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1

A Working Master

1. ADVENTURE, ENTERPRISE, FORTUNA

The beginning is known: a father warns his son against abandoning the ‘middle state’—equally free from ‘the labour and suffering of the mechanick part of mankind’, and ‘the pride, luxury, ambition and envy of the upper part’—to become one of those who go ‘abroad upon adventures, to rise by enterprise’.¹ Adventures, and enterprise: together. Because adventure, in Robinson Crusoe (1719), means more than the ‘strange surprising’ occurrences—Shipwreck . . . Pyrates . . . un-inhabited Island . . . the Great River of Oroonoque . . .—of the book’s title-page; when Robinson, in his second voyage, carries on board ‘a small adventure’² the term indicates, not a type of event, but a form of capital. In early modern German, writes Michael Nerlich, ‘adventure’ belonged to the ‘common terminology of trade’, where it indicated ‘the sense of risk (which was also called angst)’.³ And then, quoting a study by Bruno Kuske: ‘A distinction was made between aventiure trade and the sale to known customers. Aventiure trade covered those cases in which the merchant set off with his goods without knowing exactly which market he would find for them.’

Adventure as a risky investment: Defoe’s novel is a monument to the idea, and to its association with ‘the dynamic tendency of capitalism . . . never really to maintain the status quo’.⁴ But it’s a capitalism of a particular kind, that which appeals to the young Robinson Crusoe: as in the case of Weber’s ‘capitalist adventurer’, what captures his imagination are activities ‘of an irrational and speculative character, or directed to acquisition by force’.⁵ Acquisition by force is clearly the story of the island (and of the slave plantation before it); and as for irrationality, Robinson’s frequent acknowledgments of his ‘wild and indigested notion’ and ‘foolish inclination of wandring’⁶ is fully in line with Weber’s typology. In this perspective, the first part of Robinson Crusoe is a perfect illustration of the adventure-mentality of early modern long-distance trade, with its ‘risks that [were] not just high, but incalculable, and, as such, beyond the horizon of rational capitalist enterprise.’⁷

Beyond the horizon . . . In his legendary lecture at the Biblioteca Hertziana, in Rome, in 1929, Aby Warburg devoted an entire panel to the moody goddess of sea trade—Fortuna—claiming that early Renaissance humanism had finally overcome the old mistrust of her fickleness. Though he recalled the overlap between Fortuna as ‘chance’, ‘wealth’, and ‘storm wind’ (the Italian fortunale), Warburg presented a series of images in which Fortuna was progressively losing its demonic traits; most memorably, in Giovanni Rucellai’s coat of arms she was ‘standing in a ship and acting as its mast, gripping the yard in her left hand and the lower end of a swelling sail in her right.’⁸ This image, Warburg went on, had been the answer given by Rucellai himself ‘to his own momentous question: Have human reason and practical intelligence any power against the accidents of fate, against Fortune?’ In that age ‘of growing mastery of the seas’, the reply had been in the affirmative: Fortune had become ‘calculable and subject to laws’, and, as a result, the old ‘merchant venturer’ had himself turned into the more rational figure of the ‘merchant explorer’.⁹ It’s the same thesis independently advanced by Margaret Cohen in The Novel and the Sea: if we think of Robinson as ‘a crafty navigator’, she writes, his story ceases to be a cautionary tale against ‘high-risk activities’, and becomes instead a reflection on ‘how to undertake them with the best chance of success’.¹⁰ No longer irrationally ‘pre’-modern, the young Robinson Crusoe is the genuine beginning of the world of today.

Fortune, rationalized. It’s an elegant idea—whose application to Robinson, however, misses too large a part of the story to be fully convincing. Storms and pirates, cannibals and captivity, life-threatening shipwrecks and narrow escapes are all episodes in which it’s impossible to discern the sign of Cohen’s ‘craft’, or Warburg’s ‘mastery of the sea’; while the early scene where ships are ‘driven . . . at all adventures, and that with not a mast standing’¹¹ reads like the striking reversal of Rucellai’s coat of arms. As for Robinson’s financial success, its modernity is at least as questionable: though the magic paraphernalia of the story of Fortunatus (who had been his main predecessor in the pantheon of modern self-made men) are gone from the novel, the way in which Robinson’s wealth piles up in his absence and is later returned—‘an old pouch’ filled with ‘one hundred and sixty Portugal moidores in gold’, followed by ‘seven fine leopards’ skins . . . five chests of excellent sweetmeats, a hundred pieces of gold uncoined . . . one thousand two hundred chests of sugar, eight hundred rolls of tobacco, and the rest of the whole account in gold’—is still very much the stuff of fairy tales.¹²

