’s idea of freedom,] [t]o achieve ‘true’ freedom, your higher self must have control over the impulses of the lower self. Otherwise you are simply a slave to your passing emotions and desires. [In On the Social Contract, Rousseau says,] ‘Whoever refuses to obey the general will shall be constrained to do so by the whole body, which means nothing other than that he shall be forced to be free …’.42

This lecture also points out that because of this tricky affirmation of coercion, such thinkers as Berlin and Bertrand Russell43 associated Rousseau with totalitarianism. Thus, individualism is connected to what seems to be its very opposite by means of the positive concept of liberty. ¯ Getting back again to Otsuka Hisao, a Japanese scholar Nakano Toshio ¯ points out the secret continuity between Otsuka’s wartime connivance at totalitarianism and his post-war dedication to democracy:

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¯ [During the war, Otsuka developed the idea of “the productive power” of the nation that could be applied to the “wartime mobilization” of national ¯ resources.] Otsuka’s idea of “the productive power” was not obliterated in the post-war era but survived in a new fashion as “the human archetype.” ¯ … If Otsuka’s discourse during the war exhibits his thought on “wartime ¯ mobilization,” this discourse Otsuka stated in the post-war era must be ¯ interpreted as the thought on “post-war mobilization.” Otsuka’s wartime discourse and post-war discourse are seamlessly connected via this thought on mobilisation centred by the whole (i.e. the nation).44

As “the productive power” mentioned above sounds like a state-centred idea, it can hardly be equated with “the human archetype,” through ¯ which Otsuka envisioned to establish a public-centred nation. Neverthe¯ less, Nakano’s revision of Otsuka’s post-war standpoint becomes more convincing if we consult Berlin’s criticism on “positive” liberty. Conscientious people who suppress their desire for the public good can bring about a totalitarian nation, however democratic its political system may ¯ post-war project for rebuilding Japan as a truly democratic be.45 Otsuka’s nation also involved such a risk. ¯ Having confirmed the latent danger in Otsuka’s post-war writings, this chapter finally examines whether and how his project was eventually realized. Japan’s rapid economic growth during the 1950s and 1960s might make us think that Japan succeeded in restoring and enlarging the ¯ national economy more than ever, but Otsuka himself was not satisfied with its way of gaining profit. In The History and Modernity, published ¯ in 1979, Otsuka points out that the Japanese economy “has little by little become close to the Dutch model since the start of high economic growth,” even though the reformations after the war had once seemed to lead it strongly towards the British model.46 Then he warns that with all the success of Japan’s booming economy, the Japanese must remember “what kind of problems the Dutch model of growth will eventually and inevitably face and what kind of fortune might await it if these problems are neglected.”47 The final paragraph of this work reads: “If we consider the present state only from the viewpoint of short-sighted strategies and if we stubbornly refuse to learn anything from history, it cannot possibly ¯ critibe denied that we might be bitterly avenged by history.”48 Otsuka’s cism here is mainly directed toward Japan’s dependence on foreign trade, which, in his opinion, should be subservient to domestic, self-sufficient

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industry. His ideal economic model was “the national economy led by the domestic market.”49 In hindsight, this sentence seems to have predicted the bubble which burst in the early 1990s and the economic quagmire Japan has fallen into since then. Does it mean that Japan could have avoided these ¯ troubles if Otsuka’s post-war project had been faithfully put into practice? If we turn our attention from the economic structure to the ¯ human archetype, however, it can be pointed out that Otsuka’s project was largely realized during the era of high economic growth. Until the burst of the bubble economy, most Japanese believed that the growth of the national economy had priority over personal happiness and dedicated themselves to the production of national wealth. These people composed a thick, homogeneous middle-class that was symbolized by the so-called “salaryman.” Their homogeneity and dedication ¯ enabled a powerful, almost totalitarian economy. Thus, Otsuka’s ideas on the “human archetype”, liberty, and nationhood matched the ethos of post-war Japan very well. This model of economy seems to be outdated in the age of globalization and international mobilization of all resources, including humans. Japan has been struggling for decades to reform its economic system into a more “global” and dynamic one rather than enlarging its domestic ¯ market as Otsuka recommended (which seems to be unrealistic, especially in this country with a rapidly aging and declining population). At such ¯ a time, Otsuka’s writings might also look outdated, and they seem to be rather neglected by current academia. This chapter has also been some¯ times critical on Otsuka. However, I would like to suggest that we must read him again now, not as one of the sacred texts of post-war democracy but as an actual, if not impeccable, body of work offering a rich source for examining both the merits and demerits of post-war Japan. If we forget ¯ Otsuka without due examination, we would simply cancel the ideals of post-war democracy, which might end up with summoning the ghost of wartime totalitarianism. ¯ Talking of oblivion, Otsuka’s argument on the national economy is also marked by the complete forgetfulness of Japan’s colonial past.50 It was not a monoethnic nation before the end of World War II, and even today, of course, cannot be regarded as such. This, again, corresponds with the problems Japan is now facing. It seems, however, that I have to leave this topic for another occasion.

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This chapter is based on the following presentations: “‘Of What Use ¯ Art Thou to Me?’: Otsuka Hisao’s Reading of Robinson Crusoe visà-vis Joachim Heinrich Campe’s New Robinson Crusoe,” presented on 19 September 2014 at the University of Tsukuba as part of the international conference, “Robinson Crusoe in Asia”; “‘They Are Actually ¯ Worthless’: Otsuka Hisao’s Reading of Robinson Crusoe and Post-war Japan” [「こんなものは、ほんとうはなんの役にも立たないんだ」 大塚久雄の『ロビンソン・クルーソー』読解と戦後日本], presented in Japanese on 19 October 2019 at Satellite Lecture Room, Ryukoku University, Kyoto as part of the symposium commemorating the tercentenary of Robinson Crusoe, titled “Robinson Crusoe and Modern Japan”; ¯ “Kicking Away the Gold Coins: Otsuka Hisao’s Reading of Robinson Crusoe and the Human Archetype of Post-war Japan,” presented on 7 January 2020 at New York University as part of the NYU Winter Institute 2020. I appreciate the hospitality of the convenors, namely, Professors Yukari Yoshihara, Toru Nishiyama, and Xudong Zhang. All translations from Japanese texts are mine.

Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

¯ Otsuka is his family name. This chapter writes down Japanese names in the Japanese order. ¯ Otsuka, Humanity in Social Science, 105. ¯ Otsuka, The Methods of Social Science, 73. ¯ Otsuka, The Methods of Social Science, 88. ¯ Otsuka, Humanity in Social Science, 105. Defoe 99. Jenkins 110. Jenkins 113. Defoe 152–53. Defoe 199. Defoe 264. Blamires 25. Blamires 26. Blamires 26. Campe, The New Robinson Crusoe, vol. I, 169–71. My underlinings. Campe, The New Robinson Crusoe, vol. II, 90. The libraries in the University of Tokyo hold four copies of this book, all ¯ of which were published before Otsuka was born. Rousseau 264; translated and quoted in Campe, Robinson the Younger, xii–xiii. As Campe’s preface is not translated in The New Robinson Crusoe,

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20.

21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28.

29.

30. 31. 32.

33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41.

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all passages in the preface are quoted from Robinson the Younger. The latter half of this translation is not faithful. The original text goes: “et où les moyens de pourvoir à ces mêmes besoins se dévelopent successivement avec la même facilité.” Rousseau 266; Campe, Robinson the Younger, xv. The asterisk is in Campe’s text, suggesting to readers to consult the footnote to be quoted later in this chapter. Campe, Robinson the Younger, xv. This is why Campe’s Crusoe is not given the chance to fetch modern goods including coins from the wrecked ship. Campe, Robinson the Younger, xix–xxi. Campe, The New Robinson Crusoe, vol. III, 112–13. Campe, The New Robinson Crusoe, vol. III, 114. Defoe 159. Defoe 160. Defoe 160. Campe, The New Robinson Crusoe, vol. IV, 5–6. In Campe’s New Robinson Crusoe, Crusoe sometimes learns from Friday important skills for survival, especially how to kindle a fire (vol. III, 57– 58). Defoe’s Crusoe discusses Christianity with Friday and finds his curious disciple’s question confounding (217–19), whereas Campe’s Crusoe has Friday accept Christianity with no qualms since he is “very soon clearly convinced of the principal truths of religion” (vol. III, 93–96). See Zhang’s chapter in this volume. ¯ Otsuka, The Human Basis of Modernization, 218–19. ¯ Otsuka, The Human Basis of Modernization, 169. ¯ During World War II, Otsuka did not collaborate with the military government. However, Nakano Toshio points out that his wartime writings contain passages that directly or indirectly affirm (if not openly support) the controlled economy and the mobilisation of resources under the totalitarian government. See Nakano 44–70. ¯ Otsuka, The National Economy, 115. This work was originally published in 1965. ¯ Otsuka, The National Economy, 52. ¯ Oguma 94. Oguma’s quote is from Otsuka, “The Two-Sidedeness of Modernity and Nationalism,” 316. Otsuka, The Human Basis of Modernization, 166. Otsuka, The Human Basis of Modernization, 167. Original emphasis. Otsuka, The Human Basis of Modernization, 208. Berlin 175. Berlin 178. Berlin 178.

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42. Matravers, no pagination (from the script of the podcast). 43. See Russell’s audaciously clear statement, “Hitler is an outcome of Rousseau” (623). 44. Nakano 77–78. 45. Berlin’s lecture, originally given in 1958, can be read as a harsh criticism on communist countries, especially the Soviet Union. ¯ 46. Otsuka, The History and Modernity, 382. Original emphases. As for ¯ Otsuka’s response to the post-war Japanese economy, also see Nozawa 275–81. ¯ 47. Otsuka, The History and Modernity, 385. ¯ 48. Otsuka, The History and Modernity, 387. ¯ 49. Otsuka, The History and Modernity, 374. ¯ 50. Although Otsuka did not write much about Japanese colonialism after the war, his library contained many books on this subject, as may be confirmed by its catalogue at Fukushima University. Also see Nakano’s criticism on ¯ Otsuka’s neglect of Japan’s colonial past (70–75).

Works Cited Berlin, Isaiah. 2002. Two Concepts of Liberty. Lectured in 1958. Liberty. Edited by Henry Hardy. 166–217. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Blamires, David. 2009. Telling Tales: The Impact of Germany on English Children’s Books 1780–1918. Adelaide: Open Book Publishers. Campe, Joachim Heinrich. 1779–80; 1981. Robinson der Jüngere. Stuttgart: Reclam. ———. 1781–82. Robinson the Younger. Hamburg: C. E. Bohn. ———. 1788. The New Robinson Crusoe. 4 vols. London: John Stockdale. Defoe, Daniel. 1719; 2008. The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe. The Novels of Daniel Defoe 1. Edited by W.R. Owens. London: Pickering & Chatto. Jenkins, Eugenia Zuroski. 2013. A Taste for China: English Subjectivity and the Prehistory of Orientalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Matravers, Derek. 2009. Rousseau and Positive Freedom. Podcast: Philosophy and the Human Situation. Milton Keynes: Open University. ¯ Nakano, Toshio. 2014. Otsuka Hisao to Maruyama Masao: doin, shutai, senso ¯ sekinin [Otsuka Hisao and Maruyama Masao: Mobilisation, Subjectivity, and the Responsibility of the War]. Tokyo: Seidosha. ¯ Nozawa Toshiharu. 2005. Otsuka Hisao shiron (2): ibunka sessyoku ga unda ¯ rekishi riron to sono saiteigi [An Essay on Otsuka Hisao (2): The Historical Theory Generated from Contacting Other Cultures and Its Redefinition]. Studies in Economics (Chiba University). 20.1: 67–109.

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Oguma, Eiji. 2002. Minshu to aikoku: sengo nihon no nationalism to kokyo sei [Democracy and Patriotism: Nationalism and the Public in Post-war Japan]. Tokyo: Shinchosha. ¯ Otsuka, Hisao. 1948; 1969. Kindaika no ningenteki kiso [The Human Basis of ¯ Modernization]. Collected Works of Otsuka Hisao, vol. 8. 163–260. Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten. ———. 1964; 1969. Gendai to nationalism no ryomensei [The Two-Sidedness of ¯ Modernity and Nationalism]. Collected Works of Otsuka Hisao, vol. 6. 306–16. Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten. ———. 1965; 1969. Kokumin Keizai: sono rekishiteki kosatsu [The National ¯ Economy: Historical Investigations]. Collected Works of Otsuka Hisao, vol. 6. 3–123. Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten. ———. 1966. Shakai kagaku no hoho: Weber to Marx [The Methods of Social ¯ Science: Weber and Marx]. Collected Works of Otsuka Hisao, vol. 9. 3–158. Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten. ———. 1977; 1986. Shakai kagaku ni okeru ningen [Humanity in Social ¯ Science]. Collected Works of Otsuka Hisao, vol. 12. 3–183. Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten. ———. 1979; 1986. Rekishi to Gendai [The History and Modernity]. Collected ¯ Works of Otsuka Hisao, vol. 11. 313–88. Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. 1762; 2009. Émile ou de l’éducation. Edited by André Charrak. Paris: Flammarion. Russell, Bertrand. 1945; 2004. A History of Western Philosophy. New York: Simon and Schuster; London: Routledge. Weber, Max. 1905; 1930. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Translated by Talcott Parsons. Boston and London: Usnwin Hyam.

CHAPTER 10

Transforming and Translating the Novel Form: The Examples of Daniel Defoe and Lin Shu Yuanwen Chi

In The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1719), Daniel Defoe adopted a wholly new narrative strategy to depict the quotidian life of a castaway on a deserted island. Apart from being read as a popular adventure story, this work also holds a place of special significance in the history of the English novel both in its form and in its content. Thus, Defoe has become well-known among literary scholars for having played an important role in molding the literary medium of the novel at a critical stage. Having translated many important works of Western fiction for Chinese readers including Robinson Crusoe, Lin Shu (1852–1924) plays a similarly important role in Chinese literary history. As a translator who did not know any foreign languages, but instead relied heavily on collaborators who did, he translated or paraphrased 184

Y. Chi (B) National Tsing Hua University, Hsinchu, Taiwan e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 S. Clark and Y. Yoshihara (eds.), Robinson Crusoe in Asia, Asia-Pacific and Literature in English, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-4051-3_10

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Western works into Chinese.1 The impact of Lin’s translations on the rise of modern Chinese fiction was so dramatic and tremendous that the evaluation of his literary achievements has been divergent and controversial even to the present. To be sure, one of the chief contributions of Lin’s translations lies in the fact that Chinese society first came to be acquainted with the lives, customs, and habits of the Westerners and their emotions, feelings, and ethos through the vivid depictions of these rendered texts. Due to the limitations in Lin and his collaborators’ knowledge and scope of Western literature, the quality of their joint enterprise was uneven— some translations are so beautifully phrased and structured that they are arguably better than the source texts,2 whereas others do not come close to reflecting the style and content of the original work. Nevertheless, Lin’s translations give ready examples and embody the kind of “New Novel” propounded and promoted by Liang Qi-chao (1873–1929), the most famous champion of a Westernized Chinese Enlightenment in the late Qing Dynasty. In what follows we will articulate the intertextuality of Lin’s and Defoe’s works in light of what Franco Moretti has termed as a World Literature project.3 In doing so, we will probe into Defoe’s revolutionary writing style; then, will address Lin’s translation and introduction of Western fiction (including Robinson Crusoe) to China and its subsequent impact on the rise of modern Chinese fiction; and finally will raise some conclusions about their contributions to the development of the novel as a major mode of narration in world literature.

I After the Glorious Revolution of 1688, there was relatively a substantial decline in violent strife in England, although there were afterwards some disturbances caused by Jacobite rebellions after the Act of Union in 1707. As a result, British society witnessed tremendous changes in many sectors of public life: Enlightenment and rationalism challenged traditional ideas and customs, rapid progress of technology and industry gradually transformed modes of production, and the accumulation and investment of capital, among other factors. The rise of manufacturing guilds marked the decline of the traditional handicraft industry, and introduced a new class of merchants and craftsmen. Due to the narrow electoral franchise, the emergent class, who came to the foreground in the economic and social sectors in the British society, was dissatisfied with and strongly demanded a share in the power structure.4

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As one of the writers who would eventually come to help found a new form of narrative art, Defoe began late in his career of fiction writing. He had gone bankrupt, but also had periods of prosperity and eventually repaid his creditors. To be sure, he did succeed and famously paid off his debts with the publication of his novels. In order to reflect the new social realities he had personally lived, he adopted a new narrative strategy that leaned heavily on an innovative literary realism—a writing style that enumerated and itemized realistic details so as to create an illusion that what he depicted in his works really happened. The substantial changes in style and form wrought upon the British society in the eighteenth century raises the question of the dynamic relationship between form and content, which is intriguing but, as many previous scholars have found, not easy to fully dissect. Insofar as literary study is concerned, critics have endeavored to look into the function of form in the process of artistic creation. The dispute over whether form precedes content or vice versa is just beside the question; the critic’s primary concern is to better understand the way the writer makes use of form to articulate and embody what he perceives of the world. Instead of interpreting form as a limiting literary device that the writer imposes on his subject, Marxist aesthetics regard form as a code invented by the writer to represent his conceptualization of the world. It can be argued that the tangibility of this code is clear, as it serves as an ideological context whereby different forces contest for power and dominance in society at large. Homer Brown has described the novel as “a new form of cultural capital,” in which conflicts of competitive forces converge, including: criticism, readership, and the mechanism of production and consumption. “This institution is accomplished in spite of, or perhaps because of the somewhat frantic competition fired by the relatively new problem of obtaining rights to titles.”5

II In his monumental work, The Rise of the Novel (1957), Ian Watt explicitly deals with the relationship between socioeconomic change and the emergence of the new genre. Ever since the publication of the book, the critical attention of scholars in eighteenth-century studies has concentrated upon questions regarding the formation and institution of the English novel. The convergence of critical voices on the issue will more than likely serve as a key step to a better understanding of the comparatively new genre

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as critics are probing into every aspect of its emergent form so as to shed new light on it.6 Based on the assumptions of cultural materialism that artistic and literary production is interwoven and rooted deeply in the infrastructure of a given society, Watt’s theory investigates the rise of the novel in terms of eighteenth-century England’s modes of production, the constituency of its readership, and the evolution of the literary paradigm in Britain in the early eighteenth century. For Watt, the text that serves to illustrate the point best is Robinson Crusoe, which has long been regarded as the first English novel. Employing the now more common literary device of “formal realism,” which depicts the individual’s life in the form of a day-to-day journal or accounting book, Watt argues that “Robinson Crusoe is certainly the first novel in the sense that it is the first fictional narrative in which an ordinary person’s daily activities are the centre of continuous literary attention.”7 Like his Puritan predecessor, John Bunyan, who was an innovator of prose fiction, Defoe also took much interest in representing secular experience in plain and pictorial language. By and large, critics studying the narrative form of the novel have emphasized the realistic tendency of Defoe’s works so much that the assumptions of naturalistic texture and voice seem to predominate in the critical discussion of Robinson Crusoe. While this critical stance is frequently challenged and criticized, it has also been staunchly defended and theorized.8 Although Watt has tried to interpret Robinson Crusoe in terms of realistic conventions, there are still some episodes incompatible with this paradigm. Peter Hulme has correctly pointed out the improbability of Crusoe’s dreams which come true one by one: “There is no doubt that the presence of the dream, eighteen months but no more than a couple of pages before the arrival of the cannibal party, does strange things to the texture of the fictional ‘realism’.”9 True, Defoe/Crusoe also wrote about ghosts and witchcraft, and there are hints of dreams, footprint, providence, and the supernatural in Robinson Crusoe. Ironically, the narrator’s assertion that the story is “a just History of Fact” contradicts with a dozen weirdly and supernaturally fabricated episodes.10 The incongruity of the text with traces and remains of other genres indicates the evolutionary nature of prose fiction at its early stage. Analyzing the coexistence of these seemingly heterogeneous features in the novel, Michael McKeon has argued that it is “constituted as a dialectical unity of opposed

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parts, an achievement that is tacitly acknowledged by the gradual stabilization of ‘the novel’ as a terminological and a conceptual category in eighteenth-century usage.”11

III The introduction of Western literature to China at the turn of the nineteenth century (ca. 1890) was particularly significant in that it was the product of a variety of discourses and dialectics on the impending national crisis and the danger of foreign imperialist invasion and encroachment. The aftermath of the short-lived Wu-Xu Reform (1898),12 the influence of prevailing social Darwinism, and the urgent desire to find a literary vehicle for political, sociocultural, and economic Enlightenment, all came together to spur on a movement for the modernization of China. It is true that “modernization” was regarded as a Westernized and innovative process of reform, progress, and development in this specific historical context: the liberal literati Liang Qi-chao and Yan Hu (1854–1921) were the most active champions who, understanding that the democratic reforms, strong national defense, and economic prosperity of Western countries and Japan might be the result of universal literacy and general Western-styled Enlightenment, tended to promote and propagate the writing and reading of the novel. For Liang Qi-chao, the decay and degeneration of China were at least partially attributed to the harmful contents of the traditional zhang-hui-xiao-shuo (or the serial novel) and chuan-qi (or romance), which were stories consisting of a revolving stable of high-ranking officials, beauties, robbers, and ghosts.13 In “The Translator’s Preface to the Translation and Publication of the Political Novel” (1898), he prescribed the genre as a panacea to get rid of these seemingly poisonous maladies: At the very beginning of reforms and revolutions in European countries, the leaders and scholars usually wrote novels from their own experiences to embody their ideals and political opinion. Thus, students read these novels at free time after school. Soldiers, merchants, farmers, carpenters, cabmen, grooms, women, and children, all tried to find novels to read. Therefore, the opinion of the nation changed whenever a book was published. The day-by-day progress in political affairs in countries like the United States, Britain, Germany, France, Austria, Italy, and Japan can all be attributed to the political novel.14

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What is more, he further elaborated on the theory of the novel and its social function as evinced in the following essays: “On Translating Books” (1896), “Preface to Da-tong Translating Publisher” (1897), “Preface to Translating and Publishing the Political Novel” (1898), “On the Rapport between the Novel and the Community” (1902), and “To the Novelist” (1915). As for Yan Hu’s remarks and critiques on the evolutionary form of the Western novel and urgent need of the Chinese for its literary renovation, he earnestly stated in an article “The Origin of the Fictional Supplement of National News (Guo-wen Bao, [1897])” in which, citing materials from mythology and history, he upheld the proposition of “natural selection” to elucidate on the implications of competition and “survival of the fittest” among animal, humans, and nations in the world. The narrative strategy of mixing up history with fiction serves as an effective tool to mold a new kind of prose fiction. In sum, he states his aim of publishing and translating novels as follows: “We have heard that the Enlightenment of European and American countries and Japan derive much help from the novel. Therefore, we are not afraid of the hard work to comprehensively collect novels from foreign countries, to translate and publish the works in the Supplement, and to distribute them to the readers.”15 The question, however, of whether or not the promotion and popularity of the novel resulted in the national progress and prosperity of Western countries and Japan is still open to debate. C. T. Hsia has challenged this view as follows: When was the beginning of civilization in Britain and France? Renaissance? Enlightenment? Or the Industrial Revolution? Although both countries had some specific kinds of fictive literature (including drama) during these periods, we can hardly say that the writers, being in accordance with Geistegeschichte, were willingly working with the government’s universal education project to educate the people.16

Basically, Liang Qi-chao and his followers regarded modernization as a shortcut to save China. Since translating Western books would be the most efficient means of shortening the gap and difference between Western countries and China, it was naturally a corollary that the novel would become a useful medium for popular Enlightenment. As a result, since the novel in China was judged primarily according to its social utility rather than formal aspects, it was content that preceded form in

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the discourse surrounding the novel in China, a situation that was unfavorable to the development of the genre. Leo Ou-fan Lee has argued, “Thanks to the spirit and mentality of worrying about the age and the country, the writers all focus on content rather than form, with realism as the preeminent literary style.”17 Lin Shu clearly understands this defined role of the translator, as he explains in his “Preface” (1905) to the Chinese translation of Robinson Crusoe, “Translation is quite different from creative writing. The writer can put down what he sees, pursuing the ethereal and the subtle without any restraint. But the translator is to recapitulate what has been done. How can he express his own opinion?”18 This guideline clearly defines the distinction between fiction and translation; nevertheless, Lin Shu did not stick fast to this rule in most cases. His accuracy was often called into question by critics. He tries to defend himself by writing that “Although I do not know foreign languages, I have been engaged in translation with the help of some collaborators.”19 Cooperating with a great many collaborators, Lin Shu translated the texts not into common vernacular, but preferred instead classical and outmoded Chinese and, in doing so, restructured sentences and paragraphs, and added or deleted parts of the source text.20 In that way, he produced fluent texts of prose fiction, whose elegance was enjoyed by millions of Chinese readers. The fact that Lin Shu and his collaborators translated and transposed Western works via indirect oral recitations is inevitably susceptible to the charge of distorted representation. While Lin Shu conducted the translation project, his overall control was limited as he had no knowledge about Western literature, and thus had no say in the selection of the texts, which depended entirely upon the literary tastes of his collaborators. Ma Tai-lai has done many excellent studies to restore these bibliographical data, even to the point of indicating the specific editions that Lin Shu used. Among Lin’s translations, there are about 40 with accredited literary repute.21 Ma has pointed out that one of Lin’s collaborators—Chen Jia-lin (陳家麟)—made a great number of errors in his oral translation of Guai Dong 《怪董》 ( ; originally Thomas Bulfinch, The Legend of Charlemagne) and Er Gong Mi Shih 《俄 ( 宮秘史》 ; originally William Le Queux, The Secret Life of the Ex-Tsaritza). He has remarked that “Generally speaking, Chen Jia-lin did not know the original works thoroughly, so that Lin Shu’s Prefaces were not to the point, just like fumbling about trying to search for something in the

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dark.”22 Han Guang had the same complaints, “This is one of the examples which shows Chen Jia-lin was ignorant and did not care much about knowledge.”23 Due to the lack or incompleteness of copyright law in China at that time, the translators usually left out the names of the authors and even changed the titles of the books. From the perspective of translation studies today, the works Lin Shu chose to translate are strangely characterized by, and fluctuate wildly between, masterpieces and trash. It should be noted that the evaluation of literary works has to do with the oft-changing criteria of literary canon. Like today, some authors were popular at that time, but their reputation would decline later on. Nevertheless, the popularity of these translated works had strong ties and affinity to the Reform Movement in the social context of the late Qing Dynasty. In his Prefaces, Forewords, and Epilogues to these works, Lin Shu dwells upon his career in translation, his views on literature, and expresses his worries about the fate of the nation. These discourses provide us with valuable insights into the evolution and trajectory of his thoughts on society and culture. Under the threat of imperialist expansion, aggression, and widespread fears about impending national crisis, Lin Shu lamented the fact that he was too old to serve his country. His contribution to the distinctively national effort, however, was to translate books to encourage the youth to devote themselves to learning science and technology, promoting the didacticism of literature and commenting on the decay and moral degeneration of the age.24 As Lin Wei argues, these commentaries, undertaken from the vantage point of Western literature, are dialogues between a Chinese intellectual tradition and new “modernized” Western forms: At least he was the first one who utilized Western literature as framework of reference to examine and reflect on traditional Chinese psychology and national culture—a stance which was tinged with Enlightenment. His eloquent Prefaces so sublimely combine the East and the West that the reader is able to examine the modern and the ancient in one moment and to take a look at the four seas in one glance.25

IV It should be noted that Japan and China were confronted with the same dilemma of modernization in the middle of the nineteenth century. The

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fact that the rapidity of Japanese translation of Western texts after the Meiji Restoration helped transform the feudal system into a modern society inspired, in one way or another, Chinese literati to engage in the enterprise. In contrast, while the history of Chinese translation of Western literature was not quite long, the strategy and practice of translation vary heavily between time periods. In the early stage (ca. 1900), translators tended to appropriate foreign terms and ideas and to recast and remodel them into Chinese style of expressions, because there were few people versed in Western literature and the presence of foreign culture did not threaten the wholeness of the empire yet. In one way or another, the Qing Dynasty remained intact, while her people were living traditional lives, holding on to customs and values similar to those of their ancestors. But there was a great change a decade later as a result of the frequent communication with the Western powers. With a great number of people studying abroad and possessing some knowledge of Western literature, there arose a recognition after 1911 that Western literature, like natural science, technology, and medicine, had worth and value in its own right. Therefore, it was not entertainment only, but instead should be looked upon as a serious art saddled with the burden of leading the Chinese Enlightenment. In consequence, Chinese scholars and translators began to pay much more attention to the form and style of the original works. By that token, as Robert William Compton shows, faithfulness, and accuracy of translation did not only lie in the rendering of the meaning of the language, but also in its form and style: Faithfulness and accuracy becomes a concern of the translator only when he assumes that the original work has more value than his rendition of it. This implies a recognition of foreign literature as something worthy of being read in a form as close to the original as possible. It presupposes that the style, the feeling, and the exact phrasing of the original author is important and should be preserved.26

The history of translation in China dated back to the first century when Buddhism was first introduced to China. The translation of Buddhist sutras on a large scale occurred in the sixth century under the Tang Dynasty when Buddhism was very popular then. The invasion and encroachment of Western imperialists after 1840 initiated the call for social reforms, among which translating Western books on military science, technology, and natural science was one of the major concerns.

