In summary, under “Ecosophy M” I draw on several concepts, not all of which are ecocritical, to extend what Morton calls “the ecological thought.” “Milieu” can help us to examine the interaction between man and environment in Life of Pi, Morton’s “mesh” provides us with an opportunity to reconsider the self-other relationship in Friday, the notion of mutuality helps us to examine symbiotic
relationships in Concrete Island, the concept of maternity elicits the subject of gender issues and is helpful in reading The Wall from an ecofeminist view, the notion of minorities makes us pay more attention to the marginalized voice in texts, and the concept of mood helps us explore the ontological questions in castaway narratives such as The Wall.
III. Organization of the Dissertation
This dissertation consists of an introduction, five chapters in the main body of the study, and an afterword. Following this introduction, the first chapter surveys the Robinsonade genre from the eighteenth century to the present time, focusing primarily on Anglophone novels. I will offer a history of the genre and pinpoint the shift of thematics in this genre.
In the subsequent chapters, I discuss four contemporary rewritings of Robinson
Crusoe, which I call “Eco-Robinsonades”: Marlen Haushofer’s The Wall, Michel
Tournier’s Friday, J. G. Ballard’s Concrete Island, and Yann Martel’s Life of Pi. These four novels are chosen as representative texts that mark an ecological turn in the contemporary Robinsonade genre.Chapter Two examines The Wall in light of ecofeminism and “maternity.”
While Robinson Crusoe involves man’s exploitation of nature, The Wall subverts Defoe’s version by depicting a female adventurer who seeks to maintain a harmonious relationship with animals and coexist with nature. The novel can be considered as a radical ecofeminist novel that stresses maternity and establishes the bond between the female protagonist and animals, especially female ones, at the expense of the only man appearing near the end of the novel. The death of the man caused by a gunshot from the woman suggests the destruction of patriarchy. I argue that the man’s death not only deepens the demarcation between the genders but also weakens the novel’s ecological thought that it sets out to make. Besides examining the issues of gender, animal, and nature, I also address the ontological question raised by the protagonist.
Different from Defoe’s Crusoe, who finally returns to his hometown, England, the protagonist in The Wall stays alone in the enclosure forever. What she experiences is the absolute solitude in which she considers the question of boredom and the
definition of being a human. To maintain her humanity, she keeps writing and thus differentiates herself from other species. I argue that The Wall, although labeled and marketed as an ecofeminist novel, still has a tincture of anthropocentrism that the novel attacks.
In Chapter Three, I draw on Morton’s concept of the mesh and argue that the worldview in Tournier’s Friday shifts from the utilitarian to the ecological. In the first part of the work, Tournier’s Crusoe builds his relationship with the island, the new
environment, by a full schedule of work and a number of rules. He is like Defoe’s Crusoe in the sense that what he is most concerned about is how to gain the greatest production from the land. Additionally, when it comes to his relationship with Friday, Crusoe recognizes Friday through his awareness of this Other’s usefulness. Yet, in the later part of the novel, I contend that Crusoe is open to strange strangers that include not only human beings like Friday, but also non-human beings such as the island, figured as a female in the novel. Tournier’s Crusoe learns from Friday that his organizations on the island are in fact unnecessary, and this changes not only his relationship with Friday, but also his relationship with the island. In Friday, nature is not merely a passive object as described in Defoe’s version; it can also be active as a living being. The island is rendered as a female figure that Crusoe develops a material, spiritual, and corporeal relationship with. In the novel, Crusoe’s sexual attachment to the island deviates from a normal expectancy of heterosexuality between a man and a woman, and instead presents a queer ecology that involves sexual intermingling of the human and non-human. Unlike Defoe’s Crusoe, Tournier’s Crusoe meshes with the milieu, and thus eventually discards his utilitarian view of the milieu.
In Chapter Four, I discuss three ecologies in J. G. Ballard’s Concrete Island, namely, natural ecology, urban ecology, and inner ecology. Different from Defoe’s
Robinson Crusoe and most Robinsonades that are set on a natural island, this novel is
set on a concrete island in London City in the era of late capitalism. I argue thatConcrete Island breaks the divide between culture and nature by presenting an urban
wilderness and showing compassion for minority groups in the urban social milieu while intertwining the issues of gender, class, and disability, issues that are barely present in Defoe’s version. Although the background of the novel is the city, the island that the protagonist, an upper-middle-class man, is marooned on is pervaded by grass.Grass, endowed with an animacy, is figured as a guide acquainting him with the
island and the lower-class people, represented by a prostitute and an idiot. Using Derrida’s notion of hospitality as a point of departure, I interpret their encounter as a relationship that is at first commensalist but turns out to be parasitic. Meeting the Other makes the protagonist deviate from his humdrum routine and prompts him to take an interest in his past and in his inner world. After this inner journey, the protagonist eventually chooses to stay on the concrete island, thus becoming a voluntary castaway. On the surface, his refusal to return to society is a form of
escapism, but I contend that his refusal is a Bartleby-like gesture: not only the refusal of his previous life but also the refusal of a capitalistic world.
Chapter Five argues that Martel’s Life of Pi is an ecological work because the concept of interconnectedness, which I call “milieu,” runs through the entire novel.
The novel reworks the themes of a castaway life and sea voyage canonized by
Robinson Crusoe, and revitalizes the relationship between Crusoe and Friday, self and
other, master and slave. While Defoe’s Crusoe story draws a rigid line between man and animal, Martel’s version breaks this line. The tiger is not only Pi’s enemy but also his friend that encourages him to hang on despite the taxing circumstances. I contend that because of Pi’s closeness with the tiger, he is becoming-animal in Deleuze and Guattari’s sense. Transforming the self, he deterritorializes his subject as a human.That is, he crosses the border between man and animal, thus interconnecting with other living beings as well as with the milieu. Staying with the tiger and learning from nature, Pi not only transcends himself but also overcomes the humanism imposed upon him. Furthermore, in the second part of the chapter, I extend the issue of ecology to religion. While Lynn White, Jr. comments that Christianity is an anthropocentric religion that causes ecological crisis and proposes that we need a new religion, Life of
Pi can be treated as a response to White. The novel deals with the crisis by
interconnecting religions. In believing three religions at the same time, the protagonist
breaks religious boundaries and obtains a more universal view of the world. Like a messiah-like figure, the protagonist proposes a new politics that looks at beings in terms of equality rather than hierarchy.
Finally, my dissertation’s conclusion suggests that the four contemporary Robinsonades discussed offer an ecological vision in which the relationship between the living and the non-living is not oppositional but rather interconnective. The distinction between the self and the other is rendered inoperative, for both are beings within the ecosystem. Thus, contemporary Robinsonades impel “man” to think of the question, not of how to encounter the other, but of how to be meshed with other beings within the same milieu.