Specimen of Bushmen Folklore: Book Review
Introduction
The Specimens of Bushman Folklore was published in 1911 and is authored by Wilhelm H.I. Bleek and Lucy C. Lloyd. It contains myths, legends, and other traditional stories of the Ixiam Bushmen in their current extinct language. The stories were collected through interviews with various narrators. The tales were then written down and translated by Bleek. However, Bleek died in 1875, but his sister-in-law continued transcribing Ixam narratives after his death (Watt, 2013). It is due to her efforts that some tales were published in the book, which includes art sketches of rocks that attribute the Bushmen, their lives and traditions, and some Ixun narratives.
The Bushmen were members of the larger hunter-gatherer people who occupied the Southern region of Africa. It would seem that they were totally or partially exterminated or absorbed by more robust races that occupied these regions, except in a few regions where they could manage to hold their cultures together (Green, 2010). The average height of an adult male Bushman was 144 centimeters or 60 inches. Von Wissmann gave the perfect height from a measurement he took of 140 to 146 centimeters. This essay is aimed at discussing the irony and colonial implications of this novel.
Relationship between Crusoe and Friday as portrayed in the book
The relationship between both characters is rather a mixed one; sometimes the reader is given a similar relationship to that of a father and son between Crusoe and Friday impression, and at other times Crusoe is represented as the master and Friday as merely a servant who has to serve the master as long as he lives. The colonial master-servant relationship is repeatedly expressed in the book, for example, “I (Crusoe) made him know his name should be Friday… I likewise taught him to say Master, and then let him know, that was to be my name” (Edward, 2014, p. 340).
He never told Friday his real name; this displays a hierarchy system, which is Crusoe as the master while Friday is the servant. During that time, slaves were named by their colonial masters, and this is shown well in the case of Crusoe who calls Friday without any regard to his real name (Reele et al., 2015). Nonetheless, Friday does not take this kindly, in fact, he welcomes it in an incredibly grateful manner by embracing it in the form of submission to servitude: “he kneels down again, kissed the ground, and laid his head on the ground, and taking me by the foot, set my foot upon his head; this it seems was token of swearing to be my slave forever;” this part gives an adamant impression of the kind of submission Friday was subjected to for being saved by Crusoe. After making sure that the savages are dead, Crusoe takes Friday under his control and returns his fear of being attacked during the night by separating Friday’s house from his own. He shows little trust that Friday through Friday has been submitted fully, similarly, in the situation of the use of a gun, Crusoe makes Friday believe that a gun is made to cause death and destruction (Johnson, 2017). This contributes significantly to Friday acting cautiously around the weapon: “as for the gun itself, he would not so much as touch it for several days after; but would speak to it, and talk about it…which, as I afterward learned of him, was to desire it not to kill him.” This level of cautiousness instilled through fear shows a relationship between a master and a slave, where the master does not fully trust the slave in his work. The difference here is that though a master should not praise his slave, here Crusoe honors Friday for his work, and describes him using several positive comments.
As Crusoe describes Friday, he tries to portray a picture of a now-typical black man during that time. Black people contributed most of the slaves owned by colonialists, they were treated as lower than animals and treated like dirt. However, here Crusoe is trying to show the reader a different picture, by raising Friday’s level in the social strata. He also adds that Friday is intelligent by mentioning his broad forehead. During that time Defoe wrote, about the science of physiognomy which was the study of a person’s facial features to identify whether they were intelligent and also to measure their personality (Abou and Morey, 2014). Hence, Crusoe describes Friday as having a high and large forehead showing that he believes Friday to be good and smart. In this section, Friday’s behaviour is imperative; he shows gratitude to Crusoe for his fatherly care and finds many ways to thank him during their first days together.
Implications for the Novel and Colonial Encounter
As a British trader in the distant Caribbean island, Crusoe cries out on its colonial context. Indeed colonialism from the British informs nearly every feature of Defoe’s novel. Crusoe illustrates that the vastness of the world can bring a corresponding enlargement, rather than shrinking, and can also produce self-reflection of a kind that is not easily achieved in a civilized society (Boyd, 2015). Religiously, the novel demonstrates that a spiritual awakening can take place in isolation from the public and can be clear to an Englishman who converts a non-European other. Economically, the novel functions to argue for the enlargement of trade. From a psychological point of view, Crusoe illustrates that in a relationship with a person from a different racial background, there can be an ego that could master its selfhood and the fate of others. Overall, Crusoe has included a lot of characteristics of the colonial context.
