Rodas 1
Julia Miele Rodas
MLA 2011: Autism / Text
December 30, 2010
Autistic Aloneness and Social Space:
Robinson Crusoe and Narrative Architecture
It is with some sense of trepidation that I confess—before this esteemed audience—that my first
thoughts linking Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) with autism had to do with the protagonist’s
remarkable partiality for enclosures and fortifications. Resonating powerfully with Bruno
Bettelheim’s long-discredited notion of autism as an “empty fortress,” Robinson Crusoe’s
architectural aesthetic is so absolutely typified by walls, fences, hedges, bulwarks, and physical
barriers of all kinds that the novel may almost appear—to the initiated—as a kind of parody of
popular discourse regarding autism.
That autism is often seen as a condition of being walled-in is, of course, so ubiquitous a
representation as to be almost without need of further explication. According to this paradigm, as
Joseph Straus indicates, “the person with autism is concealed or imprisoned, inaccessible to the
outside world, which is implicitly invited to tear the wall down” (ms 17). Likewise noting that autism
is still frequently understood in Bettelheim’s terms, Stuart Murray observes that there is a “continued
resonance of [Bettelheim’s] idea of autism being a kind of ‘fortress’, or state of siege” and that
“multiple metaphors … emanate from this—of battles and breakthroughs, and attack and defense”
(175). Though it has not served as a productive model for understanding or interacting with autism,
the motif of fortification has nevertheless served as an enduring metaphor for the way autism is
popularly represented.
That the story of Robinson Crusoe might play into this motif seems almost irresistible. Of
course, we all know the story: A disobedient teen leaves his comfortable middle-class home against
the kind and well-reasoned advice of his loving father. After multiple dramatic adventures—violent
storms, life-threatening encounters with hostile beasts, success as a plantation owner in a distant
Rodas 2
land, even a stint as a slave—Robinson Crusoe is shipwrecked on an uninhabited tropical island
where, armed with his ingenuity and a few tools providentially supplied from his wrecked ship, he
survives the next 25 years without human companionship.
Indeed, the very outline of the story establishes a baseline for the more distinct and
deliberate defensive architecture Crusoe ultimately constructs. For the isolation of the desert island
is the foundation of all further fortification cutting our hero off from the rest of humanity. As
Crusoe puts it,
my very heart would die within me, to think of the woods, the mountains, the deserts
I was in, and how I was a prisoner, locked up with the eternal bars and bolts of the
ocean, in an uninhabited wilderness. (105)
Despite his apparent isolation from the remainder of humankind, the world that Crusoe narrates is
nevertheless persistently threatening, hostile and chaotic, filled with mayhem and potential loss, and
especially fraught with the possibility of being eaten by cannibals. It is only by the persevering
construction of additional enclosures and fortifications that the first-person protagonist can secure
his physical safety and peace of mind. Thus, Crusoe builds obsessively. Indeed, the castaway’s very
first project, upon settling himself on the island, is to pile “all the empty Chests and Casks up in a
Circle round the Tent, to fortify it from any sudden Attempt, either from Man or Beast.” Having
done this, Crusoe reports, he
blocked up the door of the tent with some boards within, and an empty chest set up on
end without; and spreading one of the beds upon the ground, laying my two pistols just at
my head, and my gun at length by me, I went to bed for the first time, and slept very
quietly all night. (51)
Crusoe then goes on to build a more permanent retreat, doubly fortified with “two Rows of strong
Stakes” interwoven with cable taken from the ship (54). This shelter, Crusoe notes, is constructed
Rodas 3
without a door, but relies instead on a short ladder, which “when I was in, I lifted over after me, and
so I was completely fenc’d in, and fortify’d, as I thought, from all the World” (55). Constantly
enlarging, organizing, and perfecting this space “into several Apartments, or Caves, one within
another” (140), Crusoe also builds what he calls his “Bower” or “Country Seat” (94, 140) in one of
the pleasantest spots on the island, “surround[ing] it at a Distance with a strong Fence, being a
double Hedge, as high as I could reach, well stak’d, … fill’d between with Brushwood,” and likewise
accessed by “going over it with a Ladder, as before” (94). In addition to the barriers surrounding his
“Country-House” and his “Sea-Coast-House,” Crusoe encloses the land he has prepared for
growing grain (107), constructs a cage for his parrot, Poll (104), and takes great pains building a
fenced pen to domesticate some of the feral goats he finds on the island, reporting,
I had taken an inconceivable deal of pains to fence and enclose this ground. I was so
