The Catholic Crusoe

Let's approach the question of Catholics, novels, and the "Catholic novel" (or not) from another angle: a Catholic rewriting of a foundational text in the history of the (Protestant) English novel.  W. H. Anderdon's Owen Evans, the Catholic Crusoe (1862) (also known as The Catholic Crusoe) is, as the title suggests, a revisionist Robinson Crusoe (1719), set in the late 1730s.  Its narrator, Welsh surgeon Owen Evans, does indeed wind up stuck on an island, albeit for about four years instead of twenty-eight, and because he was abandoned by an evil ship's captain instead of shipwrecked.  Much of the narrative is occupied, as is Robinson Crusoe, by extensive descriptions of the island's geography and the human effort necessary to transform nature into something approximating a domesticated space; there are obvious echoes of a number of Crusoe's own projects, such as making pots and taming animals.   Again, the narrative is supposedly transcribed from a journal, with the text's purported factuality supported by extensive "editorial work" in the footnotes.  However, of a number of pointed alterations to Defoe's plot, two immediately stand out, and they transform Robinson Crusoe's entire trajectory:

Owen Evans is trapped on the island with several other people, including a Catholic priest, and because there is no shipwreck (at the beginning, in any event),  there are also virtually no supplies to plunder.

Until Robinson Crusoe finally meets Friday, well on in his narrative, his story is one of individual self-sufficiency in the face of a potentially terrifying, hostile natural world.   Owen Evans, however, is always with his somewhat ragtag group of sailors, and his narrative details how the influence of the priest, Don Manuel, enables them to reshape themselves into a fully Christian community, founded on mutual collaboration.  Unlike Crusoe, who figures out on his own how to do everything from carving out caves to sewing clothes, Evans and his compatriots are frequently brawn to Don Manuel's brain; it is he who suggests how they might cook meat using indigenous practices, identifies bread-fruit trees, and so forth.  On other matters, though, Don Manuel must take advice, and he cheerfully joins in any necessary hard labor.  Everything is a group activity, whether hunting great white sharks (!) or building a home in a cave.  Moreover, given the lack of ready-made supplies, the men must quickly resort to "common property" (31) or face certain starvation; in effect, as Don Manuel later acknowledges, they return to the condition of the early church (Acts 4:32).  This corporate quality soon comes, in fact, to miniaturize the structure of an idealized church polity, with Don Manuel (the "kind counsellor" [72]) and Owen dividing up the spiritual and secular duties of rule.  Owen soon defers to Don Manuel on all things (the spiritual governs the secular), while the sailors (and the Indians who soon put in an appearance) form the obedient body.  

This figurative church, which soon becomes a literal one thanks to Don Manuel's evangelism, eventually problematizes Crusoe's colonization of the island.  Recollect that at the end of Robinson Crusoe, Crusoe goes back to check on his "new Collony," now populated by Spanish settlers, but over which Crusoe retains "the Property of the whole."   Although this experiment in colonization certainly suggests the importance of international cooperation, it nevertheless roots "belonging" in materiality, portable (objects) or otherwise (land).  Crusoe's Providence, of which he is well aware, eventually rewards him with this-worldly prosperity; goodness equals goods.  But The Catholic Crusoe, which has already sidelined personal acquisition by emphasizing common property instead, uses the Mass to alter how the men understand their relationship to time and space--and, therefore, to national or colonial identity.  As Don Manuel explains,

"This very day", says he, "many millions of Christians, spread over the face of the globe, of every clime, colour, language, race, are kneeling before such an altar as I vainly wish for, hearing Mass said by one of God's anointed priests [...] I say, this day; but I say not, at this hour alone : for all day long, from early dawn to night, Mass is somewhere being said: when 't is early in one part of the Church, 't is late in another ; and she is truly that world-wide empire on which the sun never sets. That voice of prayer, and still more, that act of Sacrifice, girdles the earth round ; since the habitable globe itself is the appointed dwelling of the universal family, 'the household of faith': and the dawn, as it runs swiftly westward, awakens freshly that consent of hearts, that union of intentions, that one, great, Catholic act of obedience and love [....]" (164-65)

Don Manuel's global "household of faith" simultaneously domesticates all territories (all are at "home" in the Church) and estranges those within them from single-minded national allegiances (all belong to the true empire).  Although the British were hardly the first to borrow the "the sun never sets" to evoke their imperial might, Anderdon is clearly taking aim at his countrymen by putting the phrase into the mouth of his priest.  As in so many nineteenth-century Catholic novels, hearing the Mass implicitly or explicitly distinguishes organic Catholic community from atomized Protestant individualism.  Moreover, whereas Robinson Crusoe mostly associates the calendar with forward movement and the slow accumulation of his property, Don Manuel emphasizes ritual repetition (both in and of the Mass) and, concomitantly, the free communal reaffirmation of faith.  This "household" takes practical form when the Spanish Armada abruptly puts in an appearance at the end, and the by-then Catholic sailors agree that they will not "prosecute that war" ongoing elsewhere (232).  

