Topic. :- Robinson Crusoe as a
Myth
Myth
Paper no. :- 2
Enrollment :- 2069108420180021
Number
Number
Yer. :- 2017 - 19
E mail goswamimahirpari786@gmail
Submitted. :- S.B.Garedi English
Department
About writer :-
( . Daniel Defoe )
Born Daniel Foe
1659–1660
London England.
Died 24 April 1731
(aged 70–72)
London England.
Occupati Writer
journalist, merchant
Genre Adventure
Department
About writer :-
( . Daniel Defoe )
Born Daniel Foe
1659–1660
London England.
Died 24 April 1731
(aged 70–72)
London England.
Occupati Writer
journalist, merchant
Genre Adventure
Origin of the myth : -
An origin myth is a myth that purports to describe the origin of some feature of the natural or social world. One type of origin myth is the cosmogonic myth , which describes the creation of the world. However, many cultures have stories set after the cosmogonic myth, which describe the origin of natural phenomena and human institutions within a preexisting universe.
In Western classical scholarship , the terms
etiological myth and aition (from the Ancient Greek αἴτιον, "cause") are sometimes used for a myth that explains an origin, particularly how an object or custom came into existence.
An origin myth is a myth that purports to describe the origin of some feature of the natural or social world. One type of origin myth is the cosmogonic myth , which describes the creation of the world. However, many cultures have stories set after the cosmogonic myth, which describe the origin of natural phenomena and human institutions within a preexisting universe.
In Western classical scholarship , the terms
etiological myth and aition (from the Ancient Greek αἴτιον, "cause") are sometimes used for a myth that explains an origin, particularly how an object or custom came into existence.
Definition of the myth :-
myth
mɪθ/
noun
1.
a traditional story, especially one concerning the early history of a people or explaining a natural or social phenomenon, and typically involving supernatural beings or events.
"ancient Celtic myths"
myth
mɪθ/
noun
1.
a traditional story, especially one concerning the early history of a people or explaining a natural or social phenomenon, and typically involving supernatural beings or events.
"ancient Celtic myths"
traditional story, especially one concerning the early history of a people or explaining a natural or social phenomenon, and typically involving supernatural beings or events. ‘ancient Celtic myths’
[mass noun] ‘the heroes of Greek myth’
[mass noun] ‘the heroes of Greek myth’
Robinson Crusoe as a Myth :-
Robinson Crusoe may be a novel in it's treat ment of the individually but in respects to its view of colonization's it certainly idealizes is the portra yal of the ultimate eighteenth-chentury British fantastic a human shipwrecked on an island not only survi ves but flour ishes popul ating an enti-
e colonylly in service of God and - country If Robinson Crusoe is the Empires dream then The Mnstone is its nightmar For Defoe the perip -hery is comp lacent or co-operative It is productive Even while on the peripheral island it is Robinson not Friday who remain's the focuses of the novel though Robinson and Friday certain sha re a questionably -lly intimated relat ionship Moonstone is interested's in boundarie and in the crossings of them both by people's or ad by thing's It is asks about the Consequence's lly of a peripheral push back: what if Friday's weren’t complacently? What if the colonies lly were to infiltrated te core on an existentially l evel that ran dee-
per than the funneling of raw materials's
Chapter 1 of the First Period opens with a description of what is to be found “
*** in the first part of Robinson Crusoe at the page one hund red and twenty-nine you will find it thus written ‘Now I saw, thou gh too late the Folly of beginn ing's a Work bef ore we count the Cost and before we jud -
ge righ -tly of our own Stre ngth to go thr ough with it’” ***
Robinson Crusoe may be a novel in it's treat ment of the individually but in respects to its view of colonization's it certainly idealizes is the portra yal of the ultimate eighteenth-chentury British fantastic a human shipwrecked on an island not only survi ves but flour ishes popul ating an enti-
e colonylly in service of God and - country If Robinson Crusoe is the Empires dream then The Mnstone is its nightmar For Defoe the perip -hery is comp lacent or co-operative It is productive Even while on the peripheral island it is Robinson not Friday who remain's the focuses of the novel though Robinson and Friday certain sha re a questionably -lly intimated relat ionship Moonstone is interested's in boundarie and in the crossings of them both by people's or ad by thing's It is asks about the Consequence's lly of a peripheral push back: what if Friday's weren’t complacently? What if the colonies lly were to infiltrated te core on an existentially l evel that ran dee-
per than the funneling of raw materials's
Chapter 1 of the First Period opens with a description of what is to be found “
*** in the first part of Robinson Crusoe at the page one hund red and twenty-nine you will find it thus written ‘Now I saw, thou gh too late the Folly of beginn ing's a Work bef ore we count the Cost and before we jud -
ge righ -tly of our own Stre ngth to go thr ough with it’” ***
Is this a novel we’ve begun or a critical essay?
