Introduction

I've finished reading Friday, or the Other Island by Michel Tournier. I read this while going back and forth between the novel its based on, Defoe's Robinson Crusoe. I've had a keen interest in the topic of otherness/alienation in post-colonialist literature for a long time now, and comparing these two novels felt like a good way of delving into that topic a bit more in-depth. Thanks to a recommendatino from Balckwell I also read Typee by Herman Melville, and used it as a third point of comparison between the novels. Their video comparing Typee to Crusoe provides good context for this post, go watch it if you are interested.

This text was originally posted on the books thread on the Insert Credit forums. It was a 6-page easy I wrote in a couple of days that frankly, I shouldn't have posted. But here it is in expanded form.

Overall I heartily recommend the original Robinson Crusoe and Typee. They have a much broader appeal than Tournier's Friday -- I suspect there's some psychoanalytic stuff going on there that I personally have no grasp on, and as I understand it psychoanalysis can be a turn off, for me it just made the book go in directions I was not expecting. In reality, I greatly enjoyed reading it and found it to be much weirder and interesting than I anticipated.

I'd say if you are into postcolonial theory you should give this book a chance. I wrote this whole post and only once I was done did I realize Deleuze dedicated a section of Logic of Sense to this very same book and with a very similar interest. So I guess I'll have to read that too :)

I'm not sure if I would call the following a review or a discussion of the book's themes. I admit that cohesively discussing three books at once is challenge, and it's been a minute since I've read/wrote about philosophy in this way. But it's fun! I hope I am at least coherent.

Friday, or the Other Island

If you skim through the book's wikipedia article you'll find a very short description of the book's plot. In general terms, this book is a retelling/revision of the original *Robinson Crusoe* that focuses on Crusoe and Friday's relationship throughout their time in the deserted island. The book feels much more abstract than the original and Typee -- the realist depiction of these latter two is not emulated by Tournier. Overall, this novel is much more allegorical in nature (that might put some people off, understandably!)

In the original, Crusoe's first person perspective narrates his day-to-day on the deserted island. He often includes passages from his journal entries as way to describe or contextualize particular mental states. In both cases, this first-person perspective is the vehicle through which we can understand Crusoe as a person. This high-fidelity view of Crusoe's internal world is what makes the original such a compelling case-study or time capsule through which we can understand the colonial mindset of the times.

It was wild to me that Friday, a pivotal character in the story as Crusoe's first and only 'companion' after being shipwrecked for several years, gets such a lackluster focus in the narrative. For example, he is barely mentioned once Crusoe makes his heroic escape from the island and returns to England. This bewilderment at the lack of 'screen-time' Friday gets in the original is not just a criticism of the novel's politics, but also an example of how eurocentrism/colonialism manifest themselves in literature.

That the alienation of Friday as a living subject is effected by Crusoe's eurocentrism and the formal constraints of first-person narration is interesting to think about. In this sense Typee raises the same question as Crusoe does. Is it at all possible for a first-person narrative told from the perspective of the 'colonizer' to validate the subjective experience of an alien 'Other'?

I think this is related to what Balckwell describes in his video on Typee -- Melville's empathetic approach to the natives of the Marquesas is generous and even commendatory, but it is still tinged with language that suggests that, for Melville, the 'Typee's are not fully actualized subjects. For example:

As I extended my wanderings in the valley and grew more familiar with the habits of its inmates, I was fain to confess that, despite the disadvantages of his condition, the Polynesian savage, surrounded by all the luxurious provisions of nature, enjoyed an infinitely happier, though certainly a less intellectual existence than the self-complacent European.

In a lot of ways Typee is a reversal of the kind of first-person account offered in the original Crusoe. Whereas Crusoe is completely unconcerned with Friday's culture, origin and thoughts (even his language), Melville's Tommo (the narrator and protagonist of Typee) is wholly engrossed in the Typee way of life, and provides generous descriptions of their culture to an almost anthropological degree. It is plain that this deep fascination was a function of Tommo's genuine respect for the 'Typees'. That being said, the ways in which Melville stops short of perceiving the people around him as equal subjects to him is also indicative of the same dynamic displayed in the original Crusoe: an innate colonialist bias.

So, I was interested to pick up Friday, or the Other Island with these things in mind. I was very curious to see how a so-called post-colonial retelling of Crusoe was going to play out. I can't quite put words to it, but there is something fascinating in seeing how these big philosophical concepts: otherness, colonial relations and subjectivity play out in the context of a novel versus reading a philosophical text as in Fanon or Cesaire. How these ideas are mediated through particular narrative devices is fun to pay attention to.