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The Institutions for translation were set up thereon, such as the School of Combined Learning (Tong-wen Kuan, 同文館, estab. 1862), Institute of Foreign Languages (Guang Fang-yen Kuan, 廣方言館, estab. 1863), and the Jiang-Nan Manufacturing Bureau (Jiang-Nan Zhi-zao Ju, 江南 製造局, estab. 1865). Yan Hu and Lin Shu, the most eminent translators in modern Chinese history, were at the peak of their career in the period from 1890 to 1910. As for the source of the texts, most of the books were translated from the English language before the Sino-Japanese War (1894–1895); afterwards, Japanese books carried the day.27 Although one might have expected hostility to Japan after such a crushing military defeat, instead Japan’s successful model of modernization stimulated Chinese emulation. In general, the criticism of Lin Shu’s translations is directed to whether or not the high-flown, classical Chinese prose of the Tong Chen School is compatible with the style and language of the novels that were praised for their literary realism. In Robinson Crusoe, Defoe adopts a new narrative strategy different from that of the epic, romance, or knight-errantry to depict the quotidian experience of the rising middle class. With special attention to the details of the setting and atmosphere, Defoe also vividly describes the appearance, features, dialogues, and moods of the characters, leaving no detail unexplored insofar as it had anything to do with the characterization of the protagonist and the narrative structure as a whole.28 Translating Western texts into the classical forms of Chinese which were remote and distinct from everyday language usage, Lin Shu’s translations are often criticized as being fluent and elegant at the expense of the true form of its original. Was this archaic, classical Chinese with simplified syntax capable of representing the quotidian and realistic details of the novel? In essence, Lin Shu’s translation of Robinson Crusoe deserves critical attention as shown in his sensibility for the writer’s shifting of style in the story per se. Beginning the novel with “I Was born in the Year 1632, in the city of York, of a good Family…,”29 Defoe’s narrative strategy is to set up a first-person narrator between the reader and the external world so as to authenticate what the persona is about to witness and experience in his adventures. However, in the sequel of the story, Defoe is self-conscious about the redundancy of the first-person narrator as the story is going on and on. To some extent, this is true of the return to the island but not once Crusoe departs for Asia.

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I shall no longer trouble the Story with a Relation in the first Person, which will put me to the Expence of the Thousand said I’s, and said he’s, and he told me’s, and I told him’s, and the like, but I shall collect the Facts Historically, as near as I can gather them out of my Memory from what they related to me, and from what I met with in my conversing with them and with the Place.30

With his sensitivity for literary art and prose writing, Lin Shu is obviously keen enough to discern the fact that the novelist is stranded in the predicament of shifting between the first- and third-person narrators; therefore, he coins and supplements a terminology to describe the style of Defoe’s prose fiction as “a parody of historiography” (仿為史體).31 Interestingly, Noriyuki Harada in this volume points out that Defoe’s use of the first-person narration helps promote the verisimilitude of the story to camouflage the fictive representation as truthful facts, whereas Lin Shu inverts it to avoid the redundant and monotonous tone of the pronouns (I, he) by implicitly referring to the purported objectivity of historiography. Despite the flaws inherent in Lin Shu’s translations, many readers and writers such as Lu Xun, Guo Mo-ruo, and Qian Zhong-shu still regard his translations as their literary antecedents, commending these works highly for direct influence.32 In his evaluation of Lin Shu’s achievements, one critic has said, His translations had positive impacts on shaking the deeply-rooted Chinese feudalism which had been existing over 3000 years. Meanwhile, they also served to promote the status of the novel, liberating the form of prose fiction and expanding the world views of the people. His efforts to infuse new blood into the literary community of the late Qing were commensurate with the necessity of democratic revolution.33

The remark epitomizes what Lin Shu achieved in his translations. However, the impact brought forth by these works unleashed an avalanche far beyond what he could imagine. “Democratic revolution” accompanied by the liberation of thought was in conflict with the feudal, imperial China to which Lin Shu’s life-long loyalty had been dedicated. For the old gentleman at his sixties, all was gone with the founding of the republic!—monarchy, feudalism, ancient Chinese prose, Imperial Examination, concubinage, herbal medicine, and so on. Limited by his own education and background, Lin Shu was unable to catch up with

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the urgent desiderata for a clear and simple written vernacular language for the purpose of universal literacy. Moreover, the emergent scenario of modern Chinese literature heralded by the May Fourth Movement was the last blow to traditional Chinese literature written in ancient Chinese prose. Although Lin Shu fiercely defended this tradition, he was fighting a battle which he was doomed to lose: “Classical language is not so good as modern language in terms of popularity. The one is finite, whereas the other is infinite.”34

V As British society was witnessing the advent of an industrial and mercantile socioeconomics, Daniel Defoe tried his hand at prose fiction by a historical contingency. By intermingling of fictionality and historicity in Robinson Crusoe, he consciously created a new mode of literary art to represent and embody the Dissenter’s experience and ideology for an emergent reading public. It is not an exaggeration to say that Defoe contributed his talents and imagination to the form of the novel while it was in its infancy. As Maximillian Novak has pointed out: “It [the novel] arose out of a conscious application of Defoe’s imagination to the creation of narratives for their own sake–narratives that derived their power directly from the representation of characters experiencing a vividly realized world.”35 In contrast, Lin Shu translated the work into Chinese 186 years later with the intention to educate and enlighten his compatriots through the introduction of Western literature. What he counted on was not the form of the novel, however, but the didactic and moral content which would wake the people up. Overindulging himself in Chinese past traditions and much worried about impending national crises, domestic and abroad, Lin Shu wholeheartedly advocated translating western works as a redemptive remedy for the malady of the time, merely at the expense of intrinsic literariness that characterizes the text per se—the choice of language, style, and form. Although the presence of innovative and experimental form maybe appears inconsequential and is easily overlooked by the reader when first encountered, yet it is present at all times. As a landmark in the history of east–west cultural encounters, Lin Shu’s translations of more than 180 western literary texts had tremendous impact on contemporary social life and thought and heralded the outbreak of the May Fourth Movement.36 Ironically, all of these great

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changes were brought forth by and/or had to do with a traditional, old-styled literatus who knew no foreign languages. It is true that Lin Shu pursued the didactic aim of the novel at the expense of the form, so much so that the modern Chinese novel would need to go beyond the May Fourth Movement in search of an appropriate narrative mode.37 This belated reception of the novel’s form underscores the fact that translating and transposing literary texts from one cultural context to another is susceptible to a great deal of distortion, misunderstanding, and misinterpretation. In Robert William Compton’s words: This new attention to the novel at this time did not constitute any recognition of the novel genre as a serious form of literature worthy of existence for its own sake. Such recognition was to come later. Nevertheless this development did go a long way towards breaking down the traditional antipathy towards the form.38

In sum, Lin Shu’s contribution to the making of the modern Chinese novel was chiefly attributed to his introduction of Western customs and culture and the expansion of the worldview of the Chinese people. By exploring the social and historical contexts in which the well-known translator was living and working, we can be more objective in re-evaluating and appreciating his unique achievement in translating hundreds of fascinating works of Western fiction into Chinese.

Notes 1. According to Ma Tai-lai’s (馬泰來) study, the total of Lin Shu’s translations is “184 books, including 137 books by single authors, 23 unpublished books, and 8 manuscripts.” Ma Tai-lai, “A Complete List of Lin Shu’s Translated Works,” in Qian Zhong-shu (錢鍾書) et al., Translations of Lin Shu ( Beijing: Commercial Press, 1981), 103. The other critic estimates the number of Lin Shu’s translated works at 163 and 18 unpublished manuscripts, which cover 98 writers from 11 countries. See also Yu Jiu-hong (俞久洪), “An Inquiry into Lin Shu’s Translated Works,” in Xue Sui-zi (薛綏之) and Zhang Jun-cai (張俊才), ed. Research Data on Lin Shu (Lin Shu Ian-Jiu Zi-Liao) (Beijing: Information Property Rights Publisher, 2009), 348. 2. Strictly speaking, Lin Shu’s prose style, commonly termed as Tong Chen School (桐城派), was a popular classical Chinese rather than the ancient Chinese prose. As Qian Zhong-shu has pointed, “The style that Lin Shu

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3.

4. 5.

6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

11. 12.

13.

used in translation was in his mind’s eye a much more popular, casual, and flexible classical Chinese (wenyen, 文言). Although [classical Chinese] retained some components of the ‘ancient Chinese prose’ (wenyenwen, 文 言文), yet it is by far freer than the ‘ancient Chinese prose’ in phrasing and syntax.” See Qian Zhong-shu, Collected Essays on Seven Complements (Qi Zhui Ji,《七綴集》 ). (Beijing: San Lian Bookstore, 2001), 109. Franco Moretti’s hypothesis on “distant reading” contextualizes the rise of the novel “in cultures that belong to the periphery of the literary system” in global scenarios. Hence, the modern novel per se is “a compromise between a Western formal influence … and local material.” Franco Moretti, “Conjectures on World Literature,” Distant Reading (London and New York: Verso, 2013), 50. See also John Pizer, “Johann Wolfgang Goethe: Origins and Reference of Weltliteratur.” In Theo D’haen, David Damrosch and Djelal Kadir, eds. The Routledge Companion to World Literature (London and New York: Routledge, 2012), 7–8. Maxillian E. Novak, Daniel Defoe: Master of Fictions—His Life and Ideas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 513–516. Homer Brown, “The Institution of the English Novel: Defoe’s Contribution,” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 29, no.3 (1996): 304. See also Terry Eagleton, Ideology: An Introduction (London and New York: Verso, 1991), 198–200. Robert Mayer, “The Reception of A Journal of the Plague Year and the Nexus of Fiction and History in the Novel,” ELH 53, no. 3 (1990): 529. Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1957), 82. Michael McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel 1600–1740 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 2–4, see also xiv-xvi. Peter Hulme, Colonial Encounters: Europe and the New Caribbean, 1492– 1797 (London and New York: Methuen, 1986), 204. Daniel Defoe. The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1719). Vol. 1 of The Novels of Daniel Defoe (10 vols.). Edited by W.R. Owens (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2008), 55. All references are to this edition. Michael McKeon, “Generic Transformation and Social Change: Rethinking the Rise of the Novel,” Cultural Critique 1 (1985): 180. Wu-Xu Reform (戊戌變法), also known as One-Hundred-Days’ Reform (百日維新, Bai-Ri Wei-Xin) was a constitutional monarchy movement initiated by Emperor Guang Xu (光緒皇帝, 1871–1908) in 1898 dated from June 11th throughout September 1st. Later on, Empress Dowager Ci Xi (慈禧太后, 1835–1908) deposed and imprisoned Emperor Guang Xu for a while. Liang Qi-chao (梁啟超), “On the Rapport between the Novel and Community” (1902), In-Bing-Shih Wen-Ji (Essays of In-Bing-Shih) 《飲 (

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冰室文集》 ), in The Complete Works of In-Bing-Shih 《飲冰室合集》 ( ), 12 vols., edited by Lin Zhi-jun (Beijing: Zhong Hua Bookstore, 1989), Vol. 10:9. 14. Liang Qi-chao, “The Translator’s Preface to the Political Novel” (1898), In-Bing-Shih Wen-Ji (Essays of In-Bing-Shih) 《飲冰室文集》 ( ), in The Complete Works of In-Bing-Shih 《飲冰室合集》 ( ), 12 vols., edited by Lin Zhi-jun (Beijing: Zhong Hua Bookstore, 1989), Vol. 3: 34–35. For Liang Qi-chao’s concepts on the political novel and translation theory, see also Wang Chi-hong, “Fidelity, Fluency, Elegance” Revisited—Studies of Chinese Translation in the Twentieth Century (Beijing: Tsing Hua University Press, 2007), 121–158. 15. Yan Fu (嚴復), “The Origin of the Fictional Supplement of National News (Guo-wen Bao”( 《國聞報》 , [1897]), in Collected Essays on Literature in the Late Qing Dynasty: Studies on Fiction and Drama 《晚清文學叢鈔: ( 小說戲曲研究卷》 ), ed. A-Ying (阿英) [Qian Xing-tun, 錢杏屯] (Beijing: Zhong Hua Bookstore, 1960), 12. 16. C. T. Hsia (夏志清), Literature of Mankind (Taipei: Pure Literature Publishing Company, 1977), 70. Commenting on the controversy about Taiwan’s Movement of Indigenous Literature (Xiang-Tu-Wen-Xue YunDong, 鄉土文學運動) in 1970s, Hsia reflects on the utilitarian tendency of Chinese literature ever since the May Fourth Movement—a leftist view of literature which has overestimated its social function at the expense of art and aestheticism. 17. Leo Ou-fan Lee (李歐梵), The Pursuit of Modernity: Selected Essays on Cultural Criticism (Taipei: Rye Field Publishing Company, 1996), 229. 18. Lin Shu (林紓) and Zeng Zong-gong (曾宗鞏), trans. Lu Bing Soon Piao Liu Ji (Adventures of Robinson Crusoe,《魯濱孫飄流記》[1905]) (Taipei: Taiwan Commercial Press, 1973), 2. 19. Lin Shu. “Preface to The Old Curiosity Shop” (“Xiao-nu Nai-er Zhuan Xu” 孝女耐兒傳》 序, 1907), in Writings on Spring-Awakening Study (Chun-Jue-Zhai Zhu-Shu Ji,《春覺齋箸述記》 ), ed. Zhu Xi-Zhou (朱羲冑), The Chronology and Scholarship of Mr. Lin Qin-nan: Four Volumes in One 《林琴南先生學行譜記四種》 ( , 1949) ( Taipei: World Bookstore, 1961), 5. 20. Cf. Note 2. 21. Zheng Zhen-duo (鄭振鐸), “Mr. Lin Qin-nan” (1924), in Qian Zhongshu (錢鍾書) et al., Translations of Lin Shu ( Beijing: Commercial Press, 1981), 14. 22. Ma Tai-lai, “A Supplement to the Original Works of Lin Shu’s Translation,” Novel of the Late Qing 《清末小說》 ( ) 16 (1993): 117. See also Ma Tai-lai, “22 Abstracts on Lin Shu’s Translations.” Proceedings on the Centennial Commemoration of Fung Ping Shah Libray (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 1982), 109–233.

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23. Han Guang (韓光), Lin Qin-Nan ( Shanghai: Zhong Hua Bookstore, 1935), 93. 24. Lin Shu, “Preface to Uncle Tom’s Cabin,”《黑奴籲天錄》 ( , 1901). Writings on Spring-Awakening Study (Chun-Jue-Zhai Zhu-Shu Ji,《春覺齋箸述記 》 ), in The Chronology and Scholarship of Mr. Lin Qin-nan: Four Volumes in One 《林琴南先生學行譜記四種》 ( ), ed. Zhu Xi-Zhou (朱羲冑) (Taipei: World Bookstore, 1961), 24. 25. Lin Wei (林薇), “Afterword,” in Familiar Essays by Weilu 《畏廬小品》 ( ), ed. Lin Wei (Beijing: Beijing Publishing Company, 1997), 373. 26. Robert William Compton, “A Study of the Translations of Lin Shu, 1852–1924,” Diss. Stanford University, 1971 (Ann Arbor: Microfilm International, 2005), 32–33. 27. Zhang Yu-fa (張玉法), “The Historical Trends in the Late Qing Dynasty and Its Rapport with the Development of the Novel,” in Proceedings on Sinology (Monograph on the Novel of the Late Qing Dynasty) ( Taipei: Wen Shih Zhe Publishers, 1984), Vol. 3: 8–9; Yu Tian-cong (尉天驄), “The Society and the Novel of the Late Qing Dynasty,” in Proceedings on Sinology (Monograph on the Novel of the Late Qing Dynasty) (Taipei: Wen Shih Zhe Publishers, 1984), Vol. 3: 95. 28. Maximillian E. Novak, Transformations, Ideology, and the Real in Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and Other Narratives: Finding “The Thing Itself.” (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2016), 15–17. 29. Defoe, Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, Vol.1: 57. 30. Daniel Defoe, The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1719). Ed. W. R. Owens (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2008), Vol. 2: 30. See also 155–167, 235–237. Lin Shu’s Chinese translation of this paragraph is as follows:「亦弗令讀吾書者煩瀆, 但見書中悉作余字。 似余書屢屢均述己 言者, 重疊複沓, 令人寡歡。今當簡括其詞, 仿為史體, 取其扼要, 並於余有 涉者。 請諸君公關之。」See Lin Shu and Zeng Zong-gong, trans. Lu Bing Soon Piao Liu Xu Ji (Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe,《魯濱孫飄 流續記》[1906]) (Shanghai: Commercial Press, 1914), Vol. 1: 31. 31. Lin Shu and Zeng Zong-gong, trans. Lu Bing Soon Piao Liu Xu Ji (Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe,《魯濱孫飄流續記》[1906]) (Shanghai: Commercial Press, 1914), Vol. 1: 31. 32. Zheng Zhen-duo (鄭振鐸), “Mr. Lin Qin-nan” (1924), in Qian Zhongshu (錢鍾書) et al., Translations of Lin Shu, 16–17; A-Ying (阿英) [ the alias of Qian Xing-tun, 錢杏屯], “Preface” (1960), in Collected Essays on Literature in the Late Qing Dynasty: Studies on Fiction and Drama 《晚清 ( 文學叢鈔: 小說戲曲研究卷》 ), ed. A-Ying (Beijing: Zhong Hua Bookstore, 1960), 1. 33. Xue Zhuo (薛卓), “An Investigation into Lin Shu’s Translation Theory in Early Career: On Reading Prefaces and Afterwords to Lin Shu’s Translated

10

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36.

37.

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Works,” in Research Data on Lin Shu, ed. Xue Sui-zhi and Zhang Jun-cai (Fuzhou: Fujian People’s Publishers, 1983), 396. Chu Qing (楚卿), “On the Position of the Novel in Literature” (1903), in Collected Essays on Literature in the Late Qing Dynasty: Studies on Fiction and Drama 《晚清文學叢鈔: ( 小說戲曲研究卷》 ), ed. A-Ying (Beijing: Zhong Hua Bookstore,1960), 29. See also Lu Xun (魯迅), “‘Literal Translation’ and ‘Class Attributes of Literature,’” E-Xin-Ji (Collected Works of Double Hearts,《二心集》 ), in The Complete Works of Lu Xun (Beijin: People’s Literature Publishers, 2005), Vol. 4: 203-206; Hu Shih (胡適), “Chinese Literature in the Past Fifty Years.” Collected Essays of Hu Shih 《胡適文存》 ( ), in The Works of Hu Shih 《胡適作品集8》 ( ) (Taipei: Yuan Liu Publishing Company, 1986), Vol. 8: 140–146. Maximillian E. Novak, “Defoe as an Innovator of Fictional Form,” in The Cambridge Companion to the Eighteenth-Century Novel, ed. John Richetti (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 67. The major figures of the May Fourth Movement were Hu Shih (胡適), Lu Xun (魯迅), Chen Du-xiu (陳獨秀), Qian Xuan-tong (錢玄同), Cai Yuanpei (蔡元培), Qu Qiu-bai (瞿秋白), among others. It should be briefly noted that, the trend of modern Chinese literature has had a left-wing, Marxist trend and tendency, because more than half of the leaders of the May Fourth Movement were liberal intellectuals immersed in Marxism. Cf. Wang Chi-hong (王志宏), “Fidelity, Fluency, Elegance” Revisited— Studies of Chinese Translation in the Twentieth Century (Beijing: Tsing Hua University Press, 2007), 303–310. David D. W. Wang, (王德威), The Making of the Modern, The Making of a Literature: New Perspectives on 19th- and 20th-Century Chinese Fiction (Taipei: Rye Field Publishing Company, 1998), 29–32. Compton, 18.

Works Cited A-Ying (阿英) [the alias of Qian Xing-tun, 錢杏屯]. 1960. Preface. Collected Essays on Literature in the Late Qing Dynasty: Studies on Fiction and Drama (Wan Ching Wenxue Congchao: Xiaoshuo Xiqu Ianchiu Juan,《晚清文學叢鈔: 小說戲曲研究卷》 ). Edited by A-Ying. 1–2. Beijing: Zhong Hua Bookstore. Brown, Homer. 1996. The Institution of the English Novel: Defoe’s Contribution. Novel: A Forum on Fiction 29.3: 299–318. Chu, Qing (楚卿). 1903; 1960. On the Position of the Novel in Literature. Collected Essays on Literature in the Late Qing Dynasty: Studies on Fiction and Drama (Wan Ching Wenxue Congchao: Xiaoshuo Xiqu Ianchiu Juan,《晚清 文學叢鈔: 小說戲曲研究卷》 ). Edited by A-Ying. 27-31. Beijing: Zhong Hua Bookstore.

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Compton, Robert William. 1971; 2005. A Study of the Translations of Lin Shu, 1852–1924. Diss. Stanford University. Ann Arbor: Microfilm International. Defoe, Daniel. 1719; 2008. The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe. Ed. W.R. Owens. The Novels of Daniel Defoe 1. London: Pickering & Chatto. ———. 1719; 2008. The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe. Ed. W. R. Owens. The Novels of Daniel Defoe 2. London: Pickering & Chatto. Eagleton, Terry. 1991. Ideology: An Introduction. London and New York: Verso. Han, Guang (韓光) . 1935. Lin Qin-Nan. Shanghai: Zhong Hua Bookstore. Hsia, C.T. (夏志清). 1977. Literature of Mankind. Taipei: Pure Literature Publishing Company. Hu, Shih (胡適). 1986. Chinese Literature in the Past Fifty Years. Collected Essays of Hu Shih 《胡適文存》 ( ). The Works of Hu Shih 《胡適作品集8》 ( ). Vol. 8: 65– 152. Taipei: Yuan Liu Publishing Company. Hulme, Peter. 1986. Colonial Encounters: Europe and the New Caribbean, 1492– 1797 . London and New York: Methuen. Lee, Leo Ou-fan (李歐梵). 1996. The Pursuit of Modernity: Selected Essays on Cultural Criticism. Taipei: Rye Field Publishing Company. Liang, Qi-chao (梁啟超). 1898; 1989. The Translator’s Preface to the Political Novel. In-Bing-Shih Wen-Ji (Essays of In-Bing-Shih) 《飲冰室文集》 ( ). The Complete Works of In-Bing-Shih 《飲冰室合集》 ( ), 12 vols. Edited by Lin Zhi-jun. Vol. 3: 34–35. Beijing: Zhong Hua Bookstore. ———. 1902; 1989. On the Rapport between the Novel and Community. InBing-Shih Wen-Ji (Essays of In-Bing-Shih)《飲冰室文集》 ( ). The Complete Works of In-Bing-Shih 《飲冰室合集》 ( ), 12 vols. Edited by Lin Zhi-jun. Vol.10: 9. Beijing: Zhong Hua Bookstore. Lin, Shu (林紓). 1901; 1961. Preface to Uncle Tom’s Cabin 《黑奴籲天錄》 ( 序). Writings on Spring-Awakening Study (Chun-Jue-Zhai Zhu-Shu Ji,《春覺齋箸 述記》 ). The Chronology and Scholarship of Mr. Lin Qin-nan: Four Volumes in One 《林琴南先生學行譜記四種》 ( ): 24. Ed. Zhu Xi-Zhou (朱羲冑). Taipei: World Bookstore. ———. 1907; 1961. Preface to The Old Curiosity Shop 《孝女耐兒傳》 ( 序). Writings on Spring-Awakening Study (Chun-Jue-Zhai Zhu-Shu Ji,《春覺齋箸述記 》 ). The Chronology and Scholarship of Mr. Lin Qin-nan: Four Volumes in One 《林琴南先生學行譜記四種》 ( ): 5–6. Edited by Zhu Xi-Zhou (朱羲冑). Taipei: World Bookstore. Lin, Shu and Zeng Zong-gong (曾宗鞏) trans. 1905; 1973. Lu Bing Soon Piao Liu Ji (Adventures of Robinson Crusoe,《魯濱孫飄流記》Taipei: Taiwan Commercial Press. ———. trans. 1906; 1914. Lu Bing Soon Piao Liu Ji (Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe,《魯濱孫飄流續記》 ). 2 vols. Shanghai: Commercial Press.

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Lin,Wei (林薇). 1997. Afterword. Familiar Essays by Weilu 《畏廬小品》 ( ): 371– 376. Edited by Lin Wei. Beijing: Beijing Publishing Company. Lu, Xun (魯迅). 2005. Literal Translation and Class Attributes of Literature. Essays on Double Hearts (E-Xin-Ji,《二心集》 ). The Complete Works of Lu Xun. Vol. 4: 199–227. Beijing: People’s Literature Publishers. Ma, Tai-lai (馬泰來). 1981. A Complete List of Lin Shu’s Translated Works. Qian Zhong-shu (錢鍾書) et al., Translations of Lin Shu: 60–103. Beijing: Commercial Press. ———. 1982. 22 Abstracts on Lin Shu’s Translations. Proceedings on the Centennial Commemoration of Fung Ping Shan Libray: 109–233. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. ———. 1993. A Supplement to the Original Works of Lin Shu’s Translation: 114–122. Novel of the Late Qing 《清末小說》 ( ) 16. Mayer, Robert. 1990. The Reception of A Journal of the Plague Year and the Nexus of Fiction and History in the Novel. ELH 53. 3: 529–556. McKeon, Michael. 1985. Generic Transformation and Social Change: Rethinking the Rise of the Novel. Cultural Critique 1: 159–181. ———. 2002. The Origins of the English Novel 1600–1740. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press [2nd ed.]. Moretti, Franco. 2013. Conjectures on World Literature. Distant Reading: 43– 62. London and New York: Verso. Novak, Maximilian E. 1996. Defoe as an Innovator of Fictional Form. The Cambridge Companion to the Eighteenth-Century Novel. Edited by John Richetti: 41–71. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2001. Daniel Defoe: Master of Fictions—His Life and Ideas. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2016. Transformations, Ideology, and the Real in Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and Other Narratives: Finding “The Thing Itself.” Newark: University of Delaware Press. Pizer, John. 2012. Johann Wolfgang Goethe: Origins and Reference of Weltliteratur. The Routledge Companion to World Literature: 3–11. Edited by Theo D’haen, David Damrosch and Djelal Kadir. London and New York: Routledge. Qian, Zhong-shu. 2001. Collected Essays on Seven Complements (Qi Zhui Ji, 《七 綴集》 ). Beijing: San Lian Bookstore. Wang, Chi-hong (王志宏). 2007. “Fidelity, Fluency, Elegance” Revisited—Studies of Chinese Translation in the Twentieth Century. Beijing: Tsing Hua University Press. Wang, David D.W. (王德威). 1998. The Making of the Modern, The Making of a Literature: New Perspectives on 19th- and 20th-Century Chinese Fiction. Taipei: Rye Field Publishing Company.

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Watt, Ian. 1957. The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Xue, Zhuo (薛卓). 1983. An Investigation into Lin Shu’s Translation Theory in Early Career: On Reading Prefaces and Afterwords to Lin Shu’s Translated Works. Research Data on Lin Shu: 387–399. Edited by Xue Sui-zhi and Zhang Jun-cai. Fuzhou: Fujian People’s Publishers. Yan, Fu (嚴復). 1897; 1960. The Origin of the Fictional Supplement of National News (Guo-wen Bao《國聞報》 ). Collected Essays on Literature in the Late Qing Dynasty: Studies on Fiction and Drama 《晚清文學叢鈔: ( 小說戲曲研究卷》 ): 1–12. Edited by A-Ying (阿英) [Qian Xing-tun, 錢杏屯]. Beijing: Zhong Hua Bookstore. Yu, Jiu-hong(俞久洪). 2009. An Inquiry into Lin Shu’s Translated Works. Research Data on Lin Shu (Lin Shu Ian-Jiu Zi-Liao): 348–370. Edited by Xue Sui-zi (薛綏之) and Zhang Jun-cai (張俊才). Beijing: Information Property Rights Publisher. Yu, Tian-cong (尉天驄). 1984. The Society and the Novel of the Late Qing Dynasty. Proceedings on Sinology (Monograph on the Novel of the Late Qing Dynasty). Vol. 3: 95–110. Taipei: Wen Shih Zhe Publishers. Zhang, Yu-fa (張玉法). 1984. The Historical Trends in the Late Qing Dynasty and Its Rapport with the Development of the Novel. Proceedings on Sinology (Monograph on the Novel of the Late Qing Dynasty). Vol. 3: 1–30. Taipei: Wen Shih Zhe Publishers. Zheng, Zhen-duo (鄭振鐸). 1924; 1981. Mr. Lin Qin-nan. Qian Zhong-shu ( 錢鍾書) et al., Translations of Lin Shu: 1–17. Beijing: Commercial Press.