anxious to see it kept entire, lest the goats should break through, that I never left off
till, with infinite labour, I had stuck the outside of the hedge so full of small stakes,
and so near to one another, that it was rather a pale than a hedge, and there was
scarce room to put a hand through between them; which afterwards, when those
stakes grew, as they all did in the next rainy season, made the enclosure strong like a
wall, indeed stronger than any wall. (141)
All this is not to dismiss Crusoe’s concerns. There are real (i.e., fictional) threats and challenges that
lurk beyond these meticulously engineered containment units and protective systems, but the kind of
mental and literary space the protagonist devotes to the process of enclosure is extraordinary. The
tender way in which he lingers over the details of construction, the ways in which his narrative
revisits or loops back upon these structures, suggests a sense of relationship with boundary and
enclosure that borders, at least, upon the fanatical. Although Defoe’s classic novel is ordinarily
appreciated as a story of adventure and survival, it is so richly brocaded with the organization,
Rodas 4
enclosure, and protection of personal space that it may be seen, in some respects, as literally baffling
the reader. It is tempting, indeed, to explain the extreme fortification of the protagonist in the banal
terms of populist diagnosis: From this angle, Robinson Crusoe sure does look autistic.
If Bettelheim’s metaphor is recognized, however, as nonproductive and disparaging, why
pursue this point? Already, even the idea of a man on an island presents a stereotype of autistic
existence that we need to struggle against, one that has caused profound damage through its
promotion of autism as inherently apart from ordinary humanity and, a reduction that implicitly
suggests, as Straus mentions, the need for rescue or redemption. The assigning of the restrictive
diagnostic label “autism” to the fictional character of Robinson Crusoe, in large part because he
appears to have boxed himself into a fortress radically resistant to human social contact, echoes the
kind of mechanistic and unidimensional understanding of autism that so many autism theorists have
declaimed against. Why bother going here?
This is why: Although the representation of the autistic subject walled up inside him- or
herself is not one that is true or fair, there is another interpretive possibility, both functional and
socially productive. This second model watches Crusoe constructing his boundaries and is arrested
by a powerful and culturally popular representation of an autistic self deliberately partitioning space
to satisfy a sense of personal aesthetic, a fully developed person, emotionally and socially complex,
who, in building his customized habitat, asserts both presence and subjective agency, who not only
survives, but thrives in his singular utopia.
Indeed, while Crusoe may occasionally lament his lonely and isolated lot, his narrative far
more frequently speaks to his contentment, a sense of peace and satisfaction in his solitary state with
everything about him arranged by his own hands for his pleasure and convenience. During the
course of his solo residence on the island, for instance, Crusoe considers that “conversing mutually
with my own Thoughts” might be “better than the utmost Enjoyment of human Society in the
Rodas 5
World” (125-26). And he reports, variously, that he “looked now upon the world as a thing remote,
which I had nothing to do with, no expectations from, and, indeed, no desires about” (119), that “it
was possible for me to be more happy in this forsaken, solitary condition than it was probable I
should ever have been in any other particular state in the world” (105), that he “had nothing to
covet, for I had all that I was now capable of enjoying” (119), and, most famously, that he “was
Lord of the whole Manor; or, if I pleased, I might call myself King or Emperor over the whole
Country which I had possession of: there were no Rivals; I had no Competitor, none to dispute
Sovereignty or Command with me” (119). Thus, from one perspective, Crusoe may be seen as
having liberated himself from a life fraught with tension, conflict, anxiety, and loss to one of peace
and productivity. Rather than conceding power to the oppressive strictures of middle-class
convention, Crusoe instead constructs a world where there is room for the individual to structure his
own life and to determine the shape of his own destiny.
Moreover, despite its appearance of isolation, Crusoe’s utopia is actually quite explicitly
social, though—again—this sociality is constructed very much according to his particular aesthetic.
As the narrator slowly partitions and orders his environment, bringing the physical architecture of
his habitat into alignment with his personal ideal, so, too, does he slowly add other lives to his
domestic arena, until, poised at the cusp of renewed human contact, our hero is surrounded by what
he lovingly identifies as his “family.”
