Time and Spiritual Transcendence in Robinson Crusoe
Time and Spiritual Transcendence in Crusoe
In The Rise of the Novel Ian Watt says of capitalism in English Society it “is, at least, generally agreed that the foundations of the new order were laid in that period immediately following the Glorious Revolution” (61). Defoe, a denizen of the new economic structure, was one of its unabashed supporters. Though in Robinson Crusoe he created an island far removed from Western society, it was used as a stage to expound the virtues of both Western religion and capitalist economics.
Michele Tournier—in the midst of the reign of capitalism in English (and most of Western) society—shrewdly uses the same setting to launch an explicit critique of the strange dogma that’s evolved of the amalgam of Puritan religion with those capitalist economics, since the times of Defoe. Friday begins much the same as Robinson Crusoe, but quickly veers from that plotline, tracing the evolution of a man who—ironically, through the weight of extreme seclusion—transcends the individualistic and isolationist tendencies of his capito-puritan social inheritance and finds a superior spirituality through Friday, a character who represents in many instances the opposite of Western thinking.
Stamped in the template of the work is a clearly delineated spiritual journey—one fraught with systematic reversals, failures and regressions for every step gained in the direction of transcendence. The atavistic instinct to survive leads Crusoe to an overzealous grasp for control, which eventually manifests itself in an ugly preoccupation with dominance [survival→ control → dominance]. Dichotomously, the natural instinct for self-preservation leads to his obsession with accumulation, which is eventually corrupted into a fascination with greed [self-preservation→ accumulation→ greed]. Ironically, nearly three centuries after Robinson’s fictional birth, Tournier’s work uses the very Crusoe myth to expose the debilitating limitations of the religion—economic and spiritual—panegyrized by Defoe.
Through the latter-day Crusoe’s journey, Tournier shows that ineluctably linked with the vices of consumer accumulation and avarice in the Western mindset are tenets that call for the parallel accumulation and preservation of time. This thought pattern both leads-to and is born of the Western model of...