"Infinities of Islands": Reconfigurations of Crusoe's Island in the Work of Bishop, Coetzee, Tournier, and Walcott

By James McCorkle

• Part One
• Part Two
• Works Cited

Part one

The re-visioning of Crusoe, Friday, and the island upon which they were castaway offers a register of the connections between postcolonialism and postmodernism. Both involve a radical decentering of economic, aesthetic, and political identities and structures. Postmodernism may be posited as the sliding chain of signifiers, where signifier is subsumed or erased by a subsequent one, resulting in either indeterminacy or accretive space. If this can serve as an abbreviated description of postmodernism, then what is most striking is the unmarked interstices within the slide of signifiers, the in-betweenness in the lattice-work of the accreted space. This translational arranging, and this diaspora of meaning, can describe postcolonialism. Thus both postmodernism and postcolonialism reveal temporal and spatial disjunctions which subvert the totalizing effects of dominant metropolitan culture.

Implicit in this brief sketch of postmodernism and postcolonialism are oppositional and transformational elements. Rather than defining postmodernism as the globalization of multinational capitalism, postmodernism is the interrogation of that imperative culture including oppositional positions. This process is subsumed in such a postcolonial project perhaps best typified by Derek Walcott's poetry. Homi Bhabha describes Derek Walcott's project as going beyond "binaries of power in order to reorganize our sense of the process of identification in the negotiations of cultural politics" (233), so as to write "a history of cultural difference that envisages the production of difference as the political and social definition of the historical present" (234). Walcott's poetry registers the history of language--its genealogy and geography--and offers the prospect of a transforming language, one not rejecting its histories but "turning the right to signify into an act of cultural translation" (234). The complex of the figures of Crusoe, Friday, and their island provide a narrative in which, in the works of Walcott, Elizabeth Bishop, J. M. Coetzee, and Michel Tournier, the interstitial condition of identity becomes the primary focus. While Defoe's narrative was an accumulation and writing over of previous accounts of exile fused with Defoe's economic doctrine, the recent re-visions of the narrative displace Defoe's interests with a re-reading of Crusoe's position. Defoe's vision of a cohesive, hierarchial, colonial world driven by capitalism and theology became praxis as Defoe was writing his narrative. We have become Crusoe, his name is part of ours, he is the mask that Walcott, Bishop, and Tournier assume to consider their own identities. For Coetzee, Crusoe is the originary but lost figure who controls the identities of all who come into contact with him.

The materialist history that Defoe theorized and initiated (where history and the novel, for Defoe, emerge as discourses supplanting and complementing each other), is not the modality these writers explore. The perceived failure to engage history on materially explicit terms of class, economics, gender, or sexuality are criticisms levelled especially at Bishop and Coetzee. The question of representation, how identities of self and other are constituted, do not omit or abandon history, but militate, as Brian Macaskill writes of Coetzee, "against facile and misleading oppositions, and not only generates subtle and affective ways to 'do-writing', but allows also for the activity of 'doing-listening'" (472). Embedded in the dynamic of self and others or their representations is the condition of listening. Listening is the interstitial space where reception, response and transformation are possible. The conditions of reception are explored, theorized and tested in the texts of Bishop, Coetzee, Tournier, and Walcott. To listen closely opens an ethical space and temporality. To listen implies an approach to the other who is speaking, so that the words become shared and dwelled in or upon. To listen is to accumulate and accomodate histories; the failure to listen results in entrapment within a restrictive identity. Listening is the opening toward interpretation and a re-vision of one's self and one's relation to others. Elizabeth Bishop's poem "Crusoe in England," from her final collection, Geography III, begins with Crusoe's lament that no one has listened thus his chronicle has been misread:

But my poor island's still un-rediscovered, unrenamable. None of the books has ever got it right.

Crusoe's island, unlike the report of an island being born, named, and "caught on the horizon like a fly," remains uncharted and unrecognized except as a misidentified feature. Later Crusoe, when introducing Friday's memory, parenthetically remarks that "Accounts of that have everything all wrong." What "that" refers to is left undisclosed, necessitating that we listen carefully to Crusoe's elegy.

Crusoe serves as a mask for Bishop, who avoided writing direct autobiographical poetry. David Kalstone dates "Crusoe in England" as having its inception in Brazil, reporting that in a 1965 letter to Bishop's friend, the poet and editor, Howard Moss, the poem needed "a good dusting" (255). It was not published, however, until 1971. With the death of her companion Lota de Macedo Soares in 1967, Bishop's desire to remain in Brazil, where she had been living for over fifteen years, diminished and she returned permanently to the United States. The loss of Lota was further amplified by the loss of the houses in Ouro Preto and Petropolis, which Bishop shared with Lota. A castaway since her childhood, these houses represented a haven for Bishop. The poem, narrated by a Crusoe bereft of his island filled with singularities and his beloved Friday, uncannily portrays Bishop's bereavements.

