By HOMERO VIZEU ARAÚJO*
The bourgeois hero and slave trader at the origin of the rise of the novel
The saga of the English adventurer who spends twenty-eight years isolated on an uninhabited island has ceased to be the plot of an 18th century novel and has become a kind of myth of Western culture, according to Ian Watt. It is worth remembering that among the characters analyzed in the book Myths of Modern Individualism: Faust, Don Quixote, Don Juan, Robinson Crusoe, by Ian Watt, the only myth that emerges from the 18th century is Robinson Crusoe, the others come from the 16th and 17th centuries, which is a sign of the strength of the appeal of Daniel Defoe's character.
My interest here is less to discuss, in the novel Robinson Crusoe, characterization of the character, progress of the prose, etc., and also to evaluate episodes that have been of little interest to most commentators, including perhaps the most famous among them, Jean Jacques Rousseau. My focus is on the moments before and after the adventures and misadventures on the desert island, that is, the proposal here is to evaluate where Robinson leaves for his ill-fated journey and what happens to him after being rescued.
A marginal, or rather peripheral, perspective to approach the classic so often referred to, which allows us to claim a slight supremacy here, after all, this is Brazil's debut among the classics of the Western novel. Or will we have a novel prior to 1719 in which Bahia de Todos os Santos appears as a slave-owning sugar center?
Incidentally, no claim to be particularly original is made here in recording an early triumph of the European realist novel, which in its first efforts to map the trajectories of the bourgeoisie already describes a distant and prosperous tropical Portuguese colony. In this sense, the aim here is to contribute to a history of the novel in the New World, which could include – but would that really be a surprise? – the prestigious novel whose hero became a myth, since the colonial experience had been prematurely apprehended in the literary tradition of the West. On the periphery of Daniel Defoe's plot, the Brazilian experience was inserted, or, better, according to the Marxist argument, primitive accumulation and its violence were revealed, in a register that frames and relativizes the more palatable core of the fable of self-made man, which became so famous.
It is also worth remembering that Daniel Defoe's book is literally at the beginning of the emergence of the novel according to Ian Watt, in another famous text, The rise of romance, whose third chapter, and the first dedicated to a specific novel, is “Robinson Crusoe, individualism and romance”. For Ian Watt, in Robinson Crusoe The change that has occurred in relation to the classical rule and convention is already very clear: “In the literary, philosophical and social spheres, the classical focus on the ideal, the universal and the collective has completely shifted and the modern field of vision is mainly occupied by the isolated particular, the directly learned meaning and the autonomous individual” (WATT, 1990, p. 57). Thus, realism was advancing strongly towards the deconventionalization that would intensify until it established new rules in Western fiction.
According to Ian Watt, Daniel Defoe sets a new standard of expression: “Daniel Defoe, whose philosophical position has much in common with that of the English empiricists of the seventeenth century, expressed the various elements of individualism more fully than any other writer before him, and his work presents a unique demonstration of the relationship between individualism in its many forms and the rise of the novel. This relationship is particularly evident in his first novel, Robinson Crusoe.” (WATT, 1990, p. 57).
Ian Watt's interpretation of the book in question is reworked in Franco Moretti's thought-provoking and articulate book, The bourgeois: between history and literature, whose second chapter analyzes and interprets Robinson Crusoe as a synthesis of bourgeois attributes. A part of the chapter will be revisited in the following pages and it will become clear how much I owe to him for writing this essay, although in order to characterize his bourgeois Crusoe Moretti considers relatively little the narrative as a whole and the episodes before and after the island. But it is Franco Moretti who correctly emphasizes the relevant circumstances in which Robinson Crusoe finally gains access to the condition of a man of means, which is relatively disregarded by studies on the work.
The disregard of Robinson's “adventures” is recommended by Rousseau in Émile, of 1762, in order to leave aside or even avoid the passages of Robinson Crusoe which refer to episodes external to the Island of Despair and foreign to Robinson's self-construction, or rather, external to the discipline and intelligence that would give the marrow to the isolated but efficient individual. Here we follow the opposite line to this prestigious orientation, which leads us to evaluate the presence of slavery in the book.
Regarding Robinson's relationship with slavery, it is worth noting that the character is far from ignoring the procedures and violence of the activity, especially since he himself was enslaved on the African Atlantic coast, before landing in Bahia. There he had to escape, with the help of a young man named Xuri, from a fierce slave owner, which does not prevent Robinson from selling Xuri, when the opportunity arises. The sale comes with an extenuating clause that satisfies Robinson's dubious feelings.
