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... ensibilities, his queasy fastidiousness, wondering if this were a last rare token of civilization, or only a dead weight that he must be willing to shed before embarking upon a new way of life (Tournier 164). Its the essence of concern for another living being for this ugly birth putting of the self on the same level with another, the lack of need for control and domination, that probably most affects the mind of Crusoe; a mind that is, at this point, flipping ever more precariously between an explicit, conscious condemnation of Fridays animal bonds and an unconscious desire to abandon the cultivated island for the other island, he dreams about. Ironically, Crusoe himself writes the sad but true statement that, it is typical of our English nature to show more mercy toward animals than to men (Tournier 161), a subtle reminder that, while close to a breakthrough, hes at the same time far from it. In fact, the closer he gets, the farther his conscious mind removes him from it. While a certain quality of Fridays mind spread, around him a confusion which infected Robinson himself (Tournier 164), his conscious mind fought the slippage with continued domination, overtly symbolized by the whip he constructed.
The whip, of course, comes about as hes haunted by the striped mandrake leaves and his suspicion that Friday has sexually soiled his island. Tellingly, along with the whip comes a renewed dependence on the Bible for guidance. In perhaps the most overt statement about the dangers of Western religious thinking, were given Crusoes twisted, aggrandized thinking as he falls into a rage and beats Friday savagely when he catches the man in the act of cuckolding him. He was the Flood drowning human iniquity over the whole surface of the globe, the fire from Heaven purging Sodom and Gomorrah, the Seven Plagues chastising Pharaoh for his hardness of heart (Tournier 167). Unable to deal with the situation and probably having scared himself with his own outburst, Crusoe reverts fully to the Bible for guidance. Who was he, then?
Was he the avenging arm of Jehovah, or was he marked by the curse of Cain? He got to his feet and turned and ran to cleanse himself in the source of all wisdom... (Tournier 167). The barbaric event marks a paradigm-shift, like many that follow the emotional power of a domestic dispute, as catharsis gives way to confusion (Platten 60). After gaining control of his emotions and a subsequent emotional bout with the scripture, in a deep moment of introspection Crusoe becomes ever more conscious of the gap between the image of the island projected into his mind by the garbled recollections of human society, or his reading the Bible, and the inhuman, primitive, and uncompromising world whose truth he was timidly seeking (Tournier 171).
Its in the emotional denouement of the beating that Crusoe begins, for the first time, to appreciate Friday as another human being. He notices the divinity in the mans physical characteristics, which ends with the epiphany of the mans inherent humanity. It took his near-death, but Friday had brought Crusoe round to the realization that people are people: For the first time he was clearly envisaging the possibility that within the crude and brutish half-caste who so exasperated him another Friday might be concealed just as he had once suspected, before exploring the cave or discovering the tomb, that another Speranza might be hidden beneath his cultivated island (Tournier 172). Though on the brink of self-discovery, of breakthrough, Crusoe again slinks back from ultimate change and life resumed its arduous and monotonous course (Tournier 172); another example of a step back in the wake of forward-thinking. He is, however, awaiting a decisive event, something overwhelming, a radically new beginning that would reduce to nothingness all his past undertakings and future plans (Tournier 173). Its Friday who brings about that decisive moment with the explosion in the cave.
The explosion is the breakthrough moment, the final paradigm-shift that will leave Crusoe truly open for a new way of thinking. In the immediate aftermath of the explosion, he symbolically stood up and stripped off the rags still clinging to him (Tournier 177). The eventual fall (and subsequent impotence) of the cedar teeth symbol of Crusoes paternity and dominance over the island frees Friday of his tedious slavery and Crusoe of the remaining physical reminders of his Western casino-puritanical belief system. It is into this eternal present that Robinson is thrown by the explosion, Purdy writes, into a limbo rendered sacred by the sacrifice of duration to the moment by the letting go of the linear logic of subordination on which he had long depended for his identity and his sanity (Tournier 189).
And so the way is set for the fulfillment of Crusoes metamorphosis. Before ascending to the white-light of pagan sun-worship it was necessary that he be stripped, figuratively, of his remaining rigid accoutrements of neurotic Western ideology. Friday the foil is now in the perfect position to play a Laconic mirror and spiritual guide. Their relationship is based not on domination or monetary dependency, but mutual respect and spiritual need. Watt writes: Earlier writers, Spenser, Shakespeare, Donne, Ben Jonson and Dryden, for example, had tended to support the traditional economic and social order and had attacked many of the symptoms of emergent individualism.
By the beginning of the eighteenth century, however, Addison, Steele, and Defoe were somewhat ostentatiously setting the seal of literary approval on the heroes of economic individualism (62). Robinson Crusoe of 1719 is just such a character the isolated hero of capitalist virtue, one conveniently propped with the dogma of Puritan religion. Recast by Tournier after 248 years of flourishing capitalism and Western religion with the drives and latent desires of a new movement and new generations at the end of his journey he has discovered that quite apart from God or money, it is another person one needs for transcendence. Works Cited Cloonan, William. Michel Tournier (chat. 2: Vendredi, ou les lines du Pacifique). Boston: Twayne, 1985.
Lentz, Millicent. The Experience of Time and the Concept of Happiness in Michel Tournier's Friday and Robinson: Life on Speranza Island. Childrens Literature Association Quarterly 11 (1986): 24 - 29. Platten, David.
Michel Tournier and the Metaphor of Fiction. Chat. 2: Suspended Animation: Vendredi ou Les Lines du Pacifique). New York: St. Martins, 1999. Purdy, Anthony.
Skilful in the usury of time: Michel Tournier and the Critique of Economism. Robinson Crusoe: Myths and Metamorphoses. Ed. Live Space and Brian Simpson. New York: St. Martins Press, 1996. 182 - 198.
Tournier, Michel. Friday. Trans. Norman Denny.
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University P, 1969 Watt, Ian. The Rise of the Novel. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1960
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Research essay sample on Time And Spiritual Transcendence In Crusoe