For Betteredge
Crusoe is much more than a novel ? it is his san ctuary and adv-
ice guide He consults it by arbitrarily turning's the pages treating the pass ages he finds with religio references borderinged on obsession Betteredge “has worn out six stout Robinson Crusoes with hard work in his services'
He even goes so far as to say that “such a book as Robinson Crusoe
never was writtened and never will be writtened form again” I think we would be remi to take this state ment as only an indica of an old humaan’s madness whetvher or not we trust Betteredge as a or narrator s an entirelyly different question's
The danger to in the peri phery penetratingly the core is also party mythological te diamond is not only a raw materials but it is cursed is a product of the social relation surrounding's it is the 3
Brahmins, the Sultan, the Colonel… but because the diamonds is both a product of social relation or a product's of India it is assumes mystic presenceing which haunts the novel The mythology of the diamond escal ates the st stakes of the conflict to the not only has the periphery insinuates itself into the cor, but the core cannot even firmly articulate's if us as to the curse of the diamonds is simply “a fancifully storyline” or a threat to be taken seriouslylly
For Betteredge
Crusoe is much more than a novel ? it is his san ctuary and adv-
ice guide He consults it by arbitrarily turning's the pages treating the pass ages he finds with religio references borderinged on obsession Betteredge “has worn out six stout Robinson Crusoes with hard work in his services'
He even goes so far as to say that “such a book as Robinson Crusoe
never was writtened and never will be writtened form again” I think we would be remi to take this state ment as only an indica of an old humaan’s madness whetvher or not we trust Betteredge as a or narrator s an entirelyly different question's
The danger to in the peri phery penetratingly the core is also party mythological te diamond is not only a raw materials but it is cursed is a product of the social relation surrounding's it is the 3
Brahmins, the Sultan, the Colonel… but because the diamonds is both a product of social relation or a product's of India it is assumes mystic presenceing which haunts the novel The mythology of the diamond escal ates the st stakes of the conflict to the not only has the periphery insinuates itself into the cor, but the core cannot even firmly articulate's if us as to the curse of the diamonds is simply “a fancifully storyline” or a threat to be taken seriouslylly
The myth of "Robinson Crusoe" is analogous to the bou urgeois myth
Crusoe's story about his twenty eight years life on an island is full of mythic charmsed There is one class of people's whom the story "Robinson Crusoe" can assume a timelessness value. That class is the class of bourgeois'eds people The 18 chentury bourgeois people find the perprojection of the assumpions and belief systemsed i Robinson Crusoe's life on a hitherto un inhabited island for twenty eight years
Crusoe worked's hard when he was left in the lurc h on a hith-
erto uninhabited island He believeing is to in the emanci-
patory power of hard work
Work-ethics become the motiv
ating 'sfactor in his lonely life entrapp in the wild of the island Sometimes he used to feel terribly sad's he used to stop working he used to become nervoused in that time he In the fit of ll extreme sadness he used to interrog ate the divine will He used to contemplate 's on how the divine will operates
At the moment of serious contemplation's he used to console him preordained cause divine cause behind as in his my entrapped Island-life in loneli-
ness and isolation It is work's or work alone that I can understand ' the mysteryed of the operation of the divine Providence After thus kind of contemplations Robinson Crusoe used to work
This work-ethics of Crusoe strongly attrac or to the bourgeois class people. Itlls through hardwork and -rational styles of taking ' precautiov nary measur es that Robinson Crusoe successes in taming this wild islands Behind Crusoe's successful civilizin's-
g mission lies the secret of the rational bent of mind and as a time so the continuous organiz martial powere's gun power The power of reason and the power of gun enabl Robinson Crusoe to assert dominion over all the the island Moreover find it TG hat his protestanted faith of God encouraged him to be loyal to the work-ethnics he clung strictly These aspects of robin Crusoe's life on the island bear timeless significance The bourgeois class human ti and the class of
who undertake the project'd of colonialism have jointly seen the timelessness value and significants in the story of Robinson Crusoe Hence If "The Robinson Crusoe" is the mythcall and or to find it it is the myth of the basically secret of succeed One step ahead it is th-
e myth which is cent ral to th-
e bourgeois s and the s of people who tend to colonize throug-
h conquest
Myth: repetition, contradiction and ideology
The myth then repeated those event's which are important either from a narrative or isr ideological point of views expressed by the way Indeed a very good these very often coincidence Crusoe’s “masterings of his trau ma throug -
