SELKIRK - CRUSOE
On Mon, 27 Jul 1998 08:50, Alfred M Kriman wrote:
"In all the learned and interesting speculation on footprints in Robinson Crusoe, I missed one thing: Alexander Selkirk. His unplanned solitary stay on the Juan Fernández Islands, 1704-1709, is usually given as the basis or spark for Defoe's story. I believe that Daniel Defoe, early journalist, interviewed him. Even allowing for Defoe's imagination and Aristippus allusions, it's possible AS sometimes considered, hoped or feared that footprints he saw on the beach were not his own, and mentioned this to DD.
The twenty-year captivity of Robert Knox in Ceylon (1660-1680) is also sometimes cited as an influence."Although Richard Steele's account of Selkirk' experience off the coast of Chile and the later account by his rescuer (Woodes Rogers) of the voyage in which Selkirk was discovered, the second edition of which appeared the year before _Crusoe_, are often cited as the spark for Crusoe, there can be little doubt that the experience of many other sailors and castaways from this explosive early phase of English transoceanic exploration, commerce and settlement were brought together in Crusoe as well. As an entrepreneur and merchant himself, for whom trade was his "beloved subject" and one of whose businesses was the insuring of ships, the widely travelled Defoe was well aware of these mariner experiences long before the Steele account was published in December 1713 or the subsequent publications of the Rogers account up to 1718.
The appearance in our forum of the Aristippus anecdote promted our colleague Diana Wright to inquire as to whether Defoe may have known of this incident on Rhodes, an inquiry which, at least to my view, embraced the possibility that Aristippus may have been a stimulant for Crusoe (if Defoe had known of it).
While it is conceivable that Defoe could have known of the Aristippus anecdote, it is not probable that he knew of it. There is certainly no evidence that he knew of it, at least to my knowledge, and most certainly no need for him to have known of it for the purpose of Crusoe given the huge accumulation of experience available to Defoe in his own lifetime, not to mention the countless literary deployments of this micro plot device (the discovery of an unexpected presence, marks in the sand, et al.) or even Defoe's own rich imagination. Any presumed connection at whatever level between Aristippus on Rhodes and Crusoe on his desert island can thus be simply brushed aside, or at least should be.
Defoe's interest in trade was inextricably entwined with his interest in politics. Born of modest circumstance and raised in what would become for well more than a century a center of the Protestant Dissenter intellectual tradition, he came to perception in the brutal political environment of Restoration England in the wake of the Treaty of Dover, the Cabal, and when the terms Whig and Tory made their bitter debut. At age 23 he wrote his first pamphlet, in the same year that Locke (then in exile) wrote the famed Two Treatises. Their ideas, and those of many other English writers of the late 17th c., were converging long before Locke's great works were published in 1689. Defoe opposed James II and welcomed William, giving vigorous support to the Orange King in a series of pamphlets. His 1701 poem is yet a valid critique of racial prejudice. And his famed 1706 poem was a brilliant attack on the notion of divine right at the dawn of the new age of the natural right philosophy which intellectually captured the economic experience of 17th c. England (when England, as they say, "went Dutch") and paved the way for the economic reforms of the 1690's and the trading and financial empire whose economic success in war and peace alike was in turn the primal stimulant for the French Englightenment.
Inherent in these early expressions of natural rights philosophy was the notion of the state of nature and the partly Hobbesean fear of the anarchy, chaos and violence that it entailed if not brought to heel. Defoe was obsessed by this notion of the individual struggling in the state of nature, and his own real life alternating experiences of entrepreneurial success, imprisonment, bankrupcy (caused by imprisonment in the most famous instance), hounding by creditors, et alia, no doubt contributed to this. All of Defoe's characters are in a sense solitary individuals who are placed in remarkable circumstances almost for the purpose, it seems, of revealing their constant struggles with a dangerous and hostile ambient world. This was a world that Defoe knew more than well. The conceptualization of the type of situation in which Moll Flanders, Robinson Crusoe, et alia, found themselves did not simply pop into Defoe's head at the age of 58 years as a result of reading some new publication that year or of doing some alleged interview at age 51 when Selkirk returned to England for the first time in 16 years. These conceptions had been forming in Defoe's mind over the course of his entire life. In a sense, they were his life.
It has been suggested that the second publication in 1718 of the Rogers account of Selkirk's island experiences may have provided the stimulant for the incident of seeing Friday's footprints in the sand. I believe this to be a credible proposal (while that for Aristippus is not). Given the human propensity to seek simple causalities, I suspect this is also the reason that the Rogers report on Selkirk's experience has been asserted as the source for the Crusoe story as a whole. This latter is surely incorrect, even though it is at least conceivable that the island setting (in addition to the footprints in the sand incident) may also have been a stimulant for that of Crusoe.
But this, to my view, is to miss the point. For the experience of Crusoe and Flanders and company taps a far deeper well of provenance in the mind and the experience of Defoe and the resultant story and allegory of Crusoe has a far greater meaning and significance to its readers then and its unending renewal of readers ever since, as Robinson Crusoe's immortality would suggest.
© http://omega.cohums.ohio-state.edu/hyper-lists/classics-l/98-08-01/0512.html#qlink1
More information: [Next][1][2][3]
Página creada y actualizada por grupo "mmm".
Para cualquier cambio, sugerencia,etc. contactar con: fores@uv.es
© a.r.e.a./Dr.Vicente Forés López
Universitat de València Press
Creada: 22/02/2000 Última Actualización: 27/03/2000