Ian Watt comments: “Consider, for example, Crusoe’s treatment of Xuri, the Moorish boy with whom he escapes from Salem. Crusoe promises Xuri, “if you will trust me I will make a great man of you” (p. 45); later Xuri’s great affection and admirable services lead Crusoe to say that he will love him “forever.” But when they are both saved by the captain of a Portuguese ship, and Crusoe tries to do business with him, his savior offers him 60 reales de eight (an old Iberian coin) – double the price paid to Judas – for Xuri. For a few moments Crusoe “is reluctant to sell the poor boy’s freedom, who had so faithfully helped me to regain mine” (…); but in the end he cannot resist the money, and, to save face, stipulates that the boy “shall be freed within ten years, provided he becomes a Christian.” Crusoe will have the opportunity to regret the sale, but this will only happen when he realizes that Xuri could be of great use on the island.” (WATT, 1997, p. 173)
Robinson's pro-slavery pragmatism was already defined, therefore, before arriving in Brazil, where, according to the book's first-person account, there is no mention of slaves and whippings to narrate Robinson's patrimonial evolution. The not-so-naive fable of self-made man and the profile of the focused and disciplined bourgeois subject literally takes on sinister and mercantile contours, once the reasons that led Robinson to embark again to cross the Atlantic towards the coast of Guinea are exposed.
He leaves Salvador to obtain slaves from Africa and return to Brazil, where he would deliver the order to his friends and associates in Bahia; that is to say, it is a slave ship on which Robinson is shipwrecked and whose wreckage will alleviate his twenty-eight years of isolation. Up until this point, these are fortuitous and less relevant conditions (according to whom?) to the plot, although far from being insignificant. But as the novel draws to a close, Brazil returns with prominence. The twenty-eight years of tenacity, labor and discipline on the island did not yield Robinson a single leaky guinea: it was the slave income from Brazilian lands that would guarantee Robinson's peaceful and prosperous return (through bills of exchange!) to England.
In order for Robinson Crusoe to enjoy the proper status in his homeland, the income from the South Atlantic slave trade circuit had to come into play, which pushes the meritocratic center of the novel into the category of ideological digression to cover up the brutality of extracting value from slave labor, conveniently distant and abstract. After all, when it comes time to balance the books, all the effort and discipline of the good bourgeois become vain, and what really counts is the investment in the slave trade zone, that is, the income obtained from the efforts of enslaved Africans in Portuguese America.
Robinson gains access to an income through a stroke of luck that returns him to Lisbon and to an honest and kind merchant who is willing to pay what he owes him. That is, once again, we are on the level of arbitrary and adventurous procedures, with strokes of luck that are decisive in contrast to the calculation, discipline and rational projection that guarantee survival on the island and the fame of the book. A bourgeois in search of lessons on prosperity would have to disobey Rousseau and read Defoe's secondary stories to achieve the necessary profit, in an irony that results in formal consequences affecting the flow of the prose, the emphasis of the narrator, etc.
The Reluctant Pilgrim in the Slave Tropics
"Oh, Lord, won't you buy me a Mercedes Benz” (Janis Joplin).
When he is rescued with Xuri on the northwest coast of Africa, where he was a fugitive after having been reduced to slavery, Robinson is kindly received by the ship's captain, who also tries to buy Xuri. The two gentlemen exceed in mutual courtesy and try to negotiate the young Muslim, with a clause that satisfies Robinson: “However, when I told the Captain my reasons, he conceded that they were just, and offered me a middle term, that he would assume before the boy the obligation to give him his freedom within ten years, if he would become a Christian. In view of this, as Xuri agreed to go to him, I left him to the Captain” (DEFOE, 2011, p. 83).
