Caliban and Crusoe II

FRIDAY by Michel Tournier (translated by Norman Denny). 235 pages. Doubleday. $4.95.

There is a fine Gallic impudence to the notion: take Robinson Crusoe, that age-of-reason parable of Western civilization's triumph over rude nature, and turn it upside down. In this position Crusoe's diligence, rationality, racial pride and Christian ethics--the very qualities that in Defoe's handling ensured Crusoe's survival--get lost while Crusoe accepts the "primitive" values of his black manservant. Call the book Friday to make the irony unmistakable. So much for Western civilization.

This is what French Novelist Michel Tournier has done. The beautifully translated result, though, is far more than a Cartesian blueprint fleshed into creaky fiction. Like Crusoe I, but more elaborately in Tournier's version, Crusoe II shakes off despondency by creating a makeshift England, complete with fertile fields, full storehouses, a church, a fortress and an elaborate code of law and punishment with which to govern himself.

Eventually, Defoe's cannibals appear in Tournier's book, too, intending to eat a captive. Crusoe II frightens them off with gunpowder and English pluck, names the captive Friday, and sets about turning him into a proper British slave. He succeeds to the extent that Friday learns English and performs complicated chores. But the Negro-Indian half-caste will go no further; he refuses to be a black Englishman. Although he is tireless, he is not diligent. He is clever, but not rational. For him, the Church of England, punitive ditch digging and goatskin trousers are merely the mystifying apparatus of Crusoe's games. At last, Crusoe realizes that Friday's instincts may be more sensible than his own. He abandons his bookkeeping system of morality, adopts Friday's formless sun worship and lives in harmony with his friend and the island, which he has named Speranza--hope.

Thus Tournier's book may seem to be one more demonstration--and a notably self-conscious and unconvincing one--of a mercantile society's well-known and often belabored shortcomings. Tournier intended some satirical comment on civilization's defects, of course, or why else so pointedly rewrite a tract in which the Western world is praised? What gradually dawns on the surprised reader is that the author has accomplished much more. As a 20th century author, Tournier is concerned with Defoe's implicit but largely unexplored theme, the development of a mind in isolation. With a winning blend of Parisian wit and sensuousness, he concentrates not on Crusoe's conclusions but on the subjective process of reaching them.

Crusoe II is alone and traveling fast on an interior journey. Gradually abandoning rationalism as flat and absurd, he whizzes through Descartes, Locke, Freud and existentialism, all experienced not as abstractions but as personal modes of apprehending himself and the mysterious island around him. Like Speranza, Tournier's novel is an island, unique, self-sufficient, imaginative, well worth exploring, and with a number of minor marvels to reveal.

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