Exactly 300 years ago, in April 1719, Robinson Crusoe was published. Given the national nervous breakdown we are living through, literary anniversaries are easily overlooked, but Jack Robinson has remembered his namesake’s birthday and in this cheeky polemical essay he celebrates it with a vengeance by making Defoe’s novel responsible for the mess we currently find ourselves in.
For Defoe’s contemporaries, Crusoe was a parable about pious economic rectitude. For the 19th century, it became a study of romantic solipsism: Rimbaud, coining a verb, said that his mad heart “robinsoned” around the world. In the 20th century, it warned about civilised man’s regression to barbarism. In Michel Tournier’s novel Friday, the castaway coats himself with mud and ritualistically humps the earth, thrusting his penis – for want of better outlets – into a mossy crevice.
Or did Defoe’s stolid hero get through his ordeal by concentrating on humdrum manual chores? A postwar critic admired his endurance and remarked that Crusoe was one of the few books that had something to say to a survivor of Auschwitz.
Jack Robinson – the jokey alias of Charles Boyle, a witty and ingenious dropout from the publishing trade – is unimpressed by the rich, imaginative afterlife of a story that soon became a myth. He considers Defoe’s novel to be “a dull thing” and questions its elevation to “the sacred status of Eng Lit”; what matters to him is its malign influence – its xenophobic propaganda and its pandering to the delusions of imperial Britain.
Forget about the desert island as a symbol of ego or Crusoe’s solitude as a terrifying test of sanity: in Robinson’s view, the book, written by a slave trader, was intended as both “a prospectus for potential investors” in the South Seas and a manual outlining the DIY skills that colonists would need to conquer the wilderness. In 1903, a schools inspector trumpeted the novel’s educational value by declaring that “nothing, not even football, will do more to maintain and extend the dominion of the Anglo-Saxon than the spirit of Robinson Crusoe”. Dominion back then was a synonym for colony; football, with its tribes of baying hooligans rallied by the likes of Tommy Robinson, can be fascism by other means.
Much of this has been said before. The novelty here is the way Jack Robinson uses Crusoe to analyse the mad act of self-maiming we call Brexit. As he demonstrates, all the blinkered mental preconditions for the Leave campaign exist in the novel. Crusoe fancies himself the monarch of his paltry terrain, although his only subject is the enslaved Friday: “sovereignty” is for him a mystical value, as it remains for atavistic fogeys such as Jacob Rees-Mogg. The alien footprint on the beach alarms Crusoe because it announces that his realm is about to be besieged by migrants, probably of a different race. His panic is hypocritical, since his own father is “a foreigner from Bremen” and his surname sneakily anglicises Kreutznaer, a fact that prompts Robinson to point out that the portly oaf who blathers loudest on behalf of the Little Englanders was exotically christened Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson. (I’d suggest tsar Piffle as a useful abbreviation.)
Crusoe’s staunchly Anglo-Saxon identity is manufactured and this insecure fiction explains his prickly mistrust of others. In one of his acutest perceptions, Robinson says that this autocratic man has a “sense of embattlement” that is “the obverse of his sense of entitlement”. Hence his bristling paranoia: he spends years reinforcing a stockade to keep out imaginary enemies, labouring over a wall that is an almost Trumpian hallucination.
In 2014, David Cameron wrote a patriotic op-ed about Magna Carta for the Mail on Sunday, in which he argued that freedom, football and fish and chips were “what sets Britain apart”, a phrase that evokes Defoe by equating uniqueness with insularity. Then, having called the 2016 referendum and excused himself from managing its aftermath, Cameron retreated to write his self-justifying memoirs in a “double-glazed, sheep’s wool-insulated, Farrow and Ball-painted ‘shepherd’s hut’” – Crusoe’s rudimentary cabin fitted out with expensive modern frills.
After he published Crusoe, Defoe went on a tour around what he called “the whole island of Great Britain”. Although he dismissed the Scilly Isles as irrelevant “excrescences”, he described the rest of the crumbly landmass as a self-sufficient fortress, “one solid rock formed by Nature to resist the otherwise irresistible power of the ocean”; as proof, he pointed out that the Roman general Agricola only subdued Britain at his seventh try.
Brexit demonstrates the persistence of that insular worldview, with EU bureaucrats replacing Roman legions, the Spanish Armada or the Luftwaffe as the extraterritorial menace. We are all marooned on Crusoe’s island and our self-proclaimed leaders seem determined to ensure that we will never be rescued.
• Good Morning, Mr Crusoe by Jack Robinson is published by CB Editions (£10)