CHAPTER 11

The Boy and the Sea: Translating Robinson Crusoe in Early Twentieth-Century Korea Eun Kyung Min and Hye-Soo Lee

It seems fitting that Robinson Crusoe, arguably “the first extensive Western fiction about China” and the Far East, has a particularly rich history of translation in China, Japan, and Korea. According to Donald Keene, Robinson Crusoe was “the first Western novel to be translated by the Japanese.”1 Kuroda Kikuro’s remarkably early 1848 translation was based on a Dutch version and appeared under the title Hy¯ ok¯ okiji, or Record of Wanderings. Numerous subsequent translations of Robinson Crusoe followed, testifying to the popularity of Defoe’s novel in Meiji Japan. The first in China, Shen Zufen’s Juedao piaoliu ji (Desert Island Wanderings ), appeared in 1902, soon followed by Lin Shu and Zeng Zonggong’s 1905–1906 Lubinsun piaoliu ji (The Wanderings of Robinson), the best known of the early Chinese translations.

E. K. Min (B) Seoul National University, Seoul, South Korea e-mail: [email protected] H.-S. Lee Konkuk University, Seoul, South Korea © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 S. Clark and Y. Yoshihara (eds.), Robinson Crusoe in Asia, Asia-Pacific and Literature in English, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-4051-3_11

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In Korea, two early translations appeared in the early twentieth century: Kim Ch’an’s Ch˘olsae kidam robinson pyoryugi (The Surprising Tale of Robinson’s Adventures on a Deserted Island, 1908) and Ch’oe Nams˘on’s Robinson muin ch˘oldo pyoryugi (The Tale of Robinson’s Adventures on a Lonely Deserted Island, 1909). These predate the Japanese colonization of Korea (1910–1945) by just a few years. Although both works are based on Japanese translations of the English original, they exemplify two very different strategies. Kim Ch’an’s version, which is based on Inoue Tsutomu’s 1883 Japanese translation of Defoe’s novel, attempts to recontextualize Defoe’s novel for a Korean audience by redefining Crusoe’s Protestant values as Confucian ones and by emphasizing hyo, or traditional filial piety.2 Unlike Kim Ch’an, who renders Robinson Crusoe into a traditional moral tale, Ch’oe Nams˘on updates the novel for Korean colonial modernity. Ch’oe, who based his Robinson Crusoe on Iwaya Sazanami’s Mujinto Daio (1888), a later Japanese translation of the novel, turns Defoe’s work into a story about adventure at sea for Korean youth, emphasizing the virtues of youthful self-help, courage, and resourcefulness. Ch’oe emphasizes not only the individual but also the national value of these virtues, allegorizing Robinson Crusoe as a tale of national progress, independence, and modernization. This chapter will focus on Ch’oe’s translation, which appeared serially from February to August 1909, in a youth magazine titled Sony˘on that was published between 1908 and 1911. Li Jin and Sean MacDonald note in their study of Robinson Crusoe in the late Qing period that the emergence of Crusoe translations in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries coincides with a turbulent period in East Asian history.3 The early Japanese, Chinese, and Korean translations of Robinson Crusoe overlap in particular with the 1894– 1895 Sino-Japanese War and the 1910 Annexation of Korea by Japan. Read in this political context, a critical question emerges. Given that Defoe’s novel is “explicitly enabled by an ideology of overseas expansion—directly connected in style and form to the narratives of sixteenthand seventeenth-century exploration voyages that laid the foundations of the great colonial empires,” how did these East Asian translations negotiate with Defoe’s implicit colonial ideology?4 As this chapter will show, in the Korean context this question could not be separated from the rise of Japanese imperialism. Although Ch’oe’s translation of Robinson Crusoe was published precisely one year before the Japanese annexation of Korea, it did not engage directly with the colonial content of Defoe’s novel.

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Nor did it take an explicitly anti-colonial stance. Indeed, Ch’oe asked his young readers to identify with, rather than against, Crusoe’s adventurous spirit. In order to probe Ch’oe’s strategy as translator and publisher, we will first need to situate his publishing career in biographical and historical context.

A New Magazine for Korean Boys Ch’oe Nams˘on (1890–1957) was born in Seoul to a chungin (“middle people”) family. His father, a geographer who worked at the national observatory in Seoul, later opened a successful Chinese medicine shop in the Chongno district of Seoul. He became prosperous enough to support his son’s education at Ky˘ongs˘ong Haktang, a Japanese-owned school in Seoul, and later to send his son to Japan to study at Waseda University in 1906. Although Ch’oe was not a student for long (he withdrew from the university after clashing with Waseda authorities over a Japanese student’s political statement about Korea), he ended up staying in Japan between 1906 and 1907, soaking up modern Japanese culture. Ch’oe was especially impressed with Japanese print media—the “abundant, diverse, shining, and fragrant books and magazines”—which he regarded as the preeminent symbols of Japan’s modernity.5 In 1907, Ch’oe returned to Seoul with a new printing press and set up a small publishing house called Shinmun-gwan (House of New Culture). On November 1, 1908, he launched Sony˘on (Boys ), his first monthly magazine. He was only eighteen at the time (Fig. 11.1). The year of the first publication of Sony˘on, 1908, was a stormy period between the forced Eulsa Treaty (or Japan–Korea Treaty) of 1905, when Korea was made a protectorate of Japan, and its eventual annexation in 1910. Published during this tumultuous time, Sony˘on marks Ch’oe’s attempt to interpellate an ‘imagined community’ of youthful readers as the new subjects of Korean history. The word Sony˘on (少年) is a word made by combining two Chinese characters meaning, respectively, few (so) and years (ny˘on). Literally, it means “few in years.” Ch’oe probably took the word from Japanese magazines such as Sh¯ onen-en (Boys’ Garden, 1888), Sh¯ onen sekai (Children’s World, 1895–1933), and Nihon sh¯ onen (Japanese Boys, 1906–1938), which he no doubt had come across during his time in Japan.6 In Korean context, the term referred to male students between ages 9 and 15, to whom Ch’oe, older by just a few years, could speak with authority as well as sympathy. As Dafna Zur notes, Sony˘on

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Fig. 11.1 Title page, Sony˘on, Year 2, Volume 2 (February 1, 1909). The boxed contents include Robinson Crusoe

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“took on the project of molding and politicizing Korea’s youth” who would play “a central role in the formation of the New Korea (Shindaehan).”7 A manifesto for the magazine, which appears in the front matter of the first volume and also embellishes later issues, identifies its target audience as well as its national thrust: “Let’s have our great nation of Korea (Daehan) be a country of boys (sony˘on). For that purpose, we would teach and qualify them to be equipped to take full responsibility for our nation.”8 Generally regarded as the first modern Korean magazine to have had a major impact, Sony˘on was published on a monthly basis between November 1908 and January 1911, with its publication history directly reflecting Korea’s national fate. Its publication was interrupted in August 1910, when Korea was annexed; resumed in December 1910; then finally was banned in May 1911. Sony˘on was an encyclopedic and educational magazine that, in Chizuko T. Allen’s words, “introduced the best in Western civilization from its history, geography, natural sciences and technology.”9 Printed in color in lively visual format, it contained general information about western countries, maps, biographies of heroes such as Napoleon and Peter the Great, and translated excerpts from such authors as Swift, Defoe, Byron, Victor Hugo, and Tolstoy. Ch’oe’s translation of Robinson Crusoe appeared serially in six installments between February and September 1909.10 The first five chapters contain an abridged account of the first book of the Crusoe trilogy; the sixth and final chapter consists of a drastic summary of the whole of The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe. The chapter breakdown is roughly as follows: Chapter 1. Robinson Crusoe goes to sea against his father’s wishes and experiences his first shipwreck, which he fortunately survives. Chapter 2. Crusoe makes his first successful voyage to Guinea; on his second voyage, he is captured and taken prisoner by the Moors; he eventually escapes with Xury and is rescued by a European ship. Chapter 3. Crusoe goes to Brazil and becomes a planter; later, he is fatefully shipwrecked on a desert island during another attempted voyage to Guinea. Chapter 4. Crusoe builds his house on the island; he plants barley; dreams of an avenging angel; repents, prays, and is converted; tames a parrot. Chapter 5. Crusoe discovers a footprint; meets Friday; rescues two ‘white’ men; returns to England; visits Portugal; travels through Spain and France on his trip home.

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Chapter 6. Crusoe voyages to Brazil where he marries; returns to England upon his wife’s death; embarks on a voyage to his island; loses Friday during a skirmish on the African seas; goes to Madagascar; ends up traveling throughout Asia; returns to England via the Siberian hinterlands. What becomes immediately apparent even in this sketchy summary of the translation is Ch’oe’s primary interest in Crusoe’s identity as an adventurer, traveler, and voyager. Ch’oe organizes Defoe’s text roughly in accordance with geographical location, emphasizing Crusoe’s voyages before he is shipwrecked on his desert island, as well as his travels after he returns to England. Crusoe’s sojourn on the deserted Caribbean island is dramatically reduced to a single chapter. Although Ch’oe does refer to Crusoe’s prayers and conversion, he clearly downplays the religious aspects of the text; nothing in the translation suggests that Crusoe is a religious pilgrim whose desire to travel constitutes his “Original Sin.”11 Nor does Ch’oe display any overt awareness of the capitalist and colonialist energies in Defoe’s novel. Ch’oe does not interpret Crusoe as a character obsessed with profit or bent on proving his racial superiority. Crusoe’s relationship with Friday is portrayed in unproblematic terms as an affectionate master–servant bond. Neither religious pilgrim, economic individual, nor racial colonizer, Ch’oe’s Robinson Crusoe is first and foremost a young boy whose desire to travel the seas is based on an innocent, childish desire “to float a small boat on the big sea and, sailing here, to caress the back of the whale, then rowing there, to pull on the crocodile’s tail.”12 Crusoe refers to himself as a “sony˘on moh˘omja” (boy adventurer) who is “young in years and inexperienced with the waves.”13 He is innocent enough that, when his father sorrowfully warns him against a seafaring life, he weeps bountifully, tears streaming down his face. In Defoe’s novel, however, it is Crusoe’s father who weeps, not Robinson. At the beginning of his translation, Ch’oe repeatedly emphasizes Crusoe’s youth, interpreting his “Original Sin” as an innocent fault in years rather than spiritual or political tendency. Ch’oe’s Crusoe is neither a particularly unfilial son nor a strongly filial one: he neither leaves home in conscious rebellion against paternal authority nor torments himself with guilt over his disobedience. He does regret going against his father’s wishes immediately after he dreams of a “man in a cloud of fire,” but then, almost as swiftly, convinces himself that God has forgiven him.14 Indeed, Ch’oe’s Crusoe is a remarkably cheerful, sanguine subject, free from the endless spiritual doubts that torment Defoe’s Crusoe. He is easily consoled by what he reads in the

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Bible, readily convinced of God’s providential care, and quick to find peace. When he discovers a footprint on the island (which is tellingly a bit smaller than his own), he is pacified by reading the Bible and filled with “unspeakable happiness” at God’s blessing.15 Such childlike optimism and imaginative energy land Ch’oe’s Crusoe in trouble but also support him through all his trials. Ch’oe does not invest his young Crusoe with overwhelming and crippling interiority. His Crusoe is all cheerful action and adventure. At one level, this version of Crusoe is a function of the massively abridged narrative, reflecting the sheer brevity of the translation. However, Ch’oe’s Crusoe is not simply abridged into an action hero. While the plot necessitates his rapid aging, he in many ways remains at heart the young boy whose desire to play with whales and crocodiles propelled him to the seas. Though profit-making adds to the enjoyment of voyaging, it is not economic motivation so much as the spirit of fun (chami) and adventure (moh˘omsim) that make Ch’oe’s Crusoe continually travel. This becomes especially clear in the last chapter where an old, bereaved, and rich Crusoe sets out once again on a seafaring voyage simply because his life has become devoid of all fun (chami). Ch’oe’s prefatory remarks to the Robinson Crusoe translations in Sony˘on vividly attest to his authorial strategy: We like what is lively and sublime (k’waejang ), therefore we love the sea and the sky. We like what is exceptional and unique (y˘ongt’uk), ˇ so we enjoy going on adventurous voyages. As we like the sea and the sky and enjoy going on voyages, we delight in reading stories of wanderings and literary adventures. It is this tendency that has made me translate Robinson Crusoe, an extraordinary and fantastic story, for our beloved boys (sony˘onjaeja), so that they will have a taste of the enjoyment of sea life and the pleasure of sea adventures. We can say without exaggerating that there is no boy (sony˘on) today who does not know this most fantastic of all the most fantastic stories of the world. Why should this magazine print less worthy works with grand titles rather than such a useful text? That is why we have decided to allot half of this magazine to this work. What boy (sony˘on) in New Korea (Shindaehan) would choose not to read it? We do aver that there could be no such boy.16

In this remarkable preface, Ch’oe claims that the ideal readership for Defoe’s novel is the boy whom he proceeds to define in aesthetic terms, as a subject open to natural and literary sublimity. The boy takes natural

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interest in the limitless and boundless spaces of nature. Correlatively, Ch’oe implies, he is attracted to stories that satisfy in compensatory form a natural thirst for action. The boy is not yet old enough to engage in adventure; he is a potential rather than an actual hero. Robinson Crusoe’s fantastic story about adventures and wanderings on the many seas of the world, Ch’oe argues, will be useful (yuik) because it will keep the spirit of adventurous action alive for the New Korean boy (Shindaehan sony˘on). In defining his readership in this manner, Ch’oe thus deliberately interpellates a new national subject—a subject still in the making, defined less by present action than by aesthetic sensibility and a boundless, limitless futurity.

The Boy and the Sea Why did Ch’oe Nams˘on choose to mobilize young readers for his project of nation-building? Considering that Korea was already a protectorate of Japan when Ch’oe began publishing his magazine, his decision to put the fate of the nation in the hands of young boys not yet ready for political action might seem at once excessively utopian and politically circumspect. Despite its flamboyant rhetoric, Ch’oe’s magazine did not carry an easily identifiable political message. Kwon Boduerae has argued that his magazine was not fundamentally anti-western or even anti-Japanese. Sony˘on identified the patriotism of the New Korean boy (Shindaehan sony˘on, 新大 韓 少年) not in agonistic and antagonistic terms, in opposition to a political other, but rather in terms of self-action (chadong, 自動), self-certainty (chasin, 自信), self-formation (chas˘ong, 自成), and self-control (chasu, 自守).17 Ch’oe envisaged his national project first and foremost as a broad project of self-education and enlightenment rather than immediate political intervention. Notably, Ch’oe’s primary symbol for this open project of enlightenment is the sea. Today Sony˘on is perhaps best known in Korea as the publication in which Ch’oe’s famous “From the Sea to the Boy” (Hae eges˘o sony˘on ege) first appeared. This rousing poem written in vernacular han’g˘ul, featuring a dramatic use of onomatopoeia and caesuras, moving freely between narration and colloquial first-person speech, imitates the crashing of the waves as they break against the shore. The main speaker is the sea that roars and swaggers at a world it threatens to beat, break, and destroy. At the end of the poem, however, the sea suddenly turns tender

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as it addresses the boys who throw themselves into its embrace. The sea declares its animosity to all but these boys whom it “kisses.”18 What is the nature of this apparently special connection between the sea and the boys? Ch’oe’s concluding remarks added to the end of the Robinson Crusoe translation provide some clues. In the following passage, Ch’oe ventriloquizes an aged Crusoe speaking to his young Korean readers: You boys of New Korea (Shindaehan sony˘on), who have a most bright and honorable future, should not take for granted that your nation is surrounded on three sides by the sea, a bag of diversions and a repository of treasures. I humbly hope you will listen to my words and take the sea as your friend and teacher, your playground and sphere of action, to reign over it and humor it. Do not use the sea as we have done, for profit or for play. Use the sea for higher purposes, for humanistic studies and national interests. Study it as an object of theoretical inquiry and as a natural resource, with a sincere heart and earnest intention. Then, I am sure, you will be able to have more interesting sea adventures than myself, an old man.19

For Ch’oe, the project of educating and enlightening Korean youth depends on a new geographical understanding of the Korean nation as a peninsula bounded on three sides by the sea. Realizing the potentiality of the Korean nation means recognizing its connections to the world at large and going beyond the tradition of Sino-centrism. Turning to the sea means turning away from a cultural imagination centered on Korea’s land-based connections to China and reimagining Korea as vitally connected with and oriented toward the West via the sea.20 By having Crusoe speak directly to his Korean readers, Ch’oe calls on his young readers to engage actively with Crusoe’s adventuring spirit and become Crusonian subjects in their own right—voyagers into the intellectual and political future as well as an expanded global world. The metaleptic trope of a fictional eighteenth-century British Crusoe traveling through time to address twentieth-century Koreans testifies to the extraordinary pressure Ch’oe put on Defoe’s text. Not only does Ch’oe make Crusoe directly address Korean youth; at one point in the translation he makes Crusoe into a Korean character. In the fourth installment (July 1, 1909), Crusoe declares his intention to build his island house in a place where he will have an open view of the sea and, he hopes, of Chos˘on Korea (Kuchos˘on)!21

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As numerous critics have noted, Ch’oe’s “obsession with seas and oceans” is in evidence everywhere in his magazine.22 Ch’oe printed multiple essays and poems dealing with the sea in Sony˘on, including a serialized essay on “Korean maritime history” (Taehan haesang sa), a translation of Byron’s poem “The Ocean” (Year 2, Volume 7), and short prose pieces entitled “Look at the Sea” and “I shall spend this summer by the sea” (Year 2, Volume 8). In these works, Ch’oe connects the sea with modern knowledge, especially that of the West and Japan. Ch’oe’s translations of western literature are obviously connected to these historical, theoretical, essayistic writings about the sea. Ch’oe’s obsession shows that he viewed an enlightened, modern knowledge of world geography and history as a precondition for national rebuilding. His translation of Robinson Crusoe was designed to offer his young readers information about distant places and to impart to them an expanded, global sense of Korea’s place in the world. Ch’oe paid close attention to the names of foreign countries such as Britain, Brazil, or Portugal, underlining geographical names and even adding footnotes for some unfamiliar places. For example, Ch’oe inserts a footnote to “Lisbon” that appears in the part where Robinson travels to England on land, saying “Lisbon is the capital of Portugal, and if you want to go to Britain on land from there, you should pass Spain and France, take a ship in the harbor of Calais, and then go over the small sea [strait].”23 Ch’oe’s decision to include a drastically abbreviated Farther Adventures in the last installment of the translation most likely stemmed from his desire to provide new geographical knowledge for the reader.24 It is clear from the translation, however, that Ch’oe’s own grasp of the geography of the novel was far from perfect. He seems to be unaware of the position of either Brazil or the desert island. Crusoe keeps traveling to Brazil in Ch’oe’s version of Farther Adventures, which suggests that Ch’oe may have confused Brazil with Brussels. Additionally, he appears to be unaware of the exact location of many of Crusoe’s Asian destinations. This was probably a problem caused by the difficulty translators had in deciphering Defoe’s rendering of Asian place names. Interestingly, in the July 1909 issue (Year 2, Volume 6) of Sony˘on, Ch’oe printed a world map in which the territorial span of the British Empire was clearly marked (Fig. 11.2). The image was accompanied by a caption that reads “The Nation with the Greatest Wealth in Colonies is Britain.” In the accompanying essay titled “World Knowledge,” Ch’oe

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Fig. 11.2 Sony˘on, Year 2, Volume 6 (July 1, 1909), 54

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noted that these British colonies were located either in areas of great international competition or where there was great potential for growth; they had been gained by means of the British character founded on “willingness to adventure and courage.” Ch’oe’s point was not that Korean boys should aspire to conquer colonies in the manner of Britain but that they should learn from the honest self-appraisal, perseverance, and relentless effort of the Anglo-Saxon spirit.25 Ch’oe believed that a proper comparison with Britain would encourage Korean youth to see Korea’s peninsular identity—its openness on three sides to the sea—not as a geographical weakness but as a potential advantage and opportunity. Ch’oe’s rhetorical call to Korean boys to become more Crusoe-like—in short, more British—is rife with historical irony. By strategically selecting the sea as a symbol linking Korean youth with western knowledge and modernity, Ch’oe risks aligning his project of enlightenment with maritime—and potentially imperial—adventures and accepting the problematic equation of Asian history with premodernity. He appears to have been aware of this danger. By making Crusoe exhort his young Korean readers to use the sea not for “profit” but rather “for higher purposes, for humanistic studies and national interests,” Ch’oe attempts to disengage from the capitalist and colonial overtones of Defoe’s novel. For Ch’oe, Crusoe does not represent economic individualism, as Ian Watt argued; rather, his travels and travails symbolize the “project” (kihoek) of national enlightenment and uplift. The cost of this interpretation is clear. Ch’oe’s attempt to turn Defoe’s novel into a national, anti-colonial allegory must disregard the internal tensions that are so central to the lasting power of the book: the tension between Crusoe the wanderer and Crusoe the colonizer; between his avowed, mysterious impulse to travel and his equally restless desire for accumulation and profit; between his essential solitude and his hapless dependence on Friday. Since the 1905 Eulsa Treaty officially had made Korea a protectorate of Japan, no doubt Ch’oe thought that the imaginative benefits to be reaped from encouraging Korean boys to dream of becoming British adventurers ready to conquer the world were far greater than the political danger of them becoming colonizers in their own right. A much stronger political argument has also been made. Some critics have argued that Ch’oe’s project was more cunningly political than may at first appear. On this view, Ch’oe was not a naïve misreader of Defoe so much as a strategic disavower of the colonial content of Robinson Crusoe. By seemingly misrecognizing this obvious implication of the novel, Ch’oe

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was in fact making a subversive move. For instance, Kwon Boduerae has persuasively argued that Ch’oe’s “apolitical politics” (pi ch˘ongch’ij˘ok chongch’is˘ong ) is a calculated posture that makes him look safely apolitical whereas his magazine actually harbors a strong oppositional message.26 In Ch’oe’s hands, the idealization of Crusoe’s resourcefulness and independence—what the Victorians notably would call his knack for “selfhelp”—would turn into a not-so-covert call for national independence. The idea of cultivating “national independence through personal independence” was in fact a motto of Meiji Japan’s foremost intellectual, Fukuzawa Yukichi. Ch’oe could not have been blind to the connections between Britain’s colonial ambitions and Japan’s. In turning Crusoe into a figure for national independence, Ch’oe was emulating Fukuzawa while simultaneously subverting Fukuzawa’s Japan-centered message by recontextualizing independence in the context of colonial Korea. Caught between the dual meanings of Japan as an invading and colonizing entity on the one hand and as an indispensable medium of Westernization and modernization on the other, Ch’oe chose to preserve this tension rather than to resolve it in any easy fashion. This is what gives his translation of Robinson Crusoe its peculiar pathos.

Reforming East Asian Youth: Korean Transmutations A useful analogue to Ch’oe’s struggle to invent a new Korean subject for the twentieth century can be found in Liang Qichao’s efforts to reform China. Liang (1873–1929), “arguably the most influential Chinese intellectual of the first decade of the twentieth century,” was a reformer who was profoundly influenced by the fourteen years (1898–1905) he spent in exile in Japan.27 After the shock of the Sino-Japanese War, which led to China’s ceding of Taiwan and the Penghu Islands to Japan, Chinese reformers such as Liang embarked on a soul-searching quest for national reform and salvation. With slogans such as “follow Japan” and “learn from Japan,” Liang unabashedly called on China to take Japan as its model. What impressed Liang in particular was Japan’s openness toward the west and to western values. For this reason, Liang actively “promoted the adoption of Western thought systems through Japan,” leaning heavily on Fukuzawa’s ideas about self-reliance and independence.28 In particular, Liang called on translation as “the most important way to strengthen a nation” because of the power of literature to stir consciousness.29 A

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prominent social Darwinist, Liang took a particular interest in the AngloSaxons whom he considered examples of “masters among the masters, strong men among the strong” (主中之主, 强中之强). Liang stated that “Caucasian people dominate globally, not because of divine providence, but because of their national superiority” and took Robinson Crusoe as a good instance of the “national superiority” of the “unrivalled” British people. As editor of the new journal Xin Xiaoshuo (New Novel , 新小 說), Liang established a section on “Adventure Fiction” and planned to translate Robinson Crusoe “to inspire the spirit of adventure in our citizens.”30 While Ch’oe’s interpretation of Robinson Crusoe is in line with Liang’s national reform project in many ways, his interpellation of the Korean sony˘on is refracted through Ch’oe’s exposure to the Japanese publishing market as well as his own youth. As Youn Youngshil has pointed out, Liang’s well-known 1900 essay “Young China” (少年中國說) was an important precedent for Korean invocations of the sony˘on.31 In this essay, Liang identified old China metaphorically with the poverty, indifference, and conservative stance of old age, and contrasted it with the prosperity, energy, and progressiveness of youth. His political point was that the future of China lay with the new nation-state as opposed to the old Chinese dynasties. For Liang, in other words, “young China” was first and foremost a political designation for the nation.32 For Ch’oe, however, the young sony˘on had a more particular incarnation in the boy, who was a pre-citizen rather than a citizen proper of the Korean nation. By appealing to the sony˘on, Ch’oe deliberately identified his reading public as readers slightly younger than the older youth, ch’ongchun, who had their own more political publications. He chose to interpellate a pre-political, malleable readership open to new ideas and narratives, and to emphasize the building of national character and moral reform rather than direct political action. Ch’oe’s cultural project, however, quickly ran into hard reality. As Allen puts it, the “gulf between Ch’oe’s dreams for Korea and the reality of Korea’s status as a colony after 1910 must have led him to reexamine his position.”33 In the years after 1910, Ch’oe abandoned his oceanic, Crusonian imaginary and the pursuit of “enlightenment” and “modernity.” Instead, he developed an intellectual interest in classical Korean literature, wrote about mountains instead of oceans, and turned to indigenous Korean folklore in order to reinterpret the value of Korean culture.34 In this sense, we could say he ultimately chose a very different kind of

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nationalist politics than Liang, who maintained a strong focus on practical learning and modernizing the Chinese state. Today, Koreans generally regard Ch’oe’s cultural and political legacy with ambivalence. Although Ch’oe is recognized as a key participant in the March 1st Movement against Japanese imperialist rule and one of the writers of the Korean Declaration of Independence (1919), his subsequent evolution into a proJapanese collaborator in the 1930s and 1940s has tarnished his status as a cultural nationalist. It is a startling historical irony that Ch’oe the youthful publisher who urged his boy readers to model themselves after Robinson Crusoe evolved into a pro-Japanese academic who claimed in the 1940s that Anglo-Saxons were the greatest enemies of East Asia.35

Notes 1. Donald Keene, “First Japanese Translations of European Literature,” American Scholar 45.2 (1976): 273. 2. Oh Hyun-sook, “Kaehwa kyemong’gi Robinson Crusoe u˘ i p˘onan kwa adong text ro u˘ i ihaeng” (An Adaptation of Robinson Crusoe in the Period of Enlightenment and the Transition to a Children’s Text), Pipy˘ong Munhak 46 (2012): 299–332. 3. Li Jin and Sean MacDonald, “Three Late Qing Chinese Translations of Robinson Crusoe: Shen Zufen, Dalu bao and Lin Shu,” Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews 38 (2016): 80. 4. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), 69–70. Cited in Li and MacDonald, 81. 5. Chizuko T. Allen, “Ch’oe Nam-s˘on’s Youth Magazines and Message of a Global Korea in the Early Twentieth Century,” Sungkyun Journal of East Asian Studies 14.2 (2014): 198. 6. Allen, “Ch’oe Nam-s˘on’s Youth Magazines,” 198–99. 7. Dafna Zur, Figuring Korean Futures: Children’s Literature in Modern Korea (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2017), 30. 8. Sony˘on, Year 1, Volume 1 (November 1, 1908), front matter. Digital copies of the magazine are available at the Museum of Korean Magazines Digital Collection website: http://museum.magazine.or.kr. 9. Allen, “Ch’oe Nam-s˘on’s Youth Magazines,” 202. 10. The six installments appeared in the following volumes of Sony˘on: Year 2, Volume 2 (February 1, 1909); Year 2, Volume 3 (March 1, 1909); Year 2, Volume 4 (April 1, 1909); Year 2, Volume 6 (July 1, 1909); Year 2, Volume 7 (August 1, 1909); Year 2, Volume 8 (September 1, 1909). 11. Daniel Defoe, The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, ed. W. R. Owens, The Novels of Daniel Defoe, vol. 1, ed. W. R. Owens and P. N. Furbank (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2008), 200.

