A Typology of Islands Part Two

The Island and the Death of Hope Shame by Ingmar Bergman

This is one of a number of Bergman's films that were shot on the Swedish island of Fårö.

The Film begins with bedroom scene depicting a married couple whose relationship is not in a healthy state.  Eva (Liv Ullmann) and her husband Jan (Max Von Sydow)  have been living on an island for four years, their phone is being cut off, their radio is always broken and in parallel with a crisis in their marriage it seems that a war is breaking out. It’s not clear what the historical context is in that respect.

One way or another they have come to this island to escape from their lives on the mainland. They had both involved in a concert orchestra but there is very little music on this island; metaphorical or otherwise. Their plans, this escape, this island are all starting to unravel.

Eva is increasingly at odds with her husband’s disengagement from the word:

“It’s better not to know anything…I’m so fed up with your escapism”

They go to the mainland, the military is everywhere, they buy some wine, have a chat with their conscripted and depressed shopkeeper and return to the island.

Soon after they have a conversation about having children – she wants one, he doesn't want one now – and instead of the cinematic staple of alternative over the shoulder close ups as each character speaks Bergman films in one shot over Von Sydow’s shoulder, all the time Liv Ullman is facing him, and her love for this man is etched on her face. Why did he use this perspective? To underline his lack of commitment to a common plan for the two of them?

Whatever common plans they’d had are shelved when the war comes to their island. They’re attacked by enemy paratroopers, arrested by their own side an eventually released by their acquaintance, the mayor. Their relationship breaks down, One scene where they are pulling stones from garden plot together is reminiscent of the plight of two anti-heroes ofWaiting for Godot

The mayor takes a liking to Eva. On one visit he has sex with her in exchange for money. Soon after the rebels arrive. The mayor tries to buy his life with money he’d given Eva. Her husband has the money but lies saying that he doesn’t. The mayor is then executed by the rebels; in a twist, they force Jan to pull the trigger. The rebels burn their house to the ground and now, more than ever they resemble Vladimir and Estrgon from Waiting for Godot

The two 'tramps' try to survive. The war has taken everything from them and when a deserting soldier arrives at their farm Jan shoots him and takes his equipment. At this stage the once pacifist Von Sydow has become a ruthless kill or be killed survivor who has no time for sentiment or love. The war has burned those excrescences away.

They  take to a boat to escape their island – it has become a place of war and probably famine. Their journey leads them out to sea where they get caught up in a crowd of dead soldiers’ bodies. Von Sydow works the boat through this grisly soup with a long pole.

In one shockingly bleak shot the pilot of the boat just slips over the side to his death. His hopeless suicide is witnessed by Jan, who looks on silently.

The couple lie down and as Eva tells her husband about a dream she’d had where she saw plane destroy a garden where the burning flowers were nonetheless beautiful the film ends with their boat adrift in a nameless hopeless ocean.

This is a film about the abandonment of the island. After hope has gone, when killing is the only currency there can be no islands, there are no utopias, there is no comfort. This is a bleak film.

Accountancy Island aka England in the Caribbean - Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe

As islands go there are few more famous than Crusoe’s. Ironically, in a story that has become a byword for adventure and the exotic,  Defoe’s narrator manages to bleed the whole affair dry of these very properties: After the reader navigates his way through Crusoe’s interminable inventories, lists and accounts, endures his painstaking descriptions of every last, banal detail of the twenty seven years of his time on the island and suffers his turgid and repetitive musings on religion and morality there is very little in the way of adventure and the exotic left.

Defoe takes his reader to an island in the Caribbean but his narrator never really leaves England.

The problem is, Robinson Crusoe is a tiresome bore. The only thing worse than having to read this novel again would be the horrific vista of ever meeting someone like him.  As for spending time with him on a desert island? Perhaps this is what Colonel Kurtz saw in the depths of the Congo when he uttered his soul – scourged words of despair: “The horror, the horror!”

Crusoe’s accountant’s sensibility almost performs an act of reverse alchemy: He almost turns a fantastic setting and a riveting plot into a depressing ledger of profit and loss, of good and evil, of civilisation and barbarism of goods inwards and goods outwards.

For all that, Robinson Crusoe has to appear on any list, or inventory or ledger of islands in fiction. It is all here: It is a refuge, a place of nightmare, a simulacrum in which the old world, the settled world of Europe is reimagined, repackaged.