Let me be clear, Defoe’s novel is a great modern myth; but it is so despite its adventures, and not because of them. When William Empson, in Some Versions of Pastoral, offhandedly compared Robinson to Sinbad the Sailor, he had it exactly right;¹³ if anything, Sinbad’s desire ‘to trade . . . and to earn my living’¹⁴ is more explicitly—and rationally—mercantile than Robinson’s ‘meer wandring inclination’. Where the similarity between the two stories ends is not on the sea; it’s on land. In each of his seven voyages, the Baghdad merchant is trapped on as many enchanted islands—ogres, carnivorous beasts, malevolent apes, murderous magicians . . .—from which he can only escape with a further leap into the unknown (as when he ties himself to the claw of a giant carnivorous bird). In Sinbad, in other words, adventures rule the sea, and the terra firma as well. In Robinson, no. On land, it is work that rules.

2. ‘THIS WILL TESTIFY FOR ME THAT I WAS NOT IDLE’

But why work? At first, to be sure, it’s a matter of survival: a situation in which ‘the day’s tasks . . . seem to disclose themselves, by the logic of need, before the labourer’s eyes’.¹⁵ But even when his future needs are secure ‘as long as I lived . . . if it were to be forty years’,¹⁶ Robinson just keeps toiling, steadily, page after page. His real-life model Alexander Selkirk had (supposedly) spent his four years on Juan Fernandez oscillating madly between being ‘dejected, languid, and melancholy’, and plunging into ‘one continual Feast . . . equal to the most sensual Pleasures’.¹⁷ Robinson, not even once. In the course of the eighteenth century, it has been calculated, the number of yearly workdays rose from 250 to 300; on his island, where the status of Sunday is never completely clear, the total is certainly higher.¹⁸ When, at the height of his zeal—‘You are to understand that now I had . . . two plantations . . . several apartments or caves . . . two pieces of corn-ground . . . my country seat . . . my enclosure for my cattle . . . a living magazine of flesh . . . my winter store of raisins’¹⁹—he turns to the reader and exclaims, ‘this will testify for me that I was not idle’, one can only nod in agreement. And, then, repeat the question: Why does he work so much?

‘We scarcely realize today what a unique and astonishing phenomenon a “working” upper class is’, writes Norbert Elias in The Civilizing Process: ‘why submit itself to this compulsion even though it is . . . not commanded by a superior to do so?’²⁰ Elias’s wonder is shared by Alexandre Kojève, who discerns at the centre of Hegel’s Phenomenology a paradox—‘the Bourgeois’s problem’—whereby the bourgeois must simultaneously ‘work for another’ (because work only arises as a result of an external constraint), yet can only ‘work for himself’ (because he no longer has a master).²¹ Working for himself, as if he were another: this is exactly how Robinson functions: one side of him becomes a carpenter, or potter, or baker, and spends weeks and weeks trying to accomplish something; then Crusoe the master emerges, and points out the inadequacy of the results. And then the cycle repeats itself all over again. And it repeats itself, because work has become the new principle of legitimation of social power. When, at the end of the novel, Robinson finds himself ‘master . . . of above five thousand pounds sterling’²² and of all the rest, his twenty-eight years of uninterrupted toil are there to justify his fortune. Realistically, there is no relationship between the two: he is rich because of the exploitation of nameless slaves in his Brazilian plantation—whereas his solitary labour hasn’t brought him a single pound. But we have seen him work like no other character in fiction: How can he not deserve what he has?²³

There is a word that perfectly captures Robinson’s behaviour: ‘industry’. According to the OED, its initial meaning, around 1500, was that of ‘intelligent or clever working; skill, ingenuity, dexterity, or cleverness’. Then, in the mid-sixteenth century, a second meaning emerges—‘diligence or assiduity . . . close and steady application . . . exertion, effort’, that soon crystallizes as ‘systematic work or labour; habitual employment in some useful work’.²⁴ From skill and ingenuity, to systematic exertion; this is how ‘industry’ contributes to bourgeois culture: hard work, replacing the clever variety.²⁵ And calm work, too, in the same sense that interest is for Hirschmann a ‘calm passion’: steady, methodical, cumulative, and thus stronger than the ‘turbulent (yet weak) passions’ of the old aristocracy.²⁶ Here, the discontinuity between the two ruling classes is unmistakable: if turbulent passions had idealized what was needed by a warlike caste—the white heat of the brief ‘day’ of battle—bourgeois interest is the virtue of a peaceful and repeatable (and repeatable, and repeatable, and repeatable) everyday: less energy, but for a much longer time. A few hours—‘about four in the evening’, writes Robinson, ever modest²⁷—but for twenty-eight years.