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12. Sony˘on, Year 2, Volume 2 (February 1, 1909), 21. All following translations into English are our own. 13. Sony˘on, Year 2, Volume 2 (February 1, 1909), 23. 14. Sony˘on, Year 2, Volume 6 (July 1, 1909), 34. 15. Sony˘on, Year 2, Volume 7 (August 1, 1909), 30. 16. Sony˘on, Year 1, Volume 2 (December 1, 1908), 42. 17. Sony˘on, Year 2, Volume 3 (March 1, 1909), 50–53. Cited in Kwon Boduerae, “Sony˘on, Ch’˘ongch’un u˘ i him kwa ilsang u˘ i chaepy˘on” (Sony˘on, the Power of Youth and the Reorganization of the Everyday), in Sony˘on kwa Ch’˘ongch’un ui ˘ ch’ang (The Windows of Sony˘on and Ch’˘ongch’un), ed. Kwon Boduerae (Seoul: Ewha Womans University Press, 2007), 161. 18. Sony˘on, Year 1, Volume 1 (November 1, 1908), 4. 19. Sony˘on, Year 2, Volume 8 (September 1, 1909), 43–44. 20. The association of western Europe with the sea is also evident in early twentieth-century Chinese literature. Li and MacDonald note that, “after the invasion of China by Western powers from the southeastern coastal areas, the ‘West’ was linked to the ocean and sea travel and Western superiority would be regarded as the result of its seafaring genius and military capabilities” (82). 21. Sony˘on, Year 2, Volume 6 (July 1, 1909), 33. 22. Allen, “Ch’oe Nam-s˘on’s Youth Magazines,” 203. 23. Sony˘on, Year 2, Volume 7 (August 1, 1909), 41. 24. The inclusion of Farther Adventures in early twentieth-century Asian translations is no doubt due to the fact that Victorian editions of Robinson Crusoe usually included the first two books of the trilogy. 25. Sony˘on, Year 2, Volume 6 (July 1, 1909), 62–63. See also Kw˘on Yong-s˘on, “Kukto chiri u˘ i palgy˘on kwa ch’˘olto y˘ohaeng u˘ i ilsangs˘ong” (Discovery of Geography and the Everyday-ness of Train Travel), in Sony˘on kwa Ch’˘ongch’un ui ˘ ch’ang, 98. 26. Kwon Boduerae, “Sony˘on, Ch’˘ongch’un u˘ i him kwa ilsang u˘ i chaepy˘on,” 161. 27. Hiroko Willcock, “Japanese Modernization and the Emergence of New Fiction in Early Twentieth Century China: Study of Liang Qichao,” Modern Asian Studies 29.4 (1995): 818. 28. Willcock, 818, 826–827. 29. Liang Qichao, “Bianfa tongyi: lun yishu” (Comprehensive treatises on reform: On Translation of Books), in Yinbing shi heji (Collected Works from the Ice-Drinker’s Studio) (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1989), 1: 66. Cited in Li and MacDonald, 81. 30. Li and MacDonald, 82. Liang’s translation was never completed. 31. Youn Youngshil, “Kungmin kukka u˘ i chudongny˘ok, Ch’˘ongny˘on kwa Sony˘on u˘ i k˘ori: Ch’oe Nams˘on u˘ i sony˘onji chungsim u˘ ro” (The Motor of

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the Nation State, the Distance between “Youth” and “Boys”: Centering on Ch’oe Nams˘on’s Boy Magazines), Minjok munhwa y˘on’gu 48 (2008): 108. Youn, 109. Chizuko T. Allen, “Northeast Asia Centered around Korea: Ch’oe Nams˘on’s View of History,” Journal of Asian Studies 49.4 (1990): 790. Allen, “Northeast Asia Centered around Korea,” 791–792. Hwang Kyung Moon, A History of Korea (London: Palgrave, 2010), 191.

Works Cited Allen, Chizuko T. 1990. “Northeast Asia Centered around Korea: Ch’oe Nams˘on’s View of History.” Journal of Asian Studies 49.4: 787–806. ———. 2014. “Ch’oe Nam-s˘on’s Youth Magazines and Message of a Global Korea in the Early Twentieth Century.” Sungkyun Journal of East Asian Studies 14.2: 195–217. Ch’oe, Nams˘on. 1908-1911. Sony˘on. Digital copies of the magazine are available at the Museum of Korean Magazines Digital Collection Website: http://mus eum.magazine.or.kr. Defoe, Daniel. 1719; 2008. The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe. The Novels of Daniel Defoe, vol. 1. Edited by W.R. Owens. London: Pickering & Chatto. Hwang, Kyung Moon. 2010. A History of Korea. London: Palgrave. Keene, Donald. 1976. “First Japanese Translations of European Literature.” American Scholar 45.2: 271–277. Kwon, Boduerae. 2007. “Sony˘on, Ch’˘ongch’un u˘ i him kwa ilsang u˘ i chaepy˘on” (Sony˘on, the Power of Youth and the Reorganization of the Everyday). Sony˘on kwa Ch’˘ongch’un ui ˘ ch’ang (The Windows of Sony˘on and Ch’˘ongch’un). Edited by Kwon Boduerae. Seoul: Ewha Womans University Press. 159–182. Kwon, Yong-s˘on. 2007. Kukto chiri u˘ i palgy˘on kwa ch’˘olto y˘ohaeng u˘ i ilsangs˘ong (Discovery of Geography and the Everyday-ness of Train Travel), in Sony˘on kwa Ch’˘ongch’un ui ˘ ch’ang: 83–107. Li, Jin, and Sean MacDonald. 2016. “Three Late Qing Chinese Translations of Robinson Crusoe: Shen Zufen, Dalu bao and Lin Shu.” Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews 38: 79–106. Liang, Qichao. 1989. “Bianfa tongyi: lun yishu” (Comprehensive treatises on reform: On Translation of Books). Yinbing shi heji (Collected Works from the Ice-Drinker’s Studio). Beijing: Zhonghua shuju. Cited in Li and MacDonald, 81. Oh, Hyun-sook. 2012. “Kaehwa kyemong’gi Robinson Crusoe u˘ i p˘onan kwa adong text ro u˘ i ihaen” (An Adaptation of Robinson Crusoe in the Period of

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Enlightenment and the Transition to a Children’s Text). Pipy˘ong Munhak 46: 299–332. Said, Edward. 1994. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Vintage Books. Willcock, Hiroko. 1995. “Japanese Modernization and the Emergence of New Fiction in Early Twentieth Century China: Study of Liang Qichao.” Modern Asian Studies 29.4: 817–840. Youn, Youngshil. 2008. “Kungmin kukka u˘ i chudongny˘ok, Ch’˘ongny˘on kwa Sony˘on u˘ i k˘ori: Ch’oe Nams˘on u˘ i sony˘onji chungsim u˘ ro” (The Motor of the Nation State, the Distance between ‘Youth’ and ‘Boys’: Centering on Ch’oe Nams˘on’s Boy Magazines). Minjok munhwa y˘on’gu 48: 99–125. Zur, Dafna. 2017. Figuring Korean Futures: Children’s Literature in Modern Korea. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

CHAPTER 12

“I Must Endure Courageously and Manfully”—Robinson Crusoe Translated by Minami Y¯ oichir¯o and Its Influence on Later Translations in Post-war Japan Kazuya Sato

Introduction Robinson Hy¯ ory¯ u-ki (The Chronicle of Robinson Adrift),1 one of the many Japanese retellings of Robinson Crusoe, written by Minami Y¯oichir¯o (1893–1980) and published in 1950 by Dai Nihon Y¯ubenkai K¯odansha, with some amendments to its first edition in 19382 opens with this scene.

In this paper, I quote from this Japanese version by translating the passages back into English myself. I indicate Japanese names in the Japanese order, that is, surname first. I also translate into English all the quotations from Japanese authors and writers, including Japanese translators, unless otherwise indicated. K. Sato (B) Japan Women’s University, Tokyo, Japan © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 S. Clark and Y. Yoshihara (eds.), Robinson Crusoe in Asia, Asia-Pacific and Literature in English, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-4051-3_12

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There was a roaring sound in the middle of the night. I woke to the deafening sound of great waves and sat up on my bed in the cabin. A coffee cup slid off the table and smashed to pieces on the floor. My boots, which had been placed neatly under the bed, tumbled to the corner of the room, where they stopped still. I clung to the iron edge of the bedstead and listened. From amidst the storm and the raging billows, I could hear the desperate cries of sailors on deck. “I must be in terrible danger.” I felt the blood drain from my face.3

When we juxtapose this vivid description of a shipwreck with the rather prosaic chronicle of Crusoe’s family history found in the first page of the original novel, the contrast is striking: I Was born in the Year 1632, in the City of York, of a good Family, tho’ not of that Country, my Father being a Foreigner of Bremen, who settled first at Hull: He got a good Estate by Merchandise, and leaving off his Trade, lived afterward at York, from whence he had married my Mother, whose Relations were named Robinson, a very good Family in that Country, and from whom I was called Robinson Kreutznaer; but by the usual Corruption of Words in England, we are now called, nay we call our selves, and write our Name Crusœ, and so my Companions always call’d me.4

Here we can easily see the difference between Minami’s text and what Defoe wrote, even if we ignore the difference of the languages. Minami, however, kept the main story and most of the characters almost intact even though he made a number of changes when he retold Robinson Crusoe. This means that what will be examined here is not one of the Robinsonade stories, which are in most cases totally different desert island narratives, such as Robinson der Jüngere (1779–1780) written by J. H. Campe or Der Schweizerische Robinson (1812) by Johann David Wyss. Sometimes even Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island (1883) has been included in this group of stories. What Minami presents is a unique text, which is, unlike these examples, essentially a translation, with some interpretations and alterations of his own added to the original. Without changing the main storyline and most of the characters, Minami succeeds in not only modifying the narrative structure of the story but also in making the personality of Crusoe more humane and accessible to readers than Defoe does. Minami’s Crusoe is kind and

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considerate to animals, sentimentally longs for his parents and his home country, and displays wider variety of emotional capacity, including humor and gaiety, which the original Crusoe rarely shows. In addition, Minami invents a number of scenes to illustrate the changes, and to explain a few questions which Defoe left unanswered. For instance, Minami explicates why Friday refuses to add salt to his food, whereas Defoe only points out the fact without explaining the reason.5 At the same time, the text expresses the distinctive ideological tendencies that were prevalent at the time of the first edition, 1938, rather than the time of its final version, 1950. Japan had already been at war with China for a year in 1938, and the military began to rule the nation. Jingoism had spread widely among the public.6 It is also essential to note that this book is aimed at juvenile readers, since it was published as part of Sekai Meisaku Zensh¯ u (A Collection of the World’s Great Works ), which contains well-known children’s stories in the West, such as Tom Sawyer, and Little Lord Fauntleroy, as well as Treasure Island. The “translation” from the original to the version that will be discussed here was twofold: first, from a novel for adults to a children’s story, and second, from English to Japanese. Robinson Crusoe has been read as a children’s story on both sides of the Pacific as well as the Atlantic for a long time; already by the late eighteenth century, children’s editions were being published in Britain and America.7 Thus, a large number of high-quality studies have been produced in the English-speaking world on the transformation of Defoe’s work from adult novel to children’s story, including some excellent examples by M. O. Grenby and Andrew O’Malley.8 Little has been studied, however, concerning the translation of Robinson Crusoe into Japanese, especially as a work of children’s literature, although it was known, not only as a literary work for adults, but also as a children’s story from an early stage following its introduction to Japan, even as early as 1899, as will be discussed in the next section. Accordingly, the present essay will concentrate on this aspect, namely Japanese renditions of Robinson Crusoe as a children’s story. There are three reasons why the renditions of Robinson Crusoe by Minami are worth discussing here. As will be discussed later, one is that Minami was immensely popular in the early decades of the twentieth century, not only as a writer of boys’ adventure stories, but also as a translator of various sorts of children’s stories, even though he is almost forgotten now. The second reason is that he was representative of a group of writers of children’s stories. Minami was a regular contributor of Sh¯ onen

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Kurabu, one of the most widely circulated boys’ magazines before the war. These contributors were all noted authors, not only of children’s, but also adults’ novels and stories, such as Sato K¯oryoku, Yoshikawa Eiji, and Osaragi Jir¯ o, to name but a few. They were not, of course, homogeneous. Still, they shared certain values concerning what was desirable in children’s, especially boys’, stories. Third, Minami was influential. His renditions of Robinson Crusoe have had much influence on the post-war translations of the work. It is his style and narrative technique that the following translators imitated most, but his ideological leaning is not totally separable from his technique. In this sense, he established a touchstone for Robinson Crusoe’s translations in the following decades after the war. This essay will discuss the following three issues concerning the Japanese rewriting of Robinson Crusoe by Minami. First, before scrutinizing the text itself, there will be a brief look at the background and context of the book. Second, the distinctive features of Minami’s retelling of Robinson Crusoe will be examined, with special attention to its narrative techniques and ideological perspective in the respective sections. Third, retold versions of this work after Minami, from the 1960s onward, will be looked at, including the influence on them of his text. Through these discussions, this essay, though tentatively, would argue that Minami’s final version of Robinson Crusoe, which was published in 1950, was still retaining some of the characteristics of the first edition in 1938 because some parts of the ideological climate in Japan did not change much even after the Asia-Pacific war. This thesis is just embryonic and needs more supporting historical research, but it will be demonstrated in the latter part of this essay that Minami had many imitators in post-war Japan. Although it was his narrative techniques that were most adopted by following translators, close examination of Minami’s retelling might give us a hint in deciphering what was ideologically changed and what was constant in Japanese children’s reading materials after the war.

Background, Context, and the Translator Translation of Western literature into Japanese has flourished since Japan opened to the world on a full scale after the Meiji Revolution in 1867.9 As Yamanouchi Hisaaki points out, “Western literature was popularized in Japan through endless translations and adaptations, thereby influencing

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Japanese literature in both content and form.”10 In a similar vein, European and American literature had a special meaning for Japanese children in the atmosphere of enlightenment and progress in the Meiji era.11 Approximately two decades after that great change, around the last few years of the 1880s, literary magazines for children began to be published, and most of them contained translations of stories, such as Aesop’s fables, Grimms’ fairy tales, and stories by Hans Christian Andersen, as well as well-known works such as Little Women and Little Lord Fauntlery. In fact, these translations were widely read even before children’s literature began to be written by Japanese authors after the 1890s. It is generally agreed that modern Japanese children’s literature began with Koganémaru (1891) by Iwaya Sazanami (1870–1933), who was also one of the earliest editors of specialist series and literary magazines for children.12 He began a series of translations, Sekai Otogi-banashi (Children’s Stories of the World) in 1899, which continued until 1908, reaching one hundred volumes. This series established Iwaya’s position in the world of children’s books. Not only has American and European children’s literature been translated for children, but literature for adult readers also has, with much omission and simplification. A number of series—such as Sekai Meisaku Zenshu¯ u (A Collection of Great Works of the World) and Sh¯ onen Sh¯ ojo Sekai Bungaku Zensh¯ u (A Collection of World Literature for Boys and Girls )— were published, as far back as the early decades of the twentieth century. It was thought that works of Western literature, if they were great ones, would be good for the education of Japanese children. Early examples can be found in Akai-tori (The Red Bird), founded by Suzuki Mi’ekichi (1882–1936), one of the earliest children’s writers, translators, and editors in Japan. Suzuki published in his magazine not only his translations of works of children’s literature such as Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865), but also stories for general readers, such as Mateo Falcone (1829) by Prosper Mérimée (1803-1870), and Katherine Mansfield’s “The Little Girl” (1912), transforming them into children’s stories. All in all, translation and transformation of adult literature into children’s stories has been fairly common in Japan since European literature began to be read. The translations of Robinson Crusoe in Japan were also targeted at juvenile readers. What is immediately striking is their sheer number. Since they first started to appear in the mid-nineteenth century, the translations of Robinson Crusoe well exceed 200.13 Needless to say, not all of them

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were aimed at juvenile readers, but at an stage of their history, translations of Robinson Crusoe became children’s reading material. One of the series of translations of foreign children’s literature edited by Iwaya, the above-mentioned Sekai Otogi-banashi, includes Robinson Crusoe, as Mujint¯ o Dai¯ o: Robinson Hy¯ ory¯ u-ki (The Great King of the Uninhabited Island: The Chronicle of Robinson Adrift ), in 1899. This is the first known instance of clear designation for a young readership. Since then, especially after the 1920s, there have been a number of examples of Robinson Crusoe published by many translators, some of whom are noted authors of children’s literature, such as Hamada Hirosuke (1893–1973), whose Naita-Aka’oni (The Red Demon who Cried) (1933) is still staple reading in contemporary Japan. Also, Robinson Crusoe has been frequently included in collections and series of translated children’s books, as discussed above. Thus, in 1938, when Minami published the first edition of his Robinson Hy¯ ory¯ u-ki, it was received by the general reading public as a legitimate children’s book. It is worth mentioning here that slightly fewer than fifty editions, about a quarter of all the translated works, were published in the decades after the AsiaPacific War ended in 1945, as Minami’s work was published in its final form in 1950. This number indicates that people were particularly interested in Robinson Crusoe immediately after the war. The reason for this phenomenon is yet to be clarified, but one of the provisional answers may be that Japanese people, having lost everything in the war, sympathized with Crusoe, who has to survive in harsh conditions. This leads to the third topic of this section, Minami Y¯ oichir¯o himself. Minami was a schoolteacher, and had relatively little formal education, which was just enough for him to become a teacher at an elementary school. Yet he was a self-made polyglot: he learned German by himself, and went to a private institution to acquire French and Latin.14 In 1926, Minami began contributing to Sh¯ onen Kurabu (Boys’ Club), a popular magazine for pre-teen children to early teenagers, mainly boys, under the name Ikeda Nobumasa. With this pen name, he wrote a large number of human-interest stories, primarily based on incidents in European history and his own experience in Europe (he was sent to Denmark as a delegate from the Japan branch of the Boy Scouts in 1924). Some of the most notable among these stories include “Ko-yagi no Uta (A Song of a Kid)” (1928), which is about an ex-schoolteacher in a village in northern France who becomes deranged when many of his pupils are killed in bombing during World War I, but regains his sanity as one of his

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surviving pupils, now a general in the army, comes back to him and sings the song which the teacher sang to the pupil many years before. “Katami no Man’nennhitsu (My Fountain Pen Returned)” published in the same year was also well received. The story is about how the valuable fountain pen the author has lost on a trip to Germany is sent back to him in Japan some years later, badly damaged. A letter of explanation comes with it, saying that a German boy had kept the pen by mistake and had been trying to find the identity of the owner to return it. At last the boy finds out who the author is and where he lives in Japan, but hurrying to the post office, he is hit by a car and dies (the pen was damaged in the accident). The letter is written by the boy’s mother, with tear marks on it. The effort and sincerity of the boy to return the precious pen to its rightful owner deeply moves the author. As these two examples show, Ikeda mainly wrote about the humane, even overtly sentimental, aspects of Europeans and Americans. Under the name Minami Y¯oichir¯o, Minami wrote adventure stories set in “exotic” places such as Borneo, Africa, and the South Pacific. In many cases the protagonists are American or European hunters or explorers, male, strong-willed, and greatly skilled at activities such as shooting and devising traps for animals. Minami’s adventure stories were received with great enthusiasm by young readers, mainly boys. One of the most popular ones titled Hoeru Mitsurin (The Roaring Jungle) (1932) is a story about the adventures of an American hunter who goes around the world hunting a great lion, a monstrous rhinoceros, and a gigantic orangutan. It is noted here that Minami invites his young readers to identify themselves with Western values. He later wrote, just before he published his translation of Robinson Crusoe, a Japanese Robinsonade called Midori no Mujint¯ o (The Green Uninhabited Island) (1937). This is a story about a Japanese family who have been stranded and try to survive in the same manner as in The Swiss Family Robinson. After much adventure, with apes kidnapping the daughter of the family (and her being rescued,) and even an evil sorcerer trying to destroy them, the family safely comes back to the civilized world. Minami also wrote a number of biographies of noted Westerners, such as Abraham Lincoln (1930), which also first appeared in Sh¯ onen Kurabu, and translated European literature for juvenile readers. In these translations, he usually used the name Ikeda Nobumasa. He was certainly a prolific and popular writer before the war.

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After the war, Minami continued to write stories and biographies, and to translate European and American literature. His most well-known contribution to Japanese children’s culture is the series on Arsène Lupin, the noted French gentleman-thief, created by Maurice Leblanc (1864– 1941). Minami’s retellings, which began to be published as the “Lupin series” in 1958 by the publisher Popura-sha, were made more vivid and thrilling than the original to suit young Japanese readers. Lupin would never otherwise have been as popular as he has become in Japan. As will be discussed in the next section, Minami’s narrative techniques were fully realized when he retold Robinson Crusoe.

Minami’s Robinson Crusoe (1) Narrative Technique Minami’s retelling of Robinson Crusoe is unique and requires special attention for three reasons. First, he fully applies his own narrative technique, which he developed through writing adventure stories, to his versions. A good example of this is the gripping scene of a shipwreck with which Minami begins. As an immensely popular author of children’s stories since the 1920s, and respected translator of Western children’s literature, Minami paid special attention to making the protagonist accessible to his young Japanese readers. Second, the first edition of Minami’s translation was published in 1938, during the Asia-Pacific War, and thus reflects the ideological atmosphere of the time. His version shows us how contemporary ideology can influence the way in which a children’s story is translated and adapted. Moreover, we can see what ideological aspects changed and which remained unchanged during and after the war, by comparing his original 1938 version and the final one published in 1950. Third, and most importantly, Minami’s retelling significantly influenced subsequent juvenile translations and adaptations of Robinson Crusoe in post-war Japan. Many translators and writers imitate Minami’s techniques and narrative structure, and even to a lesser extent, his ideological tendencies. In a sense, he set a kind of standard for post-war retellings of Robinson Crusoe for Japanese children. We will start our analysis of Minami’s translation by returning to the quotation at the beginning of this essay. The scene of the storm occurs during the first voyage to Yarmouth. In the following pages, the frantic efforts of the sailors to keep the ship afloat are minutely depicted, and in a much more vivid manner than in the original, with a lot of dialogue between the sailors and the captain, which is totally absent in Defoe’s text.

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(Incidentally, Minami adds here that the captain of the ship is reluctant to cut down the foremast “because it is his own property.” This is another example of his explanation in the story.) Minami’s graphic description of the storm and the sinking ship is also remarkable. As the extract shows, he attempts to depart from the original by completely changing the structure of the narrative. This also differs from the majority of English abridgements, which usually begin with Robinson’s birth, as in the original. As it is not known exactly which edition Minami used for his translation of Robinson Crusoe, and given the countless number of editions of this work, it is theoretically possible that there was an English edition with this narrative framework. Still, this re-structuring of the story is most probably Minami’s invention.15 As a popular writer of boys’ stories, Minami must surely have known what was required to make his translation of Robinson Crusoe into a bestselling book. His technique of in medias res was just one such device to capture the attention of young readers. It is much more exciting than the usual chronological narrative of the story beginning with the family history. Also, Minami made his version of Robinson Crusoe a mixture of a sentimental narrative and an adventure story with a strong, heroic protagonist. Another technique Minami employs to attract readers is the use of animals in the story. The dog rescued from the ship is given an important role as Crusoe’s companion. Until his very last day, the dog works for Crusoe, chasing away birds from the cornfield. Minami emphasizes his loyalty to Crusoe.16 On his deathbed, he fixes his gaze on Crusoe’s, as if “in gratitude for their long years together.” Crusoe cries bitterly and digs a special grave for the dog. This Crusoe is considerate to animals, which might make him more humane than the original figure, who seldom expresses feelings for the animals around him with the intensity of Minami’s Crusoe. Minami’s skill at storytelling is highly effective but at the same time, sometimes mixed with particular ideological leanings. In depicting the sentimental scene of the dog’s death, Minami squeezes in phrases like: “The dog fell down while at work. His loyalty is most praiseworthy: no less than the soldier who dies on the battlefield.”17 In this manner, many of the techniques he uses to increase reader empathy with the protagonist also contain militaristic elements which might reveal a belligerent tone, as will be discussed in more detail later.

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Minami’s Crusoe is also heard to speak warmly about the memory of his parents more than once. Especially during the first part of the story, his strong wish to see them again is given as a reason for his will to survive. Here is another scene Minami invents, where Crusoe succeeds in making a candle for the first time: Gazing at this faint yellow light, I was filled with unspeakable longing for the people I had left. Nothing evokes more nostalgia than a flame. In the flame of the candle, there appeared the faces of my parents at home and friends who had drowned in the sea, and then they disappeared. “How sad my parents must be, losing their last son!” … The dog stood up silently and came to me, rubbing his head against my knee. “Oh, you understand how I feel … You must feel lonely, too.” He softly licked me on the cheek, as I held his furry head to my breast. Though he could not speak, a warmth of affection flowed between his eyes and mine. Dogs are indeed man’s best friend!18

It can here be seen how a range of narrative devices are employed simultaneously to provoke an emotional reaction from the reader. Robinson’s intimacy with the animal is connected to the sentimental description of his longing for his parents. Whereas Crusoe’s disobedience to his father is dealt with in religious terms in the original, the longing for his parents here is narrated in relation to respect for, and consideration of, seniority. Defoe rarely deals with Crusoe’s parents in emotional or sentimental terms after the shipwreck, which shows a marked difference between the two narratives. Another notable feature in Minami’s Hy¯ ory¯ u-ki is that he has given Crusoe many heroic characteristics. For instance, this Crusoe has acquired remarkable physical strength. According to Minami, the hard labor Crusoe has been given as a slave of the Moor has strengthened his body so much that “a large knot of muscle swelled up on my arms and shoulders.”19 After a year on the island, due to the manual labor he has to undertake, he claims that he has become “as hard as steel, both mentally and physically.”20 More importantly, Crusoe’s mental endurance and moral sense become the key focus of the story. He says to himself on more than one occasion, “I must endure courageously and manfully.” Effort and perseverance are valued throughout the story. This outburst of masculinity manifests itself in the aggressive attitude he adopts toward the “man-eating savages”

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(this is the literal translation of “cannibals” in this text.) The language Minami’s Crusoe uses is even more forceful, as is shown in the following monologue. “With my sharp sword, guns, and pistols, and with my unbending British soul filling my body, I cannot evade the cannibals like a coward. I must not hide from them. If they take any wretched captives, I must go and rescue them, whatever the risk. That’s what a man should do. This is what I should do.”21 Actually, this monologue occurs while he is swinging his sword, clasped with both hands, in a downward swipe from an overhead position, just in the manner of a samurai swordsman. It may be noteworthy that the sword is not so emphasized in the original, though the Spaniard uses it in the battle with a group of cannibals.22 It is true that Minami’s Crusoe does not fight with the sword himself either, same as in the original, but in this scene, the sword he holds is explicitly foregrounded: “I drew my great sword from its sheath and stared at it. The blade, which was meticulously sharpened and impeccably polished, reflected the light of the candle, and shone as clearly as springwater in autumn.”23 Phrases like “meticulously sharpened and impeccably polished” or the comparison of the sword to clear water might give readers the feeling that it might be a Japanese sword (nihonn-t¯ o,) if not explicitly described as such. Japanese swords, as well as swordmanship, have been closely associated with Japanese imperialism and militarism. Thus, this scene, though it may seem trivial, offers us the ideological tendency of Minami’s translation. In relation to the representation of cannibalistic islanders of the “South Seas” in Japanese boys’ magazines, Robert Thomas Tierney argues that: “the cannibal never became a familiar or prevalent figure of the savage in oken Dankichi Japanese colonial discourse,”24 even though he refers to B¯ (The Adventures of Dankichi) and “popular adventure tales in boys’ magazines.” However, this episode involving the Japanese sword and Crusoe’s hatred of cannibals might imply that the image of cannibals was more prevalent among the young, male readership in Japan than Tierney suggests.

Minami’s Robinson Crusoe (2) Ideology and History Most notably, the story ends with a long monologue by Crusoe in which he describes what he wants to do after returning to Europe. The following is near the end of the story:

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I am going to recruit a great number of young spirited people, to go and establish a splendid colony on my island, and thereby collect unfathomable wealth from it. I am so ambitious. The nation that conquers the sea will flourish more than any other nation in the world. The ocean is the stage where people should thrive. The innumerable islands scattered on the sea are waiting to be colonized and dwelled upon. Go abroad and prosper! This is our great destiny. I will devote the rest of my life to this great destiny. Even if I fall in the midst of my grand mission, strong young people will succeed. I will become their spearhead. I will become one of the volunteer corps on the sea. … Yes, I must go, at any risk!25

His passionate, if misguided, monologue occupies more than three pages at the end of the story. This Crusoe is unabashedly imperialistic, wishing to colonize numerous islands over vast areas of the ocean and acquire a fortune from them. Such characteristics lead us to the ideological features of Minami’s retelling. Although the original work by Defoe has been criticized for its imperialism and colonialism, especially after the notion of Orientalism became common in the 1980s,26 Minami’s adaptation is even more controversial, and explanations related to its historical context and his professional background should be sought. As has been mentioned, Minami’s version of Robinson Crusoe has its origin in 1938, in the middle of war with China. It is the time when “Liberal minded people in Europe and America began to place Japan in the same camp as Fascist Italy and the new Nazi Germany,” with good reasons.27 By then, Minami was already a successful writer and translator of children’s books and stories. These factors combined to greatly influence the ideological tone of Minami’s translation of Robinson Crusoe. A closer look into the timeframe reveals a question related to the understanding of the changes in the cultural and ideological atmosphere during and after the war. As has been mentioned, Minami’s version of Robinson Crusoe was first published in 1938. Then in 1946, the second version—with minor corrections and deletions of some of the more explicitly imperialistic and militaristic references—was published, before the final version came into the world in 1950; all were published by K¯odansha (in some copies, the imprint reads “Dai Nihon Y¯ubenkai K¯odansha,” but this is the same publisher).