After the cordial slave negotiations, the ship docks in Brazil, or Brasis, as Defoe tastefully refers to it and the excellent translation by Sergio Flaksman maintains. Or rather, it arrives in Bahia, more specifically, in Salvador in the mid-2011th century, where the English adventurer could meet Gregório de Matos Guerra and hear about an illustrious priest Vieira. The paragraph is short and emphatic: “We made a great crossing to the Brasis, and arrived at the Bay of All Saints, in the port of São Salvador, in about twenty-two days. Now I had been saved again from the most miserable of all conditions. And I had to consider what I would do next with my life.” (DEFOE, 83, p. XNUMX)
But, well treated by the ship's captain, Robinson has nothing to complain about, since everything he was carrying in his small boat when he was rescued can become merchandise: leopard skin, lion skin, box of bottles, two guns, etc. “In a word, I accumulated about two hundred and eighty hard weights of silver with my cargo; and with this patrimony I landed in the Brazils” (DEFOE, 2011, p. 83).
Armed with some capital and no small amount of luck, Robinson sets out to visit a sugar mill (“namely, a sugarcane plantation and a sugar refinery”) where he becomes familiar with the production techniques and learns how the colonial landowners lived and grew rich. He then proceeds to buy as much land as he can and begins to plant food and, shortly after, some tobacco, in addition to making contact with a neighboring landowner, the son of English parents but born in Lisbon. A well-meaning bourgeois, Robinson laments the absence of his young slave: “But we both needed hands; and I now realized, more than before, that I had been wrong to get rid of my boy Xuri.” (DEFOE, 2011, p. 84).
This perception triggers the narrator's intervention, referring back to the opening pages of the novel, when he opted for a life of adventure over his father's advice. The intervention consists of a reasonably long paragraph that we transcribe below. The pathetic tone of the reflection contrasts with the short and calculating sentence already cited, of slave-owning lament for the folly of having given Xuri to the Portuguese Captain.
“But, alas, that I had always decided wrong was no new thing; and now I had no remedy but to go on. I had begun an enterprise very unlike my temperament, and directly contrary to the life I had enjoyed, for which I had left my father's house, and ignored all his good advice; nay, I was entering upon a middle station, or the highest of the low, as my father had advised me before, and which, had I decided to pursue, I might as well have stayed at home, and never given myself to all those worldly fatigues. And I used to say to myself that I could have gained as much in England, among my friends, as I could have done five thousand miles away, surrounded by strangers and savages in a land unexplored, and at such a distance that I should never have heard from that part of the world where they had any knowledge of my existence.” (DEFOE, 2011, p. 84-85)
Readers somewhat familiar with the rhetoric, somewhere between complacent and pathetic, of the narrator Crusoe will recall several passages after this one in which he laments the lack of discernment and wisdom, which leads the hero to plunge into unfortunate episodes in which divine providence is also mentioned as irremediable and mysterious.
Posterity will understand Robinson as a talented individual amidst the adversities of a world on the verge of commercialization, while Robinson himself generally sees himself as a Protestant, a believer submitted to the divine will, or even a “reluctant pilgrim,” in the words of critic J. Paul Hunter, quoted in John Richetti’s introduction: “Puritans and other devout Protestants of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries were encouraged to keep religious diaries and to write spiritual autobiographies, accounts of how they felt they had been saved, records of their deepest feelings that were supposed to assure them that they were the objects of divine grace, and to encourage them to keep ever in mind their higher spiritual destiny. Defoe’s novel, produced in this period, fits the model, and it can be said that this approach was sanctioned by Defoe himself, when he published, in 1720, Serious Reflections during the Life and Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (Serious Reflections on the Life and Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe), a collection of essays and religious meditations presented as Crusoe's religious reflections on the meaning of his story. He awakens from religious and spiritual indifference to the idea of God's providential intervention in his life. No matter how complex and particular the events of his life are, they end up taking the form of the central narrative of Christian salvation in his mind.” (RICHETTI, 2011, p. 25-6)
For our purposes in this essay, a reluctant pilgrim besieged by slave-owning appeals (the premature farewell to his Xuri, etc.) that trigger him to reflect on paternal advice, on his somewhat rebellious will, and the paradox of fulfilling his paternal wishes five thousand miles away from England among Catholic subjects in an exporting tropic. A paradox that can only become evident through reason capable of discerning interests and class position (“higher rank from lower ranks”), in an exercise in rudimentary sociology that gives a modern touch to the remorse of the prodigal son of biblical extraction.
In other words, we are faced with a complex and vivid prose in which the religious motives adopted by Robinson are contrasted by the entrepreneurial and adventurous impetus of the character who can oscillate between Christian contrition and individualistic greed in the vertigo of one paragraph to the next, which relativizes and better determines Crusoe's puritanism: “Aggressive and energetic, independent and productive, Robinson also defines himself, over time, by his patient submission to the will of God, by his devout acceptance of a mysterious destiny that cannot be changed” (RICHETTI, 2011, p. 21).