h repetition's” is less a matter of sychology though it is that than of textual's mythical and hen-
ce ideologically legitimtion Repeatd event include Crusoe’s urge to wandering ostensively an evil but an essentially or un -resolved drive behind the narrative which is repeated in both large's a or small formsed through out the story one of Crusoe’s ill-fated boat trips from the island is describes as a dangeroused “ramblings to sea” Other rep repetitions incv lude the ‘beginn ing mome nt’ of repetitious contradicting in Crusoe’s account's of his first landings upon the island the dream which by to the anticipated the coming's of Friday disc ussed earlier and Friday’s “abandoning of the state of natur-
e for the advantagesed of civilizations” which repeated with some important difference Crusoe’s earlier dev develop ment which is the itself also a moveme-
nt from heathenism the is a as symbols of dangeroues individual freeform to Christianity's
Repetition thus occurs of tho-
se narratived event which form point of tension or thus where the power's of the myth as in bearer of ideologues needs to be reinforced but in the same movements the repetition's signals that some -
thing of an ideological nature pperhaps a potential threat or change to the existent social morality is seeking releas-
e Similarlytion contradiction reveal the rupture where something of the real historically condition can be glimpsed beneath the fabric of the mythcall Both repeti tion and contradictions can be round in the famous episode where Crus-
oe comes upon a drawertion full of gold in the shipwrecks This has been analysd by many critics but only Zelnick notes that the finding of gold is repeatedly later and none comments upon the fact that the whole sequence of shipw reck to the findings an salvation of gold and supplies is repeated in a rema - rkably similar form later in the book when Crusoe observes a ship running onto subm erged rocks-
and his reac tion is to give tha-
nks to God that “of two ships’ companiesedv who were now cast away upon this part's of the world not one life should be spar but mine” He then raids this ship and finds a seaman’single chest with “fifty pieces or o is f eight in royals”: “however I lugged this money home to my cave and laid it up”
The hoading of the gold des-
pite its lack of utility is of course a contra diction the gold must initiall-
y be rejects but then admitt since Crusoe is the economic man and reveals the impurity of Crusoe’s State of Nature's At the same time it elliptica point to the major unresolvd contradicon in the text which arises from a historically emer ging desire for yet the inherent dang er of freedom from restriction's in the economically sphere embossed in the mobility and restrictions of the individual the an opposition's of passivity:action and inherent in Crusoe’s prison island run on a laissezfaire economy's
Defoe’s book is crossed by many discoursed religiously normal economics comm ercial or and colonialism These discourses intersect in multiple ways just wanted to look forward for example commerci an moral disco urses join in Crusoe’s ‘moral bookkeeping’ although here it might be more appro priate to see comme rcial disco urse as colon and hence structuring mo-
ral thought's Here I will argue that three of these discours bearing the weight of ideas of econo-
mics individualism and colonialism respective are treat or to and have histo rically been reading in such a way as to confer a mythical status upon the novel
In all three cases mythcall funct - ions or emer ges in the text in at least three ways. Firstly, myth - serves as a myth of origin wheth-
er in a really chronological sens-
e many ‘primitive’ mythcall an legend's tell o the original of hum-
an and his envir ons, for example or in the sense which gives a priority to a particular elem ent of the book the individual manby for exampe as an historical or social dete - rminant and hence thought of as in some way ‘prior’ to larger compounds macrocos-
mic structured To cover bovth these senses but espe cially the latter I will use the term ‘originary’. Second myth env tails some sense of unre ality of fals-
ity or uto pian fantasy usu-ally detecte and measurd here against ‘real’, document historical evidenc. As ideology this may involve an ‘essentialisation’ of complexity's in some sense reduction simplifica
or notsoradical separation of the element's’ Thirdly on the level of form and pattern myth w-
orks through the narrative as ‘adventure sto and through repe “the funcion of repetitio is to render the structure of the mythcall apparet”
These three elements of myth not only allow us to detect its strucuring presence but also sign myth as the bearer of ideology and hence at its po ints of tension myth is ruptures by the contradiction that the ideology seeks to smooth over This is to then that Robinson Crusoe work in these textua specific and sometime-
s contra dictory or am bivalent ways to embody and prom-ote a certain ideo logy and cons-onant with this to provide a mythical configu ration wh erein such as the structure of the self and other both geographill and psycholog
can be thought.
