Poor, Poor Robinson Crusoe
I was rereading my notes on Defoe’s ‘Robinson Crusoe’ today, and came across the following impression I had recorded as an irrelevant yet troublesome problem with old Rob as a character:
‘It is preposterous that with so much interminable discussion of invention and making, Crusoe never once digs a latrine. Defoe never once has Crusoe have a slash or drop the hammer for twenty eight years. Crusoe’s body must be impermeable. Defoe’s omission somehow makes Crusoe an unreal narrator - a painfully fictive character. Neither does Crusoe rub one out or discuss his sexual longings for Mrs. Crusoe or a buxom port wench in all that time spent on the island’.
This insight won’t make it into my PhD dissertation on Clare. Nonetheless, I am distinctly troubled by it. If you argue back by saying Crusoe certainly did have a regular waz three times a day, Defoe just didn’t want his narrator to report on it, well you are bringing that to the text yourself and reading it in, for there is no textual evidence that supports the claim that Crusoe had regular evacuations and just didn’t report on them.
Notions of propriety and authorial decorum probably forced Defoe to rely on the following two assumptions to fill in this dire black hole in the text: no. 1:- his readers would bring the understanding to the text themselves that Robin had regular excretions and just didn’t talk about it (as noted above); no. 2:- his readers wouldn’t think about Robin going poo or pee at all. Either possibility suggests a disturbing state of distaste of the physical body in Defoe’s time, and a discomfort with the permeability of the body.
I believe I now understand why Joyce was so set on cannonballing literary decorum by having Leopold Bloom take a massive shit in Ulysses; why Welsh loved talking about Renton’s ‘fetid pish’ splashing into dirty toilet bowls. Thank the good Lord for unflinching literary realism.
