Fourth Day: A World without Others (Tournier)
December 1, 2020
After the last meditation on the two dominant ecstasies of the pandemic, profound boredom during the day and insomnia during the night, I decided to return to the fable of Robinson Crusoe to reflect on living in “a world without others.” Nevertheless, I will not return to Defoe’s original prototype of the fable, but instead to Michel Tournier’s perverse avatar from the novel Vendredi, ou les limbes du Pacifique (1967). Of course, there is a much simpler explanation as to why I choose Tournier’s version over Defoe’s, since it is the only version of the story of Robinson Crusoe that I brought with me to my own desert island. Therefore, one must make do with whatever one has at hand. This oversight has also proved to be opportune since, in my view, Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe never actually experienced his own shipwreck, and never really departed from the world of others, since he brought his culture and religion with him—packed in watertight compartments in the large suitcases he rescued from the Virginia—and so in this regard he was more of a colonizer than a castaway.
To picture the extreme situation of living in a world without others, therefore, demands more than a simple desert island fable, but a more phenomenological investigation of the subject of Robinson himself. As Tournier’s version exemplifies, first, to be “alone,” there must also be others, or what Deleuze refers to in his commentary on the novel as an a priori Other, or an “Other-Structure,” that in many ways resembles Heidegger’s description of the world that is populated by others as a complete structure of references and referrals (verweisungen) that constitute the very possibility of subjectivity. I can only be alone apart from all the others, or at a remote distance from the world of others; otherwise, solitude would never be experienced as my own. However, given the extreme state of solitude that is being suffered by many castaways today, locked into their private apartments or separate rooms, with or without the company of a companion animal or a Friday, I decided to choose Tournier’s version of the fable to explore whether, ontologically speaking, it is possible to speak of a world without others, or of an existence without world, and remain “I” or “oneself.”
Taking up my claim that the fabula of Robinson Crusoe has changed sense today, if only because, at least to some degree, everybody (tout le monde) is living on a desert island, this is not intended as an empirical description of the many different states of affairs caused by the pandemic, or by the underlying inequalities of global populations. Instead, it is only a statement that one no longer needs a fable to imagine the existential reality of such an “extreme situation” of solitude. Sometimes it is necessary to place an ocean between yourself and the world of others to reflect on your existence, but the idea that one can choose to become a castaway one day is nothing but a fiction. Nevertheless, the fiction of the desert island still serves a useful and dialectical function as a surface of reflection on existence, which cannot be viewed directly—at least, not at first. (It is a bit like what Plato said about the sun, which can only be viewed in the reflection that appears in a puddle of water.) After all, why do we read novels to look at our own existence? To gain the necessary vantage point? To look at ourselves from a second- or third-perspective point of view? In this sense, the fable functions as a navigational beacon homing in on the world that was once populated by others, which is now called “the former world,” or the world that is gone.
Once again, this recalls Heidegger’s earlier definition of signs—and what are novels but a certain constellation of signs?—as “equipment” for referring or showing something else (Verweisung), and he also pointed to the way the sign’s own phenomenological aspect immediately disappears in referring to something in its place. Is this not also to define the function of a novel as a kind of equipment for causing our familiar existence to become visible and, at the same time, strangely unfamiliar (unheimlich)—that is, to give it the status of a shadow or a refection? This is the ontological status of all fiction. And yet, according to the term of my claim that the ontological sense of the Robinson fable has changed in (the) light of the pandemic, what use will we have for the fable now? This will be the subject of my investigation.
Concerning the fact that the prototypical Crusoe was never really exposed to the extreme situation we are imagining today, this has been noted before by many others. It was first observed by Ian Watt in The Rise of the Novel, who perceived in the description of Robinson Crusoe’s neat and tidy island, in which everything has a place and there is a place for everything, the perfect representation of the mode of production and the relations between production and consumption that prefigure the emergence modern capitalism, including a certain Protestant temperament of the dry and completely humorless type of liberal individual that Crusoe represented, a real “bore.” As Deleuze once commented, if there is an upside to the fact that children are still forced to read the most boring novel in the world, perhaps it can be found in the completely healthy reaction that it might provoke in them to avoid becoming such an individual themselves.