Many contemporary readers of the novel regard it as a prototypical novel of the eighteenth century. Crusoe has not extensively demonstrated the colonial elements as we might have expected in the eighteenth-century context of post-colonial criticism. Curiously, some of the most provocative critics of Defoe’s novel appear in postcolonial literature. Even more numerous are the frequent allusions to Crusoe, particularly his relationship with Friday. The fact that the novel has been mentioned or his protagonist’s relationship with Friday seems to summarise the colonial relationship dynamics in general. For example, Edward (2014), describes Crusoe as a “work whose protagonist is the founder of a new world, which he rules and reclaims for Christianity and England” (70). References like this are standard, but there seems to be an attempt to avoid engagement in the colonial aspects of the novel sustainably. I suspect that the novel’s status as the prototypical colonial text accounts for the neglect, hence making such analysis unnecessary of the studies engaging colonial issues and themes at length. Most, if not all tend to focus more on Crusoe–Friday relationship or related themes such as cannibalism-peter Hulme’s Colonial Encounters: Europe and the native Caribbean, 1492-1797 being a case in point. Martin (2015) shows a tendency in the novel to reduce Crusoe to an illustration of colonial fantasy. Issues of colonial trade have been addressed and explored mostly by Maximillian E. Novak (2010).
In this essay, I attempt to show the extent to which the novel is shaped by colonialism both thematically and formally, and I also suggest that Crusoe indicates many ways through which the British colonial history was involved in making the novel’s genre possible. Specifically, I will trace the influence of the empire on the novel while paying close attention to individual characters. Watt (2013) distills the realism of the novel to its ‘formal essence’- the ‘narrative method’ through which most novelists represent a ‘circumstantial view’ of a person’s life. He also identifies Crusoe as the first novel because of the critical attention given to an ‘ordinary’ individual by Defoe. Nonetheless, Watt undermines the fact that Crusoe’s self-image in the novel is in a colonial setting though Crusoe’s journey to precarious grounds is disrupted by nearly being enslaved by moors, engulfed by a storm, and being shipwrecked on an island that is uninhabited but frequented by cannibals. He quickly learns how to assert himself over people and land. In short, the colonial setting helps build his character as he comes to understand the unique place of his position as a British Protestant in a world full of religious and cultural others.
While assessing the effect of colonialism on his individualism, we should imagine dealing with an imagined colonialism. The terms shown such as ‘colonial context’ and ‘influence of empire’ sound as if one should base their arguments on actual practices of colonialism, but this is partly true (Hicks, 2016). Some readers have responded that Defoe has illustrated an individual‘s pure experience, and the narrative still holds true in an allegorical sense, we should look into the novel’s engagement in colonialism even if it is wholly fictional. Crusoe represents the embodiment of colonialism, not an exhibit of it.
The author had no direct experience with plantations, oceanic voyages, slave trade, and South American coastal people. What he knew mostly was from his imagination on knowledge from travel narratives, geographies, and trade. The truth of his novel represents deception, serving to engage the reader in a psychological journey that does not wholly represent the experience of colonialism. The author himself admitted a distance between his representation and the reality of Britain’s colonial endeavors. Prose fiction provides Defoe with a medium showing reality that, Novak (2010) argues, “could be turned to useful ends, interest was not so much in getting at ‘the thing itself’, something any writer and artist has to know to be impossible, but in the methods of deceiving the eye and the mind into accepting the presence of the representation as something that might have existed,” he concludes that the author eventually knew that he was writing in a medium more vivid than painting. He transforms the aspect of colonialism through the power of fictional representation into the endeavors of a single man who leads an island and his native friend. Crusoe’s formal realism works to show the myths of both mental and economic self-sufficiency. The highly creative nature of the author’s colonialism is illustrated in a passage from The Gentleman of full English.
[The English gentleman can] make the expedition of the biosphere in books, he
may make himself chief of the topography of the World in the book of maps,
atlases, and dimensions of our statisticians. He may go around
the world with Dampier and Rogers. (225-26)
The point of view of the gentleman is unlike Crusoe’s who overlooks his island home. He primarily imagines authority in both instances preceding in his case, his actual shaping of colonial attitudes and control over the island. We also recognize that any distinction between imagined and real colonialists and imperialists quickly surrenders to the fact that such institutions are imaginary constructs, which in turn influence the concrete policies that help regulate and govern the political, economic, and social relationship with other people. The author’s debt to the colonial environment happens at the level of representing premonitions and anticipations of colonialism (Haskell, 2017). Any impact Defoe had on colonial psychology is more of a mentality than an actual instance in history. The contribution of the novel’s colonial context happens in the same vein. Through the imagination of a solitary escape to a far island in the Caribbean seas, the author creates and implements events crucial to the development of the novel: fully realized characters who clearly bring out the main themes of the novel resembling real life.
The character of Crusoe represents a peculiar feature of Robinson Crusoe, in spite of his insignificant origin, he is filled with a sense of self-worth. He is presented as the novel’s part hero, particularly as he is vital to the development of the novel and its origins. He appears as a character who views himself together with his experiences as having huge consequences; in Crusoe, we get work that agrees with the primacy of an individual human subject. Watt (2013), attributes such individualism to the rise of capitalism and Protestantism. While his thesis remains close to the truth, other postcolonial critics have shown the large influence of imperialism on Western culture and its artifacts. His argument agrees the kind of individualism in Crusoe could only have arisen in the eighteenth century in England, a place where Protestantism and material capitalism are influential (Kincade, 2017). He also mentions that Crusoe owes the eighteenth and seventeenth-century travel literature a debt and continues to suggest that colonialism helped contribute to the development of capitalism. In his study, he further goes on to look into the influences of colonialism in the novel while making thorough traces of cultural and social influences that gave rise to the development of the novel. Similarly, he paid insignificant attention to colonialism.