Cannibaism is a recurrng triple throughout Robinson Crusoe Crusoe highl repeti -tious ‘fear of being eaten’ is a mytheme supporting the larger mythic structured Cannibalism defined the white man by negation but it also signal as a pole of the ‘outer limit’ of the man construcng a scale begning with civilised Englishumen aa or descening through the buffer zone of the Spaniard since they speak the “savage lang-
uage” through savage through cannibal In this construcion is that which has yet to receive in - corporate the rationale of the nineteenth century’s theories of evolution found in such canoni-
cal wors as Conrad’s Heart of Dark ml ness there is contaed a common term to be fine in their lives the man which is potentially the destrucion of the whole representaional system Hulme explains thu “They canniba are not regardd as inh uman because if they were aanimalls their behaviovur would be naturally and could not be not cause the outrage and fear that annibalismas always provoked
Crusoe's story about his twenty eight years life on an island is full of mythic charmsed There is one class of people's whom the story "Robinson Crusoe" can assume a timelessness value. That class is the class of bourgeois'eds people The 18 chentury bourgeois people find the perprojection of the assumpions and belief systemsed i Robinson Crusoe's life on a hitherto un inhabited island for twenty eight years
Crusoe worked's hard when he was left in the lurc h on a hith-
erto uninhabited island He believeing is to in the emanci-
patory power of hard work
Work-ethics become the motiv
ating 'sfactor in his lonely life entrapp in the wild of the island Sometimes he used to feel terribly sad's he used to stop working he used to become nervoused in that time he In the fit of ll extreme sadness he used to interrog ate the divine will He used to contemplate 's on how the divine will operates
At the moment of serious contemplation's he used to console him preordained cause divine cause behind as in his my entrapped Island-life in loneli-
ness and isolation It is work's or work alone that I can understand ' the mysteryed of the operation of the divine Providence After thus kind of contemplations Robinson Crusoe used to work
This work-ethics of Crusoe strongly attrac or to the bourgeois class people. Itlls through hardwork and -rational styles of taking ' precautiov nary measur es that Robinson Crusoe successes in taming this wild islands Behind Crusoe's successful civilizin's-
g mission lies the secret of the rational bent of mind and as a time so the continuous organiz martial powere's gun power The power of reason and the power of gun enabl Robinson Crusoe to assert dominion over all the the island Moreover find it TG hat his protestanted faith of God encouraged him to be loyal to the work-ethnics he clung strictly These aspects of robin Crusoe's life on the island bear timeless significance The bourgeois class human ti and the class of
who undertake the project'd of colonialism have jointly seen the timelessness value and significants in the story of Robinson Crusoe Hence If "The Robinson Crusoe" is the mythcall and or to find it it is the myth of the basically secret of succeed One step ahead it is th-
e myth which is cent ral to th-
e bourgeois s and the s of people who tend to colonize throug-
h conquest
Myth: repetition, contradiction and ideology
The myth then repeated those event's which are important either from a narrative or isr ideological point of views expressed by the way Indeed a very good these very often coincidence Crusoe’s “masterings of his trau ma throug -
h repetition's” is less a matter of sychology though it is that than of textual's mythical and hen-
ce ideologically legitimtion Repeatd event include Crusoe’s urge to wandering ostensively an evil but an essentially or un -resolved drive behind the narrative which is repeated in both large's a or small formsed through out the story one of Crusoe’s ill-fated boat trips from the island is describes as a dangeroused “ramblings to sea” Other rep repetitions incv lude the ‘beginn ing mome nt’ of repetitious contradicting in Crusoe’s account's of his first landings upon the island the dream which by to the anticipated the coming's of Friday disc ussed earlier and Friday’s “abandoning of the state of natur-