Bishop suggests that not to hear Crusoe's lament, to continue to get it "all wrong," is to fail to hear Bishop's own, albeit mediated, self-definition. Portraying herself as Crusoe, Bishop considers herself as an outsider: Crusoe's only home is memory. Sexuality, too, is displaced: neither Crusoe's nor Bishop's homosexuality is directly expressed, instead that identity must be listened for. This does not mean to suggest ambivalence, but a political and social necessity, as well as personal temperament, for discretion, and more importantly the awareness that homosexuality is indeed not listened for, except so as to silence.

Homosexuality remains difficult to name--accounts always get it wrong. Bishop has seized another text, a different history, and re-visioned it to provide her own history of identity. It is a Crusoe and Friday who we recognize, but who are also re-enunciated. For Bishop as a lesbian, a history of desire and presence must be retrieved; failing that, one must be invented. Or more radically, Bishop transgresses by utilizing an archetypic narrative to open a space to listen to what has been silenced. Bishop must cross genres and figuratively cross-dress to disclose her identity. Boundaries are thus revealed but also shown to be permeable or porous. What is striking about "Crusoe in England," and somewhat parallel to Tournier's Vendredi ou les limbes du Pacifique, is that it is Friday who appears to re-vision Crusoe's sexual and spiritual identity:

Just when I thought I couldn't stand it
another minute longer, Friday came.
(Accounts of that have everything all wrong.)
Friday was nice.
Friday was nice, and we were friends.
If only he had been a woman!
I wanted to propagate my kind,
and so did he, I think, poor boy.
He'd pet the baby goats sometimes,
and race with them, or carry one around.
--Pretty to watch; he had a pretty body.
And then one day they came and took us off.

Crusoe's interest in Friday is not proprietory, though Bishop has indeed problematized the conditions of desire between the European Crusoe and the exotic, otherness of Friday. While Crusoe assumes a paternal voice in this passage, that voice is perhaps a variation on the voice of lament for the loss of an intimate, for Bishop ruptures this passage's enclosing, mirroring, coupling language with the breaking of the idyll: "they came and took us off." This does not resonate with rescue or salvation but punishment or imprisonment.

Crusoe's exile in England returns him to a world of interrogating gazes, that of Foucault's panopticon. His artifacts are desired by a local museum, though "How can anyone want such things," Crusoe asks, especially since the "living soul has dribbled away" from each object. Friday's presence suspends the genealogy of disciplinary modalities; prior to Friday's introduction to the poem, Crusoe describes his recurring nightmare of "islands / stretching away from mine, infinities / of islands, islands spawning islands" where he had to live on each, "registering their flora, / their fauna, their geography." Ironically, this is the nightmare of procreation, belonging to the same genealogy as Crusoe's comment that both he and Friday "wanted to propagate"--where an economy of reproduction replaces eros.

Crusoe, however, marks a difference in how one constitutes oneself within sexuality, for he also desires Friday. Desire holds aesthetic values as well as the colonial rejection of individual subjectivity and possible freedom. "Pretty to watch; he had a pretty body," Crusoe remarks, thereby combining the gaze's possession and mastery of the body as well as aesthetic pleasure. That these two modalities may not be exclusive reflects a genealogy that cannot be erased from Defoe's figure of Crusoe. Indeed, Bishop may be implicitly scrutinizing her motives in her relationship to Lota. To write from Crusoe's position or to ventriloquize his voice is then to hear in her own voice the ethos of Crusoe.

Bishop's Crusoe is determined by her own loss and estrangement: Crusoe is appropriated figure to convey Bishop's condition. Bishop offers a critique of the self, as does Tournier in Vendredi ou les limbes du Pacifique. However, there is a crucial difference: Bishop's Crusoe expresses desire for Friday, whereas he is not an object of desire for Tournier's Robinson. Despite all the roles Robinson insists on Friday performing, Friday seemed to belong "to an entirely different realm, wholly opposed to his master's order of earth and husbandry" (180, 188) and as Crusoe writes in his journal, "As to my sexuality, I may note that at no time has Friday inspired me with any sodomite desire" (211, 229). Eros humanizes Bishop's Crusoe--the absenting of eros, as we shall see, dehumanizes Tournier's figure of Crusoe.

