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He is, on the contrary, rather self-congratulatory and self-
approving. No doubts exist about the identity of the char-
acters in Wyss s story. They have fixed personalities from the
beginning. These personalities are carefully labeled: Fritz s
courage and level-headedness as the eldest, Ernst s laziness
and bookish thoughtfulness in the next eldest son, then the
impetuous and somewhat foolhardy Jack, and, last, the
youngest, the naïve but game Franz.
Wyss s motive seems to have been partly to write a book
that would correct Robinson Crusoe, just as Coetzee s Foe was
quite overtly to do in our own epoch. The Swiss Family Robinson
is the most famous and best of the  Robinsoniads that
followed the original in the eighteenth and early nineteenth
centuries. The two adjectives in the title,  Swiss and  family
identify what is being corrected. In place of Robinson
Crusoe s isolated self-reliance, it puts the  family values of
loving interdependence and cooperation, along with the
pieties of nationalism. The Swiss Family Robinson is unashamedly
sexist and patriarchal. The father is explicitly referred to with
the latter adjective. The long-suffering mother is kept in her
place, cheerfully performing endless household chores. She
has no given name. She is just  die Mütter, or sometimes she
is called by the diminutive  Mütterchen. Any other females
are conspicuously absent, until the climactic episode of Jenny
Montrose, added later. These boys can go it alone, without any
women around, except the mother, who sews, cooks, and
washes. Girls may like The Swiss Family Robinson, but it is not a
141
How to Read Comparatively
 girls book, unless all that housework done by the mother
can be seen as useful instructions about a woman s lot.
In place of Crusoe s faithful/faithless, ironically under-
cut, English Puritanism, The Swiss Family Robinson puts a Swiss
Protestantism that is never disobeyed or questioned. That
Protestantism stresses piety, hard work, and collective rather
than individual self-help. A great deal of praying punctuates
The Swiss Family Robinson. That is something I had entirely
forgotten from my first reading, perhaps because my father
too was a clergyman, a Baptist minister. We had grace before
meals and were taught to say prayers before going to sleep. It
probably seemed natural enough to me that there is a lot of
praying in this book. The difference from Robinson Crusoe is that
in The Swiss Family Robinson religion is much more nominal,
taken for granted, incorporated in everyday behavior. Defoe s
Robinson Crusoe is, among other things, a fictive Puritan conver-
sion narrative, modeled on real seventeenth-century ones. A
Puritan Protestant interpretation of experience is deeply
inwrought in Robinson Crusoe. It is much harder to miss or pass
over than the routine praying in The Swiss Family Robinson. An
example is a lengthy reflection by Crusoe about the  secret
intimations of Providence that have led him to make right
decisions when the wrong would have been disastrous:
 certainly they are a proof of the converse of spirits and the
secret communication between those embodied and those
unembodied, and such a proof as can never be withstood,
and so on.
The ultimate message of Robinson Crusoe, however, is
ambiguous. While Crusoe is camping out for twenty-eight
years, two months, and nineteen days on his desert island and
having his conversion experience, the slave-worked sugar
and tobacco plantation he has left behind in  the Brazils is
142
On
Literature
flourishing. Crusoe ends his life a rich man, whereas
Coetzee s Cruso dies in Susan s arms on the way back to
England after they are rescued. Defoe s Crusoe s wealth is
another example of Providence s care for him. He also
maintains possession of the island he had lived on for so
many years. He colonizes it successfully. This endpoint is a
spectacular example of  religion and the rise of capitalism,
to borrow the title of a famous book by R. H. Tawney. It also
anticipates the ending of The Swiss Family Robinson. In the latter
book too a permanent colony is established.
Both Robinson Crusoe and The Swiss Family Robinson are episodic
and open-ended, promising further adventures that might be
told. Defoe did publish The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe a
few months after the publication of Robinson Crusoe in 1719. The
Serious Reflections . . . of Robinson Crusoe appeared in 1720. Both
Robinson Crusoe and the two Alice books, however, have plots. All
three have narrative goals toward which the whole story
moves, however wild those may be in the Alice books, each of
which has its ending in a scene of surrealist violence.  You re
nothing but a pack of cards! cries Alice in Alice s Adventures,
and they turn into just that:  the whole pack rose up into the
air, and came flying down upon her. The last episode of
Through the Looking-Glass is that weird dinner party in which
Alice is introduced to the leg of mutton and then to the
pudding:  Alice  Mutton: Mutton  Alice . . . Pudding 
Alice: Alice  Pudding. When Alice wakes from her dream,
the Red Queen turns back into the black kitten. The Swiss
Family Robinson, on the contrary, is endlessly episodic. In each
episode, each one probably corresponding to a single [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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