III. or the adventure is always already violent

Daniel Defoe’s The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe is set in 1651–94, and was published in 1719, thirty-one years after Oroonoko, or The Royal Slave. I will not reproduce the plot of Robinson Crusoe so much as index some of its possible significa­tions, which so often go unattended in favour of praise for its narrative structure and lasting influence on English novels. The story is known, and one needs only the slightest of gestures to usher its spectre into every room. It has become a compelling template for narrative structure and narrative idea in the novel, for plot and feeling. So: someone goes into the world, an unfa­miliar world, where there is no food or shelter and there are hostile elements whose purpose is to kill or capture you. You arm yourself, you find food, you wait for deliverance, you appeal to God. You say, “If I get out of this, I will never do this again.” You discover God. You bargain with God. You avoid the hostile non-human life, you kill some of the hostile almost-human life—and you save some of them, who are so grateful that henceforth they adore you. Eventually, you are rescued, and you win the prize.

Oh no, wait: that’s a long-running reality TV show, Survivor.

One can fill in the countless narratives, the countless itera­tions of this novel, in the many education and communication regimes of the past and present. Let’s go back to 1719, then, and The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe.

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Our expectation at the outset of the novel is the survival of Crusoe. Adventures never end in death—at least, not for the protagonist, and not in novels. They are about life and death, but the protagonist must survive. And we are taken in by that desire and expectation. We wonder: How will he fare? How will he continue to live? We know vaguely that his survival depends on slavery, as this is more than a shadow at the beginning of the text. Perhaps it is somewhere in the warnings and reticence of the father: stay in England, make a living on the secondary and tertiary economies of slave trading and plantation slavery. But the reader is positioned with the protagonist, against his father—longing to defy the father, to experience the world. Crusoe is young and fleeing a dull life and his father’s control. We want him to go on the adventure. How else will the book proceed?

The innocence implied, or introduced, in the word “adven­ture”—the gesture toward the seemingly unknown—is not innocence at all, but a will to strive and to make something. And in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, readers understood what that something was, just as we too understand: notions of investment, finances, venture capital, etc. We know the words; we demur the meanings. As those earlier readers did. Or, we love the meanings. As they did.

Crusoe is “entirely bent upon seeing the world”. To “see the world” is a working phrase for exploitation; likewise, to go abroad, to make one’s fortune, and so on, are all euphemisms or understandings for conquest—or profit, at least. The adventure is already violent—it presupposes an encounter that has no boundaries and from which there will be profit. It is not a “journey” with travellers who go to seek enlightenment; an adventure is not a supplicant act. (And even a journey of “enlightenment” is surely wed to the adventures of slavery and genocide.) The adventure sets out as the character does, a character who indeed may change—but only toward aggression, because he expects to encounter dangers. There is a penetrating quality to the adven­ture. It is prepared for violence or harm, either receiving or giving that violence. It is prepared to act, as opposed to witness. An aggressive foray is understood in the word “adventure.” The land­scape of adventure is kinetic, volatile, risky. And the adventurer is prepared for battle.

Dionne Brand (Clea Christakos Gee)

Dionne Brand is the award-winning author of 23 books of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, including Land to Light On, Ossuaries, What We All Long For, and A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging. She is the editorial director of Alchemy, an imprint of Knopf Canada, and professor emerita at the University of Guelph. Salvage: Readings from the Wreck is out now.

Excerpted from Salvage: Readings from the Wreck by Dionne Brand. Copyright © 2024 Dionne Brand. Published by Knopf Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited. Reproduced by arrangements with the Publisher. All rights reserved.