Gilles Deleuze, writing on Tournier's novel, distinguishes between the concrete Other, which "designates real terms actualizing the structure in concrete fields" and the a priori Other, which is this structure or "the existence of the possible in general, insofar as the possible exists only as expressed" (318). The novel is Robinson's meditation on a world absent of all Others; indeed, what Tournier has indicated is the "otherwise-Other" (319). Rather than belonging to a shared landscape or perceptual field, Robinson lacks this structure, with its double fold of concrete and a priori others; instead he lives within a completely different structure. Though Robinson exhibits no perverse behavior--indeed he seems potently rational--Deleuze argues Tournier has theorized, by showing, the manifestation of perverse structure, or the principle from which perverse behavior is actualized: "the perverse structure may be specified as that which is opposed to the structure-Other and takes its place" (319).

While at first Robinson is discouraged by the absence of others and how cognition and identity seem structured by the presence of others, he soon abandons these early speculations in favor of what Colin Davis describes as a "poetic meditation" and a "rejection of discursive reason and the abnegation of selfhood" so as to "allow the genesis of a new kind of order" (377-8). While Davis correctly sees Robinson's ambition, at one stage of the novel, to affect a "reversal of individuation" and a "synthesis of consciousness and nature" (376); the novel unfolds into a theory of the very renunciation of nature, a removal of being from self and the world. Thus Robinson's is a journey into the absenting of Others, which describes, perhaps in extremis, the colonial enterprise. The colonial project is a perverse structure in that it presupposes the "murder of the possible" or commits an "Other-cide" and an "altrucide" (320), to use Deleuze's terms. Although Deleuze does not draw together the psychoanalytic and the historical in this discussion of perversion, Tournier constructs a new myth whose structure is that of perversion which can describe colonialism. While the absenting of the other, and thereby the murder of the possible, is replete throughout history, by assuming Defoe's narrative, Tournier has placed this fiction's description of perverse structure in a postcolonial context.

Robinson's journey is toward an undifferentiated state where he embodies the solar myth or merges with the surface of the sky. Robinson's journey takes him through the elements: he is delivered to the island over water; he moves through the earth in all its degrees from wallowing in the mire with the peccaries to cultivate the earth, and to curl into the island's deep cave:

He was suspended in a happy eternity. Speranza was a fruit ripening in the sun whose white and naked seed, embedded in a thousand thicknesses of skin and husk and rind bore the name Robinson. (101-2, 106)

While enmeshed in the element of the earth, Robinson slides between the realities of the island and phantasms, memories, and reveries. Tournier's organic metaphor of shedding and ripening, however, does not designate generation or fertility. Instead, Robinson acts incestuously to drain the island of its life:

. . . he could not conceal from himself the fact that although his own belly might be filled with milk and honey, Speranza herself was being exhausted by the monstrous maternal role he had imposed upon her. (108-9, 113)

Robinson grows more than he can consume; in fact, he creates prohibitions against consumption. All his activity is directed toward accumulation. His accumulation, however, is the consumption of the entire island, which is the primary effect of a colonial economy. Robinson transforms his desire. He sees himself as both the agent of monstrous generation--

Even worse, I came near to sullying her with my semen. What hideous ripening might not that living seed have produced, in the dark, vast warmth of the cave? I think of Speranza swelling like a loaf in which the yeast is working, her bloated body spreading of the surface of the waters, eventually to die in disgorging some monster of incest. (109, 114)

--and, as the outcome of that hideous coupling, he implicitly names himself as that "monster of incest." Increasingly, his desire and his sexual identity becomes undifferentiated and objectless. Desire, language, and memory are all interwoven. As desire loses its sexual energy in its course toward an undifferentiated condition, words and memories lose their energy. Writing in his journal, Robinson expresses this solar desire, which will separate himself from the world of others:

To say that my sexual desire is no longer directed toward the perpetuation of the species is not enough. It no longer knows what its purpose is! For a long time memory was sufficiently active in me to feed my imagination with objects of desire, non- existent though they were. But that is over now. Memory has been sucked dry. The creatures of my imagination are lifeless shadows. I may speak the words, woman, breasts, thighs, thighs parted at my desire, but they mean nothing. Words have lost their power; they are sounds, no more. Does this mean that desire has died in me for lack of use? Far from it! I still feel within me that murmur of the spring of life, but it has become objectless. Instead of flowing submissively along the course set for it by society, it floods out in all directions like the rays of a star, as though in search of a channel, the course wherein all the waters will be joined and flow together toward a goal. (113, 118-9)

Robinson indicates that his journey is toward some transcendent and imperial goal. A total, celestial unity is his aspiration; instead of integrating or submitting his desire to the demands of society, his desire becomes over-arching, drawing all desire into a radiating golden flood.