Other Crusoes

I. The provocation:

Robinson Crusoe is pictures of cats.  Gulliver’s Travels is lolcats.

II. The allegory:

Hundreds of years from now, a professor will teach a class called “Visual Culture of the Early Internet, 1990–2020.” One lecture will focus on the online history of cat pictures. This lecture will open with a discussion of ASCII art, proceed through the Bonsai Kitten Hoax of 2000 and the YouTube-driven rise of cat videography, and conclude with the ascent of text-overlaid feline still photography in the 2010s. There will only be room on the syllabus for a single example of this latter phenomenon. Let us suppose that it is this one:

In a brief class discussion, the professor will draw students’ attention to how this image invokes the sentimental domesticity of earlier digital cat photography, but how it also recasts that genre’s politics by depicting the feline subject in an act of resistance — and by overlaying text that alludes to a protest song that would have been familiar to the contemporary audience. Later, a perceptive undergraduate will write an essay arguing that this image trivializes the twentieth century’s civil rights movement, for it figures the practitioner of civil disobedience not as a human being deserving of equal dignity but as a mere household pet (indeed, a conspicuously lazy and indolent one). This student will receive the A grade that her astute reading assuredly deserves.

III. The problem:

This is a perfectly plausible reading of the civil disobedience cat image in isolation. But if you have ever encountered a lolcat before, you know that isolation isn’t its natural environment. The nature of memes is that no single instance stands alone: the context is an anonymous, collectively created, densely self-referential, and constantly evolving body of text and images.

Memes, like genres, are forms around which we organize acts of creativity. They come with expectations and conventions that serve not only to be complied with but also to be flouted, repurposed, transposed, played with, varied, subverted, ironized, mashed up, remixed, and rearranged. (Auxiliary provocation: the chief difference between a meme and a genre is that we say “meme” when the creators are non-professionals, and “genre” when the creators are professional artists.)

You leave a lot of meaning on the table if you isolate a single lolcat from the broader lolcat phenomenon. You lose fundamental layers of irony, pathos, cleverness, and critique. You miss the image’s place in an exuberant, organic, anonymous mass creative phenomenon. You grasp only a narrow band of its original range of experienced meanings, and you misunderstand the participatory nature of the mass creative event.

IV. Refinement of original provocation:

It would be more accurate to say that if Robinson Crusoe is pictures of cats, Gulliver’s Travels is a single lolcat, such as the civil disobedience cat: a single canonized instance of the copious memes and submemes that Robinson Crusoe touched off.

V. Anxious consideration of scholarly bona fides and impostor syndrome, rendered in the form of a dialogue between the author’s ego and superego:

tim cassedy’s ego:
I think I’m much more interested in the wave of mass creativity touched off by Robinson Crusoe than I am interested in Robinson Crusoe. Possibly my main interest in Robinson Crusoe is so that I can understand its mashups and remixes.

tim cassedy’s superego:
Why? Robinson Crusoe is endlessly fascinating and complex.

ego:
Yeah, but it’s sort of too legible. It’s familiar both in its novelistic form and in its castaway content. It invites the kind of reading that I know how to do.

superego:
You see this as a problem?

ego:
Look, I don’t really know what to say about texts that are easy to read. They make me comfortable as a reader, but uncomfortable as a scholar. I like what Robert Darnton says about a baffling eighteenth-century proverb: He who is snotty, let him blow his nose.

superego:
“When we cannot get a proverb, or a joke, or a ritual, or a poem, we know we are on to something. By picking at the document where it is most opaque, we may be able to unravel an alien system of meaning.”

ego:
Right. I only want to write about alien systems of meaning. I don’t have anything to say about texts that I’m well-equipped to read.

superego:
Are you anxious that your insights about canonical texts wouldn’t be smart enough? By studying the weirdest, most opaque, least canonical materials you can find, you insulate yourself from criticism because no one else has read this stuff?

ego:
Fuck you.

superego:
I’ll rephrase. How is your interest in alien systems of meaning reconcilable with being “an English professor”?

ego:
Early mashups and remixes of Robinson Crusoe are evidence about the experienced meanings of Robinson Crusoe for its early audiences. Robinson Crusoe was probably the best-known, most-read novel on either side of the Atlantic until Stowe.

superego:
So your interest is in “the experienced meanings of Robinson Crusoe”?

ego:
I am a cultural historian of the experienced meanings of texts.

superego:
Is that a kind of literary scholar?

ego:
Yes.

superego:
Does your tenure committee agree?

ego:
I guess we’ll find out.

