Confronting Authority: JM Coetzee's Foe and the Remaking of Robinson Crusoe (original) (raw)

1991, International Fiction Review

The process of remaking Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe continues as each successive generation since 1719 has taken the Crusoe myth, reconsidered it, reshaped it, repudiated it-and still we have not finished with this strange man, his island, and his Friday. In this century alone, writers the likes of H.G. Wells, Joseph Conrad, Rose Macauley, Muriel Spark, E.L. Doctorow, William Golding, and Richard Hughes (to name only a few) have grappled with Defoe's creation in an attempt to silence his presence once and for all. As Martin Green has suggested in his recent study, The Robinson Crusoe Story, Crusoe is a towering figure in literature: his tale has been hailed as the first English novel, the first story of psychological realism, the first adventure narrative, and the most compelling myth of Empire. 1 Indeed, so powerful is this father of literature, an entire genre, the Robinsonnade, has been named in his honor. And as this name suggests-Robinsonnade-Crusoe exists in each of these remaking-a trace, a shadow, a subtext. He is always there, in the margins.