Returning to the narrative where we left it, that is, with Robinson lamenting not having the good services of the enslaved Xuri, a series of successful maneuvers by the character to recover his wealth are triggered, including that which was in distant England.
The result was that the provident and organized Englishman achieved great prosperity, partly as a result of the resale of manufactured goods in high demand in colonial Bahia: “And that was not all. My goods being all of English manufacture, such as cloth, knitwear, baize, and other articles especially valuable and desired in the land, I found means of selling them all at a great profit; so that I may say that I made more than four times the value of my original cargo, and was infinitely better off than my poor neighbor, I say, in the progress of my property, for the first thing I did was to buy a black slave, besides a European servant, not counting the one the Captain brought me from Lisbon.” (DEFOE, 2011, p. 87)
And here we record the movement that leads from the importation of English manufactures to the acquisition of servants and a black slave in order to better produce exportable goods, thus British technical progress intensifies slave production on a medium-sized farm that promises stability and profits, but which does not satisfy the restless sinner in question: “Had I persisted in the position in which I now found myself, there would have been room for all the happy things aimed at which my father so earnestly recommended to me, a quiet and retired life, and of which he so sensibly told me that life in an intermediate condition was full. (…) All these missteps were caused by my obstinate adherence to my foolish inclination for foreign travel, and by having yielded to this inclination, contradicting the clearest views of my own good, pursuing in a fair and clean manner the projects and resources which Nature and Providence concurred in granting me and pointing out as my duty”. (DEFOE, 2011, p. 88)
In fact, Robinson lets himself be carried away by his inclination to travel and is willing to abandon his prosperous and secure situation to join a business that is perhaps more dangerous but undoubtedly very profitable, had not mercantile capitalism advanced in its momentum to the point of transforming men into commodities. A God as overwhelming as that of the Protestant and Catholic temples then manifested himself on the Atlantic routes uniting America and Africa: Robinson demonstrates here a peculiar devotion to this abstract force but with ends that are not so inscrutable.
The neighboring landowners in Bahia had a very interesting conversation with Robinson, who speaks the local language fluently and informs them of his travels to Guinea and refers to “the manner in which they traded with the Negroes there, and how easy it was to trade on that coast, exchanging trifles such as beads, toys, knives, scissors, hatchets, pieces of glass and similar things not only for gold dust, chili peppers, elephant tusks, etc., but also for Negroes in large numbers for servitude in the Brazils” (DEFOE, 2011, p. 89).
Faced with such a well-informed interlocutor, the Bahian colonists came to the conclusion that they should undertake a slave expedition to supply themselves, since they did not have a royal concession to sell slaves in Brazil: “(…) since it was a trade that could not be practiced, since it would not be possible to publicly sell the Blacks who came, they wanted to make a single trip, bringing Blacks to their private lands, dividing the total between their properties; in a word, the question was whether I would accept to embark as commissioner of that cargo on the ship, in charge of negotiations on the coast of Guinea. And they proposed that I would keep an equal share of the Blacks, without having to contribute any money to the enterprise”. (DEFOE, 2011, p. 90)
In the next paragraph, Robinson regrets his improvidence that led him to embark as a slave commissioner, since he was progressing quickly and would soon have achieved, by exploiting his property, “a fortune of three or four thousand pounds sterling, at least” (DEFOE, 2011, p. 90). And after the relatively negative evaluation, the narrator-character regrets again his adventurous disposition that led him not to refuse the proposal, which he recognizes as good and profitable, “in the same way as I was not able to restrain my first errant designs when I did not listen to my father's good advice” (DEFOE, 2011, p. 90).
It should be noted that the reason for his lack of foresight once again leads to the accusation of his inability to accept his father's advice, bringing the evaluation of commercial procedures into the patriarchal and family-oriented circuit, now within the slave trade routes. But after evoking his distant father's authority, Robinson, aware of the risks of the trip, sets about signing documents and preparing agreements so that his property can continue to prosper in Brazil, even drafting a will. The configuration is that of an adventurous capitalist. ma non troppo, willing to establish guarantees and prepare documents that protect your property rights.
