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Why did Muriel Spark undertake a rewriting of Robinson Crusoe (1719, 2003) in her second novel, Robinson (1958, 2003)?1 Of all earlier novels available to her for such a purpose, this one, with its Presbyterian, extremely masculine protagonist and his masculine world, would seem antithetical to her firmly Catholic foundation and predilection for centering on women and their society.2 In her essay "How I Became a Novelist" (2014), Spark writes that "When I started my next novel [after her first, The Comforters] I was in an adventurous mood and I wrote a desert-island story called Robinson" (45).
As elegant as this explanation is, others surface-for example, that a book without women, like Crusoe, all but begged for a rewriting in which a woman would narrate. Or perhaps the temptation to play with Defoe's stark realism by embellishing her narrative with surrealist (magical realist? mystical?) elements, like a pingpong-playing cat and a sometimes screaming, sometimes sighing volcano, was irresistible. Or maybe she wanted to counter Crusoe's Protestantism.3 Spark had herself experienced a parallel, dangerous adventure when she traveled to Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) with her soon-to-be husband, Sidney Oswald Spark, for an intended three-year stay. But, once married and with an infant, she discovered her husband's depression and violence; she escaped to London, leaving her son, Robin, in a convent school until the war's end permitted children to travel.
These and other reasons for the book's indebtedness to Robinson Crusoe may have their validity, but they don't explain the complex layering of literary appropriation in Robinson, whose narrator's name, January Marlow, gestures toward Heart of Darkness on one hand and the two-faced Roman god Janus on the other. The book's set-up, moreover-three survivors of a plane crash stranded on an island with an imperious man named Robinson and his ward, the boy Miguel-resembles the dramatic situation in The Tempest.4 I would argue that Spark's rich allusiveness suggests that her interest in Defoe's novel lies not in detailed correspondence between the two works' specifics of character and plot, but elsewhere: Defoe's elusive tone toward his protagonist is a precursor of Spark's toward her characters, principally January and Robinson.
I encountered that elusiveness in the classroom when, years ago, I assigned Robinson Crusoe in my college's sophomore-level, early...