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 CONTENTS: INFO TOPICS
Robinson Crusoe 1,000,000 A.D.
About Robinson Crusoe (1719 Novel)
Robinson Crusoe is a novel published in 1719 by Daniel Defoe (1660-1731), an English author, whose published and enduring works also include Moll Flanders (1722) and A Journal of the Plague Year (1722). All of these books have remained in print without interruption.
Surprise: Not a Walt Disney Fuzzy-Bunnies Tale to Warm Your Heart. Daniel Defoe's 1719 masterpiece, which has never gone of print, is not a fuzzy bunny Disney cartoon for children and childlike minds, but a DarkSF classic full of stark terror (betrayal, murder, cannibalism, nightmares) with only glimmers of redemption. One or two readers have vented because they had expected a fuzzy bunnies cartoon and got DarkSF instead (not 'juvenile', not 'gruesome,' etc, but "The Dark Chocolate of SF"). People with strong opinions should inform themselves before posting these sorts of graffiti. Read the 1719 original, read the literature about it and the Robinsonades genres, actually read my novel and understand it, and read world literature in general (Iliad, Odyssey, Hamlet, and many more; and that includes modern classics like H.G. Wells' The Time Machine, H. P. Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness, and in the film world Planet of the Apes and Blade Runner to name just a few in a very rich field).
Hear The Professor. I found it significant that the Introduction to the Barnes & Noble Classics Edition, written by Professor L. J. Swingle, starts out by emphasizing this most common point of popular misperception. Dr. L. J. Swingle is Professor Emeritus of English Literature at the University of Kentucky, and a notable expert on these matters. He begins the Introduction with these words:
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People who have never actually read Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe often think of it as a children's book. It is a tale, so they suppose, that belongs on the shelf upstairs in the playroom alongside Lassie, the Hardy Boys books, and Charlotte's Web. But to discover the fallacy of this notion we need only sit down with a child and start trying to read the book. Reading Robinson Crusoe to a child usually turns out to be a different, somewhat less amiable adventure than telling the child about Robinson Crusoe in our own words. The child can eagerly attend to our retelling of the Crusoe story, relatively inept storytellers though we may be. The experiences of a man shipwrecked alone on a desert island-his initial fears, his efforts to escape, his struggle to secure food and shelter, his discovery of a footprint in the sand-all these things take powerful hold on a child's imagination. But if plunged into Defoe's original narrative of Crusoe's experiences, a child immediately senses that the waters of storytelling have suddenly gotten uncomfortably deep, that the exciting shallows of the story as Mom or Dad would tell it at bedtime have been left behind, that many things going on around the margins of the adventure story in Defoe's book are not attractively adventurous. How can a person possibly wade through this strange book that pretends to be Robinson Crusoe? Some sort of incomprehensible adult trickery must be going on here.
Published in 1719, Robinson Crusoe is a novel for grown-up minds that has been kidnapped for, though obviously not by, the kids. In this respect it's interestingly akin to another supposed children's book that would be published midway into the next century, Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865). Like Crusoe, Alice presents us with the story of a person transported from our own familiar world into foreign territory that offers opportunity for exciting adventure, obviously, but also for an encounter with some complex intellectual issues. A child, responding eagerly to the adventure but brought up short by the intellectual issues, is likely to sense immediately that neither Crusoe nor Alice is a book for the playroom. Both belong in the library downstairs, where adults retreat to contemplate the shadowy mysteries of their own minds and experience.
Once we adults rescue Robinson Crusoe from the playroom and begin thinking about its significance for ourselves, it is helpful to consider some things we might expect to find in the novel that either do not appear there at all or that appear in unfamiliar forms. Writing Robinson Crusoe in the early years of the eighteenth century, Defoe reveals himself to be in several important respects not quite of our mind. True, he's an intellectual precursor of the modern mind and, as such, some aspects of his basic interests and values are relatively close to our own. Rudiments of the Crusoe story exert considerable contemporary popular appeal, and not just to small children. Many movie adaptations have been made of the story. In the last few years alone, for example, we've had Aidan Quinn play Crusoe in a 1988 film of that name; we've had Pierce Brosnan, of James Bond fame, play Crusoe in the 1996 Robinson Crusoe; we've had Tom Hanks play a rather interesting loose translation of Crusoe as a plane-wrecked Federal Express man in the 2000 film Cast Away. The name "Robinson Crusoe" itself has entered the public domain; like "Gatsby," "Tarzan," "Superman," and "Mickey Mouse," it has become a useful shorthand term in contemporary popular thought, meaningful to people who have never encountered the literary source.
But if we go back to the novel Robinson Crusoe and see what Defoe made of the story in 1719, we run into some intriguing basic differences from common inclinations of thought in more recent centuries. These differences constitute an important part of what makes Robinson Crusoe not simply entertaining-occasionally almost more puzzling, or even more irritating than entertaining-but thereby greatly worth reading for the mind's sake
—Quoting Prof. L. J. Swingle's opening words in his Introduction to the Barnes & Noble Classics edition of Daniel Defoe's 1719 Robinson Crusoe.
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Robinsonades cover a wide range of reader tastes, from fuzzy bunnies to downright cannibalism as in Daniel Defoe's very dark, horrifying 1719 novel that too few have actually read. In response to a few fuzzy bunnies protests, from readers who have never read either my work or any wider world literature, I have pointed out the constant blood bath in epic works like Homer's Iliad, just to name one example, which is filled with cruel and gory battle scenes; like the one where a Greek or Trojan warrior chops off an enemy soldier's arms and legs, and then with his foot kicks the dying man's body, so it rolls 'like a log' toward his nearby fellow warriors.
Or how about the ending of Shakespeare's Hamlet, where an entire castle hall full of people kill each other in a massive technicolor sword fight? How is that different from the culminating scene in Homer's Odyssey, where Ulysses and his allies murder all the women in a dining hall who had consorted with the leering suitors who were after Telemachus' mother Penelope?
My work is extremely mild compared to all of that. Typically, my novels include a powerful romantic love story between a strong female and a strong male lead, whose harrowing (but not gruesome, adolescent, or pointless, whatever those fuzzy bunnies critics have claimed after not reading my work) adventures always have a Happy Ever After (HEA) ending. If there is a sex scene in my work, it is not pornographic, but will inevitably by mutually passionate, respectful, poetic, and downright ecstatic. In all John Argo or JTC tales, there is always hope for redemption and joy at the end of a somber & terrifying ride. From the blurbology of my robinsonade novel, "Is there a woman-Friday to relieve what would otherwise be a nightmare existence for Alex Kirk? Read this novel and learn the answer. Hint: "strawberry ice cream."
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