I rushed down to the local video store, where I discovered that only one version is readily obtainable: Crusoe , starring Aidan Quinn. Surely in an R-rated film, I thought, there might be a little room for God. But I had forgotten Hollywood's knack for rewriting history.
Sure enough, every sign of Robinson's conversion had been removed. Crusoe , in fact, manages the neat feat of completely reversing Defoe's intent, transforming Robinson into an antireligious tract in which our hero utters but one prayer, a desperate plea to God to spare the life of his dog. The prayer goes unanswered unspoken premise: no God exists to answer the prayer. The film also inverts Robinson's tutelage of Friday: the native learns no English but the Englishman goes native, dropping his table manners if not his aitches, and learning to worship sun and sand.
But at least in Crusoe our hapless Englishman does not apply for membership in Friday's cannibal tribe. This weird turn of events is reserved for the mercifully hard-to-obtain Man Friday , starring Peter O'Toole as Robinson, with Richard Roundtree in the title role. Here orthodox religion is not ignored as in Crusoe, but rather mocked without mercy. Robinson proves to be a fool, God a prude, Christian faith a sign of mental illness. The voice of reason, warmth, and love belongs to Friday.
At least in this respect Man Friday conforms to Defoe's intent, for in the original, Friday is indeed a kind and perceptive man. But just when writer Adrian Mitchell seems to have gotten something right, it blows up in his face; for Man Friday presents a Friday who has hung out too long at Woodstock. His tribe has more in common with the Hog Farm or Summerhill than with any real preindustrial society.
It is a blissful communal family, free of such Western hangups as ambition or competition, and practices free love polymorphously perverse, of course.
The tribe's religion, too, has burst free of the chains of orthodoxy, offering instead, as Friday explains, the apotheosis of be-your-own-best-friend:. In the end, Robinson is summarily dispatched back to his lonely island, to brood in solitude over his Bible and its joyless legacy. Hollywood's fascination with Robinson Crusoe continues apace: a big-budget version, starring Pierce Brosnan the new James Bond is now in production.
Will kneel in the muck, begging God for deliverance? Maybe so; Hollywood likes on occasion to throw a sop to special interest groups. But it's a sure bet that the full story of Robinson's conversion will be left on the cutting-room floor. It is not difficult to see in the strange saga of Robinson Crusoe a parable of our own condition. We are all Robinsons, cut off from the mainland of religious tradition, shipwrecked on the shoals of secularism.
Our culture as a whole has suffered the same fate as Defoe's book; a systematic purgation of religious content. In thus assaying our lot, it is essential that we avoid seeing conspirators behind every gunwale; our fingers can point only at ourselves.
At no time, I am convinced, was there a deliberate suppression of Robinson's religion in order to buttress secular claims. Culture does not evolve or collapse so consciously. Revisionist editors and revisionist filmmakers work in good faith, but they work within a culture that is suffocating for lack of connection with traditional faith.
This suffocation has brought with it its own form of amnesia or cultural brain damage. Few artists and critics even remember that people once worshipped a God who gave ultimate meaning to civilization's great creations, from law to literature, as He did for Robinson's meaner crafts. Intended or not, the results have been devastating. As anyone who spends much time dealing with intellectual history knows, truth seems to be slipping from our grasp; we are in danger of fabricating a past and not only in English literature to suit our present biases.
Our contemporary allergy to the sacred, and our related inability to read history with any rigor, is thrown into sharp relief when we look at the critical interpretations of Robinson bandied about in recent years. Hammond in A Defoe Companion , taking for granted a divorce between religion and "the human condition.
This book, says Green, was "simply out of date. It was a mere oddity. Any audience it may have had in must have belonged to a special group, out of step with the majority.
Who, then, is Robinson, to those who thus ignore the text? A Marxist hero, for one: in , the Soviet Writers circle declared Defoe, along with Jules Verne and Jonathan Swift, as one of the three great foreign novelists of the Cause.
Presumably Stalinists took their cue from Marx, who declared of Robinson in Das Kapital : "Of his prayers and the like we take no account. Other critics have seen in Defoe's book a parable about imperialism or social progress or oedipal conflicts.
But the truth is that reading Robinson as a lesson in economics or psychology or pedagogy is akin to reading Moby Dick for its tips on spermaceti harvesting. It matters first of all because truth matters. And it matters secondly because Robinson Crusoe matters. Robinson matters in its own right, as a splendid novel that deserves to remain intact; and Robinson matters in the history of the novel. Many critics count Defoe's masterpiece as not just the most famous novel in the world, but the first novel in the world.
This judgment depends on definition, of course, and a powerful argument can be mounted to push the genre back to Don Quixote , if not all the way to The Golden Ass.
Nonetheless, all agree that Robinson Crusoe stands as a primordial example of the form. It is also, unquestionably, the first English novel, progenitor of a glorious stream whose great current encompasses Fielding and Dickens, Grahame and Lewis.
As Leslie Stephens put it, Defoe did "discover a new art" even if others had discovered it before him. Admittedly, the art is rough; perhaps it always is, when a new form is whelped.
Defoe forever jumbles facts, for instance having his hermit swim buck naked out to the shipwreck and then stuff his pockets with salvaged goodies. The text is long-winded, repetitious, sometimes frightfully crude. Defoe handles emotion poorly; as Dickens pointed out, Robinson "is the only example of a universally popular book that can make no one laugh and no one cry. As if conscious of his role as father of the novel, Defoe bequeathed us at the very origin of the genre a work that addresses the origin and destiny of human beings, of justice, freedom, and the state, of civilization itself; and he locates the source of these essential matters just where they must be found, in the very origin of all things.