However, it was Virginia Woolf who first perceived in Defoe’s own alter-ego the sad domestic economy of a typical English gentleman, whose ideal intimate companion would be a dog curled up at his feet, and a boy, rather than a member of the opposite sex, who would later turn out to be Robinson’s “Man Friday” in the Farther Adventures. In other words, Woolf immediately discerned that Defoe didn’t need to travel at all to find Robinson Crusoe’s island, and that the South Sea adventure was merely a popular fictional vehicle that Defoe had ripped off from the London newspapers of this period to portray the external space of his own desert island subjectivity. As Defoe himself confessed in Serious Observations, one does not actually need a desert island, since “I never feel myself more alone than in the center of a populous city like London.” Therefore, it is a lasting historical irony that Crusoe’s desert island was England itself, which in the end is only an island that is populated by smaller islands.
The South African novelist J. M. Coetzee would later deploy Woolf’s insight in his own version, Foe, which is the story of a female castaway, Susan Barton, who narrowly escaped the abuse of Brazilian slavers by slipping overboard in the middle of the night and ending up on the island with the actual “Cruso” and, of course, Friday, “a Negro with a head of fuzzy wool, naked except for a pair of drawers.” Nevertheless, Coetzee employs the fable as an allegory of a colonial Afrikaans woman writer who travels to London to confront the famous author, Daniel Foe, for plagiarizing her own castaway narrative, and ends up occupying the author’s apartments in Kensington while Foe is in prison for unpaid debts, bringing along with her her shadow, the black and mute figure of Friday. When the author finally returns, Barton holds him hostage and forces him to acknowledge the dubious existence of certain letters she wrote to the author recounting her misfortune and her encounter with the real “Cruso,” that is, to admit to the fact that this was really her story, and it was moreover real and not simply a fable invented by her “Foe” (enemy). As an aside, even though Derrida mentions the novel in his own reading of the Robinson fable in The Beast and the Sovereign, he apparently never read more than the title, especially in the claim that there is “no trace of woman” (pas trace de femme) on Crusoe’s Island—and thus could be accused, along with the author himself, for eliding the existence of a real female castaway. Ultimately, Coetzee’s version gradually strips away all allegorical representation and destroys the fable itself by revealing the finger of a “darker author” who is writing on the wall of colonial history, the real Friday who will seal the fate of both European castaways, Daniel Foe and Susan Barton.
Turning now to Tournier’s version of the fable, the reader might already have guessed that it narrates the experience of another (autrui) Robinson, and most importantly for our purposes, describes the possible transformative and even destructive effects of living in a world without others, which is why I have decided to employ its fable either as a word of warning or sign of hope for the reader and fellow castaway. The novel begins, prior to the shipwreck, with the fortune-telling of “Robinson’s” fate as told through a reading of tarot cards by Captain Van Deyssel. As the captain says, “My brief lecture is in some sort of a coded message, and the key to the cipher is your future itself.” Each card represents a different stage of Robinson’s solitude, from the loss of his original identity due to the corrosive effects of his estrangement from the world of others to the eventual recovery of a new subjectivity caused by his union with the quasi-mythical being of Friday.
The first card reveals the Demiurge, the creator of second order; “There is an organizer in you,” says the captain, “one who does battle with a world in disorder which he seeks to master by whatever means come to his hand.” “‘Mars,’ said the captain. ‘The little Demiurge has achieved a seeming victory over Nature. He has triumphed by the force of his own will and imposed an order which is in his own image.” With these words, the captain stops to reflect upon Robinson’s own image to imagine what this world might look like:
Robinson the King . . . you are 22. You have deserted—that is to say, left behind in York—a young wife and two children, to seek your fortune in the new world, like so many of your compatriots. Your close-cropped hair and square, russet beard, clear eyed steady gaze, in which there is a hint of something narrow and rigid, your attire, whose sobriety is near to affectation—all this puts you in the category of those who never had doubts. You are pious, parsimonious, pure.