Friday, or the Other Island departs from the original by describing Crusoe's actions through a third-person perspective and offering insights into Crusoe's subjective experience by providing excerpts from his journal entries. The main through-line of this book is how Crusoe's experience of himself and his world are affected when there are no Others around him. Here's an example of how the third-person and first-person assist each other in depicting Crusoe in a new light. This example section appears in the beginning of the book:

His state of physical weakness and the softness of sand and mud, but above all the breaking of some spring in himself, had led to his only moving on hands and knees. He knew now that man resembles a person injured in a street riot, who can only stay upright while the crowd packed densely around him continues to prop him up. Exiled from the mass of his fellows, who had sustained him as a part of humanity without his realizing it, he felt that he no longer had the strength to stand on his own feet. He lived on unmentionable foods, gnawing them with his face to the ground. He relieved himself where he lay, and rarely failed to roll in the damp warmth of his own excrement.

And here is how that behavior is contextualized by the inclusion of passages from Crusoe's journal:

Solitude is not a changeless state imposed on me by the wreck of the Virginia. It is a corrosive influence which acts on me slowly but ceaselessly, and in one sense purely destructively. On my first day here I was divided between two human societies, both imaginary -- the vanished crew and the people of the island, which I supposed to be inhabited. I was still warm from contact with my fellow-men, continuing in my mind the dialogue cut short by the disaster. Then the island turned out to be deserted. I was in a land bereft of human kind. The group of my unfortunate companions receded into darkness, and their voices had long been silent when my own was still only beginning to weary of its soliloquy. Since then I have noted with a horrid fascination the dehumanizing process which I feel to be inexorably at work within me.

This is one example where Tournier provides ground to walk on that Dafoe, for whatever reasons, did not provide in the original. Crusoe spends almost a decade by himself in the island in the original and yet seemingly suffers no big shock to his psyche because of it. By using the third person to present Crusoe as someone slowly becoming less human because of his isolation, explicitly because of a lack of Others to 'prop up' his subjectivity, is one of Tournier's major departures from the original, and in my opinion the main contribution of this novel to modern interpretations of Robinson Crusoe.

It is also worthwhile to point out that as can be seen in his journal entry, Crusoe in Friday, or the Other Island is much more introspective in his journals. I might have implied this elsewhere on this longass post, but Tournier's depiction of Crusoe and Friday is following a certain logic borne out of (I assume) his own theory of otherness and subject formation. By making Crusoe a philosopher that is keenly aware of his internal state, it is easier for us to understand the trajectory that Tournier puts him on. I don't mind this, but it is imo valid to be annoyed at this 'teleological' aspect of the novel.

Crusoe's dehumanization goes through certain stages of confusion and enlightenment. The part in the original Crusoe where he begins to build his different forms of sustenance (goat herding, agriculture, etc) is depicted in Friday as an almost psychotic reaction to a world without Others.[^3] In a particularly memorable part of the story, Crusoe is surrounded by his parrot and his dog while at the dinner table and makes the following statements:

It would have made a Stoic smile to have seen me and my little family sit down to dinner. There was my majesty the prince and lord of the whole island; I had the lives of all my subjects at my absolute command; I could hang, draw, give liberty, and take it away, and no rebels among all my subjects. Then, to see how like a king I dined, too, all alone, attended by my servants! Poll [his parrot], as if he had been my favourite, was the only person permitted to talk to me. My dog, who was now grown old and crazy, and had found no species to multiply his kind upon, sat always at my right hand; and two cats, one on one side of the table and one on the other, expecting now and then a bit from my hand, as a mark of especial favour.

This is seemingly said jokingly by Crusoe, at best it's taken as a humorous perspective on his own solemn situation, but Tournier seems to take Crusoe at his word. In *Friday*, Crusoe cannot help but fashion himself the governor of Esperanza (his name for the deserted island), to the extent of crafting and proclaiming a legal charter and penal code for the Island:

On Day 1000 by his calendar Robinson dressed himself in formal attire and closed the door of his official Residence. Standing at a desk which he had designed to enable him to write in an upright position, and in an attitude of solemn formality, he wrote in the largest of the seawashed volumes he had brought off the Virginia: CHARTER OF THE ISLAND OF SPERANZA INAUGURATED ON THE 1000th DAY OF THE LOCAL CALENDAR

The narration tells us:

Thus for Robinson the strenuous ordering of his island was accompanied by the growth, timid in the first instance, of tendencies of which he was still scarcely aware [...] he continued to despair at the imperfections of the structure he was creating. Indeed, his observance of the Charter and the Penal Code, the punishments he inflicted on himself, his rigid adherence to a time schedule that left him not a moment's respite [...] this straitjacket of conventions and prescriptions which he resolutely wore in order to stay upright, did not prevent him from being agonizingly conscious of the wild and untamed presence of the tropical world surrounding him, or, within himself, of the steady work of erosion effected by solitude on the soul of a civilized man.

Crusoe's frantic creation of empty social roles and responsibilities, from the creation of time-keeping devices to the enforcement of a charter and penal code of which he is the only subject, is only one of different ways that Crusoe tries to recreate the Others gaze. This having no viable supplement for this, Crusoe is always keenly aware of how fragile his recreated world is.