The evidence for a calculated risk being taken is varied and almost excessive, although the rhetorical emphasis on retrospect is damning and somewhat superstitious: “But I went on, blindly obeying the dictates of my whims instead of listening to reason. And so, the ship being fitted out and the cargo completed, all according to my agreement with the partners in the voyage, I came on board in an untimely manner, on the 1st of September 1659, the same day and month in which, eight years before, I had left my father and mother at Hull, rebelling against their authority, and foolishly allowing myself to be led astray by my own interest.” (DEFOE, 2011, p. 91)
Once again we seem to be dealing here with organization, discipline and instrumental reason that measures, calculates and evaluates, in contrast to the moral judgment that denies the very rationality of the procedure, with the reluctant pilgrim embarking on his slave expedition that will in fact lead him to shipwreck in the Caribbean, off the Island of Despair where he will spend a long time. Recognizing the emphasis and length of the commentary-lament, with the narrator interrupting the account of the preparations for the voyage in the name of reflection and morality, the somewhat unaware reader may relativize the pragmatism and commercial interest at stake, to identify with the narrator and agree with him.
It is arguable that this is indeed the pact of adhesion sought by Daniel Defoe, which does not prevent the author from setting out in detail the preparations that precede the journey and the corresponding arrangements and activities, an exposition that is decisive for establishing realist prose, in Franco Moretti's formulation: “And the same logic is valid for the details of the prose of literal apprehension: their significance lies less in their specific content than in the unprecedented precision that they introduce into the world. Detailed description is no longer reserved for exceptional objects, as in the long tradition of ekphrasis: it becomes the normal way of observing the “things” of this world. Normal and valuable in itself. In fact, it makes no difference at all whether Robinson has a jug or a clay pot: what is important is the constitution of a mentality that gives importance to details even when they do not matter immediately. Precision for precision's sake”. (MORETTI, 2014, p. 69)
The detailed account of the expedition, among other episodes, in fact anticipates the narrative procedures that will immortalize Robinson as a hard-working bourgeois in adverse conditions, although the business in progress is much less palatable as a civilized, bourgeois operation. One wonders about another slave expedition with such an impact on Western literature.
Lisbon revisited or Robinson Crusoe’s “I got it!”
“… and whatever is not sold, / by means of a sack / will pass from our hands, and we will exchange farms for forests, / farms for titles, farms for mules, farms for mulatto women and mariatas, / for trading is our weakness and profit is our strength”.
(Carlos Drummond de Andrade, The goods and the blood).
The voyage from Bahia to Africa results in the famous shipwreck “near the mouth of the great Orinoco River”, in which all the occupants of the ship die except the narrator Robinson. On the Island of Despair, according to Robinson’s baptism, the rational and organized character of Robinson Crusoe is defined, whose detailed prose emphasizes discipline and industriousness, as is to be expected. “Precision for precision’s sake”, in Moretti’s terms. During his long stay of twenty-eight years, Robinson has the opportunity to demonstrate several skills and recreate part of the island’s nature for his own purposes. Hence, Jean Jacques Rousseau considers that the episodes that are of interest to good education are only those that take place on the desert island, as Ian Watt noted in Myths of modern individualism.
“Fourth point to be considered: since only the part of the novel spent on the desert island deals with the isolated individual, Rousseau wants the book – as he writes, in an insolent tone – to be “stripped of all its trappings”; he wants the book to begin with the shipwreck and end with Crusoe’s rescue. Of course, this change would deprive Daniel Defoe’s tale, to a large extent, of its religious and punitive aspects; as a true precursor of the Romantics, Rousseau did not accept the idea that obedience to one’s father and God was meritorious. For Rousseau, the emphasis should be on the individual’s authenticity in relation to his own feelings, while the idea of a supreme duty would have to be seen as an antinomian subjectivism.” (WATT, 1997, p. 180)
As we are arguing here, such a radical Rousseauian amputation would not only deprive the story of its religious and punitive aspects, but also of its Brazilian character, that is, of a rapacious adventure on the edge of capitalism, or even of a lapidary trajectory within the scope of the primitive accumulation of capital. As Ian Watt goes on to argue, Rousseau helps to establish a pattern in which Robinson Crusoe becomes a synthesis of the “basic philosophy of individualism” (WATT, 1997, p. 182), which constitutes a crucial step towards the establishment of Robinson as a myth of modern individualism. Robinson Crusoe becomes “the epic of those who do not give up”, of the lone man whose performance allows him to overcome the greatest difficulties, perhaps even “a work mostly dedicated to egocentrism immune to criticism” (WATT, 1997, p. 176).