Through the voice of the captain, Tournier parodies the portrait of Defoe’s original prototype as a young colonizer. If there is a dominant psychological trait that appears in the captain’s words, it is the perception of Robinson’s anal character, which will play an important part in the re-creation of the new house economy on his island. “The kingdom over which you will preside will be like one of those tidy cupboards where the women of our country keep their piles of immaculate linen scented with lavender.” At this point, as the reader might have expected, the captain prophecies Robinson’s “downgoing” (Untergangen), which comes from Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra, but also echoes the Heideggerian theme of “thrownness” and coming face-to-face with the “nothing” of the world. However, the true cause of Robinson’s descent was already implicit in the judgment that underlies the captain’s sarcasm: Robinson is inexperienced, a heterosexual white male of twenty-two, even though Robinson himself is—at the moment of his tarot reading—completely unconscious of his inexperience and carelessness towards others, such as his wife and children, whom he left behind to go on his adventure. (In the original novel, Crusoe’s father even forewarns the young adventurer of the catastrophe that will befall him as God’s judgment for his desire to escape his “station in life” and, in the end, would make him “the most Miserable wretch that ever was born”). Only the immanent shipwreck will reveal to Robinson the fact of the captain’s final judgment: “The truth is you have everything to learn.”
On the island, immediately following the shipwreck, Robinson begins to learn the reality of his extreme solitude. The first effect of solitude that Robinson notices is an immediate distortion of the perceptual field: “optical illusions, mirages, hallucinations, waking dreams, imagined sounds, fantasy and delirium.” This also has immediate effects on Robinson’s natural capacity for speech, or “actualized language.” “Language,” according to Robinson’s logbook, “in a fundamental manner evokes a peopled world, where the others like so many lamps casting a glow of light around them in which everything is, if not known, at least knowable. The lights have vanished from my consciousness.” In fact, by the time that Friday arrives on the island in Tournier’s version, the power of language—the identity of the subject that it brings with it, along with the community to which this subject belongs—has atrophied to the point where words themselves appear more like dream images. All associations appear false or strangely distorted, and consciousness no longer glows with the illumination of interiors and the contours usually furnished by others.
Only after a brief period on the island, Robinson’s own body is no longer defined as a “possession” of Robinson himself, but appears to resemble a “thing” in a neutral and objective relation to other bodies or objects, which are either present or found to be missing from the reality of the island. Robinson’s own perception of his own body is reduced to being purely “present at hand” (vorhanden) like a common object merely expressing the predicate relationship of “the body of Robinson,” but with no more proximity to the subject than statements like “Robinson’s pipe,” or “Robinson’s goat.” In other words, the predicate relationship that language usually expresses is now contingent and can undergo further modification as, for example, when a common object (e.g., my comb, my keys) is accidentally lost or destroyed. By the end of this process, Robinson gradually sheds all the attributes of his former identity such as age, gender, race, sexuality, nationality, memory, perception: in short, the subject of “Robinson” is peeled like an onion and vanishes, layer by layer.
As the duration of Robinson’s solitude on the island grows longer, Tournier describes a state in which Robinson’s consciousness begins to merge with the island itself, a process that is accompanied by Robinson’s descent into the inner core of “Speranza” and the discovery of a secret coombe where he curls up and goes to sleep. In a later journal entry, Robinson himself comments on the significance of the last barrier of his subjectivity that has been dismantled by his experience of solitude. It is at this moment that Robinson compares his state to the conscious recognition of his own physical death in the consciousness of others.
