ABSTRACT

The tropical island is the scene of Robinson Crusoe’s “adventures.” Perhaps the topos “island” itself, with its geographically marked isolation from “something else” that is the “main-land,” is a particularly fitting scene of fictional solitude: the island as a perfect setting from which to examine the implications and describe the results of extended solitary existence. The analogy may be tenuous in parts, but it does have the merit of providing at least the basis of a common frame of reference for two subjects whose affinity is not immediately obvious: autoeroticism and a contemporary French reworking of Daniel Defoe’s classic. The sexual, autoerotic entry into Speranza constitutes a diversion of energy from the productive economic and sexual spheres. The incompatibility of this appearance with the logic of Tournier’s version of Robinson Crusoe, which points to an end of language as prerequisite to an end of categories, has been commented on elsewhere.