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By examining differences between the first edition published in 1938 and later editions after the war, Minami’s original ideological standpoint reflected in Robinson Crusoe might become clearer. In the preface, titled, “About this Story,” the post-war editions states: Above all, Robinson’s manfully adventurous heart and great mind brilliantly shine throughout the story as its theme. With this grand mind, the audacious and courageous man dauntlessly fights with the surging waves and feels no fear in traveling a vast expanse of waters. It is this brave mind that is exactly the same with the courage and enthusiasm that swells up in the mind of you, young readers of Japan, which is struggling to reconstruct itself after the war. [my italics]28

In the equivalent passage of the 1938 edition, the italicized phrase is: “young readers of the Great Empire of Japan, which is rapidly expanding and developing with great strength.”29 In the 1938 edition, Robinson Crusoe is depicted as a role model of military expansionism, whereas he is a model of recovery from war-devastation in the 1946 and 1950 editions. Also, in the 1938 edition, Minami tries very hard to make Robinson Crusoe German. For instance, he introduces himself, “I was born in 1632 in the city of York in England, but actually I am a German.”30 Another example can be found in the above-mentioned scene with his sword. Instead of “unbending British soul” in post-war editions, Crusoe in the 1938 edition has an “unbending German soul.”31 In addition, this Crusoe first wishes to teach Friday not English, but German (he abandons the idea because it seems that German pronunciation is too difficult for Friday.)32 These references to Germany are rather unnatural, to say the least. The reason for these references should only be conjectured, but it might be possible to explain them in relation to the Anti-Comintern Pact between Germany and Japan in 1936. Thus, the original sense of expansionism is evident. Minami’s 1938 text is certainly imperialistic, militaristic, and pro-German, which probably reflects the general atmosphere of the time. Historical context would explain why such references are found in a children’s story published in 1938. Subsequent deletion of the phrase explicitly referring to expansionism and pro-German (i.e., pro-Nazi) in tone can be explained by the apparent changes of the cultural milieu after the war. It is striking, however, that Minami did not have to change many of his words and phrases of the 1938 edition to fit almost the same text into

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the post-war editions. As has been examined, the militaristic and overtly masculine features of Minami’s Crusoe have not changed much even in the final edition of 1950, suggesting that in the early post-war era the ideological status quo did not change much. The work was even able to evade the GHQ’s censorship.33 It may be hypothesized that some of the fundamental ideological strands did not change in Japan even after the war. In defeat, expansionism and imperialism, as well as belief in male superiority, all seemed to have been gotten rid of from the façade of Japanese culture and society, but they actually remained under the surface for many years to come. In other words, the fundamental mentality underlying the reconstruction of Japan after the war is closely related, or even very similar to, the zeal for dynamic expansion of the Great Empire of Japan. Still, it might need more research to clarify post-war Japanese culture, and the question should be left here.

Minami’s Influence on Later Renditions Lastly, how has Minami influenced later retellings of Robinson Crusoe in Japan as a children’s story? In attempting an outline of the adaptations specifically designed for young readers, the author of the present essay found that there are more than two hundred translations altogether, including both adults’ and children’s, as mentioned earlier. In order to make the following discussion clearer, the Japanese renditions of Robinson Crusoe can be classified into two categories. One type is abridgment. With just one or two exceptions, most of the Japanese children’s versions deal with only the first volume of Robinson Crusoe, and many of them end when Crusoe leaves the island. All of them omit many scenes. As a general rule, his life on the island is foregrounded and the episodes before and after are very much shortened. Thus, the keyword here is “omission.” In the post-war era, eminent scholars of English literature carried out this kind of retelling, among them Abe Tomoji (1903–1973), Nakano Yoshio (1903–1985), and Kaiho Masao (1938–2003). They shortened and simplified the original, but they did not try to make any significant changes to it, either in language or ideas. Thus, it is difficult to see Minami’s influence on this approach. The other type of retelling is, as in the case of Minami’s version, the one which includes a number of scenes that do not appear in the original. This sort of changing and adding is also found in subsequent retellings. Like Minami’s rendition, translators invent scenes with animals, or change

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the narrative structure. Most probably, Minami is the first Japanese author who changed the story into one beginning in medias res, and employing techniques to increase juvenile readers’ familiarity with Crusoe by adding scenes with animals and heroic behavior. Other writers, knowingly or not, must have followed suit. Thus, the keyword here is “addition.” In most cases, writers of children’s stories, rather than scholars, have carried out ¯ this sort of retelling. Authors like Kubo Takashi (1906−1998), Ohira Y¯osuke (1904−1981), and Ij¯uin Shizuka (1950–) are among them. In fact, there are many examples in these works of Crusoe being described as a hero with mental and physical strength, or an animal lover, and more than one book employs in medias res. I will now look at some of these cases. ¯ Ohira Y¯ osuke, who published a number of children’s versions of Western literature in the 1960s and 70s, has a scene like this in his version of Robinson Crusoe: “Even if the savages come, I am a man, and I will never behave like a coward, nor will I surrender. No matter how many of them come, I have knowledge and intellect which savages lack, and I own much superior weapons. I shall never lose. I will fight, and win! Courage fills my body and soul.”34 Here, manliness and courage is much emphasized, in the same manner as in the corresponding scene in Minami’s version discussed in the previous section. A similarity in language is also evident here. Actually, “similarity” might seem an understatement, as examples can be found of descriptions of nostalgia and filial emotion, or sadness over losing the dog, in the renditions by other authors. These features are certainly absent from the original, and are most likely Minami’s invention. Two such examples will be cited here. The first one, written by Kubo Takashi, an author of a number of children’s stories and biographies, is the scene of the dog’s death, and this text is peculiar in that it is written in the third person. The dog lived with Robinson for sixteen years: it had lost most of its teeth, being weak with old age. Robinson did his best to make it live longer, even a day, giving it goat’s milk or cooking it soup. When the dog died, Robinson felt as if he had lost his human friend, and he dug the grave next to the tree by the house, with much weeping.35

It is easy to see how this narration of Crusoe’s emotional attachment to the dog is remarkably similar to the description by Minami quoted earlier.

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The second example retold by Inaoka Michiko, a lesser-known writer of children’s stories, is a scene in which Crusoe thinks about his parents, which is close to Minami’s version in its language, and the dog appears in the scene, just in the same manner as Minami’s. How glad I was when I first succeeded with lighting in the dark cave! I sighed a deep sigh before I knew, and kept gazing into the yellow light for quite a long time. “Will I ever see my father and mother again? Will I die alone?” A sudden feeling of loneliness and sadness came over me. My breast nearly burst with it. My eyes were filled with tears. Then, my dog softly growled as if he was comforting me. How tender his eyes were!36

Again, some of the language is much the same as that found in Minami’s text, almost to the extent of plagiarism. These examples demonstrate that some of the techniques which Minami employs were regarded as effective by translators in later periods. What later authors owe to Minami is not limited to language and expression. Similar changes in narrative structure are also found in other authors’ translations. In medias res is one of the distinctive characteristics of Minami’s text, as has been discussed, and it is imitated by some of the later authors, with different scenes chosen as the opening. As late as in 1999, Ij¯uin Shizuka, a popular author and essayist, published his Robinson Crusoe in the “Exciting Adventure Stories of the World” series. The publisher, inevitably, K¯ odansha. Ij¯uin begins this book with the scene in which Crusoe arrives at the island: I Was Saved. I was certainly alive. I grabbed at the grass at my feet, and touched my shoulders, arms, and feet. I was alive. I had survived. Just a few minutes ago, I had given up hope in the rough waves. I looked up at the sky and thanked God. How could I express my joy? I walked around with my arms extended to the sky. I cried that I was alive, throwing myself on the ground.37

This might be less dramatic than Minami’s version, but is surely more exciting than the usual narration beginning with Crusoe’s birth. The scene gives a feeling of directness and vividness to the reader, in much the same manner as Minami’s text.

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It cannot necessarily be ascertained that these children’s versions of Robinson Crusoe all share Minami’s ideological inclinations, although they certainly have inherited his techniques. Still, traces of his tendencies can be found in some of the works. For instance, Ij¯ uin’s edition greatly emphasizes the element of “adventure,” as it is part of a series advertised for this characteristic. The motive underlying most of this Crusoe’s behavior is an acute longing for adventure, whereas in the original, it is explained as “not being satisfy’d with the Station wherein God and Nature has plac’d them.”38 This may be a subtle distinction, but we should note that most of the boys’ stories in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in Japan and in Britain, which contain imperialistic elements call themselves “adventure” stories. Among such stories are The Coral Island (1858) by Robert M. Ballantyne, or numerous stories for children, mainly boys, by G. A. Henty (1832–1902) and his successor, Herbert Strang (pseudonym of George Herbert Ely, 1866–1958 and C. James L’Strange, 1867–1947), in Britain; Kaitei-Gunkan [The Warship Under the Sea] (1900) by Oshikawa Shunr¯o (1876–1914) and many of Minami’s own works discussed above in Japan. The word “adventure” still contained some connotation of masculinity and a sense of superiority toward other people, even in the climate of post-colonialism of the 1990s. Children’s editions of Robinson Crusoe today still sometimes connote, though almost imperceptibly, a vague sense of the imperialistic attitude as a legacy. It must be added, though, that many of the authors of the first type of retelling (abridgment rather than rewriting) have tried hard to explain— in the preface or notes— the imperialism which the original contains to young Japanese readers in terms of its historical context. Many of these authors are academics, and they have attempted to reconcile Robinson Crusoe’s literary value and its negative elements, such as racism and imperialism, by putting it in historical perspective.

Conclusion As has been mentioned, there have been more than two hundred translations and retellings of Robinson Crusoe in Japan since its first appearance in the 1840s. It had established itself as a children’s book by the early decades of the twentieth century, and ever since, it has been regarded as such by the general public rather than as a work in the English literature canon, with the exception of literary students and historians who have

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seriously studied it. In the twenty-first century, although the number of new editions is few compared with the previous century, translations of Robinson Crusoe, both for children and adults, are still widely read. New translations were published in 2011 by Takeda Masaaki, a contributor to this volume, and by Karato Nobuyoshi in 2018.39 On the other hand, Minami Y¯oichir¯o’s works have now mostly been forgotten, except for his rendition of the Arsène Lupin series, and his translations are rarely discussed by scholars, but as has been mentioned, he was immensely popular from the 1920s to the 1940s. This essay has argued that, as ideologically somewhat problematic, partial and genderbiased Minami’s text may be, the fact remains that the renditions of Robinson Crusoe in post-war Japan owe much to this version. A number of retellings have featured friendly dogs and heroic Robinsons, and have employed in medias res, even if they start the story from different scenes. It might be difficult to say that Minami’s versions are important in themselves today; certainly, his ideological leanings, as well as his lavish language, seem old-fashioned, dangerous, and rather out of place in contemporary Japanese children’s literature. Since his influence on subsequent renditions in terms of narrative devices is undeniable, however, his retelling of Robinson Crusoe should be read and studied from this standpoint. By analyzing the language and techniques of such an influential translator, we can get a glimpse of what makes a popular children’s translation in post-war Japan. Notes *Some parts of this essay have been published in “A Japanese Version of Robinson Crusoe by Minami Yoichiro: A Case-Study on Robinson’s Reception in Post-War Japan” Studies in Comparative Culture, No. 106 (2013): 235–47 [in Japanese].

Notes 1. The title was probably first used in Japan in the late 1850s. The Japanese word “hy¯ ory¯ u ” means “drifting” or “being adrift.” Although this does not convey the actual contents of the story correctly, as many of the incidents happen on the small island, it has been widely used in Japan. The reason for the popularity of this title might require another cross-cultural inquiry, and is beyond the scope of this essay.

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2. According to the record in Jid¯ o-bungaku Hon’yaku Sakuhin S¯ oran: Igirisu-hen 1 [All about the Translation of Children’s Literature: British Books, Volume 1] edited by Kawado Michiaki and Sakaibara Takanori ¯ (Tokyo: Ozora sha, 2005) and my research using the database of the National Diet Library of Japan, Minami published seven books retelling Robinson Crusoe, four of which were published by K¯ odansha. The following discussion concentrates on them, excluding three of them, published by different publishers, for the sake of the integrity of the argument. Also, K¯ odansha has been an immensely influential publisher in the children’s books industry, and might deserve special attention. 3. Y¯ oichiro Minami, Robinson Hy¯ ory¯ u-ki [The Chronicle of Robinson Adrift ] (Tokyo: Dai Nihon Y¯ ubenkai K¯ odansha, 1950), 16–17. This essay mainly deals with how Robinson Crusoe has been translated into Japanese as a children’s book. Accordingly, in the notes and references, each translation is identified by the translator and the Japanese title of the book, rather than the author, Daniel Defoe. 4. Daniel Defoe, 1719; 2008. The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe. The Novels of Daniel Defoe 1. Edited by P. N. Furbank. London: Pickering & Chatto, 57. 5. Defoe, 214; Minami (1950), 239. According to Minami’s explanation: “I later found out that meat or vegetable have some natural relish in them without any seasonings added. Civilized people have made their palate dull by overusing seasonings and flavourings in their food, whereas savages mainly eat raw meat and uncooked vegetable, thus retaining a sharp sense of taste, and can discern very little salt in raw meat. If they put salt on their meat, they must feel it painfully salty.”. 6. Richard Storry. A History of Modern Japan (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982), 194–96. 7. A search on ESTC (English Short Title Catalogue) will show some imprints of abridged editions of Robinson Crusoe in American cities and towns toward the end of the century, such as Baltimore, Boston, Dedham, Fairhaven, Philadelphia, Portland, Wilmington, Windham, and Worcester. 8. This transformation has been discussed in detail by historians of children’s literature, beginning with F.J. Harvey-Darton, Children’s Books in England (1st edition, 1932; 3rd edition, revised by Brian Alderson, London: The British Library and Oak Knoll Press, 1999). Recent scholarship which deals with this includes: M.O. Grenby, The Child Reader 1700–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2011) and Andrew O’Malley, Children’s Literature, Popular Culture, and Robinson Crusoe (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). 9. Japan adopted a seclusion policy under the Edo Shogunate, but even during the period of national isolation, between 1639 and 1854, the

258

10. 11.

12.

13.

14.

15.

16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24.

25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30.

K. SATO

country had several channels, though limited, to the outside world, such as Russia, Korea, the Ryukyu Kingdom, China, and the Netherlands. Hisaaki Yamanouchi, The Search for Authenticity in Modern Japanese Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1978), 3. The information below is generally taken from Zusetu Jid¯ o-bungaku Hon’yaku Dai-jiten [The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Translation of Chil¯ dren’s Literature] (Tokyo: Ozora-sha, 2007), Volume 1, Chapter 2. Shin Torigoé, Nihon Jid¯ o-Bungaku-shi Kenky¯ u [A Study on a History of Japanese Children’s Literature] (Tokyo: F¯ ut¯ o-sha, 1971), 4. In a later study, Torigoé modifies his explanation with some evidence before Kogané-maru, but in terms of its influence and contemporary generally favorable reception, this work should count as “the first” of this kind. (Shin Torigoé. Hajimete Manabu Nihon Jid¯ o-Bungaku-shi [A History of Japanese Children’s Literature for the Beginners ] [Kyoto: Minerva-Shobo, 2001], 1–12). These numbers are obtained from Kawado Michiaki and Sakaibara Takanori eds. and my research using the database of the National Diet Library of Japan. ¯ Nobuo Takahashi. Yume no Okoku—Natsukashi no Sh¯ onenn Kurabu [The Kingdom of Dream—Sh¯ onenn Kurabu in a Rminiscence] (Tokyo: Kadokawa Shoten, 1986), 165. Supporting this assertion is the fact that Minami often uses in medias res in his translations and retellings. Some of his most famous translations of the Lupin series also have this type of beginning. Minami (1950), 178–80. Ibid., 178. Ibid., 105–6. Ibid., 44. Ibid., 125. Ibid., 186. Defoe, 231. Minami (1950), 187. Robert Thomas Tierney. Tropics of Savagery: The Culture of Japanese Empire in Comparative Frame (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), 185. Minami (1950), 333–4. See, for example, Margery Hourihan, Deconstructing the Hero (London and New York: Routledge, 1997). Storry, 194. Minami (1950), 3. Y¯ oichiro Minami, Robinson Hy¯ ory¯ u-ki [The Chronicle of Robinson Adrift ] (Tokyo: Dai Nihon Y¯ ubenkai K¯ odansha, 1938), 3. Ibid., 18.

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31. Ibid., 98. 32. Ibid., 239. 33. The University of Maryland Libraries, Hisayo Murakami and Tani, Eiko (eds.), Guide to the Gordon W. Prange Children’s Book Collection Occupation-Period Censored Children’s Books, 1945–1949 (Ann Arbor: UMI, 2003) has a list of children’s books censored by GHQ during this period, which consists of fifty stories, six picture books, twenty-one cartoons, and three scripts for kami-shibai [picture-card storytelling] pp. xviii–xx. No text of Robinson Crusoe is included. ¯ 34. Y¯ osuke Ohira, Robinson Hy¯ ory¯ u-ki [The Chronicle of Robinson Adrift ] (Tokyo: Tsuru-shob¯o, 1972), 146. 35. Takashi Kubo, Robinson Kur¯ us¯ o [Robinson Crusoe] (Tokyo: Sh¯ ogakkann, 1967), 401. 36. Michiko Inaoka, Robinson Kur¯ us¯ o [Robinson Crusoe] (Tokyo: Shuhu-noTomo sha, 1976), 76–77. 37. Sizuka Ij¯ uin, Robinson Kur¯ us¯ o [Robinson Crusoe] (Tokyo: K¯ odansha, 1999), 5. 38. Defoe, 200. 39. Masaaki Takeda, Robinson Kur¯ us¯ o [Robinson Crusoe] (Tokyo: Kawadeshobo shinsha, 2011); Nobuyoshi Karato, Robinson Kur¯ us¯ o [Robinson Crusoe] (Tokyo: K¯ obunsha, 2018).

Works Cited The British Library. English Short Title Catalogue. http://estc.bl.uk/F/?func= file&file_name =login-bl-list. Accessed 18 September, 2019. Defoe, Daniel. 1719; 2008. The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe. The Novels of Daniel Defoe 1. Edited by W.R. Owens. London: Pickering & Chatto. Grenby, M.O. The Child Reader 1700–1840. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2011. Harvey-Darton, F.J. 1932; 1999. Children’s Books in England. 1st edition, 1932; 3rd edition, revised by Brian Alderson, London: The British Library and Oak Knoll Press, 1999. Hourihan, Margery. 1997. Deconstructing the Hero. London and New York: Routledge. Ij¯ uin, Sizuka. 1999. Robinson Kur¯ us¯ o [Robinson Crusoe]. Tokyo: K¯ odansha. Inaoka, Michiko. 1976. Robinson Kur¯ us¯ o [Robinson Crusoe]. Tokyo: Shuhu-noTomo sha. Karato, Nobuyoshi. 2018. Robinson Kur¯ us¯ o [Robinson Crusoe]. Tokyo: K¯ obunsha.

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Michiaki, Kawado and Sakaibara Takanori, eds. 2005. Jid¯ o-bungaku Hon’yaku Sakuhin S¯ oran: Igirisu-hen 1 [All About the Translation of Children’s Litera¯ ture: British Books, Volume 1]. Tokyo: Ozora sha. Kubo, Takashi. 1967. Robinson Kur¯ us¯ o [Robinson Crusoe]. Tokyo: Sh¯ ogakkann. Minami, Y¯ oichir¯ o. 1938. Robinson Hy¯ ory¯ u-ki [The Chronicle of Robinson Adrift ]. Nihon Yubenkai Kodansha. ———. 1950. Robinson Hy¯ ory¯ u-ki [The Chronicle of Robinson Adrift ]. Tokyo: Dai Nihon Yubenkai Kodansha. ¯ Ohira, Y¯ osuke. 1972. Robinson Hy¯ ory¯ u-ki [The Chronicle of Robinson Adrift ]. Tokyo: Tsuru-shob¯ o. O’Malley, Andrew. 2012. Children’s Literature, Popular Culture, and Robinson Crusoe. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Storry, Richard. 1982. A History of Modern Japan. Harmondsworth: Penguin. ¯ Takahashi, Nobuo. 1986. Yume no Okoku—Natsukashi no Sh¯ onenn Kurabu [The Kingdom of Dream—Sh¯ onenn Kurabu in a Rminiscence]. Tokyo: Kadokawa Shoten. Takeda, Masaaki. 2011. Robinson Kur¯ us¯ o [Robinson Crusoe]. Tokyo: Kawadeshobo shinsha. Tierney, Robert Thomas. 2010. Tropics of Savagery: The Culture of Japanese Empire in Comparative Frame. Berkeley: University of California Press. Torigoé, Shin. 1971. Nihon Jid¯ o-Bungaku-shi Kenky¯ u [A Study on a History of Japanese Children’s Literature]. Tokyo: F¯ ut¯ o-sha. ———. 2001. Hajimete Manabu Nihon Jid¯ o-Bungaku-shi [A History of Japanese Children’s Literature for the Beginners ]. Kyoto: Minerva-Shobo. The University of Maryland Libraries, Murakami, Hisayo and Tani, Eiko (eds.). 2003. Guide to the Gordon W. Prange Children’s Book Collection OccupationPeriod Censored Children’s Books, 1945–1949. Ann Arbor: The University of Maryland Libraries. Yamanouchi, Hisaaki. 1978. The Search for Authenticity in Modern Japanese Literature. Cambridge, Cambridge UP. Zusetu Jid¯ o-bungaku Hon’yaku Dai-jiten [The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Trans¯ lation of Children’s Literature]. 2007. Tokyo: Ozora-sha.

CHAPTER 13

Robinsonades in Japan: Colonial Fantasy, Survivalist Narrative and Homo Economicus Yukari Yoshihara

Robinson Crusoe has produced numerous Robinsonades in Japan, some of which are fairly faithful to the original, while others are almost unrecognizable as coming from Defoe’s novel. Even though there have been numerous Japanese studies of this tradition of Robinsonades, including the works by Izumi Yanagida, Yasuhiko Kisaichi and Ryutaro Iwao, they are not much known outside Japan. As I shall try to show, Crusoe has functioned as a figure for sakoku, Japan’s isolation policy (1639– 1854) in its feudal past, for its struggle to become a part of the modern economic world system, for the colonial expansion of its maritime empire over Asia and the Pacific (1895–1945), for its period of neo-colonial economic dominance over Asia (since 1960s), and for its anxiety over its declining economy in recent decades after the burst of its bubble economy (1990–2020).

Y. Yoshihara (B) University of Tsukuba, Tsukuba, Japan e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 S. Clark and Y. Yoshihara (eds.), Robinson Crusoe in Asia, Asia-Pacific and Literature in English, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-4051-3_13

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This chapter examines several cases of Robinsonades in Japan dating from the 1880s to today, in an attempt to place them in the successive geopolitical contexts in which Japan has been placed. It wishes to argue that these texts form an integral part of the complex interplay of globalization and localization in the reception history of Robinson Crusoe. Just like Chinese Robinsonades Yuanwen Chi analyzes and Korean Robinsonades Eun Kyung Min and Hye-Soo Lee examine in this volume, Japanese Robinsonades are stories about adventure, self-help and modernization. What is particular about Japanese Robinsonades is that they are intertwined with Japan’s history as a maritime colonial empire.

“A Japanese Robinson Crusoe” in New York in the 1880s The earliest Japanese version of Robinson Crusoe, which derives from a Dutch translation, was composed by Kikuro Kuroda, Hy¯ ok¯ okiji (1848) (Record of Wanderings ). Other early translations/abridgements from the original include Tsutomu Inoue’s translation (1883), Sazanami Iwaya’s Mujinto daio (1888) (Great King of an uninhabited Island)1 and Yuho Takahashi’s translation (1894). Inoue translated a large number of Western fictions, including Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea (1884), which greatly influenced Japanese maritime adventure tales. In 1864, Jo Niijima, or Joseph Neeisima, inspired by Kuroda’s Hy¯ ok¯ okiji, smuggled himself out of Japan illicitly to the United States.2 After being educated in Amherst College, he was to establish Doshisha University, a Protestant university in Kyoto in 1875. Jen’ichiro Oyabe (1868–1941) published A Japanese Robinson Crusoe, a fictionalized biographical account of his transpacific life in his youth, in 1898 in English. After leaving his “earthly father” to “obey the word of my heavenly Father”3 in 1884, he attempts to go to the United States via Hokkaido, “the Kurile Islands, Kamchatka, North Siberia.”4 In Russia, suspected of being “a spy or a wrecked pirate”5 and having no passport, he is forced to go back to Japan. Via Hokkaido, he arrives at the Bonin Islands just after “a violent political outbreak” between the local people and the Tokyo Government. He goes through Okinawa, Tientsin and Peking, “the great Mongol city,”6 and back to Kobe. He sets out on sail from there in 1888 to the United States, where he is educated at the Hampton Institute and Howard University. He returns to Japan, after fourteen years since he “wandered away from my father’s house as a poor

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heathen,”7 burning with “missionary zeal” to help “those who are weak and neglected,” especially the indigenous Ainu people in Hokkaido. Oyabe is a self-styled “Japanese Robinson Crusoe” for his adventurous spirits, husbandry and industriousness. In the early chapters when Oyabe desperately tries to escape from Japan and is repeatedly forced to go back, the sense of being confined and isolated inside Japan is strongly felt. He attempts at escaping via Hokkaido and the Bonin Islands, boundary zones between Japan and abroad, which had histories and cultures distinct from the mainland (Hokkaido was made into a part of Japan in 1864, followed by the Bonin Islands in 1876). In Hokkaido, “[t]he goodhearted daughter of the chief” of the Ainu tribe gives Oyabe wild grapes, which he hangs “on the sunny side of the house and made a kind of raisin.”8 It is possible that he has Crusoe’s “Raisins”9 in mind. From the Bonin Islands, he sets sail on a small canoe, is “cast upon a desolate isle” and saved by “a wrecked Portuguese sailor who had been over ten years on the island.”10 On its way to Okinawa, his ship stops by at “Ponape Island, one of the Caroline group.”11 He had previously “thought the South Sea Islanders were a most barbarous race, cruel and warlike, and fond of eating human flesh.” He is under the influence of the fantasy of cannibalism, which is examined in Ted Motohashi’s chapter in this volume. But Oyabe finds that the South Sea Islanders are “as gentle as innocent children.” It is “the presence and influence of vagrant foreigners,” the majority of whom are “wrecked sailors and poor adventurers whose characters set at defiance all religious and moral laws,” that are causing problems. It is in the chapter titled “Darkest America,” where he describes his experience in multiracial, working-class, capitalistic New York in 1888, that he presents himself as a Robinson Crusoe in explicit ways. Old Robinson Crusoe was cast upon an uninhabited island of the sea, but nature had abundantly provided him with food and a climate that was always warm.… But I, the poor stranger, was now landed in a thickly inhabited and most civilized and thriving city. My heart was not at ease, for my situation was more dangerous than on a bare island where one could freely get fruits and game. I had far more difficulties than Robinson had, for though there were all sorts of the things in the market, yet nobody would welcome me unless I had my pockets full of the almighty dollar, which seemed the only deity which many of these people worshiped.12

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He is horrified at by the spectacle of a “sandwich-man,” who is hired to carry around advertising slogans on boards on his front and back and thinks of him as “far worse than one who keeps a negro slave around his house.”13 He thinks of sex workers who have “holes in their ears” in which “they hung bangles and rings” as practicing “an old barbarism.”14 Upon being taken as a Chinese and then Javanese by a barber speaking in a thick Irish accent, he laments, “[t]his was American civilization.”15 He loses his confidence in the United States, for “the language was imperfect” and people are with “a strong race prejudice, much stronger than in China” and he shows his own class and racial bias when he visits Chinatown in the neighborhood of the Five Points slum and witnesses couplings between Chinese men and white women with disgust.16 He consoles himself that all his disappointment arose because he was “among too low a class of people in the American republic,” “an inferior part of society which had been recently brought over from the old European countries.”17 Thereafter the biographical novel describes his education in the United States in which he attempts to assimilate himself with white, middleclass, Christian values. As Oyabe’s editors write, he is “a combination of Robinson Crusoe and his faithful servant Friday, the Christianized man of color who begs to be enlightened into Western ways,”18 even though he himself identifies himself with Crusoe when he names his servant Friday.19 Though Oyabe becomes more nationalistic toward the end of his biographical novel, it is basically his individual experience that he compares to Robinson Crusoe’s adventure. However, during the same period of time, the tendency to compare Robinson Crusoe with Japan as a nation is also intensifying.

