I'm a lifelong fan of Defoe's Robinson Crusoe. I love all the shipboard stuff, the adventure, the exoticism, Crusoe's self-reliance, his psychological complexity, his religious ponderings, and especially the recapitulation of nascent capitalism on the island. I'm as entranced as ever by the attempt to domesticate goats, by his attempt to build a boat, by the single footprint on the beach, by Friday's escape and the battle with the cannibals. With a little effort, I have been able to set to one side the novel's faults: the author's careless repetitions, his appalling colonialist racism, those last anticlimactic adventures and the return to England, the unnatural absence of sexuality or passion, the paranoia and the unnecessary violence. Massive defects, yes indeed, but Robinson Crusoe is still a great eternally wonderful mishmash of a novel.
So it came as a surprise to read Laura Brown's one-sentence summary of the novel in The Counterhuman Imaginary: "Robinson Crusoe enacts a self-creative other-than-human vitality by setting matter in motion through the persistent repetition of irresistible succession."
Maybe Robinson Crusoe does "enact" and "set matter in motion" -- I don't know, can't say. But I do not plan to undergo the pain and woe of making sense out of her ungainly and mystifying sentence. For Laura Brown, Robinson Crusoe is not the pleasure and challenge that it has been for three hundred years -- it's just raw material for her dry-as-dust ideological machine.
And a waste of my precious time.
[February 1] Bernhard Starr writes: "Brown transforms the gold of literature into the dross of criticism."
[February 1] Professor Merlon Crenelle, Southwestern Louisiana U., writes: "Vivian, you're totally unfair. You take one sentence out of the chapter and make fun of it. You don't even bother to see how the sentence is related to the larger argument. You owe Professor Laura Brown an apology. You're irresponsible."
[February 1] Marianne Morrison, Ph. D. writes: "Vivian, I agree with Mr. (Ms.?) Crenelle. You've not tried to understand Brown. Your lazy."
[February 2] Vivian de St. Vrain responds: "Whether I'm lazy or not, Brown writes in an obscure code. Why should I have to try to crack the code? Why can't she write in English? She's a Professor of English, for goodness sake. It's not my job to figure out what she's trying to say; it's her job to make it plain."
[February 2] Sean R. Fine writes: "It makes me wonder about the "imaginary" in which Laura Brown seems to thrive. Closed, cloistered, self-congratulatory."
[February 3] Thurman Valentino (SVDGA) writes: "I think that Vivian de St. Vrain is absolutely correct not to try to figure out what that sentence means. It's not a reader's responsibility. My opinion is that Laura Brown is smart enough to produce a complicated argument, but not smart enough to make complicated argument clear."
[February 3] Michael F. Bristol writes: "Or maybe, dear Viv, you're not smart enough to figure it all out."
[February 4] Vivian de St. Vrain replies: "OK, Bristol, if you're so smart why don't you just tell us exactly what "persistent repetition of irresistible succession" means."
[February 4] J C Occhiogrosso suggests: "One thing regularly follows another?"
[February 7] Beulah Withee writes: "The problem is not with just that one sentence. It's that whole paragraphs and pages are filled with such difficult sentences. After each of these, a reader has to pause and interpret before going on to the next one. It puts far too much burden on the reader."
[February 9] Gabriel Cussen III writes: "I tried to read the book but I didn't get very far. Do visitors to this blog remember the criticism of academic articles and books: "What is new is not true and what is true is not new." This book is even worse, because what's true is utterly trivial."
[February 9] Bernhard Starr responds: "Gabriel Cussen, I agree with you. There's no there there."
[February 13]. Herbert Lecovin (Cornell '61) writes: "The important question is what is going on in her classroom. Does she lecture in this dialect and does she expect her students to write as she does?
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