In the previous section, we have looked at the adventures that open Robinson Crusoe; in this one, at the work of his life on the island. It’s the same progression of The Protestant Ethic: a history that begins with the ‘capitalist adventurer’, but where the ethos of laboriousness eventually brings about the ‘rational tempering of his irrational impulse’.²⁸ In the case of Defoe, the transition from the first to the second figure is particularly striking, because apparently wholly unplanned: on the title-page of the novel (Figure 2), Robinson’s ‘strange surprising adventures’—mentioned at the top, and in larger size—are clearly billed as the main attraction, whereas the part on the island is simply ‘one of the many other episodes’.²⁹ But then, during the composition of the novel, an ‘unforeseen, uncontrolled expansion’ of the island must have occurred, which shook off its subordination to the story of adventures and made it the new centre of the text. A Calvinist from Geneva was the first to grasp the significance of this mid-course re-orientation: Rousseau’s Robinson,

Figure 2

‘cleansed of all its claptrap’, will begin with the shipwreck, and be limited to the years on the island, so that Emile will not waste his time in dreams of adventure, and may concentrate instead on Robinson’s work (‘he will want to know all that is useful, and nothing but that’).³⁰ Which is cruel to Emile, of course, and to all children after him, but right: because Robinson’s hard work on the island is indeed the greatest novelty of the book.

From the capitalist adventurer, to the working master. But then, as Robinson approaches the end, a second about-face occurs: cannibals, armed conflict, mutineers, wolves, bears, fairy-tale fortune . . . Why? If the poetics of adventure had been ‘tempered’ by its rational opposite, why promise ‘some very surprising incidents in some new adventures of my own’ in the very last sentence of the novel?³¹

So far, I have emphasized the opposition between the culture of adventures and the rational work ethic; and I have indeed no doubt that the two are incompatible, and that the latter is the more recent phenomenon, specific to modern European capitalism. That however does not mean that modern capitalism can be reduced to the work ethic, as Weber was clearly inclined to do; by the same token, the fact that activities ‘of an irrational and speculative character, or directed to acquisition by force’ are no longer typical of modern capitalism does not mean that they are absent from it. A variety of non-economic practices, violent and often unpredictable in their results—Marx’s ‘primitive accumulation’, or David Harvey’s recent ‘accumulation by dispossession’—have clearly played (and in fact still play) a major role in the expansion of capitalism; and if this is so, then a narrative of adventure, broadly construed—like for instance, in a later age, Conrad’s entrelacement of metropolitan reflection and colonial romance—is still perfectly appropriate to the representation of modernity.

This, then, is the historical basis for the ‘two Robinsons’, and the ensuing discontinuity in the structure of Defoe’s narrative: the island offers the first glimpse of the industrious master of modern times; the sea, Africa, Brazil, Friday, and the other adventures give voice to the older—but never fully discarded—forms of capitalist domination. From a formal viewpoint, this coexistence-without-integration of opposite registers—so unlike Conrad’s calculated hierarchy, to use that parallel again—is clearly a flaw of the novel. But, just as clearly, the inconsistency is not just a matter of form: it arises from the unresolved dialectic of the bourgeois type himself, and of his two ‘souls’:³² suggesting, contra Weber, that the rational bourgeois will never truly outgrow his irrational impulses, nor repudiate the predator he once used to be. In being, not just the beginning of a new era, but a beginning in which a structural contradiction becomes visible that will be never overcome, Defoe’s shapeless story remains the great classic of bourgeois literature.

3. KEYWORDS I: ‘USEFUL’

Nov. 4. This morning I began to order my times of work, of going out with my gun, time of sleep, and time of diversion, viz. every morning I walked out with my gun for two or three hours if it did not rain, then employed my self to work till about eleven a-clock, then eat what I had to live on, and from twelve to two I lay down to sleep, the weather being excessive hot, and then in the evening to work again.³³

Work, gun, sleep, and diversion. But when Robinson actually describes his day, diversion disappears, and his life recalls to the letter Hegel’s crisp summary of the Enlightenment: here, ‘everything is useful’.³⁴ Useful: the first keyword of this book. When Robinson returns on board the ship after the shipwreck, its incantatory repetition—from the carpenter’s chest, ‘which was a very useful prize to me’, to the ‘several things very useful to me’, and ‘everything . . . that could be useful to me’³⁵—re-orients the world by placing Robinson at its center (useful to me . . . to me . . . to me . . .). The useful is here, as in Locke, the category that at once establishes private property (useful to me), and legitimates it by identifying it with work (useful to me). Tullio Pericoli’s illustrations for the novel, which look like deranged versions of the technological tableaux of the Encyclopèdie (Figure 3),³⁶ capture the essence of this world in which no object is an end in itself—in the kingdom of the useful, nothing is an end in itself—but always and only a means to do something else. A tool. And in a world of tools, there is only one thing left to do: work.³⁷

