Friday not only criticizes the Enlightenment subjectivity in Defoe’s version but also problematizes the issue of the Other by addressing the question: “What happens when
IV. Ecology, Religion, and Politics
Although Friday, set in the eighteenth century, contains rich philosophical insights and reflections, we should not overlook its political dimensions that are relevant to our time. As Bogue remarks, “His treatment of capitalism, colonialism, exoticism and primitivism engages historical forces that continue to play through the present world” (“Speranza” 129-30). In fact, Friday reveals Tournier’s political concerns and can be treated as his political response to contemporary times. As Tournier states:
For I had wanted to dedicate my book to all of France’s immigrant workers, to those silent masses of Fridays shipped to Europe from the third world—some three million Algerians, Moroccans, Tunisians, Senegalese, and Portuguese on whom our society depends and whom we never see or hear, who have no right to vote, no trade union, and no spokesperson. (Wind Spirit 197)
His words show his concerns about those who are treated as outsiders or minorities and suggest that his novel Friday has a political agenda. Here, I would like to point out another possible agenda underlying Friday concerning ecology, religion, and capitalism.
If Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe presents a utopian-like world based on capitalism that emphasizes accumulation and production, then Friday, I contend, provides a critique of such a capitalistic mindset by deactivating production. In the first half of
Friday, Crusoe, as in Defoe’s version, is anxious about production because for him
“all production is creation” (Tournier 61). Thus, this explains why he is so eager to make bread by himself and why he is so delightful when he makes his first loaf of bread. At first, like his English fellowmen, he strives to accumulate as much as possible of what he can produce and grow: “My situation is, in fact, not unlike that of
my fellow countrymen who land by shiploads on the coasts of the New World. They too must bow to the law of accumulation. For them too the wasting of time is a crime and the saving of time a cardinal virtue. To accumulate!” (61). Production and
accumulation, for him, not only demonstrate his creation but also remind him of a civilized world. Therefore, the more he is concerned with production, the more he sticks to his own civilization and his own identity as a civilized man.
Time is essential and vital to Crusoe because it endows him with a sense of his own being on the island. For Crusoe, “the whole problem of this island may be expressed in terms of time” (Tournier, Friday 60). He feels that he lives on the island as if he were living “outside time,” so he makes a water clock to measure the passing of time and starts a “calendar” to regain “possession” of himself (60). Moreover, to produce more crops, he works according to a rigid time schedule. Yet, later, his cave experiences change him. He used to rigidly stick to his time schedule, not allowing himself to rest for a moment. However, now he, staying in the cave, overlooks the water clock, and thus is not bound by the tether of time.
After undergoing spiritual experiences in the cave, Crusoe overlooks the time measured by the water clock; this is a turning point for him. Compared with Defoe’s protagonist, who continues to stress work and labor, Tournier’s Crusoe tends to realize the importance of rest toward the end of the novel. The stopping of the water clock suggests the stopping of time. The stopping of time not only challenges the notion that time progresses in a linear way but also relates to the religious dimension of the novel, that is, the rest day. The concept of “rest” underlying the novel, in fact, is indirectly conveyed through Crusoe’s choice and understanding of the name “Friday.” Although Crusoe explains that he gives the coastal Araucanian’s name as Friday because it is the day when he saves the Araucanian’s life, the day possesses an implicit religious meaning associated with the notion of rest. When Crusoe makes laws for the island,
the fourth article that he writes down is: “Friday is a day of fasting” (Tournier, Friday 70). “Fast” is commonly regarded as a religious duty and defined as “to abstain from food.” During fast days, the practitioner must reduce the intake of food; the reduction of food also suggests the reduction of production. In this sense, the name “Friday” not only denotes the day of the week but connotes a refutation of overproduction as well.
This connotation is embodied in the character of Friday. As Crusoe notes, “Friday never worked in any real sense of the word. Unconcerned with past or future, he lived wholly in the present” (182). Recognizing Friday as his guide after the cave explosion, Crusoe starts to observe Friday’s way of living. What Friday brings is not just a
destruction but a philosophy of life that disrupts Crusoe’s old notion of linear time, old habit of consumption, and old understanding of work. If Crusoe’s living principles that follow a busy schedule represent a production machine of capitalism, then the appearance of Friday serves as a counteraction against such a machine.
The title of the novel also suggests the function of Friday’s role. Tournier’s French novel Vendredi ou les limbes du Pacifique is translated into English as Friday;
however, the full title should be translated as “Friday or the Limbo of the Pacific.” As Ian Watt points out, Tournier may have used the word “limbo” in a theological sense because this word “denotes the area on the borders of hell where unbaptized souls dwell, especially those born before the coming of Christ the Redeemer, who, if they had had the chance of being baptized, would have gone to heaven”; however, Tournier’s “emphasis is more on the general idea of the unformed, special, or
marginal nature of the island itself, as well as the imagined ‘other’ island” (255). The word “limbo” means an uncertain, neglected situation. The novel’s title literally refers to the protagonist’s situation on the island—that is, Crusoe is in limbo. The use of “or”
in the title implies that Friday figuratively means “the limbo.” Indeed, if Friday did not exist, Crusoe would still live in a civilized world that he builds on the island. It is
Friday that keeps Crusoe in limbo between his world and the other world, more specifically, between a capitalistic world that emphasizes accumulation and a world that downplays the importance of overproduction.
