When Robinson Crusoe was stranded on a tropical island he did pretty well for himself, all things considered. But to the rest of the world he was as good as dead. Daniel Defoe's novel, masquerading as a memoir, came out in 1719, a time when voyages were dangerous and people could easily be lost to one another with no way to get in touch or even determine if the other party was living. Indeed, when Crusoe finally gets back home he finds himself disinherited by a father who had assumed, sensibly enough, that his son was deceased.
Today, of course, Crusoe's dad would probably just check his son's Facebook page—unless Crusoe had used his iPhone to send his GPS coordinates to his various Twitter followers. After all, these days what is known as Robinson Crusoe Island, off the coast of Chile, has Internet access.
What a momentous change. For most of human history, losing contact with a loved one was all too easy, especially when great distances intervened. Leave-takings must have been particularly fraught when one might not get word of a loved one for months, years—or ever. Laura Linney, as Abigail Adams, brought to vivid life the heartache of an 18th-century parting when John Adams left for Europe in the TV miniseries. In Crusoe's day, in fact, most people didn't even have pictures of one another to hang onto.
It's no wonder that variations on the long-lost theme have been a literary staple practically since the dawn of narrative. In "The Odyssey," Penelope weaves her way through years without word from her wily husband, Odysseus, who finds himself waylaid by a Cyclops here and a minor goddess there for the better part of a decade. Fast forward to the 20th century and the same issue is at the center of Chaim Grade's novel "The Agunah" (published in English in 1974); unable to prove that her husband really was killed in World War I, the uncertain widow of the title risks bigamy in the eyes of Jewish law by marrying another man.
No comments:
Post a Comment