But Anderdon sees other implications for the colonial enterprise.  Flipping Robinson Crusoe about, we have not one but three Indian characters put in an appearance (three men, one old, one middle-aged, one young) and they do so relatively close to the novel's beginning, not the end.  Again, this emphasizes that the men must collaborate to survive, and not just using their own European skillset, but that of the indigenous people.  More importantly, from Anderdon's point-of-view, it also foregrounds missionary conversion as central to exploration, far more so than "mere" colonial conquest.  Anderdon's treatment of race is not what you'd call an improvement on Defoe's--all of the Indians are infantilized and overawed by the white men--but he does take on Defoe's initial approach to Friday.  To begin with, Don Manuel inverts Crusoe's utter panic at the discovery of the "hellish Wretches" who threaten his solitude, sparking off excessive and obsessive fantasies of brutal violence.  Don Manuel, by contrast, yearns for "some poor heathens in this place whom I might win to God" (48)--whom he might bring into the community in other words.  Moreover, Crusoe initially has "Slaves" in mind, which he later alters to "Servant, and perhaps a Companion, or Assistant."  So, too, does Evans, who cannot make up his mind whether the Indians should be "slaves" or "prisoners" (97); Don Manuel, adopting a paternalist approach, has to inform Evans that while the Indians may be treated as "children," they are merely serving "an apprenticeship to liberty," and must be turned into "equals" (98).  Needless to say, this does not initially go down all that well, and the novel itself doesn't do a particularly good job of following its own precepts.  Nevertheless, Anderdon here associates Catholicism with at least something resembling egalitarianism (once again, as the Mass affirms, all are equal in the faith), and Robinson Crusoe-ish Protestantism with self-serving dehumanization of other races.  Protestants, the novel hints, want to subjugate; Catholics, by contrast, wish to elevate.

These attempts to counter Robinson Crusoe's materialism climax by blowing up the ending of Defoe's novel.  Literally: while Robinson Crusoe gets to see his little colony turning into a thriving enterprise, the Catholic sailors lose absolutely everything when a volcano decides now would be a good time to explode.  This wholesale destruction is crucial, because it actively prevents the sailors from translating their labor into monetary profit; the only true profit they receive from their adventures is their conversion.   Similarly, when the Spanish show up near the end and their ship capsizes, the sailors find little of value on the ship to plunder--a blatant parody of Crusoe's ship-shopping.  Nor do the sailors necessarily enjoy the stable, wealthy afterlife that Crusoe does after his rescue, filled with adventures but also with lots of cash and property: Evans returns to find that "being a Catholic stood in my way at every turn" (288), although he eventually finds comfortable employment in Norfolk, while his fellow sailors either go off to unknown destinies as missionaries, live modest lives, or die.  (The named Spanish characters tend to do that last somewhat over-frequently.)  In other words, the characters are stripped of both worldly ambition and worldly desire, and sometimes plagued rather than otherwise; virtue's rewards on earth are of the modest sort, if any.  At the same time, Anderdon reworks Robinson Crusoe's "wait for the sequel" ending by concluding not with Tom Evans, but with a fragmentary message in a bottle (well, really, a message on a buoy) from Don Manuel, recounting the beginnings of his missionary work on another island.  This, in fact, is the real parallel to Robinson Crusoe's burgeoning colony.  Although Don Manuel is assuredly getting nothing material out of this arrangement, his work on the island represents the Catholic church militant.  But we know nothing of its outcome or his fate, although there are ominous signs pointing to eventual martyrdom.  Instead of Robinson Crusoe's attempt to grab us for the next installment, The Catholic Crusoe invites us to be content in unknowing.  

So, then.  The Catholic Crusoe poses at least three major challenges to what it sees as certain tendencies of the Protestant English novel, as embodied by its predecessor: it devalues competitive individualism in favor of spiritual development through collaborative work and suffering; it attacks (not very successfully...) attempts to objectify and subject others for the purposes of any material gain; and it tries to unsettle straightforward narrative closure.