e for the advantagesed of civilizations” which repeated with some important difference Crusoe’s earlier dev develop ment which is the itself also a moveme-
nt from heathenism the is a as symbols of dangeroues individual freeform to Christianity's
Repetition thus occurs of tho-
se narratived event which form point of tension or thus where the power's of the myth as in bearer of ideologues needs to be reinforced but in the same movements the repetition's signals that some -
thing of an ideological nature pperhaps a potential threat or change to the existent social morality is seeking releas-
e Similarlytion contradiction reveal the rupture where something of the real historically condition can be glimpsed beneath the fabric of the mythcall Both repeti tion and contradictions can be round in the famous episode where Crus-
oe comes upon a drawertion full of gold in the shipwrecks This has been analysd by many critics but only Zelnick notes that the finding of gold is repeatedly later and none comments upon the fact that the whole sequence of shipw reck to the findings an salvation of gold and supplies is repeated in a rema - rkably similar form later in the book when Crusoe observes a ship running onto subm erged rocks-
and his reac tion is to give tha-
nks to God that “of two ships’ companiesedv who were now cast away upon this part's of the world not one life should be spar but mine” He then raids this ship and finds a seaman’single chest with “fifty pieces or o is f eight in royals”: “however I lugged this money home to my cave and laid it up”
The hoading of the gold des-
pite its lack of utility is of course a contra diction the gold must initiall-
y be rejects but then admitt since Crusoe is the economic man and reveals the impurity of Crusoe’s State of Nature's At the same time it elliptica point to the major unresolvd contradicon in the text which arises from a historically emer ging desire for yet the inherent dang er of freedom from restriction's in the economically sphere embossed in the mobility and restrictions of the individual the an opposition's of passivity:action and inherent in Crusoe’s prison island run on a laissezfaire economy's
Defoe’s book is crossed by many discoursed religiously normal economics comm ercial or and colonialism These discourses intersect in multiple ways just wanted to look forward for example commerci an moral disco urses join in Crusoe’s ‘moral bookkeeping’ although here it might be more appro priate to see comme rcial disco urse as colon and hence structuring mo-
ral thought's Here I will argue that three of these discours bearing the weight of ideas of econo-
mics individualism and colonialism respective are treat or to and have histo rically been reading in such a way as to confer a mythical status upon the novel
In all three cases mythcall funct - ions or emer ges in the text in at least three ways. Firstly, myth - serves as a myth of origin wheth-
er in a really chronological sens-
e many ‘primitive’ mythcall an legend's tell o the original of hum-
an and his envir ons, for example or in the sense which gives a priority to a particular elem ent of the book the individual manby for exampe as an historical or social dete - rminant and hence thought of as in some way ‘prior’ to larger compounds macrocos-
mic structured To cover bovth these senses but espe cially the latter I will use the term ‘originary’. Second myth env tails some sense of unre ality of fals-
ity or uto pian fantasy usu-ally detecte and measurd here against ‘real’, document historical evidenc. As ideology this may involve an ‘essentialisation’ of complexity's in some sense reduction simplifica
or notsoradical separation of the element's’ Thirdly on the level of form and pattern myth w-
orks through the narrative as ‘adventure sto and through repe “the funcion of repetitio is to render the structure of the mythcall apparet”
These three elements of myth not only allow us to detect its strucuring presence but also sign myth as the bearer of ideology and hence at its po ints of tension myth is ruptures by the contradiction that the ideology seeks to smooth over This is to then that Robinson Crusoe work in these textua specific and sometime-
s contra dictory or am bivalent ways to embody and prom-ote a certain ideo logy and cons-onant with this to provide a mythical configu ration wh erein such as the structure of the self and other both geographill and psycholog
can be thought.
