Robinson Crusoe in the Pacific: REFUGIO by Roger Palmer and the Marxian theory of economic character masks

ABSTRACT

Robinson Crusoe is among the world’s most mythologized fictional characters. As homo economicus, economic man, Crusoe is a byword for rugged individualism. Crusoe has been linked to the emergent bourgeois individual, and this role offers a way to reconsider, after 300 years of circulation, an alternate economic reading of the character. This article rereads Crusoe’s role in Marx’s theory of commodity fetishism, prompted by an art installation, REFUGIO – after Selkirk, after Crusoe by Roger Palmer, which explores a visually doubled figure of Crusoe relocated to the Pacific Ocean. This trope of doubling is reinterpreted with Marx’s concept of “economic character masks” and J.M. Coetzee’s postcolonial re-imagining of the Crusoe story, Foe, showing that Crusoe’s economic character mask continues to operate in the capitalist world while his body is absent. Homo economicus is a fiction that obscures the capitalist individual’s imbrication with globalizing networks of exchange, accumulation, and exploitation.

KEYWORDS:

• Crusoe
• Marx
• homo economicus
• Pacific
• Robinsonades
• character mask

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. This episode of nominal displacement echoes the journey “Selkirk” has already made from its original “Selcraig” (Dykes 1969; Reid 1994), which is itself an echo of Crusoe’s account of his name’s journey into English (see Hund, this issue).

2. See Hutnyk (this issue) for the significance of a range of other texts and precursor figures for Crusoe as well as Friday, notably William Dampier’s A New Voyage Round the World (1697), and Hutnyk (2021) for the case in favour of William the Moskito as “real” precursor, rather than Selkirk.

3. See also Pepperell (2010, 62) for a discussion of the role of irony in Marx.

4. I thank John Hutnyk for introducing me to this idea.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Claire Reddleman

Claire Reddleman teaches digital humanities and art history at the University of Manchester. She is the author of Cartographic Abstraction in Contemporary Art: Seeing with Maps (2018), which theorizes abstract modes of viewing with artworks and maps. Her articles have appeared in Humanities, GeoHumanities, and Socialism and Democracy; her creative work has appeared in Living Maps Review; and a recent book chapter addresses cartographic depictions of the former penal colonies in French Guiana and New Caledonia. Her book Pennine Street: A Cartographic Fiction is forthcoming, and combines creative writing and original artwork to critique capitalist abstraction. She is writing about Robinson Crusoe’s fantasies of surveillance and the voice of the other.