Here we have an ordinary man who, upon finding himself alone, reveals himself capable of subjecting nature to his goals and triumphing in adversity. The meritocratic fable in which hard work, discipline, rationality and dedication guarantee survival, moral victory and the sympathy of readers. But it does not guarantee prosperity. When he is rescued, he is as poor as one would expect of a shipwrecked man; his efforts of such merit were to guarantee his survival. It is after having gone to London and then on to Lisbon to check what was left of his business that Robinson discovers himself rich, as noted by Franco Moretti, who tries to record a certain paradox in which wealth did not result from Robinson's work.
Working for oneself as if one were someone else: that is exactly how Robinson works. One side of him becomes a carpenter, or a potter, or a baker and spends weeks and weeks trying to get something done: then Crusoe, the boss, shows up and points out the inadequacy of the results. And then the whole cycle repeats itself over and over again. And it repeats itself because work has become the new principle of legitimizing social power. When, at the end of the novel, Robinson finds himself “master (…) of more than 5 pounds sterling” and everything else, his 28 years of uninterrupted toil are there to justify his fortune. Realistically, there is no connection between the two things: he is rich because of the exploitation of nameless slaves on his plantation in Brazil, while his solitary labor has not earned him a single pound. But we have seen him work like no other character: how is it possible that he does not deserve what he has? (MORETTI, 2014, p. 39-40)
The work and effort on the island, which take up almost the entire book, are the principle of social legitimacy, but Defoe cannot be accused of concealing the origin of Crusoe's sudden wealth: it was the slave property in Brazil that brought him prosperity. The news is of such an order that there is a certain lyricism in the enumeration of procedures (contracts, collection of taxes, records, etc.) that literally almost kills with happiness: "I can now say, without a doubt, that the latter part of the book of Job is much better than its beginning. It would be impossible to describe here the palpitations of my heart when I went through these letters, and especially when I found myself covered by all my wealth, for, as the ships from Brazil always came in convoys, the same ships that brought my letters also carried my goods, and the merchandise was already safe in the river when the letters reached my hands. In a word, I turned pale and felt sick; and if the old man had not brought me a cordial, I believe that unexpected surprise would have defeated Nature and I would have died on the spot.” (DEFOE, 2011, p. 375)
And Robinson goes on to tell how a doctor, upon learning of the impact of wealth on his patient, tries to bleed him and “(…) if that evil had not been alleviated by that outlet created for the spirits, I would have died” (DEFOE, 2011, p. 376). It is no wonder, Robinson discovers himself “owner of more than five thousand pounds sterling in cash and of vast domains, as they may well be called, in Brazil, which produced more than a thousand pounds a year, with the same security as a stately property in England” (DEFOE, 2011, p. 376).
The outcome of that always lamented disobedience to his father could not have been better, although there is a lot of fantasy in the characterization of the honesty, loyalty and devotion of the commercial and patrimonial partners of Crusoé's Lisbon and Bahia circuit. It is not easy to believe that in the slave-owning and adventurous end of capitalism, the partners would guarantee the assets and income of an English slave trader after approximately 30 years.
Here Daniel Defoe's British faith in respect for contracts seems to blend with the adventure fantasy of tradition, according to Moretti: "As for Robinson's financial success, his modernity is at least questionable: although the novel does not have the magical paraphernalia of the story of Fortunatus, who was Robinson's main predecessor in the pantheon of self-made men moderns, the way in which their wealth accumulates in their absence and is later returned to them (“160 grinders from Portugal in gold”, “seven beautiful leopard skins”, “five boxes of excellent chocolates and one hundred uncoined gold pieces”, “one thousand and two hundred boxes of sugar, eight hundred rolls of tobacco and the rest of the account in gold”) still has many things from fairy tales”. (MORETTI, 2014, p. 37-8)
Which is also highlighted by the progress of the narrative at the end of the story, according to Moretti: “From the capitalist adventurer to the working gentleman. However, as the novel draws to a close, there is a second twist: cannibals, armed conflict, mutineers, wolves, bears, fairy-tale fortune… Why? If the poetics of adventure had been “moderated” by its rational opposite, why promise to tell “some very surprising episodes of other adventures of mine” in the last sentence of the novel? (MORETTI, 2014, p. 42).