Everything for him. Everything a tool. And then, the third dimension of the useful:

At last, being eager to view the circumference of my little kingdom, I resolved upon my cruise; and accordingly I victualled my ship for the voyage, putting in two dozen of loaves (cakes I should call them) of barley-bread, an earthen pot full of parched rice (a food I ate a good deal of), a little bottle of rum, half a goat, and powder and shot for killing more, and two large watch-coats, of those which, as I mentioned before, I had saved out of the seamen’s chests; these I took, one to lie upon, and the other to cover me in the night.³⁸

Figure 3

Here, next to Robinson as the active centre of the story (I resolved . . . I victualled . . . I had saved . . . I took . . .), and to the objects he needs for the expedition (an earthen pot . . . powder and shot . . . two large watch-coats . . .), a cascade of final constructions—for the voyage . . . for killing more . . . to lie upon . . . to cover me—completes the triangle of the useful. Subject, object, and verb. A verb that has interiorized the lesson of tools, and reproduces it within Robinson’s activity itself: where an action, typically, is always done in order to do something else:

Accordingly, the next day I went to my country house, as I called it, and cutting some of the smaller twigs, I found them to my purpose as much as I could desire; whereupon I came the next time prepared with a hatchet to cut down a quantity, which I soon found, for there was great plenty of them. These I set up to dry within my circle or hedge, and when they were fit for use I carried them to my cave; and here, during the next season, I employed myself in making, as well as I could, a great many baskets, both to carry earth or to carry or lay up anything, as I had occasion; and though I did not finish them very handsomely, yet I made them sufficiently serviceable for my purpose; thus, afterwards, I took care never to be without them; and as my wicker-ware decayed, I made more, especially strong, deep baskets to place my corn in, instead of sacks, when I should come to have any quantity of it. Having mastered this difficulty, and employed a world of time about it, I bestirred myself to see, if possible, how to supply two wants . . .³⁹

Two, three verbs per line; in the hands of another writer, so much activity may become frantic. Here, though, a ubiquitous lexicon of teleology (accordingly, purpose, desire, prepared, fit, employed, serviceable, care, supply . . .) provides a connective tissue that makes the page consistent and solid, while verbs pragmatically subdivide Robinson’s actions into the immediate tasks of the main clauses (I went, I found, I came, I set up), and the more indefinite future of its final clauses (to cut down . . . to carry . . . to place . . . to supply . . .); though not much more indefinite, to be sure, because the ideal future, for a culture of the useful, is one so close at hand, as to be little more than the continuation of the present: ‘the next day’; ‘the next season’; ‘to cut down a quantity, which I soon found’. All is tight and concatenated, here; no step is ever skipped (‘whereupon—I came—the next time—prepared—with a hatchet—to cut down—a quantity’) in these sentences that, like Hegel’s ‘prosaic mind’, understand the world via ‘categories such as cause and effect, or means and end’.⁴⁰ Especially means and end: Zweckrationalität, Weber will call it; rationality directed to, and governed by its aim; ‘instrumental reason’, in Horkheimer’s variation. Two centuries before Weber, Defoe’s page illustrates the lexico-grammatical concatenations that were the first embodiment of Zweckrationalität: instrumental reason as a practice of language—perfectly articulated, though completely unnoticed—well before it became a concept. It’s a first glimpse of bourgeois ‘mentality’, and of Defoe’s great contribution to it: prose, as the style of the useful.