Crusoe and Japan’s Isolation Policy of Sakoku In the late nineteenth century, Robinson Crusoe, for his isolated and selfcontained way of life on the island, was compared to Japan in the near past, during the period of the isolation policy of sakoku. Tokutomi Soho (1863–1957), influenced by the Manchester School of Economics, writes that “we must not be like Robinson Crusoe, cast away on a remote island among the vast ocean” (1886),20 if Japan is to be economically prosperous. Tameyuki Amano, an ardent advocator for free trade, regards Robinson Crusoe as a symbol of protective tariffs and isolation policy, and argues that Japan must no longer be like him, so that it can compete

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with the Western powers (1904).21 Ukichi Taguchi (1855–1905), one of the ideologues for the policy of expansion over South East Asia and the Pacific (nanshin ron), however, claims that Crusoe can be a role model, for Japan needs to solidify its domestic economy with “Labour and Invention,” before it can become a competent player in international free trade (1884).22 When he sets sail to Micronesia in 1890 to explore the possibilities of Japanese settler agricultural colonies, his colleague recommends that he should not be like a traveling venture merchant with knickknacks, but should cultivate the land with a spade and a plow, just like Robinson Crusoe did; if Taguchi is to be a Crusoe, there trade, merchants and economy will follow.23 This interpretation returns with heightened sophistication, as Masaaki Takeda’s chapter in this volume shows, after ¯ Japan’s defeat in World War II, when Hisao Otsuka presents Robinson Crusoe as “the archetype of homo economicus ” in 1966. If Crusoe in late nineteenth century Japan was more associated with economy, industry and trade, he was transformed into a militaristic, imperialistic and hyper-manly adventurer when Japan established itself as a maritime empire over conquered and exploited islands, starting from the colonization of Taiwan in 1895. This issue will be explored in the next section.

Robinson Crusoe in Japan, a Maritime Empire In 1909, S¯oseki Natsume (1867–1916), a professor of British Literature at Tokyo Imperial University at that point and later to become a leading novelist, describes Robinson Crusoe as “a practical machine,” and writes that the British are methodical like Crusoe in their colonization of South Africa and Hong Kong.24 He quotes from Crusoe’s exploits in Asia in Farther Adventures, citing “the Japoneses, who are false, cruel, and treacherous People”25 and comments that “Japan does not have a favorable reputation.”26 As Kyohei Sakazaki demonstrates, the prefaces to various translations in the earlier half of the twentieth century show how Robinson Crusoe was used to encourage Japan’s fashioning of itself as a maritime empire aspiring to be a Britain in Asia. One example comes from a 1911 abridged translation. [Robinson Crusoe] will not only encourage the spirits of maritime exploration, adventure, perseverance and industry, but also cleanse lasciviousness

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and luxury that are poisoning today’s society, contain discontents and complaints, enlighten erroneous beliefs, enhance the virtues of benevolence, duty, loyalty, reflectiveness, husbandry and discipline.27

¯ As Sakazaki observes,28 Ogai Mori, considered to be one of the great novelists in modern Japan, maintains a certain degree of ironical reserve on the prevalent use of Robinson Crusoe as a national allegory. He presents his preface to another 1911 translation of Robinson Crusoe (by Takahashi), as a fictional conversation between three men—a conservative nationalist, a liberal individualist and the moderator of their talk. The nationalist condemns Robinson Crusoe for lacking filial devotion and loyalty to the nation in running away from his parents and his country. According to him, Crusoe’s preference for personal liberty over patriotism and family piety makes him an anarchist. For him, Crusoe stands for all dangerous ideologies, such as republicanism, socialism, communism and atheism. The liberal individualist believes that the strength of the British Empire as a maritime empire depends on its sailors’ Robinsonesque spirits of independence, inventiveness and self-help. It is intriguing that Mori wrote this preface soon after the High Treason Incident (1910), alleged to be an assassination plot against the Meiji emperor organized by socialists and anarchists, which led to the execution of twelve dissident thinkers. For the nationalist in the preface, Robinson Crusoe is harmful to Japanese interests, while for the liberal individualist the novel is actually nationalistic, in that it serves the policy of maritime expansionism. Mori ironizes both of them for being trapped into thinking about Robinson Crusoe within the framework of nationalism, even if they appear to be opposed to each other on the surface. Mori’s reserve notwithstanding, Robinson Crusoe was utilized as a textbook for Japan to establish a maritime empire. Izumi Yanagida (1894– 1969), a scholar of Japanese literature, in his book Kaiyo bungaku to nanshin shiso (1942) (Marine Literature and Japan’s Southward Expansion Ideology), lists Robinson Crusoe and Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1870) as the most powerful Western influences on Japanese sea stories. One example of Japanese popular novels romanticizing colonial expansionism as manly adventure is Nansui Sud¯ o’s Kyokujitsuki (1889) (Rising Sun Flag ), in which a Japanese young man, collaborating with the Russians, competing with the Dutch and the British, explores an unnamed island in the South Pacific (Nanyo, combining two Chinese characters standing for south [nan] and seas [yo]). Another

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example is Ukishiro monogatari (1890)(Story of the Floating Castle) by Ryukei Yano. The protagonist conquers cannibals in Nanyo, and establishes a navy base for exploration and colonization of Madagascar. His further ambition is to establish a New Japanese Empire in Africa.29 Naoto Sudo in his 2010 book names romanticization of Japan’s maritime colonial expansion over the South East Asia and the Pacific (southward expansion: [nanshin ron]) as “Nanyo-Orientarism,” and points out that “Nanyo-Orientalism depicts Nanyo as primordial chaos to be reclaimed or liberated from Western rule by the Japanese.”30 Japanese translation/ adaptation/abridgement of Robinson Crusoe forms an essential part of the genre of sea adventure tales heavily imbued with Japanese colonialism. Y¯oichiro Minami’s translation of Robinson Crusoe, discussed in detail by Kazuya Sato in the present volume, is a prime example. Yanagida’s article, published in November 1942 by the Japan Broadcasting Company, which was acting as the main body for wartime propaganda, was no doubt advocating Japanese colonial expansion via literature. Japan occupied Manila in January 1942, and Singapore in February of the same year. Yanagida was a member of a literary association supporting war efforts (Bungaku Hokokukai, established May 1942). After the Battle of Midway in June, Japan’s defeat was becoming inevitable. At this historical juncture, Yanagida’s book was published in November, as a part of the campaign waged through literature in the Pacific War (1942–1945). In Japanese maritime novels Yanagida analyzes, Robinson Crusoe is made into a Japanese character, as if it were Japan, rather than Britain, that could represent his true spirit of Robinson Crusoe, at the time when Japan was claiming that it was a liberator of Asia and the Pacific from Western colonialism. It is to be remembered that, as Clark’s chapter examines, the Pacific was the contentious site of imperial rivalry between France and Britain from the second half of the eighteenth century onward, which is reflected in the genre of the French Robinsonade. If Robinsonade in Japan in the late nineteenth century and in the early twentieth century can be understood to show how Japan appropriated Robinson Crusoe to fashion itself as a maritime empire aspiring to be a Britain in Asia, in the 1930s to 1945, when the relationship between Britain and Japan moves from increasing tension to open conflict, Robinsonade was utilized as a means to differentiate Japanese from British colonialism. In this context, we encounter surprising cases of Robinson Crusoe interpreted as a German.

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The Germany–Japan Alliance and Robinson Crusoe Robinson Crusoe is sometimes associated with Germany, partly because Crusoe’s “Father being a Foreigner of Bremen”31 —Inoue’s 1883 translation explains that Bremen is a town in Germany—and partly because of Japan’s close ties with Germany in World War II. This section attempts to situate Ein Robinson (1940) by Arnold Fanck (1889–1974) as a product of the political and cultural affiliation between Germany and Japan in the 1930s–1940s. It will look at the Japanese interest in the popularity of Robinson Crusoe in Germany, then examine Fanck’s Ein Robinson and his Daughter of Samurai (1937) as Robinsonades, and see why Crusoe was made into a German both in Germany and Japan in the late 1930s. In 1932, Umekichi Tanaka, a Japanese professor of German Literature at Keijo Imperial University in Seoul under Japanese occupation, contributed an article “Robinson Crusoe in Germany” to the Bulletin of the Keijo Imperial University English Association. Using Hermann Ullrich’s Robinson und Robinsonaden as his main source, he describes the great impact Robinson Crusoe had on German literature in the eighteenth century. While regarding most of Robinsonades in Germany as having little value as literature (Campe’s Robinson der Jüngere (1779) being an exception), he examines Johann Gottfried Schnabel’s Insel Felsenburg (1731–1743), which used the term “Robinsonade” for the first time, in some detail. Since Tanaka studied folktales in Germany in 1921–1924, it is likely that he witnessed the popularity of Robinson Crusoe there at that time. As Chunjie Zhang’s chapter in this volume demonstrates, “the popularity of the story of Robinson Crusoe could well be part of the widespread German Anglophilia in the eighteenth century.” In the early twentieth century, however, the value of Robinson Crusoe was being debated as German Anglophilia declines. According to Christa Kamenetsky, in a debate over adolescent literature in 1937 Germany, critics defending Robinson Crusoe for its use in education underlined “the so-called ‘Nordic virtues’ of Robinson Crusoe,” his “Nordic attitude toward fate, his bravery, self-reliance and his ‘Germanic resourcefulness’ in managing to survive on the desert island.”32 Tanaka was in Germany in the early 1920s, when Germany claimed Crusoe as its own. Interestingly, Tanaka’s academic works on German literature and culture, including his article on German Robinsonades, are part of his career as a colonizer in Korea. Best known for his works on the Brothers

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Grimm, who collected German folk tales as a basis for German nationalism, Tanaka, during his time in Korea as a government consultant and then a professor at the Imperial University, collected Korean folktales with the purpose of justifying Japanese colonization. It is in this historical context, as Sato examines, that Y¯oichir¯o Minami in his 1938 translation of Robinson Crusoe manipulates the original to make the protagonist possess an “unbending German soul.” Nagamasa Kawakita (1903–1981), who was to be the producer of Saga of Anatahan (1953) later to be discussed, was active in cultural diplomacy in the 1930s, as Yuji Segawa examines in detail. One of the films he produced is a German–Japan co-production, Daughter of Samurai (1937). In the last scene of the movie, we see the protagonist, a Japanese agricultural specialist educated in Germany, riding on a tractor cultivating the vast land of Manchukuo under Japanese colonization, protected by a Japanese soldier with a machine gun against the threat of Bolsheviks’ and anti-Japanese activists’ resistance. The protagonist is, figuratively, a Robinson Crusoe who settles down in the new colony. While the original Crusoe, as Robert Markley’s chapter in this volume clarifies, “disclaims any long-term plans or imperialist intentions,” this German-educated Japanese Crusoe aims at settlement backed up by Japanese militarism. With hindsight, we know that the new colony is going to vanish soon in 1945 when Japan is defeated and lost its colonies. This movie is co-directed by Mansaku Itami and Arnold Fanck. The latter was to direct Ein Robinson with the Nazis’ support in 1940. The New York Times reported, “NAZIS PLAN CHILEAN FILM; ‘Robinson Crusoe’ in Original Setting to Be Made” (June 25, 1938). It is based on a real experience of a German sailor during the first World War, who landed on Más a Tierra Island, the island of Alexander Selkirk (now called Robinson Crusoe33 Island) off the coast of Chile, after his battleship had been sunk by the British Navy. The pro-Germany Chilean government offers to help him to go back to Germany. The protagonist, however, disillusioned with his Fatherland in the throes of socialist revolution, determines to go back to Más a Tierra Island, to live like a Robinson Crusoe.34

Post-War Robinson Crusoe for Young Readers Japan’s colonial past haunts Robinsonades in post-war Japan. Tomoji Abe, a novelist, scholar of American and British literature, and translator of

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Jane Austen, Herman Melville and Robert Louis Stevenson, published his new translation of Robinson Crusoe in 1950, in a series that would have the greatest influence on the new canon for children after the war, Iwanai sh¯ onen bunko (Iwanami Literature for the Youth). Abe in his afterword declares that Robinson Crusoe can be a good model for post-war Japanese children, for his spirit of industriousness, inventiveness and perseverance, ¯ and also for his sense of economy, undoubtedly referring to Otsuka’s understanding of Crusoe and homo economicus , discussed in Takeda’s chapter. As Sato, author of Chapter 12 of this volume, rightly points out elsewhere, Abe’s afterword attempts to cleanse Robinson Crusoe’s taintedness in British colonialism when he insists that Crusoe was not a violent colonizer, but a benevolent master to Friday.35 It should also be pointed out that Abe here does not mention Japan’s use of Robinson Crusoe to justify its colonial expansion in the near past. Paradoxically, his novel in 1948 shows traits of his consciousness of how Robinson Crusoe had previously been used in the Empire of Japan. The novel36 is set in Indonesia under Japanese occupation. The protagonist, a Japanese officer of cultural diplomacy, befriends a Dutch settler. The protagonist compares the Dutch settler, as a merchant-adventurer, first to Robinson Crusoe, and second, as a family settler-colonizer, to the Swiss Family Robinson (Johann David Wyss, 1812). In presenting the Dutch person as a victim of Japanese colonialism, Abe condemns Japan in its recent past. Yet he does not mention the propagandistic functions of Robinson Crusoe in Japan in his afterword to his new translation of the novel, intended for the readers too young to know Japan’s past atrocities. For these readers, Abe is attempting to erase or suppress the memory of Japan’s use of Robinson Crusoe in its colonial militarism, but it nevertheless lingers. Generally speaking, post-war Robinsonades in Japan for younger readers are cleansed, gentrified, rendered utopian and go without much violence. Let us take an instance that came out about forty years after Abe’s preface. In an episode in Doraemon titled “The Robinson Crusoe Set” (1989), adventure turns out to be not very adventurous. Stronger boys bully Nobita as a loser who cannot even row a boat on a park pond. He wishes to escape from them to some remote island, only with a girl, Shizuka. Doraemon, a cat-shaped robot from the future, gives him a hand-size wooden barrel named the Robinson Crusoe set. It makes Nobita into a manly, inventive and dependable hero for Shizuka. Everything necessary for island survival pops out from the barrel. However, the utopian island adventure is short-lived. The barrel vanishes. Nobita

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returns to his usual self, a wimpy sissy who has no inventiveness, intelligence or power to solve problems. But no worries, Doraemon comes to rescue them. The remote island, it turns out, is the island on the park pond. In this adaptation, though it offers merely a theme-park experience, the idea of adventure, manliness and inventiveness is associated with Robinson Crusoe.

“The Doomed and Living Robinson Crusoes”37 In both real life and fiction for adults in post-war Japan, Robinson Crusoe revives traumatic memories of war, both as victims and victimizers. Those who had come back to Japan from colonies, especially from the islands in the south, are often compared to Robinson Crusoe. In the “Anatahan Incident” in 1952, twenty-one Japanese—twenty men and one woman— after having refused to believe Japan’s defeat for seven years, return home. The media coverage both in the United States and Japan eroticizes the incident as a tale of “femme fatale” in “a male harem.”38 When former Japanese soldiers return, after long years of concealing themselves as if still in combat, they are praised as Robinson-esque heroes. The “Anatahan Queen” returns “to Tell of Romance” of “12 Men Died for Her Charms on Lonely Isle,”39 the Nippon Times reports. The incident, in which twelve men were killed or lost, fighting for the only woman, took place on an island some 120 km north of Saipan (mandated territory of Japan between 1920–45) named Anatahan. An article in Collier’s Weekly (January 1952) entitled “Dark Angel of Anatahan: Trapped on an island with 32 Japs who refused to believe the war over, she lived five years of lust and violence” depicts a scene when the marooned Japanese scavenge nylons, utensils, needles, knives and automatic pistols out of the wreck of a B-29, in a manner reminiscent of Robinson Crusoe “plundering” his wrecked “ship of what was portable.”40 “Chronology: Japanese Holdouts in the Pacific” records that the Japanese government asked the U.S. Navy for information about “the doomed and living Robinson Crusoes who were living a primitive life on an uninhabited island.”41 As Sachiko Mizuno examines, when Josef von Sternberg visited Japan in 1953 in preparation for the filming of Saga of Anatahan,42 the Japanese, having become fed up with yellow journalistic media coverage of the Anatahan Incident, reacted negatively. Sternberg tried to defend himself on the grounds that “this great story is almost as great as

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Robinson Crusoe Story.”43 In response, Yoshio Nakano, a scholar of British Literature, active in the peace movement, wrote that the incident “evoked uncontrollably traumatic physiological response to any mnemonic traces that would evoke the unwanted memory of the past.”44 Nakano also emphasizes the difference between Robinson Crusoe and the Anatahan Incident. According to Nakano, while Crusoe leaves his country on his own volition for adventure, the people involved in the Anatahan Incident were forced to live on the island because of Japan’s colonial policies—they were victims of Japanese colonialism. Nakano asks for Sternberg’s understanding that the incident stirs traumatic memories which the Japanese would like to suppress and erase.

“It Is Reasonable to Represent One Kind of Imprisonment by Another”45 Shigekazu Yamamoto returned from Mindoro in the Philippines in 1956, Shoichi Yokoi from Guam in 1972 and Hiro Onoda’o from Lubang Island in the Philippines in 1974. Yamamoto and his soldiers cultivated the land among the mountains, built houses and raised pigs and sheep. ¯ Shohei Ooka, a novelist, whose use of Robinson Crusoe is to be discussed later, calls Yamamoto’s life “self-sufficient like Robinson’s.”46 By the time Yokoi and Onoda returned in the 1970s, Japan had already become economically prosperous and forgetful about its colonial and militaristic past. In 1972, John M. Lee reports that many Japanese praise Yokoi’s patriotism, for refusing to believe in Japan’s defeat. Some lament the absence of such loyalty in the 1970s, others consider Yokoi’s return as an occasion for the Japanese to look back on “the ills and dangers of a militarist philosophy.”47 According to Lee, there is “envy of the former soldier’s Robinson Crusoe-like isolation from the ills and problems of modern society.” Concerning the media frenzy over Yokoi’s return, Hiroshi Iwadare criticizes the affluent, satiated and overweight Japanese of the 1970s for romanticizing Yokoi as “today’s Robinson Crusoe.”48 ¯ Ooka, who was to praise one of these holdouts for having had a “selfsufficient life like Robinson’s” in 1969, wrote his first novel, Furyoki (Taken Captive: 1948), comparing his experience as a soldier and then POW in the Philippines to Robinson Crusoe on his island. The protagonist of the novel is kicked out of the Japanese army base with little provision because he is too weak to fight and too healthy to be hospitalized. With “[t]he 99 percent certainty of death,” he finds “a medley

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of ways by which [he] might actually ensure” his survival.49 With one fellow soldier, he determines to wait for the end of the war on the mountains, imitating “some of the details of Robinson Crusoe, which we had both read as young boys.”50 After some weeks of wandering and starvation, he is captured by the U.S. Army. There he works as an interpreter between Americans and Japanese, finding the captors generally kind and efficient, while witnessing endless scenes of vice, disgrace and stupidity in the Japanese military system. The comparison of the protagonist to Robinson Crusoe works in two ways: first, as a wanderer on the island, and second, as a prisoner secluded in POW camp, which is felt to be like Crusoe in “a State of forc’d Confinement” and in “a confin’d Retreat in an Island.”51 Or, he could be more like Friday who was one of “Prisoners” of the cannibals52 and who is to become Robinson’s “Interpreter.”53 ¯ The irony in Ooka’s novel is that it is the Japanese who were potential cannibals: he finds that a sergeant, his senior, “advocated cannibalism”54 before becoming a POW. ¯ Ooka begins his novel with an epigraph quoting from “Robinson Crusoe’s Preface” in Serious Reflections: “It is reasonable to represent one kind of Imprisonment by another.” It is actually a re-quotation, since ¯ Ooka borrows Albert Camus’s epigraph to The Plague (1947) which quotes from Serious Reflections. In Camus’s novel, an Algerian town under lockdown or “Imprisonment” is an allegory of France under the ¯ Nazi occupation. In Ooka’s re-quotation, “one kind of Imprisonment,” that is, his confinement at the POW camp, is compared to Crusoe’s “Imprisonment” in the island, in which he feels that “tho’ I was indeed at large in the Place, yet the Island was certainly a Prison to me, and ¯ intends his that in the worst Sense in the World.”55 Furthermore, Ooka novel about his experience as POW as a means to criticize the American occupation of Japan, another “kind of Imprisonment.” ¯ future Nobel Laureate, published a novel, Nip the Kenzaburo Oe, Buds, Shoot the Kids in 1958, a dystopian tale of a group of boys confined in a plague-ridden village during the war. As Y¯oichi Komori has pointed out, it is a parodic adaptation of R. M. Ballantyne’s Coral Island (1857), Jules Verne’s Deux Ans de Vacances (1888) and Robinson Crusoe. The boys, inmates of a reform school, including a boy nicknamed Minami (south), because of his wish to go south as a part of Japan’s colonial extension projects (nanshin ron), were sent to a small village among the mountains. They find that the villagers evacuated when a plague patient was discovered, leaving the patient, the boys from the reform school,

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a young Korean resident, and a deserter confined in the village, to die out. The gate to the village is shut down with a guard with weapons, ¯ a university student majoring in French making escape impossible. Oe, literature at the time of the novel’s publication, was under the influence ¯ of Camus, and Oe’s novel has been compared to both Camus’s The Plague and William Golding’s Lord of the Flies.56 The protagonist, driven out of the village after the villagers’ return, feels that one form of imprisonment ¯ ¯ express their has merely been replaced by another. Camus, Ooka and Oe feelings that escape is impossible, by, directly or indirectly, referring to Defoe’s Serious Reflections and The Journal of the Plague Year.

Robinson Crusoe in Japan’s Economic Bubble and Its Aftermath One of the most sustained efforts to historicize Robinson Crusoe in Japan is Yasuhiko Kisaichi’s 1974 article. He analyzes oceanic adventure novels of Japanese empire, of which Robinsonades formed an integral part, as having functioned to propagate Japanese military expansion, and points out that as of the late 1970s, this aspect of Robinsonades in Japan has not been fully explored. He shows that the protagonists of popular oceanic adventure novels never have the slightest doubts about the legitimacy of the status quo, including the emperor system, and therefore they have no Robin Hood quality of independence, freedom and anti-establishment views of the outlaw. While they are self-fashioned heroes that strive to encourage Asian independence from the Western colonial powers, they themselves are colonizers under the guise of liberators. Oceanic adventure tales including Robinsonades in Japan function to instill the racist and masculinist idea of Japanese imperialism into the minds of the readers. Kisaichi ends his article by implying that in the 1970s Japan is conducting its neo-colonial expansion to Asia by economic means, without due reflection on its imperialistic past, of colonial expansion over South East Asia and the Pacific.57 Nobuhiko Kobayashi published Sekai de ichiban atsui shima (World’s Hottest Island) in 1990, a novel about a Japanese manager of a resort hotel on a Pacific Island, catering for mostly Japanese tourists’ fantasy of tropical paradise. The scenes are set on an island named Colonia. Though fictional, Colonia is intended to be reminiscent of Palau, which had been under Japanese occupation (1914–1945). In the novel, Colonia is the second country to have a nuclear-free constitution—a reference to Palau

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as the first country that voted for such a policy in 1981. Though it is not a Robinsonade in itself, Kobayashi’s novel shows the author’s awareness that Japanese tourism industry’s expansion to the Pacific after the war is an extension of Japan’s colonialism in the past [nanshin]. In an article in 1984 about his fact-finding trip to the Koror Island in the Republic of Palau,58 he writes about his nausea for an advertisement by a Japanese tourist company that says “we are living in the age of nanshin through tourism,” especially as he is keenly aware of the history of Japanese colonization of Palau, and anxious about the potentially serious harm to the ecology of a country that has to depend on Japanese yen. Ikezawa Natsuki’s Natsu no asa no seiso ken (Stratosphere in a Summer Morning ) (1990), explicitly modeled on Robinson Crusoe, displays nuclear anxiety, awareness of Japanese colonial history and of the impossibility of pure, innocent and boyish adventure in the Cold War Pacific. The protagonist, a Japanese journalist, is dropped overboard from a tuna fishing ship, to be washed ashore on what seems to be an uninhabited atoll island. Remembering a story he read as a child, he begins his “Reckoning of Time”59 by making crosses with palm tree leaves, as he does not have a knife with him60 as the original Crusoe did. The illusion of an adventure on an isolated island goes away soon when he realizes that the palm trees line up too neatly to be naturally grown and finds a brand-new white house in western style, well stored with canned foods, modern utensils and books. Knowing he is somewhere near the Marshall Islands, he suspects the atolls might have been the sites of nuclear weapon experiments some twenty years ago61 —a reference to the Lucky Dragon Incident in 1954 in which a Japanese tuna fishing boat was contaminated by nuclear fallout from hydrogen bomb weapon test on Bikini Atoll by the U.S. Navy. One of the crew of the ship, Lucky Dragon, died afterward because of radiation. As the Marshall Islands including Bikini Atoll had been under Japanese occupation between 1920 and 1945, the inhabitants of Bikini Atoll who had to evacuate prior to the hydrogen test and the crew of the ship suffer from Japan’s colonial history. In the novel, the protagonist meets a Hollywood star actor who owns the atoll islands for his private vacation—reminiscent of Verne’s Mysterious Island, where Captain Nemo turns out to be the proprietor of the island—to learn that they were the sites of recent American missile—not nuclear—tests. Natsuo Kirino’s Tokyo jima (Tokyo Island, 2008), modeled on the Anatahan Incident previously discussed, is another case of a Robinsonade for the nuclear energy age. It displays unease about the decline

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of the Japanese economy and rise of China. The protagonist, a Japanese woman in her mid-forties, is washed off on an island on the Pacific with her husband, who had retired himself just before the burst of Japan’s bubble economy, so that he could secure his pension. With the money they set sail on a luxurious cruiser, but they were shipwrecked on an inhabited island. After three months twenty-three Japanese young men arrive, who are runaways from a Japanese island where they were forced to work in extremely harsh conditions and with little payment. One year later about a dozen Chinese men are abandoned on the shore, out of a smuggler ship on its way to Japan. At the beginning of the novel, there are thirty-two men and just one woman on the island. Many men, including the protagonist’s original spouse, die mysterious deaths, fighting over the right to be “husband” to the sole woman. The Island is named Tokyo jima (Tokyo Island). The Japanese are divided into several factions, while the Chinese group, which has better survival skills, keeps its solidarity. The Japanese find sealed metal barrels painted yellow on a beach, and suspecting that these might contain radioactive waste, name the beach as T¯okaimura62 (T¯okai village)—a reference to the T¯okaimura Criticality Incident of 1999, which resulted in more than 600 people being exposed to radiation, leaving two dead. In the novel, it turns out that a Japanese company has been illegally dumping radioactive waste on the island. As modeled on the Anatahan Incident, the novel invokes the cultural memory of Japanese colonialism. In the novel, numerous men are found dead at the bottom of Sayonara Cliff, either having killed themselves or been thrown down after having been killed. As the Anatahan Island is close to Saipan, the site of Battle of Saipan in 1944 between the United States and Japan, the name of Sayonara Cliff calls to mind Banzai Cliff (Suicide Cliff) on Saipan, from which hundreds of Japanese civilians and soldiers jumped to their deaths. If earlier Japanese Robinsonades before World War II are hopeful for the future—Crusoe serves as a model for development of economy, industry and trade, as well as a hero of militaristic and colonial expansion—and if Robinsonades in post-war Japan are attempts to reconstruct the nation with Robinson Crusoe as a model of homo economicus , these later novels by Ikezawa and Kirino, written after the decline of Japan’s economy, are dark, claustrophobic and dystopian. In Ikezawa’s novel, there is no real Robinson Crusoe-like adventure, as the island is a resort island owned by a Hollywood star, where everything is pre-packaged and formulated. In Kirino’s novel, claustrophobic feelings of there being no

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way out are pervasive. As a unique exception to the rule of Robinsonades as masculine adventure stories, the protagonist of Kirino’s novel is a middle-aged woman. As such, it is a sharp challenge to and criticism to the masculinist tradition of Japanese Robinsonades.

Conclusion This chapter examined numerous Robinsonades in Japan for a period of over 160 years, starting from the first translation from the Dutch in 1848. Crusoe stood for Japan’s isolation policy, its struggle to become a part of the modern economic world system, its colonial expansion to the Pacific and South East Asia, its neo-colonial economic expansion to Asia and its anxiety over its declining economy. It clarified that Robinsonades in Japan form an integral part of globalization and localization of Robinson Crusoe.