It would have made a Stoick smile to have seen, me and my little Family sit down to
Dinner. […]
[…] Poll, as if he had been my Favourite, was the only Person permitted to
talk to me. My Dog, who was now grown very old and crazy, and had found no
Species to multiply his Kind upon, sat always at my Right Hand; and two Cats, one
on one Side of the Table, and one on the other […] (137)
Rodas 6
This loyal and obedient “family” form a stark contrast to the human outsiders Crusoe has such good
reason to fear. For when his island is encroached upon by other people, he is sickened and horrified
to discover they are cannibals, the site of their feasting “spread with Skulls, Hands, Feet, and other
Bones of humane Bodies” (152). In a world peopled by eaters of their own kind, one must regulate
one’s environment and choose one’s companions carefully in order to avoid being devoured
altogether. When Crusoe does, eventually, bring other human companions into his domestic circle,
they, too—like the animal members of his family—are secured by ties of loyalty, gratitude, respect,
and affection. These companions he ultimately leaves on the island to reproduce and govern
themselves in accordance with the patiently ordered system he has established, the tenets of which
explicitly include “Liberty of Conscience” (222), a phrase specifically denoting freedom of worship,
but which might also be liberally understood as embracing cognitive diversity. Thus, the order which
Crusoe independently prepares is, ultimately, fully social, but this sociality is wrought from a
foundation of physical and economic order that predates and prefigures the peaceful and productive
society that follows. The success of community on what Crusoe initially terms “The Island of
Despair” is rooted in our hero’s solitary vigilance, founded on his meticulous articulation and
management of resources; this is the autist’s utopia, a world comfortably ordered and aligned, firmly
(and successfully) resistant to the violence and chaos represented by the cannibal conventions that
intrude from the outside world.
That Robinson Crusoe’s gift for partitioning and expertly re-engineering his environment
may be understood as part of an autistic aesthetic, and that these skills not only support his own
contented existence, but enable the existence of a peaceful and thriving human community as well,
are worthwhile considerations. Such a contemplation of autism in Defoe’s undisputedly canonical
novel might allow us, as David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder have expressed it, to “destabilize our
dominant ways of knowing disability” (1-2). And, in keeping with Stuart Murray’s project,
Rodas 7
understanding Crusoe’s success in terms of autistic practice may open up new “reading strategies by
which we might revise our cultural knowledge” of autism (12).
Beyond the projects of physical and social re-engineering undertaken by this arguably autistic
subject, however, Robinson Crusoe manifests an even deeper and more intimate autistic architecture
and aesthetic. For in addition to working out physical and social platforms that bring this world into
alignment with his own particular values, our hero is also an inscriber of text, the formulator, writer,
and provider of the book that establishes the reader’s virtual participation in Crusoe’s singular
community. When we consider not only the physical and cognitive partitioning described in the
novel—i.e., the design and construction of enclosures and fortifications, the ordering and storage of
material goods, the creation of a calendar, the social training of humans and other animals—but also
examine Crusoe’s textual performance, it becomes possible to understand the novel itself as an
autistic artifact, shedding additional light on recent work by theorists who increasingly suggest that
autism may be understood as reflecting its own distinctive verbal and logical aesthetic.
Among those who have contributed to the discussion on this subject is Kristina Chew, who
likens autistic “idiolect” to the poetic mode, arguing that one can “decode” the seemingly “random
utterances” of autistic people to “create meaning” (142). According to Chew, there is a fundamental
association between the “unusual” language of autism and the “metonymical language” of poetry,
invested as both are in sound, texture, and association, sensory factors that pervade the use of both
autistic and poetic language (136). Likewise, observes Chew,
The sudden disruptions of topic and meaning in prose poetry are similar to an
autistic person’s abrupt introduction of unrelated concepts and association of entities
and ideas not based on logical connections. (136)
In keeping with Chew’s observations, disability theorist Joseph Straus, too, focuses on the
idiosyncratic nature of autistic language, pointing out that “autistic expression” is characterized by
Rodas 8
“rich networks of associations, often private in nature” and frequently consisting of “richly observed
specific details” (Straus ms 15). Pursuing Marion Glastonbury’s concept of an “autistic dynamic”
observable in texts by Ludwig Wittgenstein, Franz Kafka, and Samuel Beckett, writer Patrick
McDonagh looks at autistic expression as part of a modernist aesthetic, suggesting that the extreme
egoism that distinguishes modernist culture provides an “opening of aesthetic space [that]
contributed to the recognition of [autism as a] condition” (113). For McDonagh, modernist aesthetic
and autistic articulation are expressive templates inextricably bound together. So, he observes, for
instance, that James Joyce’s Leopold Bloom uses an individuated “language that is both florid and
precise, but passes dramatically beyond simple communication” (109). In other words, autism may
be understood as having its own idiosyncratic expressive form, one “that passes dramatically beyond
simple communication,” at once “abrupt” and “unusual,” “rich” and associative, “florid and
precise.” Within this framework, autism is not a syndrome or disorder, but an expressive aesthetic, a
genre, a text.