Cannibaism is a recurrng triple throughout Robinson Crusoe Crusoe highl repeti -tious ‘fear of being eaten’ is a mytheme supporting the larger mythic structured Cannibalism defined the white man by negation but it also signal as a pole of the ‘outer limit’ of the man construcng a scale begning with civilised Englishumen aa or descening through the buffer zone of the Spaniard since they speak the “savage lang-
uage” through savage through cannibal In this construcion is that which has yet to receive in - corporate the rationale of the nineteenth century’s theories of evolution found in such canoni-
cal wors as Conrad’s Heart of Dark ml ness there is contaed a common term to be fine in their lives the man which is potentially the destrucion of the whole representaional system Hulme explains thu “They canniba are not regardd as inh uman because if they were aanimalls their behaviovur would be naturally and could not be not cause the outrage and fear that annibalismas always provoked
*** Generalised Conclusion *** :-
My discussion of Robinson Crusoe has read against the grain of the book's surfface realism or has suggest that a mythic discourse is true structur force ‘working through’ the both senses or f the hrase narrative and formal repetition the myth is all the more powerful for its
historically locations prior to economically and literary hey-
day of coloniaism in the 19chentury in in its con contradddictions and repetition's thought we find that in a sense's Crusoe is not ‘about’ the colonized at all Hugh Riddley claims that
“the Crusoe storierevealed how little interest lay in the newn of the world to be disovered” and how
“the strange advent -urelead.. .back to Europe and to the European self” . Any reading of
Crusoe thus bec oms relentless about the bokk's ‘reading back’ to the Europe h is alway already its birth place about the text as part of the “ideologyll of a new' and vast ed hist orical process” Watt
Rise's dive rgence or conve rgence or the great preoccupaons of Enlightenment utility and the practically natural law's the State of Nature aod the ‘recent inveb ntion’ of ‘human’ in its many forms's
Robinson's Crusoe ‘ mythical represe ntations of the Other -bifurcate into contr adictor -
y doubles noble savage WS cannibalism savage geography vs. Edenic dominiontion and represe -ntations of the primal encoun -
ter as “** idealised tribute***” vs. “f***ierce hostility”*** under the weighted an expa nsive capitalists ideology which cannot ye-
t represent those dangerous complexities which consequen escape it yet inevitably return in the text in or Neither but can show to
For the ideology nor mythical creature disc ourse that's is it's 'vehicle openly admit that the Other always pro duces the Self despit-
e it's narrative' which develops due -to a search for self a them which prod uces an inf on inite number's of narative's – how many book including The Life and Str-
ange Surprizing Adve oes ntures of Robinson Crusoe beg in with “I” Myth utopia projection exist because of the gap be tween represen-
tation and the really and more specifica
n the yearly eiightenth chentury the geographically or metaphys-
ically gap between Europe and its emerging colonies as Other come to be economics and ideol ogical indis -pensab
day of coloniaism in the 19chentury in in its con contradddictions and repetition's thought we find that in a sense's Crusoe is not ‘about’ the colonized at all Hugh Riddley claims that
“the Crusoe storierevealed how little interest lay in the newn of the world to be disovered” and how
“the strange advent -urelead.. .back to Europe and to the European self” . Any reading of
Crusoe thus bec oms relentless about the bokk's ‘reading back’ to the Europe h is alway already its birth place about the text as part of the “ideologyll of a new' and vast ed hist orical process” Watt
Rise's dive rgence or conve rgence or the great preoccupaons of Enlightenment utility and the practically natural law's the State of Nature aod the ‘recent inveb ntion’ of ‘human’ in its many forms's
Robinson's Crusoe ‘ mythical represe ntations of the Other -bifurcate into contr adictor -
y doubles noble savage WS cannibalism savage geography vs. Edenic dominiontion and represe -ntations of the primal encoun -
ter as “** idealised tribute***” vs. “f***ierce hostility”*** under the weighted an expa nsive capitalists ideology which cannot ye-
t represent those dangerous complexities which consequen escape it yet inevitably return in the text in or Neither but can show to
For the ideology nor mythical creature disc ourse that's is it's 'vehicle openly admit that the Other always pro duces the Self despit-
e it's narrative' which develops due -to a search for self a them which prod uces an inf on inite number's of narative's – how many book including The Life and Str-
ange Surprizing Adve oes ntures of Robinson Crusoe beg in with “I” Myth utopia projection exist because of the gap be tween represen-
tation and the really and more specifica
n the yearly eiightenth chentury the geographically or metaphys-
ically gap between Europe and its emerging colonies as Other come to be economics and ideol ogical indis -pensab