Returning to Franco Moretti's accurate record above, there is no fantasy whatsoever in establishing that Robinson's wealth comes from the "exploitation of nameless slaves on his plantation in Brazil". Here Daniel Defoe was of a mild and amoral good sense, who does not bet half a guinea on the meritocratic version of rewarded work but tries to show how the exhausting work of slaves generates the wealth of others. Realism mixes with fantasy to the extent that those responsible for the smooth running of the planting Brazilians come to fulfill the terms of a contract entered into by, say, Brazilians of the previous generation, thirty years earlier. If it's not true, it's well found, a compatriot of Franco Moretti might say. On the other hand, there is some evidence that corroborates, at least on a fictional level, the fanciful progress in the acquisition of wealth through the plundering of enslaved Africans.
In Brazilian literature, in one of the rare moments in which a slave expedition is recorded, the outcome is also a stroke of luck. I am referring to chapter nine “O – arranjei-me! – do Compadre”, in Memoirs of a Sergeant militias, the now classic novel by Manuel Antônio de Almeida. It is a chapter at the beginning of the novel, which narrates, in retrospect, the method by which Compadre, who raises and materially supports Leonardo from the age of seven until he is a young man, acquired the wealth that allows him to live in relative comfort.
“As a poor man, Compadre was a barber and bloodletter who walked the streets of Rio de Janeiro armed with a basin, razors and lancets. While providing services to a sailor in the street, he was invited to board a ship that “traveled to the Coast and was engaged in the slave trade; it was one of the convoys that brought supplies to Valongo, and was ready to set sail” (ALMEIDA, 2000, p. 115).
That is, it is a ship bound for Africa in search of slaves. After successfully saving sailors and human cargo, the Compadre bleeds, on the return trip to Rio de Janeiro, the ship's captain, who had fallen ill. But the captain dies and leaves him in charge of delivering a large sum of money to his daughter, who never receives the money. The betrayal of the dying man's will yields the Compadre's stability, which in turn guarantees the good life of Leonardo's childhood and youth, "our memorandum" to use Manuel Antônio de Almeida's terms.
Thus, it is a heritage derived from the slave trade that allows a certain relief to the free man, who can thus support without much effort, but always shaving the clients, the character who will become a militia sergeant. There is no sign of moral condemnation here, the slave enterprise is totally naturalized; therefore, the transgressive touch of “I got by” would be the non-compliance with the will of the deceased captain.
Thus, there is a picturesque, and somewhat sinister, encounter between the stability of Almeida's rogue hero and the prosperity of Defoe's bourgeois hero, both struggling with the fortune that provides them with wealth from the slave trade. With a foot in the wonderful thing (“fairy-tale fortune”), the episodes also deal with the primitive medical procedure of the time, with Compadre as the bleeder, and Robinson Crusoe being bled, which creates a strange family atmosphere.
This is not about forcing an alignment between the two novels that would be arbitrary, but rather about noting that the approximation proceeds, I think, by emphasizing the adventurous side of the two characters and by illuminating similarities in the use of themes and forms induced by the experience on the periphery of capitalism, which seems to mark even an illustrious representative of bourgeois individualism in its early days when he ventures onto the shores and into the waters of the South Atlantic.
*Homer Vizeu Araujo is a full professor at the Institute of Letters at UFRGS.
References
ALMEIDA, Manuel Antonio de. Memorias de um sargento de milicias. Presentation and notes Mamede Mustafa Jarouche. Cotia: Ateliê, 2000. Col. Ateliê Classics.
CANDIDO, Antonio. “Dialectics of trickery”. In The speech and the city. São Paulo: Two Cities, 1993.
DEFOE, Daniel. Robinson Crusoe. Translated by Sergio Flaksman. New York: Penguin Classics, 2011.
MORETTI, Franco. The bourgeois: between history and literature. Trans. Alexandre Morales. 1st ed. New York: Routledge, 2014.
RICHETTI, John. “Introduction”. In DEFOE, Daniel. Robinson Crusoe. Trans. Sergio Flaksman. New York: Routledge, 2011.
WATT, Ian. The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding. Trans. Hildegard Feist. New York: Routledge, 1990. WATT, Ian. Myths of Modern Individualism: Faust, Don Quixote, Don Juan, Robinson Crusoe. Translated by Mario Pontes. New York: Routledge, 19.
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