Looking at Robinson Crusoe’s text from this theoretical vantage, it is especially interesting to
see how the unusual language and narrative techniques at play in this writing emerge out of and feed
into a larger autistic aesthetic. The text’s keen attention to detail, for instance, replete as it is with
inventories and detailed process writing, evidence Straus’ observation that autistic writing is
characterized by “richly observed specific details.” Robinson Crusoe’s rapid, non-transitional shifts in
mood, content, and generic form demonstrate Chew’s point about the seemingly “abrupt” nature of
autistic discourse, and echo a similar observation made by Stuart Murray regarding the writing of
famed autist Temple Grandin, that in her books, “sections and chapters regularly seem to stop
rather than conclude, often when a specific point has been made and discussion thereby finished—
as if the text were a form of manual” (Murray 42). In other words, autistic narrative may emerge in
distinctively staccato tones.
Rodas 9
In addition to these features, Crusoe’s writing is distinguished by reiteration, by copious
revisitings of the same process, event, or experience, imbuing the text with a richly perseverative
quality, what Leo Kanner might observe as “monotonously repetitious … verbal utterances” (44,
Kanner’s italics). Thus, the narrator frequently recurs to a specific that already seems to have been
exhausted. The topic of wall-building, for example, is one to which Crusoe recurs constantly, often
seeming to dismiss the subject while in actuality adding texture and detail.
N. B. This Wall being described before, I purposely omit what was said in the journal; it is
sufficient to observe, that I was no less Time than from the 3rd of January to the 14th of April
working, finishing, and perfecting this Wall, tho’ it was no more than about 24 Yards in Length,
being a half Circle from one Place in the Rock to another Place, about eight Yards from it, the Door
of the Cave being in the Center behind it. (71)
This narrative strategy seems designed in some respects to allay an implied anxiety on the part of the
reader; an enriched reminder of the existence of the wall, in this instance, serves as a form of
reassurance. Sometimes, however, the text sequentially re-presents exactly the same information in
an alternative format, perhaps to ensure understanding or to lend weight and credibility to the
narrator’s report. So, for instance, at one point, the text offers a detailed narrative description of a
pitched battle between cannibal attackers and Crusoe’s forces, including the specifics of each
casualty. Despite the fact that the narrator has just presented this information, the narrative section
nevertheless concludes with a deliberate recasting, providing an “Account of the Whole”:
Three killed at our first shot from the Tree; two killed at the next shot; two killed by
Friday in the Boat; two killed by Friday of those at first wounded; one killed by
Friday in the Wood; three killed by the Spaniard; four killed, being found dropped
here and there, of the wounds, or killed by Friday in his chase of them; four escaped
in the Boat, whereof one wounded, if not dead—twenty-one in all.
Rodas 10
In this unique combination of features—the scrupulously detailed, staccato, and reiterative nature of
Crusoe’s writing—we thus discover expressive qualities which, like the narrator’s management of the
island’s physical and social resources, reflect a distinctly autistic aesthetic.