Notes 1. See Eun Kyung Min and Hye-Soo Lee’s chapter for Korean adaptation of this work by Ch’oe Nams˘on. 2. Niijima 37. 3. Oyabe 47. 4. Ibid., 54. 5. Ibid., 72. 6. Ibid., 95. 7. Ibid., 184. 8. Ibid., 54. 9. Defoe Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe 130. 10. Oyabe 81. 11. Ibid., 83. 12. Ibid., 108. 13. Ibid., 110. 14. Ibid., 111. 15. Ibid., 113. 16. Ibid., 114. 17. Ibid., 116. 18. Ibid., 3. 19. Oyabe writes that he named his servant Friday simply because he met the man for the first time on Friday. 20. Cited on Kono 40. 21. Ibid. 22. Cited on Kono 41.

278 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43.

44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62.

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Cited on Kono 52. Natsume 617. Defoe The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe 170–171. Natsume 602. Preface to “Robinson Crusoe Funto no shogai” (Robinson Crusoe: Life of Struggle) by Matsushima Tsuyoshi, cited and analyzed on Sakazaki 42. ¯ Ogai Mori, Preface to translation of Robinson Crusoe by Takahashi Gor¯ o and Kato Kyoe (1911), cited and analyzed on Sakazaki 44–45. Yanagida 30–32. Sudo 5. Owens 57. Kamenetsky No.3204. It was renamed as Robinson Crusoe Island in 1966. Severin 23–24. Segawa 336–337. Sato 146–147. Abe 1975 259–260. Taylan. Kalischer 20. Shown on Hornyak. Owens 99. Taylan. About this film, see Gomot. Mizuno 18. Mizuno’s translation from the original, Joseph von Sternberg, “Anatahan no yume” [Dream of Anatahan], All Yomimono (October 1952), 180–183. Ibid. ¯ Ooka 1996 No. 8. Defoe Serious Reflections 53. ¯ Ooka 2016 No. 1675. Lee. Iwadare. ¯ 1996 No. 158. Oka ¯ 1996 No. 178. Oka Defoe Serious Reflections 53. Defoe Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe 203. Ibid., 235. ¯ 1996 No. 2320. Oka Defoe Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe 128. Harris 2. Kisaichi 32. Quoted in Okada 37–38. Defoe Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe 104. Ikezawa 44. Ibid., 113. Kirino 14.

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Works Cited Abe, Tomoji. 1952. Afterword. Robinson Crusoe. Tokyo: Iwanami. ———. 1975. Shi no hana (A Flower of Death) in Abe Tomoji Zenshu (Complete Works of Tomoji Abe), Vol. 5. Tokyo: Kawade Shobo Shinsha. Camus, Albert. 1947; 2020. The Plague. Translated by Stuart Gilbert. New Westminster, BC: Mercy House. Defoe, Daniel. 1719; 2008. The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe. The Novels of Daniel Defoe 1. Edited by W.R. Owens. London: Pickering & Chatto. ———. 1719; 2008. The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe. The Novels of Daniel Defoe 2. Edited by W. R. Owens. London: Pickering & Chatto. ———. 1720; 2008. Serious Reflections during the Life and Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe with His Vision of the Angelick World. The Novels of Daniel Defoe. 3. Edited by G.A. Starr. London: Pickering & Chatto. Gomot, Guillaume. 2020. Death and Desire in Josef Von Sternberg’s Anatahan. In 300 Years of Robinsonades. Edited by Emmanuelle Peraldo. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Harris, Michael. 1995, July 2. Born of Anger: Where the Japanese Nobel Prize Winner Began His Story Telling. Los Angeles Times. https://www.latimes. com/archives/la-xpm-1995-07-02-bk-19308-story.html. Hornyak, Tim. 2014, May 3. A Homage to the ‘Queen of Anatahan’. Japan Times. https://www.japantimes.co.jp/culture/2014/05/03/books/bookreviews/homage-queen-anatahan/#.Xo2Bc1P7S3c. Iwadare, Hiroshi. Monokaki wo mezasu hito he (For those who are wishing to become a journalist). https://www.econfn.com/iwadare/page197.html Iwao, Ryutaro. 2010. Bakumatsu no Robinson (Robinson Crusoes at the End of the Edo Era). Fukuoka: Gen Shobo. Kalischer, Peter and Gloria. 1952, January 26. Dark Angel of Anatahan. Collier’ s Weekly. https://www.japantimes.co.jp/culture/2014/05/03/books/bookreviews/homage-queen-anatahan/#.Xo2Bc1P7S3c. Accessed through the Unz Review. Kamenetsky, Christa. 1984. Children’s Literature in Hitler’s Germany: The Cultural Policy of National Socialism. Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press. Kindle. Kirino, Natsuo. 2008. Tokyo jima (Tokyo Island). Tokyo: Shincho-sha. Kisaichi, Yasuhiko. 1974. Kindai Nihon ni okeru Robinson Crusoe no unmei (Fate of Robinson Crusoe in Modern Japan). Shiso no kagaku 6 (26): 20–32. Kobayashi, Nobuhiko. 2004. Sekai de ichiban atsui shima (World’s Hottest Island). Tokyo: Shincho-sha. Kindle. Komori, Yoichi. 1999. Sabetsu to haijo no gensetsu sistemu – Memushiri kouchi (System of Discrimination and Exclusion in Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids. Shosetsu to Hihyo). Yokohama: Seori Shobo.

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Kono, Yuri. 2013. Taguchi Ukichi no yume (Dreams of Ukichi Taguchi). Tokyo: Keio Gijuku University Press. Lee, John M. 1972, January 31. Japan Debates Spirit of War Holdout. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/1972/01/31/archives/japandebates-spirit-of-war-holdout.html. Mizuno, Sachico. 2009. The Saga of Anatahan and Japan. Spectator 29 (2): 9–24. https://cinema.usc.edu/assets/096/15618.pdf. Natsume, Soseki. 1909. Bungaku Hyoron (Literary Criticism). Tokyo: Shunyodo. Niijima, Jo. 1996. Niijima Jo Zenshu (Complete Works of Jo Niijima), Vol. 10. Kyoto: Dohosha. ¯ Kenzaburo. 1996. Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids. Translated by Paul St. John Oe, Mackintosh and Maki Sugiyama. New York: Grove Atlantic. Okada, Satoshi. 2010. Nanshin Nihon to Gendai no nanyo ni okeru ichi fukei (Advance of Imperial Japan to Southeast Asia and its Legacy Today). Bungaku kenkyu ronshu 28: 31–46. ¯ Ooka, Shohei. 1996. Taken Captive: A Japanese POW’s Story. Translated by Wayne P. Lammers. New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc. ———. 2016. Mindoro tou futatabi (Mindoro Island Once Again). Tokyo: Chuo Koron. Kindle. Oyabe, Jen’ichiro. 2009. A Japanese Robinson Crusoe. Edited by Greg Robinson and Yujin Yaguchi. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. ¯ Sakamoto, Kyohei. 2014. Yokuatsu Sareta Bungaku Tachi no Fukken: Mori Ogai ¯ Robinson Crusoe Ron (Reviving the Literature Suppressed: On Mori Ogai’s Robinson Crusoe).” Nihon Bungaku 63 (4): 39–51. Sakiichi, Yasuhiko. 1974. Kindai Nihon ni okeru Robinson Crusoe no unnmei (Fate of Robinson Crusoe in Modern Japan). Siso no Kagaku 6 (26): 20–32. Sato, Kazuya. 2014. Framing Robinson Crusoe as Children’s Literature in Japanese Translation: How Editorial Prefaces and Notes Represent the Novel. Showa Joshi Daigaku Eibei Bungaku Kenkyu 49: 143–158. Segawa, Yuji. 2017. Atarashiki Tuchino Shinjitsu (True History of the Daughter of Samurai). Tokyo: Heibonsha. Severin, Tim. 2002. In Search of Robinson Crusoe. New York: Basic Books. Sudo, Naoto. 2010. Nanyo-Orientalism: Japanese Representations of the Pacific. New York: Cambia Press. Tanaka, Umekichi. 1932. Doitsu ni okeru robinson crusoe monogatari (Robinson Crusoe in Germany). The Bulletin of the Keijo Imperial University English Association IX: 2–6. Taylan, Justin. Japanese Holdouts in the Pacific. http://www.wanpela.com/hol douts/list.html. Yanagida, Izumi. 1942. Kaiyo bungaku to nanshin ron (Marine Literature and Southward Expansion). Tokyo: Nihon Hoso Kyokai.

CHAPTER 14

Crusoe Comes to Caramoan: The Survival of American Cultural Imperialism in the Philippines Maria Lorena Santos

The mythos of Robinson Crusoe survives and thrives in the twenty-first century in forms faithful to, playful with, and subversive of the source text. This work’s status as progenitor of the realist English novel as a genre may be debated, but its rich afterlife is unquestionable: as Michael Seidel asserts, “perhaps no single book in the history of Western literature has spawned more editions, translations, imitations, continuations, and sequels than Crusoe.”1 The “Robinsonade,” a genre birthed by Daniel Defoe’s novel, includes works from almost as soon as it was published, surveyed by scholars like Pat Rogers who lists “196 English editions …; 110 translations; 115 revisions; and 277 imitations” in continental literature alone.2 Carl Fisher defines the Robinsonade as “an obvious

M. L. Santos (B) University of the Philippines, Quezon City, Philippines e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 S. Clark and Y. Yoshihara (eds.), Robinson Crusoe in Asia, Asia-Pacific and Literature in English, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-4051-3_14

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rewriting of the Crusoe story,” usually incorporating or adapting “specific physical aspects of Crusoe’s experience.”3 This literary sub-branch is “distinguished by its use of the desert-island setting, although other forms of solitary voyage are sometimes admitted,” as in, for example, futuristic science fiction novels and films.4 Evidence of the Robinsonade’s place in popular consciousness is the long list of examples on the TV Tropes website, a “wiki” documentation of various conventions and devices in fiction and other trans/media forms. The site defines the term as “a plot about characters being stranded in the wilderness far away from civilization, and forced to live off the land in order to survive,” and Robinsonade examples span many genres and forms such as novels, films, television shows, web comics, anime series, and even video games.5 While many stress fantasy and playfulness rather than verisimilitude and reverence in their reuse of Crusoe, they enact the novel’s status as myth, referred to in Ian Watt’s claim that the novel is “Almost universally known, almost universally thought of as at least half real.”6 Scholars have explored how and why the Crusoe narrative resonates with contemporary cultures, particularly in terms of what recent reworkings reflect about the societies producing and consuming them. Sophia Nikoleishvili argues that the novel’s enduring power resides in its possibilities of interpretation, observing that it can and has been read as an “adventure story,” a “spiritual autobiography,” “a redemption narrative,” an “economic parable,” and “a piece of pre-colonialist propaganda” by audiences and critics from different times.7 If, in fact, these new incarnations of Crusoe “are the critical responses to, rather than the ‘literal’ adaptations of Defoe’s novel,”8 how do these contemporary Crusoes construct new meanings and realities in and about locations far removed from at least those in Defoe’s most well-known novel? For Asians who read Anglo-American literature, it is useful to engage with Asian-set Robinsonades still relatively “less traveled” in academia. This chapter focuses on one such example: the twenty-first-century, massconsumed television show Survivor filmed in the Philippines. Survivor belongs to a genre dubbed “reality TV” for its cast of ordinary people, use of supposedly unscripted dialogue, and filming of “real” situations. While these characteristics have been questioned, i.e., reality TV is understood to have “nothing to do with reality and everything to do with TV,” scholars note that these shows “are always in dialogue with reality as it is commonly understood and in doing so […] help to produce current

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knowledges about what that reality might consist of.”9 Sweden’s Expedition Robinson (1997) was the first to introduce the format of Survivor, classified more specifically as adventure reality television. However, it was Mark Burnett’s US version that went on to become so widely successful and “astonishingly popular” that it is referred to as “the show that started the reality television trend.”10 Since the year 2000, Survivor has been a highly rated series, both in the US and around the world, making it to Time magazine’s list of the 100 greatest TV shows of all time.11 Its audience is “one of the largest in broadcast television,”12 and nearly two decades later, Survivor has “managed to outlast a slew of clones and cousins,” the finale of season 36 drawing in 8.74 million viewers in December 2017.13 In the Philippines it was popular enough to spawn four seasons of a local version called Survivor Philippines from 2008 to 2011. On Survivor, ordinary individuals are “marooned away from civilization,” provided with only what they can salvage from their boat, seeming at first to follow Crusoe quite closely. Stock Survivor phrases let the audience know that these players must “battle the elements” and “live off the land,” and while their arrival on the island is a less terrifying simulation of Defoe’s “agonies of the mind,” its dangers are remarked on by both host and contestants.14 Like Crusoe, players must find food and water, and establish a secure shelter. At some point, these new Crusoes participate in an encounter with Other cultures, in the form of challenges and/or rewarding experiences. Although a key difference is the social dimension to the game—which shifts from group to individual survival as contestants must “Outwit, Outplay, Outlast” each other—it is arguable that Survivor closely replicates the Crusoe narrative, which also transforms from that of a solitary survivor to a group endeavor. It thus provides fascinating new material for cultural criticism, especially since the series capitalizes on the appeal of modern Americans “roughing it” in an exotic and desolate locale, distant in terms of geography and experience. These “deserted” and “remote” lands of Survivor have included locations in Africa, Oceania, South America, and Asia. Nine of the 38 seasons have been set in Asia, and four of these in two locations in the Philippines. The first, Caramoan in the Camarines Sur Province of the Bikol region, has hosted not only two US seasons but also ten other versions of Survivor with “castaways” from France, Sweden, Holland, Denmark, and Bulgaria. The 25th and 26th seasons of the US version of Survivor, which aired in September 2012 and February 2013, respectively, were both set in the

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Caramoan Islands. The discussion is limited to these seasons rather than the two that followed, Survivor: Blood vs. Water and Survivor: Cagayan, filmed in Palaui Island, Cagayan, because the former were the first to be shot in the country and made many explicit references to the setting. The local version, Survivor Philippines, is also not tackled because three of its four seasons were filmed outside the Philippines. This chapter offers a reading of the narratives of Survivor’s Season 25 and 26 as a repackaging of Robinson Crusoe’s proto-imperialist themes for a contemporary American audience. More specifically, it both argues and outlines how a Robinsonade set in this region reinforces American cultural hegemony in the Philippines and reformulates American imperialism as entertainment. The simulation of reality in this particular “island” location is worthy of examination because of the “special relationship” as well as fraught history between the Philippines and the United States.15 The Philippines was under US colonial rule from 1898 to 1946, having been ceded as a former Spanish territory via the Treaty of Paris. During this period, described as a “‘forgotten’ episode of US history,” the Philippine–American war was waged from 1899 to 1902 to protest against the treaty and continue the struggle for independence.16 This was finally “benevolently” granted in 1946 by the US when it deemed Filipinos “ready.” However, even postindependence, America enjoyed a preferential trade system, investment opportunities, and a military presence until the late twentieth century. US cultural influence remains strong in the Philippines, resulting from the tactic of benevolent assimilation, the Americanization of the educational system, and the adoption of English as an official language. Until the present, US-made programs, commodities, music, and literature enjoy popularity that surpasses those from local sources, prompting scholars to label the relationship between the two countries a neocolonial one.17 This relationship can be analyzed in these Philippine-set seasons of Survivor via an examination of in the relationship between the show’s neocolonial Crusoes and their new territories. Just as the desert island plays a prominent role in Crusoe’s narrative, the landscape in Survivor “is as significant as the players themselves,”18 an observation supported by Burnett’s assertion that “The location is the seventeenth character on Survivor.”19 His emphasis on a “location” that is “mysterious, epic, and inspiring” underscores the unreality of reality TV and its actual distance from a text that has been called the first realist novel, particularly as he adds, “No suggestion of the real world is allowed.”20 The first salient point for discussion, then, arises from how the US’s status as

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imperial power is maintained via the reality show’s mythologizing of the Philippines as a remote and exotic location. In Survivor: Philippines , an ideological distance from America is established by host Jeff Probst’s descriptions of the locale. For instance, when he says to the contestants in Episode 1, “We are in one of the most beautiful and remote locations in the world… the Philippines,” the pronoun “we” overtly refers to himself and the contestants and/or the show as a production but is also implicitly extended to its target American audience.21 Via such possessive pronouns, such as when Probst represents the country as “one of our most treacherous locations yet” [my emphasis], an ideological fault line is drawn between Americans and Filipinos.22 Such descriptions, as Brook McDonald points out, serve “to signify and relegate island spaces as exotic and ideologically distanced spaces.”23 In the case of the Philippines, its relegation to the peripheries of America is significant because this erases the colonial history between the two and, at the same time, justifies the neocolonial relationship. This is accomplished by reinforcing the idea that the Philippines is unfamiliar, unknown, uncharted—even uninhabited—terrain, just like the desert island as Crusoe describes it: “environ’d every Way with the Sea, no land to be seen except some Rocks […],” “barren,” an island which he “saw good Reason to believe, un-inhabited, except by wild Beasts….”24 Such reinforcement is dangerous because the general American public remains largely unaware of, or even ignorant about its relationship with the Philippines. In the introduction to a 2017 publication titled The Philippine Archipelago, the book is described as: born from the realization that the Philippine islands are largely unknown to the general public and that academics have neglected them. Rarely mentioned by media except during disasters […] or episodic political events, […] the country is largely absent from catalogs and brochures of travel agencies and has also been ignored by many political leaders.25

When little is known about a place, it is easy to fill in gaps and erase or rewrite history, to reify myths about the civilization of one nation and the primitiveness of another. Distance and erasure are emphasized by references to the dangers of the Caramoan Islands, which in season 25 are used as a stand-in for the entire nation. In Robinson Crusoe, the protagonist writes in his journal about the bleakness of the setting, calling the place a “dismal unfortunate

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Island,” and labeling it “the Island of Despair.”26 Meanwhile, as he does in other Survivor seasons, Probst underscores the harshness of the environment and the unfriendliness of nature, stock traits of a Robinsonade, alongside the Western paradise trope. In Survivor: Philippines , this is phrased even more ominously to highlight the season’s theme of bringing back former contestants previously evacuated because of injuries. To highlight the “treachery” of the location, Probst describes the Philippines as a place where “thousands of islands scattered over the Southeast Asian sea hide a dark and sinister secret”27 which is that the “stunning paradise” is also “a dangerous wilderness.”28 In a voiceover juxtaposed with images of threatening storm clouds and predatory fauna, Probst warns the contestants and US viewers: “The waters are teeming with ravenous sharks and the land provides no refuge. Deadly snakes rule the jungles and the furious storms can break even the strongest of spirits.”29 In the following season, Probst describes the country as “an exotic paradise, both beautiful and treacherous, filled with formidable wildlife, with mother’ nature’s true fury only one storm away.”30 Such descriptions reconstruct the entire country as a space of hardship that will test the endurance and resourcefulness of American contestants, one of whom will triumph over it. While the Philippines is “under tropical weather yearlong,”31 warranting the show’s association of it with typhoons and monsoon rains, the Survivor narrative exoticizes this as if it were not a natural phenomenon that occurs elsewhere in the world, including in the US. Probst’s warning, that “amidst the serenity of this majestic landscape, furious storms can arrive without warning ” [my emphasis], shapes these occurrences as unpredictable manifestations of “mother nature’s true fury” and makes them a signifier of wildness.32 According to Jennifer Bowering Delisle, this allows viewers to enter “an anachronistic space,” wherein, like tourists, they can imagine that “in traveling to a far away and exotic location, they have also traveled to an earlier point in the history of civilization.”33 Survivor France director also underscores this quality, saying the production team chose Caramoan “because it’s really wild. It’s necessary contestants don’t see anything other than nature for them to believe that they’re really lost in the wilds.”34 Thus, both the paradise-like descriptions of the Philippines and the emphasis on its dangers, relegate the country to a peripheral, primitive space and time outside of the reality of Westerners.

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The more pernicious threat is, in fact, the “reality” of the Philippines which Survivor: Philippines constructs not just verbally but via cinematography and editing. Shots of the Caramoan Peninsula are intercut with those of other tourist attractions in other provinces of the region: Mount Mayon in Albay and whale sharks in the waters of Sorsogon. The close-ups of fauna—snakes, sharks, lizards, eagles—represent a false amalgam designed to suggest that the contestants live among and closely encounter these exotic and “dangerous” animals. Much is, in fact, exaggerated: According to outdoor adventure organizer of Caramoan Cam Sur Kadlagan Tours, Jojo Villareal, the “ravenous sharks” are few in number, and the Butaan or Gray’s monitor lizard’s habitat is the Caramoan National Park, and not in the island locations of Survivor.35 Ironically, the Butaan is cited as a rare and vulnerable species in the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List of Threatened Species, is itself “threatened by habitat loss and fragmentation, through conversion of land to agricultural use and logging operations” and “by hunting for food” and “collection for the pet trade” for the international market.36 One of the “dangerous” birds featured in Survivor’s footage is the Philippine Brahminy kite eagle, which is a scavenger rather than a predator. The constructedness of the “dangers” of these animals is most obvious to locals in the repeated images of the tiny Philippine tarsier, a protected species endemic to Southeastern regions of the archipelago. The footage of choice is a zoomed-in view of the nocturnal primate “dangerously” pouncing on and devouring an insect. Another episode is valued for what Probst calls “epic” and “stunning” close-up footage of Survivor cast members swimming with whale sharks in a Southern Bikol province.37 Here, one contestant touches a shark despite being warned not to do so, in a moment that he later refers to as his favorite on the show.38 Lastly, the so-called “deadly snakes that rule the jungle,” shot and edited as if they are around every corner of the players’ camps, are sea kraits, prevalent in the islands where Survivor: Philippines is filmed; these are not aggressive and attack only if provoked.39 The cobras, featured in the footage and in the Survivor: Philippines logo, are residents of the national park, along with other reptiles that are part of a preservation project. Just as wildness and danger are constructed via the footage and description of flora and fauna, chosen to fit the Survivor aesthetic rather than for the sake of authenticity, so is the imagined tribal aesthetic, a “Philippine look,” created by the production design elements in the show’s

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logo, props, and tribal council area. As a result, cultures viewed as Others by American capital are easily interchanged: For Survivor: Cagayan, for example, which was the fourth consecutive season set in the Philippines, “the art department decided to forgo the Philippine look and instead adopted Balinese culture, building the sets and props as if they were filming in Indonesia.”40 The ideological ramifications of this are serious when one considers that the Philippines, like many other Survivor locations (e.g., Thailand, Kenya, Australia), was once under colonial rule: as Delisle observes, “The construction of privileged foreigners entering exoticized, ‘uncivilized’ territories’ immediately signals the colonial relationship between North and South.”41 When juxtaposed with the Crusoe narrative, which “celebrates human ingenuity and resourcefulness,” its creation of an “optimistic, flattering image of humankind”42 that specifically caters to a Western audience in not innocent. The narrative of a human being “desperately struggling to survive alone against the world, surviving by sheer native energy, triumphing over difficulties, and creating his own little cosmos out of what, if he had been indolent and hopeless, must have remained chaos,”43 structures the “native energy” to be Western/American and the “chaos” to be Eastern/Filipino. This representation extends beyond the landscape to the show’s racist representations of Filipinos in the form of “staged savagery.”44 Postcolonial critics have already noted how Crusoe embodies the Anglo-Saxon spirit in his triumph over the cannibals and particularly in his “civilizing”/subjugation of Friday. Their works call attention to Crusoe’s first encounter with Friday, where the former meticulously describes the latter’s height, age, and general appearance, remarks upon his obvious submission, and finally, gives him the name Friday and himself the name “Master.” The parallels in Survivor: Caramoan are not exact but are even more disturbing because of their departure from the more obvious colonial master–subordinate native representations as well as their echoing, decades later, of American phrases about Filipinos during the colonial period. In Defoe’s novel, Friday shows “all the possible Signs of an humble thankful Disposition, making a many antick Gestures to show it.”45 Friday’s inferiority and lowliness are marked by his posture and behavior as described by Crusoe: Friday’s laying of his head under Crusoe’s foot, his signs of “Subjection, Servitude, and Submission,” and the pleasure taken by Crusoe in this.46 This imagery is echoed in images of conquest,

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defiance, and victory present in nearly every season’s opening credits— images of the silhouette of a contestant, or even host Jeff Probst, standing atop a rock, with arms akimbo or with one hand triumphantly holding a fiery torch. But there are other, more disturbing echoes. In Episode 4 of Survivor: Caramoan, one team is rewarded with the guidance of a Filipino named Dominador Liwanag, more popularly known as Tata Kasoy. “Tata,” as the contestants call him, is introduced by Probst as a “local bushman” who will help the players use their resources better and as “someone who knows how live off this land” [my emphasis].47 However, Tata Kasoy is not from Caramoan, but is an Aeta, one of the indigenous people from the mountainous regions of Northern Luzon, where the landscape, climate, flora, and fauna differ from that in Bikol. Probst tells the survivors, “Use him as a resource,” a phrase which is apt on two levels.48 Tata Kasoy makes his living in the North as a tour guide, and he improves the contestants’ lives by bringing in bamboo to reinforce their shelter and by cooking them food for a special feast. He is also a resource in the sense of being a commodified spectacle to boost the show’s ratings: Probst notes that he wants to bring Tata Kasoy back every season because “Based on his one appearance, he’s already a Survivor legend.”49 The contestants’ descriptions of Tata Kasoy are both distinct from and reminiscent of Crusoe’s, who finds Friday comely, remarking on his face that had “all the sweetness and softness of an European” and his skin color “that had in it something very agreeable.50 Crusoe also teaches Friday English and instructs him in Western practices, all of which Friday “quickly complied with, and made signs that it was very good for him.”51 On Survivor: Philippines , Tata Kasoy promises to be a savior of the tribe, dubbed a “Filipino Jesus” by one contestant,52 but he quickly becomes an object of amusement. Initially, there is condescending admiration in player Malcolm Freberg’s description: “Nothing could have prepared us for this little guy. He’s about four feet tall, sixty years old; he’s all knotted up with muscle.”53 However, later, the guide is lowered further than Friday. After Tata Kasoy uses English and gestures to teach the contestants basic survival skills, Freberg says, “It was entertaining more than anything, you know, just to watch him. You don’t understand half of what he’s saying anyways.”54 Another player, John Cochran, describes the guide’s demonstration of how to cook rice as “great to watch – dinner and a show.”55 The gap between American players and their Filipino subordinate is, here, even wider than that in a master–servant

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relationship. Freberg engages in his own Crusoe-like naming, calling Tata Kasoy “a Filipino Gollum” after the skeleton-thin, wizened, and crouching, loincloth-wearing creature in The Lord of the Rings who talks in an idiosyncratic, and sometimes child-like way.56 Further dehumanizing him, Cochran likens the Filipino guide to a “bizarre little woodland creature.”57 The imperialist themes of the Crusoe narrative are repeated in Survivor via its staging of even more “moment[s] of encounter between ‘primitive’ cultures and the modern world.”58 In 1904, the Philippine Exposition at the St. Louis World’s Fair, was used to justify American nationalist expansionism via its deliberate “‘savaging’ of the Filipino.”59 It is easy to recognize the similarities between the Exposition’s replicated villages “‘stocked’ with tribal men, women, and children as living exhibits” of exotic curiosities and what is displayed in Survivor: Philippines .60 Episode 9 not only features a team reward where the winners are taken to a “lovely native village” in which they enact an encounter of imperial benevolence: Probst tells them they will be “Survivor ambassadors” who will deliver “much needed school supplies and a little joy in the form of toys.”61 The Americans interact with the show’s “sanctioned” locals, used to highlight the primitiveness of local culture, as when contestant Jonathan Penner describes the village as coming “straight out of The Blue Lagoon,” incidentally also a Robinsonade.62 In Defoe’s novel, Crusoe’s education of Friday highlights their hierarchical relationship: “I likewise taught him to say Master, and then let him know, that was to be my Name.”63 While Penner and the other Survivor: Philippines contestants do not subjugate the locals, there is an echo of paternal racism—Crusoe describes Friday having “Affections were ty’d to [him], like those of a Child to a Father”64 —and of Western benevolence in how Survivor: Philippines focuses on the interaction between the American players and the local children. In one scene, Penner clowns around with the children and then in an interview describes how happy the children were as they went “wild” over his antics.65 Despite having only a brief encounter with the villagers, he concludes, “It seems to be the happiest community I’ve ever walked into.”66 Another contestant talks with amazement about how the villagers, “people of all ages…just hanging out together” are “wide open to the experience” of meeting the American survivors.67 These impressions speak less of what the contestants see (or what is staged for them to see) and more about what they seek: local culture as a spectacle, a “once-in-a-lifetime experience,”68 as