4. KEYWORDS II: ‘EFFICIENCY’

The style of the useful. A novelist as great as Defoe devoted his last, most ambitious novel entirely to this idea. Emile will want to know all that is useful, Rousseau had written, and nothing but that; and Goethe—alas—observed the second clause to the letter. ‘From the Useful by Way of the True to the Beautiful’, we read at the beginning of the Wanderjahre (1829);⁴¹ a novel where, instead of the usual ‘pleasure garden or modern park’, one finds ‘fields of vegetables, large beds of medicinal herbs, and anything that may be useful in any way’.⁴² Gone is the conflict between the useful and the beautiful that had been the key to the previous novel about Wilhelm Meister, the Apprenticeship of 1796; in the ‘Pedagogical Province’ of the Wanderjahre conflict has given way to functional subordination; having ‘chosen to be useful’,⁴³ explains one of the few artists present in the novel, a sculptor, he is now perfectly happy to make anatomical models, and nothing else. The fact that art has been deprived of its recently acquired purposelessness is repeatedly presented as a commendable progress: ‘as salt is to food, so are the arts to technical science. We want from art only enough to insure that our handicraft will remain in good taste’, writes the Abbé to Wilhelm;⁴⁴ ‘the rigorous arts’—stonecutters, masons, carpenters, roofers, locksmiths . . . —adds another leader of the Province, ‘must set an example for the free arts, and seek to put them to shame’.⁴⁵ And then, if necessary, the punitive, anti-aesthetic side of Utopia makes its appearance: if he sees no theatres around, Wilhelm’s guide curtly informs him, it’s because ‘we found such impostures thoroughly dangerous . . . and could in no way reconcile them with our serious purpose’.⁴⁶ So, drama is banned from the Province. And that’s it.

‘The Renunciants’, reads the subtitle of the Wanderjahre, indicating with that word the sacrifice of human fullness imposed by the modern division of labour. Thirty years earlier, in the Apprenticeship, the theme had been presented as a painful mutilation of bourgeois existence;⁴⁷ but in the later novel, pain has disappeared: ‘the day for specialization has come’, Wilhelm is immediately told by one of his old associates; ‘fortunate is he who comprehends it and labors in this spirit’.⁴⁸ The day has come, and falling in step is a ‘fortune’. ‘Happy the man whose vocation becomes his favorite pastime’, exclaims a farmer who has gathered a collection of agricultural tools, ‘so that he takes pleasure in that which his station also makes a duty’.⁴⁹ A museum of tools, to celebrate the division of labour. ‘All activity, all art . . . can only be acquired through limitation. To know one thing properly . . . results in higher cultivation than half-competence in a hundred different fields’, says one of Wilhelm’s interlocutors.⁵⁰ ‘Where I am useful, there is my fatherland!’,⁵¹ adds another and then goes on: ‘If I now say, “let each strive to be useful to himself and others in all ways”, it is neither a doctrine nor advice, but the maxim of life itself.’

There is a word that would have been perfect for the Wanderjahre—had it only existed at the time Goethe was writing: efficiency. Or better, the word did exist, but it still indicated what it had for centuries: ‘the fact of being an operative agent or efficient cause’, as the OED puts it: efficiency as causation, and nothing more. Then, around the mid nineteenth century, the shift: ‘fitness or power to accomplish, or success in accomplishing, the purpose intended; adequate power, effectiveness, efficacy.’⁵² Adequate power: no longer the mere capacity to do something, but to do it without any waste, and in the most economic way. If the useful had turned the world into a collection of tools, the division of labour steps in to calibrate the tools towards their ends (‘the purpose intended’)—and ‘efficiency’ is the result. They are three consecutive steps in the history of capitalist rationalization.

Of capitalist rationalization—and of European colonialism. ‘These chaps were not much account, really’, says Marlow, dismissively, of the Romans in Britain; ‘they were conquerors, and for that you want only brute force’.⁵³ Brute force; by contrast, ‘what saves’ British rule in the colonies is ‘efficiency—the devotion to efficiency’.⁵⁴ Two mentions, in crescendo, within a single sentence; then the word disappears from Heart of Darkness; in its place, a stunningly in-efficient world where machines are left to rust and disintegrate, workers gather water with pails that have holes at the bottom, bricks lack the crucial ingredient, and Marlow’s own work is halted for lack of rivets (though ‘there were cases of them down at the coast—cases—piled up—burst—split!’⁵⁵). And the reason for all this waste is simple: slavery. Slavery was never ‘ordered around the idea of efficiency’, writes Roberto Schwarz about the Brazilian plantations of Conrad’s time, because it could always rely ‘on violence and military discipline’; therefore, ‘the rational study and continuous modernization of the processes of production’ made literally ‘no sense’. In such cases, as in the Congo of the ‘company’, the ‘brute force’ of the Romans may turn out to be more perversely ‘efficient’ than efficiency itself.

