This is a companion piece to Barbara Taylor’s article ‘Robinson Crusoe Counsels Against Solitude’ recently published Open Access in History Workshop Journal 100.
Who are we with, when we are alone? No-one, our selves, memories, loved ones living and dead, God or gods? Over the centuries the answers have been multiple, diverse and often contradictory. Solitude has been, and remains, one of the most puzzling eternals of the human condition.
Probably the most famous western solitary is Robinson Crusoe. In the three centuries since his literary birth (Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, 1719) Crusoe has become a global icon of solitude, his twenty-eight year sojourn on his ‘desert’ (deserted) Caribbean island is emblematic of ‘man in a state of perfect isolation’ (Edgar Allen Poe). What more can be said about a figure whose story has been endlessly evoked, translated, bowdlerised, filmed, performed, debated? ‘We have all become Crusoes,’ a friend said to me during the Covid pandemic.
Yet, a closer look at Crusoe’s story yields surprises. Solitude, it seems, has many faces. It is terrifying: in his early days on the island Crusoe was consumed by fear that he would be ‘devoured by wild beasts, murdered by savages, or starved to death for want of food’. It is lonely: witnessing a shipwreck near his island from which none of the crew survive, Crusoe breaks into a wail of misery: ‘Oh that there had been but one or two, nay, or but one soul saved out of this ship … that I might but have had one companion, one fellow-creature, to have spoken to me and to have conversed with!’ It is energising: Crusoe’s hugely successful exertions (house-building, farming, hunting) have inspired generations of schoolchildren. And it is revelatory: during a period of serious illness Crusoe has a terrifying dream. Finding a Bible inside a chest that had been lost in the shipwreck, he experiences a spiritual epiphany, in which God’s ‘presence and the communications of His grace to my soul … fully make up to me the deficiencies of my solitary state’. He is ‘happier’ in his solitude, he insists, than in ‘any other state in the world.’ Yet, solitude is also ‘unnatural’, ‘bestial’, ‘a rape upon the soul’. These descriptions come from ‘On Solitude’, the first chapter in a 1719 sequel to Robinson Crusoe. Writing again as Crusoe, Defoe counsels his readers: ‘In solitude a man converses with himself, and he is not always sure that he does not converse with his enemy.’
The history of solitude is riddled with such ambiguities. From antiquity onward people have debated the merits and demerits of solitude, the opposed claims of the vita activa and the vita contemplativa – solitude verses action, as it was long denominated. A half century before Robinson Crusoe was published, the Restoration diarist John Evelyn engaged in a vigorous pamphlet exchange with George Mackenzie, a Scottish lawyer, in which they rehearsed longstanding antitheses between negotium (public busyness) verses otium (private life, leisure, contemplation), practice verses theory, society verses self, city verses country, service verses freedom, conversation verses contemplative silence. The debates proliferated in moral and religious treatises, poetry, medicine, natural philosophy, so that by the time Defoe entered the fray, ‘solitude’ was a palimpsest of competing meanings and associations.
While Defoe’s extraordinary career — as a committed Dissenter, businessman, political pamphleteer, journalist, spy, and seminal writer in multiple genres — has been discussed in depth, his attitude to solitude has received less attention. In personal life Defoe was far from solitary, marrying early and acquiring a big family. Yet in many respects he was an isolated figure, bankrupted twice through failed businesses and financial speculations; dunned incessantly by creditors; regularly threatened with arrest; imprisoned multiple times; working all sides of the political fence; constantly under attack for his religious affiliation while simultaneously carrying on fierce disagreements with his fellow Dissenters. ‘How I stand alone in the world’, he lamented in 1706, ‘abandoned by those very people that own I have done them service … how, with … no helps but my own industry, I have forced my way with undiscouraged diligence, through a sea of debt and misfortune’.
In fact, Defoe had powerful friends in high places. Nonetheless, his life, like that of Crusoe’s, was one of exceptional self-reliance. At all times, however, he was accompanied by God, ‘my unfailing support through my misfortunes’. But this was a Calvinist God: fierce, unyielding. John Calvin famously espoused ‘worm theology’, portraying humanity as crawling like worms on the earth to emphasize God’s supreme majesty and human insignificance. This was no creed of Christian benevolence; only by God’s grace could man overcome his innate depravity. ‘Nature has left this tincture in the Blood’, Defoe wrote in a 1701 poem, ‘That all men would be Tyrants if they could.’
As so often with Defoe, these convictions were wobbly: his ‘man Friday’ (the native Carib with whom Crusoe spends the final period of his island isolation) is depicted as naturally kind; a man of deep affections who finds ideas about evil and original sin difficult to comprehend. The damnation and hellfire that loomed large in so much Puritan theology appears to have played little part in Defoe’s; the novel has much more to say about God’s love than divine retribution. Nonetheless, the image of natural man as a creature of unmitigated egoism whose life is ‘solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short’ (in the words of Thomas Hobbes, who Defoe admired), has many echoes in Robinson Crusoe.
Human existence, Defoe argues at one point, is inherently solitary. Some influential scholars have interpreted this as a mark of his modernity, of the solipsistic individualism increasingly characteristic of western society from the eighteenth century onwards. Certainly, statements like this one, from ‘On Solitude’, would appear to bear it out: ‘Everything revolves in our minds by innumerable circular motions, all centring in ourselves’. Defoe writes:
‘… What are the sorrows of other men to us, and what their joys? The world is nothing to us but as it more or less to our relish. All reflection is carried home, and our dear self is, in one respect, the end of living. Hence man may be properly said to be alone in the midst of the crowds and hurry of men and business … Our meditations are all solitude in perfection; our passions are all exercised in retirement; we love, we hate, we covet, we enjoy, all in privacy and solitude … All that we communicate of those things to any other is but for their assistance in the pursuit of our desires; the end is at home; the enjoyment, the contemplation, is all solitude and retirement; it is for ourselves we enjoy and for ourselves we suffer.’
But what early commentators on the novel described as Crusoe’s ‘awful solitude’ is also often represented by Defoe as not just wretched but unliveable: ‘Man,’ he writes, ‘is a creature so formed for society, that it may not only be said that it is not good for him to be alone, but ‘tis really impossible he should be alone.’ The solitary person is a non-person. Inevitable, impossible, unthinkable. How do we now understand this, inasmuch as we can understand it? Solitude is not unitary but plural, a field of experience lived in multiple registers. In this sense, the paradoxes of Crusoe/Defoe’s reflections on it are typical of this enigmatic eternal of human life.
Feature image courtesy of Paolo Bici via Unsplash.