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Into the Mouth of Hell
| Article
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17826 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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3 / 1990 |
2,009 Words |
| Author
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Alfred Mac Adam
Alfred Mac Adam is professor of Spanish at Barnard College,
Columbia University. He is a translator, most recently of
Alfredo Bryce Echenique's Tarzan's Tonsillitis (2001), and
edits Review: Latin American Literature and Arts, a
publication of the Americas Society. |
BOCA DO INFERNO
Ana Miranda
Sao Paulo: Companhia das Letras,
1989
Suppose we were to read Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe not as an adventure story for children but as a historical novel. We might see that Crusoe's narrative has a fairly rigorous chronology, that the time Crusoe spends on his island in the Caribbean is, roughly, the time of the Restoration in England (1660-1680) and that the entire text (of Part I, the only one anybody reads) is a meditation on the "shipwreck" of the English (Whig) middle class under the Stuarts.
Thus the text is simultaneously realistic and allegorical, simultaneously an account of how a man might survive alone on a Caribbean island in the seventeenth century and a meditation on English political life in the latter part of the sane century. We might recall that Defoe, writing in Crusoe's voice, ironically defends himself (that is, Crusoe) from those who charge that his tale of shipwreck is a lie:
“I…do hereby declare their objection is an invention scandalous in design, and false in fact; and do affirm that the story, though allegorical, is also historical; that it is the beautiful representation of a life of unexampled misfortunes…intended for the common good of mankind….”
Crusoe's dream
Did it really happen or was it a fabrication? Or, assuming, for the sake of argument that there is some
... (1998 of 11931 Characters)
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