Strange experiment, Heart of Darkness: sending a clear-sighted bourgeois engineer to witness the fact that one of the most profitable ventures of fin-de-siècle capitalism was the opposite of industrial efficiency: ‘the opposite of what was modern’, to quote Schwarz one more time. ‘Acquisition by force’ survived side by side with modern rationality, I wrote a few pages ago, and Conrad’s novella—where the ethical bourgeois is sent to rescue the irrational adventurer—is the perfect example of that jarring cohabitation. Surrounded by a crowd with whom he has nothing in common, Marlow’s only moment of empathy is with an anonymous pamphlet he finds in an abandoned station along the river; ‘humble pages’, he writes, made ‘luminous’ by their ‘honest concern for the right way of going to work’. The right way: work ethic, in the midst of colonial pillage. ‘Luminous’, versus the ‘darkness’ of the title: religious associations, like those of the ‘calling’ in The Protestant Ethic, or that initial ‘ devotion to efficiency’, which has its own Weberian echo in the ‘devotion to the task’ of ‘Science as a Profession’. But . . . devotion to efficiency—in the Congo Free State? Nothing in common, I said, between Marlow and the plunderers around him: nothing in common, that is, except for the fact that he works for them. The greater his devotion to efficiency, the easier their looting.

The creation of a culture of work has been, arguably, the greatest symbolic achievement of the bourgeoisie as a class: the useful, the division of labour, ‘industry’, efficiency, the ‘calling’, the ‘seriousness’ of the next chapter—all these, and more, bear witness to the enormous significance acquired by what used to be merely a hard necessity or a brutal duty; that Max Weber could use exactly the same concepts to describe manual labour (in The Protestant Ethic) and great science (in ‘Science as a Profession’) is itself a further, indirect sign of the new symbolic value of bourgeois work. But when Marlow’s wholehearted devotion to his task turns into the instrument of bloody oppression—a fact so patent, in Heart of Darkness, as to be almost invisible—the fundamental antinomy of bourgeois work comes to the surface: the same self-referential absorption that is the source of its greatness—unknown tribes hiding ashore, foolish and frightened murderers on board, and Marlow, oblivious to all, keeping the steamer on course—is the source of its servitude, too. Marlow’s work ethic impels him to do his work well; to what end, is not its concern. Like the ‘blinders’ so memorably evoked in ‘Science as a Profession’, the legitimacy and productivity of modern work are not just intensified, but established by their blindness to what lies around it. It is truly, as Weber writes in The Protestant Ethic, an ‘irrational sort of life . . . where a man exists for the sake of his business, instead of the reverse’, and where the only result of one’s ceaseless activity is ‘the irrational sense of having done his job well’.⁵⁶

An irrational sort of life, that dominated by Zweckrationalität. But instrumental reason, as we have seen, is also one of the underlying principles of modern prose. In a few pages, the consequences of this association will become visible.

5. KEYWORDS III: ‘COMFORT’

Christian asceticism, we read in The Protestant Ethic,

had already ruled the world which it had renounced from the monastery and through the Church. But it had, on the whole, left the naturally spontaneous character of daily life in the world untouched. Now it strode into the market-place of life, slammed the door of the monastery behind it, and undertook to penetrate just that daily routine of life with its methodicalness, to fashion it into a life in the world, but neither of nor for this world.⁵⁷

A life in the world, but neither of nor for the world. Just like Robinson’s life: ‘in’ the island, but neither ‘of’ nor ‘for’ the island. And yet, we never have the impression that he ‘gets nothing out of [his activity] except the irrational sense of having done his job well’, as Weber writes of the capitalist ethos.⁵⁸ There is a subdued, elusive sense of enjoyment that pervades the novel—and that is probably one reason for its success. But enjoyment of what?

Earlier on, I quoted the moment when Robinson addresses the reader—‘this will testify for me that I was not idle’—in the tone of one who is justifying himself in front of a judge. But then, the sentence veers in an unexpected direction: . . . that I was not idle, and that I spared no pains to bring to pass whatever appeared necessary for my comfortable support’.⁵⁹ Comfortable: this is the key. If the ‘useful’ had transformed the island into a workshop, ‘comfort’ restores an element of pleasure to Robinson’s existence; under its sign, even The Protestant Ethic finds a lighter moment:

Worldly Protestant asceticism acted powerfully against the spontaneous enjoyment of possessions; it restricted consumption, especially of luxuries . . . On the other hand . . . it did not wish to impose mortification on the man of wealth, but the use of his means for necessary and practical things. The idea of comfort [in English in the original] characteristically limits the extent of ethically permissible expenditures. It is naturally no accident that the development of a manner of living consistent with that idea may be observed earliest and most clearly among the most consistent representatives of this whole attitude towards life. Over against the glitter and ostentation of feudal magnificence which, resting on an unsound economic basis, prefers a sordid elegance to a sober simplicity, they set the clean and solid comfort [Bequemlichkeit] of the middle-class home [bürgerlichen ‘home’] as an ideal.⁶⁰