Defoe moves from the colonial context to Crusoe’s character. Crusoe, on the other hand, wanders through the globe which he gets a paradoxical effect; rather than being influenced by his immediate environment, his self-image becomes better the more he travels from England. This double image serves to place him at the center of the world he is set by Defoe and the world he moves (Harkin, 2017). Crusoe is an important character because he plays a significant role in the wake of expanding empires; this is the precise mindset that colonialism requires. He is also the most notable because of his long solitary nature and growing imagination under his control. While on the island, he regularly faces trouble, both real and imagined. Crusoe finds himself trapped in the Spanish empire on an island inhabited by cannibals. However, as otherwise expected, he finds confirmation of his self-importance, while surveying the circumstances on the island, he imagines himself as the “lord of the whole manor; or if I pleased, I might call my self-king, or emperor over the whole country which I had possession of”, (128). The unflinching confidence with which he asserts himself on the island derives from the predicament; he imagines himself as the king or emperor.
As the author transforms colonialism through representation, Robinson refashions himself and the island through imagination and naming, making laws and giving names to specific places and things, including himself. He also assumes authority over the island; this nature reveals something about colonialism in general; that it involves material practices and circumstances and a unification of cultural aspects and images. Crusoe’s tendency to imagine himself regarding control replicates what was being experienced in eighteenth-century England. According to Green (2010), “from 1688 on, England had been expanding, and the pride of Englishness had been swelling, particularly concerning the country’s overseas possessions,” (120). Imperialism began asserting its influence on the English as early as the seventeenth century, and they began associating their national prominence with colonial activities associated with them, these were trade and acquisition of foreign territories. However, Great Britain experienced its share of troubles in its dealings with neighboring European countries. Thus their people’s sense of pride neutralized those anxieties similar to Crusoe’s imagined answers to potential dangers which eased his fears.
The Englishmen further alleviated their concerns regarding their international relationship and status by becoming a self-referential society, seeing more of themselves despite the increasing contact with many other races and countries, or we can say seeing more of themselves through the colonization of other races. Crusoe’s character clearly shows this fact, in that he validates himself with more of his self-image than his association with Friday (Jie, 2014). Given the situation in Britain and its status as a colonial power in the eighteenth century, it is therefore not a surprise that Robinson Crusoe emerged when it did. This was a time when the British were struggling to establish a colonial and trading power to compete with other European countries for lands and markets abroad, Robinson Crusoe directly covered insecurities relating to Britain’s imperial journeys by affirming their unusual nature through Crusoe’s character. By placing Crusoe away from society for more than a decade, the author grants his protagonist a chance never seen in actual life. He has the luxury to work out the political disadvantages of colonialism in the economy. While it may seem weird to talk about the political implications of a single person, his mental work for almost twenty years is all politics. His mastery of self and his creation of an imaginary kingdom helps him prepare for his re-encounter with human beings of different cultures and subsequently for recovering his property and his renewed trading endeavors.
Ironic separation
Nine months alone on the island, Crusoe had fears that the sickness he had recovered from my return, he remembered that “Brazilians take no physic but their tobacco” (126). He looked for some tobacco in his stretch taken from the shipwreck and accidentally discovered a Bible and a bundle of tobacco beside it. First, he tries to chew the raw, green tobacco leaves and then puts his face over a smoking tobacco fire and nearly suffocates from the smoke and fire. He also takes the Bible which he tries to read, but due to the tobacco smoke, he only opens random pages and reads a single line. He reads a verse from Psalms that says, “Call me in the day of trouble, and I will deliver, and thou shalt glorify me” (126). He then prays and asks God to deliver him in a broken and imperfect prayer (Nagib, 2017). He drinks some rum and tobacco leaves and passes out from exhaustion and tobacco smoke; he finally finds what he was looking for which is rest.
In writing this Christian conversation of Crusoe, Defoe leaves a trace of irony. We are given the just facts, with realism that works as an antidote to the moral ambiguity of his actions. The more fact-filled the report is, the less wicked Crusoe appears. It is remarkable that many good readers overlooked the fact that Crusoe’s Christian conversation begins when he starts using tobacco (Rossi, 2017). Perhaps, reading from the vantage position of our secular age, we have not noticed the significant difference between primitive cures of the physical body and religious remedies of the soul. Sometimes, realism is taken for granted and as a transparent narrative of the real world evident in Defoe’s writing in this particular section. Most probably, he intended for the readers to smirk at Crusoe’s scientific language of experimentation in the passage, to smile at his confusion between the power of the tobacco and of the Bible as we read, “I took up the Bible and began to read” (126) (Watson, 2017).
While the sincerity of his Christian conversation and his religious commitment have been discussed by critics ever since the novel was published, the writer’s viewpoint on Crusoe is that of a protestant who is close to his colonial possibilities and envisioned them in the novel. He can create a tolerant and committed Protestant who mainly focuses on essential practice (Root, 2017). Crusoe is keenly evaluative of his behaviours in the religion and inten