All those who knew me, all without exception, believe me dead. My own belief in my existence is opposed to that of unanimous belief. No matter what I do, I cannot prevent that picture of Robinson’s dead body from existing in all their minds. This alone, although certainly it does not kill me, suffices to remove me to the outermost confines of life, to a place hung between heaven and hell—in a word, to a Limbo.
Here we might understand this comparison as a more accelerated duration of natural death that is usually made visible by a fatal disease, but otherwise operates invisibly and imperceptibly in the individual’s body from the moment of birth. In the above quotation, the mechanism that causes this accelerated state of decomposition is the association of Robinson’s name with the picture of Robinson’s dead body, which initiates a gradual fading of the distinct presence of Robinson to himself “in the minds of these Others.” Of course, what this implies is that the only thing that was holding Robinson’s former identity together while he was alive was the very same structure of association that originated from the presence of others; therefore, the gradual release of the others’ grip on Robinson’s presence-to-himself positively frees him from being Robinson-himself, who was, in fact, only Robinson-for-the-others.
Nevertheless, this positive discovery also constitutes the revelation of the identity of death and sexuality in Robinson’s consciousness. On the sea floor surrounding the island (Robinson’s body), a small crevice occurs and suddenly widens, where the earth is ripped open. At first a canyon appears from the small crack of Robinson’s anus, and tidal waves spill over the entire surface of the island. The first wave would be a shift that occurs in the meaning of Robinson’s solitude, which he initially enjoys with his bride “Speranza” (the earth) by crawling into the dark recesses of her body to deposit his seed in the “pink coombe.” Nevertheless, the danger lurking in Robinson’s sexual union with Speranza is his continued vulnerability to all manners of “wallowing in the mire,” which Freud had attributed to the persistence of the “death instinct” (Todestrieb). In other words, surviving the disequilibrium caused by the fear of his natural death, Robinson has managed only to construct a state of affairs that is even further from equilibrium. Thus he will only be saved from this second death, an inorganic death much more terrifying than the natural death he has just survived by the intervention of Friday.
Who is Robinson’s Friday? In Tournier’s version, Friday represents nothing more than the reality principle that threatens to deconstruct the fragile order that Robinson constructs by means of his sexual union with Speranza. Thus, from the very beginning, Friday’s very presence on the island seems to disturb the order and tidiness of Robinson, and his actions fundamentally disturb its strictly economic and prescribed order of days and places, as well as the moral codes of propriety and impropriety that were far too rigidly ordered, like the “tidy cupboard of immaculate linen scented with lavender” that was earlier prophesied by the Captain. At the same time, the introduction of Friday’s presence already foreshadows a new understanding of desire that is no longer founded by the notions of possession and property that belonged to Robinson’s previous economic arrangements of heterosexual desire. As I have already outlined, the first economic determination of the sexual object was destroyed by the corrosive effects of Robinson’s solitude caused by his estrangement from the others. The second economic arrangement reproduces itself by transferring Robinson’s desire for a lost or missing sexual object onto the body of Speranza herself. Reflecting on a dream in his journal, Robinson eventually concludes that both of these earlier failures were caused by the residual elements of anthropomorphism that still influenced the sexual organization of his substance.
My love affair with Speranza was still largely human in its nature; I fecundated her soil as though I were lying with a wife. It was Friday who brought about a deeper change. The harsh stab of desire that pierces the loins of the lover has been transformed for me into a soft jubilation which exalts and pervades me from head to foot, so long as the sun-god bathes me from head to foot.