The bourgeois home—the English bourgeois home—as the embodiment of comfort. In the course of the eighteenth century, writes Charles Morazé in Les bourgeois conquerants, ‘England made fashionable a new type of happiness—that of being at home: the English call it “comfort”, and so will the rest of the world.’⁶¹ Needless to say, there is no ‘middle-class home’ on Robinson’s island; but when he resolves to make ‘such necessary things as I found I most wanted, particularly a chair and a table; for without these I was not able to enjoy the few comforts I had in the world’,⁶² or when he later declares that ‘my habitation grew comfortable to me beyond measure’,⁶³ he, too, is clearly identifying comfort with the domestic horizon: a chair, a table, a pipe, a notebook . . . an umbrella!⁶⁴

Comfort. The origin of the word is in a late Latin compound—cum + forte—that first appears in English in the thirteenth century, to indicate ‘strengthening; encouragement . . . aid, succour’ (OED), and whose semantic sphere remains more or less the same for another four centuries: ‘physical refreshment or sustenance’, ‘relief’, ‘aid in want, pain, sickness . . . mental distress or affliction’. Then, in the late seventeenth century, the sea-change: comfort is no longer what returns us to a ‘normal’ state from adverse circumstances, but what takes normality as its starting point and pursues well-being as an end in itself, independently of any mishap: ‘a thing that produces or ministers to enjoyment and content (usually, plural, distinguished from necessaries on the one hand, and from luxuries on the other)’.⁶⁵

Necessaries on one side, and luxuries on the other. Caught between such powerful concepts, the idea was bound to become a battlefield. ‘The Comforts of Life are so various and extensive’, states the wonderful ‘Remark (L.)’ of The Fable of the Bees, ‘that no body can tell what People mean by them, except he knows what sort of Life they lead . . . I am apt to believe that when they pray for their daily Bread, the Bishop includes several things in that Petition which the Sexton does not think on’.⁶⁶ In the mouth of a bishop, ‘comforts’ are likely to be luxuries in disguise; this is certainly how the nameless hero of the opening pages of Pilgrim’s Progress—who receives the name of ‘Christian’ in the act of forsaking them—understands the term.⁶⁷ But grim Benjamin Franklin, for his part, hesitates: ‘ Friends and Countrymen’, proclaims the Poor Richard’s Almanack for 1756, ‘you spend yearly at least Two Hundred Thousand Pounds, ’tis said, in European, East-Indian and West-Indian Commodities: supposing one Half of this Expence to be in Things absolutely necessary, the other Half may be call’d Superfluities, or at best, Conveniences, which however you might live without for one little Year.’⁶⁸ One little year is the period one can reasonably be asked to abstain from conveniences. Conveniences? ‘The words Decency and Conveniency’ are so full of ‘obscurity’, notes Mandeville, implacable, that they are completely useless. And the OED proves him right: ‘Convenience: The quality of being . . . suitable or well-adapted to the performance of some action’; ‘material arrangements or appliances conducive to personal comfort, ease of action’. If comfort was elusive, this one is worse.⁶⁹

Wars of words are always confusing. So, let’s re-read that passage from Robinson Crusoe: ‘I began to apply myself to make such necessary things as I found I most wanted, particularly a chair and a table; for without these I was not able to enjoy the few comforts I had in the world; I could not write or eat, or do several things, with so much pleasure without a table.’⁷⁰ From ‘necessary’ to ‘comforts’ and ‘pleasure’, from ‘wanted’ to ‘enjoy’ in fifty-six words: a modulation so rapid that it seems to confirm Mandeville’s sarcasm, or the OED’s non-committal definition of ‘necessaries on the one hand, and luxuries on the other’. But if we look at Robinson’s actual comforts, the notion loses its supposed equidistance: writing, eating, and ‘doing several things’ with a table are all things clearly inclining towards necessity—and with absolutely no relationship to luxury. Luxury is always somewhat out of the ordinary; comfort, never; whence the profound common sense of its pleasures, so different from luxury’s perverse delight in being ‘ornate, grotesque, inconvenient . . . to the point of distress’, as Veblen ferociously put it in Theory of the Leisure Class;⁷¹ less caustic, but just as trenchant, Braudel dismissed ancien régime luxury as ‘all the more false’, because ‘it was not always accompanied by what we would call comfort. Heating was still poor, ventilation derisory.’⁷²