Similar to the original, Friday comes into play towards the second half of the book when Crusoe saves him from the cannibals. In this retelling, Crusoe only saves Friday by accident. Therefore, Crusoe accepts Friday only reluctantly and even then only barely acknowledging his humanity. In specific terms, he was utterly disappointed that the person he saved was a 'savage' and not an equal.

It was apparent from the get go that Friday posed a particular problem for Crusoe. Despite lamenting that his companion was less than human, he is nevertheless aware that Friday is an actualized subject and an expression of another possible world, one that Crusoe can have no control over. This is how Crusoe works through the problem:

My course is clear. I must fit my slave into the system which I have perfected over the years. My success in doing so will be manifest on the day when there can no longer be a doubt that Speranza and he have jointly benefited from their meeting. I had to find a name for the newcomer. I did not choose to give him a Christian name until he was worthy of that dignity. A savage is not wholly a human being. Nor could I in decency give him an invented name, although this would perhaps have been the sensible solution. I think I have solved the problem with some elegance in giving him the name of the day on which I saved him Friday."

Friday's good-will was boundless, but on the other hand he was very young and there were times when youth was too much for him. Then he would laugh. He would burst into an explosion of laughter, confounding the Governor, the sober-minded mentor, the administrator of the island, and putting him out of countenance. Robinson detested those youthful outbursts, which threw his order into confusion and undermined his authority. It was Friday's laughter which first moved Robinson to strike him. Friday was required to repeat after him the religious and moral axioms which he propounded in measured tones. For example --- 'God is an all-powerful, omniscient master, infinitely good, merciful and just, the Creator of Man and of Al Things.' And Friday's laugh rang out, irrepressible, lyrical and blasphemous, to be extinguished like a snuffed candle by a resounding blow on the cheek.

In the original, the process by which Friday comes to learn his masters language, and follow his orders is hidden from view. I think it's not something Dafoe would want to depict or he just didn't think about it. But again, the original is full of omissions that become interesting in their own right. Friday's laughter bothers Crusoe because it's a reminder that Friday is simply playing the role of servant. As much as Crusoe tries to suppress it, Friday is his own subjective center of the world. The easiest way to describe what I'm thinking here is if we imagine a solar system suddenly gaining a second sun. For Crusoe, the addition of this other "center of gravity" bothers him as his whole edifice is built on him being the ruler-maker of Speranza. Friday's innate subversive potential has to literally be smacked out of him. Tournier's Crusoe inevitable turns to violence and punishment in order to 'enforce' his conception of the world.

Circling back to Typee, Tommo is at the complete mercy of the 'Typee' people. He has no privileged position except in the narration of his story. I'm inclined to say that there is actually little point of comparison here. In his video comparing the two, wickedcestus draws a contrast between the original Crusoe and Typee by pointing out that in Typee, Tommoo chooses to visit the island instead of staying with his ship's crew. This is an important difference because Tommoo's objective is to live amongs the island's native population, not to establish his own territory or colony, as Crusoe does. Therefore, Crusoe's desire to stockpile and defend his fortification as well as to establish a system of roles and conduct for his subjects to follow is altogether missing in Tommo. I think this is why Tommoo's condescending admiration of the Typees is easier to stomach, as there is a level of empathy there that is miles ahead than what is offered to Friday.

But this example of Friday's laughter provides another way of looking at Tommo's relationship with the Typees. Is it far fetched to say that Tommoo admiration of the Typees is a result of his fitting the Typees into a particular mold? It feels like the same operation Crusoe performs on Friday, beating him as soon as he steps out of line, except in Tommoo's case there is no violence. While Tommo's perspective is still one based on conceptions of white supremacy and eurocentrism, his treatment of the Typees puts those conceptions into question. This is one aspect of what I think is the paradox of Melville's politics. With one hand he exposes the pitfalls of colonization, and with the other paints the Typees as uncivilized savages.

This is a topic I'd like to interrogate a little more once I read more of Melville. I have some quotations off of Typee that are interesting to look into in more depth but this entry is already incredibly long I'm sorry lol.

Another thing I'm still chewing on is related to my earlier questions about the role that first-person narratives play in *Crusoe* and *Typee*. I might have confused myself by trying to focus on the role that narrative devices play in depicting an alien Other. A few years ago I was really into Bakhtin's theory of polyphony. I'm not as smart as I used to be but I bet there is fertile ground there to analyze these books.

I'll conclude by saying that the way that Tournier lets the second half of the play out is very interesting. In these sections he depicts the struggles between Crusoe and Friday. Despite being a servant, Friday continues to poke holes in Crusoe's carefully constructed world and we can see the effect of that in his journal entries. The ending is a compelling reversal of what happens in the original, and imo poses a possible solution to Crusoe's conflict. However, there are several aspects of the novel that can be interrogated/critiqued. But again, thats perhaps for another time.

I hope this overlong post is enough to entice some people to read one of these three books and think about them in a similar way. Towards the end it felt like I was commentating the text which doesn't sound fun to read for people who are hearing about this book for the first time and would perhaps like to read it themselves. If you're made it this far thank you for reading!