Finally, the above dream-work prefigures a last phase where Robinson’s sexuality undergoes another and final metamorphosis, as was foretold in the tarot reading where the combination of Robinson-Friday prefigures the arrival of a new avatar of Venus “rising from the waves.” It represents the culmination of the series of metamorphoses that Robinson’s “substance” undergoes that lead to a final teleological accord with a pure and elemental Desire, which is described as the coupling of Friday and Robinson, who are born from “le Grand Luminaire Halluciné,” the moon goddess who has swept the stars from the night sky (désastré). At this point, Robinson is writing in his journal or dream-diary by the light of the moon, while Friday is curled up like a blossom or an egg at Robinson’s feet. In this state of enraptured vision, Robinson is finally able to sink all the way to “the hither side of consciousness” and slip his yoke into the egg of Friday’s hallucinatory presence:
Vague patterns appear and vanish on the white disc, shadowy hands reach and clasp, faces smile for an instant, to vanish into mist. The spinning gains in speed until it resembles immobility, as though the very excess of turbulence had caused the lunar jelly to set. And gradually the pattern is defined. There are two poles at either end of the egg, with a tracing of lines between them. The poles become heads, and the arabesque the outline of two conjoined bodies. Two similar beings, twins, are in the process of gestation: Gemini are being born on the moon.
In the above passage, Tournier reveals the identity of Friday as the avatar of Robinson’s sexual metamorphosis. Friday appears in the waves in the figure of Venus who “drives Robinson out into the region of her father Uranus” and returns them to a state of pure and elemental sexuality, one that neither colonizes the earth nor requires a detour through the body of woman: “The truth is that the height to which we have soared, Friday and I, the difference between the sexes has been surpassed.” Robinson is now “a Uranian,” so that when a ship finally appears and then departs, it does not return home with Robinson (who by now has lost all filiation with his former species), but rather with Friday, who travels back to Europe in Robinson’s place. In Friday’s place there suddenly appears a new castaway, an orphaned child who steals away from the presence of the sailors in the middle of the night to live with Robinson (a bit like Susan Barton in Coetzee’s version). This is the child who Robinson will adopt as his new companion. Since he comes from Estonia and his name, “Jaan Neljapäev,” is unpronounceable, Robinson decides to name him “Tuesday,” since “Tuesday is the Sunday of children.”
Concluding my brief précis of the fable, if I said earlier on that Tournier’s version is a more realistic account of the extreme situation of living on a desert island than Defoe’s original narrative, I would now qualify this statement by saying that this only extends to the account of Robinson’s initial effects of solitude (which is more or less accurate, speaking from personal experience). However, beginning with the arrival of the child Friday, and all the metamorphoses that Robinson undergoes from that moment onward, the novel is more like science fiction in the fantastical account of the hallucinatory phenomena caused by Robinson’s loss of the world of others. As to the real cause of the hallucinations, I can only speculate, but perhaps he ate some wild berries on the island that produced the same psychotropic effects as LSD, including the final vision of Friday as Venus rising from the waves. Nevertheless, what this illustrates is that both the extreme poles of depressive and schizoid mania must also be recognized as possible “existential attunements” (Heidegger), alongside the normal effects of profound boredom and insomnia, for the purposes of our phenomenological investigation of solitude. A second hypothesis would be that everything that transpires following what I will define as Robinson’s schizoid and depressive phases takes place deep in the cave where Robinson is dreaming, and thus everything afterward—including the arrival of Friday, and later, the child Tuesday—is part of the long dream that begins when the conscious Robinson falls unconscious.
Regardless, there are only two possible endings to any castaway narrative: rescue or death. Concerning the ending of Tournier’s version, therefore, either we must imagine Robinson curled up in the deepest part of his cave dreaming of the events involving metamorphosis with Friday, as well as the ship that eventually lands on the island to take Friday away and deposit “Jaan Neljapäev,” who becomes the new child Tuesday; or, we must imagine Robinson Crusoe already dead and what we have been reading is the dream-dairy that was salvaged from the cave. If this were indeed the case, then Coetzee’s ending of the novel Foe is perhaps more realistic in showing the bloated corpses of Susan Barton, the female castaway, and Daniel Foe, the author, floating in the stateroom of the Virginia. Circling above them, on the ceiling of their sunken crypt, is the dark shadow of Friday on a bamboo raft, throwing flowers on their watery grave. In applying this fable to our contemporary situation, I wonder if the end of our own fable will be no different.