Besides Friday, an even more direct manifestation of the notion of rest is Crusoe’s choice of the name “Sunday.” Near the end of the novel, Crusoe suffers loneliness again and falls into deep grief after discovering that Friday boards the ship
Whitebird and leaves the island without him. Yet, subsequently, he finds that he is not
alone because an about twelve-year-old boy, who worked unhappily in the galley of the Whitebird, flees to the island and decides to live with him. Treating the boy as“Sunday’s child,” Crusoe calls him “Sunday” because “[i]t is the day of the
resurrection, of the youth of all things, and the day of our master, the Sun” (Tournier,
Friday 235). The boy suggests the coming of a new hope, a new cycle, yet such a
newness is not based on the concept of production but on the implicit principle of rest.Why Sunday? What is the significant implication of choosing the name
“Sunday”? According to Crusoe’s fifth article that he writes down for the island,
“Sunday is a day of rest” (Tournier, Friday 70). Sunday is the rest day—Sabbath. The boy’s name echoes the word “limbo” in the full title of the novel. On the rest day, people do not work or produce; in a sense, they are “in limbo,” in a situation where nothing changes or happens. Doing nothing on this day does not mean negating one’s ability but instead means preserving it. Here, I would like to read the meaning of the rest day as an echo to Crusoe’s passivity with reference to Giorgio Agamben’s philosophy.
Agamben’s theory of potentiality not only challenges the Western philosophy that insists on the primacy of actuality over potentiality, but also provides us with a glint of life’s resistance. Whereas actuality is commonly regarded as a guarantor that confirms the existence of being, Agamben argues that “[i]nstead one must think the
existence of potentiality without any relation to Being in the form of actuality” (Homo
Sacer 47). That is, Agamben shifts the focus from actuality to potentiality, from the
question of who or what is to “the meaning of the verb ‘can’ [potere]” (Potentialities 177). Developing his conception of potentiality from his interpretation of Aristotle, Agamben argues that “it is necessary that potentiality be able not to pass over into actuality, that potentiality constitutively be the potentiality not to (do or be) . . .”(Homo Sacer 45). His argument suggests that potentiality and impotentiality are two sides of a coin; that is, potentiality consists of both dimensions: “to do” and “not to do.”
The notion of “not to do” relates to another of Agamben’s concepts, namely
“passivity.” Passivity should not be understood as inaction or non-production; for Agamben, passivity does not mean inertness or inactivity, but instead it can be a kind of counterforce that deactivates sovereign power. Take, for example, the Muselmann, one of the figures of bare life under Agamben’s discussion, can neutralize law, for his
“behavior—which does not register any difference between an order and the cold—might perhaps be a silent form of resistance” (Homo Sacer 185; emphasis added). Likewise, in Herman Melville’s short story “Bartleby, the Scrivener” (1853), Bartleby’s obsessive refrain, “I would prefer not to,” should not be merely interpreted as passive action (Melville 25). For Agamben, Bartleby is a character with a potential nature, because his negative statement denotes the power of counteraction which can weaken law or order, that is, make it “inoperative.” Moreover, his preference for not writing is not non-production, but apparent non-non-production; his passive resistance, or potentiality in Agamben’s words, is embodied in his being able to “not-write”
(Coming Community 37).
Let us return to our discussion of Friday. Compared with Defoe’s Crusoe that extols the capitalist ideology of production and accumulation, Tournier’s Crusoe
stresses “rest.” In a sense, Tournier’s Crusoe preserves his ability to produce or not to produce. On the surface, he produces nothing when he rests in the cave or on the rest day, yet this does not mean that he lacks the ability to produce but instead manifests his potentiality. “Being in limbo” not only indicates Crusoe’s potentiality (to do and not to do) but is also an alternative view of identity. Agamben’s notion of potentiality, to be and to not-be, disavows such an interpretation of identity that presupposes who
“is” and shifts the focus from the question of who “is” to that of who “can be.” In
Friday, the notion of rest deactivates not only the capitalistic mode of production but
also identity labels formed by history and culture. On the rest day, or the Sabbath day, identity labels are rendered invalid because the day erases the difference between“master and slave, employer and employee, lord and servant, humans and beasts”
(Trepp 373). The importance of the rest day lies in the fact that it emphasizes equality;
this is perhaps the reason why Tournier is so concerned with the notion of rest. This notion makes a caesura—a cessation of history, linear progress, Western civilization, and the presupposition of identity. Because of this, Friday is no longer merely a slave but can be a brother, a friend, and a guide to Crusoe.
Moreover, it is worth noting the question of naming here. In the French version of the novel, as David Cowart observes, “Crusoe renames the boy Thursday
(evidently because French schoolchildren have Thursdays off—the name becomes Sunday in the English text)” (161). On the surface, Crusoe gives the boy a name as he does to Friday. However, the naming in this case, I contend, is entirely different from his naming Friday because Crusoe, in fact, does not give the boy a new name but calls his original name. When asked by Crusoe about his name, the boy replies, “I am called Jaan Neljapäev. I was born in Estonia” (Tournier, Friday 235). The Estonian name “Jaan” is the equivalent of the English name “John.” “Neljapäev” in Estonian means the fourth day of the week—Thursday.
The ending of Friday is extraordinary. After seeing the “possible worlds”
represented by his British countrymen, Crusoe refuses to leave for England with them but instead decides to stay on the island. His gesture of refusal is to some degree like Bartleby’s. He would prefer not to return to his previous stable state but rather prefers to remain in limbo. Like Bartleby’s passivity, Crusoe’s refusal of return can be treated as a kind of political resistance, a resistance to the working of the capitalistic
production machine, as well as western time, history, and civilization.