Moreover, these narrative qualities may be seen not simply as reinforcing an interpretation of
Robinson Crusoe as autistic text, but as mirroring the explicit delineation of physical and social boundary
described in the first part of this paper. For Crusoe’s narrative habits reflect the pattern of his
greater aesthetic values: Even when managing language, the narrator has a partiality for clearly
marking and enclosing verbal spaces, one that is powerfully reminiscent of the observations of
disability scholar Bev Harp, who argues that a proclivity for parenthetical writing is elemental to
autistic rhetorical sensibility. According to Harp, founder of the autism awareness and self-advocacy
site, Square 8, her own prolific use of parentheses may be understood as “a function of having an
autistic mind.” For Harp, parentheses are a means of concretely delineating tangential thinking, a
device for inclusively mapping her elaborately detailed thought-process. As tools of verbal and
logical containment or partitioning, parentheses preserve discrete narrative units, enabling a
discursive aesthetic that is, at Patrick McDonagh might observe, at once “florid and precise.” It is
exactly this narrative maneuver that we see expansively elaborated by Robinson Crusoe, who
employs numerous narrative devices to unfold his story in distinct and discrete encapsulations. In
addition to his brief journal entries, each identified by date or time period, Crusoe’s account makes
use of the dialogic conventions of drama:
Master. Well, Friday, and what does your nation do with the men they take? Do they
carry them away and eat them, as these did?
Friday. Yes, my nation eat mans too; eat all up. (198)
Rodas 11
The narrator uses comparative charts to assess his state of well-being:
EVIL
GOOD
I am cast upon a horrible, desolate
Island, void of all hope of Recovery.
But I am alive, and not drown’d, as all my
Ship’s Company was.
I am singl’d out and separated, as it
were, from all the World, to be
miserable.
But I am singl’d out too from all the
Ship’s Crew, to be spar’d from Death; and
He that miraculously sav’d me from
Death, can deliver me from this
Condition.
I am divided from Mankind—a
Solitaire; one banish’d from humane
Society.
But I am not starv’d, and perishing on a
barren Place, affording no Sustenance.
I have no Clothes to cover me.
But I am in a hot Climate, where, if I had
Clothes, I could hardly wear them. (61)
Crusoe frequently uses lists or manifests to help tell his tale.
I got three of the seamen’s chests, which I had broken open, and emptied, and
lowered them down upon my raft; the first of these I filled with provisions—viz.
bread, rice, three Dutch cheeses, five pieces of dried goat’s flesh (which we lived
much upon), and a little remainder of European corn, which had been laid by for
some fowls which we brought to sea with us, but the fowls were killed. There had
been some barley and wheat together; but, to my great disappointment, I found
afterwards that the rats had eaten or spoiled it all. As for liquors, I found several,
cases of bottles belonging to our skipper, in which were some cordial waters; and, in
all, about five or six gallons of rack.
Even in the ordinary course of his narrative, the writer often stops short to describe his life in
numbered sequences, or to lay out a set of numbered choices:
I was very seldom idle; but having regularly divided my Time, according to the
several daily Employments that were before me, such as, First, My Duty to God, and
the Reading the Scriptures, which I constantly set apart some Time for thrice every
Rodas 12
Day. Secondly, The going Abroad with my Gun for Food, which generally took me up
three Hours in every Morning, when it did not Rain. Thirdly, the ordering, curing,
preserving, and cooking what I had kill’d or catch’d for my Supply. (106)
In sum, the book is riven through with rhetorical boundary and demarcation, our hero’s physical and
social architecture corresponding to his narrative architecture; Crusoe’s language, like his space, is
disciplined and managed to align with an aesthetic sensibility placing unusual value on patterns of
logical partitioning.
Works Cited
Chew, Kristina. “Fractioned Idiom: Metonymy and the Language of Autism.” Autism and
Representation. Ed. Mark Osteen. New York: Routledge, 2007. 133-44. Print
Defoe, Daniel. Robinson Crusoe. New York: Modern Library, 2001. Print.
Glastonbury, Marion. “The Cultural Presence of Autistic Lives.” Raritan. 17.1 (1997): 24-44. Print.
Harp, Bev. “On the (Autistic) Use of Parentheses.” Square 8: Talk about Squares, Autism, and the
Number 8. Blogger. 23 Mar 2007. Web. 26 Jul 2010.
McDonagh, Patrick. “Autism and Modernism: A Geneological Exploration.” Autism and
Representation. Ed. Mark Osteen. New York: Routledge, 2007. 99-116. Print.
Murray, Stuart. Representing Autism: Culture, Narrative, Fascination. Liverpool: Liverpool University
Press, 2008. Print.
Snyder, Sharon L, and David T. Mitchell. Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse.
Corporealities series. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001. Print.
Straus, Joseph N. “Autism as Culture.” The Disability Studies Reader. 3rd ed. Ed. Lennard J. Davis.
New York: Routledge, 2010. Pages? Print.