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Probst assures them it will be, of the gratefulness of the primitive local. Such observations also echo and reinforce, more than a century later, the paternalist racism expressed via President William Howard Taft’s coinage of “little brown brothers” to describe Filipinos.69 As charted in Benevolent Assimilation: The American Conquest of the Philippines (1899–1903), Taft, who was the Philippines’ first American Governor-General, asserted that Filipinos “would need fifty or one hundred years of close supervision to develop anything resembling Anglo-Saxon political principles and skills.”70 Survivor: Philippines , moreover, utilizes “the customs and rituals of the ‘other’ cultures to create ‘challenges’ for the show’s contestants,” widening the gap between Americans and Filipinos further.71 In what Probst calls a “Survivor classic,” characteristics of primitiveness are staged in a “challenge” of eating selected “local delicacies.”72 This challenge is critiqued in a chapter called “Gagging on the Other,” where the author asserts that, “Despite claims that the chosen edibles encapsulate the traditional local fare, Survivor actively constructs the ‘otherness’ of food through a range of production choices and televisual structure.”73 In Survivor: Caramoan, Probst warns contestants about the food: “It won’t always be pleasant; they won’t always be familiar, but these are things that are eaten out here every day.”74 The survivors then race to chew and swallow beetle larvae, shipworms, balut or boiled duck embryo, and pigs’ brains. However, apart from the balut, the other dishes on the menu are considered exotic even in the Philippines and are prepared differently: larvae are stewed rather than eaten raw, shipworms are not worms but mollusks that are cleaned and then marinated in vinegar, onions, and chili pepper, while pig brains are chopped, seasoned, and stir-fried rather than boiled whole. The show, thus, “feeds” viewers and players what they already anticipate from such an experience: awe and disgust over “authentic” local fare. This is starkly contrasted with other reward challenges such as the Survivor food auction, where contestants eagerly vie for fried chicken, hamburgers and fries, and doughnuts—in some ways parallel to the less exotic and, to Westerners, more palatable fare of milk and bread offered by Crusoe to Friday.75 In a study of imperialism in children’s literature, Rashna Singh observes that “Robinson Crusoe is a white man who discovers by chance an apparently unpeopled island of which he becomes ruler and conqueror, not by force and not just by expediency, but by his own wits and by moral right.”76 Just as nineteenth-century appropriations offer narratives of the

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white man’s dominion over the island “a triumph of human achievement and enterprise…,”77 so does Survivor: Philippines tell a tale of the American protagonist’s success as agent of cultural imperialism. Survivor: Philippines highlights American-ness even more by featuring contestants like a former Miss Utah Teen USA, a Major League Baseball player, and The Facts of Life star, Lisa Whelchel, described as “America’s Sweetheart.” While, of course, there is only one winner—which means the other Americans lose—the images of torch-bearing triumph juxtaposed with a washed and groomed, now “civilized” contestant, during the final tribal council suggest a victory akin to territorial conquest. Delisle’s assertion that “the relationship between the Americans involved in the show and the host cultures is not unproblematic” is an understatement in the case of Survivor: Philippines .78 Its careless, if not deliberate, exoticizing of the country, its people, and its culture/s is a form of myth-making that both reifies American superiority and justifies the continuing cultural subjugation of the Philippines. The two seasons construct a country steeped in an exotic and primitive aesthetic both imagined and generic. This then becomes the venue for what a Filipino journalist calls “the American conceit of going the ‘Eat, Pray Love’ route via a reality show.”79 The reality is contestants do not trek through the jungles but are ferried on speedboats to different islands, including the amenity-filled production base camp of Gota. They are provided with bamboo for their shelter, with sweet potatoes strategically planted near their camp site, and with chickens set loose for them to capture. A Philippine news feature dubs the show “American unreality” and ridicules the idea of Caramoan as an “‘intimidating’ environment,” suggesting that the castaways “come to Manila or fly down to Sharrif Aguak,” the site of an election-related massacre in 2009.80 Yet Survivor continually emphasizes its authenticity, such as when Probst says of Tata Kasoy: “He’s a local. The real deal,” in its offer to American viewers of an anachronistic and colonial space, an imagined Philippines.81 As for Filipino viewers, it may seem at first that there is an uncritical embrace by many of such representations, made manifest by the production of a local version, Survivor Philippines which aired during a primetime slot and enjoyed ratings of 31.8% and 30.8% in the Greater Manila area for the its first two season premieres.82 However, Filipino scholar Antonio Contreras argues that the first season reconstructs the western logic of the show, including its Machiavellian Politics and the idea of “survival of the fittest” and that the reaction of the Filipino players,

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viewers, and even producers are different from that in the West.83 He asserts that the players in the Filipino version exhibit values of accommodation, tolerance, and compassion particularly during the tribal council eliminations, demonstrating the practice of “walang iwanan” (“leaving no one behind”) in times of crisis.84 Unlike American viewers, local ones, he says, admire and praise players who have good will towards others and who practice ethical strategies and condemn those with negative behavior.85 A notable difference between the Filipino adaptation and its source text is that not a single reward challenge involves the Filipino castaways meeting “exotic” locals of the islands they visited. These lead one to hope that Filipino audiences who resist the Western myths of the show are not necessarily condemned to be Fridays. “We learn as much from the varied shapes that a myth takes in men’s minds as from the form in which it first arose,” says Ian Watt.86 Taking this point further, Matthew Nilges asserts that the Robinsonade “is fundamentally an exercise in establishing and highlighting a hierarchy of those values and social practices that are deemed most elementary to a society at a given point in history.”87 American cultural imperialism can be said to survive, then, in the form of entertainment, in a show that is widely watched in the US but also, to some extent, positively received in the Philippines. Identifying the parallels between Robinson Crusoe’s imperialist discourse and America’s neo-colonial ideology thus becomes important in raising critical awareness about what representations of Philippine–American relationships both Americans and Filipinos entertain themselves with. Perhaps, then, this will lead to significant forays into the implications of such simulations in light of the stark realities of the present.

Notes 1. Michael Seidel. Robinson Crusoe: Island Myths and the Novel (Boston: G.K. Hall & Co., 1991), 8. 2. Pat Rogers, ed. Defoe: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge, 2011), 23. 3. Carl Fisher. “The Robinsonade: An Intercultural History of an Idea,” in Approaches to Teaching Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, ed. Maximillian E. Novak and Carl Fisher (New York: The Modern Language Association of America, 2005), 130. 4. Rogers, Defoe, 23.

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5. “Robinsonade.” TV Tropes, accessed September 18, 2018, https://tvt ropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Robinsonade. 6. Ian Watt. “Robinson Crusoe as a Myth,” in Robinson Crusoe: An Authoritative Text, Contexts, Criticisms, 2nd ed., ed. Michael Shinagel (New York: W. W. Norton, 1994), 289. 7. Sophia Nikoleishvili. “The Many Faces of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe: Examining the Crusoe Myth in Film and on Television” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Missouri-Columbia, 2007), 5, https://mospace.ums ystem.edu/xmlui/handle/10355/4786. 8. Nikoleishvili. “Many Faces,” 7. 9. Anita Biressi and Heather Nunn. Reality TV: Realism and Revelation (London: Wallflower Press, 2005), 3–4. 10. Henry Jenkins. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York: New York University Press, 2006), 25. 11. James Poniewozik. “All-TIME 100 TV Shows,” TIME, September 6, 2007, http://time.com/collection/all-time-100-tv-shows/. 12. Jenkins. Convergence, 25. 13. Mara Reinstein. “‘Survivor’ Team on the Reality Giant’s ‘Bullet-Proof’ Format and ‘Over the Top’ ‘Ghost Island’,” Variety, February 20, 2018. https://variety.com/2018/tv/features/survivor-jeff-probst-ghostisland-interview-1202664724/. 14. Daniel Defoe. The Novels of Daniel Defoe. Part I, Vol. 1. The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1719) (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2008), 61. 15. Astri Suhrke. “US-Philippines: The End of a Special Relationship,” The World Today 31, no. 2 (February 1975): 80. 16. Paul A. Kramer. “Introduction: Decolonizing the History of the Philippine-American War,” introduction to Little Brown Brother: How the United States Purchased and Pacified the Philippine Islands at the Century’s Turn, by Leon Wolff (New York: Leon Wolff Productions, 1960, 1961; New York: Bookspan, 2006), ix. 17. Daniel B. Schirmer and Stephen Rosskamm Shalom, eds., The Philippines Reader: A History of Colonialism, Neocolonialism, Dictatorship, and Resistance (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 1987), 35. 18. Nikoleishvili, “Many Faces,” 219. 19. Mark Burnett. Jump In! Even If You Don’t Know How to Swim (New York: Ballantine Books, 2005), 109. 20. Burnett, Jump, 109. 21. Mark Burnett. “Survivor Smacked Me in the Chops,” Survivor: Philippines , Aired on September 19, 2012, CBS Television. 22. Mark Burnett. “Live Reunion Show,” Survivor: One World. Aired on May 13, 2012 on CBS Television.

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23. Brook McDonald. “Survivor’s Imperial Aesthetic and the Guise of American Innocence” (B.A. thesis, University of Sydney, 2017), 24. https://ses.library.usyd.edu.au/bitstream/2123/17822/2/Thesis% 202017%20Brook%20McDonald.pdf. 24. Defoe, The Novels, 96. 25. Yves Bouquet. The Philippine Archipelago (Cham, Switzerland: Springer International, 2017), 1. 26. Defoe, The Novels, 109. 27. Burnett, “Live Reunion.” 28. Mark Burnett. “She Annoys Me Greatly.” Survivor: Caramoan, aired on February 13, 2013 on CBS Television. 29. Burnett, “She Annoys Me.” 30. Mark Burnett. “Reunion.” Survivor: Philippines , aired on December 16, 2012 on CBS Television. 31. Bouquet, Philippine Archipelago, 1. 32. Burnett, “Live Reunion.” 33. Jennifer Bowering Delisle. “Surviving American Cultural Imperialism: Survivor and the Traditions of Nineteenth-Century Colonial Fiction,” The Journal of American Culture 26, No. 1 (March 2003): 43. 34. Ephraim Aguilar. “4th-Class Town Well on the Way to Celeb Status,” Philippine Daily Inquirer, May 8, 2008. https://www.inquirer.net/?utm_ expid=.XqNwTug2W6nwDVUSgFJXed.1. 35. JojoVillareal (Tour Coordinator/tour guide/Outdoor Adventure Organizer at Caramoan Camsur Kadlagan Tours), in discussion with the author, September 12, 2018. 36. Society for the Study of Amphibians and Reptiles. “Nutritional Analysis of Natural Fruit Items Consumed by Butaan (Varanus olivaceus) with Comparison to Commonly Used Captive Dietary Items,” Herpetological Review, 48, No. 4 (December 2017): 787. 37. Kimberly Nordyke. “‘Survivor: Philippines ’ Jeff Probst Spills Secrets on Final 2 Episodes,” The Hollywood Reporter, December 11, 2012. https:// www.hollywoodreporter.com/live-feed/survivor-philippines-jeff-probstspills-400440. 38. Burnett. “Reunion.” 39. Villareal. 40. Colin Thomas. “Designing Survivor Part 1—Graphic and Cultural Design.” Inside Survivor (blog), July 6, 2016. http://insidesurvivor. com/designing-survivor-part-1-graphic-and-cultural-design-14581. 41. Delisle. “Surviving,” 45. 42. Nikoleishvili. “Many Faces,” 10. 43. Ibid., 10. 44. Dean MacCannell. Empty Meeting Grounds (London: Routledge, 1992), 19.

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45. Defoe, The Novels, 209. 46. Defoe, The Novels, 209. 47. Mark Burnett. “Kill or Be Killed,” Survivor: Caramoan, aired on March 6, 2013 on CBS Television. 48. Burnett, “Kill.”. 49. Dalton Ross. “Jeff Probst on Episode 4 of ‘Survivor: Caramoan—Fans vs. Favorites.’” Entertainment Weekly, March 7, 2013. https://ew.com/ article/2013/03/07/survivor-caramoan-jeff-probst-episode-4-shamar/. 50. Defoe, The Novels, 209. 51. Ibid., 209. 52. Burnett, “Kill.” 53. Ibid. 54. Ibid. 55. Ibid. 56. Ibid. 57. Ibid. 58. Delisle, “Surviving,” 45. 59. Bel S. Castro. “Food, Morality, and Politics: The Spectacle of Dog-Eating Igorots at the 1904 St. Louis World Fair,” in Food and Morality: Proceedings of the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery 2007 , edited by Susan R. Friedland (Devon, UK: Prospect Books, 2008), 73. 60. John L. Silva. “Little Brown Brothers’ St. Louis Blues: The Philippine Exposition, 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair.” Positively Filipino, June 5, 2013. http://www.positivelyfilipino.com/magazine/2013/6/little-brown-bro thers-st-louis-blues-the-philippine-exposition-1904-st-louis-worlds-fair. 61. Mark Burnett. “Little Miss Perfect,” Survivor Philippines. CBS Television, November 14, 2012. 62. Burnett, “Little Miss.” 63. Defoe, The Novels, 209. 64. Ibid., 211. 65. Burnett, “Little Miss.” 66. Ibid. 67. Ibid. 68. Ibid. 69. Leon Wolff. Little Brown Brother: How the United States Purchased and Pacified the Philippine Islands at the Century’s Turn (New York: Wolff Productions, 1961; New York: Bookspan, 2006). 70. Stuart C. Miller. Benevolent Assimilation: The American Conquest of the Philippines, 1899–1903 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982), 134. 71. Nikoleishvili, “Many Faces,” 11. 72. Mark Burnett. “Blindside Time,” Survivor: Caramoan, aired on April 3, 2013 on CBS Television.

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73. Stacey Jameson. “Gagging on the Other: Television’s Gross Food Challenge,” in Food and Everyday Life, edited by Thomas P. Conroy (Plymouth, UK: Lexington Books, 2014), 20. 74. Burnett, “Blindside.” 75. Defoe, The Novels, 209. 76. Rashna Singh. Goodly Is Our Heritage: Children’s Literature, Empire, and the Certitude of Character (Lanham, Maryland: Scarecrow Press, Inc., 2004), 152. 77. Watt, “Robinson Crusoe,” 289. 78. Delisle, “Surviving,” 54. 79. Karl De Mesa. “American Unreality on ‘Survivor: Philippines’,” Rappler, September 24, 2012. https://www.rappler.com/entertainment/12931american-unreality-on-survivor-philippines. 80. De Mesa. “American Unreality.” 81. Dalton Ross. “Jeff Probst on Episode 4” of ‘Survivor: Caramoan—Fans vs. Favorites’,” Entertainment Weekly, March 7, 2013. https://ew.com/ article/2013/03/07/survivor-caramoan-jeff-probst-episode-4-shamar/. 82. Erwin Santiago. “Updated: AGB Mega Manila TV Ratings (Aug.14–17): Survivor Philippines: Palau Debuts Strongly.” Philippine Entertainment Portal, August 18, 2009. https://www.pep.ph/news/local/22873/upd ated-agb-mega-manila-tv-ratings-aug-14-17-survivor-philippines-palaudebuts-strongly. 83. Antonio P. Contreras. “Building Communities and Simulating the Nation: Politics of Engaging the “Other” in the First Season of Survivor Philippines,” Philippine Political Science Journal 31, No. 4 (2010): 1, https:// doi.org/10.1080/01154451.2010.9723523. 84. Antonio P. Contreras. “Ang Konsepto ng ‘Pagsasaayos’ Bilang Panimulang Postkolonyal na Pagdalumat Pulitikal sa Panahong Postmoderno,” Diwa E-Journal 2, No. 1 (November 2014): 32. http://www.pssp.org. ph/diwa/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/02.1-Artikulo-Contreras.pdf. 85. Contreras, “Ang Konsepto.” 86. Watt, “Robinson Crusoe,” 290. 87. Mathias Nilges. “Lost —A Post-September 11, Post-Oedipal American Jeremiad,” in The War on Terror and American Popular Culture: September 11 and Beyond, ed. Andrew Schopp and Matthew B. Hill (M. Vancouver, BC: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2009), 149.

Works Cited Aguilar, Ephraim. 2008. 4th-Class Town Well on the Way to Celeb Status. Philippine Daily Inquirer, May 8. https://www.inquirer.net/?utm_expid=.XqNwTu g2W6nwDVUSgFJXed.1.

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Index

A Abe, Tomoji, 252, 269 Abridgement, 6, 9, 88, 98, 262, 267 Act of Union, 2, 6, 202 Adaptation, 6, 11, 12, 73, 138, 144, 171, 185–189, 242–250, 267, 273, 293 Adventure, 6, 11, 13, 222, 227–229, 232, 234 Aesop, 243 Africa, 115, 116, 174–175, 267 Afterlife, 6, 281 Allegory, 11, 162, 232, 266, 273 American cultural hegemony, 284 Andaman Islands, 8, 48–51, 54, 55, 58 Animal Crossing, 16 Asia, 1–3, 6–10, 14, 15, 17, passim Asia-Pacific War, 242, 244, 246 Atlantic, 2 B Bayle, Pierre, 121 Benevolent assimilation, 284

Bible, 109, 116 Borneo, 31, 125, 245 Boy, 223, 225–229, 232, 234, 235 Brazil, 110, 111, 114, 115, 125, 126 British economy as a national model, 191, 202, 265, 270 Brothers Grimm, 269 Bubble economy, 15, 195, 261, 274

C Cai, Yuan-pei, 217 Campe, Joachim Heinrich, 11, 12, 159–178, 181–196, 240 Cannibalism, 8, 48, 49, 51–62, 64, 131, 172–174 Capitalism, 12, 138, 148, 182 Castaway, 2, 8, 15, 47–63, 139 Catholicism, 10, 110, 118–127 Ceylon (Sri Lanka), 125 Ch’oe, Nams˘on, 13, 222, 223, 228, 236, 237 Chen, Du-xiu, 217 Childhood, 187

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2021 S. Clark and Y. Yoshihara (eds.), Robinson Crusoe in Asia, Asia-Pacific and Literature in English, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-4051-3

301

302

INDEX

Children’s literature, 241, 243, 244, 246, 256, 257, 291 China, 1, 3, 12, 13, 110, 112, 114, 115, 117, 119, 123, 221, 223–224 Chinese literature, 12, 201, 202–209, 212–213 Chinese Rites Controversy, 119, 130. See also Jesuits Classical literature, 82 Coetzee, J.M., 7 Colonial fantasy/history/modernity/narrative, 14, 110, 222, 261, 285, 288 Colonialism, 15, 17, 18, 48, 63, 160, 170, 171, 267, 270, 272, 275, 276 Compton, Robert William, 209, 213, 216, 217 Contact zone, 48, 53, 58, 59 Conversion, 9, 10, 32, 57, 109, 111, 114, 118–127, 226 Copyright, 9, 96–99, 208 Cowper, William, 143, 155, 156 Crusader, 9, 121, 125, 136 Cultural imperialism, 281, 292, 293, 295 D Dai Nihon Y¯ ubenkai K¯ odansha, 239, 250, 257 Darien Scheme, 2 de Bougainville, Louis Antoine, 10, 139–142, 153, 155 Defoe, Daniel Atlas Maritimus and Commercialis , 6 Captain Singleton, 6, 23, 27, 32, 39, 184 Consolidator, 117, 129 Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, 1, 2, 7, 9–11, 17,

22–41, 67–90, 110, 112–122, 126, 137, 153, 230, 265 Journal of the Plague Year, 16, 92, 126, 131, 274 Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, 3, 10, 12, 110, 112, 115, 118, 126, 128, 201, 202, 204, 207, 210, 212, 281, 284, 285, 291, 293, 294 Moll Flanders , 126 New Voyage around the World, 2, 6, 17, 40 “Of the Proportion between the Christian and Pagan World”, 3, 110, 113–118, 124 Political History of the Devil , 118, 129 Review, 6, 24, 89 Serious Reflections During the Life and Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, 3, 9, 10, 15, 110–116, 124–127, 128, 149, 273–274 Shortest Way with the Dissenters , 111, 123, 128 “Vision of the Angelick World”, 4, 113, 117 Delirium, 147 Democracy and nationalism, 191 Devil, 10, 111, 114–117, 124, 127 Diffusion of technology, 99 Discourse, 48, 49, 51, 54, 55, 57–60, 62 Dissent, 93, 113, 121, 123, 126, 212 Donne, John, 2, 17 Double consciousness, 162, 165, 171, 178 Dutch East India Company (VOC), 35, 59, 69, 120

INDEX

E East India Company (EIC), 7, 23–25, 27–33, 35–40, 43, 52, 60 East Indies, 37, 39 Economic improvement, 88, 91, 101, 103 Ecstasy, 11, 145 Education/pedagogy, 154, 162, 163, 166, 167, 175, 179 Ein Robinson, 268, 269 Empire, 14, 15, 31, 73, 110, 115, 120, 123, 209, 230, 251, 265 Empirical observation, 91, 95 England, 6, 8, 12, 26, 28, 29, 32, 33, 36, 38, 39, 68, 69, 71, 74–76, 79, 81, 88, 89, 94, 95, 97, 100–102, 121, 149, 189, 191, 202, 204, 226, 230, 251 Enlightenment, 87–97, 123, 126, 140, 202, 205, 206, 208, 209, 228, 232, 243 Exoticism, 15, 149, 170, 283–293

F Forster, Reinhold, 139–142, 155 Friday, 2, 5, 8, 10, 11, 15, 48, 55–58, 108–115, 118, 121, 126, 150, 167, 188–189, 225, 232, 241, 251, 264, 270, 273, 288–293 Fukuzawa, Yukichi, 233

G Geistegeschichte, 206 German Robinsonade, 162, 164, 165 Germany, 6, 160, 169, 177, 245, 250, 268, 269 Global Eighteenth Century, 2 Glorious Revolution, the, 202 Golding, William, 7, 274

303

H Hamada, Hirosuke, 244 Hamilton, Alexander (Scots merchant), 25, 29, 30–34, 51 Homo economicus , 15, 88, 182, 186, 265, 270, 276 Hsia, T.C., 206, 215 Hu, Shih, 217

I Iconoclasm, 3 Ij¯ uin, Shizuka, 253–255 Imaginary voyage, 137 Imitation, 6, 9 Imperial benevolence, 290 Imperialism, 9, 14, 15, 127, 160, 171, 222 Improvement, 90, 91, 93–96, 98, 100, 101, 103, 167, 172 Individualism, 7, 91, 193, 232 Industrial Revolution, 9, 12, 89, 206, 250, 252, 255, 274, 281, 284, 291–293 Intellectual piracy, 89, 99, 100 Intellectual property, 88, 89, 96, 97, 103 Island, 2, 3, 9, 10, 15–18, 25, 27, 31–35, 38, 47–59, 63, 75–77, 93–94, 110–114, 116, 118–119, 121, 125–127, 139, 143, 146, 149–153, 161, 163–165, 167–174, 176–178, 182–184, 186–189, 201, 210, 227, 229–230, 240, 248, 250, 252, 254, 263–266, 269–276, 282–287, 292–293 Isolation, 2, 14, 16, 54, 68, 144, 164, 261, 263–265, 272, 275 Iwaya, Sazanami, 13, 222, 243, 244, 263

304

INDEX

J Japan, 1, 3, 10, 12–15, 67–70, 72–75, 78–83, 221–223, 228, 230, 232, 233, 261–277 Japanese Robinson Crusoe, 262, 263 Jesuits, 119, 120, 125 Joyce, James, 4

K Kaiho, Masao, 252 Kim, Ch’an, 13 K¯ odansha. See Dai Nihon Y¯ ubenkai K¯ odansha Korea, 221–223, 225, 227–230, 232–234 Kubo, Takashi, 253

L Labour, 9, 16, 90, 93, 101, 103, 114, 137, 139, 142, 153, 168, 183, 265 Language learning, 6 Leblanc, Maurice, 246 Lee, Leo Ou-fan, 207, 215 Liang, Qi-chao, 202, 205, 206, 214, 215, 233–235 Lin, Shu, 12, 13, 201, 202, 207, 208, 210–213, 215, 216, 221 Lu, Xun, 211, 217

M Magazine, 222, 223, 225, 227, 228, 230, 233, 235 Mansfield, Katherine, 243 Maritime fiction, 164, 165 Marx, Karl, 5, 18, 168, 186, 203 Ma, Tai-lai, 207, 213, 215 May Fourth Movement, 13, 212 Mercantilism, 9, 12, 212 Mérimée, Prosper, 243

Migration, 152 Minami, Y¯ oichir¯ o, 14, 239–260, 267 Missionary, 9, 67–68, 115, 118–120, 124, 127 Muscovy, 3 Myth-making, 292 N Nakano, Yoshio, 252, 272 National independence, 233 Negotiation, 51, 58–60 Neocolonial discourse, 293 Novak, Maximillian E., 88, 212, 214, 216, 217 O ¯ Ohira, Y¯ osuke, 253 Other, 283, 288, 297 ¯ Otsuka, Hisao, 11, 181–184, 186, 189–198, 265 P Pacific, 2, 7, 11, 14, 15, 77, 138, 140–143, 147, 148, 152 Paradise, 150, 152 Paternalist racism, 291 Pedagogical use of Robinson Crusoe, 12 Perse, St John, 11, 144, 145, 148–150, 152, 153, 155 Philippine-American history, 284, 293, 294 Philippines, 2, 15, 37, 272, 281–293 Picaresque, 9, 127, 162 Piracy, 5, 9, 30–34, 43, 58, 62, 89, 96–99, 150, 262 Pleasure principle, 152 Positive concept of liberty, 193 Postcolonial Enlightenment, 1 Post-war democracy in Japan, 195 Property rights, 9, 91, 118

INDEX

Prose fiction, 9, 68, 70, 77, 80, 204, 206, 207, 211, 212 Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, 182 Protestantism, 3, 9, 13, 87, 109–111, 114, 118–121, 127, 138, 222 Proto-imperialist, 284 Providence, 9, 103, 109, 114, 116–121, 166, 175, 188, 204, 234 Psalmanazar, George, 8, 68–72, 79–81

Q Qian, Zhong-shu, 211, 213–215

R Realistic fiction, 75, 80, 204, 210 Reality TV, 6, 283–284 Reception history, 1, 7, 10, 11, 88, 213, 262 Reworking/recycling, 14, 239, 242, 246, 250, 259, 253, 255–256, 282 Rimbaud, Arthur, 10, 137, 144–146, 148, 149, 152, 156 Robinsonade, 6, 9, 10, 11, 14–17, 87, 88, 94, 96, 98, 261, 262, 267–270, 274–277, 281, 282, 284, 286, 290, 293 Robinson Crusoe as a human archetype, 183 Robinson Hy¯ ory¯ u-ki, 239, 244, 257–259 Rogers, Woodes, 2, 39 Romance (or chuan-qi), 205 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 3, 10, 12, 88, 94, 138, 139, 144, 145, 148, 153, 154, 156, 181, 187, 189, 193, 196, 197

305

S Sakoku, 14, 261, 264 Schnabel, Johnann Gottfried, 11, 138, 161, 268 Scott, Walter, 6, 113, 138 Second World War, 265, 268, 276 Selfhood, 58, 169 Selkirk, Alexander, 2, 143, 149, 269 Sequel, 10, 17, 21, 70, 110, 112–114, 164, 210, 281 Serial novel (or zhang-hui-xiao-shuo), 205 Seven Years War, 10, 139, 140 Shipwreck, 3, 14 Sh¯ onen Kurabu, 242, 244, 245 Simulation, 283, 284, 293 Slavery, 63, 153, 174, 175 Sony˘on, 222, 223, 225, 227, 228, 230, 231, 234–236 South Sea Bubble, 2, 7, 24, 39–40, 113, 127, 195 Spain, 24, 36, 37, 39, 67, 148, 230 Stephen, Leslie, 5, 18 Sumatra, 8, 48–52, 58–60 Survivor, 15, 282–284, 286–292, 295 Survivor Caramoan, 15, 281–292 Survivor: Philippines , 285–287, 289–292, 294, 295 Suzuki, Miekichi, 243 Swift, Jonathan, 6, 8, 68–75, 77, 80–82, 124, 225 Symbolist, 10, 151 T Technological innovation, 100, 102 Technology, 93, 95, 99, 102–103, 159, 160, 162, 164–167, 170, 171, 175, 202, 208 Tourism, 16, 275 Tournier, Michel, 2, 7, 17, 139, 144 Trade, 23–29, 31–33, 35–40, 47, 48, 51, 54, 57–60, 264, 265, 276

306

INDEX

Transmission, 1, 6, 160 Travel narratives, 73, 77, 79–81

U Utility, 6, 90–92, 139, 206

V Vernacular, 6, 207, 212, 228 Verne, Jules, 137, 146, 155, 262, 266, 273, 275

W Walcott, Derek, 7 Wang, David D.W., 219

Watt, Ian, 83, 88, 91, 129, 203, 204, 214, 232, 282, 293 The Rise of the Novel , 203, 204 Western literature, 1, 7, 202, 205, 207, 214 Wu-Xu Reform, 13, 205, 214 Wyss, Johann David, 156, 171, 240, 270 Y Yan, Fu, 215 Youth, 166, 167, 233, 236, 237, 270 Z Zheng, Zhen-duo, 215, 216