Comfort, as everyday necessities made pleasant.Within this new horizon, an aspect of the original meaning of the term returns to the surface. ‘Relief’, ‘aid’, ‘sustenance’ from ‘want, pain, sickness’, the word used to mean. Centuries later, the need for relief has returned: this time though, not relief from sickness but from—work. It’s striking how many of the modern comforts address the need that from work most directly arises: rest. (The first comfort that Robinson wishes for—poor man—is a chair.)⁷³ It is this proximity to work that makes comfort ‘permissible’ for the Protestant ethic; well-being, yes; but one that doesn’t seduce you away from your calling, because it remains too sober and modest to do so. Much too modest, retort some recent historians of capitalism; much too sober to play a significant role in the precipitous changes of modern history. Comfort indicates those desires ‘that could be satiated’, writes Jan de Vries, and that therefore have in-built limitations; to explain the open-endedness of the ‘consumer revolution’, and of the later economic take-off, we must turn instead to the ‘volatile “daydreams of desire”’,⁷⁴ or the ‘maverick spirit of fashion’⁷⁵ first noticed by the economists of Defoe’s generation. The eighteenth century, concludes Neil McKendrick, with a formulation that leaves no conceptual room for comfort, is the age when ‘the dictate of need’ was superseded once and for all by ‘the dictate of fashion’.⁷⁶

Fashion instead of comfort, then? In one respect, the alternative is clearly groundless, as both have contributed to shape modern consumer culture. What is true, however, is that they have done so in different ways, and with opposite class connotations. Already active within court society, and preserving to this day a halo of hauteur, and indeed of luxury, fashion appeals to the bourgeoisie that wants to go beyond itself, and resemble the old ruling class; comfort remains down to earth, prosaic; its aesthetics, if there is such a thing, is understated, functional, adapted to the everyday, and even to work.⁷⁷ This makes comfort less visible than fashion, but infinitely more capable of permeating the interstices of existence; a knack for dissemination that it shares with those other typical eighteenth-century commodities—they, too, somewhere in between necessaries and luxuries—that are coffee and tobacco, chocolate and spirits. Genussmittel, as the German word goes: ‘means of pleasure’ (and in that ‘means’ one hears the unmistakable echo of instrumental reason). ‘Stimulants’, as they will also be called, with another striking semantic choice: little shocks that punctuate the day and the week with their delights, fulfilling the eminently ‘practical function’ of securing ‘the individual more effectively into his society because they give him pleasure’.⁷⁸

The accomplishment of Genussmittel, writes Wolfgang Schivelbusch, ‘sounds like a paradox’: Arbeit-im-Genuss, reads his definition: work, mixed with pleasure. It’s the same paradox as that of comfort, and for the same reason: during the seventeenth and eighteenth century, two equally powerful but completely contradictory sets of values came simultaneously into being: the ascetic imperative of modern production—and the desire for enjoyment of a rising social group. Comfort and Genussmittel managed to forge a compromise between these opposite forces. A compromise, not a true solution: the initial contrast was too sharp for that. So, Mandeville was right about the ambiguity of ‘comfort’; what he missed, was that ambiguity was precisely the point of the term. At times, that is the best that language can do.

6. PROSE I: ‘THE RHYTHM OF CONTINUITY’

By foreshadowing Robinson’s actions before they occur, I wrote a few pages ago, final clauses structure the relationship between present and future—I do this, in order to do that—through the lenses of ‘instrumental reason’. Nor is this limited to Robinson’s deliberate planning. Here he is, immediately after the shipwreck: the most calamitous and unexpected moment of his entire life. And yet, he walks

about a furlong from the shore, to see if I could find any fresh water to drink, which I did, to my great joy; and having drank, and put a little tobacco in my mouth to prevent hunger, I went to the tree, and getting up into it, endeavored to place myself so as that if I should sleep I might not fall; and having cut me a short stick, like a truncheon, for my defense, I took up my lodging.⁷⁹

He goes ‘to see’ if there is water ‘to drink’; then he chews tobacco ‘to prevent hunger’, places himself ‘so as’ not to fall, and cuts a stick ‘for [his] defense’. Short-term teleology everywhere, as if it were a second nature. And then, alongside this forward-leaning grammar of final clauses, a second choice makes its appearance, inclining in the opposite temporal direction: an extremely rare verb form—the past gerund: ‘and having drank . . . and having put . . . and having cut . . .’—which becomes in Robinson Crusoe both more frequent and more significant than elsewhere.⁸⁰ Here are a few examples from the novel:

Having fitted my mast and sail, and tried the boat, I found she would sail very well . . .

Having secured my boat, I took my gun and went on shore . . .

. . . the wind having abated overnight, the sea was calm, and I ventured . . .