VI. Rhapsody in praise of weirdness:

I like to not-understand.

I like texts that are opaque to me.

I like to be thematically and generically alienated. That’s when I know there’s something new to know.

My favorite Crusoes are the ones that break things I thought I understood. For example, Robinson Crusoe’s London Daily Evening Post, a daily newspaper that ran from 1741–43 and seems to have existed mainly to carry an unauthorized serialization of Pamela. It messes with my understanding of eighteenth-century newspapers and of the eighteenth-century marketing and circulation of fiction.

The island setting of Crusoe Richard Davis (1756) is home to a race of feathered humans, with one of whom the protagonist enters into an interracial marriage, then plucks off her feathers to see what’s underneath.

The title character in Hannah Hewit; or, the female Crusoe ([1792]) tames a lion, builds a brick house with her bare hands, and fashions a talking robot that croaks out the words “I luv u Anna.”

The pursuit of historical weirdness is virtuous.

VII. Notes toward a syllabus for the Robinson Crusoe course that I would like to teach for my institution’s Program in Historical Weirdness Studies, should such a program ever exist:

1. Robinson Crusoe’s London Daily Evening Post (daily newspaper, 1741–43)
2. The life and surprizing adventures of Crusoe Richard Davis (novel, 1756)
3. Robinson Crusoe; or, Friday turned Boxer (long-running pantomime and boxing match, Birmingham, from c. 1780)
4. Richard Brinsley Sheriden, Robinson Crusoe, or Harlequin Friday (harlequinade, 1781)
5. Thomas Spence, A s’upl’im’int too thı̆ Hı̆stı̆re ŏv Rŏbı̆nsı̆n Kruzo, beı̆ng th’i h’ist’ire ’ov Kruzonea, ŏr R’ob’ins’in Kruzo’z il’ind (spelling reform proposal, 1782)
6. J.H. Campe, The new Robinson Crusoe (book-length narrative pedagogical dialogue, 1788)
7. Marguerite Daubenton, Zelia in the desert: or, the female Crusoe (novel, 1789)
8. “Robinson Crusoe’s Soliloquy” (student poem, Berkhamsted School, 1793)
9. Charles Dibdin, Hannah Hewit; or, the female Crusoe (novel, [1792]; musical drama, 1798)
10. “Extracts from the Journals and Remarks of Jonathan Crusoe, a peripatetic Philosopher of the present Century,” New-York Magazine (political satire, April 1796)
11. The Robinson Crusoe (schooner, U.S.–West Indies trade, ca. 1796–98)
12. Oh, Poor Robinson Crusoe (song, 1797)
13. William Mavor, “Adventures of a Robinson Crusoe, written by itself,” Young Gentleman’s and Lady’s Magazine (it-narrative, 1799)

VIII. The other Crusoes:

The most opaque Crusoes of all are the ones that are not texts, but people dead and gone, including

Crusoe Freeman (b. 1779, Connecticut)
Robinson Crusoe Ranson (b. 1784, Suffolk, England)
Robinson Crusoe Major (b. 1787, Virginia)
Crusoe White (b. 1790, Mississippi)
Crusoe Harvey (b. 1794, North Carolina)
Crusoe Civils (b. 1800, Virginia)
Crusoe Kendall (b. 1807, Massachusetts)

Men named Crusoe were disproportionately black, although there were white Crusoes, too. Like Robinson Crusoe’s London Daily Evening Post — like a delightful 1799 it-narrative written from the perspective of a copy of Robinson Crusoe — like the Kruzoneı̆n Aulfı̆bĕt invented by a schoolteacher better known as a political radical — these men were artifacts of the Robinson Crusoe meme. They are forgotten Robinsonades. What I wouldn’t give to read Robinson Crusoe through their eyes. I bet it wasn’t easy reading. I bet it was weird.

Crusoe Freeman, age 71, in the 1850 U.S. Census