Robinson Crusoe Walks Into a Bar

Last spring I served as an expert witness in a lawsuit involving Daniel Defoe, the 18th-century English novelist and author of Robinson Crusoe. The case concerned a nightclub in Miami called Crusoe Cabana. Odd as it sounds, my job was to say whether Defoe’s novel, due to its setting in the Caribbean, could be considered a product of Latin America. The outcome of the lawsuit depended on the answer.

The litigants were former partners who had owned a Miami nightclub that went out of business. To avoid future competition, they had signed a contract that allowed only one of them to open bars and restaurants with a “Latin concept.” The plaintiff, then, claimed that the Crusoe-themed venue was Latin American because the novel itself was: Much of it, after all, takes place on an island near what is now Venezuela.

An assistant to a lawyer on the defense team found my faculty profile and emailed to ask if I, a scholar of 18th-century literature who’s written on Defoe, could speak to the history of the text. She asked, as well, what my fee was. I conferred with lawyer friends to get a sense of what to request. You won’t be surprised to learn that law firms have more money than English departments do. Still, I agreed to take part less for the money than for the oddity of the experience. It seemed like the kind of thing one does for the anecdote.

The lawsuit both amused and intrigued me. On the surface, it seemed silly. How often do nightclubs in Miami name themselves after books from the 18th century? How often do disputes between businesspeople hinge on questions of literary history? At the same time, I was intrigued by the strange claim that Defoe’s novel was Latin American. What would it mean to reframe Robinson Crusoe in the context of Latin America? It’s the kind of question I often think about as a professor of English in South Florida, where my students, most of them from Spanish-speaking backgrounds, tend not to regard British literature as part of their cultural inheritance.

My job, alas, was not to advance a bold, new thesis but to restate facts you can find on Wikipedia. I had to give answers that were definitive but not particularly interesting. It seemed sad that this sort of information was treated as the province of experts — as if one needed a doctorate simply to read a classic novel. When I mention my area of expertise to nonacademics, or even academics in other disciplines, many reel back or shake their heads, conveying an impression of the subject’s abstruseness. The Crusoe case put me face-to-face with the public’s lack of knowledge about literature, especially that of other times and places.

As I looked at the documents, it became clear to me that the plaintiff’s claims about the novel had been made in bad faith. There was no textual evidence to support the claim that Robinson Crusoe was Latin American. The plaintiff simply stated that the setting of the book is Latin America, though in fact the episode on the island forms only part of the narrative. This island, moreover, is fictional and uninhabited; thematically, it’s treated as blank and empty, and thus hardly representative of the culture of Spain or the Spanish Empire in the 18th century. At any rate, Crusoe takes ownership of it and remakes it in his own image. According to James Joyce, he was “the true symbol of the British Empire,” “the true prototype of the British colonist,” a character who embodies “the whole Anglo-Saxon spirit.”

And yet I was still intrigued by the notion that the novel is, nevertheless, part of a different tradition, that this canonical text of English literature might have been influenced by colonial Spanish and Portuguese culture. We, as academics, trade in claims that are counterintuitive and provocatively hypothetical. We tend to assume that the basic facts of literary history are well understood, so that we can build on them, with interpretations that are tentative and provisional.

The question of Crusoe’s national affiliation is one that scholars have discussed. Patrick Parrinder writes that Defoe gave us heroes who are “wanderers of no fixed abode,” “‘half-outsiders’ without national ties.” Stephanie DeGooyer says of Crusoe that “national identity and character are legally and figuratively transformed by the global trajectory of his adventures.” Of course, those claims belong to a broader critical debate; they cannot be picked out and used to deny historical facts. It annoyed me that what seemed like an interesting interpretation was just a crafty maneuver by a disgruntled businessman.

At the trial, I told the lawyer for the defense that the novel is typically thought of by scholars as characteristically British. I explained that Defoe was English and read aloud the title page of the book, which gives Crusoe’s birthplace as York. The point of the desert island, I said, is that it’s a blank slate, a space that’s separate from the rest of the world, void of anything that Crusoe himself does not bring or create. Sad to say, there was no packed courtroom, no audience that gasped in response to my blockbuster testimony. The whole proceeding was conducted on Zoom.

The cross-examination was briefer than expected. I was ready for pushback, but the lawyer for the plaintiff was sheepish and hesitant. He struck me as a student who hadn’t done the reading. At once, it was clear that the claim that he had hatched — that the novel was Latin American — had been concocted in the time-honored legal spirit of “let’s throw things at the wall and see what sticks.” (To be fair, the language of the argument went beyond the novel, adducing as further evidence of the bar’s “Latin concept” the fact that they served ceviche and played reggaeton.)

In the end, the defendant won. The bar remains open for business. The judge ruled that the phrase in question, “Latin American,” had been applied too broadly. It cannot be stretched to encompass works of 18th-century British literature. All bars serve a range of food, play different sorts of music. The judge might have added that the term “Latin American” is too diverse and amorphous, too dynamic and incremental, and too relative in its meaning to individuals from different backgrounds.

Case closed, from the judge’s point of view. But the question remains: How do we decide if a novel is “British” or “Latin American”? Can’t it be both? We tend to think of literature as produced by or reflective of nations or cultures in a nonrestrictive sense: You hear that this or that text is an American novel — or perhaps even “the great American novel” — but not that a given work is not American in any way and can’t be thus classified. These classifications are positive and additive, not negative or subtractive. A given text can represent one or more cultures, but not zero. The half-baked claim of the plaintiff seemed to be that Robinson Crusoe was no longer British because it was set on a fictional island that, had it existed, would have been claimed by the Spanish government. No one with a Ph.D. in English would accept such simplistic categories and merely re-sort their contents, leaving the scheme of divisions unquestioned. We like “both/and,” not “either/or,” arguments. Not long ago, novels were closely identified with the nationalities of their authors. Now we look for the ways literature crosses borders. No one I know thinks of nations or cultures as tidy, air-tight receptacles.

Once the case was settled, I paid a visit to the venue. It’s located in Wynwood, a neighborhood in Miami with lots of gimmicky party places, including a sneaker-themed lounge, where drinks come in plastic shoes. The nightclub in question is decked out with maritime paintings, big wooden mastheads, displays of shells and corals, wallpaper with desert islands, and copies of Robinson Crusoe presented on end tables for customers to peruse. I doubt many do. Servers and bartenders seemed to be dressed in outfits that could be sold at Halloween stores with the label “sexy mermaid.” In many ways, it was a typical nightclub in Miami: The place was packed with well-dressed and good-looking people who danced and flirted and spent a lot of money. If the vibe is Latin American, that seems inevitable in a city filled with not just Cubans but also Nicaraguans and Colombians and Venezuelans and so on.

I came away from the experience with more appreciation of the line between academic and nonacademic discourses. At first, the case was interesting for the way it merged or blended categories: Defoe in Miami; bygone literature amid nightlife and club culture. Later, I was thankful for the separateness of those domains. We hear calls for scholars to talk to nonspecialists, to engage public audiences, to bring our ways of thinking and speaking into closer alignment with conversations outside the academy. I concur! At the same time, we need to preserve the differences of those sectors and leave intact their assumptions and procedures. We still need spaces to say what no one else says, to take chances and test possibilities without the risk of misconstrual or misapplication. We need our enclaves, our journals, our conferences, where we can take for granted basic facts of history and reflect on ideas that are intended to be debatable. Ideas such as: What if we thought of Robinson Crusoe as a Latin American novel? That question is worth pursuing, perhaps — but on a conference panel, not in a court of law.