As Chelsea pointed out on her blog, the next LOST episode isn’t until 2009. To head off island withdrawal, I picked up the eighteenth century’s version of Lost, Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe. I remembered reading it as a kid (or having it read to me) and being absolutely enthralled by Crusoe’s shipwreck survival, mysterious island life and determined ingenuity. I had forgotten or more likely, been oblivious to the assumptive racism, not remembering that Crusoe’s original voyage was an attempt to capture African slaves for his Brazilian plantation. –Yikes!-
.jpg)
James Joyce describes Crusoe as "the true prototype of the British colonist… The whole Anglo-Saxon spirit is in Crusoe: the manly independence, the unconscious cruelty, the persistence, the slow yet efficient intelligence, the sexual apathy, the calculating taciturnity". (Thank you Wikipedia) That’s had me laughing all week. I love a manly independent but sexual apathetic protagonist.
As for unconscious cruelty, Crusoe is clearly not a cat person. He salvages a dog and two cats off the shipwreck and describes them as his only companions in his miserable and lonely state. When one of his cats goes missing he worries that it has been eaten. But it soon returns leading three young kittens back to Crusoe’s home. Crusoe first tolerates the “great increase of his family” but becomes so irritated and “overrun with cats” that he is forced to “exterminate them as common vermin” and drive the rest away. So he’s lonely but not lonely enough to be a crazy cat guy.
Even with all the baggage, I love the story of Robinson Crusoe. There is something curiously attractive about his determined will to live and shape his environment. And I love imagining a lonely island far away from my florescent lit office and how well I could survive there.
I’ve actually been listening to it at work on librivox, the free audiobook site. The reader does a great job. You can check it out here. At home I’m still slogging through War and Peace. I think I’m around page 1000 so it’s just starting to wrap up.
3 comments:
Yep, he definitely was not a cat person. Very true about the racism. I didn't notice it at all as a kid either, and my teachers definitely didn't point it out.
As also a big fan of Lost, I've been reading "The Third Policeman" which the Lost producers have said have a lot do with the more radical concepts in their show, and I'm only four chapters in but I can already see where the cabin and most of the Locke stuff has come into from that book. It's a good read so far.
Today I cheated and used your post to verify an entry into my crossword. Crusoe's creator.
Thanks for being so cultured, Katy!
Post a Comment