Crusoe’s arrival on this island is an accident. He does not seek it out. His narrative does begin in flight, however. In defiance of his parents’ advice to follow the “middle station of life” and settle down to a middle class life of relative ease and comfort he goes away to sea. In the early part of his narrative, Crusoe sounds like Odysseus! He repeatedly uses Odysseus’ narrative trick of claiming to have suffered immensely:

“never any young Adventurer’s Misfortunes, I believe, began sooner, or continued longer than mine”

“it was always my fate to choose for the worse”

The contrast with Odysseus is instructive in understanding what kind of character is telling this story. Odysseus is an inveterate adventurer – his use of rhetorical hook that his life has been one of great suffering is consistent with the excitement of his story.

When Crusoe gets to the island the adventure changes – he is no longer an explorer. He has found a home. For Crusoe this island is a terminus and a foundation. Unlike Odysseus, Crusoe seeks to build a society from the ground up. He is not homesick; the thought of returning to England does not enter his narrative until more than twenty five years have passed.

What is this island society like?

It is one based on private property. At various points he considers himself to be the king of the island. This is not a metaphor. Early in his stay he declares: “I was king and lord of all this country indefeasibly, and had a right of possession”. Much later on, when some other sailors visit the island Crusoe throws his weight about and demands that the visitors follow his orders:  he is referred to as “Governour” and his word is law in the resolution of a dispute involving the sailors. Finally, having left the island, Crusoe returns and tells us that even though he lets others stay on the island he considers himself to be the actual owner: “I shared the Island into parts with ’em reserved to myself the property of the whole, but gave them such parts respectively as they agreed on”.

Crusoe does not have an imagination. He has a work ethic. He plants crops, builds a series of fortifications, makes boats, tailors clothes, plots time, tames, farms and milks goats, builds a canal – reading the lists of his herculean feats is probably not as exhausting as actually carrying out the work described but at times I was wondering.

Crusoe’s island is an island where Christians and Savages know their place. Crusoe is the lord; Friday is, without question, a subordinate. Time and again Crusoe sets Friday to work at various tasks:

“I pointed him to run and fetch the bird I had shot”

“I order’d Friday to take one of the canoes….I order’d him to go and bury the dead bodies….I order’d him to bury the horrid Remains of their barabarous feast”

Friday is, nonetheless, grateful for having been subordinated. He has none of the defiance of Caliban, not even the vague disenchantment of Ariel. He is a docile beast, happy to have been delivered from his state of barbarism by this benevolent Christian lord:

“You do great deal much good, says he, you teach wild man be good, sober, tame man. You tell them know God, pray God, and live new Life ”

From the mouths of savages. This island is a utopian fantasy about the benevolence of European empire building. The slaves are delighted to be slaves.

The accountancy is all part of this process. The sheer ubiquity of this mode is astonishing, He counts and inventories everything. At one stage he details and inventory of how he, Friday and a Spanish prisoner freed from certain death at the hands of cannibals account for those cannibals:

“The account of the whole is as follows: Three killed at our first shot from the tree; two killed at the next shot; two killed by Friday in the boat; two killed by Friday of those at first wounded; one killed by Friday in the wood; three killed by the Spaniard; four killed, being found dropped here and there, of the wounds, or killed by Friday in his chase of them; four escaped in the boat, whereof one wounded, if not dead - twenty-one in all.”

Crusoe undergoes a religious transformation while on the island. The island therefore becomes a place of spiritual salvation for him: “I was going to give Thanks to God for bringing me to this place”. 

Crusoe’s religious beliefs are as protestant as his work ethic. He is distrustful of ‘papists’ indeed, at one point he says:

“I had rather be delivered up to the Savages and be devour’d alive than fall into the merciless Claws of the Priests”

Despite this prejudice, Crusoe, in an echo of Thomas More’s Utopia professes that freedom of worship is important on his island:

“It was remarkable, too, I had but three subjects, and they were of three different religions - my man Friday was a Protestant, his father was a Pagan and a cannibal, and the Spaniard was a Papist. However, I allowed liberty of conscience throughout my dominions”

This island is not a wilderness . It is private property. Everything on this island is to be counted, fenced off, marked as the possession of its lord and master. This is an island of hard work. It is an island of protestant worship. It is an island with a clearly defined class structure. It is an island whose nearest neighbours are cannibalistic, heathen savages.

Sounds an awful lot like England, doesn’t it?