LITMIR.BIZ

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the status of Sunday is never completely clear, the total is certainly higher.¹⁸ When, at the height of his zeal—‘You are to understand that now I had . . . two plantations . . . several apartments or caves . . . two pieces of corn-ground . . . my country seat . . . my enclosure for my cattle . . . a living magazine of flesh . . . my winter store of raisins’¹⁹—he turns to the reader and exclaims, ‘this will testify for me that I was not idle’, one can only nod in agreement. And, then, repeat the question: Why does he work so much?

      ‘We scarcely realize today what a unique and astonishing phenomenon a “working” upper class is’, writes Norbert Elias in The Civilizing Process: ‘why submit itself to this compulsion even though it is . . . not commanded by a superior to do so?’²⁰ Elias’s wonder is shared by Alexandre Kojève, who discerns at the centre of Hegel’s Phenomenology a paradox—‘the Bourgeois’s problem’—whereby the bourgeois must simultaneously ‘work for another’ (because work only arises as a result of an external constraint), yet can only ‘work for himself’ (because he no longer has a master).²¹ Working for himself, as if he were another: this is exactly how Robinson functions: one side of him becomes a carpenter, or potter, or baker, and spends weeks and weeks trying to accomplish something; then Crusoe the master emerges, and points out the inadequacy of the results. And then the cycle repeats itself all over again. And it repeats itself, because work has become the new principle of legitimation of social power. When, at the end of the novel, Robinson finds himself ‘master . . . of above five thousand pounds sterling’²² and of all the rest, his twenty-eight years of uninterrupted toil are there to justify his fortune. Realistically, there is no relationship between the two: he is rich because of the exploitation of nameless slaves in his Brazilian plantation—whereas his solitary labour hasn’t brought him a single pound. But we have seen him work like no other character in fiction: How can he not deserve what he has?²³

      There is a word that perfectly captures Robinson’s behaviour: ‘industry’. According to the OED, its initial meaning, around 1500, was that of ‘intelligent or clever working; skill, ingenuity, dexterity, or cleverness’. Then, in the mid-sixteenth century, a second meaning emerges—‘diligence or assiduity . . . close and steady application . . . exertion, effort’, that soon crystallizes as ‘systematic work or labour; habitual employment in some useful work’.²⁴ From skill and ingenuity, to systematic exertion; this is how ‘industry’ contributes to bourgeois culture: hard work, replacing the clever variety.²⁵ And calm work, too, in the same sense that interest is for Hirschmann a ‘calm passion’: steady, methodical, cumulative, and thus stronger than the ‘turbulent (yet weak) passions’ of the old aristocracy.²⁶ Here, the discontinuity between the two ruling classes is unmistakable: if turbulent passions had idealized what was needed by a warlike caste—the white heat of the brief ‘day’ of battle—bourgeois interest is the virtue of a peaceful and repeatable (and repeatable, and repeatable, and repeatable) everyday: less energy, but for a much longer time. A few hours—‘about four in the evening’, writes Robinson, ever modest²⁷—but for twenty-eight years.

      In the previous section, we have looked at the adventures that open Robinson Crusoe; in this one, at the work of his life on the island. It’s the same progression of The Protestant Ethic: a history that begins with the ‘capitalist adventurer’, but where the ethos of laboriousness eventually brings about the ‘rational tempering of his irrational impulse’.²⁸ In the case of Defoe, the transition from the first to the second figure is particularly striking, because apparently wholly unplanned: on the title-page of the novel (Figure 2), Robinson’s ‘strange surprising adventures’—mentioned at the top, and in larger size—are clearly billed as the main attraction, whereas the part on the island is simply ‘one of the many other episodes’.²⁹ But then, during the composition of the novel, an ‘unforeseen, uncontrolled expansion’ of the island must have occurred, which shook off its subordination to the story of adventures and made it the new centre of the text. A Calvinist from Geneva was the first to grasp the significance of this mid-course re-orientation: Rousseau’s Robinson,

      Figure 2

      ‘cleansed of all its claptrap’, will begin with the shipwreck, and be limited to the years on the island, so that Emile will not waste his time in dreams of adventure, and may concentrate instead on Robinson’s work (‘he will want to know all that is useful, and nothing but that’).³⁰ Which is cruel to Emile, of course, and to all children after him, but right: because Robinson’s hard work on the island is indeed the greatest novelty of the book.

      From the capitalist adventurer, to the working master. But then, as Robinson approaches the end, a second about-face occurs: cannibals, armed conflict, mutineers, wolves, bears, fairy-tale fortune . . . Why? If the poetics of adventure had been ‘tempered’ by its rational opposite, why promise ‘some very surprising incidents in some new adventures of my own’ in the very last sentence of the novel?³¹

      So far, I have emphasized the opposition between the culture of adventures and the rational work ethic; and I have indeed no doubt that the two are incompatible, and that the latter is the more recent phenomenon, specific to modern European capitalism. That however does not mean that modern capitalism can be reduced to the work ethic, as Weber was clearly inclined to do; by the same token, the fact that activities ‘of an irrational and speculative character, or directed to acquisition by force’ are no longer typical of modern capitalism does not mean that they are absent from it. A variety of non-economic practices, violent and often unpredictable in their results—Marx’s ‘primitive accumulation’, or David Harvey’s recent ‘accumulation by dispossession’—have clearly played (and in fact still play) a major role in the expansion of capitalism; and if this is so, then a narrative of adventure, broadly construed—like for instance, in a later age, Conrad’s entrelacement of metropolitan reflection and colonial romance—is still perfectly appropriate to the representation of modernity.

      This, then, is the historical basis for the ‘two Robinsons’, and the ensuing discontinuity in the structure of Defoe’s narrative: the island offers the first glimpse of the industrious master of modern times; the sea, Africa, Brazil, Friday, and the other adventures give voice to the older—but never fully discarded—forms of capitalist domination. From a formal viewpoint, this coexistence-without-integration of opposite registers—so unlike Conrad’s calculated hierarchy, to use that parallel again—is clearly a flaw of the novel. But, just as clearly, the inconsistency is not just a matter of form: it arises from the unresolved dialectic of the bourgeois type himself, and of his two ‘souls’:³² suggesting, contra Weber, that the rational bourgeois will never truly outgrow his irrational impulses, nor repudiate the predator he once used to be. In being, not just the beginning of a new era, but a beginning in which a structural contradiction becomes visible that will be never overcome, Defoe’s shapeless story remains the great classic of bourgeois literature.

3. KEYWORDS I: ‘USEFUL’

      Nov. 4. This morning I began to order my times of work, of going out with my gun, time of sleep, and time of diversion, viz. every morning I walked out with my gun for two or three hours if it did not rain, then employed my self to work till about eleven a-clock, then eat what I had to live on, and from twelve to two I lay down to sleep, the weather being excessive hot, and then in the evening to work again.³³

      Work, gun, sleep, and diversion. But when Robinson actually describes his day, diversion disappears, and his life recalls to the letter Hegel’s crisp summary of the Enlightenment: here, ‘everything is useful’.³⁴ Useful: the first keyword of this book. When Robinson returns on board the ship after the shipwreck, its incantatory repetition—from the carpenter’s chest, ‘which was a very useful prize to me’, to the ‘several things very useful to me’, and ‘everything . . . that could be useful to me’³⁵—re-orients the world by placing Robinson

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