Thirdly, our discussion matters because the novel itself matters. Although no longer the most popular narrative form for who goes through more novels than movies in a year? Moreover, the novel is the art of the public square par excellence.
By the very nature of its production and distribution the novel cannot be privatized, as can, say, painting, which made a disastrous swerve towards subjectivity after World War I and in consequence is no longer a subject of serious public discourse.
Nor can the novel's subject matter be successfully privatized, as failed avant-garde experiments by Anais Nin and others have proven. True, the recent history of the novel shines with its own sickly decadence; one need only think of the efforts of French writers such as Natalie Sarraute or Alain Robbe-Grillet to deify style by exchanging moral or psychological depth for a richly patterned surface.
But few people read these novels and fewer remember them. The fact remains that good novels I mean novels as varied as The Brothers Karamazov, Pale Fire , and Silence invariably deal with relationships between people, or between people and God, and the moral implications of these relationships.
Moreover, a novelist works alone unlike an artist in theater or film ; each novel is as individual and as universal as a prayer. Of all art forms, then, the novel even when a tale of a solitary castaway remains the essential aesthetic mediator between public and private realms.
Fourthly, our discussion matters because art matters, and the messages that art embodies. One litmus test of any society will always be its sense of beauty. This now-famous photograph cannot be rejected out of hand; in fact, it makes a perfect pivot for the debate about the role of art in society, for on first impression Serrano's photo is undeniably beautiful, a haunting portrait of the crucified Christ suspended in a mysterious golden-red cloud, whose bubbles and streaks remind us of remote galaxies, ancient suns.
But of course the photography has a title, and it comes like a slap in the face: Piss Christ. That this crucifix sits in urine is more than incidental; it forms the core of Serrano's art.
Most viewers react to this photograph with howls of outrage. And properly so, for we perceive in it an indiscriminate mixing of the sacred and the profane a confusion to which the post-conversion Robinson never falls prey; he always offers his earthly labors in service to God.
We should not be surprised that Serrano's photograph has the power to shock, for even in a secular age we instinctively recoil in the presence of sacrilege.
Nor should we wonder that Serrano aims to shock, for such is the stock-in-trade of much contemporary art. But real beauty is more than compelling sensory impressions the immediate photograph , even when charged with intellectual electricity the potent complex of associations surrounding crucifix and urine.
Real beauty is also a matter of rightness. Real beauty always unfolds in a moral landscape; it reflects in its order, intelligence, and harmonious dispositions these same qualities in their transcendent state. Real beauty never divides, degrades, or corrupts. Rather it weds, elevates, and purifies. Such beauty always leads to God, for "God is beautiful and he loves beauty," as the Islamic hadith has it. To put it succinctly, real beauty converts. Once conversion takes place as Defoe shows so clearly in Robinson Crusoe the human being expresses his love for the divine order through the beauty of his own creations, be they symphonies or straw baskets.
In this enterprise, at its best, we draw near to God's mysterious workings. Finally, distortions of Robinson matter because culture matters. To grasp why, we must first recognize that secularism has muddled the relationship between religion and culture.
My desktop dictionary, The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language , defines culture as "the totality of socially transmitted behavior patterns, arts, beliefs, institutions, and all other products of human work and thought characteristic of a community or population.
Not so, not entirely, not for those who admit the possibility of divine revelation. Here culture confesses what God expresses; culture is the medium through which we hear the muffled voice of God. For just this reason, dogmatic truths find different expression in different cultures. For just this reason as well, religion without culture is dead. According to Christopher Dawson, "a society which has lost its religion becomes sooner or later a society which has lost its culture.
Defoe made lots of changes to Selkirk's tale. He moved the island to the Caribbean and peopled it with cannibals, one of whom becomes Crusoe's faithful servant Friday. While Selkirk was stranded for a mere four years, the fictional Crusoe spends 28 years, two months and 19 days as a castaway, as he meticulously notes in his journal. Defoe clearly took much of his inspiration from the Caribbean, not the southern Pacific. Crusoe's island is covered in tobacco plants, cocoa trees and tropical hardwoods that would never grow here.
But at times when reading the book, you get a sense of the Chilean Robinson Crusoe Island. Crusoe finds grapes, hares, foxes and even penguins on the island, suggesting a temperate rather than a tropical climate. He describes his island as a "dreadful place, out of the reach of humane kind, out of all hope of relief or prospect of redemption". It is a "dismal unfortunate island, which I call'd the Island of Despair".
Thankfully, things have improved since then. These days, around people live here, surviving on lobster fishing and tourism. It is a stunningly beautiful place of dramatic cliffs and soaring mountains. There is only one village, San Juan Bautista.
Above it, a path winds steeply upwards to "Selkirk's look-out", a vantage point where, according to locals, the lone Scotsman would sit for hours, scouring the horizon for ships. In Defoe's book, Crusoe slowly warms to his new home. Crusoe survives an earthquake and tsunami, just as the current islanders did in February The current residents of Robinson Crusoe Island know all about that. Rudy Aravena, a year-old hotelier, was almost killed by the tsunami of Animals This frog mysteriously re-evolved a full set of teeth.
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