| Abstract [eng] |
This paper examines two novels about Robinson Crusoe: “Robinson Crusoe” by Daniel Defoe, first published in 1719, and the rewriting by Michel Tournier, first published in 1967 under the title “Friday, or, The Other Island”. The aim of the study is to investigate the postmodern alternative that Tournier constructs as a substitute for the Enlightenment myth of Robinson, raising the question of whether postmodernity – characterized by anti-modernist and anti-mythological attitudes – does not itself create its own mythology analogous to that of the Enlightenment. A comparative and immanent analysis of Defoe’s and Tournier’s texts is carried out mainly on the basis of Algirdas Julius Greimas’s narrative grammar, especially the aesthetic/bodily semiotics developed by him and Eric Landowski. Since it became clear that the constructed alternative or Tournier’s postmodern myth acquires a positively defined content through its oppositional relationship to Defoe’s text in particular and to modern mythology in general, the analytical part of the study consists of two main sections, each examining this opposition in its own way. In the first section, Tournier’s text is compared with Defoe’s text, which is generated by the mythology of the Western Enlightenment and relies on it as a grand narrative, thereby legitimizing itself. The second section analyzes and compares the two main parts of Tournier’s text. The first, referred to as the “rewriting”, is characterized by a closer adherence – both narratively and semiotically – to the hypotext, while the second, referred to as the “supplementation”, is marked by innovation. In other words, the immanent analysis of Tournier’s text is also fundamentally comparative, since the rewriting part represents Tournier’s reconstruction of the Enlightenment myth – an internalized version of Defoe’s text – which is then negated by the supplementation part that constructs an alternative to it. The rewriting part not only reconstructs the Enlightenment myth but also simultaneously deconstructs and delegitimizes it by parodying it through hyperbole. The most important distinguishing feature of the supplementation part, analyzed in opposition to the rewriting, is the emergence of a bodily/aesthetic dimension of discourse. Based on Greimas and Landowski, it is established that in Tournier’s text, liberation from the Enlightenment condition signifies an engagement with the world through bodily/aesthetic competence. This engagement restores to the world – reduced in the Enlightenment perspective to an intellectual construct and a projection of the subject’s pragmatic interests – its immanent potential for meaning. For a more abstract description of the alternative constructed by Tournier, the theories of structure and anti-structure by Victor Turner, play by Eugen Fink, and carnival by Mikhail Bakhtin were also employed. Although the text clearly intends to construct a positive alternative that could become a new universally valid Western myth, it ultimately appears to be an individual, particular, and ephemeral utopia of Robinson. Nevertheless, it should still be regarded as a postmodern Western myth, since anti-mythologism, anti-modernism, negation, deconstruction, relativization, individuality, and particularity themselves become the new values constituting its universal mythological/axiological structure. Since this analysis examines only two texts and aims specifically to describe the alternative that Tournier constructs to the Enlightenment myth, it cannot claim to be a comprehensive study of postmodernity and its mythology. Therefore, this analysis could be extended through a broader study of postmodern versions of the Robinsonade, which would allow for the formulation of wider questions and more generalized conclusions about modernity, postmodernity, and myth. |
